Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #96 by Drew Barth

Energized and Anthologized Vol. 2

All right, collective exhale. Un-clench your jaw. One immediate existential threat mitigated, many more to go. But this is where comics come in—we can have these moments to come together to create things and collectively take a second. It’s why things like anthologies are some of my favorite publications in the medium: a collective work of wonderful creators making the comics they want to see in the world along a singular theme. I’ve talked in the past about the Ex.Mag anthology series that Peow Studio kickstarted earlier this year and how that was one of the best encapsulations of comics this year. Good news, volume two was recently released into the wild and, to the shock of no one, it continues those quality comics with a new theme: paranormal romance.

But what is paranormal romance in the context of this anthology? Much like how many minds can interpret “cyberpunk” from the first volume to mean many things, this volume is no different. From ghosts, spirits, demons, beasts, seraphim, and so on, we have a variety of different romantic partners in these stories. But even with the word “romance” in the title, that doesn’t mean every single story is going to end happily, or even well, for many characters. And when you have creators like Natasha Allegri, Luis Yang, Leslie Hung, Yon Lee, and others, there are so many ways these stories can go and every single one creates worlds and experience unlike anything else in comics right now.

This is also an anthology that explores our relationships with time and distance. One of the major themes a lot of stories in Ex.Mag vol. 2 work with is how space—physical and chronological—can affect who we are the stories we can tell. Stories like “Ex Girlfriend,” “Return to Sender,” “Man in Passing,” and “Our House” deal with variations on the ghost story. Either a lingering spirit attached to an object like a letter or a house or the ghost that doesn’t want to let go of their relationships. These are all spirits that, for the most part, know that their time is up—they’re an ex-person and need to move on—but it’s hard to let go. So, what can anyone do? Some people force the ghost away, some become a ghost themselves, while others are taken by the spirits around them. It’s horrifying and comforting in equal measure, but then your idea of romance can be different.

Anthologies will always be the incubators of the best ideas in comics and Peow Studios has proven that twice now with their Ex.Mag anthologies. With one more volume left in the series, Dark Fantasy, coming up sometime soon, we can only get more excited for what’s left to come. And with this volume providing some of the highest quality work in comics right now, the quality can only be consistent.

Get excited. Get romantic.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #95 by Drew Barth

Afterward

So. This is being written a few days before the 2020 election, so writing about comics at this point in time is like digging a ditch for the lava to go around Pompeii. But comics still happen, as does this article. But what do you write when, the day this goes live, we’ll be living in a vastly different world? Well, I write about comfort. There’s some comic series that are like a warm bowl of soup in the way they sit in your stomach and just make you feel like things are okay. So, these are three different series to either find some comfort in for a bad day or something to relax with after a long decade these past six months have been.

One of the least controversial statements I can make is that All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely is the definitive Superman comic. It asks a simple question: Do you like hope? From there is gives you twelve issues of the labors of Superman before he eventually succumbs to the cellular degeneration that has come from flying too close to the sun. But this is Superman as the best of us—from interviewing Lex Luthor as Clark Kent to giving Lois Lane superpowers for a day to finally getting to say his goodbyes to Pa Kent. This is the alien from Krypton as his most human and is the kind of series that needs to be reread as Morrison and Quitely pack in so much story in a dozen issues

John Allison, Lissa Treiman, and Max Sarin’s Giant Days is that dozen season show we’ve all been wanting to binge-watch. Luckily, it’s a comic series that carries Allison’s signature writing that has made him a staple of the medium for the past twenty years. ButGiant Days is also that series that hearkens back to the simplicity of our college years. I remember starting my undergrad program in 2009 and thinking about how bight and open the world would become. This is a series that lets you follow three friends—Susan, Esther, and Daisy—as they navigate the minutiae of college life and the personal disasters that follow. But the disasters are low-stakes enough where their drama is like that of a normal life—back when we would crave a normal life.

Sometimes I want to cry on my own terms and not when I doomscroll. That’s where Pretty Deadly by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Emma Ríos, and Jordie Bellaire comes in for me. Although I’ve talked about the series at length in the past, I bring it up again because it’s just that good. The daughter of Death playing witness to the tragedies of the Fields family throughout history may not sound like the most comforting read, but the thread that ties this series together is its humanity. There is a goodness at the heart of this series that shines through in the darkest of moments and that’s why I keep coming back to it year after year.

I don’t know what Wednesday is going to look like—you want to hope but then don’t want to be disappointed—but I do like having something that can soften the day just a little bit. I hope we all have stories we can crawl into either as a means of lessening the terror or as a deserved break from the continual nightmare this year has been. These are just a few options, but there’s always more stories out there. I just hope we can keep making good ones.

Get excited. Please.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #93 by Drew Barth

A Sunless Legacy

What is a legacy? In monthly comics, it’s usually a character taking up the mantle of a hero that has passed on or passed out of the popular lexicon. This new character dons the mask, the famous name, and the responsibilities that entails. The heroics and mistakes of the past hang over this character’s head throughout their life. But this is an optional legacy—no one has to take up a mantle. Unless, of course, you’re family. Familial legacy is at the heart of The Sacrifice of Darkness by Roxane Gay, Tracy Lynne Oliver, Rebecca Kirby, and James Fenner. Hiram Hightower flew a craft into the sun and threw the world into darkness and his son, Joshua, has to contend with the legacy that has been carved out for him before he ever had a chance to say otherwise.

The Sacrifice of Darkness is an adaptation of Gay’s story “We Are the Sacrifice of Darkness” and with Oliver, Kirby, and Fenner in tow, she’s able to create a story that soars even higher than the original. This is a story that centers on family and legacy—what our parents leave behind for us and how we deal with it. The majority of this story centers on the Hightower family and how a legacy of working underground in their town’s mine and never seeing the sun or his family has left him wanting to show the rest of the world how he feels. So he flies a craft into the sun to extinguish it. But more importantly than that is what his son, Joshua, experiences as the son of the sun killer. He’s ostracized by his town and lives in isolation with his mother, until a girl, Claire, begins to talk to him.

This expansion of Gay’s original story is something that could really only be done within the medium of comics. Through Kirby’s art can we see the extent of Hiram Hightower’s legacy of sunlessness. And it is through her art as well that we see the five years Hiram had spent underground without seeing his family or the sun. Her lines resonate perfectly with Gay and Oliver’s words throughout. From the closeness of the Hightower family to the sparseness of a nearly sunless sky to streets crowed with artificial light, the original story can breathe so much more into its distances and silences.

As an adaptation, The Sacrifice of Darkness is one of the best the medium has produced this century. It takes its source material and expands upon it with the original author to create a new take, but the same feeling. As a graphic novel, it exists with the legacy of the original story over it and, at time, surpasses the original. Gay, Oliver, Kirby, and Fenner have created an evocative story of family and legacy between them that can only exist within comics and I hope this isn’t the last time they work together.

Get excited. Get the sun.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #87 by Drew Barth

Looking At What’s There

Abstraction is one of the key components of comics. Nothing we see on the page is real—we only ever see a representation of reality through an artist interpreting it. Comics are interesting since they can play with this abstraction and interpretation in ways many other visual mediums cannot. Seeing abstraction done well, however, is still rather rare. That’s why it’s refreshing to see works like Creation by Sylvia Nickerson and Cowboyby Rikke Villadsen. What these two creators do is work with the abstract in multiple ways—either with a new mother watching a city slowly being swallowed by gentrification or with the absurdity of cowboy masculinity.

What both comics do so well, though, is work with the idea of abstraction to almost absurd degrees. With Creation, Nickerson rarely draws detailed people. Instead, she opts for outlines of people that interact with beautifully laid out backgrounds and environments. What matters throughout her story of her and her newly born son is their environment—how they interact with and move through it. Creation presents us with the idea of the act of creation in the city of Hamilton, a place filled with toxic waste and smog, while working with the creation of human life. It is in the way Nickerson presents herself and her son as these abstract outlines that makes for a closer, more personal look at trying to create in a place that is slowly losing itself. We always see Nickerson as herself, but we can see just a little more of ourselves as well.

Rikke Villadsen’s Cowboy, on the other hand, works in a different kind of abstraction. While our characters all have names and faces, they’re caricatures rather than actual people. What Villadsen does so well throughout this comic is taking the expected and presenting it in an unexpected way. We expect gunslingers, bar fights, and heroism in cowboy literature. Instead we have these caricatures of cowboy media presented in a way that highlights the ridiculousness of their existence. And when one of them is killed, their mantle is flipped and taken by a woman who witnesses the murder. She steals a horse and rides out of her small town to become the cowboy that she believes she could be before dying. And the cowboy whose horse she stole? His role becomes hers—the woman watching cowboys from a window and wishing she could do something more.

The medium works the best when it’s representing what’s in front of us in the way the artist views the world. Creators like Nickerson and Villadsen are important in comics since their visions are clear—their works create a deeper understanding of the world in a way that only they can represent.

Get excited. Get abstract.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #86 by Drew Barth

Mortuary in the Stars

One of the heaviest lines in comics is “there was a time when the Old Gods died…” from Jack Kirby’s New Gods #1. From that fertile ground comes We Only Find Them When They’re Dead #1 by Al Ewing and Simone Di Meo, a story of dead gods floating in space and the ships that harvest what remains.

From proteins and eye jelly to organs and bones, the gods left floating in the void are cordoned, claimed, and cut apart by dozens of ships. At this point of godflesh commerce, we have Georges Malik, captain of the autopsy ship Vihaan II on his and his crew’s most recent harvest. As of the first issue, we’re already embroiled in the politics of harvesting and how the world is already beginning to change. Independent ships like Captain Malik’s Vihaan II and others are slowly being pushed out by corporate interests, but Malik and his crew plan a new strategy for dealing with that.

Seldom in We Only Find Them When They’re Dead #1 do we have a standard panel. Di Meo gives us splash pages with panels that cut in at odd angles and shapes that generate a continual unbalance and unease. We feel as though we’re on uncertain terrain because that’s what these characters are heading toward.

We Only Find Them When They’re Dead is one of the best examples I’ve seen of creating a tone and pace just through panel positions. We have a story that is taking its cues from Kirby classics, but with art forging its own path.

Get excited. Get carving.

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.