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.

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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.

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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 #85 by Drew Barth

I Can Feel It In The Air Tonight

Oh, Lord. You break one guy’s neck and he’s your nemesis for life. But, then again, Maxwell Lord is a great foil: manipulative, mind-controlling, ruthless, blood-thirsty—everything Wonder Woman can stand against at a base character level. When wanting to show the compassion and indomitable will of Diana Prince, Mariko Tamaki selected one of the best villains for that contrast. And coming off the heels of an Eisner win for best writer, Tamaki shows us the nuance and subtlety that makes her one of the best comic writers in the medium right now as she takes over Wonder Woman at its 759^thissue.

Although there are only two issues on stands at the moment (the third is being released in stores as this sentence is being read) we get our story foundations: Wonder Woman moves into a new apartment in D.C., meets her new neighbor, goes furniture shopping, and stops a mind-controlled woman from plowing her car into oncoming traffic. Relatively normal for Wonder Woman, but a good baseline for excitement for a first issue. Tamaki has been doing this for a bit and knows how to build up that energy from small moments into something much more bombastic. Everything in these first issues—even if they involve fights with maximum security prisoners and parademons—is just small moments building on top of one another to something greater we’re not privy to just yet. All we know is mind control and Maxwell Lord are involved, but that almost feels too simple for the moment.

As readers, we go into a comic written by Mariko Tamaki with a certain degree of confidence that the story is going to be strong. We also go in knowing that the art by Mikel Janínand colors by Jordie Bellaire are going to complement the writing further. The story has these wonderful moments of contrast between shopping for furniture for a new apartment and dropping into a maximum security prison and the art helps to bring this contrast into a more stark light. We have these full splash pages of bright, colorful heroics before we descend into the blacks and reds of tension. Janín’s art brings tension in his panels while Bellaire colors the world to match. They create a tag-team effort that bolsters the arcs Tamaki is putting Wonder Woman through.

Much like Kelly Sue DeConnick taking over Aquaman last year, Tamaki’s start on Wonder Woman already feels as though it will be one of the defining arcs in this character’s history. Although we only have a small portion of the story, this is how a writer coming into a long-running series should begin—a moment to begin anew with some connections to their past. We have some familiarity with Max Lord returning and Etta Candy providing some counsel, but this already feels like a story that is going to introduce more to the character of Diana Prince that can last well into the next decade.

Get excited. Get wonderful.

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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 #84 by Drew Barth

How Bad Can A Dream Be?

There have been plenty of stories that deal with dreams. Either characters having to jump into a friend’s head to dissect what about their dreams is disturbing them or having to pull the dream out into the real world to fight it off. But what if the latter kept happening—what if dreams kept popping out of people’s heads with enough frequency that a whole governmental department had to be created to deal with them? This is the world of Queen of Bad Dreamsthat Danny Lore, Jordi Pẽrez, Dearbhla Kelly, and Kim McLean have created for us and is the kind of comic series that jolts you awake in the middle of the night.

Queen of Bad Dreams is, for the most part, a story about family. It is the family we dream of having—sometimes we dream it so hard that it comes to life before our very eyes. This is what Daher Wei and Viv have in their daughter, Selene. But this kind of dream isn’t necessarily the norm. Daher is an Inspector Judge for the Morphean Annex, the governmental agency that deals with escaped dreams, and has a specific role when it comes to those dreams: execute, return, or free. From what we see from the first few pages, the execution is rather gruesome. And her own daughter is someone whom she had freed even before becoming an Inspector Judge. So what about returning dreams? This is where things get weird and complicated as a rising political star has an escaped dream that knows all of his family secrets–all of the worst from a family of politicians. On the one hand, a part of Daher’s job is to return these dreams to their dreamers if necessary; on the other hand, the family in question are a swarm of slimy assholes. So, you know, decisions.

But what is it about family that Lore and Pẽrez really want us to see throughout Queen of Bad Dreams? There is a continual thread of connections—the ones we make as people and how we are all bound together in certain situations. Ava, the escaped dream from the rising politician, is bound to her original dreamer, but he isn’t family or anything close to that. Daher, Viv, and Selene, despite their limited interactions with Ava, act more as a family or at least as someone actually familiar. While the political family will see Ava as a tool in dreams or a liability in the real world, Daher and her family can empathize with her desire to remain her own person. 

Queen of Bad Dreams is the kind of work that comics needs as voices like Lore’s and Pẽrez’s aren’t heard often in monthly comic spaces. It’s one of the reasons Vault is quickly becoming a favorite publisher since they’re giving platforms to creators of color and nonbinary creators who haven’t been well represented in the past. Giving these voices space is necessary to keep comics relevant and inclusive. And without these voices, we don’t have their stories, and their stories are what live on to inspire generations afterward. 

Get excited. Get dreaming. 

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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.