So Buttons Holiday Special #1; Written by Jonathan Baylis with art by various celebrants; Black and white; 8 pp.; Self-published; $2

www.sobuttons.com

The latest pair of comics from writer Jonathan Baylis come themed. The more substantive is the third issue of his series, So Buttons, subtitled So Horror-ble. Accordingly, scary is the watchword, beginning with a Danny Hellman cover paying homage to spooky EC titles. The image, that of an encrusted skeleton arm reaching out to choke the male of a seaside couple, ties into the lead story. “In Need of a Hand – or – So I went to L.A.” is an eight-pager with art by Thomas Boatwright. Looking at the larger scheme of things, Baylis finds the tale fits “perfectly as a transition from my usual auto-bio stories into the horror fiction.”

The mood struck by word and picture is quite perfect, too. Speech is conversational and plausible, the action nicely composed and framed. It feels natural enough to be, at bottom, an autobiographical incident with added authorial wrinkles, including Baylis’ stretch into the purple prose of vintage EC (spoiler alert: liberties have been taken with that boney strangling hand). It’s in color and Boatwright does a good job keeping both the mundane and the weird alive and in close company.

David Beyer Jr. takes over for two stories of more concerted horror featuring genre staples. Set in an alternative world where vampires have lived beside humans for a hundred years, “In the … Old Fashioned Way” posits that the predators have found an alternative food source. Or so they maintain. The zombie tale that follows, “In the Head Please!” is “sick” enough to earn a disclaimer from Baylis: “This is not what typically goes on in my brain, people.” I’m no connoisseur but the narrative does ooze a few surprises.

Both offerings are eight-pagers done in black and white. The vampires get a cleaner, lighter, more open look from Beyer, as befitting the more “civilized” tone to their story. The zombies, meanwhile, are given a funkier, clotted rendering. Both efforts are comparatively humorless.

…unlike “In the Heat of Battle,” a three-page coda in color with art by T.J. Kirsch. Think of the chess match from The Seventh Seal with a zombie in place of Death with running movie commentary and situationally appropriate stakes.

The So Buttons Holiday Special leads off with a quick recollection of childhood Thanksgivings, festivals that center around King Kong rather than turkey. Through its two pages Boatwright keeps things light afoot with substantive efficiency. Ophira Eisenberg, Baylis’ wife, provides the basis for the concluding five-pager, a “Christmukkah Story,” as adapted by her husband and drawn by Kirsch. It goes a long way over familiar territory for its joke, but at least it’s Canadian territory with all its foreign exoticism. In the select company reviewed here, the story is something of an anomaly, extravagantly simple where Baylis’ other material is economically kinked.

Holiday bonus: On the back cover, Kong, in yarmulke and prayer shawl, sends a punched-out giant Santa reeling back onto a church, crushing it, as a beak-nosed Fay Wray figure cheers and a distant Godzilla looks confused. It is perhaps the oddest single image — a fusion of religion, aggression and iconic figures — that I can recall from the tenure of this column.

Such an expansive summary pronouncement reflects a bit of nostalgia as, with this installment, Minis Monday folds its tent and steals away into the electromagnetic ether. Nonetheless, I’ll still be ahead for the unstinting torrent of your self-published, low-to-the-ground, irrepressible expressions of idiosyncratic intelligent design with undiminished anticipation and, no doubt, pleasure. Om Shakti Om, baby!

The part of the Boom Kids! solicitation for Mickey Mouse #304 that really stood out was the statement that the comic’s lead story, “The Pirate Ghost Ship” by Bill Walsh and Floyd Gottfredson, had not been reprinted in its entirety since 1944. To longtime fans that meant that the tale had not been re-presented in the fine albums and comics released by the Gladstone imprint in the latter half of the 1980s. Reading the story today, a couple of reasons for that oversight suggest themselves, although it endures as an interesting product of the confluence of creativity and commerce.

“The Pirate Ghost Ship” is a lengthy segment of the Mouse’s daily newspaper strips done for the King Features Syndicate. The strip began in January 1930 as a sequence of loosely linked gags written by Walt Disney himself. In short order, the strip was modified to reflect King’s desire to capture its share of the growing public enthusiasm for continuity strips, particularly ones involving exotic derring-do. In May of 1930, Gottfredson was brought aboard (some say shanghaied) and proved himself to be the Good Mouse Man.

Mickey, of course, had begun life as a plucky, resourceful, enterprising underdog so the call for sustained adventures seemed pitch-perfect for him. As it turns out, it also proved tailor-made for Gottfredson. That being said, nothing I’ve seen before from either of them quite prepared me for the absolutely furious action and breakneck pacing seen here.

“The Pirate Ghost Ship” starts fast and runs hard throughout. Mickey signs up for a hitch aboard a tuna trawler. (“Shucks! The country needs more food … and a couple of days hard work won’t hurt me!”) By the third installment, Pluto has plummeted from the crows nest and, during the five days following, the strip sees a storm at sea, Pluto overboard, monstrous fish, the sighting of a pirate’s frigate, the sinking of the fishing boat and a shark attack — over a single working week! Nor is there any let-up in the action toward the wrap-up, with its battle between monstrous water serpents, sunken treasure retrieved, a busted dam, a river of fire and an exploding island, and that’s skipping over walking the plank, a whale attack, a mutiny, wrestling an ape, a warning, “ghostlie haff-human forms,” sea cannibals, Dead Man’s Isle and its “walking death,” natives who speak in musical sounds, shrunken seadogs, a fight with a crocodile and a green princess who’s otherwise a Minnie Mouse look-a-like in a Dorothy Lamour sarong.

This is lickety-split storytelling anticipating an A.D.D. pandemic among newspaper readers. Emphasis remains squarely on the gag-a-day format while overarching continuity makes seat-of-the-pants plotting seem languorous. Any given installment seems comfortable commencing with a non sequitur or incongruence. There are also a couple of notable fatalities along the way, which may account for the story’s absence within the Gladstone canon.

Mickey Mouse #304 is rounded out with a two-page joke by Gottfredson and co-writer Webb Smith “in its first re-printing ever!” as well as a 10-page Goofy misadventure — “making its American printing debut!” — in which he takes up the occupation of tree trimmer with predictable if spectacular results.

I quote Book Kids! solicitation information with an ulterior purpose. Sharp-eyed readers might already have noticed that “The Ghost Ship” is not definitively dated within Gottfredson’s career, all years and spans being extrapolated and couched. Specific chronological information isn’t to be found in the solicitation or in the comic itself. Clearly, this isn’t a priority of the Boom or its presumed audience of Kids! but it does, in retrospect, emphasize defunct Gladstone’s comparative thoroughness in presentation. And, not to be too much the company shill here, it also whets the appetite for the more definitive and exacting reprinting of the Mouse adventures forthcoming from Fantagraphics.

While the premise of The Best American Comics series is clear, its realization has always faced formidable practical obstacles. The annual hardcover from the high-profile publisher was designed from its inception to entice a wider, booky audience. An immediate complication was that newcomers might need some remedial help with the medium, an introduction to its conventions or generally be brought up to speed rapidly on the state of its art (nowhere is this made more explicit than in this year’s introduction by series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden where, in the first sentence of their foreword, they describe “pamphlet comics” as “what we in the biz call what you probably think of as ‘comic books’”).

That wider audience might also be largely unfamiliar with the annually chosen guest editors, comics creators who would need no introduction to medium habitués (prior to this volume, they were Harvey Pekar, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry and Charles Burns). Editors were encouraged to make their selections according to quality and what tickled their fancy, with less attention to concrete attributes as format, scope or size of the original comics and presumably even less concern with how varied material would be subsequently assembled into a single volume.

Note that so far this has nothing to do with taste, sensitivity or preferences of editors (nor with the unfortunate necessities of lag time inherent in print publishing: The Best … 2010 culls work from September `08 through August `09). Actually, personalized assessment made for one of the livelier features of the series and up until this year, particularized sensibilities had never proven to be a drawback. Idiosyncratic choices were often annual highlights. Still, accomplished creators aren’t necessarily skilled editors, which helps to account for why the annual whole was never greater than the sum of its parts and why no Best American was the standout anthology of its calendar year.

This current edition, which unquestionably includes some absolutely superlative comics, is the least adventurous, most ungainly, most circumscribed and least surprising assortment ever, so much so that it’s worth considering whether anybody reading here at the Journal site would find it, on balance, of value.

Well, if you keep up with such publications as Bookforum, Taddle Creek and Reason and the on-line site Metropolis, if you’re familiar with Michael Cho, David Lapp, Fred Chao and Theo Ellsworth, if you keep abreast of more cutting-edge compilations such as Kramer’s Ergot, Mome and World War III and if you aren’t an obsessive Chris Ware completist, well no, it’s probably not for you.

Alternatively, if you’ve read Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, Crumb’s The Book of Genesis, Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #19 and Tyler’s masterpiece You’ll Never Know, Book One, it’s probably not for you either, as portions of these books have been included to the tune of either 12 or 19 pages each. Add segments from Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (at 27 pages), the whole of Chao’s “Lobster Run” from Johnny Hiro (30 pp.) and what looks like an entire issue of Marvel’s Omega the Unknown by Jonathan Lethem, Farel Dalrymple and Gary Panter (24 pp.) and you have eaten up almost half the book, with large chunks of the Gilbert and Mario Hernandez’s Citizen Rex, Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel’s The Alcoholic and Lilli Carre’s The Lagoon yet to go.

©Lilli Carre

Given that roster this obviously is less a question of quality than of allocation of resources. (But OK, as for quality, at this point is anything gained by a 10-page segment involving Bryan Lee O’Malley’s character Scott Pilgrim that, out of context, is hopelessly confusing and that, enlarged to this extent, is more grandly insubstantial?)

The book feels bloated. By inevitable comparison, the two-page pieces from Peter Kuper and Laura Weinstein feel pared and lean, compressed, urgent and vital; as artistic expressions complete in themselves, they are proportioned and buff relative to the far longer, carved-out and ponderously dangling bits. Prior volumes had the occasional blank and spacing page to make sure certain stories began on the proper side of the book; here there are multiple sheets to decorate and set stage and signify gravitas, mostly to diminishing effect. In years past, the concluding lists of other Notable Comics, as compiled by Abel and Madden, have seemed supplemental and superfluous. In this year’s sampler of superstars, Hall of Famers, big books and best sellers (all relatively speaking, of course), their addendum feels like an exotic tease, a menu of extras and exciting come-ons addressing the more catholic tastes and wider interests of more intrepid readers.

Which brings us to worse: As a package, this edition comes across as far too satisfied with itself, its lack of vision and lack of ambition. A handsome portrait of this year’s editor, Neil Gaiman, appears on the back cover. (Where was Harvey Pekar’s mug on the inaugural release?) Flattering as it is, it’s hard not to think of it as an idealization, a completely realized do-over of the face of the comic geek.  As such, it appears as a one-shot rehabbing of the image of comic fans so grievously wounded by Drew Friedman on the front of The Best American Comics Criticism of the 21^st Century. Gaiman’s pleasing visage contrasts to his description of himself in his Introduction, as having “bags under his eyes … the little potbelly … the haunted expression” of a man who — we are free to infer — has physically sacrificed himself for the good of funnies.

Abel and Madden allow “it’s clear where Neil is coming from: the stories and excerpts are longer than in the preceding volumes, and that they are focused on the narrative,” which is fine as far as it goes but the trouble is it isn’t very. His 25 selections are the fewest ever. As for the excerpting, Gaiman was hoping to feature portions that “would interest, intrigue, or irritate you enough that they would perhaps send you out to buy the whole [original version].” Inciting emotion and moving folks to action is a tricky business; more likely you will — if you follow the biz at all — glance at your bookshelf and, seeing the originals there, wonder who might benefit from a regifting of this potpourri.

Toward the end of that facile Introduction, one that dabbles in a faux-pamphlet comic-scripting format for the rubes, Gaiman suggests a “real title” for the volume as “A Sampler: Some Really Good Comics, Including Extracts from Longer Stories We Thought Could Stand on Their Own” and, as such, finds “It’s not half bad.” The Best American Comics this year, every year, any year, needs to be better than that.

A while back I offered comment on Desmond Reed’s Aloha and The Island. The two comics here, Dexter Park and The Neighbor, come in the very same, cozy, 4¼” x  2¾ ” package with double-thick pages. They feature the very same clear, congenial, pictographically accessible drawing style. Reed uses a single, confident line of unvarying thickness to virtually embody cartooning directness. Outlines define the world and solid blacks, spotted to purpose, are it in terms of texture. No shading, no crosshatching. In a similarly no-nonsense fashion, dialogue is to point yet wholly conversational, amicable and routinely engaging.

From Dexter Park

Such approachability does wonders for the delicate balance struck in Reed’s comics. Each generates real frisson, a suspense that naturally propels a reader toward a resolution concluding with a twist. The hint of danger, if not mayhem, provides the momentum, the playful drawings beguile, the straightforward talk lulls and all the while the wackiness is escalating steadily. (Remember the axe-wielding earthworm in Aloha? The deserted isle with the dog and talking hamburger of The Island?)

The narrative tension evoked in Dexter Park is more concerted, directed. We have a central question that is fairly explicitly developed in terms of theme and plot payoff. Moreover, it’s a mystery that implicitly invites participation, for the reader to match wits and play along. More than usual, the pleasure of the journey is transferred to the destination. An uncharacteristic degree of the comic’s success hinges on the committed reader’s satisfaction with the story’s conclusion.

That reveal takes place during some of the busiest pages I’ve seen from Reed, including his first crowd scene (that I know of). Reed’s art has always been pragmatic, fearless and intuitively apt and this finale exemplifies as much. Another “first” is his commitment to pen and page of a quadriplegic grandfather frog. With beard. Also Dexter Park is about the chattiest of Reed’s comics, occasionally crowdedly so, which may suggest a move to a format with more elbow room or a story pared of some of its intriguing side branches.

The Neighbor immediately benefits from the empathy generated by the self-introduction of its protagonist, Stephen, a cat grateful for an adopted life free of the animal shelter. (Thanks to a particularly crafty move, we will come to see much of the action from the cat’s perspective, over his shoulder, thus deepening our identification.)

From The Neighbor

Then, with delicious, luxurious, Hitchcockian precision (think a feline Rear Window), a shadow creeps across Stephen’s newly charmed existence. All is threatened, all in doubt, all imperiled as menace grows closer in a now claustrophobically ominous situation.

Here, the ride is more irresistible, more compelling. Our concentration has been heightened, as if made unable to ignore the sound of binding ropes cinching tighter. The reader indulges less in the sense of playing along, which, in turn, allows the resolution to demonstrate how gratifying he or she has been played. The Neighbor is certainly among the best within Reed’s still growing body of minicomics work.

images ©2010 Desmond Reed

There are any number of ways to try and get proper perspective on a television series that has reached 20+ years of broadcasting. The method I now prefer — and the one that last Christmas offered Santa-certified proof that I had been a very good boy the year prior — is Simpsons World: The Ultimate Episode Guide.

“Guide” is a fit if pale description for the tome, one that at least holds a suggestion of the range and breadth of functions here provided to escort and enhance. Each of the episodes of the inaugural 20 seasons of the show gets two or more pages combining recap, listings, references and profuse quotes, one exhaustive if specialized encyclopedia.

Generous, dutiful synopses do their level best to convey the usually convoluted, unfailingly crazed narrative of each episode. These do a good job conveying the imaginative premise and precipitous action, even occasionally suggesting how groundbreaking certain themes and their treatment were for their time. Still, given the program’s rapid-fire pacing, the brilliance of the voice-acting, the depth of the characterization and the other inherent virtues of animation refined to its peculiar art, these synopses, when compared to the viewing experience, are the least likely of the book’s features to boost viewing pleasure.

Bountiful hilarity rains down elsewhere. The bulk of every page is taken up with episode dialogue, song lyrics, character profiles, show art and more focused highlights, including separate compartments for “Stuff You May Have Missed” and “Moments” citing homages /swipes from films or television history. Every episode includes Bart’s signature chalkboard joke as well as more mundane info such as original airdate, production code designation and creative credits.

Ultimate duplicates the same format of earlier “complete guides” (to my knowledge, the last before this one was The Simpsons Beyond Forever covering seasons 11 and 12) but, as we’ll see, fortifies, refines and updates. The biggest changes between earlier compilations and this’n is the uniform expansion of earliest episode listings from a single to multiple pages, whether those earliest episodes, relative to later shows, deserves the expansion or not (many don’t and can’t support it, accounting for the heavy reliance on more program art for the inflation).

Let’s take a closer look at how a single program fares in an earlier guide compared to this Ultimate guide and make some disturbingly obsessive observations.

I just happened to have recently seen “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes” from the middle of the 12^th season. It’s a sturdy if run-of-the-mill outing immediately eye-catching for being credited to the inimitable writer John Swartzwelder.

The episode rated two pages in both earlier and Ultimate editions. Here, Homer gets a computer and begins a blog site as Mr. X until his wild “bull plop” lands him in a “creepy village by the sea” à la the television show The Prisoner. Accordingly, hero and guiding hand of that program, Patrick McGoohan, guest stars.

Neither guide explains the title which adapts that of an undistinguished Disney film, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, itself of interest possibly only for its early starring role for Kurt Russell … and let me emphasize possibly. Ultimate expands the number of highlighted entries and quotes for the episode from 22 to 27 and extends the dialogue of a common excerpt. On the debit side, Ultimate drops a reference under “Stuff You Might Have Missed,” an aside about this show representing the second appearance of The Prisoner’s “anti-escape orbs” (they having been seen prior, in show 5F23, “The Joy of Sect,” when Marge flees the Movementarian religious compound). That’s a net gain of four highlighted excitements, all of which warm the cockles of your funnybone, although the missing link about the orbs is to be lamented.

Regardless, bear in mind too, that 22 or 27, we are talking about that many funny bits in a show that, without commercials, runs some 23 minutes.  Interestingly enough (well, to some of us), both guides contain the same reference to escape boats cobbled from toiler paper rolls, toothpicks and plastic forks; additionally both also list as construction components “scabs and dynamite,” a joke absent from the televised program.

In the earlier guide “bull plop” goes unhyphenated while in Ultimate it gets the hyphen… but maybe I’ve already said too much …

Although wait, there is more. In the original guide, the plot synopsis regarding Homer’s site reads “His web page starts becoming unpopular …” This is changed in Ultimate to “His web page becomes unpopular …” Now, what that means is that the powers overseeing this new volume were not content to merely reprint the perfectly serviceable earlier material wholesale, but made the effort to augment, amplify and improve, up to and including hiring somebody familiar with the English language to go ahead and reedit everything. That, in my book, is service above and beyond.

I haven’t really gotten to the added treats that would so appeal to longtime viewers and that, to recite even a tiny fraction of the savory good parts as examples, would brand me the enamored fan that I am. But what must be mentioned are the voice credits in f-u-l-l (Dan Castellaneta’s go on for almost four pages; Hank Azaria’s for more); every celebrity guest star (Art Spiegelman and Alan Moore both have one more than Bruce Springsteen but themselves are doubled by Thomas Pynchon); mercilessly extended index (“Tinkle, Ivana” is in two episodes!); complete descriptions of every opening sequence (including the original, that of seasons 2-20, the new, Christmas and post movie versions with variations); every couch gag; every Itchy & Scratchy cartoon-within-a-cartoon; every First Church of Springfield marquee; every Krusty authorized product (OK, dweeb alert from here on out…) including Krusty Brand Imitation Gruel; every occasion when Homer said “D’oh!;” every time he said “Mmm” (“Mmm … extra-virgin” [don’t ask]); the lyrics for every song sung (“We see another shot of U2 sitting on their barstools, revealing that their rears are exposed. Each member of the band pulls up his pants. Bono: ‘And tell you when your arse [here “ass”] is showing!’”); and “A Tribute to Troy McClure,” voiced by the late, great Phil Hartman, including his television shows and specials, telethons (“Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House”), his 29 films (including Leper in the Backfield) and funeral hostings.

I’ll stop, but this isn’t finished, not by a long shot.

On the inside flap of the front cover of his comic, Joshua Rosen gives a brief prose sketch of the larger world of his story. He mentions a Northern Empire, an Imperial Palace, the Most Holy Synod and even the mythological underpinnings of its capital city, Ophestios. On the rear flap he allows for a fondness for “depressing Russian novels.”

Ophestios, 1890 offers a peephole into the Northern Empire particularly its culture and members of its social classes as creators and consumers of the arts. Its lens is that of the young protagonist, Iosif, a playwright on the avant-garde side of things. Surfacing after an unexplained absence, Iosif is making something of a re-imersion in the social if not artistic scenes of the city. The comic’s settings are bound by the preoccupations of the writer over the course of a single day: the theater for rehearsal, the club for boozing and mostly unwelcome schmoozing and finally the bed of a fresh acquaintance.

The first segment, on and behind the stage, is nicely engineered as introduction. The denouement, of chemical enhancement, assignation and aftermath, is even more cleverly constructed. A cinematic mix of punctuated panels depicts flitting under the influence, the perceptions while under the same and the visual correlatives of commingling and sobered awakening.

But the heart of the narrative takes shape at the club. Here the seeds of a more extensive drama are most assiduously planted. Several new characters appear, each adding to or contrasting with some concern of Iosif: Madame K, the chanteuse with a secret; hail-fellow-well-met Aleksey; former female interest Svetla; drunken boor Gennady with a drunken girl hanging off his arm; and the prosperous, self-satisfied embodiment of old guard sensibilities, Maksim. The director Viktor also does his turn, fleshing out the role of opportunistic and preoccupied artiste.

The others express their opinions and stake their positions with Iosif remaining aloof and uncommitted by choice and temperament. Nonetheless, several drinks in, he’s loudly, defensively holding forth on the sanctity of art as the purifying fire, as “What rips away the shroud behind which you cower you pustule, you PARASITE , you — you — ” He is accordingly reached only by the singer, her song, disclosure and potential, all of which accentuates the poignancy of evening’s end and morning’s dawning.

Iosif wears his heart on his sleeve as prominently as the comic displays its influences. If characters appear stock and easily identified, they are at least rich figures engagingly offered. It’s easy to imagine some them standing for matters and enunciating issues of interest to Rosen himself, in theory if not in practice.

In many ways Ophestios, 1890 is composed in a manner opposite from Jason Lute’s Berlin. There, a host of characters is painstakingly drawn in order, cumulatively, to provide human scale and dimension to the complex political and social flux at the time and in that place. Call it a bottom-up approach. Here, it is the familiarity of larger narratives that offers quick recognition and resonance for individual figures occupying niches, framing them in most intriguing lights, a top-down construction.

Barring something turning up in my sock drawer, Ophestios, 1890 is the final comic of last May’s harvest from the Maine Comics Arts Festival in Portland. It’s pleasant to contemplate that Rosen may have been adding to this narrative since then.

Images ©2009 Joshua Rosen

This particular edition of Colin Tedford’s Square Dance suggests what underground comics might have been in their nth iteration if maybe America and its cartoonists had progressed differently. For instance, what if, when head shops disappeared, the undergrounds migrated and were sold in farm and feed supply stores?

What if they’d made a wholesale shift into the funnies section of the free local papers?  If they became less burdened by revolution and throwing off the shackles of repression and more fully cognizant of being irreparably part of “the system,” consequently committing to work from inside said system?  If doing one’s own thing hinged less on sex, drugs and rock and roll and more on tending one’s own rows in the community garden?

Of course, no modern comic escapes the legacy of the undergrounds any more than it transcends the influences of its times or can divorce itself from the talent and preoccupations of its creator. Still, few comics celebrate such legacy, cultural grounding and personal distinctions quite like this. Square Dance #4 is fun-loving and solidly entrenched — socially, politically, economically and agriculturally — working to make the world a nicer place one panel at a time.

While there’s little dead space to be found anywhere, the issue, for the most, is carried by three large features. “Spinning World” is a collection of short strips in diverse formats and sizes wherein Tedford’s outlook and attitude is most explicitly developed. Cold-weather holidays loom large. Thanksgiving gets a jaundiced eye while Christmas appears less irrevocably stained, tracing fond holiday traditions only so far back as the disco era where “colorful lights in the dark” represent an evolution from the mirror ball. While various sober topics are broached (“On average, it takes 10-15 calories of fossil fuel to bring you each calorie of food that you eat”) before skewering, special attention is reserved for nuclear power, beginning with Tedford’s neighborhood nuke, the creaky Vermont Yankee. (Haven’t heard much about nukes lately? Wait’ll it’s time to decommission your own neighborhood plant.)

If you can imagine Wonder Wart Hog wanting selflessly, guilelessly, desperately to be of service, then the title of “Super Friendly Garlic” pretty much says all you need to know about his story. A high point is where S.F.G. poops out two cloves into the waiting hands of a needy cook. (Pooping is noteworthy in Square Dance. Check out The Almighty there on the front cover, His face showing strain, His fists clenched atop a porcelain throne of clouds.)

“Winter in Headville” offers a closely observed cartoon burg (pooping dog alert!) in the grips of a spectacular snowy storm, a condition made all the more daunting for its citizens being oval heads atop stick legs. But busy, engaged ovals! Imagine a whole city of Trondheim’s Mister Os drawn, if anything, even smaller. And without arms. Throwing snowballs and making snow angels is all the more challenging, but the frolicking kids (and Tedford) carry it off with merry aplomb. Headville bustles with seasonal seriousness (front end loaders piling urban snow drifts into dump trucks to be hauled out of town) and silliness (hey, I said heads on legs with no arms). Mundane pains, like crossing a really slushy street, as well as special problems — a worker in hardhat putting up decorations grows wobbly after winding around the town’s Christmas tree — find resolution in fantasy: In a woodsy scene on the final page, one head warmed by a plaid cap with earflaps unrolls a blanket and shares a hot thermos full of something with a fir tree. After a bit, they both go their respective ways. Pulling back in an aerial shot, we see that the forest is crowded with such pairs, heads and trees, their respite over and resuming business, but not until they’ve advanced an elegantly charming notion of community `way beyond the conventional norm.

And what’s that on the back cover? That mummified snowman? A victim of  inventive vandalism, some T.P.’ed Frosty? No, no, below that. Why it’s Tedford’s self-portrait. But what’s he doing, gesturing like that? Voguing? Striking a disco pose? Square dancing? A hip-hopper turning over the action to the next person? Yeah, “Wave yo’ arms like you jus’ do care!”

You can’t improve upon the participants’ own definition of their title: “Tag Team is a sweatshop-style comic anthology with an indie vibe.” Gathering in White River Junction, Vermont, six cartoonists — Dennis Pacheco, Pat Barrett, Robyn Chapman, Sam Carbaugh, Colleen Frakes and Morgan Pielli — created six stories using a modified Exquisite Corpse arrangement in the round.

Seated at a circular table, participants took a turn working on one of the tales performing one of six successive tasks — plotting, scripting, thumbnailing, lettering and paneling, penciling and finally inking. At the end of timed intervals, they passed the evolving work along to the creator to their left (meaning that during the first period, everybody was plotting one of the six stories; in the next period, everybody’s scripting the pre-plotted narrative just passed to them; then on to thumbnails next go `round, etc.). Whatever their task and whatever the tale, each was “encouraged to develop the story, improve it, and put their own stamp on it.”

It sounds like a great exercise for thinking about and working through formal (if atomized) facets of comics-building. But it’s an even better way to foster a sense of communal creativity. Potentially it sidesteps personal sticking points (“God, I hate inking;” “I never have any good ideas;” etc.) while diminishing impediments to invention like absolute control, artistic perfection and proprietary ownership.

As would be expected with even six “ordinary” stories, quality and interest varies. So does topic, ranging from casual realism through accented caricature to nurtured fantasy. More efforts adopt a lighthearted tone although there are exceptions. All are four pages save the last with five. All feature the same seating arrangement among artists, hence the same string of contributors merely broken by different folks at beginning and end (taking the successive tasks for the opening story, by way of first initials, were C-M-S-D-F-R; the second was produced by R-C-M-S-D-F, and so on. No, hey, that’s important, as there’s only six permutations of talent instead of, you know, 6 factorial or 720 different combinations … ). Did I mention that additionally all stories explicitly include a public transportation bus pass?

To adapt Tolstoy’s observation about families, all the happily wrought stories are happily wrought in the same way: An intriguing premise is developed and fleshed out, paced with respect to flow and momentum and rendered with sympathy and skill. These pages go by quickly. “Full Ride” establishes its tension immediately, maintaining no small amount of suspense until its concluding comeuppance. “Depth” is submarine sci-fi that skirts genre conventions to arrive at its peculiar but decided grace note (yes, with bus pass). “Expired” is a cartoon character study affectionately if rankly rendered.

By comparison, less happily wrought efforts are less happy for different reasons. Thin conceptions aren’t bolstered down the line. Action does not progress smoothly, to advantage. Mood is not corroborated. Words don’t engage or don’t communicate enough, be they too few or too many. Art does not sufficiently substantiate. In fact, as object lessons go, such offerings serve to demonstrate just how many things need to go right and in coordination in order to create good comics.

Images ©2010 Dennis Pacheco, Pat Barrett, Robyn Chapman, Sam Carbaugh, Colleen Frakes and Morgan Pielli

Mimi’s Doughnut Zine #19: Health; By Marek Bennett; B&W; 27 pp.; Self-published; www.marekbennett.com

I am told that devout Muslims do not undertake the sacred Haj until all their outstanding worldly debts are repaid. This comforts at the moment as I find myself unable to really get on with 2011 until I’ve fulfilled my obligations to some comics gathered in 2010.

The Widow Reminisces Over a Plate of Vegetables is a re-imagining of a poem by Alexander Danner adapted by Danner and rendered by Stephanie Smith. It’s a graceful arc of triggered thought and pained reflection, of loss and the reconfiguration of prior resentments. In keeping with its poetic origins, there’s more still, deeper still, depending on reader receptivity.

Verbally the comic is guileless and puts on no airs. The visuals complement what is written and make explicit what is not. Although panels stretch to panoramas and wide shots, impact lies in individual expression. What I like about Smith’s postures and faces is that they are not reflective of their most primped moments, at their most graphically optimal, photogenic and distilled — a vegetable is poised too close to the mouth; emotions are too immediate, too broad, as they might be when one is unselfconscious and unguarded; robust memories contrast to frailer realities.

Sympathies are undermined, however, in the choice of detailing and method of illustrative refinement. A blanket of Benday dotting of varying densities provides texture and adds shading. When too ambitious, it competes with more delicate linework, obscuring finesse, intruding on faces. Sights accumulate an overall gritty feel. I assume this is the result of some form of computer-aided layering, a mechanical distraction from the more precise, ethereal pangs evoked.

In contrast, Marek Bennett’s 19^th issue of Mimi’s Doughnuts Zine is flagrantly handmade and a product of a 24-Hour-Comic stint to boot. This number differs from other Mimi’s Zines as well as the “usual” 24-hour-event product, in that it is a series of shorter segments and strips all devoted to matters of health, health care and reform of same. So it winds up being, again in contrast, as communal and public as Widow is individual and intimate.

Despite the comic’s animated, congenial delivery in cartoon streamlining, this is one sobering anthology of wellbeing interruptus, of malady and misfortune made geometrically more dire through incompetence, corporate malfeasance, bureaucratic indifference and simple if pandemic civic apathy. For the most, episodes are given dates and complaints, inflicted without discrimination upon Bennett himself (as autobiography) and upon scarcely more differentiated members of “a small cast of stick figures — a single family, if you notice such continuity among stick figures.”

Actually, the comic’s real strength is that you do recognize the continuity among them, among us, because, regarding the allergies, coughs and skin, heart, cholesterol, kidney, blood, face and finger problems, there but for the grace of God go you and your loved ones, afflicted, unprovided for and worried sicker. (Oh, you have medical coverage? Swell for you and may you dream on uninterrupted upon your bed of tissue.)

Segments progress through anywhere from a single to a quartet of pages. It doesn’t do, exactly, to call them “stories;”  they are more instances, episodes that form a social mosaic, a patchwork portrait that backfills the book’s ominous frontispiece, the more considered, decidedly non-stick-figured scene from a cemetery, “A Child’s Grave.”

So then: a pair of comics that can be read relatively quickly but not lightly, one on death and longing, the other on life and hardship. Happy New Year, everybody!

First, though, the decks needed to be hosed clean of the last several N!N!B!T!s and the mess they’d made. Spider-Man Saga is a concerted marketing booklet that essentially shows how easily the momentous changes written into the character’s history by a succession of caretakers, handlers and hacks could be written right back out again. Originally these “changes” were items that broke into the advertainment menu of broader, pandering media, things like “Spider-Man Marries!,” “Spider-Man Reveals His Secret Identity To The World!” and “Aunt May Shot!”

After the initial bump they gave to sales, such turning points came, of course, to be impediments for later puppeteers. But as the Saga relates, no biggie! Apparently authors painted into a corner by prior regimes could reclaim their artistic liberty by merely walking straight back over the work already laid down. Take Peter’s marriage to Mary Jane: It turns out that those whom God hath joined together, funnybook satan Mephisto can put asunder. As for how Parker’s going public with his secret identity was reversed, well, that was just plain silly.

As far as I can tell, Spider-Man Saga is a kind of superhero Cliff Notes where no honest academic cheat ever got to compress such ripe-unto-rotting source material:

Mysterio — apparently Quentin Beck back from the dead — used a remote control Silvermane robot to make the Maggia believe their metallic crime boss had returned, while igniting a gang war against Mr. Negative and Hammerhead.

Saga goes on like this for some 15 pages (“Caught between a cosmic champion of the Enigma Force and an unstoppable brute …”), this even before the 17 pages of equally useful character profiles (“Losing his sanity again …”). Bear in mind the book is a refresher for all of maybe two years of character continuity. (For December delivery to comic shops, Marvel Previews lists four Spider-Man comics and two Spider-family spin-offs in their own special designated section, but this doesn’t include team books of which he is a member, Ultimate comics, guest-starring appearances or any all-ages adventures for the month … so lot of things happen fast for Peter!)

Individual paragraphs in this Saga remind one of the desperate bedtime ploy where, turning the tables on an adult narrator, a child makes up his or her own story to ward off lights out: “… an’ then the dragon comes back but he can’t beat up Frankenstein, who’s a giant now, `cause he’s got a ray gun from these space aliens who came from inside the earth, but they were invisible …”

Nor does the Spider-soap-opera, the melodrama that fleshes out the barrens between fistfight, go neglected: “Peter and his new roommate Michele had a one-night fling after the reception, severely straining their relationship once the morning arrived.” Finally, there are those highlights that are sui generis, beholden to no recognizable medium, tradition or normal waking mental state: “Meanwhile, Aunt May caught her boss as his alter ego, Mr. Negative, disemboweling one of his henchmen. For a time, she became the foul-tempered ‘Anti-May’ …” Is it any wonder that a rapidly aging audience can’t keep track of it all, that 40-year old fanboys need precisely this kind of short-term memory crutch?  (Guys! Hurry! The Marvel Previews for February has an all-black cover with block red letters trumpeting “THE DEATH OF SPIDER-MAN”!)

Back in 1985, I remember being surprised by the cover and featured article for issue #99 of The Comics Journal: “What’s Wrong with the X-Men?” (This from a magazine that prided itself on the rare distinction in the day of flagrantly not fronting superheroes.) Inside, Heidi MacDonald took the X-Men comic to task for its shabby regard for consistency, particularly with respect to the integrity of its characters. I believe she referred to them and their utter malleability as plastic, with the additional implication of them being synthetic and patently fake. And bear in mind this was during a span when there was only a single X-title and it was written exclusively, as it had been for years, by Chris Claremont.

Today, plastic would look good. This Saga summation shows the state of contemporary Spider-Man to be more reminiscent of the molten and drooping pocket watches in Dali’s The Persistence of Memory: distinctively marked and readily identifiable but grotesquely contorted, sad and pathetic and rendered completely unsuitable for their original purpose. If there’s any kind of response to be made, it is to laugh.