Gabriella Giandelli’s Interiorae wound up as one of the most conventional of the Ignatz line of comics.  Of course, given how unusual most of the line has been, that’s not much of a knock.  Giandelli wove genre and slice-of-life concerns into a single story that wouldn’t have merited much notice on their own, but this extended exploration of the dreams of the bored and disaffected in an apartment building is notable for a certain flat beauty.  Each issue had a single-color wash: pinkish-red in the first issue, olive green in the second and kelly green in the third.  The fourth issue, however, is entirely in black and white.  Dreams and dream-time are over, the issue suggests.

Last issue brought the interpersonal conflicts and dramas of the building’s inhabitants to a climax, or rather, an anti-climax.  There was a great deal of the proverbial sound and fury, but the lives of the combatants changed as little as the ghosts of a family shown inhabiting their old apartment.  The genre conceit of the series is that an invisible white rabbit watches the lives of those who live in the building, reporting back to his dark, ovular master, a creature that feeds on the dreams (and nightmares) of the building’s people. This series is less concerned about the petty secrets and lies of people and more interested in the idea of inbetween spaces.  There’s the space between sleep and consciousness, the line between life and death, the space between commitment and detachment, the line between love and hate.

Giandelli revealed in the third issue that the rabbit in fact was the personification of the go-between between life and death, between flesh and God.  When a frail elderly woman began to sense the end was near, she tried to find ways to cross that divide.  When the rabbit guided her across a mystical forest to meet her maker, that was literally the end of everything.  The rabbit and the dream-eater left the building.  The family of ghosts departed.  The building itself shuddered and collapsed, its protectors now gone.  One gets the sense that the most truly worthy people left, or at least the most interesting; there was nothing left for the dream-eater to nourish himself on.

That final forest sequence was spectacular, as Giandelli drew a forest of delights filled with Jim Woodring-style creatures and numerous purely decorative touches.  This sequence was certainly in sharp relief compared to the rest of the series, which bore a flatness of style and affect along with a certain relentless grayness.  All of the various interpersonal conflicts never went anywhere, an indication that the “interior” life of the building’s characters was drab and dull–no matter their ideals or lack of same.  That essential dullness and tedium, while necessary to portray, wasn’t necessarily all that interesting to read.  Happily, the final issue addressed that issue by simply having the characters stop in their tracks with regard to the conflicts, with many realizing that something awful was about to happen.  While the series wound up cohering nicely, the end result was simply less engaging than the rest of the books in the Ignatz line.

Sergio Ponchionne’s conclusion to Grotesque returned to the mind-bending storytelling of the first issue, tying together loose story threads in a manner that treated those threads as tangible objects.  As I’ve noted elsewhere, Ponchionne’s line is very “American”: thick and rubbery, influenced in equal parts by classic cartooning of the 1920s (like many of the Ignatz artists) and the American underground and alternative traditions.  There are echoes of R.Crumb, Elzie Segar, Charles Burns and Kim Deitch in his work, creating a lush, bizarre world that he doesn’t quite allow the reader to get lost in.  Indeed, if the past two issues (the “Cryptic City” story) felt a bit more conventional than the more expansive first issue, the finale not only fully fleshed out the first issue’s themes, it gave the last two issues a new context.

The series has been about the machinations of a permanently sneering, godlike figure named Mr. O’Blique.  He’s a disquieting figure in part because of the rhomboid shape of his head and the way it sits on his body at an impossible angle. After the adventures his emissary Professor Hackensack experienced in the past two issues, O’Blique offered him a peek behind the curtain: the chance to see the Meaning of Life.  Hackensack, a figure who looks not unlike Crumb’s Mr. Natural, demurred, preferring his lifelong pursuit of mysteries and secrets to an easy answer.  O’Blique is a figure that embodies the intimate relationship between fantasy and reality, one whose mere presence inspires that search for meaning and mystery–a spark for each man’s own narrative but also a figure who tempts people to escape from reality.  For him, these narratives of humans delight him, as the three seekers in the first issue get their stories finished (in a highly abbreviated fashion) when O’Blique takes their books off the shelf.

Those endings were not happy ones.  An intrepid explorer winds up on a desolate plain, seeking the void for the meaning of life.  A man haunted by the thoughts of the fictional characters he loves wound up living with them, only to discover that his creations were starting to disappear.  A man who had withdrawn from the world only to recover finds himself relapsing.  All are seeking an answer, a meaning, trying to muddle through that process.  For each, O’Blique played tempter and practical joker, and always got his way using one method or another.  Hackensack resisted temptation, but wasn’t quite savvy enough to realize when he was being led by the nose for an especially wicked practical joke.  Being led back through Cryptic City (featuring a sudden switch from black & white to a light brown wash), he’s led to a hole where he accidentally learns what he didn’t want to know: The Explanation.

It’s not clear if O’Blique did this as a favor to him or not (because the reader doesn’t see what’s in the hole), but it was clearly a punchline to the elaborate joke that Hackensack was in O’blique’s eyes.  He essentially left Hackensack, and the reader, in the same position: having had a cosmic joke played on them without much regard to what will happen to them next.  He revealed knowledge to Hackensack knowing it would bring the same kind of abrupt end to his narrative (and the series) that withholding knowledge from the other three characters did.  He hints at what the secret is, however, when he talks about his admiration for man’s attempt to draw meaning and explore the “great mystery”…which includes “the grotesque immensity that encompasses it”.  That “immensity” could be either the infinite or the void–or both.  It’s grotesque because it’s too awful to look in its face, to comprehend its scale.  Fantasy is a way of deluding one into thinking that there is such a thing as a personal narrative with particular meanings; it’s a survival technique but one that’s doomed to always fail, one way or another.  It’s a way for us to look away from the void.  O’Blique is less a sinister figure than a mischievous one who understands this and treats it as a trick to play on others–especially the reader.  It’s a trick that all of us one day will have pulled on us.

It’s hard to decide which Ignatz book is the best-looking purely from an aesthetic standpoint, but Leila Marzocchi’s Niger has to be in consideration.  It’s another series that’s dominated by two tones (in this case, rust red and a chalky blue) that’s remarkable to behold simply in terms of its mark-making.  There’s a lushness to this series, in the way Marzocchi uses a scratchy technique that makes her figures and backgrounds look as though they were less drawn than constructed with dense webs of color.  Her figures are fabulously exaggerated, all curves and bulbous noses.  Everyone is larger than life, creating a sort of mysterious and slightly dark fairy tale atmosphere for this story.

There’s a touch of darkness to be found in what is otherwise a whimsical woodland story.  The mysterious, tiny central character, Dolly, is a sort of female gastropod of sorts.  Raised and protected by a number of different birds (all with a different set of idiosyncrasies), Dolly proves to be far deadlier than one would expect by her tiny size.  Who and what she is is still the primary mystery in a series that is about the way mysteries upset the balance in an otherwise stolid ecosystem.  This issue introduced another mystery, that of an ancient stone that “hatched” two wings.  The ecosystem, which includes a talking tree and the flying Hand of Fatima (literally, a flying, flapping hand that lays down decrees) was set a-twitter about this development as Marzocchi introduced the first elements that resembled plot points in an otherwise pleasant ramble of a series.  Most of Niger has been an exercise in world-building surrounding its very cute but not entirely innocent main character.

Working big suits Marzocchi’s style perfectly.  The only white space to be found in this comic is in its word balloons.  Each panel tends to be a close-up of a figure or figures, and working any smaller would destroy the comic’s impact.  It’s really a visual feast thanks to the sheer density of her line and backgrounds, even as her narrative techniques are quite conventional.  It’s an easy comic to follow and probably the friendliest to non-comics readers in the Ignatz line.  While its ideas are original, its familiar feel creates a certain immediate comfort level for the reader as they delve into a strange and beautiful world.  It’s as though Niger is a favorite old fairy tale whose memory is just out of reach.  I am quite curious to see if she actually ratchets up the stakes in this series or if she will continue to unravel its mysteries more slowly and with fewer overt conflicts.

Though it’s flying a bit under the radar now, the joint Fantagraphics-Coconino Ignatz line publishing project has produced some of my favorite comics of the past five years.  While all of the series are clearly labors of love, Zak Sally’s Sammy The Mouse feels as much like therapy-on-the-page as it does a comics narrative.  Like many of the Ignatz artists, Sally is drawing inspiration from 1920s comic strip cartooning, using it as a template to explore some deeply personal aspects of his own life.  Whether or not the personal aspects of the comic refer to current or past events isn’t relevant, nor is proving my particular supposition essential to appreciating and fully apprehending what Sally is trying to do here.  This is a story about purpose, inertia, the road blocks we throw up for ourselves and the ways in which we are forced to interact with a demanding and frequently demeaning world.  This book feels intimate because unlike his past work, Sammy The Mouse has an immediacy to it that’s quite different in tone from his earlier, more distant (but no less visceral) comics.

Anyone following this series should prepare themselves by re-reading issues 1 and 2 before tackling the newest issue.  Sally is delicately balancing a number of visual motifs that double as long-term narrative devices: a bullet flying in the air, a moustache sinking in the ocean, a pair of eyes blinking in the dark, and unseen voices offering direction to lost souls like Sammy and best friend Puppy Boy.  Sammy lives in a shabby, crowded urban environment that’s clearly seen better days, like most of its residents.   Each issue more-or-less resets with Sammy in his house, staring at the walls.  Sally really gets at that feeling that’s a combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, the awful sensation that the only thing worse than staying inside is going outside.  In the first two issues, events conspired to make Sammy leave the house and have an “adventure” that felt like a seedy, drunken version of Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse adventures.  While Sammy was pushed and pulled in all sorts of unpleasant ways in the first two issues, what happened here felt worse.

Instead of an outside force pulling him out, it was the awful realization of how disgusting his bathroom was and how little he really wanted to clean it, despite his using that as an excuse to get him.  In the first chilling scene, Sammy parrots his hidden voice word-for-word in order to create an excuse to leave.  When he visits his friend Puppy Boy, he’s far worse off than our protagonist, working on a “project” in a paranoiac state while sitting in the dark.  The characters are pushed along by their unseen voices, as Sammy is told to bring a shovel and Puppy Boy told to draw a map.  Even drunken loudmouth Feekes (who feels so much like a character based on a real person that it’s palpable) is hiding secrets from Sammy, concealing the presence of the mysterious, silent and vicious Him, a skeletal creature with sharp teeth.  The apparent aimlessness of Sammy’s “adventure” ends with him encountering a barkeep who happens to be a talking fish in a bowl–wearing a moustache.  It’s a very different sort of ending, marking a transition point of sorts.

Sally’s comics have an ugly physical quality to them that I’ve always liked, but the two-color process he uses here pushes the ugly/beautiful tension even further.  The ugliness I refer to is the deliberate messiness of certain corners of the page: a squiggle here, a patch of darkness there, or the employment of a ragged or scratchy sets of lines.  The blue/sepia color gives the book an air of being something old, of being an artifact of sorts.  Animation seems to be as much an influence as comic strips, both in terms of the character design (Disneyish anthropomorphic animals gone to seed, but with an organic design rather than as part of a specific parody) and the overall look.  The colors add to this cartoon effect and set off some of the more ragged lines with a genuine sense of beauty.  Sally is careful not to overdo it with color, leaving lots of white space as Sammy tries to negotiate his world.  The care and thought that Sally put into adapting his comic into the Ignatz format shows on every page and makes the story resonate all the more.