Driven by Lemons by Joshua Cotter

Driven by Lemons (available from Adhouse Books) is not like most other indie comics on the market. Cotter himself would only call it a graphic novel at his publisher’s insistence. Though it reads and looks intellectual and experimental, the book isn’t “serious” per se.  You’ll be disappointed if you go looking for some kind of brainy final word on anything.  That being said, Lemons’ is a great example of how comics can use visual and narrative abstraction to tell an engaging story. Cotter’s life was complicated when he wrote Lemons. Both his marriage and his mind were breaking down. In his own words, Lemons was “an attempt [...] to make sense of what just happened to [him],” the fear and detachment he experienced at the bottom of a deep psychological hole.

The story is about an anthropomorphic bunnyman’s unfortunate collision with a delivery truck that falls out of the sky, and the trauma induced spirit walk that ensues. It combines stream-of-conciousness and visual abstraction with panel by panel action and poetic dialogue to drive home a point about how it might feel to have a truck fall on you. Our protagonist is unnamed and mostly doesn’t talk. Post-collision, following some abortive efforts to pull pieces of the truck’s wreckage out of his body with a rope tied to a passenger train, Bunnyman passes out and finds himself in a hospital (the “get-better factory”). For the next 50 odd pages, a barrage of utterly engaging and emotionally expressive anomalies occur, all of which ultimately hold together into a visually stimulating and bizarrely cute riff on life after trauma.

Our bunny protagonist suffers visions and intrusions: interrogations by a faceless doctor and the screams of a neighboring trauma patient. Bunnyman’s only reprieve is either pharmaceutical or induced by brain damage. As his grinning head floats away, he drifts in and out of hallucinations. He comes face to face with his doppelganger, who he then races into a dark cave. In the cave, a strange shaman talks to him about incomprehensibly deep stuff. The bunnymind falters, bends, and squeals - and it all comes alive in Cotter’s unique surrealist style.

Lemons’ benign headfuckery seeks to express something intangible and scary about the all-too permeable boundary between the mind, the body, and the world around us. Cotter uses a variety of visual languages to push the protagonist towards transformation. Some pages feature block by block sequences, others break out into messy, painterly explosions. Occasionally, broad rivers of color and line will eat up a whole page. Driven by Lemons shines brightest when Cotter steers the comic out of the panel by panel sequences and into non-representational insanity.

The book's physical design is meant to mimic the moleskine journal in which Cotter initially drew and wrote the story. The facsimile is faithful down to the corner doodles and underlying pencil outlines. The pages are printed on heavy stock cream-colored paper, but at times look as though they’ve been spilled on, bled through, scribbled upon, taped, stained, and sullied as though it were from a planet with a pure nicotine atmosphere. The books's cover even looks like its been painted with white-out. I don’t often come across a book that so ardently begs to be flipped through.

At the time he was writing Lemons, Cotter lived alone in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Chicago. He was an all too frequent witness to violent crimes, which he could see from the windows of the 7th floor apartment. His volatile living situation served as background to his efforts to reconcile a mental breakdown and the breakdown of his personal relationships with his still nascent urge to make more art. Lemons demonstrates its creator’s willpower through its beautiful visual and narrative neurosis. In its full pages of abstract scribbles and shapes, we can see him giving a visual representation to what it was like to be caught in the throes of a mental collapse. In the serendipitous doodles and random absurdist gags we see him synthesize pain into something palatable and usable.

This book is ultimately about trauma and what it can do to the mind. It’s not exactly a book about healing, but it is most certainly a book about being changed. Trauma, whether mental or physical, breaks us out of ourselves violently, unexpectedly. In life there are unavoidable misfortunes and surprises, cataclysms big and small. They come along and remind us that our physical and emotional boundaries are soft and flexible, if not downright spongy. Trauma comes with a reminder that these precious systems of selfhood (molecules, cells / memories, thoughts) are random motes of garbage sustaining themselves in collective hives, one head-on collision away from complete chaos and annihilation. Maybe our only hope against this random and unpredictable onslaught is to be at the ready with enough beauty and absurdity to bandage it over.

Cotter is fine now, by the way.  He remarried, moved out of the city, and recently put out an experimental sci-fi comic called Nod Away (published via Fantagraphics). In 2011 he had his first major work, Skyscrapers of the Midwest, turned into a play which ran in Columbus, Ohio. You can learn more about his experience with that, and his experience writing Lemons, in this podcast interview at The Comics Journal.

Ancestor by Matt Sheean and Malachi Ward

Here’s a drink you can make to best enjoy Ancestor, which was released today in trade paperback by Image Comics. Take one Philip K. Dick and one Alejandro Jodorowsky (circa The Holy Mountain) and throw them in a cocktail glass with two blackberries and a splash of agave nectar. Muddle. Add two shots of blanco tequila, two drops of Dimethyltryptamine or Lysergic Acid, and give it a dash of Black Mirror. Mix, shake, and serve. Now take your drink to a dark corner of your room, far from your computer or any wi-fi enabled devices. Read and drink slowly.  Short as it is, Ancestor is a trip for the mind that’s worth your time.

Ancestor is a loaded slice of psychedelic philosophy, written by Matt Sheean and pictorialized by Malachi Ward. Set in a non-specified time in a non-specified corner of the United States, it’s the story of a well-meaning lunatic genius who upgrades a social media platform / body enhancement service into a hybrid, post-human being that changes the course of entire human race. Its narrative swerves are buttressed by knods to the philosophical anxieties that we, as a society of “enhanced” interconnected technologies, are slowly coming to know.

Surrender your autonomy to the service
and make her the perfect cocktail!

The plot’s lunatic genius, Patrick Whiteside, is an outwardly kind, curly haired tech billionaire who's tendency to turn conversations into one-sided motivational pep talks betrays his maniacal desire to control and reform everyone he comes across. Whiteside was a co-developer of “the service.” The service is what personal computing will be like once we're able to inject the internet into our blood streams and tether it directly to our mental and bodily functions. It’s more or less augmented consciousness, an artificially intelligent Siri for your mind, that goes with you everywhere. The service can float social media and web content in your face on levitating yellow jelly screens, instantly identifying friends and strangers and objects. It can also talk you down from a panic attack if you’re going nuts. When talking doesn’t work, the service can, at your behest, administer a calculated dose of whatever medication you need to to get on the wagon again, then monitor your vital signs until you’re copacetic. On good nights, it can take control of your body (after you grant it permission to access your motor skills), which it can then use to make a perfectly mixed cocktail of your choice for whatever platinum blonde art femme you're hitting on. The service is the ultimate integrated web experience.

Whiteside talks it out

Like us and our hyper-connected devices, people in the world of Ancestor can become so inured to the service that they experience varying degrees of anxiety when disconnected from it. While the service enables superhuman abilities, it's also a nuisance to immediate experience. Whether you want it or not, the service will tell you everything it thinks you need to know.

Ancestor’s main character, Peter, is not sure how he feels about this intense connectivity. Though he relies on the service to get a grip on his anxiety disorder, he’s often a victim of the incessant suggestions of it’s yellow jelly screens. As troubled as he is by all this, it’s apparent that he is a brilliant and pensive man who is simply trying to life his live free of anxiety, and sees the service as a tool to that end. Peter is invited to an impromptu party hosted by Whiteside in his billionaire mansion in the middle of nowhere. There, he’s made to participate in the beta-testing of Whiteside’s magnificent new invention, his Service 2.0. Peter, Whiteside, and the rest of the world are then forcefully thrust into unknown territory, as Whiteside loses control of his new product. From there on out, things get incredibly strange and wonderful.

Whiteside is like a cross between Goethe's Faust and Ozymandias from Watchmen, placed in the body of a creepy child-therapist or hypnotist. In him we see the expression of a utopian ethos prevalent in Silicon Valley. This ethos, “California Ideology,” preaches that a blend of technological innovation and bold individual action will eventually solve all of humanity's problems. But as the story progresses, Peter grows to resist Whiteside's manipulations and psychological games, and resents the implication that he needs either a guru or a some post-human bio-integrated bloatware to give him peace of mind. By the end of their "relationship," it's Peter, not Whiteside or the human race, who finds something resembling inner peace.

We all know by now the mythology of the tech boom. Scientists and ex-hippies, with the help of massive private and public investment, invented the personal computer, the internet, the iPhone, the Google. The digital backbone of information technology was highly influenced by a bourgeois subset of the 1960’s counter culture. This counter culture failed to liberate human consciousness from its societal captors. Having failed, those with the knowledge and the inclination began to look towards technology and capitalism as humanity’s only hope. A large part of the advertising for contemporary technology and software displays a remnant of that failed hope for technological liberation and omnipotence, the hope that “existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals [or businesses] and their software.”

In response to the Silicon Valley messiahs preaching salvation, peace, and money through tech-gnosis, Ancestor offers an almost satirical counter narrative. It expresses a healthy distrust towards anyone who claims to have all the answers, be they human or otherwise. Malachi Ward and Matt Sheean’s story is an expression of the desire to not be told who you are or what you need to do with your life. It also asks whether or not we should sacrifice genuine unmediated experiences (and the commensurate euphoria and excitement that comes of sometimes not-knowing) for the sake of complete control and self-determination.

If Ancestor has one failing it’s that it’s way too short. While readers will get a conclusion that satisfies the arc, there’s 15 billion years worth of plot missing that I wish they had gotten into. By the end, I found myself wanting to hear more about the how and why of it, to see more of Matt and Malachai’s bizarre alternate reality. It’s such a tease. Maybe the comic book gods will see fit to provide mankind with a spin-off? It’s pretty great for what it is though - a self contained thought experiment with poetic conceits and beautiful art.

I would recommend also checking out this short comic by Ancestor's creators regarding "the process" of making Ancestor a reality.

Artist Jennifer Linton reclaimed her life from the baby who stole it

Jennifer Linton created My Alphabet, (all of which is available to view on her website) as a way of reclaiming her life in the face of parenthood’s demands. She quotes the Guerrilla Girls, who in a 1989 poster quipped that women artists have “the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood.’” Linton defied the expectations of both so called “womanhood” and so called “adulthood,” by seizing “nap schedules and playdates as opportunities for creative output.” To many who feel the demands of real life are crushing to their true selves, she could be viewed as a sort of hero.

Your standard illustrated alphabet for children is depoliticized, and intentionally dumb. Usually involving animals and unremarkable objects -- O for Orange, T for Train -- they present the world in bits and idealized pieces that create a world of safe nonsense for our young ones, a fantasy zone where no one calls you fat, no one calls you a fag, and where the constant silent scream of the world at large can’t keep you from learning your ABCs.

Life is only a bit easier after learning the alphabet. Arguably, you’re one step closer to being able to read about the latest terrorist attack or Donald Trump tweet. But it’s disingenuous to say that Linton’s alphabet offers a more honest alternative to children’s literature. Linton's alphabet is for us, the sullied and profaned, we who have already had language imprinted on us and have suffered its ravages.

Typical childhood realness

What life is actually like

Illustrated alphabets for children are made for children by adults. They represent the world we want our kids living in, a world of smiling Apes eating Apples, a world where a Duck is fucking stoked to be beating a Drum, and where Frogs can wear Frilly dresses and Fans if they want to, Fuck the consequences. Illustrated alphabets by adults and for adults are invariably entirely about style, or entirely about sex, or entirely ironic. Ours is not a world of Bears eating Buns but of Bombs killing Babies, of Commercials asking for Cash.

In the end, Jennifer Linton seems to have succeeded where so many others have failed. She's integrated her family life with her artistic practice, in a way that doesn't compromise ideals, in a way that reminds us that the concepts that plague or control us in daily life are, in many respects, learned. 

You can buy Jennifer Linton’s alphabet in a “perfectly bound” edition (or as an ebook) at this Blurb.com page.

Some words with Zsófia Döme, Hungarian Treehugger and Illustrator

Zsófia Döme (http://zsofiadome.tumblr.com/) likes to get lost in the woods and draw the things she didn’t see, those things that imagination can’t help but see while surrounded by wild greenery teeming with hidden creatures. She is a Hungarian illustrator and a current student at the Hungarian School of Fine Arts. Rooted in a kind of grotesque and spooky fantasy aesthetic, her work exudes moodiness and mythology. She works in everything from playful creature studies to scenes lush with atmospheric tension, while incorporating just enough surreal quietness to make each image more than your average fantasy art.

I sent her a message on DeviantArt, because I had to find out more about her and what was behind the pictures. I began with the thing that stood out most for me: Zsófia’s use of surrealism, fantasy, and good old fashioned creepiness to make a visual statement about nature and what we call civilization. For the sake of completeness I’ll let you know that Zsófia’s English is in it’s “intermediate” phase, and I have taken the liberty of editing her answers to a point for clarity’s sake, hopefully not so much that you forget she’s Hungarian.

MR: The way you portray nature is kind of magical and foreboding at the same time. Where did your love of nature come from, and what goes through your mind drawing such lush scenes?

ZD: I had grown up in a small town in Hungary, and the love for nature comes from there. In my childhood we played in the tall grass, discovered the forest and sometimes we got lost, but we didn’t mind.

Nature can have a thousand faces. It could be the Garden of Eden where you can retire and meditate, but it could also be a place full of darkness, decadence and sickening things. For me it’s a mystical hideout where you can find interesting creatures in every corner. [….] It’s a kind of shelter for me. In my artworks every component has its own meaning on a deep, personal level.

Zsófia, who describes herself as a “tree-hugger,” on her DeviantArt, has a special connection with that natural world she liked getting lost in as a child. Whether she depicts nature as massive or miniscule, it’s always the uncontrollable and invasive, and at times violent and grotesque aspects of nature that shine through and give her work a little edge.

Most recently, Zsófia created a series of studies that pair drawings of (mostly) real life flowers and roots with those same plants sprouting eyes and little mouths and horrible little mutant limbs. It’s a study in giving a face to the plant world, a world that most forget is filled with living, breathing things— with life that grows, eats, moves and feels in its own way, but generally doesn’t have the facial structures necessary to show us how pissed off or ecstatic it might be about it all.

Birds I & II, Silent Lake, and No Way Out all seem to be done in the same style, and I was wondering if they were connected somehow, or were part of the same story, and if so what the project was. Am I just imagining it?

To be honest, the other half of my Birds series is still waiting in a forgotten corner of my laptop to be colored (Birds III, IV). Months have been passed after I finished the line art, but the coloring progress is stopped. I also wanted to upload some new works, but school deadlines kept me away. Maybe I can share some stuff later. The illustrations you mentioned all are separate pieces, except ‘Birds’. The style is the same of course, but I can’t explain why. I just felt this style fit to this kind of dark world, and I also found that is close to myself, as well. One of my friends said some time ago, once she discovers an interesting subject she draws until she exhausts the whole theme. In my case it’s almost similar, but it’s not about interests, rather about style. It’s very meditative and calming, when you are making dotwork or just draw leaves for hours.

These illustrations are begging to tell a story, but as of yet Döme is letting them stand alone. Her experiments in storytelling thus far are few, but promising. My favorites are her illustrations for a violently satisfying story called Anyagyilkossag (“Matricide”), by little known Hungarian author, psychiatrist, and certified murderous psychopath Géza Csáth. Döme was inspired after watching the movie The Whitman Boys, based on the Csáth story, to illustrate scenes from the story. After learning the story of Mr. Csáth life I had trouble reconciling the terms “tree-hugger” and “psychopath,” but Döme does a great job in her illustrations of capturing the story’s pathologically sardonic tone. (If you want, give the story a read here.)

I saw on your tumblr that you were working on a series of illustrations for a story by Geza Csath — “Anyagyilkossag” after you saw The Whitman Boys, which was based on the story. Is that project finished?

My illustrations represent a mood rather than events, as you can see in my works about Csáth’s stories. Yes, this project is finished and I still have others in progress. I really like Csáth’s works and I also regret that he didn’t write more stories during his short lifetime. As for the illustrations it was a short-lived project which was made for my own pleasure. It wasn’t published, but it would be a real honor to illustrate a whole volume.

Do you have any other illustrative projects in the works. What have you been working on lately?

My current project is called “My Wardrobe”. Nowadays I live in an old student hostel and the idea came there. The base of the project is a wardrobe which is used by my roommate and me. Imagine an ugly, old, dusty wardrobe with unclosable doors and a big mess inside. [It’s an interactive illustration where] you can click on the doors and have a look inside, but the small places hide more than only clothes, boxes, or shoes. There are tiny surreal words in every part of it. 

These days I’m more and more interested about connection of body and soul. With this current project I speculate about where is the soul within our body or how it can manifest through our environment and our personal things?

So you’re still a student?

I’ll get my degree next year, and I hope everything will go smoothly.

Could you name some artists or writers who’ve inspired you?

In my teenage years I was obsessed with anime and manga, cartoons and my early dream was to be a comic artist or an animator. After the high school I got into a fine arts university which was a huge twist for me. I got new perspectives about how to approach art, how to enjoy even the abstract pieces, which are the least understandable for the most people. [In school] my taste turned another way. I don’t mean that I completely gave up my early interests, just got new perspectives, new doors opened before me. In the future I’d like to find a balance between popular art and fine art. To be honest, it’s a bit hard, and I’m still growing and developing.

I’m inspired in many ways, with almost everything melancholic, lyric images mixed with a little bit of grotesque horror. As for art, I love pre-raphaelites, art nouveau, and surrealist works. Just a few names from my favorite artists: Max Ernst, George Grosz, Harry Clarke, John Bauer, Alan Lee, Arthur Rackham, Eyvind Earle, Theodor Kittelsen, Csaba Rékassy.

I often listen neofolk while drawing, sometimes a little bit of darkwave, but mainly folk metal, death metal, movie and game soundtracks. Medieval and Nordic sounds are the closest to my heart.

Here’s hoping to hear more from the Hungarian tree-hugger, the talented young Zsófia Döme. If you’d like a print, I encourage all money-havers to click to her Society6 page and buy one.