Babybel Wax Bodysuit by Eric Kostiuk Williams

The main conceit of Babybel Wax Bodysuit (Retrofit Comics, 2016) revolves around those familiar Babybel cheese wheels you can buy by the sackful at grocery stores. Hopefully you’re familiar with them, because they’re quite delicious. Soft. Creamy. Babybel’s claim to fame is enclosing their product in a layer of soft red wax that you have to peel away to enjoy.

What most take for granted is that these cheese snacks, safely nestled in their wax armor, are in fact striking metaphors for the human spirit.

Williams broke into the indie comics scene with Hungry Bottom Comics, a series of autobiographical stories delving into his experience as a “feminine” gay man in an increasingly butch gay scene in Toronto. I haven’t read it, but I’ve read about it. At the time Hungry Bottom Comics is set, Williams felt jilted and pigeon-holed by a scene that was increasingly becoming mainstream and thus normalized. Normalization raised the cultural capital on the “butch” gay man aesthetic, or the gay man who who’s gay but totally doesn’t “look” or “act” gay. Being a submissive and loudly dressed gay man in this atmosphere got him side glances and teasing. William’s got flack from his peers, arguably, for just being himself. This gave him a unique perspective on selfhood and the signs we broadcast when we’re communicating our identities to the world.

This short comic is about externalities. It offers two largely unrelated stories and a few stray pages that casually muse on themes of presenting the self, protecting the self, and becoming true to yourself. How much of what you give to the world as you “self” is contrived? How much of it is for the sake of putting other at ease, or tricking others into believing you are something which you’re not? How much of that presentation was fashioned or imposed by corporate overlords or advertising executives?

In the opening story, “The Literal Word,” Williams recalls his relationship with the moderator of a comic book internet forum who went by the handle “Cross”. She was the “open-minded” Christian type, and he the “painfully realizing his sexuality is a liability” type, and the two bonded over a love of funnybooks. The two inevitably change, their anonymous, non-politicized internet identities ultimately failing to keep the real world out.

Later, Williams offers a science fiction fable based on the life and travails of Britney Spears. If you’re the type to groan at a sentence like that, I feel you. But as a cultural phenomenon, Britney’s life actually has a lot to say about the nature of identity in contemporary Western society. Outward appearance is something to capitalize on, especially when you’re born with, or work to build, a body and face people want to gawk at. It’s a well known business: building bodies, identities, whole personal histories. Williams examines this by way of the Britney Spears mythology of rise-crisis-fall-transformation-resolution. He gives us “Britney Jean,” a cyborg built by production companies, whose own true history is kept from her for the sake of the coherence of her manufacture identity. An ancient order of self-actualized women free Britney’s mind by using a milkshake to trigger hidden authentic emotions. Cyborg Britney obliterates the faces of some corporate totalitarians before escaping and learning the ways of the free woman.

Williams’ visual style is perfect for the subject matter of the book. He doesn’t go nuts with experimental sequencing, but he does make sure that each page’s panels break, bulge, and reach into one another. This works especially well for the first story, where the internet is represented as floating islands of tendriled fungi. Personally tailored identities and forum topics connect and disconnect on branched rhizomatic arterial structures.  It’s a good metaphor for the overstimulating information carnival that was the early internet.

There are gold nuggets of randomness placed at the very beginning and the very middle that serve as thematic glue. Their brevity and compact nature make them the strongest parts of the book. One in particular stands out. It’s about the “Gay Clones,” a derogatory term for heavily mustachioed and burly young homosexuals who multiplied in droves in urban centers in the 1970’s and 80’s, and Keith Haring’s artistic response to them. Though brief, the one page sequence is dripping with excellently placed visual cues.

Toward the end of the the second story, the newly liberated cyborg Britney gazes out into the desert and contemplates her intention to wander the world without aim for a while. She doesn’t just want to find herself. “I want to know I’m worth more than all I’ve given to folks,” she says behind her shoulder to the tribal feminists who freed her. This is the basic thesis of Babybel Wax Bodysuit. It’s William’s using his rich visual language to examine the nature of identity and outward appearance, folding and bending it like melted wax and seeing what shapes he can come up with. It’s worth a read.

An interview with Aaron Lange about his "outrage porn" collection, HUGE

Leading up to the election, Aaron Lange, a comic writer and illustrator, didn't have a really pressing urge to illustrate his hatred of Donald Trump. Like most "liberal” people, he took cues from his friends, from the media, from common sense -- all of which assured him that he had nothing to fear from this, to use his own words, “narcissistic charlatan and pizza hut pitchman.” 

On November 9, 2016, when the smoke cleared and the dark-side stood victorious, Lange spent most of the day in bed, under a blanket, wishing it all away. The sinister liberal agenda of not being complete dicks to each other had been pussy-grabbed by the supreme dicklord himself. Like the Scottish newspaper so poetically made clear recently, life had turned into a dystopian alternate reality. Lange eventually got out of bed. Life inevitably moved on, and when it did Lange went straight to the drawing board. The putrescent obscenities below are what spewed forth. 

Lange, 35, has been drawing for as long as he can remember, and has been focused on making comics since graduating college. His comics, among them Trim and Romp, can be heavy on obscenity, satire, and Lange's own absurd past experience (they're all available for purchase here). His recent collection of anti-Trump cartoons, entitled HUGE, is something else entirely. The election results made Lange terribly ill. These drawings are infused with the same cynical bile that crawled up the throats of anyone with an ounce of reason and empathy in their heart on November 9th.

I found HUGE in a tiny but dependable comic shop, on the mixed recommendation of the attendant (“The drawings are cool, it’s just… Well, he really hates Trump, you know?”). All but three of the images were made after the election results came in. You can buy a copy here for six bucks, and I hope you do because the proceeds go towards shoring up Planned Parenthood for the fight against orange Hitler. While no one would call these drawings a "mature" reaction to Donald Trump's victory, it's clear how cathartic they might have been for the illustrator. Next time you want to cry about a bully who won't leave you alone, try drawing their face at the tip of the grossest, most decrepit schlong you can draw. It won't stop them, but you might realize that laughter and disdain are much more useful than tears. 

Below are some questions Lange answered about HUGE, and his general response to these trying times. 

Your drawings for this collection are explicit to the point where its both hilarious and disturbing. Looking back now to when you made them, how do you feel that style connects to what was going through your head?

A word being tossed around a lot right now is "normalize". As annoying as that is, it is also appropriate. As I write this it is Jan. 11 and Trump is not yet in office. So the drawings in HUGE were done very recently. But already in that short time Trump kind of has been "normalized". You wake up, make coffee, read the news, and see all manner of outrageous and horrifying business and just kinda nod and go about your day. I'm glad I was able to capture and express my total shock and disgust immediately following the election results. It is important to remember what a gross aberration this whole climate is.  

Would you call these drawings satire or something else?

That's a very good question. Though they serve some of the same purposes as satire they don't exactly fit that bill. I'm not, for example, really doing anything clever, or addressing particular issues and policies. I think they share certain qualities with some of the more politicized works of the Surrealists, but that label is also insufficient. I'm sure my critics would label it "outrage porn" and they just might be correct. 

Some of these drawings include severe derogatory language, like “spic,” and “faggot,” writ large, at one point literally embedded into the president-elect’s hair. These are words Trump has never been confirmed to have used, but which you seem to feel are tied to him in some way. What led you to use such emotionally charged words?

When Trump says "build a wall" he is in effect saying "spic". When he attacks civil rights such as gay marriage, he is in effect saying "faggot". He's too savvy to say these words, in public at least, but his meaning is not lost on anybody.  

Judging by your website and a google search I don’t see much other politically geared work. Is this new territory for you?

I've certainly never done anything this blatantly political before. There's a vague politic to my work in general, but it is a bit oblique. On this issue I didn't want to skirt around, be ironic, tongue in cheek, or whatever; I wanted my stance on the matter crystal clear, and etched in stone, so to speak. 

Is political cartooning territory you plan to continue exploring as Trump begins his reign of terror?

God, I don't know. It's really so boring. It's such a low level discourse. Being opposed to Trump and what he stands for just strikes me as so obvious. It's such a no-brainer, Trump is so transparent. This whole thing is very bad Science Fiction. 

What do you think about left-leaning folks who say we should give Trump a chance?

They need to wake up. Look, I didn't like Bush, didn't agree with him, etc. But at his core I don't think Bush is a bad person. A stupid, spoiled frat boy? Sure. But I don't think he's some destructive monster. Trump is beyond politics. This isn't a WWII guy like Bob Dole, who's got some old fashioned opinions like your grandpa. Trump is most likely mentally ill to some degree.  

Much has been said about golden showers and Trump lately. What do you think of the recent allegation that he hired escorts to decorate a Moscow hotel bed with piss because Barack and Michelle Obama had slept in it? Any plans for an illustration from you on this unconfirmed yet possibly historic event?

I find this to be very dubious. We don't need to make shit up about Trump. Jesus, he does or says something awful every fucking day. This "pee gate" horseshit has the makings of a Leftist birther movement. I just don't believe it's true. Look, I'm sure Trump has done nasty things with prostitutes, and frankly I don't care about that. The red flag, for me, is that this water sports session was conducted on some bed that the Obama's once slept in. It sounds so made up. Also, that would be a symbolic act. I don't think Trump is capable of abstract thought and things like symbolism. He is a brutally literal person, incapable of reflection.

Again, you can check out Aaron Lange's comics and others at The Comix Company's website, or just go directly to the Huge page. Today Donald Trump will be inaugurated. Here's to cathartic immaturity, and four years of political and artistic resistance. 

Material by Ales Kot, Issues 1-3: Acceleration and its discontents

Material is a comic by Ales Kot, a doe-eyed young man 28 years of age, who has of late injected such a massive amount of enthusiastically bizarre ideas into the industry that he’s being heralded as one of its most vital modern voices. Ales Kot also pens The Surface and Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier, and recently wrapped up Zero, all of which are overtly cerebral comics, rarely simple, and always aiming to open your eyes to some new and glorious strangeness. Kot very obviously gets a lot of satisfaction out of confusing people by saying several things at once, be it through subtext or panel content. He loves to stir up chaos with his words, and he’s damn good at it.

From the very outset, though, Material isn’t chaotic, and while it says many things at once, it is more overtly simplistic than any of Kot’s other writing. Material is utterly structured. The book tells 4 alternating stories, always in the same order, two pages at a time, three rotations per book, totaling 24 pages per issue. Each story chugs along on a 3 x 3, nine panel grid. Additionally, the stories have their own color schemes, providing instant familiarity at each transition. This is comic book formalism, and it makes for a story that feels slower and more contemplative than anything else Kot’s been putting out. It’s also entirely based in reality, our reality, our time. The Black Lives Matter movement and American torture programs come into play, as well as references to recent pop music hits and contemporary activists and writers.

In his interview with Entertainment Weekly, Kot remarks that with Material he wanted to be, above all, honest. “As I go through therapy,” he says, “and an overall complex process of shedding behavioral patterns that I no longer want in my life, my path becomes clearer. With Material, I am primarily interested in people and poetry. What I am decidedly not interested in is genre and false conflict. I want to explore what it means to be alive, in America and out of it, now.”

We get the impression, from this interview, that Ales Kot has suffered a bit of disillusionment with the strange, the incomprehensible, with the fantastical. We can certainly feel general disillusionment in the characters he’s writing: Julius Shore, the bored, aging postmodern professor whose faith in his own convoluted theories has been disrupted; Nylon, the actress with a sordid past begrudgingly and doubtfully playing along with the male director who’s taken an interest in revitalizing her career; the black rights protestor, Franklin, who struggles to maintain faith in social progress even while he suffers detention and extortion at the hands of a purported police officer; and Adib, a former Guantanamo prisoner who cannot escape the trauma of the torture he experienced. Each character is fleshed out through conversations, and through many sequences of wordless panels that make Material such a quiet book.

Professor Shore is threatened by a mysterious individual who claims to be an artificial intelligence program. The A.I. proceeds to troll professor Shore so hard he has to start revert to wearing band t-shirts and wearing dynamite on his head during a lecture.

Material comes together like a movie from the French new-wave in the 60s, a movement that itself attempted to reflect its time using realism and honesty. Will Tempest’s illustrations lend muted realism and immediate personhood to each character that enters the panel, and the lettering by Clayton Cowles hangs back and allows the words to say what they needs without embellishment. Tom Muller, who designs the covers and interiors, has a bold and simplistic style that emphasizes text over image. Reading through Material, you can see exactly what Ales is talking about: it’s about people, and the poetry they're living out. There's no teenagers fighting their way through a surrealistic hellscape, no spies being plunged into Lynchian nightmares. It’s just people and their reality, our reality.

That being said, the themes being touched on are not at all dissimilar from the themes Kot’s crazier titles talk about, but for the simpler tone and more realistic, straightforward style. Things like accelerating technology or government brutality and the search for real human connection in the face of an oppressive and uncontrollable larger society are more than prevalent in other works by Kot, but being dressed in science fiction and fantasy pushes those themes into the subtext.

Adib comes home from a night trying to escape his wife and his past. A mix of vivid and desaturated colors all throughout the book gives the action an cohesively understated feel.

Material is where Ales Kot goes to slow the fuck down from his usual output. He’s taking his time writing character studies, and he clearly wants us to study right along with him. Footnotes at the bottom of most pages offer potential points of divergence, a book or song or idea that strengthens the impact of what just occurred, begging by virtue of its esoteric understatement to be Googled.  At times it’s just a helpful quote, like Susan Sontag waxing philosophical about the fear of getting old, or George Orwell reminding us that the personal is political. Other times Kot tells the reader to go Google some concept or neologism, like “wyrd” or “Homan Square”. This device is used most devastatingly for Franklin, whose innocuous African American boyhood is more often than not underscored by footnotes listing a seemingly endless stream of names of black men and women gunned down by police.

Franklin seeks empowerment in a society that feels engineered to repress him, his family, and his friends. His efforts towards making positive change lead to a dangerous and inescapable situation. 

Material refuses to ignore the outside world. It points outward again with the essays at the end of each issue, chosen personally by Ales because he respects them, because they speak to him. The essays are phenomenally written reflections by writers most won’t recognize but who are nonetheless undoubtedly talented. They are wittily written and enticing perspectives on topics like political detention, the objectification of commercial femininity, and the academic ivory tower, themes present all throughout the series. Between the footnotes and the essays it’s obvious what this book wants from us: to read and watch and listen and above all think about the problems we’re faced with as a society today. “Material,” he tells The Gaurdian, “[…] is my way of staying sane in a world where these patterns and systems are still very alive, and it’s also a part of my way of working towards breaking these patterns and systems apart and building something new and better instead."

Nylon's movie producer mansplains the problem with redheads to her. Her character seeks to reconcile a harsh past and a desire for voice with the fact that whatever voice she is allowed to have must be on a man's terms.

We live in accelerated times, and in a severely outdated civilization. The internet information explosion has amplified our voices and served in many ways to organically filter truly important news from propaganda and corporate non-stories. It’s also shined a light into the depths of our depravity and inhumanity, and it’s paradoxically made it easier for corporations to sneak their way into our consciousness with viral advertising. It’s easy to be giddy about the prospects for change such an immediately transmissible medium offers, easy to fall into the old accelerationist trap of thinking that this brand new means of production, which was initially developed for war and then distributed for the sake of commerce, will in itself help us topple and conquer the status quo, if only we would grab the reigns tight and crash it through the palace gates. Right now it feels like too much too fast. Professor Shore frames the problem in good old fashioned postmodern terms at the end of his opening diatribe in Issue #1:

“There is now no single authoritative voice on history. Instead there are billions of voices overlapping, and in the confusion of their songs, we can hardly discern our own voice. The maps in our hands no longer match the territory – and perhaps they never did. Now what?” 

This technology has to an extent deepened our schizophrenia and narcissism. It’s hard to see the real world, because we’re busy gathering moments from it, collecting flashes of life to add to the digital scrapbook (a cute cat video here, a #Blacklivesmatter protest picture there) while ignoring our actual physical agency and potential in the real world.

“Now what?” An essay by Bruce Sterling, titled “Atemporality for the Creative Artist,” is footnoted on that page and hints at an answer. Sterling, being an atemporal jerk himself, doesn’t offer a clear definition of what he means by atemporality, but implies that it’s a way of dealing with history and social problems that doesn’t try to pin it down to a single story or solution, but instead collaboratively and digitally filters and evaluates components through a myriad of perspectives and processes. The atemporal historian has conversations and tinkers with datasets simultaneously, using technology and that vast social media forum to confront a social problem as a living and breathing entity, existing fluidly in the here and now.

In similar fashion, Ales Kot is providing waypoints for the broader context of the book, effectively linking us to tutorials on remapping the world. In its persistent concern with the now of our existence, Material is constantly attempting to push us out of the book and back into the very information storm we are ostensibly trying to escape from, urging us to find the voices that speak to us, just as he presents us with the voices that have spoken to him. He tells The Guardian about his intentions and inspiration, how “the best fiction, to me, educates and entertains at the same time. It brings awe and it leaves us richer than we were before. Sometimes it feels as if it’s reminding us of something we already knew, but forgot a long time ago, and now, with its help, we are remembering again."

He continues: “There’s so much more to it: the way a book or a painting resonates through me without my understanding why, seeing people replay ancient myths in real time without even knowing it. There’s a reason why the Nazis burned books. They’re powerful.”

More specifically, words are powerful. When mixed with real social concerns and a bit of faith and enthusiasm, it can start revolutions. It’s obvious what the world needs: Strong voices, thoughtful words. It needs linguistic cartographers handpicked by the mass disenfranchised collectively creating a mental and emotional roadmap for this insane new world we’ve stumbled dizzily into. In that sense Material tells us how to go about it: to read, to write, to listen and discuss, and above all to take the time to contextualize and restructure. It’s one way out of the digital tarpit: steady, structured, and honest words.

Lastly I'd just like to link another good interview with author Ales Kot, this one done in Vulture magazine. A great read if you have an interest in finding out more.