The Inktober 2017 Variety Pack

Close. Every year in October tons of illustrators, both amateur and professional, attempt a drawing a day. The resulting flood of visual honey is overwhelming and invigorating. I've been flopping around in it for the past couple weeks.

On this, the occasion of yet another Inktober, I've gathered a collection of some of my favorite efforts. Check out the Inktober tag on whatever social mediums you favor. Draw a thing or two. Do not drink ink.

Tonci Zonjic

@tozozozo

http://www.to-zo.com/ | http://tozozozo.tumblr.com/

Tillie Walden

@TillieWalden

http://tilliewalden.com/ | http://www.onasunbeam.com/

Jorge Fornés

@jfornes74

http://jorgefornes.blogspot.com/ | http://jorgefornes.daportfolio.com/ 

Daniel Isles

@1SLES

http://danielisles.com/ | http://dirtyrobot.work/ 

Victor Mosquera

@victormosquerar

http://victormosquera.bigcartel.com/ | https://www.instagram.com/victormosquera/ 

Christian Ortiz

@BITSOFCROM

http://cristianortiz.com/ | https://www.etsy.com/shop/cromstore

Abby Howard

@AbbyHoward

http://www.jspowerhour.com/ | http://www.last-halloween.com/

Emily

@fruitdecay

https://www.ghostgods.com | http://ghostgods.tumblr.com/ 

Vivirin

@vivirin__art

http://vivirin-art.tumblr.com/ | https://www.instagram.com/vivirin__art/

Cosimo Galluzzi

@csmgllz

http://www.cosimogalluzzi.com/ | http://poolsofchrome.tumblr.com/ 

Sonogram by Grant Gronewold

A while ago I reviewed Virtual Candle, a collection of short comics, drawings, and photographs by Grant Gronewold, better known to the internet as HTMLFlowers. His most recent effort is titled Sonogram. Subtitled “hospital diaries 2017,” the book offers drawings, notes, and documentation from his frequent stays in the hospital for cystic fibrosis treatment.

Sonogram is filled with worries and plastered with documentation from Gronewold’s treatment. Everything from overdue medical bills to medicine lists to pamphlets on cystic fibrosis -- They are photocopied in, then infused with Grant’s meditative line drawings. These drawings range from bizarre to mystical but always retain that silence inherent in the clear lines and unshaded forms. This style is a big departure from the artist’s usual psychedelic-stoner color pencils. You wouldn’t expect Ronald McDonald to make an appearance, but yeah he’s there, either as a reference to the children’s healthcare charity run by the clown's eponymous fast food company, or as proof that Grant’s still got a sense of humor (maybe both).

This zine is almost a work of ritual significance. It is art under pressure, art under the assumption that the artist is, at any given moment, a couple months or less away from death. During those long nights in the hospital he draws his heart out not just for the sake of memorializing his experience, but to maintain his selfhood. In his own words: 

“When I die I wanna still be the person I always was, not perverted by my bitterness, distorted by the unhappy chore of living. For all the emo shit I tweet I still love life & im going to fight for that small piece of life that I love, no matter what a doctor says.” 

Grant goes on to talk about feeling a kind of all encompassing fascination in life’s most mundane moments, like being ecstatic about “watching the afternoon light bargain for space with the shadows” even while taking a shit or laying a shallow bath. He goes into a few other moments like that in the cellphone notes that have been photocopied into the book, simple things like a bus driver stopping to let a crow walk past or hearing a story about the life of his favorite nurse. 

Hospitals can be miserable places -- but to those who rely on them to stay alive it’s necessarily more than that. The paperwork, the neighboring patients, the doctors and nurses with their small kindnesses and transgressive ambivalence -- all that swirling machinery we know as “hospital” is where your life (and the love, loss, joys, and memories that make up your life) is sustained. If there is no permanent “getting better” for you, then hospital is, for better or worse, part of where your soul resides. 

So those recognizable icons that haunt Grant’s hospital, from the Nike swooshes to Ronald McDonald, to the spiders and moons and giant scalpels, are manifestation of his internal world intruding on the world around him. Like a magician, Gronewold conjures them out of himself and sets them to the task of giving shape to the unspoken and unseen emotions that live in his world. It’s only our world, at the bottom of it, but specifically, to him, it’s a world where our bureaucracies endanger his physical and mental health, where a prescription slip is a ticket to not feeling terrible for a while. 

Sonogram is low on narrative. It’s best taken as a series of impressions. I don’t think it was meant to tell a story, and maybe even wasn’t made to be published. The drawings and words in Sonogram are documentation of a coping process that leaves strange and beautiful byproducts. The mysticism and silence of these drawings is that same mysticism and silence that strikes all of us when we’re faced with our own mortality. They are sadness and bodily anxiety, but also immense internal strength. 

Sonogram is available via Grant's Big Cartel page. 

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.

Some videos you needed to see

Tonight, I set my research parameters to "visually interesting garbage," fell into Vimeo, and came out with these. My publication of these videos in list format is not endorsement or disparagement of any particular band, artist, religion, food item, livestock rearing technique, or drug. Actual plot lines may vary.

Alagoas “Ghosts” / Music Video

Highly-effective appropriation of native american images and rituals for the exaltation of  blindingly white aspiration-core indie rock. A witch drinks some drugs and has a vision, thereafter pulls a fungus elemental out of a portal and dances joyously with it. The spirit's rainbow spores infect the whole tribe, resulting in eventual genocide I'm guessing.

Synesthesia

Live action sitcom starring an old general, a lonely housewife, and their boring sons. Cats start jumping out of the stereo and the children poke at vegetables and porkchops with 6.35 mm headphone plugs. Then the stereo explodes.

“Batongo- La notte Dei Tempi”

Man spends a lonely Saturday night putting on an art show for no one and records it on a vintage super 8 camera. Intercut with flash-forward scenes of him partying at a nightclub, having made millions with his high effort, low quality art memes. Presumably he gets laid.

The Shoes Ft. Dominic Lord - 1960’s Horror

Animal rights fever dream. First, the cruelties industrial chicken farming are demonstrated in gory detail. Then, the products then seize the means of production, and giant roosters destroy several major landmarks. A skeezy hipster is filmed humping poultry. Dope rhymes, too. 

Nematodes

"If all matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes and oceans represented by a thin film of nematodes. The locations of towns would be decipherable since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites." 

Nathaniel Cobb, ‘Nematodes & their Relationships’, Yearbook of the US Department of Agriculture, 1914.

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.

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.