Peach on Earth
Donna Barr
Subscription (Modern Tales)
The problem with Donna Barr is that she's too prolific. She has a huge amount of work out there, all of it interesting, all of it sophisticated, complex and a bit difficult. So for the critic, trying to do a proper review of Barr's work is a daunting task, requiring literally weeks of study.
That's why for now, we're not going to do a proper review of Barr's work. Instead, we offer this snapshot of Peach on Earth, one of her many short stories. This is not her best artwork, though its rough pencil style has a beguiling charm. It may not be her best story, though perhaps it's one of her most sentimental.
It picks up the saga of the Desert Peach, German Army Colonel Manfred Pfirsich Marie Rommel, on Christmas Eve in 1945, a refugee struggling to survive. Huddled against the cold in a roofless barn, Pfirsich is accosted by a young boy. The two spend the night together, and the next day have a run in with American soldiers that takes a fortunate turn.
The child refugee is a demanding little runt, and very presumptuous about his right to curl up in Pfirsich's lap in order to keep from freezing. The next day he tries to swap Pfirsich's army hat to an American soldier for cigarettes and bread, and kicks up a fuss when the soldier blithely seizes the garment.
The youngster has a world-weary outlook. "Don't you know nothin'?" he says to Pfirsich. "Amis [Americans] are diff'rent-- y'gotta know how they think. If y'was a woman, y'd be fine- they'd wanna screw ya. An' feedin' kids is like a game; they really get off on pity. But grown men they shoot or ship off." Alas, the happy turn of events that conclude the story provide no lasting assurance of the child's safety in the harsh war-torn land.
Barr's art effectively sets the scene and tells the story, and her experiment with pencil rubbing fills the page with texture capturing the characters' ragged state, with streams of chilled vapor coming from their mouths.
But her strong suit in this piece is the writing and conception, remarkably capturing the fight for survival from the viewpoint of a child.
Read This Comic.
--Joe Zabel
Ballad (and other comics)
Dead Mouse
Free
There's a little store you may have heard of called Hot Topic. They are a huge chain of stores that sells black pants and soft-core bondage gear to teenagers who want to look like vampires. Aside from Manga, Hot Topic is probably one of the biggest sources of income for comics creators in North America. Why? Because whether they know it or not, people love comics. They just feel weird going into stores to buy them, and they feel left out reading irrelevant nonsense like the latest issue of Ultimate Spand-X Force. But kids who want to look like vampires love going into Hot Topic, and artists who draw comics about people who look like vampires love having their work distributed by Hot Topic. The result: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is a cultural phenomenon, to the point that creator Jhonen Vasquez even got to make a short-lived (and I am told, rather disturbing) animated series for Cartoon Network on its strength. Thanks to financially groundbreaking (if perhaps artistically vapid) works like JTHM, there can be big money in making a comic that looks creepy. Comic artists who have been paying attention know that. It's old news now.
You may well have noticed the resulting boom in creepy comics -- one that continues even now. The last few years have seen a lot of print-minded web artists donning their black lipstick and trench coats in a desperate attempt to get a little Slave Labor Graphics action. Serenity Rose comes to mind, which was successful primarily because it was actually very good, but also of course because of the artist's connections to, hey, Jhonen Vasquez. We won't discuss the crap (cough ORNERYBOY cough). You may think that after weathering the surge of vaguely gothic crap out there that spookiness is dead, no longer fun, and generally unworthy of your time. You are wrong. As evidence, I bring you Dead Mouse, the artist behind Ballad.
Dead Mouse is a mysterious figure with no biographical information to speak of available. My intuition tells me that she's a girl, but I could very easily be wrong. While she does show some of the classic signs of a webcomic artist lusting after print -- lack of sophisticated web-only features like a forum or a well-tended news page, for instance, or the fact that each page of her comics are all in print proportions -- she's just so damn talented that I find it hard to hold that against her. There's a lot to hate about using one medium as a path to another, but only insofar as it frequently leads to degraded work. I didn't like most of the Flight anthology artists very for this reason. Dead Mouse's work, on the other hand, is unapologetically horrific and extremely attractive, all at once. In two short comics and one on-going epic, her black and white art portrays all manner of surreal and incomprehensible events with a clinical coldness that somehow makes it all seem utterly rational. There's a weight to her work, a truly great grasp of lighting and composition and design, one that evokes the truly great online black and white artists. Her technique is immaculate. Her attention to detail amazing and rare. Sometimes this excellent aesthetic is all that holds her work together, but it's always quite good, and always ten times more convincing, more honest, more genuinely creepy than any JTHM comic has ever been.
Her six page short Mermaids is pretty much impossible to understand, and it suffers from legibility issues. That's okay because it looks great. Oshidori, another six page short, is less creepy, and less visually compelling, but still very nice looking, and it has a very coherent if overly brief story. Ballad, though, Dead Mouse's current work in progress, is really quite something. At eighty eight pages of surreal flesh horror, we are only beginning to have any idea what's been going on. The majority of the action so far has been a corpse marching across a landscape, finding a secret elevator, and riding it up to meet a creepy little girl with a cat. Yes, that took this long. Yes, each and every second of it was extremely compelling. I have my doubts that this would have held together over a long period of updates -- although Dead Mouse does tend to post four pages at a time, which is a good start toward maintaining baseline continuity -- but we don't have to worry about that anymore, as the story seems to have begun in earnest, and will now gather momentum. Its archives make for a great one-sitting read. There's not really much meat on the bones right now and it's difficult to pick out one specific theme to comment on, but have no doubt that we will be returning to make a full examination of this strange, truly creepy comic has grown a bit longer in the tooth.
For now: Fuck all the other "goth" comics and give this genuine horror comic a chance. It kicks your ass and scares you, too.
Read This Comic.
--Mike Meginnis
Kagerou
Fireball
Free
Kagerou could turn out to have been an utterly nonsensical fantasy epic, or it could turn out to be something of a webcomic classic. Three years after its inception in 2001, it's still impossible to tell. Three years from now, it may be done, and I may come back to give it the full Examiner treatment. Right now, all I can say is that in spite of its weaknesses, I've stuck with it for a long time. If you give it a chance, you may end up in the same boat -- frustrated, but addicted.
In its beginnings Kagerou was a cute little fantasy comic with some serious pacing difficulties, layout hiccups, and the occasional gorgeous artistic excess. Three years later, it's an excessively gorgeous comic still suffering from serious pacing difficulties, but having very few layout hiccups and offering plenty to keep readers interested. Recapping the story at this point would be difficult, as in a lot of ways I've lost track. I still know who to root for but I'm not entirely sure what everyone is up to anymore. I'll have to reread this whole comic when it concludes.
Fireball's art started out with some very nice lines and some bright, beautiful colors, but her colors were an acquired taste. She used (and still uses) gradients. You may be familiar with gradients as the most awful thing ever used by a webcomic artist. Sometimes, the way Fireball used to use them were pretty awful. Usually, it worked anyway. Usually, she even made the gradients work for her. These days, she's gotten so good with them you'll hardly notice their existence. Her taste for excess has cooled slightly, but it's still there, and personally I love it. Her line work has gotten even better, and while her manga-influenced style was never really awkward, it's reached a level of truly natural lines and anatomy, a balance between cartoon and realism, that is absolutely guaranteed to flip your switch. This is one artist who is not afraid to work "too hard" on her comics.
Of course, the story at this point seems to be needlessly complex, and the rate at which she serializes has always been a problem. There have been a lot of times in the comic's past where she simply took too long to get things where they were going, and currently it's damn hard to have any idea what's going on. This problem has only been exacerbated by the fact that Fireball has been touring the manga and comic conventions around America to raise money for the comic, from which she now seems to draw most if not all of her living. Thankfully, she'll be getting back to work in earnest soon.
There are a lot of great things about Kagerou's story. Personally I find The Nick to be a ridiculously likable character, and I'm impressed that Fireball managed to foster a devoted crush on a (ridiculously pretty, seemingly pre-op transsexual) man in this straight man. (Seriously, read the comic, he's fucking hot.) There are valid reasons to pick Kagerou up and put it down again, but personally I plan to read it until Fireball's done. Then I'll go back and read the whole thing again in hopes of understanding it. Perhaps you'll join me.
Read This Comic.
--Mike Meginnis
