Booty from the MSU Comics Forum

Yesterday I zipped out to East Lansing to swing by the annual Michigan State University Comics Forum. Over the past few years the MSU Comics Forum has become one of the best events on the calendar each year for anybody interested in comics. Alas, I got out there a bit late and missed the first couple of sessions, but I did get a chance to attend one creators' panel (with Joe Foo, Jeremy Bastian, and Nate Powell, moderated by Jay Jacot -- more on their work later) and to spend some time in the Forum's Artists' Alley, which had a really nice assortment of mostly Michigan-based comic artists.

As usual at this sort of thing, there was more cool stuff than I had dollars, and alas, a some really cool items from some great artists went unpurchased. Alas, you just can't buy all the cool comics. (Trust me, I've tried!)

But I was pleased with my stack of treasures when I returned with them, and am doubly so now that I've read them all. So, without further ado, here's a list of my booty:

(Oh, wait. One last bit of ado: apologies in advance for some of the blurriness in the pages I scanned below to give you a taste of some of these treasures. Rest assured the fault lies with me, and not with the artists.)

Let's start with this nifty bookmark from Ryan Claytor's Elephant Eater Comics:

"What's that, you cheap #%&%*&@?" you say, "You had all of Ryan's swag in front of you and you came back with a freebie bookmark?!"

As regular Patio Boat followers know, I've plugged Ryan's work frequently and enthusiastically, and honestly I already have all of his books (you should, too!) so Ryan went home without any of my cash this year. But I wanted to mention him at the start because he did much of the organizing of this year's event. He also created the nifty poster at the top of this post, featuring media superstar Katie the Beagle. (Um, "featuring" Katie the Beagle if you look closely enough. That's close enough for me, anyway, and that poster's goin' up on the wall!)

If you want to be a cheap #%&%*&@, too, and check out Ryan's work for free, you can do so at his website, where he's rolling out his latest issue of And Then One Day at a steady one-page a week clip.

Next up: a 24-hour comic from Jay Jacot:

For those who haven't encountered them before, 24-hour comics are comics that are written and drawn in a single 24-hour stint, usually at a "24-Hour Comics" session with a gathering of local comic artists. The resulting comics can sometimes be a bit sketchy -- as is the case with The Chase: A Twist of Fate -- but since the purpose is often shaking artists out of their usual process, that's hardly surprising. I always find them interesting to read because they tend to have a really raw and fresh vibe to them.

If you haven't seen Jay's work before, I'd recommend checking out his sci-fi detective Tao of Snarky comic, either in the Tao of Snarky compilation, or at his website where he's publishing pages from his new Snarky comic at a page-a-week pace.

What's next? Why it's The Amazing Cynicalman by Matt Feazell:

This wee eight-page Cynicalman chapbook was a freebie for drawing Cynicalman on a post-it note, a blatant bit of Artists' Alley self-promotion that worked just dandy. I hadn't picked up a Cynicalman collection in a couple of years, and this one had a couple of strips that genuinely cracked me up. You can check out Cynicalman yourself at Matt Feazell's website.

Now we come to a couple of items from Megan Rose Gedris. The first is a graphic novel, Yu+Me: dream, Vol. 1. This collects up the first four volumes of her Yu+Me: dream webcomic, a romance that chronicles the coming of age of a high school girl in Catholic school who discovers that she may be a lesbian. This collection is filled with interesting characters, some beautiful images, and some very compelling storytelling.

The web comic ran from 2004 through October 2010, and the story is now complete on the web. I really liked this book a lot, so I'm sure I'll check out the webcomic to see how it all turns out.

Since I bought a volume of Yu+Me: dream, Megan was kind enough to throw in a chapbook with the first ten pages of her new webcomic: Meaty Yogurt, the tale of a girl growing up in a small town.


This one really caught me up, too, so I can tell that Megan Rose Gedris's various webcomics are going to get a lot of traffic from me in the next few weeks.

Now, for something completely different, the Tales of a Checkered Man webcomic by Denver Brubaker, the adventures of a middle-aged aspiring superhero.

I picked up a little two-dollar chapbook with the first 23 strips of this webcomic, and a few of them cracked me up. Check it out for good-natured almost-superheroic fun.

This seems a good time to break up this list of reviews with a bit of discussion of the web and comics. This is a great time to read comics. The growing popularity of webcomics has given all sorts of artists a platform on which they can publish essentially for free. And more and more artists and storytellers are rising to that challenge. Every year I grow more and more impressed at the depth and breadth of the talent that is out there toiling in a world beyond superhero comics and the comics page in the newspaper.

Don't get me wrong ... I love my paper comics. But one of the big pieces of hype about the Internet in the 90s was that it would unlock a new platform for artists of all genres and democratize creativity. But it was one thing to speculate that the web might do that back in 1995, and it's another thing entirely to stand here in 2011 and watch it happening in independent comics. There is a new generation of artists out there who are doing some amazing things, and part of the reason is that they have always been free to draw their story the way they wanted. I can't wait to see what the next fifteen years brings from them.

And now, with that little pep talk over, it's on to another webcomic collection: Desmond's Devastating Dozen by Joe Foo.

This limited-edition book (hand signed and numbered with a sketch by Foo, natch) collects up a dozen of Foo's favorite panels from Desmond's Comic, the adventures of a wolverine who works as a character in a popular video game. The webcomic updates once a week on Tuesdays, and I can see I'm going to have to add another regular Tuesday stop to my lunchtime comics browsing!

Now, just when you think you've seen everything that can possibly be done with Zombies, we get Apooka: The World's Most Adorable Zombie written by Jon Hickey with art by Mike Roll.

I suppose this is perhaps more of a children's picture book than a comic in format, but there's no denying that Apooka is cute as the Dickens. Apooka is not a webcomic, but you can pick up an adorable copy of your very own of this book or its sequel via the web at the Apooka online store. This is without a doubt my favorite zombie book that I have ever read. (Though I must confess that I haven't yet read Night of the Living Trekkies, which I picked up from the Science Fiction book club last month. We shall see who remains my top zombie after that.)

We come now to the girl who put the "Booty" in this post's title, Cursed Pirate Girl: The Collected Edition, Vol. 1 by Jeremy A. Bastian, which collects up the first three issues of the Cursed Pirate Girl comic.

Before we go any further, click on the page below and check out the enlarged version:


So why did Cursed Pirate Girl put the "booty" into this post's title? Because when I came to Jeremy's table I picked up the book, paged through a couple of pages, and realized that I was three dollars short of the purchase price. So I grabbed my jacket, walked outside, and strolled around East Lansing in January in single degree temperatures until I could find an ATM. That's right, the art in this book is so cool that it made me wander around Michigan on the coldest day in January so that I could find enough booty to buy it. Now that I've had a chance to see the entire book, it was well worth it. Anybody who knows how I feel about Michigan in January knows that this is the highest compliment I can possibly pay to any artist. Any further praise I could heap on this imaginative and brilliantly detailed comic would just be redundant.

Speaking of the Interent and comics, this book has an Internet story of its own. The money to fund this printing was raised through Kickstarter, an Internet site that lets fans collect up enough money to fund an artistic project. One of the great advantages of established publishers is their ability to provide writers and artists with an advance on a project. Kickstarter creates an alternate way to raise the sort of capital that you need to make full-time work on a project possible for most folks. It might not be the right path for a lot of projects, but in this case it's been a huge success.

Finally, despite my Michigan-Winter defying love for Cursed Pirate Girl, we come to my absolute favorite of the treasures I brought home: Swallow Me Whole by Nate Powell, the keynote speaker for the 2011 MSU Comics Forum.


Swallow Me Whole was released in 2008 and won the 2009 Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel. When I came to Nate's table he had a little pile of them on the front with a sign that said, "Winner of the 2009 Eisner Award." I looked at the sign, looked at him, and said, "Wow, this book won the Eisner Award? That's commendable. I guess I should buy a copy."

This is the dorkiest thing I have ever said to any creator in any forum. Really. Winning an Eisner Award is "commendable"? Good heavens.

Um, sorry, Nate. My bad. But thank you for talking to me kindly after that opener, nonetheless. And thank you for creating such a fabulous book. Swallow Me Whole is a graphic novel about a teenage girl and her family as they deal with mental illness. What makes this book so moving and powerful is the way that Powell uses the artwork to reflect the inner landscape of the characters. It's well worth seeking out.

And that's it for now. Thanks again to Ryan Claytor and everybody else who worked to make this year's MSU Comics Forum such a great event. I'm already looking forward to 2012!