Zut!!

Postcard of Shanghai Manhua, 1936.

Ack!

Found on the Abstract Comics blog: this wicked set by Michael Crowe.

Low Soup Clouds

(From Leela Corman's Queen's Day.)

Don't expect a hands tag. Unmoved by hands. (Not that I had much to say about faces.) These roiling broth clouds remind me of low-hanging mountain clouds in BC.

Corman is curious because she devotes space to blank space: in her panels, there's a lot of wall to take in, so much couch. Her stories are one-on-one meetings threatened by expanding voids: meeting the Baba Yaga and her ethereal soup, meeting a grandparent and your memory of death.

Couch. Wall. Jonathan.

That a Usagi Yojimbo Hand?

The last time I posted on Kevin Huizenga I chose a sequence less inventive and more subdued than his many comic frolics. I have done it again. From the paranoid romp of Ganges #3.

My Hand Outstretched

(From Michael Allred's Madman Atomic Comics #14. You may enlarge.) I guess I simply appreciate the space devoted to this encounter between freaky man and spooked deer. Where else do you see something like this?

Hockey Hauser, Eh

In Kaspar Diane Obomsawin does the story of the 19th century foundling with many many placid effects like above's scissored starburst and below's delightful locomotion.

Realism

(From Gray's Little Orphan Annie. Click to enlarge.) The first panel anticipates the next two. The detailed cityscape has been lettered over. Underneath in the white space we see Annie and Sandy taking stock of the town -- its "nice business section," its "clean streets" -- before declaring that "there's nothin' here that we want." The second panel's style is scoffed at: its stillness, its vanishing point, its realism. Annie and Sandy, like the cartoon letters in the first panel, prevent the city's clear emergence by heading between the vantage points to somewhere less specific and nearly blank (apart from a few contextual bricks). They "push on through and see what's on beyond," and there is no finer mission statement in comics than this. Trading fairness for blindness, business for busking, and cleanliness for spareness.