![]() The "Ripper" of the title is a trouble-making, skateboarding doggie. Here's a guy known for violent parodies of gangsta rap posing and sleazy remakes of forgotten 1980s crime movies and plenty of social satire dressed up in revenge fantasies, but this comic is like an alternate reality children's cartoon. The first thing I noticed about "Ripper & Friends" was how far Marra was willing to go to commit to this project - a project completely outside the rest of his Traditional Comics output. Kessler's juxtapositions work and the comic resonates beyond its final page. These comics aspire to say something, even as they unravel into futility in the end. ![]() Kessler exhibits a playfulness in this book, but also a questing for something more. Kessler throws a few different styles at the reader in this comic, with each story getting its own distinctive visual approach, but Kessler's use of accent and background colors provide a unifying aesthetic. Kessler's been published by Nobrow too, I believe, but this "Windowpane" comic from Breakdown Press is, if not "THE Book of the Show," certainly one of the prime contenders. I bumped into Matt Seneca on the way up from the BCGF basement, and he flashed this comic at me, and as soon as I saw the interiors, I knew that I had to seek it out. Okay, I enjoyed it more than that last sentence would imply, but it is a bit repetitive, and it certainly doesn't live up to its title or the boldness of its color choices. But I went with the "Megaskull" as my one pick, and I was drawn to the bright pinks and yellows and blues, but this comic is really just a bunch of tame Johnny Ryan gags drawn with garish colors. This is the only thing I ended up buying from the Nobrow table, even though the Nobrow folks continue to publish some of the best-looking comics in the world. The fabric of reality is often shredded in Gonzalez's comics, and that's still true when he's telling a story about a player seeking his "perfect pitch." In this new, non-"Slime Freak" minicomic, Gonzalez frames a baseball story around transformation and dimension-shifting. I don't know anything about this guy, other than seeing some of his minicomics and enjoying their sci-fi trappings and rudimentary clear-line art. What's the story with Carlos Gonzalez (or Gonzales as the PictureBox website sometimes spells it)? His "Slime Freak" series is one of the best minicomics in recent years, but he has no online presence and practically nobody talks about his comics anywhere. I know I always find stuff I didn't know about when I go to Brooklyn looking for comics. Maybe you'll see something here that you hadn't yet heard of. (I even broke my rule about not buying stuff at the show that I could easily get online in a month or two, because that Basil Wolverton "Spacehawk" book from Fantagraphics is a monster that I couldn't ignore, and one of these weeks I will devote an entire column to that beast of a comic.) I read a bunch of the comics I picked up already, and I want to talk briefly about eleven of them. Let's get down to business: I went to the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival (BCGF) over the weekend and I bought about 35 comics of different shapes and sizes. The work becomes more personal, even if it's about space barbarians or troublesome anthropomorphic farm animals. The connection between reader and creator is more intimate with self-published and small press comics. That isn't to say that corporate comics are always terrible while self-published or small press comics are always amazing, but it does mean that the voice of an individual artist is more likely to come through in the latter, and more likely to be drowned out in the former.
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