Leslie Overnight by Damien Jay

Leslie Overnight is the result of a larger project, Opolis, at the Flux Factory in Queens. A group of artists constructed individual beuildings out of paper and cardboard. Visitors walk among the buildings, peering into the windows to follow the story within.
Above you can see the structure of the building. In the comic, different versions of Leslie creep around the building. To make the comic, Jay photographed each scene and assembled them in order. In this story, Leslie is a bit of a kook. At one point, he even breaks out the tin foil hat.

Jay doesn’t simply make a static image of Leslie and move him around; there must be dozens of cutout Leslie figures to fit in with different scenes. If you sit down and really look at this comic, you realize just how much work he has done to pull this off. Jay has drawn and cut out dozens of Leslies, multiples of the security guard character, and the various word balloons. He then had to place the cutouts correctly for each panel before taking a photo of each. Multiply this by 30 pages.

The finished product is much richer than it sounds. The cardboard scenery kind of adds to the realism, as weird as that sounds. The props have more fullness than something merely drawn. As Leslie floats through each panel, the office desks, cubicle walls, and other details create a stage prop feeling.

The cover of Leslie Overnight is striking. First, it’s larger than your standard mini-comic, but second the close up image of Leslie’s face is unforgettable and a little disturbing. Jay did a fantastic job on the screen printing as well.

I don’t see a price on this, but according to Jay’s website it’s $4. You can read the comic on his website, but take it from me; this is a nice one to hold in your hands. Leslie Overnight is unique and charming. It reminds me why I love mini-comics.

“__________ Are Always Fun to Draw” edited by Isaac Cates
Comics are hard to make, mini-comics even more so. Yet there are some hardy fools out there who try to make it even more challenging. Isaac Cates of Satisfactory Comics and Elm City Jams is one of those fools. He’s made a name for himself in the mini-comic word by doing minis with various constraints and rules in place.

Right around SPX, he sent me a copy of “_________ Are Always Fun to Draw,” and it continues with the weird rules thing. Each of the twenty-two contributors made a big list of things that “are always fun to draw.” Isaac compared the lists and picked the forty most common things from them, and then sent that new list back to each contributor. Then each person had to draw a single page with at least forty things from the list, with the top thirty as required things for each page.

The Thirty Required Things:
Skulls or skeletons
Dinosaurs
Robots
Octopi or quid, including giant squid
Space aliens
Cats
Monkeys or apes
Demons
Fish, especially in goldfish bowls
Pirates or pirate hats
Self-portraits
Dogs
Explosions, especially mushroom clouds
Mountains or volcanoes
Vampires
Birds, especially black ones
Dragons
Fire or flames
Guns, especially rifles or x-ray guns
Saturn or other planets
Trees, especially talking trees
Earthworms
Bats or other things with bat wings
Cigarettes or cigarette butts
Eyes or eyeballs, especially angry ones
The undead, especially zombies
Vikings
Ducks
Cowboys, especially drunk ones

Here are three pages from the book.

Damien Jay
Karen Sneider
Ben Towle

You can get a copy of “_________ Are Always Fun to Draw,” and you really should, by sending $2.50 to:
Isaac Cates
178 Lawrence St. 2nd Floor
New Haven, CT 06511

You can also send $3 through PayPal to isaac.cates@liu.edu

Guest Post the Second by Kate Nyland Meow, by Jesse Reklaw, is a treasure. The cover is a delightful scrap of wallpaper with the title and a picture of a cat silk-screened onto it. Although it set me back $5, it is worth every penny. Each of the sixteen technicolor paintings of cats is a little work of art. “Cat Women,” the final picture, consists of three motley women and a little cat, all in dominatrix gear. Two pages adjacent to each other each have three cats in similar poses, but it took looking at their titles (listed on a page at the end of the mini) to really get the difference between the two. On the left, we have “Good Cats,” looking dapper as they clean themselves, sleep, and lounge about. In contrast, on the right you’ll find “Bad Cats.” They have shifty gazes and ragged ears. Most cat-owning readers will probably identify more with the latter than the former. Below are two paintings, “Pile of Cats” and “Space Cat,” to show the more whimsical side of this mini.
I appreciate The Probe by Damien Jay because although it includes no dialogue, it is visually packed. Smaller than a deck of cards, with a silk-screened cover, this mini has nine panels on almost every page. In the beginning, a rabbit wakes up and is overcome with boredom. Since the mini ends with the rabbit in a near-identical state of tedium, one wonders if the rabbit simply imagined what transpired in between. The action occurs when an alien tries to lure the rabbit out of his den, using a carrot, in order to study him.
Jamie Tanner’s Barry Pago: Crime Scene Photographer violates the mandate I always give Shawn before he passes along anything comic-related to me: no sad stories about animals. I still haven’t forgiven him for Goodbye, Chunky Rice. I picked this mini up on my own at SPX and was immediately awed by the art. There is so much texture on every page. Even the most inanimate of objects (rugs, tables, bathtubs) come to life when drawn with Tanner’s pen. The tale is equally as nuanced. The title character, an anthropomorphic penguin, has brought his son, Walt, along on a job – several gruesome murders need to be documented. Pago likes to, ahem, engage with the victims to the detriment of his son, who wants to follow in the footsteps of his dad and take a picture. The disregard of Walt by Pago leads to chilling consequences, although Pago’s callousness remains untouched up through the last page.
General Thoughts I would imagine something that prevents many people from becoming comic lovers is the feeling of not getting enough bang for your buck. I spent $30 on minis and felt as though many of them lacked substance. Had I spent that money on a good novel, I would have had hours of entertainment. More than several of the minis left me empty. They weren’t horrible, they weren’t stellar, they were just eh – barely blips on the radar. A few times, I exclaimed incredulously to Shawn something along the lines of, “$3.50 for this?!?” Some were trite; others had the uncomfortable air of an adolescent boy trying to show off how crude he could be. I really enjoyed the minis I reviewed and would have paid more for them than I did. Couch Tag by Jesse Reklaw, which Shawn snagged first but I would have undoubtedly picked up had he not, was what I wish more minis were like. Dense, thought-provoking, and memorable, it was just as fulfilling as a chapter out of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

One of Shawn’s quirks is that he does not like short stories. If his favorite author publishes a book of them, he isn’t tempted to buy it. Even compilations including many of his favorite authors get ignored at the bookstore! He feels that maybe a few of the pieces would be fantastic, but the rest don’t have enough development for him to bother. This, ultimately, is how I feel about minis-comics. I understand there is blood, sweat, and tears poured in to the making of every mini. Shawn and I made our own once and can attest to that. As much as I want to love minis to the same extent Shawn does, I don’t. I appreciate the work that it takes to make them, and will continue to read the outstanding ones Shawn passes my way, but I’d rather read a novel - or a book of short stories.