Ballyhoo Stories No. 4

Sequential art, feisty were-beast that it is, has been clawing its way out of the comic book store for many a full moon now. We had to figure it would break free and be loosed on our cities eventually.

Escape was inevitable from the day that alternative press books of all shapes and sizes began to appear on the shelves telling tales of day to day existence, commenting on life and love, and drawing crowds of art-smart ladies in to the comic book stores.

Traditional fan boys clutched weathered copies of West Coast Avengers from the quarter bins and dared one another to walk up to the girls. “Come on, ask her out. There’s a coffee shop right around the corner. She likes comic books, for crying out loud! What do you need, an engraved invitation?”

Especially dazzling graphic novels — say, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, David B.’s Epileptic, or Blankets by Craig Thomas — attracted the attention of the literati and, soon enough, sequential art found its way into traditional bookstores, Houghton Mifflin’s Best American anthologies, and some of the sassier literary journals.

Case in point: Ballyhoo, a literary annual founded in 2004. Each edition of Ballyhoo explores a given theme through fiction, creative nonfiction, and, now, comics. Sin and redemption is the subject matter for Spring 2007, as apt a choice as any for the edition in which comics form creators are added to the mix.

Comics fans will recognize the distinctive style of Paul Pope (Sin Titulo, The Ballad of Dr. Richardson, Batman: Year 100) on the front cover. Inside the journal, several comics are mingled among the prose pieces.

The King and the Beast by illustrator/typographer Ray Fenwick (Hall of Best Knowledge) of Nova Scotia reads like a fairy tale or parable with post-modern sensibilities. In typical Fenwick fashion, lettering plays a huge role in the overall look of each page as royal decrees, nailed by turns to posts, doors, and walls, inform the populace of the divine provenance for a king’s grudge against a beast.

Luckily, the days of kings declaring that they are simply doing what the Almighty (with whom they apparently must share quite intimate conversations) has instructed them to do are long behind us. Otherwise, we might suspect a subtext in the tale.

Please Forgive Me by Corinne Mucha is a clever consideration of dead flowers and karmic debt while A Fall Apart by J.P. Coovert details a family struggling to stay together when confronted by cancer and chemotherapy.

It’s an eclectic mix of imagination and talent, with the quirky featured as prominently as the poignant. The Rise and Fall of Yip the Wonder Dog by Andy Hartzell (Fox Bunny Funny) demonstrates the power of comics to tell a tale without (or mostly without, at any rate) words. Hartzell is one of those artists whose work is deceptively easy on the eyes. Go back to the beginning after finishing one of his stories and look closely at how many different things he is telling us in each and every panel.

Oh, yeah, and there are several very well-written and edgy prose pieces in the latest Ballyhoo as well. Have a go at a few of them and let the words alone sketch images across the doodle sheets in your head. The two forms of media, comics and prose, play against one another well. Proponents of each should find much to enjoy in the other as well.

Tread carefully, though, as there is sin aplenty to be found therein.

That said, redemption lurks there as well.