Seq. Art: American, Eh?, Release the Bats!, Is it the Future Yet? (Or, the punctuated review edition.)

American, Eh? #4 and #5 by Heather Bryant
The continuing story of a Canadian who fell in love with an American and moved to the states is Heather Bryant’s American, Eh? Heather’s drawing and scripting techniques just keep getting better (and they were pretty damn good to begin with) - there’s quite an artistic difference between Issue #1 and the latest two. Issue #4 tells the story of working as a projectionist for a demanding film professor, and how much “H.” learned, even if it was a struggle to please him at times. The two-page spread that impressed me the most was her drawings of one of the most famous scenes from Hitchcock’s film Notorious.

From American, Eh? #4

Issue #5 of American, Eh involves a holiday trip back to Canada to see her family, with boyfriend Michael in tow. Besides the beautiful snowscapes (it’s a fairly rural town), Heather varies page layouts with different sized frames on each page. It keeps the action flowing well. I can’t wait for the next installment!

Heather also does the webcomic Cake Brat, the tales of bakers on the nightshift, lots of fun.

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Release the Bats! Ten Years of Comics by Liz Baillie
I’ve raved before about Liz’s comic My Brain Hurts (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), and how I had previously misjudged her work as “crusty punk comics”, when they are not that at all. Well, they sort of are, but they are SO. MUCH. MORE. than that.

Release the Bats! collects Liz’s hard-to-find work from other anthologies (her great piece from Side B is in here), selections from her “Minicomics of the Month Club”, and a few unpublished pieces. I really enjoyed “Record Collecting and the Cartoonist Tradition”, “Grandma’s Song”, and “The Awkward Punky Teen’s Guide to Dating”. She’s truly one of the finest comic creators in the indie/mini culture, and you must check out her work.

Liz is also publishes the webcomic Freewheel, a story of a girl searching for her brother, and the people she finds along the way.

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Is it the Future Yet? by Corinne Mucha
Another SPX, another collection from the lovely Corinne Mucha. In Is It the Future Yet?, she ponders about deja vu, trying to change the future, superstitions, and having her hyperlineated palms read.

From Is it the Future Yet?