Hello faithful Queer Eye On Comics fans! Are you getting tired of our regular reviews of the standard offerings from the big two publishers? Sick of Superman? Bored with Batman? Annoyed by The Astonishing X-Men? If so, you’ve got a real treat in store—today I’m going to show off a couple of recent acquisitions I’ve made of up-and-coming young talent in the field of comics. They disappoint on some levels, but the promise they show is undeniable.
First up is a little GN I uncovered at last year’s APE here in San Francisco: Animal Sounds by Lili Todd. Ms. Todd seems to be doing both pencils and inks in this black and white one-shot here, though the back cover does mention “Age 6” – which could imply that the inks were provided by a “studio,” much as various employees of Digital Chameleon and the like provide colors for many books these days. It also occurs to me that “Age 6” could be the name of her self-publishing imprint, too. I wish I had asked her directly at APE, but apparently she was at “naptime” when I returned to her tiny table. You know those artistic types—always sleeping mid-day!
At any rate, Todd sets a tone of savage action from the get-go with a dynamic lion cover illo. The story itself carries this theme, but in some unexpected ways. She uses the innovative device of large, obvious page numbers to call attention to the characters on each page… one flamingo (or is it a goose?) on page 1, two bears on page 2 and so on. 
The juxtapositions start out tamely (despite the well-known animosity between flamingos and bears), but kick into high-gear with a battle royale between three fuzzy bunny rabbits and four feral cheetahs on the next two pages. She uses a repeating numeral “4” in various states of legibility as a sort of stylized sound effect – reflecting the snarling of the fighting beasts. Ingenious, really.
The thrilling conclusion on pages 5 and 6 are done in a pencils-only style that is lean on blacks but high on motion, as a school of five flying fish flee across the pages from a terrifying group of kitty-cats… who, in a break with the book’s prevailing theme, number eight in all. The motion in this two-page panel is so powerful as to completely reverse the numeral “5” on that page, so that it appears to be fleeing along with the fish. Hey… you’d run to if you had to face down eight wet kitties!
As if to further drive home the finality of this ending, the final page number, a “6,” is the only fully inked part of the illustration on this panoramic two-page spread. Is Todd warning with the kitten-to-page-number disparity that overpopulation threatens all life on the planet… even if the overpopulation is of animals?
My one complaint about this otherwise compelling read is the print quality. I don’t know if she used some one-off printing house or something, but it really looks for all the world like she took a piece of cheap, kindergarten grid paper, folded it, and made strategic cuts that allowed it to be folded into a mini-comic. The contrast of the poor paper quality (obviously full of acidic pulp which limits its long-term collectability – is this an unlabeled ashcan?) with the powerful message of the piece is an unwelcome dichotomy. Todd should give her next work the professional print quality that any Kinko’s could provide for just a little more money. It’s an investment is all I’m saying.
My second pick (also a black-and-white indy gem) is a wild-ride adventure with superhero-style action aplenty. The Masked Mutant #1 by the singularly-named Basie delivers slugfests without all the jibber-jabber. In what may be an homage to G.I. Joe #21 (the “silent” issue), there are no sound effects and only two word balloons in this book—perhaps writer-artist Basie’s way of letting us know that no words can truly capture the sound of the carnage of the story. The reader is left to fill in the sounds with his own imagination… and Basie does not disappoint on the visuals.
The cover establishes the titular character as a hard hitting martial arts expert, and by the second panel in the story, he is striking out with weapons, fists and more. The action gets a bit garbled (sometimes appearing as nothing but scribbles in the panels) by the time he is set upon by a group of nefarious types, who exclaim “ReadyReady,” The Masked Mutant is ready himself, declaring them “creepy,” while apparently hanging one of them from the neck! Ultraviolence aside, this book quickly establishes itself as not just another indy book.
From then on, Basie dispenses entirely with dialogue and shows the masked mutant using powers like stretching, fighting skills, specialized weaponry, force fields, and literal butt-kicking. Its clear Basie has been influenced by the “hot” artists of the last two decades 
(Michael Turner, Jim Lee, Rob Leifeld, Todd McFarlane and their ilk), since he puts his stylized signature not only on one particularly complex page full of multiple panels, but larger than life on the cover itself—apparently reflecting an ego that puts creator firmly above creation.
So prominent is his name on the cover, that it doesn’t just call attention away from the title of the book, it completely replaces it! Indeed, the words “The,” “Masked,” and “Mutant” don’t appear anywhere in or on the book. I’m guessing Basie has seen some of the big price tags that have come from the sale and resale of signed original art and is hoping for a payday of his own making. Basie… you need to build your reputation before cashing in! I hope he reads this and stays true to the art instead of the Almighty Dollar.
It might be too late, though, a look at some on-line pictures of him—on the site of my local comics shop Isotope, who turned me on to his work—show a person clearly cultivating a rock-star persona among comics creators… a sort of Bono meets Garth Ennis. Ah well! The glamorous life of a rising star can do that to person, and we all know the drug-soaked, sexed-up, high-salary world of comics can be no exception. A return trip to Isotope this week showed me his book is already in its second printing… just one week after I picked up my copy of the initial print run! Yep… definitely too late.
If I had to compare these two indy books, I’d give the edge to Animal Sounds if for no other reason but the innovative storytelling technique. Fortunately, I don’t really have to compare them to one another as much as to the wide world of indy comics – and the even wider world of mainstream books. Both Animal Sounds and The Masked Mutant #1 hold their own in both these worlds, and if they have a few flaws, they can easily be overlooked as the inevitable result of freshman efforts.
Undoubtedly, both Lili Todd and Basie are names to watch out for. Should I be the first to predict that Lili will be under exclusive contract to Vertigo and Basie will be singed on to take over a second-tier Wildstorm book—maybe Stormwatch?—by the time, say, 2010 rolls around? I think I just did. Just remember that you read it here first.
