After the ACT-I-VATE panel at Politics & Prose, I exchanged a few e-mails with Jim Dougan and he was nice enough to send me both Crazy Papers and No Formula: Stories from The Chemistry Set, Vol. 1. But then there was job transitions and moving and just general life-related insanity and while every now and then I’d think “Yeah, I really need to write about those comics” something would get in the way and I wouldn’t.

So many apologies to Jim Dougan for the delay.

I find Dougan’s work to be interesting because he’s someone doing indie comics that is just a word guy — he writes and edits but doesn’t draw. There are many people who just write in mainstream comics, but it’s fairly rare in small press stuff. Being much more a word person myself (no, you don’t want to see my drawings), I love that someone like Dougan has found a way to make comics.

Onto the actual reviews!

Crazy Papers Buy at Amazon.com

Crazy Papers — art by Danielle Corsetto
I’m pretty sure I’ve had a night like this. Minus the ending up in jail part, though. Fortunately.

Melanie works in the admissions office of Georgetown University, and her life is turned upside down for a weekend when her friend Amanda comes from L.A. for a visit. There’s a man who’s too good to be true, clueless gangsters/waiters, bar fights, and a mysterious briefcase. It’s a funny, breezy story that does have a core message of breaking the personal boundaries you’ve set for yourself. Yes, Amanda causes all kinds of havoc for Melanie, but in the end, Melanie ends up better for it.

Dougan lives here in D.C. so I enjoy his in-jokes — the bar The First Edition standing in for The Front Page in Dupont, a comment about someone living in Petworth — but I think this story would be fun to just about anyone. I do love that Dougan always treats the D.C. area as a place where people actually live and that not all of us here are connected to politics. This is something we don’t get quite enough of.

You know Corsetto’s work from her webcomic Girls with Slingshots and her playful, animated style is a perfect match for this story. She makes this whole thing too much fun.

No, this comic isn’t going to change your life, but it’s all too easy to relate to and incredibly entertaining.

No Formula: Stories from the Chemistry Set, Vol. 1 Buy at Amazon.com

No Formula: Stories From the Chemistry Set, Vol. 1

The webcomics collective known as The Chemistry Set is apparently defunct now, but after reading this anthology, I think that’s really a shame. In all honesty, this is one of the more interesting comic anthologies I’ve read.

Is everything here great? No. Certainly, it’s a pretty dark collection of stories (whether it was intentional or not, all the stories involve death in one way or another) but after reading countless thinly-veiled autobiographical stories, it’s pretty refreshing to see people doing something very different. To imply some stereotypes, these are more inspired by The Sandman than say, Jeffrey Brown. And sure, that’s probably a matter of personal preference and personal taste, but I obviously like the former more than the latter.

I think the standout for me where “Red” written by Elizabeth Genco with art by Kevin Colden. It was a story that started out in one place and completely turned in the most awesome way. The use of color was also perfect.

I also loved “Come the Dawn” by Dougan and artist Hyeondo Park (and yes, you know the pair from ACT-I-VATE’s “Sam and Lilah”). It’s maybe a bit more lush than Dougan and Park’s work with “Sam and Lilah” but it’s well-suited to both of them.

There are still a few copies of this book out there (especially if you believe Amazon) and I think it’s worth seeking out. It’s an anthology worth having and has pointed me to some creators I’m going to seek more work from.

So yes, I was much delayed with these reviews, but better late than never, right? And I do want to thank Dougan for sending me these. He’s someone you should be paying attention to.

Sure, I kept up with Diesel Sweeties for a while, but mostly, I have a hard time keeping up with them (this shouldn’t really come as a surprise, honestly, if you know I have trouble following monthly comics. That’s once every four weeks. Do you really expect me to be able to remember to read something every day or every week?).

But after seeing some of the creators behind ACT-I-VATE last night at Politics & Prose, I think I better start.

Featuring founding member Dean Haspiel and creators Jim Dougan, Joe Infurnari, and Simon Fraser (right to left in the photo above) this really surprised me.

Haspiel is obviously awesome, and I liked his story of how ACT-I-VATE came about — he started by showing a photo of himself, all alone, working at his desk. You see, he said, making comics is lonely, and he found out that if he posted stuff to his LiveJournal (yay, LiveJournal!) people would respond. It began that just his friends were saying things, but soon, people he didn’t know were leaving comments too.

He saw that some of his creator friends were experiencing the same sort of thing. He thought they could join forces and therefore combine their respective fanbases.

ACT-I-VATE is a noncommercial enterprise — it exists, more or less, to just promote these creators’ work. Infurnari echoed this sentiment, saying he liked having a portfolio of his work online and that he could get feedback immediately. Fraser liked that he got control over his work — as primarily a creator for 2000 AD, he said he didn’t often get a lot of say what happens to his creations. (That was actually a point that was brought up many times by everyone — comics, especially at DC and Marvel, are work-for-hire. Creator-controlled works are the exception and not the rule.) He said he travels a lot and likes that he’s able to point people to the site when they ask him what he does.

DC local Dougan’s story was a little bit more of an interesting one. He’s a writer of comics and not an artist, so he’s had to find people to work with, and while the point wasn’t so much made, it was clear that the Internet makes it easier for him (Hyeondo Park, the artist of his ACT-I-VATE comic, Sam & Lilah, lives in Dallas).

Haspiel also told the story about how he encouraged Dougan & Park to submit Sam & Lilah to Zuda first, with the understanding it probably wouldn’t win (everyone seemed to have words of praise for Zuda, though, and everything I know about Zuda makes it seem like it’s a good deal). They joked about how after Sam & Lilah lost, they actually scooped the winner with their press release saying the comic was going to be on ACT-I-VATE.

While the event was for the ACT-I-VATE Primer, that seemed a little secondary to most of the discussion. They wanted to do the book because there’s still a print audience (although Haspiel talked about how that’s probably fading) and that there’s not necessarily a crossover between webcomics readers and print comics readers (I’m probably somewhat of an example of that). It was a good way to push people to the site that may have otherwise not known about it.

Then they read from their comics, accompanied by Dougan’s wife Rachel. This was, for the most part, hilarious and utterly charming. Fraser did voices and Rachel sometimes playfully stumbled over her parts (she said she hadn’t rehearsed). Haspiel called for audience participation when it came to sound effects. I’m all for this and I now demand that everyone does dramatic readings of their comics during panels. This was awesome.

The Q&A section was better than most, and allowed me to realize much too late that I was sitting behind Mike Rhode of ComicsDC. (I seriously didn’t make the connection until a little bit later, otherwise I probably would’ve said hi. So I’ll just say it here: Hi, Mike!)

It was a good presentation and I left an ACT-I-VATE fan. I foresee spending many, many hours on the site now.