For some people, a minicomic is just a small comic book. The struggle of regular publishers to wean audiences away from this point of view was one of the more entertaining sideshows of 1990s artcomics. It may sound crazy to say so now, but it wasn't too long ago any comic too small to fit snugly into a mylar snuggie was looked at with a very jaundiced eye, even by those who wouldn't bag a comic if they were paid to. The issue was perceived value. Fantagraphics hit one of the decade's home runs with Acme Novelty Library's small Jimmy Corrigan volumes, but one can easily recall fans of Chris Ware making an impassioned case for those comics' density and narrative heft despite their diminished size. Rhetorical evidence indicates a cheaper cover stock on Walt Holcombe's similarly dainty first issue of Poot may have helped get that lovely title off to a clumsy start in the first-impressions sweepstakes at the nation's comics store, an interpretation no doubt nudged along by how easily Holcombe's art moved across the page (elegant storytelling doesn't necessarily indicate a high linger-per-page count). Throw in debates as to the value of any and all pamphlet comics vis-à-vis trade formats of the kind that were popular following the speculator-driven mainstream-comics crash of mid-decade, and we're talking a battle fought in fits and starts with no clear winner.

At the same time this war of perception was being fought by some on almost a book-to-book basis, Chris Oliveros and Michel Vrana were changing the size of books across their lines. Both Drawn & Quarterly and particularly Black Eye featured design work that drew attention to each comic's status as an art object. Changing a book's size, a potential thumb in the eye to comic-store racking concerns, was a subtle but powerful step away from the unstated commercial expectations of the direct market. This was the door subsequently kicked down for many arts comics readers by the printing-process-infatuated gang working under the Fort Thunder umbrella. Yet old prejudices about size stick around just below the surface. When Robot Publishing mixed a slick, art-happy approach to comics with variations on standard minicomics formats, reading the resulting books was like watching frothy, effects-laden science-fiction movies on a 12-inch Panasonic.

The Top Shelf Small Batch Series upholds the standard minicomics ethos, through its reduced size and plain, uniform design -- the individual books look and feel as if they could have been made in a small apartment with a stapler and copy machine. But the content is edgy and unfamiliar enough to specifically reward the choice in format. The projects featured in the Small Batch Series are primarily side-projects from cartoonists familiar to readers of both the Top Shelf anthologies and publication line. The Small Batch book therefore immediately plays to the lingering completist compulsion of the artcomics reader. Think of these books as a quick re-release of a first novel upon someone winning an award or a low-cost video tape of a director's home movies and you begin to comprehend their understated charm. And because publishers Chris Staros and Brett Warnock have shown pretty solid taste on whom to offer this platform, the Small Batch Series has not only become a must-read for fans of certain Top Shelf artists, but one of the better across-the-line reading experiences available in comics. Works that would have seemed a stretch as hardback graphic novels find a comfortable and low-key home here.

Because of artcomics' nearly endless supply of suitable roads not taken or otherwise abandoned, there is no reason this line couldn't expand by a factor of two or three without a noticeable drop in quality. The greatest danger for projects driven by little-seen work and reprints is overestimating their audience. Two hundred people clamoring for a reprint of The Cowboy Wally Show in an on-line chat room isn't necessarily an indication of tens of thousands readers silently pacing the aisles of the nation's Barnes and Nobles looking for out-of-print Kyle Baker. The number of fans who like any alternative or arts-comic work enough to seek out other works by the same artist is insignificant to anyone but a seasoned small publisher. So even with the Small Batch Series firmly established, Top Shelf remains primarily focused on its standard graphic novel line -- a line without a pulp ceiling. And instead of pinning hopes on the format as a point man for increasing sales or an industry-saving return to design simplicity, Staros and Warnock seem perfectly content with pushing these books as bonus content rather than as a synergistic marketing ploy. In return, Top Shelf gains a semi-sizable backlist much sooner than they might have otherwise. The artists maintain the rewards of having more works in print, not the least of which is keeping their name in front of an audience between major new efforts. In an increasingly trade-driven comics world, minicomics efforts, both self-directed and those culled by savvy publishers like Top Shelf, may end up playing the disposable role of the old pamphlet comic.

Bern and Edwina
David Greenberger and Patrick Moriarity

Of all the alternative cartoonists who more closely adhered to the visual and verbal vocabularies explored by the underground generation, Pat Moriarity may be the one artist whose absence from regularly published, alternative comics work is most keenly felt. A natural cartoonist and a longtime favorite of his peers, Moriarity seemed, during the run of Big Mouth, to be on the cusp of developing a wonderfully idiosyncratic art style with a tremendous range of expression, the kind of style that could relate any story with confidence and charm. His work for the Top Shelf anthology allowed Moriarity to stretch his artistic wings a bit, pushing the cartoonist out of more representational drawing and into broader, more explicitly cartoon-like, visuals.

Moriarity worked with several writers on Big Mouth and in his anthology work, but one stood out. David Greenberger wrote scripts for the "Bern & Edwina" feature in Duplex Planet Illustrated that were quirky but fundamentally straightforward, like a tightly written quarter-hour 1950s television show. Reprinted here, Greenberger's stories allowed Moriarity a chance to strut his stuff with variations on his developing style. A one-page story done in 35 panels is an even better showcase for Moriarity's craft in the Small Batch book than when it originally appeared, each figure instantly recognizable at the tiny size. The characters are designed extremely well. The final story features the kind of gray-tone work that no one seems to do right now, lending an authority and weight to the figures that almost makes mincemeat out of the lightweight, back-and-forth banter.

In Small Batch form, Bern and Edwina receive a fitting revival, one that doesn't overwhelm the warm but still rather thin appeal of the characters. It reads like the first strip of a great newspaper-strip tandem, unaware of its own lack of staying power but friendly, warm company while it lingers. (Not many know Bern & Edwina was proposed as a newspaper strip at one time.) Barring that wider exposure, and as Greenberger and Moriarity move onto projects of greater scope and more immediate reward, getting a Bern & Edwina book is a pleasant surprise, a drop-in visit from a couple of old friends.

Better Luck Next Century
Dylan Horrocks

In addition to enjoying a reputation in his field as one of its most thoughtful spokespersons, Dylan Horrocks is also one of its hardest-working talents. Amongst peers, for whom it seems a single comic idea is enough to justify a career's worth of angry griping about the lack of mass-media success to follow, Horrocks seems a beehive of activity. Exploring a lot of his unseen work recasts the creator of Hicksville, Pickle and now Atlas in a new light -- not as a new cartoonist experimenting with a working style, but as an established artist demolishing previous ways of work to experience the process of creation from a new standpoint. That playfulness, really more a willingness to explore based on competing intellectual curiosities, also gave the medium Art Spiegelman. Horrocks can't come close to matching that comics giant's creative savvy and delicious showmanship, but much of Spiegelman's output lacks Horrocks's heart.

"A heart on the sleeve" is a good way to describe the New Zealand cartoonist's work in his Small Batch book, Better Luck Next Century. Horrocks uses this publishing opportunity not for little-seen work -- of which he has a ton -- but for a heavily illustrated essay on his work in political cartoons. It's much like the New Zealand comics survey that gave Horrocks the chance to visit the United States and the Small Press Expo in 1998. But instead of a couple dozen collaborators of varying skill and unvarying space requirements, Horrocks is able to more expressively use his own material, drawn from various but very specifically local politically-oriented magazines published in his home country. Although the cartoons presented often deal with local issues, the rule that countries other than the United States seem to live with an internationalist view Americans couldn't tell apart from a Denny's menu definitely applies here.

Better Luck Next Century fulfills its promise as a primer on local issues, a fascinating one for American audiences because it's little-seen and presented critically without rampant hostility. As a comics fan and a fan of Horrocks comics, it's fun to see him play with and against the traditions of a specific cartoon legacy -- Horrocks's figures hold the eyes like the typical American newspaper editorial cartoonist, but also move across the page like figures in a Nickelodeon comedy. The project feels like an amusing, let-the-audience-in cheat, as if Horrocks picked a segment of his cartooning career that barely holds together as a cohesive book even with copious explanation. Luckily, he's smart enough that by the time you may decide to withdraw your initial bemused support from the disparate cartoons, you're learned enough about Horrocks's world to make you want to read until the end.

Cirkus New Orleans
Josh Simmons

This is the gem of the series, a near-hallucinatory first-person account of time spent with a performing modern circus of the modern freakshow/Jim Rose variety. Josh Simmons utilizes a reasonably sophisticated and incredibly effective narrative technique in telling his story. Most of the pages are single- or two-page loose stories that are slightly reminiscent of Joe Coleman and (naturally) old-time circus posters, blocks of text pulling the reader chaotically across the page into tiny graphic detail and grotesque imagery. Yet Simmons also makes great use of grid-like comics within those spaces, usually for brief, comic interludes. These sunny anecdotes feel like islands of lighthearted lunacy in a sea of lurid excess. Simmons's pages are therefore not just packed with detail, they're packed with multiple viewpoints and competing moods.

Simmons gets credit for not overplaying his hand as a participant in his own story, limiting those scenes in which he resists sordid temptation to a bare minimum. That light touch helps his narrative tremendously. The Cirkus regulars are free to storm to the story's forefront unfettered by a reader's desire to check in on the moral state of the narrator. Simmons's generosity in sharing center stage provides his story with a unique energy that at times seems more likely to induce nausea than shake free character-defining insights. But in a story like this one, manipulating mood seems more the point. Best of all, Simmons refuses to humanize the subjects of his story, seemingly confident that the unflinching steadiness of his observant approach is all the help the reader will need to understand this world. I have no idea, after reading this book, if the experiences are real or imagined. Scenes both repulsive and beautiful lingered anyway.

Bible Doodles and Doot Doot Garden
Craig Thompson

The young Mr. Thompson, whose debut Goodbye, Chunky Rice both benefited and suffered from being one of the few satisfying books released in its calendar year, gets the star treatment here with not one but two books in the Small Batch series. Doot Doot Garden was an initial release of the line, and reviewed in an earlier installment of this column [TCJ #234]. By depending heavily on reprinting Thompson's minicomics efforts like "My Friend Joey's Legs" and an early story featuring Chunky Rice, this may be the only book in the line that comes across as a perfunctory home for the older work featured. And while Thompson's work is always lovely to regard, some of the visual iconography employed here doesn't mesh as smoothly as in some of the cartoonist's other efforts. Still, this is a nice little volume of extra work and outtakes, with a slightly rougher edge that many felt missing from the first major work.

Bible Doodles, on the other hand, takes off-hand drawings done by Thompson while musing in church or writing friends and makes a fine little book out of them. In the accompanying essay, Thompson writes cleverly about seeing pastors as fellow craftsmen, using their usual Sunday hackjobs as a stepping point to all sorts of very freely-constructed interpretations of Bible verse. It reads very much like what some adolescent super-talent might draw on the back of several programs. Not only does Thompson use the timeworn humor method of drawing literally what a pastor might interpret as spiritual subject matter -- some sexually alluring material from the Song of Solomon -- but he draws a story from the apocryphal (literally) Book of Tobit in such an offhand goofball manner that one can imagine the story being used as exhibit A by those who would argue against the book's inclusion as accepted scripture. Only the illustration work, including one for a Neil Gaiman poster featuring angels, seems visually lacking. All in all, the book signals that Chunky Rice may be the starting point for more challenging, elegant narratives to go with all the eye candy. This is a well-conceived little book, with visuals worth visiting time and time again.

Smudges
P. Shaw!

P. Shaw! has been around for years on the periphery of alternative comics consciousness, his works covered at least one substantial time in this column's past. His universe of one-eyed, single-fingered monsters and the primeval world in which they run around and encounter one another reads like the missing link between the free-wheeling fantasies of Vaughn Bodé and the monster-fetish, mind-blowing fireworks from the Fort Thunder gang. They have a charm and solidity that seems to defy any kind of super-rational analysis; one denies the effectiveness of the comics in Smudges at the risk of missing entirely some unknown greater point and looking like an ass.

But let's risk it anyway. There is actually very little in the way of formal comics in Smudges, much to the book's benefit. A series of single cartoons, scenes and what looks like character studies and model sheets, Smudges allows the reader to formulate his own mini-epic out of characters like Mush Grubb, the molemule and Crushmore -- the last of which I have to admit not even knowing if it's a character or the name of a scene. And Shaw is another artist who definitely knows how to craft a gray tone. In other words, even if you don't like reading it you'll probably like looking at it and you probably should have only wanted to look at it anyway.

Still, this is the least important book in the line, and hopefully not an omen for future releases. Warnock and Staros have to walk a fine line between satisfying content and work that fits the format -- like masters of an island of lost toys who must remain cognizant that a squirt gun that shoots jelly really does have a place in somebody's house. Used correctly, the format could be a way to keep in print material necessary to understand an artist's specific development, and as a more humble, sustaining and accessible alternative to the soon out-of-print glossy reprint volume. Keep emptying those closets, everyone.