AUDRA STANG

Available HERE

Audra Stang, a resident of Pittsburgh with an approach to color that makes me think she’s been a student of Frank Santoro’s in some capacity. has been making a series of minicomics I find pretty endearing. Each issue of The Audra Show is fairly self-contained, working in an anthology format to follow young people in a southern town called Star Valley across two separate generations — The late eighties gets a cast revolving around restaurant workers, with some light magic-realist elements (a boy who gave himself gills), while stories in the aughts follow teens hanging out after one of them has built some sorta sci-fi technology. Comparisons to Archie do not feel out of line — there’s a fast pace, vibrant colors, etc. You could also maybe compare it to Peter Bagge’s Hate, but it’s drawn by someone who grew up in the manga aisle at Barnes And Noble rather than looking at Basil Wolverton and Mad Magazine. Dialogue gets R-rated and people do drugs but the mood is never depressed or dour except in the way people get when complaining about their jobs. There’s jokes, and they’re emphasized enough to be recognizable, though they’re employed for the sake of establishing character details. You can see a two-page strip of Audra’s in the latest issue of Bubbles, and while I would have said her stuff works better in black and white after reading the first two issues of The Audra Show, the newer minicomics have found her color approach adjusted for greater clarity. It kinda seems like she’s just getting better, with increasingly improving comedic timing coinciding with the reader having a better understanding of who the characters are. You can order these comics through Copacetic Comics, Domino Books, or Audra’s website. She also self-published a larger collection called Star Valley Stories, which, if I understand correctly, features earlier comics featuring the same characters that she’s reworking in the new series.