#comics workbook

The plot involves the rise and fall of Werewolf Jones. It is based on the overly aggressive, hypocritical ,cartoonishly volatile douchebaggery of Frank Santoro. Frank and Simon are, or have been friends (don’t know if they still are), and it’s not clear what the intention behind the comic is. It was posted without comment.

The way I’m reading it, WWJ/Frank successfully kickstarters the creation of his comics school, and his ego swells a bit, and by the end of the first set of grids, WWJ/F is driving around while making a video. He’s scolding people about comic show tabling etiquette, mirroring a real life video Frank made while driving around in his car. In the comic, WWJ almost runs over a pedestrian on his way to TCAF, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. screaming “Fuck You” at him. At this point in the comic, I’m thinking it’s possibly just a little bit of ribbing of one friend to another, sort of like “Keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel. Don’t be the douchebag who runs somebody over while you video yourself lecturing people on tabling etiquette.”

The next set of grids shows WWJ/F at TCAF with the swollen ego, “Out of the way, losers. Gridless heathens” reflects Frank’s attitudes toward other cartoonists who don’t share his dogma and his own constant harping on “grids”. When TCAF is slow and attendees aren’t greeting WWJ as comics’ savior, he ends up hypocritically sitting and eating behind the table, the very thing he was scolding people about in his car video when he almost ran over a pedestrian.

The look on Megg the Witch’s face in the next panel suggests that the whole comic isn’t just being played for laughs. There is sadness and concern in the expression. This set of grids ends with a WWJ drive by shooting of The Paris Review. This mirrors Frank’s own “personal vendetta” (his words, not mine) against The Paris Review. Somewhere along the line, they rejected him or his artwork or his writing or his suggestions about how they should run their website. Or maybe he was just pissed off because they used the wrong nomenclature,  calling a comic they posted a “graphic essay”. It’s hard to tell what exactly will set of a bout of volatile douchebaggery. He reblogged Paris Review tumblr posts, claiming they were “blocking his canoe in the river of art” or some such nonsense, even calling the unknown staff member running the Paris Review tumblr “a stupid bitch”. The hypocrisy on display here is that when his comics workbook website came on line, a number of people must have made suggestions to him about how it looks, how it works, how he should change it to improve it, and he ended up posting a rant, saying something like “If you don’t like the website, then just fuck off and unfollow, stop offering suggestions about how I’m running the site.” You should take your own advice, Frank. If you don’t like how The Paris Review runs their Tumblr account, then fuck off and unfollow them.

The next set of grids shows WWJ attacking an alleged “Aidan Koch biter”, a “public hanging”. This mirrors Frank’s own attack, or “public hanging” of someone he accused of ripping off Aidan Koch. Frank tossed the word “Xerox” around so much, you’d have thought the “European Aidan Koch Biter” had pulled some kind of Shia Labeouf stunt and was printing Aidan Koch comics under the European Aidan Koch Biter Name, but that was not the case. When challenged on that, Frank’s cronies rushed in to fine tune the “Xerox” accusations down to copying the style, “biting her mark making style”, not copying the comics.  Simon’s comic deviates from what really happened on the European Biter side of things. In real life, her reaction to the “public hanging” was something like “so, some guy at something called comics workbook thinks my comic looks like somebody else’s comic, big deal”. The suicide in Simon’s comic seems more like a cautionary tale, as people in real life have committed suicide after being bullied online. For someone claiming to be “an educator”, maybe “public hangings” aren’t the best way to teach people lessons.

The next set of grids shows WWJ partying on a yacht with his cronies when the navy and “the guys from Nobrow” show up and arrest WWJ. I’m not sure if “the guys from Nobrow” is referring to any specific beef in real life.