Getting my attention early on is Cameron Stewart's SIN TITULO is an interesting noir thriller than catches my eye as a notable point of evolution in style for the creator. Cameron has always been a virtuoso in his work, displaying almost machine like consistency and skill in his past work. With the weekly SIN TITULO he's engaging in a paring back and simplification that appeals to my personal sensibilities, and complements his work a great deal. It's too soon to make a true comparison but so far the story is reminding me of one of my all time favourite books, City of Glass by Paul Auster & David Mazzucchelli. Very promising beginnings. This is a first for Cameron as a writer as I understand it, and so far he's displaying a good instinct for intrigue and suspense, and some nice touches with atmospheric details like the radio story about disappearing bees during a cab ride and other little notes like that. Great stuff.

Brilliantly drawn and bound to be engaging for many, is Karl Kerschl's The Abominable Charles Christopher. Kerschl has been working professionally for some time, and in the Transmission X web cast he explains that his motivation with this strip is to get away from the intense planning that typically goes into his long form comic book work and just have fun with a stream of consciousness narrative. The weekly strip is well under way and so far entirely enchanting. Backing up and often stealing the show, the mute wall eyed soother sucking Abominable headliner is supported by a cast of snappy talking animals. It's all superbly drawn and the art looks like it will be well worth seeing in print one day, elegant and subtly rendered, it's really something. 14 pages in a sub plot is now beginning to immerge about some kind of immanent peril to the forest, I'll be looking forward to seeing were this one is going.

Last for this post, Papercut is the monthly short story offering from Michael Cho. So far two have been posted, Smoke and Stars. Michael's background is in illustration work more than anything, and in a way it shows. His choice of image, subtle moods he achieves, they feel indicative of the challenges you often face in that medium. As a mode of expression it forces you to think in subtler terms than comics often do. His short stories are very introspective, and sombre so far. Their nostalgic air reminds me of Seth's work, but frankly I think more tightly rendered and lacking the obsession with a specific bygone era. Thanks to that in part, Michael's stories manage to be more contemporary feeing and broader scoped. Lovely work and when he completes a book of these shorts, I'm betting a best seller too.

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And, more seriously, a mythic approach or a different form can allow for a whole new way of understanding a subject --Chester Brown's Louis Riel graphic novel, for example, is way more accessible than dense and vaguely obscurantist Canadian histories on the same topic.

I'm not advocating elevating comics to high art. I've been around long enough to know that being canonized isn't all it's cracked up to be. But I do think that high art has a lot more in common with the gutter than with respectable, middlebrow art. Van Gogh sold one painting in his life and was considered a crappy painter, so crappy he had to take his ass to the sticks. Herman Melville's novels were such a failure that he quit writing them. Emily Dickinson? Shut-in. Nijinsky? Booed off the very stage he was humping fifteen minutes into Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." And as with James Tiptree, jr., there's a passel of English Victorian novelists with male pseudonyms, including all three Brontes. High art is often disdained as something a child could do, as mocking the audience, as degenerate, as gutter trash. I guess that's part of why the phrase, "gutter culture" makes me a little itchy, even though I know here at the Cultural Gutter we're reclaiming it.

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