Category: mojo special issue

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mojo special issue

Jason Hart- The Attack of the 151-ft Woman

6 page comic, 3 panels per page. Read top to bottom. Full color. Cover: Panel One: Family in a car with mother in the front seat and daughter in the back. The backs of their heads to us. Also in the backseat, another daughter is facing us with her hand pressed against the back mirror. “When they finally launch their offensive against the giantess,” Panel Two: Car turning the corner in a city, reads “(cont.) we pack our bags.”

Page 2: Panel Three: Highway by a large city with helicopters in the background reading, “Momma says she won’t watch debris rise over NYC again,” Panel Four: “(cont.) so we head for the southern coastline.” Looking overhead at a highway with many cars. Panel Five: Group of military-looking men. One of them in foreground with a large missile going off.

Page 3: Panel Six: Missile hitting the back of the 151-ft Woman in the city with helicopters flying over. Panel Seven: Hand of the 151-ft Woman with ropes being thrown over it by many people. Panel Eight: Large police force in riot gear and a large police truck on the left hand side.

Page 4: Panel Nine: Hand of the 151-ft Woman crushing a helicopter. Panel Ten: Torso of 151-ft Woman being hit by missile, dropping a torch from her left hand. Panel Eleven: Head and shoulders of 151-ft Woman on the ground. Her head is wearing a crown. It is clear the Woman is the Statue of Liberty.

Page 5: Panel Twelve: Smoke coming off of the Statue of Liberty with people walking over her. Panel Thirteen: On left, close up on the Statue of Liberty’s eye. On the right, two men with shot guns stand. One is holding the confederate flag. Panel Fourteen: Two women taking a selfie in front of the fallen torch. Panel reads, “When we reach Florida,”

Page 6: Panel Fifteen: “(cont.) there’s a wildfire burning all along one side of the horizon.” Close up to one of the daughters’ face looking through the car window with a reflection of fire. “It cuts a white-hot line through the deepest night I’ve ever seen.” Panel Sixteen: “Momma glances at me in the rear view, says it won’t get us. We’re moving too fast.” Car in the bottom left corner driving on the road with wildfires in the distance. “But even still, an animal fear rises up strong in my throat. My eyes start to water, thinking about that heat.” Panel Seventeen: Close up to fires. “I can’t even see the other three sides still open to us.”

Jason Hart is a visual storyteller based in Dayton, Ohio. He graduated from The Art Institute of
Pittsburgh in 2005 and works by day as a marketing agency art director and designer. By evening, he
is a father and husband (his favorite job). And once everyone else falls asleep, he writes and draws
comics all night long.

Jason’s most recent narrative works can be found in arts and literary journals such as Illustoria,
UPPERCASE, Ink Brick, New Plains Review, Barrelhouse, Geometry, and Flock, as well as comics
anthologies from Stache Publishing, Oneshi Press, Call Out Comics, and elsewhere.
Jason hates the Internet but posts to Instagram often enough (@json.hart) and Facebook
(jasonhart.comics) and Tumblr (showerstorm) more infrequently.

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mojo special issue

Mary Matthews- liberty

Image Description for “Liberty” by Mary Matthews One page comic Water color Statue of Liberty standing on a building that looks to be a government building of some sort, saying, “Don’t let me down, Boo.”

Mary Matthews is a photographer and illustrator living in Portland, OR. Mary travels the country documenting the fights and wins of workers in the U.S. labor movement and it is these experiences on the road that often inspire Mary’s drawings about current events, pop culture, social justice and everyday American life. Mary’s illustrations can be seen on Turner Movie Classic’s FilmStruck Podcast, in the Cynthia For New York campaign and in communications work for labor organizations nationwide.     You can see more of Mary’s work at mcmpress.wixsite.com/drawingdaily

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mojo special issue

Ross Allison- He’s Trying

3 page comic. 2x2 (4) panels/page. Read left to right, top to bottom. Black and white, with blue shaded texturing, almost like watercolor. Panel One: An angler sits on a dock in the middle of an urban lake. An unnamed city skyline stretches across the background of the panel. Panel Two: Close up of the pillars that hold the dock and the fishing line entering the calm water. Panel Three: With no causal relationship to the fishing line, a man reaches out of the lake, disturbing the water around him. He has an octopus on his head. Panel Four: Dripping water, the man and the octopus walk past the angler. The angler does not acknowledge the man with the octopus on his head. Page two. Panel one: The man removes the octopus from his head and throws it into the angler’s pail, startling the angler. Panel two: The man peers around a brick wall in a cityscape. Two people are around him, but neither of them are paying attention to him. They are staring at their cellphones. Panel three: The man walks down a city street. For the first time, we can see that he is a young adult. To his left and right are tall buildings. He has messy hair, large square glasses, and a baggy coat over slim fit pants and a shirt. Three people in the background look at their phones. A person to the man’s left is walking and looking at her phone. No one pays attention to the man. Panel four: In the foreground, the man waits to cross the street with his back to the reader. He is facing a café—his implied destination. The people in the café are looking at their phones. Although the pedestrian walk sign is on, he does not cross the street. Page three, panel one: The perspective is reversed and the panel shows the front of the man crossing the street towards the café. The walk sign is off for pedestrians. Panel two: A car hits the man in the middle of the crosswalk. Panel three: The driver gets out of his car, but the man walks away unharmed. Panel four: The man enters the café. The server and a customer are on their phones and do not look at the man.

 

Ross Allison is a twenty-year-old visual artist currently living in Virginia. Primarily self-taught, he began by drawing a comic book a day throughout his elementary years before moving onto singular art pieces during his adolescence.  He has fully embraced the way art is currently consumed (via online) by constantly uploading any finished work of art, be it paintings, digital works, or pages of his many sketchbooks. He has described his art as “vicious depictions of what (he) consider(s) to be ‘the inner eye’, or visual subconscious”, displaying otherworldly landscapes of patterns and color.  He has only recently returned to the comic format, attempting to display his style of obsessive spontaneity in the forms of loose narratives.

His art has been published in 805 Magazine (www.805lit.org) and the Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal (www.unrbrushfire.org).  He can be found on Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter under the title “ross24fps”.

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mojo special issue

Jonathan Alexandratos- Strawberry Blind

18 page comic 1x1 (1 panel per page) Read top to Bottom Black, White, and Red Sketched/Hand-written text Page 1: “Strawberry Blind by Jonathan Alexandratos.” A box with the word Moomin on it displaying several small items on a table. “Today, I bought a Japanese blind box. It contained a random set of miniature, plastic food.” Page 2: “When I opened the box, I found I had gotten the ‘Homemade Strawberry Jam’ set.” The box is open on its side with small objects fallen out of it. The box now looking like a little house.Page 3: “There was a small, toy basket...” Hand holding a tiny basket. “....and a tiny plastic bunch of strawberries to go in it.” A small bunch of strawberries is by the second set of text. Page 4: A pot similar to a crockpot with two Moomin on it and a spoon leaning against it. “(Berry ‘goo’ inside)” with an arrow pointing from the text to the pot. “the pot came with “boiling” berries.”Page 5: “I guess this is sugar? In some kind of canister? Shaped like a house?” A cylinder with six small windows on it, filled with something powdery, and a red lid with roof shingles beside it. “As I open each piece, I realize: I have no idea how jam is made...” Page 6: “...but these I do recognize. Kind of like the ones at Stop & Shop, but more Old-Timey.” The text is written around two jam jars with cloth over the lid tied with a string. Text to the left reads “jam jars.” Page 7: “What you don’t know is that I bought this set because, when I saw it at the toy store, I started to cry.” At the left of the text is a drawing of a man standing behind small boxes with the word “Moomin” on them. Only his face and neck are visible. He has short, coiffed hair, a short beard, and there are ink smudges at the bottoms of his eyes. “I do not know why.” Page 8: “But, as I look at these now-revealed contents of my once-blind box,” and beneath it are the basket with berries, the spoon, the pot, the sugar canister shaped like a house, and the jam jars. “I am comforted by a metaphor contained in these objects.” Page 9: A strawberry occupies the center of the page. “Sometimes, I am the strawberry. Looks bright, natural, full of life. You’d think being the strawberry is good.” Page 10: “But I don’t want to be the strawberry, with its cold, hard skin, pockmarked by its seeds, which it wears on the outside.” Beneath are two strawberries, upside down and not touching. “One strawberry cannot meld with another, even in a basket of dozens, where the world looks so claustrophobic, immobile and immediate.”Page 11: The page is dominated by a piece of bread with red jam on it that is partially flowing off of it. A bite has been taken out of the bread. “I want to be the jam. Preserved, but free. giving. fluid.” Page 12: A rough diagram of the inside of a human head in profile takes up most of the page. The skull, nasal cavity, esophagus, and spinal cord are labelled. At the back of the head, in the hollow where the brain should be, is a small strawberry, and its label reads “I have a strawberry in my head.” “Sometimes, it presses up against my eyes, making it seem like the world is closing in on me, crushing me from the inside.”Page 13: “The strawberry takes over. It robs me of my vision, voice, language.” Two strawberries flank a nose, with the word vision over the nose and the words voice and language beneath it. Page 14: “Like I said, I know nothing about making jam, but the boiling makes sense. In order for the strawberries to change, it takes fire, heat, and risk.” Risk is underlined. A pot of berries boiling on a gas stove. “‘Change,’ after all, is just one stroke away from ‘chance.’”Page 15: “But the strawberry convinces me that I don’t need to boil. I don’t need to take time. There’s jam inside me already. All I need to do is find it. Quickly.” A hand and forearm are laid diagonally across the page, and at the bottom right corner cuts are on the arm. “So I go in search of my quick fix. But what comes out isn’t strawberry jam.” Page 16: “Out of frustration, the strawberry in my head grows harder and more bitter, but it also becomes more vibrant. And you’d never know it. As things get back to ‘normal,’ I’m not sure I’d know it either.” Half of a strawberry, with little skulls for seeds.Page 17: At the top of the page is a box with eyes and a nose on it and “Moomin” written at the top. The box is open, and a red question mark floats above it. The eyes look up at the question mark. “In fact, when my strawberry shrinks back into its dark corner of my mind, I’m not even sure it’s still there. My head becomes a new blind box, its mystery equal parts hopeful and terrifying.” Page 18: “Memories of the strawberry make this all feel like such a burden, however. So I choose blindness over the box, and I go back to the toy store.”

Jonathan Alexandratos is a New York City-based writer whose plays, essays, and comics tend to live in the space where pop culture connects with human emotion.  Their award-winning plays have been produced internationally, some of which can be found on the New Play Exchange (newplayexchange.org).  Much of Jonathan’s non-fiction writing is about the academic applications of action figures, a lot of which is summed up in their edited collection, Articulating the Action Figure: Essays on the Toys and Their Messages, out now from McFarland.  Other action figure-related work by Jonathan has appeared on Tor.com, Women at Warp, Legion of Leia, and PBS.  Jonathan also co-runs Page 23, the literary conference of Denver Comic Con.  This is Jonathan’s first published comic.