A rebrand is a tricky thing: once it becomes clear, it becomes profoundly difficult not to view the new identity in light of what preceded it, of previous iterations; the question of whether the ‘new’ is fundamental or merely a fresh coat of paint becomes dogged and hard to ignore. Looking at the recent inaugural issue of Peep Magazine, there’s one thought you cannot be faulted for having: hang on a minute, this is just another volume of Kramers Ergot in disguise! The title is new, of course, as is the publisher, Brain Dead Studios (a street-wear brand and self-proclaimed “catalyst for creative minds from around the world,” making its first foray into publishing)¹, but the inside is readily familiar: curated by Sammy Harkham and fellow indie cartoonist Steven Weissman (himself a multiple-time Kramers contributor), its thirty-odd contributors include (by my count) ten contributors to Harkham’s uber-influential revue.

A key point of divergence here is the density. Though the first two issues of Kramers were likewise saddle-stitched affairs with low page counts, they also had only four contributors apiece. Peep‘s contributor-to-page-count ratio dictates that each artist gets only a small handful of pages; the longest piece, by Antoine Cossé, clocks in at four. The trade-off is the greater page size, providing much more real estate than, say, Fantagraphics’ Now (certainly the ‘mainstream’ fixture closest to Kramers nowadays), though many of the artists don’t make use of that – I would even go so far as to say that some of them seem unaware of this possibility, as is the case with Matthew Kam’s one-pager, which leaves a large frame of blank space around its four panels, a bleed distinctly larger than in the other comics. 

One of the most charming pieces in Peep, and one of its most understated, appears courtesy of Molly Colleen O’Connell, who serves up one of the anthology’s two wordless comics. O’Connell’s one-pager is less preoccupied with narrative than it is with pure motion and spatiality: we follow a colorful carpet with legs as it stands up, looks in the mirror, walks around, rolls itself up, then falls to its sides and sprawls out elsewhere. The cartoonist also peppers in ink drawings of animals—an egret, a crocodile, a pig—which sometimes don’t ‘stand’ so much as float on the page, as if questioning their own existence on the same plane as the ‘main event.’ There’s an early-cinema streak to this comic, what film historian Tom Gunning termed ‘cinema of attractions’: a work concerned with the very act of display, of emphasizing the novelty of its form and mode. Though certainly not ‘novel’ in that sense—slapstick comics have existed for as long as there have been comics in some form or another—O’Connell’s comic still retains great appeal, in part due to the sparsity of the affair: there is an instability of plane and space, as the floor the carpet walks on is basically only gestured toward, and drawn unevenly. If a cartoonist should strive toward elegance and legibility in equal measure, this comic has both in spades.

One thing that came to characterize Kramers Ergot, especially in its last three volumes, was an increasing emphasis on history; what started as an enfant terrible that rather assaultively confronted readership with what comics can be, it slowly became a demonstration of what comics have been, less ‘in conversation’ with the comics landscape du jour than with the historical ur-construct of the artform (in itself a worthy goal, though one that is perhaps too lofty to achieve in any real way).

This interest has carried over to Peep, in the form of two entries from ‘elder statesmen’ of indie comics and two reprints from masters now deceased. In the former category, we first have three gag strips from Art Spiegelman riffing on the Vaudevillesques of early 20^th-century comics. These are not new comics—evidently first published in a 2018 issue of the Italian Linus—but this is their first appearance in English, and a Spiegelman appearance is rare enough nowadays to warrant a perked eyebrow. I confess to having never read any of Spiegelman’s non-Maus work—I was born into a world where the name Spiegelman is synonymous exclusively with Holocaust-Related Significance—so these were something of a shock; the art achieves its slapstick aims effortlessly, with a clear and well-executed evocation of first-generation strip-makers George Herriman and Bud Fisher, though the gags themselves are nothing you’ll find yourself looking back on about five minutes after you’ve moved on.

Some pages down, Ben Katchor offers three strips from his own older personal files. Two of them, “An Evening Demonstration” (2017) and “At the Stillbourne Hotel” (2002), are of a piece: the first shows satirized protests against a couple of dynastically-rich people who have moved into a neighborhood in the process of gentrification. The protests are asking for something simple: please, for the love of God, don’t procreate, so your lifestyle doesn’t continue. But, of course, rich people being rich people, this only motivates them further, only turns them on more. Even beyond the punchline itself, Katchor offers a somewhat cynical view of protests as a revelry of futility: surely there are better ways to ensure a better future than to stop a couple of rich people from fucking, right? No, not right at all – the class of power exists in a different realm, one that is perpetually out of reach; demonstrating, perhaps, is merely an act of catharsis. In the second comic, meanwhile, a couple arriving at the titular hotel are offered an upgrade to their room: the “Callous Swine Club” level offers perks whose only appeal is the appearance of luxury – which of course is synonymous with hegemony and gleeful abandon, a chance to play at the fuck-you attitude only billionaires are typically entitled to. Another bit of cynicism from Katchor: the couple takes the upgrade, of course – it’s disgusting, but it’s disgusting in a way agreed-upon to be appealing. 

Other pieces may be new, but they feel almost yanked from a past time. Such is the case in Brian Chippendale’s entry, a three-pager which at merely two panels per page elects to use its space for the purpose of sheer impact. Though Chippendale never contributed to Kramers, he was certainly in its periphery, through several of his Fort Thunder cohorts who had. But his entry almost serves as a reminder of the contrast between early-days Kramers and this latter-day magazine: easily the headiest, ‘dirtiest’ piece in the book in terms of raw mark-making, it’s the sort of cosmic, high-meets-low pastiche—reminiscent of Anya Davidson, or perhaps Ryan Browne—that feels incongruous within its largely clean-cut context. It’s not a bad comic—its core gags are simple, but they get their chuckles—but it feels out of place, out of step, out of time.

An anthology is generally an interesting social construct: it is fundamentally a collective effort, yet most of the time its constituents are largely isolated, brought together by a curator but not usually intentionally engaging with one another; cohesion becomes entirely the task of the curator, both in the leap-of-faith of choosing contributors and in the post-hoc sequencing and editing. 

There’s a certain beauty in an anthology that is without a unified theme: not only is it an indicator of potential (how wide the curator’s tastes are, what stylistic connections they make); but it is also, for the contributors, an exercise in conscious existence: you are given space to do whatever you want, with little constraint – go forth and make it count. Sometimes the result will be all over the place: Fantagraphics’ Mome, for instance, had some great contributors but little to distinguish it as a complete whole. But an un-themed anthology, at its best, serves as a sort of ambush, a crescendo of concerns that arise naturally.

Such is the case in Peep, an anthology that appears, among other things, positively rattled by the social and physical isolation brought on by COVID: the third Katchor comic, from 2020, for instance, fantasizes about undesired bodily emissions—a moist hand, an interception of mid-conversation spittle—now taking on the appeal of unattainability.

But Katchor is only one example. For another approach, take Gabrielle Bell, who engages with those aforementioned concerns of lineage head-on, albeit from a more interpersonal angle. A day out with fellow cartoonist Angela Fanche triggers certain neuroses of Bell’s, as she depicts herself as compelled to portray the role of the responsible elder to Fanche, a would-be protégé. But she seems, from the outset, unable: she finds herself in a physical state of weakness from not eating enough, and the mention of a third cartoonist (Liana Finck) having a baby prompts Bell to state her dislike of friends having babies, “because they don’t have time for me anymore.” By the end, she resigns herself to not being the classical model of the responsible adult: when Fanche asks for Bell to blurb her book, Bell reciprocates by asking if Fanche could get her some molly. It’s a funny way to end, at once a failure and a success: on one hand, Fanche is portrayed as more grounded, more ‘serious,’ than Bell, a total flip in dynamic that indicates one generation being forced to ‘grow up’ simply because its predecessor failed to do so; on the other, in a way the dialogue indicates a truer connection: in lieu of detached mentorship, in her own way the older cartoonist comes to view her interlocutor not as a protégé as a peer. 

One of the anthology’s two archival reprints, a three-page nonfiction comic by the late Spain Rodriguez originally drawn in 1988, is another clash of sensibilities in the comics-social space, taking place during a car ride with Gilbert Shelton and Rip Off Press co-founder Dave Moriaty (misspelled “Moriarty” in the comic). Rodriguez predicates the bulk of the comic on a My Dinner with Andre-esque dynamic of discursive tension, with the cartoonist assuming the position of the skeptic while Moriaty uses the context of the conversation—a car ride in the middle of a rainstorm—as a jumping-board for loftier ideas of existence as life forms in the universe. It’s a genuinely funny read, in part because Rodriguez responds to Moriaty’s would-be spiritualism with, not judgment, so much as pure befuddlement. “All life forms are just trying to extend their existence to the farthest possible point in time,” Moriaty says (one imagines a Matthew McConaughey drawl); to Spain, in a not-quite-rainproof car, a safe arrival may just be out of reach.

But enough about artists as people, communing over their work – isn’t an artist supposed to suffer in solitude, to sink everything into their art and use their blood, sweat, and tears as paint materials? Well, Antoine Cossé has plenty to say about this in one of his finest works yet, titled “Aix-en-Provence, 20^th Octobre, 1906.” I associate Cossé with a certain mercuriality, a mode of comics that is often less understood than felt², but here he is almost disarmingly precise in his narrative. Depicting the dying days of Paul Cézanne, Cossé offers little romance on the art life; his Cézanne is a futile figure, refusing to listen to the reality of his failing body and paying the price time and time again. He goes to his studio to paint and passes out in a snowstorm; he insists on painting at home and passes out without painting a single line. The artist figure is no happy Sisyphus; he is no Quixote but Quijano. Yet Cossé evades the easy trapping of self-effacement; his Cézanne becomes almost a Paul Thomas Anderson character, trapped in his own self-dictated complexities. This is no mere parody; it is the genuinely felt tragedy of inevitability.

Immediately afterward comes co-curator Sammy Harkham with his habit of crafting the flashiest short in his own anthology³: at least in terms of sheer density, his “How to Be a Cartoonist” takes the cake, fitting 55 panels into one page. The piece follows a day in the life of an everyman, Art Garfunkel-looking cartoonist; the cartoonist narrates his rigid inner #grindset-heavy doctrine, and seems to have it all figured out – except pragma is nothing without praxis, and the latter is distinctly less satisfying than the former. Our protagonist wears a face mask when he goes out, but it quickly becomes clear that it’s not really out of caution: it’s a way to separate himself from the world, to feel better-than through chastising. Just as our protagonist comes to realize that cutting himself off from the world for his art is pointless, and that his neighbor is, in fact, a kind man worthy of gratitude, he hits his face on a fence, his mask growing increasingly bloody. That’s the thing with building walls to leave the world behind, Harkham seems to say here: ultimately it’s your blood that will stain them. This part, I confess, is somewhat frustrating—fine enough shorthand that one bristles against when thinking about the actual real-world implications of masking or lack thereof, in a world that has largely relegated a global pandemic to a mere “skill issue”—but it provides our Harkham with an admittedly handy visual metaphor. That “How to Be a Cartoonist” immediately follows Antoine Cossé feels almost obvious, a thematic rhyme of the foremost order: where Cossé’s Cézanne dies within his own constraints, Harkham’s nameless protagonist is fortunate enough to reach blessed anagnorisis in life.

Key to Harkham’s game of point-counterpoint is his epigraph, a quote from Maimonides: The day is made for eight hours work, eight hours study, and eight hours sleep.” Harkham’s choice of this quote here demonstrates a razorlike acuity of intent, a simultaneous deconstruction and reconstruction: in the days of Maimonides, ‘study’ was a fundamentally communal experience – new insights were achieved by sitting in a room and discussing, debating, and sometimes heatedly arguing over every letter and emphasis in a given text; it was through inhabiting the world that you achieved knowledge, a far cry from our cartoonist’s conception of ‘knowledge’ as something that is achieved in isolation – a conception that the character himself comes to realize as false. “How to Be a Cartoonist” may well be the thematic centerpiece of the whole anthology; though not an outright sneer, it shows a clear dialectical divergence from the Clowes-and-Ware generation that begot Harkham, artistically speaking. Gone is that Weezeresque veneration of loner’s-misery – we’re ready, refreshingly so, to acknowledge our needs as human beings. 

It also makes sense for Harkham’s piece to be followed by the first of the anthology’s reprints, a one-page gag by Harvey Kurtzmann from 1950, a bit of wordless humor as a much-appreciated respite from these heavy ruminations. Kurtzmann’s is a strong physical gag—a couple of kids caught in the middle of a storm can’t use their umbrella because it’s too windy, so they wait for the wind to turn the umbrella inside out and wear it as a mobile tent—though strikingly reminiscent of Ernie Bushmiller, a comparison that does Kurtzmann no favors: at twelve panels, I can already see where the Nancy cartoonist’s ‘trim the fat’ approach would come in and hack off two-thirds of the comic.

Following this lighthearted pause is Sophia Foster-Dimino, who picks up where Harkham’s acuity of human observations left off to remind us that human connection is no lilting, jaunting ease. Her “Happy Birthday Henry!” is a barrage of interaction, each of its three pages sporting around thirty tight panels of rapidly varyingcat size. I’m compelled to compare Foster-Dimino’s art to Nick Drnaso’s, with a similar post-Ware hyper-clean flatness, but where Drnaso offers a stiff detachment SFD is nothing if not attached, close-up and personal. The comic is nonstop interpersonal engagement, but it’s Henry, the boy whose birthday is being celebrated, that gets the least ‘page time’ as the cartoonist constructs a sort of chamber play around him. Yet, although human errors abound, they are not confronted so much as subsumed. The way the cartoonist doles out information about the titular Henry’s mother is a perfect example: one of Henry’s friends innocently remarks on her short-cropped haircut, which another friend reprimands him about. The exchange, over three minuscule panels:

A: Nice haircut Ms. Lee!

B: Idiot! Don’t you know?

A: Ow! Know what?

B: Shh! I’ll tell you later

A clumsier cartoonist would have lingered on this moment further, revisited it and sublimated it into foreshadowing; but this is the last mention of the incident, leaving us with the faint promise of loss. Elsewhere, as one of the guests—an ex of Henry’s mother’s—makes a speech, he is constantly aware of his sticking out in the party (nobody knows him other than the mother), yet uses this awareness to justify, in his own mind, making the party about him. His faux-apologies don’t scan as passive aggression: only as the tics of a man who, genuinely, does not know another way. In only three pages, Foster-Dimino constructs a striking snapshot of human existence, one that either embraces failings or is too tired for interpersonal blowouts. “That’s ok,” Henry says at the end of the comic, referring to a boss fight in the video game his friend is playing. “It took me like, fifty tries.”

Where some cartoonists, like Harkham and Dimino, make the romantic point that the difficulty in human connection is part of what makes it worthwhile, other Peep contributors venture outside of the romance of communality altogether. E.A. Bethea’s one-page contribution, “Louisianambush,” is one such excursion, narrating a visit to the Bonnie & Clyde Museum in Gibsland, Louisiana – or, rather, the absences in that visit: most of the exhibits at the museum are photocopies, and even the main attraction, the car from the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde (not even the real-life car!), is on loan; she stops at a café known for their icebox pies prior to the museum visit, but the pie is “nothing to write home about.” Bethea’s approach to comics is fairly bare-bones – handwritten narration appears above panels in a way that relegates the scruffy, ink-heavy cartooning to straightforward illustration. But her stoic presentation belies lofty ideas, as the excursion takes her to more than just your standard tourist-trap museum; it is a map-and-territory affair that treats the mythologized as little than a fresh coat of paint – scrape it with your fingernail and the shining gold will turn out to be nothing but iron, or maybe lead. But then again, reduction is another path to myth: as Bethea tells us, Clyde, that archetypal hero, still came from a poor family, poor enough that they reused the pants he died in; the pants slowly disintegrated from extensive use, but the man who wore them became folklore. Maybe that’s all we can hope for, at our lowest: that some part of our apotheosis will answer the needs of those who still can’t afford clothes.

Steven Weissman, by now a seasoned cartoonist of Americana absurdism, offers his own take on mythologizing and heroism in the form of “Black Feather Valley,” a three-page Western about two horses, two children, and an adult chaperone. Weissman, though, is a gag-man at heart, and his story is a prolonged joke of the subverted-expectations variety, rendered in monochrome blue pen and zip-tones. In comparing the pasts of the two horses, the chaperone tells the two children about their horse, Dusty – previously belonging to a Private in the Confederate Army while secretly serving as a Union spy. Dusty, that equine Jane Bond, betrays her Private in his dying hours, only to be ambushed by a panther fighting on behalf of the Confederacy. The joke, of course, is that the two kids hear this story of equal measures’ animal ferocity and political intrigue – and are not impressed at all, because their horse is a “dirty stinking Yankee.” “Black Feather Valley” is a wonderfully effective joke in part because it ends at the exact moment that its extensive meander is rendered worse than pointless: all this adrenal excitation – and our horse can’t even have ‘good’ politics?

For an added dose of sardonicism, allow me to point out that Peep bears the distinction of sporting the single most mean-spirited Kevin Huizenga comic I’ve encountered yet: on its face, it adapts a Craigslist singles post that was spotlighted in Harper’s Magazine, yet its contents are enough to indicate roughly where Huizenga stands: the man’s run-of-the-mill vaguely-eugenics-based sexism (his search for a “worthy female” to have a child with) quickly escalate to a bizarre cosmogony predicated on sex during a total solar eclipse with his penis pointed toward the sun. The ‘cool guy on dating app’ photo quickly leads into a tier of three extreme close-ups of the man that are not entirely aligned, only slightly out of sync with one another (the middle one, showing the man’s almost crazed eyes and the top of his nose, is the most overtly Herriman-esque drawing of Huizenga’s career). It’s a great comic, though within constraints of the ‘preaching to the choir’ variety: there is no possible response to it other than the sarcastic Sure, good luck with that, fella, you’re a catch reserved for a true sleazebag – simultaneously a spiritual successor to the exploration of conservative illogic of the much-earlier “Jeepers Jacobs,” a far cry from its discursiveness: twenty years later, Huizenga is no longer interested in an in-depth analysis of a clear red flag; he just wants safe distance.

Some artists, though, opt for a cheaper sort of cynicism, evidently because they don’t have much to say elsewise. More art-on-art comes from Jeff Mahannah, one of several Peep contributors I was unfamiliar with, who presents us with a one-pager about a portrait artist, “Love Park,” that proves, if nothing else, that the Johnny Ryan school is alive and well, in all its pudendal glory. There’s a Stan Kelly (he of “sickos” fame) bone-stiffness to his characters, and an Ivan Brunetti an-artist’s-self-loathing-is-their-self-love streak to the narrative – a sensibility that I have encountered in dozens of comics and yet have not enjoyed even once. Mahannah’s contribution is the second silent strip in the anthology, its only words appearing in diegetic signage, and I suppose that’s a good thing if only because I found the actual tone of it offputtingly juvenile enough that I don’t want to spend much more time reading it. It’s certainly for someone, this sort of work, but I don’t suspect I overlap with such people too much.

Another bit of misanthropy is offered up in Roman Muradov’s page, which is divided into three strips of varying sizes, all focusing on dinner parties almost in an inversion of the Sophia Foster-Dimino comic. The top strip of the page shows people gathering and introducing themselves, each vying for the title of ‘most interesting guest,’ a title promptly won by a man who professes to be “a data scientist and a racist,” the latter part of which gets much more attention (much to the other partygoers’ envy); a longer piece shows a ‘no-phone dinner party,’ that trend designed to reduce alienation by reducing distractions, but, of course, in Muradov’s comic it only demonstrates alienation as irreversible, ingrained: the attendees find themselves physically incapable of engaging in profound conversation; their cause to live, or at least their connection to the world at large, is only restored once their phones are handed back to them, bombarding them with bad news. These comics show a different side of Muradov the artist, as he forgoes his usual design-heavy block-colored contours for brash, almost slapdash pen and half-tones, which certainly works well for the comics at hand, but the comics themselves aren’t as insightful as they seem to think themselves: the gags at their core—outrage-politics as performance, smartphones obscuring a dim society—seem tired and jaded, ironically just as lacking in insight as the characters Muradov portrays. Being ‘out of touch’ becomes a greater sin when you deride your own characters for that very trait.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the book’s weakest pieces are the ones that seem to want the least to do with humanity; emotionally speaking, Peep is a hungry book. Where Kramers Ergot bore first the coolness of the fuck-you upstart and then basked in the detached air of fuck-you-upstart-turned-establishment, the new Harkham-Weissman venture makes no bones about wanting your attachment. A surprisingly raw product of post-COVID emotional crisis, the anthology’s ambitions are humble: where Kramers wanted to warp comics in order to exist at its center, Peep just wants to exist within a shared human context. It’s all the richer for it. In fact, I think we all are. 

1. In the context of rebrands, it’s worth noting that Brain Dead Studios shares another connection with Harkham: it has also “permanently taken over” the erstwhile Cinefamily movie theater; the theater was owned by the cartoonist and his brother, until accusations of sexual assault leveled against the vice president of its board of directors led to the dissolution of the Cinefamily organization. Kyle Ng, founder of Brain Dead and an erstwhile member of Cinefamily’s subscription-based club, has voiced a desire to distance himself from both the accused and the culture of internalized racism and misogyny that he perceives as having anteceded the incident. ↩︎
2. Antonioni comes to mind: “Until the film is edited, I have no idea myself what it will be about. And perhaps not even then. Perhaps the film will only be a mood, or a statement about a style of life.” ↩︎
3. Look no further than the tenth and evidently final volume of Kramers Ergot, which includes Blood of the Virgin‘s “Color Cowboy” non sequitur – both perhaps the best story of the anthology and the best part of his graphic novel.
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