Ariel Schrag, ed., Viking Penguin

About as far from the world of Teen Boat as you can get are the teenage comics contained in Ariel Schrag’s Stuck in the Middle anthology. Schrag is already well known as the autobiographical comics wunderkind who had read too much James Joyce for her own good. She still hasn’t finished her own teen comic Likewise, long overdue, but it’s nice to see her return to comics with this enjoyable collection.

Nobody likes reviewing anthologies, which is why I’m not talking about Mome this month, so I’ll just run through this one briefly. The bad news is that the stories by Joe Matt and Daniel Clowes, both standouts, are also both reprints (from Fair Weather and Caricature, the copyright page says: they’re really from Peepshow #8 and Eightball #16, but I guess we’ll have to get used to people assuming graphic novels are comics’ default format). The good news is that the rest of the book is far stronger than is usual in the problematic world of comics anthologies.

These are stories about middle school life, and taken together they present some pretty good evidence that it’s a bad idea to put everyone at “that awkward age” together in one building. Many of the stories are clearly autobiographical, and those that are not are presumably pseudo-autobiographical. Autobiography is, after epic poetry, the most difficult genre to write, which is why almost all autobiographies suck, and read like resumes interspersed with anecdotes–but by focusing on the distant past and allowing the characters (either by editorial mandate or simple inclination) to be humiliated, the pieces in Stuck in the Middle avoid one of autobiography’s main pitfalls: making the author look too cool.

But Ariel Bordeaux’s and Cole Johnson’s stories both suffer from what might be called Stuck-Rubber-Baby Syndrome–you know, where a comics artists lets a fantasy stand-in live a life in the past that flatters the preconceptions of the present. In these cases, both Bordeaux and Johnson imagine tween hipsters who are into punk rock and thrift store chic and are just not understood because they’re ahead of their time. An adult Bordeaux comes on and mocks the convention at the end of “Disco Prairie Rebellion,” and Johnson at least changed the sex of his fantasy stand in for “Tina Roti,” so the crime in each case is less grievous than it could be, but I feel obliged to pick flaws with these stories because their art is far and away the strongest in the collection. Bordeaux has long been one of the comics most under-appreciated artists (although she tends to overrely in this story on the same face drawn in the same three-quarter view, ho hum), and Johnson’s art is a revelation, drawn with simplicity and understated elegance, but simultaneously adorable–imagine a cross between Brian Lee O’Malley and Scott Dikkers, if that makes any sense.

Lauren Weinstein’s “Horse Camp” deserves mention because of its careful balance of misery with a small dollop of joy. And both of Ariel Shrag’s stories are particularly good, “Plan on the Number 7 Bus”, after a shaky start, because it permits a humiliation that is both entirely the protagonist’s fault and entirely deserved (unique situations in this anthology), and “Shit” for sheer Rabelaisian scatology.

Finally, it’s interesting to note that the artwork in Jim Hoover’s “Relationship in Eight Pages,” which is in many ways better and certainly more polished than many of the stories around it, simply does not work at all in this context. It may be the contrast between the smooth and detailed characters and almost total reliance on zipatone shortcuts for backgrounds, or it may simply be that his art is too mired in genre convention to permit a story it illustrates to exist outside of them. In any event, if ever a case was needed to show how an artist can be both good and bad when paired with the wrong story, this is it.

Stuck in the Middle is clearly aimed at the bookstore market (it is, after all, a Viking publication), but while the inviting cartoony cover captures the feel of the book, I’m not sure what the audience is supposed to be. Do parents want their thirteen-year olds reading comics titled “Shit”? Do indie comics fans buy their comics at book stores? Is there a market for a for thing kind of book? I hope there is.