Flotation Device by Keith Helt and Various

Normally the appearance of "Various" as a art credit on a comic means one of a few things. One, there are so many artists who "chipped in" that it wasn't worth giving any one top billing. Two, there are numerous artists of mediocre quality so that if you gave any one billing, you would need to give all of them an above the line credit. Or, three, there are so many high quality artists that you can't give any of them top billing, and they only did a few pages each. Lucky for readers of this book, the third is the one that applies. There are numerous great comics artists here, so many that instead of listing all of them, or trying to pick the greatest of the great, I'm just going to list my favorite: Dylan Horrocks, Anders Nilsen (above), Kevin Huizenga, Gabrielle Bell, and Onsmith. There is no shortage of great art here, the story is a different issue.

There have been a few short story anthologies with art by "various" and writing by one individual. Denny Eichorn's Real Stuff and Harvey Pekar's American Splendor come to mind and cover two ends of the spectrum style-wise. Harvey Pekar's stories are the stories of an average life, taking small pieces of mostly uneventful days and building a life narrative from them. Denny Eichorn's are spectacularly eventful happenings that build incredulity through their sheer volume. Both writer's managed to secure the strong independent artists of their time, with Pekar working with luminaries as bright as Crumb, and Eichorn with the shining lights of the next generation, including Jim Woodring and Peter Bagge.

Keith Helt's Flotation Device seems to fall somewhere in the middle of the two. He sometimes seeks to provide the small events that make the personal resonate with a wider audience - the best in this issue is the six page sequence drawn by Nilsen, sampled here - in the style of John Porcellino, who, in fact, is one of the contributing artists. Other times, he wants to provide a representation of the Big Important Moments in life, hinted at in a two page sequence drawn by Horrocks. Unfortuantely he doesn't quite hit the mark of either, having to settle instead for the book remaining what it is, a diary, relaying the life and times of one man, neither more interesting nor more insightful than his reader. I would love to see him try a longer form story where he can play to his artist's strengths and wring some of the poetry out of these small events, as he and Nilsen manage to provide, but I'll never complain about such stunning art as the pages by Horrocks or Huizenga.