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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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Mercury Lounge, Tear-Stained Makeup #1-3, Carl is the Awesome Vol. 1
There’s a heartening variety of style running through these minicomics, all
of them by Marcos Pérez of Cliff Face Comics; they’re imperfect works, yes,
but they evidence varying flavors of ambition on the part of their creator,
and the pleasures one might cull from these books are intensified through
their semi-successful striving for a finer state.
 Take the one-off Mercury Lounge, 20 pages of landscape format story nestled between purple and black covers, the title peeking through, front and center. I don’t know if it’s autobiography; it sort of feels like it. It’s a wordless story, following some young fellow on his trip to the titular club to see a band - he becomes briefly infatuated with a young lady, and then she goes away. Pretty simple, but it’s an opportunity for Pérez to demonstrate an aptitude with simple page design, controlling the emotional impact of certain scenes by restricting the amount of image that covers the page. Sometimes there’s a single thin strip of panels bisecting the page, sometimes the page is full of art, there’s a single full-page splash, and a pair of crucial pages with only one small panel, dead center. It’s attractive stuff, and adds a bit of impact to the (very) simple story. The in-panel visuals are decent, with intuitive use of balloon-ensconced symbols in place of dialogue, and appealingly simple character art. It fits what Pérez is trying to pull off.
It’s a more troubled work for its scope; Pérez has a tendancy toward the loudly melodramatic, with characters throwing things through television monitors and flinging themselves at oncoming vehicles and making dramatic speeches (“You could shatter glass with those pitch perfect pipes! Fuck! I’ve seen you do it! But you waste it spitting the monotone venom we called music!!! All so your black little heart can bask in the adoration of a bunch of hipsters!!!”) - it gets a bit ripe. There’s also a lovely, dialogue-free 10-page sequence that opens issue #2, which adds some promise to the future development of the book’s themes and characters, work with a steadier hand. It’s still difficult to tell how this might all wind up, as there’s only these three chapters thus far, but it’s a series probably worth keeping an eye on. Issue #1 is also currently available for perusal at Web Comics Nation, where I believe serialization will continue (along with printed issues at appropriate intervals), with 2 to 5-page updates on Wednesdays.
It’s a nice, varied body of work here, and pretty inexpensive. Click around the above homepage and give it a look. -- Jog
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There’s ambition in the three extant issues of Tear-Stained Makeup as
well, but it’s more in terms of storytelling scope than intuitive design.
Pérez has referred to this series as “a very long story,” of which
these books are but the first three chapters, running 21, 29, and 21 pages
respectively. The first two issues have been printed through 
And then, there’s Carl is the Awesome Vol. 1, which is actually a
cute little cardboard slipcased collection of four 8-page comics, all of
them featuring a very confidant dinosaur (in inexplicable possession of a
beaver’s tail) who boasts about his prowess in every damn thing under the
sun. There’s not a lot to say about it, save for the fact that Pérez has a
nice handle on comedy (tips on kissing: “You must kiss with passion!
Imagine you have been in the desert for months and there is Poland Spring
and a tuna wrap lodged in her throat.”) and the art is cute and
appealing, the simplest of the styles present in these books. There’s three
additional Carl comics available from Cliff Face, at fifty cents a pop.