Geoff Vasile's Trackrabbit

Trackrabbit

by Geoff Vasile

This is a review of Trackrabit issues one through four. There is also a fifth issue available at Vasile's website. You can check out some his work for free on his tublr page.  Vasile calls Trackrabit his "one-man fiction anthology."  To date, he has alternated between science fiction and twenty something slice of life stories.  I wanted to start these mini comic reviews with Geoff Vasile because he had the strongest collection of mini-comics by creators that I met for the first time at Staple! 2012.  Later this month I'll be reviewing some artists who I knew of before the '12 expo as well as a few I have yet to meet.

Initially, I wanted to focus on the writing in Trackrabit.  Each issue contains a single stand alone story of twenty-four to forty pages.  In my first read, his writing stood out as more innovative and personal than the artwork.  My impression is that Vasile packs a lot of story telling in those few pages without being overly textual.  I came away from each issue feeling like I had spent far more time with the characters than I had.  With a re-read, it became clear that this is as much a product of Vasil's skill as an illustrator as his skill at prose and dialogue.

Panel choices are a big part of what is not visible in McCloud's formulation of comics as the "Invisible Art."  Vasile's break down of pages shows his talent for very conservatively cutting unnecessary scenes and panels.  While his illustration lacks the showiness and/or hyper stylization that I am a sucker for, there is a solidness to it that actively propels the story without getting in the way.  It is his skills as a graphic storyteller that masks the very skills he uses.

The second thing that has to be said about Vasile's Art is his professionalism.  In a world of near infinite digital content, part of what fans of Mini/DIY Comics are buying is the physicality of the book as art object.  This can be a splashy use of artistic and crafty flourishes that can only be accomplished in very small print runs.  It can just be a basic attention to detail and design that sets one book apart from another in any form of publishing.  Each of these issues is progressively more and more professionally designed (issue four looks like it is ready to be distributed by Top Shelf), yet there is a wonderful handmade quality to them.  

While the pacing is very different I think if you enjoyed the work of Alex Robinson you should check out the Ignatz nominated Trackrabit issues 2 and 3.  They both craft well balanced completely fictional narratives with the feeling of brutal honesty of auto-bio comics.

There are people who I would just suggest reading issues 1 and 4 and people who I would steer towards 2 and 3.  Nevertheless, I do believe all four issues of Trackrabit hold together.  The work that I keep thinking about is Jaime Hernandez's first volume of the Love and Rockets magazines.  There is a combination of very real people in almost accidental science fiction settings that speaks to the very unreality of very real situations.  You can get copies of Trackrabit as well as a few other books at his website.  I picked up Vasile's short auto-bio work A History of Increasing Humiliation at Staple!.  I just found more auto-bio work he has posted to his tumblr account.  This week I wanted to focus just on Trackrabit, but I will come back to his work.