Yeast Hoist
by Ron Regé, Jr.

This is a Highwater Books collection of minicomics and anthology pieces Ron Regé produced in 2002 under the name Yeast Hoist. While I had been aware of Regé's work in the past, it wasn't until reading his mini in the Chris Ware edited issue of McSweeney's that I decided to actively pursue his work. The story in that book was adapted from a transcript of an interrogation between a female would-be Palestinian suicide bomber and her Israeli captors.

Regé's simple iconography was effective in keeping the reader focussed on the two principals without unnecessary and possibly distracting imagery while upping the ante on the emotional content, putting seemingly cute characters into a volatile relationship.
I would soon pick up Skibber Bee Bye, a thick collection of stories set in a fantasy world just one person's imagination separated from our own. Here, Rege explores common alt-comics themes: loneliness, beauty, the power of music, love at first sight, lovers who seem incompatible, suffering at the hands of thugs and deviants. It was a book full of Regé's trademark drawing, a weightless line that reminds one more of writing than drawing and plenty of speed/stink/pain lines, arrows and his weird eigth-grade girl notebook cover decorations.

When I saw two copies of Yeast Hoist at Forbidden Planet, NY, I knew I had to pick up this slim volume. What was Regé doing now?

It appears that the Yeast Hoist series was a number of real-life anecdotes and observations produced in 2002 as Regé traveled across the country and into Italy with his band (they are never named). I have to assume that the pieces are all documents of that trip since there is none of the structure one would expect to find in fiction.

Regé's snippets from his life deal with moments when something else isn't there, or something isn't said. The book is almost a document of the things that didn't happen. We see the band rehearse in Berkeley, but Regé is thinking about someone else and the strangeness of being moved by electronic instruments and not human contact.

The band does play one show that we see, but they are quickly obscured by Regé's need to run around with drumsticks. We then follow him to Italy where he seems to be by himself and where he states that he hasn't spoken a word in two weeks. At one point Rege stares at a lingerie-clad mannequin. There are drawings of rivers and architecture and chapter breaks covered in hand-drawn diamond patterns.

The final chapter is a documentation of all the places Regé and his friend slept on their tour (presumably). You have to wonder how they got to these places, who did they know there, what happened that night, where is everybody else, who are all these people, isn't that uncomfortable?

Regé's strengths as a cartoonist lie precisely where you think his weaknesses are and vice-a-versa. At first, I was disappointed that the book seemed so short, and then overwhelmed by how much time I spent with it. With his seemingly spare, clean-line approach with no blacks spotted at all, the first impression is that Regé is more writer/storyteller than artist/cartoonist, that his words will be his strength and his drawings will serve little use as illustrations. But Regé is a true cartoonist through and through. The words he uses would have little meaning alone and can even be slight, trite and overly sentimental, but when paired with his imagery, everything becomes much more evocative. This is comics as poetry, and the ideas, events and relationships Regé hints at, the stories underlying these moments become richer in our own minds as we try to make sense of them.

And the drawings. At first glance, the absence of blacks, the pared-down figures and monotonous line work suggests an artist still tentative in approach, still under-qualified to be producing work in this medium. Upon closer inspection, even just sitting down in a quiet room to read this book, his work reveals an incredible eye for detail, a classic eye for framing an image, a landscape artist's love of scene and an ability to transform figures in a space into lovingly rendered still lifes.

Regé also experiments a little, creating montages of different moments, held together by a single, tangential thought. Twice he attempts a sort of 'X' layout where the captions crisscross with one another. The first time, he is more adventurous and captures an idea better than he is at translating it; the second time, he reigns the idea in and gets this new technique down.

Regé has proven that, far from being a one-trick pony or flash in the pan sensation, he continues to be an artist to watch out for and one whose work will remain vital, vibrant and exciting as more and more people are exposed to it.

—Justin J. Fox