Compiled by Rebecca Kaplan, featuring Sophia Glock, Zack Quaintance, Avery Kaplan, and, Silent Mogg Edition 3.2

Why? Because It’s the Most Posh Comic of the Year, Duh

Sure, we can all agree that Fantagraphics 2021 release Crisis Zone by Simon Hanselmann is one of the best graphic novels of the year, but what are it’s best moments? Originally released online (well, almost) daily throughout 2020 to chronicle the confusing early days of the global pandemic, Hanselmann’s magnum opus about the COVID experience was published as a graphic novel with new panels. And it sold fast, which makes me ecstatic and sad both at the same time. It makes me ecstatic because it can be voted best comic two years running, and it’s that good. However, it makes me sad because it means the Crisis Zone brand of escapism is still speaking to people in 2021, which makes sense because more people died in 2021 than in 2020. People are drawn to comics where characters are put in realistic situations that are similar to what everyday people deal with in our lives; for example, in Crisis Zone, there are good examples when the characters are dealing with the pandemic.

We invite you to step into our twisted world as we laugh, pontificate, and discuss the best, funniest, scariest, and chostiest Crisis Moments that we considered for this year's only slightly crusty Daddy Burger Award. The following Crisis Zone round table includes a panel of four active judges and a Mogg edition who refused to participate in the inaugural Daddy Burger Awards. The four judges who voted in the categories below are: Sophia Glock, author and cartoonist of graphic memoir Passport, Zack Quaintance, Editor-in-Chief of Comics Bookcase, Avery Kaplan, Features Editor at Comics Beat, and Rebecca Kaplan, freelancer and author, who, with her wife, Avery, authored Double Challenge: Being LGBTQ and a Minority. The panel of Simon Hanselmann-loving judges reflects on the comic’s best moments then and now before deciding on the official winner.

Editor’s Note: The Award’s presentation is edited for clarity and hilarity, but not for content so you might want to consider tucking your shit kittens in tight.

A Crisis Zone Roundtable

Best Storyline to Move Forward
Daddy Burger Award: The Jen, Owl, Jack, Desi Family

The Discussion:

Zack Quaintance: Not to be sappy, but probably Jack. I think it was a manipulative storyline to get you feeling for someone, and it totally worked on me.

Avery Kaplan: I’m very personally invested in Jen. I think it’s super hilarious that she called out the whole trans women have to look traditionally femme thing, and then in the epilogue she doubles down on it.

Sophia Glock: I have to second Jack. On a personal level, I need him to be safe, I need him to be loved, I need him to be taken care of. Also, I love that he loses the mouth ring of garbage, and he’s got his Bowie poster up and stuff.

Rebecca Kaplan: Jen.

Avery: Yeah, I’m hoping Mike transitions in the main timeline, which sort of seems like Simon’s hinting will happen one way or another. Fingers crossed. In an interview with Alex Graham, he said both branches are going to continue with Meg’s Coven in the main timeline and, he’s sort of been dodgy about this bit, another webcomic that I suspect will be the Crisis Zone timeline, but picking it up in 2022? I don't know if he’ll follow the calendar timeline. Basically, after the epilogue, they move to the country. Desi goes to a military camp and gets multiple people fired.

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Best Animal Crossing Moment
Daddy Burger Award: Fuck Fruit

The Discussion:

Sophia: I didn’t play Animal Crossing, but I did relate to when Meg comes out of her Animal Crossing fugue and everything is unreal to her. Sometimes when I read something, especially when I was a kid, if I read too much Mad Magazine, I would feel a little ill afterwards: What is real? What is life?

Avery: When I was walking in the early days of the pandemic, back when people still wore masks, and I'd see a fruit tree and be like, “I gotta grab that for 500 bells.” My career could be comics journalism and gathering seashells.

Rebecca: The first splash page reminds me of his Animal Crossing island so much. He had that bear resident, Grizzly, that he dressed in red flannel that seemed like the Werewolf Jones standin and the Fucktown flag.

Best Call Back Moment
Daddy Burger Award: Jen in Seeds And Stems by Simon Hanselmann

The Discussion:

Sophia: I would love to ask Simon: “Why does Mike appear, and not Jen, in a reality where Mitzy exists because Jen transitions before we’re introduced to Mitzy? I think this is an alternative reality, not canon, so is this Mike’s potential? Or are there alternate dimensions where both Jen and Mike exist?”

Avery: He said in an interview that hints about Mike exist in Seeds and Stems. If you read it very closely, there are hints about it.

Sophia: I got very excited about the new material. I reread it all. I was shocked at how much I remembered. But the attraction between Jen and Owl, Hanselmann definitely works on that, it’s not just a cheap thing at the end.

Avery: They both redefine themselves in relation to Jack, and I think that helps redefine their relationship to each other. Because they both must figure out how to parent Jack, and they cannot figure it out on their own. However, they start to figure it out in the end, with the Christmas celebration.

Sophia: Right, because even though Owl becomes very protective of Jack, he’s totally flummoxed when he’s actually given custody, and it’s only Jen’s support that makes it possible. It’s actually sorta beautiful. What’s great about this for me is that it’s this fantastic pastiche of all these tropes, cliches, and genre mashups, and he throws everything at these characters, and he knows his characters so well that everything feels natural to them.

Biggest Belly Laugh
Daddy Burger Award: “Two-way street motherfucker.”

The Discussion:

Editor’s Note: In case it’s not obvious this was the hardest category, most of our notes going into this roundtable were ‘LOL,’ unless you’re Zack, and then you write, ‘CHOST.’ Hamburglar is tied for biggest belly laugh, but gay rights are winning out.

Zack: When Owl flies to catch one of the kids, and somebody is just like, “Wtf Owl can fly?” That was a nice bit.

Sophia: I think I cried. Less laughing out loud, more of being genuinely moved by him taking to the air. Owl’s exactly the type of person, or bird, who would be able to fly and not.

Avery: My biggest laughs came from Desi. She’s such a little psycho. When she gets so upset about Cyberpunk 2077, not because of any transphobia but because it’s a shitty game. I read that one outloud like 15 times.

Sophia: I laughed out loud at Elon Musk's cameo. He shatter’s Ian’s leg. Then, he tells them to stop filming, and then there’s a beat. It’s like perfect comic timing. He keeps beating him up over and over. Ian is the perfect choice because he deserves it all. He’s like the perfect punching bag, all of these horrible things can happen to him because he’s not very redeemable. But it’s okay, just keep chopping off his limbs.

Rebecca: One of my favorite moments was, “My establishment runs on freedom. Two-way street motherfucker.” Booger’s thongs are also one of the biggest laughs of the whole book, the thong funeral particularly. Then, there’s something about the four trash bags full of thongs at the height of lockdown.

Zack: One of the other things that really got me was when the hair had burned off of Mogg’s face and he was wearing that Hamburglar mask again.

Avery: He does an amazing job of folding in details from the main continuity. You don’t need to appreciate it, but if you know the whole backstory about the Hamburglar mask, it was so funny to see him wearing it. I’m a huge fan of interconnected universes and multiverses. But of course, it’s so dominated by corporate comics that I really like seeing these techniques utilized by an individual like this.

Most Moving Panel
Daddy Burger Award: Owl’s Beak Shatters

The Discussion:

Zack: Owl shattering his beak. Again, it’s disgusting, but it’s a nice callback to the other work. It starts to give me phantom pains in my teeth.

Sophia: I have mixed feelings. I like looking at it, but it’s honestly a horrifying image to imagine if you were a bird and your beak broke… Like ugh.

Avery: I love how he has no option but to get a mask to cover it up. It’s terrifying, and it’s plausible. I also really liked the one where Jack rids himself of the Hooters shirt and runs off into the sunset. It’s a beautiful moment. It’s like, “I’m done with this bullshit family stuff.”

Most Relatable Panino Character
Daddy Burger Award: Jen (for personal panino growth)

The Discussion:

Editor’s Note: Using a magnifying glass on yourself can be hard.

Sophia: Who was I really? I think I was Owl by default. No offense to Owl. I’d like to think I was a Booger, but I was Owl.

Zack: It’s a hard question because there’s not really anyone you want to be because so many bad things happen to everyone involved in Crisis Zone. If you have to pick someone to be during the pandemic, you have to fess up to your bad behavior a little bit, I think.

Avery: Half Jen, Half Meg. I visited Simon’s Animal Crossing Island last November, and it was wonderful. Then, last summer, I did Animal Crossing tours of cartoonists’ islands, which was partially inspired by Crisis Zone. I visited his island, and we talked. I could definitely see some parallels between his island and stories. I was just like Meg in the beginning of the panino. I’m embarrassed to admit that one of my major concerns was my Animal Crossing pre-order :/

Rebecca: I was Jen. I came out during the pandemic. I think the pandemic helped others by also giving them space to explore their gender identity in less restricted spaces.

Avery: Crisis Zone also helped Rebecca understand the experience better because it talks about how being at home all the time is helpful.

Sophia: I imagine the life and death stakes of the last year puts things in perspective, like what in life matters.

Rebecca: Yeah, it speeds along self-realization. It also helps to sever the personal connections that make coming out difficult. Of course, none of mine were as tragic as the Waffle House shooting…

Avery: When she bleeds out in the smoking section of the hospital parking lot... There were a few jokes like that that were complete gallows humor, which were just what I needed at the time. The other one is when Werewolf Jones calls the hospital, and they just laugh at him.

The Realist Moment
Daddy Burger Award: Haneslmann’s Exploration of Depression

The Discussion:

Rebecca: I like how Simon lets situations be real. There are so many situations throughout the story, where it’s like, yeah, that is reality, but those are not often the stories we are told in comics. Like in Bad Gateway by Simon Hanselmann, when Meg is trying to get her disability approved for depression, and she can’t look too depressed but she also can’t look too happy, basically she has to look just right or she risks losing the support whether she medically needs the help or not.

Avery: She’s like I gotta make it look legit, but also it is legit. Simon says there are no jokes in Bad Gateway, but when Meg pulls out the two crows, that’s one of the funniest things ever in my opinion.

Sophia: One of things that I remember reading in an interview is that Meg is a witch. She probably did have powers at one point but she did too many drugs and now they’re all gone, which is this horrible metaphor for wasted potential. I find it really depressing, and she does this in Crisis Zone, whenever she’s like “I should be in the woods. I should be more with nature.” And she should be, she’s a witch, and that’s her nature. She’s actually denied herself her nature on some level by being in this constant state of escapist haze. To bring it home at the end, there’s this lovely pacing where she’s in the garden with Jack, and there’s this moment of possible growth, but then, in the epilogue, she lets that shit die. It’s so depressing, and so real. Yeah, it’s about a witch and a cat, but it's the perfect metaphor for mental health and dealing with life and its realities.

Avery: I love the way her mom factors into all of that. I feel like a lot of Meg’s problem is with her mom: she can’t move past it and is stuck with it, and it seems like the story is moving toward a confrontation with her mom. I don’t think she can let herself move past the grief with her mom in her life.

Rebecca: Now, you have the Jen parallel of what can happen if you can move beyond those relationships. You see her life actually move forward when her mom dies, finally freeing her of that relationship, which you see her talk about very directly.

Sophia: That also felt very real. Jen’s mother is obviously kind of backwards, a problematic person with a dangerous, toxic worldview, but she’s still her mom. She still needs to grieve for her, and she misses her on some level. And that’s the reality, no matter how messed up our relationships are with our parents.

Best Character
Daddy Burger Award: Booger

The Discussion:

Sophia: I’m falling in love with Booger a little bit. I’m part of the Booger appreciation club now. When they go to the pool, now that’s a great Booger story. That’s when I first realized that Booger has a soul in a way that some of the other characters don’t.

Avery: Yeah, and as a transwoman, I’ve never seen some of those experiences portrayed in anything else, like wondering if you’re gonna get attacked at a pool. This was very straightforward. And then, there’s the other story where Werewolf Jones defends Booger against some random people in the street, which is where Booger really started to come to life for me. “When the days of traditional full bottom underwear have passed…” When she said that in the Crisis Zone panel, I lost it.

Rebecca: It’s also where you see the soul of Werewolf Jones. He will always defend Booger, Meg, and Jen against negative comments in no uncertain terms. He just says, “No, that is wrong.”

Sophia: That’s the tragedy of Werewolf Jones: he does have a heart, and he has these beautiful worldviews sometimes. Very egalitarian. Very accepting of all people. But ultimately, he’s just this destructive, selfish monster. Is that him or drugs? Because in the mythology, he’s constantly high if he’s in werewolf form.

Zack: I think the tragedy of all these characters is substance abuse, whether it be through their families generationally or Werewolf Jones’ destructive behavior.

Rebecca: This is addiction not drug use, although in pop culture terms, it reminds me most of Workaholics. Drugs were a stopping point in their careers too. I mean, he wanted to be a politician, but engaged in heavy drug use.

Sophia: Yeah, Owl looks like a stick in the mud, but it’s all relative. He’s stoned all the time too, and he chooses these people again and again. He just can’t quit them.

Rebecca: Mogg is my favorite character. You really need to see Mogg in high school to understand him. He had it going on. Everyone thought he was the coolest, all the football players were like, “Yeah, Mogg, Go, Go.” He used to be the number one guy for doing nothing. Now, he’s here. Now, he’s basically the couch.

Best Crisis
Daddy Burger Award: David Choe

The Discussion:

Zack: One of my notes is just “Chost,” but underlined four times. I don’t know why I put that in there as something we need to talk about…

Avery: Did you read the note about “Chost”? I guess during the pandemic, David Choe was walking and someone yelled, “Chost!” Then, Simon goes on to wonder if Choe liked his cameo in The Mandalorian or his cameo in Crisis Zone more.

Rebecca: He definitely preferred his cameo in Crisis Zone.

Zack: While I was rereading this graphic novel, I was watching the Anthony Bourdain documentary, and Choe is featured prominently in it. I don’t know what’s going on in my life where this guy keeps popping up in seemingly absurd places, but there’s gotta be some meaning.

Sophia: The universe is talking to you.

Avery: I loved that mystery of is he dead or not. I think Simon admitted in the notes that that part got away from him a little bit. And it’s sort of a dig at himself for not coming up with a less convoluted explanation for Choe.

Zack: Yeah, it definitely felt like something he didn’t have an answer for right away, but it was just the right type of ridiculous.

Avery: Then, when you see Owl burying Choe, he’s like, “I think I’m still messed up from the COVID.” Long COVID is the idea that new or returning health problems might stick around weeks after your recovery from being majorly sick. This scene is one of the few places where I’ve seen the idea of long COVID even addressed. I don’t see a lot of legitimate new sources talking about it even.

Sophia: But again, real. My husband had it at the very beginning of the outbreak and he felt crappy all summer. He would all of a sudden be like, “I need to take a bath.” He’s not somebody who takes baths, but it was the only thing that made him feel better. He was sick with COVID for two weeks, and that was horrible. But then, he’d get these bouts of like, “Count me out, I’m done.” It’s for real, real. Speaking of, one of the deep COVID details that really struck a chord with me was the Christmas party at the end where everybody comes over, and they set up the socially distanced tables, and everybody’s wearing masks and they’re tossing gifts, and then I believe Werewolf Jones say’s, “Alright, let’s check on lunch. Ah fuck it. Booger, Kenny, come inside. I’ve had a few beers. Fuck it.” Everybody begins their parties with the best of intentions and then you get a little bit of alcohol in you and that breaks down. That felt very true to me.

Best Art Supplies for Comics
Daddy Burger Award: Colored Pencils

The Discussion:

Sophia: When he was telling people to vote in the Eisners Awards, he said, “It would just make me so happy if a comic written on computer paper with grocery store pencils won an Eisner.” I think it’s interesting because he’s super married to the grid, which makes sense specifically for this comic because it was in squares everyday. It was fun to see how the original medium (Instagram) affected the final product, and then, we got all of those extra panels. I like how he always uses different materials, but the structure of the comic doesn’t shift around too much. He’s actually very strict. But I love from book to book, he’s like, oh this one will be painted, this one will be in black and white, and this one will be this. I’m always trying to get my color pencils to reproduce nicely, so it’s really gratifying to see someone do straight up colored pencils so nicely. I imagine Simon’s using something adjacent to Crayola.

Best Panino Experience
Daddy Burger Award: Reading Crisis Zone Next to Family

The Discussion:

Avery: The crux of my pandemic coping was the brutal let’s look at what's actually happening Crisis Zone and forget that I’m going to pretend to live in a utopia in the future with Star Trek.

Sophia: He held up a weirdly refreshing mirror to the pandemic. At some points the characters are clearly mouthpieces for what Simon’s actually thinking and reacting to that week, and it was always refreshing as a nice reset button to be like, “Oh yeah, I don’t have to swallow a garbage narrative. I can actually take a step back.”

Avery: I set up notifications and would stop whatever I was doing when it posted on Instagram and would scream out, “CRISIS ZONE! CRISIS ZONE! CRISIS ZONE!,” wherever I was and read it outloud. And those days where it didn’t show up were crisis zones in our house. When they had the spiked Daddy Burgers, he had to post in his story that there is more coming tomorrow. I was like, “Is that it? Are they just dead now?”

Rebecca: I wasn’t kidding when I said we acted the stories out.

Sophia: I had an infant. I gave birth about a month before lockdown. I would literally be in a dark room and nursing a baby, after a day of tossing my infant back and forth between me and my husband and my two year old because there was no school, and I had a book to write, so at the end of the day, I’d be nursing in the dark and scrolling, and Crisis Zone was like the one reprieve. So if you need a visual: darkness, baby, Instagram.

Zack: That was kind of similar to my experience, minus the darkness and the baby. It was a daily end of the night decompression to look forward to, which was really helpful throughout the pandemic. I wasn’t clever enough to think about notifications, so I never figured out when they were going up. Especially in the early days, it always felt like the one new thing we had access to.

Best Comment
Daddy Burger Award: Justin Roiland

The Discussion:

Avery: Yeah, the Instagram comments really ran the gamut. I understand why Simon got so upset by some of them. I didn't see that drama he talked about in the notes though where he had a friend who stopped being a friend because of one of the comics. But I did see Ed Piskor commenting during the rescue of Jack saying, “This is the Avengers comic I would read.” Then, Justin Roiland, when the Fucktown flag went up over the house, he commented, “I would buy that immediately.”

Scariest Character
Daddy Burger Award: Susan

The Discussion:

Sophia: Susan is still out there…

Avery: I think we saw her in a special comic in non-werewolf form, but her big debut was here. I thought for a final boss she was pretty perfect.

Sophia: Yeah, even that final fight was deeply satisfying because of the small stuff, like she’s down, injecting herself, or when Meg’s nose breaks, which I haven’t seen in previous realities, it’s so grotesque and satisfying to see what would happen to her nose if she got punched.

Avery: The whole fight is built like that. Jen gets an ass-whooping because she can only fight her because she’s a woman, so it’s kind of validating, but she also gets the ever living shit kicked out of her.

Zack: Also, just the ridiculousness of Mogg being kept in that carrier with a brick on top of it, like it’s really disturbing to have him imprisoned for that amount of time/ and they’re only feeding him ham slices. He’s begging for yard time, and they’re just straight up ignoring him. Like the plot is happening around him, and he’s in his little box.

Rebecca: In Bad Gateway, Desi and Jax spent some time in those trash cans with the rocks on top for an indeterminate period of time. Well, they literally just adapted the same strategy for Mogg.

Avery: And Verjonica, the baby. When you meet her in the main continuity, it’s savage: in the birdcage and locked car.

Sophia: But speaking of Mogg, I found the cat being punted through the window, and then attaching himself to Owl’s face. I found that fight incredibly satisfying.

Avery: You brought up the mouthpiece thing earlier. I love the way he was able to do that in way that other viewpoints were legitimately represented, so you always have another character who disagrees with the first character but not in a straw man way, legitimately they do represent the perspectives, which went a long way in making this a more faithful account of the pandemic than some of them.

Focus of the Story
Daddy Burger Award: Owl

The Discussion:

Sophia: But whose story is this? To me, if it’s anybody’s story, it’s Owl’s.

Everyone: Agreed.

Avery: Well, the family at the end sort of coalesces around him, and then you see that Meg’s not really a part of it because she splits off with her mom in the epilogue. So really it’s Owl and Jen.

Zack: And then, the death of Werewolf Jones is sort of the story of Werewolf Jones and Owl, and the tension between them seems to drive a lot of the book.

Avery: A tale of two daddies.

Sophia: I guess if you measure it by growth, Owl and Jen grow. Jen literally changes in a fundamental way. But Meg doesn’t change.

Avery: There’s even the fakeout of change, but it’s not legitimate. I think Jen and Desi are actually really good foils. Jen grows a lot as a person, and Desi doesn’t grow at all. I mean I love that she understands herself better. I love when she goes into that trans house, and she comes out of it and is basically like, “I’ve learned that I’m a shitkicker. I just want to be a problem. That’s what I want.” I love that there are so many trans characters in this. I love that there is a shithead trans woman, and you don’t get to see that a lot.

Check out our piece about Crisis Zone from during its Instagram run!

Rebecca Kaplan has a Master of Science in Criminology and Juris Doctor. To the disappointment of her law school, she’s really a geek at heart and would rather have a cup of coffee with Captain Janeway than any non-fiction person. You can find her writing at Marvel Blog and in Double Challenge: Being LGBTQ and a Minority, which she co-authored with her wife, Avery Kaplan.