I’ve reached a point in this summer that can be considered both blessing and curse: My last full workshop of the summer session has been cancelled so I have lots of time for reading and projects (yay!), but of course, I’m completely broke.
I should define terms. By ‘broke’, I mean each first of the month, I pay critical bills and trek to the grocery to assemble a decent store of food, and whatever’s left ( in this case, nothing) is used on clothes, books, restaurants, etc. Trips to the library for books, dvd’s and lately a Spanish conversation group, are my entertainment. Inventorying and scanning youthful ‘collectibles’ for sale is for beer money. And of course, there’s time for ongoing studio work. Whether I eat steak or lentil curry pretty much depends on what’s on sale. I enjoy both, and cooking in general, so all in all, it’s not a bad life. Writing for my blog helps me to process this, and also to promote the next workshops.
So here’s a description of some additional Fall workshop offerings, namely, two Denver Public Library drop-in classes at Hampden Branch in September. I’m still waiting on a full Fall Library schedule.
And below is a recent partial reading list.
(In a Sense) Lost and Found, Roman Muradov: This is the second GN, and the third story overall, I’ve read by this very appealing artist, who I think comes from an illustration background. His stories are rich in innovative visual design and textures, and as art, are glorious to look at. His stories are not that engaging, and can in fact be obscure and precious, because he foregrounds the illustrative concerns and his pictures, sometimes constrained by a too-rigid 9-panel grid, become too clever by half.
In many panels, for instance, he has decided to experiment with a very muted, low-value color scheme, and I think a veteran comics person would intuitively know that with the limitations of printing, one must include a generous amount of highlighted contours, or the action gets murky. A lesson imparted in the noir films of the 40‘s, or also in Milton Caniff’s classic newspaper daily adventures, and which Muradov thinks doesn’t apply to his somewhat bland fable of a young woman searching a dark city for her lost innocence. Long segments would be gorgeous visually, if a few highlights or even mid-values were included to provide a way into the action.
Similarly, however attractive the drawing, his uniformly hard-edged images contradict the air of mystery and depth he is trying to evoke. They would be fine in a simpler, more minimal illustration, but Muradov aspires to a comics tour-de-force, sprinkled liberally with Joycean word play, only without having done the homework. Its superficiality overwhelms its ambition. Eisner is another comics great who evokes the mist and mystery of urban alleys with well modulated color and minimalist ink effects. And Maria and Peter Hoey (below), who also come from an illustration background, source the evocative lighting of 50’s Hollywood or the welcoming secondary colors of mid century advertising to make sure the story remains front and center.
Muradov has great potential, and is improving. Jacob Bladders and the State of the Art, a subsequent GN ( this is his first) features a lively retro futurist noir tale with gorgeous ink effects, and a recent story in Now #4 simplifies and hones his unique visuals even further, though the narrative in both remains obscure at times. They both include scenes in rain, Lovingly rendered, as is all his work. As they say, there is a very important difference between drawing and cartooning.
On A Sunbeam, Tillie Walden: I got this from the Young Adult section in the library, where if one is seeking to keep caught up with current trends in comics, one must sometimes go. The category is rapidly expanding, thanks to libraries and school reading programs, and the publishers and writers are paying attention, since that is definitely where the money is. The current Comics Journal (303), has an article about its history and current state, if that interests you.
The book is a lesbian romance at its heart. I’m sure it’s on some Red State Trumpster’s hate list somewhere already. Yes, I’m looking at you, Alabama. There are in fact, no male-identifying characters in the story, as far as I can tell, a somewhat incidental fact that will undoubtedly lead to Twitter-pated outrage over what messages about love’s untamable diversity the book imparts. It is a lovely book that is much more than that.
The main characters are engaged in restoring old buildings in far flung space. A separate narrative explores a somewhat Harry Potter-like private school for girls. One character, a troubled, very restless and impulsive girl named Mia, links the two threads, past and present. This provides ample opportunity for both adventure and school girl drama, and Walden, with subtle pacing, is good at both. The art is both intimate and panoramic at times, and the facts on the ground unfold slowly, and -rare in Sci-Fi, many conflicts are solved without violence. It’s a great read for either young, or older, adult, in short.
What’s a Paintoonist?, Jerry Moriarty: Moriarty’s latest work lacks the fine balance of memoir, surrealism and quiescent expressionism of his earliest work. There are some great images here, but others seem thin and loosely formed. The overall premise, of Moriarty exploring his life through the eyes of himself as a teenage girl, seems not to arouse the same wry, loving humor as Jack Survives, his groundbreaking and rather brilliant early work in Raw Magazine of the 80’s that views the world through his father’s eyes.
The girl character, Sally, seems to be an attempt to know his older sister, but the character gets bound up in adolescent sexuality, mostly that of a young boy, and only rarely demonstrates any girlishness. A shop woman’s large breasts are glimpsed tumbling onto the counter as Sally buys a soda. Is it an adolescent boy’s memory, or a girl’s? More convincing is a scene where she climbs a tree to impishly urinate on a passing adult. There are scenes filled with Hopper-esque mystery, such as the girl taking refuge on the porch of an abandoned house in a sudden rain, but the linking, interview style black and white panels lbetween never approach the dense, voyeuristic, claustrophobic yet somehow nostalgic atmosphere of Jack Survives. Nor its wry humor. A loose central narrative of leaving/ return ( Moriarty frames the images around leaving his NYC loft to return to his parents’ upstate NY home.) similarly fails to generate any real emotional tension, showing spare images of his studio, intended to be ghostly, but here, just simply empty. It’s a shame, as the one artist one would trust to properly evoke the haunted vacancy of lived-in spaces would BE Moriarty.
One wishing to acquaint oneself with Moriarty’s special genius for linking American idioms, would be better served by going to the earlier work.
The Customer Is Always Wrong, Mimi Pond: Mimi Pond appeared in old National Lampoon Funnies Pages issues during the 70’s. This is a memoir of her day job during the run-up to that gig. Many who lived through that period will recognize the milieu, when drugs infused every corner of youth experience, and restaurant gigs provided a family- and party-like background to unsettled lives.
This is Pond’s story of those strange times, and she sticks to the events and characters that affected her in her youth, without trying to over-dramatize or universalize them. So the story almost became my own memories. A neat trick, but not enough to make this more than a voyeuristic peek into the past.
Worn Tuff Elbow #2, Marc Bell: This follows from #1, 14 years ago. I recently re- read earlier collections, such as Stroppy, and Pure Pajamas, that delineate Bell’s surreal dystopian class-ridden world of rich, entitled bureaucrats, blank faced robot factotums and tubelike proles, with non-plussed humanoids between. It’s funny and bewitching, with the antics and endeavors mostly centered around low-gain working class striving for free lunch, or poetry contests. It’s a very retro cartooning style with E.C. Segar and R. Crumb the obvious reference points, but other more far-flung affinities pertain. The angst level being turned up to 11, Phillip Guston is an immediate association. For instance. I did abstract over a creative/aesthetic/cultural lineage from Segar ( Popeye, a ‘big foot’ everyman, with agency) to Crumb ( neurotic, id-obsessed everyman with agency) to Guston (neurotic, surreal, KKK-beset everyman, without agency) to Bell (passive, beset by dystopian forces, no agency). A more succinct, yet concise, history of comics in the 20th/21st C. one would struggle to find. At its terminus, dense and beguiling world building meets funny, relatable characters, and cannibalised human relations are the norm.
Coin-Op #7, Peter and Maria Hoey: I made a trip down to the Denver Independent Comics Expo (DINK) in Spring, and had a nice conversation with Maria, whom I’d met before. I haven’t met her brother Peter. They alternate appearances, and apparently, so do I.
I regret not asking more questions about their method of collaboration, but the convo took a nice turn into printmaking, so was wonderful anyway. I picked up a silkscreened Illustration and The latest issue of Coin Op. I don’t think I even spent $40, so they could probably charge more for a very limited edition hand-pulled silk screen and a pretty much full-sized GN, but on the other hand, I know from experience that it’s in the nature of these festival-type shows, that you often have to compromise on price to keep sales up. Still, many there were selling giclees and other commercial reproductions at close to the same price, and there is a major difference there in quality and provenance. So on the one hand, I was pleased with scooping up a deal, but also mindful of the fact that the task of educating the general public on what constitutes an original print versus a reproduction continues.
Coin Op is their ongoing comics series which I first encountered in Blab! magazine, which was the first I know of to collect work from both the comics and graphic illustration worlds that it turns out, many artists ( such as the Hoeys) inhabit. Nobrow is another, later magazine that performs this function in Europe.
So as you can imagine, Coin Op affects a clean, cool, retro commercial style, but with a very unique, incisive intellectualism that comments on varied topics such as M.C.Escher’s spatial experiments, old R&B music, and even, often through collaboration with writer C.P. Fruend, film history and iconography. A quiet irony abounds. This issue has a wordless visual oddysey featuring their ongoing characters Saltz and Pepz, a romantic epic that seems to have its ancestry in one of those grade school film strips about The Making of Paper, and two of their engrossing filmographies, one on 50’s Sci Fi movies with a vaguelt dystopian conspiracy theory thread, and one that explores the life of proto-Noir producer Val Lewton.
They are dense with looping allusions and visual hijinks (in each issue, there is always an ‘exploded view’ sequence, ala Frank King’s classic Gasoline Alley Sunday strips), and in my house they get read over and over. They recently collected the previous six issues of Coin Op, along with some of the earlier Blab! material, a steal at $30.
The Hoeys, perhaps becuase they probably earn their living from illustration, haven’t received a lot of attention from the alt comics world, but that may be changing, as they were just nominated for an Eisner Award for the above-mentioned romantic ‘pulp’ tale “Supply Chains” from this issue. They occupy a rarified space between the angst-ridden, expressionistic scrawls of the more punk cartoonists, and the disturbing cartoon brut displacements of the Fort Thunder school, a place where advertising art and marginal cinema goes when we’re through ignoring it.
A Western World, Michael DeForge: These are collected stories, and take various approaches to DeForge’s continual search for innovation, both visual and narrative. Example: A story about idyllic reincarnation on Saturn begins in media res, with an unseen factotum explaining to the ashen, newly elevated vice president just why he’s acceded to the highest office.
DeForge has been adding softer visual textures to his backgrounds behind his attenuated, harder-edged figures. A sort of chiaroscuro develops, which matches and heightens the subtle emotional longings of his characters. He’s got a unique voice and style, which is as responsible as any for refining the Fort Thunder-style cartoon brut into a sort of sci-fi fabulism that will probably define the next phase of avant grade comics.
Leaving Richard’s Valley, Michael DeForge: DeForge’s latest full length work is a melodrama of masochistic longing and toxic attachment, played out in a post industrial Eden made alluring with its smudged grays and Hello Kitty-style smiley-faced denizens. It is Manga’s cute creepiness, elevated to quasi-biblical epic.
And it all began as a four panel web toon. A subtle mirroring of Peanuts’ wry punchlines propels us into its dark human drama. In this, it recalls Jillian Tamaki’s brilliant( and hilarious) Super Mutant Magic Academy, which also began as a web toon, and which achieved a sort of unitary dramatic power. There is real poetic, even diegetic, alchemy in these sorts of unassuming cartoons, as if someone had taken episodes of a sitcom, say, That 70’s Show and turned it into an opera ( have they?). Tamaki’s Academy is about a young girl’s coming out; DeForge’s Valley is about the moral boundaries of friendship and love. DeForge doesn’t reach the power of Tamaki’s narrative climax, but he is not afraid to break faith with the punchline in service to psychological inquiry ( I cried until I laughed?) He is again, always- a visual innovator here, and if the book flags a bit as it ends, it will -again- probably be very influential.
Last minute update: It’s been announced that Kelly Sue DeConnick’s, Emma Rios’, and Jordie Bellaire’s very intriguing Folk/Western/Apocalyptic epic Pretty Deadly will return in September. Already re-reading the first two volumes in preparation. Expect more in this space on that.
