New Small Press Comics In Context

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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Considering comics in context does not mean simply considering them in the context of social, political, or ethical concerns, but also considering them in the context of cultural relevance, that is, considering them in the context of a set of broader aesthetic developments. Considering comics in context, from this perspective, is simply wondering what a given comic adds to the “conversation”.  Of course we’re all good post-modernists round these parts, and we don’t buy into the notion of cultural “narrative” as a properly unifying concept.  Whether we think we live in “Late Capitalism” or that we’ve “Revealed an Essential Emptiness” or we think that we “Respect the Play of Difference” or that “People just like different shit, and, you know, everyone has their own opinion, so just leave me alone to do what I want, and anyway, what are you, a fucking censor/fascist/communist?” we can all heartily agree (with smiling tolerance all around) that there is no unquestionable criterion for whether or not a cultural product is worth our time/money.  In that light, considering comics in terms of their context, that is, in terms of their relevance, is to consider them in terms of a close reading that takes into account what they do within the vocabulary of the texts that have influenced them.  It’s a Bloomian stance, sure, but it’s also minimalist and generous. It acknowledges that there needs to be some context to an object of art for it to even qualify as evaluable (or able to be experienced at all) and it extends a helping hand to the work by saying that the context of the work is context enough.

With this sufficiently vague cultural program in mind, I went into Forbidden Planet by Union Square and searched desperately for new “Small Press” comics on the little shelves that wouldn’t make me cry after I realized that I had spent upward of five dollars on each of them. I shot for visuals that looked dynamic or unique, considering that most of what was on offer looked like a bunch of silly and ugly little people standing around apartments with speech bubbles floating above their heads. I don’t have Santoro money, so I only bought a couple books for this review.  It wasn’t scientific, it wasn’t rigorous, it wasn’t even especially practical, but I thought it was as close as I could get to random while still attempting to not feel deep regret afterward.  As we’ll see, I wasn’t successful.

 

ALAMO VALUE PLUS Rusty Jordan from Revival House Press

Rusty Jordan’s aesthetic is a mix of Tezuka and the Groening workshop with spruces of Crumb and Mike Judge thrown in. From Tezuka, he borrows a certain Disney sensibility for repetition and caricature of form.
 

tezuka comparison

tezuka

Jordan and Tezuka draw uniformed men.  Note the classical cartoon repetition. Neither is afraid of
typology when it comes to stock characters.

 
From Groening, he takes faces and physicality.
 

greoning comparison 1

groening for comparison

Jordan character and obvious Groening precursor.
Notice the reference in lips, eyes, and nose.

 
From Crumb, he takes a certain penchant for ugliness (as so many do.)
 

crumb comparison

crumb for comparison

Jordan and (fairly unexaggerated) Crumb.
Note the ugly, vacant molding of the characters. Griffith is also present.

It’s charming, but the charm wears away quickly.  The characters are dull; the protagonist, Baldemar, is an old man straight out of Groening cartoon, and the other two characters are ears for his crypto-WWII tale that isn’t even brave enough to label its antagonists Nazis.
 

evil empire more groening

Evil Empire. More Groening.

But keeping in mind our critical agenda, does Alamo Value Plus provide us with anything that isn’t already on offer in the source material?  The answer is no.  The corporate workshop that produces Groening scripts is cleverer (even today), Tezuka books are more perfect executions of sterile formalism, and Crumb, for all of his shitty sensibilities, at least has the decency to put his ugliness on display.  The story is plodding and the “action” sequences are wooden.
 

action sequence

Not very dynamic at all. Warner Brothers and Groening all over.

 
If you wanted to read a WWII book, Spiegelman still towers in the background. Alamo Value Plus is a “nursery rhyme” book; it’s there to remind us of all the comfortingly familiar stories that it’s derived from. This is issue #1. I’m not interested in reading issue #2.

PICNIC RUINED by Roman Muradov from Retrofit Comics

Muradov reminds us that his character is well read and insecure on every page. His characters float around with a long legged and sketchy bourgeois wispiness that I know best from Joann Sfar.
 

sfar

sfar comparison

Muradov and Sfar.
Wide eyes, narrow bodies, light touch.


Jansson is explicitly referenced, and it’s not hard to descry her safe and polite influence on the book.
 

moomin comparison

moomin

Muradov’s characters and Moomins.  Plain, wispy, and vacant.

Is the book pretentious? I don’t use the word, myself, but it does betray a certain over-education.  It experiments with styles taken from art and literature, from Beckett to Nabokov, from Klee to Picasso, thrown together in a sequence that’s supposed to convey how the “protagonist” of his book is haunted by an overflow of words that overwhelms and distorts him.

words and identity

It’s the 60’s again and language writes identities.

 

remember museum

You remember last month, when you went to the museum?
So does Muradov.

 
But underneath is a wistfulness and loss of direction that demonstrates the damp humanism behind the experimentation.  All throughout the book Muradov is worried that it will come off as a masturbatory whine, including in a sequence where the protagonist talks to his shadow about how pathetic he is.
 

funny responsibility displacement 1

funny responsibility displacement 2

I will die happy if I never read or hear another awkward
and “funny” displacement of responsibility.

The book has nothing at stake but its own circular insecurities.  Its most beautiful moments are expressions of the sheer emptiness of its content, but, tragically, they are undermined by its alternation between simpering self-consciousness and self-satisfied intellectualism.
 

self satisfied intellectualism

Hearing people say this kind of shit usually drives me crazy.

 
Reading this makes you remember why you didn’t hang out with the English majors in college (ya zinged, English majors, what about it).

 

Let’s return to our critical program again; does it add to the discussion that it takes part in? It adds about as much to its illustrious forebears as a poetry jam adds to Crane. The visuals are cute at times (if you understand the references), but once you’ve read it you never have to pick it up again.  Maybe go back and pick up Vampire Loves or, if you’re feeling old, some Wodehouse.
 

you definitely, definitely are

You definitely, definitely are.

These comics are inoffensive.  They are stable and boring narrative and aesthetic statements. But if we consider the role that they play in their context, they’re simple placeholders.  They’re echoes of their source material and repositories for the affect that we have reserved for formative cartoons or the feeling of being in art history class.  By sticking to affective scripts, they don’t even risk melancholia.  There’s no challenge or development here. There’s just a lot of pleasant memories and reminders that there are people out there that feel just like you.

Groening Minus Groening

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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Dan Walsh’s Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to creating Beckett-esque (or Schulz-esque) soliloquies by, yes, removing Garfield and his dialogue from Garfield strips.

tumblr_mqetfv06XX1qz8z2ro1_500

As great as this site is, its lack of originality comes not only from being based on appropriation, but also from a history of Garfield appropriation that I associate with Ben Jones et al. in the Paper Rad collaborative (anyone remember the old castlezzt.net?). I find it an instructive counterpoint to the incredible gulf of quality that exists between Matt Groening’s breathtakingly lame Life in Hell comics, and the towering cultural treasure that The Simpsons has become. Hiring writers is pretty important, obviously, since Groenig’s treacly, patronizing attempts at whimsical spontaneity has taken years to be diluted to a sufficiently non-toxic level. But there’s more to it than that.

girlfriends1

While it cashed in on the reliable appeal of self-pitying misogyny, the best part of Life in Hell was always visual, a frequently grid-based evocation of Winsor McCay, but, like Peanuts or Garfield, stripped of all miniscule Art Nouveau detail in order to preserve its readability when reduced to fill available space in the alternative weeklies that ran it, starting in the 1980s and ending last year. It would be hard to argue that it wasn’t at least a somewhat original strip— there were no wisecracking animals, nor clown-guided magical dream zeppelins, nor angst-filled six-year-olds, but, rather, angst-filled rabbits and fez-topped gay midgets, with non-punchlines designed to appeal more to New Yorker subscribers than the Sunday funnies crowd. Along with Jim Davis and Charles Schulz, contemporary work by Keith Haring and Gary Panter could certainly have been an influence, but Groening’s distinctive compositions and renderings made him instantly brand-able as a middlebrow cartoonist.

The non-punchline format is the same thing that makes Garfield Minus Garfield a success. That was not Groening’s problem. I think probably his problem was that he was an artist and not a writer. Some people are multi-talented, but the stigma of collaboration in “fine art” after the rise of the auteur, ironically a byproduct of professional-industrial schemes of specialization, has made for no end of unsatisfying products from those who fall short of being polymath dilettante geniuses (cough, George Lucas, cough). But of course the reason “art by committee” has such a strong negative connotation is owing to the lack of freedom imposed in professional-industrial institutions of modern culture, be they commercial or educational.

Conversely, the victory of the professional-industrial auteur is her autonomy. This autonomy managed somehow to carry over into the collaborative production ethos of The Simpsons, and Matt Groening, either directly or indirectly, is probably very much to be given credit for that. When Lisa was inspired by an ultra-authentic old black sax player (“Bleeding Gums” Murphy) and Dustin Hoffman as an enlightened substitute teacher in the first and second seasons respectively, Groening’s saccharine-sticky fingerprints were all over it.

But in season thirteen, Lisa, portraying Joan of Arc, gets burned at the stake after a trial in which God Himself folds under cross-examination. In season sixteen, Lisa wins an “American Idol”-style singing championship; Homer becomes Lisa’s tour manager, and they have the following exchange.

Homer (angrily): Oh, you LOVE sausage, but you HATE to see it
getting made!
Lisa: I don’t love sausage!
Homer (meekly): Then would you like to see it getting made?
Lisa: NO!

At this point, Matt Groening’s leaden wit was nowhere in sight (not the case, unfortunately, with Futurama). Like any master artist of old (and a few superstar artists today), the apprentices do all the real work. In olden times, though, there was much less of a middlebrow (or perhaps protruding upper lip) to speak of, and so Matt Groening should perhaps be worthy of gratitude for having the relative originality to write himself out of the picture.