Monthly Archives: September 2007

Re-animator

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I just saw this 1985 movie (thanks, Netflix!) I’ve been thinking about Lovecraft adaptations recently ( I wrote a long review of the graphic classics Lovecraft volume for the last Comics Journal.

Anyway, Wikipedia claims this is true to Lovecraft’s original, which I think is not quite the case. Yes, Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West:Reanimator” was intended to be a goofy parody of sorts. But it didn’t really work: Lovecraft’s tongue is much too ponderous and unspeakable an organ to be placed in his cheek. Certainly, the zombie scenario is goofy, but its also macabre and slow; less a parody than a poor imitation. The movie, on the other hand, is pitch perfect, from the day-glo reanimating serum to the Herbert West’s uber-nerd portrayal to the gleefully disintegrating body parts to the puncturing of academic pomposity to the gratuitous sexual exploitation. Even the soundtrack is great. It’s smart and accomplished — which means that it shares little with Lovecraft except a few clever ideas and a title.

Which isn’t to say that the movie is better than the book. Lovecraft’s surface clumsiness was always part and parcel of an inner, lumbering anxiety. His writing, in other word, had an overwrought emotional core, which is what made them both ridiculous and compelling. The re-animator story (as I argued in my TCJ review) is powered by a deep, Puritan distrust of/fascination with bodies, sensuality, and (possibly) homosexuality. The film plays with these tropes to some degree (any zombie film has to) but it’s mostly committed to having a good time. Nothing wrong with that — it’s just not where Lovecraft was coming from. Even when he tried.

Making Textbooks

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This review of Scott McCloud’s “Making Comics” ran in The Comics Journal #280. I’ve added a couple of illustrations, both from the book in question, and both copyright by Scott McCloud.

Making Textbooks

Scott McCloud is comicdom’s leading aesthetician. He’s also responsible for some of the most butt-ugly graphic novels in the business. As my friend art-teacher Bert Stabler put it, reading McCloud’s first book, *Understanding Comics* is “like getting a lecture on sexual titillation from a talking pair of pants filled with lunchmeat.”

The problem here is not that McCloud is a mediocre draftsman: you can criticize an art form without being possessed of a virtuoso technique (or so I like to tell myself). But while you don’t need skill to talk about a medium, you do need a feeling for the form. This McCloud simply does not have. To pick the most obvious example, his cartoon-self is a nadir in the art of self-portraiture. Not realistic enough to be impressive, not hyper-deformed enough to be cute, the Scott icon appears in panel after panel, like some sinister avatar of aggressive mediocrity. After a page or two, I was longing to tear off his pupil-less glasses and shove them down his perpetually gaping mouth.

McCloud’s most recent volume pushes the disjunction between theory and practice to the breaking point. *Making Comics* is a how-to book by a man who can’t. The effect is grotesque — as if the talking pair of pants filled with lunchmeat stopped lecturing and began elaborately miming intercourse with the podium. In his introduction, McCloud actually posits his hideous cartoon-self — now fatter, grayer, computer-aided, and even, impossibly, less appealing — as an example of excellence in character design. In another sequence, he tries to demonstrate how to guide the reader’s eye to the important details in each frame. You’re supposed to follow a magic wand as it taps a hat. But the drawings are so generic and presented with so little panache that my eye refused to take them in; they might as well not have been there. I wouldn’t have known I was supposed to be watching anything at all if the text hadn’t laboriously told me to do so afterwards.

If McCloud’s limitations as a creator merely made it difficult for him to provide good examples, it would be bad enough. But they are so far-reaching that they actually interfere with his ability to understand the material he is putatively teaching. Take the issue of design. McCloud has about as bad an instinct for layout as it is possible for one man to have. Every single page in his book is a cluttered, boring nonentity. As a random example: page 149, like most in the book, is a modified grid. The eye here is drawn to a large, unbordered panel at the middle right, featuring a distinctively ugly graphic of the Mona Lisa’s head trapped in an arrow. The next most prominent panel is in the lower left, showing cartoon-Scott surrounded by a semi-circle of icons demonstrating the possible connections between words and pictures . The overall effect is of a half-assed PowerPoint presentation.

McCloud’s obliviousness to layout has actually been behind some of his most interesting ideas — I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the “infinite canvas” was invented by a man without any appreciation for more finite ones. But however well his blind spot has served him in the past, it’s a huge detriment here. If you’re going to talk about making comics, you really need to discuss how to make pages — and McCloud simply won’t. The closest he comes is a consideration of “flow”: the techniques you use to make sure the reader looks at your panels in the right order. Useful enough, but no substitute for an in-depth discussion of what is arguably comics most important aesthetic unit. Nor can McCloud say he ignored the subject because of lack of room — not when he spends twenty pages telling you how to draw different facial expressions, complete with a diagram illustrating the muscles that control smiling, frowning, raising the eyelids, and so forth. I almost felt sorry for him when, at the end of the explanation, he lamely admits that, for most creators, the bulk of this information is completely useless.

As this indicates, McCloud often seems unsure exactly what it is he’s supposed to be doing. For example, at the beginning of the book he claims his overall purpose is to teach you “storytelling secrets”. But then later he insists — correctly, in my view — that many comics artists are more concerned with visual beauty or formal experiments than they are with storytelling. Or, again at the start, he claims that his ideas are things that “every comics artist needs to tackle before they even pick up a pen.” Then, later, he admits that you don’t really *need* to know a lot of this information, though it might come in handy at some point.

One thing that McCloud *is* clear about is that he is not writing one of those how-to draw books which teach you, step-by-step, to be a shoujo artist or a Jack Kirby clone. But though these books may be limited, they are for that very reason actually able to do what they claim — that is, show you how to draw in a particular style. McCloud, on the other hand, has such diffuse goals that he has trouble explaining them, much less following through. It’s no accident that the best part of his book is a nuts-and-bolts discussion of the pens, papers, and computer tools used by professional artists — a discussion which would fit perfectly into the “how-to” books he slights.

McCloud is right, though — he isn’t writing a how-to book. He’s writing an academic textbook. As it happens, I write textbooks for a living myself, and I must say that, in my experience, it’s a genre badly suited to teach anyone anything. Textbooks are, however, especially ill-equipped to teach art. A textbook relies on lists (“these panel-to-panel transitions come in six varieties”), on sweeping statements (“almost any story can be evaluated on its ability to provoke emotion in the reader”), and on staged, lifeless examples (just read a few pages of “Making Comics” — you’ll find one.) But lists and abstracted examples have very little to do with the visceral ways in which people interact with and/or learn about art. Or, to put it another way, there isn’t any “secret” to being an artist, no complicated formula to learn. Instead, there’s a simple, two step process. (1) Look at a ton of art. (2) Practice copying a ton of art. That’s what all those “how-to” books encourage you to do. It’s how manga artists train in Japan. It’s how I learned about being a writer. And I’d even bet it’s how Scott McCloud picked up the skills he needed to create his charming comic *Zot!* twenty years ago.

If you must write a textbook about art, the least you can do is to include lots of examples from great artists. Yes, of course, if you want to learn how to make comics, you should look at art by Hergé, not a textbook by Scott McCloud which references Hergé. But at least if McCloud included a page of Hergé art in his textbook, there’s a possibility that the reader will get *something* out of it — it’s a chance, in other words, for him to mix some actual medicine with his snake oil.

McCloud does include a lot of art by great creators — Tezuka, Schulz, Ware, and so on. But in almost every case, the images are chopped into bits, tucked into corners, and generally eviscerated. For me, this is where McCloud’s aesthetic clumsiness — in a word, his philistinism — is at its most painful. McCloud claims to love these artists, but he is unable or unwilling to give them space. If you’re going to talk about a Peanuts strip, why not just print it in its entirety? And why not put artists’ credits right next to the panels you’ve chopped from their work, so that a casual reader knows, exactly and instantly, what he or she is looking at, and can start making a mental list of writers and illustrators to check out? The answer could well be simple incompetence; the effect, though is presumptuous, not to mention deadening. “Making Comics” doesn’t present great artists as masters to admire, or emulate, or dismiss, or inspire, or vie with. Rather, it uses them as examples, illustrating particular aspects of one of McCloud’s many esoteric arguments. Talented visionaries are turned into boring footnotes — and this is supposed to inspire the next generation of creators?

McCloud’s attitude toward copying is also wrong-headed. He does mention drawing from life and from photo-reference. But when it comes to imitating the work of other artists, he has little to say, and his few comments are generally negative. For example with those nefarious “how-to” books forever on his mind, he warns against copying facial expressions from other artists since “there are countless ways to draw any expression, and countless artists whose techniques you can study.” True enough — but surely it’s worth pointing out as well that the best way to “study” a technique is not to describe it or think about it, but to copy the damn thing. Like it or not — and McCloud does not seem to — art is a lot closer to being a craft than it is to being an academic discipline. You can burble on all you like about the five kinds of clarity, or Jungian archetypes, or the great potential of the comics form. But at bottom it’s all smoke and mirrors, a worthless and tedious distraction from the hours of imitative practice which are the only real way to master an art form.

When listing the four kinds of comics creators, McCloud likes to posit himself as a formalist — someone interested in understanding and expanding the potential of the comics form. But on the evidence of this book, he isn’t really, deep down, a creator at all. Instead, he’s an educator —here defined loosely as someone who takes in wisdom, knowledge, and beauty, and excretes an odorless gray paste. As a result, and despite the title, “Making Comics” isn’t designed to teach you how to make comics. It’s designed to bore undergraduates. And in that, at least, I am certain it will succeed for many years to come.

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When it first ran, this article provoked a heated conversation on the TCJ message board.

In the course of that discussion, cartoonist Jesse Hamm suggested that my own art was relevant to a discussion of this article. I think he’s right, at least to some extent. My own experience learning to draw (which mostly involved copying) had an effect on my reaction to McCloud’s book. In any case, if you want to see my own art (whether to admire or sneer) you can do so here and here. And, finally, here’s me copying a page from Grant Morrison’s Invisibles

Alternately, if you’re in Switzerland in October, some of my drawings will be shown in the huge Lovecraft exhibit at the Maison d’Alleurs this October.

Filth blurb

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Not that I want this to turn into the all-Grant-Morrison-all-the-time blog, but…this is a blurb about “The Filth” I wrote for the Comics Journal a few years back (2004, I think?), just in case anyone’s interested.

Grant Morrison’s first two popular series — “Animal Man” and “Doom Patrol” — were notable for, of all things, their elegance. Dreamlike, addled, bursting with ideas, they nonetheless unfolded with an inevitable grace, akin to the best movies of Buñuel or David Cronenberg. Since then, though Morrison has largely forsaken his idiosyncratic sense of pacing, . These days he relies half the time on relatively conventional super-hero plots, and the other half on an aesthetic of one-damn-thing-after-another. The Filth is an example of the second of these, but if the whole isn’t quite the sum of the parts, the bits and pieces still form some of the trippiest debris floating through comics, mainstream or otherwise. Marxist assassin chimpanzees, psychic-defense toupees, porn stars spurting black semen, plus standard Morrison themes like pulp-comics-as-metaphor-for-reality and the sadness of pet owners — like, what does it all mean, man? Something about the deliberate destruction of utopias? The insanity lying beneath the surface of the workaday world? And is the Weston/Erskine art really meant to look like Hanna-Barbera’s take on H.R. Giger? Who cares? I’ll plop my money down as long as I can open the thing at random and find characters spouting lines like, “I learned to read the intestinal weather and correctly guess the lifestyle and habits of the people around me from their stifled farts.” Morrison doesn’t really do beauty that well anymore, but God (or whatever) bless him, he’ll always have dada.

Speaking of shitty art….

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Since I was talking smack about Grant Morrison’s collaborators, I thought I’d put my money where my mouth was and look after I leapt (or something like that.) Below is an image by (and presumably copyright by) Steve Yeowell from Invisibles #22.

And here is an abstraction I drew based on that image:

I think we can all agree that at least one of these images is lousy.

Incidentally, the text on mine says, “I am 40 pounds tall,” which is something my son said the other day. I’m thinking about doing a series (maybe 4 or 5) of abstractions based on comics from my youth, with pithy sayings from my son added. If this thing is your cup of tea, you can see a much longer similar series I did here

My Romance Is Your Romance — Nana review

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A shorter version of this article was published in (I think) June 2006 in the Chicago Reader.

My Romance Is Your Romance

Romance novels are popular genre fiction written for women with literary credibility just north of People Magazine. Comics are a mostly ignored medium which, despite increasing aesthetic bonafides, are still often thought of as being aimed at under-12s. Put them together and you get…romance comics! Air-headed picture stories designed for young girls, which nobody actually reads, but everyone can sneer at.

Or so it was until a decade or so ago. But recently, romance comics have been helped enormously by the fact that they are no longer called “romance comics” at all — instead, they’re called “shoujo manga,” and they’re mostly imported from Japan. Under cover of the new nomenclature and exotic place of origin, femme heartbreak has been gaining in both popular and critical acceptance. Titles like “Chobits” have actually hit the Bookscan best-seller list for *paperbacks*, not just graphic novels. Last year the relentlessly snooty *Comics Journal* devoted an entire issue of mostly favorable criticism to shoujo. And a couple of months ago Columbia College housed a touring exhibit of shoujo manga, which was favorably reviewed in the Reader by art critic Bert Stabler.

Both the *Comics Journal* and the *Reader* focused mostly on the ways in which shoujo differs from occidental comics, Stabler, for example, pointed out that shoujo comics “aggressive search for perfection and macabre sexual energy subtly undermine superficial Western notions of the feminine.” I don’t disagree with that — with its gender-swapping, same-sex love, and ravishing imagery, shoujo can be both disorienting and other-worldly. But it’s also true that a lot of the appeal of these titles is due, not to their alienness, but to their familiarity.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the best-selling shoujo title in Japan, Ai Yazawa’s *Nana.* Nana is Japanese for seven; it’s also the name of the two main characters. Nana Osaki (nicknamed “Hachi”) is a ditzy, needy, materialist, transparent young woman who heads to Tokyo to shack up with her boyfriend Shoji. Nana Komatsu is an ambitious, aloof, street-hardened, secretive young woman who goes to the big city
to become a bad-ass rock star. Through a series of improbable coincidences, the two end up as first roommates and then friends.

Japan isn’t America, and there are many touches to remind you of that in the series. In the first place, as in most manga these days, the art has not been reversed for English translation, so the pictures scan from right to left, which can be a little disorienting at first. And, content-wise, there are lots of cultural references that don’t quite scan. For instance, Nana K. constantly namechecks the Sex Pistols, a reminder that, though punk is dead in the West, no one has bothered to tell the Japanese.

But these are little more than touches of exotic color; overall *Nana* makes perfect sense for a U.S. audience. Ai Yazawa’s designs are elegant, accessible, and always serve the narrative, rather than vice versa, as is sometimes the case in shoujo. Not that narrative is exactly the point, either. Instead, the storyline, while necessary, is not nearly as important as who the characters are and how they interact. As in porn or martial arts flicks, plot is just a way to deliver the goods: in this case, unrequited love, heartbreak, and tearful reconciliation. In short, if you like melodrama, from Georgette Heyer to the O.C., *Nana* should be just the thing.

That isn’t to denigrate Yazawa’s work; on the contrary she is an absolute first-rate romance writer, which is no small praise. *Paradise Kiss*, her first translated series, was a heart-tugging weeper about the fashion industry with a (mostly) lovable collection of idiosyncratic misfits, a fairy-tale ending that never quite arrives, and heaping dollops of bitter and sweet larded out with exquisite immoderation.

By those standards, *Nana*’s first two volumes were a little plodding, but the latest collection gets up to speed with a brutal love-triangle. Nana O.’s boyfriend, Shoji, is attracted by a new girl at his workplace named Sachiko. The set-up is pedestrian enough, but the execution is flawless. Even though Nana is the central character, Yazawa is careful to make both Shoji and Sachiko sympathetic as well: in fact, if anything, whiny, bi-polar Nana is the least likeable of the three. Sachiko, on the other hand, is thoughtful, sweet, and desperately trying to hold onto her self-respect in her role as the other woman. Shoji, too, is hard to hate; Yazawa is a vivid depicter of facial expressions, and throughout the comic Shoji’s face conveys, by turns, horror, despair, confusion, and numb resignation. His main sin is that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone; as a result, he methodically breaks everyone’s heart, including his own.

Great as the central drama is, it’s only a small part of what makes the volume so compelling. Yazawa’s story unfolds in a leisurely manner, but it’s filled with details, subplots, asides, and minor characters. The world she creates seem real, and new developments and emotional subcurrents have time to arise naturally out of what has come before. For example, we know from Volume 1 that Nana O. is so emotionally volatile that she falls for just about every third guy she sees. Her (mostly) platonic crush on the charismatic Nana K.in Volume 3 is, therefore, entirely believable. Nana K.’s response — a mix of exasperation, affection, and good-natured exploitation — is also in character. The scene where the two kiss is one of the funniest moments in the book.

There are lots of other great scenes as well, but they’re difficult to describe succinctly, in part because, like the kiss, they’re all as much about the slow build-up as they are about the climax. Attention to detail is a hallmark of shoujo in general, and of Yazawa’s work in particular. From her careful plotting to her lusciously painted covers, from her gorgeous renderings of clothing to her seamless transitions between emotive close-ups and cartoony slapstick, everything in Nana screams craftsmanship. And it’s this craftsmanship, rather than any nuances of content, that really separates shoujo from most romance on the market today — or, indeed, from most Western comics.

It is possible to find similar combinations of high caliber skill tied to affairs of the heart in the West if you go back a bit, of course — Jane Austen’s novels come to mind, or even the screwball comedy films of the 30s and 40s. Nana isn’t necessarily that good, at least not yet. But there are 15 volumes and counting in Japan, and the series has been getting better as it goes along. It’s certainly worth sticking around to find out. And if you just can’t wait till Volume 4, you can try tracking the story chapter by chapter; it’s currently being serialized in Viz’s anthology title ShojoBeat.

Grant Morrison, Transcendence, and Shitty Art

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I was looking at Douglas Wolk’s essay on Grant Morrison, in which he says, among other things:

“Fortunately, Morrison makes it easier for our own vision of The Invisibles, as readers, to be multiple, too. Return and begin again with what we asked earlier: who’s telling this story? Who’s making it possible to see? The Invisibles is comics, not prose: the creator of its images is, to a significant extent, the person telling the story. But various sections of the series are drawn by roughly 20 artists, and there’s no single “true” or “correct” representation of any character. The climactic storyline is drawn “jam”-style, with everyone taking a few pages, including the one Morrison himself drew. Morrison nonetheless has a prior claim as the image-maker, since he’s the one who directed the images via his own use of language.”

In other words, Wolk argues that the inconsistency/multiplicity of the artwork fits into Morrison’s themes of multiple identity and identity indeterminacy.

Okay…but this ignores a major point. The Invisibles’ artwork sucks. In fact, in virtually every title Morrison’s worked on, the artwork sucks. I know some people like Frank Quitely, and, by contemporary super-hero standards he’s not bad…which is to say, if you’re not grading on a curve, he’s pretty lousy. Moreover (with the possible exception of Arkham Asylum) Morrison hardly ever makes an effort to collaborate with his artists. You don’t get the sense with Morrison (as you do with Alan Moore) that he chooses people he wants to work with based on a particular project. At the end of Animal Man, he noted that he had yet to even communicate with his artist, if I remember correctly. In the recent “Grant Morrison: The Early Years,” when asked if he gives any consideration to his artist, he responds, basically, by saying “no”. “I just write what I feel the need to write and expect my collaborators to be professional enough and creative enough to interpret my stuff to the best of their abilities.” He notes that some artists interpret his ideas better than others…but it never seems to occur to him that he might be inspired by particular artists, or learn something from them in a back and forth creative process. Nor does he think visually in his writing. Where Alan Moore (for better and sometimes worse) experiments with layout and panel transitions and different looks for his comics, Morrison clearly couldn’t care less — which is why so many of the comics he works on are, visually, either boring or desperately cluttered.

Rather than being some sort of pomo strength, I think Morrison’s indifference to art is his signature weakness…and not coincicdentally, a major weakness of super-hero comics in general. Its says a lot about the field that the person who is, in many ways, its most thoughtful and intelligent proponent has no discernable visual aesthetics. I’ve actually read a couple of Grant Morrison’s straight prose stories (in an old series of erotic horror anthologies) and they’re great. It might really have been better if he’d stuck with that, though it pains me to say it. I love Animal Man and Doom Patrol, and have enjoyed Morrison’s other work as well. But, and alas, no matter the care and genius he puts into the writing, even his best efforts look like shit.

Johnny Ryan Review

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This is a review of Johnny Ryan’s work in general, and of Angry Youth Comics #10 in particular. A shortened, less snarky version of this article was published in The Chicago Reader in March 2006.

Comics: They’re Not Just For Pompous Blowhards Anymore!

After a long and painful struggle, comic-books have finally made themselves more or less indistinguishable — in subject-matter, in marketing, in content, even in length — from just plain books. Whether it’s Dan Clowes or David Foster Wallace, Art Spiegelman or John Updike, you hear the interview on Fresh Air, purchase the tome at the local chain bookstore, open it with the solemn joy of a humble seeker, and close it with new insight into the profound humanness of our shared ineffability.

And then there’s cartoonist Johnny Ryan’s latest effort, Angry Youth Comix #10. Fifty pages of filthy one-panel gag cartoons in the worst possible taste, this is critical comicdoms drooling, atavistic doppelganger. You can’t get it in bookstores, you can’t even talk about it on NPR without violating FCC regulations, and the whole thing takes about ten minutes to read. There are no deep meanings (unless you count scatalogical double entendres) ; no poignant autobiographical details (unless Ryan’s private life is exceedingly peculiar); no redeeming social value (unless you consider mocking Art Spiegelman to be some sort of philanthropic act.) Instead, Ryan’s comic is composed entirely of dick jokes, tit jokes, fag jokes, abortion jokes, racist caricatures, blasphemy, and the occasional stupid pun.

If that sounds like Ryan is just some snotty shock-jock — well, sure he is. But what’s wrong with that? The fact is that comics has always been a uniquely snotty and shocking medium. Wilhelm Busch’s 1865 “Max and Moritz” — often considered the first comic-strip — featured two naughty prepubescent German pranksters who inventively brutalize all and sundry until they are captured, dumped in a flour mill, ground to bits, and eaten by ducks. The gore and goofiness wasn’t necessarily Busch’s fault: comics just seem to lend themselves to over-the-top imagery. Most of the greatest work in the medium — Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, the EC comics horror titles, Jack Kirby’s super-hero art, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat — rely on slapstick or the macabre or hyperbolic violence or some combination of all three. Sure, today “comics for adults” may denote politely edifying creators like Craig Thompson or Jessica Abel, but it wasn’t so long ago that that same phrase referred to R. Crumb, Robert Williams, and other underground artists whose work overflowed with giant reproductive organs, hideous epithets, bizarre sexual conglomerations, and gratuitous everything. And in case anyone had forgotten, the riots which greeted the publication of Danish gags depicting Muhammad reminded the world that nothing offends quite as thoroughly as a really offensive cartoon.

Political cartoons can be plenty dull and predictable, of course: as a non-Muslim, my reaction to the Danish cartoons was basically, “eh.” Still, it’s hard to read anything by Johnny Ryan without feeling that comic-books lost something important when they opted to largely abandon the sight gags and overblown obnoxiousness to the editorial pages. Sure, you can use comics to chronicle either a Bildungsroman or an endless fight against evil if you want to. The truth, though is that those kinds of stories could really just as easily be novels or films. But in what other medium (other than comics’ bastard step-child, animation) can you show, as Ryan does, the moon using some poor unfortunate as a tampon? Or a dead baby in the park with a kite at the end of its bloody umbilical cord? Or the tragedy of brain-piss? In fact, many of these cartoons are so bizarre they can’t even be effectively put into prose — one gag with the caption “Oh, don’t mind me!” involves a man, a woman, a blow-job, and a discontented bystander, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out an economical way to describe the exact mechanics of the scene.

Part of the reason it’s hard to imagine many of these gags as anything other than cartoons, though, is simply because it’s hard to imagine anyone but Johnny Ryan thinking of them. His subject-matter may be limited, and his black-and-white line art is efficient rather than dazzling, but there aren’t many artists in any field who can match Ryan for sheer surreal creativity. His longer strips suggest a filthy hybrid of the Marx Bros. and Monty Python; the full-length story in Angry Youth Comix #9 included a single sequence in which a bald man is blessed with a wig made out of shit, propositioned by a passer-by, has his penis inconveniently detach, obtains penis-glue, loses his shit-wig, asks a passer-by to defecate on his head…and that’s just the set-up for the punch-line. The single panel jokes in #10 don’t match that level of manic intensity, but they have their own virtues. The best gags, in fact, seem like humor’s distilled essence; middle-school, smart-ass witticisms raised to a sublime and unsurpassable height. There will never be a funnier super-hero parody than Fucked-Up Man, whose main power appears to involve intercourse with a duck. Nor will there ever be a funnier penis joke than Ryan’s gag about the Salem Dick-Witch trials.

It’s not like I’m the first person to rave enthusiastically about Ryan’s work. He’s been praised by lots of comics luminaries, from Robert Williams to Ivan Brunetti to Dan Clowes to Peter Bagge. And yet, the critical enthusiasm often seems to come with a certain nervous backwards glance over the shoulder. His comic is put out by Fantagraphics, one of the most important independent comics publishers — but both owners of the company have publicly expressed reservations of one sort or another about his work. He gets a fair number of positive reviews in the comics press— but those reviewers hasten to notify their readers that Angry Youth Comics isn’t necessarily for everyone. Ryan readily admits as much himself, but I’m not quite sure why it has to be stressed. After all, whose work is for everyone, exactly? Chris Ware’s?

I don’t wish on Ryan — or on anyone — the clouds of hagiography that hang about Ware’s cranium like some sort of oleaginous shroud. But I do think AYC deserves better from comics taste-makers than a slightly embarrassed pat on the head. Ryan’s work is smart, crammed with ideas, and so funny it will melt your retinas. Moreover it seems to me that whatever the limitations of its appeal, it would be immediately accessible to a huge number of people— fans of South Park, for example — who don’t necessarily read comics.

That’s important, because the audience for American comics right now is vanishingly small, and only likely to shrink further as imported manga from Japan snaps up more and more shelf-space and attention. In the face of vast public indifference, super-hero publishers have basically given up on marketing comics altogether, and have instead shifted their attention almost entirely to selling their properties to Hollywood. Meanwhile, smaller publishers — like Fantagraphics — concentrate most of their limited promotional oomph on relentlessly snooty releases like the anthology Mome. When Ryan has managed to get mainstream media coverage, it’s generally been quite positive: he was featured in Rolling Stone’s annual Hot List last September, for example. But given comics’ low profile, and his own industry’s ambivalence, it’s going to be a long, long time before Johnny Ryan becomes a household name. As it is, you’ve got to make some effort if you even want to find his stuff. He does have several excellent trade paperback collections, though I’ve never seen one in a bookstore myself. As for AYC # 10, It’s available online at fantagraphics.com, and, to the best of my knowledge, at only two stores in Chicago: Quimby’s Queer Store and Chicago Comics.

[I contacted Fantagraphics, and they corrected me: AYC is also sold through Alternate Reality, Inc. (couldn’t find a website) and Comix Revolution.]