I’ve seen a lot of folks recommend the online comic Achewood by Chris Onstad so I thought I’d give it a try.

Some twenty strips later and…why do I want to read this again? I don’t find the drawing at all interesting or compelling. I’m not in principle opposed to the amorphous mammal-blob school of cutesy drawing (I like Jay Ryan) but Onstad seems determined to do it in as boring a way as possible. His linework is blankly unvaried; he does nothing composition wise; the expressions are so repetitive that it makes his work look like clip-art. It reminds me of Dilbert…though I may actually like Dilbert better. Those strips are really viscerally ugly; Achewood doesn’t even manage that. It’s just boring. And holy crap is the bland computer font for the lettering annoying.

And, yeah, the gags don’t do anything for me either. This one, for example, got a lot of positive comments:

So getting drunk is funny. That’s brilliant, I guess. And being mistaken for gay is really funny too. And poignant. Don’t forget poignant.

Or there’s:this

Sorry, but “Sex Funeral” is a pretty piss-poor band name (the real band the Crucifucks is, for example, in the same vein except it’s actually clever.)

I think part of the appeal is supposed to be the not-funniness of it; the lameness of the jokes is itself a joke, in that ironic we’re-hipper-than-humor way. For non-humor humor to work, though, it needs to be weirder, and, yes, more earnest. Charles Schulz for example; Spike standing in front of a giant waterfall, for example, or Sally declaring she will triumph over her lazy eye; those are funny because there’s really nothing nothing nothing going on; they’re completely flat and ridiculous and at a 90 degree angle to what would usually be considered amusing. This stuff — drunkenness and dumb band names — it’s basic class clown boilerplate. It’s not unusual or unexpected to hear someone try to pass that off as a joke; it’s the sort of thing you’d hear at an amateur stand-up night. And, indeed, Onstad’s stuff in general reminds me of mediocre stand-up; mild smut, mild shock value, lame cultural references (let’s make fun of Flavor Flav!) — it’s really tedious.

Dirk says I’ve got to read six months of archived Achewood strips if I’m going to love it. Alas, I’ve got to get *a lot* more enjoyment out of individual strips if I’m going to read a book’s worth of this crap. In fact, so far, the magic seems to be working in reverse; the more strips I look at the more it pisses me off.

Update:..and that’s Onstad, not Onstaad. Corrected now. Duh.

Update 2: I’d urge folks to scroll down through comments. Tucker Stone and Bill Randall offer much more educated takes on the strip, and several others point out some of their favorite moments. All of which allows my loathing to take on a more complex, more meaningful shape….

This review ran in the Comics Journal a while back.

The visual arts have long been, keen on comics. From Roy Lichtenstein to the art-school trained members of Paper Rad to the recent Masters of Comics Art exhibition, high art institutions and practitioners are perfectly happy to appropriate, create, and interact with comics in various ways.

The reverse is less true. Certainly, there are comics creators who move in the high-art gallery world – but rarely without a chip on their shoulders. RAW’s self-promotional copy repeatedly and reflexively insisted on comics’ unique high-brow/low-brow status — though how anyone could mistake RAW for anything but high-brow is pretty unclear. And while artists may dip into and appropriate comics in various ways, comics creators rarely seem to pay much attention to what’s going on in the contemporary gallery scene. When I’ve glanced at such discussions on TCJ’s message board, I’ve been amazed at the level of animosity expressed toward the visual arts. The consensus seems to be that people who show in galleries are a bunch of talentless scam artists, emperors trying to cover their exposed peters with jars of urine and elephant dung.

I know that dada is only about a century old, and that, as such, it’s a bit much to expect comics professionals to get their minds around it. But even if you hate Duchamp and all his sneering progeny, there’s still heaps of worthy art out there. I go to galleries only occasionally, and I’ve seen plenty of visual art which focuses on strong representational illustration, narrative, and humor — art which should, in other words, appeal to a comics audience.

As just one example, take Chicago artist Ryan Christian. His drawings are semi-surreal in the best sense — that is, they’re quirky, unexpected, and funny. In fact, many of his illustrations function as single-panel cartoons. An image of a dinosaur torso affixed to a pair of naked male legs being threatened by a meteor with spread female genitalia caused me to laugh out loud. Somewhat more abstruse, but still quite entertaining, is a tiny drawing of a terrorist psychically destroying the head of a hapless basketball player as both stand in a bathtub. And Christian’s series of pieces featuring giant, dripping, copulating mud-entities looks like it would be at home in any number of underground-influenced comics anthologies — such as Legal Action Comics, for example.

As I said, Christian is just starting out, and while I like these pieces, I don’t love them. In part, the problem is a disconnect between form and content. Christian’s meteor/dinosaur/genitalia illustration could almost have been done by Gary Larson or Johnny Ryan — but both of those creators use a loose style which seems perfectly fitted to absurd, off-hand jokes. Christian, on the other hand, is an extremely tight illustrator, with a gift for subtle shading. The combination of beautiful line-work and throw-off one-liners makes the images come off as a little smug or cutesy, rather than as energetically gratuitous.

In some of his most recent work, though, Christian addresses these problems, and the results are dazzling. Rather than the sharply clean delineations between figures and (mostly empty) background in his earlier pieces, he has now started to incorporate elaborate moire patterns. At the same time, he’s moved away from the dryness of surrealism and toward a more pulpy mysticism. The result is ambiguous wizard-things floating through gorgeously patterned space. Again, Christian is a lot less sloppy than the Paper Rad crowd, but his work recalls theirs in some ways — that is, it touches on popular culture before wandering off into pure evocative eye-candy. Not only is the work lovely in itself, but — given the speed with which Christian seems to be developing — it shows enormous promise. I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s doing in two or three years.

Ryan Christian, hello friends

Another gallery artist who should by all rights excite comics fans is Neil Whitacre. Whitacre is a significantly more established figure than Christian, and his work is quite different. Where Christian’s drawings suggest cartoons — either through punch-lines or simplified figures — Whitacre’s work seems much more closely related to classic illustration. For example, one of my favorite Whitacre images shows a lanky, hairy, hippieish mountain-man sitting on what seems to be a tiny island, toasting a marshmallow by the waterside. The water is represented by smoothly undulating, broad inky strokes; the island foliage is an interwoven net; the night sky is stippled grey with some darker branches just peeking through. On the hippie’s shoulder sits a large, fluid white bird of indeterminate species.

The elegant, off-center composition, as well as the intricate use of different shades and patterns, suggests Japanese prints. And like those prints, the particularity of the details and the vividness of the scene makes it hard not to feel that there is a story before and after, of which we see only a single instant — or one panel, if you prefer. There’s obviously a sense of reflection here, but the very use of stillness points to motion outside the frame. This is a contemplative high-art moment, but its energy or weight relies in part on an obscure, never-quite-defined genre narrative of wilderness adventure.

Whitacre manages to be indisputably high-art while retaining a low-art energy and verve — in other words, the holy grail of comicdom aesthetes, which calls to many but is seized by almost none. Whitacre’s color work may make this even more apparent; for example, a red, black, and blue image of a black cowboy riding a hammerhead shark is garish, tripped-out, trashy biker art of the sort that would make Juxtapoz magazine aficionados salivate. And yet, the image isn’t at all messy. Instead, the blue twisting patterns on the shark and the stylized flames drifting up and off-panel look like art nouveau wallpaper. Its absurd but restrained, evoking both the tasteless fussiness of flash tattoos and the tasteful fussiness of upper-crust decorative traditions — both masculine swagger and feminine delicacy. It’s clearly making fun of the first— whether located in the image of the cowboy, or the working-class artist, or, perhaps, in the racially oppressed. But the cowboy’s awkward, thrown-back pose, and the delicacy of the patterns, is also elegaically romantic. And, of course, Whitacre’s line-work is such that any piece he does is going to swagger more than a little anyway.

Neil Whitacre, Tranquilizer (No, not the image I talk about in the text; sorry about that.)

Neither Whitacre nor Christian is especially indebted to comics for material or inspiration. But neither do they reject it. Both have expressed interest in various comic artists (Christian is a fan of Paper Rad, Whitacre of Basil Wolverton). And both have thought about working in something like comics form. Christian has a zine coming out shortly called “Lonesome Dandy Quarterly.” Whitacre says he’s an “aspiring comics writer.” He’s currently working on a comic-like series called “Into the Abyss” about “a small-scale entrepreneur of sorts.” In other words, for both these artists, comics provoke interest, curiosity, and even ideas…but not anxiety. Comics, in other words, make the visual arts richer. The reverse is occasionally true as well, of course. But it would be nice if it were the case more often.
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More Neil Whitacre images here and here

Ryan Christian’s blog is here

Walter Koenig, Star Trek’s Chekhov, has a mantelpiece loaded with action figures, ranks of them. Earth-2 Flash stands out. Koenig was already 20 in 1956, when the Flash got revived. His autobiography makes no mention of superheroes or comic books.

He’s French, she’s American. He’s giving up his name and taking hers. Their kid, when born, will also take her name. Why? She explains:

This review ran a while back on the now defunct Bridge Magazine website.

“Rock’n’roll is a spontaneous explosion of personality and it is an attitude,” Chicago-based music critic Jim DeRogatis tells us towards the end of Milk It, his collection of columns from the ‘90s. After making this sweeping statement, DeRogatis goes on to insist that Josephine Baker and the Farrelly brothers be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He also provides a lengthy analysis of Beethoven’s confrontational Grosse Fugue.

Ha ha. No, of course he doesn’t. The definition which he provides isn’t meant to be taken seriously; like most aesthetic pronouncements, it’s simply an effort to present the taste of his own demographic as universal. What DeRogatis really means when he says “rock n’roll,” as it turns out, is music sold mainly to college-educated white twentysomethings. Today’s marketing executives call such music “alternative,” and it is with the birth of alternative music as a successful programming format that DeRogatis’ book is primarily concerned.

Now don’t get me wrong — I like Nirvana as much as the next pale-faced Oberlin grad. And, to be fair, DeRogatis is an intelligent enough writer. The clichés are kept to a minimum, and the attempts at humor are usually pretty funny in an efficient, no-nonsense kind of way, as when he suggests that “Even those who enjoyed Woodstock ’94 would have been within their rights to storm the stage, hog-tie David Crosby, and drop his bloated carcass right on top of co-promoter Michael Lang.” Nor is DeRogatis crippled by undue reverence, either for old sacred cows like the Grateful Dead, or for newer ones like Alex Chilton.

None of which can save Milk It from terminal predictability. As you read through its pages, you learn that Kurt Cobain was very talented and his death was sad; R.E.M. started to really suck during the ‘90s, etc. etc. etc. If you care about the genre, you know this stuff already; if you don’t — well, you’re probably not reading the book, are you? Even DeRogatis’ efforts to demonstrate eclecticism seem overdetermined: when he chooses to champion a hip hop group, for instance, it’s Arrested Development, a decent band whose up-with-people attitude and just-funky-enough grooves have made them the darling of white rock critics who don’t quite get de la Soul. When he chastises the U.S. for failing to appreciate non-native music, he’s not touting Scandinavian black metal or the phenomenal ‘90s Japanese rock scene — no, he’s unhappy because Americans just aren’t buying quite enough Brit pop. And when he does profile some surprising acts, he lumps them together in a section entitled “Freaks and Geeks,” just so we know that he knows that Aphex Twin and the Melvins aren’t, er, mainstream. In any case, none of these outré musicians receive as much space as the decidedly unfreaky U2, nor as much as Courtney Love, with whom DeRogatis, like the fashion magazines, is unaccountably obsessed.

On several occasions, DeRogatis states that nostalgia is the biggest enemy of rock ‘n’ roll today. Nostalgia is certainly a force for evil: witness DeRogatis’ own misty-eyed hope that September 11 will do for the music of Generation Y what Vietnam did for the music of the baby-boomers, man. Bad as nostalgia is, though, it’s only a symptom of a larger problem: the tendency to view music as a lifestyle accessory rather than as an art form. The middle-aged suburbanite paying a hundred bucks to see Mick Jagger is just not that far removed from the trend-happy rock critic who can’t say “Smashing Pumpkins” without adding “one of the most successful rock bands Chicago has ever produced.” At least the Jagger fan knows he wants to keep listening to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” till his brains fall out of his flaccid peter, or vice versa. DeRogatis, on the other hand, has to constantly be on the lookout for that spanking new sound that’s the same as the old sound. The Foo Fighters, Liz Phair, Yo La Tengo; they’re rebellious, they’re catchy, and, by God, they were newsworthy once. So it goes, over and over again, till you feel like you’ve read the same fairly entertaining review about a hundred times. The ‘90s can’t have been this dull, and, indeed, they weren’t — unless, of course, you spent them, like our author, staring into the navel of Jim DeRogatis.

This is just an impression, because I don’t follow entertainment/culture the way I used to. But …