Inside-Out: Follow Me

Rob reviews Jesse Moynihan's debut graphic novel, FOLLOW ME (Bodega Distribution).




FOLLOW ME is actually a follow-up (but stand-alone) to Jesse Moynihan's two issues of THE BACKWARDS FOLDING MIRROR, one of the more delightfully strange series I've ever read. In FOLLOW ME, we see an artist at the height of his powers: confident with his own strengths and weaknesses as a draftsman and turning every idiosyncrasy into a powerful and dynamic sense of style. I've rarely seen a more individually expressive marriage of form and content than in this comic, which has shot up into my personal top ten comics of the year to date. Moynihan effortlessly shifts between and mashes up genres, maintaining a casual sense of humor no matter what sort of weirdness he throws at the reader.

It's hard to pin down influences for this comic. There's certainly some Gary Panter in there, in terms of the ambling narrative and main character who wanders from odd situation and makes sudden, dramatic transformations. But Moynihan eschews Panter's ragged-line quality in his comics. Indeed, there's a smoothness and simplicity to his line that makes reading each page easy. The directness of Moynihan's composition also contrasts him with another possible influence: Mat Brinkman. There's the same kind of crazy internal logic driving Moynihan's narrative as in Brinkman, but Moynihan has a much firmer hand on the reader's eye. Moynihan isn't quite as immersive in terms of his backgrounds as a Brian Ralph, even when leading the reader on a journey.

There's also a delightful vulgarity to Moynihan's work that's rather matter-of-fact, especially with regard to sex and sexuality. Every event that happens to the book's unnamed protagonist (a short man wearing a conical hat) is depicted with an air of detachment, whether it's a passive-aggressive argument with his girlfriend, an encounter with a homeless man who haunts him after his accidental death, or living on past infinity after the end of the world. The protagonist is always slightly restless, never satisfied either at home or away.



FOLLOW ME has a psychedelic bent to it in the truest sense of the word. Many of the stories feel like acid trips, experiences where the filters we put up against the world fall away and our perceptions change. At the same time, genuinely strange things often happen when one is in public in an altered state, and the book brings that sort of feeling to the page. The book starts with a hilarious and eye-opening sequence where the protagonist, after realizing that he's not going to get to see his girlfriend, performs fellatio on himself. Amazingly, that act is referenced again late in the book as he floats in the void and meets up with someone else. There's a loose but very deliberate structure in this book, as throw-away references pop up again repeatedly. Strange images recur and wind up taking different meanings. Unexplained characters take on new roles, like the protagonist's devil-friend who winds up becoming king of the underworld and later shoot's the protagonist's girlfriend.

Very quickly, the book starts to cohere around a central core of short stories. "Mirror Man" features the protagonist's encounter and role in the accidental death of a homeless man who attacks him. The homeless man comes to haunt him after death, but the protagonist is indifferent and refuses to play along; eventually, the homeless man leaves, grumbling "Same shit every day of my life". In "Big Talk", the protagonist dodges a potential break-up from his girlfriend after seeing a vision, collecting her menstrual blood and planting it. The resulting tree that sprouted up had a headless John the Baptist inside, who liked slow jams but had little wisdom to offer. When the protagonist starts to perceive living beings as blobs of energy, he stabs himself in the head (possibly in the pineal gland?) to stop the effect.

"Bubble" plays with time and space conventions after he gets hit by a car; he winds up taking the man who hit him (now dead) on a trip to the ends of the earth, only to be denied access to a hidden valley. He later encounters what appears to be an alternate version of himself inside a weird physical emanation, who revisits a traumatic encounter with someone who accosted him on the street and reformulates it by kissing him (prompting the potential mugger to say, "I'll never be ashamed of love again.") That leads to "Moment of Truth" and a rap pilgrim looking for the best rhymes, who winds up climbing a tree sprouting out of the hero's head and engaging in a rap battle with god (and losing). Finally, "No Choice" throws in all sorts of ritualistic and shamanic rites as the hero destroys the earth, gets yelled at (to no effect) by various shamans, and winds up floating in the void as one of his few companions masturbates.

I realize that my description of the book found in the last three paragraphs sounds like utter gibberish, yet it's a pretty accurate description of what happens. The book has a fluid quality to it that allows Moynihan to go on these very long digressions without the story feeling like weird-for-weird's-sake. This is a book where the reader simply needs to allow oneself to be swept along with what the artist is doing, because a close reading is rewarded by the surprising connections Moynihan makes. Above all else, Moynihan quickly establishes a rhythm to this story, a series of beats that make the reader follow along and flow with the absurd, enigmatic and sometimes inexplicable events of the story. The hero wants answers, wants a purpose, wants wisdom handed to him, but is frustrated to find again and again that there are no answers to be found. He is cynical and smartassed, but keeps trying and keeps hoping, even when it literally takes forever to do so.

The book rewards multiple readings, as connections become clearer and certain jokes start to make more sense. Moynihan unravels time, space, ego and the Other in a manner that manages to be direct in some aspects of its presentation (like when he undergoes various transformations) and oblique in others (like why it's happening). Things simply happen, and the hero has a choice in how to deal with them--and his choice is to be as aggressive as possible when it comes to knowledge and as passive as possible when it comes to relationships. That willingness to engage with the abstract rather than face the complexities of honestly engaging other people is at the core of the hero's journey, and it's a conflict that is never resolved. For the reader, this record of that trip is one not to miss.

Another Side of CCS

Here's another look at work from Center For Cartoon Studies (CCS) students new and old. Included are works by Sam Gaskin, Kubby, Jeff Lok, G.P. Bonesteel, Morgan Pielli, and Joshua Rosen.


OPHESTIOS, 1890 by Joshua Rosen. Rosen is currently entering his second year at CCS, and this pleasing little mini faked me out at first. Given the sort of alternate-world explication of the city of Orphestios as capital of the "Northern Empire", I expected some sort of political world-building story. The story started off as what seemed to be a comedy of manners, and then we got another fake-out: this was a rehearsal of a play that was going badly. It's not until we're introduced to the character of Iosif, an itinerant playwright, that the story really begins. It took me a while to warm up to Rosen's scribbly character design and extensive use of grey and black for backgrounds. I think the dreariness it created was intentional, given that this was supposed to be a Russia-like country in the winter. The consistency of Rosen's visual language eventually won me over, especially with the expressiveness of his characters.

This is a story about the intersection between art and love, and the quest to link the two. Iosif is a celebrity of sorts back in Orphestios, but he hates the attention, hates talking about his work and especially hates people talking to him about what they think art really is. He's fascinated by a singer at a club and starts to obsess over her, only to learn that they were childhood friends--and feelings still ran deep. What I liked most about this story is that ultimately Iosif is not a sympathetic character, even if he is the protagonist. Given the opportunity to grab onto something truly meaningful in his life, he instead gives into temptation and tries to slough off his regret by saying "Fuck it". That interesting turn came during a clever, silent two-page sequence where Iosif and an actress hook up. We see close-ups of the couple with grey backgrounds, alternating with white-on-black squiggles depicting sex and then dissolving into unconsciousness. This is a solid if modest early effort, and I'll be curious to see if Rosen continues to build more stories in this environment.



KILLER INK COMICS #1, ICE CREAM and THE SURVIVING LIFE OF HANZE ENEFFER, by G.P. Bonesteel. Bonesteel is a humorist somewhat in the vein of a Johnny Ryan, with a particularly deadpan and dry sense of humor combined with a tendency to go over the top (and beyond). ICE CREAM is a tiny minicomic wherein Bonesteel uses a minimalist line to depict what happens when an ice cream truck doesn't stop for a group of kids: rocks, guns and flaming arrows are deployed. This is essentially a bit of extended slapstick, with all sorts of clever background eye-pops. HANZE ENEFFER is another minimal-line comic featuring an anthropomorphic rabbit's pathetic dating life. This one feels more than a little familiar, with the lonely loser finally scoring but eventually feeling even worse about his life. It's nowhere near as provocative as his other work.

The real draw here is KILLER INK COMICS #1, especially the first story. This is the tale of "Abortion Andy", a for-hire aborted baby who lectures teenagers about the perils of teen sex. In this story, he interrupts a young couple with his bizarre lecture, complete with two pages of working in track listings from Grease into his warnings. It's an audacious idea, hilariously executed with as straight a face as possible. The backup story features a man on the run from Cupid on Valentine's Day and the collateral damage their conflict causes (including a man falling in lust with a newspaper vending machine). This story is a bit more predictable (and I've seen a similar idea in the pages of PROJECT: ROMANTIC) but still funny. Bonesteel's line is a bit crude at this point but still effective in getting across his gags. I'll be curious to see just where he takes the Abortion Andy series in future episodes.



INDESTRUCTIBLE UNIVERSE QUARTERLY #1 & #2, by Morgan Pielli. These are grab bag collections of CCS grad Pielli's stories for assorted anthologies and other odds & ends. These are really nicely assembled, with beautiful silkscreened covers, striking design and nice paper. The art in the first issue is all angles and interesting formal tricks. Pielli often dips into sci-fi type stories, like "For Want Of An Oomplip", wherein a punctuation error on an alien sign nearly sets off a war. A longer story in the first issue features a chase between two characters across, through and between the gutters of panels.

The second issue also features a story with some unusual panel configurations. "The Watchmaker's Dance" reimagines earth's creation story as carried out by three alien robots. The use of tiny panels and sketchy line makes this story work well; in fact, it's the most attractive and successful of all the stories featured in these two issues. Pielli abandoned that more angular style of character design for the rest of the issue in favor of a softer, fuzzier line that was a bit less interesting. His stories continued to have a certain tortured quality to them, like "The Terror In Choices", featuring a man who loses everything after he loses his ability to choose. "The Trial of Narcissus" features an irresistible hook: everyone realizes that god is coming in three days, but the revelation of its true form drives everyone insane. At the moment, it seems like Pielli is experimenting with different drawing approaches, looking for the most comfortable style. I thought the more angular approach was more interesting, but it's clear that Pielli really thinks through his pages carefully. I especially like the way he straddles genres without owing allegiance to any one in particular.



SAM 'N DAN, by Jeff Lok. A quick look at Lok's work reveals that while he doesn't have the drawing facility of some of his fellow CCS grads, he overcomes that with the use of various techniques and a total commitment to the dark absurdity of his concepts. This is the story of a bank-robbing dog and cat duo named Sam and Dan. The cat speaks with a faux-elegant dialect, as though he were an early 20th century con man. The dog, a truly disturbing characters, says little but does much. After they rob a bank, the dog shoots the sun with his gun, bringing on darkness and an encounter with a wood witch, ancient prophesies, fireflies that shoot lasers out of their eyes and a commandment to duel each other to the death. To set the mood, Lok makes extensive use of hatching and cross-hatching. That creates an oppressive atmosphere with his otherwise funnily-drawn anthropomorphic characters. Sam the dog in particular has a Droopy-like expression no matter his mood or situation, which cracks me up in spite of his psychopathic personality. Dan the cat is an oily smooth talker who talks loud but says nothing, and it's fun to watch him sweat, slant his mouth and otherwise squirm while otherwise looking quite cheerful. The wood witch, an amorphous-looking creature, later tries to disguise itself as a farmer in the least-convincing costume of all time.

Lok brings all sorts of weird, comedic touches to a piece that has apocalyptic overtones, making its overall tone hard to pin down but compelling. His matter-of-fact absurdism reminds a little of what Chuck Forsman is doing, but Lok brings a different sensibility to his work. It's more clearly calculated and less improvisatory than Forsman's comics (especially in SNAKE OIL). Both artists are world-builders where the reader is deliberately kept in the dark, but there is certainly a logic of sorts behind the weirdness. Forsman's work is more about the telling of tales through the mundane execution of a journey, while with Lok it's about a series of bigger moments. I look forward to fat collections of comics by both artists in the future.



THE MUD BOG, POCKET PORN #1, r, THE UGLY PLACE and BEAUTY PATROL, by Kubby. Kubby's comics are beautiful, intensely personal little art objects. All stops are pulled out as we see full color, silkscreened covers, interesting paper, etc. THE UGLY PLACE is a 24-hour comic that's one of the best-looking of it's kind that I've seen. It's a silent story about a farmer who puts in a hard day's work threshing a field, only to be overcome by a memory of a lost love. The stoic farmer tucks the memory away when he gets home, only to wistfully see the image of his lover in the door. This looks like it was done only in pencil with no inks, but Kubby goes to town on creating gradations of texture, especially in the close-up shots of the farmer's face. The viscerality and sweat of the farmer's toil on page after page is a nice contrast to the real pain he feels.

r is a very personal little mini that details the death of someone very close to the artist, printed on purple paper with what looks like colored pencil. There are some striking images, like the cartoonist-as-bear hunched over a sheet of paper with slitted eyes. THE MUD BOG is an experiment in color, detailing a funny memory of hiding out and watching guys driving their pick-up trucks into a mud pit, gunning the gas and getting it covered with mud. Why they do this and why people secretly watched it is besides the point; it was clearly something that both groups loved for different reasons. POCKET PORN was something Kubby drew collaborating with another writer and drawn with a brush, giving it a scratchy quality not seen in the artist's other work. It's a story of fetishes gone slightly awry, as a dominant woman and a more submissive woman who likes feet meet behind a dumpster. As the dominant woman is using her foot to pleasure the sub, the sub makes the mistake of suggesting that she be "rocked like a baby". That angers the dominant, who then uses her feet to slap her legs and ass raw. It's a visceral, ugly series of moments that clearly bring mixed feelings to the sub. The brush works both for and against the artist here: the scratchy quality of the line and the way it blurs reinforces the nature of the experience, but there are points at which there's a lack of overall clarity. It's still one of the more interesting examples of comics erotica I've read.



The artist's most-distributed comic is BEAUTY PATROL, a delightful series of fake-outs, science lectures, psychedelia, long-distance longings and time dilations. The book starts with a comic called "Beauty Patrol", about a bear making his way around the world. It's promptly crumpled mid-page by the artist of the strip, Cody Roder. The rest of the comic finds Cody going about her day off, meeting a strange person with whom she shares a connection they don't understand. It's there that Cody starts to wonder if deja vu is simply our understanding that time isn't a straight line. Meanwhile, we also follow the day of Cody's long-distance love Roxie Dagger, who who is on a more deliberate quest (to see her favorite band) but winds up in circumstances as unexpected as Cody. There's a spontaneity to Kubby's line here that I enjoy that carries it through some of its rougher pages; indeed, the more scribbly the line, the more the images burst off the page.



PIZZA WIZARD #2, CALL ALL MY DAWGS #3, and SUGARCUBE by Sam Gaskin. Gaskin's PIZZA WIZARD and other humor comics are sort of like Mat Brinkman on Pop Rocks. They carry fantasy elements, ludicrous quests and earthy & dense foregrounds and backgrounds. Gaskin's imagery is a bit simpler and easier to process than Brinkman's, and much sillier. There's definitely a story going on in these one-page episodes, revolving around the title character's quest for a magic pizza, but they're really an excuse for propulsive world-exploration in the Fort Thunder tradition. Gaskin is also working in the tradition of classic Sunday comic strips, supporting the main strip with shorter strips at the bottom of the page (usually tangential to the main story), wacky puzzles, and even hand-made advertisements (the weirdest of which was a straightforward ad for a fast food restaurant that winds up playing a significant role later in the story.



That's an apt metaphor, because Gaskin's work has a delightful junk food quality to it. In CALL ALL MY DAWGS #3, Gaskin gives us his ode to the schlock comedian Sinbad. Of course, it's filtered through Gaskin's demented imagination, so we see Sinbad bemused by the Cheshire Cat, posing in various outfits, having his TV son defecate on a toybox to spite him and dream about Kenan 'n Kel and barbecue sauce, wondering if he's become a "ghost dad". It's simultaneous a perfect tribute and deconstruction of a familiar but awful pop culture figure. It's comics like these that make Gaskin a singular figure as a humorist, even when he wears his visual inspirations on his metaphorical sleeve.



SUGARCUBE stands as a very surprising and personal work for Gaskin, and a wholly unexpected one. The story's protagonist, Andy, learns at age 20 that he has type-1 diabetes; and his whole life changes. This comic is less about the disease than the way it made Andy feel like his youth was over. By the end of the story, his earnest recklessness felt out of place, but he was no happier being forced to grow up so quickly. Gaskin eschews the more textured approach of his other work and instead uses a minimalist approach: clear lines, sparse backgrounds and iconic character work. Gaskin is trying to get across a lot of pain here, and I'm guessing he went this route so as not to overdo it. He also intersperses some of the heavier moments of depression with quotidian anecdotes about the mechanics of testing for blood sugar and injecting insulin as well as funny anecdotes about how and why he started smoking marijuana. That actually winds up as a significant plot point when he and his best friend are caught smoking by a policeman, the single event that effectively ended Andy's whimsical childhood. This is a comic without a neat and tidy ending; Andy feels trapped and the comic ends with an absurd fantasy sequence about becoming a subsidy farmer, living a quiet life. This isn't so much an ending as an escape, a denial; Andy has a long way to go to becoming a fully-realized person.

Digging Deeper: Melvin Monster and Moomin

Rob reviews two intriguing reprint projects from Drawn & Quarterly: MELVIN MONSTER VOL I and MOOMIN VOL IV.



In this, the Golden Age of Reprints, we've started to get all sorts of heretofore unlikely and obscure comics getting loving reissues. While Fantagraphics' reprinting of PEANUTS kicked things off and there have been other long-running and beloved series getting rereleases, this is also a time when publishers are taking chances and printing some less obvious choices. Drawn & Quarterly in particular has been issuing forgotten series or comics unfamiliar to American audiences for quite some time. Indeed, the Drawn & Quarterly anthology in years past reintroduced such classics as Gasoline Alley as well as the work of Doug Wright.

D&Q has really gone to another level by taking a risk and reprinting Tove Jansson's classic MOOMIN series, with great success, as well as starting the John Stanley Library. Seth's design for Stanley's shorter and lesser-known comics is not unlike a prestige children's line of forty years ago, complete with an embossed cover, a "John Stanley Library" seal on the back, playful endpapers, etc. Rather than reprinting the series on glossy paper (the bane of many reprint series, especially when originals can't be found), it's on paper that uncannily mimics the original pages. As a designer, Seth sets the emotional tone for his projects with the endpapers and repurposed images from the original art. For PEANUTS, he's reclaimed the strip's contemplative and melancholy aspects, using dark tones in the endpapers and stripping the characters away from familiar background shots. PEANUTS, partly through it being so thoroughly marketed over the years, had become shorthand for sentimentality as opposed to more complex emotions, and it felt as though Seth needed to correct for this.



In MELVIN MONSTER, on the other hand, Seth seems to be attempting to create an alternate reality where John Stanley's books have always been children's classics, read by millions in perpetuity. It's as though we've reached through a time machine to pluck out a newly-published volume from 1965. The first endpapers we see reinforce the "JSL" brand with lots of funny drawings of the title character; it's both slightly stuffy (indicating to parents the brand name) and endearing (letting children know the emotional tone of the book). The next few pages tell the reader that while this comic is funny, it also involves monsters and vaguely disturbing images--the way Seth has black-ink drawings on charcoal-gray backgrounds, with only the eyes colored bright white, creates an atmosphere that is somehow both goofy and slightly scary.



Getting to the stories themselves, the hook of the series is a young monster boy who is a constant disappointment to his parents because he wants to be good, go to school, not be destructive, etc. Stanley gets a lot of mileage out of this very simple shtick, as the indomitable Melvin has to find ways to outwit his parents and everyone around him. The situational gags are better than some of the cheaper visual gags. It's funny that his mother is "Mummy" and is dressed up in bandages and his father is "Baddy" and is a hulking Frankenstein-like monster; it's funnier to see him innocently outwit the parade of creatures (and people) trying to kill him. It's even funnier when he winds up in "human bean land" where "everybody is nice and kind", only to be tossed down into a manhole, chased by a car and whacked by a woman carrying a purse. The punchline layered on top of that betrayal is that Melvin interpreted these actions as people trying to make him feel at home!

The best sequence of the book is where his parents send him to the cellar as punishment--a place where even they don't go. Stanley throws all sorts of sight gags in, like being told to watch out for a steep third step, only to find that there are no steps at all after the third one. Melvin wavers between being a scared little boy (calling for his guardian demon, whose help is dubious) and an invincible innocent, stumbling into adventure after adventure and inadvertently escaping harm. When his father winds up in the cellar later on, it's sweet (but unstated) revenge. The stories in this volume (reprinting the first three issues of the original comic book) vary from longer adventure stories to shorter bits that establish life in Melvin's house, like the furry arm in his wall that acts as his alarm clock but also plays checkers with Melvin during the night.

Stanley the writer is clever, but what sells the work is Stanley the artist. His line is simple and his figures are delightfully cartoony. His characters are remarkably expressive despite the simplicity of their design; like Schulz, Stanley, with just a squiggle or two, could completely change the mood of a page. In the Monsterville sequences, Stanley throws in eye pop after eye pop (Will Elder-style), punning on monster cliches with either funny drawings or funny labels. What I like best about his art is the way he propels Melvin from scene to scene, creating constant but seamless action. I'm really looking forward to future releases in the Stanley library, especially his teenager comics. There's a breeziness to his character design that I find irresistible, and such comics are really in his wheelhouse as a cartoonist. It's a tribute to his skill and ingenuity that he was able to pull off a slightly more visceral and wacky style in MELVIN MONSTER.



This was the first volume of the collected MOOMIN strips that I'd read, and as it turns out four of the five stories were written by Lars, as opposed to Tove, Jansson. Tove still drew the stories that were featured in a British daily newspaper, and they still possessed a remarkable amount of gentle charm and wit. Jansson's line is remarkable simple and graceful in creating her family of hippo-like Moomintrolls. She got more out of less than any cartoonist this side of Charles Schulz. Unlike Schulz, Jansson's work also had a number of clever decorative touches. In many of her strips, she used things like umbrellas, canes, flutes, pens and lamps to form the vertical interior panel borders, subtly reinforcing the story's themes. Jannson first gained fame as a children's book illustrator with her Moominfamily, but these strips were actually aimed at adults.



While restraint was certainly Tove's watchword as a cartoonist, the stories themselves had a surprising amount of bite. While "Moomin Goes Wild West" is the weakest of the five storylines in this book (due in part to the reliance on stereotypical western humor as the Moomins go back in time), it does wind up redeeming itself by revealing that the wild west adventures they experienced were all part of a cynical, money-making con. "Snorkmaiden Goes Rococo" is another slightly formulaic story spoofing the overromanticization of the age of enlightenment. The book really picks up with "The Conscientious Moomins", a hilarious spoof of manners and "duty" that felt like a direct blow to philosophers like Kant. Jansson depicts a great deal of chaotic bufoonery in her drawings, yet her strips were always clear and never cluttered. Like Schulz, Jansson rarely relied on funny drawings to get across her gags, preferring to let her art tell the story and the gags flow naturally from character and situation.

The book saves its best for last with "Moomin and the Comet" and "Moomin And the Golden Tail". The former is a surprisingly grim, apocalyptic tale of how the various denizens of Moominvalley deal with the arrival of a potentially deadly comet. The satire of parasites, opportunists and last-second religious converts is pointed but still gentle; even the biggest phonies in these stories tended to be treated more with pity than scorn. The latter story was written by Tove and is incredibly rich in characterization and acidic in tone. When Moomin accidentally acquires a golden tail and receives unexpected fame, he has to face the negative consequences such a life brings. It's obvious that this was a commentary on Jansson's own life as an unexpectedly huge international success; the cutting remarks on managers and worldwide merchandising rights sounded like they were coming from the voice of experience. Despite that success, it was obvious that Jansson related much more to the carefree, bohemian lifestyle of the Moomins and their friends rather than any attempts at "bettering" themselves or putting on aristrocratic airs.

Rescuing these strips from obscurity was truly a public service on D&Q's part. It's encouraging that this big risk has paid off so handsomely for the small publisher; the Moomin books have become their biggest sellers. It's interesting to see a boutique publisher like D&Q suddenly flourish in the book market, especially with collections aimed at children and old-time strip fans. It's only logical that the publisher will branch out and starting reprinting Jansson's actual children's picture books, which will be a departure of sorts since they've rarely strayed far from comics in their publishing history. I think the biggest reason why their reprints aimed at children have been so successful is that these have been labors of love that have paid off for both designer and publisher, rather than cynical money grabs. The care and detail in these projects shows and no doubt draws in the curious reader. With more Stanley volumes and Jansson reprints on the way, readers will have much to look forward to.

The John Kerschbaum Interview

[Please note: This interview originally appeared in The Comics Journal #295.]

In a perfect and just world, John Kerschbaum would be one of its most famous cartoonists. In the world of comics, he instead carries the status of cult favorite, a cartoonist’s cartoonist. One reason his work is treasured among the discerning few is that there’s a surface blandness to his drawings that belie their content. His work becomes all the more jarring when he suddenly injects violent and viscerally powerful scenes depicted in that same cozy, cartoony style. Kerschbaum’s work demands full engagement from his readers, often crafting punchlines that are not immediately obvious unless one follows the verbal and visual clues he provides very closely. He is a gag craftsman of the first order, a total master of panel and page composition as well as the integration of word and image. Above all else, Kerschbaum trades in deception, luring the reader in with one set of expectations and then brutally subverting those expectations repeatedly.


Kerschbaum began his career trying to become a syndicated cartoonist with a number of false starts. He did freelance cartoons for any number of national publications in the early 90s and even had a collection of strips published (IF NEW YORK CITY WAS THE WORLD). In 1996, he received a Xeric grant for his one-man humor anthology, THE WIGGLY READER. Attendees of shows like SPX or MoCCA will recall a stream of hilarious, attractively-designed minis he crafted for those shows. TIMBERDOODLE was nominated for an Ignatz award and may be one of the most memorable minicomics of the last decade, all about a young boy named Wally Timberdoodle who happened to be born with an enormous wooden cock. His most recent creations, Petey and Pussy, were finally published in the format they deserve by Fantagraphics. The book is anchored by his longest sustained comics narrative, a dense collection of brutal gags that leads up to a final, sublime punchline.


Beginnings

CLOUGH: Where are you from originally? Did you grow up drawing? Were you encouraged in this pursuit by your family?

KERSCHBAUM: Farmingdale, Long Island. I drew a lot as a kid. My mom had been an art teacher. I recall getting a lot of encouragement both at home and in school.

CLOUGH: Did you grow up reading comics? What sort of things had the biggest impact on you as a child? Am I correct in assuming that MAD magazine, and Will Elder in particular, were influences?

KERSCHBAUM: I didn't read a lot of superhero comics. I was into Spider-Man for a few years; they sold it at a local drugstore. I always looked forward to getting the next issue. But at some point, I think Marvel started to weave the story line from the one comic into several other titles and in order to follow the story, you had to buy all of them. That annoyed me and I sorta gave it up.

I loved MAD - my favorite was Don Martin. I'd say he's probably my greatest influence. But I enjoyed the whole magazine - the fold- in, the movie and television parodies - Jack Davis and Mort Drucker wowed me. In my early teens, I started reading National Lampoon and Heavy Metal. I really loved the cartoonists in National Lampoon – Gahan Wilson, S. Gross, Bobby London, and Shary Flenniken. While looking in the humor section of the local bookstore for an S. Gross collection, I found one of B. Kliban's paperbacks and spent years tracking the rest of those down. Somewhere in there I stumbled upon Edward Gorey, too. I also enjoyed reading the comics in the newspaper.

CLOUGH: What sort of schooling or training did you receive in art?

KERSCHBAUM: I studied illustration at Parsons School of Design.


CLOUGH: Was the training you received there useful to you as an artist?

KERSCHBAUM: I learned a lot of stuff and met a lot of people who affected my career later. It was definitely a positive experience for me. I also met my future wife there, and it doesn’t get much better than that. She was also in the illustration program.

CLOUGH: What other cultural influences played a part in shaping you as an artist?

KERSCHBAUM: Do movies and television count as culture? I loved Monty Python. Saturday Night Live introduced me to the stand-up of Steve Martin (comedically, he was a big influence). Get Smart was a favorite. I'd stay up late to watch The Twilight Zone. That was awesome to me. I would guess that's where my affinity for twisty surprise endings came from. I really enjoyed cartoons like Looney Tunes, Rocky & Bullwinkle Show, and Pink Panther. As a kid I really wanted to be an animator. I studied those shows and tried to draw like them.

CLOUGH: When did you first start cartooning seriously?

KERSCHBAUM: In the late eighties, I tried pretty hard to be a cartoonist in The New Yorker. I was very serious about it for a while.

CLOUGH: How much drawing are you able to do on a daily basis that isn't directly related to your comics or illustration work? Does the physical act of drawing bring you pleasure?

KERSCHBAUM: I doodle occasionally but I rarely draw for the sake of drawing anymore. If I have some free time it's more likely I'll try to write.


CLOUGH: Do you consider yourself an artist that writes, a writer that draws, or neither?

KERSCHBAUM: I have a lot more experience in drawing than writing. I feel like I’m still learning what I’m doing as a writer, and so it’s more of a challenge. It can be fun. Writing for me is about trying to create a spark of an idea, or stepping away from an idea and coming back to it with a fresh eye.

Professional Work

CLOUGH: The earliest dated strips I've seen from you come from 1992 and were reprinted in If New York City Was the World (Citadel Press). What kind of comics or illustration work did you do prior to this time? Were you making a living as an illustrator before you started selling your comic strips, or did you do something else for a living?

KERSCHBAUM: During the nineties, I worked as a staff artist at United Media. I did the corrections on the syndicated comic strips (United Features & NEA). Back before all the art was digital, the artists would mail their originals to UM where the editors would have a go at them. I then made any corrections on the original art before it was sent to production.
Around the same time, I did a lot of freelance illustration for the Village Voice and Associated Press, among a few others. The AP relationship led to a lot of work for the short-lived sports daily, The National. They were fun to work for and paid well too!I was also actively submitting gag cartoons to various magazines like SPY, The New Yorker, and National Lampoon where, by that time, S. Gross was the cartoon editor. I freaked out the day I got home and found a message on my answering machine from him. It was hysterical. He sounded just like I imagined he would. I'm pretty sure I still have the tape from the answering machine the message he left for me.

CLOUGH: You've made a number of attempts at becoming a syndicated artist. Can you describe what went into making strips like Cartoon Boy (a superhero parody), the original Petey & Pussy strips, and Well Whatta You Know?

KERSCHBAUM: I did Cartoon Boy when I was still working at United Media. I wanted to create a good continuity/adventure strip that was also a gag a day. But I also included every current comic strip taboo. So there's smoking, sexual innuendo, and naughty puns… but all G- rated, really. It began as a joke but I kind of grew to like it. I submitted it to all the big syndicates - no takers. I'm actually considering giving it another shot. Well Whatta You Know? was just an attempt to do a fun and educational strip for kids, something, I felt, the comics pages lacked. Well, what do I know? The magazine I initially did Petey & Pussy for folded before it was launched. So I tried to self-syndicate the original strips to alternative weeklies. Creative Loafing ran it for a few weeks but I think readers complained.

CLOUGH: You've gone back and forth in your career from doing comics & illustration work for children and then doing incredibly visceral, profane, violent humor. Yet, a similar voice can be heard in each set of strips. How do you approach these two different worlds when you're given a particular assignment vs. your own work?

KERSCHBAUM: I enjoy doing both. They're kind of the same but different. They both pose a problem or a set of problems to be solved. With an illustration assignment, my main objective is to make the editor or art director happy - I'm a hired gun. So basically, you do what they tell you. And there's usually a deadline.

I have no real deadlines with my own work so I can shelve something indefinitely when I can't figure it out. And I get to be more self-indulgent. I get to do what I want. Otherwise, the basic approach to each is the same. And when you're doing work for kids you just leave out the cursing… and tits - no tits.

CLOUGH: Something that's remarkable about your style, both in terms of art and writing, is that it seems to have arrived fully-formed in those early-90s strips. The dense cross-hatching, the layers of jokes, the interplay between verbal and visual humor, the slack- jawed character design--it's all there. What went into developing your own personal style and voice? How long did it take you to reach that point? How long did it take before you became fully comfortable with your final, published output on the page?

KERSCHBAUM: This a tough question because I've never really consciously tried to draw with a certain look or style. I just keep drawing until it looks done. By nature, I'm a bit of a nitpicker and for good or bad, I think that's reflected in the art (and the writing, I guess). Just recently, I had a couple of experiences where someone commented on some aspect of the way I draw like, "Oh, yeah, I know your stuff, you draw everybody with big overbites!" And I had to think for a second before realizing, "Oh yeah! I guess I do!"

CLOUGH: Do you ever revisit old works?

KERSCHBAUM: I rarely revisit past projects. I have to re-read the mini-comics whenever I make a new batch (y'know, to check the page order). There are a few things that them make me smile but mostly, I find it difficult to look at old stuff. It usually takes me so long to finish a comic, I've already looked at it and read it dozens of times. So once it's done - I'm done. I must admit I'm enjoying flipping through the new Petey & Pussy book. I think Jacob Covey did a great job with the design – it's a fun little package.

CLOUGH: Dissecting what makes something funny is sort of like killing the goose that laid the golden egg, but here goes: How do you decide to layer the jokes in your strips? Some of your strips provide information that leads up to an ultimate punchline, while others deliver smaller punchlines in each panel. Others, like Timberdoodle, do both.

KERSCHBAUM: I'm not sure I have an answer for this either. There's no science to it that I'm aware of. I mean, there might be… but I don't give it much thought. I just write and rewrite stuff until it makes sense. The jokes kind of write themselves. My immediate goals when I write are, 1. Make it funny; Pack in as many gags as I can. This is probably due to that part of my personality that makes me crosshatch the hell out of everything. And, 2. Challenge the reader; force them to pay attention and maybe turn back a couple pages to check and see if they really saw what they think they saw. I like a punchline or ending that changes all of the previous jokes, sheds new light on them and makes them funny again only in a new way. It's also why I hope people can re-read my comics and laugh at a joke they missed the first time.

CLOUGH: There's often a tension in your strips between subtle and over- the-top. A strip with a lot of violence will often carry a punchline that needs to be carefully deciphered by the observant reader. Do you worry that some of your punchlines will go over inobservant readers' heads?

KERSCHBAUM: Yeah, I worry sometimes, but what can you do? Some people won't get it, some will get it and not like it. It's not everyone's cup of tea.


Tools

CLOUGH: Have you always used that intense cross-hatched style? How long does it take you to finish the average comics page?

KERSCHBAUM: I think it's grown more intense over the years but that wasn't a conscious decision. I just draw until it looks done. It's hard to say how long an "average comics page" takes. I don't generally work on one page start to finish. I've always followed a basic routine with comics. I begin with my penciling, and I roughly layout the whole book. I then go back and ink all the lettering and word balloons. I go through the whole book and tighten up the rough pencil drawings. I use a lot of tracing paper to draw and re-draw stuff and place it in the panel exactly where I want it. If there's a lot going on in a panel, I'll often draw all of the elements separately on tracing paper and then transfer each one to the panel. It's sort of like setting a stage, if that makes sense. After that I do the majority of the inking – all the major stuff. Then I erase any pencil peeking through, go back to the beginning again and do all the crosshatching and fill in the solid blacks if there are any. Lastly, I do all the whiting out and correcting. I use a lot of white-out. It's a time-consuming process that I increasingly feel the need to streamline and simplify. I'm having trouble doing that though.


CLOUGH: What do you draw with, in terms of pencils, pens, brushes, etc?

KERSCHBAUM: All sorts of stuff, rapidographs, brushes, etc. but I do most of the inking with a regular old Pigma Micron. I go through them quickly because I have a tendency to break the points coaxing a slight thick and thin out of the line.

I use a quality watercolor brush (size 0 or 1) to do my whiting out. My white-out of choice is Pelikan graphic white, which I always have a hard time finding. It's not great for inking over but that's not such an issue for me (large mistakes I usually patch over and redraw). I use the white-out to draw with. This particular one flows nicely off the brush (when mixed to the right consistency) and is really opaque even when it's thinned down.


CLOUGH: I've always liked your use of color--there's a dense, saturated quality to your hues. How long have you been working with color, and how did you develop your palette?

KERSCHBAUM: Thanks. Funny, this is something I feel I've always struggled with – seems like my color palette is all over the place. Most of my coloring is done in Photoshop these days. I used to use watercolors to paint, but since I never really learned the proper techniques it always was a bit of a crap shoot.


CLOUGH: In your illustration program in college, did you learn other art techniques? Print-making, photography, sculpture, etc? What impact did learning these other techniques have on your aesthetic and career as an artist?

KERSCHBAUM: I took intros to photography and printmaking. I didn't take to either really – too much process. Too many rules and ways to screw up. In printmaking, I was a few shy of the required finished assignments so I actually made a mini-comic as a sort of make-up assignment. I passed the class – barely. I think the teacher would have preferred I had silkscreened it rather than run it off on a Xerox machine…


The Works Themselves

CLOUGH: Building on that last question, can you go into how you developed the ultimate punchlines for your minicomic "Dumb Cluck" and your story from the Wind anthology (Bries)? The former forces the reader to very carefully examine what is being said and how you subvert their immediate expectations, while the latter relies on a subtle but prominent visual cue to explain the ultimate punchline.

KERSCHBAUM: I'm afraid it's hard for me to recall exactly the origins of either of these stories. But I remember for the Wind anthology, I wanted to do a story that wasn't obviously about the wind. Maybe even make the casual reader wonder, "How's that about the wind?!?" But it is - it's all about the wind.

With Dumb Cluck, I set out to create something for kids because they always come up to your table at a convention and most of what I had was inappropriate. So I just set out to do a little riff on a typical kids story. The only other thing I can recall about it is that it came to me very quickly. I wrote, paced, and drew it very quickly without any rewriting, something quite unusual for me. One other interesting thing about Dumb Cluck – at least to me – is that kids always seem to get it right away and adults do not.

CLOUGH: You've done a lot of commercial work over the years. How much do you enjoy working for Nickelodeon, DC Comics, Dolphin Log Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, etc? These strips seem very much "you", even if it was for another entity.

KERSCHBAUM: I've been fortunate to have some fun clients. Nick Magazine, Klutz Books, and DC are great to work with - the assignments are always rewarding and challenging. Most clients want the stuff to be "you". Hopefully, that's why they hired you. But again, ultimately, you do whatever the client asks you to do.

CLOUGH: Your "Shock of Recognition" strip for the Comics Journal Special edition has one of your best punchlines and best uses of subverting expectations. Have you always enjoyed drawing/reading violent humor? What do you like to give your comics such a sense of viscerality? Is it your intent to shock while provoking laughter?

KERSCHBAUM: This strip isn't even that old and I can't remember how I came to it. I know I struggled with the assignment initially because I wasn't sure I'd ever experienced a "shock of recognition." I generally shy away from writing about myself. I'm pretty sure the ending just came to me and then I worked out the pacing and set-up. Even though it's obviously a fictional story, it ended up being a fair dramatization of my "a-ha" moment.

I think I've always found that type of humor funny. I strongly suspect there is a close connection between fear and laughter in the brain. I remember seeing An American Werewolf in London and thinking how cool it was. It had me laughing one second and cringing the next, then it would have you doing both at the same time. The funny bits in that movie made the scary bits scarier and vice versa.

CLOUGH: Another thing I've noticed in your work is that you love to contrast word and image, with one undermining the other for comedic effect. Your "Cartoonist Anonymous" strip is one long series of self-deprecatory jokes merged with blowhard text, while "Little Billy Blumpkin" matches up fairy tale-text about a snail speeding away with panel after panel of a snail barely moving. What is it about subverting reader expectations that appeals to you as a humorist?

KERSCHBAUM: Yeah, this is just a gimmick, I suppose. I think there's something funny about saying or implying one thing and then blatantly doing or showing another. The contradiction creates a tension that, hopefully, you can generate some laughs out of.

CLOUGH: I've always looked forward to seeing your Christmas-themed comics. "Snowballs" shows us what a snowman looks like naked, "The Snowman" tells us why a snowman needs a scarf, and the snowman evolution panel you did was brilliant in its simplicity of design. Do you enjoy doing holiday-specific jokes?

KERSCHBAUM: I enjoy sending homemade cards or mini-comics to friends for the holidays. Most of my friends and family don't see a lot of the work I do, so the feedback I get from them is always interesting. I've even had some ask me to stop sending them.The evolution of a snowman card is one of those things that came to me in a flash. I was convinced that I must have seen it somewhere, forgot about it, and then remembered it as if I thought it up. So I spent a lot of time looking for it and asking friends if they'd seen it before (thus ruining the gag for them when they got it in the mail).

CLOUGH: For whom did you do IF NEW YORK CITY WAS THE WORLD? Was it a syndicated strip first, or did you pitch it as a book?

KERSCHBAUM: As I mentioned earlier, they ran in a very small Manhattan weekly called the Chelsea Clinton News (named after the NYC neighborhoods, not the ex-president's daughter.) I don't know how that came about, but I recall that all the editors there hated it and weren't shy about letting me know when I dropped off the strip. At the time, I had done illustration work for Carol Publishing. I think I had met the art director there, Steven Brower, at United Media. He liked my work and offered to pitch it at the next editorial meeting. That was a huge break!

CLOUGH: You’ve mentioned a few times about editors, friends or readers complaining about your work? What kind of effect does this have on you? Does it make you glad that you at least get some kind of reaction?

KERSCHBAUM: It’s not really a big deal. With the editors at the Chelsea Clinton News, they were old-timers who didn’t like the way my strip was soiling their newspaper. When introduced to one editor for the first time, I reached out to shake his hand and he just said, “Oh, it’s you.” I’m still friends with the guy I sent the dirty Christmas comic to. Still, it is nice that my comics always get some kind of reaction!

The Wiggly Reader

CLOUGH: You were an early Xeric grant recipient. What kind of impact did this have on you in terms of encouraging you to keep making comics?

KERSCHBAUM: Although I was doing well with my illustration, I was having trouble finding anyone interested in my comics or cartooning. The few magazines that would run my gags had either ceased publication or changed editors. I couldn't find a publisher for my longer comics, either. Kitchen Sink Press tried to publish a trade paperback of a comic I did about a family reunion, but as luck would have it, it was solicited at the same time DC killed Superman and they couldn't sell it. A friend and previous Xeric recipient, Stephen Blue, suggested I give it a shot. All in all, it was a great experience, and I seriously doubt I'd be doing comics today if not for it.

CLOUGH: What inspired the astoundingly demented and detailed Abraham Lincoln cover on TWR #2? Do you enjoy creating these finely-detailed scenes with all sorts of "eye-pops" in them?

KERSCHBAUM: Again, the original inspiration for this escapes me. I have always enjoyed working on large, crowded scenes. When I was in elementary school I used to tape 18 x 24 pieces of drawing paper together and draw these huge panoramic scenes. One time, I did a prehistoric landscape filled with dinosaurs and cavemen in little scenes with jokes and gags and I also remember doing a cut-away of the Starship Enterprise showing all the decks and inner workings with the crew running about.

CLOUGH: You really seem to enjoy the humor of cruelty. City Guy/Country Guy, where the title characters are killed off early in the story but are further humiliated even in death, seems to be an example of the way you use cruelty as a form of commentary. That's also true of the story about the dancing robots who get separated, torn into bits and then almost reunited the in most banal way possible. How often do you see yourself as a commentator on our culture and society? What sort of issues do you think humor is best equipped to take on?

KERSCHBAUM: My humor can be cruel. I hate to blame it on my ancestry, but I'm of German descent and I think it may just be innate. That schadenfreude thing.

I'm not trying to comment on culture or society, at least not intentionally. There may be some other psychological reason for that particular bent, but I'm not all that concerned with it. Sometimes a poke in the eye is just a poke in the eye. In fact, I'd generally say that I shy away from making political statements or such in my work. Believe it or not, I'm not looking to offend people or stir up controversy – I prefer my cruelty to be more generic, more random… which is not to say that humor can't be used to address societal ills or whatever. As far as I'm concerned, in the right time and place, nothing is really taboo.

CLOUGH: Your humor matches absurdism with horror on occasion. For example, the strip about the woman finding 2 exact copies of her husband making love, only to find that one is a gigantic lawn beetle masquerading as her husband, is perhaps the single-most disturbing and hilarious series of images I've ever seen. What was your thought process in creating that strip? Were you out to horrify as much (or even more) as you were to amuse?

KERSCHBAUM: This goes back to what I said about American Werewolf in London – that close relationship between scary and funny. When I wrote that strip, I was intentionally trying to be silly and absurd one minute and unnerving or gross the next. But it's all just silliness.

CLOUGH: Your characters often have what Sammy Harkham describes as a "falsely wholesome" appearance to them. They're cartoony and easy to look at, but you rarely rely on "funny drawings" to create laughs. Why is this?

KERSCHBAUM: Well I actually do try and draw "funny" some times, you're probably just not noticing it! But you're right, I don't do it often. I can tell you that when I do have occasion to review old work, it's those "funny" drawings that make me cringe the most. I don't think I'm very successful at it; I avoid it and try to mine the humor elsewhere.

In general, it’s hard for me to track back to how and why I thought something was a funny idea. It’s not something I really think about as part of my creative process. Also, the process or inspiration doesn’t work the same way every time.

Petey and Pussy

CLOUGH: This cat and dog pair seems to have really captured your imagination over the past few years. What inspired their design, with balding human heads on top of very-anatomically accurate bodies?

KERSCHBAUM: In the late 90s, a friend got me an interview with an editor who was in charge of re-launching some major cartoon monthly – like MAD or Cracked – I can't recall the name. Anyway, I met with the editor and he liked my stuff and offered me two bits of advice. First, he said it would be in my own best interest to do recurring characters as all the work would be creator-owned (I assume he meant that if you got lucky and the characters caught on, you'd have a chance to cash in.) Second, he said, "No people with animal heads, I HATE that shit!" or something along those lines. So I went home and sorta cheekily did the opposite. He ended up liking it, but the magazine never happened.

With regard to their "anatomically-correct bodies," it just makes me laugh. People see real dog and cat asses every day and no one thinks twice. Show them a drawing of one and they're repulsed, or giggle, or both.

CLOUGH: The long strip in your new Petey & Pussy book is your longest sustained narrative to date. How did you balance the demands of a longer story with the demands of being a gag cartoonist? Did you feel this story was a sort of summing-up or combination of everything you've done before in terms of gag-style and techniques?

KERSCHBAUM: I wrote that story in bits and pieces over the course of several years. I then peppered it with little jokes and gags that I'd also collected over the years in notes and sketchbooks. Then I rewrote it making sure it flowed and there was a strong story arc and point to it all. When I was done, it was nearly twice as long as it ended up in the final book. At the time, I knew I would never be able to finish something that long - I didn't have the time or the energy. So I edited it to the bare bones. As it ends up, it still took almost four years to draw and ink.

CLOUGH: How long had you been working on this longer story? When did Fantagraphics pick it up?

KERSCHBAUM: When it was almost done, I sent it to some publishers. Surprisingly, a few were interested. It took me a long time to figure out what to do. In fact, I shelved it, finished, for nearly another year before going with Fantagraphics.

Other Projects

CLOUGH: You've been somewhat absent from the comics scene for the past few years after steadily putting out a new mini-comic every year. Has it been difficult to balance your life as a commercial illustrator with your own work?

KERSCHBAUM: It has of late. But generally, it's not hard. Illustration work tends, for me anyway, to come in spurts, so there's always a little down time.

CLOUGH: Can you talk about the project you've been working on for the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the past four years? Do you see that as a culmination of sorts for your hyper-detailed style of illustration, with every corner packed with small visual or verbal puns, that you've done for others over the years?

KERSCHBAUM: A while back I did an illustration for a puzzle in Nick Magazine. It was the interior of an art museum that was actually a maze. I asked the Met if they would be interested in doing something similar. They were planning to redo their kids/family map and wanted to know what I had in mind. So I proposed, basically, a "Where's Waldo" type picture search using the Museum. So I've spent the past four years researching and photographing the Museum and a making a poster of it. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into. The Museum is just an amazing place - it's alive. Not only do they move, rotate and change the art around, I would visit and swear that the walls had moved too! Although the drawing is dense, when I look at it I just think of all the really cool stuff I didn't have room for or missed entirely. But I did the best I could. The way I look at it, it needs to hold up to repeated viewings. If the Met wants to use this for years and years – and I want them to – people have to be able to spot something they didn't see the last time they looked; just like a visit to the Museum itself. I'm very close to being done – the Museum has been very patient but they want it for the upcoming holiday season and I'm very anxious to see what the response will be. I'm also a little nervous. I've been working on it for so long now that I'm not sure what I'm going to do when it's finished.

CLOUGH: What are you reading these days?

KERSCHBAUM: Funny. I think I read more comics now than I did as a kid.

I start every day by reading the newspaper strip Monty online. Jim Meddick is a good friend, but it's the funniest damn strip. In fact, he won a Reuben for it this year. I've recently started following Richard Thompson's strip, Cul De Sac, too.

I'm reading the old Peanuts reprints. I'm a few volumes behind but they're nice books. I love how mean the strips can be!

I recently enjoyed Mike Dawson's Freddie & Me. There's a brief section about how he remembers things that I thought was revealing and insightful. But it's all good and beautifully drawn.

Alex Robinson's latest, Too Cool To Be Forgotten, was a great read. I think it's his best book to date and that's saying something.

I got the complete Don Martin last Christmas and haven't finished it yet. There's so much of his early work I was unfamiliar with - I had no idea! And, oddly, the stuff that I'd seen before seems different to me now after not having seen it in so long… but I can't really describe how.

Kevin Huizenga's work is fascinating - I get everything he puts out. I also enjoy the Leon Beyond feature he does with Dan Zettwoch.

I've only read one issue of Dungeon by Lewis Trondheim. But I plan to get more of those. Great story. Great art. Very funny.

And I'm a big fan of Bob Fingerman's work. It is so well-crafted and beautifully drawn. I always wanted to be able to draw like him.

I don't get to the comics store that often, but when I do I like to pick up anything new by T. Millionaire, J. Ryan, M. Kupperman, Kaz, Tony Consiglio and Steve Weissman. They're always guaranteed to be quality, funny books.


CLOUGH: What impact have shows like SPX and MOCCA had on your career? Do you feel like part of a community when you attend these shows?

KERSCHBAUM: I enjoy these shows. They can be a bit exhausting even though you're mainly just sitting there. Over the years, I've met some fantastic people there and made some great friends. It's an opportunity to talk shop with talented folks.

Peter Bagge: The Modern-Day Mencken?

Rob reviews the new collection of Peter Bagge's strips from REASON magazine: EVERYBODY IS STUPID EXCEPT FOR ME AND OTHER ASTUTE OBSERVATIONS (Fantagraphics).



Peter Bagge rose to fame in the 80s and 90s by creating HATE, the classic slacker comic that uncannily anticipated trend after trend in music and youth culture. It's still as funny as ever, primarily because the cultural touchstones were always less important than its cast of characters, led by Bagge stand-in Buddy Bradley. Bagge always said that Buddy was him, minus about ten years. So while Bagge was getting married and starting a family, Buddy was still single and dealing with weird roommates, crazy girlfriends and "working" for a living. Nowadays, Buddy is married and has a kid--though his life is far from normal. Bagge has always been a prolific writer apart from HATE, and his more personal strips revealed that he's really a big ol' square. He loves the Beach Boys, hates live rock shows, admires Britney Spears & the Spice Girls and hates hipsters.



Bagge is also a libertarian and has been crafting strips about free speech and limited government issues for a decade. Given that that decade was during the GW Bush administration, one that saw both out-of-control spending and increasing limits on personal liberties, Bagge certainly had a lot of material to work with. Libertarians tend to hammer home the same themes, often in a less-than-practical or humane manner, but Bagge for the most part manages to stay an engaged (if partisan) observer when he goes on his field reports. That's really what separates these pieces from the random ravings of a political blog: Bagge actually goes to political conventions, gun shows, protests, "swingers" conventions and rides on Amtrak. He talks to people, seeks to understand their points of view (even when he finds them horrifying) and isn't a blind devotee (as the strip where he comes to grips with libertarian star Ron Paul's past racist statements).



While Bagge makes no pretense of ever being a neutral observer, his best strips are those that put the people he talks to front and center rather than his own opinions. The weakest long piece in the book is "'Real' 'Art'", which is one long gripefest about modern art and his own experience in art school couched in some rhetoric about funding such programs. On the other hand, his campaign trail pieces, the articles about hypocrisy with regard to the war on drugs and sex, and funding boondoggles like light rail & sports stadiums. Perhaps the most even-handed and thought-provoking piece in the book was "Bums", wherein Bagge not only provides a lot of information about the reasons people become homeless but also interviews a number of the chronically homeless. Throughout the book, Bagge makes even the dryest of subjects palatable with his hyper-exaggerated line, rubbery figures with looping arms & legs and just-plain-funny drawings.



When Bagge does get really personal, as opposed to biased, that produced a number of great strips as well. "Malls" actually persuasively argues in favor of big shopping malls as places for people who aren't hipsters to spend time, like teenaged girls (who won't get hassled as much), the elderly, the infirm, etc. He also notes that pedestrian-oriented downtown shopping often features hassles with parking and the homeless, and is happy that malls threw him out as a teenager, as "keeping out the riff-raff is what makes malls worth going to!" The bluntly-titled "Amtrak Sucks" makes loaded but persuasive arguments about why Amtrak is a waste of time and money. As someone who frequently endured trains that were 12 hours late and for prices that seemed astonishingly high for the level of service performed, I found myself nodding along to Bagge's hyperbole.

Overall, the longer pieces are fairer and funnier than the shorter strips, which use strawman arguments and are generally a bit more unfair. I like that he was quite willing to take shots at the left as well as the right--though honestly, the Bush era gave him many more targets. The title of this book is quite revealing: Bagge savages his targets not out of partisan fervor, but rather because he finds them stupid, hypocritical and small. Like H.L. Mencken, Bagge favors a scorched-earth satirical attack, tearing down arguments by ridicule as much as reason. Unlike Mencken, Bagge's work is more playful and less likely to attempt to install himself as a know-it-all (even if he thinks he does) because of his nebbishy self-portrayal. Bagge is anything but an intrepid reporter, crumbling under the rhetorical styles of politicians or getting freaked out by weirdos. He admits to getting even with mean-spirited cartoons later, with their bite perhaps inversely proportionate to how meek and mild he was with his subjects in person. Admitting this out loud goes a long way to putting the reader squarely in his corner even if one doesn't quite agree with his beliefs.

It's rare to see a cartoonist branch out into this kind of second act of a career with this much flourish and skill. No one would have ever thought of Bagge as a political cartoonist or cartoonist/journalist before he started publishing with REASON, yet his work here demands a reader's attention every bit as much as the more famous editorial cartoonists in America. While Bagge is no Joe Sacco, it's still exciting to see a cartoonist put that much time and effort into crafting a piece around a subject that is meaningful to them. Best of all, Bagge is still funny. One may find some of the laughs unfair or even shooting fish in a barrel, but his total commitment to entertainment supercedes his political agenda, and this is a very good thing for both his hardcore fans and new readers alike.

Short Reviews: Jo Dery, Sleazy Slice, Grady Klein

Short takes on a few works: QUIETLY SURE--LIKE THE KEEPER OF A GREAT SECRET, by Jo Dery; SLEAZY SLICE #3, edited by Robin Bougie; and THE LOST COLONY VOL 3, by Grady Klein.


QUIETLY SURE--LIKE THE KEEPER OF A GREAT SECRET, by Jo Dery. This is another beautiful book from Little Otsu: well-crafted, well-designed and lovely to look at. Dery's art has a slightly immersive quality (not unlike Theo Ellsworth's approach) but also makes the reader look at the page perhaps more than read it. There's a loose narrative about a series of creatures searching for meaning or solutions to their woes, all of which wind up eventually crossing over into each other. There are actually some quite clever narrative touches to be found that coalesce after a couple of readings that evoke a certain wistfulness. Dery has the rare skill of being able to modulate the story's emotional content purely through her use of decorative flourishes. A shadow here, a lonely tree there and a set of background designs all serve to move the reader's feelings rather than just one's eye. This is a book about seeking what's missing in one's life: sight, a true home, knowledge, and how finding them is sometimes a matter of letting them find you. This is a book that in many ways is incredibly slight and manipulative by turns, yet is ultimately redeemed by an almost palpable sincerity that matches the artist's skill.



SLEAZY SLICE #3, edited by Robin Bougie. It's a Robin Bougie-led project, which means three things: 1) It will be impeccably drawn, with an emphasis on detailed linework; 2) It will have lots of sex; 3) It will be incredibly violent. Bougie's "Human Cows" gleefully shatters any number of taboos with this story of women used to pump milk to feed to cows in a world where cows are dying and the rich still need meat. Like most of the stories in this comic, there's a real bleakness and cynicism regarding sex and human relations. The brutal ending of this story reminded me a bit of what the Marquis DeSade used to do in his stories, but the upbeat Bougie still manages a nod and a wink in acknowledging the source material for this particular kink. Josh Simmons' "Cockbone" is no less brutal a story, but is filtered through his own surreal sensibility. Simmons creates worlds with his story that run on dark magic and dream logic as much as they do on rationality. He especially loves to play out twisted, hillbilly family dynamics in the form of a Candide-like innocent forced to run a gauntlet of misery. The story I enjoyed most was husband-wife team SCAR's "Wild Bessi", a bizarre and hilarious mix of wild west tropes and pornapocalyptic weirdness. A man on the run in the wild west encounters all sorts of weird and dangerous sex-related creatures: cowgirls who are part cow and part girl, centaur women with multiple genitalia, sex-crazed horses, dickworms, etc. It's the funniest story in the book, in large part because it plays it straight. Like most of the things Bougie publishes, the audience for this one is largely self-selecting: one look, and you'll know whether or not it's for you.



THE LOST COLONY, VOLUME 3, by Grady Klein. I hadn't read the first two volumes of this series and was prepared to be baffled and/or disinterested. Klein is also an animator by trade and it shows in his exaggerated character design, thickness of line and dependence on color for storytelling. When I often see a comic done by an animator, it's usually too slick-looking for my eyes to latch onto. I didn't find that to be the case with Klein's work, however, in part because of the eccentricity of his characters and the surprisingly dark story that he tells here. It's sort of like BONE meets NAT TURNER in this comic, dealing with a mysterious, hidden land teeming with secrets that happens to be a haven for escaped slaves, mystics and other outsiders. Like BONE, the central character is an innocent with a strong will who has some unusual connections to her home. However, the racial tensions in the story are always simmering and come to a head at the end of this story.

Klein pulls it off because of the way he positions Birdy, the little girl who is central to the story. Like most of the story's protagonists, she is not entirely sympathetic as a character, even though her heart's in the right place. She has a certain Dennis the Menace quality to her, especially when Klein draws her flitting all over the landscape in a single panel, as though she had clones of herself. The last connection to BONE is actually a connection to Jeff Smith's twin inspirations of Walt Kelly & Carl Barks. Like Kelly, the island swampland is its own character of sorts, informing the lives of every character. Like Barks, there's a constant propulsiveness to the cartooning, especially with regard to Birdy but with other characters as well. Klein transcends his influences with his own unique mythology and grounding of the fantasy elements of the story in history.

Adrian Tomine: Old and New

Reviewed are two recent re-releases from Drawn & Quarterly by Adrian Tomine: a new edition of 32 STORIES (a collection of the original OPTIC NERVE minicomics) and a paperback edition of SHORTCOMINGS (his most recent work).

It was a pleasure to compare the early and latest strips from Adrian Tomine, whose sheer ambition as a writer is a wonder to behold. In many ways, Tomine is the epitome of the neurotic, self-conscious, loner cartoonist stereotype. It's why so many comics fans give him so much grief: he takes himself and his work very seriously, making him an easy target for mockery. There's also the charge that he writes too much about the lives of so-called "hipsters" and/or too-obvious character stand-ins for himself, dipping into self-indulgence. I find these charges to be nonsensical, given that most of his strips featuring thinly-disguised stand-in characters are brutally self-deprecatory. None of his stories do anything to glorify the lives of hipsters. Indeed, what Tomine is the master of is distancing character from reader. Like his biggest influence, Dan Clowes, Tomine actively creates antipathy between reader and protagonist. He plays this antipathy for acidic laughs, especially in SHORTCOMINGS. Tomine's constant flattening of affect (both in word and image) creates a weird tension on the page where lust, guilt and jealousy are bubbling under. His greatest skill is making the reader want to read a story where virtually every character is awful yet totally believable.

Tomine's work is about authenticity and the way people desperately avoid authentic speech and action. The artist's eye and pen are harsh judges of inauthentic action, especially in himself. That shows in his harsh assessment of 32 STORIES, a new edition of his minicomic version of OPTIC NERVE. Tomine goes into great detail as to his reluctance to have this material reprinted because of its rawness, but relented if it could be reprinted in its original format. He didn't pretend that this approach was any less self-aggrandizing (coming in a fancy box and even featuring the Optic Nerve sticker from #4), but he did think it was a more honest approach--warts 'n all. Tomine's demolition of his own author's statement from 1995 is hilarious, as he calls himself out for copying Dan Clowes and David Mazzucchelli, being vain and having no sense of humor about himself. To that end, he reprinted an embarrassing photo of himself from his high school yearbook that someone tried to humiliate him with on the web a few years ago.

What stands out about these seven minicomics was his astounding ambition as an artist at a very young age, having published the first when he was sixteen. His earliest strips were crude but bursting with energy, dealing with small and often brutal moments. While the sort of emotional distancing that Tomine would make his trademark was present, these stories frequently had a visceral quality that would fade as his line became more sophisticated. They felt a bit like Tomine going through his R.Crumb/Julie Doucet underground phase. Still, his early autobio was frequently hilarious, especially when he started grappling with the idea of reporting "truth" in these stories. Early on, it became quite clear that, like many authors, Tomine revealed more of his true self through fictional characters than his own autobio persona.

Indeed, that latter persona was as deliberate and artificial a creation as any of his fictional characters. His character Amy was a combination of extrapolating the life of someone he saw at a bookstore and his own yearnings as a loner. His own self-caricature had an appropriately blank expression, his eyes always obscured by his glasses. That figure was an apt representation of the impotence he felt in expressing his rage; "Adrian Quits His Job" featured him apparently screaming at his own boss, his face dissolving in a bit of Ralph Steadman-esque scribble, until we see that such an expression of anger was simply a fantasy.



The fifth issue saw him start to move into his mature style, and the sixth issue featured two significant stories in "Smoke" and "Leather Jacket"--distilled but restrained expressions of despair and freedom with regard to relationships. The seventh and last issue saw him go into full-on Clowes mode in terms of both line and narrative style, but the best story was "Happy Anniversary", the kind of examination of a doomed relationship that would become Tomine's trademark.



Fast-forwarding to SHORTCOMINGS, we find Tomine's line and voice honed to a razor's edge. By this time, he had shed the slickness that had started to infect his work around the time of OPTIC NERVE #7, simplying and clarifying it while at the same time adding a level of sophistication in his character expressiveness and understanding of gesture and body language. Indeed, a big part of the storytelling in this book consists of body language belying actual speech, especially on the part of the putative protagonist of the book, Ben Tanaka. The story finds the stuck-in-his-ways Ben taking his girlfriend Miko for granted and not-so-secretly pining for sexual encounters with white women--his forbidden fruit.



The character of Ben is an obvious Tomine stand-in (they even share the same allergies down to olive bark), but it's a stand-in that feels almost like self-flagellation--or perhaps self-exorcism. It's a character that's a mass of insecurity, self-hatred, wheel-spinning and paranoia. His intelligence and lack of tolerance for fakeness in others (especially with regard to race) is constantly undermined by his relentless negativity and blindness to his own hypocrisy. With Tanaka, we get a character who engages in arguments with his girlfriend that have an almost painful verisimilitude, gets off hilarious and vicious one-liners but winds up being the butt of a particularly nasty joke, courtesy of fate.



The central conflict of the book is really Ben's conflict with himself and lack of willingness to embrace or even approach change. He doesn't want his girlfriend to explore her racial identity; he doesn't want his best friend to move to New York; he doesn't want to think about why he's managing a movie theatre instead of taking a hard look at his life. He not only doesn't want to think about the mire that his life has become, he wants everyone in it to stay mired with him. It's not til he comes to the final punchline of the book that he faces up to this fact, not allowing his best friend to speak ill of his now ex-girlfriend, saying "We all have our reasons".



What makes this book more than just a nuanced look at the end of a relationship is Tomine's fearless handling of race. He zeroes in on stereotypes, forbidden fantasies and desires publicly denied. Tomine plays these for awkward, uncomfortable laughs in brilliant scene after brilliant scene. His control both over his line and over character dialogue & interaction gives his comics a powerful tension between restraint and boiling-over passions. SHORTCOMINGS is proof positive that Tomine found his voice as one of the best naturalistic, slice-of-life cartoonists in comics. He's not a brilliant formalist, but rather sticks to his strengths and has refined them to a level that make every page and panel pleasurable to simply look at without reading dialogue.