Comics-As-Poetry #9: Inkbrick #3

Alexander Rothman, Paul Tunis and the rest of the Inkbrick gang have been quite busy since I reviewed the first two issues a while back. They've taken on an incredibly difficult task: publishing a journal of comics-as-poetry on a semi-regular basis. Given that it's still a fledgling sub-art form of an art form that itself is still in relative infancy (or perhaps young adulthood by now), finding good candidates can't be easy. There's also the problem of defining just what comics-as-poetry is. Some might include what I would simply call "poetry comics": poems with some illustrations. Such work lacks the interdependence of word and image that poetry comics has, even if making such a distinction is of the "you know it when you see it" kind.

Still, there's no question that even when some issues are a little thin on the best of comics-as-poetry, it's unquestionably true that they still publish the best of the best as well. Anna Grzton's "Gert" is a good example of a great find. In relating this story of his father and an imaginary friend, creating an immersive environment that takes the metaphor of tears cried by peonies falling like diamonds. Rothman continues to grow more daring in his experiments, sticking to concrete imagery (like a bird and a walnut as actors in a play) but more abstract ideas. His images are becoming more abstracted while still retaining some literal roots by using techniques like negative space to create foreground figures and a dense use of colored pencils.

Sabin Cauldron's "Water Damage" was an interesting piece that considers the micro and macro ramifications of a humble kitchen sponge. There's a micro level of the internal structure of the sponge and of bubbles, and the macro level of a hand about to disturb this equilibrium of moisture and dryness. The orange used in the comic adds an alien feeling to the whole thing, down to the shadowy, spidery black fingers reaching for the sponge at the end. Wynn's "Unanswered" uses negative space to talk about identity in the form of one's self-image. In some ways, it seems to be a reference to proprioception, the sense that we know where our body is even when we don't see it. When that sense goes awry, we literally can't feel ourselves. Expanding that idea to identity itself (as opposed to one's position in space) is a clever idea, perfectly suited to comics to quickly explain.

Paul Tunis' matches images to text in a way that doesn't quite jibe. It's not random, but there's a false solidity in the way in which the naturalistic images and the short narrative bursts of text don't contrast in ways that seem very meaningful or interesting. Similarly, the rhyming structure of Laurence & Myra Musgrove's is a big distraction with regard to the simple image of a crow singing about its world. A lot of the artists take a big chance with the visual structure of their pieces, and not all of them are successful. John G. Swogger's "The Shrine" successfully redacts aspects of archaeological drawings to compose a beautiful poem about an abandoned space from all four cardinal directions. On the other hand, Alexey Sokolin's "Panopticon" uses 3D art effects that veer, paradoxically into total abstraction and the uncanny valley effect. It's distracting more than disorienting, and the font used for the lettering doesn't aid the reader in grasping the work.

Other notable contributions include Anthony Cudahy's mixed-media entry "No Eyes", which features drawings and photos of statues from antiquity and obsesses over the way they stare, even when they've been torn out. Catherine Bresner's excerpt from "January 2nd" is also a mixed-media piece reminiscent of Julie Doucet's recent collage work mixed with text. She also took images that look like they came from 1950s and 60s lifestyle magazines and inserted images of dominance, violence and in general elements related to patriarchal oppression. Maelle Doliveux and Alyssa Berg both rely on a sharp use of color and the passage of time in their pieces. Doliveux's is a clever one about a woman with a blossom for a head that slowly wilts over time when her lover leaves and doesn't come back. Berg's strip is rougher, using color to create the crest and fall of an ocean wave and comparing it to the rise and fall of a (presumed) lover's chest. The use of color crosses panel borders as we see two images simultaneously, just as she does.

The two long narratives in the book come from Glynnis Fawkes and the team of Marguerite Van Cook & James Romberger. The former story is a funny one that focuses on Fawkes' established fascination with Greek mythology, as she tells the tale of how she met her future husband as though she were a wild nymph and he was a charming faun, trying to lure her away from her busy life. There's a lushness to her brushwork and use of color that matches the heat of the sexual tension depicted in the book, but there's also that lasting sting of no longer being able to frolic in quite the same way as she did before she and her husband had their sun. Fawkes also expertly depicts that push-pull feeling of loving someone but desperately wanting to retain independence, until the attraction and affection wins out. Van Cook & Romberger's "Perfectly Manicured (To the Bone)" sees Romberger doing a take on the illustration style of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant strip, down to the flourishes selected for lettering. It tells the tale of the garden of dead children, the remnants of war, and horror and exploitation, waiting to bloom again in the wake of disaster. The question is, bloom for good or ill, as a young girl walking through the garden takes one of the "flowers" with her, against the advice of the gardener. It's a fold-out that doubles as a dust cover, and it's a spectacular, beautiful work. It's one of many chances the editor-publishers were willing to take, and it was a success.

Comics-As-Poetry #2: Linen Ovens

Linen Ovens is a 2014 anthology featuring four cartoonists who would continue to carve out interesting paths in comics-as-poetry. Keren Katz, a rising star in the comics world, led off with "A Picture Of Health", a story that features a frequent motif in her work: a narrative thickness that is immersive in the sense that it demands a reader's full attention and a willingness to adhere to the frequently playful, absurd quality of her imagery. At the same time, Katz also uses a lot of negative space in her page design, letting the reader breathe and refocus their gaze on a page-by-page basis. Using colored pencil and a distorted figure composition, Katz weaves a tale about performance, celebration and secrets, as creatures pour from a tree to provide gifts and secrets. The use of color is dazzling and is crucial to moving the eye across the page in the ways in which Katz wants. The story follows the flights of imaginative fancy that follow after attending the ballet, with text that adheres to figures and creeps around the page. The tone is one of strange delight throughout the story, which befits the images.

Molly Brooks' "Selvage" leans heavily on its two-tone effect in addressing memory and place. The dark green of the sweater that's been knitted and its inner fibers is analogous to the narrator's thoughts, plans and dreams unraveling. The flashbacks to the finished sweater and a lover now gone add poignancy to the interminable Now the narrator finds herself in, having lost both a burden and a gift. Andrea Tsurumi's comics always tend to hew closer to light absurdism. In "Hectacle", there's a nursery rhyme cadence to the disparate set of farm-related images and the text that accompanies them, especially the phrase "biscuits and breath". Alexander Rothman's "The Thing In The Wall" is illustrative of one of his main interests: the poetic qualities of brief, quotidian moments. This story is about hearing a sound when one is about to drift off to sleep, a sound that shouldn't be there. It goes beyond simple fear or annoyance and instead follows a different path, as the narrator drifts into a dream (in a beautifully bright image that's a nice contrast to the greyscale of the other pages) and considers the way time is warped by perception, sleep and seasons. He ponders the theoretical existence of the animal he thinks he hears and mourns its theoretical passing in a touching panel where he's leaning up against a wall and the ghost animal is on the other side.

This is a strong, if short, anthology. It's a good forerunner/companion piece to Rothman's Inkbrick anthology and an excellent primer for just how broad a category comics-as-poetry can be. For Katz, it's about the image in itself that creates meaning. For Tsurumi, it's formal juxtaposition. For Brooks, it's poetic and abstract language that is aided by the drawings to help communicate the emotions involved. For Rothman, the images are conventional and the text is descriptive, but their combination is indicative of a place outside time and our conventional understanding of the everyday. It's a great place to start for those new to comics-as-poetry.

Comics-as-Poetry: Rothman, DW, Thomas, Bean

Abzernad, by DW (Hic 'n Hoc). DW's first full-length comic is like a cross between Gary Panter, Will Elder, Jim Woodring and psychedelic art (what he calls "psychedoodles"). Each page is its own puzzling mix of psychedelic wave drawings, scratchily-drawn and slightly amorphous characters, found text impositions, and eye-pops hidden in wave after wave of drawing. There is a kind of narrative carry on from page to page, as the main character is featured interacting with both words and images, but the effect is almost like discovering a series of mysterious cave drawings. Some of the text is random, but much of it obliquely comments on the action on the page, especially the many excerpts for a sort of mask to be worn at night to help with one's skin commenting on the waves of destruction on each page. The comic also has a densely visceral quality, as there are many scenes of cartoonish violence, predation, and other ordeals.  At the end, it feels like the main character (and the reader) have survived a harrowing rite of passage that was as much about the psychological makeup of the main character as it was about its physical presence. It's DW's most ambitious work to date, to be sure, and it coheres in a way that's surprising

Dodo Comics #3, by Grant Thomas. This is an all-abstract comics issue, as Thomas carefully uses panel placement and design as a kind of anchor for the abstract images he places into each one. Much like John Hankiewicz, he uses panels and marks to create a kind of visual rhythm, something that's emphasized by titling each piece as a sonnet or "untitled poem". Thomas especially seems to like rising and falling of lines and splotches from panel to panel, "rhyming" them throughout the piece in a complex and intuitive manner. The reading experience is explicitly shaped by the number of panels and tiers he uses on each page. The first "sonnet" has four tiers with 3/2/3/3 panels on each respective tier; the second page goes 3/3/3/3, the third page 4/4/4/4 and the final page has two tiers going 4/2. That rising and falling of each mage allows one to think of the lines as water, wind or anything that flows. That's even more explicit in the other pieces, where a definite sense of motion is implied from panel to panel, even if that motion is ultimately static. I don't get a sense that Thomas is going after provoking an emotional reaction (despite the use of the nomenclature of poetry), but is rather more interested in a more visceral reaction to the way lines on paper react against other lines and the expectation of the reader for a sequential narrative when we see one panel placed after another. These are explicit abstractions, and what they're abstractions of is entirely up to the reader. That's what makes comics like this so interesting to read.

Watching What You Say, by Alexander Rothman. This is a "versequential" book of comics-as-poetry by Rothman, who very carefully tries to balance word and image off of each other in a series of short, snappy works. Rothman spares no expense in this limited run of minis, using full color for every strip. Some of the poems are narratives: I love the phrase "On the last day of the Great Depression"; it reifies an amorphous historical period in a visceral way as a farmer drowns his no longer utilitarian bees. The story/poem "Still, Small" cycles through a group of people sitting in a church pew, "waiting in a field of quiet fires for a glimpse of the flowering fern". The illustrations here are a bit on the nose with relation to the fantastical, metaphorical language of the text, but they nonetheless get across that anxiousness one feels in trying to connect with the divine. On the other hand, the text for "Muses" hilariously acts against the text, introducing the author both as a kind of monkey and someone who draws inspiration from a certain kind of thought. "Praise Poem" uses a nearly static image of a turtle to depict a quick deceleration and a sense of awe as the narrator runs into it. "Processing" takes some sensitive prose and drives it way over the top with the page-stuffing depictions of a chicken getting gutted. It's not that the images themselves were inappropriate, it's that Rothman unnecessarily lays it on a little thick. All told, there's an enormous amount of potential to be had with Rothman's technique. His best works are those where text and image don't repeat each other, but instead reveal different aspects of the same event in interesting ways, like in "Euglossine Bees". In his work, Rothman is trying to reveal something about how we relate to nature, both intentionally and inevitably. That's an ambitious topic to tackle, and this comic is the result of Rothman experimenting with any number of different methods in getting at that elusive relationship. Some succeed more than others, but he's certainly on to something here.

Gorilla Year #1-2, by Cara Bean. This is an amusing stream-of-consciousness series wherein the author gets involved in a series of gorilla-related situations. In the first issue, Bean writes a short auto-bio strip that basically answers the question of "Why Gorillas?" When in art school, she decided to observe gorillas as part of an animal behavior class, an activity she found comforting in the face of anxiety. It wasn't until years later, when she started making comics, that it occurred to her to incorporate these images into a sequential narrative. The results remind me a bit of the surreal storytelling one sees in an Eric Haven comic: there's a slightly sketchy but naturalistic line telling a story where strange events flow into other strange events. The main character watches a movie starring herself turn into a gorilla, which leads that character to witness Mount Rainier erupt and a giant gorilla emerge. Then we see her back in the audience, where her fellow audience members are squirrels, gorillas, cats or dogs. There's a nice fluidity in the story, as Bean's stand-in is always moving forward, leaning at an angle that keeps the reader's eye propelled along the page. She later gets literally swept up by music, boards a bus that says "Finish Art School" and finds herself surrounded by gorillas. I took these images to mean that she surrounded herself with positive and comforting images and events in the face of doubt, fear and even loneliness. Drawing them in a story is almost a way of summoning these comforting feelings and concretizing them in a way that's funny but still very personally meaningful.

The second issue goes into more depth regarding that tumultuous time in a variety of clever ways that still manage to eschew a lot of standard narrative devices. The first story sees Bean walking through an art museum where all the pieces have narrative captions aimed directly at her. Most of the pieces are scenes of nature, but some include drawings of alcohol, food ("secret sadness snacks") and coffee leading the uncomfortable narrative that essentially zeroes in on her every weakness and attempt to mask those weaknesses. The piece segues into her feeling trapped, as though in a cage, which leads back to the narrative of drawing gorillas becoming a therapeutic method of dealing with the tumult in her life and the fact that she is unable to discuss it with anyone. The next story involves gorillas explicating an essay about conceptual art in her fluid but dynamic style, a juxtaposition that I found amusing. The last pieces in the book deal more directly with her art school difficulties, like being forced to live in her school art studio in secret. It's written in a sort of deadpan, matter-of-fact manner in the present tense, even as her being unable to sleep leads her to become unhinged. There's a great scene where Bean shrinks in size at dinner, beds down with a napkin and kisses the fork goodnight as she falls asleep. It's this kind of whimsy and magical realism that makes so many of her stories so memorable.While her comics have more straightforward narrative trappings than the other comics on this list, there's no question that her use of imagery and the way she juxtaposes it against text act to create an entirely different kind of meaning than either one on their own.