Catching Up With Jason Martin

Jason Martin is often hailed as one of the best writers in his sphere of comics, which is autobiographical & poetic observations. Indeed, I first became aware of him thanks to Papercutter #17, an issue of the dearly missed anthology that featured a number of different artists interpreting Martin's stories. However, I also greatly admire the spare economy of his line. He's an excellent example of someone with limited talent as a draftsman who nonetheless manages to maximize this with an assured understanding of cartooning itself. His use of gesture and ability to create atmosphere using a simple line make spending time with his gentle, thoughtful, and often amusing observations not only a pleasure, but even nourishing for the reader. 

John Porcellino is an obvious touchstone and influence for Martin, and he acknowledges this fact in one of his stories. However, Martin's Laterborn series is different from Porcellino's King-Cat Comics & Stories, because Martin is a different kind of writer and artist. Porcellino's line is distilled so far down to its essence that it borders on abstraction, yet it doesn't lose any of its expressive power. Martin's line is more rudimentary and earnest, but there's also something pleasant about the way he creates shapes. There's a consistency and intentionality in his visual language that complements his subject matter. While both artists delve into the poetic qualities of anecdotes, Porcellino's writing is often as spare as his line. Martin's eager effusiveness for living informs even the most quotidian of his anecdotes.

Life Lines is his second collection, drawing mostly from his zine series Laterborn and Black Tea. The latter series, he noted in his introduction, was started as a more spontaneous, sloppier attempt at making stories left over from Laterborn. It's a clever way of retaining a certain freshness and liveliness in one's line after the labor of crafting something more elaborate. (Julia Wertz does something similar.) Martin's approach to narrative is interesting, because he retrofits a new narrative onto previously unconnected stories with a unifying theme. The themes are simple, like "Cedar Street," which clearly all seem to take place during the same time period, living in a particular place. No one anecdote stands out, but there's a warmth to them tinged with a slightly bittersweet feeling in retrospect. Some of them are more cohesive narratives, like "First Tour Comix," a document of a tour of a two-man band on the West Coast. Playing live, traveling, meeting other musicians, and trying to find a place to stay are all recalled with fondness. 

The second section, "Changing Gears," is probably the most ambitious set of stories in terms of scope. There's a story about Carolyn Cassady and her old San Francisco house, a touchstone for him given that her book got him into her husband Neal's famous Beat adventures. Another is about visiting a friend at a zen center and the aftermath, and several others are about work encounters with surprising personal outcome. Above all else, Martin seems most interested in stories about connection. The third section hits on stories from his childhood, from being born deaf in one ear to early attempts at making art with others. There's a chapter dedicated to Portland, a city that means as much to him as San Francisco, that includes convention tabling stories, friendships, and the overall vibe of the city. The rest of the book focuses on finely-tuned portraits of people he met, small but meaningful moments, and other places that had significance in his life. There are moments of playful, almost silly humor, but what sets Martin's comics apart is his sense of wonder. 

Martin also included the latest issue of Black Tea (#7), which once again featured stories that both dovetailed into singular & memorable moments and pleasantly emphasized the small joys experienced along the way to those moments. The best was a story about his childhood devotion to Late Night With Conan O'Brien, which eventually led to him getting a last-second seat at a taping. Another story about being a page turner for a piano player for a musical. Here, Martin's attention to the smallest of details in this most minor anecdote is what brought it to life. While the longer collection of his work was enjoyable, Martin's comics are best enjoyed in smaller doses like this, especially with the mix of longer stories and one-page anecdotes and gags. 

Finally, Covers #2 is a comic featuring stories about musicians. What these stories displayed was Martin's ability to distill information into a compelling narrative, even if it's the smallest of anecdotes. In three short stories, Martin zipped off compelling accounts of playing a birthday party gig for Keanu Reeves, one of the band members nearly getting killed during 9/11, and how a legendary guitar brought bandmates Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore together. These moments had little to do with music but everything to do with the life of a musician, and it's understanding that process that makes Martin unique. The same was true in adapting some stories from Mike Watt, especially one about a friend who went to great lengths to help him. The final story, involving an anecdote about an unusual song by Neil Young, was all about music and the process of creation in particular. Martin strips away the glitz and ego and gets down to the art and relationships, and this is emblematic of his work as a whole. 

Moreton Of The Week #5: Garden & Bright Nights

Here are are in week five of my series about Simon Moreton. I'll wrap things up next week and start a new feature in its place.

Garden. Published by Lydstep Lettuce in association with the Lydstep Library, this is a zine done on conventional copy paper that follows the slow progress of a garden over time. It's nice to see Moreton's work on a big canvas, allowing his book loops and swirls room to really expand across a page. Moreton walks a delicate line between a naturalistic take and abstraction here, as certain objects (like watering cans) have a solid composition but others (like chairs and tables) are a bit more abstracted. Moreton flips between single-page images meant to slow the reader down and take in the image in full for a moment and a 2 x 3 panel grid that emphasizes the slowness and sequentiality of the garden, as observed one bit at a time. It's Moreton quietly taking in his environment and not glamorizing it--he's trying to capture an essence in terms of shape and form that emphasizes broad strokes of perception rather than exacting minutia. Moreton is also playing with light and shadow (created through the use of zip-a-tone), as he draws the garden at different times of the day. There's also the relationship between nature and the way it's hemmed in, with as much emphasis on pots and planters as the actual vegetation, as well as an acknowledgment of the background with clothes hanging on a line, flapping in the wind. There's also a record of dark clouds and rain (a favorite of Moreton's to depict), adding a degree of animation to the stillness of the prior scenes. This is a nice, simple form of meditation exercise for Moreton, drawing without narrative expectations but still with some kind of sequential base.

Bright Nights, by Simon Moreton & Jason Martin. This is a shared zine between Moreton and Martin, both looking back at past events from today's vantage point. Each of Moreton's stories is taken from a different year of his life. "Fifteen" sees him and his friends jumping out a window to hang out with some friends on a trip, watching the sun rise. There are a lot of these sorts of moments in his comics that he turns back to again and again: perfect little moments in time, frozen by beauty. There's a perfect balance of negative space and actual drawing in each panel, and Moreton's composition is simply top-notch. It's not just about abstracting a sequence down to its core, it's doing so in a way that makes it look best on a page. "Sixteen" is another perfect, simple moment of walking home in the snow from someone he obviously loved, feeling "Like I could do anything". That kind of spontaneous joy is remarkable, and Moreton knows just how to capture it by sort of capturing just the edges of the experience. "Nineteen" is a flood and flurry of racing down a road as fast as he and his friends can, until arriving at a special hang-out spot. "Thirty" is a lovely reflection of "Fifteen" in some ways, featuring a gathering where he met someone special and a subsequent trip to a mall with her and other friends, forming that awkward, exciting moment of possibilities ahead. It's Moreton at his best.

Martin's style is a simple, naturalistic style that's on the crude side but still gets the job done in terms of expressing emotion. He seemed to take his cues from Moreton in terms of what age he was in the stories he tells. "Gualala" is about him going with friends to a party on Y2K. He notes that even though he was just four years younger than most of the people at the party, that as a teenager that kind of age gap is more significant. The story is full of those unforgettable moments when a teen gets a glimpse of a life just ahead of them. That's especially true when he hears the stories of a group of older girls who give him a ride home from the party. His second story is a brief one from age 16, recalling the first time his parents felt comfortable leaving his older brother in charge of him and his younger brother for a night, and the things they did together. His third memory is that of a huge delay on a train as he was going to a Leonard Cohen concert. It's a perfect Martin story in how sanguine and measured he depicts himself in that situation, and the gratitude he feels at the end of the Cohen show. Every one of these stories has that sense of gratitude, including the final one, where he and his girlfriend crash at a friend's house with two other couples all saying goodnight to one another as they fell asleep.

I also wanted to mention the comic that he gave out at his wedding, Michelle And Jason Comics. It's a funny, lovely little inventory of small anecdotes about his future wife that delighted him, the ways in which they've influenced each other's tastes and interests, times they may have crossed each other's path in the past, the precise moment he knew he wanted to marry her, and a special moment on a carousel. It's simple and heartfelt without being sentimental or saccharine: the perfect blend of restraint and emotion that marks so much of his work.

Shades of Autobio: Baylis, Martin, Runkle

So Buttons #6, by Jonathan Baylis and various artists. This is yet another solid issue of bite-sized anecdotes related by Baylis and rendered by an increasingly-impressive group of collaborators. Fred Hembeck continues to be an ideal artist for Baylis' stories about his time as an intern at Marvel Comics, and printing this story in full color adds to its effectiveness. Baylis has a front-line view of exactly how Marvel treated its most talented creators, and the anecdote here where he chose to give Joe Simon a couple of Golden Age comics that Simon himself did not possess instead of just getting them autographed shows how a fan treated the creators with more compassion than Marvel itself. Baylis made an interesting choice by also running the superb Josh Bayer story "Trimpe Survives", originally printed in black & white in the Rub The Blood anthology broadsheet. Printed in color and on a smaller scale, this story that interpolates a fantasy sequence with Trimpe's real struggle to get work from Marvel in the 90s is in turns profane, poignant and hilarious. It also dovetailed nicely with the first story. "So Begrudgingly" and "So This Is Where I Got It From" (drawn by Sam Spina and T.J. Kirsch, respectively), are the sort of short, gag-oriented strips that Baylis does well. Spina in particular adds exaggerated body language and flopsweat to a story about living well being the best revenge (but tweeting about it not hurting things).

The centerpiece of the issue is "So Basquiat". One of my early criticisms of Baylis' writing, especially with regard to longer, more serious pieces, is that he tended to overwrite. Too much narrative caption text and too little room for the artist to do more other than functionally describe that text was a frequent problem, though not a surprising one for a writer trying to figure out how to write a comic. As Baylis has evolved, he's come to trust his artists more and more; in turn, the artists he's working with are more adept at taking what he's written and transforming it into something visually striking. This suite of three stories works so well because it begins with Baylis' own personal experiences discovering Jean Michel Basquiat, the famous graffiti artist/painter who emerged in the 1980s. Baylis discovered his work through the biopic about his life, which tied into his own unsatisfying experience at NYU film school and that the downtown art scene was not what he had hoped. That segues into a sequence drawn by Becky Hawkins (jammed full of eye-pops) that saw a naive but enthusiastic Baylis take the money he got after being downsized by Topps to go to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain. The cartoony nature of Hawkins' line and the soft use of color was a perfect match for the delightful weirdness of the museum's design, and Baylis let the art do the talking as much as possible while still adding in key expository points that talked more about his emotions than actual events. Victor Kerlow did the first and third segments, and his comparatively, scratchy & dirty line further communicated how much seeing the museum and Basquiat's pieces there affected him as a person, creating a sense of not necessarily relating to him but getting a sense of what they had in common. This story is a true breakthrough for Baylis, and when you tack on the cover by Jay Lynch (combining Topps' imagery with Basquiat's likeness) and a back cover portrait by Noah Van Sciver, you have his strongest issue to date.

Runx Tales #3, by Matt Runkle. Runkle is a fine general-interest storyteller who moves seamlessly from talking about a beloved drug store that closed to weird spots in San Jose to an interview with a beloved author to a series of anecdotes about a couple of ex-lovers. There's something pleasingly crude and beautifully ugly about the way he draws people: bug-eyes, stubble, skewed mouths and slouched, often amorphously drawn bodies. I think the best way to categorize him as a visual essayist, as he eloquently and colorfully spins yarns about things that interest him. His extended essay about seeing Prince on the day that fringe Christian Harold Camping claimed the world would end was jam-packed with interesting bits of trivia that went off on fascinating tangents. It was like reading a personal, emotional version of Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, stripped of its hyperbolic qualities. That was especially true when he segued into discussing the famous Winchester House. The story goes that Mary Winchester, the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, kept on adding to the house in order to appease the ghosts of those killed by the rifles. Runkle goes deeper, discussing Winchester's roots in theosophy and spiritualism but also making note of her innovative architectural concepts.

The interview with author Jincy Willett is also tremendous, combining quotes from her novels, quotes from the interview, a variety of cleverly-composed illustrations and some solid literary criticism. The feature on the bizarre variety store SuperLongs was a bit tougher to swallow because of how esoteric its subject was and how text-heavy the feature turned out to be, but it did give Runkle a chance to draw the interesting objects one could find in there. Finally, "My Two Daddies" finds Runkle literally cutting a horizontal line in the middle of the page to create dual flip-books about two life-changing relationships when he was a "failed rent boy". It's a fascinating look at Runkle coming to terms with a stereotype, dealing with the racial implications of his relationships (he's white, but both of those sugar daddies were African-American), and how injecting money into personal and sexual relationships made things more complicated, not less so. It's a beautiful, haunting and bracingly honest account of his past and just the sort of story that makes him such a sharp writer.

Driftwood City, by Jason Martin. This is a 100-page collection of Martin's Laterborn minicomics series. Martin's comics are all about capturing small, powerful and poignant motions. Above all else, they are about trying to capture particular strong feelings. "Lily, or Save Your Pity" is about being a teen and meeting a girl with whom he had an intense phone-and-letter relationship with for a couple of months. It eventually fizzled out, but Martin really gets at that feeling of going through an experience that has an indelible impact on one's experiences and memories. It's a personality-forming experience. In the first section of the book, "Home", the stories inevitably turn to either brief, funny anecdotes or life-changing experiences or individuals. The strip about his class reciting the lyrics to "The Humpty Dance" to a teacher who inadvertently says the first line of the song is hilarious. "Who Are You" is about a teacher who inspired him to be a better human being, one more empathetic, caring and courageous. Martin himself would downplay this, as some of the strips in the book depict a breakdown of his own moral courage, but there's no question that there's a sense of being more evolved than the average high schooler.

"The College Years" gets at the heart of Martin's stories, which is the relationship between him and his friends. He had the fortune of meeting and cultivating a group of friends that had a nourishing and sustaining effect on his life, and he likewise for them. The strips here are about small moments, shared moments of beauty, funny stories, and the ways in which emotions from grief to joy are felt. It's clear that Martin is powerfully affected by what the philosopher Kant refers to as the "sublime" experience, which is a moment where one is overwhelmed by beauty. The moment can be talked about and around, but the moment itself is beyond descriptive language. Sharing these moments through the poetic language of comics, in a manner similar to John Porcellino, is one of the best ways of attempting to communicate the experience.

Martin's line is crude but functional. He's allowed himself to try to draw less and less in terms of detail and lines, which has made his actual comics look better. Some of his more labored drawings get in the way of understanding the feelings and experiences he's trying to relate, but for the most part his sense of restraint as both writer and illustrator meshes well enough to get across his meaning. That's true in some clever strips, like "The San Joaquin Route" and "Nocturnal Waltz", where his drawings and page design have qualities that affect the narrative. The third section of the book, "Drifting/Nocturnal Waltz" was my favorite because it wasn't tethered to a particular chronological era in his life, but instead allowed him to jump from anecdote to anecdote about traveling, especially traveling with others. The book concludes with Martin once again expressing his devotion to his friends, old and new, and the ways in which they obviously drive and affect his art. This is a deceptively simple and beautifully sincere book with many moments of wry humor and more moments of how wonderful and difficult it is to be alive and interact with others.

Poetics of the Everyday: John Porcellino and Jason Martin

Jason Martin and John Porcellino are two of my favorite autobiographical cartoonists, in part because of the way both take a  poetic approach in talking about their lives. Martin is more likely to use a traditional narrative approach (much like Harvey Pekar), but there's a thoughtfulness to his stories that goes way beyond the simple and the quotidian. Porcellino is often more poetic in describing small events that have a large impact, or the ways in which interacting with his environment can mask his pain. It's almost comforting to see a new issue by either artist.

Laterborn #8 is Martin's latest comic, a year after the superb issue of Papercutter that he wrote and others illustrated. His own style is much cruder and simpler, but he's quite effective in getting across a wide range of emotions with it. This is a flip-cover comic meant to emulate the way a mixtape or album can have dramatically different tones on different sides. I like this idea because it allows form to shape content. "Side A" of this comic contains slightly more light-hearted stories. "Half-Deaf" is about how being born deaf in his right ear has affected Martin over the years, for good and ill. It's a funny but poignant story that reflects on how losing his hearing altogether would have prevented him from being able to hear music, something that is crucial in his life. "Book Reports" and "Secret Origins: I Want To Eat Pizza" both deal with his zine roots. The former is about a junior high teacher who demanded a lot from his students in terms of book reports, including illustrated covers that wound up looking like zines. The latter story is about Martin's college-era revelation of wanting to do a zine with friends. What I found most interesting about this story is how Martin so thoroughly conflated zine-making with playing music, especially in the sense that he thought of zine-making as strictly a collaborative activity. It was something creative and fun to do with friends at that point, not a solitary pursuit.

"Side B" begins with a dark series of anecdotes titled "It's Not Like He Tied Her Up And Other True Stories".. Essentially, these are stories told by others or overheard about horrible things. A woman who spoke little english asked a security guard for direction and he wound up feeling her up; stunned, she said "thank you", which is both awful and hilarious, as noted by the woman herself at the end of the story. People Martin knows experience, in a real and virulent way, homophobia, racism (in a truly disturbing anecdote), sexism, rape, and the desire to rape. At the end, there's a cringe-inducing story about Martin needing to head to the restroom just as a class video was about to air about date rape."Buffalo Blood" is a story about a visceral memory regarding a beloved Scoutmaster who died before Martin could complete an important initiation ritual, rendering that ritual heart-rending when he finally completed it.

"New Year's Day" is partly about Martin's sense of social anxiety and how a kind word by his friend Dylan Williams instantly negated that feeling. It's a beautiful tribute to Williams, whose enthusiasm and openness to others meant a lot to a number of people. "Lightness" feels like the the heart of this comic, and is typical of what I've read by Martin. Martin is someone who closely examines their feelings and memories in an attempt to come to terms with both, but always retains a sense of hope and optimism. It's not an optimism based on self-deception, but rather the hard-earned wisdom of someone who's been through ups and downs. This story connects a period of unemployment and stress with waiting on the new issue of King-Cat to arrive at his local comic shop. Not only does he get the comic, but the cover matches the part of town he had to travel to in order to get a new job! A sense of place is crucial to Martin and becomes part of his emotional background, often acting as scenery to music that's important to him; this is reflected in the second half of the story. There's a meatiness to Martin's stories that remind me of Pekar, an intellectual and emotional curiosity that's as attuned to the thoughts of others as it is to himself.

King-Cat #73 finds John Porcellino in an intellectually curious and roving state, a sign of becoming more settled both in his new Illinois home as well as his position as a cartoonist and publisher. The darker observations of the recent issues have subsided in favor of the sort of close reading of nature that's frequently been at the heart of his work. "In Search Of The Cuckoo Bird" reveals a lot about the author's life while making life events take a back seat to the obsession of the moment: trying to find out what sort of bird he saw at a park. Being a decent amateur birdwatcher, he was stumped by the brief, blurry glimpse he caught of the bird but managed to see it again later after he finally started wearing eyeglasses. Along the way, we see John P reminisce about one of his ex-wives in relation to his obsession with seeing the cuckoo and then lay next to his new girlfriend, his mind free to wander along paths that weren't tortured. The fact that the story ends in uncertainty is fitting, because this is a process story, both in terms of living his life and trying to identify a bird. There's no certainty regarding relationships or happiness, just as trying to identify a bird with limited expertise and corroborating information is a difficult process. I love his drawings in this story, especially the crude and then increasingly sure-handed attempts at drawing the bird he saw.

The rest of the issue is rather light-hearted. There's a story about sneaking in cats to go see The Blue Lagoon, a story about a cat needing to approve his shoelaces, and a dream involving Porcellino as a monk but still in the very confusing and disorienting comics industry. The dream was as lighthearted as these other stories, but masked some of Porcellino's real concerns: how much to commit to the comics industry as personified in his decision (after some hesitation) to "get his hands dirty" in a situation that had a number of downsides. The dream is a testament to Porcellino's new and steadfast attitude regarding comics--he is determined to make them and determined to be one of those people who gets the work of others read. This story and this issue are both a statement of purpose and a celebration of the small moments and the fact that he has time and the opportunity to focus on the small moments. Those opportunities do not entirely ameliorate stress; indeed, in some situations they exacerbate it. Still, there's a buzz of energy that pervades this comic, stretching from the cover image to his "top 40" to the final gag, an energy that still mostly manifests in quiet, contemplative moments but is present nonetheless.