Comics As Poetry #3: Comics As Poetry anthology

The origins of comics-as-poetry go way back to the 1960s, at least in terms of poets incorporating illustrations. The origins of what I call comics-as-poetry go back to the 1990s, with Warren Craghead being one of the earliest exemplars of the genre. I first used the phrase in 2009 to describe John Hankiewicz' Asthma and Tom Neely's The Blot. In 2012, New Modern Press published an anthology by the title of Comics as Poetry, edited by Franklin Einspruch. It's a short but solid introduction to the genre, featuring some of its greatest exemplars.

William Corbett's introduction regrettably references superhero comic books and generally lacks a real point, other than "who knows what the future will bring". Fortunately, the first piece is by Paul K. Tunis, who opens and closes the book with a style that brings a decorative quality to text that is well-integrated with its corresponding imagery. His first poem addresses the plastic quality of words, in the sense where all words sound like nonsense or onomatopoeia if said enough. Contrasting that with cartooning representations of said words adds to the fun, playful exercise that this piece is. His final piece is just as playful, using vivid imagery in his description of a relationship between a man and a woman--a relationship that's somewhere between work, romance and mutual aggravation.

Derik A. Badman's piece is his usual stuff: repurposing the work of old cartoonists (usually from romance or western comics) and adding either his own text or text from a completely different source. It's a kind of shtick, but it's a surprisingly effective shtick in that this juxtaposition really does create a new meaning for both image and text. The melodramatic quality of the figures is "cooled" by text that's frequently oblique, but not random. Einspurch's own piece is what I would call more of an illustrated poem rather than comics-as-poetry in that the text could hang entirely on its own without the use of the watercolors of different kinds of flowers he employs in the poem. It's an amusing poem but just doesn't hang together like the other work in the book, and I think part of that may be that he was a poet before he tried cartooning.

Absolutely no one puts together a page like Warren Craghead does. His nautical piece uses carefully drawn images, scrawled lines, odd uses of spot color, a six-panel grid with no outside edges, images that bleed into each other and text that is attached to images and tumbles across the page. Despite the spareness of the drawings and the extensive use of negative space, Craghead's comics have a thickness to them that takes several readings to truly absorb. Jason Overby's comics are like that as well, only he's not afraid to go much more abstract than Craghead. He also makes extensive use of collage, found images, scribbles and repurposed text as he goes meta in a piece titled "Process Is Poetry", referring to process in creating anything, not just a poem.

Kimball Anderson uses a first-person point of view in her piece about riding in a car through the countryside and losing one's sense of self. Not just ego loss, but that sense of being unable to understand the difference between sleep and consciousness. The art here is mostly naturalistic, but the color scheme gives the piece a strange quality, like a sense of being hyper-real as though one is in a psychedelic state. Julie Delporte's story about OCD/pure obsession and tracing it back to her childhood and a fear of being hated by her parents over something she did related to sex is actually one of the more conventional pieces in the book. The accompanying images are quite straightforward, but it's her extensive use of colored pencil and open-page layout that makes it unlike other comics. Finally, Oliver East's feature employs some of that Craghead minimalism and negative space, but then goes in a different direction by providing small cutaways of walks around gardens, tiny slices of quietude that I found to be remarkably moving.

Comics As Poetry #1: Inaction Comics

This is the first entry in what will be a months-long series on comics-as-poetry. It's a branch of comics that's exploded in recent years, with the results being remarkably varied. A cousin to abstract comics, comics-as-poetry stretches the limits of narrative in comics and explores the different ways words & images can interact in a manner similar to poetry's ability to use words in an intuitive manner to get across a hint of the sublime.

This week's book is Inaction Comics #1: Productivity, edited by Kimball Anderson. It's more than just a clever title; indeed, its premise is a challenge to a fundamental aspect of comics: that it is sequential art, featuring movement and action between panels and pages. The grids and the rhythms of storytelling are all designed to create a fluidity of action that carries the reader along. Anderson goes in a different direction, and the other artists in the book follow along; create a single narrative from a number of different artists that focuses on stillness, inactivity, and quiet. The book is separated into three sections: floating, weighted and balance. One of the running themes of the book is how frenzied and uncontrolled activity is in itself a kind of sickness, or at least an inability to stop and be still. There's virtue in having goals and working hard, but this book examines what happens when work consumes us. At the same time, in one running narrative spearheaded by Anderson, one of the characters is clearly medically disabled, and they have trouble reconciling what they see as a lack of usefulness with their partner's activity.

The Weighted section is the book's most intense, as there's a frenzy of activity but also a period of having to wait before being active, and it's portrayed as agonizing for a certain set of people. For them, as LB Lee shows us, activity is simply an antidote to a fear of being still, of being alone with one's thoughts, as well as being part of bipolar. That's followed up on in the Floating section, where the mania of needing to be in constant motion eases and equilibrium is achieved. In the course of works that vary between stream of consciousness narrative, snapshots of relationships, case studies, and traditional narratives, the very concept of "productivity" is examined and flipped around. There's a strip by L. Nichols that examines the anxiety surrounding "work" and "getting work done", highlighting the fact that being anxious about work interrupts the actual flow of being able to first relax, then focus and finally follow-through. In their strip, as they sit at a drawing table, they finally are persuaded to go on a walk with their dog. In the middle of the walk, they realize the irony that sometimes the act of moving one's body creates a stillness of mind that's impossible to achieve simply by trying to will it into being. Anderson goes even further to suggest that such activity creates erasure of self and meaning.

The book also hints, in the Floating section, that the very concept of productivity in a capitalist society is toxic. It values frenzied activity over thoughtful contemplation, rushing instead of moving, and busyness as a form of self-worth. Susie Oh's strip about the silkworm is a perfect encapsulation of the book's ethos, as the silkworm creates beautiful silk in its own time, at its own pace, in its own way. Frenzied activity is almost incapable of the act of creation. Laurel Lynn Leake's strip is the visceral opposite of this, as the "shame of inaction" is turned inward, until one devours oneself. In this strip, it's a literal self-destruction, a metaphor for the ways in which guilt and self-loathing drive self-destruction. It's an interesting strip because the visual approach of each artist is radically different. Anderson's use of line is spare, as color shapes create the emotional narrative. Nichols uses a single spot color and line, concentrating on close-ups but never showing their face in total. Lee's work is standard pencil and ink, hewing closely to naturalism in a way that's jarring when compared to the rest of the book. Andrew White often works directly with words and shapes, representing the way in which one's vision becomes strained and one's ability to concentrate dims. Leake's art is visceral and terrifying. The overall result is a beautiful, restrained and remarkably cohesive work, despite slipping from the work of one artist to another. The overall effect is as though the reader has been given the rare privilege of seeing how someone else sees the world, feeling what they feel, and understanding their fears and desires. At just over a hundred pages, it moves at a remarkably brisk pace, as the artists found a way of locking in together in an intuitive way. It's poetic and direct, but also offers so many sublime moments of simply being, of inhabiting each strip and understanding, even if only for a moment.

The Poetic Images of Kimball Anderson

Kimball Anderson is a cartoonist experimenting with abstract comics, comics-as-poetry and other interesting techniques for creating offbeat forms of sequential narrative. In particular, Anderson seems interested in juxtaposing dialogue against abstract or shadowy images. For example, I Don't Get It can be interpreted in a few ways. Judging from the dialogue alone, it's about one person trying to evaluate and negotiate his relationships with several other people through a conversation with another friend. The person feels misunderstood, even as they judge the motives and things other people have said to and about them. The dialogue is presented on each page with a number of captions, each one being a blurred series of color splotches. It's like trying to look through a window in the rain, or see your reflection in a dusty mirror. One interpretation of the comic is that this is actually a monologue spoken in front of a mirror; lines like "I just feel like...I'm a reflection of everyone I've ever met" seem to offer that up as a hint. Another take might be that the shapes and colors represent emotions and feelings, and there seems to be something to that as well--the patterns do not feel random.

Hands 1: Objects feels more like a writing exercise/phenomenological investigation. Drawn in a photorealist style in pencil, each drawing of a hand holding a new objects asks questions like "What is it?", "How does it feel?", "Are there memories in it?", "Is it a symbol?" It's a clever concept, especially at the end when the objects are post-it notes containing questions, giving the whole comic a recursive quality. It's phenomenology-as-narrative, as each question is designed to evoke a feeling but also to use the evidence of one's senses to truly consider objects beyond their average, everyday understanding of them. Inside features full-color, cartoony art with an interesting panel design concept. In this story of an extreme agoraphobe told from his point of view, there's not so much a traditional panel-to-panel set of transitions as there as a cascade of images contained in panels, each loosely connected to the patches of text that make up the narrative captions. It is a sympathetic portrait of someone trapped by mental illness, one where the narrator tries to pathologize himself as little as possible and even explore certain creative and comforting aspects of his condition. Anderson's skill is evident in all of these experiments, wisely keeping them all relatively short.

Anderson's full-length "poem comic about not being ready to let go", Okay Okay, combines the narrative and visual elements of their other comics. Instead of speech balloons, there are narrative captions, some of which are dialogue and others of which are told in the third person. The character design is naturalistic on some pages and sketch & cartoony on others. There are single-color washes used on some pages, smaller uses of spot color in some panels and the occasional large color splotch on others that look like water color paint drippings. The resulting atmosphere is dreamy, halfway between creating life on the page and letting the reader know that these are lines and splashes of paint on paper, that it was constructed and built. There's always a sense where the reader and characters alike are being kept off-balance. Characters build up barriers, while others come close to touching but veer away in an asymptotic fashion. Even when some characters touch physically, Anderson points out that this isn't the same as letting them in emotionally. The book follows a twisting, spiraling path around the relationships of several characters, some of which are real and others of which are fantasy. An all-pervasive fear of touch, of allowing one's self to be known by another (in all senses of that term) pervades the book as different characters attempt to cope in a variety of ways, with art being the most obvious response. Anderson suggests that true connection can only occur when one's fantasies and self-deceptions are stripped away, a process that sometimes requires a tremendous leap of faith. That's just what happens at the end of the book, as two seemingly separate stories suddenly merge as two individuals who experienced isolation and connection with different results come together, with a truer path laying ahead of them. Anderson is still in the stage of figuring things out as an artist in terms of style, technique and approach. There is occasionally a labored quality to Anderson's work, and it lacks a certain fluidity at times as a result. That was certainly true in Okay Okay, their most ambitious comic to date, but one senses that the rough patches in the comic (mostly in terms of body language, bodies in space and other spatial issues) are ones that will be smoothed over in time. Kimball Anderson is certainly a promising addition to the small pool of cartoonists specializing in comics-as-poetry, and Anderson's focus on both ontological and social concerns makes these comics especially intriguing.

31 Days of Short Reviews #21: Hellbound #3 and #4

The Boston Comics Roundtable's annual Hellbound anthologies have grown increasingly stylish in presentation. The 2012 edition, "Darkness" starts out especially strong with stories by Janaka Stucky/Josh Wallis and Kimball Anderson. The former, "Blackout", follows a mortician confronted by a group of bodies who start whispering "You are dead but your body is still dying", which leads to a narrative side bar of discussing a sect in India that believes that in order to avoid reincarnation, we must transcend duality by embracing the most depraved of practices. Ultimately, it is hinted that he becomes one of them in a story that varies its visual styles from stark realism to shadowy expressionism. Anderson's "no, he can come" is a frightening but simple story about a young man negotiating a fog; everything he sees is in shadowy gray and black. He is invited to explore an old factory with what he thinks is a group of friends and reluctantly agrees to come along...until he has the chilling realization that he doesn't actually know them. It's a perfectly timed story made all the more effective thanks to its use of grey and black.

Of the other stories, Adrian Rodriguez's "Pedestrian" is silent and spooky in depicting the ways in which abandoned city streets can be terrifying; the Lindsay Moore/Donna Martinez/Joey Peters story "Garbage" effectively subverts the dynamic between the wholesome, perfect schoolgirl and the tough girl who's always in trouble; and the Gregery Miller/Jacob Oley story "Vinshaw" is mostly nonsense in terms of the story, but Oley's delicate and disgusting line art is a genuine pleasure to behold. The worst piece in the book was Jon Clark's "Void", which was less a horror piece than a bit of misogynist torture porn.

On the other, hand, Gulp!, the fourth volume of Hellbound, is an attractive, well-executed anthology that makes the most of its Risograph printing. Every story is scary or funny or both, and the mix of artistic styles makes looking at every story a genuine pleasure. It starts strong with Dan Moynihan's story about kids trying to avoid monsters on the way to getting cookies and Rachel Dukes' story about a ghost cat going from being cute to horrifying as they both grow up. Old Highwater favorites like Jef Czekaj and Greg Cook contribute cute stories in their "cute-brute" style, while Owen Heitmann, John Lechner and Jerel Dye go more in the direction of horror-adventure stories. There are no clunkers in this collection and the editing by Moynihan and Dan Flynn carefully shuffles the stories so as to avoid repeating themes on a story-to-story basis. The duo-tone orange and blue from the Risograph printing adds to the attractiveness of the overall work. This was by far the most skilled set of contributors and the most attractive presentation of stories yet conceived for this series, a trend that I hope continues for 2014.