Heavy Hitters, Part 2: Thurber, May

Men's Feelings #2, by Ted May (Revival House). May's sardonic strips about men and men's culture are always hilariously dead-on, whether they stray into absurdity or border on the poignant. His loose, cartoony line is a big part of his appeal, as what appears to be a plain, no-frills style works because of subtle flourishes, steady expressiveness, and a flat approach that creates a deadpan effect for much of the book's humor. "Reflections", for example (the book's opener), features a man shaving--one of the manliest of activities. When he looks into a mirror and sees three faces staring at him (somehow, companies can install one-way glass in people's homes that sometimes gets revealed as there being a secret room there), the man goes into the fetal position on the floor. It's a fantastic gag to start off the issue, as May dials up and down absurdity, poignancy and pettiness in equal measure.

As to the latter, "Connecting Flight" is a good example. A man who hates flying looks on his neighbor, wearing too much perfume, with contempt. It's not until he dismisses her musical taste out of hand, thinking "Nothing we could possibly have in common", and he sees an Abba best of collection, that he thinks, "I stand corrected." Once again, May takes the piss out of this guy's aggro attitude and diffuses with a less-than-macho musical selection. "Lifetime Subscription" is an example of how May's deadpan style and careful pacing crafts a punchline. When a guy asks a drug store clerk for cigarettes and a copy of Alone magazine, there's a bit of awkwardness when she says they don't. Nine panels of walking home, going upstairs and lighting a cigarette later, he says, "I need to develop a better pickup line." May retroactively adds an extra layer of awkwardness as the reader is made to realize that the bizarre nature of the man's request was his attempt at flirting, especially since the tact was so remarkably pathetic in nature.

The silliest strip was "Finally", which starts off with a man on his deathbed being visited by his departed wife to take him to the great beyond, only to get fussy about the appearance of his body and blow his big chance. May has a way of drawing bug-eyed characters (not unlike Steve Ditko) that later have their irises reduced to dots while the rest of their eye still bulges out. It's his shorthand for an extreme reaction, be it anger, disgust or some other negative emotion. "Call Of Duty" is about a younger sibling managing to carry out the instructions of his mother in a highly indirect way, "putting away" some eggs by feeding them directly to his video-game playing brother. It's a funny, almost sweet little episode that reveals a surprising amount of empathy between siblings. Equally funny and more poignant is "You Can Skip This One", which is a sort of shaggy-dog anecdote about a man trying to make friends with his girlfriend's preteen son. The kid is entirely quiet while the guy hopelessly and painfully babbles on, desperate to make some kind of connection. That's the focus of the story as the man then turns to skipping rocks on the nearby lake, trying to teach the technique to the kid (who fails hilariously), only to wind up accidentally committing an act of destruction that ironically elicits precisely the kind of connection he craved. There's are two glorious splash pages in a row that depict the act of destruction, as May finishes the shaggy-dog joke before adding the final punchline. May is so remarkably assured in his pacing and use of expression, creating a naturalistic environment to act as the underpinning of the gag.

The last big piece, "Wait, What?" is a hilarious send-up of sports fandom and sports announcing. A fan sitting in the stands watching the last play of a football game is also listening to the radio commentary at the same time. May perfectly captures the pompous, over-the-top, life and death nature of sports commentary while creating a ridiculously bizarre end to the game, then deflating it at the very end. Finishing up the issue with a kid being made to say his prayers and expressing his hatred for everyone and everything more-or-less sums up the issue.

Art Comic 1-2, by Matthew Thurber. Thurber's sense of humor and approach land with me like few other cartoonists. His combination of intelligence and absurd sense of humor make every comic he does an incisive commentary as well as something I laugh at on nearly every page. With his new series, Thurber turns his attention to his own sphere: the art world. Having worked in New York art galleries for a number of years and attended art school at Cooper Union, it's safe to say that this is a subject that's well in his wheelhouse. What's interesting is that for all his absurdity, Thurber has shown that he uses the same narrative technique in each of his major works. He starts the story in media res, writes short vignettes about a set of characters and then moves on to another vignette involving completely different characters, and then eventually connects all of them up. The main difference this time around is that a number of his characters are actually real people.

It's perhaps a bit cliche' for a cartoonist to do yet another version of "Art School Confidential", poking fun at the more pretentious and pompous aspects of art school. While Thurber gets off plenty of jokes at the art world's expense, this isn't really his project here. Indeed, Thurber has said that he enjoyed art school because he was encouraged to do a number of different things and he managed to avoid the fate that many cartoonists who were scorned by their professors, especially in the 80s and 90s. This comic is much more about the professional art world, which Thurber has noted is entirely run by money, using a number of different takes on satirizing it.

The first issue is set in 1999 and features Cupcake, a student at Cooper Union, being told by a friend that he spotted the artist Matthew Barney on the street. There's a perfect Thurber panel where they run to find him where Thurber contorts Cupcake's body such that his leg appears above his head; it's a delightfully rubbery image. They get a lecture from a clerk at Kim's Video, go to a Turkish bath filled with Vaseline (something Barney actually used), and realize only too late that the attendant at the baths was Barney himself. It sets the tone for the comic: frantic and absurd, but closer to real life than you would expect.

That's certainly true in the second chapter, where there's an art critique. Cupcake gets lectured for yet another Barney-inspired piece (a gingerbread house of the baths filled with Vaseline), but Thurber quickly segues to an art opening, two gate-crashers from "Drunk TV", and the intervention of three little pigs in a brick house smashing into the gallery. From there, Thurber goes rapid-fire with new characters: Ivanhoe, a knight in armor who is aiming to crash the "Miami Basel Art Faire" with his squire/intern Walter, Ivanhoe's object of affection Tiffany Clydesdale, and Jesus Christ emerging from the cube near Union Square and turning the manager of the local Chase bank into a pack of rats before turning the building into a giant ice cream cone that rains down money. There are also two robot handlers whose charges are directed to have sex.

After Thurber threw a lot at the wall to see what would stick in the first issue, he remarkably tightened up the narrative without losing an ounce of energy in the second issue. For example, he went deep into the story of Password, Cupcake's art professor. Initially a disciple of Robert Rauschenberg (depicted as a tyrant who'd smash you in the head with a bottle), he's revealed to be working for a cabal of veteran artists who want him to undermine any potential future competition from art schools. Naturally, when visited by his master, the master turns into a vampire bat and flies out the window, just as a student whose spirits he had crushed was committing suicide. Ivanhoe is revealed to be a classmate of Cupcake's who was hit on the head and learned that his parents had been accidentally killed by a piece of art, launching a crusade of revenge with one goal in mind: destroying art.

In a story about art, Thurber manages to introduce a quest narrative fueled by a desire for revenge and a shadowy cabal with supernatural connections into a story about the hypocritical nature of an art teacher telling his students not to worry about how to make a living. By heightening the absurdity around the edges of the story and using over-the-top elements, Thurber's able to make his points about greed and the art world without lecturing the reader. Indeed, this is a story about multiple characters with different obsessions and the ways in which those obsessions are being constantly thwarted. His character design is hilarious, from the chainmail that Ivanhoe wears, to Tiffany's beret, to the cartoonishly vile face of the vampire bat artist that has the only dense use of spotting blocks and hatching, to the various artists that he caricatures; Thurber's characters always have a rubbery quality that makes them capable of anything. I enjoy the fact that Thurber continues to release work as periodicals, complete with full color covers and letters pages. 

Artists To Seek Out At SPX 2011; High-Low @SPX

I will be at SPX 2011 this year. I'll be hosting a panel on 9/10 at 3:30 in the Brookside Conference Room on "Stories Of Cultural Identity". I'll quote the blurb from the website: "America’s own culture wars are only part of a global struggle with identity, as nations the world over attempt to address the challenges of assimilating multiple cultures within a stable society. Moderator Rob Clough will talk to Jessica Abel (La Perdida), Marguerite Dabaie (The Hookah Girl), Sarah Glidden (How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less) and G. B. Tran (Vietnamerica) about comics that deal with issues of cultural identity." I'm looking forward to it.

As always, I'm happy to review whatever comics cartoonists choose to give me.

Here are ten young artists to seek out at SPX, on the basis of their potential and/or significant debuts at the show. A number of them are up for Ignatz awards. In alphabetical order:

1. Darryl Ayo. Ayo is an Ignatz nominee for Promising New Talent and is someone who has been steeped in comics and comics culture for a long time, even for a cartoonist as young as he. He's become a sharp observer of social mores as well as a mark-maker whose style has begun to coalesce.

2. Pat Barrett. This graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies is one of its best draftsmen and stylists. His Oak & Linden minicomics are well-crafted one-man anthologies, and the actual anthologies he's been a part of (Nymphonomena and Tag Team in particular) are rather good.

3. Marguerite Dabaie. Dabaie is on my panel and has proven to be an interesting young voice with her Hookah Girl comics, which are autobiographical stories about growing up as a Palestinian-American. Dabaie is a fine draftsman with an eye for intricate detail.

4. Mike Dawson. Dawson is one of the more established cartoonists on this list, but his new book Troop 142 debuts at the show and it's his strongest work to date. He'll also be hosting a panel on his Ink Panthers co-host (on ten years since the publication of his first major work, Box Office Poison) that will likely be hilarious. Look for an extensive interview with him (by me) at tcj.com very soon.

5. Lisa Hanawalt. She's one of the top humorists in comics, full stop. I don't know if she'll have anything new, but now is your chance to pick up both issues of her awesomely gross and hilarious series I Want You.

6. Melissa Mendes. This CCS grad has a bright future ahead of her and will get a bit of spotlight with the release of her collected Freddy stories. Mendes' scratchy line and ear for children's dialogue make her comics a wistful pleasure.

7. L.Nichols. Nichols is a talented artist still restlessly searching for her ideal style. Her Jumbly Junkery one-woman anthology comics feature an assortment of diary strips, longer autobio stories, fiction, comics-as-poetry and other experiments. Like the other young cartoonists on this list, she has a relentless work ethic and it shows in her improvement.

8. Laura Terry. Terry's up for an Outstanding Minicomic Ignatz award for Morning Song, a comic I greatly enjoyed. Terry's work has a lyrical quality that complements her interest in formal experimentation quite snugly.

9. Matthew Thurber. Thurber is the genius behind the 1-800-MICE series, which is now done and will debut in its collected form from PictureBox. He'll be on a panel at 1pm on Saturday titled "Drawing The Grotesque".

10. Noah Van Sciver. Van Sciver is another hard-working cartoonist who's gotten better thanks to his willingness to publish everywhere possible. His recent mini The Death of Elijah Lovejoy will likely be one of my top 25 minis of the year. He has a book coming out with Fantagraphics next year, but until then I'd buy up copies of his one-man anthology comic book Blammo.

The Density of Dreams: Sleeper Car and 1-800-MICE

Rob reviews SLEEPER CAR, the new comic by Theo Ellsworth (Secret Acres) and 1-800-MICE #1-3, by Matthew Thurber (PictureBox).

Theo Ellsworth's CAPACITY was one of my favorite books of 2008, one that provided a road map of sorts for his fevered imagination. Many artists have felt the sensation of not really coming up with ideas, but rather acting as a conduit of sorts for ideas that are simply floating out there in the ether. CAPACITY was a series of stories, a description of method, and a warm, personal invitation to share in these ideas. Ellsworth crams an enormous amount of frenetic detail into each panel and page, leaving very little negative space to breathe. He counters what could be an incredibly off-putting reading experience with narrators who talk to and guide the reader, making sense of the page. He's literally laying the composition of each page out for the reader, gently introducing them to his world and visual language. Within a few pages, one is immersed in the style and the nearly vibratory quality of his line and crammed-in details feel normal--all part of the scenery.

With SLEEPER CAR, Ellsworth offers a much shorter comic--almost a palate cleanser for both artist and reader after the exhausting (if exhilarating) trek of CAPACITY. Included are a number of unconnected (other than by general theme) stories about a bet made by robots, an unusual journey by train, the adventures of a dream recorder, how to make a pajama tent and the many faces of the author waiting for a bus. "Sleep Study" is a recapitulation of his work, as an adventurer literally walks through the dreams of a creature and records all of the strange and wonderful things that he sees. That's Ellsworth to a T, simply relating all of the odd things he sees in his mental wanderings that compel him to draw. Ellsworth is very much an artist who writes, with the images driving the story instead of the other way around.

The opening image of two robots having tea in a forest sets "Norman Eight's Left Arm" into motion, a story about a bet about the existence of gnomes between the two automatons. There's nothing Ellsworth enjoys portraying more than journeys--the more convoluted, the better. Here, there's a journey of one robot in his quest to find gnomes and an internal journey from the other robot to keep himself entertained in the meantime. The woods he draws feel like places that are being inhabited, an indication of how real the author clearly feels these places are in his imagination. The story ends with a sight gag after cycling through a number of jokes--yet another palate cleanser of sorts for the reader. "Travel Report" takes a somewhat dimmer view of taking a journey, given its dreadful description of a train ride, yet the protagonist notes that he wanted to travel shortly after he got home. There's a pleasant restlessness to Ellsworth's comics as one senses that he can only hope to transcribe a tiny portion of what he sees in his mind, but that the comics he draws are better than nothing.

I knew little of Matthew Thurber's work (except by reputation) before I read the first three issues of 1-800-MICE, and I was prepared for a stream-of-consciousness narrative with primitivist art (the mark of many PictureBox releases). While the first couple of pages were difficult to parse at first, it quickly became evident that this was a stunning, multilayered story with a deep wellspring of themes and a dizzying array of memorable characters. It's not dream logic like Ellsworth's comics, but what it does instead is present a series of absurd premises and build an iron-clad narrative stemming from them. While there's a primitivist veneer to Thurber's art, his page composition is not only spotless in how easy it is to process, but it also rewards multiple readings as one tries to connect the various unfolding plot threads.


The story revolves around a huge cast of characters in and around Volcano Park, a city built on an active volcano controlled by sentient trees. The main tension of the story revolves around events that are about to happen: a meteor crashing into the city, a banjo contest with sinister consequences, and (most of all) the potential eruption of the volcano. Fatalism and eschatology are two running themes in the comic, as a constant state of dread stalks the characters even as they whir and buzz around their lives. Exploitation, reconciliation and conspiracy are also ideas in play, with the forces of the corrupt and immortal "Banjo Shogunate" conspiring to work against a potential rapproachment between humans and tree-creatures. Even the three members of that cabal work at cross-purposes: one as a gang lord in Los Angeles, one the personification of crazy evil coming down in the meteor, and a third as a sort of omnipresent entity that passes herself off as a force for benevolence.


There's not much point in discussing the plot any further, given that Thurber obviously still has much to reveal and that it's so tightly wound that unraveling it would take the fun out of reading it. Suffice it to say that Thurber is interested in societal roles and how they change (especially in the person of a police officer), the concept of institutions & people being poisoned, the ways in which communication is always a form of intervention no matter how far removed we wish to be (personified in a company that sends mice to deliver messages but not otherwise intervene), and the ways in which we interact with our ecosystems. Thurber isn't afraid to throw in absurd commentary on activism, either--his "Peace Punk" character is a walking pile of scattered activist thoughts and identities. He winds up at a year-long alt-music festival held in a city's sewers and has to dodge a trio of sushi-chef assassins who hilariously have to get minimum wage jobs and listen to a prescribed course of music before they were allowed passage.

While Thurber occasionally dazzles the reader with a densely packed splash page (like the one introducing the reader to the bustle of Volcano Park), he concentrates most of his effort into character design. He favors the slightly grotesque (like the wildly gesticulating Officer Nabb, with a beaklike nose, bulbous pate and pointy ears), the anthropomorphic (like the various mice) or the ridiculous (like his badass sushi chef assassins). In terms of composition, he's all over the place, rarely repeating a panel set-up twice from page to page. He goes from splash pages to 12-panel grids to a page with 4 triangular panels meeting each other, where one has to turn the page around. None of this feels gratuitous; indeed, Thurber has an uncanny sense of meeting the story's needs with the construction of the page. He meets claustrophobic scenes with small panels, disorienting sequences with skewed panels, and grander scenes with much more white space. Some panels are crammed with background details, while intense scenes between characters have a white backdrop. It's Thurber's composition in this regard that makes this such a compelling read. He may want to slowly unveil information in the style of a mystery, but he doesn't want to deliberately confuse the reader. There's always enough information to know what's going on, though I would recommend reading all three issues to date one after the other.

The biggest reason why the comic is successful is that Thurber softens his thematic points with laugh-out-loud gags and absurdism. It's as though Thurber took a few Michael Kupperman-style concepts and spun a deliberate narrative from them. The events may well be grave, but the characters themselves are ridiculous. Despite the crazy conceptual nature of his cast, Thurber has fully-fleshed out backstories for each of them, pulling tighter the threads of the story in unexpected and delightful ways. It seems a bit odd to describe a story this crazed and complex as a page turner, but there's really no other way to say it. When it's over and collected, it will create a huge sensation in the alt-comics world. For now, it's a delightful treasure for fans of comics periodicals.