Here are all of the reviews, features and interviews I wrote for TCJ.com in 2011. Note that the website went through a reboot in March of 2011, with articles from prior to that date appearing on the "classic" TCJ site. My favorites from this year include my reviews of Habibi, Gay Genius, The Collected John G Miller, The Heavy Hand and Habitat #2, as well as my feature on Dave Kiersh. I think both of the interviews featured here (Mike Dawson and Mari Naomi) are worth reading.
Papercutter #17, edited by Greg Means 12/21/2011
Gay Genius, edited by Annie Murphy 12/19/2011
Freddy Stories, by Melissa Mendes 11/30/2011
Pope Hats #2, by Ethan Rilly 11/22/2011
Mark Twain's Autobiography, by Michael Kupperman 11/16/2011
Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton 11/11/2011
Habibi, by Craig Thompson 11/4/2011
The Burden of Promise: Fusion and the Comics of Michael DeForge 10/5/2011
Collected John G Miller, 1990-99 9/30/2011
Little Nothings V4, by Lewis Trondheim 9/13/2011
The Mike Dawson Interview 9/8/2011
Americus, by MK Reed & Jonathan Hill 9/2/2011
Too Small To Fail, by Keith Knight 8/25/2011
I Will Bite You!, by Joseph Lambert 8/17/2011
Island of 100000 Graves, by Jason & Fabien Vehlmann 8/8/2011
Huntington, WV 'On The Fly', by Harvey Pekar & Summer McClinton 7/22/2011
Level Up, by Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham 7/18/2011
Sundays 4, Forever Changes, edited by Chuck Forsman 7/8/2011
Lost Boy: The Comics of Dave Kiersh 6/30/2011
The Next Day, by John Porcellino, Paul Peterson, Jason Gilmore 6/28/2011
Willie & Joe: Back Home, by Bill Mauldin 6/18/2011
Dungeon Monstres, Vol 4, by Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar 6/9/2011
The Heavy Hand, by Chris Cilla 6/3/2011
Melvin Monster Volume 3, by John Stanley 5/18/2011
Habitat #2, by Dunja Jankovic 5/6/2011
Top 25 Minis of 2010 5/4/2011
Blammo #7, by Noah Van Sciver 4/28/2011
Approximate Continuum Comics, by Lewis Trondheim 4/15/2011
Eric Reynolds and the End of Mome 4/12/2011
Gazeta, edited by Lisa Mangum 4/8/2011
The Latest From Revival House 3/16/2011
Switching Between Languages: An Interview With MariNaomi 3/15/2011
Lewis and Clark, by Nick Bertozzi. 3/2/2011
Twilight of the Assholes, by Tim Kreider. 2/28/2011
Interiorae #4, by Gabriella Giandella . 2/26/2011
Grotesque #4, by Sergio Ponchionne. 2/23/2011
Niger #3, by Leila Marzocchi. 2/21/2011
Sammy The Mouse #3, by Zak Sally. 2/19/2011
The Broadcast, by Eric Hobbs & Noel Tuazon. 2/16/2011
Comics as Poetry 2: L. Nichols, Malcy Duff 2/14/2011
Comics as Poetry 1: Jason T Miles, Aaron Cockle 2/12/2011
Mineshaft #26 2/9/2011
Minicomics: Candy or Medicine, Dina Kelberman, Kel Crum, Lydia Conklin, Desmond Reed 2/7/2011
Nipper, by Doug Wright 2/5/2011
Solipsistic Pop, Volume 3 2/3/2011
Tubby V 1, by John Stanley 2/2/2011
Nancy V 2, by John Stanley 1/31/2011
Minicomics from Alexis Frederick-Frost, Sean Ford and Noel Freibert 1/29/2011
Curio Cabinet, by John Brodowski 1/28/2011
Scenes From An Impending Marriage, by Adrian Tomine 1/26/2011
Toner by Jonathan Wayshak; Boston Gastronauts, by C. Che Salazar; Negative Too by Phonzie Davis; The Short Term, by Nick Jeffrey; Interview With Delicious Storm, by Si-Yeon Min 1/24/2011
Big Questions #15, by Anders Nilsen 1/22/2011
Berlin #17, by Jason Lutes 1/19/2011
Palookaville #20, by Seth 1/17/2011
Borderland by Dan Archer, World War III Illustrated #41 1/15/2011
Hotwire V 3 1/12/2011
Eden, by Pablo Holmberg 1/10/2011
Minicomics: Sacha Mardou, Kyle Baddeley, Ryan Cecil Smith 1/8/2011
Minicomics: Francois Vigneault, Johnathan Baylis, ES Fletschinger 1/5/2011
The Whale, by Aidan Koch 1/3/2011
1-800-MICE #5, by Matthew Thurber
Showing posts with label nick bertozzi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nick bertozzi. Show all posts
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Sequart Reprints: Peter Conrad, Superior Showcase
I happen to love comics anthologies, in all their beautiful sloppiness. I love panning for gold in them, hoping to get at least one great story even in an anthology that's otherwise a waste of time. I enjoy seeing authors stretched to put something together for a themed anthology, to be put out of their comfort zone either by the length of the story or its theme. In the history of comics, there have been so many significant talents that were discovered in anthologies, so much important history made. I especially enjoy reading minicomics anthologies, as so many artists get their first significant exposure (such as it is) in these venues.
One advantage of self-published, self-constructed minicomics is that the formal and design possibilities are almost limitless. They can become as much art object as a vehicle for delivering narratives. Peter Conrad has done a lot of exploring with both form and design for his comics. His best known was a comic he affixed to a Rubik's Cube, where every twist and turn created different stories. It wasn't just an ingenious idea, it actually made for some good comics, because he took the time to break down every panel and how it might connect to every other panel.
Along these lines, Conrad conceived of an anthology where every artist had to draw their story using their non-dominant hand. I was intrigued by such a severe formal constraint, and it was Conrad's aim to get each artist out of their comfort zone. What was interesting is that a number of similar themes popped up from story to story, including twins, mirrors, and other states of not quite being oneself. Conrad's formal constraint wound up producing a set of stories that fit well together, but was not burdened by the sort of repetitiveness that a thematic constraint often brings.
Highlights from On The Other Hand include Josh Neufeld's "Josh And I", Diana Tamblyn's "Cat Scratch Fever", John Hankiewicz's "Left Side/Right Lung", K. Thor Jensen's "Business Plans", Luciano Cruzado's "Secrets" and most especially Renee French's "Tooth Fairy". Neufeld's story is told from the perspective of his mirror twin, wondering about the odd person he sees in the mirror every day. Using his other hand loosened up his normally fine line considerably, adding a nervous energy that seemed to suit the personality of his mirror self. Tamblyn wrote about a cat whose "bad" paw caused it to get into all sorts of mischief. It seemed a sly way of talking about how difficult it was to work with her "bad" hand. The subject matter of Hankiewicz's story fit right into the rest of his typically cryptic tales, but still meshed nicely with the overall theme. There's his typical sense of foreboding here, about a man who can't sleep on his left side without his right lung causing him agony. Hankiewicz is another artist who normally employs a tight and spare line, which belies the tension beneath. Here, the nervousness and claustrophobia is all on the surface with an almost rubbery quality.
Jensen's story is a bit of autobiography: an embarrassing, drunken night. It's funny and the crudeness of his drawing looks perfect in this context. Cruzado's entry is perhaps the most beautiful-looking piece, suggesting that he may be ambidextrous. Regardless, it's a creepy yet touching account of a young boy finding a roomful of secrets and dreams, where he learns the most important secret of his young life. Finally, there's the insanity that is Renee French. Blessed with some of the best chops in the business, her disturbing-yet-charming style remains intact with her off hand. The story tells us what the Tooth Fairy really looks like, and it's not pretty.
Many of On The Other Hand's stories stayed with me for awhile, which is unusual for an anthology. I think part of that was due to the strength of the writing. While most of the stories clearly showed how much the author struggled to even get them on the page, it was ultimately their themes and execution that made this a memorable experience.
Turning to a thematic constraint, Superior Showcase #1 ($3.95, AdHouse Books) spun out of Chris Pitzer's beautiful Project: Superior anthology. That one was pretty simple: artists told stories about superheroes they way they wanted to. Whether it was superheroes as romance, straight-ahead stories, slice-of-life or humor, the results were at worst amusing and at best quite charming. Showcase is a "regular" comic book that continues the theme, and the three artists featured turn in very different pieces. The ultra-versatile Nick Bertozzi gives us "Super-Mart". In TOP TEN, Alan Moore gave us a city where everyone has superpowers and wears a costume, so that those two things no longer serve to differentiate members of the populace. "Super-Mart" works on a similar level, only with the more mundane setting of a convenience store. Mike Dawson shows us the fate of "Ace-Face", a retired superhero turned college professor. When he decides to stop a brutal vigilante, the real world catches up to him. Finally, Dean Trippe (with John Campbell) brings us a tale of "Butterfly", the son of a Superman-like character. He meets up with a disaffected Robin-like sidekick named Birdie, and they encounter Hipster Ghosts on Halloween.
The stories vary in tone, with Dawson's becoming unexpectedly grim. Trippe's is sweet and frothy, while Bertozzi's is absurd with a healthy helping of smart-ass. The book is aided by a gorgeous Hope Larson cover and publisher Chris Pitzer's impeccable design sense. I like superheroes and enjoy seeing artists put them to uses beyond simple action. What I've enjoyed about Pitzer's vehicles is their sense of fun. Superhero comics are really not very good at dealing with "serious" subjects; the inherent ridiculousness of the genre tends to make attempts at seriousness collapse. This is not to say that one can't do character work in a superhero setting, just that the artist has to have a grasp on the absurdity of that sort of world.
Finally comes, a miniscomics version of Conrad's webstrip Paper Dummy, which Conrad describes as a cross between a blog and a comic strip. What this winds up meaning is that formally, every entry is a comic strip. It's just that Conrad doesn't feel constrained to stick to a particular genre. Some days, it's gags. Other days, it's slice-of-life stories. And on other days, it's just little observations: things he's noticed in nature, or odd things that he's heard. The punchline here is that I'm reviewing a minicomics version of an online comic strip, which of course provides certain constraints of its own: the size of the paper, the order in which I am to read the strips, etc. While there are some web cartoonists who are uninterested in being published in "real" books, there are plenty who happily view the web as a great place to get the kind of daily / weekly / monthly exposure they might get from more traditional (but hard to obtain) means of serialization. After reaching a certain critical mass, they can simply use a service like lulu.com to whip up print-on-demand collections. For artists with more clout, they can cut a deal with either an established comics publisher or even a "real" book publisher; there seem to be more and more of these kinds of deals every day.
Of course, that's a whole 'nother story. Conrad's own contribution has lots of great gags. I especially liked the story about his parents moving to California and him getting them a TiVo and subscription to Wired so as to fit in; staying awake on the road by watching movies in other cars; and a dog reading a book called "Where The Ball Went" in bed. My favorite gag was "That Tingle Means It's Working", depicting a man with his hair on fire. The strips definitely have that sketchbook feel, looking quickly drawn. That aids in their immediacy, but their visual component is not all that compelling. I like a loose style that contains a certain energy, but I also appreciate the craft that goes into honing a line to perfection. The beauty of the online sketchbook is that an artist can do both: draw something every day to keep their skills in practice and get the instant gratification of having the world as an audience; and working on that long-range, slow project that can take years to finish.
One advantage of self-published, self-constructed minicomics is that the formal and design possibilities are almost limitless. They can become as much art object as a vehicle for delivering narratives. Peter Conrad has done a lot of exploring with both form and design for his comics. His best known was a comic he affixed to a Rubik's Cube, where every twist and turn created different stories. It wasn't just an ingenious idea, it actually made for some good comics, because he took the time to break down every panel and how it might connect to every other panel.
Along these lines, Conrad conceived of an anthology where every artist had to draw their story using their non-dominant hand. I was intrigued by such a severe formal constraint, and it was Conrad's aim to get each artist out of their comfort zone. What was interesting is that a number of similar themes popped up from story to story, including twins, mirrors, and other states of not quite being oneself. Conrad's formal constraint wound up producing a set of stories that fit well together, but was not burdened by the sort of repetitiveness that a thematic constraint often brings.
Highlights from On The Other Hand include Josh Neufeld's "Josh And I", Diana Tamblyn's "Cat Scratch Fever", John Hankiewicz's "Left Side/Right Lung", K. Thor Jensen's "Business Plans", Luciano Cruzado's "Secrets" and most especially Renee French's "Tooth Fairy". Neufeld's story is told from the perspective of his mirror twin, wondering about the odd person he sees in the mirror every day. Using his other hand loosened up his normally fine line considerably, adding a nervous energy that seemed to suit the personality of his mirror self. Tamblyn wrote about a cat whose "bad" paw caused it to get into all sorts of mischief. It seemed a sly way of talking about how difficult it was to work with her "bad" hand. The subject matter of Hankiewicz's story fit right into the rest of his typically cryptic tales, but still meshed nicely with the overall theme. There's his typical sense of foreboding here, about a man who can't sleep on his left side without his right lung causing him agony. Hankiewicz is another artist who normally employs a tight and spare line, which belies the tension beneath. Here, the nervousness and claustrophobia is all on the surface with an almost rubbery quality.
Jensen's story is a bit of autobiography: an embarrassing, drunken night. It's funny and the crudeness of his drawing looks perfect in this context. Cruzado's entry is perhaps the most beautiful-looking piece, suggesting that he may be ambidextrous. Regardless, it's a creepy yet touching account of a young boy finding a roomful of secrets and dreams, where he learns the most important secret of his young life. Finally, there's the insanity that is Renee French. Blessed with some of the best chops in the business, her disturbing-yet-charming style remains intact with her off hand. The story tells us what the Tooth Fairy really looks like, and it's not pretty.
Many of On The Other Hand's stories stayed with me for awhile, which is unusual for an anthology. I think part of that was due to the strength of the writing. While most of the stories clearly showed how much the author struggled to even get them on the page, it was ultimately their themes and execution that made this a memorable experience.
The stories vary in tone, with Dawson's becoming unexpectedly grim. Trippe's is sweet and frothy, while Bertozzi's is absurd with a healthy helping of smart-ass. The book is aided by a gorgeous Hope Larson cover and publisher Chris Pitzer's impeccable design sense. I like superheroes and enjoy seeing artists put them to uses beyond simple action. What I've enjoyed about Pitzer's vehicles is their sense of fun. Superhero comics are really not very good at dealing with "serious" subjects; the inherent ridiculousness of the genre tends to make attempts at seriousness collapse. This is not to say that one can't do character work in a superhero setting, just that the artist has to have a grasp on the absurdity of that sort of world.
Finally comes, a miniscomics version of Conrad's webstrip Paper Dummy, which Conrad describes as a cross between a blog and a comic strip. What this winds up meaning is that formally, every entry is a comic strip. It's just that Conrad doesn't feel constrained to stick to a particular genre. Some days, it's gags. Other days, it's slice-of-life stories. And on other days, it's just little observations: things he's noticed in nature, or odd things that he's heard. The punchline here is that I'm reviewing a minicomics version of an online comic strip, which of course provides certain constraints of its own: the size of the paper, the order in which I am to read the strips, etc. While there are some web cartoonists who are uninterested in being published in "real" books, there are plenty who happily view the web as a great place to get the kind of daily / weekly / monthly exposure they might get from more traditional (but hard to obtain) means of serialization. After reaching a certain critical mass, they can simply use a service like lulu.com to whip up print-on-demand collections. For artists with more clout, they can cut a deal with either an established comics publisher or even a "real" book publisher; there seem to be more and more of these kinds of deals every day.
Of course, that's a whole 'nother story. Conrad's own contribution has lots of great gags. I especially liked the story about his parents moving to California and him getting them a TiVo and subscription to Wired so as to fit in; staying awake on the road by watching movies in other cars; and a dog reading a book called "Where The Ball Went" in bed. My favorite gag was "That Tingle Means It's Working", depicting a man with his hair on fire. The strips definitely have that sketchbook feel, looking quickly drawn. That aids in their immediacy, but their visual component is not all that compelling. I like a loose style that contains a certain energy, but I also appreciate the craft that goes into honing a line to perfection. The beauty of the online sketchbook is that an artist can do both: draw something every day to keep their skills in practice and get the instant gratification of having the world as an audience; and working on that long-range, slow project that can take years to finish.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Sequart Reprints: Activate
In the mid-90's, when I started to fully engage the world of alt-comics, some of the first artists I encountered were the KEYHOLE duo of Dean Haspiel & Josh Neufeld. Shortly thereafter, I discovered the comics of Nick Bertozzi, whose development as an artist was rapid and remarkable in how quickly he matured from work to work. In the mid-90's, Haspiel created a livejournal group called ACT-I-VATE, designed to bring together a group of artists serializing their comics on the web. There are now 28 different series on the site in various stages of completion. Some have seen publication in print, and others will even likely get published by a major house. They are certainly an interesting alternative to the sort of thing I'm used to on the web: variations on comics about video games, role-playing games, derivative sci-fi, manga rip-offs, etc. I realize that there are obviously plenty of intelligent strips online, but on first perusal it's like walking into a comics store that is almost entirely mainstream-oriented. I am not interested in reading strips like PvP or Penny Arcade, and I am especially not interested in reading knock-offs of those strips. Having an alternative like ACT-I-VATE (and sites like serializer.net) has been important for both fans of alt-comics and webcomics readers alike.
After a couple of successful years as a livejournal presence, the group now has its own dedicated website. Since the site has expanded so much, with a roster of 24 artists, I'll be taking a periodic look at the site, exploring the work of three artists at a time. I'll start with comics by Haspiel, Neufeld and Bertozzi, those three artists whose work I've been following for a decade.
Let's start with Josh Neufeld's THE VAGABONDS. Using the same title as his occasional series from Alternative Comics, Neufeld spins the same sort of stories we're used to from him: travelogues, meditations on war, disaster and art, and a touch of the absurd. The advantage of seeing his work online is that he gets to use color. Like most of his work, his use of color is subtle--the use of blue & orange for his funny riff on steroids & baseball (imagining the Mets' mascot as a rage-fueled abuser), washed-out greens for a story about Neufeld reacting to seeing a film about Viet Nam, a light & friendly green for a little "travel tips" bit. My favorite of his strips here is "Post-Traumatic Skyscraper Anxiety", a triumph of design and tension. Embodying many New Yorkers' fear of buildings coming down post-9/11, Neufeld cleverly creates a linear narrative with his captions and contrasts that with panel design that is at once meant to be read as a gestalt and as individual panels. It's not a profound or revolutionary observation, but it's heartfelt and well-crafted. Neufeld is mostly working on his A.D.: AFTER THE DELUGE strip at the moment (to be reviewed in a later column), but his contributions here made a great place to start.
Dean Haspiel is serializing a couple of Billy Dogma stories here. IMMORTAL is finished, while FEAR, MY DEAR is still in progress. IMMORTAL is probably the strongest work overall I've seen from him in his long career. Billy is "the last romantic anti-hero" and these comics have always been a blend of superheroics, romance and Haspiel's own eccentricities and beliefs. Billy is Dean's own stand-in, and so these stories have elements of autobiography to them, at least on an emotional & philosophical level. Everything about his work, from dialogue to art, is about as stylized as one can get. The one problem I've always had with his art is that he makes it too slick, too much like a typical mainstream superhero comic. That's especially evident when one compares his rough pencils to final product--it's obvious that the energy and power of those initial sketches doesn't always translate into a final product, robbing it of the visceral quality that is so clearly his aim.
With IMMORTAL, Haspiel let go of that need to over-render and provides a story that still has all of the warmth and oddball humor of a typical Billy Dogma tale but that also packs a punch and a crunch to the reader. The platform for reading it works quite well, providing a single panel at a time but allowing the reader to quickly page through. Haspiel immediately sets the tone with a stark red-and-black palette, extensive use of shadow and silhouette, and a grittiness reminiscent of Will Eisner or Frank Miller (only with much different goals). The story concerns the tumultuous love affair between Billy and his girl Jane Legit and how it awakens an immortal god from outer space. One can see all of Haspiel's many influences at work here (Kirby, Chaykin, Simonson), synthesized to provide an experience that has echoes of each of them yet is straight out of Haspiel's id.
The follow-up series, FEAR, MY DEAR, is just about a third of the way through, so one can't offer a full judgment of it. The story concerns Billy learning that the eighth deadly sin is love and confronting his own past, in what can be called a slam-bang allegory. It lacks the same kind of punch as IMMORTAL and is a bit murkier and talkier. As a reader, I can say that IMMORTAL had me frantically clicking ahead to the next frame but FEAR, MY DEAR feels like a bit more of a slog. There are still plenty of striking visuals and there's still that rawness to his art that was so appealing in IMMORTAL. We'll see how this one develops.
Nick Bertozzi offers up three features, each of which is completely unlike the other. EARNEST SHACKLETON, a story about Antarctic explorers trying to survive a desperate sea voyage, was later printed in the third volume of the anthology SYNCOPATED. This is a fairly naturalistic story that has a certain breathless quality, as Bertozzi adapts a real-life event into comics form.
From a naturalistic style and thrilling adventure, Bertozzi switches over to a highly-mannered, warped tale about anthropomorphic sweets called PECAN SHANDY. The title character is a dreadful, self-centered fop whose font is an affected cursive script. He winds up in a series of misadventures that are mostly caused by his own selfishness, and while he winds up paying a heavy price, he enacts a humorous form of revenge in the end. I don't associate Bertozzi with straight-out humor, but this was a very funny strip, mostly because of his extreme stylization in his art and his use of fairy tale-style pastels.
The most ambitious of Bertozzi's three strips is PERSIMMON CUP, a sci-fi/fantasy/world-building exercise that follows the quest of a creature named Garo and the female creature he loves, named Persimmon. It's a twisted world of pirates who live in rivers, stone monoliths that offer wisdom, traveling inside of other creatures and other assorted oddness. I'm not sure that the web is the best place for this strip, I think that it will flow a bit better on the printed page. I do like Bertozzi's total commitment to his world in his strip, leaving out or muddying exposition and forcing the reader to figure out what's going on. Bertozzi's use of color here is a key element to his story, something that's been true of his work since he had the opportunity to start using color. In my next look at ACT-I-VATE, I'll take a different path and examine the work of three cartoonists I've never read before.
After a couple of successful years as a livejournal presence, the group now has its own dedicated website. Since the site has expanded so much, with a roster of 24 artists, I'll be taking a periodic look at the site, exploring the work of three artists at a time. I'll start with comics by Haspiel, Neufeld and Bertozzi, those three artists whose work I've been following for a decade.
Let's start with Josh Neufeld's THE VAGABONDS. Using the same title as his occasional series from Alternative Comics, Neufeld spins the same sort of stories we're used to from him: travelogues, meditations on war, disaster and art, and a touch of the absurd. The advantage of seeing his work online is that he gets to use color. Like most of his work, his use of color is subtle--the use of blue & orange for his funny riff on steroids & baseball (imagining the Mets' mascot as a rage-fueled abuser), washed-out greens for a story about Neufeld reacting to seeing a film about Viet Nam, a light & friendly green for a little "travel tips" bit. My favorite of his strips here is "Post-Traumatic Skyscraper Anxiety", a triumph of design and tension. Embodying many New Yorkers' fear of buildings coming down post-9/11, Neufeld cleverly creates a linear narrative with his captions and contrasts that with panel design that is at once meant to be read as a gestalt and as individual panels. It's not a profound or revolutionary observation, but it's heartfelt and well-crafted. Neufeld is mostly working on his A.D.: AFTER THE DELUGE strip at the moment (to be reviewed in a later column), but his contributions here made a great place to start.
Dean Haspiel is serializing a couple of Billy Dogma stories here. IMMORTAL is finished, while FEAR, MY DEAR is still in progress. IMMORTAL is probably the strongest work overall I've seen from him in his long career. Billy is "the last romantic anti-hero" and these comics have always been a blend of superheroics, romance and Haspiel's own eccentricities and beliefs. Billy is Dean's own stand-in, and so these stories have elements of autobiography to them, at least on an emotional & philosophical level. Everything about his work, from dialogue to art, is about as stylized as one can get. The one problem I've always had with his art is that he makes it too slick, too much like a typical mainstream superhero comic. That's especially evident when one compares his rough pencils to final product--it's obvious that the energy and power of those initial sketches doesn't always translate into a final product, robbing it of the visceral quality that is so clearly his aim.
With IMMORTAL, Haspiel let go of that need to over-render and provides a story that still has all of the warmth and oddball humor of a typical Billy Dogma tale but that also packs a punch and a crunch to the reader. The platform for reading it works quite well, providing a single panel at a time but allowing the reader to quickly page through. Haspiel immediately sets the tone with a stark red-and-black palette, extensive use of shadow and silhouette, and a grittiness reminiscent of Will Eisner or Frank Miller (only with much different goals). The story concerns the tumultuous love affair between Billy and his girl Jane Legit and how it awakens an immortal god from outer space. One can see all of Haspiel's many influences at work here (Kirby, Chaykin, Simonson), synthesized to provide an experience that has echoes of each of them yet is straight out of Haspiel's id.
The follow-up series, FEAR, MY DEAR, is just about a third of the way through, so one can't offer a full judgment of it. The story concerns Billy learning that the eighth deadly sin is love and confronting his own past, in what can be called a slam-bang allegory. It lacks the same kind of punch as IMMORTAL and is a bit murkier and talkier. As a reader, I can say that IMMORTAL had me frantically clicking ahead to the next frame but FEAR, MY DEAR feels like a bit more of a slog. There are still plenty of striking visuals and there's still that rawness to his art that was so appealing in IMMORTAL. We'll see how this one develops.
Nick Bertozzi offers up three features, each of which is completely unlike the other. EARNEST SHACKLETON, a story about Antarctic explorers trying to survive a desperate sea voyage, was later printed in the third volume of the anthology SYNCOPATED. This is a fairly naturalistic story that has a certain breathless quality, as Bertozzi adapts a real-life event into comics form.
From a naturalistic style and thrilling adventure, Bertozzi switches over to a highly-mannered, warped tale about anthropomorphic sweets called PECAN SHANDY. The title character is a dreadful, self-centered fop whose font is an affected cursive script. He winds up in a series of misadventures that are mostly caused by his own selfishness, and while he winds up paying a heavy price, he enacts a humorous form of revenge in the end. I don't associate Bertozzi with straight-out humor, but this was a very funny strip, mostly because of his extreme stylization in his art and his use of fairy tale-style pastels.
The most ambitious of Bertozzi's three strips is PERSIMMON CUP, a sci-fi/fantasy/world-building exercise that follows the quest of a creature named Garo and the female creature he loves, named Persimmon. It's a twisted world of pirates who live in rivers, stone monoliths that offer wisdom, traveling inside of other creatures and other assorted oddness. I'm not sure that the web is the best place for this strip, I think that it will flow a bit better on the printed page. I do like Bertozzi's total commitment to his world in his strip, leaving out or muddying exposition and forcing the reader to figure out what's going on. Bertozzi's use of color here is a key element to his story, something that's been true of his work since he had the opportunity to start using color. In my next look at ACT-I-VATE, I'll take a different path and examine the work of three cartoonists I've never read before.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Race, Rage & Fatherhood: Stuffed
Rob reviews the new book written by Glenn Eichler and drawn by Nick Bertozzi, STUFFED (First Second).
STUFFED is an interesting book that suffers from a couple of high concepts that didn't quite mesh. The first involves race: issues of assimilation, guilt and the ways in which we dance around both. The second involves fatherhood: in particular, the disconnect between fathers and their children and the ways in which our parents embarrass us. This book plays both ideas for laughs, dipping into humor of discomfort and humiliation. The reason why the combination of these concepts doesn't work is because Eichler doesn't take them far enough.
The basics of the plot involve a mild-mannered man named Tim estranged from his father who inherits a "museum" from his father upon his death. It's a museum of con-man curiousities, including "The Savage"--a stuffed & mounted African wearing ridiculous "jungle" clothing and holding what might be the shaft of a spear. It's a fully upright reminder of exploitation, colonialism and dehumanization. Tim tries to give it to museums and eventually is pointed to a PhD in anthropology who happens to be an African-American man named Howard, trying his best to assimilate in a mostly white environment. Toting the statue around, trying to get various countries to take the statue and the sheer spectacle of the "savage" are all fodder for any number of sight gags. Things take an extra turn for the wacky when Tim's hippy brother is summoned back to town, who then gets into all sorts of mischief. In the end, the "savage" is repatriated, the brothers come to terms with the awfulness of their father, and Howard learns to stand up for himself a bit more amongst his peers.
The big problem with the book is that it doesn't go far enough in any direction. As a character piece, it's all too shallow, predictable and cliched. The character of the hippy brother is especially eye-rolling as he changes his name from one wacky cliche to the next ("Red wolf", then "Free"), and juxtaposing him against his tight-ass brother brings about expected results. Tim's anger buttons are pushed and he simply snaps. Eichler never lets that anger get out of control or even change relationships fundamentally, giving them all a happy ending that seems as pat as it is predictable. The wise and long-suffering wives of Tim and Howard felt like something out of a screenwriter's go-to cliche' bag than fully-developed characters, especially in the scene when they were drinking together and exchanging bon mots.
Thin characterization could have been forgiven if Eichler had gone the Ishmael Reed route and pushed the envelope on the discussion of race. Books like JAPANESE BY SPRING or MUMBO JUMBO are how-to guides on provocation, exposing our cultural guilt, self-hatred and fear and turning it into the most uncomfortable but hilarious of scenarios. The image of the "savage" in Harlem and the discomfort that evoked was one of the funnier scenes from this book, but it seemed as though Eichler didn't want to be too confrontational. He wanted us to like all of the protagonists despite their flaws (though he had no problem playing up the negative aspects of the characters we weren't supposed to like to the hilt), and that watered down the more dangerous aspects of the book that focused on race. The only character who pushed any kind of racial buttons was the hippy, someone clearly depicted as naive and buffoonish. So we're left with humor without enough bite attached to characters who didn't have enough depth.
Through it all, Nick Bertozzi did his best to bring the story to life. He expertly carried the few scenes that depended on social discomfort for their punchlines and was especially adept at making the characters expressive. The way he drew Tim in particular was quite clever, superimposing his father's face on him when he finally blew his top. There were other flourishes, like an exterior shot of the roof of the house coming off when his daughter screamed upon seeing the stuffed man.
There were some funny images and ideas in this book, but they felt watered down and padded in a book-length story. Eichler is a writer known for developing the cartoon DARIA and writing for the Colbert Report, and this book felt like trying to develop a topic discussed in THE W0RD into a full-length story. It also felt like a screenplay try-out, given the plot structure, easily pigeonholed characters and feel-good ending. As genre fiction, it felt flat. As satire, the points it made were all too obvious. It made have made a nice short story or sketch, especially if they focused on the more challenging aspects of the story. Any charm or bite the story had seemed to come more from Bertozzi's pencil than Eichler's word processor.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
