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 zak sally. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zak sally. Show all posts
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Monday, August 26, 2013
Autoptic and Everything Before in Minneapolis
From Friday 8/16 to Sunday 8/18, Minneapolis was the alt-comics capital of the US. Combining the resources of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), the minds behind PFC and the organizing committee behind Autoptic, comics fans were treated with a true comics arts festival. The focus was on guest of honor Jaime Hernandez, who gave a talk on Friday at MCAD in support of the closing of his exhibit in the MCAD gallery. However, collaboration was the theme of the weekend, as a week's worth of collaborations between North American and European artists was on display on Saturday. All of these artists attended the inaugural Autoptic show. Let's take a closer look at each event.
1. Jaime Hernandez exhibit and talk at MCAD. Friday night was the closing of the Zak Sally-curated exhibition of Jaime Hernandez' work, with the artist himself giving a talk in a packed auditorium. I had an opportunity to go through the show slowly before the crowds arrived. While I've never been a big proponent of comics in galleries, I thought Sally did a fine job in giving interested parties a good reason to study the show closely. Before one entered the main exhibition room, there was a wall dedicated to media coverage about "Los Bros" as well as posters and other ephemera. Sally sensibly arranged the art to reflect Hernandez's evolution as an artist over the years, dividing it into a variety of eras. He was careful to select a few stories here and there and display several pages in sequence, a decision that helped preserve the sequential nature of the work. There were also displays of the original, self-published Love and Rockets #1 and dozens of issues and collections under glass.
Hernandez is known as one of the greatest comics draftsmen in the world, so getting to see original art was fascinating. In the early days, he actually used quite a bit of whiteout. In the pages I saw from the recent story "The Love Bunglers", there was almost none. The real discovery of this exhibit is that Hernandez had a few out-take pages from several stories, including the only extant original art from "Flies On The Ceiling" (the originals were "lost" after being displayed in a gallery). Another outtake from "Jerusalem Crickets" was thrown out because it depicts Hopey writing a letter to Maggie while she's touring; Jaime realized that Hopey simply wasn't the kind of person who writes letters and scrapped the idea. Other pages were simply abandoned after a panel or two. It was also interesting to see him draw a couple of pages and later cannibalize them, combining them into a single page as he switched around or threw away panels. Also on display were a few pages from his scripts, which he continues to write on yellow legal pads. He used to throw them away until someone urged him to keep them. He told me he now has a huge stack of them and doesn't know what to do with them. I suggested he donate them to one of the many universities now collecting comics-related work. He said he's thought about that, but that he's also thought about selling them (he's selling some of his art now).
Stories highlighted in the exhibition include the aforementioned, "Spring 1982", "Home School"; and "The Death of Speedy"; Sally hit the highlights hard. At the end of the exhibition, there were two couches and a bookshelf with various volumes of L&R for readers to peruse. The crowd then streamed into the building's big auditorium on the campus of MCAD. It was standing room only in the hall, with a video feed being piped into the overflow room next door. Sally interviewed Hernandez in his heartfelt, passionate style, and it was clear that the artists had established a clear connection in working together on this project. As Sally enthused later, Hernandez indeed told stories he hadn't heard before. A big focus was on the role of his family in becoming a cartoonist. Jaime talked at length about his mother, who used to collect comics in the 40s and 50s but had to hide them from her own mother. He talked about drawing with his brothers one day, and his mom brought out a stack of drawings she had made of various comic book and comic strip characters. He and his brothers were awed by the fact that she had done this and it became something very cool to them.
He noted that he and his brothers had simply always drawn comics. "It was just what we did. Get up, eat breakfast, draw comics". It was a cheap way to get a bunch of little kids to quiet down for a while. His older brothers did it, so he had to do it too. Sally made a joke about wanting to have introduced the Crumb brothers to the Hernandez brothers. I ran with that idea and asked Jaime about the hierarchy in the family, noting that Charles Crumb was the comics boss of the family and the other two brothers followed along. I wondered if he was ever told to draw a certain way, or if he was told he was doing something wrong. Jaime replied that it was never like that. Instead, it was just a constant sense of excitement from his brothers, but especially Gilbert:. "Hey, let's draw!" There were suggestions about fun things they could draw together but never orders.
Jaime said that during the academic year, comics were frequently forbidden until they got their grades up. When summer rolled around, his mom would take out a huge bag of Archies, Dells, Gold Keys, etc. (Mario's Marvel collection was considered to be "the good stuff" and off-limits for rough re-readings.) Those frequent re-readings refined Jaime's eye and made him realize what excited him. He remembered an issue of Dennis The Menace (most likely drawn by Al Wiseman) where Dennis and Joey walk down a street, having a conversation. This excited young Jaime for reasons he didn't understand, but he started to love the scenes in super-hero comics were they were in civilian clothes instead of the fight scenes. That launched him on his way.
There were any number of other interesting anecdotes as Sally and Hernandez got to the heart of how comics and music were meaningful to them. One common theme to Hernandez talking about his own comics is authenticity; he wants to depict things accurately and honestly. That extends to growing up Mexican-American in Texas and California, to the punk scene in early 80s Los Angeles, to how women think and act, to writing gay and lesbian characters. When I mentioned to him that a mutual cartoonist friend was working as an apartment manager in LA like Maggie, he said that he had run into her and she had told him that story. His main concern: "Did I get it right?" The other interesting theme that emerged about him over the weekend is how important it is to him to be part of the current comics scene. There was a long period where "the phones stopped ringing" and he and Gilbert stopped being hot cartoonists. The show and the reception he got the entire weekend spoke to just how important he is to young fans and cartoonists alike.
2. PFC Exhibition. Coinciding with the Jaime Hernandez show and the Autoptic festival was Pierre Feuille Ciseaux #4, or "Rock Paper Scissors". Organized by the ebullient June Julien Misserey and brought to the US by way of Zak Sally's suggestion, this was a weeklong experimental comics camp that brought together artists from North America and Europe. PFC is all about constraint comics, wherein artists are asked to draw stories given time limits and particular limitations. In one "game", an artist would draw a panel. The next artist would continue the story by drawing a panel above that panel, to the right of the panel and under that panel. The next artist would have to draw five panels, and so on, all the while keeping up the narrative. Another game saw the artists have to draw themselves captured by Wonder Woman's lasso and forced to tell the truth about something. Another game, called "Fuck This Thing" (printed as a free mini) forced each artist to draw the the thing they hated drawing the most until they got sick of it; they got to write "Fuck drawing thing x" as a sort of reward.
The roster of artists included Kevin Huizenga, John Porcellino, Eleanor Davis, Lisa Hanawalt, Genevieve Castree, Jim Rugg, Anders Nilsen, Lilli Carre', Marc Bell, and Tom Kaczynski from the US and Canada. Representing France and Belgium were J.C. Menu, Misserey, David Libens, Max de Radigues, Benoit Pretesille, Domitille Collardey, Eugene Riousse, Sandrine Martin, and Pierre Ferrero. All of these cartoonists have reached their mature style, but all of them are still in their primes. There was a careful balance of styles, from naturalistic to cartoony to minimalist. The artists also collaborated with a group of MCAD students on a number of projects, and the students came up with their own games as well. Something remarkable about this assemblage is that even by Saturday, the last day of PFC, the artists still couldn't stop drawing. A number of professional cartoonists sat in with those stopping by for a public zine/mini making workshop. Lisa Hanawalt and Eleanor Davis made a last-second mini for Autoptic. When I stopped by the main studio on Saturday, the artists were hanging around, helping each spot blacks and make beautiful, accordion-style minicomics.
In speaking to the participating artists, most of them were apprehensive to begin the week. The joke of the situation was that every artist felt like they weren't as good as their neighbor--they couldn't draw as well or as seemingly effortlessly as everyone else. That was true from John Porcellino to Jim Rugg, representing a beautiful and minimalist style to a highly elaborate, detailed line, respectively. Critic Xavier Guilbert discussed how being forced to work with another cartoonist, especially a stranger, was a way of breaking the ice for you. You each had a project to do and had to find solutions together, which naturally led to talking about everything else. Menu noted that artists from both Europe and North America not only have drawing in common, but the common language of storytelling. Even someone like Marc Bell, who works in a kind of dream logic, is working in that common language of narrative. Being forced to engage in these games forced the artists to work in their most spontaneous and natural styles, putting down their purest line before doubt and the need to clean up lines or the urge to choke a drawing to death took over.
The ostensible goal of the week was to create a screenprinted comic. Each artist was asked to pick a character from a list. A North American artist was randomly paired up with a European artist (in most cases), combining their two characters with the theme "Break Something". The screenprinting studio Aesthetic Apparatus printed them and they were cut on site as the artists pitched in with folding and cutting. There are a lot of great collaborations, but the Kevin Huizenga ("The Devil") and Sandrine Martin ("God") was the best, as God was a cartoonist and the Devil kept burning up his work. I also quite enjoyed Eleanor Davis & Max de Radigues doing a Soldier and a Corpse. All of the cartoonists used the sort of rich color screen that popped when screenprinted on thick paper stock.
Another highlight of the day was getting a guided tour to the students' exhibition of their PFC challenges by Barb Schulz, a professor in the comics program at MCAD (I should note that Sally is also a professor there). She talked a bit about particular students and the curriculum for undergraduates. MCAD has offered cartooning as a major since 1997 and they're now up to fifty or so cartooning majors in a school that has about 700 undergraduates. A number of the cartoonists wound up tabling at Autoptic. Mandie Brasington was one interesting artist who runs the Dead Cartoonist's Society, which published an anthology. Dawson Walker is a senior who has serious cartooning chops. Frosh Rosemary Vallero-O'Connell's cartoons for PFC really stood out; despite her lack of publishing experience, it's clear that she has real talent and ambition. I'll have a more detailed MCAD artist report for my High-Low column over at tcj.com soon, once I plow through the pile of minis I got from the cartoonists who tabled at Autoptic.
There was an interesting lightness I observed in the PFC artists as I saw them working. Combining the social aspects of a convention with an environment that demanded actual productivity led to work that was mostly light-hearted and even crude in nature, but there was also a lot of cleverness and truth-telling to be found in the PFC exhibition. The sheer amount of comics they produced was staggering. Even Jaime Hernandez got into the act on Friday night, drawing a couple of images for a Nancy animation and getting in on a couple of games. Lisa Hanawalt naturally started a comic involving a woman's ass, knowing that Jaime was taking part and knowing that he'd "knock it out of the park" when he got to it. (Needless to say, he did.) Porcellino and Misserey both described the week as one of the best of their lives. I imagine a number of the other artists concurred. The lingering memory I'll carry of the day is Porcellino flitting from table to table and room to room, cracking jokes, spotting blacks and whistling Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy".
I'll be curious to see what the future of PFC might be. The last event in France had all sorts of logistical problems, and there was talk that that might have been the last one. Bringing it to the US was a logical move that obviously bore great fruit. I could see the event moving to England for a year, given the now-high concentration of interesting cartoonists there. I could also see it coming back to the US. The Center for Cartoon Studies would be a logical home. SCAD in Savannah might work as well, or perhaps Columbia College in Chicago (Ivan Brunetti would be a total natural in this scenario!). Those institutions might have the money to make this possible. A longshot but interesting possibility might be SAW in Gainesville, which would be fitting because Tom Hart is a longtime OuBaPo participant. This is a worthwhile experiment that foments enthusiasm and productivity, and I hope to see it continue on an annual basis.
3. Autoptic. The show itself was a one-day affair held at the Aria Building, a renovated former warehouse and theater that's now an all-purpose event space. Others have raved about the space for the purposes of this show and I have to agree. The exposed brick, the quirky accents and the airy feel of the place reminded me a bit of the Puck Building in the MOCCA festival's early days. The fact that the show was free combined with a sunny day meant a number of curious passers-by came to take a look, given that the building is in a walkable part of downtown near the Mississippi River. The organizers of the show smartly had a hot dog stand and a food truck set up outside the show, and there were raves about both. There was clearly a great deal of thought that went into any number of decisions related to the show, even as they ran into some last-minute snafus.For example, the programming for the show was supposed to be at Alliance Francaise next door, but there was a mix-up in scheduling on their part that froze out Autoptic after 4pm. So the organizers quickly made a room in the back of Aria into a makeshift programming area. This had mixed results, as the microphones were all hand-held and the ambient noise out in the hall muffled a number of panel members. Luckily, the room was small enough that most information got across.
The show itself was just the right size for a one-day event, with just over a hundred exhibitors. Some of them were printmakers, local radio stations and local independent music labels. A few artists noted that prints seemed to be the biggest sellers in the room. For the most part, the room was still dominated by cartoonists. What I found interesting about the character of this show was that it drew a number of west coast cartoonists who I'd never met who were able to afford a ticket to Minneapolis (and in the case of some, drive there). This show was also a chance for the thriving Minneapolis comics scene to make itself known, especially students and graduates of MCAD. Of course, the American and French PFC artists also tabled at this show and made a big splash. West coast artists on hand included Elijah Brubaker, Rusty Jordan, David King, Greg Means, Tom Neely, and Virginia Paine. There were a number of Chicago artists who made the short trip up, including Sam Sharpe, Laura Park, Keiler Roberts and Marnie Galloway. The locals filled out many of the other spots, including Anna Bongiovanni, Kevin Cannon, Zander Cannon, JP Coovert, Max Mose, Will Dinski, 2D Cloud, Tom Kaczynski, and MCAD students and alumni like Dawson Walker, Leigh Luna, Mandie Brasington, Danielle Chenette, Alexis Cooke, Amara Leipzig, Jay Ragorshek and many others. There were any number of other familiar faces and micropublishers, but seeing that local color in a juried show gave the show an unusually high level of overall quality.
Sales ranged from low to solid. John Porcellino said he did quite well and sold a lot of comics to non-comics readers who were curious, including plenty of his own King Cat series. Annie Koyama also reported good sales despite having nothing new for the show. Having Jaime Hernandez on hand certainly helped Fantagraphics (repped by the tireless Jen Vaughn) move a decent number of books. The total attendance for the day neared 1500, which is about what the defunct Minneapolis Indie Expo (MIX) did in its second year. The low sales were perhaps not surprising give the fact that the show drew in lots of local fans who weren't necessarily sophisticated comics readers. However, even a publisher like Secret Acres, which pretty much took a bath at the show, said that they want to come back if possible when the show is held again in two years because of the show's many other attractive aspects.
I had a strong hand in programming the show's panels after volunteering in the early going. Bill Kartalopoulos suggested doing a Q&A with Menu. I didn't get a chance to see it, but Bill said that the Alliance Francaise had a bottle of white wine on the table and the two of them drained it over the course of an hour, leading to a very relaxed panel. I put together the "Impact and Future of Micropublishing" panel and handed it over to the very capable hands of local writer Greg Hunter, who was also a big help in the A/V department during one of my panels. That panel included Justin Skarhus (2D Cloud), Virginia Paine (Sparkplug), Kartalopoulos (Rebus Books), and Barry Matthews (Secret Acres). Zak Sally moderated a panel on "Independent Culture" that included Koyama, a printmaker and a indy record label producer, while Isaac Cates' "Animals as People" panel had Lisa Hanawalt, Anders Nilsen and Sally.
I moderated two panels. The first, "The Dark Roots of Myth" took an unexpected and personal turn in the early going. Featuring Eleanor Davis, Caitlin Skaalrud, Eamon Espey, Max Mose and Anna Bongiovanni, each artist noted that their frequently dark and fictional comics are rooted in autobiographical concerns. For example, Davis said that she is every one of the characters in her stories, and so conflicts presented are really internal conflicts. Espey said that some of his violent, meat-grinding imagery reflects an unpleasant job he was working at the time. Skaalrud and Bongiovanni both said that comics are a way of working through their own personal issues without having to talk about it at a conscious level. Bongiovanni said that she depicts motherhood and babies in the unusual way that she does as a way of working through her own childhood trauma. Mose works through political issues that burn at him (like the Louisiana oil spill) using monsters and horror so as not to be didactic. All of them mentioned using primal imagery as something direct and easy to understand by a reader and easy to translate as a creator.
The panel was an interesting mix of frivolity and sincerity. After taking up about half the panel with my questions (mostly of the explanatory nature mentioned earlier), I turned it over to Lisa, who had told me she had taken some notes during Jaime's lecture on Friday night. Jaime talked a bit about how embarrassing but true it is that he has a crush on a number of his characters, but especially Maggie, because he "knows" her best. Paradoxically, he puts her through the emotional wringer because he's interested in seeing her display a range of emotions in different situations, but he exclaimed that when he does it, he wants to yell, "I'm with you, Maggie!" He also revealed a couple of simple narrative tricks that were head-slappingly obvious when he talked about them but were things that I had never noticed. Because he knows Maggie, we the reader get full access to her thoughts and feelings, but from the point of view of an outsider. Hopey is a character who is a little more unknowable, and so the reader never gets to see her thought balloons. Ray is a sort of reader substitute so his comics feature first-person narration in captions.
The artists also talked about process, with both Lisa and Domitille both being relieved to hear that Jaime encounters problems he sometimes can't fix when trying to tell a story. Jaime mentioned putting some stories in a drawer and coming back a few months later to see if the problems magically worked themselves out. If not, back in the drawer they go. Lisa described her version of this process as putting her pages in a drawer in order to "let them think about what they did." Lisa and Domitille also talked a bit about Pizza Island, their old studio were all the artists were women, which received some funny publicity as a result. I noted that Pizza Island is the sort of concept that Jaime would have done twenty years ago.
At one point, Jaime suggested that Lisa aim some of the questions meant for him over to Domitille. On cue, Lisa said, "So Domitille, what was it like to grow up as a Mexican-American?" Jaime ended the panel by saying that he was happy to do it to tell the artists how much of a crush he had on their work and to let them know it. Lisa elaborated on a point I made toward the end, in that Jaime is drawing packed rooms and has a lot of younger fans: "Deal with it!"
Regarding Autoptic as a whole: as others have noted, the lighting was too low in some parts of the room, there was no easy access to an ATM, and while the crowd was decent, many of them weren't interested in buying comics. Still, there was a tremendous amount of goodwill in the crowd and affection toward the organizers and volunteers (mostly MCAD students) who tried to solve problems and offer help as quickly as they could. Like the city of Minneapolis itself, the home team wanted the out-of-towners to have a great time and love their city and scene as much as they did. The show and the city certainly made a believer out of me.
4. The Social Scene. I generally tend not to focus on this sort of thing very much in my convention reports, because it's not generally relevant to the show, and no one really cares unless you were there. That said, the kick-off party, held at the CO Exhibitions building that was housing an Anders Nilsen-curated exhibit of the PFC artists, featured cheap PBR and a number of interesting musical/performance art pieces. This is when guests of the show started showing up en masse, and the place was packed and full of nervous energy. After Autoptic, there was an afterparty at a restaurant/bar called the Red Stag Supper Club. While the ambiance and weather were both absolutely perfect, the restaurant was a bit overwhelmed by the crowds of cartoonists and service was spotty as a result. When the hour grew later, the place emptied out of non-cartoonists patrons and a great time was had by all. The evening benefited from the general good vibes of the show, as crowds ebbed and flowed together and artists of multiple generations entertained each other. Goodbyes were long and lingering, and the conversations ranged from serious discussions of art to fall-down laughing anecdotes. I know of at least one editor who got a cartoonist to quickly sign on to his anthology as a result of their conversation. Even though some cartoonists and publishers didn't make a lot of money, the low-key vibe and relatively small size of the show (the juried guest list was top notch) made for an intimate and pleasant weekend for all and struck a powerful claim for the Minneapolis comics scene as one of the most exciting in North America.
Special thanks to the ever-amazing Laura Jent-Clough for taking photographs (all photos taken by her unless otherwise credited). and to Annie Koyama for being Annie Koyama.
The top two pages were cut up and combined into the bottom page for "Spring 1982".
Hernandez is known as one of the greatest comics draftsmen in the world, so getting to see original art was fascinating. In the early days, he actually used quite a bit of whiteout. In the pages I saw from the recent story "The Love Bunglers", there was almost none. The real discovery of this exhibit is that Hernandez had a few out-take pages from several stories, including the only extant original art from "Flies On The Ceiling" (the originals were "lost" after being displayed in a gallery). Another outtake from "Jerusalem Crickets" was thrown out because it depicts Hopey writing a letter to Maggie while she's touring; Jaime realized that Hopey simply wasn't the kind of person who writes letters and scrapped the idea. Other pages were simply abandoned after a panel or two. It was also interesting to see him draw a couple of pages and later cannibalize them, combining them into a single page as he switched around or threw away panels. Also on display were a few pages from his scripts, which he continues to write on yellow legal pads. He used to throw them away until someone urged him to keep them. He told me he now has a huge stack of them and doesn't know what to do with them. I suggested he donate them to one of the many universities now collecting comics-related work. He said he's thought about that, but that he's also thought about selling them (he's selling some of his art now).
Outtake from "Jerusalem Crickets".
Stories highlighted in the exhibition include the aforementioned, "Spring 1982", "Home School"; and "The Death of Speedy"; Sally hit the highlights hard. At the end of the exhibition, there were two couches and a bookshelf with various volumes of L&R for readers to peruse. The crowd then streamed into the building's big auditorium on the campus of MCAD. It was standing room only in the hall, with a video feed being piped into the overflow room next door. Sally interviewed Hernandez in his heartfelt, passionate style, and it was clear that the artists had established a clear connection in working together on this project. As Sally enthused later, Hernandez indeed told stories he hadn't heard before. A big focus was on the role of his family in becoming a cartoonist. Jaime talked at length about his mother, who used to collect comics in the 40s and 50s but had to hide them from her own mother. He talked about drawing with his brothers one day, and his mom brought out a stack of drawings she had made of various comic book and comic strip characters. He and his brothers were awed by the fact that she had done this and it became something very cool to them.
The author in the reading section of the exhibition.
He noted that he and his brothers had simply always drawn comics. "It was just what we did. Get up, eat breakfast, draw comics". It was a cheap way to get a bunch of little kids to quiet down for a while. His older brothers did it, so he had to do it too. Sally made a joke about wanting to have introduced the Crumb brothers to the Hernandez brothers. I ran with that idea and asked Jaime about the hierarchy in the family, noting that Charles Crumb was the comics boss of the family and the other two brothers followed along. I wondered if he was ever told to draw a certain way, or if he was told he was doing something wrong. Jaime replied that it was never like that. Instead, it was just a constant sense of excitement from his brothers, but especially Gilbert:. "Hey, let's draw!" There were suggestions about fun things they could draw together but never orders.
An outtake from "Flies on the Ceiling".
Jaime said that during the academic year, comics were frequently forbidden until they got their grades up. When summer rolled around, his mom would take out a huge bag of Archies, Dells, Gold Keys, etc. (Mario's Marvel collection was considered to be "the good stuff" and off-limits for rough re-readings.) Those frequent re-readings refined Jaime's eye and made him realize what excited him. He remembered an issue of Dennis The Menace (most likely drawn by Al Wiseman) where Dennis and Joey walk down a street, having a conversation. This excited young Jaime for reasons he didn't understand, but he started to love the scenes in super-hero comics were they were in civilian clothes instead of the fight scenes. That launched him on his way.
Zak Sally and Jaime Hernandez. Photo by June Julien Morrisey.
There were any number of other interesting anecdotes as Sally and Hernandez got to the heart of how comics and music were meaningful to them. One common theme to Hernandez talking about his own comics is authenticity; he wants to depict things accurately and honestly. That extends to growing up Mexican-American in Texas and California, to the punk scene in early 80s Los Angeles, to how women think and act, to writing gay and lesbian characters. When I mentioned to him that a mutual cartoonist friend was working as an apartment manager in LA like Maggie, he said that he had run into her and she had told him that story. His main concern: "Did I get it right?" The other interesting theme that emerged about him over the weekend is how important it is to him to be part of the current comics scene. There was a long period where "the phones stopped ringing" and he and Gilbert stopped being hot cartoonists. The show and the reception he got the entire weekend spoke to just how important he is to young fans and cartoonists alike.
2. PFC Exhibition. Coinciding with the Jaime Hernandez show and the Autoptic festival was Pierre Feuille Ciseaux #4, or "Rock Paper Scissors". Organized by the ebullient June Julien Misserey and brought to the US by way of Zak Sally's suggestion, this was a weeklong experimental comics camp that brought together artists from North America and Europe. PFC is all about constraint comics, wherein artists are asked to draw stories given time limits and particular limitations. In one "game", an artist would draw a panel. The next artist would continue the story by drawing a panel above that panel, to the right of the panel and under that panel. The next artist would have to draw five panels, and so on, all the while keeping up the narrative. Another game saw the artists have to draw themselves captured by Wonder Woman's lasso and forced to tell the truth about something. Another game, called "Fuck This Thing" (printed as a free mini) forced each artist to draw the the thing they hated drawing the most until they got sick of it; they got to write "Fuck drawing thing x" as a sort of reward.
The roster of artists included Kevin Huizenga, John Porcellino, Eleanor Davis, Lisa Hanawalt, Genevieve Castree, Jim Rugg, Anders Nilsen, Lilli Carre', Marc Bell, and Tom Kaczynski from the US and Canada. Representing France and Belgium were J.C. Menu, Misserey, David Libens, Max de Radigues, Benoit Pretesille, Domitille Collardey, Eugene Riousse, Sandrine Martin, and Pierre Ferrero. All of these cartoonists have reached their mature style, but all of them are still in their primes. There was a careful balance of styles, from naturalistic to cartoony to minimalist. The artists also collaborated with a group of MCAD students on a number of projects, and the students came up with their own games as well. Something remarkable about this assemblage is that even by Saturday, the last day of PFC, the artists still couldn't stop drawing. A number of professional cartoonists sat in with those stopping by for a public zine/mini making workshop. Lisa Hanawalt and Eleanor Davis made a last-second mini for Autoptic. When I stopped by the main studio on Saturday, the artists were hanging around, helping each spot blacks and make beautiful, accordion-style minicomics.
The Saturday Comics Workshop at MCAD. The author's wife is in the lower left-hand corner. Photo taken from PFC website (presumably by June Misserey).
In speaking to the participating artists, most of them were apprehensive to begin the week. The joke of the situation was that every artist felt like they weren't as good as their neighbor--they couldn't draw as well or as seemingly effortlessly as everyone else. That was true from John Porcellino to Jim Rugg, representing a beautiful and minimalist style to a highly elaborate, detailed line, respectively. Critic Xavier Guilbert discussed how being forced to work with another cartoonist, especially a stranger, was a way of breaking the ice for you. You each had a project to do and had to find solutions together, which naturally led to talking about everything else. Menu noted that artists from both Europe and North America not only have drawing in common, but the common language of storytelling. Even someone like Marc Bell, who works in a kind of dream logic, is working in that common language of narrative. Being forced to engage in these games forced the artists to work in their most spontaneous and natural styles, putting down their purest line before doubt and the need to clean up lines or the urge to choke a drawing to death took over.
The assignment board for "Break Something".
The ostensible goal of the week was to create a screenprinted comic. Each artist was asked to pick a character from a list. A North American artist was randomly paired up with a European artist (in most cases), combining their two characters with the theme "Break Something". The screenprinting studio Aesthetic Apparatus printed them and they were cut on site as the artists pitched in with folding and cutting. There are a lot of great collaborations, but the Kevin Huizenga ("The Devil") and Sandrine Martin ("God") was the best, as God was a cartoonist and the Devil kept burning up his work. I also quite enjoyed Eleanor Davis & Max de Radigues doing a Soldier and a Corpse. All of the cartoonists used the sort of rich color screen that popped when screenprinted on thick paper stock.
Another highlight of the day was getting a guided tour to the students' exhibition of their PFC challenges by Barb Schulz, a professor in the comics program at MCAD (I should note that Sally is also a professor there). She talked a bit about particular students and the curriculum for undergraduates. MCAD has offered cartooning as a major since 1997 and they're now up to fifty or so cartooning majors in a school that has about 700 undergraduates. A number of the cartoonists wound up tabling at Autoptic. Mandie Brasington was one interesting artist who runs the Dead Cartoonist's Society, which published an anthology. Dawson Walker is a senior who has serious cartooning chops. Frosh Rosemary Vallero-O'Connell's cartoons for PFC really stood out; despite her lack of publishing experience, it's clear that she has real talent and ambition. I'll have a more detailed MCAD artist report for my High-Low column over at tcj.com soon, once I plow through the pile of minis I got from the cartoonists who tabled at Autoptic.
L to R: Genevieve Castree, Zak Sally, John Porcellino, Jaime Hernandez, Max de Radigues. Photo by June Julien Misserey.
There was an interesting lightness I observed in the PFC artists as I saw them working. Combining the social aspects of a convention with an environment that demanded actual productivity led to work that was mostly light-hearted and even crude in nature, but there was also a lot of cleverness and truth-telling to be found in the PFC exhibition. The sheer amount of comics they produced was staggering. Even Jaime Hernandez got into the act on Friday night, drawing a couple of images for a Nancy animation and getting in on a couple of games. Lisa Hanawalt naturally started a comic involving a woman's ass, knowing that Jaime was taking part and knowing that he'd "knock it out of the park" when he got to it. (Needless to say, he did.) Porcellino and Misserey both described the week as one of the best of their lives. I imagine a number of the other artists concurred. The lingering memory I'll carry of the day is Porcellino flitting from table to table and room to room, cracking jokes, spotting blacks and whistling Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy".
I'll be curious to see what the future of PFC might be. The last event in France had all sorts of logistical problems, and there was talk that that might have been the last one. Bringing it to the US was a logical move that obviously bore great fruit. I could see the event moving to England for a year, given the now-high concentration of interesting cartoonists there. I could also see it coming back to the US. The Center for Cartoon Studies would be a logical home. SCAD in Savannah might work as well, or perhaps Columbia College in Chicago (Ivan Brunetti would be a total natural in this scenario!). Those institutions might have the money to make this possible. A longshot but interesting possibility might be SAW in Gainesville, which would be fitting because Tom Hart is a longtime OuBaPo participant. This is a worthwhile experiment that foments enthusiasm and productivity, and I hope to see it continue on an annual basis.
The funkiness of the Aria Building.
3. Autoptic. The show itself was a one-day affair held at the Aria Building, a renovated former warehouse and theater that's now an all-purpose event space. Others have raved about the space for the purposes of this show and I have to agree. The exposed brick, the quirky accents and the airy feel of the place reminded me a bit of the Puck Building in the MOCCA festival's early days. The fact that the show was free combined with a sunny day meant a number of curious passers-by came to take a look, given that the building is in a walkable part of downtown near the Mississippi River. The organizers of the show smartly had a hot dog stand and a food truck set up outside the show, and there were raves about both. There was clearly a great deal of thought that went into any number of decisions related to the show, even as they ran into some last-minute snafus.For example, the programming for the show was supposed to be at Alliance Francaise next door, but there was a mix-up in scheduling on their part that froze out Autoptic after 4pm. So the organizers quickly made a room in the back of Aria into a makeshift programming area. This had mixed results, as the microphones were all hand-held and the ambient noise out in the hall muffled a number of panel members. Luckily, the room was small enough that most information got across.
The show itself was just the right size for a one-day event, with just over a hundred exhibitors. Some of them were printmakers, local radio stations and local independent music labels. A few artists noted that prints seemed to be the biggest sellers in the room. For the most part, the room was still dominated by cartoonists. What I found interesting about the character of this show was that it drew a number of west coast cartoonists who I'd never met who were able to afford a ticket to Minneapolis (and in the case of some, drive there). This show was also a chance for the thriving Minneapolis comics scene to make itself known, especially students and graduates of MCAD. Of course, the American and French PFC artists also tabled at this show and made a big splash. West coast artists on hand included Elijah Brubaker, Rusty Jordan, David King, Greg Means, Tom Neely, and Virginia Paine. There were a number of Chicago artists who made the short trip up, including Sam Sharpe, Laura Park, Keiler Roberts and Marnie Galloway. The locals filled out many of the other spots, including Anna Bongiovanni, Kevin Cannon, Zander Cannon, JP Coovert, Max Mose, Will Dinski, 2D Cloud, Tom Kaczynski, and MCAD students and alumni like Dawson Walker, Leigh Luna, Mandie Brasington, Danielle Chenette, Alexis Cooke, Amara Leipzig, Jay Ragorshek and many others. There were any number of other familiar faces and micropublishers, but seeing that local color in a juried show gave the show an unusually high level of overall quality.
The Dead Cartoonist Society table from MCAD. L to R: Jen Silverman, Joel McKeen, Kitty Berry
Sales ranged from low to solid. John Porcellino said he did quite well and sold a lot of comics to non-comics readers who were curious, including plenty of his own King Cat series. Annie Koyama also reported good sales despite having nothing new for the show. Having Jaime Hernandez on hand certainly helped Fantagraphics (repped by the tireless Jen Vaughn) move a decent number of books. The total attendance for the day neared 1500, which is about what the defunct Minneapolis Indie Expo (MIX) did in its second year. The low sales were perhaps not surprising give the fact that the show drew in lots of local fans who weren't necessarily sophisticated comics readers. However, even a publisher like Secret Acres, which pretty much took a bath at the show, said that they want to come back if possible when the show is held again in two years because of the show's many other attractive aspects.
I had a strong hand in programming the show's panels after volunteering in the early going. Bill Kartalopoulos suggested doing a Q&A with Menu. I didn't get a chance to see it, but Bill said that the Alliance Francaise had a bottle of white wine on the table and the two of them drained it over the course of an hour, leading to a very relaxed panel. I put together the "Impact and Future of Micropublishing" panel and handed it over to the very capable hands of local writer Greg Hunter, who was also a big help in the A/V department during one of my panels. That panel included Justin Skarhus (2D Cloud), Virginia Paine (Sparkplug), Kartalopoulos (Rebus Books), and Barry Matthews (Secret Acres). Zak Sally moderated a panel on "Independent Culture" that included Koyama, a printmaker and a indy record label producer, while Isaac Cates' "Animals as People" panel had Lisa Hanawalt, Anders Nilsen and Sally.
L to R: Max Mose, Anna Bongiovanni, Eamon Espey, Eleanor Davis.
I moderated two panels. The first, "The Dark Roots of Myth" took an unexpected and personal turn in the early going. Featuring Eleanor Davis, Caitlin Skaalrud, Eamon Espey, Max Mose and Anna Bongiovanni, each artist noted that their frequently dark and fictional comics are rooted in autobiographical concerns. For example, Davis said that she is every one of the characters in her stories, and so conflicts presented are really internal conflicts. Espey said that some of his violent, meat-grinding imagery reflects an unpleasant job he was working at the time. Skaalrud and Bongiovanni both said that comics are a way of working through their own personal issues without having to talk about it at a conscious level. Bongiovanni said that she depicts motherhood and babies in the unusual way that she does as a way of working through her own childhood trauma. Mose works through political issues that burn at him (like the Louisiana oil spill) using monsters and horror so as not to be didactic. All of them mentioned using primal imagery as something direct and easy to understand by a reader and easy to translate as a creator.
L to R: Eleanor Davis, Caitlin Skaalrud, the author.
The second panel was a conversation with Jaime Hernandez and Lisa Hanawalt. I was well-prepared for my first panel, but I was mostly winging it here, counting on Lisa to make Jaime laugh for an hour. This is more or less what happened, to my great delight. I had a few questions prepped for them, mostly along the lines of when they first encountered the other's work, what you saw in their work that you wish you could do, etc. Right before the panel, Lisa brought Domitille Collardey up to the panel to participate, to my great delight. Jaime recalled meeting Lisa in a van at Comicon in San Diego, getting a ride with Matt Groening and Lisa to some location. He remembered being thrilled to actually hang out with some of the younger cartoonists. Then he said that he signed up as "an old man" on twitter, stalking his favorite young cartoonists. Domitille said that one of her crowning achievements in life was getting Jaime to favorite a fart joke that she made, but he replied that he favorites all fart jokes on twitter.
L to R: Domitille Collardey, Lisa Hanawalt, Jaime Hernandez, the author.
The artists also talked about process, with both Lisa and Domitille both being relieved to hear that Jaime encounters problems he sometimes can't fix when trying to tell a story. Jaime mentioned putting some stories in a drawer and coming back a few months later to see if the problems magically worked themselves out. If not, back in the drawer they go. Lisa described her version of this process as putting her pages in a drawer in order to "let them think about what they did." Lisa and Domitille also talked a bit about Pizza Island, their old studio were all the artists were women, which received some funny publicity as a result. I noted that Pizza Island is the sort of concept that Jaime would have done twenty years ago.
At one point, Jaime suggested that Lisa aim some of the questions meant for him over to Domitille. On cue, Lisa said, "So Domitille, what was it like to grow up as a Mexican-American?" Jaime ended the panel by saying that he was happy to do it to tell the artists how much of a crush he had on their work and to let them know it. Lisa elaborated on a point I made toward the end, in that Jaime is drawing packed rooms and has a lot of younger fans: "Deal with it!"
The Autoptic organizers spelling out "Thanks!!" at the end of the show.
Regarding Autoptic as a whole: as others have noted, the lighting was too low in some parts of the room, there was no easy access to an ATM, and while the crowd was decent, many of them weren't interested in buying comics. Still, there was a tremendous amount of goodwill in the crowd and affection toward the organizers and volunteers (mostly MCAD students) who tried to solve problems and offer help as quickly as they could. Like the city of Minneapolis itself, the home team wanted the out-of-towners to have a great time and love their city and scene as much as they did. The show and the city certainly made a believer out of me.
Critic Xavier Guilbert and the author, both in black, at the kick-off party on Friday night. Photo by June Julien Misserey.
4. The Social Scene. I generally tend not to focus on this sort of thing very much in my convention reports, because it's not generally relevant to the show, and no one really cares unless you were there. That said, the kick-off party, held at the CO Exhibitions building that was housing an Anders Nilsen-curated exhibit of the PFC artists, featured cheap PBR and a number of interesting musical/performance art pieces. This is when guests of the show started showing up en masse, and the place was packed and full of nervous energy. After Autoptic, there was an afterparty at a restaurant/bar called the Red Stag Supper Club. While the ambiance and weather were both absolutely perfect, the restaurant was a bit overwhelmed by the crowds of cartoonists and service was spotty as a result. When the hour grew later, the place emptied out of non-cartoonists patrons and a great time was had by all. The evening benefited from the general good vibes of the show, as crowds ebbed and flowed together and artists of multiple generations entertained each other. Goodbyes were long and lingering, and the conversations ranged from serious discussions of art to fall-down laughing anecdotes. I know of at least one editor who got a cartoonist to quickly sign on to his anthology as a result of their conversation. Even though some cartoonists and publishers didn't make a lot of money, the low-key vibe and relatively small size of the show (the juried guest list was top notch) made for an intimate and pleasant weekend for all and struck a powerful claim for the Minneapolis comics scene as one of the most exciting in North America.
Special thanks to the ever-amazing Laura Jent-Clough for taking photographs (all photos taken by her unless otherwise credited). and to Annie Koyama for being Annie Koyama.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Sequart Reprints: Recidivist #3
Recidivist, by Zak Sally (La Mano, $15).
I've been peripherally aware of Sally's work for quite some time through an assortment of anthologies, but his collected work seen here floored me. There were a number of great comics published in 2005, but I would have to give Recidivist my highest honors, for its originality, complexity and compellingly dark tone. Sally is better known to some as the former bass player of the band Low. Their 2005 record, The Great Destroyer, was on many critics' lists for best album of the year. (It really is a fantastic record, and Sally does the art for it.) Recently, Sally decided it was time to quit the band for various reasons. With the life of recording and touring put aside, it's opened up more room for comics, his other passion. He started his own publishing company, collecting the work of his friend John Porcellino in the memorable Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man. Then he put out a handsome hardcover collection of his own work over the years, all before he officially decided to quit Low.
It is difficult to discuss this collection of short stories without giving away story points. While Sally isn't a cheap "twist" artist who relies on shock instead of craft, there are indeed profound surprises to be found in each story that a new reader should be allowed to savor. What I can note is that his stories require a careful reader willing to examine details, because Sally doesn't spell a lot of things out. Happily, the stories have a lyrical power and depth that invites and rewards multiple readings.
There are six short stories in the collection. None directly relate to each other, but there are strange interconnections here and there, not to mention certain thematic similarities. The first three stories ("Feed The Wife", "The Secret Girls" and "Animal Vomit") all have to do with secrets. The first story involves a man who keeps his wife locked up in their basement; what is the true nature of their relationship? Here, there is no narrator, no one to give the reader any clues as to what's going on other than the panels chosen by the artist. In the second story, we switch to an omniscient but not necessarily helpful narrator who tells us all about the Secret Girls, who come along to "save" you when you're about to utter that last secret.
"Animal Vomit" is the most dazzling bit in the book. It too is heavily narrated, but this time the narrator is a nameless character in the story. It's about three men who have an unusual disease: they each have the head of a different animal (pig, monkey, wolf) and come to a facility for treatment. The story builds up unbelievable suspense to a climax that is utterly bizarre and over-the-top. It's really about what is done in the name of secrecy, the relationship between lies and information. It's a spoof on conspiracies and hidden knowledge, still told with an aura of dread.
Sally's art adds to the somewhat downbeat nature of his work. He combines a fine, thin line with the heavy use of blacks. The pages in "Animal Vomit" are all black, including gutter lines. This adds to the air of mystery and oppressiveness, the sense that everything is hidden and undecipherable/unrecoverable. The thin line helps ease the mood in some respects, reducing its dynamism. There is nothing overwrought or overstated on Sally's page. Subtlety is his hallmark, as the details of each panel never have a spotlight thrust upon them, telling the reader what to observe. Instead, his pages have a muted quality, making it all the more shocking when something mad happens on them. Sally's stories are not without humorous and absurd moments. "Animal Vomit" in many ways is hilarious, and there are moments of black humor throughout the book.
The second half of Recidivist deals with mortality, retribution and desperate pleas for help. "The Great Healing" may be the best story in the book. The narrative comes from one character, talking out loud to his friend who is missing. The images are of that friend, driving along, oblivious to the wondrous news his friend wants to tell him. The ending is inevitable and shattering. The narrative is amazing: "Miracles fell from the sky, like bullets...Lovers returned to their beds. Poetry was annihilated. Tears crawled back into wet eyes."
As nuanced and wrenching as that story was, Sally turns around and hits the reader over the head with his next story, about a disgusted surgeon laboring over a hopeless patient. Sally reverses ground in every way: white becomes the dominant color, there's a visceral quality on every page and an increasing sense of the author's cynicism and disgust. That carries over into the final story, "Your Black Fucking Heart". It's about a man who deserves to die and gets what's coming to him from above. What makes it fascinating is the narrator is talking to the "you" who dies, but who can't hear them. Like "The Secret Girls", the narrator lays everything bare for the reader, but this knowledge only creates more questions.
The title of the collection gives the reader a hint as to what's going on. There are patterns found in each story, patterns that reveal that the behavior found in each has been going on for quite some time, despite any attempt at reform or improvement. It's too late to change, even if there was any intention of changing. A heart was broken one too many times, another person committed one wrong too many, another person saw one horror too many and cracked. The result is a work like no other in 2005: full of real horror and terror, the struggle that is daily existence and how we find ways to cope (or not). These stories stay with you, both inviting and rewarding detailed readings. Any fan of art comics must get their hands on this book.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Sequart Reprints: The Ignatz Line: Sally, Igort, Giandelli, Sala
I've stated more than once that the Ignatz line of comics are undervalued and underdiscussed. The all-star lineup of artists (matched with an exquisite format, nice paper and top-notch production values) delivers issue after issue of superb reading. It's a particular treat to be exposed to so many non-American artists, especially the Italian artists whose work is particularly flattered by this format. I'm guessing the price point scares off some readers ($8 for 30 or 40 pages), as does the fact that these are serialized comics, not "graphic novels". These books, in my view, have single-handed revitalized the relevance of comics as periodicals, even if their overall impact has been muted.
Let's start with Delphine #3, the latest issue in Richard Sala's demented take on the Snow White fairy tale, told from the perspective of the male lead. The way that Sala obliquely refers to Snow White (a poisonous apple, deranged dwarves, a menacing forest) while reframing the story as a Sala-style tale of horror is truly inspired. As much as this book is a dark reworking of a fairy tale, it's also very much touches on horror-movie tropes. The protagonist experiences multiple dream fake-outs (twice dreaming he was reunited with his lost love Delphine, and twice waking to horror), unexplained danger (he'e never given the slightest clue as to what's happening or why), and an array of grotesque but familiar creatures who dog his every step. Sala's scratchy, wobbly line is a perfect fit for this kind of fractured fairy tale, both cartoony and grotesque. The brown color tone contributes to the dirty, grungy feel of this story.
The main weakness of this issue is that it felt much less like a complete story (which Sala had managed in the first two issues) and very much like a whiplash ride that leads to a cliffhanger. The hero met the one figure from Snow White we hadn't yet seen in the story (the wicked Queen), and it'll be interesting to see how Sala wraps up the story. Sala's protagonists are always very active and propulsive, but their actions don't necessarily always lead up to solutions. Given the relentless darkness of the series to date, it'll be interesting to see if the hero manages to actually find Delphine, and if so, what the nature of their reunion will be like.
Baobab #3, by series editor Igort, is another pitch-perfect, achingly beautiful comic. Igort's sense of composition alone is worth the price of admission; BAOBAB is the most strikingly attractive of the Ignatz books, where every page is worthy of simply being stared at. This is a deliberately-paced story involving multiple threads and locations and will take a while, I'm sensing to fully coalesce. Most of the action has centered on cartoonist Celestino of the fictional South American island nation of Parador. Thus far, Igort has thrown the kitchen sink at the reader in terms of themes, motifs and storytelling concerns.
The storyline involving Celestino is about the power of comics (including many pages of Celestino's own comics), the struggle to create art, the way art survives under an oppressive government, the nature of friendship and family, the relationship between science and spirituality, and the ways in which the unconscious guides everything. There's a sequence in which a mesmerist accidentally coaxes Celestino into confessing his love for his longtime friend Tecla that fits perfectly with Igort's exploration of spiritualist practices of the early 20th century and his obvious affection for his characters. On top of everything else, Igort's use of negative space is ingenious. In one panel where Celestino describes bad news as though he "had been kicked in the face by a willful mule", Igort draws an image of a man being kicked (with a starburst impact) by a donkey, the men rendered only in terms of shadow and light. He returned twice more to that particular visual motif, going from violence to understanding to cooperation.
We also get another glimpse of the young Japanese boy Hiroshi, who learns that his grandmother is dying. These pages incorporate some traditions of Japanese art, like the emphasis on landscape vs figure drawing, where the background becomes an important character in its own right. It's a bit frustrating as a reader to be given so little forward momentum regarding this part of the story, but the key to engaging BAOBAB is simply to enjoy the ride as best as possible without worrying too much about where things are headed.
In the last pages of Interiorae #3, the languidly-paced bit of mythology by Gabriella Giandelli, we finally start to get an explanation of why there was an anthropomorphic rabbit feeding dreams to a creature living in an apartment building's basement. This is a comic with a number of sharp contrasts that don't fully emerge until after it's been read. It's the story of the lives of the people in the building: quotidian dramas that seem like life and death to them, but seem rather quiet and muted when compared to this mysterious, ominous mythological narrative. The creature that feeds on dreams is a kind of godlike being, and the rabbit is his go-between. The implication is that he's performing some kind of service, and the fact that some people are able to detect him is a bad sign. The figures are simply but expressively, but the intensity of the hatching and shading on each page adds a sort of neurotic underpinning to everyone's lives. What seemed like the most rambling and episodic book in the Ignatz line may well end up having one of its most conventional narratives; the next issue will conclude the series.
Zak Sally's comics have always had a powerfully visceral quality to them, especially with regard to pain and confusion. I'm not talking about emotional pain, but rather the feel of splitting headaches, bones splintering, waves of nausea and the like. What's more is that he's able to play these sensations off for dark laughs, like in his gloriously rambling Sammy The Mouse #2. The opening sequence, where poor Sammy is in a field and gets poked in the head by the finger of god, was a hilarious one--especially when he's jolted out of a fitful sleep and awakes with a deadly hangover. Sally structurally takes us back to the first issue, where an unwelcome visitor demands that Sammy leave his house, and a voice from above tells him he must do so.
Like in the previous issue, the person rousting him from sleep is a lunatic. This time, it's a woman that Sammy has never met who insists that she knows him and must drag him off to a picnic. Sally's line is gloriously ragged and expressive, once again evoking a world suggestive of classic comic strips, only much grimier and more frightening. Sammy is constantly being propelled forward against his will, but finds ways to bend back against that influence. The woman (who oddly wears a fake mustache to look more "exotic") is an especially frustrating influence: she claims to know him, demands his time, never listens and never stops shouting enthusiastically. Meanwhile, there's all sorts of weirdness going on in the background: a short man with sharp teeth emerging from the ocean (who in the last issue mysteriously fired a gun), the disappearance of Sammy's friend Puppy-Boy, and some kind of oceanic prison. Above all else, it's frequently gruesomely funny. The scene where a rabbit buries a nail into the forehead of a drunken duck who was taunting him made me both flinch and laugh, which roughly sums up the experience of reading this book so far. I'm not sure where the narrative is going, but Sally's stories, no matter how odd they may seem, tend to eventually cohere.
Let's start with Delphine #3, the latest issue in Richard Sala's demented take on the Snow White fairy tale, told from the perspective of the male lead. The way that Sala obliquely refers to Snow White (a poisonous apple, deranged dwarves, a menacing forest) while reframing the story as a Sala-style tale of horror is truly inspired. As much as this book is a dark reworking of a fairy tale, it's also very much touches on horror-movie tropes. The protagonist experiences multiple dream fake-outs (twice dreaming he was reunited with his lost love Delphine, and twice waking to horror), unexplained danger (he'e never given the slightest clue as to what's happening or why), and an array of grotesque but familiar creatures who dog his every step. Sala's scratchy, wobbly line is a perfect fit for this kind of fractured fairy tale, both cartoony and grotesque. The brown color tone contributes to the dirty, grungy feel of this story.
The main weakness of this issue is that it felt much less like a complete story (which Sala had managed in the first two issues) and very much like a whiplash ride that leads to a cliffhanger. The hero met the one figure from Snow White we hadn't yet seen in the story (the wicked Queen), and it'll be interesting to see how Sala wraps up the story. Sala's protagonists are always very active and propulsive, but their actions don't necessarily always lead up to solutions. Given the relentless darkness of the series to date, it'll be interesting to see if the hero manages to actually find Delphine, and if so, what the nature of their reunion will be like.
Baobab #3, by series editor Igort, is another pitch-perfect, achingly beautiful comic. Igort's sense of composition alone is worth the price of admission; BAOBAB is the most strikingly attractive of the Ignatz books, where every page is worthy of simply being stared at. This is a deliberately-paced story involving multiple threads and locations and will take a while, I'm sensing to fully coalesce. Most of the action has centered on cartoonist Celestino of the fictional South American island nation of Parador. Thus far, Igort has thrown the kitchen sink at the reader in terms of themes, motifs and storytelling concerns.
The storyline involving Celestino is about the power of comics (including many pages of Celestino's own comics), the struggle to create art, the way art survives under an oppressive government, the nature of friendship and family, the relationship between science and spirituality, and the ways in which the unconscious guides everything. There's a sequence in which a mesmerist accidentally coaxes Celestino into confessing his love for his longtime friend Tecla that fits perfectly with Igort's exploration of spiritualist practices of the early 20th century and his obvious affection for his characters. On top of everything else, Igort's use of negative space is ingenious. In one panel where Celestino describes bad news as though he "had been kicked in the face by a willful mule", Igort draws an image of a man being kicked (with a starburst impact) by a donkey, the men rendered only in terms of shadow and light. He returned twice more to that particular visual motif, going from violence to understanding to cooperation.
We also get another glimpse of the young Japanese boy Hiroshi, who learns that his grandmother is dying. These pages incorporate some traditions of Japanese art, like the emphasis on landscape vs figure drawing, where the background becomes an important character in its own right. It's a bit frustrating as a reader to be given so little forward momentum regarding this part of the story, but the key to engaging BAOBAB is simply to enjoy the ride as best as possible without worrying too much about where things are headed.
In the last pages of Interiorae #3, the languidly-paced bit of mythology by Gabriella Giandelli, we finally start to get an explanation of why there was an anthropomorphic rabbit feeding dreams to a creature living in an apartment building's basement. This is a comic with a number of sharp contrasts that don't fully emerge until after it's been read. It's the story of the lives of the people in the building: quotidian dramas that seem like life and death to them, but seem rather quiet and muted when compared to this mysterious, ominous mythological narrative. The creature that feeds on dreams is a kind of godlike being, and the rabbit is his go-between. The implication is that he's performing some kind of service, and the fact that some people are able to detect him is a bad sign. The figures are simply but expressively, but the intensity of the hatching and shading on each page adds a sort of neurotic underpinning to everyone's lives. What seemed like the most rambling and episodic book in the Ignatz line may well end up having one of its most conventional narratives; the next issue will conclude the series.
Zak Sally's comics have always had a powerfully visceral quality to them, especially with regard to pain and confusion. I'm not talking about emotional pain, but rather the feel of splitting headaches, bones splintering, waves of nausea and the like. What's more is that he's able to play these sensations off for dark laughs, like in his gloriously rambling Sammy The Mouse #2. The opening sequence, where poor Sammy is in a field and gets poked in the head by the finger of god, was a hilarious one--especially when he's jolted out of a fitful sleep and awakes with a deadly hangover. Sally structurally takes us back to the first issue, where an unwelcome visitor demands that Sammy leave his house, and a voice from above tells him he must do so.
Like in the previous issue, the person rousting him from sleep is a lunatic. This time, it's a woman that Sammy has never met who insists that she knows him and must drag him off to a picnic. Sally's line is gloriously ragged and expressive, once again evoking a world suggestive of classic comic strips, only much grimier and more frightening. Sammy is constantly being propelled forward against his will, but finds ways to bend back against that influence. The woman (who oddly wears a fake mustache to look more "exotic") is an especially frustrating influence: she claims to know him, demands his time, never listens and never stops shouting enthusiastically. Meanwhile, there's all sorts of weirdness going on in the background: a short man with sharp teeth emerging from the ocean (who in the last issue mysteriously fired a gun), the disappearance of Sammy's friend Puppy-Boy, and some kind of oceanic prison. Above all else, it's frequently gruesomely funny. The scene where a rabbit buries a nail into the forehead of a drunken duck who was taunting him made me both flinch and laugh, which roughly sums up the experience of reading this book so far. I'm not sure where the narrative is going, but Sally's stories, no matter how odd they may seem, tend to eventually cohere.
Friday, September 7, 2012
Flinch and Laugh: Ten Reasons To Love Sammy The Mouse
Zak Sally has earned "cartoonist's cartoonist" status in that I hear his name being mentioned in awe by many of his peers, yet he doesn't seem to get the same kind of critical notice that other artists receive. Sammy The Mouse is on its way to becoming his career-defining masterpiece as a sprawling, hilarious surreal ramshackle of a comic that feels more at home in its new, smaller, collected edition than in its original format as part of the Fantagraphics/Coconino Press Ignatz line of books. I've reviewed individual issues elsewhere, so what follows are some more rambling, bullet-point observations.
1. The comic at times is almost painfully intimate. Reading it, there are times that I felt that if I were given the proper pair of glasses with the right sort of filtering, I'd be reading a direct transcript of portions of Sally's life. This is despite the fact that the art takes its cues from Floyd Gottfredson, George Herriman, EC Segar and to some extent Dr. Seuss. The more surreal aspects of the story only serve to emphasize the verisimilitude of its emotional content. As I said in a previous review, there's an immediacy in this story that's a new development in Sally's storytelling, which used to keep more of an emotional distance.
2. Though the original Ignatz editions were quite beautiful, this literally handmade edition is a perfect match for the intimacy of the story. Sally printed each copy on his own press, and if the spot colors (shades of blue and brown) bleed a little at times, it only adds to that sense that the reader is holding a bizarre artifact that was made by human hands.
3. Sally's lettering is highly underrated. When Sammy is bullied into letting the drunkard bird Feekes into his house, Sally's gigantic scrawl for Feekes so perfectly captures the personality of this kind of drunk that is so familiar that it almost induces a headache just to read it. By the same token, when Feekes hilariously tells him he shouldn't have let him in if he didn't want company, Sally has Sammy say in tiny, all lower-case letters "i am realizing that." These tiny details are what make the book so effective. Feekes is my favorite character, the kind of intrusive drunk that everyone knows in bar communities. You're not really friends with him, but you feel obligated to interact with them.
4. The dialogue between Sammy and his seizure-prone friend Puppy-Boy at the bizarrely structured Baby Bar (it literally looks like a baby) feels like something out of a real life incident: "Let's really try not to drink too much." "Okay." "I'm serous this time, Sammy." "That tastes good. I like it". "Yes." "I think I would like another." "I agree with you."..."Just bring the bottles." All during this deliberately clipped dialogue, both characters have a sort of thousand-yard stare where they both know exactly what's going to happen but can't quite say it out loud.
5. The city where everyone lives is a sort of demented Seussian nightmare: crazy angles, buildings looking like they're toppling over, strange wires, and a sort of eternal gloom thanks to the coloring. It's like the city built where the Lorax was trying to protect the trees.
6. There's a lot going on in this story that is unexplained, yet this is all secondary to the daily struggle of Sammy. We don't know who the voice in the ceiling that tells him to do things is, or if it's connected to a similar voice that Puppy-Boy also hears. We don't know the agenda of the bizarre, skeletal creature with pointed teeth who fires a gun in the air, other than that his machinations are everywhere and they seem to involve Sammy. We don't know if the gigantic furry creature that takes Sammy home after a bender is real or a hallucination. We don't know why Sammy's voice insists that he go out and do things rather than stay at home, though I'm guessing this is a metaphor for both restlessness and finding ways to battle depression. The fact that Sammy is as bewildered by all of this as the reader is part of Sally's intent, but the reader will eventually receive the kinds of answers that Sally deems fit, even if they are cryptic.
7. Sally's comics have always been visceral, but this takes it to a new level. The image of the finger of god smiting Sammy's forehead and giving him the worst hangover of all time is a hilarious one and an apt description of this sort of experience. The scene where Pat the bunny bartender (another children's book reference!) holds Feekes down after the bird had ranted at him and buries a nail in his head is simultaneously absolutely hysterical and truly disturbing.
8. The second-chapter invasion of Miss Linda into Sammy's home, demanding they go on a picnic despite his hangover, induces a different kind of cringing. Sammy claims not to know her, and the reader is never clued into as to whether or not this is true. She may well be someone Sammy met one night on a bender and totally forgot, or she could also be a busybody who pushed herself into his life. Either way, her tone-deaf quality manages to make some valid points to Sammy, until he finally (and unexpectedly) gets her angry and she stomps off. The scene where she asks him "HOW'S YOUR HEADACHE? IS IT BETTER? HOW ABOUT NOW?" is another pitch-perfect comedic scene that makes great use of lettering.
9. The third chapter in some ways is even more horrifying than the first two, given that no one rousts Sammy out of his house this time. Instead, he has an argument with the voice in the ceiling, telling it that he's going to clean his bathroom. The voice begs him to reconsider until Sammy walks into the horror that is his bathroom and starts to parrot the voice's every suggestion to get out of the house. It's funny how much this book is a dark reflection of Gottfredson; Sammy even receives a treasure map from Puppy-Boy and the voice tells him to make sure to bring a shovel. Gottfredson's adventure comics had an easy, bouncy kinetic quality that kept everything in motion, whereas Sally presents these kinds of adventures as almost a sort of death march, alleviated only (and just slightly) by the numbing effect of alcohol.
10. As I wrote in an earlier review, "Sally really gets at that feeling that’s a combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, the awful sensation that the only thing worse than staying inside is going outside." At the same time, he gets at the sensation of trying to be creative and work with others. The only thing more painful than doing something or creating is not doing something. Hence the liberal applications of alcohol and the later self-recriminations. This book is not autobiographical in the sense that's it's not literally about true events, but it's entirely autobiographical in that it depicts the way it felt (and feels) to be an artist, to be consumed by a "project", to self-medicate one's emotional pain by drinking, to negotiate a world full of people whose methods of communication are entirely one-way, and to alternately try to address and flee from moments of authenticity. Taking his cues from an earlier generation of artists gives the book to date a timeless look for a timeless dilemma, making a personal story that much more accessible. I can't wait for volume two, which he will also publish through his own La Mano publishing house.
1. The comic at times is almost painfully intimate. Reading it, there are times that I felt that if I were given the proper pair of glasses with the right sort of filtering, I'd be reading a direct transcript of portions of Sally's life. This is despite the fact that the art takes its cues from Floyd Gottfredson, George Herriman, EC Segar and to some extent Dr. Seuss. The more surreal aspects of the story only serve to emphasize the verisimilitude of its emotional content. As I said in a previous review, there's an immediacy in this story that's a new development in Sally's storytelling, which used to keep more of an emotional distance.
2. Though the original Ignatz editions were quite beautiful, this literally handmade edition is a perfect match for the intimacy of the story. Sally printed each copy on his own press, and if the spot colors (shades of blue and brown) bleed a little at times, it only adds to that sense that the reader is holding a bizarre artifact that was made by human hands.
3. Sally's lettering is highly underrated. When Sammy is bullied into letting the drunkard bird Feekes into his house, Sally's gigantic scrawl for Feekes so perfectly captures the personality of this kind of drunk that is so familiar that it almost induces a headache just to read it. By the same token, when Feekes hilariously tells him he shouldn't have let him in if he didn't want company, Sally has Sammy say in tiny, all lower-case letters "i am realizing that." These tiny details are what make the book so effective. Feekes is my favorite character, the kind of intrusive drunk that everyone knows in bar communities. You're not really friends with him, but you feel obligated to interact with them.
4. The dialogue between Sammy and his seizure-prone friend Puppy-Boy at the bizarrely structured Baby Bar (it literally looks like a baby) feels like something out of a real life incident: "Let's really try not to drink too much." "Okay." "I'm serous this time, Sammy." "That tastes good. I like it". "Yes." "I think I would like another." "I agree with you."..."Just bring the bottles." All during this deliberately clipped dialogue, both characters have a sort of thousand-yard stare where they both know exactly what's going to happen but can't quite say it out loud.
5. The city where everyone lives is a sort of demented Seussian nightmare: crazy angles, buildings looking like they're toppling over, strange wires, and a sort of eternal gloom thanks to the coloring. It's like the city built where the Lorax was trying to protect the trees.
6. There's a lot going on in this story that is unexplained, yet this is all secondary to the daily struggle of Sammy. We don't know who the voice in the ceiling that tells him to do things is, or if it's connected to a similar voice that Puppy-Boy also hears. We don't know the agenda of the bizarre, skeletal creature with pointed teeth who fires a gun in the air, other than that his machinations are everywhere and they seem to involve Sammy. We don't know if the gigantic furry creature that takes Sammy home after a bender is real or a hallucination. We don't know why Sammy's voice insists that he go out and do things rather than stay at home, though I'm guessing this is a metaphor for both restlessness and finding ways to battle depression. The fact that Sammy is as bewildered by all of this as the reader is part of Sally's intent, but the reader will eventually receive the kinds of answers that Sally deems fit, even if they are cryptic.
7. Sally's comics have always been visceral, but this takes it to a new level. The image of the finger of god smiting Sammy's forehead and giving him the worst hangover of all time is a hilarious one and an apt description of this sort of experience. The scene where Pat the bunny bartender (another children's book reference!) holds Feekes down after the bird had ranted at him and buries a nail in his head is simultaneously absolutely hysterical and truly disturbing.
8. The second-chapter invasion of Miss Linda into Sammy's home, demanding they go on a picnic despite his hangover, induces a different kind of cringing. Sammy claims not to know her, and the reader is never clued into as to whether or not this is true. She may well be someone Sammy met one night on a bender and totally forgot, or she could also be a busybody who pushed herself into his life. Either way, her tone-deaf quality manages to make some valid points to Sammy, until he finally (and unexpectedly) gets her angry and she stomps off. The scene where she asks him "HOW'S YOUR HEADACHE? IS IT BETTER? HOW ABOUT NOW?" is another pitch-perfect comedic scene that makes great use of lettering.
9. The third chapter in some ways is even more horrifying than the first two, given that no one rousts Sammy out of his house this time. Instead, he has an argument with the voice in the ceiling, telling it that he's going to clean his bathroom. The voice begs him to reconsider until Sammy walks into the horror that is his bathroom and starts to parrot the voice's every suggestion to get out of the house. It's funny how much this book is a dark reflection of Gottfredson; Sammy even receives a treasure map from Puppy-Boy and the voice tells him to make sure to bring a shovel. Gottfredson's adventure comics had an easy, bouncy kinetic quality that kept everything in motion, whereas Sally presents these kinds of adventures as almost a sort of death march, alleviated only (and just slightly) by the numbing effect of alcohol.
10. As I wrote in an earlier review, "Sally really gets at that feeling that’s a combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, the awful sensation that the only thing worse than staying inside is going outside." At the same time, he gets at the sensation of trying to be creative and work with others. The only thing more painful than doing something or creating is not doing something. Hence the liberal applications of alcohol and the later self-recriminations. This book is not autobiographical in the sense that's it's not literally about true events, but it's entirely autobiographical in that it depicts the way it felt (and feels) to be an artist, to be consumed by a "project", to self-medicate one's emotional pain by drinking, to negotiate a world full of people whose methods of communication are entirely one-way, and to alternately try to address and flee from moments of authenticity. Taking his cues from an earlier generation of artists gives the book to date a timeless look for a timeless dilemma, making a personal story that much more accessible. I can't wait for volume two, which he will also publish through his own La Mano publishing house.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Another Worthy Kickstarter Effort: Zak Sally
Anyone who's read my columns knows how much I admire the work of Zak Sally. He's trying to assemble the funds to publish (on his own press) a collected edition of his outstanding Ignatz series Sammy The Mouse. Here are links to my reviews of the first and third issues of the series. Here's a link to Sally's kickstarter page. As of 5/17/11, Sally is just $900 away from his goal of $4300 to fully fund his book. Unsurprisingly, there are some pretty great incentives still available.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Artist Introspective, Part 2: Like A Dog
Rob reviews Zak Sally's collection of early comics, LIKE A DOG (Fantagraphics), as the second entry in a three part series on artists with recent publications that look back on their careers. 
Sally was a member of the rock band Low, a group that achieved a certain level of fame and critical regard in the last decade. Being in the band meant a lot of travel and a rootless lifestyle, something that suited the restless Sally just fine when he was younger. At the same time, he found himself drawn to comics as a form of expression very different from his musical career. It was his first love, but a pursuit that left him constantly frustrated. Never allowing himself to have roots was, in a sense, a way to cut off the possibility of having to confront the idea of commitment. Comics, to Sally, represented a very particular kind of relationship and commitment that was especially difficult, yet impossible to deny. The result was the publication of a couple of issues of his elaborate minicomic RECIDIVIST, both of which were reprinted in this volume.
The first issue is rough compared to his later work, with a lot of overrendering and shaky lettering. Still, it's a compelling read because of the way he's able to establish his unique narrative tone. Sally often writes in second person, like in "All My Friends Are Giants", a squirmingly uncomfortable story about a literally tiny person who is a relentless manipulator. His nonstop blather is such that this feels like someone Sally dealt with on a regular basis. "Dresden" dialed back the intensity, both in terms of the visuals (heavy on blacks but otherwise rendered in a more minimal manner) and the story. Sally wisely let the disturbing events he witnessed speak for themselves, an inexplicable scene at a club he was going to perform at involving a striking young woman & what appeared to be a priest. The final story, "Severed" reflected Sally's obsession with the true existence of human beings as bags of meat. This was another story told in second person, as the body alerted the person that they had violated a contracted and that relations (and a tendon) were officially severed. It was a statement of disgust with himself, as well as being unable to live in his own skin as both person and artist.
The second issue was a big leap forward. While this collection wasn't quite able to capture just how intricate it was in terms of its cover, there's a stunning beauty in its design, especially the endpapers. He mentioned writing it, between tours, living in a 10x6 room so compact that every inch of it "had to make sense". I think as a result, this forced a similar sense of structure on his comics, which became at once more ambitious and more disciplined. "You're Going To Fry" was the most over-the-top strip in the issue, a brutal allegory about Hollywood culture written once again in second person. Its tone is less of an imperative one than his other stories of this ilk, but Sally's final visual, showing the film discussed in the strip merely reflecting the hellish reality of life in Los Angeles, spoke volumes.
The highlight of the issue, and the book, was "At The Scaffold", an impeccably researched and intensely moving account of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's time spent in prison. Jailed for speaking out against the Tsar (in the mildest of fashions), he spent his time in solitary confinement wracked by pain. Still a young man, he forced himself to focus past the pain and write. The parallels to Sally's own situation were obvious, and Sally was clearly moved and inspired by the letters of the young man who would later go on to be one of the greatest authors of all time. It was also an admonition to himself to stop wasting time, to let go of his past bitterness and self-loathing as an artist. It was fitting that in the first story that Sally wrote that wasn't actually about himself, he wound up revealing more of himself in a direct manner than he had before. It was reminiscent of what Ivan Brunetti would later do in SCHIZO #4, as he wrote biographical stories about famous figures that Brunetti identified with.
Sally's admonition for change was further reflected in "You Won't Let Yourself Be Touched", a dream comic told in first person, but where we never see the narrator. It's a desperate plea to himself to find a place to settle down into, but he wasn't quite ready yet. As Sally himself noted, this story saw him shift into his mature style in terms of his line. The line is expressive & simple, and much less reliant on the use of heavy blacks or intense rendering. It's the first time he showed a great deal of restraint as a draftsman. The story reflected his sense of disgust for how he was living ("like a dog"), that he was somehow less than human, and represented the first step on his road to transformation.
The rest of the book contained short stories from a variety of sources, including MOME and COMIC ART. There are some real stunners here: Sally was down on "The War Back Home" because of its timing around 9/11, but this scratchboard comic was one of my favorites in the book. It's one of the most clever stories about self-destructiveness that I've ever read, as Sally anthropomorphized every item in his apartment in terms of being allies or enemies in a constant battle, concluding with his worries about a potential alliance between the beer and his blank drawing paper. "21" was a hilarious (and as it turns out, autobiographical) story of a waiter who encountered an unusual guest who only ordered orange from room service--but wanted something altogether else from her waiter. "Dread" was a standout story from MOME, one where he incorporated the unusual lettering he'd been developing as a story device that heightened the sense of existential terror the narrator felt. "The Man Who Killed Wally Wood" was Sally at his best in that it was an autobiographical story that revealed a lot of crucial personal details, but did it as a secondary concern to the real story. That story was one of the struggle of the artist against exploitation on top of an everyday battle to gain inspiration, and the EC Comics flourishes in it were a nice touch. This story also displayed Sally's pitch-black sense of humor; despite the relentlessness of his style, Sally is far from being a miserablist.
In his afterword, Sally first provided context for each and every piece and then evaluated them. There's a brutal honesty to his approach that eschewed both a narcissistic sense of self-validation as well as self-negating self-deprecation. Rather than simply declaring all of his old work to be worthless, he treated it as part of a process. Some of the work he was still proud of, some of it he saw as a breakthrough in some way, and some of it was a dead end. All of it had value, because it was documentation of what led him to his current status as an artist. He noted that "somehow, making these comics forced me to work some shit out. And that the process of 'working it out' is real, and it's got value..."
It's obvious that this is true, because while not all of the work here is strong, one can see a voice developing and sound some truly interesting notes. The third issue of RECIDIVIST was one of my top comics of the decade, and his SAMMY THE MOUSE series clearly touches upon a number of events that he experienced as a younger man as well as his older works. Sally quit his band, settled down, bought his own press and has become comfortable with the process of making and publishing comics. He's quick to deflate his own sense of self-satisfaction, along with the idea that anyone's got it figured out. In the end, he says, "it's the work that counts". It's what mattered when comics frightened him, and it's what matters now that he's more settled. While Sally wanted to provide the reader context and his own view on his work (because he liked that sort of thing reading other collections), his opinion about his art was no more or less valid than the reader's.
It's a crucial point, because a difficult part of being an artist is declaring when something is done and can be experienced by others. The work becomes a separate entity, a monument to what the artist has created that has the potential to have an impact on its readers. Whether it's positive or negative is obviously out of the artist's hands and may or may not wind up affecting what the artist does later. There are certainly hard-working artists who have never produced a single worthwhile work, but the point is that unless the artist continues to release work, it is absolutely certain that they will never get better. The work is all that's left after the ephemeral nature of process and emotion fades away. It's the responsibility of the artist to create the best work of which they are capable, to have the courage to publish it, and to have the discernment to figure out how to ge better. I'm reminded of Lynda Barry's Two Questions from WHAT IT IS: if the artist immediately focuses on the questions of "Is this good?" and "Does this suck" instead of their actual inspiration, they will be in a constant state of paralysis. It's a struggle that Sally obviously was afflicted by, but has found a way to overcome it, and LIKE A DOG is a testament both to the struggle and the triumph.
If the mood surrounding Paul Hornschemeier's ALL AND SUNDRY felt a bit chilly and reserved, Zak Sally's collection of his RECIDIVIST material and other works was positively pugillistic in nature. Of course, the battle Sally was fighting was with himself and his place in the world, both as an artist and a person. In republishing his first mature works, Sally went out of his way to directly confront the feelings he was experiencing at the time he was writing these comics and contextualize where he was at the time, both literally and psychologically. The extended endnotes written by Sally were one of the most bracing but inspiring pieces of writing I've ever seen by an artist on their own work. It's a statement of purpose not just as an artist, but as a human being. Sally simply embraced every misstep he committed as an artist, every mistake made as a person, every pang of doubt and self-hatred felt--because in the end, one has no other choice if they're going to continue to create. LIKE A DOG is in many ways a journal of a restless artist drawn to comics and frightened of them at the same time, with these two impulses tearing him apart as his own pattern of constantly uprooting his life reflected this conflict.
The first issue is rough compared to his later work, with a lot of overrendering and shaky lettering. Still, it's a compelling read because of the way he's able to establish his unique narrative tone. Sally often writes in second person, like in "All My Friends Are Giants", a squirmingly uncomfortable story about a literally tiny person who is a relentless manipulator. His nonstop blather is such that this feels like someone Sally dealt with on a regular basis. "Dresden" dialed back the intensity, both in terms of the visuals (heavy on blacks but otherwise rendered in a more minimal manner) and the story. Sally wisely let the disturbing events he witnessed speak for themselves, an inexplicable scene at a club he was going to perform at involving a striking young woman & what appeared to be a priest. The final story, "Severed" reflected Sally's obsession with the true existence of human beings as bags of meat. This was another story told in second person, as the body alerted the person that they had violated a contracted and that relations (and a tendon) were officially severed. It was a statement of disgust with himself, as well as being unable to live in his own skin as both person and artist.
The second issue was a big leap forward. While this collection wasn't quite able to capture just how intricate it was in terms of its cover, there's a stunning beauty in its design, especially the endpapers. He mentioned writing it, between tours, living in a 10x6 room so compact that every inch of it "had to make sense". I think as a result, this forced a similar sense of structure on his comics, which became at once more ambitious and more disciplined. "You're Going To Fry" was the most over-the-top strip in the issue, a brutal allegory about Hollywood culture written once again in second person. Its tone is less of an imperative one than his other stories of this ilk, but Sally's final visual, showing the film discussed in the strip merely reflecting the hellish reality of life in Los Angeles, spoke volumes.
The highlight of the issue, and the book, was "At The Scaffold", an impeccably researched and intensely moving account of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's time spent in prison. Jailed for speaking out against the Tsar (in the mildest of fashions), he spent his time in solitary confinement wracked by pain. Still a young man, he forced himself to focus past the pain and write. The parallels to Sally's own situation were obvious, and Sally was clearly moved and inspired by the letters of the young man who would later go on to be one of the greatest authors of all time. It was also an admonition to himself to stop wasting time, to let go of his past bitterness and self-loathing as an artist. It was fitting that in the first story that Sally wrote that wasn't actually about himself, he wound up revealing more of himself in a direct manner than he had before. It was reminiscent of what Ivan Brunetti would later do in SCHIZO #4, as he wrote biographical stories about famous figures that Brunetti identified with.
Sally's admonition for change was further reflected in "You Won't Let Yourself Be Touched", a dream comic told in first person, but where we never see the narrator. It's a desperate plea to himself to find a place to settle down into, but he wasn't quite ready yet. As Sally himself noted, this story saw him shift into his mature style in terms of his line. The line is expressive & simple, and much less reliant on the use of heavy blacks or intense rendering. It's the first time he showed a great deal of restraint as a draftsman. The story reflected his sense of disgust for how he was living ("like a dog"), that he was somehow less than human, and represented the first step on his road to transformation.
The rest of the book contained short stories from a variety of sources, including MOME and COMIC ART. There are some real stunners here: Sally was down on "The War Back Home" because of its timing around 9/11, but this scratchboard comic was one of my favorites in the book. It's one of the most clever stories about self-destructiveness that I've ever read, as Sally anthropomorphized every item in his apartment in terms of being allies or enemies in a constant battle, concluding with his worries about a potential alliance between the beer and his blank drawing paper. "21" was a hilarious (and as it turns out, autobiographical) story of a waiter who encountered an unusual guest who only ordered orange from room service--but wanted something altogether else from her waiter. "Dread" was a standout story from MOME, one where he incorporated the unusual lettering he'd been developing as a story device that heightened the sense of existential terror the narrator felt. "The Man Who Killed Wally Wood" was Sally at his best in that it was an autobiographical story that revealed a lot of crucial personal details, but did it as a secondary concern to the real story. That story was one of the struggle of the artist against exploitation on top of an everyday battle to gain inspiration, and the EC Comics flourishes in it were a nice touch. This story also displayed Sally's pitch-black sense of humor; despite the relentlessness of his style, Sally is far from being a miserablist.
In his afterword, Sally first provided context for each and every piece and then evaluated them. There's a brutal honesty to his approach that eschewed both a narcissistic sense of self-validation as well as self-negating self-deprecation. Rather than simply declaring all of his old work to be worthless, he treated it as part of a process. Some of the work he was still proud of, some of it he saw as a breakthrough in some way, and some of it was a dead end. All of it had value, because it was documentation of what led him to his current status as an artist. He noted that "somehow, making these comics forced me to work some shit out. And that the process of 'working it out' is real, and it's got value..."
It's obvious that this is true, because while not all of the work here is strong, one can see a voice developing and sound some truly interesting notes. The third issue of RECIDIVIST was one of my top comics of the decade, and his SAMMY THE MOUSE series clearly touches upon a number of events that he experienced as a younger man as well as his older works. Sally quit his band, settled down, bought his own press and has become comfortable with the process of making and publishing comics. He's quick to deflate his own sense of self-satisfaction, along with the idea that anyone's got it figured out. In the end, he says, "it's the work that counts". It's what mattered when comics frightened him, and it's what matters now that he's more settled. While Sally wanted to provide the reader context and his own view on his work (because he liked that sort of thing reading other collections), his opinion about his art was no more or less valid than the reader's.
It's a crucial point, because a difficult part of being an artist is declaring when something is done and can be experienced by others. The work becomes a separate entity, a monument to what the artist has created that has the potential to have an impact on its readers. Whether it's positive or negative is obviously out of the artist's hands and may or may not wind up affecting what the artist does later. There are certainly hard-working artists who have never produced a single worthwhile work, but the point is that unless the artist continues to release work, it is absolutely certain that they will never get better. The work is all that's left after the ephemeral nature of process and emotion fades away. It's the responsibility of the artist to create the best work of which they are capable, to have the courage to publish it, and to have the discernment to figure out how to ge better. I'm reminded of Lynda Barry's Two Questions from WHAT IT IS: if the artist immediately focuses on the questions of "Is this good?" and "Does this suck" instead of their actual inspiration, they will be in a constant state of paralysis. It's a struggle that Sally obviously was afflicted by, but has found a way to overcome it, and LIKE A DOG is a testament both to the struggle and the triumph.
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