The Rhythm of Color: Chico and Rita

Chico and Rita (Self-Made Hero) is the rare graphic novel adapted from an animated feature.A collaboration between writer/director Fernando Trueba and artist Javier Mariscal, it's an extended love letter to Havana, New York, jazz and romance itself. Indeed, the titular characters are a piano player and singer who are separated a number of times during their lives, but their romance and musical collaboration always wind up drawing them back together. The story itself is familiar and even predictable, as Chico's initial inability to stay true and later feelings of jealousy wind up wrecking the relationship the first time, while outside forces force them apart a second time. This is less a narrative than an extended atmosphere piece, and as such it has a frothy, light quality. Certainly, there are snide references to life under Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba as well as more serious narrative events related to the racism endemic in both America and Cuba in the 1950s, but those are secondary to the imagery surrounding the lights and musical magic taking place in New York and Havana at that time.

It's in those sequences where the book shines. The book's colors are vibrant but not garish or overly slick, allowing the reader's eye to fully engage them and bring the night cityscapes of Havana and New York to life. The book is especially adept at giving cities a sort of buzzing life of their own, an electricity that's felt by all involved and that sweeps them away. That buzz combines with the crackle of creativity and musical innovation to create a wave of pure pleasure; the way Mariscal draws musical venues makes the bigger halls look like cathedrals and the small clubs look like earthy, pulsating chambers of energy. The best sequence in the book is a dream that's reminiscent of the fantasy sequence in the film Singing In The Rain (indeed, the similarity is no doubt intentional). As Chico is on a boat to New York in search of his lost love Rita, he dreams jealous dreams of her dancing with Fred Astaire before he's gunned down by Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. The colors gloriously overwhelm the linework here, spilling over and becoming tangible forces of their own. There's also a frenzied quality to the drawings that's unlike the slower pace of the rest of the book, as when Fred Astaire spins Rita around until her dress pops off and she is dressed like Josephine Baker doing her banana dance.

The characters are mostly of the stock variety, with villainous and rapacious rich industry types actively working against Chico and Rita being together, a betrayal by Chico's best friend and manager, a jealous girlfriend getting in a fight with Rita, etc. Chico and Rita themselves don't get much development outside of their abilities as musicians and their magnetic attraction toward each other. They wind up getting a happy ending that in many ways reflects the ways in which American audiences "rediscovered" a lost generation of Cuban jazz musicians after the revolution of 1959 in the last decade or so (as documented in films like The Buena Vista Social Club). Chico's rediscovery leads to that happy ending, as both characters are finally free of ego, jealousy and the machinations of others. The reader feels sorry for their situation, even if much of it is self-inflicted (especially on the part of Chico) because of a total lack of communication. However, the flatness of the characters limits a feeling of being connected to them, so that final scene simply registers as a nice moment rather than an emotionally powerful one. Those moments are reserved for the fleeting and glorious moments onstage and soaking up the nightlife, as Mariscal & Trueba get across the sense of excitement and limitless possibility. The actual events of the book are less interesting than what those images suggested.

Once Removed: Couch Tag

Jesse Reklaw's Couch Tag is an example of what I call mediated autobiography. In each of the five chapters of the book, Reklaw uses a particular narrative structure and an accompanying aesthetic & decorative strategy in order to get at certain deep, painful feelings and events in his life. Much like in his highly-structured, year-long daily memoir comic Ten Thousand Things To Do, Reklaw uses these structures as a kind of safe space and even distraction that allows him to get at powerful, formative memories and how they relate to his current life. The core question that eats away at him is identity and how it is created relative to one's friends and family, and what the state of his identity is as he struggles with mental illness. The rawness of his emotions, especially as the book winds on to its conclusion, tend to spill over and swamp his structure, leading to some narrative and pictorial unevenness as his current mental state at the time of drawing the stories about his past has everything to do with how the story appears on the page.

In the first chapter, "Thirteen Cats of My Childhood", Reklaw introduces the reader to his family by way of listing every cat they had as pets. This is an ideal device, given the way people tend to project their emotions and fears onto their pets and use them as an outlet for affection, especially when that affection is difficult to come by at home. While Reklaw stays within this framework, the emotions and fears immediately come spilling out, as he reveals how his father's tempo frightened him as a child and how his family completely disintegrated when his mother divorced his father and his sister moved out of the house at the same time. The breakdown of his family is disguised by the trope of the Cute Cat Strip, complete with each cat getting its own personal logo and quips on either side of that logo. One of the repeated themes of the book is how Reklaw's young mind was unable to fully process and understand the chaos occurring around him, leading him to the the family "nothing" (in the words of his sister). The only way to get to these feelings, even now, is to trick them by capturing them with these literary devices.

The way each chapter addresses slightly different but overlapping concerns leads to some repetition in the memoir, but only in the sense that certain events and people are viewed from differing perspectives from chapter to chapter. For example, the second chapter, "Toys I Loved", rewinds from the divorce discussed at the end of chapter one and examines his family and life growing up yet again. The first chapter also established how many times Reklaw's family moved and how he often felt rootless and lonely as a result. The second chapter, with each section compartmentalized with a memory of a particular beloved toy, is all about his experiences in each of these locations, focusing on his young sexual history, as well as the way sex in general was brought up in his house growing up. With hippie parents who established few boundaries but also declined to make the world less mysterious, Reklaw was bombarded by a lot of information that was difficult to process. Some of that played out in terms of the "dirty" games he enjoyed playing with some of his friends, but he mostly portrays that as simple childhood pleasures that are rarely discussed as opposed to something pathological. This chapter is also about power and hierarchy, and how he often felt powerless against his older sister when he fought and the time he whipped a friend with a belt just to understand what that sensation felt like. The writer Michel Foucault explicitly connects power and sex in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, and this chapter very much plays out this way, as sex and sexuality are used and abused with regard to children based on hierarchy, power, familial superiority and other exploitative ways.

The third chapter, "The Fred Robinson Story" is about the ways in which friendships, especially male friendships that don't always allow for open expressions of affection and intimacy as children, are often mediated through activities like play and sports. In Reklaw's case with his friend Brendan, this chapter is a kind of love letter to the history of their friendship that was mediated through games, creative projects and music. It's also a love letter to comics in general, both the superhero comics of Reklaw's youth that obsessed him and the possibilities that comics opened up to him as a creative person and a collaborator. It's a chapter that intersects with the rest of the book in terms of talking about his family and interests, but it's also a chapter that very much works entirely on its own. It's tonally different than the other chapters, which tend to wind up being more downbeat and more explicitly about disintegration, decay and disarray. This is also the funniest chapter, as it details all sorts of collaborative pranks and shenanigans that wound up being a kind of special language spoken by Reklaw and his friend Brendan. There is a kind of bittersweet tone at the end as the friendship faded a little over time, but it concludes in the present day and notes that the friendship has endured.

The fourth chapter, "The Stacked Deck" is a family history in the form of all of the card games Reklaw learned to play as a child. Each anecdote starts with the rules of the game, a quick story about learning to play it, and then a family story related to the game. Once again, the chapter jumps back and forth but is roughly in chronological order. Some of the games mentioned (especially games involving working with a partner) resonate with the anecdote discussed, while others feel like a more cursory attempt to stick with the chapter's high concept and then move on to the story he really wanted to tell. Reklaw cleverly connects the element of chance in the games he played with the random element we must face when dealing with our extended families; the vagaries of genetics often lead to strange, seemingly arbitrary connections. At the same time, the deck was stacked against Reklaw growing both because of genetics but also the family history itself. Reklaw also talks about his regrets in not doing more to get to know his beloved grandparents in a real way as an adult, in part because he wanted little to do with so many of his crazy aunts and uncles. It's the first time the book touches on mortality, as this chapter turns characters in Reklaw's own internal narrative into real people who disappear and are unknowable.

Finally, "Lessoned" really gets to the heart of the matter in this memoir. It's a chapter about mental illness in his family and himself, told in the form of an A to Z primer.  The style of art here is the collaborative, rough, full color and sketchbook-style seen in his minicomic LOVF. The above gif is from his girlfriend Hazel Newlevant's blog, as she did the underlying blue pencils and Reklaw added the rest. It's fitting that even in his own memoir, Reklaw sought out others to work with him. This is a difficult chapter to process in many ways because it's so viscerally concerned with pain. If Reklaw's entire life was marked by chaos, a lack of structure and disorder, then many of his comics bear the mark of someone using a tidy, neat grid and a restrained, relaxed line. That's certainly true of the earlier chapters in this book, which are unusually smooth-looking even for Reklaw. However, all of that chaos simply spills over as Reklaw can no longer contain that pain, or perhaps is no longer interested in trying to conceal it. The book ends with an anecdote from his youth where he talks about an extended illness and a simple decision to no longer be sick. Couch Tag similarly is an exercise in personal agency. Designated as "the nothing" by his sister--a passive bystander who still managed to suck up emotional energy--his entire career as an artist can be seen as Reklaw creating something out of nothing. It's a portrait of an artist creating his own portrait that begins with formalist tricks, as though Reklaw is trying to trick himself into writing about these things by removing their immediacy by making them about something else on the surface. By the end of the book, that artifice is only superficially present as Reklaw's acknowledgment of his own struggles goes hand in hand with asserting his worthiness as a human being, all mediated and assisted by the way he creates art. If the book is uneven in tone and feels like it loses its way narratively at times, it's a side effect of artistic and personal freedom and agency. That raw self-discovery and revelation more than makes up for the book's rougher edges.

Thanks For The Fundraising Help!

Thank you all so much for the help with my family's recent financial difficulties. We received a rapid and astonishing response from friends, readers, artists and so many others who have enjoyed my work here at High-Low as well as my other writings. At the moment, the money we've received will recover all of our expenses, and I'm happy to say that as a result, the crisis has passed. As a result, there's no imminent need to make any more donations. I'll leave the button up for the future in case folks randomly feel like making a donation on behalf of my efforts, but as I said, the crisis is over. My wife and I feel like Jimmy Stewart at the end of It's A Wonderful Life and are simply astonished by the caring and generosity expressed by so many. Thanks again.

Elastic History: Woman Rebel

Tom Spurgeon and others have written extensively about how Peter Bagge was one of the first rank, most influential alt-cartoonists in the world in the 1990s. Bagge was not only a preeminent humorist, he was also a fine editor, first at Weirdo and then again in the latter issues of Hate, when he started printing work by the likes of Rick Altergott and Johnny Ryan. Indeed, Bagge mentioned that he almost thought about keeping Hate going as an anthology periodical, but he saw the handwriting on the wall at the time: the market would no longer support a comics periodical in numbers large enough to sustain a viable professional career. Bagge was also a tastemaker, as a mention from him in Hate was enough to help launch a dozen careers. Even as he was drawing Buddy Bradley's misadventures, I always sensed a restlessness from him and a probing intellect. This played out in ending Hate to pursue any number of other projects and interests, from writing a couple of kids' series for DC (Yeah!, Sweatshop) to writing & drawing a couple of series for Dark Horse (Reset, Apocalypse Nerd) to creating an original graphic novel for DC/Vertigo (Other Lives). Of course, Bagge was also active on any number of websites, with his political strips for Reason winding up in the fine collection Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me.

These projects have had varying degrees of financial and aesthetic success, but the pieces that resonated most for me as a reader were his biographies. The backup strip for Apocalypse Nerd, "Founding Fathers Funnies", were spot-on historically and absolutely hilarious; indeed, I preferred them to the funny main story. In the new edition of Everybody Is Stupid..., the standout piece is "I.M.P", a short biography of literary critic and iconoclastic libertarian Isabel Mary Patterson. Writing about these historical figures, especially women who struggled against sexism and stupidity in general, seemed to really bring out not just Bagge's best satirical bite, it also gave his art far more energy than it did in his recent fictional stories. Bagge seemed genuinely excited to tell Patterson's story, and he did an expert job in picking out just the right anecdotes to keep a reader completely unaware of her achievements interested.

Working with Drawn & Quarterly for the first time, he pitched some ideas about other female historical figures he wanted to write about, and the creator of the birth control movement, Margaret Sanger, was the most favored idea. Bagge was fortunate to have a wealth of biographical information about this crucial, misunderstood and (today) forgotten figure available to him, as well as the good judgment to choose a subject who lived such a crazy life. There's an argument to be made that Sanger bettered the lives of women worldwide like no other figure in the 20th century, and her life is a crazy-quilt of meetings with famous historical, political and cultural figures. Like Patterson, Sanger was an iconoclast who was stubborn to a fault, an intellectual hurricane who did not suffer fools gladly, and a passionate woman with a disdain for antiquated morals. All of that resulted in some great storytelling fodder, as Bagge details her affairs with men like H.G. Wells and sexologist Havelock Ellis. The latter is recounted in a hilarious scene where he reveals his utter disinterest in actual sex, other than in watching women urinate. The eagerness with which she volunteers to do so felt like something Lisa Leavenworth might have done in the pages of Hate.

Indeed, having a protagonist as dynamic and short-tempered as Sanger allowed Bagge to use his trademark rubbery, expressionistic style to its fullest. There are plop takes, eyes bulging out of heads, distorted limbs and other typical Bagge visual cues, but none of them feel forced or extraneous. Indeed, the craziness of Sanger's life makes one feel that Bagge is the only cartoonist able to bend reality to his will in such a way as to depict it properly! Bagge is sympathetic, perhaps to a fault, regarding some of Sanger's more controversial positions, though he points out in the afterword that some of that controversy is misinformation placed on the behalf of her arch-enemies, which included the Catholic church. Sanger didn't actually approve of abortion, but the mere act of supporting birth control and giving equal access to information for women of every socioeconomic stripe was an astoundingly radical idea. That led to her giving a lecture to the Ku Klux Klan's "ladies auxillary" a dubious choice then and now, but one she defended at the time because she thought every group of women deserved to have this information. There's also her murky connection with the eugenics movement, but evidence seems scarce that she favored birth control in order to discourage the poor from breeding. Regardless, Bagge tries to touch on these issues but more-or-less lets Sanger off the hook. It's hard to blame him, because her influence and the organization that she helped create (which later became Planned Parenthood) has been astounding. And like all good heroes, her own hubris, pride and arrogance cost her dearly in her lifetime, even as she lived life to the fullest. Bagge captures all of that, and it's amazing to see him excel in his second and third act as a cartoonist.

Fundraising For High-Low

You may have noticed that I've placed a paypal Donate button under my profile to the right. As much as it pains me to make mention of this, the Clough family is having some financial difficulties at the moment: our rental house is being sold in the next couple of months (it will take a couple of thousand dollars to move and put down a security deposit), we just learned that we have to invest $3000 worth of repairs into the car we just bought, and we have had some medical bills popping up. It's a perfect storm of expenses, and at this point I'm trying to raise money any way I can. Thus, if readers have enjoyed my work here at High-Low over the years, I might ask them to kick in a few bucks if they feel so inclined. Thank you so much for your attention.

Thirty Days of CCS: The Index

Thanks to all who read my "Thirty Days of CCS" feature, which was thirty days' worth of reviews of students and alums of the Center for Cartoon Studies.  Tom Spurgeon made the sensible suggestion of having an aggregate link post, so here we go with articles talking about 44 different cartoonists, not including the anthologies:

1.   Paul Swartz
2.   Sophie Goldstein
3.   Sasha Steinberg
4.   Laurel Lynn Leake
5.   Aaron Cockle
6.   Melissa Mendes
7.   Joseph Lambert
8.   Amelia Onorato
9.   Sean Ford, Chuck Forsman, Alex Kim, Dane Martin, JP Coovert, Sam Gaskin
10. April Malig
11. Josh Rosen
12. Joyana McDiarmid
13. Cole Closser
14. Penina Gal, Betsey Swardlick, Moody
15. Steve Seck, Pat Barrett, Garry Paul Bonesteel
16. Melanie Gillman, Allie Kleber
17. Jesse Mead, Carl Antonowicz
18. Lena Chandhok
19. Andy Warner, Adam Whittier, Josh Kramer 20. Beth Hetland, Colleen Frakes
21. Luke Healy, Max Riffner, Mathew New, Simon Reinhardt
22. Chuck Forsman
23. Bingo Baby (collaborative story)
24. Queerotica (anthology)
25. Max Mose, Rio Aubry Taylor, Casey Bohn, Bill Bedard
26. Awesome Sound, Can't Lose, Stranger Knights #4 (anthologies)
27. Luke Howard
28. Adventures in Cartooning, CCS Pamphlet, Jai Granofski, Ian Richardson, Dan Archer
29. Irene #3 (anthology)
30. Dakota McFadzean

Thirty Days of CCS #30: Dakota McFadzean

Dakota McFadzean came into CCS as an already fully-formed talent, but it's clear that his experience there only served to bolster his confidence and encourage him to take even more chances as a creator. In his first collection of short stories, Other Stories and the Horse You Rode In On, McFadzean manages to create a surprisingly coherent meta-narrative. McFadzean is not unlike Joseph Lambert in that many of his stories have to do with the ways in which children engage the world in magical realist terms, but there's a certain melancholy that pervades his work in ways that it doesn't for Lambert. A big part of that is McFadzean's work is marked by its sense of restraint and subtlety, even in the craziest of situations.

For example, the opening story "Standing Water" is about a kid navigating a world that's frozen in time, as though he were the only one who could travel through a world that's entirely underwater. Friends, family and pets float limply in the water, and his attempts at interacting with the world reveal a hidden well of meanings that have lost all their significance in the wake of what is essentially the end of the world. What seem to be acts of revenge or cruelty lose their meaning, leading him to a sense of sad resignation in a totally absurd situation. There's no background or explanation given here, because the emotional resonance of this world is what's important.

The same is true in "Unkindness", which is one of McFadzean's very best stories. It's typical of his work in that it depicts small town life in Canada in an entirely unromanticized fashion and also contains unexplained elements of magical realism. While there's a strong streak of naturalism running through his work (the world he creates feels quite solid and real), his character design here is looser and more expressive. He allows for a certain rubbery quality of reality that gives him the opportunity to mold and bend it. An "unkindness" is what is referred to as a gathering of ravens, and there is indeed a mysterious and surprising visitation by the birds in the dead of winter. The birds observe, feed and even communicate (one says "goodbye" to a little boy), often by creating a series of mysterious lines and circles in the snow. The title also refers to small acts of unkindness in the story, leading up to a mother essentially telling her teenage daughter that she was a mistake. There's a sureness to the way in which McFadzean flips from character to character in this story, each of whom are just trying their best to get by in life without a whole lot of happiness or fulfillment. When one character tells another "I'm going home to run out the damn clock like I do every damn day", it's a brutal statement of how life is that comes after a joke that covers up that fact. There's also a sort of hidden momentum and tension in this story generated by the wild card factor of the birds and the repressed emotions that well up as the story unfolds, exploding in a manner that is unexpected. It's also a story about different entities being at cross-purposes and being unable or unwilling to fully communicate their desires. That's made literal in the mystery of the ravens--there's no real sense of what their purpose is or if they mean harm to the humans in the town, but it's also expressed in the way that characters talk past each other. McFadzean never spells out the secrets and mysteries in his stories, preferring that they hold a charge for the reader to interpret as they see fit.

One running theme in the book is that of loss or the sense that something is about to end. That's true in "Boxes" (about a young woman leaving a town and the people she sees on the bus behind) and "Skeletons" (about a boy telling his best friend he's going to move). The former story concerns the boxes we put other people in as we classify them, the ways in which others see us that we don't understand, and the ways in which categories in general limit us. The latter involves a supernatural element, as the titular skeletons refer to what happens when we look back. If that seems like a heavy-handed metaphor, it's mitigated by the way in which McFadzean uncannily is able to get at the ways in which kids actually behave toward each other as well as the genuinely spooky nature of his imagery. "Seelie Court" is a different take on this kind of relationship, where two friends share their difficulties as young adults in a context of wishing magic was true. While McFadzean offers a visual hint regarding this magic, the real power here is in the way the two boys are able to talk to and relate to each other in an honest manner, while still retaining the profane, slightly distancing tactics that boys have with regard to their feelings.

Another story about loss and memory is "Ghost Rabbit". This story features the parallel narrative of a young girl growing up in a house where her mother struggles with her own mentally decaying mother along with an anthropomorphic rabbit haunted by the titular ghost rabbit. The lingering images of memory loom large in this story and they're elegantly portrayed by McFadzean. McFadzean implies that the anthropomorphic rabbit's narrative is a product of the girl's imagination as she processes the repeated phone conversations her mother has with her grandmother, until she actually sees a rabbit in the wild. Initially, that real-life meeting leads to a joyous fantasy sequence (featuring two pages of the characters dancing with each other excitedly in a manner not unlike that of Charles Schulz or Bill Watterson characters) but the ghost lingers further when she understands that the rabbit is sick and soon dies. We see that small ghost hop after her when she comes inside after covering the dead rabbit with leaves, as the girl has acquired the same sort of ghost that she imagines her mother is burdened with. This is a simple, elegant and poetic story.

McFadzean also seems to be fascinated by the human capacity for cruelty. "Everything You Can Think Of Is True" is about a child who can literally think a weird, child's version of anything he wants into existence--only he's being held by scientists for experiments. McFadzean's primitive line used for the things the child imagines is almost heartbreaking in its execution, especially when the child literally disappears into his fantasies. "Brokenface" is another more fanciful tale involving a man without a face and the assorted cartoonish indignities he suffers as a result; the story has the rhythm of a Milt Gross strip, even as it grows weirder and more contemplative by its conclusion. "Snotgurgle" transfers McFadzean's interest in the real lives of fantastic creatures like gnomes into a nightmarish torture scenario, one whose seemingly happy ending is a cruel fake-out of its own. "And The Horse You Rode In On" is an Archie pastiche that features extended segments about a lone horseman riding out on the prairies by himself, relishing his solitude. This is the daydream of a nebbish who is manipulated, abused and/or ignorde by school administrators, fellow students and his parents. He has a laughable lack of agency even as he's drawn to fit in a kind of Archie-verse, content to flit from embarrassment to embarrassment even as he refuses to truly knuckle under to anyone else's desires. There's a delicious, unresolved tension at the end of the story where the protagonist is given a chance to renounce his "purity" once and for all with a bag of weed that was given to him, but it's unclear what path he will choose.

The oddest story in the book is "Leave Luck To Heaven". It's about a young man visiting a slightly older person to have a "session" playing a video game. The structure of the session is more like Lacanian psychotherapy, wherein the analyst is often cold and demanding, threatening to throw out the analysand if they detect inauthentic action or speech. This has the rhythm of therapy, with the interesting detail that the reader can't see the eyes of either character. The corpulent, slovenly and highly erudite analyst has long hair that obscures his eyes, while the analysand is wearing glasses that deflect the reader's gaze. This device prevents the reader from getting a clear idea of either character's motives, forcing one to rely entirely on body language and what is actually said. The story also features the only color portion of the book, which plays out in a Chris Ware-style diagram that's also a sort of circuitry sketch. The story sums up McFadzean's work in a nutshell: subtle, bizarre, restrained, probing, melancholy, hopeful and mysterious. Like the analyst, McFadzean has no interest in giving readers pat answers to the scenarios he introduces. Instead, he wants readers to experience the isolation, loneliness, tenderness, familiarity and strangeness of the environments he creates and the people he introduces. Thanks to his skill as a draftsman, storyteller and writer of dialogue, each and every story is a success, and each story builds on the momentum of the next.