Max Huffman and Garage Island

I've been following Max Huffman's work since he was a teenager, and now he's a graduate of SVA's comics program. It's difficult to pin down exactly what he's doing, other than to note that it's extremely funny and highly stylized. A few years back, he did an issue of Bootleg Jughead (#1), which features highly polished and grotesque images in the ballpark of Michael DeForge and certain Meathaus alumni (I sense some Brandon Graham deep in the DNA of his drawings). However, his sense of humor and comic timing are entirely his own. There's an intensity in his writing that demands multiple rereads, even as the action on the page flies by.

Huffman puts every genre in his comics and sets it to puree, as there's detective noir, science-fiction, comedy nerd stuff, slice of life and pure action. Bootleg Jughead also revealed perhaps his greatest strength: his willingness to go to great ends for a gag, especially if it somehow involved violence. There's a scene where Jughead imagines himself slam dunking a ball (drawn in stylized but mostly naturalistic manner) only to realize that he dunked on a light fixture. That total and unexpected demolition of previously established logic is his go-to gimmick. It's a sort of warped storytelling logic in the tradition of the Marx Brothers, where each character looks like a beloved and familiar figure that's been warped and turned into a caricature. That was obviously necessary when writing his comic about Jughead, but it was continuing this technique into his Crim Coblend's Garage Island series that really made it funny.

It is a series of gags tied around the loose premise of a Johnny Carson-style talk show, only its host (the titular Crim Coblend) is also the dictator of the small island country where it's filmed. The first issue is a micro-mini, something like 4" x 3". Huffman often uses the thinnest of line weights in some of his drawings, especially in drawing bodies. The heads are often grotesque, inhuman, drawn from a Cubist perspective or otherwise falling apart. The second issue gets bigger, at 5" x 8" and continues the use of almost lurid one and two color looks, often alternating between brick red and a light, vaguely nauseating green. The narrative is propulsive and even uses elements of continuity, but it's also nonsensical, as a detective in the employ of his family is looking for his missing uncle. Meanwhile, a roaming journalist makes his life miserable. There's a great gag that when the detective returns to his office, it was clear that some people had picked it over, inadvertently making it a little nicer looking in the process. One character exercises his true nature as being part airplane. The journalist (in a two page interlude with a cool, blue wash) winds up at a scenester party where after a dip in a pool consisting of olive oil, she's handed a loaf of bread to wipe off with. The action makes sense within each panel in a very clear manner, which means that it's not at all a confusing read. It's just that the further back you thinking about the story, the more absurd it becomes.

The third issue is in regular comic book forat, only with a lot of gutter space at the top and bottom of each page. The colors can be described as psychedelic pastels: soft and warm at first, but also disorienting and meant to be looked at as much as absorbed as part of the narrative. There's a return to the talk show setting and a long digression with the band leader, Doctor Website, who enters a Steve Ditko-like dimension for adventures there. Reading the previous issues is both helpful and entirely irrelevant; it's the former less because of the narrative and more to help get into the flow of Huffman's storytelling style, and irrelevant because Huffman himself informs the reader not to worry about the cast or story. Indeed, entering into scenarios in media res is another common tactic for Huffman, starting the action and gags first and letting story catch up to it later. Though I've thrown a few names out for comparison, Huffman's influences are also steeped in fine art and comedy as much as any comic, but there's a wonderful sense of geometry in his comics. Weird angles, squiggles, distorted figures and other techniques that make it feel like Huffman is illustrating some of warped view of reality in his own head, one that's both relentlessly unsettling and hilarious.

Though he made his goal, I'd like to note Huffman's kickstarter campaign for a project called Plaguers Int'l. Huffman continues to push the boundaries of his visuals while using adventure tropes for subversive purposes. This isn't work, at this point of his career, that can be indefinitely or as his signatures. It feels more like him trying to figure things out at a rapid pace until he's ready for something bigger, but the journey there is certainly a great deal of fun.