2dcloud: Blaise Larmee

Following up on my recent Minnesota post, let's take a look at one of Minneapolis's finest: 2dcloud. The publisher, Raighne Hogan, is a cartoonist in his own right, but he's made a splash thanks to his willingness to take risks with avant garde, eccentric and boundary-pushing comics. Hogan's put interesting work back in print, printed the work of locals, given homes to more-widely read cartoonists who needed a new publisher, published the work of emerging cartoonists and he's even gone the international route. At the moment, 2dcloud is running a kickstarter in an effort to support publishing some pretty remarkable books. Here are some reviews of releases from the past couple of years.

Ice Cream Kisses and Comets Comets, by Blaise Larmee. I've been following Larmee's career since his earliest minicomics to his most recent books. Despite his frequent online forays into deliberately provocative, Dada/Situationist-style culture-jamming, Larmee is an artist who has consistently been 100% committed to whatever he's writing about. In some cases, like Young Lions, his stories were about concepts like erasure and the nature of relationships and art scenes, which was a bit of an ouroboros. In Ice Cream Kisses, Larmee instead explores sexual longing and fantasy. The structure of the book is an extended Skype session between a young man and a young woman, in which we hear the fantasies of the man and see them played out on the page by Larmee. It is important to distinguish between fantasy and reality here, No one actually has sex in the story, other than masturbation. The images we see are fuzzy, even if they are explicit. In many respects, they represent images in the man's mind. Another interesting thing about the book is that we only hear the man's perspective in all of this; Larmee does not allow the reader to hear anything the woman has to think or say. In that sense, the intimacy portrayed here is as imaginary as the sex itself, and the dialogue is deliberately coarse. There is some affection proffered, but this is an extended look at lust and the ways in which levels of separation both heighten and frustrate that lust. The result is a 122-page shaggy dog sex joke without a punchline, which was designed to put the reader through that same experience of unquenchable arousal and fantasy as the narrator. It's an in-between state, a limbo state, and so the end in many ways was as arbitrary as the beginning. Larmee could have accomplished roughly the same thing in a hundred less pages, but that would defeat the purpose of the experience for the narrator, for the reader and perhaps for Larmee himself.

Comets Comets is a mini drawn by Larmee in his Young Lions/C.F. style, featuring an interview conducted by an unnamed  young woman and "celebrity artist couple" Hall Hassi and Davidson Middle. Not surprisingly, it's an imaginary interview with imaginary artists who discuss their imaginary careers using celebrity in conjunction with feminism, using tools like webcams to disseminate their work far and wide. Larmee deliberately uses heavy colors to obscure some of the lettering in the comic, refusing to grant the reader the privilege of knowing all that was said among the three characters. Hassi is an extended internet creation of Larmee's, who loves playing with the concepts of identity, fame and creation in an internet world where fame is arbitrary and viral, identity can shift or easily be hidden and manipulated, and repurposing art and images is more rampant now than ever. Like I said, when Larmee commits, he really commits, and he never breaks character in either comic.

Sequart Reprints: Leslie Stein, Blaise Larmee, Katie Skelly

 This article was originally published in 2008 at sequart.com.
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Eye of the Majestic Creature #3, by Leslie Stein. Stein's unique blend of misanthropy, anthropomorphic fantasy elements and search for connections returns with a new issue. #3 goes in a slightly different direction, as "Larry" (Stein's likely stand-in character) leaves her isolated cabin to visit her family in Chicago. This 40-page comic is quite rich and dense, both in terms of story and art. As always, the visuals in her comics are a treat. The fact that it's printed on cheap, thin newsprint somehow enhances the tactile experience of reading this comic. As in prior issues, she employs a rubbery thin-line style that's given depth by her painstakingly intense use of stippling.

This issue is probably her most focused and sustained single narrative. There are fewer random digressions and surreal moments, but the story is no less odd. The plot is simple: Larry goes to stay with her mother, hangs out with old friends for a night of drunkenness that leads to a blackout, then has dinner with her brother, father, and his assorted exes. Then she returns home to her best friend, the anthropomorphic guitar Marshy. What's interesting about the story is the way Larry lives a little less in her own head than in past stories. The comic has always been about the tension between misanthropy & alienation and the desperate need to connect. This issue feels a bit like Larry is rewinding to a past identity or identities and seeing how they fit. The result carries an evocative sense of verisimilitude in its craziness. It reminds me a bit of certain issues of Hate, as we're thrust straight into someone else's family drama and pub crawl. The latter sequence is one of the most entertaining I've ever read. I love the way that the button eyes she employs for her characters dilate as they get drunker and drunker. The page where Larry approaches her blackout is cleverly composed, as the formerly neatly-aligned panels get smaller and tumble down the page and her figures get more and more sketchy (in every sense of the word). The story's last page reiterates Larry's essential struggle: the need to connect against the exhaustion she feels when she gets home...and the exhilaration she feels when she's alone again.

Stein's work is alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) charming and grotesque, and I was especially impressed by her character design and characterization in this issue. There is an issue-to-issue narrative of sorts, albeit a thin one, and I'm curious to see how long she intends to continue this particular project and where she sees it going. Her high level of craft and care, combined with her unique sense of humor, makes reading each issue an increasingly rewarding experience.

Nurse Nurse #2, by Katie Skelly. The clever Skelly really starts to bring her psychedelic sci-fi story to full life in this second issue. Skelly shows a confidence in using the visuals to carry the narrative that wasn't quite there in issue #1, and the result is a pleasantly demented story. Our heroine, the sexy nurse Gemma, arrives on Venus only to find a man attacked by a cloud of butterflies, a mysterious black goo and the surprising sight of two of her colleagues making out with each other. Skelly really stands out here with a hallucinogenic sequence of one patient, a free-flowing & loopy series of drawings that coalesce nicely with her expressive character design. I like the fact that this is a science-fiction story that draws from very few conventional sci-fi sources, especially in terms of the look of the story. As always, Skelly writes funny, blunt dialogue to go along with her rapidly-developing sense of motion and composition. I'm looking forward to the eventual collection of this mini-series.

Untitled, by Blaise Larmee. This is a 12-page comic printed on thick cardstock, with a mysterious, evocative narrative about family and tragedy. Jumping back and forth in time, Larmee tells a story of a teenaged boy and his two sisters. Working with light, pastel tones, Larmee uses color to evoke different levels of memory, fading panels in and out as though he were connecting them to specific memories. A brother and sister must deal with a phone call out of the blue telling them that their parents have died, while a third sister is in the hospital with a toy elephant that serves as an emotional anchor for her. The end of the story flashes ahead to the brother, Birch, thinking about his past and literally walking out of the present into the past, taking his youngest sister out of the hospital as she rides out on her elephant, the hospital room flooding. There's a sense that the whole sequence, the whole story is about regret and connections lost. It's a story that demands multiple readings to allow the visual cues Larmee uses to really wash over the reader.

TCJ Post #15: Comics Youth

Rob reviews the Blaise Larmee-edited comics zine COMICS YOUTH #1 over at The Comics Journal.

Form and Function: Minicomics from Blaise Larmee, Kenan Rubenstein & Dina Kelberman

Rob reviews three unusually formatted mini-comics. Included are IMPORTANT COMICS, by Dina L Kelberman, WIG-WAM by Blaise Larmee, and TICK, PROLOGUE and ON THE BEACH by Kenan Rubenstein.

WIG-WAM, by Blaise Larmee. Larmee is one of the more interesting artists who works primarily in abstract comics. This is a somewhat vaguely defined branch of art comics, given that sometimes it means a narrative told without the use of concrete figures, sometimes a comics story where the panel to panel transitions seem unconnected, sometimes a series of collages, and sometimes a comic with an emotional story arc rather than a concrete one. WIG-WAM is about as DIY as it gets, with the cover a folded-over sheet torn from a sketchbook and silkscreened. Larmee's main subjects of interest are children: their gestures, their interactions, and their secrets as they explore the world of their homes. The most interesting thing about this comic is Larmee's point of view as an artist with relation to the children. In the scenes where we see the children at play, walking, or in silent thought, the reader sees large, vividly colored images. In scenes where he depicts children exploring their secrets, the text and drawings become tiny and simplified; he's not really privy to these secrets. Naturally, the secrets revolve around sexuality, especially as it relates to identity. This comic is less a coherent statement than a series of loosely-related images that coalesce around a few simple ideas. What I like most about it is that it gets at the feeling of childhood mystery, a feeling that is never resolved as a child and never again accessed as an adult.



IMPORTANT COMICS, by Dina Kelberman. Kelberman works in a number of different media, with comics as the seeming repository for her most spontaneous work. IMPORTANT COMICS is a collection of her ephemeral, stick-figure minimalist comics. I'm fascinated by the way she uses color in her comics. It's rarely there to define space or push a narrative; often, it seems to interrupt narrative with random blotches or swaths of color completely sweeping over a panel. Like everything else in this collection, it serves to keep the reader off-balance. Despite the crude and simple nature of the artwork, Kelberman is clearly fascinated by the formal qualities of comics. Strips where her main two characters (a cylindrical triangle character and a bean-like character) "talk" with word balloons completely filled with color and no words get at this idea. Characters pour out of panels, panels are placed at weird angles in connection to each other, and in general form & function blur into each other.


This particularly plays out in the way Kelberman employs text: sometimes it's a scrawl, sometimes it's precise, and often it's part of the art itself. This is less immersive than taking an aspect of Chris Ware's work (his interjection of text occasionally dominating image) and running with it in an entirely different direction. The reader gets a big clue as to what Kelberman's doing when she reveals that she wishes she was synaesthetic. This comic is meant to be looked at as much as it is read, and the way word and image blurs mimics this desire to simulate the experience of different senses blurring in one's perception. While this collection was carefully constructed, with images juxtaposed with obvious intentionality, it also seems clear that the original images were entirely spontaneous.



It also helps that the book is very funny. Kelberman lampoons her own ambitions by printing an index in the back that refer to the text captions on each page from "jurassic park rehearsal" to "shaddap". Most of the strips are small observations, arguments, non-sequiturs, jokes and bits of absurdism (like a pair of shorts and socks being mean to a t-shirt). While it seems clear that part of the original effect of reading her comics is a visceral one, with tiny pages, she manages to keep that "what-is-this?" feeling up on page after page. Even as the reader settles into Kelberman's technique and style, she still manages to surprise and delight on every page.

TICK, PROLOGUE and ON THE BEACH, by Kenan Rubenstein. I've seen all sorts of hand-made trickery employed to spice up mini-comics, but it's the truly skilled artist who can turn such formal pyrotechnics into something that dovetails with the narrative. Will Dinski is one of the best I've seen in that regard, but Kenan Rubenstein's efforts here were also quite memorable. PROLOGUE and ON THE BEACH are tiny minis (about 2x3) that expand like maps. You open the first flap for the first panel, the next flap for the next two panels, the next flap for the next four panels, and the final flap for a splash page that serves as either a punchline or a capper.

PROLOGUE starts as a typical boy-meets-girl slice-of-life story, narrated by the author. It turns into something quite different, though the ending is alluded to early in the story. The final twist doesn't feel like a cop-out; instead, it turns the story on its head, using one cliche' to add depth and meaning to the cliche' we are initially presented with. ON THE BEACH is much more light-hearted, relating an anecdote about the author's experiences on a nude beach. Once again, the formal properties of the mini serve the story well, "exposing" more and more of the scene on the beach. It's an enormously clever use of the canvas, as it were, truly forcing the reader to engage the work and sparking their awareness of the comic as an object and delivery system.


TICK is formatted much like a calendar, which makes sense since page headers are months and several of the pages are gridded like a calendar. This is a story mostly told in images, with little dialogue. It's about a frustrated and clearly lonely artist who tosses aside his drawings for blueprints, creating a mechanical companion (which looks much like himself) run by a huge key that makes a ticking sound. "Tick" has a double meaning here--both the ticking of the automaton and the ticking of the clock as days pass by in frustration. There's a clever and unexpected twist in the story halfway through when the initial protagonist disappears and the automaton essentially lives his life in his place, biding his time until winter comes again. Ironically, winter proves to be a time of renewal for both characters.

It's an interesting idea for a comic and ambiguous enough to support several different interpretations. The main character is obsessed with spring and trees, perhaps because he's unable to actually experience it. The months that pass with the automaton are cleverly designed; each panel is a day on a calendar, roughly, and there's a sense of jumbled and blurred time bubbling up as a series of moments. It's a comic about loneliness, separation, reconnection and the ways in which relationships can break apart--even one's own relationship with one's muse. Rubenstein's sense of composition is bold and daring, with the calendar format both a problem to solve and the solution to the problem all at once.

Rubenstein's main weakness as an artist is his line. His figures are stiff and he tends to overrender a bit, which is not unusual for a young artist. His character design is a bit limited at this point as well. His line is just not very lively at the moment; it has the precision of an illustrator rather than the fluidity of a cartoonist. After he's able to loosen up a bit, this will allow him to really play to his strengths: his understanding of composition, striking use of light & shadow contrast and empathy for his characters. It's why I enjoyed his smaller "Oubliette" comics more than TICK; they were more spontaneous and less labored over. As Rubenstein matures, hopefully he'll be able to maintain that spontaneity for his more ambitious projects.