Cartoonist Utopia: Breakers

Breakers is less an anthology than a snapshot of what was obviously a magical experience for a number of cartoonists. Every other year, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in the barely-there town of New Smyrna Beach, FL invites a couple of dozen cartoonists for a three week arts residency, with three master artists selected to run individual groups. This year's master cartoonists were Dean Haspiel, Megan Kelso and Ellen Forney--three cartoonists with very different approaches to the art of comics. Breakers is divided into comics done by cartoonists in each of the three groups. Each of the leaders wanted different things from those under their instruction. For example, Forney wanted everyone to keep a comics diary and perhaps try a different formal approach than they usually use; in her case, it was adding more dialogue and using fewer narrative captions. Most of the comics here are really just snippets, exercises and sketchbook work. Don't read this comic as you would most anthologies, where an editor carefully constructs the flow of the work to manage the narrative thrust of each entry. Breakers is more about the way our work reflects our surroundings and co-workers.

The Forney group, "Team Zeppelin", is not unlike the others in that the group's common experiences and in-jokes shaped their work. A day at a nude beach where an elderly man approached them and started questioning them was used by almost everyone on her team as a touchstone. Forney really pushed her team to draw that incident and the bodies they saw at the beach in general, and that was obviously a clear bonding moment that pushed individual boundaries of comfort in a positive way. Lara Antal, the editor of this collection, leads off with a long, personal story about her career that's formally very ambitious in terms of the way she sets up panels, uses negative space and creates detailed close-ups that are emotionally powerful.  Rebecca Case's smudgy and cute style is all about the use of shapes rather than lines to tell a story, but they're no less expressive than Antal's more naturalistic style. Jean Chen's simple line in her one-page, punchline heavy strips is also quite appealing and makes for a nice contrast. Julie Condon's story "Married to Dick" looks a bit like the sort of thing Liz Baillie used to do and is hands-down the funniest story in the book. It's one long nightmare/fantasy where the artist and a friend see this kind of douchey-looking guy at a fruit stand and she imagines what life would be like if she was married to him. The stakes grow continuously hire and more ridiculous as the story proceeds, perfectly amping up the ridiculousness of it all. From the concrete we move to the abstract, as Gabrielle Greenlee's painted account of diving underwater is all about waves and motion. Boum and Lynda May both share simple stories of their Florida experiences from entirely different points of view: passive (Boum was pregnant and unable to do things like go on hikes) and active (May was constantly on her bicycle). K-Fai Steele rounds out the group with an interesting childhood strip, a story about a runaway monkey and her own take on the beach and the encounter with the naked old man. Forney's own strips are very stripped down and even scrawled out in comparison to her more refined typical line.

I'm not sure if it was because the Forney group was Antal's group, but that section was by far the most cohesive and interesting in the book. Kelso's group ("The Field House Gang") had some fine veteran cartoonists in it like Lark Pien and Gabrielle Gamboa) features some intriguing glimpses of work (especially from Nusha Ashjaee's haunting story of an encounter in a forest), but most of the cartoonists here submitted just one or two pages each. The reader only gets a taste of their experience as a group. Kelso's own strips, on the other hand, are absolutely superb. They're very much in Kelso's cartoony, long-limbed style, but there's a dynamic looseness in her line and in these stories about connections, beauty and lust that's not usually present in her work. What she emphasized to her group was trying to regain the simple pleasure of drawing once again, and it does seem clear that there's a looseness as a group with her artists.

Dean Haspiel's "Team YOLO" played on his interests in formal experimentation and collaboration. He gave his team an assignment to draw, in whatever fashion they saw fit, a story with his text called "A Letter Lasts Longer". Christa Cassano's take on it was very clever, using a honeycombing approach to panels that contained memories with the text alongside them. What I thought was interesting was how many of the cartoonists went to exactly the same narrative well: revealing that the letter being read was at a gravestone or funeral in the final panel. It made some of the strips in this section a bit repetitive, feeling like the exercises they were. An exception was Meghan Lands, whose anthropomorphic rabbits and landscape drawings were pitch-perfect for Haspiel's text.  On the other hand, the strips involving the "Shifty Goth", a character they made up and shared, were absolutely hilarious--especially Haspiel's account of the SG in prison. JP Pollard's sci-fi vision of "Shifty Godth" was also amusing.All told, Breakers allows a reader to get an understanding of what that experience must have been like for the artists while providing a wide-ranging and ambitious number of styles and approaches to making comics.

Sequart Reprints: Lust

This article was orginally published in 2007.
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Ellen Forney has a clear understanding of sex as an act that, when examined closely, has a strong undercurrent of ridiculousness to it. Not just in the act itself, but in the things that people will do and say to get it. Anyone familiar with personal ads in the back of local weekly independent newspapers, especially those that have "variations" or sex-only ads, will understand that this is doubly true for fetish ads. Yet these ads, however absurd they are on many levels, reveal something important about human desire and human happiness. Once a week, Forney has been adapting one ad from Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger for print in that publication. This is from their "Lustlab" section: people looking for a very specific kind of sexual fulfillment. Forney pointedly avoids stereotypical, frattish "man seeks two women for fantasy" scenarios, instead focusing on kinks that are a bit more unusual.

The key to the success of her cartoon adaptations is that she understands the line between humor and mockery in her ads. She fully embraces the often ridiculous nature of the desires expressed while still respecting those needs. The result is a series of cartoons that can best be described as "playful". The cover image itself is a hilarious triumph of design--we see a star covering up the woman's breast, which is understandable, but it takes a second to figure out why the second star is so big until the reader notices the strap on the woman's thigh. Forney's playfulness and openness regarding sex and sexuality put her in just the right position to "solve" the problem of adapting these ads in a clever manner. Be it depicting these desires as ads, turning text into illustration or just using an amusing cartoon image, her cartoons are both clever triumphs of composition and strangely endearing translations of desire.

It's no accident that The Stranger's sex-advice columnist Dan Savage wrote the introduction, because the potential readership for this book is less a comics-buying audience than one that would purchase a collection of Savage's columns. As such, that would explain the book opening up with forty pages of interviews with Forney and a selection of people who placed kinky ads--"satisfied customers", if you will. I thought it was a mistake to place these at the front of the book, because the real attraction here is Forney's cartooning, not the detailed fantasies of furry-MUCKers or sadists. It certainly wasn't very illuminating of Forney's process, especially since there were no cartoons accompanying them in those sections. If they had to be included, it would have made more sense to make them part of an appendix. On the other hand, the handful of selections where a few lines from the actual text of the ads she drew from placed next to her cartoon shed a lot of light on her process.

It's interesting to contrast this book to some of the recent pin-up collections that Fantagraphics has recently published. Those books are designed to create stylized images that evoke lust and desire in their target audiences, to titillate. The reader projects their fantasy onto the image, which has no inner life of its own. On the other hand, the images in Lust are far from erotic, even when many of them are much more sexually explicit than a standard pin-up girl. There is some degree of voyeuristic or people-watching titillation, but this is still a very different experience than from a pin-up book that is divorced from reality. While Forney playfully finds the humor in the kinks of her subjects, at heart these ads are the honest projection of someone else's desires. Forney cheerfully confronts the reader with the desires of everyday people, setting up an interaction between reader and image that is in direct opposition to that of a pin-up book. While we may chuckle at the impishness of some the kinks described here, what Forney really does is get us to think about our own kinks and fantasies--and encourage us to both embrace them and see them for how frivolous they can be.

Sequart Reprints: I Love Led-Zeppelin

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2006.
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Ellen Forney is a hard cartoonist to pin down. Her work is charming and disarming, but isn't easy to categorize. Her first collection of strips, Monkey Food, compiled her "I Was Seven in '75" strips. These autobiographical comics were about her childhood in the free-spirited 70's, replete with tales of Unitarian services, attending nudist camps, her parents smoking pot, and wild parties where she might discover a couple of guests fooling around in a spare bedroom. They're also about kid stuff: games played, Judy Bloome books read, bedroom set-ups and arm-wrestling boys. Even the racy material in the book is drawn with a gleeful, childlike innocence; she makes the reader believe that there's nothing salacious about any of it. There's a refreshing quality at work here in reading a memoir about a happy (if not entirely conventional) childhood: Forney genuinely enjoys being around her parents and brother and has a great time as a child.

That sense of her well-adjustedness pervades what one might call her new, more "grown-up" collection, I Love Led-Zeppelin.. Forney is fond of titling her collections rather tangentially. This book got its title from a strip where she talks about her death fantasy: dying in a car crash, being flung from her big muscle car as Led Zep plays dramatically over her car radio. Of course, she immediately starts worrying that instead of Plant & Page blasting, some less cool band (that she still secretly likes) will be playing instead (Don Henley?). It's perfectly illustrative of her breezy style that can broach any topic, no matter how heavy (or sexy).

For example, consider her series of "How-To" strips that appeared in assorted weekly newspapers. Instead of typical topics like cooking or home repair, she worked with collaborators on topics like "How to sew an amputated finger back on", "How to fuck a woman with your hands", "How to become a successful call girl" and even more mundane topics like "How to tip your server". What makes these strips successful is that while the topics may be slightly outrageous for middle America, she both approaches the ideas with complete seriousness (there's actually lots of useful advice) and a healthy dose of humor. Her light touch, cartoony & expressive line and clever page composition make each strip fun to look at. For example, the call girl strip is presented as a board game. Some of these strips are kind of a tough slog to get through, especially if you're not interested in a particular topic. For example, "How to roller-skate backwards" is pretty much all diagrams. I think each individual strip probably played better in context in its original source, but their collected weight drags a bit here.

On the other hand, the material that Forney does solo is delightful. The highlight is "My Date with Camille Paglia", an account of Forney's attempt at collaboration with the notably wacky author and media figure. While Paglia had no interest in collaborating with Forney, she did mistake her attentions as asking her out on a date! Further hijinks did not exactly ensue, but Forney did have a bizarre phone conversation with her and got a funny story out of it. Other delights include another tale of her parents from the 70's and a costume-party blowout (including one man who dressed up as a penis and balls), a kinky photography tale (that seems quasi-autobiographical) involving three women, and the search for a white alligator.
Forney's also quite adept when she's just the illustrator for someone else's stories. That list includes Dan Savage (of Savage Love fame), Kristin Gore (the daughter of Al and a fine comedic writer) and David Schmader. Schmader's "What The Drugs Taught Me" series is both funny and a pointed alternative to anti-drug propaganda. The openness he has with his parents on the issue and the discoveries he made about the pros and drugs of the assorted drugs he tried made this an enlightening piece.

Ellen Forney's comics inhabit a space where sexuality is an understood, comfortable part of daily life. It's something that's talked about casually and in everyday conversation, and this comfort pervades every aspect of her art. Talking about sex is as normal as talking about roller-skating, and the simple but expressive flow of her art creates an aura of relaxation for everything she does. It's interesting to see a cartoonist who is not a part of the R.Crumb tradition of scrawling down ones' neuroses on the page, but who still has an interesting point of view and a compelling way of bringing it across to the reader.