D&Q: Pascal Girard, Jillian Tamaki

Nicolas (updated edition), by Pascal Girard. I wrote about the first edition of Nicolas here. I've always had mixed feelings about Girard's work, as his tendency to play up his less flattering qualities for comedic purposes gets to be so extreme that he transforms into a loathsome George Costanza-style character, divorced from reality and polite society. Nicolas avoided a lot of that artifice while still being self-deprecating, as it was an honest look at the ways in which we process grief are difficult and mysterious. The new edition offers a twenty five page addendum, picking up roughly ten years after the last book. If the first edition was about Girard finally coming to terms with his grief and allowing himself to feel it, then the update is about his shaky relationship with his youngest brother, Joel. Girard was three years older than his brother Nicolas, who died at the age of five, but Joel is a full eight years younger than Girard. Girard blamed that distance in age for why he wasn't close to his brother, but he explores some of the real reasons in the story.

While turning the deceased Nicolas into a saint, he ignored the sibling who was actually alive. The reason is obvious: when he was growing up, he wasn't able to process the death of Nicolas, so it follows that establishing an emotional relationship with his younger brother simply wasn't within his capabilities. It was too emotionally risky. Girard also tracks down something else: Nicolas served as a totem protecting him against the generalized anxiety disorder that developed shortly after his brother's desk. From writing his brother's name on his foot or hand to looking at that photo in his wallet, Nicolas served as a way to calm him down. However, reifying his dead brother not only prevented Girard from properly mourning him, it directly interfered with growing close to his youngest brother. Girard addresses all of these issues as he slowly comes to understand how much his brother loves him, something he always tried to ignore. Getting closer is something that came in fits and starts, as he agreed to be his brother's best man but wasn't quite ready to make a speech about him, but in the end he initiates a get-together. It's a beautiful, powerful ending that carries a powerful truth: we are always potentially growing and changing and are never finished products. It can take years sometimes to get at certain truths, but a willingness to be open to them and work can yield the sort of results that Girard discovered in the course of his growth and the creation of this book. The wobbly and ragged nature of his line is a mixture of his current style and a reclamation of that initial, threadbare and spontaneous line that he used for the first edition of the book. The new section complements and adds to the complexity of the overall work in unforeseen and serendipitious ways.

SuperMutant Magic Academy, by Jillian Tamaki. Adapting her web series of the same name, Tamaki gets at the heart of what is compelling about X-Men comics and Harry Potter novels: the parts when the protagonists sit around between adventures and try to cope with life as young adults. At the same time, the magical/superheroic elements of the book are almost incidental to the emotional core of the book, and can easily be seen as over-the-top metaphors instead of the real meat of the story. As such, Tamaki manages to send up the genre trappings of her book while at the same time writing one of the best, most true-to-life YA stories I've ever encountered. Each of the members of the ensemble, no matter how exaggerated or absurd they might seem on the surface, feels like a real person. So much so that each character feels like a slightly different person of someone that Tamaki knew.

There is a barebones plot as the story follows the students through the school year until it ends with prom. Most of the book takes the form of one to two page vignettes with a gag, focusing on character moments instead of trying to sculpt a more fluid narrative. It's snapshot after snapshot, and the character of her line is different on each page. Sometimes, Tamaki a thin line in her fully-rendered style. On other pages, it's a cruder, thick line. Other pages are just lightly-rendered pencil or a quickly-sketched pen. The different approaches allow for a level of spontaneity that's unusual in a book like this, as the characters seemed to provide Tamaki with endless inspiration for gags that she tried to get down as quickly as possible.

The book's emotional heart and soul is Marsha, a frumpy, bespectacled girl who's secretly in love with her best friend Wendy. Marsha is caustic, kind, confused, depressed and hopeful all at once. She tries a few times to tell Wendy how she feels (including an aborted attempt where she accidentally tells her how she feels and says "KIDDING!"), including a hilarious scene where Marsha knocks on Wendy's door and simply blurts out "I'M GAY". Wendy's response in trying to be a good ally is so painful as to be excruciatingly funny, especially when Marsha hints at her feelings with a long soliloquy about Wendy's hair. Wendy uncomprehendingly asks, "Do you want to borrow my shampoo?"

Tamaki hits on queer issues, appearance-based issues (all of Wendy's pronouncements about never giving up and whatnot are put in dubious light by some of her friends because Wendy is beautiful), and class-based issues. Some of the characters are a bit more wacky or cliched than others, like Frances, the guerilla performance-art weirdo or Trevor, the burn-it-all-down troublemaker who doesn't know what he wants. (In his case, he is assisted by having laser beam eyes.) There's the running gag of Everlasting Boy, an immortal who is constantly being depicted as being chewed up and spat out by the world again and again, but always coming back. His strips are palate cleansers in a way, acting as blackout gags in between interpersonal drama. On the other hand, there's Cheddar, the successful jock who's lazy in class and tries to use his charm to get out of as much work as possible. While smarmy at times, he's also genuine and enlightened in unexpected ways, and the story's (anti)-climax puts him and Marsha together in an unusual circumstance as both decided to skip prom and wind up facing epic danger. Tamaki respects and understands all of the rules and tropes of genre fiction but only employs them when it advances characters or is good for a joke. That insider understanding is key to the success of the book, allowing her to only superficially focus on the genre elements of the story and plot and instead focus almost entirely on character and humor. In essence, it's the inverse of most genre fiction, and Tamaki has crafted a book that's all the best parts of it.

Punchable Face: Petty Theft

Pascal Girard goes yet deeper into the realm of squirm humor with a protagonist who goes from being pathetic and unlikable and skates into loathsome territory. Some have invoked Larry David's name when talking about Girard's comics, but David's "social assassin" self-caricature in his Curb Your Enthusiasm TV show is always an active agent in his life. With Girard in comics like Reunion and his new Petty Theft, he's more like a grown-up Charlie Brown. He's constantly defeated by life, but so many of his problems are a result of his own passive (and sometimes passive-aggressive) behavior. There's a touch of late-era Charles Schulz in Girard's line: his figures are cute, his line is thin to the point of being fragile and wobbly and there's a tremendous understanding and use of compact space and body language in order to generate slapstick gags. The lack of border panels only serves to emphasize the fragility of the line and how much negative space there is on each page. I have no doubts as to Girard's skill as a cartoonist nor any regarding his storytelling. One does wonder about a cartoonist whose self-caricature not only defies the reader to sympathize with him, but actively made me as a reader want to punch him repeatedly in the face.

Part of that is a result of the way Girard draws his self-caricature. With the stooped posture, oversized glasses, huge dot eyes, and oversized chin & nose, he's a sort of walking "kick me" sign. He's both the schlemeil and the schlimazel, to put it in Yiddish terms; in other words, he's the cause of accidents and also the recipient of bad luck. In this book, Girard is at a particular low point after a break-up of a long-term relationship; already a neurotic narcissist to begin with, his self-worth is in desperate need of a pick-me-up. He's couch-surfing with a friend, wants to abandon cartooning in favor of a more manly career like welding and even ponders going back to school. He's the epitome of the "first world problems" meme and so helplessly bourgeois that he can't see beyond his own ridiculous self-pity. When he's a bookstore and spots a pretty girl shoplifting a book that he drew, it launches him into the truly absurd career of "detective", as he starts following the girl around.

Girard makes fellow autobio cartoonist Joe Matt look confident, secure and healthy. Like Joe Matt, Girard is fascinated by the limits of breaking the social compact and engaging in squirm humor. That humor of awkwardness is at its zenith whenever Girard is following the thief around, daydreaming about first having sex with her and then having babies with her (!). He manages to contrive showing up at the cafe' at which she works and eventually ask her out on a date. Girard loves starting a premise and then throwing on as many crazy obstacles as possible in the path of that premise. For example, a date with the girl where he promises to cook her dinner is hindered by an eye injury incurred at his welding job, which makes it difficult for him to see, much less cook. After botching a kiss, Girard bumps his head into a shelf. That's after he carried a giant paper mache' head of his ex-girlfriend downstairs and literally bumps into the thief.

There is an eventual confrontation between Girard and the woman about her thievery and the various "noble" things he does to make up for it. Of course, she has other bizarre tics, like laughing loudly and inappropriately at comments she makes, not to mention her near sociopathic willingness to steal books from anyone and everyone. Naturally, Girard winds up with her in the end, healthy relationships be damned. Girard's self-flagellatory depiction, his masterful use of slapstick and the page design all serve to heighten discomfort. Petty Theft is a hundred page ride of awkwardness that never lets up, never encourages us to sympathize with its lead while never punishing him for his behavior in any direct way. In a sense, living in his own skin is its own punishment.

Cat Story: Fanny & Romeo

Andy Brown's taste in publishing is pretty spot-on for his Conundrum Press, even when it comes to lighter fare. Yves Pelletier & Pascal Girard's Fanny & Romeo is in essence a romantic comedy that has a number of side-alleys, but the author-artist duo keep it from drifting into cliche' or sloppy sentiment. It's cute, to be sure, but never quite strays into being unbearably twee. In part, that's because the two leads in the story (Fanny and Fabien) are not entirely sympathetic throughout the book, even if there's frequently good reason for their mutual antagonism. These aren't two nice, perfect people who are led through a series of merry mix-ups and contrived conflicts in order to attach a spine of a plot to the book. Instead, these are two damaged, conflicted people who frequently act out in inappropriate ways as a means to avoid confronting their real problems.

Fanny desperately wants to have a baby with her boyfriend Fabien. Fabien wants to wait until their lives are more stable--which is in some ways code for saying he wants her to be more stable as a person. When Fanny adopts a stray cat from a friend leaving the country, she instantly starts treating him like a person, as a sort of weird hybrid between boyfriend and child that sometimes happens when people substitute the affection of animals for humans. Fabien is allergic to the cat and gets sick around it (which Fanny blithely ignores much of the time), but he's also dismissive toward Fanny and doesn't respect her needs. Fabien grows increasingly frustrated when Fanny starts transferring all of her affection toward the cat, going as far as to rent a separate apartment for her to take care of the cat in. Pelletier does a nice job of playing up the sheer ridiculousness of Fanny's behavior while leaving a little room to offer some understanding of her desperate need to share love and receive it from her pet. Pelletier also notes that Fanny's stubborn need to have the cat forces her to grow up and put her talents as a graphic designer to real use.

One of the big themes in the book is infidelity. Fanny's old boyfriend cheated on her (and she similarly was unable to get him to have kids--something that immediately changed with his new girlfriend's pregnancy), and she constantly suspects Fabien of stepping out on her as well. Just as her old boyfriend didn't want to have a kid with her, she sees Fabien inevitably following in his footsteps in other ways and seeing other women -- and his old girlfriend Kim in particular. Fanny's success and ability to cope while being alone is only heightened when she discovers that her cat isn't exactly faithful to her, either, as she is shocked to learn that the cat really belongs to a whole other family. The book ends with a reunion that while a bit soapy, is totally earned on the part of Fanny and mostly believable on the part of Fabien. Girard is really at his best here, channeling his inner Joann Sfar in the way he draws animals and uses color to flesh out characters' emotional states. The simplicity and clarity of his slightly ragged line matched with the softness of the watercolors adds a lot of restraint to the proceedings, whereas a more cutesy approach with digital color might have made the book unbearable. Instead, it's a clever, cute and entertaining book with some wise observations folded into the silly scenarios. It's a lightweight bit of fun that is firmly in the camp of what Kim Thompson once referred to as "good crap": stories aimed at a mainstream audience that are solidly constructed, entertaining and fun to look at.

New Post: Developments Arrested-- Mid-Life and Reunion

Pascal Girard's Reunion and Joe Ollmann's Mid-Life are books with similar sensibilities but different approaches. Both are self-deprecatory (sometimes to the point of self-flagellating) accounts of emotionally stunted men at facing crises that are entirely of their own making. Both books are autobiographical up to a point, but clearly take a lot of creative license in order to stitch together a narrative as well as emphasize the humorously pathetic nature of their protagonists. Girard's "Pascal Girard" character is faced with his ten year high school reunion while Ollmann's "John Olsen" is a new dad at 40-something years old who finds himself smitten with a children's music performer. Both characters are dissatisfied with their lot in life in a typically bourgeois kind of way; both have perfectly nice, successful and satisfying lives but have the nagging feeling that there's an ideal version of themselves that they're not quite living up to. It's certainly not an unusual feeling for men of that age, and both books are mostly predictable in how they unfold. Both men are obsessed with their appearance, both men sabotage their own successful lives for their ridiculous fantasies and both men wind up humiliating themselves in spectacular (if differing) ways.


Girard's approach is as loose as Ollmann's is labored. It feels like something torn out of a sketchbook, with no narrative captions, no chapter separations and no panels. Each page feels open and loose, an organic and relaxed approach that belies the sheer relentlessness of Girard's comedic assault upon the reader and his own person. The very first page introduces the reader to Girard's self-caricature, an awkward & stubbly presence throughout the book. The character is obsessed with being considered a "winner" and so is lured to the reunion by an email from a girl for whom he always harbored a crush. He hides that from his girlfriend as he decides to lose fifty pounds to look good for his old crush. That triggers a series of events where Girard, to use some delightful Yiddish terms, is both schlemiel and schlemazel. That is, he's an awkward person who manages to offend and annoy any number of well-meaning friends and acquaintances, as well as someone who has a lot of bad luck.


With 156 pages of this material, Reunion at times feels like too much of a good thing. Girard never embues "Girard" with a single positive trait. It's a bold move to make your protagonist so thoroughly pathetic and loathsome, especially when you throw in the cruel self-caricature (the exaggerated chin he draws on himself and the sweat stains he draws on his clothes are especially amusing) without narrative captions to help defend himself. The first half of the book sees him preparing for and anticipating the reunion, as he looks at Facebook photos of sexy old classmates and fantasizes about being desired by Lucie, his old crush. He starts to lose weight but is in pain from a bad tooth and constant cramping in his legs. Even as he loses weight, he tries to ignore a huge wart on his finger and the fact that his jutting jaw is becoming ever more pronounced. He manages to offend everyone at a dinner party he's dragged to while embarrassing himself by revealing that his socks are full of holes when he has to take his shoes off.


At the reunion itself, he arrives overdressed and proceeds to either abuse or get abused by every single person. He ignores the people who genuinely want to see him. He interrupts conversations and overreacts to perceived slights. The climax of the book comes when his mouth is in pain, he cramps up and his glasses get broken. Friendly former classmates work on all three problems at once as he squirms on a bench, creating the funniest photo of the night. He gets several lectures on not focusing so much on appearances and being a "winner". I was worried that Girard was going to cop out as his namesake went through a pat learning experience, but he stays the course and piles on an exquisite final physical comedy sequence and a topper gag on top of that as the final panel.

The book was a bit of a grind at times, especially during the first half. It's a book whose humor is dependent on schadenfreude at the expense of the author, but the author invites the reader to laugh at his hubris and vanity. There are times that he perhaps thinks his foibles are funnier than they actually are, but it's a credit to his skill as a cartoonist that he was able to blast through the book's slower moments with a series of gags that were not only funny in the moment, but paid off earlier set-ups. Mid-Life similarly has a final act filled with hilarious humiliations, but how Ollmann gets there and the ultimate message of the book are quite different. There are lessons to be learned in Ollmann's book, whereas for Girard, the lessons are far less important the comedy inherent in them.


Ollmann's book is rigidly structured and it's obvious that every page and every panel has been labored over intensely. There's an almost tortured quality to his line, as if he's afraid of having much white space poke through. His line is thick, and while his characters are cartoony (with some of them bordering on the grotesque), he fills them with detail. Olsen in particular gets lavished with a sort of self-loathing and self-obsessed detail: liver spots, lines on his forehead, random tufts of hair, a paunchy stomach, etc. That said, one never gets the sense that Ollmann doesn't trust his line enough to really tell his story, as he uses a lot of distracting greyscaling to fil up space. This is unfortunate, because his drawings are funny enough to carry the story on their own.


The book's first page is hilarious, as the Olsen character has to deal with the shit of his three cats and a feces-filled diaper left on the floor; the line "there's more poop in my life than a German porn film" was a laugh-out loud moment for me as a reader. Ollmann proves throughout the book that he's witty writer who can dish out punchlines and shtick. Indeed, Ollmann is as sure-footed a scripter as he is unsteady a draftsman. At times, text overwhelms his panels, either with Olsen's brutally self-deprecating narrative captions or frequently long-winded dialogue. There were times that I wished he used a smaller 2 x 3 or 2 x 2 grid instead of the 3 x 3 grid that Ollmann employs with few exceptions throughout the book in order to let his pages breathe a little. Mid-Life has a cramped, frantic quality as a result of its panel layout that doesn't always seem to be the author's intention.


Indeed, what I like best about the book is the way Ollmann brings the narrative conflict to a slow boil and frequently pauses along the way in order to reflect. The story involves an exhausted Olsen, having passed 40 and in a constant state of exhaustion due to dealing with a young child, desperately wanting to feel young and vital again. The wrinkle here is that he was a young parent and has two adult daughters, meaning that he never did get to have those carefree days of youth. He spends time after he and his wife divorce trying to play catch-up, and there's a sense throughout the Olsen is chasing some idealized state of youth and desirability that is entirely a fantasy.


Olsen develops a remote crush on Sherri Smalls, a children's musician who is on the cusp of a major career decision: should she accept a job as the host of a kid's show on a Disney Channel-type network, even if it means completely selling out? That crisis is punctuated by her inability to find the right kind of relationship, even as she's attracted to older men (in a bit of foreshadowing that is not exactly subtle). Olsen's burgeoning obsession affects his job performance and his relationship with his second wife. It's as much a fantasy about creating an escape hatch from one's current life as it is something centered on someone in particular. Throughout the book, Olsen simultaneously apologizes for and tries to explain his position while letting the reader know his behavior is awful. At 172 pages, there are about fifty pages of exposition that drag the book down and feel ridiculously self-indulgent. Olsen starts to repeat details and feelings that seemed obvious and cliche' the first time around, let alone the second.


That said, once Ollmann gets to Chapter 17 (103 pages into the book), the book picks up in painfully funny fashion. Contacting Smalls to do an interview in New York City as part of a related work assignment, there's an amazing scene the night before he leaves where his wife pours her heart out to him, regretting their recent lack of intimacy and their constant bickering. Olsen doesn't want to hear it, in part because he wishes he could meet Smalls with his marriage in a state of uncertainty, a feeling that immediately produces guilt but doesn't go away. The New York sequences are as sharp as the middle of the book was flat, as Olsen and Smalls meet, he lies to her about being married, they find they have chemistry, and a guilt-ridden Olsen decides not to go through with it. However, a baffled Smalls calls to tell him she's coming over to talk about this, leading to a number of scenes of great physical comedy that climaxes with Olsen hiding behind a plant in the hotel's lobby in an effort to hide from her.

Regrettably, Olsen tries to tie up loose ends into a neat package at the end, as he ponders all of the ways he plans to change, how the trip was an eye-opener for him and he owed his wife honesty. Sure, there's a plot-derailing bit at the end, but it still feels a bit like Ollmann lets his character off the hook more than a little, and certainly much more than Girard did. There's still a lot to like in this book and I admire Ollmann's willingness to flog himself for humor as much as he did, but the book would have benefited from a less-is-more approach.

Lives Worth Living: Nicolas, Kaspar and Baloney

Rob reviews the three latest releases from Drawn & Quarterly: Pascal Girard's NICOLAS, Diane Obomsawin's KASPAR and Pascal Blanchet's BALONEY.


A trio of smallish books were just published by Drawn & Quarterly, and they range from minimalist to highly stylized. All three are concerned with capturing important moments of the human experience. Pascal Girard's NICOLAS is concerned with how we deal with grief and loss when we aren't ready to process it. Diane Obomsawin's KASPAR is about a young man in 19th century Europe who was left in a town after being raised in a cellar without human contact. This book is all about the line between individual and society and how this creates identity. Finally, Pascal Blanchet's BALONEY seeks to examine misfortune, exploitation and despair through aggressively quirky and angular design.


NICOLAS is the most powerful of the three works, in larger part because of its restraint. It's about the relationship Girard has with the death of his brother, who passed away at a young age at a time when Girard was also a child. The book unfolds as a series of vignettes as Girard takes an unflinching view of how he tried to cope (or not cope) with the experience, explain the experience, exploit the experience and then finally come to terms with his grief. It's at times hilarious, like when Girard is in high school and relates his loss to a girl so as to get over with her--his grin when he realizes his sneaky plan worked made me laugh out loud.

What NICOLAS gets to the heart of is the experience of grief as a child and the ways children try to process it. The process of grieving is as much a physical one as it is an emotional one, and the ritual of funerals (prevalent in every culture) is a way of expunging the visceral power of those feelings. Children aren't really capable of processing these emotions in the same way that an adult can, and as the anecdotes in this book reveal, the nature of that processing often doesn't come until many years later--often in random or inappropriate ways. This book could have easy been mawkish or scored points with easy sympathy; instead, Girard goes out of the way to demonstrate the less flattering ways in which he went through this experience. He did this not so much as a deliberate act of self-deprecation, I believe, but rather as the only way he knew of relating what he actually felt at a given time, rather than what people expected he should feel.

His minimalist line and barest backgrounds recall John Porcellino's work a bit, especially in the way they evoke a certain kind of emotional shorthand. It's another way of avoiding sentimentality, so that at the end of the book when he talks about missing his brother every day, it's a moment that's been earned in the eyes of the reader. NICOLAS is a modestly ambitious but perfectly executed book.


Obomsawin's KASPAR is similarly drawn with a very spare line. In this case, it's a way of mimicking the childlike state of its subject. Obomsawin chooses to tell the story as a first-person narrative from Kaspar Hauser's point of view, making this a sort of children's narrative where the main character is writing his own story as he goes along. It's an interesting strategy, because it speaks to Kaspar himself being interested in spinning his own story and becoming a character in the new world he was thrust into; it seems very clear that he was quite aware of what his eventual status in society meant. We get a sense of Kaspar the showman with the story told this way. Second, it's a way of hinting at but not getting bogged down in the greater philosophical questions his existence raised. Nature vs nurture, the individual vs society, language vs cognition are all running arguments in this comic, and none of them are resolved. She also hints that Kaspar developed some interesting sensory tics, like synesthesia.

Instead, we have Kaspar narrating his own death scene, almost detaching himself from what passed for reality and phasing into the world of fiction. It's a great story, both in terms of the reader following his life and seeing how and what he learns as well as how the world treats him. He went from being pitied to studied to celebrated to being an object of suspicion. "Object" is a key descriptor of this comic, because the world saw Kaspar as an object of study, while Kaspar saw others as objects related to his own simple ends and happiness. It's not a story about emotional connection or emotions at all other than those directly related to survival. The simplicity of the art (and Kaspar's own narrative) is both funny and sad and becomes more poignant as one begins to realize that Kaspar will never be able to fit in in this world.



The most visually striking of the three books is Blanchet's BALONEY, "a tale in 3 symphonic acts". There's a lot of ambition in this book, as Blanchet seeks to translate the swelling emotions felt while listening to a symphony's performance into comics form. He wants the reader to feel music crashing as they go from image to image and page to page, getting across the immense sadness and despair related to this story of oppression.

It's not an entirely successful mix. The formal elements of this book, while stunningly beautiful, interfere with any attempt at grounding the characters emotionally and letting the reader hook into them. They're caricatures that are part of a larger morality tale, not characters. As such, it was hard to work up much interest in the travails of a doomed little mountain town plagued by a vicious autocrat and the over-the-top woes of the butcher and his daughter. The book is not a tragedy in the Greek sense, but rather a story of oppression, a brief ray of hope, and then that hope mercilessly snuffed out at the hands of a brutal authority figure. It's opera-as-polemic, writ larger-than-life, but ultimately a bit too simplistic and on-the-nose.

It also doesn't feel like a comic. There are swaths of beautiful, sharply-rendered illustration that cleverly mix black, white & red in all their contrasts. Blanchet's character design is wickedly clever, especially with one bicycle wheel subbing as a missing leg for a crippled girl. Problems come when we see an image and then a long, clunky chunk of text explaining what we're seeing and what everyone feels. I couldn't help thinking while reading this that this comic seemed to want to be an animated feature with sound rather than a comic. Blanchet had specific pieces of music in mind all along when drawing this comic, and it would have been a much more subtle way of getting across emotion and relating information while still retaining that slightly bombastic operatic feel.

It was jarring to read BALONEY after reading NICOLAS, given the restraint the latter displayed in the depiction of the same sort of emotional trauma. The two authors obviously had different ends in mind while writing these comics and certainly different motivations, but the restraint of NICOLAS made it all the more powerful, whereas BALONEY is a book more to be appreciated for its formal qualities than experienced as a coherent work of art.