Brit Comics; Sean Azzopardi, Oliver East

Let's take a look at two British cartoonists known for poetic comics abstracted from their daily lives.

The Homesick Truant's Cumbrian Yarn, by Oliver East. Somehow, this is the first comic by East that I've read despite his solid reputation over the past few years. The short description of this autobio comic is that it describes East's walk from Arnside to Grange Over Sands in Northwest England's county of Cumbria. He makes the walk for no other reason than as a thing to do, walking as near the railroad tracks as possible but taking nearly seven hours to make it to his destination because of the mud, sand, wild animals, and odd strangers. There's a strong John Porcellino influence at work here, which isn't surprising, but East's voice is quite different. He has a wonderfully dry and sarcastic wit that accompanies his spare, blotchy line that goes from depicting moments of great stillness to accelerating into frenzied moments of pursuit. 

His narrative captions veer between simple and descriptive to saying things like, in discussing the distance he must walk "Somewhere between 200 K and fuck loads" or a brightening day as "The overcast sky like a Tupperware lid. And the tub has just been removed is all. Bright but still locked in." His page layout instructs the reader as to what to pay attention to without actually saying it. When he sticks to a 2 x 3 grid on the page, this signals a steady walking rhythm. When he expands to a 2 x 2 grid on page seven, he wants the reader to slow down and observe the damage done by recent storms, which is marvelously depicted by a blotchy, splattered ink technique. Later on, when he's chased by a dog, he adds more panels to get the reader into the action and fear of the event, reducing both his body and the dog to rudimentary sketches flashing across the page. The comic is full of little delights and surprises such as this, as East drops hints and clues about his own personality without ever discussing why he's making this particular trek. It is simply something that he needs to do, and the degree of difficulty as well as its eventual conclusion are both implicitly tied to a certain emotional feeling of earned triumph, a task completed. East helps the reader see the beauty in the mud, the downed branches, the locks and levees and the simple struggle of putting one foot in front of another--all without calling attention to that beauty in his narrative. It's all in the drawings, whose beautiful immediacy and sketchiness draws the reader in.

Same Day Return and Rain On Glass, by Sean Azzopardi. Azzopardi's comics tend to reflect on his life, career and friends in particular. The former comic is a bit on the diffuse side, as Azzopardi sees a potential dopplelganger on the street, one whom might have been him if he hadn't changed his habits; he reunites with old friends in a mall and feels both the weight and awkwardness of years as well as the eventual easy and familiar rhythms of conversation; and returns to his small home town to see his sister. That latter strip is excellent, as one can see Azzopardi stripping out more and more extraneous detail from his art while adding a touch of grey here and there to give its visuals more weight. That story is ambitious in other ways, as Azzopardi flips back and forth in time as a way of recording his initial ambivalence to coming home, to what he was like growing up and what actually happened on the trip. The final major story, where he's attending a going-away party for a friend but his heart isn't much into it. When a friend texts him about the death of his mother, being able to console his friend is almost a form of relief.

Rain On Glass is a major step forward for Azzopardi. Something about his cartooning just clicks in this connection, though in terms of format it's very much like his other comics. He really spills some ink as he goes back and forth in time in talking about his teenage years living with his father in a miserable setting while turning to his friend Matt via mail in order to keep sane. It's a beautifully illustrated comic that gives the reader just enough information about the narrator to have the story make sense, while delivering odd and jarring anecdotes, like his father sitting him down with his stepbrother to watch a porno. There's a harrowing story about being brutally assaulted as a teen by a thug who thought Azzopardi had messed with her and the scars the incident left; there's little in terms of wrapping the incident up neatly--it is simply recalled in visceral, dizzying fashion (there's a remarkable two-page spread of Azzopardi's dizzying response to a vicious headbutt). The final story is a funny, sentimental account of following around The Jesus and Mary Chain around England as a teenager and even getting invited to stay in their hotel and get free passes to their next, inevitably riot-inciting show. Wading through a non-stop rainstorm, the memory cheers him, even as the waters absurdly rise above the heads of the crowd.

The comic is Azzopardi's best primarily because of his increasing sophistication with regard to story structure. It's not just the flashbacks that I'm talking about here, but rather how his strategic use of them strengthens the overall theme of each story. There are perils to dwelling in the past, Azzopardi's comics seem to be saying. Good memories are sometimes the product of horrific abuse and can easily connect to them. Thinking about the past can be instructive for the present, but one must be aware of rising tides. Above all else, Azzopardi has mastered restraint in his storytelling. Certainly, he's still a cartoonist who very much wears his heart on his sleeve and that earnestness is central to the way he tells his stories. However, the way he gets across that earnestness is slightly less direct, redirected through formal tricks that allow the reader to experience a number of difference narrative perspectives. That's aided by a much lighter rendering touch that reveals an increased confidence in what he's drawing and how he's drawing it. Hopefully, he'll continue to refine and perfect his storytelling, now that he seems to have truly moved into his mature style. 

Diary Comics: Azzopardi, Budnik, Delporte

Our Ever-Improving Living Room, by Kevin Budnik. Budnik was a student of Ivan Brunetti's at Columbia College in Chicago, and there's a clear link in sensibilities between the two cartoonists. Budnik turned a one-week diary comic assignment into a thirteen-month odyssey that helped him refine his style and slowly unlock the parts of himself he really wanted to start talking about. The format is the classic James Kochalka four-panel structure--four beats, every day. Budnik's style couldn't be more different from Kochalka's, however. In terms of his character design and tone, Budnik is a cross between Jeffrey Brown and Charles Schulz, and I don't mean that lightly. There's an incredible sturdiness in each and every strip, as Budnik carefully thinks through certain events but creates the rhythm of a four-panel strip with a punchline. What's interesting is that he arrives to the project almost totally fully-formed as an artist. Sure, he refines his line and his storytelling over the course of thirteen months, but it's subtle things like using a slightly thinner line and perhaps different tools. He also chooses his background details more carefully, and the result is a more consistent-looking strip that leads the eye exactly where Budnik wants it.

His figures are slightly ragged like Brown's but immediately recognizable and even iconic, like Schulz's. More to the point, Budnik immediately creates his "There goes good ol' Charlie Brown/Oh, how I hate him" moment with his first strip. It starts almost as a parody of the tedium of diary comics, as he checks off the things he does when he has the apartment to himself: take out the trash, do the dishes, vacuum the rug...and "cope with horrible loneliness". It's a great joke, one that's reprised near the end of the book, and it's made even funnier by the way he draws himself in the "loneliness" panel-laying naked in his own filth on the bathroom floor. That's very much a Brunetti sort of moment, but Budnik is actually more reluctant to completely spill his feelings at all times. Having a daily diary comic, however, has a way of getting at information that's otherwise hard to express, and so it comes to pass that he lets slip that he really is seriously OCD. That occurs in a strip where he tries to downplay being called OCD, saying it's an overused and misused term...but that he really does think something bad will happen to his family if he doesn't do certain things.

Overall, this is an incredibly strong first work. Budnik gives voice to his loneliness, his wanting to connect but often feeling uncomfortable with others, nostalgia for a comforting childhood and difficulty accepting adulthood. Somehow, amazingly, he comes up with a punchline every day and a strip that's just a solidly-constructed read. His work ethic and how seriously he takes this project shows on every single page; there's never a sense that he's blown off a day or gotten lazy, even on days when he's not inspired or nothing of interest is happening in his life. He's self-deprecating without being pathetic, open without giving away too much of himself right away, and most of all possesses a sense of self-awareness that is both a blessing and a curse. This book was published by RJ Casey's Yeti Press, yet another small publishing concern that's releasing excellent work. I hope they will publish future volumes from Budnik, who continues to do autobio comics.

Journal, by Julie Delporte. This is a very different sort of diary comic, in that it starts right after a serious break-up. The mother of a friend of mine, when talking about break-ups, once said, "Don't ooze out, get out!"  Delporte is very much in "ooze" mode throughout this comic, seeing her ex-boyfriend regularly even as she no longer lives with him. She also tries something different with this comic; instead of using her usual black & white style, Journal is done entirely in colored pencil. One can even see the tape on the pages where they were originally shot, giving the whole book a sense that it was constructed as much as it was drawn. Unsurprisingly, Delporte does a lot of soul-searching throughout this volume, as she moves from Canada to take up a residency at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. If Budnik's book was about him grappling with loneliness but wanting to connect, Delporte's book is about her struggle with her desire for connection when she knows that relationship would never work, no matter how much she still loved her ex-boyfriend. She also struggles with the concept of adulthood and living a life without a particular structure or sense of rhythms.

The result is a series of incredibly beautiful pages, as her color sense with the colored pencils is bold and dynamic--almost like what a child might draw, only with a firmer grasp of structure and harmony on the page. Her looping cursive script is as beautiful to look at as her images, and it's done in the same colored pencil as her drawings. Journal is an account of a journey where she moves two steps back for every step forward emotionally, where a bad week follows a good day, often with an almost embarrassing amount of intimacy. It's also her attempt to understand the difference between sadness and depression and whether or not she needs therapy, an attempt that is ultimately left unresolved. She tries to work through her feelings and insecurities quite literally through work--drawing the journal. Unlike Budnik, her journal eventually starts to have diminishing returns and she returns to a more "hidden" life, to use her term. It's clear that in the epilogue, writing the journal had a powerful and positive effect on her, but it was time to let the actual contents into the world and then forget about them. As one would expect, a book published by Koyama Press looks great, as the key to its success is the brightness of the color contrasting with the sadness she feels while evoking childhood delight in drawing.

100 Days of Winter, Nine Months of Beige, and Eight Tablet Dream by Sean Azzopardi. Azzopardi is a bit older than the other two cartoonists discussed here, but he's still grappling with many of the same issues. In particular, the thorny notion of "growing up" haunts him in these accounts of stress, moving, diseased pets, medical issues and time spent with friends. Azzopardi discusses his battle with the skin disease psoriasis at length, detailing his mixed feelings about submitting to a drug regimen that cuts alcohol out of his life. At the same time, he notes how much worse his life could be in terms of health. Azzopardi is in his forties and is single with no children, which brings about those sorts of self-recriminations, the sort of thing that Tim Kreider refers to as "The Referendum". That's where we measure ourselves against the typical and expected societal goals like owning a house, being married, having children, etc vs the current reality. It's a question many artists have to ask themselves repeatedly throughout their lives, especially when they doubt their own abilities.

Nine Months of Beige is a more loosely-drawn journal that's less about specific dates than it is about places and spaces, and trying to come to terms with both as one's age advances and it's harder to be part of a scene. Azzopardi's drawing really takes center stage here and includes some funny drawings about having one's hands in the air at a party, having one's hands in the air on the tube, and improbably doing a "rave" at work. I love Azzopardi's square-headed, bespectacled self-caricature, complete with receding hairline. Eight Tablet Dream is about self-recriminations and the feeling that he is bad at everything: bad at being a friend, a worker, a brother. It ends with Azzopardi having grappled with all of these feelings (as well as loneliness) and coming out the other side intact with an artist's sense of wonder. His drawing is also quite excellent here, especially with regard to depicting exaggerated emotional states and outdoors scenes.Azzopardi's comics have a certain poetic quality on many of the pages as he's given to direct musing about his life in a manner that's different Budnik and Delporte.