Idealist Abroad: French Milk

Rob reviews the travelogue comics of Lucy Knisley, FRENCH MILK (Touchstone).

FRENCH MILK is a travelogue about transitions and the way a dramatic change of ritual can make us understand our choices a bit more clearly. Lucy Knisley was a 22-year-old in this story on the precipice of starting her adult life and faced a fair bit of anxiety about the prospect. She went to Paris for a month with her mother, ostensibly to celebrate the latter's 50th birthday and spend extensive time with each other while they still could. Knisley also had to deal with being separated from her lover for a protracted period and the home she had made in Chicago. It's funny to see a travelogue as the first major project of a promising young artist like Knisley. This is the sort of comic one generally sees from older, more experienced cartoonists who have already established their narrative voices.

At its heart, the book was about the tensions between the joys and restrictions of childhood versus the freedom and responsibility of adulthood. The one bad move Knisley made was spelling out this conflict in her afterword, which hammered home rather clumsily all of the themes she had elegantly teased out in the rest of the book. This had the feel of a young cartoonist who wasn't quite confident enough to let her work speak for itself. This is unfortunate, because Knisley's narrative voice shifted from childlike glee over things like food and dresses to an almost world-weary cynicism, illustrating the nature of this tension. When Knisley early in the book alerts the reader that she always feels herself revert to childhood habits whenever she returns home, it feels like she then goes out of her way to talk about her sex life as "proof" of her adulthood. It's unstated (until the end) but clear that the trip was mostly about finding new ways to relate to her mother now that both of their lives were changing in ways both subtle and dramatic.



That sense of melancholy and uncertainty certainly doesn't pervade the book. Indeed, Knisley focuses on things like food, sightseeing and other everyday trivia as a means of getting her mind in the right space. The book also feels like a way of reifying a powerful event: getting it down in ink, photos and thoughts was a way of solidifying the ephemeral nature of experience, and more pointedly, memory. What makes the comic a delightful and breezy read is how much of an open book Knisley presents herself as, remaining upbeat and reveling in delight even as she faces down her anxieties. She opens with a little bit of context about her family and life, but not so much as to drown the reader in details. Knisley begins with the events of just a few days before her trip to France, given us some grounding in the life she's leaving behind for awhile, her sense of curiosity, her neuroses and what she wants out of life.

Keeping a diary of an event often changes the way we perceive the experience. Knisley was clearly going after a series of magic moments and found them in the simplest encounters with food, art and a very old & established culture. Her brushwork has an appealing weight to it and I liked the way she composed each page. Some pages were comics with panel-to-panel transitions while others were labeled illustrations of what she was eating, visiting or wearing. The cartoony nature of her line gave the whole book a certain whimsical quality, even when Knisley temporarily descended into melancholy over her future career as an artist and the concept of financial responsibility. The drawings remind me a bit of Hope Larson (a friend and peer) but also a bit of a Dupuy-Berberian cityscape.

Knisley's youthful enthusiasm pervaded the entire project, especially in moments when she visited the graves of writers she found inspiring (like Oscar Wilde) or connected the experiences of writers she admired to Paris (like Ernest Hemingway). Once again, Knisley did take quite noticably inform the reader that she was not an innocent, injecting frank talk about her sex life into the otherwise breezy travelogue entries. She confessed that her obsessiveness on the topic had much to do with being apart from her boyfriend while having so many tempting opportunities in front of her. While Knisley expressed her fears and worries, she managed to avoid whining and at least continue to draw something interesting, even if it had nothing to do with Paris.

What makes the book a success is that her autobiographical voice is such a pleasantly winning one. She's so plain-spoken and unpretentious that the reader can't help but wonder what witty observation she'll make next. Combine that voice with her cartooning chops, and it's no wonder why this book was green-lighted by a major publisher. The multi-media aspect of the book had to have been another draw, with the mix of photographs, text and cartoons. It's a choice that made sense for a book aimed at audiences who read books about travel, giving them a bit of a foundation they understand and something to connect to the cartoons in the book. This is the sort of book that by definition an artist can only do once: an autobiographical rite-of-passage travelogue. That said, it would be interesting to see her repeat the experience in another twenty or thirty years, this time from the perspective of her mother. Until that time, I'll be curious to see how she evolves as an artist. Subtlety is not her strong point at the moment, so it'll be interesting to see if she can turn that weakness into a strength.

Secret Origins: Funny Misshapen Body

Rob reviews the new collection of autobiographical stories by Jeffrey Brown, FUNNY MISSHAPEN BODY (Touchstone Books).



For someone who's been sharing intimate and embarrassing details of his life in book after book, it's funny to call Jeffrey Brown's FUNNY MISSHAPEN BODY his most personal work. The description fits, however, and it's all due to his style of narration in this book. In his previous autobio comics, Brown evoked universal feelings of love, loss and confusion by way of very specific vignettes. He was always careful to use a lot of time and narrative fracturing so as not to get the reader too invested in "story", per se, but rather the sort of feelings we can all understand about how relationships get jumbled up in our memories. It's an emotional ordering of events, not a chronological one but such a tactic can feel more true and vivid. Using that technique also allowed Brown to maintain a certain distance from his reader. Withholding basic but key contextualizing facts from the reader forced one to instead think about what these people were thinking and why. This emotional narrative always superceded what one would think of as a standard plot-driven narrative; indeed, it subverted such a standard narrative.



The manner in which Brown chooses to reveal personal details varies between self-indulgent, self-depracatory, and self-aware. Brown also varies between narratives with clearly defined punchlines and situations that simply trail off with no resolution. He's adept at depicting awkwardness and his self-caricature often winds up creating it. No matter how much Brown tries to distance himself from the reader through the narrative, one can still sense a certain warmth for everyone involved in the story, including himself. Despite pain, failure and heartache, his comics have always carried a certain degree of optimism, maintaining that spark of hope we might all feel when we're caught in a despondent situation.



FUNNY MISSHAPEN BODY wastes no time delving into Brown's past with a directness, focus and attention to detail that he deliberately left out of past volumes. The reason seems pretty clear. While LITTLE THINGS was about the way small details in our lives accumulate, form patterns and ultimately add up to a life lived, FUNNY MISSHAPEN BODY is about Brown's personal quest to become an artist and how this got wrapped up in his coming to terms with identity and self-image. It's a warmer book than Brown's other material and more direct, even if he still continues to splinter the chronology of events. As a result, it doesn't feel as much like a "Jeffrey Brown book" as his other comics and reminds me a bit more of conventional autobiographical comics.

This plays out on the page in the way Brown uses narrative captions. In most of his stories, narrative captions provide the sparest of information and never reveal Brown's thoughts or drive the narrative. In FUNNY MISSHAPEN BODY, narrative captions almost exclusively propel the story forward and feature lots of "I did this" statements. Brown spells out his intentions and feelings pretty clearly in the captions, leaving the actual images and dialogue as a method of conveying punchlines. This approach allows Brown's unabashed enthusiasm for comics to shine through in a way that's not expressed in his other books. This comic actually reminds me a bit of Alec Longsteth's autobiographical work in its directness, sheer enthusiasm and refusal to be the least bit abashed about either. While Brown is looking back at how he developed as an artist with a wiser eye, one never gets the cloying sense of certitude that one feels after reading a David Heatley comic. Heatley's comics tend to follow a very dialectical path (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) with clear "right" and "wrong" positions emerging in his own mind. On the other hand, with Brown we get a sense of "well, this is working for now". There's less a method to his madness than there is a sense of him following his instincts.

The conflicts of instinct vs ambition vs outside expectations are at the heart of this book. Brown's stories of his fumbling attempts at young romance, becoming cool by way of pot and alcohol and the ways in which his body betrayed him with Crohn's disease relate to his quest for purpose in that they reflect his overall awkwardness. While the book is ostensibly about the way his artistic path developed, he pointedly tells that story out of order and intersperses it with these other, intimate accounts of personal embarrassment and humiliation. It's a key move, because the book otherwise would have been overwhelmingly specific and self-indulgent. Brown also amps up the level of humor in this book in an effort to leaven the more directly personal nature of his stories. Sometimes he goes a bit overboard in telling the reader how he used humor in his poetry readings to undercut his own potential self-seriousness; this is something that was pretty clear in the narrative and didn't need to be spelled out--and especially not several times.

That said, I do understand some mentions of his use of humor, since it accidentally became one of the cornerstones in his future career as a cartoonist. His stories of how he went from a boy who loved comics to a high school cartoonist to "serious" artist are refreshingly honest and mostly free of the blame and frustration I've seen in other accounts of art school from cartoonists. While Brown was frustrated, it was more due to him not knowing what he wanted to do than with his teachers or fellow students. When his teachers called him out on a lack of ambition and direction, he took that message to heart. Meeting Chris Ware pointed him in the right direction, and from there, he started to realize that instead of the detached art he had been making, he instead wanted to make something direct, honest and communicative of human experience. Brown really showed the reader all of his cards here, revealing that his now oft-imitated narrative structure was inspired by a particular writing class in art school. This also became the rationale behind his loose, scratchy art. He wanted something immediate and easy to parse rather than an overworked, slicker style that would deflect reader engagement and involvement.

LITTLE THINGS is still Brown's best book; it's his most challenging and rewarding in terms of its structure and ideas. The clever way he connects memories and anecdotes to create a larger overarching structure was enormously ambitious and successful. FUNNY MISSHAPEN BODY is a bit less ambitious, more of a companion piece that fills in gaps than a significant statement of its own. In some ways, it wasn't a surprising move, because even in LITTLE THINGS Brown starts to become unsure of his autobiographical approach and starts to think about trying something a bit different. FUNNY MISSHAPEN BODY clears up mysteries, airs secrets and gives context to Brown's other comics, looping back to his first book, CLUMSY. It does so enthusiastically but unpretentiously and invites the reader to poke fun at him along the way. More than any other autobiographical artist that I can think of, Brown is acutely aware of the difference between actual experience and the interpretation and recording of same. While the view in this book is perhaps not as compelling as his best works, it's still worth seeing and a compellingly honest statement about the frustrations and joys of the artistic process.

Self-Portrait of the Artist: Likewise

Rob reviews Ariel Schrag's autobiographical high school epic, LIKEWISE (Touchstone Books).


Ariel Schrag long ago carved out a unique niche for herself in comics with the release of her first work, AWKWARD. She wrote and drew an autobiographical account of her ninth grade experiences immediately following the conclusion of ninth grade. She did the same for her next book, DEFINITION, a comic that started to gain her a good bit of notice and began a chain of events where experiences and the recording & interpretation of those experiences started to blur together. Her next project, POTENTIAL, was a series that was later collected and was considerably more complex than her earlier works. While she wrote this account of her junior year during her senior year, it took her a lot longer to actually finish drawing and inking the book. LIKEWISE, her senior year chronicle, took a year to write, but she only just finished inking and had it published it a decade later.



LIKEWISE is a glorious mess. It's a reflection of an artist who was simultaneously fully coming into her own and a young woman grappling with an identity crisis on several levels. There are so many conflicting artistic agendas in this book that one almost needs a scorecard. Part of this is due to the way Schrag was cycling through her influences so quickly. She started reading James Joyce's ULYSSES as a senior and suddenly her work took on the time-fractured, stream-of-consciousness nature of Joyce's fiction. At the same time, LIKEWISE has a decidedly postmodern bent, with Schrag pulling away from the narrative to make metatextual comments. Schrag was also constantly aware of the need to entertain and dramatize; she deliberately veered from pages of navel-gazing into over-the-top situations. She reveled in the depiction of tenseness and unraveling normalcy, like a scene at a family birthday party where her mother and aunt engaged in escalating hostilities. It's clear that Schrag wanted the audience to simultaneously laugh and squirm even as she depicted herself as being paralyzed when the whole event was going down.

What prevented this all from becoming too clever or jumbled for its own good was the way Schrag's work really served to document a young person coming to grips with their own obsessive disorder. While Schrag didn't precisely spell this out, she gave the reader enough clues to figure out what's going on. The first is when she talked about being a child obsessed with disease and coming up with rituals that would help "prevent" her from getting them, finally needing therapy to work through it. While she worked through the compulsive element, her work stands as a monument to the way art can be both therapeutic and an impediment to growth. Recording her life as a comic became the center of her life, to the point where she started to think of everything in how it would translate as part of her story. She started keeping files and photos on the people she hung out with, and went as far as tape recording them in LIKEWISE. It's telling that when she finally started to cut off contact with an ex-girlfriend, she was distressed because she didn't have the right reference photos for the comic and desperately wanted her to pose for them.

Schrag's comics started as fun, carefree ways of recording her experiences, obsessions and relationships. AWKWARD, contrary to its title, lacked almost any sense of self-consciousness or attention to style. DEFINITION, on the other hand, was heavy-handed at times in the way she was trying to integrate visual styles she found interesting (like graffiti art) into her own work. The way she picked through the narrative to create something coherent made it ring the most false of all her comics, even as it read the smoothest. POTENTIAL was remarkable because Schrag never depicted herself as a sympathetic character in any manner, even with a girlfriend who grew increasingly cold and distant. Even though that book shifted its focus from what she experienced at school to the way her relationship consumed her, it maintained its illusion of being about "now".

LIKEWISE smashes that illusion even as she told a very loosely linear chronology of the year. In the book's prelude, Schrag depicted a conversation between herself and her ex, Sally, where Sally noted "You might as well call the next book 'writing Potential'". LIKEWISE was not about Schrag's senior year, but was rather about an obsessive person trying to write, in the most minute and painful detail, about an experience that consumed her. Eventually, Schrag started to understand that her obsession started to make her a snake eating its own tail. Memory and experience started to blur together, where recording her immediate thoughts almost started to supercede having other experiences. There was a point in LIKEWISE where she realized that she had to stop what she was she doing in terms of her obsessive recording of every moment if she was going to move on in her life. At that same point, she also knew that the comic was the only thing keeping her together even as her life was falling apart in other ways. The divorce and increasing weirdness of her parents, her inability to cope with Sally, and the fracturing of friendships coincided to turn making the comic from creative outlet to last tether to sanity & stability. Of course, if POTENTIAL at its heart was about Schrag's inability to see how she wound up in obsessive situations, then LIKEWISE brought with it the dawning realization that she brought most of her problems on herself.

One of the more interesting things about Schrag's work is that her books tended to reflect aspects of whatever her current academic obsession was. In DEFINITION, it was chemistry, which spilled over into the obvious ways in which people combined. In POTENTIAL, it was biology, and she really ran with this idea both in terms of the individual structure of each chapter and the ways in which she looked to science to solve her own identity crisis. Her own homophobia is a running theme throughout both POTENTIAL and LIKEWISE, as Schrag becomes obsessed with trying to prove to herself scientifically that homosexuality isn't an aberration. That sort of scientific flatness was a nice complement to the teenage diary feel of her narration.

LIKEWISE dwells a bit more on literary devices as Schrag systematically reveals and dismantles all of her own comics-making techniques. The problem in the first section is that the Joycian techniques combined with high school angst made for a tough slog at times. When Schrag was dealing with her family or wondering out loud about the ineffable concept of "it", a sort of sense of total aesthetic balance, the first section really pops. When Schrag goes back into moping about Sally by way of Joyce and the text piles up on the page, LIKEWISE becomes a frustrating read. Interestingly, at the climax of a huge, dramatic revelation by Sally that included the carefully-detailed anecdote of Schrag wetting herself, Schrag-the-writer pulls back and flashes forward to herself writing this segment. This is when LIKEWISE starts to get interesting and Schrag uses the structure of comics to get at what Joyce did rather than simply write in stream-of-consciousness style.

The rest of the book is fragmented, with certain images repeating as Schrag nonetheless keeps up the roughly linear chronology. Details of certain events are parsed out slowly and obliquely, only to be referred to again and again. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is when Schrag really starts to get more daring with her visuals. It helped that LIKEWISE was printed on better paper than any of her Slave Labor books were, but she didn't quite have the chops to pull off a few of the things she did in this book in the past. Schrag alternates between her heavily-crosshatched and more densely rendered style to a scribbly & sloppy line that represents the immediacy of a diary (and open wound) to a dazzling scratchboard technique to a greyscaled, more naturalistic line. Schrag's strength was always in her use of gesture and expression, and her scribblier drawings carry feeling and the immediacy of crazy moments better than her more tightly rendered drawings. This is also reflected in her lettering, which varies from standard print on what's deliberately drawn as something ripped out from a sketchbook to her smaller, more precise lettering style to a more frantic scrawl.

In the book's final section, Schrag's chapters start to get shorter and shorter as she barrels toward the end. She's no longer going on at length about how she feels, and instead just gives us quick snapshots and anecdotes, allowing the reader to fill in the details. It's the kind of restraint that Schrag never used in the rest of her work; her style has always been about a frontal assault of sorts on the reader--take it or leave it. This most-fractured segment of the book is also about her increasingly fractured personality, as she questions her sexuality and is forced to confront her burgeoning celebrity with a certain segment of youth culture. This is reflected in her experiences with her oldest friend, who talks about the way people talk to Schrag, and Schrag herelf owns up to using that celebrity at times for her own purposes. The book's last two chapters are a sort of recapitulation of the rest of the book, both in terms of story and art, as Schrag goes from a goofy cartoon depiction of herself to that greyscale version and then back to her standard style. The book ends on a goofy, self-effacing note, deflating both the expectations of senior year of high school and her own obsessions, leaving the reader with a protagonist who is perhaps at last a bit more comfortable in her own skin.

Reading LIKEWISE is frequently a rocky and frustrating experience, but Schrag's sheer ambition and drive behind this comic is so compelling that one can't help but get swept along. It's fascinating to see the decisions she makes as a storyteller and autobiographer, since the concerns of one are frequently not the same as the other. Schrag pointedly shows herself as difficult to interact with and love, even when the narrative is driven by teenaged Schrag's righteous anger against the world. Schrag's pain came from both internal and external sources, and while her identity and output as an artist probably wasn't the ideal way to cope, it was all she felt she could cling to at the time. That desperation made for a commitment to the story at all costs, and it's the depth of her commitment that makes LIKEWISE such a compelling read.