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Buy this book already!

I’ve been reluctant to comment on Art in Time not just for the obvious reason (a glaring conflict-of-interest!) but also because like the best anthologies it is a book that I feel I have to live with for many months before I can properly appraise its value. I’ve talked before about the anthologies that have meant the most to me and one common trait they have is that I keep going back to them, keep learning from them, and have gained a deeper appreciation of the way they were put together from my 5^th or 6^th reading rather than my initial impression.

Having said that, I’m pretty confident that Art in Time belongs in the small pantheon of great comics anthologies. Art Out of Time was a distinguished book but the companion volume is an improvement in almost every way: the artists and the excerpts are more thoughtfully selected and hang together better, and Dan’s writing on them displays a new level of engagement and insight.

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Our own Dan Nadel spoke with Chris Marshall over at
Collected Comics Library. Check it out, True Believers-
slack off at work early with this one. Why are you at work anyways? It’s summer!

Collected Comics Library Podcast #274

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Right up front let’s admit this: Wally Gropius is a terrifying comic book and everyone reading this should buy it immediately. Tim Hensley has crammed more horror into these 64 pages than any comic in recent memory. There is body horror, money horror, sex horror, parental horror, incest horror, school horror. Pretty much every feeling that lies just below the surface even now. We’re all supposed to be grown up, and the pangs of adolescence should be safely at bay, but they never really are, and I get the feeling that Hensley knows and can articulate each and every one. It is also a terrifying book to talk about, because its level of craft is so high, its surface so impenetrable, that it’s like trying to write about Kubrick or something: You know it’s all in there, but it’s hard to find a foothold. And worse, nearly any attempt to write about the comic basically turns me into a Dan Clowes comics-blowhard (if I’m not one already). Of course, none of this would be terribly interesting if it weren’t so funny. Wally Gropius is at its most basic level, the story of a guy who wants to get the girl, the girl who fucks him in both senses, and the fathers that fuck them both. This is a lot of fuckery for one comic. But there it is.

And the reason I’m sitting in front of a screen on an otherwise balmy Friday afternoon when I should be down the road at Sycamore drinking beer in the garden is that after a long day of accounting work, irritating editorial conversations and a single glass of gin, I felt like if I didn’t say something about this book my head might explode. (more…)

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Harold Gray drawing Annie.

Click here if you want to see a brief but interesting discussion of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie.

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A fine greeting

Just last night keen-eyed CC reader Seth G. of Guelph, Ontario sent along some fine images by Jack Davis. Seth explains that they were published in Canada’s Weekend Magazine in 1959 to accompany an article on the legend of Big Foot. Can we pause for a moment here and marvel at this period of Jack Davis’s work? (more…)

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I thought [the visuals] were stylistically subordinate; words and pictures are what a comic strip is all about, so you can’t say what’s more important or less. They work together. I wanted the focus on the language, and on where I was taking the reader in six or eight panels through this deceptive, inverse logic that I was using. The drawing had to be minimalist. If I used angle shots and complicated artwork, it would deflect the reader. I didn’t want the drawings to be noticed at all. I worked hard making sure that they wouldn’t be noticed.

—Jules Feiffer, in the introduction to Explainers. [Italics mine.]

Huh. It’s almost like Feiffer deliberately intended his art to be … what’s the phrase I’m looking for? “Not much to look at?” Yes, that’s it! God forbid anybody should agree with him.

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Essays on Chris Ware.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have an piece in a new collection of critical essays devoted to Chris Ware (The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking, edited by David Ball and Martha Kuhlman). Now, thanks to the wonders of Google Books, parts of that collection are now online, including the whole of my essay. You can look at the book here. The entire book is very much worth reading with many fine critical essays. You can buy a copy here.

My essay begins like this:

In 1990,Chris Ware, then a twenty-two-year-old student at the very beginning of his career, made a pilgrimage to Monument Valley, Arizona in order to investigate the life of George Herriman. Author of the classic comic strip Krazy Kat, which ran in variety of newspapers from 1913 until the cartoonist’s death in 1944, Herriman used  the other worldly desert landscape of the region as the ever-shifting backdrop to his comics. Along with the adjacent area of Coconino County, Monument Valley inspired the dream-like lunar landscape that made Krazy Kat a rare example of cartoon modernism. Eager to learn more about the sources of Herriman’s artistry, Ware felt he had to see landscape of jutting buttes and flat-topped mesas that the earlier cartoonist had so creatively incorporated into his work. This hajj to the Southwest was an early manifestation of Ware’s interest in the history of cartooning, a persistent fascination that has been much more than an antiquarian passion and has had a profound influence on Ware’s body of work.

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 Over at his New Construction blog, Kevin Huizenga riffs on my earlier reflections on Bushmiller’s Nancy and iconic solidarity. Kevin is right that I radically simplified  Groensteen’s notions of “iconic solidarity” to suit my own purposes, highlighting what might be considered one tendency of “iconic solidarity” in order to draw attention to Bushmiller’s exploitation of this property. Kevin’s post is full of smart comments and I especially liked his comparison of Bushmiller’s style to the Helvetica font.

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Nothing in this comics world is more compulsively readable than random Steve Ditko comics, and here’s a recent favorite: The Big Man, from the 1986 Renegade Press release Murder #1. Simplicity in action – an anxious toymaker gets back at his nasty business partners by building a super-costume that transforms him into an enormous guy at will.  Then he crushes his enemies with enormity. “An envious mind, maybe a tiny mind with a big hate. A victimized mind seeking redress, etc. etc. etc.” muses a detective, whose function is mostly philosophical elaboration; the villain dies in a costume malfunction. So basically it’s The Incredibles, if The Incredibles was 115 minutes of Syndrome handing out critical beatings.

Murder was one of frequent Ditko cohort Robin Snyder’s anthology projects with Renegade, loosely arranged under the banner of Robin Snyder’s Revolver, as in ‘revolving’ artists and themes, although only the first six issues were numbered under the Revolver title – then came three issues of Ditko’s World: Static, an issue of Ernie Colon’s Manimal, three issues of Murder and a reprint-heavy Revolver Annual subtitled Frisky Frolics. Ditko showed up in almost every issue, as well as various artists and writers associated with the Warren magazines, which had folded a few years prior in 1983; indeed, some of the content is reprinted from Warren publications, while it’s possible the assorted Bill DuBay and Jim Stenstrum pieces (scripts?) were intended for Warren during their time with the publisher. To your left you’ll see Jim Stenstrum’s Tales of the Siberian Snowtroopers #1 (Revolver #6, reprinted in Annual #1), drawn by future Image co-founder Erik Larsen, who otherwise contributed a few illustrations to the extended Revolver project. If the story wasn’t intended for Warren, this would mark the only original, non-Warren comics work by Stenstrum, a specialist in keen violence and sarcastic heroism of the sort that would eventually spark a pre-Image comics revolution in America, the ’80s British Invasion fed by a growing 2000 AD and Warrior, as I’ve indicated in this space before. Here, it seems several time periods exist at once, although I wouldn’t call Stenstrum ‘ahead-of-his-time’ in the ’70s – internationally he was perfectly of his time, while many American genre comics hung a few steps back.

But now, onto the sequels, collections and follow-ups you dare not miss:

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Nancy and her doppelganger-cousin

One tired jab against Ernie Bushmiller was that he didn’t draw his characters but merely rubber-stamped them on the page. Bushmiller was aware enough of this complaint to draw at least on one occasion a strip where Nancy and Sluggo do in fact emerge from the push and pull of a rubber stamp, a sort of comic strip version of the myths whereby the Gods of old emerged out of nothing. It is true that in the prime years of Nancy, say from 1945 to 1970, Bushmiller’s characters possessed a startling degree of iconic solidarity: any simple drawing of Nancy or Sluggo in profile looks remarkably like another such drawing, right down to the uniform bristle that surround Nancy’s hair. But Bushmiller wasn’t content to have his characters look recognizably similar from panel to panel and strip to strip which is after all what almost all cartoonists do. Bushmiller also had a propensity to proliferate images of Nancy and Sluggo within each panel, as if to show off his virtuoso skills at replication. Examples would include stories where Nancy and Sluggo have almost identical looking doppelgangers (such as the 1947 story with Nancy’s cousin Judy, which manages to be both stupidly funny in the Bushmiller manner and also a little bit creepy).  Also panels where the characters see themselves in mirrors or dreams. Or the general tendency of all of Bushmiller’s secondary characters to look like Platonic-types of characters rather than individual characters.

Comics theorist Thierry Groensteen, in his formidable and daunting book The System of Comics, has made “iconic solidarity” a key feature of the language of comics (within of course a much more complex system). But if “iconic solidarity” is a formalist property common to comics in general, what Bushmiller is up to is heightening this formal property by making it as blunt and visible as possible. In effect, Bushmiller’s gambit is to make us aware as possible that we’re reading a comic by taking a key formal property and making it part of the narrative itself. Hence all those twins and mirror images. This might explain why so many comics aficionados have a special regard for Nancy, which often seems to be the very beating heart, the very distilled essence, of comics itself (for those who still believe, of course, in essences). And wasn’t that part of the point of Mark Newgarden’s “Love’s Savage Fury”, to show how Nancy could retain her iconic solidarity even if distorted in countless different ways?