Tales Designed to Thrizzle #6

Michael Kupperman, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, April 2010

32 pages

$4.95

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Aw, bummer, this one isn’t that good! I never thought I’d be saying this, but this issue of Michael Kupperman’s heretofore unfailingly, unflaggingly hilarious humor series is kind of flat. That manic twisting-and-turning of his, where each new panel or turn of the page can completely upend the premise of the previous one, is nowhere to be found. You don’t know how disappointing it is for a die-hard Kupperfan to discover that, say, the “Jungle Princess” story begins and ends with the same jungle-heroine premise. Yeah, it’s funny that she dresses the exact same way in her city-dweller “secret identity,” and there are some cute sight gags involving jungle creatures doing unusual things, but that’s as you’d expect it to be. Similarly, a Richie Rich parody in which the little rich kid eats jewels ends with him needing surgery to remove the jewels from his intestines; the story of a has-been Broadway actress in danger of getting upstaged by her new production’s elaborate drainage system ends with her getting upstaged by her new production’s elaborate drainage system; Einstein and Twain in space is basically just Einstein and Twain in space, and though it does end with the out-of-nowhere death of director Tony Scott, it’s your basic “spaceship lands on someone annoying” gag. (I preferred it when Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie wished that the crashing spaceship at the end of This Island Earth would land on, of all people, Kenny Loggins.) Kupperman’s unmistakable art is as meticulously constructed as ever–I’ve seen him draw and I still can’t figure out how he does it–and the appealing color work still lets his uncanny linework shine, but beyond that? It’s like half of the ideas fell out someplace, and you keep waiting and waiting for craziness that never comes. 🙁

Death Trap

Lane Milburn, writer/artist

self-published, April 2010

112 pages

$12

Buy it from Lane Milburn

It feels good to see someone win a Xeric Grant whose work you’ve already been following, then to discover that the work they won that Xeric for is their best work to date. In that light, Lane Milburn’s Death Trap is the feel-good comic of the year. Everything he does well, he does as well as he’s ever done it here: Immersive environments, crosshatched and “lit” to look like they were constructed from solid smoke. Weird, ugly monster designs that connote some sort of infectious sickness of reality as much as they do simply somethin’ scary. A real mastery of building the human body out of its constituent parts into something that appears meaty and palpable on the page–from his trademark fireplug goons to a convincingly sexy teenage girl. A flair for the ridiculous that manifests itself both through far more controlled riffing on the over-the-top writing of comics of yore than what you saw in his recent Feeble Minded Funnies and through a series of action beats and sight gags that juxtapose his bizarre creatures with the ’70s redneck-stoner-horror demimonde he squeezes them into. Some truly killer beat-by-beat action sequences of the sort you wish somebody, anybody who isn’t working with Grant Morrison on Batman & Robin would attempt in a contemporary superhero comic. An intelligent combination of the teenagers-preyed-upon-by-maniacs horror of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with even woolier comics villainy. Off-to-the-side visual flourishes, from the separate full-color science fiction story that opens the book to a Mario Bava/Barbara Steele-style pin-up that kicks off the main titular tale. And perhaps the most finely tuned sense of queasy, bottom-just-dropped-out horror and madness you’ll find in comics this side of Al Columbia. If any of this sounds at all appealing to you, drop the 12 bones, and put some cash aside for whatever he does next.

Keeping Two

Jordan Crane, writer/artist

finite webcomic, 2001-?

Read it at What Things Do

That question mark up there is doing a lot of work. I remember following Keeping Two in serialized fashion…but I don’t remember where. Were any installments in NON? Were they on Jordan Crane’s old Red Ink website? Did he make minicomics of them? Was maybe some of it in Uptight? The comic’s presentation on Crane’s gorgeous webcomics-anthology site What Things Do bears the date “18 December 2001,” but I have no idea what that means. I think that’s when it started? I don’t know when it ended. Hell, I don’t know if it ended. But I’ll get to that.

Anyway. Comic!

Jordan Crane’s comics are Mary Poppins’ maxim at work. The spoonful of sugar, and actually it’s more like a dumptruck full, is Crane’s art. His characters have the slightly disproportionate and adorable heads of children. They see the world through little dot eyes. They’re drawn with a line so soft you wanna reach out and pet it. His omission of periods at the end of sentences gives even the dialogue a vulnerable, open feel.

Then the medicine comes along, and it’s like one of those giant needles doctors admit in advance will hurt like hell. In the case of Keeping Two, the medicine is death. It’s presented here with shocking directness. When a baby is stillborn, you see his corpse, see his weeping mother hold him and say “Oh my sweetie”. When a dog dies, you see his body lying on the ground, eyes open, his owner’s recounting of her discovery of her dead best friend staggered out over the course of countless word balloons as though every word is an agony. I hadn’t read this stuff in a long time, and seeing it again knocked the wind out of me. It’s brutal and unflinching.

The story itself is a multifaceted look at a young couple on a day when death touches their lives in several ways: Through the book the woman is reading, through the passing of an acquaintance and the death of the man’s mom’s dog, and finally in the head of the man as the woman takes too long to return from the video store. (Video stores: Sign #1 this comic was started up a long time ago.) In a way it reminds me of Richard McGuire’s “Here,” dazzlingly complex but centered on absence rather than presence and stretched out for an entire story. The couple’s story is sequenced out of order, there are flashbacks, there are multiple perspectives on the same conversation, there’s a story within the story, there are multiple daydream sequences, there are scenes imagining what the real scenes must have been like, there are lengthy “Scott McCloud explaining manga”-type sequences of washing dishes, there’s an ending so open I’m not 100% convinced it is an ending…but it all circles around the direct and devastating image of a dotted-line silhouette where a person, a dog, a baby used to be, just like your mind does. That it’s so lovely to look at doesn’t soften the blow so much as aim it.

Skim

Mariko Tamaki, writer

Jillian Tamaki, artist

Groundwood, 2008

140 pages, hardcover

$18.95

Buy it from Groundwood

Buy it from Amazon.com

The story of a teenage outcast’s traumatic, illicit first love, Skim impressed me with what it chose to show and what it chose to hide. On the show side of the ledger, first of all, it’s a book about a teenage Wiccan lesbian and about suicide, and it really doesn’t skimp on any of that. There are rituals, there’s a love story, there’s cursing out the wazoo, and teenagers die. It’s an article in a local newspaper about What Our Children Are Reading waiting to happen. In that sense, even though it’s very much a Young Adult book, it felt to me less like something created to be maximally appealing and accessible to a YA readership and more like something created the way we like to imagine all good comics are created: A writer and/or an artist had an idea and committed it to paper, full stop. Ballsy.

Also in the “show” column, there are the stylistic filigrees and flourishes of Jillian Tamaki’s art. Her figurework is really singular and memorable, most prominently: There’s a shot early on of a hallway full of Catholic high school girls, the plaid of their skirts more a suggestion of motion than a pattern on fabric, that is simply swoonworthy if ever you’ve swooned over a hallway full of Catholic high school girls. Main character Kim “Skim” Cameron’s “otherness” is suggested with the clever visual shorthand of making her face look like someone that stepped out of a classical Japanese portrait. Ms. Archer is every bohemian art or English teacher you’ve ever crushed on, swirling around under yards of fabric and hair. Suicide-haunted Katie Matthews’s face is a pinched little scowl, not depressed so much as enraged. Even the cowlick epidemic that plagues the hair of what seems like a solid 50% of the characters comes across as an endearing tic rather than a goof. It’s all very cleverly done.

Then there’s the equally clever “hide” column. I fairly marveled at just how much was left unsaid or performed offstage. Why on earth would Ms. Archer do what she did? Though we get a lot on the damage she did, and can infer how she chooses to deal with that damage, the damage that caused her to do what she did is unexplored. Actually, so is…what she did itself. There are hints, there’s a fleeting glimpse, but we never learn how far things went, what was done, what was said. This is where the wise choice to make Skim such an unreliable narrator comes into play. She’s constantly crossing out and rewriting her narration, and we establish early on that she’s willing and able to skip over major, major events if she doesn’t feel comfortable discussing them. We’re never able to trust that she’s giving us the whole picture, and that lack of trust is the structuring absence around which the story and our understanding of it is built. This in turn is reflected in the rumors and half-truths and lies and gossip that keep buzzing in the background, and in the lack of candor between Skim and her supposed best friend Lisa…it’s really a book about hiding, now that I think of it. The villains of the piece, such as they are, are villains precisely because they make such a show of everything. Even the climactic happy ending is presented to us as obliquely as possible. The moral of the story is that private lives are private, and you offer access to them at both your great pleasure and your great peril.

Young Lions

Blaise Larmee, writer/artist

self-published, March 2010

96 pages

$10

Buy it from Blaise Larmee

Now here’s an interesting combination: A fairly straightforward “aimless young smart people” graphic novella in the vein of Adrian Tomine or Ghost World-era Dan Clowes, drawn in the wispy, dreamlike style of C.F. Larmee’s take on the CF “tradition”* foregrounds its frequent warm beauty rather than its fetishistic cold transgression. It pushes back the Henry Darger and pulls forward the Nell Brinkley, if you will.

This has a dual effect within the narrative (“story” isn’t quite right), which is about three young “conceputal artists” whose routine is shaken up by the unexpected intrusion of a beautiful young woman whose drunken disruption of one of their performances leads to their most successful gig yet, and a subsequent road trip to determine whether she’s worthy of official inclusion in the group. First, in the hands of Larmee’s delicate pencil line, these people are gorgeous–skinny, babyfaced androgynes constantly hitting effortlessly languid, painfully beautiful poses. If the characters in Young Lions were real, you might not want to talk to them, but you’d sure wanna stare at them, or, you know, dash your heart to pieces on the rocks of their indifference, tossing underappreciated mix CDs in their direction every now and then.

The second effect the beauty of the art, and by extension the characters, has on the narrative is making it immersive and appealing. A lot more so, in fact, than it might otherwise have a right to be. Cody and Alice seem completely oblivious to how easy they have it as (apparently) wealthy, (definitely) gorgeous, (avowedly) artsy young Americans; Wilson is less attractive but makes up for it by sheer force of obnoxious intellectual domineering and is the type you know will always be able to find a scene he can dominate; Holly is a bit harder to get a handle on, but she clearly enjoys the attention inherent in her exploitation by the trio and is thus difficult to sympathize with even as the others condescend to her naivete and poverty. A less charitable documentarian of this particular demimonde might simply stick “Bohemian Like You” by the Dandy Warhols on loop and be done with it. In the hands of a less visually charitable cartoonist–Clowes, say, or even Tomine!–this would read as a pretty merciless satire. Given Larmee’s deeply unfortunate internet persona (the fact that it’s a put-on doesn’t make it any less of a head–scratching headache inducer), you might even say merciless satire is what both characters and creator deserve.

But when I said Larmee is dragging the beauty of this art style forward, I meant that literally: As opposed to CF’s side-scrolling distance, we’re in constant close-up close quarters with this quartet. Their reclining bodies occupy entire panels, their upturned, closed-eye’d faces appear inches away from our own, the background details are all but nonexistent. It’s tough to stand in judgement of people you’re seeing primarily through the POV you’d get if you were about to make out with them, you know?

It’s that intimacy that makes Young Lions successful, that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, these are assholes. But who–especially among artists and arts-interested people of the sort who’d buy a Xeric-winning self-published graphic novel such as this one–hasn’t been an asshole? Who hasn’t been friends with assholes, worked with assholes, been impressed by the creative output of assholes, been disappointed with the creative output of assholes, fallen in and out of love with assholes? Larmee may doom them to an open, down ending, but as Kevin Smith once said, that’s exactly what life is. Beyond that it’s not our place to judge.

* the emergence of which is fascinating to me, by the way, a second generation of the Providence artcomics aesthetic following Fort Thunder and Paper Rad, which are themselves obviously quite distinct but still noise-dominated while I think CF is quiet-dominated, but anyway

The Arrival

Shaun Tan, writer/artist

Arthur A. Levine, 2006

128 pages, hardcover

$19.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

(Before I begin the review, can you believe this book came out four years ago? I swear I thought I was a year at most behind this particular curve. But comics barrels headlong through its Golden Age and you have to run to keep up sometimes.)

Don’t let the sepiatones fool you. This fine, captivating wordless graphic novel re-strange-ifies the immigrant experience, shaking it free of elementary-school field-trip/filmstrip nostalgia and making it something scary and wonderful again. Taking place in a fantastical, almost Expressionist city filled with incomprehensible writing, bizarre architecture, and creatures that look like they evolved in a world where Jim Woodring’s Frank stories are the central creation myth, it powerfully conveys that traveling far from home, all alone, to a place you’ve never been before, where you know no one and don’t speak the language and aren’t even guaranteed a place to work or sleep, is extremely risky…but also worth the risk. I don’t think it had occurred to me how weighed down by cliche such narratives have become until I read The Arrival, but with each of Tan’s dreamlike or nightmarish twists on the pitfalls and miniature triumphs of his suit-wearing immigrant protagonist, I marveled anew both at his inventiveness, and at how effectively he burrows down through a million PBS documentaries to get to the core of emotion in each vignette.

Me being me, I was hit hardest by Tan’s depictions of the things that caused each character to flee his or her native country: representing persecution as faceless giants in hazmat suits, sucking people up with enormous vacuum cleaners; representing ruinous war as happy men in conical gnome hats happily marching out of a city, their feet crossing ever more harsh landscapes, giving way to a tableau of skeletal remains, and culminating in just one of the me, badly wounded, returning to a city that’s totally destroyed. But there’s cute business too, like our protagonist’s short, ill-fated stint putting up posters; and there’s genuine joy in seeing him slowly form the makings of a new community of friends with his neighbors and co-workers. Tan’s neo(magic)realist art is particularly good at the latter: He puts us in the place of the protagonist as his new friends directly address him, drawing us in with their gaze and gestures, as intimate as his massive splash pages and spreads are intimidating.

Perhaps the nicest thing I can say about what Tan does in The Arrival is that despite its provenance as a children’s book, he keeps the action on the knife’s edge, the danger of failure (or worse) radiating from our worried, harried hero at every turn. I really wondered whether things would work out for him or not. The effect is enveloping. I imagine this will make the eyeballs of little kids and parents who pick it up from the library melt out of their skulls, it’s so lush and lovely and fully conceived an act of visual worldbuilding. Well worth a read, a flip-through, and a read again.