Daybreak
Brian Ralph, writer/artist
Drawn & Quarterly, 2011
160 pages, hardcover
$21.95
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For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

Map of My Heart
John Porcellino, writer/artist
Drawn & Quarterly, October 2009
304 pages
$24.95
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I’ll be honest: I skipped most of the prose stuff. I’ve never felt much kinship with zine culture, and among all the other things that John Porcellino’s legendary, long-running, self-published minicomic series King-Cat Comics and Stories is — most notably a pioneering combination of pointilist autobiography and minimalist cartooning without which the careers of Kevin Huizenga, Jeffrey Brown, James Kochalka, James McShane, and virtually every webcomic diarist would be unthinkable — it is also a zine. Over the years it’s functioned, essentially, as one end of a pen-pal conversation between Porcellino and his readers, and thus his lengthy handwritten digressions about fishing trips or local wildlife or his Top 40 lists of stuff he’s recently enjoyed serve a necessary and fruitful role during that particular round of correspondence. But that’s never how it’s functioned for me: My experience reading Porcellino and King-Cat has come either from buying a bunch of issues all at once and reading them in one go or from seeing his work in collections like this one. I’m here for the cartooning, not for the conversation.

Fortunately the cartooning is fantastic. The stretch of “comics and stories” collected here run from 1996-2002, a pivotal time period for Porcellino not simply in personal terms — he became critically ill, recovered, moved back home to Illinois after years spent in Denver, married, divorced, and remarried — but in artistic ones as well: I’m reasonably sure his long-form memoir Perfect Example was constructed during this time, and within King-Cat his art made its second quantum leap. After what looks to my admittedly inexpert eyes like an experiment with a brush in issue #57 (which followed and revealed his divorce), his line becomes a true thing of beauty in issue #58’s story “Forgiveness.” It’s smoother and thinner, its curves more graceful, the sense of space between them less cluttered and more balanced. With no captions to guide us, we’re left alone with young John in this reminiscence of an unintentional act of cruelty that clearly still haunts him; the image of his younger self twice curled into a fetal position, repeating “I’m sorry” over and over again, is devastating. Similar flashes of remonstrance and self-loathing creep up occasionally and unexpectedly in some of his Zen-influenced comic poems, a powerful juxtaposition with their serene images and contemplative words. Can it get a little twee? Sure, but I think there’s a sharpness and a coldness to that line, and the occasional glimpses of despair it affords us, that make writing Porcellino’s stuff off as cutesy hippie stuff a big mistake. To flip through the comics material in Map of My Heart is to get a picture of a man fighting to find beauty in the world even as what he’s seen of it buffets him around like one of the leaves on the breeze that he draws. No wonder people loved to hear from him.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is…

Big Questions #15
Anders Nilsen, writer/artist
Drawn & Quarterly, December 2010
48 pages
$7.95
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Big Questions is a series about the impossibility of learning the answers to those questions, because there are none. Even still, you might be forgiven for expecting the final issue of Anders Nilsen’s decade-in-the-making, 600-page funny-animal opus to offer some kind of benediction for the plight of its avian and human protagonists. Maybe it’s just one character who ends up really getting it, maybe it’s some magic-realist glimpse of a world beyond a la Chauncey Gardiner’s final stroll in Being There, maybe it’s just Harry discussing Item Six on the agenda or Gaston’s telling us what his mother put him on her knee and said to him or Michael Palin in drag summing things up prior to the gratuitous pictures of penises in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, but it’s something, right?

No, not really. Maybe Morris the bird’s carpe-diem credo on the final page can give us some direction, but in general, the climactic events of the previous issue end up offering little insight, and no one takes the opportunity to grow. The zealots Charlotte and Leroy remain steadfast, as do the hedonists Morris and Louis. The Idiot remains oblivious. The flock remains obedient. Even in death, the Pilot simply moves on to a world that if anything is even more baffling, and mute in the face of our bafflement. It’s all a big dark cave or a vast white field, our experiences accruing like tiny stippled dots; we draw our own conclusions, and are drawn by them.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is…

The Wrong Place
Brecht Evens, writer/artist
Drawn & Quarterly, October 2010
184 pages
$14.95
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The brightness of Brecht Evens’s watercolor reds may well have been the only thing that helped The Wrong Place pass my traditional “if it doesn’t appeal to you at first glance, you’ve got other books to read” test. See, I’d assumed it was just one of those froofy Euro-art comics of the sort Nick Gazin describes here as “new-age bologna.” It’s just not a visual or tonal aesthetic that speaks to me. It’s also not The Wrong Place at all.

No, here’s something that is in actual fact closer to that elusive, perhaps mythical “Okay, so I like Scott Pilgrim — what else is there?” comic than to anything else: A fun, funny, sexy, insightful comic about the lives of urban twentysomethings that doesn’t pull punches about their shortcomings but also doesn’t beat you bloody with them either, told with a unique visual vocabulary that pops off the page and makes you jealous of the creator who came up with it. The two books couldn’t possibly look more different, of course — just for example, everyone remembers Bryan Lee O’Malley’s invitingly slick manga/videogame/cartoon black-and-white line, while Evens’s lush and liquid watercolors have no real lines to speak of. But O’Malley’s pop-culture grab-bag shorthand and Evens’s symphonic color-coding both serve the same purpose: Giving the reader ready-made and memorable character designs, the better to reveal character through those designs’ interactions with the environment and with one another. In Evens’s case this mostly means tracking two polar-opposite friends, legend-in-his-own-time bon vivant Robbie (he’s blue!) and dependable, well-liked but never really well-loved Gary (he’s gray!), as well as the (presumably) latest girl to spend one crazy night with Robbie, Olivia (she’s red!).

What I like best about how things play out is that Evens resists the temptation (one I thought would be irresistible) to lecture us about the shortcomings of each character’s monochromatic approach to life. Sure, Robbie’s “on” enough to make him a nice place to visit but not live, but at no point is there any indication that his life-of-the-party lifestyle is anything but fulfilling and sincerely lived; moreover he appears to genuinely care about the well-being of everyone he comes in contact with — old friends, new lovers, random people at the club, everyone. Gary’s comparative dreariness engenders empathy, not pity or disgust; I think his motives for staying in the shadow of his friend and not taking the kinds of chances Robbie takes are clear and sympathetically portrayed — that lifestyle really isn’t for everyone! — and moreover he’s a genuine and caring guy too. Olivia decides to take a chance, and as a reward has an awesome night and reality-warping sex with a super-hot and funny and interesting dude; there’s a tinge of regret in a thoughtfully colored scene after the fact, but as best I can tell it goes unheard by Robbie and presumably the two of them, being grown-ups, wake up the next morning and go on with their lives, their experience together having enriched it just that much.

I’m glad no one has an arc to speak of. Why should they? It’s just a cartoonist painting the living shit out of parties and club nights and sex scenes and subway rides, the stuff people’s lives are made of, and sometimes those lives don’t have arcs.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is The ACME Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware, published by Drawn & Quarterly — the single best comic I have ever read.

What makes a life? Is it the narrative we assemble in retrospect from the sights and sounds we remember best? Is it like comics in that regard, a combination of words and pictures stacked together to tell a story? To what degree do we act as our own cartoonists, then, picking and choosing the right combination of words and pictures to tell the story of ourselves we most want to hear? Is it possible that the way we misremember things tells us more of that story? What about the words and pictures we skip entirely?

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Wilson by Daniel Clowes, published by Drawn & Quarterly — a comedy-of-cruelty masterpiece.

I don’t think the kaleidoscopic array of styles in which Daniel Clowes drew Wilson says much of anything. I think that’s the gag….Draw it how you will: Wilson’s always there, in medium close-up more often than not, a wide-eyed and open-mouthed expression of guileless wonder on his face more often than not, saying something fucking horrible almost constantly. No matter how you shake and dance, the last two drops go in your pants; no matter whether he’s detailed or abstracted or realistic or cartoony or full-color or two-tone or black-and-white or whatever the hell, Wilson is a massive, massive tool.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information; click here for a roundtable discussion of the book with the Savage Critics.