It’s been a year. Filled with event, not all of them positive. We forge on, after a crazy summer of family matters, and my usual art show scramble. Not to mention the Red States’ massive brain fart in November.
I survived the summer family drama, and then got through the art show rush, then I handled the compressed Fall class schedule it caused pretty well, too. I didn’t always post consistently. So I’m trying to assemble my thoughts about art, life and books for the beginning of the year.
Books and Repression
In times of great repression, is is quite common to have a resurgence of art and writing, as if people are trying to resist negative political movements with positive creativity. This is a very encouraging aspect of dark times. I hope to post a lot more about comic art and books this year, things the thugs in charge hate with a passion.
I developed a hobby of posting about books that I read to fill in the gaps, and even began posting about my favorite books at the end of the year. I tend to post mostly about comics, to set myself apart from millions of other bloggers who like mainstream books. So I would have something to write regularly about.
I read fairly obscure titles, that most people, even alternative and progressive sorts I hang out with at my art school, have never heard of. I have to search them out, and often the web sites I find them on, people have never heard of either.
The puritans that try to repress all colors and genders in this country are also petrified by the combination of words and pictures- always have been, google “Comics Code of America”. They stereotype the medium as juvenile, to justify censorship, and comics consistently show up at the top of lists of banned books. No surprise- comics have often provided a venue for repressed voices to speak out. Sometimes even progressives, readers and thought leaders have tended to swallow this stereotype at face value, without challenging the reactionary attitudes behind it.
Though comics, like Jazz, are an art form Americans have at times embraced enthusiastically ( no, American exceptionalists, Americans did not invent comics ), adherents of high art often have exhibited colonialist attitudes toward the medium. After soup cans, comics are the pop culture object most associated with the Pop Art movement, but the relationship has always been one sided. So I’m glad to report that tied for #2 on this year’s Besties list is a genuine pop art masterpiece.
Nonetheless, the comics that inhabit the same aesthetically ambitious space that fine arts and fine literature do, and arrive on my doorstep in regular intervals, keep me company on cold nights and are actually small art objects. Their tiny print runs often mean I can sell the ones I’m done with at solid prices to fund the new ones.
Comics are the one pop culture item, aside from soup cans, most identified with Pop Art, the hugely misunderstood art movement that challenged Abstract Expressionism as American art, and American culture established hegemony in the late 50s. The Japanese, immersed in American pop culture during the occupation of 1945-53, were the first to see the implications for comics, just as the Brits were the first to see the insurgent power of self published zines during the punk era.
Drumroll, Please
Here in oh-so-dramatic reverse order, are my top comics reads of the year:3
Worn Tuff Elbow, Marc Bell, No World, 2024: A comic book comic, floppy is the popular term, referring satirically to an outmoded media of the early computer era. For relatively small investments, artists can self publish in magazine-like format. For those curious, “comic books” like this now go for $7-12. Bell’s surreal humor would never fly in a DC comic book, but he’s a giant in the zine sub culture. This one is about a minor creator in his All Star Schnauzer Band corporate hegemony, who has been made irrelevant in his job.
All of Bell’s protagonists seem to end up in the wrong place. They often encounter women who potentially could help them, but then wander off. Slogan Schnauzer had ambitions to write songs for the ASSB, but now is being ignored. Bell himself refers in a comic for Lithuania’s Si! anthology, Banal Complications, to his NYC gallery artist career waning. Loaded with wacky invention and populated with surreal denizens, Bell’s world is one of restless losers. His cartooning, a big foot style that like Phillip Guston before him, refers directly back to the origins of North American comics in the newspaper wars of the early 20th Century, by way of the 60s undergrounds of R. Crumb, is a surreal explosion of urban life.
Peep, Sammy Harkham, Secret Headquarters, 2024: is the magisterial Kramers Ergot now finito, done, gone? This more modest anthology by its editor ( and coeditor Steven Weisman ) might provide clues. Designated #1, implying more issues to come, and much less labor- and capital-intensive to produce ( one assumes), it solves KE’s emerging problems: It’s too expensive and complex to showcase unknowns, as KE #4, a break out issue for the seminal Ft. Thunder school, did. Large format, paper bound Peep still stuck close to KE’s canon, though. So we’ll see where Harkham is going with this, but of course it’s gorgeous, coming closer, like Worn Tuff Elbow to the ‘traditional’ periodical mode of comics publishing, though its price continues to suggest: bookstore market, the comics industry’s new reality.
Marvel and DC continue to service the direct market with pamphlet (floppy ) periodicals, now at $5 or so apiece, and cumbersome to market, store, and create. These are the artifacts that spurred Roy Liechtenstein’s Pop Art explosions, then at 10 cents, now airbrushed and inflated, like cheesecake sex bombs. The comics in this column exists in an entirely different world than those quaint ‘collectibles’, though both once inhabited at least the same distribution and marketing scheme, the Direct Market.
I don’t privilege pricey hard bound collections over ‘floppies’, and in fact many of these inhabited this very list not long ago, but it’s clear where most of the innovation is coming from. Comics, in fact, have been at the forefront of the bookstores’ revival. These two titles are exceptions to the new norm. And it’s also true that those fresh approaches are still bubbling up from street level, first appearing as minis and zines, or other self-published projects, just as the Undergrounds, that other great adolescent comics innovation of the 60s did. Though the renaissance that self publishing launched in the 80s may now be tapering off, comics have not lost their creative sass.
Whether Peep will be the vehicle that keeps it sassin’, stepping in where Raw, Weirdo, and even the recent Scratches, used to tread, is hard to say. But there will probably always be one, and Peep, along with Now, along with younger upstarts such as Bubbles, might be it.
One finds these titles in small niches, a website out of Pittsburgh, a mini comics pioneer formerly from Denver who now ships out other self published obscurities from his home, the network is there, if you look for it. I stopped by a Zinefest during Month of Printmaking in an old church gymnasium in Globeville this past year, and took home a small stack of wonderful hand made or small press art objects.
Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke, New York Review Comics, 2024: an early ( 1971 ) alt-manga masterpiece by Shigeru Sugiura, who led the infusion of Pop Art into alternative comics in the ground breaking Garo magazine of 60s Japan.This is the first attempt anywhere in the world to create a place for comics of adult sensibilities. There had been movement into genre with adult appeal, such as crime and mystery in France and Japan beginning in the mid to late 50s, along with EC crime and horror comics, quickly suppressed, in United States. Garo allowed artists to experiment in creative ways, and Pop art and French New Wave cinema were huge influences. Sugiura and others were manga veterans invited to submit, and he took nansensu manga for kids he had done for the rental market during the American occupation of Japan and retooled them as Pop art pastiches only now seeing publication in this country.
I first encountered Sugiura in Raw magazine in ’85, and he popped up in The Ganzfeld, another favorite anthology, in 2007. In 2013, his The Last of the Mohicans was published by PictureBox. All are Pop pastiche, blending such wildly divergent sources as Japanese folk art, Hollywood westerns and comics, and French Post Impressionist art. Sugiura did not restrain himself. Among the characters who appear in various Sugiura comics are: Laurel and Hardy, Little Lulu, and Sunday comics star Henry. Major story references are made to Princess Anastasia of the Romanoffs, John Ford westerns, and settings include Maurice Utrillo cityscapes and Monument Valley.
Appearing in this book: John Wayne, Ilya Kuryakin from Man From U.N.C.L.E, and Boris Karloff as Frankenstein, among many others. Sorting out this cornucopia of pop references and allusions would be impossible without the help of Ryan Holmberg, a scholar of Japanese pop culture who contributes one of his lengthy essays here. This is especially valuable in linking the various Japanese influences that Sugiura merges with American pop culture to form his antic narratives. The Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke being a folktale from early 18oos Japan who became popular as a genre figure during a brief artistic flowering during the Taisho period of early 1900s, when Sugiura grew up. The impish ninja used illusion to outwit foes, and when Sugiura redrew the children’s comic for Garo in the late 60s, he played up the hallucinogenic aspects of tale, not to mention his love of Hollywood.
There is really nothing like Sugiura in comics, and whenever new material is published ( this showed up in October), I snap it up. It could easily have been the top pick this year, but it was a very rich year, so read on.
Talk To My Back, Yamada Murasaki, Drawn and Quarterly, 2022: On the other end of the spectrum is a book that is easy to ignore with its emphasis on the domestic life of Japanese women in the 70s and 80s, but which is suffused with a quiet anger and determined spirit. It was originally published in the 80s. It was not a book I expected to like, full of sweet domestic moments, but in perfect balance with the bittersweet. And if I learn much about Edo and Taisho pop culture, Showa and Occupation from Sugiura, this brought home the modern corporate era in Japan. A quiet anger pervades it, which she discusses. Small injustices lend an undercurrent of dread, but there’s an undercurrent of real power and determination. The drawings are simple and graceful and the writing is pared down. She was a poet and musician, and her ability to seamlessly combine what is visual, and felt; with what is direct, and verbally declared is the essence of comics, and what links them to the most sophisticated of art forms. It is a measure of its quiet power that just as the protagonist in the book frees herself with art and craft, so this comic actually, in real life, allowed Yamada to leave her abusive marriage and become independent as an artist and single mother.
Comics have been ignored as a very real and important outlet of expression for women’s voices in this period. I’ve talked about Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Diane Noomin, et al, in American comics, but Japanese women ( men, too ) led the way in bringing these issues in a literary way, to comics, when TV, Movies, everything in pop culture except pop music were closed to female voices.
The book’s complex metaphors and subtle, ambiguous action ensure I’ll be back to it. The line work is elegant and suggestive. This one also comes with an essay by Ryan Holmberg, an expert on Japanese pop culture, who helps to unlock the unique history of Japanese manga, by far the largest ( and certainly during this period, the most innovative) comics industry in the world.
Bestiest
Another late arrival this year has been designated as my Bestiest: Distant Ruptures, C.F., 2024: a collection of mini comics, zines and anthology contributions by Christopher Forgues, a pioneering artist out of the Providence, R.I. Fort Thunder art, music and comics collective who collaborated on the Paper Radio/ Paper Rodeo publications, then found national attention in forward looking anthologies such as The Gansfeld, and Kramers Ergot. I first discovered his work in Kramers Ergot #5, which I found at the Tattered Cover in Cherry Creek. His most well known work, Powr Mastrs, was published by Dan Nadel of PictureBox, also the editor and publisher of The Ganzfeld.
C.F. has been mercurial and Powr Mastrs was never really finished. His work has been hard to find, appearing mostly in micro edition, self-published zines. Distant Ruptures collects a lot of these hard to find mini comics in a nice 9×12″ hard back published by New York Review Comics, a sub-imprint of New York Review Books, which has been putting out hard to find comics for a few years now. NYRC also republished early New York School punk/alternative comics Agony, by Mark Beyer, and the harrowing Jimbo: Adventures In Paradise, by Gary Panter, first seen in Art Spiegelman’s legendary Raw Magazine, also the first American publication to feature Sugiura.
C.F. came out of the RISD noise rock and zine underground of the 90s. His work can most easily be linked to Neo Expressionism, if we are determined to link pop culture to high art movements, but his insistence on incorporating process into his style certainly recalls Warhol’s deliberate mis-registration of image and color to create ironic distance. Forgues’ uproarious non sequiturs and insistence on ‘showing his work’ allows us to examine the most basic equations in the abstract collision of word and picture that is comics. Rodolphe Topfer and Thomas Nast forged a new way of telling stories in the 1800s. As we moved towards comics’ 200th Year, the thing comes full circle.
Here are the Resties
Consider these honorable mentions, or things that are a bit too far off the basic intention of exploring recent comics:
Career Shoplifter, Gabrielle Bell, Uncivilized 2022: These are sketchbook- or diary-style comics, very direct impressions of day to day life in an autobiographical or memoir type mode, that has been popular since the 80s Alt Comics explosion, with R. Crumb as its patron saint, and people such as Julie Doucet its pioneers. Done here with Bell’s usual quiet humor and penetrating self regard. The drawings are simple yet rich, and integrate Bell’s interior monologue with random encounters with strangers. This also links to the zine/mini/periodical part of comics, meaning, not easy to find. The web is a great resource for these sorts of publications, but 60 years after Garo Magazine started and 45 years after Love and Rockets was first published, this city could use a good Comics/Small Press/Zine oriented bookstore.
Here’s a good place to note that Joe Matt died recently. A true and uncompromising pioneer of the auto-bio genre of comics. A final issue of his fascinating Peep Show series, #15, was published but in a very small print run that sold out quickly, so it doesn’t get considered for the Besties this year. I did pull out my older copies and they hold up quite well, and I’m sure will be collected. Then I’ll read and discuss them here.
The Agency, Katie Skelly, Fantagraphics 2023: Like Bratz Doll cartoons injected into a world of high fashion and international celebrity, Skelly’s slinky, sexy and violent It girls are sent on ‘assignments’ by an agency that is both spying and modeling. Gathering intelligence in a sex positive world, each short episode features a different character, each cool and capable, none appalled by murder, drugs or kinky sex. What these tales really say about women I’m not sure, but they’re erotic and delicious, and perhaps the point- dangerous.
The Comics Journal, Kirby Special Edition, Fantagraphics, 2000: The Penguin Marvel Classics edition of the Fantastic Four that came out last year raised the old question of who, Stan Lee or Jack Kirby, deserves the major credit for the so-called Marvel Age, a major intellectual growth spurt in the adolescence of American comics that eventually led to Alan ( Watchmen ) Moore, et al; and to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This beautifully illustrated, half periodical, half coffee table book, addresses that question head on with interviews and critical essays, and comes to a sensible conclusion. The Lee v. Kirby ‘debate’ that raged in comics fandom around the turn of the 21st C. was way overblown, and three books, this, plus Penguin’s, plus Taschen’s The Marvel Age reissue, with Roy Thomas commentary, provided a depth of analysis on the famous ‘Marvel Method’ that helped me settle the issue in my mind. Lee’s (Jewish) humanist wit was as essential to the maturation of American comics as Kirby’s (Jewish) abstract expressionist gesture.
It’s important to remember that Japan’s Garo Magazine was way ahead of American ( and European ) comics in including mature intellectual themes into comics at this time, but the Marvel Age was certainly a great leap forward, with heroes that contended with complex lives, social issues, and cultural diversity beginning to be explored.
Showa, Shigeru Mizuki, Drawn and Quarterly, 2022: blends personal childhood memoir with a fairly detailed account of the rise of fascism in Japan. The memoir cartoony and quotidian, the history, incorporating photographic research and cross hatched detail, weighty and concise. Showa refers to the period of the reign of the Emperor Hirohito, who indulged Tojo and his fascist thugs, and the many atrocities committed in his name, before his country ultimately experienced the final atrocity of nuclear war.
I only read 1 of the 4 volumes comprising this book, beginning with Hirohito’s ascension to the throne in 1925, and will return to this when I read the others, I’m sure. But this is a fascinating way to learn about Japanese history.
Ducks, Kate Beaton, Drawn and Quarterly, 2022: I spent many years in Wyoming, an energy boom state, with many good people, and of course, many more whose simplistic world view allows them to vote for fascist, racist morons and is constrained by the need to make a paycheck, even at the expense of thoughtful use of the planet’s resources.
Beaton, a talented and funny cartoonist, went to the energy fields of Western Canada to pay off her school loans, and sends back this rather dark and serious dispatch of the life in extremis that is the boom energy economy. Having met many of these same characters in Wyoming, I can say with absolute authority that it rings true. Beaton’s experience is of course, of a women in that social ( feral ?) environment, something I cannot speak to, and therein lies the value of her memoir, which hinges on a violent event which haunts her still.
We’ve all learned – the hard way- this year that United States is not nearly as educated or advanced or civilized as we thought it was, especially places like Wyoming, which is a beautiful Rocky Mountain state with many beautiful people but a hard edge of resistance to humanist progress. Canada’s Rockies is a similar situation, and this is a very readable and compelling account of the people that make it so.
Box Score
I’ve gotten into the habit of surveying various publications that I read for representation, and in fairness, I also apply that to my own picks. Here, we have 10 titles, including 4 by women, 3 by people of color, 6 by men, 4 of those white ( as am I ). This somewhat balanced composition wasn’t hard to accomplish, as the 10 titles were pretty clear choices, beating out such recent titles as Manga Shakespeare Theatre, by Osamu Tezuka, and Pee Pee Poo Poo #69, another self published magazine by Caroline Cash. Other titles that might easily have made this list but which I didn’t get time to read were by Charles Burns and Daniel Clowes.
Another is Gary Panter’s Jimbo in Purgatory, which I dropped when I decided to read it along with the original Dante, though Panter specifically characterizes his version as a “mis-telling”.
There is one anthology here, edited by Sammy Harkham of the indispensable Kramers Ergot, which is not known for a diverse mix. But Peep is somewhat improved from that, with 19 male and 11 female artists.
Memoir accounts for half of these entries, which surprises me, but shouldn’t, as I’m mostly retired now and am conscious of the fact that of the many challenges that face older people, telling your story to people who don’t feel they have time to listen, or are too smart to learn anything from it, is one of the biggest. Most of the memoir here is very affecting, possibly because it is mostly by women artists. Manga, which I deliberately ignored with my limited budget, until around 2010, accounts for 3 titles.
As for Pop Art, comics has not been known for conceptual complexity and camp irony, except as source material. Marvel Comics, the 60s mainstream company that started the return of the medium to its original place as an adult oriented medium, briefly called itself “Marvel Pop Art Productions”, completely misunderstanding its place in this hierarchy. Gary Panter, who along with Jack Kirby and Osamu Tezuka and R.Crumb, along with George Herriman and John Stanley, would be in a conversation for greatest of all cartoonists, at least in this blog, is known for his punk expressionism, but would clearly, from at least DalTokyo on, be just as much about Pop Art. So when I dropped Panter from this year’s Besties, I kind of blew my theme, but I kept the title because it was a funny funny line.
And this year, we’re going to need all of the funny funny jokes, and cartoonists, we can find. Support freedom and democracy and the right to read: buy comics, or thank your librarian for defending diverse voices!
#Comics #Pop Culture #CultureWars
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