Consistent with Enid’s interest in exploring different personas, the line has a slightly staged quality, as if she had heard it in an old movie (the kind other teens would never watch) and senses that it’s the kind of thing you say -- the kind of sentiment you want to feel -- to mark the finality of a closing scene, the end of a romance. You desire to acknowledge (to yourself and an imaginary audience who would no doubt approve, you believe) the power of the scene that you are participating in and creating. The heightened drama of this moment is also nicely evoked as Clowes sets Enid against a background of dense and billowy clouds, a romanticized way to accent the moment and a visual approach that Clowes uses elsewhere:
Enid’s words, though, are more than stagey; they are undoubtedly sincere. But while she speaks her appreciation for Rebecca aloud, Rebecca can’t possibly hear it, a kind of failure to communicate that is the final act -- or so it seems -- of their troubled friendship. (Many Clowes protagonists often confess to readers things they fail to share with those who most need to know them.) Clowes marks this change in their relationship by having Rebecca’s look change: she’s wearing glasses (previously Enid’s trademark), the appearance of which he had set up a few pages earlier with a short but symbolically loaded scene in which Rebecca discusses the trouble she’s having with her eyes.
Enid is literally fading from Rebecca’s -- and shortly from the readers' and her author’s -- view.
Is Enid’s line equally, or perhaps only, about herself or her belief -- or need to believe -- that she has naturally “grown into,” rather than consciously adopted, a look? She is dressed in her most refined and feminine outfit, with little hint of the more extreme styles, especially the punk looks, that were a source of pride -- and anxiety -- for her earlier in the comic. This outfit is also her most “adult,” an important choice given her intense investment in her childhood, which is seen, for example, in her deep attachment to a toy given to her by a boy in the 5th grade, and a children’s 45 that she listens to:
These lyrics seem to express Enid’s fundamental desire: like the singer of "A Smile and a Ribbon," she wants to be thought of as something "special" and "rare," foreshadowing the way she talks of Rebecca when she calls her a "beautiful young woman."
To say “You’ve grown into a very beautiful young woman” is to position yourself as an adult, as one capable of recognizing, understanding, and appreciating this growth. Yet I wonder if this is what Enid really wants to say, if this carefully crafted sentiment masks something less pleasant -- and we have seen a steady increase in the tension in their friendship. Three pages earlier, Enid watches a child being cared for by its mother and quietly says aloud “You little fucker.” The child has what she wants: a caring mother.
And does Rebecca, sitting in Angels with Josh, have what Enid wants, as well? In the closing scene, Rebecca and Josh occupy the place where Enid and Rebecca had spent so much time. Enid, it seems, has been replaced.
But Rebecca is distracted, as shown by her chewed straw.
Is she thinking, not about Josh (she’s not looking at him), but about Enid? Their connection is so strong that we can easily imagine each would be thinking about the other at the same moment. . .
It also seems oddly ironic and fitting that, while the stimulus for Enid’s decision to leave is the return of her father’s ex-wife (who she hates), her failure to get into college, and the changes in her friendship with Rebecca, she is also inspired by two the typically odd Clowes characters Bob Skeetes and “Norman” (the name Enid gives him), both of whom haunt the margins of Ghost World, but exert an inexorable pull on Enid. Like Clowes, Enid finds these kinds of outsiders compelling, and they are crucial characters even if their “screen time” is very limited; these characters seem minor, but are in fact major. Skeetes offers an astrological reading of Enid that’s vague (like most such readings), yet specific enough that it tells a kind of truth about Enid and the crossroad at which she finds herself. And it predicts/inspires the choice she will make in the last scene: “she’s running away.” 
We can barely see Norman in the left of the story's penultimate panel (is he just riding the bus around town and going nowhere -- and is this what happens to Enid after she “escapes our scrutiny?”). Earlier, the girls realize that Norman, who was always waiting for a bus that never came, finally had taken the bus in the last panel of page 52, a scene that foreshadows, and perhaps encourages, Enid’s ‘escape’:
[The final view of Enid, one of the few silhouettes in the comic.]
Perhaps Enid is interested in these kinds of characters because they seem to be beyond growth; they are interesting in and of themselves and have no need to “grow into” anything. And they certainly appear to be beyond the many personal and social pressures that shape Enid and Rebecca.
In this kind of coming of age story, we expect that a main character will grow up in some way, will come into a new kind of understanding about the world. But the kind of growth that matters most here might be the growing apart. “Growing into a very beautiful young woman” means Rebecca is moving away from Enid. (The line is also odd because Enid often had commented on Rebecca's attractiveness, which made Enid, who's uncomfortable with her own looks, unhappy.) And if Rebecca has adopted a more conventional engagement with the world (on the last page she is depicted inside while Enid is alone outside) is Enid moving away from it? And towards what?
The growth is visually set up and balanced -- and perhaps even undermined -- by a subtle and literal sign of decay that we can trace throughout the story: we have seen the sign for Angel’s (a place closely associated with Enid) lose letters since the novel opened.
Tellingly, Enid is walking away from the school, in the opposite direction of what this sign represents (childhood, nostalgia, safety . . .) and away from nearly everyone else in the scene (which occurs shortly before the final line of dialogue). We also see the backs of two Clowes characters, Squirrel Girl and Candy-Pants (from Eightball), who are a kind of younger, more playful version of the Enid and Rebecca pair. If Enid, like Rebecca, has grown into a young woman, she has to leave everything behind her -- childhood toys and records, Rebecca and Josh -- or so she believes . . .
[Musical side note: Enid listens to the Ramones and Clowes did the art for a Ramones video “I Don’t Want To Grow Up,” a sentiment that is in tension with Ghost World’s last line. Here's a link to "A Smile and a Ribbon" and to Clowes's Ramones video. ]
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Ghost World: “You’ve grown into a very beautiful young woman.”
Monday, August 25, 2008
Drawing Power.
I'm posting my own optimized jpgs of a few comic strips I drew for this weekend's Washington Post.
They printed okay, and its exciting to see it printed on newsprint in full color, but the WP online translation is kind of hard to look at. Maybe this will look a little bit better. The strips were written by Bob Thompson, the author of the piece. Possibly the most fun I had was drawing my own versions of other peoples book covers for the cover illustration (above). Click on the images to view them larger.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Unabridged
Courtesy of the Peanuts Collector Club FAQ
It Was A Dark And Stormy Night
by Snoopy
Part I
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out!
A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived
in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was
growing up.
Part II
A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was
making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in
Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas
who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the
daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?
The intern frowned.
"Stampede!" the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head
of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men
rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves.
A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An
uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch
was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the
coffee shop. he had learned about medicine, but more
importantly, he had learned something about life.
THE END
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Cartoon Appropriation
In a Barnes and Noble a while back, I was flipping through a thick, glossy, and expensive art/fashion magazine and came across a feature titled “Moonlighting,” a kind of implied narrative that alternates between stylized S&M-like photographs and minimalist cartoon drawings. The piece (called a “site-specific insert” by the magazine) was credited to Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, but the drawings looked just like those of the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, who I assumed was a collaborator. As I looked more closely, however, I began to realize that the cartoons were altered and redrawn images from one of Jason’s graphic novels, Sshhhh!
The two-page spreads in “Moonlighting” typically have a photo and a drawing that each take up a full page and are placed side-by-side. Here are two representative pairs:
1. 
2. 
The magazine’s art editor offers the following commentary and interpretation as a set-up to the piece:
New York-based mixed-media artist Ugo Rondinone is a master of appropriation. Either by looping footage from Antonioni or Fassbinder to atmospheric soundtracks, building minimal "Sol Lewitt"-style sculptures or placing his own face into famous fashion editorial spreads, his work comments on the omnipresent cultural re-formulation and recycling so often found in contemporary art. Rondinone takes us on a journey of an unhappy cartoon raven set against a bakkdrop [sic] of black-and-white rubber suit images reminiscent of S&M and sexual fetishes. By contrasting these obviously oppositional contexts, Rondinone’s critique is even more explicit, a reference to the impossibility of creating a stable identity in an ever-changing, completely "renewable" society, where anything and everything is possible.
This language echoes the ways that many art critics have talked about Rondinone, emphasizing his appropriation of celebrated artists and filmmakers (who are usually always named), his use of pop culture detritus (such as cartoon animal drawings - whose artists are typically not named), and his destabilization of aesthetic and identity boundaries and categories. The editor’s phrase “oppositional contexts” (and the boundary blurring that it supposedly creates) refers to the division of the work into a sequence of photos and drawings, as well as oppositions such as clothed/naked, night/day, human/animal, erotic/mundane, etc . . . Yet, perhaps the name-dropping (Antonioni and Fassbinder) and name-withholding (Jason) reinforces, rather than blurs, a familiar opposition (one unremarked upon by the editor): high art and low art, which is here connected to the binary of credited/un-credited. Why drop Jason's name if it won't give you any fine art cred? And that assumes, of course, that you are familiar with his work in the first place . . .
Here are some of the images and source panels:
A.
B.
[Note some of the odd choices Rondinone makes in the redrawn image above as compared to the source below, in particular the way the wine bottle becomes more like a chunky milk bottle and the disappearance of some of the chair's legs -- and those that remain seem splayed.]
C.
[Note the differences in the lines that define the walls, which seem rather loosely and unevenly drawn above. Jason's lines are simple and relaxed, but they are always carefully executed.]
D. 
E.
I would argue that Jason is not only the master appropriator for his idiosyncratic blending of elements of funny animal, horror, and slice-of-life comic book traditions, but that his work already contains within it a series of “oppositional contexts” that truly destabilize the kinds of categories that the editor claims are undermined by Rondinone’s approach. The majority of the oppositions in “Moonlighting” are already fully at play in Jason’s work, as well as many others: clothed/naked, night/day, human/animal, erotic/mundane, quotidian/horror, stasis/drama etc. And much of Jason aesthetic -- and his humor -- comes from the ways that he seamlessly moves between contrasting genres and expectations with a consistently deadpan sensibility. “In all of Rondinone’s work,” one critic claims, “the artist is interested in disrupting boundaries”; yet the alternating structure of “Moonlighting” tends to keep many boundaries intact; I like “Moonlighting,” especially for the way it combines two narratives whose relationship is evoked but never clarified, but it also seems a little heavy handed, especially when compared to some of its source material.
These are two of the source pages for the panels in “Moonlighting”:
1.
I like the way that this gag about the couple's living situation works; in the beginning of book, the animal characters are almost completely humanized, so we are surprised to see that the protagonist lives in a nest. Yet this reversal of logic gets modified again when we see the couple realize that the nest will not work, and so they select an apartment and look less than excited about it. (Are they wistfully looking out at the nest in the last panel?) Nothing in "Moonlighting" seems as interesting as this.
2.
Here the horrors of everyday life -- the almost oppressive weight of mundane activities -- intertwine with ominous yet comedic panels of a newspaper-carrying skeleton, who seems passively to haunt the main character, perhaps as a reminder of a tragic event we have witnessed earlier in the story and others to come. This is also an unusual, non-scatological take on "bathroom humor": why is the skeleton in there -- does he just use the bathroom as a place to read? And it seems funny to me that the bird character doesn't need to take his pants down . . .
Perhaps Rondinone was attracted to Jason's work because of its interest in everyday life (a concern of the Swiss artist), and its deep sense of stillness, repetition, and pathos (as seen in this page from Jason's Hey, Wait . . .) 
all of which it somehow maintains while at the same time being gently (yet not always so) comic:
Even the titles of these two novels -- Sshhhh! and Hey, Wait . . . -- suggest some of the sense of quiet and slow pacing that are hallmarks of much of Jason's work.Coda:
Carl Barks certainly appears to have been an influence on Jason's work, and we can see some of Jason's appropriation of the famous Donald Duck/Scrooge McDuck artist in these images from a Gyro Gearloose story. Here is Jason's main character followed by Bark's Gyro:
And here are typical background characters, who often seem more blandly human, particularly in their dress, than do the protagonists:
Other Blog Flume "Side-by-Sides":
Miriam.
Roy Lichtenstein.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Fine Art.
Found on a cluttered table set up on 23rd street covered in pieces that ranged in size from 2 inches square to about 10 inches square . The many paintings featured a variety of cartoon characters, often engaging in sex acts. Popeye and Olive Oyl, Blondie and Dagwood, even The Little King (he doesn't wear underpants) were among the appropriated work. A few pieces jumped out and surprised me. Direct transcriptions of Ivan Brunetti's Schizo panels in acrylic paint on little stretched canvases. Here are scans of the two "Ivans" I picked up.
