Thank you to Ken Parille and Dash Shaw for their flattering blog posts about Wally Gropius. Not to appear ungrateful, but imagine my dismay, however, when both failed to mention the following source material:
"Yeah, on Tuesday, September 22nd at 7:00 p.m. at Family Books in Los Angeles, there's going to be a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror #15 launch and art shew. Sammy Harkham, Jeffrey Brown, Jordan Crane, Tim Hensley, and Matt Groening will be signing books 15 hours before they hit the shops."
I learned how to draw comics from library books. Old tomes like Jack Markow's Cartoonist's and Gag Writer's Handbook might explain to render art twice up and use a number 2 brush and ink so the photostat camera could recognize it. By the time I finally assimilated this knowledge picked up piecemeal over the course of many years, photostats were replaced by TIFs from scanners and everyone began drawing same size using colored pencils. In an attempt to avoid being a casualty of mere history, alongside my published work I inadvertently created this four panel strip:
Exteriors often use the same approach, as in these panels from “Gropius Besieged” (Mome Summer 2009). Just as there is no distinction in many of the ‘interiors’ between floors, walls, and ceiling, the field of color redefines exterior space by eliminating any clear distinction between ground and atmosphere:
NOTE: For a recent post by me on the book version of Wally Gropius, please see here.
Around a month ago, cartoonist Dash Shaw put up a nice post at Comics Comics about cartoonist and Blog-Flumer Tim Hensley. Dash notes that “It’s like what [Tim] chooses to draw in the environment (and what he chooses not to draw) is determined by some graphic Feng Shui.” This is an astute observation, and I think there might be something going on in addition to Feng Shui.
It makes sense that Tim’s Wally Gropius (which recently concluded its serialization in Mome) should take such an interest in interior and exterior spaces, given that the comic’s title references Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. But rather than look primarily to architectural history, Tim’s sense of space seems to reference (and he can certainly correct me on this) a fundamental conceit of children’s humor comics of the mid-to-late 20th century.
This Little Lulu cover represents this minimalist conceit:
It features only the characters and objects necessary for the gag –- and they appear almost to be suspended in space. Like these covers, Hensley's approach in Gropius is to redefine and often erase the boundaries that separates interior and exterior -- and distinct dimensions in reality are replaced by a continuous field of color in his comic.
Tim’s cover for the latest issue of Comic Art (#9) follows in this tradition (especially prevalent on Dell and Harvey covers), with its off-kilter take on funny animal gags:
In this panel from “The Dropouts in 'Virgin Vinyl'” (Mome Winter 2007), a section of Wally Gropius, Tim includes only the scene's characters and objects related to the story’s running gags, echoing the above covers' minimalist take on space and humor:
Here the teen romance/sexual frustration theme is visible in Wally’s romantic excitement and lack of focus: he plugs his guitar into the Ficus instead of the amp. Perhaps this gag also suggests sexual frustration in a coded way –- the position of the guitar and the fact that the cord is plugged into the plant (fertility?) as a kind of sexually suggestive act. The other objects that appear in the panel -- the hammer and the piggy bank (‘breaking the bank’) clearly relate to the Richie Rich-esque money puns that run throughout the story –- and the future aggression implied in the pairing of these objects next to each other (eventually the bank [as in Jillian Banks, Wally's love interest?] will be 'broken') might relate to things yet to happen in the story, and one extremely chilling scene in particular.
Almost every panel on this page is set up in a way similar to the children's comics' covers:
Note the surreal shadows in the last panel . . . And in the whiteness of this panel we see a potential blurring of inside and outside. Are they inside a garage -- The Dropouts as a literal "garage band" -- yet an armored car appears in the far distance . . . If this an interior space, it's vast . . . Also note the way that blocks of color organize the page's design (as do, in a different sense, the money-related objects that appear in each panel). Tim's approach to space allows his coloring ability to occupy center stage and to emphasize the panel in a new way.
[What's the pun on Greenspan and the saw in the first panel? "Saw + bucks" -- sawbucks as slang for a $10 bill?]
Given the strangeness of the environment, the shadows (here and in the above panels) appear to be an odd relic imported from 'reality,' reflecting a more conventional approach to delineating space. . . . And even the different kinds of shadows in the two panels suggest Tim's original approach to environments.
This panel -- a scene in Jillian's bedroom where closets and the door 'f'loat' in space yet are realistically positioned -- puns on the fact that cartoon characters in these kinds of comics always wear the same outfit, day after day:
Gropius is dense with such puns, and Tim’s approach to space is like one ever-present -- albeit abstract -- beautiful pun. I can’t think of another cartoonist who approaches space -- and what we might call 'spatial color' -- in such a rigorously strange way. As Dash observes, there's a real logic to Tim's work.
Wally Gropius and Walter Gropius --
Fagus Works (1911-13):
Monument to the March Dead (1921):
For some of Tim's Gropius related posts on Blog Flume, see the following: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Ivan Brunetti on the curent New Yorker:
Jen Sorensen, a pal and fellow UVa alum, on The University of Virginia Magazine, which also has a feature on Jen and her cartoon Slowpoke. There's a video, too.
If you are interested in some great Welk videos, check out The Hip Side of Lawrence Welk at YouTube.
I was happy to see Scott McCloud discuss Lisa Hanawalt’s I Want You at his site: "I like Hanawalt’s work because it creates sensations I’ve never seen comics achieve and opened my eyes to radical possibilities." I certainly agree. Her comic is not only an impressive debut, it’s one of the best new comics I’ve read this year. I appreciate McCloud’s review -- this comic certainly deserves attention -- but I have a different take on a few aspects of Hanawalt’s work.
To set up my brief look at his comments, I'll talk a little about the form of I Want You:
Hanawalt’s comic is a 32 page anthology that features 18 different pieces. Yet because some of the pieces are one-page illustrations that relate to stories that come later, we can’t even say precisely how many works are in the anthology -- do we count these as two separate pieces or as one that’s been split into two locations? And I say pieces and works -- slightly awkward terms -- because some of them are not really comics, in the traditional sense.
This is one of the things that’s so interesting about I Want You. It’s loosely composed as a single work that’s held together by recurring themes (bodily fluids, wounds, horses), characters (She-Moose), and cartoon forms (the many illustrated lists, for example). It mixes conventional narrative comics, illustrated lists, single-page illustrations, color pieces that resemble a standard three- or four-panel daily narrative newspaper comic (without actually being one), and more. Some of the lists, too, create a categorizing problem; they could be described as non-narrative comics, or as semi-narrative, or even as narrative lists. They have properties that I think would make any of these terms applicable. Deciding on the genre category that these ‘comics’ fit is an interpretive act . . .
McCloud says "There’s no pretense of a 'story,'" but I don’t think this is correct. It’s true that the comic itself is not a single story, but no anthology is. I Want You does include five conventional narratives, at least in the formal sense. These stories feature what we could call “continuities of character, place, or time”-- the things you typically need some of for a story. “One Day at Work,” for example, features a group of characters who ‘proceed through’ a linear plot in a consistent setting. Formally, this story ‘reads’ like the average Archie comic -- except for the sex-bugs.
Here's the first page from another narrative, the story "Lunch Break":
McCloud notes that "Hanawalt’s pages are aggressively experimental." I think he's right in some cases, but many, like the above page, chart the familiar comics territory of the grid. Hanawalt's comic is innovative, especially in the way it combines familiar and unusual page layouts. And in many ways, it's aggressively accessible, with all of its funny animal humor and gleeful crassness. . .
"Hanawalt’s work," McCloud writes toward the end of his review, "is the type often dismissed by artists I know as ‘pretentious’ or ‘self-indulgent.’" When these terms are typically applied to an indy comic, it’s because the comic is either a slow-moving slice-of life story, or a "navel-gazing" autobiography, or tries claim the status of Serious Art. I don’t think Hanawalt hopes these comics will appear in The New Yorker (the standard claim made by bloggers etc. against cartoonists they think are pretentious and desperate for legitimacy). I can't see what an illustrated list of funny menstrual terms (can you guess what the "The Death Valley Stuffer" is?), a mini-instructional manual on how to fake jerking off while driving, or two pages of beautifully-drawn animal heads with silly hats is aspiring to.
[I recognize that McCloud doesn't use ‘pretentious’ or ‘self-indulgent’ himself, but invoking these terms might mislead some readers about what kind of comic that I Want You is.]
I Want You is a very funny and formally inventive anthology, one that's the opposite of pretentious. Hanawalt’s comic is something fresh: an anthology of cartooning styles that has no allegiance to any single kind of comics form. Like the car accident on the cover above, it’s “cartoon chaos” -- in the best sense of the term.
(Coda: Perhaps it makes a kind of sense to call a comic that includes a masturbation manual "self-indulgent." And McCloud say "the subject matter seems tossed-off," making a clever masturbation pun himself.)
Ditko's version of an imaginary Martian machine owes less to contemporary science fiction and more to familiar cartoon abstractions. Take this panel for example:
There’s a giant 'paint splat' surrounded by a fuzzy 'lightning bolt':
Even though a cartoon 'paint splat' has a representational connection to an actual one, here that connection is severed, for the nature of the object is unknown - it's just a gesture, a play of form and color. In the standard cartoon idiom, a splat would represent an action; here it may be an action or just a thing: in other words, in the grammar of this scene it could be either a subject or a verb.
Some 'cobweb'-like figurations:
Many shapes suggest a flower seen through the fragmented prism of a kaleidoscope:
At first, it’s almost hard to perceive these two creatures in the panel as life-forms--if that’s what the green shape (a rabbit/fish?) on the left and the red one on the right are intended to evoke:
In this three-panel sequence, the narrative aspect itself is almost abstract, seen in the panel-to-panel transformation of the shapes that make up the door:
In this panel, a character appears to comment ironically on the issues of representation and recognition; it’s obvious to Dick and Leo that it’s a city, but we might not think so if they hadn’t told us:
Perception depends heavily on context.
Ditko’s art in "The Dimensions of Greed" employs a play of distorted shapes and heightened exaggeration; and like this story, much of his work has an unrecognized sense of humor and playfulness. While many of the stories he draws grapple with ‘heavy’ themes (crime, justice, moral and psychological dilemmas, etc.), Ditko’s art often recalls the comical traditions of cartooning. And it looks like it would be fun to draw -- There's often a real feeling of joy to his art.
In this page from "Escape" (reprinted in Space Adventures #11, 1978; Charlton), Ditko's abstraction takes a more minimalist and geometrical approach. Underneath a highly stylized city (again, so abstract that the reader might not recognize it as such without textual clues), a man runs in the first panel:
He says, "It looks like a street" but it’s just a series of circles or ovals floating in space. The next panel introduces, as the ‘ground’ of this world, a triangle and a cross, as well as two yellow triangles and other shapes created by the panel borders and the lines that define the purple cross and triangle:
The last panel above features a different kind of abstraction: Ditko literally abstracts (in the sense of removing) almost all sense of the physical context in which the figures ‘stand’ (except for the small shadow under a foot). The art in this story is sparse to begin with; but this scene takes that a step further, as each consecutive panel has less visual information.
Note how the floor of his "home" changes shape in the story's final two panels: a square surrounded other four-sided irregular shapes a series become all squares—and the oval shape of his room itself seems to become square:
What's that big black ink area in the lower corner? Is it intentional or a Charlton printing error? [It oddly extends below the plane of the panel borders into the margin.] Either way, it fits with the abstract strangeness of the images.
So often, Ditko is not interested in representing, in either a literal or conventional way, what the writer asks for; and this tendency is part of what makes his work so singular; he seems to rewrite the narrative as he draws it, making the finished story far subtler and stranger than what’s suggested by the script. Ditko is one of the few artists who can consistently take a mediocre script and make something special from it. And too often readers focus on Ditko's thematic concerns and not his formal innovations . . .
Jack Chick, the beloved and notorious evangelical pamphleteer, believes that souls can be won for Jesus through the ministry of the humble comic book. He understands that cartoon drawings printed on newsprint and held together by staples possess an almost magnetic power. You have likely seen Chick’s comics, left mysteriously by the faithful at bus stations, roadside casinos, public toilets, and laundromats. While waiting for your clothes to dry, you happen to notice, say, The Only Hope or The Death Cookie -- You read it and are never the same -- You Believe. How is it that something so ephemeral can be so transformative?
The Buenaventura Press shares Chick’s missionary zeal (if not his orthodoxy), feeling deeply that there’s something special about this folksy format -- it’s not just another ‘content delivery configuration.’ Addressing young cartoonists, Adrian Tomine recommends that they ‘Start out small. I know it's tempting to take that big book contract the first time it's offered, but it might be better to hone your skills in a less ostentatious venue.’ What ‘venue’ is ‘less ostentatious’ than the comic book? Think of the great artists who began there, aided by appearing in a format beneath notice, one that allowed them slowly and carefully to perfect each of the many disciplines (writing, drawing, lettering, acting, costume design, etc.) that together we call ‘cartooning.’ Think of Art Spiegelman’s Maus or Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, visionary comic book stories first and only later bookstore-friendly graphic novels.
It’s ironic that the rise of the graphic novel is hastening the demise of the comic book, when the former is just a long version of the later, sans staples. But what respectable store wants to stock flimsy pamphlets with a limited shelf life and low profit margins, when it can proudly sell a sturdy, substantial Graphic Novel (a comic legitimatized by a binding and high price)? While mainstream comics (the kind featuring super-powered, lycra-clad buffoons) limp painfully toward their death, decades past their mid 20th-century heyday, economic forces threaten to kill ‘alternative comics’ (the kind released by Buenaventura Press), whose discriminating followers brave trips to the seedy part of town to purchase them in ‘specialty shops.’
Unconcerned with fleeting trends or the material conditions of the market, the enthusiasts at the Buenaventura Press have their eyes fixed solely on the aesthetic merits of the comic and the artists they publish. Emanating from the grimy yet luminous cartooning mecca of Oakland, California, the BP is engineering a Comics Revival, a modest yet bold endeavor to revivify the comic book. They might be foolhardy to think they can overcome the economic downturn, but BP’s business savvy, undergirded by a fervent, almost religious idealism should give us hope that the form we love will continue, and perhaps even flourish.
***
At the appearance of these humble pamphlets, town after town, and city upon city shall awaken out of their lethargy, night organizations for reaching the great masses shall be extemporized, as if by magic; and better still, the quickening impulse of the cartoon shall be imparted unto myriads, so that multitudes of readers shall be converted within the space of a few years, and cold hearts shall be fired with a burning desire to know the Comic Book.
{The above is a 'press release/ faux manifesto' I wrote for the Buenaventura Press's Comics Revival; they will be publishing a number of pamphlet comics in the coming months; see here . . .]
