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.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Need-Based Criticism
Much has been made recently of the need for a 'negative criticism' that takes certain comics to task for their failures. Advocates of this position argue that comics can’t grow unless more of this type of criticism is written. But the causal logic (and historical realities) here seems a little off; it makes negative criticism prior to good comics. Advocates of this position believe that negative criticism currently does not exist in a sufficient amount, and yet, I believe, Americans are living in a time of a great growth in quality comics that didn’t require critics in any direct way. Certainly, in a general sense, a more robust critical climate might have a positive effect by elevating standards, but the current standards for cartooning -- the work of Clowes, Ware, Brunetti, Tomine, Kevin H., and others -- are already incredibly high. {Editors could help a lot with standards by employing a constructive criticism that happens before publication: see my short piece here. I’d like to see more critics hold editors accountable for the lack of actual editing . . .}
1. a recurring feature in which different writers analyze at length an influential comic of, say, the last 10 years. It should be heavily illustrated with examples, something I’d like to see much more of in writing about comics in general -- people digging deep into images . . .
2. a feature in which writers and cartoonists focus on an aspect of comics theory that is presented in a way suited to a non-scholarly but well-informed readership -- it should be free from the tics of academic writing yet engage issues important to both academics and general readers.
3. a feature in which cartoonists talk in detail about a small portion of their work; for example, a discussion of all the choices and decisions that went into a single panel or page.
4. analytical interviews: interviews that avoid that typical biographical approach and ask probing questions about the work.
Irrelevant images from Tippy Teen #12 (Tower Comics - 1967) [I love that the money has $ signs emanating from it -- and that the exclamation points in the balloons are so stylized.]
Mod Gag
Saturday, July 5, 2008
POV and Autobiography
He argues that well-known autobiographical comic creators like Crumb, Pekar, Paley, and Spiegelman “get it wrong.” They falsify experience by employing what could be called an “objective camera” point of view instead of a “subjective camera,” which would truthfully represent experience by showing only what the artist saw when he/she lived the events of the story. Objective camera implies, for Chelsea, that an observer other than the cartoonist is doing the recording; and so, for example, the cartoonist/protagonist can be seen from behind, when the cartoonist should only show what appeared in front of him. I doubt Chelsea thinks that these artists are really wrong (perhaps he does, though; he uses the word “wrong” nine times on the first page.) Perhaps he just wants to make us aware of a strategy employed in conventional auto-bio that he thinks needs to be examined.
I think, however, that there are a number of ways in which his analysis could be complicated and taken further. Chelsea wants to draw our attention to an important choice that many cartoonists make, but there are a number of other choices he doesn’t discuss that I think are equally relevant -- and maybe even more important than POV -- to his argument.
The minute you put your experiences into comics, and certainly into the form in which Chelsea and many other cartoonists do, you are “falsifying” or modifying reality. There seems to me to be no reason to assume that a representational approach like “subjective camera” has any more claim on truth than any other. A cartoonist can easily re-imagine a personal experience from a more expansive point of view. And the rightness or wrongness, for readers at least (if not the cartoonist), will come from a hard to define aspect of the comic, often the way it relates to their experiences of the world; i.e., does it have 'the ring of truth?” -- whatever that is . . .
Chelsea relies heavily on rectangular panels and borders, yet we look at the world through a vision that gets fuzzier and less precise towards the margins of the field of view. So perhaps a more “truthful” -- which is to say a literately accurate method in Chelsea’s way of thinking -- would not use rectangular panels or borders at all, but would feature images that fade at the outer limits or blend into the margins of the page. Maybe something like one of Anders Nilsen’s page layouts would begin to get at this “truth”:
I think it would be more accurate call his approach in 24x2 something like “subjective camera/close-ups.” It offers restricted notions of “subjective camera” and of human vision -- we can see with far greater variety in "shots," from intense close-ups to extreme long shots (see Dan Clowes's The Stroll below). But “subjective camera/close-ups” is a very effective strategy in creating the kind of claustrophobic anxiety and drama that Chelsea exploits in his second comic, Sleepless.
Of course, I'm not saying that there’s anything wrong with subjective camera, only with claims about its relationship to truth. Dan Clowes plays with the idea of objectivity in “Daniel G. Clowes in ‘Just Another Day,’” a story about autobiographical comics:
Despite my differences with Chelsea, I like the fact that he creates a strip about approaches to narration, something under-discussed in comics. I hope people will checkout 24x2.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Future Acme
I hadn't seen this cover image on any blogs, and so thought I would post it. According to Amazon, Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library #19 will be released in December.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
The Trons.
Found this while perusing a dorky guitar message board.
The Trons are from New Zealand. This is all I know about the Trons.
Direct Youtube link.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Nicely Drawn Boy
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