The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival

I mentioned back in September that I was going to the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. I went, had fun, took photos. I also got a lot of books and comics, and I'll be writing about them in the coming month. But this post will be about the experience--and I'm writing it mostly as an excuse to inflict my terrible photos on you all. (If you want to see much better photos of the event, read this.) Now Pan readers who come here for the art coverage might find their eyes glazing over. But this festival is relevant to art lovers--it was put on and attended by a bunch of people who view comics as art, and among them are many who cross-over to the gallery world, whether in their own practice or just as people interested in art. I still think there is a distance between these two worlds that doesn't need to be there, but the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival certainly represents to largest overlap of comics and the fine arts world. (Many in the comics world would cringe at this. But I guess what I want, and what I think this show represents in a way, is a comics world that is engaged with serious culture as opposed to one that is only engaged with the kitsch of the world, which is what you would mostly find at the San Diego ComicCon, for example.)


Gary Panter, Matt Groening, Bill Griffith and a bunch of other people

The people who were there were amazing--guests, exhibitors, and attendees. This is a young person's show, but the organizers made certain that a lot of people of my generation and of older generations were present. The show was put together (I think) by Dan Nadel of Picture Box, Gabe Fowler from Desert Island, and comics scholar Bill Kartalopoulos. Nadel is one of many people involved in comics who has been working on creating a new history of comics. By this, I mean trying to imagine a different canon. He has work in this regard in his two books Art Out of Time and Art In Time and to a certain extent in what he publishes in Picture Box. This kind of project is appealing to me. People are always reclaiming history (aesthetic or otherwise) to understand the present. See for example art critic Rapheal Rubenstein's The Silo.

Why this is relevant is that this show featured older guests--an attempt, maybe, to school the young hipster guests. Hence guests like Mark Alan Stamaty, who is not someone who is well-remembered in comics despite the fact that he produced a number of brilliant books over the years, especially the great MacDoodle Street.



Mark Alan Stamaty

He shared a panel with Jordan Crane, Brian Chippendale and Keith Jones, mostly on the subject of horror vacuii. 



Mark Alan Stamaty, Jordan Crane, Keith Jones and Brian Chippendale

The panels were quite nice. Lynda Barry and Charles Burns were great--Barry is hilarious in person. While Sammy Harkham (editor and publisher of Kramer's Ergot) and Francoise Mouly (co-editor of Raw and current art editor of The New Yorker) tended to ramble, they were entertaining.



Sammy Harkham and Francoise Mouly



Kim Deitch

So this revised history puts underground cartoonists like Kim Deitch in a pantheon.



Charles Burns and adoring fans

And creates a situation where a cartoonist like Charles Burns gets mobbed.


For me, it was great to see old friends like Jordan Crane...

 
Jon Lewis and Sam Henderson...


Doug Allen...



Jessica Abel and Matt Madden...


And Jason Little...



Little was debuting his new book, The Motel Art Improvement Service. I'll definitely be reviewing it later, but one thing that is really interesting about this book and the preceding volume, Shutterbug Follies, is Little's familiarity with contemporary fine art. Here he was dressed, as he always does for conventions, in an extravagant outfit. He used to include a straw boater or top hat with costumes, but he told me that when he would wear a top hat, he would end up getting bothered by steampunk fans, thinking that they had found one of their own. (Fiction fans may be interested to know that Little is married to novelist Myla Goldberg. The main character in his graphic novels is named Bee, which can't be a coincidence, can it?)

The space was packed with humanity. Despite temperatures outside in the 30s, it got really toasty in the church hall where the festival was held. Little asked me to spot his table so he could go to the restroom and shed his longjohns. This is what his table looked like from the driver's seat perspective.





Pat Ausilio

I think this is Pat Ausilio, who did a comic called Abstracted Comics. I liked this because despite the fact that it was 80-something degrees in the building, he kept his toque on. That is hipsterism above and beyond the call of duty.



Johnny Ryan

This is Johnny Ryan, the lowbrow cartoonist embraced by highbrow comics lovers.



Bob Sikoryak

This guy was so hardcore that he worked on a comic while attending a panel. Tight deadline, I guess. Update: This is apparently Bob Sikoryak.


Chris Pitzer and Josh Cotter

This is Chris Pitzer (proprietor of AdHouse) and one of the artists he publishes, the excellent cartoonist Josh Cotter.


Ben Catmull

Ben Catmull had a space right next to Jason Little's.



Gabrielle Bell and Tomasz Kaczynski

This is Gabrielle Bell and (I think) Tomasz Kaczinski. Bell was selling her original art, which is literally the smallest original art I have ever seen except maybe for Drew Friedman. In addition to selling individual pages, she was also selling individual panels. As I understood it, these were panels she completed but decided not to use. I bought one of those-- 2.75" square.

One final photo. I stayed in a hotel two blocks from the festival. And just around the corner was Desert Island, which I have to say is my ideal comic shop.



It is filled 100% with art comics and pretty much nothing else.

Recent Acquisitions from Several Artists

This is a "catch-up" post for a bunch of things I have gotten in the past few months (!) that I haven't written about. The big one is a page by Jaime Hernandez.



Jaime Hernandez, Bob Richardson page 2, ink on bristol board, 1995

This is not the most spectacular Jaime Hernandez page (which is probably why I could afford it). But it is an elegant example of his work. This is from a story called "Bob Richardson" which features two full pages of Maggie getting slapped in the face by everybody she has ever known, a dog with a telepathic link to Isabel, and a low-level traitor named Boyd (!).

Back on September 18, The Joanna had their "gala," in which I came dressed as Pan. They had an art raffle, which they set up the same way that Box 13 did theirs earlier in the summer. Because the raffle tickets were really cheap, I ended up winning three pieces of art.



Molly Gochman, Red Truck (from Lullabies), inkjet print mounted on aluminum, 2010



Emily Link, Prime Ordeal Ooze, watercolor, ink, graphite and glitter on paper, 2009



Jessica Ninci, untitled (detail), watercolor and ink on paper, 2010

I didn't know much about Molly Gochman, Emily Link and Jessica Ninci when I won these. Gochman is highly regarded enough to get big public commissions and to be featured in that massive Texas Artists Today book. Jessica Ninci is currently a student getting her BFA at UH, and she was part of a group show ar the Joanna earlier this year. And I've seen Emily Link's plush heads in various venues, including some that are up at Box 13 right now.

PictureBox is a really great small press art comics publisher, and like all small presses, they are chronically having to figure out how to pay for their projects, particularly those that are large and expensive. I can tell you from personal experience that the lag between the expenses on a publishing project and the revenue is a long time, and for a small press, that can spell bankruptcy. That's why so many small presses try to get grants for specific projects because it moves the revenue stream forward in time.

For a pair of books, PictureBox did something innovative to move that revenue stream forward. Two Fort Thunder alumni had books in the works, If 'n' Oof by Brian Chippendale and Powr Mastrs [sic] #3 by C.F. (the pen name of Chris Forgues). If 'n' Oof was an especially ambitious (and expensive) book to print--800 pages long. So they put out word that if you bought these books up front--way in advance of publication--you would get some free artwork by C.F. and Chippendale.



Brian Chippendale, Murderer, Coyote, Trickster, Fool, Hero, ink and marker on paper, 2010



Brian Chippendale, untitled, silkscreen (?) 119/130, 2010



C.F., untitled, silkscreen (?) (unnumbered), 2010

The grey areas in the C.F. silkscreen (if indeed that is what it is) are actually silver ink.

Yesterday I stopped by P.G. Gallery to see the latest exhibit, and I noticed there were still some Gabriela Trzebinski slats available from an earlier show. Since they were only $30, I went ahead and bout two.


Gabriela Trzebinski, American Thunder (from the Matatu Sticks Project), acrylic paint on recycled wood, 2010


Gabriela Trzebinski, Voice of the Ghetto (from the Matatu Sticks Project), acrylic paint on recycled wood, 2010

Now you might ask yourself why I got these. American Thunder I just liked because it made me think of Bob Segar and Dodge Ram Pick-ups. As for Voice of the Ghetto, people have often said to me, "Robert, even though you are whiter than Dick Gephardt and are a known fan of both The Decembrists and Belle and Sebastian, you are truly the voice of the ghetto."

Finally, I went to the opening last night at Box 13 and they had another raffle. This time, you didn't get to choose the art that you won. However, there were no rules against trading. That's how I ended up with this:


Maria Smits, untitled (?), ink and pastel on paper, 2010 (?)

Maria Smits is a Dutch artist who has somehow landed in Houston. She has a show opening November 19 at Lawndale. And I'm afraid my photo utterly failed to capture the extremely delicate pen and ink work in this piece.

Note on Hypermorph at Domy

There is a visually engaging show up at Domy right now called Hypermorph by Mark P. Hensel, under his pseudonym William Cardini. You look at Hensel's work, and you see a lot of Ben Jones, a lot of Fort Thunder. Things I love about those other artists are present, and things that bug me about them are here, too. I want to start off with what bugs me, just to get it off my chest. I'm going to quote Domy's press release:

Since 2006 William Cardini has been slowly developing the mythology of the hyperverse through his videos, comics, drawings, paintings, and writing. The hyperverse is a realm filled with immensely powerful inhuman beings who battle over worlds with strange geologies and hoard advanced technologies left by ancient starfarers. On the planets of the hyperverse, mountains shift from molten to crystal between moments and clumps of rock are inhabited by malevolent intelligences ready to hurl face-melting spells. Everything is in flux in this cosmos of constant magical warfare.

My first reaction to this is that it seems pretty dumb, the kind of thing I--a sci-fi and fantasy loving kid--would have dreamed up in 7th grade and abandoned (or turned into something more satirical by 10th grade). You get this kind of sci-fi video-game world making a lot from the guys in Fort Thunder. In something like Multiforce by Mat Brinkman or Ninja by Brian Chippendale, you have a certain level of irony and satire. In Chippendale's work, specifically, you have a deliberate attempt to engage with his childhood self as well. These things give their work a greater level of complexity--engaging childhood doesn't require regressing into it. 

I don't see that in an obvious way in Hensel's work. I seriously doubt that what you see is what you get--I suspect there is something more going on. But what? It may be that seeing a small slice of his work in Domy's tiny gallery space doesn't allow one to really dig deep into Hensel's whole project, whatever it may be.

On the other hand, he may have simply and narrowly set for himself a project of producing work that deliberately recalls (to the point of being indistinguishable from) being 12 years old, living in a largely girl-free world of his own imagination. Is there value in that approach? The proof is on the wall.


Mark P. Hensel (aka William Cardini), The Wojrollox Chomps the Miizzzard; the Miizzzard Attacks With Frogheads and Laser Vision, acrylic on canvas, 2010

It's hard not to like this cartoonish riot of colors. And I do like it, a lot. I like his drawings even better.


Mark P. Hensel (aka William Cardini), Hypermorph #47, ink on paper, 2010


Mark P. Hensel (aka William Cardini), Hypermorph #103, ink on paper, 2010

These drawings demonstrate a high level of skill combined with a recognizable personal drawing style. Drawing creatures ("hypermorphs," one assumes) like this I think reflects Hensel's age. Not that artists haven't been drawing fantastic creatures for millennia, but I think "character design" is a key part of life for the artists raised on sophisticated video games. But these creatures also have a mythic feel to them--they seem almost Babylonian.



In this installation shot, we see plush frog heads. This again feels like Hensel is deliberately addressing childhood. Except that plush toys are not really part of the 12-year-old-boy-creating-a-sci-fi-world milieu. They seem a little girly. But wait, the frog heads were created by Hensel's studio-mate Glade Whitworth, and looking at the photos from the exhibit's opening night, we learn that Whitworth is in fact a woman.

So, if creating boyish sci-fi worlds is an aspect of the whole Fort Thunder aesthetic, can we say that aesthetic is inherently male? And if we accept that, is there a female counterpart? And if so, are plush frog heads a part of it?

If it sounds like I haven't fully digested this art movement (and it is a movement), you are right. I've known the Fort Thunder artists for over a decade and I'm still trying to understand them--to devise a framework or theory that makes sense of their work. I feel I am about halfway there. Maybe in another 10 years, I'll have it figured out. So right now, I have to depend a lot on what my gut tells me, and it's saying that Hensel and Glade are really good, entertaining artists.

New Acquisitions--another 20x200 print and a Fort Thunder veteran

Brian Chippendale, untitled (Lets Party), ink on paper, 2010

Chippendale did the densest, hardest to comprehend comics while he was part of Fort Thunder. these have been collected in the book Maggots. He did another book called Ninja. He is half the noise band Lightning Bolt. And he has a great blog where he analyzes mainstream comics with a jaded connoisseur's eye. I saw this piece on the website of Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn, and liked it. This piece is second by a Fort Thunder alumnus (the other is Brian Ralph). That leaves Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Lief Goldberg, Chris Forgues and probably a few others I am forgetting.


Ross Racine, Prairieside Forks, archival pigment print (22 of 500), 2010

This looks like a Google map of suburban sprawl, except the more you look at it, the more odd it seems. In fact, it was drawn by Ross Racine on a computer. No suburb would have a street layout like that--it would be a  bizaare maze. But perhaps no more bizarre than the curvilinear cul-de-sacs, arterials and freeways of our government mandated suburbs, which have helped turn us all into petroleum-guzzling lardasses. This piece is another print from the wonderful 20x200.