It's late 2018 and I Can't Stop Reading Comics

Robert Boyd

I am a 55-year-old man who should have outgrown comics when I was 13. I sort of did. I pretty much stopped reading them throughout high school. What was happening with the Avengers just no longer felt relevant to me. But in college I rediscovered comics thanks to my roommate Hal, who had somehow stumbled across an English comic called Warrior featuring the mind-blowing comics of a guy named Alan Moore. Shortly after that, I found issue 2 of Love & Rockets at a comic store and it changed my life. And I was lucky to come along just as comics were growing more sophisticated and diverse by leaps and bounds, year after year. Because of this, I've never had a reason to quit reading them.

The first three I'm going to write about are published by a tiny English Press called Shortbox. Shortbox is the project of a young woman named Zainab Akhtar, who previously ran a review site called Comics & Cola, which she shut down in 2017. She was someone who was discovering comics and writing about those discoveries in real time. Unfortunately, she did so while being Muslim and a woman, which reportedly brought the fucking worst in the internet. She was not a victim of the racist, sexist movement known as "Comicsgate" (they coalesced a little bit after she shut down) but apparently of similar assholes. ("Comicsgate" will make an appearance a little later in this post, however.) When she announced she was shutting down Comics & Cola (in March, 2016), there was an outpouring of disappointment and sympathy. Heidi McDonald, who runs the comics site The Beat, wrote the following:

When Zainab first started writing for me, she was optimistic and idealistic, or at least expressed that most of the time. Over three years, via social media, I watched all that optimism and idealism wash away in a sea of  fatigue over daily battles, battles that should quite rightly never have had to be fought.

That said, posts kept appearing on her blog, The last one appeared in October 2017. She obviously didn't stop loving comics or wanting to engage with them.Sometime in the past couple of years, she started a small publishing outfit called Shortbox. I believe the blog was still happening when she started. Its name comes from a standard-size comic book storage box, which is slightly ironic since none of the comics she publishes seem to be "standard" size. The three I have all have small trim-sizes and are in full color. They are tiny beautiful objects.

And they are all decidedly alternative comics--they make no concession to mainstream comics tastes. And all three are by women cartoonists, although her entire catalog has plenty of male cartoonists. It's just that I happened to pick these three when I was shopping.

Starting a publishing company takes gumption. But in the past few years, quite a few new small publishers have appeared on the scene, and I am glad to see it. Good luck, Shortbox!



The Island by Joy San (Shortbox, 2018). Drawn with crayon or pastels, Jay San's The Island has dense color that reminds me a little of the great Lorenzo Mattotti. The story takes place partly on a dangerous desert island. A young woman goes to the island with a seed that was given her by her great uncle who had been stranded on the island.. He gave her several seed which she was never able to grow. Down to her last seed, she decides to try to grow it on the island of its origin.


The island seems to be forbidden or off-limits. The bird that transports her there refuses to land on the island. It drops the woman off without touching the earth. She grows the seed using pieces of her own body (at the request of the plant) which then produces a duplicate body, identical to the young woman's. A little like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the duplicate takes the place of the woman. It returns to civilization and lives a happy life, ironically. The woman is left stranded on the island.

The Island is a minor but likable fable. Joy San is an artist to watch.



The Worst by Molly Mendoza (Shortbox, 2016). Two girls, Sam and Jen, on a swim team are close friends. Jamie (I think) convinces Jen to drop Sam as a friend. We see this happening through the dialogue of two gossips, one of whom admits, "I'm only in it for the drama."



Mendoza's art is quite stylized and illustrational.It doesn't have standard comic book panel-to-panel progressions. Instead it is a series of images that more-or-less illustrates the drama of Sam and Jen as it unfolds. Lots of images of girls in pools in their one-piece swim-team bathing suits. She likes to draw the distortions of a body partly submerged in clear pool water.

 
Beneath the Dead Oak Tree by Emily Carroll (Shortbox, February 2019). Emily Carrol specializes in somewhat disturbing fairy-tale-like stories. In this one, the characters are all wolf-like anthropomorphic figures. A young woman attends a party thrown by a man. The environment is one of wealth and finery, recalling perhaps the 18th century. The characters are never named.


The man is pale green and the woman is orange, and Carroll uses that to isolate the two in some of the party scenes. He asks her to join him beneath the Dead Oak Tree, which she declines to do. But curious, she follows him out there where she sees he has brought another young woman. Our heroine witnesses the man murdering the woman. She keeps this fact to herself (for some reason). The man continues his pursuit of her but never again asks her to go under the Dead Oak Tree. Eventually he asks her to marry him, and on their wedding night, she extracts a bloody revenge on him. It somewhat recalls the fairy tale of Bluebeard, except that Bluebeard murdered his wives. Here, being the man's wife seems to protect the woman.

The artwork is, like all of Carroll's art, elegant and lovely, but the story seems kind of a trifle. It strives for the universality of a fairy tale, but the motives seem obscure. Why does he murder? Why does she not tell anyone he is a murderer? How does he act with impunity? And why does she kill him in the end?

If I had to characterize Shirtbox comics on the basis of these three titles, it would be comics where the artwork if foregrounded over storytelling and plot. They are beautiful to look at.



One Dirty Tree by Noah Van Sciver (Uncivilized Books, 2018). I said Comicsgate would rear it's ugly head again, and it does quite obliquely here in One Dirty Tree. Noah Van Sciver is an extremely talented alternative cartoonist probably best known for his hilarious series of books about his poet-manque character who calls himself Fante Bukowski. One Dirty Tree is about his growing up in a run-down rental house in New Jersey. the street address was 133, and it had a dead tree in the front yard which lead one of his brothers to name it One Dirty Tree. He was from a Mormon family with 7 brothers and sisters, including Ethan Van Sciver, who has become one of the faces of Comicsgate. Ethan is a very talented artist who was quite successful for a while drawing mainstream superhero comic books. But he drifted over into far right politics and online harassment, burning many bridges. Noah never mentions this aspect of Ethan's life in the book, but he does depict Ethan as a budding comics artist creating his character Cyberfrog while still a teenager. Amazingly (or maybe not), Ethan is still trying to make a go of Cyberfrog, crowdfunding it to self-publish it. To me, these two brothers are exemplars of the difference between mainstream and alternative comics. Not because of Ethan's politics (although there has always been a whiff of the fascist in superhero comics), but in that Noah has advanced to a much more subtle and adult type of storytelling while Ethan, a 44 year-old man, is still drawing fucking Cyberfrog, a character he made up in high school.

But I didn't love this book, although it feels stronger on rereading. Even Noah has mixed feelings about it because he feels a little guilty about putting his mentally ill father down on the page (he said as much in an interview on the podcast The Comics Alternative). This is always the danger of doing autobiographical comics is that you may end up depicting people you know and love in ways they wouldn't necessarily want.

But what is appealing is how Noah switches back and forth in time with the kids in the 133 and the future when he is a young man full of self-doubt because he has chosen the spectacularly unremunerative career of alternative cartoonist. It makes him feel like he can't live up to his more conventionally employed girlfriend. I think this is a feeling many cartoonists (and artists) have felt.




Survive 300,000,000: Serpentine Captives by Pat Aulisio (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2018). I wrote about the first part of this series in an earlier post, and this is more of the same. The cyborg and his son Blaze have been captured and transported to Mars. The meet new allies and fight thier way to freedom. And I really don't care!



Our Wretched Town Hall by Eric Kostiuk Williams (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2018). This is a series of vignettes dealing with gay life in Toronto. What I noticed right away was how psychedelic the art was--it reminded me of certain comics artists from the 60s and 70s--Jim Steranko, for example, or  Frank Brunner when he was drawing Dr. Strange. It made me think for the first time about how queer that art was with it's art nouveau-inspired excesses.



The title story seems to refer to a dance club (whether the club is actually called "Our Wretched Town Hall" is not clear). But Williams makes a case for it being an other place, a kind of artificial home. "Together we've made this a home away from home where you can be free . . . fearless!"

Williams is an artsy guy--one of the stories is a tribute to a defunct art space called Videofag, and in another he draws and discusses David Wojnarowicz. And conflicts between gay and straight, conservative and flamboyant show up, as does the specter of turning from a twink to a twank. But what pulled me along was the extravagant artwork.



The New Yorker Cartoons by Johnny Ryan (Mirror Editions, 2018). This is a very unusual little book. I have no idea who Mirror Editions is. There is no information in the book. The design is very spare and elegant (the design is credited to "H. Patel"), which is in extreme contrast to the cartoons themselves. They take the form of classic New Yorker cartoons--an image and a caption, which is usually the words of a character is the image. Like New Yorker cartoons, the images are black and white, unframed so they float on a white background, and often feature a grey tone. This format is a signifier of polite, bourgeois wry humor; what Johnny Ryan does with the form is ironic. Ryan's comics are filthy and objectionable. Another cartoonist who has done similar deconstructions of the polite New Yorker-style cartoon is Ivan Brunetti, a cartoonist who matches Ryan for filth but who not-so-secretly loves the New Yorker esthetic--he done very respectful comics about James Thurber and has even drawn covers for the New Yorker. It is impossible to imagine Johnny Ryan ever drawing a cover for the New Yorker. (Brunetti's New Yorker-style atrocities are collected into a very funny book called Ho!: The Morally Questionable Cartoons of Ivan Brunetti)


I think some of the funniest cartoons in this collection are about Nazis. The thing about Nazi-themed humor you have to ask yourself is, would a Nazi find it funny? If yes, then maybe it's beyond the pale. And in these two cases, Ryan certainly skates that line. Neither of these make fun of Nazis or satirize them.


However, the second one is most typical of the cartoons in this tiny volume. It makes fun of the fad for adding politics to ones artwork or entertainment product regardless of whether or not it works. It seems of the moment. And making the art stripping and the politics Nazism makes the idea of left wing art or Alt-right art seem, well, ridiculous. Which is what good satire does.

These cartoons were originally published on Ryan's Instagram feed, outlawscumfudge. Needless to say, it was always a race against time to see how long they would be up before the gnomes of Instagram deleted them. Thank God we still have books--a platform that is diffuse enough that they can't really be censored by a monolithic corporate master, like Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, etc.

I have a couple of more comics to write about, but I want to get this up in 2018. This is the last post of 2018. Happy New Year!

Big Frame Up in Austin

Robert Boyd


This giant blue genie had nothing to do with Frame besides being across the parking lot from Big Medium

East Austin has become a locus for Austin's art scene.  Of course there is EAST, the East Austin studio tour, but studios are the loam out of which other things grow--galleries, artists spaces, etc. Frame to me seemed to be about promoting the next stage of the evolution of an art district. Some institutions have sprung up, and to help people realize this, they join their voices like the citizens of Whoville, shouting "We are here!" The four participants were Tiny Park, MASS, Big Medium and Co-Lab. What's interesting is that this grouping includes a commercial gallery, a non-profit and a couple of artist-run spaces.

Big Medium is a nonprofit that organizes EAST and the Texas Biennial. Soon they will have their own storefront space in a new development called Canopy. Right now, Canopy is empty. I think they'd like to full of galleries and complimentary businesses. Big Medium arranged for two of the spaces to be used on a temporary basis. So on the day of Frame, Fahamu Pecou: All Dat Glitters Ain’t Goals (curated by Salvador Castillo) was having its closing night and The F.R. Etchen Collection; Selected Works and More was opening.


Fahamu Pecou at Big Medium

Fahamu Pecou is an Atlanta-based artist who uses self-portraiture, video and performance to reflect on images and stereotypes of black manhood in the era of hiphop. The big canvases were impressive and projected an ironic sense of overblown masculinity, but the videos were the star of the show. They came across as modest and homespun (although they included some clever effects), with forceful but ironic raps.



The other Big Medium show was a show of Russell Etchen's personal art collection. Obviously this is a curatorial idea I have no real objection to. In Etchen's case, a lot of his collection comes from his colleagues in Sketch Klubb, various folks on the Houston art scene who are about his age, bits of comics-related artwork, and other odds and ends. Etchen is a cash-poor collector, which makes his collection all the more interesting--each piece has a story and is not simply the result of a cash exchange.


Mark Flood, Blue Skies for Russell Etchen

For example, Etchen has an astonishing collection of Mark Flood paintings because he designs Flood's publications and is more-or-less a member of the Flood entourage.


Mark Flood, Kitchen Mirror


Clockwise from the top: Jonny Negron drawing; 2 Geoff Hippensteil paintings; Travis Kent, Fan



Johnny Ryan

I loved Johnny Ryan's tribute to D.J. Screw.


Tim Kerr, Coltrane

John Porcellino, Skunk Cabbage

My next stop was MASS Gallery, a co-op operation that includes studios and a giant exhibition space. They were opening with a group show called Wally, which was apparently about the relationship of art to the wall. Unless you are radically examining this concept as William Anastasi did with Six Sites, it seems like a trivial theme for a show. The ways that the work addressed "walls" were not particularly profound. But it was a group show, and the thing about group shows is that one can usually find a few things to like.


Leah Bailis, Cinderblocks, 2013, cardboard and paint

Something like Cinderblocks by Leah Bailis strikes me as painfully obvious in terms of "walls," but quite appealing in terms of being a piece of sculpture. Because of their cardboard structure, they have the feeling of cartoon cinderblocks--the kind that Popeye could bust through easily.


Lee Piechocki, I Have a Lot of Faith in This Model, 2013, plexiglass, wood, sculpy, paint, paper, vinyl, found objects on shelf

As someone whose job revolves around making computer models of real things, I liked I Have a Lot of Faith in This Model by Lee Piechocki. The models I make are generally opaque to the people I make them for, and a lot of what I do is convince them that I believe in the model and that they should as well. This mysterious grouping of objects is also asking us to take it on faith that it works. And I do.


Yashua Klos, Totem, 2011, woodblock prints collaged onto archival paper

And I thought Yashua Klos's Totem was simply beautiful.


Kansas City Plein Air Coterie (KC PAC) Open Session 

After checking out the show, I went out into the vast concrete "courtyard" where several people were set up painting. This was an activity open to all but led by the Kansas City Plein Air Coterie (KC PAC) with artist Lee Piechocki.

Then off to Co-Lab, which was having an exhibit and performance by Brooke Gassiot called The Stories Our Neurons Tell. It consisted of several sculptural objects, some incorporating video elements.

 
piece by Brooke Gassiot.

This one, whose title I didn't catch, was quite powerful. At first, you saw a large circular structure supporting a curtain that was about 7 or 8 feet high. You had to walk into the corner of the gallery space behind the structure to find a gap in the curtain. When you did, you saw the bathtub with a video projection in it above. I couldn't tell if the woman in the tub was crying or exhausted, but it's a strong image. And the way it provides a glow within the otherwise dimply-lit scene made it stronger. A projected image like this is a ghostly image--I didn't feel like it was meant to portray something existing now but rather the memory of something, possibly something very bad. Something that makes a woman cry in her bathtub.


scar piece by Brooke Gassiot

And memory is continued in this piece. You can't really see them in this photo, but the lightbox there is covered with little drawings. Gassiot was drawing these in the next room. People would sit down and show Gassiot a scar, which she would draw. As she drew, her subject told the story of that scar to her. Mine was a scar on my right palm, acquired in the late 80s on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, stitched up in an emergency room in Houma, Louisiana. Then using needle and thread, she sewed up the drawing of your scar with the same number of stitches you actually got. Then you took the drawing and added it to the pile. It was a very personal experience between you and the artist. (And the artist got to hear a bunch of great stories, so she got something out of it as well.)

My favorite show was at Tiny Park, my last stop on my Frame Tour.  It was a show by Joel Ross and Jason Creps. Their work consists mainly of signs that they have made and left someplace. This is Ross's part of the process. The residue of the work are photos of the signs in situ (taken by Creps, who is also a commercial photographer. He did the cover photo for Neko Case's album Middle Cyclone.)


Joel Ross and Jacob Creps, IN THE FUTURE (Installed and abandoned, Bradley, IL), 2012, archival pigment print, 42 x 55 inches

In addition to the photographs, the show consists of signs and word pieces. Their power is somewhat diminished being in a gallery setting (instead of just being out in public), but Ross makes up for that by being so amusing and clever.


Joel Ross, #UC!&+%, 2012, vinyl and acrylic paint on pine, dimensions variable


Joel Ross, #UC!&+%, 2012, vinyl and acrylic paint on pine, dimensions variable


 Joel Ross, It Was a Bad Idea, 2010, flashe and graphite on paper, 60 x 30 inches

Still, the problem with these in the gallery setting is that they seem like clever one-liners of a sort. It's only out in the world that these things gain power. So Ross did an installation. He did it at the studio of OK Mountain over on Cesar Chavez, so he wasn't strictly removing it from an institutional setting. Nonetheless, it must have given people whiplash as they drove by it at night.


Joel Ross, TORTURE SOUNDS INCREDIBLE, 2006, electronic LED sign, 57 x 84 x 7 inches

All in all, I thought Frame was a success. But it would be even better if there were a bunch of galleries at Canopy. Frame is trying to force a beneficial clustering effect, and that may work, but it needs to get bigger and more dense in the long run.

Young Lions and New Character Parade

 Robert Boyd

 
Blaise Larmee, Young Lions cover, 2010

I know little about Blaise Larmee--he has left a trail of writings on the internet containing his thoughts about art. His name sounds kind of fake. Blaise (as in Blaise Pascal, author of Pensées --"Thoughts"?) Larmee (as in "l'Armée"--"The army")... Maybe it's a pseudonym, maybe not. As a thinker, well, he comes across like an undergraduate or recent graduate who is just discovering a bunch of new criticism and theory. He seems excited to be able to put together these new things he's read with his own ideas. His writing feels shallow, even callow, sometimes. His primary venue, Co-Mix, is relatively forgiving and nurturing--contentious, but contentious within a narrow range of argument. When he ventures outside of Co-Mix, as in his piece for The Comics Journal entitled "Trophy Economy," he gets shredded. But it's admirable what he's doing. He's working out a personal philosophy in public. Why he is willing to do this, I don't know. Maybe he is an exhibitionist. But one hopes the feedback he gets and arguments he encounters will help to both sharpen and broaden his thinking over time.

I see Young Lions the same way. It reads very precious, very self-centered. Its characters don't exist in the world. Indeed, the way Larmee draws them, they look like children. However, they are adults. Cody Campbell is a boy with rosy cheeks (is that supposed to be theatrical makeup, or a comics shorthand for actual rosy cheeks?). Alice is a dark-haired girl who is apparently used to a life of privilege. Wilson, slightly older, balding with glasses, the only one who doesn't appear to be a child, is the leader of this performance art trio. Their act is not successful until they meet Holly, who faints during one of their performances, giving it a level of excitement that they had not previously had. Holly, with long blond hair, is another child-person.



Blaise Larmee, Young Lions p. 16, 2010

Now everything I've told you so far implies a fairly complex back-story. Who are these characters? How did they meet? Why have they started a performance group, and what are their goals? How do they live? Do they have day jobs? Trust funds? None of this is revealed or even hinted at in the story. Only Alice's contemptuous attitude towards being poor or living in a rural place imply a personal history.



Blaise Larmee, Young Lions p. 48, 2010

I have a 19th century need to know this information. Stories can feel a little airy if they don't at least hint at the context the characters inhabit. But it would be churlish to demand it--fiction in the 20th century has proven that such context is not required. But in the case of Young Lions, it might have helped out. As it stands, the only motivation they show is a desire to improve their act by adding Holly. (Cody also seems attracted to Holly, but not very strongly.) They don't seem bored or affectless, but they likewise don't appear to be moving in any particular direction. We don't even really know what their performance consists of--only that Holly fainting (which wasn't a performance at all) seemed to have improved it quite a bit.



Blaise Larmee, Young Lions p. 50, 2010

Larmee seems completely aware of all this. When they travel to a real place--Holly's childhood home in Florida--Alice expresses that she would like it better mediated through the experience of seeing it in a museum, decontextualized. (This issue is also a key part of Motel Art Improvement Service). The fact that they are drawn as children seems to remind us that they have no past, no experiences.

But so what? In the end, I just don't particularly care about these characters. That would be acceptable if there was something else to hang onto here. But there is not. The whole book, drawn in light pencil, seems ready to blow away with the slightest breeze. This is like a lot of Larmee's writings as well. His work, in all media, is tentative. And yet, he is putting it out there into the world. He spent a lot of money (admittedly a Xeric grant) to publish this book. Let's put it this way--if I feel tentative about something, I usually keep it inside. Whether through bravery or exhibitionism, Larmee is going to grow his art in public. I think it's worth following to see where it goes.



Johnny Ryan, New Character Parade cover, 2010

In some ways, Johnny Ryan is the opposite of Blaise Larmee. He's earthy to Larmee's ethereal, he is unreflective and Larmee is constantly thinking about theory. But at the same time, neither artist is concerned with "realism". Neither one learned from Harvey Pekar.

In New Character Parade, Ryan creates a new character for every page. It comes off as sort of a game--what shocking or disgusting nonsequitur can he come up with. Many of his new characters are existing characters with some twist added: H&R Cockblock, Sherlock Homeless, Rasputin on a Dirt Bike, Judge Judy Dredd, Lesbian Spock, etc. Most are extremely crude, sexual, scatalogical, etc. Always drawn in his manic, relentlessly happy cartooning style, which takes the edge off.



Johnny Ryan, New Character Parade "White Power Sluggo", 2008-10

Some of them take an obvious association (doesn't Sluggo look like a skinhead? doesn't Nancy's hair look like an afro?) and runs with it.

These are occasionally very funny, but reading a hundred or so at once is a bit tiring. New Character Parade is best in small doses.

Comics at the Temporary Space

 Robert Boyd

The Temporary Space was Keijiro Suzuki's baby, and now that he is leaving town (having graduated, his student visa is running out), I don't know what will happen with it or whether it will continue. Even if it does continue, it will be an inherently different project than it was in the past. So much of what has been displayed there so far has depended on Suzuki's particular curatorial vision, and that will necessarily change. Art spaces in Houston (and everywhere) are always in flux, so I won't count it as a tragedy if the Temporary Space closes down, relegated to art history... Something else will probably pop up in its place (after all, the Joanna recently expanded and has been showing larger, more ambitious shows).

The last show under Suzuki's directorship is Unheralded Media from a Pop-culture monologue, a group show by four cartoonists, Ted Closson, Mark Nasso and Brian and Stevie McCord. What interested me most about the show was the installation concepts on display. Art exhibits of comics require creative thinking. Most comic art consists of black ink drawings on uniform-sized pieces of white board. So if you just frame the pieces and hang them, you get something that might be visually monotonous, and also get something that doesn't pop out from the wall (if the wall is also white).

So the obvious solutions are to paint the wall some non-white color or to frame or mat the pages in some contrasting color. Nasso and the McCords opted for the latter approach. But because they were all in one gallery, they each had a distinct framing concept that made it obvious from a distance where one artist's work ended and the next began.




Nasso's pages were matted with a dark brown mat. It gives the work a kind of antique feel that is appropriate for the fantasy subject matter.



Mark Nasso, Land of the Rats #1, comic book

Nasso's comic, Land of the Rats, isn't exactly to my taste. To describe it briefly, imagine a more serious, less pornographic version of Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit. But judge for yourself. You can get a copy at Nasso's website, The Underground Forest. The point is that the display was appropriate for the art, and distinct from the other artists in the gallery.

The McCords are a husband and wife team who are best known as performance artists. (One of their pieces involved having sex inside a white "fuck box.") Their exhibition concept here involved mounting the pages on thin sheet metal.




Like Nasso's brown matting, the grey sheetmetal helped the pages pop off the wall. They also had a cool concept for displaying copies of their comic, Spectacula, for sale.




This gets to another point about art exhibits of comics--the end-product for a comics artist is usually a printed object. So if a comic is in an art gallery (whether commercial or non-commercial), it makes sense to also include the printed comics. But galleries aren't bookstores--they don't have racks set up for selling comics and graphic novels. So specific, temporary racks of some kind need to be set up, which was done at The Temporary Space.



Brian & Stevie McCord, Spectacula, comic book

The McCord's comic was a somewhat incoherent story of a cat's quest for a job--first as a driver, then as a DJ. It's wordless and the story is a bit difficult to follow. The drawing is busy and pretty crude, which doesn't help in terms of story-telling clarity. But the result is vigorous, and they carried over their sheet-metal theme to the binding of the comic. It is bound with a folded piece of thin sheet metal, held together with three tiny nuts and bolts.

Closson had the most difficult display issues and the most interesting display. I've written about his work before. When it comes to displaying his work in an art gallery, he has one big problem--there are no physical originals. Even though his scratchy line-work looks totally hand-made, he actually produces it on a computer. So what do you display in this case? Closson's perfectly post-modern solution was to show process.




Like other cartoonists, Closson actually makes clay models of his characters. One of the most common but most overlooked aspects of comics is that an artist draws the same characters over and over. Clay figurines or busts allow the artist to draw this or that character from different angles, while maintaining a consistent visual appearance. Closson displayed some of his clay busts here.




He also showed script pages and printed-out art. Basically, a close observer would get a pretty good idea of how the finished product came to be through all this stuff.

Closson, too, came up with a visually interesting way to temporarily display his minicomics for sale.




The comic on sale was Never Worn (the title comes from the famous six-word short story by Ernest Hemingway: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn").



Ted Closson, Never Worn, comic

The story is an exceptionally economical telling of a story that resembles the first half of A.I. I won't say more lest I spoil it.You can see more Closson work here.

Finally, a back gallery had a slide show running of art from the show. It seemed pretty superfluous, but also was kind of cool the way they did it.



If this really is the last Temporary Space show, it's a good way to go. And I think it will be instructive for other Houston curators who want to show comic art.