Robert Boyd's Book Report: My Boy

 Robert Boyd

Today I looked at My Boy by Olivier Schrauwen. I've written about Schrauwen before, but not that much. Here is a good video interview with Schrauwen, talking about a 2014 graphic novel, Arsène Schrauwen. Other works mentioned were 29,000 years of bad luck, 30,000 years of bad luck, and Portrait of a Drunk.

What People Thought Were the Best Comics in 2020

Robert Boyd

Everyone has been producing their lists of the best of the year. I'm not going to try to build a meta-list this year (like I did last year for the best comics of the decade). But I do want to mention two lists that I respect: "SOLRAD’s The Best* Comics of 2020" and the Comics Journal's "The Best Comics Of 2020." I find it alarming how few of these books and comics that I know. It's startling confirmation of how old I am (and a less-painful confirmation than my morning back pains). 

In both lists, the editors have asked their regular writers to give them their best of 2020. So instead of one list, SOLRAD had 16 contributors make lists, and the Comics Journal had 15. SOLRAD asked contributors for their top 5 and the Comics Journal didn't seem to specify how many they wanted from each contributor, so the number varied. And at least one contributor, Francesca Lyn for SOLRAD, took "best of 2020" to mean the best comics she read, regardless of when they were created. I appreciate this because for me, any book that I read for the first time is new to me, even if I read it years after it was created.

I can't comment on comic I didn't read, except to say that these list make me want to go back and search out many books I missed. Below are the books on these lists that I did read.

Yoshiharu Tsuge, The Man Without Talent. (This one was chosen by Michael Aushenker, Robert Clough, Alex Hoffman and Nicholas Burman for SOLRAD and Austin Price and Matt Seneca for the Comics Journal.) I wrote about this book when it came out. A book that moved me in its depiction of depression.

O. Schrauwen and Ruppert & Mulot, Portrait of a Drunk. (Chosen by Jef Harmatz for SOLRAD and Helen Chazan, Joe McCulloch, Brian Nicholson and Matt Seneca for the Comics Journal) This grim story of a terrible alcoholic sailor named Guy set in the 17th or 18th century was a portrait of unrelieved misery, kind of an Under the Volcano in comics form. I like both Schrauwen and the team of Ruppert and Mulot, and they blended their work seamlessly here. A great book.

Werewolf Jones is frequently erect in Crisis Zone

Simon Hanselmann, Crisis Zone. (Chosen by Rob Clough and Alex Hoffman for SOLRAD and Clark Burscough and RJ Casey for the Comics Journal). This demented strip was drawn and posted on Instagram daily by Hanselmann. It was a COVID project. His usual characters star in it--it involves Megg, Mogg and Owl in a series of COVID-isolation adventures, and includes BLM riots and a Netflix reality show starring Werewolf Jones called "Anus King." Whatever extreme limits you can imagine, this comic shattered them. Johnny Ryan may have seemed like the taboo-breaking heir of the undergrounds, but I give that crown to Simon Hanselmann. 

Gabrielle Bell, Inappropriate (Chosen by Francesca Lyn for SOLRAD ). I love Gabrielle Bell's work, and I loved Inappropriate, but it doesn't come close to being my favorite of her works. Any Bell is worth reading, though. Inappropriate consists of short, somewhat surreal stories, which feel similar to where she started early in her cartooning career.

Derf Backderf, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio (Chosen by my old friend Charles Hatfield for SOLRAD and Rob Kirby for the Comics Journal). Backderf had the bad luck to publish a major work of non-fiction comics in the middle of the pandemic. I did one of my first book reports on it.

Adrian Tomine, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (Chosen by James Romberger for SOLRAD and Hillary Brown and Rob Kirby for the Comics Journal) I've followed and written about Adrian Tomine since he was a teenager doing minicomics. This book is unique among all the comics here because I'm actually mentioned in the text. Tomine mentions an early review I did, I think for the Comics Journal. It's an autobiographical comic and in common with many of my favorites this year, the protagonist is thoroughly unlikable (a bold move for autobiography!). Tomine is really good when he allows himself to be funny, and this book is very funny.

John Pham, J&K  (Chosen by Nicholas Burman for SOLRAD and Matt Seneca for the Comics Journal). I read this book this year and loved it. It depicts the somewhat surreal adventures of friends J & K and comes with oddball extra goodies--trading cards, a mini-magazine, and weirdest of all, a 5-inch 45 rpm record. It was published in 2019, but I didn't read it until January of this year.

panel from "Giving Thanks in 2020" by Eleanor Davis
 

“Giving Thanks in 2020”, Eleanor Davis (Chosen by Hillary Brown for the Comics Journal). This strip was published online by The New York Times on Thanksgiving. Brown wrote, "It’s not really fair to keep asking Eleanor Davis to turn herself inside out for our pleasure..." I'm not qualified to call Eleanor David the greatest living American cartoonist, but she's my personal favorite at the moment.

 panel by Emily Flake from the Nib

The Nib. (Chosen by Hillary Brown for the Comics Journal). The Nib publishes new political comics nearly everyday, by excellent cartoonists like Matt Bors, Emily Flake, Pia Guerra, Ruben Bolling, Jen Sorensen and many others. I read it almost every day. 

 Jim Woodring, And Now, Sir?Is THIS Your Missing Gonad?  (Chosen by Helen Chazan for the Comics Journal). This is kind of a minor work by Jim Woodring, which like calling an early piano concerto by Mozart a minor work. It is filled with enigmatic "gag" cartoons that stretch the reader's brain. This reader, anyway.

Paul Ragabliati, Paul at Home  (Chosen by Rob Kirby for the Comics Journal). I did a book report on this great book in December.  Like so many of the books on this list, it features an unpleasant protagonist. And like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Cartoonist, it is autobiographical. 

Yoshiharu Tsuge, The Swamp (Chosen by Matt Seneca and  Tom Shapira for the Comics Journal). This is supposed the first of several volumes of Tsuge's work to be published in English. It's some of his early work, and it many of the stories had the feel of earlier, pulpier stories. They often have obvious twists. But there is much to admire here, including the story "Chirpy." It's not as good as The Man Without Talent, though.

Kim Deitch, Reincarnation Stories (Chosen by Frank Young for the Comics Journal). I loved it, but I love everything by Kim Deitch. A minor Deitch book, but still utterly pleasurable.

Ruben Bolling, Super Fun-Pak Comix Reader (Chosen by Frank Young for the Comics Journal). I loved this collection and did a video about it in November. 

And that's it--everything that was listed on SOLRAD's and the Comics Journal's best of 2020 lists that I had read. The one omission from both lists that surprised me was Grip by Lale Westvind. This book was published in 2020 and certainly qualified. I reported on it here.

Some Minicomics. etc.

Robert Boyd

So I was in New York a couple of weeks ago at Comic Arts Brooklyn, a small festival devoted to art comics. I bought a lot of comics there, among them comics I'd class as minicomics. Minicomics used to be a pretty specific term--it referred to comics produced by folding a sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" paper twice until it was 4 1/4" x 5 1/2". You would trim and staple it and then you had a tiny 8-page pamphlet. So it was a very cheap format for someone to publish their own quickie 8-page comics on a xerox machine.

Of course, artists being artists, this was just the starting point. They played with formats, they added silkscreen covers on cardstock, they published each others' work (moving it from the realm of self-published to small press), they used different printing technologies such as print-on-demand, offset litho, risograph, etc. And, of course, they overlapped with the world of 'zines, so the content wasn't always strictly comics.

Given these caveats, here are a few modern minis.



 Sorry I can't come in on monday i'm really sick (2014) by Jane Mai. This mini was published by an established publisher of high-quality comics, Koyama Press. It seems to consist of diary excerpts from the girl on the cover, along with drawings of her sitting around in her panties depressed. Some of the thoughts are suicidal and self-deprecating. Some are funny, though: "i'll show you mine if you show me yours but also if you give me $1000 and also no". It's the bored thoughts of one person on a somewhat bad day. It works perfectly as a minicomic--you wouldn't want it extended much longer than it is, but for what it is, it feels truthful and revealing.

 

Devil's Slice of Life (2014) by Patrick Crotty. We follow a little devil, Barbatos, as he spends his day playing pranks on humans. This may remind you of many of the activities of the devil in the great Peter Cooke/Dudley Moore movie Bedazzled. In Bedazzled, Peter Cook's Satan character was pranking people to provoke anger, one of the seven deadly sins. In Devil's Slice of Life, Barbatos gets paid for his work. I'd describe it as a cute-brut-style comic--Barbatos (and his victims and fellow devils) are drawn in a deliberately rough style, but it maintains a kind of manga-influenced cuteness. Devil's Slice of Life was printed in three colors on a risograph, which is a popular printing platform for small-press and self-published comics. Crotty is a member of a Dutch artists' studio called Peow Studio. CAB is surprisingly international, which is wonderful.



Lil' Buddies Magazine, issue 1 by Edie Fake. This is a bit of a cheat, because it's not a comic and I didn't get it at CAB. This was by the cash register at Printed Matter, the venerable New York bookstore devoted to artists books, art books, art zines, self-published stuff, etc. Edie Fake is a Chicago cartoonist/performer, but Lil' [sic] Buddies is about found cartoon art--specifically quasi-vernacular anthropomorphized images used in advertising. The examples he and his correspondents have found are excellent.


from Lil' Buddies Magazine, issue 1

These two are not even close to the most insane anthropomorphic cartoon things in Lil' Buddies.



Greys by Olivier Schrauwen (2012). I've reviewed Belgian cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen's work before, so I expected to like this, which I did. The narrative here is much more foregrounded than in his other work that I've seen, but there is a degree of distancing and irony that flickers in and out, making you question what you are reading. Of course I see it as fiction (Schrauwen is relating an alien abduction experience), but the deadpan way of telling the story begs the question of whether Schrauwen is trying to create a convincing tale or if he is playing with the form of abduction stories for ironic purposes? And does it matter?



The spread above depicts the future of humanity as depicted by the aliens. Greys was published by Desert Island Comics, the great Brooklyn art comics store. Check it out the next time you're in Williamsburg.



Wastezoid by David Waterhouse. The loser stoner genre has always seemed very American to me, but the brilliant work of Simon Hanselmann proves that it's an international genre. David Waterhouse, from Brighton, England offers up an amusing English take. Especially fun is "Thorven, Invisible Black Metal Bestfriend," in which an unnamed wastezoid takes relationship advice from an imaginary friend spouting phrases like "Resuscitate my dying breeze into the dreams of tangled living corpses behind sigils made of flesh and trees!!" The drawing is rubbery and fun. It appears to be published by Rad Party.



Blindspot no. 3 by Joseph Remnant (2013). This is another comic published by a comic shop--in this case, Kilgore Books in Denver, Colorado. All the stories here are autobiographical (I think), and Joseph portrays himself as a dyspeptic, depressive individual. The comics are well done, and I can take this kind of story in small doses (33 pages is just about right). The stories are solipsistic--mostly Remnant and his thoughts and reactions to the world. Indeed, the one story where he interacts with friends, "Elevator", turns out to be a dream! But the drawing is beautiful, and Remnant constructs his stories well. I found myself enjoying them a lot despite the somewhat grim and depressing subject matter.



Mothership (2014)  and The In Between (2012, I think) by Esther Pearl Watson. Esther Pearl Watson is an artist who deserves a lot more consideration than a drive-by review of some minicomics. Watson is a painter, a cartoonist and an illustrator. But these two works don't slot easily into any of these categories not least because they are both heavily photographic. Mothership seems to conflate mothers (in general) with flying saucers (apparently, flying saucers have an important part in Watson's personal history, but not how you would think). She collages (I think) fuzzy photos of objects that could be UFOs over fairly generic landscapes, while describing the "soaring sisterhood" of the motherships.



The In Between mixes more straight-forward comics narrative with photos. The "in betweens" are places and situations--for her, it's art school (she went back to school to get a MFA at CalArts in 2010), and for her grandfather, it's  a "healthcare facility". I read this in between place as between his life and his death, but I may have been jumping to an overly bleak conclusion.



Combining paintings, comics and photos, this small color zine seems like a "mini-Gesamtkunstwerk," if such a thing could exist. Art school is on her mind--she compares her grandfather's constrained existence to minimal artwork and artwork dealing with nothingness, blankness and the void. But for herself, the opposite seems true. She is inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's "combines," which really were Gesamtkunstwerks.



You come to realize as you read it that a lot of the paintings and photos you have been seeing are parts of Watson's own combine.



Has she continued to make large scale installations? Or was that just an art school detour, a product of being in an in between place? Both Mothership and The In Between are examples of minicomics that are really on the edge of the category, which has never been well-defined anyway. Their existence makes me feel that the form has continued vitality. She sells them on a site called Funchicken.

Recently Read Graphic Novels

by Robert Boyd

 
The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists by Seth. Seth has been working on Clyde Fans forever. It seems like he got into a need to create something artistically perfect, and perhaps this is a bit overwhelming. So while he has been working on Clyde Fans, he has published three books, each of which involved techniques for curing writers block. The first, Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World, was drawn in his sketchbook--which freed him from having to do "perfect" drawings. It was also done in little self-contained episodes, which freed him from having to have a sense of absolute unity for the work. (Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad squad operates similarly.) George Sprott: 1894-1975 returned to a highly polished drawing but kept the episodic approach--each page was kind of a separate story relating to the life of George Sprott. The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists was also drawn in a sketchbook, but it has a continuous story flow. It imagines that there is a professional society of Canadian Cartoonists that was at one time extremely wealthy due to the huge popularity of comics in Canada throughout the 20th century. Some of the ideas are similar to Dylan Horrocks' graphic novel Hicksville--including that of a great library of all the important works of comics. But at the end of the book, the narrator--Seth himself--explains that the GNBCC was never as wealthy and successful as he has portrayed it here (obviously). It's an extended, lovely fantasia on the idea of comics and comic strips being an art form as respected as visual art or literature--a fantasy of many cartoonists, to be sure.


The Armed Garden and Other Stories by David B. David B. is one of the most important cartoonists in France. A member of L'Association, his most important work is Epileptic, an autobiographical work about growing up with a severely epileptic brother, and his parents' fruitless search for ways to control the condition through both conventional medicine and alternative therapies. But I will confess that I like the stories in The Armed Garden more. These are stories about heretics. Heresy is a subject of particular interest for certain storytellers--for example, Jorge Luis Borges. And interestingly, Borges wrote two stories involving Hakim al-Muquanna, who is the subject of the story of "The Veiled Prophet", one of the three stories here, which describes the origin of al-Muquanna as a prophet and his battles with the Caliph. "The Armed Garden" deals with clashes between two sets of heretics in 15th century Czechoslovakia--on one side, the free-love practicing nudists led by Rohan the Blacksmith, and on the other the Taborites, lead by the bloodthirsty general Jan Žižka. The first panel of this story starts with the words "1415 was not a very good year for Christianity." In such times, heresies are born. These bizarre fable-like tales may seem far from us, but they show want can happen when societies are stressed.


The Man Who Grew His Beard by Olivier Schrauwen. Most of these stories were published in the anthology Mome. I admit that when I read them there, I kind of skimmed them. They seemed like trifles. But in this book collection, the effect is much stronger. The stories are funny, ironic and absurd. In that, he reminds me of his fellow Belgian cartoonists, Kamagurka and Herr Seele. But he also reminds one of the avant garde Belgian cartoonists of Freon (later Fremok). These are more "art comics," where the visual aspect is paramount.



Olivier Schrauwen, The Grotto p. 6, comic page, 2011

This is not to say the narratives are unimportant, mere hangers onto which to hang the art. They are amusing, weird and compelling--the visual aspect makes them all the more so. I think this book was overlooked when it came out--but it deserves to be read.

Love & Rockets #04: Love and Rockets: New Stories by Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez. This book, on the other hand, has gotten tons of recognition. The Hernandez brothers have been producing Love & Rockets comics since 1981, and in 2008 started releasing them as book collections. I have to admit I don't get Gilbert's work anymore--he's gone so deep into his obsessions (old genre movies, ginormous boobs) that it's hard for me to see anything else. Jaime's stories are the ones that people really responded to in this issue. For the past few years, he has been concentrating on his character Maggie, and filling in her life. The previous volume contained a particularly powerful story about her childhood and her brother Calvin. This time around, the Maggie stories are a little more sentimental. (SPOILER ALERT) She finally ends up with Ray Dominguez, a character that has been a part of Maggie's life for decades. Jaime is too oblique a storyteller for this to be a cliche. But still, I think one reason people like it so much is because they have wanted to see these two characters settle down and be happy for so long.


Flesh and Spontaneous Combustion by Skip Williamson. These are self-published Kindle books by the long-time underground cartoonist, Skip Williamson, and they could have used a good copy-editor. But between the whiff of vanity publication and the amateurish editing, they're actually great! Skip Williamson is a funny writer--he writes as if he's telling you a longish shaggy-dog story in a bar, and his use of language (as anyone who has read his comics knows) is interestingly florid. I wish it had been organized a little better, and hadn't been so episodic--there are spaces between the anecdotes he shares that I would like to have heard more about. At the very least, I'd like to see the trajectories of his career, his various relations, his life in Chicago (and why he moved to Atlanta), etc. As it is, we get glimpses of these things. The two books are kind of a  "greatest hits" collection. Readers of Pan will be especially interested in Williamson's adventures in Atlanta's art scene as related in Spontaneous Combustion.

Flesh mostly deals with underground cartoonist Skip Williamson's time as an art director for various naughty magazines, including a long stint as an art director for Playboy. Like Spontaneous Combustion, it's highly readable if scattered. Williamson self-published both books as short Kindle books, but what would have been better would have been a single book in which the essays were sliced up and reassembled into a single, full-length auto-biographical narrative. In short, these books would have benefited from having an editor. As it is, they are quite entertaining if sometimes a little confusing as far as chronology goes.