Books I Got in Brooklyn--The End!

Robert Boyd

If you've followed along this far, you're probably wondering, when the hell is Robert going to be freaking done talking about the books he got at the Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Festival? Well, good news--this post is it! The last one until the next Festival. (If you are new to the party, you can catch up by reading this post and this post and this post and this post and this post and this post and this post and this post and this post and this post.) The last two books I will be reviewing are not comics. But The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen is about a comics artist, at least, even if comics art is not what Denis Kitchen is best known for.



Denis Kitchen, The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen cover, 2010

Kitchen started off his career as an underground cartoonist and underground newspaper designer/editor/illustrator in the late 60s. Initially he was self-publishing, but like other reasonably-successful self-publishers, he quickly attracted others to his orbit and went from being a self-publisher to being a publisher of other people's work. His publishing company was called Kitchen Sink Press. I think you will find that in the history of publishing, becoming a publisher is the death knell for one's own creative work. It's too hard to successfully wear both hats--artist and impresario. So even though Kitchen had a highly enjoyable drawing style, as time went on he drew less and less.

At one point in the mid-90s (I think), comics writer Alan Moore suggested in print that Kitchen's art was actually really good and should be collected into a book. He even came up with the title. But Kitchen had been a publisher for so long that I think he felt something like this would be a vanity project. He always thought other people's work was better than his own. (In addition to being a publisher, he was and still is also an avid art collector.) But after a series of setbacks and bad publishing bets, Kitchen Sink Press folded in 1999 (after a 30 year run, which is well on the high side of the median life-span for small press publishers). He remained involved in publishing, working as an artists' agent and book packager. And finally Dark Horse Comics has published a book of his art. And it's kind of a revelation.



Denis Kitchen, The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen p. 157, "Fox River Patriot" cover, 1977

Kitchen was my employer for several years, but even I was surprised by most of this stuff. I knew he had been on the staff of an underground paper (the Milwaukee Bugle-American) but I didn't realize that it lasted eight years before folding in 1978. Kitchen also worked on a rural alternative paper, The Fox River Patriot, all while running Kitchen Sink Press. The covers and illustrations for these two papers make up a good portion of the book, and they are really great. Kitchen's drawing was whimsical and light-hearted--rather out-of-step with his underground comics peers (I'd put him closest to Willy Murphy and Kim Deitch, two other underground iconoclasts).

The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen is a treasure trove.  Not only is it full of excellent art (Kitchen seems to have saved everything), the biographical essay by Charles Brownstein was full of hilarious details about Kitchen's life that I didn't know. (Not only was he a member of the Socialist Labor Party in the late '60s, he was by far the youngest member.) It is also well-annotated and beautifully designed. A long overdue book! Now maybe Kitchen will get back to the drawing board and start on volume two.


Shary Boyle is a Canadian artist. I'm not sure if she has ever done any comics, but she does seem to have links to the artier suburbs of that world--she has exhibited at Fumetto, the very artsy comics festival in Lucerne, and in her book, Witness My Shame: Bookworks and Drawings she thanks Megan Kelso. her drawings have a comics feel to them. That said, they are drawings. They don't have word balloons or stories really. Most of the work in this book was originally published in artists books.



Shary Boyle, Witness My Shame cover, 2004

The thing about these drawings is that they are both funny and uncomfortable. I should qualify that. Uncomfortable if you're a guy. The first artists' book recreated, also called "Winess My Shame," is a series of clumsy pencil drawings of girls screwing up in public--some of the situations pretty fanciful, some all too real (a girl running away from a friend's house crying after having wet her pants).



Shary Boyle, Witness My Shame p. 58, from "Schoolgirl Bullies", 1999

"Schoolgirl Bullies" feels pretty real, too, and there is something uncomfortable about seeing these evil faces on little girls. I'm scared of these girls. (Unlike many of my friends in both the art world and the comics world, I was never a victim of bullies as a kid--I was too big and strong for them to mess with, and I was an athlete. But if I had been 25 or 30 pounds lighter...)



Shary Boyle, Witness My Shame p. 111, from "Horny", 2000

The drawings from "Horny" are hilarious, but again I have unease. Should I be looking at this stuff? Well, yeah. But only because it's awesome.

Boyle's current work seems to be mostly ceramic--really kitschy looking pieces made of slip (I think). They remind me a little of Bari Ziperstein's work. They look fantastic--I'd love to see them live and in person.

Comics I Got in Brooklyn, part 6

Robert Boyd


 Chris Day, Second Contact cover, 2009

I got two books of a series by Chis Day.  Missing the first book, Marginal Ecstasy, and the third, Moribund '74, one might get a bit lost trying to make sense of them. But these aren't designed for making sense--they are yet more of those fuzzy-area publications. Is they comics or artist's books or both? Second Contact has an introduction that implies that it is a comic in the sense that it appears to be part of a story. The introduction reads:

This book contains images of, from, pertaining to the statue realm. A half reality. Our reality was burned. Few arrived here. In this realm things may change in an instant or never at all. What is flesh may soon be stone.

But the pages that follow don't tell any kind of comprehensible story. Instead, you get images like this:



 Chris Day, Second Contact page 8, 2009



Chris Day, Calf: Scenes From a Marginal Reality cover, 2010

This is the fourth book of the series. Both of the ones I picked up featured silkscreened covers on colored cardstock with photocopied b&w interiors. You can't quite see it in the scanned versions, but Day has carefully chosen a red carstock and a blue silkscreen ink that are almost the same value, which gives it a psychedelic, vibratory look.



Chris Day, Calf: Scenes From a Marginal Reality p. 12, 2010

Some of Day's imagery, like this one, reminds me a lot of Houston poster artist Give Up. The dark imagery and the high-contrast drawings/photos recall Give Up's posters. It has kind of a heavy metal vibe to it.



Lisa Hanawalt, I Want You #2 cover, 2010

Lisa Hanawalt is one of the most interesting artists that I discovered at this show. She's someone whose name I had read but just never read until now. I'm glad I did. Her art and comics combine absurdity, surrealism, disgust, and humor. A lot of her pieces remind me of classic 70s National Lampoon in the way that they combine a kind of gnarly obsession with bodily functions (and with bodies in general) with a dry, absurdist tone.



Lisa Hanawalt, I Want You "How to Flatter a Person" page 3, 2010

The fact that these pieces often feature numbered lists also recalls the Lampoon. This is a kind of humor that I don't see too much in comics today because cartoonists are often stuck on the idea of presenting a narrative. But formally, there is no reason that a comic can't be a list of things. Lists are especially good for humor, and they are also really good for magazines (where you have multiple short features). And that is what Hanawalt is doing with I Want You. It can be described as a one-artist anthology, but I think a better way to think of it would be a one-artist magazine. It's what Dan Clowes used to do with Eightball (and he even included lists, like "I Hate You Deeply"). Pete Bagge's Neat Stuff was structured this way, as well.



Lisa Hanawalt, I Want You "Extra Egg Room" page 4, 2010

But all her pieces are not straightforward humor pieces. Occasionally she dives right into out-and-out surrealism as in "Extra Egg Room." These bizarre stories (usually starring either He-Horse or She-Moose) also have their own absurd humor, but the real charge is the completely strange drawings.



Adam Higton, Yule Bringer cover, 2010

Adam Higton's booklet Yule Bringer is not a comic but a series of drawings. A bunch of jolly, cartoony figures inhabiting a dense dark woodland, they remind me a bit of Moomin. Moomin combined with prog rock. I found some photos of Higton online, and he looks perfect.



Adam Higton, Yule Bringer pages 13-14, 2010

His drawings are lovely and magical and fun, perfect for a cold winter's night, listening to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn or Jethro Tull on the headphones.



Tin Can Forest, Baba Yaga and the Wolf cover, 2010

The team of Tin Can Forest (Marek Colek and Pat Shewchuk) produced Baba Yaga and the Wolf, which is absolutely one of the most beautiful things I saw at the Brooklyn Festival. Based on Slavic folklore, it has a story of sorts about a man who beheads his brother and exchanges bodies in order to wed the girl he desires. However, he didn't realize that his brother was a werewolf. When he falls ill from guilt, his wife seeks Baba Yaga, the legendary witch, to cure him. Telling the story this way makes it seem much more straightforward than it actually is. It is being told to a young girl by her great-grandmother. The narration, however, is likely to come out of anyone's mouth (as indicated by the word balloons).



Tin Can Forest, Baba Yaga and the Wolf page 5, 2010



Tin Can Forest, Baba Yaga and the Wolf page 12, 2010

For example, the word balloon here is still the great grandmother speaking, even though it seems to be spoken by this utterly irrelevant demon sitting by a camp fire. These little dislocations add to a fantastic, magical quality. It seems that after a long period of realism as an ideal for alternative comics, we're seeing a return of fantasy--with a particular emphasis on folklore and fairy tales. (I wonder if cartoonists are influenced at all by Kiki Smith in this regard?)

Appropriately, I end my reviews of the comics in my Koyama bag with a great one from Koyama. But I still have some graphic novels from the festival to review, so stay tuned.

Comics I Got in Brooklyn, part 4

Robert Boyd

If you're reading this, then you probably have read my other three reviews of comics and other items published at the Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Festival. A note on method: I'm not choosing comics to review that go together thematically or that make interesting contrasts. I have most of the comics I bought in a red canvas bag given to me by Koyama Press. So I have been reaching into the bag and pulling out four or five items at random to review. The stuff in the bag tends to be smaller, thinner items--comic books, minicomics, pamphlets, etc. I also bought several graphic novels which, being larger and heavier, are stacked separately. I'll review them once I'm done with the contents of the Koyama bag. But I wanted to mention the Koyama bag because it gives me an excuse to mention Koyama Press, which is exemplary of one aspect of what this festival is about: the fuzzing of the line between the art world and the comics world. This is how Koyama Press describes itself: "In addition to publishing books, Koyama Press has financed such diverse projects as zines, comics, artist designed t-shirts, installations, photo montage work, print folios, letterpress cards and more." And if you look at their catalog, you will find--in addition to comics--a lot of books that look much more like art books (or artists' books) than comics. Koyama Press does not come off as a comics publisher or even as a comics publisher that dabbles in art books on the side. It's an art publisher that includes comics proudly in its mix. This is something I will return to later in this review.



Gabrielle Bell, All My Dreams Come True cover, 2010

This minicomic (published by Lightful Press) by Gabrielle Bell is formatted with one panel per page. So although the story is 62 pages long, it is not terribly complex or involved. This is not to say it is uneventful. The protagonist, after an encounter on a train that leaves her with a strange man's briefcase, is flung into a series of dangerous situations in various locales. It seems to be taking place in the 30s or 40s, but it's vague. The lack of solid grounding and logic make it seem like a transcribed dream, but it is not fantastic like a dream. Motifs repeat as the scenes subtly change. I was reminded a bit of Donald Barthelme stories like "A Picture History of the War." A traditional story has anchors holding it fast to the "real world"; even a science fiction story attempts to do this, usually with a lot of exposition to explain why it could be real. Fantasy stories are praised for internal consistency, which means while they might not be anchored to the reaf world, at least they make sense on their own terms. This story (like many of Donald Barthelme's), dispenses with those anchors. It's unsettling.



Gabrielle Bell, All My Dreams Come True pp. 31-32, 2010

Update: Commenter Volsticks mentions that this story was in Kramers Ergot #7. I had completely forgotten that. The format was completely different, of course. Kramers Ergot #7 was the tabloid-sized issue, and Bell's story was presented complete on one page. So, does it change a story to present it in two drastically different ways? The art was identical in each case.



Jason Little, Gimmick Illustrated #1: Vlak chapter 1 cover, 2010

Another quasi-suspense story set partly on a train is Vlak by Jason Little. Little premiered his new graphic novel, Motel Art Improvement Service, at the festival--I will be reviewing it later. But he also had this intriguing comic. It is mostly wordless. A man arrives in an Eastern European city sometime in the early 20th century and loses his top hat. He goes to a hat store and buys a new hat. The store owner stuffs a piece of paper into the brim to help the hat fit better. Later on a train, the man discovers the piece of paper in the hat. He pulls it out, and sees this:


Jason Little, Gimmick Illustrated #1: Vlak chapter 1 p. 30, 2010

He is mortified by this, at least at first.



Jason Little, Gimmick Illustrated #1: Vlak chapter 1 p. 31, 2010

There is not enough here to feel out where the story is going. It has numerous little surreal touches (the steam engine is powered not by coal but by burning books) and hints of an Eric Ambler-like thriller (secret police on the train, etc.) Also, you will notice that in the pornographic photo, the woman is holding a fan. We can see the back of the fan in the mirror behind her, and on the back of the fan is a floorplan of a building--presumably the castle depicted on the front of the fan. So this suggests a spy-thriller. In any case, I am eager to see where this goes.


Madeleine Fairbairn and Robbie Guertin, Epic Love cover, 2009

Robbie Guertin and Madeleine Fairbairn are a couple, and this mini is a series of cartoons about their couple-hood. Each of the two take turns drawing cartoons.The book is consequently pretty episodic. There is no story arc here--we are plunked down in the middle of this relationship and see fairly trivial glimpses of it.



Madeleine Fairbairn and Robbie Guertin, Epic Love pp. 6 & 7, 2009

As you can see, Fairbairn and Guertin have fairly distinct drawing styles. I think Guertin is on the left and Fairbairn is on the right. These two cartoons are typical--the feel of this is casual, a fun little project that a couple can do together. They aren't particularly funny cartoons and the drawing is nothing special. In short, it's OK for a minicomic, but not something they could push much further.



Gary Panter, Jimbo cover, March 24, 2010

Gary Panter is one of the giants of comics, a somewhat polarizing figure (at least in the past) because his work skitters on (and often over) the edge of readablility. There is so much to say about Panter that I don't even want to try. Suffice it to say that he is the embodiment of this fuzzy intersection of the art world and the comics world. And this is not just because he is a painter who shows his work in galleries, but also because while most great alternative cartoonists' work can reasonably be described as literary to an extent, Panter is the one whose work feels least literary and feels most like other contemporary visual art in its approach and concerns.



Gary Panter, Jimbo pp 4 & 5, April 13, 2010 and April 15, 2010

So it's funny to pick up this Jimbo minicomic at this festival. Of all comics shows, this is one where Panter work in its most radical manifestation would be highly welcome. His progeny were present in force. And yet, this is perhaps the most straightforward Panter comic I have ever read. It has a comprehensible story with a beginning, middle and end. The dialogue is straightforward, legible, in commonplace word balloons. The panels are neatly ruled and arranged  in a traditional way. The drawing is crisp and the spaces depicted have a Renaissance perspective logic to them. What's going on here?! I don't know, but this was an amusing minicomic--a trifle--by a master. A minicomic like this is a little like, I dunno, György Ligeti writing a minuet in the key of C, just to remind people that he could if he felt like it.


Joel Spaesmaker, Forest Small Book Series, Book One: La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires, Argentina., 2008

This, at first glance, could be mistaken for a minicomic. The format is minicomic-like. And if you go by Scott McCloud's hyper-formalist definition, it is a minicomic. (For a bunch of reasons, I hold no truck with that definition or any essentialist definition of comics. But many do.) And, more importantly, it was being sold at a comics show. It's in the world of comics. But when you read it, or any of the other books in the series, it's pretty clear that they aren't comics. They are closer to artists' books.



Joel Spaesmaker, Forest Small Book Series, Book Two: Of Great Masses Moving at Visionary Speeds., 2008

What is an artist's book? Here's how Wikipedia defines it:

Artists' books are works of art realized in the form of a book. They are often published in small editions, though sometimes they are produced as one-of-a-kind objects referred to as 'uniques'.

Artists' books have employed a wide range of forms, including scrolls, fold-outs, concertinas or loose items contained in a box as well as bound printed sheet. Artists have been active in printing and book production for centuries, but the artist's book is primarily a late 20th century form.

Maybe the best known artist's books are those by Edward Ruscha. At least, best known to me. These include such little books as Royal Road Test and Various Small Fires and Milk. So artists' books seems pretty close to a lot of the minicomics and other small publications I've been reviewing the last few days, right?



Joel Spaesmaker, Forest Small Book Series, Book Three: Things on Walls, Volume One., 2008

By total coincidence, I have been reading a manuscript of a book by a friend of mine that has a chapter on this very subject--the differences and similarities between comics, artists' books, and children's picture books.  I don't want to quote it or even name the book (it will be published in Fall of 2011 and I think is going to be an important book for anyone thing seriously about comics as art going forward). But what this chapter spoke of was how despite very real similarities between certain artists' books and certain comics, they were still viewed institutionally as distinct classes. It's the word "institutional" that is key here. A store specializing in artists' books like Printed Matter is pretty obviously not a comic book store. Even if you search the word for comics, you end up with entries that describe a book as "being told in comics format." They actually have to explain to their customers that a comic is a comic.

But comics--particularly "minicomics" in the sense of handmade comics--are very similar to artist's books, and I think we are seeing comics that cross the boundary, that inhabit both worlds. Just like we are seeing artists that inhabit both worlds. And that's why after an initial feeling of surprise, seeing this set of artist's books at the Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Show felt OK.



Joel Spaesmaker, Forest Small Book Series, Book Four: Lessons Learned, Volume One., 2008

I like Joel Spaesmaker's Small Books.  They deal with his fascinations and document his life in an interesting, elliptical way. I initially picked up the set because of Book One. I once spent two days wandering around in this cemetery, La Recoleta, looking at the amazing mausoleums of Buenos Aires' elite. I was looking for Borges' grave (he is buried in Switzerland, apparently--but the internet wasn't around when I made my fruitless search). I thought it was cool that Spaesmaker had been there and recorded his trip in this 'zine. Looking back, I think it is perfect that books like this were mixed in at a comics show. Comics shows almost always include some non-comics stuff. That stuff, though, is usually stuff aimed at genre fans--movie merchandise, toys, etc. Because the Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Festival deliberately positions itself as an art comics show, it is only appropriate that the extra stuff in this show come more from the art world than from the genre entertainment world.



Joel Spaesmaker, Forest Small Book Series, Book Five, We Are Children of the Earth & Sun., 2008

Many more reviews to come. I have a little time off, so I should be able to write them all before the beginning of next year. And of course, you can read the earlier Brooklyn posts at part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Poems & Pictures at the Museum of Printing History

Poems & Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book (1946-1981) at the Museum of Printing History is probably the best exhibit you have never heard of going on right now. The Museum of Printing History is a low key (but wonderful) institution--indeed, unless you are specifically looking for it, you are very unlikely to stumble across it accidentally. Make an effort to find it for this show, though.

I made that effort on Friday for the opening. When I showed up, there were so few cars in the parking lot and so few people inside that I thought I had missed the opening. But no, here it was.



This is what the exhibit consists of--lots of cabinets displaying magazines and books. These are books that were the result of collaborations between artists and poets (and poet/artists). They range from quite elaborate productions--"printing orgies" (as someone once described Raw)--to mimeographed 'zines. Generally speaking, the curator has chosen work where the poet and artist worked in collaboration, although there are some cases where the poem preceded the art. Obviously this made me think of comics, but very few of these items are comics or even comics-like. Still, many feature an interweaving of text and image to a degree that recalls comics.

A lot of these pieces are printed with letterpress. If you come across letterpress printing today, it's likely to be on a wedding invitation. In the art/poetry/small press world, it is a sign of quality, a kind of old-fashioned hand-made printing job one occasionally sees in chapbooks or small press poetry books. And a lot of the books and magazines in this exhibit are printed on letterpress. But as one of the publishers included, poet Tom Raworth, was quoted in the catalog, "I mean, letterpress wasn't particular and arty, particularly in those days, it was just another way of printing." Raworth was speaking of the 1960s, and the impression one gets from the catalog was that there were a lot of old letterpresses around--some over a hundred years old--that one could pick up cheap in junk shops. So while there is an art to letterpress (and certainly a skill), these publishers were using it for much the same reason that 'zinesters of the 80s and 90s used photocopiers, and why I write a blog on Blogger--it's an economical way to communicate with a small number of like-minded individuals.

So you see in this exhibit extreme rarities like Wallace Berman's Semina 2.


Wallace Berman, Semina 2, letterpress handmade magazine

Berman was one of the Ferus artists. In his one and only Ferus show, an illustration he had drawn for Semina was declared obscene by the ultra-reactionary L.A. police. This experienced soured him on working with commercial galleries for life, and also made him very wary of printing up loads of copies of Semina. He only printed enough to give to sympathetic souls. He didn't want a bookstore or art gallery to be busted because of his work ever again. And having loads of people see it was not important to Berman. He was one of those people who is very rare today--an artist who cares not a jot for fame or success or even praise. He was a shamanic character, and only needed to communicate with a select few who were on his wavelength.

This indifference to large print-runs and fame is something pretty common among the poet/artist/publishers here. Not necessarily because they were all like Berman--but they chose a life of poetry and of working in a small-press environment. It is inherently a life and medium for a select few. So if the work was produced on something like a mimeograph, that was OK.

I think when comics fans think about the evolution of minicomics, the small-print-run art-comics that are almost always handmade items, we think about 'zines. And 'zines have a well-established history. But when I think of some of the elaborate comics produced by Fort Thunder and other art-comics publishers, and when I think about their approach to comics as an art, it feels a lot closer to Wallace Berman and Joe Brainard and the teams of Alastair Johnson and Frances Butler or Bill Berkson and Philip Guston than to any zinester.

Of course, Brainard was really into comics, and he roped his friends--basically a bunch of poets who came to New York from Tulsa, OK (weirdly enough)--into doing comics with him. Brainard's big obsession was Nancy (see The Nancy Book for the results of his obsession). His friends played along.


Ron Padgett, Nonsense appropriation of Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller

Brainard published two full-on comics, with contributions from John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, and others.


Joe Brainard, page from C Comics #2, mimeograph, 1966


Joe Brainard, page from C Comics #2, mimeograph, 1966

There are several avant garde experiments with comics that were published in the 60s and 70s, far outside the mainstream of comics (and even outside the world of underground comics). Martin Vaughn-James, Jess (whose illustration work is represented in this show), and Brainard of course. Probably others as well. I really wish some publisher with an eye towards the art history of comics would bring these back into print.

This all barely touches on the riches here. I plan to revisit the show and soak it in some more. It's a little much to absorb in one trip. The curator, Kyle Schlesinger, has a highly personal take on all this. He is one of those poet/publishers. His small press is called Cuneiform Press--indeed, he has one of those 100+ year old letterpresses. (But perhaps the oddest thing about him is that he is a professor at the University of Houston-Victoria. You never know what kind of talent is hiding away in our more obscure universities and colleges.)