True Artist Tales Talk

by Robert Boyd

On November 20, I gave a lecture on Scott Gilbert with PowerPoint slides at Zinefest. I'm curating an exhibit of art by Scott Gilbert at the Galveston Artist Residency, which opens November 26. Below are the slides and the text of my talk.



True Artist Tales was a comic strip that was drawn by Houston artist Scott Gilbert between 1988 and 2000.



Scott Gilbert was born in 1961. He grew up in Tampa, Florida, where he was into comics, science fiction fandom, and heavy metal music. Gilbert and his friends published a science fiction fanzine in high school.

He told me, “Art, fine art or anything hadn’t really entered the picture. I had all these pretensions, though. The 'truth' was out there beyond. There was always something beyond what was really apparent to me. What was right in front of me, like the comics were right in front of me. Heavy metal music was right in front of me. And TV and movies. “

Gilbert moved to San Antonio, studied art there in college at UTSA for a couple of years but moved back to Tampa after his parents split up. He finished his undergrad art education at University of South Florida

In college his tastes expanded to include fine art and punk rock. He still had the idea of being a mainstream comics penciler then—working for Marvel or DC. But then he saw RAW magazine and the explosion of independent comics in the early 80s. They showed him that there were other possibilities for comics as art.



He heard about Lawndale (where the UH art department was at the time, in an old warehouse on Lawndale St. ). His father was living in Houston then, so he applied to UH for his MFA. He didn’t get in at first—they made him take a year of classes for a baccalaureate. It was a way for UH to feel him out as a potential MFA student. But ultimately he made it into the program.

 

True Artist Tales started as an independent project Scott did for his MFA. His professor was Derek Boshier, the well-known British pop artist (he was David Hockney’s roommate in art school).

“You could take two independent study courses. You get a faculty member who agrees to guide you through a particular course of study. For a lot of students, it would just be a group of paintings or a major project. So my faculty member was Derek Boshier. Derek is a very special person. Great artist and a tremendous mind. 

“He knew from talking to me that I liked comics. For this independent study, the thing was that I would create a comic strip—and it had to be of quality—and also it was required that I get it published somewhere."

(Ironically, Gilbert never got his MFA from UH. “All of a sudden I get a call from this guy. He’d taken over the graduate student advisor position from Ed Hill. This guy tells me you’re not going to graduate because you didn’t fulfill the course work. You need to take a few more courses. I was like, what the fuck?! Because I’m not an idiot, you know. I read all the course catalogs and saw everything I was supposed to take and I sure as hell did the work. And I was just like, fuck you! Fuck it! I don’t need this degree. I’m going to work. And that was that. And all that was left was my debt.” Maybe UH will correct its error and grant him a belated degree.)



Gilbert knew an editor at Public News and showed her his sample strips. She liked them a lot and started publishing them.

In 1988, Gilbert wasn’t producing comics every week. It took a while for him to get up to that frequency. But by about 1990, True Artist Tales was a regular weekly feature.

How also did covers for Public News, usually the first week after New Years



The first strip shows Ron Hoover, a Houston painter who died in 2008.

“In about 1987, I moved in with a fellow student Linn Schwartz and it was in this house in the First Ward on Summer Street. It was that complex that was owned by Earl Staley. He was my landlord. That was an amusing situation. He had me and Linn and Ron Hoover lived right next to us in another bungalow. And James Bettison lived in a garage apartment behind Earl’s place. And then Derek Boshier’s studio was right next door to us. So it was this nice little cluster. I was there about a year. “

Noah Edmondson was an undergrad art student when Gilbert was at Lawndale. He is now the director of the Art Car Museum.

 

This story was based on a real incident. The inspiration was an early iteration of Lawndale’s "Big Show," a large, annual open-call juried art show, in which Walter Hopps, the director of the Menil Collection, was the guest juror. He gave the grand prize to Dave Kidd (who became Dave Childe in the strip). Afterwards, Kidd's painting was stolen from the show. It kept reappearing for months at parties. The strip takes off from that event.

After the story in Public News was complete, Gilbert published a minicomic version. What you see in the center is the cover of the comic book he made. The wanted poster was part of a prank by some artists associated with Commerce Street Warehouse.



The strips are from the top:
A strip about the media’s obsession with drugs
Reagan and Bush
Clayton Williams, the 1990 Republican gubernatorial candidate who lost to Ann Richards. The comic refers to Clayton Williams’ publicly made joke likening the crime of rape to bad weather, having stated: "If it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it”. Hard to imagine today that that was enough to cost him the election.
On the bottom left is a comic about one of the last unabashed liberals on the Supreme Court resigning



Ida Delaney was killed by intoxicated, off-duty policeman Alex Hernandez (who was wearing civilian clothing) after he chased her 13 miles down the freeway. There were two other police with Hernandez. They chased her because she cut them off in traffic. They chased her on 59, tailgating her and flashing their lights. She pulled over at the Newcastle Exit. Hernandez confronted her, hitting her in the face. At that point, she pulled out her gun and shot Hernandez. Hernandez pulled his gun and fired every bullet he had. He hit her four times.

Hernandez was fired and indicted for the crime. A jury in Dallas found him guilty and sentenced him to 7 years. But that sentence was overturned on appeal. He ended up serving 11 days in jail, with a sentence of 2 years probation.

 

Scott Tschirhart was a Houston police officer who shot three different African American suspects, culminating in Byron Gillum in November 1989. Tschirhart’s fellow officers said he was a steroid abuser. Scott Tschirhart was not indicted but was finally fired. He later got work as a sheriff’s deputy in San Antonio. He subsequently got a law degree and works as an attorney. According to his LinkedIn page, “I represent municipal and county governments and officials in diverse litigation including issues involving police, employment, land use and economic development. I also provide City Attorney services to the City of Rosenberg, Texas.”



Cartoonists like Harvey Pekar, Art Spiegelman, Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Joe Matt and many others were mining their own lives for material in the 80s and 90s. This was endlessly mocked at the time as navel gazing and narcissistic, but those artists really opened up the comics medium to new ways of expression.

The strips here: 7 Day Story – an all-pencil strip about the various events of a particular week
Doctor Strangelove’s Bar—about finding a particularly strange bar in Austin
Maryland—a random hotel elevator encounter in a dive hotel in San Diego
In the Dark—Gilbert lived for a while at the Richmont apartments on Richmond. This was an incident of overhearing a woman crying in the dark from the second story balcony



Autobiography for Gilbert was often quite poetic.



Alternative newspaper strips tended to be funny (Life in Hell), political (This Modern World) or both. Only occasionally did they escape from those poles. I’d say Ernie Pook’s Comeek by Lynda Barry was an exception to the rule.

So was True Artist Tales. Gilbert could be unusually contemplative in his strips. They are unlike the work of nearly all of his weekly newspaper cartoonist peers.



“That comes from working at Fondren Library at Rice. I was always up in the stacks. They had seven floors of books. Of course, the joy of that job was to get caught onto something as you’re passing by. And they had books going back 400 years on the shelves. I wouldn’t just sit there and read a whole book, but I’d find these chunks of text. I’d get these bits and pieces. It worked a lot like the internet does now.  

“This actually happened. My buddy, Randy Cole, had to come over and jump my car. And I mentioned this to him. It was something we discussed.”



Imagining what kind of film Degas might have made if he had been a filmmaker. Gilbert told me he imagined it as a Martin Scorcese film, but to me it feels more like Eric Rohmer.



What I liked about this one was the barrenness of the setting and the dream-like quality. It reminds me a little bit of Martin Vaughn-James classic surrealist comic The Cage. I especially liked the spilled ink at the end—it reminds you that you are looking at ink on paper.





Mysterioso was Gilbert’s third serialized story in True Artist Tales. It was published in 31 parts, and ran from June 1996 to January 1997.

Franco “the Animal” Guzman is a gangster holed up in a shack (based on the house Gilbert was then living in). It is a variation on the classic Faust story. It was originally intended to last 7 episodes, but it grew in the telling.

Despite the fact that Gilbert had Jesus appear as a stripper in Satan’s “gentleman’s club,” it never attracted controversy. I guess the readers of the Public News were just too blasé.

It shows Gilbert’s love of noir storytelling and chiaroscuro visual effects very well.



Public News was struggling by the end of the 90s. Its competitor, Houston Press, was stuffed with ads, Public News was skimpy in comparison. A free alternative newsweekly requires ads to continue publishing. So a huge ad campaign from Camel for its new “hipster” cigarette brand, Kamel, was a godsend for the Public News.

That’s not how Gilbert saw it. “My parody was Marlene Dietrich. An old nostalgia picture. The cigarette ad always pissed me off because it was so pretentious. It seemed to be exploiting Marlene Dietrich and the whole nostalgia trip for fucking cancer sticks. That was like the beginning of the hipster period when hipsterism got so commercial. It began to be exploitative.” He hated the clever design which was becoming popular then.

The middle image is the artwork Gilbert drew without any of the lettering he was also including. The finished strip was never published. Instead, there was a bizarre “apology” from Public News publisher Bert Woodall published in its place.









 

 



 

I know many artists who put up exhibitions that are attended only by their friends and family. It’s dispiriting. I think Gilbert was feeling that a little. At some point, you have to ask yourself what is the point?



“Amarillo” was an 11-page story published in Pictopia in 1992. (It got its start as a self-published zine in 1990.)
“The Worst Possible Job” was published in American Splendor: Comic Con Comics in 1996.
It’s All True was published in summer 1995 by Apeshot Studios Press (i.e., by Scott Gilbert himself).

The Xeric grant was founded by Peter Laird, who had hit the jackpot when he and collaborator Kevin Eastman self-published the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He wanted to encourage cartoonists to self-publish and the Xeric grant was how he did this. It was part of his non-profit foundation, the Xeric Foundation. It gave out grants from 1992 to 2012. Other recipients included Megan Kelso (1993), David Lasky (1993), Jason Lutes (1993), Adrian Tomine (1993), Tom Hart (1994), Jessica Abel (1995), James Sturm (1996), Ellen Forney (1997), Gene Yang (1997), Jason Little (1998), David Choe (1999), Jason Shiga (1999), Anders Nilsen (2000), Jordan Crane (2001), Brian Ralph (2001), Donna Barr (2002), Lauren Weinstein (2002) and Josh Neufeld (2004). If Xeric were a publishing house, it would have to be considered one of the best of its era.

 

True Artist Tales at the Galveston Artist Residency

by Robert Boyd

I've been sitting on this until we got the official press release written, but now all can be revealed. I am curating an exhibit of 130+ pieces of art by Scott Gilbert at the Galveston Artist Residency starting in November. I hope you can come out. Here's the press release:

In 1988, Scott Gilbert was a Masters of Fine Art student at the legendary Lawndale Annex of the University of Houston. He asked a professor, Derek Boshier, if he could do a comics project for an independent study class. Boshier said yes, on one condition. He made it a requirement that Gilbert get the comic published. Gilbert approached a local newsweekly, The Public News, and started his strip, True Artist Tales. Initially the comic strip was set among the artists of Houston, but he soon spread out to drawing highly political comics as well as very personal and revealing comics. And what started as a class project lasted from February 1988 until October 2000, starting at the Public News, moving to the Houston Press in 1997.

Scott Gilbert was born in 1961, studied art at the University of South Florida and then started his MFA at the University of Houston in the mid 80s. In addition to True Artist Tales, he has had work published by Fantagraphics Books, Dark Horse Comics and Caliber and has collaborated with famed autobiographical comic writer, Harvey Pekar. His art is known for its strong chiaroscuro effects and visual influences ranging from Alex Toth to Jaime Hernandez to Chester Brown. True Artist Tales was unusually philosophical for a comic strip, and his comics feature such legendary Houston settings as the Axiom, Commerce Street Artist Warehouse, Pik-N-Pak, etc., as well as strips from the road set in Fort Davis, Port Aransas and Balmorhea. In addition, Gilbert did a number of serialized stories, including the early one True Artist Tales Featuring Nick Duchamp, a quasi-hardboiled detective story set within the Houston art community, which will be rerun on the art website Glasstire starting in October, and Mysterioso, his hilarious and shocking modern retelling of Faust starring conscience-stricken gangster, Franco "the Animal" Guzman. The entirety of Mysterioso will be included in the retrospective, which includes 133 pieces of Gilbert's original comic art.

The exhibit is curated by Robert Boyd, who has long been involved in both comics and art. He was an editor for Fantagraphics Books and published the Houston-based art blog, The Great God Pan Is Dead.

Please join us for an opening reception of True Artist Tales at the GAR Gallery on Saturday, November 26th from 6-9pm. And be sure to check out the preview on Glasstire in the weeks leading up to the show!

Here's some art from the exhibit:

 
 Scott Gilbert, Suddenly I Fell Down, pen and ink on bristol board, 1994, originally published in the Public News 3/24/1994



Scott Gilbert, The Killing of Ida Delaney, pen and ink on bristol board, 1990, originally published in the Public News

  
Scott Gilbert, Hot Town, pen and ink on bristol board, 1993,  originally published in the Public News

Auction Night

by Robert Boyd

I went to the Lewis & Maese auction last night. It was a big auction for them--270 lots. I got there just as it was starting. I picked up my catalog and my number (with which I would bid). The place was packed and there was no seating room. My friend David McClain was there. We laughed about some of the pieces--pieces that were claimed to be by Picasso or Renoir or Soutine or Degas. Lewis & Maese is not a major auction house. They handle mostly the sales of estates. But one good reason to go is that art by local Houston artists often shows up for sale there. For instance, there was  huge 155 x 72 inch Earl Staley painting, Noche en Oaxaca. According to the catalog, it belonged to the "Corpus Christi Art Museum." Did they mean the Art Museum of South Texas? Was it being deaccessioned? In any case, the bidding didn't meet the reserve, so it didn't sell.

Earl Staley, Noche en Oaxaca, 1977, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 72 x 155 inches

Pablo Picasso, Bonne Fête Monsieur Picasso, 1931, tempera,20 x 26 inches

The craziest piece for auction was a painting attributed to Picasso. It's probably best to let Lewis & Maese describe it:

A still life painting with a silver-screen connection. The work from 1931 — a scene depicting a classical bust, wine bottle, fruit, and a window surrounded by a flourish of ironwork is signed Picasso in the upper right. The back bears a faded label from its last exhibition: “‘Bonne Fête’ Monsieur Picasso,” at the UCLA Art Galleries, 1961, on the occasion of the modern master’s 80th birthday. It appears in the exhibition catalog which featured loans from Hollywood notables Kirk Douglas, Vincent Price, and Mrs. Gary Cooper, as well as the Los Angeles Museum of Art, as number 95. The painting, a tempera (gouache) on paper, measures 19 5/8 x 25 ¾ ", and its original owner was Alfred Hitchcock, who lent it to the UCLA exhibition. It came to Houston via the late director’s only child, daughter Pat Hitchcock O’Connell, who gifted it to her best friend, Georgia Waller, and her husband, Gerard Waller. It was bestowed upon them in 1982, after Hitchcock and his wife Alma had both passed on. Mrs. Waller died in 2008, and Mr. Waller is now sending the painting with the Hollywood provenance to auction. (Hitchcock worked with Picasso and Dali and is known for employing artwork throughout his films to great effect; he also commissioned Dalí to create a dream sequence for his 1945 film Spellbound.) This artwork has been looked at by Christies and Claude Picasso.

The estimate was $300,000 to $500,000, which is far more than the average thing at Lewis & Maese goes for. In the end it only went for $150,000. My question at the time was why was it being sold by Lewis & Maese? Surely a larger auction house like Bonhams, Phillips, Sothebys or Christies could get a lot more money for it. Houston painter Pat Colville, who was there last night,  came up with a convincing explanation. If one of these auction houses looked at the piece and had any doubts about its provenance, they might have passed on it. Is there any paperwork that says who Hitchcock bought it from, for example? So if they pass, your only other choice it to sell it through a second or third tier auction house like Lewis & Maese. (And I can assure you that Lewis & Maese do not have an art historian on staff, given the dubious attributions encountered in this auction.) What was interesting was that some bidders were willing to roll the dice and bet $150,000 that it might be real. If the buyers can prove its authenticity, they can make a big profit.


David Adickes, Japan, 1959, watercolor, 8 x 7 inches

The watercolor Japan by David Adickes was an interesting piece. There was an actual bidding war for it, and on one side of the bidding war was Adickes himself! He often sells pieces in these auctions, but here he was trying to buy his own work. He won the piece. I was perplexed by this and asked on Facebook why he would be doing this. Some of the answers seemed plausible, but the one that made the most sense to me was from Margaret Bott, who wrote, "He bought it for his museum in Huntsville, I would think." And I can see why--it's a great piece. I think a lot of his work, especially his early paintings, tends to be very corny. But Japan is lovely.


Dorothy Hood, Comet Tangled in the Sun, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 10 x 8 feet

The star of the night was an enormous Dorothy Hood painting, Comet Tangled in the Sun. I liked the colors, but I didn't like the paint handling. There weren't the watery areas of color which give so many of her canvases a cosmic sense of depth, nor did the edges between colors have that Clyfford Still-like serration that gives her best work a sense of danger. Without prompting from me, Pat Colville criticized Comet Tangles in the Sun as not one of Hood's best. I was happy that we agreed! The estimate was for it to sell between $22,000 and $26,000. The bidding was vigorous and the hammer price was $40,000. The room burst into applause.

I suspect the big exhibit opening soon at the Museum of South Texas, the new monograph, The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood by Susie Kalil and the great article in Texas Monthly have put Hood in people's minds. There is certainly a feeling that she has been an unjustly neglected (and perhaps undervalued) artist.


Pat Colville with her newly purchased David Alfaro Siqueireos lithograph, Moisés Sáenz.

One of the cool things that came up for auction was a lithograph by David Alfaro Siqueiros, the great Mexican muralist. It was a portrait of Mexican educational reformer Moisés Sáenz. It was purchased by Pat Colville, who knew what she was getting into. She asked me if I knew a conservator in town who might be able to clean up some of the foxing on the piece. I didn't even know what "foxing" was (it's discoloration that sometimes occurs on old paper). The image gives Sáenz a stoic, stone-like presence. And it wasn't all that expensive--I think Colville got her money's worth. I like the idea of it going into the hands of an artist, who is someone who will truly appreciate it.


Malinda Beeman, Protection from Demons, 18 x 11 inches

I only bid on one item, a strange painting by Malinda Beeman called Protection from Demons. The auction catalog did not list a date for it. It had a retablo-like feeling to it. I had heard Beeman's name before, but knew nothing about her. I showed it to Colville and she said that Beeman had lived in Houston and had produced eccentric art (which this piece certainly confirms). She lives in Marfa now and runs an artisanal goat cheese business. You can see a short documentary about her farm here.

I had a maximum bid in mind based on some money I'm getting from some freelance writing. The bidding started and quickly reached my limit. It finally sold for just a hundred dollars more than my limit, so I kind of regret that. But I feel good about having a budget and sticking to it. I hope whoever got Protection from Demons likes it as much as I did.

At that point, there were 70 more lots to go and I had been there for several hours. The room had thinned out considerably from the beginning of the night. I was bored by all the furniture and jewelry for sale, so I left. Even though I left empty-handed, I was happy with the results. It's nice to see artists like Dorothy Hood get the prices she deserved in life, and I was happy to be introduced to the art of Malinda Beeman. (If you have a Dorothy Hood gathering dust in your closet, Lewis & Maese proved last night that they can get a lot of money for it.) It was nice to chat with Pat Colville, an artist whose work I love and whose opinions were valuable (at least insofar as they confirmed my own prejudices).

Various Writings

Robert Boyd

I have been writing a lot lately, but mostly for other publications. Here are some links for the writing I have been doing.


I visited Houston artist Trenton Doyle Hancock at his studio and came away with this article which was published in Art Ltd. 


Cometbus 57 is the latest issue of the venerable zine (first published in 1981). This issue is dedicated to New York area cartoonists and members of the comics world. I wrote about it for The Comics Journal. 


Garden Of Flesh by Gilbert Hernandez is a hardcore pornographic version of the first nine chapters of the Bible. I published this review in The Comics Journal. Warning--it's definitely not safe for work!

Cary Reeder at Optical Project

Robert Boyd

Been a while since I wrote some art reviews. Here is a short one.

Cary Reeder
Limes, Twigs, and Digits
at Optical Project 
On view through September 4, 2016


Cary Reeder, Entangled, 2016, Acrylic goauche on board, 14 x 11 inches

Cary Reeder is known to me as a painter of houses, particularly of the disappearing Queen Anne houses and Craftsman-style bungalows of the Heights. These paintings usually feature pastel colors and hard shadows. Her new work retains the basic color scheme but is somewhat more abstract and stylized. For instance, Entangled features tree branches with high-contrast shadows (which look similar to what we've seen before from Reeder), but behind the branches is a regular pattern of hexagons and diamonds in lavender, teal, lime green, pale yellow and light blue.


Cary Reeder, In Flame, Acrylic gouache on paper, 9 x 12 inches

Most interesting to me were a group of gouaches on paper of pairs of hands. The hands are all depicted as flat areas of color with brightly contrasting linework depicting wrinkles and blood vessels. The fingernails are all painted as flat, light pastel colors. (Because Optical Project is barely climate controlled, the humidity in the gallery has caused the paper for these gouaches to curl slightly.)

I'm told that she spent several week in a friend's cabin up in New Mexico working on these. I was quite pleased to see something different from Reeder. The new work makes me realize that what I've always liked most about her work were the flat areas of color. He colors are really quite wonderful.

The show will be on view tomorrow afternoon at Optical Project--that's your last chance to see it.

Morally Compromised Comics Reviews

Robert Boyd

I've known Matt Madden and Bob Fingerman for many years. An issue I often have is how do you write about people with whom you have a personal relationship. That's become an issue writing art reviews in Houston. I've come to be friends with many Houston artists, for example, which over time became a problem for this blog. I picked up two recent comics by Madden and Fingerman that I want to talk about, but I wanted to warn readers that I've known these guys a long time. Hell, I've stayed in Fingerman's apartment with him and his wife! I attended Matt Madden's wedding! I am totally biased. So keep that in mind.


Drawn Onward by Matt Madden (Retrofit Comics & Big Planet Comics, 32 pages).

Matt Madden has been making comics since the early 1990s (the first Madden comic I ever saw was Terrifying Steamboat Stories, which was published when he was an undergrad at UT in the early 90s). I've been following his career pretty closely since then.

Madden has always been a formal experimenter, and a few years ago joined a group of French comics experimenters who call themselves OuBaPo (which stands for ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle, which roughly translates as the "workshop for potential comics"). Literary-minded readers might recognize OuBaPo as a spin-off of OuLiPo, in which a bunch of writers used specific formulas to write novels and poetry. Raymond Queneau founded OuLiPo in 1960, and the group included such writers and Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. They would come up with arbitrary, slightly absurd rules for writing. For example, Perec wrote a great novel without the letter "e", La Disparition (A Void, in English). Think of the complex poetic rules that used to be de rigueur--the number of syllables in each line, the arrangement of stresses, the rhyme scheme, etc.

OuBaPo cartoonists do the same thing. Some of the exercises they do include "larding" (taking an already existing comic and adding extra panels between the existing panels), "reduction" (taking a longer comic and summarizing in a few panels), and "reversibility" (making a comic that can be read forward and backward). The goal is to use these constraints as a creative boost; essentially, they don't believe that absolute freedom is all that good a way to come up with original ideas. (Perec wrote, "I set myself rules in order to be totally free.")

The most famous example of reversibility is The Upside Downs by Gustave Verbeek, which appeared in newspapers from 1903 to 1905, nearly a hundred years before the creation of OuBaPo. (OuLiPo refers to such examples OuLiPo-like texts avant le lettre as "premature plagiarists".)



Then you turn the page upside down and read the rest of the story.



Drawn Onward is a example of reversibility. Not only can it be read backwards and forwards, it is necessary to read it both directions to get the whole story. Formally, it's an amazing feat. But the same could be said about The Upside Downs, which had pretty dumb stories. You as a reader never care about its two ongoing characters, Little Lady Lovekins or Old Man Muffaroo, which is not the case with great contemporary comics strips from the early 20th century (see for example the great characters in The Katzenjammer Kids or Little Nemo in Slumberland.) This is the fundamental difference between an Oulipo novel and the world's longest palindrome. The Oulipo writers tried to make literature worth reading. And Matt Madden, as a OuBaPo artist, is trying the to do the same.

When I first read Drawn Onward, I didn't realize that it was a reversible story. It wasn't until I got to the end of the comic did I realize that it had to be reread backwards. Unlike The Upside Downs, you don't turn Drawn Onward upside down--you just read the panels in reverse order.

It starts with the sentence "This comic is a double suicide note..." The first three panels depict the studio of a female comics artist, drawn in a light style with very little chiaroscuro. It's almost clear line, but not as perfect as we expect from clear line. There is a human quality to the drawing; the panel borders for example are hand drawn--no ruler was used. But when we turn the page, we see what has been drawn by the comics artist--a flashback. The style is completely different. The line-drawing is done in these flashback segments with a heavy brush, with lots of solid black and occasional drybrush touches. The protagonist encounters a young man who appears distraught and says something cryptic to her. He acts like he knows her, but she has evidently never seen him before.

As the comic progresses, she sees him again several times. She perceives him as a stalker of some sort, but starts to grow amused by him. She writes in the narration of the comic, "My god, was I developing a crush on my stalker?" Once she finally expresses her feelings (in the center spread of the comic, in which she kisses him), though, he starts to grow colder and becomes sarcastic towards her. She sees him in the subway several times after that, but he avoids her.

In the last page, she instructs the reader to read the story backwards: "The beginning of my story was the end of his."

Below is a typical two-page spread. Please note that it makes sense read backwards or forwards. Reading it forward is like a typical comic--you start in the upper-leftmost panel of each page. To read it backwards, start in the upper-rightmost panel of each page.

 
Matt Madden, Drawn Together pp. 10 and 11

Drawn Onward fulfills what I think of as the requirements of OuBaPo (or OuLiPo)--to be formally interesting (based on the constraint underlying the form) as well as interesting as a work of comics storytelling. As you read this, you are interested in the young woman cartoonist and her mysterious crush. One fault it has it that it has to tell you to read it in reverse, and as part of the story that is a bit awkward. But given the way we ordinarily read comics, I don't know how else one would do it.



Minimum Wage Volume 2: So Many Bad Decisions by Bob Fingerman (Image Comics, 158 pages.)

I first became aware of Bob Fingerman's comics when I was working for Fantagraphics Books. He did a humorous porno comic for us called Skinheads in Love (1992). I thought it was funny, but the art was a bit overwrought. Later, as an editor for Dark Horse Comics I took over a comic he was producing when the previous editor abruptly left. It was a social satire called White Like She (1994), a take-off on the Freaky Friday body-switching genre, except instead of a mom and teen-aged daughter switching, it was a 50+ year old black man switching with a bratty suburban white teen-aged girl. It was pretty funny, but the art was even more stiff than Skinheads (it was almost completely photo-referenced).

Fingerman decided around this time that he needed to loosen up his art. He started his comic series Minimum Wage (1995-1999), a roman à clef about the engagement and wedding of his alter-ego Rob Hoffman to Sylvia Fanucci. A lot of that book (collected in one volume, Maximum Minimum Wage) dealt with life as a barely-scraping-by 20-something freelance artist in New York City. I would say that aspect of the story was for me the most interesting thing about Minimum Wage, but I loved the whole story. By this time, I had gotten to know Bob personally pretty well, and he included me and some of my co-workers in the background of one panel. Because it was a lightly disguised roman à clef, part of the pleasure in reading it for me was to try to figure out who all the people in the story were in "real life"--a lot of them were from the world of comics, so I knew a bunch of them.

Anyway, that was the work that really demonstrated that Fingerman was an important comics artist, in my mind. His drawing style didn't really loosen up all that much (Fingerman just cares too much to just let go), but the cartoony drawing (as opposed to photo-realistic style of White Like She) was an appealing direction. And it pretty much set the course for Fingerman's subsequent comics. For example, in his post-apocalyptic comedy, From the Ashes, he drew the whole thing in pencil, which I have always taken as a deliberate attempt to loosen up his drawing by changing techniques.

After the 2013 publication of Maximum Minimum Wage, Fingerman decided to revisit the characters from Minimum Wage in a new Minimum Wage series. He starts the new series almost instantly after immediately after Rob has broken up with Sylvia. The series is all about Rob getting back out on the market for love. The first volume of the new series, Minimum Wage book 1: Focus on the Strange, has Rob briefly dating a 30-something hippie lady, a 50-something former TV actress and a woman who edits a gay porn magazine. (I assume these are fictional analogs to real people--I'm totally wondering about the identity of the former TV actress.) None of these assignations seem too disastrous, but they don't lead anywhere for Rob. Rob is 25 years old and a very eligible bachelor. He has a new well-paying comics gig drawing PRIX (sort of the analog in the Minimum Wage world of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, whose comics Fingerman drew for about a year 1993. In Minimum Wage, instead of being turtles, they are horseshoe crabs.) He's kind of uptight about some things, but he is good boyfriend material. Of course, that could be self-congratulation on the part of Fingerman, of whom Rob is a quasi-autobiographical counterpart.

Book two leans more on disastrous dates. Rob meets a goth woman via a dating site who turns out to be horrible on many levels. The unrelenting horror of their brief relationship is the source of any of the books' funniest moments. But worse, he hooks up with his ex-wife. He needs some way to process what's been happening to him. So Rob starts drawing autobiographical comics just to amuse himself. He gets encouragement from professional colleagues to continue on that path.  It's weird. In a sense we get Fingerman drawing Rob drawing an early iteration of Minimum Wage.

The art has a really loose feeling that I've never seen from Fingerman. The character designs are more-or-less the same as in the original Minimum Wage, but everything is more exaggerated and the ink is slung on the page more expressively than ever before. It may be his best artwork ever, although I loved the pencil art on From the Ashes as well. It is colored rather simply in a duotone (black and white and light blue, similar to the way Dan Clowes colored Ghost World) but with occasional full-color pages. The fill-color sequences tend to be dream sequences, which aside from an opportunity to show off some very nice drawing and painting, don't add much. I know they are meant to give a glimpse into Rob's inner life, but this comes out well in the plot and dialogue, which makes the dreams feel redundant.




Bob Fingerman, Minimum Wage book 2: So Many Bad Decisions, p. 37. Rob's first terrible date with Bekka, the Ayn Rand-loving gothmedienne

Aside from the dream sequences, I loved everything about this comic. And the dream sequences aren't bad, just unnecessary. But one problem with Minimum Wage book two is that there is too much filler. After 124 pages of comics story, there is a 36-page "bonus section" of covers, sketches and pinups. The pinups are by various guest artists, so you get to see some art by Rick Altergott, Collen Doran, Jason Little, Stan Manoukian, Troy Nixey and many others. But while I like some of the drawings, I don't think they add much to the book.

I'm not sure if the story is over with this volume. It does end with Rob decisively calling it off with ex-wife Sylvia, but there is a hint of a continuing story. It does seem as if Fingerman is taking a break from the regular comic book, but I hope he launches back into it. I think there is more to Rob's story.

Take these two reviews with a big grain of salt, as I've known both cartoonists a long time and can't really be objective. But both of these comics are worth reading, and in the case of Minimum Wage, I would strongly suggest you read the two earlier volumes if you are going to read book 2.

A Kingly Gift to the Menil

Robert Boyd

REVISED June 14.

Thursday night, a show of artwork from the art collection of Stephanie Smither and the late John Smither called As Essential as Dreams opened at the Menil. This is the second time in two years that works from this amazing collection have been on display (the last time was in 2014 at the Art League in a great show called One of a Kind: Artwork from the Collection of Stephanie Smither, which I reviewed). The show opened on the same day as the announcement of a huge gift to the new Menil Drawing Institute, currently under construction on West Main Street between Loretto and Yupon Streets.

The gifts were from Louisa Sarofim and former Hosuton gallerist Janie C. Lee; they include works on paper by Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, Cezanne, Willem de Kooning, Brice Marden, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, Georgia O'Keefe, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, Barnett Newman and others--a total of 100 drawings by 41 artists.

As I looked at the art on display, I noticed the labels all identified the art as "promised gifts to the Menil Museum." So on the day they announced the Sarofim and Lee gifts, the Smither gift was effectively also announce.


This photo of the foyer of the Smither home is reproduced in the catalog for As Essential as Dreams

And the Menil will be perfect home for her collection. The Menil has already shown a willingness to collect visionary or outsider art work (see for example their holdings of Charles A.A. Dellschau, Henry Darger, Bill Traylor, etc., much of which was displayed in the excellent exhibit Seeing Stars: Visionary Drawings from the Collection). And with the new Drawing Institute, there is a renewed commitment to works on paper and the conservation challenges they pose (Martín Ramírez drawings must be a special challenge for conservators). I think it is great that the Menil is going deep into this kind of art with the Smither gift.

Just three days later, Stephanie Smither died. She had serious health problems and had had both lungs transplanted. The timing is poignant but at least she got the opportunity to see her collection in its new home.

(As an aside, when Dan Nadel came to town to discuss Copley, he and I buttonholed Menil curator Toby Kamps about how cheap it would be to add an excellent comics art collection to the Drawing Institute. We pointed out that superb examples of, say, Chester Gould original art could be purchased for less than $500 at auction. A museum hoover up this stuff cheap by going to Heritage and Artcurial. I suspect some collectors here in Houston might be willing to donate examples of this kind of work to the Drawing Institute if asked!)