Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
As always, sex and violence rule the roost in youth culture, and "The Originals" is filled with both. But it's not exploitative or transgressive -- as we'll see later with Alejandro Jodorowsky's new "Son of the Gun" collection, also out from DC. If anything, it is the escalating gang violence of "The Originals" that signals the end of Lel's innocence, as well as that of his favorite subculture. And all it takes is one gun.
"A gun was unheard of," Gibbons says, "certainly amongst these gangs back in the '60s. Of course, you're nobody now if you're in a gang and don't carry a gun, but in those days a gun would be a most unusual thing to have. In my whole lifetime of being a mod, I rarely ever saw anyone with a knife. Most of the violence in those days was of the short-lived brawl variety. But one of the things I wanted to do in 'The Originals' is show what happens when violence does get out of hand, when it turns from being a boyish schoolyard fight to palpable violence where people die and their lives are irrevocably altered. I certainly never murdered anybody!"
"Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists"
Edited by Ted Rall
127 pages
Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing
Order from Powells.com
Cartoonist/columnist Ted Rall has spent the last several years calling bullshit on the power brokers that have been running this country into the ground. This second anthology of up-and-coming or established alternative cartoonists is Rall's love letter to the genre that has brought him to prominence.
"For years, I've been frustrated at the lack of attention generated by this genre of alternative weekly-based political and social satire cartoonists," Rall explains over the phone, "which has been around pretty much since the late '80s and early '90s. And it's true that you can argue that not all them are social or political cartoonists, or even in alternative weeklies -- most of my clients are in dailies, actually -- but there are certain things these comics have in common. They tend to be drawn by a certain age group; Generation X is certainly the wellspring of the first or second wave of the alt-weekly cartoonists. They feature stripped-down or abstracted drawing styles to convey complicated ideas; for that reason they tend to be wordy, text-based exercises. And since I work in that genre, I love it but am endlessly frustrated by the lack of exposure it gets. This stuff always falls between the cracks."
Unless you're there to catch it, which some, like Salon and other forward-looking publications, are. But no matter how much indie cred artists like David Rees, Keith Knight and Aaron McGruder receive for their outstanding work, there are toiling cartoonists like Tak Toyoshima, Emily Flake and Max Cannon who may never get the credit they deserve. Which is where Rall comes in.
"Here you have intelligent and funny comics being ignored because no one yet has pulled it all together as a genre," Rall added. "That's one reason why I felt these cartoonists had a hard row to hoe, because people need to have genres, to be able to categorize things. If it's something you've never seen or heard before, it doesn't fit anywhere. So the goal of the first book was to say there's strength in numbers, and it did much better than I or my publisher ever expected. But this was before 9/11, so in a way the scene we were documenting changed right as we were putting the book to bed." Ergo, the new book, which features interviews with the aforementioned, as well as 15 more budding Matt Groenings, many of whom deserve to be stars already.
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