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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Despite (or perhaps because of) this relentless nihilism, many of Clowes' strips are scathingly, brilliantly funny. "Why I Hate Christians" and a companion piece, "Devil Doll," are witty satires of the fire-and-brimstone rumblings of the religious right, popularized in fundamentalist Jack Chick's cartoons threatening eternal damnation. "On Sports" offers Freudian deconstructions of such popular games as football ("sublimated homosexual rape and Oedipal hostility"), baseball ("again the player is fucking, though not so much his opponent as the field ... itself"). If you can imagine what the illustrations depict, it won't be difficult to understand why this strip prompted a boycott when it appeared in an Austin alternative weekly.
Many readers will recognize several characters from "Ghost World," the movie, including Feldman, the annoying guy in the wheelchair with the laptop connection, who is stalked by SquirrelGirl and Candypants, teenage girls on the Enid and Becky model. The best of these strips is "Art School Confidential," which has been optioned as a feature film, a story about the futility and silliness of art school, based on Clowes' years at Parsons. In this strip, Clowes takes on pretty much every kind of art (trashed dorm rooms and toothbrushes as final projects; the "famous tampon in a teacup trick") and artist ("Mr. Phantasy," who "does a Frazetta-style painting of a barbarian as the solution to every assignment" and the guy who draws his girlfriend in "humiliating, sexually submissive poses, then brings her to class with him.")
But for all his cynicism, Clowes offers many moments of compassion, even beauty. "Ugly Girls" is an ode to the kind of cute girl with big teeth, glasses and plaid skirts who so often shows up as a Clowes' heroine. "When I see a 'beautiful' woman," writes Clowes, "I'm usually bowled over by existential boredom ... True physical beauty must be that perfect combination of natural and chosen elements, which fall together ... suggesting something beyond the physical."
And in the aptly named "Marooned on a Desert Island with the People on the Subway," Clowes spins a strangely touching fantasy of how, exactly, the 10 or so people on his train car would re-create civilization were they to be, you know, stranded on a desert island. Will the cute blonde choose the young wanker, or will the businessman get all the chicks? Can the professorial-looking guy make a ham radio out of that high school kid's Walkman? By the end of the strip, when he has planned how they will care for the second generation of desert island inhabitants, one feels a certain genuine grief that the weird community he has imagined for them will never be, or at least that none of the people who share his car know that the cranky guy in the corner has been studying them with such a shrewd and compassionate eye.
Those in search of the next lone genius or those looking for a gorgeous collection of literary short stories would also do well to pick up "Summer Blonde," the latest hardbound collection by Adrian Tomine (pronounced "Toe-Mean-uh"). Though Tomine is only 28, this is the third collection of stories taken from his comic, "Optic Nerve," which he has been publishing since age 16. (Tomine self-published until 1994, when the Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly signed him up while he was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley.)
Tomine's illustrations regularly appear in the New Yorker, and "Bomb Scare," a story from this book, was included in the "Best American Nonrequired Reading" anthology, edited by Dave Eggers (though a reference to fisting and the last panel, which contained nudity, had been removed). He's already been around long enough to inspire a mini-backlash from those indie purists who say his best work is behind him.
Tomine's work is aimed at the same audience as Clowes'. (In fact, the two are good friends and lived for many years on the same street in Berkeley.) Although many alternative writers go through a superhero or supernatural phase, "Optic Nerve" has from the beginning been almost exclusively devoted to realistic, impeccably drawn short fiction, usually about relatively young urban characters casting about for their place in the world.
Tomine is a master of the arts of both cartooning and fiction, and he uses each to complement the other. His panels are meticulously, nearly obsessively perfect, and his freakishly accurate mastery of human facial expressions means that many times, he is able to forgo lengthy plot explication altogether and say it all with spare dialogue and a glance or gesture. It makes one wish that MFA students intent on writing minimalist fiction would simply get themselves to the drawing board instead.
On the comics shelf
Eightball #22 by Daniel Clowes, Fantagraphics Books
Twenty-nine interlocking stories follow a Leopold and Loeb-inspired kidnapping in a small town and examine various characters along the way -- a frustrated poet, a teenage bride, an anti-Semitic school bully, a kid in love with his older stepsister and a teen 'zine genius.
Love and Rockets #5 & 6 by Los Bros Hernandez
Jaime's Maggie and Hopey deal with Izzy's psychotic episodes, while Gilbert offers a sympathetic and disturbing portrait of Fritzi's teenage sexual escapades as the girl with the big boobs whom everyone wants to do but no one wants to date.
La Perdida #2 by Jessica Abel
Abel, the creator of Artbabe, has produced a striking series about Carla, a girl who decides to go from Kansas City to Mexico City to discover her "roots." In this episode, Carla ditches her trustafarian sort-of boyfriend for a goateed revolutionary, while her communist friend continues to berate her for thinking she can discover her authentic Mexican self in pretty pottery and peasant costumes.
B. Krigstein by Greg Sardowski, Fantagraphics
A lush, coffee-table retrospective of the work of Bernard Krigstein, the classically trained painter who became one of the most influential and innovative comics artists of all time during his period at EC Comics in the '40s and '50s.
Three Fingers by Rich Koslowski, Top Shelf
An amusing Ken Burns-style faux documentary about the early days of animation, starring "Ricky Rat," the first 'toon to break into pictures with the help of "Dizzy Walters," and featuring a scandal surrounding a mysterious practice dubbed "the Ritual."
