Artfully Wage War on Nostalgia: Nick Hanover reviews CARTOON DIALECTICS #3 by Tom Kaczynski and Clara Jetsmark

There is an envelope in the mailbox. You pick it up, intrigued by its handwritten address. This is nothing you’ve ordered. It is an artifact from another time. You open it. A nearly monochromatic little comic slips out. Purple and white dominate the page. The paper feels raw, there’s no gloss to it, but also none of that try-too-hard matte. As you flip through it something else slips out, a postcard-sized print that only says “Nostalgic Blob.” You grin because that little blob gets you in too many ways. You proceed.

***

Inside the pages of Cartoon Dialectics #3, Tom Kaczynski and Clara Jetsmark force you to consider the cheerful yet ominous reach of the nostalgic blob, that cultural motivator that compels us to look backward even as we’re moving forward. Connecting nostalgia to Trump’s Make America Great Again movement as well as the styles and tastes of progressives and, in its potent final section, Kaczynski’s own relationship with his past, the central question of Cartoon Dialectics’ third installment isn’t “How did we get here?” but “Why do we keep returning here?”

When I spoke to Kaczynski in 2013, that question weighed heavily on both our minds, running through our discussions of gentrification, global warming, the mystification of technology and beyond. Kaczynski told me that the frequently bleak stories collected in his impressive work Beta Testing the Apocalypse were inspired not by dystopian works but his interest in utopian fiction and his time growing up under communism, a system that was itself utopian in design but nonetheless broke down in execution. Responding to a point I made about the negative outcomes of his stories, Kaczynski said: “If my stories seem really negative, it's only because I'm examining the negative to see if a positive can be teased out eventually.” 

At that point, less than a year into Obama’s second term, the concept of “failed utopias” was more theoretical but, looking back on it now, it seems clear that Kaczynski instinctively knew catastrophe was looming and, more importantly, realized that it would come in large part because of our fetishization of a nonexistent, utopic past. 

That aspect of Kaczynski’s vision, both as a comics creator and a comics curator, is most explicit in the opening story of Cartoon Dialectics #3, “Trump and Nostalgia,” created with Jetsmark for The Nib in October of 2016, shortly before the election when most experts emphatically stated Trump had no real hope of winning. Rather than tackle Trump’s prospects as a candidate, “Trump and Nostalgia” bluntly examines his now ubiquitous slogan at face value, wondering when the “Again” aspect actually refers to.

For most of the past couple years, The Nib has been a toothless, overly simplistic purveyor of progressive editorial cartoons, and though “Trump and Nostalgia” certainly doesn’t erase that history, it does serve as a reminder of what the publication is capable of when it is at its best. Avoiding the trap of merely stating some variation of “America has never been great/has not yet achieved greatness,” “Trump and Nostalgia” achieves the twin goals of proving the slogan’s vagueness is a core part of its success because it allows the target audience to fill in the blank themselves, and that for Trump, in particular, it hearkens back to the Reagan era both in terms of the semantics (it was lifted wholesale from a Reagan speech) and in terms of when Trump’s dog whistle politics actually became mainstream.

The stark but emotive art helps the complexity of the “Trump and Nostalgia” arguments land with minimal effort. This is notable because even now, Democratic and Republican leadership try to argue that Trump’s approach to politics is new and unexpected, and that we must listen to his rabid base in order to appease them. In a mere 14 laid-back pages, Kaczynski and Jetsmark not only destroy that claim, they did so before the election even happened. The nostalgia half of the title, therefore, doesn’t just critique the bigots who voted in Trump, but it also critiques Democrats and Republicans both for nostalgizing a nonexistent time when politics were “clean” and naively falling prey to bad faith opponents.

The follow-up to “Trump and Nostalgia”  in Cartoon Dialectics #3, simply titled “Nostalgia,” has Kaczynski expertly laying out the culture-wide retromania that set the stage for our utopian aspirations to break down. Rougher in linework and more lecturely than Kaczynski’s usual material, “Nostalgia” nonetheless moves at a brisk pace as it details nostalgia’s growth from an actual malady afflicting touring Swiss mercenaries in the 17th century to its modern development as a viral, commercialized impulse. 

While it recycles some quotes and panels from “Trump and Nostalgia,” the section waxes more philosophical than historical, weaving in quotes from cultural theorists Svetlana Boym and Simon Reynolds, the latter of whom coined the term “retromania” specifically in regards to music but, as Kaczynski shows, it’s a useful theory for everything from politics to comics’ own terminal nostalgia infliction. 

Kaczynski also connects Boym and Reynolds’ work to Alvin Toffler’s “future shock” theory which essentially states that as we become more technologically advanced, we will suffer a kind of cultural shock that will prompt many of us to latch on to regressive ideas and lash out at intelligence in general. Kaczynski’s style is perfectly suited to illustrating this phenomenon, with his lines seamlessly transitioning between architectural precision and scribbled looseness to drive home the escalating divisions between thought and feeling. 

Later in Cartoon Dialectics #3, in “The Nostalgic-Critical Method: Praxis,” Kaczynski even provides some yoga-esque suggestions for recognizing and controlling your nostalgic impulses as they happen. The key, according to Kaczynski, is to allow yourself to notice the nostalgia as it appears and then isolate the memory triggered by it rather than simply giving in to the compulsion to purchase goods related to the nostalgia.

That’s likely what Kaczynski is doing on some level with “Skyway Sleepless,” the fictional yet personal story that makes up the entire second half of Cartoon Dialectics. Set in a near-future city where people can live in “skyways,” bridge communities situated above and between streets that function a bit like terrestrial space stations, “Skyway Sleepless” is a love letter to Kaczynski’s own past as an architecture student. More specifically, it’s an intense and deep interrogation of Kaczynski’s internal architect/artist conflict.

One of the first interactions in “Skyway Sleepless” is between the protagonist and Professor Ecke, who calls the protagonist his “best pupil” before immediately lamenting his protege’s choice to never become an architect. Prof. Ecke’s missing arm makes it clear he’s modeled on famed Minnesota architect Ralph Rapson, head of the University of Minnesota architecture program from 1954 to 1984. Kaczynski told me in that interview in 2013, before “Skyway Sleepless” was originally published, that Rapson’s academic interactions with Kaczynski, as well as his contributions to the aesthetic of Minnesota, had caused a fictional version of Rapson to loom large in his stories.

But “Skyway Sleepless” seems to confront Rapson’s influence on Kaczynski’s art far more directly than anything in Kaczynski’s other material, portraying Ecke as both a genius mentor and a villain of sorts, while the unnamed protagonist struggles to find his own identity within what is essentially Ecke’s city. “Skyway Sleepless” also provides an impressive platform for Kaczynski’s Escher-like tendencies, the titular setting twisting into physical and mental labyrinths, with Ecke at the center, putting the citizens to sleep as part of some grand artistic statement.

“Architecture and urban design are really interesting to me, because that's where we live and that's where we form our character, our ideas,” Kaczynski explained to me back then in our interview, stating that architecture is “something that we don't know overtly and we struggle with it, and if we knew what it was maybe we wouldn't struggle so much.” 

That struggle is at the core of “Skyway Sleepless,” as the protagonist appears to lose his grip on reality as a result of probing it. But on the meta-level, it’s Kaczynski’s application of his own Nostalgic-Critical Method that is the driving force, isolating the memory of the person who had an influence on his meta-city fiction and confronting it rather than seeking out the more immediate pleasure of, say, a model of one of Rapson’s designs.

The resolution at the end of “Skyway Sleepless” is as nebulous and mysterious as the nostalgic blob Kaczynski cutely drops into random panels, squeezing its way out of definitively stating whether the revived interest in Ecke’s design work is good or bad. But it fits perfectly with the question connecting all of Cartoon Dialectics: why do we keep returning to certain places, certain culture, certain objects, even when we know they won’t fix anything and might actually make things worse? And it’s even more fitting that Cartoon Dialectics offers no real answer, except that perhaps to overcome our past, we must look ahead more often than we look behind.

***

You put the book down. You look at the old posters on the walls. The vinyl gathering dust in the corner. The trinkets on the shelves. You pick up the Nostalgic Blob print. You smirk. You stick it to the fridge. You stare at it. It reminds you of one of the ghosts that would chase Pac-Man in the arcade cabinet at the pizza place you used to go to after school. You wonder if maybe you can buy it as an enamel pin. 

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Nick Hanover got his degree from Disneyland, but he’s the last of the secret agents and he’s your man. Which is to say you can find his particular style of espionage here at Your Chicken Enemy as well as at Comicosity, Loser City and Ovrld, the latter of which focuses on the Austin music scene. You can also flip through his archives at Comics Bulletin, which he is formerly the Co-Managing Editor of, and Spectrum Culture, where he contributed literally hundreds of pieces for a few years. Or if you feel particularly adventurous, you can always witness his odd .gif battles with his friends and enemies on twitter: @Nick_Hanover

Spring 2018 Box from UNCIVILIZED BOOKS!

Minneapolis-based small press comics publisher

Uncivilized Books 

has recently announced it's offering its 

SPRING 2018 BOX

Included in this offer is:

The Clandestinauts

by Tim Sievert 

Tsu and the Outliers

by E Eero Johnson

Cartoon Dialectics Volume 3

by Tom Kaczynski and Clara Jetsmark

Draw Stronger: Self-Care For Cartoonists and Other Visual Artists

by Kriota Willberg

Uncivilized is one of the great small press comics publishers operating in 

North America today. 

You can trust them to publish some of the best comics being made.

Top 15 Comics (I Reviewed) in 2016

I think most of us are in agreement that 2016 was one of those years that took the wind out of a lot of our sails. It was easy to stagnate and bob in the middle of unchartered waters looking around at our dwindling supplies with terror in our eyes. In fact, 2016 made me take full stock and prioritize in ways that I never have before.

As Coleridge once wrote, “Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.”

Still, even unmoored in the vastness of this ocean and all its oncoming storms, there were little moments of calm when the sun cracked through the clouds and reflected beautifully on the tops of the waves. There were still brave artists making profound works and unleashing them into the world. Thank you all for that.

The following are 15 of my favorite comics I reviewed in 2016. Click on the titles to read my full write-ups. All italicized parts are taken from those reviews.

15. Star Wars Special: C-3PO #1

Written by: James Robinson

Art by: Tony Harris

Published by: Marvel Comics

Earlier in the year, Chase Magnett and I started a comics criticism column called Crocked Critics which, ostensibly, was to be the two of us drinking too much and talking about shitty comics. In the middle of April, we geared up and drank up and dove into this obvious corporate cash-grab crossover crap, only to find it to be one of the most impressive books I read all year.

C-3PO wonders “How important have I been?”

Which hits right to the core of all of us. Right? As we are essentially the summation of our experiences (sprinkled, as it were, with a fine dusting of genetics), it stands to reason that the ultimate human question is “How important have I been?” To have these words come out of a construct, a droid, throws so much sand in the eyes of philosophy that I kind of went weak in the knees when I read it.

What the hell is James Robinson’s end-game here? How much of this is pre-ordained by the corporate concerns of Marvel/Lucas Films/Disney — and how much of this is the expression of an artist who, given the simple task of explaining how C-3PO got his fucking red arm, takes that narrow conceit and shows his true artistry?

14. I Feel Weird #1

Created by: Haleigh Buck

Published by: Hey Boy! Press

Haleigh Buck is writing I Feel Weird to heal herself and, by doing so, help to heal others. It is a diary comic of sorts, chronicling Buck’s own battle/recovery with mental illness. It’s deeply personal and communicative. I shared this with some of my students and they really took to it. They were glad it existed. Issue #2 of the book is equally spectacular.

And it is this that transforms I Feel Weird from diary to art -- that liminal space between experience and transmutation -- from immediacy to contemplation in the moment of creation. By the very existence of these pages, the reader carries through, confronted with the emotional crotch-kick of Buck’s narrative, knowing that through her art she has put distance to her inner horror and has reconstructed it into something for us all.

13. Casanova: Acedia

Written by: Matt Fraction

Art by: Fábio Moon

Published by: Image Comics

Is anyone even reading this series anymore? Two years in and we are only at issue 7? The irregularity with which it comes out is somehow perfect given the nature of its contents. This is one bonkers book. Full of fun and inside jokes and action and dicks and dimension hopping and rocking and rolling, Fraction and Moon are cooking one big sandwich on the Foreman Grill with this iteration of their decade long ode to super-spy comics.

I’ve also been suffusing all of my reviews with Bowie lyrics. And Bowie died. Fuck that.

I still love this series, though.

But the train that is Casanova constantly holds together. While Fraction may be putting the loco in this locomotive, the real engineer continues to be Fábio Moon. At the center of it all, at the center of it all. Art and colors. Dynamic. Fluid. Beat for beat. Beautiful.

12. Other Selves

Created by: Theo Ellsworth

Theo Ellsworth continues to show the world that he’s got his own thing going on, and that thing may, in some small way, end up saving the world, one self at a time. This is a 64 page black and white self-published mini that Ellsworth put together for this year’s Linework NW and it’s all Ellsworth, full of meticulous and dense pages of direct address and dream-like images.

Ellsworth calls this book a “psychic chiropractic adjustment” (to be filed under: “Hand Drawn Inner-Space Documentary Comics”). Here he is an artist viewing himself as the one who is in control of creating the Other Selves of his imagination. As he probes deeper and deeper into his self-creations, though, things get weirder and weirder, layering levels of the fantastic and the imaginative, each self in control of itself. Finally his inner workings are so far out that a part of him unleashes the “Reality Control Officers” into his “Personal Imaging Zone” admonishing him to “Go back to reality! Now!” What remains is a battle between inspiration and sense, art versus logic.

11. Time Clock

Created by: Leslie Stein

Published by: Fantagraphics

Continuing her Eye of the Majestic Creature series, Leslie Stein keeps unfolding the life of her semi-autobiographical doppelganger, Larrybear, and her gang of friends. This one is sad and funny and beautiful.

Larrybear’s interactions with those she loves and those she stumbles into are confessional on either end. Though Stein suffuses much of these moments with humor or absurdity, they have an emotional truth at their core. Those whose lives she touches see their interactions through the lens of their own distractions and understandings. Larrybear exudes an endearing and surreal sweetness that brings others into her various spheres, comforting or confusing them in a manner that is seemingly just what they both need at that juncture.

Whether it be popping pretensions or providing inspiration or affirming humanity, Larrybear seems to say or do the right thing, no matter how off-kilter it is. There is nothing mean anywhere, even in the casual, but rather there is an over-riding kindness that cannot be helped.

Even as Larrybear draws inside herself and faces her own uncertainty, Time Clock seems to acknowledge that above all else, we have no other option than to acknowledge that we are all in this together.

So why not choose kindness?

10. Silver Wire

Created by: Jordan Shiveley

Published by: Uncivilized Books

This is another small book that seemingly slipped under a number of people’s radar, but it is a quiet, powerful book that deserves a wider audience. Shively calls it a “mouse tragicomedy” and it is all about the casualness with which we loathe ourselves and how, by harming ourselves, we do the most damage to the people we would never want to hurt at all.

Silver Wire works because of its pacing. It unfolds from minutia to the larger world and back again. Even in its most dramatic moment, Silver Wire takes the time to linger on the soft gestures that Shively uses to convey emotion -- the distance engendered by both the choice of using mice and the choice of taking everything down to basic shapes in his rendering. Somehow this makes the emotional beats that much more potent. In these layers of erasure the reader finds their own faces and connects, as if the hardest punch comes from the softest hand.

9. Every Life I Ever Lived

Created by: Robin William Scott

Published by: Good Comics

Sometimes a book comes to you at the absolute right time for its true weight to rest in your hands. So it was with Every Life I Ever Lived. Given the overwhelming chaos unleashed by the last half of 2016, Scott’s gentle reminder to look around and pay attention to the little moments, to understand life is its own work of art, was healing.

Every Life I Ever Lived is essentially a collection of diary comics. It is comprised of 100 (mostly) four panel strips capturing Scott’s daily routine, one day at a time. Herein, Scott details the meals he ate, the beers he drank, and the television he watched. He captures his time at work, his concerns about learning to drive, and his problems with sleep. In the pages of Every Life I Ever Lived there is no pretension, no didacticism, no polemic against modernity, and no exhortation to the “better person.” Rather, there is a laser focus on the platitudinous and bromidic, the marking of time and the distractions sought — the tiny moments of life.

In seeing his “Self” in his days he sees his “Self” as it is, wobbly at times, unsure and detached — he reaches out and reaches in, and in this, becomes the everyman, and in this, becomes heroic.

8. What Happened

Created by: Simon Moreton

Published by: Killgore Books

Simon Moreton creates art that is beautiful in the complexity of its simplicity. He pares down storytelling to the essentials: the essential moments, the essential lines, the essential beats. Between his self-published zines and his published longer works, the oeuvre of Moreton is to be treasured for how it exposes the world to the possibilities of quieting down a little.

It’s amazing how much information can be conveyed when you remove the details. Such is the premise of the art of British cartoonist Simon Moreton. In What Happened, his latest release from small press publisher Kilgore Books, Moreton combines thin lines, thick scribbles, and a profusion of Dot Toning in order to craft an April to September tale of childhood summer that softly and deftly evokes what changes and what stays the same in the process of growing up.

7. My Dead Mother

Created by: Clara Jetsmark

Published by: Uncivilized Books

I picked up an early edition of this book at SPX this year without any sense whatsoever as to what it contained. What it contained, though, was something magical. Smart, outstanding, and bonkers, My Dead Mother came at me from unexpected places; each page went sidewise, yet I ended up really happy with the destination.

In My Dead Mother, it is only when women carve out a path for themselves that actualization occurs and the cycle of dependency is broken. Yet Jetsmark is never thematically heavy-handed in her book. She uses the elements inherent in comics to make her point and relies on her deft and tight cartooning to allow her motif to unfold. There is as much a clarity to her tight lines as there is to her storytelling. In the midst of such a daring narrative, one that could easily become bogged down in the preciousness of the idea, there is an undeniable confidence in Jetsmark’s art which transfers to the book’s easy readability.

6. Our Mother

Created by: Luke Howard

Published by: Retrofit/Big Planet

Our Mother is a book that only congeals upon finishing. It’s one of those books that you have to have faith in -- as its rewards are many, but require patience for the payoff. Howard’s art in this works perfectly for what he is exploring here, and, though seemingly slight, it hits with power.

Our Mother is an incisively transcendent exploration of the effects of anxiety disorder. It works in a structure that seems dispassionate, yet ends up poignant and ardent as it gets to the truth behind trying to comprehend that which is incomprehensible. It sticks because of its humanity; it punches through the shut doors in our brains in welcoming ways, opening passages to a collective understanding of what has happened, how it shapes us, and where it leaves us as we step forward. Sometimes we become who we are by what has happened to us, not through what we have chosen to occur.

5. Frontier #11: BDSM

Created by: Eleanor Davis

Published by: Youth In Decline

Ryan and Jane Sands are doing some amazing things over at San Francisco based publisher, Youth in Decline. One of those things is curating an amazing comic series called Frontier. Pretty much everything in this series is something you should have or should be reading, but in 2016, the clear winner was Eelanor Davis’ contribution, BDSM. There isn’t a line wasted in this book.

Whether it is confronting the ramifications of power in what feminist film critic Laura Mulvey conceptualized and labeled “the male gaze,” or understanding the interpersonal dynamics of dominance and submission in a sexual relationship as it plays out in both a public arena and a private space, Davis uses the framework of a tight narrative structure to expound upon her ideas, allowing the reader to assign understanding a posteriori. In the end, though, the reader ultimately has to confront themselves.

4. Nod Away

Created by: Joshua Cotter

Published by: Fantagraphics

The density and intricacy of Joshua Cotter’s art and narrative in Nod Away are breathtaking. The very thought of him continuing this for another seven volumes boggles the mind. And yet, if he pulls it off at the same level as this first volume, it may become contender for one of the most amazing artistic achievements in comics in the modern era. This is so good.

Ostensibly this first volume is a sci-fi story that circles around issues such as the human desire for exploration and connection, the power structure inherent in gender politics, and the gray area created in the intersection between science and morality, but, as the book unfolds, the reader feels there is something more complicated occurring in the periphery. Cotter is exploring profound questions of consciousness itself by creating a story that asks them indirectly.

3. Beverly

Created by: Nick Drnaso

Published by: Drawn and Quarterly

Growing up in suburbia breeds a certain ennui that is a beast unto itself, available to nobody other than those that inhabit those spaces. I was one of those, and Nick Drnaso’s Beverly hit me in all those old wounds that I thought had scabbed over many years ago. I loved this book so much that I even lobbied hard and successfully to get Keith Silva and Taylor Lilley to write about it with me.

The quest to assimilate is the definition of suburban life. Sure we may try to one-up the Johnsons with a shiny new fully-featured “Hypersonic Red” 2016 Prius Three in order to “Be Someone,” but it’s all tightly bound by the norm– you can only go so far. Thus the repression. Which breeds the ennui.

All swaddled in the smugness of privilege.

As Tyler and Cara’s dad says to his young son, “Cherish these years. You will miss them someday.” There’s perfunctory abuse in these words. It is as it needs to be. It is expected, don’t you see?

Drnaso gets it as if he’s lived it. Beverly connects because it captures the concrete sponge we use to whitewash the lives of suburban white America. It so easily reveals the effortless castigation of the stranger, because one of us would never do us any harm.

2. BLAMMO #9

Created by: Noah Van Sciver

Published by: Kilgore Press

Watching Noah Van Sciver mature as a cartoonist has been amazing. With each successive release, his drawing gets more detailed and his story telling more intimate. This year, BLAMMO #9 came out and it captured me from the beginning to the end. Van Sciver makes so much out of so little; his pacing and choices are spot on. This book is hard to shake, as it speaks deeply to human insecurity and longing.

“Culmination” — it’s a word that is easily bandied about by often thick intellectual types who caper about places of higher learning wearing paisley sweaters and corduroy pants. Derived from the late Latin word culminātus (past participle of culmināre, “to come to a peak”), its definition runs along the lines of something like, “to reach the highest point, summit, or highest development … especially as attained after a long time.” I bring this all up for the following reason: cartoonist Noah Van Sciver has been producing his one-man anthology series Blammo for almost over a decade now, and Blammo #9 serves, in many ways, as a culmination of his development as a cartoonist, artist, and man.

1.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Lake Imago

Words by: Eddie Wright

Art by: Jamaica Dyer

Bat-Man is Lost in the Woods

Created by: David Enos

Published by: California Clap

Mean Girls Club

Created by: Ryan Heshka

Published by: Nobrow Press

THREE BOOKS I LOVED IN 2016 BUT NEVER GOT AROUND TO REVIEWING

Laid Waste

Created by: Julia Gfrörer

Published by: Fantagraphics

Jacob Bladders and the State of the Art

Created by: Roman Muradov

Published by: Uncivilized Books

Libby’s Dad

Created by: Eleanor Davis

Published by: Retrofit/Big Planet

THE ONE BOOK I UNABASHEDLY HATED THE MOST IN 2016

Dark Night: A True Batman Story

Words by: Paul Dini

Art by: Eduardo Risso

Published by: DC Comics

This fucking book got me so mad that I had to write a screed/rant regarding everything I found poisonous about it. It is a garbage book with a garbage message that needs to be put in the garbage can of history and set on fire. And if you disagree with me, you better come at me with some seriously valid criticism, otherwise sit down, shut up, and leave me alone.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I don’t know how much criticism I’m going to be able to write in 2017. I’m turning 50, quitting smoking, and Trump is our president. This is the proverbial trifecta in terms of battening down the hatches and waiting out the storm.

Yet, as one of the witches says in Macbeth, “Though his bark cannot be lost, Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.”

I wish you all strength, good will, and the quiet respite of good comics in the coming year.

Peace.