Looking At Him Looking: Daniel Elkin reviews THROUGH A LIFE by Tom Haugomat

“How'd you know I was looking at you

If you weren't looking at me?”

-- Mr. Bungle, “Egg” 

We are all, in some sense, voyeurs. It’s inevitable as we watch the world before us unfold. Yet, never before have we had such access to the lives of others. And as we willingly and carefully curate and document our own lives for the edification of others, privacy becomes a tenuous space. Still, the act of watching others is how we learn: learn to grow, learn to hope, learn to dream. But what is the value of watching others as they watch their world? What do we learn from this?

In Tom Haugomat’s beautiful new book from Nowbrow Press, Through A Life, the answer seems to be that through this act of voyeurism, we learn that growing, hoping, and dreaming ultimately leads us nowhere except to disappointment.

Told through a series of single-page illustrations, Haugomat places his main character, Rodney, in time and space and then, thorough point-of-view, focuses the reader on what this character is seeing. Each page turn marches the perspective through a lifetime, year after year, from earliest memories to final moments, the full range of a life lived. By this, we are given access to the creation of Rodney’s hopes, the development of his dreams, and the brutal realities of eventual disappointment.

Haugomat is, first and foremost, an illustrator whose background in animation is instantly apparent in this book. Paring his visual cues down to their essentials, Haugomat works in forms mostly, eschewing detail in order to broaden the reader’s connection to the work. But what his illustration lacks in specificity, it makes up in his use of color. Suffused with a consistent palette throughout featuring a bold blue, a pale yellow, an inky black, and an amazingly vivid red, Haugomat’s work pops from the page, as if it is a series of propaganda posters advocating for a carefully constructed political platform that is, at its heart, a vision of an idealized world unobtainable, an illusion, a fraud.

“Rodney spends his life looking through…” begins the blurb on the back of Through A Life. He’s an observer whose observations gives him a distance, sets up a barrier between himself and his experiences. As such, the emotional beats of the book seem as detached from the truth as Rodney himself is from the reality of his life. As he grows and hopes and dreams, there is an inevitability to the loss he encounters, but, because of the manner Haugomat has framed this work, the visceral impact of these losses on the reader are lessened. We are only observing someone else observing, after all.

There’s an interesting, albeit well-worn exploration of the juxtaposition of the micro with the macro in Through A Life, as Haugomat tries to bring the reader’s attention to (while raising the value of) the small moments in life by placing them in contrast to the vastness of space and the notion of grand exploration. But, once again, through the distance engendered by Haugomat’s narrative and artistic choices, this, too, seems a specious and misleading propaganda. It’s as if nothing ends up mattering in the end -- that in reality, everything is disappointing because we expect too much from it all.

Perhaps this is the parable of our times.

Perhaps, too, the value of Through A Life is not just in its striking beauty as a work of craftsmanship and art, but in the fact that its lies are so blatant while its truths are so revelatory.

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Daniel Elkin is the EIC of Your Chicken Enemy, the Former Small-Press Comics Editor for Comics Bulletin, and has Bylines at Loser City, Psycho Drive-In, Wink, Factional, WWAC, Shelfdust, and PanelXPanel. He's a High School English Teacher in Northern California. He'll talk to you about Sandwiches and that Tusk is the best Fleetwood Mac album.

Work and Workspace: Rob Clough reviews NOBROW 10

NoBrow began as a publisher putting out anthologies of beautiful illustration work. It wasn't long before they started branching out into comics, launching the careers of cartoonists like Luke Pearson and Jon McNaught. Their tenth-anniversary anthology is a throwback to the early days, as it's almost entirely illustrations instead of comics. That said, there's much in here to discuss with regard to the way cartoonists see themselves and their workspaces. NoBrow 10 is also a strong statement about the publisher's aesthetic that's strongly guided their approach during that time. 

The theme of NoBrow 10 is "Studio Dreams". There were a set of patterns regarding how each artist interpreted what this might mean. For some, it meant what their dream studio might look like without regard to reality or limitations. A number of them fantasized about treehouses as their studios, such as Jarom Vogel, Dustin Harbin, and Jan Van Der Veken. Many more imagined them in a house in a forest, surrounded by vegetation. Others fantasized about a lake or ocean view. A general rule of thumb for most of the entries is that the more detailed the environment was in their drawings, the less detailed their actual workspaces were. That was especially true for naturalistic styles like Bianca Bagnarelli, whose drawing emphasizes the house and the surroundings she works in, but only offers up a tiny silhouette of her actual workspace. On the other extreme, Jim Stoten's illustration is heavy on presenting the tiniest details of his workspace, even if some are imaginary. 

Regarding the details of the space, a number of illustrators chose to draw the most minimalist of spaces for a work area. Matthew The Horse's drawing was of a giant rainbow that he saw outside, as he stood, half-naked, in front of a blank canvas. David Doran's entry is a plain table with some papers and books on it; his drawing was more concerned with looking at the sea. Sarah Soh's illustration had her sitting on a couch, away from a humble table with a work computer on it. On the other hand, Virginie Morgand's workspace wraps around the entire room and the drawing itself, cleverly drawing the reader's eye in a circle from the foreground to the background. Noa Snur's illustration is a celebration of workspaces of all kinds, from painting to music to cartooning to writing and more. Joe Todd Stanton's piece is another departure, using muted dark greens to highlight peeks through brightly lit windows, each with a different artist at work in a different way. 

Another interesting detail was how the artists drew themselves in their workspace. Malika Favre didn't draw herself at all. Neither did James Wilson, whose drawing was a set of floating shapes. Andrew Rae was one of the few who drew himself in the same proportions as the environment, although he was in a mechanical contraption that allowed him to do everything at once. Daniel Locke was the only illustrator to draw a comic with text, one where the scene shifted in every panel. Some artists drew themselves in a busy coffee shop, like Rebecca Crane. Steve Scott's strip was very funny, as he drew a fictional illustration studio that included a demonic shrine, a research department going off in a submarine, and an armed invoice collection squad. Perhaps my favorite drawing was that of Shannon Wright; she drew herself taking up most of the space in her drawing, with a board in front of her with a work in progress. Zhang Liang imagined a studio with a guy and a gal each indulging their favorite activities while taking turns drawing. Zosia Dzierzawska's drawing is a departure from the rest: she dominates the illustration, which is filled with muted colors and scrawled lines. 

I think it's important to key in on the second word of the subtitle, "dreams" with regard to the differences in how the artists drew themselves vs how they drew their studio space. From an editorial perspective, it's implicit in the title that the illustrators were asked to draw an idealized version of their workspace. I think for some artists, the lush surroundings they drew for their workspace vs the way they minimized themselves was an indication that they would prefer to draw anything other than themselves.  However, I think most just preferred to really indulge themselves in the direction given to them by the theme, creating an artist's utopia in image after image. 

There's a lot of great drawing in this anthology. However, the candy-colored NoBrow house style resulted in most of these drawings bleeding into each other. NoBrow's comics, for the most part, have a bright, friendly palette: oranges, reds, yellows, pinks, light purples, etc. It's a pastel parade that eschews darker colors in general and shading techniques like hatching in particular. There's a lack of density or weight in many of these illustrations as a result. It's not unusual for a publisher to have an overall aesthetic defined over time. Drawn & Quarterly, especially when Chris Oliveros was still the publisher, was strongly influenced by a combination of classic American comic strips and Franco-Belgian cartooning. 2DCloud is known for its willingness to take risks on comics that eschew narrative. Even Fantagraphics, which publishes a wide array of styles, has always had a strong connection to the underground era's dense drawing techniques. 

However, the aesthetics of a line have an effect on how those comics are perceived. Drawn and Quarterly is often perceived as having a more refined aesthetic than other publishers, even if it isn't always true. The opposite is the case with Fantagraphics, where folks think of their publications as edgy or transgressive. In the case of NoBrow, the unbending brightness of the color schemes and their dominance over line gives them the look of children's books, which certainly wasn't true in their earlier days. However, they've leaned into that aesthetic to the point of establishing a separate children's imprint called Flying Eye. Other than their content, most of those books don't look significantly different from their main line of comics. A closer look reveals a variety of storytelling techniques, just like a closer look at this anthology reveals dozens of subtle differences from drawing to drawing. NoBrow 10 is a book best examined slowly, just a piece or two at a time, and it rewards multiple reads with new details emerging each time. This is a book to be cherished for its production values, its commitment to giving its illustrators all the space they need, and a firm commitment to the aesthetics that are the bedrock of the publisher. 

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Rob Clough has written about comics for Cicada, the Comics Journal, Sequential, tcj.com,
sequart.com, Savant, Foxing Quarterly, Studygroup Magazine, as well as for his own blog, High-Low (highlowcomics.blogspot.com).

A “Shopping List” For A (truly) Black Friday

I'm depressed. I can't write reviews right now. So, instead, for this week's

TINY PAGES MADE OF ASHES

on Comics Bulletin, I made a shopping list instead:

Review: MEAN GIRLS CLUB by Ryan Heshka

Wrote about Ryan Heshka's MEAN GIRLS CLUB 

from Nobrow Press 

for Wink Books.

READ THE WHOLE REVIEW HERE

In a nod to the pulps and pin-ups of the past and rendered in fluorescent pinks and inky blacks, Heskha upends the conventional idea of the B-movie Vixen by adding a layer of such over-the-top brutality and vehemence that it transcends the possible, bringing the trope into the post-ironic age where we have lost the ability to discern what we are meant to take seriously.

Top 10 Comics (I reviewed) of 2015

Click on the titles to read the full reviews.

10. DHARMA PUNKS by Ant Sang. Published by Earth's End Publishing.

While Sang is working deep within a philosophical construct, at its heart Dharma Punks is a character driven story. Sang uses all sorts of temporal tricks to not only tell his story, but also to unfold motivations and emotional ballast in each one of his characters. It pulls you in as it smacks of the way we actually learn about the people in our lives. Traditional “Origin Stories” are lazy, simplistic, and false – we get to know people through layers of time, we understand them in pieces and through that, formulate the whole. Sang breathes this sort of life into Dharma Punks and thus engages his audience on a level more true to experience than narrative convenience.

9. HOUSES OF THE HOLY by Caitlin Skaalrud. Published by Uncivilized Books.

Houses of the Holy is a beautiful, horrible, unyielding, noble, and ferocious diary of self-introspection in which the narrator journeys through her pain, the damage at the heart of her psyche. Everything is alluded to in page after page of art installation metaphors laid inky thick in panels, in splashes, forcing the reader to piece together fragments into wholes that never fully gel because outside in the periphery there are still moments to be confronted.

8. VACANCY by Jen Lee. Published by NoBrow Press.

The experience of Vacancy is one that fills the gap and suffuses the emptiness that its title suggests. It peers through the hole in our fence and fills our minds with the possibilities of what might be on the other side.

7. FEDOR by Pat Kelley. Published by Hic + Hoc Publications

This is a book about connecting as much as it is a book about outsiders. It touches on questions of identity and appearances, but also sacrifices and longing. Kelley’s beautiful and light cartooning adds a distance to its heavy subject matter, and the brown watercolor washes that cover every page augments both its historical conceit and its sense of grounding in the real world.

6. PLANS WE MADE by Simon Moreton. Published by Uncivilized Books.

Longing is a human construct that is saturated with hope. It is the wellspring from which arises disappointment as much as it slakes desire. Within all discontent comes the impetus for change. Morton takes this all apart in Plans We Made through narrative, through pace, but mostly through his simple lines and layouts. In Morton’s pages, forms are dissolved into naked shapes through which the reader makes meaning, attempts closure, overlays the self. Here, what is less becomes more; the silence echoes reflections like a placid lake seen from above. Each moment is about that which is unsaid and undrawn; it leads to the cacophony of silence and an emotional center that holds tight insomuch as it becomes universal.

5. CASANOVA: ACEDIA by Matt Fraction and Fabio Moon. Published by Image Comics.

Sure Casanova Quinn is all mid-70’s Mick Jagger swagger, but at its heart, Casanova: Acedia grooves with the strum und drang of Ziggy Stardust’s impossible mission realized, to become a rock and roll star by just being a rock and roll star. You show up in a stretch limo, gonked to the nines on rails of cocaine — you step out in your fashion with a guitar in your hand and people start taking notice, people start taking pictures. Suddenly you climb up on stage and everybody wants to sing along with your songs, everybody wants to be you, and they feed and they feed on your dream until there is nothing left to do but escape to the Eastern Block wearing Jimmy’s pants, crank up the electronica mood inducers, and start howling into the microphone all that is left of your soul.

4. BORB by Jason Little. Published by Uncivilized Books.

Borb is infinitely accessible and incredibly hard to swallow. It confronts the idea of homelessness full on, relentlessly, and, although presented in humor comic format, it doesn’t candy-coat. In fact, the choice of exploring an issue of such gravity in the style of something that evokes a light-hearted expectation is what gives Borb so much of its power.

3. GENEROUS BOSOM #1 by Conor Stechschulte. Published by Breakdown Press.

See, there’s a thickness to every aspect of this book, as if gravity itself is exerting some different type of influence on these pages. There’s a disturbing weight to it, as if it were a singularity unto itself, composed, metaphorically, of an infinite density.

2. SAINT COLE by Noah Van Sciver. Published by Fantagraphics.

Because Saint Cole is part of the long tradition of the balladry of brutality. It sings the song of the sink hole caused by a life lived in response to expectations it could never fulfill. It's the chant you hear in the places people gather to drown out their sorrows, it echoes in the alley behind the neighbor's house whom you've never met, it rings in your own head from time to time, that is, if you are sensitive to it.

1. ANN BY THE BED (FRONTIER #6) by Emily Carroll. Published by Youth in Decline.

In this book, Carroll manipulates conventional narrative with a surgeon's scalpel cutting through cause and effect, bouncing her reader through time and space, disconcerting as she disconnects, adding a layer of displacement to the tone of its entirety. Then there's her apt choices of art style and color use, each of which adds another emotional hue. As well, she varies the thickness of her inking to contract and expand, and her lettering changes to resonate with the mood she is working with. In Ann by the Bed, Carroll uses all the evocative tools that comics offer in order to concentrate the tenor and the feel of the reading experience.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

HOLLOW IN THE HOLLOWS by Dakota McFadzean. Published by One Percent Press

PERPLEXING STORIES by Jonathan King. Published by Eel Noir.

BIG PUSSY by Gina Wynbrandt. Published by 2D Cloud.

SUPERCAKES by Kat Leyh. Published by Yeti Press.

ABSTRACT KIRBY 1 and 2 by Mark Badger.

BOOKS I LOVED BUT HAVE YET TO REVIEW

UNDERSTANDING MONSTER #3 by Theo Ellsworth.

SHADOW HILLS by Sean Ford

Finding the Sound of The Self: A Review of 101 ARTISTS TO LISTEN TO BEFORE YOU DIE by Ricardo Cavolo

While it has been said that there is a soundtrack to everyone’s life, I think this statement is misleading. Music is not the backbeat to our daily lives, it is sound of the self. I insist that the music we love defines us completely, while also, of course, allowing for community. As much as our “taste” is a product of our environment, music somehow is a personal testament to the person we are, even more so than the person we want others to think us to be.

I bring this up as a result of reading Ricardo Cavolo’s new book 101 Artists To Listen To Before You Die, recently published by NoBrow Press. I also bring this up because while both Jason Sacks at Comics Bulletin and David Fairbanks at Loser City have both written tremendous reviews of this book, neither of them seemed to point out the role music plays in our development of self.

Fairbanks and Sacks have examined this book from an outsider’s perspective, spending most of their reviews scrutinizing the personal nature of Cavolo’s almost poetic mini-essays about his choices, how they are revelatory of Cavolo’s subjective taste. They also examine his beautiful outsider art portraits that hallucinatory punctuate this book, adding even more of a singular personality to 101 Artists To Listen To Before You Die. What is missing from these reviews, though, is what the totality of the book adds up to, and what deriving meaning from that exploration means universally.

Music is the litmus towards how we conceive ourselves. I mean this absolutely. Would I be the man I am today if I had not, at a pivotal moment in my life, listened to Black Angel’s Death Song and the rest of that first Velvet Underground album? I had been trying other music on for definition up until that moment, but up until then they had all fit me like a cheap suit or the skin of another man. The moment I discovered the sounds Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Mo Tucker were making, I discovered myself. Not who I wanted to be or how I wanted to be seen by others, mind you, but my essential self.

And this is why music plays such a powerful role in all of our lives. We inhabit songs because they are us. The diary aspect of Cavolo’s book emphasizes this in subtle ways. We understand Cavolo because of his musical choices. His connection to the songs and bands that he examines in 101 Artists To Listen To Before You Die tells us directly who he is. By looking at the music that he loves, he lays himself naked before us.

Yeah, sure, music builds community as well. We hear about new bands from our peers and gravitate to music that people we like, like. But I posit that we gravitate to that music in the same way we have gravitated to the people recommending it. We see so much of ourselves in our friends. We should see as much of ourselves in our songs as well.

Ricardo Cavolo’s 101 Artists To Listen To Before You Die is a beautiful book, not just for its honesty and not just for its transcendent art. It is a beautiful book because it is a pure expression of self, celebratory and excited. It is the direction that autobiographical books can easily go towards in order to strip away the self-deprecation and the self-doubt and the self- loathing that we all swaddle ourselves in so often.

It reveals the light inside us, the large heart we contain, the song that we are.

Many years ago, Victor Hugo wrote, “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” What he was talking about, and what Cavolo perfectly captures, is that music is access to our souls. If the universe began with a word, humanity began with a song. And, oh, what a beautiful song it is that we sing.

You can pick up a copy of 101 Artists To Listen To Before You Die from NoBrow Press here.

Review: CYBER REALM by Wren McDonald is Animus, Retribution and Vengeance

As one of my last reviews of comics for the next couple of weeks (going on a much needed vacation), Comics Bulletin Editor-in-Chief Jason Sacks and I dig into the underpinnings of Wren McDonald's new book from Nobrow Press, part of their 17x23 series.

While Sacks wants to talk happiness, I want to talk Will to Power:

"I could easily draw parallels between Cyber Realm and the state of race relations in our country, or even use it as a soapbox to examine the Israeli/Palestinian situation, but I think McDonald would rather us keep our discussion on a more intimate, human level.

I think his art demands that as much as his story does too. There is, like you said Sacks, a depth to the main character here. Sure his motivations are painted in bright neon colors on his sleeve, and we don’t get a lot of inner turmoil or philosophical musings on his part, but his singular focus is familiar insomuch as it broadly reflects so much of the subtle frustrations we all feel on a daily basis. The frustrations we feel at work, in our day-to-day, and even, sometimes, in our own homes.

It was Nietzsche who posited that the “world is the will to power – and nothing besides!” Humans have a drive to control their lives as much as they do the world around them. When that is denied, they lose identity. In Cyber Realm, that loss of identity is physically manifested in the main character’s physical transformation and the fact that McDonald never gives him a name.

Perhaps Cyber Realm is, in its way, the prophecy of the Übermensch, but more likely, it’s just a damn fine comic book that’s fun to read and leaves you wanting to read more."

READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW HERE 

After The Fence We Find Each Other: A Review of Jen Lee's VACANCY

“How cold the vacancy

When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist

First sees reality.” – Wallace Stevens Esthétique du Mal.

Loneliness is drug. Powerful. Hallucinatory. Its psychoactive effects can lead you to underestimate the consequences of venturing into uncharted territory. To a place you don't belong. A place fraught with danger. “There” not “Here”. Outside. Through the hole in the fence. Into the woods.

But we are not built to be alone. The solitary man is no man at all. A life of quiet contemplation is no life really. Being alive requires us to step forth into the world of others. Shared experiences are more real somehow.

When I was 21, I made a road trip from New York to Texas. Along the way I stopped in Memphis and took the tour of Graceland. As I wandered around Elvis' mansion, my sense of self began to bend in ways it had never bent before. By the time I made it to the Jungle Room, my brain was so filled with an internal dialogue composed of a thick, viscous gibberish that I began to eye all the exit routes, convinced that I would need to flee before it got any worse. If only I had someone I could trust next to me, someone to whom I could have whispered, “Can you believe this?” I could have made sense of the experience, I could have reveled in the weirdness. Alone, I was bent. With a buddy, I would have been King.

Why am I telling this story?

Nobrow Press has just recently published Jen Lee's Vacancy as part of their 17x23 series, and this beautiful book has me thinking about solitude and experience. It's these ideas that provide the backdrop for an amazingly dense story told through character and inference.

The solicitation for Vacancy reads, “In a dishevelled and ransacked backyard, a dog named Simon has been forgotten by his owners. Simon contemplates breaking free and eventually partners up with a raccoon and a deer who take him into the woods. But Simon realizes he is not quite ready to live in the wild.”

In Lee's telling, though, there is a larger background to this seemingly “grass is always greener” story that has to do with anthropomorphic animals, crashed planes, destroyed spaces, quarantine areas, and questions like “Don't you remember what happened to Randall?” Much like her webcomic, Thunderpaw, there is this sense that something apocalyptic has happened, leaving the animals changed, leaving them to fend for themselves, leaving them unsure of what the rules are now. And, like in Thunderpaw, Vacancy revolves around the need for companionship in navigating this new world.

It's a beautiful book both in terms of its storytelling and well as its craft. Lee's use of color is breathtaking, especially her use of sunset and sunrise soft reds and pinks to capture atmosphere, tone, and mood, especially when juxtaposed with the blue-greens of her nights and the momentary stark, flat white of her days. In the 24 pages of Vacancy, things crackle when they should, quiet when you need to hear the whispers, and bleed when something is after you. Lee's cartooning seduces you into one set of emotions – comfortable and familiar in a Saturday Morning sort of way – while the story itself murmurs something strange off to the side, almost hidden in the forest.

Lee's main character is hoodie wearing, bespectacled dog. Simon cannot function in isolation. Upon hearing howls from the woods outside his fenced yard, he dreams of marking “trees with you soon, my yote brothers.” But he just doesn't have the capacity or the wherewithal to venture forth alone from his enclosure, his home. He takes the random opportunity of strangers in his midst to step out into a new world; he needs guides to show him the ropes of this adventure.

But his pathfinders are seemingly little help when it comes to navigating the dangers of the woods. Rather, as the monomyth trope demands, they teach him the value of something more meaningful, the powerful sense-making systems of community, the understanding that we are all that much more capable when we stand together as one.

Lee's world-building is as dynamic a character as her anthropomorphic heroes. As her trio journeys, the environment they discover and cross through develops and, in doing so, tells a secondary story of destruction and despair. Through inference, reading the signposts that Lee has put up in this world, the audience begins to glean what may have happened to Simon's family and why these animals dress and behave as they do. And it is in these conjectures that the reader begins to unfurl a terrible backstory that they, themselves, own.

Which gives this comic its heft and its power. Which serves as a dialogue between artist and viewer. Which makes the reading of Vacancy such a pleasure and provides a small communal event therein.

The experience of Vacancy is one that fills the gap and suffuses the emptiness that its title suggests. It peers through the hole in our fence and fills our minds with the possibilities of what might be on the other side.

You can purchase a copy of Vacancy from Nobrow Press directly by clicking here.