3 Books by Blaise Larmee (2Dcloud, 2015)
In talking about Blaise Larmee’s work, it’s said that it’s hard not to talk about Larmee himself. He has a confident, argumentative online persona, asserting himself in editorials often perceived as long-winded screeds, impenetrable as they are oppositional.
So before I being to dig into 3 Books, Larmee’s latest release, let me describe my first encounter with both his work and the culture surrounding it. In 2007, seeking respite from a relationship on the rocks, I went to visit my friend in Brownsville, Texas. It was the last year that people were allowed to cross the border without a passport, so we took an afternoon to visit Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande. It was there, in the flea market plaza at the center of town, that I first saw Larmee’s work. His recent release, Young Lions, lay amidst gaudy Mexican historia comics. I was entranced by the loose linework haunted by (purposeful?) erasure, a stark contrast to the bold Mike Mignola and Mike Allred work I had been reading.
I offered the guy running the stand $20, but he wouldn’t take American money. Back across the border, I scoured the internet for details. There was nothing on Ebay (this was back when Ebay was in use), but I did find this review of the book on the Comics Comics site. With such a lively comments section, I was sure someone could help me get a copy of the book. I posted a request, hoping I could PayPal someone some money in return for a book, but I was, perhaps inevitably, trolled. I deleted my comment, but two days later, I got an email from someone who was ready to ship me a copy of Young Lions.
I’m getting a bit off track, but this context is important to how I approached 3 Books. That sense of desperate mystery in 2007 has always shaded my view of Larmee; 3 Books rewards being approached as an enigma or even as an outright lie. These challenges to classification are established immediately in the introduction by Pamela Lee. “The subject of an omnibus is almost exclusively that which it reproduces,” it starts. “Any critique we might fire slips past it. Only paratextual elements are vulnerable…” Lee is telling us (critics, and possibly readers) not to interact with Larmee’s work. Instead, she’s telling us to focus on the paratext: the cover, the intro, the context of the book instead of the contents.
Jumping back outside the book, the cover itself supports this approach. It’s immediately subject to a critique on the subject of its truth; it isn’t attached at the spine, so it shows that, despite the title, it’s not three books. It’s one book, all glued and sewn together. The title could have been 3 Stories or 3 Vignettes, but that’s too coy, too soft for Larmee. It’s three books or it’s one book, but both of those descriptions are wrong. “These are books best understood in profile,” Lee says at the end of her introduction, “the interiors of which are little more than extensions of the spine.” But that spine isn’t attached to the book(s); it wobbles around, inviting other interpretations. So can we believe Lee? Can we trust her as an authority on this book, on Larmee’s work, on art in general?
Lee has no bio or credentials listed after her intro; she’s just a name with a date. Doing some light searching, we come up with a possible match: an art professor named Pamela Lee with a bio at Stanford. Is this the same Pamela Lee? If so, it seems strange not to list her credentials since much of what she writes is an effort to make 3 Books unimpeachable; wouldn’t a noted inhabitant of the ivory tower of higher ed strongly serve that purpose? But maybe the absence of a bio is purposeful, pushing the reader to ask more questions and track down more paratext. Or maybe this isn’t the same Pamela Lee. Maybe this Pamela Lee is made up.
Larmee’s no stranger to making people up. This excellent interview with him, conducted by Sean T. Collins, mentions the fake Twitter account Larmee ran as cartoonist CF. Is it outside the realm of possibility that Larmee wrote the introduction himself, using it to point readers toward interrogating the paratexts of his own book?
Which allows me to transition back to my own early attempts at Larmee’s work. The email offer I received was from comixcomix@aol.com, and it was signed John. I was hoping he’d send the book and give me proof, such as a tracking number, at which point I’d pay him. He wanted payment first, which doesn’t seem so strange now, but I was young and suspicious those 8 years ago. I had no idea who this guy was.
As we emailed back and forth, trying to reach a deal, we got to talking about comics. It seemed like John read everything I didn’t, and recommendations littered every email he sent me. He was the one who finally pushed me to try Los Bros Hernandez’s Love & Rockets, who told me about Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, and much more. Unlike Young Lions, these were all available at Barnes & Noble. (My local comic store in La Crosse, Wisconsin, didn’t carry much past superheroes.)
John encouraged me to track down the comics as they were originally issued, though. Reading Love & Rockets in books organized by artist wasn’t the same as reading them as anthology issues where each featured all three brothers. The same went for Louis Riel; John thought it was impossible to separate the original serial issues from their context of Brown’s larger work on his Yummy Fur series.
One component of John’s insistence was the letter pages in the backs of each issue. It was living critique, and John had participated. I tried to find his stuff in the few issues I could find (and afford), but there was no John. In confronting him with this, he hinted at being prolific letterhack TM Maple or Comic Book Resource’s Augie De Blieck, Jr. I took these all to be jokes, of course—why use a pseudonymous email if he were famous?—but I never got his real identity out of him.
But again, I digress. The key point is that John, whoever he was, insisted that context was key for understanding a comic. And context is what 3 Books is all about. Dan Nadel, author of that long-ago critique of Young Lions, also reviewed 3 Books, giving it just under 300 words of contempt. Nadel does what Lee commanded not to: he focused on the material collected in the omnibus. And he found the work dull.
I’m sympathetic with Nadel; there are times when I want everything there on the page without all the dressings of context and layers of parody. And there are certainly some clunky pieces in 3 Books. The narration in the third story occasionally slips into a strange rhyming format that feels like a juvenile love (or lust) poem. I wouldn’t necessarily call it dull, though. Perhaps banal is a better word. Throughout the three books, the relationships Larmee portrays feel similar to what most college-aged boys go through, or at least what they want to go through: endless sex, dirty talking trying to be poetry, and romps through fancy hotels. If this were presented without the paratextual elements, 3 Books might end up feeling like nothing more than a typical teen romance movie. By Photoshopping his pages onto gallery walls (and I’m reasonably sure that’s the case—check out the floors under each painting), Larmee recontextualizes those scenes and moves them toward how some people wish sex felt: worthy of a museum. It’s intimacy cast as public performance—sex you can be proud of without demeaning it.
But it’s not without an element of satire, and the targets are many: the art world, the patriarchal view of sex, and Larmee himself. Why go through all these hoops to get this sex on the walls? Who benefits? Why is there an industry that supports this? But as usual, Larmee doesn’t give us the answers, so it’s up to whether we want to dig around for answers. It’s like an alternate reality game; what we get out of the book depends on what we put in. 3 Books is perfectly content to sit on the shelf, to be understood in profile, never giving any answers.
I never got an answer from John regarding Young Lions, and to this day, I still haven’t read it. The university email I was using to correspond expired a couple years after I dropped out of school, and when I finally enrolled again, my account had been wiped. Maybe John’s out there with Pamela Lee, with the people who bought Larmee’s fake paintings, and with Fake CF, all having a good laugh at our expense.
Sea Urchin by Laura Knetzger (Retrofit Comics & Big Planet Comics, 2015)
Laura Knetzger’s Sea Urchin starts the same way many stories do: with the disruption of a status quo. “I’ve been stuck lately. The bad moods are lasting weeks.” Things aren’t how they were understood to be. What follows, though, is not a typical narrative conflict or escalation of consequences. Nor is it a typical autobiographical hand-wringing and exploration of options. Instead, Sea Urchin comes off as a chronicle of symptoms and a meditation on negative feelings.
Sea Urchin’s pages seem to have more white space than other books. For instance, Knetzger’s lines are thin and consistent, and spot blacks and halftones are rare. Also, panel borders are scarce, and even when they’re present, they’re often broken by characters or design elements leaking from one panel to another. Lastly, the book is made up of a number of discrete vignettes, but there are no chapter heads or stanza breaks between them, so it can be difficult to tell where one ends and another begins. These effects combine to create a sense of slow wandering and exploration; reading the book feels a bit like wandering through a garden (a pretty sadness garden).
The things growing in the garden are surprising and occasionally dangerous. Knetzger gives her feelings imposing physical forms: black sea urchins pushing through her head, fractured faces dripping across her face, and raging anime villains. Characters grow and shrink in relation to each other and their emotional interactions. In prose (or in many autobio comics), narrators struggle to explain their negative feelings to the reader or to friends. In Sea Urchin, these feelings are more than metaphor. Knetzger’s depression isn’t like a sea urchin in her brain—it is an urchin.
People with mental illnesses (or other “invisible” illnesses) often have to bear the burden of proof that something is affecting them, as though there’s a subjective element to what they’re going through. Knetzger’s stories challenge that, portraying her feelings as object facts and inviting others to walk through her life.
What We’re Reading: In Real Life and Heaven’s Dream Town!
In Real Life by Cory Doctorow & Jen Wang (First Second, 2014)
In Real Life follows the decisions made by Anda, a teenager in Flagstaff, Arizona, as she tumbles through life both online and off, navigating the gray economics of earning real-world money for in-game actions.
Written for a YA audience, the scripting is clear and naturalistic. The plot, which finds Anda trying to help a Chinese gold farmer who works long hours playing online games, is almost preachy. However, a few more subtle developments save it: Anda inadvertently causes Raymond, the gold farmer, to lose his job; she’s called out for trying to dictate morals to a culture that isn’t her own; and Raymond ends up fixing his own life without help from a white savior. It’s an effective story that doesn’t let a moral lesson get in the way of honest character interaction.
The true treat of In Real Life is Jen Wang’s art. Her character designs are varied and realistic, and each one has a separate and believable posture and style. Their body language and facial expressions have a beautiful rhythm that propels the characters through situations without any need for written dialogue.
The quiet, real-life moments are punctuated by Wang’s madcap descent into the world of Coarsegold, the fictional online game that Anda plays. Her action sequences are fluid, and her use of in-game interfaces (health bars, inventory menus, log-off icons) works as an almost musical counterpoint to the more representational visuals, adding tension or slowing things down as needed.
And the colors in this book are just fantastic! Anda’s everyday life is filled with browns and yellows, while the game world is vibrant and bright. The tension between the bland and the vivid illustrates why Anda might be more drawn to the online world than her school and family life, and when she dies her hair a bright red, it’s a symbol of how her confidence in Coarsegold is bleeding into the passions she’s discovering as an organizer and activist.
Heaven’s Dream Town! by Wren McDonald (self-published, 2015)
Where IRL is long, full color, and clearly moral, Heaven’s Dream Town! is short, monochromatic, and much fuzzier. It follows an unnamed protagonist as he alternates his factory life with trips into an online VR world. Throughout the book, the protagonist is confronted with three moral decisions. First, in Heaven’s Dream Town, a new player asks him for help but actually tricks him into losing all of his inventory. Next, the factory he works in catches fire, and he attempts to save a fellow worker. On failing due to an explosion, he runs to safety. Finally, another player helps to win back his inventory, but she’s killed while the protagonist’s avatar stands silently, the final page showing that he’s fallen asleep in real life.
It’s a much more pessimistic view of life than what is presented in IRL: those that try to do good are fleeced, fail, or get too tired. But it’s not as bad as it seems—at least he tried, and with no incentive for himself. So if we can’t be Anda, at least we can be a nameless protagonist.
McDonald’s page structures are smart and clear. Real life and online life never “live” on the same pages. The pages taking place in Heaven’s Dream Town have black gutters and rounded, square panels reminiscent of screens (where each panel could be a screenshot), while the pages of his everyday life have hectic panel placement with repeated imagery.
The game mechanics of Heaven’s Dream Town as represented on the page feel less “true” than the similar elements in In Real Life. Characters’ levels are based on their inventory, so when the protagonist loses all his items, he’s bumped back to a beginner’s power. In most games, a character’s level and power is based on how long they’ve played, and it’s generally not possible to lose those levels. McDonald’s imagined system is subtly capitalistic, and it’s much scarier than traditional scaling. The one with the most toys literally wins, but those toys can be taken away. It’s just one more way that Heaven’s Dream Town! shows a world that is painfully like ours, while In Real Life, with its closure and personal power and self-evident power, might represent the world we’d like to see.
The Sculptor by Scott McCloud (First Second, Feb 3, 2015)
The Sculptor, Scott McCloud’s just released graphic novel, is a dense and impressive work. Using a set of familiar tropes (a deal with the devil, an artist and his muse, superpowers with consequences), McCloud tells a deep and affecting story while avoiding the pitfalls of said tropes. He uses a full complement of storytelling methods to control the rhythm and pacing across hundreds of pages without seeming flashy or clinically formalist.
I honestly wanted to dislike The Sculptor. I had just finished a new release by one of McCloud’s contemporaries (age-wise, at least, and probably fame-wise) that left a sour taste in my mouth. I was ready to read this book and write off an entire generation of cartoonists.
The introductions of McCloud’s many moving parts had me primed for dismissal: a deal with a too-cutesy Death, a troubled male artist and his beautiful but out-of-bounds muse, and big questions about the importance of art. I was ready to see the deal backfire due to the artist’s pride, to see the muse (a manic pixie dream girl) be harmed in the process, and then see the artist learn that art is universal or something like that.
I was so happy to have my expectations subverted. With almost 500 pages at his disposal, McCloud refuses to rush through his plot. The characters gain development and dimensionality. They rub up against their faults and the faults of others, circle each other, come apart, and return. And yes, maybe the guy gets the girl, but the girl has a full range of emotions, their relationship has ups and downs, and their love is a project they work on together.
And art’s not universal. Art is a mix of human desires, market forces, and human whims, and it doesn’t have any answers.
Protagonist David begins the book seeking success as an artist. He’s at an all-time low, drunk and penniless. He’s given 200 days of magic powers to meet his goal, and then he dies.
These powers come from his hands, and McCloud doesn’t let us forget this:
Hands are what we use to grab the world, mold it, push it. The implication is that David has power, responsibility, and agency. He’s primed to be the hero who takes control of his life in his final days and seize victory from Death!
But that’s not what The Sculptor is about. Instead, it’s about David learning what he can’t control. His hands, able to sculpt any inanimate material with a touch, aren’t worth a thing when his muse, Meg, is struggling with a mood disorder. His hands can’t make people like his art. They can’t stave off death or bring back his family.
The length of the book is key to McCloud’s organic development of the characters, and he utilizes every inch of space in a thoughtful way. Regular grids with wide margins take the reader through conversations at a comfortable pace, but McCloud also stretches panels to the gutters to lead into scene changes…
…or creates frenetically repetitive layouts for stressful party scenes.
The texture and coloring lends a quiet three-dimensionality to the drawings that’s appropriate for a story about sculpting, and it reveals a skillset that hasn’t found a place in other McCloud works.
With the comfortable display of cartooning skill on display and the touching character work, I’m worried that there’s some hidden flaw in The Sculptor that McCloud has puttied over and rounded off—some crumbling foundation that I missed while I was too busy being wowed. If that’s the worst thing I can say about the book, though, I’ll count it as a success. Besides, it gives me a reason to walk through its pages again.
Psst: Hear McCloud read from The Sculptor at Macalester on February 15! Details here.
