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What We’re Reading: 3 Books

2015 October 1
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What We're Reading

blaise-larmee-3-books-cover3 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.

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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.

What We’re (Going to Be) Reading: Autoptic Edition

2015 August 6
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What We're Reading

The Autoptic Festival is this weekend, August 8 and 9. It’s a convention that focuses on prints, comics, and music, and it’s free to attend. MN Artists has an excellent write-up on some of the big-name artists who will be attending, and they’re all excellent choices. Autoptic is a huge festival, though, and there are five other artists whose books I’m looking forward to buying. In no particular order…

11822457_10205664710110089_6664723219953127088_n The Suitor by Nicholas Straight

It seems like a lot of Straight’s creative energy has been taken up with a design job, and while it’s always great to see an artist have steady work, I was sad that it seemed to come at the expense of his comics. But I was wrong! The Suitor is debuting at Autoptic, and it looks great.

Straight’s line work is fine and feathery, looking almost like etchings at times. A high level of detail typically contributes to a more static image, but Straight is also great at dropping those lines out when he needs to show movement and action:

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In addition, the book seems like a generally beautiful object to have around. The die-cut cover (possibly done by hand?) over the pink paper is striking, and the full-page panels give it an “art book” feel and make it easy to browse after giving it a thorough read.

tumblr_nro529pUDh1rfs5alo1_1280 Ashen by Chase Van Weerdhuizen

It’s a comic so mysterious, I can’t even find the cover! Ashen looks to be a short black-and-white fantasy comic, and while I seriously overdosed on fantasy movies, shows, and novels around the age of 16, I still find delight in taking short dips into made-up worlds. It’s similar to what Kurt Vonnegut said about science fiction: “‘You know, the problem with science-fiction? It’s much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself.’ And it’s true: If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it’s over in a minute or so. It’s a tedious business to read all the surrounding material.”

And based on what Van Weerdhuizen has shown so far, he’s going beyond the Tolkienesque tropes of elves and fellowships. The previews I’ve seen seem to echo Greek or Babylonian design, his monsters are fleshy and strange, and his halftones give a feeling of stark, lonely travel. With minimal narration and short dialogue, Ashen looks to be a slow trip through a strange land without any of the expositional baggage of a fantasy epic.

tumblr_ns68p84qVB1qafb8to10_1280 Fütchi Perf by Kevin Czap

I’d only heard of Czap through his co-distribution of the Ley Lines series (one of which I’ve reviewed here). When I saw this preview of Fütchi Perf, it felt more like being swept into a song than reading a comic. Hair and clothes and eyes loop together across establishing shots. Snippets of conversation are spattered across snapshots of hands and mouths.

And those colors!

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It’s almost a neon pastel aesthetic, I guess, and it works perfectly for what Fütchi Perf seems to be—an album of shorts, with colors playing the roll of instruments, recurring through different songs but playing different notes. That’s a clumsy metaphor, especially next to Czap’s graceful lines, but it seems apt.

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Phases by Maddi Gonzalez

I got to see the first few pages of Phases at a reading, and I’ve been looking forward to reading the rest. Gonzalez has always been a brave cartoonist, dealing directly with issues of mental health and representation. Phases looks to be light-hearted, but it’s still an important topic: how we define ourselves and how that definition changes over time.

What stands out most is Gonzalez’s excellent page structures. Here’s my favorite page from what I’ve seen so far.

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When looking at pages like these, I try to consider what an artist didn’t do. Gonzalez could have used any number of comic “tricks” to show the passage of time: wide blank space, dense grid of panels with incremental differences, or a lone caption. Blank space is very ambiguous, though. A grid of incremental panels is more obvious to a reader, but it destroys the juxtaposition of Fairy Queen Maddi with Goth Pokemon Trainer Maddi. As for a plain block of narration, it’s the equivalent of movie voiceover: it gets the job done, but it doesn’t utilize the visual possibilities that make comics different from other media.

For the rest of preview and the option to buy the book as a PDF, check out this post.

51fjQdcTy7L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_ Stroppy by Marc Bell

I initially only knew of Bell as the editor of Rudy by Mark Connery (which was probably my favorite book of 2014). That’s what led me to this conversation between the two about Bell’s new book, Stroppy.

The general aesthetic of the book looks great—a mix between Segar’s Thimble Theatre or Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, manic crosshatching like a ’60s underground, and bright, flat colors that feel like they came out of a Joost Swarte book. Here’s a sample from the publisher.

Bell recently did a reading at Magers & Quinn, but if you weren’t lucky enough to see him, he’s a late addition to the Autoptic bill, joining dozens of talented artists. Who are you going to see?

What We’re Reading: In Real Life and Heaven’s Dream Town!

2015 May 7
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in real life coverIn 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.

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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.

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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.

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img745Heaven’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.

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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.

What We’re Reading: Superheroes After Birdman

2015 March 5
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A superhero movie won Best Picture at the Oscars! And while I don’t know if I’d personally rate Birdman as film of the year, it’s become one of only two superhero movies I’d recommend to strangers on the internet (the other being 1999’s Mystery Men).

But where do you turn once Birdman ends? Where else can you get that fractured, bizarre, taciturn-but-hopeful tone filtered through superheroics in a slightly meta way? Look no further. Here are six comics that do what Birdman does, oftentimes doing it better.

img690It’s a Bird (Steven Seagle, Teddy Kristiansen; Vertigo)
It’s a Bird is a semi-autobiographical account of a comic writer’s struggle to discover the point of superhero fiction. Offered the chance to write Superman, Steven wonders if adventurous power fantasy has a place in a world where his family is struggling with a genetic disorder. His ponderings take the form of short vignettes, each meditating on a different theme and each rendered in a different style by Kristiansen. Some sections don’t hold up too well (particularly a stream-of-consciousness section that seems to imitate slam poetry), but the narrator’s emotional journey rings true, and Kristiansen’s painterly virtuosity shines.

It’s a Bird was issued as a hardcover original graphic novel in 2005 and is still in print.

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img689I Kill Giants (Joe Kelly, JM Ken Niimura; Image Comics)
Part of Birdman’s success comes from the juxtaposition of the mundane struggles of Riggan Thomson as he prepares his play with the imagined glory of his past; in the end, this seeming contradiction is resolved, and the characters find glory in their messy, everyday existence. I Kill Giants shares this juxtaposition and resolution, but the imaginary vistas, rendered in Niimura’s thick and flowing brushstrokes, put Riggan Thomson’s flights of maybe-fantasy to shame. The stakes, both in human terms and how they’re portrayed, feel much higher than those of Birdman, and I Kill Giants shows an actualized inner life that is powerful, terrifying, and deeply empathetic.

I Kill Giants was originally published as 7 issues in 2008 and 2009. It has been reissued in multiple collected editions.

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img692Hawkeye (Matt Fraction, David Aja, Annie Wu, et al.; Marvel Comics)
Despite being the least explicitly meta book on this list, Hawkeye shares a certain tender, bruised masculinity with the men of Birdman. (Depending on your tastes, that may or may not be a good thing.) Additionally, Clint Barton shares a strained but hopeful relationship with his ward, Kate Bishop that reflects the Riggan/Sam relationship. The amazing, time-dilating establishing panels by David Aja rival the single-shot conceit of the film. Add in a penchant for one-liners, persistent consequences to violence, and dudes in the buff, and you’ve basically ticked all the same boxes as Birdman does.

Hawkeye was published in 22 monthly issues from 2012 to 2015 and is also available in paperback and hardcover collected editions.

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img686Enigma (Peter Milligan, Duncan Fegredo; Vertigo)
Speaking of tender, bruised masculinity, Engima offers it up in spades. When Michael Smith discovers that his favorite childhood superhero might be real, his flagging sex drive returns, even if is desire migrates from his girlfriend to the mysterious Enigma. Setting out on a cross-country trip, Michael questions his sexuality, his memory, and the existence of free will. This superhero existentialist parable is brought to jagged life by Fegredo’s Klimtian compositions. His frantic lines are filled by Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh’s earthy palette, and the world that results is, at least at first, muddy and hard to get ahold of. Then come the splashes of color: flying lizards, childhood comic books, and miraculous powers.

Engima was originally published in 1993, but it’s been recently reissued in a new trade paperback.

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img691Herbie (Richard Hughes as Shane O’Shea, Ogden Whitney; ACG)
But let’s cut the pretty-guy navel-gazing, huh? Herbie Popnecker demands recognition. According to his parents, he’s a fat little nothing. In actuality, with the help of an arsenal of lollipops, he’s a flying, time-traveling, invulnerable hero. He’s teamed up with Dracula, the Green Lama, Napoleon Bonaparte, and John F. Kennedy. He helps everyone (even if it’s begrudgingly). He breaks hearts, and he breaks the fourth wall. To top it all off, his verbal patterns inspired Watchmen’s Rorschach, and you can trace a direct line from him to Christian Bale’s Batman and Michael Keaton’s Birdman.

Herbie originally appeared in Forgotten Worlds and Herbie comics from 1958 to 1967. His appearances have been collected in three volumes of Herbie Archives by Dark Horse Comics.

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img687The Ti-Girls (Jaime Hernandez; Fantagraphics)
Lots of dudes, huh? Dudes make most of the decisions in Birdman, and even though Emma Stone’s Sam ends up being justified in asking her dad to get on social media, the movie still ends with Riggan taking flight on his own, leaving Sam to look up at him. This is not the case with the Ti-Girls, though. In Hernandez’s world, all women are born with “the gift” of superheroics. Men must acquire them through magic or technology. While this could easily serve as a tagline for a typical HBO show or Vertigo or Image comic, Hernandez doesn’t actually reveal the girls-only nature of superpowers until over halfway through the story. Instead, as he always does, Hernandez lets the characters tell the story. The Ti-Girls, disbanded years ago, reconvene to help a woman find her children. They vary in age, power, ethnicity, and outlook, but their faith in each other and their methods helps them prevail. It sounds schmaltzy and pandering, but Hernandez handles it deftly, never letting themes overpower the vast range of personalities of the nearly all-female cast of heroes and villains.

The Ti-Girls originally appeared in Love & Rockets: New Stories issues 1 and 2 in 2008 and 2009. Their stories have been collected in God & Science: Return of the Ti-Girls.

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In looking back through what I’ve read, I couldn’t find or recall a superhero comic written by a woman that felt like it matched up with Birdman‘s themes. (There are, of course, dozens of books by women that are out-and-out better than Birdman, though.) How about it, comic literati? Any superhero books by women that tap into the same reservoir?