Larmee/Seneca: Wednesday

intro/Monday
Tuesday



MATT SENECA: I want to talk a little more about your lack of interest in comics history, just because it’s such a unique relationship to past work for a cartoonist to have. You’ve talked about how old comics weren’t calculated to be art, but pure product; do any comics that are designed as commodities first interest you?

BLAISE LARMEE: I think the real question is where do you exist as a consumer and where do you exist as a producer.

MATT: So where are you as far as comics are concerned?

BLAISE: I’m a producer. But I’m also in this territory that assumes you’re a consumer. I gave a talk here recently and it was - I just found this out - really negatively received. I didn’t want to talk about the past, about images or objects I’d made, etc. I wanted to function as a producer, talking about production processes that exists in parallel with actually making things - where the process gets lost in the images/objects … but people wanted a sort of “reading” of my past.

M: Do other cartoonists’ production processes not interest you?

B: Those of close friends do. And this is maybe not … I don’t want to ‘write off’ that question. But … I mean, ultimately I’m not interested in drawing styles, I’m interested in real people and real narratives.

M: Do you not see the historical narrative of “comics” as having much to do with the process of creating a modern comic? Or is it that the narrative just doesn’t compel you?

B: It seems like a closed system to me. It doesn’t hold much currency outside of itself. It doesn’t have a healthy import/export relationship with other cultures.

M: I think you could argue that it doesn’t have one at all.

B: Well there’s the Wertham trial. That carried signification. But that was an isolated phenomenon and comics was really just a scapegoat. And there’s Persepolis and whatnot but then comics is really just a container for content. Although now that I type that it seems rather attractive. I guess because it devalues comics as a medium. Persepolis made headlines last week but i don’t think the comic was mentioned - just the film. Anyway I guess the content doesn’t really interest me either.

M: I think this is where the perceived division between form/content I was talking about earlier comes from: the wider culture and media only pick up on one aspect of the comics they take into account.

B: The informational aspect?

M: Yeah. The subject matter. Though I will say that many of history’s great cartoonists don’t seem to have cared a ton about form and just wanted to produce content.

B: I guess the form was provided for them.

M: That’s interesting... but nobody gave it to them, none of the newspaper guys were actually looking at Hokusai or Topffer from what I understand. All those attempts to relate comics back to stuff like hieroglyphics seem really false to me. But the lack of one Genesis moment or even a consciousness of creation in comics is conspicuous. Do you see a lot in comics that comes from other art forms?

B: The father of comics is an absent father. Yeah, I saw a comic today that came out of an art context. But it was really bad. Anytime I see art that reads as comics I hate it.

M: That surprises me a little, just cause your stuff reminds me of Jim Shaw. But I know what you mean. How do you feel about comics when they try to do “fine art” -- like single-composition pages and stuff?

B: What are single-composition pages?

M: Jim Steranko type stuff... or Gary Panter... Pages that exist as sequential, “paneled”, but also as posters or paintings. There to be read but also to approach like a canvas.

B: I don’t know. I just don’t like reading comics. So if I’m looking through an art book and I see a comic … it brings me back to a reality. Because I have a lot of distance between myself and art. I can see the products, the images, the narratives I want to see. I can focus on a few artists and be rewarded with a massive elliptical narrative. But comics are too close, too present.

M: Too close historically, or in proximity to everything else in comics?

B: It’s where I work.

M: My immediate thought in response to that is that the comics narrative has a lot of interesting “characters” whose biographies are maybe better to engage with than their work. Does the historical “cartoonist” -- working-class, uneducated, put-upon, supporting a family, maybe he fought in a war -- appeal to you at all? It's no longer a living species, of course...

B: I prefer cartoonist as child. Playing with crayons. Picasso’s children.

M: What cartoonists do you see as inhabitants of that archetype?

B: Austin English, Genevieve Vidal, Julie Delporte, maybe Brian Chippendale.


[comic by Brian Chippendale]

M: All the artists you mention are pretty open to readers/readings that come down somewhere outside the boundaries of “conventional comics”: there’s at least some intersection with the “finer” arts. Is that a part of enjoying comics for you, or do you think the character you want the cartoonists you read to inhabit just ends up making comics that fall somewhat outside the norm?

B: Again I think I would rather not read comics. But my friends happen to be cartoonists because of events in my past. But I also do admire the way they are able to navigate the shitty terrain. I think they aim for art but they are using twigs for arrows.

M: Can comics be art?

B: I don’t think so. I think at times it does, but like the Wertham trial these events are isolated. But I’m biased because I position myself between these two domains, as an importer/exporter, consumer/producer, so my stability depends on their distance from each other.

M: That’s interesting. I’m thinking about how art has made big strides past the figurative since comics came about in the late 1800s, and how comics have remained almost the last outpost of great figurative artwork... but whether that’s a reaction or just a lack of culture I don’t know. What should comics be if they’re not going to be art?

B: I’m going to give a negative answer. I feel like this is obvious. I may be playing this character that I’m used to playing in this sort of context, and maybe this is limiting development of some sort of progress. I really don’t want to be the antagonist. It’s just this situation where comics seems isolated and I want to effect larger structures. or less isolated structures. Comics should aim for art. But that’s not enough, obviously. Or the actual outcome could be like a dog that catches the vehicle it chases. But production in art is something very specific and demands a lot of consideration. There’s a lot of built-in structure. I’ve never considered this structure, I’ve never produced inside it. I consume its products, often translated into books or images and texts dispersed online. There are a lot of parallels between art and comics, and perhaps my negative/positive attitude toward comics/art would be reversed if my production/consumption arenas were swapped.

M: I think it almost certainly would be. There’s probably even a simple equation for it: the people who consume the most comics seem to have the least interest in art, and I guess you’re saying vice versa. I wish I could read the same exact number of pages as I draw, haha. Are the larger structures you think art effects and the ones you think are built into it the same?

B: I don’t know, it’s hard to tell if art effects anything other than its own domain.

M: Which I think it’s pretty obvious is also true of comics -- but comics operates on a much smaller scale. Would you like it if comics became a mass medium, with the audience that film or music has?

B: That would be something. I think what art produces is a constant remapping of its territory. Comics is pretty indistinct, yet it is also very distinct. Its territory is small yet strongly grounded by a grassroots economy.

M: Does significant market expansion have to happen before significant formal expansion can?

B: Maybe abandoning territory is as significant as expanding it.

M: I assume you mean commercial territory. I think the danger of abandoning the superhero support-system is that then the only financial recourse remaining to cartoonists is the gallery, which you don’t seem to think is the answer either... or is that not what you meant?

B: What’s the superhero support-system?

M: The “mainstream”, the sort of commercial engine that keeps the rest of comics running via trickle-down economics. Is that the territory you’re talking about giving up?

B: Uh … is this trickle-down a real thing?

M: For myself and the people I know who buy art-comix (or whatever)... including your stuff... it’s almost entirely people who got into superhero comics between childhood and middle age and then decided to “find out what else is out there.” So yeah, it is to me at least.

B: I think these giant cultural forces will be mediators no matter what. But a community that emerges from this can sustain itself without those larger forces - it is not dependent on them. Your community of buyers would still buy art comics if superhero comics disappeared.

M: True enough -- and I think a lot of them have given up superhero comics like I have -- but there’s a question of the community’s growth and sustainability that I feel like I should at least mention. The people I’ve been able to get into art-comix via the community around my writing are, I think, 100 percent coming from the “mainstream”. I know that’s not the case for all or maybe even most art-comix buyers, but it’s still a fair amount of them. And it’s more all the time: a constantly occurring process. Take away the Point A of that process and Point B becomes nonexistent for a lot of people, because you need to have caught the bug before you start going to trade shows and leafing through zine racks and hitting up obscure artists’ websites. I’m not sure alternative comics can sustain itself, by itself, at its current level. Even the retailers that sell the more mass-market friendly stuff are superhero stores, with literally like eight or ten exceptions. I think the level “other” comics reach without any help from superheroes is not enough to make them at all significant. Even the alt-comics websites get a boost from mainstream traffic.

B: There’s a lot of room for innovation. Reconsider dominant labor-intensive forms of practice. Explore alternative models of publishing and distribution. Project artificial scarcity and artificial demand.

M: Are these the ideas behind your Cruise project?

B: Yeah, Cruise is born in part out of exasperation with existing economic models. It’s a tentative step towards a more lightweight, efficient, adaptable model.

M: People are commissioning these zines from you, right? They’re not pre-made?

B: No, no one’s commissioned me. They’re all pre-made.

M: Can you run through the economic model you’re using real quick?

B: I was going to make a 16 page comic in an edition of 50. Due to a sequence of mistakes I ended up with 50 covers that I liked and an abandoned interior. Instead of an edition of 50 I decided to make 50 unique booklets with the same cover. Each booklet is released individually and arbitrarily.



M: So it’s a limited financial commitment for you to make. What jumps out at me is the quality of uniqueness -- how do you feel about the mass-produced-object status comics have historically held?

B: I think it’s fine. I just opened the wikipedia page for “post-fordism”. Post-Fordism is characterized by the following attributes:

* Small-batch production.
* Economies of scope.
* Specialized products and jobs.
* New information technologies.
* Emphasis on types of consumers in contrast to previous emphasis on social class.
* The rise of the service and the white-collar worker.
* The feminization of the work force.

M: What type of consumer are you emphasizing?

B: I think I am sending out a signal through aesthetics, through style. The consumer who buys Young Lions may simply be interested in an interior, closed narrative - the narrative in the book or the narrative surrounding the book (which is pretty closed). Cruise doesn’t have any established territory other than the site through which it is presented and sold and advertisements. It’s more a currency in itself, or the imagination of such a currency. The narrative is its movement. Its consumers effect this movement.

M: Are you going to be documenting the movement itself in any way? Or is that up to the consumer?

B: I thought about that. I mean it is all documented of course. But so far it’s private. I think I will consult with shareholders before going public :)

M: Do you think strategies for selling comics that aren’t based on subject matter (“content”) are going to become more prevalent?

B: Well with Cruise you could say there is no content. But you could also say that there is nothing but content. The last three releases used polyester film for the interiors, so you can see from the preview image - the scanned interior - straight to the inside covers.

M: Before the screen, and maybe even more relevantly the browsing tab, became a vehicle for reading matter the page was a lot less negotiable. Do you think the see-through page can support more conventional comics?

B: Why do you say the page was less negotiable? Lack of search function?

M: You had to move through it to get anywhere else. Turn it -- which strongly implies reading it. Now our paths through media are not as linear. Tabbed browsing. Chapter-skipping and multiple endings in DVDs, the decline of the album in music.

B: I see...

M: Though now that I think of it I felt like 2001 was more linear than a print-format comic in many ways...

B: Yeah, I don’t understand how “non-linear” readings can occur if time moves linearly. Maybe authorship can shift around. Maybe we can talk about compression. Or elliptical narrative.

M: Compression seems like a greater possibility with online comics. It’s a lot easier for readers to vary the pace they read at and change their experience of the comic by doing so when it’s just a big scroll instead of pages to turn. And elliptical narrative... I find myself using a ton of jump-cuts in my online comic, like five times as many as I see in print. It just feels native to the medium of presentation. Though 2001 was sequenced with like, the opposite of jump-cutting...

B: Yeah, 2001 is super linear. The space is linear too. Or the way in which it’s navigated.

M: Were you at all surprised by how your comic read in the scrolling format?

B: I just looked at it. It’s kind of like comics, or books in general, in that the only way to find stable ground is by reading, where the flow of texts/images finds a sort of stability, like the way the images in a film strip or zeotrope become stable at certain speeds. So in this, unlike in Cruise, the content is hidden, or latent, within the comic itself. It’s traditional in this sense.

M: Yeah, Cruise sounds pretty experimental by contrast. Did coming back to the more traditional medium of print make you want to get more experimental with your content?

B: I’m still interested in both forms. And I feel Cruise is still ultimately, in a way, an image object - an absence of the material thing itself. At least this is how most people encounter it. It’s presented and sold online. Its informational content is laid bare. This is its public narrative.



M: Comics where the imagery and the narrative just occur in different spaces?

B: Maybe just emphasizing the public narrative over the private. Or focusing on the split between the two. But yeah, I guess that’s a nice way to phrase it.

M: The private narrative you’re talking about is the individual reader’s experience of the comic, right?

B: Yeah. The hidden experience.

M: And then the public narrative is what, critical response? The internet “noticing” the existence of the physical comic?

B: It can also be the image of that response or discourse. I mean it can be a private sort of fiction, the individual “reading” this sort of theater which the author creates props for. Like the way a work can seem like a manifesto. You’ve had that feeling I’m sure. A statement that demands a response.

M: Do you hope a lot of people who get these zines create work in response to them, reviews or whatever?

B: Um, nothing so direct. Like, the response can go unrealized in public. It can just be assumed that it occurs.

M: Hmm, I’m picturing the “public narrative” you’re talking about emphasizing as something that you stop authoring at a certain point... which I guess is always the case if it’s constituted of people’s readings... but documenting the sections of that narrative that other people “write” isn’t something you’ll be doing?

B: I think you were talking with Whiteshasta about how being in the public “meme-ory” might not be the best gauge of success. The actual public narrative is usually this kind of meme-oriented thing.

M: Sure, it reduces the totality of content to a few ideas or images. Is that degrading of presented thoughts into soundbites part of the reason you stopped doing comics blogging?

B: Yeah, maybe. The style and attitude of our blog would get a lot of response but never the actual content. The ideas we were expressing, apart from basic ideas of “cool” and “youth” - the basic branding stuff - none of those ideas were engaged with in a public way. But it was still … there was still the feeling that people were processing these ideas, reacting to the surface maybe, but still processing these ideas. But we were compromising anyway by having this branded surface. I think that part was integral. We just didn’t anticipate the response. I think we got bored with it.

M: I think if you want a significant response to the deeper ideas you were working with you might have to wait a bit, because the responses that end up mattering will come via comics and not blog posts. I mean dude, I drew my whole Flash comic based off stuff you were saying there!

B: What was the Flash comic based off of?

M: A couple things... some stuff you said about drawing with pencil, the idea of art as autocritique, and especially the stuff about comics criticism having to move onto the page as opposed to existing in this separate sphere from the work itself. Seeing Young Lions too, I guess...

B: That’s funny … I wonder if … well I feel everybody kind of interpreted that post (I think it was titled “criticism” or something …) … I wasn’t suggesting that critics make comics! (not that there’s anything wrong with that. obviously we were critics making comics) or be more creative or anything. Just feel implicated … is that the post you were referring to?

M: “New Criticism” [now offline], yeah. That wasn’t how I took it -- the real thing I got from it was that comics need to engage more thoroughly in self-analysis than they have. Or analysis of process. The idea of comics having multiple “surfaces” or “screens” now also made (and still makes) me think about how if that surface appearance/narrative of the work doesn’t have as much currency as it used to, it should be replaced with something. Oh, and this is funny - Jason Overby left a comment on that comic and then deleted it before I could see it -- and I would have given anything to know what it was, ha ha.

B: Yeah, I just saw that. Can you expand on the multiple surfaces thing?

M: Well, it wasn’t something that I actually read in a Comets Comets post, but when I saw your thing about the physical copy beginning to function more and more as a “trophy”, it was like... I mean I can boil it down to just saying that my thought was “well then comics need to come harder with the ideas if their physical aspect doesn’t matter as much as it used to”, but it’s a little more complicated. I have a huge amount of reverence/fetishism for comics as objects, like old crumbling back issues and also shiny new hardcovers, whatever it might be. And if that physical aspect stops being “what the comic is”, period, because there’s an online version, an app, a phone version... objects have a great deal of “spirit” for me and I felt like as a cartoonist there’s this onus on me to make sure the work retains the same amount of spirit even without the object there to imbue it with any. So I drew this raw-ass comic on top of old pieces of paper whose actual substance had a lot of personal, emotional meaning. Does that make sense?

B: I’m not sure. I feel I encounter that spirit in images that document objects. Maybe the image even captures something latent or hidden in the object. It’s still in relation to this object. But then maybe the spirit for you is your image of the object.

M: That’s a good way of putting it. When I share an actual physical space with an object I can form my own image of it. Even a scanned comics page, which is flat and doesn’t have a ton of texture, is so different than the physical version just because of the light in the room, you know?

B: Yeah. For me the irony in that line of thought comes from the fact that the book is literally a composite of scanned pages.

M: Yeah, that’s why it works better for old comics, where the original art was just this byproduct of drawing for the print process and you can’t see much of the original in the printed object. At a certain point in history comics art started being about reproducing an original and then, yeah, it does lose some power.

B: What loses power?

M: The book version. Like, if I compare a Gary Panter original page to one by any artist to have worked before like 1965... I’d way rather see the printed version of the old comic, because that’s the thing they’re doing this art in order to create. But in modern comics it’s just scans from the originals, and you get the sense that the original art is truer, better. Though I think comics art made specifically to be run through xerox machines helps mitigate that.

B: I’ll just say that I feel translation is a very relevant field.

M: You’re not wrong. I’m just the kinda guy who always gets jealous of people who know how to speak Russian when I’m reading Dostoyevsky, ha ha. Do you not prefer the online version of 2001 to your paper drawings for it? Or the printed Cruise to your web page about it?

B: I threw away the 2001 originals when I left Portland. With Cruise … one of the ads is going to be in anthology put together by Scott Longo. It’s going to be 100%, a facsimile. The value of the original becomes invisible, or conceptual, or material I guess.

M: “Invisible” and “material” almost seem contradictory... though I guess you’re asking whoever buys that one to pay for the literal “invisible material” that the film pages are.

B: Yeah :) actually I really liked that one, it had a black and white photo from a newspaper and some of this color ad on the other page rubbed off on it in this really subtle way. And I put a transparent overlay on it as sort of “protection”. And I didn’t even staple the newspaper, it’s being held in between the overlay and the cover. Yeah, it really felt archival, like preserving this image/object. Also the photo was of a painting.

M: That’s awesome. Are you familiar with the trend of “variant covers” in mainstream comics?

B: Yeah. That seems like a smart idea.

M: Duuuude, we may have just found the nexus point where the cutthroat capitalism of superhero comics and the highbrow conceptualizing of art comics intersect! The best superhero variant cover has all these blood splatters all over it but the blood is done in RED VELVET. like the cake flavor. Anyway.

Larmee/Seneca: Tuesday

intro/Monday



MATT SENECA: So is it that cartoonists need to come at comics with a new mindset...?

BLAISE LARMEE: Cartoonists need to be willing to abandon comics.

MATT: Comics history? Or the formal devices that have characterized comics until now? They might be the same thing...

BLAISE: Yeah, the whole orientation toward preconditions, foundations, and building a sovereign medium. There’s too much fear of translation. Film, especially, is seen as a threat.

M: You talked earlier about comics as a general way of conceptualizing sequenced images. In that case can you turn the tables and conceptualize films as comics?

B: Film is its own thing, obviously. I sometimes feel like I’m in a movie whereas I never feel like I’m in a comic. Although I’ve been in comics. That is interesting. For me comics is a more abstract or virtual text, whereas film is integrated into my immediate perception of “reality.”

M: Well film is reality in a lot of ways, moments of real time that actually occurred, just reproduced for viewing at a later date. Or at least it has been in the past. Now with computer effects bringing most films closer and closer to animation, which is just comics at 24 frames a second, do you think that gap is closing at all?

B: I don’t think computer effects will do anything. The Netflix model makes movies more a part of disposable culture, though. And more navigable/disruptible. Still, the formal differences are vast.

M: That’s interesting, because I see comics as being on the opposite trajectory, into hardcover books and archive editions, trying to position itself as far away from the disposable as possible. Do you see it that way? I guess webcomics confuse the issue...

B: Yeah, I guess both mediums are responding to their economic environments.

M: So anyway... you were saying that basically comics has yet to develop defining characteristics beyond basic formal ones?

B: I feel like formal preconditions are one and the same with this whole notion of comics-as-medium. This is the mentality that must be transcended.

M: Are “mediums” something that exist for you? Like is painting a medium?

B: Yeah, and comics can be read as a medium. But this reading was retroactively constructed, and in a time when the established mediums were being deconstructed to the point that it was almost boring.

M: Right, comics used to just be considered a backward subset of literature.

B: Yeah? I don’t know.

M: Sure, that’s why people get pissed when you call it a “genre”. Do you see it as more something that developed out of the visual arts?

B: I don’t know how it started. I think more out of newspapers. And animation. But I’m talking about underground comics and Art Spiegelman and Scott McCloud.

M: That was the road to “medium”, yeah.

B: Scott McCloud was so modernist … he wanted this new beginning divorced from the past, the liberation of form from content. That’s why it feels like comics was invented in 1993. That book became the form.



M: Do you think comics needs more texts like McCloud’s books to develop as a medium? Is that the kind of self-critical work you’re saying it lacks?

B: McCloud’s book is the medium. All developments undertaken for the medium add on to the narrative of “the medium” he created.

M: Hmm, have you ever read Eisner’s textbooks? Sequential Art, Graphic Storytelling? McCloud was riffing heavy on those....

B: The theme of McCloud’s book was the blank slate, the new beginning. He figures Eisner into his history (and credits him as inspiration) but the history is so revisionist that Eisner is in effect created by McCloud.

M: Lolz. My main problem with reading McCloud is that those books are completely lacking in poetic capacity, which is something I think a lot of other comics are pretty good at delivering. Can the self-reflexive and the poetic be combined?

B: Self-reflexivity is built-in to the format. The book literally flexes in on itself. The modernism of McCloud is extremely seductive. The promise of the future, the potential, the threshold. The Obama campaign. Now upon reflection we see how this infinite vision was also completely singular and authored. The hand drawn empty vessel.

M: So any promise of a blank slate delivered via comics is a false one, basically. Dude, you should read Grant Morrison’s Animal Man comics, that’s the one thing I can think of that comes close to McCloud, but it’s all superheroey and "fucking crazy, man!". Are you saying that comics, being this hand-made, meticulous thing, can’t avoid having some aspect of the poetic to them?

B: The poetic is useful as a means of opacity and privacy - keeping the author’s intentions somewhat in the dark. On the other hand I think a lot of critics are drawn to the poetic because it creates a pool of text that they can find their own way through and then present these trips as criticism.

M: Exactly, without opacity built into works the critic is useless.

B: Critics love to try to see through the text to the author. Or rather, to construct their own image of the author, using the text as a sort of puzzle.



M: Well, it is a lot of fun, even though you have to confront the fact that you're on some total bullshit at some point. So do you think comics should put the author on display more frequently? How do you feel about “autobio” comics, where the author is examining something else (not the form)?

B: I really feel something other than the form should be examined. Modern artists focused on the form in order to free themselves from powerful institutions - the church, the state, the public. The only institution in comics, really, is comics itself. “What is art” was a useful question because it was kind of a synecdoche for “what is church/state/public/etc”. “What is comics” is only relevant for comics fans, and I think we see this question mostly in contexts where the modern art narrative is nostalgized and re-staged in a seemingly virgin medium.

M: This is where a strong working knowledge of comics history seems essential to me, but you’ve talked about not being so interested in that. How can we build upon narratives we’re unfamiliar with?

B: That’s a really good question. My answer would be focusing on trajectory - movement itself - rather than specific origins of departure.

M: Chain of influence is an idea that has a ton of currency in comics, but right now more and more interesting new cartoonists seem to come at the medium from a unique place. Everybody used to just start out as copyists and work their way into an individual voice, now the journey is figuring out craft. You haven’t been shy about declaring CF to be a big influence on your work -- are there any others (besides McCloud) who hold as big a sway?

B: I don’t identify as a reader of comics.

M: Do you not read any, or just not a lot? or is it more about the connotations that identifying as a comics reader holds?

B: I meant it more as the sort of identity statement that’s acceptable these days.

M: Right, the one that also makes you a partisan of “comics culture”. What about that culture don’t you want to engage with?

B: I guess the reader - or consumer - orientation.

Larmee/Seneca: Monday

Get hyped. Not only is Blaise Larmee one of the most talented and challenging young cartoonists to have surfaced over the past decade, he's also one of the most notable members of the cartoonist/critic club. Whether it's in his boundary-breaking webcomic 2001, his gorgeous, ephemeral debut graphic novel Young Lions, his near-punk truth-to-power blogging, his concept-heavy zines, or even the work he publishes via Gaze Books, Blaise projects the kind of provocative spirit comics could use a lot more of. In an artistic community that's more closely knit and self-involved than ever, Blaise may be most notorious for his detachment: the comics he's most interested in are his own and those made by his friends. It says something about how committed to its own orthodoxy comics is that Blaise's statement that he prefers his own drawings to those of Jack Kirby is at all surprising; but then, it can take a unique viewpoint to point up just how unique a place comics is. It's something Blaise seemingly can't help but do with every project he turns his efforts to.

I've been wanting to interview Blaise for quite a while now, but once Comets Comets, the main outlet for his comics criticism, was taken offline this summer, that goal was joined by a practical desire to see more of his writing out there. When we finally did get together online for a chat, it ran so long and ranged so far and wide that we both figured it didn't look much like an "interview" anyone would want to read. But just about everything Blaise had to say was worth getting out there, so what will follow over the rest of this week is a series of shorter conversations on various comics-related topics. Blaise's non-fan, creation-first outlook on the comics form is one that produces a highly unique opinion of just about every aspect of the form it touches, so I think you will be as pleased as I am that we did our best to talk about everything under the sun.

MATT SENECA: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is how you see comics as a whole medium, the divisions the “industry” enforces within it set aside. As a single art form among many others. You’re fairly unique among young cartoonists in that you don’t have the concern for “comics” the community and historical narrative that say someone like Michael DeForge does, so as just a young contemporary artist, what makes comics different from other media?

BLAISE LARMEE: Comics, in the word itself, emphasizes the pluralised object.

MATT: Right, the commodity.

BLAISE: Painting also functions as a noun but it is a verb as well. It is a practice.

M: Whereas you can’t “comic”. And there’s no adjective for comics either, no “painterly” or “filmic”. Which is why the question of what comics are in opposition to other media is tricky....

B: Medium specificity in itself is tricky. Has investigation of comics-as-medium resulted in any progress other than introducing comics into certain markets?

M: I think the main thing it’s produced is an awareness of history in comics’ younger practitioners - an awareness that wasn’t always there for young people who decided they wanted to become cartoonists. But I know you’ve gone on record about not being very interested in comics history...

B: Comics never had a modernist period. It never had an establishment to rebel against. It never cohered into any sort of federated structure, although that is always the image one hopes to convey when using the word “comics” - a site where all of these local narratives can be represented. Comics history has always been a local history, dispersed, with a deficit of cultural currency.

M: Well, I think if comics has any establishment it’s cultural, not aesthetic. You’ve engaged with that culture via blogging and your general internet presence, and occasionally ruffled people’s feathers by doing so -- do you think rebelling against comics culture is useful?

B: I think even direct opposition is too much involvement. Like, it’s not worth negating.

M: But not worth following either, I’m assuming. Is comics enough of an establishment for the “outsider cartoonist” to exist, or is that where everybody using the form is?

B: I like my relationship to CCS. [Note: Blaise currently holds a fellowship at James Sturm's Center for Cartoon Studies.] I am different and my difference is being incorporated. But this is a specific example.

M: It’s probably still a relevant one, just because it’s reflective of how comics has incorporated iconoclasts before. When people like Crumb and Ware come along with idiosyncratic styles there’s less of a reactionary backlash than a picking-over of their methods for useful takeaways. Maybe that’s why comics hasn’t really gone through modernism -- it hasn’t needed to. Do you agree with that? And do you think it’s a useful way for an art form to progress?

B: You’re talking about how comics is accepting of creators?

M: Of creators who bring stylistic or formal innovations to the table, specifically. Underground comics were a big response to the sort of trite content that was necessary to pass censors in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but then it became “cool” and got sort of taken up by everyone pretty quickly...

B: Honestly I think my problem with comics is that they are not cool...

M: Do you see that as an inherent problem, or the current circumstance?



B: I think it is possible for comics to be cool. Picturebox still presents a kind of cool, though it seems more like a residue, or a paste, than a vibrant present moment. I think 1-800-MICE could become retroactively cool at some point. But I guess the problem with the present moment - and this is also a historic problem - is the massive interiority of comics and the neglect of their distribution as objects. With Fort Thunder the interiority swelled to a point that it became a sort of exteriority. I mean, the space itself is a good illustration of that.

M: I think the availability of free webcomics is going to close the gap on the distribution question at some point, though heaven knows what that means for cartoonists’ ability to eat.

B: Webcomics stlil seem massively interior. Like, in the same way that 4chan is massively interior. 4chan can be referenced as a thing - a community or whatever - but the images/texts that compose it get lost in the overall fabric. It’s like the cover of a book vs its insides.

M: So you’re saying with webcomics everything is more like the cover?

B: No, like ‘webcomics’ is the cover. Like, that is what will get an article in the New York Times. and an individual webcomic will be like a detail of the overall ‘image’ (cover) being covered.

M: That’s the case with all new media though, don’t you think?

B: Yeah … hm … and the New York Times is really bad at covering art in general … but … hm, it’s really hard for me. It’s confusing trying to think about vernacular versus … the opposite of vernacular.

M: “Formal”?

B: Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. Or Catholic maybe. Like, I guess my religion is academic/artistic thought, so that seems to be the highest authority for me. But it gets confusing when, say, the New York Times also presents itself as an authority and it doesn’t even seem to be aware of those academic/artistic transmissions.

M: I think any institution that big is just always going to have a hard time with the new.

B: I was trying to imagine what the New York Times comics section would look like.

M: It would be the McSweeney’s comics section.

B: God.



M: Getting back to interiority in comics... you talk about it as an impediment to “coolness”, and I think it usually is/has been, like in Chester Brown, Ware, whoever else. But the two webcomics I show “cool” young people are yours and mine, and with both what people seem to connect to is that they’re relatable, with young characters. I think that’s a necessary component of “cool” - it has to be interior on some level to grab people maybe?

B: Yeah. Or I can see how it could be perceived as interior. Or often is interior. I mean, cool is just one articulation of this site that I’m interested in, which I think could also be articulated as the revolutionary site, an ecstatic present moment in which the future seems wild and the memory of the past changes. The threshold of something. I think the “cool” I’m thinking of might just be an image, impossible to enter. But being on the threshold of that image.

M: So it’s not something you can embody? Like, with how you dress or whatever?

B: I think fashion, in a general sense, not necessarily limited to fabric, is related to this threshold. “In is out.” “Out is in.” It’s wildly unpredictable territory.

M: If there’s a route to “cool” for comics, do you think it’s more tied to content or visual appearance?

B: I try to collapse the two.

M: Well sure, every cartoonist does, but like... ok, which do you think would be cooler, Jack Kirby drawing Young Lions or you illustrating a Kirby style comic?

B: I guess the latter. I don’t like other people’s drawings as much as my own.

M: Do you think the visual aspect of comics is “stronger” or “hits harder” than the story/information-containing aspect? I think a lot of people “inside” comics think they should be exactly equal, but for people outside the culture do you think one is more attractive?

B: I guess I’m in the camp that thinks it’s pretty much impossible to say something does not qualify as information.

M: I think most people who don’t have a big interaction with mainstream comics see it that way. Superheroes, work made for hire, that’s where the distinction comes from.

B: Children’s literature also delineates authorship into “writer” and “illustrator”. “Goodnight Moon” depicts a bedroom. There is the text of the object next to the illustration of the object. The words “red balloon” next to a drawing of a red balloon. I would argue neither aspect is redundant. Maybe the room could be viewed as a site of contested authorship. But I wouldn’t say both parties have equal power in or access to that site.

M: I think it’s the same thing in comics, though there are two sites we’re talking about really, and they’re connected in a really weird way: the page and the culture. In the wider “comics culture” the words are always the nexus of authorship and the pictures merely proceed from them. On the page it’s often different sets of information being communicated by each thing. I guess I’m not talking so much about pictorial content as style. Like, Winsor McCay’s red balloon drawing versus Steve Ditko’s. Do you think a cartoonist’s style can be more or less appropriate to the story content they’re creating?

B: I can’t divide the totality of the creator into distinct aspects. Some creators have bodily intelligence - you can see it in the figures they draw - but they write bad stories and dialogue. But we must judge the totality of this person.

M: How much does a comic’s formal quality -- innovation, boldness, whatever -- affect your reading of how cool it is? (I’m using “cool” as shorthand for the place you want to see more comics going...)

B: It’s important. I think part of my problem with separating form from content is the absurdity of this question in the face of architecture. I rely on a lot of spatial terms - interiority/exteriority, the site, the threshold - in describing comics. This content/form division is real, I think, but I’m not sure how to incorporate it into this spatial/architectural model.

M: More literalism, maybe? Like, you can have interiority of content -- say a dream comic or something -- and interiority of form, like weird layouts. Content sites, like setting, and formal sites, like color schemes. If you take Impressionist painters’ multiple pictures of the same place at different times of day as comics, I think it’s possible to do a reading where the different images have the same content but different form. Does that sound right, or are you talking about something different?

B: Content is 3D, form is 2D?



M: I guess what I’m getting at is like... content is always an abstraction, the idea of whatever you’re communicating. Form is more literal, the sensual aspect of the work. Shapes, colors, size. In comics it’s tricky because formal tools like sequencing or layout can communicate abstract information. But I think the division exists to some extent or another in all comics that are out there to date. Probably abstract comics come closest to lacking it.

B: I’m not on the same page with you. Language is … let me find a quote … “language is not [...] a mediation between thought and the real.” The rest of the quote is kind of hard to explain. But basically as thought opens up to me, in language, I experience the thing itself. Does that make sense? In the articulation of a thought the thought is discovered, or entered, or the thought opens up to us.

M: Yeah, that makes sense. Tying this back to what we were talking about earlier, do you think formal innovation can lead comics into its own “modernist period”? Is it only the formal strictures of comics as they’ve been created in the past that need to be rebelled against?

B: I mean, there’s aspects of modernism present in the comics narrative today that are really gross.

M: Yeah?

B: Pretty much any sense of progress as a “medium” divorcing itself from everything around it. Any sense of triumph of “self expression”. Any sense of “innovation” as something that will lead to more innovation.

M: What aspects of modernism would you like to see become part of comics?

B: Maybe I’m just nostalgic for kindergarten. Or nostalgic for a time before I was born. I’m not sure. All articulations of modernism that I respond to have a sort of aesthetic fascism. But it’s also a fascism that I welcome. At root is this idea of progress.

M: Do you mean “aesthetic fascism” in terms of a strong individual vision, or a contempt for the “other”, or...?

B: I guess both. The individual vision is downplayed, but it’s still really prominent. Like, twitter is a good example of an articulation of a modernist tendency. The structure for creating and dispersing information is extremely regulated, aesthetically, using an “authorless” modular architecture. And the whole “brand / brandless” aesthetic is that of childhood as illustrated by vector graphics. And there’s this sense that order will persist and cannot be subverted.

M: So are you a fan of instructional comics, like the “how to put on your oxygen mask” ones on airplanes? Or Will Eisner’s Army training manuals, you ever seen those?

B: I haven’t seen those. I like the image of direct communication. Like, anything in Helvetica carries that image. Some aspects of punk culture seem to idealise that image. Like, direct, simple, 3 chord manifesto on how to overthrow the establishment. I also like the image of the other “dropped onto” a foreign order. There were these suburban style government housing projects next to where I lived and these black refugees occupying/being occupied by this space.

M: That appreciation or propensity for the “image” of things -- it seems to me that comics is the ideal medium to present those kind of basic situations or ideas, because the pictures make it so direct but it can still carry a lot of complex information. Did you come to comics wanting to tell fictional narratives like most people do, or was it always more about putting over ideas?

B: I think it was always about images. The image of power and gender in superheroes. The image of subculture later on.

M: Is there a specific image you’d like your comics to communicate?

B: I guess now it’s more about ideas, including the idea of the image and the image of the idea. Comics is a useful metaphor for communicating a sequence of images.

M: Why is it a metaphor?

B: I mean the way you can talk about a “text” without necessarily referring to a book. Comics as an applied conceit.

Next Week On DTU

MATT SENECA: So is content not enough? Does comics need to interrogate its language before it can say anything of value?

BLAISE LARMEE: It needs to do both at the same time.



Coming up on Monday: a week of conversation about pretty much every aspect of the comics form imaginable with Blaise Larmee, the most exciting cartoonist/critic to have hit comics in years. I've been wanting to interview Blaise for a long time; what I came away with when it finally happened did not disappoint. Prepare your caps -- they'll soon be peeled.

Your Wednesday Sequence 33

"Pablo Ferro Films" (1967). Victor Moscoso.



At Robot 6. Go read. Try not to drool at that picture.

A Conservative Medium

Last week everybody got really upset at Frank Miller for making a critical statement about the Occupy Wall Street movement -- one in which the comics great sounded more like one of his macho, trigger-happy characters than an informed or reasoned political commentator. It's the kind of statement a lot of people have come to expect from the increasingly conservative Miller, but it was my immediate thought that comics shouldn't be surprised when this kind of reactionary thinking emerges from anyone associated with the medium.




The sequence above is from half a week of Frank King's classic, influential Gasoline Alley strip in 1927. It's neither the first nor the most famous instance of King poking fun at the post-World War I, pre-Depression modernist arts scene: in a much-reprinted Sunday page from a few years later, the strip's father-son duo Walt and Skeezix take a dreamlike meander through a post-Impressionist landscape they see in a museum canvas and emerge decidedly unimpressed. "That was an awful dream!" Skeezix exclaims in the strip's final panel, after being told by one of the painting's distorted inhabitants that "there is no way out". "Or was it a dream at all?" the boy muses to a knowing audience.

The politics behind King's critiques of modernism are interesting enough to warrant some unpacking. In Gasoline Alley's golden era of the mid-'20s through early '30s, comics were still very much a "low", populist art, with a few Gilbert Seldes paragraphs on Krazy Kat about all the form had to show as far as cultural cachet goes. King, an engaged observer of the modern arts, was doubtless aware of his status as an artist for the masses rather than the privileged few -- a status all cartoonists of his day shared, and all but enough to count on one's fingers do today as well. While it's unclear whether or not King himself resented this, he certainly got mileage for his strip by tapping into a kind of populist resentment of a high-art scene that was making rapid strides away from relatability and depictive realism toward theory, formalism, and personalized expression.

King himself was an experimentalist, pushing the formal boundaries of comics in ways that still echo today in the work of cartoonists from Ware to Quitely and beyond, so perhaps it's unfair to paint him too heavily as the reactionary artistic conservative. But then again, his conflation of Einsteinian physics with the modern literature he satirizes hints at a real unease with the changes occurring in the wider world around him, not just its high art. It's easy enough to do a reading of the homespun, quiet Gasoline Alley as a staunchly conservative "family values" strip, and the answer to Skeezix's question about whether early 20th-century modern art might all just be a bad dream has implications for the wider form of comics, not just King himself. That answer, of course, is a resounding "No" -- since the Sunday strip in question's publication in 1930, figurative painting and drawing have only receded further into the background of the contemporary arts, and literature has suffered a near-total loss of its pre-eminence as a storytelling medium.

King's criticisms of abstracted modernism as a resolutely figure-based, humanist artist-in-comics are almost prescient: as painting has moved further and further toward the theoretical, comics have stood out in greater and greater contrast as the last refuge for the great figurative draftsmen to ply their trade in. A similar phenomenon can be seen in comics' relationship to prose fiction, perhaps best exemplified by the major chain bookstores' reliance on comics to stay solvent as the printed book went the way of the dinosaur. The conventional action of comics comes close to insisting on the story and the figure, and where it doesn't the market certainly does. As comics have grown from a medium of simple stories intended for children into one patronized by amateur historians and archivists wary of any idea that breaks the continuity of the perceived smooth progression from its past to its present, works in which theoretical or abstract concerns are more prominently displayed on the page than figurative ones have routinely been met with outright hostility, a retrenching of comics' self-policed borders: we don't have any room here for that. The fact of such works' publication and popularity with a small specialty audience means little. They have not caught on. They have not changed the mechanics of the comics world the way modernism changed literature and the fine arts.

If comics are not quite the final bastion of figurative art and novelistic storytelling, they are not too far away from it either. They are at the very least a place for traditional artistic values that have been discarded elsewhere thrive. Of course, comics' acting as a repository for lost wisdom doesn't preclude its ability to function as a progressive site for innovation as well; but it makes things harder. When a medium grows a preservationist focus, a simultaneous focus on expansion both becomes more difficult and can constitute a challenge to the relevance of what is being preserved. Viewed from this angle, it seems very much that comics is just a conservative artistic space. The community's slight lean toward political liberality (common enough in artistic circles) aside, comics more than any other medium during the past hundred years has been built on nostalgism and resistance to change. Artists' total failure to push back against their editorial overlords and stand strong for a space in which they could have a proper means of artistic expression is the story between the lines of the universally accepted statement that "reduced strip sizes killed newspaper comics". And the newspaper strip's replacement as the medium's most popular delivery mechanism -- the pamphlet genre comic book -- has undergone only one serious challenge to its hegemony over the past seven decades: the small-press underground comic, whose intense popularity in the mid-to-late 1960s rivaled that of the superhero books for a period that lasted perhaps a thousand days in total.

The narrative that the comics community has spun as a counter to this idea is one of increasing freedom of content and artistic virtuosity: comforting thoughts, and not unsupportable ones either. But audience acceptance of the work that gives this narrative its merit has been patchy -- so much so that the vast majority of the artists whose work functions as its evidence are unable even to make a living from their comics alone. The people who read comics and give comics their money have never been comfortable with material that goes beyond the look and feel of canonized past works. How bizarre and unhealthy is it that "artistic growth" in comics is and has been almost totally restricted to finding different ways of working within the same set of formal boundaries that have remained in place since the 19th century? People have to see those better, braver comics for the notion of their very existence -- let alone their growing prominence -- to have any currency. And they don't. Comics, by and large, wants more of the same, and if it reminds us of some rose-colored and distant past, so much the better.

All this being said, however, it's difficult to know where to go from this point. While a few comics have successfully discarded the figurative and the narrative to break new ground for the form, few would argue that these works are as satisfying or engaging as the best of the medium's more conventional stories. Personally, I even find it difficult to imagine that the kind of concerted exploration that painting gave abstraction and hard theory a century ago would yield results as valuable as the works of a Picasso or a Duchamp in comics. For me, and for almost every other participant in the comics industry I've spoken about these issues with, comics are inherently narrative, inherently figurative, and while work done outside these boundaries can be interesting, it can never get at the highest potentials for excellence the medium offers. Perhaps the only thing that can be done with this opinion is to admit that the notion of inherence, of nature determining form, is the bedrock of the conservative mindset -- to acknowledge that just because you can see there is a problem doesn't mean you aren't a part of it too.

I fail to see anything surprising about Miller's statements -- neither as the views of an individual or a statement made on the behalf of comics as a whole. Artistic conservatism is cultural conservatism. Miller merely speaks a politicized version of the mindset that's been a part of comics from the cradle.

Your Wednesday Sequence 32

Gasoline Alley Sunday page (1934). Frank King.



Yeah yeah, I couldn't find the exact date that page was published on like I usually do, get over it. Try looking at just how beautiful a piece of comics it is instead, my God! As I explain over in the latest installment of my Robot 6 column, I think this might just be King's defining piece of comics art -- whimsical and experimental, with an adventurous form that's perfectly suited to its content as well as its warm, homey (see?) tone. Just wonderful, probably my favorite page that I've written about on this column. So go read me rhapsodizing about it, talking about why single Sunday pages are the best single pages, and dissecting just how intelligently King gets past the trouble comics has in simultaneously depicting motion through both time and space, right here. I was really proud of how this column came out, you won't be disappointed.

A Treatise On Optics

Sans Genre IX



I've been having trouble reading comics lately. Not because of moral qualms with the material or difficulty in finding good ones or the pull of other media -- there's no "lately" about any of those things. No, I mean I've literally been having trouble reading them. The act of reading is a pretty remarkable thing when you come down to it, a singular act of will and concentration that we somehow experience as passive enjoyment. Maybe my brainpower is just ebbing away from me, but I'm finding it increasingly tough to see past my own vision and onto the page. There are so many things mitigating between a page of comics and our ability to make a perfect visual capture of it. The quality of light in any room changes a comic's color scheme the second it's opened. There's excess visual information surrounding every comic no matter where or how we look at it, at least until the point that it's held so close to the face we can't read it at all anymore. And then there are the barriers the eyes themselves place in between us and everything we see: sunspots, fuzz, the bridge of your nose in the periphery, the impossibility of taking in everything at once. Sight is the only way we have to access comics, and sight is imperfect.

It's comics' ability to get past so many of sight's imperfections that make the form such a special thing. Film and photography face many of the same problems as natural vision does -- lens flares, unwanted visual information, lack of ability to achieve total focus -- at least one of these things have a way of making it into every photo. And even though digital tools that can correct all these problems are rapidly being developed, those tools can't legislate the way a piece of drapery wrinkles and folds, the way a lock of hair falls, the expression on a face. Accident and happenstance will forever be a major compositional force, and the main contextual force of art forms that use machinery to capture documentary images from the world around them. And whether they realize it or not, when the photographer or the filmmaker begin using the computer to create from whole cloth, they've left the realm of the photographic for drawing. Drawing, in which the artist's vision is the sole motivating force, where the problems of vision can truly be left behind.



But the influence of the photograph has done much to dilute the power of drawing, the art of the picture. Unwanted happenstance may have a great deal of influence over the content of every photograph we see, but the prevalence of photographic imagery has created a knee-jerk impulse toward a documentary quality in drawings that aren't meant to carry it. Without excess information of some kind, the line of thought goes, pictures look like pictures, not representations of the real world that can be read into. Hence the strain of modern comics art that has gone far afield from the word "cartooning" in an effort to engage readers on the same quasi-realist grounds that film does. It's a troubling departure from the early cartoons and engravings the comics form grew out of, which in turn had roots in symbolist painting. Handled correctly, no amount of information a picture can hold is "too much". But where once all pictorial information took the faculty of invention in order to make it into the work, today most imagery contains at least something that the artist didn't intend but simply "shot". For centuries even incidental information was designed to give the image further relevance, added context, or autocritique. Today comics are more likely to be stuffed with lines and shapes and colors that can't be described as anything more than "background detail" -- meticulous documentation of extraneous surroundings -- unremarkable, interchangable, irrelevant.

This is why the blank backgrounds and empty spaces left open and free of lines by the cartoonist carry so much more power than the crumbling concrete and flaking facades of the mega-detailer. The comics form, once again, is in thrall only to the imagination that powers the hands putting images to page. Much has been made of comics' ability to leave the real world's laws of physics and anatomy behind in presenting their apocalyptic battles, but the reality is that comics need not present anything in keeping with the real at all. There is nothing unavoidable in drawing, none of the accessions that photographic imagery is forced to make to visual information other than the content it depicts. In fact, it is impossible to draw something you don't mean to.



In comics all that exists is what the artist wants us to see -- and in the best comics, that means if it doesn't play a role in the story it doesn't exist. Look at the drawings of a Roy Crane or a Chris Ware, a Yuichi Yokoyama or a Jack Kirby. They are silent, pure, free of noise and anecdote. Free, in fact, of the world, of the billions upon billions of tiny distractions and happenstances that clutter up the days and prevent us from attaining the clarity given to superheroes who can see through the pages to their true purpose. The look of reality, in which the biggest difference from fiction is perhaps the existence of the totally irrelevant, is an impossibility for comics, and the best not only acknowledge but embrace this, creating unified drawings in which everything has a role to play and the connection to the world around us has been decisively severed. This quality, of course, is hardly unique to comics -- great visual art across the spectrum of media carries it. But comics is the only medium in which we actually read the pictureplane, in which engagement with the form necessitates an attempt to draw meaning from, rather than simply observe, pictures. Hence, the existence of extraneous information on the page is not just glossed over, as in film or photography: it is analyzed, which dulls the impact of the aspects of the picture which carry relevant information. And by contrast, comic book drawings in which every bit of the picture serves some conceptual purpose are the form operating as precisely and effectively as possible.

To possess natural sight is to understand that some of what we see with our eyes is not, in fact, "real". There are tricks of the light and afterimages, blind spots and blurs, and these things all translate to the photographic image. Because of their status as a story as well as a pictorial medium, only comics present an inhabitable world in which everything we see is real. If it's on the page it's included: not only does comics lack a mechanism to point out visual information as being subjective or nonexistent, it's (at least thus far) wholly uninterested in doing so. The ability to legislate an entire, uninterrupted reality with the work of human hands seems a much more intriguing proposition for most artists.



This quality of comics, in which everything visible must be judged as true, is what makes comic book drawings that carry visible traces of the tools used to make them so wonderfully intriguing. When we look at real-world objects we understand that the layers of light suffusing them or backgrounding them or covering them over aren't their substance, only the way we perceive the wood or stone or plastic or whatever else it is that makes them up. But comics are made of medium, brush or pencil grain, digital fuzz, the folds and overlaps of an uneven paint job. On the page there is no disavowing these things, no saying that they aren't as much of what the pictures are as their content or their characters. They are both the construction of the world inside the comic and the way back out into reality, evidence that somewhere someone manufactured these things. In reading prose we can imagine events that take place in a photographic, real world, the characters as flesh-and-blood humans. But comics take away the reader's ability to imagine their narratives occurring anywhere but within the parameters of the artist's visual style. The fact that it's all just drawings is always apparent, always part of the reading experience. Perhaps comics are inherently metafictional, pocket worlds that constantly tell the stories of their own creation along with the stories they're designed to be telling.

It goes right down beneath the lines, to the paper they're printed on. If the grainy excesses of an ink line are part of a comic's reality, no less can be said for the xerox grain blanketing the pages of a minicomic, or the chips of wood pulp dotting comics printed on newspaper. And comics' readers can't help but pay attention to these things; the format of the book legislates a comic's reading experience as much as the colors of the ink used to print it or the font it's lettered in. In comics, every bit of the object matters. By comparison, how many novels get noticed for their paper stock, or paintings for the qualities of their canvas? The action of reading comics encourages a deep, investigative visual contemplation above all else, a systematic mining of each page for all its details. The ones that are there all matter. And everything else doesn't.



The perfect comic, then, is the one in which every fleck of ink, every slightest color modulation, every tiny waver of every tiny line, is a part of the artist's vision and intention. Even if it happens one day, this comic in which happenstance plays no part whatsoever, it will still be an impossible thing to experience. Its reader will turn on a light to read it, and open their imperfect, afterimaged, fuzzed out eyes, and see the comic covered over by the real world around it, see something beside the world on the page. Artistic intention is a failure the second it meets its audience. But on the comics page, at least, it lives and thrives. The only hurdle comics can't negotiate is human biology itself. Everything else is within reach.

DTU Interview: Yuichi Yokoyama

Oh my god oh my god oh my god you guys, I just interviewed Yuichi Yokoyama over at Comics Alliance! There's a couple reasons that this is a pretty sweet moment for me: Yokoyama's by far my favorite cartoonist going, and this has been nothing short of a career year for him, with not one but two books coming out that are better than all the other ones, and then there's the fact that English-language interviews with the man are few and far between. Yokoyama's a delightfully Warholian interview subject, with a persona that comes across as elevated and robotic as his comics are. I asked the questions, and there's no denying that he answered them with economy and precision. It was a cool contrast with my last couple of interviews, which were like long and anecdotal conversations.

Anyway, go read the interview already, it's me and Yokoyama talking about comics and stuff! If you're unfamiliar with the magic that is the man's work, peep this Comics Journal article I wrote on it last week. Or you can just check out the excerpted pages from Yokoyama's eye-destroying new book Color Engineering below the interview, brought to you by an eyebrow raising team-up between Comics Alliance and Picturebox. Get going!

Your Wednesday Sequence 31

Mystery In Space #71 (1961), page 6. Carmine Infantino.



This week on my Robot 6 column, I talked about a page by the artist who might be my favorite guy to draw superheroes ever, Carmine Infantino. I think the page above is an absolutely stunning piece of unconventional comic book storytelling (look at how effortlessly he makes that weird layout just work for him!), and I was happy to have the chance to dig into it. I tried to include a little bit of background on Infantino, too -- he's so hyped up as "dude who drew the Flash that one time" and "dude who did the little yellow circle on Batman's chest" that I think a lot of people miss what makes him really special. You don't want to miss THAT, do you? Okay, so go read the article already!

Your Wednesday Sequence SupaSpecTac DeluXXXury Edition #2

This week on my Robot 6 column I interviewed the great Benjamin Marra about the mechanics of comic book storytelling, spotlighting a couple of his phenomenal pages along the way. I've been wanting to talk about Ben's approach to sequencing for a while now: his comics are the wildest around but they're always just flawlessly composed, with an incredibly cool control of the information on the page. As far as action storytelling goes right now, some artists get more baroque, but for my money no one's as effective. Ben had some really fascinating secrets to reveal in our chat about his working methods, and on top of that he can talk you through Jack Kirby's pages like nobody else. Head over here and read it; you just might learn a thing or two.

"Tryptich"

The life of Lou Gehrig was only equal to the story of Galahad and the collected works of Curt Swan on Superman as a heroic and even like, mythic narrative for me as a kid. I could never figure out what attracted people to figures like Jesus when constructs with more immediate power and greater apparent purity existed. Lately I've been feeling a sort of contemplative sadness about the fact that the rational mind can't just force itself to believe in God, so I thought drawing comics about the substitutes I used for that idea when I was a kid might be a good way of getting at some kind of spiritual solace.

I've also been looking at a lot of triptych paintings in an effort to pull as many of painting's lessons about picture-making as I can from a strain of it that still has a lot in common with comics. Triptychs usually carry a very sincere type of religious imagery too, which is a big plus for me right now. The idea of doing what I could to deify Gehrig (who I think has the most tragic and poetic life story of the 20th century, hands down) by creating a triptych of him was really appealing. I thought I'd make a "triptych squared" -- three pages of three panels each -- to bring the piece a little more in line with comics. It had to be wordless, of course, so the real effort of it was distilling thirty-seven years of life into nine images that told as much of the whole story as possible. I read a few biographies and narrowed it down to these ones from a list of fifty or sixty possible one-panel scenes, about thirty of which I drew thumbnail sketches for. I made an explicit point of not watching the Gehrig biopic "Pride of the Yankees"; it's a phenomenal film but I saw it so many times as a kid that I didn't want its visual dictation of these scenes in my head any more than they already were.

Animation art is the other thing I've been trying to absorb a lot of recently. The stylistic dissonance between line animation of figures and painted backgrounds in 20th century cartoons has always really fascinated me. I explored it a little in that "Haunted Bike" comic I did a while back, but that was before I had really begun to make a study of this stuff, plus I drew that one in like two hours while I was drunk. I tried to do it the right way this time. Disney films pre-1980 probably have the most sumptuous and impressive painted backgrounds I've seen, but those are just impossible to follow, it's like trying to outdo Rembrandt. And I didn't really want to use paint, because I don't have an effective way to superimpose my figures over the backgrounds. I found a model to follow in the backgrounds for the Bruce Timm/Eric Radomski/Glen Murakami Batman and Superman animated series: basic color shapes, good use of shading but never too meticulous, and you can always see the brushstrokes if you're looking for them. Something between Art Deco and Impressionism, but such a basic, utilitarian use of paint that it also recalls the "paintooning" done by Jerry Moriarty. Backgrounds that drop out and push the figures forward but have enough life and prettiness to them to stand up by themselves. It's very "comics" to me. I marathonned my Timm DVDs while I drew this strip.

It didn't come out exactly how I was picturing it -- at one point I seriously considered erasing all the backgrounds and just leaving the inked figures floating in a blank space, which I still think would have made a stronger graphic statement. But I didn't want this to be some crazy conceptual avant-comix thing. I just wanted to make a tribute to Lou Gehrig. So here's that.