Herriman's Dailies

When it's considered on the individual level and not as a component part of a much larger tapestry, the daily comic strip occupies a place that's just about unique in the arts. Most of the forms comics have taken over their decades of history can be slotted fairly conveniently next to the popular idioms of other artistic practices. A great anthology short or single issue of a comic works along the same lines as a great pop song or TV show episode or short story. A great graphic novel holds an amount of inspired work commensurate to a great film, or a great LP, or a great book. Even the great Sunday pages of yore (and the great broadsheet pages we're seeing in larger and larger numbers today) stand well enough alongside great paintings, great photographs, great poems.

The daily strip, though, thwarts cross-media comparison. Perhaps it carries similarities to haiku, or viral videos, or sketches, but really it is something that doesn't have much of an equivalent in other art forms. This fact both makes it a little surprising and goes a long way toward explaining why it's been around longest as a consistently popular and available mode of presentation for the comics medium. It's a test of skill unique to comics, and no mean one, forcing artists to maintain the form's pictorial consistency while also putting across an acceptably substantial bit of story in a few squares. Difficult, to say the least; maybe too difficult in a comics landscape that gets more friendly to long-form, "epic" works every day. The story of the newspaper daily strip's fade from glory runs right alongside the "rise of the graphic novel" narrative that's so popular in more self-congratulatory comics circles. A bit of consternation arises when anyone comes right out and mentions the daily's flagging fortunes, but it doesn't seem to be a pressing concern for just about anyone beside the artists making the things.

It's hard to do much more than guess at the reason for the lack of interest the daily strip receives these days, so let me do just that: in the current climate of thick, archival reprint books and recastings of daily-strip artists as proto-graphic novelists, it can be difficult to find much material that really gets everything out of the form as what it is. Consider: Frank King and Milt Caniff and many more besides reached dizzying heights via both the fantastic and mundane in daily strips, but both used the format as a mere building block, tailoring their stories to fit within it but more importantly to expand far beyond it, much the same way great novelists use single sentences. Charles Schulz and Doug Wright crafted individual strips that relied on readers' familiarity with character dynamics and stock situations established previously to make their points. When one looks at the format critically, it gets tough to find work done in it that doesn't work better some way else.

For dailies that function best as what they are, the greatest cartoonist of all is as good a place as any to start. Even the daily strips of George Herriman's magnum opus Krazy Kat, however, seem a bit undervalued by the current market. While his undoubtedly glorious Sundays are lavished with beautifully designed, lovingly researched complete collections, his dailies exist piecemeal at best; a handful in Patrick McDonnell's biographical art book, a lovely though frustratingly brief sample in a deluxe Fantagraphics compilation, and a book that collects a sequence of strips from the 1930s while emphasizing the fact that they share a continuous narrative, a relative rarity among Krazy Kat's decades of single daily strips. And yet Herriman worked on Krazy Kat every day for more than 30 years, which as a sentence packs something incredibly grand into something that sounds incredibly matter-of-fact. Think about it: one of comics' most talented practitioners creating a strip every day for thirty years. I mean, how old are you? Herriman's work laps my entire life by half a decade on either side, and he did it all in three or four or five panels a day, rarely connecting one to any other, using a peculiar little format unique to his peculiar little medium.



Herriman worked the broadsheet page on Sundays like any other successful cartoonist, and it's for those broadsheets that he's best remembered. But the volume of his dailies far outweighs his Sundays. It took three years for Krazy Kat to make the move from strip to full page, and Herriman died with a daily half-completed on his table, not a Sunday. We remember Herriman as a broadsheet artist, but he lived his life as a daily man. And the broadsheet page always seemed to dwarf Krazy Kat and his ragtag cast of anthropomorphic "pixies": the size of the characters remains the same no matter the format they find themselves in. While Herriman's boundless Sundays let him stretch out and tell stories of the mystical, surreal world he set his stories in, or prove just how much was possible to accomplish with a single sheet of paper in comics, his daily strips were where he zeroed in to work on the characters, the personalities and peculiarities he spent more of his life living with than anyone else.

If anyone recognized the challenge of the daily strip, it was Herriman: where his Sundays spread with an epic ramble, the dailies are intensely concentrated, undeniable in the speed and energy with which they put their information across. Crowded into the tight boxes of the smaller strips, Herriman's loose, electric pen line often seems in danger of exploding, bunching up into tight oils of ink around the corners and inside the characters whose spastic, unpredictable antics drive the little bursts of action forward. Though it was standard to treat the long, flat expanse of page space the daily strip allows as a vaudeville stage in Herriman's day, no one moved action through that space quite like he did. Rarely is a character in motion without a bramble of ink marks behind him, pushing forward; rarely does an object make contact with another (whether it's knuckles to door or mouth to trumpet or Herriman's famous brick to his kat's head) without an accompanying flurry of impact lines. The art of Krazy Kat dailies feels less abridged than condensed, as though Herriman was cramming comics' liveliest jack-in-the-box into proportions as manageable as possible during the week before letting it expand to its full size on Sundays.

However, the stories (or jokes, or dialogues, or puns, or double entendres, or koans, or just plain nonsenses), are fully formed, maybe the purest examples of Herriman the writer. In daily strips especially, cartoonists of Herriman's ilk were expected first and foremost to be comedians, and for thirty years the artist threw out bit after bit after brilliant bit, effervescent, gorgeous fragments of a single epic poem that means absolutely nothing when taken as a whole. Here, it's in the bits that the genius abides. (Precious few places accommodate that truth as well as the comics form.) The dailies were the arena Herriman's monumental wit was given its most rigorous workouts in: five frames at most to put the joke across, and nothing outside of those. Where Krazy Kat Sundays delay or outright interrupt the path to a punchline with pastoral asides, layout tricks, or dense blocks of Joycean language, Herriman gets right to the point in his dailies. The free-associative wordplay is refined down to absolutely dizzying little balloons of pure dreamlike verbiage, the more on-the-nose comedy comes rapid fire, the non sequiturs happen with only thin single panel borders separating them, and the wonderful craft of Herriman's processional, step-by-step approach to humor is laid bare. Setup in the first panel, expansion in the next, cliffhanger, punchline, and that's all there is to it. And of course, when there isn't a clever inscrutability to end a strip on, slapstick enters the picture, Krazy Kat gets a brick to the head, and we all go home happy.



Herriman's most interesting daily strips, however, come when it feels like he was reaching the furthest, truly without a joke for the day and uncertain of what to do about it. It's in these strips that Herriman created "punchlines", if they can really be tagged as such, that related to the mysterious immediacy of art, the trompe l'oeil nature of the comics form, or even his own identity as the hand behind the artwork. At the climax of one daily, Ignatz Mouse, the perennial jailbird, is surprised to see a portrait of himself behind bars drawn onto the jailhouse's wall; and we, the readers, are surprised as well, because this is the same exact drawing Herriman has used innumerable times before to show us the real thing, Ignatz locked up -- yet there he is, looking up at himself, one no more "drawn" than the other. In another strip, Ignatz draws one of the bricks he so often clobbers Krazy with (again, one identical to the "real" bricks Herriman has drawn so many times before), and protests when the voice of the law, Officer Pupp, chastises him for his proximity to something as innocuous as a drawing. It takes further reflection to come across the thought that everything in the comic is a drawing. The strip following leads off with Krazy Kat getting pasted by a brick that Officer Pupp insists must be real, because "drawings simply cannot do that." Ignatz's simple response, an advertisement for the wonders of the comics form if there ever was one: "Animated drawings can."

Herriman's dailies brim with just as much life and magic as his Sunday strips, but it's more than just that. By managing to reduce his strip down to the smallest possible size something called a "comic" can take without losing any of what made it so special, Herriman proved that his particular brand of genius was beyond format. It touched anything his hands did. These strips are minimalism, yes, but they also incorporate as much maximalism as any broadsheet; they are a great deal somehow stated in a small space, little and much in single strokes. And the Krazy Kat dailies are also a reminder for the modern era: the medium is capable of wonders even when it's whittled right down to the core.

Read a bunch of great Herriman dailies here.

TCJ Review: Sediment

I reviewed Sediment, the absolutely stunning new artist's book from CF, over here at TCJ. (Um, The Comics Journal. So many acronyms!!) Starts like this:



The latest release from Providence-based noise cartoonist Christopher “CF” Forgues is something of a departure from his previous output, but it’s one that makes sense. Over the past decade or so, CF has gone from a marginal figure in the culty art-comix circle to perhaps the most influential cartoonist making noncommercial work on a regular basis. Though his stories in Powr Mastrs, Kramers Ergot, and The Ganzfeld (among numerous others) ring with conceptual focus and clarity of execution, the biggest reason for Forgues’s catapult to the top of the other comics heap is his often imitated but never equaled drawing style, which fuses childlike simplicity to virtuosic nuance beneath a pencil line that crackles with a raw energy wholly its artist’s own. The more work he puts out, the more CF emerges as that rarest of creatures: a true visionary who has chosen to devote himself to making comics. Read more

"Red Windows (In Los Angeles)"

"Hipsters" sequel




CONTINUES HERE IN "AFFECTED"

How To Read Art-Comix And Why

Sans Genre X



Into the valley. Sometimes you stare into a microscope for so long that you only remember there's a world a million times wider outside the lens when somebody taps you on the shoulder. Such is life as a reader of American art-comix. The relatively low cultural visibility of all comics makes the medium something that's at least moderately difficult to follow without being motivated and passionate about it, but when you start talking about the cutting edge of avant-garde sequential art, you're talking about a specialists-only interest. It's a precondition for work that only makes it into maybe fifteen or twenty retail outlets nationwide, that relies on tumblr websites for publicity and paypal for money more heavily than anything else, and most of all, has such a tightly knit community of followers that it's often difficult not to wonder whether the audience for the stuff outside of cartoonists and critics numbers in the triple figures. But every once in a while the uninitiated folks to whom you insist that acts of unfettered artistic expression get at "previously unseen potentials" and that risograph printing is "the most beautiful production method going" and that Gary Panter is "the fucking bomb" actually get themselves interested and decide to take the plunge.

Almost always, the result is confusion. Especially for people with a pre-existing image of what comics are and how they work (which these days is pretty much everyone of the age and inclination to check out some more difficult comics -- Watchmen and Walking Dead, like it or not, have become pop currency), confronting work that uses pages and panels and quite often even a word balloon or two but doesn't subscribe to the same precepts as the mass-market "graphic novels" named above, can be a befuddling experience. It gets even more so because the few corners of comics' critical body that are capable of expressing simple opinions with a modicum of intelligence are almost uniformly rapturous and equally vague in their praise of such work. The story I usually tell here for some color is the tale of The Day My Brother Visited And My Copy Of CF's City-Hunter Came In The Mail. I studied the pages of what might be the quintessential arty-comics zine of the past few years consumed by transports of delight; he gave it a quick flip-through, handed it back to me, and shrugged "dude, this comic sucks."

I knew I was right -- leave the fact that I write for the Comics Journal and as such all my opinions about comics are automatically correct out of it, the mere fact that anyone could look at the comic and be so enraptured by it indicated the abiding worth of it. But art-comix, almost exclusively, don't come to you -- pulling the value from them can be a difficult task. Luckily, I recently had the issue brought to my attention again, by a pen pal who asked for some tips for accessing and appreciating more esoteric comics. Since not quite knowing how to get around inside these wonderful books is anything but an uncommon complaint, I thought it might be good if I shared a few simple strategies on how best to appreciate art-comix. Pencils ready!



Look at the pictures. That might sound obvious, and it's true for any kind of comic you might run across. But the great tragedy of the "graphic novel" era, in which comics have risen slightly above the status of a cultural joke and onto the Barnes and Noble shelves and the aging hipster professors' curriculums, is that the mainstream acceptance they've been afforded has come with an unprecedented emphasis on the writerly qualities of the books that have made it to the NY Times/AV Club canon. The pictures serve the story, yes, but they're also an equally lively and much more immediate vehicle for individual aesthetic expression than narrative. In most art-comix, this is the facility for expression that's being given the better part of the workout. I like to think about the relationship between pictures and words in art-comix as being like that of music to lyrics in songs: the words certainly count, but the reason to listen is what's underneath them. They use the word "art" in the name for these books with reason: the best art-comix are an exercise for the eyes and the mind, the content they hold based as much in concrete visuals as abstract plot points.



Forget what you know. Coming to art-comix from superhero comics, especially, makes for a bumpy road. Leaving aside the obvious aesthetic differences for a moment, the best way of processing information presented within the two idioms is vastly different. What superhero comics emphasize above all else is essentially sameness: readers are encouraged to look for dialogue between what they're reading at the moment and previous issues, or classic stories featuring the same characters, or books from the same publisher that feature other characters, or all of the above at once. Pretty much every corporate superhero comic exists as a tiny sliver of something the reader is encouraged to see as seamless and continuous, a vast reach of inextricably connected story material. Art-comix, on the other hand, frequently disconnect from themselves, even in the shortest of stories. Random digressions, subplots that never follow up, pin-up pages, "commercial breaks" of varying length... rather than shoehorn every possible idea into a single plot a la Grant Morrison, the preferred route of comics' avant-garde is to let ideas coexist as separate entities from one another, even if they happen to share the same cover or even the same page.

The ideal mindset to enter an art comic with is something as close to passive reception as possible: reading actively in an attempt to make as many connections between what's at hand and what's come before is usually a mistake. Instead, try to see everything for what it is. Find what value you can in every page, every panel, every drawn form and line of dialogue before moving on. More likely than not, the neatly tied narrative fulfillment we're trained to look for as pop-media consumers in a historically Judeo-Christianate country is not forthcoming, so embrace a more hedonistic reading style and focus your energy on pulling as much enjoyment as you can from what your eyes are resting on this second. If it links up later, that's great. If not, who cares? You'll be looking at something else by then.



(New) world building. Frequently -- maybe even more often than not -- art-comix won't make a whole lot of what's commonly referred to as "sense". Scenes switch setting midstream, words and pictures don't match up, characters come and go without warning, and figurative content jacknifes into abstraction at the drop of a hat. Where so many comics stress the patient, meticulous evocation of a world that corresponds as closely as possible to our own, art-comix embrace the differences, the fact that any world printed on paper is never even going to come close to what's outside your window. So take them as they come. The world you're inhabiting while you're on the pages of the book is never supposed to be the one you live in; revel in the surprises and discoveries that figuring out its individual logic entails. Accept what's on the page as reality, no matter how unfamiliar or nonsensical it may seem. It's meant to be that way. Comics are a powerful tool for escapism, after all, and few will take you to a further remove from reality than art-comix.



Bad is good. This one works along the same lines as the last. We're trained to interrogate drawn images for as much faithfulness to reality as possible: reproducing the look of the world around us for artistic purposes is the most common goal in everything from figurative painting to movies to photographs to comics art. We're also told to value professionalism above pretty much anything else, but when people who draw like "professionals" produce terrible comics with such frequency, passion stands revealed as the truly necessary component of exciting work. Leave your classical illustrative values at the door for art-comix. Books that contain worlds removed from the logic of this reality have no obligation to replicate it visually. Savor the imperfections of the art, the deviations from both realism and common artistic shorthand. The parts that look wrong are the parts that define the outer limits of the world you're reading, the easiest ways to see that what you're involved in is different from usual. Sometimes being individual is a more important statement than being pretty. It's why you dyed your hair purple in seventh grade. All it takes is training to get things right: send anybody to commercial-art school for a decade and they'll be able to draw like Neal Adams. But the stray marks made, the liquid medium splattered, the hiccups in form and style that riddle art-comix are the property of their creators' hands alone.

They cost too fucking much. Yes they do. Grit your teeth real hard, is my advice. Nobody's getting rich here. Being part of something that only a handful of others are means paying premiums. Look at it this way: if Marvel knocked a dollar off their cover prices, maybe a few ancillary titles might get canceled. If most art-comix were any cheaper they simply wouldn't exist, because their creators couldn't be making comics. If you're buying it you value it, so you should damn well value it.



Tool and technique. Since the artists are also usually the most effective proselytizers for art-comix, it's easy to come away resentful, feeling like you're reading a bulletin from some cartoonists-only clubhouse meeting. And as with all comics, an appreciation for artistic technique adds to the reading experience. But there's no need to sign up for a correspondence course if you want to enjoy this stuff. The main thing is to view the art you're reading as art: not abstract information, but real substances pressed or scratched or smeared or xeroxed on a page. If there's any aspect of art one should enter the noisier regions of comics ready to appreciate, it's the tactility of the media used to make the comic, something we can all understand. Art-comix tell the stories of their own creation, calling back to the components they came together from. The dust of a pencil line speaks in a different voice than the trail of ink left by a pen. The filmy sheen of marker colors is something entirely separate from the buff crust of dried paint, even if the tones themselves are exactly the same. The charming waver of a freehand line against the eerily mechanical feel of a rulered one. Look for as much in the building materials of the comic as the comic itself: they're a part of it too, after all.



These are only a few strategies that you might find useful; there are certainly plenty more, many of which you may have already found or be yet to find on your own. All of my instructions rely on sweeping generalizations made about a wide-ranging and incredibly vital corner of comics, so depending on the book your mileage may vary. Of course, the real fun begins once you master reading art-comix and bring the reading methods honed there back to your favorite mainstream comics: insurrection, bitches. And now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the release party for the new issue of Kramers Ergot!

Thanks to Messrs. Dave Morris of Calgary and Corey Mullee of Williamsburg for asking the question.

Your Wednesday Sequence: Bernard Krigstein (part 2)

I think the latest installment of my Robot 6 column is the best one I've written. It starts like this:

Short version: Bernard Krigstein was the best artist to work for the best genre-comics publisher of all time (EC), unsurpassed in his masterful use of sequencing, but — this is the important part — frequently hemmed in by the undercooked stories he was assigned to draw and the limited length he was given to explore what dramatic potential they had in. Krigstein never drew a story longer than twelve pages. However, the way he went about solving these problems, as we’ll see, was a big part of what made him not only unique but truly great.

And now to business.



Here’s a prime example of how Krigstein seamlessly elevated less-than-inspired script material. Saddled with wordy, adjective-weighted narration that nonetheless transitions between scenes at the snap of a finger, from bundled up on the streets of London to pajama-clad in a hotel room with a single narrow panel in between, Krigstein has no hope of giving the action a blow-by-blow reading. The rapid jump cutting employed here is a necessity, not a choice; but look at just how elegantly Krigstein carries it off, by placing an element in each panel that ties it to both the previous and the next. We move smoothly from the lamp in panel one to the streetlight in panel two to the wall torch occupying the same exact spot in panel three. Then Krigstein takes advantage of the strict top-to-bottom reading the high, thin panels he’s boxed into creates, ending panel three with his character’s feet before featuring them in the tier’s final frame. It’s an incredibly awkward format somehow made to flow like melted butter, a beautiful little bit of work. Read more

"Imaginary Art Show"

This one is exactly what it says in the title: a picture I made of an imaginary art show. Actually, it's an art show I dreamed, not just imagined: one very quick flash in front of my eyes in that last moment between sleeping and wakefulness where you aren't seeing the world around you. If you want to "take a step back" and see the whole thing at once, click here. Dream images are incredibly important to me as an artist for a few reasons: first, their meaning isn't immediately clear, which makes drawing them much more engaging than simply fleshing out the details of a picture you've already consciously contrived. It's a process of discovery. Also, that lack of pre-contrivance tells you about yourself as not just an artist but a visual thinker -- like, what images are really coming out of your head when it's not leaning on the realism of capturing waking life, or even a more constructed fantasy world? Drawing dream images is a good way to figure out what your truly natural facilities as an artist are. Plus, I think they always hold a strong element of enigma, like a question without an answer. There is never a conscious idea about them, never anything they've set out to accomplish. They're simply here because they're here. Other dream comics I've drawn are here and here.

So I dreamed about a gallery exhibition, and it looked like this: two photos printed onto big canvases sandwiching a circle of eight two-panel watercolor comics with only color in them; and those sandwiching another piece, the same size, with "3120" written on it. Everything up against a beige wall, with the top of the whole thing maybe nine feet off the ground. I couldn't recall all of the color combos on the watercolor pieces, only that they looked somehow futuristic to me: color harmonies that aren't really in popular use now but looked like they would be one day. I've been going to a lot of galleries here in LA lately, and thinking more about the rather comics-specific element of sequencing that comes into the way they're hung. (Frank Santoro and I had a chat about this that you can listen to here.) It seemed like a fun challenge to create a gallery show in miniature, and so rather than drawing everything on one sheet of paper, I set about creating what's basically a 2-D diorama: I painted the "wall" sheet beige, drew the "photos" on the most canvas-y paper I had, chopped down a sheet of xerox paper into nine little pieces to do the watercolors on, and then pasted them all up in the configuration from my dream. It's sort of an homage to Marcel Duchamp's "Green Box", which summarizes one of the 20th century's greatest artists' career in a portable, attractive package. Not a bad way to spend a free afternoon.

And yes, I really burned my pretty eyelashes off by accident the other week.

Links's

Images To Haunt Your Fucking Nightmares: Alex Ross does Jimmy Corrigan.



- BREAKING NEWS: Seminal psych-comics Brett Ewins, whose Judge Dredd storiess are like a model for how to make by-the-numbers action comics visually exciting, has been embroiled in an incident that sounds like it wouldn't be out of place in an issue of 2000AD...

- Best Eurocomics being made? It's all Ruppert and Mulot, you ask me.

- And this is a photo of Killoffer. How much more of fucking pimps are French cartoonists than American ones? It must be at least 83%.

- Shit Comics brings you the Panels of 2011. Who am I to argue?

- A jewel amidst seas of nothingness: George Elkind on Tintin.

- Oh, I'm sure you super fucking care what my favorite four records of 2011 were, right? (Cold CAVE!) Well, listen to me yakk about 'em on my new favorite podcast Them's The Vagaries here (about an hour in). I totally forgot to list that Araabmuzik album though. Also that new Prurient.

- Brandon Soderberg of Comics For Serious, perhaps the comics critic whose work I most miss seeing on a regular basis, put in some serious time on Them's The Vagaries as well, delivering a brilliant, fiery address on the state of comics circa now. Not to be missed: part one, part two. Brandon also put one of my comics on his best of 2011 list! Therefore said list is Correct.

- Nobody shit-talks Grant Morrison like Eddie Campbell shit-talks Grant Morrison.

-Speaking of whom, Frank Santoro's comics-as-criticism blog post on Campbell's How To Be An Artist book is super fantastic.

- The world's best comic shop has a tumblr.

- Better to be silly than a pansy, of course.

- Tim O'Neil nails Marvel's current publishing practices. Like, with a nail gun level of nailing it.

- Michel Fiffe is on the crowdfunding circuit for the next issue of his comic Zegas. According to prominent critic Matt Seneca, issue 1 was the shit. So give him your money.

- And as always, my art porn graphic novel AFFECTED continues apace. However, I think I'll be bringing it from its usual twice-weekly posting schedule down to once a week in order to serve up more satisfying chunks of story as the ending draws ever nearer. So look for it Mondays, and then look again on Tuesdays cause I am late sometimes. I just posted some sick fighting pages. In addition, I have a new, weird, but seemingly quite popular short comic up at my other comics website. And I have another short on my table right now (hence this link post instead of putting in the work on a real blog post), so stop by again in a couple days to see that one. UPDATE: Here it is, looking lovely if I do say so myself.

The Next Big Thing

O Plexo Holistico (2011), by Diego Gerlach. Barba Negra (Brazil).

This is why I do what I do. When you're a Noted Comics Critic you get a ton of rando emails from people who want to send you their comic. I never turn one down, but until recently I've never been quite sure why that was. Just like the ones I buy at the store, most of the comics I get sent are real awful, and then a couple are ok or even pretty good. It's cool when that happens because then I get to learn about something I wouldn't have otherwise. Still, as I said, if you'd come out and asked me at any point last calendar year why I subject my mailbox to such an utter deluge of manila-enveloped comics, I probably wouldn't have been able to verbalize why. But then last week I read the copy of O Plexo Holistico, a slickly produced magazine-format Brazilian import comic that the book's creator, Diego Gerlach, had asked about sending me a while back, and here it is. Why do I never turn an offer of a comic in the mail down? This is why.

I feel... I dunno, I feel like the record exec who stumbled into some Midlands club on some a dingy night and discovered Black Sabbath? This comic is luminous, hugely exciting work, but it's also so out of nowhere that I still have trouble figuring it out. The fact that I'm the only guy in the country with a copy only increases that perception of O Plexo Holistico as a phantom comic, something not quite real even though I can read it through and hold it in my hands.



And so, an explanation, if only so I can convince myself that this thing is really going to sit on the shelf between Nipper and 100 Bullets: this is a silent all-action comic, almost completely free of "story" as such. What replaces narrative is meticulous, intensely disciplined motion tracking, a single sixteen page fight scene planed open with a surgeon's eye, panel after pyrotechnic panel pulled from one simple chain of events. The participants in the extended smackdown are the lucha wrestler/superhero fellow featured on the book's cover and a hipster Teen Wolf type with psychic powers. What happens on the pages is simple: the hipster kid's concentration on getting wasted in a skatepark is broken by the appearance of the masked man ("Nil", if we're going by the lettering emblazoned in scotch tape across his chest), who announces himself by pissing on a wall covered in posters of a werewolf. Angered by the insult to what we don't yet know is his secret identity, the kid brains the superhero with a barrel full of garbage, and proceeds to take the physically powerful but mentally hapless figure apart with a telepathic assault barrage after switching into werewolf mode. The fight over, he shifts back into a kid with cool clothes, and that's all, folks.

It's a lot of fun, both hilarious and gripping, and pretty much any comic that goes in this intently on a single subject -- not just a feature-length fight, but a silent one, with nothing at all in the way of the acts of drawn violence -- has got something to recommend it. But for all Gerlach's kinetic blocking and high-volume impact shots, he seems at least as interested in using his epic fight scene to put on a formal show and exhibit the stunning aesthetic of his work. Up front is the book's lack of the gridded layouts so typical of art comix: rather than hitting one to the next in regimented lines, these pictures explode all over each other, multiple drawings sharing the single canvas of the full page. Gerlach never tries to cram too much into one space: most pages only feature two or three panels, but they're big ticket pictures that swagger up and demand your attention, rolling in slow so you can really feel each one's sick crunch. Once the imagess switch from physical to psychic conflict, the Kirbyist banging is replaced by a swift-flowing, deeply psychedelic stream of lines and screentones, culminating in what's sure to stand unchallenged as the year's best vomit scene. Throughout, the intent remains unchanged: these are drawings by an artist who's going for your throat via your eyes, his each panel more expressive and ruthless than the last.



Sure, this is style over substance, but that's perfectly okay -- better than that, it's pretty amazing -- when the style in question is something so fresh and unexpected. There are moves swiped from Paul Pope and Katsuhiro Otomo here, of course; after all, it's a fusion-era action comic. But much more noticeable is the inspired fusion of the detail-rich, gloriously mean style seen in the work of Rafael Grampa (the last young action-comics stunner to come out of Brazil) with a strong strain of the deep-underground, allusive, almost sadistically dark tone and raw, personal, geometric design work found in work by Providence noise-comics makers Ben Jones and CF. The deep-focus punchouts and perfectly rendered explosions of body fluid of Grampa are backed up in O Plexo Holistico not by the cliched settings of Westerns or superhero stories, but by the tortured, symbol-strewn cityscapes of the scariest art comix. And on top of all that, Gerlach has somehow managed to create what may be the first post-Jonny Negron comic, shooting his pages through with plenty of the '90s anime gestures and reverberating compositions that have come to be associated with the medium's current coolest new artist.



This glossy yellow magazine, made far outside the fractious, self-obsessed American comics scene, feels like a downright revolutionary site, a place where the divisions between what we think of as "mainstream" and "alternative" in this country disappear, or become irrelevant: Gerlach has created a deeply impressive piece of work that pulls equally from the furthest cutting edges of both. So just call it cutting edge comics if you need to call it anything, and hope we'll be seeing a lot more soon.

You can order a copy of O Plexo Holistico from its Brazilian publisher here, though I understand copies may be hitting the States in select locations at some point. You should also check out Diego Gerlach's flickr here for the most baller Spider-Man picture ever.

Your Wednesday Sequence: Bernard Krigstein (part 1)

God, before I even did the first one of my sequence columns over at Robot 6 -- I mean like, the second I got the idea that I was gonna start doing them -- I knew I was going to have to dig deep into Bernard Krigstein. As far as revolutionary approaches to putting drawings together on a page go, he's pretty much it: an unparalleled genius who remains far ahead of the game. The only problem facing me was picking a single Krigstein sequence that stood out as a shining, emblematic example of his genius; a task which, unfortunately, I've failed at after attempting it for a solid 40 weeks running. Why do you think it's taken me so long to get around to him, after all? Anyway, there's a silver lining to it all: this week and next, I'll be spotlighting a shit-ton of Krigstein's best sequences, discussing what makes each of them so wonderful and unique. The hope is that everyone will come to the same conclusion I have: Krigstein was simply too good to be summed up with one example of his craft. So check out part one here, and get ready for plenty more.

PS: if you draw comics, this stuff is mandatory reading....

"Ghost House"

I've been looking over some of my earliest efforts at making comics lately, the stuff I did back before I could draw. That photo-collaged work obviously loses something to its lack of handmade content, but I like the directness of it, how willfully I was going about doing "experimental comics". Much as the mannerisms of drawing style are a part of comics, the way I interact with the medium it also takes a lot of setting aside before I can get to the actual content. Photographic imagery is more objective, maybe more communicative. "This is a picture of ______", with nothing getting in the way. I also think found imagery is a fun, useful thing to bring into my comics, because it dictates content that I wouldn't have thought up myself.

So: I found the photo negatives that make up this comic at LA's famous Fairfax Trading Post today, in the bins full of random old pictures. I love looking at photo negatives a lot more than I like looking at finished photography, I guess because it doesn't look like the real world looks at all, but still unmistakably represents it. Negatives are a lot like drawings that way. And strips of negatives, like the ones in the middle of this comic, are about as close to the comics form as photography gets. They're always so small, though -- these pictures are about half an inch tall in real life -- that it's tough to really live inside them, to drink them in as imagery. (Though that too is undeniably part of their ghostly charm.) So I thought I'd blow them up and put them online, big enough for the eye to really inhabit. I think the resulting photocopy-machine grit is a pretty tasty extra, deteriorating the objective quality of the photographic image a little bit, bringing it back into dialogue with drawing. But it's like a drawing done by a machine: human hands are still nowhere near this stuff. Negatives always creep me out, and I know I'm not the only one... maybe that's why. Regardless, that's where the title "Ghost House" comes from.

Year One Art

Over at Robot 6 I wrote my first column of the new year up extra good. It's a special edition on David Mazzucchelli's art in Batman Year One. It seems to me like the art of that comic more than a ton of others gets short shrift, probably because it serves the story in such a subtle and considered way, rather than calling any undue (or even due) attention to itself. But boy is it there, and boy is it great. I talked about the way Mazzucchelli finds a place for both that deep subtlety and more typical superhero pyrotechnics, the way his four-tier layout throws off the usual rhythm of action comics storytelling and mirrors pop music, the uniqueness of the particular moments Mazzucchelli chooses to draw, and a lot more. It's kind of a companion piece to that "Dark Knight Art" thing I wrote a while back. Slowly makin' my way through the canon here! You can go read it if you want to.