Surface Dweller

[This one’s for Natasha, who’s cool enough to own the Hopey zippo lighter.]

I think this is the picture that sparked something:

This pin-up – entitled “Ray And Maggie Down At Leo’s” as you’ll note at the bottom – or, rather, its trace signature of grin, posture, shit-faced gaze, and the harsh pop of black against white, is what would come to mind whenever Jaime Hernandez or, more likely, Love And Rockets (not yet having the knowledge to differentiate between Los Bros. themselves or the title to which they were attached) was mentioned. It’s what piqued my interest, the first cheap fix that’ll bring you back for more. I can’t say where I first saw it – it flashed by quickly and it stuck, not as an epiphany or a cause for pause, just another bit of sound and vision I grabbed and made a bit of my own internal environment when I was In Love With The Modern World, if not quite a part of it.

I don’t plan on making this a Proustian promenade of my past, but they have been on my mind, those shiny bits of pop that made life bearable for late-teens/early-twenties Me – Faye Wong reflected in the walkway glass, the opening clang of “Pyjamarama”, the title sequence to Band Of Outsiders, and a few dozen others; moments of pure possibility that never failed for a contact high. A lot of it has kept its thrill but, as I’m no longer prone to inveterate romanticization, what I’m left wondering is how they worked. This image in particular – devoid of tension, yet always eagerly summoned up; a depiction of a moment that seems to continually unfold but never quite reveal itself, Zeno’s Paradox-style.

So bear with me as I burn holes into it with my eyes.

Well, bluntly, it’s a nice slab of beauty; this being Jaime, any discussion of the picture’s quality can be handily dismissed in a barrage of superlatives. You can find it echoed, along with a less vivid and more typical drawing of Ray, in the story “Ninety-three Million Miles From The Sun…And Counting” (page 15, panel 2, true believers), though you can’t slot “Ray And Maggie…” in there as, say, a documented moment seen from another angle – should questions of continuity bother you, you can probably peg it as occurring a little before then; regardless, it’s self-sufficient, the association of a many-volumed opus notwithstanding. Mind you, it’s not divorced from narrative – there’s the fun gag-strip ploy of that sign being flouted by our man of inaction, but the real storytelling qualities to be found aren’t those typical of a comic.

You could, of course, easily reduce the image to a preset function – a couple’s portrait, with “leisure” and “contentment” damn close to the center of its web of associations – and let that iconography dictate our reading, aesthetic effect flattened out for the sake of a message. But we don’t have to stop there; we can, if not willfully ignore, then proceed from that premise, deem this image discussion-worthy by virtue of its considerable cultural cache, not unlike an auteurist faced with a minor film in a director’s canon – it’s Jaime, why not? Or we could view it as I first did – as something isolated, absent any “modern master” context, an object which, by simply existing, means to fight for your attention; something made it stick out, at least for me – a disjunction, a feeling of lives in motion rather than a single note, played very nicely.

If you’d care to cast a glance back at Jaime, compare and contrast, you’d probably pick up a certain emphasis on realism here rather than generalization, a clarity, that harsh pop I mentioned before; this would probably be explainable by the pin-point focus demanded by a stand-alone image, free from sequential constraints – seen in an average Jaime story, the strip would stop stone dead on this panel, the storytelling momentum never to be recovered. But it’s an oddly lopsided realism – the setting around them spare and precise, we see Maggie pretty close to her page-bound presence, but Ray is worked over with detail: the very fine layers of hatching on his jeans, the folds on his t-shirt (worthy of an hour or two of art class discussion), his stubbled double chin above which you’ll see a plain ideal of alcohol-induced contentment.   

So there’s no surprise that, at a first glance, he’s the one who dominates our attention; despite the presence of cutie-pie Maggie, Ray’s the visceral punch of the piece, his very demeanor an event, an instance of complete ease and the airiness that arises from that ease. He’s pretty buzzed, only vaguely conscious that he’s on display, his focus more to his right – probably a friend in a comparable state – the bottle in his hand the third of the evening at least; he’s nowhere near us. Much closer is Maggie. If Ray is in thrall to circumstance, Maggie is creating hers and clearly having a ball doing so, hamming it up as Betty or Veronica to Ray’s oblivious Archie for an onlooker, an almost certain photographer.  

It’s an easy contrast between the two, but you’ll find little push and pull, their visual relationship being more complementary: spontaneity to poise, naturalism to artifice. Maggie throws Ray into relief, ensuring that his off-hand exuberance doesn’t exist in a void, nor does it annihilate everything else in the picture, and vice-versa. Take one of those elements out and you’re left with an ad, or something very close to one, a free-floating gesture which would come with both a single point to make and a definite barrier between us and the picture, one we might surmount only by a literal transaction. As is, though, there’s nothing to upend the image either way, as buoyant or alluring as we’d care to interpret it; it only means what it says – Ray and Maggie down at Leo’s.

Which means what we can see clearly is two ends of a spectrum of being, ably defined – and from that perception a moment is conjured up, and the possibility we feel within that moment. This is the key juxtaposition, because it alludes to every state in between, leaving us, the spectators, to cross the vast gulf linking the expression on Ray’s face and the one on Maggie’s, to define the stations you’ll find however you wish.

That could be the real appeal of spontaneity, Ray’s or anyone’s, when we encounter it in art – the actions on view are secondary, what matters is what they represent: a sensation of time suspended when nothing is happening and, as nature abhors a vacuum, everything comes rushing in to fill that empty space, the action ready to swing any which way you feel appropriate – choose your own adventure. They’re rare enough. Narratives – comics, movies, books, whatever – have the burden of hampering them with consequence, something to put the moment in its place, to label it as either positive or negative, a plot necessity or a waste of time. As autonomous objects, as a song or, as here, an image, they become nice engines which set the mind humming, replayable.

That simple juxtaposition may be its substance, but it’s not the whole of the image – what keyed us into it? There’s no mystery in this picture – the states depicted are, while not banal, fairly common. I’ve been on both sides of this camera and there’s a good chance you have too.

Well, there is that camera – the onlooker, the one personally privy to this moment, whose vision we view it through. You could reject this claim, say it’s only circumstance playing its part – Jaime’s whim of drawing this picture, at this spot, a wispy bit of artifice concerning people he’s portrayed so many times before and after; beauty needs no justification.

Of course it doesn’t. But if we’ve agreed that iconography won’t override their identities, to treat them as more than a vague notion of a pretty girl and some drunk dude and let them exist as full-bodied ideas, of significance (as is the Jaime way!), to let them affect us, then nothing about Ray and Maggie can be taken for granted here; everything we see demands a purpose. They don’t point toward themselves or each other, really, but outwards: Ray to that bit of distraction to his right and Maggie’s glance, her pose, her smirk, directed our way, at an onlooker, someone with enough presence to make her aware of the sliver of time she occupies, someone with the means to capture it.

But audience identification, our role as a witness, probably isn’t where the real potency resides here – any image which addresses us directly, should we choose to acknowledge it in return, accrues no small amount of realism; and with the playing field between us and that object instantly leveled comes an implicit suspension of disbelief. Plenty of those are around and this is no exception. What girds this image, I suspect, makes it seem less like a plain depiction of a night that once happened and more like an invitation to an existing moment, may be how we see it, the odd and very physical place we see it from.

And so it becomes peculiar – seeing immediacy, randomness, depicted with such clear deliberation. The composition suggests a tripod and enough careful preparation to seem illogical – a sense of patience, as if waiting all along for reality to orchestrate this precise moment. A more practical and less pictorially-driven point of view – a little higher, less like a frame from an Ozu film, further back for the sake of ease, off-balance enough to imply something casually grabbed and more attuned to the prevalent mood, take your pick – and that iconographic pretext (a boy, a girl, good times) would run roughshod over our perception, place us at a discreet distance; a lovely glimpse, like many. Instead what we have is a freedom of vision we might ascribe to an all-seeing eye or, as we definitely know to be the case, an artist’s preconceived vision – yet, thanks to Maggie’s glance and Ray’s lack of self-consciousness, we’re bound to that narrative trap, taking this image at its word.

And that is what I think implicates us as a part of the picture, creates a space we can inhabit and to feel everything which follows when we’re there. It’s why I can’t shake it, bound as I am to see omens in the clouds and patterns in the pavement. I have no idea if Jaime intended it, if I’ve just created a bridge of rickety conditional clauses from me to this image. Could be. It may not look safe but, if you care to cross, you’ll be welcomed on the other side.

Scavenger’s Delight: Cluttered

100 words each. Word counters are awesome.

Daredevil, Vol. Whatever, #5: Written by Mark Waid, Art by Marcos Martin, Color by Javier Rodriguez

A tour-de-force of art, obv., but what’s especially neat is how it forgoes the overt set pieces of, say, everything J.H. Williams or Martin’s own recent board-game prone double-page splashes in Amazing Spider-Man and opts for a more disciplined ingenuity, akin to Quitely, with the effects mostly enfolded into the panels themselves: SFX as actual palpable punctuation on the page (rather than bombastic clutter), Matt’s precise body language all throughout, etc. Martin can seemingly divine the storytelling momentum of any page, even plain exposition, so that your eye bounces from one precise detail to the next, like a trap. Cool.  

The Flash #2: Written by Francis Manapul & Brian Buccellato, Art by Francis Manapul, Colors by Brian Buccellato

Also in the Art-driven superheroics dept.:

If Martin and Waid manage a cool coherence, story and art in a no-fuss tandem like the chain/sprockets on a bike, Manapul and Buccellato can’t quite meet that standard, but they do alright. Thus far, it’s been ambitious and disjointed – the script is decent, if inclined to jutting out at odd moments, with motivations elided and too-sudden scene shifts, but the dots do connect. Art-wise, Manapul’s chutzpah pushes him ahead into the above-average league – clumsy yet impressive moments (Barry parsing the implications of one instant, etc.) coasting into “pretty good” via sheer striving, really.

35 Shots Of Rum (D: Claire Denis, 2009)

Very much like an Ozu film, with 70% of the movie keyed into an everyday rhythm (work-school-home), an anxiety about a soon-to-change status quo of a father-daughter family unit, repeated (albeit nowhere near as rigid) visual motifs in domestic settings plus, of course, a bar scene. All the characters and subplots reflect that conflict: the ambivalent suitor and his dead parents, the neighbor eager to play mother, the lonely desperate retiree, the restaurant owner and her nephew. Denis’ signature tactility breaks loose during the “aborted concert” sequence, a mélange of shoulder blades, glances, and close faces that conveys tremendous eroticism.

Uncle Boonmee Who Remembers His Past Lives (D: Apichatpong Weerasethakul [aka “JOE”], 2010)

CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT:

How the commonplace intermingles with the unreal, each quality quantifiable/casual, sans genre to skew emphasis.

CONSTANT READJUSTMENT OF THEMATIC FOCUS:

Grounded set-up (sister-in-law visiting dying Boonmee), followed by the return of his dead wife and long-lost son (now a monkey man); a shift into doc aesthetics (RE: fruit-picking, beekeeping); a princess’s affair with a catfish spirit (past life?); etc.

UPPING THE ANTE:

Possible extratextual rupture: still images of dudes in fatigues leading around a monkey-suited guy – the movie’s earlier solemn elements now plain artifice – juxtaposed against Boonmee’s dying speech; the film’s unreality embedded within itself.

LATER:

Time bifurcates.

DISCUSS.

Four Guys In A Van

Tunes: A Comic Book History Of Rock And Roll (Universe) edited by Vincent Brunner

This is an odd thing to see stateside, a French comic strip anthology of basic rock history. It has a pretty simple format – one band to one cartoonist, the bands all well within the pantheon: Sex Pistols, Beatles, The Clash, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Nirvana, and a variety of others probably equally familiar, with, let’s say, LCD Soundsystem and (maybe) The Stranglers as outliers. With that in mind, it probably isn’t too surprising to learn that most of the stories hew close to the myths there to be found – most musicians viewed during their heroic phase, the faces all youthful enough so that the sneers don’t seem stagnant. (Notable exception: Ruppert & Mulot’s take on Elvis, a plain middle finger extended to the artist or America or both, which alternates between Elvis’ ignominious end on the toilet and a giant Elvis climbing atop various skyscrapers in the New York landscape, with possible allusions to King Kong or 9/11 – it’s hard to parse; either way our final image is that of the King expiring on his restroom floor, pants down and strewn in vomit.) And even when the content escapes that status quo of “glorification”, there’s always the two pages of big honking prose from editor Vincent Brunner attached to each strip, replete with a recommended discography, just to ensure the pre-set history of ROCK is unavoidable.

As I started off with, it’s just… weird to encounter this, a European comic so determinedly aimed at the mainstream, or rather a mainstream of the meat and potatoes variety, with a pungency of conservative rockist nostalgia expected to overcome, for the curious passerby, all the mostly unfamiliar names contained herein – a book seemingly bent on the Film/TV/Music section of your local big box bookstore, a few feet from Leonard Maltin. I’m not complaining of course; I realize that, by broaching the subject, I risk the lack of any further similar publishing ventures crossing over to these not-so-welcoming shores, and maybe even the entirety of Eurocomics just disappearing in a puff, the fates willing foreign language comics (and maybe even Europe itself!) into a dream or a rumor that never was, rendered non-existent in the span of a blink by one lowly blogger’s doubt. Anyway, Killoffer is always welcome and, hey, there’s an actual Jean-Christophe Menu comic on ready display, not just another view of him from afar as the preferred villain in the bande dessinee scene at the moment.

The better pieces tend to be nice and blunt first person pieces, like Charles Berberian’s (one half of Monsieur Jean fame) take on Elton John, here done in his casually anecdotal style, expressive scratches against a page more blank than not; it’s also probably the only strip which crosses over into something like criticism (said criticism consisting of “Ignore Elton John after 1975”). Olivier Josso’s strip on The Clash is pretty swell as well, a personal memoir with an emphasis on the intersection of the band with his life. Luz delivers something similar with his take on LCD Soundsystem, but his approach is less intellectual and far more in the key of “unconstrained fanboy” – he’s actually friends with James Murphy, so whatever mythmaking is absent from Brunner’s synopsis you’ll certainly find present in the strip which follows it. (Murphy‘s jolly misadventures in semi-homelessness! Murphy’s love for his dog Petunia! Actual quote describing Mr. Murphy: “With any more integrity, you’d be the Mother Theresa of groove!”) It’s fun and giddy, livelier than most.

At the other end of the conceptual spectrum you’ll find Jochen Gerner’s Pixies piece, a work-intensive six-page catalog of every damn concept, situation, meaningless hoot from Frank Black’s voice, whatever, found in a Pixies song and rendered in ideogram form; it reads a lot like one of Mark Newgarden’s Meet The Cast strips, except not funny. Also in a similar “fuck narrative” sense is Killoffer’s piece on Led Zeppelin, which isn’t so much a strip as a very busy bit of design layout in search of an album cover or an article, a frictionless explosion of symbols and fun w/ lettering.

Neither of those are especially grabbing, but they do buck the trend of this book, which is to mount a hazy one note altar to the band in question, simultaneously  overly earnest and lazy – a wordless Beatles piece with goony psychedelic avatars floating around a recording session, an Alice In Wonderland pastiche featuring funny animal Iggy and The Stooges (‘cause “Fun House” is a lot like “Wonderland” or something), a wake for Ziggy Stardust in the light of his Rock N’ Roll Suicide, followed by a Rock N’ Roll Rebirth with an attendant new Bowie persona, Nick Drake in a pastoral landscape and then the complete lyrics to “Time Of No Reply”, et cetera. They either plod there, inert, or suffer from conceptual strain, the first few panels far too much heavy lifting so the artist can ensure whatever pretext he’s chosen meets up with the musician(s) in question.

The best strip is, almost certainly, Sebastien Lumineau’s take on The Ramones and this is the best page from it:

It’s the opening page, two stark images which work at a gut level – it may not easier to ignore them than otherwise, to paraphrase that Wally Wood anecdote about Nancy, but it is close. Context may play a part – relative to most of the strips in the book, the immediacy of this page is exhilarating.

It’s a simple premise – a distillation of the Ramones’ mid-to-late-70s touring experience into nice basic images, a thousand shows in six pages. The visual logic of these first two Stations Of The Cross is pretty clear – a shift from immensity to intimacy, vast white scale to dark cramped interior, this opposition bound by a wide angle sense of perspective, a tactic which, notably, only appears on this page and nowhere else in the story. The first panel is dominated by a sky as wide as can be and the land equally flat, the van a degree or two above a speck, just off center, with the smoke emitted a nice touch. It’s very studied – the Middle of Nowhere, U. S. A., cut through by that inexorable piece of logic known as The Road; a place that’s only a place between a place and another place. Absent any context, it’s a nice depiction of an archetype – that vision of America which cultural criticism dictates may drive the unwary to either madness or serenity, an unkind expanse and an unspeaking God (courtesy of those clouds) your only points of reference.

In the second panel you’ll find, naturally, the Ramones. They’re stuck in that van, heading to the next show, a ritual they’ve experienced before and will experience again. As packed in as they are, each is clearly bearing a bubble of isolation, guarding it as best they can; judging by their demeanor, we can guess that they are, if not sick of each other, content to keep quiet, aware that, by this stage of the tour, any attempt at conversation will just be repetition and irritation. Funny ‘cause it’s true, y’know? This image comes with its own baggage of iconography and artifice – if it seems familiar, that’s because the character placement of our Blitzkrieg Boppers is taken from the cover of their first album (l-r: Johnny, Tommy, Joey, and Dee Dee). The canned-sardine sense of tension and expectancy works well enough that you’re willing to forgive the lapses of logic: Who’s driving? Bands that play shows ground level to the audience – as per Lumineau’s vision – at clubs called Mondo Bizarro are more inclined to drive themselves around than not. A van with that seat would possibly (maaaaaybe) have room enough to hold the instruments, but where the hell would you put the amps?

Still the show must go on, and it does, for another twelve panels over five more pages. From here we head to the backstage of a club for a pre-show beer surrounded by flirty girls and scenesters, and then the show itself, the strip climaxing here with the opening 1-2-3-4 battle cry and actual panel-to-panel movement, followed by a coda of the band separated into various post-show jollies: Johnny watching tv in his motel room with cookies and milk, Joey chatting up some girl, etc. Lumineau’s naturalism takes its cue more from the photographic instant than photorealism proper, the odd aura that accrues over stray moments captured in media res; he seems to have digested as many Ramones performance photos as possible and then conjured up this. And of course there’s the drabness and amiable cracked-wall decay of an average rock club, which gets nice and precise portrayal here, DIY ambiance being an international language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The strip probably makes the top five of an unlikely “band on the road” comics pantheon, with Jaime Hernandez’s “Jersualem Crickets” an obvious number one. It’s easy to think that Lumineau took inspiration from the songs themselves – after all, the band did write some of the better tunes about touring, which view the process through neither an entitled or ennobling point of view, just songs about one soul being put through the ringer; “I Wanna Be Sedated” and “Danny Says” are the songs I’m thinking about.

Not much need be said about “Sedated” – sometime in the next week or so, it’ll probably be static in the background while you find yourself preoccupied with something else. It manages to stick, maybe thanks to the compressed intensity of the song’s first person scenario, which seems fitted to suit the group’s de facto energy, never mind the all-powerful tool of identification: not everyone has the threat of psychotherapy hanging over their head, but there’s a good chance you’ve recently been run ragged enough by the world that temporary oblivion sounds appealing – many weekends are guided by this internal mandate.

If that song is about the exhaustion and breakdown touring can induce, “Danny Says” is more mundane approach to same, without any implied exclamation marks, just a catalogue of little details, everyday loneliness – being stuck in your hotel room with nothing to do but watch old tv shows, hustling for promotion to the night’s show, the bits of displacement that shouldn’t affect you so strongly but do. It’s one of the few songs to survive Phil Spector’s shellacking on End Of The Century, which, by then (the late seventies), had receded from the sixties exuberance into a mere bag of tricks, bells and whistles that now only sounded like bells and whistles. Spector’s presence here is very careful to emphasize the song’s dramatic structure, a lullaby which grows into reverb and noise while still, weirdly but undoubtedly, remaining a lullaby. It’s quite nice, wonderful really, but it may be best viewed as a clever remix of the demo, which, natch, sticks to the tried and true Ramones template. Here the song isn’t an event, just a song, its shifts less theatrical but still there – you take more notice of them when you’re not being led by Spector’s hand, the song’s melancholy more resonant when you have to dive into that familiar sea of fuzz for it. 

No matter how far you venture, it’s always good to have a place to return to.

A Bullet In A Bed

Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit – adapted and illustrated by Darwyn Cooke

[This was originally published on the web on FA Online, via the good graces of the late great Martin Skidmore. As it has since seemingly fallen into oblivion (and I'm quite fond of it - indulge me), I've decided to reprint it here.]

Appropriately, we’ll begin at the beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Up above is the first page proper of Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit and a fine page it is. It quite befits the tale to follow, grabbing you, poor reader, by the lapels and shoving you into a slowly moving black car headed toward some unknown and isolated location a few miles outside city limits. It has, as they say, “chops”.

To begin with, there’s the obvious focal point: the eruption from the pillow. There’s plenty of details compelling your eye there – the blue shade of watercolor slanting from the left edge of the page downwards which delineates the black above from everything below, the woman’s right arm which angles you directly towards it, her leg beneath the sheets poised like a pinball paddle to kick your attention back up should you by chance stray. The trajectory of the explosion is an exclamation mark which more than counterbalances Westlake’s ever understated prose and the stunning little grace note of those three feathers floating above make an especially lovely set of ellipses.*

If the image is likely to deliver the opening wallop, that caption throws it into further relief, calling your attention to the sheet’s movement below the pillow – it’d be easy without any further context to label it the vagaries of a bullet in a bed, but the narration leaves no doubt that there’s another force at play causing movement in the scene, just beyond the right edge of the panel and you, reader, must turn the page (now!) to glimpse what’s to come. The page gets a great deal of its cumulative impact by what isn’t there, a very fine bit of cartoonist’s sleight of hand that makes you fully feel the impact of the absent figures – the acting figure and the reacting figure, both unseen but completely felt within a very discrete space.

And beyond the internal workings of this piece (thankfully, I doubt my powers of perception are keen enough to wreck anyone’s enjoyment), there’s the actual substance. The image, as is, is of unbalance: we’re afforded a symmetrical view of a setting – picture, cabinets, bed – which frames a scene of turmoil, with the harsh off-kilter light emanating from the left edge of the page leaving everything within those very orderly parameters in flux and the bed set in disarray. Every detail points up the central fact of the scene – stability has been disrupted.

Mind you, stability rarely reigns when a bed is nearby in a Parker novel – more often than not a scene in a bedroom will soon mean trouble for whoever resides there, a fate often ushered in by Parker himself, a man with no bed but many beds, all ephemeral and ready to be abandoned. Parker is, very simply, a professional thief, with an emphasis on the adjective; he exists for the reader only in action and beyond his appetites, occasionally alluded to but rarely glanced upon – women and nice temporary five-star backgrounds to accompany those women – his inner life revolves entirely around the goal at hand, the prize to be won or the prey to be stalked.

A great deal of the pleasure of Donald Westlake’s Parker books (written under the nom de plume of Richard Stark, as the unwieldly IDW titles are careful to remind us) comes from watching a man who knows what he’s doing do what he does. It’s no accident that those who stand in Parker’s path are immediately associated with recreation – sex, of course, but also the fink dispatched at his poker game, the head of the outfit first seen engaged in a game of Monopoly (insert capitalist subtext here) with his bodyguards, the second-in-command practicing his golf game. And all the while Parker works works works – methodically taking notes, watching for patterns, and setting his traps; the heart of The Outfit is embodied in those scenes where Parker does just that, with two set pieces near the beginning and the end, Cooke’s pages laid out with terse panels of tiny observations, meaningless when seen out of context but each an element ready to be placed in an equation for our ubercompetent superthief to solve. Never let it be said that there’s no place for the work ethic in the crime genre!

And with no small ambition to guide that ethic along:

He’d… write letters to every man he’d ever worked with. He’d tell them the Outfit hit him for forty-five G’s – do him a favor and hit them back when you get the chance.

At least half these men were just like Parker – they already had an Outfit job cased. All they needed was an excuse to go take it.

Those are quotes from Cooke’s earlier adaptation, The Hunter, and they serve as a nice summary for The Outfit, the plan Parker puts into action when the Outfit comes a callin’, courtesy of that moment posted above – the fuse lit in one book exploding into all sorts of hi-jinks in the next. As such, the books work quite well in tandem, although Westlake’s original sequence of publication differed somewhat – when Parker first laid his eyes on the prize of pulp stardom, both books were bridged by another title, The Man With The Getaway Face; that book, for the purposes of plot (i.e. Parker being the titular “man”, with a new surgically-gotten face designed to evade any unwanted consequences from his shenanigans in The Hunter), is enfolded into this version of The Outfit as prologue, boiled down to a bare bones essence of thirty some pages, a good chunk of which are silent.

On the evidence given, it’s not too difficult to see the appeal of Cooke’s abridgement, beyond plot mechanics and Cooke’s own cheery admission of just liking The Outfit a whole lot more. If The Man With The Getaway Face is, at bottom, a basic tale of a heist gone awry (replete with that always helpful moral, reiterated from The Hunter, of “Never trust a woman”), a more rarefied air flows between The Hunter and The Outfit, one of maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, take-downs and negotiations. As a duo, they’re only incidentally crime books, more often showcases for how one small independent businessman can take a bloated conglomerate (the eponymous “Outfit”) down a notch, with crime being their common trade. Jurisprudence, that structural necessity of the genre, is virtually nonexistent in this war between the good capitalists who get their hands dirty and the bad capitalists who indolently play games – it makes a perfunctory appearance via the jail square on that Monopoly board and is never again acknowledged.

Or perhaps I’m just interpretation-happy. The Outfit is, more obviously, a well-tuned piece of pulp, a highly-regulated hunk of invisible craftsmanship on Westlake’s part designed to be gulped down in as minimal an amount of sittings as possible. And, in bringing it to the current format, Cooke remains who he is – if you had little patience for the retro-aesthetics or storyboarding tics for which our interpreter is synonymous, well, there’s the door, pal.

And yes, the styles do mesh, as every commentator is required to note when speaking of this merger – Cooke’s perpetual project of zeroing in on the essence of midcentury pop finds a completely apposite milieu in the Parker novels. Which isn’t to say that certain caveats don’t apply; there’s always the danger of an interpreter shellac-ing the source material in their sensibility, the vulnerable pre-existing text refitted with an unnecessary frame more ornamental than functional and occasionally at cross-purposes with the original. That gets skirted here, but the tendency does make itself known; Cooke’s glee is palpable when rendering the precise designs of the late fifties and early sixties, whether rigging up his own bar signs or nailing the font on a Timex watch in its pared down minimalism – his occasional indulgence culminating in a page which consists of nothing but lovingly drawn road signs for inns and gas stations all of which nearly crowd out the narrative caption at the left hand side of the page.

Yet it’s a happy marriage for the most part, with nothing else as oppressive in terms of mannerism; Cooke dives into the book and reacts to the text with the instincts of a cartoonist, divining motifs and thinking through the storytelling logic of each moment. The format and design from The Hunter are repeated here (natch) – both works shaded different tints of muted blue, as if in reflection of the cold unyielding anger that Westlake saw in Parker, and the negative space on each panel bleeding out into the white edge of the page. It is a gorgeous thing, rife with Cooke’s preferred four-tiered layouts, each tier, more often than not, devoted to a single sequence, gesture, or visual motif. It’s not uncommon among cartoonists, but it really pops out here, the logic of the page on display and nary a muddling of the narrative. It may be a holdover from his time in animation, but there’s something especially amazing about the three-panel-to-a-tier sequences that Cooke is prone to every few pages, specifically those of equal size, with the rhythm of the actions portrayed played out at a metronomic beat which sticks in the memory: it’s there on page 42 when Parker dispatches the woman escaping from her vehicle; on page 132, when the POV pans back from the bound driver; and there’s a wonderful Eisnerian variation of it on page 62, as the light from a bar door opening in the first frame flows into the discontinuous next panel of an overhead shot of the bar.

But no matter what finesse an artist brings to it, transition from one medium to another is always bumpy, and one of the neat characteristics of Cooke’s adaptations is how, occasionally, the seams show in the end product – in both books, the give and take inherent in the process results, every twenty pages or so, in neatly designed splash pages which compress as much information as you need to get by – the decoded/annotated letter from an associate telling of a further venture, Parker’s movement across the east coast depicted via an Esso travel map, and many another – sudden disruptions in Cooke’s progress that make you crane your neck back at the original Westlake/Stark text. Cooke, however, remains the man with the plan with the turn-the-page momentum of the book undisturbed.

It’s not too difficult to see these overt bits of formalism as precursors, semi-conscious or otherwise, of The Outfit‘s third (but not final) act, a rapid array of stylistic shifts depicting Parker’s cohorts in crime descending en masse upon the Outfit’s operations. They’re great little set pieces, each immersing you in a process – how the well-oiled mechanisms of organized crime work – and then showing you how it gets destabilized by some blue collar thief with a little ambition; here, with our central character largely absent, Cooke casts aside his default naturalism in favor of a scene-specific style: storybook illustration, a text-dominant tabloid format (font and everything!) et al., every few pages another fireworks display for Cooke to set off, a different set of stage directions to frame around huge dollops of Westlake’s prose. It’s a sight to behold, gimmicky in description but a bravura performance in each case, all with attendant punch lines as dry as fine wine.**

And finally, we return to Parker on the prowl, his objective within sight. Spoilers obviously, but any such story firmly set in the purgatory of popular serialization will conclude as all such stories must – the antagonist defeated and the forces set against our hero quelled, if only for the time being. The final page, like the first, is a splash: Parker, his vengeance sated, walking away from the reader, his destination another hotel, another luxury suite, another comfortable bit of symmetry ready to be thrown off balance.

FOOTNOTES

*I’d say having the explosion pointing directly at the fedora of its intended target is probably a bit too cutesy, a bit of unnecessary symbolism distracting from the pure action of the page, with the snifter opposite another bit of clutter for the sake of equilibrium. But, overall, it works.

**In the broader context of pop culture, it’s not too difficult to see it all within a wider tradition, the Parker novels as a consistent beacon for formalists – Darwyn Cooke in good company with Jean Luc Godard and the guy who made Zardoz (Made In USA (1966, adap. of The Jugger) and Point Blank (1967, adap. of The Hunter), respectively).

De los muertos

[Written to accompany the catalogue for the "Dia de los Muertos" show by the Cesar Chavez Guey art collective.]

So:

First off, it’s Dia de los Muertos, and not, en ingles, the Day of the Dead, and this is not merely due to the dominant cultural associations attached. Very simply, it sounds better: an elongated phrase with a ready plural as opposed to two flat atonal thuds, those extra syllables traded in for a bland bit of ambiguity – let’s leave that name to the news anchors and zombies.

As with most of the better holidays, it’s built upon an absolute – Cupid’s arrow may never strike true, but death, like the solstices and Lincoln’s birthday, can’t be avoided. Barring the transcendence of our earthly selves into the digital Elysian Fields of the Singularity, it’s coming for us all; the cigarette I just smoked tells me that if most are sauntering down the sidewalk of existence, I’m inclined to the occasional hopscotch. It’s the day (or rather three) when, like those damn zombies, the dead come back; where our dead differ though, is that when we greet them, they’re always sure to wear a smile. You know the image – the joyful skeletons, at the center of the festivities, completely at ease in the setting. And why wouldn’t they smile? Rarely are they welcomed back so eagerly.

More typically, the dead’s presence will elicit some trepidation. I mean, what if they’re actually and bluntly present, Ouija board-style? Spooky. Not too long ago, I was coffeeing it up with some friends and the topic arose – the unexpected encounter, the hairs raised at the back of the neck. Someone ventured a tale and, as with many “this really happened” tales of the beyond, it was a game of telephone involving a sibling, a friend of a friend, a foreign land, and a location of some significance – a hotel in Germany that had seen catastrophe in World War II, and had since known unusual happenings, complaints by the guests, and so on.

Most ghost stories are like this and every time I encounter one, I get irritated. From a God’s eye view, one death is no different from another – a stillborn child and my mother’s mother and the soul(s) who may or may not haunt that hotel and FDR are all equally dead; maybe they do, at times, come back, but I refuse to believe they are privileged or damned, however you want to read it, to return according to a ready framework of myth or melodrama, a battle or some full-blown turmoil or a murder, much less the greatest war of the last century. All moments are fair game, even the smaller ones that few know - it’s hubris to claim the dead deem as relevant the same values we do. Not when there are so many more of them than there are of us.

Death probably made itself known not too far from where you’re reading this, history’s chalk outline so extensive as to possibly blot out all the inhabitable areas of the earth. And that’s only taking space into account – consider the seven people who died in the time it took you to read this sentence. All one’s powers of ignorance can’t discount it. The dead – they’re everywhere.

Right now it’s probably accessible on a television screen near you: death as a designated rupture in reality, there to be amended. The status quo is interrupted and the culprit is there to be captured, sentenced, or repaid in kind –Law And Order may be your drug of choice, though you’ve got plenty of options. Or else it’s a battlefield, and the theater of war is an actual theater, with one man, one battalion, placed in its spotlight; death, which in this domain is not a disturbance but a daily statistic, gains value by virtue of our having witnessed it. And numerous other genres, with their own careworn scenarios and specific harbingers of doom: the aliens intent upon conquest and genocide, the serial killer racking up a kill count dictated by his own private logic, et cetera…

All those made-to-order victims stand in stark contrast to the far greater likelihood awaiting we, the contentedly industrialized – the dominant point-of-view from an adjustable bed, all the actions in your last weeks or months dictated by a hospital schedule of necessary routines and pre-planned visits and the coup de grace, the winding down rhythm of EKG beeps to regulate your final moment. That may be the point: entertainment not only as escapism, but consolation. If the end must come, than let’s imagine it writ large, an absence from the world which must be remedied, or at least acknowledged, rather than a quiet fade.

From this point of view, Dia de los Muertos is a brief respite from our instincts: we, the living, greet the dead not through a mandated veil of mourning, nor as specters bent upon regaining their moment past or as reflections of our limited selves, the desired culmination and climax to the story we unknowingly repeat to ourselves every day – who we are and who we want to be. No, we get to put those aside on this day and we build our own place for that absence. 

From the outside it may look like a stern-faced repetition of Halloween, with a creepy crawly trope or two gussied up in formal wear and pushed from night to day; a self-serious sequel, with sugar skulls in lieu of inedible candy corn. If you wish to draw a relationship, consider them counterparts: freedom and fate, hand in hand. If Halloween is given to masquerade and the mutability of identity, becoming who we wish to be by mere virtue of saying so, then Dia de los Muertos declares that everything is what it is, but even more so; the past is there, in the form of the homage we pay to those whom we remember fondly and will only ever know us as we were, and so is the future, as we don the guise of what we will become, the face we’ll wear when we reach the absolute boundary of ourselves and may move no further – you can’t call it pretending if it’s true.

We define those extremes and, with little fuss, we collapse them into now. Death is revealed not as the ultimate Other - always where we are not, but for the grace of god – but where it always was: at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So we’ll make the dead their favorite food, give toys to unseen children, and share beers with friends and relatives, past and present. We’ll make them at home inside or we’ll go out and visit them at the cemetery, turning it into a picnic, a playground, all the while acclimating ourselves to where we’ll spend eternity. The dead don’t respond, they don’t give thanks, but that’s okay – they don’t need to.

Not when they’re so eager to smile.

Rites Of Spring

“Sleeping And Dreaming Of Food” from The Troll King (Top Shelf) by Kolbeinn Karlsson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A dwarf drifts unconscious down a black river and dreams himself at the center of a pagan bacchanalia, where he is feted by all the participants – worshippers in masquerade and makeshift creatures composed of rags and cardboard boxes – with pigs and humans among the feast’s main courses; perhaps befitting the dream state, everyone is drawn in a single color against a fully colored background. Having sated himself into a stupor, the dwarf is then placed within a box-like wooden mold and is sodomized by the King Of The Forest (a green Hulk-like fellow, and the only character in this story drawn in full color – he does actually look like Lou Ferrigno), whereupon he is transformed into a flying beast, galloping skyward in triumph with the King his rider, Destination: Moon.

It’s an affecting little story, nice and exhilarating, and probably the most traditional piece you’ll find here, thanks to a) an easy audience surrogate at its center and b) the entire narrative tailored to the self-conscious framework of a dream; sure, dream-logic is predominant within The Troll King, but more often presented in a matter-of-fact manner. Neither is anything else quite as eldritch or silent-movie sinister, what with the costumes and cannibalism – more typically, things tend toward the hermetic and, y’know, damn weird: a carrot man goes for a dive in a pool and grows into a mighty tree and, in a later story, the flowers which sprout from his form breed whole new batch of carrot men, one of which serves as a vessel for a creature akin to the aforementioned jolly green monarch, etc. (As the key blurb you’ll find on the back cover points out, it does call to mind Miyazaki, specifically Princess Mononoke .)

There’s also stray bits of surrealism as a condiment to this main course – the dreamscape of “Sleeping…” isn’t a forest, but a series of rooms in the David Lynch manner (replete with wall sockets), with trees growing within and the walls a painted backdrop of black mountains outlined against a blood-red sky, never mind the brief genre switch-up, probably the book’s only definitive narrative rupture, where one of the Hulk fellas, after having been planted, Swamp Thing-like, in the earth, announces his rise to consciousness by telling his caretakers “HERE COMES THE WILD WEST!” Therein follows a series of scenes, in the revisionist western manner of, say, El Topo: a cowboy having his limbs pulled off, a showdown against a fake Hollywood backdrop, a headless prostitute; stuff like that.

Altogether, it adds up to one of those works, a personal mythology of interconnected sketches in the insular “you can tag along if you want” fashion. Or, probably better stated, world-building premised not on a message but on compulsion; the medium is certainly amenable to this approach, being itself never too far from a slightly more elaborate version of a ten year-old’s notebook of imaginary creatures. The cumulative effect is a catalogue of odd rites of spring, or maybe just a vast one, glimpsed in parts – a frequent interplay of twin motifs, forest creatures and wood gods that adds up to, one imagines, an unending cycle.

It’s not too hard to parse, assuming you’re paying a little attention. Karlsson’s style is a wondrous bit of simplicity – all flat simple images that mean what they say and say what they mean, with a basic day-glo color palate which shows he knows his way around a Crayola 24-pack, and a typical panel layout of two images per page, one above and one below, just a notch above a straight-up storybook (SEE ALSO: Panter’s Cola Madnes). It’s little surprise to learn from the author’s bio that Karlsson recently adapted the book into an animated short*, given that many of the works here are silent pieces, each image a nice rectangle more often than not depicting a discreet action, very much ready to be mistaken for a cartoon cel. (In fact, you can see the story summarized up above in fancy pants moving picture form here – just skip to 1:28 for the sake of convenience).

Comics or otherwise, worth a gander, natch.

* UPDATE: From the good Mr. Karlsson, via twitter:

“That was actually a bit of confusion with the film. Only Sleeping and dreaming of food was ever animated, sadly.”

“Oh, I can go on like this all day”

Lately I’ve been thinking about Glenn Dakin. He’s a marginal figure in the grand scheme of comics, not by dint of talent, just someone who made a brief bold stance before being defeated by the ever-enduring menace of reality. It’s the same scenario in every medium, at least when the emphasis is on personal expression - names seen often and then rarely at all – and doubly so in comics, by virtue of their oft-low status on both the cultural and economic totem poles. You may not know his work directly, but you might be familiar with his several appearances in Eddie Campbell’s Alec, most prominently in Alec: How To Be An Artist (which Campbell dedicates to him), where, courtesy of the second-person self-mythologizing tone of that book, Dakin emerges as something like Alec’s artistic conscience.* He was a significant presence in the eighties British small press scene, a solar system of names – Woodrow Phoenix, Phil Elliott, Campbell himself, among others – which revolved largely around the redoubtable Paul Gravett of Fast Fiction and Escape Magazine.

No one’s gonna begrudge you ignorance of his actual comics, considering how few of them are currently collected and in print – at the moment, you can fish around, with some likely profit, for Temptation (Active Images), Abe: Wrong For All The Right Reasons (Top Shelf), and, with Phil Elliott, The Rockpool Files (Slave Labor Graphics), with the rest of his corpus waifs and strays haunting basements, forlorn long boxes, and the fourth dimension, presumably. For much of the current millennium, his focus has been less on cartooning and more on television writing (he’s partially responsible for the hours of enjoyment me and my nephews have spent watching Shaun The Sheep) and media tie-ins, along with his very recent Candle Man series of children’s books; may success greet him in his attempts to usurp Rowling’s throne.

Among that bunch, I recently got my hands on (courtesy of the wonders of the interlibrary loan system) Temptation. It’s a fine piece of work – Krazy Kat is invoked by both Campbell (in his introduction) and Stan Lee (blurb-wise) and it’s certainly prominent in the strip’s DNA (or at least the Sunday Funday full-page format that probably cues up in your mind whenever anyone brings it up), with each installment another variation on a basic conflict – the Man, the Devil, the Man’s soul which the Devil craves – played against a barren oft-mutable environment. Although strong enough to be immediately noticeable at a glance, it’s a comparison which only goes so far – there are no linguophilic phits of phrenzy nor is Dakin inclined to make each instance a connect-the-dots event of physical movement and off-center design, much less the synaesthetic fever dream of the Kat’s later years (Temptation, in book form, being strictly black & white beyond the strip included on the back cover). No, Temptation’s layout rhythm is a more stately saunter and its verbal sophistication, while lively, not quite as singular – it owes as much to Herriman as it does to the dialogue-dialogue-punchline structure of the typical mid-century syndicated strip ala Johnny Hart’s B. C. and it’s ilk. (I cite B. C. not from personal knowledge but because Dakin himself mentions it in a brief introductory note.)

But Herriman is a cruel standard to impose – it’s hard to imagine how Temptation’s spare premise would mesh with that idiosyncratic graphic vocabulary. As a story foundation, though, it’s plenty solid, with each page a reliable dose of witty off-hand morality, our central characters both specific enough to ensure each comedic punch hits proper and easy to generalize into a grand unending battle of wills, the lone Man vs. the wily Devil, their backdrop elastic enough to be either the mythic Then or the relevant Now. Campbell notes that the strip was initially pegged as “most likely to succeed” by those in the know, so appealing and user-friendly it seemed, with something like a hypothetical regular weekly slot and a ready rhythm of collections as its final reward. Instead, Temptation proved a series of false starts, appearing sporadically throughout the eighties and nineties, jumping from one small-press haven to another, before inevitably petering out, with this collection, released a decade after its heyday, all that remains. (Although, quite recently, Dakin did break it out again for the Spirit Of Hope anthology, to benefit victims of the Japanese earthquake.)

But if you want your source of Dakin as pure as can be, without the market-ready constraints of a single page premise or a kid-lit tome, your best bet is Abe: Wrong For All The Right Reasons. A few months back I hunted a copy down from one of my discount sources and another few weeks after that, located another one in the clearance shelves for three dollars, so keep those eyes wide and may fortune guide your step.

It’s a collection of Dakin’s “Abe” strips, natch, your source for proper personal expression in the unfiltered-lens-capital-A-artist sense; Warren Ellis, in a nice bit of hyperbole, described Dakin’s work as “…comics that sounded like the best bedroom indie you ever heard…” and this, almost certainly, is the work to which he’s referring. You don’t put a cover of your protagonist standing upon a grassy precipice before the becalmed splendor of the sea – contemplating the boundary he’s treading, with nature in front of him and the world behind, or simply gazing into blank space, the silent vista before him a ready canvas for his thoughts – as anything other than a statement of sincere intent, singer-songwriter album cover style. You can rest easy knowing that, in this book, it’s an image that won’t steer you wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, mostly.

“Abe”, y’see, first began as “Captain Oblivion”, a decidedly understated approach to superheroics. It’s an appropriation of genre sans convention; close-ups, splash pages, a backdrop of “realism” against which our Supergod may stand all the more mighty, and so on – those are all non-issues. Like all of Dakin’s work I’ve seen, it proceeds from the physical base of the early twentieth-century daily newspaper strip (Gasoline Alley; Thimble Theater; Herriman, obv.), its panels nice and tight, with an implicit proscenium arch up above so as to render all characters in equal proportion within its space – a form fitting for its central character, the most unassuming of superheroes.

It’s little surprise to learn it began in Dakin’s adolescence, what with the brashness of juxtapositing the word “oblivion” with this indubitably mild man of mystery; that may be a tell. And perhaps Dakin gave Captain Oblivion an actual secret origin, but it’s one that remains secret, away from our eyes in some notebook or zine (like many of his adventures, one imagines), all-around irrelevant before the image which prevails, one of a reasonably normal fellow, probably not unlike you or me, with a cape, tights, and the typical template of extranormal abilities to justify those ridiculous pieces of clothing. Oh, and he’s in the 25^th century. In light of Douglas Wolk’s claim of the superhero genre as the last bastion of the “novel of ideas”, you’d be wise to notice the undercurrent of ideology all throughout, esp. w/r/t the rogues gallery the Captain found himself up against (when he’s taking on villains at all) – a series of smooth-talking charismatic types intent upon remaking messy, unpredictable reality (which amounts, in these stories, to the community, the neighborhood) into a corporate model of logic and efficiency, and thus, at bottom, dehumanization. But all within the context of gentle satire – bemused glances at how outside forces (sometimes malevolently, sometimes misguidedly) may intrude upon private space, set well within the context of the humdrum world.

And any time the concepts of “superhero” and “satire” come within contact of each other, there will invariably be a few jabs at the genre itself;  you’ll find a few here, but superheroics function primarily as a convenient tool for use, with no real qualms. Violence is largely eschewed, with Captain Oblivion positing himself not as a force of will, with all its attendant ethical complications, but more as an example for all who offers the occasional helping hand. Or at least from our privileged extra-textual POV – there’s a running joke of our hero refusing that more imposing role and being pegged as such anyway; an old premise, but one that rarely fails. He’s already a marginal figure in his stories by the time the book begins, with Abe the clear dominant force – plenty of the earlier stories here bear the “Captain Oblivion” title and feature no hint of the character, just plain Abe and his adventures in introspection. Frequently they’ll be writ large through the use of fabulist tropes (Abe encountering Poseidon and birthing a new idea, Abe inheriting the moon, and so on), but they’re just as likely to see our hero navigating the social swirl in romantic comedy mode – whatever suited Dakin’s fancy.

And so, about a fourth of the way through, the good Captain is sent on his way. It’s not a decisive break – he returned in a nice one-off later in the book – but, from then on, Abe remained mere Abe, his cape cast aside and his mild-mannered lenses thoroughly in place, the Captain Oblivion persona traded in so as to better stand in for the man wielding the pen, with his surrounding World Of Tomorrow following suit, more closely resembling our own (which it pretty much always was, minus the odd spire and antenna). Dakin even gave him a nice epitaph:

You could draw a comparison to Jaime Hernandez, considering the similar trajectory both Abe and Locas follow – a cycle of stories setting out into publication with genre training wheels before finding a surer footing when they untethered themselves from that context, with that later blossoming somewhat visible in the earlier work. But if the quality soared once Jaime jettisoned the Rockets and gave the Love his full attention, the learning curve isn’t too steep for Dakin’s “Captain Oblivion”; they’re swell reads, with no anxiety of influence or stake in the genre to throw the writing or art off its course.

With no man of mystery, the strip went from being a celebration of the idiosyncratic meandering life to a depiction of it. Dakin’s penchant for the fable remains, so genre may be gone but the fantastical is never entirely absent – regardless, all dues have been paid and Dakin then hits upon a groove which doesn’t let up for the rest of the book.

Autobiography does become predominant and, considering the close connection, it would be easy to peg Campbell as an influence on this shift, what with the occasional use of the illustration-with-caption-up-above format in Abe, a Campbell trademark by the force of will imposed by 700-some pages, omnibus style, never mind the transparent alter-ego. Perhaps he was an impetus (Campbell, in How To Be An Artist, implies (and only implies, hence this paragraph) they were both plowing the same field before they’d met), but Campbell’s work is that of an inveterate storyteller and a canny operator, his own handmade style one of literary stylistics transformed via some unknown alchemy into pure comics, with even the most incidental narratives allotted a place in an arc, along with running motifs ingenious enough to induce whiplash and a dry-as-the-Gobi sense of dramatic irony.**

Dakin, in Abe, is a far more instinctive beast (note “The Demon Cartoonist”, his chosen nickname), a termite to Campbell’s white elephant. There’s no whiff of memoir here and the tendrils of continuity never coil too tight. Abe will frequently prove to be less an onstage character and simply a more porous filter, a handy P.O.V Dakin wields whenever apposite. Thus the longest piece here, a travelogue through northern Europe which runs to fourteen pages of Abe contentedly drifting from one observation to the next, with circumstance his preeminent guide, takes its place next to a jolly sketch of Abe interviewing a mopey but stoic Hiawatha. Very often, a strip will proceed with not so much a story as a subject of inquiry, a question asked or a topic introduced. Take “At the End of the Rainbow”, which begins as a glance at nostalgia and becomes a monologue on uncertainty. From there, the strip makes its own wayward promenade across six pages: a blunt lesson on survival from a tree is learned and a parable about two ninjas is recounted, along with images from Doctor Who and a scene from D. H. Lawrence’s Women In Love among many an et cetera; every few panels a new motif, some evoking the titular rainbow - the treasure at its end which may never be reached - and some only tangential to the theme, if that. In the end, the strip climaxes with an evocation of pastoral bliss in poem form.  

Such is this book’s m. o. You’ll find a smattering of proper narratives, but it soon becomes clear that stories are no longer the book’s central concern – the focus isn’t on the life lived, its dramatic moments of note dutifully tallied off. Dakin’s preoccupation isn’t with narrative, only the moment, both the moment captured – the fleeting observations and, occasionally, epiphanies that can be experienced anywhere, on a night out or staring out into space when you’ve got work to do – and the moment he’s absorbed in right now, the speed of thought as he’s moves from association to association across the page; various strips are cut-and-paste affairs, making that sense of performance just a little more immediate. But the spotlight here is never pointed at process – for all his frequent play and experimentation, Dakin’s not a formalist; each action is devoted to getting the idea, this mood, this odd nexus of ideas, its own space, before it fades.

There are songs, poems, stuff that probably happened and stuff that most certainly did not – as you might have gathered, nothing here is defined too concretely; modes will frequently shift from one to the next, ever mutable, each piece thoroughly reveling in its status as pictures on a page. A quick flip through the book will see the plot-happy foundation of tiny dense panels to which we’ve grown accustomed more likely to dissolve and break apart, its once-dense flow of information now sparser and the statements often as self-sufficient as koans. It’s all confidence and no strain, scratchy, sloppy, and crystal clear in terms of linework and storytelling, achieving a simplicity so off-handedly assured as to suggest years of study, a keen foundation of discipline (esp. considering Dakin’s age when he produced these – from his early twenties to his early thirties). Very often they seem to have coalesced on the page by sheer happenstance, Dakin’s loose lines floating together to form a wispy vignette, the frequent lack of panel borders leaving the image’s negative space to trail off into the edges of the page. Nothing is irrelevant; everything is of a piece, resoundingly whole under Dakin’s all-powerful sensibility.

Dakin probably drew them the way Frank O’Hara wrote poems, on the fly, the strip he’d be working on something that needed to escape his nervous system, with his mind already intent on both the strip he’d work on tomorrow and the strip he’d start while he buses it to a friend’s place later in the evening. It’s not a unique approach, but it’s palpable when you look at the pages, a restlessness unhindered by perfectionism, the need to move move move, onto the next panel, the next idea. Even the quietest strip suggests a relentlessly mobile pen, a poem jotted down while the inspiration remains. Territory needs to be covered!

And like O’Hara, there’s a sense of intimacy which ensures none of it is precious. In a less talented cartoonist, these strips would veer either toward insufferability - an adolescent’s notebook of poems put on display – or gnomic abstraction, a hazy work-intensive plod through half-digested ideas. Here you’ll find no barrier between you and the artist, only generosity; they read like letters from a good friend, a friend who can’t help but take in the joy and sadness of being alive and will compulsively share them with you every few weeks, another email about what the world is like at this holy moment.

This may be stretching, but, if I squint hard enough, I think I can see one more comparison (as is my m. o.) – indulge me. If you or I were to make a go of writing our own version of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book Of Disquiet, cataloguing our own solipsism, the extent to which we’re out of sync with the rhythm of the world around us, it would probably be pretty close to Abe, except nowhere near as good. Abe/Dakin – social, charming, ceaselessly peripatetic – is far from Pessoa’s hermit – recoiling from the world, preaching inaction and reclusion, defining the entirety of his universe as four walls, a bed, and a great many books – but the books do share one obvious point of congruence – each being a document of notes, sketches, figments, and monologues dictated directly from the deep interior of one man – along with some nice glib ones: you can flip randomly to any page of each and uncover an able epigram; both are, at bottom, manifestos for slackers. There’s no missing the exuberance in Abe, but you’d be hardpressed to neglect what it shares with the Book Of Disquiet:  a sense of disconnection, an unmistakable dissatisfaction with a standard of measurement that is axiomatic with society. Abe at no time approaches Pessoa’s full-on nihilism (plenty do, but often the only testament to their beliefs they leave for posterity are suicide notes); he’s just a man who knows his own definitions of freedom – mystery, chance, stillness – stand in direct contrast to a life that demands practicality as a necessity, which requires set goals, a pre-programmed sense of progress. It may be a losing game – the subtitle of the book doesn’t deny it.

And, perhaps incidentally, both books seem infinite. Abe is only 174 pages but it has all the density of a white star. There are strips here, some lasting one, two, or three pages – each a simple flow of near-calligraphic images dredged up from somewhere, with not much in the way of motion or movement forward – which, in my mind, never seem to stop; I continually play them like pop songs, easy and abstract. The connections they make are vast, continually expanding, and the mysteries (or is it just one? I return to that word ridiculously often in this essay, but there’s no more perfect word) contained therein always beckoning. There aren’t many books like this, with so many landscapes at play, unknown vistas. You might be obliged to take a cue from Ignatz in the image up above, nodding in quiescent siesta before that moon, immutable, ineffable.

Or you can find a spot on a proper precipice and then, as is natural, stand and stare.

FOOTNOTES

*It runs both ways – Eddie (along with his daughter, future Comics Journal contributor Hayley Campbell) makes an appearance in the strip “Abe In Australia”, collected in Abe. 

**If you can see some trace of Campbell in Abe, then Campbell himself claims Dakin as a direct influence, specifically on Graffiti Kitchen, arguably the least illustrative of the Alec books, with each image reliant more upon a scrawled spontaneity and less on pictorial effect.