5/14/2026

5/2/2026

As people grow older, they tend to lose the ability to connect with new art that they can understand or (more crucially) that moves them. And so they start to say 'people just don't make creative work anymore, something has happened in society, I was part of the last generation that had thoughts/feelings.' And when someone in this mindset does find work that 'matters' to them by a younger or emerging artist, it is often a pastiche of older styles and approaches they recognize and endorse. The embrace from older generations of work like this perverts their past higher ideals----in the heat of the moment of their early involvement with art, in moments of defining work that mattered to them, cynically assembled nostalgia would have been repellent. Now, to tired eyes, it becomes 'the last hope', a needed turning of the tide.

In the first years of art immersion, you are often surronded by peers making formative steps, early expression. You are close enough with your peers that you see them generate new visual ideas, new poetic concepts in real time. These moments are fleeting, artists (sometimes tragically) bulldoze over these periods of image generation in favor of refining and honing towards a systematic approach. So the power within a formative image, if you weren't there to witness it, is likely lost forever, not historicized, not remembered, an event only known and witnessed by intimates.

As time goes on, these interactions fade away. You come to know emerging artists once they are 'formed' and the visual langueage that builds the 'mature' and 'public' version of an artist is foreign, you weren't around during the langueage's evolution---and you remember being around during past langueage's struggled births, and you recall the pleasure in that, and in this way you cannot accept a way of speaking that presents itself without your involvement.

In comics, this is why the long holdover of underground and alt comic approaches still dominates. It's the only langueage most people with power in comics will accept, the only one they played a part in. There is a pressure to give the younger generation a seat at the table, but they have to be a throwback, a 'new' old person. Art/lit/underground/alt comics has such a bizarre desire for venerating a rejection of the present. In the 90s, old styles of music/dress/behavior were embrassingly fetishizded within alt comics circles, and while the extreme nature of all this has passed, the undertone of rejection of the present remains.

Ages ago, I talked about how, at minimum, Crumbs 'A Short History of America' is on the same level of cultural critique as Denny O'Neil's 'social justice' Green Lantern comics---both a weak and ultimately easy to disregard smattering of false insights that offer easy (but not lasting) pleasure. In contrast, a real artist like Lee Friedlander looks at the world as it is and confronts it. What Friedlander finds in his photos of 'modern America' (which is Crumb's entire obsession, though he doesn't put much thought into his chosen subject) is something beyond cliche, a highly complex visual world that contains both pleasure and pain within it. Friedlanders images suggest that it would be a crime against ourselves to look away from the moment we exist in, to find only rejection within a walk down the street because the architecture 'isn't correct' or 'people dress wrong' or the music playing in a bar 'isn't traditoonal zydeco'. All these reactions exist within Friedlander's art, but the counter to them is also there. Comics, still under the influence of cultural reactionaires like Crumb, defines itself as looking away, and defines itself in this way as its public facing persona. But of course, beneath that persona is reality: emerging cartoonists looking directly at life as it is without nostalgia for a flase past or a false pastiche approach to living. Its these artists who are the most inexplicable to people who have been involved in comics for a long, long time. At the start, a comics lifer finds exhiliration in a reactionary cultural critique of life as it is. Often times, they've been mistreated or oppressed in some way shape or form, so comics that postulate some sort of fantasy of a pure analog past feel revolutionary. But the returns of this exhiliration diminish when it becomes clear that any rush of enthusiasm beyond this initial one is barred by the narrow moral code and vision of the work itself.

4/19/2026

I think (some of) my problems begin with this notion of art as having real earth changing power, and assuming everyone is on the same page with that. The art that has enacted real change upon me has been work that struggles to articulate itself in opposition to the standard mode of expression. And so I assume this is everyone else's experience as well...& then of course I have to confront, over and over, that this isn't the case (& of course it doesn't need to be). I make another mistake in thinking that it *can* be a universal experience if people are more patient...but, honestly, why should they be?  Marxist theory is an annoyance to basically everyone (which makes sense!) but the most beautiful part of it can be siloed from critique: the idea that there's always another step, but that step involves a tangle of varied movement. Work that presents 'a step forward' simplistically & denies complex movement repels me.

I read an EP Thompson passage recently that I really connected with. Thompson shows that, in the last decade of the 18th century, textile workers went from living comfortably (some even owning summer homes in addition to their regular residence), only to suddenly find themselves all but destitute----all the while still working and producing. There is a constant, powerful current of movement disintegrating us, and that movement is crude in its intentions but deeply specialized in its execution. I cannot separate art from my perceived view of it as a counter to this. And this is not advocacy for political art, which I mostly dislike. Instead, I see art as containing a richer movement within it that can expose and repudiate the insufficiency within the crudeness of the opposing disintegration. 

4/15/2026

Frank Stack, most known for his work on Harvey Pekar's American Splendor series, has passed at the age of 88. Stack was my favorite American Splendor artist, and he worked on what I consider the greatest single issue comic of all time: 'American Spledor: TransAtlantic Comics', with Colin Warneford and Pekar, published in 1998. Below is writing I did for The Comics Journal in 2021 about this comic:

The late '90s and early to mid '00s were probably the most successful moments in Harvey Pekar’s life. A relatively acclaimed movie based largely around his art and, at last, some financial stability. However, I think there was a tendency in those years among the audience of [the magazine you’re reading these words in] to not simply take Pekar for granted, but to drift into ‘maybe he's not very good work at all’ territory. During this time, as Pekar was probably enjoying a media conversation around his work that he felt was well-deserved, in his chosen corner of his chosen medium, American Splendor seemed very much apart from the earth-shattering project that cartoonists like Ware, Clowes, Gloeckner or others had begun to be associated with: comics as art at the highest visual and literary levels. Including an artist of Pekar's generation like Robert Crumb in cutting edge anthologies like Kramers Ergot was of course a necessity for how that publication viewed itself, but even if he’d been asked, Pekar would have been an oddity in those pages.

Now that (to me, regrettably; to you, perhaps rightfully) no one seems to care about comics in that rarefied way anymore, it’s interesting to focus on Pekar again. In contrast with the haute literary/art comics moment, his work was not coming from a midwestern meticulous craft concern or the Charles Schulz goy depressive angle. American Splendor is, at its core, neurotic, but Pekar is alive in a way Schulz positively understood he wasn’t, and his successors negatively mistook as a mode of total life cosplay (often mixed with weak Crumbisms). Perhaps more telling than the frankly Jewish nature of his work, in a medium that was increasingly defining itself as the regretful gospel of Schulz-style Christianity, is how casually made Pekar's comics were. While the Hernandez brothers and their followers wouldn't allow a mediocre panel to exist beyond the thumbnail stage, Pekar and his artists greenlit hundreds of poorly-composed drawings to publication. His tendency to work with artists of varying skills (from the best in the business to those that signaled a potential towards competency some day or other) was, in retrospect, a misdirection that aesthetic values of the time allowed many to fall into. Comics as an airtight aesthetic edifice didn’t seem to concern him. Instead, ordinary thoughts and unnoteworthy drawings sitting comfortably alongside thoughts and marks that had a little more spin on them is what he was after.

It shouldn’t have been that hard to miss. While the endless Toby and Mr. Boats stories felt like repetitive space-fillers that annoyingly popped up in almost every Pekar publication, they point at an oddly underdiscussed aspect of Pekar’s art: American Splendor as a receptor for working peoples' attitudes and ideas. We focus so much on American Splendor as autobiography that we forget how much of it is often about other people in Pekar’s life, without much of Pekar’s voice imposing itself on them aside from mere transcription. This is an important part of American Splendor as a working class project, and it’s revealing that his work is rarely discussed in class terms. Is American Splendor a memoir project? It’s not about Pekar’s childhood or his parents, or really looking back all. It’s about working at the Veterans Affairs hospital, crucially in the present. The people Pekar works alongside or encounters through his reality as a working person are as important as family members in the larger scope of his comic, and they’re there with him in the trenches as he writes - not as a boyhood remembrance of work long abandoned for a literary life. The pages of American Splendor were made while working with these people 9-5, not after. Unassailable craft isn’t much of a concern when this is what your project is about.

The best document of all these tendencies is the 1998 release TransAtlantic Comics (importantly a comic; the American Splendor movie was released during a boom period for the 'comic made for bookstores' market, forever associating Pekar, for casual readers, as a graphic novelist, but he published and thought as a pamphlet comics writer for much of his career). It begins with an eight-page story drawn by Frank Stack (arguably Pekar’s best artist, who often understood his beats and concerns far better than Crumb) where Pekar gets in a minor car accident. Worrying about the insurance costs of all this, Pekar goes to his PO box for a moment's distraction, and finds a lengthy letter from an artist named Colin Warneford. The comic immediately shifts to a retelling of Warneford’s letter, adapted into a comic by Warneford himself. Warneford, a fan of American Splendor, has written to Pekar out of the blue, and immediately launches into an account of his own day-to-day struggles with severe Asperger syndrome.

Pekar offers no explanation for why he’s presenting this to us. Warneford’s voice is enough of a justification. Pekar, without saying as much, seems to naturally assume that this is what comics are for: an unknown person's story, published without much fanfare.

4/13/2026

Cartoonists and comic readers often wonder: ‘is cartoon language capable of depicting life as it is, can a medium based in joke telling approach tragedy?’ Comic works that retell the greatest upheavals and pain of modern society, for the most part, answer with two solutions. The first is to start fresh, to invent a new comics language (Life? Or Theater?), as the gravity of what needs to be shown must exclude Symbolia. If the tragedy minded cartoonist chooses to preserve traditional cartoon language, an attempt at reduction of histrionics is made (Maus). Barefoot Gen, on the other hand, a manga centered on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, modernity’s greatest shame, does not discard cartoon language. Instead, it uses bursts of sweat, exaggerated violence, high register and rapid dialogue, and (expertly crafted) cartoon caricature for our principal characters. There is no apology or shame in this work of its cartoon form. We follow our young protagonist, Gen, living and breathing in an increasingly sick and nationalistic Japanese society. His father is a rare dissenter of Japan’s imperialist ambitions, and so is Gen. This attitude marginalizes him and his family. Gen, a child, is beaten by pro-war adults. This violence is depicted in the same mode as Popeye fighting Bluto. Bodies are thrown around without adherence to the laws of physics but with an allegiance to the laws of cartoons. Nakazawa, a master cartoonist, makes no triage for the gulf between his characters animated acting and the horrible truth they exist within. In lesser hands, these events phrased in shrill cartoon meter would age badly, laughably. But instead, something far different happens to us as we read this comic. As with many well crafted and traditionally told works of comic art, we cannot help but read it. We process it much as we do with Stanley’s Little Lulu, a glance at a page is harder to ignore than it is to read automatically. And yet,  we know what’s coming, and so we ask ourselves ‘how, a million times how, will this language satisfy the tragedy—perhaps the ultimate tragedy—that is coming?’ When the bomb drops, we turn the page, eager to look away. Gen has survived, and immediately sees a fallen dead countrymen, their face melted off. It is here where the genius of this project becomes apparent. If, one day, Schulz had drawn Charlie Brown beaten to death, it would be a psychological attack on his readership. Nothing, really, could justify such a drawing act, it would only be an act of provocation. Nakazawa has no choice, he works with the same tools as Schulz but needs to depict something far different than deep depression. In Barefoot Gen, when the reality of humanity’s greatest crime is depicted within Nakazawa’s razor sharp (think Chester Gould level prowess) cartooning, the effect on the reader is nothing short of devastating. Barefoot Gen is Brechtian in that we begin to look at this cartoon imagery with new eyes, these harmless ink figures now staring back at us lifelessly, connected to our true lives but still wearing their cartoon masks. In this way, Nakazawa unlocked a new power within the form. This was not done out of a need to formally experiment for experimentation's sake. The unfathomable shock of what Nakazawa must depict is so great, he could not be satisfied through the creation of a new cartoon language, with a simple break from tradition. Instead, he had to subvert and deform cartoons from within, as 8/6/1945 perverted and deformed our own way of living, thinking and breathing.

4/9/2026

Readers of this blog take note, more info coming first week of May, but for now: watch this space.

And on instagram: @nyworkingcartoonlibrary.

4/7/2026

I saw a post by a respected comics maker and thinker, talking about early advice he received on making comics. I love this particular cartoonists work, but disagree with (virtually) all his thoughts. I personally find this disagreement useful in that it clarifies my concerns to me, to see them inverted. This is all to say: what follows is written with respect for that disagreement.

The post consists of statements an early mentor of this artist made as advice towards completing a book. It reads (underlines not mine, reproduced from original):

'do you want to average 36 pages per year? Or zero pages per year? You do have another choice you know.

Get to work! Draw it once! Draw it as well as you will on that attempt and then you will be producing work.

Comics must have spontaneity. In order to tell a story, you must complete a long sequence of drawings. 

The reader's eye will only linger on each panel for about a second --- so how much time should you spend on it? How much work do you want to produce in the next 6 months/year?

Don't obsess

Don't freak out

That's not comics---it's art student pretense----it's painting, not storytelling.

A comics artist must be a craftsman---and produce work---so get to work.'

I can't imagine any 'advice' I find more detrimental than what is written here, for any artist really, but for comics specifically. It calls to mind a point Dylan Williams once made: so many comics people (all of us to a degree) still dream of this false reality where we wake up in Long Island, put on a suit and tie, take the train into midtown Manhattan, and draw comics all day.  Of course, the first thing to educate yourself about comics, the most essential truth, is that this type of life and career was misery. So many cartoonists living and working this way poisoned themselves (slowly, day in and day out) with hard liquor sipped while drawing, just to ease the pain of it all. And the pain was real because it's inhuman to hack out work for 8 hours a day without reflection. This 'advice' calls 'obsessing' or 'freaking out' over your work 'art school pretense.' Why is reflection for the elite, and hacking out work/denying thought the scraps left for the rest of us, what we must aspire to---and be proud of? This medium is deeply resistant to admitting that it's an art form, so much so that it reduces itself to playing dress up: 'Hey, let's act like it's the 1950s and pretend that we need to work this way, let's pretend to be totally destitute and desperate like Bill Everett and Wally Wood! There's no industry anymore, no jobs paying to draw comics in this way (maybe if we had the hunger Wood had, we'd actually pick up shifts at Office Max), but let's act as if still an industry overflowing with (badly paying, mind numbing) jobs. Maybe it's possible that the reason all those jobs are gone and that this industry is a cultural backwater has to do with this very mindset. Hmm, too uncomfortable.  Get to work!'

Do you think Wally Wood would endorse any of this thinking? No, he yearned for escape, his hatred of all this is what defined him. Wally Wood in his own words: “American publishers don’t care about the quality of their comics—all they care about is keeping people from saying what they want to say. They’d rather have power than do things well. I don’t have anything much to add. Let’s talk about communism or something."

It's a machismo thing, for a medium that is as unmacho as anything else on the face of the Earth. The very idea that it's pretense to spend time thinking about your work is beyond wrong headed, but nevertheless a common thought pattern of modern cartoonists. Increasingly, as there is no real career to be had within comics, the idea that you are toiling away in the same way that sweat shop cartoonists did and that you're merely a craftsman, not someone who reflects (because that's pretentious and silly and, let's face it, unmanly)---this all becomes required thinking to power yourself through the real lay of the land, the real scorched Earth of where comics are at---never mind that it's this precise thinking that got us here.

Comics are a working class medium, but that does not mean we need to 'get to work' for our 'employers'. We do not work for Kanigher or Gaines or Leibowitz anymore, and thank God. Denying yourself the freedom of reflection---the first and most essential tool for living & feeling, and the thing that everything in our current society sets itself directly against---is internalized oppression. Comics has this internalized oppression imbedded deep within it, more so than any other medium (do other art forms still, to this day, debate whether they are actually art and that it's possibly worse to be art than craftsmanship? No, these battles have been fought and won ages ago). Comics are made up of working people and working people are told to not be pretentious, to not think, to not value themselves, but to work and get by. That's all I see in the above passage: you're a comic artist, do your job and shut up, thought and reflection are for other people, 'that's not comics.' If anything, my political thinking begins and ends with working people being encouraged to be pretentious, to be encouraged to reflect and make art that rejects an enforced valuation of hack work as superior to real expression. The London Art Labs, which formed Alan Moore, where places where working people were exposed to---and encouraged to make their own---experimental art. This is not a casual thing, this needs to happen more. Working people's true domain should be pretense and reflection---- because it has been denied to us and because the circumstances of our lives require reflection about what must be done and what can be. What will follow once reflection is allowed en masse cannot be anything less than a total and vehement rejection of 'get to work.' 

3/31/2026

Ultimately Domino's project is a suggestion to go beyond  international progressive comics first revolution [whatever the equivalent is of the bourgeoise Democratic phase we are currently in...lit comics?] and instead follow through on those demands [the first inklings of which might be traced back to the publication of The Nostalgia Journal #27, 1976] onward to the inevitable permanent revolution. The art of this revolution cannot be anticipated until it is realized, but before that happens, obstruction and enemies need to be articulated so work can be done to clear them away.

And, of course, this does not mean permanent dismissal but instead an end to a decayed (and increasingly incoherent) rule. I cannot count the littered bodies of cartoonists who, early on, access a very real truth about the potential of the form, only to be told (directly or indirectly) by institutions, influential peers, frustrated teachers, beloved veterans, seemingly anyone with power to spend, that the approach of this emerging talent is wrong, that it is not cartooning. The fringes accept these discards, and the fringes emerge as the only real representation of the art form left, vibrant, alive and meaningful. The center, on the other hand, by insisting on only one form of storytelling, which necessitates the policed exclusion of all else, not only deforms itself but corrupts itself as well. Work that is against the requirements of the original revolution, work that is insipid, cynical and incompetent in all ways---except in its desire for clear storytelling---is welcomed into the fold, subverting the militancy of original goals. The French New Wave admired Howard Hawks as an artist, but not as a model, they did not blind themselves to Chantal Ackerman because she didn't work like Hawks. And in avoiding this prejudice, film matured and is a relevant force in all our lives. Comics face a choice: insist on a debunked thesis (that, admittedly, suffered its own frustrated articulation) and stubbornly wither away, or allow itself to demand more of itself. 

3/26/2026

Alt comics prized The Silver Age as the ideal and looked at The Golden Age & Bronze Age with derision. The spontaneity, inconsistencies and wildness of both Golden and Bronze render both irrelevant to a movement obsessed with precision. The creativity of The Golden Age has to do with images generated out of desperation and invisibility, slave like stretches on a drawing table making work no one would take credit for, and at times a transcendent image is summoned as if out of rebellion for The Golden Age cartoonists dire situation. No discernible editing exists at this point* and so discrete expressionism is allowed. The Bronze Age features actual editorial control but one that only pays lip service towards consistency when its obvious master is producing books on time. And so the same level of wild gasps to fill a page with imagery, sometimes brilliant & built from improvisation and fear, is revived here. The Silver Age is all about hatred for the artist by the editor achieving perfection and realization, desperation by the artist replaced with crushing acceptance and assimilation with designs on survival. Kirby is an obvious exception because he's actually from The Golden Age. Alt comics mistakes this self loathing moment of the form as something to emulate, while covertly distancing itself from suspicion by laughing at The Silver Age whenever possible. In its final form, Alt comics combines the writer, penciller AND editor into one super entity, and follows its spiritual inspirations logic: the Alt cartoonist diminishes (as an editor) themself (as an artist). 

Alt comics, in this way, becomes the most neurotic strain of comic book making, and appears to casual observants as flagellation. A Fred Guardineer drawing is comparatively confident, All American, come what may in its ruggedness.

*Outside of EC, which doesn't count because their editing amounted to art direction, albeit highly skilled.

3/24/2026

Masereel looked at city life, passion, and modernity with a lively acceptance. Lynd Ward focused on the same subject matter, but through a twisted schism, vacillating between fear (even drifting into critical repudiation) and naive reverie. His graphic woodcut stories are so bombastic that they risk cliche. It's Wards undeniable command of imagery that saves his narrative art from this fate. In Gods’ Man, we have a young artist resist ‘corruption’ (financial and sexual), only to find total artistic and spiritual love fulfillment by stories end. Only fate itself can (and, predictably, will) intervene. Ward’s images transcend the confused bile within his ill fitting idealism, as they contain something beyond what his literary mind was capable of. The melodrama and treacle that guides us through this, his most famous work, washes away when we turn our eye to his peerless images. Ward’s woodcuts actually fufil his mission of imbuing a new spiritual (well, quasi spiritual at least) perspective on the world. Ward’s narrative contains a strange backwardness that contradicts its intended high mindedness, but we see the fulfillment of his higher goals in this proud and hard fought (tho faultless rather than ragged) imagery. In them, there is genuine and meaningful care for his fellows. We can read his images as they must be read only when we begin to approach graphic novels as something beyond the literary demands we so often bring to them. 

3/22/2026

With Sam Kieth's passing, the amount of love people have for him, in every corner of comics, is wonderful to see. I do take issue with the constant description of him as 'so weird! But I love weird' or variations on this. Kieth is only weird in terms of comics culture. If we step back just an inch, and consider a sliver of the congealed total of art in the world, Kieth's approach is of a piece with most of the art that mattered in the 20th century. Jim Lee, on the other hand: that's weird art that makes me feel bad. His art is akin to orthodox surrealism in that it reveals what's inside Lee's soul, and what's inside is a confused and uncomfortable stance on how people look and move and behave. Kieth's art is in touch with life as it is, filtered through his body. The same is true for most of the artists I carry in the Domino store, which is also characterized as 'weird', 'strange', etc. The point of Domino was to show a swath of work of this type to prove how commonplace a certain strain of visual/literary approach on the fringes of comics culture is. Undeniable, rather than 'weird.'

People watch a Bresson film and say 'why are the characters talking that way? Why is everything so stilted?' But Bresson's films are the only ones that actually get close to the rhythm of everyday life. Casablanca, as opposed to Bresson as possible, exists in some kind of hyper sci fi universe where people speak and behave in a deeply bizarre way, we only understand it because of its relentless nature of imposing its attitudes on us.  Bresson and Kieth are only 'odd' because so much of art subverts its allegiance to confronting daily life towards a new allegiance for rapid storytelling and a demand for information over poetry. But life isn't information, it is poetry, and it isn't Jim Lee, it is Sam Kieth. 

3/14/2026

On 4/26/2024, I wrote here: "The influence of The Hairy Who on comics culture is more detrimental than the entirety of Wizard Magazine." Of anything I've stated, this always invites the most confusion or anger. A couple ways to illuminate what I mean: Ray Johnson makes seductive images, but they grow organically out of an emotional project, and that project is the engine that drives (or, more accurately, births and builds) the imagery. The Hairy Who have no engine underneath---except, crucially, the groups female members (with the notable exception of Christina Ramberg). Further: the collages of Joe Brainard offer a visual seduction that can be found in varying degrees within The Hairy Who, but Brainard's work is restrained, subtle, sometimes delicate, sensitive, emotional. The Hairy Who are loved as image makers by a male (not referring to the percentage of male powerful figures vs. percentage of female powerful figures, but instead a mindset) dominated art world because they make loud, aggressive work that lack any femininity---or, maybe more to the point, the art overcompensates for a fear of coming off as insufficiently male, which is the way of the world but should not be the way of art, or at minimum should not be the way of art we take seriously. Art without a feminine note in its body is without utility. And I suspect everyone feels this internally and yearn for more, but cannot bring themselves to express such a notion externally. 

The art world presents a sterile, colorless and seemingly genderless frontal appearance, which communicates fear but simultaneously (and this is crucial) a ruthless corporate logic (male). The business side needs to be both invisible but also felt at all times, in every corner. Then, it self congratulates & self protects its own prerogatives by deifying (male) visual 'rebels' (Cobra) who 'just don't play by the rules' and make 'improvised' marks on canvas (these artists also phrase themselves as 'children' obsessed with 'wonder and imagination', and in a way they are children, because they're monsters. However, in a much truer sense, they are the inverse of a child's sensibility in all ways that actually matter---and they are conscious of this because they have to constantly litigate what a 'child' is). That improvisation could result in some accidental poetry, but if you look at the work rather than glance at it (rare, because it's so ugly) reality is revealed: the marks are hyper calculated to almost offend while of course falling short of actual provocation---recall the corporate truth, hovering over everything. The art world, though, is vast and its intricacies allow for genuine expression to slip through and exist on the fringes, though this existence is under constant threat of erasure. The artists who make this work could reject the condescending gift of existence they have been passively granted, and instead adopt a more warlike stance. Cartoonists might have been a natural ally in this, but are not---they look past any genuine art expression, eager to focus on the trinkets and gimcrack.

All credit to Blaise Larmee who (years ago) pointed out to me the emotional gulf between The Hairy Who and Johnson, which clarified my own unvoiced discomfort with it. 

3/11/2026

Of his great work, Fires, Mattoti said: ‘I had not felt able to convey nature in my works before…I wanted to communicate my fascination for light, nature … how can you explain these things in a comic? Is it possible?’ When Fires was published, in 1988, such a notion had seemed impossible for many decades, the expressive and magical qualities of comics at the turn of the century dulled and faded over the years. Mattoti’s work brought comics back to the earth and the sky. Its color and prose are so unashamed, so audacious, that initial reactions to Fires were muddled. Mattoti’s portrayal of Lieutenant Absinthe’s direct confrontation with magic aboard the Battleship Anselm II was felt to be ‘over the top’ in its pretension for painterly possibilities within the comic form. Forty years later, this work has won the battle, and asserts itself as one of comics bravest works. It takes the notion of ‘comics as art’ more seriously than most, as it merges Herriman with Kirchner into a lesson that we still try to do justice today.

2/21/2026

Alt-comics orthodoxy is possibly more suffocating than mainstream genre immersion. That trajectory of Kurtzman Mad/EC to Undergrounds to late 80s/early 90s alt at times excludes more open approaches and expanded field interpretations of the form than the most hopeless genre filler. At least the latter suggests a raggedness that can be built on, while the former's strongly (and seductively beautiful) fortified walls are, more often than not, guarding empty thoughts. It's a true gilded cage, the craft put into the walls blinding us to the non reality of living within them and suggesting to us that all we can do is strengthen our holds to this place, rather than escaping it. 

In dialectical materialist terms, you can think of alt comics as false consciousness, and mainstream genre as the necessary phase to transcend towards emancipation.

2/19/2026

I was drawn to Zoe Thorogood’s It’s Lonely At The Center of The Earth less for its artistic appeal than for its market significance . This is a non-genre book from Image Comics, a company that almost exclusively publishes genre. The independent comics house has published autobiography and naturalistic fiction before: the excellent Pencil Head by Ted McKeever comes to mind, as does the famously maligned within these pages Touch of Silver by Image partner Jim Valentino. Valentino himself ushered in quite a bit of genre-less work to Image in the late 90s through his Shadowline imprint. However, Shadowline was never meant to be the commercial centerpiece of Image. Little was expected of the line in terms of sales, its books serving mostly as an apology for Image’s help in the destroying independent books presence in the mid 90s direct market.

ILATCOTE signals changes worth noting for comic book publishing as it is, without question, a certifiable hit. In fact, It’s Lonely At The Center of The Earth has found a wider audience than most memoir tinged graphic novels from (far larger than Image) legacy prose publishers. And it has found this audience without doing what most memoir comics from traditional publishing concerns seem almost required to do: centering the autobiography around a historical fact or specific trauma. Thorogood does have a hook here, but it’s a less specific one. ILATCOTE is about the author’s struggle with depression, and treats the subject non linearly, resembling more a zine you’d find at an avant grade comix fest than a graphic memoir you’d find at Barnes and Noble. It’s in this that I find ILATCOTE most intriguing. As traditional publishing grows more staid, self publishing and ‘underground’ comics (in North America at least) offer a counterpoint. Increasingly, narratives eschew a need for clarity (with genre itself a laughably distant after thought). Self published zines today often present us with a single thought over their 20 pages, rather than grant us the melodrama break up story a previous ‘fringe’ generation would have cartooned.  ILATCOTE, at first glance, is on common ground with these new works.

A second glance, though, reveals anything but. A common feature I find in the best of self published ‘poetic’ comics these days is a resistance towards epiphany, simple answers, self serving resolution, ‘lessons learned’. For an emerging generation not engaged in traditional publishing, how could any of these things be taken seriously? We might look at a modern zine from the likes of Morgan Vogel called Nightcore Energy. A sick teenage boy is interviewed by what appears to be a mental health worker, but in the end no ‘breakthrough’ occurs. Instead we are in the midst of a conspiratorial illness that has amplified. Is the author a witness? Endorsing the behavior? Repulsed? We draw our own conclusions, but the unresolvable center of the story isn’t ‘news’ to us, we all feel the inability to offer any meaningful resolution to our current moment. As the world fractures, relating something personal only to tie a bow upon the final page is a contradiction that is less avoided than it is laughed at, by Vogel and by the majority of serious cartoonists working in the zine tradition today. Thorogood isn’t laughing. Her work offers a bridge, one I was waiting to see crossed, between the non traditionalism of today’s emerging generation of cartoonists towards the traditional publishing world that has passed them over. But the construction of that bridge is built on superficial gloss, shimmering solutions stuffing up the patches of righteous thought left in its wake.

It should be noted, without qualifiers, that I find Thorogood an exceptionally talented artist who will (most likely) author noteworthy work as time goes on. As I write this, Thorogood is 25. Her first book, The Impending Blindness Of Billie Scot, arrived when she was only 21, ILATCOTE following it two years later. Anyone devoted to the art of cartooning can see how advanced she is. Her characters speak freely and what they say is a natural extension of what she draws, what she desries to express is expressed, and done with economy, tact, not to mention an invitingly skillfull line. Most who approach cartooning, if they stick with it, spend decades getting to the summit Thorogood now occupies, having advanced there within a very short amount of time.

It’s important, then, to quesiton what Thorogood says beyond simple communication at that summit—what is said with her line beyond statements, received ideas and forumlas masked in anti formulas. Transedence is an appropriate standard to apply to ILATCOTE as the book states a yearning for just this throughout its 196 pages.

Early on, Thorogood encounters a public service sign with a slogan ‘It’s OK To Not Be OK’ and a sterile unhappy face, which she rejects. The cliche of such a statement, the specificity it misses, is what ILATCOTE strives to counter. ‘I see a lot of comics about depression online, often trying to be palatable and relatable—-and that’s great, y’know?’ writes Thorogood. ‘But…I don’t often find my experience reflected in them.’

So how is Thorogood’s experience of depression depicted? In this book, it is often done with visual metaphor. In a cafe, she is approached by two strangers. At first they appear as grotesque worms and bugs, aggresively asking Thorogood ‘why can’t you be happy?’ Our author recoils. Upon closer inspection, however, these are two adoring fans, and are now depicted as cute animals, who are actually saying ‘I said—-you’re Zoe right? We loved your book.’ Our author smiles.

Is what the reader receives here all that much deeper, as a visual representation of depression, than the sign we saw Thorogood unable to connect with earlier? Yes, there are more lines and there is an elegance of presentation that the purposefully roboticically depicted advert lacked, but on a deeper level (the level ILATCOTE yearns to achieve) I don’t see much qualitative difference. ‘It’s ok to not be ok’/unhappy face vs ‘I am seeing things as worse than they are’/smiling.

Thorogood’s depression, and her struggle with it, is mentioned on virtually every page of this book. She begins to do something, she trails off, her depression again the focus. Out with her parents, looking out over a picturesque vista, she shifts from depicting herself (and her parents) as an iconic cypher to a more ‘realistic’ drawing. ‘Even on beautiful days like this one, it feels impossible to imagine a future where I don’t kill myself.’ This is the formula the book employs over and over again: our author at odds with the mere idea of connection, isloated, then a blunt statement of depression and suicidal ideation. What Thorogood struggles to depict is a unique texture of her depression, how it feels beyond statement. And, it must be said, she struggles with this because of her lack of interest in other characters. She is aware of this as a symptom of her depression (‘she could stop writing this, she could put down the paintbrush and chose to live outside of her own head. But that would require her to think about something other than herself for a change’) but unaware of how much this obstructs ones ability to express emotions. It is other humans that form our thinking, our feelings and narrative itself. At one point, a romantic interest of Thorogood’s enters the stage. He has been referred to as a simpatico weirdo. Now, in this fellow travellers presence, Thorogood relates a story from her childhood, one she feels explains her depression accurately. Her partner expresses no such story, and his presence in the story only leads us back to where the rest of the novel has already ventured: a solo monlogue by Thorogood (‘So, when I was fifteen, I tried to kill myself…’).

This may be the books point, the texture of Thorogood’s specific depression is, precisely, its insularity. We’d be on interesting ground, perhaps, if this was explored as a state of being rather than a problem to be solved, transcendence towards truly communicating a thing rather than transcending the thing itself. But Thorogood is after a soltuion at all costs. Hopeless insularity is flirted with throughout the book, but close attention reveals a foreshadowing of insularity without hopelessness as a  suitable ‘epiphany.’ While at her romantic interests apartment, she scans his personal affects: ’Zoe enjoyed how much you could piece together about a person based off the environment they build for themselves.’ The main point she reaches from ‘piecing things together’ is revealed in one panel: he owns a copy of Thorogood’s first book.

What other characters have suffered, what their experience in the world is beyond surface explanation, is absent from these pages. Thorogood does not escape her plight, her plight of isolation, through others. She finds it through her own role as an artist. At first, she parodies this acceptance (a dazed expression as she intones ‘Well, I guess that’s it. That’s what this book was about. Completing another book.’)

Soon, though, she challenges herself into radical acceptance of art as her solution. In a moment of despondency, an imaginary alter-ego of Zoe gives her a pep talk: ‘This is going to be a real book? Then why the frig aren’t you making that? Idiot! Stupid!’

Later, this same alter ego questions Zoe: ‘Can this book be over now?’ ‘I don’t have an ending’ responds Thorogood. ‘You can’t have a story without an ending.’ Her alter ego: ‘Story? What story?’ Because, after all, her art isn’t a story, it’s her life itself. The book ends with this notion made into perscription, after a discussion of how, when she has suicidal ideation, she actually wants to ‘go someplace else’: ‘I used to think my art didn’t matter until it was published, but I was so wrong.’

This honest statement, that it’s Thorogood’s art she can interact with rather than her fellow people, corresponds with all we’ve seen expressed by the author throughout the book. However, this directness is followed, on the books final page, by a new statement, which feels unearned: ‘If today you so much as earnestly asked someone if they were okay, your impact on this world is already phenomenal.’

Thorogood does not treat characters beyond herself with this earnestness though, whether it be as minimal as ‘asking them if they’re ok’ to the deeper responsibility of treating people that are not her as multi faceted emotional beings in her life defining art project. In this dual final diagnosis and treatment that the book hedges upon (‘be kind to others’/‘your art is your life, even when it isn’t public’), it is her dialogue with herself, through her art, that is ultimately chosen.

My problem with the book rests with the fact that something is chosen at all. Whether or not my personal feeling is that Thorogood’s ‘choice’ is one that won’t offer a solution in any meaningful way is irrelevant, as is my belief that someone so young desperately looking for ‘an answer’ and findining one on the final page feels shallow. It’s that the book, ultimately, resembles so much of modern ‘trauma’ graphic noveling (or therapuetic literature in general), in that ultimately there is an answer to the unanswerable. Thorogood’s solution feeling discordant is inevitable, someone in their early 20s ‘solving’ themselves is going to feel incomplete. It’s that she can’t break out of the expectation to offer a solution that I find to be a cheat, not just to the reader, but to Thorogood’s clear talent, and more significantly, her ability to work in a free, poetic & experimental mode. ILATCOTE has the look of a post modern poetic multi media ‘text’ that ultimately transforms into the self-help  ‘It’s OK To Not Be OK’ sign that Thorogood (correctly) recoiled from.

The true form of work like this, these days, auto-biography or pseudo auto-biography that is non linerar but composed blocks of poetic thought, maintains revulsion to solutions and follows through on exploration of the thing itself rather than solving the thing. Vogel’s narrative ends as a threat to life as we live it today. ‘Making peace’ with one’s self is, rightly, outside the scope of its deeply serious consideration. Vogel herself said “I  cant think of any other way to love except through artwork or some other medium that is public, loving everybody is easy, when you have an actual commitment to a thing or to somebody, then it gets more complicated than I can handle." Here we have real engagement with the problem of ones self, our fellows in the world, and the act of creation. Thorogood has not thought about this problem, across 196 pages, as seriously, and resorts to the template that most modern chroniclers of depression resort to: I, myself, have thought about this, and I, myself, am doing better.

2/13/2026

Poetry, Jazz and Comics are similar in that they suggest a limitless creative potential---and specifically a creative potential that may enact true emotional and psychological (perhaps even religious) change within the world. They remain similar in that they rarely reach this potential, and in fact maybe cannot, as their energy & capacity to inspire movement of the heart and mind exists in the attempt to fulfill the promise.

Each form proposed forced revolution from the imposed day to day structure. In their thwarted attempts, poetry & jazz achieved some sentimental victories amidst the larger & truer loss we were all dealt. Comics stood apart, proudly subverting itself to the very conservatism it was made to oppose. 

2/5/2026

Fellini's The Book of Dreams is, on page after page, about shape, the shape of people, living and breathing. The physical qualities of human beings is felt and important in early film works like La Strada, but not so remarkable so as to be explicit. Later on, the structure of a female actress’ proportions is not merely an obsession for Fellini, but a filmic creation, bolstered by costume, make-up and the filmmakers direction toward transforming a vision into a graphic fact. Fellini’s films become notable in the ‘60s for their total creation, the directors hand in every color, every expressive prop (beach balls, umbrellas), for how the physical body looks and, notably, for how rarely they look ‘real’. His bodies are more sculpted creations than they are shapes from life as we know it. In his cartoons, we see these shapes at birth, the films themselves a later echo.

On one page, Fellini draws a woman alongside the note ‘who is that incredibly robust, plump blonde dressed like a vaudeville Amazon who’s blowing hearts from her mouth?’ Fellini’s prose can only ask the question, but in his drawing, he answers: unlike the (mildly) lewd picture his note implies, Fellini draws a far more complicated person: our woman wears an angular dress that is both sexually functional and poetically innocent in its vibrant design. Her face does blow literal kisses, but in the vein of utopian connection and love more than of carnal desire. Her legs are gigantic and her raised arm features a fearsome muscle. Unlike notable doodles and storyboards by visually astute directors like Hitchcock, Fellini’s drawn art is not  information conveyed precisely, but instead his heart and poetry in miniature. Here, the contradictions, joys, and shames that he found in the human form, and the psychological truths he observed in people, are detailed without reduction. Comics offers what film cannot, a facial expression labored over by the person who conceived it, rather than a facial expression made in collaboration with an actor. Much poetry was gained from those who portrayed Fellini’s web of shapes, and their own personal poetry infused into filmed performances. In comics, though, a significantly distilled version of Fellini’s complex vision is available.

One wonders why comics, as a culture, passes over work like this. So much of comics scholarship hovers around finding possible depth within formulaic scripts from competent practitioners working on lent out IP. Often, comic devotees seem so starved for psychological portrayals, that a glimpse of the Fantastic Four eating lunch at a diner will, for them, resemble some sort of truth. People are thirsty, surrounded by salt water, and mirages are emerging. This is unnecessary when books like Fellini’s Book of Dreams exist. The woman described above is one of many psychological notions made tangible in these pages, and made tangible through the art of cartooning.

1/22/2026

Jim Shooter is some kind of genius re: taking junk (Transformers, the Gold Key characters) and making it into sleek & cold commercial smash hits. He should have worked for a candy company or in pornography.

I do wonder, in the end, if he was penniless or retained some percentage of the billions of dollars he generated. The more you learn about him, the depths to which he was mistreated are staggering. But an ignored aspect is, once he had power and was generating (likely) billions for his corporate masters, how little respect was given for his commercial instincts. He was a cruel figure, but so are lots of people in comics, but I think a lot of the narrative around his shortcomings was key in justifying the diminishment of his accomplishments. Julie Schwartz is a far more villainous figure, but receives only a fraction of the hate that Shooter does. 

1/21/2026

Going through a long phase in therapy where I'm discussing things that happened in early adolescence---avoiding discussing where comics fit into all this with my therapist, because there's too much context and the 'idea' of comics is still something I feel like I can't explain to anyone without them becoming prejudiced towards everything I say. This is unrealistic, I'm sure any well meaning person would retain their composure and respect post hearing about someone's childhood (extending into adulthood) obsession with comics. But whatever my specific obsession with comics is, I can't seem to explain it or define it or do it justice. When I think about this conundrum, it becomes undeniably clear that comics where, from childhood into teenage years, a lifeline of major importance, maybe the only lifeline in a period of total chaos. I have a deep suspicion that, for the vast majority of comic obsessives, this is a shared truth. But why? What is it about comics that holds such power to young people in dire straits? I (obviously) still love comics, but my care for them now is on some level a show of allegiance and respect for that past phase of deep, all encompassing attachment and devotion. Nothing can equal the focus I had for comics from ages 10-16, when I really needed them. But, again, why did I need them? How where they addressing the problem at hand, specifically? I cannot answer these questions.

1/10/2026

Read some old John Byrne Fantastic Four comics out of hatred/fascination. It's a style of comic making I cannot resist, the storytelling is so 'well done' you can simply glance at a page and more or less understand what's happening. It's opposed to everything I find valuable in the Herriman mode of cartooning, but I also have to admire the skill involved. Pre-decompression superhero comic storytelling, with an eye towards the newsstand general reader rather than the comic shop hard core fan, still holds power to me.

When you look at these Byrne comics, you realize that this style of comics making just does not exist anymore. So many once dominant styles have had revivals, we see Chester Brown looking at old as dust Little Orphan Annie comics, we see contemporary cartoonists looking to the strip format in general and translating it to instagram. Even Golden Age approaches get toyed with or appropriated, etc. The 'Copper' age, on the other hand, seems lost to time---except for the 'Image style' that happened during the Copper age and the 'decompression' comics that followed (which, by my count, began at Image as well, with Ellis' Stormwatch). The Copper age, in my view, ends when the decompression era begins, with The Authority #1, 1999. Most mainstream comics still look like that book today. The use of stylish computer coloring is the most obvious giveaway, but it's also the lack of density. Less panels, less words in those fewer panels, writing for the trade, etc. The Ultimates line took a hybrid approach, one dash dense, one dash writing for the trades, one dash slick computer coloring, one dash old style Mark Bagely. 

The last non decompression comic is (likely) Tom DeFalco and Pat Olliffe/Ron Frenz' Spider-Girl, which began in 1998, right before decompression happens. In '98, it already felt somewhat antiquated, but not so different than recent comics as to be self-aware of its style. It is not a homage/pastiche of 1992, some sort of 'before Image broke' throw back. It's just a comic. All it's concerned with is making sense to general readers. The issues are dense with explanation, each issue can be read on its own (more or less) while retaining continuity elements and building soap opera. There is nothing particularly stylish about these books, they are writer driven, but Olliffe's art is very professional, very clean and reader friendly.   

It would be odd to mourn the death of this type of comic. It's the work of veteran entertainers working diligently at their craft, though not all that passionately. These are comic book people making these books, not graphic novelists. And comic book people, of this variety, are lost to time.There does not exist, any longer, a dense, monthly comic with tons of story that you can pick up in March, skip April through June, then start again in July and still get a ton of story for a modest price without it being essential to get the issues you missed---you'll still get it if you just pick it up casually. Without a comic like this---and the denseness is a big part of it, that bang for your buck if you're the type of person who maybe buys two comics a year---a huge market of readers is lost to comics forever. 

It's interesting to compare these books to the success DC has had with their recent Absolute Line. The Batman book in that initiative is a slight edit to the decompression model that still reigns supreme. You see a bit of an uptick in the denseness on the pages, more panels, more words. The books are still written for the trade, that battle is lost, but the success of these books has to do with the reward of picking them up month to month. There is a lot of comic book in them. Not enough to read and enjoy without buying all the issues, but almost. 

Graphic novels have such a hold on how people buy comics today. Manga is (basically) graphic novel in format, as is YA. The Copper age comic is gone, but when it was still with us, was highly popular and (this is my opinion) created an ecosystem through that popularity, through that wide reach. A wide reach means comics reaches more people and potential artists from all walks of life have a chance to connect with the medium and do interesting things with it. I still do not think graphic novels are the right format for comics, as they require too much work for too little money for most artists to do something of note with them. There is always someone, every year, who says: 'why can't we just sell comics in supermarkets again?' To do so would require a lot of changes to reality, one of them being a stronger magazine market, and erasure of the internets impact on print. But a larger issue that people ignore is that commercial writers and artists in comics do not think or work in the same way as they did in '98, when an effort like Spider-Girl being sold at WalMart actually made some kind of sense. 

You can't revive the past without it being cheap nostalgia or grating pastiche. There is no way back to a functional, monthly American comic book once you dismantle it. The tankōbon manga format has remained consistent for decades and been wildy successful all over the world. Part of manga's artistic and commercial strength can't be entirely seperated from this format, and part of American floppy comics struggles cannot be seperated from the death of the floppy, or the death of what made the floppy comprehensible. 

1/4/2026

The entire run of Dirty Plotte shows us, in microcosm, all the repressive pressures and creative potential on offer to a cartoonist in the late 20th century. The first 8 issues, prior to Doucet’s attempts at the more reality based autobiography which she would became most associated with, must be compared to the early days of American newspaper comic strip cartooning for their heady sense of wild creative possibility made real on the page. In these early works, Doucet is the central character, but she does not exist in our day to day world. Instead, this is a world where  she is duplicated as a sort of psychological doppelgänger (‘The Double’ in Dirty Plotte #6), where she has a phallus as much for ‘political’ reasons as fantastical ones (in countless strips), where we see her figure segue from the mundane into violent horror (‘Poor Me’, Dirty Plotte #7), or where Doucet is a methodical butcher  (‘Le Strip Tease Du Lecture’). There are then masterpieces of total imagination, like ‘Robert The Elevator Operator’ (Dirty Plotte #6),  where Doucet guides us through a cityscape with perfect gestalt alterations to figures and buildings, everything transformed seamlessly to maximum cartooning pleasure. The city is not fractured to the point that it approaches sci-fi or fantasy. Doucet shows a populated city with families, amorous couples, isolated drones, hot dog vendors, all recognizable phenomenon, but made electric and new through minor organic alterations, most notably in the nose of Robert (which is drawn like a flaccid and hairy cock), our guide through the town. The story doesn’t ‘end’, exactly, the final panel shows Robert walking up a boulevard. If we followed him for a few more pages, more of the world would be revealed, but we have enough, 5 pages of a world that exists and functions in this way, forever more substantial than the ‘realism’ of an Alex Raymond.

A shift in tone begins to seep in around Dirty Plotte #8. We feel things coming down to Earth. There are less dreams, less created worlds, less violence and even less humor. Issues #10-12 chronicle her classic work ‘My New York Diary’, which is grounded in fact rather than imagination and whose storytelling is tight and clear, in what feels like a concession to alt comics sacrosanct guidelines of the time. My New York Diary was a triumph upon serialization and remains Doucet’s most known work. There is a sense in it, though, of frustrated finality. If comics are meant to be ‘this’ way, bound to clarity and three act structures, how can someone like Doucet dedicate her life to them? Her famous quote about her peers in comics becomes very telling here: ‘“…A lot of those guys, their drawing style never changes—the content neither—and it seems it never will. I just don't understand that, how you can spend fifty years of your artist life doing the same thing over and over again. The guys tend to be nerds. They’re pretty obsessive, and they’re generally not very interested in anything outside of comics.” With My New York Diary, Doucet proved she could do what these nerds did and do it just as well, if not better, but the experience of ‘achieving’ this served to alienate her from the form. Her first post Dirty Plotte/New York Diary work, The Madame Paul Affair (2000), felt flat and uninspired. Doucet hadn’t lost the thread of comics as poetry so much as an exclusion of poetry had been imposed upon her and left her with little reason to continue working within the comics form.

Her recent ‘returns’ to comics show a confirmation of Dirty Plotte’s real relevance not as finely made alt comics autobiography but instead mature comics poetry. Carpet Sweeper Tales (2016) is comics fumetto with nonsense phrases and sounds collaged into characters mouths. Doucet uses fumetto not for earthly concerns of titillation, but instead to ask readers to create nonsense and voice the gibberish sounds out-loud, a far cry from the verging-on-dry events of New York Diary. The masterful Time Zone J (2022) returns to auto bio, but accomplishes an incredible feat:  the work begins as Doucet is filtering through thoughts, hitting on nothing and doing so passively. Then, suddenly, things comes into focus, she remembers someone, a fan, 'a hussar', writing her obsessively. She connects with the writing, and in turn reveals herself to him. She stresses, repeatedly, that she stumbles in connecting with people but there is something here, an actual intellectual correspondence, with touches of passion on both sides. The interaction increases, and then a meeting. Immediately, she's disappointed by the site of the hussar, but decides to keep going. There is a physical encounter, which Doucet describes as important and honest, one of a kind. There is no discussion of happiness here, let alone ecstasy, and—defiantly—nothing is depicted visually. Doucet continues to draw whatever she pleases on every page, and the hussar is depicted only as a bird, constantly monologuing. The meeting itself is a moment of genuine connection, perhaps the richest Doucet has so far experienced, but there is no steady ground or feeling of triumph. Then, immediately, touches of menace, things erode. Doucet gives us a memoir which, consciously or not, defies what comic memoirs have come to traffic in: epiphanies; learned lessons; the author spiritually confident; trauma with a resolution. Instead, we have emotion that hits a dead end, incoherent pain, action taken passively, coherence with another person hand in hand with revulsion, all of which stops on a dime, as Doucet's thinking loops out and onward. The comic is drawn from the bottom of the page to the top, which is what most people will either insult or praise, but it's the most unremarkable aspect of the book. For those reading with any degree of respect, the searing emotion—which cannot be reduced or rationalized or explained outside of the poetry of this book—is what will be remembered. Many memoirs try to assign a hard won feeling of 'confidence' as a resolution to a narrative of struggle. Doucet's book can only laugh at all this. Life as depicted here has no forward momentum and deep feeling arises from failure. This is a comic that's actually for adults, unlike most comics for adults.

Doucet is so confident of her powers in this work that she asks her audience to read the work from the bottom of the page to the top, and she depicts the hussar as a bird, offering no explanation at all for this choice. If we look for a work that could have influenced the form of Time Zone J, a work that could equal its poetry, we can only come back to Doucet herself and the early issues of Dirty Plotte. Time Zone J articulates the revolutionary nature of Dirty Plotte, a body of work that today’s cartoonists are making use of. There is likely, right now, a young cartoonist finding creative salvation within its pages.

12/31/2025

Julie Doucet was the greatest cartoonist of the late 20th century and the most influential cartoonist of the early 21st century. 

12/29/2025

On Charlotte Salomon's Life? or Theater?: If Spiegelman asserts that the conditions of mass reproduction set the stage for the birth of comics as ‘the bastard offspring of art and commerce’, in Salomon we have a rapid evolution of text and imagery to tell a story with the ‘commerce’ requirement removed. Salomon may have hoped to sell these works at one point, but she made them in secrecy, in isolation and in remove from society as she hid from forces that would ultimately force her demise. Instead of a compromise between a.) telling a story with images as freely as possible and b.) the concerns of a newspaper editor concerned with circulation and sales creating (such a synthesis creates the early bacteria of the comics form that began to crawl onto land during the early 20th century), with Salomon we have only the former, and the latter becomes ‘my life will be extinguished soon.’ In the works final images, the drawings are all caricature and simplification, gestures towards tasteful illustration gone, the text is now fused fully with the imagery, the characters perform on a stage for us—but instead of pratfalls or catch phrases or adventures to pay for the creative highs, we have a dream version of the comics form.  Character poses are chosen for their expressive potential, conversations are drawn out and allowed to linger on until they organically die out as there is no need to keep things at a commercial clip, color is used poetically rather than prosaically, a family’s entire history unfolds as a sentimental chronicle rather than a historical one. In this potential hidden and counter history of the form, comics are a medium where feeling is amplified rather than reduced.

12/28/2025

In Inio Asano's work, characters interact over 'nothing', no conflict, no high stakes, for 12 pages and it feels effortless. This is what Bagge and Hanselmann do as well, but with them it's all conflict/spectacle (respectively) based, whereas Asano somehow solves the equation of "how do I show characters 'just existing' and still operate as a highly commercial cartoonist?" Most authors develop their characters through conflict/arguing, whereas Asano shows how they speak, move their body while remaining super entertainment minded, very 'pop' rather than experimental exploration of interaction.

12/27/2025

Most treat Töpffer as a mere question to be answered: is he is the origin of sequential storytelling or merely an origin? An answer to this will never satisfy, and obscures what Töpffer’s century old narratives have in kind with the most progressive comics of 2025. The great critic Theirry Smolderen knew to quote Töpffer’s words directly, to explain how radical his rejection of Europe’s existing art history was, a history already too much to bear for so many in the nineteenth century: ‘I saw, in vignettes made during the Middle Ages by some unskilled monk, a face drawn in such a way that it would make a teacher shrug his shoulders, and yet all the knowledge of the professor would not be able to reproduce its energetic appeal, its singular grace…those who…study art at its infancy, [know] the merits of which are erased, utterly lost in sophisticated art.’ Töpffer’s art was not hopelessly nostalgic for a lost time, it instead proposed a new kind of ‘unsophisticated’ art full of ‘singular grace.’

12/25/2025

Krazy Kat, if read seriously, will never offer the ‘utility’ that the narrow minded, as a dominant majority, impose on art. It does not court the concerns of the powerful, it is not melodrama, it offers no instruction. The avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman encountered a similar impediment when addressing his audience, remarking that theater goers attended his plays hoping for their sexual, moral or familial concerns to be explored and assuaged, only to be meant with what appeared to be mere scatological sound and motion.  Reactions to Krazy Kat wear the same colors and will continue to for the foreseeable future. For those willing to accept this work into their lives in full, we offer a paraphrase of Flaubert’s demand for how we approach art: do not read Herriman, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read Herriman in order to live.

11/14/2025

One thing I hope Domino can be: a constant display of as much creative work in comics as possible, without any rule/aesthetic to unify it, constant proof that people keep making comics outside of definable narratives. Another week of books added, another uncategorizable paragraph in comic history.

So many small press publishers I observe seem to have some sort of idea that they are right about what comics should be---and I'm guilty of that too, of course, except in my work around Domino, where I shove that idea aside.

11/14//2025

More Krazy Kat thoughts in progress:

Those changing landscapes, a cloud one moment and a moon the next (both so beautiful) is what we all remember most of Coconino County, or rather: what we feel secure in remarking upon—we try to explain their meaning but falter, maybe we connect them to ‘expressionism’, maybe one thinks ‘this is why the strip was respected, this chance it took, it wasn’t bound to reality’. This is all, we know, inadequate. Coconino County’s life (as we come to know it) begins in those famous changing skies, but it continues on the ground and in the trees (which, for decades, grew). Its life continues to this very day, as Coconino County is as alive as the Redwoods of physical reality, the only thing created in art that meets the challenge of orthodox surrealism, at times becoming more real than those Redwoods, though equally unknowable and to be reckoned with forever. If we squint and rearrange our focus from Krazy and Ignatz’ daily interactions and instead focus on the terrain they walk, we begin to accept this place into our lives. What do we do then? As readers, what can we give this place, what possible purpose can we serve? It is a place beyond us, we cry out that we cannot understand it intellectually—but we do want to stay, emotionally we know we belong here—though we wouldn’t call it a kind place, or a particularly warm place, it is what we hoped for all along, the great contradiction bridged, a utopia free of the mundane (for all its unknowableness, it is not a violent place (the brick throwing doesn't approach that), nor is it a dry listless place either). The texture of it is as indefinable as Lovecraft’s shapes, but with the reverse implications, we are drawn in rather than repelled. Sci-fi, at its loftiest, promises this, a new world that exists on paper, let us explain all to you as you settle in. This is not how Coconino County operates, it is not explained, it offers no origin or purpose. Anything resembling attempts at familiarity is contradictory to this place, any program of mediating us as readers is laughable. So, again, what do we do in this place that is—we must admit—as hostile as it is non hostile, and that is beyond our capacities to reconcile?

11/14/2025

One thing you likely grow out of the more art you look at: imagery that is nothing more than skillful design with a dash of incongruity thrown in so that it's 'art.' I used to be very susceptible to this, I loved images where all the choices were 'just right', maybe there's a little restraint, one detail 'off', but basically pleasing, hard fought simplification. My revulsion to this imagery now becomes a subject of critique as well, my need for art to be something one can 'do something' with, take something from, correspond with. I can't correspond with the design of my iPhone. If pressed, I'd admit I actually love its design, as hateful an object as it is, there's something about it, every time I look at it it's like having a piece of candy. But there's nothing I can do with that---if you try to do something with the implications of the iPhone design, if you actually let that low level pleasure it gives you into your actual interior, the only viable path is resentment of the natural world, which you cannot allow yourself---so you have to hold this pleasure at bay, at all costs. The iPhone's design is evil if you actually take it seriously, it denies pretty much everything about being human. And though I hate to admit it, a lot of modernist art I enjoy contains the same problem. 

11/6/2025

So much about meaningful art is a negotiation of repression, of one kind of another. Crumb’s entire project thinks it’s about this, but Crumb is not repressed at all, he’s just a consensus person. He seeks repression but that’s not the same as living with it day to day. 

There's a line Bertolucci's The Conformist that I think about a lot. Marcello describes turning his head to look at a pretty woman in a bikini on the beach, and noticing other men doing the same thing. He says that there is a pleasure in this, in this agreement of turning your neck to look, and that this makes one 'a perfect fascist', the acknowledged agreement. We are all like this in one way or another, we all have organic (I guess) consensus impulses, but Crumb's fatal error is branding those drives as something other than what they are, that being a standard sexual being is somehow a political act for him specifically. Crumb's comics don't speak to any kind of emancipation of sexuality for us all, it's only about him, but his type of sexuality faces no barriers at all. It's this contradiction at the center of his art, one he seems totally unaware of. And if we are being honest, he doesn't have the mind to someday become aware.

There is something so embarrassing about his new comic sporting a 'Warning: This Comics Is Not Popular Entertainment' label on the cover. Reading this 'warning' in a moment where cultural figures are fully soaked in the deepest and most fantastical conspiracy theories and their messages are attracting millions of viewers just feels depressing. Yes, they want to stop you from droning on about the pandemic Crumb, it's not as if people with the most power in this moment---including the leader of the free world---aren't saying more or less the same things, only in a tone that's more crass and more vulgar. And of course it's that way, because Crumb is the same as them, he's deeply non introspective, with a veneer of transgression as misdirection. At some point, as you age, you have to challenge yourself to become an actual humanist, because you'll never keep up in the 'pushing the boundaries' upping the ante game. You will fall behind and when you do, it will start to look like a schtick. Spiegelman is the same way: 'can you believe I have a perspective on 9/11??' Although he doesn't, really. 9/11 x Krazy Kat is not even a thought. These guys do not have cultural perspectives, but they like to indicate that they do, and comics is such a backwater that the indication is enough to become 'fact', the same way a gigantic page count in a graphic novel indicates 'depth.' Charles Burns included one of these 'warnings' in his recent book...who is stopping these guys from doing anything? I do not share the online critique of Crumb that he should not be read because he's sexist or racist. I think his art is valuable and I've read every single page of it ever published and I've enjoyed every one of those pages...but I also find it stupid. And the idea that Charles Burns work would offend anyone, in 2025, is beyond silly. It's on the same level as the Deadpool movies marketing themselves as 'oh, can I actually say this, tee hee?' All media is essentially Deadpool these days, our current presidential admin's social media is more overtly crude and crass than any of this nonsense. I remember in high school, in one of the bathrooms someone had graffitied a nude woman and underneath the drawing they'd written 'take that, hush hush society.' I remember wondering 'is this supposed to be sincere, or are they this stupid?' But that was a high schooler, at least, not an artist known around the world for his 'transgression.' When your themes are the same as every spoiled and reactionary aging upper middle class property owner, you are not a cultural critic, you are just confused and searching for the answer, but searching with a kind of unrighteous anger, so you'll never get close to finding anything. 

10/24/2025

Looking at this new C Comics collection brought up some thoughts. Since the early 00s, poetry comics DID happen, but they did NOT happen in publications like Ink Brick. There is the famous Jean Cocteau quote about a child prodigy poet, Minou Drouet. When asked what he thought of her, Cocteau said 'all children are poets, except Minou Drouet.' That's how I feel about Ink Brick. All comics [have the potential to be] poetic, except those published in Ink Brick, comics that just graft cartooning onto outdated and conservative poetic forms. What's happening now, at the heart of comics fringes, is something different than simply breaking up a sentence over many panels and calling it 'comics poetry.' Instead, many young artists focus on publishing work that is a short exploration of a thought or a feeling, and this exploration unifies text and imagery in the pursuit of eliciting feeling from the reader. Instead of naturalistic fiction (which dominated alternative comic spaces in the 80s and 90s) we begin to see less and less focus on characters. Even auto bio seems to be disintegrating. Self publishing art cartoonists now often begin with an unnamed persons speaking directly to the reader, with great focus on how such a person poses on the page, how they carry their weight. We see, in these kinds of comics, an avoidance of epiphany and an avoidance of resolution, though (crucially) without an avoidance of feeling. 

If we attempt to trace the origins of this, I'd say Doucet looms large, though I'd narrow her influence to before her concessions to alt comic conventions got the better of her (New York Diary and everything that came after, until her return to form with Time Zone J). In an early Doucet strip, called 'Month of December', Doucet stands on a bridge and says 'Christmas is coming.' She sniffs her nose, 'it's cold....'. In the final panel, she hurls herself off the bridge: '...and I'm gonna die?' That is the entire strip. Is it about suicide? Depression? Maybe, but no simple prosaic judgement can contain the strips power. So many emerging cartoonists work in this way today. This makes sense, as pure comics get at the core of poetry better than poetry itself could. Poetry strives to make expression new while working with an inherited set of symbols, the letters of the alphabet you write your poetry in. A comic like Doucet's goes farther, she does not write 'I stood on the bridge and began to speak to you.' She draws the bridge, her description of this specific bridge is already charged with a poetry that the letters themselves could never contain, no matter how you place them or rearrange them (all the tortured word placement of modernist poetry could have been solved, it seems, with drawing). Traditional cartoonists worked hard to make the bridge disappear. If Milton Caniff's story required him to draw a bridge, he'd do it perfectly, but so perfectly that you would not notice it or linger on it, the bridge merely a prosaic detail to connect point A to point B, no matter how proudly he drew it. Doucet allows the charge of her expression to be seen in every line, you ignore nothing, it's all part of the whole, just as nothing can be discarded or ignored in poetry. 

Doucet, and the generation that embraces her approach, is not like the group of avant garde poets who made C Comics. Joe Brainard and his ilk lived and breathed what poetry was and is, they devoted their life to it. When they sought to make comics, the tools of poetic expression were already on call within them, and the tools were finely honed. The work in C Comics feels mature and exact, work made by people conscious of what they were doing. Poetry comics circa 2025 are most often made by those with no (or little) interest in orthodox poetry, but instead in how comics can be used for self expression. This search for how to use comics in a mature way has been subverted and derailed for a century. When someone taps into the poetic potential of comics, you see it happen on the page, you feel the charge, 'finally, this is how it can be done!'. Lately, I see this moment of conception everywhere, all the parts coming into place organically and the thrill of artistic gestalt happening in a way that it has really never happened before, the absolute triumph of raw artistic discovery. You'd think C Comics would connect to this, but it feels oddly distant, not so much a relative to todays explosion as it is an acquaintance who,  if you come to think of it, you never actually met, .

And yet, despite this disconnect: as contemporary underground and fringe comics lean deeper into their poetic destiny, it is very important that this book is out now. C Comics is a tome that can now be corresponded with, there is enough strength in contemporary and organic poetic comics that the community making them won't be bulldozed by what is within this book ('it's already been done'). Instead it can act as a prophecy that you missed, and reading it now is exhilarating in its affirmation but not so influential as to change the flow of where we are already headed. 

10/5/2025

It should be called Coconino County. The creation of this place is the most potent expression of Herriman’s great genius. The antics of Krazy and Ignatz could be repeated through speech or explained in text (though shabbily and without the passion we see when they are made with ink). Coconino County, however, can never be given form elsewhere than on paper, and placed on paper through the high art of cartooning. It is the greatest creation this form has to offer, and one that rivals all other art form’s masterpieces of imaginative art . If we compare it to the creative highs of, say, Carrol’s Alice In Wonderland (Wonderland itself quite a formidable notion), a key difference emerges: Coconino county lives, it may be the most alive work of art I have ever encountered. Carrol gives us Wonderland through a series of words made by letters, all inherited, the alphabet a tool he uses. Herriman’s creation is shown through his own invented language, his shapes and his images, and a logic born out lifelong study of how to speak this language fluently. We find him, year after year, obsessed with Coconino County and how things grow in it, foliage building itself with motive unique only to this place panel to panel. We find him immersed in how people move, how their bodies weigh their steps on this mythic terrain. Natural phenomenon in Coconino County is spiritually real, maybe even more real than it is in our own. For all of Herriman’s unapproachable alienness (or perhaps because of it) he gives us something more human than ourselves, as Coconino County is an organism birthed by Herriman and realized in our own eyes—when we focus on it, it lives more markedly than reality because of how precisely we create it with another, which is what we all seek in daily life itself but so rarely realize. This is no accident of a naive master who stumbles into poetry through his artlessness. It is, instead, a hard fought (and fought daily) victory of creation that Herriman modified and honed for decades, tended to with more care (an aggressive and wild creative care rather than a treacly ‘loving’ care) than the cities or towns we all have lived in while reading it, struggling with it and ultimately accepting it.

8/28/2025

There is a kind of comic, a style of comic that people who know a little bit about my writing/art/publishing might assume is my favorite kind of thing. The kind of comic that appears to break new graphic ground, to invent 'new forms of graphic language', suggesting artistic 'innovations' that are somehow scientific and possibly worthy of anthropological attention.  I have a deficiency in engaging with work like this, work that presents itself as graphically defiant but that is rather, in fact, quite restrained, is in fact so restrained in order to remain polite in the large, with flirtation towards the reverse, which (crucially) is enough to flatter many a reader. And this flattery will lead nowhere, to nothing but a kind of graphic engagement that can only be grown out of. My failing as someone who values expression in art more than (possibly) human expression in daily non artistic life: in the end, all I care about is work that engages with poetry & emotion, my tastes hover around this alone. So many of the enthusiasts of the medium, the obsessives, are deeply engaged with work in which I find no utility in, work that cannot admit to the scent of revealing itself, work that is aggressive in its self removal. 

8/18/2025

Re-read Devil's Grin v. 1 by Alex Graham (had read the single issues as they came out, this was the first time reading it all in book form). I truly think this is one of the best comics of the past decade, maybe one of my favorite comics ever. With the idea of graphic novels as the dominant way comics get out there now, most of them are just a single issue comic idea stretched out to an under cooked 200 pages (or way more). This one is a real novel, it's worth the pages it's printed on. Also, while being novel like in depth, it IS a comic, I love how it's drawn, even in certain panels that are rushed, there's no way anyone else besides Alex Graham could draw what's written here, she gets the expressions exactly right in a way that a more virtuosos drawer could never do, all of Adrian Tomine's printed work combined can't equal the actual writing that goes into Graham's cartooning/drawing. Maybe the wrong way to describe it, but it's deeply emotionally intelligent work, which I think is what so many cartoonists struggle with actually doing, there's intense/'transgressive' stuff happening here, but also real feeling and real care for how people treat each other. Each panel in this is worth 1,000 Milton Caniff panels. Justifies my interest in the art form, which needed a jolt like this currently...

6/1/2025

Kirby is  this example of someone whose cultural impact hasn’t been (and never will be) examined/appreciated in the way that a somewhat middling American author (Phillip Roth for example) is examined/appreciated. And even if Kirby DOES get that recognition, it will still never get close to deciphering what he was all about, because the language to talk about what he's doing does not exist. Matisse is more important on his own than all the words written about him. But, those words, over the last century, help us to approach his work in its totality...even if we've never read them, they've merged into the air enough that we can accept Matisse's radicalism as part of our lives. Kirby will never have this, and that is a loss. In fact, Kirby's work, in the way most get to access it, is a putrid ugly version of his vision, an almost satanic crime. ‘Comics working class' this, 'comics can be made by anyone' that, but those words miss the complexity of a generation of young &  poor men whose destiny was to be blue collar and, in a way, remained blue collar, essentially working in sweat shops....but made visionary art. Every effort has been made to degrade what they did, to make it ugly, and those efforts have been successful. The delivery system, a system for people from poor backgrounds to create imaginative works and communicate to a mass audience, has also been erased.

4/26/2025

The influence of The Hairy Who on comics culture is more detrimental than the entirety of Wizard Magazine. 

4/25/2025

Comics inability to assert itself as a serious art form (a condition which persists and I believe most likely always will): people have all the wrong explanations. It's not the comics code, it's not Fawcett getting sued, etc. To say something in comics that has texture, something that genuinely needs to be expressed, something that an artist has earned the right to state through years of defining whatever that thing is, defining and reflecting to the point where improvisation can begin so as  to get at the poetry of it all...comics requires an unbelievable amount of patience to do all this, and only those who make comics can truly understand this. If your intentions are pure, it means spending months and months on, possibly, a single panel...and not due to a paralysis of neuroticism, but out of obligation to the project itself. 

This is why so many of comics actual masterpieces, the works that matter, are a marriage of limitless time offered to the artist and a delivery system that subsidized the time: newspaper comic strips from the turn of the century into the 60s and, arguably, serialized alternative comics of the late 80s and early 90s (subsidized by newspapers circulation and the direct market system, both at the height of their powers, respectively). Manga, at its highest level (think: Matsumoto), has such a powerful commercial center that it creates a reliable enough market to protect those on the margins, those making art. You might think underground comics has a place in all of this, but for the most part, they remain the movement offered all the right conditions that ultimately failed to seize the moment. That may seem heretical, but go back and read those books. We are talking about timeless art, not an assertion or approximation of such a thing lost in a haze of confused ego, but the thing itself. 

4/24/2025

Teaching Feuchtenberger and De Vries' W The Whore to students at Parsons and observing a trend that carries over from semester to semester: multiple people in each class see the work as being about asexuality. I respond with 'I do not think Feuchtenberger and De Vries anticipated that reading or intended it, but I also believe that they'd an interpretation of the work viewed through that lens.' But I say that only to encourage further discussion, I'm not confident that it's true. W The Whore is about male/female daily life. What does it say about how men and women interact? I'd push back against a reading of the work as a feminist text where women are in a subservient role that demands change. There is a lot of talk about being 'free' and that freedom being frustrated. Everything hovers around the idea of freedom as relational, in that freedom only exists when you are as free as everyone else. The men in W The Whore are anything but, and this becomes a factor in the book. An isolated reality dominates both sexes, though every chapter shows interaction. 

4/19/2025

'Disaster is My Muse' is about as embarrassing as it gets when routinely used as a phrase to describe your life project. 

4/15/2025

I want to write a review of Nadel's Crumb book, but I need to reread Céline and Kafka to prepare to get at what I want to say. Crumb is an artist I care about, but all this 'hey man, he's struggling with his own racism and putting that struggle on the page!' is dead end thinking. In my mind, he is a gleeful participant in the racist and misogynistic attitudes that govern our world, and acknowledgment of this obvious fact doesn't preclude the works high and clear value. Crumb is a noteable artist because he offers no resolution to his attitudes, and that makes his art electric in a world of equally racist/sexist though more delusional lesser talents. It does not make him a great mind though. In fact, it makes him a common place one. We can respect him for being honest and expressing that honesty with truly incredible artistic distinction. This honesty, though, is not the same as the 'honesty' everyone ascribes to Crumb. It's 'honesty' born without struggle.  He is one of comics greatest artists, which points to a kind of poverty within comics. Crumb's thinking is so, so thin, but comics culture regards his work as something of a masterful intellectual project. Crumb can either be viewed as a reflection of our received attitudes or a reveling in them, but his thinking is not lively enough for (even a negative) departure from what has already been (poorly) thought out. Kafka is an artist worthy of actual mental engagement from readers in this moment, because he saw the same sickness in the world and could not participate. He had a mind that allowed him to navigate the basic necessities of life (more than we can say for many today, it must be said), but engagement beyond that was an impossibility. If people followed his art to its logical conclusion, if we truly digested his view of participation in the world as it is being beyond the capabilities of those who grasp it (which is all of us, if we take ourselves seriously),  life as we know it would vanish and a new way of being would emerge. The often told story of Crumb not appearing on Saturday Night Live is not the same as this, though it may be to the most mush brained TV fed fans of underground comics. Crumb, though confused with Kafka, does not admit to a basic incompatibility with the world----though he does flirt with this notion enough to make his readership feel that he is, in fact, a critical thinker. There are mentions of 'the trouble with this here Modern America' but he notoriously (to me at least, no one else seems to mention this) loses interest after the first few pages of his social critiques and reverts to very lazy surrealism (Mode O 'Day may be the one he had the energy for, and is possibly his best work, but...it's not just about yuppieism, it's also about some uppity woman being a bitch, which is probably what sustains his interest). His sustained and vigorous anger is reserved for...he didn't get laid much when he was younger? But, it ended up working out later? In fact, in the end, everything worked out pretty good? But, it's like, man, even having it all is harsh, right? To be clear, this ability to thrive within and with the putrid aspects of our age and still end up being a spoiled, annoying self involved guy is no mark against Crumb (and a scathing critique of society that rests on your anger at being denied the level of sex you feel owed is more compelling when it comes from (almost) Dürer level drawing than it does from some crappy sub Ziggy drawing ability groyper dork). I am grateful to engage with his view on the world, and as a graphic artist he has few peers. I am, though, extremely ungrateful for lazy readings on him. The received ideas of 'Crumb outsider this', 'Crumb struggles that', etc etc. He, like many of his generation, thrived within an age that offered them very little pushback, and any denial of their confused patchwork Eastern-philosophy-as-hedonism (the collectivism of it left in the dust almost instantly) was, to them, the fight worth having. They easily won, because there was no real struggle against their attitudes, except in their own minds, minds so empty that no amount of indulgence can ever hope to fill them. 

4/6/2025

Happy to have the Kunzle Cham book, it's valuable because I don't think Cham is very good. His well crafted but passionless mediocrity proves how much of an artist Töpffer is in comparison. Cham is the kind of cartoonist people still fall for now, though. Töpffer: 'I saw, in vignettes made in the Middle Ages by some unskilled monk, a face drawn in such a way that it would make a teacher shrug his shoulders, and yet all the knowledge of the professor would not be able to reproduce its energetic appeal, its singular grace. They know all about it, those who browse through these vignettes, and sit for long hours in public libraries with fifteenth century books to study art at its infancy, the merits of which are erased, utterly lost in sophisticated art.' Yes...these are the words of the only father of cartooning I want to acknowledge. Sadly, even if he's a footnote compared to Töpffer, it's Cham whose spell we exist under. The first cartoonists understood what comic art was, but received ideas about what this new art should be were too dominant for its founders radicalism to survive.

4/3/2025

Going to start writing about things here from time to time. I have a long term goal of writing a book about comics, maybe putting different thought threads here can help with that.

I'm so overworked lately that it's hard to engage with serious comics, comics that attempt actual art. With students at Parsons, I'm teaching Joe Sacco's Paying the Land. That's a sophisticated, strong book, a book engaged in real questions about what people alive in this world today, no matter who they are, face. If I have some free time from work, I've been allowing myself to read junk like Roger Stern's Spectacular Spider Man run, just for pleasure. It is odd, the way you start to think about comics...the cheapness of these Stern Spider Man comics holds so much appeal, how worthless they are, the paper fading away, the small kindness of the story, easy heroism, some kind of weird humanity, people being 'nice'. You see how this medium attracts the most screwed up people. It's assumed superhero comics are fascistic, and they are a bit, but they're not really that forceful, they're not committed to much of anything, and a fascistic project needs conviction. Comics are for people who crave super low level, no effort needed friendship, a drawing of a nice person doing things that are vaguely exciting, that's what 80s comics are like, a time when the medium was actually popular. What Sacco is doing is disconnected from all this, there's no comfort to be had with this book, it presents a hopelessly cynical world but not in the romantic way that most alt comics do, where the cynicism is 'why doesn't a depressive old fart like me get to have as much fun as I think I deserve?' That's not real cynicism. Sacco's Paying The Land, if you read it closely, is: there was a way of life that functioned, industry destroyed it, you can try to reform that destruction, but it won't take. That's a comic engaged in truth, a comic that isn't pretending. I don't particularly like a lot of the drawing choices Sacco makes...he's brilliant but it's his least 'cartoony' work, basically words and pictures not congealing together for hundreds of pages. A Stern/Marie Severin Spider Man is more cartoony than this, very lively drawings of a strange figure in tights swinging around doing things that don't matter. Feels intentionally artistic even though it was drawn by someone punching the clock, and this view of it as art enforces a reading of comics as folk art made by serfs. More romanticism, getting further away from reality. And it's an alt comic brain problem, seeing comics as 'beautiful' when words and pictures congeal, but it's Sacco who has it right: drawing pictures involves people in his text dump, there doesn't need to be more justification for words + pictures than that. Plus he draws so well, and good drawing is persuasive. Who cares if it moves nicely? There's more important things in life.