What I’m Reading

Let me start by introduction and salutation, though reversed: Howdy. I’m Nick Francis Potter, comics editor at Drunken Boat. The origins of the soon-to-be longstanding DB comics section occurred as follows: I said to DB, “Let’s do comics, too,” and DB said, “Let’s,” and here we are. So, yeah, no cajoling necessary. It’s a no-brainer: we all love comics around these parts. With that said, here’s a non-exhaustive, mostly-comics list of things cherry-picked from what I’ve been into/reading over the past few months. If you recognize work on this list, or perceive relationships between the work described below and other work you’ve seen out in the world, please, share your recommendations in the comments. We’re always on the look out!

Soft Float by Valentine Gallardo (Space Face Books, 2015)

As with so many others, I stumbled across Valentine Gallardo’s artwork while trolling the internet. Rarely, however, has my encounter with an artist’s work left me so immediately and irrepressibly smitten. Gallardo’s cartooning style is achieved with a loose, brazenly tactile pencil line, complete with darkly scribbled shadowing, haphazard smudging, and plenty of erasure, all intermittently highlighted with red pencil. It’s an act of endearing chaos, especially in service of Gallardo’s cadre of multi-species characters — human, animal, alien (?) — each faintly harkening the design of pre-Golden Age newspaper strips while maintaining the rich history of alternative European comics, of which Gallardo is a beneficiary. It was inevitable, then, that I’d snatch up Soft Float, Gallardo’s first stateside publication, collecting a series of her short comics. I think what Gallardo’s work does so well stylistically is exhibit the kind of lovingly chaotic and empathetically dissonant social spaces that so often occur in her stories. I see Gallardo on the forefront of many young artists whose work address contemporary concerns with identity, relationships, and, of course, low doses of stray magic.

The Being Being by Jason Overby (Gridlords, 2015)

The Being Being is something I’ve been hoping for for some time. For those familiar with the more abstract realms of contemporary underground comics, Overby is something of a legend, and The Being Being collects nearly a decades’ worth of his work, most of which has long been out of print, having initially appeared in handmade zine form. In The Being Being, Overby emerges as an adventurous experimentalist. The collected work run the gamut from dedicated minimalist (“Apophenia” uses the 2X3 comics grid as a site for absence and abstract patterning, while “Rube Goldberg Vs. Occam’s Razor” develops an internal narrative by artfully anchoring its text, panel by panel, sans images) to hyper-fragmented maximalist (in “Solopsistic Cosmology,” Overby pushes his tendency for fragmented character design to its zenith, filling each panel, border to border, with a flurry of hatching, squiggling, and deranged pointillist pen-markings). It’s really a tour de force in formal exploration, and an essential book for comics readers seeking the edges of the form.

“Some Other Animal’s Meat” by Emily Carroll (2016)

I think my first time reading Emily Carroll was a few years back around Halloween, appropriately enough. I’d discovered the comic online, and there was this terrific moment when the protagonist of that story was descending into a pit, requiring you to scroll down the length of this hole (and it was deep) to reach the pit floor. It was an amazing, eye-opening experience for me, how Carroll adapted her comic to the conventions of a web browser, and I still think it’s the best place to experience her work (though, don’t let that dissuade you from her amazing collection, Through the Woods). She has definitely changed the game when it comes web comics. And her most recent comic, “Some Other Animal’s Meat,” only confirms the obvious: Carroll is an incredible visual artist and storyteller, both, with impeccable comics timing: the rightful comics heir to Edgar Allan Poe.

Curveball by Jeremy Sorese (Nobrow, 2015)

One of the things that I find so attractive about the comics medium is the immediacy of its effects. Point in case: Jeremy Sorese’s debut graphic novel, Curveball. Gazing at the cover, then taking a cursory glance through the interior pages, it was clear to me from the beginning that Sorese was a terrific, inventive artist, with lush line-work and great character design. I was excited by the contrast of leaden-gray pages accented with an idiosyncratically electric orange. The book was hefty and beautiful. And yet, for all it’s drunken style, it was something more subtle that really hooked me while reading Curveball. Set in an apathetically post-apocalyptic future, Curveball is focused on the lopsided infatuation between a blithe sailor, Christophe, and our lovesick protagonist, Avery. It is, on its surface, very much a melodrama. Curiously, however, after nearly fifty pages I realized that while Christophe was clearly referenced as male, Avery remained gender ambiguous. Certainly I’d missed something, I thought, paging back through what I’d read, but I found nothing persuading of Avery’s gender identity, male or female. Pressing forward, I was left likewise floundering in ambiguity, and happily so. This slow recognition highlighted for me a wonderful formal distinction available to comics and visual arts generally. As a writer, it’s fascinating how quickly our pronouns betray us and our characters. Even in circumstances where one uses established or invented gender-neutral pronouns, there is always the increased weight of attention to such a choice. And yet here, in illustrated form, the move works seamlessly, drawing no advanced attention, and permitting a seemingly benign, personal, perhaps even overly dramatic narrative to play out in a brilliantly gender-expansive way. As a debut, Sorese has really set himself a high bar. In terms of intersection between illustration, design, and ideology, it doesn’t get much better than Curveball.

750 Years in Paris by Vincent Mahé (Nobrow, 2015)

I can’t talk about 750 Years in Paris without mentioning Richard McGuire’s book Here, which I don’t feel too terrible about, because I really love both books. Here, which is about a year-and-a-half old now, but which has a history dating back to a shorter comic McGuire did in 1989, shares the distinction of its formal premise with 750 Years in Paris: a fixed point-of-view which catalogs the temporal narrative of a specific place (a cartoonist’s version of time-lapse photography). And while McGuire’s work serves an explicitly American locale, Mahé’s book, as the title so concisely reveals, gives us 750 Years in Paris. Working in a linear temporal fashion, Mahé’s begins in 1265 with a fictional Parisian building, and charts its evolution, sorting through 750 years of history, including the Black Death plague, several wars, the Great Flood of Paris, all the way up to the 2015 marches defending freedom of speech in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings. It is a marvelous, and marvelously attractive book, particularly for architecture lovers, history buffs, and color-separation enthusiasts.

Citizen by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press, 2014)

First, I know, this one’s not a comic. And oddly, I suppose I have Donald Trump to thank, via a Trump rally-protesting attendee, for re-reminding me that I needed to read Citizen. The book is really an amazingly dynamic, beautiful, affecting, and infuriating meditation on race and citizenship in the United States (and beyond). And, of course, there’s been plenty of intelligent writing in conversation and praise of Rankine’s book, so I’ll happily defer newcomers to those more thorough contemplations of the book’s themes. What really blew me away regarding the book, though, is the intersection Rankine finds between the social, the political, and the aesthetic. And that’s why I’m including it here: Citizen is truly a multi-modal work, featuring numerous artworks and photographs, operating as much as a curated gallery space as it is an essay or a poem. And it’s within this realm that Rankine creates some truly fascinating interactions between text and image, including images that read by illustration and association, by various degrees, with Rankine’s language. You don’t need me to tell you that Citizen is essential literature — essential.

Ganges #5 by Kevin Huizenga (self-published, 2016)

I often think of Kevin Huizenga as a less ostentatious Chris Ware, though the comparison does a certain disservice to the idiosyncrasies of Huizenga’s work. Ware, of course, has long represented the high-water mark for formally sophisticated comics-making, for which he’s been universally lauded by aesthetes, academics, and eager crowds of comics apologists. And I get it, I too am impressed by Ware’s work, even if it’s as relentlessly dreary as it is conceptually and geometrically pleasing. I compare Huizenga with Ware because Huizenga’s comics are every bit as formally, conceptually, and aesthetically accomplished as Ware’s, every bit as deserving of the kinds of praise Ware garners, and yet Huizenga’s work remains nearly invisible by comparison. Huizenga, like Ware, engages with the domestic politics of the mundane, meta-comics formalism, and patently middle-class existentialism, however with Huizenga there is a certain intellectual verve that’s marked by sincere curiosity and play that, while present, feels less effective in Ware’s work. Where Ware seems determined to crush the excitement of life out of you, Huizenga’s work adds life, generating a kind of humble, transcendental blossoming that is, at its root, precisely the effect I’m seeking when I engage with art of any kind. Of course, there’s something to be said for life-crushing art — I don’t intend to wholly dismiss Ware or likeminded artists/projects — but it’s the kind of work Huizenga is doing that is, for me, worth the lion’s share of attention.

Perhaps one reason that Huizenga isn’t yet a household name among literary-minded comics readers is the patience with which his work has been accumulating. His present series, Ganges, named after his oft-used protagonist Glenn Ganges, has been in production nearly a decade, the last issue (#4) arriving in 2011. The long intermission between issue four and five is perhaps an added joke on the series’ premise, Glenn Ganges inability to fall asleep. Issue five, the penultimate issue, keeps course with meticulously designed and illustrated diversions into history and philosophy, and, at its core, comics-making, as Ganges persists in his quest for sleep. For its brevity, it’s pretty astounding how masterful an exhibition it is to read 32 pages of Huizenga. Ganges #5, like Ganges #1–4, like Gloriana and The Wild Kingdom, etc., is a comics event, a gift, an unassumingly complex, poignant, and hilarious experience in rejuvenation and life. All of which is to say, if you’re unfamiliar with Huizenga’s work, get familiar.