Your Money, Somehow
Julia Gfrörer’s comics, electric imagery, and affirmative social acts.
I came to Gfrörer because of purple-faced anger: I caught myself saluting the ceiling and the heavens beyond it after having dramatically lowered a comic by Mark Millar called Jupiter’s Legacy, issue three (published by Image). Millar’s speciality is also Alan Moore’s speciality: the significant rape or brutalization of women in hot, popping colors. The men who write about women in lieu of women writing about women can join the white men who write about black men in a special circle of hell—Millar and Mark Twain together.
While it’s orthodox to poke and hurl blame at Millar, like you do at Malcolm Gladwell for his own empire, what really got to me was my own complicity in this bathetic production: my eyes were for artist Frank Quitely, to experience every new burbling of his scraggily line, a desire which in turn fuels the demand for more high profile Quitely projects, rare as they are. This time, late 2013, it’s Jupiter’s Legacy, and as I fed my desire, buying a Mark Millar comic when I normally do not, I had a revelation: everyone’s favorite precision instrument, Frank Quitely, is the new face of totalitarian art. All those vapid hooded faces and endless iterations of firm jaws need to be seen as the sick state fetish that they are. Quitely’s been giving us the same meatheaded skinheads for decades. Stick a cape on one, and you could call it Superman, though it’s still just a pig with lipstick. That the pairing of Millar and Quitely makes so much sense is obvious now; I sought the purity of the artist, but I discovered the artist’s corruption.
Good for Jim Carrey for having second thoughts about Kick-Ass 2 the movie, but better still for moviegoers not kissing the latex boot of Millar’s dull pop terrorism. Moviegoers showed some real discrimination last year in terms of what junk got plunged down their throats. How you spend your money is an ethical issue: seven dollars here and there can endorse and condone and enable, though I’m wary of resorting to the childlike metaphor of dominoes to convey the momentum and knocking-down power of a boycott.
I sympathize with how Kelefa Sanneh closed out a recent New Yorker article about the stability of blockbusters in the face of the promise of the long tail:
…the availability of free pirated content online has endowed other, legal, forms of cultural consumption with a faint aura of righteousness. Many connoisseurs have come to think of themselves as patrons, eager not just to consume culture but to support it—or, occasionally, to boycott it. Each paid-for download, each Kickstarter donation, each movie ticket, each HBO subscription is an affirmative act, and a social one: a contribution to the cause, a vote in favor of Katniss Everdeen or some rookies on Bandcamp, a strike against the demise of whatever part of the entertainment industry still entertains us.
So instead of continuing to satisfy my longing for a new Quitely blockbuster, I redirected my energy and my money-voice into joining Etsy and buying eleven dollars worth of homemade comics by the romantic gothic cartoonist Julia Gfrörer. Two months later, I went back and picked up more, two of her scratchy blowjob comics.
They are tremendous.
In the past, I admit that I have tried to tweet in that arch philosophical mode of Errol Morris and Alain de Botton, and I remember very well this one riff: “How can I condition myself to crave the products of women like I am trained to crave those of men w/o craving being a gross subset of lust?” The subsequent tweet: “I ask because I just stopped myself from ordering Charles Burns’ The Hive. Stopped myself yesterday too. Saw myself as drooler/tyrant.” However much I try to control, refine, or redistribute my desires and purchases, the default is men and male culture. It sometimes seems like the alternative—choosing the products of women—turns me into a “drooler/tyrant”: lusting after and lording over. But surely that better describes the homoerotic lust I have for Quitely’s every pencil emission?
Every month I have to remind myself that I want to be the author of affirmative social acts, so that’s what this blog is for: after today’s installment, I will look at recent comix from Sophie Yanow, Mimi Pond, Roz Chast, Gabrielle Bell, and Carla Speed McNeil (in September).
To see female artists in control, you have to venture into single-creator creator-owned projects. Mainstream comics are faithful to the team, and collaboration in comics remains the province of men: the world can’t wait for Johns-Romita 2014. Ideally, you love the both of them, writer and artist, but sometimes you will settle for one over the other, one at the expense of the other. Mainstream is okay with this: the balance does not necessarily have to be right because you are beholden to one of them and therefore to Us.
Before I discuss Gfrörer’s comics, I want to discuss the collaborative imbalance of wan writing and high-profile dazzling art, and the (so often) botched results of those dazzling artists who try to write. This will lead me back to the unsplit unity of single-creator comics. R. C. Harvey in the Comics Journal argues that the imbalance between word and image, writer and artist, results in the pollution of the form. The cartoonist who is in control, Harvey writes, “thinks in words and pictures simultaneously, but the pictures set the pace. Too often of late, graphic novels are produced by people who are not cartoonists: typically, they are essentially writers, wordsmiths, taking advantage of this new commercially successful storytelling medium, the graphic novel. They write their stories and then get artists to illustrate them.” Harvey sees these illustrated graphic novels as a failure of collaboration, and I claim that this failure can also happen when there is only one person involved.
A truism is that single writer/artists have better control over their vision, but in corporate circumstances they face danger: the prettier artists who also want to be writers can’t really write. Recently, Andy Kubert’s Damian series received a tar-and-feathering, and when layout exploder J.H. Williams III took over writing and drawing Batwoman (co-writing it with W. Haden Blackman), I knew that I was in for a shock: the wealth of splash pages in each issue (20 pages boiled down into 10 dynamic posters) seemed to cop to this very shortcoming. In the big, creator-owned world outside of DC, Marvel, Image, and Dark Horse, where I believe I am more lenient and much more at home, I was nevertheless disappointed by David Mazzucchelli’s cheap art lessons and middlebrow ennui in Asterios Polyp, even as his compositions, page after page, gobbled me up and made me linger, or by Charles Burns’ watered-down punk and greasy Tintin riff in X’ed Out and The Hive, even as the solid blank black or red panels wonderfully upended my comfort. I do my best to give the benefit of the doubt, but I also feel like I do so automatically, blindly. Are these artistic compensations enough? Don’t the words matter? What about the evenness of words and art, the compatibility between the two?
In an indie, DIY sense, this unevenness doesn’t matter so much, which brings to mind a retort often heard about pop music’s lyrics: that’s why there’s music there. Inflect any cliché about the suburbs or romance with enough attitude, reverb, harmonies, and brittle instruments, and the theory is that you can transform the banal into the sublime. On his own, Schulz did it, and Gabrielle Bell and John Porcellino do it. As Daniel Clowes says in his essay “Modern Cartoonist,” “Comics offer the creator a chance to control the specifics of his own world in both abstract and literal terms. As such, the best comics are usually done by a single creator, often an obsessive-compulsive type who spends hours fixing things and making tiny background details ‘just right’” (7). Obsessiveness promotes expressiveness, a terrible intimacy, and a sense of breath, not unlike Charles Olson’s push for projective, transfer-of-energy, living, breathing, typewriter-written poetry, which Lynda Barry comes close to approximating in her manual What It Is: “How does electricity [AN image] travel? It goes along a pathway. You can find a pathway for electricity [an image]. [It goes from place to place] Look at the picture. Do you see the path which electricity [the image] takes?” (88). As she defaces a science textbook, Barry makes “electricity” interchangeable with “an image.” Her whole project complicates any easy idea we have about the stillness of an image.
Images—the words count as images, too—can ossify because the writing cannot be substituted with electricity. Ivan Brunetti’s emulsion theory of comics is less likely to work when the writer tries to compete with film or TV. Comics freeze time into discrete instants of time and then fashion these instants into active panels, so that the moments before and the moments after the frozen image get left out on purpose. However, by the activity known as closure, the image’s incomplete quality allows it to breathe, to buck the border of the panel to the left and the right, to flow and animate and expand. In wanly-written comics, though, there is frozenness at the expense of intuited lateral motion; it is practically impossible to imagine the before and after because the clichés and tropes of the script are so fake that life gets wholly blotted out. The characters are such empties that they cannot exist outside of the panels. You hope that the dynamism of the actual images, rhythm of the panels, and the architecture of the page will bleed out, break away from the stock script. The dialogue may be stilted, but with any luck the images might move.
Cartoonists have always been bad spellers and bad grammarians, but the commanding ones still cared about the words and the glyph-like nature of language: Feininger’s thin sticks, Crumb’s steady script, Eisner’s splash pages and windblown handbills, C. Tyler’s exercise-book crayon and cursive, Michael DeForge’s drooling titles, and more and more. For Lynda Barry, whose collage comics show you all the time and effort it took to cut, arrange, glue, and scan each page, the inclusion of her own handwriting into the mix offers you one more layer of time passing: in What It Is, she scrawls, “HANDWRITING is an image LEFT BY A LIVING BEING IN MOTION it cannot be duplicated IN TIME OR SPACE.” To the right: “ONLY BY BEING A BEING IN MOTION CAN YOU KNOW ABOUT *IT*” and “IT’S HARD TO DO IT AT FIRST. IT CAN MAKE YOU FEEL CRAZY” (109).
Frank Quitely’s new work has forced me to admit that even the good fine art does not suffice anymore. At moments like these, when I can hear the totemic nature of male art break down, I look for alternatives and repudiations, unknown arguments and brand new satisfactions. Barry’s in-motion image of handwriting offers a model for the dynamism of truly startling single-creator work: from panel to panel, it moves, and from letter to letter, it should move, too!
Which brings me to Julia Gfrörer, whose work excels at destabilizing repetitions. Her heavily shadowed and crosshatched black and white comics (sometimes on blue or pink paper) let just enough light through. Her similar-looking panels require minimal closure between them, and this formal choice installs her in a long tradition of cartoonist-animators, back to Windsor McCay’s Rarebit Fiend and Little Sammy Sneeze. In stories like “Phosphorous” or In Pace Requiescat, Gfrörer has an eye for incremental transformations over time, particularly faces caught in convulsions of pain or orgasm (an update to Sammy’s achoos).
“River of Tears,” from Black Light ($8 on Etsy), takes place on a nine-panel grid, except for the first and final pages, where one panel the size of six begins and ends the story. They are opposites of each other, and the difference marks the distance we have come: the former is colloquial, the latter baroque. The story begins at a party with the ennui of “oh, no kidding” and ends wordlessly with the swooping down of life’s great dance partner, the King of Death. David listens to a young woman trying to explain semiotics (“so like take a triangle”), but both characters are distracted. We can see them cast their minds out of the frame, which is reinforced when David is interrupted by texts from Alex, his captive ex who “just shot heroin” and “can’t stop crying.” Ridiculed as “a liar and a coward,” David goes to Alex, only to be obstructed by a cop car, beleaguered by nightmares, and disoriented to the point where he mistakes salt for sugar. The world has shifted for David, and there are consequences: he ruins the coffee he makes in the morning.
Though the story keeps David and Alex separated by distance, Gfrörer interrupts David’s sequence (his advance and retreat) with similar triptychs of Alex’s desolate, crying face: is this moment-to-moment or action-to-action? How long has this been going on? Unlike David’s progression (going home, sleeping, waking up, spoiling the coffee), Alex’s high is depicted as repetitive and incremental. Yet, in Gfrörer’s first triptych, the bones in Alex’s hand disappear in the middle and then reappear in the third as she clenches and wrings her hands; black marker overlaps her hair in the middle; white specks poke out of the black background. Tears and snot increase—that’s the story—but the background’s alive, as well, thin and permeable.
The comics teacher in Ivan Brunetti’s strip “Mr. Peach” remarks that when it comes to repetition “every mark takes on a greater importance. / The imperfections and deviations in the marks create a sense of movement, and thus of life. / One could say the marks themselves, as documents, have a narrative quality…” (panels 7-9). Hand-drawn repetition gets things wrong as the sequence moves on, adding new tilts, lines, bulges, smears, and dots, as little signs of life—imperfect indications of the artist’s life behind the scenes, or before the page. Such false repetition, changeability, and slight deterioration provide for that evenness between words and images: the casual pain of everyday speech (“See you in hell,” “for fuck’s sake block her number”) balances between unremarkable and overburdened, while the images meet on this edge, too. This is a virtue of single-creator creator-owned comics.
In the end, Alex’s abduction replaces David’s inadequacy. (She’s Persephone.) Blessedly free from semiotics small talk and the insults of text messaging, the large silent final panel is the equivalent of the tranquility of Walden Pond if Thoreau had been shooting heroin. A feathery ornate Death provides comfort to Alex, releasing her from the timeless terror of moment-to-moment experience. There are no more panels, similarities, or imperfections to pore over because it is the very end of life.
Buy:
Julia Gfrörer on Etsy (thorazos)
Reading:
Julia Gfrörer, “Phosphorous”
R. C. Harvey, “The Perversion of the Graphic Novel and Its Refinement”
Kelefa Sanneh, “Blockbluster”
