Time has come now to stop being human / time to find a new creature to be, sing Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 on their "Noble Experiment," the lyrics for which appear as epigraphs opening and closing Skibber Bee~Bye, the first longform work of cartoonist Ron Regé, Jr. It's an apt companion, not just for the book but for much of his career. I couldn't tell you how it was that I initially became aware of Regé, at some point about three years ago, but I can say that the first book of his that I actually managed to buy and read was The Weaver Festival Phenomenon, an adaptation of the short prose story "Moonlight Shadow" by Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto. By then I knew that spiritualism played a large part in Regé's work, and it showed; his display of the story's supernatural phenomena, and the emotional truth underlying it, had the feeling of an artist for whom such a story is no mere story.
In hindsight, the spiritual element appears obvious. Consider Skibber Bee~Bye (Highwater Books, 2000; Drawn & Quarterly, 2006): it's a delightful piece of work, depicting a budding love affair between two characters, a presumably-male elephant and a woman drawn in Regé's oft-employed manner, somewhere between cat and bear. Regé toes an interesting line in this dynamic, delineating their differing "species" while having his characters engage in a perfectly familiar emotional landscape which we would be inclined to describe as "human"; they are anthropomorphic without being animals. There's something of Woodring's Frank in Regé's depiction of emotional nuance through purity of gesture: the elephant's urge to cook and bake for the woman and her younger brother; the woman's constant search for a certain musical sound. The motivating force is an emotional primordiality, exposing us not to the inner workings of the characters but to their struggles to externalize it in a way that their interlocutor might understand. Like Woodring's anthropomorph, the two are entirely non-verbal, which allows Regé an opacity to justify that gesturalism; but they, unlike Frank, exist in an at-least-partially verbal world, as other characters speak to them in plain English, only to be answered with that same gestural opacity. Their communication is theirs alone: it frustrates the expectations of the world around them, and it itself is frustrated in turn.
Since then, Regé's work does not appear to have changed much in the aesthetic sense—his post-Marc Bell brand of cutesy loudness was more or less fully formed from the start, even if his linework and realization thereof left some refinement to be desired—but in hindsight his earlier work lacked the vessel to point it in the broad direction in which it wanted to go, a restless force that knew enough of itself but not enough of its destination.
The Cartoon Utopia (Fantagraphics, 2012) crackles with an energy missing from the preceding work: it has purpose, it has drive, it has brio, from knowing its next steps. Utopia has an evangelizing quality, almost: collecting what amounts to Regé's real-time "notes" while learning about spiritualism, it is perhaps the most faithful reflection of its author as a man whose perception of the world is deepening, running wild; these territories might not be new—they are deeply referential, buzzing with the names of his forebears and sources—but they are new to him, and that is close enough to still embody that new.
To his credit, following this spiritual rebirth, Regé has allowed himself to be carried into new regions not only of consciousness, but of artistic form as well. With The Cartoon Utopia, Regé appears to have found a new appreciation of the page as not only a unit of storytelling but also a unit of design, a piece that is a whole. Many of Utopia's pages are comics in the loosest possible terms, montage-like splashes lacking in any overt temporality or neat spatiality; his narration, often quoting texts from writers such as Manly P. Hall, is rendered in blocky depth-effected lettering, perhaps not entirely meant for easy legibility—the cartoonist often writes out the same text "plainly" at the top or bottom of the page—so much as sheer visual experience. Text and imagery are densely packed, finely articulated detail alongside scratchily feathered energy lines, without any colors for easy spatial separation - but these pages are easy to be sensed, if not read. To me, he is at his best in these pages: the integration of that maximalist typography has a profound, thunderous impact that perfectly reflects the message carried. It's that touch that makes it feel like the reader is not being quoted to but directly addressed on a profound level. That Marc Bell influence is also particularly present in these pages: Regé's previously monolithic and uniform approach to texture, his fine reedy brushwork and rounded lines that do not particularly tend toward variation in weight, is often replaced by a much heavier ink line, with imagery that has now embraced the sharp angularity often absent in the cartoonist's work, resulting in a gravity of mark-making that feels almost woodcut-like.
These works have warranted comparisons to Jack Kirby, but to me even more they share the explosive energy of a different R.R. - Royal Robertson (familiarized to me by Sufjan Stevens' loosely Robertson-themed album The Age of Adz, itself surprisingly comparable to Regé, a celebration of that selfsame heady spiritualism mediated less by teaching and more by sensory experience). But, where Robertson spoke of eschaton, Regé is far too excited by the implications of the existence of spirit to get to the end times just yet. As far as texts go, The Cartoon Utopia is a jumbled one, and its central source of appeal sometimes becomes its own burden: it is a collection of the first impressions of a newly-inducted and self-appointed apostle, all too excited to make as much sense as he wants, but clearly bearing a certain unrefined brilliance, detectable but not yet in reach.
In a 2017 interview with Kim Jooha, Regé said:
A lot of people get mad about theosophy because they see it as Orientalism or a whitewashing of Eastern ideas. But it’s from the 1800s; it’s just such a different universe. Theosophy takes Eastern ideas and combines them with Western mysticism and Kabbala and all that stuff and turns it into New Age in a way that seems strange to a lot of people. But this was before everyone knew what Tibetan Buddhism is. Nobody knew that there were monks in Tibet, because you couldn’t get there! No one in Europe knew that. We live in a culture where you can study those things, and you can go to Zen centers, and you can go directly to the source of this stuff, but I don’t think we can understand a hundred or two hundred years ago how that all made sense. In PC culture, the way that everything is being examined these days for what it is, and acceptance of things, and also calling out things that are offensive or appropriative, I’m looking forward to examining that with this work I’ve done, because it makes people very tense. Our cultures have always been intermixing, like, Native American beads came from India in the 1600s. They knew that they liked glass beads, and these guys on boats brought them from some other place. There are things that are wrong, and appropriative, and then there are ways that things have just mixed together.
There's the glimmer of a point there, burdened by its own self-justifying framing; to paraphrase the observations of Martin Puchner in his Culture: A New World History, culture must be fluid in order to survive, and is formed not only by that which comes before it but also by that which exists concurrently around it. But his focus on "PC culture"—that most mercurial strawman, oft accused, seldom logically—as an antihistorical force, in addition to engaging in its own slight historical revisionism,1 also betrays a too-eager willingness to use this point as a refutation of criticism. And indeed, Regé's own work is defined not only by its excitement but by the inverse as well: it is reluctant to face up to its own lacunae. By quoting existing texts he finds interesting, from authors like Hall and Theosophical Society co-founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Regé affords himself an engagement in a controlled, and thus artificial, microcosm of that cultural process he describes. In weaving his own intertextual tapestry, he reinforces the messages without addressing any requisite criticism, with an excess reliance on quotation that scans as an almost regurgitative urge.
Where Regé struggles is thus not in identifying the line between "assimilation" and "appropriation" so much as in the selective critical thinking necessary for the successful coherence of a worldview. The 2014 zine "Cosmogenesis," collected in What Parsifal Saw (Fantagraphics, 2017), is a good example. Illustrating "highlights" from the first part of Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine in one-panel pages with extradiegetic header lettering, it's a striking display of the forces in constant battle in Regé's work. His balance between inherent whimsy and frenzied energy makes for a beautiful aesthetic experience; there is something particularly delightful in the page where Blavatsky speaks of the myth of the "fiery serpent breathing fire and light upon the primordial waters ~ until it had incubated cosmic matter and made it assume the shape of a serpent with its tail in its mouth," which Regé renders not as an epic Vallejoesque dragon but as Richard Scarry's Lowly Worm, complete with hat and bowtie, amidst waters barely recognizable as liquid for all its tumult.
But the aesthesis of veneration and venerability, to me, cries out for a substance that is not yet present. There is, of course, merit in the revitalized aesthetic experience itself - in a way, Regé is almost a teacher offering primers, first forays into the spiritual world. But the problem is that he is at the same time a student taking his own first steps, thus lacking the curatorial sensibilities that good, meaningful teaching requires. "Cosmogenesis" in particular feels too airy for its own good: Blavatsky's prose crackles with much the same energy as Regé's illustration—turns of phrase like "This phenominal [sic] universe is a great illusion, the nearer the body is to the unknown substance, the more it approaches reality," are, quite simply put, cool as hell—but the verbatim quotes, being highlights, have the tendency of bringing the reader rather immediately to Regé's own level, insofar as the author sees fit to offer neither counter nor explanation. Their presentation, too, feels much more "humble" in their straightforward nature than those aforementioned splashes that The Cartoon Utopia so eagerly employs: by electing to letter the narration as a block of plainly-written header text, the engagement between text and image is lessened, the impact diluted somewhat, if only in its begging for comparison. This is a first foray, the author almost seems to say; from here on out, go forth and learn on your own, as I cannot help you any further.
One region in which Regé particularly appears to struggle in these texts is the plane of gender. The prevailing notion in his work is a seeming inability to view gender beyond the lens of the binary. This, of course, comes with the added moralistic baggage that frames Woman, an idea more than a person, as either a nurturing saint-mother or #girlboss here to Get Things Done, in both cases beyond reproach and not to be defiled, and Man as a violent destroyer (Alejandro Jodorowsky cackles to himself somewhere, declaring "we are so back"); the two together are described as being in an endless conflict until we reach a spiritual complement resulting in total metaphysical androgyny. But Regé's vision of androgyny is still fundamentally focused on its binary, a bringing-together of two ends of the spectrum that rejects the existence of other than those ends; as he himself writes in The Cartoon Utopia, "The spirit is androgynous, male and female at once. Not sexless, the opposite of that - both at once." He then complements it with depictions of chromosomes: X for female, the "default," or Y for male, the "exception," the divergence "at the fork in the road." By advocating for the blending and combination of these stereotypes, the author has no choice but to inadvertently engage in an unwavering essentialism that upholds these stereotypes as a fundamentally true and all-encompassing.
Beyond the grating politics of it all (itself a subject that deserves unpacking at length), this perception of gender as tied to sex and body seems almost an undoing of the very notion of spiritualism: for all of Regé's eager talk of higher planes far beyond our meager earthly perceptions, this man/woman divide would be surprisingly Aristotelian were it not borrowed, whole-cloth, from his many forebears, uncritically. If these earthly forms are, indeed, dim and faithless reflections of a deeper truth that we must train ourself to see—if, indeed, the core gnosis of spiritualism is an act of rebellion against the treacherous sensory, and our earthly constraints are vessels made for breaking—then the claim that the higher plane of existence not only neatly corresponds with our models of biology-at-birth but ascribes moral implications therein seems absurd; it belies almost a lack of commitment to one's own thinking.
The Cartoon Utopia and its peripherals are preoccupied with the ideas of spirit as an element detached from our flesh-and-blood existence; they mention love but only as a sort of abstract force, and gender as metaphor and synecdoche, but its insistence on that detachment is a proscription from dwelling on the here-and-now. Our earthly lives are illusory and fleeting, hence they aren't real - right?
Wrong! Even if we exist beyond these confines, even if at present we only exist as in a mirror dimly, that mirror is still real in the experiential, and thus is worthwhile. After all, doesn't the idea of eternal life imply with it an eternal community? We're all stuck with each other, forever, our configurations perhaps prone to variation and refinement but our essence fixed; the spiritual is nothing without the communal, even less than nothing: without the communal, we are fundamentally isolated, forever, no matter what form we take. These two elements cannot be said to be truly separate, and any separation is in fact artificial.
This difficulty in mediating the cave-wall-shadow of the immediately-experiential with the eternal and extra-temporal spiritual is perhaps the key difficulty in Regé's work. This can be seen in the two-page manifesto-esque comic "Hey America! Wake the Fuck Up!", originally published on the Vice website in 2015 and also collected in What Parsifal Saw. It's a perplexing comic, almost incoherent in its messaging, rattling off some of society's political ills yet failing to determine where people actually come into it. In one panel, Regé draws a scene in which five police officers shoot down one person, evidently unarmed and innocent - he draws this scene from a window looking outside, while inside stands a hipster-looking dude in sunglasses, listening to music with earphones on and drinking coffee out of a single-use cup, while a computer monitor reads, "The 'news' is just ppl shouting and arguing." Following panels deride "popular entertainment portray[ing] a level of violence & terror beyond comprehension for most of human history.... While other countries live under a constant web of indiscriminate robot death from above." Again and again this binary asserts itself: illusory spectacle desensitizing us from the Things That Matter. In his framing, he casts blame on both the consumed and the consumer: while you're busy on your phones, people are out there getting killed. And yet the comic itself feels desensitized, performing an urgency of outrage while failing to determine any way out of it.
Up until I viewed Regé's spiritual work as one linear oeuvre, I knew something was missing, some thematic component, but I couldn’t tell exactly what it was until I got to the second chronological stage, that of adapted narrative, at which point it hit me like a ton of bricks: communality! If spirituality can be boiled down to our eternal shared experience, it was the eternal component that had previously been at the forefront, and now, with these two mid-sized narratives, the focus goes to the shared. Having attempted to establish a vocabulary of the internal spirit, Regé's work goes on to deal with how we engage not only with our eternal selves but with our others. It is perhaps due to that for-better-or-worse faithfulness to his sources that Regé makes for a particularly interesting craftsman when it comes to adaptation.
"Diana," also published in 2014 as a standalone zine and later reprinted in What Parsifal Saw,2 describes itself in two manners: according to the cover of the original printing of the zine it is "adapted from the original [Wonder Woman] strips by William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter"; the introductory page in Parsifal, meanwhile, reduces it, perhaps out of legal fair use requisite, into merely "a parody of" the original strips. Whatever the reason, "Diana" is first and foremost a largely faithful adaptation, taking most of its story from Wonder Woman's origin as told in her debut in All-Star Comics #8, so the aesthetic renewal inherent to Regé's version is the fulcrum of Diana's appeal. And it is enough, to be sure, enough of a divergence to justify its own existence; Regé's artwork certainly feels more alive than Peter's perfunctory stiffness, and, while wordy, he replaces the operatically overexpository nature of "Golden Age" writing with a cheeky fuck you edge, a casual whimsy with interesting friction that undercuts the mythics of it all. The gods speak like you do, dear reader - they call each other 'dickhead' and everything.
A key divergence in the story is the reasoning for Steve Trevor's expulsion: while the original is fundamentally a World War II narrative designed to propagate a rudimentary political awareness (resulting in some genuinely if inadvertently funny dialogue in which goddesses Athena and Aphrodite sing the praises of America, the last safe haven for humanity), Regé's narrative strips away the chronological anchor, which also shifts the power dynamics: no longer on a mission to catch a spy ring and now merely crash-landing on Paradise Island, he no longer has any reason to be sent back to America, no higher calling to make good on. Now the reasoning becomes simply the presence of man viewed as an inherently tarnishing force, as residue left by the confrontation between the two warring forces that rule the Earth in the forms of Aphrodite and Mars - "Woe the day that brought a man to Paradise Island!" declares Queen Hyppolite. Feminine love and masculine war: again Regé engages, through evident inadvertence, in a dichotomy that seems superficially progressive yet, in practice, further entrenches those it purports to champion in a state of compulsory infallibility; in ascension to discursive sainthood, their humanity is reduced. Its communality is established, but only in the way of opposition.
Regé's other big adaptation, The Weaver Festival Phenomenon (self-published, 2018), is also strikingly faithful, but here the cartoonist counters his own tendency toward binary framing; there is an all-encompassing tenderness here, not interested in war and hostility but in the smallness of human life. The story itself is one of people stuck in the routines paved by loss: Hitoshi died in a car accident while driving Yumiko, his brother's girlfriend, to the train station; Hitoshi's girlfriend, Satsuki, and his brother, Hiiragi, are both left to mourn their loved ones for the months to come. Satsuki mourns by going out for a run every morning, while Hiiragi wears his girlfriend's uniform to school - both of these acts, Satsuki remarks, are rituals tantamount to prayer. There's a straightforwardness to Yoshimoto's prose, first-person narration focused entirely on the events depicted, which complements the childlike nature of Regé's artwork; Regé himself is prone to the occasional dazzle of geometric design, allowing calligraphic arrangement to dominate some pages, which, while somewhat divergent from the simplicity of Yoshimoto's approach, still allows him to evoke a deeper faithfulness to the introspection in her narration.
The Weaver Festival Phenomenon itself revolves around Satsuki's encounter with a stranger, Urara, who tells her over time about a strange phenomenon Satsuki may soon experience. Urara does this teasingly, divulging little information over several encounters; it is unclear where she's come from, and who she is, beyond her relation to Satsuki, tentative as that may be. They finally meet at the same place they met at for the first time, a local bridge, where Urara explains what will actually happen, some sort of inter-dimensional convergence, momentary and fleeting, during which the two will be separated entirely, seeing different things. And indeed it happens: Satsuki sees, for a brief moment, her beloved Hitoshi from across the bridge; they communicate only barely, gestures without words, before he disappears in the same fata morganic shimmer. Some days later Satsuki learns that Hiiragi, too, saw Yumiko - she came to his room, took away her sailor's uniform, and vanished. Memory of that which is gone, taking material form, becomes closure. "Pain is a way you can move through time / and visit people that are gone in your mind," Christian Lee Hutson sings, and it's this sentiment that echoes through both the original story by Banana Yoshimoto and Regé's adaptation: it is, perhaps, true that our momentary Earthly existences are but pale reflections of the eternal and undying, but the inverse is just as true - that that which is beyond, that which is absent in the momentary sense, allows us to anchor ourselves in that which is present; through that beyond we can allow ourselves to become more real.
Having first adapted his teachings, then existing narrative texts infused with those teachings, it should only be natural that Regé's next effort would be, at last, a new narrative of his own. Initially self-published in monochrome then collected in color, Halcyon (Fantagraphics, 2022) calls to mind a simple three-word phrase: "Return, having changed" - a classically well-earned resolution of an arc if there ever was one. It bears the same air of roundabout mystery as Regé's pre-spiritual work, with characters and their surrounding lives depicted in broad, nigh-archetypal strokes, while also serving as the culmination of the preceding decade's worth of the cartoonist's releases.
Halcyon is disjointed, but not unpleasantly so; its core narrative is bookended by vignettes not entirely related to the book beyond its general thesis statement of dual-plane vistas, Earthly and divine alike, whose engagement with one another is typically one-sided, the divine coming from a place of inherent superiority in power. It overlaps with the Earthly only momentarily, and much to the latter's befuddlement. Its vision of the great beyond is, as ever, more felt than described, and the cartoonist excels at conveying that feeling: its extended sequences of spirits traveling through that great aether are sweeping in their worshipful ecstasy, as palpable in their hyper-sensory nature as Westvind or Yokoyama.
Yet, being that culmination, the book also reveals certain weaknesses as unresolved. Within the Earthly itself, Regé remains preoccupied with false dichotomies and all-too-neat divisions, employing dual protagonists to embody those: one short-haired character, whose life is defined by simple-minded communality, technological only in a rather analog sense; and another long-haired character living in a technopolis alienated by cultural overwhelm. The plot itself is driven by the latter's spiritual awakening, recognizing the illusory and rather Debordian nature of the place and anti-community they'd theretofore embodied - which the place, of course, regards punitively. They attempt to make an escape using the advanced technology they have been up to that point submerged in, but of course this doesn't work - an escape, to be successful, must be total. It is at this point that the long-haired character meets their counterpart who attempts, to no real avail, to help them; they chase the long-haired character, attempt to house and feed them, even having their rural home destroyed in the process, but any calm, any respite, is transitory, as the long-haired character is haunted and persecuted by their former life, reduced to helpless paranoia. In the end, they reach a desert where they are confronted, for a moment, with a vision of the great eternal, with that which lies beyond - moments before their deaths and final release, at which point their spirits, disembodied and ethereal, are sent off to disappear into the great and primordial sea.
Halcyon, then, posits, as ever, all-encompassing dualities: the spiritual, existing in a free sea of abstract, and the illusory and material that is dominated, in itself, by binary, by dual opposing forces: a destructive technological, that actively reduces itself into a hyper-dependent paranoia, versus a communal "simplicity," kind but powerless in the face of its counterpart. One should, in this context, spare a moment to discuss a certain remark in the book's promotional copy as well: given Regé's previously-detailed struggles with gender, I was rather surprised, and not entirely persuaded, by the promotional copy's assertion that the book "details the spiritual journeys of its two nonbinary protagonists." The two characters, while their genders are not overtly remarked on, are drawn in manners entirely indicative of Regé's previous gendered (if preadolescent-in-atmosphere) drawing; Regé even goes the extra mile by coloring the former's clothes blue and the latter's pink. There is, fundamentally, a binary in place, even if such exists purely for the purpose of the aforementioned liberatory 'unification' promised in that world-to-come. It is, however, noteworthy that the moral roles of this binary are in this case inverted somewhat in relation to the author's previous work; the forceful evil of the masculine and the love-and-creation ethos of the feminine are replaced by a shared humility in the face of that which is larger than them, not malevolent but certainly immense beyond measure and scale, and worthy of veneration as such. It is, to be sure, a step in a more interesting direction, but still immersed in that which came before it.
"Nature is never stationary," writes Madame Blavatsky in "Cosmogenesis." "It is ever becoming ~ not simply being.” To Blavatsky, becoming is an action, not merely a passive state. It requires intent, this cosmic finding of oneself, in nature as in life. It brings to mind the Jewish state of kavanah, the mindset of the person engaging in prayer or ritual. It is an utter sincerity that allows a surrender to the ritual; without this surrender, without your opening yourself to the splendor of ritual, the ritual itself cannot succeed. You may think active surrender a bit contradictory, or oxymoronic - surrendering, you may say, is in itself passive, that the necessity of surrender inherently begets a passivity of ritual, going against the very idea of intent as active.
But that, precisely, is the essence of spiritualism to me: the Hebrew word kavanah, one might note, should one be possessed of a certain sprachgefühl, shares its linguistic root—k.v.n.—with the words for "direction" and "attunement." Intent is, itself, an inclination to be attuned to, revealing the direction you must take: it is the acknowledgement that you, as an individual, must surrender to that which is inestimably larger; that to partake in the spiritual, you must serve as a funnel for creation and process that which has come before you and around you and act as a new prism. This appears to be the same conclusion that Ron Regé himself has come to, and though some introspection appears to nonetheless be lacking, it is evident that he is in the process of searching his tuning, his direction inwards and outwards, and it is a striking process to behold. Having demonstrated a great enthusiasm for being, I certainly hope that he will fully, and actively, become.
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The post Eternal Breath – Ron Regé, Jr.’s Spiritual Cycle appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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