See, here's the thing: as I write this piece, I am about two months shy of my twenty-fourth birthday. I have a solid day-job, I'm semi-actively pursuing creative work, I write about comics pretty consistently… yet a lot of it feels like poured concrete that hasn't quite settled yet. Twenty-four: mature enough to know that everyone advances at their own pace and life doesn't have one track that fits everyone and all that affirming crap that would get great traction as a Canva graphic on Instagram, but not mature enough to know what it feels like, materially, for this all to be true. Being a wanderer over a sea of fog only kicks ass so long as you're really into looking at fog all the time.
Luke Pearson seems to have known this feeling well. How Long Have I Been Lying Here?, a collection of short comics by Pearson put forth by London's foremost comics retailer and occasional publisher Gosh! Comics, all originally published when the cartoonist was in his mid-twenties. Pearson has the distinction of being, at this point, one of the most well-established kids'-comics creator out there – Hilda is surely one of the most successful series in its field since Bone, enough that the Nobrow imprint Flying Eye Books has largely been propped up around Pearson's aesthetic. Yet there was always another side of him which the great success of Hilda has superseded (if not erased outright), one that How Long Have I Been Lying Here? wishes to showcase.
It's a lean collection, fifty pages of comics and an illustration gallery, at a total of fifteen comics, ranging between one and eight pages apiece, it masks its leanness well. In a brief introduction, Pearson remarks that "some of [the comics in the collection] I feel proud of, some of them make me cringe, some of them make me scratch my head and wonder if I still have any of that in me." The cartoonist appears to have always aimed his most pointed criticism at himself; back in 2014, when interviewed by Chris Mautner, he remarked that his graphic novella Everything We Miss—published a mere two years prior—was "clearly the most affected and self consciously 'indie comics' thing I've done and it makes me cringe." Thus the collection at hand already tells us how best to view it: the safe-for-consumption remains of a past self, acknowledged but only at a remove.
How Long Have I Been Lying Here? establishes its aesthetic baseline early on: entirely in step with its context of the approachable indie of the mid-'00s and early '10s, the presence of Jordan Crane in particular looms tall, as does Martin Cendreda. The cartooning is clean, welcoming, with slick inks and appealingly-broad features; where colors appear, they are not desaturated but nonetheless fairly soft. Outside the very first story ("The Egg," 2010), its panel divisions have a clarity-first-and-foremost sensibility, little flash or ornament in arrangement.
From a visual perspective, collecting these shorts feels at once counterintuitive and perfectly natural: a demonstration of stylistic flexibility of the sort that only emerges from the lack of an established baseline. Pearson professes to have used these short comics as "me trying out different voices, some of them perhaps trying to be something I'm not," thus disabusing himself of any need for consistency. It sounds silly, but the way Pearson draws noses throughout the stories might serve as a case study for the variance in his cartooning: depending on his mood, what is situated at the center of his characters' faces might an acute-angled L, a button-small c, an elongated, a rubbery French fry, or a Mordillo-like bulb. It's not that the tone of the stories so greatly varies that Pearson needs to reinvent his own cartooning in order to fit the work or themes, à la Tommi Musturi; most any given narrative within the collection would work with most any other style of the ones on display. What the cartoonist engages in is a process of self-discovery through a process of elimination, a genuinely fascinating thing to watch, making me suspect that Pearson would benefit from successive one-man anthologies to sustain his self-refinement on a long-term basis.
Given the self-aimed anxiety in some of Pearson's statements describing this period of work, it makes sense that he paid much mind to the idea of what qualifies an artist; and, indeed, several of the shorts are concerned with #TheArtLife and with what makes an artist as both a craftsperson and a social category. This thematic preoccupation first reveals itself in the sole piece in the collection that isn't entirely 'original': "The Boy Who Drew Cats," a 2012 adaptation of a Japanese folktale about, well, a boy who draws cats, rather compulsively. The boy's father sends him off to become an apprentice at a temple, which does little to exorcise his habit, as he covers the floors and walls of the temple with cat drawings. Cast out of the temple, he finds an abandoned temple—haunted, unbeknownst to him, by terrible rat-goblins—where he may draw cats to his heart's content. He gets the last laugh, of course, though unwittingly; when the rats return to attack the boy, the cat drawings come alive, defeating the threat once and for all. It's certainly one of the most charming pieces in the collection, in its subtle, non-flashy way; there's a Kevin Huizenga quality to the way Pearson approaches the 'real' characters in the stories, but the cat drawings, which embellish and simplify components of 'cat' as though in an unrelated sketchbook study of stylistic extremes, hew much closer to the Hilda artist's own kids' work, which is a nice contrast. Perhaps most interesting, though, is the ending's subtle divergence from the source. Two main versions of this story exist, the Japanese original and the English retelling by Lafcadio Hearn: in the former, the boy goes on to become the temple's abbot; in the latter, he becomes a renowned artist. Pearson, however, chooses neither, turning the boy into a samurai's apprentice, though a reluctant one: "I really just want to draw cats," he says in the final panel, wearing full armor.
A cute punchline, but also the first indication of a broader narrative thrust: in this collection's shorts, the artist is only ever defined by their being an artist, not so much a job as a trait that consumes life entirely. "Idea Generation," a silent comic from 2014, equates the artist's creative process to a child who collects (abducts) creatures from the wild like knick-knacks into a box in his room, then sics a wild rat on them; sitting at the dinner table with his mother, he is entirely preoccupied with the bloody aftermath he will surely find. The earlier "Beds" (2010), meanwhile, narrates Pearson's life as a freelancer working out of his bedroom; depicting his life as a cycle leading from one sleep to the next, he expresses the concern that perhaps there is nothing to life beside that constrained, lonely space of routine (the title of the collection, taken from this short, is a cry of anxious anagnorisis). An anxiety of stunted adulthood underlies this couplet: the artist is either an ambling child playing with toys or an adult whose whole life is, if not behind him, then certainly separate from him.
Nowhere is Pearson's view of the artist as grim as it is in "My Latest Work" (2011). Pearson cites Ivan Brunetti as an early favorite, and his presence is palpable here, in both character drawing and theme, as the short portrays Pearson's stand-in—and perhaps all artists by proxy—as, inevitably, something of an opportunistic vulture: after meeting a girl from his town who is entirely naïve in her romanticism of art and artists, the protagonist, having repeatedly failed in his self-effacement-as-defense-mechanism, takes the girl to show her his current work – a massive sculpture of himself, made out of literal pieces of his life and the lives of people around him, "held together by spit, jizz and plasticine," which the girl finds physically revolting, running away. The punchline, of course, is that the artist incorporates the girl's vomit into the statue – even the disgust aimed at him is subsumed. It's a strange comic, in that it operates both as straightforward self-flagellation or as a takedown thereof, and whether Pearson used it to embrace his antecedents—Brunetti, Ware, Clowes—or to move past them depends entirely on the generosity of the reader; one can pretty safely guess that the self-loathing, though affected, was felt by the author genuinely enough. 'Self-awareness' in indie comics: ever the squint-inducer to many a critic.
This concern with the figure of the artist, however, only betrays a greater conflict: the frustrated search for one's identity outside of the art. The shorts in How Long Have I Been Lying Here? are fundamentally embodiments of a young person's fears, suspended at a point where the obligations of adulthood have already asserted themselves, but the direction of life has not. In trying to find himself, our cartoonist starts at the most logical place: childhood.
See the first two stories in the collection: "The Egg" sees a young boy try to impress his crush by showing her a Fabergé-egg-like object of unknown origin, hidden in an empty lot in town; "Ghosts," published the same year, depicts a boy of unclear age (he's drawn the same way even as he advances in age within the story) who becomes enamored with the idea of discovering a ghost. It's noteworthy that these two comics were published around the same time as Hildafolk (re-released in 2013 as Hilda and the Troll), but these children are nothing at all like Hilda, whose bubbly positivity propels her into adventure: their concerns, though situated in fantastical conceits, are distinctly earthly (the boy in the former story just wants to impress his crush; the boy in the latter cares more about being the boy who saw a ghost, and about not being alone, than anything else).
Their in-story fates are likewise uneventful: the egg opens up UFO-like and traps the heretofore-unimpressed inside it before shrinking down to its previous size, leaving him no choice but to hold onto it in case something happens; the boy in the latter story finds no ghosts, but, still excited by the concept, stays up at night and waits. These are open endings, leaving the reader to infer the obvious, which is that nothing really comes out of them. Together, these stories offer an early delineation of the two sides of Pearson: a child, in their own eyes, is a creature of immediate wonder, of dynamism as a means to an end; maturing, perhaps, is a process of sinking into passivity. Not, altogether, an optimistic view, but one that is certainly in line with the cartoonist's view of his own life as demonstrated in "Beds."
The third piece in the collection, an untitled two-pager from 2013 drawn only in pencil, further builds on this idea. There are two planes of duality in this story: the protagonist and her younger brother; their childhood, their adulthood. The narrative concerns a wooded area behind the two siblings' grandparents' house, which the protagonist would use as a platform for her flights of fancy, embellishing and inventing fantastical details to tell her brother. When the two siblings, now older, visit again on the occasion on their grandfather's passing, the woods feel smaller, more 'real,' to the point that the sister no longer feels the compulsion to walk through them; her first-person-past-tense narration throughout the story takes on a tone of hindsight, of now-I-know-better grounding. Her brother, however, is not quite ready to let go, and though he sees nothing on his excursion the sense of fear doesn't seem to leave him – and justifiably so: in the most intentionally Ghibli-esque image in the collection, the brother stands right on top of the 'giant face' his sister used to lie about seeing.
I can't help but view these two siblings as representative of Pearson's own artistic ambivalence: on one hand, the desire to be seen as adult; on the other, the fear of not knowing what you stand to gain by putting away childish things. By 2013, the cartoonist, aged 26, was certainly not a mere beginner, with three albums of Hilda already published, but still evidently trying to put some distance between the Luke Pearson of Hilda and the Luke Pearson that appeared in anthologies. The former, like the brother in the story, still ventured behind the house, grandfather's rifle in hand, ready to face whatever fantasies the woods may put forward; the latter chose to stay comfortably at home.
Although it predates the untitled piece by a year, "You Mustn't Be Afraid" (2012) seems to serve as the logical and chronological end-point to this cycle of childhood stories. In terms of cartooning, it's one of the most self-assured pieces in the collection (as well as the aforementioned Crane, the great Hartley Lin also comes to mind, as does the rounder, more simplified end of Chris Ware), though it shares the affected somberness Pearson identifies in the same era's Everything We Miss. The story shows a man settling the last accounts of the soul before his passing; he seems horrified of confronting any unresolved business, and it's only through a transformation that he gains the power to engage – transformation into his childhood self, of course. He zooms through several areas that exerted authority over him in childhood—school, home, church—before facing the sum total of his life: piles on piles of stuff to sort and sift through. Only after he's boxed up everything worth keeping and gotten rid of the rest can he finally take on his adult form and pass on.
Where the story struggles is in the creation of a life that is, simply put, convincing – the pile of stuff may well be associated with him, but we aren't shown any actual emotional connection; the classroom and church are as good a signifier as any for a communal context, but they are, literally and figuratively, empty. The life in "You Mustn't Be Afraid" is not a life inhabited; it is merely gestured toward, through a system of signs sufficiently agreed-upon to make sense. The story is more an embodiment of Pearson's hang-ups with boyhood and adulthood than anything: the specter of death holds the protagonist in her arms, Pietà-like, as he becomes a child again; later, as he finishes his work, he only wants to know if he “did alright." There is, in death, a humility: it is one last chance for validation from the ultimate authority.
How Long Have I Been Lying Here? also collects a smattering of one-page comics, four of which are page-long gag strips; they're entertaining gags—one of which, an early-DeForge-style self-effacement, shows an ugly, emaciated, only-barely-humanoid monster sitting at a laptop, trying to compose the most normal social media bio possible; another, drawn in Pseudonym Jones-like round-cornered curves, shows one friend struggling to take another seriously after seizing an opportunity to look through the latter's online search history—though, perhaps by design, not entirely remarkable beyond the demonstration of radically differing styles.
It's in a fifth and separate one-page comic—a dream comic, surprisingly enough—that Pearson manages to transcend the rest of the collection. I say "surprisingly enough" because the very concept of the dream comic is, perhaps more than anything, a trapping: between our typically-imperfect recall of dreams and our desire to make sense of them, the use of dreams in sequential art-forms is usually awkward at best, a ham-fisted attempt at meaning filtered through an artificial opacity. In "Last Night" (2013), Pearson, demonstrating an acute understanding of this trapping, uses his space wonderfully: a six-panel lament to a lost loved one, he captures the uncertainty of the dream by using his panel transitions to switch not only the location—but the very recipient, the very subject of the dream. His narration is constantly aimed at a 'you,' but his narrator's relation to that 'you' is unfixed: first an old dead relative, then a crying loved one out of reach, then a possible paramour, dying in Pearson's arms. Pearson overplays his hand somewhat with the last two panels, by depicting the final 'you,' wolves gathering on a ridge—an appeal to archetypal fear, incongruous when following a sequence of more immediate emotion—before depicting the narrator sleeping, so as to drive home his preceding narrative fragments as dream. Yet it still works, for the most part, thanks to that upswing of ultimate helplessness; the sweatiness of the nightmare has already been felt, already registered as emotional reality.
Elsewhere, in "Melting" (2012), the protagonist is physically and literally melting; by the end of the story nothing is left of him besides a cup of liquid in a hospital bed. Such works, where Pearson wisely challenges himself by turning his insecurity outwards into the realm of human relationships, indicate a much more interesting trajectory that the cartoonist didn't often take. There's an obvious grim humor to it—one of the nurses spills the cup while fixing the bedsheets, and a doctor runs to fill the cup with tea—but what sells the story is the wife's desperation; completely unaware that the fluid in the cup was spilled and replaced, she sees no reason at all to let go, even though any semblance of humanity has long left the building. In thirty-two panels spread over two pages, "Melting" constructs a surprisingly strong metaphor to the support of a loved one in the grips of terminal illness – the human connection at its core is fundamentally doomed, and nonetheless it persists, through denial more than anything.
The last story in the collection, "Cultural Capital," is the latest chronologically, published in a 2015 kuš! anthology. Visually, it's the loosest piece in the collection, its lines a thick monochrome orange-brown with some screen-tone for added texture; it feels more in line with an early PEOW aesthetic. In it, the cartoonist monologues about visiting "one of the cultural capitals of the world" and, feeling aimless, resorting to simply walking around and taking pictures, not actually communicating in any meaningful way. Confronted with his failure to engage with his world directly, he is given—through fantastical means, in the form of a talking cat—a chance, once and for all, to actually live. But, Pearson being Pearson, he decides to make up some excuse to walk away, relegating this magical squandered chance into a dream he dreams on his train home. As far as I can tell, "Cultural Capital" is the last non-Hilda comic Pearson has put out, which feels about as on the nose as you can get – one final admission of the comfort of stagnancy. As he puts it, in the same TCJ interview,
“It's frustrating because I want to be able to produce work that I'd be interested in as a reader. The truth is I continuously have opportunities to do that stuff, but I second guess everything as try-hard or embarrassingly derivative and on the few occasions I've gotten over the hurdle and done something, I tend to prove myself right and it makes the next thing even harder.
The time might come when I have to give it up and accept that I'm a "children's comic book artist" but I don't think it will be connected to whether or not Hilda is successful. People sometimes ask me if Hilda's going to be "my Tintin" and the thought of that has always chilled me to the bone, but if that does end up being the case, then maybe that's fine. I don't know. I might just not have anything to bring to the larger comics world.”
It has now been five years since Pearson declared the sixth Hilda book, Hilda and the Mountain King, to be the final installment in the series. It was in that same breath that he alluded to other graphic novel projects to come – projects which to date remain not only unreleased but, to the best of my knowledge, unmentioned altogether. Given his comments on past work, from both this year and a decade ago, one wonders what a new Luke Pearson might look like. More at peace, one might hope; more certain of who he is, rather than who he isn't.
How Long Have I Been Lying Here? is an odd collection. It's not bad by any stretch—its cartooning is lovely, and its writing, while sometimes awkward and wrongheaded, is more revealing of its author's emotional truths than many works would be willing to be—but it still takes too much comfort in its own befuddlement. Eminently preoccupied with growth past—past one's influences, one's childhood, of one's self-doubts—it is what we grow toward that Pearson appears proud not to have an answer for. That this "early works"-type book—a format whose artistic and commercial significance is come see the development of this now-lauded craftsman—is the end, at least so far, of Pearson's adult work is proof of his willingness to defeat himself, to be defeated by himself.
It's a painful admission to make, but even more than that it is frustrating to listen to. The notion that maybe we don't grow toward anything, that maybe life is just a succession of beds, that maybe growth is just something we dream of on our way home. I'm grateful, then, to Luke Pearson, or at least the Luke Pearson of nine years ago: if nothing else, I want to live in order to prove him wrong.
The post How Long Have I Been Lying Here appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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