Rescue Party

Remember those heady days of COVID lockdown, when all save those designated essential workers were implored to stay indoors, isolated? People were sewing masks and washing their groceries, unsure how exactly the contagion was spreading. There was a unity in the realization that everyone, in all cities around the globe, were experiencing the same event, all thoughts dominated by shared fear and uncertainty. Do you remember learning about the influenza outbreak of a hundred years prior, and how radiators were invented as a way to keep air circulating, and realizing that the reason you had not learned this before now was because it was memory-holed on account of how bad it must have felt and no one wanted to talk about it after the fact? Of course you do, it wasn’t very long ago.

For those who want to re-enter those heady days of doomscrolling, now armed with the assurance that comes from being on the other side, there is Rescue Party. Rescue Party was there then too, as an Instagram feed, but now it is in a book format. It’s a high profile release, published by Pantheon, edited by Gabe Fowler, owner of the Brooklyn comic shop Desert Island, and progenitor of the initial project. Fowler is also the editor of the Smoke Signal newspaper anthology, which this can be seen almost as a variation on, packaged for the shelves of Barnes And Noble. Here is an experimental and open-hearted ethos being presented to a potentially wide audience.

In place of tight curation, an open call was made, with the insistence that a structure be agreed to. Every strip is a page long, and all are in nine-panel grids. On a story level, there’s barely anything in here. When we talk about how the best comics to come out of the COVID era were Simon Hanselmann’s Crisis Zone and Alex Graham’s Dog Biscuits, this, implicitly, is the competition being beaten out. There is not a narrative to compel you here, pulling you through the pages, but there is wide variety of visual approaches that intrigue. A great number of people are trying things out, and the most exciting thing about the project is the idea that not all of them consider themselves cartoonists. One need not be committed to an artistic practice to make something interesting. Every page that feels closer to a collage than an illustration assignment carries the charge of possibility of an amateur attempt, and every strip by a name you recognize is carried by a sense of generosity of spirit, to exist on equal footing outside the structures of professional posturing.

Contributors approached the project with a spirit of play, which allows for experimentation with form and straightforwardness of sentiment. No one seems to be seeing this as a branding exercise or opportunity for exposure. Artist bios in the back of the book contain neither Instagram handles or the URLs to Etsy stores. On a certain level, this borders on malpractice, considering the high profile this offers to artists who are all somewhat obscure. It is also arguably utopian, in keeping with the worldview strips often espouse. A casual read makes clear how many people are wishing for a world that didn’t involve money. Such a world would also negate the need for promotional opportunities and neoliberal personal branding. However, for the sake of meeting the world as it stands, I will offer a link for any artist in this book I name.

Two artists whose books I’ve reviewed on TCJ before, Mike Taylor and Stanley Wany, contribute panels that were clearly created at a much larger scale than are seeing print. Taylor addresses the idea that going back to normal is an unacceptable idea, because the normality of pre-pandemic life was brutal to a great many people. Wany speaks of having dreams of disaster before COVID came to North America. Jesse Simpson, whose comics have appeared in an issue of Now and in a book published by Mansion Press, makes the point that even if the structures of the world will not change, we, the people who’ve endured the pandemic, are changed for having endured it. It is hard to escape the conclusion that in our refusal to adapt and improve the world, we have become worse, but this was not a foregone conclusion at the time these comics were drawn.

Mike Shea-Wright, a man of many artistic styles whose comics deserve an extensive feature at the Journal I swear I will get to soon, contributes a page that presents longing for another person’s body in a way that balances cuteness and the grotesque. Creator of the Eyeland series Nick Forker is here as well, lamenting the exploitative nature of the world we live in. The two of them recently began co-hosting a YouTube show called Comics People, demonstrating their enthusiasm for the medium and cartooning community. Another advocate for catholic tastes, Tana Oshima, editor of Isolated, an earlier anthology of cartoonists responding to COVID isolation, provides a strip here, offering an appreciation of quiet and nature.

An unexpected pleasure was provided by Germany’s Jiaqi Hou, whose strip depicted people as pieces of paper, with one figure folded up on themselves, until in their healed form they lay flat. This was a charmer, its visual metaphor so inextricable from the formal language (which was in itself new and striking) that its conclusion was surprisingly touching.

Annie LeFevre pushes against the constraint of a nine-panel grid by subdividing certain panels further to get more beats into her story of going for a walk with a rat, a gentle fantasy that is simple enough but nonetheless still needs more than nine panels to explain itself. Heather Loase subdivides her panels ever further, making a page that feels like an effective sample of her pop-culture referencing humor. Here she hooks up with a young Cat Stevens. Her style’s use of bold color and watercolor texture is still discernible at the reduced size.

I first encountered Maya Durham’s comic Bloolight at a larger size, printed as a minicomic briefly available through Domino Books. Each panel was presented as a full page, with the first panel as the front cover and blank pages occupying the inside front cover and back cover. Taken on its own terms, I found it inconsequential and narratively thin, albeit still visually appealing enough that I hoped she would make another comic that would have greater ambitions. Here, her comic is of a piece with other fantasies being presented: A laptop is a portal to a world where one can dance with human-sized cats.

There are a lot of cats throughout the book. They’re an ideal domestic companion, quiet and independent and undemanding of expanses of space. I’m sure many cartoonists had felines living with them in quarantine and took delight in observing their strangeness. However, an outside observer cannot help but notice the cat is an animal that has proven, time and time again, to be popular on the internet, and anyone immersed in online world has surely learned that entangling one’s artistic output with depictions of the same will earn you likes. Yes, there is a comic in here envisioning a utopia where cats rules the world. There is also a comic that uses sourdough starters as a metaphor. Any time capsule is going to occasionally demonstrate an acquiescence to the hive mind which will stand in the way of evaluating any individual piece’s artistic merits.

And yeah: there’s stuff in here I shook my head at and muttered “this sucks man” about. (One can safely assume I did not approve of any comic narrated in rhyme.) While there’s strips that would elicit the most basic technical feedback imaginable (try lettering with a finer pointed pen, keep the size of the final printed page in mind to ensure legibility) were the people who made them looking to continue making comics and improve their craft, I didn’t roll my eyes at that work the way I did pieces where slick art styles overlap with an approach to thinking that seems to have systematically evaded any friction or frisson of thought in putting itself together. Such specimens abound here. In the same way as a one-page strip doesn’t allow much time for a reader to become invested in the lives of a character, it also doesn’t allow much space for an artist to explore an idea in any kind of nuanced way. Even the people whose work I know I like do not have enough space here to distinguish themselves as thinkers. The politics here are simple by design. The editorial remit calls for utopianism, which leads to a lot of work that feels naive in its earnestness.

As a statement of intent, it’s very impressive how the strip on page one, by Clare McCarthy, dodges the sort of thought-terminating cliches that wind through the rest of the book. Clear-eyed, jokey, but not belabored in its drawing, McCarthy avoids the moves that lead to Instagram virality, making a strip that possesses a clear worldview but is self-aware about the limits of what it can predict. The book is broken up into three sections, each of which are organized by alphabetical order of the artist’s first name. So much of the book’s editorial decisions and sequencing seem designed to eschew hierarchy, but designating this strip as first in the book is clearly A Choice, and it’s a smart one.

The other instance of clear editorial presence is the placement of prominence given John Broadley’s work. He provides the cover art, endpapers, spot illustrations, and a one-page, nine-panel comic located in the book’s first section. Broadley’s art appeals because his linocut-inspired style, which uses a variety of hatched patterns to create different textures while retaining a thick mark throughout, impresses its physical materiality on the viewer, a nice contrast to contributors working digitally. Katharina Kulenkampff’s page takes a similar approach, with a nice palette of three colors.

There are 146 one-page strips in this book, and I cannot name all the contributors. It is not unlikely that you might have a friend or acquaintance printed in its pages, regardless of how immersed you are in the comics community. You might not know they’re in there going in: many of the people who created pages have essentially said, as colorfully as they could, that they’d rather be fucking, or at least dancing. Of course, still others endorse the notion that art-making is what our world should be oriented around designing the conditions to promote.

I am ashamed of the fact that I spent lockdown largely in the same room where I am writing these words now, for it feels like a squandering of freedom. But Rescue Party is a reminder that for every hedonistic possibility we longed for, there was just as much longing for freedom from systems of normalcy. If it is disappointing that we are not out among our community right this very moment, these cartoons remind us is it is also lamentable we have not transcended our physical forms to be existing on a spiritual plane as sentient plants and radiant energy. Here on Earth, capitalism persists with its banks, currency, and assorted degradations one must go through in order to maintain health care in its clutches. In the absence of a world reconfigured to be less materialistic and more spiritual, free from the demands of having a human body, the only recourse is in the imaginary. The very existence of Rescue Party attests to how the space to dream and envision a different tomorrow comes from having time and space to oneself where one is no longer just accepting the world as consensus creates it.

The issue that emerges in a book of this size is that the sheer number of pages offering overlapping perspectives flattens everything out again. One person’s hopes and dreams, repeated among dozens coalesce into a set of precepts that makes you feel like people’s imaginations, collectively considered, aren’t that large at all, and then the weight of retrospect makes every radical proposition unrealized just feel all the more exhausting. Rescue Party is a time capsule of a moment too geographically diffuse to cohere into a document of an art scene, and so feels just like an extract from the internet. One built on hope and good intention, which is certainly rarified air as far as the internet goes, but still possessed by an overwhelming disposability. The ideal takeaway is also the most pragmatic: to see assembling an anthology oriented around accessibility as a good way to build community, with community understood as something people long for and are enriched by participation in.