Sequential Bodies

When I was starting out in this whole comics crit thing, the standard joke about crappy criticism or academic writing about art was to say a work was about “bodies in spaces.” Is that still the joke? Talking bodies in spaces is, the maxim goes, a way to sound important while saying nothing of significance. But lately, when I’m reading comics, I really do find myself wondering – what could be more interesting in sequential art than bodies? Formally, what is more compelling than spaces? Whether its the dynamism of Kirby or the minimalism of Okazaki, the erotics of comic book art lie in the shape and movement of bodies, or perhaps more importantly, how the artist crams them into those little picture panels.

Bhanu Pratap and Katie Lane are both cartoonists of the moment particularly concerned with bodies – how they are, how they move, how they touch. Pratap’s figures are derived from sculpture and animation; Lane’s from the practice of life drawing and observation. Both train an artistic effort on unconscious movements, the ugly or grotesque forms we tend to elide when reduced to a still photograph or an ideal cartoon. These are cartoonists who capture reality without realism, exposing intimacy and vulgarity in liminal zones.

 

Cutting Season is Bhanu Pratap’s long awaited followup to his debut graphic novel  Dear Mother and Other Stories, and presents a major departure from narrative form, or perhaps an affirmation of his push against narrative logic. In Cutting Season, there are no beginnings, no endings, but middles and in-betweens. The book is a collection of vignettes, most no longer than a few pages, presenting bodies twisted and tied in grotesque knots. Like the animation smears which inspire them, Pratap’s mangled bodies always seem to make sense – the reader’s eye is primed to disambiguate – yet who they are, what they look like, and to some extent what they are doing is hard to render into words. Text and context sometimes provides a framework of gags – slipping on a banana peel, farting, cumming, bleeding and spilling of entrails, falling anvils, all well-worn terrain for Pratap – but these reasons for moving have a rhythm of poetic meter rather than explanation. “Woah how did I do this?” Proclaims a man who slipped over a ragged empty banana peel and finds himself clinging to the ceiling. “You slipped on a banana peel and fell upwards,” a woman calmly states, looking up at him. The sequence is ominous, shadowy. Explanations do not resolve the meaning of actions but define the mood, erect an eerie structure on the physical, psychological landscape.

The people of Cutting Season are moved by corporeality and sexual urges into painful contortions, colliding like speeding vehicles. Pratap invokes the erotic grotesque in the vein of Clive Barker – nails and shapes are gleefully driven into bodies twisted into pain or pleasure beyond comprehension. The climax of “Into Me,” the story with the banana peel, shows the ceiling-bound man suspended by intricate knots reminiscent of shibari, as the woman, perhaps his lover, named as his savior, tells him to await the crash, an erotic image wherein he seems to melt from his bondage into formless, viscous folds of fleshy abstraction, melding body and body together into sex. Bodies flow like smoke, and bones are in a constant state of breaking. Pratap’s humor nonetheless remains enthusiastically crude – in “Late Night Spread,” a man furiously jacks off to the beauty of the moon while his lover remarks “I didn’t know you were romantic.”

 

The bodies of Cutting Season are overwhelming and vast in their contortions, always threatening to press a little too hard into one another. The spaces which they occupy are, in contrast, empty and yawning, vast in the sense of unfillable. Rooms may be cramped, but windows betray the barren scope of the outdoors, little doors peer into towering doorways. They are hungry, frightful places, without warmth save for the burn of flesh. Ultimately the place of Cutting Season is literally fugitive terrain, of hiding in broad daylight or the cool clarity of night, every shadow suggesting the possibility of another desired or threatening form yet ultimately bereft of any but one and another. Pratap’s comics cut into space and open up liminality, cut into bodies and reveal contradictory physicality and sensuality, and in their unraveling most of all deconstruct linearity. In my interview with Pratap, he commented on his interest in how “comics don't function how we expect language to function:”

 

We expect language to function in a very linear sense. One word comes after the other. One sentence after the other. But the moment – let's say even in language, right? – when you start using parentheses, you start hyphenating, you are interrupting the flow. Even just referring back to an earlier moment in the text, you can go back to the text. All of these things make you realize like it's not linear. You realize that linear is just how we are taught to experience things. It's not really how we experience things.

It is that fascination with the medium’s ability to puncture time that propels Cutting Season. These vignettes are not only moments out of order, or without order, but reflections of moments are not ever remembered as linear sequences but as rupturing events – ejaculation, farting, falling, trauma. These are events without temporality, without voluntary choice but emotionally full, sequenced in words but not told as stories, try as we might. There is no beginning or end to Pratap’s pain or pleasure, only the time that it was. This temporal play is intensified by Pratap’s formal experimentation. Pratap’s work in colour, hot, solid, yet almost faded, salmons, periwinkles, lemons and lavenders burning as if disappearing, at once neon and autumnal. Pratap occasionally trades his crisp digital penline for coarser brushwork, the vignette “Stuff-icked” in particular bleeding past panel borders with intense materiality. These are exciting comics. Challenging both emotionally and formally, Cutting Season is – dare I say it – art out of time.

Katie Lane is a storyteller whose comics adore the humor of boredom, pushing tedious or frustrating conversations to an extreme where people’s painful psychological underpinnings are pushed to the surface. Yet as a cartoonist, Lane is very much an artist of the body, fascinated by subtle movements and awkward contortions, as reflected both by her figures and by the wavering strokes of her penline, evocative of a hand beset by the occasional tremor pushing the nib forward. Lane’s bodies have a physicality that avoids realism but rings true. Lane’s drawings are not always "good" per se, but they are always right – perspective and anatomy are a distant second to observation, Katie Lane’s cartooning is showing the reader what she sees. People are crammed into these panels, taking up space awkwardly, changing size from panel to panel with a naïve, or perhaps medieval, logic that is somehow more observably truthful than a three plane perspective. The stories in Perception Through A Gap, a self-published collection of works which have previously appeared in anthologies and online, generally occur in blank voids of smeary black ink and splotchy gray watercolors, but the environments are still familiar – cramped apartments, anonymous university classrooms, movie theatres, places where the bored intellectual spends their days and tunes out by their sheer familiarity.

 

“The Science of Knowing” is a satire in the mode familiar to anyone who kept up with Lane’s webcomic single camera sitcom, a tableaux of a philosophy professor droning on about god knows what while a bored student shops for shoes on the internet, building to an uncomfortable and searing confrontation over grades and dissipating into disconnected conversation. “Bathers” is likewise an exercise in dramatizing tedium, a drug trip among friends arguing over the point of said trip and devolving into romantic declarations, but this story punctures the collection with its striking colors, yellow, orange and auburn watercolours dotted across the page in what might be a sunset, might be a reflection of the trip, might be an emotional landscape as the question “What if you leave me?” hangs languid in the air. Along with the welcome addition of primary colours, it’s the only setting in these stories that truly feels outdoors, with the bright horizon stretching endlessly with its brightness.

 

The remainder of the collection is erotic in its focus, “Moviegoers” a quick tableau of a couple making out in a movie theater and “Reference Image” (which previously appeared in the wonderful anthology Death Spark) presenting two women fucking as a recursive meditation on art, boredom and anxiety. These works feel like a turning point for Lane, but the focus is no different. Lane’s pen in “Moviegoers” renders the lovers tongues with obsessive, detail, almost revoltingly, but the climax is not their activity but its interruption, the word balloon of an off-panel usher begging the pair to cease snogging over the Spongebob matinee filling the frame just enough to obliterate their passionate faces. “Reference Image,” the best story in the collection, crashes together tedium and eroticism, doubling as both a sex scene and the activity of taking reference photos for drawing the sex scene, a woman (presumably Lane, although this is not important beyond the reflexivity of the work) topping her girlfriend for her art as the two bicker lightly and overtime severely about the artist’s creative, sexual and emotional anxieties. As the artist eats her model’s ass, she moans, “It’s annoying when you get this insecure. I don’t think you want me to validate you – it’s worse than that – you want me to agree. To tell you you’re shitty at drawing and to call you a man.” “I’m sorry,” the artist flatly chirps, uninterrupted. Throughout the piece, poses repeat, and with them phrases at times recur and twist, while at other times the conversation pushes forward. This repetition evokes the awkwardness of memory, that disjunction of linearity that also powers Cutting Season, but the breaking of sequence also comments on the materiality of the work’s basis on reference photos, the silliness of photographing the same poses, scenes or acts over and over again regardless of if one is really feeling that moment. It is also an exercise in Lane’s practice as a life drawer, the simple observation that the same real pose can be drawn over and over again in many different ways, capturing slightly or dramatically different physicalities and sensations with only subtle changes. It’s an intimate, haunting piece that is nonetheless as funny and exciting as the sex that the comic only really pretends to be. This story has lingered in my mind more than any of Lane’s comics work to date.

Cutting Season and Perception Through A Gap are liminal comics about bodies in space. These are apparently pretentious and empty words, but meaning lies in that chasm. These are erotic bodies, languid frustrated bodies. Their space belongs to the medium of comics. These bodies press upon panel borders or are swallowed under their weight. These are bodies of meaning, piles of text and sparse captions alike cannot contain their explanation. These are bodies held together by the materiality of illustration, that crash against the logic of linear time, whose meaning can be felt immediately by the reader yet ever so slightly defies description. Neither pornography nor horror yet unafraid of either meaning, these comics are erotic in a way that scratches at the boundaries of what the medium could mean.

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