Welcome to Casa Baba

Casa Baba is simultaneously a space and a non-space: part of the Baba Jaga Europe’s initiative attempt to "open up" a pan-European culture independent of borders and national traditions, it is a residency insofar as its artists live elsewhere for a set period of time, but they do not live in the same physical space, instead swapping countries three ways – for the 2024 residency, Latvian cartoonist Jurijs Tatarkins was in Prague, Czech artist Jindrich Janiček was in Rome, and Italy’s Giulia Cellino was in Riga. The resulting anthology, Welcome to Casa Baba, is an interesting exchange, its constituent voices different from one another in self-evident ways yet revolving around similar thematic concerns.

The first piece, Tatarkins’ “Drip, Sip, and Spill,” is a succession of largely-comedic diary vignettes, opting more often than not for a humor of small humiliations: in the first vignette, “Arriving,” for instance, Tatarkins’ stand-in initially thinks that everyone at the train station is looking at him, and feels a sense of pride as if they know he is an artist on an exchange program, before realizing that they were looking at the train schedule; taking great umbrage, he scares a bunch of pigeons and makes them crap on some of the bystanders, if only to give people a reason to look at him. Even in its humor, the anxiety here – whether authentic or affected – is clear: it is the anxiety of being elsewhere, of being torn out of one’s natural habitat. Tatarkins tries to own his momentary foreignness and leverage it into a place of power, and time and time again he is rebuked, failing to reconcile the habits of back there with the changed circumstance of right here.

The vignettes are all generally charming, and they fit the cartoonist’s style well: his lines are wobbly and generalizing, without much detail. His characters sport bulbous, a-geometrical heads and bodies, and his spaces have little depth to them, less solid background than cardboard backdrop. What comes to mind is the affected-casual aesthetic commonly associated with PEOW — the artist Mushbuh is an easy tonal comparison, the diary comics of Jane Mai even more so. Part of me can’t help but feel, perhaps unfairly, that it’s a style readily suited for "disposability" — it makes me laugh for a few seconds, but I rarely come back to it. Which is a shame, as Tatarkins is a strong constructor of gags. In discussing gag comics, I think of two polarities: Ernie Bushmiller (whose perfection of craft stems from his distillatory, not-a-line-wasted efficiency — note how he sags and flounders in the longer Nancy Sunday strips compared to the weekday strips) and Harvey Kurtzman, whose Hey, Look! is overwrought to the point that just about every strip I’ve seen could stand to benefit, mechanically, from cutting out about half of the panels. Tatarkins, for his part, seems to have found a strong balance between the two — he lingers on beats more than Bushmiller does, but there is a solid enough reason (often for added neurosis) that it doesn’t feel labored.

In the sole non-comedic vignette in Tatarkins’ comic, “Sunset Festival,” the author sits among the locals in a local park overlooking Prague to watch the city at sunset. It’s a moment of quiet romance, compellingly incongruous with everything that comes before or after. His full-page drawing of Prague is sparse in a way that makes one think of Warren Craghead, or John Porcellino, a beauty displayed from a distance; I wish you could see it the way I saw it, the cartoonist seems to be telling his reader, and at that moment I wish I could see it, too.

Janiček’s “Heatwave,” meanwhile, is the anthology’s sole overtly-fictional piece, focusing on the owner of a small-town bookshop that focuses on photography books. The business itself quickly turns out to be something of a dead end — only one of the four walk-ins in the comic actually winds up buying something, and two turn out to want to sell their own books. That the bookshop focuses on photography books, and especially localized ones, is significant, as is the bookseller’s hobby of watching hockey games months after they aired — again and again, professionally and for his own personal pleasure, the man inundates himself with visions of elsewhere, while he himself remains almost incurably fixed; the walk-in customers hail from places they themselves describe as boring (Ottawa; Rome, not in Italy but in Arizona), yet to our protagonist boring is good enough as long as it’s a novel kind thereof.

Janiček is an even-handed visual storyteller, his perspectives remaining more or less at eye-level while zooming in and out to keep from monotony or repetition. The quality of his line is reminiscent of Karl Christian Krumpholz, rich ink brushwork applied with spontaneity and a faint tremor; the latter effect allows the cartoonist to lean into the mildly-delirious component of the heatwave as the weight of his line varies from solid to fluid. This comes in useful when the last of the customers — the man from Rome, Arizona — comes in, initially rendered as a blob of ink with details overlaid in white before gradually cohering into human form.

Janiček appears to keep the exact setting of “Heatwave” purposefully vague — the way the two Romes are discussed makes them sound equally remote, relegated almost to a status of myth akin to Venice in Calvino’s Invisible Cities; what matters here is not the setting but its almost-purgatorial status. Customers come and go, often not leaving much more than a pencil that reads Canada; and yet the protagonist cannot say the same for himself. This is one metaphorical heatwave that will clearly never break.

The final comic of the bunch, “Kiss the Rain” by Giulia Cellino, finds a balanced mid-point between the two styles that preceded it. Like Tatarkins, her cartooning is loose and sparing in detail, rendered in a lightly-wobbly hand, while like Janiček her proportions are largely realistic. It’s a pleasant style, elevated by a keen eye for page structure — a lot of Cellino’s pages are rendered without panel borders, drawings more or less floating on the page, and yet they are clearly delineated in space, clearly organized in invisible systems of tiers and columns.

“How [sic] will your comic be today? Dramatic, romantic or clumsy or funny?” asks a friend of Cellino’s over text message, to which the cartoonist replies “I don’t know yet, let’s see.” Ths more or less sets the tone for the piece; although Cellino "returns" (at least in terms of the book’s internal sequencing) to Tatarkins’ mode of diary vignettes, she is not at all concerned with the manufacturing of comedy. Her precise intent is perhaps best articulated in an offhand vignette: a page divided, Rothko-like, into two sections, both of them blank apart from an unevenly-distributed splatter; near the center of the lower section appears the internal monologue “Should I create an Excel file of the people I dream?” Which is to say, at the center of Cellino’s comic is a push-and-pull between connection and distance. She clearly hangs out with a larger group of people, but exactly who these people are beyond the catch-all "friends" we do not know; it feels simultaneously warm and lonely. This feeling reaches its peak when Cellino joins a larger group to watch the Eurovision Song Contest; the friends go down to the beach to see the northern lights, but they see nothing — or, rather, most of them do, but Cellino swears that she sees it.

This, then, lies at the core of “Kiss the Rain”: a beauty with no one to share it with. Every now and then, the cartoonist will address a "you," only who the you actually is remains undetermined. The last words of the comic, addressed to that you, attempts to articulate what will happen “when we meet again.” It’s a lovely little note to end on — “I will look something like this,” she says, using that same splatter texture, making it clear that there is no you, only the aspiration toward one. Beauty, in truth, is only ever shared; beauty, in truth, is the very act of sharing.

“Airplane, airplane, carry me back to her side / airplane, airplane, I need God as my guide,” sings a much-diminished Brian Wilson in what is possibly the last great Beach Boys song. What the three comics of Welcome to Casa Baba share is not so much the travel (physical or mental) as the listlessness that, at least in some cases, underlies it. Every time I personally travel (once or twice a year, the past few years), I can’t help but feel like I’m missing out. I go to museums, I see concerts and plays, I eat at restaurants — yet, partly because I tend to keep to myself, I always feel like I’m not doing enough, or seeing enough, or feeling enough. It’s good to know that Jurijs Tatarkins, Jindrich Janiček, and Giulia Cellino all share that sentiment. Is it schmaltzy to say that beauty is a state of mind?Certainly. But it’s a possibility that’s nice to consider, at least.

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