When I ask to review a certain comic (just because I know you were dying, dear reader, for a peek behind this most glamorous of curtains), it’s generally for one of two reasons: either (this is usually the case) because I know how I feel about the comic and deem it worth discussing at length, or because, for whatever reason, I have an instinctively-powerful yet hard-to-parse reaction that I want to force myself to sit down and articulate. A recent trio of comics from New York’s Cram Books falls into the latter category. I now intend to speak to you about these comics.
First among the three is Leone in “Blood from the Stone” and Other Stories, a selection of three shorts by New York cartoonist Max Burlingame. The first page, opening the title story, is a fine introduction to Burlingame’s hefty mark-making sensibility: as he draws a sunrise in the city, rather than a smooth smear of color, the cartoonist renders the sky as a tight cross-weave of vertical and horizontal lines (drawn in long, focused strokes), growing less dense before finally becoming a vaguely-concentric stippled pattern. Burlingame’s world is dominated by these hatched lines, granting his art a suffocating tactility that might’ve easily found its place among the Zap crowd. Leone, the protagonist of the story, works for a ‘fleshwork’ company — ambulance workers who, by the looks of it, save the lives that can be saved on the spot and take apart the bodies of those unfortunate suckers who can’t, selling the parts for scraps. Leone’s employer (the name of which, “Catacomb Fleshworks,” is enough to dispel any possibility of noble intentions) is not the only rotten dynamic in his life; he and his younger brother live in terror of their abusive father.
Structurally, “Blood from the Stone” (which, at seventeen pages, is longer than the other two stories combined) is as conventional as Burlingame gets, but the cartoonist sticks to a rapid clip of events, treating his moments with a perfunctoriness that blurs the line between background and foreground — when his father gets in a fatal car accident, for instance, Leone quickly puts his pre-established scientific discovery, a stone that miraculously renews blood circulation, into practice, showing little in the way of emotional distress; the two brothers’ fantasies of escape from the father, made possible by this same discovery, are likewise relegated to a brief exchange toward the end of the story. It’s an erratic approach to pacing, which I am of two minds about — on one hand, Leone’s sympathetic traits are clearly signified but wind up deadened by authorial matter-of-factness; on the other hand, Burlingame’s whole world seems to operate on an emotional dampener. A double-edged sword — the bad news is that nothing feels like anything, but the good news is that, man, at least nothing feels like anything.
Of the collection’s three stories, it’s the second one, the four-page “SkySpy WhyDie,” that I find most compelling, as Burlingame leans into the brevity: a spy in a future vision of Salt Lake City tries to escape the agents of a rival organization, who capture him before he can dispatch a message to his handlers. “SkySpy WhyDie,” in truth, is less a ‘story’ than a sketch toward one, a distillation; the cartoonist eschews the conventional appeal of the spy narrative (i.e. its supposed piercing of the veil of political normalcy) as we receive a concrete sense of neither exposition nor stakes.
Instead, Burlingame’s focus is less a narrative one than a textural one. His SLC is an unruly, sprawling tangle that completely defies coherent spatiality. There’s something of the “G----- City” of Josh Simmons’ Bat comics there, though more than anything I think of the visual barrages of Henriette Valium, as the cartoonist defies his reader to distinguish where each building starts or ends. One observes that the heading on the first page of the comic is topped by a web-like grid of parallels which, in spite of the occasional warp or tangent, is still legible; what is clearly designed to resemble an urban map winds up a sneer at the reality of the declining anti-space below. Inevitably, the inhabitants of the city come to resemble their dwelling-space. While in other stories Burlingame’s faces are already prone to some degree of warp (Leone, in “Blood from the Stone,” is distinguished by his slab-smooth face as opposed to the worn, rough-hewn hatching of other faces inhabiting his world), the world of “SkySpy WhyDie” is far past the point of facial coherence. Our protagonist’s eyes are spiral-shapes; one incidental character’s eyes and eyebrows are interconnected, cursive-like swoops, whereas his interlocutor’s nose appears a zigzag lace running down from his eyes to his mouth.
When our protagonist is captured, it transpires that his face is, in fact, a mask; his rivals tear it off, and reveal a normal face — handsome, even, in a classically-composed sense. There are easy ways to expound on this—aha! normalcy is the agent-provocateur—but Burlingame elects to end the story right there, on the reveal of beauty, not ascribing any moral positions to either side. From setup to non-resolution, the arc becomes dizzying, in a Rory Hayes sort of way.
The same sort of narrative chaos is most dominant in the final story, “Crashing (O.T.R.),” in which Cressel, a drug smuggler, goes to a doctor to have a brick of cocaine removed from his stomach. Right away we see that things are bursting at the seams. On the very first page, a large chunk of building simply chips off, crushing a passerby to death; the clinic secretary informs a patient that “failure to make payment in the agreed upon time frame will result in immediate repossession [of his newly-implanted eyes.” Once the cocaine (mixed in with drywall and creatine) is removed, the ‘doctor’ immediately destroys it, then professes to be not a doctor at all. At the same time, a wrecking ball begins to tear down the building, skipping the formalities of evacuation notices or what have you.
Much like in the previous story, the characters here are blunt functionaries of the plot, the events of which are neurotically crowded, completely doing away with the notion that plotlines, or planes of plot, are discrete and clearly delineated. To me, “Crashing (O.T.R.)” appears most closely in conversation with the first generation of alternative comix-with-an-x, as Burlingame bypasses completely the idea of narrative as something from whose specifics the reader derives emotional enjoyment. Instead, this is a comic that is all point, that point being, largely, It’s a fallen world and there’s nothing you can do about it, so don’t expect any neat resolution. It’s a point intensified by the sequencing, with the second and third stories tossing out of the window the straightforward-narrative aspirations of the first. This, then, is the core thesis of Max Burlingame’s world: sometimes there’s no punchline; sometimes there’s just a punch.
Elsewhere, it’s not every day that you (I) see an extended Red Hot Chili Peppers needle-drop in a comic; it’s also not every day that you (I) see a Red Hot Chili Peppers mention that doesn’t make you (me) at least mildly upset about having to think about the Red Hot Chili Peppers. As such, it should be considered a credit to cartoonist Connie Myers that, even though the first two pages of her Big Gamble Rainbow Highway are set to the song “Californication,” I still liked the comic quite a bit.
There is an occasional rockiness to Myers' pen-strokes, especially on the 'quieter'/more incidental panels, and her detailing is often on the sparing side. Yet this is made more forgivable by Myers’ declaration on the inner front cover that the comic was drawn directly in ink, without any preliminary penciling — a choice that brings to mind CF’s approach, by which a line, once drawn (albeit typically in pencil), is never erased; one recalls fellow Fort Thunder-ite Ben Jones’ description of this practice of CF’s as “forcing himself in the moment to make confident decisions,” and Myers—an effective, clear, and intuitive visual communicator—rises to the challenge. Making exclusive use of what appears to be a fineliner pen for most of the book (with a thicker marker for panel borders), Myers creates a sense of textural austerity, an unwavering sort of solidity that declines to distinguish between physical reality, emotional reality, and transdiegetic depictions of energy (sound, movement) — in particular when depicting movement Myers favors Muybridgean ‘shadows,’ transparent outlines of the erstwhile (see her drawing of Jodie opening a door — though the door, which opens inward, should obscure the view behind it, we can see the room behind it perfectly).
Big Gamble Rainbow Highway focuses on Jodie, a young shut-in living on her own. She appears to have two channels of connection to the outside world: the first, the voluntary, is her best (and evidently only) friend, Rhoda; the other, the involuntary, is a recurrence of anonymous calls cursing Jodie and wishing her ill for some undetailed past infraction. After waking up from a distressing dream of self-harm, Jodie calls Rhoda and pleads that she come visit. She comes over, and when Jodie’s phone rings Rhoda picks up in hopes of confronting the anonymous caller. When she hears her ex, who works as a telemarketer, on the other end, she becomes convinced that Jodie has betrayed her and storms out, leaving behind a packet of shrooms.
The natural comparison, in the sweat-stained tone, is Simon Hanselmann (a cartoonist I’m not very fond of), but Myers far transcends Hanselmann by skirting the more Joe Matt-derived elements—that self-aggrandizement that presents itself as self-loathing—to focus on the immediate impact of the emotional distress on its own terms. There is little humor in Jodie’s state, or at least the state itself is not the butt of any joke; her withdrawal from the world (her reluctance to leave her house; her unemployment; the fact that she doesn’t have a cellphone, only an unwieldy wall-mounted set) reads as both genuinely sad and justified by circumstance.
Things come to a head during the last movement of the comic, being Jodie’s shroom trip — predictably, the drug has an adverse effect, and Jodie confronts, briefly, the embodiment of her guilt, which is depicted as a lamb tied up in telephone cords, stuck in her garbage disposal. Myers draws Jodie and Rhoda as fursonas who, despite anatomical resemblances, share very little in common with their animal-like counterparts; the lamb, tied up in a way that calls to mind animal sacrifice, is rendered in a realistic, non-anthropomorphic fashion, magnifying the implicit power that Jodie had, at some point, held over it — a power foisted upon Jodie, regardless of whether or not she was capable of handling it, or even deserved to. The trip sequence is a level-up for Myers, cartooning-wise — her detailing and textures become more confident (if the aforementioned Muybridgean shadows have a lo-fi Lale Westvind feel to them, then the later nightmarish scene has a solidity that tilts the cartoonist closer to J. Webster Sharp) as Myers introduces a second tool, a dip pen, employed with bold, sweeping strokes.
Myers' protagonist eventually wakes up, or rather is snapped back to reality by the ringing of the phone, which has been torn off the wall. It’s Rhoda, calling to check in on her, but Jodie is too rattled to say a word. The phone call casts into doubt everything that happened prior to the trip, in a way reminiscent of the end of Twin Peaks: The Return. Nominally, Jodie may have woken up, but the helplessness and fear are nonetheless palpable. No matter how much you need help, nor how much you want to offer it — some calls, Connie Myers fears, will always be one-sided.
Of all three books in this recent Cram batch, Jack Lloyd’s The Yard is the hardest to talk about, simply because it is not exactly a proper book in and of itself — a follow-up to his previous outing Boxcar, the back cover of this present outing describes the comic as “a brief preview of a larger story currently in the works,” which according to Lloyd’s Instagram should be out sometime in the fall — it is not even the second act, but the first twenty-odd pages thereof. As such, it is less a full story than a vignette, establishing the world’s broader tonality and dynamics but not presenting a full arc of events. Though Lloyd’s description of Boxcar describes his two main characters as a wizard and a hapless knight, their narrative function affords them few chances for fantastical heroics; having previously hopped a train and dozed off, they now amble around the titular train-yard in search of their next destination. The locale is non-specific, purgatorial enough to drive one to think of Beckett, albeit with slang-driven cadence more in line with a ‘70s stoner comedy.
The appeal of Lloyd’s cartooning is kaleidoscopic, pulling together so many disparate points of similarity that one is discouraged to assert any of them as ‘influences’ with any real confidence. His characters, at a glance, evoke Vaughn Bodē, or even the Argentinian cartoonist Mordillo, with round-but-buoyant anatomies centered around spud-like noses; his panel layouts, rife with arches, ovals, and semicircles, bring to mind Moebius’ Arzach. And yet all of these are offset by a sense of haptic anarchy reminiscent of—sorry, I know, two references in one piece is really too much—Fort Thunder, namely the more Chippendale/Brinkman end of things.
Color—the surest way to distinguish between graphic objects—does figure into The Yard, but it is limited to the interior covers, which are employed as first and last pages, and the first sheet of interior paper (which is to say, pages 2-3 and 20-21 of the comic) — on these pages, Lloyd employs earthy, desaturated hues of brown, green, and yellow, in keeping with the aridity of the setting. For the brunt of the story, however, the cartoonist keeps to a fine, uniformly-weighted pen, and it is in this medium that his work truly comes alive. Let us defer, momentarily, to Walter Benjamin’s “Painting, or Signs and Marks” (tr. Rodney Livingstone):
The graphic line is defined by its contrast with area. This contrast has a metaphysical dimension, as well as a visual one; the background is conjoined with the line. The graphic line marks out the area and so defines it by attaching itself to it as its background. […] The graphic line confers an identity on its background. The identity of the background is quite different from that of the white surface on which it is inscribed.
Viewed together, Burlingame, Myers, and Lloyd present a wide spectrum of approaches to the dimensionality and physicality of the drawn line. Burlingame’s art, almost obsessive in its rendering, takes on a full, almost assaultive weight and tangibility; Myers, for her part, is more streamlined, more tentative, though she nonetheless establishes a concrete and consistent spatiality both through her backgrounds and through textural rendering. Jack Lloyd, with his typically-unrendered surfaces and fast, sweeping pen-strokes, is quite easily the loosest, most chaotic cartoonist of the three. Looking at his cartooning, I cannot help but feel a temporal shock. The farther I read into comics history (Segar, for instance, or Herriman), the more compelled I find myself by the emptiness of the artwork of a century ago, an emptiness partly brought on, of course, by the constraints of pre-digital printing technology, far diminishing the possibility of more ‘fiddly’ graphic nuance. It is precisely this emptiness that Lloyd harkens back to, not in the way of a trite, shorthanded homage but as an earnest mode of expression. Note, for instance, the way he draws the wizard: his broomlike mustache-and-beard (usually rendered in singular strokes, as if to omit the mouth entirely) goes down to his legs and completely erases his torso, giving him a disjointed, airy physicality. It feels like the continuation of Steinberg’s promise — the idea that the drawn line as a unit can, and should, be underscored, not merely assimilated in the interest of ‘the picture.’
The effectiveness of Lloyd’s pared-down approach is illustrated by two panels, in which the wizard, intent on going to a mysterious pub known as the Devil’s Fiddle, is positioned in front of the knight:
Note how the space around them is completely blank, delineated only by the folds in the sand immediately around the knight’s feet. The cartoonist could’ve easily drawn the knight as simply floating in the panel, but with this subtle touch he creates a sense, akin to the theatrical stage, that the tangible space is artificial. Just a few panels later, he draws his duo walking away, and here the sand and the trees are more overtly articulated, but that doesn’t matter — you’ve already seen the hidden strings.
A few days ago I was looking through old articles on this very site, and I came upon one reviewer derisively rejecting the notion that comics released simultaneously by the same publisher should, on occasion, be viewed as interconnected. Me, I heartily disagree — I think it’s fairly natural to look for connections in art, even (especially) unintentional ones, certainly if you believe that a prominent function of curation is to create connections where there are ostensibly none. In the case of Burlingame, Myers, and Lloyd, then, the connection is clear, at least on the tonal level: these are tense works, powder-kegs whose bursting is inevitable, visible on the horizon.
More than that, however, they are comics that quietly but assuredly deepen my understanding of, and more importantly my enthusiasm for, the drawn line. And, frankly, what more can one ask for?
The post Three from Cram: Burlingame, Meyers, and Lloyd 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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