Quiet Bubble

Will Elder, 1921-2008

Will Elder was one of the greats. With Harvey Hurtzman, he defined the humor and design sense of MAD Magazine, Help!, Humbug, and co-created Little Annie Fanny with Kurtzman. Together, this team was perhaps the most potent and influential force in American satire, and certainly in American satirical comics, until R. Crumb came along. (Crumb, by the way, has openly acknowledged Kurtzman and Elder’s influence in shaping his own work.) Elder was capable of mimicking almost any cartooning style and infusing it with his own sense of slapstick, high level of detail, and gags. His panels are full to bursting with asides, obscure visual jokes, art parodies, and strange riffs. There are usually no fewer than five jokes in a single panel of his art.

As with any profligate artist, his work sometimes seems overstuffed. His visual approach reflected the kitchen-sink, anything-goes, working-class conditions of his native Bronx, and there wasn’t a gag–good or bad–that he wouldn’t try to cram into the background. For a fascinating look at how comics collaboration actually works, read the appendices for Dark Horse’s two collections of Little Annie Fanny. Kurtzman wrote and sketched it, Elder painted it, and you can see in Kurtzman’s notes that he’s constantly reining in Elder’s impulses and nixing Elder’s add-ons to the script. Elder loved laughs, sure, but he also loved yuks, and his worst work reflects more of the latter than the former.

Even at his most groan-inducing, however, Elder was never just a prolific hack. Little Annie Fanny, which satirized the culture promoted by the magazine in which it appeared (Playboy–it’s hard to tell if Hugh Hefner got the joke), is a work of astonishing loveliness. Painted in full-color by Elder, its lushness and rich detail make it a joy to read, and not just because Annie spends more time out of her clothes than in them. He deftly parodies everything from Pop Art to psychedelia to Abstract Expressionism, while maintaining a look that’s distinctly “cartoony” and easily readable. Even with a depth of field that’s more realistic and less flat than what typically appeared on the comics page, Elder’s style was as zippy and energetic as a Carl Barks comic or a Chuck Jones cartoon. In short, the level of realism and detail in his work didn’t hinder its readability. His work was breathtaking but only after you’d stepped back from laughing at it.

Elder brought that level of detail and invention to almost all of his comics and illustrations. As this retrospective volume proves, he was one of the most gifted draftsmen that comics has ever seen. I miss him already.

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The New York Times, always late to the game, hasn’t gotten around to publishing an obituary yet, but other tributes are pouring in. Here is a reproduction of Elder’s cover of MAD #5 (June/July 1953) and a signature story from that issue. The Comics Journal reprints “Goodman Goes Playboy,” which spoofs the magazine and Archie, and got Kurtzman and Elder into legal trouble with the latter. (The duo would refine and sex up the naive Goodman Beaver character with their Little Annie Fanny.) Tom Spurgeon provides an informative, appreciative obituary.

Queen-Cat

Every morning, my cat and I go through our little ritual. The alarm clock goes off at 6:45am, and I hit the snooze for another 15 minutes of blessed sleep. Eliza, maybe mimicking my slap of the clock, began batting me gently on the back of the head. At 7 or maybe 7:15, I decide I’ve had enough and stumble into the bathroom to turn on the shower. As soon as the rumble and psssst of the faucet starts, I hear the cantered steps on cat on floor, and she jumps onto the rim of the tub. She clambers into the tub and begins drinking the water on the tub’s floor.

Within ten seconds, the water’s hot enough for me to switch from main faucet to shower faucet. I rattle my fingernails on the far wall of the tub, to warn Eliza that she’s about to get drenched by overhead water. She jumps out of the tub, I step in, and whoosh the shower curtain shut. For most of my shower, I see her silhouette stalking the rim. After three minutes or so, once I’m into my morning shave, her head peeks between curtain and wall, and she begins sipping the droplets that occasionally fall from the main faucet. She doesn’t care if her head gets wet. If she’s feeling bold, she’ll jump back into the tub, at my feet, with my body (mostly) blocking the stream of water that would otherwise soak her through.

And that’s the opening minutes of my day.

I’m always curious as to how much Eliza behaves like other cats. I don’t have a second cat, she lost her mother within two weeks of her birth, and she hasn’t been around other cats regularly since I took her away from the rest of the litter, when she was ten weeks old. So, whatever behavior she’s learned is mostly either innate to her cat-self or stuff she’s picked up from her environment and from living with me. At regular intervals, I wonder, How differently does she behave from other cats?

So, imagine the jolt of recognition I had when I read the 4 April 2008 strip of Matthew Reidsma’s High Maintenance Machine. Now, despite my antipathy toward the memoir in general (with Brian Winter’s Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien and C.S. Walton’s Ivan Petrov: Russia through a Shot Glass as noted exceptions), I’ve got a soft spot for autobiographical comics. By drawing yourself and the world around you, you’re automatically forced to put an aesthetic distance between events and your rendition that complicates the reader’s understanding of the situations as the “truth.” With photography, cinema, and prose, the reader is inclined to accept what’s shown at face value; with comics, it’s always conscious that the view presented is a subjective, constructed one.

Reidsma’s strip, expressly begun to force the artist to improve his skills, is a joy. He’s not as stylistically dazzling as James Kochalka’s American Elf—Reidsma sticks to a basic 2X3 panel layout, and draws in black-and-white instead of full color—but I like Reidsma’s work better. His daily vignettes are beautifully, cleanly drawn, and are sweet without being saccharine. The cute, clear-line style is jazzy and bold—the pacing seems quick as a result, even when the six daily panels actually show an infinitesimal moment. He dares to show pivotal moments in his spats with his wife, his minor foibles and successes, and himself at his angriest and least likable. I’ve been following his stuff for a few months.

So, there on 4 April, I discovered that he’s a truly keen observer of cats, and that my girl isn’t a total oddball after all. I decided to buy the original art right then and there: $10 plus $5 for shipping. I got the art, charmingly and carefully packaged and with a free sticker to boot, a mere four days later. Reidsma’s a very tight penciler—there are only a few stray marks differentiating his penciled art and the final inking—and the page makes for a cozy feel. The newest acquisition to the Quiet Bubble collection will hang in the bathroom, where it’s most appropriate.

Soap opera for boys: Quiet Bubble’s favorite comics of 2007

After more than a decade away from following continuing comics series, and from reading any monthly Marvel or DC titles, I got pulled back in. I can’t fully explain it. While I’m far from becoming a regular at Action Island Comics—they don’t carry enough Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, or other independent labels for my tastes—I’m now avidly following three series, and they ain’t highbrow, either. Monthly comics are like crack—expensive, sordid, and unhealthy in regular doses.

I blame TV. Since I’ve given up on following any regular shows—the writers’ strike has helped—and I can catch my favorites (Weeds, The Wire, various British series) on DVD, I’m missing my fix of regular characters, recurring storylines, and convoluted cliffhanger plots. Even in my youth, I knew the Marvel Universe I obsessed over was essentially soap opera for boys; under those tights and sculpted muscles, there lurked the hearts of romance novels and melodramatic schlock. Hell, the city-destroying battles and visual effects were more heightened (and ridiculous) melodrama than anything dished out by The Young and the Restless.

It would be nice to say that I’ve graduated to finer things, and that’s partly true, but it’s also true that I moved back to superheroes and b-movie adventurism, like the prodigal son returning home to live in his parents’ basement after a sojourn to the Real World.

So, this year’s favorites reflect my rediscovery of serial pulp, whether as regularly appearing comic books or newspaper strips. With regard to the latter, we’re living in boom times. The late, lamented Kitchen Sink Press was a pioneer in reprinting older strips with contextual materials. Fantagraphics has kept the tradition alive, bringing 50-year-old (or earlier) strips to contemporary audiences. It’s churning out lovely reissues of the complete Peanuts, Krazy Kat, and Dennis the Menace, and have added E.C. Segar’s Popeye and well-designed volumes of pin-up cartoons by overlooked cartoonists. They’re putting Walt Kelly’s Pogo into the mix, designed by Bone’s Jeff Smith, this year, which means that maybe the best American newspaper strip ever produced is getting a first-class showcase. Drawn & Quarterly continues its masterful reprints of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley and Tove Jansson’s Moomin, which means the press is doing God’s work. NBM inaugurated its series of reprinted screwball strips with Bud Fisher’s groundbreaking Mutt & Jeff; let’s hope this continues.

Even academic presses are getting with the program: University Press of Mississippi (full disclosure: it signs my paychecks) released Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips, a deluxe 600-page collection that includes the Swiss cartoonist’s unfinished story fragments and sketches, translated from the French and extensively contextualized by comics historian David Kunzle. Töpffer’s work, from the mid-nineteenth century, place the comic strip’s origins in Europe, about a half-century before the common understanding of the form’s ascension with Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, so this is revolutionary stuff.

All of this is to say that now’s a damn fine time to be introduced to the richness of comics’ form and history. What follows is my highly opinionated attempt to lead you to 2007’s greatest stuff. It can’t possibly be definitive but it will definitely be idiosyncratic, pulpier, and longer in the tooth than last year’s list. Enjoy.

Almost home: Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Chris Van Allsburg, meet Shaun Tan. He’s your long-lost son.

In The Arrival, Tan’s drawing style shares Van Allsburg’s lush use of charcoal, otherworldly architecture and creature design, muted color palettes, and the slightly ethereal fuzziness around the edges of figures that evokes sepia-toned photographs. The unnamed city teems with bustling life and odd contraptions—it’s a rich, full world. In the big panoramic drawings, which sometimes form two-page spreads, the cityscape feels almost overstuffed. Tan’s cramming in every interesting idea, stylistic curlicue, and exacting detail that he can think of. Sometimes, he plays with the conventions of the page itself, drawing and designing pages that look crumpled and dusty, with fake creases, as if his panels and pages have been folded, pored over, and carried around in a back pocket or a beat-up salesman’s portmanteau.

Tan’s book is, however, a continuation of Van Allsburg’s aesthetics, not a mere aping of them. By making The Arrival a comic, he animates the elder artist’s vision. The book has propulsive motion—it feels less like still photographs than like deteriorated film stock from the silent era.

As with silent cinema, Tan dispenses with dialogue altogether. His unnamed protagonist—unnamed to the reader, anyway—moves from a unnamed city and country to a new land. It could be New York City; it could be Sydney (Tan’s Australian); it could be San Francisco; it could be any seaport anywhere in the world where immigrants come to make a new life for themselves. As he walks from his home to the docks, sad wife and daughter holding each of his hands, we see giant jet-black, spiky dragon tails slithering around the tenement neighborhood. It’s a two-page spread, alarming in its free-floating anxiety—we never see dragon heads, but we know they’re there—and its oppressiveness. Those tails look like tendrils, encasing and smothering the city. No wonder the family wants out.

The drawing doesn’t want us to believe the city actually swarms with giant dragons—in a later full-page spread, as the wife and daughter walk home to the now-empty house, the tails look like shadows and smoke, which doesn’t make them any less threatening. Rather, Tan’s using fantasy in the right way—as a bravura, overloaded way of conveying symbolically the urgency of real-world terrors and hopes. The family isn’t actually beset by dragons, but oppressive governments and societies sure feel monstrous.

Just before the sequence, the comic begins with a succession of quiet panels. Each shows, in close-up, an aspect of the home the protagonist is leaving behind. A half-full teacup, a child’s drawing of the family, a clock, a hat hanging on a nail. The next page shows, in a 3 x 3 grid sequence of the man picking up a framed portrait of the family, lovingly wrapping it, and packing it in a suitcase. The page’s final panel shows a feminine hand darting out to caress the protagonist’s hands. In two pages, Tan devotes enough to this everyday scene to establish it fully in our minds, to give it emotional resonance, to make it stick. Good thing—it gets reiterated, and tweaked, later on in the book.

Throughout, The Arrival merges the quotidian with the fantastical. The protagonist’s arrival in the new city shows off all kinds of whoppers—animals and insects that have never been seen in nature, taxis and buses that fly, appliances that are dazzling in their oddness, signs and newspaper headlines in a hieroglyphic language that exists only in Tan’s imagination, fashion styles that could be Oriental as imagined by a Martian. Tan draws it in the same Van Allsburg-influenced way, which means the most wondrous things and the most pedestrian items are all bewildering and fresh.

It’s a precise, economical way of rendering a newcomer’s experience in any unfamiliar country. It all looks almost normal; most of The Arrival’s comedy comes from the man’s attempts to work with new devices and appliances. He gradually adjusts by learning to trust people, including himself, as he rushes headlong into job searches, grocery-shopping with unfamiliar foodstuffs, and explorations of neighborhoods and markets. Each supporting character, human and animal, pulses with life and specificity. These immigrants, somewhat new to the place themselves, tell their own stories of how they got to the City. Do we believe that one man, a new and dear friend, escaped from a place where giant men roamed the night streets with huge vacuum cleaners, sucking up citizens? No—but we believe in the environment he creates with his words (which, of course, we don’t see). After all, the mood evoked in the drawings feels a lot like real-life night raids and horrible visions of Kristallnacht dance in our heads. An old survivor of a war—he lost his leg, his village, and his wife—limps with our man to a gentle, florid pastoral scene in which a wonderful-looking game is being played outdoors with immigrants. It looks like a cross between bocci, marbles, and chess—we only see the gameplay in glimpses, but it looks like something we would want to play for hours and hours. Our man talks to a woman on the bus who came to the City as a child slave, but still finds enough goodness in her to teach him how to ride the bus. Nearly every major character has a pet, a delicately rendered animal that’s new to the protagonist and our eyes, and these animals are vivid and personable.

Every character has personality. They might be intended as generalized creations that symbolically portray various immigrant experiences, but they are also concrete, specific people. The same goes for our man, who might be naïve but who is clearly no dope. He’s an origami master, and his letters home to his family become swans and herons before he puts them in the envelope. He learns quickly, and is charming enough to make friends quickly, too. His formal attire and quietness hide a playful streak revealed in his love of his newfound pet—the cutest weirdass animal ever, seen on the book’s cover—and in a glorious dinner amongst new friends.

The Arrival’s pace is gentle. Tan modulates beautifully between eye-popping expanses and close-ups, slowly crawling interactions and action sequences. His evocation of silent cinema—think of the hallucinatory nature of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but warmer and more benign—and eye for weirdness and detail makes the reader slow down. My eyes wouldn’t let go of pages for minutes at a time, even after I’d absorbed the action that took place. Each panel sustains and deserves deep attention. The Arrival is not just the protagonist’s, but Tan’s as well—with this comic, he’s emerged as a major cartoonist and crafted one of the year’s best graphic novels.

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RELATED: Billy Mernit offers a lovely appreciation of The Arrival as well. I wrote about Chris Van Allsburg here.

Growing up with John Porcellino

Like Matt Feazell’s Cynicalman, John Porcellino’s long-running minicomic King-Cat is so simplistically drawn that I, at times, think I know third-graders who are better craftsmen. Porcellino reduces figures and landscapes to near-stick figures and bold squiggles. He’s not much for rigorously detailed faces, objects, animals, or much of anything else, really. His art is high-contrast—stark black-and-white, with no hatchmarks or shading or even the pretense of shadowing. He rarely even attempts realistic perspective—Porcellino’s the most consciously two-dimensional cartoonist I can think of. In a back issue, Porcellino defends his “content over form” work, in an irritating manner much like fellow intentional-simpleton James Kochalka’s perennial rants that “craft is the enemy.” (And, like Kochalka, Porcellino is beholden to the shibboleths of indie/post-punk rock and culture, regardless of how well that ethos fits the current story he’s drawing.) In an early-1990s piece ironically titled “Well Drawn Funnies #0,” Porcellino tries to explain:

A lot of people complain about my art—they tell me I can’t draw, my art is garbage, etc., etc. Maybe I can explain. My first artistic loves were the “Hairy Who” from my hometown of Chicago, and other “funky” artists. Their art was direct, bold, and often embraced ugliness. In high school I discovered “punk rock” and fell in love with the tortured “bad is good” school—Flipper, Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, etc.

About this same time I discovered the underground and “new wave” comics of the early-mid ‘80s, like Gary Panter, Mark Marek, Lynda Barry. A big turning point came when I discovered that a crappy line, scratched on paper, was infinitely more “realistic” than the most labored rendering. Especially in this day and age. Why bother spending 3 hours on a drawing if the world could end tomorrow? Or I could spend time watching TV instead? Anyhow, if the world is a piece of shit, art that denies that is in essence a lie. It is more important to me to make art that is an honest expression of my life than it is to make pictures people think are well drawn.

Oh dear. It’s easy to pick apart this desperate bid for “authenticity.” First, the world is a piece of shit, granted, but it’s also more beautiful than we can imagine and more expressive than any individual could ever understand. The inability to hold these multiple strains of thoughts in mind simultaneously is a sure sign of foolishness. To use this as an excuse—shitty art equals honesty and integrity; craft is dishonesty and commercialism—is adolescent nonsense. Besides, this sort of art brut is in itself incredibly stylized. As with so many consciously anti-craft cartoonists (or lo-fi indie-rock bands, or Dogme 95-aspiring filmmakers), Porcellino went to art school. He’s no outsider artist. The cover of some King-Cat issues are delicately and realistically rendered. “Ugly” comics work, when they work at all, because they wrench away our expectations of sanitized blandness or manufactured cuteness, because they make us conscious of this comic being the work of this particular sensibility, and therefore make us less complacent about and more suspicious of the mass-market stuff that’s fed to us. Sure, it’s self-expression, but most mini-comics are as sweated over as any Marvel or DC pamphlet, in part because it’s usually one person—rather than a team—who does all the work of writing, drawing, lettering, assembling, reproducing, and mailing. As Dolly Parton once said, “it takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” To make it plain, it took a lot of labor to make Porcellino’s comics this grungy.

It’s difficult, though, to stay mad at Porcellino. “Well Drawn Funnies #0”—which is, incidentally, mostly hand-lettered text—is obviously a provocateur’s throwing down the gauntlet, written by a very young man, and not the work of a mature theorist. We’ve all said stupid things when young; I forgive him. Furthermore, he’s got a point. The strip, published in issue #21, came out in September 1990, at the height of the post-Watchmen/post-Dark Knight Returns emphasis on steroidal style and revisionist plot mechanics—and only faux-revisionist, just enough so that the teenage boys don’t give up on superheroes entirely. Computerized coloring was just coming into fashion. Even the independent comics companies seemed to have a house style. Image Comics, founded just two years later, billed itself as creator-centered, and where cartoonists kept the rights to their work—but the content and drawing style was just as formulaic as that of the companies these cartoonists used to work for. Porcellino’s bid for a line that reflected the cartoonist more fully is amateurish, but a point worth making against comics as pure commodity.

Besides, in all honesty, I look forward to each new issue of King-Cat. (Issue #68 just came out, the first new one in a year. Hallelujah!) His omnibus best-of collection—the new King-Cat Classix—selects the best from the first 50 issues. It’s convinced me that, if he ever believed the aforementioned sentiments of “Well Drawn Funnies” in the first place, he doesn’t subscribe to them anymore, at least not fully. This anthology is published by Drawn & Quarterly, one of the most high-end comics publishers in action. Their production standards are so high that it’s initially hard to justify Porcellino’s crude art, originally hand-stapled and folded and photocopied, in its roster.

Porcellino’s gifts as a storyteller are tremendous, however, and the art grows on me. I found the comic last year, through Buenaventura Press, and was immediately impressed by the cartoonist’s lulling sense of pacing. The artwork, full of white space and open vistas, makes the reader fill in the details with her imagination, making it seem more personal and iconic. “These characters could be me, or my friends, or my dog,” I found myself saying as I stared at the minimalist art. “This suburbia could be mine.” The stories, mostly low-key vignettes and dreams from Porcellino’s life, are snapshots from a life in progress. Like Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, King-Cat ardently opposes “big” moments or era-defining statements. It’s the quotidian stuff, the job-related effluvia, the little victories, and the perfect mixtapes that fascinate Porcellino. He’s content to place a comics adaptation of a Zen koan he’s mulling over next to a remembrance of playing a rock gig at a house party.

The later issues—I started with issue #62 (2003)—are suffused with calm. The spareness is charming, in part because it belies how well-constructed the narratives are. These might be little stories, but they’re not fragments. They feel like complete thoughts—even the one-page tone poems. Everything here’s so personal, so idiosyncratic, that the comic is sometimes embarrassing to read. An issue of King-Cat feels like a letter from an old friend, not something intended to be read by a couple thousand people. Issue #64 (June 2005) is devoted to his father, who had just recently died, and it’s one of the more touching comics I’ve read this decade. A mix of Zen koans, prose-only stories, comics, and single-panel cartoons, Porcellino builds up a portrait of a generous, unpretentious man in the most unpretentious format possible—on paper stock you can buy at Kinko’s, in 32 pages, in black-and-white, on a cozy trim size of 5.25 x 8.25 inches. It looks simple, like something we could pull off in our spare time. It’s only when reading again, and noticing the precision of language and image, that it dawns on us that the ruminative, Buddha-like gentleness of the comic conveys difficult truths and uncommon depth.

Again, I started with the later issues. So, King-Cat Classix, which selects from 1989 to 1996 (the early years), is a revelation. Frankly, it’s rough sledding, too. The later issues marry the fidelity to the punk lifestyle to the resonance of Zen teachings, but the early stuff doesn’t have much of the latter. There’s a lot of unbridled id here. Explicit sex fantasies, fart jokes, one-off fictions, an incomprehensible serial (“The Violent Garden”) that riffs off soap operas, stories of drunken bouts of weirdness, and morbid (but inchoate) thoughts on death and suicide are all here. The art is not clean and airy as it would be in later issues. It’s not always clear what objects are being drawn, and the backgrounds are smudgy, the figures shaky, and the narratives freewheeling and unhinged. It takes about halfway through the 384-page volume for Porcellino to find his style.

Still, the quintessential artist peeks out from between the dirty blinds. Porcellino’s affection for cats and road trips makes him a winning narrator, even at his most self-consciously earnest or irritating. Through the use of rich blacks, he conveys night well. The über-Expressionist quality of his work lends itself well to adapting his dreams onto the page, and so they’re more interesting than they have a right to be.

Plus, he’s figured out something about autobiographical comics that few memoir-based cartoonists discover—the best way to convey your life fully is to make the other characters within it as interesting as you are. Pekar, Joe Matt (Peepshow), and Lynda Barry (One Hundred Demons) all understand this; occasionally, they even serve as mere vessels for stories about the people around them, and the cities in which they live. Porcellino’s friends are losers, layabouts, dreamers, and drunkards, rambling through Illinois and Colorado, and they’re all engaging.

The exception here, and it’s unfortunate, are his women. In the omnibus, Carolyn and Kara may well be the same girlfriend (and eventually first wife), but it’s hard to tell. His sister is a presence through her absence; there’s an intimation that she died, but it’s not made clear. Of the women, only Porcellino’s mom comes through with a forceful personality until midway through the book. It’s a serious lapse.

Fortunately, he improves in his characterization (of everyone) as he goes along. This is another way of saying that he becomes less self-absorbed as the issues move forward. Issue #38, the “All Sam” issue, is a triumph. As with #64, it’s a tribute issue, but this time it’s devoted to the recently departed, thoroughly loved family dog. Samantha Love, a golden Labrador Retriever, belongs on a list of all-time great Porcellino characters. His observations of her—she bullies the other dog, she eats cat poop straight from the litterbox, she sighs loudly when she wants to sleep on the couch that’s currently occupied by a human—are so acute that, by the end of it, we know this dog. It’s our dog. We hate to see her leave this mortal coil. She resonates.

John Porcellino, despite (or maybe because of) his simple style, makes life resonate. It’s not always a good life, it’s rarely an easy one, but it’s his. He offers it up to us, issue by issue, and this act of generosity is as pure a form of love as we’re likely to see in comics these days.

A world of quiet wonder

All these points in the progress of Gasoline Alley illustrate that if you mirror humanity, if people can really see themselves in your work, they will want to follow it, to go on seeing themselves. A strip family, with all its complications of in-laws and so-on, will become almost as real to the readers as their own. If you can once arrive at this interest, and then sustain it, you’re in.

—Frank King (1959)

As with so many good things, I was introduced to Frank King’s Gasoline Alley through the pages of a Drawn & Quarterly annual volume. Volume #3 (2000) features roughly 30 full-color reproductions of King’s Sunday pages from the 1920s and 1930s, most of which was loaned to the company for use by Peepshow cartoonist Joe Matt. Underneath his festering obsessions with porn, short Asian girls, and annoying his long-suffering friends, Matt apparently has an unexpected taste for the gentle and G-rated. The issue’s cover and endpapers, designed by Chris Ware, mimic King’s drawing style and arresting, warm color schemes.

Gasoline Alley’s punchlines rarely induce guffaws, but rather aim for grins or low-level chuckles. Humor or suspense, of course, were the primary entryways into newspapers for many cartoonists, so King’s strips end on mild jokes. Laughter, however, is ultimately the least of his concerns in these Sunday pages. The early pages in D&Q #3 were devoted to Walt Wallet and his gang of automobile enthusiasts. The car was the hot new thing in 1918—the year Gasoline Alley began—and the jokes and weeks-long storylines revolve around these amateur mechanics, their kooky foibles, and their finicky “newfangled” contraptions.

In February 1921, however, the strip abruptly changes. One evening, Walt hears a knock on the door and opens it and discovers a baby on his doorstep. He names the child Skeezix, and decides to take care of the boy. Through Walt’s anxious, loving eyes, we watch Skeezix grow up. Gasoline Alley is one of the first comic strips in which its characters (more or less) aged in real time. Skeezix becomes our boy. We see him take his first steps, lose his first tooth, make friends, find a girlfriend, get married, and ultimately have kids of his own. Walt grows old—his pudgy stomach solidifies, his hair gradually whitens—along with the strip. The supporting characters—the black housekeeper Rachel, the town doctor (Doc), and others—age as well. So does the town and, as it does, it grows larger and becomes more urban. Through the strip, we see America’s evolution during the first few decades of the twentieth century.

Soon after Skeezix’s arrival, Gasoline Alley’s focus shifted from vaudeville gags and slapstick to domestic life and the discovery of nature. Unlike so many strips, Gasoline Alley isn’t trying to wow us—with either striking design or with a wild punchline—but, rather, wants to slowly, almost imperceptibly astonish us with quiet wonder.

Everything—cars, houses, streets—is rounded and supple. Even hubcaps look fleshy and as organic as the lovably fat Walt and his big, soft shoes. The line between the hills and the buildings is mighty thin when King wields the pen. His line, indeed, was thin, which gives everything rendered a sense of delicacy, further developing the poignancy of his rich characterization. At the same time, though, Gasoline Alley is lush and resonant and full of depth. King’s line may have had a relatively uniform level of thinness, but his sense of perspective—particularly with regard to natural horizon lines in the outdoors—is superb.

Where he shows true mastery, though, is in his Sunday pages. The daily strips, which are being reprinted in full (at least, through the King years) by Drawn & Quarterly, concern an exaggerated, knockabout of home life. In the full-page Sunday strips, though, King lets his freak flag fly. More often than not, Walt or Skeezix—and, sometimes, both at once—goes on a fantastic daydream. They head to the North Pole, deliver toys for Santa Claus, explore the ocean depths and the world of mermaids, get shrunk to insect size, and get spooked by Halloween ghouls. Everything turns out okay in the end, but many of these pages give rise to anxieties and nightmares as rich as those in Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. King experiments with design—in one, Skeezix digs his way to China and, midway through the page, the panels turn upside-down to reflect the change in hemisphere. Layout gets played with as well. Several Sunday strips are actual really big single panels that have been divided into smaller panels, so that we can read the page as a single image or as a regular, divided comic strip. (The effect is disorienting, as we see Skeezix scramble and talk throughout multiple panels, while we’re simultaneously keeping in mind that it’s really just one image that he’s traipsing through. King highlights comics’ ability to mess with time and space in the way, emphasizing how odd it is that we accept multiple images of the same characters on the same page.) Occasionally, King draws to emulate woodcut prints, intentionally eschewing his trademark style. Despite the nostalgic strain that runs through the strip, Gasoline Alley is thoroughly modern on Sundays.

For all the trippiness, the best Sunday pages were those in which Walt and Skeezix simply strolled or drove through the countryside having little adventures. The pacing of the strip is slow and meandering, basically requesting that you linger on each panel, on each deft stroke of line. King wants us to simmer down instead of speed up—Gasoline Alley is fundamentally, for all the concentration on cars, a rural, country strip. The comic wants you to pay attention to each flicker of the always-moving landscape. Comics scholar Jeet Heer writes:

But the pedagogic Sunday pages are more than just illustrated civic lessons. Walt is not trying to teach Skeezix how to think, but rather show him how to experience. The lessons are about noticing the world around you, paying attention to the changing seasons, the interplay of colors, styles of art. “I want you to grow up with an eye for the beauty about you,” Walt tells Skeezix on October 21, 1923. “It’s a source of much joy. Color even drops from the trees like rain after a shower. I could almost be a poet today!”

King’s poetry—the evidence of his genius—comes through best in his coloring. Instead of the solid, primary colors of most humor strips, Gasoline Alley’s colors are subtle, tender, and as close to naturalistic as the printing process would allow in the 1920s and 1930s. His grasp of outdoor life, of critters great and small, rings absolutely true even at the strip’s most fantastical, simply because of how richly the comic is colored. Even when objects are colored solidly instead of in gradations, King’s combinations of colors make each panel full of life.

The Drawn & Quarterly volumes #3 and #4 tried to reproduce these strips at their full ripeness, and approximate it well enough to engage me. But the pages they were reproducing were yellowed with age—it goes without saying that, like most newspaper strips pre-1970, the original art was discarded soon after publication. The coloring held an unfortunate brown shading. Some panels were splotchy. The pages weren’t reprinted at their original, tabloid-page size, so you have to squint to read King’s loopy, wide lettering. It’s not the company’s fault; the Montreal-based publisher holds extremely high production standards, but it probably didn’t have much to work with. King was so superb a cartoonist, though, that he survives production problems.

All the same, I’m going to recommend, quite strongly, that you spend $100 on a book. Sunday Press Books has just published Sundays with Walt and Skeezix: 1921 through 1934, and it’s easily the best Gasoline Alley compilation I’ve ever seen or am likely to see in my lifetime. This deluxe edition, edited by Peter Maresca and designed by Chris Ware, includes a full-size facsimile of a Skeezix paper cut-out toy from 1927, oversize photos of King and his family in the 1910s and 1920s, photos of some of the various dolls and board games designed as Gasoline Alley< marketing tie-ins. The inside jacket, if you remove it from the book, shows reproductions of rare, original Gasoline Alley art. The endpapers are fabulous, tiny checkerboard patterns featuring Walt’s beloved car. Essays by Heer, Donald Phelps, and Tim Samuelson give historical, aesthetic, and industrial context for the strip and King’s methods. (Heer’s essay, in particular, is enlightening and heartfelt. The quote above comes from his introduction.) So, the production is topnotch.

It’s all just dressing, however, for the comics themselves. Splendidly reprinted at their original size—it’s a huge book—and scanned at the highest resolution imaginable, the Sunday pages chosen represent the best, funniest, oddest, and most delightfully drawn and colored strips from the strip’s earliest years. The yellowing and fading has been corrected insofar as it’s possible. Each strip is carefully dated. At full size, the reader can’t help but notice King’s little details—the bluish-gray underside of clouds, the whiskers of Santa Claus, the wrinkle of bedsheets as Skeezix sleeps, the almost-pillowy look of both cars and humans—as well as his dazzling pacing and understanding of full-page layout design.

Critics call Gasoline Alley a sentimental strip, and it’s true that it’s not nearly as biting as Li’l Abner, Mutt and Jeff, or other humor strips of its era. Seeing it in this format, though, as it was originally seen, only emphasizes the strip’s sense of fragility. If King’s line weren’t so thin, or his colors were less subtle (instead of bold and self-assured), we wouldn’t be aware of the strip’s best years were created between the end of World War I and through the midst of the Great Depression. (The hard, thick, bold lines of Li’l Abner and Dick Tracy suggest a level of strength that wasn’t felt by very many people. Maybe that was the point.) Something quivers in King’s art. Something makes us want to give Walt a hug, despite the joviality he and his town projects. Sundays with Walt and Skeezix allows us to immerse ourselves in a smiling but rarely guffawing world. King pokes fun at his characters, but loves them too much to stick the knife in, or to let us forget that their world’s foundation is shaky.

King understands that gentleness is rarely rewarded in the real world, so, for about three decades, he gave tribute to it in one of the best works of American art the past century has brought us. Please pay tribute alongside him.

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If you’re still hesitant to plunk down the price of a month’s groceries on a single art book, try some sample pages at Roger Clark’s site. The comics/illustration art dealer has scanned his collection of King’s Sunday pages. When I win the lottery, this piece of original King art is mine.

Monsieur Lambert

“It seems that about every ten years in the early 20th century somebody invented the graphic novel. Most of the time, they seemed unaware of the previous attempts.”

—Seth

Throughout the 1930s, Lynd Ward created long-form “silent” novels that used only woodcut illustrations, in sequence, to tell a narrative. In his case, he acknowledged his predecessor Frans Masereel, but their work lacks most of the apparatus—speech balloons, panels, modern concepts of layout design, the interplay between words, images, and elapsed time—that makes up the grammar of comics. Other artists—Rodolphe Töpffer (the Swiss pioneer of the comic strip) in the 1840s, William Hogarth a century before that—basically created the long-form comic, in formats that were ultimately not taken up en masse. Oodles of children’s books, including pop-up books, could be characterized technically as graphic novels, in that the text and the images complement each other. In the mid-20th century, the French and the Belgians produced graphic novels (48-64 pages)—think of Tintin and Asterix—but these were serialized before being collecting in book form.

It’s not until Will Eisner’s 1978 book A Contract with God consciously called itself a “graphic novel” that the form became standardized. Contract, though, is a sort of aberration, given that it consists of four loosely-connected vignettes about 1930s tenement life in the Bronx, rather than a singular narrative. Art Spiegelman’s Maus further legitimized the form—though it, like Tintin, was too originally serialized.

Despite the aforementioned caveats, Contract more or less created the template for the graphic novel—stand-alone story not connected to previously existing characters; a tendency to veer away from pulp-fiction genres; a length substantially longer than the 24-page pamphlet; in a predominantly vertical trim size similar to a regular book. The most important distinction is that graphic novels have taken the structural form of comics, and not any of the other attempts to combine text and image that percolated before 1978.

Among these attempts was Jean-Jacques Sempé’s Monsieur Lambert in 1965. His wispy, whimsical line captures the foibles and pretensions of middle-class people in quick strokes. Sometimes, he draws a full background, but more often he gives us just enough to suggest the full contours of a place, as if his pen were a spotlight illuminating a chosen corner of an otherwise dark room. He shines that light, almost always, on the perfect spot that displays the telling, funny detail.

The famed French cartoonist and New Yorker cover illustrator primarily works in single-panel cartoons, not comics.

Monsieur Lambert is, in a sense, no different. Each page consists of variations of a single scene—the interior of the restaurant Chez Picard, populated by its regular customers. The image is crowded by speech balloons that give us context. To the left, a group sits at a long table, arguing politics, specifically whether or not the Left is in decline since 1936. In the top middle, Monsieur Cazenave dines alone, hurriedly, much to the consternation of the waitress Lucienne. Two groups of three sit—one group seems animated and jovial, while the group nearest to us (in terms of Sempé’s slightly titled, birds-eye perspective) eats every day in silence. To the right, there’s a group of four, discussing soccer. This is Lambert’s table. Although each gentlemen (and there’s all men except for Lucienne) dresses about the same, our eyes immediately go to Lambert. He’s younger, thinner, and has more hair than all the men around him.

Each page’s image has a caption underneath it. The caption comments on the action above it, in the first-person plural. Even so, we know that the speaker is a member of Lambert’s table—Sempé sets him off subtly by his dark, shaded jacket; everyone else, Lambert included, dresses in white.

An example: Early on, we realize that Lambert’s most notable by his absence. When he breaks the routine of the everyday lunch by not showing up—and thus also breaking up the repetition of images—everyone wonders why. His first no-show causes the lunchtime crowd to bring on a cascade of speech balloons, crowding the frame: “Isn’t Lambert coming? That’s funny…” “What have you done with Lambert?” “I hope he’s not unwell?” Only Lambert’s table of friends is silent. Turn the page, and they respond: “He never said a word to us. Well, actually, we didn’t ask him…” says one. Another proclaims, “We don’t like to be nosy about our friends’ private lives.” The third is even loftier: “That’s what friends are for…”

Some friends.

Underneath the two images, however, lies a subtle truth. The running caption reads: “Of course, Lambert’s absence didn’t go unnoticed. However, we were able to field the rather pointed questions easily enough… after all our little group is well known for its profoundly liberal attitude. This made us feel Lambert’s worrying absence even more acutely.”

The caption thus works simultaneously with the page’s image (as a propulsive element, moving the narrative along through the eyes of one of its characters) and against it (as a contradiction, providing thoughts that contradict what we’re seeing). Unlike most children’s books, the illustrations, speech balloons, and captions often work against together, as counterpoints, or running two parallel lines of thought that only initially seem unrelated.

Lambert’s absence is benign. He’s found a girlfriend. Knowing this, the dry joviality of the bistro seems a little sad, a little hermetically sealed. These men get together every day for lunch out of friendship, but also out of loneliness. They discuss the same old things every day with slightly different variations and know each Monday what they’ll be having to eat. Lambert’s out there chasing a woman and living life to the fullest.

When he’s there, Lambert regales them with tales of his beautiful girlfriend, which sets off stories about the older men’s romantic escapades. When Lambert’s gone, the love/sex talk continues. All of this occurs within the above image despite the captions’ insistence that football and male camaraderie are the primary topics of conversation.

The drawings are marvelous, reflecting the same-old-same-old (but delicately varied) conversations that we get scene after scene. Despite the fact that each image takes place in the same bistro, and that the restaurant is seen from the same angle, Sempé inserts sly details—the ever-present cat, a single-line curl of smoke from a cigarette, the minimalist but exact facial expressions, the portions of background shown and hidden—that differentiate between the images.

Still, the images are basically static. The variations and winsome but slight and, without the captions (telling us what day it is, what today’s menu is), each one could be a stand-alone variation of the same image—a sketchbook of a bistro. (Indeed, the narrative is bookended by Chez Picard’s menu.) The speech balloons settle almost on top of each other, and it’s not always clear from their layout that everyone’s not speaking at the same time. That’s part of Sempé’s point about conversation in restaurants—the talk overlaps. Still, it’s clear from how we’re expected to read the book that it is an illustrated novella, a graphic novel that is not quite a comic.

We see this a lot, as previously mentioned, with children’s books. But Sempé’s model didn’t catch on, and there’s not a lot of adult graphic novels of its kind. Monsieur Lambert is a quiet, small gem, but also a somewhat lonely one.

Bootlegs for the bande dessinée crowd?

Bless all those scanlating souls out there. For those of you who don’t know what scanlation is, here’s a long, useful primer. I’m tired, so here’s Wikipedia to take it away:

Scanlation (sometimes scanslation) is a term used for manga comics which have been scanned and translated by fans and pirates from its native language (usually Japanese or Korean) to another language, commonly English, French or Spanish. Scanlations are generally distributed for free via the Internet, either by direct download, BitTorrent or IRC. The word scanlation comes from scan and translation.

Despite the questionable legality, copyright issues, and ethics of all this activity, and despite the fact that all this work is being done by non-professionals for no pay, scanlation is basically a cottage industry. There are lots (and lots, and lots, and lots) of sites devoted to making previously unavailable Japanese comics accessible to English-speaking Westerners. Usually, scanlation sites are devoted to specific genres of manga, but several are across-the-board. This amateur phenomenon has reached such heights that The Comics Journal has written extensively on the subject, and a book–Watching Anime, Reading Manga–that explores the subject in one of its chapters. It won’t be long before there’s a media-studies course on the aesthetic, sociopolitical, ethical, and linguistic concerns involved.

I’m very interested in amateur communities that crop up around specific (most often cult or obscure) art, usually in a conversational and haphazard fashion, primarily so that they can document and disseminate art that would be otherwise inaccessible. This folks—be they bootleg traders of live concerts, scanlators, fansubbers—know full well that there’s no profit in all this. In fact, given the amount of work involved, the cost of maintaining a website, and the oblique but ever-present threat of litigation, these amateurs are actually losing a lot.

I’m not as interested in fan fiction (read: not at all), whereby fans write new episodes of Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer using the parameters and mythologies established by the shows’s creators. I understand the impulses–both the egotistical and the communal–to create art that’s readily available; I’m a blogger, after all. We all want attention. Fan fiction writers can get it by piggybacking on the work of others. (That’s not, by the way, a criticism. It’s just a fact. Joe Blow, who dreams of being a sci-fi writer, might not get any attention or readers if he just published his own stories for free on his site. If he writes a story starring Dana Scully, however, he’s guaranteed that his stories will at least be found by googlers searching for The X-Files, and means that he’ll tap into a community of like-minded fans.)

But scanlation amounts to essentially a curatorial function. The emphasis is on making the work of others accessible, to expanding the manga’s audience through translation, high-quality scanning, and downloading capability, and to preserving comics that aren’t popular enough to be translated and reprinted in America by Tokyopop or Viz. The scanlators themselves are mostly invisible, known more through the quality (or lack thereof) of their work rather than through their own creations.

Again, all that’s interesting to me. But it’s not the focus of this post, for a simple reason: Manga’s not as interesting to me as comics from outside Japan. Sure, there are artists I love (Jiro Taniguchi–please read The Walking Man, if nothing else) and respect (Osamu Tezuka and Yoshihiro Tatsumi). Manga’s influence has been impressive but the standardized aesthetics–and I know there are exceptions upon exceptions, potential naysayers–and the dominance of the fantasy/sci-fi/horror genres leaves me cold. It’s telling that, of Japanese comics, I greatly prefer the domestic/daily life stuff to the fantastical stuff that typically makes it to America, which is 1. why scanlation sites are so valuable—they provide an outlet for this; and 2. why I like Ponent Mon more than any other manga publisher.

So, I’m not gonna delve into copyright, or give an extensive critique of manga, or anything like that. Rather, I’m posing a basic question: Why is scanlation limited to manga? I’m an ardent reader/champion of European work, particularly Francophonic comics. (The Montreal-based press Drawn & Quarterly is my hero.) But I know from reading Bart Beaty’s columns for the Comics Reporter that there’s a whole world of French, Belgian, and Canadian comics that most Americans won’t see because they’re in French. Argentina, Mexico, and the Phillippines are all big, as is the Malaysian comics scene. The Spanish, German, Italian, and Dutch scenes, taken collectively, rival the enormity of Japan’s output. The Franco-Belgian comics world has yielded as much invention, iconography, and theoretical discourse as anything produced in America or in Japan.

There are, however, few scanlation sites out there that aren’t devoted to manga. Why is that? Are there sites that I’m missing? I assume there’s a sizable cult of Euro-comics readers here, so why hasn’t a group (or several groups) formed to address the lack? What is there about Japan—as opposed to Malaysia, China, or Korea, all Asian countries with major comics industries—that holds us under sway? Certainly, there’s more people in this country (and in England and Canada) who’ve taken high-school French and Spanish than there are who have even moderately fluent in Japanese. So, why aren’t there obsessive amateurs out there providing us with a fumetto fix? There’s enough action-adventure, Western, and sci-fi bande dessinée to provide genre fans with material to translate, but no French-comics projects that I can see.

It’s enough to make me want to start up on Spanish again. Until I’m fluent enough to think this through, though, does anyone have any sites or suggestions to recommend? Does anyone want to start up a group? Please, help us all out.

Toys

I like Chris Ware’s comics but don’t love them. Granted, he’s one of the most gifted comics technicians ever to put ink to paper. His work foregrounds and explodes the grammar and structural concerns inherent in cartooning. At his very best, he marries his formalism and experimentalism to emotionally moving narratives.

The problem is he’s rarely at his best on the latter end, so his work often leaves me cold. His character designs are so abstracted and simplified that his characters, and thus their situations, don’t draw me into them, or into his world. This doesn’t seem to be his intent, anyway. He uses closeups sparingly; his colors are always muted and solid, rather than vibrant and shaded; his pages read like diagrams, and it’s (intentionally) difficult to find an entryway for the eye; his buildings dwarf his characters; the natural world—trees, animals, rolling hills—is drawn as schematically as possible, like architectural blueprints. Ware’s humor—and he is very funny—tends towards a single tone, a conflation of irony and melancholia. The abundance of deadpan dialogue, super-sad events, and super-arch voiceovers can be deadening.

All of this lends a distancing sense to Ware’s comics. Even at its most absorbing, the experience of reading The Acme Novelty Library is like looking through a microscope. As a result of all this, Ware is a cartoonist whose work I admire more than I adore.

His best work is his 2000 epic, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Even there, he sometimes resorts to what I initially thought was an irritating tic. Interspersed throughout the long story are designs and instructions for cut-out toys. I figured Ware included all this stuff in his comics as elaborate jokes, as conceptual art intended to articulate, too obviously, the diagrammatic nature of drawing and reading comics. The incredibly detailed instructions, and digressions from them, are funnier and more useful than the end results. So, I never imagined that the toys could actually be built, like model airplanes or Lego buildings. Besides, I never wanted to cut up, fold, and paste together pages from my (expensive) full-color issues to find out if his toy designs worked.

To use an art-theory term, the toys are diegetic—i.e., internal to the fictional world that Ware created. A foldout toy of a robot is a mockup of a robot that appears in one of Jimmy's dream sequences; a large toy is intended to be a 3-D replica of Jimmy's childhood home, which appears in the comic; a cut-out zoetrope is a model of one that appears in the comic.

It turns out, though, that there’s someone as obsessive as Ware out there. Following Ware’s instructions and diagrams, he has constructed various toys from Acme Novelty Library pages. They work. The above picture is the Corrigan homestead.

Among other things, this complicates my understanding of Ware’s cartooning. If he didn’t mean these toys to be ironic catchphrases, but instead wants us to build them, this means that he wants us to interact with his comics on a deeper, more visceral level than by merely flipping the pages. Despite the distancing nature of his art, Ware wants us to immerse ourselves in his cartoons, cutting out and manipulating its pages, encouraging (and sometimes forcing) our eyes read the panel in different patterns than we’re used to. The opening section of Jimmy Corrigan requires that we rotate the book 90 degrees clockwise to read it properly, and then turn it back to the regular position after the first four pages. He’s alerting us that this reading experience will be different than any you’ve ever read before.

All of which sounds like postmodern gimmickry. Ware’s oeuvre is very much comics about comics—how they’re created, and how they’re read. But I don’t mind postmodernism, in part because I think it’s not well-defined enough to irritate me. On the right, conservatives tend to define postmodernism as anything modern that they don’t like. On the left, liberals tend to refer to art with “transgressive” political concerns—about race, gender, sex, art, and capitalism—as postmodern, even if these themes have been addressed in countless works of art pre-1960. “Postmodernism” is a term with political, not aesthetic, concerns. Literally, it just means “after modernism,” which, if you think about it, isn’t much of a definition. It’s also worth noting that, in literature and comics anyway, few of the people most often cited as quintessential postmodernists actually refer to themselves that way. William H. Gass, a critic and philosopher as well a high priest of postmodernism, calls his prose “late modern.” I doubt Ware’s used any iteration of the word “postmodernism” to define his work. Thomas Pynchon, that grandmaster of the style—well, we’ve got no idea what he thinks about the term.

Postmodernism is a shorthand term, but who knows what it’s shorthand for? In any case, these cut-out toys indicate that Ware’s comics are rooted as much in the past as in some imagined newfangledness. Comics as an artform are 150 years old. Ware’s layout and design elements evoke turn-of-the-century (20th, not 21st) advertisements, record covers, posters, and product labels. (Ware, incidentally, edits The Rag-time Ephemeralist, a magazine devoted to ragtime and American old-timey culture.) His stories featuring Quimby the Mouse look like storyboards for 1920s silent cartoons.

And make-your-own paper toys are products of the 1950s, if not before. I finally get it. Ware wants us to read his comics—intended for adults—with the same immersive commitment that children bring to favorite picture books. Dog-ear them, color in them, make origami out of them, don’t be afraid to smudge them. The Acme Novelty Library is conceptual art, sure, but it’s not meant for museums or academic tomes.

I’m still on the fence about Ware. Seeing the cut-outs, though, made me aware that the academic theory’s not just abstract with him, but is right there on the page, ready to be used.

QB's favorite books of 2006 (comics)

Sorry for the slight delay…

I’m biased against men-in-tights comics but, even so, 2006 was a groundbreaking and stellar year in medium, in a way that rivals 1999 for cinema. Women cartoonists forced their way into popular acclaim and mainstream critical discourse. Comics began to address 9/11 in practically every genre, to mixed results. Y: The Last Man pushed on with its examination of gender politics, all under the mask of high-falutin’ adventure and schlock violence. Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly continued to reprint fantastic newspaper strips (Moomin, Peanuts, Gasoline Alley, Dennis the Menace, Popeye, Krazy Kat), peppering these lavishly produced volumes with critical commentary and tidbits, revealing that comics has a history and a canon worthy of the rest of 20th-century art.

The alternative/underground vanguard keeps on keepin’ on. R. Crumb published his portraits of blues/country/early-jazz musicians; the slashes are intentional—Crumb shows how the boundaries between the genres were blurred in the early part of the last century). Joe Matt got out of his bed and published the first new issue of Peepshow in five years. Dylan Horrocks got out two issues of Atlas within twelve months, wiping away a four-year drought. Kim Deitch brought forth Shadowland, a collection of his interconnected, cutely drawn but eerily disturbing stories from the 1980s.

Top Shelf was, until 2006, considered the weird redheaded stepchild of fellow alternative publishers, well behind the prestige of Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly. That’s unfair, of course—Top Shelf did publish Craig Thompson’s Good-Bye Chunky Rice and Blankets, after all. In 2006, however, Top Shelf had the courage to publish Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s art-porn epic Lost Girls, a book that has ended up on so many best-of lists that I lost track, and that has sold so well that Top Shelf can swim in money for the next couple of years. (It also reprinted Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, thank God.) It’s now a major player.

Another alternative press appeared and garnered attention—First Second Books. With its focus on European stars Lewis Trondheim, Eddie Campbell, and Joann Sfar, and on all-ages narratives that are still aesthetically challenging, First Second positioned itself as providing comics that are distinct from the aforementioned alternative presses.

Not that the mainstream crowd didn’t try to dig into the alternative branch. Gilbert Hernandez’s Sloth, one of this year’s most avant-garde and deeply awarding works, was published by Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics. Two traditional book presses published two of the most acclaimed graphic novels of 2006: Pantheon Books published Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken with Plums and Houghton Mifflin put out Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.

And, apparently, this manga thing is for real.

So, the field of 2006 comics was both wide and deep. That makes choosing my favorites—and I read a lot of comics this year—very, very difficult. It’s a nice problem to have. So, without further adieu, here we go.

#1: Get A Life by Dupuy and Berberian. For 20 years, Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian have written and drawn—it’s impossible to tell where one’s hand ends and the other begins—their Monsieur Jean stories, chronicling the life of this moderately successful Parisian writer. These stories of city life are low-key, funny, and mature about love, friendship, and jobs. The Dupuy-Berberian style is a jazzy clear-line that conveys more in a few loops about a person’s personality and a neighborhood’s mood than a deep-focus photograph. This sexy breeziness in the art hides how dead-on the stories are about the travails of adulthood. The stories meander, but snap to attention just when you think they’re trailing into quiet, well-observed nothings. Get A Life collects several stories about our Jean—and he comes to seem like “our” man pretty quickly—and reproduces them in rich, subtle full-color. (They’re superb colorists.) Two of the longer Monsieur Jean stories have appeared in Drawn & Quarterly’s annual big anthology. For most, though, Get A Life represents the first time such a large body of Dupuy-Berberian’s work has been available in English. Run, do not walk, to buy it.

#2: Sloth by Gilbert Hernandez. Sloth might be Gilbert Hernandez’s first true graphic novel, in that it’s the first really long narrative comic he’s published that wasn’t originally seen in serialized form. In any case, it represents a sea change from his previous, equally great work. For one thing, it consciously draws from cinema—with wide panels that overwhelm the page, with landscape shots and close-ups that look like expansive movie screens. The pacing, as befits the book’s title, is slower than his Love and Rockets stuff; even his imagined biography Poison River moves in jolts and odd fragments. The large-scale black-and-white art pulls us into Sloth’s sinister dream world, but it’s the rich characters and strong writing that hold us. It’s the dream vision that ultimately feels different from Hernandez’s earlier work. Sloth has a lulling grace that never feels choppy or unfinished, even though it leaves several narrative threads tantalizingly open, and never bothers to explain its fundamental incidents. Lovely, enchanting, and supremely sexy, it’s a masterpiece by any standard, and perhaps points to a new direction in the cartoonist’s brilliant career. (For a fuller appreciation, go here.)

#3: Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip [volume 1]. Once every other year or so, I’m introduced to a work of art that makes me slap my forehead and wonder how I’ve missed this for so long. In 2006, it was Tove Jansson and her Moomin. Her strips possess quiet, insistent humor, enchanting narratives that digress into odd whims, and beautifully drawn flora and fauna. All the characters—even those that never speak—are fully realized, interesting, and funny creations. Jansson’s pacing is always just-so, moving things forward while giving the impression of stillness and stability. This handsomely produced volume, with full-color art painted directly onto the cloth binding, should charm any reader. If the cover doesn’t grab you, the interior will.

#4: We Are on Our Own by Miriam Katin. There hasn’t been a better debut in years. In 1944, Esther Levy and her young daughter Miriam fled Budapest, just a step ahead of the Nazis. They spend the rest of the war hiding from them and from their supposed saviors, the Russians, who turn out to be just as bad. This, in essence, is the story of We Are on Our Own, told from memory and recollected material by that daughter. She was old enough to remember the fear and day-to-day details, but not old enough to add it up without help from her still-living mother and relatives who survived the Holocaust. Katin’s art is heavily detailed and dramatic, but is done in scratchy gray pencil—the whole thing looks like the perfect sketchbook. It’s appropriate; the inherent instability of her lines and shadows underscores how shaky and wispy their lives were during this critical moment. Even in the full-color flash-forwards to the present look like they could be wiped away. The unsettled, unsettling art reflects the protagonists’ flight during WWII, and their subsequent flight from God after it.

#5: Castle Waiting by Linda Medley. In Castle Waiting, friends are the family you choose. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much how real life is, too. In any case, a group of misfits, outcasts, free spirits, and rebels converge on the mythical, enchanted Castle Waiting, and somehow form a family. Some of the folks are human, and some aren’t, but all have humanlike personalities—even the water sprite and the bird-like creature (Rackham) who runs the place. Each has his or her reasons to settle here. This panoply of kindly oddballs must contend with each other’s quirks, do chores, and settle into Castle Waiting. They all pull their weight. It’s tempting to say that Medley’s vision—funny, full of conflict, deeply feminist—is a microcosm of a modern multi-ethnic society. It is that, of course, but saying so makes Castle Waiting sound much more academic (and much less fun) than it is. Medley is fond of strange creatures, puns that draw on mythology and folklore, jokes about fantasy literature, and ribald slapstick that’s just barely appropriate for kids. Her thick line and bold hatchmarking makes her comics look like woodcuts. That sort of implied permanence gives the book an aura of myth. Indeed, the whole thing’s set (like a lot of fantasy fiction) in some undetermined, vaguely medieval past. But Medley’s concerns, and the diction throughout, are thoroughly modern and thoroughly human.

Honorable mentions:
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was an affecting family history and coming-out memoir, although its focus was so self-consciously literary and text-driven than Bechdel’s beautiful art was often overshadowed. In Chicken with Plums, Marjane Satrapi finally conquered the limitations of her über-minimalist drawing style and disjointed storytelling method to create an engaging portrait of an irascible charmer. Kim Deitch’s Shadowland uses vaudeville, the tent show circuit, and circus life as means to explore the seedy underbelly of American culture. You’ll never again look at the early 20th century with rose-tinted glasses. For sheer weirdness and grotesquerie, you can’t beat Lewis Trondheim’s A.L.I.E.E.N., which interweaves a series of wordless comics stories involving cruel aliens, sick humor, and lots and lots of poop.