The Comic Image, Part One

I must confess that as a child I never actually read comics. By read, I mean the activity of reading the narrative through the use of text, rather than image. I never really read the speech balloons or the captions. It wasn't because I was uninterested in the idea of following a story, or immersing myself in the development of character or plot. Rather, for me, the image was all. If the artist was successful, then the nuances of character, the mechanics of plot, and the thrust of the narrative could be conveyed entirely through images alone. Oh I read quite a bit as a child, devouring every horror novel I could-- even those not meant for the eyes of a small boy. But when it came to comic books, I reserved my right to separate text and image. There was something so basic, so elemental, in following sequentially composed images that appealed to the childhood cinematician in me. So often, while laying about in bed at night, or sitting in a particularly dull class in school, did sequences unfurl in my imagination, as sequential narratives. Comics seemed to validate those private moving-image fantasias of mine.


I never really experienced what that peculiar breed of reader known as the fanboy, experienced. I never integrated comic book narratives into my life so that I became obsessed with every little nuance of the character's existence. I never felt threatened by changes in plot or even the governing laws within the comic book's established setting. Instead, I felt betrayed whenever the art suffered. I was indignant when standards began to slip and the quality of line or coloring trailed off into factory production fare, in which the individual hand soon gave way to that of a company shill fobbing off work for a quick buck. I took comic art very seriously as a young lad, even forming a pantheon of the gold-standard artists within my little artistic heart. To me, the true artists of the trade were never those that strove for any form of realism in their work. Rather, it was those who understood that the art of comics was a language unto itself that had a tremendous amount of flexibility in the realm of expression. I always gravitated towards artists who cultivated exaggeration, those who leaned toward the comical grotesque and who understood and underscored the term comic, before anything else. What made a thing funny, was not always in a joke or a snappy punchline, but it was in the visual telling. And in this case, the telling was in the use of line, color, scale, and above all the elastic possibilities of the body. For me, the more fantastical it was, the better-- it was like the artistic equivalent of defying gravity.


This meant that I began to wander away from the superhero fodder that clogged the shelves and bins of every comic shop, and started to seek out the pleasures to be had in publications like MAD, where it seemed all bets were off. Although MAD has long since lost its satirical stamina and traded its bite for something more likely produced by a dentureless geriatric, it once had enough madcap invention to capture my imagination and hold onto it long past the point of contact. The diagrammatic powerplay of Antonio Prohías' Spy vs. Spy, and the one-two punch of Al Jaffee's back cover fold-ins, were powerful examples of comic art invention at its purest, with an ingenious and deceptive simplicity that meant more to me than any scripted superhero soap opera of the day. In each case, these were also supremely economical expressions of visual wit that needed nothing more than a single page to convey an idea or multiple ideas. They were dense micro-narratives that did not require thirty-two pages of textual support to carry their weight. This meant alot to someone who preferred to read images on their own terms.



It is only upon intensive reflection, that I can identify my youthful tendencies as reaching for a compacted comic language delivered with a single blow within an image that could hold its own. I believe that is why, at a certain age when my visual floodgates opened ever wider, I gradually began to harbor a nagging curiosity for forms of visual expression beyond those found in comics. My impulses slowly led me to the existence of images that fulfilled that earlier desire for self-contained images, said more with less and did not have to be stapled into a book at all. They were so powerful in their individual voice, that they could hang on a wall with only the hook behind it providing a means of support. But I still retained the need for images whose strength resided in humor. And not just any humor-- nothing sentimental or sprinkled with cute. No, I wanted the bitter pill. I wanted those smart, MAD laughs that hurt a little and had something to say about something. So naturally, my inclinations led me to the work of artists whose voice took me back to that mordant sweet spot that derives a delicious tension from somehow being both smart and dumb, sophisticated and crude, complex and simple, quiet and loud, elegant and obnoxious. In short, images that carried a blunt sure-footedness in their sheer exuberant vulgarity-- something to chew on without anything in the way. Cut to the chase, but done smartly. This was a language I discovered to exist not only in the work of some of the finest comic artists, but also in the great 20th century artists I soon began to stock my gold-standard pantheon with.

(To be continued in Part Two)


Images: Unknown Photographer- Boy Reading Flash Comics (c.1960's); Basil Wolverton- Cover of MAD #11 (May 1954); Antonio Prohías- Spy vs. Spy; Al Jaffee- Acrylic Plastic Squirt Gun (1975); Al Jaffee- MAD Fold-In; George Grosz- Friedrich Ebert: Life of a Socialist (1919)

Fat Comics

In 2007 I began making a few small drawings with black and red Sharpie brand markers, on cardstock. They were essentially doodles of no great importance, in which I worked out little sequences in which the transformation of a form was charted in stages. Ergo, they were time-based images and by default, driven by a line of narrative action, however minimal, that had a beginning, a middle and an end. Did this constitute a comic strip? There was some interest to be had in these little Sharpie drawings. First, the line itself. When using a larger-width Sharpie, which I was in this case, the amount of ink deposited eventually exceeds what is necessary to describe a clean line. In other words, it bleeds. This is a wonderful chance element in making Sharpie drawings, as the imperfect, fat line, takes the polished edge off of what one does, and returns drawing to a more primitive state. Second, the notion of a minimal comic. Although this is an idea that I wish to explore and expand upon much further, this first foray into the bare essentials of sequential art lays the groundwork for an attempt at much greater abstraction in the comic strip form.

A Man and His Drawing Table

I can recall a time when the pleasure of sitting down at a table and drawing first entered into my being as a necessary component of my existence. When I became consciously aware of it, that is. For me, it all began with comic books. Around the year 1984, when I would have been nine or ten years old, I started buying comic books at the neighborhood drugstore in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. As was customary at that time, I accompanied my grandfather as he went out to replenish his supply of cigars-- he preferred the cheap variety, in this case Phillies Tips. While he was making his selection, I wandered over to a set of spinner racks that contained the comic books. My first memory was of the smell that was present. Although there was the usual aromatic melange that seemed to emanate collectively from the pharmacy, the candy aisle, and the tobacco aisle, this was something altogether different. As I approached the racks, removed a comic book, and opened its cover, I became aware of the object I was holding through the smell that in retrospect seemed to result from the interface of printing ink and newsprint. I was hooked.


What comic book it was that I first purchased on that day, does not matter for this digression, nor do the particulars of a childhood of reading comics. Rather, what began that day was what I can now identify as an appreciation for the drawn image. For it was not long after I leafed through those printed-on pages of newsprint, that I found myself retrieving some sheets of paper, along with pencils and pens, struck with a compulsion to engage in the same activity that must have yielded the images I so loved in those little stapled issues. At first I copied, then I embellished, and then I tried to remake and improve upon. Soon, I was inventing images altogether. There was an intense cluster of years in which I would devoutly give myself over to daily drawing sessions with various boyhood friends. The routine was always the same: a stack of freshly purchased comic books, sometimes accompanied by a Slurpee and a fistful of pretzel rods from the local 7-11, a binder or notebook with blank, lined paper, and a selection of ball-point and felt-tip pens-- we rarely drew in pencil in order to raise the stakes. And then, for several hours, we sat and we drew and we bantered. There was something about being stooped over a desk or a kitchen table and letting oneself get lost in the building up of lines on a sheet of paper, that induced the most wondrous states of mind. For me, that was play. While others were practicing for team sports, or even studying for school, I would find myself wandering into the thicket of imaginary minutiae of a different sort of world, that of purest individuality-- a realm of boundless invention with no fixed definition, in which one felt more freedom than having to obey the arbitrary dictates of social pressure. No, this was different than what school and sports had to offer. This was solitude. And there was freedom in this solitude. I knew it. My friends knew it. And it seemed that this was our way of keeping adulthood and all of its attendant responsibilities at bay.


I must confess, that for me this seems to still be the case. I don't want to intentionally summon forth the oft-abused notion of "never growing up," but there is a particle of truth to the idea that when I find myself in a chair, alone and stooped over a drawing table, at night, with a single light illuminating the brilliant surface of the drawing paper, surrounded by all manner of pens, pencils, brushes, ink bottles, erasers, rulers and notebooks, I am that boy choosing something different than what is being offered up outside of my window. Here, at this table, everything is quiet. Everything has its own beautiful reason, separate from the chaos at large. Drawing at my table, late into the night, when everyone seems to be asleep, I feel very much awake with each stroke of the pen. A kind of meditative envelope forms around such a private activity. I am sure that an artist working in any medium may experience this, writers not excluded. However for me, it is that magic combination of this medium and this space, in which thought is carried out through the infinite permutation of line. And it is a certain kind of line. A line that, although produced in solitude, could speak to many others when released from the drawing table. It is the same line I recall loving from those early comic book days. And even now, once again, there are the stacks of comic books surrounding my drawing space. It seems to be all coming back.


Since those boyhood days of drawing from comic books, I have often been overcome by poetic reverie whenever I have seen a photograph of a cartoonist or comic artist, sitting at his drawing table. Particularly in those photographs from a distant time, that allow me to conjure romanticized notions about the early cartoonists working in a cramped studio space in a newsroom or even in their own apartment in the big city, during the summer with sweltering heat and old electric fans working overtime alongside radios, and the sounds of city traffic below. Or even in the winter with clanging and hissing hot water heaters and still the radio. In many of the older photographs from the 1920's, 30's and even 40's, the cartoonists are seated at their table, drawing, and wearing a tie and jacket, often smoking a cigarette or a pipe. I think of them being in a room together, a group of cartoonists, "gag men" bouncing ideas off of one another, trying out fresh jokes. I think of the smell of tobacco, the smell of ink, the smell of paper. I think of the sound the pens make when they scratch into the surface of the paper or board. While gazing at these photos, I often strain to read the surface contents of each desk, to glean what kind of pens they were using, what, if any, reference materials, what they were working on...whatever I can find. Some artists have a deep affinity for seeing painters standing before canvases, or sculptors working with wood or stone, ceramicists with clay, or even printmakers relishing the activity surrounding a printing press. But for me, it will always be those images of cartoonists at their drawing tables, dreaming up entire worlds in those little sequences projected onto those flat sheets of paper with simple lines and washes. When I look at those photographs, I say to myself: "That's what I want to be when I grow up." And then I catch myself: "That's what I want to be when I don't want to grow up." A man at his drawing table.


Images: Will Eisner- The Spirit (Self Portrait), published May 3, 1942; Rube Goldberg; George Herriman (c. 1916); Chester Gould; Jack Kirby; Steve Ditko (c. 1955)

Art Envy Oil

Another work culled from the archive. Art Envy Oil is comprised of three drawings originally intended for publication as a broadside, to accompany a selection of text by a writer based in Iowa City. Unfortunately, the project never came to be, but these images remain to stand on their own. The germ for the composition was a free-association on the theme of the text that I was to create a corresponding image to. That theme, as I interpreted it, was desire. Namely, the male narrator's desire for a specific woman whose physical attributes, such as her eyebrows and shapely hips, helped to fuel said desire. Around the time this piece was percolating, I was fresh from finishing my graduate studies in printmaking at The University of Iowa, and was preparing to leave Iowa for good, to return to my hometown of Detroit. Subsequently, the completion of Art Envy Oil took far longer than I had hoped. It became the thin thread that held my sanity together as I made the move, took up a couple of teaching positions at a university and a community college respectively, began and navigated a long-distance relationship with a wonderful woman I had met just prior to leaving Iowa, all the while living in my grandmother's basement and pondering my fate in the larger scheme of things. These three pieces served as a very small bridge from the end of my life as a student to the beginning of my life out of the protective womb of academia. None of this was or is intended to find its way into the drawings. My only goal was to hold onto that slippery notion of desire that originally set me on my way. That, and the need to create something a little more graphically assertive, indulging in my love of using brush and ink, and employing black and red. I should note that in two of the panels, the red is slightly "misprinted," that is, jogged a bit to recreate that wonderful "happy accident" of plates not properly aligned on the printing press. In the age of digital correction and polish, I yearn for those "misprinted" color images I devoured in the comic books of my childhood.


Images: Ryan Standfest- 1. Art (air); 2. Envy (novelty); 3. Oil (and cactus felts), all 2006, ink on paper, 14 x 18.75 in. (collection of Violet Lucca)

Stumblebum's Progress

You can see it here first, ladies and gentleman-- the first thrilling panel from yet another strip brought to you by the dyspeptic folks at Rotland Comicworks! Yessir, the little panel you see before you, is none other than Stumblebum's Progress No. 1. There will be many more to follow, and expect a self-published Stumblebum's Progress compilation to appear in the near future. We thank you for your continued interest.

"On Line" at Adam Baumgold

I spent an enjoyable thirty to forty minutes in the Adam Baumgold Gallery, on 74 East 79th Street, earlier in the week, examining the works on paper to be seen in the exhibition On Line. The impressive roster included: Pablo Picasso, George Grosz, Saul Steinberg, H.C. Westermann, Chris Ware, Marc Bell, Renée French, Elvis Studio (Reumann + Robel), Scott Teplin, Christina Ramberg, Alice Attie, Karl Wirsum, Aline Kominsky Crumb, and Chris Hipkiss among many others. It is a show that rewards the keen viewer with an attentiveness given over to the pleasure of detail, and serves as a celebration of the individualistic nature of line. For all the works on display here, there is a trusting relationship between material and hand, and it is that trust that translates into the entry point for the viewer, into each experience that is framed and presented at Adam Baumgold. In most of these works, with a few exceptions, the line serves as a voice with a decidedly humorous bent-- sometimes whispering a subversive phrase here and there, sometimes yelling it. In every case however, the line/voice commands the most intimate form of audience interaction, as these works on paper establish a nice conversational exchange in their very scale. For me, some of the more striking conversations to be had, were with works that I had previously viewed in printed and mass-produced book form, but in this case, presented in their original, hand-drawn form, took on a much clearer voice.


In the case of the two small drawings exhibited by Renée French, which appear to be from her recent book Edison Steelhead's Lost Portfolio: Exploratory Studies of Girls and Rabbits, both possess a radiant quality that I hadn't seen before in their reproduced format. Now although it is common knowledge that the reproduction almost never captures the essence of the original, Miss French's use of a pencil is a revelation, as she appears to delicately massage the drawing surface and layer the graphite in a way that each movement locks into the previous, to form a patterned "skin." The atmosphere of these small portraits, is achieved not only with these softly-patterned graphite skins, but also with a deft handling of a range of contrasts. There has always been a sadness present in Miss French's work-- not in a sentimental or nostalgic fashion, but in a more suggestive, subdued and ultimately distanced mode. Certainly this is arrived at through the scale of the works, the choice of graphite as a vehicle for expression, the subject of childhood, and it can most clearly be pinpointed in the eyes of her characters-- sometimes large, sometimes small, but always black and jewel-like, nestled in a pool of flesh or fur. I often feel that the way in which her characters and the world they inhabit, appear to me, is as if viewed through the sad, fogged-over eyes of those characters.


The star attraction of the show must be the presentation of the one foot by thirty foot scroll graphite drawing Elvis Road, by the Swiss artists Helge Reumann and Xavier Robel, who go by the name of Elvis Studio. Although published in book form last year by Buenaventura Press, this picto-graphic tour-de-force must be seen in its original form to truly be appreciated, with any suspicion of "post-production" digital manipulation or cutting and pasting washed from the mind. What the viewer of Elvis Road will enjoy, is the opportunity to engage in a freewheeling and more democratic form of comic art, trimmed of the usual storytelling devices such as speech balloons, sequential paneling, and an integrated color scheme for added emotional resonance. As in Renée French's recent contributions to comic art, here too does Elvis Studio proceed with the magic of graphite without the added polish of inking. Presented with a remarkably busy composition rife with satirical jabs at every socio-political/cultural level, I was at first reminded in many ways of James Ensor's masterful attack on the plebeian horde The Entry of Christ Into Brussels (1898) -- is it a coincidence that Christ also figures into Elvis Road, crowned with thorns, bleeding and walking amid a chaotic and highly consumerist contemporary milieu?


However, with further consideration, the work also summoned Jacques Tati's remarkable experiment in 70mm comedy, Playtime (1967). Tati's goal with Playtime was to present a new, more democratic means of viewing a film comedy, without the manipulative introduction of visual hierarchies such as close-ups, excessive camera movement, and frenetic editing. Instead, his widescreen frame was densely populated and taken over with multiple everyday events that the viewer had to sift through, to locate what was funny. It was a means of reminding an audience of how to look for themselves, by slowing down and becoming patient observers, at a time when the world was speeding up. Indeed, it was believed that how and what you saw of Playtime, was depending on where you were seated in the movie theatre!


Likewise, with Elvis Road, at least in its scroll form, the viewer must slide forward and backwards along its length, to piece together a narrative based upon personally-defined parameters of attention. In other words, you do the editing. It seems that this form was arrived at and defined by the means of its creation. The two artists approached the making of the piece in similar democratic fashion, unrolling the paper and working together, in unison, one building off of the other. The work then becomes, literally and metaphorically, a road that is traveled along, with various stops. It is a drawing that requires multiple viewings, and therefore gives way to multiple readings. The structure of the image itself, is very fluid and inviting. The artists' firm grasp of the use of spatial depth allows for constant investigative engagement. Never is the information too difficult to interpret-- confusion only occurs the farther you step back from it. No, the lesson here, is to move in ever closer, and to demonstrate patience and above all, curiosity. For you will be rewarded.

On Line will be up only until January the 26th at Adam Baumgold gallery, and will then be followed by the exhibition Chris Ware: Drawings for New York Periodicals, from February 1st through March 15th.

Images: Renée French- Untitled (Bunny), 2005, sepia pencil on paper, 5 x 4 1/2 in.; Elvis Studio- Elvis Road, 2001, detail, graphite on paper, 11 3/4 x 354 in.; James Ensor- The Entry of Christ Into Brussels, 1898, hand-colored etching and gouache on paper, 9 5/8 x 14 in.; Jacques Tati- Playtime, 1967, 70mm film

Lumphouse!

I began work on a new series today-- a strip with the working title Lumphouse. The image here, is a graphite drawing done on a 3 x 5 notecard. Although there is no text as yet, the image will remain as is. I am planning to draw the entire series out on 3 x 5 notecards, as I enjoy the scale, and the idea of the notecard as a kind of pocket-sized object. I do not know how long the series will be, nor do I know just yet what it will be about. Rather than illustrating a script, the images will unfold first, and the narrative will find its way from these images. I hope to self-publish the finished strip, in a small, limited edition book.

Saul Steinberg: Tables and Other Sculpture

Today I made a pilgrimage to visit the Pace Wildenstein gallery on 57th Street, to be afforded the rare opportunity of viewing the sculptural works of American cartoonist and illustrator Saul Steinberg (1914-1999). Saul Steinberg: Tables and Other Sculpture, is the first exhibition focused solely on the artist's wood assemblages, created in the 1970's and 80's. The works consist of mixed-media constructions that include trompe-l'oeil drafting tables and table-top wall reliefs, as well as miniature reconstructions of a hotel room and a federal post office.

Sometime in the early 70's, Mr. Steinberg began to carve actual-size replicas of the various objects to be found in his studio, on his drafting table. Quill-tip pens, pencils, brushes, sketchbooks, matchbooks, rulers, even slices of bread, were fashioned out of wood and painted or drawn onto for added effect. These studio objects were then installed onto or made a component of larger reconstructions of tabletops and even entire drafting tables. The effect is quite startling, and one that is difficult to convey in any photographic reproduction. The table works achieve a delicate balance between being a drawing and being a sculpted object. When one approaches the works, the illusion begins to break down a bit, and one can see the whittled nature of the wood, the handcrafted quality. This is the beautiful essence of these pieces. As in all of Mr. Steinberg's work, irony is in play. To take the site of artistic creation, the space of intensive laboring over individual images, be they painted or drawn, in which the hand is daily recording it's own expressive, highly individualistic activities, and then apply that same hand to the activity of recreating that daily space, ultimately involves the reassertion of the hand. Many of Steinberg's works make use of his love of the calligraphic line, of handwritten text, and indeed in these wood recreations of the artist's tools, the hand can be gleaned in a modeling style that is both rough and unpolished, yet patient and deliberate. It is trompe-l'oeil and it is not. Throughout his career, Mr. Steinberg was often taken with the puncturing of the artificial tools of his trade, frequently toying with the very nature of visual language and its bag of tricks, such as perspective.


The "table works" presented here, achieve the unique balance of being both whimsical and meditative. The whimsy of the pieces is derived not only for their trick optical identity, but in the very materials they are crafted from-- wood that sometime appears to be common scrap, something rescued from household projects, as well as the usual array of rubber stamping and even the addition of thin, etched metal sheets. As in his graphic work, Mr. Steinberg here revels in the sheer materiality of his given medium. As his drawings express the very essence of "the mark," so too does his sculpted work stress a fundamental love of the object, the essentialness of the form. One can see this in his wonderfully considered recreation of a slice of bread laying on a table, its surface mottled with various punctures that suggest the air pockets from within a baked loaf. I am reminded here of the studio-based objects, or "crapola," that populate the work of Philip Guston. Although Steinberg's objects are not as vulgar in the sheer weight of their assertiveness, they are still on equally celebratory terms for their "object-ness." This may be a component of the "cartoonist's sensibility," to intensify the essence of a given thing. The meditative quality of these pieces, seems to come from both the subdued palette, which does make frequent use of the natural wood grain and its color, as well as the considered arrangement of each object within the space of the table. We are not talking about a chaotic workspace here. No, these workspaces are very ordered, very clean, and seem meant to convey a sense of work completed, rather than in the process of being. Afterall, the sculpture is the work itself, and it is finished. Steinberg is not trying to fool us into thinking we happened upon the scene in "real time." These tables are presented more as miniature exhibition spaces, in which each mundane object, each ordinary tool, is hoisted to the status of the carefully handcrafted and significant, in how it is placed with an intensified reverence to a vertical or horizontal orientation, within a a grid-like composition. These spaces are curated, and hence are about organizational clarity. They are idealized artist's spaces-- another terrific irony.


In addition to the table constructions, there are two easel constructions, both of which make reference to Nikolai Gogol's The Nose, concerning the events surrounding the disappearance of a man's nose from his face, as it seems to have a will of its own. The reference takes the form of painted portraits of Major Kovalyov, the man with the troubling nose, that sit upon trompe-l'oeil easels. Is Steinberg saying something about the interchangeability between life and art, the paradox implicit in creating these pieces?


One of the most striking details to be found on each of the works in this show, are the edges of the tabletops, the corners of the desk legs, and the sides of every box and book. When he arrived at an edge or a corner, Steinberg drew a line, as if he were describing an edge in a drawn space. In other words, there is a hand-drawn outline on all of the objects. They truly exist somewhere between the flat and the dimensional; between the drawn and the sculpted. It is as if they are a cartoonist's private fantasia on creative process, in which his tools become props in a theatrical space.


One other work of note in the exhibition, is a smaller, yet no less intricate work titled U.S. Post Office (1984), in which Steinberg transforms an example of public architecture, in this case an imposing and oppressive federal building, and reduces it to a modest little model perched atop a pedestal, to be stared down on, rather than it staring down on the public. This is the ingeniously modest and very human scale that circulates through the entire exhibition, and it is most certainly why I recommend that it be seen directly with the eye, rather than through the unreliable mediation of photographic reproduction.

The show is up until February the 9th.

Homage to Ernie Kovacs and Emile Cohl

In 2006, I created a suite of eleven drawings called ENDAGAIN NOHOW: a rotland phantasmagory, that had at its core, three nine-panel pages that illustrated a comic vignette modeled after a skit by the 1950's avante garde television comedian Ernie Kovacs (1919-1962). The routine, known as The Nairobi Trio, described as a "nihilistic operetta," was an exercise in repetitive futility, as two costumed figures tormented a third, practicing the art of the "slow burn," until the object of such abuse finally initiated a payback. It was an exquisitely timed piece of funnybusiness that had an underlying sense of tragedy: no matter what variation was introduced into its numerous performances, the outcome remained the same. This repetition, coupled with the inevitable, clockwork plot, had a kind of graphic, diagrammatic clarity that lent itself to a simplified, static visual interpretation.


Enter the thought of pioneer French animator Emile Cohl (1857-1938): Cohl was a caricaturist turned "father of the animated film," who forged a relationship between early graphic humor and early cinema. It was a logical step: static sequences on the page into moving sequences on the screen; panels in a comicstrip, into frames in a filmstrip. His early, crudely-drawn animations such as Fantasmagorie (1908), promoted his notion of an "incoherent cinema," in which a narrative defying rationality, humorous and almost whimsical representations of cruelty and revenge with painless violence, and a lack of a specific setting, with the preference of a void as a backdrop, made use of the new medium as only a caricaturist could. Cohl's earliest animated works were created in a way that would mimic white lines on a black chalkboard-- a technique employed by another early animator J. Stuart Blackton, which had its origins in the "chalk talks" or "lightning sketch" performances given by artists who would tell a story to an audience by sketching it out on a chalkboard or paper tablet in real-time. Cohl would draw black lines onto a glass-surface light table, film each frame, and then reverse the negative to create the chalkboard effect.


Therefore with a plot device borrowed from Mr. Kovacs, and a stylistic device lifted from Mr. Cohl, I felt that these two would make ideal bedfellows and produced the three pages seen here. Although, just as Emile Cohl had done, the originals were black lines on white, which were then reversed during a lithographic process for a small printed edition. The entire suite of eleven images, including more detailed character studies, can be viewed here.



Images: Ernie Kovacs; The Nairobi Trio; Emile Cohl; still from Emile Cohl animation; J. Stuart Blackton giving a lightning sketch performance; Ryan Standfest- three sequences from Endagain Nohow, Studies for an Animation, 2006, lithographs, 11 x 8 1/2 in.

Roland Topor: Mister Panic

My introduction to the work of French cartoonist, novelist, playwright and actor Roland Topor (1938-1997), came in 1997 during a trip to an erotic art museum in Hamburg, located on the notorious Reeperbahn, or "die sündige meile" ("the sinful mile")-- historically one of Europe's most well-known red-light districts. The museum itself was a wonder, with many treasures to be seen within it's converted warehouse space. Columns were transformed into slender cabinets, from which drawers containing glass-covered drawings could be viewed. There were works by Bellmer, Cocteau, Grosz, Picasso, as well as rarities from the dawn of pornography. But what truly grabbed hold of me, was the work of Roland Topor. In the drawings and prints of Mr. Topor, I had glimpsed scenes of maniacal wit, an artfully antagonistic voice jabbing its finger into the collective eye of propriety.


It was scatological, masochistic, juvenile, disobedient, and it hit all the right notes. I immediately purchased the only remaining catalogue of his work available in the museum giftshop, even though it was severely dog-eared and smudged with fingerprints, which seemed all the more appropriate. Since that day, I have come to appreciate the impressive scope of Mr. Topor's output, which seems to be held in higher regard in Europe where exhibitions of it are frequently mounted, than here in the states. A true artistic polymath, Topor consistently explored every medium at his disposal. As a novelist, his works include The Tenant, which was filmed by Roman Polanski in 1976, and Joko's Anniversary. He contributed to the creation of a sequence involving magic lantern projections within the belly of a whale, in Federico Fellini's film Casanova (1976), was the chief architect of the animated science fiction film Fantastic Planet (1973), as its co-writer and designer, and wrote and designed the film Marquis (1989), a tale loosely based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, in which the characters wear cartoon-like animal heads, and the Marquis conducts philosophical conversations with his animatronic penis. Following this very adult project, Mr. Topor then went on to create a popular children's program for French television, Téléchat, which also made use of human-animal hybrid characters. As an actor, Mr. Topor appeared in films by Volker Schlöndorff (Swann in Love), Dusan Makavejev (Sweet Movie), and Werner Herzog (playing Renfield in Nosferatu). Additional artistic collaborations have included the creation of the Panic Movement in 1962 with Fernando Arrabal and Alejandro Jodorowsky, and the illustrating of Daniel Spoerri's Anecdoted Topography of Chance in 1966.


In all of these endeavors, Roland Topor has consistently taken up artistic arms against the hypocrisies of society-- chief among them the church and the state, wielding a sharp, but above all extremely funny, pen. If I were to characterize the stylistic trait of his graphic work, it would be "deadpan." For however outlandish the circumstances, Mr. Topor constructs his images in a manner that deceptively suggests traditional illustration and visual storytelling techniques. Then again, there is a devil lurking in the details. A recurring theme of his work, is the fundamentally absurd corporeality of man, regardless of the institutions he creates to control the inevitable whims of the body. The body is often the site for many a humorous truth in Mr. Topor's work-- a body that demands to eat, to defecate and to fornicate. The simple foundation for all the complexities to follow.

Something Old and Something Old

As a way of inaugurating Rotland Comicworks, I thought I would first delve into the Rotland Archive to pull out a couple of older pieces to put up for show. Digging deep into the year 2005, we have a little violent episode of "Rotland Funnies by Flyfast," titled "Sperm to the Worm Blues," a silkscreen from an edition of 20.


Next up, are three episodes from a series I began in the summer of 2007, titled "Daily Rotland." I daily carry a 3 x 5 notecard around in my pocket, which is usually covered with various lists for things such as groceries, movies to see, books to locate or phonecalls to make. After a time, rather than throwing these cards out, I decided to save them and, at the end of each day, drew a gag over the lists. After a month, the series had run it's course, but a revival of this practice is in the near future, is highly probable. The entire series of 24, can be viewed on my website, by clicking here.