Bandes Dessinées

Sorry this was late I was on vacation.

Did a lot more than comics in France, but ...

the comic scene is amazing.

This was the start of a street with over seven comic book storefronts less than half kilometer from out hotel in Paris.

Three of the stores belonged to a company called 'Album'

 Another two where exclusively selling English language comics.

more..

 The eleventh store-front was closed.

Jeremy Bastian's Cursed Pirate Girl

Cursed Pirate Girl is an all-ages, fantastic, slightly creepy comic that follows the adventures of a dock urchin between the stratified world of colonial Caribbean society and the magical Omerta Seas in search of her father a pirate captain.

This review could be difficult for two reasons. On the one hand, much ink has already been spilled praising Jeremy Bastian for his truly magical creation that there is a question of what can be add. On the other hand, as wonderful as Cursed Pirate Girl is it does not neatly fit into the critical categories. Largely, I am as interested in what happens in the gutters (the space between panels) as the panels themselves.  Looking to see how the story is created through the creation of a narrative space filled with motion out of static two dimensional images.

The first thing that must be mentioned is that every page in Cursed Pirate Girl is so pretty it makes your eyes hurt. Mr. Bastian's panels pull a totality out of an expansive disordered much like Guy Davis only with a surgical precision of line. He also has a great sense of page as canvas.

His story is also truly remarkable. While clearly in the vein of the classic modern fable like Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan, it threads a needle between homage and post-modernism. There are modern fairy tails that are clearly products of this century but have the traditional fairy tale atmosphere and tropes for example Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Conversely there are post-modern fairy tales like Bill Willingham's Fables. Mr. Bastian's work is has the clear wonder of the classic fairy tale but is the product of post-modernism.

There are two terms that need to definition. Mimesis and diegesis can be summed up as the show and tell of art. In prose the straightforward narration works mostly as diegesis while dialogue and poetic and symbolic narration operates more as mimesis. While visual representation is by definition mimesis, It has an axis of diegesis. Blueprints or a photo of a church are more in the realm of diegesis than a Van Gogh painting of a church.

So as a work of prose and illustration, Cursed Pirate Girl is an undeniable success. But there is a third sense of mimesis in comics. Comics, as collections of static two dimensional images, have the unique ability to show space and motion without spelling them out. My first reaction to Cursed Pirate Girl was that it wasn't as successful as some the books I have discussed here. At times the panel and scene transitions seem choppy.  Bastian's establishing panels can be so epic and detailed that the information they convey about spatial relations of individual characters can get lost in his mastery of detail. He also pulls off these amazing page layouts that tie all of the individual panels into a grand composition. At first glance there seems to be a jump over the gutter.

On further reflection two things have occurred to me. One is the lasting effects of John Tenniel's illustrators in Alice In Wonderland. The other is the narrative timing in the work of Edward St. John Gorey.

In the interplay between words and images there is a duration to powerful images that continues after the page is turned. A good example of this is how John Tenniel's images are so iconic that dwell and shape the text. Mr. Bastian bolder compositions don't overshadow the narrative they set the tone. Their grand weirdness lingers through his more traditional pages.

Mimesis and diegesis Edward Gorey work is strange. Specifically how Gorey would use the discontent between words and illustration to create a kind of motion through the double take. The text would tell one thing, the image would show you something slightly different, that would in turn cause you to reevaluate a double meaning in the text. What I will call the “Gorey effect” is how a single panel can show (as apposed to tell) motion and causation backwards by the readers unpacking of the relation between the images and text. It is the kind of eureka moment that you get from dealing on the massive amount of information contained in the pages of Cursed Pirate Girl.

In closing you should pick this book up. It remains rewarding read after read. You won't find a lot of Eisner/Kirby showy cuts on action or McKean/Mack collage as narrative space. Rather Mr. Bastian uses his penn like a scalpel and carvers the gutters into your frontal cortex.

You can follow Jeremy Bastian's blog here and should be able be able to buy or pre-order it form its new publisher Archaia.

His listed upcoming appearances are...


July 11th-15th- San Diego Comic Con San Diego, CA.
Sept. 8th-9th- Baltimore Comic-Con Baltimore, MD.
Oct. 26th-28th Detroit Fanfare Dearborn, MI. 
Nov. 17th and 18th- NC Comicon Durham, NC. 

David McKean's Cages

Cages centers on a apartment populated with a jazz musician, a novelist and a painter. In orbit of the building is a cat, a cray man, a homeless man and a Demiurge. The ten issue arch is both tribute and performance of the trials and rewards of the creative process.

Cages, like McCloud's Understanding Comics and Moore/Campbell's From Hell, is alumni Tundra Publishing. It shares in, and is partly responsible for, the mystique of excellence around that short lived publishing house. Cages is still a contender for being the high watermark of art house comics even after being in print for almost a generation. While it isn't a breeze read I found it flowed pretty smoothly once I committed to sitting down and giving it my full attention. It can be challenging but it never sacrifices the simple joy of storytelling for its well deserved reputation as a avant-garde comic book narrative.

McCloud lays out his theory of the 'four tribes' in the third essay of chapter six of Making Comics.  Here is a short article from The Guardian on the subject. I want to focus on the relationship between Animists and Formalists which from the less subjective of his two sets of opposed artistic preference among the comic book community. Jeff Smith and (early) Jack Kirby are excellent examples of Animist. Their mastery of form and style intentionally and seamlessly obscures itself in their devotion to story and content. McCloud singles out Cages as the perfect example of the junction between the Formalist and Classicist tribes.

The juxtaposition between the preferences of the Animists that use the techniques of comic book composition to tell a story by concealing those techniques and what McKean offers us is telling. Mckean shows off his skills in his composition and editorial decisions. He weds the artistic showiness of his form to content as his story pulls the reader deeper and deeper into the drama of the creative lives of characters.

Cages has been in and out of print and shifted publishers 4 times. Currently Dark Horse is keeping it in print and has a well-priced paper back edition. His web-site isn't live yet, but its going to be gorgeous.

Alex Robinson's Tricked

From the first chapter, reoccurring themes of small scams and funny retail math set the stage for the larger deceptions. Tricked follows the lives and loves of six seemingly unconnected characters whose paths occasionally cross as they move toward a final convergence. Each character is actively holding something back that must be resolved either by coming to terms with it or with crisis. The Little Piggy Diner and the its owners round out the cast and provides a reoccurring location.

What makes Robinson's body of work so relevant is in his non-heroic, non-autobiographical long work he has given us some incredibly dynamic characters. All likeable even while unapologetic, petty and flawed. While deceptions and revelations shift our sympathies towards the characters, it is our empathy that turns the page. (I was barely able to closes this 349 page book. I also finished Robinson's Box of Poison's 608pgs in a long weekend and To Cool to Be Forgotten's 128pgs in a sitting.)

I love Box Office Poison, but it is almost his juvenilia. In Tricked, the wild experimentation with page layouts that show his love for Dave Sim has settled down. It is more the case that Tricked 's symmetry of form and content has unified into a narrative fatit-accompli. Matt Kindt gorgeously playful rap-around cover for the second edition highlights the interconnected totality of the book.

In Robinsion's speech at Staple! 2011, he claimed that he was a better writer than an illustrator. On the face of this claim it is him talking down his cartooning, but I would argue that it highlights one his strengthens as a cartoonist. As a writer he is very good about allowing his character drawings to hold most of the diegesis of the internal states of his characters. The lines of his faces, body posture and even the externalization of internal body image creates an expansive dimensionality to his characters. If he had attempted to convey this content in prose it would quickly become ponderous and preachy. As it is, the character contradictions are conveyed atmospherically. The accomplishment has relevant teachings in the larger world of the narrative arts as one of the defining separations between high and low art.

There is an open question of whether he has a profound admiration for or is disgusted by humanity. Tricked can be read as love for the human condition (warts and all) or as condemnation of human as all too human. Either was the trick of the book, and Robinsion's work in general is sincerely guileless and a beautiful read.

You can click to Mr Robinson web-site.  If you don't have a hip local comic book store you should buy his books from his Top Shelf page because Chris "rock-"Staros and the gang at Top Shelf deserve your love too. The Top Shelf page is also a great resources.  If your trying to squeeze every nickel out of your dimes you might consider by a digital copy from Top Shelf or the comiXology smart phone app.

About the blog

If there is one thing that I want to get across it is that comics are an important art form. 

In 2007, SUNY Stony Brook awarded me a Master's Degree in Philosophy for a thesis largely focusing on Kantian Metaphysics and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. My plan was to create a new critical vocabulary for the study of comics as high art.

Now that I'm out of the academy my exposure is limited to what I pick up here in Austin and from podcasts like Indie Spinner Rack, so I want to reach out to communities of like minded readers and to up the profile of comics. I feel that part of doing that is maintaining a few commitments to those of you who are kind enough to read this and the artists that share their brilliance with the world. So here is the mission:

1) Every Monday I will publish a post of either reviews or bits of house keeping like this one. Hopefully one day I will have interviews...

2) Because I want this to be a resource for ongoing discussion and not a soap-box, each post will be tagged to allow you to search out my thoughts on a particular artist or on comics in general.

3) I am interested in sequential art as art and not a given genera, so my reviews will focus on artist styles of narrative storytelling favoring form over content.

4) I will try to keep the reviews updated with info on where you can purchase the books and contact the artists.

5) Out of the deep admiration I have for anyone who puts their art out there, I will not publish any reviews on anything self-published and self-marketed without getting it approved by the artist.

6) I won't review anything that I wouldn’t generally recommend and I will try to give warnings if I feel a particular work might be too offensive or difficult for a given audience. (I have a 10 year old nephew who breathes comic books. I get the need for rating.)

That is what you can expect here. Hopefully, there will be audience participation. There are three ways that I would especially love to get feedback from you the reader.

Please, please leave comments. They are always welcome. Don't hesitate to share any positive or negative feedback about this blog. Positive discussion about the books reviewed is the point. The only caveat is if you pick up something I suggest and you don't like it, I ask that you focus your criticism on my failure to properly represent the work and live up to point 6 of the above. You don't have to agree with me, but I ask that you remain polite to the artist and those of us who do like their work.

I want to encourage you to get involved in the comic book community. It is still small enough that most artists are reasonably approachable. Most have websites or blogs which make fan mail easy. They tend to do lots of book signing and conventions which I should be highlighting according to point 4. If you do get a chance to meet them, ask if you can take a picture of yourself with them and post to the review.

If any of the artists read and especially like my review, I hope you want to help build the content I offer. Please contact me to do an interview by e-mail or locally around one of our Austin conventions. Contact me if you would be willing to share an image or images of a page from the book in the progress of composition. It would be extremely cool whether it is just a quick photo of the page with the pencil lines intact or images from the stages of completion.

And let me know if there is something you want me to review

Free comic book day score!

Austin Comic Con

Jeremy A. Bastian auteur behind "Cursed  Pirate Girl."  CPG has to be the breakaway 2010 critical success.  While the book has had all kinds of success it has had lots of distribution and printing issues.  The indvudial issues and collection are hard to come by and I had feared I would have to buy a copy from a third party Amazon dealer.  I wasn't aware he was attend and I must have walked by his table three time before stumbling across him.  We got a chance to talk for several minutes and I had a chance to pick up the collection of the first three issues.  I look forward to reviewing it.

Andy Hirsch artist of SLG's "Royal Historian of OZ."  As well as auteur of his new self published serires "Varmints."   He has a wide body of short works like "Doggie Houndser: Muttical Dogtor" and "Idle Threat" as well as other on-line comics.  I really really want to see him at Staple: Independent Media Expo.

David Mack is the auteur behind "Kabuki."  He has been working since 1994 but largely went under my radar.  It started amid a slew of comics with cheesecake pinups with swords on the cover "Shi" and "Lady Death."  Recently Indie Spinner Rack brought it to my attention, and just thumbing through it at the library it is startlingly cerebral.   I 've been reading this and a few other collections the breadth and variate of his art and storytelling styles will merit a much longer analysis then I can pt forward now.

Marv Wolfman  is forty year writer and editor veteran of comics.  I had hoped to get my nephews sketch books full of doodles and get my older nephew who is sort of interested in writing a chance to get Mr. Wolfman's autograph.  Unfortunately my brother-in-law and younger nephew came down with the plague.  The my nephew and some of his friends quickly became distracted by all the toys and wall art....

Jeffery Stevenson's mains stream credit is probably as writer "Jim Valentino's Task Force 1" at Shadowline.  I talked to him briefly about his role as writer for creator owned "Steam Punk Faeries" and online comic brat-halla.  We also talked about an opportunity he had to correspond with Marv Wolfman.  He has attend Staple: Independent Media Expo in the past and is thinking about the 2012 con.

Robert Wilson IV artist "Knuckleheads"  I didn't talk to him long I think he did say he was thinking about coming to Staple: Independent Media Expo.   I bought this because it looked art looked like Jamie Hernandez take on Matt Wagner's "Mage."

Isaac Mardis auteur"Defending Neverland" Didn't have time to talk to him but a James M. Barrie interpretation is the fast way to separate me from my money.  At quick glance I can't find any web info in the book : (  But I do have a card.

I picked up two free samples from Penny Farthing Press pfpress.com they look like a neat outfit and there web page is awesome.

With the last few dollars in my account I bought the latest two issues of Richard Moore's  "Gobs." Apparently he has a long history with Antarctic Press.  I may look into them the link is antarctic-press.com , but they seem to be pretty far flung and developed. 

I didn't get a chance to talk to Joe Eisma artist "Morning Glories."