Hurricane Reflections
Not for the first time, I get waylaid in Vermont by a hurricane. I read four short works by four great cartoonists.
My cross-country train journey was affected by a fire in the west and finally by a hurricane in the east.
In between filing the last two entries, I rode the rails southwest from Massachusetts to Connecticut to switch to a Vermont-bound train so I could visit White River Junction, where I used to live and have stopped in on occasion over the years. I was meant to be there for about thirty-six hours.
But the train from Vermont to Philadelphia that I was scheduled to catch for the final leg of my rail journey was cancelled when Connecticut was found to be under a looming threat from Hurricane Henri. This was unfolding precisely a decade after I’d witnessed firsthand Hurricane Irene’s flooding of White River Junction, when the White River overflowed its banks, bridges were damaged and much of the town was under several feet of mud.
My host in Vermont had consented to accommodate me for two nights and couldn’t swing a third, so I asked a colleague and former teacher (some of whose work I wrote about in an older entry) if I could crash on the couch in his art studio. I ended up staying two nights there, so my visit to Vermont was twice as long as I had originally planned and about ten times as fun, since the delay afforded me time to carouse, hike, chat and drum with new friends. It also gave me extra time to make use of the cartoon arsenal at the comics library where I used to work and of the fine selection of comic books on my teacher’s shelf that were within grabbing distance of the couch on which I was sleeping for those two unplanned nights.
At The Schulz Library I first read Mooncop by the eminent Scottish cartoonist Tom Gauld. Gauld is justly well-regarded for his clinical line-work and meticulously tidy, economical style. He uses simplistic graphic signifiers to indicate a broad and expansive universe of visual, narrative and emotional information. Restrained, deceptively simplistic cartooning requires of its wielder a sense of poise and the keen eye of a capable designer; Gauld has both of these and is good at using them in concert with a rapier wit and a deep breadth of historical and literary knowledge that allows him to find novel ways to comment on well-known figures and tropes. Some of the work I’m thinking of, the best of Gauld’s of which I’m aware, appeared in several installments of the legendary weirdo comics-and-art anthology Kramers Ergot and in Gauld’s short, compulsively readable and very funny 2017 book Baking with Kafka, which collects his literary-themed newspaper gag strips.
Mooncop is a quick standalone read that isn’t up to the level of Gauld’s best work. It’s well-executed and the book is handsomely designed but the setting and story, concerning a solitary policeman patrolling a dwindling community of near-future moon-dwellers whose repetitive, solitary lives daily grow more boring and pointless, don’t do anything with the comics format more innovative or arresting than his other stuff. Part of Gauld’s shtick is his knack for mining a droll, relatable sense of aimless mundanity from subjects or circumstances that by rights should be interesting and exciting, but here I fear he performed this function too well for the work’s overall benefit. Mooncop amounts to a book-length joke contrasting the fun-seeming concept of being a cop on the moon with the disappointing tedium of nevertheless being a mildly depressed, existentially confounded (normal) human being. Maybe Gauld needed to exercise or exorcise something with this piece as a creator or as an individual. As a consumer, I’d give this one a respectful pass and see if the local library has Baking with Kafka or Kramers Ergot. (If you happen to be in White River Junction, I can tell you to a certainty that The Schulz Library has both.)
After replacing Mooncop I pulled down a slim, pocket-sized hardcover volume entitled Charlie Brown’s Reflections. Published in 1967 by the Hallmark company, this appears to have been intended as an impulse-buy novelty publication, the kind of thing that might make a good stocking stuffer or a safe-bet graduation gift. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve read all fifty years’ worth of Charles M. Schulz’s original newspaper Peanuts strips, and since Charlie Brown’s Reflections comprises nothing other than a curated selection of reformatted strips that according to the table of contents are purported to have things to say “On DISAPPOINTMENT” and “On FAILURE” and “On APPEARANCES” and so on, there is nothing in this book that I haven’t read before. This doesn’t lessen the quality of these several early strips from one of the all-time masters of the newspaper comics medium, and I respect that with Peanuts Schulz made something so universally relatable and beloved that there was and is money to be made from, as here, picking out eleven black-and-white strips, adding some red spot-color for mild visual spice and packaging them in a book attractive enough to grab in a checkout line and light enough to mail in an envelope. Schulz was every bit as savvy a businessman as he was a brilliant cartoonist and a sad human being, and I have nothing against cheap Peanuts ephemera like Charlie Brown’s Reflections, which could serve as a quick taste test for the uninitiated.
While staying in the art studio I made recourse to my old teacher’s shelves and read Haw! Horrible, Horrible Cartoons by Ivan Brunetti. I also re-read Teratoid Heights by Mat Brinkman.
Like Gauld, Brunetti is acknowledged as a living master of the comics form. While visiting Chicago on my cross-country train trip I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and imbibed the current exhibition on Chicago cartoonists, with Brunetti receiving a room dedicated to his output, including sketchbooks, original pages and a wall-sized mural. Brunetti’s mature style restricts his character designs to round, over-sized heads atop simply-indicated and comically-undersized bodies and has them traversing a flattened-out, video-game-like cartoon universe that feels alive without making pretense to realistically-rendered perspective or geometry. Like Gauld’s work it’s very simple, elegant and evocative, but Brunetti generally favors a boxier, more angular look compared with Gauld. The comics in Haw!, while retaining the oversized heads, are from an earlier Brunetti period with a more slapdash line, more detailed backgrounds and an aw-shucks New Yorker-type design sensibility. (Brunetti is in The New Yorker’s current stable of regularly-assigned cover designers, but the sneering, juvenile tone in Haw! makes it read like a petty New Yorker parody.) Brunetti himself forthrightly acknowledges in a short introduction that these early comics are vulgar and disgusting, that he doesn’t know exactly what he was thinking and can only conclude that he must have been a pretty screwed-up young cartoonist with some issues that might have been better worked out in real life and not on the comics page. But here we are, with a book of aggressively-drawn gag strips that intentionally go too far for no good reason. (Captions include “Why is Grampa dead, and why is his asshole filled with semen?” and “What’s the past participle of ‘queef’?”) Brunetti’s current work as seen in the Museum exhibition has tightened up and focused his style and content, but these earlier strips feel like a primal scrawl from a less mature cartoonist duly transcending the limits of acceptability to procure a laugh at any cost. It’s fun reading.
Mat Brinkman was a founding member of the influential Nineties underground art collective and creating/performing space Fort Thunder. Like Gauld and Brunetti, his work has also appeared in those Kramers Ergot collections, with Brinkman contributing the cover to the breakthrough fourth volume. Teratoid Heights is a small-format solo Brinkman comic of largely wordless short narrative pieces dating from his time in Fort Thunder. (I last read this book in White River Junction in 2011 around the time of Hurricane Irene. Maybe I’ll continue to read it every ten years, only in this town and only during hurricane season.) Brinkman uses a formal and conventional set of comics-making rules — old-fashioned panels and gutters with a straightforward narrative progression and a lived-in, three-dimensional sense of weight and geography — to craft eerie, obscurantist stories set in an oddly banal fantasy realm of plodding, insensate creatures who may or may not know or care what they’re doing or why. They vary wildly in size and their juxtapositions lead to jarring encounters with outcomes dire or oppressively nihilistic, or both. They are mostly without eyes and often completely silent, indicating their intentions or desires with gestures or blunt actions, as if the programmatic logic of insects had pervaded the scale of anthropomorphic humanoids. Like the other cartoon masters cited above, Brinkman wrings a lot of narrative power out of his control over a simple set of compositional tools. His line is thicker and sloppier than Gauld’s, Brunetti’s or Schulz’s and he has far less to say with words than any of them (or most cartoonists in general). But the weird imaginary world in which he deposits and envelops the reader seems to have some urgent internal logic that yearns to be understood, and words would potentially sully the fun of not really knowing quite what is going on. He uses black as the default background for most of his compositions instead of white, so his pages feel crowded up with ink and his characters’ otherworldly plights are shrouded in perpetual darkness.
Schulz is dead and buried (I’ve made a pilgrimage to his graveside) but rightly still read and celebrated. Gauld and Brunetti are at the top of their respective games and still cranking out excellent new work. News of or new work from Brinkman is hard to come by. All of these guys deserve to be read and re-read.
Next: My former teacher gave me a copy of a collection of the first years of the classic strip Terry and the Pirates by the great newspaper cartoonist Milton Caniff. I’ve never read the strip before and am digging into it with a few installments each day. Also onto Volume III, the final section of Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice.