Expectations & the City of Boston

Went to the “Right Thing the Wrong Way: The Story of Highwater Books” opening last weekend, surprisingly quiet (maybe due to the rain or the Red Sox game down the street), but few names from the postcard were actually in attendance. The art was great, exciting to see the cover painting for “Skibber Bee-Bye”, Brian Ralph’s Fort Thunder memoir, and really impressed by Jordan Crane’s original pages, amazing draftsmanship, oriented “the Marvel way”, commented to James McShane about Jordan’s expert use of brush-applied white, that shit ain’t easy! However, my favorite area was easily the cubicle/corner that had all the artifacts, photos, and promotional materials from the Highwater heyday. I found that it instilled a great jealousy in me to see that it wasn’t just a publishing company, but a real team-oriented project that didn’t wait around for conventions to happen. Tom wasn’t really a boss, more of a facilitator and, more importantly, a participant, silkscreening with the crew, getting psyched on their music; a punk, tried and true, and I have an incredible amount of respect for that. My favorite quote from the transcript featured on the Comics Comics blog:

“I was definitely working from the classic alternative comics model, which is: this is an interesting artist and I will just trust them to do what they do. And that’s enough. And help them do what they do. And then people will eventually come around and realize that this amazing work is going on.”

(I was really tempted to steal a lot of these items, photo: Greg Cook)

I’m getting a strange feeling that this show and the revival of the “Monster” anthology are indicative of better things to come, not a “revival” of any sorts, but stronger and more concrete work, fewer cutesie-pie one shots and more of the kind of hard storytelling that got me excited about comics in the first place. Maybe now that “graphic novel mania” and the zinester ethos have died down, 2011 can be more concerned with doing good work than the format that the work will end up as. I recently attended the first-ever Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) at the Art Institute of Boston and was really disappointed at how lazy all the work was. I’m all about credit where credit is due when someone puts the effort in, and I don’t believe in the principle of “bad” artwork, but this wasn’t anything like an art show, it was more like a flea market where everyone goes around patting each other on the back. I lied to a man with a video camera who was going around filiming people without asking if they wanted to be filmed. I told him my name was Dwight Howard and that my comic was called “Patriots on the Run”. When he asked why he didn’t see that title on the table, I told him that I had sold out, but he could buy a noise tape if he wanted. I was very clearly wearing a name tag.