WHATEVER WORKS

Austin and I went to see the exhibition of pages from Crumb's Genesis the other day and it got me excited about comics, reminding me how much an artist's style can modify the content of their words and vice versa.

I was kinda just walking through the exhibition, no big deal, until I noticed this panel from chapter 34 where Crumb had depicted a girl in such a way that she reminded me of a teenaged mall-rat, trying hard to look "adult:"




It was really powerful to me, a strong juxtaposition, the way the drawings modified the text, bringing this totally evocative association to my mind.

There were instances of this all over the place, the visceral, lurid quality of Crumb's drawings pushing up against the more detached Biblical prose. And the immensity of the project laid out spatially, how this insane amount of drawing resulted in an organized narrative made it feel like an amazing achievement.

We started talking about how Crumb (and most cartoonists) has internalized the vernacular of comics history and makes things according that particular set of rules. As great as Crumb is, he's also a good counterexample w/r/t his aesthetic conservatism. I brought up that there is no reason in the era of Photoshop and cheap printing for drawers to go through the steps printing deemed necessary 40 years ago. Surely, many folks have recognized this, but the ramifications of desktop publishing for comics are immense. As long as your images and words function in combination to create something that works and is cool, then you've made good comics. Scanning drawings made on paper and then tweaking them for printing could be eliminated in favor of directly making images using a computer. There aren't a lot of good examples of it so early in the game, but this newish technology will probably bear more interesting fruit in the future. This page:




by Frank Miller from The Dark Knight Strikes Again looks horrible by some aesthetic criteria, but I think it's amazing in its over-the-top garishness. The sense of freedom and lack of preciousness is exciting to me. I hope more kids use books like this as a jumping off point and start making tons of work, just getting their feet wet, not letting the rituals of an older generation overwhelm them in their complexity.

It would also be nice to see folks using analog tools and methods (collage, crayon, whatever mark-making instrument you can think of!) that stray from the ad hoc Bristol, pencil, pen. Austin, himself, is the best example of this I can think of:





There is no reason to be limited by the methods and visual forms of previous generations.

Digital or analog, the drawings can be whatever you want them to be. Luckily, with comics, context creates meaning. You don't have to render representationally in order to express something. Crumb draws in a very literal way. Though heavily stylized, the objects he draws faithfully represent a visual reality that corresponds with the narrative the text is trying to get across. There's a pretty heavy bias in comics toward representational imagery, but this doesn't have to be the case. The context created in a comic allows cartoonists to draw whatever they want, as long as they are getting their point across. Imagery can be expressive, minimal, contradictory, anything. Comics are as much telling as showing and meaning can be gleaned from the text as easily as from the drawings. The opposite is true, as well. Drawings can offer information that is impossible to convey as text. Subtleties of mood, existential details, or even the process of mark-making itself can add nuance to the work. And the style does not have to cohere, though cartoon signifiers are useful for maintaining clarity. For example, the character I mainly use in comics always has a dark left eye and light right eye:




This allows me to change the way he looks often, while it is still clear that it's the same character. Again, as long as the overall story or idea is being expressed clearly, anything goes. The intersection of words and pictures produces something new. Comics create a specific space.




The exhibition was poorly set up, by the way. There was very little background information on Crumb's process or materials. There were colored, enlarged photocopies of drawings of characters in the book pasted on the walls in a way that seemed to signify that this was pop culture that you didn't have to take seriously. Alas.