Comment: Alternative Medicine

Alterative Comics is the latest independent publisher to put out a call for help. Chris Ekman picks out some of his favourite Alternative reading from the past few years. Plus, can comics break the paper ceiling of mainstream arts coverage?
19 July 2004

THE ANNUAL INDIE COMIC CRUNCH

April 2002: Top Shelf In Trouble ? We Need Your Help!
May 2003: Fantagraphics Books Needs Your Help!
July 2004: Alternative Comics Needs Your Help!

If I were Chris Oliveros of Drawn & Quarterly, I might start getting real nervous about my finances round about August 2005?

It's easy to forget, for those of us in the audience, how fragile the ecology of the independent comics press is. All it takes is one stroke of bad luck, such as the bankruptcy of a bookstore distributor, to bring a publisher within spitting distance of the abyss. Granted, Top Shelf and Alternative Comics, both of which were brought low by the demise of LPC, are one-or-two-man operations. But even the bulkier and better-entrenched Fantagraphics proved vulnerable ? their money troubles began when Seven Hills went under.

Top Shelf and Fantagraphics both managed to save themselves by means of internet appeals to readers to buy books. Alternative Comics is doing the same, but it might have a tougher time. The comics press hasn't been covering this appeal with as much urgency, probably in part because LPC is now such old news. The alt-comics audience might by this time be succumbing to (to use a hateful term) compassion fatigue. And Alternative Comics, although it's been around for over 10 years, doesn't have quite as high a profile.

Publisher Jeff Mason readily admits that he doesn't believe in (to use another hateful term) branding, as you might guess just from his company's generic name. And Mason hasn't cultivated a public persona ? he's neither everybody's best buddy, like Brent Warnock and Jeff Staros of Top Shelf, nor everybody's worst critic, like Gary Groth and Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics. He doesn't swagger and holler and pick fights and spew hype, the way a lot of recent entrants into independent comics publishing have learned to do. All he does is put out a steady stream of good books, mostly by young cartoonists whom other publishers might not be able to find space for.

And that, of course, is the best reason to support Alternative Comics right now. Not out of a sense of charity or of duty, but because they publish good books. And here are some of them that I've enjoyed:

THE MAGIC WHISTLE, by Sam Henderson

There is, in the sage words of Spinal Tap, a fine line between clever and stupid. Sam Henderson leaps across that line, speeds off over the horizon, keeps running until he's doubled back to the clever side, and then hops over the line again. These are crudely-drawn gag cartoons, stripped down to their barest essentials, informed, as Henderson happily admits, by dangerously close readings of movies like PORKY'S ? and yet they're surefire every time.

GRICKLE and FURTHER GRICKLE, by Graham Annable At first these, too, look like books of gag cartoons, informed by Henderson and maybe also Harvey Kurtzman's pre-MAD strip HEY, LOOK! But a funny thing happens when you read it ? you realise that, while some of the strips are pure knockabout comedy, others have real emotional depth. And I know what you're thinking: "Just what I need, fart jokes with emotional depth." But trust me. It works. You'll thank me later.

CUSP and GONGWANADON, by Thomas Herpich

Oh, god. Please don't make me even try to describe these comics. Experimental and bizarre strips, mostly short, some of them darkly funny, some wistful, some nightmarish and some completely cryptic. If you find yourself baffled, you can at least enjoy the bitchin' drawing.

BIPOLAR #1-5, by Asaf and Tomer Hanuka & Etgar Keret

A seriously odd book. Tomer and Asaf Hanuka are twins, but their styles have evolved in entirely different ways. Tomer's stories are fractured and dreamlike, while Asaf has been drawing a more straightforward narrative in "Pizzeria Kamikaze", an adaptation of a prose book by Etgar Keret, in which the place that suicides go after they die turns out to be pretty much like the place they left. Asaf has the slicker art style of the two, a bit like Eduardo Risso without the Frank Millerisms, but Tomer's slightly coarser style is no less powerful; you may have seen his work on the cover of some DC books lately, particularly on the Focus line.

TITANS OF FINANCE, by Josh Neufeld and R Walker

A collection of strips documenting the rise and fall of some particularly flamboyant tycoons (including former Marvel owner Ron Perelman). It's a hoot, especially if you remember the days not long past when CEOs were being celebrated as the new culture heroes ? that is, before they all started going on trial.

Also coming soon from Neufeld is a Xeric-winning collection, which Alternative will distribute, entitled A FEW PERFECT HOURS, comprised of his travel strips from Southeast Asia and Central Europe. They're solid entrants into a neglected genre.

AIM TO DAZZLE, by Dean Haspiel

The further adventures of Billy Dogma, billed as "the last romantic anti-hero", a big emotional (and chronically-unemployable) lug who looks like a quarterback but talks like a flowery dimestore novel. Billy Dogma takes prose beyond purple and all the way to ultraviolet. If Stan and Jack had done a relationship comic in the Mighty Marvel Manner back in the '60s, it might have come out something like this. It's really rather sweet, though it requires a high tolerance for bombast.

Haspiel also has a collection of autobiographical strips available from Alternative, titled OPPOSABLE THUMBS, but I think his keyed-up style is less well-suited to those.

ROSETTA VOL 1 & VOL 2, edited by Ng Suat Tong

A rigorously edited comics anthology with an international feel, full of names to reckon with. You can read more about Volume 2 in Ninth Art's Shipping Forecast this week.

And, though I can't say I've yet been converted to the cult of James Kochalka, it's worth noting that he's done a ton of books for Alternative Comics, namely; MERMAID, QUIT YOUR JOB, THE HORRIBLE TRUTH ABOUT COMICS, MONICA'S STORY, SUNBURN, FANTASTIC BUTTERFLIES, PEANUTBUTTER & JEREMY'S BEST BOOK EVER, and FANCY FROGLIN'S SEXY FOREST. And he?ll probably have finished another graphic novel or two in the time it took you to finish reading that list.

That's enough to be going on with, but there's a good deal more in Alternative's roster worth investigating. Jeff Mason is urging people to buy his books from a comics shop if possible, but if your local store doesn't carry them, you can get them online from Mars Import and other retailers.

"CRASH! ZAP! POW! COMICS AREN'T JUST FOR KIDS ANYMORE!"

There's a headline we all know and loathe. During the '80s and '90s, it seemed like this was the mandatory lead for any news article on the rise of the graphic novel, back then we could only pray for the day when the media might cover comics with some respect, or at least without that damn smirk on their faces.

And so it was a welcome shock to see the New York Times Magazine devoting an extensive cover feature to the best in contemporary graphic novels last week, entitled "Not Funnies" and written by former NYT Book Review editor Charles McGrath. Serious arts coverage in America doesn't get much bigger than this. And not only was the article largely respectful, but also well-informed enough to specifically mock all those old "Crash! Zap!" headlines right at the outset.

So, mission accomplished, then? Have comics won the battle for respectability? Not so fast. McGrath's own piece, despite the best intentions, winds up proving how stubborn that cultural condescension really is.

I don't mean to criticize McGrath just for writing as a layman for other laymen. It's true that there's much in his introductory section to make the well-versed comics reader's eyes roll. He breezily dismisses comic strips, manga, and anything put out by DC or Marvel; he pointedly includes the traditional objection of "highbrows" that comics are intrinsically sub-literate; and he appropriates Topffer and Hogarth as "lofty antecedents" of modern comics, in the mighty McCloudian manner.

One could quibble, a lot, with all of the above ? by pointing out, for instance, that highbrows nowadays seem to be much less bothered by the pulpy roots of comics than middlebrows are ? but there would be no point. These introductory gestures are present just to assuage the scepticism of the audience, and to reassure them that "graphic novel" doesn't just mean the same old junk in a fancier package.

Once McGrath gets into the meat of the article, he acquits himself pretty well. He chooses to profile Art Spiegelman, Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Seth, Joe Sacco and Alan Moore, and gives them space to explain themselves. True, there are some glaring omissions from that line-up ? such as, for instance, women ? but nonetheless, there's no denying that these guys belong in the modern canon, and there wasn't room to cover everybody.

Where McGrath runs into trouble is at the end, when he tries to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the medium. He starts by dithering: "How good are graphic novels, really? ... Some of them are much better than others, obviously, but this is true of books of any kind." You don't say.

He then starts listing strengths, starting with the unique way that comics can portray time. But right afterward, he lapses into damning with faint praise. "The graphic novel can make the familiar look new," he says; Craig Thompson's BLANKETS, for example, "would be insufferably predictable in a prose narrative" but works as a comic. The implication, perhaps unintended, is that there's been so little serious work done in comics that even a story that other media have done to death nevertheless can be made to look novel. Which may well be true, but it would hardly count as a strength.

McGrath goes on to observe that comics are well-suited for tales of "blankness and anomie", "spookiness and paranoia", and, of course, humour and satire. All well and good. Then, in the last paragraph, the caveats creep back in:

?In fact, the genre's greatest strength and greatest weakness is that no matter how far the graphic novel verges toward realism, its basic idiom is always a little, well, cartoonish. Sacco's example notwithstanding, this is a medium probably not well suited to lyricism or strong emotion, and (again, Sacco excepted) the very best graphic novels don't take themselves entirely seriously. They appeal to that childish part of ourselves that delights in caricature, and they rely on the magic, familiar but always a little startling, that reliably turns some lines, dots and squiggles into a face or a figure. It's a trick of sorts, but one that never wears out.?

Can McGrath mean this? Is he really saying that comics can't fully engage the emotions, ought not to be taken entirely seriously, and are in some essential way childish and frivolous? If so, it means all the artists he's cited in the preceding 7000 words have failed. After all, Seth, for one, is nothing if not lyrical, for god's sake. (And Sacco mostly isn't ? I don't know where McGrath got that from.) As for strong emotion, LOVE & ROCKETS, for example, is positively drenched in the stuff. (McGrath may not have read much of L&R; in one of his most glaring omissions, he gives the Hernandez Bros only a cursory mention.)

Even Chris Ware, who's been characterized by some as a chilly formalist, does "really try hard to put as much feeling and emotion as [he] possibly can into" his work, as he once told The Comics Journal. And as much as Ware and the others self-deprecate, there's no question that they take their work very seriously indeed. It's McGrath who can't quite bring himself to. Despite all the research he must have done, and all the graphic novels he must have read, he clearly still isn't comfortable with the idea of comic books putting on airs.

It's not McGrath's fault, or the media's, or even the uninitiated masses'. The prejudice against high-falutin' comics is so deeply ingrained that you'll often find cartoonists themselves espousing it. See, for example, Martin Rowson's review last month of McSweeney?s #13, the all-comics issue that Chris Ware edited. Here was a working political cartoonist, who once adapted TRISTAM SHANDY as a graphic novel, ridiculing the notion that comics should aspire to be anything more than "disposable, light relief" for grubby, cloistered "adolescents of all ages". It's one thing to want to preserve in comics the spirit and freedom of being an ?outlaw medium'; it's quite another to demand that cartoonists know their place in "the ecology of culture" and stick to it.

The battle for cultural legitimacy won't be won until everyone, both inside and outside of comics, recognizes that nothing is forbidden and everything is permitted. Until then, "Crash! Zap! Pow!" lives.

Chris Ekman is a political cartoonist.

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