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Featuring Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot vs. Jean Jaques Perrey, The Pipettes, Sparks, Magnetic Fields, Emir Kusterica, Ladytron, Duke Ellington, Madness, Songs to Wear Pants To, Siobhan Fahey, Stella, Popup, Pop Will Eat Itself
It’s rare that a graphic novel actually realizes and achieves the intellectual and experimental possibilities that the medium suggests — too often, graphic novels are repositories for narrative stories. Though they can affect a level of surrealism or make use of a stream of conscious narrative, the structure of a graphic novel — panel after panel after panel — provides a physical roadmap that undercuts any ventures into disorientation. There is always a path, always a frame, whereas in literature words on a page are just abstract symbolism that requires the reader’s mind to disseminate any order that might be contained. In other words, it’s a hell of a lot easier to write a novel like “Finnegan’s Wake” than create a graphic novel with the same impact.
If I were to name the best graphic novel of 2007, it would be “Alice in Sunderland,” the work of British creator Bryan Talbot. Not only is it probably the most important graphic novel of last year, it’s one of the most important and transformative graphic novels ever.
Though subtitled “an entertainment,” Talbot’s magnum opus is anything but the trifle such an affectation implies. Instead, it is a sweeping chronicle of British history, mixed with local lore, biography, literary criticism, personal memoir, cartoon studies, and more. There are two focuses in the book from which all points explode in the big bang of Talbot’s mind — the industrial city of Sunderland and famed author Lewis Carroll. With those two as the vantage point to the book, Talbot’s tapestry includes the swirl of people and places from many eras. Talbot realizes this monumental tale through a mix of digital and traditional mediums, photography and cartooning and anything else you can think of. These styles come together seamlessly, you can’t pick them apart, and they create a world unto itself where there are no barriers separating past or present, nor what goes on in Talbot’s mind and what takes place in the so-called real world.
Bryan Talbot’s previous work includes “The Adventures of Luther Arkwright” and “The Tale of One Bad Rat.”
JM: This is not a straight biography or history — what was your process of devising what exactly you wanted to do with this book?
BT: I always think long and hard about every graphic novel I do, usually for years before I start. Once I do, it’s a big commitment — several years’ work — so I have to have everything straight in my mind before I begin. The starting point with this book was me moving here to Sunderland. I’d been thinking about doing something relating to Alice and Lewis Carroll for about twenty years, but it was only when I arrived here and discovered not only Carroll, but also Alice’s family, had many, many links with the city and the surrounding area that I saw a way of doing it. The next step was research - a hell of a lot of it! I realized pretty early on that, if I was going to tell the story of how the roots of Wonderland grew here, then I’d also have to tell the story of the city itself. The framework of the book — that of a performance at the Sunderland Empire — an Edwardian “palace of varieties” - was already something that I’d had in mind. About 20 years ago, I had the idea of doing a graphic novel using a theatrical piece as a setting and made a few notes and scribbled a few sketches. Shortly after moving here, I went to see “Return to the Forbidden Planet” at the Empire and I was amazed by the place. When I started to think seriously about doing a graphic novel about Alice based in Sunderland, the two ideas seemed to spontaneously collide.
It’s alarming when something starts off with an apology, as Best American Comics 2007 does — like in that dreadful Terry Gilliam film “Tideland.” It’s as if something horrible is being heralded. And yet that’s exactly what guest editor Chris Ware essentially does by clarifying in the introduction that the collection reflects his personal taste more than it does any critical summation of the year. What ends up following is a wonderful essay explaining his choices and his wider view of this representation of the comics field — that is, autobiographical works that present the truth, something he is in awe of.
Autobiography and truth do not always walk hand-in-hand. Some might even say such a thing is impossible, no one can stand back enough to present a personal story with an appropriate level of truth. I interview a lot of people in my job at a newspaper and through those interviews I tell a lot of people’s stories from their point of view. I have a very simple view of this, which is similar, I think, to Errol Morris’, as well as Ware’s, and that is that I think everyone should have the chance to tell their story. The difference between me listening to their story and relating it and them telling it, thus cutting out the middle man, is that I am there to read their story like it is a story — find the connections and themes, pick the moments that resonate in the larger narrative of their life, pick out the sentences that not only support these moments but also stand out in such away that they pepper the larger point with the smaller picture — personality. The job is to get inside them and let them use your writing and editing brain, act as a kind of receptacle for their unconscious in order to relate their story. To someone in my position, a person telling their own story is not necessarily any different from fiction, because the subjective nature of addressing yourself makes it so.
People who ply the trade of autobiographical comics would probably beg to differ with me. Truth in person, I think they might say, stems from how they perceive and present themselves, not how I do. The truth is not the result of a third person deciding what stays and what goes in a story, how it is pieced together, what it all adds up to — the truth is the result of the same stumbling person stumbling through their own expression.
Different strokes, as they say.
There are many ways to look at autobiography in comics and still endorse the form even if you don’t particularly like it. One is to just recognize that it’s a glorious thing for people to express themselves, regardless of content, talent, regardless of how interesting the result of their expression is. The doing is far more important than the work done, because it’s not about contributing to the greater consciousness of transformative art, it’s just about doing something for yourself. That’s the way I look at a lot of autobiographical comics. In my mind, autobiography is a nuts and bolts step of a young person to practice the fine art of representing something on a page (or wherever) and drawing out the meaning for others to witness. The next step is taking this talent you have honed on yourself and applying it to the people and world around you – an empathic move that is what I described in regard to the interviews I conduct, but can also be linked up with a variety of storytelling, most notably fiction. There are people who can continue on with autobiography beyond that point, but it’s nice if they have something to say — and something notably different about their lives to say it with. Very few of us are Mark Twain.
And so there are a few problems with “The Best American Comics 2007.
One of them is largely a creative issue. While people like Jeffrey Brown and Ivan Brunetti and Sophie Crumb are obviously talented — well, in all honesty, for me the jury is still out on Sophie Crumb, but still — the stories that are chosen for the volume and observations they present in them are on such an ordinary, mundane level — anyone could live these lives — and offer the chance for some to confuse self-deprecation with the truth. I think it’s great that they do these sorts of comics for themselves and other interested parties, but I don’t quite understand why these stories are in this book. There is nothing in stories such as these that show me anything that I or any of my friends haven’t lived before — slice of life is fine, but I suppose it doesn’t mean much to me personally.
Furthermore, if Chris Ware can defend a book called “The Best American Comics of 2007” by saying it’s all his personal taste, then I can criticize it on the same grounds — in fact, I can slam it because I think some of the work in is just dreadful and I don’t necessary need to give any other reason for slamming it than to say “Not my taste, sorry.” And that’s the problem, because it leads to impassable points where someone sticks works by Paper Rad and C.F. and I can’t, because of my personal taste, see one reason this sort of substandard scribbling is in a book published by Houghton Mifflin. The comics look and read like they were done by 10-year-olds in 1975, which, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing — it just is with these.
Not all the works in the book are autobiography in the strict sense — rather they are told in an autobiographical format or get to the kind of truth that Ware speaks of. This is the narrative format of the the best works in the book.
Unfortunately, the last problem with the book is that some of the best works in it — Alison Bechdel’s or Kim Deitch’s or Adrian Tomine’s, for instance — are excerpts from larger works. This has two effects — one, it turns an expensive book into a publisher’s sampler and that is truly annoying. Two, it leaves you wanting, but not in a good way. It’s a frustrating want. Given the presentation — and the price — it seems reasonable to think that this collection should present complete stories, that it should be a collection of short works, especially since the longer works are already easily procured in their own books. Shorter works could use a little help, it seems to me.
This all adds up to the fact that there are only two reasons I can possibly recommend this book and, because of such a low page count for my thumb ups, can only really suggest you go find it in a library or very cheap used. Art Spiegelman’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@#*!” is a nice little tale of Spiegelman’s introduction to comics and his alienation from traditional American manhood — and his embracing of another form of that within forbidden comics. As an autobiography, it works because it takes a personal story and widens it across the eras to something many of us can identify with. Spiegelman finds the thread in his own story and makes it work.
However, the honor of the best story in the entire collection — and the one that should make you run out to that library and grab a copy — is Dan Zettwoch’s “Won’t Be Licked!” a tale of devastating flood in Louisville, KY, in 1937 that is based on a story about his grandfather taking a homemade boat around the flooded. Zettwoch’s grandfather drew some sketches and took him around on a tour and from this interaction, Zettwoch crafts something both peaceful and exciting. Zettwoch is brilliantly able to step outside himself and inhabit his grandfather for this tale of charming adventure, understanding what his grandfather saw, what he got out of it, and the worlds that opened up to him through this natural disaster — in crafting the tale, Zettwoch shows the same curiosity as his grandfather. Zettwoch’s illustration style is a warm and cartoony one that captures the architecture and textures of the time with great skill and personality. It’s a wonderful work, a more down to earth journey of discovery down a waterway — reminiscent of Mark Twain in its own way, in fact, as it addresses the story of the land it takes place in as much as the people involved. In this short story, Dan Zettwoch shows himself to be a very major talent who, I believe, has a lot of amazing things to offer in his future.
To me, Zettwoch exhibits the sort of insight that makes a great writer that I spoke of earlier — he is able to take the lessons of self-examination and apply them to other venues. He has learned the ultimate lesson of a creator — it is not all about you. You are but one part in the larger mix that is the work. Your part is vital, but no more important than any other part of the mix.
In this way, I cannot pronounce the collection a failure, because it gave me one story that was filled with power and promise. Anthologies, whatever the criteria for them, are hit and miss affairs where sometimes the failure of 90 percent can’t wipe out the victory of that small portion that grabs your heart. Which is to say, Dan Zettwoch, I’ll be watching you.
Genesis P-Orridge is an industrial music legend, pioneering the form as well the lifestyle — his ventures in body modification, tattoos, and piercing were well documented in the seminal RE/Search book “Modern Primitives,” a counter culture sensation that spawned a mainstream aesthetic form.
He still performs with both his bands, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV.
Recently, P-Orridge’s partner in life and art, Lady Jaye, died in their Brooklyn home. The two had been working on a performance project of body modification wherein they created a third being, known as Breyer P-Orridge, and received cosmetic surgery to bring them closer visually. The work was an examination of self and sexuality that the couple made personal and part of their everyday life.
The following interview was conducted prior to Lady Jaye’s death — in the same interview session Lady Jaye spoke about the Breyer P-Orridge project in conjunction with an installation at Mass MoCA — that can be read here. What follows is the conversation with Genesis about his beliefs and work.
SB: The book “Modern Primitives,” which you were featured in, is one of those quiet bits of influence that never really gets its due.
GP: It’s funny, because that book Modern Primitives, I knew Vale, who runs RE/Search, already and he used to do it in a newspaper format and called it “Search and Destroy” and then I was hanging out with him way back in 1980, maybe earlier, and we were talking. I said “You know what someone should do? Do a series of books that are like an alternative culture encyclopedia that you get in volumes and start to document all these new underground movements that are going on.”
So the first one was William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Throbbing Gristle, then he did “The Industrial Culture Handbook” and then he said to me when I was visiting “What next?”
I said that we had been getting piercing and tattoos and the Fakir Mustaphar and Mr. Sebastion, I explained why it was interesting, this reclamation of the human body, and that was how modern primitives happened, it was actually a suggestion that he took up.
We had no idea that it would be so incredibly influential. When you look at it chronologically, that’s when it exploded across the planet. Now there’s a piercing and tattoo shop in almost every village, everywhere you go, it’s incredible.
SB: You can’t pass a teenager without one or the other or both or several.
GP: We walk along and Jaye says “I blame you for this.”
Photographer Gregory Crewdson is known for his meticulous, cinematic work, where mysterious circumstances are depicted as nuggets in a larger story. His photo shoots work like movie sets — indoor sets are crafted with the same detail and intensity, while his on location work can often resemble a movie crew at work, and can cause as much disruption and awe.
Crewdson’s images are often captured at night and mostly depict people in some moment of their own personal twilight — his book of the same name is a collection of surreal moments captured, slices of time laid down on the page for the audience to decipher. His subjects might be staring off, lost in something the camera can’t capture — women are often in their underwear and look surprised to be in feminine bodies. Men are obsessive, attending to mounds of dirt and piles of junk that they have amassed in their living space. There is often the slight suggestion of another presence — unseen but felt, lurking and watching from off the frame. Perhaps it is the viewer, perhaps a god, perhaps a UFO. Crewdson keeps it to himself.
His upcoming book, “Beneath the Roses,” is a collaboration with author Russell Banks. Crewdson lives in New York City and teaches at Yale.
JM: Some people have noticed a similarity between you and Edward Hopper — particularly between your untitled photo from winter of 2004 and his painting “Morning in a City.”
GC: Believe it or not, I didn’t have it in mind at all. I guess that’s how art operates. Obviously I’m a big fan of Hopper and know his work really well, but I wasn’t in any way attempting to do an homage or pastiche of his work, I was just entirely focused on making the best picture I could.
Artists always have a relationship to the tradition in which they work, so I think that maybe on an unconscious level previous images saturate you in some way or another.
JM: Your photos are filled with women in the same mood as the Hopper woman— various states of undress, disarray. Where does the interest lie?
GC: That’s not something I’m very conscious of. I know I’m interested in a particular type, a certain kind of hauntedness or loneliness, and beauty, and a certain kind of nakedness. Anything more than that I’d be hesitant to try and articulate, I like to keep it a mystery in a certain sense. To myself, I mean.
JM: No pivotal moment in your life to explain the preoccupation — like that story David Lynch has about the naked woman walking down the street when he was a kid?
JM: It might be a similar kind of thing, and now I’m not even quite sure if I was there or if I just heard my parents talk about it, but I think we were all at the next door neighbor’s in Brooklyn Christmas party and it was all very proper and everything, and the mother walked down the stairs of her house completely naked. I don’t even know if I was there, but I’ve always had that in my mind. I love that notion. I guess you could make a distinction between naked and the nude. Naked just feels more psychological.
It was just when we were talking right now, I was reminded of that story, and that’s why I’m unclear as to whether I was there or not, but I can follow that up, I’ll ask my mother about it. Or I just completely made it up, I’m not quite sure. I don’t think so. I draw from certain images in my mind and something stays up there or not. If it stays up there, I try to make a picture of it.
JM: I’ve heard you come up with your ideas while swimming.
GC: During the day, there are always distractions, things happening, even in my studio there’s very little time for allowing your imagination just to open up, so when I swim, I just very consciously allow my imagination to wander. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. As I’m swimming, I’m counting the laps and, at some point, images do emerge. I start to think about that and, then, I let it sit and if it stays, I start to think about, well, what kind of room would that be in or what would the space look like, all that.
I have two distinct ways of working — on location, which is more location-driven, where I look around over and over again for a location that might work for one of my pictures, but if I’m working on a sound stage, I start with an empty space and I have to build everything up. So if the image stays with me, I work with the art director and start working on all the fiscal aspects of creating it.
JM: There are stories implied in your images. Does a story come to your mind at some point along with the image?
GC: In terms of what it actually means? No. I really don’t have any interest in the before or after. I am just completely invested in the single moment. I can have some ideas, but I much prefer to keep that a mystery and just make sure that I render that single moment as perfectly as I can.
JM: Are you a movie fan?
GC: I love films in general, I love light on the screen. My favorite filmmakers— David Lynch, Cronenberg, Hitchcock, Orson Welles — in all these filmmakers, there are levels of meaning where nothing is as it appears to be. In terms of influence, I could be looking at any movie and there could be a scene in the movie that strikes me as beautiful that I could just file away.
JM: Your photographs could be mistaken for stills from a film.
GC: Ultimately, there’s a big difference from a movie in that there’s a certain kind of investment to a single image that no movie could sustain. That’s one of the reasons I don’t make movies, because I love the notion of putting everything into a single picture.
JM: Do you think of yourself as a storyteller?
GC: Yes, I do, a storyteller in a very particular way. I don’t want my pictures to be hermetic or inaccessible. I want the pictures to tell a story of some sort and engage the viewer. Photography has a very limited capacity to tell a story, so it’s a very different kind of story than film or literature.
JM: It’s an implied story.
GC: Of course, like all photographs are.
JM: Do you think of yourself as a New England photographer?
GC: That’s an awful interesting thing. At this point, I feel like it’s very clear that a setting is so important to my pictures and I’ve made all my pictures in and around the Berkshires. The way I see it is that the setting is a stage for my picture-making activities and it’s an important one, but I also want the picture to feel like it could be anywhere.
It’s the place, it’s my connection with the place and it’s my imagined sense of the place all coming together. My family has a cabin in Becket and that’s the starting point of why I make pictures there. And we still have that cabin.
JM: What’s your trajectory in photography been?
GC: I started photography late in life. I really didn’t start until I was an undergraduate at SUNY Purchase, that’s really when I took my first photography class and, from that moment, it was very obvious what I wanted to do.
The first art photograph that really had a profound effect on me was the Diane Arbus retrospective that my father took me to when I was 10-years-old. It wasn’t until later I realized that I had that connection. It’s a long list of people who have influenced me, from Cindy Sherman to William Eggleston.
JM: What sort of photos did you take when you first started?
GC: I’ve always, over and over again, been drawn to the same subject matter, suburban landscapes, small towns, always.
JM: Is it a case of a city kid finding a rural area exotic?
GC: I feel the reason I’m drawn to that kind of imaginative place is that I look at it with a sense of wonder and awe, but I also feel like I have a double life. I have my life in New York with my family, and then I have my more imaginative life when I’m in Massachusetts and I make my pictures.
What I’m most interested in now is a kind of non-descript, desolate town where everything feels like its from another period, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.
It’s a funny thing. I lived in New York City from 1983 to 1987 and, yeah, I could tell you stories. It was a place that often seemed on the edge of sanity, a place that felt like it was being engulfed by something unseen that was tearing it apart. To those who lived there, it manifested in what appeared to be slow decay, a place that was dying.
After I left, I chose not to tell the stories I lived — those are, honestly, even still stewing inside me — and, instead, put down my emotions and somewhat pretentious philosophical observations about the place in a horrible short story with a science fiction bent that I called “Patmos.” That’s an allusion to the island where the illusions of the Book of Revelations took place.
Yeah, I know, you don’t have to say anything, I know. I was young, what can I say?
In context of this review, it’s worth pointing out that the plot included a nightmarish scenario of high rises being built for the populace to live in so they can survive a mysterious flood that is overtaking the city — in my story, it’s a flood of some sort of grotesque ooze. Eventually, madness overtakes the people in the buildings.
It was bad.
The important point of even bringing it up is the fact that I felt the vibe of New York City as a flood overtaking everything and unleashing psychological demons upon the citizens.
So, apparently, did illustrator Eric Drooker. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there were lots of others who felt the same. Some may never have been able to express it through creative work, others might have, but were far less skilled at doing so than Drooker. Regardless, in Drooker’s book “Flood,” he has captured a vital truth to the daily existence of people in New York City during that time period.
“Flood” is a stark and silent work by a cover painter for The New Yorker that originally saw publication as a complete work in 1992, though Chapter One was done in 1986, Chapter Two in 1990. With the final chapter, the story becomes an apocalyptic trilogy of a city drowning and an artist beset by nightmarish visions of himself and the world around him, not much different from what I imagined at the time, but far, far better.
Drooker portrays New York City of the time through the medium of scratchboard — every illustration is an engraved work, creating a negative stark quality to each image. This echoes throughout the whole work, bringing in an otherworldly portrait of a place that has been long lost in time.
The story follows the bleak existence of an artist as he loses his day job, indulges in hurtful romance and falls victim to the subterranean excesses of the city’s own imagination. Eventually, the artist’s own work flows out into reality, mixes with the decay of the city and cleanses through destruction.
The book’s cover tells you everything you need to know about it — a thick-lined sketch of a man is overpowered by a heavy rain storm, his umbrella being violently tossed away, lightning striking at him out of the top corner of one side of the book. The image is realized in the cold blues and gloomy blacks, but at the center of the man’s chest lies a deep red, glowing, vibrant heart.
It’s an image that any city dweller might identify with.
In Drooker’s powerful work, New York City itself is as much a character as any person portrayed — in fact, the humans whose movements are etched into the narrative can, at times, seem less like creatures at their evolutionary peak and more like vermin that has infected a body. If decay is the work of the vermin let loose, then the titular flood is a necessary cleansing — and the ending that Drooker provides walks the same line, challenging the reader to decide if it is a pessimistic or optimistic tale — or a little of both.
The bonus of the book is an extensive interview with Drooker, in which he has the opportunity to speak about the experiences and psychology that lead to such a vivid work, and about the technical prowess that were his tools to do so.
In Drooker’s New York City, the landscape your body inhabits is inseparable from the way your mind perceives it — living in that overwhelming island can be a hero’s journey dominated by illusion and horror for anyone who lives there, and “Flood” functions as the last testament for any person who might require it. And I thank Drooker for providing such a vivid travelogue to the days of my youth.
It was about ten years ago that Peter Garfield began taking photos of houses falling out of the sky.
Blurry, at times lacking in basic composition and focus, Garfield’s work appeared to be a collection of impromptu snapshots in the tradition of UFO photography more than any kind of gallery art. Part of Garfield’s method is to embrace the most important component behind the UFO phenomenon — the fakery of it. The photos are not real photos of houses flying in the sky, but there is a back story to the images that extends perception of fiction as reality, the idea that Garfield’s photos reflect a larger effort to take houses and drop them for the purpose of art. Garfield’s method of utilizing the iconography he had created to expand into an entire mythology was similar, also, to the way information about UFOs is passed around popular culture — he made a book that put the images into their fictional content in the form of his artist catalog for a show.
These days, Garfield is working in film and exploring very similar themes, but the falling houses are still well remembered by lovers of the absurd.
JM: I felt as though your photos were so realistic that they couldn’t be anything other than fakes.
PG: The whole thing is fiction. The photos themselves, of the houses falling, are done with models, very small models. I break them up and glue stuff to them and make them look more realistic and destroyed and then the documentary stuff was all done. The helicopter images and the crane images were the first time I had ever used Photoshop —that was ‘97 — and that Web site is actually from 1998, it hasn’t changed once. The black and white one is myself, a bunch of other people, friends and actors. There are some interior shots in my friends’ design space.
“It’s not so much a calling as it is a means to a calling. I don’t think about it much, though.”
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