Bill Randall

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I still haven’t received my comp copy of the new format Comics Journal, but poet-cartoonist Gary Sullivan has already written a couple of detailed responses to an essay of mine in it. The essay, a look at comics as poetry, takes a provocative Austin English piece as a chance to review the Poetry Foundation’s comics-poems.

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The Comics Journal has announced their Best of 2007.  My own contributions, in addition to my addendum, are:

• Red Eye, Black Eye by K. Thor Jensen
• (and Trains Are Mint #4, which may or may not be a “comic” but is a lovely collection of drawing by a young cartoonist)
• Elvis Road by Elvis Studio
• Powr Mastrs Vol. 1 by C.F.
• Achewood by Chris Onstadt
• How To Be Everywhere by Warren Craghead, my favorite book of 2007

Justifications, of course, are in the magazine, which should be out in a week or so.  Read it!

In a 2006 interview, Anders Nilsen recalled, “Cheryl used to say I had the Horror Vacui.” His fiancee Cheryl Weaver had teased him for his habit of filling the empty spaces in his drawings; an artist herself, she poked fun with a choice art history term. Earlier in the interview, he mentioned a book he was completing about their relationship. It would chronicle their travels together, to Michigan and France, until the point when the traveling stopped and she lay dying of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in a hospital bed. This book couldn’t have been easy to start, much less finish. Nonetheless, Nilsen probably didn’t have much choice. As an artist, his job of work is filling in spaces, and he was faced with the most profoundly empty one imaginable.

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Warren Craghead, a singular cartoonist and a fine fine artist, has released his latest tiny chapbook on his web site. I picked his interpretation of Apollonaire, How To Be Everywhere, as the finest comic of ‘07. So it’s a treat to see another book so early in ‘08.

Best of all, you can download and print it yourself. Pretend you’re a cutting-edge artist making ‘zines in the attic! Print, fold, staple, cut, until the carpal tunnel threatens your livelihood.

Now I need to head for Portugal to compare the drawings with the sights. Another link: my interview/essay on the artist, covering his interactive site “A Map’s Little Spell.”

With the early, sudden success of her memoir Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi has found herself in a tough place. She spoke to the divide between the West and Iran, and so came dangerously close to becoming one of the few Voices of Iran out there. Yet speaking for her country would require broad generalizations, and Satrapi’s work seems much more concerned with the details of her own life. Her latest, Chicken with Plums, focuses on the very specific plight of her great-uncle. It is a far cry from the political journalism the marketing department might have preferred.

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Something to get lost in, The Stacks opens with at least a partial map. As if he understands we’ll need some help, Marc Bell offers four pages of “secret codes,” clueing us in to the fact that “oven mitt means ‘take it easy’” and “nipple’s [sic] mean macho—man very much alive.” Forty pages of odd art later, he notes that “young Klee wondered if women had udders.” Maybe not in our world, but what they have in Bell’s curious world, only he knows. His entrancing doodles riff not just on Klee, but Philip Guston too. Like both those fine artists, he delves into Old Time cartooning as if it’s the fundamental image of a thought. The characters aren’t fun playpals but chunks of meaning rearranged, and The Stacks becomes a map of his mind.

Fortunately, Bell never seems to build his world from within his hermetically sealed studio. He makes frequent enough reference to the world outside, whether in lists of celebrity names or Canada Council for the Arts rejection letters. All these things get transformed by his bottom-feeding sensibility, as scrap paper and envelopes become art. That palimpsest of the outside reminds that about half the pieces in The Stacks originally surfaced in a gallery show. The other half appeared in an early mini-comic. Perhaps “comic” is off the mark, since only one traditional comic-with-panels appears in the whole book. The rest runs the gamut from paintings and collages to intricate, lighthearted drawings, and everything builds his vision of an off-kilter world.

Unlike many of his peers in both fine arts and comics who use such imagery, his vision’s not limited to the ironic. Instead, he’s created a world that’s whimsical and open. It invites lingering. What it lacks in immediacy, it more than makes up for with a sense of depth that extends beyond the page. As a whole, The Stacks rewards a second visit, and I get the impression that Bell’s world could take visitors, in the short or even long term. After all, anywhere that Tim Ho-Ton sponsors the Canadian Curlers is a place I’ll gladly sit a spell, even if Canadia [sic] doesn’t have an udder. That is to say, excellent work.

This review originally appeared in the October 2006 issue of The Comics Journal, #278.

My list of the Best Five Comics of 2007 should be at the printer for issue 288 of TCJ. I sent it off in October, but proceeded to play catch up in the interim. Looking at other lists online– especially Time’s, which seems to have been compiled by algorithm– I rather like mine (cough cough). But I am reminded that I read some fantastic books only after the deadline passed.Had I written at year’s end, I would change not a thing about the five I selected. Except perhaps lobbying for a Best Ten, which might also contain:

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I am a columnist for The Comics Journal, the oft-cranky, oft-praised magazine of record for comics criticism. My Best of 2007 will appear in an early 2008 issue, thanks to the vagaries of print publishing.

So I figured I’d share my best from the last year, originally published in the March 2007 TCJ.

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