Happy birthday to Hayao Miyazaki. From The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.
Category: Art
My entry in The Comics Journal’s “Best Comics of 2018” article
The editors of The Comics Journal have put together an extended feature called “The Best Comics of 2018.” The full feature is pretty cool (and pretty enormous), and is a great place for anyone looking for a diverse concentration of new comix to read. Here’s my entry:
- Slum Wolf by Tadao Tsuge (English translation by Ryan Holmberg, NYRC) This collection of “alternative manga” (from The New York Review of Books’ NYRC imprint) showcases nine rough and seedy stories focused on the kimin, the “abandoned people” who live on the margins of Japanese society. Under Tsuge’s mean humor is a diamond-sharp kernel of pathos for all humanity, rendered in spare, even rushed art. Tsuge draws as if his ink and paper might be snatched away at any moment by some civilizing agent who would keep his slum wolves away from respectable eyes. His world isn’t pretty but it is somehow beautiful.
- Hieronymus & Bosch by Paul Kirchner. (Tanibus) Paul Kirchner continues his late career renaissance with Hieronymus & Bosch, a collection of over eighty comic strips set in Hell. The plot of most of these one-pagers is pretty straightforward: Hieronymus and his wooden toy duck Bosch try to escape—either Hell itself, or the boredom of Hell—and fail. Kirchner’s Hell is a slapstick paradise, and if Hieronymus is eternally doomed, at least he finds some solace in his own creative prowess.
- Samplerman, January 2018-December 2018 by Yvan Guillo. (Self-published) In a profile a few years back, the artist Yvan Guillo (who works under the name Samplerman) declared: “I am half the artist and half in the audience, exploring all these pages, picking the things I want to use, making a template and watching the composition being made nearly by itself.” Guillo perfectly describes his techniques of collage, amalgamation, and transformation—and also describes the pure joy that teems through his work. The Samplerman strips synthesize the history of cartooning into something transcendent and energetic, a reining-in of visual entropy into a strange new order.
- The Labyrinth by Saul Steinberg. (NYRB) First published in 1960 and back in print again from the NRYB this year, Saul Steinberg’s The Labyrinth condenses the modern and the mythic. “Steinberg was a lyricist of the metal nib—a twirler of nonverbal non sequiturs,” notes novelist Nicholson Baker in his introduction to the new volume. Steinberg’s lyrical non sequiturs evince in squiggles and dots, tangles and loops which turn into well-dressed men and staid women, cityscapes and night scenes, cocktail parties and art shows. Steinberg turns Abraham Lincoln into Don Quixote, with Santa as his Sancho Panza. He takes us out of urbane New York and into midcentury America, land of motor courts and baseball parks, a knotty chaotic chorus of life. Steinberg could seemingly do anything with ink, as the range of styles in The Labyrinth shows, but what he ultimately did was utterly-Steinbergian. The Labyrinth echoes Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which sought a century earlier, to find a new language to describe a new country. Steinberg looked at America through new eyes, and, like Whitman before him, found a new language of expression—the language of labyrinthine lines on paper.
- Nancy by Olivia Jaimes. (GoComics/United Feature Syndicate) I ♥ Nancy.
Paleo I — Mat Brown
Paleo I, 2014 by Mat Brown (b. 1980)
A review of Saul Steinberg’s The Labyrinth
My review of NYRB’s reissue of Saul Steinberg’s Labyrinth is up at The Comics Journal. First paragraph:
First published in 1960 and back in print again from the New York Review of Books, Saul Steinberg’s The Labyrinth condenses the modern and the mythic into 250 pages of strange and wonderful cartoons. The fourth of Steinberg’s seven major compilations, The Labyrinth covers his work between 1954 and 1960, loosely distilling the state of American mid-century cartooning. Quirky, obliquely intellectual, cosmopolitan, and deeply ironic, Steinberg’s modernist approach addresses many of the major cultural changes in America during the 1950s. The Labyrinth touches on urbanization and suburbanization, the expansion of ready-made mass culture, the post-War shift in the relationship between men and women, the advent of televisual mass media, and the zany paranoia of the Cold War zeitgeist.
Floating Nude — Xi Pan
Floating Nude, 2008 by Xi Pan
Goya’s Ghost — Veronika Holcová
Goya’s Ghost, 2016 by Veronika Holcová (b. 1973)
January — Gerhard Richter
January, 1989 by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)
The Reader — Grace Cossington Smith
The Reader, 1916 by Grace Cossington Smith (1892–1984)
Odysseus on the Island of Circe — Paul Reid
Odysseus on the Island of Circe, 2018 by Paul Reid (b. 1975)
Parakeet on Table — Yamamura Toyonari
Parakeet on Table, 1924 by Yamamura Toyonari (1885-1942)
Siblings — Eva Švankmajerová
Siblings by Eva Švankmajerová (1940 – 2005)
What is happening here is obvious: that lady who is knitting fisherman’s rib is making animated characters who leave through the window.
What is happening here is obvious: that lady who is knitting fisherman’s rib is making animated characters who leave through the window.
Remedios Varo’s description of her painting The Knitting Woman of Verona (1956). From the collection Letters, Dreams & Other Writings. Translated by Margaret Carson. From Wakefield Press.
Too much plasticity (From Gaddis’s The Recognitions)
— Where were you all day? Mr. Yak asked again, when they bumped the second time.
—The Prado.
—The art museum? Mr. Yak shrugged. —What did you do there? He glanced up at the face beside him, and said, —You don’t look like you liked it much. The art there.
—Well they . . . the El Greco, his companion began, as though called upon to comment, and he drew his hand across his eyes.
—They have so many in one room, they’re almost hung on top of each other and it’s too much, it’s too much plasticity, there’s too much movement there in that one room . . . He suddenly looked up at Mr. Yak, holding a hand out before them which appeared to try to shape something there. —Do you … do you see what I mean? With a painter like El Greco, somebody called him a visceral painter, do you see what I mean? And when you get so much of his work hung together, it … the forms stifle each other, it’s too much. Down where they have the Flemish painters hung together it’s different, because they’re all separate . . . the compositions are separate, and the . . . the Bosch and Breughel and Patinir and even Dürer, they don’t disturb each other because the . . . because every composition is made up of separations, or rather … I mean … do you see what I mean? But the harmony in one canvas of El Greco is all one . . . one . . . He had both hands out before him now, the fingers turned in and the thumbs up as though holding something he was studying with a life which Mr. Yak had not seen in his face before. But he broke off abruptly, and his hands came down to his sides.
From William Gaddis’s The Recognitions.
Behold!!! I am Senta Klaws (George Herriman)
Minotaur Surprised while Eating — Maggi Hambling
Minotaur Surprised while Eating, 1987 by Maggi Hambling (b. 1945)
“A Tale of Christmas” — Moebius
“A Tale of Christmas” by Moebius. Published in Heavy Metal, December 1979. Via the Bristol Board.
Mirage — Bridget Tichenor
Mirage, 1967 by Bridget Tichenor (1917-1990)
