Comics for Comics' Sake

I’ve been to the Alternative Press Expo every year since I first moved to San Francisco in 2004; even now that I live in Orange County, I still make an annual trip back up to the Bay to attend. I love small press stuff and minicomics and always spend much too much sampling things at random; if there’s an booth that looks interesting, I’ll always try to get at least one of their wares to take home with me.

But I haven’t been so good, necessarily, at actually reading those comics once I get them. They tend to be filed away somewhere on a shelf–or worse, on a permanent stack on the floor near a bookshelf somewhere. One of my goals in starting up a comics blog was to motivate myself to unearth those stacks, discover what’s in them, and write about it. And I’ll start with Why Did I Put This Town On My Face? by Matt Wiegle, which I seem to have picked up at last year’s show.

It’s a short minicomic of 32 pages, and maybe I should explain what a minicomic is for those of you not into the indie-comics scene. These are photocopied, hand-stapled creations produced in limited print runs by amateur artists. More than anything else this blog will cover, minicomics are literally comics for comics’ sake: they’re created out of a pure impulse of expression divorced from any attempt at making money. And as such, they can get pretty damned weird.

Wiegle’s minicomic, a collection of pieces that had appeared in other anthologies, is a good example of what I’m talking about. “Good” in both senses of the word: it typifies the genre and it’s also well-executed, which is hardly a given when you’re talking about random minicomics purchased at APE. A lot of them can be pretty awful, in fact, and out of respect for their creators’ courage in putting their work out there for public consumption I probably won’t be touching on those should I find one in The Stack.

The stories in WDIPTTOMF are short and whimsical. Most of them are surreal one-gag affairs, like the story about a man buried up to his jaw, and the humor is derived more from the strangeness of the stories more than a punchline. There’s not much plot to speak of–these vignettes barely qualify as one-acters– and the stories stand or fall mainly on Wiegle’s wavy, thin-lined art style.

Wiegle’s other strength is his ability to keep the ideas coming. The best piece in the book, the title of which is irreproducible since it’s just a picture of an anchor, is about a tattooed man invading an art gallery showing with the intention of using his power to bring art to life in order to make some ill-defined point. It’s only five pages long, but Wiegle puts a lot in there: a pair of freeloading students only interested in crashing the snack table, a lovelorn art critic, and the tattooed man himself, who’s worked out a system of using his tattoos to support himself in everyday life. Also, David Bowie with his legs chopped off.

In the end, there isn’t much to say about minis like this without just summarizing the already-thin pieces, so posts in The Stack series will probably end up being more review-y than other writeups, using the following as a form of final judgement:

IF MATT WIEGLE EXHIBITS AT THIS YEAR’S APE I WILL: Probably buy another of his minis if I happen across his booth.

North Korea didn’t get its reputation as the bogeyman of international policy just because it’s a militarized nation with institutionalized anti-West ideologies led by a half-crazed dictator. It did so by being all of those things and keeping itself almost completely unknowable. With the citizenry prevented from having any contact with the outside world and the few foreigners allowed within its borders from having any contact with the citizenry, North Korea’s reclusiveness just added to the fear.

Which is why books like Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang are so important. There have been glimpses into North Korea before, such as the Vice Guide to North Korea, but they tend to try a bit too hard to be scandalous exposes rather than simple inquiries into what life in the country is like.

What makes Delisle’s account different is that he wasn’t there to observe horror stories and report them back to an audience eager to hear tales of oppression and paranoia. He was there to do his job, which happened to take him to the North Korean animation studio SEK just as it had previously taken him to studios in China and Vietnam. He was there for two months, giving him plenty of time to settle in and have a good look around the place. Or as good a look as any foreigner is allowed to have around Pyongyang, at any rate.

But the particulars of the two-stop subway, the empty highways, and the omnipresent guides can be found in nearly any account of the city. Pyongyang shines in its recurring characters, the party officials and fellow expatriates and how they reveal themselves over the course of Delisle’s stay.

On the DPRK side, there’s Comrade Sin (sometimes mockingly called Captain Sin), Delisle’s chaperone around the city, and an unnamed translator who later replaces him. Sin is for the most part implacable and unnerving; he’s got a military background and insists that everyone Delisle sees doing manual labor is “volunteering.” In one of the book’s creepiest exchanges, he calmly explains that a former star animator in the studio isn’t on any of the current production teams, didn’t transfer studios, or go abroad, but remains silent on Delisle’s obvious follow-up question: “He didn’t just disappear, did he?”

Delisle wonders of Comrade Sin the same thing most people who learn the basic facts about life in North Korea do: “Do they really believe the bullshit that’s being forced down their throats?” As he points out–more often in narration than dialogue, since to casually discuss the truth with his guides could be a very bad idea–North Korea has serious problems and its neighbors, if and when things come crashing down, are not going to be sanguine about supporting a bunch of brainwashed, jobless refugees. Is there hope for these people?

Probably so. You can see it in the cracks and between the lines of Delisle’s story. The officials who let down their guards on the one outdoor afternoon they spend following a trip to the surreal Friendship Museum. The pure joy on Comrade Sin’s face as he receives a gift of Hennessy cognac. Even the fear, in places, is revealing. When Delisle lets a translator borrow a copy of 1984 he brought with him and later asks what he thought, the translator starts trembling and stammers that he doesn’t like science fiction. The slip in the carefully maintained doublethink shows that the translator, like everyone else, knows the score. Someday he may even be able to say so.

After all, as Delisle shows, the facade can’t last forever. Even during his two-month stay, there’s a revolving door cast of expatriates in the form of fellow animation vets, fashion designers, tech experts, and NGO workers coming to and from the country all the time, an inevitable factor in the country’s economy since it requires so much foreign aid and foreign investment to stay afloat. All that imported help comes at the price of further exposure to ordinary Western people, in stark contrast to the Museum of Imperialist Occupation or the propaganda films that comprise the sole programming in the country’s movie theaters.

The cracks are there, and they’ll widen, and it’s books like this that will drive the wedge. The propaganda films isn’t as scary as long as you know there’s one guy there willing to say he thinks they’re boring. The guides’ authority isn’t as absolute after they’ve laughed their heads off at a subversive joke you made. The country isn’t as alien once you know they’re waiting for the same thing we are.

The hardest part when talking about Jason is knowing where to start. He’s prolific, and his books are all great, so when I recommend him to someone and they ask what to read first, it’s tempting to say “All of them. Read them all first.” But in lieu of the temporally impossible, you might as well start with The Left Bank Gang.

The premise of the book is so high-concept and ludicrous that it sounds like a shaggy dog story. What if all those famous novelists of the Jazz Age lived in close proximity on the Parisian Left Bank, except they were all animals, and they were cartoonists instead of writers, and they fell on hard times and tried to pull off a bank heist?

It’s as dryly nonsensical as it sounds, but it works because of Jason’s art style. His depiction of the story could hardly be called realistic; the best word to describe it might be “fair.” Not fair as in a qualitative judgement of his skill on a scale from “excellent” to “poor,” but “fair” as in a style that makes no qualitative judgements. His hard-luck cartoonists don’t make grand or exaggerated movements, they just do what they do, never betraying any artist’s knowledge that they’re in a story.

The page composition complements this style well. I had initially thought that one of the reasons Jason’s style worked was because he didn’t vary his camera distance or placement much from panel to panel, and on most pages that’s true. But there are plenty of pages where it isn’t, enough so that you can’t discount his range as a cartoonist. What is true is that he rarely deviates from the simple-to-understand nine-panel grid.

When used like this, page after page, nine-panel grid does two things. It sets up a steady rhythm for the reader so that even when things start to go seriously awry in the story, it feels as natural and everyday within the grid as that casual dinner conversation ten pages back.

More than that, though, it prevents any panel from ever growing too big to let a character breathe. This is mostly a story about people feeling trapped, whether it’s in a country, a career, a marriage, or a life, and the tight space of every panel gets that feeling across well. Big, open vistas of breathtaking scenery are pulled out when an artist wants to impress the reader, but Jason’s restraint and insistence on the nine-panel grid goes all the further toward emphasizing the smallness of these people and their concerns.

Even if “these people” do happen to be the most celebrated writers of the early 20th century.