In late 1995 I gave up smoking, which put an immediate, temporary
end to my writing. I couldn’t write and not . . . but
neither could I do absolutely nothing. A couple of smoke-free
weeks into it, I took up cartooning, which I had abandoned ten
years earlier after having been fired as “house cartoonist”
for the SF Weekly. For ten years I hadn’t, out of
bitterness, drawn a single panel, nor paid any attention to the
world of comics. I became an obscure coterie poet. I moved to
Minneapolis and published small-press books by all my friends,
books with titles like Possible Floor and And/Or and:
Or and Or. I became a minor hero for a handful of completist
librarians.
It didn’t take long, once I was able to admit to myself what
I had abandoned, before becoming nostalgic about the days when
I would sit in the Chatanooga on Haight Street and spend hours
sketching comics and reading Lynda Barry, Matt Groening, Gary
Panter, Bill Griffith, Mark Beyer, et al. I began to make occasional
trips to Dreamhaven, Comic Book College and other stores that
trafficked in underground comics. It’s no exaggeration to
admit that nothing could have prepared me for what I discovered.
Sometime in the early 90s, the comics industry as a whole experienced
a major boom. Not only had sales gone through the roof for the
two major publishers, D.C. and Marvel, but there was now a plethora
of independent and self-publishing ventures—prominently displayed
as though there was actually an audience for this stuff. More
impressive than the exponential increase in non-superhero comics
was the work itself. Julie Doucet’s Dirty Plotte was a revelation,
for the jagged, black-heavy art as much as for her raw feminist
stance (panel after panel of cartoon Julie severing men’s
penises from their bodies). Not even the Freak Brothers were as
nakedly abject, as human, as either Mary Fleener or Joe Matt in
their explicit autobio comics Slutburger and Peep Show,
respectively. Was there any precedent for Joe Sacco’s mind-blowing
comics-journalism vehicle Palestine? Or Aleksander Zograf’s
Psychonaut, which combined straight reportage of current
events in war-torn Serbia with renderings of the cartoonist’s
dream-life? The clinchers, in 1996, were Daniel Clowes’ Eightball
(especially the serialized “Like a Velvet Glove Cast
in Iron”) and Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library
(in particular the Beckett-like “Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest
Boy on Earth”). Fortunately, both are popular enough that
I don’t have to attempt to describe them.
It’s now the summer of 2001, some five years later. The comics
boom is over (the curious reader can check back issues of The
Comics Journal ca. 1995-99 to follow the rise of Diamond Distribution
and the simultaneous demise of every other comics distributor).
But every week I discover something new. Last week it was a number
of self-published titles: John Pham’s Epoxy, Jessica
Abel’s Trazo de Tina, Tony Consiglio’s Double
Cross, Matt Madden’s Así Pasan los Días
and Kurt Wolfgang’s Low Jinx. And, despite the supposed
comics slump, “graphic novels” and book-length collections
of non-mainstream comics artists are being published at an impressive
rate.
All this said, the present volume is not, and had no intention
of being, any kind of overview of the “current state”
of comics—which the reader can readily find in anthologies
from Top Shelf, Drawn & Quarterly, The Small Press Expo,
Stripburger, Blab and elsewhere. What it is is a collection
of comics, collaborative pieces, and comics-inspired writing and
performance-documents arriving out of and negotiating a variety
of disparate contexts. It’s a kind of “proof” of
the impact the language and milieu of sequential art, both recent
and historical, has had on so many of us—as well as a document
of the extent to which “high-brow” art forms, concerns,
strategies and techniques have seeped “down” into the
realm of comics. It’s a conversation between diverse forms.
I had originally set out to comment on specific pieces in this
collection. But it finally seems superfluous, especially given
how many of the artists have supplied process notes along with
their work. I do want to thank Jena Osman, Juliana Spahr and Janet
Zweig—the Chain “J” Girls—for putting all
of these artists in dialogue with each other. I’m hardly
an authority on matters of aesthetics, but still . . . I don’t
think there’s anything more generative, even & especially
in the realm of the arts, than conversation.
—Gary Sullivan
