Dongery Appreciation Week

Did you know that’s what the first week of January is? I swear it’s true. Dongery is a Norwegian comics group primarily composed of Sindre Goksøyr, Bendik Kaltenborn, Kristoffer Kjølberg, and Flu Hartberg (although I only have real reading experience with the first three). They seem to stay pretty under the radar for those who aren’t on the regular convention circuit, especially considering how hard it is to find copies of their fanzines (I don’t think the term “mini-comics” is used in the EU) online nowadays, and how incredibly unhelpful their website is, but maybe that just adds to the wonderful feeling of receiving one. I feel privileged to read these comics.


I guess the first notable thing is the design of the books. I don’t know what kind of color copiers they have in Oslo, these things are put together so cleanly and in an appealing digest size, it took me a long time to even realize that they weren’t made in some magical Scandinavian press factory, these fellas are folding and stapling with the best of them. The second most notable thing is the rampant collaboration. I hesitate to call them “jam comics”, these have a much stronger feeling of intent and, when they do team up, the drawing styles are practically seamless.




Not to say that each member doesn’t have their own idiosyncratic style. Goksøyr has a distinct affinity for Disney, mostly drawing rats, dogs, and ducks, even appropriating Gyro Gearloose as a character in the “Lisboa” comic he does with Kjølberg, and then shading with sharp Charles Burns-esque brushlines.



Kaltenborn has an intense wrinkle illustration style; old men wearing baggy suits in cool toned watercolors with a strange, “New Yorker” level of craft. “Serier Som Vil Deg Vel”, a collection of his short works, just came out from No Comprendo Press, and his book, “Seks Sultne Menn” (“Six Hungry Men”), craves a proper English print edition.


Kjølberg’s work is significantly more crude, but quite possibly the most accessible. Seemingly drawn with a big ol’ fat Sharpie, I’ve never seen character design more appealing; big eyes, big noses. In 2008, Soyfriends printed his fanzine, “There Is An Upstairs?”, and I value this more than any other comic I own, the closest thing to perfection I could imagine. This is my “Ghost World”.The last thing I have to mention is the writing, the unequated humor. Some of it may even be due to the vernacular of the English translation, but whether the context is panels or gags, hand-drawn or fumetti, there’s still a universally international appeal. I can’t tell you how many times people have walked up to me at SPX with a copy of “What is Hair?” and a smile on their face, saying, “have you seen this?”other works not mentioned:
“Sing It Out!!!”
“Funny Humor”
“Godammit! I Didn’t Get That Boat!”
“A Reachout for Sindre Mouse”
“High Five”
“M Walk With Me”
“GOGO: A Very Nice Gliding Session”
“Friends for Fighting”

CATHARSIS

“I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them”
Steve Reich

I had a ‘monk’-like phase where I would feel frustration and emotions and I would hold this energy inside me and only let it ‘come out’ via drawing. By ‘cumming’ into drawings/comics I could share something raw inside me with others.



Relationships, especially sexual relationships, are cathartic. ‘Bruise blood’ 'comes' out. Art at this time, for me, is like lazy masturbation, something done out of habit / boredom.

If we do not create out of necessity then why create at all? I value objects (books, zines, images) because I believe I am holding something very personal to someone. I imagine there is an aspect of catharsis which is quite literal. When I hold a book I am holding a fetish object / a lock of hair / a synecdoche. The object is like a chia pet, seeded by the author and watered by the reader.

If blood letting is an act of catharsis then death is the ultimate catharsis. In sexual relationships there is a desire to lose individuality, to break down interpersonal barriers, to let ‘it all’ ‘come out’. Sex is a struggle against these boundaries, a physical struggle to escape one's one bodily confinement. The 'little death' is a small break in the barrier. The 'big death' erases the barrier.

Do we make art for others or do we make it for the other - that imagined other whom we never meet. Do we make art for the living or for the dead?

Do we invest in people?
Do we invest in objects?
Where do we put our seed?

"I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."
Ernest Hemingway

Images via Sam Gaskin and vvork

Slime Freak

It’s the dialogue that really made me fall in love with Carlos Gonzalez’ epic sci-fi series, “Slime Freak”. I’m not sure what the early issues are like, I only have one of them, and it’s just an A4 size sheet of paper folded in half, a big difference compared to the 30-40 page regular issues he’s putting out now, three of which came out this year. I think that started with issue #6, which also included a Russian Tsarlag CD-R. The prolificacy alone is mind-blowing.


This is a comic that is more about the immediate reading experience rather than connecting from issue-to-issue, mostly due to the innumerable cast of characters (and missing a couple of issues), though maybe it would be easier if collected into one continuous volume. The story follows various factions as they vie for attainment of “Havaskin ability”, a powerful exoskeletal suit created through bizarre alchemic processes. It’s a weird, horror movie world of ghosts, mutation, super science, and underground celebrity. The characters are snake-like in appearance with elaborate costume patterning. This is something that I have recognized as important to Carlos in real life as well, always donning a specific outfit when he is performing, common objects given unreal potential as props in a creepy, semi-alternate universe.


At the end of issue #9, he includes an excerpt of Wally Wood’s “My World”, which is a more than apt analogy. You can tell Carlos puts the same love and sweat into his work, not just in story and art, but in composition and physical object. He includes regular “see issue #X” footnotes, tiny profile faces next to narration, Xerox art, shout-outs, center spreads, and universal cover design of hand-drawn colored pencil outlines. He breathes the medium like Vincent Price. I want to find this in the drugstore.

Neo-cool-high-punk-coke-art

I mentioned this in a comment just now, but does anyone know about Wet Magazine? I came across it in a vintage magazine store in San Diego a few years ago and couldn't believe it. In the tradition of underground art magazine culture that had its heyday in the mid-70's-mid-90's. Wet is kinda like RE/Search, but probably appealed to a trendier, more cocaine-based segment of the population. It's bitchin' to think that there was at some point a large group of people willing to buy alternative culture. Totally worth seeking out...

Tsuge

Face/Off

Just saw Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Really liked it. It reminded me of Dash Shaw and how one of my favorite things about manga or low budget movies is the shittiness. There's no preciousness, it's all movement and experimentation. totally humble. just make a bunch of shit and people will look at it and history will sort it out.

PANELING SHMANELING

All this CF talk got me to look up an interview with him>

http://inkstuds.com/?p=360


While I appreciate that it is gay of anyone to repeat any of his ideas ever, I enjoy how CF touched on the otherwordlyness of squares. I agree. I am stealing that idea. Squares: What The Fuck? As in, what came before the square? Why do we have it? Is it liberating or enslaving?

+

I have never warmed up to comics the way I have to picture books. I really like children's books and anything with a nice full page illustration. Text way over there, art right here. No shitty thought bubbles. It is like a blissful audio tour inside an enchanted museum. Look at this beautiful shit:




In comparison, this is comics:



Even without titties, this looks like a page of sex phone adds. Confusion, ad nauseum.

For serious, as far as I can tell the clearest difference between comics and normal drawing or illustration is all the funny boxes around everything. Comics loves frames and paneling: The Magic Square.

I am conveniently excusing the entire history and development of the medium in favor of concentrating on a fundamental formal distinction, so let's proceed...

Short world history:

cave drawings - no frames to speak of
hieroglyphics- frames the size of a pyramid
painting for the catholic church- big frames
photography- smaller frames
film and comics- tons and tons of fucking frames

Films pretend to move but comics, like all good static art exposes the lie. Not only are the characters boxed in but they are frozen and repeated in an agony of non-motion, like when you see someone dancing in a strobe light. Yuck, scary.

COMICS: AN ATROCITY EXHIBITION
Infinite Containment
Exploitation,
Punishment



+

Jump to 21st century. We are surrounded by the square frame! Everything is a screen or a panel or whatever. Nature has circles, triangles, lines, and blobs but I mostly see squares in architecture, construction, agriculture, prison, etc. The tools of man hath the frame while God and Earth are beyond it.

Back to our main point: the square is rather unnatural. Whether used in comics, picture books, or billboards it is a tool of separation, of reproduction and order. Like language it is difficult to imagine life without it, but of course we have not always had either. Perhaps.

If not always the square then, from what are its origins? Or from whom?



Images courtesy The Comics Curmudgeon, Comic World News Forum (not sure where, sorry!), "I Never Promised You An Egg Roll", and charismatic heresy (rad site!)

Barirony

I've been trying to put this link up for an hour or so but haven't been able to because I was playing with my daughter in the bedroom while my wife was making biscuits for Thanksgiving. good Lynda Barry interview. I think she's right - that the most important function of art is play. But, yeah, I couldn't stop thinking of how I was gonna word this post while I was tossing Rita around and making her giggle by giving her raspberries on her tummy...

CF + STYLE SITE

'[Ben] Jones presents the next attempt at a new drawing style (thin pencil lines drawn on smudgy velum or grid paper, using geometric shapes and simple figural forms to construct a formal pictorial dissection of contemporary art, life and humor), soon to be the next artistic statement seen on Justice T-Shirts and/or Art Collective’s large smelly big pieces of drawing paper. Oh wait, Powr Masters already did that. Hmmmm. Sorry. This is slightly different. It's more Yokoyama-ish.'

from 'Paper Rad (how to draw like this)' by Ben Jones




I started reading a book called 'Style Site', which seems to argue that 'style' can be seen as a collaborative 'site' in which cultural exchange can take place. I find relief in this positive reappraisal of style, which in some ways defines the hipster generation. If everything is a surface, every action a 'put on', then style emerges as a structure in which to engage/explore surfaces, to construct and assemble, to meme and reproduce.




Why is CF so meme-able? In his comics and his blog he constructs a world that is glaringly fetishistic - humans are lines, hands are gloves, information is organized in specific, stylized ways. Compartmentalized. Styles are easy to sort through, to pick and choose.

In comics these compartments extend as far as the author wishes. Comics can be seen as a form of 'total design' - a 'fantasy about control, about architecture as control.' While this can be viewed as a fascist tendency (and fascism is certainly a theme in CF's oeuvre) it can just as easily be viewed as a Buddhist tendency toward a loss of self. If we are all just lines and shapes (existing in a 'floating world') then there is an implied 'other' that is absent. To lose oneself is also to own everything.




There was a great comments thread on one of Sam Gaskin's images, where someone was 'heckling him' for the imagery he was using. His response was something like, "Who owns circles? Who owns triangles? Who owns parallel lines?" The cultural/natural forces that manifested CF also manifested the rest of us! We are all responding to the contemporary zeitgeist and trying to relate that experience back to each other. This is all going on simultaneously and we are all grasping on to whatever language we can find, in a desperate attempt to find our tribe. CF has had a powrful hand in formulating the language we use.








These are all artists whose drawings I strongly admire, many I am friends with. In order from the top:
ola vasilijeva, zach hazard & nick gazin, zara messano, Joshua Vrysen, jonathan chandler, famicon, erin wo, chris day, apollo
hall hassi

SPACE

I saw this ad recently in a magazine and I felt good seeing it. I thought of a couple things:

Use of a gradient to create sequence of movement and feeling, from roof to basement, from exterior to interior

The feeling of being warm indoors on a cold day, being strongly aware of interior and exterior

Being the only person in a building at night, feeling powerful, sneaky

Death, a mausoleum, Pompeii, being wealthy with no possessions

This reminds me of 'this post'

FORMING

When assigned to write about Jesse Moynihan's serialized weekly epic Forming a couple days ago, I promptly lost myself in an irritating Adaptation style metatextual hell of drifting mystical staircases and mental distortions. Happily, this frustrating process says as much about Forming's many great attributes as narrative as my own brain's exasperating echo park.



In the interest of clarity and setting personal failings aside, here's a brief list of observations and thoughts:

1. Forming is a great title. The word itself is a gerund which means a verb that acts like a noun, or to put it pseudo-poetically: movement frozen. Besides the nerdiness factor, this is a beautiful way to describe a narrative that is literally about creation. It speaks to the infinite and eternal as belonging to the newly born. Or: action being stasis.

2. The fact that Noah's communion with Ain Soph - a confusing Kabbalistic idea of God as pure limitlessness - involves visions of a vomiting Garbage Pail Kid seems appropriately in touch with the absurdity of the infinite.



3. Consistent, rigid grid and black outlines over murkier gouache emphasize the theme of forms, of separating objects, which reminds me of conflict, which is the whole point of storytelling. Becoming and undoing, etc.

4. Really enjoy the shifting sympathies. So many overlapping mythologies crash into each other here that reader identification constantly changes. Do we like the rather PC black Adam and Eve, the neurotic alien techno-bureaucrat Nommo, Serapis the Androgyne, or Michael, the reluctant blue angel? As with any excited collision of ideas, characters, and forces, discerning sincerity from deception, or purity from corruption is a nearly impossible task. Perhaps that's what forming is anyway, the constant upheaval of the old for the new. An endless process that we try to stay on top of as artists and as humans.

Despite our most crybaby emo efforts though, chaos is funny.

ZINES

DIAMOND COMICS 4




Selections

Aidan Koch's spread. It is visually coherent and plays with structure in an 'organic' way. The left page a mess of pre-sleep imagery, the right page a mess bound by dream structure. The transition between the two curves around the lower left triangle of the left page.

Matt Lock's 'perfect' left page. Where does one go with that perfection, that symmetry? Love that tension, moving forward, moving down, the tension of symmetry in a left-to-right sequential context, the weight of the unread right page bearing upon the eyes. So much build-up but where can it go?



Wet Paint by JTM




Like a tour around the better parts of America given by an insurgent comedian. I got this with Pines 2 and they go well together. Amazing phrases written 'out of necessity', like funny jokes that someone remembers years later in prison, that become the only links to a previous life. Loose phrases written desperately, desperate phrases written loosely.

MAGAZINE MEMES

I saw this book in Powells yesterday. The cover design resonated strongly, it triggered associations with contemporary and classic design by seeming 'wrong' and 'right' at the same time.

It was such a strong statement I thought, 'is asymmetrical bleed the new meme?'

Soon after I saw another publication with asymmetrical bleed, and I noticed Anders Nilsen's new zine has asymmetrical bleed as well.

I first became aware of magazine memes in St. Marks Bookstore. When I started flipping through all these new magazines I had a feeling of being connected to a contemporary international culture, one that takes its aesthetic cues from blogs and fanzines. It was a culture I had previously only heard about online. To see it in print felt like a rare privilege.


This design imagery reminds me of seeing a google-translated japanese website that is loading awkwardly on my screen. Not only is it 'right now', but it is committing this fleeting feeling to print. And isn't this what magazines should do?



Is there anything on this chart I left out? Where does McSweeneys fit in? Will this chart be relevent next year? Is it relevent now? When I found out TATE ETC has been using these memes since 2004, I felt 'behind'. Should I pay more attention to the 'high hipster class' or the 'low class'? Which is more contemporary? What is right now? Is it still worth engaging with print culture or should everything be online?

"The blog is the modern drawing. Whatever I say there could be seen as part of my work. It gives the most information; it shows my complete surroundings." -Ai Weiwei

HALL HASSI PT. 1

Beyond Nihilism = the Absurd