PX84: Kromalaffing

Kromalaffing edited by Michael Merrill (179x267mm)

This is a catalogue:

From February 4 to 25 of that year, Michael Merrill curated a gallery show called “ChromaZone/Chromatique Presents Kromalaffing” at Toronto’s Grünwald Gallery. The exhibition presented experimental and humorous comic artwork from American, Canadian and European artists.

It was in 1984, and I think it had to be one of the earliest gallery shows to feature such a gamut of artists. It’s a slightly confusing selection of people: It’s basically “Raw people” and then “people from around the area” (i.e., Toronto).

The catalogue explains the show briefly…

… and then we get a page or two of pretty random comics from people (along with an introduction). Here’s Kaz, for instance.

Some people get no introduction, like M K Brown.

Gary Panter is represented by some Daltokyo strips…

… and Art Spiegelman by a truly random selection of randomness.

There’s a single European here — Joost Swarte.

It’s just a very oddly curated show. I mean, you can’t fault somebody for wanting to have all these different people in the show, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a through-line here.

Hm! Here’s somebody I’m not familiar with… Kat Cruickshank? With “No Name Comix”? Those pages look intriguing.

KG Cruickshank… Must be this twitter? I’m unable to find “No Name Comix” on the ebay, though. Too bad; I want to read those.

Anyway, there’s even Mark Beyer in here, and he says that he consciously chose not to go to art school.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX79: I’m in Training to be Tall and Blonde

I’m in Training to be Tall and Blonde by Nicole Hollander (210x137mm)

I thought it might be amusing to include a few things that’s sorta “adjacent” to the putative subject matter of this blog series. Nicole Hollander was a friend of Lynda Barry’s, started working a few years earlier (Hollander 76; Barry 79), appeared in similar places (weekly newspapers), and also has a very distinctive ink line. So why not have a look at her first collection?

I’ve been a huge fan of Sylvia ever since the (late) 80s — it’s a hilarious series. But I’ve never gone back and read Hollander’s earliest work (which has been out of print for many decades).

This book collects work from 76-79, and it’s striking how fully formed Sylvia (without a name yet) is already at this early stage.

This is earlier, I’d guess, and Sylvia doesn’t quite look like what she’d look like later… but it’s basically all there.

If you look at Lynda Barry’s first few years, she’s relentlessly experimenting with different rendering styles and approaches to cartooning, but Hollander seems to slip into one type of cartooning very quickly, and has basically remained there ever since. Not that there’s anything wrong with that when it’s this good, but it’s a marked difference from most of the people I’ve covered in this blog series.

Futura!

That one made me laugh out loud.

Hey! The Supreme Court were way ahead of the times!

Wow. Well, fortunately, we’ve gotten rid of all these insane people like Schlafly from politics, right?

This generally isn’t a very angry collection — it mostly leans hard into being funny (and it is). But sometimes it does go grrr.

Gendering’s hard!

So, to sum up slightly: Hollander doesn’t come from an underground background, and neither does she come from the art-schoolish background of many of the people in this blog series. She works instead in a gag strip tradition that nevertheless seems to be in some sort of dialogue with what’s going on in more avant comics? I think?

Another thing that separates Hollander from the people in this blog series is that she was basically ignored by The Comics Journal: There’s no review of this book in the archives — or any of her other books. She’s basically doesn’t exist in the alt-comics world.

Larry Rodman writes in The Comics Journal #144, page 43:

Nicole Hollander and Lynda Barry, the mav-
erick women of the film, have a sort of spiritual
association which nourishes both of their com-
ic strips. The conflicts of uoman against the
world, against nature and against herself follow
familiar lines. Like Guisewite, Hollander and
Barry are concerned foremost with relationships
in general, the influence of a mother figure in
particular, and the communication of experi-
ence. It is in the formal aspects of writing and
drawing where they innovate. They take the
facade of traditional domestic comedy and go
at it with a wrecking ball. In the film, we see
them in Hollander’s home discussing their pro-
cesses as writers pursuing an elusive idea. The-
oretically, a continuing cast of characters, once
set in motion, will generate stories. Nicole
Hollander’s strip, Sylvia, depends less on a tight
ensemble than does Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s
Comeek, but both women need to prod their
subconscious for their texts.
Nicole Hollander’s themes are taken from
current events and the social condition. “[I
wanted] some way to respond to what’s happen-
ing around me,” as well as to play with concepts,
exaggerate, and generally keep that “kernel of
outrage.” Possible sources for ideas include
books, magazines, television, and eavesdrop-
ping. Sylvia is more political than the average
daily strip, and, consequently, is in self-
syndication. Satiric social comment is often
presented through fantasy: Hollander uses an-
thropomorphism, space aliens, fortune tellers,
angels, and the Devil to Offset her “real”
characters. Sylvia, in effect, can go anywhere,
and is only grounded by the artist’s personali-
ty The titular character herself — flamboyant,
outspoken — is Hollander writ large. “[Sylvia]
speaks her mind, she’s never at a loss. I’m often
at a loss for words.” The character’s perfect con-
fidence is not so much a projection of the Car-
toonist’s ideal self as a product of her concen-
tration. Hollander can take seven hours to com-
pose a precise one-liner Or put-down.

Oh, right, this is a review of the film Funny Ladies, where (amongst other things) Barry and Hollander interview each other. Hm… perhaps I should get that…

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Oda

All the intertubes were atwitter about the Oda Speakers last year. The concept is pretty odd: You buy these speakers, and then you buy a subscription to a series of concerts. You can only listen to these concerts on these speakers, and the speakers don’t really do much else. They do have a line in, so you can plug something else into them, but they don’t do bluetooth or anything.

There’s no social dimension, and there’s no video. There’s just the speakers that suddenly switch themselves on, automatically, when there’s a concert.

It sounded like such a strange concept that I had to have a couple. But it’s only available in the US. And there’s a long waiting list.

But I used a US forwarding service! I haxored it! And I finally got my speakers the other month…

So let’s look at them.

Epic unboxing sequence:

What… Oh! Steel stabilising magnetically attached thingies.

The speakers look mighty nice. Apparently hand-crafted by hipsters in Brooklyn.

So much plastic packaging! Two full bags! That’s not very hipster!

So this is what they look like… The speakers are very light, but with the metal plates they’re very stable.

There’s an app, of course.

When there’s nobody playing, you can stream nature sounds from Kaaterskill Farm (and some other places — it changes once in a while).

Did I mention that the speakers switch themselves on by themselves? They do. But you can set a “Do Not Disturb” time period. I kinda like the way they magically just switch themselves on?

So… OK, the concept is a bit precious. But I like that somebody’s thinking about new ways to connect musicians and audiences. The Oda broadcasts limit themselves naturally to a very select number of people (since you have to have the physical speakers), and in a way that feels like a … new way to have a local radio station? So it’s intimate? And immediate? Because you can’t listen to these concerts later: Once it’s over it’s over. The speakers stream via wifi, and there’s no audio out on them, so you can’t even record the music if you wanted.

But there’s obviously been some pushback to the sheer impracticality of the concept — Oda recently announced that they’ll be making it possible for people that own the speakers to stream the concerts via other gadgets, too.

I think the Oda people have come up with a very interesting approach to getting an alternative way to experience music; making it less … industrial? again.

But what about the audio quality? It’s fine. There’s not much bass, but then again, they aren’t doing any dance music. The most famous person who appears regularly is Terry Riley, I guess, and there’s a lot of… eh… spiritual? music? Gongs and stuff? So kinda new agey? It’s a bit hippyish, which shouldn’t be surprising.

But like tonight, Elizabeth King suddenly started singing while I was here on the couch, minding my own business:

It’s fun? Perhaps I’ll grow tired of being… interrupted?… in this way after a while, but not yet.

I would appreciate a greater variety of music, though.

A Cerebus-Inspired Roundtable on Sexism in Comics

I was reading World War Illustrated 3 #16 when I happened upon an article by Trina Robbins that vaguely intersected with two recent subject matters on this blog: Cerebus and Art Spiegelman.

Cerebus had raped Astoria, and Dave Sim had invited women to write in with their reactions. Robbins was impressed by the responses, so she invited four of them to participate in a roundtable: Robbins would show them excerpts, and then they talk about them.

I don’t think anybody saw this Cerebus plot twist coming.

One of the pieces that Robbins shows the women is… A thing by Art Spiegelman? I didn’t see that coming! I had never heard of this strip: It’s called The Viper, and it sounds like the entire plot of the story was… well, read yourselves.

I’m guessing that’s not a strip that’ll appear in many Spiegelman retrospectives, eh? When Googling this, I find a lot of mentions of The Viper, but a different one:

When you first enter, you’re greeted with a wide range of Spiegelman’s earlier work. In addition to Blasé, a fanzine he created as a teenager, there is “The Viper,” an outrageous noir-esque comic about a man attempting to rescue strangers

The original art sold in 2005 for $6500.

Uh huh:

The Viper was the most vile antihero ever modeled after Will Eisner’s The Spirit, and it earned the 23-year-old Spiegelman recognition in the underground. He created the character after meeting Robert Crumb, who inspired him to “get in touch with your inner psychopath.” Spiegelman’s chest may not swell with pride when he looks back on The Viper (“I’m not proud of my Viper period. It was a poor imitation of Eisner…it was a period I went through”), but it was probably something he had to get out of his system. At least it only took him a year or two. It’s taken Crumb a lifetime.

The panel was split on whether Chantal Montellier’s piece was sexist or not.

Sabrina Jones writes in the introduction how hard is was to get the WW3 people to do an issue on sexism.

It’s a really strong issue. As with most of WW3, it’s mind-bogglingly hard to scrounge up a copy. Perhaps somebody should just scan it and upload to archive.org.

JUST KIDDING.