A Chance Meeting

I get a lot of joy out of a good comic. Spending time on the couch just reading and nothing else is happening. I with I spent more time reading, but that’s just life. I have gotten a lot of interesting books lately and maybe over the holidays I can just put on some noise music and wash the world away in a stack of books.

If you want to send something for me to read, please see below.

Inkstuds
#2147 – 720 Sixth St
New Westminster, BC
V3L 3C5
Canada

and only if you are mailing from the United States

Robin McConnell
1685 H Street # 27043
Blaine, WA 98230
United States

As I get older, I find my social circle get smaller and smaller. I have a tendency to hide as much as possible. My work life takes a lot out of me and time off is basically just refueling my energy levels. I appreciate the folks that stay connected with me as I am horrible to make any kind of social plans with. A couple of friends with gracious enough to bring me back books from trips over overseas. Comic gifts are the best gifts.

First is from my friend Jarrett who brought me back a fistful of very different Japanese works. From Dream Dimension by Ding Pao Yen is a really neat work. The book is formatted in the traditional western style of reading left to right. The protagonist is cartoonist that appears be mentally languishing at his drawing board when one of his drawings come to life and spends the rest of the book forcing him to create stories about bulky non-descript humanoid creatures. Some of the stories within stories are in english or have english translations alongside the japanese. The book appears to be about artistic isolation and getting lost in the sauce of your own process. The stories merge to a point of surrealness that I am not sure I can fully understand, but I appreciate it anyways.

Yoruko is by Hiroki Shono. This is a little nugget of beauty. The comic is has a velum/overlay outer cover, with a brown paper kraft cover under that with the actual image, and then the paper on the inside is a different type velum. The art is great with minimal lines focusing on vignettes of isolation, style and cats. But not cutesy cats, cats as companions through loneliness.

I got benefit of receiving a copy of accidental purchase. Jarrett picked up Alchemical Graphics by Hironori Kikuchi for our friend Cole, but Cole needed the second book, so yay me? There is no mention of this being the first book on the cover, but then again, this whole book is a highway into claustrophobic madness. The art is like if underground artist, John Thompson was on a lot of speed and got really into HR Giger. Each page gets increasingly dense, reminding me of those big spreads of Pascal Doury in Raw Magazine.

I’ve had this biography of Austin Osman Spare by Phil Baker, kicking around in my bag for many months. I try to read it when I am commuting but am really bad at getting around to it. I finally finished it this past week. Spare was an artist that started in the early 1900’s with critical acclaim and recognition for his work. There was high expectations for his work, but he slowly faded into obscurity, getting caught up in himself and obsessions. He continued to create fascinating work that came from a different place than his contemporaries. Spare’s creative practice centering around his magick beliefs would go on to be highly influential to people like Alan Moore and one of my favorite bands, Coil. Spare passed away in the mid 50s in complete poverty and obscurity, find posthumous recognition through the late 60’s and 70’s counter culture movement. You can find a number of his works cheaply reproduced via POD on amazon, there has also been a release of his tarot deck recently.

The reason that I bring this book up, is because of how it connects to the research I am doing right now. The work that Baker did to piece together from a wildly disparate range of sources is phenomenal. I think about this story a lot in terms of comics, because of just how much work from artists came out in obscure little pockets. My current research into the Canadian Underground movement requires extensive and deep digging. I was having lunch with one local underground artist who knew one of the other people i was meeting with, but had no idea that person did comics. I urge anyone that has any Canadian underground comics to reach out to me and share you knowledge as I put this all together. Even more recently, when I look at work that came out in the 80s, it’s really fascinating to see all the different people that did a handful of comics in the black and white and then just disappear. I was describing this to a friend as a really specific naive art movement that we have strong evidence of, but not documented at all for posterity. I hope to share some of that excitement here and bring more artists to light.

One of the less obscure folks I am looking at in terms of the Canadian Underground movement is bpNichol. His name may not resonate much among comic circles, but he is widely recognized for his concrete poetry work. bpNichol left behind a legacy of really varied comics work. My fellow comics researcher, Brian Campbell did some great writing here that can give some nice contextualization of that movement. While doing these very avant garde works, Nichol was also doing more genre based work for anthologies like Andromeda. See below for examples of work written by him and drawn by Tom Nesbitt, as well his more unusual comic work. To give this more context, it’s like if Marc Bell was also writing for the new iteration of Heavy Metal. This is just a taste of what exists in the Canadian Underground comics movement. Take a look through Brian Campbell’s research for more great examples of different Canadian works. You can also order a really nice collection of bpNichol’s more experimental comic works through Talon Books.

On the note of Marc, who has the amazing anthology with Neoglyphic Media out Bellingham (town just 45 minutes south of me, on the other side of the border and has the closest Trader Joes to this coast of Canada). Alive Outside looks fantastic. I still need to get a copy, and write more about it soon. Marc was recently in Europe doing amazing comic festivals and brought me back some mini comics by Roman Muradov that I greedily asked him to grab for me. Roman is an artist that never stops learning or developing. His substack is a great look into the chaos of his interests and his extremely specific sense of humour. He has been carefully distilling his drawing down to bare essentials and beautifully refining to create his own cartooning style. His is personal, funny and I connect with it on so many levels. There is an uncomfortable existentialism that speaks to me quite loudly, but also an absurdity and playfulness. This Russian born Armenian cartoonist has such perfect way of using language as a tool in his work. I know there is a new book coming out soon from Uncivilized and I can’t wait.

This Is How I Disappear by Mirion Malle resonated with me in quite a profound way. Processing trauma is fucking hard and it’s hard to explain the impact it has. It’s not a case of moving on or getting over it. You can’t just easily share what you have been through. It’s brutal. Extremely good and affective book.

Lastly is something I found at local comic show. it’s the first issue of the cleverly titled Comic Book and came out in 1973. The contributors in the book are Gary McDonald, Greg Spagnola, J. (the Mogue) Mogan, Gerry Jones and Tom Wiloch, publishing under Progressive Energies Company out of Clair Shores in Michigan. This is 3rd wave underground at it’s oddest. Some of the work is quite funny and well put together, other work is printed so tiny that I can’t even read the writing. Maybe I am getting old. They also reprint a handful Little Nemo strips. I’m not sure of the reason, maybe to pad out the comic when one of the people involved wasn’t able to get their strips done? I really appreciate just how chaotic it is.