Reading Through 2021 88: The Playboy, by Chester Brown

 The Playboy, by Chester Brown

1992, revised edition 2013

When I last read this book, I was a boy; now I am kind of a man.

The cover is a repurposed panel

Sometime around the mid-90s, I got turned on to the output of Drawn & Quarterly, and without a doubt, it changed my life. For one thing, it was the leveling up I needed to see from comics to justify keeping up with them. I love genre, but I couldn't subside on genre alone. I needed something with a deeper motive and a greater ambition to keep me from giving up on them all together. D&Q was that thing. It also helped that they were Canadian and helped me to see Canadian art as different than merely government funded would-be American art (there was a lot of not-so-great CanCon movies, music and TV in the 90s).  This book, along with the work of Seth and Joe Matt, gave me something to aspire to, though the work of those three is a pretty narrow spectrum through the lens of 2021.

The current version is smaller in size, with a lot more pages than the 90's version

So I had this, and all the rest of the D&Q books of the time, but I think I gave my copy of it away around the year 2000. It was long gone, anyway. More than once, I looked on my bookshelf for it and couldn't find it, so I finally just ordered a new copy. First thing I noticed was it's a new edition. The old edition was bigger, more panels on the page, black backgrounds, and if I remember correctly, a comment by Hugh Hefner. The new one has one or two panels per page, it's been re-scripted, and other subtle alterations which I missed.

I like the paper the new one is printed on, simple newsprint like a cheap novel has.

You can't buy pornography at the store near your house, for obvious reasons

The book in a nutshell is this: Brown tells autobiographical anecdotes about buying Playboy from teenage years to adulthood. It involves a lot of shame and being extremely conscious about all of it. Where to buy it, how to talk about it, how to dispose of it, how to carry it so that nobody thinks you're doing anything abnormal.

Hiding stuff in your shirt is a terrible idea. You hide it out in the open

Of course, he has his own personal details as to how he did things, but this hit home to me like few things I'd ever read at the time. Even today, it hits home. Pornography is pretty near universal in male experience, but in most circles, it's not something men want to talk about or acknowledge. It's embarrassing, verging into shameful. It depends on the person and their upbringing how much shame there is, but I was raised pretty non-religious, in a fairly open house, and I was mortified that someone might think I wanted to look at naked women. 

The use of pornography at the very least is universal, and if there is a guy who says he's never, then chances are he was simply using Sears catalogs instead. And it's a part of human experience. I studied the history of art, and one of my favorite quotes was by David Hockney (if I remember correctly), which went along the lines of, "It's only pornography for a hundred years, then it goes into a museum." It's been a constant in human culture. 

That's the kind of stuff I had to remind myself to not just feel like a skeeve.

The rituals of calculatedly disposing of his pornography is painful 

Brown lays it all out in detail the efforts he would go to to destroy evidence of having bought a Playboy, being haunted by not having it, and repurchasing it again, and eventually getting rid of the evidence again. It's painful, because he was doing it to himself. He wasn't being preached at by his parents or a reverend. He had just internalized this idea that wanting, having and using pornography was wrong.

So painful

The biggest takeaway is the honesty Brown shows throughout. Even as an adult writing about it, he isn't comfortable with it. In a Maus-like reflection of people reading his work in progress, he feigns not knowing about Playboy history in conversation with a guy who will likely read his comic a month later and see that he was lying. He's tackling the topic, yet he hasn't come to terms with it. It makes the whole project fascinating, and fairly unique. Autobiography was still a minor genre in comics, and rarely does the artist show themselves to be barely able to acknowledge in life what they're acknowledging on the page. Most autobiography is about topics someone has come to terms with.

Porn in forests and parks will never change. I've seen it in Japan lots too

My thoughts on this book, over twenty years after I last read it: it's much smaller than I remembered. At that time, trade paperbacks were still somewhat new. The original book was maybe 160 pages, which felt pretty substantial at the time, but feels quite short within the world of comics today, especially as Brown doesn't use half of the paper on the page. The landscape of comics has evolved a lot in the past 25 years and if it were released today, I think it would still get a lot of praise, but it feels slight compared to most alternative comics I buy.

How foolish of him to try to dispose of a magazine in the family fireplace

The book feels as personal now as it ever did. I've read a number of autobiographical comics this year, and all are revealing, some more than others. Maybe for me, because this resonates so deeply with my own experiences, it just feels that much harder of a book to have made. At this point, I could tell some of my own stories like this, but having read this book would make it easier, and I'd have to have some ironic distance from the "me" I were talking about.  Brown does have his own ironic distance as well, as he narrates the book in the form of a demon.

I imagine an eighteen year old today would still relate to this, though some of the details would be harder for them to imagine. Do young men buy magazines anymore? Maybe a young man today just amasses files on their hard drive, which they purge and rebuild repeatedly. I don't know, I don't talk to any teenagers. Maybe their porn is in the cloud. 

Can't just throw pornography out with your garbage. Someone might see it

This wasn't a book I was dying to get back, it was languishing in my online wishlist for about two years, but I just decided I should have it back on my shelf. Reading it reminded me how important it was for me, because I saw myself in a comic as much as I ever had. My own life had drama and conflict that I had never recognized.

Reading Through 2021 32: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine

2020

What an enormously frustrating book.

AAA production values

I love Tomine's work. I really do. I was buying Optic Nerve in the 90's, I love his New Yorker illustrations, and Killing and Dying is one of my favorite comic collections period. Killing and Dying is incredible. Right from the first preview of this, I was not down with The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, a collection of autobio strips about how embarrassing Tomine's life is.

In 2020, it ended up being what seemed like the most reviewed work of the year. Not best-reviewed, but most reviewed. Tomine is a comic artist with fans in a lot of media organizations, so Rolling Stone or EW or the Guardian or the New York Times will weigh in on his work, along with lots of comic sites. And they kept saying it was very good. Everywhere kept saying it was very good! Only a few places, like Solrad, gave mixed to negative reviews of it. The thing is, the positive reviews of it highlighted what I expected would be a negative about it. The Guardian (pulled up as the top pick on an Internet search as an example) said:

 In a series of autobiographical sketches from childhood to the present day, Tomine casts a cynical and unforgiving eye on his fragile ego, the dubious rewards of his successful career and the absurdity of the comic-book industry.

That doesn't sound great to me: a successful artist showing he was unhappy and frustrated in the comic industry. 

"This one time, I was at Dan Clowes studio, and I felt bad."

The majority of the book is a series of vignettes where Tomine is experiencing the dream of indie success and feeling bad about it. He's one of the youngest nominees at the Eisner awards, and he feels bad. He's at a book signing in Tokyo, and he feels bad. He's the subject of a TV documentary program in Angoulême, and he feels bad.

It's honest, and I'm sure he felt that way, but the jokes are only mildly amusing, not really funny, and not so insightful. For most of the book, I was just wondering why I was reading it at all.

"This one time, I was a guest at the world-renowned Angoulême Comics Festival, and I felt bad."

Around the mid-way point, he starts to add some dating themed strips. He hopes that if his girlfriend will see he's a popular cartoonist, it might impress her. This sort of detail was more endearing to me than the cringe stuff, since it was a lot more of a peek into his psychology. It's his own weakness as a person rather than the world not boosting him up enough. But this sort of thing is in a minority of the stories in the book.

The thing is, I knew from reviews and previews before I read the book that this was the main thrust of the book, and I bought it anyway. After reading, I don't think this is what the book is actually about, despite it being the majority of it. The final story is about a near-death panic he has where he reevaluates his life and everything he knows. Tomine is very frank, and direct to the reader in the form of a monologue to his wife about where his head is, that all his perceived slights are nothing compared to the love he has for his family. That final story is that Adrian Tomine magic that I love.

It doesn't change that the first hundred pages of the book are a guy highlighting the negative in every aspect of a long and successful career. He got to where he is through hard work. It wasn't given to him, so I don't want to say that he isn't thankful for it. But I don't enjoy reading a book where he makes success out to be such an emotional burden. 

What he's really trying to say

Other than that, the packaging is gorgeous. It's made up to be a Moleskine notebook, with the elastic band and everything (clout in the industry has some benefits when asking for frills in publishing at least). And the cartooning is incredible. Really incredible. He drew in this style in some of the stories in Killing and Dying. I loved it there, and I love it here too. It's very elegant, very precise, and the level of nuance in the facial expressions is simply amazing. I was regularly comparing panels to see the level of detail, for example, in jaw lines as mouths opened and closed. It's a weird thing to comment on, but it's difficult to draw and he does he perfectly. He's doing very simple images, but the structure behind them is sound. 

He's at the top of his game as a cartoonist. And he's got decades ahead of him to do more great work if he chooses to. 

When I saw him put that text balloon tail in the third panel, I cursed the cartooning for being so elegantly simple and clever

Books can change upon a reread. Maybe knowing that the book uses the first two thirds as a set up of the lonely cartoonist to contrast the family man learning to appreciate his life in the third act will work on a second reading. I read all his stuff twice, so maybe it won't be so frustrating next time. 

Reading Through 2021 31: Nineteen, by Ancco

Nineteen, by Ancco

2000s, published in English in 2020 

I used to love Drawn and Quarterly. In the 1990s, I bought pretty much everything they published. Some time in the 2000s I started getting tired of some of their books. They branched out into more artsy fare that I didn't enjoy reading. I still think they are a publisher worth checking out though. Their 2020 release, Ancco's Nineteen, is everything I ever loved about the publisher's output.

The cover was what made me pull the trigger and buy it

This is a collection of mostly autobiographical stories, loosely drawn. No rulers, possibly no pencils. Ancco is one of those artists that just has a strong personal style. I've seen work graphically similar before, but it's not overly common in comics. It's very readable. You are quickly pulled into what's happening in each story.

The stories were done over a number of years, and her style evolves over time. They portray her life being a high school student to an independent 20-something.

I always appreciate comics where they suck the fun out of drinking

This is dark, personal comic work. It's really sad too. She very frankly portrays vignettes of her life without melodrama or self-pity. She shows alcohol use within a family without labeling it alcoholism per se, but shows how it affects family dynamics. She shows physical abuse in the family, without making explicit criticism of it. One story, she gets beaten up by her father, in another she's eating at the table with him. That's how family has tended to work for most of history: a family can have serious problems, and you just take it as the status quo. The concept of breaking things off with "toxic" family members is a relatively new Western idea (not that people didn't do it, but that you would receive widespread encouragement and support for doing so).  I think she as a writer knows the alcohol and abuse is not healthy, but that's not necessarily how people think while in the midst of their family life.

Reading this was very cathartic to me. It just tapped into a lot of emotions I don't touch on much, in my life or in other reading. If I had 50 books that were on the topic of coping with a depressing life, I wouldn't be as moved, but it's not that common, and especially not with this tone. This is not a survivor's tale, of how she escaped, it's her just showing her life. In multiple places she shows herself to be a difficult person to the people around her, and it complicates things. If you have guilt or self-loathing, it's easy to place blame on yourself despite being a victim of abuse. 

Absolutely my favorite sequence in the book

This is not a didactic book. It's simply straightforward storytelling which probably reads differently to each reader, depending on your emotional background.  

Family

I found it to be in that sweet spot of indie books: graphically interesting, very readable, and memorable. I can't recommend it enough.

Reading Through 2021 23: Or Else, by Kevin H(uiznega)

Or Else #1, by Kevin H(uiznega)

2004

I miss Drawn and Quarterly's textured paper covers!

This comic was one of the last indie "issues" I bought. I know Fantagraphics and Drawn And Quarterly occasionally print some at the request of the artist, but those companies have pretty much moved to the graphic novel format. For me, I remember enjoying this issue at the time, but not being blown away by it. After a decade of reading Eightball, Palookaville, Black Hole, Hate, and Peepshow off the stand, this didn't resonate too strongly with me. 

The art stood out though: a simple, classical cartoonist style; and Huizenga has stuck with this character, Glenn Ganges. I saw some of his work on his Tumblr some years back and really was blown away. I read Glenn Ganges in: the River at Night last year and was immediately convinced it was a Great Comic. That's a book that every reader should own.

So I had my eye on revisiting this book. What first stood out is that this wasn't original work; it was a collection from his mini-comics and anthologies around that time. D&Q must have been quite taken with his work to republish it.

There are three longer pieces, and some one pagers here. The first full story, NST '04, is indie fare, trying to find poetry in daily life in a slow town. It works because Huizenga is somewhat formalist in his construction, cutting between scenes from panel to panel, creating a patchwork experience of life. I don't love it, but it's different from what was being produced at the time and manages to stand out.

The final page of NST '04 is quiet and poetic

By its length, Chan Woo Kim is the meat of the comic. It's, again, a formalist comic, overlaying adoption agency notes over Asian ink paintings (I live in Japan, it's called sumi-e here, I'm guessing Huizenga is following a Korean tradition in his piece). The art is refined, and shows that Huizenga has skills outside of simply cartooning. I don't know that it's a great comic, but it's an interesting experiment at the very least. 

I don't think this is a must-own comic that people need to track down, but it definitely shows the seeds of an artist who is interested in exploring beyond the established boundaries of comics. In his later work, he has very good linework, but it is in story construction, abstract concept illustration, and the use of repetition and tropes where I think he shines. This book shows some of the promise of that work yet to come.