PleasureGallows

Tim Hensley: Wally Gropius

2012-01-14T00:44:00.000-08:00

Fantagraphics - 2011

Forgive the "Look Inside" via Amazon. But perhaps if you can overlook wandering graphics, you can fully appreciate the latest in misappropriated visual language which is "Wally Gropius." A mutation of the Herge' style and Richie Rich idiom, we are taken to the highest absurdities of upper-class living, which ends up being a cutting insight into upper-middle class meandering in America. Its printing coincides with the CG film adaptation of Tintin-- perhaps not a coincidence, seeing as Hensley hails from the belly of the beast, Los Angeles.

We see our leading man bear the cross of housing foreclosure conspirator, stock market cry-baby, and Illuminati vampire. He is paired with a terrible band while during practice he casually ponders, "how much money will it lose?" The humor stems thematically from excess and its applications. We are challenged with overgrown subject matter in a style designed for children. I was actually embarrassed to be found reading this book in its legal sized, glossy, primary color splendor on my couch as my roommate walked in.

In one excerpt repeated by Charles Burns edited "Best American Comics 2009," we see the apex of this style's misalignment with subject matter. Wally Gropius discusses marriage and its anxieties with his mother who shoots a bird out of the sky to read its entrails in an impromptu tribal-religious ritual-- very Jodorowsky.

Despite its irony, Wally Gropius hits a personal nerve with me. Not that I am a trust-fund brat, but I can relate to the dry, disenfranchised humor and have a great deal of affinity for work that attempts usage of an alienating vessel for emotional discourse. There are so many jokes that barely get a mention, they are subtle, and so the reader is trusted to pick up on their presence, in their rapid succession. That subtlety and relentlessness made this book one of my favorite reads of 2011.

Failed relationships and the Huey Lewis and The News joke that repeats throughout the book, referencing the awful "Chill Wave" trend sweeping the hipster nation in America, followed by throngs of Xanax popping imitators. Money can't buy us love, to quote a band almost as vapid as Huey Lewis. Wally traverses an antiseptic world similar to the emotionless padded closet of professional gated communities, finally explaining the simplified Herge' inspired style made to be a competent parody, sterile and bubble-gum linework, complete with unadorned or gesture-less backgrounds that fail to even admit a vanishing point. (A room is often depicted by a floating window and a table).

What results is very Los Angeles; the reader learns of an angst and emotional state that is communicated through dry, mechanical jokes that will surely alienate most, impress the steel hearted, and reel in the less wary of us with the lure of style, which is what is to be expected from the ivory tower that is Fantagraphics.

Aapo Rapi - Naaburger

2012-01-04T12:20:00.000-08:00

Huuda Huuda - 2009

This little gem was a small, oblong, glossy zine presented in glorious post Fritz-The-Cat trip glow, by an artist from Finland. Huuda Huuda, a great publisher of rugged illustration and psychedelic exploration stories, does their work mostly in their obscure native language but translates a few stories in English. I decided to do a review of this work because it touches on my favorite themes: ennui, existential decay, and desolation through humorous idiom.

Our main character resembles Homer Simpson, with the same jelly-like physique and primatial facial structure. There is something pathologically dense in his conduct. The first dozen or so scenes involve him wandering from one meat-pie truck to another along a deserted forest road, striking up banal conversations with the cooks and eventually getting punched in the face.

Speaking of which, I don't know what a meat-pie is, but I assume it's your typical blue-collar meat/gruel/slop. Perhaps it is the Finnish backwater equivalent of the Burrito, the Gyro, or the Hamburger. Comparisons are made between the consumer and his greasy muse. There's no distinction between the simple, fatty meal and the man who eats it. From birth to grave, a "naaburger" philosophy.

Eventually the story follows the course of a working class failure of a marriage, complete with unemployment drama, aloof pregnancy, and acrid insults.

We rarely see the faces of the people our ape-faced main character interacts with. The meatpie theme runs consistent. It is his only interest in life. The metaphor is used by him to describe the christening of their marriage.

I enjoy seeing into the hidden parts of other countries. It feels as though Finland is not so far away. I see this happening in Montana. The great thing is, our story is sparsely populated with dialogue but full of emotion. There's the despair, that's the meat. There's the humor, and that's the bread. Done and done.

-Aaron $hunga

Psycho Shit Fuck, Jose G. Angeles

2011-10-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

Totally hilarious, and insane.

This book is 249 pages of short vignettes that follow a maddening formula. Morbid Angel and Napalm Death blast out of each unruled panel. It seems Troma Films, Wes Craven and that Steroid infused era of Hollywood starring Chuck Norris and Arnold Schwarzenegger have been tossed into a short circuiting blender. Frenetic, poorly drawn sex and violence leap off the carved surface of an 8th-grader's desk interspersed with social commentary and philosophical rants that slap normalcy, maturity and reservation in the face. Admittedly, I can't leave the thing lying out in my room because it looks like a maggot infested stain on the floor.

Jose Angeles appears at Bay Area comic book events with a table covered in paper-mache' gore, advertising his own personal brand of 80's hesher freakout art. He hails from the seldom mentioned South San Francisco district. One story implies he is a janitor where piles of prostitutes' condoms and dogshit accumulate, but this could be the life of a fictional character.

Since 2000, Jose has gone against anything "acceptable" or "trendy" in any sphere, devoting himself to a purity void of social pressure in his drawing that refuses to clean up its adolescent scribbling and shot-gun pointillism which achieves something that I can only describe as . . . "Brutal."

Let's ignore Freud today. Any artiste' or anthro-psycho-activist over analyzing this book would obviously be missing the point completely. To these people I say: When is it a good idea to invest the powers of careful art criticism, sociopolitical analysis, or the skills of Rembrandt upon artery-laden viscera, flaming vomit, and silicone tits? It's a joke.

Pure Pajamas, by Marc Bell

2011-10-07T17:14:00.000-07:00

Picked this one up, a Drawn n' Quarterly hard cover compilation released in 2011 by Marc Bell. I have to say I really enjoyed it. It's one of those light hearted explorations of the subconscious, while marginally censored, that I enjoy. Often comics are rampant with brutality and sex because of the male-centric demographic of repressed, wimpy readers. Be it Iron Man or the wild eyed glam psychos of Suehiro Maruo, or R. Crumb's fidgeting libidinous penmanship of thick Jewish ham-hocks.

Speaking of which, Marc is clearly influenced by R. Crumb. The bluesy ragtime era dialogues that harken back to the days of Krazy Kat and Bugs Bunny set the tone for his work, and the numerous little characters and bizarre landscapes lend themselves to LSD inspired dreamscapes. But in Marc Bell's world some one has picked up all the garbage and policed the area for sleaze. It seems a bit more like the inside of the S.F. Moma rather than 60's era Haight Street.

Perhaps this distance from the hustle and bustle of R. Crumb's world, the trashy streets of the hippie infested 60's era San Francisco and dirty, industrial Philadelphia contrast greatly to Marc Bell's hometown and place of art education in London, Ontario.

The best analogy for his work is smoking weed in a museum. The modernized version of R. Crumb explores pastel color schemes, abstract forms and ideas that resemble Japanese videogames and toys, puppets, and futuristic cities where everything works like a sterilized, female-friendly clockwork.

Did I also mention, having this book on your shelf when a girl comes over is a good idea.

2011-04-21T21:56:00.000-07:00

Blam by Roy Lichtenstein was originally All American Men of War #89 by Russ Heath. And here I present to you "Bang" by Aaron Kaneshiro. The memetic transmission of ideas from one artist to another lead to infinite redundancy and connectivity. Here I tried to draw a parallel between the world of Davey Crockett and Science Fiction. Boys with their guns in the wild, facing down adversities with violence and square jaws.

Here I am trying to incorporate the EC/DC comics style of the 50's more. The one principle I stumbled on today was the fact that line widths express lighting and give objects volume through subtle variation. In Japanese work it is more common to see a uniform line that encompasses every object with the same width, and depth is created more through observed shapes. Using a brush more than not seems to help. There's a great sense of dynamics they communicated with in that era in the line widths and accents. I hope to obtain the secret eventually...

As I near the end of my 20's, there remains a soft spot and a deep devotion to drawing comics. There is little for the cartoonist other than a bizarre sense of excitement that stems from practically nothing, a wintry, blank world that stretches out into infinite blank invitation. I love comics and will not stop drawing them. What results will be interesting, I hope.

2011-04-19T18:33:00.000-07:00

Aaron Shunga's Recent reads

2011-04-19T14:40:00.000-07:00

Cerebus: Form and Void- David Sim

This book is an ambitious meld between fantasy and a critique of Ernest Hemingway. Aside from being entirely cerebral, it is accompanied by very powerfully drawn winter scenes in a beautiful, photorealistic style. Many objects are depicted as suspended fragments of shadow. There is a long flashback featuring Ernest Hemingway's wife taking us through a recollection of her safari in Africa. The story is overall effective in making us feel the sense of desperation during a blizzard and the anguish of such a long, arduous trail.

My gripes are with the pacing and the composition. A good deal of the scenes could stand to be illustrated in a more conventional style, as varying panel sizes tend to needlessly divert attention from the story. A lot of dialogue had a tendency to change font and even include objects in the sound effects that represent letters (scissors as the letter P.) I found these variations to be unnecessary, purist that I am. A lot of the word balloons were disembodied and so it was unclear who the speaker was.

Perhaps such conceptual experiments with the graphic novel medium are just gymnastics performed by people who want intellectual gratification, from themselves just as much as the reader. In other words, they're rather masturbatory.

But I suppose that's what happens when you create a gigantic literary and philosophical epic foundation to justify drawing an Aardvark fucking a blonde.

Buddy Does Seattle- Peter Bagge

Hilarious, raw, and dismal. The protagonist Buddy Bradley essentially manages to emotionally sabotage his life for months at a time, drinking himself into a stupor and being too blunt for his own good. The grotesque characters that change shape according to their emotional states and the facial features that mutate drastically from panel to panel are the perfect medium to convey the constant insanity that is Peter Bagge's HATE comics.

The dialogue is expertly done, every line is clever, fluid, and suited to the sheer depravity of the characters that never recess. It's an accurate depiction of the early nineties. It really hits home. When he tries to manage the failed band, "Leonard and the Love Gods", or ends up sleeping with a psychotic girl Lisa and her roommate Val, shortly after living with both of them, it just hits home what an incestual nightmare the short end of the stick in Bohemia is. With no hope of escaping their terrible jobs, people become wild animals, clamoring for some kind of sanity and decency in a world, anger gnawing at their stomachs like an alcohol induced ulcer.

Buddy ends up moving to his parent's house in upstate New York and the book ends there, where enough emotional dynamite is planted to cause an explosion for hundreds of nasty pages to come.

Dark comedy, I'm an addict. More please!