I knew David Heatley just before he moved to New York and his comics career took off. As a result, I was lucky enough to be privy to one of his earliest and least-celebrated projects: a comics anthology titled
The New Graphics Revival. Though the anthology was, of course, inspired by
Raw and
Kramer's Ergot, in conception it was very different from either of them. Instead of focusing on avant-garde and emerging cartoonists, David decided to create an anthology which would include, basically, everyone. He wanted to invite as many people as he could find — comics creators, artists, non-artists,— to each contribute a single page of the book. Since many of the participants wouldn't necessarily have art experience, David also planned to send them art materials — pencils, pens, correction fluid, and instructions on how to use them.
The anthology was originally David's idea, but he developed, organized, and edited it in collaboration with my good friend Bert Stabler (who introduced me to David.) They eventually titled it
The New Graphics Revival, and they received tons of submissions; over 100 artists each completed a page. The contributors included some established talents, like Ron Rege, Aaron Neathery, and Kamagurka and Herr Seele. There were also contributions from established visual artists like Josh McPhee, from Bert's high-school art classes, and from other relatives and friends. That last group included me.
Obviously, the page I did myself is a work of unbridled genius (no fashionable Chris-Ware-style self-denigration here, no sir.) But even without my stellar contribution, the anthology is a wonder — like a yard-sale on infinite earths. On one page you've got
Crystal Savage's manga layout with Fort Thundery abstractions drifting off the top; flip around and you've got
Donei Ebenezer's crudely stiff account of a grudge basketball match between Osama Bin Ladin and a U.S. Marine; flip again and you've got
Patrick Dunn's ultra-slick, languid goth pen drawing of nude woman, cats, and seafood; skim around again and you've got
a strip by Michael Heatley, David's father, in which computer-generated triangles crack the kind of groaner puns you'd expect from your dad. Manga, alternative, Paper Rad, mainstreamy, cartoons, stick figures, high-gloss illustration — all jostle genially for space. The effect is funny, surprising, confusing, and exhilarating: a reminder of just how accessible and beloved comics are; how readable the form is, and how easily it allows readers and creators to switch places with each other and communicate. It's a vision of comics as open — to artists, to kids, to random passersby. Not every page is great, of course, but in its imagination, its energy, and its love, it's easily my favorite comics anthology ever. It's a beautiful thing, and I am extremely grateful to David and Bert for creating it, and for including me.
Of course, commercially and critically, it went nowhere — Bert still has boxes of the things in his basement. I don't think there were public reviews, but the informal response from local comics professionals was, shall we say, tepid. The visual art and gallery scene in Chicago is very interested in community-based work; the comics scene, not so much.
New Graphic Revival's aesthetic diversity was viewed as a lack of focus, its energy as crudeness, its openness as just a bad idea in general. After publication, David himself seemed to lose some of his enthusiasm for the project. He remained (rightfully) proud of his accomplishment, but he suggested that perhaps there should have been more quality control. In any case, he moved on to other projects and to New York — at which point, as friendly acquaintances will do, he and I lost touch.
So my next sustained contact with David was not as a friend or a collaborator, but as a reader. I hadn't followed his series
Deadpan all that closely, but I heard he had a long, ambitious piece in
Kramer's Ergot, and so I checked it out. In doing so, I learned way more than I wanted to about him, in every sense.
The piece I read was "My Sexual History," a story in which David lists (virtually) all of his sexual experiences, from pulling on a friend's penis as a five-year old to rear-entry intercourse with his pregnant wife as an adult. David has, as it happens, had a lot of sex, and to fit it all in to fifteen pages he resorts to an 8 X 6 grid, with 48 tiny panels per page. This is an unfortunate choice for a cartoonist whose main strength is layout and design. Given a little space, David's capable of striking illustrations, where complex images and colors resolve into a harmonious whole — as, for example, in his striking cover for
My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, his new anthology for Pantheon. Forced to shoehorn his work into repetitive miniscule borders, though, David has to rely on his draftsmanship and character design, which means that what you get is standard, ugly, unstylish alterna-art.
And, unfortunately, the numbing literalness of the grid is matched by the numbing literalness of David's material. Masturbate, hand job, blow job, fuck, repeat. In detailing his sex life, David has captured the essence of pornography — unrelenting boredom.
Pornography is boring because it's sadistic; individuals are shorn of personality, and become things. Watching porn is like watching a dish-washer run through its cycle over and over — there's nobody there. David sleeps with lots and lots of bodies, but none of them ever attain the level of what you'd call "people." They are so small, and their relationships and features so ill-defined, that David often has to attach little floating name tags to them so the reader can tell who is who. The only real distinguishing traits involve sexual variation; one woman is really good at oral sex, another's juices taste bad, etc., etc. The big black dildo with which David occasionally sodomizes himself has more personality than virtually anyone else in the piece.
That isn't to say that "My Sexual History"
is actually sadistic porn -- more's the pity. Sadistic porn at least has the virtue of embracing its own anti-humanism; of reveling in naked power, defilement, and misanthropy. There is, in other words, some truth in sadism about how people treat each other and why; there's a recognition that cruelty and out-of-control ego are not a misunderstanding or an accident, but an actual pleasure.
"My Sexual History" isn't so forthright. The story is framed as a loose Bildungsroman; David's sexual misadventures eventually lead to marriage and fidelity. The patina of sensitive new-age narrative contradictorily makes "My Sexual History" more, not less, egotistical than typical porn. In pornography, after all, everybody's just a body and a desire; Peter North's emotional life isn't any more important than that of any of the women he screws. In "My Sexual History," though, David's inner life matters; we see him crying when he's rejected, or hear his inner-monologue when he rejoices over a conquest. The women he has, on the other hand, are emotional ciphers. He occasionally wonders what is up with one of them — why is she behaving so oddly? Why didn't she get me off? But he never really cares enough to find out — or, at least, not enough to waste one of his tiny panels telling the reader about it.
The one exception, in theory, is Rebecca, David's wife (who I also knew in Chicago). David doesn't want to "embarass her" or "cheapen" their relationship, and so he says that he is not going to discuss their sexual encounters. He even draws her larger than everyone else, giving her a full-page portrait with a black bar across her naked breasts. In other words, even if he's willing to degrade every other woman he's ever come in contact with, Rebecca is off limits.
And yet, does he really treat Rebecca with respect in the comic? It's true that with one or two exceptions he doesn't show them having sex. But respect is more than eschewing voyeurism. It involves actually treating the other person as a person; dealing with their perspective, being open to what they have to say. David doesn't do this for any of the other women (or men) in the book, and he doesn't do it for Rebecca either. We see lots of images of them fighting, and learn that this fighting irritates David, but we never find out what the fighting is about. Why was Rebecca mad at him? Was it because of his infidelities? Why did she decide to marry him? What is going on with her? The closest we really get is a one-panel scene in which Rebecca tells David she's sick of his crushes, and he says, "I feel like I've been waiting for you to say that" — which to me sounds incredibly condescending. Perhaps not to Rebecca, though it's difficult to say for sure; in any case, next panel they're in couples therapy, the next after that they're engaged, and the one after that they're married — a fast-forward happy-ending which cheerfully elides...well, everything.
Confessional comics are sometimes seen as uniquely courageous or honest, or personal - a kind of authentic alternative to the corporate, anonymous super-hero dreck which has dominated the industry for so long. But to me, "My Sexual History" seems cowardly, and deceitful, and almost ludicrously impersonal. David seems afraid to let anyone else speak, to acknowledge their effect on him or his effect on them. Terrified, he reduces them to miniature, almost invisible blobs, and drowns them in an endless monotone monologue;
New Graphics Revival, on the other hand, strikes me as a markedly bold, even brave, venture, built, not on fear, but on faith in others and in a willingness to place one's reputation and one's dreams in their care. Certainly, at least to me, "My Sexual History" comes across as a deliberate repression of David's earlier project; a decision to no longer reach out to others, but to instead turn people into cogs in his own validation.
New Graphics Revival was about opening comics up; about celebrating comics as an accessible medium. "My Sexual History," is about denying just that. Its embrace of solipsism is extreme...but not unique. Indeed, American comics devote an inordinate amount of energy to refusing their own obvious appeal. Whether through pointlessly tangled continuity, repetitive autobio dreck, aggressively ugly art, or reflexively irrelevant literariness, comics seem determined to find some way, any way, to keep out all those readers and creators who might otherwise, and naturally, see comics as their own.
Image credits:
Pages from The New Graphics Revival © the artists.
Panels from "My Sexual History" appeared in Kramers Ergot 5. Images ©2004 David Heatley.
Click for full-sized images.
Noah Berlatsky writes regularly for The Comics Journal, The Chicago Reader, and his own blog, The Hooded Utilitarian. He's also an artist of sorts.
A Pundit in Every Panopticon is ©2008 Noah Berlatsky
