Once again, This Ship Is Totally Sinking went to one of those handy-dandy comics related events that happens to occur within a block and a half of the subway stop your correspondent takes to go to his non-comics related job, was free, and didn't interfere with an episode of
The Shield. It was "Graphics Novels from Europe" organized by Goethe-Institut New York, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Instituto Cervantes, and the Czech Center New York and held at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art.
The event—sort of like a five-part book reading—was a well attended one. Despite arriving a few minutes early, the seating area of the Museum was packed, and it wasn't until the museum's staff pulled over a long wooden stool that your correspondent was able to rest his weary legs after a long day sitting at a desk. Plenty of other people ended up staying on their feet though, including a gentleman who leaned against an open door and was saved from breaking his pelvis through cat-like reflexes, a couple of young artist types, and about seven tired-looking pregnant women.
I'm just kidding. Of course I would've given up my seat for a young artist type. They are the gatekeepers of our future!
It's probably best to break down the event by each of its participants, and that would mean starting off by talking about David B. The only problem is that there isn't a whole lot to say about David. Despite having the ongoing
Babel work available, despite a stack of his latest English translation,
Nocturnal Conspiracies being for sale, David stuck to one thing, and that thing is
Epileptic.
While listening to the author of
Epileptic—a comic that I happen to think is extraordinarily good—certainly sounds like a hot ticket, the truth is that it wasn't really that interesting. David fired up the required powerpoint slide-show, and then he described what was on each slide in turn. An actual quote includes "here I drew the seizure like it was a dragon." (Meanwhile, on the slide was…a page from
Epileptic featuring a dragon.)
There wasn't any excursion into form, theme, style, work method—honestly; there wasn't anything that couldn't have been just as easily grasped by simply reading the work. Now, that's not David's fault—he's an artist, a smart one with an undeniable talent, he's under no obligation to be either as entertaining as David Chappelle or as analytic as David Hilbert.
But when contrasted with the later artists, David's presentation wasn't about Graphic Novels from Europe, it was about a particular one that probably everybody in the audience had read, and it would've been nice if there'd been some more depth to it. For example, his response to the one question he was permitted the time to answer went like this—a paraphrase:
"Why did you draw the epilogue of the story in such strong horizontal panels?"
David responded to the question—but not really. Instead of speaking specifically to what was strictly a question of form and design, he quickly explained that he can't have a conversation with his brother as an adult (because years of disease have rendered this impossible), and the epilogue was his imagined version of what a conversation with his brother would be like. Which doesn't have anything to do with horizontal panels.
Am I being harsh, I wonder? David B is an excellent artist, and it's easy to be disappointed when you get the opportunity to sit in a room with someone like that and not end up walking out with your mind thoroughly blown, your clothing soiled with so much artistic exuberance that you end up being arrested for blinding the passersby.
After all, it was free. He didn't have to come to New York and tell a bunch of hipster New Yorkers—did I mention the room was all hipsters? It was, not a Green Lantern t-shirt in sight—that he drew a picture of a dragon, and here that picture of a dragon is. There might be a little harshness, sure. That aside—the remainder of the presenters, many of whom I had far less experience with then I do
Epileptic—outshone him, and they did so easily.
Igort, the Italian cartoonist currently best known for his Fantagraphics-published series,
Baobab, was up next. While he'd brought along a powerpoint presentation as well, his was clearly one designed for a much longer talk—this came up again and again, leading me to curse myself for not having attended his talk earlier that week. He went on to explain some of his various inspirations for the series, with slides of Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger and Picasso setting the tone for a serious examination of graphic comic art.
That's when the scumbag idiot sitting near me started passing gas. Now, I'm not going to mention this again (although I could, it was a constant), and if it had only happened once, I wouldn't mention it at all. Humans are dirty, biological creatures who do dirty, biological things. But this guy? Give me a break.
If you're going to sit in at a heady presentation on "Graphic Novels From Europe," something where the biggest laugh of the night came when Nicholas de Crecy's translator told the audience he drew "fifteen pages a day" when he actually said "five pages a day", and you're going to fart, non-stop, from beginning to end, you're the worst kind of comics fan alive.
I'd rather the room be full of unshowered
Battlestar Galactica fans who keep interrupting Igort to ask when
All-Star Wonder Woman is going to come out. Whoever you are, passing gas man, I hope you read this column, I hope you feel ashamed, and I hope you see a doctor. You have serious gastrointestinal problems.
While Igort continued on with his presentation, touching on various satirical magazines, he also went into detail about
Baobab, and some of the choices he'd made for it. For those who don't know,
Baobab's story takes place in both Japan and South America at the turn of the century, focusing on a young Japanese boy and a South American cartoonist.
While Igort discussed both with an equal amount of focus, his excitement for the Japanese portions was palpable—dropping unexplained words like "satori" (a Japanese Buddhist term commonly used in Zen to describe enlightenment) as well as discussing the differences between the way his work is colored in their Japanese and American publications—at times it was difficult to keep up.
Still, even his throwaway mention of his desire to work in duotone instead of color or his desire to publish more "mute" cartoon sequences made it clear that this was a cartoonist that takes his work incredibly seriously, and it was hard not to find that inspiring. He'd opened by saying he believed that we are in a new golden age of graphic novels. By the end of his too-short talk, it was obvious why.
It would interest me to know how Isabel Kreitz, the next cartoonist, felt coming into this event. Besides being lesser known in American comic circles then David B, Igort or Nicholas de Crecy, she was the only woman cartoonist, and on top of all that, she was the cartoonist with the least amount of work available for purchase.
But if she did feel any trepidation or nervousness, then she hides it well. As previously mentioned, this wasn't a laugh riot of an event, but Kreitz got more then a few chuckles as she described her fascinatingly ramshackle career—after growing tired of the opportunities available to her in Germany, she enrolled at Parsons and took the recommendation of a notorious faculty member to pursue work at Marvel Comics under the impression it would be an easy-to-get side job—it didn't work, and she informed the audience that this was something the professor had been telling students for years, a tactic that had by then worn out the good graces of bewildered Marvel editors, wondering why in the hell all these random art students kept showing up at the end of the semester with a dog-eared copy of
How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way.
By the time Kreitz returned to Germany, she'd found a dream—to someday work in a smoke filled studio, like the ones Will Eisner used to run, drawing comics with a team of other chain-smoking artists. The Germany she described isn't one that shares the current French or American vogue for graphic novels—she said that things like Jason Lutes'
Berlin series do well, but that most of the time, her peers are stuck making rent money working in advertising and illustration.
There to promote her latest, she showed off a short television commercial for
Die Sache Mit Sordie—while the art was certainly impressive, it didn't really mesh with the whole vibe Kreitz brought across—it's a little more on-the-nose, and she just seems a bit more playful. Of course, that was explained when it finished playing and she sheepishly said "It was made by the publisher."
After Kreitz, the floor was yielded to the even more unknown duo from the Czech Republic, Jaromir 99 and Jaroslav Rubis. The two men are responsible for the three graphic novels that make up the
Alois Nebel trilogy,
White Brook,
Main Station and
Golden Hills among various other works, both as individuals and as partners.
It was difficult to play the objective correspondent with these two—both men were charming and excited to be there, and despite Jaromir having to use a translator, they moved so rapidly through the discussion that it was hard to believe they hadn't been doing these sorts of talks for decades. Jaromir, a singer-songwriter who'd experimented with doing storyboards, CD sleeves and comics to pay the rent, had ended up in a bar with Rubis and it was those meetings and conversations that spawned a successful partnership. (At one point, Jaromir earned the first big laugh of the night, admitting he'd gotten himself committed to a mental asylum to avoid military service.)
The work they put on display was striking enough, but the closer—a dark piece of animation featuring
Alois Nebel that looked like something Charles Burns would be proud to call his own—was brilliant. If and when their work becomes more widely available, it's unlikely they will be doing more talks where half the audience is previously unaware of their existence.
After that, it was time for Max, most well-known to American readers for his Fantagraphics-published
Bardin the Superrealist. Out of all of the cartoonists, I had the lowest expectations for Max—I didn't find
Bardin to be too enthralling of a read, and it wasn't high on my list of books to listen to a talk about.
However, Max—a legendary Spanish cartoonist who I believe may have the longest career of any of the artists who appeared at Moccca—certainly changed my mind. His dissection of
Bardin, why it's structured the way it is, and his frank admission that he's interested in religion, death and dreams in his work made me realize that a couple of cursory reads of the comic clearly weren't enough for me to make a snap judgment on his career.
(If going to comics-related events has taught me anything in the last year, it's that "taste" and "intelligence" aren't something I have in huge supply. That being said, I'm still sure that Scottt McCloud's
Reinventing Comics is as boring as eating lard while reading an untranslated Russian dictionary.) Max sped through his presentation—like Igort, he was clearly trying to take something designed to last an hour and boil it down to less than 15 minutes—and the biggest loss of the evening was not getting to see his personal take on Luis Bunuel's
Un Chien Andalou. (Yes, that's the one with the eyeball stuff.)
Nicolas de Crecy was the final speaker of the night, and although the temptation to sidle over to the book-buying table was too tempting for some, I'd already bought
Nocturnal Conspiracies on my way in, so I just settled back and prepared myself.
I've actually been aware of de Crecy's work for a few years, but had never really dived into much of his biography. While he wasn't much for revealing anything beyond the standard stuff already available on the internet (I've since discovered), he had clearly decided that he would use the opportunity of his first New York visit to show off as much of his work as possible—which he then preceded to do.
While the all-in approach might have gone by too quickly, it was exciting to spend time with a cartoonist who strikes a very different chord from the others appearing that night—simply put, de Crecy is both confident and intelligent, and after saying that it is very difficult to explain his work in words, and that he would just show the images instead, he proceeded to do exactly that.
It was a knockout presentation, slide after slide of busy, unusual watercolors, surreal portraits of lust, pain, "the Nobel Prize in Love," a fantastic imagination of the streets and buildings of a New York he'd based off his response to mid 20th century photography, and all sorts of cartoonish creatures. There was some of his Victor Hugo work, some of his Lourve-based story, his children's books—the man held nothing back.
His translator—de Crecy's English is either not very strong or non-existent—did a valiant job to keep up with him, not because he spoke a lot, but because he spoke with such clear force and directness. At times, his concise delivery seemed to fluster her—like when he looked at a particularly gorgeous slide and apparently said "I tried to put too much in here. It doesn't work."
She, and the audience, clearly disagreed—but Nicolas clearly wasn't a guy you'd want to argue with. He knows his work, and while he's proud of it, he clearly didn't treat it with the same level of awe that both I and the rest of the room did. For him, cartooning is an art, yes—but it's also a craft that consumes his life, and his refusal to tolerate what he sees as even the most minor failure goes completely against most of what I've heard talked about at these sorts of events.
Well, and that's that. I'd imagine you'll be hearing about all of these individuals more in the near future—companies like Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly and the abysmally named "Comics Lit" have grasped the wide array of non-American content that can find a place alongside homegrown heroes like Chris Ware, Brian Chippendale and Peter Bagge. And even if they don't, it's clear that a trip out of the country could turn into the best shopping trip any comics fan ever makes.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
