Let's Get All Meta with AdHouse and Remake. First Up: I Can't See You
AdHouse first came to my attention when Paul Pope's
Pulphope turned out to be one of those "first spike" type of books that interested some of the non-comics readers at my place of employment, which is where I'd had my copy sent. At the time, I was too invested in
Pulphope itself to really pay much attention to the book's publisher. That changed a bit when I came upon the
Superior Showcase series, a sort of super-hero by way of alt-cartooning, an idea that seemed clever enough that--while I can't really lie and say the comics were to my taste--still registers as a bit of a disappointment that the recent restructuring of the what Diamond chooses to distribute has left the
Showcase series as a cancellation casualty.
Superior Showcase finally registered AdHouse as a company to keep in mind--the care and production value of the issues was obvious, the taste level strong, and, after getting directed towards Josh Cotter's excellent
Skyscrapers of The Midwest, they were no longer floating in my brain as one of those random publishers that "does stuff"--they were ones to actually keep up with.
The thing about comic book publishing that I enjoy, although I realize it's connected to the low level of income to be made in the industry, is that smaller publishers are often tied into the taste and choices of small groups of people. Larger companies, like DC and Marvel, are often beholden to larger corporate concerns, and individual taste can get mangled in the process. In a way, keeping up with small publishers is, for me, similar to the process of keeping up with certain online comic critics. If a specific individual keeps speaking about a comic I already enjoy in a fashion that that leads me to enjoy the comic even more, if I pick up comics, or try out new artists, based on their positive reaction and find myself enjoying the process, I eventually start trusting those people, at least until they reveal some weird obsession with
Gray's Anatomy or Paul Verhoeven's
Hollow Man.
Smaller publishers can work the same way, and for me, that's what happened with AdHouse. It's not that I buy everything they put out--I'm not building a shrine in their honor or anything--but that I find that the work they select for publication is work I either like immensely, or respect the choice even if it doesn't work for me. (The reverse works as well--while I've found some of Avatar's releases entertaining, they clearly operate from a place of "Can our printers produce multiple copies of this thing?
Publish it immediately!")
I had only just begun keeping up with AdHouse's release schedule when I found out about their upcoming publication by Lamar Abrams,
Remake.
Remake, quite honestly, wasn't what I was expecting--and it wasn't really something I'd seek out, either. A compilation softcover made up of three self-published mini-comics, plus some "new content"? About a kid-hero type who looks sort of like DC's Aztek character, if DC's Aztek character showed up at the last 15 minutes of
Innerspace? But then I figured that hey, I trust the people recommending the book, the publisher hasn't done me wrong--okay, I'll give it a try. After all, it's not like I haven't disliked things before. I mean, c'mon. I paid money for a Tracy Chapman album once because I'd heard it was good workout music. Things could be worse.
It would be kind of easy to throw out a couple of really long sentences about some of the crazy stuff that goes on in
Remake's collection of stories, all of which center around a character (that really does look sort of like DC's Aztek) who embraces that same sort of personality that would be infuriating in reality--petulant, selfish, not very smart, aggressive--that's become so popular in recent years when it's time to make another Will Ferrel movie about Crazy Sports and the Crazy People Who Play Them. Trust me, cheap praise is something that is a whole lot easier to throw out than people might tell you. Works kind of like this:
"
A crazy romance between Max Guy's roommate Cardigan and a hot girl with massive T-1000 spike/knife arms?! A character who kills a police officer because he believes the cop might have called him gay, only to reveal that, unbeknownst to him, the cop was actually an alien bent on world domination? A guy who's willing to throw down rage-core style for good pudding? A robot that pretends to be a baby so it can hang out with prospective mothers and stare at their butts?! How can you NOT BE INTO THAT?"
See what I mean? Brother, anybody can do that kind of stuff all day. It's not valuable information that helps you figure out if you want the book, and it's impossible to really determine whether or not you'll want to buy it or read it--it just sounds like whoever wrote it also happened to read the book, and then they looked through it for memorable scenes so that they could back up a really simple feeling-based statement: "I liked this. You SHOULD like it too, because I did."
I think that's what people run into when they deal with something that acts on an almost purely visceral level, I know it's true for me. Some stuff I just like, and when I'm pushed to come up with an explanation, an intellectual one, I run right up to the point where I realize that I'm not altogether sure why. I don't have a reason, except that I know it's true that I do like it. Sometimes, these are the easiest things to dismiss, as well--if you can't explain yourself, the next step is to start doubting yourself: "I must not really care, since I can't even give you one solid reason." And that's where the empty praise machine gets rolling.
You figure it out yet?
Remake is a collection of Lamar Abrams' originally self-published comic book of the same name. It's all black and white comics, vignettes of varying length centered around the actions--which are almost predominately reactions--of Max Guy, the character I keep referring to as looking like DC's Aztek. The closest Max gets to being a contemplative dude is on the cover, where he's depicted at peace, floating upside down against a Super Mario Brothers blue sky. His adventures are built around him seeking out his various whims and desires--be they for pudding, to expel anger, to kill time, to find companionship, or prove he's awesome--most of which result in him shouting "Max Blaster!" before shooting things or people with said blaster.
Sometimes the Max Blaster kills things, sometimes it just changes them into something totally unrelated--eventually Max Guy admits that he doesn't really know how it works, but he seems to know that it occasionally runs low on energy. His roommate is named Cardigan, even though he wears a t-shirt most of the time. And that's it. Some of what happens in the stories is really, really funny, not in the absurdist vein of humor mastered by Michael Kupperman or Johnny Ryan's scatological musings on Captain America and 9/11, but in the general ABC of watching an idiot do idiotic things, get away with them in a "sort of" way, and go on to do more idiotic things. Some of what Max says is funny, but mostly, it's what he does--how he looks like a super-hero mixed with Astroboy, but he acts like a petulant child who has the powers of Green Lantern's boss.
Lamar Abrams' art is the kind of thing you'd find in a high-schooler's journal, cartoons on the edge of manga that are just as in love with an almost universal grid structure as they are supported by them. At times, it seems like Lamar's decision was to format the stories into a page with all the squares already drawn, and it was up to him to figure out how to improvise his stories into that framework. (That could be totally false, and I'm sure he can tell you if you need to know.) But to me, it reads like a guy who wanted to make sure that his stories, no matter the length or content, met and reached certain points, so he enforced a structure to contain his random comedy impulses with an eye on the clock.
Whatever his reasons were, it was the right choice, because the moments where he breaks the grid are that much more impactful. It's also interesting to see him play with his own style--there's a story near the end where he uses some kind of paintbrush to do the letters, violating what seems like a firm commitment to pen only, and then he draws a skeleton as if he were working at the Marvel "try to make it look real" factory. The thing is... I can't really tell you why he does this. I can tell you that I think it adds a sort of bizarre twist to that story--which also happens to be the best one in the collection--but I can't discern the motive for it beyond my belief that it's the right way to tell it, and it wouldn't work if he'd stuck to his own format.
And that's what got me thinking about AdHouse again, and their publications. Because for me, this is simply "A comic I liked." But I'm not sure if that's because it filled a need for something funny at the time, or because I like the idea of singular artists finding success off bookstore editions of their self-published work, or even if this is the best possible version of the comics that Lamar Abrams can make. (Although I have a suspicion that he can do more, and he's worth keeping an eye on.) What I am sure of is that I'm glad that there are people who are able to make that distinction working in comics publishing right now. Because if there weren't, it would be up to...well, other people, and those "other people" might be people like me, and they might sit back and think, "Is it enough that I like this? Shouldn't I be able to talk it out? Shouldn't I be able to make the case that this is the Best Possible ______ since ______"?
See though? I'm the lucky one. All I have to do is sit back and let somebody else do the work. My job is just to have some fun and spend some cash.
On prostitutes.
Editor's note: the 2009 AdHouse Free Comic Book Day release, FCHS
, will include a preview of Remake.
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
