Visit to San Francisco

I went to San Francisco at the end of May with my mom. She went for a conference on Latin America, so I had most mornings and afternoons free. And what did I do, given hours upon hours to explore San Francisco? Explore the city's comics culture, of course. 

On the first day I went to the Cartoon Art Museum. The museum isn't large, but a surprisingly large quantity and range of exhibits was packed in without feeling cluttered. The Avenger's exhibit, featuring art spanning from Jack Kirby (1960) to Frank Cho (2007), was surprisingly enjoyable, although I usually disregard superhero comics. Maybe the hokey 60's dialogue featured in a Hulk/ Iron Man fight  caught my attention: "Get out of the way you rust-pot before I peel that armor off you like a tin can." 

"La Raza Comica," an exhibit featuring Latino-American experience in comic art, is apparently one of the first large-scale shows in the country to showcase the contributions of Latino artists in comics. Spain Rodriguez, Grasiela Rodriguez, Mario Hernandez, Lalo Alcatraz, and Isis Rodriguez each displayed original art or pages from their comics. There always exists the danger that exhibits with ethnic orientation will end up focusing on kitschy aspects of culture to make it more recognizable to the general public. In this regard, the Cartoon Art Museum's choice of work was a relief. The exhibit showcased political cartoons, superheroes, and anecdotal comics.

The poster for the exhibit

By Lalo Alcaraz

By Jaime Crespo

The museum also managed to pack in a Mad Magazine retrospective with original covers, pages from Jeffrey Brown's new book "Darth Vader and Son," and a history of comic art from 1750 to the present. 

On my second day in San Francisco, I walked to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to check out  Comix Experience. I asked the clerk for a recommendation, something written by someone in San Francisco, and he suggested Julia Wertz's Fart Party, a hilarious autobiographical comic. 

I have a few friends from college living in the Bay Area and I met up with Sophia (pictured below). Her boyfriend Neil has an amazing comics collection and works at Kayo Books. Kayo specializes in vintage smut and sci-fi. 

Nos Tocó Hacer Reír

I’m going to go ahead and say it. "Nos Tocó Hacer Reír" is probably the best panoramic of Argentine comics that I will ever see in my lifetime. The exhibit was the perfect combination of history, politics, and culture that exists so fluidly in Argentina. Original work by contemporary and historical comics creators was divided into three themes: “Nunca Más,” “Fundaciones, Tierra, y Urbe,” and “Dónde Está Oesterheld?”.

The exhibit “Nunca Más” dealt with a number of political themes including poverty, exploitation, and the dictatorship. The constancy of these preoccupations is seen in their occurrence throughout all eras of Argentine history from the late 1800’s to the present day. However, the thing that most caught my attention was not the content of the work, but the curation. The drawings were grouped according to both political message (i.e. hunger) and image.

For example, this series had hunger/ inflation as a theme. The transition from hunger (left) to inflation (right) is achieved through grouping together characters with open mouths.

Grenet, Julio Málaga, "El pan se fue a los nubes," 1917; Cao, José María, untitled, 1911; Venturi, Franco, "En este país todavía se come," 1969; Palacio, Lino, "La inflación," 1971

This series, in contrast, is not bonded together by a common theme, but by airplanes.

“Fundaciones, Tierra, y Urbe” (“Foundation, Land, and Metropolis”) presented various images of Argentina’s interesting history and diverse territory. The groups were more intentional, with each section bearing the name of the sort of images it contained.

“Urbe” contains images of life in a big city. Although Argentina is a relatively large country, most of the citizens live in cities. Thus, urban life is very much ingrained in the mentality and culture of the Argentines. Some of the themes presented in this show were soccer, architecture, tango, and human interactions.

The middle of the room was filled by a timeline comics. I loved looking at how the different styles developed throughout the 200 years of Argentine history. The comics shown in the Peronist Era (see below) were mostly modern comics (Dora by Ignacio Minaverry), which makes me wonder if that is the period most often recreated by contemporary authors.

“Dónde Está Oesterheld?” was the mandatory tribute to Héctor Germán Oesterheld, the father of Argentine comics murdered during the military dictatorship. We read and talk a lot about his work in the “Artes Secuenciales” class, so it was nice to see pages from some of the comics we have been examining.

I wish I could tell you all to go to “Nos Tocó Hacer Reír,” but the exhibit was taken down at the end of April. It was shown in Frankfurt last year, so hopefully it will be presented in other corners of the world. Chicago, maybe? Fingers crossed!

Nilsen's Birds and Big Questions

I viewed Anders Nilsen’s work in terms of art alone. An assortment of panels from Big Questions, a graphic novel about talking birds, was displayed without a specific sequence. I believe they were generally placed in order from beginning to end, but it was impossible to understand the narrative from the pages given. The panel told the story of an underground cavern filled with sightless birds, some guy ends up there, and a plucky young sparrow saves a friend? I’m not really sure how the stories connected. The show obviously wasn’t about the narrative, it was about the art. And let me tell you, the art was fantastic.

A panel from Big Questions

The panels were much larger than a normal, 8.5X11 page, allowing me to see the details lost when shrunk for publication. The art reveals the little secrets of creation. I could see every stroke of the pen, every tiny dot used for shading or creating a line, details that in a book would blend together and go unnoticed. My cousin Liam just sent me a website where you can buy original work by a bunch of artists. If I could, I would purchase this panel by Nilsen. Does anybody want to lend me $350?

Another panel from Big Questions

My favorite panel showed the sparrow investigating a downed plane. Perhaps it is all for the best that there was no narrative attached to the story, so I can create my own without bias. The sparrow looks into the cockpit of a plane with curiosity, observing the compasses, switches, and buttons that make the machine fly. When I saw the image, I though it amazing the amount of technology needed to do what a bird does effortlessly.

And thus concludes my discussion of the New Chicago Comics. I wish the show would continue, but alas, it has been taken down. I finally found pictures of the show, although I think reposting it on my blog may be illegal, so you can check them out on The Monologuist, Nilsen’s blog.

Lilli Carré Challenges Comics

Don't Drink From the Sea (2010)

Comics comprise a small part of Lilli Carré’s section in New Chicago Comics. Video stills, hand-bound silkscreened books and an assortment of videos surrounded excerpts from the graphic novel The Lagoon (2008). Carré shows the viewer that comic art can be realized in many forms. Don’t Drink From the Sea (2010) and My Dreams Have Been Quite Strange Lately (2010) are short narratives that look like children’s picture books. The short videos were beautifully done, using movement and growth to connect time and space. Head Garden (2009) illustrates the travels of a head that leaves its body. I love the idea of the head as a seed, separating from its body to go on an adventure, and then eventually sprouting and returning to its owner.

Head Garden from Lilli Carré on Vimeo.

The featured portion of The Lagoon shows a clandestine encounter between a woman and a swamp creature in the dead of night, their connection arising from a haunting melody sung by the creature. The scene ends when the woman’s husband wakes up from a deep sleep and attempts to find her. The cliffhanger ending serves a purpose for both the writer and the curator. By entrapping the reader with an intense and mysterious scene, the curator shows that comics can be powerful narratives as well as art. The questions left unanswered by the excerpt encourage the readers to read the book.

Excerpts from The Lagoon

Although I enjoy Carré's work, I did not enjoy the curation. There were too many art forms represented and it seemed almost eclectic. Comics may only be a small part of her repertoire, but it was inappropriate to display everything she’s ever created when the theme clearly was comic art. Perhaps the setup was meant to challenge our definition of comics. What is the difference between a graphic novel and a picture book? Isn't a video simply an animated version of a comic? If this were the case, the curator might be a genius...

New Chicago Comics at the Museum of Contemporary Art

I am extremely lucky to live in a city that has such a vibrant comics community. I can find a wide range of comics in bookstores and libraries and many of my favorite artists, like Chris Ware, Lucy Knisley, and Ivan Brunetti, live in this very city. So it comes as no surprise that The Museum of Contemporary Art is hosting “New Chicago Comics” an exhibit dedicated to the work of four comics creators from Chicago—Jeffrey Brown, Lilli Carré, Paul Hornschemeier, and Anders Nilsen.

As a former tour guide at the Smith College Museum of Art, I am acutely aware of how exhibits are curated. The media poses a potentially difficult problem for a curator. How do you showcase the work to exhibit the artistic merits of comics without compromising the unique sequential narrative? Michael Green, the show’s curator, recognized this dilemma and created an exhibit that explored the sequential narratives while exhibiting the pages as works of art.

The cover for The Three Paradoxes in German

(There was a sketch of this at the exhibit)

A panel from The Three Paradoxes

Pages from Hornschemeier’s The Three Paradoxes were pasted on a part of the wall, allowing the viewer to read quite a large chunk of the narrative. The original panels were presented to the side of this printed copy, not yet colored, with visible blue pencil drawings. Green presented the comic’s narrative while showcasing the original work. Very little happens in The Three Paradoxes, and exhibiting only a few panels might not capture the attention of the viewer. By allowing the viewer to read part of the comic, he or she understands where the individual panels fit into the larger story.

An excerpt from Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown

Green similarly excelled in his presentation of Jeffrey Brown’s various sketchbooks, published works, and stories. Two tables in the middle of the room displayed each book open to a narrative, interesting sketch, or script for a comic. Usually, I have a problem with displaying books as art objects because I find it frustrating to only see one page out of an entire book. However, Brown’s short vignettes were so amusing and well paired that I was not bothered. The one-page stories moved from childhood to Brown’s pimpled teenage years to his sometimes-awkward adult life. Although only a random sampling of his work, these stories presented a seemingly complete narrative.

One of the most important aspects of Green’s presentation was that he revealed the process of making comics. He showed this by combining Hornschemeier’s original pages and finished comic. With Brown’s work, he paired a rough sketch and notes of a cartoon with the final version. Green created an exhibit that not only presented comics in a unique way, but provided an intimate look into the creator’s mind as well.

(I didn’t forget about Carré and Nilsen. They are, out of the four, the two artists that draw the most beautiful and detailled comics. I plan on discussing their mind-blowingly fascinating art in my next post.)