Reading Between the Lines

For starters, it takes Mormon devotion to learn how to draw. Looks simple enough when Dan Clowes does it, but you can bet your batusi Mr. Enid Coleslaw (Clowes' anagrammatic alter ego) spent his adolescence sweating boulders to master a proper circle, not to mention the clammy grotesques that populate his books. Pro cartoonists, even modern primitives like the Fort Thunder clan (a group of art grads from Rhode Island who suppress all hints of tutelage in their work), spill litres of saliva licking clean their Rapidograph nibs and run their carpals ragged practising shadow and perspective, proportion, volume, movement, composition, etc.

Writers are no less burdened. In fact, they have the collected works of human cogitation to stare down -- from the Vedic Sanskrit to Dude, Where's My Country? Many cartoonists have a counterpart slinging the dictionary: Jack Kirby had Stan Lee, Will Elder had Harvey Kurtzman, René Goscinny had Albert Uderzo. Likewise, celebrated scribes like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore and Harvey Pekar have a phalanx of mercenaries sketching their visions for them. Cartoonists on double duty come mostly from an arts background, and as brilliant as their comics may be, the swaths of mediocre prose by the likes of Chris Ware or Adrian Tomine pale badly next to copy by a full-time writer, who can twist a phrase like a strand of Bubblicious.

Yet there are a precious few cartoonists whose work is stacked with their own ace wordplay, whose comics are, so to speak, worth reading.

One of them is Ivan Brunetti, a Chicago artist and teacher who in his comics seems the most miserable bastard this side of William Randolph Hearst, but whose smarts are as fascinating as the things he envisions doing to a severed head. Brunetti's Schizoseries is the misanthrope's gospel. His prose can skew purple, but his pungent quips are gold. "Luckily," he writes in Schizo No. 1, "the absence of any supreme being in this pitiless abattoir of a universe will eliminate the possibility of cosmic retribution for any human wrongdoing. Ha ha ha!"

Phoebe Gloeckner, a medical illustrator and cartoonist from San Francisco, was a hit at last spring's Toronto Comic Arts Festival, where she read from her book A Child's Life and Other Stories. She describes one of its quasi-biographical comics, A Shoulder to Cry On, as "The pitiable tale of a maddening little child and how she disrupts those around her, and a glimpse into her fantasy life." Like all her writing, the piece is diuretically confessional and undercut with a cynical, ebony wit.

From 1992 to 1999, cartoonist/writer/musician Peter Blegvad published a strip in London's The Independent on Sunday called Leviathan about a faceless baby and his feline companion. It's surreal and fiercely literary (an Anglicized Calvin and Hobbes), and quotes Hegel as readily as Prince. One strip is subtitled "A digression on the subject of noun verbs," and contains exchanges like:

"Can one chair?"

"Yes, and table, too."

"Can one wall?"

"Up or in, yes. And one can, from time to time, completely floor."

And no list of artist/writers should neglect one of comicdom's best: R. Crumb. Yes, he's praised/razed for his art, his influence, his anal fixation. But often ignored in the melee is his damn-tight prose. Here's a passage from a 1976 comic in which he imagines a conversation with Mao Tse Tung. "It is the weakness of man that he does not get it together until he is forced," Mao intones. "And it is his own wanton destruction of the bountiful and generous Mother Earth which will finally compell him to change his ways." Heavy stuff, especially from a guy best known for hatching a firm caboose.

Of course, singling out writing in a comics column may be a bit disingenuous, the medium being a melding of two art forms, with the best work a true symbiosis. But then, the art is always in the spotlight. The phrase deserves its turn.