Karl Stevens comics commissioned by the Gardner Museum
Penny is the new graphic novel by Karl Stevens. I reviewed it recently and now I provide you with an interview with the author. If you go on to see the video below, you’ll get to know a bit about a most engaging and talented artist with quite a distinctive style. As a cartoonist, he finds himself in a unique place as a champion of realism in comics, something of a lost art, certainly not as common today as it used to be in Alex Raymond’s day.
There’s a point in my conversation with Karl Stevens where he really gets to the heart of his motivations as a cartoonist. Karl was discussing where he was heading with new projects and that got him to thinking back to the process in general. He started looking back at the artists who influenced him, like Fragonard and Rembrandt. Currently, he’s been exploring genre comics, including a lot of work in Heavy Metal from the ’70s and ’80s, specifically the work of Caza and Moebius.
The Alston scene. Will Greta Gerwig want to turn a Stevens comic strip into a movie?
The point is that Karl was thinking about his attraction to a certain crisp line in the service of realism in cartooning. It’s not for everyone. In fact, it’s relatively rare. Thinking back on it, I’ve always loved exemplary cross-hatching from such greats as Thomas Nast, Edward Sorel, and David Levine–or, for something finer, Goya. Anyway, Karl went on to share:
“The history of comics has always been based on other comics or commercial illustration. It’s rare that you have a cartoonist who has studied art history in a serious way. A lot of comics look like they’ve been commercially made. They have that slick line to it. It’s different from a fine art line. As a younger artist, I was trying to bring that sensibility to comics. I did try to draw in a more cartoony way. But I found realism to be more complicated, and more interesting.”
Karl, took a pause. He laughed a bit, and said he realized it might sound pretentious to be speaking this way. But what’s an artist supposed to do, really? This is how we explain things. And so he continued.
“The history of realism in comics died in a serious way in the ’60s, along with representational art in general. You had people like Art Spiegelman and Scott McCloud railing against realism, stating that realism was antithetical to comics. I don’t believe that’s true. I just don’t think realism has been fully explored.”
We chatted about a lot of other things, including the great art heist at the Gardner Museum, but I think what I’m quoting here is probably the best gem. As far as representational art goes, I think the death of figurative painting is something that is perpetually declared in art circles. And, as for realism in comics these days, well, I think there are some fine examples that pop up here and there but you really don’t often enough see realism in comics, at least not in the United States. What came to mind as part of my response in the moment to Karl’s comments was just that, as much as I like to play with quill pen points, I don’t tend to have the patience to pursue realism. I’ve gotten some nice results but I really need to be motivated. Clearly, Karl is very motivated!
With that said, I do hope you enjoy our full conversation. I provide a number of images that help round things out and give you a better sense of the man and his art. For now, it’s Karl’s latest book, Penny, that’s the main focus. Do check it out! For more details, be sure to visit Chronicle Books.
Review: ‘Failure’ by Karl Stevens
I certainly hope that artist Karl Stevens never abandons what he’s accomplished in the pages of his latest collection, “Failure,” simply because he might feel compelled to rip apart what he’s done up until now and strike out fresh. He can do whatever he wants, for sure. But I hope he continues to build on what he’s accomplished so far. “Failure,” I dare say, is a success. This collection shows growth but it’s consistent growth. There isn’t a weak page in the whole lot. It’s more an evolving viewpoint: the angry young artist keeps pushing and pushing until he gets what he wants, a reaction; afterward, he finds he’s pushed his way into new terrain and he finds himself breaking new ground.
There’s all that explaining for a couple of pages at the start of the book about how the Boston Phoenix yanked the comic strip in 2012, after an illustrious seven-year run. All because of a joke that maybe went too far. Well, does it really matter at this point? Nope. What matters is the artist and man, Karl Stevens, and his work. He’s had some success with critics with three previous books and, with “Failure,” we can observe an artist evolving with these final installments of his comic strip.
It’s a process all of us artists most go through. There’s a time when you’re acutely sensitive to the fact only a few people will ever get you. They will never get art and so they will easily never get you. It’s a very real time that some artists never get over. This can lead to despair or, if all goes well, it can launch a career, likely to be mingled with despair too but you can’t have everything. Getting back to the point at hand, it is a time filled with one’s first overwhelming feeling of complete uncertainty that will stick with you (cause you never forget your first). You start to think that cats and dogs have a better shot at getting you than your fellow humans. Thus, we find a good share of eloquent cats and dogs in this strip.
Then we get a little comfortable and settle into something but we don’t want it to become too easy, a phoned-in gimmick, something that has already been done in The New Yorker or observed by Douglas Coupland. The above strip is a good example of finding your way within the long history of social satire. The humor is broad and yet there’s a sense of the specific. The young woman claims she was “nerding out” to Chekov. This is an annoying, and perhaps disturbing, prospect to her older friend who wonders out loud about what has become to simply being “intellectual.” The artwork is a refined crosshatch that itself harks back a hundred years ago which just adds to the joke, the tension between the proper order of things and the brashly new.
So, you do keep at it. Listen to your own special blend of neurosis. And it will come out. Stevens has mastered that play between the old and the new, the high and the low. “Failure” offers us a very funny look at an artist growing up. It’s a pleasure to see that evolution, that special blend of Karl Stevens come out.
Visit our friends at Alternative Comics. Visit Karl Stevens HERE. Purchase a print edition of “Failure” HERE. And, now, you can purchase a digital edition of “Failure” at ComiXology HERE.
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Filed under Alternative Comics, Art, Comics, Comixology, graphic novels, Humor, Karl Stevens, Satire
Tagged as Art, comics, Entertainment, graphic novels, Humor, Illustration, Pop Culture, Satire, Social Commentary