Here is a new work of art by Hurricane Nancy. We all have our thoughts on current events these days. It can be a lot to process and sometimes art can help lead the way. In this latest piece, it looks like someone is being torn in two directions without any clear path ahead. Well, time will tell.
Be sure to visit Hurricane Nancy and check out her art for sale.
Filed under Comics
Eric Drooker is that consummate artist, the ideal artist that young people generally aspire to be. Take a look at the short film below to gain some perspective on Mr. Drooker. This is a short film he did in New York in 1981, a tumultuous time with undeniable relevance to today; a timeless film. We will always need to remind ourselves we have nothing to fear but fear itself. I had the honor of putting together this studio visit with the artist. We discuss his latest graphic novel, Naked City, published by Dark Horse Comics. In it, we find a set of characters, representative of all humanity, who are basically reminding themselves that they have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Born and raised on Manhattan Island, Eric Drooker began to paste his art on the streets at night as a teenager. Since then, his drawings and posters have become a familiar sight in the global street art movement, and his paintings appear frequently on covers of the New Yorker.
Eric Drooker in his studio.
His first book, Flood, won the American Book Award, followed by Blood Song (soon to be a feature film). Naked City is the third volume in Drooker’s City Trilogy. His graphic novels have been translated into numerous languages in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. After designing the animation for the film Howl, he was hired for a project at DreamWorks Animation.
The City Trilogy: Flood (1992), Blood Song (2002), Naked City (2024).
Drooker’s art is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Library of Congress. He is available for speaking engagements and frequently gives slide lectures at colleges and universities. Mr. Drooker’s art is available for sale at his website.
At heart, Eric Drooker is a street artist with all the energy that comes with it: everything from his zest for creating work to his zeal for talking about his art. Just give the floor over to him and he’ll work his magic, maybe even play the harmonica if necessary.
The New Yorker, October 28, 2024, The Money Issue. “Crushing Wealth” by Eric Drooker.
“Troubadour” by Eric Drooker.
The New Yorker, March 6, 1995, “Under Bridges” by Eric Drooker.
“Tomorrow” by Eric Drooker.
While I was in his studio, he picked up a copy of The New Yorker magazine, with his art gracing the cover, an issue published just the prior week, and launched into a talk about how the magazine cover functions as a form of street art. While the magazine has a healthy readership, it also reaches a vast number of people who regularly consume just the art on the cover as they come across the magazine on display in various locales whether in a bookstore or in the dentist’s office.
The New Yorker, November 9, 2009, “Autumn in Central Park” by Eric Drooker.
The New Yorker, August 6, 2007, oil on canvas, 20″x16″, “Urban Jungle” by Eric Drooker.
Naked City got on my radar earlier this year and I’m so grateful that I got an advance copy. My friend, and colleague in the comics world, Paul Buhle, wrote the review for us here at Comics Grinder. Without a doubt, Naked City is a significant graphic novel with the added distinction of being part of a trilogy, part of a great artistic process. We, as artists, can and must do some planning ahead on projects while, at the same time, allow the art process to do its thing. Such is the case with Naked City. It is as much a graphic novel about being an artist as it is simply about being human and being true to yourself.
“The Argument” by Eric Drooker.
Filed under Comics, Eric Drooker, Interviews
NAKED CITY: A Graphic Novel. Eric Drooker. Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Books, 2024. 329pp. $29.99.
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
For many an aged connoisseur of film and television history, the title of Eric Drooker’s new comic conjures up fond, familiar images. A 1948 film offered the nearest Hollywood approach to Italian “New Realism,” and was directed by Jules Dassin,a left-wing film director about to flee the US and the blacklist for a legendary role in Greece (think Never On Sunday). On the surface a mere “policier,” it captured the grit of Manhattan as a manufacturing city, including a police chase on foot through crowds of working class types, never seen in quite this way before or perhaps after. “Naked City” made a titular reappearance for good reasons, one of the finest “New York Era” television efforts (1958-63) which began each episode with a vivid view of Manhattan, and plots that often featured police as social workers dealing sympathetically with broken lives.
Drooker himself actually fled New York for Berkeley, decades ago. But he co-founded the annual, hard-hitting anthology World War III Illustrated before departing, and has returned spectacularly—in his dreams, that is.
We are in the world of existential experience. Artists and musicians trying to make a living and make their way and also find some kind of companionship, where possible. Street scenes, park scenes, people who aren’t nearly as dangerous or unfriendly as they look, and cops who are a lot more casually brutal than the press would have us believe. Drooker, as in an earlier Manhattan GN, Flood, does not need much dialogue and some pages have hardly any at all.
Let’s try another analogy. One of the most useful observations of European art historians generations ago captured a crucial turn away from narrow religious art. For a thousand years, more or less, painters had drawn human beings at close quarters, engaged in one or another religious expression. And then, not necessarily for non-religious purposes, the landscape began to appear as something in itself, something to be seen, reflected upon, captured in art.
It was a giant step forward, anticipating the following steps in which humans would reappear but in a new light. Bruegel was already there, in a sense, but by the nineteenth century, a flood of art, more and more secular, placed ordinary people in ordinary lives. Or exotic people in their ordinary lives somewhere far from the Euro-centered world. Only one step remained, in the lowly comic pages of the yellow press, to allow ordinary as well as extraordinary people to talk, make jokes, swear, and generally carry on.
Thus comic art, long unrecognized as any kind of art. Drooker brings us back to landscapes, but as cityscapes. Interiors and exteriors alike, not to mention the subway caverns, not to mention music venues. Not to mention balmy days, and snowstorm days, tenement to public park.
The plot is fairly thin and the characters not developed with notable complexity because Drooker wishes to direct the reader’s attention elsewhere. Our protagonist, a young woman coming from a rough background, has aspirations as a singer. She naturally can’t pay even a meager rent without finding some kind of work when nearly every kind is obnoxious as well as unrewarding. By accident, she becomes an artist’s model and we enter the world of the artist himself.
Here, any comic art volume will poke around a little, raising inevitable analogies to the comic artist’s own artistic vision, work and troubles. This guy is more than a generation older than our protagonist, has no apparent sexual designs upon her but also no sense of a career more successful than following his agent or exhibitor’s advice. He may not come to a happy ending because hardly anyone does here. The City is rough on the ordinary aspirant to artistic fame or even relative stability. The lonely streets are too dangerous, just for starters.
She is lucky enough to escape the worst dangers except the sense of being alone in a world of skyscrapers, tenements and offices. She is lucky enough to be recognized as a singer with talent. But something is definitely missing.
Drooker is a socialist and environmentalist as his art has always explained to readers. He does not thump any key here, no political causes are highlighted, if the plight of the working stiff is always on display. He is pointing in another direction. She is undocumented and in that way always endangered, her memories of her family’s political persecution in Mexico stand for themselves, part of a past that she has left behind except in wistful moments.
She is, finally, one more stranger in the metropolis. Like millions of others facing the same dangers, including deportation. And with similar hopes. She is not allowed her own special songs to them. But she endures.
Actually, it is the Yiddish language short stories and novels about Manhattan from the 1890s to the 1940s that seem the closest to Drooker. Strangers in a language that will remain forever alien West of the Hudson. Inclined toward visionary social solutions based on culture as much as politics, the artist, even the ordinary lover of art, group-music singer or musician to film-maker and even cartoonist, those curious Jews left a mighty legacy that Drooker follows.
Then again, Drooker could also be seen in Tompkins Square Park, where Allen Ginsberg discovered his art on anti-gentrification posters, introduced himself to the artist and began a process that culminated in a Drooker/Ginsberg collaboration of poetry and comics. Quite something to remember. And again, quite the city saga.
Ginsberg discovered Drooker as Drooker had discovered Ginsberg. Together—which is to say a new collection of Ginsberg’s poetry illustrated by Drooker, published in 2006—they created a unique comic. We can appreciate the partnership best with Ginsberg’s words, from Drooker’s website:
Essay by Allen Ginsberg
Drooker’s Illuminations
I first glimpsed Eric Drooker’s odd name on posters pasted on fire-alarm sides, construction walls checkered with advertisements, & lamppost junction boxes in the vortex of Lower East Side Avenues leading to Tompkins Square Park, where radical social dislocation mixed homeless plastic tents with Wigstock transvestite dress-up anniversaries, Rastas sitting on benches sharing spliff, kids with purple Mohawks, rings in their noses ears eyebrows and bellybuttons, adorable or nasty skinheads, wives with dogs & husbands with children strolling past jobless outcasts, garbage, and a bandshell used weekly for folk-grunge concerts, anti-war rallies, squatters’ rights protests, shelter for blanket-wrapped junkies & winos and political thunder music by Missing Foundation, commune-rockers whose logo, an overturned champagne glass with slogan “The Party’s Over,” was spray-painted on sidewalks, apartments, brownstone and brick walled streets.
Eric Drooker’s numerous block-print-like posters announced much local action, especially squatters’ struggles and various mayoral-police attempts to destroy the bandshell & close the Park at night, driving the homeless into notoriously violence-corrupted city shelters. Tompkins Park had a long history of political protest going back before Civil War anti-draft mob violence, memorialized as “. . . a mixed surf of muffled sound, the atheist roar of riot,” in Herman Melville’s The Housetop: A Night Piece (July 1863).
Filed under Dark Horse Comics, Eric Drooker
Honestly, this is the only graphic novel that matters right now.
Final Cut. Charles Burns. Pantheon. 2024. 224pp. $34.00.
Honestly, Final Cut is the only graphic novel that matters right now. And we’re about to take a look at it. Everything about it, from the title on down, is true to the artist’s vision. Charles Burns had to invent his place in comics. As he has said himself, the underground comics of the 1960s had receded into the twilight around the time he came of age. There was no alt-comics scene when it was Charles Burns up to bat. He had to create a whole new thing. Yes, there were other cartoonists of his generation in the same boat but Burns brought in such a distinctive and original vision that only a few others could stand alongside. In recent years, perhaps Burns wondered if he could still pull a rabbit out of his hat. Well, that is not asking the right question. It’s more just a matter of when and now we have a new book. Burns’s comics are typically set in the atmospheric woodlands of the Pacific Northwest, circa 1970, and this one is no different. No need to change a winning format.
Boy Meets Girl. Boy Obsesses Over Girl.
It’s a new book following in a well established Burns tradition of alienation nation, just what the doctor ordered if what ails you is a need for the extraordinary. This is the story of one young man’s need for the transcendent, and his inability to rise to the occasion when he comes face to face with it. What’s wrong with him? Maybe it has to do with him being a teenager, a little too young for his own good. When he met the girl, he flinched. He didn’t win her over. Instead, he did quite the opposite: he obsessed over her.
At the movies!
As much as this book is about horror movies, from classics to B-movies, this is also about fan culture and the fans who have a need greater than they can fully express to other people. There is no way that Brian is going to connect on a deep level with Laurie. Maybe when he’s older but not now while he’s in high school and that’s all he’s got. At this point in his life, he is driven to tears by the disturbing ending of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He took Laurie, on a just-friends-date, to see it at the local movie theater but, no such luck, she didn’t really get it. So, for now, his love of horror movies is all he’s got. And that’s not too bad. He’s a budding filmmaker after all.
My last reading of Charles Burns goes back to the trilogy (X’ed Out, The Hive, Sugar Skull) he did about a decade or so ago. Before that, I read Black Hole when it came out in singles. By comparison, this new full length graphic novel feels as grounded as Black Hole and more accessible, even personal. Brian feels a bit more like an alter ego. The reader is supposed to be sympathetic to Brian. He seems a little off but, at the same time, he seems to be figuring out things at his own pace. For now, he has an unstable mother to attend to and he’s got the afternoon horror movie on local TV to help him cope.
Filed under Charles Burns, Comics, Graphic Novel Reviews
“You know how to read a comic. But what is your eye actually doing? That’s something I think about all the time.” Dash Shaw is not only talking about the mechanics of comics but a way of seeing. He goes on: “A classic example would be where you have on the right side of a two-page spread some sort of splash, someone has shot at something. And on the left side you have a six-panel grid. We know the rules of reading comics tell you to start reading from the left side. But your eye will go directly to the right side to see whatever the surprise happens to be.”
Dash Shaw is a cartoonist and animator. His new graphic novel is Blurry, published by New York Review Comics (review), is a story about various characters going about their life struggles who perhaps share an amorphous connection of sorts. Nothing obvious is going on here. Nothing is either too funny or too sad; it’s life at a moderate level and it’s within this world that the characters navigate. To evoke this in a graphic novel is a daunting task but, for Shaw, Blurry turns out to be a tour de force work, an evolution of the multi-layered storytelling many readers took notice of when Shaw’s first major work was released in 2008, Bottomless Belly Button.
From small insignificant moments . . .
. . . a life unfolds.
Creating comics at this level is a constant looking to see where the eye is going: what is being observed; who is saying what to whom; what is really happening or imagined. And it’s also just as much about setting a tone. “Nothing is too low or too high in this comic. It’s an ambient tone, like a Brian Eno album. I wanted it to be a pleasant environment with nothing too dramatic happening, a place you could enjoy inhabiting.”
Towards the end of our conversation, I cut to the essence of what was running through my mind before, and during, our chat: the tension between the earnest and the ironic. In Shaw’s work, from what I can tell, there’s a very real conflict between an inclination to tell a sincere story and a compulsion to throw a little water on things with a bit of irony. Shaw responds: “That tension of the ironic and the earnest. I think about it all the time. It’s the story of my life.” Well, ultimately, Shaw is no fan of biting satire. That’s just too much. But a little bit of irony can add some spice, especially certain formal devices that give the reader a slight nudge. In the end, however, a meaningful story must emerge. And so it does with Blurry.
Filed under Comics
Blurry. Dash Shaw. New York Review Comics. 2024. 480 pp. $34.95.
Dash Shaw is one of our most interesting, and fearlessly experimental, auteur cartoonists. At this point in his career, any new book is a big deal, and deservedly so. Blurry is quintessential Dash Shaw with its moody and enigmatic vibe, a refinement of what began with his debut graphic novel, the family saga, Bottomless Belly Button, back in 2008. What new tricks will he pull out of his hat this time? Shaw is someone who takes his work seriously, almost as seriously as his followers. I say this because I think he operates with a healthy dose of irreverence and gets on with making the work and lets the comics cognoscenti do what they do. Comics, the actual creation of comics, has a way of keeping you honest. If you roll up your sleeves and just dive into the art process, any sense of preciousness should fall by the wayside.
As much as some comics scholars talk about comic strips as the source to the comics medium, they rarely pay much attention to contemporary cartoonists who do comic strips. The conversation quickly turns to something that is thought to be more high-minded. These same comics scholars view an elegant and mysterious version of comics by someone like Dash Shaw, and their delicate antennas go straight up, gravitating to the latest big score of “art comics” to pontificate over. Anyway, it’s good to bring this up since Shaw, you can’t deny it, is one of the most celebrated artist-cartoonists. With that in mind, what often turns out to be the most intriguing thing here is how the story is told rather than the story itself, much like a poem. In this case, Shaw presents the reader with a disparate group of individuals, all engaging in their own quiet and subtle ways, with no obvious throughline connecting everyone to each other. This is a story as much about mood as it is about motivation, which makes perfect sense to me. Shaw has, throughout his career, maintained a deceptively simple style which, I think, acts as a good ballast to offset the more esoteric nature of his storytelling.
But a story takes shape as you plunge into this nearly 500-page comics tome. Shaw has a penchant for the sprawling saga, sprinkling it with the less obvious bits of flotsam and jetsam of life. By its very nature, “flotsam and jetsam” keep a low profile until perhaps a precocious storyteller makes hay out of it. And Shaw makes excellent hay. Keep in mind that this graphic novel is a collection of stories of seemingly random individuals who, bit by bit, become more and more interconnected by seemingly random bits. Given that Shaw is determined to evoke the chaos of real life, some of these stories fall flat in their quotidian understatement. But that is the whole point, like a sadder than sad Chris Ware comic. Still, like in real life, gems emerge. Shaw is among the best in employing the tools of comics. You could create quite a heated panel discussion at your next comics art festival on his use of the four-panel grid. So, if you’re a follower of such comics connoisseurs as Frank Santoro, there is much to love here. That said, with Shaw’s keen satirical wit and overall social observation, there is much to love here too on that level alone. Enjoy it as a rad soap opera if you wish. There are enough pages here to have you feeling like you’re bingeing your latest favorite show.
The writer’s life.
My favorite gem among this collection of character vignettes is the plight of professional writer Christie Oliver, something of an alter ego for Shaw. Among all the characters who are scrutinized here, it seems to me that she manages to pluck the most out of her situation, which isn’t all that bad: a writer who gains some success from being picked up by a prestigous publisher and then must navigate her way to sustaining her early promise. Christie ends up using a technique to get out of a rut that is also utilized by a different character, Fiona, in a modest yet stressful place in her own life. So, each character, in their own way, no matter how meaningless their life may seem, is up to something, trying things out, doing interesting things.
Along with Dash Shaw, Derek Kirk Kim is another cartoonist I greatly admire. Recently, Kim told me that one of the most satisfying works in comics can involve bringing together parties that have no obvious connection–and then finding it. He was referring not only to his own masterful graphic novel, Same Difference, but also to Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. Both books revolve around a group of disparate characters who, at first, don’t seem to share anything in common. And so it is with Blurry. For a long and extended amount of time, Blurry takes us down one existential rabbit hole after another. It is a series of prolonged moments which brings to mind another favorite auteur cartoonist, Paul Pope. Part of his bag of tricks includes this stretching of time, which is most prevalent in manga and anime. Shaw presents us with characters who are having trouble with an assortment of life struggles including the most simple of tasks, like deciding on a flavor of ice cream, which becomes an endless pondering, requiring a good deal of stretching of time, a predicament that keeps popping up and actually runs through the entire length of the book. You can’t miss it. All these characters, at least at first, seem to lack the fortitude to contend with anything substantial but that is exactly what they will need to acquire in order to make more sense of each of their lives–and there lies the bigger picture, the whole shooting match, and what will connect each and every one of these characters. Well worth sticking around to see how that turns out.
Filed under Comics, Graphic Novel Reviews
Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion. By Jeffry Odell Korgen and Christopher Cardinale, with Friar Mike Lasky. New York/Mahwah: The Paulist Press, 2024. 106pp. $16.95.
Guest review by Paul Buhle
A most unusual comic! These days, meaning the last fifty years, Dorothy Day (1897-1980) has slipped out of the news but also into an official Church process, now a decade old, of literally making her a Saint. Jeffry Korgen, the principal (and official) activist to push for her sainthood, is also the moving force here. Seen in this light, it would appear a daunting responsibility for a comic. But Korgen and artist Christopher Cardinale measure up to the task.
The beautifully written and drawn story takes us back to her youth, where as a child, she survives the Bay Area earthquake and what became known as the Great Fire. The comic passes over her time in my own hometown of Urbana, Illinois (she also seems to have found the place dull, and left after two years of college), to arrive in Manhattan in 1916 as a would-be journalist. She “discovers” poverty and makes her own first effort to provide a sympathetic, empathetic journalism of support. In her way, she will always be a muckraker, in the honored tradition of going and talking to the impoverished and exploited about their lives, and honestly reporting what she learns. Soon she will invite them into her life.
For many of her devotees beyond the Church or any religion, however, her days in Greenwich Village have always stood out. Never again a place like this in the 1910s, never a crowd like this, with bold art, theatrical experiments, modern dance and radical politics mixed together with low rents. Young Dorothy supported both the egalitarian Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party (working for a while for its Daily Call). A staffer for the brilliant artistic Masses magazine, she tries to keep it going as the ostensibly liberal Woodrow Wilson administration, launching the Red Scare, prosecutes the editors for opposing US entry into the First World War.
Many of the readers of The Eleventh Pregnancy (1924), her famed semi-fictional novel and of lively writings about her life dwell upon her time with Eugene O’Neill. Then the nation’s greatest social-minded playwright (Arthur Miller and Tony Kushner among others follow him and receive the same conservative outrage), O’Neill attracts her to the Provincetown Players. She could have been an actress! That is, if modesty had not set her on another road.
Several gripping pages show Dorothy in another campaign of the 1910s, for Woman Suffrage. In this one, the federal government really does jail her. In sharing the poverty of fellow up close inmates, she ponders the power of religion. It will take her a while yet to get to her calling. The Wilson administration, even amidst a fury of jailing thousands of union members, is successfully pressured to let the suffrage protesters go.
I could wish that the comic gave more time and space to the adventures that found her shortly after marrying money, traveling to Europe and writing her novel, among the handful from the times still read as a guide to the Bohemians of the day. This follows a love affair, an abortion (purportedly by none less than Dr. Ben Reitman, Emma Goldman’s lover) and a failed attempt to suicide. A new lover, a baby and her insistence upon a baptism—against the father’s arguments— finds her convincingly alone, without the institutional connection that will soon enough be decisive for the rest of her life.
We learn, but only at the end of the book, that she remained, until the end of her time on earth, an intimate friend to leading Communist novelist and literary critic Mike Gold and of leading Communist Party official Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the “girl Wobbly” of the 1910s who goes on to embrace Moscow. These friendships seem to me a decisive clue to the psychological mysteries of her character that have, in the face of considerable scholarship, remained somehow elusive. She takes part in the great Unemployed March of 1932 and seeks out one of the most curious and contradictory characters of the day, Peter Maurin. An fervent and, it must be considered, largely reactionary opponent of the mass strikes leading to the CIO, Maurin has another plan. Voluntary poverty, voluntary cooperation based on manual labor of a mostly agricultural character, all this looks something like an ecological, democratic vision. Or maybe not, depending on one’s view of mass life in the Middle Ages.
The Communists’ Daily Worker and its many counterparts in non-English languages of ethnic working class communities might not have possibly existed without the illusion of the USSR. The Catholic Worker, a weekly with an astonishing circulation that sometimes reached almost 200,000, based itself on another illusion, the voluntary cooperation that would, somehow, displace capitalist power.
The Catholic Worker, for those who now remember its thriving days, was lively and well-written, with appealing stories and quite wonderful illustrations. Peter Maurin did not even like it! But the Hospitality Houses of his inspiration had a great appeal. The “CW” brought in the most progressive figures of the Church, a remarkable thing for a historical moment when antiSemitism had a powerful influence, far beyond the considerable reach of famed radio evangelist Father Coughlin. That the CW would support the Sit Down Strikes and even help lead a reform movement of seamen against their typically corrupt (but avowedly Catholic) AFL bosses testified to her determination and savvy.
Indeed, somehow, with friends on high, she managed it, as she supported the the Spanish Republic when most of the Church, including the Pope, openly favored Franco and his anticommunist partners, the Fascists. She managed an antiwar sentiment, then ardent advocacy of Conscientious Objectors, even as the Second World War embraced the nation and the world.
Pacifism and antiwar sentiment of the Cold War years, even more than the existence of the Hospitality Houses, the civil rights movement and the continuing struggle against poverty, defined Day in the public eye through most of the following decades. The New Yorker took her up as a “personality” as the Cold War deepened. The FBI pursued her, albeit without the harassment and public “investigations” that hounded members and former members of the Left, emphatically including unionists.
Hitting the fifty year age mark in 1956, Day built the Catholic Worker movement as a writer and a public personality, perpetually on tour. Today’s “Nuns on a Bus” owes a lot to her historical inspiration, as does the wide embrace of Liberation Theology during the last decades of the twentieth century. City officials in Manhattan in the 1950s plotted to shut down the movement by shuttering the Hospitality Houses for code violations. She was put on trial very much like her contemporaries…the publishers of comic books.
Her civil rights activity and her opposition to the Vietnam War would offer the last, grand moments of her public life. She would not back down in her opposition, even her support of fellow Catholics who burned draft center documents, and met verbal assaults verbally by the all-powerful Cardinal Spellman.
The Pope, the newest Pope, was more or less on her side. She gained a powerful new ally in Cesar Chavez and his farm workers’ movement. There, in the religious faith of the mostly Chicano workers, she may have found the radicalism lacking in the Church’s own anticommunist Labor Schools and the notorious collaboration with the FBI and Chamber of Commerce to take down unwanted union leaders.
Day was, finally, more than an icon, and as we near the end of the comic, we are reminded that hers is very much a story with many twists and turns—but less in her than in the worlds around her. Someone told me an anecdote about the “sainting” process that would have surely made Dorothy laugh. One of the big bishops, probably one advanced by the dark knight of reaction, Pope Benedict, wanted to halt the sainthood process because Dorothy was a “harlot,” that is a bohemian, in her young days. If not a free lover, she was at least someone who did not marry the father. How dare the Church honor her! The elderly bishop was reminded that if she DID become a saint, it would seriously endanger his celestial status, more or less forever: a very convincing argument indeed. Dorothy passed muster, even with him.
In the wonderful, final pages of Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion, we find her at death’s door and beyond, her wake attended by the likes of I.F. Stone and Abbie Hoffman. She had become the counterpart, perhaps, of Woody Guthrie, saints needed for the continuing guidance of their example, words and deeds. From the (continuing) Hospitality Houses to the fiercely persecuted Keystone Pipeline protesters, her story goes on and on.
Filed under Comics, Graphic Novel Reviews
Just when we thought we had it all figured out, we realize that the mystery continues and we can relax. We don’t have to be serious. We can be silly.
Be sure to check out Hurricane Nancy’s new book, HURRICANE NANCY, published by Fantagraphics Books, and stop by and visit her at her site to see more of her art.
Well, we finally got around to having an interview. It seems as if we’d already done that but now it’s official. I am beyond words in my deep respect for the artist Nancy Burton, aka Hurricane Nancy. It is a delight and an honor to know her and call her a friend. Fantagraphics has recently published HURRICANE NANCY, a monograph on the art career of one of the legendary underground cartoonists and you will want to seek it out.
Give Peace a Chance!
Over the years, it has been a point of distinction for this site, Comics Grinder, to showcase art by Hurricane Nancy. When Nancy told me about her upcoming book, I was as thrilled about it as if it were my own book coming out. We discussed my doing some coverage and it was great getting to review the book and now to attach this interview during the book’s promotional run. I can’t say enough good things about the book, about Nancy and about Fantagraphics. I know that Fantagraphics loves me too, as I’ve gotten to know various folks there over the years. Well, one thing is for sure, the years keep rolling along. So, you better make the most of it while you can. I firmly believe that is exactly what Nancy has done. If I had to sum up her art career, I’d say it’s been a wild, and steady, ride made up of an artist trusting herself and going for it with her art.
What Fantagraphics has done with the Hurricane Nancy monograph is create something special in the spirit of this most audacious publisher: a taking the bull by the horns, and let the chips fall where they may, attitude that, at the end of the day, is what life is all about. I encourage you to get a copy of the book and stick around and go to the interview at the Comics Grinder YouTube channel.
Filed under Comics, Comix, Interviews
Guy Colwell, Delights: A Story of Hieronymous Bosch. Seattle: Fantagraphcs. 162pp, hardcover, $29.95. (release date: 13 August 2024).
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
Not all readers of comic art will recall the occasional evocation of a young Robert Crumb, in the later 1960s and shortly after, to the fifteenth century Dutch artist Hieronymous Bosch. That Bosch saw and drew the dark prospects of the human fall from innocent beginnings, as depicted in his singularly famous altar triptych, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” prompted religious-minded viewers and several centuries of art critics to treat the painter as warning against sins and sinners.
Excerpt from Guy Colwell’s Delights.
Quite the opposite or nearly the opposite, as now understood. One of a family of artists, his work made possible by the support of a wealthy wife older than himself, Bosch sought to depict human innocence within nature turned by society—arguably class society with its exploitation and corruption—into an unholy, totally destructive mess. In the left-most panel of the famous triptych, the beautiful, young humans are conversing with animals, equally unashamed of their own nakedness. Increasingly, as our eyes move rightward, horrors appear. The last panel has a character shitting out gold coins. Socialists would call this final depiction Class Society, and they would not be wrong.
Excerpt from The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch (1490-1510). Depiction of shitting gold coins.
Not all comic fans will remember artist Guy Colwell vividly or perhaps at all. But he is sui generis, mistaken often to be a Black artist, and for good reasons. Busted on drug charges in the Bay Area of the 1960s, he spent years with black prisoners affably, listening and learning. His Inner City Romance (initial book publication, 1978) explored the lives of erstwhile prisoners and their girlfriends, graphically and sympathetically, with all the tragedy and occasional exuberantly happy moments intact. Nothing else like it could be seen for decades during which Colwell, who never made a living from comics, looked in other directions.
Millions of art lovers have traveled to European museums to see Bosch paintings (and not only the famed triptych), and many have been lucky enough to capture traveling shows. None could have come into visual contact with anything like Colwell’s Bosch.
Why would that be? The painter’s life remains largely obscure. His membership in the small but intense, devotional Brotherhood of Our Lady must help to explain something. His relationship with other artists or trends of the time, even within the village where he lived and worked, will likely never be known. We do know that the Radical Reformation, its origins in the Wat Tyler Revolt of the English 1280s, continued taking shape across the following centuries, shaking large parts of society. Peasants’ and craftsmen’s uprisings in Central Europe, influenced by millenarian visions of a perfected social order, pointed to the future. These uprisings, crushed with great violence by the authorities, anticipated modern class struggle—as Bosch’s work anticipated Surrealist art. Did such social and class struggles play a role in his visions?
Late in the book, the artist briefly suggests another possible explanation. “New ideas” are coming from Italy, that is to say the Renaissance, starting to reveal different ways of seeing art and the uses of the body in art. Indeed, another long-held rumor has Bosch influenced by an Italian mystic who traveled to Holland from Italy.
In either case, the power of the Church is weakening, as Bosch’s defenders reference in the comic. They no longer hold absolute power over art. This explanation is as good, and as limited in explaining what is really going on in Bosch’s fantastic visions.
To Bosch or Not To Bosch?
Colwell has taken yet a third and more direct path, a narrative that drives the comic forward. He suggests the obvious, that an artist who needs funds to survive can sometimes find a patron—in that long-gone era most likely a royal patron. How would that painter work, and struggle within himself, to satisfy the client? In this version, Bosch’s wealthy wife evidently cannot support the household herself.
Colwell, himself the craftsman, makes the painter a deeply religious figure, fretful about the art of nudes ordered— along with generous payment for following directions. The narrative plays to Colwell’s strengths, as readers of his 1970s comic art will remember. The nudes, male and female, are wonderfully drawn, unashamed and a thousand miles from anything like pornography. They radiate the innocence of an art work that is not quite innocent. They obviously enjoy looking and touching, something that comes through so clearly and scandalously in the triptych.
The protest of the presumably respectable townspeople whom he characterizes is one more bit of Colwell’s history-imagined world. He is correct, as scholars of medieval Germany have explored and explained at length, that ordinary and most highly-placed people of the time and place thought in such religious terms, could not actually think outside of them. Radicals likewise saw their lives and their work in equally religious and often millenarian terms. Driven to their death by the rising classes of merchants, assaulted in sermons and pamphlets, they were depicted as immoralists seeking to overthrow all religion and virtue—agents of Satan himself.
In Colwell’s imaginative re-creation, the monsters come to Bosch as he doubts himself, especially when he is beyond his studio and his comforting wife. They lunge at him and leer at him, but we discover in the final pages that they may be showing him the limits of his time and place, hinting at the strange things somewhere beyond.
I do not think it is likely that, as the book suggests, the artist is even thinking about a possible secular age ahead. This seems too much. But he has, like the most sensitive of art historians, accurately pointed to the appreciation of Bosch’s work after centuries of Christian-based misrepresentation.
No one else in comic art, perhaps, would undertake such a project. Colwell is to be congratulated for his beautiful, meaningful work.
Paul Buhle
Filed under Comics
