Comics more than just huge superheros

Imagine my shock at going to that fine comic book establishment, the Million Year Picnic, to see writer/artists Seth, Tom Hart, and Adrian Tomine, and finding only 10 people there. I can think of no greater public service to perform in this inaugural column than to alert you all to the talents of these three in hopes that next time, there will be 11 people there.

Most people know little about the comics scene, with good reason. Ninety-nine percent of the sales are to arrested adolescents who subsist on violent, badly-drawn cityscapes filled with phallic superheroes and implanted women. It would send any literate person screaming from the local slovenly pervert-owned comic shop.

But there are a few publishers, like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, as well as a burgeoning self-publishing movement, with titles that appeal beyond power fantasies. Even here, quality is at a premium, and no one is going to wade through the products of an adjusted-for-inflation Sturgeon's Law unless they are a complete obsessive.

Most of the people at the signing were there to see Tomine, a young Berkeley grad whose Optic Nerve has gotten quite a bit of attention. Too often compared to Raymond Carver, his stories tend to be inconclusive, often despairing snippets of everyday life. Up until the latest issue (#3), the unrelenting anomie and underdeveloped characters were oftentimes more enervating than affecting.

Issue three fulfills at least part of Tomine's promise. Each of the four stories is drawn and written in a drastically different style, and all but the slight, overwrought "Hostage Situation" are far beyond anything Tomine has previously done. The art highlights a strong, clean line and effective use of moody shading.

"Dylan and Donovan" takes up half the issue with its extended narrative of two teenage girls and their father's excursion to a comic convention. Though it suffers from an inner narrative that renders the panels inert, working against the medium rather than with it, the two titular characters are the most human and fleshed-out that Tomine has yet created. Surprisingly, he overloads the story with background and events; the story could (and should) have been twice as long as it is.

Next up is "Supermarket," a spare and understated piece about a blind man and a supermarket clerk, pencilled in subtle, haunting grays. Devoid of narrative captions, it is near-perfectly told, and just ambiguous enough. "Unfaded," on the other hand, is completely internal, with no dialogue until the last page. While beautifully drawn, it once more seems ill-suited as a comic. But for someone in his early twenties, Tomine is learning the ropes at an astounding rate. The new issue shakes off any accusations of stagnation and opens a wide realm of adventurous possibilities for the future of Optic Nerve.

Tom Hart has a strong background in mini-comics, but his art far surpasses the doodles that too often pass for art in them. His midget characters, with their vacant eye sockets and round ears, seem to subsist purely on subconscious impulses, while his art is somewhere between Jules Feiffer, George Herriman, and my kindergarten self-portraits. Now on its second issue, his limited series The Sands is a surreal tale of a couple that move to an uncivilized desert to study bugs. I don't know where the story's going, but Hart's rampant creativity is enough for me; more cautious readers should try New Hat, a self-contained work of genius with a similarly out-of-time setting that matches stoicism with equal amounts of unbridled fury.

Drawn & Quarterly just released the six parts of Seth's It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken as a collected "picture-novella," and it's quite an achievement. It's a slow, reflective tale of Seth's search for Kalo, an obscure gag cartoonist of the '40s. The drawing is something of a modern update of the old New Yorker style, all simplicity and understatement. The nostalgia pervades the writing, too: Seth rattles off neo-Luddite tracts about how the world used to be a lot better "back then," then admits that he can't justify them. And he refuses to give up on his search for something, even when he discovers that Kalo is dead.

Yet the story isn't a tiresome spiel irrelevant to anyone not sharing his obsessive interests; it's rather an elliptical examination of those pained obsessions. There are long passages of pure scenery, often with faceless words of introspection. There are few tricks here; like the art, the story is reduced to its bare essentials and examined from inside and from outside, immediately and in retrospect.

By the end of it, I still didn't share his concern with Kalo or old gag cartoonists, but that's the point. (I have my own obsessions, thank you.) Seth isn't out to win converts to his forgotten heroes, but to show their insignificance. Kalo is a complete unknown, but nowhere is there a case made for his greatness. Seth never adequately explains why he is pursuing this man above anyone else, except that Kalo's style is somewhat like his. It is in this stripping of external significance that the book succeeds. Eventually, I cared so little about Kalo the cartoonist, that I focused on Kalo the man, who I did care about. In drawing that out of me, Seth is a master.

So we have two artists whose style has already solidified into unique craft, and one who is coming into his own at a remarkable pace. Tomine is the most well-known, and Hart is a complete original, but it's Seth who has created a magnum opus with It's a Good Life. In a medium known for endless recycling of idiotic genre elements, Seth, for all his nostalgia, provides one of the most forward-looking voices.