I Can Suffix Her

my summer of content continues, despite your indifference

Hello, reader. Most of today’s letter is messing around with Nancy and Sluggo again, but first, here are some warm-up cartoons.

my idea of topical humor

I’m putting together a handmade 32pp risographed zine, collecting some of the better cartoons from this newsletter, and it will be called…

There’s also a 60-page printed version of the first chapter of Foghorn which you can still read for free here. All of this, plus some new and old prints, will be available at Gosh! Comics on August 17th during their Small Press Day, so mark your calendars. Also, coming to NY late September for a week, and then Grafixx in Belgium in November, will bring some copies to those places too.

NANCY VARIATIONS

I’ve always been obsessed with stuff that’s barely legible, the tricky pull-and-push of detail and definition that either feels effortless and light, or incomprehensible and muddy (as was the case in most of my early books, unfortunately). My aim is always to capture the process in the static image, something either almost formed, or something just beginning to dissolve.

The benefit of having an obsession of this sort, is that it can never be resoled (just look at Giacometti), but the process is the thing, and you can apply it to any subject matter, as well as other people’s property. Nancy is an interesting one to play with, since Bushmiller’s design is kind of the opposite of my usual messy approach—total clarity and readability, to such a degree that this straightforwardness, I think, is part of Nancy’s famed surrealism.

SUGGESTED SOUNDTRACK

I used to play this cover of Milk Cow Blues on repeat over and over. It’s a good example of this balancing on the margins of recognizable. Messy, but still fun.

Anyway, here’s the quickly drafted version strip, in which the sequence overall reads better without the detail and visual noise. Even the forest-ness of the forest. That’s why I’ve been mostly trying not to do sketches, and just go for it, otherwise it’s an endless struggle to scale up something simple and effective.

There’s the problem with this obsession—nothing ever feels finished. Here’s v1 and v2 of the upcoming zine cover, for another comparison. May not seem like a world of difference, but it feels more complete on the right, somehow—the right kind of stupidity in the expression, the right balance of looseness and stiffness, etc.

GUS BOFA INTERMISSION

Take a look at these two engravings from 1931. Interesting to see how he buries most of the hatching in the second layer, and how much the second version gains in atmosphere.

And here’s a tribute to Bofa (who is something of a grandaddy of arty French comics—you see his influence in Blain, Sfar, Meurisse, practically everyone), by Blutch, who is a real master of shifting between realism and cartooniness within one drawing.

Blutch has an entire coffee-table book of redrawn pages from various cartoonists, mostly in the BD canon, sometimes going for a fairly faithful rendering, sometimes completely upending everything, remixing pages and layouts, and so forth. Here is his weirdly realistic take on Tintin.

Hergé’s suspension of disbelief is not totally dissimilar to Bushmiller’s—they both have a certain library of poses and compositions, and everything that happens in their comics feels right within that stylistic bubble. As soon as you take things out of it, everything begins to feel a bit off.

That said, Hergé’s proportions are pretty realistic, which works in Blutch’s favor in the last panel, where the figures take up almost all the available space. I didn’t grow up with Tintin books, and they always felt a bit uncanny—so many tiny panels of full-length figures running around... Something about it feels like toy models, rather than real characters. Anyway, back to Nancy.

NANCE VARIATIONS

Ok, I’m done, for now. The reader is encouraged to pursue this thread of thought on their own. For more pretentious Nancy content, check out my very anal dissection of one panel from the comic in the second half of this post:

Also, I stumbled upon this great drawing of Nancy and Sluggo on DeviantArt, of all places, and I think it’s the best post-Bushmiller take I’ve seen. There’s a cleaned-up color version, but I prefer this one. Something about their expressions just gets me every time.

THOMAS BERNHARD INTERMISSION

Recently, I got back into printmaking, and made this two-color motivational poster for myself, as a reminder to not hold back and alienate all your contemporaries, as well as your entire country in the name of your so-called art. I have a few more copies, so let me know if you’re the unlikely target audience. Orange & teal on fancy A3 paper.

🙅‍♀️ True bernhardheads only, no fakeberncels! 🙅‍♀️

MORE ON THE LENIN MUSHROOM

Continuing on the musical motifs between the lines of my previous post, check this absolute banger¹.

And if you clicked on the fake discount button later in that post, you would’ve seen one of the great proto-memes of early Russian TV, in which the avant-garde musician Sergey Kuryokhin proves that Lenin was a mushroom. With this spoof, Kuryohin set out to demonstrate that you can prove anything, no matter how absurd, if you commit to the bit and string enough vague evidence together.

Weirdly enough, I haven’t actually seen the full Lenin mushroom broadcast (which is 1 hour long) until last week. It was an urban legend when I was growing up, and somehow I never thought to look it up on youtube until now. The whole thing is kind of a precursor to the Day Today and Brass Eye, which I also discovered relatively late, when my passion for artistic confusion was already firmly in place.

I often wonder if your artistic influences are nothing more than confirmations for the obsessions you’ve had since day one…²

1. Otomo Yoshihide had a tribute to Kuryohin, which is how I stumbled upon the cartoon album above.

2. ……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..…………………!…………..………………..……………………………..……………………………..…………/…………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..…………………………/…../……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..think about it, yea…………………………………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………………!!……………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..…………………………………………………..……………………………..……………………………..…………………/…………..……………………………..…………………………….??????…………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..…………………???…..……………………………!……………………..……………………………..……………………………..………………………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………./.……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..……………………………..th/