A messy midlife crisis? A sentimentally nostalgic (or perhaps crotchety and embittered) old age?

No need to fret. Humor may be the "salt of life," as Brunetti puts it, but the other essential ingredient throughout An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons & True Stories is youth -- or, rather, an abiding connection to its testing, questing qualities. They manifest repeatedly here as philosophical curiosity, dark (and often scatological) comedy, and a self-protective brand of nihilistic cheer. Life's a piece of s - - -, as Monty Python would have it, but always look on the bright side!

That's not to say there aren't some very old souls here. Robert Crumb, still the genre's towering figure, is represented by some of his most wistful and curmudgeonly work. This includes "A Short History of America," in which a series of gorgeously drawn panels shows a bucolic rural landscape devolving into a tacky and treeless urban nightmare, and "Where Has It Gone, All the Beautiful Music of Our Grandparents?," about the transformation of acoustic folk music into soullessly blaring electronic pop. Bill Griffith's "objective study" of the superiority of mid-20th century design -- of houses, furniture, corporate logos -- over its consumerist, "mod" successor likewise shakes its fist at the future.

But that's just a different way of demonstrating how securely art comics are anchored in childhood, adolescence and early adulthood; at its core, the genre is about the formation of the self. (Some gestations, such as Crumb's, just take longer than others.) We see this in the work of Lynda Barry, whose memories, regularly excavated and embroidered in her long-running alt-weekly feature "Ernie Pook's Comeek," seem rooted exclusively in her early teens, and in that of Chicago artist Chris Ware, whose masterwork Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth imagines the dysfunctional present as the product of a traumatic past.

And if the anthology doesn't quite convey a sense of the Ages of Man, Brunetti, a cartoonist and graphic designer who teaches at Columbia College Chicago, has organized the book in a way that, while not chronological, manages to suggest a gradual maturation. The reader moves from the reflexive irony of Jim Woodring ("Frank's Fish") and the doom-loving Mark Beyer ("Agony") to the sexual guilt of Peter Bagge ("Oedipus Junior") and the bizarre non sequiturs of Archer Prewitt ("Sof' Boy").

Then it's on to the more fully developed and "adult" word-and-picture narratives of Art Spiegelman's Holocaust meditation MAUS and Debbie Drechsler's harrowing sexual-abuse nightmare Visitors in the Night to Seth's cinema-influenced It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken to Daniel Clowes' Gynecology, in which an unethical physician ends up both betrayer and betrayed.

In this continuum, Ware (who functions as an assistant editor for the anthology) stands out as the artist who comes closest to abandoning the buffer of comedy altogether in his search for a baldly tragic vision. His is the oldest soul of all here, and it's possible that he may yet lead some of his colleagues into a literature of uncharted complexity and seriousness. Most, though, will trail behind, lobbing raspberries.

Source: http://www.msn.com
POSTED BY KEVIN NANCE



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