Glad To Be Unhappy

In all the hustle y bustle over the last few weeks I neglected to mention that the Valentine's Day edition of The High Hat was released, which I just remembered the other day when discussing Tom Waits because Jon Morris reviews the new album. The issue is appropriately all about first loves, who we fell in love with at first sight, first read, first listen. Punkmeister Hayden Childs recalls his cred-levelling first blush with Styx. Talented Leonard Pierce waxes romantic on Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. And Emerson Dameron gets his dopamine fix on Nazi nostalgia in the three-martini dry "My Favorite Flag", just to name a few.

I suppose I should also update what's been going on in the comix forefront, which as you all know is basically me being woefully behind on everyone else. In this case here are a few hardback comic novelizations that pick away at my brain where most people see a blank thought balloon over my head.

Currently reading the Harvey Award winning hardback collection Black Hole by the immensely talented Charles Burns, whom I have been a fan of going on the last 20 years or so since his days with RAW. The story revolves around a social circle of Seattle teenagers circa 1970's who pass strange physical deformities to each other through sexual contact. Written between 1995 and 2005, I remember buying the first two issues back around when they first came out and getting rather into it, but I think somehow my local store stopped carrying it or something, but either way I lost track of the story over the years and now I'm looking forward to catching up with it all over again. Burns' trademark stark, severe black and white style creates a terrifying atmosphere with the forests and lakes used as an almost pre-human primordial backdrop for a fable saturated with man-versus-nature metaphors as well as the fears and insecurities of young people being thrust into the wild unknowns of puberty and impending adulthood.

I was rather hoping that The Illustrated Jane Eyre would have been a straight comic book interpretation of the novel. Turns out it's just the novel itself with a few scattered B&W and color illustrations by noted Meatcake artist Dame Darcy, a woman whose style as well as sense of humor I've always appreciated. She creates an interesting visual take on the story, and her gothic flair couldn't be better matched even if Edward Gorey took a turn at it himself. Bronte nerd that I am, I don't know if I would have drawn either Jane or Mr. Rochester so flatteringly, as the classically accepted image of Bronte's Jane was a plain, unadorned, "Quakerish" woman in simple dark clothes, uncomplicated hair, and unmade, unremarkable face. Jane looks like she's been treated to a shopping spree at Hot Topic here, complete with Darcy's trademark raccoon-eye make-up and spiraling hairdos. But I can't help it, I'm too much of a sucker for Dame Darcy's work in general to fly off into full-on nitpicky mode. And I can always do for another copy of the book to go with my numerous other Jane Eyres and Wuthering Heights... Ooooo! Now that's a tale I'd like to see her drape her lacy goth-cloth across.

Finally I have thoroughly gotten down and funky with Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir by undeniably funky seminal underground cartoonist Aline Kominsky Crumb. Although overshadowed by the career of her famous husband Robert Crumb, her style was never as accomplished and aesthetically pleasing as his, and most of the time it borders on downright difficult to look at sometimes. But what colors her work is the infusion of her brash, spunky personality and distinctive humor in every page, etched in every loose, squiggly line. The book is her autobiography, of a little Jewish girl growing up in Long Island, New Yok, feeling fat, ugly and outcast from her self-described monstrous family, to her wild sex-and-drug freewheeling years during the 60's, and meeting the community of women artists who would come together for the first issues of Wimmin's Comix, the first truly all-female collection of women cartoonists, and later, becoming an outcast even among her fellow artists, began her own series called Twisted Sisters. Aline became known as one of the first female cartoonists to write about herself as her subject, displaying all of her faults, her fears, her insecurities in real, every day instances, airing her dirty laundry for all to see (the first cover for Twisted Sisters featured a cartoon of Aline sitting on the toilet, which up to that point had never really ever been seen before from a female perspective in comix). Yet Aline's work is completely, unapologietically feminine, and like myself she obseses over her family's approval, her fluctuating weight problems, her artistic abilities, her insatiable sex drive, and her copies amounts of shoes (well maybe substitute CDs for shoes in my case). Aline Kominsky Crumb was a pioneer in a genre that was once a predominantly female demographic by taking it back to the female perspective and creating a deeply personal twist that few had ever attempted before, and has since been duplicated many times over. An interesting woman who led a fascinating life, and left a distinctive legacy of her own behind.