Crickets #1 & 2

by Sammy Harkham. Drawn and Quarterly, publisher. $4.95 for #2, $3.95 for #1.

The back cover of Crickets #2 gives you a good idea of Sammy Harkham's aesthetic. It shows what appears to be a bucolic woodland scene, over which is superimposed a todesrune or inverted peace sign, like a busted cross (click the thumbnail for a bigger view):

A green idyll, perhaps, but undone by the graphic crow's-foot of that inverted, controversial and polysemic sign (due warning: Googling peace sign or todesrune means inviting esoterism, right-wing fear-mongering, and/or black metal!). The image is quiet yet troubling. About it there's a sense of unacknowledged danger. It's confusing, frankly. Look more closely and the details add to the trouble:

See, right there, just to the left of the enigmatic rune: two figures, one armed with a knife, one with perhaps the peace sign on his (?) sleeve. They look like they're playing tag around a tree trunk. It's like some awful courtship or standoff. Everything about this image, from the greenly-penciled beauty of the whole thing, to the silent provocation of the broken cross, to the telling, almost-buried drama going on behind, is emblematic of the hushed yet bothersome nature of Harkham's work.

Crickets is Sammy Harkham's solo comic book. Being a pamphlet-sized alternative comic book serial, it's of a dying breed (and, like most alt-comic books, it comes out seldom enough). Right now it's in the good company of Jordan Crane's Uptight and a very few others that are trying to come out more often than graphic novels (trying is the operative word). By definition, then, it's a quixotic undertaking -- the more so because Harkham is not known for deadline-driven comic books. Probably he's best known as the editor/designer of the irregular and always-spectacular anthology Kramer's Ergot, which has a reputation for crowding in a shocking variety of narrative and non-narrative (or nonlinear, anyway) comix and illustration. Kramer's is a whirling, kaleidoscopic affair (Harkham has likened it to a graphical mix tape) and the de facto HQ of a playfully avant-garde art/comix community. Poring over it doesn't feel like reading a pamphlet-sized comic book. So, three years ago, I wouldn't have pegged Sammy Harkham as somebody needing or wanting a comic book serial. Huh.

Since the interval between issues of Crickets has been so long (what, two years?), and is likely to continue being long, the book has to live by the quality of its execution each time out, not by the breathless maintenance of suspense. It's a tribute to Harkham's skills that Crickets is worth waiting for.

The meat of the series is a strange, unpredictable serial set in a vaguely premodern world. It's titled Black Death, and it comes off like a work of reckless, scudding improvisation, a top-this riff combining Harkham's delicacy of line with roughhousing, Segar-esque action, horror-movie jolts, and fart gags. The territory is close to Harkham's lovely Poor Sailor, though with a rawer, more ribald tone and without, so far, its tenderness and alarm at the frailty of life. Its atmospherics are too muted and its style too understated and fragile to recall splatter horror, exactly, but, still, Harkham has a go-for-the-throat enthusiasm for sudden shocks. He enjoys a bit of fear and trembling. One of his early entries at the Family blog says it plain: horror is his bread and butter.

This clearly is the work of someone who knows and digs cinematic horrors, everything from Häxan to (as he has acknowledged) Mario Bava and George Romero. Harkham's sensibility has a lot to do with the commingling of horror and beauty, something you can see very clearly in Poor Sailor, or, for another example, in a wonderful drawing of his called "Girl Dreams Werewolf" that he recently posted to his blog (I ought not to reproduce it here, but go check it out, it's haunting). Frankly, his nerves are tougher than mine: after all, this is a guy for whom the word "sick" seems to be a supreme compliment.

What Black Death is, then, is a nervy balancing-act. The style, as ever, says admire my classicism and restraint, but its bizarre plot and headlong-tumbling action say fuck all, this is mine.

The plot defies recounting, really. [BEWARE SPOILERS:] We arrive in mid-tumble, in a scene of desperate flight: a guy is running away from some unknown threat. All we can see is a hail of arrows, chasing him. In fact the guy is already shot full of arrows (he not only survives this but stays pincushioned with arrows for the duration). He crashes through trees, falls to the ground, blacks out. Then he's found by a hulking big golem (a childlike chip off of Segar's Goon). Man and golem make a peculiar team: the man is driven toward some vague goal, a destination, while the golem is inscrutable, silent, an emotional blank, like an autist. They're lost together. They run across two men in the woods, a bereaved father and son, who are traveling to bury one of their family. The father believes the arrow guy to be a wizard and begs him to raise the dead. Fear and misunderstanding lead to a scuffle, the son accidentally shoots the father, and the golem, apparently, kills the son. Pointless tragedy. Later (issue #2), the arrow guy falls into a well and thus unwittingly rescues another guy: a buck-naked, raving loon whom he can barely stand. The naked guy smells of pig shit and has gone through mind-rattling trauma. The two guys and the golem travel together and get even more lost. The two guys bicker. Arrow guy tells the naked guy to, basically, fuck off. Later, some kind of outsized worm slithers into the arrow guy's ear while he's sleeping. Tormented thrashing ensues: cliffhanger. My god, it's weird.

But it looks and feels great. It's eerie and funny as hell, and sometimes sad. It's got beautiful silences. The rhythm is interesting, shifting from rowdy action to bemusing moments of stasis and ellipsis:

And the drawing: yow. Harkham's fetching delicacy of line is put to purpose here. I love his flaccid, rubbery-limbed people, their floppy, mitten-like hands (more Segar influence?). His settings are minimal at first, mostly inky nighttime blackness and stands of tall, straight, smooth-trunked trees, but the second chapter (#2) is positively fecund, boasting a beautiful, blossoming riot of forest growth:

Of course my scans are inadequate, but they should be enough to testify to Harkham's rugged, almost gestural use of color (olive green in #1, a ruddy near-pink in #2). It's delicious.

Narratively, Harkham's pages lean toward understatement and evenness of delivery. Chester Brown-like, he has a way of underplaying his shocks, with light lines, distanced compositions (though check out the close-ups at #2's cliffhanger), and a lack of visual hyperbole. His approach reminds me of Jordan Crane (though Harkham's line is wispier) or Eleanor Davis, whose "Stick and String" (from Mome Vol. 8) and The Beast Mother are in similar horrific-beautiful territory. Like Crane and Davis, he's consistent and measured. There is an intuitive rightness about Black Death that belies its seemingly improvised, slapdash nature.

It's nice to see Harkham's work in pamphlet form. Crickets #2 especially, like a good (hell, like any) issue of Eightball, gives you a whole package, replete with various other strips and drawings. In true alt-comix fashion, everything in the package seems to be the product of Harkham's handiwork, and the result is like being handed a file of clippings from a couple of years of an interesting life. Design-wise, each issue of Crickets has its own identity, and the color covers, inside and out, are wonders. Dig the woodland verdancy and rhythmic silence of #1's back cover (a pantomime strip starring the golem), or the comical self-caricatures on #1's inside front, or the sheer eye-wrenching, face-melting multihued excess of #2's front (a collage of stuff based on the strips inside):

#2's other comics, a baker's dozen densely crowded together, vary in size from a few postage stamps' to two whole page's worth. They make up a Halloween bag of mixed goodies, some slight, some of lingering oomph. Several are (semi-)autobiographical strips about being a cartoonist or an expectant father: nothing new here, but Harkham brings pungent wit and teasing ambiguity even to his bitchy insider stories. Plus, there's an anecdote about Gary Panter that I found haunting. Sometimes Harkham filters autobio through plain fiction: for example, the one-pager "Napoleon" reimagines the cartoonist as emperor (this recalls "Lubavitch," Harkham's story in Kramer's #6, which reimagines the cartoonist as a young scribe in a 19th-century shtetl).

Best of all is "Elisha," a two-page strip of roughly sixty panels that retells the Biblical story of the prophet Elisha and the woman of Shunem (2 Kings 4). First Elisha prophesies the birth of a son to this heretofore childless woman; later he raises her son from the dead. Here Harkham manages a tightwire-balance of religious sobriety and impious, subversive humor (again Chester Brown comes to mind). The bluntness of the delivery masks a serious complexity of tone. Elisha is here depicted as a loopy, near-comical figure who literally has his head in the clouds:

This makes Gehazi, Elisha's down-to-earth servant, seem long-suffering and patient. Most startling is the resurrection scene, based closely on the Biblical account yet creepy and funny, with Elisha seeming to melt and ooze over the body of the dead boy:

(Note that I've done violence to these panels by resizing them and resetting their contrast. Again, scans are inadequate!) I like the way Harkham makes this canonical story his own, following its outline yet bringing his own rhythm, sly characterization, and dark humor. There's an awful lot going on in "Elisha," which, in a short, smart burst, epitomizes Harkham's delicate-yet-scary aesthetic.

Of course, all the little things in Crickets are consolations for the series' intermittency and lack of narrative extension thus far. Frankly, Black Death hasn't gotten far enough to measure up as a complete story yet, so Crickets had better look damn good. It does. More than that, it opens a window onto a unique and interesting cartooning mind. I like getting a glimpse of that in pamphlet form and I look forward to, eventually, getting a bigger serving in a book.