by Geoff Grogan. Self-published with the aid of a Xeric Foundation Grant. $9.95.
Is it possible for something to be inscrutable and yet accessible at the same time? I think that's a fair description of Geoff Grogan's Look Out!! Monsters, an oversize, Xeric-funded mute comic that, like Grogan's gallery paintings, weds pulp-culture references -- including monster movies, superhero comics, and Warren horror comics -- to a literally pulpy paper-collage technique.
Though it has passages of narrative in it, Look Out!! Monsters is less story than meditation: an insinuating, dreamlike remix of disparate elements plucked from hither and yon. Febrile and hallucinatory, it invokes Karloff's Frankenstein monster, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and Kirby & Lee's Fantastic Four, among other crazy-glorious things, against a blurry collage background molded out of paper culled from, it looks like, newspapers (the NY Times especially) and fashion ads. It's not simply an exercise in Pop Art whimsicality, though. The terror of 9/11 and the ensuing cultural climate hovers over the book and eventually becomes explicit, in ways I'd rather allude to vaguely than spoil for you.
I knew nothing about Geoff Grogan's work before this (turns out he's not only a painter but also an Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Adelphi University, as well as creator of the serialized online comic Nice Work). But I'll be looking out for him from now on, because I like Look Out!! Monsters a lot.
On one level, the book meditates on Jack Kirby: style and substance. Of course I like that. On another, the book does something striking with the image of Frankenstein's creature. On yet another, it captures something of, as Grogan says, "the 'cultural mind-scape' in the age of the 'war on terror.'" Grogan's monsters aren't just the monsters of movies and comics, but also monsters of politics and culture; he makes explicit the implicit ideological pull, the underlying terrors, of genre horror. And he does it in striking collage/paintings whose richly textured, paper-clotted surfaces remind me of the almost-sculptural weight of Stefano Ricci's work (Anita, blackdepot/02, etc.). The way he sculpts a Bela Lugosi out of newspaper scraps... it's uncanny.
Physically, Look Out!! Monsters is a handsome artifact, a roughly RAW-size (11 x 13.5) saddle-stitched 32-pager with covers of heavy, canvas-textured stock. Its oversize pages are spectacular photo facsimiles of what I imagine are very large collages of distressed and mushed-up paper:
Grays and colors are in bracing contrast to each other. Muddy, faintly yellowish gray/brown trench-war landscapes -- raw, rotten-looking, and darkly suggestive -- alternate with pages of sizzling-bright color and fizzy Kirby dots. Most pages are smudgy and organic: painterly masses of shadow built up of what look like decomposing layers of paper that simultaneously obscure and reveal. On others, though, Grogan dives into ultra-bright cartoon graphics, cranking up Pop Art's Lichtenstein-inspired preoccupation with Benday dot-patterns to a new extreme, in effect decomposing the stereotypical offset comic book page into its component parts:
(It looks as if this obsession with dots is also reflected in Grogan's comic book Dr. Speck, a tongue-in-cheek adventure series that he self-published for a while under the name Poutmouse Production. Check out the dot-imagery from Dr. Speck's online fourth issue.)
Unlike Lichtenstein, though, Grogan is not an ironist but rather someone working with materials that he cares about deeply; as the book's indicia page says, he borrows "with affection & love for the original source material." Moreover, Grogan favors a look of organic density and frank cruddiness over the pristine surfaces and willed vacuity of Lichtenstein's comics-based work. The work has a sense of texture that is overwhelming: when I showed it to my wife Michele (who has an art background, particularly in printmaking, photography, and photosculpture) she was immediately blown away and, thinking that the work was three-dimensional, like a raised-relief map, she ran her fingers over the page. It was as if she was trying to read Braille.
How does Look Out!! Monsters read, as a comic? Well, it has sequence and hints of narrative, but works best on the level of suggestion. It unfolds in pantomime. The panels are largely empty of text, but for the pulpy remnants of newspaper that comprise Grogan's surface. These textual scraps are often mashed to the point of illegibility, but at times they're left legible so that the occasional reference pops out and makes a claim on our reading: 'Innocence'... Tuesday, September 11, 2001... 3rd drowned girl... Mad Doctor's Work... Wolfowitz Retreats on Al Qaeda Charge... and so forth. Also, Grogan's Lichtensteinian riff on elements from Fantastic Four #66 and 67 (the "Him"/Beehive story) recreates (and reassigns) some of that tale's dialogue between Alicia Masters and the arrogant members of the "Citadel of Science":
As I see it, Grogan brings the implicit critique of "science" in that FF story to the fore and makes it serve as a larger political commentary on hubris and downfall. (Note that the FF story in question deals, like Frankenstein, with creating life; there's a suggestion here that we create our own monsters.) As Grogan's spectacular pages pull you in, his larger theme falls into orbit round the memory of 9/11, coalescing into climactic images that -- well, again, I won't say.
I've probably made Look Out!! Monsters seem much more schematic and simple-minded than it is. There's a lot about the book that is not summarizable or paraphrase-able, and that's where its beauty resides. As a poetic rather than a linearly narrative comic, it perhaps qualifies as "experimental" in the sense I posited here at Thought Balloonists not so long ago -- but it's also immediately striking, enticingly readable, and a pleasure to gaze at again and again. Haunting, eye-flattering stuff.
Look Out!! Monsters received a Xeric grant in Fall 2007 and is soon to be solicited via Previews. Look for it in comics shops this September.
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