THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

“Art becomes magic when it has nothing left to hide”

Young Lions. By Blaise Larmee. Self-published, funded by a Xeric Foundation Grant. 96 pages. $10.00.

The front cover of Young Lions, with its flap folded out.

Young Lions is a lovely object and a confounding story: a book that doesn’t quite hang together but makes you wonder whether “hanging together” is a fair criterion to bring to bear. Its narrative is wispy, evanescent, but likely to inspire certain kinds of reader to a spirited exploration. I couldn’t escape the feeling that there were depths unplumbed or meanings unrealized (by me, anyway) in its vaguenesses; certainly there’s a challenge and a pleasure its exquisite gestural openness of line and form. I found it teasing and a pleasure to look at, but frustrating too.

Look Out!! Monsters (Craig replies)

[Go and read Charles' post first, because I'm not going to make any sense here.]

1. Soon after 9/11/01, in an interview with the Associated Press, film director Robert Altman argued that the World Trade Center catastrophe was caused in part by Hollywood. Altman said, "Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie...how dare we continue to show this kind of mass destruction in movies? I just believe we created this atmosphere and taught them how to do it." How--and how much--do the dreams and nightmares of popular culture influence both individual behavior and the macro-shifts of history?

2. Frankenstein's Monster is the enduring symbol of mad science, of Enlightenment hubris eradicating--with unforeseen consequences that would become cliches in later Universal and Hammer horror flicks--the God-given distinction between death and life. How appropriate that Geoff Grogan has the Monster haunt the trenches of World War I, those scars in the landscape (echoes by the scars on the Monster's limbs?) that represent guns, flame-throwers, mustard gas, and more science-gone-wrong.

Look Out!! Monsters

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.

Tōnoharu; That Salty Air

This month Top Shelf Productions is putting out new books from two Minneapolis-based cartoonists, Lars Martinson and Tim Sievert. The two artists recently appeared together at a book launch party at Minneapolis’ Big Brain Comics and have promoted each other on their respective blogs.

   

This is interesting because Martinson’s book, T­ōnoharu: Part One, and Sievert’s, That Salty Air, though similar in size and heft, differ drastically in tone, narrative technique, and style. With that caveat in mind, what follows are twinned reviews of these Twin Cities comics: