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Hobby #1: Comics by Simon Gärdenfors
There’s something about the Swedes. My first experience with Swedish comics came in college when a librarian from Malmö came to Chicago and bought a minicomic I was selling on consignment. He contacted me, and I started sending him more comics for him to fill out the ranks of the library’s ‘zine section. After that I started researching what comics Sweden itself had to offer, and their beauty cowed and shamed me.
Maybe I’m just romanticizing the other, but Simon Gärdenfors’ comics in particular have a numinous grace to them. They appear to be effortless, but every line is just so and could not have been otherwise, like those Buddhist monks with the purported ability to draw a perfect circle freehand. And so I thought I would talk about a minicomic of his that I picked up at this year’s MoCCA, which boasted quite a few Scandinavian ambassadors this year.
Hobby is a synaesthetic piece. The colors demand to be touched and tasted and smelled. The default texture appears to be molded plastic, but there are more liquid and gaseous scenes, too. The big, round page numbers alternate between the top and bottom corners of the page and sometimes cleverly work themselves into the design of the page, defining a border design or taking the place of the letter “O.”
Hobby #1 is so strong as a piece of design that it would work even without the words, but the copy I have my hands on has been conveniently translated into English. The visual style never gets in the way of the storytelling – the graphic representation of each character is clear, distinctive, and elegant enough to be legible under just about any color scheme. Though it’s divided into different episodes spanning several years, it has a very tight framing device for an autobio: Gärdenfors learns that his friend has died, and then he recalls memories of their time together. Some of the episodes induce genuine giggles.
If you asked me to draw a penis resting inside a hot dog bun and decorated with condiments, I couldn’t do so nearly as economically as Gärdenfors does.
The last page is the sort of innocent commentary on race that could never have come from America, complete with a Golliwog bearing Kevin Huizenga-esque lips.
Left: Hobby #1. Right: Huizenga lips.
Gärdenfors has a lot of other work out there, and some of has been being translated and published by Top Shelf. So seek him out, and know the grace of the Swedes.
Andromeda Issue Ten by Anthony Ferguson, Stephanie Neary, Lizzee Solomon, Nate McDonough & Daniel McCloskey, Andy Scott, Joe Probition, Artnoose, Jeremy Northrup, Tom Dewing, and James LaVecchia.
I’d like to give a shout-out to a growing fellowship of hungry young dynamos from my native Pittsburgh. Andromeda has come out at a rate of a little more than one per month since last Fall, and their comics show an enthusiasm that matches their prolificacy.
That logo you see on the bottom right corner of the cover is The Penna Assembly, the “secret society” that denotes long-time contributors to Andromeda. It’s a neat little piece of design work, one of many gems to be found in this churning wellspring of effort and human emotion.
The first full-length comic, by Lizzee Solomon, starts out with all the trappings of a typical autobio comic – the narrator works at a paint-your-own-pottery studio and notices that one customer always desperately wants to paint a “ring holder” even though she wears no rings on her fingers. This everyday sub-observation is the setup for some well-plotted surreal suspense that keeps the reader hanging at each page transition before the unspeakable payoff. The customer returns home, and the freshly-glazed ring holder is put to use… for holding Funyuns… to feed… to some kind of chained-up equine monster with an enormous gaping vagina for a face. “Mutual paradise” ensues. It’s a bit of perfectly transcendent silliness and a stab at less adventurous autobiographers.
The next comic is a self-parody in which each artist draws himself toiling in Andromeda’s sweatshop. Once again, a predictable premise is made fresh and enjoyable again with a few choice details. The cackling, vaguely Wonka-esque overlord is constantly eating chicken, because every evil act is more evil if it’s done while eating, and one of the cartoonists calmly resumes drawing with his feet after his arms are torn off at the shoulder.
The last multi-page comic is the only one that takes itself seriously, and it works surprisingly well given the context. It’s a biography of the narrator’s father driving a Higgins boat in World War II. Joe Probition is elegant and innovative in the way he establishes a sense of place: We never quite see a horizon, only churning waves or ships tilted at slight angles as far as the eye can see. The way he draws water also adds to the physicality of the scene. It never quite escapes the bounds of its premise, but it makes the premise weirdly charming.
Some of the pieces of non-comics art, though good, feel like they’re crying out for a story to be attached to, and the interior pages themselves are legible but a bit muddy (The submissions page asks for 200 dpi .JPGs.) The silkscreened cover is quite crisp, though, and the letterhead on the inside back cover reveals that the cardstock was stolen from the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Human Security. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but that’s a very Newspeak name for a department, and it meshes well with the secret society theme. Pittsburgh is a post-industrial city searching hesitantly for a new identity and a new relationship with labor, and maybe Andromeda has something in common with it, a sweatshop of labors of love, a secret society screaming as loud as it can.
Take a look at this cover. This is a comic published by Dark Horse in 1993.
Now, since this is a comic that’s clearly trying to succeed by virtue of its premise alone, you probably examined the cover for just long enough to discern that Godzilla is fighting Charles Barkley. Look closer, dear reader, because Godzilla vs. Barkley is a multi-layered piece that bears examination.
Here we see the two titans locked in combat. Our hero, Sir Charles Barkley, is suspended in midair over a burning building, or perhaps standing tiptoe on a streetlight, so we can see his totally rad Nike shoes. His small, cherubic head is frozen in fear, his hands awkwardly holding out a basketball in a feeble attempt to block Godzilla’s mighty atomic fire. The cover explains no fewer than three times that this is a comic in which Godzilla fights Charles Barkley – four times if you include the art itself. That’s probably a little excessive, but I think the caption on the bottom is really there to hide the wonky perspective. Notice how high up Godzilla’s knees are. What’s he standing on?
The next interesting thing about Godzilla vs. Barkley can be found in the credits:
For the record, “Alan Smithee” is a pseudonym used in the film industry by people who are so ashamed of something they’ve done that they want their names taken off of it. It used to be the only pseudonym that directors were allowed to use, but that rule has been changed, possibly due to the influence of a film called Burn Hollywood Burn, which is about a director whose real name is Alan Smithee but who wants his name taken off of a bad film he directed. Burn Hollywood Burn was itself a bad film, and its director wanted his name taken off of it. That’s pretty meta, but unfortunately the film is so bad that it can’t even be enjoyed ironically.
My point here is that whoever came up with the “plot,” the premise of Godzilla fighting Charles Barkley, the premise that is in effect the comic’s only selling point, does not want to be associated with this work. That speaks volumes about what we have in store. Or perhaps it was all Mike Baron’s idea, or some Dark Horse executive, and they only included Alan Smithee as an inside joke. The truth is lost to history, faded into the foggy mists of 1993.
However, Mike Baron did a surprisingly good job putting this shameful premise into practice. He sets up size as a metaphor for fame and one man’s struggle with returning to his roots and making good with the “little people” who made him what he is.
After the obligatory scene where Godzilla comes out of the sea and tears up a cargo ship, we see Charles Barkley filming a commercial on a beach. So rather than renting out the whole beach and maybe posting guards around the perimeter, the studio making this commercial has decided to keep the entire set inside a radius of maybe 30 feet, and they let beachgoers crowd around this area as much as they like. This gives Barkley the opportunity to rebuff a child.
This child, it turns out, is the grandson of a certified Magical Negro, a black man who possesses magical powers that can help the protagonist but not himself. In this case the magic comes in the form of a silver dollar with incredible supernatural properties, and although it will make Charles Barkley grow 300 feet tall, its original owner has found no use for it except to pitch a single no-hitter in a minor league baseball game.
Or perhaps it was the Negro Leagues. The Magical Negro Leagues. The players themselves would be nothing remarkable, but any white protagonists in the audience would find themselves at the height of cosmic power.
Usually Magical Negroes only show up when the protagonist is white, so perhaps this is some kind of canny subversion. Let’s just say that it is.
Soon afterward, Godzilla shows up on shore and starts terrorizing Los Angeles. This does not halt production on the commercial. Charles Barkley only considers reacting to Godzilla at all when the child returns, silver dollar in hand, and insists that Barkley is “Earth’s greatest warrior.” Calling Barkley a “warrior” is a weirdly specific piece of terminology that comes up again and again in this story. I don’t think anyone ever calls Barkley a basketball player, but he’s called a warrior something like five times.
Maybe Barkley has actually been to war. For all I know, he could have single-handedly ended Desert Storm with his deadly atomic dunk.
So maybe Barkley feels guilty and out-of-touch. Maybe he’s remembering what life was like back on the mean streets of… wherever it is he came from. In any case he decides to quit filming the commercial and go play some one-on-one with the kid. The Godzilla issue is brought up, but it doesn’t get in the way of the one-on-one game until Barkley flips the silver dollar and grows to be 300 feet tall.
This is it. This is what you people came for. Not the fight between Barkley and Godzilla – I’m referring to the payoff of the size metaphor. Barkley wants to connect to his fans on a personal level, but now he can’t anymore… because he’s 300 feet tall! Get it? It’s a moment of perfect pathos. Charles Barkley doesn’t want to be big, in any sense of the word, but now that he is, he realizes that there’s no going back. He must serve the people he loves in a new way – by challenging a giant radioactive dinosaur to a cataclysmic game of hoops the likes of which has never been witnessed by MAN!
So, fortunately for humanity, Godzilla picks up on how basketball works pretty quickly. Even more fortunately, there is a “shuttle scaffold” that is shaped exactly like a giant basketball hoop. And Barkley knows where it is. And it’s in California instead of Florida for some reason.
But hey, if we’re going to pick at the minor details of something like this, we may as well ask how and why Barkley acquires a giant pair of Nikes for Godzilla.
The plot is treated as resolved when Barkley sets up another hoop for Godzilla in some kind of secluded canyon and convinces him to practice one million layups.
I don’t think that Barkley understands the full gravity of the events he has just set in motion. Godzilla will remain in that canyon, practicing nonstop, possibly for one hundred years. When he returns, Godzilla will be a finely-tuned basketball-playing machine. He will truly be able to take it to the house, if by “house” you mean “500-foot-tall skyscraper.” He will be able to take Shaq’s words to heart and not fake the funk on a nasty dunk. He will be able to throw down… on the human race. He will be unstoppable.
Imagine this, except that Shaq is Godzilla and the backboard is human civilization’s life-sustaining infrastructure. And he doesn’t clean up afterward.
This leaves room for a sequel, but somehow I doubt it ever happened. If anyone can prove me wrong, please do so! The suspense is killing me.
Up-and-coming publisher Banner Year Press has created an anthology of art featuring combative bears, and I am honored to have a comic of mine grace one of its pages. I won’t show the comic here in full, but the company has released a preview video:
