Category: Comics

From off the streets of Durham comes …

Cover of Mineshaft magazine, issue #44, by R. Crumb.

Now available for holiday giving, issue #44 of Mineshaft magazine dropped into my mailbox in a plain brown envelope a few weeks ago, and as usual it’s a magazine to spend a few thoughtful evenings with. (And you can impress your friends when you leave it on your coffee table.) Among the highlights are tributes to the late Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin from Bill Griffith and others; a new, haunting story called “Nostalgia” from Christoph Mueller; Mary Fleener‘s meditative “Between the Worlds” travelogue; a Skip James portrait from R. Crumb; co-editor Everett Rand’s ongoing saga of Mineshaft itself; and great new stuff from Simone Baumann, Glenn Head, Drew Friedman, and company. I wrote a little more descriptively about Mineshaft here.

Mr. Friedman has called Mineshaft “the best magazine being published in the 21st century,” and who am I to argue with Drew Friedman? Certainly it’s one of the few magazines to which I maintain a subscription (the others are Acoustic Guitar and The Syncopated Times, which shows you where my head is at these days). You can yourself join the illustrious Mineshaft community easily enough; the current issue is available here, and you can sign up for a subscription here. And while you’re there, why not give the gift of bemused alienation to someone close to you?

Below, The Mighty Millborough himself discovers Mineshaft, as told to Christoph Mueller in 2011:

What, me worry?

Mad magazine is still staggering along lo these past 71 years — I started reading it myself in 1971 or 1972, when I was about 10, and moved on a few years later to National Lampoon. Even though my subscription was short-lived, I credit Mad with changing my perspective on the world in a way that a lot of other Mad readers acknowledge too — and it still makes me laugh when I page through the collections I still own. It was best put perhaps by Brian Siano in a 1994 issue of The Humanist:

For the smarter kids of two generations, Mad was a revelation: it was the first to tell us that the toys we were being sold were garbage, our teachers were phonies, our leaders were fools, our religious counselors were hypocrites, and even our parents were lying to us about damn near everything. An entire generation had William Gaines for a godfather: this same generation later went on to give us the sexual revolution, the environmental movement, the peace movement, greater freedom in artistic expression, and a host of other goodies. Coincidence? You be the judge.

Similar encomiums came from Art Spiegelman (“The message Mad had in general is, ‘The media is lying to you, and we are part of the media.’ It was basically … ‘Think for yourselves, kids'”) and R. Crumb (“Artists are always trying to equal the work that impressed them in their childhood and youth. I still feel extremely inadequate when I look at the old Mad comics”), though Mad publisher William Gaines topped them all when he said, “We must never stop reminding the reader what little value they get for their money!”

Though National Lampoon‘s efforts in other media — including films, television, and the stage — were far more successful, it’s possible that the magazine went Hollywood too quickly, leading to it and its form of satire having perished many years ago. Mad tried too: a moderately successful stage show in 1966 (with original music by Mary Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim) and a moderately successful television show beginning in 1995, but a disastrous 1980 Mad film Up the Academy destroyed any ambitions the magazine had of finding its way to success in movie theatres. In 2006 its director, Robert Downey Sr., touchingly observed that it was “one of the worst fucking things in history.”

I myself have written about National Lampoon in the past, and that magazine recently enjoyed the documentary treatment, but it’s been surprising that Mad, which played such a central role in humor and comedy in the post-war era, has remained without similar recognition from documentary filmmakers — until now, that is. Now in post-production, When We Went MAD!, directed by Alan Bernstein, may be the documentary we’ve all been waiting for. Featuring a history of the publication as well as interviews with many of its staff and enthusiasts, the film promises to be to Mad magazine what Ken Burns’s The Civil War was to the Civil War. No release date has been announced, but the trailer for the film is below.

Comics in a bitter age

About a week after the War in Israel began, I picked up Joe Sacco’s Palestine (Fantagraphics Books, 2015), the collection of Sacco’s comic books that provided a journalistic overview of the West Bank and Gaza in December 1991-January 1992. I did this not because of any particular political sympathies associated with the war, but because I thought it important to expose myself to other historical and geographical material about the region. Comics has been one of my lifelong interests, and Sacco is among the most celebrated of the comics journalists, a pioneer in the field of using narrative comics as a means of expressing individual perspectives on world events.

Reading Palestine for the first time at this point in history was a sobering experience. Sacco, who graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981, travelled to the region as a solo writer, unassociated with any larger media outlet, and visited and interviewed a side variety of Palestinian men, women, and children over a two-month period; he also spent time in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, getting to know a variety of Jewish and Arab Israelis as well. He emerged with a saddening chronicle — inconclusive, as all such chronicles must be, but with a deeper understanding of the tensions in the region and the recent past of the Middle East.

I also must confess that I read it as an antidote to the now-unending news cycle, more traumatic during wartime (an eternal wartime, apparently; the Russo-Ukrainian War continues, as well as a variety of conflicts in Africa and other regions, which largely go unreported in the US media). Distant from the military conflicts, I search for a deeper compassion and understanding instead — for everyone involved — and this is not something one finds in newspaper headlines, television coverage, or Facebook feeds.

I came away from Sacco’s Palestine with two notes relating to comics journalism and to independent comics generally. First, comics provide a unique worldview through the juxtaposition of word and hand-drawn image: a deeply personal expression, unique from other literary forms in that word and image always exist in a state of tension, sometimes ironic, sometimes tragic, sometimes humorous, sometimes sarcastic or satiric. In comics journalism especially this is an antidote to the single-dimension approach of prose reportage, whether that dimension is Ernie Pyle’s or Hunter S. Thompson’s. Second, that tension between word and image, between the white spaces of panels in the comics themselves, provide room for the reader to insert their own responses to what is seen and read. Sacco claims that his use of negative and positive space within an image is a response to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s use of ellipses in his novels: a caesura, a pause, a disconnection that readers bridge themselves with their own reaction. What also emerges from these pauses, from these white spaces, is room for contemplation, for thought itself. Every reader of any literary form from verse to narrative prose to reportage, of course, participates in this, but the comics form demands further effort on the part of the reader in negotiating the relationship between word and hand-drawn image. Contemplation and meditation emerges from that negotiation. (I had the same experience, by the way, reading Daniel Clowes’s new disturbing and masterly Monica, which I hope to write about soon.)

I should also note that comics artists are also responding to another current war, the Russo-Ukrainian War; tomorrow, October 24, will see the publication from Ten Speed Graphic of Diaries of War: Two Visual Accounts from Ukraine and Russia by Nora Krug, who most recently illustrated an edition of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny.

Sacco’s work is a continuance of the comics form’s approach to the real world, especially about war, conflict, and anti-Semitism, and in dark days like these that approach, because it breeds complex thought, is essential to making it through our world. I only need to mention the roles that Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis have played in the maturation of the form. Although these works can’t be characterized as journalism per se, nonetheless their status as imaginative, stylized non-fiction memoirs of the terrors of war — as personal responses to armed conflict — elevates them to the level of art.

Footnotes from Mueller’s life

Now available and shipping from Europe, Partial, a new chapbook series from Christoph Mueller, is billed as “Footnotes from the artist’s life.” The first issue looks to be a gorgeous miscellany of graphics, text, and typography from this unique comics artist; the inimitable Chris Ware, another of my favorite comics artists, says that Partial “captures something essential, buoying and truly life-sustaining” — surely high praise in these troubled times. Partial #1 is now available directly from the artist in a limited edition of 250 copies. More information here.

I wrote about Mueller’s work earlier; you can find those passages here.

The Mighty Millborough

A few more items from the cupboard, these concerning cartoonist Christoph Mueller and published here a few years ago.

Originally published on March 4, 2020

I’m in receipt of The Mighty Millborough, a fine self-published portfolio of work by Christoph Mueller, currently of Germany. I first came across his comics in Mineshaft and quickly sought out more.

Mueller’s elegant, carefully crafted comics seem simultaneously nostalgic and unsettling, an evocation of the mirrored images of the individual and the world. His Millborough comics are a study in isolation, solitude, and cynicism set in Sassafras County, an idealized small-town America of the 1930s. The main character’s name itself was inspired by the old-time-radio situation comedy The Great Gildersleeve, but Mueller’s absurdist, quotidian approach is even more reminiscent of Paul Rhymer’s great neglected Vic and Sade radio comedy of the same period.

The cartoonist’s craft is evident in every panel; a post-Crumbian attention to detail and careful, almost melancholy crosshatching lend contemplative depth to his backgrounds and, especially, his domestic interiors. Millington F. Millborough’s house, which boasts a warm if dark “Library of Drink,” is a textured expression of the character’s own interior life. But whereas Crumb’s characters explode with anxiety, Mueller’s bottle it up inside (an apt construction, that), and more frequently than not, that anxiety like Crumb’s is sexual.

It so happens that I share many affinities with Mueller and his work, not least an admiration of W.C. Fields and especially It’s a Gift. I’m only partway through the portfolio and may have more to say. You can read more about his work at his web site.

Originally published on June 24, 2020

Christoph Mueller‘s The “Mighty” Millborough: Les Choses De La Vie, published by 6 Pieds Sous Terre just last year, collects over a hundred of Mueller’s adventures of the contemplative isolate Millington F. Millborough, resident of Sassafras County in the 1930s. A polite middle-aged bachelor with a taste for drink, Millborough spends quite a lot of time alone, a solitude that leads him to contemplations about landscape and his place in it. “Some feelings words cannot express,” he muses, meditating on a hilly New England landscape. “Nor music, art or act — only landscape can.” Indeed, a great deal of Les Choses De La Vie considers how the man makes the landscape, and the landscape makes the man.

Mueller’s style seems the unholy love child of Little Nemo‘s Winsor McCay and Mutt and Jeff‘s Bud Fisher — backgrounds are lavishly detailed, and his human figures are vaguely ridiculous against it, especially Millborough’s, traipsing through Sassafras County with cigar in hand and lost in self-conscious thought. Of course, it’s this self-consciousness that renders Millborough ridiculous, if sympathetic; it’s the artist who draws character and background together, not the character himself. Although Millborough doesn’t have much luck with the modern world — his battle against automobiles especially is doomed to comic failure — he nonetheless values man-made architectural elegance and grace (more obvious in an earlier, full-color portfolio of Millborough’s adventures). The natural landscape in Millborough’s eyes is prone to surreal transfigurations, as is Millborough’s body in that landscape, the McCay influence; the comic loping bodies of the strip’s characters are straight from Bud Fisher. Millborough’s friends respect him if they don’t understand him — maybe a degree of tolerance we’ve lost in contemporary America, as we’ve lost valuable Millboroughs themselves. Mueller reminds us of what we’ve lost with them.

The “Mighty” Millborough: Les Choses De La Vie has no American publisher, alas, but is available from the French publisher here. It is a gorgeously made collection, inside and out. Pester your American publisher friends, please, about Mr. Mueller’s “Mighty” Millborough.

And an appreciation by the brilliant Chris Ware:

I believe him to be one of the most talented young cartoonists in Europe, and easily one of the most sensitive hand-lettering typographers in the world. I might be wrong about this, but European cartoonists seem to view the world and the self from the top down, or the outside in, whereas Americans seem to try to see from the inside out. Christoph seems capable of both. As well, there are few cartoonists, European or American, who have taken the incandescent example of Robert Crumb — the original inside-out cartoonist — and folded it into their own approach and sensibility so sensitively, self-critically and, most important of all, so warmly, than Christoph. He’s a careful observer and attentive draughtsman, and his sensitivity to craft and to turn of the century (i.e. the 19th to the 20th century) typography and ornament, back when the human hand still obviously contributed something to the world we see, is pretty close to unparalleled. He seems to understand letterforms the way botanists understand plants: where to sow them, how to shape them, and most especially, how to make them grow. Of all human hands, Christoph’s is one of the more elegant and sensitive I know.