When Hey Wait first came out, back around the turn of the millenium or so, it was only by chance that we got one at the store. One of my buddies was of Norwegian descent and proud of it, and when I saw the Hey Wait solicitation, which mentioned that the author “Jason” (real name John Arne Saeteroy) was from Norway, I thought I’d get one for the shop in case my friend wanted one.

When the book came in, I picked it up and leafed through it, and at first couldn’t figure it out. Then came the big “Hey Wait” moment at the center of the book, and after that I was hooked. I’ve been an I’ll-buy-anything-by-him fan of Jason’s since then, but I still think of Hey Wait as his best work, the most nuanced, the most beguiling. Even rereading it before writing this, there are so many things I feel like I only half-understand, images that hint at something I can never grasp all the way.

The book reads almost at first like a collection of one-page strips, each one laid out in the same 6-panel grid. Each page is its own little vignette, sometimes detailing a moment in the characters’ lives, sometimes just a collection of static images for background. Jason doesn’t tell his story so much as allow it to accrete–the moments add up slowly to a sort of comfortable, worn-in picture of a couple of friends enjoying summer, dealing with boring classrooms, confusing adults, girls, etc.

And then all of a sudden there’s only one friend. The second half of the book is almost a mirror image of the first–everything that was pleasant about the lives of the boys in the first half is absent in the second, as the remaining friend becomes an adult burdened by guilt and what seems like a dwindling interest in life. The world of the second half is as bleak, humorless, and despairing as the first half is pleasant.

Most good cartoonists use the form and language of comics to create something unique, not simply illustrated dialogue with occasional captions for exposition. But Jason, especially in Hey Wait, is a master. From the anthropomorphized characters, which seem to only loosely resemble a collection of dogs and birds and so forth; to the fact that instead of driving cars, fathers come home in the evenings on stilts. Or that the “tough” characters in the book, the intimidating ones, seem to be rotting corpses, with visible skulls and torn bits of flesh.

Most scenes we’re shown in the book are quotidian in the extreme, such as the page featuring six panels of the boys reading comics, then agreeing in the last panel that Neal Adams is the best Batman artist ever. But in another, the boys’ kite is stolen by a passing pterodactyl. Hey Wait is normal enough to be your own life, but these little touches of strangeness lend it a pervasive dreamlike quality that forces you to reexamine things that otherwise you would not look at twice. Hey Wait is probably the most obvious in this; in later works Jason would tone that dissonance back to a more nuanced position, letting the situations and his characters’ often bland reactions to them do most of the heavy surrealist lifting.

One of the stranger things about how Jason constructs his pages is that they often are not composed in a traditional way, with compositional elements directing your eye around the page. This is not to say they’re not composed–but Jason (usually) seems to be composing per panel. Each panel seems to be a snapshot of a moment–his pages rarely flow like a Jeff Smith‘s or Paul Pope‘s might, but rather are often a series of little cages, with the action stilted and chopped up. I’m inclined to think that this is, at least in part, a conscious decision–Jason’s stories are never about things flowing. If there is romance in his books, it is uncomfortable romance. If there is a battle, it is a clumsy battle. And, because of the static image quality of the panels, it often feels like, instead of being carried along as part of the story’s flow, we are forever merely watching it, removed from it–another level of discomfort? It’s hard to say whether or not certain choices an artist makes are purposeful or accidental, and harder to say whether it matters. But I’m a fan of Jason’s, and I prefer to think that he’s a smart dude making some ridiculously smart comics.

If you haven’t read Hey Wait yet, mm-mm you’ve got some good reading ahead of you. And if you have and dug it, I would also recommend The Last Musketeer, The Iron Wagon, and especially I Killed Adolf Hitler, one of my favorites. Oh but that new Low Moon is good too, and how could I leave out The Left Bank Gang? Jeez, he’s good. There’s a great profile of him at the Read Yourself Raw site too, that might be worth your time.

By the time Sammy Harkham‘s Poor Sailor book came out, he had already produced at least 4 volumes of his now-essential Kramer’s Ergot anthology, been featured in Drawn & Quarterly Showcase, and was about 25 years old. Whew! Humbling, no?

Poor Sailor reprints the story of the same name from the classic Kramer’s Ergot Volume Four; except, instead of printing on big pages, with multiple panels per page (or were they? I don’t have mine in front of me, and now can’t remember), the Poor Sailor hardcover is not even 6″ square, printing a single panel on each page. The little orange book was the first work by Harkham I’d seen, something I ordered for the store on a whim out of Previews, then bought on impulse once it showed up.

I don’t want to oversell this book–it’s a good book, even a great book, but I like to think Harkham has and will do better. But it’s hard to overstate what happened in my brain when I first read it, then immediately reread it, then left it by my bed for weeks, picking it up often and flipping through its strange silent pages. Poor Sailor was one of the books that made me want to start making my own comics–not that I hadn’t before, but something about Poor Sailor made me want to IMMEDIATELY START making comics. I suspect this would be similar to how a budding writer might read a certain short story and feel compelled to pick up their pen, or a painter with Picasso, or whatever… I have always been drawn to the kind of art that provokes a creative response.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of Poor Sailor is the aforementioned format, which has two clear effects (for me). The first is to completely compartmentalize the passage of time, which is no different from “regular” comics, but since there is a single panel per page, each page is one “moment”, rather than a collection of them. The story follows the fortunes of a husband smitten with wanderlust, who leaves his wife and home for adventure on the high seas. The early pages are a scattered portrait of the man’s life, chopping wood, building his house, his wife hanging clothes in the wind. The strange meta-space between pages–a page turn can propel the story forward by months or seconds, you never know–adds a dreamlike, haiku quality to the storytelling. It’s almost like a folk tale, a cautionary tale–it’s at once mundane and terrible.

The second effect of the single panel format is harder to explain, especially since I’m only now realizing it, years later: without exception, each page is bounded by a thick black panel border. Yes I know that’s very normal, BUT: by containing each image in that big chunky border, Harkham delineates the space within that panel–in effect, he CREATES the space by placing it inside the box, each image static, a little portrait of time. When you flip through the book, there is often more SPACE than there is image, with a character’s head just popping into view at the bottom of the frame, or a tiny boat floating in an immense ocean. The characters in Poor Sailor are grappling with SPACE, often drowning in it: the space they live in, the space between them and where they’d like to be, the space between them and what they’ve left, and most of all the limitless SPACE that time and circumstance create, and into which any evil thing may insinuate itself.

It helps that Harkham’s style is a weird amalgam of the European ligne claire (“clear line”) style and that of old newspaper strip artists like E.C. Segar (Popeye) and Frank King (Gasoline Alley). His figures are lumpy and worn-in, regular schmoes who are trying to figure out what’s what. His steady line creates systems of forms on the page, just shapes and occasional dollops of black floating in all that SPACE. Oh, and speaking of space, the end of the story kills it, the last little coda emerging from 4 blank pages, each still with its panel border, containing just… SPACE!

For more Sammy Harkham, I heartily suggest Drawn & Quarterly Showcase volume 3, which he has a long story in, as well as any volume of Kramer’s Ergot, especially 4 and 5. Also Crickets, which is amazing and which is also now cancelled. Bummmmmmmer. You can check Sammy out (sort of) online at his store’s site (he runs a store in LA called “Family”), or just Google “sammy harkham” and start the fun! Below is an image I found via this aformentioned fun Googling, some more clear line magic courtesy of the Comic Art Collective.

While we all would think of books like Maus, Dark Knight Returns, or Watchmen as comics “canon,” there are a growing number of books that I am coming to think of as, if not canonical in and of themselves, then at least “must-read” books.  Maybe they’re still too new, or their influence has not grown enough to be considered part of a comics canon–but in an age with more high-quality literary comics than ever, it follows that the canon will eventually grow and adjust to this new influx. So, for now: The Beta Canon, or at least my version of it.

(NOTE: I’m having a hard time getting WordPress to let me post these images below in a way so when you click on them, they expand to a readable size, BUT if you right-click and choose “Open In New Window” or something like that, that should work.)

Gus And His Gang, by Christophe Blain, came out in 2008 here in America, although I think it was published first in France in 2006 or 2007, and possibly (probably?) in a different form.  When the book came out I was already a fan of Blain’s work, having read his two volumes of Isaac the Pirate and his (even-better) graphic album The Speed Abater.  I say “liked,” which is correct–they are enjoyable books, good but not really earth-shattering.  So when Gus came out, with its garish safety-orange cover, and its Wild-West subject matter, I looked forward to reading it but wasn’t really peeing myself or anything.  This seems to be the opposite of a lot of people more connected to European comics than I am–some people were let down by it after all the hype it received, and a lot of people didn’t notice it at all.

But when I grabbed it one day on the way out the door for lunch, needing something quick to read… well, by the end of the first story I was in love with it, and by the end it had become one of my favorite comics EVER. 

It’s hard to pin down exactly why, which is the strength of Gus, and maybe its weakness for others.  Some books just resonate with some readers; there’s something ineffable there that hits just the right combination of notes to form that perfect chord.  You know what I mean?  Like you can feel it happen and then hear that vibration for the rest of the reading experience.  Most of my favorite books do this, and Gus for sure caught me off guard. 

Moreso than Blain’s other books, Gus And His Gang employs a really gestural, expressive art style–similar to the kind of high-energy, fast style of fellow Frenchmen Joann Sfar and Manu Larcenet.  What looks at first to be rushed or even sloppy, reveals itself to be well-planned, well-executed storytelling, without a lot of  the fussiness that often gets in the way with lesser storytellers.  You can almost FEEL the artist making his brush strokes and pen lines on the paper, you imagine him bent across his drawing board, making decisions, deciding when a panel is done, how much nuance is enough…

It’s organic, I guess.  It’s like the book has just grown right up in your hands, that if you were to mash your nose into it you’d smell the rich loamy earth of France itself.  It’s constructed in the same way–the overall story (so far) seems less like a linear a-to-b progression, and more like an aggregation of story, like a herd of cattle stretched across some plain.  Ditto for the way the action can skip from action to humor to death to sex, at once silly and and serious enough to keep you worrying about the characters from moment to moment.

In fact, while the titular star of the book is Gus himself, most of my favorite stories center around the more taciturn Clem, he of the red broccoli hair. Where Gus will say and do anything to achieve his ends, be they love or money, Clem is more complex, has some scruples (though often violated scruples, even so).  Clem is no less a philanderer than Gus, but Clem is haunted by his own guilt, in the form of a towering one-eyed version of himself that haunts his spiciest moments.  Through Clem we meet Isabella, whose appearances are SO spicy, I had a hard time finding a page I could even show on our blog that wouldn’t set off alarm bells. 

Which makes writing about it even more challenging–Blain uses the cartooning form brilliantly to show the various moods and inner thoughts of the characters, not only through body language but the use of what cartoonist Mort Walker called “emanata”–the various stars, sweat beads, squiggly lines of frustration, and other abstract marks that tell the reader what’s going on without using boring old words. 

It’s the CONFIDENCE of Blain: his drawings seem effortlessly made, almost gestural.  Instead of fussing with getting this line or that just so, he concentrates on the subtleties of posture and the “acting” his figures are doing on the page.  In the page above, Blain takes a simple moment and stretches it into 8 mostly-silent panels.  Look at all the information you get there: though there’s no establishing shot or other reference to location on the preceding page, it’s easy to imagine where Clem and Isabella are. Even more impressively, Blain indicates the blocking of the scene itself without hardly moving his “camera” at all. 

Isabella comes in, moving to the right (the way the eye is moving as well, left to right, as it reads), then looks back (against the “flow” of the reading) towards Clem.  This has the double effect of telling us where the two are in relation to each other, again without any single shot containing both of them; AND it increases the importance of her look because the speed of our reading is interrupted by the reversal of the regular left-to-right flow by her look back. 

From there it’s perfect: beat, beat, then boom! Clems’s eyes open up and he’s in love.  Isabella continues moving with the flow of the eye and our special moment is ended.  I love it!

But I think maybe my favorite thing about Gus & His Gang, or at least the thing I find myself thinking about the most, is the colors.  The palette the colorist uses is just crazy, all these bright colors from all over the spectrum.  He goes from super bright, almost magenta shades to electric blues, but it’s never noisy, everything always makes sense.  And the pages are so BRIGHT.  He’s also not afraid to just leave a background totally white–the pages seem to breathe, everything seems so airy.  It might even undermine the overall sense of danger that most “Wild West” stories have, but I guess I don’t mind much.  I’ve definitely tried as hard as I can to appropriate this palette for myself in my own humble efforts, but so far without the grace and panache of the colorist, whose identity was kind of hard to figure out for awhile.  But Gina Gagliano over at First Second informs me it is “Clémence”, and worked closely with Blain himself on the palette. Thanks to Gina and especially Colleen AF Venable for helping me get all these images together real easy.  The best!

I’m not sure if this is the first volume of a continuing series or not.  Jeez, I sure hope so; I love it so much.  It is hard to imagine a book that’s come out over the last couple of years (a time RIFE with incredibly good comics) that has influenced me more that this one.  Although I will try in the coming months, as I write further on my choices for this “Beta Canon.” 

Have you read Gus or any of Blain’s works?  I’d love to hear what you think in the comments section.  Let’s hear it!