poetry

I consider myself a connoisseur of the obscure and a champion of the forgotten, falling a little bit into both camps. I admire those creators who bring themselves to the brink of disaster and death to bring their visions to life, whether or not there’s financial gain or fame at the end of the whole mess. Spend five minutes watching the films of Damon Packard to witness the pure beautiful madness of it all. I remain envious of those creators who are capable of art at all costs, beyond all sacrifices. There’s a certain insanity in that.

So, when ‘The Unicorn Man‘, penned by the mysterious Vox Anon, found its way to my mailbox a few weeks ago, I was a little scared. I mean, I’ve never been disappointed by identity-obscuring creators before – Leon Redbone, Unknown Hinson, Jandek, The Residents – all good things, if not completely bizarre, but as a creator who practices radical transparency myself, the whole world of anonymous creativity can sometimes fall outside of my realm of understanding.

The simple paperback is structured in three parts, bound in black paper and using a very organic typewriter font, like the manifesto of a fevered revolutionary or an isolated man-monster trying desperately to communicate with the world using the only materials available to him. Indeed, is the author to titular Unicorn Man, or Vox Anon, or the oft-mentioned Qayin? Or are they all the same thing? Is he here to steal our women, or to just invite himself in for coffee?

Pages I though LVIII are dedicated to three narratives, which tangentially describe the origins and travails of the beleaguered Unicorn Man in a dizzying miasma of action and fire and fairy tale. One gets the impression that hidden somewhere in here is a set of clues which direct the reader towards an answer to an unasked question. As the reader progresses through the pages, they slowly begin to unravel into an avalanche of words and a collage of sounds, which mimic the collages that represent the latter third of the book.

This artful strangeness is followed by 233 pages of poems, thick with religious imagery and icons. These comprise the bulk of the book, and are divided up into seven sections, evoking something biblical. I’ve been guilty of poetry in my day, but most of it evolved into writings within the ‘Shel Silverstein’ school of lyricism. Again, I get the feeling that every poem is a hint towards an identity, as the phrase ‘I am’ is used in almost every single one, and usually at the end of a phrase, Yoda-style. 233 pages of ‘I am’ must mean something.

The final pages of collages, all black-and-white digital overlays, are the most frenetic part of the whole collection. The theme of the unicorn is repeated in hundreds of ways, with a variety of unicorn imagery heretofore unseen, including everything from medical textbooks to Pokemon and My Little Pony images, with Ultraman and charts of M.U.S.C.L.E. figurines mixed in with zodiolocical and scientific diagrams and symbols. Is it talking about the strange unity of all of these disparate things, or is it an ultra-dense dumpsite for an information overload? I’m not qualified to answer that, but the whole package feels like someone frustratedly wringing their hands in some undisclosed location, knowing more secrets than they can handle.

I admit : I don’t fully understand it, and I enjoy things that I can’t understand or exist outside of my usual zone of awareness. It’s a challenge, and a curious addition to my collection of the obscure.

The ‘Best American‘ series of books has been around for a while, compiling and cataloguing the best WHATEVERS from the previous year – poetry, fiction, nonfiction, ’science writing’, mysteries, random assortments of things, and graphic verbal depictions of why every one of my relationships has failed. It’s not that the series is being unnecessarily exclusive by limiting itself to ‘American’ output, but the amount of beautiful creativity expressed by the world at large just wouldn’t fit into a singular, annual volume – so we focus on the local crowd.

It’s only been since 2006 that there’s a volume dedicated exclusively to comics, and it’s a definitely sign that graphic storytelling is being taken seriously. In this, I take a personal pride. I was SO there, like, fifteen years ago. This second volume, focusing on stories collected in 2007, is a full-color, 341-page, 2.5 pound, hardcover testament to comics as art.

The collection of stories bridges all forms of indie comics, omitting the standard superhero fare from DC and Marvel – which can almost always be found in reprint editions anyhow. It’s a bit of an elitist omission, but I’ll deal with it. Not even a page from Ultimate Avengers? Fine.

Many of the comics herein are small autobiographical tales, a good handful are bizarrely fictional, and there’s that whole middle section where things just go completely hallucinogenic, best read (as I did) with a low fever. Even a quick flip through the pages will break down any notions that a new comic reader might have about what a ‘comic’ is. Here’s the new definition : just about anything that you make and choose to call a ‘comic’.

More than half of these comics don’t display any kind of traditional artistic skill, just a desire to tell a visual story, and actually seem to pursue more of an ‘outsider‘, untrained and uncensored approach. While I’m a fan of comics of all types, one can expect that the narratives in these will fall apart entirely and follow the strange mental machinations of a 5-year old, along with the same explosive enthusiasm and unbridled use of color and line. Skim through the works of Paper Rad, and the artist known only as ‘C. F’, who makes liberal use of ball point pens and stencils. Unusual and childlike as they are, they’re all carefully calculated. They can’t NOT be. These demonstrate the ideas that a comic doesn’t even have to be narrative anymore, and collections of surreal pictures are just as valid. Is it charming that these are being made by 30-year old men, or is it kinda creepy and effortlessly cheap? They have their place, and exist in their own bizarre section of the book. Gary Panter, best known for his design work on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, is probably the strangest (and least kid-friendly) of all.

The only disadvantage to this collection is that it pulls a lot of work from the ‘Mome’ series of comics, which are small collections of work in themselves. Because I’m a reader of these, roughly 20% of the book is old news and already in my collection. Also, the inclusion of Aline Crumb in any collection of ‘best’ comics is an automatic disqualification from total greatness. For those readers who are unaware, Sophie Crumb is the daughter of legendary ‘indie’ comic artist Robert Crumb, who revolutionized and advanced the art form more than we can ever credit him for. Still, just because your dad is a rocket engineer, it does NOT automatically qualify you to work at NASA and fly the big spaceship (which is a comparison that I did not come up with on my own). Sophie Crumb’s derivative, obnoxious comics are perpetuated on the basis of her last name alone. Fortunately, there’s only one page of her, and unfortunately, that’s enough to make me go on a prolonged rant.

Most of these comics here weren’t even created in 2007, but have been culled from the last two decades. I was more interested in recent evolutions in the artform when I picked up the book, so the title remains misleading, but I guess there’s a lot of catching up to do after so many years of ignoring the artform. Chris Ware, a stellar artist himself, edits the collection and manages to arrange the stories in such a way that it’s like reading one enormous story that spans the book. None of Ware’s comics are included, though, which is another glaring omission. No James Kochalka (but a little Jeffrey Brown), and no Paul Hornschemeier, but it still finds a place alongside McSweeney’s #13 and An Anthology of Graphic Fiction as big, heavy books that I can show people when they start talkin’ smack about comics.

And if they still don’t believe me, it’s probably heavy enough to do some cranial damage.

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