a page by Jay Stephens (admired by Craig).
I've long been a fan of Jay Stephens' cartooning, and my life is a wee bit sadder because he doesn't draw comics much anymore. His latest comic, released in early 2008, was Teen Titans: the Lost Annual, a nifty evocation of Titans stories from the go-go-checked '60s, written by Arnold Drake, penciled by Stephens, and inked by Mike Allred. Stephens actually drew The Lost Annual back in 2003, however, and the comic was inexplicably shelved by DC for several years. For much of the new millennium, Stephens has channeled his energy into animation rather than comics, winning Daytime Emmy awards for his Tutenstein TV show, and if he's currently producing comic book or strip cartooning on a regular basis, I don't know about it. (I've poked around his website for evidence of new print work, but no luck. Visit his blog, too, because he updates it fairly often, and because there are pictures of Boris Karloff and Alfred Hitchcock there.) During the 1990s, though, Stephens belonged more to alt-comix than to Nickelodeon--no doubt he lived in abject poverty back then, drinking out of gutters and rooting through garbage cans for his next meal--and my weekly trips to the comic shop were considerably brighter when a new issue of Sin Comics or the Dark Horse Land of Nod ("Featuring Jetcat!") came out.
My favorite Stephens work is the short-lived (only three issues, alas) Land of Nod comic book published by Michel Vrana's Black Eye Productions in 1996. In those Black Eye Nods, Stephens pulls off a bizarre mix of Hanna-Barbaraesque protagonists (like the super cool Space Ape Number 8) and a cynical, profane, "mature" sensibility. Evan Dorkin nailed the Nod aesthetic in a letter to the comic, where he directly accused Stephens of "always drawing these cute and funny characters" and then killing them. In the preface to The Land of Nod Treasury, Dorkin further defines Stephens' art as "the fever-dreams of cartoon-addled children zonked out on sugar-coated breakfast cereal and 'shrooms." I loved Fruit Loops as a kid, and Stephens' comics remain some of the fruitiest loops around.
Let's take a close look at a page from Black Eye Nod #2, "Captain Rightful":
Very simple, very direct, very naughty--and it brings up some fascinating issues. Stephens' "Captain Rightful" strips are extended gags that follow a rigid formula. Every CR page is divided into twelve small, identically-sized panels, and Stephens draws his figures and backgrounds in a minimalist style, giving us stick-figure people in a stick-figure world. Further, the story is always the same: an unnamed character (identifiable by the single hair growing out of the middle of his head) gets into trouble, cries for help but receives none, and goes through the travails of Job before he dies. Every CR tale finishes with the same punch line, as Captain Rightful himself, a superhero drawn as a weird armless lizard, arrives too late to save our stick-figure protagonist. On the back cover of Black Eye's Nod #1, Stephens presents a single-page coming-next-issue teaser that perfectly sums up the minimalist CR aesthetic:
Nod #2 takes this formula and stretches it across 24 pages. On page one, our hero receives a harsher-than-usual breakup letter ("Remember when I used to love you? Now I hate you. You are stupid") that propels him into bad behavior. He eats multiple cans of beans, guzzles bottles of booze and, by the end of page two, generates a fart powerful enough to shoot him into outer space, where he slams his head against a satellite. He then falls back to earth, smashes through the roof of the Snack Hut, and meets the "pokey pokey" woman: see the first example above. Her flirtations drive him to an extreme reaction...
...which leads our hero into escalating predicaments. He survives his heart attack; he's dumped in a sewer, trapped in a flow of liquid lard, eaten and crapped out by a circus lion, etc. The story concludes when he's murdered by a street psycho with a knife, moments before (you guessed it!) Captain Rightful flies into the last panel, asking "Did someone say 'help'?"
To appropriate a cliche: when you've read one "Captain Rightful" comic, you've read 'em all. So why do I like them so much? Implicit in this question, of course, is that I shouldn't like a comic that's so formulaic, or that I should be a bit ashamed of my taste. But I'm not. Captain Rightful has helped me (he's on time for once!) to realize that it's OK for me to love formula, genre, repetition. I love westerns. I love the three-minute pop song. I love Road Runner cartoons. I'm amazed that George Herriman became the greatest cartoonist that ever lived simply by coming up with variations among a relatively small cast (Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, Offisa Pup, various hangers-on) in endlessly repeated situations (Krazy's pining for love, Ignatz throwing the brick, Ignatz behind bars). All of these formulas, and "Captain Rightful" too, shift storytelling emphasis away from what's going to happen, and towards how it'll occur, and I believe this shift can produce art as entertaining and as intellectually rigorous (and, conversely, as moronic and boring) as narratives that keep listeners, readers and spectators in suspense about what's going to happen next.
There are other ways that the "pokey pokey" page functions as art masquerading as artlessness. I have no idea how Stephens got the characters' heads so perfectly round--even with a compass, I can't do it--and he stages the scene as a perfect example of classical Hollywood editing. The final nine panels on the page alternative single-panel close-ups between one character and the other, with one exception: the two panels where the girl begins to "slurp" and "suck" the French fry. Appropriately, the motion that kick-starts the flirtation into high gear receives the greatest emphasis. Stephens also establishes the setting in panels two and three, and then keeps the boy and girl in consistent positions throughout the page. Our hero looks slightly to his left to see the girl, and she flirts with him out of the right corners of her eyes. The scene's consistent staging achieves maximum legibility. Stephens wants this sequence--and the whole comic--to go down as quickly and smoothly as a glass of water on a hot summer's day.
Finally, the "pokey pokey" page brings to my mind the arguments made by Dylan Horrocks and others that comics is a form of map-making. Crafting a map involves reducing the complexities of the real world into abstractions that are nonetheless effective in conveying selective information. Include too much detail, and you're that person in the Borges story "On Exactitude in Science," who creates a map so accurate that it becomes as big as the terrain it charts. This reduction process is also true of the stick figure, where the individuality of people is stripped away, in favor of a universal symbol capable of expressing universal emotions. There are moments in Nod #2's "Captain Rightful" where the forward surge of Stephens' narrative detours into a fascinating hybrid of sequential storytelling and the unfolding of a map. On page 12, as our hero precariously navigates his way around a Jetsons-like tower, the page layout becomes a fractured single picture similar to one of those David Hockney pieces comprised of hundred of Polaroid photographs:
The central comics antecedent would be a Frank King Gasoline Alley Sunday page like this. (I stole this page from the terrific Family Bookstore blog, where Sammy Harkham's post on images like this is a must-read.)
In "Captain Rightful," Stephens reduces people to stick figures, he reduces a cityscape to a schematic map cut apart by panel gutters, and he tells a story with a formula so rigid that I can accurately predict the beginning, middle and end. I love it. "Captain Rightful" is an extraordinary example of how comics can boil complex information down into salient, instantly accessible abstractions, and, more importantly, it cracks me up.
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