the BP (banal pig) portrait prize anthology, edited by Steven Tillotson. A Banal Pig publication. £4 including 1st class UK p&p. (Please email stevotillotson@hotmail.com for details.)
While wandering around merrie olde London in May, my pal Paulette Marty came upon Orbital Comics, a famous comics shoppe which is part of a chain that also includes a manga bookstore and a shop for designer toys. Paulette strolled into Orbital, approached the clerk, and said, in her Minnesotan accent, "I don't read comics, but I have a friend in North Carolina who loves them. I don't know what comics he needs or has. Do you have something--something locally produced, maybe--that'll be a surprise for him?" That's how I got a copy of the BP (banal pig) portrait prize anthology, published and edited by the endearingly off-kilter Steven Tillotson.
I'm no expert on self-publications and mini-comics. I've never lived in a city with an alt-press bookstore (it's been ten years since I lived within a three-hour drive of Chicago Comics and Quimby's), and I'm too lazy to buy money orders, lick envelopes, and send away for self-pubs. I'm so lazy, I've never even ordered from clearing-houses like USS Catastrophe. When I go to comicons, I buy minis, but that's not often. Heroes Con was the first show I'd been to in a year (since the 2007 Heroes Con, in fact). Still, I love to read minis; I love their lo-fi aesthetic, the way their paper folds represent dozens of hours of work at the local Kinko's, and the democratic distribution that cheap copy machines provide for new artists. And sometimes self-pubs are better than so-called professional comics. My first exposure to St. Louis' amazing repository of cartoonists (Kevin Huizenga, Dan Zettwoch, Ted May) came when I read Zettwoch's elaborately designed, self-published Ironclad (2002), for me one of the best American comics of the last ten years.
So the BP (banal pig) portrait prize anthology ain't as arty or ambitious as Ironclad, but it is great fun from start to finish. As Tillotson writes in BP's inside front cover, the anthology is comprised of "art, comics and writing based loosely around the theme of portraiture. There is no prize, the title is a weak parody of the BP Portrait Prize held at the National Portrait Gallery in London, as BP is also the initials of Banal Pig, the series of comics i make. I hope you enjoy it." I sure did.
The strongest piece in the book is the first, Gareth Brookes' "Bastard Teachers," which begins with a line that made me laugh out loud:
"If they teach you nothing else, let them teach you to hate, for it is a lesson that will last your whole life long."--My dad on my first day at school, 3/9/83.
I wish I'd gotten a pep talk like this when I started kindergarten; my parents just prattled on about playing well with others. After this opening quote, Brookes establishes a simple structure across four pages. Each page is divided in half by a horizontal line, and above and below the line, on the left side of the page, Brookes draws suitably grotesque pointillist portraits of rotten teachers from his past. Next to the pictures, Brookes hand-letters stories and details about each "Bastard Teacher." Here's a sample, from the bottom of page three (click the thumbnail):
There's nothing new about Brookes' approach here; it immediately reminds me of a strip in Bill Griffith's Griffith Observatory that juxtaposes small pictures of faces with funny, incongruous captions. But I love how faux-highbrow Brookes' language is here ("the moral barbarity of secularism"), and how the Nirvana incident nails how unfair and petty this teacher was. Inevitably, the last portrait in "Bastard Teachers" is a self-portrait. Alongside a drawing of a standard-issue long-banged, glasses-wearing geek, Brookes clinically and ruthlessly describes his teenage self as "a fat, ugly, ridiculously nervous wimp who only cared about eating sugar puffs and loading up cassette games on his Amstrad whilst listening to Brian [sic] Adams." Yipe. Nobody gets out of high school, or out of "Bastard Teachers," without wounds.
Editor Tillotson's own contributions are three single pages, mostly prose, sprinkled through the anthology that tell bizarre fictional stories about celebrities and their homes: "Round Rod Stewart's House," "Round Jean-Claude Van Damme's House," and "Round Lionel Richie's House." Like Brookes, Tillotson has an eye for telling detail, but unlike Brookes, Tillotson is making it all up...I think. Tillotson describes Van Damme's drawing room as "tasteful enough in its decor, wood paneling, nice big telly, but the glass case full of pewter dragons with jewels seemed slightly incongruous"--and the illustration on this page is of a dragon comically frowning as he holds a glass orb in his paws. (Lionel Richie is much cooler, though; he's got four tigers (!) living in his pad.) Tillotson's willingness to drag celebrities through the detritus of his own imagination is reminiscent of the outrageous David Sedaris story "Parade" (collected in Barrel Fever [1995]), where Sedaris blithely assumes that all the famous men in the world (including Morley Safer, Charlton Heston and Mike Tyson) are gay, and then has them camp it up accordingly. I like it when crazy artists use celebrities as puppets to act out personal narratives.
There's lots more good stuff in the BP (banal pig) portrait prize anthology. Dan Locke's "These Fists Fly" operates along two channels; pictures and word balloons show us an old bully bragging about his toughness, while footnotes placed below each panel undermine his words, dishing out facts like "he has not actually been in a fight since 1982; a pub fight in which he sustained a broken nose and bruised knuckles." Jess Bradley's "Dogs Gone Bye" uses picture/caption combinations and a grid structure to commemorate the surreal deaths of some of man's best friends, including one who was "crushed by [a] poorly constructed outhouse" (click!):
The anthology is shot through with hilarious single-page comics like this, and little prose stories too. Many are entertaining, and even the ones that don't quite work are short enough to ignore; kudos to editor Tillotson for keeping BP's diversity high and boredom level low. I see on the Banal Pig blog that there are more comics to be had by Tillotson and his chums, and maybe--just maybe--I'll get off my Barcalounger, buy an international money order, lick an envelope, and order more Pig. It's the right thing to do. It's what Lionel Richie would do.
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