Bill Randall

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…over other people’s shoulders, flying in a cramped multiplex, one of these Airbus flights with personal viewers for the lowly coach folk. Me with no sound, no remote, just lots of choices.

Craning my neck, I can’t follow the stories. Characters becomes actors in light and rhythm, cutting patterns, composition. And in movie’s I’d never otherwise see, greats like Some Martin Lawrence Movie In Which They Cared So Little That They Cut Repeatedly in the Middle of Dolly Shots Before the Dolly Finished Moving, or a half-dozen Playstation-FX movies, like that Hulk movie. The pixels have no weight, so skim. I’ve come to prefer watching computer effects this way: scattered and smothered, like surfing the Internet with ten tabs in Firefox and those asinine Snap! previews.

Case in point: Charlotte’s Web. Not the classic, but the newer one, with barnyard animals more real than real. An animator’s toolkit is now a Pandora’s box, as in an early scene of the spider on a pig’s snout. Though in shallow focus, every snout hair is visible. It’s disgusting, like the pores and sweat of a Brobdingnagian. Better the abstract, gentle sweep of a hand-drawn line.

Or a projector: that day, turbulence bumped me around, so the LCD image went half-negative. More recently, I scuttered a trip for the cost of fuel.  Hence the older examples.  And I doubt I’ll replace them with newer ones, as airlines will soon scutter movies & their equipment to save money with sky-high fuel. Not that it will save them from bankruptcy. Or that the particular pleasures of watching Tom Cruise the Scientologist samurai, riding a raging horse in a seemingly endless loop on twenty screens all around my head, should be eulogized so much as treated with some kind of drug, perhaps one found in the Amazonian mycelium, flown in at great expense.

So I guess the next time I travel I’ll read a book.

Osaka’s greatest landmark, the snare-drumming clown Taro, has left for a warmer clime. He had a steady gig playing in front of Kuidaore, an eating institution. Or so I’m told; the one time I had a decent tempura there, the place was deserted. Of other customers. I guess the perpetual hordes of photogenic tourists posing with Taro never stopped for a bite.

Anyway, he’s retired to Beppu, famed for its “Nine Hells” of blood-red hot springs. At least he’ll have naked people all around. Meanwhile, Osaka’s left with what? Every time I go back it seems like it’s lost something, even if it’s just been a few days. Of course, when most of your precious memories are tied to advertising brands, what can you expect?

The best story in Glomp #9 also bridges the gap between the freer art and more traditional storytelling. In “The Trashing Party,” Amanda Vähämäki draws a palpable dread in nervous pencils. Her art recalls Katri Sipilainen’s, but with more particulars. Each of Vähämäki’s characters is an individual, just like their place, a factory town’s school. Garish color underscores a pervasive unease.

The story focuses on a boy worried sick about the werewolves that have been terrorizing the school. He’s not the only one: even though the wolves have been caught, the adults in charge have sweat beading on their foreheads. A school assembly– that site of schoolchildren’s ultimate dread– threatens to go south at any moment. No one save the boy seems to realize it. Everyone else is happily beating up the werewolf gang, following the principal’s orders. But the wolves are right next door. It would all be terribly dreamlike if Vähämäki didn’t reject that option outright. The story’s ending lets everything grow long after reading’s done.

Vähämäki, a Finnish artist who works with the Canicola collective in Italy and KutiKuti back home, has proven herself a talent to watch, not for the future but right now. Her story “The Bun Field” was published online by Action Yes, and another of her short comics, “Prophet,” can be downloaded free from the German publisher Electrocomics. Neither has the impact of “The Trashing Party,” but all are solid work from an artist for this decade and the next.

One of the most traditional stories in Glomp is also one of the best. Lilli Carré, an American artist based in Chicago, turns in “The Thing About Madeline,” a story that recalls the standard entries in mid-90s anthologies. But she takes it further, with fluid art in purple and orange.

The story centers on a young woman, no qualities, in a humdrum life. Daily highlight: she gets so drunk that a stranger helps her home. When the monotony’s too much, she splits, literally. One half watches her doppelganger live her life better than she ever could. After spying in the bushes for too long, the first half discovers that no one recognizes her. She has no choice but to disappear.

Were this the mid-90s, the story would stop there, probably with a lyrical, cheap non-ending. Carré takes it further selling the odd plot with a scrupulous realism. Everything in the story could happen, given the right psychology and situation. It’s done with solid cartooning that balances the plot’s fantasy conceit with its logical conclusion.

“Madeline” first appeared in a mini. It far surpasses The Tales of Woodsman Pete, her first book collection.  Next to the radical flights in the rest of Glomp, it stands out for its lack of experimentation: Carré knows what she’s doing.

The Economist this week on a Vilhelm Hammershoi exhibit: “All his best-known paintings are of household interiors that are drained of colour and tell no stories. …the mood is melancholic and enigmatic, but the paintings are oddly compelling. Quite why, no one seems sure.” Which almost sums up how I feel about Lee Jyung-Houn’s comics.

This South Korean artist seems to work outside tradition: pencils over inks, sideways pages, and a foreboding restraint. Her two pieces in Glomp, “Kitchen and Bathroom” and “Death,” play with the balance of light and dark in empty rooms. The panels-in-panels suggest passing time, recalling Richard McGuire; her domestic scenes are no less infused with meaning than his. But I don’t understand the meaning.

I’m reminded of a Guy Davenport quip: “Stan Brakhage had recited ‘The Kingfishers’ [by Charles Olson] with passion in my living room. But he had no more understanding of the poem than my cat.”

Meow. Glomp’s author bio states that Ms. Lee lives in Incheon with her cat Budgi. So maybe I’m on the right track.

Much of Glomp’s art, arresting and experimental, looks more like gallery hangings than comics. That’s nothing new, but it nicely displays certain trends in art comics. In three artists:

I. Andrea Bruno

In this untitled comic by Bruno, an Italian member of the Canicola collective, its seductive surface recalls painting. But it’s not painting. It’s just some borrowed surface tics, rather like distressing a chair from Ikea.

Bruno’s work, like many of the artists with full-page illustrations instead of comics in Glomp, truly borrows from the world of design and illustration.  That is to say, these are commodity images, easily digested.  I would contrast a painting by, say, Sigmar Polke.  While superficially similar, Polke’s actually welcomes deep seeing, like the comic by Aapo Rapi.  Its traditional cartooning, cloaked in foreboding watercolors, and does not flatter my eye so much as bleed through it.

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II. Katri Sipilainen

At the other end, this Finnish artist borrows from childhood art. She has a vibrant, often gaudy color palatte well-suited to her folktale story. I find it more painterly than Bruno; it looks like watercolor, though often feels like colored pens.  Of course, using cartoon art with adult themes has been a tired shock tactic since the undergrounds.  Here, the color and wily line contrast childhood’s world of bright forms with the swirling unease at the heart of folktales’ moral world.

Other artists make similar use of primitive drawing.  Some can’t draw.  Others, like Olivier Schrauwen, need an art style that resonates with a death-metal story.  Adolescence follows childhood.

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III. Janne Tervamaki

Finally, a purity of form and color in this story, “Three Short Circuits.”  It is one of the book’s best, a few pages of dashed expectations made more striking for the coldness in the images.  In part, it just shows the tools used, a fine pen and a computer for color.  But it is also a response to a certain kind of story, a way of emptying the narrative with the images.

I used to pretend my poor English, French, and Japanese could cover the comics world pretty well.  Then Stripburger arrived from Slovenia, the Germans came on my radar, and Canicola appeared in Italy.  And the Finns.  At least they subtitled their anthology Glomp for those poor readers not invited to the Finno-Ugric party.

Visually, the book’s a treat.  It has been compared to Kramers Ergot, as both share some artists (Anders Nilsen, C.F.) and crazed visuals.  But the tiny leap does Glomp a disservice.  It seems studied next to Kramers‘ audacity.

Many of the comics often seem like conceptual games. Lamelos’ Trondheim-like romp follows an OuBaPian constraint, with the same dialogue on each of three very different pages. Roope Eronen’s bizarre story takes a break for two pages of food photos, a stop-motion film-within-the-comic.  And the book’s third image shows people in cardboard-box dragon costumes.

I’ll be writing about the book all week, focusing on some of the best works. Until then, BoingBeing’s web site has more samples, and English for those of us so inclined.

1. The Comics Journal’s 291st issue appears online & in print this Monday. I have a long essay on Frank Santoro’s Storeyville, which was a pleasure to write, if just for an excuse to re-read an old favorite. Fanta has previews of the issue, and a fine orange soda.

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2. Book-of-the-Year: the disjointed, entrancing Red Colored Elegy hits stores this week. I’m still kind of amazed it has been translated. Way ahead of its time, it will rewrite many people’s understanding of the art form’s history.

Very soon in the Journal, I will have a long essay about the book, touching on the political context, the animation industry in the day, artist Seiichi Hayashi’s role in both, and some of his earlier work. So read the book now, mull it over, and maybe we can talk about it in a month or two.

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3. If I ever finish it, I’ll have an essay about Dousei Jidai, the other great youngsters-living-in-sin manga from the 70s, in a future issue.

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4. This week, I’ll have short snippets about the Finnish anthology Glomp #9 every day Monday-Friday. And sometime soon, a little note about the “1-2-3 Trio,” I suppose.

Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers floated a soporific city symphony on the walls of MoMA, balancing long takes with short bursts of rhymed images. The multiplane video was silent, but Aitken talks 26 ears off in Broken Screen, his book of interviews.

The thin thread connecting the interviews is put best in the subtitle: “expanding the image, breaking the narrative.” It’s really just an excuse for him to interview a bunch of mostly gallery artists and filmmakers (and an architect) he likes.

Even though many artists are close to overexposed– would that Werner Herzog had bitten Matthew Barney– it is refreshing to have them out of their respective ghettos. Broken Screen reads like a great magazine that only lasted for two issues because it tried to do too much.

Some of the artists are new, like the fascinating Olafur Eliasson. Others, like Manny Farber and Alejandro Jodorowsky, seem curiously old-fashioned. Better are the lesser-known, like Pablo Ferro, the titles designer of Vertigo, Dr. Strangelove, and many others. And especially welcome is Eija-Liisa Ahtila, whose interview glimpses the nuts and bolts of an artist working with a seasoned film crew.

The book’s real value is in its lavish production. Like a little coffee table book, it teems with full-color reproductions of art, film stills, and even a clutch of photos from Robert Wilson stage shows. I doubt I’ll reread the interviews, but I leaf through the book every time I see it.

The Cabal of Sea Urchins, in other words. Thanks to my schoolboy French, it took me a few viewings to realize Luc Moullet did mean sea urchins. They infest the maps around Oignies in the north of France, and inspire his hilarious 17-minute film, an unclassifiable jape on tourism, art, and piles of useless rock.

These urchins represent the unnamed mounds that pepper the landscape in what were once coal towns. The mines have closed, but the mounds remain, changing a landscape without so much as a proper hill. They have no names, no doubt due to a conspiracy. As Moullet reminds us, coal mining is underground work, so the heaps insult its discretion. Defiant, he aims to liberate, even elevate them.

To his eyes, the heaps look like his beloved mountains. While he has juggled a dual career as film critic and filmmaker in Paris, he is at heart a country boy and climber. Mountains appear throughout his films, as the backdrop in the anti-Western A Girl Is a Gun and the subject in Up and Down, about an absurd bicycle race in the Alps. In “La Cabale,” they appear almost as a pun. The heaps may have a more perfect form than Fuji, but they’re not exactly stable. Yet he climbs on, skidding down the side.

His deadpan humor– two lovers walking on crumbling mound, a cheeky crew, an argument over the most beautiful of all mounds ending with a monkey wrench– shares the tone of Agnes Varda’s masterpiece, The Gleaners and I. Both have a quotidian quirkiness, with a judge in a field or a hotel on a heap, that gets better with repeat viewings. Moullet might not be the most famous or prolific of the Nouvelle Vague, but he certainly is the funniest. And “La Cabale des oursins” is probably my favorite of his works.  It translates this unique director’s wit into an intricate short, a perfect miniature.

A shame, then, that it’s so hard to see. One DVD exists, a part of the fine French journal Cinéma’s 11th issue, and is French only. At least a box set of most of his features has been released, by Blaq Out in France and Facets in the US. And another hilarious short, “Essai d’ouverture” (”Essay on Opening”), about a bottle of Coke, can be seen online.