Graphic Medicine
Last year I took up permanent residence in the kingdom of illness, a place we all eventually visit. 2023 was a body horror year, but 2024 offered some adaptive strategies for balancing chronic illness and creation. Drawing became a daily practice for staving off the spookies. In my sketchbooks I revisited familiar iconography and themes, applying a fresh cognitive filter. The language of cartooning soothed my headspace with its graphic simplicity. Returning characters and imagery patched up a schism between my pre- and post-diagnosis self. In my Chandeliers zine, Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy starts a noise group with a lobotomized sock monkey and a Kathy Acker action figure. A balaclava-clad Charlie Brown liberates a captive Snoopy in tones of the Chicago Imagists.
The Comics Journal’s 2020 “Disability and Illness” issue was gifted to me by a thoughtful friend. Kayla E (creator of the brilliant, chilling Precious Rubbish)’s tribute to Marge’s Little Lulu considers its heroine through a PTSD lens. Kayla writes “I was obsessed with midcentury kids comics because I think I found them calming…[I]t was this whimsicality in the violence that comforted me as a child. There’s a distance there that’s only found in the stories, in play.”
Problem solvers//Firestarters:
I ate a lot of candy this year. Gummy sharks with marshmallow undercarriages jazzed up hypoglycemic moments. Foods shaped like other foods (gummy pizza, gummy sushi) buoyed my blood sugar.
I smoked a lot of weed this year. Occasionally while in the clouds I’d record a note in my phone–a gift for my future self to decode in the morning.
One revelation: “Candy is a toy you eat.”
This simple equivalency illuminates a connection I’ve FELT between toys and cartoons, art and novelty objects, but couldn’t spell.
The stoner landscape is populated by novelty objects. Rolling papers printed with the US constitution beg to be burnt (These Days LA). Golden roach clips with tiny hands demurely cup a blunt (Pygmy Hippo Shop). I forget who made the burning cop car incense holder but I’m haunted by its poetry. The Angelus Matchcover Club stakes firemaking on bold, graphic roots. Eileen Wolf Echikson made a papier mache cigarette hair pin and it’s perfect.
Gumby Dharma at The Philosophical Research Society
The Philosophical Research Society is rooted in the esoteric teachings of Manly P. Hall, but its programming has taken an expansive and populist turn. In its Mayan Revival theater building, adorned with green and terracotta brickwork, you can see a lecture by Mark Mothersbaugh, a haunted ventriloquist performance, or a documentary about Art Clokey–the psychedelic creator of the Gumby franchise.
Clokey was a bohemian and a seeker. When his Gumby series stalled in the 70’s he sought spiritual guidance from Sai Baba, an Indian guru and “miracle man.” Baba smudged Clokey’s Gumby figurine with ash produced from an empty pot, endowing the green clay hero with longevity to which Clokey credits his success. A set of Clokey’s more abstract and eccentric claymation assured the audience that its creator was indeed on drugs.
Nancy
Nancy Fest at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library of OSU situated academics, comix luminaries and other nerds in an auditorium for a full day of panels and presentations celebrating Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, a beacon of graphic economy and visual humor. The fest supported a new exhibition of original illustrations by its creator and riffs by other artists in its debt, attesting to Nancy’s long shadow, but my personal highlight was in the lobby.
Cornhole is the ACTUAL national pastime of Midwestern backyards and college campus quads. This piece of folk art puts a finer point on the transmutability of Bushmiller’s protagonists. Seems like Nancy has always bucked authorial sovereignty– as pictured here.
Not pictured: an abundance of “Love’s Savage Fury” tattoos on attendees: funnies on the flesh !
Yoriko Mizushiri at Eyeworks Animation Festival, 2220 Arts & Archives
Yoriko Mizushiri’s animations foreground objects: Shoes shaped like quarter notes, disembodied noses, dollops of frosting, snake tongues and scotch tape. She hones in on their softness and elasticity, yielding unexpectedly erotic moments of slowness. Ambiguous encounters are tinted in an achromatic rainbow of beige, bone and taupe.
Mizushiri explained that she’s interested in “tactility and composition” as opposed to narrative. What a relief to be unmoored from story !
No comments:
Post a Comment