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Special Feature
Three Glimpses of MoCCA Fest 2008
By Adam McGovern
Published: 2008-05-23
In which we sample the top of the reading-stack from the leading alternative-press event
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Released in a physically rare yet hugely influential newsprint
edition in 1995 (Chris Ware cites reading it as a turning point in his
career), revived as a lovely outsize hardback in 2007 and snapped up
by many at New York’s premier indie-comics showcase MoCCA Fest
in ’08, Storeyville is a
historical narrative that gathers beauty and meaning with the passing
of years.
Storeyville follows the
quest of a young drifter in the early 20th century for his
missing mentor, a fellow member of a transient, petty criminal
fraternity in an era on the cusp of pioneer survivalism and
civilization as we’ve come to know it. It’s the progress
of a youthful but confused spirit committed to a life of hardship yet
terrified of true self-reliance and its tougher choices. In the
protagonist’s wandering path writer/artist Frank Santoro sketches a landscape of
a North America wide open but vastly lonely, limitless in its
possibilities but paralyzing in its potential. The story is brisk and
riveting, yet told largely in silence and stillnesses, desolately
beautiful snapshots of factories and farmland, the places we seldom
stop to notice but which wait for us eternally.
The main referent for Santoro’s sketchy style is the
world’s only McArthur Genius Grant-winning cartoonist, Ben
Katchor; huge shoes which Santoro fills comfortably. Katchor is known
for eccentric, novelistic classics like The Jew of New York and Julius Knipl, Real Estate
Photographer, quirky everyday epics with a skewed humor but a
deep emotional impact. Santoro shows that Katchor’s stylistic
lessons can be expanded, while diverging distinctly from his method:
Katchor’s characterizations are very revealing but deliberately
opaque, to give a sense of mutual isolation in teeming crowds; you
feel for his players and you can see their folly and tragedy, but you
never really find out what the people themselves think they’re
doing; Santoro’s narrator is just as lonely but his thoughts are
laid bare, lending another emotional dimension to the artist’s
scribbled spaces.
With concise visuals and complex insights, Storeyville is a look at the past
that shows how far forward comics can go. [www.pictureboxinc.com]
The precise vision and absurd perceptions of Lilli Carré’s
woodcut-like psychodramas (and psychocomedies) make them one of the
main finds of any indie-comics show, and two works – one a bit
older, one a debut – were no exception at MoCCA Fest ’08
(exceptional though they are).
In the Ignatz-nominated one-page story “A Day in the Life of
a Mandolin Man” (from papercutter #3, Fall 2006), an
apparent humanoid with a head shaped like the title instrument endures
derision and exploitation in a sad little tale that seems like the
obsessive elaboration of some phrase misheard in childhood. True to
Carré form, it proceeds from a premise that makes no sense to a
circumstance that can’t be escaped.
In the new minicomic Dorado
Park, two sisters share a strangely sheltered life in a small
house amidst a dreamlike forest that’s like an inversion of Waiting for Godot’s desert
limbo, then drift apart with ever more surreal visual metaphors
filling the distance between them. With her trademark bad-dream
bedtime story logic, Carré spins a tale of people lost forever
in the winding landscape of their distorted reaction to each
other’s unforeseen emotional needs.
Carré’s cartoonish yet expressive everypeople,
filigreed yet foreboding settings and bittersweet subjects make for a
pictorial poetry of doom and charm. [www.lillicarre.com]
Rat Fever is a set of
bizarre cubist narratives by sage prankster Ian Harker, in which, over the course
of one or two pages, stories unfold and deepen not by the accumulation
of events but the density of perspectives on the same moment. With the
traditional panel grid reconfigured in Buckminster Fuller facets
around cubes, crosses, and folded or curled planes, literally almost
nothing happens but there is an infinity to know. Harker completely
reorients our conception of time and understanding of narrative, with
the brevity of quantum mechanics on a cocktail napkin, showing an
expansive compositional wisdom which is executed with his cultivated
crudity. It’s like the scribblings of an infant in the tenth
dimension. Which is to say, the answers are simple but the path to
them is mind-boggling, and we’ve all got a long way to catch up.
[www.doppelgangercomics.blogspot.com]
—CCdC— Read all of ComicCritique.Com’s columns, old and new,
at our columns archive!
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