Pim & Francie – The Golden Bear Days

About a year ago, if you’ll remember, I posted a snippet from Al Columbia’s anthology Pim & Francie – The Golden Bear Days. Over Christmas in New York City, I dropped by the amazing comics shop, Forbidden Planet, and picked it up. I’m very late to the party here, and there have been plenty of reviews of it online, so I’m just going to quickly toss a few thoughts in and add to the chorus.

Because the book is a fragmented mess of half-completed, scrapped comics, maybe the best way to review it is through some sort of super-pretentious gestalt word vomit exercise. Here we go:

horror • disgust • unease • amusement • terror • awe • distortion • innocence • despair • zombies • lust • betrayal • paranoia • beauty • john lithgow • loneliness

Well, doesn’t this book just sound like a blast to read? In truth, the book carries huge emotional heft, even though a nothing resembling a narrative ever threatens to congeal from the mess of scraps. Columbia has an amazing talent for crafting potent images, and telling stories in very small spaces.

It’s all the stuff of nightmares: the death of a loved one, the fear of being lost, the terror of sleep paralysis when you can swear a knife-wielding monster is shuffling closer and closer to your door. The sensation generated is an overwhelming, macabre curiosity. You have to know what will happen on the next page, especially because it’s so uncertain of a particular storyline is going to continue to the next page.

When every artfully placed panel could represent a bleak ending, Columbia realizes that a few breaks are in order. Of course, you won’t find any positive thinking here – the brief reprieves from terror are mostly stocked with bravado, cynicism, lust, and the pure will to love to see another day. It’s not the best side of humanity represented here, by any measure.

So far, you should have picked up on two things:

1. this book is intense
2. you should buy this book on Amazon, because it is cheaper there and I will get some money if you do
3. you should also tell your friends to buy this book on Amazon, because I will make even more money

But there’s more to this review than adulation and greed. Just a little while ago, one of my friends pointed out an interview with Al Columbia that reveals how difficult it was for him to draw these comics and put the book together. Turns out, he’s not immune to the images he creates:

Intrusive thoughts of a violent nature haunted me, made me pretty sick, actually, for a few years. I couldn’t get them out of my head … it happened for a good three-year period, about three or four years ago, where I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work on anything. I almost couldn’t function properly in everyday life. I never knew when it would happen. Not only were they scary images, but there was a spiritual quality to it that made me feel like something was in jeopardy, something wasn’t right with me.

via ComicsComics

I’d be lying if I said the result wasn’t fascinating. I talked in a previous blog post about sincerity. This book epitomizes it, in all its schizophrenic struggle. Get ahold of this book somehow—it’s a quick and unforgettable read.

This is just cool

via Arthurmag, via Jordan:

Here we are, about two weeks from the release of Al Columbia’s first book in almost a decade.  Pim & Francie is already receiving advance praise from folks like Spike Jonze…Al’s always working on something new and amazing, whether it’s music, filmmaking, comics, or in this case, painting.  Al showed me a photo of this new painting he was working on and I became immersed in the labyrinth of frayed facade and haunting beauty.

(click for full view)

May is surrealism month

Upon finishing The Physiognomy, I was suddenly filled with an unexpected and unshakeable need to re-read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.  I immediately called the Borders on Ponce and checked to see if they had it in stock, and then drove there while listening to this song (World’s End Girlfriend – Satan Veludo Children).  I arrived exactly four minutes and twenty seconds after I left—coincidentally where a lull appears in the song after an early crescendo—and walked inside to find my book.

After picking it up I decided to meander around, and I happened to stumble into a collection of Borges’ fiction, misfiled far away from its alphabetical port of call.  I’ve never read Borges but have always wanted to, and accidentally finding it amid thousands of other books seemed like way Borges was meant to be discovered.  So I purchased The Book of Imaginary Beings too.  It seems to me like they should make a pretty good couple, at least in theory.

Then I glanced at the magazines and picked up the latest issue of Hi-Fructose, where I flipped open to an article on the art of Thomas Doyle.  Doyle’s work felt like something out of a Kelly Link story or Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves:

See what I mean? It’s incredible stuff. Check out his site here (I’m linking it twice so you’ll actually go.)

Then I drove home through a sea of green lights, picking up where I left off in the song, and arrived home exactly four minutes and twenty seconds later, which is again, coincidentally, exactly the point at which the song ends.

Life is strange, sometimes, in its symmetry.

Why do you all love art so goddamn much

Evidently the single most common search phrase that leads people to this site is: Hudson River School. This, from the post a few weeks back about Team Fortress 2, where I drew only the most tenuous link possible between the two things. So I think the lesson here is that from now on the secret to success is to slip in references to things high school students are going to need to write papers on for social studies class. And when possible, provide high-res images that rank highly in Google Image Search.

So to that end, everything I remember about high school social studies class, in no particular order:

Horace Mann! (which holy shit check out that forehead!) William Jennings Bryan! Cross of Gold! Manifest Destiny! Monroe Doctrine! Turner’s Frontier Thesis! Dada! Neo-expressionism! Gulag! (Not the Mad Max kind though that’s awesome too!) William Henry Harrison! George Clinton? No! Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Justice Samuel Alito! William Renquist! Magna Carta! Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin! That Dude Who Invented The Gatling Gun That Wiped Out Tom Cruise In The Last Samurai!

I’m winded. But hopefully this will turn up some more search results. I’ll be sure to update you guys (all 1 of you) since I know you’ll all be waiting on the edge of your seats.

The Breakfast Crew, Murderers

And don’t you fucking forget it.  Also from Vermilyea:

Perfect for your avatars and what-not.  Send me some more art along these lines.

the team fortress 2 aesthetic

Reading Spy Vibe, it occurs to me that the art direction of Team Fortress 2 owes a huge debt to the mod aesthetic of the 60′s, as presented in technicolor in spy movies.  Also, maybe, a perverse sort of homage to the Hudson River School.  And maybe also Krazy Kat.

There’s a great deal of natural beauty presented in the game, and its garish, cartoony style only serves to highlight the majestic quality of the American landscape.  I say American even though there’s no consistent signifier indicating where the skirmishes of the game unfold, but it seems like an intrinsically American sort of experience – you know, teams of brutal idiots murdering each other for fun with a variety of different weapons.  Valve does a tremendous job with their art direction, tying functionality into aesthetic pretty seamlessly – as this post on their new alpine aesthetic demonstrates.

The bearded recluse speaks

A great, long-form interview with Alan Moore in Wired, definitely worth a lunchtime read:

At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think, “This is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we’ll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them.” I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.

That isn’t really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.

(via Casual Optimist)