Self-P, part five

Plump ironies: John Stanley's Judy Junior bosses herself into a self-portrait after she fails to compose a self-portrait of Jimmy Fuzzi.

Relevant Page

Can't believe I'm stooping to this intro. In a tweet from April 3, I wrote, "Unbelievable: reading a comic that doesn't have sex, tits, drugs, swears, ennui, violence, or superheroes. No, wait, there's a fuck."

I was kidding about the disruptive fuck; that's just a punchline fuck.

My archival tweet refers to my elated discovery of Dan Zettwoch's "Spirit Duplicator" comics in The Best American Comics 2009. Simply by virtue of his choice of subject matter -- fictional church bulletins across decades -- Zettwoch ensures that the precious and predictable litany of North American comic virtues goes untouched.

Thank God.

Relevant Panels

The Best American Comics 2009: Tim Hensley, Gary Panter, Kevin Huizenga, Kaz.

Self-P, part four

Case in point: Dan Clowes' self-portrait is the second-to-last component of his new book Wilson. Meta-Clowes writes, "He finds it uncomfortable to hand-letter information about himself in the third person but feels the need to fill this space with a block of text for design purposes." Exactly: need and design.

Douglas Wolk notes, "Paul Gravett observed that 'Wilson' is a partial anagram of Daniel Clowes (like 'Enid Coleslaw' from Ghost World)--maybe this is some kind of nastily refracted self-portrait, and in fact the final images we see of Wilson are very close to Clowes' actual self-portrait a few pages later" (via Techland). The image above teases loose continuity with the comic vignettes (he's like his character) and subsequently teases loose correspondence with real life Clowes (his character's like him).

This publishing necessity, however, makes me wary of both because the bio becomes a new focal point for sabotaging sincerity. Even though it's jokey, it does exactly what it needs to do: dates, location, family, works, this work. The midsection of humor attests to the fact that we the audience love Clowes' sensibility, that we will follow Clowes anywhere, and more importantly that peevish Wilson, however Clowesian he may be, is but a temporary manifestation of our beloved clown Clowes. Long live the string-puller, no matter how short-lived the pulled was.

Self-P, part three

From the copy to Omar Calabrese's Artists' Self-Portraits:

"At first a self-portrait was hidden in a narrative painting: an artist would paint his image as part of a crowd scene, for example, or as a mythological figure. On the other extreme, once the genre was accepted, it was practiced by some artists—Rembrandt, van Gogh, Munch, and Dali, for instance—as almost an obsession."
--
For these comic book book jackets, hiding is not an option. These artists, no matter what measure of control they assert in their portraits, are winners in the publishing world: a-mythological, unflayed, nowhere near a crowd. The book precedes the self-portrait; the self-portrait is the book's penultimate manifestation. Joe Schmoe gets no. Zinesters give only the ghostly fingers of their email addresses. Drawing obsessive autobiography is perhaps the compromise, the build-up, but the surrogate self as a narrative subject opposes the typical self-portrait. Crumb and Spiegelman have the obsession, and have achieved both surrogate and self. Joe Sacco's obsession, however, netted him a real life photo to bolster his real life reporter credentials.
--Ho ho: Norman Rockwell's Triple Self-Portrait (from Autoritratti).

Self-P, part two

-artist with tools (David B. at drawing table)

-artist with accoutrements (Lynda Barry with some animals and her own creation Beat Poodle Fred Milton; Lynda Barry in Eden)

-artist descriptive, r-e-a-l-i-s-t-i-c, non-ironic (Crumb); yet, also artist iconic (older Crumb still recognizably Crumb)

-artist styled as character, brought into characterworld (doglike Jason and Renaissance Sikoryak, but also Barry and B.)

-artist all of the above (Spiegelman on the Maus flap)

Self-Portrait in a Comicvex Mirror

Author self-portraits from Epileptic, The Greatest of Marlys, The Book of Genesis, I Killed Adolf Hitler, and Masterpiece Comics, respectively.