Toyama Medicine

This origami cube advertises "Toyama's Medicine - 300 Years of History."

I usually don't indulge in travel souvenirs.
I take photos, but don't really need trinkets. And I am bad at finding those for other people. They always strike me as kind of chintzy. But while I was in Japan this year, I stopped at Iwase, a port town in Toyama prefecture, and found a small trinket shop with a medicine counter. As it turns out, Toyama is famous for its medicines, having a long history of powders and treatments being brought to rural customers by itinerant druggists.

A traveling drug salesman from olden times, and one from more recent times.

I fell in love with the package design of these slim envelopes, and Tomoko suggested I buy some - as a souvenir. I couldn't resist, and once committed to the idea, could not limit myself to only a few. So I picked up about $50 worth of medicines that I will never use - headache powders, stomach relief, and what all else I don't even know. But the art on these is so nice I wanted to put them up here for people to see.


They remind me a little bit of Polish movie posters - which I have written about on this blog before. This is product design without the boring constrictions so typical in the US. I know a lot of people don't think much about advertising, but I work in that industry, and trust me, the people who make it often think too much about it. Which is part of the reason why I think it tends to look so uniform and uninteresting. Avoiding photography and choosing instead to go with an entirely hand-painted approach automatically contributes more life to these designs. But I also love their color palettes, text treatments, and the depictions of masks, demons and devils.



After displaying these packets proudly to Tomoko's mother, she told me that the tradition of traveling drug salesmen continues to this day in Toyama. She pulled a plastic pill box down from atop her refrigerator and showed several packages of her own. She explained that the box was left stocked in each home, and when the salesman returned he deducted what was used from the box and presented a bill for it. In some of the rural areas of Gifu, south of her house, I could definitely see this kind of service being useful, but in the suburbs of Toyama it was mostly just an interesting holdover from an earlier time.

I might have looked a little strange in the drug shop, a foreigner with a camera around my neck, ogling the merchandise, but I was probably the biggest customer for headache powders all that week.

Bizarre New World: My Debut as a Comic Book Character

My friend Skipper Martin had been talking about this story idea of his for almost as long as I'd known him. The first time I heard it, it was not quite developed; mostly just a concept. I remember him giving me the intro over some Mexican food, and it went something along the lines of ... "Let me pick your brain for a minute... Suppose you could fly..."

Skip, lover of all things Superman, wanted to write a story about a flying guy. A flying guy who resembled Skip. Uh-huh. Actually, even in that earliest incarnation, or swirl of ideas, Skip was imagining a flying world, because directly after the "what if you could fly" questions came the "what if everyone could fly" query.

I admit I was a little more focused on my margarita than on the idea of a story about flying people. It seemed too "Superman" to me. So Skip went away with the idea and came back a couple years later with a much more evolved pitch. He sent me a story outline with a three-act structure that had a strong father-son relationship, a villain, and a satiric take on religion and the media. In other words, something (other than the enchilada I had been eating last time) that I could really sink my teeth into.

One thing about Skip, the man has deep convictions. He believes in his own ideas - although not in an arrogant or immodest way. He is always open to other peoples' views. He always weighs his friends' opinions. But he has the kind of conviction that's necessary to do creative work, to take a project from his head to the sketchpad to completion.

Along with the story outline, Skip told me his plans to turn this into a serialized comic book. He was going to find an artist. He went out and shot "research photos" from a helicopter, to provide the artist with realistic aerial views. And every so often, I would get a peek at how things were progessing.

A half year or so later, Skip again prefaced one of our conversations with "Let me pick your brain..." He said he'd been mulling over the "problem" of how to explain his protagonist's ability. He wanted my theories on the subject. He said he wasn't convinced that it was actually important to his story, and I agreed. But he said he might want to do a scene where several characters discuss theories of how unaided human flight MIGHT be possible. I gave him my best theory, which came from my experience scuba diving. In short, I guessed that you could metabolize atmospheric gas into something lighter than air, which would be stored in your tissues, giving your whole body "buoyancy." Skip liked it.

When I received the first page layout showing myself in comic book form, I was amused to find that I was wearing the same London Underground T-shirt and grey hoodie. I guess some caricatures have some truth to them.

So, several months later, I got a call from Skip saying he'd like to drop by my office to take a couple of "research photos" of me to give to his artist. He cruised by, jumped out of his car, snapped two or three quick shots and disappeared again.

All this while, Skip was busy working away on his book, unsure of how he would eventually get it out into the world. Everything was being done out of his own pocket. (Remember what I said about the strength of his convictions). He prepared a fine leather portfolio with oversize inked and colored pages to display to potential publishers. On the strength of that presentation, he was given meetings to discuss his book, and eventually got a distribution deal with Ape Entertainment.

The three-acts have been broken up into three "series" for publication, each consisting of three comic book issues. The first series, in which I make my cameo, was published to strong critical response last year. The next series, titled "Population Explosion," is due to hit stands soon.

Lately Skip has been a busy guy, doing interviews and promoting the book. I wonder if my character will ever return - with the ability to fly?

Pick up Bizarre New World at a local comic book store, or visit the website for more info.

You can hear Skip in an interview from cindy.com here.

Chicag/no

Labor Day - Just returned from Chicago and Indiana. The Lake Michigan region. Said lake is big enough to fly over in a jet aircraft and not see either side for twenty minutes. It's big enough to look down on from the clouds and see white caps, as one sees when flying over the ocean. It's big enough that in Chicago, they refer to the waterfront as "the beach," and there is sand and surf and seagulls too. For all that size, Toddrick, who lived in Chicago for six years, tells me that in the winter, when temperatures can drop to 40 below, that entire lake will freeze solid and chips of ice can be lifted off of it, sailing on the wind through downtown's city streets. "Great city to visit, hard city to live in," he mumbles.

I traveled to the northern midwest with Richard, Danica and Salomón. Richard has been doing a documentary on Salomón, a painter whose art was being featured in a show at Notre Dame. I didn't know Notre Dame was in South Bend, Indiana. I didn't know I was going to Notre Dame. Some of my pep for the trip had subsided when I found out we would not be spending the majority of our time in Chicago. There's something about the big cities that has always lured me in. San Francisco, New York, London, Tokyo, even New Orleans, although it is not known as the massive metropolis some of the others are. These are places that have layers and layers of human history that no amount of urban renewal can ever completely remove.

Before we could even get off the ground at LAX, we were delayed for about an hour due to some kind of security breach at the airport terminal. No one passed through security during that time. We all just stood outside on the curb in the pre-dawn darkness, while our planes waited empty on the other side. We speculated on the changed nature of air travel and the false sense of security these new measures provided. I wondered why someone could not swallow a condom filled with explosives and find a way to detonate it on board. Drug mules swallow condoms filled with drugs.

We stayed at a hotel on the Notre Dame campus called the Morris Inn. It was nice, comfortable. Although Salomón accurately pointed out that from the outside it looked like a prison (all beige concrete and right angles), inside were pieces of furniture that looked expensive, which always makes people feel like they are getting the best. In the bathroom were hung quaint Irish proverbs - toasts and prayers. The legacy of the Irish is felt strongly throughout the school, although it was founded by a French priest. The driver who picked us up from the airport, a student of politics who was born in Guatemala, recounted for us the origin of the "Fighting Irish" mascot. Apparently, the name stuck after the Irish went to rumble with the Ku Klux Klan, who were attempting to set up a chapter in South Bend.

After we dumped our junk in our rooms I sat outside for moment to enjoy some fresh warm air. There was a bit of tropical humidity, but not enough to make your shirt cling to your skin. Cicadas hummed. The campus is all manicured green lawns and large shady trees.

There was a large dome on campus, topped with what looked like a gold plated figure of Mary, mother of Jesus. Notre Dame. Our lady. Makes sense. There was a building across from a massive football stadium with an arms-uplifted mosaic they called "Touchdown Jesus." Jesus was everywhere. Most of Notre Dame's student body is Catholic. Richard and I took a walk at night and discovered "the grotto," a candlelit stone recess where students came to pray during all hours of the night. The quiet flickering candlelight was serene, a marked contrast to the nights of screaming and beer drinking I remember from UCLA.

Notre Dame has an Institute for Latino Studies and a guy named Gil Cardenas is the Director of it. Although there are ethnic studies departments at most universities, I wondered if Notre Dame was making a special appeal to potential Latino students (known statistically to be predominantly Catholic), as they may have done in years past with America's larger population of recently immigrated and Irish Catholics. Gil's an interesting guy. He lives in a massive house that seems to keep expanding into more rooms as you travel through it. It is just outside of the campus and sits on the bank of a calm green river that reminded me of Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyland. Every inch of interior wall space is covered in art; above bookcases, under stairwells, in bedrooms, in bathrooms, above the toilet, art was hung. My first and second nights in South Bend, I moved about the rooms of his house, following the dozen-plus artists who had gathered for the show with a video camera and making them slightly uncomfortable.

It has been a long time since I have done any shooting. It was a nice change of pace, scenery, action, mood. Not the sunless edit bay of the Cimarron Group, air-conditioned to 70F everyday. I didn't mind playing paparazzi, it was good exercise, but there was very little I could do with the camera on or off that would make me feel like more than a functionary, a walking lens.

I know nothing about fine art and my attitude towards it tends to be ambivalent. There is fine art that I can admire and relate to viscerally, but the scene surrounding it seems to be about qualifying good art over bad for the purpose of creating value. I hate the snobbishness of gallery spaces and I despise the idea of people gloating over their precious private collections. Gil seemed to have a real passion for all of his art though, and his repeated attempts to get artists to sign books or do sketches for him stemmed from both his nature as a curator and his desire to create and maintain personal relationships with all the artists he admired.

The artists and work gathered for the show were all quite different from one another. The show was titled Caras Vemos, Corazones No Sabemos: The Human Landscape of Mexican Migration, so it all focused on immigration or the immigrant experience in the US. I was a little too overwhelmed by new faces and information to remember names, but I saw video installations, photography, traditional paintings, and silkscreened art. Some of the artists made three-dimensional sculptures and one created a mural out of twelve panels which were printed from woodcuts. Another guy made masks out of mirrors that were intended to scramble the wearer's facial features with those of the person who looked at him.

Richard chats with Marcos Raya.

Marcos Raya's work caught my eye. One of three men in the show whom I never saw without his hat, Raya had a lean and nimble figure. He spoke seldom, seeming to reserve speech for comments which were necessary or worthy. He was impossible to gauge; after looking at his work, I had no idea how to begin a conversation with him. Regardless of the fact that he was fluent in English, I found myself wishing I could make conversation with him in Spanish, feeling that might help bridge the intellectual chasm between us. I suspect I know less Spanish than Japanese these days, which doesn't say much for my capabilities in another language. I felt out of his league, even on my linguistic home turf. His art is surreal and incorporates a lot of imagery of technology, seemingly gone haywire. He paints himself into some of the images, and other times incorporates himself in a much more unusual "first-person" perspective, showing the inside of a skull and the view through a pair of eye-sockets. He's got a Fellini-esque fascination with asses, bulbously distorting the naked shapes of women and driving foreign technological shapes into the flesh of his human subjects. Sometimes his colors are bright reds, blues, greens, and sometimes his paintings look as though they were made with ash.

Malaquias Montoya gave off a much more approachable, almost grandfatherly vibe. I guessed him to be in his mid 50s, but he had that mellowed, good-natured air that people usually ease into once grandkids appear in their lives. Never once did I see Mr Montoya without his fedora, or a paint encrusted stopwatch which he hung around his neck. Shaking hands with him was like shaking hands with a tree; his skin was calloused and weathered from years of working with brushes and chemicals. His smile was carved by deep lines in his face. One never expects to find brothers in a place far from home, but I learned that Montoya had lived for several years in my hometown of Oakland, and taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts. I was introduced as well to his son, Maceo, whose work was also featured in the show. It was interesting to see the artistic lineage being passed down, the same way a carpenter or mason or other craftsman might pass on their knowledge and skill to a son or an apprentice. Malaquias' silkscreened image, UNDOCUMENTED, was chosen to represent the show. On the return flight, I flipped through a book of his images, based on the theme of capital punishment. I admired him for his idealism, which is nothing more than rational thinking, but so uncommon. I recently watched "Gangs of New York" and recalled a scene in which four men were pulled from the streets and hanged to create a political distraction and the illusion of civil control. I remembered an argument I had with my family over the execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, and how plain it seemed to them that vengeance was the right answer to crime. Malaquias' paintings depict the graphic deaths of several hanged, electrocuted and poisoned convicts, not simply to garner sympathy for their suffering, but to question the humanity of the perpetrators. Making that argument verbally, I could not do anymore than have heads shaken at me, and I doubt whether these paintings would make their way into many people's homes. I sympathized with Montoya's placement of his principles above his concern for offending an audience's aesthetic sensibilities.

Much discussion about the purpose of art and the ways to connect it to an audience was had during the conference which followed the exhibit. Particularly since this show focused on Chicano art, which is by nature political, there was a deep concern with how to engage the public in the issues addressed by the show. Jose Limón of UT Austin made the valid critique that a museum show, with limited public accessibility, was not an effective way to engage people in political ideas. I thought that the inclusion of a Lalo Alcaraz "L.A. Cucaracha" comic strip panel came closest to representing art from a public sphere that people could easily relate to. Fine art does not seem to me to be a part of many peoples' modern lives. I think graffiti and stencils and Xeroxed posters and other street art that augments/alters/vandalizes advertising is the most interesting type of "fine art" going right now. It addresses some of the same ideas that the artists in this show are concerned with, but it makes itself visible in places where people already are, it does not wait for people to find it. And it uses a familiar visual language. Some of what you find on the street is just self-promotion - many people are branding themselves with an image the way Shepard Fairey did with Andre the Giant. But other people are coming out of the advertising world and using the visual language of advertising, which is common to everyone, to tackle political issues, even if their message is not always totally clear. I remember distinctly the wave of iRaq posters featuring Abu Ghraib silhouettes that lampooned the Apple iPod campaign. It would be cool to see a show that tracked down more samples of this kind of political art.

Salomón Huerta stands before an early piece in the home of a collector.

Richard observed that this show was attempting to "canonize" Chicano art within the "mainstream" world of fine art. Salomón Huerta had some interesting points on this. He appears to have carefully managed his career to avoid being "ghettoized" in an ethnic artist category. He's achieved fame for dealing with ethnic identity uniquely, by painting the backs of subject's heads. Where most Chicano artists seem to qualify themselves as Chicano first, Salomón seems to want to achieve notice simply as an artist. He struck me as an incredibly smart guy who kids around a lot and projects a kind of casual but super-confident indifference, like my old friend Joaquin, but with the chops to back it up. There has been plenty written already about his heads and suburban houses, so I won't try for a critical summary here. My sense was merely that, behind the wisecracking exterior, there was another kind of cool - a patient, watchful eye, as observant of color as of behavior. I realized with Salomón and some of the others that they've done art most of their lives, and whatever art you do, that level of practice and discipline nurtures highly developed thought, because it is a constant meditation on oneself and one's surroundings. I never quite viewed myself as an "artist" and I think being in the company of these guys made that distinction in self-perception and commitment apparent.

Lastly, there was Chicago. I finally made it there for a day of roaming around and to take in the Cubs against the Giants at Wrigley Field. I've now repeated to various people that the Wrigley Field experience is a must, not just for baseball fans. I am not a sports fan of any kind, but the flavor of that field is distinct and historic. It's situated in a neighborhood of brownstone apartment buildings, from the roofs of which people gather to watch the games. The field is one of the MBA's smallest, which supposedly accounts for more balls sailing out of the park. We saw Barry Bonds rock one out, around the 4th inning, to mixed cheering and boos. The Giants took the game 7-4 (although we left in the 8th, when we thought it was over at 4-3).

From Wrigley Field we moved on to Millennium Park, a new development on the lake shore which opened in 2004 and purportedly cost in the neighborhood of $500 million. Taking in the public art pieces, it was easy to see where that money was spent. One of the favorite pieces was referred to as "the bean," and was a chrome kidney shaped lozenge, with enough of a curve for several dozen people to pass under at once. Because of the distorting reflections, I smacked my head up against the side of it while trying to pass under, haha. Like a carnival fun house mirror, people loved just standing in front of it, taking pictures, doing strange walks and dances, or just smiling and pointing at themselves and each other. I was slightly more impressed with a piece a few hundred yards away. It was two towers of video screens facing each other, projecting images of faces with pursed lips. After about fifteen minutes, water shot forth from the pursed lips in a thick stream like a suspension bridge cable while naked kids dodged and danced underneath it. It was such an unusual sight and people seemed to be having so much fun splashing in the water around it. There was also a massive outdoor public theater designed by Frank Gehry that bore quite a strong resemblance to LA's Disney Concert Hall. Gehry also designed a winding overpass bridge that pedestrians could walk and park themselves on, suspended over six lanes of downtown traffic for stunning views of the city's skyline. There were public gardens filled with grasses from around the world, from which a small rabbit bounded out and nibbled on the lawn at the foot of Gehry's bridge. There was a large grassy field where a free jazz festival was being held and beyond that, the massive water fountain I remember from the opening credits of "Married... With Children." There were museums everywhere, all of which were closed, it being the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. As we walked downtown, Danica pointed out a large sculpture by Picasso, sitting in a public square. The guys were somewhat skeptical about it being a Picasso, but Danica was the only one of us who had been to Chicago before, and taken a guided tour of downtown landmarks no less. The sculpture was large enough to walk on, which Richard and I did. Salomón seemed a little disturbed at the idea of skateboarders busting ollies off a Picasso.

Richard suggested we try a restaurant that his friend had given the glowing recommendation of "best Mexican restaurant in the US." So we went in search of it. Along the way, we found a massive drawbridge which had been left abandoned in the vertical position. It stood, arm upraised at the elbow, at the base of the Chicago Sun Times. It looked as if it might crash down at any moment. The river winding through the city reminded me of Tokyo and the ferries that one could take to get around the city there.

Even at 9 or 10pm, there were large numbers of people on foot in downtown areas, walking under skyscrapers, near L-trains, past storefronts and restaurants, outside of jazz clubs and blues bars. I decided I needed to come back to see the rest of this place: all the art inside the huge museums, all the old buildings, all the historical landmarks, all the unique neighborhoods, all the old bars, hear the music, ride the trains.

Yeah, it's definately on the list of places to return to.

Polish Movie Posters ( ...Are Cool... )

Polski Governator circa 1984

I haven't had much to say lately. Maybe it is the heat-wave that has been burning up Southern California and the rest of the country lately. Maybe it is watching Beirut get blown to bits while Bush and Rice say they don't want to negotiate for peace unless it is a lasting peace. I have no idea what any of this blather means anymore. Sitting in my shorts sweating and watching people make meaningless blah-blah talk. The weather forecasters keep saying that LA is in the 90's, but the "feels like" temperature is well over 100. I don't know when they began giving the forecast in "feels like" degrees. Temperature seems to have become a very subjective issue this year, with Al Gore trumpeting the alarms of global-warming and being ludicrously compared to Joseph Goebbels by the right-wing pundits. Voices on the radio and television are talking about blackouts in California again, saying this time, there is no Enron to blame. Ken Lay is Dead; not from heat exhaustion, but heart exhaustion. Too much cholesterol in his diet. News that the energy crisis was manufactured came too late to stop the Republican coup that seized the California governorship, but it probably did slow the rate at which they hoped to build new power plants. Now that we are all sweltering, the hands are hovering over the power kill switches, and politicians are ready to explain to us that the power grid is old and out of date and insufficient to meet current demand, which I understand owes its blame to increased population... caused by immigration. It all dovetails so nicely sometimes. I found this rather ingenious solution to the problem while poking around the web: http://www.pocho.com/news/2001/wattback/wattback.html
I actually had this idea myself, when I was frequenting the gym. Why are those treadmills and ski machines plugged in, drawing power? Why not reverse the flow and let those hot young girls in their 20's pump their energy back into the grid? As one dirty old man said to the other, if we could bottle that heat, we'd be rich.

So on to the Polish movie posters.




Sampling of Polish movie poster art from the late 1960s to the 1980s. From L-R top to bottom: Apocalypse Now, Platoon, In Cold Blood, Playtime, Alien, and The Phantom of Liberty.

I signed up as a volunteer with the American Cinematheque. I've been trying to get myself a little bit more involved in community affairs. Being a lousy manager of my own time often makes that extremely difficult. But the Cinematheque is one of those places that has exposed me to too much good stuff, and I owe something, however small, in exchange for all the great films I've learned about from their programming staff. So this month I searched the internet for movie posters to upload to fandango.com, to represent the films that are programmed in August. Found some cool old stuff for the Roger Corman retrospective, and old Elvis movie poster art is fun to look at it.

One of the great resources on the net for old movie poster art is posteritati.com. They specialize in film posters for collectors and have a bunch of posters for foreign films and foreign posters of American films. While browsing, I began to notice that almost all movie posters from Poland resisted the typical Hollywood marketing strategies that have been inherited in most other parts of the world. Polish movie posters, first of all, are almost always painted artwork, rather than photographic art from special photo shoots. Also, in concept, they do not strain themselves to "sell the star," by showing his stupid face. Instead, they draw their concept from the theme of the film, resulting in great expressionistic (or impressionistic?) subjective variations on the content of the movie. I have no idea how many Polish artists were active in the film advertising industry during its peak, or during the duration represented by posteritati's collection. But the art seems highly individual, as though there were no agency art director, no creative meetings, no client on the phone to dumb down the concept or request that it look more like the poster of last year's Oscar winner. These are designs where the painter seems to have had full control.

It is interesting to see how they interpreted huge Hollywood blockbusters, movies that were marketed here with bright colors, big stars' faces, bold letters. The Polish art is totally indifferent to the salary of the actor who was in the movie, or the box office draw of the name "Spielberg." In the case of Back to the Future, it's as if the artist knew the movie was a pointless piece of shit and could not be bothered to make any unreasonable fuss over it. In more than one instance, looking at the Polish movie art for Hollywood films makes me curious to see what a Polish version of those same films would have been like. Of course, with films that have interesting thematic content, the artist grabs hold of it and produces a bold, effective design that often trumps the design from any other country. What's cool about posteritati's search engine is that you can search by film title or just by country, so after pulling a huge list of Polish posters, you can select one title and compare it to other art from around the world. This is exactly how I discovered that there was a consistent style to the art from Poland. If I knew more about art and painting, maybe I could use vocabulary to describe it more effectively or understand its relationship to the rest of Polish or Eastern European art. But as it is, I'm just a film buff who finds it extraordinary, and if I had the disposable wealth, and the mind to spend it on a collection of stuff, I would doubtless be buying Polish movie art.



Great Polish art for a great Polish film director. Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant.

Go to posteritati's search engine and select POLISH from the POSTER NATIONALITY drop-down menu.
While you're at it, why not go to the Cinematheque's calendar and see what cool movies are showing this month?

Tomine Talks and Signs

DISCUSSION / BOOK SIGNING - Nov. 5 - Skylight Books

I first saw Adrian Tomine's art at the GR2 gallery on Sawtelle. GR2 is one of Giant Robot's many storefront operations these days. Besides running interesting interviews with Japanese, Hong Kong or Korean filmmakers, Giant Robot succeeds, like any good art and culture magazine should, in occasionally turning my head slightly to catch something new on the passing cultural landscape.

That's exactly what happened when I walked into the Adrian Tomine show last summer. I saw a wall of 20-30 ink and watercolor panels that were as detailed in their capture of emotion as photography is, yet simplified in their high-contrast style of line drawing. They were like snapshots of people caught unobserved in mundane daily activity, whose faces revealed something about what they were thinking. Tomine struck me as an eavesdropping doodler, with a flare for capturing the expressions of people-in-passing. On some of Tomine's panels, he would scribble an impression or additional detail about the people he was spying on. "Deep in thought (or maybe just staring at his expensive-looking shoes," is written over a guy riding the train. "Making subtle facial reactions as one Wall Street guy explains to another his plan for 'scoring' with his ex-girlfriend when she comes to visit," reads the text beside a weary looking woman trapped between two jovial men.



I suppose the ostensible filmmaker in me appreciated the panels not only for their visual qualities, but for their stripped-down storytelling. Each one seemed like a micro-world of one or several characters, colored in their distraction or anxiety, with the past or future glazed into their eyes or reeking off their clothes.

I would have loved to walk out with one or more of these little ink panels, but each was attached to a price tag of $200-$400. Although I believe in "supporting the arts," I have never "owned art." Not the high-priced one-of-a-kind variety. So, bumbling around the store, I came across Optic Nerve - Tomine's comic book.

To anyone unfamiliar with the current state of comics, Optic Nerve might come as a complete departure from the expected. Super-heroes are still the driving force in that end of the publishing industry, but there has been a growing niche of illustrated fiction, autobiography and even journalism in comics that goes back at least 20 years to works like the Hernandez Bros.' Love and Rockets. Optic Nerve continues that tradition.

I am actually not well-versed in the existing body of comic literature out there. Having never been much of a comics reader as a kid, I did not naturally gravitate towards "adult comics." Many comics readers would mark the publication of Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns as key moments in the evolution of "adult comics." Each put a post-modern spin on super-heroes, exploring real psychology, politics and graphic violence. They were not simple, innocent tales of heroism. The adult "superhero" that emerged in the following years was more often than not an "antihero," the protagonists and antagonists of these stories each had a moral yin and yang. The gradual over-arching trend which culminates in works like Optic Nerve shows a move away from mythic characters altogether.

Optic Nerve is mostly populated with people in their 20s, living in and around Oakland and Berkeley, who have unhappy or awkward relationships. It does not tell one continuous story, but is a collection of short vignettes that read like fleshed-out forays into the worlds of Tomine's ink drawings and watercolors. They're great short fiction, small slices of mood, with an authenticty that feels autobiographical. Initially I picked up Issue #1 as an affordable way to take home some of Tomine's drawings, but I found the stories, with their occasional cliff-hanger endings which emphasized mood over narrative, to be addictive. I have scooped up the remaining issues in print (Drawn and Quarterly is currently re-printing them all), but was surprised and frustrated to learn that there were only 9 issues in total. To add to my frustration, Issue 9 was the first of a serialized three-part story - a departure from the normal anthology format.



Optic Nerve seems to have been an on-going project for Tomine since his late teens, when he published it himself. Since he has been signed to publisher Drawn and Quarterly, issues have appeared as seldom as once a year. Doing all the writing and art himself, in addition to making a living with illustrations for mainstream magazines like the New Yorker, doubtless slows down production time. So I was enthused to hear that Issue #10 was soon to be on shelves and Tomine would be making the rounds doing in-store appearances.

The event drew a sizable crowd. There was some discussion on the settings in which comics now find themselves, which was interesting to ponder as I took in the faces of LA hipsters and literati - this was not Comic-Con. Tomine remarked that comic book art is out of context when hung on the walls of a gallery. The art is the book itself, he argued, the painting or drawing done to make it just a part of the process in creating that piece of art. After a lot of talk about whether or not the work was autobiographical or not and what sources served as influences, I felt that was the nugget of the evening. Art might be commerce, as Warhol argued, but you don't always need to be in the company of the trendy or the well-dressed, drinking shitty wine and receiving disapproving glances to appreciate it. For two or three bucks you can read it a few times and still have the author sign the worn cover.


Interview with Adrian Tomine
NY Times article on graphic novelists
Online gallery of Tomine art for sale