CORNY COMIX, INDIE GUILT EDITION

U can't corny indie fux with me!

Going through an "ew Kidstuff is so IMMATURE" phase is natural, tho. That comix is going through / will continue to go through this is a good thing, regardless of the end result (on a creator-by-creator level, @ least).

Mark Beyer.

Kochalka = Sarah Records, or maybe Moldy Peaches

too easy, he's actually played with the Moldy Peaches IIRC

Yeah, Clowes and Tomine aren't exactly high art. If anything "= Nirvana" here, it's more or less them-- adolescent subject matter/concerns (coming of age stuff, twentysomething real world relationships, etc.) + very plastic (and well done-- don't get me wrong) cartooning. I actually became interested in Tomine recently after happening to randomly page through some "Yearly Best of Young Adult Literature" anthology and coming across his bomb scare story from Optic Nerve (YA's not normally my thing-- it was a bit of a freak accident since it was on the new books shelf at the library). This is very much teenybopper "hipster" territory, but the whole "comics aren't just for kids" movement was, a bit, wasn't it? Superhero comics "for adults" was pretty much the standard bearer then-- mix in a little influence from the 2nd gen comix publishers (Fanta, Kitchen Sink, indies like Elfquest and Cerebus) and the result seems to have been the flowering of all the very nicely drawn and written things we have on the market today that are somewhere very much in the middle ground between entertainment/reinforcement-of-accepted-social-values and "art", Liefeld/Crisis bollocks aside. It's much preferable to the state of the industry ten or twenty or thirty years ago, but it's mostly still very reader friendly. Is this really anything to be snooty about? (I hope not!) (Shit, was the NYC RAW scene ever even anything to be snooty about? "Artistically" speaking, what's the difference between David Chelsea in Love and My New York Diary, other than the fact that the former's illustrative style was influenced by Winsor McCay and the latter's cartooning whatever fine arts bollox Doucet was into? (Not a knock on Doucet, BTW-- just saying, storytelling-wise...))

If anything, Tomine toned down his hipster-ness and embraced more of a generic mainstream teenage American (well, early 90s Bay Area-centric) outcast/misfit with Optic Nerve. His earlier work in Pulse and in his own early work compilation references much more fringe/esoteric touchstones.

I think there's a thread in the ILC archives that talks about the (incorrect) assumption that Tomine shared the same tastes as his characters.