"Love is the Reflection in the Mirrors Behind Your Eyes"
Phoebe Gloeckner makes me feel the way I did when I first seriously started reading comix.
Gloeckner, from "A Child's Life", banned in Stockton, CA for being "a how-to manual for pedophiles"
As a kid, my social and intellectual maturity far outstripped my emotional side. It put me in a weird limbo of neither being able to engage intellectually with my peers, or find emotional satisfaction in talking with adults. At the time, it was a combination of my own writing, books, and comix which gave me the middle ground I was looking for. The space between adulthood and childhood - anywhere that wasn't the unsettling transition of puberty. I basically ignored that. Hell, I didn't buy a bra until high school. I just didn't notice. (On the other hand, it wasn't like I was a runner or anything.)
I read a lot of different comix to get me through, but got my best fixes from artists like Aline Kominsky, Robert Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry, Matt Groening, and Chris Ware (though, to be honest, as brilliant as Chris Ware is, after a while, he's poisonous for me to read). These were artists willing to transgress on the page in ways that were funny, awful and honest. A bunch of perverts, druggies, loners, neurotics, misanthropes - these were my closest confidantes. It helped, too, that their work fed into the kind of ultimate, death row intimacy I'm always looking for (and am secretly suspicious of). The jokes and stories they told pushed the limits of what anyone else around me was talking about, and nourished my inner voyeur, knowing that i was getting to see the world in a way that the people around me would have thought was crazy.
They were my dirty Playboys, the best friend from the wrong side of town, my jar of animal bones.
Gloeckner, from The Atrocity Exhibition
Then, slowly, I outgrew them. I stopped being able to go back to them so often for the same solaces. Their self-awareness made me pity them, not empathize with them, their styles made my body tic nervously, reading too much of them gave me headaches, and I began to date someone with an even filthier sense of humor and a broader sense of taste than my own. And, I began to realize some of the limits of limitless self-divulsion in one's art.
I was looking to a lot of these comix for validation and consolation, too - it worked as a kind of deviant check-in. Oh, I'm fantasizing that that teacher is gesticulating with a dildo. Is that okay? (check.) Oh, I think I've started to sexualize even the people I hate. (check.) Oh, sometimes Ilike it when it hurts (check.) Oh, god am I the only one who sees how absurd this all is? (check check check ch...) I grew out of a lot of the things I wanted to be consoled about. I got comfortable with my sexuality, the body discomforts, the alientation, my obsessive need for secrecy. They all turned out to be pretty normal symptoms of the condition of being a person.
It didn't hurt that no one around me was reading them - in high school, I knew a lot of people who read manga, and some Jhonen Vasquez, and in college, there were a lot of superhero comics fans...but it wasn't the same. So I let it go by the wayside.
Gloeckner, from a longer essay, "I Hate Comics" (2001)
[...two college comics classes later...]
Phoebe Gloeckner takes a great deal of style from the comix artists I've loved. She also works primarily within the realm of autobiographical comix (though she's been quoted as saying that much of what she writes is fictional). Her stories are also centered around the dark, unsettling,secrets of family and adulthood, "women's issues", and the horrors of growing up. Her comic timing is wild and impeccable. Gloeck's artistic style is ever shifting, and the influence of her anatomical study is impressive. Her text is snappy, fills the panels without crowding or causing the kind of claustrophobia that Crumb's panels sometimes gave me. By all means, I should be able to file her away between Crumb and and Kominsky (according to Crumb, Gloeckner did, in fact, ask to run away and live with them as a child).
But I can't. Her teeth, her pen, her intents are so much sharper than theirs. When she bares herself, it is not in communion, or neurotic, Freudian confession, but almost as a weapon. A dare. She challenges the reader's comfortable position as voyeur, stands them up and pushes the limits of their pain, discomfort, horror,and the willingness of be honest about their own darknesses. And she does this in ways which are full of subtlety, while remaining incredibly graphic and violent. She is not of the contemporary confessional school which so cherishes still images of tear drops, migratory birds, long silences, faded photographs. Gloeckner's memories are not nostalgiac, or melancholically wistful - they're with you, in the room and violently alive. It is not to say that one can't objectify, empathize with, or laugh with Gloeckner's work, but that those only accompany the venom she slips the reader, a serum that starts in the stomach and works its way out only after something in the reader has taken up with it. It is a kind of serum to force condemnation, or confession - collision or collusion.
I am in love with her.
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There's more to be said, re: the book I've just read ("A Child's Life"), but these are my first reactions.
Time to go make a comic and go to sleep.
love.
a