Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: ITDN
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Burkholder, Andrew
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://andyburkholder.com/
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, cartoonist, and filmmaker.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including Sonatina, Happiness, Thickness, and Best American Comics 2015.
SIDELIGHTS
Cartoonist Andy Burkholder is the author of numerous mini comics and comics appearing online. Much of Burkholder’s work is experimental in nature and typically features adult themes, such as sex. His comic “Pretty Smart” was included in Best American Comics 2015, edited by the novelist Jonathan Lethem. Writing for the Los Angeles Times Online, Carolina A. Miranda noted in a review of Best American Comics 2015 that Burkholder’s entry “experiments with the nature of language” and went on to note: “Comics can be as experimental in their art and format as they are in the texts they convey. Such is the case with the work of Andy Burkholder.”
Qviet
In his book of comics titled Qviet, Burkolder presents one-page comics with human sexuality as their theme. “A contributor to the Just Indie Comics Web site, noted Burkholder’s “unique style” and “avant-garde attitude,” adding that “the lines, the shapes, the symbols are the core of his work.” In some of the comics, ordinary objects become sexual in nature and in other strips people transform into genitalia. Rob Clough, writing for the High-Low blog noted: “Burkholder’s figures, even at their most abstract, have a raw and real quality to them as all pretenses are dropped and the fetishes and desires of the characters are laid bare on the page.”
Burkholder sometimes covers part of the comics with large black lines that obscure both the comic and the text. “I took it to mean that the creation of these strips was no clinical and calculated event, but rather as transformational and joyous for the artist as they were for the reader,” wrote High-Low contributor Clough. Globe and Mail Online contributor Sean Rogers noted that some of the comics such as the one titled “Graft Black Cypress to Her Myrtle Bow,” which draws from a sonnet by Baudelaire titled “To Debauchery and Death,” give “homage to other prurient precursors, from the lowest of limericks … to the Venus of Willendorf.” Burkholder includes titles to each of the strips, but the various strips do not connect to tell a story. Burkholder also wrote a comics blog titled Qviet.
“These strips are the detritus of good and bad culture filtered through Andy’s lizard brain,” wrote Jason Overby in a review for the Comics Journal Web site, adding: “And the sex is just a vehicle to explore anxiety about unfulfilled desire.” A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked: “This is a complex book that challenges readers to overcome traditional hang-ups over erotic material.”
ITDN
In his next book, titled ITDN, Burkholder presents ten stories in comic form and previously published between 2010 and 2014. Among the tales is the story titled “The Fury,” about black human-like figures doing battle with people who are drawn only in outline form. Throughout the battle, the two sides argue philosophy. Another tale, “Craft,” takes images and breaks them down to various simple elements ending up with only an X. “His ideas seem to come so quick that his hand can’t keep up with them so his drawing style remains quite loose and changes fairly often even though its obvious the dude has serious drawing chops,” wrote a Nudes Reading Mini Comics Web site, who went on call the comic entry titled “Chris” “a relaxed and open song of a head split open and dumping its patterns onto the page.” The reviewer compared the comic to the work of R. Crumb, a comic book artist who gained notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s with his satirical depictions of American culture.
“Even in these early stories, Burkholder displays his desire to push the comics medium to its limits,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. San Diego Book Review Web site contributor Melanie Dillon noted that Burkholder’s comics feature violence and degradation, including necrophilia, and noted: “This comic reads like the ravings and doodling of a mad man.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, June 29, 2015, review of Qviet, p. 54; April 25, 2016, review of ITDN. p. 7.
ONLINE
Andy Burkholder Home Page, http://andyburkholder.com/ (February 14, 2017).
Comics Journal, http://www.tcj.com/ (December 4, 2015), Jason Overby, review of Qviet.
Globe and Mail Online, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ (June 19, 2015), Sean Rogers, “Review: New comics from Marc Bell, Andy Burkholder and Jason Little,” includes review of Qviet.
High-Low, http://highlowcomics.blogspot.com/ (July 13, 2016), Rob Clough, “2dcloud: Blaise Larmee, Andy Burkholder.”
Just Indie Comics, https://justindiecomics.com/ (June 11, 2015), “Preview of Andy Burkholder’s Quiet.”
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (December 15, 2015), Carolina A. Miranda, “Five Comics Artists to Qatch from 2015’s ‘Best American Comics.'”
Nudes Reading Mini Comics, http://nudesreadingminicomics.tumblr.com/ (February 14, 2017), review of ITDN.
San Diego Book Review, http://sandiegobookreview.com/ (September 18, 2016), Melanie Dillon, review of ITDN.
no bio
Andy Burkholder is a Chicago-based cartoonist who has been very active over the past several years, creating mini comics and releasing a steady stream of work online. Andy's comics are abstract yet playful, oftentimes dealing with very adult themes twisted through an extremely dry sense of humor. His work has been featured in anthologies such as Sonatina, Happiness, and Thickness, as well as his Oily published Ground trilogy. Qviet is his third graphic novel.
Andrew Burkholder is a Chicago-based artist, cartoonist, and filmmaker. His comics are abstract yet playful, oftentimes dealing with very adult themes twisted through an extremely dry sense of humor. His 2013 comic " Pretty Smart " was included in the Jonathan Lethem edited " Best American Comics 2015 ."
LC control no.: no2013102139
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Burkholder, Andy
Variant(s): Burkholder, Andrew
Associated country:
United States
Located: Chicago (Ill.)
Field of activity: Cartooning Motion picture authorship
Profession or occupation:
Cartoonists Motion picture producers and directors
Found in: Ground movement, 2012: title page (Andy Burkholder;
cartoonist)
ITDN, 2016 title page (Andrew Burkholder)
Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2016 website, viewed September
20, 2016 (Andrew Burkholder; Chicago-based artist,
cartoonist, and filmmaker)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
ITDN
Publishers Weekly. 263.17 (Apr. 25, 2016): p78.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
ITDN
Andy Burkholder. 2D Cloud, $22.95 trade paper (216p) ISBN 978-1-937541-22-4
Psychology, strangeness, and squiggles combine in a collection of 10 stories, all first published between 2010 and 2014, by up-and-coming indie cartoonist Burkholder (Qviet). The works show his broad range but also some questionable decisions. Highlights include a Michael DeForge--like focus on breaking objects into geometric shapes and a brilliant modern-day Steve Ditko--inspired story called "The Fury" in which an all-black humanoid fights against a morass of people drawn only as outlines, arguing philosophy the entire time. In both cases, Burkholder perfectly captures the essence of his inspirations in his panel constructions and layouts. "Craft" literally breaks down the nature of comics, taking semi-familiar images and devolving them to their most primitive elements until readers are left at one point with a simple X. Sadly, two stories feature implied violence against women, with "Fuck This" adding necrophilia to the mix along with a primitive, stick-figure style that doesn't stand up to the other entries. Even in these early stories, Burkholder displays his desire to push the comics medium to its limits. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"ITDN." Publishers Weekly, 25 Apr. 2016, p. 78. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450904587&it=r&asid=691a807f3d0f28ed198fc80bc9cec11a. Accessed 23 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A450904587
Qviet
Publishers Weekly. 262.26 (June 29, 2015): p54.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Qviet Andy Burkholder. 2D Cloud (2DCloud.com), $22.95 trade paper (248p) ISBN 978-1937541-11-8
A series of unconnected one-page comics exploring sexuality, taking it to an abstract and absurdist extreme, come together in a collection that's not easily digested. Burkholder, in his full-length debut, uses many of his signature elements from his mini-comics, including challenging lettering, small panels, and art that ranges from angry, violent jagged lines to smooth curves detailing the many nude figures portrayed here. In some places, thick blacks obscure the art and text underneath them, giving them an almost three-dimensional feel and leaving readers to wonder about the meaning of defacing these particular portions. Burkholder shows in multiple sections how ordinary objects can be turned sexual, and he isn't afraid to push past the usual gender binary to express it. The recurring themes, however, work against the overall effect at times, as visions of people dissolving into penises, vaginas, and breasts become repetitive. In all, this is a complex book that challenges readers to overcome traditional hang-ups over erotic material. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Qviet." Publishers Weekly, 29 June 2015, p. 54. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA420928923&it=r&asid=8a780dcb993ceea238b8ea0a25437c9b. Accessed 23 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A420928923
Posted September 18, 2016 by Melanie Dillon in Sequential Art & Comics, Special Interest 511
ITDN
ITDN
by Andrew Burkholder
Released April 26th 2016
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9781937541224
Published by 2dcloud
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ITDN is comic book containing 11 “stories” and an additional excerpt of bits and pieces by artist Andrew Burkholder. The title itself is a pseudo-acronym – it doesn’t actually stand for anything and is in fact just 4 random letters. Strange? You haven’t seen anything until you open the book.
“I’VE ALWAYS FELT HALF A CHRIS.”
208 pages of contemporary art, this comic reads like the ravings and doodling of a mad man. The second chapter includes a stick figure beating a kid to death, and then attempting to copulate with it’s corpse; other chapters are much more difficult to discern what is going on at all. There is no plot, and the following chapters make even less sense. The words and statements made by characters are hard to correlate with the picture actually being shown, and a good third of the book consists of scribbles turning into other scribbles that almost resemble something recognizable, but not quite. With the meaning being as difficult to find as a five-leaf clover, ITDN seems to be an objectified acid flashback and is just as hard to enjoy. If you’re looking for something that will boggle your mind, Andrew Burkholder’s work will keep you occupied for a half hour or so.
Review: New comics from Marc Bell, Andy Burkholder and Jason Little
SEAN ROGERS
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jun. 19, 2015 12:16PM EDT
Last updated Monday, Jun. 22, 2015 5:56PM EDT
Qviet
By Andy Burkholder, 2D Cloud, 248 pages, $22.95 (U.S.)
Equal parts sublime and bawdy, Andy Burkholder’s debut collects hundreds of frenzied single-page comic strips that try to evoke our infinite varieties of sexual experience. The artist’s approach is cubist and poetic, exploding sex into suggestive fragments – protruding tongues, the crook of a limb, crevices, eyeballs, nubbins and lumps – that he either doodles with abstract crudity, or else over-renders with intensive detail, as though shuttling between ineffable thoughts and fleshy reality. These strips are endlessly exuberant and inventive in the ways they represent bodies and ecstasy. In “I Want to Fold You,” a woman creases and crumples a male body like it’s a shirt; in “Scurvy,” a group of randy seamen fertilize the soil of a citrus plant; in “Graft Black Cypress to Her Myrtle Bow,” the artist interprets Baudelaire’s sonnet to Debauchery and Death. Proudly decadent, Qviet often pays homage to other prurient precursors, from the lowest of limericks and bathroom-stall graffiti, to the Venus of Willendorf and the Demoiselles d’Avignon – but Burkholder’s odes to snug trousers and loose blouses are uniquely audacious.
Qviet
Andy Burkholder
2D Cloud
$23, 248 pages
BUY IT NOW
REVIEWED BY Jason Overby Dec 4, 2015
andy-burkholder-qviet-coverSomething as a metaphor for nothing
Steal this comic book
Sex is a vehicle
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
-Wittgenstein
It’s nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down… The best songs to me — my best songs — are songs which were written very quickly. Yeah, very, very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it.
-Dylan
I make one whenever I can’t figure out what else to do. A lot of the time I don’t find doodling/drawing satisfying & I don’t have the energy to make a conceptualized “full comic” so I find this a happy medium to meditate on one of my favorite topics.
-Andy Burkholder in 2011
image01
In 1989 I bought that year’s Rolling Stone “Hot” issue, and for the first time was exposed to comics that were more “adult” than Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.
image02
I stole Ed the Happy Clown from a shop in Dallas, and it quickly became my favorite book.
image04
It was funny, smart, stupid, and I had to steal it, because there were penises involved.
I probably first heard about Qviet from an email exchange with Scott Longo in 2011.
“Oh, also, totally LOVING 2101. That and Andy’s QVIET blog are what I look forward to the most from the recent Internet.”
It felt at the time like everyone (myself included) was trying their hand at this new medium of internet comics. And Qviet was just a Tumblr (not much there anymore) put out by the pseudonymous Tracy.
It was fresh, urgent, ephemeral…
image10
Now Qviet has been given corporeal form as this amazing little book by 2D Cloud, beautifully packaging a huge number of strips (one per page) into a perfect object.
Reading it in this form reminds me of how I would read collections of comic strips we had laying around the house as a kid: Peanuts, Family Circus, Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes. The process felt infinite. I would pick up a book, open it at random, and dive into perfectly formed nuggets of cartooning functioning appropriately within the boundaries of their world.
image12
But Qviet has more in common with the spelunking of the sexually repressed I got into when I found Chester Brown at age 14 than with the strips I read splayed out on the carpet as a kid.
The drawings are mostly clean and simple, operating both to describe objects, words, people, etc. and functioning just as marks: expressive, flat, etc. The space that’s created is subjective, calling into question the constructed world.
The lines are crummier and less fussy than ligne claire, more urgent.
image07
…sometimes becoming rougher, becoming more about exposing process, pulling you away from any diegesis and into the real Dasein:
image03
…reminding me of Jason Miles:
EPSON MFP image
EPSON MFP image
There is silly formal play reminding me of my favorite Tim Hensley strip:
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…or John Hankiewicz:
image11
Symbols flow in and out of each other…
image06
Qviet reads to me like Andy Burkholder’s id expressed through all the comics and philosophy he’s ingested. It’s associational rather than surrealistic.
image05
My songs aren’t dreams. They’re more of a responsive nature…
-Dylan
The creative process requires these moments of brainstorming, allowing the raw data of the amygdala to coalesce into these illogical chunks that often work like poetry or koans…
These strips are the detritus of good and bad culture filtered through Andy’s lizard brain.
And the sex is just a vehicle to explore anxiety about unfulfilled desire.
“What’s the matter, Molly, dear
What’s the matter with your mound?”
“What’s it to ya, Moby Dick?
This is chicken town!”
-Dylan
Wrapped up neatly in an elegant object that perpetrates the lie that there is some logic in this mess, some inherent organizing principle that will shine through.
The neat package doesn’t resolve nicely. There is no climax. It’s Andy Burkholder’s Basement Tapes.
Such a great book.
PREVIEW OF ANDY BURKHOLDER’S “QVIET”
Home / In English / Preview of Andy Burkholder’s “Qviet”
Standard by JustIndieComics June 11, 2015 No Comments
Andy Burkholder’s new book Qviet, published by 2D Cloud, has officially debuted at CAKE last weekend, amplified by an exhibition at the Learning Machine Gallery featuring the entire collection, open through June 19th. Initially appearing on Tumblr in 2011 as the work of an artist operating under the sole name of Tracy, Qviet intrigued the underground community for not only the mystery surrounding its creator but also for its unique style. In one-page comics, Burkholder revisited the language of the strip with an avant-garde attitude. The lines, the shapes, the symbols are the core of his work, particularly in the initial phase, but at the same time they’re a starting point to move from the abstract to the physical, investigating sexual themes with irony and stark realism. Over time, the line became thicker and so Burkholder created more accomplished comics, very incisive and also refined. Below a preview of the 248-page book, in stores on June 15th for $22.95.
Five comics artists to watch from 2015's 'Best American Comics'
By Carolina A. Miranda
One comic takes place in an apocalyptic near future in which demons are chased away by the music emanating from a record player. Another explores what became of the Greek gods of myth after their popularity waned. A biographical comic explores the life of birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. These are just a few of the roughly three dozen stories featured in the 2015 edition of "Best American Comics," released this fall by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
The series was guest edited by author Jonathan Lethem, who is not a stranger to the form: The title of his 2003 novel, "The Fortress of Solitude," was inspired by the name of Superman's headquarters. And in 2007, he collaborated with artist Farel Dalrymple on a series for Marvel called "Omega the Unknown."
"He's informed enough about comics to be credible," says series editor Bill Kartalopolous, a comics critic and curator who also teaches at New York's New School for Design. "But he is also an outsider from the literary world — an outsider who knows a lot about visual art."
"The Best American Comics 2015," guest edited by novelist Jonathan Lethem, with series editor Bill Kartalopoulos, features cover art by Raymond Pettibon. (HMH)
As in years past, this edition of "Best American Comics" features work by a wide gamut of artists — including established figures, such as whimsical New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast and Joe Sacco, who uses the form for profound explorations of war. But as always, the book contains surprises too: experimental comics published as zines or on Tumblr or created as an intricately silkscreened accordion book.
This year, quite interestingly, the compilation also features the work of L.A. artist Raymond Pettibon, who contributed an original drawing for the cover. Though comics are often cited as a point of inspiration for Pettibon's art, which often pairs text and images, his work is rarely classified as such since it is most often pinned to a wall in gallery settings.
"We have cultural assumptions about what comics should look like," Kartalopoulos says. "But Raymond's work represents a potential counter-narrative ... the possibility of comics made for installation, where the book becomes the secondary documentation of an experience that works in three dimensions."
"Best American Comics" also features work by plenty of other artists who are pushing the boundaries of the form. I spoke with Kartalopoulos about five of them:
Matthew Thurber
The artist behind the series "Infomaniacs" captures a hybrid analog/digital world.
Thurber's comic, though hand-drawn, incorporates myriad clever nods to the digital sphere — such as a pop-up ad of a dog floating over a traditional sequence of comic book panels. (Matthew Thurber / HMH)
Matthew Thurber was born in Washington state and now lives in New York City, where he and his wife, painter Rebecca Bird, operate the artist-run Brooklyn gallery Tomato House. His series "Infomaniacs" takes elements of the digital realm and places them into the real world, such as a character who uses Photoshop tools to erase an adversary.
"Talk about post-Internet art," Kartalopoulous says. "So much work these days seems to be to show how cool you are with the Internet. But in Matthew's work there is a love-hate statement that comes from an unavoidable entanglement with digital media. I still can't get over the page with the pop-up on it [above]."
"By performing these mash-ups, where people are using Photoshop layers in the real world, it kind of points to how quickly things get reified by the culture," he adds. "You get this explosive new tool kit, but pretty much everyone is using it in the same way. By transplanting it into reality, Matthew makes the familiar strange again. He shows us how quickly this stuff has become familiar to us — at the same time that he's being very entertaining."
Henriette Valium
A wildly ornate approach to drawing in "Lâcher de Chiens."
The Montreal-based artist's hyper-detailed panels evoke a French style of cartooning, as seen in this detail published in "Lâcher de Chiens." (Henriette Valium / HMH)
The French Canadian artist Henriette Valium (born Patrick Henley) has been making art since the 1980s but has had limited visibility in the United States. His work feels like a mash-up of Wild Style graffiti, Sunday funnies and the Rococo — a place where decaying urban settings, cartoonish violence and Churrigueresque levels of decorative embellishment give every panel the feel of a hallucination.
"It's like it's heavily embroidered and you see all of these weird patterns in the background," Kartalopoulos says. "There's a sense of everything being braided to the point of almost losing its intelligibility as graphics. It is purely expressive in a very concrete way."
"I think his work is very strongly connected to a French tradition of exquisitely rendered grotesque images in the service of transgressive content," he adds. "You see this emerge in France in the late '70s with artists like the Bazooka Group, Pascal Doury and Bruno Richard. They come out of this kind of punk aesthetic, producing extreme art, extremely rendered. It's the kind of work that is most strongly sustained today by a publishing house called Le Dernier Cri in France."
English-speaking audiences can expect more from Valium soon. A larger work titled "The Palace of Champions" will be published by Conundrum Press in 2016.
Gina Wynbrandt
"Someone Please Have Sex With Me" is both tragic and comical.
Executed in a simple style, with bubbly colors, Wynbrandt's story lines are quite the opposite, dealing with abject themes. (Gina Wynbrandt / HMH)
"Look at this comic from three feet away, and it looks really cute," says Kartalopoulos. "But then you get close to it and it depicts a lot of direct sexual content." Gina Wyndbrandt's "Someone Please Have Sex With Me" plays with conventions of style and color, featuring pleasingly feminine sherbet-y tones juxtaposed against a story line about a woman looking for love in all the wrong places — in all the wrong ways.
Wynbrandt is from Chicago, where she is best known — and is reflective of the ways in which alternative comics can remain a distinctly regional phenomenon.
"A lot of small-press work is not very well distributed," Kartalopoulos says. "In the '80s, alt comics always had a safe space within a comic book store. But comic book stores have increasingly turned into media opportunities for superhero franchises, selling statues and video games. So you have this rising wave of alt comics that aren't quite suited for the graphic novel section in bookstores, and comic book stores are less hospitable to them."
"I ran into Gina's work at a Chicago festival called Cake," he says. "She's young, in her 20s, but the work is very powerful. There's a really striking sense of self-deprecation and self-parody, but it's combined with the ability to take a mature perspective on her own life and possible future choices. And the art is very strong — it has an almost photo reference kind of look, like clip art, but way more specific."
David Sandlin
Painterly renderings in "Manifestations of American Destiny"
Sandlin uses silkscreening techniques to produce his elaborate works, which are made in very small editions. (David Sandlin / HMH)
Originally born in Ireland, David Sandlin moved to the U.S. as a teenager and now lives in New York, where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts.
"He teaches silkscreen print-making, and his students come out producing these beautiful silkscreened books," Kartalopoulos says. "His work is cross-disciplinary. David works in oil painting, he creates silkscreened books, he has produced off-set printed books with publishers like Fantagraphics. Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly included him in 'Raw' around 1990."
The work excerpted by "Best American Comics" is part of a screen-printed artist book called "Manifestations of American Destiny," distributed in limited numbers as a cloth-bound volume. The book opens accordion style into a 360-inch tableau of intricately silkscreened images.
"As you unfold it, you get this Mad magazine fold-in quality occurring over and over again," Kartalopoulos says. "At each stage in the process, two panels side by side cohere to form a sort of third image. It's very elaborately constructed."
Like many contemporary comics artists, Sandlin straddles a range of practices — just as his narratives straddle the murky divide between fine art and popular culture.
"All of his work is interconnected with this overarching mythology," Kartalopoulos says. "This portrait of himself and his family against history, and the puritanical underpinnings of American society and how it intersects with capitalism. There is this apocalyptic imagery that has to do with evangelical Christianity and apocalyptic movements in American culture. It's a remarkably sustained body of work and remarkably consistent."
Andy Burkholder
The artist's "Pretty Smart" experiments with the nature of language
Burkholder's drawings capture the tiniest bits of action and his stream-of-consciousness texts channel Gertrude Stein. (Andy Burkholder / HMH)
Comics can be as experimental in their art and format as they are in the texts they convey. Such is the case with the work of Andy Burkholder, another artist from Chicago featured in this year's compilation. "Pretty Smart" features a stripped-down drawing style in which the action is minimal, but the text is quite experimental, featuring a repetitive cadence of half phrases.
"He's really engaged with language in this piece and the drawing is very precise," Kartalopoulos says. "The language has that Modernist, stream-of-consciousness Gertrude Stein kind of aspect — in counterpoint to these precisely rendered sequences of fixed images. It speaks to the fluidity of language. It revisits that stream-of-consciousness language from the early 20th century, from the point of view of the early 21st century, when the distraction of digital media has fragmented our own thoughts and attention."
"Pretty Smart" was also a bit of a departure for the artist, previously best known for a work called "Qviet,", a series of loose drawings that dealt with themes of sex and eroticism.
"It was posted on Tumblr over the course of a year and then published as a book," Kartalopoulos says. "It was very abstract at times. So what's interesting about the new work is how different it is. It highlights the breadth that the artist is capable of."
WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2016
2dcloud: Blaise Larmee, Andy Burkholder
Following up on my recent Minnesota post, let's take a look at one of Minneapolis's finest: 2dcloud. The publisher, Raighne Hogan, is a cartoonist in his own right, but he's made a splash thanks to his willingness to take risks with avant garde, eccentric and boundary-pushing comics. Hogan's put interesting work back in print, printed the work of locals, given homes to more-widely read cartoonists who needed a new publisher, published the work of emerging cartoonists and he's even gone the international route. At the moment, 2dcloud is running a kickstarter in an effort to support publishing some pretty remarkable books. Here are some reviews of releases from the past couple of years.
Ice Cream Kisses and Comets Comets, by Blaise Larmee. I've been following Larmee's career since his earliest minicomics to his most recent books. Despite his frequent online forays into deliberately provocative, Dada/Situationist-style culture-jamming, Larmee is an artist who has consistently been 100% committed to whatever he's writing about. In some cases, like Young Lions, his stories were about concepts like erasure and the nature of relationships and art scenes, which was a bit of an ouroboros. In Ice Cream Kisses, Larmee instead explores sexual longing and fantasy. The structure of the book is an extended Skype session between a young man and a young woman, in which we hear the fantasies of the man and see them played out on the page by Larmee. It is important to distinguish between fantasy and reality here, No one actually has sex in the story, other than masturbation. The images we see are fuzzy, even if they are explicit. In many respects, they represent images in the man's mind. Another interesting thing about the book is that we only hear the man's perspective in all of this; Larmee does not allow the reader to hear anything the woman has to think or say. In that sense, the intimacy portrayed here is as imaginary as the sex itself, and the dialogue is deliberately coarse. There is some affection proffered, but this is an extended look at lust and the ways in which levels of separation both heighten and frustrate that lust. The result is a 122-page shaggy dog sex joke without a punchline, which was designed to put the reader through that same experience of unquenchable arousal and fantasy as the narrator. It's an in-between state, a limbo state, and so the end in many ways was as arbitrary as the beginning. Larmee could have accomplished roughly the same thing in a hundred less pages, but that would defeat the purpose of the experience for the narrator, for the reader and perhaps for Larmee himself.
Comets Comets is a mini drawn by Larmee in his Young Lions/C.F. style, featuring an interview conducted by an unnamed young woman and "celebrity artist couple" Hall Hassi and Davidson Middle. Not surprisingly, it's an imaginary interview with imaginary artists who discuss their imaginary careers using celebrity in conjunction with feminism, using tools like webcams to disseminate their work far and wide. Larmee deliberately uses heavy colors to obscure some of the lettering in the comic, refusing to grant the reader the privilege of knowing all that was said among the three characters. Hassi is an extended internet creation of Larmee's, who loves playing with the concepts of identity, fame and creation in an internet world where fame is arbitrary and viral, identity can shift or easily be hidden and manipulated, and repurposing art and images is more rampant now than ever. Like I said, when Larmee commits, he really commits, and he never breaks character in either comic.
Qviet, by Andy Burkholder. Here's one way to describe this book: it's 300 pages of single-page strips about sex. That doesn't begin to address the contents of the book, however, as Burkholder's daring, weird, innovative and trippy use of line bends and warps his figures in the act of fucking in a myriad of ways. From barely-sketched out figures that transform into objects mid-coitus to cartoony figures who have sex to naturalistically drawn figures that provide the strangest backdrop of all, Burkholder goes through sex in every permutation. As opposed to Larmee's comic that simply imagines sex, Burkholder's figures, even at their most abstract, have a raw and real quality to them as all pretenses are dropped and the fetishes and desires of the characters are laid bare on the page. Some of the strips are intensely erotic, some are played for laughs, and some become Dada punchlines. In each of them, Burkholder adds a title that creates a humorous frisson, piling a conceptual joke atop a visual one. Later in the book, the strips are "vandalized", as Burkholder scribbles over the original strip with thicker lines and ink blots--he's jamming his own work! I took it to mean that the creation of these strips was no clinical and calculated event, but rather as transformational and joyous for the artist as they were for the reader. As such, there were times when he simply "lost control", and these clever id-inspired strips were truly overrun by the id unfettered. In many respects, they resembled bathroom stall graffiti.
In further contrast with Larmee's book, the denseness of Burkholder's work never feels punishing or unnecessary. While it took me a while to get through it (it's best read in twenty to thirty page bursts), every strip proved to be as startling and unpredictable as the next. Burkholder's conflation of geometric shapes with sex organs gave them an elastic quality, leading to any number of different punchlines. On the inside front cover, there is an oblong shape next to a hole, with an arrow pointing from the phallus to the opening. It's a funny gag, but it's also a recapitulation of the entire book: humanity's obsession with putting things inside of holes and having holes that need to be filled. From this admittedly ridiculous image comes all of human desire, and Burkholder gives an honest account of all kinds of desires, fetishes, attractions, and practices in all their glorious silliness. Some of the desires are dark and destructive, some lead to self-destruction or exploitation of others and still others simply reflect what it is to be alive and embodied. From frantic to gentle, from densely penciled to barely suggesting form, from visceral to theoretical, Burkholder feverishly journals what it is to be a sexual being.
POSTED BY ROB CLOUGH AT 3:00 AM
LABELS: ANDY BURKHOLDER, BLAISE LARMEE
‘ITDN’ by Andrew Burkholder
Here’s a great compilation of works from 2D Cloud by author Andy Burkholder, ‘ITDN’. Burkholder is a penis that can’t stop jizzing. The ideas are constantly spewing out of him at about 25 miles an hour and whereas the rest would be one and done he just keeps flowing like a syrupy fountain of sweet sticky comix love. He’s a faucet that’s been left on and forgotten about, coming home from vacation to find that your apartment is now an aquarium full of little fish and turtles swimming around in this brand new ecosystem and Lucy Ricardo frantically trying to plug up the source. His ideas seem to come so quick that his hand can’t keep up with them so his drawing style remains quite loose and changes fairly often even though its obvious the dude has serious drawing chops.
A fanboy cannot keep track of everything, I buy as many minis as I can, but I totally did not get on the Burkholder train until the comp ‘Qviet’ was published a while back. Well, I also bought that graphic novel he did that was stuffed in a manilla envelope but I think that’s all I’ve got. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to encounter these fuckers as minis, as I assume they were originally published, because they’re goddamn real art. Little gems, little pearly gems.
The piece ‘CHRIS’ rings like modern day Crumb. Crumb used to do those stream of consciousness, LSD inspired, few pagers back in Zap and other places that were fun but also a terrifying look into a demented mind struggling with sex and abuse and the times he lived in. Burkholder’s ‘CHRIS’ tells me that, at least for a little bit, times have gotten somewhat better because it is a relaxed and open song of a head split open and dumping its patterns onto the page. Its obvious free-association is not lots into the realms of overdone or mindless surreal because he’s an intelligent kid and the connections have the with of Python while stilly wholly being the product of the author and without reference or compare; just a great glimpse into a mind that is really digging around corners and having fun with it.
I guess maybe that would be my only criticism of Burkholder’s work is that he’s got a pretty sizable output already and it all rings of experimentation and questing, of developing voice and style in preparation for the ‘big one’ that big story that the comics maker is gonna write but I, as a reader, really don’t mind because these comics experiments have a real joy behind him and they are way more fun to read than watching your wealthy trust fund baby friend’s instagram photos of their travels to Kiribati. Burkholder’s experiments and travels in the comics realm are real fun to watch from the sidelines so I take back that criticism.
I live on a bus for a good part of the year, touring a show, and Burkholder’s comics ring of the inside jokes that come out of extended travel and extended close quarters. ‘The Tendersons by Colby Tenderson’ is the kind of repetitive gag we would be riffing on constantly to each other on those long drives. Or I wish we did instead of this tour’s constant references and repetitions of Steve Brule, theres’ other comedy out there folks!!
And the story ‘A Poetic Conception of Reality’, a bitter and truthful statement on the state of things; of the artist as a somewhat elevated individual not wrapped up in the trappings and the brainwashings of the times but still totally terrible in that their only response is to often isolate and clique… which is no kind of defense and no contribution. And, if one flips back and forth around the pages of the book often, the few pages of ‘Gags’ elevate the book into some real insane corners as he riffs on the style of Jerry Van Amerongen and others of that terrible ‘not quite good enough to work in editorial cartoons but too good to settle into ‘Cathy’ style pap’ cartooning pastiche.
Go to 2d Cloud and buy this compilation, its freaking awesome: http://2dcloud.com/
ANDY BURKHOLDER’S WEBSITE IS HERE: http://andyburkholder.com/