A pleasure of returning home is the revisitation of old habits & things. Of particular interest is the book collection. As I’ve roughly 5-6,000 books stored in Rhode Island, I’m unable to bring them wherever I go. When I move, typically I take those books most salient to my present state of mind. This time, the coastal transfer put the kibosh on the deal. I brought 3 books. Strange days.
Knowing that I was coming back to Rhode Island, I had thought about what books I should open while at home– one was Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969, published by PictureBox, and edited by Dan Nadel, the imprint’s founder. When I saw this book at last year’s MoCCA, I bought it on the spot. The concept is great: unsung heroes given the high class presentation ordinarily reserved for the acclaimed Masters of the Form. You know, like Jack Kirby!
I was interested because the book contained some work by Rory Hayes, the oddest of the underground comix oddballs. Hayes was (in the awful and irresponsible manner of the day) metaphorically adopted by the SF scene and embraced as a contemporary. Except he wasn’t– in essence, Hayes was an outsider artist with minimal formal training. He was also about 18. It shows. My favorite (and totally unobtainable) example of early Hayes is CUNT Comics #1:
And that’s only the cover, folks!
Everything here is fantastic: the image’s unbelievable crudeness matched by the execution, the shock joke illustration underscored by the bawdy subhead, and then the hilariously unsubtle parody/worship attribution to “R. Fuck”. It comes across like the epitome of the kind of comic that would be produced by an intellectually precocious, emotionally immature and painfully undersexed 18 year old boy.
The beauty of SF & its underground comix scene was thus: Hayes may have written and drawn CUNT, but someone else published it. (Of course, the print run was only about 100 issues. Which is why it’s impossible to find.)
When I finally read Art Out of Time, I was disappointed– not only had Hayes been given about 5 pages, at most, but the book’s internal categorization of different artists seemed utterly random and meaningless. We’re talking about “Exercises in Exploration,” “Slapstick,” “Acts of Drawing,” “Words in Pictures,” and “Form and Style.” None of which inform the reader of anything besides someone’s memories of foundation year courses in art history & theory.
The categories wouldn’t be a problem if they in any way were defined. They’re not. Each has a terse, one-to-two paragraph introductory blurb as vague as the names. Furthermore, after a section has been introduced, other than changing names at the top of each right page, the artists appear one after the other with no break. This might be an appropriate if new each artist was different from the last, but this is often not the case.
Far, far too many pages are given over to the early days of newspaper comics. Two problems: one, the reproductions are small and barely readable. Secondly, few of the artists reproduced are distinct from one another. Most seem typical examples of their day– distinguished either by a supposed lack of formalism, or too much formalism, or a Strangeness of Content.
Given that the artists best loved from the early period of newspaper comics– McCay, Herriman, and Segar, for example– all produced unbelievably weird work & were all masters of the form, one starts wondering about the integrity of the book’s core concept. After 13 pages of Harry J. Tuthill bleeds into 13 pages of C.W. Kahles, this impression is only reinforced. Even more baffling is that the truly distinct artists, like Hayes, or like Fletcher Hanks or George Carlson, have significantly fewer pages than the aforementioned Tuthill or Kahles.
Hanks is what had me re-reading Art Out of Time. There’s been a lot of discussion of his work lately, brought on by the forthcoming Fantagraphics book. I’d found the online scans of Hanks’s work hard to read, so I had hoped that Art Out of Time might be an alternate resource. Inevitably, I was disappointed: there’s only one story, and while great, it’s 8 pages long. By contrast, it’s followed by 17 Sundays of Garrett Price’s White Boy, the most interesting feature of which is its title.
My final complaint, and a not insignificant one, is that the last 12 pages of the book contain breezy and uninformative biographies of the artists. While I recognize that space constraints determine the length of such things, I find these entries to be particularly uselessness.
Think I’m exaggerating? Let’s quote from the Rory Hayes bio:
“He, like Fletcher Hanks, drew without reference to any known world besides the one inside his head.”
And what does the Fletcher Hanks bio read?
“All of his work is crude, but like Rory Hayes, completely self-assured.”
Both artists are part of the ACTS OF DRAWING section of the book, and their bios are separated by less than two pages. What do these two sentences even mean? I assure you, they’re not taken out of context.
With Art of Time, you ain’t gotta worry about no context.
