A ‘Primal Paper Forest’

Near the end of the third volume of CF’s hermetic, hallucinatory fantasy series Powr Mastrs, a character named Pico Farad rips a bit of wiring out of a machine. Pico is a collector of magical objects, which he keeps in an array of little square drawers that looks a lot like a vast grid of comics panels, and this “very beautiful” machine, he tells us, “makes,” among other things, “stories.” “I had to fix it, so I broke part of it!” he declares. “That’s how it is sometimes—you have to rip something out—and not replace it—leave an empty space.”

It is hard not to see this scene as a sideways declaration of artistic principles. Pico’s odd method of repair is what CF has been doing to the comics form throughout his career: breaking it to make it work, ripping it to pieces to produce something new. To read his work is to learn a series of lessons in the many things that can be disrupted in a comic, and the many things that can be left out. His comics are full of scribbles and smudges, of drawings and whole pages that look half-finished at best, stories that seem to stop the moment they come into focus. He uses elements from all the traditional genres—superhero and adventure comics, sci-fi, fantasy, gag cartoons, crime, action, pornography—but always in off-kilter, often deliberately nonfunctional ways. They are “crippled and destabilized,” as he once put it.

And yet the mayhem is balanced by a surprising elegance, an attention to stillness and empty space that sets him apart from anarchic fellow-travelers like Brian Chippendale and Mat Brinkman. His plotting is not just fragmentary but suggestive and poetic. His comics don’t necessarily “end,” but they do climax, one way or another, and they never overstay their welcome. They have a surprising way of blooming into stillness and beauty at their most disorienting moments, of turning on a dime from violent scratching to sinuous curves. It is this mix that has made him one of the most imitated cartoonists of the twenty-first century, and one of the most inimitable.

Christopher Forgues, as he was born, grew up in rural Massachusetts, and began publishing comics as an art student in Boston in the late 1990s. They were generally brief mini-comics—gnomic, fragmentary, occasionally non-narrative—that he Xeroxed in very small batches and distributed himself, a practice he continued after moving to Providence a few years later. In the early 2000s, he also began appearing in anthologies, most notably Sammy Harkham’s influential Kramers Ergot. (CF’s contribution to the fourth volume may well be the highlight of that astounding collection.)

New York Review Books

A panel from CF’s ”Crate Cauldron,” published in Kramers Ergot #7, 2008

New York Review Books

Panels from CF’s “Crate Cauldron,” published in Kramers Ergot #7, 2008

The three volumes of Powr Mastrs, published by PictureBox between 2007 and 2010, remain his most popular work. They made him arguably the “creator who best exemplifies the present moment in the comics medium,” as the critic Matt Seneca put it at the time. His evocatively casual line work and dramatic use of negative space and narrative ambiguity could soon be seen reflected in a host of other indie comics—they were “absorbed by the comics medium itself,” in Seneca’s words, a new part of “the general idiom of comics shorthands and techniques.” The series is his longest continuous narrative, with a large, complexly interlocking group of characters and an extensive fictional world, the island of Known New China; each volume begins with a map and several pages laying out the cast. Though wildly multifarious in tone and style compared with most other comics, Powr Mastrs is, by the standard of CF’s other work, restrained. It is strange but never quite incomprehensible, occasionally rough-hewn but never truly chaotic. The characters and settings are always recognizable as themselves, if not necessarily as anything from the world we know.

One can feel CF chafing at these constraints, especially in the third volume, in which several chapters serve as excuses to incorporate other styles and unconnected stories. A bored prisoner sifting through fantastical memories to pass the time results in several of “Jim Bored’s Fantasy Classics,” and Pico’s story-machine, when it is briefly functional, delivers a deranged installment of something called “Hang Airborg!!!” That volume showed no signs of being a finale—it ends on a gentle cliffhanger, in fact—yet it has turned out to be one, at least so far. A fourth Powr Mastrs was announced, and a handful of pages appeared in a self-published preview pamphlet in 2014, but the book itself never emerged. CF hasn’t published a story approaching one of its volumes in size since, let alone another series. Perhaps some things need to be left unreplaced.

In the third volume of Powr Mastrs, at the bottom of the table of contents, CF includes a note expressing his impatience with his growing influence: “I see you people try to bite my work—dissapointing [sic]—follow your own star!” In the shorter comics he produced before and during his work on Powr Mastrs—now collected in Distant Ruptures—he had done just that. They are more various, more experimental, at times much rougher, at others more polished. His style grows a little more elaborate as the years go by, but even the earliest, most minimalist comics show his unique mix of scuzzy visual noise and dainty harmony, and his slantwise storytelling. He sometimes seems to be reinventing comics from first principles, letting stray marks and words drift in and out of coherence, assembling some strange new world only to smash it into pieces. It’s in these short works that one can see the full breadth of CF’s achievement in the first decade of his career.

One can also see more clearly the vast array of his influences—from Jack Kirby’s dizzying mechanical assemblages and abstract bursts of energy to George Herriman’s unstable landscapes and scruffy, monomaniacal characters, from the cutaway views of classic Batman annuals to the fey perversion of Henry Darger collages—and how thoroughly he has digested them. The brief “Dinosaur Comics” indicates the early importance of Gary Panter, and the longer “Showroom Dummies” his affinity for the isolated striving and offhand violence of Chippendale’s early comics, especially Maggots. But both are looser, more allusive and mysterious than their predecessors.

The range of styles, genres, and approaches collected here is astonishing, a kind of one-man history of the form. “Hearing Loss,” “Castor and Pollux,” and the short sequence of Wizard Acorn comics suggest a sketchier, fragmentary version of the fantasy anti-epic mode he became known for, with its improvisational world-building and inscrutable rivalries. “Castor and Pollux” especially pushes that genre in a very different direction, mixing delicate, pastoral watercolors and unexpected gore into a new sort of fairy tale. (The brief “Out to Bomb,” meanwhile, stars a pair of secondary characters from Powr Mastrs, though in an adventure that would not fit into the continuity of that series.) Elsewhere he is more lighthearted. Goofily haywire “gag” cartoons like “Sex Comic” and “Oh, That Duck” would remain an interest later in his career (there’s a good dose of them at the end of his 2013 collection Mere). The childlike two-page “G.N. Comics” finds a delightful midpoint between anti-comedy and Zen koan. And his hissing, perversely sensuous “Bat-Man” is the best parody of the Caped Crusader since Donald Barthelme’s “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph.”

Brief works like “Younglord” and “Inhalants,” and the excerpts from the Call zine, show him pushing past parody into a kind of abstract scabrousness. Scrawls briefly form into characters and scenes, then disintegrate. Scratchy, distorted text skates back and forth across the edge of legibility—the loopy, blown-up blocks of writing in Call make you feel like you’re trying to read something in a dream. These comics highlight his longstanding interest in improvisation and noise, both visual and musical. (CF is also a musician—with a focus on abstract electronics—and the concert posters and flyers included here show how intertwined the two practices have been.)

This is not just noise for its own sake—though these messier textures are an important aspect of many of CF’s comics—but part of a larger interest in the fundamental building blocks of the form. In many of the works collected here, you can see CF zeroing in on the most basic elements of comics, stripping them down as if to isolate their essence. That is often a large part of their drama: the moment when a mark becomes a symbol, a few lines a face or a body, a few words and images a story or a world; and the moment, too, when they stop being any of that. “Comics are a good medium to work in,” CF once told Vice magazine, “because they are disposable but very important. Stupid but sharp, everywhere and in one place. Moving and still. Art but worthless.” In his roughest works you can see him playing with those paradoxes, trying to create maximally worthless art, maximally artistic trash.

CF consistently foregrounds the quite humble materials and circumstances of a comic’s creation. This book is full of pencil smudges, Xerox artifacts, erasings, crossings-out, and the textures of paint, ink, and paper. Some of these comics were clearly drawn on notebook paper, complete with rules, punched holes, and torn-off edges; others on top of old calendars, or on paper visibly wrinkled from the application of watercolor. Cartoonists traditionally hide these sorts of imperfections via careful inking, whiting-out, scanning, and Photoshopping, but CF does the opposite, inviting the reader into the “entangled primal paper forest,” as Susan Howe described Emily Dickinson’s similarly haphazard manuscript scraps. (Later in his career he would add conspicuous digital coloring to his repertoire, along with a series of comics printed on scrolls of receipt paper dozens of feet long—reading them is a cumbersome, inescapably physical process.) Many of the comics address their origins directly: the table of contents of the Semen mini-comic declares that it was “drawn in 5 hours with General’s ‘Semi–Hex’ 498 & Staedtler Mars Lumograph 100 B”; “Pentel lead sucks,” he notes at the beginning of “Dominion Ambulance.”

That comic is the only example in Distant Ruptures of CF working in collaboration with another artist—the dark, smeary coloring is by the cartoonist Leomi Sadler. (This not to say that CF was otherwise working in isolation: many of his early comics originally appeared in the enormously influential zine Paper Radio, which he co-created with Ben Jones.)¹ The drawings of “Dominion Ambulance,” however, are pure CF: the thin, evenly weighted line work feels like some ne’er-do-well offspring of ligne claire and Art Nouveau, when it isn’t breaking into near abstraction or near-emptiness. It’s an unusually gloomy example of what I think of as CF’s High Style, when the surface noise recedes and his drawings become more elaborate, more harmonious, and often more colorful. This (relatively) controlled, polished mode allows him to more subtly interweave tones and genres: as “Dominion Ambulance” follows its protagonist’s dual careers of ambulance driver and cat burglar, it loops through horror, melodrama, and retro crime fiction before ending on a note of dread and uncertainty.

More typical of High CF is something like the brief “Crate Cauldron,” just a few pages later, with its mix of white space and bright, gently textured colors. “More typical” does not mean “more intelligible,” of course, and its two dense pages are an intricate, disorienting sci-fi revision of the myth of Pandora’s box that starts in a frenzy, somehow escalates, and then suddenly deflates.

“In the Second’s Lair” is a more accessible example, and is probably the single comic by CF that I would give to someone to introduce them to his work. Here, CF turns a simple story—the playful thief Blond Atchen sneaks into the titular lair, “to take what isn’t mine”—into a tour of visual possibilities, moving from clarity to noise, geometric abstraction to biomorphic psychedelia. The delicate lines and floaty foliage of the opening page give way to the coarse patterning of the lair’s entrance tunnel and Atchen’s techno-magical “cloak,” which in turn are supplanted by the clean, impossible geometries of the lair’s interior. As Atchen’s cloak is destroyed by a “cloakeater” and the hapless Bumble Boys attempt to apprehend him, more bulbous, cartoony shapes enter the field, and the narrative becomes almost jaunty—as if we slipped into some demented Tintin scene.

And then the whole thing explodes. Atchen subsumes the Boys into an amorphous mass of gut-like, brightly-colored tubes, then melts them down into an envelope—their horrified faces still intermittently visible as he does so. Atchen’s own body and face are strangely unstable as he celebrates his victory. He declares, “I’ll obliterate this whole field!” Then his words wriggle off into incomprehensibility (the spiky loops CF uses for this lettering are a characteristic motif). The comic snaps in and out of abstraction, pauses for a page in a shadowy, immobile “elsewhere,” and then ends in two-dimensional geometry, like something by Hilma af Klint.

This sort of grand climactic freakout appears throughout CF’s career. Many of his stories don’t so much conclude as disassemble themselves—with consequences for the characters that can be catastrophic or wondrous, or a combination of the two. Some of these scenes are breathtaking in their serene chaos: eruptions of liquid flowers and half-melted corners, tilted grids of color and texture, rainbow amalgams of faces and organs and inscrutable machinery.

The deeper purpose of these scenes becomes clearer as the variations accumulate. Each involves the dissolution of boundaries: between one person and another, between people and objects, between people and the world. One might engulf the other, they might meld into an “alloy” (as happens at the end of his recent graphic novella William Softkey & the Purple Spider), they might return in the end to something like their original forms; the process might be taken as a threat or a blessing or something else altogether. But in every case, there is the sprawling, frozen moment in which all categories are suspended.

“When I draw,” CF has said, “I open myself up…. There’s me, the work, and a third mysterious thing.” He has said that he is not interested in organized religion, and does not use preestablished mystical symbols (which some have occasionally claimed to see in his work). But the “third mysterious thing” remains—the potential for radical communication, or communion, with the outside world. The things that are most baffling in his comics, I think, come from his fascination with that possibility, and from his attempts to depict it: making space on the page for the accidental and undetermined, the marginal scrawlings and material mishaps, and pushing at the boundaries between storytelling and abstraction.

New York Review Books

Panels from CF’s ”Del-X,” published in Kramers Ergot #5, 2004

New York Review Books

Panels from CF’s ”Out to Bomb,” published in Kramers Ergot #6, 2006

One of the most suggestive of these attempts—and one of my very favorite of CF’s comics—comes near the midpoint of this collection. The opening pages of “O. Control” reach back to the dawn of the medium, with stiff vertical figures like something out of Rodolphe Töpffer. The story pokes along (“please read at a medium to slow pace please,” we are told) as the protagonist, Quiet Grace, checks on his garden, receives an odd warning from a man swinging by on a rope, then encounters a rotund stranger in a trance. When he touches the stranger, the comic takes flight: a peculiar smoke billows into Quiet Grace’s body and, as the panels expand and are eventually abandoned altogether, temporarily transforms him into a towering jester-like figure, emitting light and clouds of doodles. After he comes to, he is told he had been taken over by a “Rare Power.” Hosting the entity felt “magnificent,” Quiet Grace reports, but the comic ends in bathos. He and the stranger stare at each other blankly, then Quiet Grace declares that he needs “to go check on my dog.” He has spent a moment beyond his own being, touched some form of godhood, but now it’s back to chores.

I love this comic because it displays CF’s casually comprehensive variety of styles and textures—some pages are drawn on ruled notebook paper, some not; some panels are precise and graceful, others awkward and even childish—and because it embodies the everyday spiritual quest at the heart of his work. Its every line is animated by the faith that comics, if “done well,” as he once said, can be “transcendent enough.”