Can you redeem wasted time by making art out of it?
That’s the question the Belgian cartoonist Olivier Schrauwen asks in SUNDAY (Fantagraphics, 474 pp., $39.99), an enormous, wonderfully funny exploration of the nature of perception and memory. He conducts his research using an unflattering version of his cousin Thibault as his main character, and though Thibault stays inside his little rowhouse for nearly the entire book, “Sunday” is about, well, everything.
Schrauwen is especially trenchant about the nature of language: Thibault is a freelance font designer, and in the book’s sixth chapter, he idly builds a typeface out of the dark spaces in the photos on his friend Nora’s “Instantgram” feed. He begins to think not just in the book’s usual sans-serif font but in these inscrutable glyphs. He wanders past an apparently formless cyanotype print, only to remember the circumstances of its creation, and presto, the image becomes a mildly shocking nude.
These shifts — from meaning to unmeaning and from formlessness to form — give the book a genuine philosophical heft. Yet it’s structured not to be merely pondered, but to be marveled and laughed at: “Sunday” is precisely drawn and rendered in vivid Risograph tones, and its length permits Schrauwen to, say, devote a page to the painful slapstick of Thibault trying disastrously to do a James Brown-style dancing split. (Our hero can’t get “Sex Machine” out of his head, and, as you read the book, you will share this frustration.) It’s a masterpiece of openness, a book devoted to locating every kind of experience in as small a space as possible.
Schrauwen is far from the only cartoonist conducting these investigations. Chris Ware has built a career as a sort of astronaut exploring the nature of the consciousness, using his own intellect as a spaceship, and he has established a few themes in his gorgeous dispatches from the recesses of inner space: the inadequacy of his own abilities to this task; the capacity of comics to mimic memory; nostalgia and a corresponding suspicion of it. In his new volume, THE ACME NOVELTY DATE-BOOK, VOLUME THREE (Drawn & Quarterly, 209 pp., $40.95), the last in a trio of sketchbook compilations, all of these are disrupted by something wholly inimical to the tranquil contemplation of the self: fatherhood.
For all his railing against technology, much of the book is devoted, delightfully, to the kind of kids-say-the-darnedest-things material that festoons less artistically gifted parents’ Facebook pages. Ware explored childhood itself in his amazing “Rusty Brown,” and asides in his “Monograph” contain a more dispassionate examination of his own experience of the new parent’s weird hormonal exuberance and crippling fatigue; but in the third “Date-book,” we get to see him in the midst of it all, faced with the problem of a little person who not only makes him happy but also vocally refutes his cozy self-deprecation.
I can’t imagine the book’s ironies and contradictions are anything but intentional — Ware’s work is extremely careful. Here he publishes one beautiful pen-and-ink drawing after another, many of them annotated with delicately inscribed invectives bemoaning their low quality, but halfway through the book he draws an image of what looks like his own drafting board — a clock, a pencil sharpener, some blank paper. The picture is composed so as to draw your eye to the only messy thing: a scrawled little note that says “I love your art Daddy.” It is, perhaps, a graduation from self-deprecation to a healthier self-denial, the admission that, despite your convictions to the contrary, you might not be that bad after all.
Popular superhero comic artists sometimes settle into a comfortable style, but not Frank Miller. It’s all the more shocking to see Miller return to an early work with RONIN RISING (Abrams, 192 pp., $40), a sequel to “Ronin,” his 1983 sci-fi tale about a young man who becomes the avatar of an ancient warrior doomed to fight an immortal demon for all eternity.
The new book is written and laid out by Miller and drawn primarily by Philip Tan and Daniel Henriques, a penciler-inker team whose work is far more detailed than Miller’s. The effect emphasizes the pages’ compositions, which are remarkable: “Ronin Rising” is twice as wide and about half as long as its predecessor, and the panels sometimes stretch across its entire open width — or across four pages in the smaller edition, which is being published simultaneously in a format about the size of a manga volume. There are fewer characters here — the villain is the sentient computer, Aquarius, from the first “Ronin,” and her noble adversary is Casey, the original Ronin’s beloved in the first book.
Halfway through the new volume, Miller takes over drawing duties from Tan and Henriques, and these pages are revelatory. As a draftsman, Miller seems to be not his old self, but his next self. As a writer, he now has some odd tics — a lot of repetition for emphasis on pages that are already operatic — but there is, finally, a sense that he has a plan for the next kind of story he wants to tell.
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