A couple books, so far, have really stood out among my purchases from last weekend’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and they couldn’t be more different from each other. The first is a lurid looseleaf folder of oversized story pages from (I’m guessing) the former singer of the Load Records band Coughs, providing a free-associative tour through education reform featuring sci-fi Buddhist monks, or something. The second collects webcomics by a Toronto-via-Nova-Scotia cartoonist, who pulls off high-concept lo-brow hi-jinx with brassy aplomb. With both, though, I’m having a disconcerting amount of trouble trying to figure out what exactly it is that I like so much about them. So let me have a think on this…
Anya Davidson’s Consciousness 3 Volume 1 (or at least I think that’s the title) comes enclosed in a huge 17.5 x 21 inch portfolio and comprises 14 massive story pages followed by 6 unnumbered single image prints and one smaller sheet of credits. Using the iconography of metal, horror, sci-fi, and all that rad Misfits stuff, with feints toward Goya’s ghouls and grotesques, it’s all printed in a soup of subtly changing solid colour the artist has dubbed “horrifying puke-o-vision.” (I wish I knew enough about printing to name the exact process here—the colour lies in deep sloppy layers on the page, slightly off-register, the clashing hues completely unnatural.)
The main story, called “Groovin’ on the Rubble,” is about a surprising number of things, given its short page count, but seems to find its centre around Jerry Rubin, the ’60s activist-turned-stockbroker and member of the Chicago Seven, whose phrase about enjoying the destruction of the establishment gives this work its title. Rubin—who isn’t mentioned by name in the story—first appears as the subject of conversation between two friends, one of whom objects to his selling out, while the other still stumps for some of his ideas. In a nearby panel (Davidson’s sequencing is often open-concept, with images scattered across each page), a green-bearded, orange-skinned Rubin look-alike stands stark naked in a wasted landscape, saying “We’re finally free.” In the bottom corner of the page is another Rubin, fully clothed in front of a microphone, mouthing the words of a speech he delivered in 1968: “If there ever was a meatball, it’s school.”
Davidson continues to play out these strands in the rest of the story—the friends continue to argue, while the naked Rubin voyages on some kind of vision quest, completing his counterpart’s speech and vanquishing evil figures of authority and an imperious, ghoulish teacher. Other threads weave their way through the story, including: excerpts from a music video and short film playing on a late-night creature-feature television show; scenes from a depressive/romantic English professor’s lecture and home life; single-panel portraits seemingly unconnected from the narrative; a dramatic illustration of the Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth; and a science-fictionalisation of Bodhidharma’s meditations, legacy, and quest, proposed as counterpoints to the example set by Rubin.
You’ll forgive my reliance on mere description in the above, but I want to convey just how incredibly thick Davidson makes this short comic seem, as though a world extends from it on every side—several worlds, even. Davidson’s people go home to loved ones, talk about concepts with real import and consequence, have intellectual pursuits, and generally try and figure out how to exist in the world, as beings with both a moral and a physical existence. If a brand of earthy junkshop philosophising takes up most of the comic—how should we communicate, how should we educate, how should we live—it ends with an eruption of the corporeality that runs in undercurrents throughout.
It’s a freewheeling freak-out of a finale, in which the Chaucer- and Leonard Cohen-quoting professor/animal not seen since the story’s beginning recites Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights! Wild Nights!” with his wife, freeing that poem’s pent-up emotions by making literal its kinda dirty conceits. The poem ends, suggestively, “Might I moor, tonight / In thee!” and what follows on the bottom three quarters of the page is a kaleidoscope of coupling, with the printing process overlapping and blending colours and shapes rather than keeping them apart, and the panels all entirely silent and thematically linked for the first and final time in the story. It’s a celebration of pure raunch, sure enough, executed in Davidson’s big-shouldered, gestural brushstrokes. But it’s also a defiant answer to the rest of the strip’s destruction and denial of bodies—by monsters, by doctors, by mothers, and by over-academic boyfriends who think they know better (“I wish I was just a brain”). This is weird, puzzling, exhilarating stuff.
The injunction in the title of Kate Beaton’s new book, Never Learn Anything from History, is a canny one, and provides one key as to why her work holds so much appeal. I should start off by noting that this stuff is so handsome, funny, and addictively re-readable, that it’s tempting to let such strong qualities stand on their own, as though one glimpse at the right strip should convince anybody of her work’s merits. It always bears repeating just how great these strips look. There’s something of an incipient Feiffer in Beaton’s deceptively quick and off-the-cuff drawing, with every movement of her hand still visible in each line on the page. And what lines these are: one of the main pleasures of reading these strips comes from flouncing around in as many frills and ruffs and waistcoats and epaulets and facial hair and bodices as the human mind can withstand. That Beaton’s work can engage us in so immediate and effortless a fashion is surely one of its chief accomplishments, but delving into this book—her first—allows, too, for a greater appreciation of the playful curiosity which drives these never-miss jokes, and that pretty surface.
Her short, snappy strips, which she’s been posting online for the past couple years, trade mainly in historical subjects and figures both well- and little-known, from the George Washingtons of the world to the John MacBrides. She invests her characters with a silly vigour and volatility that would scandalise any textbook author’s sense of propriety, turning Robespierre into a crazed gameshow host, say, or making Thucydides sound like an internet troll. Beaton also has a fierce fondness for Canadian topics, resulting in paeans to Sandford Fleming’s majestic beard, or features like the Prime Minister Parade (“Pearson you’re too nice to be Prime Minister,” our Lester is told as he tries to hide his Peace Prize). Though these cartoons are often referred to by the title History Comics, this book reminds us that we might more suitably call them Historiography Comics. They’re not so much about some monolithic high school idea of History, that is, so much as they’re about how we’ve come to understand history, how it’s been written and rewritten, and why we should just rewrite it again, rather than ever learn anything from it.
The humour in Beaton’s work is sarcastic and absurd, sure. Screaming fans throw underwear at Tesla, a paranoid Diefenbaker goes power-mad, and Mary Shelley complains that “Byron is nice but he wants to have sex with everything!”—but all this irreverence acts as an opening gambit in Beaton’s ongoing combat with our accepted notions of history. Seeing images of Genghis Khan sipping tea or James Monroe showing off his glutes prepares us to assume from the get-go that everything we know about history is in constant flux, with the actual revisions historians have made coming off no dumber or more truthful than the ones Beaton proposes on a lark. (Anyway, history’s suggestion that Nelson’s last words were “Kismet, Hardy” isn’t a patch on Beaton’s clearly superior version: “Hardy, pretty sure my grandmother kisses better than that.”)
A strip called “The Father of Lies” comes closest to summing up Beaton’s approach to history, and to her comics, when a grinning Herodotus proclaims, “Basically I invented history! That is pretty impressive!” before the Father of History gets called out on his “total shit” inclusion of giant ants in his official records, a remark that quickly spirals off into the cartoonist’s trademark style of lightning-quick back-and-forth (“You’re the father of pain in my ass”, “You’re the father of fat butts”). By citing this example, I mean to say that Beaton is not embarked on some super-serious corrective project or anything, marshalling footnotes and fieldwork to support her arguments, but rather that her comics serve as examples of how we can recontextualise who these people were, anchoring them solidly in our own kind of dumb language and concerns. Accepting history as written is one way to ensure it remains dead; reinvigorating the subject means being willing to come to our own conclusions about it. Kate Beaton’s comics assure us that these can be silly conclusions, or sexy conclusions, or even, and most often, they can be wonderfully, slyly dumb conclusions. Or that’s what I’ve learned from this book, anyway.
I got Anya Davidson’s comic from the Picturebox table at TCAF—maybe you should bother them for more. Kate Beaton’s book will probably be available again sometime in the near future.
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