So, I’m sorry, what was I saying? Ah, yes, Kevin Huizenga. Easy enough for the mind to wander, these days. After conducting a mental inventory it occurs to me it has been many years since my first reflections on the subject - some two decades ago, if memory serves me well. Ah, yes, Kevin Huizenga. I knew him well. A fellow of infinite digression.
We’re looking at Fielder #2, which came out towards the end of last year but just recently found its way to my house. One day there was a knock on the door, and on the doorstep there was a copy of Fielder #2. “Hello,” said I, to Fielder #2, “welcome, welcome, we’ve been expecting you.” Five years, actually, since the first issue of Fielder was released, but who’s counting? I don’t know how to count.
You know what Huizenga does really well? Might as well start somewhere: he knows how to pace a single-issue comic book really well. Fielder #2 is magazine-sized but still only 32 pages, printed on nice creamy stock, two colors: black & green. Olive, actually, with orange as well for the cover. Filled mostly but not solely with stories about Huizenga’s signature character, Glenn Ganges, and the incredibly low-wattage adventures of him, his wife, Wendy, and their various acquaintances. The parts that aren’t devoted to Ganges are split between different features. In the first place, we have Deleted Scenes from “Fight or Run,” a long-running non-narrative feature that provides an opportunity for Huizenga to indulge his most experimental inclinations. In the second, we’ve an adaptation of a poem by Charles Hamilton Sorley, “All the hills and vales along,” written during the First World War by someone who died during that war, at the paltry age of 20. Kevin Huizenga’s world remains as death-haunted as ever.
He’s got a light touch, however. Like I say, pace is the trick here. Fielder feels slightly overstuffed, but somehow all the different pieces fit and the whole thing just hangs together, despite the various features being wildly different in genre and topic, remarkably similar in tone. Approaching the mysteries of human mortality in the same breath as Glenn wandering around the house, staring at his phone, and putting off answering texts and writing e-mails. Quite relatable. You may very well be staring at your phone, and putting off answering texts and writing e-mails as we speak. You may even be lazing about on the sofa, in your bare feet, thinking “our lives are about to change,” while registering absolutely no change in expression or posture. A thoroughly modern mode.
The most elemental image of Ganges remains, for me, the image of him falling asleep below a twilight of heavy black ink: the vision of the character as he appears on the cover of The River at Night. Manifesting the literal stream of consciousness. It would be a mistake, however, to confuse the dilatory narrative in these pages for aimlessness. On the contrary, the story tracks an intricate path through the mental processes of multiple characters, through to Glenn and Wendy’s dueling distractedness, on down to Wendy’s cartooning friend Glenn (not to be confused with her husband Glenn). Every character is a layer in a nesting doll of recursive reminiscences.
It’s the second Glenn who seems to demand attention here. His section is called “The Body of Work Keeps the Score,” and it’s explicitly about the career anxieties of the middle-aged cartoonist. A strange field, cartooning - practitioners don’t get a lot of opportunities to mix and mingle. Once or twice at cons, maybe. Award shows. Glenn 2 and Wendy used to have a (secret) thing, and it colors every subsequent interaction. Of course, Wendy looms larger in the thoughts of Glenn 2 than Glenn 2 looms in Wendy’s thoughts. Wendy is frequently concerned with cigarettes: that is, wanting a cigarette really bad at all times, especially when her husband is talking to her. Huizenga defends himself against accusations of veiled autobiography by filling his stories with characters whose concerns reasonably match those of his demographic. He’s not writing about his life per se. He’s writing about a troupe of fictional avatars created to carry a private discourse.
It’s not that there’s no work for career cartoonists, as Glenn 2 details, but the work often takes the form of long-term projects for children and young adults. Dissatisfying work for anyone who lacks the vocational drive to serve those specific demographics. Perhaps slightly more rewarding work than drawing a Spider-Man spinoff, but only just. “Maybe my next book will redeem all the fuckups and wrong I’ve done,” Glenn 2 muses. Lots of musing! At one point he’s musing in the middle of having sex with someone, brief little sketches of coitus with Glenn 2 thinking all the while about the likelihood of having ADHD.
That’s funny... I laughed, at least. We’re so quick to pathologize these days, ‘tis true - but ‘tis also true that just about everyone I know in my demographic has come to an awareness of ADHD, possibly also autism; quiet self-diagnoses to fill the cracks in our lives left by the fact that no one my age, or Glenn’s age, or Huizenga’s, was ever properly diagnosed with anything. That’s funny, considering the degree to which Huizenga’s branching, dissociative chains of thought shape the form and function of his stories. His work feels now, has always felt, very familiar, defined by a sensation that could almost be labeled “cozy.” His stories are almost always about characters’ thoughts, their most intimate reflections bobbing like buoys against the flotsam of daily life. Two decades ago no one was walking around talking about living with ADHD as an adult, now we’re blanketed in the narrative. Glenn Ganges is the man for this moment. Cognitive disarray in human form.
There is in Huizenga’s style a germ of insouciance around which his brushstroke curls. Extraordinarily pleasing to look at. I see a great deal of Ivan Brunetti now - that same commitment to paring down the lines to reach a maximum of expression through a minimum of strokes. Take a look at the extended passage, early in the issue, of Glenn (1) walking the dog through the neighborhood. Multiple panels of Glenn’s figure at a middle difference against a blank background, arm outstretched holding the leash of the neighbors dog as it strains to explore its surroundings. He’s not even drawing facial features, depending on gesture and body language to communicate the vicissitudes of walking around without your phone while trying to find a place to toss a little plastic bag filled with dog shit. We’ve all been there! Universal experience, quite.
But even if the figures in the neighborhood are stick figures at a distance, the neighborhood itself is a fully realized environment, houses with trees in the yard and cars on the street. The shadows are drawn with grey olive. It’s charming to see that Huizenga either doesn’t really know how to draw a dog very well or draws a weird-looking dog on purpose. Humbling! There’s your pull quote, ready for the back cover: “Huizenga... draws a weird-looking dog.” -The Comics Journal
The “Fight or Run” sections this time around don’t command much in the way of page count, but provide a breather from the book’s relentless interiority. The strips assume the language of a video, specifically a fighting game. A familiar setup: two characters regard each other against a distant background, you control one of the characters and someone else the other. But here we’re not looking at fights - what are we seeing? Dancing? Flexing? Vibrating to the music of the spheres? Abstract entities writhing against George Herriman scenery. Not quite as abstract as abstract could be, mind. There are still recognizable figures and geography. But the action is strange, disconnected from immediate meaning.
He reaches up and grabs you. The recitation of “All the hills and vales along” begins and ends with a shot of the Earth hanging in space, a lush world colored with gray screentone. Verdant in stark black & white. There’s someone who looks a little like Glenn Ganges, carrying a pack and hoisting a rifle as the fields of Europe are fertilized by the blood of veritable children. Why an ode to life and death plucked from the maelstrom of history? Just two pages previous, Glenn, walking the dog, is distracted by the sight of military jets in the air. Is that the bent of his thoughts? Is that too literal a reading of the sequence? It fits, either way.
It all just fits. The Ganges sections here are early chapters in a new longform narrative, something to go next to the just-reissued Curses and the aforementioned The River at Night on the shelf. Documents of the reign of a quiet titan. The cover of Fielder #2 features a portrait of another Huizenga character altogether, Bona, Monarch of Dinosaur Island (like Sam Glanzman's Kona). It’s a close-up, a strange picture of the bust of a muscleman, drawn with economy. A simple, almost Schulzian line, seemingly casual, childish. But compelling. Not many lines, just the right lines.
