Never underestimate the power of serendipity, my friends. Case in point: I never would have thought to conceive of Kevin Huizenga and George Wylesol as related, if not for the fact that the past few months have seen the releases of two short story collections from the two, both of them reformatting either cartoonist's respective debut, both of them titled Curses. To be sure, the two are starkly different cartoonists—indeed, their very definitions of comics might wildly diverge—and yet through that very serendipity a comparison renders itself warranted.
Kevin Huizenga's latter-day comics strike me as works of alchemy, restless in their pursuit of novel concepts in both form and content. What has always set Huizenga apart from his contemporaries (Adrian Tomine, for instance) and immediate predecessors (Ware, Clowes) in my eyes is a profound acceptance of the humility of individual emotion. Where many of the '60s- and '70s-born alt-comics cartoonists often appear to relish in, even venerate, a self-effacing and often affected misery, Huizenga's slice-of-life narrative is rich enough in its attempts to look outside of itself that it feels like an actual slice of a life lived; it exists both in and alongside a world whose function is not merely to articulate an externalization of the author's own feelings.
Curses, Huizenga's first collection following several years of minicomics and anthology pieces, is a striking testament to this: its stories vary predominantly between the discursive and the observational, either adapting stories and folktales from centuries past or presenting the ideas of others that Huizenga himself is compelled by.
As Huizenga’s bibliography has progressed and his grasp on Glenn Ganges as a prism has grown sharper, his collections have become infinitely more interlinked; Gloriana appears almost as the comics equivalent of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, a synaptic spiral unfolding in real time, while The River at Night is less a straightforward collection than a novel in vignettes not unlike Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo.1 The pieces in Curses, by contrast, still bear a distinct autonomy and rigidity. One piece in the reprint's wealth of new supplementary material sees Huizenga draw Glenn Ganges as Adam from the Book of Genesis, and the parallel instantly makes sense: even though Glenn is not a complete blank slate—he has a life, he has a personality—he is still viewed by his author as less a traditional character, in-built with narrative timeline, than a perpetual starting-point; he goes even further in a recent interview, framing Glenn as "more like an actor playing a part" than a fixed essence.
An assured work, Curses still exists more readily within its context than later volumes do. Especially in the first story, "Green Tea" (2002), based on the story of the same name by Sheridan le Fanu, there are little details that show that the artist has not shaken off his predecessors quite yet: an expression of helpless perplexity features a toothy Joe Matt-like frown; Glenn sports Peter Bagge-esque rubber-limbs when he is shown running away in fear. These moments of subtle stylistic incongruity are largely nonexistent in later works—by now the artist has learned a more profound integration into holistic style, and we're all the richer for it—but even here they are eclipsed by the strength of the overall work.
Fittingly for a cartoonist whose driving force is the search for underlying patterns and systems, Curses sees Huizenga preoccupied by matters of the spirit, though he takes a tentative, non-committal approach. The most overt piece in Curses in its spiritual discourse, "Jeepers Jacobs" (2004), is also, fundamentally, a critique on the fixity of theoretical assertion. Its focal character, the titular conservative theologian who works with Glenn's brother Wayne, is appropriately well-versed in justification of his doctrine—but the act of justification is always post-hoc, as he is equally engrossed in projection and aspersion. A textbook "good Christian," saying grace and volunteering in soup kitchens, Jeepers lends himself, on occasion, to the occasional flight of Chick Tract fancy: after briefly meeting with Glenn and learning that he isn't a practicing Christian—virtually the only thing he knows about the Huizenga everyman—the theologian effortlessly slides in his internal monologue into picturing Glenn as a sinner equal to Adolf Hitler. Yet, by limiting the viewpoint to a single character, Huizenga essentially sequesters the matter into the form of a debate; it is not an assertion so much as a recognition of dialectical existence. It is possible that this idea is correct, but the opposite is equally valid (even more so given the context of who Jeepers actually is in personality and principle).
But the spiritual is only a part of the equation. Throughout the book you get the sense that a search for the transcendent, while extant, belies a more dominant search for a shared communal infrastructure; to Huizenga, the more urgent pursuit is the elusive, transcendent joy of human connection. The cartoonist articulates this, albeit in a roundabout way, in "Case 0003128-24" (2004), the sole piece in Curses that does away with Glenn entirely. It's also, not coincidentally, the most striking divergence of form in the book, featuring no people at all—only natural landscapes inspired by ancient Chinese ink painting, accompanied by texts from internal files from adoption agencies. Here the cartoonist attempts an interesting contrast: the adoption agent is, of course, an intermediary role at its core, pit against two formal components, visual and narratorial, that are fundamentally mutually alienated. Huizenga himself raises some doubts, in the book's newly-appended backmatter, about the aesthetic of the story, given a now-heightened awareness of cultural appropriation, but the emotional impact remains: the adoption agent expresses hope and optimism for the growth of the child in discussion, framed by cliffs and waterfalls unaware of human existence. Alienation, thus, begets connection: these, too, are equally of the world.
Yet nowhere is the shared nature of the world made clearer than in the centerpiece of the book, a trilogy of stories that originally appeared in the inaugural volume of Drawn and Quarterly Showcase (2003). Here the communal and the sublime are tied up in one another: the first story, "Lost and Found," sees Glenn muse on two concurrent phenomena, mailbox notices of missing children and the flood of Sudanese refugees arriving in Michigan and struggling to find their footings in the environs of the American Midwest, while also coming to terms with the increasing likelihood that he himself will remain childless. In "28th Street" Glenn finds himself searching for an ogre's feather to help him and his wife Wendy conceive a child, while in "The Curse," Glenn, Wendy, and their newborn daughter find themselves plagued by starlings who won't let them—or anyone in their neighborhood, for that matter—get any sleep. Just as Huizenga's scenarios are systematically orchestrated, each incident begetting and corresponding with another, so too are his people; each of these stories is an insistence on positioning Glenn within a societal context, be it political, folkloric, natural, or communal (both in the desperate and disparate people helping him find the ogre and in the shared misery brought on by those pesky birds). Even in coincidence, reality is shared.
The romance of Huizenga's communality is not naïve enough to result in weightlessness; it is filled with reminders that pain is, in fact, extant. The final story in Curses, "Jeezoh" (2004), adapts the Japanese-Buddhist tradition of Jizo Bosatzu (or bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha), guardian deity of children and travelers. Taking Japanese spiritual tradition and transplanting it within the Midwest (while giving the name a Midwest-dialectal twist), it is also a heartrending follow-up to the three Drawn and Quarterly Showcase stories: where "28th Street" showed Glenn relying on folkloric faith in a last-ditch effort to have a kid with his wife Wendy, "Jeezoh" shows Glenn and Wendy turn to faith once more—in mourning that same child. I'm reminded of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' similar use of the parable of Kisa Gotami in the final track of their album Ghosteen, conceived in the wake of the death of Cave's son: an embrace of the pain of loss as an integral part of the fullness of life, and an acceptance of faith not as an escape from that pain but as a framework through which to it. Tradition becomes connection, a bridge that will be there to bear the loads that lonesome travelers struggle with.
And then there's George Wylesol, who feels distinctly more elusive than Huizenga. The cartoonist himself attests that he has few to no influences within comics, as he doesn't read many comics, and it shows. I can make comparisons within his work—there's an MSPaint Martin Vaughn-James feel to his angular, austere environments and uniform weight of line, while his characters have the doomed-by-all-encompassing-evil air of Noel Freibert—yet it feels too insular to claim an intentional connection, and the comparisons feel too specific, too topical to indicate any broader patterns. Echoes, when they come, are more likely to carry hints of Wylesol's other works: the preoccupation with liminal spaces and parallel lives in "Ghosts" (2017) reads like a dry-run for the cartoonist's later 2120; the DeForge-esque wistful Minecraft pastiche "Castle Maker" (not dated, presumably later than 2017) equates the position of the comics reader to first-person video-game experience in a similar way to his longer Internet Crusader.
Nonetheless, a perhaps simplistic but nonetheless immediately true note about George Wylesol: his work is not "inviting." From an aesthetic angle. his geometries are uniformly flat; his line weight is unvarying and mono-textural. Texture, when it does appear, is added onto the art, usually as a faint fuzz effect that accompanies the coloring, added as a final touch. The art, simply put, is not something that you enjoy looking at for much time; look at it for long enough and you inevitably start to wonder if you’re even meant to do so. This is not a value judgment; that coarseness, that purity of signification, has its own brute impact—the sensory experience of looking overpowers most everything else. His cartooning is economical, effective in a lunging sort of way: you are constantly overcome with the immediate recognition of object.
In "The Rabbit" (2015), the protagonist—a point-of-view largely devoid of specific biography, as is often the case with Wylesol's work—reminisces on their childhood visits to a geographically-nonspecific mountainous area. Here we receive a primer to the construct of Wylesol's view of the external world: constantly watching, waiting for the protagonist to transgress, all the while reminding them that they are a mere guest, unmoored and powerless. They befriend a rabbit, but a truck comes as soon as the two exit onto a road, killing the rabbit on the spot. This incident is vindication for the forest: the child has taken away from the forest, and the result is self-evident. People, in Wylesol's world, are only powerful insofar as they are culpable; their autonomy is only ascribed in retrospect, to determine punishment.
In "Porn" (2017), a looser, more disjointed piece, the narrator, perhaps Wylesol himself, searches for a car to buy on a used car lot; he gravitates toward a car which the dealer tries to dissuade him of, but finally insists on buying it because there are loads of porn magazines in the trunk, reminding him of his first exposure to porn, when a teenage friend had shown him a porn channel 'hidden' between two cable channels. The narrator's parents, furious and devout, had forbidden him from seeing this friend again, but this did little to curb an already-nascent impulse in him: porn here serves a function not strictly sexual but more broadly transgressive, which follows him into adulthood, when there is no one left to police him—and to escape his policing—but himself.
"Porn" is followed by "Worthless" (2016), a rare stylistic divergence in a collection with uniformly straightforward sensibilities: its shapes are curved, chunky, and more occupied with the design of the entire page than with mere illustration. The works of Igor Hofbauer come to mind: the page, fairly atypically for Wylesol, becomes a unit whose components are inextricable from one another. The formal leap here is certainly earned, as the story concerns a group of "bad kids" preoccupied with teenagerly transgressions (drugs and boobs, mostly) experiencing a lysergic vision of Heaven and Hell in eye-searing red and yellow—a vision which, of course, leaves them feeling like they were worse than nothing.
If "Porn" is in any way autobiographical (all we know about the narrator is that his name is George), its invocation of Wylesol's church-going background—an evidently unhappy one, at that—is a crucial prism to a broader understanding of his work. The auto-punitive attitude often associated with organized religion looms tall in his stories, as Wylesol's anxious atmospheres are almost reminiscent of Roko's Basilisk: the recognition there is a God, and a hateful one indeed.
The childlike view of the transgressive, which is warned against not in light of any material negative effects but as an assertion of power from an authority figure, is accompanied by the certainty that crime will always bear its mark, and that the mark will always be visible to authority—be that parent or God. An abstract but nonetheless palpable presence, the divine in Wylesol’s stories is at equal measure both pantheon and panopticon; reward may exist, but it is topical, specific, obscured by an all-encompassing punishment.
It should be no surprise, then, that Wylesol's curses are a challenge to the very concept of the communal: we are, all of us, sinners in the hands of an angry god, isolated and rendered powerless by our actions. The closing story, "The Cursed Lover" (undated, later than 2017) can easily be said to be the centerpiece of the collection, substantially longer than any other piece in the book and warping its center of thematic gravity. It immediately puts me in the mind of Autumn Christian's novel The Crooked God Machine (though I haven't checked in on Christian's works since some rant about "the PC police" or something in that vicinity): a distillation of God and folklore that doesn't subscribe to systematized or even morality-based theology. Wylesol completely excises two of the main components we typically associate with "the divine": it is neither worshipped, so to speak, nor is it an emanation separate from earthly life; it exists, immediately and concretely, to dole out punishment with laser precision.
I enjoy Wylesol better than much of the aforementioned self-effacement movement that preceded him, if only because he, like Ware, carries with him a sense of aesthetic renewal. While Clowes and Tomine often take what I view as a lit-fic-realist approach, Wylesol reduces these anxieties to an almost primal, forceful communication. Nonetheless, the terminus remains identical: George Wylesol's Curses opens with a hospital worker imagining himself in different lives, only to find himself right back where he started; it ends with a school-child doomed to eternal loneliness by little more than dint of circumstance. To the cartoonist, perhaps imagining different fates for ourselves is anathema—after all, what could be worse than our current conditions?
And here we have the difference between the two cartoonists at hand: if George Wylesol's Curses is about authorial fear being granted the catharsis of articulation, then Kevin Huizenga's Curses is about authorial curiosity sublimated into wonder; the latter is a full-throated tallying of the world according to the author, whereas the former is a survey of the isolated world within the author, logic-proof neuroses and all. One might take an extra step, even, and venture that the difference between Huizenga and Wylesol is, really, the difference between the rational and the catastrophizing: Huizenga's emotional warmth is a form of detachment, a recognition that the existence of pain is concurrent, not eliminatory, to joy; Wylesol's cold coarseness, an inversion – a recognition that the certainty of subsequent joy does little to assuage the real-time feeling that the world is crashing down on you.
The truth is, reader, that I have written this essay, in various forms, about four different times, reeling from a recent loss that left me swinging rather wildly between the 'universal warmth' and 'profound desolation' ends of this spectrum of art, of humanity. I don’t think that one approach is more valid or worthwhile than the other, really, even though one brings more comfort, both artistic and emotional.
Perhaps it's true that we're all alone, and that we're all together. More likely than not, it's both.
More likely than not, we're all still trying to figure out what the difference even is.
