“Christmas Eve” by John Porcellino in King-Cat Comics & Stories # 72
John Porcellino’s mini-comic series
King-Cat Comics & Stories
is approaching issue # 75. At the current pace it probably will reach
that unusual landmark, in the world of zines, in time to celebrate 25
years of continuous publication.
When it started, in 1989, John Porcellino was an art student
attending Northern Illinois University. He graduated, but, in his own
words in an interview with Zak Sally (
The Comics Journal # 241, February 2002, 49):
[…]making paintings involves a lot of stuff I don’t want
to be involved with. In order to have that process, you’re dependent on
all these other people and institutions[…]
To tell you the truth, I’ve been there too so, I empathize
with someone who stopped painting. Like John Porcellino, though, I can’t
fully understand why I stopped either. Here’s what he has to say in the
next page of the aforementioned interview:
[…]I was a crazy painter, I loved painting. I loved art.
And, at some point I just panicked or freaked out or something. I
started tearing it all down instead of putting it together. I still
wonder about what happened and what was I afraid of.
Artists with poor social skills tend to avoid competition. They may
also view the art market as a morally corrupt place eager for them to
sell-out. Anyway, what’s interesting is that the rarefied world of
self-published comics was, for John Porcellino, an affirmation of
integrity, a cry of freedom and a sign of a life style (an attitude),
more than anything else: “Drawing your own comic and putting it together
in this day and age really is a revolutionary act” (John P.
dixit).
I can’t remember when my eyes crossed a Porcellino drawing, but I’m
quite sure that his apparent art training and the complete lack of
mainstream comics tropes in his work attracted me immediately. John P.
cites many influences: the Chicago 60s funk art scene (the Hairy Who
group with Jim Nutt
et al), post-punk music (Husker Dü, whose song
Perfect Example
gave John’s first graphic novel its title, etc…). On the comics side of
things John Porcellino cites Lynda Barry, Matt Groening, Gary
Panter, and a few Fantagraphics publications, but, above all, because of
the self-publishing and DIY total control involved, Julie Doucet’s
Dirty Plotte (the zine, not the comic).
Well Wread Whead
by Jim Nutt, 1967.
John Porcellino’s minimalist art style is a reason for some
incomprehension. This is understandable because the comics subculture is
incredibly conservative
vis-à-vis art styles. Being
anti-intellectual it doesn’t accept concepts behind the visual style.
John P. felt this and justified himself in a two-pager published in
King-Cat # 21 (September 1991): “Well Drawn Funnies # Ø.”
John Porcellino justifies himself in King-Cat
# 21.
In an interview with Jeff LeVine (
Destroy All Comics # 3,
August 1995, 6) Porcellino said that his art style was a conscious
choice aimed at a straight-forward, easy to understand, simple, reading.
He also characterized his art as populist distancing himself from
the high art market. There are two mistakes in the above statements: the
first one Porcellino corrected quite humorously in the Sally interview
(64) when he said: “People do not say, “Oh, I can’t figure this out,
it’s got shading!””; the second mistake is the fact that Porcellino’s
art is not populist, on the contrary (his assumption that the average
Joe, Porcellino’s words, prefers simpler drawings is completely wrong:
most people are more easily attracted by naturalistic, detailed, art
showing a display of technique proficiency than to simple, if elegant,
drawings). Because that’s what John Porcellino’s best drawings are:
well balanced compositions where graphic patterns (leaves, grass, the
asphalt) play a slow rhythm. There’s a low-key sweet, quiet,
melancholic visual music playing in Porcellino’s backgrounds. As he put
it, better than I ever could, it’s: “A really simple grace.” A
Schulzian ode to suburbia…
John P.’s art style is a delicate balance. So delicate that it stops
working (or stops fully working) if some of the components disappears:
the supra-mentioned patterns; the childish descriptive geometry like
perspective; the cartoonish, very simple, characters; the transparency
given to the drawings by the negative space; the continuous thin lines
that always maintain the same width.
Page from “In Walked Bud,” King-Kat Comics and Stories
# 50, May 1996.
In the above page, for example, the simple
fact that the width of the lines changes changed everything. In my humble
opinion these are no longer great Porcellino drawings. On the other
hand, the addition of color on the cover below (the use of colored
pencils is a smart move on Porcellino’s part because it’s in accordance
with the childish perspective) adds a lot to the Porcellino feel of the
image.
A German anthology of Porcellino’s comics, September 1998.
The first thirty issues of King-Cat are heavily indebted to Punk aesthetics, but the story “October” in King-Cat # 30, changed it all. According to Porcellino, again (51):
There was a real sensibility shift there… before that story, King-Cat
was a little goofier, more of a catch-all, here’s-what-I’m-up-to kind
of thing. That strip really marked a shift from the more spontaneous
work to a more reflective style of looking back at my life. I remember
thinking when I did that story that it was different, in a way that I
liked. The mood of that strip was very true. To me. My mentality changed
with that strip, about comics and what I could do with them…
Porcellino’s Punk phase: King-Cat Classix Vol. 1, 1990.
The poetic, quiet, ending of “October” as published in King-Cat Classix
Vol. 3, September 1994 (originally published in 1991).
Zen Buddhism entered the picture at some
point improving Porcellino’s stories immensely. From then on his little
vignettes are like haikus. Tom Gill was kind enough to
answer a question of mine about the Zen Buddhist concept of evaporation related to the work of Yoshiharu Tsuge. To quote him:
Evaporation, or jôhatsu in Japanese, is an important cultural trope in Japan. Certainly it relates to the Zen Buddhist idealization of “nothingness” (mu)
[…]. To disappear, to become nothing: that is the dream of Zen
thinkers. In Tsuge’s works, (1) death, (2) escape, (3) enlightenment,
(4) laziness/irresponsibility, are intertwined concepts. To evaporate is
to die, to escape from responsibility, to disappear to a perhaps more
enlightened elsewhere. As well as the philosophical/religious aspect of
this metaphor there is also a political/sociological one. Tsuge’s
semi-autobiographical heroes reject the materialism of mainstream
society, or simply cannot relate to it. To be lazy, to refuse/fail to
conform to the socially sanctioned image of the “salaryman” is a kind of
statement, aligning one with a romantic, escapist, world-renouncing
strand in Japanese culture.
All of the above could be said about the political implications of
John Porcellino’s mini-comics run, but it fits like a glove to his story
“Christmas Eve” published in
King-Cat Comics and Stories # 72. I’ll end this post with the comparison below. As Tsuge put it (in an interview with Susumu Gondô, 1993):
[I travel] not only to get free from daily life, [the
point of travel for me] is also in the relationship with nature to
become oneself a point in the landscape.
Adding pantheism to the mix it’s difficult to find two more kindred spirits.
Panel from “Christmas Eve,” King Cat Comics and Stories
# 72, November 2011.
Illustration by Yoshiharu Tsuge as published in a special volume of his complete works, 1994.
