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Less Is More Than Nothing

A Review of a New Graphic Novel



Not many are familiar with the work of the mysterious artist, Brian Zero, who for several years has been laboring behind the scenes of the now-burgeoning graphic-novel phenomenon. Previous to the publication of his most recent work, “Little Specks of Nothing”, every publisher the artist approached consistently rejected his work. Yet, he has carried on, producing cartoon strips and comic books of unyielding vacuity. Starting with “The Potato Chronicles”, his earliest work, and moving quickly on through his several subsequent efforts, the reader is struck by the utter lack of humor, meaningful content or artistic skill. Mr. Zero seems intent on resisting even the occurrence of the occasional artistic accidents which can be interpreted as evidence of possible talent and which other, less mediocre artists have seized upon as useful in constructing their careers. Among the subjects tackled over the years by this artist have been root vegetables, pocket-change, clock-faces, doorknobs, shoe-laces, paperweights, lint, and dust, all rendered in the ultra-spare style which he favors and which finds it’s nadir in his latest work. With “Little Specks of Nothing”, the artist has finally stripped his art down to it’s purest form, in which he finds actual drawing and writing completely superfluous, providing the reader with only the barest of clues to decipher his dubious intent. As this reviewer scanned the seemingly unending flow of empty or near-empty panels of Mr. Zero‘s opus, he was overcome with a trance-like state of mind akin to the effects of primitive lobotomy or, no doubt in this case, merely extreme ennui.



One is surprised by the heft of this 4oo-plus page coffee-table tome, given it’s apparent lack of content, yet it’s weight is sufficient to cause injury when accidentally dropped on one’s toe, as was the case with this reviewer, who inadvertently drifted off during his perusal of the book, which slipped, both metaphorically and physically, from his grasp.



This is a title worth noting if for no other reason than to avoid unnecessary pain.

Dear Sir or Madam:

Hello, my name is… Well, currently I have no name. I’m a professional cartoon character looking for work. I’ve so far only appeared briefly in a couple of rough drawings depicting doctor’s offices. In one, I was the patient, in the other, a doctor. The problem was, neither of these ideas went anywhere. The artist couldn’t come up with anything, and the drawings disappeared into that overflowing waste-basket next to his desk. I don’t know if I’ll be called upon again or not. I would naturally love to get work in a published drawing for a change.

If you happen to be in the market for a versatile cartoon character, I might be just what you’re looking for. Here are a few examples from my extensive repertoire of characters:



And more!

I hope you can find a spot for me in your next cartoon.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a job on this guy’s blog.
It’s not much, but at least I’m working.

Spike

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I’ve been busy down at Rest Haven, here in Saint Augustine. My Uncle Spike has been causing trouble there and they called me to come and have a talk with him, which I have to do from time to time. Somehow, he gained access to the computer room and started making movies. He got one online before they could stop him. Somehow he got it posted on Nona Appleby’s Blog. They’ve got him locked up again and back on his meds, no harm done. Meanwhile, my work schedule has been interrupted, hence my late blog entry. Sorry. I promise to be on time next week.




______________________________________________________________________________

Sex Objects!

I’ve held off talking about this for a long time but I feel the time has come to broach the subject…

I’m talking about the unfortunate but common perception of the cartoonist as a mere sex-object!

Cartooning is a serious art-form, concerned with the important issues of our time and the complex enigmas of Life. The heartbreaking isolation of the individual within human society as exemplified by the lonely cartoon character on the desert island or in the office cubicle, the imperfect attempts and occasional successes of the hunt for love between men and women, men and men, women and women, dogs and cats; The complexities of human politics, from the business office to the oval office, from the bathroom to the throne-room; The very evolution of our species, as we crawl from the dark, ancient seas toward the light of our giant TV screens!

And yet, there are those who insist on overlooking the cartoonist’s noble efforts in service to Humankind and see only the superficial attractiveness of our physical assets.

Granted, we cartoonists tend to be extremely good-looking individuals. In a way, I can’t blame the fawning masses for being aware of our exceptional beauty, but, damn it, I wish they would focus on our work and not our bodies! I’m sick of spending my time turning down offers of marriage or other indecent proposals which serve no purpose other than to distract me from my true calling, directing the light of humor into the dark recesses of our imperfect reality!

And another thing: These emails must stop. I don’t know where Rosey, Cuddles, Babycakes, and those other women have obtained my email address. They all seem very unoriginal, according to their messages, which always start out with a variation on the words, “Hello. I am very lonely tonight…”. I’m sorry ladies, but I never read any further and immediately send your missives to my junk-email folder, so you might as well give up.

Well, I’ve gone on long enough. The tanning-bed calls and I must go. Eventually, of course, I’ll get back to the drawing-board.

The Pope and I

Well, I just got back from “Roma”. My reason for going was to interview the Pope, but I kept getting side-tracked every time I stepped out from my “apartmento” onto the cobblestones of those famous Roman “vias”.

(Yes, as you can see, I picked up some “Italiano” while I was there. I was hoping to become proficient in Latin, too, so that I could better communicate with His Holiness. I never got the hang of it, however).

When I first set out for Vatican City, I immediately had an overpowering craving for some “espresso”. This urge repeated itself many times during the day, waning only in the late afternoon, when it was replaced by a craving for some “vino”. There’s something about the atmosphere there, because I also found myself constantly hungry. Fortunately, restaurants and gelato shops were everywhere.

The Euro is pegged to the Martian dollar, which put a big crimp in my spending. On a trip to the “Campo di Fiori”, a well-known open-air market I visited in the hope of purchasing food at a reasonable price, I bought an onion for $9. Do you think $9 is too much to pay for an Italian onion? I do.

There were other distractions, including countless sculptures, paintings, and ancient churches, of which there must be thousands. Each church has it’s own charming beggar at the door, often a pitiful woman dressed in rags. I persuaded one of them to pose for my camera, resulting in this heart-rending video. In the excitement of filming, my wallet somehow disappeared from my hip-pocket, so I had no money to give her for her efforts. She was quite gracious about it, however, leaving me with a cheery “Sempliciotto, fesso!” I must look that phrase up.



A huge distraction was the Pantheon, an ancient, domed building originally devoted to many religions, but now with a strong bias toward Catholicism. It was very impressive except for a huge hole in the roof. One wonders why this was never repaired? Perhaps it was designed intentionally as some sort of architectural metaphor for organized religion in general. Just one of many mysteries I encountered while in “Italia”.

I also stumbled across many museums, monuments, and fountains. Here I point out one of the famous landmarks of the area.



To my great disappointment, the Pope never returned my repeated phone calls. Perhaps my trip was ill-timed for a visit with His Holiness. Easter is a busy time for him, no doubt, what with all the ceremonies connected with this important holiday, including preparations for the annual Papal Easter-Egg hunt there on the Piazza di San Pietro. He and his staff must have been quite busy coloring eggs, etc. While attempting to visit him in person, I was urged by several large men in black to move on. They even suggested that I might go further and leave the country, as there was no hope of gaining my objective there.

Sadly, it appears we may never know the Pope’s thoughts on the ancient art of magazine cartooning.

And so, I was forced to bid "arrividerci " to "Roma".

And now, also, to you, “Caro Lettore”.

Taking a Break

My usual weekly post won't be here this week due to a trip to Rome. The Pope is rumored to be a big fan of the New Yorker and it's cartoons, and I want to check that out. Back next week. Ciao!

From the Files of Dr. Sax

(Dr. Oliver Hardy Sax is a well-known psychologist and behaviorist specializing in mental disorders of a hallucinatory nature which often occur in the brains of artists and other goofy creative types).

*
Some years ago, I noticed a strange affliction which occurred in some of my patients. They were tormented by images, occasionally accompanied by snippets of conversation, which appeared, unbidden, in their brains.

*

A Few Case-Histories:

Gahan W. came to my office complaining of hallucinations. While fully awake, he would repeatedly experience dreamlike images of garishly colored, rubbery-skinned beasts with bulging eyes. On many occasions the creatures in his “Daymares”, as I call them, would have multiple eyes, arms, legs, or other body parts and were quite hideous to observe. They would speak in perfectly normal sentences and phrases, often in a humorous way. He was powerless to control the appearance of these creatures. Although he must have suffered horribly, his personal demeanor was quite calm and even cheerful.

*
George B., a gentleman farmer from Long Island, New York came to me with complaints similar to those of my other patients. In his case, however, his brain seemed full of small, deranged domestic animals. These included cats, dogs, and occasionally, small horses, all constantly on the verge of or engaged in agitated twitching and scratching or sudden, unexplained fits involving spinning about and leaping into the air for no apparent reason. As time went on, images of equally deranged human beings also entered Mr. B’s waking dreams.

*
In a more recent case, Drew D. came to me. He presented with the same symptoms as those patients previously discussed, but in his case, his dreams were of the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, a German artist whose work appeared in Europe in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The images appeared in his mind in a constant mental slideshow. Mr. D was at a loss as to why this occurred.

*
In most cases, my patients described their hallucinations as frequent but very brief episodes, lasting only a few moments.

There might be a picture in the patient’s mind’s eye of two people, for instance, in ragged clothing, crawling in an enormous, empty desert. One of the figures might say something amusing, or at least intended to be amusing, to the other person.

The image might be that of a man, a woman, or an animal sitting at a desk in an office somewhere, speaking or being spoken to by another person or animal. Occasionally, inanimate objects will also talk.

Often, the scene will be a desert island, a living-room, a doctor’s office, and so on.

One of my patients, whom I’ll call Charles B., reported to me that he often saw the same images repeated in almost identical ways, with the figures speaking completely different lines of dialog.

*
For some time I was at a loss as to how to help these poor souls. I tried many different approaches to therapy and prescribed a variety of drugs, none of which seemed to help. Then another form of therapy occurred to me. I thought it might be helpful to have my patients record their hallucinations on paper. I discovered that they all seemed to have in common some artistic ability. The resulting drawings brought some relief to them, which I found encouraging.

It was during this period, while attending a social event, that I chanced to meet an editor from the famous New Yorker Magazine. When I explained the work I had been doing, he was quite interested and asked to see some of my patient’s sketches. As a result, he published a few of them. This had a miraculous effect on my patients’ states of mind. Although not a cure, it appears to briefly alleviate the terrible anxiety common to the victims of this malady.

So You Want to be a New Yorker Cartoonist?

This could be an exciting new career path for you! Turn that crazy dream into a reality, maybe. Why not give it a try?

There are a lot of cartoonists already there, though. Think of cartoonists at the Magazine as a handful of survivors of a tragedy at sea, floating along in an over-crowded lifeboat in an ocean of rejected drawings inhabited by ferocious and hungry denizens of the deep, like landlords and mortgage companies.


On second thought, forget it. There are already too many people in this lifeboat. We don't have enough cash or coffee to keep everyone alive as it is. Just yesterday, we had cut off one guy's gangrenous drawing finger. Without anesthetic! We didn't have any brandy aboard so somebody gave him a soggy old joint they discovered in a shirt pocket. It seemed to calm him down a little, even though we couldn’t get it lit. The operation was a success, but the patient passed out. Then, sometime during the night the poor sap slipped overboard. Or maybe he was pushed. Who knows?



I understand there are some wonderful opportunities available in the poetry field.

The Great Idea Famine

It was back in ’07. There had been some hard times for us in the past. Ideas where we lived had always been pretty scarce, but nothing like the big famine that happened that year. That was the year me and the family moved out East, packing ourselves and everything we owned into our old Toyota and hitting the road. Ma and Pa sat up front, with my little brother Dingbat between the two of them on the front-seat, and me and my big sister, Slappy, in back, sitting on either side of the family’s big-screen tv, which Pa insisted we had to take along. It was a good thing, too, because it kept us separated so Slappy couldn’t whack me every few minutes with her open hand, which she did all the time, for reasons I never found out. The tv took up so much room that we had to strap a lot of other stuff to the roof of the car, including Woof and Squeak, our dog and cat, who had to share a dog-crate up there and weren’t all that happy about it. We could hear them fighting every once in a while.

Pa had made a decent living before then, drawing funny pictures for magazines, but he had to have those ideas to work with and the supply seemed to dry up around Tulsa right about then. Pretty soon, we couldn’t pay the mortgage anymore, which was one of those dicey loans the banks handed out to all us suckers back before the housing boom went bust.

Pa heard there were ideas aplenty out there on the East Coast. They said a man could just reach out and grab fistfuls of ‘em right out of the air.

We weren’t the only ones had to pull up stakes. We saw a lot of other folks out there on the road, other cartoonists’ families, mostly, in similarly dire straits. We stopped at Comfort Inns and such along the way. Pa would sit around the campfires we made in the parking lots in those places, swapping stories and dreams about the future with other cartoonists, while I hung out in our motel room with the door open, playing mournful background music on my saxophone and fending off Slappy, who was close by and in her usual bad mood. I convinced her after awhile to smack me in time with the music, which was some improvement.

Those were tough times but things got better. Once we hit New Jersey, Pa got a couple of used ideas from a down-on-his-luck tv writer and sold a cartoon to a big magazine in New York. It was a hard, slow climb, but eventually he started selling more regularly there and finally got a contract. We still lived week to week even then, but we all helped out. Ma found she had a hidden talent for oral surgery and started operating on people in the kitchen of our new rental. Dingbat ran errands for some mob guys in the neighborhood. Slappy got a job acting in daytime tv, specializing in playing angry women. Me, I landed a gig with a band playing Klezmer-Techno music at Sunday brunches over in the City. I decided to pursue a career in music. Pa told me that wasn’t much smarter than deciding to be a cartoonist.

Pa did pretty well, though. His cartoons are all over the place now, in magazines and on t-shirts and coffee-cups and what have you. Ma had to give up on her new profession when someone complained to the authorities after an especially difficult and unsuccessful operation on a man who said he had eight inflamed wisdom teeth. Fortunately, by that time, money was coming in from Pa’s work. Dingbat is now doing time for activities associated with his gangster affiliations and Slappy has moved in with a masochist she met on the set of “All My Apoplectic Children” and seems pretty happy. Woof and Squeak seem to be getting along better. I’m making absolutely no money playing and writing music, just like Pa predicted.

I got an idea the other day for a song:

Things were dark
I thought I was dead
Til I saw that light-bulb
Over my head

It lit my path
It showed the way
It made me what
I am today

Find your bulb
Make it spark
Ideas are waiting
In the dark

Those folks back in Tulsa were right.
Here in New Jersey, you can just grab ideas right out of thin air.