Josh
Neufeld

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Reviews

January 1999
The Comics Journal
Scott Gilbert

Keyhole #5
Produced by two lifelong friends whose experiences have formed them into very different types of cartoonists and people, Keyhole is a rare component of the American comix scene. Both in terms of its consistent quality of execution and the subjects it covers, Keyhole is reminiscent of magazines like Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, and Spiegleman's and Griffith's fine underground anthology, Arcade. The influence of more mainstream comics production is also apparent in the book, due to the cartoonists' reading habits and Haspiel's past duties as an assistant to some of the better known mainstream cartoonists the past decade.

The main theme of this issue of Keyhole is personal discomfort, ranging from dull ennui to physical agony. Neufeld's opening story, tells how he and his girlfriend overcame paranoia and a constricted state of general unease by opening themselves up to the unknown and unexpected (in the form of a Buddhist monastery tour and a homey monk's blessing). The story opens on the grimacing faces of Neufeld and his girlfriend on a crowded vacation flight from Hong Kong to Bangkok. Rather than enchanted or amused by the scintillation of cultural novelties before them, the characters are frightened and actually sickened by the overwhelmingly foreign qualities of the setting. Neufeld draws the scene in a low-key, uncomplicated fashion. In no overt way formally or graphically does he communicate the characters' ill feelings, aside from representing with great clarity, the rigidity and crampedness the interior of a jumbo jet presents.

Straightforward and clear, Neufeld's drawings of figures and faces fall in the same stylistic middle ground between precise anatomical representation and expressive caricature that one might find in Archie comics. Neufeld uses these characteristics to his advantage in this story, allowing their limited nature to constrain the situations presented and reinforce the cultural rigidity causing his characters so much discomfort. When character Neufeld realizes the cause of his unease and the need for him to relax and accept conditions of uncertainty, author Neufeld changes gears stylistically by placing a round panel in the center of the page and increasing the size (and diminishing the number) of panels on the page, and by increasing the variation of points-of-view. On the following, concluding page of the story, the panel size again is increased, blossoming out to express the newfound sense of openness the characters' epiphany permits them. Unfortunately, the two panels are repetitions of the same image, which, along with several caption blocks (a continuation of liberal portions of captioned narration throughout the story — possibly a legacy of Neufeld's sometime collaborator and master of heavy narration, Harvey Pekar) tend to lock down the page and stymie the more open feeling this page is meant to convey. Meant also to echo the opening page of the story and thus help unify it and emphasize its message, this page's circular trope is over-ridden and deadened by these disjuncting formal effects.

The book's second story, Haspiel's "Chasing Soho," mirrors the structure of the first tale in an abbreviated fashion. Haspiel quickly sets up a feeling of desperation due to increasing limitations (his need to find a new apartment, his inability to find suitably affordable and sizable new accommodations), which is resolved by his sudden realization that his neighbor's serendipitous bad luck is the solution to his own dilemma. Haspiel is a wilder, more expressive draftsman than Neufeld, with a broader abilities of graphic invention and construction. Haspiel's dancing, rhythmically-balanced blacks and fluid lines create a luscious jungle of forms very much at odds with the sunny, sedentary milieus create by Neufeld.

Neufeld comes back strong in the next two-pager, a chapter of his series, "Lionel's Lament." He again uses the clear, restrained aspects of his story-telling style and drawing to set up a rigidly structured story (reminiscent of Alan Moore's work with Dave Gibbons in Watchmen). His graphic elements, more carefully balanced here (as they must be due to this tale's shortness), work together with a locked-down composition and narrative to contain and compress the ironic humor of the tale to allow their clearest and strongest possible expression. Taking fullest advantage of their often highly opposed talents as draftsmen and storytellers, these two short stories best showcase both cartoonists' work.

The next story, "Proud Flesh," is the book's physical center of pain and violent life-experience. Taking a stab at "alternative" comic's mainstay, the autobiographical comix form, accident-prone Haspiel relates a life in injuries, ranging from a Chester Brown-like pus-fest of boil lancing to some Aline-Kominsky-like self-mutilation, ending with some Kirby style bone-breaking. As rough and painful as these events were for Haspiel, his tone throughout the story is breezy, off-hand, and full of pop-cultural tags (e.g.: the board game "Operation" as a frontispiece, a ritual toast lifted from the film Cooley High, and a sampling of rap and R&B T-shirts). Haspiel's graphic and narrative facility and inventiveness allow him to swing through this battered history effortlessly. The tale ends less gracefully, in a clichı about a broken heart as the worst wound of all, and a terminating panel in which the artist draws a slim metaphor between his meaningful scars and the current fad for pointless body decoration. For all the revelation of self and pain in this piece, a palpable sense of shallowness pervades. The cocksure, streetwise attitude implied by the story's title might, but needn't preclude the depth of expression and personal insight of which Haspiel is surely capable.

The final tale of the book breaks thematically to focus on maladies of culture and class. Part of a continuing series of stories titled "Titans of Finance" (drawn by Neufeld and written by R. Walker) these stories relate the misadventures and follies of some of our late-capitalist era's wildest and woolliest entrepreneurs. Neufeld applies his skillful low-pedal graphics, allowing the exaggerated and erratic behavior of his characters to continuously contrast with the mundane settings, fashions, and situations he creates. This series is a fine antidote to the free-enterprise hype ladled out by "capitalist tool" media outlets like Forbes and Money, in their stories of heroic, brilliant, and faultless monetary self-achievers. The story's hilarious progression breaks up the pretensions and self-aggrandizement characteristic of so many "self-made" entrepreneurs, showing how their own all-too-self-denied foibles and obsessions eventually bring their grand schemes to ridiculous ends.

Josh Neufeld's cultural and class observations are enormously rare in the generally meaningfully vacant world of comix subject matter. Concerned with issues which affect all people in our society, he is not content to simply dabble in the abstracted romanticism and fantasy that constitute the majority of American cartoonists' output. Dean Haspiel is a natural cartoonist, adept and lyrically athletic in his application of ink, drawing, and storytelling. He drops the science of chiaroscuro and composition, representation and timing, and graphic invention and sheer expressiveness with an ease that only comes from an intuitive understanding of the means of cartooning. Brought together in a single, independent magazine, these artists' strong, disparate talents create a broad reading experience, and a blending of artistic intentions and personal expression like very few others available today in American comix.