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James Kochalka Reviews

June 1998
The Comics Journal #205

The conceit of the series — and the title— is explained by James Kochalka in the introduction: "We decided to each choose one rule that all our comics had to follow. A dare. A triple dare!" In other words, each issue of the comic will be built on variations of a chosen theme. The theme — or "dare" — this first time around involves the phrase "a frequent contributor." Each creator used the phrase for the title of his story, and each takes a very different angle on what it could mean. We start off with Tom Hart's story about a family haunted by a ghost (and his ghost cat) who has very specific tastes for dinner. The premise is both amusing freighted with real tension, and the ending plays out the surreality in a satisfyingly unexpected manner. Next up is Kochalka with a delightfully playful conversation about weather between a human and a cat. There's a casual familiarity in the telling of this tale, resulting in an off-the-cuff charm which seems to be Kochalka's strongest asset. Jon Lewis rounds off the trio of this "triple dare" with a story about first dates and an eccentric old man's comments on the topic. Where Kochalka's characters are almost aggressively non-introspective in their musings, Lewis' narrator is manipulative, self-aware and yet helpless in the face of other people's actions. Relying more heavily on text and visual experimentation than the other two, Lewis creates a densely complex narrative which leaves the reader uneasy at the end.

This first issue is actually a quadruple dare, however. Steve Weissman did a color one-pager for the back cover and it's the most coherent story of the bunch. Dealing with a woman's very strange, highly affecting childhood memories, the piece is built like an anecdotal joke, a bus-stop monologue with an unintentional punchline. If the others could persuade Weissman to stick around — even if it's only on the back page — that could only strengthen the anthology (though they'd have to give up the catchy name for a larger mouthful in "quadruple").

What I've been emphasizing up to now has been the narrative, and I'll admit that this what appeals to me most in the individual stories. The structure and tone of each piece is highly distinctive - the panic in Hart's piece contrasts vividly to the solipsism of Kochalka's dialogue, which stands in stark relief to the labyrinthine reasoning of Lewis' narrator and the memory-play of Weissman's storyteller. The series also works well visually, however, and the ten pages allotted to each of the main stories helps a great deal. Ten pages, after all, is enough to showcase the distinctive style of each creator. (And in Weissman' case, one page is more than sufficient to leave a reader in appreciative awe.) I found it especially interesting to compare how each uses page and panel compositions to define very different narrative rhythms to accompany the tone of each piece. In particular, Kochalka's steady three-panel pages contrast vividly to Lewis' wildly varying palette — varying image-text ratios, an impressive splash page conveying fascination in an unexpected fashion.

All that said, the ten-page limit also serves to blunt the crudity of Hart and Kochalkaa's styles. I know each has very vocal fans, but I personally find it difficult to look at their comics too long — ten pages is enough to be impressed, but also sufficient to hang onto the novelty of such Panter-esque visual "rattiness." Lewis, however, is a revelation: while his play on the geometries of the human face takes some getting used to, it provides an abstracted characterization that more conventional approaches could never accomplish. It's caricature, but not in the conventional way that mode is used, This perspective carries over to the way Lewis breaks his story down into other kinds of abstractions, conveying turmoil in ways that only comix can achieve. Confusion, infatuation, embarrassment and frustration are all on display in Lewis' ten pages, and he's developed a unique idiom to capture them. Lewis is also canny enough to ground these innovations in everyday problems which readers can relate to: who hasn't felt ill at ease on a first date? Who hasn't wondered if a correct number was given in passing?

But as I said at the beginning, the appeal of Triple Dare isn't simply each creator per se: it's also the way they've chosen to interact for the series. The craft of each creator — and I know "craft" is a loaded term when referring to Kochalka, but really don't care — comes into clear focus because of the parameter set up by the dare. Stories that could otherwise seem random and precious — at least, to newcomers to these creator — take on a stronger subtext and context by the company each keeps. In this issue, one finds a clear readerly focus in "a frequent crystallizes each story's telling. But beyond that, there is also the contrasting moods, the way that the "frequent contributor" can be figured as threat, fool, enigma or blame. Such a style of connectedness makes these works more accessible, gives them added depth by creating the illusion of a creative dialogue between four talented young voices. One isn't sure if such a creative dialogue is indeed taking place — and a more concrete expression of such a dialogue isn't necessarily interesting, as any number of comics "jams" can attest — but the reader is invited to see it as such, not only because of the gimmick but because of the strikingly different personalities at play on these pages.

Of course, such influential artistic bonding has been seen in comics before - the Toronto trio of Chester Brown, Seth and Joe Matt come to mind immediately. But it's nice to see such a novel expression of this bond in a series such as Triple Dare. The autobiographical gestures in the Toronto trio's comics were entertaining in their own right, but in some ways felt insular, provided the wrong kind of parameter. One may argue the same here: the conceit of a triple dare is artificial, an in-joke that we're only being made half-aware of. (Why else choose a phrase as resonant for an anthology as "a frequent contributor"?) It's an unnecessary aesthetic restriction posing as a clever marketing tool. But from another angle, this gimmick creates a compelling gauntlet to cross: think of it as a comix game show with class, a DC Challenge for the Indy set. Even better, it gives us a peek at how creators feed off of each other's presence in a clear-eyed, deliberate manner. And if future issues provide dares as productive and imaginative as the one in the first issue, then Triple Dare deserves as much success as possible.

— Ray Mescalldo

Images, characters and likenesses © and TM James Kochalka