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Spectacles Reviews
Anodyne
v2.10
"Frustration"
by Kip Manley
"What a dorky guy," says Larry. Larry's always flipping through my comics when he should be on the phone, selling ads. "Gotta know the market," says Larry. "Gotta know the product." He says it's research. I think he's just goofing off.
Anyway, he's flipping through an issue of Spectacles, by Jon Lewis, and he's calling Lewis a dork. And here I am, about to write a column on Lewis. I love Lewis. So what do I do? Nothing. I throttle the instinct to rally to his defense. I save my breath.
Jon Lewis is an acquired taste.
His
first comic, True Swamp, won a Xeric
Grant — some of the lucre Peter Laird made off those Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles, set aside in a fund for struggling, self-published
cartoonists — and it garnered accolades from the likes of Scott McCloud,
Jim Woodring, and The Stranger. But Diamond, at the time one of
the largest national comics distributors, refused to list the title in
their catalog. "Unprofessional," they called it.
I picked up True Swamp at a San Diego Comics Convention, more because of the whole cause célèbre after the Diamond fiasco than out of a true interest in the work. I didn't start reading it until I was on the plane home, and kind of flipped through the first couple of issues desultorily. Dark, I thought. Crudely drawn. Kind of, well, unprofessional. Somewhere in the middle of the third issue, as we flew over Missouri, the enormity of what I was reading hit me, and I scrambled to reread the first issue.
I had acquired the taste.
Lewis
builds whole worlds, in even the slightest of his stories. True Swamp
delineates the society of frogs, possums, lizards, insects, and fairies:
their folk tales, their politics, their songs, as they spend most of their
time worrying about eating or being eaten. With Ghost
Ship, he whipped a rejected Monty Python skit into some of the
most profanely funny stuff ever to masquerade under the rubric of "magical
realism" — Garcia Marquez, if he were really Ernie Kovacs and
interested in pirates. His drawing had matured — still simple, but
deceptively so, with none of the dark, confused frustration of his earlier
stuff. In Spectacles, he really
hit his stride, bouncing between two magical serials: "The Frost
Changes," which collapsed his childhood home of Minnesota with Norse
myth and folklore, and "Shell Men," which took the ideas of
True Swamp one step further, positing newly sentient animals in
a world suddenly devoid of humans, slowly creating their own society together.
Animals
using the names of human cities as currency; the strange hexing powers
of guitars; the secret songs of snapping turtles; hell, in a single page,
an outtake from an unpublished story, about a madman's theories of soups
and planets, he —
But it's no use. He's an acquired taste. Either his sense of wonder hits you, knocks you off your feet, or he's unbearably whimsical, silly, too cartoony, and the guy who used the word "fuck" more often in one issue of True Swamp than all of Cerebus and Bone combined.
It doesn't help — pardon me — that he's a fuckin' flake. True Swamp reached an end, sort of; Ghost Ship was abandoned in mid-stream; and Spectacles, just as it was starting to chug, has been stopped, so he can reconsider what he's doing in comics. I hope he gets some answers soon, and I hope those answers involve him settling down and working on a good, long, book-length project, the first of many, rather than these tantalizing, interrupted glimpses. He's made me selfish. I'm hooked, and all I can think of is scoring more. If it's longer, deeper, purer — well, I can wait.
But not for long. C'mon, Jon. The world needs more of your comics.
Trust me.
A True Swamp collection is available for $16.95 from SLG Publishing, 325 South First St. #301, San Jose, CA 95113. Contact them about back issues of Ghost Ship, or haunt the back-issue bins of your local comics shop. (Good luck!) Spectacles 1-4 may still be on the shelves; if not, write to Alternative Comics, 611 NW 34th Dr, Gainesville, FL 32607, or visit them on the web at www.indyworld.com/spectacles.
Images, characters and likenesses © and TM Jon Lewis
