Browsing through Spot On: The Art of Zines and Graphic Novels at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts was something of a jarring experience. As someone who spent (or lost) more than a decade of the prime years of my life as a service sector drone, haunting independent record and book stores, and scribbling furiously in notebooks (not to mention drinking alone, listening to loud music, and fine-tuning my lousy attitude), this exhibit was sort of equal parts flashback and validation, with a little bit of inexplicable melancholy tossed in for good measure.
Modest and extremely user-friendly, Spot On showcases a broad range of past and current pioneers, prototypes, trendsetters, and obscurities from the outsider fringe. It represented something of a cultural version of comfort food for me; everything there, even things I’d never seen, seemed oddly familiar. I can’t recall attending another exhibition that felt so much like a personal attic library of the sort of life I once led. Despite the nature-or-nurture question, we all inevitably make ourselves (and make ourselves over, some of us time and time again). The raw materials we use in this ongoing project, whether acquired through deliberate adventures in curiosity or mere serendipity, become in time almost genetic components of our personalities; they exert a pull on our desires and dissatisfactions that is almost as powerful as the blessings and handicaps we inherit with our DNA.
That’s my old crackpot theory, anyway, and the world of zines and graphic novels has always been crowded with crackpots and crackpot theories, not to mention all manner of desires and dissatisfaction. I certainly know that I’ll never shake some stuff hardwired in my brain by formative influences like Mad magazine and Ernie Bushmiller, or the Minneapolis agitprop street manifestos of Earnest Free Man. Those sorts of influences (along with, of course, the emergence of punk and indie rock) made me highly susceptible to the weird world of free expression and underground art that is celebrated in Spot On.
My own introduction to that world occurred during the Reagan/Thatcher years, which, coincidentally or not, was when zine culture, as well as punk and indie rock, really exploded. This was, of course, mainly before personal computers, let alone desktop publishing, became ubiquitous, and the zine aesthetic was largely defined by copy machines, typewriters, and the crudest sort of cut-and-paste collages and guerrilla design. In Spot On, you can also see the clear influence that early punk zine artists like Raymond Pettibon had on some of the later graphic artists, and it’s surprising to find that even many quite recent efforts in both forms are refreshingly free of obvious technological monkey business.
I was curious, actually, about what sort of connection the Minnesota Center for Book Arts would try to posit between the worlds of zines and graphic novels. Despite the fact that I have loved, hoarded, and even dabbled in both over the years, I’d never really thought of the two as precisely either consanguine or contemporaneous. To the contrary, they’ve always been entirely separate things in my mind, springing from different sets of impulses and influences. Yet the first display encountered in Spot On places a selection of zines alongside a batch of covers and spreads from graphic novels. Spending some time looking at this assortment, it became apparent that—of course—these two print forms were intrinsically related, in precisely the ways that ensured that the person I was twenty-five years ago would have been helplessly attracted to them.
What they share most obviously is a fidelity to realism in even its grimmest forms, but that’s hardly all. There’s also a sense of loneliness and futility, often existing almost side by side with some notion, however vague, of an ideal community; a code of fiercely personal ethics; a melancholy nostalgia for lost people, places, and art forms—and, finally, a helpless and tangled absorption in the mundanity of that most sullied of concepts, the real world: shit jobs, family dysfunction, sexual frustration, sexual confusion, depression, suffocating boredom, the challenges and hassles of urban life. The frequent presence of drudge work, and the examination of the inevitable effects it has on the human spirit, particularly distinguishes many of these projects, whether zine or graphic novel, and that’s also a subject that has been largely missing from most other American literature of the last twenty years. In this sense, certainly, the pioneering zinesters and graphic novelists seem most often to be the burnt-out progeny of the Beat Generation rather than products of graduate writing programs or art schools, so their typical protagonist is, say, the exhausted civil servant of Harvey Pekar’s work, as opposed to the neurotic academics who populate so much contemporary fiction.
At least early on, you also never get the sense that there was ever any real financial incentive behind these labor-intensive projects, or if there was it was a product of pure romantic delusion. The early examples of both zines and graphic novels were obviously motivated first and foremost by self-expression, control, and a weird combination of defiance and defeatism that was essentially built into their severely limited models of production and distribution.
It’s all too easy to oversimplify the origins of both forms. From the very beginning of the first boom, there were as many different types of graphic novels and zines as there were subcultures and scenes, and none of them were without precedent or forebears. Punk rock was obviously a huge influence on early zine culture. It was not for nothing that one of the true pioneering modern zines was called Punk, and for a period in the late seventies and early eighties, scads of Xeroxed fanzines were available in every independent record store in the country.
Other zine templates, from the political to the literary, had their origins in older models, from Addison and Steele’s eighteenth-century pamphlet The Spectator and Poor Richard’s Almanac to Paul Krassner’s 1960s counterculture newsletter The Realist and Ken Kesey’s sporadically published little magazine, Spit in the Ocean. Literary history is likewise full of examples of small, short-lived journals that were often as inexpensively and poorly produced as many modern zines, and writers like James Joyce routinely published stories and excerpts from works in progress in flimsy and impossibly limited journals and privately printed editions.
The graphic novel has also evolved from long-established forms, and many of the modern practitioners, from Art Spiegelman to Chris Ware, readily acknowledge and celebrate their predecessors (nostalgia for the old forms is almost a religion for the current generation of artists). Included among them are European pioneers of the strip form, early American serial artists, or true graphic novelists like Lynd Ward and Franz Masereel, who composed stark, wordless novels from woodcuts in the 1920s and 1930s.
These days, zines have mostly transmogrified into more easily and cheaply produced blogs. Graphic novels have become, well, Graphic Novels. They’re increasingly recognized for what the best of them have always been: art and literature, plain and simple. That said, there’s still a certain prevailing discriminatory attitude about this work, particularly in mainstream publishing circles. Folks have gradually been coming around, and you’re seeing more and more of the sort of critical attention these artists have always deserved, but, still, check out the tiny ghetto such books typically occupy in the chain bookstores. Strip away the Japanese Manga and the straight funny pages anthologies, and you’re generally left with barely a few shelves of the obvious suspects: guys like Pekar and Daniel Clowes sharing shelf space with Frank Miller and Joe Matt.
The variety and quality of stuff that’s being produced today is truly mi
nd-boggling, but to get the full range of it, you still pretty much have to depend on the specialty stores like Minneapolis’ indispensable Big Brain Comics. (That store carries a much broader selection than its name suggests, and, conveniently, is just down the block from the MCBA.) These same stores, along with the handful of remaining indie record shops, are also the last marketplace outside the Internet for what remains of zine culture, and their proprietors are generally equal parts historians, curators, and obsessive boosters of the stuff they carry. Increasingly, in fact, such establishments, along with junk shops and old-school used bookstores, are the last American retail enterprises that still manage to retain the cluttered and exotic feel of a museum cum curiosity shop. In that sense, they’re the ideal repositories for the art they peddle.
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