CR Review: Uptight #2



Creator: Jordan Crane
Publishing Information: Fantagraphics, comic book, 20 pages, July 2007, $2.50
Ordering Numbers: MAY073466 (Diamond)

I wanted to say a few more words about Jordan Crane's Uptight; I had mentioned it last week as one of only a few publications on an entire list of publications worth looking at. The format may be worth noting. It's 20 pages, on cheap cover stock, and you don't notice either because Crane makes the cover beautiful and the stories inside are dense and ambitious. It's one of those comics where you can imagine an entire industry or at least Crane's alt-indy segment of it adopting comics of this size and variety and giving people a reason to go to the comic book shop every week -- and if we know anything about comics history it's that tipping points, a mass of books of a certain quality boasting a certain format or approach, are far more crucial than innovation.

Mostly, though, I wanted to draw attention to Crane's fine comics work in the issue. The first and third story are more typical to Crane's career output, particularly the segment of Keeping 2 that appears here: it's elliptically told, boldly drawn and shaded, and features characters worked up into a frenzy of conflicting thoughts and emotions. The book's initial short "Take Me Home" isn't something we're used to seeing from Crane but is a story type familiar to alternative comics fans, a slice of life with a heavy, portentous act flowing into center stage like so much molten metal, crowding and burning and settling in until story's end. It's a well-controlled piece, and wouldn't have been out of place in, say, an issue of Reactor Girl or Zero Zero.

The second story, "Before They Got Better," has to be one of the better short stories this year. Here Crane drops the more luscious drawing and the heavy use of black space for the most part, featuring a thin line that's meticulous and elegant. The fat, heavy shadows make sudden, swooping guest appearances and an extended cameo, feeling more like the encroachment of night and mortality than just about anything I've seen this year. Crane's older protagonist is one of his patently awkward characters, ramrod straight and boasting elbows and knees that feel longer than they have any right to be, a body that must have made for a painful pair of early teenage years. There's a priceless scene where the man, chased into the basement by an upset daughter after he lets his granddaughter handle a lightbulb for which she's not ready, opens a window and checks out the neighborhood from the vantage point of barely above ground. The exchange between granddaughter and grandfather feel real, too, the girl's hesitant speech and grandpa slowing down to swirl in her moods and fears for a moment, easing them aside the way he might blow an eyelash from her cheek. I fairly swooned.


 
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