Watching In The Realms of the Unreal

Now that Jessica Yu's generally well-received documentary on the reclusive but prolific artist and writer Henry Darger is in rotation on PBS stations, I have to admit how much it made me think of comics, and not just because some of what Darger did blended art and writing in a RC Harvey-approved way. More than any formal issue, the shape and feel of Darger's general fantasy, marked by the limits of his perspective on how the universe works in a very concrete way, made me think of Jack Katz's similarly odd creation myth First Kingdom. From Katz I began thinking about the entirety of the overground turned independent comics movement of the late 1970s and 1980s while watching Yu's movie.

From where I stood as a young reader back then, it seemed that a big part of all the comics at the time was an underlying notion that each cartoonist had deep within them a massive world, an epic story that was all theirs, and given the chance to express it they would unveil these worlds for our benefit and never create anything else as important or grand. You know what I mean? One creator, one world, one story, one impressive vehicle... I miss the obsessive purity that seemed to come with that, particularly in a day when comics aimed at a similar audience feel mixed and matched out of some passed-around duffel bag of movie-ready high concepts.
 
posted 6:24 am PST | Permalink
 

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