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In the Fall of 2009, I created and taught two college courses. The classes were Introduction to Comic Art at Emerson College and The Cartoonist in American Culture at Tufts University. The first course ran ten sessions and dealt with different aspects of comic book history. The second class ran 12 sessions and explored the personalities and influence of famous cartoonists such as Walt Disney, Mort Walker, Wallace Wood and Stan Berenstain. Teaching these classes was a great experience for me.
Here are some reviews of my comic books:
Review of Dirtbags, Mallchicks and Motorbikes from Sean Collins' excellent blog...
I've kept my eye on Dave Kiersh's work since coming across it in Jordan Crane's seminal NON anthologies, where his simple line and design sensibility and poetic writing style coupled with his aching, romantic subject matter to suggest John Porcellino gone Young Romance. In the years that followed he's drifted from more straightforward pseudo-autobio tone poems toward a more targeted examination of love, lust, and emotional turmoil among suburban adolescents, frequently filtered through the sensibilities of late '70s and '80s afterschool specials, young adult novels, and teen sex comedies. It's an unusual pursuit, that's for sure, and I think Tom Spurgeon said it's a shallow pool for a cartoonist of Kiersh's obvious talents to swim in, let alone spend a Xeric Grant on, but I don't think Tom's right. For whatever reason, that kind of material has a lot of power. The mirror it held up to the actual experience of suburban American adolescence may have simultaneously sensationalized and simplified that experience, but the reflection was recognizable nonetheless; artists as wide-ranging as Charles Burns, Judd Apatow, Richard Kelly, and M83's Anthony Gonzalez have recorded their observations of that reflection, to memorable effect. Why not Kiersh?
Dirtbags, Mallchicks & Motorbikes, as you can probably guess from the title, sees Kiersh continuing to explore and refine his interpretation of the teenage-wasteland's aesthetic and emotional milieux. It's a collection of short stories, none of which feature any kind of resolution, not even the usual non-resolution resolutions you see in other short comics about young people and relationships; they just kind of end. It's a bold choice, and it's what prevents several of the more knowingly pastiche-driven stories--the boy who falls for his invalid mother's sexy live-in nurse; the girl whose hotsy-totsy friend convinces her to shoplift a push-up bra--from feeling paint-by-numbers. Other well-worn types get zig when they should zag: The kid who winds up lonely in the crowd when he throws a party while his parents are away is the star quarterback; the beautiful tennis player with the loser admirer doesn't slowly discover the man of her dreams beneath his grubby exterior, she simply fucks him in the stands just to see what life is like when you don't care. The stories themselves twist and turn rewardingly before they expire; I was particularly taken with an interlude between the thoughtful quarterback and a drunk cheerleader who throws herself at him in the bathroom, which he escapes by promising to take a shower with her but climbing through the shower window before she can climb in with him, and by the way a story on teen pregnancy is constantly shifting the ground between the main character (the father-to-be) and everyone he encounters (the mother of his baby, his boss, his customer, his friend, his mother, the notional baby itself) in terms of values like responsibility and caring. Kiersh's art is less fancifcul here than in his old work or his recent book Never Land, rooted firmly in emotions inspired by the everyday rather than daydreams. His thick round line is reminiscent of Keith Haring's, particularly in the suburbiascape endpages, but Kiersh uses those chunky delineations to connote isolation rather than cohesion and community. This strikes me as very thoughtful, considered, personal work. If you like the Donnie Darko soundtrack school of wistfully emotional '80s pop, or modern-day approximations thereof, I think you'll get a lot out of this.
Here is a review of Neverland:
this one is written by J. Caleb Mozzocco from the Newsarama blog...
Cartoonist Dave Kiersh has a new 140-page, full-color graphic novel set for release later this year entitled Dirtbags, Mallchicks & Motorbikes (which you can look at quite a bit of art from here).
I’m not going to review that book though.
Instead, I wanted to take a look at Kiersh’s 2008 mini-comic Neverland (distributed by Bodega), which is perhaps a better starting point for taking in his work, being a smaller, shorter, cheaper book at only 30 pages. It’s also a nice introduction to his highly idiosyncratic art style, and features a story that functions like something that’s part personal essay, part poem and part manifesto.
At six-and-a-half-inches tall and four-and-a-half-inches wide, the book itself is a squat yellow square, the cover image a bold, black set of abstract silhouettes suggesting a building and water tower beneath a sky of black stars.
The pages inside are less vibrant in their yellow and stark in their black, but the color scheme remains the same.
The inside covers are covered with abstract doodles that look a little like alien hieroglyphics, blending together to form a flat, maze-like wall, which, a page turn or two later, coalesces into the small-town setting of the book. The pages are divided into grids, sometimes splash pages with big, round black borders, other times a collection of smaller panels with square-er borders, and the pictures inside them are a mixture of fat outlines and fussed over little scribbly-lines adding textures and shadows.
There’s a real naiveté to the art, whether affected or not, that gives it the look and feel of child-like art, although it’s so complex it must be the work of a skilled adult. The writing is similarly faux primitive, sometimes teen angsty enough to seem like it’s almost a parody of the sorts of things creative teens write in their journals, but with a raw emotion and palpable sense of yearning that’s hard to fake (And if Kiersh were making a joke of it, he'd need to push it a little futher).
The writing is communicated with snatches of words that hover below and above the panels, sometimes in narration boxes, sometimes outside the borders, stretched out across the gutters in a way that’s parallel to the panels. They may form sentences, but there aren’t always complete sentences moored to each complete panel.
After a “Once upon a time…” beginning, the words and panels give us a quick tour of a dead or dying small town as seen from a sad, nostalgic point of view, culminating in a map of sorts, before plunging through a quick set of memories. Our protagonist is a grocery store clerk, who wants to be creative and make art after work, but instead reads a book—Peter Pan—and falls asleep, having a dream that forms the bulk of the book.
Being too grown-up to experience J. M. Barrie’s Neverland in the way that it was intended, our young hero’s subconscious simply uses it as a prism through which to focus his sexual fantasies and memories. So when he sees the mermaids, he focuses on the fact that they’re topless, and his Peter Pan and Captain Hook are both women, who rip at one another’s tops while fighting.
When he wakes up, the fantasy gets channeled into the work we’re reading, so that the rest of the book is even more dream-like than the actual dream sequence, and Kiersh’s words move from self-analytical to focus on a concrete addressee, a “you” with whom some sort of romantic relationship seems to exist. This climaxes with a two-page spread that echoes the map of the town our narrator/protagonist lives in, only this one is a fairytale world of castles and storybook characters instead of fast food restaurants and gas stations.
I liked it quite a bit, although it’s easy to see how and why some could read it and hate the heart-on-the-sleeve, adolescent sentimentality of it (In fact, that’s part of the reason I liked it so much). It’s definitely an eloquent address to anyone who’s been disappointed with themselves for making the choices they’ve made, not lived up to the potential they thought they had and/or felt way too old before they were hardly even adults. Which, I suspect, is an awful lot of people—particularly among artists of any kind and fans of any sort of escapist hobby. Like, for example, reading comics.
Neverland portends well for Dirtbags, Mallchicks & Dirtbikes.
other stuff...
My future/current projects include my first novel length comic book about a romance between two juvenile delinquents. I also have a smaller project in the works that chronicles time I spent working as a planetarium narrator.
