McSweeney’s

The comics in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern differ from the graphic novels we’ve studied in class previously in how unusually self-aware the stories seem to be. I think that this is because several of them feature the authors themselves drawn into their own comics. It is strange to see the different ways in which artists envision themselves as cartoons, and it is curious that they chose to use this device, because in several cases the cartoon self-portraits aren’t very flattering:

The cover comic, by Chris Ware, depicts the cartoonist as a very simple character made up of variously-sized circles. In fact, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Rolie Polie Olie. What is so fascinating about his self-portrayal is that he uses the exact same drawing to depict God in his story. This constructs a kind of weird parallel between God the creator and the Comic Artist the creator. The circular shapes that make up the body of the artist/God are the visual rhymes in the story, reappearing throughout as planets and celestial rings and circles of text. It implies that the entire universe is manifest within the cartoonist, which is profound and also a little narcissistic. But Ware acknowledges his cartoon doppelganger’s enormous ego, mocking his own ambition and having God/himself call him an ungrateful shithead.

Art Spiegelman toys with the same issues of vanity and self-deprecation in his own cartoon self-portrait, labeling the series of panels where he draws himself, the “Notes of a Heartbroken Narcissist”. He depicts himself four times in front of the mirror: for the first three panels, he is a man with varying degrees of facial hair, and then in the last one he turns into the anthropomorphic mouse-man from the Maus books with the accompanying line; “…Issues of self-representation have left me slack-jawed!” (133). It is as if the cartoon mask he created for himself in Maus has eclipsed the man behind it; with the graphic novels’ popularity, he has become synonymous with his character alter-ego. Here we are dealing with the same questions of identity that we encountered when reading Watchmen – Spiegelman drawing himself as a mouse is like the dream sequence where Dan Dreiberg pulls off his own skin to reveal the Nite Owl underneath.

In Lynda Barry’s “Two Questions”, the strangeness of the cartoon self-depiction wasn’t so much in how the artist drew her physical self, but how she illustrated her subconscious self. It takes the form of a ghostly octopus thing, and it is as much a part of her being as the woman in the story. On the last panel on page 65, they twine into one creature around a brush and paper, and it is only then that we see Barry’s complete self-portrait. To call the octopus Barry’s “subconscious self” isn’t exactly the word for what it is. I still don’t really know what it stands for, but “Strange Question” by Richard Sala on page 121 (and there is an uncanny parallel between the names of the stories too), seems to build on the same symbolism and shed more light on its meaning. In it, the young Samantha is visited each night by a nasty little man, and “he would ask her a strange question which she could never answer” (122). Samantha can only get rid of the man by imagining a ferocious dog and bringing it to life, which then kills the little man and run away into the night. The octopus and the ugly man are the same nameless, inescapable urges that prod the artist into conceiving art; the man only leaves when Samantha invents the dog, and in the same way the artist can only find solace through creating. They still don’t know what makes them draw, but just that they have to.