The Glories (And Perhaps Occasionally Limits) of Kevin Huizenga

I knew that Slay loves him some Kevin Huizenga, and I've been reading a lot of the Midwestern Cartoonist's work, so I asked him to do a little diablog about it. Slay did the first entry here explaining exactly what is so awesome about Kevin Huizenga. (I should also, like Slay give some props to Douglas Wolk without whose book Reading Comics I never would've heard of Huizenga)

For those of you who haven't checked out Curses or his new series Ganges... a Kevin Huizenga stories usually involves his midwestern everyman Glenn Ganges (who looks like a brunette Tintin and is almost always dressed in striped pants and a t-shirt). Much of the time, Glenn is reading a book of a subject that's interesting to Kevin Huizenga, thus giving both of them a chance to expound on its content. Occasionally Glenn has some sort of misadventure, but most of the time he's doing something completely mundane-- returning books to the library, doing the dishes, playing a video game-- but within that a huge amount of formal invention and philosophical inquiry gets layered in until doing the dishes (or walking to the library) becomes a surprisingly deep experience.

Slay's entry talks about the four reasons why he loves Glenn Ganges, and I agree with all of them. It seems to me-- to tie this in the theatre-- that much of the appeal of Huizenga's work comes from his attention. Anne Bogart talks about attention a lot in And Then You Act she posits (and i agree) that part of an artist's job is to give something so much relentless attention that via the pressure cooker of that attention it becomes transformed into something profound. Much of Huizenga's work involves expending such effort investigating, paying attention to and portraying the mundane that it is elevated into something extraordinary.

This has certainly become his modus operandi in his new Ganges series. The first one (which I'll go out on a limb here and call my favorite of his comics) involves one day in Glenn's life. He walks to the library and thinks about time. Someone litters and he imagines what a terrible person they must be (it ends with the litterer as the head of a totalitarian sci-fi state, if you look in the corner of one of the panels, Glenn is throwing a brick at a mechanized police officer). He comes home that night and drinks too much coffee so he stays up with his wife (Wendy who in this one is a freelance graphic designer working on a video game that Glenn will spend the entirety of Ganges #2 playing). They listen to music and talk about the music they're listening to. Wendy goes to bed, Glenn stays up reading, Glenn goes to bed and then follows what might be the 11 most extraordinary pages Huizenga's ever written. They're really almost impossibly brilliant, the way that Glenn drifting off to sleep imagines everyone drifting off to sleep in the world and is filled with such love for his wife that he worries something horrible will happen to her. It's... it's just extraordinary stuff.

Ganges #1 also contains at it's beginning Glenn's investigation into time, which is to say Glenn's investigation into comics because on some level the subject of every page of comics is time (how much time has passed between panels and in what direction it has flowed is the first thing that a reader must solve when reading a page of comics). Huizenga gets this by representing time as a series of comics panels. I mean, Jesus Christ, how awesome is that?!

But here I think I must for a moment say what stops me from saying what it is that keeps Huizenga from being like my totally favorite contemporary comic book artist. It's the way he treats character in his books. Glenn Ganges on some level has no consistent features (beyond how he looks). What he does for work is unclear. Wendy is sometimes his wife, sometimes his girlfriend. They sometimes have a kid, or are trying to get pregnant, or are pregnant. What happens in one issue has only cursory bearing on another. Glenn Ganges is in many ways like a bulletin board that Huizenga uses to pin whatever he wants to talk about to. This doesn't bug me necessarily on a within-a-story level, but overall in his work it starts to bother me.

Why does it bother me? because I'm unsure what the stakes are within Huizenga's world, and I'm unsure what my relationship to his characters are supposed to be. In one of my favorite Huizenga stories, 28th Street, Glenn goes on a quest to find a mythical ogre (and slay him) so that his wife can get pregnant. What follows is a truly delightful modern fairy tale where we really root for Glenn and understand his quest etc. Except.. what happens next is the Ogre bursts into a bunch of starlings and Glenn ends up being cursed by the starling which take up root around his house. Except... we never follow up on any of this. Wendy's doesn't have a kid again in the series, the curse of the starlings serves no plot purpose but rather is for Huizenga to talk at length about the history of the starling and none of it seems to have ultimately mattered.

The new Ganges series does a similar fake out. Ganges #1 ends with the aforementioned declaration of love for Wendy. Glenn prays Oh God... Keep her safe... oh... oh God... If anything happened to her... I couldn't stand it.. to see Wendy in pain... if she gets sick, like really sick... or if there was an accident... if I wasn't even there... wen... don't leave me... it's another classic setup... the ominous scene.. you're so in love... everything's going so great...

Another classic setup... that doesn't actually go anywhere (I should also mention that another Ganges story makes a very big deal about Glenn being an atheist). Ganges #2 for all its formal mastery is set in the 1990s and is about video games and follows up not at all on the seeds planted in #1. Wendy only appears as the back of her head and has almost no bearing on the story at all. The emotional punch of Ganges #2 (which I suppose Slay and I will get to later) is about a character who will never appear in another Glenn Ganges story.

What do you think about this, Slay? Is it wrong for me to have this quibble while enjoying rather profoundly each individual Huizenga story? (I should say that should this aspect of Huizenga's work never change in the direction I would like it to, I would still deeply appreciate and like his writing). Should I just relax and quit my bitching and enjoy the riches that are there? Do you think Huizenga is deliberately playing with how character is represented in narrative? Do you think I've totally got my head up my ass here? And weren't we supposed to talk about Ganges #2 which Douglas Wolk called "the kind of thing I want to hand to people who ask 'what kind of comics do you like?'"

Comments

[Slay]

My response is up.

http://www.avltheatre.com/cbhh/2008/05/huizenga-followup-and-ganges-2.html