Keeping Two

[whitecomics]

Starting a new thread for this one, in part because I'm curious about everyone's expectations going in...

I haven't read the book yet, but I've read the portions of the story serialized in Uptight, a few of the minis, and the material that was on What Things Do for a while. So in other words I've read parts of the story multiple times and parts not at all, over many years.  Of course with a story about memory, imagination, etc. that's in many ways an ideal reading experience, so I'm curious how it will read in a single volume, but in any case I love this comic. Everything from small tricks like the unique approach to sound effects to the impeccable sense of rhythm and pacing.

I will say that the bright green in the collection threw me off when I first saw it! Seemed a bit too garish. But Crane has an excellent sense of color and design, I love his screenprinting, so maybe the color is nicer in person.

[awfulquiet]

I just finished it. Very stressful, very relatable. I read it digitally because it was available on Hoopla through the library. The coloring is great, especially at one point when it kind of inverts for a portion of the story.

I feel like the pacing is very cinematic...a bit of a slow burn that builds up momentum and ends up barrelling towards the conclusion.

Overall very enjoyable.

[BubblesZine]

I really enjoyed it. I thought the pacing and overlapping stories kind of captured what I think the inside of my brain, my inner dialouge, is really like. It's jumping around, making crazy connections, battling intrusive thoughts. I've never had a piece of art so efficiently capture that. It being the story of just a single mundane evening made it even better. I owned some of the mini's here and there but never all of them, but now I want to go back and experience them as chapters.

I like that the barcode is made to be peeled off. It makes for a real clean looking object.

[dominocorp]

I just read it, it's so impressive. One of the strongest books I've read from a micro generation of cartoonists of a certain sensibility who emerged in the late 90s/early aughts. I mostly got a sense of him exploding cartoon language, like in the way Charlie Brown looks horrifying if you change one detail..so, panel after panel you have these simple cartoon characters and then suddenly one of them is horribly disfigured. That's what makes it so worth while, you couldn't achieve that kind of moment or elicit that kind of shock in the reader in any other medium. And Crane seems to understand the rhythms of comics (and how to draw a comic with those rhythms) better than almost anyone else.

At the same time, I find it frustrating, which is all my fault and all the pretensions I bring to comics. I loved it as something that you read through ( I found myself slamming through the pages at breakneck speed, it just reads that way) and experience these sensations...and that's, again, a hell of an achievement and one I enjoy being on the ride for. But...is the only way to do that in comics by reducing all the people in it to 'types'? Like...the dialogue is well done, but it's also all statements and scenarios that are (I think intentionally) cliches. Again...this isn't a failure of the book, I think it's using those cliche structures to amp up looping us into this narrative as seamlessly as possible and then hitting us with these horrific panels. But...is it possible to have this level of craft and do something that maybe goes a little deeper into how people relate to each other rather than giving us something 'relatable' that's laced with dynamite?

Basically, I think this is one of the best books of the year, it just made me wonder about the limitations of what you can do with comics if you get to this level of airtight storytelling.

I have a bad habit of comparing things that have no business being compared. But...as I was reading it, I thought of the new Sim book on Alex Raymond. Crane's book is far superior and one I'm going to recommend to people much more over the years than Sims book. And I'm more interested in what Crane is doing as an artist. I find it inspiring as a reader. Still..in terms of 'feeling' something beyond shock, like thinking about how people exist in relation to each other, the Sim book offers a lot more. But it's also a mess, extremely uneven. I guess I always wonder if you can get at the more intricate parts of life in comics without making a comic that IS a mess. 

[whitecomics]

dominocorp I'm very interested in that generation of cartoonists as well, and I think they share a strong commitment to, and talent for, in pushing traditional cartooning language as far as it can go. But they're also, perhaps as an outgrowth of that interest, fairly restrained cartoonists. They work slowly, carefully and they're (for better and worse) not willing to go for something as messy and confused as Strange Death.

(Even more tangental: an interesting event that unifies many cartoonists of that generation, and indeed impacted their work/careers in many cases, is a pamphlet comic that was canceled [EDIT: or published far less frequently, self-pub'd, etc.] due to the Diamond minimum order fiasco of the late 00s -- Uptight, Crickets, Or Else, Lucky are all in this category.)

I also think the reduction of characters to types is a habit of Crane's. For example if you compare this book to Last Lonely Saturday, there are clear similarities in that dimension but a strong progression here where the cliches and typecasting are consciously deployed, as Austin says.

[dominocorp]

yeah Keeping Two is like all the tendencies of Last Lonely Saturday amped up to 1000, going as far in that direction as humanly possible. Sorta like going from a drawing of a car to the Wachowski's Speed Racer movie

[BubblesZine]

Jul 17, 2022 17:43:09 GMT dominocorp said:

I guess I always wonder if you can get at the more intricate parts of life in comics without making a comic that IS a mess. 

I'd be interesting in what other comics you think try to get at the intricate parts of life and do make a mess, not to put anyone on blast haha. But I agree that it's a tough thing and crane does it well here. I haven't read the Sims comic yet, but I need to at some point this year.

[dominocorp]

Mess is the wrong word, silly of me to use. I think if I look at something like Joyce Farmer's Special Exits (for instance), there's a work that's 'solidly' cartooned, well made, but not as air tight as Keeping Two but it gets at a lot. They're two different works of art with different goals, but it's an interesting contrast to think about.

[BubblesZine]

Totally, I get it. I really loved Special Exits when it came out, I should revisit it. I'd be interested in how I'd react to it now.

[mikesheawright]

Asterios Polyp comes to mind as a work that's hugely ambitious stylistically but still feels familiar in terms of comics language and pacing and structure... while still ultimately feeling kind of "messy". But the "mess" comes across more like looseness and an attempt to stretch the limits of that language rather than being a storytelling shortcoming. And the "mess" never interferes or conflicts with the emotional underpinnings and themes and stuff.

I have a hard time with tight storytelling that aims for like... lifestyle verisimilitude because lives and memories and impressions are inherently messy so tighness feels false to me. I'm much more likely to revisit something "messy" that "fails" than something that is "neat" and "successful" in some form of pure clarity. I guess this gets at a bigger discussion about abstraction/realism, my favorite stuff is some sort of blend of the two, but leaning more heavily on abstraction than realism?

[GHO]

I really loved how every time a car was present the characters seemed hectic and claustrophobic.

[teemcgee]

I don't know if I am imposing my own ways of reading on the above discussion started by dominocorp but are we talking about what I feel is the ever present tension in comics between content and form*? That while the technical elements of comics, the mark making, the panels, the page breakdown, every broadly illustrative element in comics has seen a significant maturation in the past century or so ... so many of the stories and experiences they relate still seem so rote and clumsily rendered? You take people like Ware, who draw out the wazoo, create these pages of incredible sophistication, each panel sits in relation to each other in such an intentional way, yet seem unable to do much more than tread over and over again the same emotional landscape, the self-piting (and very male) anger of the adolescent (cf most of his generation - Clowes etc). I've had fewer revelatory experiences in reading comics compared to literature, less of a sense that the writer has somehow glimpsed into my diary and made just the right edits, a diary I've not the talent myself to write... which is all the more frustrating in that I think comic's hybrid form, both image and text, is much closer a representation of our lived experience than the written word alone, more potential to evoke that frisson of self-recognition.

(*or maybe a better formulation - since content and form seem closer in comics than  literature - the sophistication of the image making versus the sophistication of the experience or narrative that image tries to relate?)

In any case - Special Exits is a special book!

[whitecomics]

Ah, great discussion here - like mikesheawright I'm very interested in blending abstraction and realism, and I do have a general disdain for work that feels over-engineered, too cute by half in its construction. Though I'm not sure Keeping Two falls into that category. More to say about this for sure...

Anyways, back to Keeping Two itself since I finally read the collection - for the first two thirds I was completely taken. The sense of rhythm and pacing is impeccable. The panels jump seamlessly between present, memory, imagination, hypotheticals, and a story-within-a-story without a single instant of ambiguity or confusion. I actually think the fact that so much of the book takes place in characters' heads excuses, even if unintentionally, many of the cliches -- certainly my experience is that when I'm worrying about a person or situation in this way, I'm going to picture the most cliched and hyperbolic scenario rather than something more nuanced and realistic.

The moment where the perspective switches from the husband to the wife is equally seamless, and a natural evolution of the narrative. There's also an incredible poetry in a few key sequences, like the mother's message about the dog, or the "her legs/her lips" pages, that I found extremely compelling and moving. Really a pinnacle of that approach to comics, where a strong sense of rhythm and narrative momentum creates a sense of poetry that in the right hands can truly become lyrical.

Then, in the final third...in some ways I'm not sure it all comes together. A conclusion where something terrible does befall a character, after so many imagined disasters, is of course a tempting choice for the story but I'm not sure it's the right one. I did like the idea, and the way it was communicated through tools already established at this point in the story, that our imaginations continue to run rampant even in the face of actual disaster. The "thank you" sequence threw me off the most; I think it was an attempt to return to some of those earlier lyrical pages and expand on them, but instead it overstays its welcome and I spent half of it wondering about the choice of "thank you" specifically as the repeated phrase, which seemed off to me.

I still loved it. But I loved the ending a bit less, at least on this first read.

[mikesheawright]

Jul 25, 2022 11:25:08 GMT teemcgee said:

That while the technical elements of comics, the mark making, the panels, the page breakdown, every broadly illustrative element in comics has seen a significant maturation in the past century or so ... so many of the stories and experiences they relate still seem so rote and clumsily rendered? You take people like Ware, who draw out the wazoo, create these pages of incredible sophistication, each panel sits in relation to each other in such an intentional way, yet seem unable to do much more than tread over and over again the same emotional landscape, the self-piting (and very male) anger of the adolescent (cf most of his generation - Clowes etc). I've had fewer revelatory experiences in reading comics compared to literature, less of a sense that the writer has somehow glimpsed into my diary and made just the right edits, a diary I've not the talent myself to write... which is all the more frustrating in that I think comic's hybrid form, both image and text, is much closer a representation of our lived experience than the written word alone, more potential to evoke that frisson of self-recognition.

Really connected with this bit, well said! Revelatory moments are also few and far between for me while reading comics and I've never been able to quite figure out why. I wonder if it is actually a pitfall of having both image and text to experience something, that even the most abstract piece is still somehow showing "too much" and the most straightforward story has "not enough" to elicit a huge emotional reaction because there's often a degree of hand-holding in one direction or another. There is definitely a middle-ground to be found and that's maybe where the elusive comics genius exists?

A lot of times my reaction to what I think is a great comic is like "wow that was really well done" instead of "wow I really felt that". But that might just be a result of making comics myself and having some form of how-the-sausage-is-made syndrome? I have had emotional experiences reading comics, it's super rare but still a thing I'm constantly searching for. As I've gotten older I've definitely leaned more towards "feel" comics over "story" comics, and "feel" comics are almost always more on the abstract side of the spectrum for me.

[mikesheawright]

also i haven't read Keeping Two yet haha