Post by arecomicsevengood on Aug 8, 2023 17:58:47 GMT
I really didn't want to make a separate Kramers thread, spinning off from the "What Are You Reading Today" thread, but I did want to say something about the cultural context, as it sort of stands revealed in retrospect, and then it got way too long and stirred up too many things that I realized it would absolutely derail the thread to talk about them all.
Someone, I think John Elliott of the band Emeralds, was saying that looking back the noise scene was a weird response to the George W Bush years. And it absolutely is that! But the other response to the Bush years, and their heavily anti-intellectual vibe, was twee stuff of the sort of Decemberists/McSweeney's axis, John Hodgman humor. Obviously Kramers has a heavy noise contingent - CF, Brinkman, Thurber's piece in the front of issue 6 apologizes for ripping off Caroliner. The main takeaway or impact or what made this stuff seem "avant-garde" is that it is in many ways basically as dumb as possible - but it's dumb within the context of Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings (which was being worked on at the same time as the Kramers 4-6 run IIRC) being considered smart. Or like the professionalization of cartooning via higher education - the Center For Cartoon Studies gets founded in 2005.
It's also pre-social-media, which affects a lot of how people were working and how these people could be grouped together by actual physical proximity and not just being people's friends online. Not to romanticize this era too much just to acknowledge the ways in which it would have been impactful on a lot of people who might now not have as much use for some of the material.
This is kinda why I'm hesitant to insist to Ethan, or anyone who didn't read these books at the time, that they have to read them now. The context they existed in was so antagonistic to "the canon" as it was constituted that reading them because they're "canonized" now will likely lead a reader to say WTF about the stuff that is making the strongest case for itself. If you can find copies at the library or through a friend, there is no reason not to read them, there's a lot of good stuff. Issue 9 is kind of a weird one because a lot of stuff in there is reprinted in larger books (Kim Deitch, Gabrielle Bell, Dash Shaw, the Pham stuff) and other stuff is like black and white (or one color) material that's intentionally rough and cartoony and could just be a zine. This is absolutely not the earlier issues make, where you got to see people that were basically zinesters making work with production value that was unmatched at the time, but now cheap color printing has made essentially standard. But what you see in Salazar's work is reproduction of a handmade quality as a way of communicating feeling, which I find very moving even when he's just making dumb jokes. Just totally different from how cartoonists operate today in terms of the emotional register, even if I understand some people might view it as too cute to connect with.
Someone, I think John Elliott of the band Emeralds, was saying that looking back the noise scene was a weird response to the George W Bush years. And it absolutely is that! But the other response to the Bush years, and their heavily anti-intellectual vibe, was twee stuff of the sort of Decemberists/McSweeney's axis, John Hodgman humor. Obviously Kramers has a heavy noise contingent - CF, Brinkman, Thurber's piece in the front of issue 6 apologizes for ripping off Caroliner. The main takeaway or impact or what made this stuff seem "avant-garde" is that it is in many ways basically as dumb as possible - but it's dumb within the context of Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings (which was being worked on at the same time as the Kramers 4-6 run IIRC) being considered smart. Or like the professionalization of cartooning via higher education - the Center For Cartoon Studies gets founded in 2005.
It's also pre-social-media, which affects a lot of how people were working and how these people could be grouped together by actual physical proximity and not just being people's friends online. Not to romanticize this era too much just to acknowledge the ways in which it would have been impactful on a lot of people who might now not have as much use for some of the material.
This is kinda why I'm hesitant to insist to Ethan, or anyone who didn't read these books at the time, that they have to read them now. The context they existed in was so antagonistic to "the canon" as it was constituted that reading them because they're "canonized" now will likely lead a reader to say WTF about the stuff that is making the strongest case for itself. If you can find copies at the library or through a friend, there is no reason not to read them, there's a lot of good stuff. Issue 9 is kind of a weird one because a lot of stuff in there is reprinted in larger books (Kim Deitch, Gabrielle Bell, Dash Shaw, the Pham stuff) and other stuff is like black and white (or one color) material that's intentionally rough and cartoony and could just be a zine. This is absolutely not the earlier issues make, where you got to see people that were basically zinesters making work with production value that was unmatched at the time, but now cheap color printing has made essentially standard. But what you see in Salazar's work is reproduction of a handmade quality as a way of communicating feeling, which I find very moving even when he's just making dumb jokes. Just totally different from how cartoonists operate today in terms of the emotional register, even if I understand some people might view it as too cute to connect with.
