Two Dark Comics Masters and Their Heir

by Dan Nadel, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 10/3/2006

In the midst of all the critical politeness around the current Masters of American Comics exhibition, two new retrospectives of underground titans S. Clay Wilson and Greg Irons are rather rude (but very welcome) reminders of the primal urgency of the 1960s and ’70s underground. The booze, cigarettes and flop sweats practically waft off these pages—it’s powerful, pungent stuff. Wilson’s is simply titled The Art of S. Clay Wilson (Ten Speed Press, $35), a fine art–style monograph collecting his drawings and paintings as well as a few compliments from R. Crumb, among others.

Wilson’s work is notorious for its ultraviolent, highly sexual images. In Wilson’s grungy world, sex, death and pain are simultaneous. So, of course, is laughter, but the first three usually trump the last one. His pictures are crammed full of ink and color—pirates, bikers, demons and women all piled on top of one another, not an inch of paper left unblemished. It's mesmerizing work, and hugely influential as well. Crumb notes that he "was never quite the same after meeting Wilson," who opened up the floodgates of Crumb's imagination by encouraging him to let his darkest id surface on the page.

But it's also so dark, so overpoweringly crowded, that the work is best taken in small doses. In the case of The Art of S. Clay Wilson, one wishes these doses were a bit better produced. The images are blurry in many cases or washed out in others. It's a shame, as Wilson is a vitally important if difficult artist, so this volume will have to do until a more conscientiously produced book comes out.

No such complaints about Fantagraphics’ impeccable You Call This Art?! A Greg Irons Retrospective ($29.95), expertly written and compiled by Patrick Rosencranz. Irons has never ranked very high in the common narratives of underground comics, but Rosencranz mounts a convincing argument for Irons's rightful place near the top of the heap. Possessed of a thick, sinewy pen line, Irons first drew quasi–science fiction comics and then environmentally concerned tales, finally revealing, cut-to-the-bone autobiographical comics starring his stand-in, Gregor, Purpleass Baboon.

Seventeen comics are included in the book, along with some fine psychedelic rock posters, excellent education book drawings and copious examples of Irons’s final vocation: tattooing. Irons excelled at fantastic, somewhat surreal scenes crammed full of detail. Like Wilson, Irons could draw dark and let everything out on the page, but Rosencranz's tale of Irons's artistic and personal progression reveals a sometimes tortured but mostly very gentle soul. Irons was a thoughtful, sometimes profound thinker about environmental concerns, art, and the self and this book encapsulates a brilliant career cut short when Irons was killed by a bus in Bangkok when he was just 37.

Meanwhile, David Sandlin continues a version of the underground tradition in his delightfully perverse Alphabetical Ballad of Carnality (Fantagraphics, $14.95). Taking the form of a children’s book much influenced by the likes of Wilson and Irons, Sandlin runs through the alphabet for sinners, from adultery to zealotry. The loose-knit tale concerns Sandlin’s sinner alter ego as he cascades down the road of darkness. Sandlin’s full-page drawings cleverly combine cartoon drawing (think R. Crumb crossed with Jack Kirby) with expertly rendered letter forms and graphics, creating a seamless blend of word and image. Like Wilson and Irons, Sandlin unashamedly and honestly explores his id, serving it up expertly to his eager audience. Like his forebears in the underground, Sandlin always looks to both laughter and wisdom to guide his ribald tales. In his work, as in Wilson's and Irons’s, it's a winning combination.

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