Matthew Thurber, Infomaniacs, PictureBox, 2014.
www.pictureboxinc.com/blogs/muk-luk/
www.matthewthurber.com/
www.1800mice.com/
INFOMANIACS is a graphic novel printed on paper all about the Internet. A hilarious detective story that manages to critique and explore digital culture, INFOMANIACS is marked by the author's restless questioning and heightened sense of the absurd. With the iconic Amy Shit as his Philip Marlow, Thurber looks in on "The Scriveners of Tweet Street", Albert Radar, a Joseph Beuys-lookalike psychiatrist, a perfectly preserved brain that has never seen the internet, an organic server farm, the Anthropamorphic Task Force, and so much more. But all of this is in service to a tightly plotted thriller. Think of it as The Long Goodbye for the Tumblr generation.
INFOMANIACS is a graphic novel about the tangled workings of the internet--a hilarious detective story that manages to both cheekily critique and document the outer reaches of digital culture. Readers will recognize much of their own daily obsessions, tunnel vision and wacky e-antics in this work. With the intrepid (and memorably named) Amy Shit as his Philip Marlowe, Thurber looks in on "The Scriveners of Tweet Street," Albert Radar, a Joseph Beuys-lookalike psychiatrist, a perfectly preserved brain that has never seen the internet, an organic server farm, the Anthropomorphic Task Force, and so many more weird and wonderfully inventive characterizations. All these quirky personae are skillfully woven into a tightly plotted and fast-paced thriller. The narrative does indeed move at the speed of light--perhaps partly reflecting this publication's genesis as an online serial--and the white knuckle twists and turns are done full justice by Thurber's deft drawing. (Indeed, in its internet incarnation, INFOMANIACS has already garnered a cult of devoted followers.) But above all, the book is marked by the author's restless questioning and heightened sense of the absurd. Accessible and extremely funny, this tour-de-force could be seen as The Long Goodbye for the Tumblr generation.
Matthew Thurber’s INFOMANIACS is my choice for best comic of 2013. Thurber is perhaps the funniest cartoonist working today, though in more of a narrative sense rather than the gag-built work of cartoonists like Michael Kupperman, Lisa Hanawalt and Sam Henderson. That said, INFOMANIACS has a looser and sillier structure than his previous book, 1-800-MICE. The latter book, originally published in comics form, had the narrative structure of a serial, with multiple and intersecting plots that were pulled together ever tighter as the story went along.
INFOMANIACS begins as a mostly improvised web comic, and its page-to-page structure reveals how Thurber tries to end each page or every couple of pages with a definitive gag and punchline. Thurber uses visual gags to some degree (simply the way he draws his characters is amusing), but he loves diving into puns, bon mots, and clever references that still manage to resonate with the story’s themes. Both books use deadpan descriptions of absurd ideas rooted in science and medicine. And while INFOMANIACS has the feel of a shaggy dog story (it doesn’t so much end as it just stops), it nevertheless gives a thorough airing of all the various aesthetic, cultural and political critiques that resonate throughout Thurber’s work.
Let’s unpack all of that a bit. Thurber begins INFOMANIACS in media res, introducing the reader to protagonist Amy Shit, the subway-dwelling eco-rapper who brings us into one of the nominal plotlines: an “internet serial killer” on the loose. Each of these first few pages introduces a major character in a loose manner, as the second page introduces parallel protagonist Ralph (a student), and connecting figure Dr. Albert Radar (Ralph’s therapist and Amy’s bandmate). I’m not sure if Thurber used a different kind of tool to draw the first six or seven pages of the book, but the quality of his drawing is entirely different than the rest. His panels are more cramped, his figures are smaller, and his line is wobblier. There is spontaneity in these pages, to be sure, but it feels dashed-off, as though Thurber was throwing ideas at the wall to see if anything would stick.
Those characters, the image of a knife-like cursor coming out of a screen and the concept of the Man Who Has Never Seen The Internet must have stewed in Thurber’s mind for some time, because according to the artist’s date on each strip, there was a five-month delay between the last rough page and the first section that actually has jokes in addition to odd concepts. Indeed, the concept of the SmartPencil (with a sales patter that would make Apple blush, including bits like “pinktip (TM) eraser-mouse”) is the first minor salvo in Thurber’s book-looking strafing of the internet and internet culture. The art from here on art is Thurber’s more typical style, mixing a clear, thin line with dense cross-hatching. The way he flips between the two creates an environment that at times feels desolate and lonely (the minimalist style) and cramped and claustrophobic (the dense style).
Poor Ralph is addicted to the internet and is unable to remember how to open up a door without googling it first. Radar then has Ralph sent off to Reality Rehab, a work camp for those addicted to the internet. This entire sequence is just one example of Thurber coming up with an idea and riffing on it for a few pages. The parody of rehab culture is hilarious, especially the complicated “guerrilla internet” that the campers use, complete with human “search bars”, “browsers”, “results runners”, etc. Later, Ralph discovers the “Download Club”, which substitutes conventional porn for watching bacteria reproduce (including, of course, a “money shot”). During the course of the book, Thurber seems to be working to entertain himself above all else. When he gets tired of an idea, he either switches to another character or simply writes the idea out of the book. Reality Rehab could make up an entire book, but Thurber moved on when he wanted to explore other ideas.
In particular, he seemed eager to explore familiar ground in a different manner. Common Thurber themes include critiques of global capitalism, the corporation as a variation on a religious cult and/or conspiracy, the ways in which culture is debased to merely viewing spectacle, and how ecological concerns inform our everyday life. Of course, he addresses these issues in over-the-top and frequently loopy ways. Entrepreneur and CEO Victor Valkyrie (the villain of the piece), controls both culture and the economy by running a successful social platform called Entirenet. It’s essentially the worst nightmares regarding the loss of net neutrality in one crazed package, as he and his followers (the Merlin League, where they must all dress up as wizards and wear beards) eat cupcakes that are supposedly made from the brain of the only man who hadn’t seen the internet. This is also an example of Thurber finding ways to connect characters and concepts introduced early in the book; these sorts of callbacks have a long-form improv quality to them, and they are continued throughout the book.
Regarding ecology, Thurber addresses these issues in a typically playful manner, by showing us a recording session with Amy Shit and her back-up rappers, the Climate Game-Changers. Their song is called “Global Chillin'”. In a two-page sequence, each member of the band (including anthropomorphic members like Mousey B Junior, God Snake, Cat Lady and Tuxedo Laughing Gas) gets a verse in. Therapist Dr. Radar talks about “This new talking cure which they call it freestyling”, which is yet another clever throwaway line. Amy’s rough and tumble punk, eco-activist persona is as tidy a package of a character as Victor Valkyrie is, only with all of his values reversed. Thurber treats both of them playfully and with a touch of the absurd, which steers him clear of didacticism.
All of this action occurs within the first forty or so pages of the book. From there, Thurber creates different kinds of spectacles for Ralph, as he’s first busted out of Reality Rehab, goes to an organic server farm featuring the edible internet, and then eludes the authorities by joining the CIA and its “micro-agency”, the ATF: the Anthropomorphic Task Force. Longtime Thurber fixture and anthropomorphic horse Mr. Colostomy is one of those agents, who sends Ralph on a mission to spy on Valkyrie. Despite his wealth Valkyrie isn’t very happy, having to deal with his son’s steampunk obsession and agents who demand that he listen to their dubstep albums as a form of payment. Thurber almost turns him into a sympathetic character, despite the vicious lampooning of his libertarian politics.
What’s surprising about the book is that despite all of the unrelenting silliness on page after page, the plot actually starts to tighten up and the relationships between characters become clearer. While doing that, Thurber continues to throw in new characters and concepts, like the talking worm who lives in Dr Radar’s hat, Amy’s brother Ned who smashes technology, a San Diego Comic-Con that lasts a month and takes place on a mountain, etc. There are more throwaway gags, like an airline whose planes never crash because they are held aloft by the sky god every passenger must worship or steampunk accessories like mints that make one’s breath smell like tuberculosis “without the annoying fatal qualities.” The relationship between Amy and Ralph is revealed in the book’s climax, and while it doesn’t make complete sense to even the characters in the book, the ways in which one character’s adventures affect the other’s is clever, especially in retrospect. Thurber suggests that culture and identity is all a matter of role playing, and that the real struggle is finding a way to determine one’s own role.
Like in 1-800-MICE, Thurber seems disinterested in a pat denouement, preferring to end each book suddenly. The former book concludes with an explosion and a couple of characters floating away. Similarly, INFOMANIACS concludes with an explosion and a deft finish with a plot device. The last page features a couple of characters once again floating away in a balloon, giving it an almost non sequitur happy ending. The way Thurber structures the book is perhaps its greatest strength, as there’s a kind of narrative nimbleness that switches scenes or introduces new ideas a beat ahead of the reader getting tired of the old one. There’s a balance of dada culture-jamming absurdity, rock-solid gags (a file downloaded from the internet becomes a file used to cut through prison bars) and fluid action sequences that give the book a sense of urgency and forward movement. It’s not as striking and original an achievement as the more intricate and narratively dense 1-800-MICE, but INFOMANIACS succeeds by playing to Thurber’s strengths as a humorist without sacrificing the complexity of his thematic interests. - Rob CloughAt the 77th meeting of the New York Comics and PictureStory Symposium, Matthew Thurber discussed INFOMANIACS, his comic about a mad but not so unrealistic future in which the internet has become even more ubiquitous. Thurber, who in addition to being a cartoonist works as a multimedia artist, performer, and musician, also gave a reading/performance of his scroll, Coffee Time.
Thurber began by clicking a file to open his presentation, only to have about thirty browser windows pop open. He seemed annoyed as he poked through them, looking for the one that had the visuals for his presentation in it. Something by Schubert began playing as he moved the windows around and commented on the existential sticking points of being constantly wired in, a great performative nod to the theme of INFOMANIACS.
He spoke about various social networking images and how absurd they were, including a Twitter ad that featured a number of silhouettes enjoying an evening on a rooftop overlooking a city. Thurber wondered what the image had to do with Twitter, and if maybe they were all just about to jump off the edge. He gave insights into his own struggles with oversharing and commented on the “geometric beauty” of viral and exponential growth. For instance, he recently quit Facebook, only to be sucked into checking Twitter and Tumblr incessantly.
Ralph is more of a victim of the times, placed first into “Reality Rehabilitation,” something like a concentration camp for internet addicts, then betrayed by various individuals as he is handed off like a pawn between the powers that be. Amy Shit, on the other hand, whose name Thurber likes because it “normalizes” an obscenity, expresses the emotion he feels unable to act on in real life; she gives voice to Thurber’s anger at what the internet has done to people. Other plot points include an organic server farm, talking-animal CIA agents, and “The Man Who Has Never Seen the Internet”, who is not anti-technology, but just never happened across a computer on the Greek island where he lives. Thurber also let the audience in on a few backstage secrets of INFOMANIACS, such as one of the characters being a caricature of cartoonist Marc Bell.
Thurber’s love for old school gags and more contemporary art comics is evident in INFOMANIACS. He mentioned Gary Panter’s Jimbo series as a specific influence on the way the linework gets tighter over the course of the story. The film Children of Men inspired him to give INFOMANIACS a “maguffin” that would make the reader “embrace the paranoia” in the form of The Man Who Has Never Seen the Internet. The original Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was also important, because, Thurber said, “everyone’s a spy now on Facebook.” Formative influences on his drawing style include John Tenniel, Gustave Dore, and Edward Gorey. He read a lot of Prince Valiant comics from the thirties while he was making INFOMANIACS. Thurber also mentioned Lucio Fontana’s “slash” series, in which the artist would slash through a usually blank canvas, as part of the inspiration for the viral cursor in the story that sucks people in “like a black hole.”
Though a number of art-comics intelligentsia eschew plot altogether, Thurber is fond of using it in his stories. He acknowledged that plot is an “artificial and contrived” device in storytelling, and likes it not just in spite of that, but because of it. Internal logic is great for narrative, he added, but if an idea is good enough, then ditch the rules and go for it.
After a brief intermission, Thurber brought out the scroll containing his comic Coffee Time on a wooden roller stand, which he lit from behind so the audience could see the art on the thin paper in the dark. He then began using the device to roll through it while narrating the contents in a dramatic voice. The result was a hysterical and captivating performance about a man whose seemingly mundane life unfurls in increasingly absurd ways. I could recount the details of Coffee Time’s plot and Thurber’s performance of it here further, but it is really better witnessed offline.
![page2image26504]()
- By The New York Comics & Picture-Story SymposiumThurber’s love for old school gags and more contemporary art comics is evident in INFOMANIACS. He mentioned Gary Panter’s Jimbo series as a specific influence on the way the linework gets tighter over the course of the story. The film Children of Men inspired him to give INFOMANIACS a “maguffin” that would make the reader “embrace the paranoia” in the form of The Man Who Has Never Seen the Internet. The original Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was also important, because, Thurber said, “everyone’s a spy now on Facebook.” Formative influences on his drawing style include John Tenniel, Gustave Dore, and Edward Gorey. He read a lot of Prince Valiant comics from the thirties while he was making INFOMANIACS. Thurber also mentioned Lucio Fontana’s “slash” series, in which the artist would slash through a usually blank canvas, as part of the inspiration for the viral cursor in the story that sucks people in “like a black hole.”
After a brief intermission, Thurber brought out the scroll containing his comic Coffee Time on a wooden roller stand, which he lit from behind so the audience could see the art on the thin paper in the dark. He then began using the device to roll through it while narrating the contents in a dramatic voice. The result was a hysterical and captivating performance about a man whose seemingly mundane life unfurls in increasingly absurd ways. I could recount the details of Coffee Time’s plot and Thurber’s performance of it here further, but it is really better witnessed offline.
Matthew Thurber, 1-800-MICE, PictureBox, 2011.
Mice couriers, man-tree love, sushi-chef assassins, hydro-powered-car chases, propagandist skywriting, a sinister banjo contest, Internet 5.0, and a mystery drug made from dead trees. Matthew Thurber’s weird and wonderful 1-800-Mice is the Gravity’s Rainbow–Sherlock Holmes–Professor Sutwell–Inspector Clouseau–Silent Spring of comics. If you don’t believe me, behold the rap. —Nicole Rudick
This intricately epic, epically absurd fantasy is set in Volcano Park, a setting that in terms of kooky characters rivals H.R. Pufnstuf’s Living Island. Talking trees, messenger mice, sinister dentists and hermaphrodite hippies abound. This ain’t no stream of consciousness, more like gushing dam-busting river. One of a bazillion subplots involves an effort to revise history to read that the banjo was created in Scotland. How? By planting fake YouTube videos that insert banjos into historical scenes featuring Highland folk heroes. As nutty as this all sounds, its a remarkably readable hyper-imaginative ride. - Jeff Newelt
Right from the introduction of his dramatis personae, Thurber lets us know that we’re in for just about the most unusual soap opera we could ever hope to follow. Set in and around the fictional environs of Volcano Park, the story in this wildly imaginative graphic novel presents us with a world of creosote addicts, sushi chef assassins, and mice couriers that can go wherever cellphones can’t. It’s a world where one’s love of trees might actually end in marriage, and where great matters or, at least, “ethnomusicological” questions are resolved by banjo contests. The story, not surprisingly, is a maze of interconnected narratives, but despite the dozens of characters we meet, the maze is a blast to follow. Heavy on humor and social satire, Thurber’s story constantly surprises, whether it’s the appearance of a floating Charlie Chaplin head, a killer musical note, or two research biologists working on a temporal distortion of the sex act. Thurber’s at his best experimenting with a wide array of visual techniques none of which get tiresome revealing an artist and storyteller who is wonderfully inventive. - Publishers Weekly
1-800-MICE, the collected edition of Matthew Thurber’s long-gestating series of the same name, looks to all the world like doodles. Specifically, doodles of a bunch of schnozz-heavy half-animal characters having wacky goofball adventures, with an art comic’s illogic replacing the solid conceptual underpinnings of a more traditional humor comic. That’s how it looked to me for the duration of the series’ run, in fact, so much so that I assumed it had nothing more to offer than the comedy value of the drawings and mostly tuned out. More fool I. Hidden behind a veil of nonsense lurks one of the most meticulously and pulse-poundingly plotted comics of the year.
The book tells the tale of a series of high- and low-level conflicts for the soul of Volcano Park, a fantastical metropolis of the sort that has become publisher PictureBox’s bread and butter. Like Citadel City in Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce, it’s a city of tribes: sentient trees who are the city’s true rulers, bombastic human authorities desperately trying to impose order, sartorially striking gangs spreading drugs and terror, and a small army of mystically powered rodent couriers, whose thriving delivery business gives the book its title. And like the city of Grain in Brian Chippendale’s Ninja, it’s a class-war battleground: dueling aristocracies battle for supremacy, anti-corporate and anti-environment radicals wage competing campaigns of violence, law enforcement officers play a perhaps too-prominent role in the city’s affairs, and people who choose to opt out of the racial or economic caste system are hounded by those who thrive by it.
But more so than either Brinkman or Chippendale, Thurber is concerned with delivering not just a series of sensations, even ones with as much of a logical and satisfying progression as the aforementioned books, but a by-god story. (In part this is born of necessity: Thurber’s thin, sketches-in-study-hall line simply leaves a lot more room on the page, so the wall-of-sound effect of those Fort Thunder alums is largely absent.) For the first few dozen pages this work is mostly done by the capsule bios provided by the “Dramatis Personae” guide that opens the book. Here, the groups that comprise Volcano Park’s “seething interspecies metropolis” are sketched out — the powerful Council of Trees, the ruthless rulers of the Banjo Shogunate, the emotionally beleaguered police force, the “death-cultists” of the Creosote Gang. It’s fun world-building, but of course world-building is one thing art-genre comics tend to have in spades.
It’s only as the story progresses that we realize there’s a lot more to it in sheer narrative terms than just “here’s a bunch of cool stuff I thought up.” Our primary guides to Thurber’s world are a trio of everyman protagonists — Groomfiend, a concerned employee of 1-800-MICE; Officer Nabb, a cop whose decency has been ground down by anger problems; and Peace Punk, a wandering bohemian — and a suite of villains — the shattered Banjo Shogunate triumvirate of Aunty Lakeford, The Great Partaker, and the Shogun of L.A., who now seek to undermine one another; Doctor Vial, a secret drug kingpin hoping to speed Volcano Park along on its way to oblivion; and the sushi-chef assassin trio of Maru, Razu, and Patson. And through a series of revelations and “reveals” as deft and apple-cart-upsetting as anything from Lost, we slowly come to learn as these characters bounce off one another that their conflicts run deeper than it’s possible to imagine at the story’s outset. Conspiracies, secret societies, double-crosses, agents provocateurs, centuries-old grudges, secret blood ties, hidden history — Thurber deploys all the tricks of an everything-you-know-is-wrong thriller as his many plotlines race toward their frequently bloody climaxes, and to similar edge-of-your-seat effect. I’ll tell you what, when I cracked this thing open, I never expected to be gasping at shocking revelations or racing through the pages to find out how it ends. I went to an arty goof, and a crackerjack suspense saga broke out.
But this is not to say that plot is serviced to the detriment of other concerns. The back-cover blurb touts the story’s “cast of thousands,” and indeed the sprawling cast evokes similarly densely populated narratives of community like Deadwood or The Wire. (Not so much Boardwalk Empire, though, in which the characters really are independent actors rather than organs of an independently functioning Atlantic City.) But more than demonstrating the interconnectedness of city dwellers, 1-800-MICE‘s many and varied players frequently provide individualized vectors for exploring different visual and thematic concerns that the others can’t. Peace Punk gives Thurber a shot at investigating/lampooning/celebrating dirt-poor, itinerant punk/zine culture. The mysterious detective/porn star/potential hallucination Tom Chief allows for the insertion of frank and lusty sexuality — Thurber sure can draw vaginas! — as well as adding an element of David Lynch-style “psychogenic fugue” to the already multi-layered narrative. Those sushi-chef assassins allow Thurber to demonstrate his casual mastery of the tropes of action-thriller pacing, as in a hilariously dead-on montage sequence of the killers traveling to their deadly destination that effortlessly hits the beats you’ve seen in a million spy thrillers. (This is another echo of Chippendale, who showed similar no-nonsense genre chops in If ‘n Oof in particular.) These characters aren’t just a way to populate the comic’s world, they’re a way to broaden it.
I’d add here that Thurber’s utilitarian line serves a similar function: He can make it as crude as any diary-strip webcomic, he can hatch it to within an inch of its life for a sudden dose of oppressive density, he can switch to a brush for impactful moments of epiphany or hallucination, he can go full-on psychedelic with splatter or energy effects, at one memorable point he can painstakingly render the most gorgeous gate I’ve ever seen. Like Volcano Park, Thurber’s artwork contains multitudes.
And Thurber doesn’t limit the action to his Fort Thunderous city of Volcano Park. He concocts a future Los Angeles that has dwindled into a quaint coastal village, in which Hollywood iconography has been relegated to serving the same function as pictures of lobsters wearing bibs in such towns in the real world. In a knowing nod to the frequently suburban roots of homegrown American punk culture, he sets a literally underground hardcore festival called Basementfest (currently in its sixth consecutive month!) in a small town in Montana. And for some reason he makes a Pythonesque version of Scotland, dominated by bearded kilt-wearing bagpipe players and references to Loch Ness and Loch Lomond, a central location. Glimpses of his own unique versions of cyberspace and astral projection suggest that these anti-locations have their own visual and physical logic as well. The overall impression is of a prodigious imagination being harnessed to make very astute and specific observations about the intersection of culture and community.
That’s another thing that 1-800-MICE has in common with the best conspiracy thrillers, from the highfalutin (Foucault’s Pendulum) to the gonzo (Illuminatus!) to the prosaic (Seven Days in May): it portrays a heightened reality that resonates with our own without being slavishly analogous to it. Massive historical and environmental forces seemingly beyond any one group’s understanding beset Volcano Park (hint: pay attention to the burg’s name), and the odds are good that they will run their course no matter what this or that character does. But conspiracy fiction demonstrates both the futility of ascribing sweeping change to networks of individuals and the foolishness of absolving individuals from their roles in a society’s downfall. Bad actors can indeed consciously push things in a terrible direction; good actors can indeed carve out pockets of resistance, slowing the tide if not reversing it outright. That’s where the thrills really come from, I suppose: the sense that against all odds, this secret agent has agency. -
Like Twin Peaks, Matt Thurber’s epic is set in a small town with a peculiar character, one that’s populated almost exclusively with peculiar characters, and which is teeming with darkness underneath the surface, hurtling towards a sort of apocalyptic doom.
Actually, doom is hurtling towards the town, in the form of The Great Partaker, a Nosferatu-looking villainous banjo player who was banished to space, but is now returning in the form of a comet.
That town is Voclano Park, home to humans, evolved animals who resemble anthropomorphic cartoon animals, living trees and even weirder creatures with even weirder names, all of whom live in a delicate, easily upset balance, which several groups seem determined to upset, not understanding how easily it could all come crashing down.
One can start to feel a little like a crazy person trying to summarize the plot, which involves cat-like hermaphrodite Peace Punk bumming around looking for Valhalla, the three warring members of The Banjo Shogunate who seek to defeat one another in order to gain immortality, an arranged marriage between a half-tree woman and human policeman, a double-undercover police detective who might have had a career in adult films, a gang of nihilistic drug-dealers and an evil dentist who advocates suicide for all health problems.
Yes, one can feel like a crazy person talking about 1-800-MICE, so imagine reading it. And once you start, it’s quite difficult to stop yourself from reading it, as Thurber’s huge cast and their twisty, intertwining plots are so full of silliness and suspense that it’s perfectly propulsive.
Thurber’s art can at times look sketchbook rough and coloring-book simple, but it’s big, bold, expressive and perfectly suited to delivering the intricate plotting in a straightforward manner.
The title, by the way, comes from a service that exists in Thurber’s world. Despite the ubiquity of cell phones and the existence of “Mindbook,” a sort of mental Facebook, there are still some people who are hard to reach. 1-800-MICE allows you to send a message to anyone anywhere in the world, via a mouse. (By the way, did you guys see Chris Mautner’s interview with Thurber about the book a few days ago? If not, this link will take you back in time to see it.) - J. Caleb Mozzocco
Rob reviews the fifth issue of Matthew Thurber’s series 1-800-MICE.
If you haven’t read any issues of Matthew Thurber’s brilliant series 1-800-MICE, you’re missing the best that comics has to offer. It’s part satire, part farce, part epic. My reviews of issues 1-3 and issue 4 detail the ways in which Thurber effortlessly weaves a complicated plot and a huge cast of characters in and around comic, absurdist and/or horrific set pieces. Thurber is always pushing his story forward even while he takes the reader on side journeys and freakouts, developing characters in unexpected ways while putting them through weird experiences. Those side journeys jolt the reader away from plot developments temporarily, as Thurber always wishes to keep the reader off-balance. In this issue, vicious cop Tom Chief is apparently possessed by the ghost of dead cop Nabb. He then happens upon the “Center For Reproductive Research” when he sees a woman photocopying her genitals and a man wearing a penis sheath. Moving to arrest them, they scold him by telling him they’re research biologists trying to improve population control by slowing down the act of sex. The image of the man reading Wikipedia and the woman splashing water on herself from a water cooler was as disorienting for the reader as it was for poor Tom Chief.
With a fairly simple line, Thurber controls the pacing and emotional content of his page through his remarkably varied compositional style. For example, Thurber gets across the desperation of a chase sequence in a forest by making his panels odd, angular shapes and putting them at unusual angles. After a page of claustrophobic images, Thurber announces the escape of Groomfiend the Mouse into an elaborate building that seems like an homage to Jim Woodring. A few pages later, Thurber literally blows up a scene with a “musical note” bomb and then flips to a full-page, psychedelic splash of one of the series’ most fearsome antagonists in space.
If one’s paying attention, there are any number of serious ideas that Thurber’s tackling, including corporate culture, conspiracy theories, terrorism, materialism, careerism and ecological issues. Every time things seem to be getting a little ponderous, Thurber lightens the mood with a good gag. He’s as deft at delivering a joke with his dialogue as he his with his images. In this issue, Peace Punk (a character who’s a one-man satire of various youth/hipster movements) checks out the ass of a fairy creature with the “Sherlock Holmes app”, and then makes a joke about the “noble ends” to which he’s using his Smartphone.
Thurber manages to make his comic both complex and accessible, absurd but pointed, funny but not rudderless. 1-800-MICE is a synthesis of so many trends in comics over the past decade. It taps into genre conventions but does so with an outsider artist sensibility. It provokes like an underground comic but has the iron-clad plotting of the best adventure serials. It has elements of absurdist humor and folds them into nuanced character work. Each issue simply enriches and deepens the story, never remotely running the risk of repetitiveness. When Picturebox no doubt collects the finished story in a few years, it should be a landmark event in comics. Until such time, I’m happy that Thurber enjoys the rhythms of serial publishing, right down to the letters page, supplemental material and guest covers (this issue was done in sumptuous color by Rebecca Bird. - Rob Clough
Rob reviews the fourth issue of Matthew Thurber’s unhinged series, 1-800-MICE (Picturebox).
As I noted in my review of the first three issues of 1-800-MICE, Matthew Thurber’s series is one of the great (if relatively unknown) achievements in comics over the past decade. It’s a comic that acknowledges and distills any number of influences without being beholden to any singular influence. It’s a comic that mixes and matches genres, as comedy and horror in particular frequently fuse into unforgettable and bewildering images. It’s a sprawling epic with over a dozen key characters. It’s a comic that mixes primitivist and grotesque character design with fluid page composition.
It’s also a comic that has multiple plot threads weaving in and out of each other, sometimes to bewildering effect. This is a comic book that merits multiple readings so as to enable one to more easily follow these threads through whipcrack-quick transitions. Every issue of the series follows a rising and falling wave pattern where a scene of pure farce is followed by a sense of rising dread, and then back to farce. Throughout, Thurber employs a simple and cartoony line so as to produce a slightly unreal, almost psychedelic effect that disorients the reader. However, Thurber’s control over his line and page never lets things spiral out of control into incoherency, nor is there ever a sense that he’s showing off on the page just because he can. There’s simply a lot of information to process on his pages.
This issue resolves one issue of dread, as an arranged marriage designed to unite the interests of the humans and trees of Volcano City was wrecked by terrorists in the most over-the-top manner possible: ramming through a gate with the aid of acid jets and then blowing up the bride and groom. On the other hand, dread is further ratcheted up with the character of Groomfiend the mouse messenger, whose addiction to the strange drug creosote may be warping his sense of reality even as he’s trying to help his longtime friend. He’s the recipient of a hilarious message from the corporation he works for, which tries to “console” its workers by comparing the recent deaths of other workers to merely losing a finger off a hand, so that “eventually, it will seem that the deaths, in a sense, did not occur.”
The other main plot thread in this issue follows Peace Punk, a young guy whose expertise with creating viral internet videos leads him to take a job with one of the series’ principal antagonists. Of course, given the tone of this comic, that antagonist (the omnipresent and seemingly benevolent Aunty Lakeford) reveals that she takes the time to prank call one of the other antagonists. The issue ends with that other foe (the Shogun of Los Angeles) ranting at the inhabitants of “charming harbor town” Los Angeles and destroying its protector, the giant floating head of Charlie Chaplin.
Thurber isn’t afraid to bring in new elements into his series while still juggling unresolved plot elements. 1-800-MICE is a whirlwind of far-out concepts, acidic satire, funny drawings, action, and horror that is somehow perfectly balanced. Each new issue makes the tapestry of the series all the more rich and complex, even as the plot is unraveled and characters’ backstories are fleshed-out. Despite its initial outsider-art veneer, this is a series than nearly any reader of comics can latch onto and enjoy, if they pay attention. - Rob Clough
1-800-MICE #2Matthew Thurber
Publishing Information: Picturebox Inc., comic book, 24 pages, 2007,
I'll admit right up front I don't understand what the hell is going of here a lot of the time, nor am I always aware on what basis I should be deciding if 1-800-MICE is any good or not. Usually with comics like this, the second in a series from Matthew Thurber and PictureBox, I concentrate on the pleasure I get from the drawing and try to find some surface sympathy with the story. That's possible here. Although there are several short stories that seem self-contained, a longer narrative deals with the quest of three chefs hired by the Shogun of Los Angeles to retrieve and kill (not necessarily in that order) a rogue member of the Shogun's staff, his former assistant Peace Punk. Peace Punk distracts the trio by directing them to a secret concert where getting a ticket involves renting a crappy apartment and working a minimum wage job. I feel ridiculous even expending the energy to describe the plot, though, because the way I'm reading the latest issue seems to have more to do with picking it up and reading random panels to see if any look cool -- which they do; Thurber's an imaginative artist with chops to spare whose stuff in the bulk of the comic looks looks like either a) Jessica (formerly Jeff) Johnson making art from Mat Brinkman's visual bible, or b) Brad Johnson working with an editor that makes him redraw half his page -- and if they make me laugh.
They made me laugh. I'm semi-helpless before crude comics hi-jinx and inspired nonsense, particularly when the writing can go toe to toe with the art like Thurber's can. Here's a Thurber line, from a supplicant before some sort of king: "Acknowledged, sir, this odd-looking bitch upsetteth my wood pulp bucket spilling a day's worth of mandible toil." Mandible Toil! Here's another, from a teenager in a cab. "I spent way too much time on the Internet today. It's fucking up my DNA." Or a third. "... Things have been quiet at Colostomy Studios ever since a firecracker blew out my eardrums on the Chinese New Year." Who the hell talks like that? Who the hell thinks like that? Why would I possibly desire to pay greater attention to this stuff and potentially ruin my enjoyment of looking at it sideways from 100 yards across the room? Enough reviewing already. - http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/briefings/cr_reviews/9959/
I knew little of Matthew Thurber's work (except by reputation) before I read the first three issues of 1-800-MICE, and I was prepared for a stream-of-consciousness narrative with primitivist art (the mark of many PictureBox releases). While the first couple of pages were difficult to parse at first, it quickly became evident that this was a stunning, multilayered story with a deep wellspring of themes and a dizzying array of memorable characters. It's not dream logic like Ellsworth's comics, but what it does instead is present a series of absurd premises and build an iron-clad narrative stemming from them. While there's a primitivist veneer to Thurber's art, his page composition is not only spotless in how easy it is to process, but it also rewards multiple readings as one tries to connect the various unfolding plot threads.
The story revolves around a huge cast of characters in and around Volcano Park, a city built on an active volcano controlled by sentient trees. The main tension of the story revolves around events that are about to happen: a meteor crashing into the city, a banjo contest with sinister consequences, and (most of all) the potential eruption of the volcano. Fatalism and eschatology are two running themes in the comic, as a constant state of dread stalks the characters even as they whir and buzz around their lives. Exploitation, reconciliation and conspiracy are also ideas in play, with the forces of the corrupt and immortal "Banjo Shogunate" conspiring to work against a potential rapproachment between humans and tree-creatures. Even the three members of that cabal work at cross-purposes: one as a gang lord in Los Angeles, one the personification of crazy evil coming down in the meteor, and a third as a sort of omnipresent entity that passes herself off as a force for benevolence.
There's not much point in discussing the plot any further, given that Thurber obviously still has much to reveal and that it's so tightly wound that unraveling it would take the fun out of reading it. Suffice it to say that Thurber is interested in societal roles and how they change (especially in the person of a police officer), the concept of institutions & people being poisoned, the ways in which communication is always a form of intervention no matter how far removed we wish to be (personified in a company that sends mice to deliver messages but not otherwise intervene), and the ways in which we interact with our ecosystems. Thurber isn't afraid to throw in absurd commentary on activism, either--his "Peace Punk" character is a walking pile of scattered activist thoughts and identities. He winds up at a year-long alt-music festival held in a city's sewers and has to dodge a trio of sushi-chef assassins who hilariously have to get minimum wage jobs and listen to a prescribed course of music before they were allowed passage.
While Thurber occasionally dazzles the reader with a densely packed splash page (like the one introducing the reader to the bustle of Volcano Park), he concentrates most of his effort into character design. He favors the slightly grotesque (like the wildly gesticulating Officer Nabb, with a beaklike nose, bulbous pate and pointy ears), the anthropomorphic (like the various mice) or the ridiculous (like his badass sushi chef assassins). In terms of composition, he's all over the place, rarely repeating a panel set-up twice from page to page. He goes from splash pages to 12-panel grids to a page with 4 triangular panels meeting each other, where one has to turn the page around. None of this feels gratuitous; indeed, Thurber has an uncanny sense of meeting the story's needs with the construction of the page. He meets claustrophobic scenes with small panels, disorienting sequences with skewed panels, and grander scenes with much more white space. Some panels are crammed with background details, while intense scenes between characters have a white backdrop. It's Thurber's composition in this regard that makes this such a compelling read. He may want to slowly unveil information in the style of a mystery, but he doesn't want to deliberately confuse the reader. There's always enough information to know what's going on, though I would recommend reading all three issues to date one after the other.
The biggest reason why the comic is successful is that Thurber softens his thematic points with laugh-out-loud gags and absurdism. It's as though Thurber took a few Michael Kupperman-style concepts and spun a deliberate narrative from them. The events may well be grave, but the characters themselves are ridiculous. Despite the crazy conceptual nature of his cast, Thurber has fully-fleshed out backstories for each of them, pulling tighter the threads of the story in unexpected and delightful ways. It seems a bit odd to describe a story this crazed and complex as a page turner, but there's really no other way to say it. When it's over and collected, it will create a huge sensation in the alt-comics world. For now, it's a delightful treasure for fans of comics periodicals. - Rob Clough
The End of the Internet: An Interview with Matthew Thurber
by Sam Frank
I met cartoonist and musician Matthew Thurber six-odd years ago somewhere in Prospect Park (a séance? a picnic?), and then saw him play alto saxophone in his Muzak-jazz-punk trio Soiled Mattress and the Springs at the New York Art Book Fair. We kept running into one another in odd places; or, since New York City is now lacking in odd places, at places where subculture obsessives go to convince themselves there’s still oddness in the world. Soiled Mattress broke up in 2008, but Thurber’s “Anti-Matter Cabaret” act Ambergris has continued, and sometimes he plays with artist Brian Belott as Court Stenographer and Young Sherlock Holmes. In 2011, after years of publishing minicomics, zines, and books on tape, Thurber collected his serial 1-800-Mice in graphic-novel form. It’s about a messenger mouse named Groomfiend, a peace punk named Peace Punk, and a cast of thousands. More recently, Thurber wrote a culture diary for this blog, and started Tomato House gallery with his girlfriend, Rebecca Bird, in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn.
Thurber’s new graphic novel, Infomaniacs, is about the singularity and the end of the Internet; it’s also the final book from the great comics publisher PictureBox, which serialized parts of Infomaniacs online starting in 2010. The book’s heroine is Amy Shit, a punk rapper who sometimes lives off the grid—in a subway tunnel, even. Her brother’s a neo–Ned Ludd who goes around smashing iPhones. Meanwhile, Ralph is an Internet addict who escapes from reality rehab, then embeds in an immortality cult run by a libertarian oligarch who wants to eat the brain of the last man who’s never seen the Internet. A horse and a bat, both intelligence agents for the ATF (Anthropomorphic Task Force), wonder what the singularity will look like—a 1950s computer, a crystal, a cell phone, a tree branch?
Thurber’s video trailer offers a sense of the comic’s raucous hugger-mugger and subterranean surrealism, but doesn’t touch on its Underground Man againstness. For that, perhaps this quote, from an early, uncollected strip: “All bundled up and no place to go … The man who hates the Internet is a man who hates the world.”
Thurber and I met in the office I share with a puppet theater, near the Barclays Center. Giant heads hung from the walls. I don’t have Wi-Fi and don’t know anyone’s password.
When did you quit Facebook?
The beginning of 2013. It was my New Year’s resolution. I was an addict, checking it twenty, thirty times a day.
And you were off Twitter for a while, right? You half-quit.
I deleted my account and then I couldn’t stay away. I don’t think I lasted more than two weeks, but I still get to the point where I’m completely furious at the way people are packaging their identities, and then I’ll make some kind of horrible statement like, I can’t, this is shit, this is …
A lot of people are able to use social media more casually than I can and feel less conflicted about it. You go to an art-marketing class, and they tell you that you have to constantly remind people of your existence. Even if you’re not directly telling them to buy your thing, you should be promoting yourself ambiently. This is a picture of my studio, or This is something I’m reading, or This is somebody I bumped into at a party. It’s interesting when you see literary celebrities doing that, like Salman Rushdie or Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates. They’re constantly on Twitter, and it makes me wonder if they’re actually really lonely or bored.
The few first drawings in Infomaniacs are more primitive. I can almost imagine your having drawn them with a stylus on a 1993 Apple Newton.
Those are unedited sketchbook pages where I was trying to launch the story. I didn’t do any scripting at the beginning. I just started developing a plot around characters I’d intuited. I knew about their attitudes and how they looked, but I didn’t know who they were. I was working from subconscious images and then trying to construct a plot or story line around them. At first the strips were gags about technology—the name Infomaniacs was there, but the characters weren’t. Starting off with nothing is a tactic I’ve used before just to get going—start with a title and write backward, trying to fill in the space between the clauses.
Infomaniacs is meant to be like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a caper—big, messy, overbudget.
The epic-comedy genre. 1-800-Mice was a soap opera, where I was cutting between all these little stories. And when I saw Mad, Mad World and Around the World in 80 Days, it made sense to go in that direction, because it’s all soap-opera story lines directed at a MacGuffin. Everybody’s going after some prize.
There’s another quality to your storytelling, though, a kind of unending proliferation of narrative. It makes me think of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.
I did pre-Internet role-playing games from age seven or eight through high school. I used to make my mom play D&D with me, and I was the dungeon master. There are preset stories you can follow, but there’s also the more improvisational school of D&D where you make things up and it’s a shared fantasy with your friends. We would come up with great plots, like a man with anthrax running after you trying to pee on you, or you find a truck in the middle of the dungeon. That’s when it gets really surreal. As the DM, you’re trying to be like Scheherazade, keeping everybody interested. You never want the game to end.
I wonder if college or high school students—kids who are born into the Internet—can relate to Infomaniacs. I’m teaching college kids now and they’re constantly online, dependent on technology, and if they’re drawing they always want to use images from the Internet as references. I had thought of them as my audience—
Or were you imagining them as your characters and thinking about how they might use the Internet?
The Ralph character is definitely just a confused college student, somebody I’ve seen in one of my classes. Infomaniacs is not a kids’ book, but in my mind the ideal audience is a confused teen or confused college student—a college student who’s angry at everything and doesn’t know why. Or maybe this is a kids’ comic. It’s pretty PG. There might be some swear words. Well, a character’s name is Amy Shit.
The comic reads like a fever dream of tech anxieties. Did you read up on singularity literature, or just make it up based on what had come to you ambiently?
I had to make it up or respond to a made-up version of what the tech utopians were thinking. There was a New Yorker article about Peter Thiel—that was my main research. He’s driving around and going to the Methuselah Foundation to meet with the life-extension researchers he’s funding. It’s like post–Ayn Rand, this is the next step you can take. Now that you’re the master of the universe, now you can behave like an immortal. And Thiel gave Facebook a huge angel investment when they were starting out. But what an incredible character. He was my idea of an Ayn Rand character come to life. He’s like a Bond villain in his nascency.
Then I started actually reading Atlas Shrugged, and I thought, This is a great science-fiction novel. For the first fifty pages, it felt like a neat Philip K. Dick story. And then I got bogged down and stopped.
I like not-knowing in general. And if I’d waited until I’d read all of Ayn Rand and all of the singularity literature, I wouldn’t have been able to work fast enough to get this comic done. I felt an urgency to get it out before it became completely irrelevant. YouTube has been around for a decade. The Snowden stuff happened when this book was coming out. But I felt like it would be funny if I didn’t know what those things were. Writing a book responding to the singularity but not really knowing what it was. It was just a rumor. Ineptitude can be funny, too.
What about the singularity made you feel like you wanted to reply to it? Because it feels like the endpoint of technology?
The escalation of culture and technology to a certain messianic goal. Is there a point to all this time-wasting activity, or is all this confusion that we feel with technology and all of the metaphysical torture from social media—is it all going to be okay in the future when the singularity happens? We’ll just have evolved?
The idea that people might be poor now, but in the future the technology that’s making them poor will make them rich.
Yeah, which is a MacGuffin. Everyone’s in pursuit of this thing, and it’s a mirage. We’re all just going to be competitive on these platforms forever.
In Infomaniacs, the singularity is a thing, but it’s also a person. It’s a character.
That’s what I mean about making it up. Because I don’t know what the singularity really is. I understand that it involves the hybridization of humans and technology, or A.I. Or actually, no, I don’t know what it is. A robot? Like the movie D.A.R.Y.L.? Or any movie where there’s a robot who has feelings?
As far as I understand it, there are a few different versions. One is Ray Kurzweil’s—predictably exponential technological growth, and that means we’ll all become hybrids. And then there’s the idea that there’s a point beyond which we can’t really know anything, it’s unimaginable, like traveling into a black hole, totally unknowable to our tiny human minds.
And maybe it already happened? Do people think it already happened?
There are some people who would say, Oh, obviously we’re self-improving intelligences and we have been for a long time, so we’re already on that road. Most singularitarians don’t think it has already happened. They think it’s going to happen around 2045.
I have the cranky old misanthropic personality of every stupid cartoonist or artist, which is that everything is getting worse and people are disempowered and can’t draw, can’t write, can’t think. They’re dependent on technology, so then it’s less a religious awakening than a Matrix-y dark future. My definition of utopia is technology-free, probably more like the Garden of Eden than like having infinite knowledge.
Maybe constant communication has its benefits. People become sophisticated pretty quickly, they figure out what’s a good aesthetic to have, and they get feedback more rapidly. On the other hand, while it’s not necessarily great to be on your own and trying to figure stuff out for yourself, sometimes it means you make something that’s super weird and amazing, even if it’s totally flawed.
Real freaks can’t help it. Sometimes you’ll meet somebody, and you’re like, This person is undersocialized, but they’re incredibly smart, and they’re talking enthusiastically and they’re not afraid to be talking about it. I don’t want people to have their freakishness crushed by constant socialization, which creates conformity. Even on Twitter there’s stuff you can’t say or you wouldn’t say, and that sucks, but you would say it if you were Mike Diana or Dame Darcy making a comic book.
Dril is the one character from weird Twitter I like reading. He’s not a consistent character. Sometimes he’s a middle-aged divorced guy who’s kind of gross. He has sexual hang-ups about jeans, and he likes smoking cigars, and there’s something that’s a little bit wrong there that’s verging on scary, which is good.
That sounds like the kind of thing I want to read on Twitter—a completely fictionalized, fully rendered character. When it gets too personal it’s like, This is me but also it’s not me. It’s too confusing. Personally, I find it difficult to write anything sincere on Twitter. And it’s why I quit Facebook. Because it’s broadcasting to the public, and I find it vulgar to share personal things about my life in a commercialized, monitored space. The NSA is spying on you, and so are your friends, your business acquaintances, and your mom. We’re behaving more like spies every day. I think this conditions us for a corporate, if not fascist, future in which free and nonconformist behavior is really difficult.
I should read Brian Chippendale’s Twitter more—is that safe?
It’s a fire hose of really good jokes. I don’t know how he does it. I’m trying to think of who my favorite Twitter person is. It’s like that quote that remarks are not literature.
Who said that?
I don’t know.
I’ll google it.
We can google it.
Are you working on another comics project right now?
Did I tell you about the handwriting-analysis thing? I wrote a bunch of one-page or one-paragraph samples and put out a call. I mailed people a typewritten sample of prose—it’s all fragmentary. Maybe some of it goes together to make different stories. So they rewrite it and mail it back, and then I’m going to develop a system of analysis to understand who they are through their handwriting samples. That’s the next project, to make a book out of that, or maybe just a long booklet, but I’ve got 160 samples so it might be a really long zine.
It’s a way to type and keep communicating with people in a non-Internet way. The handwriting-analysis project was really motivated by the desire to receive letters, so even if I had to write them and people had to rewrite them, it was still stuff in my mailbox. For when the Internet goes away—it’s my insurance.
Paris Review Culture Diary
The Comics Journal: Interview
Robot 6: Interview
Artnet: Club Nutz
DJ Tuxedo Laughing Gas
Vice magazine interview
 Icontact, 2014 |  Rampant Lion, 2014 |  Lady Ivanhoe, 2014 |  Moonlight Crusade, 2014 |
 Advertisement for Reebok, 2012 |  NY Times illustration, 2012 |  John Ashbery's Living Room (for Loretta Howard Gallery), 2012 |  I Must Warn The Cat, 2012 |
 Community Garden, 2012 |  Mr. Colostomy comic, Brooklyn Rail, 2012 |  Explode Head View (with Billy Grant) 2012 | 
Illustration for Vice Fiction issue, 2012
|
 Ambergris LP design |  Flyer, 2012 |  "Into Thin Heir", 2011 |  Smurf Pants in Subway, 2011 |
 NY Times Illustration: "Package Deals" |  Believer Comic, March 2011 |  Flyer for Performance, Sara Meltzer Gallery |  Pigeon Window |
 Flyer for Ambergris performance at Family, Los Angeles |  Comic page from Vice Magazine, 2009 |  "Spore Maintenance Kru" from Frederic Magazine |  A turbulent flume ride at Disneyland |
 NY Times editorial: "Summer of Love" |  "Year of the Duck" T Shirt |  Ike and Tina for The Walrus |  The Believer, music issue |
 1-800-MICEcomic book cover |  Kramers Ergot 6title page |  T-shirt Design for Family store, L.A. |  Magic Bus jacket design for Penguin Books |
 WFMU Website, Brian Turner Show | 
Yanni from "Great Moments
in WFMU History" | 
Blood Orange Print ad,
Fantagraphics Books | 
from Kramers Ergot 6,"Jaguar Moon Mission"
|
Soiled Mattress & the Springs
album cover art | 
BARR poster
| 
Cakeshop poster
| 
Ganzfeld 4
|
"More Oracles"
|  "Peace Punk Manifesto" | 
Map of Landy
| 
Downtown Landy
|
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.