Alive Outside

1 month ago 12

Tegan O'Neil | May 6, 2025

Do I miss the bunker-busting door-jams of yore? Kramers Ergot #4 - oh, shit, you mumble. Yeah, she’s going there. Run tell your mom. But . . . my goodness. You want to talk about going there! This book we’re here to talk about today is the product of two editors, Cullen Beckhorn and Marc Bell. Bell was in Kramers Ergot #4. One of a few handful from that volume represented here, with Joe Grillo and Ron Regé, Jr. A portentous cohort indeed.

This feels portentous. Maybe it hit me at just the right moment. After taking the initiative to approach the package - and, no small thing, the package is quite intimidating. It’s a whole package, complete with a partial jacket by Lilli Carré. There’s a fold-up poster by Trenton Doyle Hancock, and a minicomic insert by Dongery. That’s not to be confused with the mini comics and ashcans printed as inset throughout the volume. It’s a thick paperback with a bit of a speedbump when you lay it flat because it’s got so much weird shit printed in it.

It’s an object into which much care and attention has clearly been poured. A gorgeous object. So impressive that I didn’t realize until I’d had it in my hands for hours that the cover had Mickey Mouse all over it. Eden Veaudry did the cover, and introductory pages. Veaudry’s aesthetic embraces fragility, colored pencils wending tentative lines across the grain of the page. Her compositions are hallucinatory in the strictest sense, not a random array but images shattered and folded roughly.

There’s something to be said for profusion as a statement in and of itself. Certainly a test of the curator’s Rolodex. Where else do we celebrate success in the field of art curation other than in the ability to show off a vanguard movement? To create a moment in history? A good anthology is a hard thing to pull off, it must be said. A decent anthology offers you a snapshot in time. A bad anthology still has standouts.

But, yes, it’s been twenty-two years since Kramers Ergot #4. If your parents made love one year and three months after buying a copy of that comic book, congratulations, you can legally drink now.

Kramers Ergot led the pack for a good few years, and then it faded out of the conversation, around the time the conversation started to change. The fate of every anthology series, even the great ones. There have been more issues of Zap than you need to read, which is a remarkable thing to be able to say. Raw just wasn’t going to stick around, although there’s an alternate universe just a couple microns difference where Raw persisted as a brand umbrella in that region of the media scene. It’s to Spiegelman’s credit that he wanted nothing to do with that. It was its own thing for a little while, and now it’s just something that costs a little bit of money on the secondary market. A definite vibe. No one’s ever reprinted them, possibly a prohibitive endeavor.

And there was Kramers, for a brief streak in the first decade of the new century. It was certainly a moment. It seems very much a direct antecedent of the book we’re here to talk about, ALIVE OUTSIDE. They share a handful of creators. They both appear to celebrate a specific kind of plenty at an otherwise inauspicious moment. The first issue of Kramers came out in 2000, the fourth in 2003. A great deal changed in the world around Kramers Ergot over the course of the anthology’s lifespan, and 2003 was an especially inauspicious year.

Things weren’t going particularly well In 2003. Things were actually really awful at the time. A book like Kramers Ergot #4 falling into your hands in the throes of a most dismal span of history marked by successive world-historical setbacks seems … a bit of a miracle, don’t you think? That’s my memory of it, at least. A catalogue of wonders and abundance arrived in the midst of an era of spiritual poverty.

To that effect it’s impossible to talk about the last two decades of American art comics - and a good chunk of commercial comics and animation and publishing and the fine arts - without at least a glancing nod in the direction of Fort Thunder. They were central to a moment that proved remarkably generative for a great many fields, despite ceasing to exist before anyone ever heard about it. It wasn’t a movement that fell apart, it was a venue and a bit of a commune. For all of six years, 1995-2001, at RISD. The primaries scattered to their winds before anyone ever heard of the “movement.” Fort Thunder was a space, and they literally tore it down to make a parking lot before it had the chance to stick around. Would it have stuck around in any capacity? Would it be a brand name, too, if it hadn’t been bulldozed?

It wouldn’t make for anywhere near as good a story. They were a big part of Kramers Ergot #4 - with its ghostly and haunting wraparound cover by Mat Brinkman. They benefitted from the association, certainly, those that built careers. But it must be said as a judgment of the movement qua the movement, Fort Thunder was never a vanguard of visual artists committed to comics as a medium. Imagine Fort Thunder putting together an actual comic book! No, they all had their own things going on. Brian Chippendale’s day job is “rock musician,” for goodness sake. More power to him, clearly. He’s worked with Bjork. Have you worked with Bjork? I didn’t think so.

Lightning Bolt is great. I listen to Lightning Bolt all the time. He still draws, too. He does a lot of different kinds of art. But he was never going to be doing a lot of commercial work. Could Brian Chippendale draw a hell of a Godzilla comic? Almost certainly. If they don’t at least ask they’re missing a bet. But he doesn’t need to do anything he doesn’t want to do, and as wonderful a gift as that is for an artist you can’t help but think that the Fort Thunder crew were missing a connection to cartooning as a vocation. Which strikes me as a generational shift in hindsight, quite generative for the medium and the culture long after Fort Thunder was a parking lot. They had more influence on the world of comics than the world of comics had on them. I think Mat Brinkman’s cartooning is some of the most ambitious and significant work of the century, but the man is palpably disinterested in drawing comics. Just the way the cookie crumbles.

So why bring up Fort Thunder, since none of them are even in this book? Well, partly to point out just that fact, that none of them are here, even as the spirit of the moment lingers in the warp and weft of the generations that followed. Alive Outside shares with Kramers a commitment to riotous difference. There’s no theme. There’s no curatorial impress whatsoever, it doesn’t feel like, other than simply the thrill of placing so many good comics right next to each other in a fat book. Figuring out what order to put things in is a big part of the fun, I’m sure. It arrives as a necessary reminder that talent abounds, a host of different artists and different kinds of artist as well. It throws a lot at you and expects you to keep up. It doesn’t purport to be any kind of comprehensive, just overwhelming. It’s not Comix 2000, but a vigorous experience nonetheless.

It’s a little bit frustrating, too, but that’s an intended consequence. The table of contents is designed to be difficult to parse. You’re going to recognize some people but you’re not going to recognize everybody, some people sign their work and some don’t, and the whole thing is complicated by the numerous minicomic inserts. It’s frankly impossible to navigate by conventional means, so you must assume it was done that way on purpose. You’re not meant to be flipping back and forth and stroking your chin on a leisurely stroll. You have to amble rather more aimlessly, by design. Take it all in. Flip at random. Don’t get hung up on seeing everything your first time through. It’s not a book to sit down and read cover to cover, not because it’s not cover to cover packed with good stuff, but because I don’t recommend you sitting down to eat a whole cheesecake in one sitting. You’ll put yourself in the hospital. Pace yourself.

It’s good to we can still do this. Come out like this, in force. You need to be reminded of how vitally important art is, every day. Dedicate yourself to creative pursuits as much as you possibly can, expose yourself to new art every day, because that’s what we’re all here to do. Refusing yourself the luxury of expression is ceding the point. Give yourself something to fight for. Alive Outside as a publication is only political in the very tangential and very concrete way that it was released in early November 2024. Sorry, that’s just the water in which we’re swimming, compadre. ALIVE OUTSIDE hit me like a strong right hook at just the point I needed a strong right hook. It’s good to know we can still do this. That’s a reason to get up in the morning.

The first supplement insert is the most consequential, presenting a magazine-sized mock-up of a comics anthology from the historical fertile crescent of alternative comics, the late 1980s. Alive and Outside! for emphasis. It leads off with a single page illustration from Julie Doucet that steals the show in a walk. Breathtaking piece of work. There’s a historical feature on 1970s commercial artist Steven M. Johnson that lays bare a generational debt to a now obscure figure. Doug Allen shows up for five whole pages! This section also features four pages by someone new to me completely, Jordan Rae Herron. Dense, political, polemic, it feels like something that would have fit right in on a random issue of Wimmin’s Comix. Herron impressed me enough with her work here that I went to see what else she had done. Her day job is cinematography, a working camera operated for family TV and movies. Clearly she knows how to frame an image. Remarkably assured work.

Roman Muradov pops in with a few pages that feature a frank discussion of the appeal of the cartoons that appear in the New Yorker, an artist who either learned an immense amount from Ivan Brunetti or developed in a remarkable case of parallel evolution. One of the booklets features a short surreal strip, Simon’s Thumb, drawn by Julien Ceccaldi. A strangely intense but otherwise straightforward story of a man in a relationship with a giant thumb, drawn as a commercial manga. A bulletin from somewhere else. Susan Te Kaburagi King pops in with a magisterial sequence, changing vertical panels opening an aperture on abstraction. Viscerally thrilling to experience, positively eerie.

Theo Ellsworth shows up. He’s almost two decades deep into a storied career. Marc Bell’s contribution to the anthology is suitably labyrinthine. His style remains and grows, enduringly and insidiously macabre. Joe Grillo gets an insert to himself, hallucinatory pinups. Darth Vader shows up, briefly. Trenton Doyle Hancock pops in again with a section that appears to be composed of collages constructed out of his drawings. Powerful, riveting pieces.

There’s too much going on, in the very best way. I can’t offer a stronger recommendation. It’s a book that really very badly wants to make a lot of noise, and succeeds. An exciting thing to hold in your hands.

Every anthology aspires to tell a story. A snapshot in time, remember? This doesn’t feel like a particular auspicious period in history, for so many reasons, but a book like this happening along at the right moment can remind you that there are still many, many great and talented artists in this world. And isn’t that what it’s all about? Maybe that’s corny. Whatever! It’s an earnest book, heart on its sleeve about the whole comics thing. Good energy to carry forward into an uncertain future.

The final spread in the book provides a suitable thesis: a head poking out of shrubbery, hair waving in the breeze as a single star floats above. The description does it no justice. It’s a captivating piece, confident, positively exultant. I’d buy the poster if they sold it. Ron Regé, Jr. takes the victory lap. He’s still here.

And in fairness - I didn’t see it. I have struggled with Regé for decades. Skibber Bee Bye is twenty-eight years old! Yeast Hoist was compiled in 2003. Era defining work, in hindsight. I didn’t get it! Didn’t understand the fuss. But the fuss persisted past the initial hype for those two books and grew into the career we see today. Pound for pound there aren’t a lot of publishers in the history of comics with the track record of Highwater Books. They published Fort Thunder and they published Ron Regé, Jr. You can chart a lot of the last two decades in the space between those two poles.

Like I say, I didn’t get it. But many did. Ron Regé, Jr. was in Comix 2000, after all. Everyone wanted that line. Whole schools of cartooning grown up in the shadow of that line. Katie Skelly and Adventure Time alike. What a remarkably versatile style. He’s a rock star, too, incidentally. Nice work if you can get it! Regé shows up in a couple places in the book, with remarkable watercolor over black ink - or, at least, something that looks like watercolor. If it’s not watercolor don’t get mad. Emotive, intricate. You can stare at them for a long time and not plumb every crack.

I think I get it now. That line was the spirit of an age. Fort Thunder still echoes, of course, harbingers of a technicolor age. But the Fort is a told story. Regé feels contemporary still, just as then. Not everyone in ALIVE OUTSIDE runs a direct inheritance to Regé, of course. No, like I say, the point is sheer profusion. An ethos of fertility. There’s a random painting by Julien Ceccaldi early in the book, a macabre portrait of an anime girl noticing a spider on her shoulder. It keeps pulling my eye as I flip across. Turn the page and find a sequence of sketchbooks pages from Bridget Trout, super saturated felt-tip markers drawing strange sexy monsters. Tattoo ideas? Turn the page again and its Keith Jones. Multiple generations together for an expression of abundance and growth. Book of wonders. A cartoon utopia.

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