Hagai Palevsky | May 8, 2025
The cover for Goes Like This, Fantagraphics’ new collection of comics and illustrations by Jordan Crane, released this April some two years after its initial announcement, is not a pleasant thing to look at. A superimposition of various illustrations by the cartoonist (all of them included in the book itself) at differing levels of opacity, the intent behind it is both self-evident and deftly executed, as it overpowers its viewer, defies them to not only distinguish the individual objects depicted but make sense of this discordant agglomeration as well. Where many of Crane’s comics are about a streamlined visual beauty that belies genuine emotional distress, here the distress is brought to the fore, as the pieces are robbed of the graphic and aesthetic precision through which that beauty is granted.
To a great degree, Goes Like This as an object appears torn between two opposing impulses. The book takes several measures in an attempt to humble itself: its binding is exposed (and painted over with title and author name); its price is printed on top of its barcode (a sticker, like in Keeping Two), and made to look like a handwritten price sticker grown brown with age (a flourish that straddles the line between "cute" and "cutesy," offsetting the mechanical with the handwrought). At the same time, consider the maximalism of its materiality: it has a thick, goosebump-textured card-stock cover, then four pages of matte paper, then — first time I’ve encountered this — another card-stock cover, then the book’s interiors, printed with several different kinds of paper and finishes inside. To top it all off, the back cover offers no promotional copy at all, nor do the book’s contents offer any author bio, or, indeed, venues or dates of publication for the constituent pieces. (Where dates do appear in this essay, it is because I was able to identify the original publication myself.) Simultaneously, it passes itself off as both small and big, humble yet confident; for better or worse, it calls attention to itself, even when its sole interest purports to be the work itself.
For all its production dazzle, however, Goes Like This is a lot more aesthetically subdued than one might be led to believe. On occasion his work has registered, to me, as a victim of its own formal gimmickry: The Last Lonely Saturday is a largely-hollow work of Pixaresque twee; Keeping Two’s neat panel-border dichotomy robs the work of its inherent drama by clearly delineating (catastrophizing) imagination versus objective reality. The comics in Goes Like This, several of which were published in Crane’s irregular one-man-anthology Uptight, generally eschew such tools, instead focusing, for the most part, on the elegance of straightforward narrative — and they are all the stronger for it.
The wordless one-page “Going Inside Out” (date unknown) is an immediate tone-setter: a nondescript-looking man slices his face off, and out climbs, Six Hundred Seventy-Six Apparitions of Killoffer-like, a multitude of the man’s duplicates, all of them looking as sweaty and discombobulated as their originator. This, then, is our welcoming point: the self as a powder-keg of neurosis. Craft can be controlled (note the cleanness of the linework, the flat coloring, the grid of three equally-sized landscape panels) but emotions are a whole other issue.
Next comes “The Hand of Gold” (2004), one of two genre pieces in the book. A cowboy on the run rides across the desert ridge at nighttime when he sees a passed out man handcuffed to a satchel. Initially mistaking the man for a corpse, he tries to cut off his hand, only for the man to wake up screaming and start shooting at him. The cowboy ultimately kills him and chops his hand off, taking the bag with him, hiding in a cranny and opening the bag to find gold. He soon becomes paranoid, pulling out his pistol whenever he thinks he hears anything, even though there’s no indication of any other presence other than himself — and, briefly, a pair of ghostly hands.
Crane’s professed Hergé influence is on full display here, with carefully-applied, uniformly-weighted ink work that rejects shading outright and rich, unmodulated coloring. Interestingly, the only substantial gradients or color changes are not in the colors but underneath them — close inspection of both Goes Like This and the story's original publication in Kramers Ergot #5 (ideally under a reading light, as the nuance is often lost in the gloss of the paper) will reveal evident water-stains underlying the colors, both serving as a reminder of human materiality in a work otherwise so crisp and controlled that it exudes almost a mechanical confidence and provides an unusual visual nuance, particularly impactful during the daytime scene, adding a heat-warp to the scorching desert sun. His character work here is in line with the few stories to come more than with “Going Inside Out” — bubbly, sparing detailing, never drawing with a full shape what he can achieve with a single dot or line. (I particularly like the way Crane draws the cowboy’s mustache almost as an inference, drawn from below but not from above, reminiscent of the forehead curl on Charlie Brown’s often-misinterpreted-as-bald head.)
Though “The Hand of Gold” is described as a “weird western,” its events are more sedate than the term may imply. If anything, it’s very much in line with the EC morality-tale mold — far from the heroic cowboy of American myth, our protagonist is a greedy incompetent who shoots himself out of paranoia. The "ghost" that briefly appears and sends him into a frenzy may serve as a replacement for the man’s nonexistent conscience, but in truth it’s the rider’s own ricocheting bullets that do him in, handily dodging any lesson learned. “Greedy bastard,” says our protagonist, bleeding to death, vultures starting to eat at his body. “Y’ was gonna die anyhow.”
As if to provide some respite, “The Hand of Gold” is followed by 2003’s “Keep a Light Out,” displaying another aspect of Crane’s work, the non-narrative, graphically-minded side, less preoccupied with drama than with visual mechanisms. The conceit is simple: a man walks around a house with a flashlight in hand. Whatever is within the beam of the flashlight is drawn in red line; everything else is a dark blue, with so little contrast that the comic is in itself best read under a reading-light. When the man finds out that the light in the house for some reason doesn’t work, he simply unscrews the lightbulb and eats it — from which point his eyes serve as torches. It’s a cute comic elegantly executed, similar to the sort of formal play that would come to preoccupy Joseph Lambert a few years down the line, but it feels less a comic than an interlude, a proof-of-concept for a formal trick that would be charming as the means but feels weightless as the end.
The next comic, “Below the Shade of Night” (2006), launches Goes Like This’ central suite of narratives — bad interpersonal relationships given too long to ferment. Protagonist Robbie is a distressed teenager whose relationships are forever on thin ice. Reluctant to go home to his constantly-fighting (and evidently physically abusive) parents, he leaves his younger brother to hang out with his friend Ernesto and ride the latter’s motorcycle, but the two quickly fall out after Robbie tilts and breaks the bike’s gear-shifter (not the first time he’s damaged that particular machine). “Everybody is full of shit,” Robbie narrates as he kicks the bike and walks away. Later, intent on running from home, Robbie steals the bike, but when he inadvertently causes a fatal car crash (the driver quickly swerves to avoid hitting him) he returns home, helpless, to find his mother essentially catatonic in her helplessness. Not knowing how else to respond, he yells at her, then leaves, faced by the crowd of rubberneckers who appeared more or less out of nowhere.
Crane’s blank cartooning style is particularly potent in the scene where Robbie runs away; the baseline facial features of his characters (mouth, ear, nose — all dots or circles) are largely ageless, contributing to a unique sort of fluidity: Robbie’s nigh-petulant anger as he gets on the bike makes him look childlike. When he falls to the ground in shock at the crash, however, his face covered with scuffs and bruises, he looks immediately aged. The stylistic ties between Crane and Sammy Harkham (especially in his ‘00s work, such as “Somersaulting” or “Lubavitch, Ukraine, 1876”) are at their most overt here, in both the art choices (blankly-cartooned faces and precise-but-sparing uncolored ink work) and the prevailing tonality: misery taken as a foregone conclusion. Note the resigned open-endedness of Robbie’s concluding narration, as he walks out to the spectral crowd: “It was my time to go, so I went." It's less a tragedy than an anti-tragedy, its impact not in the drama but in the deadened absence thereof.
“Before They Got Better” (2007), for its part, focuses not on the teenager who "gets out" but on the older generation who had no choice but to stay. Eldridge is an electrician, presumably in his mid-sixties or thereabouts. He and his wife Lizzie are both unhappy with their lives and marriage (their feud is “an ugly bramble of malaise,” the omniscient narration tells us), evidently incapable of communicating in any form other than aimless bickering. Their daughter June, having fought with her husband, comes over with her unnamed three-year-old daughter. Eldridge, after accidentally getting into a fight with June as well, chooses to temporarily divest himself, retiring to the basement to eat in silence and then going for a nighttime walk. His granddaughter, already tucked into bed, insists on going with him, and together they reach a shared moment of tenderness: “You love Mamma even when hers mad at you?” asks the child. “Yes, even when she’s mad at me,” replies the grandfather. This is, of course, the first real mention of "love" ever existing in a familial situation. He takes his granddaughter back home and puts her to bed, and goes to sleep as well. “When he finally went to bed that night,” says the narrator, “he would pull the covers up over his head / in order to block out the years and their passage.”
Much like in “Below the Shade of Night,” Crane’s intentionally simple cartooning is a boon in its transcendence of time — though they occupy three different generations (and thus three different familial role), the four characters of “Before They Got Better” look rather identically the same: button eyes, long nose, blob-like mouth; the granddaughter is the sole character who does not have bags under her eyes. This indicates, to me, a certain degree of interchangeability — both daughter and parents are in a spot of terminal familial frustration; the child still knows a certain degree of unsullied peace, but it’s not at all unlikely that she will end up with the same fatigue.
Interestingly, in speaking about “Before They Got Better” with a fellow critic, the two of us found a rather fundamental divergence in viewpoint. My colleague (who has asked to remain nameless) takes a somewhat neutral view: to him, happiness, even love, is an impertinence — fulfilling or not, a duty is a duty, and Eldridge is an example of a man who, in spite of the momentary unpleasantnesses, still lives up to his familial duties, still takes care. To me, however, this is an irreparably sad story. The closing narration in particular drives home that his granddaughter is an object of envy, as she has not yet experienced the misery that comes with "shackled" adult life; she, unlike him, still knows happiness, even if it is the simple happiness of a child. A terrible feeling — to see the future in the other, and fear the implication, whether for them or for yourself.
“Vicissitude” (2009) and “Trash Night” (2011, originally published as “Unraveling”) are two parts of the same story, which sees Crane gradually refine his cartooning style with added detailing. His noses are sharper, represented in curves and corners rather than dots, and the eyes are fuller; for the first time, his surfaces are shaded, given added weight. Here we have another story about festering resentment. Leo, a young mechanic, accidentally finds out that his partner is cheating on him, and because she repeatedly lies about it he cannot properly confront her, leading his anger to build more and more violently (though never directed at her). At the end of the story, Leo goes out to take the trash and sees a raccoon he earlier tried to befriend; when the raccoon bites his hand, he violently kills it with a rake. Dolores bandages his hand, and they go to bed together.
The end of “Trash Night” is impactful in the same way as the scene of Eldridge putting his granddaughter to bed in “Before They Got Better." The reader, benefiting perhaps from a better view of the bigger picture, knows that the raccoon bite, certainly pressing in the immediate sense, is a distraction — a scene of sudden tenderness and mercy, borne perhaps less organically than out of necessity, only underscoring the lostness of both characters, apart and (especially) together. Except here there is a far darker undertone. Leo had initially tried to befriend the raccoon, and now that he sees that the attempt has backfired he has no choice but to demonstrate force (in what is surely the most viscerally upsetting sequence of Crane’s entire bibliography); if there is any doubt that this dynamic is meant to mirror his standing with Dolores (made even plainer by the structural mirroring between Leo’s dream of Dolores’ death in the first part and Leo’s raccoon encounter in the second), Crane’s omniscient narrator dispels this doubt entirely. If there is any one story in Goes Like This that vindicates somewhat the criticism of the disturbing positional fantasies of Keeping Two, it’s this one — Leo is not a soul ill at ease so much as a man who learns to sublimate his violence and transfer it outside the bounds of his relationship. But, at its core, the violence does, at least momentarily, persist.
In the monochrome “Wake Up” (2016), a nightmare-logic coda to the preceding stories of homely drama and certainly a tentpole piece in the collection, the underlying anxiety reaches its boiling point. The protagonist is a woman who kills another woman, who is naked, with a hammer; she takes off her bloodied clothes and tries to clean and dispose of the body, but she quickly finds her efforts futile. A man appears, naked as well, and as he tries to help her they start, suddenly, to have sex.
“Wake Up” feels almost the inevitable logical conclusion of the recurring theme of intrusive catastrophizing thought in Keeping Two and “Vicissitude” — as indicated by the broken-up inner monologue, this is a world entirely contained in and, defined by, thought. "Dream comics" are often a failure because of their tendency to over-explicate and ascribe symbolic significance, a tendency that Crane himself is occasionally party to, but here he manages to dodge that urge by leaning into the fragmentary breathlessness; the protagonist is less agent than helpless spectator, even though the actions are, at least nominally, her own.
Visually, Crane relishes in negative space, with the gutters between the panels colored the same black as his rich inks, resulting in a groggy fluidity that the rhythm of the story greatly benefits from; seeing as the characters have no names and no defined personalities outside of the roles assigned them by circumstance, the cartoonist here continues his trend of fleshing out visual character while simultaneously paring down his narrative sensibility almost to the point of a vignette.
At the end of the comic, the blood magically disappears, as does the dead body. Our protagonist feels, briefly, like she can calm down. Inevitably, however, the other woman returns, wearing the protagonist’s clothes, and now they have traded places — mirroring the beginning. Now the protagonist is the victim, not the perpetrator, the other woman beats her with the hammer, and she passes out. “It’s all gone, everything,” she narrates toward the end. “I am going to stop making the same mistakes. I want to do it right this time. Wake up. Wake up.” A swing of the hammer, then fade to black. “But I don’t.”
“The Dark Nothing” (2016) is the second genre story of the collection, this time taking the readers to space. A team of three space-prospectors, commissioned by a corporation to mine large amounts of osmium, arrives at its destination asteroid only to find nothing but mysterious debris. Two of the astronauts, Akihiro (Aki) and Claude, alight from the spaceship to try to get a sample of the debris’s chemical makeup, while a third, Dorothy, stays on the ship. From the get-go, the situation is more or less pointless. If the debris is made of osmium, they won’t be able to bring back anywhere near the agreed-upon amount. If they sell the scraps to miners instead, their payout won’t be anywhere near as profitable. Fairly soon after Aki and Claude leave the ship, they lose contact with Dorothy, and by the time contact is reestablished the core of the debris-cluster proves unstable; neither their suits nor their vehicle can accommodate for the rapidly-shifting conditions. Claude is the first to die, his body caving under the pressure of space, and while Aki makes it back to the spaceship (though not without injury, as his hand has torn itself from his arm) the vessel itself crashes onto the debris. The three die in space, with no one to know or rescue them.
Notably, the loneliness of their death is somewhat foreshadowed by their interactions in life: the team’s trip to the asteroid, we are told, lasted a year and a half, yet, even though there is no friction between them at all, their close quarters have not made them any less guarded from one another. It is only during the story’s real-time events that Aki and Dorothy learn that Claude is divorced several times over and has nine children — a fairly significant fact in anyone’s biography, mind you. It’s a subtle moment that indicates just how cut off this crew is, not only from "back home" but from one another as well, and although Crane makes no attempt to prop up any equivalencies between the two facts, or make any moral implications, it just adds to the melancholy of it all.
At some point in Keeping Two, the protagonists Will and Connie argue about whether the book they read during their tense drive home had a happy ending. Toward the end of the book, which tells the story of a married couple reeling from a stillbirth, the couple tries to take their minds off their profound depression (and the wife’s suicidal ideation) by going on a cruise, but during the cruise the wife winds up jumping overboard. The husband sees her and follows her, and the two cry out for help. Given that no one can hear the couple, Will makes the natural assumption that they are never rescued and find their deaths in the ocean; Connie, however, emphasizes the pointed lack of explicit answer: “Yes but at the end / they’re alive / yelling / screaming for help / and that’s it / the story is over / and so afterwards / if they drown / you are drowning them.” It's a charming moment — using the characters’ diverging approaches to media as a microcosm of their diverging approaches to life — but one that, within the specific world they occupy, paints one side of this disagreement as rather entirely naïve: in the bibliography of Jordan Crane, there are few happy endings — only sad endings left off the page.
This, to me, is the key difference between Crane’s genre stories and his more grounded ones. Up to this point in Goes Like This there has not yet been a happy story (barring the rather peaceful but largely empty “Keep a Light Out,” at least), but in the more "earthly" narratives the scope of disaster is largely contained: miserable or simply deadened though it may be emotionally, life trudges on. The distance of genre, however, allows the cartoonist to reach the inevitable conclusion of death, and pointless death at that; craven cowboys eaten by vultures, astronauts dying in space — and neither mission fulfilled.
Crane’s illustrations likewise frequently revolve around scenes of calamity, though typically more the sweeping variety than the interpersonal that pervades his shorts. Note the 2002 series of four illustrations that appears immediately after “The Hand of Gold”: “Toaster Oven and a Gas Leak,” “Low Mood with a Loose Rail,” “Bad Map and a Loud Mouth,” and “Late Night Long Walk High Hopes” all present the reader with a figure (two of them men, two women) caught helpless in a scene of disaster — a house on fire, a stormy sea, an avalanche, and a twister, respectively. The figures are all constructed more or less identically: physically stuck with no chance of getting out, their arms flail in the air, their faces drawn in Crane’s more minimal style, with a gaping mouth, button-eyes, and a dot for a nose. To be sure, these are visually captivating pieces, as Crane draws these forces of nature with an elegant care, but at the same time I cannot help but feel that Crane’s proclivity for elegance — his innate smoothness and pleasantness — operates to his detriment. The cartoony faces have a fairly limited range of emotive expressions, their fear recognizable but not felt due to the overall lack of specific character. Ditto the forces of nature, which are clearly communicated but lacking in active dynamism and tangibility.
“Laestrygonian” (2006, misspelled “Laestragonian” in the table of contents) — in which a giant emerges from the sea and devours a mass of sailors aboard wooden lifeboats as their ship buckles and tilts into the ocean — fares somewhat better. Crane has named Hokusai as an influence in the past, and the influence is palpable here, not only in the maritime setting but also in the sense of scale. Printed across a full spread (most illustrations in the book, being vertically-composed, take up one page), the titular sea-giant takes up a significant chunk of the left half, whereas each sailor takes up little more than a fingertip. Compared to the aforementioned 2002 series of disaster-illustrations, in which the figures are drawn fairly large and detailed, here the sailors feel easily disposable and interchangeable. It’s worth noting that here too the humans are drawn with the same sparing, unarticulated faces, but here they are contrasted with the realistically-drawn giant, and thus receive a completely different impact: a hierarchy delineated through texture.
Most successful, however, are the illustrations that lean into the understated pleasantness, like the three-part “The Night the World Turned Gold” (2005) series of landscape-format illustrations. A panoramic view of a house party, the perspective of “The Night the World Turned Gold” is not eye-level so much as crotch-level, evocative of the way adults in Peanuts often appeared as only legs; the only two heads that are shown are a couple sitting on the floor in one another’s embrace, surrounded by the faceless mass of celebrants. It’s a scene broad enough to scan immediately as nice, with a clever build-up: the floor of the first two illustrations is messy and filthy with empty beer-bottles and cigarette butts, but those two love-birds have carved out their own personal universe, and if the dirt is good enough for them then who are we to disagree?
As the third-to-last comic in the collection, “The Middle Nowhere” (2014) makes it clear that the reader has entered the final movement of the book. Now begins the kind, gradual ushering-out. Much like many of Crane’s protagonists, here too our hero is alone. Living in some distant outpost, he eagerly awaits the end of his unspecified mission. But there is a storm brewing, first interfering with radio communications (the only connection he has to the world) then completely submerging whatever land our story is set on. When he sees a woman drowning in the water and assumes that she is the pilot coming to rescue him, he jumps in, only to discover that she is a sea monster in disguise; the sea monster drowns him and tucks him in his bed for the eternal sleep to come.
Continuing his textural additions, here Crane makes extensive use of screentones, giving him a look that almost calls to mind a smoother Steven Weissman as it enhances the range of his linework’s tangibility and materiality. Note the liveliness of the shapes Crane chooses to leave blank, such as the jets of water when the protagonist leaps in to help the siren, squiggles and white-on-black vectors, and the contrast between the dormant body, filled in with white and screentones, and the protagonist’s disembodied spirit, reedy white lines on pitch-darkness, halfway to annihilation.
“The Middle Nowhere” scans as a flipside of “Wake Up,” two dreamlike comics that inundate a largely-blank protagonist (and by extension the reader) with a feeling of helplessness. Only “The Middle Nowhere” ends on a note of an agency regained — the sea-monster sends the bed floating upwards, and the protagonist wakes up, in the middle of the ocean, the bed serving as a raft. He looks around him and finds his mop, and, seeing land in the distance, begins to paddle. Though not a happy ending outright, it’s certainly closer to Connie’s optimism in Keeping Two. Land is in reach; all one’s gotta do is row.
Goes Like This’ two closers, meanwhile, revisit the mode of “Keep a Light Out,” focusing on two modes of non-narrative evocation. “Now is a New Now” (2020) is closer in sensibility to Crane’s children’s book We Are All Me than to most of his comics. An exercise in comics-as-graphic-design, in the distillatory sense, it does away with linework in favor of flat chromatic vectors and shapes in bright, flat hues.
“Now is once upon a time / now will never come again,” goes the narration, “so take a good look / watch now become when / and when / when is now / once again”; all the while, the landscape around the protagonist (a black silhouette with a nose, eyes, freckles, and three crownlike hairs) transforms from a footpath with mountains in the distance and clouds in the background into an undetailed sky blue. The cadence of “Now is a New Now” is that of an affirmation, operating on a charmingly blank, pointedly low-stakes principle of centering; its now is eternal, a non-moment whose constant renewal is encouraging specifically because of its avoidance of complication.
The recurring visual motif in “Now is a New Now” is the word "now" in round sans-serif type contained in an oval with protruding horizontal spikes. As the panels in the comic slowly merge and the pages grow less and less crowded, the "now" grows, until finally "nows" in varying sizes and colors appear nested into one another. Time is a continuum that ripples outwards ... before finally it fades out.
In the only instance of two comics appearing consecutively without any illustrations in-between, “Now is a New Now” pleasantly segues into “One Day” (2022), a predominantly-gestural comic that harkens to the graphic simplicity of Crane’s earlier works. Two travelers, a man and a woman, walk through a forest and observe nature. Technically, “One Day” is wordless; what few speech balloons appear are filled with the sort of broken-line orthography that Crane often reserves for sound effects. Orthography is in itself a pivotal theme of the comic, as Crane starts off in black and white and slowly introduces color using a succession of repeating symbols: red, yellow, and pink ovals with horizontal spikes (much like in “Now is a New Now”) represent bird-calls; light-blue upside-down teardrops are the babbling of a brook. Slowly, more and more such symbols accumulate, as the world takes on color (the colors all soft and flat, welcoming). Night falls, gently, and the couple look up at the starry night. The end.
Tonally, “One Day” is strongly reminiscent of Will’s prolonged near-death sequence toward the end of Keeping Two, where, following a car accident, he is shown his way back to life through his love of Conny. But where the Keeping Two sequence, with its shimmers and forests and disembodied hands drawn in Ron Regé-esque swirls of energy, is to me so tonally over-the-top as to be considered downright schmaltzy (note the way that the idyllic wife-and-kids life, the vision that leads Will back into the realm of the living, is as broad-stroked and clichéd a shorthand as his visions of doom), “One Day” works simply because it is an isolated unit of context. We do not know who this couple is, what their life stories are, what they may or may not argue about. Its leisurely pace is the only pace that exists, without any textural contrast. In this regard the piece — the word "story" feels inapplicable — is perhaps comparable to the Gasoline Alley Sunday pages, tone pieces largely disparate from rigorous continuity; all that exists is the romance of the present moment.
In isolation, “Now is a New Now” and “One Day” are both good, charming comics; they each have a clear statement of intent and a deft execution. Yet I find myself skeptical of their placement. At first glance the overall arc of Goes Like This trends toward peace; we start with the cowboy finding his death in the desert, and by the end we’ve got a happy couple exploring the idyllia of nature. One notes, too, that the comics in the book follow an almost-chronological order: “Keep a Light Out” was published before “The Hand of Gold,” and “The Middle Nowhere” was published before “The Dark Nothing” and “Wake Up,” but in both cases the switches are close enough in publication time that the overall intent is to show the artist grow in real time, to give the sense of a gradual mellowing-out.
Yet one can’t help but observe Crane’s tendency to depict happiness, or more subdued peace, more or less in the abstract. A key (in my mind, at least) dichotomy within narrative-minded alternative comics lies in what precisely it means to serve as a true "alternative": whether the outright rejection of the simplistic morality of "straight" genre comics (with their simplistic morality and implicit admiration thereof) should manifest as the representation of irredeemably distasteful dirtbags, or as a more nuanced, largely neutral approach to the specifics of human emotion (and the moral landscape consequent). The earlier works of Clowes generally fall into the former category, and Joe Matt, and, of course, Johnny Ryan. These are works that tell the reader, “We” — be this the author figure, in the case of autobio material, or the typical protagonists in cases of fiction — “are bad people, and if you have your wits about you then you will stay away from people like us.” In the latter category we might place Sammy Harkham, for instance, or certainly Chris Ware, whose whole endeavor, is, for better or worse, even at his meanest, one of heightened universal empathy. Though it’s often easy and tempting to lump all these cartoonists (certainly given their demographic starting points) into "sad-man-of-a-certain-age comics" the distinction remains worthwhile, if only to see the artist’s recurring shorthands and preoccupations, and the implicit worldview that emerges.
In this regard, Crane is hard to pin down. In the "misery stories," if I might term these as such, the characters are largely concrete; even in “Wake Up,” the most pared-down piece in the book, Crane’s protagonist is facing a specific problem anchored to tangible circumstance. And, indeed, I think he is at his best when he thinks in these terms — the (purposefully) blank prettiness of his art, the rigidly-maintained aversion to "chicken fat," is best when offset by friction. This gradual mellowing-out is also a gradual untethering from life as a whole, which carries with it a morose undertone. “Some times [sic] is golden and beauty,” says Claude in “The Dark Nothing” (2016); “some times you just get through.” It would appear that the brunt of Jordan Crane’s thoughts are so geared toward the latter category that the former, though certainly extant, is largely inarticulable in practice.
***
More often than I care to admit nowadays, I find myself in a bad mood. I’m impatient and irritable and tired, even when rationally I know it is unfair of me to be. Inevitably, too, the longer I dwell in these mental spaces, the harder it becomes to imagine a way out. “Things are bound to be improving,” sings Jackson Browne, in that wearily-tentative tone of his, but it’s exactly that tone, after all, that short walk to “Don’t confront me with my failures / I had not forgotten them,” that makes it pop. At the same time, though, I find myself entirely averse to "comfort food," to "escape." I am much more inclined, personally, to pick at the present like a scab and leave a scar of the future. "Everything’s gonna be alright" is not a sentiment that cheers me up when simply dispensed like candy, untethered from specific circumstance.
It is perhaps because of this aversion to easy comfort that I look at Goes Like This, a collection whose individual works are not only good — very good, even — but sequenced more carefully and holistically than with its careful sequencing than most comic collections I’ve read, with some befuddlement. Collections that cover so long a time period as twenty formative years of an artist’s creative life are bound to come with some internal clashes as the artist finds their voice through trial and error, and indeed it is possible that the arc of Goes Like This is a cathartic purging. But I can’t help but wonder if more has been purged than is desirable. In Jordan Crane’s world, when comes your time to go, you go — but wherever it is you end up is entirely down to chance.
English (US) · 