Recently Reading #2: Greg Hunter

Corresponding with writers and bibliophiles about what we’ve been reading lately.

Greg Hunter is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has edited graphic novels for young readers and contributed comics criticism to The Comics Journal, The Rumpus, LARB, and other publications.

Nate: You have a new book out this month called New Realities: The Comics of Dash Shaw. Can you give me a little intro to the book?

Greg: New Realities takes readers through the graphic novels of Dash Shaw, an American cartoonist and filmmaker. He has authored several books, and his style varies from book to book, often in significant ways. So a big part of the project is my effort to explain what these books have in common. That tends to be moments or narratives of people not connecting, not understanding - characters hitting the limits of their subjectivity or personal reality.

Nate: What drew you to Shaw's work?

Greg: I had been a reader of Shaw’s since picking up his 2008 book Bottomless Belly Button - not technically his debut but the book with which he made a big early impression. Years later, I had an invitation to pitch a critical text to my eventual publisher, Uncivilized Books. Shaw was the first artist that came to mind, but before I started to re-read his books, I didn’t know if I’d see a really evident through-line. Still, that theme of interpersonal gaps became legible almost as soon as I started reading his body of work as a body of work.

New Realities is a monograph, but it reproduces enough of Shaw’s art that - in a way that makes me happy - it also feels a bit like a coffee-table book. And while I’ve written a lot of comics criticism, I’m not an academic, and the book doesn’t observe all the orthodoxies of academic writing. (No shade, etc.) But New Realities doesn’t have academics or even necessarily other critics as its intended audience.

When I thought about an ideal reader, I thought more about someone who’s 19, 20 years old and reads one of Shaw’s works for the first time. The story resonates, but they’re also struck, or just perplexed, by how the comic functions. Especially in a book of Shaw’s like New School, BodyWorld, or Discipline, there is a purposeful willingness to get weird with the comics form. So another part of what I try to do in New Realities is explore how these thematic concerns I’m mentioning play out on the level of form, through specific visual choices we see Shaw making.

Nate: Can you give me an example of how Shaw's formal playfulness informs his themes?

Greg: Here’s one from Bottomless Belly Button. The book follows a family on its vacation, two divorcing parents, their adult children, and some of their children. Shaw draws one of the adult siblings, Peter, as a froglike cartoon person, even though the other characters are all recognizably human. (It is not, for example, a book of anthropomorphized animals.) A visual device like that might disrupt a reader’s immersion in the comic, and it might seem counterintuitive for a book that’s rooted in realism on plot level. At the same time, it invites a reader to think about ways of seeing and the limits of how people see one another. The view of Peter the comic gives us is reductive, and it’s up to a reader to flag that.

Nate: I'm looking forward to reading the book and I want to familiarize myself with some of Shaw's work before I dive in. What's a good place to start with him? 

Greg: A good place to start might be his book Doctors. It’s a short, high-concept science-fiction story from 2014, following a team of scientists who can give the recently dead a brief form of extended life - and mostly help expired elites put their affairs in order. The book works through some questions of technology and ethics in a way that’s direct and focused but still makes lots of room for formal play.

Nate: I'll check that out, thanks for the recommendation! And congrats on the publication, do you think you'll write more books?

Greg: I’d like to think so! Whether that would mean more book-length comics criticism, it’s hard to say. The most substantial thing I’ve worked on since finishing New Realities is a piece of fiction - something not developed enough for me to describe here, but miles apart from the Dash book. And if I’m fortunate enough to publish anything else, I like the thought of an eclectic bibliography.

Nate: So, I'm sure you've been busy with the book release, but have you had time for reading lately?

Greg: I’ve also been all over the place with what I’ve read lately. In prose, that’s been The Plague of Doves, a novel by Louise Erdrich; He Died with His Eyes Open and The Devil’s Home on Leave, the first two books in Derek Raymond’s Factory series of British crime novels; and a pair of oddball sixties westerns, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed and The Ballad of Dingus McGee by David Markson.

 

In comics, I’ve been having a moment with the Welsh cartoonist Carol Swain, re-reading her graphic novel Gast and picking up her book Foodboy; reading the new memoir by MariNaomi, I Thought You Loved Me; and reading collections of E.C. Segar’s Popeye comics for really the first time.

Nate: Can you tell me a bit more about the Ishmael Reed novel? I enjoy his work, but I'm not familiar with Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down.

Greg: Here’s part of the appeal for me: I’m sure that even with primary-source accounts from people in the American West or Southwest in the second half of the 19th century and start of the 20th, you’d find the start of countless conversations about what’s real, what’s true, etc. But if we’re just talking about early forms of Western fiction, we’re talking about stories that are going to hold, and further codify into myth, lots of ideas about the American character. Stories of rugged individualism, of American exceptionalism, if not more insidious fables of Manifest Destiny. 

So, maybe this is true of all genres in some way, but with the Western perhaps most obviously, what you’re seeing is this kind of warping-through-fiction-writing of these ideas that were never true in the first place. And by the time you get to the sixties, when Reed and Markson published the books I mentioned, things have gotten really weird. Parallel to their work, you have the Italian Western in cinema, these exercises in style with multinational casts and crews. And then stateside, you have the Western filtered through American postmodernism, this literary mode with a higher-than-usual tolerance for comedy and a heightened skepticism about whether anything means anything. 

 

Reed is also a Black writer in conversation with other Black writers of the time, which is a huge dimension of the book. (There’s a meta-conversation happening about what form the literature of resistance or liberation should take.) With Markson, what’s been wild is just how different the book is from his other novels, which have a very singular style. (In Wittgenstein’s Mistress or Reader’s Block, you find voices totally removed from action, and cultural references or pieces of literary trivia that somehow accumulate into a novel.) But each of those books is fascinating to me in consciously being a refraction of a refraction of a refraction of a lie.

 

Nate: The Western genre does seem particularly ripe for revisionism in literature and film, that movement has gone through multiple waves. To deconstruct the American mythos, start with expansionist ideology. 

I've been reading pretty widely as well. I want to highlight a couple of film reference books that I'm kind of always reading: the Bleeding Skull books, A 1980s Trash Horror Odyssey and A 1990s Trash Horror Odyssey. The first was co-authored by Joseph A. Ziemba and Dan Budnik, the sequel is by Ziemba, Annie Choi, and Zack Carlson. These books (and the Bleeding Skull website) are incredible resources for film discovery, they really dig deep into the DIY, backyard, SOV, regional sides of cinema to find movies that have had minimal distribution and often no prior critical engagement. 

Their reviews are humorous and awed, not condescending at all. They aren't really concerned with whether the movies are good or bad, they're looking through an alternate aesthetic lens that values obscurity, madness, resourcefulness, shock, the inexplicable, the illogical. Their equivalent of "four stars" would be a phrase like "brain-exploding". Filmmakers including the Polonia brothers, J.R. Bookwalter, and Chester Novell Turner are celebrated as auteurs, which they absolutely are. 

There's obviously precedent for this type of criticism, from Manny Farber's appreciation of B-movies to Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" to John Waters' celebration of "trash" to Quentin Tarantino's vocal love of exploitation cinema. The Cahiers du Cinema critics were also ahead of the curve in their appreciation of outré American directors and genres. Bleeding Skull is in that tradition but is maybe even deeper in the weeds when it comes to discovery: You have to actively search to turn up something like Alien Beasts. 

Co-author Joseph A. Ziemba is also the Creative Director of the American Genre Film Archive, a theatrical distributor and superb Blu-ray label. So, there's an element of advocacy and preservation in what the Bleeding Skull crew does, which I think is important.

Greg: I’ll have to check out the books you mentioned. I’ve never gone deep with things like SOV horror, although I did listen to the Live at the Death Factory podcast, which, when active, discussed a lot of it. To do some contortionist-level looping back to New Realities: Years ago, my publisher Tom Kaczynski at Uncivilized Books recommended to me The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher, a book about the difference between two concepts that animate a lot of horror stories across mediums. And ever since, The Weird and the Eerie has held a real place of privilege in my mind as an example of great arts writing for a lay readership. It’s something I’d recommend for anyone interested in what weird fiction is and how it works, too.