James Collier has a new comic coming out soon, and he was kind enough to send me a little PDF of it. It's great, I liked it a lot. Collier has a few influences which feel very prominent - Connor Willumsen, Sammy Harkham, Antoine Cosse - all cartoonists I like, but in a way they almost feel like the "correct" influences for a young cartoonist to have, in a way I'm skeptical of. A language is being used which is immediately appealing, and I become skeptical of it because I feel like there should be SOME friction between the surface and my eyes, which can generate some unexpected effect. I like it, I recognize it as good, but I want something to sneak up on me. Of course, what sneaks up on me is the development of Collier as an artist. While his previous book, The Lonesome Shepherd, was in black and white, Ballpark is mostly in color, and mostly in six-panel grid form. Each panel has a great use of flat color to separate foreground from background, and Collier is continually moving his appealing-looking cartoon characters through space, making for really fun pages. His cats and dogs recall Fritz The Cat, but we're in a post-Crumb, post-Bakshi space: If underground sordidness felt like a subversion of classic cartoon funny animals, Collier occupies a world where weed is legal, edibles can be taken in gummi candy, and when we hang out, whether we occupy a stoned or sober mindset is largely irrelevant, if we can enjoy each other's company, the world around us is beautiful either way.
This comic is funny, I laughed out loud. As per the drug comparison, trying to locate the register on the irony-sincere continuum is a fool's errand. These are dogs and cats, cartoon animals. These are pleasurable now in the same way as they've been throughout comics history. They don't situate themselves in terms of the "relatable" as a sort of lowest-common-denominator way for the reader to find their way into the work, but rather stay recognizable as cartoon forms that the reader doesn't need to identify with in order to understand.
Check it out, I think you'll like it. Like The Lonesome Shepherd, it's being published by the Wig Shop Web Shop; copies of that earlier comic should still be available.
