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Uncollected Mysteries

I bought a few Mack White comics care of Austin English’s Domino Books distro. Two issues of Villa Of The Mysteries, a Fantagraphics single-artist anthology from the mid-nineties, telling paranoid short stories involving government agencies, religion, and the like; and Mutant Book Of The Dead, which is a little earlier and more of a humorous underground comics kind of thing, but similarly well-told. These comics have been out of print for decades, and are hard to find. (I’m still trying to track down a copy of issue 3 of Villa Of The Mysteries.)

I first encountered White’s work in an issue of the anthology Snake Eyes, where he does a story, “Cindy The Tattooed Sunday School Teacher,” that’s reprinted in issue 1 of Villa Of The Mysteries. This story is incredibly tight and focused, home to a variety of ambiguities about who exactly is lying, and how the author feels about the nature of the lie. My take is that while the title character’s running a complicated scam, White nonetheless approves of it as an alternative to the more repressive Christianity she’s replacing in the lives of the people she’s fleecing. But his approval or disapproval doesn’t really matter, and since the whole thing is a fiction, neither does the notion of an unreliable narrator. What matters more is how the story’s built around memorable images, and how concluding on a panel that explains the story is being narrated by a member of the church to FBI interrogators reframes how the piece is read. It’s a representative story in a lot of ways.

These comics are great, but theirs is an unfashionable style now. An EC-influenced visual style is itself dated, and that such influence was common among underground cartoonists then becomes another reason for people to look at such work only with an eye towards dismissing it as politically uncouth. White’s a Texan, and there’s both a comic and a text piece in issue 2 about the Branch Davidians and the possibility Bill Clinton had a personal stake in their being killed by federal agents. While what happened in Waco feels similar in broad outline to incidents that have upset radicals in the past — Specifically, I think there’s a great many parallels to be drawn to the Philadelphia Police Department’s bombing of MOVE — it’s conservatives objecting to the Federal government that dictated the conspiracy narrative, and led to the FBI afterward playing a hands-off role with heavily armed right-wingers, which also makes the story of this time they did intervene seem exceptional in a way that’s even more suspect.

Mack White doesn’t seem to have had many people clamoring to publish his work in the recent decades. He did have work run in the three issues of the Hotwire anthology, edited by Glenn Head and published by Fantagraphics a decade ago. (Head also edited Snake Eyes.) Hotwire sort of posited itself as a trashy, lowbrow thing, despite having many of the same contributors that ran in Zero Zero, which was Fantagraphics’ house anthology during the nineties, when that would’ve been, you know, essentially considered the height of snobbery. Underground stuff, humor stuff, artsy Europeans working themselves into a frenzy. White contributed a serial to Zero Zero, called Homunculus, but while there have been collections of the Richard Sala, Kim Deitch, Dave Cooper, and Ted Stearn material that ran alongside it, there’s no such collection of the Homunculus material, which I have not read. I also haven’t read the first two issues of Hotwire, however I found the third volume to be remarkably coherent in its mixture of short humor pieces, extremely focused narrative short stories, and purely visual art. It’s a portrait of its segment of the comics world that feels far more satisfying than Now’s sampler-platter approach to younger artists, who have colorful and distinct visual styles but cumulatively make little narrative impression.

I’m not suggesting there’s some sort of liberal conspiracy dedicated to suppressing Mack White’s work but I do find the passive rejection of an artist whose work holds up fascinating, in light of how many comics that are considerably less satisfying as reading experiences are widely available and marketed like they’re literature. Granted, I don’t know how a book-length collection of these short stories would read. It does feel like there’s a good deal of repetition of similar themes and maybe it’s more powerful in small doses than it would be in a great heaping portion. I do still feel like this stuff seems like a difficult “sell” to the current comics market, because people don’t want to be challenged, and whether it’s for reasons of content or form, this work feels vaguely challenging.

One of the things that has replaced the ECs and the undergrounds in the hearts of the reading public is manga. In a certain light, even the U.S. comic market’s current fascination with manga seems suspect, because it’s the product of a more repressive culture. Yes, the comics are good and many of the comics intended for kids there are so wild they’re marketed towards adult audiences here. But even that is strange and suggests something strange about where we in the U.S. are at. Maybe we like manga because we simply know we don’t understand the cultural context and so don’t need to worry about it. It’s also a better value economically than American comics, and many surely view their entertainment budgets with an austerity mindset, which in turn leads to a certain conservatism even if that isn’t the intent at the outset.

For all my cohort might identify as socialists, we are still suffering under the condition of having arrived at such a place by having passed through liberalism, and have, I think, a certain self-consciousness in our thinking that worries too much to take things on their own terms. In the same way that someone might identify as “progressive” and say “Well, of course, I’d prefer if Elizabeth Warren were president, but I don’t think she could win in the rust belt! That’s why I support Joe Biden as the most electable choice” I have this tendency to see a piece of art I think is really strong — Bong Joon-Ho’s “Oasis,” for instance, and become self-conscious about recommending it to someone. Not to act like someone bemoaning the idea of “trigger warnings,” but it feels like now that’s common parlance, the only way to treat art is that it’s something many grown adults will not be able or inclined to handle, and the only people that will, are those that hunger for the transgressive as a way of establishing their bad boy credentials. This self-consciousness in presentation makes it incredibly difficult for people to simply communicate with one another, to present realities and ambiguities without couching them in a series of flags that tells you exactly how one person feels and expects the other person to feel in turn.

Mack White’s comics aren’t even rough! Certainly less so than, say, Jeff Johnson’s Nurture The Devil, another Fantagraphics series from the nineties not reprinted. (Although a friend did suggest the rape played for laughs, based around mythology, could be a stumbling block for people. He might’ve been referring to something in the Homunculus story, but there’s also a Priapus story that features this trait.) I don’t think there’s anything offensive in these comics, but I think the same culture anxious not to cause offense is also squeamish about conspiracy plots these days. Too many premises originate from a place of right-wing reality denial, and as we’re continually inundated with stimuli too overwhelming to process, those who’ve bought into a fiction feel too far gone to communicate with. A politics oriented towards consensus fears the counternarrative. There’s a hermetic, self-referential quality to the true believing mindset that feels shockingly alien when encountered by an outsider.

What makes Mack White’s comics so compelling, so assured as stories, is how tightly structured they are. Despite how their ambiguities play out, with punctures that reframe them, they reestablish themselves along these throughlines, based on these things like government agencies, paranoia, psychedelic drugs, an alien overmind. The trick to reading material like this is to not look down on it, but to go through it. In this work that feels paranoid, that can function, like a Philip K Dick story, the same way as a drug trip might, the sense that to advocate for the work feels taboo at present provides its own lesson, in the importance of attempting to embrace fearlessness.

#Mack White #Fantagraphics