Activities: comics by John Dermot Woods
John
Dermot Woods. Publishing Genius Press, $19.95 paperback (148p) ISBN:
9780988750333
I
was introduced to the art of John Dermot Woods through his collaborative novel
with J.A. Tyler, No One Told Me I Was
Going to Disappear. Woods’ sketches of mouth-less equestrians brandishing
lollipops and Jesus literally handing his gooey heart to a creepy child
straight out of a 1950s nursery rhyme nightmare serve as a perfect complement
to that text’s hypnotic strangeness. A series of images that skew familiar
cultural tropes by embellishing them with a quintessential sadness, memorable
hints of a larger void. I picked up Woods’ new collection of comics, Activities, hoping for more of the same.
That hope turned out to be misguided in the best possible way. Activities’ fully fleshed, darkly
beautiful parables reverberate with a deeper but no less indelible fire, a
psychological potency on par with the best literary fiction, and an earnestness
that is a source of odd comfort and, at the same time, totally paralyzing in
its clarity.
The
book opens with a series of full-page, caption-less illustrations, where each
one, whether gorgeously colored or starkly black and white, is a story in
itself. Why is that pelican’s neck in a noose? Why is that man kneeling,
staring into a truck’s headlights and why is the woman he’s with not doing
anything? These are the seconds before the implosion, frozen but always
pulsing. Activities’ next and largest
section (and its strongest), “Stories,” is composed primarily of multi-paneled
narratives, some drawn with sharp black ink, some in fuzzy colored pencil, all
striving toward a profound – and often heartbreaking – emotional resonance.
Being
relatively inexperienced with comics, my first impulse was to compare the way I
felt after reading “Stories” to the 3eanuts.com Tumblr, where classic Peanuts strips are presented without
their final panels (the location of the closing joke that conceals “the
existential despair of [the characters’] world”) thereby allowing anguish to
prevail. But this really isn’t an apt comparison because Woods’ comics allow
for a much greater complexity of feeling, amplified by the surreal quiet that
seeps into the smallest spaces. A man staring pensively at a rocket that will
take his partner to space completely encapsulates the wrenching finality of a
nearly dissolved relationship. A close-up of a sneaker and its accompanying leg
walking over dead leaves seems the only appropriate epitaph to a story about
loss and the possibilities of lives not lived and decisions left unmade. The dialogue
is mysterious and subtle, laid bare to let the ink bleed through. And bleed it does.
The book closes with “Recognitions,” drawings combined with a random assortment
of text from internet communiqués, Lindsay Lohan films, and work from authors
as seemingly incongruous as Sigmund Freud, Andy Rooney, and the American Automobile
Association. While not as striking as the previous section, “Recognitions”
injects a bit of levity into an otherwise mostly somber enterprise. After all,
who wouldn’t want to feel the elation of sharing a movie theater with Mark
Strand?
Like No
One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear, Activities
exults in moments of muted ferocity and seemingly unprovoked acts of the
bizarre and grotesque – a pants-less, feral child placing a cat skull on his
head, a boy getting his skeleton arm (literally just bone) severed by a
recorder this other kid was just playing, a man being crushed by a moon he’s
foolish enough to throw rocks at – a violence that cannot help unleashing
itself in the most unexpected places. But, more importantly, the book gives an
equal or greater weight to the too often overlooked aftermath, the obsession
and longing that inevitably comes with trying to pick up the pieces, that
familiar, sorrowful disconnect as old as the oldest stories. “I told that
bastard to stop,” a man says, lamenting a destructive act by a comrade that has
plunged them both into different realms of shadow. “I’ve never seen such
darkness.” We have all felt that darkness. Woods is brave enough to give it a
face. (August 2013)
Purchase
Activities HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Chris Vola is the author of Monkeytown,
a novel. His book reviews appear in The Rumpus, The Collagist, PopMatters, Rain
Taxi, PANK, and elsewhere. He is currently looking for a good recipe for kale
chips that won’t melt his oven this time.
