Hey !! Kids Comics: Carlos Nine and Nina Bunjevac edition

Academic political science blog?

Never had I seen a clearer bat signal lighted to the effect that I am letting down the side in terms of comicsblogging.

(I was going to post something about political science, but screw that noise!)

I’ve got a pair of picks that are, I think, likely to be unfamiliar to most CT readers but, within the right circles, both are big names: Carlos Nine and Nina Bunjevac. (So if you are, like, duh! then I’m not arguing.)

Carlos Nine died – I was going to say last year; hell, time keeps passing (which sort of pisses me off sometimes.) It was late 2016. He was huge in his native Argentina and big as well in Europe, in band dessignee circles. His English wikipedia page is practically a stub, which I take as an index that he never made it in America.

Google image gets you this kind of stuff, quite a bit of it NSFW. How to describe it? It’s kind of like a mash-up of Botero and Claire Wendling. (But Wendling is even less known than Nine, maybe.) It’s kind of like he keeps holding a caricature candle to life, and melting it. But it’s really action-packed. I mean, everyone’s really bouncing around in a good, slapstick-staging way. Everything is foreshortened, funhouse-mirrored.

I’m honestly not sure what tools he uses. Some of it looks like colored pencils, which is a bit unusual. Some of it is ink and some watercolor, too.

If you are like me, you like comics but your damn shelves are full. I read comics digitally when I can. I was happy and a bit surprised to find several Nine books available on Kindle. I bought ’em all and like ’em all! I think the style is just amazing. They aren’t in English but who needs words, really, when you get right down to it? Also, maybe you are, like, multilingual? Nine is a fantasist and a fetishist, which ain’t everyone’s cup of tea. But I think he’s just an amazing stylist. He gives me ideas. Even a few wholesome ones.

Nina Bunjevac is another amazing stylist. She is definitely the Serbo-Canadian queen of the persistent stipple [Google image search results semi-NSFW]. Accept no substitutes, if that’s what you are in the market for. I greatly admire such dedication in the manugraphic placement of small dots close to other small dots. That is a good thing, and what the world needs now, is more small dots close to other small dots, sweet dots. Here’s her homepage. I think her best yet-published stuff, considered strictly from a graphics angle, may be the Heartless stuff. A crazy, louche take on the Mickey-Mouse-slash-Felix-the-Cat look. Her new book – still in progress – looks amazing. But her newest published book, Fatherland, is really great. And not just for the art. And it’s available on Kindle, if that is as convenient for you as it is for me.

Fatherland is autobiographical comics, which is a category that has, rightly, garnered a lot of critical acclaim the last couple decades: you’ve got Maus, Fun Home and Persepolis. Those are the top three. (When you figure that Chris Ware kind of is Jimmy Corrigan – more’s the pity – that makes four.) Fatherland is up there. Before I praise the content, let me quibble with the art just a bit. That cover image is amazing. A lot of the portraiture is amazing, inside. I admire that. But Bunjevac seems to me to have a tendency to stiffen up with her figures. Sometimes they look like posed dolls. And her paneling is a bit stiff, sometimes. Somehow the caricature in Heartless loosens her in a way I like. I guess she likes her figures the way they are. I don’t deny the style suits the story. Let me just get on to saying why the story is so good.

All I know about Bunjevac’s life I learned from Fatherland. I take it it’s autobiography, not semi-fictionalized. She’s won awards; it was a best-seller. I haven’t seen anyone say it’s semi-fiction or embellished. So I’ll talk like it’s all true. She is, as I said, Serbo-Canadian. Her family – as of 1945 – consisted, rather unusually, of ethnic Serbs living in what is now Croatia, with an American connection. Her great-grandfather worked as a miner in Indiana (I think it was), sending home money to support everyone in the old country. Anyway, as you probably know, the political history of the former Yugoslavia is rather a crazy mess, and such a family as this would be in the nasty thick of it. And they were. But it’s one of those cases where the divisions ended up coming right down the middle of the family itself. Her grandma was a communist Partisan, fighting the Nazis, starving in the hills. Her dad was a Serbian would-be royalist terrorist bomber in Canada, a dead-ender Chetnik sympathizer. Bunjevac’s mother ends up … you know what? You can read it if you want. It’s an unusual family story and, I take it, it took the author herself some work to piece it all back together, years later.

I don’t want to say that you’ll understand Yugoslavia’s peculiarities when you’re done. You won’t. But Yugoslavia – kicked out of the Soviet bloc, ethnically divided – is peculiar. And that’s interesting.