#the lineart itself is just a copy paste from the wilde art

[cry-ptidd]

Happy Valentine's Day

[arecomicsevengood]

Jim Mahfood’s Grrl Scouts

I texted a pal to let him know I was thinking about buying the new collection of Jim Mahfood’s Grrl Scouts, and I was surprised at the total ambivalence of his reply. Considering our shared interest in comics that are kind of garbage, but interested in capturing youthful subcultures, I thought I’d get a “hell yeah man do it.” Mahfood’s style has changed a good deal since I read it in high school, and honestly the Magic Socks series looked fresh to me: While before Mahfood’s lineart was pretty stiff, sort of like colorforms or something, with thick lines, his interest in graffiti now manifests in lines and figures that are loose and gestural, the colors that fill in his compositions are bright and vibrant. Did I expect the story to be good? No, not at all. The new trade collection includes a backup on the “making-of” where the artist admits his intention with the comic was always to just do something exactly like Tank Girl, something that it seems like he can only admit to now that he has collaborated with Alan Martin on recent Tank Girl comics, but oh man holy shit do I ever not think that’s a good goal to have. The ideal influence for Tank Girl to have on someone is for them to dress like the character of Tank Girl, you shouldn’t try to make comics like Tank Girl, which are pretty hard to actually read and never very funny.

Credit where it’s due to my mom: When the Tank Girl movie was coming out, and the character and comics were being explained on Good Morning America, she asked the dude at the comic store I was shopping at to show her some issues, and she decided they were not for her. At the time I was disappointed, but in retrospect this is up there with when I explained the band Blink-182 played “pop-punk” and she responded “isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”

But not to throw Tank Girl under the bus, Jamie Hewlett’s art is indeed rad as hell, I maybe prefer his Shade The Changing Man covers to the ones Brendan McCarthy did, and Mahfood’s cartooning now has a visceral energy to it that pops off the shelf. The issue with the writing in Grrl Scouts is that it’s brain-dead, a id that runs on references and cultural signifiers, My interest in buying the book and reading it plummeted when my skim brought me to the pages where Hunter S Thompson shows up as a spirit guide, and the author photo where Mahfood wears a bandolier.

In a climate where the critical discourse has deteriorated, and people praise things for the politics it seems like they have, ignoring their aesthetic value, Mahfood, a dude I think legitimately has a cool drawing style, still sort of gestures towards aesthetics the way other comics gesture towards politics. Like, rather than include a gay character who tells off a villain for fat-shaming someone, Mahfood will have panel where two characters quote Handsome Boy Modeling School. Rather than induce in the audience the sense that reading the comic is a political act that affirms them, it wants to tell the audience that the comic it’s reading is cool, the way that Prince Paul is cool. However, the really-not-that-political act of having minority representation in a work of fiction still places more demands on the writer than what Mahfood is doing, which is basically signaling that he’s just hanging loose and doing what he feels like. What’s weird about that, then, is it that even though this is totally non-focus-grouped, independent work, it still kind of feels the same way that like Coca-Cola paying for a fake graffiti “street art” mural does, like it’s trading off of something that already exists to build its brand. Only Mahfood’s graffiti-influence style is trading off of the historical existence of Hunter S Thompson, and he himself is the sort of person that would be hired for the sort of project I’m describing- One of his first high-profile projects was the Generation X Underground Special Marvel Comics put out in 1998.

At the same time, looked at honestly, Mahfood’s work does function as a sort of aboveground version of a zine. It doesn’t conform to notions of quality, but I like it as a form of communication, of someone talking about music, and the things they think are cool. It feels adolescent, and dumb, and contrived, but I feel like I recognize the person who makes it and could get along with him. I like it, because I like comics, though it doesn’t work as a narrative. The characters are thin, but you can read through them, to get at a feeling for the character of the creator. This is not the best effect you can achieve, but it’s something. It’s something you can get from zines, through people you meet in real life or via mail order, and this can be a transformative experience. This, the version you can get at a comic store, is kind of dispiriting.

Grrl Scouts’ version of what’s cool also includes guns and doin’ cocaine. I disagree! It is kind of crazy to think of the way Brandon Graham’s stuff also contains a graffiti influence, but in so many ways is a more satisfying reading experience, and Mahfood has been making fairly high-profile professional work for way longer. It’s not fair to compare them at all, but right now I’m thinking about how Graham specifically does not include guns in his comics because he doesn’t think they’re cool, and so creates sci-fi weaponry instead: Nonetheless his stuff still feels like it has higher stakes, due to actual emotional involvement with the characters.

This may or may not be relevant to the topic at hand, but it is something I’ve been thinking about: The rapper Lil B has been incredibly influential in ways that cannot even really be calculated. One of the reasons it can’t be calculated is because he never got signed to a record label, besides putting out a double-LP of ambient music on a noise label. The lack of record label support, if anything, just demonstrates the irrelevance of record labels. And then I realized that calling Lil B “The Based God” actually points out that I sort of feel about him the way some of the devout feel: If you do not believe, your words are not relevant. But I can’t say definitively if the problem with Jim Mahfood is that he doesn’t like Lil B because I don’t think he’s weighed in on the matter, I’m just kind of assuming he doesn’t fuck with it. I really don’t know. I guess I mean more that Lil B is someone who sort of blew up the landscape, with a different relationship to tradition, and makes space for things to flourish in ways he couldn’t. So in this example Mahfood would be like Lil Yachty or something, although in other ways he’s like an old dude who probably hasn’t liked a new rapper since Def Jux folded. But I’m becoming that dude too, now that I’m my thirties. So this is maybe how I feel like I can relate to Jim Mahfood. I feel like I can call this comic “retarded” without anyone yelling at me for being “ableist” because no one who would use that word would be interested in defending the honor of Grrl Scouts.

I guess I should explain what the “plot” to Magic Socks is. But oh my god, it’s so stupid, and it doesn’t matter at all. Honestly, maybe the most accidentally revealing moment here is when a character says that Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol is pretentious, but The Invisibles is a perfect balance. The Invisibles feels really dated on the basis of its constant cultural referencing, creating a sort of hypertext for itself to exist in as opposed to developing its own system as a work of fiction that can sustain itself. The values Mahfood and Grrl Scouts have seem dated and anachronistic, but also it seems like telling a story, even a really weird story, would be beyond it. It’s a comic that wants to be fun and wild and comes off as sad, the way an older person romanticizing youth, or lamenting the way the young are now, is sad. That the art is developed way beyond what a younger Mahfood could achieve hints at a form of aging gracefully that gives the book an even greater disconnect.

Bill Sienkiewicz does a pin-up in this comic. Like Mahfood, Sienkiewicz is also a veteran of the pages of Oni Double Feature, although he was already a legend, and Mahfood was an up-and-comer. Comics is so divided up by scenes and strata these days and I hope Sienkiewicz has seen and been given copies of comics by the past decade’s more exciting younger artists. At the same time, while a younger Bill Sienkiewicz worked with Frank Miller and Alan Moore, it seems like Jim Mahfood would benefit from working with writers more skilled than Kevin Smith, his most high-profile former collaborator.