Discoveries

#1: Al Columbia

This is a new series devoted to discoveries: books, films, art, music and, on a more micro level, sometimes just individual sentences, lines of poetry, film frames, or ephemera. What’s a discovery for me may not be a discovery for you, of course. First up is alternative comic artist (are those the right words to describe him?) Al Columbia, whose work I discovered just recently. He’s a mysterious character to me whose work, because it becomes quickly collectable, is either hard to come by or prohibitively expensive. This series isn’t meant to give full coverage or overviews of the artists/writers/directors so I’ll just link to one source, an interview with Columbia from Comics Comics where he speaks of intrusive and debilitating “unwanted images” that prevented him for working for several years. I don’t want to learn too much more about him because I like not knowing, or else parsing out my knowing little by little.

These images are from Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days (Fantagraphics: 2019), a series of, as Columbia says, fragments and vignettes. “Glimpses of their adventures” is a phrase he uses to describe these. He also says: “A single image can say a lot more sometimes than a whole comic can.” There is not the sort of narrative through line you find in Charles Burns’s Black Hole, for instance.

As is the case with many of these panels, in the one above the monster/chaser/villain is offscreen. The weird, rickety wooden labyrinth exists in a kind of black, contextless space. There’s at least one broken plank in the distance. There’s no way Pim and Francie are going to make it.

In some of these drawings, like the one above, it’s hard to get a handle on spatial context. The eye is drawn to the bottom right corner with the fragment of a bright wall and Pim and Francie, but that area of the panel almost feels like a new space. Are they escaping outside of the panel itself?

This one is reminiscent of a scene in Thomas Ligotti’s story “The Night School,” whose walls run black with muck—“The landing at the top of the stairs was barely visible but for the poor light and unreflecting effluvia that here moved even more thickly down the walls.” The works in Pim & Francie are unfinished, fragmentary, some of them not fully inked inked in yet and this contributes to their strangeness. They represent a kind of partial horror.

These last two, above, appear to come from a series of stand alone, related artworks: Capture of the Bloody Bloody Killer. The fact that the killer is restrained so close to the children; well, that space between them is itself a nightmare. The snout face recalls Tex Avery’s “wolf” character and early versions of Goofy.

There’s a whole world of questions about just who Al Columbia is, given that, apparently, his interviews are unreliable, or thought to be unreliable. He hasn’t produced the kind of mainstream underground comic (there’s a contradiction) that’s just dangerous enough but not too dangerous. Perhaps there is too much darkness to sustain a book-length narrative. It’s the single image itself that holds the terror; once you begin linking things together into a story you lose some of the frisson, perhaps because coherent stories need conventional tricks like transitions.

And character motivations.

And narrative arcs.

All the stuff that normalizes storytelling to the point that it’s overly familiar, despite the transgressive content.

For now, Pim and Francie exist trapped in their own undefined world, fleeing eternally to the edges of their panels