“Perhaps You Will Join Me Yet” The Sequential Work of
Austin English
Dorothy Iannone
In her 1979 book An Explosive Interlude, Dorothy Iannone asks her adopted Central European home a series of questions. “Why have I stayed in Germany for so long, working for more than a decade sending out my vision of erotic love, never faltering in my belief that it is as important for you as it is for me?”/ “Why have I stayed in Germany so long when you said no. You said no to your pleasure and to your needs. You said no because everyone else was saying no.” /“You said no because to put me on your public wall … would have meant that you too considered love a major value.”
Love as a “major value,” the mission to live by this belief, and (crucially) to speak of it, to communicate it, is what animates Iannone’s project and what sets her apart from many of comics’ defining authors. A glance at some acknowledged masters makes for an illuminating contrast: Charles Schulz’ strip Peanuts relentlessly constructed, for decades, drawn sentences that chart out a place beyond depression. Robert Crumb’s oeuvre organizes his anger, acknowledges his bile, gestures toward humanism but falters at the idea of love for another person in the specific. Jack Kirby’s art indicates spirituality, a love whose negation must be opposed through conflict, while the flesh and blood of a lived life is largely absent. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comes close to a vision of true engagement with the world, but he filters himself through obstructionist symbols, meditations and rhythms. Iannone’s closest analogs, North American autobiographical cartoonists, are an even faultier ground for
All images and works discussed in this article are taken from the anthology Dorothy Iannone: You Who Read Me With Passion Must Forever Be My Friends, edited by Lisa Pearson, Siglio, Los Angeles, 2014.
RIGHT: From An Explosive Interlude, 1979.
“You Would not Survive if There Wasn’t humor”
Kate Beaton in conversation with Sarah glidden
Kate Beaton, born in 1983, is one of Canada’s most illustrious cartoonists. Her comic, Hark! A Vagrant, ran on her website from 2007 to 2018, and had upward of 500,000 unique visitors per month. The weekly strip poked fun at historical figures (with a smattering of famous fictional characters thrown into the mix), and Beaton’s ear for colloquial dialogue, combined with her masterful use of line and gesture, made her work stand out at a time when webcomics were exploding on a newly social internet.
When Drawn & Quarterly published her first collection of Hark! comics in 2011, it was a sensation. The highly anticipated follow-up, Step Aside, Pops, spent six months on The New York Times Best Seller list. That year, she also published her first children’s book, The Princess and the Pony, which was later developed as an animated series for Apple TV+.
Another children’s book, King Baby, came out the following year. In 2022, Beaton’s monumental memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands was published by Drawn & Quarterly. The book won a Harvey Award and an Eisner (as did both Hark! collections before it) and was the 2023 winner of Canada Reads. It even made it onto the Obama book list.
All images by Kate Beaton, unless otherwise noted. OPPOSITE: Kate Beaton photo courtesy of Ken Woroner. ABOVE: From Step Aside, Pops: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection, 2015.
