bpNichol Comics

by bpNichol, Carl Peters

The scope, innovation and depth (down to the heart) of bpNichol’s writing makes him one of the most important writers in English of the 20th century. He is widely known for his research into genres as diverse as the lyric, the long poem, sound poetry, concrete poetry, critical theory and now, with the publication of bpNichol Comics, we can even add the comic strip to this impressive list.

Carl Peters has put together this major collection of Nichol’s comics from 1960 to 1980, which frame characters ranging from Milt the Morph, to Bob de Cat, Lonely Fred and Rover Rawshanks: rich examples of Nichol’s attempts to explode conventional syntax, narrative structure, lyric self-centredness—indeed all of the conventions of modernist art and art making. And with the inclusion of a remarkable selection of previously unpublished letters and essays around the comics themselves, Peters shows us that Nichol’s comics informed not only his own work in other genres, but the work of other writers as well. But, in as much as Nichol’s comics bring us to a deeper understanding of his poetics, his comics also remind us that, as Robin Blaser writes, �the truth is laughter.” bpNichol Comics is not only for scholars, poets, cartoonists, artists, animators, writers and readers; it is for the inquisitive and adventurous child in all of us.

Genres: Comics

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Barrie Phillip Nichol, known as bpNichol, was a Canadian poet, writer, sound poet, editor and grOnk/Ganglia Press publisher. His body of work encompasses poetry, children's books, television scripts, novels, short fiction, computer texts, and sound poetry. His love of language and writing, evident in his many accomplishments, continues to be carried forward by many.

Reviews

[Dominick]

Rarely do I wish that Goodreads provided the option to give a book a rating of "zero stars/hated it." This is one of those occasions. Hence the absence of a rating for this book: interpret that as zero stars. This book fails on almost every conceivable level.

First, and perhaps most debatably, bpnichol's style does not appeal to me. I am not a fan of deliberate amateurism. I like my comics to show actual craftsmanship, not a deliberate eschewing of craft. nichol, however, is overtly anti-craft. Mistake or second thoughts with lettering? Just cross the words out or write over them. Rulers for border panels? Whatever for? etc. The stuff makes someone like Rory Hayes or even James Kochalka look like a master draftsman. The fact that it is a deliberate choice (I assume; based on some of the rendering in "Lonely Fred," nichol does seem capable of producing polished art) doesn't make me like it any better.

However, the real and major problems here involve the choice of material, the quality of the reproduction, and, frankly, the failure of editorial oversight.

Based on the material here, one might conclude that nichol finished little that he began--in more ways than one. Many selections here seem never to have been intended for publication at all but to represent works in progress or drafts/ideas for projects that were never realized. Even the dozen-plus pages of juvenalia don't constitute a completed work. Most egregious on this front is "The Big Hunger," almost thirty pages of rough draft/artist's guide. Nichol scripted several comics stories in the 1970s, adaptations of SF stories by other hands; these were drawn by artists other than nichol for publication. However, rather than providing even one sample of such a comics story in its final printed form (and call me crazy, but in a book called bpnichol Comics, not bpnichol Drafts, Scraps, and Fragments I think readers might reasonably expect to find actual comics), what we get here is nichol's rough (very rough) layout of the book, with the script written in a particularly crabbed and unreadable hand and many of the panels including simply notes saying something like "illustrate caption"--not a strong testament to nichol's skill as a comics scripter. One might make a case that seeing nichol's layouts provides insight into his working methods, and how he collaborated, but without the actual final comic against which to compare them, they have little value.

Furthermore, this selection is also the most egregious instance of how the shoddy reproduction in this book exacerbates the difficulty of reading work that is already by its design unprofessional-looking. I doubt these layouts are printed at their original size (indeed, much of what is presented here is pretty clearly printed smaller than original or intended size, which compromises its readability), and the quality of the reproduction measures up about to what you might expect of a 1970s-era photocopy machine, except for one piece, presented in somewhat better scans (why wasn't the whole book done that way? Search me!). Consequently, lettering that is already crabbed, marred by crossouts and write-overs, and even less legible than nichol's lettering that WAS designed for publication, becomes illegible due to the tiny size and blurry printing. This sequence is literally unreadable, even with a magnifying glass. Reluctant as I am to skip any portion of a book I am reading, I simply gave up on this section.

I have already commented on the less-than-optimal editorial choices about what to include. The final selection here suggests that the problem is not one simply of eccentric selection but of fundamental failure to pay attention. After an introductory section talking in some detail about how this final piece is the most publication-ready version of something called "John Cannyside," the book instead presents something that calls itself the flipside of the John Cannyside notebook and to which is assigned the title, in nichol's hand, "The Life and Loves of CAPTAIN GEORGE," which is in fact a piece on Captain George Henderson, founder of Memory Lane, one of Toronto's earliest memorabilia and comics shops (I bought my first collectors' comics from him, in fact). It is in NO WAY a piece called or about "John Cannyside." Such a gaffe is frankly appalling. How did this book get past the proofing and editing stage with its final section explicitly something other than what the book says it is? Anyway, this piece combines nichol's crappy typed transcriptions of audio-0taped reminiscences (every "um," self-correction, and even tape click faithfully retained, just to make it more readable) from Henderson (mainly about his early career as the author of soft-core porn novels) with nichol's equally-crappily-typed free association thoughts (or "thots," as nichol puts it, in one of his idiosyncratic instances of phonetic spelling--though why other words are not also spelled phonetically remains opaque) and a very roughly laid out comics format for the whole thing--complete with empty panels or notes about what would appear in a given space, if the project were ever, you know, actually produced as a publishable thing. It stops (rather than ending) mid-sentence--or, to be more precise, given nichol's refusal to follow such arcane linguistic protocols as using punctuation or capitalization, mid word-cluster. The piece is of some moderate interest for the reminiscences from Henderson, but otherwise is worthless as a comic.

In short, this is a book for bpnichol completists only. Nobody else needs to bother. I wish I hadn't. Books rarely make me actually irritated as I read them; this is one of the few exceptions.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of his comics are very good. His use of panels as cards is innovative.