Word: cole
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...stories and a punk-rock aversion to "craft" in favor of raw, expressionist artwork. Over time that outsider style has been adopted (co-opted?) by traditional, established publishers. Three recent works, available in regular comicbook shops, typify this style with their autobiographical stories rendered in immediate, rough graphics: Allison Cole's "Never Ending Summer," James Kochalka's "Sketchbook Diaries Vol. 4" and Jeff Brown's "Unlikely...
...Allison Cole's "Never Ending Summer" (Alternative Comics; 48 pp.; $11.95), just released, marks her graphic novel debut. As is the DIY style, the author focuses on her own life and relationships, putting it onto paper with a beguiling simplicity. Set during a summer between semesters in Providence, Rhode Island, Allison works at a comic store and collects LPs. Asher, her boyfriend, has left for a two-week trip. Suddenly she gets a phone call. He wants to go back to Australia for the rest of the summer - where his old girlfriend lives. Uh oh. The rest of the book...
...Cole's artwork matches the unpretentious ambitions of the story. She draws her characters with an absolute minimum of detail. They are all essentially sexless blobs with singular attributes - glasses or animal ears - to distinguish between them. The polished grade-school style emphasizes the immaturity of the characters in a clever way. Everything is rendered as outlines, with no shading, like everyone is getting blasted with white light. Cole's relaxed, confident pace develops "Never Ending Summer" into a neat little view on the vulnerabilities of human interrelations...
...would choose pain, misanthropy and terrible luck as the recurring themes of a life, but Merritt has at least put his misery to excellent use. He is the great tragicomic songwriter of his age--equal parts Cole Porter and Charlie Brown--and love is his unkickable football. "Maybe it's being gay," says Merritt, "but for me, everything related to love is so awkward, it's automatically funny. Just the idea of love is embarrassing to me. It's the equivalent of singing in the street." In 1999 Merritt and his band the Magnetic Fields released 69 Love Songs...
He’ll also have honey mustard, swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato and cole slaw, or so the new Larry Summers hamburger at Bartley’s Burger Cottage would suggest...