'Borgenson' writes in TCJ:
"Ian’s comics, to me, are earnest, if unrefined, extensions of the P.Bagge school of cartooning, which is to say, cartooning based on pure exaggeration. His drawing style is fluid and mercurial, often bordering on inconsistent.
If there’s one major fault in Ian’s work, it is that he seems to overcompensate for his lack of technical chops with an overabundance of the grotesque. I find nothing wrong in this direction, but Ian tends to meander in his own irony, which makes for pretty uninteresting work.
There are, in my mind, two stables for successful ‘grotesque’ cartooning. One is satirical, based on careful observation, and the other is purely celebratory. Drew Friedman’s work fits into the former category, and Johnny Ryan’s fart-for-fart’s sake approach is as celebratory as celebratory comes. In my mind, one of Bagge’s strengths as a cartoonist is his ability to balance these two disciplines (or lack thereof), successfully gravitating towards one or the other for specific narrative purposes. Harker is a fairly smart fellow and a competent storyteller who seems to ‘get’ this, but lazily resorts to stoner nonsense ever too often.
His Ultimate Peanuts parody, though shamelessly cliché (customary lesbian references to Patty and Marcy included), is one of his better works. Pathos and parody do not usually coexist on the same page, but the ending, in which a Lucy comes on to Charlie Brown after being spurned by Schroder, wallows in the kind of sickly schadenfreude one gets from seeing characters at their most debased and desperate, and this combined with a right amount of grotesqueness is what makes the strip funny.
All in all, I disagree with Ace’s assessment that Harker's primary appeal is a love for cartooning that “shines through his work”. If I wanted that I’d read B.J and the Dogs. Harker is ultimately too cynical and self-aware an artist to take himself seriously, in fact a lot of the conceptual energy in his work seems to be channeled into challenging his readers whether they should take him seriously. Ultimately this is a dynamic that could translate into a recipe for originality and success, or an oeuvre of irritating cartooning, only time can tell."
Last edited by Eui-Chien Borgensen on Sat Nov 10, 2007 5:52 am; edited 1 time in totalLittle boy, you've got a lo-o-o-ong road to walk before you can even think of writing serious critical prose. Pathetic.
As pathetic as the other harrumphing idiots on this thread, including the normally sane and subtle Kristy Valenti--who seems overwhelmed by the sheer 'tardedness of the Gutter jerks spewing their crap on
www.tcj.com, , and has apparently decided to lock down this perfectly normal thread (started by Hunter*-- what a coincidence, eh, Kristy?):
http://www.tcj.com/messboard/viewtopic.php?t=3200 My view? Let the crappy little trolls march on over any reasonable poster on the TCJ board. Bravo Borgenson, Steinke, Hellman, acebackwords, Kletz and "Geedis" Bogner. Heil Hellman is your cry, and Deppey seems to love it.
I made my stand against your lies, and Deppey responded by saying: "No, I want the TCJ forums to be wrecked by liars and trolls, so fuck off."
So, Ian, Hunter: you're doomed.
*Hunter and I spoke on the phone; he confirmed my identity. This put him on the shitlist of Danny Hellman and his stooges, who include Dirk and, it seems, Kristy Valenti.
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