Philly Comics Now: The Art of Graphic Storytelling
Pearlstein Art Gallery
3401 Filbert St.
Philadelphia
Dec. 3, 2024
I thought I’d already seen enough piss and poo across Philly until I noticed an outline of a man dripping neon yellow, adorned with a simple speech bubble: “I’m made of pee.”
“Ah,” I mused. “A commentary on the totality of toilet talk in graphic art, perhaps?” Hang on, I interrupted myself: This is not Marcel DuChamp’s fountain. I’m not at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I had to get my head out of my ass and back in the toilet talking game.
I was looking at a cartoon (self?) portrait of pee by Andrew Jefferey Wright. It’s currently on display at Drexel’s Pearlstein Art Gallery for the exhibit “Philly Comics Now: The Art of Graphic Storytelling,” curated by underground comic shops Partners and Son.
Comics come in all shapes and forms. These artworks by Tia Roxae and Marta Syrup are showing at Pearlstein.
The sprawling show features over 60 contemporary Philadelphia comic artists. It’s not your usual gallery fare; instead of explanatory wall texts, we get a hands-on exhibit. In between the warehouse full of composition books, inked-up wood blocks, sketches and zines are bean bag chairs in which to read. We’re invited to dig into the local scene, to even leave our fingerprints along its folds. The message is clear: Stop sleeping on comic genius!
Beyond short artist biographies, the only guided text we get is a great quote from exhibiting artist Sally Madden: “As an art form with so few dollars at stake and even less prestige, the comics scene here has little to feed itself aside the momentum from the desire to create.”
Looking around the room, I could only think of how said scarcity has bred abundance. There was plenty of technique to inspire oohs and aahs, but the substance was in the style. The myriad approaches to wielding a pen as seen in Pearlstein were as awe-inspiring as I imagine the Sistine Chapel ceiling to be. But whereas “art” is often applauded for its implicit circumventing of apparent limitations in honor of imagination, “style” seems to be about how we fashion those limitations to suit ourselves.
Suiting ourselves could mean indulging in potty humor — which comics have garnered rusty reputations for doing. But I think it’s less about diarrhea or even diaries than it is about documentation. For instance, Caroline Cash’s comic PeePee-PooPoo is a “one-person anthology series” inspired by the artist’s daily life, with scenes on the grating anxiety of paying taxes and the complications of queer flirtation told through ‘60s-era, classic cartooning. The title of the toon gets at the absurd but beautiful art of intentional transparency: “It’s a PeePee-PooPoo world,” is the thesis, as evidenced by “honk honk” illustrated-onomatopoeia and “fuck you"s shouted between city streets.
The sheer impulse to represent ourselves collides easily with the comic form, which merges words and pictures, penmanship and perspective, to deliver superhuman takes on even the tiniest topics by worshipping the golden rule: Show, don’t tell.
That’s the rule I religiously follow as a nascent arts reviewer, at least. And it’s the reason I believe that comics are not only the highest form of art, but the best means of reviewing it.
There’s proof of this not only on our site (Midbrow is proud to publish incomparable work by the likes of cartoonists Fred Noland and Izzy True, for example), but in Pearlstein’s exhibit.
Look, for example, at Kelechi Azuakoemu’s evaluation-in-panels of her favorite album, Wanderland. She walks us through each song on the CD, bringing its sound alive through one dimensional motion. Is that not magic? She spells out the “sexiness and aggressiveness that the chords encompass,” through her depictions of acrylic nails holding down guitar riffs. A mass-distributed album becomes a personal story, and comics once again save the broader industry of art from the claws of co-optation.
Check out Box Brown’s review of nerdy movie sagas, too. He hits on why the Star Wars “prequel films were doomed to rub some fans the wrong way; because Star Wars is not just the things people saw on screen.
“Star Wars is also all these events that happen in a child’s imagination when they played in that world. It can’t be bottled,” he writes. He subtitles a simple drawing of a sad, bald child pictured inside the skull of an angry, mustached man: “Nothing could replicate that feeling. The adult couldn’t even articulate it if they tried.”
Somehow, that sketch says it all. Or, should I say, shows it all. Though it may seem counterintuitive, the easiest line sketches are often the most apt expressions of human emotion. We don’t always need to understand the “why,” even though that’s often what written reviews, too-often penned by academic-minded freaks, love to chase. A collage of skills are required to intriguingly translate the “what” — the sounds, smells, touch, tastes and sights.
And how! The unmodified truth of the viewer’s experience is cleaner when it’s specific — and a sloppier, slippery-slope when it’s framed around philosophical universalities.
So as I wax wide with my keyboard, I will continue to take my inspiration from the countless Philly cartoonists sketching circles around me. I don’t buy that the comics world is just about tending to generative grassroots; even if society is starving the scene, the scene is feeding society.
Those who are brave enough to bare their PeePee-PooPoo on paper — let alone on the internet — are letting us into the process of unpacking who we really are, without overthinking it. We are what we eat: We are the songs, ads, speeches, Tweets and other media we see all day long.
Comics are the true conscious consumers. Instead of flushing their waste, they recycle it. Here’s a recycled saying I hope rings newly true: Big things come in small packages.
Philly Comics Now: The Art of Graphic Storytelling is showing through Dec. 14. Visit the gallery on Thursday, Dec. 5 for the closing reception to meet the artists.
