Comix as Performace

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the ultra-cool alternate SoHo, makes the perfect location for an "underground" event about "underground" comix. About 150 people from the New York comixcenti gathered last Thursday in a cavernous performance-space-cum-bar near the East River for the second in a series of shows known as "Comics Decode." Taking another step into the realm of comix as performance, "Comics Decode" has comicbook authors read aloud a selection of their work and then take questions about it. Through its early steps "Comics Decode" exposes the challenges of bridging private and public art forms.

Tom Hart, author of "New Hat," took the stage first. Tall and thin, he seemed the antithesis of his squat, ovular characters. Only by donning a woolly cap did he draw a parallel to his best-known character, the anti-corporate vagrant Hutch Owen. Using an overhead projector, an assistant switched transparencies made from Hart's book, "The Collected Hutch Owen," while Hart read the dialogue and even such onomatopoeia as "blip" and "wham." Afterwards he took questions from the moderator and audience.

Each of the "acts" followed this reading-discussion pattern. After Tom Hart came James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook, who collaborate on a sci-fi/urban nightmare series called "Ground Zero." Following them Megan Kelso ("Queen of the Black Black"), resembling the dark-haired Enid from Dan Clowes' "Ghost World," read from her up-coming graphic novel "Artichoke Tales." Lastly, the headliner, Charles Burns, whose work has appeared since the early 1980s, took the stage. A master of the color black (his pages are more ink than paper) Burns specializes in creepy stories filled with disease, freaks and teenagers. Reading from his ongoing series "Black Hole," Burns chose a particularly graphic scene about a teen-aged "quickie" in the cemetery that ends when the girl discovers the guy has an extra mouth on his neck.

While seeing authors come out from behind the drawing board can be fun, "Comics Decode" has set itself up for a bigger challenge. Moving comics into a public performance space demands a comparable broadening of the audience's experience of the work. Frankly "Comics Decode" hasn't figured out how best to do that yet. Where an author's reading of poetry or prose can shift the emphasis off certain words and onto others, exposing new meanings, comix' visual nature makes this much harder. The performance of comix must turn into more of a show. As a guide the producers and participants of "Comics Decode" should look to Ben Katchor.

Katchor, author of "Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer," has been at the forefront of adapting comix to performance. His work was turned into short radio plays for National Public Radio and he created an original comix-style opera, "The Carbon Copy Building." But more relevant to "Comics Decode" are his slide shows. Never a straight reading, he frames his presentations in a loose lecture format with titles like, "Halftone Printing in the Yiddish Press and Other Objects of Idol Worship." But the lectures consist of the kind of vaguely-plausible-but-absurd nonsense that make up the majority of Katchor's work. He essentially becomes a character in a one-man-show that features the reading of comix.

At the moment, "Comics Decode" feels more like a comix social mixer than a show. (A perfectly legitimate ambition, but not one that encourages broader exposure.) It needs to get tighter and slicker. Keeping the number of participants down to three, with two big names and one lesser known "opener" would speed up the overlong proceedings. Likewise the readings should be done all in row, with an open panel afterwards for those who wish to stick around. With some tinkering "Comics Decode" could evolve into more than an attempt at broadening comix' appeal. It has the potential to explore added layers of meaning to an already deeply sophisticated art form.

Note to readers: TIME.comix will be skipping a week while I take a vacation.