Joshua Malbin

Long Time Gone is a funny sort of hybrid: a comic by gallery-based painter George Cochrane that draws its inspiration primarily from a novel, James Joyce’s Ulysses, done in collaboration with the artist’s six-year-old daughter Fiamma. I’m not sure how I’d have reacted to it on the shelf in its original home at Mass MoCA (where drawings from the books are also on display until Dec. 31), let alone how museum-goers who aren’t already comic book readers might be reacting to it. You can sense the gulf between those reactions and the reactions in my local comic book store, where I actually did find it, in this account from the store owner:

“The guy came in here and wanted to sell them for ten dollars. I told him no way can I sell it for ten dollars. He said, well, it costs him five dollars each to print them. I said okay, then sell it for five. Forget about making a profit, just get your name out there.”

But does George Cochrane want to get his name out among comic-book readers? He’s appropriated the form to a high-art context, but does he really expect guys (they’re about 90 to 95 percent guys in my comic book store) who pick up X-Men and Captain America every week to follow a narrative that aims for the High Modernism of Ulysses? I suppose for him this project must be a leap into the unknown, and since he plans for it to have 24 chapters, like Ulysses, he can’t depend on showing every piece of the work in galleries. Maybe he’s looking for a new audience at home in Brooklyn.

But enough about the means of production. On to the work itself. From the exhibition summary at Mass MoCA:

The narrative arc of the work begins at 4:44 AM in the rain with a recycling truck stopped outside the artist’s apartment building in Brooklyn, when Fiamma has a nightmare. The story follows the artist to his studio and throughout the rest of the day and ends with his dreams that night.

…The visual presentations connect the history of the comic (the first chapters modeling aspects of the earliest masterpieces of the medium) with the history of art, text, and music. The course of the twenty-four chapters roughly mirrors developments in the medium over the past century. Examples of early comics cited include Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (in turn the model for Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen) George Harriman’s Krazy Kat, and Frank King’s epic Gasoline Alley. Wordless woodcut books from the 1920s by Lynd Ward are also referenced.

The art is gorgeous. Cochrane shifts styles from page to page and surprisingly to me incorporates his kid’s drawings in ways that totally work.

As for the narrative, I’ll just say that unless you’re a big Joyce fan, it’s probably not for you. Invoking the Joyce model sort of gives Cochrane free rein to write Joyce pastiches and throw in every visual, literary, and musical allusion he can think of. The first issue, for example, includes a ton of references to Bob Dylan and Charlie Parker, plus Fantastic Four, T.S. Eliot, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Philip Guston, Krazy Kat, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, The Canterbury Tales, Raphael’s Transfiguration, Lester Young, The Sistine Chapel,Velazquez’s The Thread Spinners, Rodin’s Adam, the early comic Little Sammy Sneeze, Lynd Ward, Michael Chabon, Gasoline Alley, Sonic Youth, Jack Kirby, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. If you think Joyce is a pretentious douche, you probably won’t be too impressed with all this play. But if you love Joyce and you love comics, you should give Cochrane’s experiment a shot.

George Cochrane will be signing copies this Saturday, September 12, at Galaxy Comics in Park Slope, 5th Avenue between 8th and 9th Streets. You can also pick up the books from Rocketship, The Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough NH, and Dewey’s Comic City in Madison NJ.

A couple of preview images below the fold. More at Cochrane’s Facebook page.

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