Tom Lynch

A crowd of neighborhood fans gathers at Wicker Park's Quimby's for what could easily lead to disaster: four local graphic novelists, Anders Nilsen, Jeffrey Brown, John Hankiewicz, and Paul Hornschemeier--collectively titled The Holy Consumption--plan to play their own version of "Win, Lose, or Draw" with the crowd as contestants. They pass out various free two-page comics for audience appreciation and begin. Jokes are made, laughs are had, and the game goes off better than it could have, with one major detail resonating from wall-to-wall--these guys can draw, even when drawing silly.

Chicago serves as somewhat of a support system for cartoonists, with a rich recent history that includes Chris Ware and the early-career Daniel Clowes among others, and now it looks like a new generation is following their lead. The Holy Consumption--four local artists who formed a group to help promote each other's work and make themselves more available to the public through a website and random events--is just a small faction of the roaring horde of cartoonists between our borders, but each of them, though respectfully different, all have the same goal--to be read. To make pictures echo in the minds of readers the way they were first affected by their forebears, from Schulz and Crumb to Ware and Clowes. Well, things are looking up.

Anders Nilsen

As Anders Nilsen grew up in snowy Minneapolis, he lived near a large park. He's happy where he is now, he says from his West Augusta street apartment overlooking a blizzard-covered Humboldt Park. After a year's stay in San Francisco, he came to Chicago in 1999 to attend The School of Art Institute for graduate school. He only stayed a year.

"Mostly really I just felt out of place," he says. "The place is kind of geared toward the fine art and high art way of dealing with things. My teachers liked what I was doing and they were very supportive--it just didn't seem like they could talk about it in an interesting or helpful way. They couldn't tell me anything about comics that I didn't already know."

The son of a librarian and a mason, he grew up in comics-friendly environments, and took up drawing early on, as his father would frequently draw, usually images of him and his older sister. "I started to draw ever since I could remember," he says. "I don't remember not drawing."

Growing up a fan of "Tintin" and "Elfquest" led to his own "Big Questions" series, an extensive collection of thoughts and characters that spill across six different volumes and discover the funny, if not disarming, answers of existence. His "The Ballad of the Two-Headed Boy" won him the Xeric Grant and put him on the proverbial map. His newest, "Dogs and Water," Nilsen's dive into long-form published by Drawn and Quarterly, only adds to the impressive assembly of work.

In "Dogs and Water," Nilsen creates an epic landscape of desolation and doubt as a man wanders the never-ending wilderness armed with a backpack and a teddy bear. Nearly all spare visuals, the book seems rather ghostly, a haunted setting of smothering whiteness, as its hero tumbles through a wasteland only to stumble upon packs of wild dogs, a ghastly helicopter crash, and a barrage of heavy artillery and bullets.

The story unfolds during its creation, Nilsen says. "During the time after I started it and before I finished it the war in Iraq started, so that started to percolate a little bit," he says of the two-year process of putting "Dogs and Water" together. "The original strip I started with was more about just being an artist and figuring out how to make it through the world and how to hold on to what a sort of ridiculous idea that is, but to hold on to it and persevere."

As for the bear? "When I started [the book] it was a symbol of leaving school and being in the middle of nowhere but having this notion of childhood that I'm still carrying along with me. I'm using a childhood notion to navigate the world. I'm hanging on to this idea that I'm an artist, even though it's not an adult thing to do." Though Nilsen claims to not believe "in any kind of god in a way where God has intention or is manipulating the world," he feels religion plays a factor as well. "We constantly imagine that there is a purpose or a higher meaning, a plan for all of us," he says. "It's the thing that gets us out on the road, doing stuff, feeling like what we do matters. But I don't actually believe that there's something there, but it's important to have that sort of motivation."

2005 looks to be a huge year for Nilsen. He plans to finish another chapter in the "Big Questions" anthology (which he believes will take the entire year), plus future work with Fantagraphics and a distribution deal that will send his work across the globe and publish it in different languages. "I have a friend from college who's an artist too and he and I used to joke that the way you become a successful artist is to never ever become proficient at anything else," he says. Nilsen may be on to something.

Jeffrey Brown

As a kid, Jeffrey Brown was a big cartoon fan. Smurfs, Thundercats and Transformers all shaped his Saturday mornings, and accompanied by his father's frequent doodlings on restaurant placemats, it wasn't long before he began inking himself.

Raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a place he describes as "a place that swallows you up and traps you and keeps you from doing anything in your life," Brown escaped to attend The School of the Art Institute in 2000 to get his MFA, and has been here since. His first long-form books, "Clumsy" and "Unlikely," focus on the awkward, susceptible time in male life when the other sex is as unsettling as it is mysterious, when outside you've aged but inside you're being stuffed into the high-school locker again by the senior star linebacker. They're clearly autobiographical, self-deprecating hardcore, a dangerous journey in exposition.

"One thing is I just don't think about it," he says in his hushed tone, barely over the music playing at Wicker Park's diner Earwax, his every-two-day destination where he gets most of his drawing done. "There's a switch in my head. There's a suspension of realization that I'm actually writing about actual things. When I go back and read things, it's kind of weird. Or sometimes when I see someone reading one of my books, and they'll just be reading and then they'll laugh, I'm just like `What page are they on?' It's dangerous territory and I'm trying to get away from it."

His newest release, "Bighead," a collection of comics starring a dubious superhero with an extremely large dome, is a little different. A journey into the hilarity of crime-fighting superheroes, all signs of love and disassociation are practically gone. Brown is saving the world instead.

"I had a friend who kept accusing me of having a huge ego," he says of the comic's high-school origins and title. "It's not a sexual thing at all, which apparently some people think. I just started doing it in class for fun, and I always wanted to revisit the idea."

The future for Brown seems planned; he's currently working on two separate projects, a relapse into old autobiographical form grinningly titled "Every Girl is the End of the World for Me," and another superhero appreciation, a parody of Transformers and Go-Bots titled "The Incredible Change-Bots." After that, a life-documenting epic about his college-to-Chicago-to-comics years, something he plans will hit the 450- to 500-page mark.

"When I'm drawing, it's so internalized," he says. "I'm kind of selfish and I write for myself first--whatever I find entertaining."

John Hankiewicz

It took a while for John Hankiewicz to draw full-time. The Westmont, Illinois native and creator of the biting, witty, incisive Tepid series lived in various spots in the country during his schooling and down South while he taught English composition at the University of Central Arkansas. Finally, back in Westmont and studying printmaking at the College of DuPage, he finds the time to draw.

"Time is the most important thing," he says in the lobby of the Art Institute. "More than money, more than having a good studio, more than anything else, if you have the time and you use it, it plays a key factor. Having a job and drawing comics is really hard for me, and if and when I get another one the comics will probably dwindle to an unsteady drip."

Hankiewicz laughs out loud at his prediction, though it's difficult to imagine the author of the Tepid series laughing audibly. The comic glimmers in a sleek, intelligent smirk. Usually downsized to a minimal number of panels per page, Hankiewicz's detailed drawings--mostly of ordinary items or scenes, a man in a chair, a glance between people, expressionless except for their eyes--are accompanied by a title or headline, sometimes a line of dialogue, each perfectly making the image both humorous and tragic, a crafty disaster that will tool with the reader's reaction. Hankiewicz's work resembles the unforgettable imagery of Edward Gorey, a comparison that he welcomes. Hyper-intelligent and sophisticatedly droll, his work hurdles with grace.

But it was Chris Ware's early- to mid-nineties work that kick-started Hankiewicz. "It was the first thing that I saw that matched what I thought comics could be. I always like comics and classic comics, but what Ware was doing was so radically different that I thought I could do something like that, but you know, not as good."

Hankiewicz's books don't have a cohesive storyline, though some continuing themes resonate. "There's no story," he says. "It's just a sequence, but it builds and sort of has this abstract rhythm that appeals to me." That rhythm has personal effect, or as Hankiewicz puts it, it's like "being inside the artist's mind," and the lasting emotion lingers with utter subtleness. "Yeah, they're personal. But I think `private' would be a better word than `personal.' When I'm doing them [the comics], I don't think of making a story people will laugh at or be scared of or will identify with. I'm kind of doing it for myself. It might not be autobiographical, but they're personal." So much so that he would feel uncomfortable working in public. "Oh God no, I couldn't do it in public," he says. "No, I like quiet. I'm not a very social person, I don't like being around a lot of people, and with the things I do, I'm just sort of wrapped up in my own head. If some waitress walks by me with coffee or something, or if somebody is talking to himself, I just can't...I don't want to be in the world. I like to be alone."

The artist plans to publish two or three more miniature books--which he intricately binds together himself, by hand--and after that make an anthology of all his shorter works into a tight collection. But he has no plans to alter form. "I like surrealism in art. I like disjunctions. I like confusion and I like ambiguity. I like all of that. I don't want to sit down with a title that makes sense or a plot that has some sort of linear flow. If I wanted all that linearity in my life I'd become an accountant or something."

Paul Hornschemeier

"The number one cash crop is marijuana, and number two is tobacco," Paul Hornschemeier jokes about his hometown farmland of Georgetown, Ohio. "There's a lot of racism and closed-mindedness, but at the same time the nicest people you'll ever meet."

The author of the "Sequential" series and founder of The Holy Consumption--whose first memory of drawing was when he was four-years-old and his mom handed over an inside-out grocery bag for him to draw on while his parents unpacked after the move from Cincinnati to Georgetown--studied philosophy at Ohio State University where he amusingly thought "massive thoughts about not making money." Always a fan of mainstream comics, he never had access to much underground material, until one day when a friend gave him Daniel Clowes' "Ghost World."

In 1999 he published thirty-five copies of the first volume of "Sequential," which consist of funny, insightful, endearing panels that borderline dreamlike images that you would find when you first awake, eyes blurred, the day still unrealized. Job opportunities, plus the end of a serious relationship, put him in a position to choose between Chicago and New York. "I knew a lot of people in New York, so I moved to Chicago," he says. "I really wanted to start fresh."

What followed was his "Forlorn Funnies" series, more work on "Sequential" (which was recently released as a collected anthology), and "Mother Come Home," which took from volumes 2-4 of "Forlorn," and existentially examines the relationship between a father and son coping with a mother's death. "Mother Come Home," a brilliant achievement that garnered praise from all the underground, finally drew Hornschemeier the inevitable comparisons to Chris Ware, and the focus of the praise was as much on his writing as it was on his imagery.

"I think to a large degree the writing is more important than the image per se," he says. "I think the image is subservient to reading the story. Ultimately, you're reading, even if you're just reading images and processing them as symbols. That's the engine of comics. I mean, Jeff's [Brown] work is clumsily drawn, but it's complete with everything going on, the emotions. To me, it's clearly notdependent on having nice representational drawing."

Hornschemeier met Nilsen and Hankiewicz at an underground publishing conference in Bowling Green, Ohio, and was introduced to Brown through Chris Ware. After they were all living in the Chicago area, Hornschemeier came up with The Holy Consumption, which has a website in which all the works of the four artists can be purchased. "I had this idea to do with the three of them," he says. "We were all living in the Chicago area, so why don't we come up with a collective thing that we do together? First, it was very bare-boned, you can buy this stuff here, like that. But we're talking about doing a collection in the future. The biggest thing was that nobody was really seeing the stuff we do other than the professional comics we do, and now they can."

Up next for Hornschemeier is his biggest project yet, a book for Fantagraphics titled "The Three Paradoxes." "It's an autobiographical book about me and my dad," he says. "The simple description is that we take a walk through Georgetown and I take pictures of key points, where certain events happened from my life. It's an uplifting book, less dreary, and more hopeful."

(2005-01-11)

Also by Tom Lynch

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