Mystery moving over the face of the waters of the subconscious.
There is no Gould. Then there Is, glimpsed, in moments, influence, inspiration, in non-submersible units, in all those artists I love. I'll never be quite sure where I glimpsed him first.
It's occurred to me that since Gould passed through so many artistic Modes throughout the course of his Great Undertaking-- there is no other way to think of forty-six years of self-enforced productivity, than as a Great Work --Gould embodies multiple artistic movements. I do not know the scope of his art before the period beginning with Plainclothes Tracy, so it is possible that he encompasses more than the (conservative) three-to-four I believe Tracy exhibits, overall.
So too, then, with the artists he has influenced: they contain multitudes. Gould is perhaps most cleanly glimpsed in Gilbert Hernandez, Beto having boiled to reduction, re-invigorated, and sublimated further still, Dick Tracy back-to-front. Charles Burns' psychosexually anxious heart is shaped like Dick Tracy's own strangely beaten face. Art Spiegleman exemplifies, even as he is my least favourite of The Influenced. But where else might Gould have gotten into the groundwater?
Because in all that you can see I'm talking about Style. And alchemy: infusing one's style with new shapes, methods & ideas. Who else really shines on that technical, formalistic, compositional, workaday "live-IN-the-trenches, motherfucker" level?
Keith Giffen. I mean everyone sees Kirby and Starlin and Buscema and Jose Munoz and Ted McKeever and Simon Bisley and Kevin McGuire in Giffen. Absolutely. But they don't see the In The Trenches Motherfucker who rocked at one job after another, forever refining his thing. They don't see the iterations of Gould mastering ditto machine and Giffen mastering xerox machine in parallel. They don't see these artists learning, through brute repetition, the music in the dancing motes of stillness as they stamp their way across the sequence of pages.
There is no Gould there, you may say, then there is. There is Gould (the gimmick, the sales technique, the brand. witness the example of Capp's Fearless Fosdick, the meta-joke, when Fearless Fosdick usurped Li'l Abner in popularity & brand recognition-- Al Capp losing himself in competition with Gould, losing his satire in self-parody), then there is Gould (the enthusiastic autodidact alone with his pens, paper, and Spirit Duplicator (as the ditto machine was also known) repeating his gags and polishing his schtick).
Then there was Chester Gould, the illustrator and ad hack who pitched sixty-five failed gag strips over ten years at the Chicago Tribune before landing Plainclothes Tracy:
"I'll change the name."
"That's all to the good. I want two weeks of pages. Your deadline's Monday. I want 'em Sunday. And lose the straw hat, fer chrissakes, he looks like a fag."
That's the true substrate of all these ruminations on Identity & Style: Deadlines, and Pages. No time to really plan. Big plots only trip you up when the editor's got other ideas. Pass the hat, take requests. Stay fluid. Fuck style, use a ruler. Hack it out. Keep it current. Work the crowd.
Dance, dance, dance like the face of the waters of the subconscious.
I don't know that Giffen actually dug on Dick Tracy. But we're talking about a guy who drew a double-page spread of every player in the Legion of Super-Heroes like it was a Sgt. Pepper's album cover and he worked fuckin' Garfield in there. Everything was in Giffen, ergo everything that had been in Gould would be in Giffen, too. That's kind of how this art & influence stuff occurs.
Gould, in the Great Darkness before I knew him?
Because I really latched onto Keith Giffen, before Los Bros Hernandez or Charles Burns or Jose Munoz-- because Aleck Sinner grew from a grafted cutting of Tracy, no mistake --before any of the Hep Names I'd check for myself. I'd scan the Sunday funnies when I was at paw-paw's, impatient to catch a ride with my aunt when she went to Get Her Hair Done so I could sneak off to someplace that Sold Comics. Didn't matter if it was Big B's stuffed-to-choking with unsold comix spinny rack or K-Mart's magazine aisle or some dusty hobby shoppe. My mission was always comix.
Maybe Gould was in Giffen. Maybe he wasn't. I'll never catch up with where-all Gould's influence was felt. That's not what this is about.
What is strange to me is the near-religious Recognition I feel, now, examining this comic strip, and seeing its influence refracted throughout my pre-existing enthusiasms.
Where Gould was not, Gould always was.
"Kid, you gonna use those scissors? Or just find your reflection in 'em?"
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