CRAZY CARTOONISTS CAVORT COMMUNALLY

How Hector plays games with the most playful art form around

How to play Shuffleupagus, Style B (created by Portland cartoonist Jesse Reklaw):

Gather between four and eight players. Arm them with pencils, erasers, pens, paper, and ink. Players draw (in the artistic sense) one deck of character cards, one deck of backgrounds.

Round one: Dealer pulls a wild card character from the deck. Four players each pull a character card and a background card from the decks. Players each draw one panel of a comic strip involving the character, the background, and the wild card, without conferring with other players. The four resulting panels are shuffled and laid out.

Round two: Players may rotate to allow in up to four new players at this time. The four players draw four new panels, which become the second, fourth, sixth, and final panels of the eight-panel strip. These panels should make some effort at connecting the first four panels together.

Endgame: Lay out the eight panels. Experiment with different orders. Look for meaning. Shuffle some more. Leave it to the editor. Return all character and background cards to expanding master deck for future games.

The finished strip, by artists Lonnie Allen, Phil Normand, Jeff Powers, Jason Powers, Mike Bryant, Craig Gassen, and Brenden Smith, featured Prawn Creature Crustacean and his human prey discussing shoes, reenacting Alien, and making bad blowjob jokes. Smartass games of a gifted-and-talented class on substitute-teacher day? No, just another good cartoon jam session by the artists of Hector.

Hector, an "experimental comic strip produced by a core group of cartoonists and involving contributors from other disciplines, notably literature and fine art," recently put out the call to play to the wider Denver artistic community. On January 6, the community answered, with many new cartoonists and writers packing in to play surrealist text and imagery games.

Hector is evolving, according to founder Tom Motley. Known since 1990 in Denver for its avant-garde comics featured in 'zines and newspapers around the western hemisphere, the group is growing from a tight-knit club of members into a loose society of cartoonists.

The artists, old and new, jostled over gaming tables at Clockwork Comics and Games on 2824 S. Broadway in Englewood, passing half-done comic strips between them. They played games that turned out perverse, delightful cartoons: Chain Cartoon, Panorama, Mishmash, Cartoon Chess, Five Card Nancy, Perverbs, and Brillig Beasts.

It was Hector's second such jam session, modeled after cartoon jams in other cities. The first, held at the Death Equinox convention in the fall of 1999, was a resounding success. "Having tried it once, I thought it was fun. It brought in new influences, new blood," Motley said.

All the games resulted in collaborative works, most of which will circulate bearing only the traditional name Hector.

Half a dozen artists illustrated the Brillig Beast names created by teacher and writer Pat Dubrave through anagramming two words-- vermin and glory. "It was neat," said Dubrave. "I thought, 'Ooooh, what would that look like, and got to see an artist's interpretation of the words."

The Brillig Beasts game illustrated one of the cartoon medium's great strengths. Artist Phil Normand said, "With cartoons, you have not only the images evoked through narrative language, but the images that are actually there. The images can show you something that the narrative doesn't, sometimes working contrary to the language."

Many of the games drew from the post-modern theories of the OULIPO group, an offshoot of the surrealists, said Motley. "The OULIPO movement differed from the surrealists in that they were anti-chance. They liked structural complication-- they wanted something more complicated than sonnets. Writing under constraint is more difficult, and more creative-- it teases the creativity out of the work."

Another game, Tim Winkelman's Alphabetic Apocalypse, emphasized the goal of complexity. Each strip is created using words beginning with only one letter of the alphabet. The finished strip not only has to make sense, but must also have a first panel that can form a sensible cartoon when combined with the first panels of the other twenty-five comics.

"It's very disciplined, in spite of the fact that it looks crazy, chaotic," Normand said.

Likewise, the artists had to draw on minutiae to work on Mishmash. Artist Mark Putt explained that each artist could only illustrate one part of a Mishmash character, "Someone might do all of the left arms for the strip, or the eyeballs. The comic chronicles the story of an astronaut from an anal-retentive planet who has to bring home the living embodiment of chaos."

The group is still able to look backward. One popular game, Five-Card Nancy, (invented by Scott McCloud) utilized Ernie Bushmiller's spartan, archetypal "Nancy" strip panels as a card game. Motley also hopes that the vast body of Hector work will someday be archived.

He remains most excited, though, about the new jams-- collecting people, getting them involved, and trying more challenges. The next one's at the same location on January 20.

--Kate Williamson

WHISPERS OF BEAUTY
@
FRESH ART

If you can chart the growth of a city's culture by the opening of new galleries, Denver just got a little bigger. Fresh Art, a new space featuring contemporary artists, is currently showing Whisper & Shout, the third show since the gallery opened November 3 of last year.

The theme reflects the collection's focus on very small and very large works, mostly paintings and other two-dimensional media, said Fresh Art's owner and gallery director Jeannie King. The show features 14 artists, including Homare Ikede, Angela Larson, Larry Pritchard, David Sawyer, and Harry Tulchin.

Tulchin's work "Untitled (for Mark Sandman)" is one of the larger ones, taking up most of a vertical freestanding wall. The piece is a deep, subtle mottle of browns and golds, created by burning heavy watercolor paper and mounting it on a frame with varnish. The dedication pays homage to the lead singer and bassist of the band Morphine, who died young during a concert.

"I felt it wasn't only about his death, but in that last year before that, my mother had died, so it's certainly about somebody passing-- and ultimately about any of our deaths," Tulchin said.

David Sawyer's work, displayed near the front of the gallery, is a collection of eight small, untitled pieces in two groups of four. Created with dry pigment applied to ten-by-ten inch and seven-by-seven inch mahogany blocks with UV varnish, they mostly feature hazy circles in a bicolor view. Poised between emergence and submergence, interpretations can range from physical eclipses and horizons to difficult-to-articulate reflections on presence.

"I tend to start with liking a color, a block," said Sawyer, an art veteran of 26 years who has shown in London and in cities throughout the American west. "None of the pieces arrive out of ideas or concepts or intentions-- painting is the way I access what is beyond ideas. Ideas are already known."

Angela Larson's pieces "Solitude 1 and 2" explore texture in a confined space. She created the pale, creamy hues and subtle energy of the work by laying wax over plaster on a wood frame.

Larry Pritchard's "Cedar Waxwing" stands out in the gallery for its representation, variety of media, and literary interpretation. The piece incorporates four smoky mirrors laid out to look like a window, on top of which rests a sketch of a blue, broken waxwing bird in acrylic, oils, and other media, mounted to a box with wax. The piece catches the light and darkly reflects the observer.

Pritchard, who said he is often inspired by the other fine arts, inscribed the closing lines from Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire on the mirrors:

I was the shadow of a waxwing slain By false allure in the window pane I was the smudge of ashen fluff-- and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

"The poem reminded me of a similar event a few years ago, when a bird flew into a window on our apartment and died É it was killed by an illusion," Pritchard said.

Both emerging and experienced artists in the show have been pleased and impressed with King's direction of the gallery. With Fresh Art, King hopes to create a venue for talented local artists and new talent, as well as more recognized names.

"Our emphasis is on emerging artists," she said. "It's hard for new artists to break into a lot of galleries once they've developed their favorites, although Denver has some great talent whose work should be shown. Denver needed another gallery, an opportunity for these incredibly talented people to exhibit."

--Kate Williamson

Fresh Art is open from 11 am to 6 pm Tuesday through Saturday. New exhibits go up the first Friday of every month.