The Problem Solverz

Ben Jones' The Problem Solverz finished its initial twelve episode run this week, with no word yet on whether it's coming back. I'd be disappointed but not terribly surprised if it didn't. It seems to be a favorite target for self-styled animation buffs, who deride it as the tipping point for a network pandering to internet-induced ADD and drug-addled college kids. But to me it's a monumental piece of work. It's the first show to use Flash well, as something other than a poor approximation of hand-drawn animation.

Flash animated cartoons are generally dismal. The Total Drama series is a typical offender: thematically reprehensible, visually an artless regurgitation of fifteen year old trends calling back to the flat style of animation produced at UPA in the 50s and later at Hanna-Barbera as a cost-cutting measure. At their worst, these shows seem to lack any aesthetic direction at all. Even at their best--as in Craig McCracken's Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends with its Victorian-Seuss ambiance, Samurai Jack-informed irreverence for the outline, and the unquestionable credibility in the nu-UPA idiom that comes from having created the motherflippin' Powerpuff Girls--these shows still suffer in their character animation. Limbs locked into the same unnaturally perfect, uniplanar rotations and stretches distance the viewer from the animation. We don't believe these creatures move of their own accord. We can see the strings.

Sure, aside from a few wonderful transformations and manga-tinged emotive poses, the animation in The Problem Solverz is standard Flash puppetry. And sure, the character designs are hideous, with lips ripped from the women of Dilbert and eye sockets that look like they're giving birth. But Jones is the first animator I've seen to use the new technology to create a product uniquely suited to it, rather than an inferior version of what was done with the old technology that dominated animation for the better part of a century. What better way to utilize the inherent flatness of Flash tweens than to set a cartoon within the dazzling side-scrollers and isometric platformers of the 80s and early 90s? The vector-perfect geometry, dizzyingly detailed backgrounds, and blinding gradient meshes may be garish, but the result is a singularly beautiful texture which makes full use of the available resources (is there any other show that HAS to be watched in hi-def?). These backgrounds are the digital equivalent of Spumco paint splatters or Disney and Ghibli's exquisitely painted backgrounds--effects that can be emulated digitally, but not easily perfected. Jones has created images near-impossible to recreate by hand.

The idea that The Problem Solverz is any more subversive than other cartoons of the recent past is laughable. Remember how Ren and Stimpy stretched Looney Tunes violence to shocking extremes; how Invader Zim, a children's show created by the cartoonist who made his name drawing Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, carved humor out of faux-creepy nonsense and a lot of shrieking; or how The Simpsons became an American institution by calling Americans fat, lazy, and stupid. To me, a little of Paper Rad's visual noise seems tame by comparison. The Problem Solverz's closest peer, the popular Adventure Time, isn't really any less weird--just a bit cuter--and is no less self-consciously meme-able. My rss reader fills up with Problem Solverz .gifs and one-liners from Adventure Time storyboards in equal measure.

It's easy to become exhausted in a world of endless remixes, memes, and mash-ups, where humor is so wrapped up in convoluted reference that it seems to have lost all artistry and staying power. But Jones' concerns aren't just pop culture detritus; at this point they're the definitive childhood experiences: pizza, sugar cereal, junior detective agencies, drum kits, and most of all video games. I don't know any kid who doesn't want to spend as much time shooting at pixelated aliens as possible, to his mother's dismay. Video games have become deeply ingrained in our consciousness, as anyone who's ever dreamt of falling Tetris blocks would tell you. These images have power over us, even if their very ubiquity at times threatens to dilute it. Kate Beaton's "Comics on the Internet" gives an incisive account of the problem: "'So like Mario comes in the room and Sonic is banging the Princess'/'Ha ha ha.'" But just because we live in a world that celebrates abominations like Penny Arcade doesn't mean we have to stop loving Mario. And Jones has used that as the launchpad for an aesthetic that feels radically original while rooted in the familiar. The Problem Solverz isn't on some nostalgia-based internet humor bandwagon. On the contrary, it's reclaiming and reinventing those enduring visuals from our childhoods in the name of good taste.

There are plenty of rants against this show on the internet, many of which I'm sure were written by people much smarter and better informed than me, people who aren't just posing as an aesthete. But let's face it, the implicit message in complaints that The Problem Solverz is too flashy or too crazy is "give me blander cartoons!" Cartooning being one of the more insular art forms around, I think that's a shame. Animation, certainly TV animation, has rarely looked better than Ren and Stimpy toward the end of John K's tenure, but even that was a short jump from work by the likes of Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones decades earlier. The notion that The Problem Solverz goes too far imposes an unfortunate leash on experimental cartooning just as boundaries were being pushed. It's a call for more of the same just as things were getting interesting.

Two days after writing this, I discovered that Jones, Michael Yank, and Kevin Simonon had already written better commentary than I could ever hope to in the Problem Solverz episode "Zoo Cops."

Pascal Girard

In its slim 70 pages, Pascal Girard's Nicolas follows the author's lengthy process of coping with the untimely death of his younger brother. Yeah, it's one of those comics, but it's one of the most affecting stories I've seen, in comics or elsewhere. Girard jumps days and years ahead every few pages, showing us key moments of sadness and self-destruction. This is a book that can be read in under five minutes, its borderless panels hanging just two or three to a page; the only thing slowing you down is your own endurance. Though not without humor and warmth, Nicolas is an onslaught of painful memories. Each vignette builds slowly, as your eyes soak up the quiet power of its lonely panels, to a devastating punchline that floods over you and ties your throat in a knot, demanding a recuperative pause.

The book's episodic structure and raw inks have drawn frequent comparison to Jeffrey Brown, who Girard thanks in his introduction. Girard's quivering line does have the same unrehearsed look as Brown's early work, with ink blots and doubly thick lines betraying every hesitation. But these seem less marks of spontaneity than laborious concentration. The construction of the figures underneath is more considered in Nicolas than in Clumsy, evoking the elegant minimalism of Schulz with the fragility of R.O. Blechman (or Schulz again, towards the end). And while Brown sticks to a traditional six panel grid in Clumsy, situating each panel with casual background details, Girard reduces every scene to its barest form. While Clumsy reads like the work of a man frantically scribbling the details of his recent past before he forgets them, Nicolas consists of details that its author can't help but remember. These are ghosts of memories: half formed, often as simple as a two sentence exchange or a thoughtful stare into space, and sparsely drawn--not out of urgency, but honesty. They are the moments as Girard remembers them, with the details hazy and the emotions painfully lucid.

Nicolas himself is barely a character in the story, though his presence is constantly felt. It wouldn't be surprising, given Nicolas' premature death, for Pascal's memories of him to be scarce. Thus, the small details that he does remember take on unexpected poigniency. A scene in which the boys play Ghostbusters together, the only spot where Nicolas appears in the book, is as relatable, joyous, and heartbreaking as anything I've ever read. It was enough to get me to buy Girard's next book sight unseen.

Girard moves away from autobiography in his follow-up, Bigfoot, a novella about high school frustration. From the first panel where the pimply-chinned protagonist tries to look nonchalant from behind a respectable magazine as he eyes the Playboys at the top of the rack, it's clear that he won't be sugar coating it. Girard treats with the same frankness as his own personal tragedy the minor tragedies faced by every teenage boy: impotent crushes, the ridicule of cruel strangers and careless best friends alike, and the dreaded shame of being caught looking at internet porn. His slender teenagers are adolescent awkwardness personified, as if the children from Nicolas had their limbs stretched on a rack until they resembled a Dum Dum Pop.

Apparently eager to prove himself after the modestly drawn Nicolas, Girard upgrades to full color and an ambitious 12(!) panel grid for Bigfoot. Unfortunately, it's here that the, er, clumsiness of Jeffrey Brown's influence becomes more apparent--though a more apt comparison might be the sheer clutter of David Heatley's "My Sexual History." Girard underplays the importance of the individual panel or sequence, seemingly more interested in the visual weight of stacks upon stacks of them. Foreground and background are frequently cropped out of Bigfoot's square panels, leaving 3/4 perspective as seemingly the only option left to convey depth. There is barely enough room to contain speech balloons, and despite his reliance on close-ups and waste-up shots, Girard's twiggy characters still manage to butt heads with his panel borders. Perhaps I'm being overcritical. With your nose in the book, concentrating only on the panel or tier at hand, Bigfoot reads fine. But each page as a whole comes crashing down under its own volume, lacking either the forceful drawing or continuity of color to maintain visual harmony across an entire page. (It's no surprise that the few exceptionally pleasing spreads in the book also have uncharacteristically consistent color schemes).

I suppose there is something to be said about how the disorienting scope of Girard's grid reflects adolescence, how his overflowing panels capture the newfound smallness of a suburb seen through restless hormones and recently spurted growth. I don't think it would be giving Girard too much credit to suggest that this was his intent. But deliberate ugliness in service to an ugly truth doesn't always make for an interesting or novel take. "High school sucks" is a truism on the level of "War Is Hell" (come to think of it, there is probably a significant overlap in the groups that enjoy both). After Freaks and Geeks, what is there left to say?

Girard's next book provides a much needed reassurance of his self-awareness and, more importantly, his drawing chops. Reunion is, ostensibly, a ruthlessly self-deprecating story about a "semi-autobiographical" character named Pascal, ten years out of high school and still fixated on adolescent notions of winners and losers. It makes it hard not to indulge him the catharsis of drawing Bigfoot.

Girard perfects his mechanics here in a compromise between his last two books' approaches. Paring his panels down to a more standard density of around six per page and returning to the borderless look of Nicolas, Reunion takes on the look and carefree pacing of Lewis Trondheim's Little Nothings strips. Free of square borders, Girard's composes panels impeccibly. It's as if each panel of Bigfoot is breathing a sigh of relief. Gone are the awkward cropping and flat compositions. Each uncorked panel decompresses into whatever oblong shape suits the scene, filled out with restrained but highly evocative background details. The added legroom seems to have encouraged Girard to let loose and go fully cartoony; he not only takes advantage of the space through his now unobstructed posing, but packs the book with sweat drops, sound effects, and thought balloons. His line still shakes, but here it feels strategic, pulsating in rhythm with his protagonist's every nervous twitch. He's drawing with the confidence of an old pro.

Girard's cartoonist diary for The Comics Journal shows him taking the Trondheim influence even further with the addition of watercolors. His coloring here is fairly rudimentary, far from the warmth and detail of Little Nothings or the inventiveness of (fellow Drawn and Quarterly cartoonist and TCJ diary strip character) Brecht Evens. But Girard's continued experimenting is what keeps me excited about what he'll come up with next. Nicolas established him as a cartoonist to watch, and our attention is already paying off with Reunion. If he continues to appropriate and conquer new influences at this rate, he'll make the quickest transformation from promising upstart to old master I can think of.

The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show: Camp

Most episodes of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show are unfocused collections of gags that never reach the heights of humor and emotion as some of the better Peanuts specials.  Of course, no Peanuts cartoon has ever quite managed to live up to the 60s specials, but the Saturday morning show falls somewhere in the middle of the extremely hit-or-miss concurrent specials of the early 80s (at best, familiar but satisfying stories about Tolstoy book reports; at worst, inexplicable stories about turning invisible and Flashdance parodies).  The series evokes blissful summer boredom more than wintry angst; it more often captures the misery of losing a kite in a tree than of unrequited love or unshakable self-doubt.  It’s, for the most part, like reading a so-so selection of Peanuts strips that makes you chuckle but never punches you in the gut.  As long as the entire series is streaming online though, it's worth pointing out a few exceptional episodes.  Note that I’m referring to the episode numbers used on The WB’s website, which differ from those given by IMDb and Wikipedia.

The series highlight for me comes in episode 8.  In a segment simply titled “Camp,” Charlie Brown and Linus find themselves back at summer camp, worrying about being made to clean the grease trap and wondering why they return every year to a place they dislike.  On the other side of the lake that separates every cartoon boy's camp from the girls', Peppermint Patty and Marcy learn that they’re attending the same camp as Charlie Brown’s beloved Little Red-Haired Girl.  Jealous, Patty decides to confront her.  The show skips over the encounter and jumps right to the aftermath: Charlie Brown is being thrown out of camp for allegedly causing trouble among the girls.  In classic Charlie Brown fashion, he’s just thrilled to know that girls are talking about him.  It then cuts back to a despondent Peppermint Patty, who delivers one of the most heartbreaking speeches I’ve ever heard.  You should watch it for yourself, but I’ll reproduce it here for the lazy and work-filtered:

I finally saw the little red-haired girl that Chuck is always talking about, and you know what I did? I cried, Linus. I cried and cried and cried. I stood in front of that little red-haired girl and saw how pretty she was. Suddenly I realized why Chuck has always loved her. And I realized that no one would ever love me that way. I started to cry and I couldn't stop. I made a fool of myself, but I didn't care. I have a big nose and my split ends have split ends and I'll always be funny looking. And I think I'm going to cry again. She’s so pretty, she just sort of sparkles. I’ll never sparkle.

I can’t hear it without getting a little misty-eyed, and Linus’ assurances that beauty is in the eye of the beholder do little to console me.  I don’t believe anything as naïve and mathematically improbable as the old line “there’s someone out there for everyone,” but clearly the situation isn’t as bleak as Patty paints it.  And yet, I find myself wallowing right along with her, thinking thoughts more pessimistic than anything I actually believe.  It’s classic Peanuts: not relentlessly tragic, but not quite enthusiastically hopeful either, as if to say that life is too complicated to be reduced to either platitudinous optimism or cynicism.

It's no wonder I was so depressed as a child.

Schulz plays with a comic variation on the same emotions in episode 6, in a segment called “Marcie.”  Marcie is too down on herself to accept that a love-struck boy’s pet name for her is meant in earnest.  “If someone calls you ‘lambcake’ when you know you’re not a lambcake, that’s sarcasm,” she reasons.  Her would-be suitor’s persistence only earns him repeated physical abuse.  The gags aren’t particularly strong, although it’s always amusing when Peppermint Patty and Marcie switch roles, with Marcie being the oblivious one and Patty acting as the voice of reason.  Still, it’s a testament to Schulz’s genius that this sense of lovelorn resignation could be mined so effortlessly for both comedy and tragedy.

Note: The story on which "Camp" was based on appeared in the comics from June 5 to June 24, 1972. The strips were translated nearly verbatim for the cartoon.