Mark Beyer - A Disturbin Evening i drugi stripovi

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Cinična punk-depra: Beyer je utjecao na valjda 20 domaćih stripaša.

Mark Beyer (b. 1950) has been making comics since the early 1970s. He was a contributing artist to Arcade and RAW, among other seminal anthologies. His iconic, deeply felt drawings take readers deep into a visual world entirely of his own making.
His books include Amy and Jordan, Dead Stories and We're Depressed.

Dead Stories (1982, color: 2000)

Mark Beyer taught himself to draw in the first 25 years of his life without the benefit of art school training. In 1975 he proved to the world that formal education was grossly overestimated by creating and publishing his first comic: 'Tony Target'. From that time on, a not-so-steady stream of works followed. In 1980 the mini-comic 'Death and Amy & Jordan at Beach Lake' won Beyer his first fans. Among these was Raw editor Art Spiegelman, who made sure that, in addition to his own works, Mark Beyer was the one artist featured in every issue of the legendary Raw comix magazine.

Amy & Jordan in 'The Glass Thief'

After Spiegelman's 'Maus' was completed, Raw came to a sudden stop. Mark Beyer had made a name for himself, but at the same time had difficulties keeping his audience. Currently, one is lucky to come across Mark Beyer's comix and art. One of the occasions for such a lucky encounter occurred at the 1993 Galerie Lambiek exposition of Beyer's art, for which the artist made special silk-screens, postcards and paintings on Plexiglas. Mark Beyer's animated art could be seen on MTV's series, Liquid Television. Mark Beyer is best known for his "art brut" comix style, which gives his work an unmistakable cult appeal.

Amy + Jordan, 1993 (Maro Verlag)  - www.lambiek.net/

THE OFF SWITCH – A New Serialized Comic by Mark Beyer

by Mark Beyer and Red Cell

Recently, Mark Beyer (Amy and Jordan, RAW Magazine, Liquid Television) revisited an idea he had developed and abandoned 16 years previously for a graphic, novel-length story called, THE OFF SWITCH. By 1995, Mark had been typed as a certain kind of cartoonist who created a very specific kind of work, and this radical departure from the style he was generally known for garnered some difficult responses when it first appeared in Swiss comic magazine, Strapazine. But, looking back at the idea, Mark found there was something about the story that haunted him and wanted to complete it.
THE OFF SWITCH is now a serialized comic on The End of Being! As Mark told TEoB: My idea was to create a kind of mysterious story set in a vaguely European setting. As influences I was thinking about the movies “Breathless”, and Orson Wells’ film “Mr. Arkadin”. Already, the atmosphere is tensing up and the shadows are creeping in. Please, enjoy reading, THE OFF SWITCH!

Mark Beyer: More Disturbing Evenings

Having been deliciously disturbed by his comics initially in the pages of Raw, I first met Mark Beyer in 1982 when he was invited to London for the comic art exhibition Graphic Rap at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Luckily, I had the opportunity to interview him for the second issue of Escape Magazine, one of the very few interviews he has ever granted. I closely followed Beyer’s work from his self-published titles to his Amy and Jordan strips and graphic novels and his forays into painting, but eventually I lost touch with him, apart from a 2003 exhibition at the Berlin Comics Festival.
So I was thrilled to discover at the ‘Off’ festival at this year’s Angoulême International Comics Festival in France that Beyer is making new silkscreen prints for insane Marseille publishers Le Dernier Cri. Head honcho Pakito Bolino kindly put me in contact and out of this reconnection have emerged a trove of unseen treasures such as these two pieces above (1976) and below (1978), a brand-new two-page comic for Art Review, and further answers and insights from Beyer about his unique expressions, akin to ‘Outsider’ Art, in the fields of comics and painting. Beyer is back.
 
“For many reasons, the whole issue about whether to be a cartoonist or not has been a source of a lot of confusion for me.” As an only child, an average student bullied at school, and a disappointment to his father, Mark Beyer used drawing as a way to kill time, gradually evolving his distinct, intense, decorated style,  avoiding any forethought, formal art education or guidance from ‘How To’ books. Far from being faux-naïf, his art is “...the only way I know how to draw. I couldn’t draw a realistic picture, or draw in any other style, if my life depended on it.”

More interested in becoming a writer or film-maker, Beyer might never have pursued making comics, if not for the inspiration of America’s uncompromising underground comics and the early support of Art (Maus) Spiegelman and Bill (Zippy) Griffith, co-editors of the anthology Arcade, who chose Beyer’s second-ever comic for their sixth issue in 1976. Encouraged, Beyer found that his style lent itself to comics and self-published three mini-comics, followed by his comic books A Disturbing Evening (1978, above) and Dead Stories (1982), as well as being commissioned by Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly for Raw magazine and other prestige titles, such as the one-page autobiographical comic for the anthology Lemme Outa Here below.

Beyer’s most recurring characters are Amy and Jordan, a pair of eternal victims, vulnerable, doll-like, one dressed in her diamond-patterned smock, the other all in black with a crosshair target on his chest. Seemingly imprisoned within the panels of their comics, they endure endless urban despair, made visible in the unsettling layouts and compositions and menacing forms lurking just outside the panels. Traumas are never far away in their besieged subsistence, recounted in the graphic novel Agony in 1987, the serial We’re Depressed (below), and weekly newspaper strips from 1988 to early 1996, which were compiled into a 2004 compendium by designer Chip Kidd. More growing cult than mass-market, Beyer’s work offers no comforting punchlines or reassurances, but conveys an uncanny nightmarish atmosphere and taps into an undercurrent of modern anomie.

Uncertain of his artistic direction, Beyer abandoned comics around 1997 and resumed making large single images, which he had been exhibiting as early as 1977 at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, near his hometown of Allentown. Not strictly paintings, these drawings in pen and ink were made on glass or plexiglass and coloured in acrylics applied onto a fine layer of fixative (an example from 1999 is shown below).

Beyer’s new Strip for Art Review (below) signals his surprise return to his signature avatars after sixteen years, although (spoiler alert!) this may be their swan song. “I wanted to kill off Amy and Jordan in the grand tradition of Fritz the Cat and other murdered cartoon characters.” In 1972, Crumb famously created a story in which his feline star was stabbed by an irate ex-girlfriend with an ice-pick in the back of his head, an act of vengeance for the distortion of his character in Ralph Bakshi’s animated movie.
It was only in autumn 2011 that Beyer started working again on a comic and feeling happy with the results. “The truth is I am completely burned out on Amy and Jordan, but I am not burned out on the idea of making comics.” As the borders separating comics and art dissolve still further, so too can Beyer’s singular, self-invented expression, as both cartoonist and artist.
American collector Tom Wagner is mounting Mark Beyer: With/Without Text, the first ever one-man in-depth retrospective of more than seventy pieces of Beyer’s art and comics at the Ohio State University’s Urban Arts Space from January 8th to February 23rd 2013.

 
 Amy & Jordan

  - www.paulgravett.com/

Sequential Sunday: Mark Beyer

Existential dread and despair are feelings that are not easily communicated to a reader via text or imagery. That uneasy, creeping sense of malaise that accompanies being emotionally numb in a seemingly unending urban landscape of concrete and refuse is hard to nail down recognizably without seeming overdone or heavy-handed. However, one comics artist that understands these feelings and the environment that conjures them is Mark Beyer, and his favored method of expression are through his two key characters, the queasily comical “Amy & Jordan.”
Mark Beyer is a self-taught artist whose highly geometric yet almost childlike illustrations perfectly juxtapose the grim subject matter he prefers to deal with.  His self-published comics caught the attention of “Maus” creator and underground comic master Art Spiegelman. With the demise of the comic anthology “Arcade” in the 70’s, Spiegelman, worried that comics for thinking adults may disappear completely, laid the foundation for the hugely influential “Raw” magazine and Beyer was invited on board. It is important to note that although “Raw” featured a regular stable of top independent creators like Gary Panter, Sue Coe, Charles Burns and Kim Deitch, Beyer is the only artist to appear in every issue besides editor Spiegelman himself.

It was in the pages of “Raw” that a larger audience became exposed to the characters “Amy & Jordan,” a highly co-dependent couple attempting to come to terms with their bleak surroundings and even bleaker relationship and failing miserably at every turn. They are assaulted at nearly every turn by thugs, teenagers, insects, animals, inanimate objects and even their own apartment. Yet still, no matter how much the world abuses them they suffer the most at the hands of each other. Though they seem to carry some semblance of affection and caring for each other there is also an extremely unhealthy amount of verbal and physical abuse almost always transpiring and usually leading to one (or both) of them beaten and bloody. Even sleep is not a respite from their torments. In the image below a sleeping Amy & Jordan are seen in the upper right while their sub-conscious counterparts continue to pound and maim one another.

There are times when the duo are close to experiencing actual happiness, but these rare occasions are always doomed to end badly. On a brief respite from the endlessly oppressing big city in which they, live Amy & Jordan go to the beach for some relief, only to be stomped on by a group of rowdy boys. Yet still, bruised and bloody, Jordan attempts to put a positive spin on things by saying: “We’re still alive and it is a nice feeling to lie on the beach even if we are paralyzed with fear!” On this note it is important to say that no matter what manner of devastating event is put upon them, Amy & Jordan persevere all the same, even though they know that around every street corner is more of the same living hell they are constantly facing.

The vast majority of Beyer’s work is solo, but the final volume of “Raw,” released in 1991, featured a collaboration with writer Alan Moore on a work titled “The Bowing Machine.” The story, concerning the all consuming nature of the Japanese work ethic and the usage of a machine to help one practice the all important bow, is a perfect mixture of Moore’s poetic prose and Beyer’s alienated art. If you are an Alan Moore collector and do not have this story (which has never been reprinted elsewhere) you are missing a small, yet important piece of his work.  Below is the first of the tale’s eight pages.

Though new releases from Beyer are infrequent, interest in Beyer’s work and his two key characters spawned one of the most unlikely (and cool) comic collectibles ever: an Amy & Jordan bendable figure set, released by Dark Horse Deluxe in 2006. To see the pair, who reside so solidly in their flat two-dimensional world brought to 3D life is bizarre to say the least. Soon after this release was a stationery set featuring the often doomed couple as well.

We all know existential dread is severely depressing, but who knew it could be pretty damn funny too?  Though there seems to be little to laugh about in the situations mentioned above, Beyer’s precise, yet off-kilter, draftsmanship combined with the incredibly bizarre scenarios and the sheer perseverance of Amy & Jordan prove to be high-minded comedy gold for those with a very particular sense of humor. - John Mueller

 

 

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/mark-beyer

http://www.comicartcollective.com/beyer/

·  Amy & Jordan - A man is lying injured  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - A moth is bothering me  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Are we having a nightmare  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - 'Are you enjoying your dinner'  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Assembly line  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Cemetery atmosphere  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Cleanse your brain  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Costume party  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Fishing  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Head on the table  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Hiding behind the curtain  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - I think I'll take a walk  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - 'I'm not an insect'  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Strange form  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - The house  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - There is a man knocking at the door  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Welcome to our party  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Inside the street lamps  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Ominous atmosphere  SOLD!
·  Amy & Jordan - Why do our dinner guests always  SOLD!
·  Amy and Jordan original 6  SOLD!
·  Amy and Jordan original 7  SOLD!
·  Amy and Jordan original 8  SOLD!
·  Amy and Jordan original 9  SOLD!
·  Amy and Jordan strip 1 - Dishes  SOLD!
·  Amy and Jordan strip 2 - Goldfish  SOLD!
·  Amy and Jordan strip 3 - Getting old  SOLD!
·  Amy and Jordan strip 4 - Strange dream  SOLD!
·  Amy and Jordan strip 5 - Working zombies  SOLD!
·  Beach silkscreen (extremely rare)  SOLD!
·  Day of the Dead - 2  SOLD!
·  Hand drawn/painted paperweight  SOLD!
·  Painting number 1  SOLD!
·  Pen and ink drawing 1  SOLD!
·  Plexiglass painting  SOLD!
·  Plexiglass painting #1  SOLD!
·  Potty Mouth Sherry - original poster art  SOLD!
·  The Peculiar Pretzelmen  SOLD!
·  We're Depressed - #1  SOLD!
·  We're Depressed - #2  SOLD!
·  We're Depressed - #3  SOLD!
·  We're Depressed - #4  SOLD!
·  We're depressed 1  SOLD!
·  We're depressed 2  SOLD!

Cover Art By Mark Beyer