Is it really first-fall? Is it really the greatest time of the year? Is the window really breezing in on my dying squash plant and fat pleased tomatoes? What’s that playing on the piano? The days are their dailiest this time of year. Is it really time for my eyes to see twice, heart to feel twice as prodded and twice as full? It’s, for me, King-Cat season.
Under the name King-Cat, the artist John Porcellino has spent 20 years writing pure, zen-composed, melancholy and punk-rock-dosed comics. Porcellino is retiringly modest, but is at least comics-world famous: translated into five languages, anthologized in places like Black Warrior Review or McSweeney’s, author of actual nice books. His pages are dominated by white space, narrating dreams, moments of unbodied clarity (standing by a car door, carrying a friend down a mountain, shaving, raking), analyses of childhood cats, Top 40 lists, and teenage swoons and heart attacks:
Like not many other comics writers, Porcellino’s works are restrained, low-affect, and high-attention. King-Cat’s episodes– except the memoirs, anthologized in Perfect Example– are less narrations than distillations (intense observation, and praises of symmetry and wholeness), whose backwards shadows are anxiety, powerlessness, or depression. No one but Porcellino could make a page about riding the bus like this (from King-Cat 63):
King-Cat is bottomlessly re-readable, as simple as serious things are. At the piano, my girlfriend is playing, at half tempo, a Scott Joplin rag called “Sunflower Slow Drag” (name of a Soundgarden cover band, yeah?) and drinking merlot from a little green Moroccan tea glass; the rag bouncing in the cooker of my head with the song I’ve been hearing all week, the Kinks’ dear goodbye song “Days.” After my second day at a new job, I felt saucy and rode my bike to Wallingford to blow $100 on new poetry, so next to me (has it really gotten dark out?) is this from James Schuyler (it’s this way really on every page):
CLOSED GENTIAN DISTANCES
A nothing day full of
wild beauty and the
timer pings. Roll up
the silver off the bay
take down the clouds
sort the spruce and
send to laundry marked,
more starch. Goodbye
golden- and silver-
rod, asters, bayberry
crisp in elegance.
Little fish stream
by, a river in water.
Keep your life jacket on, next week’s column will be a wider, more violent river. The critic is the person happiest with their head fast in anothers. I’ll never get old.