Ted McKeever Appreciation
The man sitting behind me is clipping his toenails, just like he does every saturday night. It could just be his fingernails. I don’t know. I never turn around to check. Maybe he doesn’t take his shoes off. I just smell feet, hear the clicking sound and see the occasional nail slide into view from under my seat as the bus lurches forward on the way back home from work. It seems oddly appropriate to be sitting here sweating into the unseasonably warm night surrounded by people wearing masks and grooming themselves reading Ted McKeever’s 1990 Plastic Forks #1, the first in a series of five books, published by Marvel’s ‘90s imprint Epic, about the consequences of bizarre medical experiments in a near future that is more purely grotesque than it is dystopian.
Plastic Forks follows a doctor named Henry who is part of a team researching a device called the Pinnealator, designed to allow human beings to reproduce asexually. A freak accident leaves Henry incapacitated long enough for one of his partners to attach the Pinnealator to him and kidnap his pregnant wife. From here things devolve into a gorgeous mess of furious chimps, mangled bodies, weaponized hot-air balloons, and extravagant explosions. As Henry and a friend(appropriately named Angel) struggle to find and rescue his wife before getting revenge on the sadistic doctors who did this to them.
Even in the gloomy twilight sun coming through the bus window, McKeever’s painted comic is one of the most vibrant and colorful books I’ve read in recent memory. There’s a scene where a helicopter explodes into an ink-splattered desert sky that could be lifted right out of Frank Miller and Bill Sienkewicz’s Elektra: Assassin or a Francis Bacon painting. Ink and paint land in every direction, illuminating the chaos of the scene.
I get off the bus and walk the last mile and a half home where I read the rest of Plastic Forks with a frantic sort of excitement usually reserved for new translations of Alberto Breccia comics. I’m reading cheap water-damaged copies of the series, which has never been published as a collection(Damn you, Marvel). Every other issue has badly warped pages, which somehow adds to the messy, urgent work rather than detracting from it. After all, it is supposed to be a little gross. A little unkempt. A little mean. This is a grimy series that oscillates between grim congested cities and near-abandoned desert towns. Every landscape carries a palpable capacity for violence made more palatable by McKeever’s inventive, wild work.
People are often quick to point out the grotesque nature of McKeever’s art or the meandering, sometimes esoteric, nature of his writing - all important things to recognize- but to me, what stands out is the pure irreverent freedom of his work. Throughout Plastic Forks the color palette changes in ways that seem to reflect his whims as an artist more than any element of the narrative. And, its not just the colors. In one panel, he utilizes a precise, unyielding line, before submerging the next panel in murky smeared inks.
His writing shifts just as freely as his art. Plastic Forks #1 reads like the first act of a Cronenberg film. Cold calculated doctors discuss philosophy before being interrupted by a burst of visceral violence. But, by the time McKeever gets to the fifth and final issue, it feels more like a shoot-em-up finale of a particularly unhinged Michael Bay movie: explosions abound and Henry’s action-packed vengeance is even more brutal and nightmarish than the rest of his journey.
Last week I read Transit, Mckeever’s first series which went unfinished until the publication of 2008’s hardcover collection - the first in Image Comic’s Ted McKeever Library. Like Plastic Forks - Transit follows a strange loner who gets wrapped up in a dangerous plot organized by the rich and powerful. Spud witnesses a prominent politician commit a murder and is forced to go into hiding with the help of a blind accordion player and a washed-up pro-wrestler.
McKeever draws Transit in black and white, but each page is just as vibrant as his work in color. He utilizes innumerable textures to bring the brutal ever-changing city to life. A majority of his characters exist without any sort of fixed anatomy. When they need to be looming giants, they loom - but they shrink and bend to avoid the light just easily. One can almost imagine the sound of bones being added and then taken away again to serve the composition and tone of each scene, which adds to the ambiguous nature of the light in Transit. The murky shadows cover the city in a darkness that has nothing to do with the time of day or the weather. Its a purely aesthetic darkness.
I can’t pretend to know what it was like to encounter McKeever’s work when it was first being published in the ‘90s. But when I discovered it in the 2010’s and when I look at it now, I’m struck by how totally unique it is. Gary Panter’s work is as stylistically free, but Panter is much quicker to abandon the narrative, and often grounds his pages with obsessive amounts of detail. Sienkewicz and David Mack both demonstrate a similar appreciation for expressionistic compositions and ink-splattered backgrounds, but they tend to tether themselves to a particular approach for each project, while McKeever is happy to utilize as many aesthetics as possible on every page. Jim Mahfood approaches McKeever’s visual fluidity, but his work is steeped in a sort of hipness that would make McKeever blush. And, where most of Mahfood’s characters are sexy pinups, the majority of McKeever’s are hideous.
No one else marries artistic experimentation, poetry and pure entertainment the way he does. The symbol becomes the center of the plot until it is usurped by an even more striking image. If it weren’t for the organic, natural progression of the ideas, it would risk becoming alienating. But even when it is difficult to discern the intention/direction of the work, it’s easy to imagine McKeever hunched over his drawing desk throwing ink at the page to see what sticks, which isn’t to say that his work isn’t thoughtful or technically impressive because it is. But, unlike most cartoonists, McKeever makes no effort to hide his process. There’s no shame in the idea that each book has the potential to be a living document - a record of the time spent making it.
I read McKeever on the bus because there are crazy, beautiful, tired people trying to get by in spite of the madness of the world at the center of all of his comics. They are put upon by the small indignities of every day life, but still manage to carve out some time for the weirdness of the world they live in. And even as that world crumbles around them, they manage to turn inward. It is at once a searing indictment of contemporary life and some aspirational image of survival in spite of it all. McKeever’s comics push back against the formulaic nature of mainstream American comics and the seriousness of most independent comics to present new, playful work that is at once experimental and approachable. It’s a very working class approach to art comics and one of the most honest depictions of the absurdity of the 21st century in any medium.