‘Chicago Comics’ at the MCA makes this plain: Comics should be seen as a Chicago thing

You could, this summer, should the mood strike you, travel to three Chicago museums, visit three exhibits on comic books and walk away with an expansive and remarkably thorough understanding of the history of comics and cartooning. You could travel, in only a handful of CTA stops, from “Gasoline Alley” to the Daily Bugle to Wicker Park circa 1992. Or go “Dick Tracy” to “Black Panther” to Lynda Barry. Or even “Brenda Starr” to the ’60s Underground to the Chicago Reader to Kerry James Marshall. Eventually, should you try this — and I recommend one show a month, to encourage digestion and avoid burnout — a pair of cultural truisms will float into your head and refuse to dislodge:

No. 1: Chicago is the spiritual home of American comics.

No. 2: Chicago doesn’t know it’s the spiritual home of American comics.

Otherwise, considering the history in these shows, it’d be on license plates by now.

Since spring, the Museum of Science and Industry has had a hit with its surprisingly incisive, self-critical, exhaustive (and exhausting) show on the history of Marvel Comics. This week, the Museum of Contemporary Art opens a sprawling survey of Chicago comics from 1960 to now. Meanwhile, not to be outdone — as a companion to the MCA exhibit — the Chicago Cultural Center hosts a veritable excavation, curated by Oak Park godhead Chris Ware and retired city historian Tim Samuelson, covering 1880 to 1960.

Minus the Marvel detours into Manhattan publishing, it’s largely a Chicago story, shaped by Chicago artists. Indeed, by the time you leave the MCA show alone, you’ll argue: Comics is a Chicago medium. We already claim the blues, jazz, house music, improv.

What’s one more?

Michael Darling, former head curator at the MCA, had the idea to make that monster argument a couple of years ago. Following the museum’s blockbuster exhibits on David Bowie, Virgil Abloh and Haruki Murakami, he wanted “another big-tent populist show that went beyond contemporary art.” He was stuck on the feeling that “Chicago doesn’t know the depths of its comic legacy — it’s never recognized how rich a vein of creativity it’s been.”

To be specific, it’s less a vein than a central nervous system.

Emphasis on nervous.

“Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now,” which runs through Oct. 3 at the MCA, is a snapshot of a perpetually anxious, sweaty, insecure, disorganized, scrappy, pissed-off strain of local artist, a group that often seems to be barely holding it together. And yet, it’s also a group way too diverse, caustic, self-sufficient and eccentric to have generated a signature local style. I asked Darling and Dan Nadel, the show’s curator, if they identified a recognizable Chicago style while working on “Chicago Comics.” Nadel said, nope.

But there is a common attitude here, Darling countered.

Nadel scrunched up his face at this: No, not really.

Nadel is not from Chicago. He’s curator-at-large of the Museum of Art at University of California, Davis; he’s been a publisher of graphic novels and editor of The Comics Journal; he’s written histories of comics (and is currently at work on a biography of R. Crumb). As for his Chicago cred: He’s curated shows on Chicago pioneers Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum and designed the album cover for Wilco’s “A Ghost is Born.”

He is, in many ways, the right outside voice for a show like this, a fresh enthusiastic take on a local subject occasionally picked over but rarely granted the proper perspective. “When did Jim Nutt have his first retrospective (at the MCA)?” he asked. “2011!? Karl Wirsum — Chicago should have built a statue long ago! As for comics: The history is deep and vital, certainly during the past 20 years. Chicago, uniquely, has helped nurture the medium. Yet Chicago also seems to have a difficult time with its own.”

Any history of Chicago comics is also the history and development of comics itself. The closest that Darling got to defining a distinctive Chicago style was a New Yorker line, from a profile of Booker-nominated Chicago cartoonist Nick Drnaso: “Chicago has a remarkable number of working cartoonists, maybe because it’s relatively inexpensive, or maybe because, as (Chris) Ware more imaginatively suggested, ‘It’s halfway between New York City, where it’s about reading, and Los Angeles, where it’s about seeing.’”

That’s a fair description of the MCA show.

Spread over 10,000 square feet of gallery, if there’s any consistency among the many pages, mock-ups of original art, sculptures and paintings, it’s how visuals and text share nearly equal real estate.

Which might sound obvious for a comics show. Until you come across artists who crowd panels with avalanches of words, or artists so spare with narrative that a single lyrical image does the heavy lifting. It’s an elephant gun approach to an untidy history, and if it comes together — if Chicago comics has a common denominator — it’s Quimby’s Bookstore, the Wicker Park institution that nurtured many of the 40 artists in this show. Rightfully, Quimby’s gets a pop-up space outside of the exhibit. The MSI Marvel show makes a case for personal expression, despite the demands of a corporate assembly line. The Cultural Center show, “Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life,” details how early 20th century illustrators pushed pulp and gag comics to take “its first real step toward legitimacy as an expressive language and semi-literary art form.”

The MCA exhibit, as nebulous as the medium itself, is about a loose community — and to some extent, who has been part of that community and who’s been neglected.

One way the show wrangles so much together is by stopping periodically for brief spotlights on connecting threads. Take Charles Johnson, a former cartoonist for Ebony and the Chicago Tribune (better known today as a National Book Award-winning author) whose pointed, single-panel comics on race echo in the works of rising star Bianca Xunise, whose own gags anchor the final gallery. Or Gary Leib, who died at 65 last year of a heart attack, becomes a missing link between bulbous ’60s styles and the more formal bitterness of early Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes. (In true Midwest working-class form, Leib also pulled double-duty as a founding member of the ’80s roots rock band Rubber Rodeo.) Lynda Barry, whose beautiful memoirs of growing up furious and (occasionally) delighted wisely dominate their own space, emerges as a catalyst for generations of graphic memoirists. Same with Ivan Brunetti, a longtime instructor at Columbia College; Drnaso, one of his students, gets nearly a whole gallery himself. In fact, Brunetti is a kind of avatar for community here: Beyond his delicate New Yorker covers of Weeble-like characters, his hilariously dour comics (“The Horror of Simply Being Alive” ), his Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon-ish sculptures, he’s represented by a Christmas card to Ware, and a set of papier-mâché and cardboard figures of Drnaso’s characters.

The longer you hang out here, the more you recognize a cycle of innovation, homage and respect, rarely flowing from the top down. Another small spotlight is on Jay Lynch, whose Bijou Funnies became a Midwest home to a comix generation that boasted R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman and Chicagoans Skip Williamson and Justin Green (whose own pioneering comics as well as the formidable work of wife Carol Tyler are oddly missing). A terrific 50-plus-year-old strip in the show cuts across questions of mentorship and lands presciently in 2021: It’s about the time Lynch and Crumb visited “Dick Tracy” cartoonist Chester Gould at his office in the Tribune Tower and found themselves pushing back at the aging cartoonist, arguing with Gould about systemic racism.

History repeats here.

Then doubles back. Nicole Hollander’s “Sylvia” springs from feminist newspapers in the 1970s with a confidence (and heavy black ink) matched by the casual ennui of Jessica Campbell’s underrated work decades later. If, as Nadel says, Chicago cartoonists in the ’60s were reflecting on their parents’ comics in the Sunday Tribune (an early pioneer of the medium, detailed more by the Cultural Center show), then later generations were even more cheerful perversions of the past, filtering, rejecting and satirizing illustrative traditions. In other words, there’s not much in the MCA show that isn’t an echo of the Cultural Center show. Among the works included by Jackie Ormes — often considered the first Black woman cartoonist — is a strip from the Chicago Defender that reads: “What do we need with the ‘lil ole exclamation point? Anybody ever surprised by anything anymore?” The first large image in the MCA exhibit has Dick Tracy exclaiming: “Today, I’ve seen everything.” Rooms in the MCA show featuring ’90s staples like “Sof’ Boy” and Heather McAdams’ Reader comics, play like Wicker Park hieroglyphics.

Where the MCA exhibit feels freshest is in its pocket histories of several generations of Black Chicago cartoonists — staples of Ebony, Jet, the Chicago Defender. (Hot tip: While “Chicago Comics” doesn’t have a catalog, it does have a small tie-in book: “It’s Life As I See It,” authored by Nadel and published by New York Review Comics, about the legacy of Black cartoonists in Chicago from the 1940s to 1980.) Among the artifacts are issues of “Super Soul Comix” by Grass Green, the rare Black cartoonist also identified with the Crumb crowd. Similarly, Jay Jackson’s “Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos” ran 48 years in the Defender, though there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it. He’s represented in the show by a strip in which the Commandos land on a mysterious planet where whites are discriminated against. It’s like contemporary satire injected with Flash Gordon. Likewise, Yaoundé Olu’s Defender work in the ’70s hasn’t aged, while Turtel Onli’s compositionally trippy “NOG, Protector of the Pyramids” (also for the Defender) captures the disorienting cosmic style of Marvel’s Jack Kirby. (Grass Green, the book explains, wanted to work at Marvel years before they hired their first Black artists, but he never made it past daydreaming.)

In fact, Onli’s “NOG” would look so at home alongside Doctor Strange, you have wonder: Why doesn’t the MCA show also include the Marvel and DC comic book artists of Chicago?

Nadel said he and Darling discussed this often, but ultimately Nadel decided more commercial, superhero-centric artists were “doing something that’s almost a different medium, with different parameters, dealing with licensed properties.” Which is a somewhat vague answer that doesn’t entirely address the ambitions of Onli’s work, or how ubiquitous commercial strips like “Dick Tracy” or “Peanuts” play such an influence. The art from Frank Miller’s “Daredevil” that’s included in the MSI show would fit seamlessly into the MCA show. But Chicago stalwarts like Brian Azzarello (”Batman”), Jill Thompson (”Wonder Woman”), Gene Ha (”The X-Men”) and many more will have to wait even longer for their inevitable contemporary art spotlight.

Still, Nadel is not exactly wrong.

Never mind that the show is massive without DC or Marvel. There’s long been discomfort and vagueness baked into the porousness of the medium, one that squirms under fundamental questions of what cartoonists should make, who they serve, what exactly they do. You walk around this show and wonder: Do we call these “cartoonists”? Isn’t “artist” better? Is this comics? Personal work isn’t compatible with commercial parameters? What’s wrong with just saying comics? That perpetual self-consciousness — more acute to fans than artists — won’t be solved by a single exhibit. That said, the vagueness of what cartoonists do allows some limberness.

Should you really care Kerry James Marshall is actually one of the most revered, sought-after contemporary painters in America when his comics — a separate, lesser-known practice, although taken just as seriously as his fine art pieces — are represented here by new works that further blur the line between gallery art and comic books? He’s even included a small diorama of the toy dolls he uses as models when making his comics. Actually, there are a lot of new works in the MCA exhibit that are not exactly comics. Ware brings an entire gallery of the fanciful, mechanized contraptions he’s been building forever — including, at the center of his own corner of the show, a totem of sorts, made of wood and brass and other materials that resembles a demonic fortune teller. As a kind of installation, Brunetti fills a display with toys from his home.

Lilli Carré, whose work is sorta cartooning, sorta visual art, sorta filmmaking, brings a new animation. Jessica Campbell covers one entire wall with characters kinda made of carpet. There’s also a lot of kinda. Emil Ferris debuts pages from her long-awaited second book, but her big contribution is a kinda Day of the Dead altar festooned with the monsters — Frankenstein, Godzilla — in her art.

Are these cartoonists, too?

Fortunately, the deeper you head into “Chicago Comics” — which is arranged chronologically — the more likely you are to encounter newer cartoonists who couldn’t care less about what a cartoonist should or should not make. A large wall blowup of a Bianca Xunise strip — a very pandemic strip, of a white woman obliviously telling a Black woman: “If you can’t breathe, then take that silly mask off” — would probably be best classified as an op-ed. Edie Fake, whose paintings often reference the trans and nonbinary experience, reframes nuggets of Chicago architecture as queer spaces, and while many will be hard pressed to see how this squares with comics, many more, taken by the vibrancy and soft neon hum of the visuals, won’t care at all. That’s a good thing.

Midway through, there’s a huge installation from DePaul University comics instructor Molly Colleen O’Connell only slightly less insane than her typical works. It shows an old-fashioned newsstand strung with comics named stuff like “Utopia” and “Fear Rising.” It’s modeled on a black-and-white image of a Chicago newsstand, though with a crocodile at the counter (which itself holds a smaller newsstand manned by a bullfrog). It’s random and also kinda sweet.

It reminds us of the past, and it points to the future — whatever that looks like.

“Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now” runs June 19 through Oct. 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; $15 at mcachicago.org. “Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life” runs June 19 through Oct. 3 in the Chicago Cultural Center’s Sidney Yates Gallery, 78 E. Washington St.; free, www.chicago.gov. “Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes” runs through Oct. 24 at the Museum of Science and Industry Chicago, 57th St. and Lake Shore Drive; $18 plus standard admission at msichicago.org

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com