Review: Emberley Galaxy anthology

EMBERLEY GALAXY
Various artists, edited by Joe Kuth
Red Panda Comics

Ed Emberley is a children’s book illustrator who is best-known for his clever “how-to-draw” books, which teach kids how to design and draw all sorts of things using simple shapes and an additive, one-by-one approach. Emberley Galaxy is a tribute anthology to the illustrator, edited by artist Joe Kuth and assembling the contributions of numerous other comic artists, many of whom are also Emberley fans. These artists take a number of different approaches to giving Emberley a nod, and the resulting anthology is both entertaining in its own right and a fantastic summation of what makes its title subject’s work so exciting and enduring.

Some of the best strips in the book are those that take a formalist approach to the material, which is fitting since Emberley’s own work is so resolutely formalist, predicated on an attention to the building blocks of drawings rather than to finished effects. The book’s most clever piece is undoubtedly Stefan Gruber’s two-page spread, which is deceptively simple on its surface but reveals complicated effects once one begins to read it. Gruber builds drawings piece by piece and panel by panel using Emberley's distinctive style, with the shapes being added to the drawing at each point identified beneath the panel. But Gruber playfully messes with the form, sometimes by including impossible instructions — a clock symbol represents an attempt to translate an image from a three-dimensional cube into the fourth dimension — or by subverting expectations. In one of the best sequences, Gruber seems to be drawing a cuddly teddy bear, but at the last moment pulls an unexpected reversal and transforms the drawing into a teeth-baring monster. The strip as a whole is a wonderful reminder of the wide-open possibilities in Emberley’s simple drawings, which can head off in any direction unexpectedly.

Warren Craghead unsurprisingly also offers a formalist take on Emberley, though it’s very different from Craghead’s more familiar style. Instead, with a clean, stripped-down line, he anthropomorphizes Emberley’s inanimate shapes into animate beings, none too happy about being pressed into service as elements in a larger design. Emberley’s work is a perfect subject for Dan Zettwoch, whose own comics almost always deal with diagrams and designs: his aesthetic is usually too cluttered and busy for my tastes, creating pages that are headache-inducing to read, but here the union of creator and subject is so perfect that his piece is great fun. I suppose Chris Cornwell’s piece also qualifies as a formalist take on Emberley, and it’s appealing to look at, but frankly so jumbled and confusing in its sequence that I have no idea what it’s actually supposed to represent: it seems to be a narrative comic but the panel order is so unclear that it’s impossible to actually discern what’s happening here. A few other pieces in this vein are even less compelling. C. Spencer Yeh, of the great noise outfit Burning Star Core, isn’t a cartoonist and his “fill in the blanks” series of strips shows that while anyone can draw Emberley’s simple figures, not everyone can make compelling art out of them. Doug Meyer draws himself trying to draw from Emberley’s example and growing frustrated with the results; it’s boring and one-joke despite some formal whimsy at the outset. Similarly, even in this context, Jeffrey Brown can only come up with a drawing of himself sulking. So much for a sense of play.

Another common approach is taking Emberley’s characters, or Emberley-inspired characters, and telling whimsical stories with them. To the extent that these tales capture Emberley’s children-oriented storytelling, they’re variously successful. Rina Ayuyang, the only artist working in color, contributes a story of fingerprint-modeled characters living in a world where all the sorrow has disappeared — and after an initial burst of excitement they’re increasingly anxious about the freedom from responsibilities and the openness of all possibilities. It’s not only a fine story, told in a distinctive children’s book style, but a visually appealing work as well. Kuth himself offers a fluffy, fun alien adventure, as well as collaborating with David Paleo on a series of monster fight comics. Alex Holden, in what seems like an outtake from Zettwoch’s story, turns in a brief but fairly amusing gag about shipbuilding, Emberley-style.

Two comics in particular capture the sense of what it’s like to be inspired by Emberley. Toby Craig offers a silent story in which two young kids, drawn in a rough, cartoony style, draw from Emberley’s example while on a road trip with their parents. As the kids become immersed in drawing, the white space on the page begins to fill in with examples of their work, animals and monsters and airplanes all crafted from assemblies of D’s and triangles and circles. It’s a loose and expressionistic portrayal of imagination running free. The final strip in the book, by Dan Moynihan, is a simple one-pager that shows how a creative artist or child might go beyond the steps in Emberley’s books to personalize and innovate their drawings. The rather basic drawings aren’t especially compelling in their own right, but it’s a fun page that celebrates how Emberley encourages creativity rather than simply teaching kids to draw by rote.

The book does have its missteps, of course, mostly in the form of a handful of artists who contribute lazy pages of doodles. Cansafis Foote’s page is utter gibberish, while Jack Fraley’s two pages are nothing but Emberley’s raw shapes, cut-and-pasted into repetitive grids over and over again. Sam Henderson’s page of Halloween-themed Emberley drawings is accompanied by his writing about (no joke) misspelling the artist’s name in a library search. Pages like this stand out because so many of the other artists put such real thought and genuine affection into their work; the few hacked-out contributions seem half-finished by comparison. On the whole, Emberley Galaxy is an admirable book, a tribute to its subject and to the imaginations of all the people — like the artists here — who he’s inspired.