My work in comics is very rarely, if ever, written about. Not to say that it never is, but years can pass between mentions in the press, on websites, or a tweet. I certainly don't "google" my name to discover a buzz. That idea makes about as much sense to me as sitting down to a family dinner at sixteen years old while peaking on a hit of windowpane. This might be okay if you're fairly immune to peer pressure, or if you simply must be certain that your sister really is a hybrid creature, part Bunny Rabbit, part Mariana Fruit Bat. Her sniffling nose twitching, eyes rolled back in her head as she sucks the marrow from a chicken's broken leg bone. Otherwise, just drop it and forget that I ever brought the idea up.
So, a few weeks back I was perusing the website known as "The Comics Journal" when I stumbled across a review of a book titled "American Comics: A History" by Jeremy Dauber, a professor at Columbia University.
As I read the review, I was surprised to see that the critic mentioned my work as being undeservedly included in the book, because no one has ever heard of it. In fairness to this critic, he doesn't single me out. He names five other authors in the same breath, so this isn't personal, it simply reveals a curious orthodoxy. It is the canonical certainty that finds its way into every art form, like a weasel in the fruit shed, where the same few artists are written about over and over and over again. And Goodness, Gracious, Tinkled On Sputtering Balls Of Fire! Is it ever boring or what!?
The critic also mentioned that the 572 page tome doesn't contain a single illustration. Quite odd given the subject, and since I am of the same mind as Alice, that what is the use of a book, without pictures or conversation? I certainly wasn't going to be spending thirty-five dollars on a copy to find out what it says about my comics, it might be cruel! Curiousity did eventually get the best of me, so I made a few phone calls to the sort of bookstores that would carry this book, and EUREKA! Armed with my smart phone, I would browse the store, find the book, check the index, and when the coast was clear photograph the page.
Off I went like an international spook and this is what I found on page 386: "This anarchy of image can have thematic resonance: the power of Ted Jouflas' Filthy comes less from the strong poetic rhythm and form it displays than the surreal, sometimes collage-based, sometimes blunt black-and-white swirling drawings of protagonists losing their minds (unless these are the clawing, rotted minds they already possess)."
A tip of my Stetson and a heartfelt Thank You! to Jeremy Dauber for reading one of my books, understanding its essence, and thinking it worthy of inclusion in his history. I'm very grateful. I've always liked comics. Which is why, as an illustrator I continue to occassionally make some of them. But the thing I don't like about the comics world is that it is far too often like dirty little children, rolling around on a treehouse floor, fighting over a Red Devil Marble.
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