When the Artist Was Underground
(03/18/2009) Long before David Geiser made a name for himself as a painter, he introduced himself to fans of underground comics in a
 Morgan McGivern
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1974 issue of one of his titles, DTs: “The Author (terminalus Derangus), a once proud human specimen of human temperance, laid bare by the swamp of reality.”
He does so, in part, because he’s one of the characters in the story, “Fishcake, a Night on the Beach,” which involves barroom drinking, a stroll through the streets of a San Francisco teeming with depravities worthy of 18th-century London in a William Hogarth engraving, travels in a VW van, more drinking. Or, in the words of the omniscient narrator, “The die is cast . . . there are strange things done, in the North Beach scum, by the men who delve for . . . drink!”
A “liquid yawn” by our man in long hair — “CHUKE” goes the sound effect — frees him up for further adventures. (“I’m not always an azzhole,” he had informed the reader earlier, “sometimes I’m asleep!”) So, back into the van for some shaky driving to . . . where? “Uuh,” the slob called Fishcake asks, “what a we gonna do now? Hee hee.” The answer comes not from one of his compatriots but is rendered in bold letters by the artist himself in a godlike intervention: “Drink more! What else?”
The story is more than something from a time capsule, more than an example of the rough beauty of pen-and-ink crosshatching, and is more of a story than it might seem. The comic-book medium, with its unique interplay of words and illustrations, is perhaps the best at conveying tales in which not much happens — with good drawing, what could be boring or banal, isn’t. (Harvey Pekar, the man behind American Splendor, once wrote memorably, believe it or not, of nothing more than moving a sofa into an upstairs apartment.)
“A Night on the Beach” also illustrates a point Mr. Geiser, who lives in Springs, is getting across in his classes on underground comics and graphic novels at the Ross School and Guild Hall in East Hampton — the importance of notebooks.
This 1974 issue of DTs has tales of the Bay Area’s drunk and down-and-out. |
“I’d take notebooks to bars, travel, draw, and talk to people, get their stories,” he said the other day of his time writing and illustrating comics in San Francisco from the end of the 1960s through most of the ’70s. The result was “a series of notebooks to glean info out of. It can help to place a story line in an environment. They’re sort of life observations,” not unlike those of his contemporary Robert Crumb, he said. Mr. Geiser called him a genius whose work is like a history of those days. (And whose own notebooks were valuable in another way: He traded a stack of them for a house in France.)
“It’s useful to see and kind of draw a quick essence of a person; it’s a way to take notes visually. And it’s a good way to develop ideas. . . . I learned to draw by going to cafes and bars and sitting and drawing people.”
Mr. Geiser wants to show his students “the way of following a story” and how to keep “a visual diary of experience.” It’s important, he said, to avoid “constricting or restraining the form. If they think or are told there’s a right way to do it, it inhibits them. . . . They can do collages if they’re not too fluid at drawing.” Or students can produce an illustrated chapbook rather than a traditional comic book.
He looked over some of his own original panels from the ’70s. “Half the fun was making them as complicated as possible.” The form is part of the pleasure: “You can blow up the page, go outside the boundaries, and play it like a jazz instrument.”
“I’d always been interested in the Beats of North Beach,” he said, and after he graduated from the University of Vermont, he found his way to the Bay Area. He was an abstract painter, then as now. “I saw what was happening with the underground there and comics and became interested.” He was going to go to graduate school, but soon “the whole idea of coming back to New England and the dusty art world . . .” His voice trailed off at the thought of what he would have missed.
Shorty, one of David Geiser’s characters, unsteadily graces an issue of Saloon from 1973. |
Charles Bukowski and Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson — “I would bump into them,” he said. That same issue of DTs features on its inside cover perhaps Mr. Geiser’s most famous strip as a comics artist, “Poets’ Last Supper,” which later appeared in the book “Bukowski in Pictures” and elsewhere. It shows a long table of ’60s luminaries killing time before a reading, Allen Ginsberg with his mind on publicity, Bukowski with his mind on his next drink. . . .
“I’d go up to Kesey’s poetry readings in Eugene. I remember Gregory Corso walking and singing poetry from ‘Gasoline.’ I was sleeping on wrestling mats with Corso stepping on and over me.”
Mr. Geiser lived in the Mission District, around the corner from the San Francisco Comic Book Company, a shop run by an enthusiast named Gary Arlington. “He was a junkie; he OD’d. He was fat. It was this Dickensian world with books up the wall. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Spain Rodriguez, we would meet there and check on the latest comics.”
Through his Yahoo Productions, Mr. Geiser turned out an assortment of titles full of social, political, and sexual commentary: Saloon, for instance (“Realer Than You’ll Ever Be!”), Demented Pervert, Uncle Sham (“distributed intergalactically”), Pain, one issue of which from 1977 reveals a phantasmagoria of copulation, intravenous drug use, and occasional, lighthearted mutilation.
The good times began to wind down when, he said, “the tentacles of distribution started drying up.” He got out of the comics business in 1978.
“San Francisco is a small town, and I left for a bigger world of painting in New York.” As a painter, he’s a “pyramid builder,” he said, referring to his use of layer upon layer of paint. He has a solo show scheduled for Portland, Ore., in June, and in August he’ll have work at Sylvester and Company in Amagansett, but he seemed spooked by the current climate. “The art world is really dead, a scary place. Corporations just can’t buy a lobby-size painting.”
Collectors are in some ways the bridge between his two lives. “Collectors of my paintings have gone and sought out comics to make part of their portfolio. It’s like buying a print.”
In other ways, his sensibility is a constant, and it’s something he wants to impart to students — a sense of freedom, a lack of self-consciousness. “Picasso spent his whole life trying to get back to exploring a more primitive way of expressing himself — I mean a more direct way.”
“I collect tribal art for the rawness, that directness of expression. It always thrills me. I know the most facile draftsmen who never put down a line that’s interesting to me.”
He said he’s drawn to the art of the insane and the incarcerated. “I like to see the demons.”