Getting Graphic: Crumb & Spiegelman

More than mid-way through last Friday evening in Bass Concert Hall, Francoise Mouly, the New Yorker’s deft art editor, flashed a cartoon panel onto the screen behind her which bore the sentence, “And remember: it’s only lines on paper, folks!!” For Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, the comic artists sitting to either side of Mouly, it would seem this line couldn’t be further from the truth. Certainly for these icons of icon-making, who touched on censorship, alienation, and the illustrating of religious texts during the course of the evening, comics were much more than just “lines on paper.”

Opening the presentation, which felt more like an intimate after-dinner conversation among friends, Mouly noted that the posters advertising the event had promised a “helluva time.” Looking to Crumb, dressed in a suit and tan sandals with black socks, and Spiegelman, who gently chain-smoked through the evening, she said, “I hope you two can live up to that.” If the bar was set high, Crumb and Spiegelman rose to meet it with genuine candor and humor, looking back over their careers and, briefly, into the future.

Crumb, who may be better known for his overall style rather than any particular work, and who was chronicled in the 1994 documentary Crumb, guided parts of the conversation, explaining his early work as that of an “alienated youth.” Looking up to Harvey Kurtzman and MAD Magazine, Crumb went to work creating comics for Topps Bubblegum. While his life and career would eventually find him living in France collaborating with his wife, Aline, and their daughter, Crumb has often drawn images considered to be controversial. When this is mentioned, Crumb looks down with mock-bashfulness, smiles slightly and says, “I was bad. I apologize.”

Like Crumb, Spiegelman was also an admirer of MAD and got his start at Topps. While Mouly showed images of Spiegelman’s early drawings, including a parody magazine called “Blasé,” which he’d drawn in high school, Crumb laughed delightedly. If the artists have distinctively different styles (Spiegelman is most recognized for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel-length comic MAUS), it was evident they were kindred spirits. Spiegelman recounted their interactions in San Francisco in the early 1970s, though Crumb claimed to have no memory of them and Spiegelman admitted he’d been doing a lot of LSD.

Decades later, Crumb and Spiegelman have continued to be inspired by the stuff of MAD – irony and social satire, followed by the occasional controversy, and devoted to working on projects with a religious focus. Mouly showed slides of the images featured in Spiegelman’s 2006 10-page feature in Harper’s, “Drawing Blood,” about controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. Crumb’s latest work, “The Book Of Genesis Illustrated,” takes a literal look at the first book of the Bible. He spent four years combing through every word and referencing stills from films like The Ten Commandments to create the images. When asked what he’d like to see Crumb do next, Spiegelman says, “The Koran maybe.” Probably not controversy-free territory.

While Mouly’s slide explaining comics as “only lines on paper” was meant to encourage viewers to enjoy comics without offense, the influence of the lines created by Crumb and Spiegelman cannot be downplayed. Comics have been and continue to be their livelihood, their passion, their lives. One hopes for many more years they’ll show readers a helluva time.

From Fun Fun Fun to Wet Wet Wet

Entering the gates to Waterloo Park for Austin’s Fun Fun Fun Fest on Saturday, concert-goers paraded in wearing shorts, tank tops, and every pattern of spandex tights. By Sunday, outfits were topped with ponchos and all the emo hairstyles had been hijacked by the “wet look.” That’s what happens when music festivals and monsoon seasons collide.

SATURDAY

If there is a manual for how to create a generic auto-tuned hipster dance band, Austin electro group LAX has probably committed it to memory. In the way that faux-Rastafarian dudes are both instantly identifiable and mockable, LAX has co-opted the hipster-dancer persona with bravado, churning tunes with lyrics like, “I want to hunt you / like a cheetah.” Introducing a new track, the band dropped a backbeat that sounded like it’d been lifted from Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” upended with a groove borrowed from Bob Marley and featuring lyrics genuinely stolen from Grandmaster Flash (“Don’t push me / cause I’m close to the edge…”). Then they sang a song about smoking pot. Well, we all knew that was coming. It was rather amazing, in a musically offensive sort of way. It wasn’t the content that was offensive; it was the construction.

On the orange stage, Knoxville’s Royal Bangs pounded away. Sonically they resemble a more dance-focused Broken Social Scene – though in the flesh they appear as three dudes on guitar, a drummer, and a lead singer who rocks on keys, thrashes the guitar, then goes crazy on drums. With a couple of hard-driving guitar tracks, Royal Bangs move from BSS to The Who territory, striking satisfying chords in both musical realms.

If LAX had delighted in lifting hip hop lyrics, James Husband, merrily strumming his guitar on the yellow stage, introduced lines taken from “The Sound of Music” as he opened his set (“somewhere in my youth or childhood / I must have done something good”). But his mellow strains were heartily outweighed by Austin’s The Sword blaring their guitars on the black stage. If music can be so loud it makes your jaw hurt, one hopes The Sword fans have health insurance. That said, when it comes to axe-swinging, these guys are not messing around. (Proof: They have a track featured in Guitar Hero II.)

Back on the orange stage, the crowd watching Red Sparrowes – old guys experiencing the music in a full-body sort of way, and a dude wearing 3-D glasses – gave way to folks waiting for No Age. Having just released their “Losing Feeling” EP, the LA duo played a noisy new track that was met with equal noise from fans. After a short and hearty set from Death, Yeasayer gave an extended soundcheck. With each band member playing multiple instruments that needed checking, the crowd grew restless, until that moment when the lead singer unwittingly said that he couldn’t quite hear the cowbell on the monitor. Then everyone had to chime in and shout, “more cowbell!” Yeasayer: making hipster dreams come true.

SUNDAY

For a brief period Sunday afternoon the rain slowed to a drizzle and it seemed safe to hide out beneath a tree in front of the blue stage where New Mexico’s seeming one-man show Alaska In Winter crooned auto-tuned songs and played the melodica while wearing a white fur hat. It was so wet out though, I saw a hipster who wasn’t able to light his joint.

The rain subsided a bit more and a mash-up dance party started when Car Stereo (Wars) took the stage. If I had to guess, it would be that one of those car stereos is playing Girl Talk, while the other blasts a local Top 40/hip hop station. While CS(W) dropped some newer riffs than Greg Gillis, sampling “Kiss Me Thru The Phone” and “Birthday Sex,” their mixes played more to the idea of giving the mainstream what they want, rather than something they’d never expect. The MC worked the crowd by asking rhetorical questions like, “Are we in Austin, Texas?” “Is that your bag?” “Is this your hat?” Before CS(W) dropped a mash of MGMT’s “Kids” versus Ciara’s “One, Two Step,” a girl dressed as a California raisin went up to a young boy who was standing next to his mother and tried to get him to dance. He looked up at his mom with a bewildered look. He will probably steer clear of raisins for the rest of his life.

On the other side of the park, the stage was being readied for comedy. While it’s become trendy for outdoor festivals to serve up hipster comedians alongside indie bands, it has always seemed an unnatural pairing. For a brand of comedy that thrives on awkward pauses, clever word play, and an esoteric nonchalance, emerging in broad daylight to compete with the roar of metal-soaked rock seems an impossible feat. Case in point, while Nick Thune can prove amusingly aloof signing about refusing to observe Daylight Savings Time on nighttime TV, his low-key Stephen Wright-with-attitude one-liners are nearly impossible to enjoy in mid-afternoon backed by the din of metalcore band Coalesce. Hipster comedy belongs in night clubs. At night.

As the rain began to pour harder and the grass swiftly turned to mud, it was time to make a gracious exit.