| Title | : | Amy and Jordan |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0375422706 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780375422706 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2004 |
But I sure was. Voraciously. Back in 1989, when I discovered that Beyer’s strips were appearing regularly in this new “alternative weekly” paper, I quickly became hooked, and a thought seized I had to clip and save them–they were exquisite poems of urban despair, dreamy and nightmarish. I was already a fan of Beyer’s talent based on his book Agony (Pantheon, 1988), but these new strips revealed, week by week, a whole new dimension to his work–an ingenious reinvention of panel-design that redefined what a comic strip could be. As with Peanuts, it helps to try and picture these in the context which they first appeared in order to appreciate just how profoundly they emerged from anything else on the newspaper page. Even the “outré” NYP ads and listings which often ran alongside them were hopelessly dull by comparison. One of its most impressive aspects was the way Form served the Content–no matter how eccentric the layout got, it somehow never confused the narrative. And what it was as if Candide had been transported to the East Village and split in two like an amoeba and holed up in a squat on Avenue C. Along with giant bugs from outer space.
So I did clip and save them, and put them into an envelope, which was then placed in a shoebox with a lot of other envelopes (receipts, receipts!), which was shoved to the back of the closet of my sixth-floor walk-up studio apartment, which I moved out of three years later and in the process I unwittingly threw them all away. Which frankly is just the sort of thing that Amy and Jordan would do. Drat. “Oh well,” I thought, once I’d realized it, “at some point someone will collect and publish them, and I’ll get them back that way.” And that was that.
Fast forward more than ten years, to the spring of 2002. During a panel of cartoonists I was chairing in Philadelphia, a member of the audience asked what Mark was working on and where he was. No one seemed to know. The discussion was transcribed and published in The Comics Journal that summer, and in the fall Mark contacted me with the best possible He’d read the panel transcript and wanted to publish again. And the Amy and Jordan strips had never been comprehensively collected. So now, as an editor, I was able to grant my own wish.
Amy and Jordan ran from 1988 through early 1996. After that, Beyer put cartooning aside to pursue other projects. This book signals his return to the realm of comics, which he says he wants to start making again. We can only hope he does. For now, I’m just thankful I finally have my Amy and Jordan collection back. –Chip Kidd, NYC, 10/03
Amy and Jordan Reviews
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I read Mark Beyer's Agony and was struck by a certain resonance these free weekly comic strips from the eighties have with Laurel and Hardy, Beckett, Mr Bill (Saturday night Live), Joan Cornelia. The introduction to this volume is helpful, and you can read it above, as if it were the publisher's description of these comic strips. What characterizes these comics is what some people describe as "urban despair," and this is true, but it is also amusing, and especially Amy has a kind of vulnerability about her that makes her likable and sympathetic through all the bleakness and misery and ennui.
But as with Laurel and Hardy in the Depression, these two hapless partners help us see our our miseries in a larger context and laugh.
One strip has it that Jordan has been told there are good luck and bad luck genes, and that his good luck genes have been damaged. He scoffs at this as he walks across the street, about to set on a skateboard, in front of a car whose driver suddenly realizes he has no brakes.
The art is both sophisticated in its ideas about framing/paneling and color and conceptual design, offset by simple cartoony characters.
Here's some examples:
https://www.google.com/search?q=amy+a... -
Mark Beyer, master of perspective and misery.
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A self-taught outsider in the sequential arts realm, Mark Beyer's graphical work has been notorious for appearing in free urban weeklies from the late 1980s to early 1990s. His best known work consists of a surreal, subterranean-inspired comic strip series. Collected for the first time (outside of crumbling newspaper clippings stashed in a shoebox in some dark hiding place), Beyer's quasi-popular "Amy & Jordan" strip has finally made it to store shelves, in black-and-white hardcover format. Indeed, while the tome is a bleak, gothic compilation which almost certainly isn't for everyone, it is (at its nicest) morbidly compelling.
Each strip is a study in urban alienation, with no oasis for Jordan or his sadistically-inclined roommate Amy throughout. The dead-end lives of the two protagonists continue unabated as the outside world invades and attacks them from the inside, page after agonizing page. Dealing with such light-hearted and universal subjects as premature death, prolonged starvation and mortal childhood illness, Beyer pries open every dismal, dry-rotted cask of the imagination, slyly smirking the whole while. The reader becomes a part of the assault, eyes incapable of averting, all the while whimpering, "Please... no more!"
And no two Amy & Jordan strips are alike, thanks to Beyer's unique paneling techniques. Every strip features its own style of frame, as if each panel were a piece of art interdependent of the other, yet isolated from all other strips within the book.
For fans who like their independent comic strips macabre (such as James Kochalka's now defunct Deadbear: Circus Detective) Amy & Jordan is the perfect compliment.
(*Though this has been my fourth read-through of this book, it seems that I have only had the capacity to recognize five or six specific strips upon review. So, in essence, the book remained 99% entirely new to me with each subsequent reading. Amy + Jordan has managed to become akin to a "living document." It is the kind of book only found in dreams. ...or perhaps nightmares?) -
Brilliantly cynical with a deceptively crude drawing style which seems elementary at first glance, but as you read you'll start to notice that Amy and Jordan has amazingly intricate and seemly endless variations on panel layout. Probably the most creative panels I've ever come across. An inspiration to anyone in the alternative comics world and a must-read for anyone living in a cramped dirty apartment in NY...which is pretty much all of us. Also major kudos to Pantheon for a fantastic book design as well.
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The most incredible aspect of this amazing strip is not the breathtakingly innovative artwork, with its synapse-destroying panelling and high-frequency textures, or its relentlessly funny, relentlessly morbid message - it's that the entire book is true! Try it if you don't believe me. I weep in wonder at its penetrating acuity.
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Well... Yeah... Uh...
This is the quintessential Amy and Jordan. A strip that tries its best to be dark, dreary, and depressing and succeeds. Most of the time. Beneath it all, however, lies a simple happiness that's hard to dispute.
At least... I think there is... -
Heartbreaking.
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The design of every strip is fantastic. The actual art is not, and the writing didn't do anything for me. The best strip is the one where the author responds to his critics.
