by Shaenon Garrity
Derek Kirk Kim works hard. Kim has developed a reputation as a
wunderkind, a natural-born talent to whom genius comes easily, when in
fact he is a classic example of the man who worked for years to become
an overnight success. He has drawn comics professionally for at least
a decade, never attracting any great recognition until recently, when
the world turned around and noticed him and suddenly he had an Ignatz,
a Harvey, an Eisner, a wildly successful and acclaimed graphic novel,
the chance to turn down film deals and offers to draw Superman, and a
website read by roughly one million people. And he works at it. He
draws slowly, carefully, and not for fun. He takes writing classes.
Everything he produces, down to the merest sketchbook drawing, is a
flawless and finished piece. It takes massive, constant, focused
effort to make drawing comics look this easy.
As an artist, Kim excels at two skills seldom found in tandem:
technical precision and emotional expressiveness. Kim is a maestro at
capturing the perfect offhanded expression, the perfect revealing pose,
the snapshot that freezes time at just the right moment, with such
apparent ease that it seems almost unconscious, desultory. Look at the
face of the pubescent Simon staring at a friend's pubic hair in "Black
Harvest," at the flailing arms of the adult Simon as he rants at Nancy
in "Same Difference," at Nancy's look of supreme disgust after Simon
shouts "Jordan!", at little Derek Kirk pulling a drooling all-nighter
in "My Sistine Chapel." These drawings glow with life: they have the
vibrancy of quick, simple sketches, commemorating tiny moments in a
minimum of lines.
But they are meticulous. Kim works slowly, building his drawings from
a mountain of careful pencil guidelines; even inconsequential doodles
can take him upwards of two hours to produce. He is a perfectionist,
never using any line beyond the right one, not satisfied until every
dab of ink is in its place. Reading his work, one realizes how few
cartoonists seem to have any sense of design or composition, how they
treat their comics as a series of drawings rather than holistic works
of art. Kim understands design, and everything he draws is governed by
ironclad design principles. That he is able to draw so meticulously,
so technically, so pedantically by-the-book, and yet retain such
spontaneity in his figures and his compositions, is nothing short of
miraculous.
Kim does have his limitations as an artist -- or, more precisely, he
seems to set limitations on himself. His settings are usually mundane,
his stories extremely short on physical action of any kind. His
favorite subject is the talking head. "Same Difference" opens with a
transparent attempt to spice up a parade of dry
people-talking-in-a-restaurant panels with interesting compositions: he
"shoots" the characters through a fish-tank, so that they appear
suspended underwater, as has been traditional for alienated young
adults since "The Graduate."
More often, Kim makes no effort to
disguise the fact that his comics are visually inert. In fact, he
embraces and exaggerates this tendency. One of his favorite effects is
to repeat a panel for a comic or dramatic "beat," sometimes over and
over ad nauseam, as when Nancy stands frozen at Ben's door in "Same
Difference." (The sublime frustration of waiting for those panels to
go up on smallstoriesonline.com, one identical row at a time, every
three or four grueling days, is burned into my memory forever.) This
is not simple laziness; sometimes Kim reproduces panels in Photoshop,
but more often he will redraw an entire panel, line for line, several
times over, just to get the effect of nothing happening. Many
comic-book artists today consciously aim for a "cinematic" effect in
their visual storytelling; Kim may be the only one who tries to emulate
a Woody Allen movie.
And yet he gets away with it, because his art is simply that good. If
his characters are engaging even while sitting around making pointless
conversation, it is largely because of their visual charm: Kim's
character designs, and his aforementioned gift for expression and pose,
have an intense and lively appeal. If his settings are bland, he draws
them with care, and often with affection. In almost all of his work,
Kim seems to aim for a very narrow and specific visual effect: of
ordinary life sanded down to cartoony essentials. He pursues this
effect with intensity and care, painstakingly sculpting his own
ever-so-slightly-altered version of smallest and most unexciting
detail. In his comics one can sometimes glimpse Kim's short-lived
career at a computer-animation studio, carefully redrawing household
objects from every conceivable angle. Boredom holds no terrors for him
now.
My first exposure to Kim's work was a little piece called "Dave's
Blind Date," which he drew as a guest strip for my webcomic, Narbonic.
When I opened the attachment on the email he'd sent me, my
then-boyfriend (later husband) Andrew looked at it in silence for a
moment, scrolled to the bottom, sat in silence again, then said, "Crap.
It's funny, too." As a writer, Kim is still honing his skills, but
he
is already better than almost anyone writing comics today, and he has
the potential to be one of the very best. His writing has gradually
lost the puppy-clumsiness evident in his early short stories and in the
first pages of "Same Difference," and his sometimes stilted dialogue is
easing into smooth realism. He is naturally witty, and is learning not
to force his wit, to let it emerge organically from the characters and
dialogue, to let it creep up on the reader from behind. He is
naturally warm and sensitive, and is learning not to allow the
sentiment in his stories to dissolve into melodrama or self-pity. The
ending of "Same Difference" is beautifully understated, yet conveys a
solid, traditional sense of closure and release, elements which will
hopefully characterize his mature work.
What is perhaps most precious in Kim's writing, especially given that
so much is partly or wholly autobiographical, is his ability to
separate himself from his protagonists, to see their flaws clearly. In
"Same Difference," Simon and Nancy sit on a curb in Pacifica, and Simon
(a character not unlike Kim, who grew up in Pacifica just as Kim did)
launches into yet another self-pitying monologue, describing how two
former classmates used to torment him in high school. Nancy, losing
interest, drifts off into her own observations: "It's really strange...
I mean, it's the middle of March and it feels like a summer day... God,
it's such a beautiful day... so warm..." Simon's navel-gazing is
suddenly less sympathetic, less vital, and the outside world snaps into
perspective. Kim inspires comparisons to Robert Crumb, whom he
resembles in many respects: his nebbishy neuroses, his attachment to
rounded, cartoony-cute art, the care and precision of his drawing, the
heavily autobiographical nature of his writing, his eagerness to wade
into the stickiest recesses of his soul. But Crumb, with only
occasional exceptions (fewer and fewer as he grows older and more set
in his ways), lacks the ability to put his quirky vision of the world
into perspective, to step outside his own head when necessary. This is
a rare skill in a writer as young and as idiosyncratic as Kim, and it
is one of his greatest strengths.
As of this writing, Kim's new webcomics output comprises a series of
short, sweet, and sketchy autobiographical strips about himself and his
friends. Usually funny, sometimes sad and bittersweet, they are a
welcome relief from the Simon stories, which, although beautifully
produced as always, were edging toward dangerously solipsistic
territory: bitterly comic stories about being a 29-year-old virgin give
Kim the chance to indulge his worst instincts as a writer, to slosh
around in warm, goopy self-pity. By contrast, "Lynch the
Telemarketer," a strip about recovering from a recent breakup, captures
the end of a relationship with direct and heartbreaking honesty, its
sentiment stripped down to six perfectly-chosen panels. This is
another of Kim's great strengths: he seems to know himself, to know
what he needs to do to develop as an artist. Now, with the first long
and substantial works of his mature period under his belt, he's wise to
experiment with loose, short comics, to relax his smooth finishes and
technical perfectionism, to give his art a chance to breathe. Derek
Kirk Kim works hard. It's good to see him play.
