Emailing with cartoonist Jordan Crane about his incredible artwork for this month’s Slate Book Review, I asked if he could dial down, just a little bit, the pools of blood in his illustration for a book about a massacre at a Hopi village. “Haha, yes, I do love my pooling blood!” he wrote back. And it’s true—the stories in the latest edition of Crane’s series of comics, Uptight No. 5, do feature quite a bit of blood, though it doesn’t only pool. Sometimes it spatters, or spurts, or in one memorable story set in space floats in perfect little zero-gravity globules.
Up ’til now I hadn’t thought of Crane as a particularly violent cartoonist. His all-ages classic The Clouds Above follows a boy and his cat up a magic staircase, with no arterial spray whatsoever. What I found fascinating about Uptight was the way that the occasional bursts of violence in Crane’s stories for adults provided not shock value but narrative ambiguity. Most particularly in the long first story in the collection, in which characters imagine again and again the worst-case scenarios for themselves or the ones they love—including one depressive woman who can’t stop mulling her own violent end.
The stories in Uptight No. 5 can be disturbing or funny or exciting or confusing, but they’re all gorgeously drawn. Crane’s style can harken back to early 20th-century cartooning at times—stories in this book, like The Clouds Above, reminded me of Winsor McCay—but also feels fresh and adventurous. Above all, it’s expertly done— the work of an artist of great confidence who’s finding new and interesting ways to tell comics stories. Even his pools of blood can surprise you—as in his final illustration for that Hopi book, in which the blood did not pool but seeped deep into the desert, a potent metaphor for the way violence in that community never quite left the cursed land where it occurred. I’m very proud and pleased to have Jordan Crane illustrating the April issue of the Slate Book Review.
—
Uptight No. 5 by Jordan Crane. Fantagraphics.
See all the pieces in the Slate Book Review.
