Extended Play

By Jake Terrell.

Published by 2dcloud as part of their 2016 fall collection.

Find it here.

Released as part of Minneapolis indie comics publisher 2dcloud’s 2016 “fall collection” of books, Extended Play is a collection of six short comics, produced by the cartoonist Jake Terrell, that interweave to produce a dreamlike mix of youthful experience and fantasy, communicated with a compellingly animated line-focused art style and an aesthetic overlay that gestures at the provisional aspects of drawing.

Sammy Harkham’s blurb on the book’s back cover describes Extended Play as “a battle cry for cartooning as mark making, as line design, for thinking of drawing as handwriting and a form of searching and discovery”, a reference, partially, to Terrell’s drawing approach which - taking a lead from the book’s title - exhibits a playfulness in its willingness to eschew consistency of visual representation in favour of a line that is freed to be expressively cartoonish as well as more directly representational when required. Harkham’s enthusiastic blurb is also a reference to the book’s design which explicitly draws attention to the idea of drawing as an intimate expression of the image-maker’s mark - “drawing as handwriting” as Harkham puts it. Each of the six comics chapters in Extended Play is preceded by its own title page on which the chapter’s label is written out multiple times and in various modes of handwritten style - standalone block letters, cursive script, confident lettering, wobbly text etc. - making the direct connection between drawing and handwriting while also pointing out how modulation of line can adjust the character of depicted symbols (text, in this case, which takes on a pictorial form on the comics page, particularly when hand-lettered), thus describing the comics to follow as somewhat provisional in their presentation for they are acknowledged as but one possible expression out of a hypothetical multitude. Accompanying this handwriting are occasional scrawled images of people and objects; in one case we see a hand holding a pen with the word “pen” inscribed beside it - this being a reminder of the signifier/signified/evidential-mark triad of drawing notions: the word “pen” refers to the signified object of the pen, and so does the representational image, but the drawn image, in attempting to replicate the appearance of the signified object, also patently falls short of achieving a perfect reflection of reality, freeing up a space for the mark-maker to imbue the image with a degree of subjectivity, the image bearing the evidence of the mark-maker’s hand as well as their interpretation of the object in question.

While these title page images provide a very conceptual brand of commentary on the nature of drawing, they also serve to destabilise the idea that a consistent authorial identity can be read from drawn images. For example, the image of the pen is drawn in a noticeably different style from what’s seen in Terrell’s actual comics - the lines used to depict the pen are far more hurried, more angular, more willing to break, more varied in weight than what’s seen in the comics work - and I suspect that this drawing may be the contribution of an altogether different artist to Terrell. A note at the base of the book’s copyright page declares that the comics artist Blaise Larmee has contributed “supplementary drawings and design” to the book, so the image of the pen may in fact have come from his hand. Regardless of the true author of the assortment of scrawled title page images, their character is different enough from the unambiguous output of Terrell - as per the pages of actual comics that appear in the book - to create doubt in their attribution to a specific author, reminding a reader who is liable to romanticise line as the revealing signature of the artist that it is but an intermediary between drawer and viewer. The blurring of authorial identity that is implied by this design strategy plays into the thematic contents of the comics proper of the book, where masks appear as a motif that comments on the existence of an interface between a person’s outward expression and their internal reality - expression being marked in this way as a performance and not necessarily a consistent truth. There is a sense, in this aesthetic strategy, that Terrell is attempting to adopt a more diffuse authorial voice in his drawings, that he doesn’t want his art to be reduced to a categorisable, and thus predictable, mode of output.

Thusly primed by Harkham’s quote and the book’s design, one is naturally directed towards a reading of Extended Play that hones in on a consideration of its drawings, specifically the way that Terrell employs line to achieve his (somewhat) narrative ends. Fortunately, there is a considerable degree of pleasure to be found in a reading experience that has been directed in this way. Perhaps the best example for these pleasures can be found in the book’s second chapter - titled Carnival 1 - a 16-page comic composed of a series of single-page spreads that feature various drawings of scenes from a party-like social gathering. The pages of Carnival 1 consist of a series of images that overlap each other rather than being confined to strict panels, creating a sense of simultaneity in the events being represented. It’s as if each page functions as a mind attempting to unravel a memory of a day or night’s festivities. Images of the slugging of booze, the tossing back of drugs, the exchange of lively banter, the live performance of music, and casual poolside playfulness flow freely about each other, tethered loosely by a shared setting and repeating figures.

As with memories of most social gatherings during which one has engaged in a multitude of interactions, it’s not the precise words shared in a conversation that are remembered (word balloons appear in the comic to denote speech but are left empty of text) but rather the after-images of the events of the occasion. It’s in this dedication to representing the swirl of memory in an almost purely image-based way (some song-lyrics appear as words on the page) that Terrell is able to fully engage his protean linework to express the sensory qualities of the various situations being recalled. For instance: on one page Terrell uses a jagged line and a low angle of perspective to impress the idea of a guitarist’s energetic and rapturous strumming; on another page he extends the lines of his figures and adds blue marker wash to the surrounds to approximate the sensation of being submerged under water, isolating the space below a pool’s surface, where a man and woman share a mutual romantic crush, from the events of the party above (the party proper forces itself into the tranquil, submerged realm of the two potential lovers in the form of an obnoxious canonballer who takes a dive into the pool, abruptly spoiling the couple’s attempted kiss); and, he also demonstrates a willingness to alter his mode of representation, showing, in one case, faces in a crowd varying in level of abstraction from recognisable visage to a reduced icon of a smiling face, depth of representation possibly mirroring depth of recognition for the unidentified person recalling the comic’s events. The disorienting non-linear nature of the page-to-page transitions and within-page compositions of Carnival 1 proves to be an ideal staging ground for such experimentation with drawing style, Terrell’s varied linework adding a dimension of sense memory to the comic’s sprawling collection of recollected moments.

The way that Carnival 1 reads like a dreamlike vision of memory can be thought of as a synecdoche for the feeling of reading Extended Play as a collective body of work. It’s particularly instructive to think along these lines as the remaining comics, despite being much more formally conventional in their use of grid-like panel layouts, are far looser in their adherence to a strict logic of cause-and-effect plot progressions or image transitions. There are many mechanisms at work in Terrell’s comics that combine to produce a reading experience that is hypnagogic and slippery in its connection to a fixed diegetic reality: there’s his willingness to allow his style of representation to fluctuate between various degrees of “cartoonishness” within the same story and even between panels; his use of non-naturalistic colours that lie purposefully off-register and oscillate between panel transitions with a psychedelic rhythm; his non-sequitur digressions into the absurd (in one story a character chases a hat that has been blown off his head only to find himself communing, in a state of delirium, with a sentient tree); his meshing of sword-and-sorcery story and visual elements with mundane reality; his deliberate inclusion of significant ellipses in the narrative; his rejection of narration and his tendency to have dialogue reveal only snippets of conversation rather than a full arc of discussion, acts which feed into what reads like a distrust of a reliance on words to construct meaning, or at least a determined preference for image over text in the word/image balance of comics; and his use of various motifs in the form of specific plot occurrences and imagery that are repeated and elaborated on in the remaining stories in odd ways.

The looseness of narrative coherence that is propagated by Terrell’s style of comics-making is exacerbated by the way that Extended Play is organised in a fragmented fashion. Certain chapters whose titles suggest continuity and sequentiality (e.g. Bel Air 1 and Bel Air 2, or Carnival 1 and Carnival 2) are separated from each other by the interjection of chapters that are unrelated in a direct plot sense. Despite this discontinuity of plot, there remains a lingering sense that all the chapters in Extended Play should be considered as parts of a holistic, non-conventional narrative thanks to the way that motifs and events frequently echo across chapters. For instance, the Bel Air chapters, which bookend the book, have their events directly echoed in the chapter titled Lovekill while also sharing repeated visual motifs with the Carnival 2 comic.

Bel Air 1 begins by showing the decadent and ennui-ridden lifestyle of a lone monarch who desires the creation of something that is “perfect as fuck” but who is unable to muster the spirit to motivate himself to work towards such perfection, opting, instead, to engage in prolonged periods of idleness, this time being spent passively watching DVDs and slipping into languid sessions of repose suffused with vacant thought. It’s relatively easy to read the monarch’s behaviour as being analogous to the procrastination that an artist may exhibit when faced by the paralysing prospect of feeling the need to create in accordance with ideals of perfection and so we get some insight into why the work of Extended Play is so varied and experimentally searching: the approach affords Terrell an opportunity to engage in uninhibited creation, to do the work first and then find a reaction to it afterwards rather than avoiding putting anything down on the page in the first place.

Within the story of Bel Air 1, the sheer idleness and indulgent lifestyle of the monarch also works to position the monarch as a distracted, detached, exploitative ruler - amusingly so - and this understandably leads to an escalation of events that culminate in a violent uprising held against him, lead by his discontented manservant, Wilburn. The monarch is decapitated in the uprising only to return, whole, in the final chapter of Bel Air to confront Wilburn who has installed himself as the new monarchical leader of the region and who is behaving in as abject a fashion as the prince he had led a coup against. The explanation for the prince’s recovery is never directly resolved in the Bel Air chapters - Wilburn acknowledges the strangeness of it but discounts giving it further thought - but there is a resurrection storyline that takes place in another of the book’s comics, Lovekill, that resonates with the prince’s return, this being an example of the mirroring across chapters that gives Extended Play its abstracted sense of continuity.

In the Lovekill chapter, which occurs in between the two parts of Bel Air, we see two ornately dressed warriors engaged in combat. One cuts the other’s head off and walks away from the fight as the ostensible victor. In a turn towards the logic of the supernatural, the figure who lost his head is able to refix this detached body part to the bloodied stump of his neck, a bolt of lightning resealing the connection of head to body. The man then reengages with his former assailant, cutting off the man’s hand as an act of revenge. This decapitation/recapitation sequence occurs in a separate diegetic world to the reality seen in Bel Air but it echoes the events referred to therein, enhancing the feeling that we’re lost in a phantasmagoria of sub-logical connections.

Beyond the narrative effect that’s created by the way that the events of Lovekill seem to echo and rhyme with those of Bel Air, the reexpression of the content of Bel Air - at least in thematic and general plot terms - provides an explicit example of the experimental, searching approach that Harkham’s blurb identifies as being present in the comics that have been included in Extended Play. In the case of Lovekill, I read the repetition of the heightened medieval setting, the presence of an abusive King, and the reiteration of a violent beheading as an experiment in the effect that could be created by depicting an established series of motifs with a much more “realist” visual approach. The duelling warriors of Lovekill are still drawn in a way that oscillates stylistically between panels but they tend towards remaining more grounded in their approximation to realistic anatomy, particularly when compared to what’s seen in Bel Air. Furthermore, the depiction of the decapitation of one of the warriors is far grimmer than what was seen in Bel Air 1, with multiple panels being devoted to the cleaving of flesh and bone, lavishing overt attention on an act that was conducted in the background of Bel Air in only a single panel. Perhaps it’s in this (assumed) wilful experimentation that we can see an example, on the comics page, of Terrell investigating how modulations in his cartooning can alter the visual tone of his stories, a lesson that he later employs in the comic Bel Air 2 when he juxtaposes a panel showing a cartoonish summary of an enraged monarch with an adjacent panel depicting the brutalisation of his prisoner in more explicitly realised detail, heightening the impact of the delivery of violence.

The woozy, dreamlike reading experience that Terrell cultivates with the fragmented narrative of Extended Play is well-supplemented by this mutable drawing style. Terrell’s thin line is predisposed to tracing out appealing curls and curves that are expressive in their allusion to what they represent without being beholden to a desire for realism. For instance, in a broadly cartoonish image of a young swimmer, Terrell takes care to mark out a believable jaw line for the character that gives the figure an impression of solidity and life when compared to the relatively flat cartooning previously used to depict this figure on the very same page. Such attention to observational nuance is threaded throughout Extended Play and is include between bursts of more exaggerated cartoonish linework that sits further away from ties to direct representation.

Aside from the dives into overtly psychedelic sequences or stylistic shifts that occurred about moments of violence or humour, I wasn’t able to detect any clear aesthetic/symbolic scheme that would allow me to easily explain most of Terrell’s transitions in drawing style, rather, these shifts came across as somewhat aleatoric in their utilisation, relying more on an artistic instinct gained from his various experiments in formal representation than on a fixed lexicon of symbolic linework meanings. While potentially frustrating to those used to a greater consistency of style within a single comic narrative, I found Terrell’s seemingly instinctual transitions in drawing approach to be a good fit for the dreamlike reading experience of the book; the “playfulness” suggested by the book’s title manifesting itself in his explorations for what modulation of line character can achieve in terms of lending mood, texture, and feeling to his imagery.

Terrell’s disavowal of a fixed mode of representation for his figures also feeds into a series of further aesthetic choices that function to present his work as “unfinished”: he leaves present the extrinsic marks around the periphery of his pages that look like the idling swirls of a hand testing the function of a pen; he has sections in his coloured comics where the colour drops out; and there are some occasions in his black and white comics where the preparatory pencil work is still viewable under the final inked lines. In a sequence mid-way through the comic titled Carnival 2, which shows a character remarking on the freedom offered by a new slate, Terrell leaves a pencilled under-image in which the same character asks who was responsible for the sudden presence of her hands, acknowledging herself as a drawing. In this case, the lack of “finish” allows for some commentary to be made on the metaphysical aspects of drawing by calling attention to the way that a drawn representation is both a symbol for the item being depicted and a trace of the hand of the maker. Beyond such self-conscious criticality of the comics medium, Terrell’s aesthetic approach is also suggestive of a desire to maintain a fluidity of identity for himself as an artist (the avoidance of a refined end product means that Terrell’s style is difficult to pin down) and for his characters who are freed from being strictly defined by a consistent drawn manifestation and thus a fixed physical or emotional reality.

This idea of the desire for a mutable identity - to not be forced to behave as expected - is something that recurs throughout the book. It crops up in the visual motif of characters being engulfed by flames - one character attempts to self-immolate but finds that the flames have no effect - and it appears laced throughout the interactions between the unnamed monarch of Bel Air and his vengeful manservant (the pair becoming different people - arguably reflections of each other - post the moment of literal revolution). Terrell’s loose attention to narrative coherence and the spare access he provides to the psychological states of his characters (at least via their dialogue - as I’ve already mentioned, his shifts in cartooning style do a good job of allowing his characters to be emotive in the way that they’re drawn panel-to-panel) also feed into this resistance of categorisation in that we only ever get an impressionistic sense of the events that the comics circle about.

Despite the nebulous nature of the events contained in Extended Play, the impressions that the reader is left with remain compelling: ideas such as the passions of youth, the cyclical nature of violence, the experience of ahistoricity, the longing for love and friendship, and the struggle to change the world (or even one’s self) crop up seemingly incidentally throughout the book’s six comics, resounding and interacting with a gentle echo rather than appearing as overtly expressed thematic concerns. Much like how the non-linear action of memory was represented in Carnival 1, the construction of a connective tissue throughout the book via these somewhat surreal repetitions of events and ideas works to similarly replicate how a mind caught up in a dream state might work to processes information by having ideas circulate and repeat, momentarily fixating on them and ruminating on their implications - not always in a logical fashion - before moving onto the next thought.

In Extended Play we get a collection of comics that read like a dream state transmission of ideas and memories about youth, love, friendship, and change. In amongst the strange narrative mix that Terrell concocts is also a bundle of ideas about the formal nature of the comics medium and the function of drawing, the book’s title providing an apt description for the way these notions are explored in a somewhat spontaneous, undirected manner. The combined result is a book that feels paradoxically ephemeral in its reading even as it captivates with an exhibition of cartooning that lingers long after the book has been put down.