Paul Hornschemeier's Let Me Be|Perfectly Clear

Hornschemeier makes me feel all funny inside. His collection of short works, Let Me Be|Perfectly Clear features expertly drafted parodies of the current indie-comics luminaries: Ware, Clowes, Burns, and more. Hornschemeier is a loving critic, however, because he replicates their stylistic tics and somehow throws away the rest--it is like he is making fun of the tics more than the works or the authors.

Let me try to put it another way. The much-discussed Obama cover of the New Yorker is supposed to take a series of mental images and make them solid, and by doing so expose their flimsiness as solids. Similarly, Hornschemeier uses Ware's little boxes and makes them feel trite. The effects alone are revealed, at last, to just be effects. Finally, we can appreciate that Ware is more than the shortlist of stereotypes he conjures, because we can sense something missing from Hornschemeier's re-creations.

I'm not exactly sure what Hornschemeier wants to get out of these exercises. Several times in the book he sets himself up to be viewed as an art critic. In Perfectly Clear he has a section labeled like a portfolio of artwork--it is a parody of a parody of postmodern art, jokes we've heard a million times before about polar bears in snowstorms. This is why I feel funny inside. I think as a comics critic he's taught me something about comics today, but I am only interested in his work as criticism.