A man and a woman—the former a host, the latter his guest—sit together for tea. They talk about a new menace in town, creeping around at night and invading people’s homes, “collecting things.” The woman has heard about this ‘nightwalker,’ and she doesn’t seem particularly concerned, only intrigued. She asks the man to explain his process. 

Man: When the moon is rich and ripe, he’ll step outside for a walk. 

Woman: In what direction does he go?

Man: He moves so his shadow is visible in front of him…

(The woman looks on, blank, perhaps unnerved.)

Man: He picks a house and with his hand knocks on the door.

Woman: And when someone answers?

Man: He steps inside and hurts people.

The scene, of course, is a perfectly classical set-up, a strong evocation of turn-of-the-20^th-Century horror. One easily imagines the rest of the story: the Nightwalker appearing, upending any ostensible sense of homely safety that the two acquaintances had previously thought they enjoyed. But this is where “Nightwalker” (2004), included in Distant Ruptures, the recent New York Review Comics collection of comics and other ephemera from the first decade of the cartoonist CF’s prolific career¹, sets itself apart from the narratives it seeks to evoke: it ends just then and there, refusing the reader its implicit thrills, creating a new set of implications in their stead. Drawn in blank, uniformly-weighted linework, its two pages seek little more than brute communication – prompting the reader to read into what little detail does exist. “He steps inside and hurts people,” for instance, is an almost childlike choice of phrasing: the verb hurts is so blank, so matter-of-fact—certainly in comparison to this purple evocation of a rich and ripe moon—that the injury sounds insubstantial and absolute at the same time. 

And what of the panel where the man, when describing the nightwalker’s visible shadow? As he speaks, the man’s own shadow appears visible before him: is this a hint that the man himself is the nightwalker, that what appeared to be idle chitchat will soon end in bloody misery? Or was it an act of mere demonstration? Slowly, then suddenly, the reader becomes entirely unsure whether details are recontextualized, inferred, or plainly projected, made up outright; slowly, then suddenly, the reader is hurled into a sense of nothing short of sheer danger.

Similarly beguiling is the 2001 short “Hearing Loss” (compiled in the zine “Semen”), which introduces us to Lucas, a knuckle-walking quasi-anthropomorph with a dolphin-like rostrum, seeking help for his titular affliction. The plot, once again, is simple: Lucas leaves his room, walks around the city of White-Block, and reaches a citadel; he climbs up the stairs and silently entreats a monk-like authority figure for help, but, as the monk speaks to him, Lucas cannot hear him at all. Aptly, for one of the earliest works in the collection, it is fairly crudely drawn, sparse detail rendered in uninked pencil, which carries the weight of helplessness well: the first page of the comic sees Lucas crouching, arms outstretched, then looking in all directions around him; though the caption tells us he is on the outskirts of White-Block, we see none of the space, only a blank background. There is an unshakable lack of mooring that stays even as the spatiality becomes clear. CF concludes on a surprisingly moving moment: as the man-of-authority correctly diagnoses the problem—a panel that CF slices quadrilaterally, leaving half blank for extra disorientation—Lucas simply climbs on this authority figure’s back and whispers “Help me” into his ear. It is oddly emotionally impactful precisely because it is the endpoint: it is not clear that Lucas can be helped at all, nor that there will be any respite. By ending on this plea, CF indicates precisely what we do not want to think about: that not all pleas are answered.

The one-page “Lone Disguiser” (2010), meanwhile, attempts an opposite trajectory, as the titular solo operative, having ejected himself from the now-ruined craft in which he’d initially traveled, hurtles down from the sky into “enemy airspace.“ Though drawn with more textural care than “Nightwalker” or “Hearing Loss”—its blue pen-strokes change weight between the wisps of cloud and the heavy crags of volcanic rock in the distance, and a second color (yellow, though in the original publication, the inaugural issue of the Mould Map anthology, it was a much harsher risograph orange) is applied, whether as literal accentuation of objects or as more pop-art-inflected swirls and ben-day dots—the structural approach remains the same. Again I am compelled to ask what a more conventional storyteller might’ve done with such a premise where tension appears almost inherent: certainly, we would have learned who this operative is and who his enemy might be. Surely we would be provided with some of his insight regarding the hazards of his operation, especially as he falls, largely helpless, toward hostile ground. In all of these regards, “Lone Disguiser” is stripped of drama. Its narration is perfectly dry and technical, sparsely detailed; what’s more, it’s exceedingly likely that the lone disguiser himself had anticipated the destruction of his craft. What is left, then? Not a story so much as a step-by-step report. As he finally activates his ‘phase inverter’ and renders himself invisible, we see a progression that is almost the inverse of “Nightwalker”: an ostensible sense of danger ultimately disproven.

Let us consider, in this context, the two pieces that appear before and after “Lone Disguiser.” Immediately before this comic is a spot illustration from 2010, depicting a technician sitting in front of a large transmission console, twisting one of its knobs. This illustration, it should be stated, is maybe the most polished piece of work in the entire book: its marker coloring is carefully applied, its detailing precise. The character himself is an interesting demonstration of artistic lineage of a sort that is often absent in other CF works; his features, in particular his protruding nose, readily calls Moebius (an early influence of CF’s) to mind. After “Lone Disguiser,” meanwhile, appears a duo of silkscreen prints from 2007, titled “Brown Door 1” and “Brown Door 2.” These neat, flat geometries rendered in harsh, uniformly-weighted pen present us with an interesting inner contrast: there is no action here, only a downtime scene, which would have been calm if not for the actual contents – what we’re looking at is a torture room, stocked with various weapons, some manual, others mechanical. Whereas the scene in the 2010 illustration is sedate in a bureaucratic fashion—no implication of drama, only a purity of function—the “Brown Door” illustrations have a sense of menace reminiscent of Martin Vaughn-James: sure, these torture devices are inactive and clean right now, but a figure in the background, stern-faced, stands to remind us that they can be switched on at any moment; any subdued mood is merely a façade.

The reason I find myself most compelled by the aforementioned works is their fragmentary nature; it would be exceedingly easy to imagine them as pages torn out of longer books, to project detailing and resolutions, but at the same time it would take away from the very exhilaration of their ephemeral nature. I can’t help but view this as a direct result of publishing circumstances: many of the works in the collection were self-published as tear-sheets, flyers, or mini-comics, produced to be expendable and disposable; numerous others were published in small-press anthologies. These are low-budget formats which, for better or worse, are more or less designed to appear and then disappear, usually with little ceremony. CF, it might be argued, developed this proclivity for the vignette purely out of constraint, forcing him, in these cases, to insinuate drama into the invisible.

Not that the cartoonist buckles to dramatic convention in his longer pieces showcased in the collection. In “Del. X” (2004), one of the protagonists kills a soldier and steals his vehicle, and, together with his friend, they try to hide from the authorities. In the end, as they are caught, one of them simply declares: “Well, we are caught and we are in prison. It means we have a private ability to imagine another situation. We’ll do this with grace, and diligence.” And they do – or so we must assume. The easy choice, of course, would’ve been to end the story right then and there, but, instead, CF gives us eight more panels—two on the same page, and the whole of the following page—wherein the two boys simply stand still, facing the reader. CF manually redraws each panel to underscore the passage of time, but we are not shown what another situation might be. Imagination is all well and good, but, in the end, it is useless. There is only stillness.

Elsewhere in Distant Ruptures, “Dominion Ambulance” (2010) opts for a mode of narrative delirium: the protagonist—a paramedic for a private ambulance company by day, a burglar by night—receives a call about a sick patient, who, when she opens the door, is initially uncomprehending; “oh yes,” she says as the narrator explains that the ambulance got a call, as if remembering some matter of little consequence, “I’ve been sick.“ Once the ambulance takes her away, the patient is hooked up to a resuscitation device, only for her condition to deteriorate, at which point she is not hospitalized but put up in a hotel (and a filthy one at that), where she eventually dies. The second movement of the story shows the protagonist returning to the woman’s house to rob it, only to find her bereaved husband there; the protagonist then steals a goblet and takes a drink from the bathroom sink, where he sees death behind him in the mirror, narrating in conclusion, “I know the reaper is always watching.” 

“Dominion Ambulance” is noteworthy, among other things, as the sole collaborative work in the collection, and its divergence is palpable: Leomi Sadler’s coloring serves as a striking contrast to CF’s own, the former being largely ‘polite’ (flat, abiding by its geometrical outlines) while Sadler offers up an acrid, murky palette that is entirely willing to stain CF’s surfaces and obscure the detailing. It’s an approach I can only describe as ‘sweaty,’ which perfectly suits the nightmarish denial-of-function at play throughout the story: the paramedic unbeholden to any manner of Hippocratic oath, the abandon with which he takes care of the patient – there is no sadistic glee here, only a stoic resignation to a fallen world.

Resignation is a recurring force in CF’s work, especially where higher powers are concerned, as several of the comics sport an undercurrent of transcendence, as the protagonist deals in ‘earthly’ matters only to come upon a sudden vision of transcendent forces. In “O. Control” (2003), Quiet Grace tends to his garden when he encounters, briefly, the otherworldly figure known as R.P. (“Rare Power”); the big-headed protagonist of “Crate Cauldron” opens a mysterious crate on the behest of a mysterious, religious-looking figure, releasing a demonic apparition which prompts the mysterious figure to remove its mechanical face and send cables surging forward, tearing a hole in reality and disappearing into thin air.

To CF, these moments of transcendence are defined by their fleeting nature, and by definition not much must remain of them after their passing. “I have to go check on my dog,” says Quiet Grace; “Back to work,” says the “Crate Cauldron” laborer. One thinks here of Jewish polymath Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s interpretation of the first verse of the Book of Genesis: that “the world is not God, and God is not in the world – God is beyond the world, beyond any reality that has to do with the concepts of man and beyond the needs and interests that stem from the reality of man in the world” – the true divine is in truth fundamentally inaccessible, defined by its separateness from earthly life. But, where Leibowitz concludes that “the ultimate essence is God, and the world (and man within it) is of secondary importance” and that “the Creation in Genesis rejects outright any naturalistic or humanist view of belief in God,” CF takes the opposite stance: the earthly task wins out. This is not an issue of great internal strife, no histrionic monologuing about crises of faith – much like the rest of the cartoonist’s work, it is a premise accepted quietly and without much of a fuss.

Artistically, “O. Control” is particularly striking: for the most part, CF renders the narrative in a simplistic, two-dimensional style from a largely fixed side-scrolling angle, with simplistic figure work that calls Em Frank or Tara Booth to mind. The page that shows R.P.’s momentary manifestation is entirely disruptive, operating in a mode of overwhelm: gone is the tight grid — instead, the otherworldly figure with a bulbous Kremlin-esque turret on his head is surrounded by abstract shapes and curves drawn in pens of various colors, snatches, and fragments of sentences that do not cohere, swatches of paint applied with the cartoonist’s thumb. The impact makes one think of the aesthetic leap in Ron Regé’s spiritualist works: a vision of true divinity is overpowering, approaching the incoherent.

That this page was drawn on ruled notebook paper only increases the impact: it’s entirely possible that this was a repurposed odds-and-ends sketchbook page with the narrative built around it, but, within this context, one is once again forced to consider that sense of confrontational anti-intuition inherent to the cartoonist’s approach – this time on the textural level. The mainstream-commercial approach to art encompasses within it the unwavering belief that the artist and the materials they use must be invisible; the work must speak for itself to such a degree that the person engaging with it forgets that it is, in fact, a work–inorganic, cautiously and mindfully arranged–as narrative immersion is worshiped, not its components. CF, for his part, blatantly bristles against this, as physicality, of both the artistic process and the finished product, is underscored. See, too, in this regard, the heading for “Dominion Ambulance,” which reads “Dominion Ambulance / experimental comic / Pentel lead sucks”. This latter remark, though playful, almost throwaway, either assumes that the reader already has an interest in the materials employed or, if they do not, forces them nonetheless to consider that a work of art is, in fact, work². It’s an interesting gambit of dual cognizance, asking the reader to consider the comic as, simultaneously, something that is merely artificially wrought and as something that is alive. 

But to discuss CF in such rigidly-analytic terms, as I have for the past two-thousand-odd words, is to ignore that much of his work is extremely funny as well. His trilogy of “Bat-Man” one-pagers (2005) is a strong gag that focuses not on the otherworldly-creature-of-the-night portrayals of artists like Todd McFarlane or Kelley Jones so much as on the points where these histrionics fail; “I’m a bat,” says the superhero after the Riddler tells him that the doorknob he’d just touched was poisoned and his arm will soon rot off, “I don’t need hands” – only for CF to cut away to a sequence of his hand growing limp and ultimately useless. Many of the cartoonist’s gag comics are constructed in this manner: panel grids of usually-uniform sizes, all scrawled in loose pen, not offering any detail more than dictated by mechanical necessity.

Often, CF opts for a comedy of absurdist cruelty in Distant Ruptures, as is the case in the laconically-titled “C” (2003), wherein a traveler comes upon a person he thinks is an inn-keeper, only for the latter to abduct him and keep him sedated. By adhering to a barrage-like square grid—the comic’s two pages sport a total of 44 panels of equal size—the cartoonist establishes a neutral, level-headed pace and a tone that clearly foreshadows Liam Cobb: between the intentional superficiality of the abductor’s actions (he doesn’t keep his actions hidden, nor is there any clear end-goal to them) and his over-the-top mannerisms (his face melts, warps, bulges), the tone is one of untethered senselessness, horror and humor becoming indistinguishable. 

To those of us who engage in criticism as an identification (or assumption) of artistic lineage, CF appears particularly tricky: in the interview in the back of Distant Ruptures, conducted by Rob Goyanes, CF cites Moebius and Robert Crumb as early influences, yet the key components of both—the heavily-wrought hatching compounded with gleeful and often tasteless taboo-busting, the turn-of-the-20^th century-revisionist aesthetics—are, at first glance, absent. It is easier to recognize, in this collection, the creators who came after CF: the smooth, tight pencils of “Out to Bomb” (2006) hint at Connor Willumsen; in the blank, upwards-looking face of the silkscreen print “Strand Chamber,” one identifies a distinct resemblance to Tyler Landry. But even these connections feel fleeting and tentative, as the cartoonist is bound to change styles before too long.

“All there is is pulling / backwards or forwards,” writes the cartoonist in a minor strip titled “Sand” (2000); it is formatted as a quote, perhaps a line from a song, though I cannot find where it is from. I have stated in the past that my ideal work of art is something that I do not entirely understand or cannot reverse-engineer. To its credit, Distant Ruptures has such works in spades. Its plots are abrupt and fidgeting; its characters are almost mechanical in their narrative functions. A disorienting collection that appears to originate purely from within itself, it refuses to surrender itself to the shackles of a thesis statement and is tied together only by its own structural counterintuition. Whether original or borrowed, the sentiment holds: with grace and diligence – sometimes you just need to let yourself be pulled and see where that leads you. If you’re lucky, you may just find yourself in another situation, better than the one you’re in. If not… I suppose you might just have to wait.

1. Though it covers earlier material, Distant Ruptures is, of course, CF’s second collection of odds and ends, following the 2013 collection Mere, from the now-defunct Picturebox.
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2. It should be mentioned that in this regard Distant Ruptures appears almost oxymoronic, as a large, lavish hardcover compiling work pointedly designed to be fleeting. Arguably this is true of most short story collections, but there is a palpable tension between the constant textural shifts—”Crate Cauldron” (2008, a rare reprint from the seventh Kramers Ergot) appears between a Xeroxed show flyer, inky and graphite-smudged, and the pointedly-messy tear-sheet two-pager “Younglord,” printed on pink paper—and the uniform ‘respectability’ of the New York Review presentation. ↩︎