To begin with, Robert’s parents strongly disapprove of his career choice. The cartoonist played by Anders Danielsen Lie in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, who is questioned about the sexism of his comics , is more like the present-day cartoonists I know than those depicted in Funny Pages.īesides a few odd outbursts of violence, Funny Pages deploys the same circa-1991 archetypes of Daniel Clowes’s Art School Confidential (adapted for the screen in 2006 by Crumb and Ghost World filmmaker Terry Zwigoff) that appeared alongside other comics about snotty aspiring cartoonists (like Dan Pussey) in Clowes’s long-running series, Eightball. But Kline’s movie feels like it takes place in some alternate reality, dominated by the snarky male back-issue “bin divers” of yesteryear, and devoid of anything and anyone that doesn’t support this retrograde vision. Today, the majority of aspiring cartoonists at the School of Visual Arts in New York are women there’s been an explosion of Japanese comics and international webcomics seemingly every bookstore now has graphic novels, young-adult comics, art comics, nonfiction comics, experimental comics, and everything in between. The movie is set in the present day, yet the cartooning world it depicts is firmly that of the 1990s.Ī lot has happened in comics in the last three decades. There’s an anachronistic feel to Owen Kline’s Funny Pages, which follows an aspiring 17-year-old cartoonist, Robert (Daniel Zolghadri), as he leaves his suburban comfort to pursue a life of real grit and hone his artistic chops on the outskirts of Trenton, New Jersey. This article appeared in the Septemedition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing.
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