Ellen Forney exercise

I think what I love most about Ellen Forney is that her comix satisfy both my desire for beautiful art and "edgy"/confessional text. Her drawing style seems to me to be conventionally "good" or "pretty"--the people are good-looking in a standard illustrative way, the lines are very clean, the style is, well, stylish. While I love underground comics--this is, in fact, the only kind of comics I know deeply--I am often unable to get into work by artists who use a deliberately ugly or messy or disturbing illustration style, even though I'm very drawn to text that is deliberately subversive, disturbing, etc. (And here I'll say that I'm a little horrified to realize that I "assigned" you--or you chose, but from a list I provided--a book with as much salacious content as I Love Led Zeppelin. It's really dirty!)

I think part of what makes Forney so interesting is that thing we keep coming back to: juxtaposition. In her work, a very lovely drawing accompanies what might otherwise be considered text that is repulsive (in the sense that people could be repulsed by it). I think the palatable prettiness of the image sort of saves AND heightens the intensity of the word.

So now I'm asking myself, how does this connect to what I like in poetry? No answers from me on that front just yet, but what about you? How palatable do you like your comix art to be? What about the text?

And for an exercise, try doing a very "pretty" or "tidy" comic for an "ugly" or "messy" poem (yours or, perhaps more fun, someone else's). Or try a very messy or ugly style to accompany a poem that is traditional...and traditionally beautiful.