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(Judging by Lightning Bolt's music, he's also one of those people who play drums because they can't stop hitting everything around them with sticks.) To borrow Robert Lowell's distinction between "raw" and "cooked" poetry, Chippendale's drawing is so raw it still seems to be alive on the page: "Ninja" is part of a series of his comics projects bearing the overall title "Maggots," and his favorite visual effect is zillions of tiny jabs of ink that all seem to be writhing. Chippendale, it appears, is one of those people who draw because they can't stop frantically making marks on everything within scribbling range. The point of the book is Chippendale's howling hyperspeed attack on every page with his pen - the kind of manifestation of pure style that has more to do with the contemporary visual art scene than with traditional comics and their ideals of clarity and representation. Still, the story and characters of "Ninja" aren't what it's really about.
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His reappearance, in an image that occupies a full page near the end of the book, seems like it's the conclusion of the story proper, but the book promptly shoots off in a different direction for a few pages, then abruptly ends. The ninja himself mostly vanishes after the opening sequence. There are recurring characters and settings, dramatic revelations, even broader thematic concerns, but if you're looking for a straightforward narrative, you're not going to find it. The plot? Well, "Ninja" probably has one somewhere in Chippendale's mind, but the parts that end up on the page don't make it terribly clear. In a couple of scenes involving a "circle room that can blink in and out of Grain's frequency," Chippendale literally intercuts what's happening in two different places, alternating eighth-of-an-inch-wide slivers of two simultaneous scenes, all the way down the page. Most pages have around 50 panels crammed onto them, and they're meant to be read in a sort of serpentine way: the top row of panels, left to right the next, right to left the next, left to right, and so on, so that not even moving your eyes can lift you out of the story. The individual pages of "Ninja" are enormous - 11 inches by 17 inches, roughly - and they're still not anywhere near big enough to hold the torrential spray of ideas and lines he fires at them. Chippendale, on the other hand, adores that stuff he revels in it, because he's a lot less concerned with expressing something "realistic" than with getting something more or less equivalent to his feverish triple-espresso internal state onto the page, and because, frankly, it's awesome. The last page of the original story went blank, the new part explains, because an evil scientist in the gigantic "eye" building in the heart of Grain had created a machine to "suck the very essence of the earth out," but it had been too strong, and absorbed reality.Ī lot of art-cartoonists' work has nothing to do with the ninjas, evil scientists and reality-absorbing machines of the mainstream comics they grew up on some of them take pains to distance themselves from fantasy and all of its clichés of violence without consequence, pseudoscience and good-vs.-evil oversimplification. The expanded "Ninja" doesn't so much continue Chippendale's juvenilia as use it as the entryway to a much broader survey of chaos in and around a small city called Grain whose residents' way of life is changing rapidly - partly because a little troll of a man named Albert Groin has bought its water supply and is insisting on changing the name of the city to Groin. (The original strips appear near the beginning of the book, with some new pages interleaved to flesh them out.) Over the course of five years, he went back to his old ninja comics and "finished" them - building the physically huge 120-page graphic novel "Ninja" around his sixth-grade project.
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Then, in the middle of the 12th one, he lost interest, and left the rest of the final page blank.Įighteen years later, Chippendale had become a professional artist, semi-famous as the drummer/vocalist of the unbelievably loud and spazzy rock duo Lightning Bolt, and one of the leading lights of Fort Thunder, an artistic collective and artists' space in Providence, R.I., that was torn down in 2001 and replaced by a grocery store's parking lot. ("And that's the end of another mission," most of them conclude.) The strips had a whole lot of panels on each page, but he drew all the characters at tiny scale, with basically no backgrounds. When Brian Chippendale was in sixth grade, he drew a bunch of little one- and two-page comic strips about a ninja doing ninja things - clobbering bad guys with his massive ninja skills, running and hiding, collecting treasures from his exploits and bringing them back to his secret headquarters.
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