An interview with Aaron Lange about his "outrage porn" collection, HUGE

Leading up to the election, Aaron Lange, a comic writer and illustrator, didn't have a really pressing urge to illustrate his hatred of Donald Trump. Like most "liberal” people, he took cues from his friends, from the media, from common sense -- all of which assured him that he had nothing to fear from this, to use his own words, “narcissistic charlatan and pizza hut pitchman.” 

On November 9, 2016, when the smoke cleared and the dark-side stood victorious, Lange spent most of the day in bed, under a blanket, wishing it all away. The sinister liberal agenda of not being complete dicks to each other had been pussy-grabbed by the supreme dicklord himself. Like the Scottish newspaper so poetically made clear recently, life had turned into a dystopian alternate reality. Lange eventually got out of bed. Life inevitably moved on, and when it did Lange went straight to the drawing board. The putrescent obscenities below are what spewed forth. 

Lange, 35, has been drawing for as long as he can remember, and has been focused on making comics since graduating college. His comics, among them Trim and Romp, can be heavy on obscenity, satire, and Lange's own absurd past experience (they're all available for purchase here). His recent collection of anti-Trump cartoons, entitled HUGE, is something else entirely. The election results made Lange terribly ill. These drawings are infused with the same cynical bile that crawled up the throats of anyone with an ounce of reason and empathy in their heart on November 9th.

I found HUGE in a tiny but dependable comic shop, on the mixed recommendation of the attendant (“The drawings are cool, it’s just… Well, he really hates Trump, you know?”). All but three of the images were made after the election results came in. You can buy a copy here for six bucks, and I hope you do because the proceeds go towards shoring up Planned Parenthood for the fight against orange Hitler. While no one would call these drawings a "mature" reaction to Donald Trump's victory, it's clear how cathartic they might have been for the illustrator. Next time you want to cry about a bully who won't leave you alone, try drawing their face at the tip of the grossest, most decrepit schlong you can draw. It won't stop them, but you might realize that laughter and disdain are much more useful than tears. 

Below are some questions Lange answered about HUGE, and his general response to these trying times. 

Your drawings for this collection are explicit to the point where its both hilarious and disturbing. Looking back now to when you made them, how do you feel that style connects to what was going through your head?

A word being tossed around a lot right now is "normalize". As annoying as that is, it is also appropriate. As I write this it is Jan. 11 and Trump is not yet in office. So the drawings in HUGE were done very recently. But already in that short time Trump kind of has been "normalized". You wake up, make coffee, read the news, and see all manner of outrageous and horrifying business and just kinda nod and go about your day. I'm glad I was able to capture and express my total shock and disgust immediately following the election results. It is important to remember what a gross aberration this whole climate is.  

Would you call these drawings satire or something else?

That's a very good question. Though they serve some of the same purposes as satire they don't exactly fit that bill. I'm not, for example, really doing anything clever, or addressing particular issues and policies. I think they share certain qualities with some of the more politicized works of the Surrealists, but that label is also insufficient. I'm sure my critics would label it "outrage porn" and they just might be correct. 

Some of these drawings include severe derogatory language, like “spic,” and “faggot,” writ large, at one point literally embedded into the president-elect’s hair. These are words Trump has never been confirmed to have used, but which you seem to feel are tied to him in some way. What led you to use such emotionally charged words?

When Trump says "build a wall" he is in effect saying "spic". When he attacks civil rights such as gay marriage, he is in effect saying "faggot". He's too savvy to say these words, in public at least, but his meaning is not lost on anybody.  

Judging by your website and a google search I don’t see much other politically geared work. Is this new territory for you?

I've certainly never done anything this blatantly political before. There's a vague politic to my work in general, but it is a bit oblique. On this issue I didn't want to skirt around, be ironic, tongue in cheek, or whatever; I wanted my stance on the matter crystal clear, and etched in stone, so to speak. 

Is political cartooning territory you plan to continue exploring as Trump begins his reign of terror?

God, I don't know. It's really so boring. It's such a low level discourse. Being opposed to Trump and what he stands for just strikes me as so obvious. It's such a no-brainer, Trump is so transparent. This whole thing is very bad Science Fiction. 

What do you think about left-leaning folks who say we should give Trump a chance?

They need to wake up. Look, I didn't like Bush, didn't agree with him, etc. But at his core I don't think Bush is a bad person. A stupid, spoiled frat boy? Sure. But I don't think he's some destructive monster. Trump is beyond politics. This isn't a WWII guy like Bob Dole, who's got some old fashioned opinions like your grandpa. Trump is most likely mentally ill to some degree.  

Much has been said about golden showers and Trump lately. What do you think of the recent allegation that he hired escorts to decorate a Moscow hotel bed with piss because Barack and Michelle Obama had slept in it? Any plans for an illustration from you on this unconfirmed yet possibly historic event?

I find this to be very dubious. We don't need to make shit up about Trump. Jesus, he does or says something awful every fucking day. This "pee gate" horseshit has the makings of a Leftist birther movement. I just don't believe it's true. Look, I'm sure Trump has done nasty things with prostitutes, and frankly I don't care about that. The red flag, for me, is that this water sports session was conducted on some bed that the Obama's once slept in. It sounds so made up. Also, that would be a symbolic act. I don't think Trump is capable of abstract thought and things like symbolism. He is a brutally literal person, incapable of reflection.

Again, you can check out Aaron Lange's comics and others at The Comix Company's website, or just go directly to the Huge page. Today Donald Trump will be inaugurated. Here's to cathartic immaturity, and four years of political and artistic resistance. 

Nameless, or, "Grant Morrison Just Wants to Watch Them Bleed"

What we all love about Grant Morrison is how resolved he is to make the traditionaly trashy or silly into something profound. Nothing new. Everyone wants to, and only a few are successful, and only one does it, effectively, with the calculated use of gigantic weaponized sperm cells.

Thus far, Nameless isn't that. From the three issues I've read there's not yet any attempt at philosophizing the esoteric references to current events, modernist architects, and ancient religions he slaps on every other page. Yeah, it's all there, that encyclopedic emesis Morrison loves to spew at you, and it's not unenticing to look into every bit of triviality, but it's so obviously not what's on display here. It's a vehicle for what ultimately feels like a gory sci-fi body-horror B-movie with culture. In short, it's pretty fun.

I honestly don't think Grant knows anymore.

The world, unlike a lot of Grant Morrison's settings, isn't a future filled with the noise of abruptly changing information structures, and no one is falling into their own mindhole and discovering glowing discs of knowledge that forever alters their world view. It may as well be set in the present, albeit a present where, for reasons not yet explained, lizard people and naga stalk the land and suburbs, making families happily massacre themselves, and hunting after our square jawed and stubbled protagonist, named Nameless (because names have power, he says) after he nabs a mystical key on behalf of his client.

Brave and handsome

Nameless is an occultist for hire. He's like a John Constantine in need of a long relaxing bath and some benzedrine. When we meet him he's recalling December, a "cunt of a month", when things started to get markedly Lovecraftian. None of Constantine's reflectiveness here; No philosophy. He needs money so he's doing this thing and now there's fish people trying to rip out his throat, then there's a fucking lady in a veil with a bulbous fleshy parasite on her face, and he knows her pretty well and he's so over her shit already, and it feels like just another fucked up day in his happy life. Nameless, through all three issues, retains this air of haggard wisdom, always knowing at least a bit about what's happeing, though not enough to save his or his company's asses.

The people who want the key, and who eventually get the key after some intense effort on the part of Nameless, turns out to be a secretive and privately funded corporation run by a billionaire named Darius. Darius, appearing only mildly Asian and generally smiling, wants to save the planet from a hulking fuck of a space boulder named Xibalba, after the Mayan underworld. He's at once an altruist and a capitalist and someone who uses his money to advance human knowledge. A mildly asian Elon Musk, in other words. Darius even floats around remotely from a base located on the dark side of the moon using a video-conferencing hele-drone, as we all know Elon Musk would love to do.

Xibalba's not just an asteroid. This thing is marked on a long flat side with a rune the size of a mountain. It's apparent that the asteroid does not simply intend to smash into the Earth like any amateur space rock: It has a payload, and Darius employs Nameless to find out exactly what the world is getting into, and how to stop it.

That's issue one. It's not much, to be honest. Issue two and three, however, is when the series begins hitting it's stride. Nameless and a team composed by Darius go to space to meet Xibalba headon and deploy drones with sensory equipment to explore what turns out to be an asteroid full of alien structures, "brutalist" in design and obviously not meant for children. Shit goes down, eyeballs with giant talons attack, and Grant Morrison smashes and reassembles the narrative in that special, and in this instance creepy, Grant Morrison way.

In a nutshell

Sometimes the art, done by Chris Burnham, feels like Quitely. Not to knock the artist, he's fantastic. There are some clever panel sequences, and the panels depicting the journey of the drones through that brutal alien architecture are done with a real sense for how massive and lonely celestial objects really must be. Xibalba seems not to be of exclusively extraterrestrial or supernatural origin, but a mixture of both, in a way that implies that maybe the two were one and the same all along (shades of The Invisibles here). Chris Burnham gets both across, with covers and splash panels alluding to creatures that reside in lonely H.R. Geiger space fortresses, but look like amorphous demons made of shapeshifting muscle tissue, and that do things to human bodies straight out of medieval Hell.

Whether the book will reach for some big-deal psychological or philosophical conclusion has yet to be seen, but I have a feeling Grant Morrison just wants to rip people apart and destroy civilization for a bit. Looks like Morrison's taking all his occult and science fiction training, and using it to make an irreverent, gory, AND clever monster movie. In Nameless #3 we get a glimpse of Xibalba floating on the horizon, it's ominous rune staring down at us all, and we just know it's getting ready to make life interesting in painful and horrifying ways. Honestly, can't wait.