Courtesy Ryan T Cook
Ruh-roh, baby acorn—you might be done for. Find 'White Glove' 1 and 2 on Amazon and the artist himself on Instagram at @ryan.t.cook.
Comic artist Ryan T. Cook keeps two books at his work station at all times: The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation and David Sylvester's Interviews with Francis Bacon. One, he says, reminds him that even though Disney now practically owns all entertainment, it has employed some of the most groundbreaking artists of all time, many of whom developed methods and styles that endure to this day; the other keeps him rooted in stylistic weirdness.
"[Francis] Bacon said that after the invention of the photograph, there's only so much art that should be done realistically," Cook tells SFR. "I like the idea of cutting past something that your brain tells you is good to something you can feel directly."
Cook's newest book, Blood Nut—the second in his White Glove series—feels like a gut punch. The bizarre story follows Enoch Squirrel, a sort of mashup of cartoon and comic tropes representative of the period between the 1920s and the 1990s, who ventures to the woods in search of a missing beaver lumberjack. There, he runs afoul of a pair of trees, one of whom tasks him with eating its acorns (or offspring, if you will—it's violent), there he winds up tasting of a demon acorn, there he becomes possessed. It's almost like the classic angel/devil on the shoulder bit as cast by a cypher-like lead, Enoch, and the trees, with one feeling like the timid voice of reason and morality, the other like a charming monster of some kind. Blood Nut ends on what might be perceived as a cliffhanger (no spoilers) and mercifully lacks shiny polish. This one's DIY and baffling—it's like Spiegelman collaborated with Crumb and the Fleischer brothers during a weekend ayahuasca trip to the desert, and it's a glorious not-for-kids combination of familiar themes told with distorted imagery.
Courtesy Ryan T Cook
Cook has called Santa Fe home for the last three years, but previously lived in Florida, where he picked up a film degree from Florida State University. His film work took him around the globe and even helped him make his own short, Lunchmeat. That project was a disaster, he says, but combining knowledge earned from a fucked-up film experience with a lifelong love of comics and animation led him to what he does now—comics, full-time.
"I've always loved drawing, and I'd fill up notebooks. I've always loved MAD Magazine and Calvin & Hobbes and newspaper comics," Cook says. "Then when I was in fourth grade, we had some cousins come visit—and these were the cool cousins who knew about Korn and Limp Bizkit and stuff—and they brought a copy of the first English-translated Shonen Jump."
A long-running compendium of serial manga chapters, the popular Japanese magazine made its way to America in the late 1990s, birthing an entire third-wave generation of manga and Japanimation fanatics. Cook was among them, but rather than the Shonen Jump siren call being about overall content or storytelling methodology, he gleaned instead the twin pillars of quality character design and reader interaction.
"American comics are meant to be read in a way where it can take you 20 minutes to read a page, whereas manga is meant to be scanned, almost, and read quickly," says Cook. "From there, I started going to a comics shop, and those guys turned me on to [comic artists like] Crumb, Clowes…all these dudes who are not in the Marvel/DC mainstream."
Cultivating stylistic and thematic elements from American heroes and Japanese execution, White Glove was born. Unlike previous Cook works, such as Skunk Ape (which ran on the Vice site some years ago), Glove makes use of what we might call a stream-of-consciousness style of writing. Cook says he spent months toiling with a notebook, crudely sketching stick figure stand-ins and letting his mind spill out on the page. Part of it, he says, comes from the dark timeline in which we've all been living since 2016; part of it just poured out of him.
"The writing is probably the most mysterious aspect to me," Cook explains. "There's this trouble in the comics industry with the regular issues—they're unsatisfying on their own. I want to move back to a place where anybody, if they pick up only one issue of something, it can stand on its own. That's what I'm trying to do with White Glove."
Blood Nut does stand on its own, even if gleaning its actual story takes more than one read-through. Still, for Cook it's about characters, and with three more books in the works and an ultimate ending already devised, there's room to grow them. Enoch, for example, seems a good and trusting sort out to help a missing person, but is his willingness to eat a living acorn, demonic or otherwise, hinting at a darker personality?
"The story's power comes from the character's perspective on what's happening," Cook tells SFR. "It's like, rather than seeing an alien invasion, try to see it through the character's eyes. I wish I could sound like a mastermind, but I feel like I'm not quite there yet."
Whatever point he's reached, it's exciting to see a DIY comic artist self-publishing absolute weirdness for not much more than the love of art.
"Any job would have been easier than comics," Cook says with a laugh. "I'm poor as a churchmouse. This is like a curse, but I don't have a choice. I have to draw."
For now, Cook will soon begin work on his newest series, Bootleg, a different approach and style than White Glove, and one rooted in real history about moonshiners. He plans to have the first volume out before the year closes, and the third episode of White Glove after that.
"One thing that separates me from the big comic producers is that they're the assembly line method: Someone writes it, someone pencils it, someone inks it," Cook says. "I'm the poor schmuck who had to learn all of these aspects for myself. Hopefully I can give the reader a focused vision."
Find White Glove on Amazon.
