Terminal Exposure: Comics, Sculpture and Risky Behavior

Veteran artist McMillan debuts with a quirky career-spanning collection of his surreal 1970s comics that showcases his restless creative energy and outside-the-box ethos. Throughout, he explicitly eschews commercial considerations: “I don’t have to become an artist like everyone else. Once you call yourself something... there you go! Into the dumper!” In his autofiction strips, McMillan similarly presents an innate aversion to the status quo (and a particular passion for mountain climbing). In one episode, he recalls his 1956 stint in the army, when he used a weekend pass to board a random bus with the goal of “intentional disorientation,” thus establishing a penchant for the “absolute pleasure of... existential fog” and making it thereafter a “lifelong priority.” In the arch and cartoony “Close Calls I Have Known,” he narrowly escapes a terrier running after his bike, getting caught peeping into a girl’s window, and the dreadful fate of taking an assistant manager position in an office. Intermittent photos of his sculptures showcase more of his playful whimsy. The scrawled lines of his early underground comix evolve into stylized and topsy-turvy perspectives in the 1990s and beyond, but his affinity for surrealism remains. Adventurous readers will enjoy the wit and weirdness of McMillan’s phantasmagorical funhouse. (July)