A two-part exhibition opening on Saturday night at both the Artisphere and the Arlington Arts Center brought the pop culture influence of comic books to these two established art venues. "Party Crashers: Comic Book Culture Invades the Art World" puts storybook alternative comics on the gallery wall, and makes a strong case that this medium has much more to say than 'superheroes will save the world.'

Like the name of the exhibition says, this is something of a party. The metaphor may have more to do with crashing the scene of the fine art gallery and its expectations for what should be hanging on the walls; but most of these artists do want to have a good time, or at least focus their art on the good parts of life.

Fittingly, the opening night party had a bit of whimsy to it. There were 'live burlesque figure drawings,' which consisted of models dressed in flapper-like outfits modeling for anyone who wanted to sketch them. And on the new 'Art on the ART bus,' a regulation green-and-white ART bus outfitted with placards of original works of art, an artist played the banjo and sang as the bus made its inaugural run from the Artistphere to the Arlington Arts center. The Art on the ART bus will now be embarking on various bus routes around Arlington.

The two venues' shows have slightly different focuses. At the Arlington Arts Center, most of the works come in a comic book format––the block pictures and bubble text you'd usually associate with comics; these works are all included to say that comic drawings can be viewed as fine art. The Artisphere exhibition works in an opposite fashion––it showcases mostly canvas paintings that incorporate elements of the comic style, like bold outlines and text bubbles.

Deb Sokolow, one of the artists featured at the Arlington Arts Center, tells a story through a sequential structure of pictures and text. But her work doesn't fit into square little boxes. Instead, pages ripped from a spiral-bound notebook and pasted on the wall in 'A Beautiful Mind' schizophrenic fashion tell tales that spring from an overactive imagination prone to conspiracy theories and sidebars. Whatever happened to the Pentagon (restaurant)? details a shady Chicago restaurant that suspiciously doesn't have spaghetti (or any food, for that matter), despite advertising "We specialize in spaghetti." The narrator describes her interactions with the "lackluster" staff  in this hole-in-the-wall eatery that lead her to believe the store is a front for the mob.

Another work by Sokolow recounts the plot of Scarface, with little red arrows leading to tangential visual explorations of the movie's implications, such as screenplay writer Oliver Stone's friendship with Fidel Castro (which, according to the narrator's imagination, includes "man-dates" of cigar-rolling parties and poetry readings). Sokolow's creations reflect a larger theme of this show: the cataloguing of strange human interactions, with incredulity and humor. It's easy to spend a lot of time perusing different comics, whether on the wall or in book form, because they incorporate a personal, literary element not usually seen at art exhibitions.

Jeffrey Brown has a shelf in the Arlington Arts Center gallery with a half dozen of his books that use the comic format to document his own life like "Every Girl is the End of the World For Me," which describes incredibly intimate moments with the women in his life––from the awkward to the adorable. In her comic panel titled Why I Do Autobio Comics, Rina Ayuyange explains the drive to document one's personal life in comics in the text accompanying the pictures: "People ask why it's necessary/ It's because I need to remember––/I need to remember that there were good, great moments."

These explicitly personal works differ from the Artisphere's show, which focuses more on large-scale paintings.  Anna U. Davis' A Swedish Midsummer Feast depicts a fantastical world populated with grotesque beings enjoying a party over a picnic table featuring beer and mini frankfurters topped with little Swedish flags. The dark outlines and blocks of color in Davis' work, combined with its humorous nature, seem to reflect the influence that comics have had on the American art world. Similarly, Jim Houser's In Decline consists of rectangular panel paintings of creatures that look like they could live on a Shins album cover. The three dimensional arrows sticking into the wall seem to be torn from the pages an Acme catalogue.

There's an impressive expanse of work included in these two shows, which play nicely off each other to say that comics deserve to be treated both as literary and fine art, and that the influence of comic style has gone a lot further than Lichtenstein or Warhol in the American art world. 

Party Crashers will show at the Artisphere until February 13, and at the Arlington Arts Center until January 16.