CR Holiday Interview #11 -- Timothy Hodler On In The Shadow Of No Towers
If Tim Hodler isn't my favorite critical voice of the last half-decade, he's in the top three. The New York City-based writer and editor is part of the Comics Comics gang via his participation in The Ganzfeld. I think he has a way of sliding up and over the rhetorical pile-ups that accumulate around various comics works and getting at their heart in clear, forceful language. I was delighted that we ended up picking Art Spiegelman's In The Shadow Of No Towers for our chat. For obvious reasons, that book will be remembered as a comics publication tied into this decade. -- Tom Spurgeon
TOM SPURGEON: Tim, I'm going to apologize in advance for a few more questions of set-up than usual. First of all, can I ask you about your personal experience with 9/11? Were you in the city? What are the memories that stick out to you now about that time just after, your own reaction and what you observed from others?
TIMOTHY HODLER: Oh, good! If there's one thing I've learned over the last eight years, it's that everyone loves hearing about what you were doing on 9/11. My fairly typical for a New York City resident story: I was lying in bed, listening to my clock radio and procrastinating the start of my work day when I heard a loud bang that may or may not have been one of the planes hitting the World Trade Center. I lived in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn at the time, and don't really know if I was actually close enough to hear the collision, but when I got up and turned on the television, CNN was reporting that an airplane had hit the towers. At first, it didn't really sink in as anything more than a freak accident, and I was late for work, so I just kind of goggled for a moment before showering and heading for the subway. When I learned that the trains into Manhattan weren't running, I thought, "Great, one more thing is going wrong." Then I noticed that everyone on the street seemed incredibly frightened, and I began to realize the magnitude of what had happened.
Fortunately, I did not know anyone personally who died in the attacks, but like everyone else in New York, the following days and weeks and months were very frightening. I won't rehearse the details everyone has heard a million times (Giuliani, cell phones, ashes, etc.). I was working at New York magazine at the time, and in charge of the letters page, and that became a slight issue after anthrax attacks began that were believed to be targeted at the media. There was a strange but strong feeling of community in those days, which you could tell even at the time was fleeting. When a young person went out at night to a show or a concert or party or something, it felt like an act of communal bravery, like an existential act in the face of apocalypse. You know, someone would always take the opportunity to shout into the microphone some New Normal bravado like, "We're still here!" or something angrier and more profane. Occasions like that were obviously stupid but in the midst of a crowd (and the times) carried an emotional charge. Another difference, I found, is that at any moment, an intense argument could start between people who were friends, each taking on uncharacteristic stances. In retrospect, the intensity of those days is hard to comprehend.
The last strange thing from that time I will mention is that on the night of September 11, my now-wife and I walked to the shore of the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to look across the water at downtown Manhattan, and found a large crowd of scores of people already there, staring in silence at the pillars of smoke where the WTC once stood, which were framed by a bizarrely technicolor sunset. I have to admit that I felt a little like a lemming, but also like it was somehow important to participate, for reasons I can't articulate. It didn't feel ghoulish until we spotted a tattered denim-and-leather, tattooed Williamsburg couple, groping each other and making out like there was no tomorrow. Based on the looks people were giving them, not many appreciated their disaster-inspired exhibitionism, but somehow it really brought out the surreality of the situation for me. Very extreme Thanatos versus Eros stuff, all wrapped up in a designer clothing. I was disgusted by them at the time, but I'm not sure I was right to be.
HODLER: Hmm. I don't know how much September 11th-related art I've actually seen. I mean, Reno 911 was okay, but lacked focus. (That's not funny, so pretend I didn't say it.) I didn't see the Oliver Stone movie or read the Paul West novel, but I did read the Onion issue, and found it mostly solid but underwhelming. Like, it wasn't really bad, but not nearly as funny as everyone made it out to be. I mean, take something like the "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule" -- not really a laugh riot, and the ending ("God's shoulders began to shake, and He wept.") is sentimental to a fault. I think a lot of that issue was like that. But there's question but that it seemed to serve a necessary function for a lot of people. I could never tell how sincere people were being when I heard the constant refrain about needing "permission to laugh again." When David Letterman teared up on his initial return to television, it felt genuine and moving, but six or seven weeping television hosts later, it started to feel like kabuki theater or something. (Of course, kabuki apparently fills a cultural need, too.)
In fact, I would say almost all of the art I've experienced that was intended to be a direct response to the attacks, from Don DeLillo's Harper's article and novel to the statue of a falling woman that stirred up a lot of controversy in the New York tabloids at the time, struck me as pretty strongly inadequate. Michael Moore's an egomanical boor, but the opening of Fahrenheit 9/11, which used audio from the World Trade Center attacks that morning, actually brought me to tears in the theater -- the one and only time I have ever cried at the movies. I actually resented him for including those recordings, which felt like an exploitative sucker punch. (That is also why I have yet to see United 93, an experience I had no interest in reliving, though I've heard some good things about it, and maybe I should.) In general, I have preferred works that indirectly approached the events to ones that tackled it head on. It is quite possible that I am forgetting more than one work that deserves more praise.
SPURGEON: Do you think there are difficulties specific to this event in terms of making art about it? I've had it suggested to me that the event itself was such an artistic experience on the ground and on TV that it makes suspect other takes on the same circumstances. But I'm not sure why that is. Is it harder to make 9/11 art than it was to make art about Pearl Harbor? What makes it different?
HODLER: Is there a lot of great Pearl Harbor art that I am unaware of? The Michael Bay movie was fairly hilariously despicable, and 1941 is justifiably considered a debacle, but I guess From Here to Eternity had its moments. [Spurgeon laughs] I think it is impossible for an artist to wholly capture the experience of a person walking down the street to buy a sandwich, much less the violent deaths of 3000 persons in a politically inspired attack that ended up effecting the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. Which doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried; I'd love to read a novel that really brought to vivid life the whole sandwich-buying experience.
Your point about the vast amount of media exposure that 9/11 received from the get go is an interesting one to ponder -- if 24-hour cable news channels existed in the days of "King" Arthur, would we ever have gotten a book as miraculous as Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur? My guess is no, we wouldn't, and yes, our art and literature has been impoverished by internet-enabled information overload. But that's just how I feel today. On other days, that position would feel like myopic whining. There have always been obstructions to creating complicated, life-enriching art; it's just the nature of the obstacles that change, not their magnitude.
SPURGEON: In comics, specifically, did you experience any of the comics tribute issues that came out in the months after 9/11 or have you looked at them or considered them since? The newspaper strips did one as well later that year. Can you articulate a thought or two on the kind of art that resulted? While I'm sure everyone who approached the project did so sincerely, I had a negative reaction to a lot of that art. To paint in broad strokes, I thought the one with the crying superheroes were silly to the point of insult, the ones with people standing outside and musing on the state of the universe were self-indulgent and the ones with patriotic leanings seemed knee-jerk, angry and ill considered. That makes this question loaded as well as rambling, but did you have similar reactions? What did you think then and what do you think now?
HODLER: I read the 9/11 Emergency Relief anthology from Alternative Comics when it was published, mostly because my wife was invited to participate and received free copies in exchange, and I read the two DC "Artists Respond" charity anthologies this month, after you invited me to participate in this interview. (I had skimmed them, and the Marvel book, back when they were first published, but didn't read them very thoroughly at the time.)
My reactions then and now are extremely similar to yours. In the Alternative book, I found the shorter strips most tolerable, and least risible. Harvey Pekar and Tony Millionaire's modest and clear-headed opening contribution ("I bet it doesn't get any easier from here.") inspired hopes that the rest of the collection couldn't satisfy, though as I mentioned, there are a few strong entries here and there. The stories in both this and the DC books about comic-book fans who just can't believe that Superman didn't save them are and were disheartening, though I remember feeling more sympathy for their emotional stunted nature in 2002, both because the books were for charity, and because many of the cartoonists who participated didn't have a history of artistic ambition. Taking on 9/11 as your first serious attempt at art would be pretty daunting.
That said, there was one terrible category you didn't mention: the rambling, twelve-page diary comic stories capturing every mundane detail of the cartoonist's day on September 11, and imbuing it all with terrible significance, even though almost all of them revolved around watching television and talking to Mom on the telephone. (I know I'm asking for it after my answer at the beginning of this interview, but I tried to keep it short and unassuming -- and more importantly, I wouldn't have brought it up if you hadn't asked! I swear.)
But yes, supervillains crying over terrorist attacks are moronic, the "philosophical" strips are incredibly underwhelming, and the political strips didn't help much. I did like that Dean Haspiel didn't hesitate about drawing himself shirtless and in boxer-briefs, even in this context. That made me laugh, in a good way. And Frank Miller's "I hate God" strip is fascinating in a keeping-tabs-on-the-progress-of-his-evolving-and-inscrutable-political-philosophy kind of way. There are other strips worth talking about, but I've probably gone on long enough, and anyway, who's rambling now?
SPURGEON: There was an interesting notion that was floated around the time of the 9/11 tribute books that they were important divorced from their content because industries that support art forms make books of that kind at turning points in history, have some sort of reaction. To bring it to No Towers, you could also say that art forms that function in a certain way make tribute books and foster books in reaction. Do you think there's anything to that sort of artistic responsibility?
HODLER: I can understand why someone in an editorial or publishing position would think, "We need to cover 9/11," or why a weekly or daily cartoonist (especially a political one) would feel obligated to respond to an event of that magnitude. I mean, it would have been weird if Garry Trudeau had just gone on as if nothing had happened. That being said, I would hesitate before dictating to artists any specific responsibilities. I think artists are responsible to their own vision, that they have a duty to express artistic truth (a slippery word) as they see it to the best of their ability. But I think a world in which every cartoonist was forced to publish a response to 9/11 would lead to an enormous amount of bad art. See the contents of the previously mentioned anthologies for evidence of my position.
SPURGEON: Are there any works in which you can detect the presence of 9/11 that maybe doesn't work with it explicitly? Is there a hangover that effects the art, and if not, why not? For example, I've wondered after how it hasn't changed the scale of superhero comics, where in the real world this destruction of a few buildings turns the world upside own and in these stories they're frequently leveling entire city blocks in this kind of unrelenting series of physical horrors. But I could imagine a similar effect in any number of comics... is there anything resembling a 9/11 hangover you can think of?
HODLER: This is an interesting question for sure, and the answer to it will probably be obvious in hindsight, a decade or two from now. I think in some sense 9/11 itself hasn't caused a hangover (besides a temporary moratorium on disaster movies, and then, as you imply, an intensification of the CGI explosions in them now that they're back), but that subsequent events made possible by it have, such as the Patriot Act, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, et cetera.
I'm not sure if I'm reading you right in your comment on superhero comics, but if you're saying that there seems to be even more city-destroying mayhem than before, I think you're probably right, or at least it feels that way. One other thing that has changed is that both of the big superhero companies, Marvel in particular, seem to have figured out that piggy-backing on current events, even in the most half-assed way, can lead to media coverage. This is a pretty obvious thing to point out, but it's still maybe worth mentioning that line-wide events like Civil War and Dark Reign, et cetera, are largely fueled by recent world history, which I think is fairly new for superhero comics, at least to this huge extent. And of course, you have the constant dark "crises" at DC as well, which may not be new, but certainly grew more unrelenting. It's hard for me to tell how much of this is due to recent politics and how much is due to the state of the market as a whole, but it's there.
It is fascinating to me how much "alternative" comic-book artists have avoided the politics and history of the Bush era. It's a far cry from the underground days. I don't know whether that's good or bad, but it's understandable, as it's hard to make political art that is actually art. But I remember when Zap #15 came out, which included a Gilbert Shelton Wonder Warthog story that took on contemporary American politics. It wasn't really a particularly good strip, actually, but it still felt like something of an indictment of the timidity of so many current younger cartoonists. Then again, the culture has changed, and as I said above, I don't believe that artists have a responsibility to take on these things unless they feel the calling. It still seems remarkable that so few do feel the calling.
I also think that without Osama bin Laden, Lord of the Rings would not have won Best Picture.
SPURGEON: Can you give me a few sentences of thought on Art Spiegelman, where he stands in your personal pantheon of comics creators and as an arts figure generally? Did you have expectations based on that view when opening this book?
HODLER: Art Spiegelman is unarguably one of the most important figures in comic-books of the past thirty-five or so years, but he's never been a particular favorite of mine. I find his persona grating; he is sometimes comes off as irritatingly self-involved, and his critical enthusiasms often appear curated for hip credibility and respectability (an odd thing to claim of a cartoonist, I know, but still). These very personal, unfair, and probably irrelevant criticisms aside, Maus was the first comic I ever read with unmistakable artistic ambitions, and I still think it one of the very greatest, most successful, and most moving single works ever created in the medium. That alone earns him a lifetime pass, and when you add the nearly impossible to overstate influence of RAW, you've got two lifetime passes, which is a record for American cartoonists. His critical essays are pretty much unfailingly insightful and deeply considered, even when I disagree with them, and he's produced a handful of New Yorker covers that will probably be considered classics for as long as the magazine is remembered. Breakdowns and the new memoir are interesting and important minor works, but I'm not much of a fan of most of the other comics and illustrations I have seen from him. His recently published sketchbooks are valuable and surprisingly revealing, of not only his artistic limitations, but also his insecurities, and what I (cringe to) call his generosity in allowing readers access to them. Oh, and the Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics he co-edited this year is impeccable.
In terms of my expectations towards In the Shadow of No Towers: I had read some of the strips in their serialized form, and did not have high hopes for the book as a whole, but was still very interested to read it -- as I will be in nearly anything he chooses to publish -- for all the reasons stated above.
SPURGEON: Spiegelman was busy enough with various comics and related projects in the 1990s that we sometimes forget In The Shadow Of No Towers was his first major comics project after Maus. Is there anything in the reading of it that indicates its place in Spiegelman's career to you? How does it function as a follow-up to that work? As I recall, there are outright references to this work following Maus in the introduction and in the text.
HODLER: Earlier you brought up the question of whether or not artists had a responsibility to cover 9/11. Besides a few stray references in the text to the earlier work -- none of which seemed particularly resonant to me -- I think the main influence that Maus had on No Towers was to make its creation inevitable. Maus made Spiegelman the go-to guy for taking on the unspeakable. I don't think it functions as a follow-up in any other meaningful way, and think Spiegelman was wise to avoid making the connections too prevalent or obtrusive -- though they are there a bit. Mostly, Maus makes No Towers look bad.
SPURGEON: As you've probably guessed, I struggled greatly with In The Shadow Of No Towers as a response to 9/11, and I wondered how you looked it. Looking at it recently, I saw a bunch of discordant elements that never really cohered to pull things in any one direction. There's an element of reaction by making art, but also a repudiation of past artistic approaches and this outright nostalgic celebration of a lost past. How do you think No Towers functions as Spiegelman's response to what he saw and how he was feeling?
HODLER: In his introduction, he calls it "a slow-motion diary of what I experienced while seeking provisional equanimity," and that strikes me as accurate. More than any of his other comics, with the possible exception of "Prisoner On The Hell Planet," No Towers reads something like art-as-therapy. Much of it appears haphazardly put together, sloppily argued -- often crudely drawn -- and straining for a significance it's unable to articulate for readers. And yet, at least to someone who lived in New York in that era, it definitely evokes the emotional state of those years -- which were often enormously frustrating and confusing and panic-strewn. It doesn't appear to me he was able to shape a lot of the raw emotional subject matter into a cohesive whole, but the parts are there. Or at least some of them are. The most fundamental problem with the book to me is the fact that Art Spiegelman didn't have much of a story to tell -- nothing really happened to him! Or at least, not much more than happened to me. All he did was see one of the planes hit, and then go take his kids out of school. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if so much of the comic didn't revolve around the idea that the experience was profound and of universal interest, something he never convincingly demonstrates.
One of the more interesting failed communications in the book can be found in what Spiegelman calls "the pivotal image of my 9/11 morning -- one that didn't get photographed or videotaped into public memory but still remains burned onto the inside of my eyelids several years later ... the image of the looming north tower's glowing bones just before it vaporized." This image, as he created it with computer software, is repeated throughout the ten strips that make up the book, and doesn't really register at all. It's not a powerful image, except apparently in Spiegelman's mind -- instead it just looks cheesy and half-baked. That the symbol so pivotal to Spiegelman, something I would not have guessed if we didn't have the introduction -- and obviously we do have it so we should keep that in mind, comes off as so underwhelming is indicative of many of the book's shortcomings.
Despite the book's flaws, it still holds a lot of interest, if only to see how such formally minded an artist as Spiegelman attempts -- and fails -- to solve various problems of representation. And while it often appears overwrought and out-of-control, Spiegelman openly admits as much within the strip itself, and there is, or was -- this is one of the ways a book like this can date itself -- something cathartic about his willingness to attack the then-prevailing let's-conquer-Iraq-and-by-the-way-you're-a-traitor mindset so unequivocally. It sometimes seems impossible to believe just how dramatically limited the public expression of dissent really became.
I think it's only in the last strip that Spiegelman really succeeds in his aims -- despite the fairly obvious visual metaphor he creates by formatting two columns to resemble the twin towers. In that one, he recounts an interview he gave to NBC for the 9/11 "Concert for America" as part of a collection of conversations with "typical New Yorkers." For the first time in the book, he describes an experience that really is fairly unique, and he manages to make something funny and poignant out of it. The gears-switching in the final panels displays an awareness and control mostly absent from the rest of the book. Not enough to save it, but enough to make me wonder what he could have done with this subject if he'd waited a few years before taking it on. But then we wouldn't have got the book we do have, which is almost more fascinating because of its flaws. Hell, Spiegelman's already made a near perfect book, maybe it's more rewarding now to work without a net and see what results.
SPURGEON: A lot of my comics-reading friends seemed to have a hard time with Spiegelman's choice to look at old art work, both as an appropriate or even interesting way to process the event. How do you view that impulse from Spiegelman? Does it work for you, both as an inquiry of its own and as it's presented here?
HODLER: I don't know. I didn't quite buy Spiegelman's claim that no art could get past his defenses in those days except for these old comic strips; the idea that everything from Aeschylus to Rembrandt to Beethoven was useless next to Happy Hooligan is alien to me. But I love old comics too, and the idea of reviving them for a contemporary audience is admirable. (It's interesting that this book came out a year before So Many Splendid Sundays, and in a way, was one of the first books in the recent wave of reprinting old strips in something approaching their original size.) For the most part, unfortunately, I don't think he was able to really make the connections between his project and the older work cohere in any meaningful way. It was nice to see them, but their connection to current events seemed a stretch at best. Except, I guess, for the reminder they give that even dramatic and monumental events usually lose their force and meaning for later generations.
SPURGEON: Does looking at In The Shadow Of No Towers now engender a different set of reactions than earlier readings? What maybe stands out now that wasn't apparent then?
HODLER: One thing that struck me upon re-reading it at this late date is just how much context it is necessary for the reader to provide on his or her own: just as in the political cartoons Spiegelman has claimed not to want to emulate, very little of the symbols are explained. Why is Cheney portrayed as slitting the American eagle's throat? You'd never know from these comics alone. Also, the crudeness of the drawings and rudimentary experimentation with computers seems far more forgivable to me now than it did in 2004. I basically find it no more impressive aesthetically than I did then, but am more drawn to it as an emotional experience and as a rather audacious act of self-revealment.
SPURGEON: One of the ways this book functions as a book of the decade is in its unorthodox presentation and formatting. I know that a lot of people were dissatisfied with it at the time, but how do you feel about this book as an object?
HODLER: I think that ideally it would not have been marketed as a $20 oversize book, packaged in such a way as to appear weighty and large, when it really consisted of only ten original comic strips and a handful of reprints. I'm sure market considerations drove that decision, but it isn't surprising that so many readers felt cheated. I remember thinking at the time that it took some guts to put out a ten-page book with pages thick enough to make it look like 200 pages. I mean, look at how much more you got in just one similarly priced volume of Maus. Still, now that my $20 is five years gone, the sense of being taken for a ride has faded. I like that the strips are big. Perhaps it would have been better published as a softcover, but Pantheon probably wasn't interested in letting a potential cash cow gift book like this slip by unexploited. It's nice to have some large examples of [Lyonel] Feininger and George McManus, at least.
SPURGEON: Spiegelman had another chance -- an earlier chance -- to comment on that world event: his New Yorker cover with the black on black towers. Do you have any comment on the effectiveness (or not) of that image, and how it might relate to his more considered efforts later on?
HODLER: It's hard for me to imagine many cover illustrations that could have portrayed that event without cheapening it; Spiegelman's cover was an elegant and impressive solution. The most obvious way it relates to the book is in its re-appearance on the latter's cover, and in the inspiration it presumably provided for the title. It is funny, though -- the best two pages by far created by Spiegelman were this early cover image and the last strip, nearly two years later in conception.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
* although it's certainly possible to write comics news using nothing but such headlines, it's still nice every now and then when a phrase like "New Dinosaur Books" slips into the workday. It's William Stout, so that makes it worth noticing.
1. Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu
2. Detroit Metal City
3. Red Blinds the Foolish
4. Moyasimon
5. Oishinbo
6. Children of the Sea
7. The Summit of the Gods
8. Bokurano: Ours
9. Red Snow
10. 20th Century Boys
Thompson gets into it pretty deep on each entry, and even provides an honorable mention section, so if you're manga-interested in any way I hope you'll click through on the initial link.
* CBRreviews the decade in news a few stories at a time. I'll look at the whole thing when they're done, but at a first glance it seems someone accidentally cut out the part where it was noted that the vast majority of comics' creative response to 9/11 sucked giant donkey balls.
Are You On CR's Birthday List? we'd love to draw attention to you and your work or your impressive comics institution on your/its birthday. and yes, we do need a birthdate, not just a birthday
CR Holiday Interview #10 -- Chris Mautner On Scott Pilgrim
Chris Mautner and I shared a comics shop before either of us did any work related to comics: Joe Miller's The Comic Store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We met in the 1990s after I had moved from central Pennsylvania to Seattle. It was my pleasure to use his work at The Comics Journal in the late 1990s. He's since gone on to a fine run of writing about comics for sources as wide-ranging as the Harrisburg Patriot-News, his own Panels and Pixels and CBR's intimidating comics blog Robot 6. He submitted a short list that included Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim. I think that's undoubtedly one of the comics of the last ten years -- look at those covers! -- and I was excited to mull over its success with Chris. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Here's a simple question, I hope. How did you discover the Scott Pilgrim work, and if your relationship has changed since that initial encounter, how would you describe those changes? Do you like it more now than you did at first, for example?
CHRIS MAUTNER: If memory serves I discovered it a bit before the third volume came out, which would be around ... [sound of shuffling papers]... 2005? 2006? Somewhere around then. I believe like most folks I learned about the series through word of mouth over the Internet. I remember Heidi raving about it at the time and a few other folks as well. Remember that store Riot that Jason Richards owned? He'd always talk up SP whenever I was in his store and I believe I ended up buying the first two volumes from him. It was the sort of thing where "everyone says this is awesome, so I suppose I should at least give it a try." To my delight and surprise, I enjoyed it thoroughly, which is usually not the case in those sorts of instances.
I definitely think my appreciation for the series has deepened over time, if only because O'Malley has shown that he's not interested in having the series just be a light, fluffy comedy. There are those elements, of course, and I enjoy them for what they are, but it's apparent with each subsequent volume that he's trying for something a bit more emotionally complex and studied than a simple action-flavored rom-com, if I can use that abysmal term.
SPURGEON: One of the things most obviously known and celebrated about the comic is its assimilation of videogame approach to visuals, characterization, timing and even narrative structure. You among all the writers about comics I know have a background writing about videogames, and I wonder how much the knowledge you have of that field drives your appreciation of O'Malley's work? Beyond noting those similarities, do you think O'Malley is using them in a creatively satisfying way? Is there a specific moment or two from the books that speak to you this way?
MAUTNER: There have, of course been comics about video games before -- Penny Arcade springs immediately to mind, and I'm sure there were Donkey Kong and Zelda comics back in the day -- but O'Malley is the first cartoonist to my mind to use videogame tropes as metaphors for the characters' inner emotions and states of mind. I know some critics find them kind of glib, I think that was a sticking point for whoever it was that wrote that negative review in TCJ, as though he's doing them "just because" in that kind of facile Dennis Miller sort of way, but I think that's too easy a complaint. It seems easily apparent to me that these references carry more significance than "Hey, Sonic. I used to play that, too."
It's important to note, I think, that most of the references are what one would consider "old-school." There's a nostalgia factor at work there (deliberately so, I think). O'Malley doesn't reference "Halo" or "Madden" or whatever the big video games of the past few years have been -- I've been out of the gaming scene for awhile -- but the big "classic" titles like Street Fighter, Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario World. I think these gamers are a real cultural touchstone for a lot of people from O'Malley's generation, in the same way that, say, the Beatles and Stones were for Baby Boomers or Saturday morning cartoons were for Gen Xers, if I can make a ridiculous statement like that.
I actually think O'Malley's videogame references are one of his more obvious tics. Everyone notices them but no one seems to really notice or say much about his manga and anime influences (other than Jog, who made it the focal point of his interview with him at SPX two years ago). He's one of the first (if not the first) North American cartoonists to successfully incorporate manga idioms into his own style. I hate to say it, but most of the other "OEL" creators, to my mind, come off as desperately trying to ape manga but only getting the surface elements and coming off as ill-thought out and shallow. I don't think you can say that about Scott Pilgrim.
In many ways I see Scott Pilgrim as the dividing line between the new and upcoming generation of cartoonists and the established folks. It's a demarcation point, a push pin in the time line, same as Zap Comix was in the '60s and Love and Rockets was in the '80s. I'm not making an aesthetic comparison here, I'm saying in terms of a historical shift, Scott Pilgrim is something you can point to and say "Here is when a new generation of cartoonists started drawing on influences outside of the traditional comics sphere of influence (EC, the undergrounds, Marvel/DC) and looking to other works, most notably manga." Does that make any sense?
SPURGEON: Are there any ways that you feel at a remove from the work? It's by a younger cartoonist, and I remember when I first started reading works by cartoonists from a generation emerging after my own there were frequently ideas and approaches I found tricky to negotiate. How do you reconcile with this comic, and maybe comics generally, that are outside your own immediate experiences? Put another way, do you feel that there's enough that's universal in Scott Pilgrim that people can react to it no matter if they're in that headspace and that general world right now? What exactly are those elements?
MAUTNER: Good question. I suppose I feel a bit of a reserve in that I'm in my late 30s and am married with kids and have a midlife crisis waiting for me on the horizon. The sort of angst that Scott and his crew are engaged in -- figuring out who they are, what they want to do with their lives, if they're capable of love and commitment -- is something I've already been through.
Having said that, it's not like I can't identify or remember having those sorts of experiences and feelings, even if I didn't experience them as intensely -- or comically -- as Scott. I think O'Malley is touching on some pretty universal emotions. More to the point, I think there's bit of wish fulfillment in that Scott Pilgrim is how we'd like our 20s to be -- to be in a band and going to clubs and bars and having a large group of lovable friends and constantly saying witty things. I think O'Malley's genius lies in how he manages to subvert that in the last two volumes, hinting that Scott's feckless ways may be entertaining, but isn't really that great a way to live your life.
Honestly, I'm not sure I've ever come across a comic that made me feel on the outside looking in. I think a good comic invites you in and makes you feel a part of whatever world it's creating and a bad one leaves you standing awkwardly around with a confused look on your face. I suppose that's too simplistic an answer though.
What about you? Did you have trouble accessing Pilgrim in the way you describe? Did the anime and game references leave you scratching your head?
SPURGEON: Not really, I guess the references I don't get kind of blow by. I realize afterwards I might not be understanding some of the material on a certain level, but it doesn't feel like I'm missing out, if you know what I mean. I'm sort of surprised how comfortable the work feels to me. Maybe I've adjusted to seeing those things through other people's eyes, as you suggest. It does sort of feel like I'm hearing about my friends' kids and their circle of friends than about my own experiences or those of my peer group. But the experience seems grounded and real to me, even if it's on somebody's plate down the table rather than on my own. The characters work for me. What is it that O'Malley does that people are able to imprint on or just enthuse over when it comes to the characters in the books?
MAUTNER: I think the characters are the central appeal of the series. I think O'Malley's characters and how he's deepened his portrayal of them over time, so that even walk-ons like Young Neil are shown to have a bit of depth and and complexity to them, is what continues to draw people to the series. I think it's really as simple as O'Malley's cast is filled with likable people that resemble folks we know or have bumped into just enough to allow for reader identification.
Again, I think that issue of fantasy and wish fulfillment plays into the series' success as well. Who wouldn't want to live a life where you get to fight robots and ninjas, play bass in a band and have a witty gay roommate while trying to win the heart of your true love?
SPURGEON: I think this was true of Peter Bagge's work in the 1990s, but do you think people dismiss or underestimate O'Malley's work because it's frequently funny and drawn in a lively fashion? Do you feel the general reaction to Scott Pilgrim has exposed anything about how we look at comics this decade, what we like and dislike and why?
MAUTNER: You forgot to mention the fact that it's been very successful. If there's one thing people are quick to hate, it's something that everyone else loves, especially a quick success that comes from a relative newcomer like O'Malley. To answer your question: yes, I do think people tend to dismiss SP because it's funny and lively. It's not a problem that's particular to comics. It's the old "comedies never win Oscars" thing. I think because it's funny and cartoony, and has stuff like ninjas and video game references, SP is seen as lightweight, middlebrow fare. I don't think it is at all, but I think that's the general perception by some critics, especially those in the more art/indie comix side of the room.
Like I said earlier, I think for better or for worse, Scott Pilgrim has become the standard bearer for the new generation of comics and cartoonists who draw from more sources than just Chris Ware or Frank Miller. People like Hope Larson (duh), Brandon Graham, Corey Lewis, Jason Shiga, a lot of the Oni and SLG folks, etc.
SPURGEON: I believe this is the only work discussed in this short series of interviews that's serialized in book form, which interests me for a lot of reasons. There's something about the experience of a sprawl of work, where the people following the work get to return to it time after time. Given that you've seen his work over a number of years in this decade, how is O'Malley a different cartoonist in book five than he was in book one? In what ways has he managed to sustain a level of visual quality that allows the series to cohere?
MAUTNER: One of the best things for me about reading Scott Pilgrim is you get to see O'Malley steadily improve as an artist and storyteller. His line has become a lot more confident and tighter as the books have progressed. His storytelling skills have increased exponentially as well. It's exciting to see him take chances with the narrative, via flashbacks or what have you. You get the sense he's constantly trying to up his game. It's like you're watching an artist turn from neophyte -- for want of a better word -- to professional, but over the course of one series instead of from work to work, which is usually the case these days.
SPURGEON: One of the nice things about these books is that there is a sense of progression, a growing sense of maturity without that notion being pressed -- one of the great traditional strengths of serial art when it's done well. Do you also look at these books in terms of the ideas they communicate on the issues broached? Does Scott Pilgrim say something to you about idea like commitment and friendship and love?
MAUTNER: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think those are the main themes of the series -- as a former English major, I'm always looking for "themes." Actually, I think the major theme of SP is the issue of maturity, in the sense of being willing to change your personality or your bad behavior in order to make a more stable and happy life for yourself. There's a scene in Volume 5 where Ramona calls Young Neil an asshole and he replies, "I'm young, I'll grow out of it." It occurs to me in rereading these books that that line is pretty much the epigraph for the series as a whole. Only I think O'Malley would put a question mark at the end of that sentence.
SPURGEON: Do you think the fact these books are regarded differently for their almost instant relative success in the comics world and now the film puts pressure on a project like this one, or even potentially changes the work from what it might have been?
MAUTNER: Well, success is a bitch and the fact that it's being made into a film that shows all signs of becoming a cult hit will probably create even more of a backlash against the books. I think in the case of Scott Pilgrim, it's pretty clear that O'Malley has had the basic framework of his story set up from the beginning and isn't going to do very much to change it at this point just to answer to the prevailing winds of angry reviews or message board posts or what have you. I've got no business giving anyone career advice, but I hope that whatever O'Malley does for his next project after SP he doesn't attempt some sort of super-serious dramaturgy just to show that he is indeed capable of handling serious stuff. I think that would be a mistake.
SPURGEON: How much do you think your opinion of the work could change according to how the series ends? Do you feel sometimes that we rush to judgment about books given that they're frequently serialized either in print or on-line?
MAUTNER: Yes, we do frequently rush to judgment, but that's human nature. How many times do we avoid a movie based on the trailer or TV show based on the first episode, etc.? Certainly I think we can both rattle off a number of comics with lengthy stories we've passed on after only reading an issue or two. It's certainly possible that the final two volumes of SP could completely alter our perception of what's come before, though I hope it would do so in a good way.
SPURGEON: Where would you detect or how would you measure the book's influence? What's important and emblematic of the decade about Scott Pilgrim? Why are people singularly disappointed when it doesn't appear on best-of lists or enter into the conversation about books of the decade?
MAUTNER: Are people disappointed? I'm kind of at a loss as to what the general consensus is on the series. I know there is a huge fan base and some folks who hate it but that's about it.
SPURGEON: All I mean is that Scott Pilgrim has very, very devoted fans who are confident of its quality to the point where it not making a list is a cause for indicting that list. I've seen a couple of comments like "No Scott Pilgrim? No way!" I haven't seen, "No The Ticking? No way!" I think that people are so willing to stick up for it is an admirable quality, and suggests how hard the work has hit with a lot of its readers.
MAUTNER: It does seem like it tends to get ignored whenever people make up those end of the year lists though doesn't it? I, for example, completely forgot until working on this with you that volume five came out this past February! I probably wouldn't haven't even thought to have included it on my best of '09 list otherwise. And I like Scott Pilgrim! I tend to think that's because it came out early in the year and there have been so many good books in general this year -- to offer another movie analogy, it's the old "the academy only nominates movies that come out in the fall" schtick). I do think Scott Pilgrim gets buried a little bit just by the weight of quality work that's out there. Our inner snobs are probably pushing to dismiss it because it is so light and -- delightfully -- silly at times. It's not about big, weighty issues like Footnotes In Gaza or engage in lots of obvious formalist tricks like Asterios Polyp. Has volume five been on anyone's "best of list" so far this year?
SPURGEON: I'm sure it has been.
MAUTNER: Would you include it on yours?
SPURGEON: I haven't even begun to think about mine yet. I get your point, though.
MAUTNER: I think ultimately Pilgrim's influence will be seen in the works of the coming generation. Like I said, I think this series is going to be a touchstone for creators of a certain age and I wouldn't be too surprised if the next couple of years of CCS and SVA grads start listing Scott Pilgrim as one of their biggest influences and we see it referenced in their own comics. I think once the series is done and people have time to contemplate the whole work, its critical cachet will go up a bit as well.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* if trials took place on the Internet or around a dining room table, this would seem to be a pretty damning development in Steve Kelley's ongoing case against former employer Union-Tribune regarding a syndicated strip project he was putting together with the paper's current cartoonist Steve Breen. I wonder if it will have enough legal traction at this point in the case to be a difference-maker.
* people really need to stop interviewing the writer Paul Cornell so that his now-completed Captain Britain series can fall to a price point at my comics shop that better facilitates my purchasing it.
* not comics: I guess this is the last word as it stands on Editor & Publisher, which sends off its potential last issue January 4. It's hard for me to think there isn't a market for a magazine about publishing in some form, and I'm guessing this is one of those situations where the market has simply shrunk past the historical infrastructure for this publication.
* I'm going to leave further analysis of these numbers to Bart Beaty, who usually tackles them in a column, but it looks like comics production for the French-language market has stabilized title-wise after years of thunderous growth. As Bart tends to point out, the great swell of titles published is a huge issue for that market for a variety of reasons, including the fact that this puts a lot of pressure on titles to make an immediate impression or be pulled back out to seas by the force of the very next wave of books.
* not comics: kudos to MediaBistro.com's Galleycat blog for pressing Amazon.com on its definition of what a "sale" means for an e-book. There's so much weak rhetoric from the traditional book publishing industry's side of things on the issue of digital books, mostly around the issue of price points, that it's nice to be reminded that an agency advocating for digital publication can use misleading language and potentially even employ a self-handicapping policy.
* Telio Navega sent along this link that takes you to a blog with a posting called "As melhores HQs de 2009," (my attempts to find a direct link without registration failed). That contains a critical round-up of best Brazilian comics, 2009. Based on number of votes received out of a potential 15 total critics participating, the Top 11 are:
12/15: Sábado dos meus amores
11/15: MSP 50
9/15: Retalhos, Peanuts completo -- 1950/1952
8/15: Gênesis por Robert Crumb
7/15: Jimmy Corrigan -- O menino mais esperto do mundo
6/15: Crônicas birmanesas
5/15: Verão índio, O chinês americano, Umbigo sem fundo, The Umbrella Academy: Suíte do apocalipse
Please go to the original posting for a bunch of titles as selected by the participating critics and a ton of links to the books themselves.
* finally, it looks like Dupuis has released a book of conversations between the late photographer Didier Lefevre and the cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert, whose acquaintanceship led to a friendship and made possible the award-winning book The Photographer.
Are You On CR's Birthday List? we'd love to draw attention to you and your work or your impressive comics institution on your/its birthday. and yes, we do need a birthdate, not just a birthday
CR Holiday Interview #9 -- Jeet Heer On Louis Riel
Jeet Heer is the kind of writer about comics I want to be when I grow up: eloquent, forceful and authoritative. Although his writing on comics appears in a variety of outlets, some of the best writing anyone's done this decade on cartooning are Heer's introductions to volumes of classic comic strips like Walt and Skeezix and Little Orphan Annie. Heer wrote a fascinating piece on Chester Brown and Harold Gray when Brown's serial Louis Riel moved into hardcover form. He was nice enough to discuss Riel further with me here. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: In your National Post essay about Louis Riel, Chester Brown and Harold Gray, you noted that Chester had discovered Gray in the early '80s. While there are elements of Gray's work in Brown earlier comics, they become full-blown and much more powerfully obvious in Louis Riel. Why do you think Brown dove back into Gray to that extent at that point in his career? Was it just appropriate to the subject matter? Had he found something in Gray with which he felt comfortable or empowered?
JEET HEER: It's true that Louis Riel is much more Gray-like than anything Brown did before. I think there were a number of factors that made a Gray-inflected style a logical choice. Brown's earlier work tended to be personal and inward looking -- the surrealism of Ed the Happy Clown, the autobiographical focus of The Playboy and I Never Liked You, the religious concerns of the gospel adaptations -- culminating with the truly hermetic Underwater series.
The Riel story, by contrast, was a very public one: based on history, dealing with politics, and often set in public places (open air meetings and courtrooms). Gray was a very public cartoonist in a variety of ways: dealing with public issues, but also showing his characters out in the open with very explicit, theatrical faces. So Gray makes sense for a history strip. Also, although Gray started cartooning in the 1920s, his style with its crosshatching and caricatures echoes the cartooning traditions of the 19th century (especially Victorian book illustrations). Thus it is a style that seems to come from the same world as Louis Riel himself.
SPURGEON: The most memorable part of that essay for me was when you spoke about how the simplicity of Brown's art work prompted a close reading of the remaining information. That's a fascinating notion, and one that maybe counter to the popular notion that the less information we have the more we imprint our own. Is there something about the way Brown presents the visual information aside from its relative sparseness that captures our interest? What makes him so good at sustaining our interest, do you think?
HEER: Aside from the sparseness I mentioned, I think Brown's great strength is in his character design: his people look like their personalities. John A. Macdonald's slyness and prevarications are embodied in his long Pinocchio nose, Riel's passionate individuality in his wild hair. Brown is also a master of understatement. One of the big problems with comics is that they are too blunt: melodrama is the default mode of comics. Brown consistently avoids the sort of ham-fisted emotionalism that comics are prone to. Brown's staging is also expert: there is a real clarity to how his people are placed, with the background furnishings also serving a narrative purpose.
SPURGEON: Re-reading Louis Riel, one way it really connected to Little Orphan Annie was the beautiful way each work portrays the outdoors. Something about the way the sky looks, and the wide-open expanses. I know that in your first Little Orphan Annie book introduction you talk some about the artists that inspired Gray. This may be a stretch, but is Gray's artistic approach suited in a particular way to a story of the central plains? Maybe more generally, how well do you think Louis Riel depicted that area of the country?
HEER: I'll repeat here a bit from my introduction to the first Annie book: The geography of rural Illinois left a strong mark on Gray's imagination, as can be seen if he's compared to his Wisconsin-born colleague Frank King. In King's work, the country-side is always rolling and sloping, with cars constantly sputtering up hills or flowing down valleys. In the early Little Orphan Annie strips, by contrast, once our heroine leaves the city, the countryside is as flat as a quilt spread out on a bed, each acre of farmland its own perfect square, with stacks of hay and isolated silos the only protrusions on the land. The flatness of the prairies, the prostrate manner in which the horizon spreads out as far as the eye can see, spoke to something deep in Gray's imagination: it perhaps explains his sense of the isolation of human existence, the persistent feeling of loneliness his characters complain of, and their commensurate need to reach out to Annie and create strong (although temporary) families, with the orphan as their child.
Brown of course didn't grow up in the prairies, which are the setting for Louis Riel. His childhood was spent in the very different landscape of Quebec. But I do think that appropriating Gray's style helped Chester capture the landscape of western Canada, especially the flatness and isolation of the region. I do think there is a tradition of mid-western cartooning, a family tree that is rooted in John T. McCutcheon and extends to Clare Briggs, Harold Gray, Frank King (with a crazy branch that includes the grotesque approach of Chester Gould and Boody Rodgers). The latest branch of this tree is the alternative comics of Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti, and Kevin Huizenga. Brown is interesting because he's not from the mid-west at all, in fact is not even an American, but has absorbed the aesthetics of this approach.
SPURGEON: Is it fair to note that Louis Riel isn't always historically rigorous? I remember someone pointing out that the story of Riel declining to take his parliamentary seat was different than what Brown portrayed, that Brown's depiction was humorous rather more than it was accurate. Should choices like that change our estimation of the book, or do you think it adds a quality a re-telling that adhered closer to the record perhaps couldn't?
HEER: Well, I think any narrative of the past has an element of fiction to it, whether the author is explicitly doing historical fiction (like War and Peace) or biography (like Donald Creighton's biography of John A. Macdonald). I don't see this as a problem because Brown is upfront in his notes about his sources and his narrative choices, which includes the choice to simplify. When you make a narrative you're always selecting from past events and bringing a point of view. Louis Riel could be classified as a historical novel, but it's about as close to "the facts" as the autobiographical work of Joe Matt (who also re-arranged events to tell his story). So I don't see this as a problem, but rather as an opportunity to get readers to think more deeply about the nature of historical reconstruction.
SPURGEON: According to Brown, this was the last serial comic of his career, which I think is definitely something that ties into industry and artistic trends of this decade in comics. Did you read Louis Riel as a serial, and did that have any effect on how you read it? Do you think being serialized had any effect on the final, collected volume? Do you have any thoughts in general about the decline of serialized print comics? I suppose it shouldn't matter, but that's a way that a lot of us grew to read comics and move back and forth between various authors.
HEER: I bought the Riel comics in periodical form when they first came out, but perversely didn't read them till the last issue came out so I could do so in one sitting. As art objects, I love all the periodicals Brown has done: he puts such care into the covers and the look and feel. But the periodical form is no longer really a good way to read long extended narratives. There are exceptions: I thought Speak of the Devil was a dandy serial: I looked forward to each issue. But that's partially because Gilbert Hernandez works so fast, so the previous cliffhanging ending was fresh when a new issue hit the stands.
In the case of Louis Riel, I don't think serializing effected the final volume since Brown wrote out everything first.
I'd like to see the periodical form survive but serializing long stories isn't the way to go. What might work is a revival of the early Eightball model of a series of short stories written in different tones. But it could also be that the form is heading to extinction, partially because its been supplanted not just by graphic novels but also by mini-comics, which is where the action seems to be for those looking for that single-issue kick.
SPURGEON: You've written so well about the positives, but does the general artistic approach used by Gray on Annie and by Brown in Louis Riel have a downside? You could argue Riel and Daddy Warbucks are portrayed with a significant amount of remove, that it's hard to understand why people react to them the way another style might make more clear. Is there something that approach doesn't do well, do you think?
HEER: Well, as I said earlier, Brown's earlier work was more introverted, and I don't think that can be done in a Gray-inflected style. It's interesting that although Brown is interested in religion and Riel had a strongly religious personality (seeing himself, as many revolutionary leaders do, in a messianic light), this isn't highlight in the Louis Riel book. But every artistic choice has a drawback as well as strengths.
SPURGEON: With a few years' perspective, where do you think Brown's Louis Riel fits into the context of other popular or historical portraits of Riel? In Canada, is it generally well regarded as history, as an artistic endeavor, an as item of popular culture...? How do you feel that it ranks in terms of the great comics that came out this decade?
HEER: It's hard to understate the impact of Louis Riel in Canada: its one of the best-selling graphic novels in Canadian history (if not the bestselling). It's sort of had the same impact in Canada that Jimmy Corrigan had in America: it made the graphic novel form much more prominent and respectable in media circles. One thing non-Canadians might not realize is the importance of Riel in Canadian history. He is as central a figure in our national mythology as Abraham Lincoln is in American culture. So the existence of a long, serious graphic novel about Riel has really resonated with many Canadian readers who don't normally pick up graphic novels.
I think Louis Riel is definitely one of the top 10 graphic novels of the last decade but, as so often with Brown's work, it's an odd man out. The major movement in comics has been towards serious fiction with a heavy emphasis on color and page design (Jimmy Corrigan, George Sprott, Asterios Polyp). But Louis Riel is a work of history (albeit historical fiction), done in black and white with a simple grid pattern. As someone once said, Brown really does like to go off in his own direction, charting a path that is unique. In that sense, Louis Riel is very an outgrowth of Brown's own personality.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Joe Sacco's mighty and uncompromising Footnotes In Gazahas been named the #1 book on the Oregonian's 2009 Top 10 Northwest Books list, one of those rare and flattering appearances on an all-books list by a major comics work.
* here's a really nice rundown of the November Direct Market and what they mean from the person I trust most when it comes to circulation numbers past and present, John Jackson Miller. Basically a strong November of sales in comic books (as opposed to the general graphic novel/trade paperback format) has led to projections that overall sales will be down 3-5 percent for the calendar year, which ain't bad. Miller recognizes the effect that a relatively slow November 2008 and a relatively stuffed December 2008 has on these projections.
* by the way, that Batman and Robin cover kills me. It's a surprisingly rare thing for a mainstream comic book writer to create a villain that a cross-section of fans will hate because they genuinely hate things about the character and/or feel that things are fundamentally wrong when he beats the hero.
* not comics: a couple of family members and hometown pals sent me a link to AbeBooks.com's weird books area, which makes me think that it was linked-to somewhere by someone major. Anyway, it's always a fun place to visit. I want a writing name as awesome as Lycurgus M. Starkey.
* a must-read critical article emerges from this R. Fiore essay on the last 30 years in comics, where the author manages to say everything he wants to say while talking about only a handful of comics and cartoonists, because he's R. Fiore and his skill set is not yours, mine or anyone else's. "Jack Kirby expressed emotions that no one has had yet." Yeah.
* not comics: Gil Roth sent along this link to an article about layoffs among a long-existing group of Hollywood agents. That really doesn't have a comics angle except it's the lesson we're seeing in all entertainment media right now. It's not that there isn't money to be made doing whatever, it's that these industries have infrastructures which in rapid fashion have come to dwarf the ability of their serviced markets to sustain them. This leads me to think that this is as much about resources are allocated during flush times as much as how they're conserved during bad.
* Steve Duin of the Oregonian, one of only a few major newspaper writers to pay frequent attention to the comics world, has named his top ten for 2009. They are:
1. Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco (Metropolitan)
2. The Photographer, Emmanuel Guibert and Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier (First Second)
3. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)
4. George Sprott, Seth (Drawn & Quarterly)
5. Sweet Tooth, Jeff Lemire (Vertigo)
6. The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book, Joe Daly (Fantagraphics)
7. The Book of Genesis, R. Crumb (Norton)
8. The Color of Earth, Kim Dong Hwa (First Second)
9. Ball Peen Hammer, Adam Rapp (First Second)
10. Parker: The Hunter, Darwyn Cooke (IDW)
Duin's breezy, well-written descriptions are worth your time, so I hope you'll click through on that initial link.
* Tim O'Shea has a big group interview with the founders of the Indy Comic Book Week promotion. I always have mixed feelings about these kinds of things because they seem to put the spotlight on books that aren't being carried by a lot of people for reasons more fundamental than the vagaries of the Direct Market system, although I know the creators don't feel that way and I don't expect them to. In the end, it couldn't hurt retailers to focus on a bunch of books like that for one week, anyway. Why not?
Are You On CR's Birthday List? we'd love to draw attention to you and your work or your impressive comics institution on your/its birthday. and yes, we do need a birthdate, not just a birthday
CR Holiday Interview #8 -- Robert Clough On ACME Novelty Library #19
Robert Clough was an Internet discovery for me. CR readers and comics-interested friends started sending me links to his reviews at something called Sequart. When that site went down -- taking Clough's reviews with them, I believe -- I followed him over to his modest but vital, content-driven blog High-Low. It's been a go-to on-line destination for me ever since. Clough is a fearless reviewer as comfortable talking about a tiny, handcrafted mini-comic as he is a lavishly produced coffee table book. He is a lottery pick of the new on-line iteration of The Comics Journal, and I hope they use him well.
When I saw ACME Novelty Library #19 on Clough's diverse list of possible discussion topics, I jumped at it. I thought that issue of ACME one of the great stand-alone books of the last five years, odd only in that it's also part of the longer Rusty Brown narrative. I knew I wanted to hear from someone about it, and was certain Clough would be up to the task. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Rob, I know so very little about you. How did you end up reviewing comics? At what point in your life as a comics reader did you begin to look at works more as a critic than a reader maybe?
ROB CLOUGH: I'm the typical life-long reader of comics, moving from children's comics to superheroes to alt-comics as I grew older. I've also been writing since I was about 18: first apazines, then about music, then about basketball (which is my other current professional writing gig) and finally comics when I decided to submit some reviews to the now-defunct Savant (the online mag that Matt Fraction started). A couple of years after that ceased publishing, Julian Darius of sequart.com contacted me, having remembered my Savant work, and asked me to start writing a review column for him. For both of those sites, my tastes leaned far more heavily toward art comics than most anyone else writing for them, which is why Julian sought out my point of view in particular.
Art comics became an increasing obsession of mine when I started to hit shows like SPX in the late '90s and became exposed to the world of mini-comics and more interested in the broad history of the medium. Like all things I become obsessed with, I start to think about them constantly, and writing is a way to focus those thoughts. Art comics give one the opportunity to really sink one's teeth into the material in a way that more genre-oriented comics don't necessarily allow, and I especially like the way in which so many of them challenge the reader to face the work on its own terms. I think it was at that point, when I fully engaged works in a sort of phenomenological approach, that I became more of a critic and less of a reader. That would be about four years or so ago. Now I'm writing for The Comics Journal, which became a goal after I felt I started to develop a distinctive critical voice.
SPURGEON: How long have you been reading Chris Ware? How did you discover his work, what was your initial impression and how might that impression have changed over time? Have you ever read him in serialized form in whichever Chicago free weekly published his work at the time?
CLOUGH: That relates directly to what I mentioned about engaging works. In the mid '90s, when I was really starting to branch out and try a number of new titles, I had heard about Ware and picked up the latest ACME. It was the tiniest issue (#10?), one of the Jokes issues. It felt like I was reading a different language, and I found myself unable to engage it. There was a viciousness to some of the fake ads that took me by surprise, and at a superficial level the tininess of the print made it difficult to get through.
When the Jimmy Corrigan hardcover came out a few years later, I bought it and sat down one afternoon a couple of months later to engage it. His figures and page construction were still difficult for me to process at first (especially since I was used to either a more naturalistic style or more exaggerated gag work like Peter Bagge). After about 50 pages, something clicked and everything he did made sense. I've had a similar reaction to other cartoonists, most notably Ron Rege' Jr., where my initial attempts to read their works wound up in my eye falling off the page. I could sense that there was still something there and that I needed to keep trying, until finally the visual language being "spoken" made sense to me. I often use the word "immersion" to describe such comics that demand this sort of reader interaction, and the play on immersive language classes is quite intentional.
I've only ever read Ware either in collected form (Quimby The Mouse, The ACME Final Report To Shareholders, Jimmy Corrigan) or in individual issues of the series (starting with Rusty Brown). It's hard to imagine reading his work a week at a time, yet it's clear to me that he structures every page to both act as a single, readable unit and as something that has all sorts of connections to prior and future episodes. The fact that each page is improvised and that he still manages to do that is what continues to blow my mind.
SPURGEON: One thing I thought was interesting about your initial review of ACME #19 is that you kick off by saying you'd avoided writing about Chris Ware "in part because so much has been written about him." Can you unpack that notion a bit? Were you intimidated by some of this writing, didn't feel you had all that much to add?? What did you mean by that?
CLOUGH: I suppose I meant two things. First, I make a point of reviewing slightly more obscure works, especially by young artists in whom I see a lot of promise. Part of that came from being the comics editor for yet another defunct publication, Other. I was always on the lookout for young artists that I thought were interesting who would be looking to publish for little to no money. Secondly, Dan Raeburn had done such an amazing job in discussing Ware's work up to that point that I really didn't feel I had much to add. In fact, Raeburn's Ware-focused issue of his much-missed The Imp (#3) proved to be extremely valuable to me when I was ready to really tackle Ware's comics. His book on Ware was good too, but didn't have quite the same flourish as The Imp with the old-timey newspaper feel, complete with a comics section by Chicago-area cartoonists singing Ware's praises. I was very disappointed that he never got around to publishing the Ivan Brunetti-focused issue of The Imp.
My feelings about writing about Ware changed when Rusty Brown and then Building Stories started in ACME. When #19 came out, I had already given a lot of thought to immersive comics in general, and this issue was so powerful that I felt compelled to immediately respond to it.
SPURGEON: As we've been talking about, Ware publishes in a variety of ways. The manner in which most devoted comics fans read him, I think, is in individual issues of ACME -- like the one we're looking at in this piece -- with an intention to then read the collections as well. How did your knowledge that this was part of the Rusty Brown serial have an effect on how you regard this particular part of that serial? Are you really able to read it solely as a stand-alone? This isn't exactly a new circumstance with Ware in that a lot of folks read the World's Fair segment of Jimmy Corrigan as its own, satisfying thing.
CLOUGH: I mentioned earlier that every page of Ware's is a complete unit in some sense but also carries other connections. One can understand the page without knowing about one oblique reference that he happens to make, but a reader also gets a richer, deeper experience if they're paying attention and make the connection. Ware is not the least bit ambiguous as a storyteller. He lays out every clue for the reader necessary to experience the full impact of the narrative's emotional power. That said, he doesn't always make these clues obvious. The reader is asked to do a lot of work in making these connections that sometimes don't become apparent until after multiple readings The thing to remember about Ware is that every panel, every word and every line is important. In every panel, he's either establishing mood, tone, emotion, plot or characterization (and sometimes several at once).
As a reader, I jumped into #19 not having recalled some details of the first two chapters of Rusty Brown. It didn't matter much, because the way this issue was structured (as a one-character showpiece) made it easy to read as a stand-alone. I remembered some key plot points (like Woody Brown being Rusty's dad, and that he was horrible to his family), but I didn't put together Woody's stunned reaction to meeting Alice White until after I went back and re-read #16 and #17. Doing that gave just a bit more context to what set Woody off on this nostalgia binge.
SPURGEON: You wrote a very long and interesting essay on the work. One thing I thought you blew past a bit is the three-pronged approach to story structure, and what you were seeing and when because of that structure. Can you get into that a bit, how Ware structured the book in overall terms and to what effect, because I think his ability to nail that specific series of effects is a key to understanding the wider work.
CLOUGH: Sure, and you're right that I didn't quite tie those together as I should have. One of the things I love about Ware's work is that his formal flourishes are always part of a greater emotional narrative gestalt. In ACME #19, it's designed to look like one of Woody's old sci-fi pulp magazines, complete with the brightly-colored cover and the font of the table of contents meant to ape such a magazine. The thing about the way the issue is structured, with three "chapters" is the way they relate to each other in time. The first chapter (the actual sci-fi story), as I noted in my essay, is not the story that Woody wrote. Rather, it is Woody rereading the story that he wrote, and the visuals in some sense are his mind's eye processing his story. That's why there's frequently such a disconnect between word and image on the page. The second chapter takes place literally seconds after he's read his life's greatest achievement, and he tries to process just what happened to him.
Ware gets across that Woody's been living in a fog since his heart was broken. His wife Sandy saved him from madness and destitution, but he not only resented her for showing weakness and allowing him to dominate her, I think he also resented her because the life he started as a teacher was one that essentially deadened his desire to create. Reading the story, the sense of accomplishment, of being a capable man, that he got from writing a story and then getting it published was not unlike the feeling he got when he lost his virginity. When Rusty was foisted on him, the fact that his son was even weaker and more awkward than he was wound up making him hate himself and this family he didn't want even more. Rusty was a painful mirror of how pathetic a human being Woody actually was, that his inability to write had everything to do with his own flaws and little to do with his family. The sneering hatred that Woody exhibited as a way of never having to confront his own pain, the pain he inflicted on others, and the pain suffered by others that he didn't understand ossified his ability to feel -- and hence, as Ware argues, to create.
That leads to the third chapter, which Ware plops down with little explanation right after the comics portion of the issue ends. This was a story that must have been written by Woody right after this reverie in an effort to recapture his spark of creativity. Another way to look at it was it was his reaction to opening himself up to recalling so many painful events in his life, even if he wasn't capable of processing the hows and whys of the experiences. When his heart was broken the first time, he wrote a story that was published. When he was able to finally sift through some of those memories, his reaction was to write out that pain, even if it was in a genre ill-equipped in many respects to capture the sort of emotional resonance he was trying to create. The final, sad punchline of the issue was that this story likely didn't achieve greater fame because he had chosen an obscure astronomical metaphor for the story's payoff line. While the story was written in the late '70s (the era in which Rusty Brown is set), the notes regarding the story reflect that it was published here long after the fact by some hardcore sci-fi fans trying to figure out what the complete works of a favorite, obscure author were. It's the sort of fan that Woody himself once was. What's heartbreaking is that it seems clear that Woody never tried to write again after this second rejection.
SPURGEON: Ware's comics are so precise and the arguments within his works as to how things function or how people behave are so smartly made that I have some sympathy for readers that at times feel bowled over by his work, almost intimidated by what he's placing in front of them. Can you perhaps talk about the -- for lack of a better word -- power that Ware achieves with his work? Is there a formal basis for that, do you think, or is it just the effect that great art can have?
CLOUGH: It's an interesting question, and it might be useful to compare Ware to what David Mazzucchelli just did in Asterios Polyp Mazzucchelli created a new language for comics that to me leaned heavily on Ware in terms of inspiration: the use of color as a narrative shortcut, the almost architectural design of his characters, the construction of a world where the artist is in such total command of the page (and hence, a whole world) that it's easy to bowl over the reader. The difference between Ware and Mazzucchelli is that with the latter artist, I can see the artifice of what he's doing. I can see the puppet strings. There are pages that fairly shout, "Hey, I'm creating a new language for comics!" The problem is that seeing the strings, no matter how enormously complex his narrative was, makes the experience feel a bit stagy and artificial. As a result, I never felt any emotional connection with any of the characters.
With Ware, the process always feels organic. The way he draws comics is simply his delivery system for expressing emotion. It really seems to be the only way he knows how to do it at this point, and it seems largely intuitive. It requires a leap from the reader to understand and appreciate his comics language, unlike the way in which Mazzucchelli made it simple for the ideal reader to get what he was doing right away. Ware's ability to express emotion on the page in such a way as to let the event reveal itself to the reader is one of the things that makes him, in my opinion, our greatest living cartoonist.
SPURGEON:That last part, "Ware's ability to express emotion on the page in such a way as to let the event reveal itself to the reader is one of the things that makes him, in my opinion, our greatest living cartoonist." Can you unpack that a bit? There's a notion with Ware's work that at times his presentational style slips into the baroque more than it stays on track in terms of communicating very specific ideas, very specific moments. How does Ware allow the event to reveal itself?
CLOUGH: I realized after writing that sentence that it was probably a bit vague, but the greater answer to that is somewhat complicated and ties directly into my personal aesthetic theories.
In brief: the philosopher Immanuel Kant, in discussing ethics, noted that we should treat others as part of a "kingdom of ends"; that is, without regard to what they can do for us but instead where each person embraces each other according to the categorical imperative (do not do anything you would not want to become a universal maxim). Martin Heidegger took that idea and noted that the way we constructed the idea of Being prevented us from being able to treat others in that sense, and it started in the way humanity created language. Language, by its nature, creates an understanding of others as objects at hand -- means to an end.
The only exception, in his view, was the work of particular German poets. The language in these poems defied being able to be "handled" as an object and instead demanded that the reader patiently allow the poem to reveal itself. In other words, the poems could only be read by engaging the work directly on its own terms, through the use of phenomenological observation. What I mean by that is engaging a work outside of one's own previous understanding and prejudices related to it and forcing oneself to engage the formal properties of art directly. The reaction of the reader to art like this, to go back to Kant, is the experience of the sublime. The sublime experience of art is mystical in the sense that it is not strictly an emotional or intellectual reaction (though those elements can be present as well) The experience can be talked about and around but it is so intensely personal that it's impossible to directly relate the experience to another person. (I don't necessarily agree with everything that Kant or Heidegger is saying here, but I mention them as a springboard to my own thoughts on the issue.)
Bringing this back to Ware, his skill gives him the framework to create an experience that forces the reader to either engage it or turn away. There is no breezy reading of Ware's comics, and I've seen many a dismissive review of his work that either completely misunderstood what he was doing as a cartoonist or focused on certain shallow emotional qualities of his work. His visual strategies and structure, combined with him leaving so many "rest points" in his comics, cohere to create a work that allows the reader to enter into the world he creates and feel what the characters are feeling. At the same time, it allows the reader to understand the ways in which each character is self-deluding. Ware is not exactly a revolutionary in doing comics about loneliness, alienation and the search for connection. Like a great poet who grounds mystical ideas in the physical weight of words, so does Ware create a sophisticated poetic structure that resonates on so many different levels. He's trying to communicate something powerful and personal and has found a way to do so without being obvious or twee.
SPURGEON: In one segment in your essay, you point out one of the themes apparent in ACME #19 as the search for connection and how that gets thwarted in any number of deeply funny and pathetic ways. I agree with that, but I thought that observation was a bit obvious in terms of the structural issues on which you focused. Is there a theme that Ware develops that you find surprising, one that works in a minor key as opposed to tied directly into structure and form.
CLOUGH: Ware's relationship with teaching and teachers is a pretty important part of the story that's not directly tied to any formal elements. I'm aware that Ware hated his experience at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and while Ware has expressed his appreciation for certain teachers he's had, there's an element of contempt of the profession to be found in his comics. It's the old dichotomy of teaching vs doing. Woody Brown initially was a doer. He was part of a bustling newspaper, in a job he was surprised to get that might have gotten him somewhere. He looked out over the big city and felt connected to a certain energy that he had never experienced before. Woody had this fantasy of accomplishment that was directly linked to his dream girl, one where love and success went hand-in-hand. After failing at his job in the most pathetic manner possible, he was shunted into a teaching job he hated.
Ware's jab here is not so much at teaching per se, but at teachers who hate their jobs. Students pick up on this sort of thing right away and often get turned off from subjects for life because of the lack of enthusiasm of a particular teacher or teachers. Ware writing himself into the story as an art teacher (in earlier chapters) is sort of the ultimate arrow fired at such teachers, because he writes from a perspective of knowing that this could have been him. There are any number of failed artists who become art teachers, and instead of trying to instill a love of art in their students, they only get across a sense of bitterness.
It's hard to separate Ware's themes from his use of structure. The ways in which he explores connection always tend to flow through a set of motifs: the emphasis on visceral sensation (touch, sound, feel, taste and smell are always heavily emphasized in his comics), the way time is fractured, and the ways in which he sorts sets of power relationships. Dominance and submission are running themes in Ware's work, especially the ways in which they supersede emotional connections. Ware has a rather bleak view of the ways in which people treat each other, one that's reminiscent of Michel Foucault's cynical take, but it's difficult to argue with his emotional logic. At the same time, Ware is never so cynical as to deny the possibility of hope and genuine kindness, a point that his detractors who claim he's nothing but a miserablist tend to gloss over.
SPURGEON: Can you provide an example in ACME #19 where Ware "is never so cynical as to deny the possibility of hope and genuine kindness."
CLOUGH: There aren't many instances of that in #19 -- though there is Sandy Brown, who takes in Woody despite his indifference toward her. It could also be argued that the most kindness Woody showed to anything was to his dog. That seemed to be another key to Woody's sci-fi story, where horrible things happen to the dogs, warping Woody's grief into something dark and ugly.
Ultimately, I predict that Woody will have a moment later in the Rusty Brown story where he'll have an opportunity for redemption.
SPURGEON: One of the reasons that I think people may have trouble seeing the positive aspects of humanity in some of Ware's characters is that his sense of humor -- what I feel is his extraordinary sense of humor -- can be pretty bleak, if not outright savage. Would you agree that for some people that sense of humor can be difficult to process?
CLOUGH: I would agree, especially since so many of his drawings are "cute" in so many of his comics, and clash so drastically with the bleakness of his humor that it can be easy to overlook. There's a humor of awkwardness and cruelty that's similar to what Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant do in their TV shows, only done with much more restraint and greater emotional resonance. The segment where Woody accidentally breaks his glasses while he's lurking outside his lover's apartment was so funny it hurt. Woody's utter cluelessness with regard to the nuances of human interaction combined with his self-image of truly being the hero of his own story made for a wince-inducing story -- especially when the depths of his own cruelty were revealed.
SPURGEON: I know that we've been discussing this a bit all along, but I think for a lot of people this story segment was notable because of its sexual component. I think I know how you're going to answer this, but do you feel that had a significant impact on the way themes played out within the story?
CLOUGH: Sex was pretty much the most important aspect of Woody's story: what it meant to him, the ways in which the reality of the experience grossed him out, the way in which he thought it gave him purchase to Manhood in a way that would be obvious to everyone, and most especially the way sex and power quickly became wrapped up together. One of the running themes in the whole Rusty Brown saga is the ways in which even the most oppressed person can use whatever tiny modicum of power they find themselves possessing to dominate someone weaker than they are. That power that they do wield doesn't make them any happier, however; it only makes them crueler.
It was sad to see poor Woody, who had this lifelong idea that sex and intimacy were exactly the same, have his notions regarding intimacy destroyed by someone who undoubtedly faced the same kind of shattering experience much earlier in her life. The question that still lingered for me regarding Woody is whether he was really capable of sharing intimacy, or if his lack of empathy (or perhaps tone-deafness regarding empathy) made that impossible.
SPURGEON: This may be kind of a minor aspect to you, I'm not sure: were you extra-impressed at all with Ware's ability as a picture-maker in this book? I thought it was a strong book visually, the quality of the art and the line. Because of his skill with design and narrative construction, I wonder how much he gets appreciated as an artist. Did his ability to portray certain events in unblinking fashion play a role in ACME #19? Do you see ACME #19 as an emblematic work above and beyond how very good it is? Do you think Ware continues to influence his peers and cartoonists-in-making?
CLOUGH: Regarding the actual pictures in the book: there were a lot of "wow" pages and panels in ACME #19. Some of the recurring visual motifs (like the snowflake and the large circle) were both clever and aesthetically pleasing. Ware seemed to really enjoy cutting loose on a genre story that, despite the fact that a lot of its elements were being subverted by his storytelling, was still a genre story. There was a brightness to his palette that isn't always there in his work. The way he recapitulated those images in the reverie portion of the story was equally clever and beautiful. The panels where Woody's glasses are broken and we see images of people jaggedly torn between clear and big-dot fuzzy were enormously striking, walloping the reader with their impact.
I elevate ACME #19 above his other work because it felt like something that had built on all his previous comics and added layers of nuance and complexity. The character of Woody's lover may be my all-time favorite of Ware's, a truly tragic and disturbed woman whose pain Woody was completely oblivious to. I don't think Ware was capable of writing such a character ten years ago. In some ways, Jimmy Corrigan felt like Ware's PhD in comics, running through the ideas and feelings that he had been grappling with for years. Once that was done, it felt like Ware was ready to move on to something different and more complex. Given that this was just one chapter, and the first of what appear to be several chapters given over to the main individual characters of Rusty Brown, the final result some years from now will likely be a candidate for book of the next decade.
Finally, Ware is a pretty clear inspiration for the current generation of cartoonists, either directly or through the works of artists who were influenced by Ware. For example, Ivan Brunetti's stripped-down style was inspired in part with the way Ware was able to get such a depth of emotion from characters drawn in such a geometric style. Ware's use of color has been imitated by any number of cartoonists. Ware is also a nurturing presence to young cartoonists, offering inspiration and advice to any number of such artists, with Jeffrey Brown and David Heatley being notable examples. Any cartoonist who uses that geometric or diagrammatic style has been influenced by Ware, whether they know it or not.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
* I'm not exactly sure how the legal case against Tintin Au Congo is going, but the public airing of the issues as reported here sounds strident and addled. I'm not sure if there's any weight to a French culture minister coming out in favor of the books, or if you can even talk about this case in terms of being for or against the book.
* Didier Pasamonik at ActuaBD.com discusses a magazine profile of Blutch as his Angouleme starts to hurtle towards us with increasing speed: the article discusses the cartoonist's relationship to the classics, including such assertions that something like the Smurfs represents an act of complete creation that's slightly beyond the current generation.
* in case you missed it, there were also random comics news updates on Saturday and Sunday in order to better serve your comics news-gathering needs during the holiday season. These reports will continue every day until the end of the holiday run.
* D&Q puts together a great selection of 1956 New Yorker advertisements.
* I'm surprised this Chris Mautner-penned primer on R. Crumb doesn't seem to mention the 1995 Fantagraphics collection Mr. Natural as a potential entry point to the great cartoonist's work.
* the writer and columnist Steven Grant presents a Gil Kane-drawn and Gil Kane-inked romance story.
* one of the outcomes of the last few years of changes in the newspaper industry is that wholesale changes on the comics page are more commonplace as individual publication try to put the best foot forward and/or operate out of any number of financial restrictions. The comics-page changes defined here would have been like 45 years of changes all at once in my hometown paper when I was growing up; doesn't seem so alarming now.
1. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)
2. A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Drawn and Quarterly)
3. The Complete Jack Survives, Jerry Moriarty (Buenaventura Press)
4. The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, R. Crumb (W.W. Norton) and The Wolverton Bible, Basil Wolverton (Fantagraphics).
5. Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter, Darwyn Cooke and Richard Stark (IDW)
6. Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka, Naoki Urasawa (Viz Media)
7. Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days, Al Columbia (Fantagraphics)
8. The Incredible Hercules, Fred Van Lente and Greg Pak and various (Marvel Comics); Captain America, Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting (Marvel Comics); Secret Six, Gail Simone and various (DC Comics); Detective Comics, Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams (DC Comics).
9. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green (McSweeney's)
10. You'll Never Know, Book One: A Good and Decent Man, C. Tyler (Fantagraphics)
11. Nicolas, Pascal Girard (Drawn and Quarterly)
12. Scalped, Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera (DC/Vertigo)
13. Wasteland: The Apocalyptic Edition, Volume 1, Antony Johnston and Christopher J. Mitten (Oni Press)
It's a solid list, and the reasons for each choice are definitely worth reading through that initial link.
Are You On CR's Birthday List? we'd love to draw attention to you and your work or your impressive comics institution on your/its birthday. and yes, we do need a birthdate, not just a birthday
I've never met David Welsh, but it's been my privilege to publish his column "Flipped!" and before that to depend on his reporting concerning a Big Comics News Story in which I was hopelessly intertwined. Like many great reviewers, the West Virginian is at heart an enthusiastic reader. He seems comfortable speaking from a grounded position within a hard-won point of view no matter where that carries him. One of the many great books he chose for possible discussion is Osamu Tezuka's MW, which I thought a really out there, really fun book with a lot of tendrils in various comics movements of the last ten years. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: One thing I find interesting in your CWN review of this material is that you extol the virtues of discussion as a critical process. I think of you as someone who claims a benefit from the interaction you have with other manga-focused writers. Is that a fair assessment? How has discussing works led you to greater critical insight than you might have on your own?
DAVID P. WELSH: I think it's a fair assessment, yes. The opportunity to talk with people about comics is the main reason I write about them, to be honest. I'm assuming that a lot of people in their 40s who read comics have experienced their comics-reading peers outgrowing the hobby at some point, so you're left without that sounding board. For me, part of the beauty of blogs and other venues where people write about comics is the back-and-forth. My initial learning curve with manga was facilitated entirely by bloggers who enjoyed it who shared my taste in other areas. If I'd just walked into a bookstore and picked something at random, it would have been hopeless.
Beyond that basic "what should I read" level, it's valuable to me to see different people approach the same work from different directions. I don't feel like I have the best visual vocabulary, so when I see someone really engage with the art, the style of illustration, I take something away from that. I feel like I've read a fair amount of reference about manga, but there are always people who've read different sources, so that can expand my understanding of the context of a work, especially with a historic figure like Osamu Tezuka. And I think there's a lot of diversity among people who right about manga in terms of age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. And while none of that defines them as a critic, it can inform them in interesting ways, and it all comes together in interesting ways.
SPURGEON: Is it hard on any level to process a work as out there as MW above and beyond that on a surface reading it's completely freaking nuts? To borrow some of your own language, there's something so demented about a Walt Disney-level figure doing melodrama this bizarre I think at times it becomes hard to me to focus on its actual virtues and detriments. Do you think the book generates a certain amount of good will just because of who is doing it and do you see that as a problem?
WELSH: I hope the fact that it's Tezuka generates a certain amount of good will. I know there are people who will pick up and read anything he's created, whether it's Astro Boy or MW, and I'll readily admit that a part of the appeal of a book like MW is the knowledge that it's by the guy who also did Dororo and Princess Knight.
I do think that kind of knowledge of the breadth of his body of work does help some books more than others. Swallowing the Earth is one of those comics that are more historically important than it is good, I think. But in spite of the novelty of the depravity contained in MW, I do think it's a very good comic in terms of storytelling and structure. With Swallowing the Earth, it's interesting to place it on the Tezuka timeline, and you can admire the ambition and see the seeds of better later work. MW is empirically good, and the bizarre melodrama is gravy.
SPURGEON: You also said in that review that you feel that Tezuka his themes differently in works like this one as opposed to his work for kids. Can you give an example of a theme in MW that gets developed more fully because of this opportunity to talk directly to adults?
WELSH: One that comes immediately to mind is the power of greed or desire for power, which comes up a lot in Tezuka's work. The dilemma of Hyakkimaru, the protagonist in Dororo, springs from that kind of hunger for wealth and influence. But the perpetrator's perspective, and all of the greedy people Hyakkimaru and Dororo encounter, is narrowly presented. They want things, they acquire them through unsavory means like force or deception, and that's pretty much all they bring. The nuance of the story belongs to the heroic characters. It's their journey, and the bad guys are fairly one dimensional.
While MW has the same structure -- greedy men leave a boy profoundly damaged, and he seeks justice -- there are more layers to the people who created the problem in MW. They aren't innately horrible people so much as average men who made bad decisions out of self-interest. They deserve punishment for that initial act, but they aren't entirely defined by vice or cruelty. They're more rounded, and I think that's a presentation that adults would embrace. It's a more complex argument that normal people can make terrible choices in a moment of pressure or opportunity and that there can be devastating consequences that they couldn't foresee.
SPURGEON: One thing I'm not sure is appreciated in MW as opposed to a couple of the other Tezuka pieces is its ambitious construction. We're kind of dropped right into the action, meet our principals, see them engage one another but also learn more about the nature of their relationship and the wider events in flashback as we move through things. It's really slick, almost to the point you don't notice its complexity. Am I right in that this is sort of atypical of Tezuka? Do you think he chose the structure he did just to emphasize the thriller aspects, or is there something more to it?
WELSH: It does strike me as atypical, but it is hard to compare something like MW to series like Astro Boy or Black Jack, which are episodic, character driven properties. It's kind of like comparing A Contract with God to The Spirit, you know?
MW was conceived with a beginning, middle and end. It's slick, but it's also tight. There's no waste in its construction, but there's that frugal artistry that's kind of unique to thrillers. I've seen it said that Tezuka wanted to trump the emerging gekiga artists of the time, to do what a lot of them did -- gritty drama for grown-ups -- better, so the level of craft in MW might just reflect Tezuka achieving that goal: "I can be a great gekiga artist, too." And it's interesting to watch his progression in terms of the available work of that kind, starting with Swallowing the Earth from the late 1960s, which is fascinating but a mess, moving on to Ode to Kirihito from the early 1970s, which marks a significant improvement in his telling of a high-minded thriller, to MW in the mid-1970s, which is pretty much flawless at least in terms of construction and pacing.
Tezuka's journey with gekiga could be your basic shônen story -- a novice chooses a goal and decides to become the best in all of Japan. I don't think there's enough gekiga available in English to determine whether he achieved that goal, but he did make some great comics in that category.
SPURGEON: Yuki is one of the more despicable characters to ever drive the action in a lengthy comic serial. How is it that through Tezuka's treatment we don't hate him to the point where it's just intolerable to follow his story?
WELSH: Part of it is the fascination in seeing what he'll do next. There's very little repetition in his wrongdoing, and Tezuka is remarkably creative in coming up with a string of new outrages for Yuki to commit. He's strange, because he isn't a villain construct that I recognize. The horrible things that happened to him as a kid don't generate any sympathy, at least in proportion to his actions as an adult. He's not charming in that "love to hate" way that some villains are. It's really that he's a perpetual motion machine of evil. You know he'll concoct some fresh horror, and you know he'll evade detection or comeuppance, and the fact that Tezuka managed that without it seeming forced or outlandish beyond the baseline level of outlandishness of the comic is mesmerizing in and of itself. And he's also fascinating because he coheres.
I think when a lot of people write a sociopath, they do so strictly because they need a character who can do anything and they don't really need to build a core. I think Yuki coheres as a specific character; he's crazy and dangerous, but he has those qualities in ways that are integral to him. As I see it, he wants to degrade and damage people in the ways that he was deranged and damaged as a child. He wants to sicken them by playing on their vices and exposing their hypocrisy.
SPURGEON: I'm kind of split on the depiction of the relationship between Garai and Yuki. On the one hand, it's treated in a forthright fashion and there seems to be some criticism of the way society looks upon that relationship -- you mention yourself that the priestly aspects of it act as a stand-in for societal disapproval in part because Tezuka was critical of Japanese society's stance on same-sex relationships. At the same time, that relationship isn't exactly a bastion of mental and emotional health. How do you look on Tezuka's depiction of that relationship?
WELSH: I tend to divorce myself from the politics of sexual orientation when I consider Garai and Yuki, even though I suspect Tezuka didn't. They're so unstable individually and toxic together that's it's almost irrelevant that they're both men. Yuki becomes what the situation and his goals demand, so it's hard for me to associate his sociopathic behavior with what we might call his gayness. And while Yuki's most genuine feelings seem to be for Garai, Yuki is ultimately functional in all of his relationships, even with Garai. I think a better reflection of Tezuka's good intentions on the subject show up in some brief scenes with a lesbian newspaper editor, who's shown to be both an aggressive professional and a loving partner. Yuki and Garai's sexual relationship might more be a reflection of the fact that they're bound by tragedy.
SPURGEON: Can you give an example or two of something in MW that benefited from Tezuka's strengths as an illustrator? There's an element of thinking about manga that almost treats the art as code, communicating quickly and effectively, that I wonder where this kind of bravura imagery fits in and how it changes the way we read a story.
WELSH: There's a really amazing sequence where we first see what happened on the island (pages 45 to 49). First, Yuki and Garai are running downhill, and the angle of the panels is skewed to show the descent. It levels off as they cross the horizon into the village, and it gets random as they discover the extent of the disaster. That continues, and Tezuka mixes in some different styles in a few key panels that are speculative, not a memory. And then there's a final full-page shot of the village. It's panel composition as a builder of mood, this kind of visual language of shapes that indicates urgency, then instability, then scale, and it's a sequence that I think of as characteristic of Tezuka. There are a number of action or suspenseful sequences that have that kind of energy and way of leading the eye that are really effective for me. It's like what those motion comics try to do, but it's Tezuka guiding your eye instead of computer animation.
SPURGEON: Am I being a total Gomer if the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw that island with all the bodies wasn't an environmental disaster but shades of Hiroshima/Nagasaki? I think we can both agree that the message portion of MW is evocatively communicated, but is it serious? Is it sophisticated? Did it connect to real environmental issues at the time of its publication?
WELSH: You're the least Gomer-y person of my cyber acquaintance, and I think that comparison is apt. I don't know if it connected to environmental issues so much as Japan's increasingly ambivalent response to the presence and influence of the United States on their politics and governance. The protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s were partly a response to the security treaty between Japan and the United States and the access it granted to the U.S. military. To have a chemical weapon unleashed on innocent civilians seems like one of the plausible nightmare results of that kind of access -- the notion of storing weapons, stationing soldiers, Japanese people of authority ultimately submitting to that kind of military presence. That's my interpretation of the political underpinnings of the work, that if you surrender your authority or sublimate your priorities to another nation, this could be the consequence. And I do think it's serious. Tezuka lived through World War II and the subsequent occupation, and he saw Japan grow in strength, so he had to be ambivalent, especially as a pacifist.
SPURGEON:MW was one of Vertical's effort bring a different kind of Tezuka book to American audiences. How important do you think has that effort been generally? Is there a reason it hasn't been more successful, do you think?
WELSH: I think it's very important. Any time you can see the different facets of an artist of Tezuka's stature, it's worthwhile. And there are some great comics in the portion of Tezuka's catalog that were conceived for adults. I kind of hate to be one of those people who dismiss commercial outcomes in favor of cultural value, especially in this economy, but I do think the latter trumps the former, particularly in Tezuka's case. I would obviously respect any publisher that says, "We agree, but we just can't afford it."
Regarding its lack of commercial success, I think it's partly because we're dealing with niches of niches in terms of audience. Most of the manga audience is looking for entertainment, and it's great that there's so much of that available for them. But I don't know how many of them look at manga as something with a historical context or care about it. So that leaves the portion of the manga audience that's curious about the whole medium, the range of stories that can be told, and the timeline of how it's evolved, plus the comics omnivores who just like good comics no matter what their provenance may be. Much as I wish it were otherwise, that's just not a huge group of consumers, no matter where the comics are coming from or when. That said, I think Vertical has enjoyed some real successes. Tezuka's Buddha made it through both hardcover and paperback runs, and MW was just offered again by Diamond.
SPURGEON: Are you able to speak to the book's influence? I don't really know what effect it had for Tezuka to be doing work like this at the moment he did. Is there anything to be said for MW as a publishing project? Do you think we'll see more select reprintings of older manga, like the kind that D&Q has been doing, or has that window closed for now?
WELSH: I can't help but think that Tezuka doing gekiga had to legitimize the whole category to an extent. The movement started in part as a response to the kind of comics Tezuka did so much to popularize, the kid-friendly adventure stories -- even though not all of them seem so kid-friendly in retrospect. As far as having an influence on his subsequent output, it seems more like gekiga was something that he added to his repertoire rather than taking primacy. He still did adventure stories for kids and historical dramas and biographies, but he did this kind of adult story as well.
I do see MW's influence in Naoki Urasawa's Monster, which has that moment of fateful binding between two people and a subsequent game of cat and mouse between them. Monster has less pointed social commentary, but it does have some similar underpinnings. But there's a lot of Tezuka influence in Urasawa's work, obviously.
My arguments for MW as a publishing project might be kind of simplistic, but I stand by them. First, I think that having more of Tezuka's work available in English has value because he's a giant. Second, I think that, even when his comics feel very much of their time, there's some exciting aspect of the storytelling or some wild flight of fancy that makes them seem fresh. There's always something exciting about his work.
And I do think we'll see more from the classics category, though I think the pace will probably slow. Vertical has expressed a commitment to Tezuka's Black Jack. Their upcoming manga titles are contemporary, which is new for them, but Ed Chavez has said that they're looking at more Tezuka, and they're open to the possibility of publishing some classic shôjo work. Drawn & Quarterly will publish one of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's long-form gekiga works next year, and CMX and DMP are releasing some relatively vintage shôjo titles. I don't think classics will ever dominate the market, but I do think they'll continue to have a presence. The window is more ajar than it is wide open, but I don't think it's closed.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
* the culturally-grounded disdain in the second paragraph of Bruce Handy's review of the new Hergé biography seems, ironically, very, very European. His reading of the comics may have special appeal to you if you also came to Tintin as an adult and attempted to "get" what makes its special. I'm quite jealous of the line, "mechanical drawing with the giggles," even if I might have used it differently.
* the very smart, very well-read in comics Robert Boyd presents his top 15 for 2009. They are:
1) Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)
2) You Are There, Jean-Claude Forest and Jacques Tardi (Fantagraphics)
3) Jack Survives, Jack Moriarity (Buenaventura Press)
4) The Book of Genesis Illustrated, Robert Crumb (WW Norton)
5) George Sprott (1894-1975), Seth (Drawn and Quarterly)
6) The Complete Little Orphan Annie Vol. 3, Harold Gray (IDW)
7) Popeye Vol. 4, E.C. Segar (Fantagraphics)
8) Journey Vol. 2, William Messner-Loebs (IDW)
9) Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Vol. 8 (IDW)
10) Multiforce, Mat Brinkman (PictureBox Inc.)
11) Cecil and Jordan in New York, Gabrielle Bell (Drawn and Quarterly)
12) Everyone Is Stupid Except Me, Peter Bagge (Fantagraphics)
13) You'll Never Know book 1: A Good and Decent Man, Carol Tyler (Fantagraphics)
14) Map of My Heart, John Porcellino (Drawn and Quarterly)
15) Nine Ways to Disappear, Lilly Carre (Little Otsu)
There is a good bit of writing on each volume, with a voice that gets more critical the further it moves away from #1. Boyd also provides a fine pair of supplementary lists, so use that first link to check the whole thing out.
* The Beguiling has a big Boxing Day sale going on right now, with deep discounts on books like the one at left.
* not comics: here's a New York Times article on the book as expensive object that may remind many folks of past comics tussles over expensive editions. (thanks, Gil)
* finally, Ken Mahood leaves the Mail. Is there anything better than the phrase, "pocket cartoonist"? I think not. That's a nice run of representative cartoons, too, which usually gets short shrift in those retirement articles.
I think Christopher Allen is the kind of writer about an art form best served by non-traditional outlets like his current home Trouble With Comics. A lot of what's fascinating about his work might be smoothed over in an old-school print magazine with an firm, outside, editing hand. There's a bristling quality to Allen's engagement with comics, a willingness to give a work of art shit about something personal over an otherwise friendly round of cocktails, that sets Allen apart from his peers. He constantly surprises me. My interest was piqued when one of the books Chris selected was the Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming superhero series Powers. Allen reminds us that sometimes it's the way the book hits you as much as it is the book. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Have you been with Powers from the beginning? When did you dive in, and what were your initial impressions?
CHRISTOPHER ALLEN: I was there from the beginning, though I should be clear that I did fall off the book for a while and there's a gap of a couple years or more since I've read it. I have read the latest #1 issue, though. My initial impressions were that this was the freshest book of the moment, the year 2000, with a writer and artist whose styles I'd never seen before in comics. You have to understand that Powers arrived at a real perfect storm time for me: I was just getting back into comics after a couple years away and finding that the creators I knew in "mainstream" comics weren't quite doing it for me.
I don't remember quite how I started reading Powers, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't an impulse buy in the comic shop. I was just getting into the comics internet and found Jinxworld, Brian Michael Bendis' message board, and just found the guy a natural raconteur, just a really engaging personality. This was such an astonishing development for me, a guy who thought the closest you ever got to comics people was John Byrne drawing himself in She-Hulk, or maybe nervously telling a creator you really liked their work as they signed a book for you at a comic convention. Yeah, I was already 30 or 31 at the time, but was still really taken into this cult of personality. Bendis was just another geek like a lot of us, except he was getting somewhere, and you wanted him to succeed. Hanging out on the message board and trying to amuse him, or striking up friendships with other visitors, was great. You were part of this community and it was centered around this talented guy and you were with him every step of the way as he started working for Todd McFarlane, then Powers, then Ultimate Spider-Man and on and on.
I don't mean to devalue the book itself. Powers was a blast. I'm looking at the first trade, Who Killed Retro Girl?, right now, and while some of the art is surprisingly awkward looking back at it now, it still has a lot of charm to it. Good layouts. I was really taken with the big chunks of black space Bendis and Oeming designed to allow moments to sink in, give more space for the winding trails of word balloons, and just give an overall impression that however funny the dialogue might be, there was a lot of darkness in this world. Bendis' writing is so confident here, so full of joy in being allowed to take his readers on a trip through everything he's into. It really could have been a cynical thing: superheroes + police procedural, but it wasn't. Certainly there were plenty of less-inspired books to come after it -- and some good ones, too, like Sleeper. But not only was Bendis sincere, the message board and the book's letter column were really masterstrokes, not just to build up his fame, but to make the readers a real part of the experience. You had to read the latest Powers as soon as it came out, so you could get on Jinxworld and talk about it with Bendis and Oeming and everyone else.
SPURGEON: Were you familiar with Brian Bendis' writing at all going in? He's one of the important mainstream comics writers of the decade, no doubt, if not the most important one. Where does this work stand in his overall development, his array of offerings over the last ten years? I know that some people consider it a best work, while others consider it a transitional one from the crime books to his run on superhero comics. What's your appraisal of his career in general and Powers' place in it?
ALLEN: I wasn't familiar with his work at all, but quickly caught up with Jinx and Torso and Fortune & Glory. I'm only just now rereading Powers, spurred by this interview, but I think it might be his best work. I'm not saying that's because it's creator-owned -- most of, say, Mark Waid's best work is work-for-hire. And Bendis' Daredevil run is very good as well. That's probably nearly as personal; in fact Bendis' Matt Murdock is probably more fully realized than his Christian Walker, but with Powers, I think you're getting pretty much all of Bendis: the pulpy side, the quiet observation, the humor, the maniacally rhythmic dialogue. I sort of agree that the book very literally led to him doing "straight" superhero books, and in them he found he could get away with a similar approach, a similar ratio of dialogue to action scenes. But I don't think it's transitional in the sense that he's not done with the book, and this is probably where he's going to go the deepest or furthest out on a limb.
As far as Bendis' career in general, I confess that aside from this new Powers #1, and that Siege: The Cabal one-shot a few weeks ago, I haven't been reading his stuff since the first few Avengers trades. I wasn't enjoying them that much, but that shouldn't be taken as an indictment of his more recent output. I don't really subscribe to the notion of a talented writer losing their ability completely. I think it's the creators with the most distinctive styles who people really turn on the easiest. Now, we can read all this fun, good-not-great '70s Kirby work and enjoy it for what it is and wonder why people were dissing the guy then, but at the same time, if I had grown up reading Kirby from Fantastic Four #1 or earlier, I might have grown sick of that style, too.
I don't know that Bendis' strengths are best utilized in superhero team books, or orchestrating events, but I guess I'd prefer he do them than lots of other superhero comics writers. It's important that he keep doing Powers, or another creator-owned book where he can explore whatever he wants, pretty much unfiltered. If all he did was write Marvel Universe stuff, it's not that his impact isn't felt, but it's easier for those impacts to be minimized, certainly from the standpoint of new creators wiping away what you did, but also because I think you have readers of those books more interested in the characters than the creators or their styles. You know, those people who think it's important that at some point, Iron Man and Captain America have to be buddies again, on the same team of Avengers.
SPURGEON: One of the things I forgot about until I went and looked at a couple of the trades is that Powers has one foot in crime procedural and another in tabloid biography of all things -- the "behind the scenes" stuff that maybe you don't see as much as you used to at the beginning of the decade. How do you see that peculiar influence at work in Powers? Does the series say something about celebrity, or is that just another source from which to shape entertaining stories?
ALLEN: I think there's a very fannish side to Bendis and it comes across for the most part without pretension. It's not just that he likes police procedurals like Homicide and The Wire and The Shield -- he likes David Simon and David Chase and others and a lot of the fun of reading the book is spotting the influences, what he's into at the time. Reading the first trade again, I'm reminded how much he was into Howard Stern at the time, and there's also lots of famous names that are referenced. You could take Morrison Elementary as a reference to Grant Morrison instead of Jim, until you see a reference to Ray Manzarek. The latest issue flashes back to an unseen chapter in Walker's life that's essentially "The Rat Pack as Superheroes" -- another mash-up -- and I think Bendis does have a real fascination with larger-than-life characters and the behind-the-scenes stuff of how they make their art. I think he's interested in the less famous creators as well -- the writers and directors of TV and film he admires -- and as a writer who wouldn't read and watch biographies of how people tick. But yes, that stuff is not going to play as well in comics and so naturally you gear your stories to stuff that's a little more sensational, like superhero groupies, power junkies, etc.
SPURGEON: Including the celebrity culture and its place in the new wave of crime material, do you consider Powers a work rich in metaphor? That's generally a way that people ascribe greater significance to a superhero series outside of its entertainment value. What do you feel are its general strengths?
ALLEN: I'm not sure there's a deeper meaning to Powers beyond, "even superheroes are fucked up." That's nothing new, nor is it all that new to have a world where superheroes are the real celebrities -- you don't see much in Powers about singers and actors. But amidst all the wise-ass banter and in-jokes, Powers does have a basic, decent moral about trusting others and putting aside differences for a greater good. It's not easy to package something corny like that in a book so funny and dark. I'm sure for a writer of comics that has to be a prevailing moral for your own life. Neither Bendis nor Oeming are without plenty of other creative opportunities now, and we've seen Oeming write or co-write for others, both work-for-hire and creator-owned. But he and Bendis must still feel they have good work left to do that wouldn't be the same if one of them wasn't in the mix.
SPURGEON: Do we sometimes look down unnecessarily on material that's "merely" snappily done and entertains?
ALLEN: Yes, absolutely we -- and I'll put myself in there as well -- tend to look down on well-crafted entertainment that doesn't have a deeper meaning or higher aims, or sometimes we like it fine at first and then get impatient when it's just more of the same good.
I think about Larry David, who in Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm has consciously created shows where the characters experience little if any growth. He actually set this extreme restriction on his work, but somehow has managed to create this vast catalog of uncomfortable or hypocritical social situations. As ridiculous as they may be played out, those situations are often very real and recognizable. His and Jerry Seinfeld's other innovation in sitcoms was to present characters who were not that likable, often very shallow and vain and selfish. It was the talent of the cast and writers that made it work.
Friends was not an innovative show -- it was just the same sort of good looking people with silly problems we'd seen many times before in sitcoms. But Friends was a huge hit because of a likable cast and jokes that made people laugh. Hundreds of sitcoms have come and gone with much shorter lives than Friends, while other similar shows like How I Met Your Mother survive year after year without ever capturing the zeitgeist the way Friends did. I don't think we should get so caught up in whether something surpasses its genre trappings. How many geniuses are there, really? You want to deny yourself Terry and the Pirates or Little Orphan Annie because they're not Peanuts or Krazy Kat?
SPURGEON: You mentioned some of these comics earlier, but do you see Powers as a significant part of that whole crime and superheroes genre as it developed -- Brubaker's, Rucka's in particular? Do you think that's been a rich vein for superheroes this decade? What does the overlay of crime material add to the superhero genre?
ALLEN: Well, you say "Brubaker, Rucka in particular," but how easy is it to name anyone else? [Spurgeon laughs] It's a pretty small sub-genre. I mean, you're taking about a vein that's only rich because there are so few other veins. Like, Warren Ellis has mixed superheroes with lots of other things in Planetary, but often just for one issue, so that's like a rich network of capillaries for superheroes. I think it's significant only in that these are talented writers working with some very good artists, so some of these books have been successful and opened the door a little wider to the next superhero crime book. If someone took a chance on a superhero sports book and it was better than NFL Superpro, we might see more of those. Superhero romance books have been tried without much success. Superheroes fight crime, and detectives solve crimes, so they go together a lot easier than another genre.
SPURGEON: Does Powers have anything specific to say about the superhero genre? There's something about the dark sense of humor that I always take in a satirical way.
ALLEN: Yeah. In a way, maybe Bendis needs Powers more than ever, now that he's so entrenched in the Marvel Universe. He's got a dark sense of humor, anyway, and I see Powers as a place where he can explore some of the ridiculous things about the genre, in the framework of sincere stories.
SPURGEON: Do you have a favorite arc, a favorite storyline? Why that one? Do you have any sense of what's been more favorably received by the fans of the series and what hasn't? When the comic really works, what factors are in play?
ALLEN: I'd have to reread more as far as specific arcs, but I'll be honest; one of the reasons I suggested Powers is that it came at the beginning of my "career" (ha) as a critic, and at the beginning of what I think of as my adulthood as a comics reader. It was a moment for me, just like any of the other books on this best-of list really just represent moments, whether ongoing works or done-in-one graphic novels or collected miniseries or whatever.
The moment is past for Powers as the hot book, the book that sets the tone for others. Now I'm interested in what it still might have to say, especially as it tailors itself to readers who may not have read it before and only know Bendis as the Avengers writer or whatever. But I will say in re-reading Who Killed Retro Girl?, there was a very Moore-like sense of a near-fully realized world here, and lots of hints at stories that would take years to explore. That can be so hazardous -- the book from the young creative team who thinks they've got a real epic on their hands and swings for the fences but don't quite have the strength yet -- but with any story, especially the debut of an indie, creator-owned book, you have to convey such immense confidence and just take that reader by the hand and convince them this is a ride worth taking. Powers really did that so well right from the start, and so most of the people who were there were then going to be willing to follow it when it went on perhaps some less rewarding avenues. I know the monkey sex issue, which I think was maybe #37? That number sticks in my mind.
Anyway, in trying to bring this sort of 2001: A Space Odyssey type of epic back story to the Walker character, a lot of readers were turned off, because of course then it's not what was expected, superheroes + police procedural. And while I also wasn't a huge fan, it was admirable. It further established Bendis as a real artist, and by that I mean that I believe a real artist has to disappoint his fans at some point. You can't be struggling and searching and looking to grow without inevitably turning off some of those who were there when you were interested in doing something else. On some level we're all the same people we were a few years ago, or ten or twenty, but in other ways we aren't. It's necessary to try other things, even if -- especially if -- you fail. I'd have to go back and read it, but I'm guessing by setting the story in prehistoric times, Bendis wasn't able to fall back on his gift for snappy dialogue. Pretty brave choice, actually.
SPURGEON: Michael Avon Oeming is a non-traditional choice for a book like this -- and yet at the same time I think his storytelling precision and design work distinguish Powers in a way that a more traditional superhero illustrator might not have been able to achieve. What is your impression of his work on the series? What are his strongest qualities as evinced through Powers?
ALLEN: Oeming is terrific, and only getting better. In retrospect, some of the early stuff is kind of rough but there's still a lot of vitality and smart storytelling there. I happen to like the less blocky current style as he's moved away from what seemed a more Bruce Timm kind of influence and is maybe more Toth-like?
I'm going to disagree with you that he's a nontraditional choice. You look at Michael Lark on Gotham Central or Sean Phillips on Sleeper, or Paul Grist on Jack Staff and Michael Allred on X-Force -- when you have a superhero book that has other elements or which purports to be a bit outside of traditional superhero stories, you want distinctive artists whose style immediately says this book isn't going to be Booster Gold. Especially with a crime or espionage book, you want artists who favor lots of shadow and are going to be more concerned with setting a tone than drawing every muscle in a character's torso.
Oeming is, like Grist or Timm, really good at getting the essence of a character in a minimum of lines. When he draws even someone else's character, he fits them to his style and they become part of the world he's depicting, even if they have a costume design he would never do or are normally drawn by someone with a completely different style from his. I would imagine Bendis' scripts aren't the easiest to draw, as a lot of thought has to be put into how to fit all that dialogue in and still have clear, dynamic storytelling. An artist also has to be very good at facial expressions and gestures to best hit the dramatic or comedic beats Bendis has written. Oeming does all those things extremely well. He's an artist I don't get tired of looking at, though like a lot of artists with very recognizable styles, I don't much care to look at the imitators.
SPURGEON:Powers was moved from Image to Marvel's Icon imprint at about the midway point this decade. For an imprint at a publisher as big Marvel, it seems like Icon never really found a place other than as this odd halfway house for projects by Marvel core creators. Has that been a lost opportunity, do you think? Could the mainstream companies make better use of creator-owned comics imprints?
ALLEN: I don't know if it's a lost opportunity; maybe it can still be made into something. But yes, I don't know why there aren't more Icon books or what the whole strategy is. One would think they might've offered to move Kirkman's Walking Dead to Icon, huh? Wouldn't some of the books Ellis and Ennis do for Avatar fit Icon? I don't know if there's all that much benefit for Marvel to only have Icon be for creators who do other mainstream Marvel Universe books for them. Are there many people who pick up Criminal out of the blue and then go read Captain America because they find out Brubaker writes both? I can understand Icon not being an artcomix imprint -- you want the books there to be printed pretty much like the rest of the stuff they do, but why they don't seem interested in books from folks who aren't already in the Marvel firmament, I don't know.
SPURGEON: Given its early place in a certain type of superhero comics and as an avenue for on-line interaction between fan and pro, how might the decade in comics be different if Powers had never been published?
ALLEN: I don't want to overstate Powers' specific importance. I will say that if not for Powers -- that is, if Bendis hadn't put out this book and if it hadn't been good -- I might not have made some of the friendships I did and might not have started writing about comics at all. A lot of networking went on at Jinxworld. My own story is not important to the decade in comics, of course, but I would say that Powers not only showed people that you could still find a fresh slant on the superhero genre by mashing it up with another genre, but it did some other things as well, for better or worse.
For the better, I think Powers is a great example of how important it is for a book -- especially a creator-owned book -- to be welcoming and accessible. Letter columns have largely gone away from monthly comics, due to collections becoming the ultimate publishing format, as well as the internet. Powers has benefited from both those things and yet it still has a letter column as a nice bonus for those who choose to buy it monthly, it's like a thank you note at the end for the hardcore fans. For the worse, I'm sure some creators have taken Powers as a model for their careers: do your creator-owned book as a kind of calling card to doing superheroes for Marvel or DC, or getting a movie deal or whatever. As a more ambivalent model, some might see Powers as an example of "one for them, one for me," as in, Bendis can make his living writing Avengers and other superhero books, but he puts more of himself into his own creation. Scorsese has done the same thing in his career.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
* comics editor Andy Schmidt blogs about breaking into comics as an editor. I became an editor in comics by applying in blind fashion to an advertisement I saw in a magazine in a comics shop during an afternoon of sneaking out of my then-office and then being lucky enough to have the four people ahead of me for that job crap out on it. It's very romantic, I know. Life was like that in the Summer Of OJ.
* there's a compelling exchange between TCJ early on-line MVP R. Fiore and the comics and cultural historian Jeet Heer over such things as gay stereotypes and blackface in comics here.
* speaking of TCJ, I'm not sure I noticed that Leonard Rifas will be posting. I'd say that's a deep bench, but I'm pretty certain Rifas starts at small forward.
* not comics: since Dan Slott asked, my hall of fame coin-operated video games are Sea Wolf, Fire Truck, Tailgunner 2, Xevious and Cliff Hanger. Nobody really remembers Cliff Hanger, but I spent like 100 quarters working my way through one at Syracuse University.
* whoa, digitized panel excerpts from the 1975 San Diego Comic-Con? Are you kidding me? Is there nothing out there so rare, so obscure, so arcane we won't somehow eventually get to see/hear/have it as the Age Of Geekdom enters its second decade? I'm becoming convinced the world of comics is one big grandparents' garage and all the boxes and suitcases are destined to be opened.
* finally, King Features is recovering a bit from hackers invading its Comic Kingdom.
CR Holiday Interview #5 -- Shaenon Garrity On Achewood
Shaenon Garrity is a veteran of webcomics cartooning known primarily for her long-running series Narbonic. A well-regarded editor in addition to a creator lauded for efforts like the currently running Skin Horse (with Jeffrey Channing Wells), Garrity is the rare cartoonist that also writes extremely well about comics. She's a columnist at ComiXology, a featured blogger at The Comics Journal and welcome on this site any time she'd like. From her list I chose Achewood, perhaps the greatest of this decade's popular webcomics.
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Shaenon, you made fun of me a little bit for picking Achewood off of your list, and when I asked you about it you said you were pretty certain that I was going to choose that one. What is it about Achewood that makes it such an obvious emblematic work of this decade? Is it just really good? Does it have qualities that allow it to be better appreciated than some other strips by print-focused comics fans?
SHAENON GARRITY: Snarky answer: because it was the only comic on the list by a white American male, so I figured the critical consensus was that it was the most important and universal.
But I know you probably just wanted me to talk about webcomics. And Achewood is kind of the quintessential webcomic -- or, more precisely, the quintessential webcomic that's any good. The quality that allows it to be better appreciated by print-focused comics fans is not sucking. I had some other webcomics on the list that are equally good, but they're not as well-known, I guess, or of representative of people's idea of webcomics.
By the way, in your e-mail you said you didn't know what I was going to say except that it would be funny. I'm sorry to tell you that I will be funny only by quoting all the good lines out of Achewood strips.
SPURGEON: How did you become aware of the strip? What was your initial reaction to it? Has that reaction changed over time and if so, how?
GARRITY: I think I discovered Achewood the way most people discover most webcomics: enough people linked to it that I could no longer ignore it. I can't remember which strip I read first, but it might have been the one where Lie Bot shows his ass. That is still a damn funny strip.
SPURGEON: Has the strip itself changed, do you think? Was there a point at which it kind of settled into its current incarnation?
GARRITY: I'm looking through the archives now, and can I just say the site seems to be designed to discourage people from reading all the way through? If you use the "Jump to a Story Arc" dropdown, the earliest arc you can reach is "The Party," six months into the strip's run. You have to dig a little to get to the actual first strip, October 2001, "Philippe is standing on it," a three-paneler that's odd and incomprehensible, yet so strangely compelling it's inspired pop songs.
This may be deliberate on Onstad's part. In the new Achewood collection, Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar, he's pretty harsh on his first year of strips. Probably harsher than he needs to be, but it's true that the early Achewood is not radically different from a lot of strips that were nosing around the Internet at the dawn of the new millennium. There was a time when sketchily-drawn cartoon animals saying bizarre and/or dirty things was a burgeoning genre. Achewood seemed to be going for something more interesting than most, but it wasn't that much of a standout.
"The Party" is important as the storyline that introduced Roast Beef ("Roast Beef, the other cat / Neither Ray nor Pat"). The relationship between Roast Beef and Ray has since become the heart of the strip, whereas in the early strips it's more about the bears and Philippe. But that relationship only gels in the next big storyline, "Ray's Startup." The first strip in "Ray's Startup" encapsulates everything you need to know about these two characters. Ray wanders in (smoking a cigarette), he asks Roast Beef why he's fiddling around on the computer, and Beef answers, "I guess it's the only thing I'm really good at." That's Roast Beef, all right. In the last panel, Ray has adapted the program Beef is writing, a spreadsheet reminding him to buy eggs and milk, into a makeshift Internet startup and is enthusiastically shilling the new product. This basic premise will be repeated, with minor adjustments (say, replacing shopping spreadsheets with prosthetic testicles for cell phones), many, many times over the course of Achewood.
All the key components are in place by about a year into the strip. Personally, I don't think Achewood becomes consistently, untouchably brilliant until mid-2003 with "Oregon Trail," where all the characters play the antique educational PC game and get seduced by Hiram the blacksmith. That's about the point where Onstad starts to put a lot of work into crafting funny turns of phrase, really punching up the characters' individual voices ("Dang what in the heck Ray / How did you get syphilis"). This is immediately followed by Ray crank-calling comic-strip characters ("I'm ready, dogg. I'm callin' Garfield"): another hilarious series of strips.
SPURGEON: If you'll indulge me, because I know there's a chance this line of reasoning may have no interest to you at all, but where does Achewood fit into a continuity of webcomics from this decade? My own perception of webcomics is fractured. They're admittedly all over the place. But I can also conceive of that group of Scott McCloud stamp-approved formalists from early in the decade -- or from the previous -- and also this wave of more traditionally formatted strips with a huge, ongoing narrative component. Achewood I see as one of those works between those two general camps, along with Get Your War On and PBF, where the basic strip format was used but at the same time gently subverted. I'm way more interested in your opinion, though, and not just whether or not I have way too much time on my hands, because that's obviously true.
GARRITY: To be honest, I don't have a clear concept of the continuity and evolution of webcomics beyond a certain point. By now it's an enormous field, and, beyond grouping some works into broad categories (stick figures, furries, two gamers on a couch shilling consumer products -- what a beautiful, gory layout!), it's very hard to gauge where individual comics come from or how they fit into a larger movement. One thing I do find interesting about Achewood, which I've said elsewhere, is that it's kind of a stereotypical "bad webcomic." It has the stiff, cut-and-paste look of many webcomics, it's never followed a reliable update schedule, the plots have a thrown-together quality, and, again, it's about cartoon animals saying dirty things. There are a lot of bad webcomics that fit that description. But by some alchemy Achewood is really good. I hope it doesn't come off like I'm putting the strip down; I deeply admire what Onstad has done with his material, because I can't do anything remotely like that. It's like improv jazz.
SPURGEON: How are Achewood and Onstad perceived by other webcomics cartoonists?
GARRITY: Like I said, webcomics is such a huge field that it's impossible to generalize. But I don't know anyone who doesn't like Achewood. I've seen several of my cartoonist friends go through the same phase of discovering the strip and being unable to talk about anything else for weeks. Sitting down and reading through the archives is mind-blowing.
SPURGEON: Onstad's highest accolades come to him as a writer. How do you feel about his art? I think it's effective, but I can't tell if that's just because I'm used to it or if I think it actually has qualities that benefit the strip. When do you think the art in Achewood is at its most effective, and what qualities does it have at those times?
GARRITY: Onstad is one of those cartoonists, like Lynda Barry, who isn't a good "draw-er" in the sense of traditional draftsmanship or illustration skills, but has a strong grasp of visual storytelling and overall design, which, in my opinion, are much more important skills for cartooning. He knows the strengths and limitations of his art and how to make it work for him. If, for example, you usually create your art by cutting and pasting elements together -- which many, many webcartoonists, Onstad included, do -- it limits the range and subtlety of expression you can get from your characters. In that case, if you're smart, you make the relative blankness of the characters' faces work for you: draw large, simple faces onto which readers can project themselves, and make more of the emoting and personality happen in the dialogue and panel-to-panel storytelling. Which is what Onstad does.
He's also got a great sense of comic timing. Check out the recent strip where Cornelius drives off with his stripper girlfriend for the first time. Something about the timing of each event on the drive cracks me up.
There's also a lot of good design stuff in Achewood. Onstad seems to be a fan of Chris Ware, and in fact his work and Ware's are similar in a lot of ways.
SPURGEON: I re-read a bunch of Achewood before this interview, and I wondered if there was a good question about how the strip is funny. I think that a lot of it is execution, of course, the precision he brings to the characters and the lean, to-the-point quality of the gags. But conceptually, I wonder how I would describe what he does. Is there an Achewood worldview that can be described? Part of me thinks that he gets great mileage out of these raw characters crashing into a peculiarly complex and idiosyncratic way of doing things, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't come close to describing it.
GARRITY: It's elusive, isn't it? A lot of it is in the dialogue, in the characters having funny and distinctive voices, but it's more than that. I can't pin it down. The Wikipedia entry cracks me up with its efforts to explain the strips: "Mr. Bear and Téodor are discussing Téodor's confusion over a drum machine. Mr. Bear informs Téodor that there is an instruction manual. However, Philippe is standing on it." Oh, yeah, I see how that's funny. Thanks, Wikipedia!
But why is it so funny? I don't really know. All I can offer is that it's funnier when characters talk without punctuation, and Onstad gets a lot of mileage out of that.
SPURGEON: [laughs] One of the things I've never been able to process because it's just too weird and too incredibly awesome at the same time is the supplementary blogging he's done. I don't even have words to describe that kind of effort. What did you think of that writing? Is there anything in webcomics that compares to that kind of sustained, sideways, second take on a comics offering?
GARRITY: I love the Achewood blogs. Onstad doesn't update them all the time, but when he does he puts a lot of effort into them. I think my favorite sequence was a series of posts by Ray and Philippe in which it becomes clear that they're unknowingly planning parties on the same day. Comedy gold! (This is another key to Achewood being funny: mining classic comedy situations. Do not underestimate the power of a party-conflict story.) Everyone goes to Philippe's party, where they run in the yard and wash the dog, and no one shows up at Ray's party ("ENORMOUS by Ray Smuckles"). At the end Ray's standing around wondering why no one came to his party. There's something about the gaps left in the blogs, the little mental leaps left to the reader, that's very appropriate to comics. Scott McCloud would call it "closure," wouldn't he?
I also like it when events from the blogs leak into the strip. I think the bar Cornelius starts, the Dude and Catastrophe, was discussed in the blogs for a long time before it showed up in the strip. Of course the strip never mentioned the whole parallel story going on in Pat's blog at the same time, where he tries to start a vegan restaurant as some oblique form of competition with Cornelius, and it goes horribly wrong. It's all brilliant stuff.
SPURGEON: For those reading who have never quite taken the plunge: is there a storyline or run of strips that you feel was particularly well done? Do you think The Great Outdoor Fight breaking out a bit was beneficial or not to reading and understanding the wider work? Was that a good ambassador for the strip?
GARRITY:The Great Outdoor Fight encapsulates a lot of key elements of Achewood, so it's a good introduction. It's about the relationship between Roast Beef and Ray, it opens with Ray starting a bizarre business venture, and it's got nearly all the characters in some role, even if most of them are just spectators to the Beef/Ray drama. It also has a great climax and ending, which is one area where Achewood can be a little weak. A lot of storylines just end rather than building to a climax, but the GOF builds and builds and builds.
Great Outdoor Fight mania was so crazy! To this day I'm not sure how it happened, but I was there, my son. I realized things were spiraling out of control when some fans started a GOF wiki and started writing entries for dozens and dozens of invented Outdoor Fights and Fighters of the past. My friend and collaborator Jeff Wells wrote at least one.
SPURGEON: It occurs to me that Achewood has done a lot of things in order to fund itself, including premium offerings, licensing and print collections. Although I don't know the specifics, Achewood has the reputation of being a successful commercial endeavor in addition to its creative success. The constant pursuit of the best kind of funding has been a significant part of making webcomics over the last decade. With Achewood with an example or maybe more generally, is there anything about the act of publishing in that basic "find the money to support it" way that you think may impinge on the creative side of things? Is the basic webcomics experience different than more traditional efforts in cartooning?
GARRITY: Okay, here's the one secret I know about Chris Onstad, based on my extremely limited personal contact with him: he's sort of a combination of Roast Beef and Ray. Underneath his shyness, he's a good businessman, and he seems to have unlimited energy for promoting Achewood and developing its world. He's tried every possible revenue stream in webcomics. Hell, he was even in the Modern Tales family for a while (he had bonus content on Serializer.net before moving it onto a subscriber-only section on his own site, which continues to this day).
One thing I admire is the oddness of some of the projects he's tried. He's done a series of Achewood cookbooks. He has a hot sauce called Ray's Rad Chilies. I seem to recall that he once wrote and self-published a book the characters were reading. His prints and posters are unique and attractive even if you're not into the strip.
I am singularly awful at making money from webcomics, so I'm in awe of all of this.
SPURGEON: You're the only with whom I'm talking about webcomics, and to take it back to our first question I wondered if you wanted to point out two or three choices that might have been less obvious than Achewood, but perhaps just as emblematic in their own way of the that group of comics in the decade just past.
GARRITY: I had some on my list, but it's really hard to be "emblematic" with webcomics, because it's such a huge and diverse field. In the balance, Achewood probably comes the closest.
* images from various Achewood cartoons, all copyright 2009 Chris Onstad
*****
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
* for everyone that had to memorize something similar as some sort of bizarre pre-Christmas vacation pageant-related punishment, "We Are Winter's Jewels..." completed.
* does anyone out there know about the two barracks day-room walls at Fort Dix, New Jersey decorated with nebbishes by their creator, Herb Gardner? I've had a soldier who was there at the time ask if I have any more information on that.
* not comics: the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com digs up word of another, very serious-sounding Bone movie project in the works.
* not comics: by "bizarre" I assume he means "awesome."
* PWCWhas a selection of photos taken at four or five comics shows from throughout the calendar year, if that's a way you remember comics.
1. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)
2. The Photographer Emmanuel Guibert and Didier Lefevre (First Second)
3. I Kill Giants Joe Kelly and J.M. Ken Niimura (Image)
4. A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi (D&Q)
5. Far Arden, Kevin Cannon (Top Shelf)
6. Stitches, David Small (WW Norton)
7. 20th Century Boys, Naoki Urasawa (Viz)
8. You'll Never Know, Carol Tyler (Fantagraphics)
9. Miss Don't Touch Me, Hubert and Kerascoet (NBM)
10. Afrodisiac, Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca (AdHouse)
I actually like this list quite a bit without agreeing with it. There are some obviously significant works and then some super-weird choices, too, but Kois doesn't seem to have made some of his more surprising picks just to be contrary.
* the writer John Seven made a list of best archival projects of the decade: Complete Peanuts, Charles Schulz (Fantagraphics); Explainers, Jules Feiffer (Fantagraphics); I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets and You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation, Fletcher Hanks (Fantagraphics); Humbug (Fantagraphics); Locas, Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics); Manga Kamishibai, Eric P. Nash (Abrams); Showcase Presents, Various (DC); The Spirit Archives, Will Eisner (DC); Supermen: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes, Greg Sadowski (Fantagraphics); and Will Eisner Library (W.W. Norton).
* not comics: so I got what I think is a little bit screwed on a Christmas t-shirt order from the people doing Tony Millionaire's latest round of t-shirts. It's a minor screwing, no big deal, the company disagrees and is trying to make it up, everything will be okay, but it occurred to me I wanted to apologize if anyone reading this site got caught the same way on any commercial activity to which you were directed by this site.
* finally, it looks like the writer Neil Gaiman will be the guest editor on next year's Best American Comics offering. The last two guest editors were Charles Burns and Lynda Barry. As far as I know, the series editor position is still held by Matt Madden and Jessica Abel. Any dinks out there that take this as a sign that the anthology will finally have some awesome mainstream comics in it after years of taste oppression by Indy Comics Overlords should be reminded that Lynda Barry wanted some Batman comics in hers and DC wasn't hearing it.
CR Holiday Interview #4 -- Kristy Valenti On So Many Splendid Sundays
Kristy Valenti is one of those smart, hard-working and valuable-to-the-cause people you routinely find at the heart of various comics industry operations, in her case Fantagraphics and The Comics Journal. In her writing for the Journal and in her column at ComiXology, Valenti manifests a curiosity and a sense of discovery perfectly balanced between respect and reverence. I was intrigued when she included Peter Maresca's high-end Little Nemo reprints project So Many Splendid Sundays on her list of potential discussion subjects, and looked forward to asking her questions about it. There's no denying that the ten years just past saw a second golden age of newspaper reprints, and Maresca's efforts have been among the most valuable. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Kristy, can you describe how you ended up at the Journal in terms of your interest in comics, what you were reading, how you were reading it? If I remember correctly, you were not the typical superhero comics reader; but maybe you weren't an omni-voracious, read-every-genre, read-every-format reader, either. What kind of comics reader were you reading when you began your internship and subsequent employment? How has that changed?
During my internship, I basically got a crash course in comics that I would never have seen in the Direct Market, library or bookstores, by proofreading people who had been writing about comics for longer than I've been alive and spearheading a project to reorganize 30 years' worth of single issues, European albums, minis, magazines, graphic novels, etc. Considering that I didn't know who Stan Lee, Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby were when I started at Fanta/TCJ, I think it's kind of funny that I put together of most of the superhero writer and artist conversations in TCJ #300.
In terms of what kind of comics reader I am now: I am a comics reader who perpetually needs to catch up.
SPURGEON: How much awareness have you had through the years of old-time strips? Has that changed since you've gone to work in comics? Has working at the Journal facilitated your being able to go through these older works?
VALENTI: My friend Chantal's parents had The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics as their coffee-table book, so I read that over and over, but that was pretty much it for old-timey strips. After working in the Fanta library, I became exposed to older newspaper-strip collections: for example, Richard Marschall's The Sunday Funnies, 1896-1950, a box set which reproduces one comic-strip section per decade, is a fantastic sampler, cleverly designed. And by this point, I've worked on almost 50 issues of the Journal, so I've learned a lot about them from that. Plus, the art department works with comic-strip clippings for books like Popeye, so I've gotten to see lots of those.
SPURGEON: I know that the 1980s generation of comic-strip reprints was a huge factor in my own understanding of comics. Has living through this latest wave of reprints and collections has a significant impact on your own thinking about comics?
VALENTI: I began interning in 2003, so I started working at a big-chain bookstore to support myself. Pretty much simultaneously, we were selling The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and The Complete Far Side by the hundreds at work, and they were launching The Complete Peanuts over at Fantagraphics. It's more like I couldn't have avoided "the golden age of comic-strip reprints" if I had tried.
I have the same little epiphanies when I read a collection of good old comic strips that I think everyone does: these are genuinely funny, the stories are exciting/moving, the art is so skillful/elaborate/I can't get over this penwork, this is so much better than the Saturday morning cartoon/feature film/theme-park mascot... Professionally, they fill in a lot of aesthetic, historical and contextual blanks.
SPURGEON: How did you initially encounter So Many Splendid Sundays? What kind of awareness did you have of Little Nemo before seeing the book?
VALENTI: I had seen Little Nemo reprinted, specifically in The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. I knew it was important, historically, but I remember just not being very engaged by it. I don't think I even got to see So Many Splendid Sundays in the office, or not very much, because we were trying to get it in and then back out to a reviewer. I have to confess that part of my attachment to my personal copy of the book is sentimental: I was dragging my very patient SO to four or five comic shops while we were visiting L.A., and I saw it in Meltdown. As soon as I opened it up I began spazzing out over it, and I showed it to him. So he remembered that, and bought it months later for a present.
SPURGEON: I think the thing that everyone knows about the Peter Maresca project is that the strips have been reprinted at broadsheet size, which makes for this giant book. Certainly McCay was a magnificent artist, but do you think that seeing the work at this size has a significant effect on how this book was received? Does it change the way those strips work or not work as art? Does it connote a validity and important that a smaller book couldn't?
VALENTI: When I saw Little Nemo at this size, with such rich color work, it simply blew my mind. I got it: it was a revelation, a perfect marriage. I'd read that McCay was a magnificent artist, but Maresca's project was the first time I was able to actually see it. I could read the words: I could get lost in the drawings. I'm no art expert, but I think So Many Splendid Sundays does what art does. It doesn't just please the eye: it makes you look at it again and again, think about it, study it from other angles and approach it from different critical perspectives.
So: yes, I think it changes the way the strips work as art; yes, I think the size connotes a validity and importance in this particular instance that a smaller book couldn't; and yes, I think it had a significant effect on how this book was received. I imagine that the this book had appeal for people who like collecting and owning fancy editions, appeal for people who are interested in art for art's sake, and scholarly appeal. I'm sure novelty and nostalgia played a part too.
SPURGEON: Kristy, I have no idea: do you think those comics are great comics? What do you feel are its strengths and weaknesses? Do you agree or disagree with some of the conventional wisdom that extols the obvious craft chops involved but maybe doesn't think much of the stories or scripting? Is there work in So Many Splendid Sundays that you think is particularly strong, particularly worth noting, a Sunday or a sequence that you thought striking?
VALENTI: I can see how some people might think the scripts and the writing are a weakness, but I don't. I usually come at comics from a story/narrative-first perspective (even if only, "how is the art telling this story?"), because that's my comfort zone and my background, but I think that Little Nemo resists that. So it can be off-putting and challenging at first. But when I didn't try to read it that way, when I read it in the context of art nouveau design and when I focused on "reading" the images and not the words and what's going on, it began to work for me. I do think these comics are great comics, with the zeal of a convert.
The first strip I think of, of course, when I think of Little Nemo, is from July 26, 1908, the one where the bed grows long legs and carries Nemo off. I also think the strip where Nemo meets the Princess is flawlessly executed, in art, story and pacing. There are so many strips and panels that just stay with you: the collapse of the mushroom forest; Nemo fretting at the birds on stilts not to kiss him; the Old Year slipping off of the Earth; the Imp, Flip and Nemo getting fat on printer's ink. I think the best punch line in So Many Splendid Sundays is the one where Slumberland is closed for the week, though.
SPURGEON: Do you think there's anything that McCay specifically offers to modern readers? For instance, I would argue that because of manga's influence comics readers are more amenable to immersive fantasies driven by the art, that we may be more appreciative of or may even read decorative qualities differently than reader would have 20-30 years ago. Is there a new audience for this work?
VALENTI: Sure: if nothing else, it's a good history lesson and can cause a total reevaluation of the comic strip as an art form. Studying McCay for craft is always worthwhile. I'm not sure if I would totally agree with your manga thesis: manga is usually visually, I think, pretty easy to read, and Little Nemo isn't. Also, I tend to think of Little Nemo as a pretty "external" strip, and U.S. manga readers tend to emphasize as part of the appeal how subjective it is -- I know the reader is seeing his dreams, so it can be argued that that's subjective, but I feel as if his dreams are presented objectively. I do think contemporary readers process visual information differently from the way people do 20-30 years ago.
This might sound strange but maybe not too far-fetched, since McCay was an animator: in a way, I can almost see Nemo appealing to anime fans more than manga fans. It would fit right in with a viewing of Paprika. I also think that Little Nemo is a perfect example of the Freudian concept of the uncanny, where something is familiar and foreign at the same time, and I think that people are really responding to that in art right now -- although, maybe they never stopped. I mean, David Lynch is more popular than ever.
Getting away from manga, this is also "the golden age of comic-strip reprints," characterized by a burgeoning market, advances in printing technology, the recent legitimization of the comics medium and archival efforts. And I think So Many Splendid Sundays played a part in that.
SPURGEON: How do you think people should process characters like Flip or other situations that might not reflect the most enlightened of attitudes in older works like this one? Does that pick at you, bother you personally, or do you kind of accept it as an example of outmoded historical attitudes? Should it have an effect on how we appraise the work?
VALENTI: Do you mean The Imp?
SPURGEON: [laughs] Yeah, sorry. Of course.
VALENTI: I will give Noah Berlatsky credit; in his review for Little Sammy Sneeze (in TCJ), he used a method that I thought was pretty fruitful: is this depiction any better or any worse than what was common for the period? McCay's was worse. I don't think these depictions should be erased, I think they should be addressed and put in context. I would like to think that I have enough critical thinking skills to be exposed to things that are racist or sexist or homophobic, especially in a historical context -- I would have a very different attitude if McCay was drawing The Imp like that today, of course -- and recognize that and still be able to evaluate their aesthetic value. So maybe I'm a horrible racist, but I really love the strips with Flip, The Imp and Nemo getting into all sorts of trouble. They're a fun team, they play off of each other well, and The Imp is such a broad caricature, it's hard to associate him with anything even remotely close to any sort of actual human.
SPURGEON: Do you think So Many Splendid Sundays is an important book for its publishing particulars? Peter Maresca's story of putting this work out there in this elaborate, risky way and being rewarded for it with such return interest is a really nice one, I think. Do you feel Maresca is indicative of a new breed of comic strip curators, this way of treating the act of collection as an idiosyncratic exercise, or does that factor into how you look at such books at all?
VALENTI: Yes, I do. It is pretty encouraging. I'm glad that Maresca chose to use his fan powers -- obsessive attention to detail, etc. etc. -- for good. And I do think there is some benefit to the blurring of the line between comics and art books. So Many Splendid Sundays is a pretty textbook example of book as art object.
SPURGEON: Do you think So Many Splendid Sundays is more of an emblematic work for its own execution or for how it influenced similar projects? What do you think you'll think of when you look back at that work five, ten, fifteen years from now?
VALENTI: I think it's a combination of A and B. I still think it is the best use of the format to date. I hope that when I look at it, hopefully, five, ten, 15 years from now, I continue to discover new facets or bring something different to it that will deepen my understanding of the work.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* the Washington Timesends its Sunday comics section. Brace yourself: there's a chance we could see a bunch of this in 2010.
* this suite of photos showing superheroes -- a broad application of the term -- in historical settings is the kind of thing that people find and blog to death from six months to three years before I'm made aware of them, so apologies there. Still, I found it amusing and maybe you're like me and didn't see it, either! (thanks, Gil)
* the retailer and industry blogger Chris Butcher digs into a recent announcement about Dave Sim's more recent books and their being made available through POD, dissecting what exactly that means for the Sim book and what he believes it could portend for such services. I share his general take on things.
* this Kiel Phegley article with Dan DiDio on DC adjusting its co-features program -- basically their adding short features to certain titles in order to blunt fan criticism of the latest price increase -- is interesting and, well, sort of odd. DiDio's proclamation that the success of the program is that the industry didn't collapse when they raised prices is a low, low standard, and I honestly can't tell how much he's joking (I'd guess he's exaggerating for humorous effect but not minding at all if the joke is taken as a stand-in for an actual measurement of the strategy's success). For the most part, though, it's product announcement as news. I guess the exact back-up features and the make-up of their creative teams will be of interest to someone out there, but it all looks like the same corporate-driven scowly-man comics of the last 15 years to me. If they swapped out the character designs here for some of the 1997 "Tangent Universe" designs, would most comics readers be able to tell?
* Zak Sally and Jaime Hernandez converse. Jaime Hernandez is my favorite cartoonist and Sally ain't bad.
* over at Geekdad, Corinna Lawson posts a list of comics for kids over the past 10 years or so: Teen Titans Year One, Tiny Titans, Runaways, Bone, Leave It To Chance, Rocketo, Girl Genius, Owly, Jimmy Corrigan, Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine, Boondocks, Iron West, Garfield Minus Garfield, The Comics Curmudgeon and The New Brighton Archeological Society. Kids love Jimmy Corrigan? Maybe it isn't a list for kids. Or maybe it's just mostly kids. I got confused with the Teen Titans kids stuff up top. Anyway, there's a list.
* Chris Staros of Top Shelf shot out an e-mail yesterday that indicated Alec: The Years Have Pants will make it into shops before the end of the year, joining Footnotes In Gaza as major, major, major books that at one time looked like they wouldn't officially, widely ship, books that ended up on 2009 store shelves after all. What a 1-2 grace note to this ten-year period in comics. I hope as many of you as possible will read and treasure both; I'd buy them for you if I could.
CR Holiday Interview #3 -- Bart Beaty On Persepolis
What would I do without Bart Beaty? Recruiting Beaty to write "Euro-Comics For Beginners" at The Comics Journal was the smartest move I made at that job, and accepting his offer to pen "Conversational Euro-Comics" for The Comics Reporter is my best move to date at this one. Sensing a temporary moment of uncertainty regarding which European book might be best suited for a short chat like this one, I fairly bullied the college professor into talking about Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. I did so because 1) that was an obvious important book this decade and 2) I was unclear as to how it was received in Europe before it showed up over here. As is always the case, Bart speaks with the clear authority of someone that knows their field. I'm grateful for his insight. -- Tom Spurgeon
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Bart, this may be kind of a stupid question to start things off, but in general, how does new work get published in Europe? Is it slush piles and mini-comics and convention portfolio reviews like it is here, or do houses like L'Association seek out new books in a different fashion?
BART BEATY: My sense -- and I might be completely off base here -- is that editors are a lot more involved in the recruiting process in French comics than they have traditionally been in American comics. This seems to be changing now in the US as well, where I imagine that Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly and particularly Pantheon are moving more towards recruiting artists. When I talk to European cartoonists I get a sense that they actively pitch work to multiple publishers looking for the best home, and the best known editors seek out promising artists. I think it's significant that when Soleil/Gallimard relaunched Futuropolis what we knew about the line was the name of the editor: Sebastien Gnaedig.
I don't get the sense that there are a lot of portfolio reviews in Europe in the way that there are in the US. Rather, connections between artist and publisher seem to arise more organically, through recommendations and other relationships.
SPURGEON: How did Persepolis end up at L'Association? Was Marjane Satrapi a known quantity at all?
BEATY: Marjane and L'Asso are actually a great example of what I'm trying to get at. Satrapi was not originally a comics artist, but a children's book illustrator who shared space at the Atelier des Vosges in Paris. At various times in its history, that work space was shared by some combination of Emile Bravo, Lewis Trondheim, Christophe Blain, Joann Sfar, David B., Emmanuel Guibert, Marjane Satrapi, and several others. If you made a list of the ten most important French cartoonists of the past decade, you'd put all of those names on the list, and they all worked together.
When Satrapi entered the Atelier, she didn't know much about comics, and she didn't do comics. But working across from these guys rubbed off, and they encouraged her to give it a try. I believe that her first published work in comics was "The Veil" (which is the first chapter of Persepolis), which was published in Lapin, the magazine that David B. and Trondheim were co-editors of. So they brought her into comics and into L'Asso at the same time.
SPURGEON: How did readers and critics react to the first volume upon its publication? Was there any reaction to the obvious visual debt she owes David B.?
BEATY: I don't recall a huge reaction to the first volume at the time. I don't even remember buying it or having it given to me, so it can't have made much of an impression at the time (I likely got it at the 2001 Angouleme Festival based on when it was published). Some of the work had been in Lapin, and it was common for L'Asso to collect work from Lapin and to try to develop an audience for it. Lapin didn't pay page rates, so it was important to get the material into a book if the author was to be paid. So this just sort of seemed like it was a continuation of typical L'Asso procedures.
The debt to David B. was obvious to everyone -- and L'Ascension du Haut-Mal was just about the most noteworthy thing L'Asso was publishing at the time. It was akin to Fantagraphics publishing work that looked like Chris Ware and focused on a lonely man, in that the comparison was unavoidable. Of course, the fact was that David taught her a lot of craft, they worked closely together, and he wrote the introduction to the first volume. They weren't trying to hide anything, and I think a lot of people saw him as her aesthetic father.
SPURGEON: At what point and for what reason, if this is knowledge that anyone could really know, did it begin to build momentum and become a hit?
BEATY: My sense that it was going to be a huge hit came with the third volume (the first half of what would be the second US volume), which was serialized in Liberation -- a major French daily. Liberation has serialized a lot of comics over the years -- generally in the summer -- but they tended to be from well-established names like Jean Van Hamme. This put her entire work in the hands of millions of readers on a daily basis. And the subject of that volume -- her time in Austria as an Iranian emigre -- is really compelling. It was the perfect chapter in terms of content to reach that mass audience, and it is also appeared at a time when her work was no longer tentative.
I remember I included Vol. 3 on my TCJ "Best of the Year" list that year, with a real sense that now the series was really going places. In retrospect, I should have ranked it higher...
SPURGEON: What is your general appraisal of the work, Bart? Has it changed over the years? Did it change when subsequent volumes are published?
BEATY: I was only lukewarm on the first two volumes. I was intrigued by the end of the second, and blown away by the entirety of the third. Now when I read it as a whole I'm constantly impressed by it. I've taught the book to university students half a dozen times, and they are always amazed by it, and I find I like a work the more that I teach it. I've gotten to the point where I prefer teaching it to Maus, actually. So I like it a lot.
There are other French comics of the past decade that I think do things better formally, or are smarter, or funnier, or more insightful, or more exciting. But I think Persepolis is a landmark work and a tremendous achievement.
SPURGEON: I saw Marjane Satrapi speak at a Book Expo on a panel with I believe Joe Sacco and maybe Doug TenNapel. At dinner that night we were all talking with some enthusiasm about how obviously charismatic and articulate and funny she was. I remember someone making a comparison with Art Spiegelman in that she shares with Art an ability to talk about comics in an exciting and engaging way. How much do you think the force of Satrapi's personality has had an effect on how her work has been received and processed? Is that important at all in European comics generally? Do people process, say, Lewis Trondheim's work through their conception of Trondheim?
BEATY: She has a very different image than Trondheim, who is much more reclusive and not a fan of the type of press work that she does so effortlessly.
Yes, I think generally that it is the case that writers or artists who are as charismatic as Satrapi have a much easier time. They charm readers, they charm journalists, they charm booksellers, they charm publishers and editors. You can go a long way on charm.
I recall the first book reading I ever attended, I was in high school and went to see a double bill of Martin Amis and Michael Ondaatje at Toronto Harborfront. Amis read first as Ondaatje was the home town man. He was mesmerizing -- so witty and charming and British and happy to be there. Ondaatje could barely follow the spectacle, as he can be a bit reserved in these settings. I was utterly amazed by Amis at the time. Now, however, 20 years later, I recognize that Ondaatje is ten times the writer that Amis is (though London Fields remains a good novel). The fact is, in the end, all the reader will be left with is the work. If the work is there, it will be remembered long after everyone who was charmed by the charmers have passed on to the grave. In this case, and in Spiegelman's, it is the combination of an outgoing enthusiasm for the work and the high quality of the work itself, that have given them the reputations that they have.
SPURGEON: To focus and/or revisit that question in a couple of ways: I've seen some criticism of Persepolis saying that the book and Satrapi herself flatter a particular self-conception of Europeans. Is that a legitimate avenue for criticism, do you think? Also, has there been any real backlash against the cartoonist more severe than that kind of sniping? Against the book generally?
BEATY:Persepolis is a book that seems to generate a lot of sniping first and foremost from the "craft boys" -- they're almost always boys -- who say that it is inelegantly drawn. That's the major source of condemnation. Even now, I imagine a number of your readers who haven't read this far because they can't imagine a book drawn like "that" deserving this much discussion. This was even more the case when Embroideries was translated without the suggestion that it was a somewhat dashed-off comic from her sketchbook.
I haven't seen much of the other criticism that you suggest, though I know where you're going. There is some sense that Satrapi is a success because of what she represents: that she is the perfect artist for a point in history when the West is grappling with its relationship to the Muslim world, and to Iran in particular; the perfect artist for a France that banned the veil in schools, and so on. If Marjane Satrapi did not exist, the French press might have had to invent her.
I think that the political reading of Satrapi over here is often different than it is in France, because the issues -- while similar -- are culturally different. Satrapi has been bemused by the fact that she wrote a book that is anti-veil and then became a spokesperson for the anti-anti-veil movement in France. She really tries hard to straddle her Iranian and European identities in a way that complicates the notion that she is simply flattering Europeans, so I don't think that the situation is so simple.
SPURGEON: What has the book's success meant for L'Association? What effect has it had on that industry generally, do you think?
BEATY: For L'Asso it is similar to Peanuts for Fantagraphics -- it saved their ass. I'm not sure if L'Asso would be where it is today without Persepolis, and its success has allowed them to underwrite a lot of work that they otherwise probably could not have taken on. L'Asso still publishes a lot more "unsellable" work than any publisher I can think of. They really truly publish work for which there is very little established audience, and they take much bigger risks than even the big risk takers over here. Persepolis has meant that they could more of that, though they'd probably do it anyway.
I also think that Satrapi's decision to stay with L'Asso is enormous. After Persepolis she could have published anywhere, and probably for a huge advance. I know what the advances are for some artists who have sold 1/20th what she sells, so I can imagine some people offered her dumptrucks filled with Euros. And she turned them down. She said, essentially, "L'Asso believed in me when none of the rest of you would give me a look; that's why I believe in L'Asso." That's really amazing when you think of it, that kind of loyalty. There are a lot of American cartoonists who have abandoned the publishers that gave them a break for a lot less.
In terms of the industry, her success really cemented a desire to find the next great graphic novelist. The French industry is no different from the American: look and see what sells, try to find 100 more of those.
SPURGEON: Certainly the movie had some effect on the way some audiences look at the book. For instance, I thought the movie's look was nearly luminous, and I think I looked upon the book's art with a kinder eye for having seen this more sumptuous version. I know how American audience look at film adaptations and have an inkling on the close relationship between manga and anime, but how does that relationship work in Europe? Do people make strong distinctions between the two, or in this case was there some respect afforded the fact that she was closely involved?
BEATY: I find it interesting already that when I teach the book one of the reactions I get from students is: "Hey, did you know that they made a movie about this?" Despite the success of film with critics and as a winner of awards, it was a bomb on this side of the Atlantic. I just looked it up and saw that it did less than $5 million in North American box office. I would guess that more Americans have actually read the book than seen the film, which is an unusual inversion of these kinds of relationships. I think that the film is really interesting in its own way and wish it had done better than it did.
It's funny that you bring up the look of the book and of the film, and the differences there. I'm one of the people that thinks the book looks phenomenal and wouldn't change a thing about it. One of the things that I like is that the drawing gets "better" -- that is, looser, more fluid, more refined and more confident -- as the story progresses. This strikes me as perfectly apt, since the book is about growing up. To that end, I think that the changes over time in the look of the book contribute gradually, sometimes almost imperceptibly, to the central theme of the work as a whole. That's a real strength of the work.
The film, on the other hand, is much "slicker" and more consistent throughout the piece as a whole. This gives the work a very different feeling in my mind, and moves it away from one of the things that I liked about the source material. To an extent this is countered by the exemplary voice work of Gabrielle Benites and Chiara Mastroianni in the film, as they are able to communicate with their performances much of what falls to the drawings in the book.
SPURGEON: Were there books other than Satrapi's that kind of built on an alt-comics memoir tradition exemplified by L'Ascencion du haut mal? Are there baby Satrapis out there?
BEATY: There are a lot. Like in the US, autobiographical comics is a defining alt-comics genre -- perhaps the defining genre. To that end there are entire publishers in France that are predominantly associated with autobiographical comics, like Ego Comme X. At the same time, I'm not sure if any of these people are really poised for the next huge explosion. I've been pushing the work of Fabrice Neaud as the best comics autobiography and memoir work going for what seems like the better part of a decade, but I've never found a publisher who wanted to take a crack at publishing it.
SPURGEON: When we were sussing out the book about which I was going to ask you questions, you said it was more difficult to figure out the books of the '00s as opposed to the books of the '90s. Can you mention a few books that you think were specifically important to this decade and why?
BEATY: When I was writing Unpopular Culture, which specifically deals only with the 1990s, I had a sense that there was a real revolution in the air in European comics, with presses like L'Association and Amok and Freon at the forefront of something really exciting. I don't feel that anymore. Some of the people I thought were leading lights of that revolution have left comics, some have curtailed their revolutionary fervor, and some went on to become president at Angouleme and are now the new grand old men of comics (though they'd hate to be considered that way). In the 1990s there was a feeling that the orthodoxies of the 1980s, which was an era of retrenchment in French comics complete with a market collapse, had to be smashed. They were smashed, but the now there are no orthodoxies against which to rebel. The field is very open, so some of the excitement has dissipated.
That isn't to say that talent is gone. The 2000s have seen the emergence of some remarkable talents in comics. To name only a few: Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot are doing the most fascinating work in comics today -- they should be superstars. Riad Sattouf had an amazing decade as a cartoonist and has moved now into film with great results. Winshluss, Satrapi's co-director on Persepolis, has emerged as an incredible talent and a grand humorist. Ludovic Debeurme continues to astound me with everything that he releases, and has an amazing ability to keep shifting gears. Frederik Peeters could make a convincing claim to most significant new talent of the decade. Dominique Goblet released two of the best books of the decade with Souvenir d'une journee parfaite and Faire semblant c'est mentir. And, of course, I think Gipi has been one of the most significant revelations of the decade even though he is older than the other names I've just mentioned. One of the great things about this decade is that I could list 50 more names here -- this is just the tip of the iceberg. Emmanuel Guibert! Most of his important works are from this decade, and he's on an incredible creative roll. My apologies to everyone I'm leaving out.
SPURGEON: One thing I found lacking in the English-language reviews was a discussion of Persepolis as a book of ideas: what exactly she was saying about her experience above its general orientation, the novelty of it, and some of the pleasing, funnier, smaller moments. The older Marjane in particular, looking for a place to belong, does that material get read in a different fashion in Europe than in the US, where a lot of this border crossing and personal orientation seems exotic?
BEATY: I'm not sure that the reviews have been significantly smarter in Europe than in North America really, though I do think that Satrapi's interviews and statements have had the effect of contextualizing her voice in Europe much more than over here. She's remarkably "out there" in the public eye and she speaks her mind, so there is a much fuller context for reading her work just by virtue of that fact.
That said, I've found that that struggle of the adult Marjane to find a place to belong is the element that most resonates with a good deal of my students. Perhaps this is a function of teaching in Calgary, which is one of the fastest growing urban centers in North America and consequently home to a lot of immigrants, but border crossing is one of the pre-eminent issues for the 20 year olds that I'm in contact with every day. I think a lot of them read the third part of Persepolis with a "there but for the grace of God" feeling, and absolutely relate to the fourth and final part. A huge percentage of my students coming from south-east Asia and Africa feel that Persepolis is speaking directly to their day to day concerns in an increasingly globalized world.
SPURGEON: It's hard for me to imagine anyone having a fruitful career of a certain type with this big a book being published up front? What's your general appraisal of the post-Persepolis works? Do you expect her to continue in comics?
BEATY: I adored Chicken with Plums, her first real work of fiction. In some ways I thought it was better than Persepolis, although I'm apparently in the minority on that over here. The book did win the prize for Best Comic at Angouleme, so the French liked it at least. As to whether she'll come back to comics, that's hard to say. She's working right now on a live-action film version of Chicken with Plums (co-directed, as with Persepolis, with Vincent Parronnaud) so it's entirely possible that the world of cinema could swallow her up. If I were to merely guess, I could imagine her having a remarkably Jules Feifferesque career: shifting between comics, film, novels, children's books, and theatre. I'm sure that she has many more opportunities before her right now than she could possibly handle.
SPURGEON: Is Persepolis a book to which you think people will return, and if so, what do you they'll be looking for? What is your takeaway?
BEATY: In many ways I see it as a very affirming story. The first volume of Persepolis was published in October 2000. The one millionth copy of Persepolis was sold in 2006. That's frankly astounding to me, that a black and white autobiographical first comic from a small press like L'Association, which has virtually no advertising infrastructure, could achieve that. It's an amazing story about the ability of an artist to connect with an audience outside of the hype market that drives so much of our current best-seller culture in a post-Rowling, post-Dan Brown mediascape.
As for whether or not people will continue to seek this book out, absolutely I believe they will. I think Persepolis is a sure keeper to the same degree that Maus is now. I was recently on a PhD examination committee in a Literature Department and I was provided with the lists of books that the student had to read in various areas to prove competency. Persepolis was on the list for Women's Writing, alongside Toni Morrison and Mary Shelley. My first thought was "that's quick," but the book also didn't look that out of place in the context that it had been placed. This is a book that is going to continue to be written about, talked about and taught to students. If anything, we're still only at the very beginning of Satrapi's fame.
* all images from the Persepolis volumes, I believe, except for the elephant sequence which comes from Chicken With Plums. I'm not 100 percent sure where the bottom image came from other than the fact it was on my hard drive for some reason. It might be worth noting that the two images at top are of the initial Pantheon English-language releases while the book with the number 3 on it is the third in the L'Association French-language releases that Bart talks about reading. At least I hope.
*****
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* highlights of First Second's Spring 2010, released via PDF catalog, are: a new edition of their Prince Of Persia graphic novel; that basic team's return to a swashbuckler called Solomon's Thieves; the first in a new series of Greek God-related graphic novels, Zeus, King Of The Gods; a book with YA author Jane Yolen, Foiled; Prime Baby, Gene Luen Yang's NY Times Sunday Magazine effort; Booth, a book with Catherine Clinton; the Euro-retro looking City Of Spies; and the kids behind enemy lines Resistance.
* Ward Sutton reviewsThe Letters Of Vincent Van Gogh.
* not comics: traffic at the top newspaper web sites was down for the late Fall period, more distressing news as that industry staggers into the New Year in the middle of seismic, paradigm-crushing change.
CR Holiday Interview #2 -- Frank Santoro On Multiforce
The cartoonist and artist Frank Santoro has in the last few years become one of my favorite thinkers about comics, and I'm always pleased to spend some time basking in his opinions about and love for the comics form. I don't care if that means reading a piece he wrote for Comics Comics; enjoying from the audience a confrontational, rollicking appearance on a small-press show's panel; or simply listening to him hold forth from behind his box of curated 1980s comic books -- I'm there. Within comics' tiny world he's that wonderful cliche "a force of nature," and my enjoyment of comics over the last few years would be poorer without Santoro around.
I wanted to revisit Mat Brinkman's jaw-dropping Multiforce with Frank. While I've been basing one or two questions per chat on what this year's interview subjects have written about the comics they've selected, when that's possible, I like Frank's original essay on his choice so much that for a few questions there I basically just made him re-argue the whole thing, only this time so we could watch. Sorry, Frank. You're welcome, everybody else. -- Tom Spurgeon
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TOM SPURGEON: Frank, I don't think we've talked about this before, but how exactly did you end up writing about comics as well as making them? Have you always done that, or is that a new thing in your relationship to art? Has it had a beneficial or detrimental effect on the way you make art, to operate from an analytical point of view?
FRANK SANTORO: I'm just doing my best Bill Boichel impression. He's such an amazing talker. I learned so much from listening to Bill ramble on and on. He can really articulate all these far flung ideas about comics. I just tried to do that when we started Comics Comics. And starting Comics Comics was just Dan, Tim and me wanting to write about comics the way we talked about them. So... I dunno. Before that I was assisting painters. Like abstract painters and portrait painters. So I had to be able to talk to them about their work while it was being made. Lots of thinking on my feet and trying to explain things that have no way of being concretely explained. Artists seem to talk about things differently to each other than they do when speaking to the audience or a critic. I thought if I started writing about comics I could represent a different viewpoint.
It's helped me in how I go about making things. I'm more alert, more aware of what my motivations are when working. And most importantly, I'm more aware of what I'm trying to say in my work and how I want to present that work to the audience.
SPURGEON:Multiforce originally appeared in Paper Rodeo, one of the most influential comics publications of the last 20 years. Is that where you encountered this work? What was your impression of Paper Rodeo generally?
SANTORO: I first encountered Multiforce in Paper Rodeo, yes. Dan Nadel showed them to me in like 2004. I was late to the party.
My impression of Paper Rodeo was that it was a sloppy mess. I didn't like it. It took me awhile to "see" what was going on. It's wildly uneven. But that's its charm. And don't forget it was sort of antithetical to the spit and polish of "literary comics." So that's charming, too. Or was back in 2004.
I read all the Multiforce strips when Dan tore them all out of Paper Rodeo and collected them all in one binder for his own reference and reading pleasure. That was when I really began to study the strips. It helped me to see how connected those serialized strips were. And how sophisticated the construction was and how it all read as a comic strip.
SPURGEON: In your short collection of notes on Multiforce you talk about not really engaging with Brinkman the cartoonist as much as with some of his other artistic pursuits. What is it you prefer about Brinkman as an artist?
SANTORO: The drawings look so different in person. Seeing his work in a gallery is just so immediate. His line, the ink, the paper -- it's just gorgeous stuff to behold. It's just so successful as drawing. His exhibition at Fumetto this year was amazing. Maybe 50 drawings of grotesque heads. All good. All made with no hesitation. They radiated heat.
The comics are more like collages, I think. He's assembling bits, gags, action, etc in Multiforce and he's doing it in such an organized, complex fashion that it's a little overwhelming. That's the opposite approach, I think, of the single large drawings that are for an exhibition. One is an intimate reading where prolonged engagement is encouraged. The other is a public display where immediacy counts.
It's not about preferring one or the other -- the comics or the work done for exhibitions. I simply appreciated him first as a poster artist, designer and sculptor before I appreciated him as a cartoonist. I mean, he may have created some of the most memorable "rock posters" since the Fillmore posters of the 1960's. And I haven't even mentioned Forcefield.
SPURGEON: I know this may be a frustrating, but can you describe exactly what you mean when you mention the architecture of the world in Multiforce? How wide a conception are we talking?
SANTORO: I don't mean "world building." I mean how he effortlessly scales from tiny detail to mammoth proportion in a three panel sequence. That's very difficult to do convincingly. Brinkman's skill lies in his phrasing style. He constructs pages out of connecting routines. So the narrative itself is built into the segments. The routines, like a giant head rolling down a hill, aren't front and center like in most comics. They're like backdrops for the gag cartoons that float around. There's a tension between the elements. It's an expansion on his earlier style which was much more about following a main character through a landscape. In contrast, the phrasing style of Multiforce is more like a diagram. It grows and grows and builds upon itself like a city; like a shattered mirror. That's the architecture as I see it. It 's the drawing. It's the scaling of panels in an organic manner that is pleasing to look at. There's evident vibrancy in the lines and forms. Those all build together in ways that I rarely see. Figures, landscapes, psychic space. Brinkman's offering a glimpse into a real world. A wide world.
SPURGEON: Do you think that the spiraling effect that you talk about, that Brinkman's pacing comes from the creation of places of visual interest and then allowing readers to move between them, is entirely a conscious one on Brinkman's part? Is it a strategy that he employs to a specific narrative effect, or a just an outgrowth of his way of conceiving story and narrative?
SANTORO: I think it's just natural to him. And the reason why it's appealing for me as a reader is that it feels natural to read. He's as conscious of it as any artist is to what "feels right." I also think that this natural strategy is something that was honed by doing "straight ahead" comics first and then sort of experimenting with ways of composing large pages with smaller fragments.
The spiraling effect is something that goes back to the architecture of the pages themselves. Despite the left to right, top to bottom arc of the reader's eye, the page is experienced as a whole all at once. And Brinkman's beautiful arrangements are like nothing I've ever experienced so completely in comics. The arrangements don't feel rigid or cold. They feel natural. He understands how to move the reader through the page. He doesn't zoom you around the page or bog you down in detail. The centers of visual interest are fragments of the whole. And all these fragments sort of fold back on each other and build up. My eye spirals around the page when this happens. It reads like a web. And one could say that he built his pages in this fashion. A sort of ramshackle symmetry.
SPURGEON: I agree with you that Multiforce has a strong narrative component, but I was wondering just how we know that, given how so much of what Brinkman's artwork asks us to do is dance playfully in and out of these startling visual tableaux. When we're looking at these page as a map, or as a lively Sunday page from some distant planet, how are we still sensing the story? Or we reading it both ways at once? Do we eventually settle in for a more standard reading?
SANTORO: Yah. My "return readings" are more standard now. I still experience it all at once, it dances around but now I, as a reader, feel more settled. There's so much to see, to explore that I find new paths to follow. The story surrounds me & I'm aware of it but it's like a war or something. It's the background. Giants are destroying castles in the background and Micromen are making me laugh in the foreground. Each page is a main event with an undercard.
I mean I can see how one could say "I don't see the plot" or wonder where the main narrative thread is going -- but Brinkman's phrasing style gives me a more complete reading experience. How does he accomplish this? I really don't know. It's uncanny. I think there is such a remarkable fusion of storytelling and drawing in Multiforce. I just get lost in there. It crushes me. Good storytelling, good sequencing. And great drawing. Man.
SPURGEON: Can you talk a little more about how you feel that Multiforce is of its time? Is it just the complexity of it that feels right now to you? Is that more of general feeling than maybe one that can be qualified?
SANTORO: The short answer for me is: Love and Rockets mirrored the '80s, ACME Novelty Library mirrored the '90s, and Multiforce mirrored the '00s.
The longer answer is: I've seen how people far and wide react to Brinkman's work. It's really interesting. The director of Fumetto in Switzerland spoke his name with reverence. His peers in the fine art world also speak very highly of him. There are very few people whom I respect who don't "get" him. He's himself through and through. Genuine. Sincere. A serious craftsman. Artisan. Artist. Cartoonist. Same thing. Same reaction on both sides of the fence. Does that qualify him as "of his time"? Maybe. But I think it's more of an echo of how far his voice has carried.
SPURGEON: How much do you relate to the gaming aesthetic that so many people seem to immediately latch onto? Is it fair to simply describe what Brinkman does here in terms of it being like a video game?
SANTORO: Sure if that's a gateway for readers to engage the work. That's an easy "in," y'know? So, go for it if that's the way the work speaks to you. Because once you're "in the game" you can see and feel how far it goes. You can keep playing so to speak. And then I think the reader will connect to other elements that are beyond its genre trappings.
SPURGEON: I know this is sort of a ridiculous thing to ask, Frank, but how much of what Multiforce accomplishes do you think can inspire people beyond the excitement we all feel when encountering a significant work? I know that when I first saw Chris Ware's work in an issue of New City, it immediately suggested to me a way of doing comics where I could imagine other people doing something along those same lines, and I'm not sure I can conceive of what work that was inspired by Brinkman would even look like. How much of this work is for Brinkman alone and how much does it speak to other artists, do you think?
SANTORO: I really feel that Brinkman taps into some universal voice. And like I said I've seen audiences respond to it. It may be how well he draws or what he draws, I don't know, but Brinkman's voice carries and it resonates with the crowd. Funny, scary, pretty. Gorgeous drawings that scare the shit out of you and then make you laugh. Audiences love that. I love that.
I think it's inspiring work. I can definitely see Brinkman's influence on comics. There's a seduction to the drawing and I can imagine kids wanting to ape it. And I mean that simply because it looks easy to draw. That's the seduction: it looks easy. But it ain't. And I think that's how or why it speaks to other makers of art. It's like hearing a really good band live and not quite believing it, wondering, are these guys really that good? You look around the room and everyone is just digging the band. And then later everyone agrees that was an awesome show, maybe one of the best shows they've ever seen. To me, that's how Brinkman's been working audiences for over a decade.
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* L'Encre du passehas won this year's le Prix Oecumenique de la bande dessinee from a jury of 14. The prize will be given out on Thursday of Angouleme Festival week.
* Vertige Graphic seems to have packaged Charles Schulz's Christian young people cartoons into their own book.
* now there is a prime time "let's you and him fight" quote, although you have to like any argumentative construction that casts John O'Hara's work as an insult.
* the 2010 Midnight Fiction desk calendar is available for download here.
CR Holiday Interview #1 -- Sean T. Collins On Blankets
Sean T. Collins lives in Levittown, New York and was I think the first writer to be receiving assignments simultaneously from Wizard and The Comics Journal. He currently writes for the CBR team blog Robot 6 and for his own blog at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat, in addition to a number of print and on-line clients. Collins has an interesting critical voice for several reasons; one that I find particularly useful is that he wandered into this current age of excellent comics as a blank slate. There's not a lot of an industry bottoming out in the late 1990s evident in Sean's writing, as I'm sometimes afraid there may be in my own.
For his list of comics from the decade just past which he'd be comfortable discussing, Collins and I settled on Craig Thompson's massive Blankets, published by Top Shelf in 2003.
*****
TOM SPURGEON: Where did Blankets hit you on your personal discovery of comics and graphic novels? You have one of the more immediate immersions into the art form, so it's always a question I like to ask you. Had you read a lot of big comics like this one before?
SEAN T. COLLINS: It's funny you should ask this. Just a couple days ago I was talking with a friend about whether or not I should do a best-of-the-decade list, and he suggested I think of doing one as a guide for people who are interested in discovering what's good out there but didn't know where to begin. I realized that that was pretty much my story, this decade. Prior to 2001, I wasn't really a "comics reader," though I'd read comics, including Jimmy Corrigan in the individual ACME Novelty Library issues. But once I got started in earnest, I jumped in with both feet.
Blankets memorably debuted at MoCCA in 2003, along with Kramers Ergot 4 and The Frank Book, both of which I also picked up, which I think gives some indication of where I was at in terms of my interest in ability to read sophisticated comics. Looking over my best-of list for 2003, there's Mat Brinkman, Gilbert Hernandez, Marc Bell, plenty of Ware... in other words Blankets wasn't a "gateway comic" for me, it was something I consumed alongside serious literary and avant garde comics, in the same way I consumed those comics. And alongside plenty of Nu-Marvel books too, of course.
That said, in one respect at least there was no comparing Blankets to anything else, and that was that it was the longest original graphic novel ever published up to that point, in North America at least. So in that sense I hadn't "read a lot of big comics like this one before" -- no one had, because they didn't exist. Bottomless Belly Button and A Drifting Life were a long ways away.
SPURGEON: Had you formed an opinion about Craig Thompson? Were you familiar with his previous work?
COLLINS: I'd read Good-Bye, Chunky Rice and liked it a lot, yes. To tie this back to the previous question, that was one of the most applicable contexts in which I could place Blankets, or at least Craig -- the rapturous and wistful alternative comics starring cute little big-round-headed guys that were all over the place earlier in the decade. I'm thinking of things like Jordan Crane's The Last Lonely Saturday, which had been a real landmark for me, and a Martin Cendreda mini-comic called Zurik Robot, and even Jimmy Corrigan. There's really not a huge leap to be made from the snowy and heartbreaking flashback chapters of Jimmy Corrigan to either Chunky Rice or Blankets, even though Ware and Thompson's approaches to line and layout are obviously very different.
Another important bit of context for me at that time was Will Eisner's work. When I first read Eisner I wasn't cognizant of the controversy over whether he really merited all the accolades heaped upon him, especially for his later and ostensibly more mature works. From where I was standing he was universally acknowledged as the pioneer of the graphic novel, the Orson Welles of comics. What had happened was I'd interviewed Frank Miller for my job at the Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly and he'd enjoyed it so much that right then at the end of the phone call he offered to hook me up with Eisner for the next issue. So I devoured pretty much any Eisner that Jim Hanley's Universe had in stock from A Contract with God onward. Eisner's nakedly emotional approach to narrative, his looseness and borderless freedom with layout, the pantomime body language of his characters, the sweep and lushness of his brushwork, the autobiographical stuff, even his depiction of rainstorms and snowstorms -- that all set me up for Blankets in many ways.
Finally, Blankets was something you could grasp in terms of its position as part of Top Shelf's line. The same year Blankets came out and my wife and I befriended Craig, we picked up Clumsy and Unlikely for free courtesy of Brett Warnock and Chris Staros, and we befriended Jeffrey Brown. So their line at the time, even though it contained From Hell and Hutch Owen and plenty more besides, was spearheaded by these heart-on-sleeve Midwestern indie-rock-soundtracked first-love autobiographies. That was an important frame for the book as well.
SPURGEON: To place that question into a wider context, do you think the timing of Blankets worked in its favor? It was this huge and original work, and I'm not certain that anyone had seen this kind of huge and original work done with Thompson's level of skill. It was also being hand-sold with great effectiveness by Top Shelf, at the time when some smaller shows were beginning to take hold... is there anything to be said about this comic and comics of its kind when they become events above and beyond their content?
COLLINS: Oh, yeah, totally. Blankets wasn't just a book, it was an event. Like I said, it came out at that year's MoCCA, and that was my introduction to the concept of "book of the show." Top Shelf was set up at what had already become its "usual spot" at the bar in the corner of the big ballroom, and you just couldn't miss this huge wall of gigantic powder-blue bricks -- that was Blankets. The whole show was abuzz about the sheer size of the thing if nothing else. To a lesser but still significant extent this was also true of the other phonebook-sized powder-blue-covered book that debuted there, Kramers Ergot 4. But what was more, the insides of both books were just so stunning, visually. When you flipped through them, the impact lived up to the visual impact of simply looking at them, or the physical impact of holding them and lugging them around the show. That was really important.
I think both books -- but especially Blankets because its art and subject matter were ultimately just so much more accessible -- established that in comics, size matters. Size connotes ambition on the part of the artist. Plus it's an immediately obvious sign that this isn't just some flimsy spinner-rack comic, and back then, when you were just starting to see the first flourishings of mainstream-media coverage of comics, that was key to breaking through. It's an instant publicity hook and it gets a crowd buzzing. I think that what you saw happen later, at other shows and in general, with the one-volume Bone and Bottomless Belly Button and A Drifting Life and Kramers Ergot 7, was very much an echo of Blankets.
And I mean, this is not unique to alternative comics -- look at the complete Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side and the sensation those caused, or DC's Absolute Edition collections. Moreover, we've all learned to conflate size with importance since the first time we heard a War and Peace joke in MAD or on You Can't Do That on Television or wherever. But Blankets was the first time altcomix had seen anything like that, as best I can tell -- it was certainly the first time I'd seen anything like that. Plus it was an original graphic novel that hadn't been serialized -- it dropped like a bomb. Plus it was so visually lush. Plus it was an extraordinarily well-designed object with that powder-blue cover. It leaped off the Top Shelf table, you know? And Craig was there, of course, indefatigably signing copies. As time passed and he continued to tour shows with the book and it caught on and blew up and people had read it and connected with it and were bringing in their own copies for him to sign, he became the closest thing alternative comics has ever come to a heartthrob, too, which also fed into Blankets the phenomenon.
SPURGEON: You mentioned that you became personally acquainted with Craig, and I mostly want to stay away from that out of respect for the both of you except for this question: could you characterize Craig's relationship to the book in broad terms? Because it's autobiographical, was there an element for Craig of wanting to get that specific story onto the page? Was it perhaps more about achieving a certain amount of skill put to work on a comic's behalf? How do you think he came to regard the work?
COLLINS: Most of my most direct discussions with Craig about the book took place during shows in 2003 and 2004, so that was the relationship between him and Blankets that I remember most clearly: just the phenomenon of being the author of that book. Having written the longest graphic novel ever, traveling all around the country and eventually the world, meeting and befriending starstruck readers including my wife and myself, how his life with his friends and his girlfriend was going in the face of all of this, signing so many copies that it literally damaged his hand and prevented him from drawing. Yet for all his and its success he was still very much living the life of a cartoonist. During San Diego 2003 he was sharing a room with three other guys while thanks to my A&F gig I had an in-room jacuzzi all to myself. At MoCCA 2004 he stayed with us on Long Island and commuted to the show rather than springing for an expensive hotel room in the city; he slept on our fold-out sofabed and suffered through the smell of the one and to this day only time our cat ever peed outside her litterbox. The word "whirlwind" comes to mind, though he was never scatterbrained, always present in the moment.
But what you said about "wanting to get that specific story onto the page" was a huge factor for him too if I recall correctly. And it turns out this is borne out by the interview I conducted with him at San Diego 2003, which I hadn't read in a long time before this discussion. What I remembered most clearly was that the material focusing on his relationship with his first love, Raina, was also inspired in large part by his relationship with his then-girlfriend. Who was awesome, by the way, friendly and funny and lovely, and welcoming to Craig's ever-expanding circle of fan-friends. Anyway, she was the physical model for Raina for one thing. And I'd forgotten this, but Craig said in the interview that when he started working on Blankets they weren't together -- their separation was the inspiration for Chunky Rice, actually -- so he poured a lot of his longing for her into the Craig character's longing for Raina. So Blankets was more of a love letter to her than to the girl who was the basis for Raina, in fact.
The other major thing was that mailing a copy of Blankets to his parents was his first admission to them that he was no longer a Christian, let alone of all the other uncomfortably intimate moments he was sharing in that book. They were still every bit as devout as they were during the childhood and teen events depicted in the book, so this took a great deal of courage on Craig's part and caused him a great deal of pain. Imagine sending your magnum opus to your parents and their reaction is concern, because this means you're going to Hell. That's literally what they told him. So that was hanging over his head constantly as well -- though I know it felt good for him to break the logjam of communication that had prevented him from ever honestly and openly discussing this with his parents before.
SPURGEON: One thing I was struck by looking at the book recently is that it's so very pretty. There's an element in comics that tends to disregard the effect of art altogether, a faction that almost talks about the art in a comic book as if it were an empty vessel in service of the writing.
COLLINS: That's true, and not just in the usual sense of overemphasizing the plot or the dialogue or what have you. A couple of days ago I read that Comics Journal conversation between Art Spiegelman, Kevin Huizenga, and Gary Groth, and it's just the latest place where Spiegelman describes cartooning as a sort of picture-writing, where your style is like your handwriting, and the images are pictograms. As Huizenga pointed out in a different context elsewhere in the interview, it's sort of contrary to his earlier notion of comics as a "co-mix" of word and picture, since he came to see them as inseparable. Blankets is subtitled "an illustrated novel" -- not so accurate in terms of what we usually understand a novel to be, of course, but bringing "illustration" into the equation makes a lot of sense, I think.
SPURGEON: Can you talk some more about how much of what Blankets did for people came from its very elegant art and Craig design sense? How would the work have been different if a good artist without Craig's particular flair had handled the art chores?
COLLINS: Well, like I said, it grabs people right away. It just looks inviting, like something it would be pleasant or even delightful to spend 600 pages looking at -- and for a book this size that's hugely important. To compare it to other "crossover" hits from a few years back, imagine if Ghost World were 600 pages long! People like you and me might give their eye teeth to wallow in Clowes for that length, but bye bye bookstore sales -- a civilian's eyes would just glaze over. In that interview I did with him, Craig said that he agreed with non-comics readers that your usual comics page is "claustrophobic." With his sweeping line and frequent splash pages and abandonment of panel borders and absence of a grid and so on, he was trying to open things up. So that was key, I think. That's what made my wife make the transition from flipping through the copy I'd left on the kitchen table to grabbing it and reading it all in one sitting to, eventually, getting that recurring mandala symbol tattooed on her person. I mean, that was also because it reflected events in her own life so uncannily that it was all but written about her, but as a comics civilian she never would have gotten there without the look of the thing first and foremost, and the easy, graceful reading experience it enabled.
But it's not a picture book, it's a comic, and to get back to the Spiegelman definition for a moment, form and function mesh pretty perfectly here. It'd been years since I'd last read the book before I re-read it to prep for this conversation, and the thing that struck me immediately was just how openly, nakedly, ecstatically emotional it is! Right from the get-go, from the first scene with Craig and his little brother in bed, they horse around like cartoon animals, then their Dad shows up all angry and he's drawn as a hulking shadowed ogre, then little Phil gets locked in the cubbyhole and it's full of monsters and demons and spiders, it's like Hell, and he screams and cries and pleads and panics and ultimately despairs, and Craig is just devastated. That's the first scene! It's all peaks and valleys. Then it happens again, right away, with Craig getting bullied at school. And so on for 600 pages. In this re-read, it became obvious to me that what many people write off as cloying or melodramatic or emo was a conscious and utterly in-control choice on Thompson's part to pitch everything to the balcony, because that's reflective of how it felt in the moment. At one point Raina makes fun of Craig's flowery way of speaking, which of course is the same way the whole book is narrated in past tense -- I think that gives the game away right there, that Thompson is perfectly aware of how this all looks and reads. And again, you couldn't get there without the surface beauty, kitschy though it may seem to some. You add an edge to it and it falls apart.
SPURGEON: There's been a bit of backlash against Blankets over the years, and one of the responses by some of its supporters has been to point out that it's a book best intended for teens. What do you think of that as a) an accurate description of the book, b) as a deflection against criticism?
COLLINS: People really say that? Hm. Wow. As a defense? Huh. I don't think it's a book best intended for teens, I can say that much. I never thought about it that way, I've never thought about it that way actually. Certainly that never came up in all the conversations I had with Craig about it. Is the idea that he intended it that way, or just that that's how it came out?
I mean, obviously it'd be an amazing book to have and study and hold close to your heart and moon over/fap to the sexy Craig and Raina pictures as a kid. If my wife and I had had something like this when we were long-distance courting by mail as teenagers -- Jesus. The doomed glamor of it all! And even aside from that, it really does just nail the specifics of that situation. Having a hard time eating around this person because you're so infatuated, wearing their clothes once they leave, the dread and hatred you feel for the passage of time because it means they'll have to leave, missing someone while they're still there, sending mix tapes and letters and all sorts of treasures through the mail... some of that stuff I'd forgotten until I re-read it just now, and wham, it hit me like a freight train. The validation that seeing this depicted would give a teenager, I imagine that's just phenomenal.
But the thing is, as teenagers we'd read it as an endorsement rather than as an observation. And it is an observation of past behavior by an older and wiser young man. That it manages to recapture those moments without condescension is remarkable, but it is recapturing them and presenting them through the filter and remove of someone who can look back and see his past emotional and intellectual excesses for what they were. Frankly I think that not seeing this betrays a lack of sophistication on the part of the critic, not on the part of the book.
SPURGEON: Can you describe one or two places where you think Thompson achieves a distance from what he's recording, where it is clearly about observation rather than endorsement?
COLLINS: Aside from the bit where Raina makes fun of the way he's speaking, which is the same way he's been narrating the comic, I think the big tell is the material with Raina's father. When Craig and Raina first rendezvous at the drop-off point and her dad drives them back to their house, Craig mockingly contrasts his happy mile-a-minute chatter with Craig and Raina's silent exchanged glances and whatnot: "Raina's father Steve seemed full of enthusiasm, but I knew OUR enthusiasm was more sincere." But then Craig -- author Craig, not character Craig -- goes on to punctuate that whole romantic middle third of the book with little glimpses of Raina's parents' dissolving marriage, Steve's difficulty connecting with Raina's brother Ben, and of course that final scene where Steve catches Craig and Raina sleeping together shirtless but instead of busting them, he just sits down and looks at the family album. Obviously that's not something Craig could have seen or known in real life. I think it was added to belie character-Craig's first impression of Steve and his superiority to him. Character-Craig is all caught up in his first love, but the great love of Steve's life is falling apart at the same time. I imagine his enthusiasm was no less sincere than Craig and Raina's back in the day.
Moreover, the lynchpin of the final third of the book is the Biblical passage that really keyed Craig into the ambiguity of that text, the thing about "the kingdom of God is around and/or within you." Earlier in the book, everything Craig did he did with the grand gestures of absolute certainty. He doesn't just stop drawing when he feels like it's too secular and selfish a pursuit, he destroys all his old drawings. He doesn't just break up with Raina, he cuts off all contact with her and burns up almost everything she ever gave him. The final section strikes me as a repudiation of the kind of Romantic absolutism that animated most of the book. Now to be fair, I'm cheating a little here, because in that interview Craig came out and said that he cut off contact with Raina because he was a kid and couldn't handle it otherwise. In other words I knew for a fact it was an observation rather than an endorsement. But I think it's present in the text as well.
SPURGEON: You told me in an out-of-interview aside that your re-reading of Blankets indicated to you that it was better than your memory of it. Other than the observational specifics you mention above, can you describe what led you to hold it in greater esteem? And why do you think that occurs to you now and maybe didn't then?
COLLINS: I think the main thing is what I said earlier about how openly emotional it is, and the reason I like it more now is because I've read an awful lot of comics since then, far far more than I had even at the time, and you just don't get that very often. That's not to say that there aren't many alternative and literary and art comics that were designed to have a major emotional impact on the reader and in my case succeeded -- just that the way Thompson foregrounds that, and the resulting pacing and layout and line and figure work and so on -- it's really unique. Particularly the pacing, I'd say. It was just a pleasure to read something I hadn't really seen done elsewhere and have enough under my belt to recognize that.
SPURGEON: Do you feel Blankets has something to say about the act of making art? It's easy to see how Raina acts as a muse for the graphic novel's Craig, but there's also a struggle he has in rectifying art to his Christian beliefs generally. Even on the page, you could say that the way he approaches this story reflects a feeling to be more specific (the posters in Raina's room, say) and present in his art than he maybe was in the funny animal stories he'd done before. At the same time, the dude is engaging those issues while creating a 600-page comics story.
COLLINS: I'm not following what contrast you're drawing with that last sentence... Uh, actually I don't know if I have much of value to say on this point. I think you just summed up most of the obvious points about making art that the book makes. [Spurgeon laughs] Maybe what you're getting at is that throughout most of the book Craig sees life and art as being at odds.
SPURGEON: Yes.
COLLINS: There's obviously very little room for it in the Christian fundamentalist worldview to which he is exposed and to which he ascribes. But even before he becomes involved with Raina he reacts with discomfort and disgust to the mass singalongs at Bible camp -- he seems to see art as solitary rather than communal, and that's a separate issue from how drawing a naked lady makes Jesus cry or how his Sunday school teacher said he couldn't possibly glorify God by drawing his creation since God already drew it. And then later, with Raina, as much as she's his muse, when he's with her he doesn't want to draw at all, since her existence is a superior substitute for the act of making art. Perhaps going back and making a 600-page comic about it all was his way of reassuring himself that art and life need not be at odds, that art can be an important part of life. You see that, a bit, when he tries to reconnect with Phil and encourages him to never stop drawing. He heeded his own advice, I guess. I mean, you can't read the last few pages and the captions about "How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface" without thinking about how he'd just done exactly that 580 times.
SPURGEON: I think people tend to conceive of Blankets in terms of at the book's evocative, romantic middle rather than its last third. It's not always what Thompson thinks about the experience in its entirety, and that's to his credit, but what do you take away when you look at the book as a whole rather than breaking it down to its admittedly lovely parts?
COLLINS: Well, I think the central metaphor of blankets works better as a metaphor than as a real binding thread. Craig said in my interview that the germinative idea was what it's like to sleep with another person for the first time, and then he realized that he'd of course shared a bed with his brother for years, and the story grew from there. But for me, Phil never becomes a character the way that Raina does. There's not really a parallel story being told -- the Phil material is just a frame for further coming-of-age stuff, introducing Craig's harsh family dynamic, providing a contrast between the "filthy" pee fight and how un-filthy he feels being sexual with Raina, and so on. The Raina material is the meat in the sandwich, so I don't blame people for focusing on that. But it's much more than just that boy meets girl, boy loses girl story. It's not Unlikely, with its laser-like focus. It's also about growing up in the rural Midwest, it's about being brothers, it's about a certain strand of American Christianity and the damage it does, it's about having well-meaning but psychologically abusive parents, it's about loss of faith, it's about cartooning, it's a portrait of the artist as a young man, to a certain extent it's about Raina's family and the issues of divorce and adoption and caring for the mentally disabled that are raised there, there are some nice little mementos of the grunge era... it's a big book with big aims, and you lose sight of something important if you reduce it to just the love story. I have no idea if that answers your question.
SPURGEON: That works. Do you think Blankets has been influential? Is comics different now for this book being published? What made you think of it as an emblematic work of the decade?
COLLINS: I think the format is more influential than the content. Other than a handful of pretty minor works I don't think you can point to an important graphic novel and say that it was written or drawn like Blankets. At least, not in the circles I run in. Indeed, I think many of Craig's methods and priorities here were roundly and soundly rejected by Altcomix Nation. Possible exceptions are Skyscrapers of the Midwest, though I think that has more to do with Chris Ware, and maybe Jeff Lemire's Essex County trilogy, which of course is another Top Shelf release. That said, I'm guessing there's dozens of young artists that this book hit like an atom bomb who are out there doing webcomics I'm not reading or making minis I'm not buying, and perhaps one will emerge with a major work at some point.
But the way the book broke was a big deal, for the reasons I described earlier, and now Blankets is sort of the default mode for how to create a breakout graphic novel. You aim for a giant fat book instead of doling things out in serialized installments. Even in 2003 that was still a dicey proposition -- I know Craig took flack from other cartoonists for it, and I know he lost out on income he could have made through his cartooning for a long time while he toiled to produce 600 pages. Nowadays it may still be economically treacherous, but no one would look at you like you were crazy if you told them the reason you hadn't been releasing work is because you were storing up for a 700-page book about high school.
Which is another thing: Memoir is a huge deal, and if you can tie it into a hot-button issue like religion, so much the better. I think it was probably easier for this decade's dabblers-in-comics to see Blankets in Fun Home or Persepolis than to see Maus in them. They'd referenceMaus if they were writing those books up for a magazine, sure, but I think Spiegelman's agenda has a lot less to do with those books than Thompson's.
Meanwhile, I'm not even close to knowing all the specifics of it, but I think Craig was the first of the post-RAW generation to at least be rumored to become very successful thanks to comics. There was that photo op of Chris Staros giving him a $20K check at Wizard World Chicago -- wow, talk about changing times -- and then of course he decamped for Pantheon for altcomix's rumored first six-figure payday. It's easy to see why a company like Pantheon would want to work with guys like Ware or Clowes or Burns, but I think a person of Thompson's age and level of output opened doors in a way that those guys didn't.
This is all making Blankets' impact sound pretty mercenary and gross, though, which I don't think it is. Partially that's because I think that most of what I just went over has been good for comics. But it's also because it has very little to do with why I suggested Blankets as one of the decade's major works. So to answer your question of why, it's because I'll never ever forget that MoCCA when it came out, the immediate impact it had on the scene. Everyone had to have an opinion about it and passionately defend it. It got people talking, and it got people reading, more than any comic I'd actually been around to see come out up until that point. It did so because it just plain worked in an immediate and obvious way. If I had a nickel for every time I saw it show up as the only comic on some LiveJournal list of someone's favorite books, I'd probably have a couple bucks. It's one of a very few books that you can point to and say "There, that's a book that made comics happen this decade." Now, I happen to really like it, so my hope is that other artists might ask themselves how it pulled this off, and return to it and read it and learn from it and apply it. There's gold in them thar hills.
* all images from Blankets except the last one which I think is an unused cover for an edition, an image that I had sitting on my hard drive for some unspeakable reason.
*****
This year's CR Holiday Interview Series features some of the best writers about comics talking about emblematic -- by which we mean favorite, representative or just plain great -- books from the ten-year period 2000-2009. The writer provides a short list of books, comics or series they believe qualify; I pick one from their list that sounds interesting to me and we talk about it. It's been a long, rough and fascinating decade. Our hope is that this series will entertain from interview to interview but also remind all of us what a remarkable time it has been and continues to be for comics as an art form. We wish you the happiest of holidays no matter how you worship or choose not to. Thank you so much for reading The Comics Reporter.
Quote Of The Week
"Sluggo Smith is a comic strip character from the Nancy comic strip. Sluggo is Nancy's best friend. He is Nancy's age and is a poor ragamuffin-type from the wrong side of the tracks. There are strips that appear to place Sluggo as Nancy's boyfriend. He is portrayed as lazy, and his favorite pastime seems to be napping."-- Toy-A-Day
*****
today's cover is from one of the great publications of the underground comix era
OTBP: Canicola Vol. 8 one of a handful of great anthologies this decade, Canicola offers up two right-to-left manga stories in its eighth edition; it should eventually be available here
This Book Is Very, Very Attractive
My review won't scroll out until the new year, but I was pleased with how the new Rocketeer collection from IDW looks. It's a fitting package for one of the prettiest comics. You can see more design stuff here.
E&P To Publish January Issue
Here's a nice, hopeful note on which to end the week: 125-year-old newspaper industry bible Editor & Publisher, whose announced closure shocked many observers, will publish in January after a groundswell of report from buyers and advertisers. It sounds like that may be an opportunity for someone to propose a modified (less expensive) version of the magazine, and let's hope someone steps up.
Here's a list of best comics from the ten-year-period soon fading from view from John Seven, this one split into adults and kids categories. His choices are:
Older Readers
* Alan's War, Emmanuel Guibert (First Second)
* Alice in Sunderland , Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse)
* The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard, Eddie Campbell and Dan Best (First Second)
* Asterios Polyp, David Mazzuchelli (Pantheon)
* Black Hole, Charles Burns (Pantheon)
* Cecil and Jordan in New York Stories, Gabrielle Bell (Drawn and Quarterly)
* Dungeon, Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim (NBM)
* Essex County Trilogy, Jeff Lemire (Top Shelf)
* Exit Wounds, Rutu Modan (Drawn and Quarterly)
* Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (Mariner Books)
* George Sprott, Seth (Drawn and Quarterly)
* Gus and His Gang, Chris Blain (First Second)
* La Perdida, Jessica Abel (Pantheon)
* Notes for a War Story, Gipi (First Second)
* Paul Has a Summer Job, Paul Moves Out, Paul Goes Fishing, Michel Rabagliati (Drawn and Quarterly)
* Persepolis 1-2, Marjane Sartrapi (Pantheon Books)
* The Photographer, Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier (First Second)
* Rabbi's Cat 1-2, Joann Sfar (Pantheon)
* Safe Area Gorazde, Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics)
* Stitches, David Small (Norton)
Younger Readers
* The Aya books, Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie (Drawn and Quarterly)
* Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange KidsFolklore and Fairytale Funnies, It Was a Dark and Silly Night, Various (Raw Jr)
* Little Vampire, Joann Sfar (First Second)
* Moomin 1-4, Tove Jannssen (Drawn and Quarterly)
* Plain Janes 1-2, Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg (Minx Books)
* Robot Dreams, Sara Varon (First Second)
* Sandwalk Adventures, Jay Hosler (Active Synapse)
* Storm in the Barn, Matt Phelan (Candlewick Press)
* Syncopated: An Anthology of Non Fiction Picto Essays, Various (Villard)
* Toon Books (Raw Jr)
Commentary on the list available through that initial link.
How To Use ComixTalk's '09 Roundtable You may want to just read the 2009 ComixTalk roundtable like any other article: there's a wealth of information there, and while discussion of any issue remains on the surface it's a nice survey of what's going on in that avenue of comics-making and several basic takes on each. With participants like Brigid Alverson, Shaenon Garrity and Gary Tyrrell and Derik A Badman, someone is bound to say something smart or insightful every 7.3 seconds. I would suggest, however, to not only read the article but to do so using a browser with a "create new tabs" function, and then employ that right-click on every actual webcomic mentioned, making the whole thing into a folder of new webcomics to check out. You're welcome.
One Way To Spend Your Holidays
I thought it worth mentioning that in the flood of Iranians seeking to feel the country in light of ongoing political struggles there, cartoonist Nikahan Kowsar, formerly of Iran and now living in I think Toronto, has been advising folks on how to set up shop elsewhere in much the same way he did. There's not much I can do other than make note of it, but I'm glad he's doing that.
Michael Cavna catches a couple of response from cartoonists on the death of newspaper industry bible Editor & Publisher, and articulates what appearing in that publication's news and features meant to several generations of cartoonists.
In completely unrelated news, here's a Cavna link I've never been able to utilize but I think asks an important question. I assume this will happen sooner, not later.
Cartooning Awards Round-Up
* Alan Gardner caught that the cartoonist Robert Ariail became the first American cartoonist to win the United Nations' Ranan Lurie Political Political Cartoon Award. Ariail wins $10,000 and will receive the award from the UN Secretary General. Second and third place went to cartoonists from Switzerland and Israel.
* according to a report in the Tehran Times, the Cuban cartoonist Aristides Esteban Hernandez Guerrero (Ares) won the big prize given out at the 9th Tehran International Cartoon Biennial, I'm guessing for the cartoon reprinted here. International cartoon exhibitions are to comics coverage what state karate tournaments in that neither entity can hope to cover all of them or even sort them out, but this sounds like a major one with some good work. Cartoonists from the Ukraine, Turkey and China won divisional prizes.
* via the FPI Blog comes this report that indicates two Times cartoonist took home awards from the Political Cartoonist Society. Peter Brookes was named Political Cartoonist Of The Year, while Morten Morland won for best single image.
Katherine Dacey of The Manga Critichas posted the site's best of 2009, broken down into a top ten and categorized honorable mentions. A lot of commentary including how A Drifting Life and Ooku: The Inner Chambers were left off of the list available through that link.
1. Children Of The Sea, Daisuke Igarashi (VIZ Media)
2. Red Snow, Susumu Katsumata (Drawn & Quarterly)
3. Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu, Junko Mizuno (Last Gasp)
4. Pluto: Urasawa X Tezuka, Naoki Urasawa (VIZ Media)
5. A Distant Neighborhood, Jiro Taniguchi (Fanfare/Ponent Mon)
6. The Name Of The Flower, Ken Saito (CMX)
7. Gogo Monster, Taiyo Matsumoto (VIZ Media)
8. Itazura Na Kiss, Kaoru Tada (Digital Manga Publishing)
9. Detroit Metal City, Kiminori Wakasugi (VIZ Media)
10. Oishinbo A La Carte, Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki (VIZ Media)
* Best Continuing Series: Black Jack (Vertical, Inc.) and Real (VIZ Media)
* Best Dressed Characters: The History of the West Wing (Yen Press)
* Best Finale: Emma (CMX) and Parasyte (Del Rey)
* Best Guilty Pleasure: Cat Paradise (Yen Press)
* Best Kid-Friendly Title: Dinosaur Hour (VIZ) and Leave it to PET! The Misadventures of a Recycled Super-Robot (VIZ)
* Best License Rescue: Yotsuba&! (Yen Press)
* Best Manhwa: Small-Minded Schoolgirls (NETCOMICS)
* Best New Manga That's Already on Hiatus: The Manzai Comics (Aurora)
* Best Prose Novel Released by a Manga Publisher: The Cat in the Coffin (Vertical, Inc.)
* Best Reprint Edition: Clover (Dark Horse)
* Best Substitute for Television: Fire Investigator Nanase (CMX)
* Best Translation of a Dense, Culturally-Specific Text: Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking (Del Rey)
* Best Use of Wagner in a Manga: Ludwig II (DMP)
* Best Yaoi: Future Lovers (Aurora/Deux)
The Flashlight Worthy All-Stars And Their Comics Picks For 2009
The site Flashlight Worthy asked a bunch of prominent comics bloggers -- I was familiar with nearly all of them, anyway -- to suggest a book for 2009. The results are thoroughly discussed through the link, and are as follows:
* Brigid Alverson: Pluto: Urasawa X Tezuka Vol. 1, Naoki Urasawa (Viz)
* Chris: The Eternal Smile: Three Stories, Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim (First Second)
* David Welsh: Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu, Junko Mizuno (Last Gasp)
* Greg McElhatton: A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Drawn And Quarterly)
* Jog: Driven By Lemons, Josh Cotter (AdHouse)
* Johanna Draper Carlson: Sinfest Vol. 1, Tatsuya Ishida (Dark Horse Comics)
* Lorena Nava Ruggero: Detroit Metal City Vol. 1, Kiminori Wakasugi (Viz)
* Matthew J. Brady: Far Arden, Kevin Cannon (Top Shelf)
* Nymeth: Bayou, Jeremy Love (Zuda)
* Peter: Stitches: A Memoir, David Small (WW Norton)
* Sandy Bilus: Parker: The Hunter, Darwyn Cooke (IDW)
Michigan Retailer Shooter Convicted
Jevon Sawyer was found guilty yesterday of several counts related to the April 8, 2008 assault of retailer David Pirkola. After an eight-hour jury deliberation, the third of three defendants that faced charges from the assault -- and the shooter -- was found guilty of assault with intent to rob while armed, guilty of assault with intent to do great bodily harm, carrying a concealed weapon, and using a firearm in the commission of a felony. The first carries a potential life sentence. Sawyer will be sentenced on January 21. He is 20 years old.
Pirkola told the reporter he was satisfied with the verdict. More on Pirkola can be found in the article leading up to the conviction here.
* Dan Nadel notes that Robert Williams has been invited to participate in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and that this is a big deal because it's an invite from the people against which Williams and Juxtapoz have always been fighting, in a sense.
* I haven't been paying to the Ed Brubaker-directed sidecar to the big, burly motorcycle that is the major Marvel Universe, but I've bookmarked this article for when I start doing that.
* not comics: Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisherprovides a list of top ten newspaper industry stories for 2009. There are a couple on here that are either straight up about comics (editorial cartoonist positions lost) or sort-of about comics (E&P itself closing down), but it's hard to get away from that 40,000 newspaper industry jobs lost in 2009. That's just brutal.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* Judge Nan Nolan has denied the bail application of Mickey Mouse Plot co-defendant Tahawwur Rana. Whether or not Rana would receive bail turned into a big moment in the early portions of legal proceedings against Rana and David Coleman Headley on charges relating to planned terrorist attacks against perpetrators of the Danish Muhammad Cartoons and assistance in the 2008 Mumbai shootings. Rana has been portrayed as the more innocent of the two, even duped into participation by Headley. Prosecutors played tapes that indicated Rana knew more about the Mumbai shootings than was being portrayed. The judge cited Rana's ability to flee the jurisdiction as a factor in denying bail.
The contributors to MTV's Splash Page blog have rolled out their Best of 2009 list. It looks like the contributors are Josh Wigler, Blair Marnell, Brian Warmoth and Rick Marshall. Their list is:
Best All-Ages Comic:The New Brighton Archeological Society, Mark Andrew Smith and Matthew Weldon (Image) Best Comic Adapted From Another Medium:Parker: The Hunter, Darwyn Cooke (IDW) Best Crossover Event:Blackest Night (DC) Best Finale:Planetary #27, Warren Ellis and John Cassaday (Wildstorm) Best Licensed Series:Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season Eight (Dark Horse) Best Miniseries:Rapture, Michavel Avon Oeming and Taki Soma (Dark Horse) Best New Series:Chew, John Layman and Rob Guillory (Image) Best New Webcomic:Bad Machinery, John Allison (www.scarygoround.com) Best Non-Fiction Comic:AD: New Orleans After The Deluge, Josh Neufeld (Pantheon) Best One-Shot Issue:GI Joe: Cobra: Special #1 (IDW) Best Print Edition Of A Webcomic:Goats: Infinite Typewriters, Jonathan Rosenberg (Del Rey) Best Under-The-Radar Series:Robot 13, Thomas Hall and Daniel Bradford (Blacklist) Best Webcomic:xkcd, Randall Munroe (www.xkcd.com)
Click through the above link for commentary on the various choices by one of the aforementioned writers.
The ComicsAlliance site has named its best ten comics of the years in a three-page list beginning here. Contributing to the list were Laura Hudson, David Brothers, Eric Drumm, Caleb Goellner, Jason Michelitch, Chris Murphy, John Parker and Chris Sims.
1. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)
2. Detective Comics, Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III (DC)
3. Parker: The Hunter, Darwyn Cooke (IDW)
4. Scott Pilgrim Vol. 5, Bryan Lee O'Malley (Oni)
5. Incognito, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Marvel/Icon)
6. Pluto, Naoki Urasawa (Viz)
7. Driven by Lemons, Josh Cotter (AdHouse)
8. Invincible Iron Man, Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca (Marvel)
9. Scalped, Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera (DC/Vertigo)
10. Incredible Hercules, Greg Park and Fred Van Lente and Various Artists (Marvel)
Click through the above link for commentary regarding each choice.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Mike Lynch is having one of those book sales that makes me wish I had unlimited disposable income.
* the comics critic and cultural historian Jeet Heer writes a long and well-illustrated post about gay characters in comics before the comics of five years ago that seemed to piss off a certain brand of conservative culture-watcher.
* an update on the Editor & Publisher closing indicates there may be some half-life involved after the site shuts down after the January issue, or a new venture altogether. It sounds kind of grim. I don't understand how a shift to a new on-line site would have to be totally unpaid work unless the E&P site was running on no money for a while, which I guess could be true, or if they have no chance to attract advertisers to a same-service site.
* it looks like Marvel doesn't know what to do with its Incredible Hercules series. I hate to backseat drive companies because I've barely made like sixteen dimes from working in comic books, but at some point it seems that if well-regarded series after well-regarded series is broken on the rocks of a market that won't respond to them, you should start to look at changing the game board to be more receptive to such series as opposed to picking up a game piece you think might work better.
* I really want to get behind the book industry in some fashion when they criticize the rise of e-book 1) because I'm fundamentally conservative and 2) because I think the rhetoric of on-line media triumphalists is frequently full of it. Still, it's hard to support in any way a statement that a $9.95 e-book is predatory pricing -- that just sounds like an industry wanting to protect a certain kind of infrastructure, not someone looking at new technology with wide-open eyes.
* not comics: so I guess the FBI finally made an arrest of a person they suspect distributed a screener for the movie Wolverine. As someone who saw Wolverine yesterday, I wish the accused had sent the screener to me. That was a strange movie. It was the first movie of this generation of superhero movies that seemed to be solely for people that had really, really bought into the previous superhero movies. If you weren't into previous X-Men movies or the way Hugh Jackman played the title lead just on principle, I'm not sure what you'd grab onto. The lead character was fiercely uninteresting and the fights were dull as dirt... the problem was that as you sat there you remembered the comics from which they drew a lot of this stuff were equally mediocre. That was kind of humbling, in a way, like the movie had asked for a better story than 20 years of comics could provide. I did like Gambit's helicopter stick; Ryan Reynolds seemed like he was in the movie for having made fun of the Fox Studio chairman's daughter at a charity dinner or something.
* the mainstream-focused web site Newsaramatalks to the writer Kurt Busiek about creating characters you will never own for a company that may or may not take a shine to them.
* not comics: as was pretty clearly obvious from the start, it looks like the robbery at the Frazetta Museum has to do with the family fighting over control of the ailing Frank Frazetta Sr.'s treasure trove of paintings more than it was the accused son of the painter flipping out and hoping to steal the paintings for re-sale. I wish the Frazettas all the luck in working things out. I can't imagine working through those kinds of family issues with this kind of attention, and it doesn't seem to me there's a whole lot that's wacky or exciting about the bond between brothers and sisters and daughters and sons imploding during a noted patriarch's final days.
* finally, the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com makes note of how a couple of groups are stepping into the forthcoming "Week Without A Diamond Shipment" with sales initiatives designed to draw that diverted attention to the things they're doing.
Bookmark And Read New Comics Until Your Fingers And/Or Eyes Hurt
Sean T. Collins makes the fine point here and here that there are any numbers of top-of-the-line alt-comics offering popp
SPURGEON: Have you read or seen any other 9/11-related art that weren't comics, like Oliver Stone's 
HODLER: I read the 
SPURGEON: Are there any works in which you can detect the presence of 9/11 that maybe doesn't work with it explicitly? Is there a hangover that effects the art, and if not, why not? For example, I've wondered after how it hasn't changed the scale of superhero comics, where in the real world this destruction of a few buildings turns the world upside own and in these stories they're frequently leveling entire city blocks in this kind of unrelenting series of physical horrors. But I could imagine a similar effect in any number of comics... is there anything resembling a 9/11 hangover you can think of? 
SPURGEON: Can you give me a few sentences of thought on Art Spiegelman, where he stands in your personal pantheon of comics creators and as an arts figure generally? Did you have expectations based on that view when opening this book? 
One of the more interesting failed communications in the book can be found in what Spiegelman calls "the pivotal image of my 9/11 morning -- one that didn't get photographed or videotaped into public memory but still remains burned onto the inside of my eyelids several years later ... the image of the looming north tower's glowing bones just before it vaporized." This image, as he created it with computer software, is repeated throughout the ten strips that make up the book, and doesn't really register at all. It's not a powerful image, except apparently in Spiegelman's mind -- instead it just looks cheesy and half-baked. That the symbol so pivotal to Spiegelman, something I would not have guessed if we didn't have the introduction -- and obviously we do have it so we should keep that in mind, comes off as so underwhelming is indicative of many of the book's shortcomings.
* Brigid Alverson 
* 
TOM SPURGEON: Here's a simple question, I hope. How did you discover the Scott Pilgrim work, and if your relationship has changed since that initial encounter, how would you describe those changes? Do you like it more now than you did at first, for example?
SPURGEON: Not really, I guess the references I don't get kind of blow by. I realize afterwards I might not be understanding some of the material on a certain level, but it doesn't feel like I'm missing out, if you know what I mean. I'm sort of surprised how comfortable the work feels to me. Maybe I've adjusted to seeing those things through other people's eyes, as you suggest. It does sort of feel like I'm hearing about my friends' kids and their circle of friends than about my own experiences or those of my peer group. But the experience seems grounded and real to me, even if it's on somebody's plate down the table rather than on my own. The characters work for me. What is it that O'Malley does that people are able to imprint on or just enthuse over when it comes to the characters in the books?
SPURGEON: One of the nice things about these books is that there is a sense of progression, a growing sense of maturity without that notion being pressed -- one of the great traditional strengths of serial art when it's done well. Do you also look at these books in terms of the ideas they communicate on the issues broached? Does Scott Pilgrim say something to you about idea like commitment and friendship and love?
* people really need to stop 
TOM SPURGEON: In your National Post essay about Louis Riel, 
SPURGEON: The most memorable part of that essay for me was when you spoke about how the simplicity of Brown's art work prompted a close reading of the remaining information. That's a fascinating notion, and one that maybe counter to the popular notion that the less information we have the more we imprint our own. Is there something about the way Brown presents the visual information aside from its relative sparseness that captures our interest? What makes him so good at sustaining our interest, do you think?
SPURGEON: According to Brown, this was the last serial comic of his career, which I think is definitely something that ties into industry and artistic trends of this decade in comics. Did you read Louis Riel as a serial, and did that have any effect on how you read it? Do you think being serialized had any effect on the final, collected volume? Do you have any thoughts in general about the decline of serialized print comics? I suppose it shouldn't matter, but that's a way that a lot of us grew to read comics and move back and forth between various authors.
* here's 
* Steve Duin of the Oregonian, one of only a few major newspaper writers to pay frequent attention to the comics world, 
* 
* the writer and columnist Steven Grant 
* Ken Parille 
* The Beguiling 
TOM SPURGEON: Have you been with Powers from the beginning? When did you dive in, and what were your initial impressions? 
SPURGEON: One of the things I forgot about until I went and looked at a couple of the trades is that Powers has one foot in crime procedural and another in tabloid biography of all things -- the "behind the scenes" stuff that maybe you don't see as much as you used to at the beginning of the decade. How do you see that peculiar influence at work in Powers? Does the series say something about celebrity, or is that just another source from which to shape entertaining stories?
SPURGEON: Including the celebrity culture and its place in the new wave of crime material, do you consider Powers a work rich in metaphor? That's generally a way that people ascribe greater significance to a superhero series outside of its entertainment value. What do you feel are its general strengths? 
* 
"The Party" is important as the storyline that introduced Roast Beef ("Roast Beef, the other cat / Neither Ray nor Pat"). The relationship between Roast Beef and Ray has since become the heart of the strip, whereas in the early strips it's more about the bears and Philippe. But that relationship only gels in the next big storyline, "Ray's Startup." The 
SPURGEON: Onstad's highest accolades come to him as a writer. How do you feel about his art? I think it's effective, but I can't tell if that's just because I'm used to it or if I think it actually has qualities that benefit the strip. When do you think the art in Achewood is at its most effective, and what qualities does it have at those times?
SPURGEON: I re-read a bunch of Achewood before this interview, and I wondered if there was a good question about how the strip is funny. I think that a lot of it is execution, of course, the precision he brings to the characters and the lean, to-the-point quality of the gags. But conceptually, I wonder how I would describe what he does. Is there an Achewood worldview that can be described? Part of me thinks that he gets great mileage out of these raw characters crashing into a peculiarly complex and idiosyncratic way of doing things, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't come close to describing it.
GARRITY: The Great Outdoor Fight encapsulates a lot of key elements of Achewood, so it's a good introduction. It's about the relationship between Roast Beef and Ray, it opens with Ray starting a bizarre business venture, and it's got nearly all the characters in some role, even if most of them are just spectators to the Beef/Ray drama. It also has a great climax and ending, which is one area where Achewood can be a little weak. A lot of storylines just end rather than building to a climax, but the GOF builds and builds and builds.
GARRITY: Okay, here's the one secret I know about Chris Onstad, based on my extremely limited personal contact with him: he's sort of a combination of Roast Beef and Ray. Underneath his shyness, he's a good businessman, and he seems to have unlimited energy for promoting Achewood and developing its world. He's tried every possible revenue stream in webcomics. Hell, he was even in the 
* for everyone that had to memorize something similar as some sort of bizarre pre-Christmas vacation pageant-related punishment, "We Are Winter's Jewels..." 
* the writer John Seven 
SPURGEON: How do you think people should process characters like Flip or other situations that might not reflect the most enlightened of attitudes in older works like this one? Does that pick at you, bother you personally, or do you kind of accept it as an example of outmoded historical attitudes? Should it have an effect on how we appraise the work?
* 
* Zak Sally and Jaime Hernandez 
SPURGEON: At what point and for what reason, if this is knowledge that anyone could really know, did it begin to build momentum and become a hit?
SPURGEON: I saw Marjane Satrapi speak at a 
* Ward Sutton 
FRANK SANTORO: I'm just doing my best 
SPURGEON: Multiforce originally appeared in 
SPURGEON: In your short collection of notes on Multiforce you talk about not really engaging with Brinkman the cartoonist as much as with some of his other artistic pursuits. What is it you prefer about Brinkman as an artist?
* 
SPURGEON: To place that question into a wider context, do you think the timing of Blankets worked in its favor? It was this huge and original work, and I'm not certain that anyone had seen this kind of huge and original work done with Thompson's level of skill. It was also being hand-sold with great effectiveness by Top Shelf, at the time when some smaller shows were beginning to take hold... is there anything to be said about this comic and comics of its kind when they become events above and beyond their content?
SPURGEON: There's been a bit of backlash against Blankets over the years, and one of the responses by some of its supporters has been to point out that it's a book best intended for teens. What do you think of that as a) an accurate description of the book, b) as a deflection against criticism?
SPURGEON: Do you feel Blankets has something to say about the act of making art? It's easy to see how Raina acts as a muse for the graphic novel's Craig, but there's also a struggle he has in rectifying art to his Christian beliefs generally. Even on the page, you could say that the way he approaches this story reflects a feeling to be more specific (the posters in Raina's room, say) and present in his art than he maybe was in the funny animal stories he'd done before. At the same time, the dude is engaging those issues while creating a 600-page comics story.
You may want to just read 
* according to 
* Dan Nadel 
* the comics critic and cultural historian Jeet Heer 
