The discussion fostered by cartoonist Eddie Campbell’s essay on comics and how they work, entitled “The Literaries,” published last month at TCJ.com, has been alternately fascinating and frustrating. Characteristically for the comics community, blogosphere reactions were divided roughly into two camps: fanboys cheering him for tracing a line in the sand against the naysayers who would hold comics to higher standards, and those same naysayers, saying, well, nay to the most superficial parts of his piece without noticing the beam in their own eye.

Campbell’s polemic was voiced in part against Ng Suat Tong’s touchstone essay “EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory” published in The Comics Journal in 2003, and recently republished here. At the time, the essay was a brilliant corrective to fanboy orthodoxy, helping usher in a more mature approach to comics criticism that refused to isolate comics from the wider cultural field, but rather attempted to judge an acknowledged comics classic by the yardstick of major achievements in other media. Unsurprisingly, the work of Kurtzman, Feldstein, Craig, Krigstein, Wood, Ingels, Williamson, Davis, Elder, et. al. seemed less than great when compared to Aristophanes, Anne Frank, Goya, Giotto, Citizen Kane, Van Gogh, The Romance of Three Kingdoms, Catch-22, and La Grande Illusion.

Suat’s essay, which followed in the tradition staked out by Gary Groth at The Comics Journal through the previous decade-and-half, was a highly illuminating exercise, and a prophetic one in that a large part of serious comics criticism since then has been preoccupied to the point of obsession with making similar comparisons. For obvious historical reasons, comics aficionados have been affected by status anxiety since at least Gilbert Seldes, and comics fandom has been plagued by it to the point of insularity. And the particular tendency at play here has been on the rise in the last decade as comics have experienced increased cultural and institutional acceptance.

Let us leave the fanboys aside and concentrate on the critics. I will forego discussing Suat’s querulous and ungenerous riposte, which only does his original piece disservice and focus on Robert Stanley Martin’s trenchant critique instead. Denying Campbell almost the entirety of his argument, Robert insists that he and others writing from similar perspectives do indeed take comics seriously as a visual medium, calling Campbell’s assertion of a literary bias a “straw man.” He further unapologetically insists upon focusing primarily on story in any comic that tells one, taking into consideration visuals only “as a means to an end which happens to be that story’s realization.” In Robert’s caricature of Campbell, the latter considers story “irrelevant”, preferring to focus instead on details of design, execution, or detail—on “flash.” He understandably asserts that this straw man (sorry Robert, but it is what it is) should not “be taken the least bit seriously.”

OK, Campbell’s piece is not rigorously argued and one can point to inconsistencies, but Robert nevertheless seems to be missing the point. Campbell does not dismiss ‘story’ (as I will forthwith call it, for reasons about to become clear) as an integral element to comics, but rather extends the concept of story to the images themselves:
 

…the art is to be found in the story the cartoonist tells in his graphic strokes, his deployment of the whole panoply of cartoon effects and ways of seeing and representing. In the work of an exceptional artist there can be a whole other story happening.

Campbell’s point is not just basic to criticism of visual art, but also reflects a perspective so commonplace that it has become a truism, namely that the value of a story lies as much in how it is told as what it tells. Leaving aside the problematic discussion of form and content and the eagerness with which many comics critics want to separate them, this is at the crux of Campbell’s argument and is exemplified well in his Billie Holiday analogy: it is her performance of a song like “Who Wants Love”, rather than the words themselves that make it a great song when she sings it.

In his response to Campbell, Noah Berlatsky seems to agree with this basic premise, but uses that song as an example of how Campbell is so overeager to separate comics from literature that he overlooks the ways in which her performance is precisely that. This is not a discussion I want to engage at length here—Robert and Noah are clearly right that comics can be seen as a form of literature, and especially that attempting to segregate the form leads to insularity, but I do not see how such an endeavor is implied by Campbell’s argument. He merely warns against insisting too assiduously that comics be measured against, and according to the logic of, whatever standard one might posit from a wider cultural field. If you ask for The Romance of Three Kingdoms when reading Two-Fisted Tales you are bound to be disappointed, as Suat rightly pointed out in his original piece, but more importantly you are liable to miss out on whatever genuine artistic value is offered by Kurtzman and his collaborators, whether their efforts compare favorably to those of Luo Guanzhong in the final tally or not.

A great work of literature, or other work of art, might be a fine aesthetic ideal to keep in mind when criticizing comics, but formally and conceptually it can blinker you to how comics work if you insist on its priority. Of course you can compare comics with works in other media, but hopefully we can all agree that they work in the distinct ways and in the distinct tradition that make them comics, and that paying attention to these help us understand and appreciate them better than if we apply the logic of a different art form to them more or less wholesale. Campbell oversells his argument when he calls comparisons with other media ‘irrelevant criteria’, but his basic point—that we should try paying closer attention to how comics work and what they do—is a good one.

But is it one we need to be reminded of? As we have seen, Robert insists that Campbell’s identification of a literary bias is wrong, but is it? Let us take a look at Suat’s EC piece: in more than 5,000 words discussing plot, character, theme, and ideology—i.e. ‘story’—comments on the visuals of the EC comics are relegated to a few laudatory adjectives. They never really become part of the argument, even as they pertain to ‘story’ elements. More confusingly, Suat argues in one place (discussing Krigstein and Feldstein’s “Master Race”) that form and content can and should be separated: “a feeble story, no matter how masterfully executed, should not be excused on the basis of mere thematic maturity”, but almost immediately follows this by saying it can not: “style and content cannot be divorced in what is clearly a narrative story.” Which one is it?

Or we could look at Robert’s extended body of comics reviews. One understands why he so emphatically describes the visual aspects of comics as “means to an end.” While perceptive and often expansive when it comes to the ‘story’ aspects of the comics, he generally relegates visuals to a few, adjective-laden sentences, good on declaration but less on explanation or analysis. His critique of E. C. Segar is particularly telling: Popeye’s high points for him are the anomalous moments of satire in certain stories, which as I have discussed elsewhere seems to me a perfect illustration of how evaluating cartooning by its literary ‘content’ may blind one to its more obvious qualities—in Segar’s case the kinetic humor, absurdist wit, and visual originality of his cartooning.

Noah, for his part, is less wedded to high culture frameworks of evaluation. Nevertheless, his response to Campbell carries intimations of the literary bias at issue here. Despite his attentive visual analysis, his final take on the Kirby-Lee Captain America page is a classic example of reading rather than looking. To him, the page is a self-reflexive performance by the authors—its anti-literary turn a celebration of Kirby’s ‘Ab-Ex’ flexing of drawing chops. Where does Noah get this idea? Well, the obvious place would be the caption at the top of the page, written by Lee, which presents it as such.

This is a misunderstanding of Kirby’s work. Reading the story in question attentively, or really reading any of the prime sixties Marvel material, it should be clear that there is a tension between image and text, a tension that precisely has to do with Kirby and Lee’s working method, as Campbell also notes. Lee is indeed a self-reflexive writer who is all about performance (sometimes delightfully so), but such terms hardly describe Kirby’s artistic sensibility. Invariably earnest, he was never a showoff and the Campbellian story he tells, beyond the ‘story’ of Captain America versus Batroc, is one of pain and perseverance, of the human condition. Literary or not, it is a story very much at odds with Lee’s writing and one that reveals itself only if one pays attention to his cartooning instead of reading its labeling.

Similarly revealing is Noah’s analysis of Holiday’s performance of “Who Needs Love.” He describes it as great because of her ironic distance to the banal lyrics, which enables her to imbue them with greater meaning that their hack writer ever imagined. This might be right in a sense, but the process seems to me much simpler: Holiday recognizes that clichés contain truth and is able to bring out this truth in a performance that is necessarily unironic. The anxiety of academically schooled critics around cliché tends to lead them into contorted and unnecessary arguments such as Noah’s when faced with it. This seems to a major reason why those products of popular culture that have genuine aesthetic value—in casu certain comics—tend to fare badly when subjected to the kind of scrutiny taught at the academy. In this context Campbell’s fairly straightforward point is worth listening to.

But how can one deny the precedence of more straightforwardly literary ‘story’ told in these comics, as Campbell is accused of doing here? And should one do so? Not necessarily, but on the other hand I see no reason to give it absolute priority. The ‘story’ is obviously an important part of the vast majority of comics and critical engagement with it can yield important insights, as it indeed often does in the writings of Suat, Robert, and Noah. My problem with the discourse as presented, however, is with the apparent—and in Robert’s case outright—denial that other approaches might be equally fruitful. That the drawings are always a means to an end, that the non-literary parts of these comics are outweighed in importance by the literary ones.

This appears generally to be less of a problem with criticism of comics of obvious literary ambition, such as those by Campbell himself,* and more with traditional genre comics. The context of these works is mass culture and as such tends toward the sub-literary. There is no question that a lot of this material is disposable, but fastidious comparison with works predominantly understood in terms of high art seems to me a blunt instrument remarkably unsuited to understanding what qualities some of it might possess. It also encourages a bizarre hierarchy of comics genres in which an unobjectionably well-crafted comic created in a high literary context, such as Fun Home, is automatically better than one created to entertain young readers, such as Astérix. Where Persepolis by its very conception is superior to Polly and Her Pals. A prescriptive and unenlightening view of art stuck in the elitist framework of high modernism. It has long since been shown how dogmatically elitist approaches to genre literature are problematic, so there is little reason to import them directly into comics criticism.

Ultimately modernist elitism is unable to explain why certain comics (or works in other media) telling simplistic ‘stories’ and offering cheap thrills endure while most others do not, in any way other than by referring to their level of craft or (*shudder*) their pandering. Some might find this adequate, and it is doubtless true in many cases, but it still fails to explain adequately why certain comics despite their flimsy premise present so powerful, original, and enduring a vision.

Robert very perceptively associates efforts to identify such qualities in genre comics with auteur theory. His take on it is negative, and auteur theory has of course been deconstructed as often happens to theories without strict methodologies, but it might yet prove useful in the present context. It seems to me that Robert’s characterization of at least its American iteration is biased and reductive: if the ideal indeed was to eschew ‘story’ at all costs, its usefulness would obviously be limited. I am willing to be corrected, but that is not how auteur theory was taught to me. In any case, it seems to me absurd to suggest that the filmmakers championed by the French auteur critics—from Vigo and Renoir to Hawks and Hitchcock—worked to subvert their screenplays, as Robert suggests. The majority of them were expert storytellers.

As I understand it, auteur theory rather emphasizes how a sufficiently original or otherwise powerful creative vision inexorably emerges in any work that the creator is involved in, regardless of the constraints, commercial or otherwise, under which it is created. Such a perspective seems to me eminently suited to comics, perhaps even more so than to film because comics are created by fewer people, often a single person. Of course there is the danger of lazy criticism of the kind Robert berates, where Jack Kirby is compared to Homer, but such dangers abound with every method.

I realize now that I was probably working on principles akin to auteur theory in my attempts on this site to explain why I find Tintin and Popeye to be fascinating works of art. But let me offer another example, and get to the images you have been looking at while reading. As this whole ‘literaries’ debacle was unfolding last month, I was reading for the first time since childhood Raymond Macherot’s third Chlorophylle story, Pas de Salami pour Célimène (‘No Salami for Célimène’, 1955). For those unfamiliar with it, Chlorophylle was a funny animal series aimed at kids originally published in Le Journal de Tintin. Basically an adventure series, it situates its protagonists, the Dormouse Chlorophylle and his friend Minimum (whom I suppose is a field vole), in scenarios fraught with danger and mystery. Macherot was an environmentalist before the fact and all-round progressive who incorporated into his comics elements of social and political satire, but he generally kept things fairly simple, if always entertaining.

Where the first two Chlorophylle books take place in the countryside and feature the struggle by a ragtag group of small animals against an incursion of rats—a clear parallel to the Nazis—Pas de Salami substitutes an urban setting to tell what is basically a detective story. Chlorophylle and Minimum are Holmes and Watson investigating the disappearance of salami from the local butcher shop, as well as the connected disappearance of a mouse child. Their primary antagonist is a femme fatale-type cat, the Célimène of the title (appropriately named after the elusive love interest of Alceste in Molière’s Le Misanthrope). It turns out that she runs an extortion racket, kidnapping mice to force their loved ones to steal food for her. But it also becomes evident that the culprit our heroes seek is not her, but somebody in their own ranks.

I remembered nothing of this plot, and even less of the supporting cast, when I sat down to reread the book. What I did remember from childhood readings was the mood and setting of the story. The deserted streets and interiors of the city at night, against which the story plays out; the empty shop floors and dusty attics; the dimly lit sidewalks and overgrown back lots. While the ‘story’ as such is fine and carries several surprises as well as interesting character moments, it is to me in the evocation of this environment, this city belonging to somebody else (the humans), that the true power and beauty of the comic resides. It is what had stayed with me since childhood and it is what resonated upon reacquainting myself with it.

I am not talking about just world-building here, although that can be an important element, but rather the kind of story told in ‘graphic strokes and by deployment of the whole panoply of cartoon effects and ways of seeing and representing’ that Campbell talks about. It is a story that only resonates further when one learns that Macherot drew it just after moving for work reasons from the countryside to Brussels, where he never felt at ease. Such behind the scenes knowledge is unnecessary, however, to experience its poetry of detail and sense of alienation. Other comics could give you much the same ‘story’, but only this one could give you that. It may not be Proust, but it is certainly a worthy work of art.

The critic R. Fiore calls such an understanding ‘the experience of comics.’ Campbell references Fiore’s capsule summation of the idea in a comments thread somewhere, but the Fiore himself clarifies it further in a recent comics review:

The Experience of Comics is a notion I half-baked some time ago to account for why comics strips can have a far greater aesthetic impact than their subject matter would imply. For example, at least five of those ten greatest newspaper comics strips cited above [in the review] hardly ever expressed an idea that wasn’t trite, absurd or patently false. The outlandish coincidences of Dick Tracy, the utter escapism of Wash Tubbs, the cracker barrel philosophy of Little Orphan Annie, these are elements that in prose would not have gotten past the lowliest hack pulp editor. What sustains this substance is the experience of inhabiting the subjective world the cartoonist creates. The writer of poetry or prose however vivid his imagery must depend on the reader’s internal image of the things he describes. The cartoonist doesn’t merely describe a tree, he determines what trees look like. And so with every person and object in the cartoonist’s world. While a painter also creates a subjective world, a painting or drawing is not a narrative. Where a painting or drawing begins and ends in one image, by implication one comic strip panel could follow another into infinity. If the cartoonist’s subjective world is vivid enough all the narrative really has to do is be engaging enough to draw the reader into it. This is why bad writing will defeat even the most accomplished comic art. Rather than drawing you into the comic strip, bad writing pushes you out.

As Fiore implies, all handcrafted images do this to a certain extent—albeit not always sequentially—so there is really little reason to give it a separate name. And the logic can be extended to photographic and digital images too, albeit with modifications. When you have images, there are non-literary forces at play and ignoring them or regarding them merely as a means to a literary end is reductive. And even though fandom has long fetishized drawing, it remains a critical blind spot.

* An example is Robert’s excellent essay on Eddie Campbell’s work, in which he integrates a perceptive analysis of Campbell’s narrative drawing. I may be wrong, but reading it seems to me as if the questions elicited by Campbell’s literary ambition prompted similar questions of the visuals. His discussion of Campbell’s debt to Henry Miller for example, for example, explains how Campbell’s drawings visualize the associative nature of Miller’s prose. Since we’re in critical mode here, I suppose I would argue that Robert takes less notice of how Campbell’s impressionistic tenor roots his meandering wit as a writer in cognitive realism, evoking like few cartoonists the visuality of memory. But that’s just building on an stimulating analysis.

During my three years as the editor of the Graphic, we published 34 issues and several minicomics. Thanks to the unceasing work of Kailyn Kent, we attended MoCCA 2011, and met many other young comics artists, most notably the then-editors of Static Fish, whose beautiful work I’d looked up to for some time.

As the Graphic grew, I became increasingly interested in similar publications at other schools. My impression was that nobody published as frequently as we did, but I had no idea if we were doing anything groundbreaking or unusual. I wanted to get in touch with other student comics magazines, trade some issues, and learn from their methods. The first step, though, was finding other college comics organizations, and that was harder than it seemed. It took me quite a while to amass a record of various other student-run comics publications, and even when I found them, they were often unresponsive to email or offers to trade comics or experience.

Something that likely contributed to the difficulty of finding other college comics magazines is the comics press’ widespread disinterest in such publications. At MoCCA we gave free copies of all of our books to every comic journalist who came by, and I personally emailed several comics interest sites multiple times, with no results. The Graphic has a complete online archive and a well-designed website, so I thought it was a natural candidate for a short write-up, but nobody ever seemed to show any interest. They were probably too busy reporting on hard-hitting topics like “Look at this mind-blowing fan-art of Batman wearing Ninja Turtles pajamas,”  or whatever. One of the only people who would actually draw attention to us was Jessica Abel, whose kind attention was always greatly appreciated.

I feel that it would be interesting to review these other publications, defunct or not, in the hopes that more people learn about them and think seriously about student-published comic magazines. The more legitimately these publications are treated, the more encouragement such publications will have to make high quality work. That’s my theory, anyway. I’ve created a zip file with all the comics that were released for free, which you can download HERE. Some of the publications I review are no longer online or are difficult to find, so I figure this should make it easier if you want to check out some of the things I’m reviewing.

[Note: I am not going to review the Carleton Graphic. There is such an obvious conflict of interest that for me to review it would be to undermine my reviews of these other publications. I would like to encourage you to check out the Graphic’s archives, and keep an eye on them in the future. They publish often, and do interesting work. http://www.carletongraphic.com/ And if you’re interested, here are a couple links to work I did for the Graphic.]

The Gargoyle at the University of Michigan
Site: http://gargmag.com/
Representative article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargoyle_Humor_Magazine

Established in 1909, the Gargoyle Humor Magazine is unique on this list in that it is far from being a comics-only publication. I include it because it has long been known for its New Yorker -style cartoons and, more recently, comics as well.

Obviously, 104 years of nearly continuous publication presents a problem to a reviewer hoping to succinctly summarize a publication’s successes and failures. Thankfully, I was able to get my hands on a weathered copy of The Gargoyle Laughs at the 20th Century, a choicely-picked “best of” volume that provides a sketch, at least, of the publication’s first century or so. It’s a great read, and I recommend it to anyone interested in a short history of a fascinating publishing venture.

At its best, The Gargoyle read a lot like the New Yorker. University of Michigan alums such as Arthur Miller submitted to The Gargoyle, and the cartoons, while quite standard, would hold their own against pretty much anything out of Punch.

In 1967, The Gargoyle published “Kill a Commie for Christ,” a cartoon by Phil Zaret, which became a popular symbol in the anti-Vietnam war movement. It also re-solidified The Gargoyle’s position as a cultural force, which had waned since its heyday in the 20’s and 30’s.

Now that I live in Ann Arbor I have access to contemporary issues of the Gargoyle (they also have a small online archive that collects recent issues.) Suffice it to say that the days of Arthur Miller and Punch-grade cartoons are long over – the current iteration of the magazine is tediously unfunny, and despite their supposed focus on comics and cartoons, only includes a comic or two an issue. It’s bad to the point that their recent “Gargoyle Comics #1” issue included only a single comic (and zero articles about comics,) indicating pretty clearly their current bent towards viewing comics as an aesthetic more than anything else.

Berkeley Bezerk (Defunct)
Site: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sap/

The Berkeley Bezerk is a funny publication. It ran eight issues in the early/mid-2000’s, each one exactly 16 pages in length (except for the first one, which ran only eight). Its pages are incredibly dense, and packed full of advertisements. The margins are often crowded with translations of comics into Chinese and sometimes Spanish.

The editorial direction of the publication is, in a word, troubling. The magazine started with incredibly lofty ambitions, its first editor’s note announcing, “we are ready to bring entertainment to all of Berkeley and begin a golden age in the Bay Area comics scene.” The editorial choices of the Bezerk consistently worked in a way that severely overestimated the strengths of its contributors. This mismatch is perhaps most apparent in Issue 3 (Special Issue on the Middle East) which includes some incredible naivete, a completely straightforward depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in proto-manga style, and some casual racism. I’m assuming the Bezerk had an incredibly limited audience, because no retractions or changes in editorial style are evident in the subsequent issues. One student in particular submitted consistently offensive comics that would have caused a scandal if printed in any publication with an actual reader-base.

Of all the comics published in the Bezerk, the serialized Robot Girl is likely my favorite, but like many of the Bezerk’s comics, it’s rendered difficult to read due to the cramped page layouts. I admire the concept of translating some of the comics into Spanish and Chinese, but it’s a bizarre editorial decision given the lack of space page-to-page. (To be fair, the translations only seem to have existed for the first year or so.)

Pulse at UVA (Defunct)

Pulse at UVA is the opposite of the Berkeley Bezerk in almost every way. It ran for six issues from 2006-2008, with an average of 40 pages per issue. Its first issue contained an original interview with Art Spiegelman, and its third issue contained an original interview with Scott McCloud. It featured a print run of over a thousand copies per issue, had a casual and unassuming opening editor’s note, and left its pages uncluttered.

The comics themselves tend to be fairly mediocre, issue to issue. Pulse almost gives its contributors too much space, allowing rambling, insanely overambitious stories to run for six to eight pages, only to be ended by a (dishonest) TO BE CONTINUED… (On this note, what is it about fledgling comic artists that consistently leads to stories based around gritty, Bible-inspired myths, full of GOD and DEMONS and CHOSEN ONES, etc? It’s almost more ubiquitous than the “zany roommate” type storyline…)

“Emby” by Ellisha Marongelli

Issue 5 represents the high point for Pulse, not only because it contains the best looking comic they published, “Emby” by Ellisha Marongelli, but also because it ended with a fifteen page, well-researched article about “controversial comics,” written by Matthew Marcus. I know it’s funny to praise a comics publication for a lengthy prose essay, but I admire it because it displays exactly the kind of critical thinking I find so sorely lacking in the Berkeley Bezerk. Marcus identifies several comics published by college newspapers that inspired controversies, and thoughtfully examines the intent, actual content, and controversies surrounding each one. Pulse even published several cartoons poking fun at the controversies surrounding publishing an image of the Prophet Muhammad, which actually managed to be (relatively) tasteful.

UC Comics at Berkeley
Website: http://uccomics.wordpress.com/

A friend recently drew my attention to UC Comics, a website that collects comics by UC Berkeley students. Overall, the comics seem to be highly unpolished, and, as a person might expect from an online imageboard, completely unedited. The site design renders the comics largely unreadable, since there doesn’t seem to be a way to quickly preview the comics beyond clicking through the archives a month at a time, and seeing a tiny thumbnail of the first page of each comic (some of which are quite long.) A re-vamped site design would definitely help in making the comics more accessible, and a minimum standard of quality (all comics must be inked or darkened in photoshop to a point that makes them readable) would go a long way in making me want to explore. There are some gems hidden in the site (I find “Blue” very pretty) but a complete lack of attribution and bizarre page controls make it highly unattractive as a whole.

Shoujo Phonebook at SCAD
Website: http://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?contributorId=283488

Founded in 2003, Shoujo Phonebook is an annual anthology released by the Savannah College of Art and Design. Their books can be bought in paperback or PDF form, and the cheapest book they offer is $3. Samples of representative work can be viewed at this page.

“Double Negative” by Lee Barrow

I bought the 2010-2011 PDF for three dollars. It’s 148 pages long, although much of the space is taken up by full page illustrations of elves standing around and looking wistful, cyborg girls looking over their shoulder at the viewer, and title pages with the artist’s name and major. The work is highly inconsistent, most of it falling into a very standard, well, shoujo format. Many of the artists seem constrained by the mandatory “comics for girls” mission statement of the publication. Many stories are highly incomplete, overambitious, or drag on way, way too long.

“The 12 Tales of Odelia” by La Toya De Brew

The editors of Shoujo Phonebook would do well to mandate a “complete stories” rule, because it’s infuriating to read the first four pages of what seems like it could be an interesting story, only to have it abruptly end. It’s equally infuriating to read what seems like a million pages of a sad elf explaining to a girl shocked by his exotic beauty that his mother didn’t want him.

“Cast Off” by Starlia Prichard

The best thing in the collection is Jennifer Stewart’s “Pasmo,” a series of single page anecdotes about the Japanese subway system. It’s a good use of the space allotted, and ignores the “girl comics” mandate entirely.

Jennifer Stewart’s “Pasmo”

Wesleyan University Comics Anthology
Website: http://www.comixpress.com/store/index.php?main_page=advanced_search_result&search_in_description=1&keyword=wesleyan

Wesleyan’s University Comics Anthology was founded in 2006 and, as implied by this site, ran for only three issues. Two of those issues are for sale on Comixpress, as linked above, and I have not bought them. The thought of spending 13 dollars (including shipping) for 56 pages of an untested, college anthology went against my nature (also, Comixpress’ site is ugly to the point that I didn’t want to encourage them), but I was able to find a few previews from Issue One at this page.

Teddy O’Connor

From what I can see, UCA was a mixed bag. None of the comics in the preview leap out to me, although I do admire Teddy O’Connor’s pointillism and use of color. As with Shoujo Phonebook, I fail to understand why ambitious, undergraduate comics artists would try to force potential readers to pay for their work. I’m fine with the concept of buying a physical copy, but put your work out for free online, too. It seems totally counterproductive to ensure that the only people who see your work are close friends and (maybe) family members who are willing to pay 10 dollars for a small booklet hidden in the depths of a site like Comixpress.

Comic Anthology at RISD
Website: http://www.lulu.com/us/en/shop/rafael-attias/comic-anthology/ebook/product-17380926.html

RISD’s aptly named Comic Anthology (2008-2009) is like Shoujo Phonebook taken to a whole new level. Their book is available as a $25.90 paperback, but the PDF is totally free. At 102 pages, about half in full color, Comic Anthology’s stories are self-contained and relatively consistent. My biggest gripe would be that many of the stories feel like homework assignments more than inspired storytelling – the anthology opens with an almost completely straightforward retelling of The Tortoise and the Hare, and several stories contain the seemingly requisite hackneyed fantasy elements.

That said, a couple stories stand out to me. Alison Dubois’ “Life After Art” uses halftone really effectively, and exploits Lichtenstein-esque pop-comic style to excellent effect. Inna Komarovsky’s “Porridge” uses collage in an incredibly inventive way. Both stories are concise and leave me feeling quite satisfied.

Xerox Candy Bar at SAIC
Website: http://xeroxcandybarzine.blogspot.com/
Standard article: http://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/archive/?p=10512

Xerox Candy Bar is another publication with almost no online presence. I became aware of them a little over a year ago, and tried getting in touch with their editors to buy some of their work or arrange a trade, but it never went anywhere. I ended up buying a couple of their books very cheaply from Quimby’s, who, in a stroke of excellent fortune, sent me several extra free XCB issues that they had lying around.

XCB is a highly versatile publication. They easily have some of the most inventive and interesting presentation I’ve ever seen – two issues came in screen-printed, sealed envelopes. Inside of each envelope was the comic, a stapled pamphlet whose cover is a manilla folder with a screen printed design. Two of the issues also came with lengthy CD’s, whose contents can be listened to and downloaded here.

XCB reads less like a comics magazine and more like a found art collection, featuring occasional poems, lots of sketchbook pages, and trippy, non-narrative comics. The more recent issues, Children’s Bedtime Stories and #19: Newspaper Edition are much more straightforwardly comics anthologies, in the vein of Smoke Signal. The Children’s Bedtime Stories issue is infinitely more linear than any other issue I have read, and is full of competent storytelling and interesting art. As a whole, it’s certainly a publication that I would read enthusiastically, but it might benefit from some stricter submission standards.

Inkstains at SVA (Defunct):
According to this page, Inkstains was founded around 2000. It’s very difficult to find record of it online, but thankfully traces do exist. This Geocities site has some Inkstain comics from 2005, and this site has an entire issue from Fall 2010 (called “The Missing Issue,” which I assume means it was never published other than online.)

“Sun and Moon” by Ogun Afariogun

It’s difficult to judge, but just from the snippets available I’d say Inkstains had a lot of visual polish but some trouble with pacing. Some of the stories end before any action is explained, and many seem to drag on and on. That’s a fairly generic criticism, I know, that could apply to pretty much any anthology, but there’s really not much to work with. Inkstains may have run for 10 years, but it’s virtually invisible online.

Avi Spivak

INK at SVA
Website: http://www.sva-ink.com/
Representative article: http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/11/18/ink-sva-digital-comics-magazine/

The successor to Inkstains, INK’s visibility is through the roof. Launched as an online-only publication (constantly and proudly described as “the world’s first 100% student-run comics magazine app”), INK was launched in 2011 and releases issues twice a year.

When it first published, INK was met with unparallelled reporting from comics news outlets. No other college comics publication has come even close to garnering the attention that INK managed to, heavily assisted, I suspect, by the perceived novelty of the “app” and by SVA’s reputation of being a school that creates comics artists.

The first and second issues of INK contain perhaps the most bombastic editor’s notes I’ve ever read. They read, in their entireties:

(For the record, the editors’ note in the most recent issue turned down the rhetoric almost 100%.)

So, how does INK hold up? I think INK, more than any other publication I’ve reviewed on this list, has problems with pacing and clarity. I say “more than any other publication” not because I think that any of the stories are worse than the worst of the Berkeley Bezerk, but because I feel that INK, more than any other publication, has consistently wasted potential. The featured artists are given three pages in which to tell a short story, and, almost without exception, deliver an astonishingly good looking story that goes absolutely nowhere. Almost every story feels like it should be part of a longer work that explains the characters and sets up the action, but as it is, every issue is frustrating to read. The Fall 2011 issue also contains a story that comes across as surprisingly racist, in which a young, white man is walking down the street with his white dog, and is stopped by a black man who shouts, “Yo, you got a dalla?” He then threatens the white man with a switchblade knife, but the white man’s white dog transforms into some sort of Chinese demon, and bloodily kills the black man. THE END.

Jose Feliciano (I think)

A serious oversight on the part of the editors in the first issue was failing to attribute any of the comics to their creators. The inner cover had a list of all the artists, but gave absolutely no indication who created what, which is an unforgivable sin when the explicit purpose of your publication is to give exposure to talented young artists. Future issues corrected this error by having a grid on the inside cover that showed a thumbnail of each artist’s submission with their name superimposed over it, but it’s still a confusing decision. I personally would put the artist’s name somewhere on the pages that contained their submission, but since the pages aren’t even numbered, I guess there’s an aesthetic being adhered to that I don’t understand.

One of INK’s staples are its interviews with successful SVA faculty and alumni working in the comics industry. The interviews are given an incredibly glossy, multiple page treatment with glamor photographs and, in one instance, the worst headline I’ve ever read (“The Doctor is INinja”) I like the interviews, but they feel a little out of place, especially considering that most of the stories feel cut short. The benefit of publishing digitally is that adding extra pages doesn’t cost anything, but it does feel oddly weighted when an interview goes on significantly longer than the stories seem to, and there are three interviews per issue.

I feel like INK could be an incredibly good publication if contributors were forced to work harder on fleshing out their stories (or getting more effective at short form storytelling.) I’ll keep reading every issue that comes out, and am hopeful that it keeps improving.

Static Fish at Pratt
Website: http://mysite.pratt.edu/~statfish/
Representative article: http://www.comicsbulletin.com/interviews/3506/sequential-arts-future-static-fish-comic-anthology/

Static Fish is the oldest comics-focused college organization/publication I’m aware of, having started in 1985. I’m obviously not able to review all 27 years of its history (especially since they have no online archive whatsoever) but I was able to get my hands on Issue 2 (1985), two issues from 2001, and three recent issues (spring and fall 2010, and spring 2011).

The 1985, second issue of Static Fish is fascinating to me. More than any of the publications I’ve reviewed so far, this must have taken a ton of time and technical effort to print (this is, of course, from before the days when you could lay out a publication in InDesign the night before.) It’s printed on oversized, glossy paper and is 36 pages long. The stories inside follow the opposite trend of many of the publications I’ve reviewed so far – they are nearly entirely complete, multi-page short stories. The art is incredibly crisp, and the comics can only be referred to as a product of their time. Take a look at this spread from my favorite comic in the issue, “Poppies” by Rich Rice and Ken Wilson:

I don’t think the content of the 1985 issue is particularly good – there’s a lot of regurgitated Bloom County or Mother Goose and Grimm influences, and failed attempts at Heavy Metal storytelling, but it’s an impressive first effort. None of the other comics publications were able to pull off this kind of quality by their second issue, and I’d say that it holds up relatively well art-wise.

The couple issues I have from the early 2000’s read a lot more like Pulse or Ink. The stories are much more inconsistent, and the art much less crisp (although I would attribute that to the students obviously using poorly calibrated scanners.) The covers are full color and glossy, and some of the stories are competent, although not nearly as interesting as the 1985 stories or the contemporary ones. These couple issues also do what I complained about INK doing: they don’t name their contributors except on the first page.

Jory. The editors didn’t see fit to give anyone’s last name in the credits, either.

Jump forward a couple decades, and Static Fish’s budget has increased exponentially. Each issue is laid out differently, two are hardcover (one full color), and one has a foil cover and gilded pages. Seriously. These are college comics taken to a higher plane, and it is honestly harder for me to find a story that I don’t like than for me to find one I think is excellent. It’s hardly surprising that recent graduates of Static Fish seem to be wildly successful. Illustrator Kris Mukai, painter Anthony Cudahy, and Koyama Press favorite Jane Mai are all fresh graduates who made their mark on the recent output of Static Fish. Seriously, if you’re able to get your hands on some of these books, I highly recommend them. They make me mad, they’re so good.

Extra credit:

Oxy Graphic at Occidental

Modeled on the Carleton Graphic, the Oxy Graphic is a fledgling publication at Occidental college. With four issues under their belt, they are steadily becoming a regular and interesting publication. Unfortunately, they do not yet have online archives, and since I’ve been directly involved in their formation, it would feel wrong for me to review them. Keep your eyes out, though.

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I hope this way-too-long review of these student-run comics publications kindled your interest in at least one or two of them. I think that there’s a lot of really great work and a lot of really talented artists working in these undergrad magazines, and that it can be a lot of fun to follow their progress, especially since this kind of publication goes largely ignored by the world outside of its campus. IF YOU KNOW OF ANY OTHER PUBLICATIONS THAT I’VE LEFT OUT, PLEASE LET ME KNOW! Defunct or not, these are fascinating experiments in self-publishing that should not be forgotten.

I was asked to be a guest on a podcast recently. I was asked to explain furry culture to the curious and open-minded hosts and (judging by the response) their equally magnanimous audience. In the interval between publication and this writing, I’ve cringed at my inadequacy at each turn at stammering out bullet-pointed shorthand that doesn’t really explain anything about us fuzzy folk in any great depth or detail. My caveat was that no one had elected me as furry ambassador. Listening to myself, there might be good reason for that. Was I being honest and candid or feeding on self-validating horseshit? A: probably both.

I have opined in the past on the social gulf between Furry and Alternative Comix Culture in 2013 as if it is not a figment of my middle class, status-obsessed imagination. Boutique mini-comic presses, comics as art objects, zine-swaps, these are “cool.” I allow myself to feel validated by my association with them. Fursuiting/kigurumi, plushies, the free and open exchange of cartoon animal people pornography are all “uncool.” I allow myself to feel validated by earnestly enjoying things that run against the grain of internet derision. See what I’m doing here? Better not let the NYT Style section catch wind of this!

Lisa Hanawalt, not a furry, but she draws them

There is no furry monoculture. There is room in the polymorphous furpile for everyone’s social baggage. If you think of yourself as a geek, then furry outsider-dom will reflect prismatically off of you. Kink-centric people, pull up a chair. You are home. Naturally the icons of my own middle-class “alternative” youth, (DIY, subversive comics) are a particular draw to me. So I read the new Girl Mountain comic (NSFW) where Mogg the talking cat gives a rimjob to Megg the witch, and it’s a darkly hilarious criss-crossing of wires that our brains can call anthropomorphism; animals doing people stuff, but sometimes in an animal way. There is no gulf between my “alt comix” reading and the “furry” one. They’re one and the same goddamned thing.

So I talk a big game about furry being cool and inherently dignified while dog-whistling my pleas for validation from some vague imagined “indie scene” because I’m an insecure baby. It’s unfair to furry to cage it in this rhetorically purgatory underdog status where it’s constantly being compared to other fandoms or scenes. Furry is furry, and furry comics is comics. Why stick my neck under the boot of good taste when something like Crumb’s Fritz the Cat can acquire respectability anyway in a few decades’ time?

Furry Black Flag girls by Birds at Midwest Furfest 2011 | photo by Tommy Bruce

Here’s one difference. As vaudville theaters disappeared into the dust, the minstrel shows re-emerged onto the silver screen and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (along with another more famous cartoon mouse than me) took their place. The roots of funny animals as we know them are more disgraceful than even Chris Ware can masterfully repackage. I use funny animal books as my internet handle partly out of the self-lacerating irony that is so popular among cartoonists, we who love the books designed to be thrown into the trash. The truth is, there’s very little interest to be found in what are properly called funny animal comics save maybe the naïve sexuality of dusty old Fox and Crow covers.

Furry is not necessarily a fandom for these comics though, despite how nice and alliterative that sounds. As funny animal comics eventually became too embarrassing to be publishable and began to slough off of communal consciousness, artists began collecting their own stories in self-published fanzines. Fan groups that budded out panels, meetups and parties at sci-fi conventions cleaved away in the 80s to form the basis of its own community. An exhaustive history of the emergent furry scene, first published in the fanzine Yarf! can be found here.  I genuinely miss the rough hewn amateur art (link NSFW) that circulated in early furry fanzines and on sites like the Vixen Controlled Library.  The internet was definitive in making furry a “thing” but it also may have brought about a homogenized, Disney-inspired “furry house style.” Really, a LOT has changed since 1996.

Because comics and illustration are less expensive and labor-intensive than say, film, they became the centerpiece of the emerging furry scene and the basis for its valuing individual creativity over devotion to established properties. Furry lexicon is always changing. I haven’t seen the word “yiff” used earnestly since the 90s, and “furfag” has been adopted from internet harassers as a playful calling card. A wolf is a walf, and walf is a way of life.

Since I’ve been involved in furry (over ten years, yikes!) BBS boards, forums and MUCKS are toast, Deviantart style social art sites like furaffinity are on their way out and new social media like twitter and tumblr are becoming the center of furry expression and communication. I see less and less comics and fanzines, but every furr seems to have a small stable of original characters they draw in disconnected scenes. Costuming, fursuiting or just “suiting” is becoming increasingly central, with dance emerging as the dominant style of performance. I don’t have the words to describe just how uncomfortable these suits are, how disoriented the limited vision can be, how HOT they become in a matter of minutes. Groans of agony, maybe. So to see how folks can make these lumpy, unblinking mascots move with such grace and style and uncanny verisimilitude, it’s not just cool, it’s *magical.*

Magical. Zeke Hyena by Firestormsix, worn by SkyRyd3r, photo by Abrahm

Over the years, a kind of micro-economy has emerged as furry events became more frequent and their boundaries defined.  There are furry apparel companies, full-time fursuit makers, music labels, news aggregates, book presses and distros, fetish gear makers, a company that makes luxury sex toys shaped like dragon cocks. We are famously open about sexuality and happily produce wave after wave of imaginative, mesmerizing pornography (that link is SO not SFW). Sometimes our radical inclusivity is our finest feature, other times it is a disaster. Some corners of furry are a literal snuggle-fest (my AC suite mid-handle of Bulliet), others are nests of malicious bullying and harassment, so drama-phobic we can allow negativity to carry on unconfronted and unaddressed. The youth culture is sometimes oppressive, though maybe I say that because in less than five years I’ll be 30 (a greymuzzle!) and out of the loop.

Van-Weasel (nsfw)

The new trend in pop journalism from Buzzfeed, Kotaku etc. has been sympathetic, if detatched fly-on-the-wall style coverage of furry conventions. Furries are now valid because we are cute and know how to party and aren’t as bad as every writer asumes we are going to be. This is better than the boring bourgeois sensationalism that came before it. It’s hard to beat the Rumpus’ interview with Kilcodo (full disclosure, a friend of mine) who is honest and candid and dignified in a way I can only look up to from my crib. To know furry is to be one. In my experience, it has been more creatively fulfilling, mind-expanding, fun and joyful than I ever could have imagined when I first snuck that notorious issue of Vanity Fair, the one with Julianne Moore on the cover, off of my mom’s nightstand. In the internet age, where there can be no underground, it is my refuge from respectability, my own polymorphously perverse tribe, and the filter through which I read anthro in comics: Krazy Kat, Fritz the Cat, Omaha the Cat Dancer, the Great Catsby… Gunsmith Cats?

Q&A+General Learnin’ TIME

Yes, a lot of us (including me!) wear animal costumes.  No, not as many of us fuck in them as people think.  Remember what I said about the dancing?

Furries are a global phenomenon thanks to the internet, though we are mostly concentrated in North America, Western Europe and Japan.  The largest furry convention in the world is Anthrocon in Pittsburgh, PA, with over 4000 attendees.

Yes, a huge percentage of furries are gay men, and gay male sexuality and imagery is a dominant force in furry visual culture.  No, I don’t have the faintest clue why this is.

We’re not called plushies.  Furries who are intimate with stuffed animals are called plushophiles.  I’ve been seeing less and less art catering to this interest since the early 2000s.

You should google Chakats.

We are sick and tired of talking about CSI and Tyra and My Strange Addiction.  When approached by media types, your modern furry might be inclined to just make shit up.  We are over it.

Reptiles and birds and dolphins get to be furries too.

A furry can be a person who identifies that way and engages with furry fandom or subculture to any extent of their choosing.  Furry is also a shorthand for any anthropomorphized animal character in historical or contemporary work.  A character in a furry fanzine comic and Bugs Bunny can both be referred to as furries, though the latter was developed of prior to and outside of any association with internet weirdos.

Yiff is a very silly word.  No one uses it like, ever anymore.  But I’m fond of it.

Werewolves are hot.

My costume is a coyote, though I identify as a cartoon mouse.

Yes, it is like a thousand degrees in that thing.  I already told you.  It’s still awesome.

It’s important to know exactly what kind of room party you’re about to visit at a convention.

Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis, MN has an entire spinner rack of Omaha the Cat Dancer comics and I regret every day I didn’t just walk in there and buy the whole thing.

In furry cartoon porn, some artists prefer to present their characters with human-style genitalia while others defer to the natural look of the represented species.  I like human-style.

I watched a lot of David Attenborough docs growing up.  Actually anything to do with animals was my shit.

Furry conventions are really fun.  You should go.

Cartoon animals rule and it is OK to like them.

Fred is the nom de plume and the nom the pinceau of Frédéric Othon Theodore Aristidès. You may have heard about him because of Pilote magazine and his most famous series, “Philemon” (or Philemon if we are talking about the albums). Before that though, Fred had a career behind him as a single-panel gag cartoonist and an absurdist comics artist in the pages of several magazines (the Mad inspired Hara-Kiri especially). It was in said mag that Fred published (from issue # 38, April 1964, until issue # 64, June 1966) his masterpiece “Le petit cirque” (or Le petit cirque if we’re talking about the 1973, 1997 and 2012 album editions). The series, in short episodes of two pages each (with the exception of the first three pages), was also reprinted in Pilote magazine (it appeared in twenty eight issues from # 701, April 1973, until # 741, January 1974).

In 2012 an important retrospective of Fred’s work, Le petit cirque included, was shown at the Angoulême comics convention in France (at the Hôtel Saint-Simon, to be exact). To celebrate the occasion Dargaud published a new remastered edition of Le petit cirque directly shot from the existing original art (which means that pages # 8, 9, 26, 27, 36, 37 – three episodes – didn’t receive the same treatment as the rest of the book; there’s no discernible difference between those pages and all the others though; the editors didn’t explain why this is so). Now I’m waiting for a new edition of Le journal de Jules Renard Lu Par Fred (Jules Renard’s journal read by Fred) with the original page layouts recovered. I hope that someone at Flammarion reads my appeal.

Panel from page 53 of the 1997 edition of Le petit cirque by Fred.

The same panel as above from page 51 of the 2012 edition.

Fred himself said, remembering the series’ first album edition in 1973:

I was pleasantly surprised that time! When we took the pages out of the portfolio to print the album, we realized that the original art had yellowed. Time yellows everything, even the mementos hidden in the bottom of a suitcase. Gray had become sepia which added a melancholia of sorts. I love those atmospheres.

As we can see above the 1997 edition reproduced the sepia tones. The lines are far from crisp though and many wash details were lost to resurface in the 2012 edition only. The latter’s matte paper retains some of the beige flavor that pleased Fred. Since Le petit cirque is a comics masterpiece I would say that this edition is one of last year’s most important comics related events. Unfortunately it passed virtually unnoticed.

The first two tiers of the first page of the series as it appeared in Hara-Kiri # 38, April 1964.

The same tiers published in the albums (in this case, the 2012 edition). As we can see the logo and the episode titles, when they existed, disappeared.

The first two panels of episode two (three in the albums) as published originally in Hara-Kiri # 39, May 1964.

The same panels as published in the 2012 album edition. The logo and episode title were removed, a paper and pencil texture was added (notice the glue smears captured by the photogravure).

We can find the prehistory of Le petit cirque in a couple of circus related cartoon gags, but we can also find it in a series of strange, imaginative professions created by Fred for Hara-Kiri: the knitter of savage balls; the bearded seller of cotton candy (barbe à papa); the representative of holes; the countryside licker of stamps; the celery grinder; the mirror fixer… In one of his “little jobs” Fred created the human time bomb. That’s where the little circus really started: it was destined to be the album’s second episode.

The little jobs: the countryside licker of stamps. Notice the Fredian twiggy tree and the wind.  Hara-Kiri # 23, December 1962.

The first half of “L’audition”‘s first page (the audition) with the human cannonball (the human time bomb appears in the page’s second half), Hara-Kiri # 37, March 1964. The little circus before the little circus: it is right there in the second panel.

But we may find the true origins of the little circus not only in time, but also in space, in what Fred calls Constantinople (aka Istanbul). Both of Fred’s parents were Greek living in Turkey when WWI raged on and the war between the two countries was declared in 1919. They both emigrated to meet each other in Paris where Fred was born in 1931.

Fred, again:

It was the first time that I did something solid and everything happened naturally, the ideas, the emotions. Maybe because it’s the story of people without roots, like my parents. After leaving Constantinople they traveled a lot too and it was my father who inspired me to create Léopold. [...] The Carmen of Le petit cirque is dark-haired and thin while my mother had brown hair and was rather plumpish, but she inspired me nonetheless.

The family that inspired Le petit cirque: from left to right: Eleni (Carmen), Yanis (Léopold), and little Fred (who, in the album, has no name); Trouville, 1930s.

Fred’s iconography is very personal and explains the strange poetical power of Le petit cirque: the wind, the leafless trees, the circus, the peasants, the authorities, the mirror, the landscape, the city, etc… Apart from that what’s great about Le petit cirque is its rhetorical complexity.

Le petit cirque, page 11 of the 2012 edition.

The above page gives the readers one of the keys to read Le petit cirque: the rhetorical reversal of the situations (the daily life of a patriarchal Mediterranean family is shown as circus acts). Another key is what I called, in Monthly Stumblings # 16, the interpenetration rhetorical mode: two distant spaces meet in a third space where both may co-exist at the same time (more about that later). The last panel shows Fred’s leafless trees with the wind blowing strongly from left to right expelling both the reader – the author too in a nostalgic statement about his childhood? – and the character out of the page (the sudden change of point of view from panel five to panel six shows that it’s time to leave already). The overall atmosphere is scrawny and uncomfortable. The vanishing point in the last panel focus Carmen pulling the circus caravan (Fred explained the metaphor: “the caravan symbolizes the family and the head of the family is the wife”; needless to say that this doesn’t convince me at all…). Notice how the horizon line gets lower and lower until we see a towering caravan getting out of reach. On pages 58 and 59 outraged peasants want to argue with Léopold and Carmen, but are overwhelmed when they find out that the caravan, despite its modest exterior appearance, is in reality a palace (not unlike Snoopy’s doghouse). This, of course, is an hyperbole showing Fred’s huge respect for his creatures.

Carmen discovers the violin tree in page 36 of the 2012 edition.

The violin tree is just one of the interpenetrations that I mentioned above. Others link circus people with animals (a clown is a rooster, etc…). The violin tree is the hope and the means to fulfill one’s dreams. The problem is that Léopold, after picking one of the violins from the tree, breaks a string interrupting the process: the family is doomed never to improve their situation no matter how hard they try.

The first two panels of page 18 of Le petit cirque‘s 2012 edition. To the circus family the city is a menacing, blocky, empty space. Fritz Lang’s expressionist Metropolis isn’t far; an hyperbole, again.

Le petit cirque: second and third tiers of page 48 of the 2012 edition.

In the image above Carmen deflates an overblown bourgeois. The stereotype is a bit blunt, to say the least, but there’s an interesting catch in the sequence: the relation between iconic and verbal expression. Fred puts an idea usually uttered in words (“she deflated him”) into drawings. Something that isn’t that usual in comics. The same thing happens in the rooster/clown interpenetration mentioned above: the clown is visually a clown; we only know that it is in reality a rooster because of what the characters say about him.

I could go on doing close readings of all the episodes of Le petit cirque (like the one in which Léopold and Carmen offer a wheelchair to their son and break his leg in order for him to enjoy his present – which he does, of course), but the above is enough, I guess…

In conclusion: the circus family wanders aimlessly in an inhospitable landscape, is harassed and hated by almost everybody else and they suffer setback after setback, but they continue their journey because they have to, winning a few small victories along the way… We only get to the sense of it all though after decoding the logic of the book which is the nonlinear, oblique logic of dreams.

Fred sets his little creatures in motion; second tier of Le petit cirque’s 2012′s edition’s last page. Another narrative device: self-referentiality.

]]> http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/01/monthly-stumblings-19-fred/feed/ 9 http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/01/stokoe-vs-druillet/ http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/01/stokoe-vs-druillet/#comments Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:28:54 +0000 Jacob Canfield http://hoodedutilitarian.com/?p=48731 I got a copy of James Stokoe’s Orc Stain TPB for Christmas. This was my first real exposure to Stokoe beyond his contribution to Marvel’s indie ghetto, Strange Tales II (a contribution I enjoyed quite well.) I didn’t start reading with any prior knowledge beyond “Stokoe draws in a complicated way,” and “Brandon Graham likes him.”

Some 168 pages later, I was really hooked. I enjoyed the story, the characters were interesting, and, maybe most obviously, the art was fantastic. As soon as I finished the book I passed it on to my father, who took one glance and said, “it’s Druillet!” He pulled out a copy of Delirius for comparison, and I saw what he meant.

Of course, my father is far from the first to make the comparison between Stokoe and Druillet. For instance, Sarah Horrocks made a passing comparison between the two on this blog back in October, in a post about the wonders of Druillet’s style. I’ve never read much Druillet outside of Heavy Metal (and quickly found that it’s difficult to find English translations of his work of his online) but I was able to read Delirius and a French version of Salammbo¹ in time to write this essay.

On a first glance, I can see why people are so eager to make the comparison between Stokoe and Druillet. Both seem to enjoy world building; packing their panels with as much detail as possible, giving special attention to complex architecture and machinery. I think most people would agree with Sarah’s assertion that Druillet’s art is undoubtedly MORE complex. Panel to panel, I think it’s safe to say that Druillet puts more ink on the page, and draws more tiny details into the backgrounds of his expansive setpieces. I would also say that the comparison between the two is more flattering to Druillet than Stokoe at this point, because Stokoe is a much better storyteller.

There are several huge differences between the approaches of Druillet and Stokoe, perhaps the greatest of which are their compositional choices. For example, here are a couple pages from Stokoe (click to expand):

And now, for comparison, a couple pages from Druillet:

I don’t think it’s a big stretch to say that the Stokoe pages are easier to read. Druillet tends to fill the page with detail from top to bottom, offering almost nowhere for the eye to rest. Even in his later work, Salammbo, the compositions are incredibly dense. Stokoe, on the other hand, employs a variety of techniques to ensure that his work is intuitive to read. First, Stokoe avoids the blocks of text that can make reading Druillet a chore. His font is easy to read. His panels follow one another more naturally; the interval between the action panel to panel is much shorter than Druillet’s. Sometimes he will even put a stylized “drop shadow” underneath his panels, to further offset them from one another, as he does in this page from the unpublished Murderbullets.

Druillet doesn’t seem to consider spread composition on pages that don’t bleed into each other, so sometimes you get spreads like this, which, while not necessarily detrimental to the story, are jarring compared to how composed the content of the pages are.

If I had to make a comparison, I would say that James Stokoe’s layouts are more like Brandon Graham’s than Druillet’s. I’d compare Druillet to a hyperdeveloped Nick Fury-era Steranko more than anyone else, with his fascination for crowd scenes, machinery, and weird optical tricks.

Aside from Stokoe’s mastery of page composition, Stokoe’s coloring allows a level of cooperation between the complexity of his images and the clarity of his story that Druillet is unable to accomplish. Stokoe colors his own work, and his color choices are almost as decadent as his drawing style. I think Brandon Graham put it best: “I seriously think he uses more gradients in a single panel then I’ve done in my entire coloring life. but it works.”

Stokoe’s coloring is vital to the clarity of his artwork. Compare an example of an uncolored Stokoe page:

With a colored one:

The color is vital. Without it, his pages would be much harder to decipher, and much less vivid. And one can only imagine how bad they would look if they were colored flatly with rich colors, as Druillet’s pages are. I’m not recommeding a re-color for Druillet (I am an original-color purist if anyone is) but it is an interesting comparison between an artist with complete control over his colors and an access to very subtle technologies, and an artist forced to rely on very garish colors somewhat outside of his control.

Now, all this being said, I think it’s impossible that Stokoe is unaware of Druillet. Some of his compositions echo Druillet very closely. Whether or not Stokoe counts Druillet among his chief inspirations, however, I think it’s fair to say that Stokoe improves on Druillet’s example, and is able to make dense, complex comics with incredible levels of detail without sacrificing clarity. A reader is able to spend any amount of time on a Stokoe comic – one could read through quickly, enjoying the story, and one could go through much more slowly, really relishing background details and the incredibly lavish art. I leave you with a heavy recommendation – if you’ve never read Stokoe, Orc Stain is great, and if you’re impatient, Murderbullets is free online!

—————

¹Have no illusions, my French is not great. I’d call it a functional “Tarzan French.”

***

Student of the Year
Directed by Karan Johar, 2012

***

WHAT CAN WE GUESS THE FILM IS ABOUT FROM THE UNSUBTITLED TRAILER?

[]

Through the intercession of those occasional bursts of English common to Hindi-language films, the monoglot can discern that St. Teresa’s High School is India’s premiere academic institution. Thus grounded, the ensuing barrage of flailing bodies and flashing lights reveals two suspiciously adult-looking male students who are clearly in love, though the rigors of the recently-opened Student of the Year Competition (also in English) will cruelly rip them apart. Obviously this is all a metaphor for the sociopathy engendered by globalized capitalism in an emerging market, thereby revealing Karan Johar as a stealth Marxist – perhaps the stealthiest in history, judging from all those brand names. Also, there’s a girl and a burning tree.

***

WHAT IS THE HISTORY BEHIND THIS PICTURE?

In the beginning, i.e 1989, there was an auteur by the name of Sooraj R. Barjatya who, at the age of 24, with the might of a production company established by his grandfather behind him, directed a film titled Maine Pyar Kiya. Tracking the rich boy/poor girl romance of its protagonists through multiple societal and familial tribulations, the film was hardly the first of its kind — a similarly goopy (if more mechanical) hit titled Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak had debuted just one year prior — but it nonetheless struck a chord with a public tired of the generic excess that marked the Bollywood of the ’80s. Barjatya was young, and driven by a religious-minded zeal for wholesome entertainment steeped in traditional family values; his art was stylized and idealized, but intently focused on interpersonal dynamics.

He returned in 1994 with his magnum opus, Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, a 200-minute, 14-song gargantuan sprawl of earthy romantic devotion that sparked a veritable revolution in Indian theatergoing – buffeted by the advent of home video, the movie house found unexpected salvation as a public venue for family togetherness. Box office receipts were fucking ridiculous.

Among the scores of industry personnel whose lids were flipped was Aditya Chopra, scion of Yash Raj Films, a production company that had left an indelible mark on Bollywood through the pastel romances of founder Yash Chopra. Emboldened by Barjatya’s success, the young Chopra, also aged 24, released his directorial debut in 1995: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, a savory bowl of cosmopolitan mush so popular that one particular Mumbai theater continued to run daily showings well into the 21st century. Yet while Barjatya’s films remained devoutly focused on Indian concerns, Chopra’s twist was to incorporate the non-resident Indian (“NRI”) experience into the action, positioning the Yash Raj brand as a global platform for homemade entertainment, aimed at monied Indian nostalgists and curious fellow travelers worldwide.

Most critical to our narrative, however, is DDLJ’s neophyte co-writer, assistant director, bit part actor and associate costume designer: Karan Johar, a Chopra friend and yet another heir to a movie studio, Yash Johar’s Dharma Productions. Johar had also became close with the film’s lead performer, Shahrukh Khan (“SRK”), a Delhi-based theater and television actor who rocketed to Mumbai movie mega-stardom over the course of the early ‘90s. Leapfrogging off of Chopra’s success, Johar teamed with SRK for his own directorial debut in 1998, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, which dressed the NRI-minded focus of Chopra’s film in every designer label its comparatively wizened 26-year old director could yank free from the London racks. It was a supreme work of dissolvable ultra-kitsch, foregrounding the artifice of its love story so severely it bordered on auto-critique, though it did command some real drama too: that of Karan Johar, who in his youth turned up his nose at the tackiness of Bollywood, and — to strike an ill-fitting protestant note — was born again on the set of DDLJ. Through a conglomeration of costume, he would isolate the ridiculousness of what he was doing, and then love it anyway.

Yet if Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was flagrantly trendy, it was also unwaveringly conservative; for SRK to truly understand his love for tomboy heroine Kajol Mukherjee — herself returning from the earlier Chopra film — she must renounce her taste in sherbert-hued overalls and dress like a proper goddamned lady. In this way, the audience is soothed – assured that the global tastes of the young will not trammel the value of tradition. Such is the key to mass appeal.

Popular as they were, these films were not always well-received by aesthetes, or devotees of more action-oriented fighting/dancing/joking/romancing Bollywood masala. “Candyfloss” became the slur of choice for Johar’s cinema, connoting banality for those who wished for a more sophisticated Bollywood, and effeminacy for those content with a more strapping brand of fantasy. Having been teased over his effete mannerisms since childhood, the latter criticisms appear to have washed off Johar, though he did seem to respond to the former, as his later films tackled notions of familial estrangement (Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham…, 2001) and sexual infidelity (Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, 2006), if always in a distinctly soapy idiom. This evolution reached its peak with the 2010 release of My Name Is Khan, a glossy tragicomedy of well-to-do Muslim angst in post-9/11 America; by this time SRK was co-producing via his own company, Red Chillies Entertainment, always with an eye toward expanding his global brand. The film wound up making most of its money outside a domestic Indian market which treated it coolly.

Indeed, if you study the Indian box office of today’s Bollywood, we have rather come back to the old days of macho masala, with hulking superstars like Salman Khan — ironically, also the male lead in those Sooraj R. Barjatya pictures from years ago — winking and flexing their way through remakes of formula product out of the Telugu-language industry down south. Johar knows this, as one of his most successful recent productions was a 2012 remake of Agneepath, originally a 1990 potboiler his father took a bath on in the wake of the very wave of ‘family’ cinema that would revive Dharma Productions.

In this way, Student of the Year, so flashy and simplistic, can be seen as both a throwback to the glory days of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, as well as its director’s throwing down of the gauntlet at the feet of the neo-masala wave – a new spin of candyfloss for a history that seems determined to repeat itself.

***

WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?

WAIT, WAIT – WHAT’S AN INTERVAL?

Good question! An “interval” is what is typically called an “intermission” in the North American parlance. Most Indian popular films have an interval, at which time the movie stops and snack vendors roam the aisles like at a sporting event (or, if you happen to be watching these things digitally beamed into a North American megaplex, you immediately visit Twitter). Ideally, some sort of thrilling cliffhanger or punchy bit of dialogue will occur just before the interval, so as to maintain the audience’s energy – in the South industry (i.e. Telugu, Tamil-language productions) this is called the Interval Bang. Critics therefore cannot resist gauging the efficacy of the film both pre- and post-interval.

Mind you, this description is premised on the operating procedures of your classic Indian single-screen theater, of which there are more than 10,000 nationwide. There are also a smaller number of multiplexes, which may or may not function in the same manner. Nor will all single-screen theaters play the same releases – an additional stereotype brands the local single-screen as a haven for “mass” films, i.e. movies that appeal to the general working public. The urban multiplex, in contrast, allegedly supports “class” films, which seek to appeal to a more superficially sophisticated, young, wealthy-ish clientele.

To combine “mass” and “class” is to know the highest success in Hindi pop cinema, and Karan Johar — himself a nearly perfect-bred “class” viewer — has done just that at times, although the comparatively weak domestic returns on My Name Is Khan have been attributed to a remote subject matter with little applicability to the immediate desires of the filmgoing public.

***

OKAY, THANKS. SO, WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?

Why, several immediate desires are duly met.

I should probably mention at this point that Bollywood — which, by the popular Western understanding, encompasses basically the whole of Indian cinema, though I will only use it to designate products of the Hindi-language industry based in the former Bombay — is probably the least reputable of the major world cinemas among English-reliant cinephiles. Talk to a film buff in my neck of the internet, and nine out of ten will instantly dismiss the stuff as garbage, fluff and nonsense, commercial imbecilities farted to life by career hacks who wouldn’t last a minute in the big show of Real Movies. Frequently, reactions become emotional. Bollywood is ‘embarrassing.’ Just look at those clowns hopping around – why can’t you watch South Korean crime movies? Hell, even a Korean television drama would be preferable; this shit’s as cringe-worthy as anime, and at least anime has decent violence sometimes.

I’ve watched anime since I was 14, so I’d heard it all before. I’d heard the newer complaints about manga too: that it’s comics for little girls, or gay men. Some of that connotation seeps into the omnibus complaints about Bollywood. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of crap in Hindi film — or that it doesn’t have devotees who swear everything was better in the ’70s — but I do suspect the sheer enormity of the scene, Japanese comics and Indian movies alike, supports a tendency to speak broadly and intimidates even open-minded commentators from delving deeper.

It is true, however, that contemporary Bollywood films have a way of idealizing the male body to an extent that’s unique to world cinema. But then, the notion of masala, a term borrowed from blends of spices used in cooking, after all, demands that something for everyone be included. Songs in crime dramas! Slapstick in tragedies! Dudes leaping twenty feet into the air in social satire! Unlike Japanese comics, which arrived at its women-friendly reputation by sharply dividing itself into semi-discreet zones of demographic appeal, Indian popular cinema of the Hindi/Tamil/Telugu variety often just tries to be as audience-inclusive as possible in any given situation, which results in both a novel ‘exotic’ surface (songs in crime dramas) as well as the occasional crossing of cultural taboos, i.e. thou-shalt-not-linger-on-a-guy’s-abs-in-a-movie-that’s-not-specifically-for-girls.

Thus, Student of the Year introduces one of its male leads with a shimmering close-up of his glistening six-pack as he strums a guitar. This is Varun Dhawan, one of the film’s three debutante stars; SRK’s Red Chillies may still be co-producing, but now Johar is focused on breaking new talent. All of them are first presented to us by revealing close-ups of body parts; heroine Alia Bhatt‘s teeny feet totter in a tall pair of designer shoes, rich yet vulnerable, while the other male lead, Sidharth Malhotra, is first seen from behind, his broad back stretching out a fine leather jacket. Importantly, he is the only one of the stars not affiliated with one of Bollywood’s dynastic film families; Dhawan and Bhatt are both children of prolific directors. He’s a rebel, you see.

Moreover, in-story, Malhotra is attending St. Teresa’s on scholarship, while the other two — characterized immediately as the sort of longtime couple that can’t recall what they like in each other anymore — are simply rich as fuck. Both Dhawan and Malhotra served as assistant directors on My Name Is Khan, so it’s not difficult to imagine story writer Johar — assisted by screenwriter Rensil D’Silva and dialogue writer Niranjan Iyengar — concocting his scenario from the ‘school’ of filmmaking that is a set full of young people, one of them maybe connected, another maybe not. There’s even a ‘director’ of sorts presiding over St. Teresa’s scrum: Rishi Kapoor, old-time star of the massive ’73 inter-class teen romance landmark Bobby, playing a tremendously camp dean of students prone to stroking hidden magazine covers of perennial Bollywood hunk John Abraham and sexually harassing a handsome Coach, who himself is the catalyst for Malhotra & Dhawan to stop hating each other and fall in loBECOME GOOD FRIENDS.

All of this is depicted in long flashbacks as various supporting characters mill about in a hospital where the Dean lays dying, alone and unloved – regretful of the relationships he smashed for his fondness of conflict! This mild criticism of competitive education is ripped straight out of the highest grossing film in Bollywood history, 2009′s 3 Idiots — an ‘inspirational comedy’ most notable for a scene where the film’s cast of engineering students revives a dead baby by chanting the movie’s catchphrase — and can easily be disregarded. The meat is in the evolving relationship of the male leads, and, to a *much* lesser extent, their relationship with poor Bhatt, who seems doomed on a conceptual level – the main guys are proper Bollywood hunks in their mid-’20s, while Bhatt is a young 19. In other words, she actually looks like a high school girl, which doesn’t at all fit Johar’s artifice, glamming her up to an absurd degree so that she seems frequently ill at ease in front of the camera.

Another issue: Dhawan is the only one of the three that can actually dance. Normally this isn’t too much a problem, as you can ‘fake’ Bollywood dancing through clever editing — and, obviously, nobody is really singing, there’s professionals for that (and albums to release with those professionals’ bankable names — but if one member of the main cast actually is better at dancing than everyone else, he or she inevitably begins to hog the song sequences. Distracting as this is, though, it still sort of fits the plot, since Dhawan’s rich boy character, alas, only wishes his Cruel Businessman Father would respect his love for music, though the wicked man secretly prefers foe-turned-friend Malhotra, who’s got an eye for finance. EVEN WORSE, Bhatt and Malhotra start to pretend they *like-like* each other as a scheme to get Dhawan to pay more attention to the comprehensively neglected lass, but OMG, then Malhotra starts to really fall in love with her!!!!

All of this climaxes in (the controversial) Radha, a supremely goofy wedding dance and probably the peppiest of music duo Vishal–Shekhar’s compositions for a soundtrack so overstuffed there’s sub-songs that bridge longer songs together.

Still, watch that video above, and see how Johar (and one or more of the film’s four choreographers) communicates the entire drama between Dhawan (in gold), Malhotra & Bhatt, even on mute, largely through motion and exaggerated, silent cinema-worthy body language. Johar then depicts the ceremony itself — the lead cast are guests — as a wordless flourish of images accompanied by a tinkling piano score, until an agonized Malhotra joins hands with Bhatt, only for her to slowly pull herself away, and then – the orchestra swells.

***

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE INTERVAL?

Shit gets real.

Seriously though, much of the second half of the film is concerned with the Student of the Year Competition, divided into four parts: (1) standardized test; (2) treasure hunt; (3) dance competition; (4) triathlon. Malhotra is keen to win, having pinned his financial future on the access to a top college the prize will net. Dhawan, meanwhile, wants to prove his worth to his Bad Dad — relations deteriorate to the point where he’s booted out of the house and must fend for himself economically — while also taking down Malhotra, whom he caught smooching the increasingly irrelevant Bhatt, to booming percussion on the soundtrack. Nobody steals his lover, goddamn it Alia.

But wait.

I’m making an awful lot of gay jokes here, surely more than is welcome on an enlightened web portal such as this. The thing is, Johar is making the same jokes, and honestly… I’m not sure either of us are really joking. More than once, Malhotra quips that it seems the emotionally needier Dhawan is about to kiss him. All the while, Dhawan neglects his ostensible girlfriend, Bhatt, only reacting when she flirts with Malhotra. As the film wore on, I began to wonder if Johar was playing a quiet game, subtly contrasting the shrill, quintessentially filmi gay stereotype of the Dean against something of greater emotional verisimilitude.

It’s difficult to talk about homosexuality in Bollywood. Part of the traditional, cliche appeal of foreign cinema to English-dominant North Americans is its departure from domestic morality, but mainline Indian movies share the NA movie dichotomy — violence is okay for display, while sex is best hidden — at a much lower intensity. Top of the line Bollywood movies often won’t progress beyond lip-kissing onscreen, and dramatic depictions of gay relationships are rare.

Redolent of this uncertainty is a movie Johar produced in 2008: Dostana, starring Abhishek Bachchan and the aforementioned John Abraham as a pair of men who pretend to be gay to secure a nice living arrangement in proximity to a woman they both pursue. Neither gets the girl in the end, and it’s hinted that a genuine attraction has developed between the two. The truth, however, remains as private as Johar’s own personal life, though rumors always, always swirl: about him and SRK, about him and Sidharth Malhotra. How does one score a leading man role in this town without connections, after all?

In Student of the Year, Johar is more willing to let go of things. Toward the end of the film, the Dean — the Director — is castigated by a fat, nerdy student for the ten million or so obvious logical shortcomings of the Student of the Year scheme; as in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Johar underlines the artificiality of his construct, but now the older director shows the Dean become sad and withdrawn. He never maintains a real relationship with a man. As he dies, his movie’s cast around him, he stares into the eyes of the Coach, the object of his lust, uncomprehending of his true desires, and all he can whisper is “that’s life,” as if he’d thrown a party as a cry for help.

By this time we’ve found out who won the competition: it was Dhawan, but only because Malhotra held back at the last minute, to disgust Dhawan’s father and thereby prove himself the more calculating player. Then he marries Bhatt and becomes a zillionaire tycoon, while Dhawan apparently throws the prestige of his prize away and becomes a famous (presumably shirtless) rock star. Like 3 Idiots, the message boils down to ‘follow your dreams, but try and select dreams that will get you a middle-class life, because being poor is pretty loathsome.’

Yet some things are not filled in for Dhawan. He is not apparently married, nor does he have any girlfriend. He claims to have bedded 100 women, although this is immediately shown to be a lie. He and Malhotra confront one another immediately, but quickly resume friendly relations. It’s a happy Bollywood ending, competition fermented into a woozy nostalgia, but also tinged with mystery, unspoken secrets hovering as the two grown men return to St. Teresa’s, and loosen their clothes as they prepare to revisit their final race for real, gazing into each other’s eyes, alone, as the frame freezes, and the color fades, and the director’s name appears onscreen before a final fade to black.

The idea could be that the future remains in the hands of “Our New Generation” – but know, dear audience, that we are not there yet.

Said article immediately dove for feminist cred by talking about our foremamas reading Jane Eyre under a cover because women aren’t supposed to have active fantasy lives and so on, and then it surfaced with the obligatory statement that the important thing about the Fifty Shades of Grey-porn-for-female-lady-person-led renaissance is that this porn is safe because it’s by women, for women. Like knitted craft projects.

I’m not entirely cynical about this, mind you. Many of us realized immediately that, like the Internet, the Kindle was made for porn. On the bus, if we so desire. Well, porn and romance. There are multiple points of intersection, as it were, between the two, and Fifty Shades of Grey is obviously not the first by-women-for-women piece of romantic porn to grace the screens of our nation’s e-readers. As soon as the Kindle floodgates were opened, a new industry was born – adapting romantic fan fiction (sometimes literally, sometime figuratively) into novellas to sell for sometimes as little as 99 cents on Kindle. And apparently this anonymous experience has cranked up demand and normalized the genre to the point that those bitches on the view are chatting about it on morning television. To which the proper response is “Huzzah!”

I am a huge fan of porn. It eases the discomfort of modern life, taking its place with naptime as another of nature’s soft nurses. Or something. And with apologies to Shakespeare, of course. The thing about porn is that it has to be broken down into much smaller cross sections than most genre lit. I like mysteries, for instance, and there are certain kinds of mysteries I like better than others, but if Christopher Bookmyre or Ian Rankin aren’t available, I can also amuse myself with James Patterson or Dean Koontz or even something starring a cat. If I’m into, say, gay romantic shape-shifting dominance and submission cowboys (which I’m not, by the way – that was just an example. Shape-shifting isn’t my cup of wereleopard), I’m not going to be able to make due with, say, het water sports. And vice versa, surely.

Fortunately, the Kindle romantic porn industry ensures I’ll never have to face such a dilemma, because whatever your kink, they’ve got you covered. There are scores of novels that never would have gotten printed because their appeal isn’t broad enough; offering digital versions, though, is apparently cost effective. Fan fiction writers such as E.L. James (who initially wrote Fifty Shades of Gray as Twilight fan fiction) can shift from writing for free on sometimes-obscure websites, change the names of the characters, and sell short stories, novellas, and full-length books online. (This was happening before e-books, with websites like Loose Id selling PDFs, but that was still not exactly mainstream.) I unapologetically love fan fiction, and I am excited for E.L. James; turning fan fiction into legit publishing can only be a good thing.

You say America’s housewives don’t have access to the filthy perversion of their choice? Let them read e-books!

Now, I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, and I’m not going to – but not because it probably sucks. It just isn’t my kind of porn. I don’t care if it’s reasonably well-written or if the prose is so tedious as to suck out your very soul through one of those tiny little straws you use to stir your coffee. Because my mother, who is as likely to embrace porn as she is to come out as a MTF transsexual alien Siamese cat, bought Fifty Shades of Grey at Wal-Mart. She hasn’t had time to read it yet because she’s not done with that heart-warming series by Jan Karon about the small-town priest, so in the meantime, she lent it to my aunt, who did read it, despite being a church-going Southern Baptist and, as such, even less porn-adjacent than my mother. (My aunt’s critique was pretty damning, though: “It wasn’t that dirty.”)

But never mind that. This is a giant step forward for all mankind! Let us all download porn onto our Kindles and celebrate.

I’m leaving simply because of time constraints. I’m running out of time in my day and some things have to fall off the bottom of the list. Unfortunately HU is one of those things. If you enjoy reading my writing, feel free to visit me over at my blog, Okazu. I’ll still be there.

I really enjoyed my time here on HU and I’m sorry to have to leave – and I hope to be back from time to time with a guest post here and there. Thanks to everyone who read any of my columns here, especial thanks to folks who commented and to all the other writers who welcomed me among their ranks.

Farewell, I hope to see you again soon. (^_^)/

 
Note by Noah: You can see all of Erica’s columns here.

There is no exact historic event to say when the modern ended or when the postmodern began. Even though World War I & II were certainly sublime in their scope, neither was the singular marker of transition. The transition happened more gradually as the individual neurosis of the modern gave way to the communal psychosis of the postmodern. However, what seems to be a constant is that comic artists have been there to comment on the types of madness that define those moments of change.

Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl embodies the man who does not know where time and history begin and end, as he moves with a detached but detailed interest in his urban and banal surroundings. Katchor’s strangely anachronistic images offer a quirky and disturbing response away from the angst ridden narratives of the high moderns. Knipl is a photographer. He is in the business of making images. He reproduces the real with his camera.  He looks and collects information about things that are in transition. He watches the people who engage in the remnants of a mechanically driven culture. Knipl’s is a gentle malady that draws one into a world without affect; a symptom of the postmodern condition.

After the wars, we tried to respond to the events of the recent past through the insufficient lens of the modern. Great thinkers and artists struggled to make sense of the human condition. They were neurotic, introspective, singular and alienated from society; they were outsiders. (The immediate problem with their strategy going forward was that we couldn’t all be on the outside.)

Mark Newgarden lampoons those great modern thinkers, Beckett, Joyce and Proust with his irreverent inclusion of “Mel.” His take offers a final ironic backwards wave adios to the modern past.  Newgarden rejects the sanctity of deep thought that had become the cultural currency of a neurotic society.  He deflates us all by brushing away the posture of alienation with the devastating tagline, ” We all die alone.” Which is to say conversely that we are all the same. Newgarden’s cartoon is a perfect transition from one historic state to the next, from the alienation of the modern into the communal ennui of the early postmodern.

The Disney Sublime: In the Belly of the Mouse.

In fact, the transition away from the modern happened not in a progressive manner, but rather when the postmodern went inside the beast and there found a different kind of collective  madness. The French theorists, Roland Barthes, Derrida, et al, who arguably were the most influential thinkers post-WWII with respect to the use and effects of the media, produced the postmodern enfant terrible, Jean Baudrillard. For him, after the failure of the revolutionary 1968 Paris riots, the world fell into the throes of late stage capitalism and into a self-delusional state in which reality slipped farther from reach. Baudrillard’s focus is on the blurred borders between the media and the real world. He cites Disney as our commonly experienced reality-irreality. Baudrillard moves his critique from the outside to the inside, he sees our new form of delusional psychosis as stemming from inside the world of Disney, from where we are no longer able to experience alienation as we once knew it.

Baudrillard in a passage entitled “Hyperreal and Imaginary” in his famous essay “Simulacra and Simulations,” first published in Semiotext(e) in 1981, writes about Disney and comics as part of the cover-up of reality. He writes, “Disney is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation.” He sums the scale of the problem as he understands it with:

The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pacified. (…) Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality(ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

In Baudrillard’s view we are being deluded. Our sanity is being deliberately assaulted. Baudrillard’s mistrust of all things Disney is palpable. His vision of a world where reality and irreality meld in a simulacrum of the real is exemplified by Disney’s fantasies. Previously, Mickey as Steamboat Willie was an amusing mouse who transported the goods that modern America desired. He stood in for those capitalist/modern values as the trickster everyman trying to get ahead. Disney honestly doubled down on the moneymaking, yet societally we still wanted to think that art and our values belonged to a commercially untarnished sphere. Mickey was the emblem of the modern. For Baudrillard, Disney became the backdrop of global conglomeration, whose tricks threatened us  from behind the veil of the corporate.  And in his article one can detect the signs of the impending schizophrenia that will follow on from delusion. Who among you does not harbor mixed feelings about Mickey? Or at least Pluto? We are all victims of this confusion of values.

While Baudrillard’s position is also more than a little paranoid, the fact remains that Disney  images are everywhere.  One is forced to ask what effect does it have on us when cartoons,  literally escape the panel borders and come to 3 dimensional life? Disneyworld, Broadway shows, toys, mugs, teeshirts and advertising occupy as much space as does any other cultural form; more perhaps. Baudrillard’s is a postmodern sublime that is the container for the vast  entity of Disney.

Almost as if to make the point, a very recent news article entitled : “The Flight from Mickey into the Madness of Pyongyang, North Korea” reported the following :

— Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh took the stage in North Korea during a concert for new leader Kim Jong Un, in an unusual performance featuring Disney characters. Performers dressed as Minnie Mouse, Tigger and others danced and pranced as footage from “Snow White,” “Dumbo,” “Beauty and the Beast” and other Disney movies played on a massive backdrop, according to still photos shown on state TV… the performance was staged Friday by the Moranbong band, which was making its debut after being assembled by Kim himself, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said. Kim, who took power after his father, longtime leader Kim Jong Il, died in December, has a “grandiose plan to bring about a dramatic turn in the field of literature and arts this year,” KCNA said.[1]

Life has not been kind to Asamiya Saki. At 16, she is doing time in a juvenile detention center for various crimes, when the police come to her with a nefarious deal – her mother is on death row for the murder of her father. If Saki works for the police to infiltrate high schools and root out criminal organizations, they’ll take her mother off death row. Saki agrees and becomes the Sukeban Deka – the Deliquent Detective.

The manga series, which ran from 1976 – 1982 in the pages of Hana to Yume magazine, was the first, the darkest and in many ways the craziest, of the three massively popular gang girl series. The manga spawned a live-action TV series that ran for three seasons from 1985-1987, in which the name “Asamiya Saki” becomes a title passed down through generations from the first Asamiya Saki to her successors. These were followed by two live-action movies in 1987 and 1988, in which two of the actresses that played Saki in the TV series reprise their roles. In 1991, an anime OVA, which covers the first arc of the manga was made (and for the finale alone, as Saki fights the evil high school crime leader on a burning oil tanker in the middle of the ocean, it’s totally worth seeing.) And, finally, in 2007 the series was resurrected for a brilliant homage/finale, distributed in English as Yo-Yo Cop, in which the original TV Saki, Yuki Saito, makes a cameo as the new Saki’s mother. All but the manga and TV series are available for purchase in English and I can’t stress strongly enough that you should at least see Yo-Yo Cop, because it’s pure genius.

Once Saki agrees to work with the police, she’s told that they can’t actually release her from prison…she has to escape on her own. With the help of her jail friends, Saki escapes and makes her way to the police, where she is given a Yo-Yo as a weapon (since minors can’t carry weapons, a proscription that Saki occasionally breaks when needed.) In the Yo-Yo is the Chrysanthemum seal, which Saki displays to let the bad guys know she is an official representative of the police. (Much as the protagonist of Mito Koumon displays the Shogun’s seal to let the bad guys know they were caught red-handed and by whom.)

Saki is taken under the wing of a half-Japanese, half-American named Jin who acts as mentor and boss. Jin and Saki eventually fall for each other, but they are never actually a couple in the course of the series.

As Sukeban Deka, Saki is enrolled in various schools long enough to draw the attention – and eventually the wrath – of the local criminal bosses. Saki takes down the gang, then the bosses and transfers away to the next school. In the course of the 22 volumes of the manga, Saki loses her memory, ends up on the west coast of the US for a while,  and then the east coast of the US for a while, until she regains her memory. Towards the end, Saki is transferred to one last post – in a juvenile detention center, rather than a regular high school. And this time, her enemy is not another student, but the evil warden himself, who raises giant snakes. Saki defeats the warden, of course. The final arc is the darkest, as she faces an adult criminal overlord. She wins, but at the sacrifice of…well, everything. Jin and she are finally united in death.

And death it is, as Wada Shinji makes perfectly clear on the last page. There will be no sequels of this series, as there were of Hana no Asuka-gumi or continuations as there were with YajiKita Gakuen Douchuuki. In fact, when the resurrections of those series brought girl gang manga back into the limelight a few years ago, Sukeban Deka was re-released as is, with no new material created.

The art style Wada used rode the line between shoujo and shounen at a time when it was massively unpopular to do so. Saki might be shown with “shock!” eyes, or with a murderously intense expression, and action shots were quite common. This style left its mark on many a mid-80s series, including Asuka and YajiKita . It’s not unfair to say that we might never have had a Revolutionary Girl Utena, or PreCure if we had not first had had Sukeban Deka.

My collection of obscura includes a Saki figurine and a Sukeban Deka Yo-Yo. But it’s this one still from the manga that is my most prized possession of Saki. This image of 16-year old Saki on her off hours, drinking and smoking will never again be replicated in today’s sanitized manga world. Sukeban Deka is a paean to a world that is lost, a world that contained high school crime syndicates, gang girl violence and giant snakes.

Good bye Saki – forever.