Sex, comics, porn… they don’t go together in my mind. Setting aside porn (as a mechanical solution to a problem of mechanical societies, not something I find critically interesting), I still struggled to come up with comics that I’d call sexy.
“All I can do is hope the one on the left is Lutheran!”
The book’s Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. It’s not sexy at all, just tortured by sex. And religion, or least how both infect the adolescent imagination. It’s a stunning work, the greatest of all the undergrounds. And it’s the best example of the debased confessional, the dominant strain of sex in American art comics: squeeze something embarrassing out of the pen and then hide publish the results.
The second work, Baudoin’s Terrains Vagues. If the tortured mix of sex and religion is terribly American, this book’s terribly European. A man & a woman, lots of talking, lying in bed naked talking. Sex, too. I think there’s some cigarettes, seashores, luscious drawings of old towns. Cafes.
(I need to move to Europe.)
Baudoin abstracts everything with sumptuous brushstrokes. He constrasts their sweep with intricate pen-and-ink, just as he contrasts the sex with his protagonist’s introspection: “Quand je penetrais une femme j’avais l’impression d’etre un vandale commettant. Une profanation.” Their relationship’s falling apart, reflected in the narrator’s drawings of her.
I guess breakups aren’t that sexy, either.
Still, the book’s much, much sexier than any other comic on my shelf. (The closest comparison is Le Portrait, Baudoin’s companion piece of a few years earlier.) It also works on the artist-model theme, which has been around for centuries, if mostly unexplored in comics. Of course, comics doesn’t have the tradition of the model stripping down while the artist draws 450 portraits in tiny boxes every month.
Comics also have no tradition of seduction. Once those 450 portraits are done, the moment’s passed. But a poem, painting, or just a camera can serve to get someone in bed, or at least naked. Donne’s poem “The Flea” or Goya’s Majas, whose myth I prefer to believe. Comics share more with the diary, where you write about how you felt when it did or didn’t work. Hence the memoirs and confessions, or just the secret fantasies of sexy trombones with TV sets for heads.
Comics also have no tradition of seduction. Once those 450 portraits are done, the moment’s passed. But a poem, painting, or just a camera can serve to get someone in bed, or at least naked. … Comics share more with the diary, where you write about how you felt when it did or didn’t work.
Do you mind doing a post expanding on the above points?
1) Why are comics more like diaries than poems, etc?
2) Why couldn’t a a diary get someone into bed?
Good call, Tom. I thought of expanding those points but figured it would bloat the post.
But first, this is a comic of a poem’s seductive prowess.
1) I don’t think they’re inherently like diaries; if I’d come of age reading Hal Foster tearsheets I’d make another comparison entirely, I bet. But a lot of contemporary comics feel like diaries for their content (memoirs, bon mots, doodles) and their physical form. You can put a moleskine in your back pocket to go with minis, a few graphic novels, and your wallet. Kind of a big pocket.
These would be mostly American alt-comics, with their strong autobio bent.
2) Logistics?
I think too, if you’re trying to get laid and want to use art to do it, first reconsider. Second, think about starting a band, or being an actor, or something else that puts you up on a stage. (Being a poet is great because you just read any old nonsense at a coffee shop and no one calls you on it.)
Third, choose an art that’s relational or collaborative. Filmmaker/photographer, pointing lens *cough* at the talent; portrait painter with the peculiar intimacy with the model. Chamber music.
A diary, I think, implies a relationship with only the page. I don’t know how you get someone to read it and then get all up on you for whatever you wrote without it being weird. That seems like pleading. The other option, leaving it out for the beloved to find, I don’t know. Seem weird.
How would it work?
I think you’re out of your mind if you think that successful comics creators aren’t able to use that to impress potential sex partners, if they want to. Autobio creators don’t even deny this (everybody Jeff Brown meets praises him for his comics; Ariel Schrag’s sweeties are into her comics; R. Crumb is probably more open than we would wish about the side-benefits of his artistic success, etc. etc )
It’s true that art where you’re actually in some kind of dominant relationship while in the act of creating (directors ordering around actors; artists ordering around models) is probably the best bet overall, and certainly rock stars and movie stars are bigger stars than comic stars in general, so that matters. But any successful artist has a lot of prestige.
2.There’s a long literary tradition of published diaries. Mary Maclean’s is over 100 years old at this point, I think. Autobio comics are meant to be published. Unless your publisher really isn’t doing his/her job, there shouldn’t be a problem with distribution.
Noah, I’m not out of my mind. Brown’s a good example. His books are mostly on relationships, and he’s drawn himself a half-dozen times meeting girls while drawing in coffee shops.
But I’m not talking about successful comics creators; successful anything is attractive.
I just mean a tradition of works created to seduce, or entice, or allure. Plenty of poems, song, paintings, not so many comics. I hadn’t even thought as far as publication.
A good negative case is Craig Thompson. He always worships and idealizes women, and indulges in extreme romanticism. I would think he’d have drawn a half-dozen odes to specific women. And he’s done a diary: Carnet de Voyage. He starts it wishing someone would pop his champagne cork and finds her in the last few pages. In between, the book stays in his head (unbearably) on a European trip. There’s a little artist-model going on, but the overall tone’s much closer to Binky Brown‘s neurosis than Baudoin. And though he probably knows it’ll be published, he indicates near the end that he didn’t think it would be– there’s a rush to get it scanned, sent to the publisher, etc. The tone’s like a diary for its frankness, its lack of form, and its disregard of audience. I’d have enjoyed it more as a work made to allure rather than get on paper a bunch of tourist’s thoughts.
Hmmm. Well, that makes somewhat more sense. Doesn’t it just come down to comics being a narrative rather than a lyric form overall though? I mean, novels don’t really have a tradition of seduction qua seduction either, because they’re focused on story rather than on speech qua speech (like poetry or song lyrics.)
It probably has something to do with comics long being a children’s medium as well.
Also, pound for pound, aren’t most comics not diaries, but pulp genre work of some sort? Obvioulsly super-hero comics aren’t much interested in seduction. But yaoi is, as is much of shojo. The book you wrote up for the latest issue of TCJ is too, right? (And breakups are often very sexy, and meant to be, I think. They’re romantic.)
I think your dismissal of porn as a mechanical solution for a mechanical society is true as far as it goes– but it’s true because that’s the case for all mass-produced genre work, not because of anything intrinsic to porn alone….
Doesn’t it just come down to comics being a narrative rather than a lyric form overall though? I mean, novels don’t really have a tradition of seduction qua seduction either
Very good point. But movies are also an overall narrative form, and I can think of plenty of examples of the camera loving the subject– certain Godard/Karina films, Sternberg/Dietrich, all Hitchcock, because Hitchcock liked his blondes. Maybe it’s a gaze thing, maybe photos of hot people get it done better than drawings of hot people. I have another post kind of about this in the works.
Also, pound for pound, aren’t most comics not diaries, but pulp genre work of some sort?
Yes, but there’s a very strong diary tradition, and I’m much more familiar with it than with the pulps. (I grew up on X-Men etc; my adult point of re-entry was The Book of Jim.) I’m probably conflating diary and autobio, but the cartoonist’s signature– the uniqueness of each one’s line– is very important to me.
But yaoi is, as is much of shojo. The book you wrote up for the latest issue of TCJ is too, right?
Kind of… I mean, the characters in Dousei Jidai are exasperating, like the ones in Red-Colored Elegy. And I don’t want to make too many dumb generalizations without flipping through my manga encyclopedia, but I don’t get a lot of seductivity from manga. Lots of chaste teen romance (Touch), lots of crazed porn. The character designs & aestheticism of much shojo makes the sexuality notional to me, even when there's sex. (Yaoi/Boys' Love are half-intentional blind spots for me: you pick your battles. A lot of it is very, very generic; the best stuff, the real masterpieces like Heart of Thomas, are rare, but also rather aestheticized. And critical discussion of it tends to the anthropo/sociological, which isn’t my thing.)
I need to read more of the post-Kyoko Okazaki crowd, who seem to have a lot of frank, smart sex; but none of it strikes me as all that sexy. I’ll get back to you on this, hopefully after spending a couple of months in a Japanese library reading 10 hours a day.
(And breakups are often very sexy, and meant to be, I think. They’re romantic.)
God, I wish. I’ll work on this.
Actually, one comic shows this beautifully: the Monsieur Jean one tracing a relationship from end to beginning.
I think your dismissal of porn as a mechanical solution for a mechanical society is true as far as it goes– but it’s true because that’s the case for all mass-produced genre work, not because of anything intrinsic to porn alone….
Yeah. I went back to Sontag’s porn essay for this series, and she compares porn to SF. My dismissal’s pragmatic: when I first went to Japan, it was like, “welcome to Porn Island.” I gave up trying to make deeper sense of it after staying in my third capsule hotel with a coin-op porn box on the TV.
To top it off: here are 3 comics that came to me this morning which might prove me wrong:
1. Frank Santoro’s Chimera. Very sexy, very seductive, very lyrical.
2. The Monsieur Jean mentioned above.
3. The second story in Iou Kuroda’s Nasu, “Two People.” Just one kiss, but very sexy.
I don’t think there’s any way around the fact that yaoi is all about swooning romance, and so is much of shojo. It’s absolutely about seduction. If it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work for you, but the appeal is absolutely sex. I guess you could call it porn and therefore exclude it….
Movies are in general a lot more like poems than comics are, I think. Comics are really story driven, like novels. (not that they’d have to be that way; it’s just sort of the way it’s worked out.)
If the issue is the camera (or artist, or whatever) loving the subject as in movies, I think there are a fair number of examples just among stuff I’ve read recently. Wonder Woman by Moulton certainly. Nana — there’s definitely an eroticism in the way Yazawa relates to a lot of those characters. Let Dai, same thing.
One thing about comics (as with novels) is that, if there is seduction, it’s not with a real person, right? In a movie, the eroticizing of the subject involves an actual person, because there’s an actor there. In poems or songs there’s an implied listener, who is (more or less) a real person. Comics tell stories, and there are no actors, so it’s harder to say, “this is a love letter to an actual person.”
I guess you could call it porn and therefore exclude it….
I have, actually, for yaoi. There’s so much manga, I’m quick to write off vast swaths of it– I’d like to read the 500+ books on my shelves before I die. And yaoi seems more interesting for its fan communities in Japan and abroad than the works themselves. Of course, I’m happy to be proved wrong, and will look at works if enough people say they’re great.
Still, I get most of my shojo vibe from 70s works, which are more romantic than sexy.
In a movie, the eroticizing of the subject involves an actual person, because there’s an actor there. In poems or songs there’s an implied listener, who is (more or less) a real person. Comics tell stories, and there are no actors, so it’s harder to say, “this is a love letter to an actual person.”
Yeah, I find this endlessly fascinating. Like Tezuka’s use of characters as “actors,” or the way the characters seem to live off the page. I think Rick Marschall? wrote that it’s not a comic without a character. But those Baudoin comics are very much about a real person. I wish there were more comics like that.
I should probably mention, too, the “pure love boom” from around 03, 04. All these crazy popular Japanese romance novels/comics/movies about pure love never consummated. The big one’s “Crying Out Love from the Center of the World” (???????????. Young love, tuberculosis, tragedy, very romantic, very sexless. I only saw the movie, but the comic’s based on the same novel.
Released by Viz as “Socrates in Love,” I think.