Judging from the pictures from TCAF. This post departs from my courtly ways; apologies in advance.
So more than once I read the many words Brandon from Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader? dropped about the graphic design of Drawn & Quarterly’s Tatsumi reissues. I guess he’s having an off day: gems like “the act of reissuing is a mix of hubris, fan boy exctiement [sic] gone wrong in the best and worst way, and opportunism” and “imperialist takeover” stand in for his not liking the design. Which is “twee and minimalist,” aimed at the “New York Times crowd” and the bad people who enjoy the Shins, Wes Anderson movies, and Neutral Milk Hotel. Those dreaded hipsters lurk in his argument, recalling someone’s glib quip that Tatsumi was hipster manga, when it’s really manga for smoke-cured old men.
Executive summary: Huh?
Anyway, let’s enjoy the graphic design in the Japanese versions of Tatsumi’s work. Maybe they’re twee and minimalist, aimed at those horrible cityfolk who read the Yomiuri, watch Le Pavillion Salamadre, and wear scarves. In the spirit of Tom’s fine series of Golden Age covers.
For context, here’s A Drifting Life, colonized by Tomine and the Canadians:
Here’s the same, pure as the finest vending machine sake:
Here, Seirinkogeisha’s recent versions of Tatsumi’s short stories:
And here’s a period cover to an ancient series of his I’ve never read and know nothing about save that it’s from around ’78:
Looks awful. Money makes the man.
And an old collection:
“The Crowd with the Blues,” more or less, from Napoleon Books. I don’t have a date, but it’s at least 20 years old judging from the design. The only word I can really make out on the blue wrapper is “sex.”
Finally, we’ve got Chip Kidd, who’s really damn good. They’ve got Tadanori Yokoo, who’s a legend. Here he drags Shonen Magazine from the gutter to the gallery:
Click to see it bigger. These are from the late 60s, early 70s. The cover on the left is from Tomorrow’s Joe, and its design doesn’t strike me as all that different than Tomine’s version of Tatsumi’s work. More garish, still using the source art as springboard for graphic strategies not inherent to cartooning. See also his baseball calligraphy cover, which stunned readers and artists when it hit.
As always, I hope I made some points.
Nicked from all over. Here’s some links:
- Moldy issues of Garo and Shonen Magazine and more
- Moldy jpegs of the greats of the Showa Era, including two Tatsumis and Akira Kawa’s classic Gemini’s Pimple
- Amazon.
Postscript: Tatsumi did up the great saint of Shingon Buddhism with Sachiya Hiro? Who knew?
I don’t know, Bill. If you were trying to convince me that American design isn’t worse than Japanese design, I’m not sure this was the way to do it….
yeah, i like the covers allright, & i can't get behind the whole "this is orientalism/this is catering to the dreaded hipsters who could never appreciate tatsumi the way i do," but d&q does definitely have a house style as far as book design(most of the time… it would be hilarious seeing them try to make "what it is" all minimal & monotone & sethy).
which gives one the idea that they have a house style as far as content too, which would be a bad thing for authors trying to distinguish themselves rather than jump on a bandwagon.
Noah, your double negative short-circuited me. I love Yokoo's stuff, while none of the rest strike me as terribly different from D&Q's versions. Certainly not enough to get in a huff. Anyway, Japanese book design's either fantastic or terrible, manga usually the latter.
Miriam, I feel sorry for the hipsters. Everyone hates them, but nobody knows who they are. And Tom Devlin does most of D&Q's design, right? I know he did Moomin; Seth does the old-timey stuff like Doug Wright, and Tomine does Tatsumi. I'd say their content has expanded a lot compare to five years ago.
As far as house style, have you seen L'Asso's book designs? They're pretty much identical no matter the book (until L'Ascension, anyway). Makes sense for the publisher's branding, especially when you're trying to carve out a space in the stagnant French market of the 90s. Though as a creator I might want more control over my positioning.
I'd love it if some enterprising InDesigner would make What It Is all Sethy & monochrome.
Hey Miriam! Hope the con went well!
Bill, I think overall the Japanese ones are clunkier, which I appreciate. The Tomine one really does seem more tasteful and boring. I actually really quite like the one with the money and the girl on the guy’s head, for example; it’s really funny and trashy in a train wreck kind of way — and those eyebrows! And the Tadanori Yokoo stuff is a lot more fun than Chip Kidd (whose work I don’t like all that much.)
So…I kind of agree with Brandon’s assessment overall, I guess, though, as Miriam says, the “no one understands manga like I do” is obviously fairly irritating….
I actually really quite like the one with the money and the girl on the guy’s head, for example; it’s really funny and trashy in a train wreck kind of wayYeah, I like “Gemini’s Pimple” for the same reason. Though I can’t agree with the original argument for its incoherence– what I’m taking as its core is that comics should be trashy? Or that the wrong kind of people (hipsters, Chip Kidd) shouldn’t influence them? It’s like he’s faulting designers for applying too highfaluting a design, even as the postcolonial screed he’s got is just as highfaluting.
Incidentally, I actually wrote and article about all the cartoonists who idealize the trashiness of comics: Feiffer, Rowson, Clowes. But the journal folded before it came out, so maybe it’s poison.
Did you read my article on the sublime trashiness of comics? I wonder what you’d think of it…
I do think there’s a desire on the part of folks like Tomine and (in a different way) Kidd to make comics literary and important in a way that I find stultifying. And that does come out in the design of archive volumes and reprints in various ways, I think. Japan doesn’t seem to have the same kind of problems…not because they’re more serious or suffered through the war or whatever, but just because the comics culture there is more established and doesn’t have the same kinds of anxieties. (Though obviously you’d have a much better sense of whether any of that is true than I would.)
Japanese visual design is also amazing in general. It’s just one of those things, like African-American musical traditions, where you look at it and say, yep, for whatever cultural reasons, these folks are just better at this art form than anyone else.
That article about comics and trash culture sounds great, by the by. Have you asked TCJ if they’d take it? It sounds pretty interesting, and something they might well be into.
I need some time to process that article, which I don’t now have…
But: I agree it’s bad ways to call comics literature, though for a different reason? The best may lack the elements of plot and characterization you find in lit. You end up with reviews that never discuss the art in any meaningful way, when it’s really core. Same with movies…
After being literary, whether comics are important, that’s fine. I’ve read enough people online and in print to know that I don’t buy the idea of comics as trash at core. I like the trashy ones, the “comics comics” so to speak, but the others I’m more passionate about don’t make sense through that lens. Yet there’s this kneejerk reaction to stuff that’s “pretentious,” as though it got new money and bought a yippy dog. Like the original article I linked to, it’s a lot of fretting about perception for no good reason.
And yeah, there’s lots of truly great Japanese design. Then there’s Nakayoshi.
I don’t dislike pretentious comics, but if it’s going to be pretentious, I want it to actually be highbrow. Fort Thunder stuff, or Ariel Schrag’s new book which actually engages with Ulysses in a thoroughgoing way; I’m all for that. I have more problems with middle-brow…stuff that makes a pretense of being important but doesn’t actually have anything to say, and doesn’t make any effort to say it in an original way.
“there’s this kneejerk reaction to stuff that’s ‘pretentious,’ as though it got new money and bought a yippy dog.”
Ha!
“I do think there’s a desire on the part of folks like Tomine and (in a different way) Kidd to make comics literary and important in a way that I find stultifying”
Uh, exactly.
Also, I like the designs on all the books! That’s just not my point. Especially the Vertical books. Those things are dope! Wrongheaded but dope. I like Wes Anderson movies a lot–wrote my undergrad thesis on Bottle Rocket–I have a t-shirt from Urban Outfitters. That’s not the point…
My beef’s not with hipsters or let’s just say, vaguely with-it twenty/thirtysomethings reading Adrian Tomine or whatever, but with the courting of a very specific audience for Tatsumi’s work, especially an audience that dominates the “comics for smart people” discussion and should come to Tatsumi’s work not have it come to them via appealing design full of telling signs and signifiers.
That’s to say, if someone turned Tatsumi’s work into wacky zany Naruto style cover, I’d be shitting on Naruto fans, you dig?
I’ll probably do a follow-up, but as someone who has reissued stuff and done some minor design work, I’d say my description of the act of reissuing is apt. There’s way way dopier things I said in that post than the quote you pulled.
In short, a lot of reissuing stems from an almost over-excited want to get a piece of work out there and I think the excitement overpowers how it should be done or controlled. BatManga by Chip Kidd is a great example of that and one it seemed a lot of comics blog people got behind.
The Moomin covers I’ve seen are nearly identical to Swedish or Finnish ones from the 70s.
Noah,
I have more problems with middle-brow…stuff that makes a pretense of being important but doesn’t actually have anything to say, and doesn’t make any effort to say it in an original way.Well said.
Brandon, thanks for your reply. I’m writing this to Vampire Weekend, which should be appropriately loathsome.
There’s way way dopier things I said in that post than the quote you pulled.Sure. The quote, as far as I could tell, is core. Reading you here, you're mostly interested in reissuing; reading you there, I took you as mostly interested in disliking a book design with a postcolonial cudgel.
I'm still having trouble following your response, in particular the fourth paragraph; I might add that the telling signs & signifiers of Tatsumi's scene are very like D&Q's scene, especially after reading some interviews with Noriko Tetsuka, T's Japanese publisher.
Please take my response as value-added grousing– everyone got to see the Japanese Drifting Life's Nascar font. I'll look forward to your follow-up and try to better understand what you're after there.
noah,
I have more problems with middle-brow…stuff that makes a pretense of being important but doesn’t actually have anything to say, and doesn’t make any effort to say it in an original way.that's kind of problematical definition of highbrow vs. middlebrow, essentially calling highbrow what you like & middlebrow what you don't like.
i'm sure adrian tomine would say he has something to say & makes an effort to say it in an original way (in "sleepwalk," none of the stories has an ending, until the last one! that's a unique approach in comics, albeit a stupid one).
"fun home" engages with ulysses, etc., & as i recall you didn't like it. does that make it middlebrow because it failed, by your definition?
also, the earlier schrag high school chronicles weren't terribly literary (in the sense of explicitly engaging with the literary canon). would you define them as highbrow, & if so, why?
That is totally awmesoe, yes. It makes me feel bad to say this, but I don’t want to buy a pricey Chris Ware designed hardcover especially when the artist probably still isn’t alive. Sounds like something great to hunt down on one of the many scanning sites out there. But I will, I will, because this looks like Axe Cop before there was ever Axe Cop. And that’s like Woah.