Yearly Archives: 2010

Can Comics Be Scary?

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Eric B. doesn’t think so. In response to my post on contemporary horror comics, he wrote:

“How’s this for a random unsubstantiated claim:

I don’t think comics can be scary, period. Too small…
too quiet…too temporally static. Never been scared
by any horror comic I’ve read…not a one. Yet…I
can’t watch horror movies–predictable or not–too scary.”

After thinking over the horror comics that I’ve read, I’m forced to agree with him. Even when I enjoyed a horror comic, such as The Walking Dead or some of the earlier Hellblazer comics, I didn’t find them particularly scary.

There’s certainly no way that comics can be scary in the same way that movies are scary. Comics can’t use mysterious noises or creepy music (textual representation of sound is a poor substitute). Also, since movie-goers instinctively understand that the world of the film extends beyond the view of the camera,  horror films routinely have their monsters lurk just outside the frame. And they can startle the audience by having the monster (or a fake-scare cat) pop out from outside the camera’s view. In comics, establishing clear spatial relationships from one panel to the next is difficult enough without also having to imply that there’s something lurking off-panel. And the “temporally static” nature of comics makes it impossible to startle readers with anything popping out.

But the greatest advantage that horror movies have over comics has less to due with the technical differences between the media, and more to do with how the average person watches a movie. Over the decades, Hollywood and the theater chains trained audiences to watch movies in a certain way: you turn out the lights, ignore everyone else in the room, and stop thinking. Movie-goers become completely immersed in the narrative, and horror films exploit this immersion like no other genre. As an example, when the soon-to-be victim wanders through a dark hall to investigate a strange sound, the camera forces the viewer to follow the victim and vicariously experience everything they see and hear.

Comics simply can’t offer the same degree of narrative immersion. For starters, reading comics with the lights off is rather difficult. Also,  immersion requires a passive mind, and comic readers can never turn their brains completely off. Even the most moronic superhero title still requires some active thought in order to read the text and interpret the narrative flow between panels. None of this is meant to say that comics can’t be engrossing page-turners, but comic readers generally don’t lose track of reality to the same degree that movie-goers do.

So does this mean that comics can never be scary? To the extent that “scary” refers to the visceral, immediate fears that horror movies deliver so effortlessly, the answer is yes. But if “scary” also encompasses the deeply-rooted fears and common anxieties of the readers, then perhaps there is some hope for horror comics.

Novels have many of the same technical limitations as comics, and yet there is a long literary tradition of horror dating back to Frankenstein, and horror writers such as Stephen King continue to enjoy great success. Obviously, a medium consisting entirely of text could never scare readers with startling noises or monsters jumping out of closets. So novelists tend to downplay immediate physical terror and focus on social fears and unnerving concepts, particularly of a religious or existential nature. Frankenstein reflected the major anxieties of the Romantic era, particularly the fear of a godless mankind. H.P. Lovecraft scared his readers by envisioning a universe that was essentially hostile. Most ghost stories exploit the fear of death and the the unknowable nature of the afterlife. There’s no reason why comics couldn’t tap into similar social or religious anxieties (and it’s worth noting that the best horror films already do so).

But horror comics have largely failed to measure up to the standards of horror novels. The earliest horror comics like Tales from the Crypt were designed to offer nothing more than the cheapest and shallowest entertainment. Plus, individual comic issues were simply too short to contain a plot with any complexity. And it was always easier to just add more gore than to write a gripping story. The visual element of comics may have also convinced comic creators that their medium had more in common with film than with literature, leading to futile efforts to re-create the thrills of horror movies on the static page.

Comics have the potential to be scary, but it’s a potential that remains unrealized. There is, however, the possibility that my knowledge of horror comics is too limited, so I’ll pose a question to the commenters: have you ever read a scary comic?

Song of the Hanging Sky, vol 2

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Yes, gentle reader, I read the next volume.  The story picks up three years after the last volume.  During the interim, things have been pretty quiet.  The doctor Jack continues to live with his adopted child-aged father and the bird men tribe.  However, the shaman River has disappeared and one of the tribe members, Horn, has become increasingly sick and has disturbing visions about the Day of Destruction.

This is, hands down, the most confusing manga I have ever read.  Well, OK, maybe not quite as confusing as Angel Sanctuary and it’s multi-personality no glossary messiness, but close.

Here are some notes that I took while reading.

Man=child

Hello=boy

Another River is not a man

Cherry=soldier

There’s a desperately needed, somewhat helpful cast of characters, but it’s not enough.  Man, for instance, is included there under the name No Man.  If you have someone staring at a big scary thing, saying “Man,” is your first thought that this is someone’s name?  The name of a baby at that?  Because it wasn’t mine.

Which brings us to the other big problem.  Most of this volume takes place in the past, which means that everyone looks different.  They’re also often addressed by their relative nicknames like sis, my older cousin, my nephew.  Which would maybe be OK, but the relative in question is often dead in the present.  And then there’s the character who is addressed by more than one gender pronoun.  The character glossary has this amusing sentence: He has no gender.  Um, yeah.

Did I mention that there seem to be two completely different Days of Destruction?

So why struggle through it?  The art is lovely and the story is quite interesting.  There’s a lot of cool plot going on under all the bizarre name problems, with interesting interpersonal politics and ideas about destiny (can it be changed?) and what honor means and the power of war.

I hesitate to explain the major plot points, because the twists are quite fun, but I think I can add that there is a nice backstory of the chief Fair Cave retelling the story of the clan’s destruction to Jack.   The story, such as it is, that happens during the modern day is primarily about the soldier Cherry, a young officer who is wounded in battle.  He makes an interesting contrast to the young Hello nee Nuts Peck, who was rescued in a similar way in the previous volume.

I’ll probably succumb and get the next volume, despite the massive translation/confusion problems.  I wish they would do something like bold or capitalize the first letter of the names.  It’s so puzzling and detracts from an otherwise very fun comic.

The Castafiore Emerald

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A while back I discussed some of my reservations about the Tintin books. I found the slapstick precious, the characters caricatured, the art lacking in visceral appeal, and the layouts consistently boring.

Numerous folks stopped by to tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about or (more kindly) to suggest that I should try some of the later Tintin books. In particular, several commenters recommended The Castafiore Emerald.

As it happens, my son has become a little obsessed with Tintin, so I thought I’d use that as an excuse to buy The Castafiore Emerald and see if it changed my opinion of the series. My boy, as expected, loved it…but I still wasn’t convinced.

That isn’t to say that the story is without interest. In fact, it diverges from earlier books in the series in a number of intriguing ways. Herge (according to trusty Wikipedia) was tiring of the series, and wanted to try something new. And what he tried was abandoning the adventure book format. In Castafiore Emeralds, Tintin doesn’t head for any exotic locale (as is the case in almost all the other books in the series), and he doesn’t encounter criminals, danger, or excitement of any sort really. Instead, he participates in a drawing room mystery/farce, in which every crime isn’t, every suspect is innocent, and the only real suspense is how Herge will manage to spin the plot out for a full 62 pages without ever having anything happen.

As a formal exercise, this is undeniably masterful; you only really appreciate Herge’s narrative genius when you see him turn all his tricks back on themselves, so that all the careful foreshadowing ends in blind alleys and the characters spin around and back on themselves, endlessly chasing their own slapstick-bruised backsides.

But as with Herge’s work in general, while I can appreciate the achievement on an abstract level, I can’t love it. Like Herge’s drawing, The Castafiore Emerald is almost too polished — and definitely too pat. You can feel the audible “click” as each false lead is resolved, and you can hear the laugh track rev up as each character is wheeled out (literally in the case of the wheelchair-bound Captain Haddock) to perform their schtick. And throwing in some gypsies so that Tintin can demonstrate his liberal bonafides by not suspecting them of theft…well, let’s just say I wish Herge had resisted the temptation.

Again, my son adores it when Calculus misinterprets what someone told him yet again because he still can’t hear and deaf people are always funny; or when Haddock splutteringly shouts “Billions of blue blistering barnacles” for the umpteenth time, or when the fiftieth person trips over that broken step and falls on their butt. Kids like to see the same joke over and over. And it’s not like I’m totally opposed…but the predictable surprises and even more predictable characters, the preciousness and the bloodlessness, the relentless clockwork perfection of it — it leaves me cold, and kind of irritated. Certainly, if I have to read something to my son, I could do (and have done) a lot worse. His current fascination with the Narnia books is giving me a lot more pleasure than his Tintin kick, though.

Utilitarian Review 4/3/10

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We’re going to take a day off tomorrow for the holiday. We’ll be back on Monday.

On HU

This week I talked to artist and critic Bert Stabler about art, criticism, pragmatism, and materialism.

Suat explained why comics will never be as exciting as video games.

Caro explained why this thing she found is comics (and in comments folks speculate on whether or not it might be by William Steig.)

Suat discussed Chester Brown’s gospel adaptations.

And Caro interviewed novelist Jonathan Lethem.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Reader I discussed the black metal band Ludicra and women in extreme metal.

The fact that when the women in Ludicra sound like women they’re essentially being used to replace a synthesizer is emblematic of how gender works in extreme metal. Which is to say, it doesn’t work at all. Extreme metal doesn’t care about men and women. It barely cares about bodies. Johnny Rotten howls “I’m not an animal!” and extreme metal responds with a louder and even more hideous howl of indifference. Misanthropy, to say nothing of misogyny, is for the living. Extreme metal’s aggression may sound male on the surface, but a corpse isn’t masculine even if it has a penis. Extreme metal seeks a monstrous oblivion; it uses unrelenting noise to destroy not just the dying animal but also the angel fastened to it. “Teach me to mask the spirit . . . The farce of human bonds / Of dignity and respect,” Shanaman howls. “Let me be the clean white void / The slate . . . the unwritten.” You don’t have genitals when you’re a mask upon a void.

I gave a one-star review to Kath Bloom’s remarkably lame new album over at Madeloud.

I reviewed the new Twilight Graphic Novel on tcj.com.

Other Links
This is a fascinating article about the copyright difficulties of producing a documentary about sampling.

And I enjoyed Erica Friedman’s wrap up of her and her wife’s trip to Japan.

Music For Middle Brow Snobs: Kaptain Death

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I’ve been tentatively getting more into death metal recently….

1. Rimfrost — The Black Death (Veraldar Nagli)
2. Testament — Curse of the Legions of Death (The Legacy)
3. Possessed — Death Metal (Seven Churches)
4. Dark Angel — Death Is Certain (Life Is Not) (Darkness Descends)
5. Deicide — Behead the Prophet (No Lord Shall Live)
6. Vader — Flag of Hate (Future of the Past)
7. Vader — Silent Scream (Future of the Past)
8. Entombed — Premature Autopsy (Left Hand Path)
9. Acrostichon — Zombies (Engraved in Black)
10. Decapitated — Visual Delusion (Organic Hallucinosis)
11. Hooded Menace — From Their Confined Slumber (Never Cross the Dead)
12. Apostle of Solitude — Sister Cruel (Last Sunrise)
13. Dark Star — Kaptain America (Dark Star)
14. Pat Benatar — Never Wanna Leave You (Crimes of Passion)

Download Kaptain Death

The Internet is the Return of the Repressed

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Back in 2007, after the release of You Don’t Love Me Yet, I was fortunate enough to “silently interview” Jonathan Lethem (I emailed him the questions and he responded in email).

Mr Lethem was a remarkably generous conversationalist, and his answers were lovely — well-thought and well-formed. I wasn’t sure what would interest him, so I sent very disparate prompts on everything from literacy to comics to postmodernism. The coherence of this interview is entirely due to his thoughtfulness.

Thanks to bizarre editorial preferences, however, the full interview never saw the light of day, until now. Lethem comments at one point about things you write on the Internet coming back to haunt you; I hope if he notices this he’ll be pleased with what he wrote. I think it’s more the Return of the Impressive.

======================================

Caro: Since I’m in DC and you’re a known baseball enthusiast, got anything safe to print about the Washington Nationals?

JL: I fear not, but I’ll risk it. As a lifelong Mets fan I grew up feeling dread and fascination with the Montreal Expos, who tended to torment us, especially a now-mostly-forgotten cluster of players — Tim Raines, Floyd Youmans, Andres Gallarraga, etc. The whole Francophone thing, the obscure swirling logo on their caps, the name bound in time to some mysterious public event… all combined to make the Expos a source of wonder. The Nationals, by contrast, remind me in their flat, grey, literal existence of the “Washington Generals” (as opposed to the “Specifics”?), the basketball team destined to lose every night to the Harlem Globetrotters. I do like Dmitri Young, though.

Caro: I feel a little obligated to ask you about book festivals [Note: this interview was conducted in conjunction with Lethem’s appearance at George Mason University’s book festival]. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on the value of putting authors and readers together in festival settings or on the state of literacy in the US in general?

JL: Ah, well, that’s a big question, literacy. I tend to worry about blowing a lot of hot air if I generalize about something like literacy, except to say that I’m in favor of it, fortunately find it everywhere I go, and therefore prefer to believe rumors of its demise are overstated.

As for festivals, all jokes aside, I really do like greeting other writers, and readers too. There’s a tension in this passion of ours, between the fundamentally solitary acts of reading and writing, the completely beautiful monastic tendencies that those activities cultivate in us, and then the countervailing urge to gather, come out of our shells, rediscover the tribal world, exchange enthusiasms, autograph one another’s first editions, brag and complain, talk about baseball, etcetera. I’ve always felt this double-urge very strongly, and I suppose my life can partly be described as a series of attempts to bridge the gap between the solitude of my private obsessions and the embrace of a larger human world — from working in bookstores, where I could meet other readers and press my favorites on them, to publishing my novels and then going out to thank personally the odd folks who liked them. Festivals are a nice opportunity to, again and briefly, resolve the public-private paradox.

Caro: You Don’t Love Me Yet is set in LA even though you are now, given your two best-known books, strongly associated with New York. Did you set this book in LA because you felt it was more appropriate, or more metaphorically significant, or just imaginative tourism?

JL: I lived in California for ten years before returning to Brooklyn — though I lived in Northern California, which in its way is as different (and as pitted-against) Los Angeles as New York is. And during that time everything I wrote was more or less set either in the Western part of the country — the Bay Area, or the desert west — or in a kind of vaguely gritty urban cartoon. You Don’t Love Me Yet actually felt like a return, to me, to the settings and modes of some earlier work, most particularly a book called As She Climbed Across The Table (as well as more recently unBrooklynish short stories like Vivian Relf). But I do understand that for a certain readership I “begin” with Motherless Brooklyn and then continue in The Fortress of Solitude, and that for those readers it may have come as a sort of shock, not just because of Los Angeles but because of the relatively blithe comic tone. I suppose I was willing to provide a u-turn experience for those members of my audience (assuming they were willing to follow me into the new territory, which is never something one should take for granted), just as I’ve felt willing — and sometimes even driven — to disappoint earlier expectations that I “stay” a hard-boiled detective writer, or a science fiction writer, or a postmodern writer, or whatever.

I landed in Los Angeles rather than the Bay Area — which would have been the more obvious home for a novel about hapless hipsters in their late twenties, seeing as how that was where I was when that was more or less who I was, but I realized that after the Brooklyn work — not just the two novels, but the constellation of essays and stories that surrounded them — I wanted to avoid the air of personal reminiscence even more completely. Rather than relying on the flavor of my memories of a place, I liked Los Angeles for being a place I was merely curious and confounded by. I felt free to write into my own perplexity about the way L.A. works because these characters are themselves perplexed (just as I felt safe writing about high-end particle physics in As She Climbed Across The Table because my characters are befuddled by physics).

Caro: LA’s media-saturated, less-than-intellectual culture is often credited with our society’s turn away from verbal literacy toward audio-visual media. It’s not uncommon for writers and teachers of writing to consider the proliferation of non-verbal media as bad for traditional verbal literacy (although there are different literacies at work). Do you think audio-visual literacy impedes verbal literacy, or is it just a matter of access and practice?

JL: Oh, big questions about literacy again! I’m terribly interested in your remarks here but fear I can’t do them justice in brief. Why don’t I just make a mysterious gesture in their direction by saying — yes, absolutely, yes: “different literacies,” even within the notion of a “visual literacy” – for instance, I’ve become hugely curious about the enormous differences in the ‘reading protocols’ that distinguish film spectatorship from comic-book reading – despite the great temptation, indulged everywhere lately, to conflate the two. One is passive and collective, the other so elaborate and private – and difficult, because of the necessity of constantly switching from verbal to visual presentation – that it may in fact be more hermetic than traditional reading. And, though I’ve never made myself familiar with it, I bet video game literacy is another thing altogether.

Anyway, I’d hardly be the first person to note that the great irony of cyberspace is that everyone’s using it to revive the epistolary tradition… e-mail (which we’re using now) was hardly the revolutionary post-literate virtual reality everybody was so hot for and frightened of fifteen years ago… but it is a revolution, isn’t it?

Caro: What prompted you to take plagiarism and originality as your subject in You Don’t Love Me Yet? And why did you choose alternative music as the place to work this out rather than, say, hip-hop, where appropriation is so much more direct and obvious?

JL: Great question. For the record, I once did, long ago, try to write a story about appropriation issues in hip-hop — this was around the time that Vanilla Ice was being compared to Elvis Presley for his usurpation of black cultural authenticity — and I failed. My attempt became a science fiction story about basketball players who appropriate one another’s skills using digital technology, so that a new player could “sample” Michael Jordan — it was a sort of disguised hip-hop story. And — continuing to feel defensive — I have no particular aversion to hip-hop. I feel the need to specify this because my semi-autobiographical character in Fortress of Solitude, Dylan Ebdus, is a sort of purist about soul music and has a great discomfort with rap. Not me, though. Yet somehow I’ve never managed to write about it very embracingly or extensively. It’s one of those things that just doesn’t seem, despite my interest, to be “mine” to write about. Like – ha! – Los Angeles.

Anyway, I had a whole bunch of other reasons to want to write about a mediocre rock band. I didn’t think of myself as having something to say about the ‘alternative scene’ (by the way, since since you mentioned scare quotes, I feel obliged to use them everywhere) in any real sense – this book simply doesn’t take place in the real world in that sense. But a rock band – two guitars, bass and drum – seems to me some kind of homely and encompassing archetype of the urge to blend artistic aspiration and hanging out with your friends – to refuse to choose between the two. And that interests me very much.

Caro: I’m not sure I have the chops to ask this question but I want to ask you about comic books as a literary influence because one of the things that I find myself as a adult not liking about comic books is how disruptive they feel in contrast with reading prose.

But highly literate people who love comics don’t seem to experience this the same way – there’s a deftness at balancing the multi-media form. Reading a comic seems to wish for a more seamless experience that takes a particular kind of literacy to really accomplish. Do you think art and words do inherently different literary work, or do they just work on the reader in different ways?

JL: Actually, I think I want to disagree with you directly here (and this is a distinction I began making in an earlier reply, above): For me, comic books are actually a very disrupted and baroque kind of reading experience, with uneasy shifts between simultaneous languages, and interesting tensions created between levels of ‘reality’ – the cartoonish and the mimetic coexisting – and it is in those kind of disruptions and discomforts that I find comic books most directly influencing my own art. (This is, again, as opposed to cinema, which seems to me a language of seamless immersion, imitative in that regard of waking reality, or dream – and, of course, interesting to and influential on me as well!)

Caro: You’re one of these literate people who love comics, but you have written several long and completely un-illustrated books in quite meaningful prose that take our cultural and personal engagement with comics and other art forms – music, film — as starting points. How do you feel about projects where someone makes a graphic novel out of a prose book, like with Auster’s New York Trilogy? Are they two ways of telling the same story or just a post-literate Cliff’s Notes?

JL: Well, yeah, much as I love that trilogy, that adaptation always seemed a bit dignified and literal to me — for the same reason I was never much of a reader of Classics Comics, and I mostly don’t like doggedly faithful middlebrow film adaptations of novels regarded as important. When one form takes from another I mostly prefer it to be a more fugitive and irreverent relationship, with stuff discarded or hidden, with slippages and rough edges showing. More energy and uncertainty. I’d love to see what would happen, for instance, if Paul collaborated with a comic book artist on something new, from the ground up.

Caro: From comics to lyrics: In your review of The Ground Beneath Her Feet for the Village Voice you say Rushdie’s lyrics “die on the page.” Lyrics play a pivotal plot point in You Don’t Love Me Yet — but not as quotes. Do you think quoting always has this death-effect on language that lives in another context? When you pull from a context that isn’t prose — lyrics or comics — what needs to happen to that language in order for it to not “die on the page?”

JL: Ah, this is the horror of the internet – ‘the return of the repressed’. I wish I hadn’t written that review. I’ll console myself by imagining that every writer has one such regret in his catalogue somewhere. The point I was snottily and overconfidently advancing is one that still concerns me: the difficulty of presenting one work of art within another, persuasively. Yet the evidence shows that I’m compelled to go up against this seeming impossibility. Rock lyrics have been, for me as a reader, a particular sticking point, even in books, like Delillo’s Great Jones Street, or Shiner’s Say Goodbye, that I find otherwise pretty beguiling. For that reason, I suppose, I chickened out and only quoted fragmentary lyrics in You Don’t Love Me Yet — and not even many of those. Mostly I just dropped the titles of my fictional songs and allowed the reader to imagine the rest. But I also believed I was safeguarding myself (perhaps wrongly) by asserting the mediocrity and marginality of my band – I didn’t claim they’d conquered the world, or even the pop charts. It’s that claim, for fictional art – that it changes the course of culture – that I usually find the most problematic and unpersuasive, like the presence of a “555” prefix in a phone number. And this is from a writer, and reader, not usually terribly concerned with verisimilitude. But we all have our sticking points.

Caro: In an interview with Robert Birnbaum in The Morning News you mention your “postmodernism” in scare quotes and emphasize your traditionalism. A sense of history and place doesn’t often provoke the adjective “postmodern,” so I’ve grabbed onto that as a traditional element in your work — you describe it as something that you had to learn by reading less-postmodern authors. Have you self-consciously tried to balance the influence of writers like Coover and Calvino an Angela Carter and those imaginative writers who created what came to be known as postmodern writing with the influences of modernism?

I’m also thinking of the way you mention elsewhere that a notion of “realism” that doesn’t take imagined reality into account isn’t really very realistic. Also in that interview with Birnbaum you say, “in Fortress of Solitude, the superhero is the metaphor that breaks out of the metaphorical and runs amok, distorting the reality.” It seems like metaphor is a much more useful and descriptive concept than “realism” for talking about the distorted way we experience the world. Questions of whether your work is realist or not seem to elide these postmodern influences and your sensitivity to metaphor and how we make our world through cultural engagement. I want to take that quote as saying that reality is itself richly metaphorical but let me prompt you to say more on how a metaphor “breaks out of the metaphorical.” Does it become something else, no longer a metaphor?

In all these dichotomies and contrasts — metaphor against reality, intellectual against inspiration, postmodern against traditional, audiovisual against verbal, LA against NY — the begged-but-not-mentioned one is fragmentation against synthesis: your essays are very synthetic and your novels do try to say something about history, something meaningful about race and class and experience and the way people make sense of the world. In that same interview with Birnbaum you say American writing “gobbles contradiction” — do you mean that it feeds on it or that it makes it evaporate?

JL: Can I say “both”? It gobbles it as it evaporates? I love all these remarks of yours, I should say first of all. Any answer I give here, in this brief form, is destined to be inadequate. But a few observations: yes, I’m quite devoted to the notion that the dreamlife is also life, and that the exclusion of reverie, daydream, hallucination, paranoid or reverent irrational belief, wishful distortions, needful projection, art projects, and other distortions of the ostensible ‘literal’ everyday surface of reality results — to the extent that my straw man actually exists — in a ‘realism’ that is not only impoverished, but by my standards quite utterly unreal. In fact it makes for a kind of kabuki notion of the real, highly mannered and communicating as mimetic only within certain very local and temporal formal traditions. In time such narrow notions of mimeticism may look as silly as, say, the huge prevalence of a bogus jiggly ‘documentary’ camera style in nearly all serious Hollywood films of the past five years, regardless of their subject.

But then again, I’m quite committed — to glance, for a moment, at the evidence — to a choice that is itself mannered, specific, and funky, and I’d be guilty of obfuscation if I seemed to be claiming that my work simply (or “simply”) represented a fuller and more “real” “realism”. That is to say, the metaphor that breaks out of the metaphorical — the magic ring or spray-can that makes lost things visible or goat man in my work — for shorthand, let’s call it my goat man. My goat man is a deliberate affront, a textual problem, an area of slippage or fissure between the use of an (generous and florid) mimeticism elsewhere and the objectionable, suspiciously genre-activating chunk of fantastic stuff — a character or object or environment that blurts out of the category of symbol or metaphor, into the story itself, and demands to be recognized. The chunk of cognitive dissonance my customers are always finding in their soup spoons. For that I can offer no explanation briefer than my collected works themselves. That pursuit is the tail I am forever chasing, and it is my own tail, and whether you find my effort ludicrous — like a puppy on the lawn — or enthralling and terrifying, like the Worm Oroborous (check the spelling on that) depends on your set and setting, I suppose. If I have anything, ultimately, to add to the great conversation of literature, it is this habit of deliberate confusion.

Caro: Paul Auster and Robert Coover have both come up in this email and both, like you, have a thing about baseball. Is there something inherently literary about baseball?

JL: Well, sure, many things. And they’ve nearly all been remarked upon here or there. But one I don’t think I’ve seen clearly identified is baseball’s tendency, with its schematic base-to-base, one-thing-at-a-time, let’s-stop-and-talk-it-over tendencies, to create a strong feeling of missed opportunity, lost chance, alternate outcome thoughts in the viewer. Whereas other sports are largely about things that actually happen, a lot of baseball ends up being about things that almost happened, that could have happened, but didn’t. It’s full of speculation and regret. Stories, in other words.

Caro: Although you have put girls at the center of your stories (Pella Marsh in particular), you have been often concerned with boyhood, with male coming-of-age as mediated by popular art. I heard someone refer to you once as the Francois Truffaut of books (which I interpreted to be because you find boys fascinating but aren’t incapable of doing justice to girls.) You do get asked a lot of those Questions-That-Are-Good-To-Ask-Smart-Men about race and class and popular culture and comics and magic realism: I would like to ask you about girls. Girls in popular culture, girls in literature, girls in your literature. The Mother Jones article on sexism in comics. Whether feminine coming of age is mediated by popular art in the same way as for boys…really just a general prompt.

JL: Let me again be defensive: before I’d written The Fortress of Solitude, I remember seeing an entry on me in some literary encyclopedia that defined my accomplishment (on the strength of As She Climbed Across The Table and Girl In Landscape, surely) as “strong female characters”. That’s a reputation I’d love to imagine I’ve burnished with You Don’t Love Me Yet. But of course the two Brooklyn books are also both books of male comraderie and female exclusion. No doubt in those books, and in some stories, I’ve explored the Hemingwayesque theme of “men without women” (and you’d be safe enough adding “men who don’t deserve women.”) And then the whole comic book and rock and roll thing may have reinforced the impression (though I don’t know the Mother Jones article you mention). But hey, wait, I didn’t write about “masculine coming of age” per se in my essays-cum-memoir — I simply wrote about my own! It wasn’t a sociological book, but a confessional one.

Caro: What would happen if Jack Kirby and Jack Kerouac showed up on your doorstep expecting…something?

JL: Jack Kerouac I’d simply want to offer soup and a sandwich, maybe a shoulder to cry on. That would be relatively simple. Kirby could get more complicated. We’d have a lot of stuff to talk over. Kirby frightens me a little.

Old Wine in New Wineskins: The Gospel According to Chester Brown

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In honor of Holy Week, I’m republishing (with some corrections) an old review which first appeared in the pages of  The Comics Journal (#261) in 2004.

For those whose memories don’t stretch that far back, Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur was one of the mainstays of the independent comics scene in the late 80s.  It was in the pages of Yummy Fur that some of his most important works first appeared, among them Ed the Happy Clown, The Playboy and I Never Liked You. He has since receded into the background once again following the publication of Louis Riel in 2003.

Brown began serializing his adaptation of the Gospels in Yummy Fur #4 in 1987. The entire series has never been collected and the only way to access them is through back issues of Yummy Fur or the magic of photocopying.

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A Review of Chester Brown’s Mark and Matthew

Mark

Chester Brown once explained his decision to embark on a project to adapt the Gospels in an interview at Two-Handed Man. “Certainly at the beginning, it was a matter of trying to figure out what I believed about this stuff,” he informed his interviewer, “It was a matter of trying to figure out whether I even believed the Christian claims—whether or not Jesus was divine.”

As such a modicum of restraint appears to characterize the early chapters of Mark. Brown’s adaptation seems to reveal an artist who is still struggling with both his craft and the quality of the garment through which he’s picking. One may also choose to wonder if part of the reason for this is some residual Christian guilt. Some years earlier, in a conversation with Scott Grammel in The Comics Journal #135, Brown revealed that he was probably unable to say that “Jesus wasn’t divine without worrying whether [he] would go to hell”, and this as recently as the mid-80s.

The reputation that Brown’s Gospel adaptations have for being ingeniously blasphemous is mostly based on his interpretation of Matthew. The Christ of Brown’s Mark, on the other hand, is serene and always in control. He is almost untouched by foul humanity and the rigors of life. His disciples act respectably and never display unscrupulous intent or a lack of etiquette at the dinner table. Judas, as we see him in this gospel adaptation, is neither craven nor a zealot but by all appearances merely youthful and naïve.

This in itself is not a criticism for Brown does achieve a degree of humanity and insight in this early adaptation, such as with the hemorrhaging woman and the widow in the story of the widow’s mite. When Jesus heals Jarius’ daughter (Mark 5: 41-42), Brown shows Jesus kneeling beside the awakened twelve year old girl with a smile on his face.  All this is in keeping with the placid figure of Christ the author presents in Mark. One might say that this is the kind of Jesus that children still learn about in Sunday school.

It is only in the later stages of Mark that Brown introduces his first piece of apocrypha. Derived from a letter of uncertain authenticity written by Clement of Alexandria, the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark is described by the author of the letter as a “more spiritual” gospel for the use of “those who were being perfected”, the interpretation of which would “lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of truth hidden by seven veils” (it can be perused on-line here):

In this “gospel”, Jesus raises the brother of a woman in Bethany. It continues:

“But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.”

It is often remarked that this passage bears comparison not only with the story of Lazarus but also Mark 14:51-52 where another unidentified young man wearing nothing but a linen sheet is found. This excerpt is dealt with at length in the pages of “The Fur Bag” (the letter column of Yummy Fur) in Yummy Fur #14 by letter writer Rob Walton and Brown himself. Here the baptism of special initiates and the homosexual undertones of the “secret gospel” are brought forth as well as the possible gullibility and motivations of Clement (if the document is in fact genuine).

Brown has indicated that he owes a debt to Morton Smith’s The Secret Gospel and Jesus the Magician for stirring him to revisit the Gospels. The former tome recounts Smith’s discovery of the aforementioned letter fragment. The latter book emphasizes Jesus’ position as a miracle worker and attempts to explain the manner in which some non-believers viewed Christ. It is a firmly critical and speculative text which cast the Gospels in the light of apology, unscrupulous “theological motives” and propaganda in addition to your basic lies and half-truths. With respect to the scribal view on Jesus, Smith writes: “his background and baptism prove him an ordinary man and a sinner, therefore, the miracles, success, impious behavior, and supernatural claims prove him a magician” (an appellation which Smith explains at length in his book). Smith also suggests a few qualities which he feels separated Jesus from other miracle workers and exorcists of the times, and which led to his being labeled a magician: “compulsive behavior, neglect of the Law and claims to supernatural status”. Some of these traits are highlighted in Brown’s Gospel adaptations, most notably in Matthew.

Even so, Brown’s Mark does not read like the work of someone who is challenging received wisdom but an exercise in illustration. One panel in the first part of his adaptation stands out and is at odds with the rest of the otherwise flat narration. On page 2, Jesus is shown being driven into the wilderness (Mark 1:12), his hands clasped to his eyes in translation of the word “driveth” which is said to be the same word used for Jesus’ expulsion of demons.

 

Another panel of interpretative interest (and one which departs somewhat from tradition) occurs in Mark 6:20 where Herod is shown listening eagerly to John outside his jail cell.

 

 

Brown only begins to bring a more creative and personal hand to his adaptation when Jesus enters Gennesaret. Here a number of the villagers are depicted (somewhat amusingly) with faces inscribed with stupefaction, while others look sternly and suspiciously out of their houses. For once, the sick and the infirm look weak, desperate and, occasionally, uncouth; something previously addressed only in relation to the Gadarene (or, in Brown’s version, Gerasene) demoniac. From this point forward, the crowd scenes become increasingly adept and Jesus begins to show a wider range of emotions – most notably anger but also a certain irritability. He begins to carry an almost threatening air and Brown slowly begins to distance himself from the previous depictions of tender righteousness.

Apart from these aesthetic considerations, there are also some unusual choices in Brown’s otherwise unadventurous transcription of Mark. When Jesus encounters a leper in Mark 1:41, he is said to be moved by compassion and not “anger” (as stated in Brown’s narration). Jesus, as depicted in the panel in question, seems at best to be irritated and one feels that Brown has over interpreted the stern warning given to the leper not to tell anyone of his healing, charging the episode with something more than what is suggested in the original text.

In such instances, we see Brown approaching Mark in the spirit of a student and not as a person who has fully immersed himself in the subject matter. He shows occasional delight (particularly in his notes) when he chances upon what he perceives to be deadly “mistakes”  in the text of Mark. In the notes for Mark 5:1, for example, he brings up the dispute concerning Jesus’s journey across the sea of Galilee to Gerasa (a translation which occurs in the NIV, NASB and RSV but not the KJV which translates as the country of the Gadarenes). Brown points out that the town of Gesara is “a good 30 miles south-east of that sea while other non-secular commentaries have also pointed out that Origen identified Gesara as an Arabian city “which has neither sea nor lake near it”.  It is an age old and complicated dispute which involves varying manuscripts and the possible misidentification of the village of Khersa. All of which has little place here. Suffice it to say, Brown reserves this kind of textural criticism for his notes, his adaptation of Mark generally being free from such gloating or any study of the unity or disunity of the gospels. For instance, he obscures Jesus’ final cry in the closing moments of his crucifixion as the exact nature of this exclamation is not stated in the Gospel of Mark. Further, the mention of two demoniacs in Matthew but not in Mark is not resolved, explained or questioned.

At times, Brown’s idiosyncratic choices hamper the sense of the text. In his notes to Mark 10:35 to 12:27, for example, Brown indicates that he has left the crowds out of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem because Mark does not specify them. Such a literal approach has limitations and is occasionally counter-productive and counter-intuitive. At one point, Joseph of Arimathea is shown closing Jesus’ tomb by himself and with his bare hands, while the panel which follows this (describing Mark 16:1-4) makes a nonsense of that depiction:

“And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.” [emphasis mine]

The sense of the passage is embedded in Mark and it might have been more instructive if Brown had brought into play the fact that Joseph was a rich man. With this in mind, one would have expected a number of servants to have helped him remove Jesus from the cross and to prepare and transfer the corpse for burial.

Brown has explained his somewhat flat interpretation of Mark in his interview in The Comics Journal #135:

“People were expecting me to do something weird with Mark. And I am doing all the Gospels…And so starting from a traditional view seemed like a good place to start. And I can get weirder as I go along but…”

And later:

“ But what I was doing was trying to distance the reader. Because I’m going to tell it over another three times. The feeling was ‘I can draw in closer in Matthew, Luke, and whatever.  This is your beginning point, just kind of show the reader what’s there, don’t get him in too close.’ And looking over it I’m not too pleased with how it looks because I think I got in even closer than I wanted to.  If I was doing it again I would distance the reader even more, I think.”

The resultant comic will be of variable interest to the reader as a consequence of this decision.

Matthew

Brown’s adaptation of Matthew harbors more vitality than his work on Mark. It is also possessed of a more divisive purpose. He signals his new intentions right from the start in his exposition on the genealogy found at the beginning of Matthew. Here Brown elaborates on the story found in Genesis chapter 38 (which concerns the sordid tale of Judah and his daughter-in-law, Tamar).

[Robert Crumb’s take on the same subject for comparison]

This is followed by his depictions of Rahab (a Canaanite woman and a harlot), Ruth (a Moabite woman who is asked by her mother-in-law, Naomi, to sexually entrap her kinsman, Boaz) and Bathsheba (an adulteress whose history is well known). Traditional interpretations have suggested that the willful inclusion of these women on the part of the author of Matthew presents a confrontation of the androcentric interpretation of Israel’s history, a desire to strengthen the earthly origins of the Christ and a means of characterizing a new attitude towards foreigners and outsiders following the passion and resurrection. However, Brown’s citation of Jane Schaberg’s The Illegitimacy of Jesus appears to indicate that he feels that the “mention of these four women is designed to lead Matthew’s reader to expect another, final story of a woman who becomes a social misfit in some way; is wronged or thwarted; who is party to a sexual act that places her in great danger; and whose story has an outcome that repairs the social fabric and ensures the birth of a child who is legitimate or legitimated” (Schaberg). Schaberg argues the case for a strong tradition of Jesus’ illegitimacy (as opposed to his virginal conception), suggesting that the key verses in Matthew such as Matthew 1:20 (“Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost”) should be taken in a figurative and not a literal manner, in essence adopting the increasing fashionable rejection of a literal virgin birth. Morton Smith (whom, you will remember, Brown admires) also mentions the genealogy in Jesus the Magician where he suggests that “Matthew wanted to excuse Mary by these implied analogies”.

One may choose to differ with many of Brown’s choices in Matthew but these choices are, in general, more interesting than those in Mark. For instance, Brown’s decision to depict the magi as “poor wandering holy [men]” while not thoroughly convincing, feels correct in spirit. His point that the costly gifts “are often considered to be an indicator that the magi were rich but…they aren’t necessarily so” is a weak one but it allows for a certain tension in the scenes showing the traveling magi.

In his interpretation of Matthew 8:21-22 (“And another of his disciples said unto him, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.”) he forsakes the unvarnished and doggedly literal readings he administered in Mark. Instead he chooses a well known but more creative reading where the father is seen to be Zebedee and the disciple, John. In so doing, he appears to take into account the use of the word, “disciple”, which was given to a select few and Matthew 20:20 which contains the phrase “the mother of Zebedee’s children” which suggests that Zebedee was no longer alive.

The notes which accompany Matthew, on the other hand, are seldom profitable. For example, in his depiction of the holy family’s return from Egypt, Brown reproduces Matthew’s quotation of Jeremiah writing, “In Ramah was there a voice heard, lamentation and weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not.” In his notes, he innocently wonders if “Matthew [is] saying that the king’s men, who were supposed to kill the baby boy’s in Bethlehem, got mixed up and killed the baby boys in Ramah by mistake?” It is a query which seems obtuse since commentary is widely available on the passage. One traditional viewpoint indicates that the prophecy was fulfilled during the Babylonian captivity in which Nebuzaradan conquered Jerusalem and assembled and disposed of the captives at Rama. The quotation is seen to be used in poetic comparison. There are other more involved commentaries on Matthew’s use of this verse, all of which are far more complex than Brown suggests in his notes. Seen in this light, Brown’s remark does nothing for the reader’s confidence in his research at this early stage in his career.

Brown follows this by recounting Joseph’s rejection of Judea (which was ruled by the tyrannical Archelaus, Herod’s successor and son) in favor of Galilee (which was governed by Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great and Malthace). The Bible passage reads as follows:

“When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.’ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee.” (Matthew 2: 19-22, NRSV)

Brown depicts Joseph fleeing back to his wife who is shown lying beneath a tree in a desolate landscape. In his “Notes on Matthew”, Brown cannot resist a snide aside and suggests that “the angel was apparently unaware that Galilee was also at this time ruled by one of Herod’s sons — Herod Antipas”. This somewhat sloppy comment highlights the spontaneous nature of Brown’s notes. They rarely suggest the wealth of commentary which feeds off the texts of the Gospels. There is, for example, the more well-disposed and Christian viewpoint by Adam Clarke (in his commentaries from 1810-1825). He states concerning the move to Galilee:

“Here Antipas governed, who is allowed to have been of a comparatively mild disposition; and, being intent on building two cities, Julias and Tiberias, he endeavored, by a mild carriage and promises of considerable immunities, to entice people from other provinces to come and settle in them. He was besides in a state of enmity with his brother Archelaus: this was a most favorable circumstance to the holy family; and though God did not permit them to go to any of the new cities, yet they dwelt in peace, safety, and comfort at Nazareth.”

This is but one viewpoint among many, and it is a particularly old and traditional one. Suffice to say, there is an atmosphere of carelessness in Brown’s notes which suggest that they should be thoroughly revised in any reprint or dispensed with altogether.

Between Brown’s adaptations of Mark and Matthew, there occurs a change in authorial temperament and viewpoint. There is a more radicalized disbelief and a greater focus on the fleshy and earthly aspects of the story. This is most evident in Brown’s conception of biblical figures. The hardened Christ of Brown’s Matthew is in marked contrast to the Jesus of Mark who, for all intents and purposes, could have taken a step out from a kindergarten school painting – smartly berobed, well coiffured and immaculate. In Matthew, We no longer see this calm aspect of Christ but the scowling features once used to depict the jealous Pharisees in his adaptation of Mark. There is also the figure of Herod the Great who is now depicted as a man on the edge of violence, driven to extremes by his unyielding character and a chronic, incurable disease. He is the man we picture when Josephus writes, “A man he was of great barbarity toward all men equally, and a slave to his passions, but above the consideration of what was right”.

Satan who once appeared as an angel in white raiment in Mark has been transformed into a thin, ebony-hued youth with pallid lips and hair.

John is no longer the rugged but respectable prophet but a wizened, decrepit mad man screaming in his cell. Like Jesus himself, he has become sharp featured, aggressive and utterly determined; a screaming, scabby looking creature tripping on the borders of sanity. In his illustration of Matthew 3:7-8, we are not given the traditional “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance”, but rather, “You fucking vipers! Do you really expect me to baptize you in the Jordan?! You could at least try to look repentant!!”

Jesus’ disciples are acne-ridden, surly, ill-bred louts. They pick their noses and eat their snot, mimicking the cartoonist’s own proclivities. They are possessed of unrestrained gluttony, feel up women as a matter of course, and are callous and rude to their relatives when asked for assistance. In other instances, there is the hint of cunning managerial skills as they selfishly protect their restricted communion with Jesus.

Brown’s approach emphasizes the poverty and crudeness of the people who once inhabited Palestine. We are allowed to see a diverse set of motivations as well as the naked selfishness and cruelty of a series of non-entities. He is like a latter-day Pasolini, rejecting purity in favor of an honest depiction of men and women. In an interview with Steve Solomos (Crash #1), Brown, insists that the snot-eating was not included for “shock value”:

“Solomos: There will be a perception that you’re doing it for some nominal level of shock value…Do you feel that you’re including it for that reason?

Brown: No. When I was growing up, it always seemed to me that what I wanted to do when I became an artist, was to show life the way I thought it really was.”

Here we see an echo of the writings of Celsus the Platonist, author of “The True Discourse” (the original being lost, it was reconstructed from the refutation written by Origen, Against Celsus) who describes the disciples as “tax collectors and sailors of the worst sort, not even able to read or write, with whom he ran, as a fugitive, from one place to another, making his living shamefully as a beggar”. This passage is cited in Smith’s Jesus the Magician and dismissed as “typical ancient polemic [which] may have come from any opponent…though the picture may be correct”. It is a tradition which continues today in the form of studies of the historical Jesus.

In accordance with his desire to bridge the distance created in Mark, Brown dispenses with the narrator’s voice thus allowing the plot and dialogue to flow more naturally. The conversations in Matthew are no longer paraphrased at length and in respectful tones but are shortened and contemporized – transformed into quasi-modern sentences, short exclamations and guttural snaps. Here we find the influence of Andy Gaus’ The Unvarnished Gospels (one of the translations which Brown says he used) which is noted for its literal translation of the gospels which eschews much theological baggage.  The Sermon on the Mount is similarly altered to a form which best fits Brown’s appreciation of Jesus’ recorded words. Jesus is shown in close-up for nearly seven pages and Brown strays perilously close to the kind of boring conception which he accuses Scorsese of in his remarks on the film adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ (in TCJ #135). This sequence may be compared with Brown’s flat handling of Jesus’ parables in his adaptation of Mark and comes across as tedious and uninspired, the familiar stories and words floundering on bland imagination.

In his portrayal of Matthew 4:23 to 5:10 (which includes the Sermon on the Mount), Brown, for once, chooses to expand upon and dramatize the gospels by means of a digression concerning a mother and her two daughters. The mother is blind and disfigured, and the younger daughter, a coarse and sickly individual. They form part of Brown’s recreation of the reality and texture of the times, his vision of what the author of Matthew suggests when he writes, “all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.”

Amidst all this harsh reality, Brown remains strangely faithful to the text where more rigidly secular and atheistic authors would defer less. The healing of a leper is presented as miracle rather than myth. The centurion’s servant is similarly raised without disagreement or question. In response to Scott Grammel’s (TCJ #135) query concerning this seemingly unquestioning acceptance of the gospel stories, Brown answers:

“Well, I’m adapting the Gospel, and…That’s what it says in the Gospel. It says he drove a demon out, so why not show it?”

Such jarring turns and discrepancies in presentation result in a certain inconsistency of tone. What one detects on a reading of Matthew is not a man struggling with a neglected text or his spirituality but an artist who has allowed his occasional whims to supersede any general thrust or plan. This leads to the narratively unremarkable and somewhat juvenile tenor of Jesus’ healing of the two blind men where one blind man, upon being healed, says to the other, “Hey man, you’re really ugly.” In another instance, when one of John the Baptist’s disciples informs his master that his jailer has kept the wild honey (to be taken with the Baptist’s locust) for himself, John replies, “Bastard.” These episodes suggest an attempt at humor in the vein of Monty Python’s Life of Brian which seems out of place in an adaptation which is for the most part quite serious.

Brown’s view of reality permeates his adaptation of Matthew.  As he has stated in relation to autobiography in his interview in Crash:

“…if you just concentrate on telling whatever story you’re telling that’s fine, but any given story can be told in a number of ways. If you expand your parameters, for instance, you’re not just telling your story, you’re also talking about life, about how you see the world around you.”

 

Pertinent to this view are Brown’s views on Gnosticism which he explains in TCJ #135:

“I’ve called myself a gnostic, but I’m not really sure I fit into the…The part that appeals to me is that you accept yourself as the true authority on God. You don’t rely on outside sources. You don’t rely on your preacher. You don’t rely on the Bible or anything. You just say, ‘What is my opinion? What in me tells me about God, about the world?’”

In The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels describes these individuals as follows: “Like circles of artists today, gnostics considered original creative invention to be the mark of anyone who becomes spiritually alive…Whoever merely repeated his teacher’s words was considered immature….Most offensive, from [Irenaeus’] point of view, is that they admit that nothing supports their writings except their own intuition. When challenged, “‘they either mention mere human feelings, or else refer to the harmony that can be seen in creation’”.

Brown has adapted this approach for both sacred and profane purposes. What has been “revealed” to him not only includes his interpretation of the Gospel message but also the altogether worldly emotions and mannerisms of the biblical characters; a modern day twist on the gnostic tradition of continuing revelation which is not hindered by direct experience. Needless to say, Brown’s irreverence does not match the spirituality displayed by the gnostic texts but he once displayed some interest in them as evidenced by his adaptation of a portion of the 61st chapter of Pistis Sophia for Prime Cuts #3 (1987). In the story, Mary relates an event from Jesus’ childhood in which she encounters the Spirit which she mistakes for a demon or “a phantom to tempt me”. She binds the Spirit to a bed and goes out in search of Joseph and Jesus. The family returns to their house where the Spirit is released and becomes one with Mary’s son upon kissing him. Brown’s extract is told without elaboration or embellishment and the reader is left to search for the mystical interpretation of the passage in the rest of Pistis Sophia.

The world of Matthew, on the other hand is fueled less by numinous revelation than by the fluctuating moods of the artist. In his interview at Two-Handed Man, Brown reiterated what has always been a variable interest in the project: “…I don’t think I’m going to be getting to Luke or John. But you never know. My interest in Swedenborg might get me wanting to do Luke or John now.” Matthew feels more like a diary of the artist’s feelings which range from a sudden interest in the text which is then periodically overtaken by boredom resulting in a lack of inspiration. A meticulously crafted plan is rarely in evidence. A somewhat haphazard method of working (in relation to that period) is described by Brown in The Comics Journal #135:

“When I have something really plotted out, really planned, by the time I’m half-way through a story I’m bored with it, and I want to do something different. Often I’ll have a specific plan – ‘Yeah, I know where I’m going with a story’ – and then half-way through I say, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. Let’s take off in this direction and do this instead.’ To some degree just to keep myself interested in the work.”

But what worked to a certain extent (when played to its limit) for the surrealistic tales from Yummy Fur, founders and fails in these Gospel adaptations if only because of undue moderation. Further, while the reader is frequently invigorated by Brown’s skillful use of comics narrative, the sharpness of his perceptions is often wanting. This is highlighted by any number of famous or more recent literary comparisons. Brown, himself, claims to dislike Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ for its style of writing (TCJ #135; “I just couldn’t get into the writing, and gave up after a couple of pages”) but had he persisted, he would have witnessed a highly charged and ostensibly heretical faith generating a novel told with uncommon passion and intensity. Jim Crace’s Quarantine (a novel which post-dates Brown’s adaptations and which is concerned with the mythical and human aspects of the Christian faith) creates a microcosm of the narratives and teachings of the New Testament through the device of Jesus’ forty days in the desert. Bruce Mutard’s Abba (from the SPX 2002 anthology) is a fine example of intellectual rigor and creativity in conceptualizing the Gospels in comics form. More pertinent, as far as Brown’s desire to inject humor into his story is concerned, is Mikhail Bulgakov’s amiably sacrilegious The Master and Magarita which has such a keen insight into the politics and philosophy of the passion story that one’s imagination is immediately seized.

Brown’s poorly-thought out blasphemy, on the other hand, is often quite unimaginative, and there are few things less needful than dull blasphemy. The extensive back catalogue of novels or redactions concerning Jesus and the gospels (and there are very many others by D. H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, José Saramago et al.) present themselves as models for what has been accomplished with the basic text of the Gospels. It behooves any serious author to educate themselves as to what has been achieved that they may identify what is aesthetically and intellectually profitable in further explorations of the text. This is something which Brown has patently failed to do in his adaptations.

Still, Brown’s Matthew is not without its own, quite insular pleasures. At the outset of his adaptation, there is a fairly delightful and quite unbiblical panel in which an angel adorned in loose robes is seen diving down through the heavens with some pyramids in the background.

The gentle wafting of this heavenly being through earthly abodes and then into Joseph’s dream is done with wonderful rhythmic delicacy.

When Satan carries Jesus through the air to the top of the temple there is an unmistakable feeling of lightness and elegance.

At periodic intervals in the story, we see the familiar motif of minute individuals fleeing across sparse landscapes; a dispassionate “God’s-eye” view used with even greater frequency by Brown in Louis Riel. The calming of the storm from Matthew 8:24 is illustrated with a care unseen in Mark. Here the elements are transformed into symbols and the short passage elevated to the level of a mythical quest or journey.

It is a far cry from the poorly drawn waves and boats in Part 3 of Mark where the sequence of panels showing Jesus stilling the waves seem particularly rushed and poorly thought out.

Nevertheless, Brown’s Gospel adaptations remain exploratory devices with a very selfish purpose. They may have worked as journeys of discovery for the author but they fail when assessed as fully formed works of art. Excessive restraint, a lack of coherence and a paucity of invention dampens both adaptations. What we are left with are snapshots of the state of mind of the artist resulting in an ephemeral experience lacking intellectual weight.