Yearly Archives: 2012

EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory (Part 1 of 2)

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Reprinted from The Comics Journal #250 (2003)

“But have you heard anyone say, “Lord! When I was young, we didn’t have such nice games to play!” Or, “When I was little, there weren’t such wonderful story books!” No. Whatever people read or played with in their childhood not only seems in memory to have been the most beautiful and best thing possible; it often, wrongly, seems unique.”

“Children’s Literature”, Walter Benjamin

In 1956, on the imminent demise of EC Comics, Larry Stark, one of the company’s most ebullient young fans wrote a heartfelt elegy for the “best-written comic magazine line ever published” (Hoohah! #6). Amidst enthusiastic descriptions of the EC office and its working practices, Stark managed to provide a fan’s eye analysis of the comics themselves. “At their best,” he wrote, “EC was easily on par with the best pulp fiction available. And, if specific individual stories were considered, many of them were a good deal better, both in originality and concept and completion of expression….If any popular writing deserves a claim as literature, this does also. They were, at their best, mature conceptions totally explored, and with a constant attitude toward realism and honesty mixed in with the short, sharp crackle of drama.” What we can detect on cold hindsight is a young reader’s devotion, mixed with an instinctive understanding that the comics he was reading were still lodged in the ghetto of world art.

A few decades later, the EC line occupies no less than 4 spaces in The Comics Journal’s Top 100 comics of the century list, a ranking exercise which should put paid to any claims that this magazine has an elitist stance. The question for today’s readers is why a line consisting of “the best pulp fiction” and sometimes “a good deal better” is still considered among the best comics ever made.

Some of the answers to this question are quite apparent, among them a blindness and mule-headedness born of nostalgia. These are rose tinted lenses that have adhered so tightly to the eyes of most comics critics that they cannot be eradicated without immense difficulty. Suffice to say, the judgements made by critics and readers in assessing their favorite art form are firmly entrenched in their childhoods.

But first, a possible exception.

 

Mad #1-20

It is only in the case of Mad that EC manages to justify a degree of its reputation.

Enough has been written about the merits of these issues that I will not bother dwelling at length on them. Starting somewhat bumpily with plots which read like standard non-humorous EC texts (only with “funny” drawings) before proceeding to parodies of television shows, classic strips, and various DC and pulp heroes, these early stories were adorned with endless visual treats, immaculate artistry, a number of classic  Hey Look! reprints and a set of outstanding covers and cover concepts. Kurtzman was undeniably a master of the form and the influence of Mad on American and European artists is inestimable. The strongest legacy of Mad would appear to be a certain subversivness and visual invention.  In his introduction to Harvey Kurtzman’s Strange Adventures, Art Spigelman virtually admits that we wouldn’t have Raw magazine as we now know it without the influence of Kurtzman’s Mad. Writing in this magazine, R. C. Harvey insists that “almost all American satire today follows a formula that Harvey Kurtzman thought up”, a statement which I would not care to dispute.

Such influences may suggest a certain level of quality inherent in the series but cannot be the sole basis upon which the greatness of Mad is built. Objectively speaking, there is a lack of timelessness, consistency and universality in these early issues.

For every “Flob was a Slob”, “Superduperman”, “Little Orphan Melvin!” and “Bring Back Father!” (a Kurtzman and Krigstein masterpiece) there’s something wordy and dismal like “Black and Blue Hawks” (which is still undoubtedly loved and appreciated by some) and “Smilin’ Melvin!”.

Outside a Western context (one which is immersed in the substantial back catalogue of classic strips, pop artifacts and comics), Mad seems almost irrelevant, incomprehensible and dull. Would anyone consider “Blobs!” (Mad #1) or something as cliched and unimaginative as “Dragged Net!” (Mad #3) essential reading (because that’s what the label classic implies)?

Some years later, Kurtzman would attempt to recreate the magic of these early Mad parodies in Strange Adventures.  In so doing, he demonstrated the severe limitations of comedy restricted (for the most part) to parodies of genres or existing works of art (for this is what the first twenty issues of Mad largely consist of). Nearly ten issues of Mad go by before formula gives way to innovation in the form of “Murder the Story”, “3-Dimension” and “Book/Movie” culminating in the issue 20 story, “Sound Effects”.  These are stories which do not receive the acclaim or nostalgic turns of the parodies but were important in adding a certain potency and variety to the mix being accomplished pieces of proactive humor, an area which is inherently more difficult to explore. 

Yet, through these early issues (and for a considerable length of time following), the writers and artists of Mad consistently failed to divorce themselves from their roots in parody and second hand satire, the unwavering elements that had endeared the series to a legion of readers. EC fans hardly ever mention these early pieces of proactive humor and I suspect that part of the reason is that children prefer the more straightforward humor of the parodies and find a certain comfort in humor directed at familiar targets such as Superman and Tarzan. The adults that have developed from these roots consistently fail to extricate themselves from this position.

As a kind of bible of pure comedy, the early Mad falls remarkably short of perfection however influential. Where is the personal slander, the rambunctious sex, the mad philandering, the sublime depravity and the political skewering we expect of the richest sources of comedy?  Over two millennia ago, Aristophanes was brilliantly mocking the tragedies of Euripides (Women at the Thesmophoria) and risking prosecution with forthright attacks on the leaders of Athens. Contrast this with what we get in Mad. In place of Aristophanes’ unrestrained invective, Shakespeare’s poetic discursions on self-delusion, Wilde’s acute observations of social norms, and Monty Python’s Dada flavored madness we get parodies of superheroes and pulp characters.

Critics have attempted to extend Kurtzman’s parodies beyond witticisms concerning the immediate pop culture products they lampoon, suggesting rather a primary preoccupation with societal ills but this is plainly ludicrous when one looks closely at acknowledged “classics” like the second “Melvin of the Apes” story or “Ping Pong”. It is certainly true that Kurtzman managed to achieve many of these ends over the course of his long career but the early issues of Mad—the ones which have attracted the most reverence—represent something cropped and stilted, not so much unworthy as failing to exploit the full measure of the history of comedy.

Further, one wonders if the consistent elevation and reverence of Mad asserts a more insidious influence on American funny books. Within America (and this excludes a whole slew of modern and classic foreign titles) there is an extraordinary paucity of long form works of comedy. Decades of imitation and decay have left us with a small clutch of longer works including Feiffer’s Munro and Tantrum, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Hate and the debatable merits of Epicurus and Why I Hate Saturn. There is little doubt that such developments are largely a function of the nature of the American market and its economic realities—namely its dependence on short form works until a few decades ago—but one wonders if it is symptomatic of a paucity of ambition and discipline among creators of comedy.

The prevailing culture of comedy in comics has somehow managed to convince artists in the field that where humor is concerned, brevity is the only form that they need consider. They have no finer ambitions than being gag men. What was once a dictate of business and the economy has now become the creative norm. The flurry of third rate parodies which were released during the black-and-white explosion of the late 80s and early 90s were the nadir of this tradition, the product of artists who failed to see the inherent limitations of this form of expression and who refused to broaden their horizons. It was  an almost inevitable end point for a form so tied to its merely acceptable roots. The classic issues of Mad were an important step in the refinement and articulation of a language. They should not be considered or treated as if they were the final flowering of a genre.

 

The EC Horror Comics

 “Oh I think you’ll find the further back you go the better they were. But simple; they weren’t classy. They weren’t great literature, but they were good. Like horrible…Yeah, they were all right. If you start judging them as works of art, you’ll never get anywhere. Judge by the fact that they were comics books written for fourteen-year old kids, sixteen maybe – we never thought we were hitting any higher than that in the beginning – who just like a good scary story to make it rough for them to go to sleep.”

Al Feldstein, from an interview in Tales of Terror

There are certain comics and stories that form the solid bedrock upon which the reputation of the EC line has been based. One of the least creditable of these foundations has to be the comics of the three major EC horror lines.

The EC horror titles as a whole have failed to generate any intelligent discussion or analysis apart from their relationship to American pop culture, the Kefauver hearings, and Seduction of the Innocent.  In short, most appreciations of the EC horror line are largely bereft of genuine aesthetic considerations often boiling down to pronouncements that they were fun, influential, irreverent, and exciting for children.

I am not suggesting that children should be deprived of profane fantasy but the finest children literature (and this is what is being claimed for EC) does not permit such concerns to overwhelm a certain truthfulness and sophistication. However much we admire the black humor of these stories, there should be more to a good children’s comic then unabashed glee at decapitated body parts roasting on a barbecue, choppers sliding into human heads, fermenting appendages, and zombies feeding on human flesh.

The primary emotions and personalities of the characters within the horror titles almost never (aside from the occasional doting wife who gets impregnated by her dead husband) extend beyond the limited values of hate, lust, covetousness, and fear. The recycled plot ideas provide the same sense of security children today feel when they watch episodes of Pokemon:  the fetish (voodoo dolls, statues, and paintings) device; the lover’s return from the dead; the buried alive motif; the horrible unmasking shock ending—all of these and more are looked upon with affection and charity rather than with disdain and boredom. More platitudes can be found in the infamous retribution endings which the EC writers were unable to extricate themselves from even in the context of the early issues of Mad:  don’t mess with witchcraft or you’ll be buried alive or catch leprosy; please don’t murder or you’ll be consumed by a zombie and do not covet thy neighbor’s spouse or you’ll be electroplated, decapitated, or buried alive. All of which, I’m sure, are fine upstanding lessons for a child but hardly the stuff of greatness. 

There are examples of stories that are possessed of some narrative and sequential intelligence. These include Johnny Craig’s “Impending Doom” from Tales from the Crypt ,  “Whirlpool” and “Star Light, Star Bright” from The Vault of Horror and Gaines, Feldstein and Davis on “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime”. But these are the exceptions rather than the rule. One must wonder where we lie in the aesthetic understanding of comics if we must continue to admire stories because they are campy and merely well drawn.  Shouldn’t such childhood experiences be confined to an aesthetic boothill alongside like-minded, nostalgia-laden refuse like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits? Why not rather rest our sights on stories that are well written and possessed of mature insights that are communicated with delight and horror to their young readers?

In Tom Devlin’s abandoned essay concerning the legacy of EC (TCJ #238), the benefits of a more cartoony style were touted as a superior form of expression in comparison to the tendency towards realistically drawn art in the EC line. This is a false dichotomy which restricts the merits and qualities of “realism” to a handful of mediocre comics. One could cite a number of realistic (and I use this term purely in its comic book parlance) artists and series whose merits far exceed those of a whole generation of “cartoony” modern American artists: Alberto Breccia, Dave McKean on Cages, Schuiten and Peeters on the  Les Cites Obscures series, Moebius’ Airtight Garage, Taniguchi on The Man Who Walks and Sakaguchi on Ikkyu.

If there are indeed any trends which EC encouraged these would be an over-reliance on illustration over the narrative powers of comics and the cultivation of a critical inability to look beyond that which is simply well executed. The EC line has fostered, encouraged and deceived a legion of artists (as well as readers and critics) who remain content with finding a safe and commercial style upon which to earn a living and who do not find any value in discovering new avenues for their craft or intellects.

Even so, the EC line is clearly not solely responsible for these prevailing trends and attitudes. They may be seen merely as the symptoms of an insidious cancer or virus; constrained irreparably by commerce and reinforcing beliefs by their firm entrenchment in the popular tradition of comics. Their continued reverence suggests how little ground we have gained in the intervening years.

 

EC’s Science Fiction Line

“The EC approach in all these books is to offer better stories than can be found in other comics. At EC the copy itself – both caption and dialogue – has taken the number one position. This is a switch from the old days of comics when the art was most important and the story secondary. We take our stories very seriously. They are true-to-life adult stories ending in a surprise.”

Wiliam M. Gaines, Writer’s Digest

The EC science fiction collections, (most notably Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, and Weird Science-Fantasy) present smaller pillars in the edifice that we are discussing. Not surprisingly, the arguments for the qualities of the EC Science Fiction line are largely similar to those extended for the horror comics.

I will spare readers of this essay any detailed rants concerning the extended sermonizing of “classics” like “Judgement Day” or the regurgitated nonsense of  “He Walked Among Us”. Suffice to say that the most coherent and imaginative of the EC science fiction comics were the Ray Bradbury adaptations; stories such as “I, Rocket”, “The Million Year Picnic”, “There Will Come Soft Rains” or “The Flying Machine”. Yet these retellings do not bring us fresh perspectives or revelations and exist as insignificant appendages to the original stories.

An inexcusable proportion of these adaptations amount to illustrations of text with a scattering of dialogue balloons, a manifestation of the way EC’s stable of writer’s and artist’s worked on their stories during their short deadlines. In so doing, they provide further credence to the belief that comics are indistinct from  illustrated prose, a position which is no longer tenable aesthetically in the light of modern day advances in graphic storytelling.

In the 1950s, Bradbury was writing alongside the likes of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C.Clarke, Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss, and Alfred Bester. Later years would bring us the classic works of Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, John Brunner, Ursula K. Le Guin, J. G. Ballard, Roger Zelazny, and Gene Wolfe. Beginning with their imaginations and ideas, these writers charted a path through literary science fiction into acute considerations of the artistic aspects of their chosen genre.

Science fiction in American comics, on the other hand, is dead. Quite frankly, there is little we should expect from a genre where a handful of weak fantasies created in the 1950s are still seen as the bench mark for all future works. Rather than advancing with the literary giants in the field, comics writers and artists have been crippled by the conservative and unenlightened trends so prevalent till this day in science fiction art and illustration. These are the very values which EC fans continue to cling to when they focus solely on the flamboyant artistry of Frazetta, Orlando, Williamson, and Wood to the exclusion of all else. We should be filled with pity not despair at their ignorance.

 

Crime and Shock SuspenStories

The one clear distinguishing mark of the SuspenStories lines were the tales of social conscience (the so-called “preachies”). Apart from these, both these series were largely indistinguishable from the EC horror and science fiction lines with their mishmash of stories of retribution, “suspense”, and “shock”. EC fan and historian, Digby Diehl, even deigns to suggest that Shock SuspenStories tended to offer up “a Whitman’s Sampler approach—often combining a crime story, a science fiction story, a horror story, and a shock story in the same issue” (Tales from the Crypt  – The Official Archives).  It is a comment that betrays the lack of ideological deviation in these comics compared to the other more focused New Trend comics. There is little doubt that the “preachies” lodged within the pages of the SuspenStories titles (in particular Shock SuspenStories) were daring, controversial moves at the time. Yet mere artistic courage cannot be the final arbiter in decisions concerning the absolute worth of a piece of art.

There is something dreadfully hollow beneath the noble veneer of these stories. The “preachies” were hopelessly didactic, simplistic, and inarticulate; failing at every point to delineate character or elicit sympathy for their cause. It is also notable that the same writers and artists who willingly allowed a considerably more lurid form of violence to pervade their horror and crime fantasies, patently failed to use these tools in a more truthful yet forceful manner when it came to depicting those stories grounded in “social realism”. Worse, this was “social realism” riddled with “white” lies.

“The Guilty”, a story about injustice towards blacks in which an innocent black man is methodically murdered while in custody, rids itself of any sense of credibility with self-righteous, non-introspective editorial comment: “But for any American to have so little regard for the life and rights of any other American is a debasement of the principles of the Constitution upon which our country is founded.” The story “Blood-Brother” has a cross burning racist breaking down in tears of repentance when he discovers that he was once saved by some “negro blood” as a child—a somewhat implausible if not quite laughable sentiment in a country that was once more used to extracting every last pound of flesh from their black slaves. Pollyanna would probably approve. 

The typical EC African American is a silent, passive individual; an innocent without voice or passion in the face of society’s racism. There are very few exceptions to this. The black solider of  “In Gratitude” is, admittedly, said to be brave, but is unfortunately quite dead. He is refused a burial plot on “white” land and his fellow white solider pleads on his behalf.

The authoritarian position of the black astronaut in “Judgment Day” (from Weird Fantasy #18) is little relief from this debased pattern. In the cloistered nunnery that is the EC SuspenStories line, the black man is dignified but not proactive; a sympathetic martyr not an angry, forceful activists. Yet a few years after these stories were published, Rosa Parks would step on a segregated bus triggering off the Montgomery bus riots and a series of events that would undermine and refute these lies and homilies. She was neither the first nor the last black person in America to recognize the value of the word “no.”

This formula of soft falsehoods and exaggeration does not confine itself merely to the topic of blacks and racism. In a public service message about drug addiction (“The Monkey”), the protagonist graduates swiftly from marijuana to barbiturates and then to the big “H” before losing control and killing his father. Devoid of any sense of irony, the story glosses over the more pressing (and common) medical and social problems associated with drug addiction, preferring to titillate its young audience with a “shock” ending. “Under Cover” and stories of that ilk are sullied by an overriding desire to simply entertain resulting in feeble if not ignorant attempts at needling lynch mobs, vigilante groups, and corrupt governmental agencies. “Hate” (a story about neighborhood anti-semitism) is a grotesque “What if you were a Jew too?” story devoid of clear ethical reasoning. 

Like many modern day series, the SuspenStories comics were for and about white Americans. Stifled by a certain intellectual laziness and a chronic inability to understand their fellow non-Caucasian citizens, they unwittingly dehumanized them; presenting them as angels devoid of immorality and wretched enigmas incapable of fending for themselves. They are wholly anachronistic as far as race and societal relations are (or ever were) concerned despite their worthy motives.

 

Bernard Krigstein’s “Master Race”

At one point in his famous essay concerning Bernard Krigstein’s “Master Race”, Art Spiegelman lets slip a telling comment amidst his effusive praise for the technical wonders of Krigstein’s story—he labels the subject matter of “Master Race”,  “a thematically mature one for comics.” Thirty years on, this remark presents itself as almost a plea to his readers to give Krigstein some credit because he and Feldstein were tackling something a bit more challenging than the average children’s comic.

Feldstein himself was more realistic about his story, labeling it merely “good” with Krigstein “[improving] the art end of the story so much that I thought we were really breaking new ground.”  Yet a feeble story, no matter how masterfully executed, should not be excused on the basis of mere thematic maturity, the very minimum basis of any adult work of art.

“Master Race” is, however, a children’s story. Perhaps a good (and this is certainly not indisputable) children’s story but still a children’s story. As a children’s story, it does not contain one iota of the humanity found in a thirteen year old girl’s famous diary during World War 2 enshrouded Amsterdam. It is pathetic that it should still be considered one of the finest stories ever created in comics.

 One may wish to focus on the formalistic brilliance of “Master Race” to the exclusion of all other indicators of its decrepit nature, yet style and content cannot be divorced in what is clearly a narrative story. “Master Race” is not an exercise in pure experimentation like Richard Maguire’s “Here”, nor do such forays into experimentation and formalism forbid coherent, fully evolved content. Is it not possible, for example, to find substance in Godard’s Weekend or Bunel’s Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie?

“Master Race” is revolutionary technical achievement illustrating banal sentiments. It is firmly entrenched in a certain hypersensitivity emanating from the protective glands of overbearing conservative adults and fails to extricate itself from a desperate adherence to the judicially blissful endings so typical of the EC line as a whole. In Feldstein and Krigstein’s make-believe world, revenge is consistently attainable and satisfying. “Master Race” is a deceitful fairy tale where every Jew has the chance to be an avenging Simon Wiesenthal and where Nazis don’t turn up healthy and wealthy on the political scene in Austria or as aged businessmen in France. All of which is perfectly fine for a middling children’s story but not for one of the greatest works ever created in comics. 

There can be no room for excuses in judging the absolute worth of a story which is no more than 50 years old and created at a time when people were already steadily being made aware of the horrors of the holocaust. Great art doesn’t need excuses. Goya’s famous print series,The Disasters of War, is often cited in comics circles as one of the finest examples of the printmakers art (and perhaps a distant cousin of the cartoonist’s art). What we hear of less often is that Goya started his print series (amidst the chaos of the Spanish nationalist insurrection and Peninsular War) by scavenging for copperplates upon which to engrave. It was a series that was initiated from personal need and distress with little consideration for the economic realities of the time. Goya realized that he would never see the publication of his print series during his lifetime and it was only released 50 years after his death.

Truly great art is not shackled by commerce. It is born of a great artist’s insatiable need to create and to tell the truth. There is an artistic impulse behind “Master Race” but it is vastly inferior to that which we should expect of a master of the form. The constraints of entertainment and commerce have housed the work in mediocrity. No one should consider “Master Race” anything other than an above average cave painting on the path to greater things. An important first step perhaps but not one of the greatest works of comics art ever made. There is more to admire in Giotto than mere technical ability and perspective, more to Citizen Kane than a kaleidoscope of sumptuous camera angles, moody lighting, tracking shots, and deep-focus shots.

Krigstein had neither the desire nor capabilities to develop beyond “Master Race”,  “The Flying Machine” or “The Catacombs”. Van Gogh stuck with his visions till the bitter end and Goya completed The Disasters of War with no sure knowledge that it would reach an audience.  Krigstein, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to have kept his faith in the artistic possibilities of comics. At the very least, he did not act upon any remnants of this faith that remained following his departure from commercial comics. Nor did Krigstein show any clear genius for writing. As a consequence of this, he remained hampered by the mediocre to poor writing he was saddled with throughout his career.

The EC artists never felt themselves part of the rich tapestry of world art but merely as dedicated craftsmen. With these values in tow and without the unpredictable fortunes of genius, they failed to produce works of lasting importance to civilization. A high ideal perhaps but one which a nascent art form needs to grasp at as tightly as possible.

 

The EC War Stories

There is little doubt that the war stories of Harvey Kurtzman form a more solid foundation than the EC horror and science fiction comics.

Burdensome as it may seem, I must reiterate the often neglected fact that the EC War comics must be viewed as children’s literature.  I do not say this in a derogatory way but in order to set our discussion of these comics within the proper context. As adult comics, Kurtzman’s war stories can only be seen as untruthful and severely compromised; God help us if adults truly believed that war was as gentle, dignified, and bloodlessly pleasant as the stories of the EC War line. It has been suggested that it was Kurtzman’s decision that his war stories weren’t as grisly as the horror comics, but his squeamishness in this regard does not present itself as a valid excuse for the pallid resulting product.

And this is the crux of the matter: not that these stories were created for children but that they glorify by exclusion and by failing to relate life’s simple truths. In so doing, these comics commit the grievous sin of misinforming and patronizing their young readers. As a child, the first book I read about World War 2 was the 1969 edition of Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of World War 2, a simple tome of articles that chronicled with photos the horrors of Buchenwald and the horrendous deaths on Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. I was neither frightened nor permanently scarred in the process.  Children are not the fragile, ignorant creatures we think they are, nor are they incapable of understanding the mere realities of human existence.

Once we recognize this, we must begin to wonder why some of the most esteemed critics in the field so often choose to place these comics over any other series of adult war comics. Do we find Joe Sacco’s truthful and engaging writings concerning Palestine and Yugoslavia hampered by his lack of exciting narrative technique and close-ups? Do our healthy appetites for dramatic, swanky portrayals of death betray our immature desires? This is the corrupting influence of the EC War line: artfulness and dexterity in place of truth; voyeurism without horror; content in the service of style instead of the reverse.

In recognition of this ill-concealed fact, excuses are often laid out to add weight to the deft artistry of the EC war artists. Critics and apologists will tell their half-informed readers that the depictions of war were not consistently glamorous nor the deaths steadfastly patriotic in contrast to the other war comics of the time. But such comments fail to reveal the entire truth concerning what EC achieved or, rather, failed to achieve—an inability to transcend and communicate the horror and repugnance of stories drawn from first and second hand accounts, resulting in misleading staples which have been propagated quite thoroughly through the field:  jingosim (see “Contact!”; which Kurtzman himself admits was “pretty dreadful stuff”); dramatic draftsmanship and intelligent structure illustrating inconsequential content (“Thunder Jet”, “F-86 Sabre Jet!”); exquisitely dignified corpses (“The Caves!” from the Iwo Jima issue); …

… the poverty of the enemies’ beliefs and the failure of their resolve (“Dying City!”);

…sanctimonious depictions of the plight of good, honest, salt of the earth Koreans (Southern presumably; in “Rubble!”); retribution for cowards (“Bouncing Bertha”), traitors (“Prisoner of War!”) and grinning, nefarious enemies (“Air Burst!; were there ever any breathing, happy North Koreans at the end of each story?). 

As Walter Benjamin put it, “Children want adults to give them clear, comprehensible, but not childlike books. Least of all do they want what adults think of as childlike. Children are perfectly able to appreciate matters, even these may seem remote and indigestible, so long as they are sincere and come straight from the heart.” To a certain extent, Kurtzman managed to achieve these ends in stories such as “Big ‘If’!” and “Corpse on the Imjin” but they are the exceptions—exceptions which sadly persist in gaudily adorning themselves with too much artifice and too little truthful, engaging emotion. 

Shouldn’t we entertain a degree of embarrassment for placing the EC War stories alongside some of the finest works of war literature; classics like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Catch-22 and The Naked and the Dead? Would we honestly trade a film collection consisting of Apocalypse Now, Paths of Glory, Ivan’s Childhood, La Grande Illusion, or Ran for the entire collection of EC war comics? There is simply no excuse for allowing our unseeing nostalgia to so overshadow our aesthetic faculties. The only other explanation remains an overindulgent respect for some acknowledged masters of the form.

I return to Goya and The Disasters of War.  Fred Licht in describing the modernity of Goya and the difference between his series of etchings and Anibale Carracci’s images of public hangings and Jacques Callot’s Troubles of War, states that

“…[Goya] forces us to see with our eyes, not with his. The critic who draws attention to Goya’s ability as an artist actually does Goya a disservice. Images such as these are clear evidence that the artist intends to be exclusively preoccupied with the unbearable inhumanity of what is happening before our eyes. In the face of what happens all around us, the talent and the ingenuity of the artist seems trivial.”

And yet here we are, over a century later, still enmeshed in debates about the merits of dramatic structure and pacing in Kurtzman’s stories about war. And why are we still here? Simply because there is little more to suck from these stories than this. As factual and humanistic documents, they are empty and irrelevant; so bereft of revelatory truths for children that they have become obsolete.

One hopes that we will soon be reaching a turning point in comics; a point at which one can look back at these comics of our youth and say with honesty that they were mediocre, even as children’s comics. A point where we can truthfully say to ourselves that we’ve grown up, that we now understand and appreciate the complexities and emotional depths the best works of narrative art should communicate. We’ve been mucking about in the sandbox for long enough.

 

[The EC War comics are discussed in greater detail in Part 2]

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

From Habibi to Tezuka, With Ono In Between

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It’s rare to get an invitation to complain about comics, so I’m going to jump in with enthusiasm, although I don’t intentionally try to read crappy comics so I can only pick out a few comics which disappointed me.

Although it’s already been dogpiled on Hooded Utilitarian, I want to talk first about Craig Thompson’s Habibi, one of the most frustrating books I’ve read in the past two years—partly because of its high level of artistic skill. It’s not that Thompson uses every cliché about Arabs and the Middle East (child marriage, prostitution, harems, slavery, despotism); this itself is par for the course in Western pop culture, just a difference of degree, not essential type, from thousands of representations including Christopher Nolan’s terrorism-themed Batman trilogy with its civilization-hating, don’t-call-them-Muslims League of Shadows. What’s frustrating about Habibi, instead, is its relentlessly pedagogical nature, alternating these stereotypical representations with its “real” storybook-Bible lessons about the Quran and the Arabic language. On the one hand Wanatolia is an Orientalist fairytale land, and yet thanks to these lessons, it’s also the “real” Middle East—it’s like suddenly getting “educational” segments about Christianity in the middle of one of those fantasy manga set in an otherwise generic Medieval Europe, like Claymore or Berserk. Thompson is obviously attempting to use his positive book-larnin’ about Islam as a counter for the negative images of Arabs, but as a result, Habibi just falls into the tired idea that “Islam in the answer” to everything in the Middle East, a belief shared, ironically, by both right-wing Western Islamophobes and right-wing Muslims. Thompson does introduce a postcolonial element with the late-in-story discovery that evil white men are behind the evil powers of Wanatolia, but on the whole the series does nothing to counter stereotypes of the Middle East, even when Thompson’s trying to show the good side. People who think that “Arabs were savages before Islam” might find confirmation for their beliefs in Habibi. Even the supposedly uplifting idea that “Islam, Christianity & Judaism have the same roots” can’t be embraced by any really secular liberals or leftists, since it expels atheists, as well as members of every other religious tradition, from the common tree of humanity. In reality, Habibi, like Thompson’s other works that I’ve read, is more than anything about male sexuality. This is where it really succeeds in expressing its theme, although unlike in Blankets and Carnet de Voyage (the obvious prequel to Habibi with its sidelong sketches of veiled women in Morocco) there’s no one “Thompson” figure—rather there’s two, Zam and the Sultan.

It’s hard to think of a most overrated manga, because most manga gets no mainstream critical coverage and most manga fans are completely fine with that. One exception is Natsume Ono, who has received a lot of Western press for her minimalistic art style and indy-comix-ish stories. To her great credit, Ono has engaged with her overseas fans in return, appearing as a guest at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in 2011. Which makes it unfortunate that, beneath her breezy art, most of Ono’s stories are so conventional. Not Simple, her first work published in English and also set in America, is typical. Ian, the adult survivor of child abuse, is a bishonen Christ figure, giving his body up to the desires of evil men and deserving women without ever expressing any desires of his own, except for family (to find his sister). Some critics seem to have taken Ian’s childishly innocent demeanor as a serious depiction of the lack of affect suffered by abuse victims, but it’s really shojo-manga-esque wish fulfillment, a male figure who’s just a handsome doll who needs a hug. Even the conflation of the American setting with homosexuality and broken families follows a formula established in ’80s manga like Banana Fish and Cipher, where such hot-button issues are depicted as ‘Western’ ills. Ono’s fascination with nonthreatening guys is also evident in Ristorante Paradiso and its sequel Gente, about an Italian restaurant whose waitstaff is composed entirely of handsome, glasses-wearing men in their 50s and 60s. Nicoletta, the 21-year-old protagonist of Ristorante, gets a crush on Claudio, a sweet, gentlemanly 50ish divorcee, who’s too physically weak to resist her advances—if only he weren’t still pining for his ex-wife! Although Ono attempts to write some real character interaction between Nicoletta and her mother, the male characters in Ristorante all lack any inner life or any flaws (apart from ‘cute’ flaws). The result is lots of eye candy and dojinshi bait, but Ono’s resourcefulness in finding and exploiting the oyajicon/meganecon fetish market does not a great manga make. I simply haven’t read an Ono manga yet which believably depicts any serious emotion or character development, which is why my favorite Ono manga is her very first one, La Quinta Camera, a slight European apartment-complex comedy manga which can basically be summed up as Ristorante Paradiso without the romance; here, Ono’s whimsy and Western-exoticism is pleasantly on display, unburdened by attempting to get ‘serious.’

This writeup also wouldn’t be complete without critiquing the halo that perpetually surrounds the work of Osamu Tezuka. It’s not that Tezuka is bad; even his lesser manga, like Swallowing the Earth, The Book of Human Insects (a character portrait so sexist Dave Sim could have written it) or Message to Adolf, provide hours of entertainment, twisty storytelling and visual invention. (Incidentally, Tezuka feels like a strong influence on Thompson’s Habibi.) But, like the way that American comics critics used to deem Lone Wolf and Cub the only manga worthy of serious consideration, it’s frustrating to see the “God of Manga” get so much attention, and so many new translations, while so many other classic mangaka linger in obscurity. What about Leiji Matsumoto, Go Nagai, Riyoko Ikeda, George Akiyama, Sanpei Shirato, Shinji Wada? Yes, we now have translations of Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya, Kazuo Umezu, Hiroshi Hirata and Shigeru Mizuki, to the great praise of their publishers, but what about so many other classics, like the ones described in Takeo Udagawa’s Manga Zombie? Must Tezuka always be the William Shakespeare of manga, with everyone else from his period in his shadow? Does the Tezuka name really = reliable $$$ from manga buyers? Admittedly, one of the reasons publishers license Tezuka is that he liked to create self-contained works of only a few hundred pages, switching from project to project rather than the “draw the same comic for 20 years”, 1000+ page tactic of newspaper strip creators and many manga artists. Also, it’s a BIG help that Tezuka Productions, the rightsholders to Tezuka’s work, are very eager to work with licensors despite the small size of the American market; the extreme example of the opposite is Riyoko Ikeda’s famous Rose of Versailles, which, it’s an open secret in the manga industry, has never been licensed because Ikeda’s company wants a ridiculously large licensing fee. But my point is: I want to see more from other classic creators.

 

As for the mainstream comics industry, my biggest complaint about it is, of course, that it’s become nothing but a license farm for Hollywood, producing movie pitches in easily digestible comic form. This doesn’t just apply to Marvel and DC, but to all the companies trying to follow in their footsteps. The glut of miniseries, the desperate chase after movie options (which destroyed Tokyopop), the prevalence of noir and superhero themes…it all adds up to an incredibly boring comics market from which the real action has long ago moved on to Kickstarter and self-published webcomics. Convince me otherwise.

 

*******

 

Jason Thompson is the artist of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Other Stories and the author of King of RPGs (with Victor Hao). He also wrote Manga: The Complete Guide.

 

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Kim Thompson on Race, Caricature, and Spirou and Fantasio

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Kim Thompson had a number of comments on Alex Buchet’s post about Spirou and Fantasio. I thought I’d highlight them here (he’s in conversation with me for much of this, but I figured I’d let his words stand alone; you can click over and read what I have to say if you want.)

Kim’s first comment:

I think Jean-Paul Jennequin has it exactly right. (Another cartoonist using extreme racist imagery satirically in the 1970s and 1980s: Joost Swarte.) If you assume the readers of SPIROU are sophisticated enough to recognize the silliness of the racial caricatures, then it’s a relatively harmless book that skirts tastelessness. But if you think the readers of SPIROU will genuinely take these absurd caricatures to heart as part of their world view, than it’s a profoundly evil racist work.

Personally, I think France has/had achieved a level of cultural diversity that even the adolescent SPIROU readers were capable of filing those characters away as playful stereotypes that had nothing whatsoever to do with the real world, and if anything have to opposite effect of pointing out their ridiculousness — a junior version of the INNOMABLES and Chaland effects. But that’s of course endlessly arguable.

I also think there’s a certain continuum of literal-minded naïveté that stretches from Fredric Wertham’s conviction that readers of TALES FROM THE CRYPT will think murder is fun to GLAAD’s conviction that viewers of BASIC INSTINCT will think lesbians are all icepick killers to Alex’s unbridled horror at SPIROU here.

Which is not to say there aren’t explicitly, viciously racist or misogynist or homophobic works out there (TINTIN IN THE CONGO remains inexcusable by any metric) or that a culture that continually propagates the same insulting stereotypes doesn’t eventually do some cumulative harm. But if anything the over-the-top ridiculousness of the imagery in SPIROU works in its favor. THE SOPRANOS is probably a lot more insidious than a clearly parodic spaghetti-slurping mafioso like the one here.

I always found Tome and Janry’s SPIROU technically proficient but uninteresting and have read only a couple of them, so it’s not as if my ox is being gored here.

Second:

I think there’s a huge difference between Crumb, who’s trying to honestly explore his own misogyny and racism, and someone like the Tome/Janry team, who are just moving around stereotypes for, basically, the fun of it. I suspect they would be horrified to learn that anyone thought any of their readers might actually allow their silly depictions of Asians, Blacks, or Italians to ooze into their word views.

And I absolutely do not think Crumb’s racist strips were aimed at convincing racists of the error of their ways (so their “failure” at doing this is a moot point, and an unfair gauge of the work).

Yes, I understand the difference between Wertham’s calls for censorship and more modern, gentler, kinder voicing of indignation that scrupulously avoids calling for censorship. Call it censor vs. censure (only the vowel changes). I do still think the literal-minded assumption that the depiction of something goes straight into the mind of the reader or viewer is a depressing constant among the censoriously or censuriously inclined. There isn’t that much difference between “This is evil and is warping children’s minds and should be censored” and “This is evil and is warping children’s minds but should not be censored” so far as I can tell.

I don’t know that I’m really defending SPIROU IN NEW YORK. I’ve never read it, and the samples seem dumb and in dubious taste at best. And I do think the history of racial caricature in comics is very problematic. I just don’t think this particular book deserves as shrill, even hysterical an indictment as it being given here.

Maybe I just think modern comics audiences are fairly smart and you guys think they’re impressionable idiots.

Third:

Just to be clear, I don’t think SPIROU IN NEW YORK is intended as or constitutes a “critique” of racism at all. What I would say is that any humorous or ethically questionable depiction of a member of an ethnic group has its own built-in perils, and burlesquing the depictions into absurdity is a way of potentially defanging them. In other words, a version of this story involving members of these ethnic groups which DIDN’T feature such flamboyantly silly racial caricatures might actually have been a lot more insidiously racist. (And non-realistic European cartoonists are always hamstrung by a comedic drawing style that almost automatically turns any visual depiction of someone of another race into arguably a racist caricature.)

Another touchstone: Ralph Bakshi’s COONSKIN.

And Fourth.

Honestly, Noah, what you’re reading from my comments bears so little resemblance to what I’m actually saying that this is that this is pretty pointless. I mean, “If we’re all so sophisticated that what we read doesn’t affect us at all…”? You think I think racism is no longer a problem? You’re arguing with a fictional Idiot Kim Thompson and you’re right, he is an idiot, I can’t defend his views.

I think your view completely disregards intent and effect and carries a dismayingly crude view of art and how we perceive it. The implicit binary choice of “The issue is whether the comic in question is racist [or not]” is less cultural critique than cultural demagoguery. The tone is strident, and carries the unmistakable, disheartening undercurrent of “If someone disagrees with me on this, he may be a bit racist himself.”

I do agree that the nostalgic appreciation of cultural racist imagery can both feed into and conceal genuine residual racism (cf. BAMBOOZLED, yes). I’m not defending all (or even any!) old racist imagery, nor all modern ironic/cultural appreciation for racist imagery, nor all attempts to satirize it by burlesquing it, some of which can misfire badly. I’m trying (clearly unsuccessfully) to bring some nuance to the “racist drawings in funnybooks always bad, always harmful” argument.

Again, there’s additional back and forth on the thread if you want to Click over.
 

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

In Search of Bad Comics

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Whisper by Steven Grant and Rich Larsen

Far too long ago now, in the early ’90s when the comics business was fat & I worked on all sorts of books for all sorts of companies, I was a guest at a convention in Michigan. In a highly unorthodox move, the convention organized a “writing comics” panel & filled it with every comics writer in attendance, an approach that packed the stage with some 14 or 15 writers. The panel had no specific agenda, and when the introductions were over we threw it open to questions.

Inevitably, up piped someone – there’s always someone – who asked in a voice deeply embittered by the world’s failure to acknowledge his genius why, since so many comics are clearly crap, was he unable to get any editor anywhere interested in buying his stories instead of using the worthless shlubs they regularly used?

Obviously, none on the panel numbered among the tired, unimaginative, untalented hacks he was referring to. Obviously. (I should mention the non-exclusive emphasis of the panel, the show and his question was on work-for-hire superhero comics. Full disclosure and all that.) As it happened, we were running a system where the first person to answer one question became the last to answer the next. I’d answered first the previous question. With that many people on the panel, it was a long time coming back to me. I was a bit numb by the time it did.

My fellow panelists rambled through the standard answers. The “for public consumption” ones. Pleasant, inoffensive if occasionally stern platitudes with which everyone replies to questions like that, responses designed to gently shuffle the querant out the metaphoric door while maintaining the delusion of hope and allowing the respondents to feel as though they haven’t been total rat bastards. Above all, don’t offend the fans, since your livelihood depends on them. It’s not like the panelists were trying to con anyone, it’s just you stick around a business, any business, long enough, you pick up the pleasant lies they feed the customers and on some level it’s often easier to tap into those lies than to come up with something else. You believe them, at least for as long as you need to believe them. It’s a survival reflex.

All in all, I also prefer not to crap on other people’s dreams. But if a dream’s strong enough there’s no way to adequately crap on it. In college, I had a fiction writing course where we critiqued each other’s stories weekly, and the teacher repeatedly asked that we should be gentle and positive because the writer’s ego is a fragile thing and it would be terrible to drive someone away from writing with harsh criticism. I always thought that was a terribly wrong approach. Anyone who wants to write will do it regardless of what anyone else says. Sooner or later they may – may! – end up with something someone besides their mother or their best friend likes. (Bias puts blinders on us all.) Anyway, to get back to the panel, I’d just about gone comatose when whoever sat next to me said, “Steve probably has something to add” and shoved the mike in front of me.

I didn’t have anything to add.

Punisher by Steven Grant and Mike Zeck

Then, just like that, I did. I was bored, I was tired of hearing the same old crap, figured sooner or later someone ought to lay the facts out, and was acutely aware I was the end of that particular road. I took a deep breath, and launched into the following tirade:

Why won’t an editor consider your work instead of the crap he accepts?

1) Your work may not be as good as you think it is.

2) It’s not actually an editor’s job to find new talent. It’s the editor’s job to get his books out. While most editors do try to look for new talent, that’s something that gets relegated to after all the required work is done, and the required work is never done.

3) Because editors have to get their books out, they usually prefer to work with talent they know can get the job done, professionally and on time. Professionally doesn’t necessarily mean great. It means publishable. New talent always represents a risk.

4) Every editor has parameters for the material his office produces. You may not understand those parameters. Just because you want to do something doesn’t mean what you want to do fits editorial needs.

5) Everyone’s taste is different, and any editor may actually like the books he’s producing, and he may think they’re good comics. Even if you don’t. He may think the talent producing them is top notch talent. Even if you don’t.

Finally:

6) Even bad work is harder than it looks.

Let me repeat that now: even bad work is harder than it looks.

I know. I’ve produced a lot of bad work. I hope I’ve produced some good work, I produced projects I think are good work, but – and far too many people in comics can’t get this simple concept through their heads – I’m not the one who gets to decide these things. Unfortunately, I also can’t afford to pay attention to anyone else’s assessment. There are projects I’ve written that I thought – in some cases, still think – were very, very good that were almost universally vilified, when anyone bothered to pay attention to them at all. I’ve done projects that got raves that I thought, still think, were just utter crap. Then again, I knew what I intended, and, generally, how short I fell. Readers/critics knew what they wanted. The problem is the two sets of criteria don’t necessarily, maybe even rarely, match up.

The fact is that what I consider the bad work was never easier than the good. In my experience, good work takes much less effort to produce than bad. It requires less forced focus, usually builds more organically. But that’s deceptive. If you go by those criteria, you can easily trick yourself into believing that effortless work is good work and that’s nothing like a universal principle either. From a creative standpoint, any rigid criterion for distinguishing good or bad is both handicap and crutch. Creating comics is less a question of good and bad than a question of success and failure. Failing to produce good work isn’t hackwork. Hedging your bets is. Counterproductively, hedged bets are frequently what readers and critics respond best to.

Distinguishing good comics from bad is something of a fool’s errand, partly because they remain mostly a commercial enterprise (it’s around this point in these discussions that art/alt comics fans write me off as “a superhero guy” and that’s supposed to invalidate my arguments, but, trust me, I’ve been around this insanity we call comics enough to know that a) if you ain’t self-publishing, you ain’t the person who ultimately decides whether your work is publishable, and whatever market your publisher is targeting is still intended to be a commercial market, and b) if you don’t know the ratio of sharp-to-crap is roughly the same in art/alt comics as in “genre” comics, you haven’t been paying attention) and commerce is always something of a distorting force on creativity, kind of the way gravity naturally distorts spacetime in Einsteinian physics, and partly because so very few people are able to differentiate what they like from what’s good. There’s an embarrassment factor there; nobody wants to believe they like crap. Let me put it bluntly: there’s nothing wrong with liking crap. Everybody does, hopefully not exclusively. What’s wrong is declaring crap to be good because you like it. That’s how you end up with the recent spectacle of Fletcher Hanks and his incoherent inanity being dug up from its grave after 65 years and marketed as surrealistic genius, or Jerry Siegel & Paul Reinman’s ugly, clumsy Mighty Comics misreproductions of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby’s pivotal Marvel work recategorized as “camp.”

Then again, I had a TV production professor in college who refused to allow anyone to discuss television in terms of good and bad. He had a term for it: buttermilk. He liked buttermilk. But some people like buttermilk and some people don’t. Does that make buttermilk good or bad? It’s not a question with an answer.

I grew up reading bad comics. What choice did I have? It was the ’60s. The early ’60s. Until underground comix got widespread later on (and, man, did I devour them when I found them) it was a rigged game. Someone recently asked me if I started out as a Marvel or DC fan. DC, no question. Marvel wasn’t even around then. But y’know what? If you were a 7 year old in the vanilla Midwest in the early ’60s, less a new decade than a drab runoff from the gray ’50s, DC Comics, specifically the superhero comics edited by Julie Schwartz, were it, man. There was nothing better anywhere that a kid my age back then could get their hands on that similarly promised, even at their most insipid, that things might possibly someday be more than the, as GK Chesterton put it, “cold mechanic happenings” the world back then seemed to be made of. A few years on, that wouldn’t be the case, but then The Flash, Green Lantern, The Atom, the Justice League, they were the closest you could come to the strange. They were pretty much the only door to genuine excitement available in the day, and walking through that door eventually got me here.

But good? I liked them, so, sure. I’d have said good. I’d have insisted. Look back now, what you’ll likely see is character-thin and plot heavy, straitjacketed into structures developed and preferred by Julie in the science fiction comics he edited. For all his reputation for infiltrating scientific fact into his comics, and he did, he cheated. A lot. Deathtrap escapes hinge on semantics, heroes miraculously develop exactly the (temporary) power needed to stop the threat du jour. In maybe the most egregious bit of stupidity in all Julie’s titles, world-hopping quasi-astronaut Adam Strange, collaborating with the Justice League, reasons that if kryptonite, a piece of Superman’s homeworld, will stop Superman, then a piece of a super-powered alien’s homeworld will lay the alien low. What the hell?

Mystery in Space #75 by Gardner Fox, Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson

It’s easily the worst Adam Strange story in the run. Fans of the day declared it the finest Adam Strange story ever. (If you reasoned out “Justice League!” the odds are with you.) Hell, the whole of comics history is punctuated with widely praised material that wasn’t very good. Comics fandom itself is built on twin delusions that ’40s comics represented a “golden age” and ’50s comics (aside from EC Comics) a Carthagenated wasteland only marginally redeemed by the late return of superhero comics. Neither is remotely accurate. While hardly devoid of good comics, the “golden age,” once the cherrypicking stopped and much material became available, turned out to be a vast dumping ground of utter swill, while ’50s comics are a gold field for those willing to go panning for it.

Green Lantern/Green Arrow #87 by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams

As mainstream comics go, the most influential of the late ’60s may be Denny O’Neil & Neal Adams’ Green Lantern-Green Arrow, which briefly staved off cancellation in a decaying market by launching a short-lived move toward “relevant comics.” This was pretty quickly crushed by the urge to “make comics fun again” (i.e. avoid controversy) but it came back with a vengeance in the ’80s as GL-GA fans broke into the business and launched their own variants. Not too long ago, out of morbid curiosity, I asked various contemporaries in comics if there were any comics they loved when younger that they find embarrassing to read now. Almost without fail: Green Lantern-Green Arrow. Yet it was still a huge breakthrough in its day and its influence continues to ripple through the medium.

Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland

The list of highly touted bad comics go on and on. Few stories, even Batman stories, are as bad as Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, an empty exercise in cruelty that depends on sleight-of-hand, Alan’s always splendid use of language and Brian Bolland’s phenomenal art to keep audiences from seeing the joke not only doesn’t have a punchline, it doesn’t even have a joke. That didn’t stop it from becoming, with The Dark Knight Returns, one of the two lynchpins of virtually all subsequent Batman interpretations. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is among the most lionized series in comics history, but its champions conveniently overlook the almost literal deus ex machina endings diminishing many early arcs, with hero Morpheus appearing from left field at the climax to terminate all storylines with languid boredom and a wave of his hand. That’s not a quality you traditionally find in good endings, in any medium. (Ever see that SCTV fake ’40s crime film that features a crusading DA trying to take down a mob boss that ends with a courtroom-standoff-at-gunpoint abruptly broken up by news “the Japs” have attacked Pearl Harbor, whereon all players throw down their weapons and rush out together arm in arm to sign up for military duty as Patriotic Americans? Same principle.) On the alt side, I’ve always wondered if fans of Craig Thompson’s breakthrough graphic novel Good-Bye Chunky Rice, which helped trigger mainstream publisher interest in alt comics, were unaware it was sentimentalized treacle, were willing to ignore it, or if that’s where its main appeal lay.

I cite these as bad comics not only because they all changed the course of comics in some way, but also because they were each, in their way, quite good. (With Sandman, it fully merited its reputation the moment Neil dropped that annoying gimmick.) If this seems a contradiction, welcome to comics. I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t be read, or enjoyed. I’m not even suggesting badness is an especially good reason to not read a comic book. There are worse things for a comic book to be than bad. A problem with discussing bad comics is that while there are a few really bad enough to be memorable, there are very few really bad enough to be memorable. Many are good enough to be momentarily enjoyable, like eating a Twinkie. Some, like those mentioned in the previous paragraph, are good enough to have altered the business.

Most bad comics are simply forgettable, and it’s more trouble to try to remember then than they’re worth.

As we grow up reading comics, we end up expecting maybe a little too much from them, or end up expecting things the medium maybe just isn’t built for. It’s a medium of shorthand, of tricky balance. As much as many have wanted comics to take their place among the literature of our time – some have even tried making “comics literature” an accepted term – it’s not really a literary medium. It’s not movies either. It’s that words and pictures thing that confuses everyone. It’s a pop medium, a commercial medium, a strangely hermetic medium, where, sure, we may adore Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Kirby and whoever else someone has put forth at one point or another as developing the “rules” of comics, but, really, it’s a medium without rules, where no theory ultimately holds sway. It has boundaries – no sound, no real movement, space limitations – but no orthodoxies, no matter how many publishers, editors, critics, readers, artists and writers have tried inflicting them. No matter what theory, what orthodoxy anyone produces about what comics should or shouldn’t be, someone else produces a comic that shatters it. A lot has changed in comics since I began reading them, but, as they were long before I began reading them and despite all the many, many efforts to gain respect for comics and have them declared “legitimate,” we remain an outlaw medium. Virtually anything goes here. This is the wild west.

In that context, terms like good and bad have considerably less resonance, given there’s no authority of any merit and “badness” has never been much of an impediment to sales, popularity or, frequently, enjoyability of a comic. What does it really matter if a comic is ultimately good or bad, by which we really mean, let’s face it, appealing or disappointing? Allow me to suggest we replace thinking in terms of good or bad altogether with a different and arguably more useful (if equally subjective) yardstick:

Is the comic/graphic novel in question interesting?

That’s what we all really want from comics, right? That what I wanted when I was 7, certainly, it’s what many comics I read delivered whether I ended up deciding I liked them or not, and it’s what I look for today, along with (I suspect) everyone else who still reads comics.

Anything else, however welcome, is gravy.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Dungeons & Nostalgia

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I came to comics by way of role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons, specifically. RPGs are how I ended up going to book stores (to get game books and then to get fantasy novels), and that’s where, one winter day, at the Waldenbooks in the mall, I came upon the comic book spinner rack in the corner of the magazine section (maybe I was looking for the latest Dragon magazine?). It must have been shortly before my 13th birthday. I don’t recall having any interest in comics previously, other than occasionally reading the Sunday funnies (I always wanted to understand Prince Valiant, but couldn’t), but I must have looked at that rack, because there I found this comic:

For those not sufficiently nerdy enough, Dragonlance is a game world for D&D that started as a series of game books (modules) and quickly spun out to novels. I’d read the novels (the first books I remember buying on my own in a bookstore, they were kind of like Lord of the Rings but with female characters) and loved them, and here was what appeared to be more of the story. That classic fan desire to increase my involvement with the narrative world took over; I convinced my parents to buy me a comic book. If only they knew where that would lead.

DC had some sort of licensing deal at that time with TSR, the company that owned D&D, because there were a few of these titles they had started publishing very late in in 1988 and which all disappeared by fall of 1991. I assume they were designed for the RPG/comics crossover audience and probably as a way to get one interested in the other. It worked on me, though not really to DC’s advantage, as the the next comic series I started buying was Marvel’s Uncanny X-men (my first issue was drawn by Rob Liefeld… see how great my taste was back then).

So what we have he is a work-for-hire, cross-media, cross-promotion between two corporations that expanded on a franchise… a comic so low on the totem pole that there isn’t a Wikipedia page for it. Even the “Dragonlance” grouping of pages (which are fairly involved, it turns out) don’t mention the comic at all.

So what’s in the comic? It’s basically a 22 page dream sequence (the cover gives this away before the actual story does) with a 2 page epilogue that ends on a “surprise” reveal. The last page of the dream has what appears to be a Little Nemo reference, but what precedes it does not even approach that level of dream-like narrative. Instead of the symbolic surrealism that often infuses narrative dream sequences, this dream reads more like a classic D&D adventure: monsters appearing here and there as the hero wanders about a stone castle. If this story is a little more personal for the characters/protagonists, it’s only to bring in the most clichéd of “background” so that both of them have issues with her/his family. Oh, and don’t forget the repressed attraction between the lead female and lead male, who just can’t be together for some reason or anything (not explicated clearly in this issue, maybe because the male is some kind of priest and the woman is a friendlier (and more clothed) Red Sonja).

The art is not horrible, it’s perfectly adequate 1980s mainstream comic book art, more realist than the work that was about to hit really big at Marvel (Lee, Liefeld, etc.), but lacking any real expressivity. It’s hindered a bit by a unnecessarily bright color palette (perhaps a result of this being part of DC’s “New Format” which was printed offset rather than four color process). The page layouts seem to be trying a little too hard to be “different” without narrative or compositional reason for it.

Even in regards to cheesecake, violence, and action, factors in genre fantasy that might appeal to, say, a teenage boy, it fails to reach a level that makes it interesting. If it succeeds at anything, it succeeds in carrying the brand, drawing in eyes (and money) from a pre-existing customer, who thinks that more of the story will somehow improve on that first exposure to a mostly closed narrative (one can read the original series of Dragonlance modules/novels as a closed series that was popular enough to not stay closed for long, though I’m not sure if that is, historically speaking, the original plan). It worked on me (damn you, DC, if I owned any books you had published I’d throw them out), I think I read this series until they cancelled it (which wasn’t very long).

Are there worse comics out there? Yes. There are comics that have worse drawing, crappier writing, stupider concepts, but this was my first comic and somehow that makes it worse to me. To me this comic is a symbol for all the nostalgia that so engrosses the comics world. Looking back is vital in growing an art form, but at some point that backwards look becomes so distorted as to not resemble what was really there (on my mind since the RNC just wrapped up as I write this). So, it seemed appropriate to draw some attention to the fact that a 13 year old boy doesn’t have good taste.
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Utilitarian Review 9/8/12

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Caroline Small interviews Nina Paley on copyright and free culture.

Me on some of the great musical guests on the Batman TV show.

We’re having our 5th year anniversary, and celebrating with a month long roundtable in which people write about the worst comic ever (or the one they dislike the most, or that they think is most overrated.) I started the celebration off with an explanation of Why I have chosen hate.

Bert Stabler on how twee ate Chris Ware.

Me responding to Heidi McDonald by arguing that negative criticism isn’t really all that popular. (I may need to eat my words, though; this week’s hatefest has gotten a huge number of hits by our standards.)

Matt Brady with 8000 words on the crappiness of Blackest Night.

Kate Dacey on Gandhi: good man, terrible manga.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys and I discuss whether you should hate the comic reader or just the comic.

Alex Buchet on Spirou and Fantasio’s racism for kids.

Matt Senece defends the outsider art genius of Geoff Johns.

Johnny Ryan on every autobiographical comic ever.

And you can keep track of our entire hatefest with our constantly updated Index of Hate.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Chicago Reader I review Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen’s new book “Darkest America” on black blackface minstrelsy.

At Splice I review Wu Tsang’s film about an LA trans bar.

At Splice I explain that political spouses are career politicians.
 
Other Links

Erica Friedman on Yuri coming of age.

And Erica again with an introduction to the study of Yuri.

Brian Hayes on what’s wrong with HU’s anniversary of hate.

Wonder Woman’s sneaky dance plot.

Glenn Greenwald on Democrats parading Osama Bin Laden’s corpse.
 
This Week’s Reading

I finished Henry James’ “The Portrait of a Lady” (Italians aren’t to be trusted — who knew?), read Stanley Hauerwas’ “The Peaceable Kingdom” about Christian ethis, read Julia Kristeva’s essay “Stabat Mater” which I’d sort of hoped would be better, and just just started rereading Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex Poems.”
 

The great black blackface performer Bert Williams.