When the people I talk with say ‘this comic had minimal impact on the comics world’ they don’t just mean ‘oh it wasn’t talked about on the 2 or 3 comics blogs i read.’ They are primarily talking about how none of the comics people they talk to in real life are talking about these books. Or, at least not talking about them in the “wow, I’m really excited about this book” sort of way. I feel like this excitement is something that is often missing when I hear conversations (real life, not just the internet) about comics like “Wilson” or “Genesis.”
Maybe this excitement (or lack thereof) is something to think about? Something to talk about? Maybe excitement is the wrong word, because strong feelings against something can also be a big motivation for change, for thought. Maybe it’s just the lack of people demonstrating strong feelings one way or another. A lot of times I feel tired of the comics scene because people just act like they’re too cool to care.
I can’t divorce myself from the creation aspect of things, seeing as that’s what I spend the majority of my time doing. But I know that for me, what I’m excited about either at the time or in my past has a lot of bearing on what I produce. Sometimes it is wanting to explore an idea. Sometimes a technique. Sometimes I am so angry I want to just make something better, something that states my view of things. But strong feelings are the reason I make art and the reason my art changes.
I remember a while back Frank talking about jazz, how he was missing the interplay in the comics world, the building off of each other. Sometimes I feel the same way. Not necessarily that we (as creators) should only play from/with the past, but maybe that we should play more off of each other as peers. Maybe we should talk more about what we’re excited about and how it’s influencing our art, whether it’s in the comics scene or not. Maybe we should not be afraid to say that we disagree something without worrying about stepping on toes.
Maybe if we talk more about our influences, our excitements, our ideas, then we can make a space for comics in the greater sphere of creativity instead of an maintaining the idea of an insular world that is only influenced by itself.
I noted in response that ““If there’d been stronger feelings about the Genesis comic on this blog, we would have had fistfights.” L. Nichols replied:
Sure. But that’s just this blog, one blog, a blog with a history of people who like to get in long arguments about comics. I was more talking about people in real life. What’s the number of times I’ve heard Genesis being mentioned in real life by real life comics artists? I talk to comics people all the time and I’ve heard MAYBE one or two of them talk about Genesis. I’ve heard more non-comics people talking about it than I have any comics people I know!
I was more trying to say that people aren’t excited enough about comics to REACT to them in their work. I mean the type of excitement that wakes you up in the morning, keeps you up at night. The kind of excitement that makes you want to go draw “Exodus.” Or maybe the kind of excitement where you’re SO upset about Genesis that you just have to react some way against it in your own work. Excitement on the creation side of things.
Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer’s Opera “Robert le diable”, 1876, oil on canvas, 76.6 x 81.3 cm.,
London, Victoria and Albert Museum
Last year’s Degas show at the Royal Academy in London was an eye-opener. Premised on an obvious idea that nevertheless has yet to be fully examined, it presented the artist’s work on subjects relating to the ballet with focus on contemporary interest in the understanding and truthful depiction of movement.
Juxtaposing Degas’ work in drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography with the photographic, cinematic, and sculptural studies of human and animal locomotion of Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, Paul Richer, and others, the exhibition made the case not so much for direct axes of influence (as the Burlington Magazine’s confused reviewer assumed, for instance), but rather of a general confluence of interest between them.
Conspicuously missing from the show, however, was one of the quintessential nineteenth-century forms dealing almost obsessively with the depiction of movement: comics. This is hardly surprising: despite the show’s progressive approach to the study of nineteenth-century art, we have unfortunately not yet reached a stage where the specific and highly charged connections between popular and high culture of the period are fully recognized.
Pointing fingers at an otherwise stellar show only goes so far, however. More interesting is how it laid bare new ways of understanding the language of comics as it developed in Degas’ time, and how its fresh perspective on his art, when seen from a comics standpoint, illuminate further the epistemological insights of his art.
As the show emphasized with a stunning display of pastels hung in the penultimate room, Degas was ever an artist in the grand tradition of the renaissance, fastening raw human experience in color, his dancers timelessly moving to the tune of history. The paragons are clear: Raphael, Titian, and Veronese, through Watteau and even Goya, all found in Degas a modern interpreter.
This, in part, is due to his investment in contemporary media and form—his boundary-challenging work in photography is but one example of this, while the exhibition suggested other parallels, one of which — a short fumetto in which Degas acted out a vaudeville skit with a couple of friends — touch directly upon the language of comics.
Years earlier, in his attentive depictions of stage performances, he touched initially upon sequentiality as a means of depicting movement, and more fundamentally conveying subjective experience. Not only is his Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer’s Opera “Robert le diable” of 1876 (see above) framed to suggest his particular point of view from the front stalls, it depicts in a brushy swathe the sensation dancing movement across the stage. Simultaneously a snapshot depiction of the large, costumed ensemble on stage and a suggestion of movement from back to front and left to right, it proposes a dynamic and novel solution to the centuries-old problem of conveying the passage of time in a single image. This strategy of employing individual figures to suggest a general pattern of movement was later employed to great effect in single panels of comics, most famously by Hergé in several of the Tintin books.
From the color version of Hergé’s “Le Crabe au pinces d’or” (1944)
It would seem that such innovations developed from the old problem of how to represent the passage of time with one image. This has been essential to narrative picture-making since antiquity, but reached new levels of sophistication in the high renaissance when the single image became increasingly divorced from the narrative series of medieval and early renaissance art. How to suggest the before and after? How to pose a figure to indicate previous or future action? Acutely aware of this tradition, Degas crucially achieved a synthesis of this knowledge with the aesthetic of photography. His figures are often posed in ways only the mechanical eye of the camera could otherwise see, but are simultaneously tweaked to achieve the illusion of movement that is mostly absent from snapshot photography.
Left: preparation for an Inside Pirouette, c. 1880-1885,
charcoal and black crayon on paper, 336 x 227 mm., Belgrade, National Museum;
Right: Dancer (Préparation en dedans), c. 1880-85,
charcoal with stumping on butt paper, 336 x 227 mm., Trinity House
This is evident from his astonishing on-the-spot sketches of ballerinas practicing from the 1880s. Drawn in something approaching real-time, the artist’s hand following the motion of his model, these sketches are fundamentally different from the sequential, or chronophotographical experiments of Marey and Muybridge along with which they were displayed in the exhibition. Although their ambitions are similar, the photographers achieve the illusion of movement through juxtaposition of individual photos frozen in time, whereas Degas’ knowledge of temporal illusion conveys an almost bodily sensation of the movement suggested.
In one sketch, the dancer torques her body in preparation, motion lines of the kind later so familiar to comics readers conveying the movement of her right arm, and judiciously applied vertical hatching between her feet helping further to suggest the determined circle she is beginning to describe. Another sketch conveys vigorously the imminent discharge before a pirouette. By drawing his models in positions tweaked beyond the anatomically possible and energizing them through motion blur, Degas achieves an effect of action-through-time impossible in photography.
In the same room, Marey’s fascinating sculptural renditions of birds in flight — transposed from photography, fusing duration in bronze — were shown alongside Degas’ bronze studies of female nudes in motion, well-known but rarely arranged as they were here, sequentially performing three steps of the grande arabesque. The connection to comics is apparent, and it would have made sense to place the similar experiments by contemporary cartoonists of combining narrative single drawing with sequence to describe movement and action.
Étienne-Jules Marey, Flight of a Gull, 1887, bronze, 16.5 x 58.5 x 25.7 cm., Beaune, Musée Marey
Grand arabesque: First, Second and Third Time, c. 1885-90, bronze, 48.5 x 24 x 34.5/ 42.6 x 29.2 x 61.2/ 43.2 x 33 x 50.8 cm., Glasgow City Council/ Sterling and Francine Clark Institute/ Norton Simon Art Foundation
Among the most accomplished in this respect is the American cartoonist A. B. Frost. Immediately attentive to the discoveries of chronophotography, he lampooned it in his early 1880s cartoons. But as Thierry Smolderen has shown us he also learned from it in a way that helped transform the sequential grammar of comics.
Eadweard Muybridge, Horse in Motion, Plate 625 from “Animal Locomotion,” Philadelphia in 1887.
A.B. Frost, “Orlando and January”, Harper’s New Monthly, September 1881
The natural movements of a horse in motion became the occasion for visual comedy, but the subtlety of a body’s motion moment-to-moment also opened cartoonist’s eyes to the narrative potential therein, resulting in sequences with only minor but no less crucial changes from panel to panel—something that would have been unthinkable earlier, not the least because the laborious wood-engraving process necessary for printing the comics generated an imperative for variety.
A.B. Frost, from Harper’s New Monthly, January 1880
Surely these discoveries also inform Degas’ series of widescreen rehearsal studio interiors. Degas painted almost a dozen of these canvases over a period of around twenty-five years, all set in roughly the same space — initially adapted from a real dance studio, but clearly turned into a malleable architectural framework for him to experiment with. The exhibition presented five of these works, proposing a link to the contemporary vogue for the panorama, but it seems more appropriate to understand them, again, in terms of representing movement, or perhaps rather time.
The Dance Lesson, c. 1879, oil on canvas, 38 x 88 cm., Washington DC, National Gallery of Art
Dancers in the Rehearsal Room with a Double Bass, c. 1882-85, oil on canvas, 39.1 x 89.5 cm., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Dancers in the Green Room, c. 1880-94, oil on canvas, 41.3 x 87.6 cm., Detroit Institute of Arts
Dancers in the Foyer, c. 1889-1905, oil on canvas, 41.5 x 92 cm., Zurich, Fondation E.G. Bührle Collection
Panoramas may have provided Degas with his unusual formatting, but his clearly articulated, subjective point of view is far from the Archimedean ambitions of that form. Having been executed over such a long stretch of time, it was certainly not a tightly planned series, but when taken together they nevertheless represent inspiringly the passage of time on several levels. A profound take on the impressionist penchant for series, Degas here paints the years passing. Seasons change with the light while his brush technique expands and flowers, achieving heightened tactility and depth of glow. The figures are animated initially through snapshot posture and motion blur, but later also through the dynamic pulse of their loosened outline. These young dancers flick through the space in a way akin to fast-motion in film — and of course to the by now commonplace technique in comics of setting action against a fixed backdrop, panel-to-panel.
From “A Clockwork Orange”, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1971)
The conceptual set piece of the exhibition, however, was no doubt the display of sketches for Degas’ most famous sculpture, the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (c. 1922). In preparation for the work, Degas made a 360-degree survey of his model. Juxtaposed, these drawings form a number of broken sequences conveying the sense of circling the little dancer, again and again. Of course, artists had made studies from multiple angles before, but it is the systematic approach — similar finish, same distance to the subject, the sheer number of sketches — that gives this series of sketches its temporal character. It is not just about seeing in the round, but about the locomotive, bodily way we experience the world, forming our impression from a multitude of fragments processed in time.
Three Studies of a Dancer, c. 1878-81, black chalk with white heightening on pink paper, 470 x 623 mm., New York, Morgan Library
Two Studies of a Dancer, 1878-79, charcoal, pastel, and wash on paper, 472 x 585 mm., private collection
There is something fundamental to Degas inquiry into time and space as articulated by movement here. The show suggested how he reached these insights by situating him in a context obsessed with inquiry into these phenomena, as someone who by virtue of his classic orientation and unique eye was able to probe their epistemological significance. It has become almost common knowledge how early nineteenth-century pictorial arts anticipated photography, and it is evident how photographic and other pictorial techniques and approaches, such as those practiced by Degas, anticipated film. What remains unacknowledged, and as mentioned was entirely ignored by the curators here, is to what extent the same phenomena were explored in comics, a medium in which Degas can be said to have worked with as great sophistication and insight as anybody else in comics history.
Edgar Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement was shown at the Royal Academy, London, September 17–December 11, 2011. Catalogue by Richard Kendall and Jill Devonyar, London, Royal Academy of Art, 2011. The paragraphs on Frost are heavily indebted to Thierry Smolderen’s eye-opening book, Naissances de la bande dessinée (Brussels: Les Impressions nouvelles, 2009).
Note by Noah: Eric posted a brief review of Dark Knight and other recent superhero films in comments. It seemed a shame to let his thoughts languish at the bottom of an old threat, so I’m highlighting them here.
______________
I liked DKR way more than the previous two Nolan Batman movies. It does seem pretty conservative in some ways…though…as it turns out…the “Bad Guys” are not really 99%’ers at all and are just manipulating political unrest and class division to take revenge. In some ways this is a copout (just another madman/madwoman bent on revenge or world domination), but in other ways it mitigates the conservatism of the film (which initially seems to take the side of the rich/status quo vs. the “crazy” poor and downtrodden). In some ways, one could read the film to suggest that it’s the mistreatment of the poor and mishandling of the economy that “primes” that (large) section of society to be manipulated by “evil.” That is, there is some suggestion that if we had a more egalitarian society, revolution/anarchy wouldn’t be necessary (or on the verge of happening). (Just as criticizing the results of the French Revolution in the short term doesn’t necessarily mean one is in favor of the ancien regime). For all those reasons, it’s an interesting film, that (to me, anyway) made more sense plot-wise than Batman Begins or Dark Knight…and had enough fun mindless superheroing and explosions to make it enjoyable. Anne Hathaway was also surprisingly good as Catwoman.
I also liked the new Spider-Man movie quite a bit. That one had almost no ambitions that I could see… I liked the return to Gwen Stacy, though, since I read about her in Ben’s book. Both DKR and ASM were better than Avengers, to my mind (which really made almost no logical sense…never mind the ideology).
Also…the fact that Bruce Wayne loses all of his money is meant to make him a more ambiguous figure (not clearly on the side of the rich). Instead he ends up in the same place as Bane—stripped of everything…at the bottom of a well…etc. I don’t think this really works to make Batman a “working-class hero” (it’s something to be, I here)… but that’s clearly the intent…and it adds an extra layer to any kind of ideological reading. To some degree, I agree that “it’s a mess”—but at least it’s an interesting mess…which is more than can be said for something like Avengers…which is both a mess…and completely mindless.
The comics internet’s been afire and atwitter and presumably afacebook in response to Dan Nadel’s editorial in which he went off on some kickstarter project because they didn’t know Garo like Dan knows Garo, and also Amazon.
I think the most telling point Dan makes is this:
p.s.: Frank Santoro is having another big back issue sale this weekend in NYC!
In short, if you get an idea and try to crowdfund it, you’re a whiny little beggar man undeserving of kissing R. Crumb’s $700 napkin doodles…but if you’re the editor of the Comics Journal and you use your position at the top of the comics critical heap to shill for your friend’s basement sale — hey, that’s professionalism.
I don’t know anything about Garo. I don’t know anything about Kickstarter. I don’t know Box Brown or his comics. But nonetheless, I’m wearisomely familiar with Dan’s argument, because it’s not an argument. It’s an assertion of professional status and in-group clout, which boils down to little more than, “Hey! I’m a publisher and the editor of the Comics Journal, and you’re not. Go around the back, boy, and if you’re lucky I’ll let you drop some pennies in my awesome tin can, which is miles more authentic than your tin can, because it was pissed in by Gary Groth himself.”
I respect Dan’s accomplishments as a publisher; I have enjoyed his writing in the past; I think that he and Tim have done many great things with TCJ. But the signature weakness of Comics Comics remains. That weakness, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, is a supposedly jocular but in fact witheringly earnest cliquishness, which manifests in fulsome sycophancy towards those who are further up the pecking order, and bullying contempt towards those who are further down. To the extent that art comics is an irrelevant insular subculture, it is not because people use the word “Garo” wrong, or because they hand money over to Jeff Bezos so he can do horrible things like support marriage equality. Rather, it’s because, in the art comics world, people like Dan, with institutional power and authority, continue to treat their artform like a grimy little treehouse, from which they emerge only briefly to blink and snicker contemptuously at all those poor schmucks (Dan’s word) who don’t know the password.
____________ Sean Collins has a thoughtful discussion of Dan’s post and related matters.
A commenter named Shannon on the tcj.com thread also had some good things to say.
And here’s the Kickstarter drive that started the ruckus.
The above is from an ad that seems to run perpetually on the Comics Journal site. It’s for celebrity photographer Eric Curtis’ Fallen Superheroes. “Using superheroes (think Batman, Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Superman) as the allegory, Curtis explores the not-so-glamorous and sometimes dark realities of those who strive to live their dreams against all odds,” says the copy if you click through. Plastering that all over your site is a lot more dignified than funding through Kickstarter, I think you’ll agree.
Today is my last monthly column for Hooded Utilitarian. When I came on here just over a year ago, I really wasn’t sure if I’d last three months. HU writers are smart, critical thinkers, with a vast knowledge base in topics I know nothing at all about. HU readers are contentious, critical and unrelenting. I thought I’d give it a try and see how long I lasted. ^_^ I lasted way longer than I expected.
I’m leaving simply because of time constraints. I’m running out of time in my day and some things have to fall off the bottom of the list. Unfortunately HU is one of those things. If you enjoy reading my writing, feel free to visit me over at my blog, Okazu. I’ll still be there.
I really enjoyed my time here on HU and I’m sorry to have to leave – and I hope to be back from time to time with a guest post here and there. Thanks to everyone who read any of my columns here, especial thanks to folks who commented and to all the other writers who welcomed me among their ranks.
Farewell, I hope to see you again soon. (^_^)/
Note by Noah: You can see all of Erica’s columns here.
“What did this Regan fellow have that bored into him so?”
The butler looked at me levelly and yet with a queer lack of expression. “Youth, sir,” he said. “And the soldier’s eye.”
“Like yours,” I said.
“If I may say so, sir, not unlike yours.”
— The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
As I’m sure I’m not the first one to point out, The Big Sleep is obsessed with queer themes, both explicit and implicit. One of the novel’s central mysteries is, precisely, homosexuality. The relationship between a purveyor of dirty books named Geiger and his male lover is at the root of a number of the murderous confusions and complications in the early part of the narrative.
The novel treats its avowedly gay men with a casual disdain; the decadently portly Geiger is a recognizable stereotype, while his more masculine lover is dismissed with a sneer by Philip Marlowe, who comments that fags can’t hit hard, no matter what they look like. But the homophobia is belied by — or perhaps meant to excuse — the way in which intense bonds between putatively heterosexual men form the emotional core of the novel. As the quotation above indicates, the novel is in large part driven by the love-at-first-sight simpatico between Marlowe and his client, General Sternwood. That sympatico is echoed in Sternwood’s similar passion for his missing son-in-law, Rusty Regan, whom he ultimately asks Marlowe to find.
Moreoever, Regan and Marlowe are doubled not only because of their place in General Sternwood’s affections, but because of their imperviousness to heterosexual escapades. Regan, who married the General’s daughter Vivian Sternwood, was also, we learn at the novel’s conclusion, propositioned by the general’s other daughter, Caroline. When Regan refused her, she killed him. Later chronologically (though earlier in the novel), Caroline shows up in Marlowe’s room, naked, and attempts to seduce him. He kicks her out, she calls him an unrepeatable name which is probably “faggot” — and later she tries to kill him.
Marlowe and Regan are “soldiers”, then, because they (a) are beloved of the General and (b) do not lust after his corrupting daughter. The appellation “faggot” is carefully erased and thereby emphasized; it is Marlowe’s unmentionable sin which is also his unmentionable distinction. By the same token, Vivian Regan’s unnaturalness is reflected in the fact that she cares about her sister more than her husband; and so tries to cover up the latter’s murder to protect the former. The whole plot, then, is powered by same-sex investments and love. In comparison, most of the heterosexual attachments in the novel — such as those between Victoria and Rusty — seem decidedly half-assed. Marlowe’s main romantic interest is barely a flicker in the novel; she appears late, wearing a platinum wig to cover her short-cropped butch cut, which prompts Marlowe to give her the campy appellation Silver-Wig. The supposed love interest, then, is effectively a false front covering gender deviance covering a nonentity. It’s as if Chandler is afraid that if he spent too much time on her, folks might start to realize that she isn’t a “she” at all.
It would be fairly easy to do an Eve Sedgwick inspired reading and draw the lines between Chandler’s romanticization of homoerotic bonds between men and his homophobia and misogyny. For Sedgwick, it would certainly be no surprise that a book which writes with such repressed approval of soldiers eying each other should figure evil as a giggling vindictive ultra-femme madwoman. The clean passion of men for men is always threatened by these atrociously pleasurable stirrings of femininity.
It’s also interesting to note, though, that there may be a link between the novel’s queerness and and its reputation. The Big Sleep is often thought of as one of the very best examples of detective fiction; it’s virtually attained high art status, in a lot of ways. That status is, I’d argue, not despite the use of homosexuality, but because of it.
In his 2011 book Art and Homosexuality, Christopher Reed argues that the avant garde has long used markers of homosexuality as signs of daring individualism. Sexual deviance can show that an artist is an original, unhindered by convention or bourgeois provincialism. Moreover, the mechanism of the closet can provide a powerful appearance of mastery and genius. The artist, through the deployment of homosexual codes and references, shows himself (or herself) to be “in the know”, and that knowledge is the mark of queer genius — an unusual and unconventional wisdom.
All of this, I think, can be related to the critical success of The Big Sleep. Chandler’s bleak, decadent vision is in large part a bleak decadence of deviant sexuality — the filthy books sold by the gay man; the old General pining for his young acquaintance while rotting among the orchids; Vivian’s tragic love for her unnatural sister. The awareness of and manipulation of homosexuality makes the novel daring, adult, and knowing — an avant garde provocation rather than (or in addition to) a simple genre fable.
Moreover, the novel’s projection of genius is accomplished in large part through a manipulation of tropes associated with gayness. Chandler’s stylistic hallmarks — the careful vivid descriptions, the quick turnabout wit — could almost be lifted from Oscar Wilde, as could the obsession with ugly, hidden truths. The Big Sleep and The Picture of Dorian Gray are different mainly in that Chandler nods more explicitly to the obvious homosexual themes. In both cases, though, there is the impression of dazzling surface facility and deep unsettling knowledge — a sense of idiosyncratic and/or perverse brilliance propelled by the mechanics of the closet.
Detective fiction is built around the knower — and what that knower knows, The Big Sleep suggests, is deviance. “Me, I was part of the nastiness now,” Marlowe thinks, before ruminating feelingly on the idea of General Sternwood lying in bed. To see into the closet is to be one who knows one; to understand is to understand. Chandler’s novel is iconic in part because it believes so fervently in this bedrock algorithm of genre noir, and because its queer lack of expression conceals so transparently its depths of love and loathing.
