Yearly Archives: 2012

Into the Inkwell

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Mort Meskin: Out of the Shadows, edited by Steven Brower. Fantagraphics Books.

Mort Meskin’s studiomates in the bullpens of mid-20th century comics production remarked that he was a sensitive soul who was known to face a blank sheet with an artist’s block akin to sheer terror, until someone would scribble some random lines on the page, which he could then be sufficiently motivated to transform into his brilliant chiaroscuro images. Meskin’s best work was a powerful formative influence on other great comic book cartoonists such as Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Steve Ditko and Jim Steranko. As the years passed, though, he became obscured in comics history. I was first made aware of him when he came up as I was interviewing Steranko. To identify the initiator of a comics storytelling technique, we consulted with the late, sorely-missed Dylan Williams, who had built a website about Meskin. Sure enough, MM turned out to have been the first to use the device in question, a Muybridge-like means of depicting rapid movement with multiple figures that Steranko called “strobing”. In more recent years, former Print magazine creative director Steven Brower has championed the artist, first with his 2010 Meskin biography Shadows to Light and now with a  career-spanning collection of complete stories.

Meskin’s drawings seem to emerge from blackness

Some of his greatest early work in Out of the Shadows like Fighting Yank and collaborations with Jerry Robinson such as The Black Terror display particularly dramatic drawing and effective storytelling. In some of the stories, the  color is unusually good; it is all wonderfully restored. Another highlight is that some of Meskin’s linework for Golden Lad is presented in incredibly crisp black and white. Sadly, there are no representations of Meskin’s work for his main client DC Comics on such inventive strips as Johnny Quick or even his later, apparently generic but no less animated and well-rendered short strips for their mystery and sci-fi titles, presumably because DC jealously protects its assets, even to the detriment of the legacies of its most innovative artists like Meskin and Toth. Still, it can be seen from Brower’s thoughtful selections that Meskin was a strong narrative draftsman and an architect of arresting images.

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The Shark King by R. Kikuo Johnson. Toon Books.

In this graphic novella produced under Francoise Mouly’s Toon imprint, Johnson appears as an heir apparent to Meskin and Toth. Adapted from a Hawaiian mythology, The Shark King reportedly truncates and makes more palatable its source story, but it is a sharply rendered and very effectively colored short children’s book that displays a tremendous amount of kinetic energy. The characters move around the pages in a manner which deliberately facilitates and enhances the reading experience. Johnson is a very clean and controlled artist who gives his book an almost “golden age” feel. His use of black and colors define the forms and spaces with a rare mastery.

Johnson’s color is apparently built from hand drawn separations.

I am a little unclear as to the value of the message the story sends boys regarding their relative relationships with their mothers and their willfully absent fathers, but still, I much prefer this book to Johnson’s earlier adult graphic novel effort, his beautifully brush-drawn but callow coming-of-age tale, The Night Fisher.

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Ragemoor #s 1-4 by Jan Strnad and Richard Corben. Dark Horse.

In an interview on TCJ last week, Rich Corben speaks of his upcoming Edgar Allen Poe adaptations and honestly, I wasn’t overly excited by the news; I have a pile of his previous Poe work and enlarging it seemed to me to be a redundant reworking of relatively quiet, morbid tales that do not show off the artist’s best abilities.  But maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt. In recent years Corben has been doing a lot of work, some of the best of it in Mike Mignola-written Hellboy comics for Dark Horse. These have offered him ample opportunities to indulge in his trademark over-the-top horrific imagery, as well as the type of  inventively articulated, muscular fight scenes that he excels at. And, although I admit I’d prefer that Corben colors himself, the Hellboys have been very well colored by Dave Stewart. I also admire a few stories that writer Jan Strnad and Corben did together in the past, but as their new miniseries Ragemoor came out over the past few months, it was a little hard to love.

Perhaps the best art in the series, the cover to Ragemoor #2

For one thing, the art is black and white, not color and Corben does his own tones, but my initial impression was that the work here often looks a little awkward and rushed. His blacks are plenty juicy and his digital greys augment the maniacal depression that permeates the pages, but there is a chunkiness to the construction of the forms—a simplification of the drawing that often subverts Strnad’s scenario; it makes it quite difficult, for instance, to buy that the hero is smitten with the female character, who must be one of Corben’s least appealing ever for the pulpiness of her features…and that is saying something. He is known for constructing clay models to draw from, but here she seems smooshed by all thumbs. Yeesh!

The “splendorous angel” Anoria takes a dive in Ragemoor #3

However, it wasn’t until I had all four issues that I was able to truly appreciate this effort. In the end, Corben doesn’t disappoint….it works much better taken as a whole than it did as a serial. So buy them and read them all in one sitting. There are some genuinely frightening moments, not least what becomes of the hideous heroine.

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Prophet #22-26 by Brandon Graham, Simon Roy, Farel Dalrymple and Giannis Milonogiannis, with Fil Barlowe, Frank Teran, Emma Rios and others. Image Comics.

I have Brandon Graham’s thick King City book, although I haven’t yet had a moment to read the whole thing. I can say, though, that his solo comics strike me as one of the few times (Damion Scott is another) that I have seen a cartoonist whose work effectively evokes the imagery of Hip Hop,  which through aerosol innovators like Phase 2 evolved from the graphic forms of Vaughn Bodé and Philippe Druillet to become commercially appropriated by corporate America, but criminalized in its public art form.

Graham recently took over the Rob Liefeld vehicle Prophet and is using it as a collaborative engine to work with other artists and in so doing to reinvent the esoteric science fiction promise of France’s Metal Hurlant, that has informed the cinematic science fiction of the past few decades but whose power disintegrated in the comics medium because of the mainstream American banalization of bad translations and airbrushed van-artiness of Heavy Metal.

Graham and Dalrymple form a compelling argument for collaboration in Prophet #24

I have no idea what Leifeld did in his earlier issues of this title, but bless him for enabling us to jump in on Graham’s stories for Prophet, which are dark and forbidding but keyed to the unique properties of comics,  written as they are to accommodate many double page spreads depicting far-flung vistas of more than passing strangeness and with odd diagrammatic passages that explain technical details. These disturbing scenarios have been drawn by a range of inventive talent, from several issues of Simon Roy’s fluid linework, to one with Giannis Milanogiannis’ slashing penstrokes, to one with some of the best work I have seen from Farel Dalrymple and then, the most recent issue is sparely drawn by Graham himself with echoes of Kirby and Druillet. All of the issues are beautifully colored. As the series goes on, an unusual sense of excitement, of discovery is engendered, a feeling that I have rarely had since my first exposure to Les Humanoïdes.

Graham draws his own script for Prophet #26

In addition, Graham has solicited some very interesting backup stories: #22 sported a short piece by the Australian Fil Barlowe, whose Zooniverse was a singular exponent of intergalactic multiculturalism in the early 1980s; #s 23 and 25 boast two parts of a Frank Teran strip and #26 has a piece by Emma Rios with an absolutely extraordinary panel configuration.

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Spotting Deer and Lose #s 2-3 by Michael DeForge. Koyama Press.

I’m very encouraged when I see people such as Graham, Dalrymple and C.F. who seem to be influenced by sci-fi junk as much as anything and who are not afraid to work in genres that were formerly discredited by the alternative. Reality is fine as far as it goes, but comics also have potentials for world-building that aren’t scratched by stories about drinking coffee in cafes whilst bullshitting with one’s peers. Michael DeForge is another of the younger generation of cartoonists who uses sci-fi in his strips and this guy not only draws aliens, he draws LIKE an alien.

DeForge’s Spotting Deer: freaky deaky

His stuff reminds me a bit of my old friend Steven Cerio—-hmmmm…I wonder what happened to him?—like Steve, the work is bizarrely well-drawn while being frighteningly “othered” in conception. DeForge’s oddly shaped and thin but amazingly colored Spotting Deer book, for example, about a race of slug beings that mimic mammalian deer, is a real mindfuck prize and his erratic but engaging floppy comic Lose rewards examination, as well.

From Lose #3: nowhere to go but up

I don’t get why his main story in Lose #3  features an apocalyptic landscape with flying dogs who interact as if they are in a contemporary technological society, but it hardly matters; what counts is that DeForge uses the freedom of comics to make characters and places that follow his own rules. My favorite strip in this issue is “Manananggal”, a fearsome but indecipherable cinematic progression of otherworldly bioforms.

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Raw Power Annual by Josh Bayer. Retrofit Books.

It can be difficult to explain to anyone, let alone someone not versed in the language of comics, the appeal of a Meskin, a Corben or a DeForge.  I find it equally hard to describe Josh Bayer’s fierce comic Raw Power. I’ll try, though. I could say his massive figures bring to mind a sort of Kirby on amphetamines (and he milks and remilks a line from Jack’s “Street Code”), that the art seems sometimes as if it is drawn with a stick dipped in mud, but then, it also has some quite delicate passages and the entire thing reads with an invigorating, furious energy that is impossible to ignore. The story veers wildly; a description of Jimmy Carter’s war to suppress punk music  (that I find completely believable and which was apparently imparted to Bayer by Jello Biafra and Ray Pettibone) segues from the origin of Bayer’s ultraviolent superhero Catman to a version of Watergate sociopath G. Gordon Liddy with the aspect of a fiendish motivational speaker and then goes into a revisioning of an issue of one of Marvel’s cheesy 1980s comics, DP7  (a little like Jonathan Lethem and Dalrymple’s reworking of Omega the Unknown), which I am certain is far more interesting than the original comic could have been.

Josh Bayer’s Raw Power: faster, harder, WTF.

Comics like these are why I still love comics—-they are full of the odd things that artists do that are personal tics, that perhaps are mistakes or maybe they are done on purpose, but they are what makes the stuff memorable and make us think that we also could make comics—-and we can! We can make them and print them ourselves! They are why, as I have discovered,  the healthy part of comics is not in the pathetically over-edited and suicidal mainstream, but in the alternative where the artists, writers and readers are in charge. We can make lines coalesce on paper to form worlds in our own image and share them. We don’t have to answer to authority.

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Rogue Mirror

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This first appeared on Comixology.
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Superheroes are power fantasies. This is not in dispute.

The latest testament to this truth was provided to me by U Mass Lowell professor Susan Kirtley, one of the contributors to Craig Fischer’s Team Cul de Sac zine to benefit Parkinson’s research. The zine consists of a number of critics (including me!) discussing their favorite comics.

Kirtley’s piece starts by talking about one day in elementary school when she found an acquaintance, Sean Robinson, “huddled against the brick wall of the school.” Sean huddled over a piece of reading material “which was bright and colorful and quite possibly naughty.” Kirtley demanded to know what he was reading, at which point Sean declared, “‘girls don’t read comic books.'”

Thus encouraged, Kirtley headed over to the “spindly wire rack” the next time she was at the grocery store, got her mom to purchase some X-Men comics…and fell in love. She was especially taken with Rogue…and here’s where the power fantasy comes in. As Kirtley says:

As I began to read the exploits of Cyclops and the team I realized these were kindred spirits. Was I not like the tortured blue Beast, a genius hiding away from the world, unappreciated and misunderstood. I certainly longed to fry some of my classmates (including Sean Robinson) with laser beams that shot out of my eyes. But most of all I adored Rogue, the Southern belle with the green and yellow uniform and unflattering skunk-striped hair, who embodied all my tweenage anxiety…. Unable to touch others without harming them, Rogue was tragic and beautiful. I, with no desire to touch others, thought myself tragic and wished to be beautiful. When I pulled the X-Men comic off the rack at Safeway I did so out of spite, but as a lonely, awkward girl I found something in comics — excitement and adventure, of course, also hope that like Rogue, I could transcend the past and become something more, despite my flaws and a horrible haircut.

Kirtley saw herself in Rogue — not the self she was, but the self she could be, a self that could “transcend the past.”

Kirtley’s description of anticipating her future self through the image of Rogue finds an echo in the work of psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan. In his 1949 essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience,” Lacan discussed the mirror stage: the moment when the child first recognizes itself in the mirror.

This event [the child seeing itself in the mirror] can take place…from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support human or artificial…he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support, and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. [translation by Alan Seridan]

Just as Kirtley sees Rogue and is joyous, so the child sees its future self and is “jubilant”. The mirror stage, the power fantasy, is tied to happiness.

Lacan says that “the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction.” And he adds that, looking in the mirror, the child “anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power.” In other words, the child looking in the mirror is not seeing and recognizing a real self. Rather, she is misrecognizing a fictional self — an anticipatory self. This false self is integrated, functional, whole — a self that is not yet but will eventually reach a “maturation of…power.” Thus, Lacan’s child is happily seeing in the mirror exactly what Kirtley happily sees when she looks at Rogue in the comic; a false future self.

For Lacan, then, every self is always already a power fantasy — every self is a fictional superself. The lonely, awkward Kirtley is as much a misrecognized image as Rogue. Indeed, Sean Robinson sitting on the ground with his comic and his sneering can himself be seen as a super-mirror-image; an anticipation by Kirtley of Kirtley. The main superpower we want, the superpower we are constantly pretending to have, is self itself; a coherent being. As Lacan says, the Gestalt, or spontaneous formation of the image, unites the I, or ego or self

with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion.

Indeed…the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world.

Lacan is saying that the fictional self, or selves, is (or are) a trap. The images of your self you make turn you into a congealed statue, place you at the mercy of ghosts, turn your world into an automaton which grinds you up. Kirtley is Sean, is the awkward girl, is Rogue, and all these false self-images hold and haunt her.

But, at the same time, Lacan suggests, it is these images which allow, or open, the world. He uses the example of pigeons, which (he claims) can’t attain sexual maturity in isolation. An isolated pigeon will not mature normally — unless you show it its own image in a mirror. Fooled into thinking its self is another, it will grow gonads, and become the fully functional pigeon it was meant to be.

Similarly, the future, dreamed-of human self is not a real self, and is in some ways a dangerous myth…but still, without the power fantasy, where are you? Child-Kirtley would not become Rogue, of course. But without the dream of transcending a false self through a false self, she would have had no false self, which is the only self. Misrecognition is the only recognition; the only thing the child sees is the mirror.

If the child sees only a mirror, then what about Lacan? Surely the images of self he sees are also misrecognitions? Or, to put it another way, if the self is always false, then the self declaring that the self is always false is also a power fantasy. Lacan seems to acknowledge as much in this oddly worded sentence:

This event [the child seeing itself in the mirror] can take place…from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror.

Lacan says he has been made to “reflect” upon the spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Lacan, then, is reflecting on, or looking at the infant just as the infant looks at its own reflection. The mirror stage is itself an image; a vision of the self. Lacan’s integrated self, his superpower, is the image of a self split in two. His misrecognized self, which (joyfully?) startles him, is a misrecognized self.

I think you can see this reflected in Kirtley’s essay too. The “I” in Kirtley’s piece, the older-Kirtley, looks at her younger I misrecognizing a super-I that anticipates, but is not, the older-I. Kirtley looks into the past to see a split self, a divided not-her that provokes jubilation. Similarly, I think, what I get from reflecting on the essay is a look at myself looking at older-Kirtley looking at younger-Kirtley looking at Rogue, those beguiling images within images, the super-power that is the me I can’t touch.

Utilitarian Review 6/7/12

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Caroline Small on Cocteau vs. Ware.

Ng Suat Tong with the 2nd quarter nominations for best comics criticism.

Erica Frideman on Sukeban Deka, hooliganism, high school crime and giant snakes.

Me on Frank Miller’s Wonder Woman, Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman, and strong men.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys on Johnny Ryan vs. P.G. Wodehouse.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

On Splice Today I sneer at Liberals sneering at Creationists.

Also on Splice I blame the Founding Fathers for Mitt Romney.
 
Other Links
 
Robert Jones, Jr. on Nubia and Wonder Woman.

N Plus One Magazine on why universities are parasitic leeches that must be destroyed.
 

Boobs Pooter versus Bertie Wooster

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Compare and Contrast Cage-Match to the Death: Joltin’ Johnny Ryan and PG “Wehrmacht” Wodehouse

Ten Rounds!

1. Both men are humourists (duh).*

2. Both have mainly made their living from serialising their work, a standard career-path for humourists in their respective times and markets.

3. Although known primarily for their work for adults, both artists have also produced work for children.

Wodehouse started his career writing allegedly comical stories about various misadventures at boys’ schools — specifically, the kind of not-quite-Eton public school that many of the characters in his later grown-up books would have attended, the kind of school where the upper-classmen have “fags” (younger students who perform menial domestic duties for them, like cooking and cleaning), where in summer the students care only about cricket (rugby in winter), where one student is always trying to cadge a fiver off another since he’s already spent his own allowance for the term betting Smythe that he couldn’t balance three copies of Liddell and Scott on his head while singing “I Do Like To Be Beside the Sea-Side”,** and where the Classics Masters have an imperious eye and brook none of the nonsense that inevitably arises. Wodehouse’s early work is for completists only and, even for them, it’s a struggle. He certainly hadn’t developed his wit in those early years; indeed, it would take more than another decade of writing grown-up humour for Wodehouse to start being even routinely amusing, let alone bust-a-gut LOL-worthy. As far as I know, he wrote specifically for children only at the start of his career; his juvenilia being thus being restricted to, well, his own juvenilia.

Ryan, on the other hand: if he’d written that last paragraph, he would have already made a dozen jokes about “fags” that would certainly not be considered suitable for the eyes of children, at least not by any reputable publisher. Nonetheless, Ryan has drawn gags for the now-defunct Nickelodeon Magazine (nearly every single issue, according to Wikipedia), MAD Magazine, and other kid-oriented outlets. It’s not as outlandishly unlikely as you might first think: just take out all the gags about the Holocaust, the KKK, AIDS, hookers — okay, so maybe it is a bit of stretch. But Ryan is first among his peers in plumbing the lower depths of scatological humour, and that sensibility translates well to kids’ humour. You just get rid of any jokes about “adult themes” like the Holocaust, and replace all the references to dicks and pussies and fucking and shit and piss and all that with references to boogers and farts and spew and, well, you’ve just designed yourself the perfect engine for making kids laugh, the very Platonic Form of What Makes Kids Laugh.

Which, I guess, in a way means that Socrates, having escaped from Plato’s Cave to contemplate the Forms themselves, was contemplating not just the Form of Beauty or the Form of the Good, but also the Form of A Unicorn Dressed in Farts Eating A Booger Pizza.

4. Both men work in a more or less blatantly unrealistic fantasy-world.

Wodehouse’s work is not overtly fantastic — there’s no unicorns riding around in Blandings Castle, not even a unicorn dressed in farts. But Wodehouse’s world is almost as far removed from reality: his characters have no more real connection to the greater world than the characters in Seinfeld. When the plot demands it, one character will have to work for a living, but only as the plot demands it. No one dies in Wodehouse, except offstage and generally some time in the past. Bertie Wooster, for instance, is an orphan but his parents appear to be long dead and of little concern to anyone. There are no serious problems for anyone, no real heartbreak or emotional turmoil or physical disability. When, in reading one of his many, many, many books, I came across a character who had not only served in the First World War but whose service was actually a plot-point, my monocle popped out and my wife clutched at her pearls — this sort of thing, essentially, does not happen in the world of Wodehouse. Even if we grant that Wodehouse’s world is, strictly speaking, a realistic one in the sense that there’s no magic qua magic, we can at least say that his world is not a naturalistic one.

Ryan’s world is much more overtly unrealistic, a world with very different physical laws than our own. Boobs Pooter shoots himself and becomes a ghost; he then invades the body of a woman, and fills her mouth with all-too-unghostly cum and then her breasts with shit. Aliens shoot tentacles down from the sky that enact hideous bodily transformations on humans. A missile-rocket visits a normal suburban family to demand a threeway with the pater and materfamilias — which he gets. A nurse makes a rope out of faeces, which she uses to swing around, hanging from the ceiling, like “Spiderman Woman”. Characters die in one strip to reappear in the next one along. Ryan’s world is the world of cartoons, where all the physical laws of our world always apply, except when it’s funnier for them not to.

Ryan, to be sure, does have some strips without Spiderman shit-rope, masturbating ghosts or even farting unicorns — strips which break no laws of nature; but even those tend to be non-naturalistic. For example, there’s a strip where Loady McGee tricks Sinus O’Gynus into thinking that the hot new look for the season is to glue a kid onto the end of your dick

— by the way, federales, please do not arrest me —

but, actually, Loady is just using a midget actor to trick Sinus. Now, nothing there violates the laws of physics, say, so it “could happen” (philosophers would say that it’s nomologically possible) — but, of course, even if the world could work like that, it doesn’t. I can’t think, offhand, of too many Ryan strips that feature people behaving “plausibly”, in a way that someone might actually behave in the real world. Certainly there are some: for instance a bit in the Jokepocalypse where one paramedic laughs at the other one for having hurt feelings, and the all-time classic 100% Anal Rape — where the whole gag is basically Ryan’s deadpan depiction of the victim’s post-event trauma — but this is more the exception than the rule. Ryan isn’t really interested in making a naturalistic or even realistic strip, not when there’s a (if not strictly unrealistic, then at least highly implausible) fart joke to be made.

5. Each has a very different sense of corporeality.

Wodehouse’s characters might as well not have bodies. They like their food, certainly — a particularly skilled chef plays an important role in several of the Wooster novels. And they occasionally get food poisoning, or sunburn, or a cold, or whatnot, and older secondary characters might complain about aches and pains, but only as the plot demands it. They certainly don’t need to shit, and they don’t need to piss, and above all they have no sexual activities whatsoever. Indeed, they appear to have no sexual desires at all, or even sexual organs for that matter. The idea of, say, Lord Emsworth jerking off is almost literally inconceivable. It is as though someone were to try to describe to you the letter “h” having sex with the number 57 — one feels that something must have gone seriously awry somewhere in his understanding, or his grasp of the English language; he has made a sort of category mistake.

Ryan, of course, would quite happily draw the letter “h” having sex with the number 57, but only if he could also draw Hitler licking the resultant creampie.

(Look it up, kids)

(Hey, speaking of not getting myself arrested: if there are any kids reading this, Jesus Christ, go tell your parents not to let you read this post)

6. Both men get a lot of humour from parodying the banality of their contemporary culture, contemporary narrative art in particular.

Wodehouse is nonspecific in his parody, his targets not so much individual artists and their work so much as general styles — the cliche of sentimental novels, mostly, but sometimes mystery novels or Hollywood gangster movies and the like.

Ryan goes personal; indeed, right for the personal jugular. He abridges Craig Thompson’s much-praised Blankets to three panels: boy meets girl, boy is reminded of “awesome piss-fight” with brother, boy breaks up with girl. [NB: this is actually a pretty accurate summary of the book]. Shitzo taunts Ivan Brunetti to just go ahead and kill himself already. Art Spiegelman’s father owns up that he was never in a concentration camp, and the numbers on his arm are just lotto numbers that have never been washed off. R. Crumb narrates a slideshow for his comics adaptation of The Book of Genesis: “uh…and here you see another drawing of Jews with big beards…wearing robes…” [NB: this is also a pretty accurate summary]; scientists fill a rocket with “liquid who gives a shit!” and blow up Crumb and his audience. And so on.

Cartoonists ribbing other cartoonists is nothing new, of course. Witness e.g. Wally Wood’s loving pastiche of newspaper strips in MAD, or Al Capp’s Dick Tracy parody, Fearless Fosdick. There’s probably some cave out there somewhere, as yet undiscovered by archaeology, where some neolithic cartoonist painted bison and hunters in way that totally zinged some other neolithic cartoonist’s painting of bison and hunters.

But Ryan’s parodies, potshots and piss-takes feel different from this. They’re cruel, vicious, bilious — and frequently very, very funny. Perhaps his most vicious swipe at his fellow cartoonists — that is, if you don’t count the already mentioned strip where he encourages the morbidly depressed Brunetti to follow through on the extended suicide note that was Schizo; or his unauthorized sequel to Paying For It, in which Chester Brown dresses up as a “whore” and is beaten, maimed and sexually assaulted, but still comes out of the experience thinking “OMG! Prostitution 4 Life!” — other than these most vicious swipes, and probably a couple of dozen other most vicious swipes, his most most vicious swipe is a strip called The Day The New Yorker Came to Town. In this strip, a take-down of the literary pretensions of art-comix-ers, Art Spiegelman cuts off his own nose to give the New Yorker a blowjob, R. Crumb sticks his adam’s apple up the New Yorker’s arse, Chris Ware gives the New Yorker a “tit-fuck” with his “brain-balls”, Seth (who, earlier in the strip, had pissed his pants at the prospect of a visit from the New Yorker) and Adrian Tomine snack on the New Yorker’s nuts, and poor old Ivan Brunetti, too ugly for the New Yorker, has to settle for sucking off a book of New Yorker dog cartoons.

Now that’s what I call comedy.

8. The main similarity between them is that they were incredibly prolific, with a similar, but not quite identical, effect on the quality of their work.

As it says in the bio at the start of so many of my copies of Wodehouse books, he wrote over 90 books in his life, as well as various plays and musical comedies. I’ve read somewhere between 50 and 60 of them (I’ve lost track, myself).

Ryan has produced hundreds upon hundreds of pages of comics. At times during the 00s, he was simultaneously drawing Blecky Yuckerella — a weekly strip for the “alternative press”, contributing gag cartoons to kids’ magazines, creating his own one-man anthology Angry Youth Comix, and churning out a one-page gag strip on the web each and every week. These last strips seem to have been entirely improvised; they’re often just one non-sequitur after another, as if the result of a game of exquisite corpse played by a gang of toilet-minded imbeciles with Tourette’s syndrome.

Because there’s so damned much of it, a lot of the art created by Johnny Ryan or PG Wodehouse is not very good. Much of it is hackwork. To be sure, due to Ryan’s peculiar sensibilities, his hackwork looks different from what other hacks might produce; but once you’ve seen a dozen vaginas spewing out leprechaun-turds covered in Holocaust-juice, you’ve seen them all. Much of Ryan’s and Wodehouse’s work is not worth reading at all, not even by connoisseurs and devotees.

But, both men, when they’re on, are among the funniest in their chosen medium. I came very close to including Take A Joke, the final collection of Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix (plus miscellanea), in my Top Ten for the Hooded Utilitarian poll — there’s an awful lot of jokes that miss in there, but Ryan has learned the valuable lesson that, if you throw enough of them out there, some of them are bound to hit. And when Ryan hits, he hits hard.

The difference between their prolificity (???) is that Wodehouse is much more consistent. Most of Wodehouse’s books from the mid-1920s on are pretty solid; even when a particular book isn’t hysterically funny, it can be relied on for a couple of amusing bons mots on every page. It’s mostly his early work that is consistently mediocre.

Ryan, on the other hand, is all over the shop. Take A Joke alternates between some of the best humour strips I’ve ever read — e.g. Home Early, The Day the New Yorker Came to Town, 100% Anal Rape, the ending to Graveyard Goofs — and lame button-pushing non sequiturs, like the multi-gag pages originally drawn for Vice.

9. Because they are so prolific, both artists exploit the combinatorial possibilities of rearrangements and variations over just a few basic elements. It would be easy enough to program a random generator to create “new” work by Ryan and Wodehouse by using a handful of variables.

For Wodehouse, the key elements are setting, plot and character. The setting will be [a country manor in a small English village or, much less often, a trans-Atlantic liner/a sea-side resort/New York]; the plot will involve one character who [wants to/doesn’t want to] marry another and who can only do this by stealing [a valuable antique/an incriminating manuscript/a pig], but in their way stands [a jealous suitor/an incognito detective/a rival thief/a hostile prospective father-in-law]; other characters will include [an imperious aunt/a nosy policeman/someone, anyone, in every book, in some kind of disguise/a mischievous but creative interloper who ultimately saves the day with an ingenious scheme].

For Ryan, the variables are: pudenda, impolite bodily functions, non-missionary sex acts, various hot-button topics (9/11, racism, rape…), and a banal or incongruous context. Just throw these together willy-nilly and you’ve got the premise for a Ryan strip, or a one-panel gag, or at least the ending to an improvised strip: a blind date who is half-man/half-shit! Hitler-piss, the only son of Christ! Erotic art-collecting squirrel! Captain America’s juicy pussy, better than Atlantis pussy! Joe Sacco interviewing his own balls about the smell of his farts! God’s giant cock shitting on Louis Riel! Harvey Pekar’s ball cancer running out on him because he and his “fucking friends and […] fucking comics are so boring that [ball cancer] just can’t take it any more!” [NB: this, too, is pretty accurate…] Luba’s haemorrhoid punching a Mexican in the face! A mountaineer riding an off-road tampon! The US President imposing a new tax on baby rim-jobs! A woman so turned on by a passer-by in a shit-wig that she begs him to “do [her] in the butt right now, right here on the sidewalk!!”, but the guy has to go glue his dick back on, at Ye Olde Dick-Glue Shoppe! A giant statue of The Cleveland Steamer! ” Sweet Chubby” Cheeks and Li’l Bloody’s Silly Putty, “made from 100% real homosexual corpse scrotums! So you know it’s good!” A woman indignantly defending her right to breastfeed her beaver as “the most beautiful & natural thing a woman can do!” Martians that love nigger shit, faggot ass and gook splooge (which turn out to be Martian words for, respectively, ice cream, nuts and hot fudge)! Sherlock McRape investigating the strange case of a woman hit in the belly by a jar of jelly while watching Hitler’s robonic testicloids on the TV news! A man on a pogo stick bouncing from vagina to vagina! An “awesome new game” called “Mommy, my faggot has diarrhea!” A Ku-Klux-Klansman stripper jumping out of a wedding cake at a KKK wedding! A man who wakes up married to Retarded Hitler, who in turn goes nuts when offered grape juice because, naturally, he wants to “Exterminate the juice!”. The award ceremony for the 2005 COBBY Funniest Baby-Boner-in-the-Ear Gag of the Year Award! Hopey Glass strumming on Maggie Chascarillo’s electric asshole with her tongue!

You get the picture.

Using a simple structure to generate indefinitely many gags is one thing Wodehouse and Ryan also have in common with another highly-prolific humourist: John Stanley. Stanley created or co-created several thousand pages of Little Lulu and Tubby strips, not to mention hundreds of pages of other comics, and he too worked a million variations off a few basic themes: Lulu tries to join the boys’ gang, Lulu outsmarts Tubby with a dose of his own medicine, Lulu tells Alvin a story about that ol’ Witch Hazel, Tubby tries to impress Gloria and outdo Wilbur van Snobbe… If you want to churn out comedy by the barrel, this is evidently the way to do it.

10. PG Wodehouse is the pinnacle of English-language comedy — his musical dialogue, precision-tuned farce, and above all his inversions and manipulations and play with language and cliche.

But Wodehouse never drew a parody of Marvel Super-Villain Team-Up starring the Red Skull and Art Spiegelman. Advantage: Johnny Ryan.

***

Final Score: Tie

* For this piece, I’ve passed over Ryan’s more recent work, in which he often turns away from humour into straightforward horror or action. To talk about that material would be another post altogether.

** Self-indulgent autobiographical note: the only thing I got out of reading Bryan Talbot’s excruciatingly boring Alice in Sunderland was learning that the Liddell of Liddell and Scott, that faithful companion of my youth, was the father of Alice Liddell aka Alice in Wonderland. Small world.

Image attribution:

Boobs Pooter sketch, Johnny Ryan at Comic Art Collective

Photo of Ian Carmichael as Bertie Wooster, at Hot Guys in Period Costume

Frank Miller Hasn’t Even Seen the Venus Girdle

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Cameron Kunzelman has a longish post up in which he tries to figure out what’s special about Wonder Woman as a character. Among other things, he talks about this sequence from the mess that was Frank Miller’s DK2.

As this suggests — and as the rest of Kunzelman’s discussion shows — Miller’s WW is largely defined by her relationship with Superman. Sometimes she mocks him, sometimes she fights him, and ultimately (as we see here) she is conquered by him. The whole point of having the strong woman woman there, for Miller, is to make the strong man stronger through his domination of her. Shortly after this scene, Superman grabs her and fucks her and she declares that he’s made her pregnant (“Goodness Mr. Kent, you could populate a planet!”) If you’re feeling flaccid, dominate the castrating bitch and soon you’ll be uncastrated. Wonder Woman’s the phallus which means (a) she can’t have the phallus, and (b) owning her is to own the phallus.

That’s not exactly where Marston is coming from, obviously. For Marston, strong women aren’t there to highlight the dominance of strong men. On the contrary, it sometimes seems like just the opposite is true — strong men only exist to be dominated by strong women.

That’s from Sensation Comics #46. In this issue, like the text says, “An enemy’s subtle plot gives Steve Herculean strength!” A scheming female gangster figures that if Steve is stronger than Wonder Woman, he’ll get her to marry him, and then she’ll stay home and cook and clean rather than fighting bad guys. So she gives Steve an electrical (ahem) ball which makes him uberpowerful.

The plot works to some extent; as Wonder Woman says, Steve’s new strength is “thrilling.”
 

 
Ultimately, though, Wonder Woman decides that she doesn’t want a stronger man…
 

 
and so Steve does the right thing.
 

 
In some sense, this is, as I suggested, simply a reversal of Miller — in DK2, the strong woman submits; in Marston, the strong man does. Male/female is not a purely reversible binary, though; the two terms have long histories of meaning and inequity which aren’t simply substituted when you flip them. Men on top and women on top are different in more ways than just the positions of the bodies.

Specifically, Miller’s fantasy of men-on-top is about love as a seizing of power; love and force go together, so that when Superman fucks Wonder Woman, he literally sets off an earthquake. The power of the love is attested by its violence. Men on top express real love by seizing and destroying.

Marston disagreed. “Love is a giving and not a taking” he wrote in his psychological treatise. And so Steve expresses his love not by grabbing Wonder Woman and taking her as his prize, but rather by submitting. With women on top, love is giving up power, not seizing it; embracing weakness, not asserting strength. And where Miller’s version of love involves male dominance and excited female submission, Marston’s version of love-as-renunciation seems more reciprocal. Or, at least, Wonder Woman’s reaction to Steve’s weankness is not a swaggering assumption of mastery, but a blushing admission — “I do l-l-like you, just as you are — now.”

In this regard, I think this image is interesting:
 

 
That’s the sequence where Steve first gains his superstrength. The ball is given to him by a woman, obviously. In the first panel, she sits on the desk with her suggestive red dress, her legs spread — and Steve’s gaze seems directed at her crotch rather than at that glowing ball. At the same time, the women explains that the ball will do for Steve what Amazon training does for Wonder Woman. Thus, Steve’s strength is, both narratively and iconically, something taken from women — to be stronger is to be feminized. The point is further emphasized in the next panel, where Peter draws the usually chunky Steve with an almost bishonen grace — his blonde hair poofing out flirtatiously in front, his eyebrows curving eloquently, his lips unusually full.

In Miller, male strength emphatically enforces typical gender norms; Superman’s phallus turns Wonder Woman from battling Amazon to mother, and all is right with the world. In Marston, on the other hand, male strength feminizes…which doesn’t change the fact that when Steve submits out of love, he is also following a feminine ideal. Men on top reads gender straight; women on top, on the other hand, makes everything queer.

It’s probably needless to say that Miller’s version of the character seems to me in just about every way more conventional and less interesting than Marston’s. But more than that, I think Miller’s handling of Wonder Woman really suggests pretty strongly that Kunzelman is wrong when he says at the conclusion of his essay that “Wonder Woman is special.” After all, there’s nothing special about women-as-phallus; there’s nothing special about women as cog in male psychodrama. There’s nothing special (certainly not in Miller’s work) about fetishizing female strength in order to more fully fetishize the strong man who conquers it. Marston/Peter’s version of the character is touched by unique genius, of course. But that genius inheres in their writing and in their art, not in some random corporate property with a particular color scheme and appellation. If creators want Wonder Woman to be special, they need to make her special. Miller — and the vast majority of people who have worked on the character since Marston/Peter — haven’t bothered.

Hooliganism, High School Crime and Giant Snakes

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In 2010 I wrote a post about one of my three favorite manga/anime/TV/Live action movie series, Hana no Asuka-gumi. Asuka is indeed a righteous girl gang series, but it is not the oldest, nor the most successful. That honor has to go to what is one of the most awesomely outrageous series ever made, Sukeban Deka.

Life has not been kind to Asamiya Saki. At 16, she is doing time in a juvenile detention center for various crimes, when the police come to her with a nefarious deal – her mother is on death row for the murder of her father. If Saki works for the police to infiltrate high schools and root out criminal organizations, they’ll take her mother off death row. Saki agrees and becomes the Sukeban Deka – the Deliquent Detective.

The manga series, which ran from 1976 – 1982 in the pages of Hana to Yume magazine, was the first, the darkest and in many ways the craziest, of the three massively popular gang girl series. The manga spawned a live-action TV series that ran for three seasons from 1985-1987, in which the name “Asamiya Saki” becomes a title passed down through generations from the first Asamiya Saki to her successors. These were followed by two live-action movies in 1987 and 1988, in which two of the actresses that played Saki in the TV series reprise their roles. In 1991, an anime OVA, which covers the first arc of the manga was made (and for the finale alone, as Saki fights the evil high school crime leader on a burning oil tanker in the middle of the ocean, it’s totally worth seeing.) And, finally, in 2007 the series was resurrected for a brilliant homage/finale, distributed in English as Yo-Yo Cop, in which the original TV Saki, Yuki Saito, makes a cameo as the new Saki’s mother. All but the manga and TV series are available for purchase in English and I can’t stress strongly enough that you should at least see Yo-Yo Cop, because it’s pure genius.

Once Saki agrees to work with the police, she’s told that they can’t actually release her from prison…she has to escape on her own. With the help of her jail friends, Saki escapes and makes her way to the police, where she is given a Yo-Yo as a weapon (since minors can’t carry weapons, a proscription that Saki occasionally breaks when needed.) In the Yo-Yo is the Chrysanthemum seal, which Saki displays to let the bad guys know she is an official representative of the police. (Much as the protagonist of Mito Koumon displays the Shogun’s seal to let the bad guys know they were caught red-handed and by whom.)

Saki is taken under the wing of a half-Japanese, half-American named Jin who acts as mentor and boss. Jin and Saki eventually fall for each other, but they are never actually a couple in the course of the series.

As Sukeban Deka, Saki is enrolled in various schools long enough to draw the attention – and eventually the wrath – of the local criminal bosses. Saki takes down the gang, then the bosses and transfers away to the next school. In the course of the 22 volumes of the manga, Saki loses her memory, ends up on the west coast of the US for a while,  and then the east coast of the US for a while, until she regains her memory. Towards the end, Saki is transferred to one last post – in a juvenile detention center, rather than a regular high school. And this time, her enemy is not another student, but the evil warden himself, who raises giant snakes. Saki defeats the warden, of course. The final arc is the darkest, as she faces an adult criminal overlord. She wins, but at the sacrifice of…well, everything. Jin and she are finally united in death.

And death it is, as Wada Shinji makes perfectly clear on the last page. There will be no sequels of this series, as there were of Hana no Asuka-gumi or continuations as there were with YajiKita Gakuen Douchuuki. In fact, when the resurrections of those series brought girl gang manga back into the limelight a few years ago, Sukeban Deka was re-released as is, with no new material created.

The art style Wada used rode the line between shoujo and shounen at a time when it was massively unpopular to do so. Saki might be shown with “shock!” eyes, or with a murderously intense expression, and action shots were quite common. This style left its mark on many a mid-80s series, including Asuka and YajiKita . It’s not unfair to say that we might never have had a Revolutionary Girl Utena, or PreCure if we had not first had had Sukeban Deka.

 

My collection of obscura includes a Saki figurine and a Sukeban Deka Yo-Yo. But it’s this one still from the manga that is my most prized possession of Saki. This image of 16-year old Saki on her off hours, drinking and smoking will never again be replicated in today’s sanitized manga world. Sukeban Deka is a paean to a world that is lost, a world that contained high school crime syndicates, gang girl violence and giant snakes.

Good bye Saki – forever.