So I’m back from my summer gig as a teacher to feral high school students and I’m stepping down from blogging here at the Hooded Utilitarian.

No juicy gossip behind it, unfortunately.

I’m just joyously busy with business and life, requiting this & that, and setting aside most of my critical work. Instead I’ll pull some creative projects out from their dust clothes. Also, I’ve learned some very nice swears in Arabic (unrelated).

I have some articles & reviews coming from TCJ, as well as my desultory blog at my own site. I will change its focus from reviews into a freer, more personal notebook. Which had already happened, actually.

As to the Utilitarian, it’s been quite a pleasure to spend a while here in the company of these writers. Noah’s great to work with, and everyone else is a joy to read and spar with in the comments. I always enjoyed that I never had any idea what the next post would be about, or what angle it might take. Some ways of reading, like those informed by gender, don’t come naturally to me, so I’ve profited from them. And I never found my own critical perspective flattered. Which is why I’ll still be reading. And why I’m sad I to go.

I want to leave on this note:

In the Summer 2009 issue of Bidoun, a magazine of arts & culture from the Middle East, there’s an interview with the four cartoonists behind Samandal, a trilingual comics anthology published out of Lebanon. (You can download the first three issues of the young, so far middling anthology– I liked Sandra Ghosn’s entry in #3, anyway.)

A lot of the interview’s childhood nostalgia between Fdz and Hatem Imam. Some standard fare about comics’ junk status meaning political freedom, about censorship. This and that.

And there’s this:

NA: Who’s your youngest contributor?

FDZ: Hashem Raslan. He’s in high school. He sent us a comic about killing his teachers. I think he’s the youngest. Then there are the girls in Tripoli– they’re maybe nineteen.

NA: Who are the girls in Tripoli?

OMAR: They contacted us with a submission. They are very shy and quiet– three veiled girls who are influenced most by yaoi manga, which are Japanese comics about beautiful boys that fall in love with each other. It’s a genre. I found it very peculiar.

NA: Do they know Japanese?

OMAR: No, they were reading online fan translations, which have horrendous English. …The girls submitted tales of unrequited love!

The new Comics Journal is out with a diverse lineup. The interviews are with twins Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon and Perry Bible Fellowship creator Nicholas Gurewitch. R.C. Harvey weighs in & in on Obama caricature in political cartoons, while Tom Hart critiques Ron Regé’s first big collection. (I wish more cartoonists wrote criticism.)

Noah & Tom do not appear, more’s the shame, but I’ve got two pieces on very different manga.

One’s an introduction to a sample from Jiro Taniguchi’s A Distant Neighborhood, forthcoming from Fanfare/Ponent Mon. The other’s a review of the October 2001 volume of the alt-manga anthology AX, the one with the Jim Woodring cover. It’s my contribution to the discussion of the Top Shelf’s orthcoming AX collection prepared by Mitsuhiro Asakawa & Seán Michael Wilson. My article’s half review, half overview, with a look at the scuttlebutt from the end of Garo and the birth of AX.

One of the joys of print, other than shelving, is that I wrote it so long ago that it feels like somebody else wrote it. I’m not saying I read the whole thing nodding and got surprised at the byline, I’m just saying.

Speaking of canons, I’d dust off a place for Dan Zettwoch in mine. Half of it’s me being a homer, half me liking familiar people and places. The other half’s that his characters have the old can-do spirit of the US in the Depression, the wars, maybe just mowing down the wilderness for suburbs and parking lots so Kevin Huizenga can have something to draw.

One more half: they might use their can-do spirit to cut down trees with their chins, not knowing it can’t be done. That’s how he draws them, the football blocks in his Kramers spread, the ’37 flood’s boatman, or the actors in his painting on the cover of the new Cinefamily brochure (detail):

That it’s of Jerry Lewis, the seminal infantile American comic now widely loathed and painful to watch because he’s so damn naked, even better. His sketches are all angles and elbows, the final version softer, with Lewis’ wound-up energy below the surface.

(I like his Sanford & Son drawings even better, since that’s my middle name.)

Kramers Ergot 7 opens with the denoument and ends with the descent. Sammy Harkham’s front cover shows an idyll after the apocalypse, while Shary Boyle’s back cover shows a leap into Hell. Or just a volcano’s less epic torments. So the book points to a narrative scale equalling its size. A few of the pieces inside (Ryan, Hernandez) can’t be asked, others just go for epic images (stunning works by Xavier Robel and Will Sweeney). The best mix grand stories with grand images.

Two in particular tell whole epics in their two or three pages. The first, a delightful sad myth by Shary Boyle, follows a bride cursed with a dead groom and an elephant mask. As these things go, she sets out to find a graveyard. Like leathery elephant skin, caves and nighttime enclose youth’s bright colors. There she finds an old Bavarian, blood-stained linens, and the crone of the moon. After a mere two pages, the final couple of panels are deeply moving. You’ve been somewhere. This is a old folktale, one with their full complexity, a myth with no dust. The title? “Grow Old.”

The second visits Kim Deitch’s America. Some years ago he met a man who’d known Louie Armstrong. The man was a counterculture visionary, aiming to create a whole new culture in the underground. His startup mixed LSD sodas until the Man put him down. He fled, only to be found years later mummified on a boat with his last disciple, still tripping. (This all has to be true.) Bottlecaps sprinkled in the margins tie the whole together. It hints at those quintessentially American stories: the Hardy Boys, Terrytoons, Horatio Alger. For all the graphic bravado in Kramers, Deitch’s piece left me the most slackjawed. It’s a creation myth with destruction besides for one generation of Americans. Its images burned into my eyes, and Deitch wraps it in layers and layers of tawdry pop culture whose meanings open up and out.

Both these stories strike me as myths in the best sense. They’re origin stories. The details of a character’s life get hoisted onto a larger stage and bleached by the lights. The song & dance tell us who we are. Compare Tom Gauld’s version of Noah’s Ark in Kramers, where myth’s emptied so that Shem and Ham can gripe about their crazy dad. Gauld’s story pits the grand scale of Noah’s project, drawn in huge tableaux, against smaller panels sized for his kids’ complaints. The entire hassle of listening to God, who knows who you are and what you should do, gets drawn as a Rube Goldberg contraption with animals two by two. Shem & Ham can’t be bothered. Once they’re surrounded by the flood, they can’t understand how Noah was right after all. Gauld’s vision is contemporary: even if there’s a miracle, it just won’t scan. Without seeming fusty, Boyle & Deitch tap into something primordial.

Of course, calling things myths can get out of hand. Some weeks ago, someone around here (me?) took a swipe at Joseph Campbell– a critic I haven’t read in some time as I feel I know him too well. He’s the guy whose ideas, a stew of Jungian archetypes and Perennialism, gave screenwriters a way to sound more important. The prime mover there is Star Wars, a Western I grew up on. I loved it; it’s vivid enough in my memory that I haven’t revisited it for years. To hear 1000 faces talk, though, it’s the Iliad teamed up with the Mahabharata.

I’ve never been comfortable with that reading. The film, along with its sequels, imitators and any other screenplay mainlining Campbell and Robert McKee, tells me all about the stuff George Lucas grew up on rather than the place he grew up. (You have to go to American Graffiti for that.) Star Wars reads as John Ford-via-Kurosawa, Errol Flynn, everything a middle-class kid or film student would know. He wouldn’t know the veins flowing beneath John Ford’s work, though, the details in the archetypes. I think of my parents’ generation, who spent very little time in front of a screen, but got Westerns in a way I can’t. Go out and tame the wild, bend nature, build dams and damned superhighways. They’re America’s creation myth.

My generation couldn’t be asked. Everything was built for us, so our stories often trade bleached-out details for no details at all. Fortunately, Joe Campbell’s there to give us a reason why. Yet his entire project differs considerably from the aesthetic shorthand it’s become. A poorly drawn character’s backstory becomes “mythos,” when “mythos” should refer just to the fundament Campbell believed was common to all. How odd that now creation myths like the Western have given way to Life After People, three dozen climate change movies, or the scrubbing bubbles of civilization-eating zombies. Destroy the foundations, then. Which is why I love the pieces by Deitch and Boyle so much. They’re small gestures, reminders of those delightful, sad ways of feeling human.

Darren Hughes of Long Pauses on the cliché epidemic in music reviewing:

Eh, no excerpt. He just quotes a dozen or so music writers all saying this album’s like Disney. Funny to see them all with no pants. And while not endemic to music reviewing, it’s probably worse there as most writers have no technical knowledge of microphones or sheet music. So no A-flat sonority above contra D, a line taken from the notes to a Silvestrov symphony. I only vaguely know what it means, like whenever I find Harvey Pekar liner notes in a jazz CD. He writes lucid, technical music criticism that I, as an illiterate musician, can barely parse. Mea culpa. For better or worse, I learned playing & reading about alt-rock and noise– back when I read reviews, they were all texture and pose. Lots of nice prose, often with nothing whatsoever to do with the disc. I.e., performance crit, the music of words, not music. I doubt much has changed.

One of these day’s I’m gonna take this up on my other blog about Japrocksampler, the *cough*-titled book about 70s freakrock on the earthquake islands. Until then, I’ll wait for the day when all us online comics critics trip over ourselves to post at the same time the exact same thing in the exact same words about, I don’t know, some book that doesn’t exist yet, like New Uncle Scrooge Adventures.