Starting later today, we at the Utilitarian will begin our latest round of theme posts.
This time: reviews of imaginary comics.
I’ll go first, with a review of “Tea-Time” #1, followed one-a-day through Wednesday. As always, comments & criticism are welcome. Just try to keep them imaginary.
Before the manga roundtable, our Tom Crippen asked why manga adaptations sucked. No helpers appeared with either generosity or bile, just me.
And this is my response, half-answer, half-question. Purely from the stance of what’s pleasing, not what’s good business, since Japanese cross-marketing is pretty ridiculous. I mean, cow catchers.
First, classic-to-manga. (I’m saving manga-to-movie for another day.)
Like Tezuka’s Disnefications of Crime and Punishment and Faust. Both kids’ works from the early 50s, they’re strange marriages, like the Otto Preminger-Jackie Gleason acid-trip movie Skidoo. Once Groucho Marx shows up as God, you can’t stop wondering how such a thing ever happened. There’s Faust, cute as a button! There’s the devil, a nice doggie!
Worse yet:
Yes, that’s him. Thank East Press.
They publish a few books you might know, like Travel and Disappearance Diary. They also do Comic CUE, the flashy, infrequent cousin of the alt-manga anthology Ax everyone’s talking about lately.
They been mangafying the classics. Rashomon, War and Peace, freaking Marx, Machiavelli, Hitler. With twice as many books as the last time I looked. They’re shameless: the series is entitled, more or less, “Finish reading them with manga!” Since no-one would ever read all those words, certainly not illiterate youths. Cliff’s Notes and all that.
So his outrage and sense of the absurd might fit in manga. I paid my money and I took my chance.
Ouch. I was going to post about manga’s tilt to melodrama, and how Manga-Ango running around screaming would fit better in issue #53 of the Sub-Mariner rather than a version of a classic. About how just drawing a writer this mercurial as a cartoon character, fit for a model kit, betrays his technique. Then I started rereading the source works and wondered if I should write a column about this.
At least the manga has modern-day Shibuya crossing in flames.
So as I see it, the question isn’t whether manga/comics/macrame can or can’t do nuance. They all can when the artist isn’t “Variety Art Works,” who takes all blame for the East Press books. The question is, in an ideal world, what do you get from mangafication? More than just quick & easy consumption? Are some things (stats books, LotR, weddings) better-suited to manga than others (wakes, House of Leaves, Georges Bataille)? What in your life should be mangafied, and why?
I’m batting cleanup. & I think Tom, Miriam, & Noah are perfect just as they are. So no suggestions for what they just have to read (outside every manga column I’ve ever written for TCJ).
Just three bunts, written listening to Animetal Lady:
The Point of Manga Is…
…to cocoon. Not just in shelves & shelves of 40, 50, 100 volume series– in character goods, posters, costumes, movies, soundtracks. Pencil boards, cel phones, cow catchers. You can use the new Kramers Ergot as a pup tent, but all of Dragonball could build the Great Wall.
The rest of it could fill the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
On land, people cocooned in manga cafes, even living them. Hikikomori, humorously presaged in Otaku no Video, who fear the sun. It’s all rather urban, where life’s a series of little boxes. Like the model-builder in Otomo’s Domu, the best comic on Brutalist architecture.
Also like the great wall of Mao’s Little Red Books in La Chinoise. But for fantasists, not ideologues. Otaku don’t conceal & carry.…to Globalize the Youngsters (aka “The Daihatsu and the Olive Tree”).
If the 21st Century City is Asian, at least 20th Century Pop was American.
Every other country just imitates our pop culture, or at least they did. (I’m sure someone will comment me down. Knock yourself out, but give specific examples of a non-American pop scene that has spread worldwide like syphillis. What’ve you got, Godard? Scandinavian metal? Okay, Brits have a point if the Beatles leapt whole from Chuck Berry’s skull.)
The few robust pop pockets– Bollywood– usually traveled only with the diaspora. Anime & manga, though, had precious few immigrants to spread them. So foreigners stepped up.
They did well: you can find manga-style pop everywhere from Kuala Lumpur to Krakow.
I don’t know what the next non-American All-World pop culture phenom will be. My money’s not on Eurovision. I do know that there will be one. If it’s like manga, following it will take a big commitment– it’s two full-time jobs keeping up with translations and nobody’s hiring. It will have its own language and rules that make it seem exclusive. It will be modern but not Western, just like Japan.
And it will be some kind of sexy.
All of which explain part of Western manga/anime fandom. I always thought the point was to get all the non-prom kids to dress in notional wisps of spandex and pack them in steamy hotels at the height of summer. Good for them!
The only problem is, they’ll teach their kids to like Japan better than the US of A, so when Taro Aso shows up and peels off his skin to reveal the Reaper, we’re doomed. Unless we got a new president yesterday and our foreign policy’s changed.
Finally: the point of manga is best explained by Asian Steve.
He’s subtle Yin to blackasthenight‘s husky Yang. He has a radio show on a college station somewhere in the sticks. He plays K-Pop, though I doubt he’s from Incheon.
I caught it in the car, not long after a stint working on farm in Kurume with a trio of Korean college kids who belted songs at the pears all day. They spoke of Boa, so I called the station.
"This is Asian Steve."
"Hi, Asian Steve. Do you take requests?"
"YES! YES! What do you want to hear?"
"Boa?"
"Which album?"
"I don't know!"
Then Asian Steve and I rocked to Boa as I drove into the sun. You weren’t invited, but we preferred it that way. Soon I arrived at the gent’s club, where I toasted in High Latin as we all tried to forget we’re surrounded by tobacco fields planted with crystal-meth users.
Conclusion: manga breeds Asian Steves. Great explainers, evangelists. But their chief should have the Christian name of Ron. “Manga Ron.” Get it?
???! I’m hilarious.
Anyway, that’s part of the point, right? Finding your own private ecosystem and then explaining the biodiversity within is a joy. Of course, that perspective dates me. Many readers younger than me don’t see the divisions, I think. And a handful of cartoonists, like Hilary Florido and Laura Park, effortlessly mix influences. They both lift from manga stuff that suits them, ditch the rest, and draw with a sense of Western cartoon history in their lines.
Sweet. Global culture, here we come.
So I took the various recommendations for stand-up comedians (thanks to all who commented), but I’m left (mostly) feeling like Noah with Achewood. Mostly obvious jokes delivered with the assumption that being on stage is a virtue. Demetri Martin, Zach Galifainakis, pretty flat I thought.
Even Patton Oswalt, who’s likable enough, seems to base his routine on statements of obvious facts? Like his 80s metal bit– metal has always gleefully parodied itself. His descriptions aren’t as funny as the music videos.
I liked Jim Gaffigan, though. His routine doesn’t seem like an audition for a sitcom. And it’s intricately designed for the stage, which I appreciate.
More generally– he also seemed like the only comedian not just taking shots at people. He layers it so he’s often the butt, or you can’t tell who’s the butt. But Patton Oswalt just seems like this guy who makes fun of people different than him (getting back to what Miriam said) while standing above it all.
I could be wrong, as I’ve only watched three or four clips for each. But I can say it’s a trend in American humor. The Daily Show, say, does a lot of media commentary, but on slow news days they humiliate civilians on the street. I think it’s rather American– I recall an essay in the English film journal Sight & Sound about a rash of American indie docs that ridicule their subjects. (American Movie, Michael Moore, anything set in the rural South, the camera loves rubes and freaks.)
So the comedian/filmmaker’s in control and unassailable. Feh. I’d rather watch them suffer as the fee for my attention.
Japanese comedy duo, did manzai standup until ’91, now mostly variety shows. Brilliantly inventive & cruel variety shows.
I like their “No Laughing” year-end specials. Like 2007’s “24 Hour Absolutely No Laughing Hospital,” with punishment games if someone laughs. Plenty of ridicule and humiliation, but all aimed at the show’s hosts, who dress as nurses and get whipped whenever they laugh.
Scores of comedians gang up on them to make them laugh. Elaborate gags, huge production numbers, random appearances by Black Jack. What’s not to like?
Comics connection: early in the show, UMEZU Kazuo, author of The Drifting Classroom and Cat-Eyed Boy, shows up as part of the hospital’s Special Rescue Team. The training drill requires him to sprint to a dummy & revive it. (He’s in his 70s.)
While running, he falls into a concealed pit. Hilarity ensues.
Then, a bunch of black-clad nurses show up and beat the hell out of the show’s four stars who laughed at this poor guy. That’s comedy!
Issue #295 of The Comics Journal is now out online and maybe in a day or two to the stands. Our contributors have several articles in:
Not only that, but I was delighted to see NG SUAT TONG back! He hasn’t lost a step: “Now if this bland listing seems somehow unfair to El Rassi’s artistry, let me assure the reader that the author has none.”
And when did Frank Santoro start doing the minicomics column? This issue? He’s a great choice, and I’m glad to see him there. Frank, welcome, but don’t be surprised if everyone starts assuming everything you say comes from a secret earpiece back to Gary Groth’s command center. (Also glad to see Tender Loving Empire reviewed.)
In 2008, I was in one place for a long time for the first time in a long time. And I had a library. So I caught up: Mahler, Hope Larson, The Golem’s Mighty Swing, Dash Shaw, Bardin. I could make a list from Jeffrey Brown to that excruciatingly unreadable autism manga. Or I could list online reads, from “Pictopia” (finally) to Kate Beaton and critical writing, most of which melts together.
Instead, I’ll just note the new comics of Finland. “Com of Finland,” why not? I discovered the anthology Glomp this past year, and have since written about works by Amanda Vähämäki and Katja Tukiainen for TCJ‘s special section of Finnish comics coming soon. And I actually found a copy of the Finnish anthology KutiKuti‘s first issue, colors pulsing on newsprint, in a stack of my old papers. Don’t know where I got it. Can’t read it. But it’s fun to look at (pictured above).
So: Finnish comics, far more vibrant and essential than I could have imagined. But it could have been another pocket of comics, as the landscape looks much more vast than it did just a few years ago. There are dozens of new artists I don’t know, and even more I never will. Good. Before I started writing on comics in 2000, I had spent three or four years reading all the touchstones I could. Then it seemed doable. Now, keeping up with everything seems quite impossible, and ignorance a sure thing going forward. Good.
Reading Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Abhay Khosla confirmed why I don’t read Khosla: I don’t know 90% of the comics he covers. But I do like the tension in these two quotes:
[#1] With art comics, the conversations that I tend to see, it’s not as much about actually caring about what happens to the characters who live in the four-corners of the page. … I’ve never seen anyone go nuts on the internet over what happened to Crying Asian Man from some Adrian Tomine comic. “I’m going to predict what happens to Crying Asian Man in the next issue of Optic Nerve.” Never seen that. I’ve never seen a Crying Asian Man fan-site, or anyone dressed as Crying Asian Man at a comic convention, or Crying Asian Man slash-fic.
(Now, since “Crying Asian Man” sounds like “Crying Freeman,” from now on I’ll see Adrian Tomine’s deathly still hipsters threatened by a yakuza assassin’s speedlines.)
And:
[#2] Comics, animation, both seems to dis-empower the artists even though they’re art-driven media.
(He’s drawing a distinction here between writer-as-creator and artist-as-creator, but I think the former point informs the latter in a slanted way.)
Think of Nancy. There’s Bushmiller’s Nancy, the Gilchrists’, and John Stanley’s comic-book Nancy. Bushmiller’s defines the character, but didn’t create her. She’s almost Platonic:
She doesn’t need the artists who drew her, or the writers who wrote her: model sheet immortality.
That’s seemed to me like a condition of cartooning. The characters tend not to change, and actively resist it. So they transubstantiate into models, toys, and character goods, and any one artist’s intentions are just a footnote. (Cartooning as iconography, as opposed to drawing as record-of-seeing).
But prose fiction, Optic Nerve‘s model, can be read as a record of a character’s change. The payoff’s often enough the character realizing the change, epiphany at the end. In comics, as in genre fiction, I think the stability of the characters works against this– Optic Nerve and many of the 90s wave of literary graphic novels have paralysis as a theme, full of characters frozen in ice.
This could be a fundamental difference in the media. The comics that deal in time have done so over decades: Cerebus, Gasoline Alley. Even the Palomar stories seem to return to state whenever Gilbert does one of those episodes where all the characters show up for a big party.
(Nitpick: Edmund Gosse was a hack just as a scholar! Father & Son lives on.)
