Author Archives: Darryl Ayo

Avengers, Assemble

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The index to the entire Joss Whedon roundtable is here.
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Introduction

“They’re trying to turn movies into comic books,” I lamented in the period of years, months and weeks leading up to the 2012 blockbuster The Avengers. My concern had been that, like superhero comic books, the Marvel Studios film franchise was beginning to focus on large events at the expense of the individual unit of storytelling.

In this day and age, and for many years prior, it has become less likely that an individual comic book would provide the reader with a complete narrative or even a fulfilling storytelling module. Entire comic books, even entire series would come and go and amount to essentially a chapter or even a paragraph in the big-picture narrative that had become priority for the publishers. More than selling comic books, Marvel (and DC) had begun pitching their full line of books to the audience as the end product. More than stories, Marvel had begun selling a lifestyle, a culture. When the films began under the Marvel Studios company, the references between the films felt cute and charming at first. And then when the Avengers project started to congeal into a reality, it stopped feeling cute and began feeling like bricklaying.

It turns out that bricklayers build sound structures, large buildings to exist inside of. I went to see 2012’s The Avengers film with three of my friends, comics people but not superhero fans. All four of us were impressed. Thrilled, tickled, impressed and thoroughly entertained. In addition, I was personally taken by surprise that Marvel’s scheme had truly worked out and paid off with a sound and entertaining film.

How did such a bizarre scheme work?

This is a film that is a sequel to several different films, which is something that to my knowledge hadn’t been attempted before. There have been previous near-attempts such as Kevin Smith’s linked New Jersey films and Quentin Tarantino’s interconnected film world. But those merely hinted at what Marvel’s The Avengers would eventually attempt and accomplish.

Character

This is a film with no single, fixed protagonist. Ensemble cast storytelling is not a common choice in popular narrative, most writers opting to lift one character above the others. While it can be argued that Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark functions as the protagonist of The Avengers, this character does not hold the primacy of position that he holds in the Iron Man films. While Tony Stark gets the most intimacy from the filmmaker Joss Whedon, his is not a point of view that the audience is necessarily tied to.

Each major character has his or her own narrative arc that from their perspective as characters, makes the narrative their own story. As an ensemble, The Avengers becomes the story of autonomous entities crossing paths and becoming a group. As such, the interplay between the characters feels human, lived-in and real. The reason it feels real is that just like people in real life, these characters are presented to the audience as idnividuals who have concrete histories, defined desires and motives. The characters do not appear in this narrative as storytelling props to support the story of one individual; rather they all seem important in themselves.

Scene Construction

The other achievement that Joss Whedon pulls off with 2012’s The Avengers is an unusual consistency in scene construction and weaving scenes and themes together. Admittedly, I don’t see enough movies to call myself a film expert but I know a thing or two about storytelling.

When watching (and rewatching) The Avengers, I felt that the film was built on an unusually firm structural foundation. The plot itself is not what I am referring to, the full plot of the film is fairly simple. It is the individual scenes that comprise the story which stand out in my mind. Each scene of The Avengers feels not only driven toward the plot and the underlying themes of the film but also feels like a small, neatly-constructed story in and of itself.

Every individual scene–from the establishment of conflict to the gathering of characters to the fight scenes–is built from the same conceptual engine. That engine is comedy. The scenes open with a setting and a premise, the characters go about their way to navigate their goals, personalities and compounding textual circumstances drive the scene toward its plot-relevant resolution and the scenes often punctuate with a joke.

As much as the action of this film is character-driven (essential since characters are the selling point of the film), it is the jokes that sell the film as a story and as a concept. Jokes, ironic reversals, physical comedy and sight-gags, miscellaneous scripting and directorial slights of hand. These are the rungs by which the narrative climbs up. Even the tip-tail end of the film is a punchline which loops back to a one-off reference to create a call-back.

The Avengers resonated with audiences because it took relatively simple themes, stacked them and juxtaposed them, looped them and returned to them at odd intervals, allowing the themes to move on different tracks, at different paces, which creates multiple effects: allowing the large cast to take turns reaching growth points in their individual character arcs as well as airing out a potentially dense story.

I mentioned above that even the fight scenes are constructed as character-driven, character-building, plot-relevant scenes rather than showy departures from the narrative. Thor’s stubbornness leading him to square off against Iron Man, Hulk’s rage which can only be matched by Thor’s clear-mindedness, Hulk sucker-punching Thor which called back the prior animosity. Everything from the punchlines to the literal punches operates in a dual function as comedy writing and character writing. The Avengers is an action film that doesn’t use wild or blurry action just for the sake of violence. Everything in the film is constructed to tell the story of how a small group of characters became friends.

Michael DeForge’s Sketchbook

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Michael DeForge destroys his sketches. He finishes his sketchbooks and then throws them away. This is a different approach to art than I am used to. For me, the sketchbook has always been a personal object. The closest approximation to an artist’s brain without telepathy. Personal letters to oneself. Sketchbooks are the work behind The Work. Many artists keep all of their sketchbooks, whether they look at them again or not. DeForge tosses his when he is finished. So I rethink what it is a sketchbook is for.

Michael DeForge publishes a lot of work. He has comic books from Koyama Press and Drawn & Quarterly. He self-publishes minicomics. He has comics in various anthologies. He posts things on his blog. He does commercial illustration. I would imagine that for him, the work itself in its final form is the personal journal of his progress. It could be that the sketchbook is merely practice. Raw, unsentimental practice.

If an artist uses sketchbooks for practice and not as some sort of defacto art project in and of itself, perhaps that artist no longer has use of the preliminary work. After all, we cartoonists think nothing of erasing our pencil lines after the ink is dry. What is the difference, now that I think of it? Why should the bound book of rough drawings be fetishized? When the final project is published, the rough work is… ?????

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My conception of sketchbook use was largely based around the idea of something between a diary and a catalogue of ideas. One problem for me is the struggle between practicing artcraft in a sketchbook and allowing the sketchbook to become the artwork itself.

I had a class in art school called Sketchbook Creation. The course was inspired by Alan Gordon, the professor’s travels across the country in which he made his paintings on the go in a bound book. His idea for the course was to help the students open up their imaginations through particular exercises and controlled free-associations. In the end most of us sort of ended up making work that looked like his. Some of us continued for years after graduation, making finished art in books of heavy paper. Portable, but shackled to a relatively restrained format. Sketchbooks weren’t practice anymore. They were the art itself.

Imagine having a sketchbook for your sketchbook.

Imagine sitting in front of the tool which is designed to be an outlet for experimentation and being unable to experiment because it has been recontextualized as yet another Grand Canvas. Sketchbook Creation was my best class in art school but it also shackled me and ruined me in some ways. I hardly doodled anymore. Every drawing had to be good enough to show people. To be fair to Alan, the film “Crumb” had previously contributed heavily to this tendency for me.

Things got better when I started talking to people who use their sketch books only to practice for projects that they were working on. It took a while to overcome the pressure that I had internalized about making “showpieces” in my sketchbooks but I feel as though I’m turning a new corner now.

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As I get older I have been growing more acclimated to the idea of impermanence. Not simply the idea that things change but more the idea that things are never fixed to begin with. Age gives perspective. We see a larger picture as we get older because events and phenomena take up a smaller percentage of our perspective as our years of existence increase. Six years means “since forever” when you are six years old. Six years means “as long as you’ve lived in this city” when you are thirty. Six years probably means very little when you are eighty-six. Your view cannot help but change as you take in more and more life experience. Things were never as “stable” as I thought they were when I was a child, I just lacked the experience to notice the movements.

In many ways an artist’s work has a life cycle as well. It’s “conceived,” no pun intended, it grows as the artist pours more work into it. The work matures and is sent into the world. At this point, we consider the tangible remnants of an art work’s youth. Do we save it in a drawer as humans do with their children’s baby clothes, perhaps in hopes of some future use? Or do we discard the husk as insects do?

I’m neither seeking nor am I suggesting an answer. Ultimately it’s a personality and lifestyle choice. As I stand amid the chaos of my bedroom, I would do well to cast away my preliminary drawings like a snake’s old skin. Being unsentimental about these things could probably spur me forward into being much more productive, as I tend to clutch things I’ve made, things I own. On the other hand, there are artists such as my old professor for whom “sketches” and cast off ideas are as treasured and valued as gallery paintings. Of course there isn’t a right or a wrong answer. The question itself is rhetorical.
 

Drawing by Michael DeForge

A Reading, A Rereading, and a Question

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About a month ago, I bought a comic book, read it, jotted down my response thoughts and moved on. As it happens I did not publish these thoughts. A little bit ago, I reread my written response. Then I reread the comic book itself. Then I set about crafting a new response. The second attempt at a response was worse than the first. The second reading of the text was less appreciative than the first reading. Time had passed. My opinion of the work had changed.

Since comic books are rooted in a periodical, serial paradigm, many of them are not even designed to be reread too many times. They become outdated the moment that a new installment become available for purchase. Those first impressions become our sole impressions.

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One of my personal short term goals is to read fewer comics. Read fewer things but read them harder. Read deeper. Soak them up and find things that a Wednesday-evening spree-reader might overlook. Perhaps those somethings that I seek simply aren’t present in many comic books. That’s fine too. I need to do fewer things. I need to be less frantic.

I need to relax. In all possible senses of the idea.

But my enthusiasm for sequential art burns bright as always. What I think that I would like to do is attempt to focus my enthusiasm on a handful (or fingerhold) of things rather than attempting to shovel a stack of magazines into my face every Wednesday evening.

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Cartoonists spend enough time making comics, the least we can do as readers is spend some time reading them.

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What is gained? What is lost? What changes for you as you reread comics? Do you reread comics? I don’t mean skimming or flipping to favored scenes. Do you restart a comic book and read it straight through the way you did when you first encountered it?

Here is my prompt for you: which comics have spent the greatest amount of time reading? For academic reasons, for your job, for fun, for nostalgia, to settle arguments–what are the comics that you personally read and reread?

And why?

Public Readings of Comics

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When I sit in my chair and and listen to the author speak, his or her voice carries me to a place of imagination. In many cases this experience helps put the listener into a frame of mind to absorb the work. Hearing the words with the author’s own inflection, tone and cadence has a transformative effect on the text.

In comics, the imagery is a literal part of the text. Image. Imagination.

The role that author readings fill in the experience of consuming prose is that of a facilitator. It serves to help guide the reader further into the author’s imagination. As they say, ninety percent of communication is through voice and facial response. Author public readings can enhance the audience’s relationship with the text.

In comics, one notices, the author’s imagery is already an aspect of the text.

What I find instead is redundancy and overstatement of the author’s worldview by placing the images upon the screen and also acting them out. Comics are, of course, a subgenre of the literary form drama. Drama, referring to plays, motion pictures: literature that is expressed through performance and acted out. While plays are acted out on the stage and motion pictures are acted out on the screen, comics are acted out on the page.

One would not attend a screening of a film and expect the director or screenwriter to be stand off to the side with a microphone, delivering all of the dialogue along with the actors. But this is what is done in comic author readings. There is an audience, a slide projector and the author not only telling the audience what is on the screen but actually reciting what is plainly spoken by the characters.

This sort of performance actually degrades the author’s own work by performing a redundancy. In trying to mimic the activities that their cousins, the print authors, undergo to create an intimacy with the audience, comics authors actually sabotage their own work. The result is a hollow imitation of both comics and prose.

The reason that these public readings enhance the experience for prose audiences is that they help guide the audience into a sense of an author’s imagination–an entirely new dimension to the work. The reason that public readings are corrosive to comics is that this extra dimension of immersion is actually competing for the audience’s attention against comics’ innate best attribute which is imagery itself.
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Image from Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem

How About the Children’s Crusade? Was That Moral?

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Every day I plant my seeds on twitter and see what trees will grow. When discussing the ongoing struggle against Time Warner and their child company DC Entertainment, particularly with regards to their campaign of exploitation against Alan Moore, I was chastised for framing the discussion in terms of black and white morality. Specifically, my argument is that all of the participants in the Watchmen project are in fact immoral.

I don’t see why people who are quick to condemn companies as entities shy away from judgement when talking about the men and women who carry out the offending actions. What DC is doing is wrong and the men and women who are working on these projects are wrong for working on the projects. I’ve heard it all about “they have families/mortgages, it’s not their fault” and blah blah blah. Personally, I make thirty thousand dollars per year. Darwyn Cooke is said to have received nearly half a million dollars for his Watchmen miniseries. So we can stop weeping for these poor starving artists who had no choice. Put your violins away.

Most people who know me flinch when I say: Watchmen is the greatest graphic novel of all time. Everybody protests, but my feeling is that they are protesting not the sentiment but rather that “greatest graphic novel of all time” is an answerable quantity. People want it to be unanswerable. Not coldly, flatly answered with “yes, there is a greatest–you read it already, years ago.”

This isn’t to say that better graphic novels aren’t possible in our medium’s future. Just that this book hasn’t been surpassed. Not surpassed in scope, intelligence, craft or cultural effect. Hasn’t been done yet.

Thimble Theatre is a better comic. It isn’t a graphic novel. Maus is important but it isn’t a graphic novel. No novel in comics form–no graphic novel–is greater than Watchmen. You have to deal with that. It isn’t an argument I am interested in having with people. As the greatest graphic novel yet created, it stands shoulder to shoulder with the other great testaments to the power of comics. Thimble Theatre, King Cat and so on. So then, some executives look at their legal documents and say: “yes. Let us add onto this story. That is a legitimate thing to do with a work of art. We shall commission a group of artists and writers to write so many spin-offs that the original work shall be dwarfed. Furthermore, as legal rights-holders we will insist that these new works are a part of the overall text that comprises Watchmen because we can.”

For actual decades, the devotees of this artform have struggled to see this medium treated as a legitimate field. One of the greatest arguments for graphic novels and comics in general as a legitimate creative artform has now been retrofitted as a hot summer crossover event. If art is to have any meaning to human culture then there should be some basic deference to the undisturbed value of the few works that have moved us forward as a people.