Author Archives: Ng Suat Tong

Review: The Man Who Grew His Beard

Posted on by

The Man Who Grew His Beard is a somewhat unexpected offering from Fantagraphics, a publisher known for its broad interests in classic American and European reprints, grungy undergrounds, “reality-based” dramas, and autobiography. The chief aspect which surprises in this anthology of stories by Olivier Schrauwen is its deeply entrenched formalism. Perhaps the closest thing to it in the Fantagraphics catologue might be Kevin Huizenga’s periodic forays into formal playfulness in Ganges, but even here the mood is much closer and more empathetic; not so much the arm’s length mental instability that can be found in Schrauwen’s narratives.

Schrauwen’s stories demand a certain degree of rereading, a flipping back and forth between pages and stories to decipher the playful code keys elaborating on the language of comics — the cartooning short hand, the persistent thematic fixtures and their variations. The story “Hair Styles”, for example, gives us a 6 fold division of grooming which is then further subdivided into a kind of follicular phrenology — a visual depiction of a kind of cartooning determinism where form dictates function.

Thus, a character with “crazy hair” ultimately acts in a wild and disinhibited manner before being put in his place.

 

In contrast, the taxonomist among these practitioners is singled out for effusive praise by a bespectacled onlooker (one presumes an analogue for that species of writer now known as the comics critic).

The besuited illustrators are very far from the general conception of cartoonists and take on the semblance of academicians in a drawing room. The task at hand (the aforementioned taxonomy of cartooning hairstyles) and the nature of their dressing are intentionally incongruous. On the one hand, the story could be seen as mere playful nonsense. On the other, a wry comment on rigid or fanciful cartooning systems; a gentle poke in the ribs for those taken with definitions and categorizations, a reminder of the medium’s humble roots.

The rest of Schrauwen’s stories suggest that this is as much self-criticism as a humorous review of cartooning practices, for much of the work in this collection has a jaunty yet “high-minded” tone. This attitude is carried over to Schrauwen’s next story, “The Assignment”, where the participants are now challenged to create a story featuring a cat, a table, a bottle of milk, a mouse, a piece of cheese, and Mr. Peters.

 

Part of this is a transposition of Mattioli’s Squeak the Mouse which is itself derived from Tom and Jerry. The final drawing of a dead cat is deemed unacceptable by the instructor-critic whereupon a graphic dissection of everything that has preceded this point is carried out — the gradual peeling back of the layers of skin and intestine of a dead cat to reveal a point of origin.

 

This codifying and deciphering of different realities is seen again in the story “Outside/Inside” which presents us first with the physical interactions of Schrauwen’s familiar bearded protagonist before proceeding to the multi-colored ramblings of a deranged mind to explain everything that has gone on before.

 ___

This motif is recalled in the penultimate story in this collection, “The Imaginist”, where the shadowy hues and lines capturing the broken, shriveled body of humble reality are juxtaposed with the kaleidoscope of hues which make up a stroke victim’s imaginary world. In all of these tales, there is the suggestion that there is nothing quite so shabby as reality.

These exercises are diverting but fall short when compared to the first story in Schrauwen’s collection (the wordless “Chroma Congo”) where the barriers are flexible, mutable, and barely discernible; a world perched precariously on the edge of dreams and the fantasies of Leopold II (who appears again as a mystical talisman in “The Imaginist”).

 ___

The protagonist (that familiar bearded figure again) is sensitive yet solitary, compassionate yet complicit. His rotting mind is conjured up in an ant-ridden slab of Belgian chocolate, the over-sized bilious faces, and the stunted monstrosities which inhabit the African landscape. It will come as no surprise that Schrauwen’s work has been compared to that of Winsor McCay (the colors, the permissive attitude towards perspective and proportion) both in reviews and in his publicity material.

The chromatic shakiness — that disavowal of shadow in favor of bright, light pastels — recalls Herge’s Tintin, the riverboats which stream before our eyes, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There is not one glimpse of an actual African. This world of menacing hippos, screaming monkeys, and rifle safaris seems a silent comment on the validity of Conrad’s vision of a dark continent of swaying “scarlet bodies” wearing mangy skin[s] with pendent tail[s], shouting “periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language”, “like the responses of some satanic litany”.

 ___

All of this far away from that semblance of normality (the Belgian sausages and cold beers at sundown) and civilization built on the banks of the Congo as seen in the final pages of the story.

 The Royal Belgian Express “heading for its damnation”, the tracks seeming “to lead right into the hole of a giant witch.”

Further Reading

A review by Bart Croonenborghs

A review by John Dermot Woods at Faster Times

Love and Rockets: The Love Bunglers

Posted on by

[This article contains spoilers throughout]

 

The ending to “The Love Bunglers” is but one ending among many in Jaime Hernandez’s Locas saga; all of them pretending to a certainty derived from an earlier age of innocence.

It is 1988 and Hernandez is writing and drawing the second part of “The Valley of the Polar Bears”. Hopey has left Maggie to go on tour with Terry’s band. Maggie has found new happiness in the arms of Ray Dominguez. They walk arm in arm into a happy future. The words of an imperfect prophet suggest that she could be coming to “the end of her whirlpool”.

She isn’t.

A few hundred pages on and it is 1996; the faithful reader now faced with the closing pages of “Bob Richardson”. Maggie and Hopey suddenly meeting for the first time in “years” at the back of a police car after a series of setbacks; finally together again as they once were 50 issues prior. The perfect ending.

Each of these moments as final as a relationship, wedding, or birth in our own lives; everything apt to be corroded by time.

These periodic assertions of finality are recapitulated in “The Love Bunglers”. Here old past times are recreated…

 ___

[1985 —> 2011]

…and ancient paths retread.

 

___

[1985 —> 2011]

The pair of lovers (Maggie & Ray) stuttering, burning brightly, fizzling out, and then rekindled over the course of a few chapters and over 20 years of comics. If likened to a piece of music then a kind of ritornello with elaborations bordered by tuttis where the orchestra plays as one.

This symmetry is reflected in the construction of Jaime’s story and the positioning of “death” in between the story of the two lovers. The first is a kind of foreboding where Maggie’s brother, Calvin, traumatized by abuse, and with a mind to save his sister, beats his tormentor to a pulp. That figure is later seen tortured by obsessive ruminations over the validity of his actions; these thoughts now carried to their natural conclusion of eternal vigilance over his sister. He is a ghost walking the streets, lost in shadow but ever ready to reiterate the past and its tragedies. A personification of his sister’s own state of mind.

In the latter half of “The Love Bunglers”, Letty, Maggie’s childhood friend, becomes an unwitting sacrifice to that tragedy — first pushed into the background by Maggie’s despair at her father’s unfaithfulness and then slowly rebuilding an old bond with her friend. There is space enough to wonder why she has been thus displaced, whether this can be put down to Maggie’s new found wariness or simply her mother’s shame at the preceding events; now spreading like a disease through her family, all of whom are kept close to the nest in light of the recent affliction that has unfolded.

Both of these episodes present themselves as answers to Maggie’s insecurities, always alluded to at various points in Hernandez’s long running series but now brought to the fore. As Ray Dominguez lies bleeding on the ground towards the close of the story, his skull crushed by a brick wielded by Maggie’s deranged brother, Hernandez offers his readers an encapsulation of this pattern of self-flagellation. Ray’s vegetative thoughts of Maggie seguing into Maggie’s own recollections; a gentle push into reconstruction and reminiscence on the part of the author.

Panel 1. It is 1997 and Hernandez will soon be embarking on his much lauded homage to Charles Schulz in “Home School” — clean, elegant lines, wiry hair, and brick walls.

In “6 Degrees of Ray D. Ation”, Ray meets the young Maggie for the first time. There is a hammer hanging over Ray’s head held by a young Maggie, just as so many years later her brother will hold a brick over Ray. He is a willing victim, a deer caught in the headlights. She, his unwitting “scourge”.

Panel 2. Maggie moves back to Hoppers after her parents separate. A friendship is rekindled and Maggie emerges from her shell.

Panel 3. A pose which mirrors that at the end of “The Death of Speedy”.

The school year is coming to a close and Ray has managed to get an art scholarship and will be leaving town. Soon Letty will be dead, a crutch taken from Maggie.

Panel 4. “The Return of Ray D.” (1986). A moment between panels and between pages. Maggie has just been kicked out of her friend Danita’s house and has been wandering the cold streets at night. “Three-thirty in the morning an’ my bed is fifteen miles away…” Ray has been away for 3 years and they meet unexpectedly at a doughnut shop. He only recognizes her after the fact. Maggie remembers that she once started a rumor that they went out “cause I liked him. Like I liked Race…and Speedy…”

 

Panel 5. “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” (1987). Ray has just seen his friend, Litos, shot in the face, and he is sitting together with Maggie in a hospital. “Why are you the only sane person here?” she asks. A moment of quiet as Maggie rests on his blood stained shirt, and then she leaves him to meet Speedy who will be dead within moments.

 

 

Panel 6. A Mess of Skin (1987). Hopey has left Maggie to go on tour with Terry. Left to her own devices back in Hoppers, Maggie accidentally jumps into a car thinking it is driven by Doyle and sees that it is being driven by Ray. They hook up to Daffy’s consternation. All this before that joyful and ephemeral conclusion mentioned above.

 

Panel 7. Maggie is posing for Ray but she’s stiff and lifeless, finally delegating her duties to Danita who soon shacks up with Ray. It is the beginning of the end for the couple, all this belied by a strained smile, happily ignored by readers of the time hoping for a reunion with Hopey.

Panel 8. “Ninety-Three Millions Miles from the Sun”. The end of the affair. Maggie says a final goodbye to Ray before Hopey puts her through another trauma and she disappears for the duration of “Wigwam Bam”.

 

This before that other blissful and temporary end which closed the magazine sized issues of Love and Rockets. The end of an era. The magazine’s circulation dropping from its heydays, partly due to the Hernandez Brothers fascination with convoluted narratives, dead ends, and indefinite resolutions.

Panel 9. “Life Through Whispers”. Doyle meets Maggie for the first time in years, and he’s worried that she’s seen him with his new squeeze. We never see her expression until this moment. Her visage is a mask of stern resignation, so far from the girl that grew up in Hoppers, the demons still clinging to her soul. The memories of happier times now tainted by experience.The one time mechanical “prodigy” now doing maintenance in an apartment block.

Ray’s expression is filled with an unaccountable sadness, staring and not daring to speak. The heady days of youth now extinct, the colorful costumes of the past long forgotten, life settling into a predictable landscape of drab buildings, anonymous clubs and darkened streets. When Jaime demonstrates his love for the feminine form in one of Ray’s life drawing classes earlier in the story, the entire process is viewed with a sense of bemused distraction by Ray. It seems almost like a casting away of “youthful” ways, a disdainful glance at a game from another age. This is a bleak middle-aged, lower middle-class existence conveyed not by picturesque chaos but by Jaime’s increasingly somber environments and restrained linework. Nowhere is this spartan existence more visible than in “The Love Bunglers”, the artist’s expressive line held in check like the lowering of a narrator’s voice.

In the fourth to final page of “The Love Bunglers”, Maggie looks into the mirror having found out that Ray has been in a near vegetative state for almost 2 years —  a direct reference to the two pages of retrospection that have preceded it. What happens in the moment between those two panels is, of course, a mystery.

Perhaps a moment of resolution; perhaps the desire to remember clearly everything that has gone on before. A clean slate from which to draw the best of memories and less of the pain. If Maggie’s problems can be placed down to her memories, then it might be said that Ray finally gets his girl because he has forgotten so much.

In the end, the attacker (that personification of psychological damage) is somehow forgotten. The author reasserting the points of connection between Maggie and Ray, tearing them down and then rebuilding them. Ray’s mind in a constant state of questioning, his memories containing real and feigned histories.

His lover’s face is placid, understanding, and yet indecipherable — the cartoonist inviting his readers to recall the couple’s years of bitter struggle, before accepting the lies of a pleasant but capricious present reality.

 
_________
This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

Tatsumi: The Facsimile as Homage

Posted on by

A review of Tatsumi. Directed by Eric Khoo. In Japanese with English subtitles. Released 17 May 2011. Un Certain Regard 2011 Cannes Film Festival. [Comics reproduced in article read from right to left.]

 

 

Tatsumi (a cartoon adaptation of the manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi) could be described as something of an anomaly — a project originating from Singapore which was made on the tiny island of Batam, Indonesia; a project no Japanese animation studio would have taken up if only because of its subject matter: slow, serious, immodest, and unsafe for children. The project’s unlikely instigator is one of Singapore’s most prominent directors, Eric Khoo, whose eighth feature this is.

Tatsumi represents Khoo’s first foray into animation. He dabbled in cartooning in his younger days, and those early works often reflect the urban angst and alienation found in many of his movies. As with Adrian Tomine (editor of the new Tatsumi translations published by Drawn & Quarterly), Khoo developed a passion for the gekiga of Tatsumi through the 1988 Catalan edition of Good-Bye and Other Stories. The motivation behind this project would appear to be simple. When asked about the impact of A Drifting Life (Tatsumi’s autobiographical manga) on him, Khoo had this to say:

“I could not stop thinking about it after reading it for three days and that’s when I decided I had to make a tribute film for Tatsumi.”

At 98 minutes, this is a bare bones version of A Drifting Life, charting in short and somewhat cumbersomely narrated sections his beginnings as a young artist, his meeting with Osamu Tezuka, his family travails, and the birth of gekiga. The film is remarkably faithful to the source text with Tatsumi’s comics panels providing the key animation frames and serving as a near rigid storyboard. Interspersed with the snippets of autobiography are adaptations of  at least five works from the author’s 70s oeuvre, namely “Hell”, “Just a Man”, “Occupied”, “Beloved Monkey”, and “Good-bye”. These stories can be found in the collections Abandon the Old in Tokyo and Goody-bye, and are derived from the best period of Tatsumi’s work. There are also short sequences from Tatsumi’s pulp comic,  Black Blizzard, highlighting and fetishizng its trashy roots by means of a faux four color process not dissimilar to the effect found on the cover of the Drawn & Quarterly edition of the same manga.

Despite Khoo’s personal affection for A Drifting Life, the fragments in the film derived from that novel are undoubtedly the weakest sections, serving largely as somewhat forgettable links to the five main manga adaptations found therein. Even cut down to its basics these segments will try the patience of viewers with any familiarity with the source material. The segment on Tatsumi’s meeting with Tezuka are the most coherent, the rest is inconsequential filler with little emotional drive. Worst of all is the clumsy and melodramatic episode depicting the destruction of the young Tatsumi’s art by his ailing brother.

The real aesthetic failure of Khoo’s film occurs in the differentiation between the autobiographical scenes and the fictional story elements. This blurring of lines may in fact be intentional — a reflection of the largely unvarying style Tatsumi uses for all his projects and also a subtle suggestion that Tatsumi’s violent themes emerged from his own torn psyche. The autobiographical sections are done in a kind of animation short hand (undoubtedly the product both of intention as well as budgetary constraints) and are shown in color for the most part. The fiction adaptations are done in raw black and white, and are more purposefully two dimensional to indicate the source material. Blurred elements intrude into the frame to mimic a camera lens’ shallow depth of field, and the figures are designed and drawn in a vigorous scrawl typical of Tatsumi’s pre-70s comics. They have none of the refinement of Tatsumi’s ink work found in stories such as “Sky Burial” and “Abandon the Old in Tokyo”. The light and breezy tone of A Drifting Life barely registers, and the segments covering it remain resolutely stiff and leaden, no different from the pre-70s strips they unwittingly mimic. The overall effect is not unlike a slightly evolved motion comic. The lack of aesthetic separation between the two narrative strands leads to a certain monotony; life and art inseparable yet flat in affect.

Sound is the one enhancing element in Khoo’s film. While the dubbing of the American soldier in “Good-bye” is calamitous (imagine John Wayne in a sex scene), the panting and gasping of coitus is wisely heightened to a pornographic hyper-reality which is totally in keeping with Tatsumi’s narrative ethos. Where Tatsumi shows us no more than one page of incestuous licentiousness, Khoo’s version is a loud, drawn out fucking.

It surpasses its source material because of its perverse animalism and utter lack of subtlety. The central hook of incest in “Good-bye” might have been sufficient in Tatsumi’s era but no longer.  Producing an adaptation some 40 years later, Khoo periodic attempts to intensify the audience’s disgust and revulsion is largely a successful one.

This isn’t the only time that the film adaptation highlights minor weaknesses in the original. The  words streaming across the panels in an apartment scene in “Beloved Monkey” (see below) fall short of the more effective and annoying repetition of a stuck record player in Khoo’s movie.

__

Similarly, the crowd in the final moments of the same story is considerably more threatening — closer, less accommodating, and more menacing — in the film version .

__

This may be a case of creative licence. The placidity of Tatsumi’s pedestrians suggest an over-reaction on the protagonist’s part, a festering agoraphobia. Khoo’s adaptation assures us of the validity of this fear. Whether these divergences simply reflect the relative strength and weaknesses of the respective mediums is a subject for another day.

The decision to animate the pornographic graffiti in “Occupied” also yields good results; coarsening the almost asexual nature of Tatsumi’s depictions of female nuditity.

Yet Khoo oversteps the material near the end of his adaptation, introducing a cacophony of siren sounds where none exist in the manga; dampening the faint ambiguity of the manga’s conclusion. It is never clear from the manga whether the protagonist of “Occupied” is apprehended by the police. The film makes certain of this by adding the sound of handcuffs.

The subjective lengthening of the material which works so effectively for the scenes of lasciviousness has its occasional drawbacks. For instance, the opening scenes of a bombed out Hiroshima in “Hell” which are tediously drawn out and which quickly outstay their welcome. Every scene Khoo includes in his adaptation may be found in the original comic, and those 3 pages of ineffectual drawing are faithfully refashioned into a ham-fisted opening sequence only likely to impress the naive and uninitiated.

One might say that the weaknesses in Tatsumi’s stories are brought to vivid life in Khoo’s animation. The manner in which the secretary (Okawa) propositions her elderly boss towards the close of “Just A Man” drew giggles of disbelief from the audience on the night of my screening. In contrast, the panel work in Tatsumi’s manga simply slips past the reader in a matter of seconds causing little if any consternation.

More damaging than all of this is the frigid depiction of creativity; devoid of any sense of the artist’s passion except through the histrionics of the young Tatsumi (in the animation) and the personal claims of the narrator. The final act — that final moment of artistic revelation — where Tatsumi creates a drawing of his old neighborhood falls flat on its face due to the consummate mediocrity of the final product.

Still, the sheer faithfulness of Khoo’s adaptation makes it a perfect tool for publicity, particularly in reference to those who still see comics and animation as the province of children. As Khoo suggests in his interview at Indie Movies Online:

“Because I’m such a fanboy, I hope that people will see Tatsumi and realise “Hey, there’s something to these stories,” and maybe go and buy A Drifting Life, and read 800 pages-worth of his life.”

This is a perfect encapsulation of the film’s worth — a paean to a cartooning deity, a devoted act of promotion, and middling entertainment for the most discerning.

 

_______________________________________

Related Material

A substantive interview with Eric Khoo at Indie Movies Online

EK: What I told everyone is that, “We will use all his panels as the storyboard of the film.” We do not create any additional shots. Everything must be from the source. And what that meant was that some of the stories I had to edit. The hardest was his life. 800 pages! I had to condense it down to 35 minutes!

 

A Comment on the Subaltern’s Progress through Habibi

Posted on by

[Part of the Slow-Rolling Orientalism roundtable.]

Those looking for a detailed examination of Craig Thompson’s Habibi would do well to read Nadim Damluji’s recently published review on this site.

Nadim’s article had an unexpected side effect. The generous tone of his article convinced me that Thompson’s comic was still worth reading despite its flaws. What that review didn’t prepare me for was the tale’s construction — a collation of tidbits from Islamic art presented in an ad hoc manner in order to denote sincere contemplation. The composition of Habibi seems less governed by concerted purpose than the passing interest of the author who intermittently introduces religious, scientific, and poetic subjects into his work without fully incorporating them into his narrative. Themes are inserted, explained, and discarded in a matter of pages; frequently devolving into distractions and adding little in the way of density to the book as a whole. One imagines a flitting bee, passing from flower to flower ever in search of a suitable subject matter for illustration and juxtaposition, yet bereft of any deep intellectual purpose or real spiritual engagement. The rich thread of narrative weaving and insight is not to be found in this work. Thompson’s characters are caricatures whose actions follow the dictates of a fairy tale less the wonder and the imagination. They are dried husks whose presence is so foul and whose formulaic fortunes are so unbearable as to elicit an all consuming desire to scream.

In many ways, I’m stunned that Nadim managed to get through the comic with so little complaint. I’m certainly amazed at the strength of his constitution or at least his stomach. Perhaps he has taken fully to heart the instructions of the Qu’ran that “…whosoever shows patience and forgives that would truly be from the things recommended by Allah”

As Nadim points out, at least three quarters of Habibi seems to be the product of a mind which chose to pore over images by Ingres, Delacroix, and other assorted Orientalist painters; this as opposed to any adequate political and cultural histories of the Middle East. As Thompson explains in an interview at Bookslut in 2004:

“…it’s a sort of an Arabian folktale of my own making. Not that I have… not that I’m justified in telling such a story; it’ll definitely be filtered through my isolated Western sensibilities. But that’s the stuff I’m reading now, a lot of Islamic art, culture, the original Arabian Nights, the Burton translation. I’m going to go on a trip to Morocco in about a month. I’m just sort of drawing on all these fun, fantastical, exotic elements of Islamic culture.”

And later in another interview at Millions from 2011:

“I trusted the Turkish writer Elif Shafak — she wrote The Bastard of Istanbul — who describes fiction as a way to live other lives and in other worlds. You don’t need to have those experiences directly. It’s almost a shamanistic journey where by tapping your own imagination you access these other roles.  And I trusted that.”

The  comments from 2004 may not tell the full story of Thompson’s creative endeavor but they are revealing. Of note is Thompson’s choice of the Burton translation of The Arabian Nights as opposed to a modern one by a native speaker such as Hussain Haddawy. In the introduction to his translation, Haddawy notes that “from Galland to Burton, translators, scholars, and readers shared the belief that the Nights depicted a true picture of Arab Life and culture at the time of the tales and, for some strange reason, at their own time….Burton’s translation…is not so much a true translation of the Nights as it is a colorful and entertaining concoction.” He proceeds to label an excerpt from Burton’s translation a parody or a self-parody. This is exactly what we get in Habibi. As Thompson explains in an interview at Guernica:

“The late 19th-century French Orientalist paintings are very exploitative and sensationalistic. They’re sexist and racist and all of those things, and yet there’s a beauty to them and a charm. So, I was self-consciously proceeding with an embrace of Orientalism, the Western perception of the East….“Embrace” may not be the right choice of words. The book is borrowing self-consciously Orientalist tropes from French Orientalist paintings and the Arabian Nights. I’m aware of their sensationalism and exploitation, but wanted to juxtapose the influence of Islamic arts with this fantastical Western take.”

Knowing or not, this parody of Middle Eastern culture shows little evidence of irony or cynicism. A charitable reading might suggest that Thompson subverts his source material by revealing the layer of cruelty behind French Orientalist paintings but, as Nadim points out, that sense of barbarism is part and parcel of a scornful ideology which has been promulgated throughout the West and which is accepted as fact today — a view which sees those men and women as objects of fantasy and, more acutely, members of an alien and subhuman world. This is a perception of that society as one which has little to offer the modern world except exoticism and the glories of past ages. It is an experience so infuriating that one would do well to wash out one’s eyes and brains with the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk having taken it in. The works of the latter author in particular would provide an object lesson in how best to traverse the borders of history, myth, and contemporary society which Thompson has chosen to explore.

What follows is a bare bones summary of Thompson’s narrative. As a young girl, our fair heroine, Dodola, is sold by her illiterate and destitute father to a scribe to be his wife. The scribe proceeds to deflower her but she gains some learning through her husband’s occupation. Her husband is subsequently killed and Dodola is seized by bandits, caged, branded, and enslaved. She manages to escape with a young black slave, Zam, who proceeds to fall in love with her. Dodola struggles to find sustenance and swiftly falls into prostitution, selling her body for food while seeking refuge in an ark-like boat stranded in the rolling sands of a vast desert. There our hapless maiden is violently raped by one of her customers. She is then abducted by a sultan of sorts who promptly puts her in his harem where she is shown at toilet, learns to use her feminine wiles, is raped repeatedly, tortured, and finally made pregnant.

This brings us up to about the halfway mark in Habibi and it should be clear from this synopsis that Thompson has been true to his word and purpose as stated in his interview at The Crimson:

 “The focus of Habibi,… is not political or even historical; the power in this tale lies in human passion, sometimes cruel and sometimes sweet, combined with its geometric precision and deep sense of the sacred.”

In other words, Habibi is a kind of pulp novel with the author layering his cake with stylish Arabic calligraphy and stray excerpts from the Qu’ran; a comic following upon the much superior genre works of Christophe Blain (Issac the Pirate and Gus & his Gang) and their tone of contemplative adventure. Lest one has any doubts as to the motivations of the author, it is also peppered with a selection of half-baked feminist grievances bemoaning the fate of Arab women; this not solely evidenced by the perils of Dodola but also visions of a stopped up dam (“She was a slender river, but we plugged her up good!”) and the inclusion of a lover who mutilates his own genitalia because of the shame he feels in his own sexuality (and perhaps in the male sex to which he belongs)

Later, a short retelling of “The Tale of the Enchanted King” (from The Arabian Nights) is labeled racist and misogynistic by Dodola. It is a moment of self-awareness meant to be self-referential and critical, both of those ancient tales and perhaps all that has gone on before. Where Alan Moore chose to elevate the insanity and inanity of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen so as to mitigate the inclusion of the character Golliwog, Thompson inserts sly winks and homages to Orientalist painters, trotting out caricatures without let or hindrance. What I sense is a certain amount of admiration for the technique of those painters, now ingrained with the pathos of oppressed females and the politics of racism. The seriousness of Thompson’s project is further emphasized by his careful study and deployment of Arabic script. This jumbling up of fantasy and political correctness produces not only an uneasy aesthetic alliance but affirms every negative stereotype produced through years of Western indoctrination; this despite Thompson’s presumed best intentions. While it may be true that Thompson’s cartooning lacks the emotive and stylistic range to capture the pain and suffering he is depicting (almost everything takes on the sensibility of an exercise in virtuosity or an educational diagram), it is sufficient to imbue the proceedings with a certain gravitas. If we are to accept the heroine’s predicament as genuine and emotionally involving, so too must we accept the veracity of Thompson’s view of Arab civilization. There are few if any countermanding examples provided.

The resultant comic is one that will excite every Western prejudice imaginable; not only of a depraved society but one of helpless, abused Arabian women begging to be saved from their bestial male counterparts. Just as the picture of a mutilated Afghan girl on the cover of Time magazine was used to justify the ongoing war Afghanistan, so too does Thompson’s comic inadvertently excite the bigotry of the unsuspecting and the gullible; a side effect which is totally at odds with his project of syncretizing the three major religions of the region. While Thompson displays earnestness in exploring the roots of these beliefs, he is completely facile when exploring their real and far more important differences — in particular the arch and potentially violent disagreements on these similarities. There is no stronger and more problematic symbol of this in our modern age than the Dome of the Rock (and the Foundation Stone contained therein) on the Temple Mount.

Not being a Muslim or of Middle Eastern extraction, it is hard for me to gauge the level of offence Thompson’s comic would cause the average person living in that part of the world. Now I can imagine a comparable comic with a Chinese woman with butterfly lips and dressed in flowing silks, mutilated by having her feet bound, opening her legs in the royal courts, and being bought and sold like live stock. All this before a flash forward to a pollution-ridden metropolis with individuals living lives of quiet desperation built on the foundation of ancient monstrosities. That tale of woe would probably end with our Chinese damsel in the arms of a brawny Caucasian as is the case in classics such as The World of Suzie Wong. In such an instance, I suspect that most modern Chinese would laugh it off as just the work of another ignorant American or an unimaginative, dated satire. From Thompson’s interviews, it would appear that some of his Muslim friends gave his explorations of the underbelly of Middle Eastern civilization a firm thumbs up. As the author puts it in his interview at The Millions:

“There’s a very offensive Islamophobia that happens in the media, especially the conservative media. But then there’s also this overly-PC, liberal reaction to tiptoe around a lot of subjects which I think is its own form of insult, because the Muslims I know are very open-minded people and would rather engage in a dialogue.”

It might be educational if one of these individuals were to step forward to defend the first 400 or so pages of Habibi. It would count for something if some of them found Thompson’s comic a fair and accurate depiction of their culture. For my part, I found Habibi utterly repugnant and well deserving of a place on a list of worst comics of 2011.

 

Big Questions: Our Father, Where Art Thou?

Posted on by

A review of Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions. Limited edition signed and numbered hardcover, 7.25 x 9.25, colour, 658 pages.

Synopsis: A group of finches begin to consider the form of their sustenance and the structure of their lives; both of these governed by men who take on the stature of gods. One is a worldly, hallucinating fighter pilot delivering mystery in the form of a bomb — impatient, anhedonic, and destructive. The other is an “idiot” who takes what he can from nature;  giving and removing life with the mercurial judgement of deity. An old and a new testament. The birds begin to take sides in keeping with their intellectual dispositions. The former figure attracts a complex theology, the latter, almost simple faith, trust, and finally devotion. There is a war of the gods and a hopeful denouement. The birds end up where they started, finally settling the big question they began with. Or have they…

 

“Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”

 Matthew 6:26

Those looking for an encapsulation of the ingenuity and promise of the 90s small press — that calculated rawness, that sense of adventure, that palm-sized aesthetic object — could do worse than read Ron Rege Jr.’s Skibber Bee-Bye. Anders Nilsen’s collected Big Questions ,itself a product of the 90s, re-imagines this for the new millennium — that slow, hesitating shuffle away from Fort Thunder and its adherents into a world of hefty Smyth-sewn tomes heavy enough to kill a small animal. This world is more laid back, engineered, and formal; as thick and traditional in its narrative as Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button (a younger cousin of sorts), yet more sprightly and clever, and difficult to envision in any form except comics.

This new edition of Big Questions is easily digested in a single sitting and  is the only sensible way to read Nilsen’s work. The individual issues suffer from a certain brevity and disconnect wrought through drawn out publication schedules, yet remain ultimately necessary for those interested in supporting independent comics artists and their publications. It is, perhaps, only in this collected edition that the inter-species relationships of Nilsen’s comic thicken and caramelize, only here that the pitched battles acquire any degree of emotional tension, only here that the scope of the entire work can be appreciated.

Nilsen describes the genesis of Big Questions some fourteen years ago in his afterword, recalling an artist’s workshop where a “very simple story…emerged [involving] a lost soldier in a barren landscape, a group of birds, and a plane crash”. He describes the process of learning how to draw comics over the course of this project, and that growth is clearly evident even within the first 100 pages of this collection. It is within these pages that we see ideas introduced and then discarded as they are found to be less useful (the somewhat clumsily drawn squirrels replaced by more vicious carrion eaters for instance); something we find not infrequently in comics which begin in a more freewheeling spirit before gaining concentration and more straightened purpose. Long dissertations give way to space and silence;  static points of view are replaced by movement across panels and the use of the full expanse of the comics page; hesitating stippled backgrounds progress to detail and increasing complexity. All this mirroring Nilsen’s increasing confidence and conviction as a storyteller.

The “talking birds” come to Nilsen quite early and form the cornerstone of the early issues and chapters of Big Questions. The imagery seems at first to thrive on the curious irony of having birds consider impossible mysteries. The first of these (reiterated once again at the close of Nilsen’s comic) concerns nothing less than predestination and free-will.

 

[The first big question]

 

Crystallized ideas and inquiries are pressed on the reader through this act of reduction. Our own wants are seen in the light of specks of indistinguishable food; our destinies seen more clearly and simply in the threads of fate that envelop the humble life of birds.

 

[Food and Life according to the birds]

Nilsen’s comic is a fable and parable asking us to reflect on where we are. The simplicity with which these ornithological forms and the distilled elements of their lives putting into sharp focus our own frailties and needs. The forms are delineated with a few strokes of Nilsen’s pen and brush but their direction, posture, and deployment suggest compassion, anger, and depression.

“I kind of like the idea that they are, in a way, all the same bird, just reacting to different situations and contexts. The sameness of the birds was an accident in a way, but ultimately I decided to embrace it as part of the book’s content.”

Anders Nilsen in an interview with James Romberger

These quickly drawn shapes almost never suggest the identity of the speaker. This can only be determined through deduction, dialogue and setting; a device which instills that sense of allegory which is itself reinforced by the author’s use of emblematic marks and legend. All this slowly coalescing into a grand narrative of interweaving lines — planned, symmetrical, and increasing in complexity — suggesting forms like a star of Bethlehem or the “Ley lines” and fractals which cut through nature; the meandering flight of birds; the by-ways of fortune.

 

At one point, an airplane (a bomber) casts a dark shape over a pastoral landscape — an outsized shadow of the birds and hence ourselves.

 

 

Much later we find a short journey into the underworld and Orphic myth.

 

 

When Nilsen recalls the places and settings of his tale in the final pages of his work, we find both symbols and a microcosm: an Arcadian field; a fallen tree; a bomb crater containing the shadows and bones of the fallen scavenged by crows and wild dogs;  a snake’s burrow guarding the entrance to the underworld; a river which is both the Jordan and the Styx; and life in cold relief.

 

 

Religious themes punctuate the narrative consistently and continuously. The leader of a group of Messianic finches is called Zwingly (presumably after the reformer Zwingli), the proselytizing concerning the new religion is done by birds identified as evangelists. It is a mystery play with birds (Betty and Charlotte) standing in for the faithful-doubtful women kneeling at the foot of the cross or waiting faithfully at the empty tomb. There is an aged and kindly reptile guarding the gates to the underworld…

 

 

…and an erstwhile deity emerges like Wally Wood’s spaceman from the husk of a giant bird (a “miraculous visitation”) — a virgin birth; an Athena springing forth from the head of Zeus; a parthenogenetic celestial appearing before their eyes.

[“Jesus” by Wally Wood; “He Walked Among Us”]

A centerpiece of this exploration is the Lazarene miracle surrounding a finch called, Bayle. Raised from the dead even as he is killed by his faith — that ridiculous and dangerous longing to be held in the hand of an unknown force.

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).

 

There are other correspondences. The biblical narrative suggests that Jesus tarried for 2 days after receiving word of Lazarus’ illness (“This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.”) only then starting for Judea and Bethany. And so it is in Nilsen’s narrative, where death is almost an act of capriciousness and, more than this, devoid of compassion. Here, the author suggests that both life and death come from the same source, one so distant and unapproachable as to seem to emanate from an imbecile, monster, or saint.

Nilsen’s standalone illustrations often depict wastelands, roadside accidents, and dumps. Disemboweled bodies centered in image and yet anonymous in their deaths; touched by some unseen pastel hand or angel; a vision of our fickle lives.

 

[Illustration work by Anders Nilsen]

 

Of course, Bayles’ death (a drowning) is made doubly significant for being a baptism from which he rises like the Holy Spirit above his messiah’s brow.

 [Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ]

 

The ornitho-Christological theme is pressed to its limit: a feeding or, perhaps, a preaching to the birds by St. Francis occurs at one point; and a latter day Elijah is fed by the same winged beasts at journey’s end.

The doughnuts and crumbs upon which the finches feed become nothing less than the elements of the Eucharist, laced with the meat and blood of transubstantiation; a meal which is cursorily ridiculed as it has been through the ages.

 

Like Eurydice and her pomegranate seeds, the bread is tainted not only by innocence but war and regret. “You are what you eat, little bird.” proclaims a carrion crow,

Nilsen never answers the big question he begins with, only jabbing lightly at the fabric of existence. If there is an answer in his puzzle and construct, it is the answer provided by the lives which writhe and weave before us in his tale; now seen from a factual and atheistic distance. A world governed by intention, coincidence, accidents, and foolishness. We can see some similarities with the work of Kevin Huizenga in that artist’s own “sermon notes” comics, philosophical inquires, scientific discursions, and theological musings.

 

Plato’s Cave is for the birds

Neither is particularly dismissive but Nilsen is the true skeptic. He peppers his narrative with religious absurdities while occasionally leavening them with more kindly interpretation. His non-existent God is something which we feed and give life to, a concept which sometimes give us strength through blind chance and misplaced faith. As he states in his interview with Romberger:

“I think about that word, Asomatognosia, as a kind of metaphor for the religious impulse. I heard about the condition while listening to an interview with the neurologist Oliver Sacks. He described it as a condition where one loses one’s sense of ownership over a limb, usually an arm or hand…That sort of alienation from one’s own sense of control, our own agency, to me works as a kind of metaphor for the displacement of responsibility that a belief in the supernatural, or in god can sometimes entail. “

We can detect that appreciation for Sacks’ wry humor throughout this comic, not least in a skeletal evangelist reciting a Panglossian homily to a former friend.

 

“Everything will turn out right in the end…”

 

…and the triumph of worldly “faith” and enlightenment.

The flower pots arranged and rearranged making us more keenly aware of their fragrance and color; the investigations and queries handled broadly rather than in depth; removing mystery from life. Nilsen would be the first to admit this and does so in his interview with Matthias Wivel at the metabunker:

“Nilsen: No, I haven’t read a lot of philosophy…I’m just curious about the world. Most of what I read is non-fiction; not philosophy explicitly, but I’ve always been interested in those kinds of issues, the heart of the matter…So I don’t think I approach these issues with a lot of knowledge about what philosophers who dealt with them before me thought about them, I don’t have a strong grasp of the history of them, but they’re just interesting questions and I’m learning. Also, my grandfather, my mother’s father, was a Lutheran minister of a very universalist stripe, so I think that some of the issues that I’m interested in are theological and stem from that…

Wivel: Are you religious?

I’m not religious at all, but I’m interested in thinking about religious issues, the nature of the world, meaning, things like that.”

 

If there is a problem with Nilsen’s comic, it would be this marginal interest — not so strange and wonderful to behold as the belief bordering on insanity we find in films like Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, and yet not so supremely intellectual in its contempt as to engage the reader’s mind fully. What remains is the emotional and aesthetic core of the narrative: the gradual mastery of form and narrative; the heat of battle; the sweetness of conversation; the pain of parting; and that sadness spoken through animals. And, perhaps, this is just enough to make us believe.

 

_____________________________________

Related articles

An interview with Matthew Baker at Nashville Review concerning his entire oeuvre.

An interview and introduction by James Romberger at Publishers Weekly. The initial discussion focuses on the spontaneity of the comics’ creation and its graphic design.

Matthias Wivel’s 2007 interview with the artist.

An interview at Comic Book Resources. “Using animals characters gives you a shorthand for personality and automatically connects them to some kind of symbolism. Birds are symbolic of transcendence or flight. Snakes have this history in Western culture, whether it’s the Garden of Eden or the way snakes are portrayed in Greek mythology. You get this extra material that just sits there in the background. You don’t have to be explicit about it but it can inform the story and inform the character.”

 

Umezu Kazuo: Gods and Devils

Posted on by

[Contains images which are NSFW but safe for Japanese children everywhere. All images read from right to left and are taken from the Chinese reprinting of The Left Hand of God, The Right Hand of the Devil]

 

 

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.”

Edmund Burke

 

It is probably safe to assume that the success of the comics of Umezu Kazuo (if mostly in Japan) is predicated on the extreme violence, the lurid monsters, and the somewhat peculiar situations he gets his young characters into.

But underpinning all of this is Umezu’s deep understanding of childhood uncertainty; a child’s nagging suspicion of the “big people” who govern their world: the teacher who deserves only to be strangled…

…the loathsome neighbor who waits ready to poison and defile innocence.

Manga like The Drifting Classroom present adults as diabolical and feeble minded beasts. If the hero’s mother seems homely and pleasant enough, she remains otherwise distant and separate, like some countermanding and occasionally comforting God; only present in the mind but never in the flesh. These adults cannot be relied upon, and we often find them debilitated and trussed up in bed. In The Left Hand of God, The Right Hand of the Devil, for instance, the protagonist’s parents lie injured and exposed to their children; together yet withheld from copulation:

This short but vicious part of Umezu’s oeuvre is persistent in its suggestions that parents are absolute savages; far more to be feared than the demons lurking beneath a tall, oppressive bed; or behind a fence hoping to pull unsuspecting children like callow fish from the pavement.

In the first chapter of volume 4 of The Left Hand of God, The Right Hand of the Devil, a well-dressed girl rejects a ratty doll left on the pavement as bait and is allowed to pass unharmed by a lurking psychopath.  A younger and less sophisticated girl shows more sympathy and retrieves the doll, cradling it with tenderness and affection. Her slow, gruesome dispatch at the end of a murderer’s hook is quite inevitable.

If there is a lesson to be learnt from these opening scenes, it may be that only those who cast aside childish things will be spared, the earnestly naive are annihilated or served up as dinner:

The children in Umezu’s stories are always on the edge of fear; that fear of aberrant birth and of unnatural parenting despite all evidence to the contrary — a dividend of that familiar combination of parental love and torment. These manga were once bought with money provided by their young readers’ parents; the very humans presented as being on the edge of reason in Umezu’s manga; here questioned indirectly for allowing their children access to the material in question.

The theme of parental neglect is reiterated as we progress through this fourth volume. An episode where children are force fed blood-soaked cupcakes may seem like a morality tale on the subject of greed, but this distant memory of Hansel and Gretel is also a rebuke to parents for presenting their children with “poisoned fruit”.  This attempt by Umezu to associate death with sweetness is a faint echo of the modern Japanese version of the water torture — the dripping leftovers shoveled down the victims’ tender throats till their stomachs bulge and their intestines sliced open to reveal the products of their engorgement.

Their heads are then severed and stored as trophies — all of this deadly reminiscent of the Japanese army during their trek down and across China and Southeast Asia.

[World War II Cannibalism from Orochi Vol. 5]

 

Whether all this is the product of a feverish mind or of careful planning is hard to ascertain. The lighthearted manner in which Umezu carries himself in interviews acts to deflect any criticism based upon sexual innuendo or base perversion.  Sometimes though, the evidence simply cannot be ignored.

Umezu’s foray into the hypersexualized industry of child idols in the final book of The Left Hand of God, The Right Hand of the Devil has an undeviating perspective on female murder. The common or garden deaths are reserved for the men of his tale. A male medium is crushed by a crane, and the protagonist’s father knocked over the head by a falling rock.

Not so the protagonist’s mother, who is accidentally pierced by a deflected harpoon during the young hero’s attempt to kill the demon possessed girl of the story.

[Freudian lapse: The hero attempts to harpoon the devilish beauty but pierces his mother instead ]

 

That girl is later seen introducing a hypodermic needle into the belly of a fellow idol and competitor….

…deflowering her competitor with an acrid flow which brings corruption and a swirl of furious inking to her pubis. Here we see her doubling over in pain as she is suffused by a cramping evil; a tainted contraction.

The demon girl’s comeuppance comes as she is ritually pierced with needles even as she is meeting the man of her dreams: both a ritual violation and a premonition of things to come.

When the demon is expelled from the young girl, it decides to inhabit the body of a lab monkey, that primal substitute for man now made intelligent. The drawing which it creates to the amazement of all is a vision of its master, a reflection of the author himself.

Now stripped of all pretense; the grinning apotheosis of Umezu’s views on human action, invention, and manipulation.

 

 

Photo of Umezu Kazuo

Original Art: A Kat in the House

Posted on by

“Too much ink has already been spilled on Herriman’s passing for white, and how the strip’s shifting perspectives and mutable characters reflect that decision. And none of it is worthwhile. Doubtless there is a relation, and I’m certain it’s too complex to be formally drawn out and distilled.” [Emphasis mine]

Harry Siegel at the New Partisan


The 16th Krazy Kat Sunday published on 6th August 1916. It has an image area of 18″ by 21.5″ and a water stain marking its lower border.

Background. I’ve been searching for a Krazy Kat Sunday for some time, and I managed to acquire this example only because none of the usual players were interested in it. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, there’s the water damage at the bottom of the page which is a minor problem in my book. The other factors are the lack of a brick gag (which I’m not particularly interested in) and the fact that the formal elements in this Sunday are not front and center.

That last point is of importance to me, but this page has other elements which make up for that deficiency. It comes from a period of great creativity for the artist, with some of the most famous episodes crafted during the space of a few years. It is the intricate inking from the early years which I am most fond of: the light touch delineating the characters, and the gentle hatching describing the illuminated night sky above the pueblo. It didn’t take long for Herriman to find his way around the large space of a Sunday page, and here we see him showcasing the wide vistas and deep perspectives so typical of the strip. Most of the major characters are represented here including Joe Stork and Ignatz’s family; all coupled with a constant movement towards the right side of the page.  The final panel is a pretty good summary of Herriman’s eternal triangle.

The Plot. Alderman Tsheez is announcing a “sad event to his constituents” who remain determinedly unimpressed if not hostile — the disappearance of Ignatz Mouse (here enjoined by the multifarious sorrow of his wife and children). A mercenary with a walking cane and ten gallon hat listens to all of this and is soon traversing the canyons and mesas of Coconino county. The reward if he succeeds is a pound of the best cheese. His cooperative guide is a “Mexican bandit” called Don Kioty; the quest which the soldier of fortune is about to undertake will take on the color of that guide’s name. The bandit points him towards the Mesa Dedo del Pie Grande which lies in the distance like a stubborn windmill; a big stub of a toe scratching the vault of the sky, and a distant cousin of the oppressive thumb which presses firmly down on Krazy in the Sunday of 2nd December 1917.

His ultimate destination is a land of humor and fear. There is a darkness on the horizon, and it is the process of enveloping the pueblo he has to visit to complete his mission.

George Herriman, so we’ve been told on numerous occassions, always wore a hat when he went out.

The better to hide the curled locks of his “mixed” heritage. A man in disguise just as his much beloved kat is in disguise in this Sunday. Krazy’s mask is a polished beard and a crumpled tail covering his/her ebon caudal appendage, now all burnished white. A cane — a comedienne’s aid — is held firmly in his hand; the tool by which she will make that connection with her desired audience both in the happy end we see on the final panel of this Sunday and the deployment of Herriman’s craft.

The mouse from whom she desires love and affection is a rascal; always mean, treacherous, and selfish in the pursuit of his own ends. The periodic beaning of the kat’s head is unambiguous to all but the love struck feline; the crowd of disgruntled onlookers in the first expansive panel is a chorus announcing the only possible diagnosis when it comes to their relationship. Offissa Pup never suspects, half in love yet always on guard; the tenacious attendant of a system of denigration — the very well from which the kat and her master derive sustenance on a daily basis.

The harsh desert glare which opens this chapter is in stark contrast to the night enveloping the pueblo on the third tier of this page. The walls of Joe Beamish’s store on the next line show a progression from watery shadows in the first instance to fuliginous night in the last, quite perceptible in the original if not on the printed sheet. The moment of confrontation is anticipated with relish by the offissa with his truncheon, and there is an evocation of tenebrosity in his words (“I’ll be made a Captain for this night’s work sure.”)

It is a forbidden place of dangerous transaction; a cage with an irresistible bait, easily resisted with the “crutch” of Herriman’s artistry and craftsmanship.

And then, that persistent dream of a safe and blissful conclusion…

…seen once again in this panel of solemn pining from 1917…

…never to be resolved even at the very end, the kat fading quietly into the arms of time and its inquisitions.

NOTE: Some images taken from the collection of Rob Stolzer.