Comics Criticism: Even comics critics don’t care about it

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

(or everyone has tunnel vision except me; or in the land of the blind, everyone is blind)

[Allegory of Comics Criticism by Wallace Allan Wood]

TCJ.com recently published an exchange between Frank Santoro and Sean T. Collins concerning the state of comics criticism (c. 2013).

In his prologue, Santoro expresses concern about the neglect of a whole new generation of cartoonists now as much wedded to the world of the internet as to paper.

“… the small subculture of engaged comics reviewers is getting older, myself included. I really hope that members of the younger generation will start writing about each other. I’m seeing some hints of it here and there, but not many organized voices…The “pap pap” demographic of comics is so insular – which is fine – but out on the circuit younger makers are telling me that they never read this site, or any websites related to comics at all. There’s really not much for them in most comics sites that reflects their tastes or their concerns.”

Some questions should spring to mind immediately upon reading this. Why is it of special concern, for example, that younger makers of comics are not reading TCJ.com or any website related to comics at all? Are they representative of the alternative comics readership as a whole? Or are they simply the kind of people Santoro would prefer read TCJ.com and comics criticism?

Comics has a long history of cartoonists not engaging with criticism and critics at all; they for obvious reasons preferring the company and conversation of their “own kind.” No doubt long time comic aficionados will begin pointing to the classic comic histories or the critical works of Seth, Chris Ware, Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman et al. It should be pointed out, however, that the very idea of a negative critique is anathema to this school of criticism (unless it is directed at blind intransigent critics). It is adulation and evangelism which is required. Such is the rarity of this engagement that one might say that the arrival of a celebrated cartoonist into the unhallowed halls of comics criticism is, more often than not, greeted with a joyousness befitting the arrival of the Queen of Sheba (the royal metaphor here being no accident of choice).

The attitude of young comics makers conforms to this pattern. They are merely ape-ing the behavior of their forebears. What was once good for the artists of Fort Thunder (and its adherents)—namely steadfast, earnest positive promulgation—is now good for the new web-based alternatives. Collins returns to these concerns towards the close of the dialogue:

“The other big problem, maybe the biggest, and certainly the one that’s worried me the most and I think inspired my whole end of this discussion with you, is that there’s an entire generation of young artcomix makers whose work just isn’t being reviewed at all. …An entire generation, an entire movement, of altcomix creators who are doing vital, defiant, personal work is badly undeserved by criticism, and that will have a huge effect on both comics and comics criticism moving forward.” [emphasis mine]

This might certainly be of concern for readers (and critics) with a long term interest in sustaining the comics grassroots. It might in fact be seen as the duty of committed blog aggregators (with a compliant readership) to push links to these sites on a more frequent basis and for publishers to consider the best of these for print publication and more sustainable retailing. Comics critics who see themselves as evangelists and want to sideline as marketing agents for the small press may also choose to delve into this. Indeed, the vast majority of comics reviews do in fact fall into the category of marketing. There is no reason why these hats cannot be put on or taken off at will. There are even college courses in marketing for those so inclined. One might even consider being reborn as Peter Laird (of the Xeric Foundation) or Kevin Eastman (of Tundra).

But all this is of secondary importance to the state of comics criticism. Last time I checked, The Comics Journal was supposed to be the magazine of news and criticism, not the Journal of Comics Marketing. Collins’ concern that the artists of the Happiness anthologies are not being reviewed suggests that he is concerned that they are not being covered positively and disseminated widely—that they are not being sold to a whole generation of readers. This would appear to be the primary purpose of comics criticism in Collins’ view.

I beg to differ. If you want to sell things, then sell them—send them to famous cartoonists, influential publishers, and comics critics who are interested in selling things. One influential Tweet by a comics celebrity will do more good than a 3000-word review of the highest quality produced by a nobody. And for god’s sake, don’t send your comics to critics who want to criticize them. Find someone who cares more about how many copies you sell than about the quality of your work. If we could only separate these comics critics from comics marketers, comics criticism might be in a more healthy state.

Comics must be the only art form where the most prominent commentators in the field (who shall remain nameless) regularly dismiss or deprioritize discussions of the art form they are engaging in. The art form I am referring to is not comics but criticism. Santoro’s comment that he “noticed that [he] wasn’t taking the time to read long reviews or blog posts” (in the last few years) is not a new phenomenon but purely a symptom of this modern age—an age of endless distractions and diminishing attentions spans. The idea that someone might take a copy of The Comics Journal on a long plane flight as reading material (as Tucker Stone has admitted to doing at least once) could be taken as a sign of mental illness or at least an eccentric attitude towards comics.

Comics criticism doesn’t actually need more people who are interested in comics (that is a given considering the insular nature of the hobby); what it needs is people who are interested in criticism. Collins’ main concern—that the comics he likes aren’t being reviewed—is understandable but should be of little concern to comics criticism per se.

* * *

Santoro and Collins began their discussion with much broader concerns, starting with the number of comics reviews being published of late. This question of quantity is first directed at Collins who answers:

“Less. Certainly less as far as alternative/art/literary/underground comics go. It seems as though there’s as much of a profusion of reviews of superhero comics as ever.”

Any proclamations on this topic are guaranteed to be anecdotal and unscientific but my impression is that there has not been a drop in the quantity of long form criticism concerning non-superhero related comics since I started monitoring the field more closely. Santoro suggests that there was an apparent golden age from 2008-2009 “when 1000-word reviews were common.” No doubt quality is always preferable to quantity but a 1000-words can hardly be considered the high water mark of long form criticism. Perhaps it is the bare minimum Santoro demands but 1000-words often suggests:

(1) “I don’t have enough space or money to pay you for more”, OR
(2) “I don’t want to waste my brain cells on this so I’m going to vomit out whatever is on the tip of my tongue”.

600 words for opinion and short analysis (at best), 300 words for the gloss and information, and 100 words for padding and style don’t often add up to much in terms of essential reading for the informed except in rare circumstances. A little more leeway might be found in instances where the work has been thoroughly assimilated by the comics community and a tighter focus brought to bear on the subject matter. 1000-words is of course the “industry standard” for long form criticism and not something to be especially proud of. As a purveyor of this kind of material, I should know. The call for 500-word reviews (to increase coverage) during the closing years of the print Journal certainly heralded the arrival of poorly substantiated opinion as opposed to analysis. A publisher’s synopsis and an Amazon.com comment would have worked just as well in this instance.

The short form approving review or “call to purchase” is tailor-made for the comics critical community, a grouping which is largely unpaid and interested primarily in fellowship—the generation of comments and making friends on Facebook and Twitter. Collins points to this early in the exchange where he writes:

“It’s exceedingly easy to type up your strongest single impression of a new work and post it to Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, and receive feedback almost immediately. And since your strongest single impression could be nothing more complex than “This is SO GOOD, you guys,” and the feedback can just be a like or a fav or a reblog or a retweet or a share, it’s tough to build up a thoroughgoing interrogation of a comic. The energy is diffused.”

The motivations for writing comics criticism are many and this is but one possibility. Some might do it for pocket change while others might participate in the interest of generating a conversation by which process they might attain enlightenment or at least a modicum of self-improvement. If one desires a large readership and a huge reception on Twitter, then an article on a superhero comic would increase the probability of this (preferably a controversial one). To expect a substantial response when writing a review of an alternative comic with a readership in the low thousands (or hundreds) at best would be to deny reality. At the risk of stating the obvious, people are interested in what they’re interested in. They are unlikely to read, comment on, or even click on a link to an article about a comic or subject of which they know nothing about. In fact, the best way for a comics critic to get an audience is to not write about comics at all—easily one of the least popular art forms extant today.

The problems associated with writing good, well researched long form comics criticism mirror those found in the creation of alternative comics with a marginal readership. The present day solution to these problems is echoed in both endeavors. If one desires quality criticism of the alternatives in the field then an altogether different attitude (and critic) is required. This is the kind of critic who primarily writes for herself or at least because of some deep inner need (pompously metaphysical as this may sound). It is a simple equation. You write criticism because you have something to say, because you feel compelled to write about it, and because you want to do the best job you can (as would any artisan). The need for an audience (and this is an ever present gnawing desire) must come only after this. The available readership for comics criticism is limited by the popularity of the form and the attractions of the topic or comic being written about; much less so the quality of the criticism.

An actual increase in the volume of comics criticism is not necessarily desirable or even achievable considering the state of the industry and art form. A different lesson presents itself if one considers the titans of comics. Kirby’s oeuvre, for instance, would have been substantially enhanced had he the luxury to draw and write less and not more comics. In the same vein, I would much prefer it if unusually prolific critics would write substantially less but longer and more considered reviews. Which makes Collins’ point later in the exchange appear somewhat wrongheaded:

“My point, ultimately, is that without a sufficient volume of reviews being written, you’re not going to see needed critiques — particularly since most people are writing for little or no money, and most humans like enjoying themselves if they’re not getting paid, and it’s generally easier to enjoy yourself if you’re thinking about something you like instead of something you don’t.”

It is not critical volume which is required but concentrated quality. The idea of twenty 500-word articles on Alternative Comics X does not please my mind in the least and would certainly not be an advancement over just one good long form article on the same comic.

Monitoring the comics critical scene is an endless drudge considering how often blog aggregators point me to worthless plot synopses and marketing copy masquerading as reviews. Even worse is how little effort they spend differentiating between this excrement and the truly worthy articles which generally get lost in the shuffle. In any case, the state of coverage is considerably better than was the case back in the 80s and 90s when The Comics Journal (the print version) was virtually the only game in town when it came to non-superhero related material. Not being reviewed in the Journal (for good or ill) in those days was tantamount to not getting reviewed at all. Since then, the state of comics criticism has been enriched by voices emerging from the fields of academia; a not surprising new source considering this grouping’s dedication to thinking, reading, and writing about things. A number of these writers emerged from fandom and it is high time fandom looked beyond its own narrow shores to the wider world of critical writing if only in the interest of improving itself.

* * *

Side note:

Noah commented twice on the article at TCJ.com; I understand with some irritation that the site you are reading was left out of the conversation when it turned to subjects such as long form comics criticism and analysis, extended comments sections on subjects other than superheroes, female writers, and coverage of non-superhero related material.

He should not be surprised or overly concerned. To put it bluntly, The Hooded Utilitarian is a pariah site as far as the traditional comics community is concerned—reviled primarily because of its owner and a lack of correct communal spirit. Others might add lies, bad faith, and a lack of “professionalism” to the mix. To expect consideration from a school of comics criticism which you have rejected is perhaps asking far too much. Like a lump of shit, the only instance in which they might care to notice this site is if they stepped on it accidentally.

HU is not exceptional in its pariah status. The manga community is yet another example of a group of “comics untouchables”, a community with women writers and readers in far greater abundance than on HU. Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that, for all intents and purposes, women are the Dalits of comics, alienated by virtue of the types of conversations which engage the longstanding comics critical community of males. It might be that in their view, it is the men who helm the traditional comics conversation who are to be avoided. They also don’t need anyone to fight their battles for them (see comments by Peggy Burns, Sarah Horrocks, and Leah at the original article) .

The “Last” Outsider Cartoonist and the Ku Klux Klan

Posted on November 3, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

I ask Aline…

“Well, he is a sexist, racist, antisemitic misogynist,” she says.

Does he agree? “Oh, I guess all that stuff is in me, sure. I wouldn’t say I’m an out and out racist or proud or amused by the idea of racism but we all grew up in this culture…[…]…Those things are complex, y’know. They were as much about what was going on inside white people as their attitude to black people. I liked the idea when I was doing that stuff of making things that looked as if they were one thing but were actually something else.”

– Interview with Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky

* * *

The first comic (c. 1920) by the “last” outsider cartoonist is morally ambiguous.

The artist’s name is Russel Deiner and the comic is presented in an envelope “made of the same folded and glued paper” as the drawings. Each envelope is crowned with a portrait of a Klansman and the title “Ku Klux Klan.” Their similarity with the comics of fandom do not end there. Each is stamped with a mark of ownership and authorship, as would be done by any self-satisfied artist.

The comic itself is almost subdued in its technical transcription if not facility.

The members of the Ku Klux Klan congregate to build a cross and burn it in the course of 8 panels. The wooden planks which make up the cross are depicted studiously but amateurishly in two dimensions as opposed to the attempt at depth in the depiction of the assembled Klansmen in the second panel. There is a fitful interest in perspective. It seems of secondary concern.

The atmosphere here is not one of fear but of fascination—a deep enchantment with the lighting of the cross and its illumination of the encroaching darkness. Everything suggests an artist engaged in an attempt to record his own testimony or participation in an event which began in the moderate light of dusk before ending in early dawn; the bare backgrounds shifting from the white light of bare brown paper to the light crayon marks of half-daylight. The sixth panel captures the moment of disruption, when the supports finally break through and the cross crumbles to a heap of burning shards before wasting to embers in the final panel.

A “true” story perhaps. Or could this scene be a work of solemn imagination, the work of someone recording an event as one would a nativity scene during a celebration of the Advent?

Arthur Keller’s picture of two Klansmen (from The Clansman) standing erect above a fallen black victim is presumably imagined but much more specific in its motivation.

The second story by the “last” outsider artist is more studied in its appreciation of the act of burning crosses.

Much more than in the first comic, it suggests above average powers of observation, beginning first with the yellow flames of initial combustion before simulating the diffuse light of the fire in the crimson night sky. Flames like a geyser of blood pour forth from the redeeming article of the cross.

The members of the Klan are largely absent, two shrouded figures seen considering the cross in the second panel, standing mute and inactive, a testament to the (falsely) avowed purpose of the burning cross as noted in Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.’s The Clansman and D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—a call to arms.

Absent of course are the targets of this cross burning. They lie at the edge of darkness, quite unseen, perhaps looking defiantly out at this pageantry like the artist, charting the progress of the ceremony and its denouement. Perhaps cowering in their beds. Perhaps a mass of tangled lines like the mangled heap of brush strokes at the bottom of Keller’s infamous illustration.

Then the fire is doused by a man dressed in green and the same man sent to prison.

A seemingly innocuous act rewarded with incarceration.

The man is unhooded, perhaps acting against the will of his neighbors and disrupting the carefully orchestrated festivities. Or is this man dressed in green a Klansman, taken forcibly to a brick-lined labyrinth where he smiles placidly back at us with the satisfaction of a job well done—the Minotaur in his lair. Is the man in green the artist himself?

The auction description for these two items is considerably less cryptic:

“As a child of about six, Russel Deiner attended Klan rallies with his father and the scenes he witnessed inspired his child-like, but artful, renditions of what he saw. As an adult he was an influential member in his local Klan.”

Thus casting aside all notions of moral enigma.

The alcoholic and abusive Fletcher Hanks, Sr. (Stardust, Fantomah) was another outsider of sorts, a neurotic cartooning adept who produced eccentric comics similarly “free” of dubious intentions. Strengthened by biography, the comics have become products of a diseased mind interested in promulgating the concepts of terror, totalitarianism, death, and eternal punishment to his young readers—this once acceptable face of fascism since displaced in our more enlightened times by the charismatic and self-sacrificing leadership of the wealthy vigilante superhero.

Hanks’ fantasy of justice is transposed to an earthly reality in Deiner’s Klan comics—an adventure in vigilantism which ends in pleasing imprisonment. Some readers will find in the eighth image of Deiner’s tale a portal into the dungeon of his mind; the panels of the comic forming windows into a self-contained reality.

These panels were hung behind a “country store style glass case…with other childhood memories such as jacks, marbles and a cap-gun.” The nostalgia of the true outsider; as uninhibited as any dauntless truthsayer and a premonition not only of the anti-Catholicism and xenophobia of Jack T. Chick but also of the tireless gnawing and prodding of the undergrounds and their adherents. Russel Deiner was the “first” outsider cartoonist; he was the “last” outsider cartoonist.

The sun never sets on the Trigan Empire

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

Look and Learn magazine.

The home of cutaway technical drawings of everything from hydroelectric dams to airplanes; the repository of one page synopses of the venerable classics of literature, opera, and ballet; and the sanctum of illustrated lessons in history and geography. The Discovery Channel before people had even thought of the Discovery Channel. In its dying days, it hosted Tony Weare’s comic Rookwood of which I remember very little. In its prime, it serialized the single most popular feature in the entire magazine—The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire.

[The Tower of Babel, Pieter Breugel the Elder]

No one outside the British Commonwealth is likely to have heard of The Trigan Empire. The Wikipedia page for Don Lawrence, the strip’s most revered artist, suggests that he was an influence on the likes of Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, and Chris Weston. Neil Gaiman had this to say about the comic some ten years back:

“When I was a boy, Don painted a comic I loved. It was called The Trigan Empire — two comics pages a week, in the otherwise comicsless and dryasdust children’s magazine “Look And Learn”, which even schools who banned comics allowed. It was the story of something a lot like an SF Roman Empire on a distant planet, and was gorgeous.”

There were other comics in Look and Learn of course. I distinctly remember that the stories from various ballets (like Giselle and Petrushka) were presented in the form of comics for example. However, there is no doubting that Mike Butterworth and Don Lawrence’s The Trigan Empire was the king of the heap—the solitary reason why kids forced their parents to buy Look and Learn week in week out. There were other artists who followed in Lawrence’s wake once he broke with IPC (the magazine distributors) over pay but he was the good Trigan artist just as Barks was the good duck artist. For these children, The Trigan Empire became an education in what comic books could look like, never once realizing that Lawrence’s work on the series was in fact a high point in British comic art, one which has been rarely equaled.

Here are the initial stirrings of The Trigan Empire as related on the second and third pages of its opening story (from the pages of Ranger magazine, its initial home).

A cosmo-craft crash lands in Florida and the documents retrieved from it are translated after decades of research. From the documents a history of the world of Elekton emerges and the history of the rise and fall of the Trigan Empire. The Trigans are descended from the Vorgs, a nomadic race compelled to choose the ways of civilization due to the encroachment of their perennial enemies, the Lokans.

Elekton was a world of wayward scientific evolution where individuals wore the armor and togas of the Roman empire while piloting modern day battleships, fighter jets, and rockets. The aircraft themselves would vary from vague facsimiles of Harrier jump jets (the British fighter elite of the day) to World War 2 heavy bombers fitted with jet engines—all this with little concern for the aerodynamic stability of this confluence of design. In many ways, the serial became a perfect reflection of the contents of the educational pamphlet enclosing it. One imagines that this mishmash of historical themes was created at least in part to fulfill an educational mission, to stimulate the curiosity of young children in the direction of the progress of European man.

The entirety of Don Lawrence’s work on The Trigan Empire has been reprinted in 12 slim hardcover volumes by the Don Lawrence Collection (under licence from DC Comics), an organization situated in the Netherlands, this being the nation which has best preserved the artist’s memory and much of his original art. The comics read seamlessly in episodes of varying length, with the reprintings often starting on a single facing page thus obscuring the 2-page a week format of the original strip. New readers will be oblivious to the fact that every two page segment actually ends with a cliffhanger. As an “old” reader, I was periodically lulled into this smooth experience.

Take for example, the 18 page story titled, “The Man from the Future” (1975), a tale which represents Lawrence’s return to the strip after a year long break. It is also the first Trigan Empire story I remember reading.

The story concerns a traveler from the future, an archivist who uses his intimate knowledge of the historical record for material gain and status. He arranges to buy a winning lottery ticket from its unsuspecting owner, “predicts” a Lokan attack thus inserting himself into the corridors of power, and then follows this up with a betrayal of the military plans of the Trigan political elite to the same Lokans. On every second page, the final panel shows (consecutively) the pride of the Trigan navy sinking, Toth Zandu’s profession to his young audience that he can look into the future, an attack on the Trigan Bay Bridge, two threats on Zandu’s life, the destruction of the Trigan fleet and so on – thus propelling the narrative onward with each passing week.

Zandu believes that he is invulnerable because the history books he has consulted have recorded his preservation to a ripe old age. The reader is constantly placed in a position of sympathy for Zandu as he escapes from each threat on his life before falling on the penultimate page in part due to his over confidence.

In a short but unrelated commentary, the editors for the Don Lawrence collection suggest that politics was rarely in the minds of The Trigan Empire‘s creators, the exception being the story titled, “The Mission of Lukaz Rann”, which takes in the subject of nuclear disarmament in the form of a planet killing bomb, and the practice of xenophobia in the guise of a demagogue based on the racist Member of Parliament, Enoch Powell.

There is some modest political correctness in this most British (post imperial) and conservative of comics. The dastardly Lokans who are colored green actually conform to no obvious race in many instances. They sometimes look like bearded Caucasians with a greenish hue and at other times like Africans or Asians (Indians?). Their one distinguishing trait is a perpetual state of irritation and fury, all knit brows and snarling teeth. A far cry then from their initial appearance in the first Trigan Empire tale where they seemed like refugees from Ming the Merciless’ army albeit with samurai headdress.

As for the barbarians at the gate, they were inevitably the Mongol hordes and vicious Native American “savages.” Maybe there were some Parthians thrown in for good measure but I don’t remember any. Just as the technology of the Trigans represented a patchwork of Western civilization and military dominance—from swords and sandals right up to weapons of mass destruction—so too did their enemies reflect the unchanging status of Western vulnerability as described by Joseph Schumpeter in “The Sociology of Imperialisms”:

“There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies….Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing-space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs.”

The entire premise of the stories in The Trigan Empire was that they were transcribed from historical documents retrieved from a spacecraft. This would suggest a hagiographic record and, as Butterworth, intimates in “The Man from the Future,” outright lies. The Trigan hegemony triumphantly bringing peace and good will to the surrounding provinces and also ushering foreign nationals to its shores—this triumph of Western civilization resembling a fairy tale vision of the beneficent Pax Romana transferred to a semi-futuristic “Europe” bordered by barbarians and villains.

Consider more carefully the two pages shown above. The Lokan artillery divisions with their modern helmets are laying waste to a field of Trigan tanks (which look curiously like mutant combinations of a German Tiger and Panther tank) in a bravura display of destruction by Lawrence. Time and again throughout his tenure on the series, Lawrence would display his mastery of smoke, fire, and the implements of war.The retreating armies of the Trigans are not in the familiar bowl-shaped caps of the British infantry, nor the ceremonial galeas often seen on the heads of Trigo (the emperor) and his retinue. Instead, we find the equally familiar round helmets of the German army (the Nazis were of course enamored of all things Roman).

Perhaps the Nazis simply had the most attractive uniforms and the best looking tanks. The British made toy tanks I was given as a child included not only a suitably patriotic Saladin but also a German Tiger tank and a Jagdpanther. When you’re producing two water-colored pages (or more) every week for a children’s magazine, you can probably be forgiven for reaching for the coolest military ephemera at hand, particularly those which would be most attractive and recognizable to a young audience.

Yet it is hard to resist the suggestion here of an alternate history where the “civilizing” force of the Nazis has encompassed an entire continent producing a land of general tolerance, as well as law and order. A careful discussion of politics was beyond the remit of the series but the script clearly shows a subtle understanding of history out of keeping with its primary purpose as entertainment for under 10 year olds. A history where Churchill is both celebrated as a national hero and reviled as a man of unholy inclinations as demonstrated by his following statements:

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.” (12 May 1919)

“I want you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas… It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts for women.” (6th July 1944)

When Toth Zandu’s deceit is finally discovered, Peric— the wisest man on Elekton, and clearly modeled on a stateless Greek—decides that history must be altered. But not only in order to deceive Zandu but to cover up their own foolishness:

In this sense, “The Man from the Future” affirms that history is not only written by the victors but also to preserve the dignity of the ruling class. If there was any semblance of tyranny or embarrassment in the record of the Trigan Empire, it has been systematically but ineffectively wiped out. For there is another unspoken question at the end of this tale. As I have mentioned, the comics which comprise The Trigan Empire are supposed to be histories in themselves. Who then wrote this “correct” history of Elekton and uncovered Peric’s deception?

Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle concerns just such a history where the Axis have triumphed and the “yanks” are now the “white barbarian Neanderthals.” Yet the reality of this physical apprehension is questioned by the book within a book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The fake “antiques” peddled by another character, Frank Frink, are authenticated by mere pieces of paper as Wyndam-Matson (Frink’s employer) relates to an audience of one:

” ‘..a gun goes through a famous battle…and it’s the same as if it hadn’t, unless you know. It’s in here.’ He tapped his head. ‘In the mind, not the gun.’..[ ]…’I’d have to prove it to you with some sort of document. A paper of authenticity. And so it’s all a fake, a mass delusion. The paper proves its worth, not the object itself!'”

In melding the objects of war and civilization almost indiscriminately and in professing the wavering basis of the historical record, “The Man from the Future” partakes (if on a more elementary level) of this turmoil in historicity. For it calls into the question the entire beneficent record of the Trigans.

Like a scribe taking in the history of European man a millennium hence, it provides a panorama of Western civilization—the histories contiguous and undifferentiated by mere national boundaries. It relates a heroic and selective history of the Greeks and Romans but also communicates more subtly the devices of Fascism (and Hitler in particular); indulging simultaneously in the belief that all men are created equal while holding to disfiguring conceptions of everything without the borders of the empire—a surreptitious and perhaps unwitting interrogation of the basis of Western civilization from the perspective of a Boy’s Own adventure comic.

Tropic of the Sea: Not the way to remember Satoshi Kon

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

A review of Tropic of the Sea

The manga is by Satoshi Kon and that’s probably as much information as most people will need to make a purchasing decision. The forgetful will receive this gentle prod—Kon is the late writer and director of movies like Millennium Actress (2001) and Paprika (2006).

One should never read an afterword before experiencing the work being described but for the purposes of this review it proves somewhat enlightening. For one, Kon was embarrassed by this early work of his (first published in 1990 in Young magazine, and republished in 1999 and 2011) and even considered redrawing it in its entirety. The serialized parts were drawn under extreme time pressure and this is evident in the plotting and pacing if not so much in the actual draftsmanship.

No wonder then that the comic proves to be a standard moralistic pot boiler about abandoning the old ways of Shinto (and living in symbiotic harmony with nature) in favor of modernization and worshiping the works of Mammon. It all does sound a bit Miyazaki-ish but done with considerably less grace. The father of the young protagonist (Yosuke) is a Shinto priest and mermaid’s egg curator—a descendant of a long line of priests charged with protecting a mermaid’s egg which they release into the wild every 60 years. As with many family friendly Asian pop culture products, he’s not a complete douche but someone who has lost his way due to a family tragedy—his wife drowned and could not be resuscitated due to a lack of modern facilities in their rural fishing village. Hence his determination to reconstruct the very traditional village in the image of Japanese modernity.

I did get the sneaking (but probably totally unjustified) feeling that the manga was chosen for translation and publication because of the current environmental tragedy afflicting Japan, the one resulting in the release of hundreds of tons of irradiated water into the Pacific on a daily basis. The representatives of the condo building and scientifically exploitative Ozaki conglomerate are dressed with all the finesse of the Yakuza elite. They want to turn the fishing village into a land of high rises and shopping centers and might as well be energy executives from TEPCO fiddling while the tuna get sick.

The last bastion of all that is traditional Japanese—hard working, salt of the earth, adherence to rites—is Yosuke’s grandfather. He rises from his sick bed to protect the pearl of great price—the mermaid’s egg which he has sworn to defend and incubate. One presumes that he belongs to the not so culpable generation; the young boys who had adulthood thrust upon them during the Second World War and whose only heritage (presumably) from that period is suffering—too youthful to have influenced that ignominious war which ended in defeat but just old enough to have built Japan up to its former (?) greatness.

His misguided son is a member of that bubble generation of rank and file workers with little chance of career progression and hence motivation; still gripped by the siren call of lucre, eager to abandon the old for a faceless modernization. All hope how rests with the feckless yet capable young who have yet to be corrupted and remain potentially mouldable into some ideal of the Japanese spirit. Their rooms are strewn with idol magazines and other pop culture detritus but deep within remains a core of purity as yet unignited. They also have a not too shabby talent for swimming and are inclined to lick themselves like cats.

This glimpse of generational conflict is safe, conservative, and panders to the potential readership; at once portraying the friction between the young and their parents while extolling the virtuous wisdom of old age. It is also instructive as to Kon’s inclinations as seen in some of his early films—that railing against shallow and corrupt pop culture in Perfect Blue and that pining for simplicity and artistic purity as seen in the films of Ozu and Naruse (in Millennium Actress).

Needless to say, all of this is an illusion. An examination of the work of both these directors will belie the simplistic vision of generational strife seen in Tropic of the Sea. Nor are the seeds of Japan’s troubles (social or otherwise) quite as simplistically delineated as in the manga. There is nothing of the warmth and sadness of Setsuko Hara’s work in Late Spring or the complexity (some have said masochism) of Hideko Takamine’s performances in Floating Clouds and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Despite this, Kon’s nostalgia remains effective. For one thing, it would probably take some sort of artist ogre not to appreciate the artistry of women like Hara (Ozu’s muse) and Takamine (Naruse’s), the actresses paid homage to in Millennium Actress

In recent years, Western readers have been assailed by articles proclaiming the failing preeminence of the Japanese economy. Visitors to Japan will be very much surprised at these tales of the lost decade (or two), an experience which forms a part of the journalist Eamonn Fingleton’s argument in articles like, “The Myth of Japan’s Lost Decades.” Regardless of its truth, the narrative seems to have taken hold.

In Kon’s manga, this “failure” of modernity has led to a yearning for things past, one coupled with every form of blindness associated with nostalgia. This wistful craving for an earlier age and the guidance of the elderly is no longer tainted by sexism, the repression of the young, outright lies, or bare-faced cronyism. When a supernatural tsunami sweeps over the Ozaki developments, the President of said company resolves to continue with his plans but in a more sensitive and sustainable manner. This is Kon’s compromise and middle ground, the happy ending for all concerned. The Shinto-blessed Japanese walk hand in hand with nature into a brighter eco-friendly future; the pungent turd gilded into a constipated reminder that things past should not always be preserved.

Film to Comics: Lessons from Daniel Clowes’ Justin M. Damiano

Posted on September 3, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

Justin M. Damiano was first published to limited notice in The Book of Other People (ed. Zadie Smith; full comic at link) in 2007. Its existence was jogged back into my memory by James Romberger’s recent review of The Daniel Clowes Reader where he calls it:

“…a classic that needs to be read by anyone who writes criticism on the internet.”

This wasn’t the way I remembered the story and I read it again to see if I had been blinded to its treasures on my first read through.

A number of critics have taken Justin Damiano to their bosoms, elevating the specific into a judgement of the whole or at least a comment on a significant number of online critics. At The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw suggests that:

“…mature, contemporary Damiano isn’t a cynic or a loser: he has transferred his idealism from the world of relationships to that of the cinema, and being an online critic, answerable only to himself, he is perhaps freer to express this pure, unapologetic idealism…Is Justin a sad sack for believing that this transcendence is to be found in the cinema rather than human relationships? Maybe – but not necessarily, and it isn’t clear that Clowes is inviting us to assume this.”

Another critic, Brian Warmoth, opines that:

“Clowes’ ability to distill the bitter side of humanity in menial activities and everyday labor or interests is extremely keen…It’s also about the rifts between critics and artists that can sometimes encompass shared ground.”

Part of this boils down to a presumption of antagonism—that artists are supposed to have a very low opinion of critics and criticism in general. It is easy to slip into this diagnosis unless one looks closely at the details of Clowes’ exposition, most of which holds very little water and specificity for critics. To suggest that Clowes was presenting a critique of critics in general here would be to do him a disservice and may even imply that he is a person of shallow intellect. Naturally the title of the anthology begs the question, “What other people?” It might be that the ultimate “other” for an artist is not his audience but his critics, but this wouldn’t be that much of a leap of the imagination for Clowes who has engaged in scathing criticism for years in the pages of his comics. Clowes isn’t so much an artist chastising critics but a practicing critic contemplating his own art.

Taking James’ premise as true, however, what exactly are the lessons we (as online critics, silent or otherwise) are supposed to glean from Justin M. Damiano?

(1) Critics have a overweening sense of self-worth.

Translation for comics-kind: A comics critic is a (part time) warrior, and each of us on the battlefield have the means to glorify or destroy (whether a comic, a career, or an entire philosophy) by influencing perception in ways that, if heartfelt and truthful, can have far reaching repercussions.

This sounds insightful (and damning) until you start replacing the word “critic” with other words like, “artist”, “cartoonist”, “director”, “journalist”, “politician”, and “pop star”. Basically anybody with access to the wider media through talent, money, or both. In this day and age, this would mean a television program, a newspaper, a studio, and, yes, a popular blog. There is very little doubt though that the comics critic is the dung beetle of this august list of movers and shakers.

(2) Critics enjoy toilet humor (or perhaps playful metaphors).

Well, they sort of do, and they’ve also shown some fondness for bidets apparently. A clear reference to Duchamp and his porcelain urinal but also a self-referential finger pointed at Clowes himself—a very arch critic in many stories in Eightball and a florid user of metaphor.

(3) Critics are self-absorbed and insular.

“He so perfectly gets how we’re really all like these aliens who can never have any meaningful contact with each other because we’re all so caught up in our own little self-made realities, you know?”

There’s an interplay between panels 2 and 3 on this page. The blonde girl, Marion, is the target of Justin’s irritable internal musings:

“Most critics will give any movie three and a half stars if it flatters their self-image…Have you noticed that most critics usually disagree completely with the public? That should tell you a lot about critics.” [emphasis mine]

That latter point is quite contrary to experience as a simple survey of the top 5 movies of the last two years will attest:

Top 5 movies by domestic gross 2013 with Rotten Tomatoes (RT) score
Iron Man 3 (RT 78%)
Despicable Me 2 (RT 76%)
Man of Steel (RT 56%)
Monsters University (RT 78%)
Fast and Furious 6 (RT 69%)

Top 5 movies by domestic gross 2012

Marvel’s The Avengers (RT 92%)
The Dark Knight Rises (RT 87%)
The Hunger Games (RT 84%)
Skyfall (RT 92%)
The Hobbit (RT 65%)

Of course Clowes doesn’t mean any old critic. He means critics like Justin M. Damiano who is shown throughout this page in an act of self-condemnation, hurling stones at others while he sits in his own ivory tower of arrogance and recalcitrant elitism—the stuck-up loner with delusions of grandeur; the keyboard warrior of “modern alternative film criticism.” For all intents and purposes, this would include well over 50% of all comics critics.

But what exactly does “flatters their self-image” mean? One presumes that it means that critics tend to prefer movies which align with their own vision and experience of existence. Damiano suggests that critics should instead acquire a taste for other aspects of humanity as presented on film—those which run counter to their own beliefs. It should be stressed that we are specifically talking about “taste” and not action here, for Damiano is never shown acting on his preferences in art. Thus a critic with Randian principles should be able to develop empathy for the works of Vittorio De Sica. Similarly, a critic who abhors violence and misogyny should be able to appreciate and enjoy glorifications of the same. Since Marion is portrayed as a typical online critic, some might see this a proposition put forward by Clowes but this may not be the case. If Damiano is seen as a negative indicator (in some instances), it could also be taken as an admonishment of the critical community as a whole.

Marion’s comment that the film depicts human as “aliens who can never have any meaningful contact with each other” proves to be Damiano’s own “defect”—the very reason why he prefers “escapism” in film. The cinema becomes a brothel of whispered dreams and vicarious experience, a panacea for his lack of human contact. This explains his boredom when faced with Godard’s Le Mepris (a film about estrangement), a movie which probably mirrors all too accurately his own life. This isn’t so much Clowes needling critics so much as Clowes poking fun at himself, for his comics have consistently portrayed “sordid humanity” and immorality.

(4) Critics are mercurial and careless – “Good I hope it fails.”

But are they significantly more so compared to the general public?

(5) They don’t suffer fools gladly – “Well watch it again!”

(6) They are frequently jealous of access.

See point 4.

(7) “Every critic, even the most most mainstream hack, thinks of himself as a “rebel.” But in a culture of self-indulgent experimentalist navel-gazing, a real rebel believes in truly subversive ideas like “escapism” and “universality.”

This isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Damiano suggests that every critic considers himself a “rebel,” which would make him a rebel himself. Rather than promoting “bidet” art, Justin has taken his beliefs one step further and is rebelling against rebellion—championing “escapism” and “universality.” In other words, the act of criticism is seen here not so much as an act of connoisseurship but a process of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement which has little relation to “taste” or the object beheld.

At this point, alternative comics criticism and film criticism diverge, at least in the American sphere. The gradual migration of superhero fans into alternative comics has led to a renewed interest in objects of times past and the assimilation of tropes and techniques associated with superhero comics and other forms of commercial art. Further, this might be an area where comics have a leg-up according to Justin Damiano’s injunction. The 5 nominees for Best Continuing Series at the 2013 Will Eisner Awards were Fatale, Hawkeye, The Manhattan Projects, Prophet, and Saga—all firmly lodged in the realm of of “escapism.”

(8) Criticism is autobiographical and self-revelatory.

“I remembered how much Ellen and I love The Devil’s Rowboat…and how desperately I wanted to impress her with that article.”

In the first panel of this page, Damiano’s thoughts completely obscure the words of the director who bears a vague resemblance to a balding Clowes (well, it could also be Gary Groth). One might say that his own thoughts take precedence over the ideas of the director being interviewed; a point further emphasized by the revelation that a favorite scene of his from an earlier film of that director was quite unintentional (the result of a distributor cut).

This seems like a knock on critics but it actually suggests that criticism is as much an act of creativity as the production of a film or comic—a metatextual comment on the object being read. The real mark of bad criticism in my view is “objective” synopsis. I wouldn’t read criticism if it all read as if it was produced by a machine (or a marketing agent).

(9) Critics are frequently loners with poor social skills.

“I believe in the transformative power cinema. It is only through this shared dream-experience that we can transcend the oppressive minutiae of daily existence and find some spiritual connection in the deeper reality of our mutual desire.”

Justin is looking at a pictorial representation of a cinema screen which is actually the fourth panel of the comics page. This is probably a reference to Clowes’ own migration to and from comics and film.

Clowes’ cynicism is so thoroughly ingrained into his comics that the somewhat ambiguous but treacly conviction stated here would quickly arouse the suspicions of his long time readers. One imagines that some people feel the same way about the films they see, but this seems like a specific interjection clarifying the state of mind of our protagonist, a point reasserted on the page following where he thinks:

“When Ellen finally left, she said she felt as though she didn’t even know me. She said I lived entirely inside my own head.”

The escapism which Justin seeks in the cinema (and art) has become a substitute for any real real connection. Any warmth in expression (the bottom panel bears his least contemptuous face) or speech is reserved for the figures he sees on the cinema screen. He has nothing but distaste for the people he interacts with in the pages of this comic.

It seems to me that whatever observations Clowes makes about critics are simply a side effect of using a film critic as the main character of his story. Any bitterness or acute observation is restricted to the first half of the story and forms the bedrock for his elaboration on the protagonist later in the tale. The further one delves into Justin M. Damiano, the less it reads like a standard exposè on the failing of critics, and the more it feels like a story about a man who just happens to be a film critic. In this way, it has many similarities to one of Clowes’ earlier works, “Caricature”, which constantly straddles the line between reality and illusion in its portrayal of a caricaturist—a competent loner working the crowd and his sexual proclivities.

But even more than in that work, Justin M. Damiano turns in on itself, becoming a moment of self-criticism and reflection; a careful dissection of his own comics. The “other” of the collection’s title (The Book of Other People) is not so much his critics or his audience—they remain anonymous and unknowable. The “other” is the person that he can never hope to become.

Island of Sex, Panorama of Empire

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

A review of Suehiro Maruo’s adaptation of Edogawa Ranpo’s The Strange Tale of Panorama Island

Synopsis (spoilers throughout)

An unsuccessful author named, Hitomi Hirosuke, has visions of creating the ultimate work of art, a Utopian panorama of existence. He hatches a plan to impersonate a university friend (a millionaire named Genzaburo Kodoma) who is not only his physical twin but who has also recently expired due to a seizure (epileptic in the novella, asthmatic in the manga). Hirosuke first feigns his own suicide, then digs up his friend’s grave, disposes of the corpse, and presents himself as a risen victim of an unintended live burial (he is initially mute in the novel but is completely articulate in the manga).

Over the next few months, he manages to seize control of the Kodoma empire and initiates his plan to build his Utopian society—Panorama Island. The only person who suspects his dissemblance is his wife, Chiyoko. He is drawn to her but also finds her unworthy of his attentions (and possibly dangerous) in view of his greater project. He soon decides that he must kill her. Hirosuke arranges for them to travel to the island when it is near completion, and in an extended passage presents her with its wonders. Torn between the life of vulgarity and excess he has created and his strange attraction to Chiyoko, he finally strangles her and buries her remains on an island resembling Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead (a concrete cylinder in the novella). He hides her disappearance and continues a decadent life style on the island, exhausting the Kodoma fortune before finally being confronted with his misdeeds.

* * *

Suehiro Maruo has long been held to be one of the masters of the Japanese “underground” ever since his introduction to American audiences in Comics Underground Japan (ed. Kevin Quigely). His “Planet of the Jap” from that collection is a violently ironic tale of the Japanese conquest of the United States. Propagandistic slogans (lifted from educational songs) proclaiming the superiority of the Japanese race are presented alongside images showing the brutalization of American women. In his compendium of ero-guro tales, Ultra-Gash Inferno, Maruo offers depravity as the only solace for humanity.

We find these aspects of Maruo’s artistry straining for release in all corners of The Strange Tale of Panorama Island (1926-27). The manga is an adaptation of Edogawa Ranpo’s novella of the same name. Ranpo (the pseudonym of Hirai Taro) was one of the key figures in Japanese mystery fiction but his novella (recently released in a new English translation by Elaine Kazu Gerbert) is less concerned with crime then with modern mechanistic entertainments (the panorama and the cinema), the siren call of art, and the obscene depths of the human soul. Ripe ground then for Maruo and not for the first time. His story, “Putrid Night” (1981, collected in Ultra-Gash Inferno) is clearly a bestial homage to Ranpo’s famous anti-war story, “The Caterpillar” (1929). The story concerns a quadruple amputee (“a large , living parcel wrapped in silken kimono”) tended to by his long suffering wife. Not only does the text deny (with a kind of black humor) anything to do with the glory and honor of war but, for the purposes of this review and as a reflection of a common theme which will soon become clear, Ranpo writes the following concerning the wife:

“…like two animals in a caged in a zoo, they pursued their lonely existence…her crippled husband’s greed had infected her own character to the point where she too had become extremely avaricious…[she] also managed to find a secondary source of pleasure in tormenting this helpless creature whenever she felt like it. Cruel? Yes! But it was fun—great fun!”

As with the short homage by Maruo, it should be made clear that the manga being reviewed isn’t a completely faithful transcription of Ranpo’s Panorama Island. In many ways, it is a rather different object. Certainly the sequence of events and the skeleton of the plot remain largely intact but there is a distinct difference in emphasis between manga and novella. Read in isolation, the manga overwhelms with its Caligulan decadence and florid imagery. Read alongside the prose work, it shows a preference for narration and wonder over psychological and philosophical depth.

The dream sequence which opens the manga sees Hitomi Hirosuke imagining the strange vistas that will fill his novel, “The Story of RA,” and eventually his creations on Panorama Island. The manuscript which ensues is submitted to an editor and the conversation he has with him replaces the internal monologue which fills the first part of the novella. The stuff of captions not being much in favor in manga publishing, the internal musings and meanderings of the protagonist’s mind in Ranpo’s prose are largely made flesh through conversation and suggestion in the manga.

This alteration plays down the deus ex mechina ending of the prose work where the protagonist is confronted by a manuscript and an editor-detective which the readers have not hitherto been apprised of. In fact, Hitomic Hirosuke’s surprise at being confronted with “The Story of RA” at the end of the novella is as absolute as the reader’s. Ranpo submits this final chapter—this unwinding of deception and evil—with an air of knowing and fatalistic resignation:

“Reader should we here announce the happy ending of this fairy tale? Could Genzaburo Komoda, who was actually Hitomi Hirosuke, continue to immerse himself in the pleasures of this extraordinary land of panorama like this until he was one hundred year old? No, no, not at all. After all, it’s the pattern of in old-fashioned tales that right after the climax an intruder bearing a “catastrophe” is always on hand.”

As Gerbert (Ranpo’s translator) explains, this has everything to do with Ranpo’s predilections—his fascination with the kineoramas of time past and his desire to recreate these childish amusements:

“… a taste for playacting and theater animates [Ranpo’s] stories. They are often presented as if on a stage, with a dramatic buildup leading to a surprise ending that is presented abruptly, as if to the clatter of wooden stage clappers signaling the finale of a show.”

The dream sequence which opens the manga also makes flesh the mysteries with which Ranpo will later titilate his readers. One might say it almost circumvents the awe readers are meant to feel as Hirosuke (disguised as Genzaburo) leads his wife through the nearly finished island of his dreams; this surprise being a part of that darkened space before entering a room filled with the panoramas Ranpo is recreating, a form of entertainment which reached its height in the early 19th century in Japan—a tradition re-enacted today in movie theaters and amusements parks throughout the world.

This final unveiling of the villain seems almost a secondary concern, as is the actual construction of Panorama Island which Ranpo dismisses in the course of a single paragraph:

“Thus a whole year of struggle in every sense went by. To speed up the telling of this story, I’ll leave it to you readers to imagine the troubles Hirosuke experienced…[ ]…I’ll just say that in the face of the power of money the word ‘impossible’ does not exist, and leave it at that.”

This may have been a side effect of the stories original serialization but this giant ellipsis is filled up quite thoroughly by Maruo in imagined scenes of construction and the hiring of specific workers for the island amusement. In so doing, the narrative threads are closed tight, the act of creation emphasized over psychological intensity and dread.

“…no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce. No such paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed on the canvas of Claude. In the most enchanting of natural landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess- many excesses and defects. While the component parts may defy, individually, the highest skill of the artist, the arrangement of these parts will always be susceptible of improvement.”

The Domain of Arnheim (1846) by Edgar Allan Poe

In the novella, the author is almost at pains to reveal the antecedents of his work; not only Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim” which provides inspiration for the descriptive flourishes in the work but also the Utopias imagined by writers and artists over the centuries; societies which have not only been expressions of human yearning but an unguarded divulgement of the creator’s ethics and desires. These utopias have rarely been places of “ideal perfection“, all too often embodying the stuff of nightmares. The only correct modern reaction befitting Thomas Moore’s “first” Utopia might be one of horror and perhaps recognition for it was a state of slavery, territorial confinement, and unapologetic expansion as dictated by the purely selfish motives of population growth and the aura of superiority of its leaders.

As Gerbert tells us in her introduction, the protagonist’s own name (Hitomi Hirosuke) is a play on the Japanese characters meaning “person” (hito) and “see” (mi) as well as “wide” (hiro). This is a counterpart to the meaningful names given by Moore to his characters in Utopia. In fact, the first fifth of the novella dwells extensively on Hirosuke’s tortured idealism, a burnished twin of his final descent into iniquity. Manchuria (latter day Korea) was just such a dreamworld brimming with promise—an undiscovered country conquered, colonized, and transformed following the First Sino-Japanese War. Gerbert notes the public fascination with that land at the time of the work’s serialization:

“Ranpo, in his novella, transformed the expansionist vision of Manchuria into a literal panorama spectacle, complete with a ‘gory battle frightening to behold.’ As few other Japanese writers managed to do, he conveyed the way in which mechanized visions of the twentieth century fed dreams of greatness, and how those dreams might lead to destruction and death.”

The most famous Panorama–kan was located in Asakusa and destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. In The Edogawa Rampo Reader, Seth Jacobwitz describes Asakusa as:

“…a famously disreputable and squalid place even before the hard economic times brought on by Japan’s increased militarism and the Great Depression…for Rampo these were not only locales where tradition butted up against modernity, or high culture encountered low, but contact zones where the firm lines separating the quotidian, bourgeois realities of daily life from the the realm of dreams and unconscious desires terrifyingly blurred and disappeared.”

Maruo transcribes both the mechanistic fantasies—the “dream machines that produce nothing”—and the Manchurian wonderland ripe for harvesting in the climax of the manga. It is in such scenes that the comic excels, making tangible the half imagined; not only placing Hirosuke in the banal depravity of a prostitute’s den and the rigid conformity and poverty of early 20th century Japan but opening our eyes to the unbridled fantasies of capitalistic excess.

If the protagonist (in the novel) had once declared an admiration for William Morris’ socialist utopia, then these feelings have been utterly suppressed by rampant greed and an egoistic gluttony. The novella is littered with instances of Hirosuke’s hypocrisy, on the one hand suggesting a preference for Morris’ socialist News from Nowhere and then dismissing the young peasants who discover him in his feigned helplessness (i.e. as a recently “resurrected” Komoda) as a bunch of foolish simpletons:

“He became aware that he was being stared at like some unusual sideshow attraction by sniveling, runny-nosed children with peasant faces, and as he visualized the comical scene, he grew all the more anxious and angry…He couldn’t help despairing. He couldn’t very well get up and scold them…The whole thing seemed so stupid that he felt like dropping everything and getting up in front of the children and exploding in laughter.”

A situation played for humor and irony since he very nearly comes from the same stock and is inserting himself into the highest level of Japanese society

One would expect the sybaritism and licentiousness of Ranpo’s tale to be of primary interest to Maruo and this is very much the case. While Maruo excises Ranpo’s improbable image of the happy couple straddling naked servants in the guise of swans, their thighs chaffing against naked flesh as they navigate a man-made river (perhaps this was considered too fantastic), he is altogether more relentless in depicting Hirosuke’s panorama of nudity and libido.

In the manga, sex becomes an indelible counterpart to artistic intent from the outset, in fact it becomes a presentiment of death (note the Death’s-head Hawkmoth beside the prostitute in the image below). Hirosuke’s dalliances with prostitutes precede an encounter with Genzaburo’s wife whom he fixates on. He seems almost struck with lust at the sight of her and almost immediately put his plan of deception into action. This scene doesn’t occur anywhere in the novella. Where Ranpo posits artistic desire and greed as the primary motives, Maruo suggest base sexual appetite as an equal accomplice.

What lies under the surface of Ranpo’s novella is given physical form in the manga. The protagonist of Maruo’s adaptation is vigorous and voracious in his relations with his wife, hardly fearing discovery (and that is exactly what happens in their first encounter):Ranpo’s Hirosuke, in contrast, is characterized by a calculated celibacy, an enforced impotence—a manifestation of his artistic obsession. He abstains absolutely from his wife, ostensibly to avoid detection during intimate contact but inadvertently reveals himself in some unknown way during a drunken stupor. Some bodily deformity or defect of a more sexual nature finally reveals him as an impostor to Chiyoko. The passage in question is left intentionally ambiguous by the author:

“Just seeing her eyes, he understood everything. A distinctive part of his body had been different from the dead Genzaburo’s, and Chiyoko had discovered it the night before.”

Whether this is as simple as Maruo’s mole (see image above) or something of a more sexual nature is anyone’s guess. When Hirosuke finally strangles his wife under an orgasm of thunderous fireworks, it seems almost like a case of erotic asphyxiation. He buries her in an unfinished black pillar (in the novella)—a rather heavy handed symbol of his sexual inadequacy—pouring wet cement over her corpse but leaving tell-tale strands of her hair sticking out of the final stiffened mix. This inescapable, almost fatalistic, sloppiness is the final evidence needed for his exposure as a fake and a murderer.

If Poe’s (of whom Ranpo was a great admirer) taphephobia is counterintuitively a longing for the womb, then Hirosuke’s escape from the tomb is the obverse of this situation—a desire for release from sexual repression and the attainment of romantic gratification. Chiyoko is the stye in his eye which once removed results in unbridled carnality.

Comics as a form has a way of making obvious the carefully hidden aspects of pure prose but Maruo exacerbates this aspect by insistently giving play to Hirosuke’s licentious feelings and actions. One should also consider the demands on visual imagery in modern day horror fantasies; more precisely, an upping of the ante with each passing year. The prose work is characterized by gruesome detail at precise moments, especially where Ranpo dwells in loving detail on the disinterment of the deceased Komoda which the protagonist plans to impersonate:

“Strangely, he realized that Komoda’s mouth was stretched to a size of ten times larger than it had been while he was still alive. It was open to the point where the back teeth were completely exposed as in the mask of an open-mouthed female demon…[ ]…Although he tried, again and again, to lift Komoda’s decomposing body, it slipped off his fingers each time…When he finished the job, the fine skin of the dead body clung tightly to the palms of his hands, like gloves made of jellyfish, and wouldn’t come off no matter how vigorously he shook his hands.”

Here Hirosuke’s encasement in the decaying skin becomes a metaphor for his own duplicity which soon takes on the decomposition of a rotting carcass. Yet Maruo eschews this, instead presenting readers with an even more violent and improbable episode where he extracts his own incisor with his fingers to mimic the dead Komoda.

This is not to say that the manga is without moments of insight, subtlety, and interpretation. The glorious spectacles which Maruo reimagines and illustrates towards the close of his comic represent a high point in his cultivated debauchery. At a deeper and more sophisticated level, as the couple travel to the island, Maruo presents his readers with a scene which does not appear in the novella:

A Japanese battle flag is painted on the side of the steamer, and a fly occupies the center of the page. The latter is a note of corruption and a presentiment of the heroine’s death. It is also silent commentary on the direction the Japanese nation soon will take in its search for power, resources, and hegemony. In this Maruo adds an additional layer of meaning to Ranpo’s text, one gleaned from the passage of several decades since the book’s publication; decades filled with horrors perpetrated and suffered by the Japanese state. He forces a comparison between the pure and beautiful Chiyoko (that essential soul of the Japanese people) and her final fate at the hands of a madman.

Where Ranpo spends several paragraphs describing the push and pull of Hirosuke’s obsession with Chiyoko, Maruo allows the persistent image of a Noh mask (depicting a young woman) to haunt him throughout the palatial surroundings of his new home—both a proxy for the visage of Chiyoko and an echo of the body he has disinterred

This is encapsulated in an exquisite page where Chiyoko first looks weary and frustrated, and then, with barely bridled longing, out at the reader (just like the subtle head positioning of a Noh actor; see above). A silent cicada crawls down the edge of the frame—both a sign of resurrection and of impending sexual ecstasy.

Throughout her tour of Panorama Island, Chiyoko is at once attracted, repulsed, and seduced by all that she sees. She is of no stable state of mind. A critical point in the book is reached when Chiyoko sees a monster “plowing its way through the bubbles” towards her position in an undersea tunnel.

“She felt as if she were being pulled by a magnet. She didn’t have the strength to move away…it looked as if the monster was all head. Its mouth opened just above its short legs, and its small eyes resembling those of an elephant adjoined the protuberances on its back. Its rough and uneven skin was covered with a multitude of bumps topped by ugly black spots.”

It turns out to be nothing more than a “frogfish” magnified through the glass of the tunnel. The monster is the outward expression of Hirosuke’s soul, kept hidden for fear of discovery by his friends and relatives—a natural manifestation of the protagonist’s perfidious character. Chiyoko’s immediate revulsion and then attraction to the sight of this twisted shape is the irresistible yet fatal call of the abyss of technological accomplishment.

This section of the novella is altered in Maruo’s adaptation—no longer stressing the personal excrescence of the protagonist but giving us a tentacled monster with Chiyoko at its heart, perhaps even covering its vaginal maw.

Where Ranpo’s work alludes to a personal and artistic failing, Maruo highlights the contamination brought forth by modernity.

All this suggests that the correct approach to The Strange Tale of Panorama Island would be to first read the manga and then the novel which in many ways is more lurid and certainly more cerebral. In this it reminds me of Fritz Lang’s The Ministry of Fear which while enjoyable in itself suffers from a lack of logical progression and, ultimately, depth of meaning when compared to the Graham Greene novel of which it is an adaptation. The forms and settings of Panorama Island take shape with Maruo’s pictorial representations, sometimes sticking in the mind with their magnificent flourishes, at other times losing in translation that prescient, alluring, and terrible picture of a nation falling into the inferno.

Further Reading

A review by Sam Costello at Full Stop.

“Maruo’s artistry also allows him to provocatively expand on the original novel’s themes of developing modernity. For instance, Chiyoko’s distress stems from a distinctly modern problem: the sense of being too observed. Eyes are a visual motif throughout the book…As Hirosuke and Chiyoko enter the island via a clear undersea tube, Maruo arranges tiny fish to appear like sets of eyes lurking in the dark water. Later, the giant feathers of a peacock are dotted with eyes. The island is thick with statues, all of which seem to leer at Chiyoko. In our YouTube age, being seen isn’t shocking — judging by reality TV and social media, not being seen is more terrifying — but when motion pictures were just 30 years old and photography barely more than 50, it’s easy to understand feeling queasy and disturbed at the revelation of this panopticon. Chiyoko seems particularly unsettled because she isn’t the viewer; instead, she’s part of the panorama, forced into playing a dehumanized role similar to a statue.

Maruo’s work also derives strength from its visual nature when illustrating the tension between modernity and tradition that the panorama — both the exhibit and the island of the story — embodies. For instance, in more than one scene, 30-something Hirosuke wears a modern suit while negotiating business deals with kimono-clad, middle-aged men. This costuming choice more effectively conveys, in just a few panels, the liminal state of the 1920s Japan in which the story occurs than pages of description would.”

xkcd: On Time and Twinkies

Posted on August 20, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

The world of comics may seem like a pint-sized planet but news still takes some time to travel from one point to another. Often (and almost paradoxically) the more popular a comic, the less likely its fulsome embrace by that monastic order of adjudicators and explainers known as the comics critics circle. We’ve seen this quite recently with the release of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? where the bulk of interviews and articles relating to the comic were formulated by the mainstream press. One could put this down to the utter insignificance of the comics press when it comes to marketing non-genre adult targeted material.

Another comic which has fallen by the wayside in terms of notice is Randall Munroe’s immensely popular xkcd— a comic which seems to have engendered even less discussion among dedicated comics critics then the much reviled efforts of Scott Adams and Cathy Guisewite; this despite being one of the most popular websites in America (it ranks in the top 1000 U.S. websites). This meant that I had to find out about Munroe’s long running serial, “Time”, from a mainstream site after it was completed.

The exact substance of “Time” is amply explained by the xkcd Time Wiki, a fan-created encyclopedia with a level of detail I normally associate with popular computer games.

A nice discussion of all things “Time” has been written by Jeffrey O. Gustafson at The Comic Pusher. Gustafson lays out the mechanics of the panel changes quite succinctly:

“…it began to change, incrementally, every half hour at first, then every hour. Some panels would feature a small change from the previous one, showing a small fraction of time passing; others contained dialog and events and changes in scenery indicative of minutes or hours passing. Every hour, a new panel would be published over the old one, and this would go on, every hour without stopping… for four months. Time finished last week, after 3099 frames. That is a comic in 3099 panels, with each panel published every hour for 123 days.”

“Time” was serialized over a period of 4 months from March to July 2013. If one desires even more detail concerning the panel transitions (down to ellipses and ephemeral subtitles), one need only read the One True Comic section of the wiki mentioned above which is meticulous and clearly self-mocking in its comprehensiveness.

In short, “Time” begins with two individuals building a sandcastle of immense proportions. Upon completing their project, they set off on a journey through a strange wilderness in search of answers to the rising tide of water beside their construction, eventually reaching an actual castle built by a mysterious race with “all” the answers to their questions. Informed of the impending fate of their community, they return to the sandcastle, board a veritable ark (constructed from the remnants of their sandcastle) with their friends and relatives, and soon reach dry land where the story ends.

A synopsis like this would suggest concerns about climate change, a chronicle of the cyclical nature of history, and a retelling of the ur-myth of the universal flood—brought in patch work fashion to us by the Mesopotamians, the Jews, and various Mesoamerican cultures etc.—which has since been scientifically put down to episodes of catastrophic localized flooding. A simple survey of articles published on “Time” would however quickly disabuse the reader of such notions. For Munroe’s avid readers have found many other avenues of research, whether they be the accurate chronological placement of the story through a review of the precession and fates of the constellations, the translation of the “Beanish” language used by the mysterious race of answer givers, faunalogical studies of the environment, modern day allusions to theoretical engineering feats like Atlantropa, and so on so forth.

As Gustafson explains in his summary of some of Munroe’s revelations in Wired magazine:

“… the travelers live at the base of the Mediterranean basin. Some geological calamity has caused it to dry out, and it is suddenly, quickly, violently flooding back. This is something that actually happened five million years ago, the Zanclean flood. Except the flood the travelers are encountering isn’t happening in the distant past, but the far future. As revealed in the night sky Munroe meticulously displayed, this journey takes place in April of 13291 CE.”

“Time” is a story stripped down to its most basic elements, forfeiting characterization and even engaging dialogue both of which remain largely functional throughout. This can be seen as a counterpart to the abolition of facial expression in his xkcd strips as a whole and the artist’s moderate reliance on body language. What remains are ideas, environment, plot, and mystery—a narrative soup meant to evoke the beauty of a mathematical equation or in this instance a complicated puzzle. One might even call it a kind of unyielding hard science fiction where the science is not a mere adornment to humanistic concerns but transformed into points of intense focus. If seen as a game, it presents its participants with no obvious demands for a solution or even access to restricted modes of direct interaction. Instead, it harnesses the power of the biological web in its absolute faith that everything can and will be taken apart and put back together again. The net community is transformed into a classroom where your fellow readers are your teachers and where every mistake in analysis is not a moment for reproof but another avenue of study. In certain ways, it brings to mind the video games of old, created in an era of stunted computing power, where exploration of graphic miracles—the creation of an “entire” world—was the be all and end all; where entering a virtual library and being able to open a book was such a thrill and the lure of movement in detailed three dimensional space in games like Myst precipitated the sale of a million box sets.

The emotions and characterizations in “Time” are so sparse that the comic takes on the tone of parable or a fable, one crafted in such broad strokes that it invites all forms of interpretation—autobiographical, scientific, historical and, somewhat improbably, religious. It’s only counterpart in comics might be the interactive comic books of Jason Shiga . Yet beneath the mathematical cunning and distance of Shiga’s best stories often lay a core of emotional loss and meaning. No such mitigating factors are evinced by the author of “Time”—which progresses unrelentingly, its protagonists like ants in the grand scheme of things. The stick figures of xkcd absolve the reader of any need to engage his/her emotions in the frivolous act of fictional narration. I imagine that many of Munroe’s readers will suggest that his figure work conveys a lot of deft emotional touches and his abbreviated dialogue the ennui of a generation twisting and turning in a Beckettian gyre. But this has more to do with his readers’ total investment in the product.

As in all intellectual communities, an element of elitism cannot be far behind. If some film fascists suggest that the only true and correct experience of a vintage movie is on a large screen in a darkened theater, then some true connoisseurs of “Time” might insist (as opposed to the more congenial wiki) that an essential part of “Time” is its methodical pacing—the mental patience, the drawn out cogitation and experience of waiting generated through the act of following the progress of the characters over the course of four months; an experience of time and narrative unavailable to the person watching the Youtube presentation of the story or even those clicking through the stills 1-2 seconds at a time (at Geekwagon)—all this being the equivalent of watching a Bela Tarr movie with your finger firmly pressed on the fast forward button.

In this light, “Time” can be seen as a self-conscious study of the effects of serialization where the the reader’s engagement during the process of serialization is as much a part of the artistic experience as the viewing of the comic; the once indistinct intellectual consequences of reading a long and involved serial like Gasoline Alley or Love and Rockets now compressed and brought to the fore, the essential and fugitive moments not only experienced over days, months, and years but now also over seconds, minutes, and hours. I haven’t bothered checking but one presumes there have been calculations made as to how the duration and pace of serialization corresponds to the duration of travel by the figures in the story.

Still this deliberate act of sluggish serialization seems far from his reader’s minds, and a comics critic like Gustafson seems more concerned that people are labeling “Time” a kind of drawn out animation with little relation to the form and accumulated experience of comics:

“I see the comic described as a slowly drawn out animation, that the experience of reading Time as it was being published was one of a very long, very slowly playing cartoon being displayed one frame per hour over four months. But this is emphatically not the case with Time. With a cartoon…each frame of the work represents a set fraction of time that when played back gives the sensation of movement. By necessity, every frame is transitional and inhabits an identical sliver of time. But Time does not do this. There are certainly transitional panels in Time that take less time to read, but there are just as many unique, illustrative narrative panels that must take more time to read. If it was animation, the panels with dialog or significant events would happen across multiple frames, but they don’t. They happen, without fail, in one frame, one panel.

…Comics are defined by their nature of the reader defining the temporality of the fiction, both the pace at which it is read and how the story plays back in the mind. Munroe dictated the pace of Time‘s consumption at first—like an elaborate live art installation—but now the reader is back in charge of the time of Time.”

That last argument of Gustafson’s seems to do harm to his idea that “Time” should be seen primarily as a comic. By his own definition (which is by no mean inarguable), the initial release of “Time” conforms to a kind of slow animation with frame replacing frame, and the pacing controlled entirely by Munroe. It is only following its first enactment, that “Time” begins to take on the shape of a comic. In any case, the comics sphere hardly seems in a rush to grasp “Time” with both hands, definitional crisis or not.

One might ask why this most popular of web comics seems of so little interest to people who have been enmeshed in the form for decades. Perhaps it is a sign of old age—a precursor to obsolescence—the critics of the Epoch of Paper failing to accede to or embrace this new era of passionate, cold-blooded impersonality.

In fact, xkcd seems of primary interest to people with only a cursory interest in the comics form. Its popularity has led to its share of avid detractors and affectionate side swipes ladling life and tender connections into the autistic aloneness of the strip. Yet virtually every article I’ve read about “Time” has boiled down to information—links to where to see it, links to discussions, and an almost a priori belief in its worth and merit. The Economist, for example, lets us know that the strip is beloved by “geeks and teachers alike” and that “readers of Mr. Munroe’s strips are clever dicks” (said affectionately and admiringly). Tellingly, it begins by comparing “Time” to a science and engineering project, the Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 year clock.

To criticize “Time” would seem to be as worthwhile as criticizing a Twinkie. You might want to dissect a Twinkie, copy a Twinkie, study the cultural history of the Twinkie, make jokes about its place in the annals of law, and enunciate its status in American society but few would question its value—which for all intents and purposes can be summarized in the word, “Mmmm!”

This is not to deny “Time” the status of art. Lord knows, being a Twinkie (or even a lump of shit) hasn’t been a barrier to being art for a few decades. In fact, it’s not hard to see a future where a comic like Watchmen will be dismissed as a bloated, flatulent mess—a kind of in-bred salon art—when compared to the technological simplicity of “Time”; a comic where form, function, and viewership are completely in sync with this age of information and technology: outsourcing emotion to its readers, fostering communality, creating a journey and puzzle without end like the ethereal substance which hosts it and this article you are reading.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Ng Suat Tong

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The sun never sets on the Trigan Empire

Tropic of the Sea: Not the way to remember Satoshi Kon

Film to Comics: Lessons from Daniel Clowes’ Justin M. Damiano

Island of Sex, Panorama of Empire

xkcd: On Time and Twinkies