In his notes on Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Born Again, Brian Cronin writes:
“And it all ends with a likely Bob Dylan reference, so how much better can you get?”
Cronin is of course donning the cap of coyness here. The final page of Born Again isn’t a “likely” Dylan reference, it’s a bare faced homage to the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan—the ultimate evocation of tenderness for a certain generation of record collectors; the knight in lusterless armor finally getting his girl.
Karen Page’s one time junkie whore has kicked her addiction and is now in the arms of her destined love or as Wikipedia helpfully tells us:
Critic Janet Maslin summed up the iconic impact of the cover as “a photograph that inspired countless young men to hunch their shoulders, look distant, and let the girl do the clinging”.
Of this description I have my doubts. Perhaps the word “reinspired” would work better here. It seems to me that women have been depicted (by men) clinging to men long before Dylan and his photographer got their hands on this quintessential moment.
“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” seems overly sentimental musically but correct lyrically for much of this comic, the song apparently written by Dylan when Rotolo left him to study in Italy. The album cover captures that point in time when she had returned safe to his arms in a trench coat and two sweaters, the fire escapes and tenements like a pastoral landscape in the background.
Born Again may be seen as an apocalyptic text divining this fleeting state of heaven…
…a paradisaical condition always on the edge of disaster; a state of perfect goodness where stories are perpetuated when no more need be told—a testament to the prescience of Miller and Mazzucchelli. The comics boom of the late 80s, that period which ushered in Miller’s Daredevil, was followed inevitably by bust and then capitulation; the present day sales figures befitting nothing less than high end toilet paper. The superhero form now even rejected by that one time font of spandex adulation, the Eisners (though this last rejection is most likely an aberration born of the judges doing the nominations.)
But such an interpretation would be to mistake apocalypse (a revelation of god’s divine will) for prophecy. The two may be intermingled but should be seen as distinct.
Suze Rotolo wasn’t a junkie who needed saving, that part is clear. No, that junkie whore was the America of sex and drugs, that 60s VW van of lust and freedom gone mad.
The new Jerusalem is one where strength and patriotism has triumphed over the nuclear threat; the hard rain has ceased to fall. The world is in the process of being reconstructed just as the sign (a tribute to Mazzucchelli’s own partner, Richmond Lewis) on the right hand side of the comics page indicates. Nuke (as coarse a symbol as any) has been defeated by that bastion of American patriotism, Captain America—all this as illusory as the life and death of a secondary character in a second tier superhero title; everything as ephemeral as Matt Murdock and Bob Dylan’s happiness.
Karen Page—manipulated to the end by her gods—”died” in 1998. Suze Rotolo died of lung cancer in 2011. That evocation of joy, as transient as a fading photograph, now extinguished; that VW van of protest now disappeared, replaced by the dumpster truck of progress, capitalism, and acquiescence.
Representations of music in comics are plentiful but few practitioners have attempted to reproduce the quality of music on the senses. If they have, the resulting products have usually emerged in in a much reduced state, not least because of the evident silence of the comics page. There are clearly other motivations at play when musicians and their music are introduced as subjects of a comic .
José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo’s Billie Holiday is little more than a biography which gives some flesh and darkness to the singer’s story, while Frank Young and David Lasky’s The Carter Family tries to capture the pace of life which gave birth to the lyrics of that ensemble. It ends in a mythic coda which is as good a page as you’ll find in that book.
Howard Chaykin’s nostalgic riffs on the Jazz Age seem less interested in historical accuracy than capturing a feeling of time and place—that meticulous dressing; the sharp pin-stripe suit; the central practitioners of the form and their language and mannerisms— all this extending to the stylized musical notation emanating from the instruments. The jazz club scene in Dave McKean’s Cages is an attempt to translate a state of mind—the drama of music—into ink painting.
The cartoonist P. Craig Russell, is probably the most dedicated practitioner of this form of transcription among his peers. In his adaptations of various operas, Russell concentrates, for the most part, on the theatrical aspects of the genre—the setting, the costumes, the players, and whatever symbolism exists. He in fact becomes a kind of theater designer and director, but one who is uncomfortably trapped by the aesthetic demands of a form with its roots in “low” art.
Of course, there are various aspects of the music which Russell does convey through his art—the lightness and darkness of its themes, the tone of voice of the singers, the screeching of a high register or even the atonality of the music. Such aspects will largely be lost on the innocent reader. One certainly assumes a relatively conservative audience for these comics; a readership which is less likely to tolerate the stylistic and directorial innovations demanded of the best opera companies. While a conventional interpretation serves the end of introducing these musical dramas to the “unwashed” masses, it frequently hinders attempts to extend the aesthetics of these merged art forms in new conceptual and artistic directions.
For example, if we consider the critical well scene in Pelléas et Mélisande—an opera well suited to comic adaptation and which not coincidentally has been interpreted by Russell—we find in Pierre Boulez and Peter Stein’s famous production with the Welsh National Opera fulsome symbolism throughout but a more or less traditional scene of the lovers at the well. A more recent production at Oper Frankfurt dislodges the same action to a bedroom with the well nowhere in sight. When the heroine of the Welsh Opera production drops her ring, it is quite accidental; in the Frankfurt production, it seems almost purposefully cast aside. These are bread and butter issues which every opera director and adapter must approach. Russell’s opera adaptations are, by constraints of publishing, isolated from this tradition of innovation and change, and usually serve as introductions to the form rather than one of several steps in the gradual development of musical theater.
Russell’s adaptations seem to be most successful when cut free from history and the dictates of accurate costuming. While my copy of his Magic Flute is currently indisposed, my memory is of a largely successful endeavor. The original setting of the opera is dislodged from realistic time and place, and the fantastic atmosphere, filled as it is with Masonic imagery, is left entirely up to the desires of the adapter. If there is a template to follow, it would be the vast selection of designs produced for this most popular of operas.
A search online for images from that comic brings up a page related to the most famous scene in The Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night’s aria (“Der Hölle Rache“).
It is a scene which has many counterparts in various visual art forms. Milos Forman’s film adaptation of Amadeus centers on this section when relating the production of The Magic Flute. While Peter Shaffer’s screenplay itself is of questionable accuracy, the film remains fascinating for its reimagination of the sets of the first production of The Magic Flute as well as other operas. Here the Queen is seen coming in the clouds like a messiah with stars circling her as in the movie poster. Not the familiar dark figure veiled in fuliginous raiment but with scepter in hand and berobed like the Virgin.
[One of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s sets for the scene in question from a later production.]
The same scene in Ingmar Bergman’s Magic Flute (a television production) bears all the hallmarks of his films—the figures seen in tight close-ups and the Queen’s famous cackling occurring off screen with Pamina’s increasingly horror-filled visage filling the space normally occupied by the bravura aria performer; her mother and Queen transformed in her eyes into a balding ghoul by the stage lighting and dodgy make-up.
A taped stage production (with the Wiener Philharmoniker and Staatsopernchor) starring one of the most famous Queen of Nights, Edita Gruberova, lifts the Queen away from the action as in Forman’s film, lodging the singer in a crevice amidst the night sky where she fumes at her daughter, Pamina. The knife with which Pamina is expected to kill Sarastro has to be drawn from a rock like Excalibur.
Considering the unlimited resources of the drawn page, Russell’s approach is decidedly subdued retaining a few stars and some menace but declining to add the heft usually required by operatic singers to project their voices. Here the Queen of the Night is thin, alluring, and covered with the shades of nighttime blue—one might say a kind of art nouveau witch. Dread and trepidation are emotions which seem far removed from Russell’s oeuvre but the symbolic nature of the Queen in Mozart’s opera lessens the demands on his art. Instead, Russell concentrates firmly on the emotional reunion between mother and daughter with their dialogue deviating from the original libretto. The Queen’s warmth is contrasted with her intimidation in dramatization of a kind of double-faced and illogical passion (a mercurial coloratura) which is the anti-thesis of Enlightenment ideals.
[The scene in question with Diana Damrau as the Queen of the Night. Note the more intimate nature of the scene, a choice also taken by Russell in his adaptation.]
* * *
“In many ways, this version is a more palatable vehicle than Wagner’s original operas, which, for ill or well, bear the added burden of being musically “difficult” work even for opera. The Ring of the Nibelung is not difficult comics. It’s like instructional chocolate that beckons the reader with its rich flavour to read ever deeper. You can open it up to pretty much any page and just get lost.” Robb Vollmar, Ninth Art
Russell’s adaptation of Richard Wagner’s magnum opus won him the Eisner award in 2001 and is one of only two full length comic adaptations of Der Ring des Nibelungen (Roy Thomas and Gil Kane seemed perfectly unsuited to the task and were less interested in the opera if their adaptation is any indication).
The first Russell opera adaptation I remember reading was his Siegfried and the Dragon from Epic Magazine #2, a comic which mirrors Wagner’s own approach to his Ring cycle with its humble beginnings. The comic is of modest ambition and certain pages may be likened to the pure illustration of Arthur Rackham’s work on Wagner’s Ring.
[Illustration for Wagner’s Ring by Arthur Rackham]
[A page from Russell’s The Valkyrie, 2001-2002]
Russell’s Ring adaptation retains much of the flavor of his earlier short story in terms of costume and setting. Such a choice has its counterpart in many traditional production including what is perhaps the best selling video of the Ring Cycle—James Levine’s production for the Met with James Morris as Wotan and Hildegard Behrens as Brünnhilde.
The artist’s approach to comics has matured considerably since that time. His collaborator, Patrick Mason, worked directly from Wagner’s libretto (which was not the case with Russell’s script for The Magic Flute), and what results is an adaptation with more obvious parallels to the operas in question. At points, it seemed as if I was actually “reading” the opera (the lyrics, the expressions, and the prescribed settings) line for line.
In the introduction to his comic, Russell chooses the example of the sword leitmotif to illustrate part of his working process—the seven note leitmotif now visualized as a twelve-paneled page which captures Wotan’s moment of inspiration.
Russell writes:
“The solution was to enter Voton’s mind through the eye sacrificed for wisdom (inner vision). This leads to the interweaving of the visual motifs already established in Rhinegold (the primal elements of water and light) with motifs yet to come in The Valkyrie (the sword and the tree). The sequence ends with an exit, via the gleaming light of the sword, through Voton’s good eye, the one which looks upon the outer world.”
In the opera, the sword leitmotif rings out between the lines “Night draws on; from its envy it now offers shelter” and “Thus I salute the fortress, safe from terror and dread”—the sword frequently unseen and Wotan’s vision signified by no more than a gesture and a facial expression. Russell’s solution to this moment of epiphany is quite elegant and certainly one of the high points in his comic. When the moment comes for the leitmotif’s return in The Valkyrie, it is preceded by a number of thin panels which seem to follow Wagner’s musical phrasing as Sieglinde leaves the room to do Hunding’s bidding—those seven notes signaled by little more than a thin panel at the top of a page depicting the barely lit sword; the comic no longer meeting the opera at its moment of veiled tension (Joseph Kerman in Opera as Drama labels Wagner’s use of leitmotif in the Ring as “reckless”.)
If we consider the most famous scene from the entire cycle, the so-called “Ride of the Valkyries”, we find in Russell’s adaptation a somewhat unconvincing but faithful depiction of the Valkyries at work.
The libretto for the scene in question contains cheerful chatter among the Valkyries about various heroes being drawn into Valhalla on their mares and stallions. In the comic, we see them in flight above mountain peaks, but the four page sequence seems limited (or beholden) to the theatricality of the original. The artist does not speculate as to the canvas beyond those skies and peaks even though he is already hampered by the lack of actual sound and long sections of purely orchestral music and on stage movement. This last problem is left largely unresolved by Russell in much of his Ring adaptation, and it seems clear that it would have taken a Cerebus-sized project to capture those extended periods between the actual singing.
In some ways, Coppola’s famous (if overly cited) use of the music in Apocalypse Now seems to get to the heart of the matter more effectively not least because of the director’s touch of irony. The Valkyrie are delivering the glorious dead from battle and the technical mastery of the famous helicopter sequence captures the reality of this celebration of blood lust. Russell’s comic doesn’t detract from the seeming majesty and nobility of the music. Any awe and terror which might be deduced from the narrative of an oncoming storm and the approach of a jealous and violent god is virtually non-existent and and everything slides easily but unmemorably down the reader’s gullet.
What follows this famous scene is one of the most moving sections of music Wagner ever wrote as Brünnhilde pleads with her father not to dishonor her by making her mortal.
“What have you ordained that I must suffer?”
“In deep sleep, I shall enclose you. Whoever wakes you defenceless, has you as wife when you wake.”
Here Russell’s pace as much as Lovern Kindzierski’s bright coloring scheme defeats his purpose, and any sadness, fear, or sense of futility is largely dissipated. Matt Wagner wrote the introduction to the first volume of Russell’s collected Ring and one is reminded of the long conversation Kevin Matchstick has with Mirth in a back alley across from a dumpster holding Excalibur in Mage #14. Wagner spent nearly 20 pages on this sequence. Russell had no more than 8 pages to convey a much more complex conversation between a father and his daughter—between a god’s sense of justice and his real will; between love and duty. Any sense of space (in the dialogue; between and around the protagonists) is diminished both by the word balloons and the figures which fill them.
If Russell’s adaptation is imperfect, it is hardly a surprise with a project of this magnitude. Still, it is hard to imagine anyone else with the interest, strength, and ambition to capture the totality of Wagner’s Ring cycle in comics form. As has been seen in the more common comic adaptations of famous novels, straight transcription and abbreviation rarely produce thrilling results. In my experience, the most effective adaptations tend to use short excerpts and commentary to fulfill their ends; the adapter feeling less obligated to more naive readers and engaging more thoroughly with the criticism surrounding the art form being transmuted.
Russell’s proferred example of Wotan’s vision in Rhinegold seems to be such a moment of expansion and examination. Presumably, for reasons of space and readability, such instances seldom present themselves throughout Russell’s Ring which tends to be more rigid in its depiction of events. And if a more straightforward cleaving to the text is essential for reasons of clarity, the artist also often finds himself almost obviated—what he thinks of the proceedings, his reaction to the music, the long years of theatrical experience, the unbridled artistic imagination sublimated to the act of transcription. Some might say that his makes him the perfect adapter but it also negates a number of reasons why an opera enthusiast might desire to read this comic. These choices and compromises—some successful, others less so—are the essence of the adapter’s art.
Once upon a time, there was a bastion of comics criticism which, it has been opined, stood against the hordes of barbarians trumpeting the works of John Byrne, Todd McFarlane and assorted other idolaters of caped beings. But time withers all, and like Saint Gregory of Rome, the rulers of that holy organ negotiated a separate peace with the hordes — the “empire” surviving but now a rotten shambles and a mockery of what it once stood for. It has been said that the purported ideals of that magazine never existed in the first place. That past is debatable, the present less so.
What was once a hotbed of disagreement and debate has now become one of affirmation and boot licking acceptance. The rallying cry heard last week was a sermon to the converted, an affirmation of the god-like status of various revered cartoonists — that their comics remain untarnished by dint of an indefinable comic-ness
Like many rallying cries, Campbell’s piece is long on rhetoric but short on substance. His primary example as to the brilliance of the EC War line is the cover to Two-Fisted Tales #26.
“Some say us marines retreated from the Changjin Reservoir! …Heck!…we didn’t retreat! We just advanced in another direction!” – Harvey Kurtzman
“Let me fix the Kurtzman war comic in the reader’s mind before moving on. Here is the cover of Two-Fisted Tales #26, March 1952. There is a whole story in it and the way the story is told is quite sophisticated. A soldier in the middle of a historical action is already referring to it in the past tense. The first time I saw Kurtzman’s war comic art I wondered how on Earth he was able to get away with something so radical as that choppy cartooning, so far removed from what one would expect in war art…” – Eddie Campbell
Now Campbell gives my name quite a bit of play in his article. He mentions it again here as if I was denying Kurtzman’s skillful storytelling in certain stories done for the EC war line — as if no juice could possibly be pressed from mediocre fruit. I would ask interested readers to read the article he cites to see for themselves if I have denied Kurtzman’s talent for cartooning as Campbell’s hysterical pronouncements seem to suggest.
Readers not predisposed to give Campbell carte blanche might be slightly confused by the logic of his arguments. The second half of his article assails us with an example of a superior comic-ness which deserves praise, but his half-hearted readings of the EC war comics don’t match this aesthetic appeal and simply revert to typical descriptions of the narrative and the art—Kurtzman’s “choppy cartooning” and the questionable narrative genius of the cover illustration in question:
“…there is a whole story in it” with “a soldier in the middle of a historical action […] already referring to it in the past tense.”
The first question one should ask is why this is especially notable or the mark of a great talent for comics. Are the soldier’s words a prophetic utterance which lodges itself into the entire fabric of Kurtzman’s Changjin Reservoir issue, or is it a philosophical discursion on the paradoxical nature of time and fate?
For those not inclined to read the comic or use their brains, let me just say that the answer is “no” to both these possibilities My suggestions seem utterly ridiculous because the answer is plainly obvious to any reader who regards the cover as a whole. There can be little doubt that the illustration and narrative communicate the language of cover advertising and propaganda.
The disheveled fighting man carrying his wounded comrade; the brilliant brush work twisting and turning—melding the two into one single beast straggling across a snow swept battle field; defiantly disabusing all non-combatants and the foolish crowd of onlookers (journalists and naysayers) of the possibility of any lack of bravery or incompetence. This is not a place for cowards or laggards but one for heroes (misunderstood, at the bottom of the chain of command, injured, or dead), who are not fighting for any abstract concept but just to survive.
What Campbell’s statement suggest is a solitary interest in technicalities, and how this differentiates him from the fans who flocked to superhero conventions during comic’s early years, I’m not entirely sure. When it comes to the spiritual content of Kurtzman’s work, he seems quite deaf or purposefully blind.
Lodged within Campbell’s thin description are other questions —whether we should judge a piece of art as a whole or by its parts; and if we accept that art can achieve greatness purely on the basis of its narrative skill or artistry, is that artistry of a level that we can forgive almost everything else (McCay’s Little Nemo comes to mind immediately).
Kim Thompson latches on to this in the comments section and I quote:
“Complaining that a comic is no good because the story is no good is like complaining that water isn’t a good liquid because oxygen isn’t wet. Bravo, Mr. Campbell.” – Kim Thompson
Thompson’s metaphor is of course thoroughly imperfect since oxygen is frequently found in its “wet” state in our modern world but let’s see what he’s getting at here. In Thompson’s comment, comics are likened to water, which every elementary school kid is taught is composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. In other words, through the combination of art (hydrogen) and story (oxygen), a new, fastidious, and fabulous art form is created known as comics (water). This art form bears only a cursory relation to those things which constitute it and is neither art nor story but something entirely new which obeys no “laws” of aesthetics except those which are conjured up in the rectum of Eddie Campbell (and, maybe, his editor Dan Nadel).
Of course, this line of thought is irrelevant if one assumes that a cartoonist-critic is interested purely in the utilitarian aspects of the art in question. If one simply wants to emulate Kurtzman’s drawing line or his almost extradiegetic storytelling, the absolute quality of the art in question is extraneous.
If we mean to be “critics” interested in the formation (or reassertion) of a canon, then the absolute aesthetic appeal of a comic takes on more importance. This was certainly one of the motivations behind The Comics Journal‘s Top 100 comics list (where the EC line plays a prominent part) — a list mired in the concept that as the roots of comics reside in degradation and populism, they should conform to and be judged by those criteria only. As such, when The Comics Journal Top 100 comics list was produced, it was not so much an exercise in choosing comics of artistic merit but a process of choosing the best smelling shit — shit which, presumably, has no relevance or connection to the world at large.
Campbells’ other argument for the genius of the EC war comics comes at the close of his piece:
“If comics are any kind of art at all, it’s the art of ordinary people. With regard to Kurtzman’s war comics, don’t forget that the artists on those books were nearer to the real thing than you and I will ever be. Jack Davis and John Severin were stationed in the Pacific, Will Elder was at the liberation of Paris. Maybe we should pay attention to the details.”
In this, he trots out an age old argument in buttressing these comics — their authenticity. And who can doubt this? For participation in war and killing (voluntarily or involuntarily) is self-legitimizing — the only truth when it comes to battle. The entire fighting corpus is like a single amoeba with a single mind and a single all-encompassing viewpoint. And why even consider the enemy, the dead, the relatives of the dead, or those who oppose war? Can a cartooning genius ever be limited in his vision or politics? Can he ever be sentimental and derivative? Can a cartooning genius ever be wrong?
[Those looking for background details and a synopsis of The Heart of Thomas can do no better than to read Jason Thompson’s review.]
In the opening pages of The Heart of Thomas, the eponymous object of desire and remembrance, Thomas Werner, leaps from a railway bridge to his death.
But who is he? This intangible ghost of doomed naivete crushed by the morass of faithlessness and abandon which has inundated the boarding school which he attends. Perhaps, a metaphor for innocence lost, reborn in the form of his more resilient lookalike, Erich Fruhling—a boy who soon becomes an indelible memory of that life carelessly thrown away; a soul on the path of transmigration in an alien and barbaric Christian world of torment.
Of course, Thomas’ body isn’t subjected to any tragic or tangible mangling despite the suggestion that “his face was crushed.” Death in Hagio’s world is as chaste as the heated embraces and kisses which reach a crescendo towards the closing chapters of the manga. Even Goethe’s Werther (no first name, similar last name) had the presence of mind to die slowly and painfully 12 hours after shooting himself in the head. Mortality is nothing more than a stylized leap into an endless stream of romantic possibilities in Hagio’s manga. Thomas’ suicide is performed out of love for a senior student by the name of Juli, a distant and correct individual who like all suffering, misunderstood heroes, conceals hidden depths of anguish. The appearance of Thomas’ lookalike, Erich, quite early in the tale—strolling past Thomas’ grave as it were—presents Juli and his classmates with a second chance. He is nothing less than an angelic being. Even the school master seems enraptured by this unspoilt youth—like Hadrian lusting after Antinous. One might almost call it a process of deification. And as with his historical counterpart, Erich is subject to both adoration and recriminations. As Hagio asserts at the start of her story:
“They say a person dies twice. First comes the death of the self. Then, later, comes the death of being forgotten by friends. If that is so, I shall never know that second death. (Even if he should die, he will never forget me.) In this way, I shall always be alive in his eyes.”
These lines define the authoress’ purpose. The Heart of Thomas rests on a physical manifestation of this remembrance, as florid as a grief stricken emperor’s commerorations of his lover—as if memory had the power to evoke a second incarnation or avatar. Still others might see everything which follows Thomas’suicide as the fantasy of a collapsed mind, the tangled memories and imaginings of a dying brain hoping for a happy corrective to a tragically short life. Certainly, that Germany of the mid-twentieth century imagined by Hagio has no anchor in on our reality. It is an alien planet both to the Japanese and European reader alike—a dream which has no interest in the tradition of Mann, Grass, and Boll but rather adheres to the hysterical breathing, coincidence, and fainting spells of wish fulfillment and hallucination. If these young male students had breasts, they would be ripping their bodices from their angular bodies
In one early episode, Juli suffers one of his recurrent fainting spells, a neurotic turn resulting from an earlier psychological trauma. It is perhaps the only time you will see an individual getting mouth to mouth resuscitation while he is having a “fit”. The fraudulence of this medical act suggest it’s placement—if it isn’t clear already—for erotic effect. The penis is verboten but a number of alternatives are grasped with both hands. A teacher’s attempt to stroke Erich with his cane is nothing less than a metaphor for the sexual tensions within the school. When the reigning queens of that exclusive institution arrange to converse with and touch Erich at a tawdry but chaste tea session, he barely manages to fend off their ministrations. This high tea of the mildly depraved is a kind of half-baked, elementary school version of the Hellfire Club where “Do what thou wilt” shall be the whole of the law.
There is the pesudo-coitus—between Juli and Erich—of grasping with sharp objects: first in the fencing room and then, somewhat less subtly, in the bedroom with a pair of scissors. Later, Erich recounts a tale where he indulges in the predominantly male practice of autoerotic asphyxiation. These recurrent acts of strangulation are brought on by the sight of his mother kissing her lover—his mental torment (and patent mommy issues) relieved only by the death of his mother and a profession of fatherly love by his mother’s lover.
This incessant intermingling of pain, death, and love is Hagio’s idée fixe; and the purity of male love the panacea for all depicted ailments. The only exception to this gloss on idealized homosexuality (a fanciful and hopeful template for a paradigmatic relationship between the sexes) is Juli’s physical and likely sexual abuse at the hands of another student named, Siegfried—that swaggering, heroic betrayer of Wagner’s Ring cycle here seen as lascivious, preening monster with an appetite for sadism and young boys.
Erich’s allusion to a meeting between Beethoven and Goethe suggests the essence of the relationship at the center of Hagio’s manga. Here is an excerpt from a Gramophone article concerning Goethe’s feelings after that fateful meeting:
“Shortly afterwards Goethe penned a more qualified verdict to his musical guru Carl Zelter: ‘His [Beethoven’s] talent astounded me; nevertheless, he unfortunately has an utterly untamed personality, not completely wrong in thinking the world detestable, but hardly making it more pleasant for himself or others by his attitude.’”
Erich is of course Beethoven in our boarding school equation. Juli’s rejection of his “untamed” sensuality—forged and broken through terror by Siegfried—is the root of all his troubles. When Juli tells Erich, “I am going to kill you,” it is not merely a prediction based upon his earlier role in the death of Thomas Werner but a sign of Juli’s repressed sexuality—a disease which manifests itself in the weird science of mild attacks of “anemia” which have no basis in medicine.
The reader’s mileage with respect to Hagio’s subtle eroticism will vary depending on his/her passion for the artist’s figure work and for characters with brittle foreheads in need of warm towels. Not that these aspects aren’t apparent to Hagio. There is, for example, that moment of epiphany when one of the characters complains that his fellow students feel that he has “a girl’s face;” an otherwise unremarkable statement except for the fact that just about everyone in that boarding school looks like a pre-pubescent (i.e. breast-less) girl. To be sure, readers of The Heart of Thomas should always assume that every woman in Hagio’s work is actually a man until proven otherwise. This isn’t a problem so much as a feature of the genre, the attractiveness of slightly feminine men (or in this case feminized yet adequately virile men) being the entire point. To imagine the alternative—consider going to an action movie in which nobody dies and no violence is performed. It just wouldn’t do.
Noah in his article at The Atlantic offers little in the comics’ defense except for the standard, “Well, it’s meant to be crap and succeeds admirably at it.” Not his actual words of course, but here they are for those so inclined:
“In a lot of ways, The Heart of Thomas is an Orientalist harem fantasy in reverse. Instead of a Westerner thinking about veiled maidens on cushions in some distant palace, the Japanese Hagio fantasizes about beautiful boys in an exotic Europe.
The genre of boys’ love, in other words, allows Hagio and her readers to place themselves in a position of power and aggrandizement that is rare for women—as the distanced, masterful position, letting his (or her) eyes roam across variegated objects of desire….Thus, the prurient fan-service which is usually doled out only to men is here explicitly taken up by women, who get to watch more exotic male bodies than you can shake a spectacle at.”
And on Juli’s emotional (and likely physical) rape:
“Instead, Juli’s rape emphasizes the universality of what is often presented as a particularly female experience. Similarly, Juli’s shame, his self-loathing, and his tortured effort to allow himself to love and be loved, are all character traits or struggles which are often stereotyped as feminine. The fact that Juli is male seems, then, not an aspect of otherness, but rather a way to underline his similarity to Hagio and her audience. If readers can with Siegfried experience distance as mastery, with Juli they experience an empathic collapse of distance so powerful it erases gender altogether…The boys’ love genre, then, freed Hagio and her audience to cross and recross boundaries of identity, sexuality, and gender.”
As Noah periodically ejaculates on this blog, this is a case where the criticism is of far more interest than the text; a situation where purpose is more interesting than result, intention far better than the delivery, and (presumed) effect more fascinating than the actual reading experience. And if, as Noah claims, Hagio is an “aesthete”, this does little to explain the inadequate metaphors, and the banal structure and prose which litters the narrative. The romance here is as invigorating as ice on genitals. Certainly, nothing works so well to preserve mood than a comic chorus commenting on every loving decision and every act of forbearance. At every turn, the manga engenders not so much an “empathic collapse” but a complete nullification of empathy.
The tacked on and thoroughly mangled Christian metaphors (angels without wings; Judas and Christ; a cursory mention of justification) serve only to highlight Hagio’s poor grasp of European culture and religion in general. Even worse is the “shocking” revelation (of abuse) which is anything but. I let out a mental gasp of incredulity when the a plot twist near the close of the comic had Juli threatening to retire to a seminary; a time honored old chestnut seen in both modern and period Asian dramas since time immemorial where women have retired to nunneries for one reason or another. The immense superficiality and unadorned derivativeness of The Heart of Thomas suggests that whatever dividends one might gain from it are largely skin deep. It is nothing less than a time capsule of high camp.
Apart for the tangy taste of forbidden fruit, is the love of one man for another any different than the much more familiar sight of a man and a woman pining for each other? As both the novel and film adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man suggests, the mere unfamiliarity of that object of affection is no hindrance to empathy. But just as truly great heterosexual romances remain in short supply in the medium (I’d be hard pressed to name more than a handful in manga and anime), so too does this rule apply to gay love in comics. Yet, to demand these standards of The Heart of Thomas is almost certainly a mistake for the comic in question was originally created for the enjoyment of women and has as much to do with the day to day issues of romance and gay love as the women in traditional harem manga have to do with flesh and blood females. Any resemblance to the gay liberation movement of the late twentieth century is simply good fortune if not purely coincidental. Some will say that the manga deserves praise because of its daring sexuality for its time—it is nothing less a seminal work in the boy’s love genre—but such a statement would be a demeaning admission that the comic is merely of historical interest.
The main inspiration for the manga at hand was apparently the film adaptation of Roger Peyrefitte’s Les amitiés particulières (novel published 1943, and film adaptation,1964). The similarities between the film and the manga are certainly striking.
There is the setting and sexual orientation of the protagonists as well as their relative ages. The lovers at the center of the film also struggle with ideas of purity and impurity (“It wasn’t his purity I loved.”) to the extent of expunging their sins of romantic (homosexual) love at confession. As with the final note left by Thomas, the letters between the young lovers act as erotic talismans. In the film, the letters are linked to the legend of St. Tarcisius—a young boy who defended the Blessed Sacrament with his life. These pieces of paper become nothing less than the body and blood of Christ to the lovers (they are certainly held in higher regard). Then there is the younger lover’s (Alexandre) suicide by jumping from a railway bridge (in this case, while traveling on a train) and the confusion of accident and suicide made more pressing in the film than in the comic because of the intransigent Catholicism which hangs heavy over the events.
While the love affair depicted in the film is not entirely convincing, it is certainly far more effective than anything found in Hagio’s comic. Peyrefitte’s work is restrained and classical in approach, and altogether more serious and real, especially in the interaction of the boys and a liberal minded priest named, Trennes. The priestly test commanded by Father Lauzon of the older lover (Georges; Juli’s counterpart) is nothing less than an act of temptation on the part of Satan. Hagio, of course, takes an alternative route. One might call it a disavowal of authenticity in setting, conversation, religion, and, perhaps, even sexuality—all of these becoming as putty and playthings in the authoress’ hand. A perfectly acceptable approach except for the decisive failure in delivery and communion.
The Heart of Thomas is in certain ways a sequel to the film, a fitful re-imagining of everything that could have been, but the final page of this book presents itself as a consummate evocation of my state of mind as I flipped through its pages.
The work was not clever enough, not brazen enough, not idiotic enough, and simply insufficiently well wrought to provide me with even a moment’s pleasure. It was, in short, interminable.
This is the final list of nominations for 2012. The judges are now deliberating on the nominations and we should have the list of articles with the highest number of votes by the end of January.
Reiteration: Readers should feel free to submit their nominations in the comments section of this article. Alternatively I can be reached at suattong at gmail dot com. Web editors should feel free to submit work from their own sites. I will screen these recommendations and select those which I feel are the best fit for the list. There will be no automatic inclusions based on these public submissions. Only articles published online for the first time between January 2012 and December 2012 will be considered.
Jenna Brager on Madeleine L’Engle and Hope Larson’s A Wrinkle in Time.
Jacob Canfield – “Subversion, Satire, and Shut the Fuck Up: Deflection and Lazy Thinking in Comics Critcism”.
Brian Cremins – Captain Marvel, The Master, and the Feminine Embrace.
Michael Dirda – “A Duckburg Holiday”. I don’t think Michael Dirda does that many comics reviews so I’m including it here more as a formality. It’s probably more competent than great.
Elisabeth El Refaie – “Visual authentication strategies in autobiographical comics”.
Emma (of Get Me Some Action Comics) on Sex in The Walking Dead.
Glen David Gold – “The Lure of the Oeuthre: On Charles Portis and Flannery O’Connor”.
Nicholas Labarre on Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s City of Glass.
David Large – Palimpsests and Intertexts: The Unwritten.
Peter Tieryas Liu On Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s Days of Destuction, Days of Revolt.
The individual essays are linked to here for the judges to peruse. Since this process is only selecting individual pieces of comics criticism, the roundtable as a whole is not eligible for consideration.
Lorenzo Mattotti and Jorge Zentner’s The Crackle of the Frost begins with a separation.
Over the course of three pages, the protagonist, Samuel Darko, recounts the circumstances under which he breaks from his partner, Alice. The disruption occurs the moment she announces that she wants to have a child with him; his seeming lack of commitment or existential terror announced by a flurry of pterosaur-like shadows and a roar in his ears. By the time he regains his senses, she has already left him. Darko receives a letter from her some time later—”mailed from a faraway country”—not quite asking for him, yet somehow enticing him in its self-possession, inspiring him to set out on a extended journey in search for her
The four panel sequence which relates this decision is a strange union of image and text, not merely illustrating but mystifying the process of description.
“Alice’s letter had been mailed from a faraway country…very far away indeed. I pulled out an Atlas…”
The “atlas” described in the first panel is displaced to the second panel of the following page with its billowing continents. Instead we see Darko’s face superimposed over his former lover’s nares. The protagonist’s distance from his lover is suggested by a hook of memory, plunged deep into his olfactory bulb (“…if I could somehow bring back, on a map, the smell of her skin.”)
The strange flame scorching through his nostrils in the second panel creates a nebulous map of memory which recurs fitfully throughout the comic. There are the forest animals burnt to cinders on the first leg of his journey…
…the black smoke from which soon cast him into darkness, closing his eyes and ears, leaving him with the disembodied hand of his nurse, Isa, and “the mystery of her hand in my hand.”
When his mask is removed and he is returned to a world filled with “shapes that elude our touch”, everything is a shade lighter, the shadows cast out by a flood of rhodopsin.
The flame of memory returns again in the form of a Virgin’s crown seen on the night of her festival…
…and then in the involuntary memory of a tree encased in fire—our protagonist’s senses clarified by hunger brought on by that feast day (all the restaurants in town are closed).
The narrative reinforces this symbolism and is interlaced with fables from another time: a Chinese emperor destroying his kingdom to keep it alive in myth and within his “…memory.”
“It alone cannot be vanquished.”
And later, the story of a flute player and his cage which contains “all the truth of the world.” The musician treads gently above the waves of a pool which will cure the protagonist’s eyes forever.
The cage he bears before him so gingerly is a recurrent motif first seen at the start of Mattotti and Zentner’s tale where Darko is told that “loneliness can be a cage within which we keep our fears locked away,” the pastel hues forming lines on his shirt like a prisoner’s dress encasing and straitening him.
The cage is seen again in the walled city of the aforementioned Chinese emperor, and even further on, superimposing itself on Darko’s pregnant wife who is seen in profile as she ascends in a caged elevator; the protagonist silently wondering to himself just when his journey had begun, his life suffused with a multitude of starting points and hints of irretrievable knowledge.
And even if the metaphorical aspects of the comic are announced a bit too brusquely about a third of the way through the book…
“Welcome, to the light, Mister Darko.”
…it can be excused as one of the few times the authors allow a pat explanation seep out.
The scene in question has echoes of Debussy’s (after Maeterlinck) Symbolist opera, Pelléas and Mélisande, in particular Act 3 Scene 2, where Golaud leads Pelléas into the depths of a castle situated in a land of perpetual night, forcing him to glance into a cavern rich with the stench of death.
This before allowing him to emerge on to the ramparts—to the bright sun where “the scent of the wet grass and the roses is drifting up. It must be about noon…”
There is a counterpart to Darko’s impaired vision in the “Blind Men’s Well” described in Act 2 Scene 1 of that opera as well—a place where the stirrings and fate of the doomed lovers are first made plain.
Pelléas: “Since the king is almost blind himself, people don’t come here any longer”
Mélisande: “How solitary it is – there’s not a sound to be heard…I’m going to lie down on the marble. I want to see the bottom of the water.”
The opera consists of dream-like scenes of almost disconnected action, the unifying thread being Debussy’s music; its fellow in the comic being Mattotti’s masterful use of color. And if the an audience wonders whether Maeterlinck’s play concerns love and death, the cycle of creation and destruction, or simply “the presentiment of disaster at the moment of happiness and calm…”
“…the characters in his work do not act; they await action, and if we are not convinced of the certainty of that action, we would be distracted by the resignation.” (Joan Pataky Kosove)
…then the comic reader is allowed to wonder about all these things as well.
Darko’s fear is banished by an act of creation—a lotus-like flame emerging from the darkness like a Buddhistic totem symbolizing love and compassion. But his journey only ends when he meets another man—his father bent with age and sheathed in the same prisoner’s dress as his son, a reflection of himself; his memories reeled in once again by his sense of smell—of his “father’s nakedness”, his father’s “breathing”.
And there it ends, the questions as unanswerable as the mystery of life itself. In the hospital grounds, Darko spots a “bright light in the darkness”—another man “taking [his] worries for a walk among the trees” who can only talk about his as yet unborn daughter, Matlida; the protagonist’s father joining them in his thoughts as they push through the breaking cold in search of intangible yet nascent rest.
Further Reading
Sarah Horrocks with a more traditional review The Crackle of the Frost.
This is part of an ongoing quarterly process to find the best online comics criticism of 2012. Five comics critics have kindly agreed to adjudicate and create a final list based on the long list of nominations. Nominations from previous quarters can be found here and here.
We’ve just ended a lengthy Hate Anniversary at HU and judging from the results, it would appear that “hate” is both entertaining and popular. On the other hand, it does seem that “hate” isn’t as easy it appears. My feeling is that while the criticism generated in the last few weeks has been useful and informative, less of lasting worth (to comics) has emerged than in previous HU roundtables. In fact, I would not hesitate to say that one of the worst pieces of comics criticism I have read this year emerged during this roundtable.
The usual reasons—as listed by Noah in his introduction to “hate”—apply. I am also puzzled as to the repeated justifications for “hate” in those articles. Rather, writers should be apologizing to readers and consumers (like myself) for loving so much dreck. There’s always the small possibility that the world of comics criticism is, for the most parts, a happy-clappy world of positive energy with practitioners ill-suited to the arts of ridicule and general nastiness. The preponderance of words of affirmation in this year’s nomination list is evidence of the same. There are far worse things then this to be accused of.
Reiteration: Readers should feel free to submit their nominations in the comments section of this article. Alternatively I can be reached at suattong at gmail dot com. Web editors should feel free to submit work from their own sites. I will screen these recommendations and select those which I feel are the best fit for the list. There will be no automatic inclusions based on these public submissions. Only articles published online for the first time between January 2012 and December 2012 will be considered.
There were a number of good articles on HU this last quarter but I won’t be nominating most of them due to a conflict of interest. Readers (but not contributors) of HU should submit their own nominations for this quarterly process.
***
Jordi Canyissa – “Pictureless Comics: the Feinte Trinité Challenge”
Jared Gardner on Joe Sacco – “Comics Journalism, Comics Activism”. This one was recommended by Noah. I will add here that I’m definitely not sold on the idea (suggested in the text) that Sacco is under appreciated or polarizing. If anything, there’s almost universal support for his political positions and comics within the comics critical sphere. He certainly hasn’t been kicked around like Norman Finkelstein for example. This might actually reflect well on comics critics for once but I’m more inclined to put this down to a lack of diversity in opinion.
Laurence Grove – “A note on the woman who gave birth to rabbits one hundreds years before Töpffer.” (According to the author, the article has appeared as “A Note on the Emblematic Woman who Gave Birth to Rabbits”, ed. Alison Adams and Philip Ford, in ‘Le Livre demeure’: Studies in Book History in Honour of Alison Saunders (Geneva: Droz, 2011), pp. 147-156.)
Dustin Harbin on Steven Weissman’s Barack Hussein Obama.
Jeet Heer on Building Stories (“When is a book like a building? When Chris Ware is the author.”)
A. David Lewis (writer) and Miriam Libicki (artist) on Harvey Pekar’s Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me. This is a useful Jewish perspective on a comic about Jewish matters. The problem as with most drawn reviews of comics is that it really doesn’t use the tools of the medium in any useful sense. Much of it reads as if it was adapted from a prose form review as opposed to a comics script. This review didn’t need to be a comic.
Heather Love on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother (“The Mom Problem”).
Mindless Ones on League of Extraordinary GentlemenParts 1 and 2
Adrielle Mitchell on the relationship between Comics Studies and Comics. (“Mutualistic, Commensal or Parasitic?”)
Matthias Wivel – “New Yorker Cartoons – A Legacy of Mediocrity” (as published on HU).
Frank M. Young on John Stanley’s Little Lulu Fairy Tale Meta-Stories. I’m including this article here despite the rather ridiculous comment near the start that Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant and the Tarzan newspaper strip aren’t comics. It’s an argument from the Land that Time Forgot which Young explains in detail in the following short summary:
“But part of the distinct recipe of comics is the speech or thought balloon. It is a narrative device unique to the form. The creation of this tool, in the 19th century, gave comics the one thing that set them apart from prose, paintings, plays, movies, video games, TV shows and any other visual-verbal container for a flowing narrative.”
The real question here is whether an outdated and eccentric idea about comics should detract from the piece.
