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From Hoppers to Honolulu: A Fan Letter to Jaime Hernandez

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As a comics creator and as a life-long comics reader, I’ve frequently been asked, who are your favorite artists, or which artists are your biggest influences? Time and again, Jaime Hernandez is in my top 10 list.

Given that most of my comics life revolves around manga nowadays, my response often surprises people. And it’s true — Jaime’s work isn’t what most people would consider manga at all, although his work is admired by fans and artists around the world for his draftsmanship, dramatic use of black/white, supple line work, and most of all, his storytelling skills. But discovering Love & Rockets when I was in college was a major turning point for me, and one that changed how and why I draw comics.

Just as being introduced to shojo manga in my tween years and later Elfquest in my early teens showed me stories that were made for me (and not just my brother) and that women could be comics creators, and just as the X-Men, Teen Titans, and Legion of Superheroes introduced me to the excitement of superhero stories, Jaime Hernandez’ work told me that I could and should draw comics about where I live, the things I did everyday, and the people I know and love.

Local Like Me/Punk Like Me

When I was going to high school and college in Honolulu, I had three separate lives: I was a “nice Japanee girl,” I hung out with ‘those punk rock kids,’ and I liked to read and draw comics. These three worlds rarely, if ever intersected.

I’m a third-generation Japanese-American, which means that my family has been in Hawaii since the early 1900’s. Japanese culture is a big part of my life, but being from Hawaii was just as important in shaping how I see the world.

Growing up and living as a ‘local’ in Hawaii is very different than what the Hawaii Visitors Bureau would have you believe. I can’t surf, I only know a handful of Hawaiian words, and dancing the hula? Please, don’t ask. But growing up in beautiful, easy-going, multi-cultural Hawaii was one of the best gifts my parents could have ever given to me.

Besides knowing where the best places to eat, drink, and surf, being ‘local’ means you know about local language/slang, and you grow up with a set of shared values, experiences, and sense of humor that you rarely see depicted realistically / non-stereotypically in movies, TV, and yes, comics too.

In the late 1980’s, I returned to Hawaii after a stint in art school on the mainland (a.k.a. New York City and San Francisco). My time away from Hawaii brought a lot of things into focus – or at least made me look at my hometown and the people who live in it in a new way. I realized that locals talked and acted differently than ‘mainland’ people. This was kind of cool / funny / interesting to observe; being a former insider who could now see this world through the lenses of an ‘outsider.’

At around the same time, I started hanging out with friends in the local punk / indie band scene. In dingy dive bars in industrial areas, high school auditoriums, garages, and in clubs tucked away in not-so-touristy pockets of Waikiki, you could hear punk, hardcore, speed metal, ska and hybrids of all of the above, played by bands like Devil Dog, S.R.O. (Something Really Offensive), The Wrong, B.Y.K. (Beat Your Kids), Mumbo Jumbo, Elvis 77, and Tantra Monsters.

There were parties at crash pads where the only furniture were milk crates, thrift store finds, and a mattress on the floor. There were nights hanging out in strip clubs with my guy friends, because that’s where their girlfriends worked. And there were lots of midnight beer runs to the 7-11’s and early, early mornings at 24-hour diners, eating breakfast while our ears were still ringing from the gig we just attended.

So when I read Jaime’s Locas stories in Love & Rockets, I immediately felt like I was looking into a world that was both familiar and new.

Reading Mi Vida Locas

While I was growing up, there weren’t a whole lot of Mexican-Americans living in Honolulu. Heck, you hardly hear Spanish being spoken, and frankly, now that I’ve been living in California for the past 10 years, the tacos in Hawaii were pretty lousy. But reading Love & Rockets gave me a glimpse into a world I would never be introduced to, much less become immersed in otherwise.

Before Love & Rockets, I had no idea that there were other types of ‘local’ cultures. I didn’t know what “mija’ or ‘vato’ meant. There are gangs in Hawaii, but I never experienced what it was like to be in the middle of the kind of turf wars that Jaime depicted in “The Death of Speedy.” The beautiful thing about Jaime’s Locas stories is that he did it without romanticizing Latino pride or preaching a heavy-handed ‘anti-violence’ or ‘anti-drugs’ message –- he just drew stories about his characters living their everyday (but nonetheless fascinating) lives.

Maggie was a character I could really relate to. She was Mexican-American, and spent time in both her Mexican and American worlds. She was curvy, and was alternately confidently sexy and insecure about her body. She was just as comfortable in a backyard party with her family and friends as she was at a dingy punk club. She was imperfect and complex.

I could also relate a lot to Ray, the guy from the ‘hood who left to see what the world had to offer. Ray came back and saw his childhood friends and ‘the way things are and the way they’ve always been’ in a different light, much as I did when I returned to Honolulu in the last 80’s after my mainland sojourn.

Unlike many comics I read at the time, Love & Rockets depicted a world that was filled with friends, family and acquaintances who were young and old, white, black, Latino, and Asian too.

I remember being particularly impressed to see Asian characters in Love & Rockets, like Daphne and Kiko. Finally! Asian characters who weren’t ninjas or samurai or dragon ladies or glorified boobs on a stick. Daffy and Kiko weren’t there to be the ‘token’ Asian characters or to add an ‘exotic’ touch to the story – they were just regular people like any other who lived in Maggie’s vibrant, multicultural Southern California world. They looked and acted like people I know, or wanted to know.

Perhaps best of all, the female characters in Love & Rockets are just as interesting (well, maybe more interesting) than the male characters. And sexy? Oh yes, they are that too, even without wearing skin-tight clothing or holding big guns. Chew on that, spandex-fetishists.

Draw What You Know

Before Love & Rockets, I drew the usual things that most young comics fans turned creators do: I drew stuff based on what I liked to read. I drew superhero comics. I drew stuff that looked like it was heavily influenced by shojo manga. I drew cutesy animals. I drew gag comics for my high school newspaper.

Jaime’s Love & Rockets stories showed me that comics can be a medium for telling very personal and engaging stories that aren’t just navel-gazing pity parties. His stories set in the lower-middle class suburbs and punk clubs of Southern California made me realize that I could draw stories about the real worlds I lived in instead of trying to tell stories about places that I would never, ever live in (like Titans Tower, or Xavier’s School for Gifted Children, or in my manga-obsessed mind, Neo-Tokyo or your generic Japanese high school where most shojo manga is set).

His diverse cast of characters showed me that there was a spectrum of human experiences and personalities that could be depicted in comics – and that I could draw stories based on people I knew, rather than people I’d never know, like Wolverine or Wonder Woman. He made comics real and relevant to me at a time when I was losing interest in superhero stories.

It’s been months since I’ve been to a club to see a live band. And it’s been over a year since I’ve been back to Hawaii. I still draw my Bento Box comic strip for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (albeit only every few weeks, instead of weekly like I used to). I don’t quite have the passion or time to draw comics full time like I used to when I was in college.

But I can still pick up Love & Rockets today, and it’s like catching up with dear friends who are growing old with me. It’s a comics series that continues to speak to me like no other, and one that I know I’ll enjoy until Jaime doesn’t feel like drawing it anymore (which I hope never, ever happens.)

I’m no where near as talented and prolific as Jaime Hernandez is, but I am grateful for the lessons that I learned from his comics many years ago: just draw what you know, and the rest will follow.
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Deb Aoki is the Manga Editor for About.com. She also draws Bento Box, a
semi-occasional comic strip for the Honolulu Star Advertiser.

The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.“>Locas Roundtable is here.

The Major’s Testament

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Jean Giraud aka. Moebius had been battling cancer for years, cheating death on several occasions before finally letting go on Saturday. His illness marked his creative production in the last decade of his life, leading to the cancellation of certain projects, including two Endless collaborations with Neil Gaiman, and the sad dissipation felt in others, most notably perhaps his last book (2010), in which he revived his classic, mute character Arzak as a talking stiff-headed nobody in particular.

But it is also a strong undercurrent in the late, exhilarating creative surge of his improvised sketchbook comics series Inside Moebius (2000–2008) and his elegiac return to his greatest creation, The Hermetic Garage, in 2008’s Chasseur déprime — works in which he captured for the first time in decades some of the same searching energy that characterized his creative peak in the seventies, delivering it with the urgency of a man with a short lease.

While in a sense youthful, these works are simultaneously very much songs of experience, with Chasseur déprime as resonant a reflection as any in comics on old age. Uncertain, even insecure, and borderline depressed, but also wise. Nothing is ever really over in Moebius and he did love the serial, so it is fitting that the story leaves things open, ending on the obligatory “fin de l’épisode.”

I have previously written at some length about the book and its relation to his 1970s masterpiece, so I will just add a few observations here, pertaining specifically to its character of artistic testament.

The plot — such that it is in this reiterative, oneiric work — concerns the protagonist, and Moebius’ alter-ego, Major Grubert, the demiurge-like creator of the tripartite world of the Garage, taking out a contract on himself, offered by one of his own creations. From the first pages of the book, we learn that there is only one possible ending for him: death.

This prompts a personal mise-en-abîme in which the Major finds himself unstuck from the temporal flux, wandering the desert, which — literally as well as symbolically — was ever Giraud’s creative locus amoenus, only to be trapped in the clinical halls of a museum overseen by a dominatrix task-master, the Overturner. Here, he loses himself in his work or, as he describes one of the pieces on the walls, “plays with fire.” The tone is retrospective, describing a creator who, in the words of one of his creations, never delivered to the arid desert floor of his world the Elysian Fields promised in his prime.

This allegorical narrative is woven through with what is clearly personal detail. At one point, the Major expresses a wish to escape to “Good Old Earth,” more precisely the Mountrouge suburb of Paris where Giraud lived with his second wife, Isabelle. And it is tempting to see in the voluptuous Overturner a complex portrayal of his formidable wife and business manager. While superficially presented as a villain, she is simultaneously the most intriguing character in the book, acting the part of the artist’s dark muse and embodying his desire.


At one point, the action jumps ahead eleven years — eleven years which we sense have personal resonance — and we understand that the Major has spent that time passively as a slumping custodian in the museum of his own work. The initially exuberant and virile, if still menacingly inflected, picture above him (“Playing with Fire”) has morphed into an oppressive conglomeration of biological havoc, reminiscent of the work of Moebius’ fellow designer for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), H. R. Giger.

Central to both compositions are the skulls that anchor much of the imagery in this book, as well as in its direct predecessor, the extended creative mediation 40 Days dans le Desert “B” (1999). The skull in art tends to signify vanitas, a symbol of the transience of life, and Moebius in one instance even makes use of the similarly consolidated motif of the artist working with Death looking over his shoulder, but he gives it all a disturbing personal spin.

The skull in these images is often at the center of the kind of mutating forms for which he is famous, the kernel animating the creative metamorphosis that is at the core of his art, and of his creative self-conception. Once beautiful and inspiring, even regenerative, at other times in his career barren and still, these mercurial forms turn tumorous in old age. Fatal.

As has ever been the rule of his art, Moebius knows he cannot escape. Yet he sees an out. The Major, on the run from the Overturner’s murderous rabbit henchmen (don’t ask), decapitates himself, leaving his body at their mercy (a charged representation of his troubled, always slightly alienated sexuality). Hilariously — the silly was ever a saving grace for him — his noggin drops down a rabbit hole, and as is the nature of such apertures, he changes.

From the resultant cancerous mass emerges once again the good old Major wearing his pith helmet, carrying his overnight bag. Meeting him there is his liberated, non-mustachioed alter ego from the ending of the original Garage, who takes him on a journey not toward Montrouge as he initially wishes, and not out of the dream in which he has been suffering, but toward the “six million” doors it still offers him. We thus leave them as they approach not our Good Old Earth, but another.

What better ending? The artist submitting his creativity as redemptive, finding it ever on the event horizon of the Other.

When We Had Moebius in Our Living Room

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Moebius was one of the weirdest things my roommate had in our living room. He wasn’t weird in the way that the shrine to my former workplace janitor was weird. That is to say, he wasn’t weird in that stupid way early 20’s ironic décor is weird, which is not weird so much as dopey (think a vintage speculum or the rare can of Storm Malt liquor found at Grocery Outlet in downtown Oakland). Moebius was weird by virtue of his incongruity. He was worth more than everything we owned and maybe even the apartment we lived in. He was definitely prettier than anything else we owned, and we took better care of him as a result. My roommate and I destroyed glassware (glass performs poorly in the hands of drunks), three futons, a couple of lamps, a garbage disposal, and a bathroom sink. Most of our other books had coffee stains on them. The ones that didn’t had been soaked in other liquids, and their spines buckled as a result. Our lives weren’t very pretty either, though they lacked the level of degeneracy necessary to make them really interesting. This is all a long way of saying that while we weren’t miserable we weren’t quite happy, either, which is a way of explaining in advance why we kept Moebius around so long.

My roommate found Moebius on the floor of a movie theater in Sand Diego in 1995. Actually, an employee of his found Moebius. Knowing my roommate (who I’ll call Rob, since that’s his name) read comics, the employee brought him to him. He was a little, 4” by 6” black, and hardbound Moebius. He contained a bunch of little drawings on medium press paper that felt slightly rough to the touch. The drawings were put down in shiny black ink, their line weights uniformly uniform, and their subject matter various. The thing about the drawings is that they were so perfect the employee thought it was a facsimile of Moebius that some conventioneer had dropped. For a second Rob thought the same thing. But before he pitched it on the lost-and-found he realized it was real. A weird little colored-pencil doodle by Bob Burden and some children’s drawings in crayon were what gave it away.

The lost-and-found was no place for such a thing. The San Diego Comic convention had ended earlier that day. This was before everybody was on the Internet. It was before everybody knew what the Internet was. Rob did what was maybe the right thing. He put it in his bag and took it home. He moved into my Oakland apartment a few months later.

I was in the process of a protracted breakup and in need of a roommate. Like many young men my age I was a terrible person, though I maintain I had my charms. The least of these charms (but a charm nonetheless) was that I drew well enough to make others think I had a future in drawing. Although I hadn’t read comics regularly in some time, I was still looking for work in the field. What’s more, I had maintained an interest in the things. So when Rob moved in he unpacked Moebius and placed him in my hand. Upon meeting him I knew exactly who he was. Good to meet you in person, Moebius.

Those little drawings had an amazing way of making the tiny pages seem ten-times their actual size. There was a drawing of a canyon that you all but fell into. The drawing of a man plodding through the desert looked vast. The man was less than an inch tall, but he was fully formed and totally lost. There were lots of crystalline landscapes, many exotic hats, some beautiful women and some less than beautiful men. There were no pencil marks, no erasures. It was totally Moebius.

Moebius lived with Rob and me for almost five years. How the hell did we get so lucky? We certainly didn’t deserve him. More often than not he’d just hang out on the shelf. But he’d come out at critical moments, like when one of us was depressed, or when somebody with an interest in comics was over, when we wanted to show off how random the world could get.

Rob and I understood that Moebius couldn’t stay forever. He certainly wasn’t ours, and we knew we’d need to find him a way home. But we were also too lazy to write letters or call France. About two years later we did take Moebius to the local comic convention. We thought we might connect with a friend of Moebius who could help him out. After a few shady dudes offered to take him off our hands, I asked a friend who dealt in original art what we should do. He and a few pros took a minute with Moebius and they all agreed. Do not give Moebius to anyone other than Moebius.

I moved out the next year, but Rob, Moebius and I still spent a lot of time together. I was back in school and feeling better about my life. Ditto Rob. Moebius was the same as ever, though he was also coming to Oakland for a convention. When Rob found this out he called me to ask if I wanted to give Moebius back to Moebius. I had to work (or something) that weekend, so Rob and Moebius headed to the convention together.

When Rob got to the convention he found Moebius at the end of a long line of autograph seekers. He stepped into line. The guy managing the line, a Mr. Rory Root, was asking people what they were getting signed or explaining the rules or doing whatever he was there to do. I wasn’t there, and while Rob has filled me in on the details, they’re the sort of details that derail a good story. Anyway, Rory did eventually get to Rob, and Rob showed him Moebius. Rory took Rob and Moebius to the front of the line.

Moebius introduced himself to Rob, not knowing why he’d been brought to him. Rob, not knowing how to start the conversation simply introduced Moebius to Moebius. He explained really briefly where he’d been, and what he’d been up to. Moebius didn’t bat an eye at the explanation, but he did tear up. “They’re quite good drawings, no?” He thanked Rob, and Rob called me almost immediately after. We were going to miss Moebius.

Clarity and Intent

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A few books by some of comics’ (male) best and brightest of several eras. Some of these have been out for awhile, but I only just got around to them.

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Jon Fury in Japan

Alex Toth’s only extended stint on a continuity strip was done for his post newspaper when he was stationed in Tokyo in the Army in 1955. Jon Fury was his first effort writing for himself. While he could brilliantly interpret the scripts of others, Toth faced nearly insurmountable difficulties to construct his own. He tried to emulate Milton Caniff’s narrative mastery, but he certainly didn’t “get” one of Caniff’s greatest assets: his use of female characters of depth and agency. Toth is strictly old boy’s club, but truthfully his male characters are not much better defined. The storylines feel forced and they are riddled with overlong exposition to the extreme.  Despite these drawbacks, his art is highly developed and constrained only by the sheer weight of text; these are dynamic, elegantly designed episodic pages in the Caniffian Sunday format. More than any of his contemporaries, Toth reached for clarity of comics expression and here he exhibits his mature style in a serialized form, where weekly deadlines dissolved the hesitations dictated by his perfectionism.

The late Toth did the work for black and white reproduction and so that is how it is seen in IDW’s recent Toth bio Genius, Isolated. The original art  was done in a process similar to mimeograph, basically drawn directly on waxy plates, which quickly begin to degenerate in the process of printing, even in such a small print run as these strips had, with the result that a complete pristine set is probably impossible to put together. The art restoration in the panel below from the slick color comic book version, Jon Fury In Japan, is definitely better than it is in IDW’s hardcover bio. In both recent versions, there are many minute amendments to the drawings by other hands; these are more pronounced in the color comic.


One panel’s restorations: left, from IDW’s version, right, from the comic.

IDW’s reconstruction of Toth’s original lettering of the later pages is readable, but in the comic book version, Toth’s lettering has been removed on most of the pages, which are re-lettered with a cold and inconsistently scaled digital font. This may read easier, but the artist’s hand is lost. And, emphasis via bold type has been added to Toth’s dialogue. As well, if art done for black and white must be colored, Toth’s is better suited to flatter hues, a four color comic book or Sunday strip-like color. The example shown above is atypical; overall, the too-plastic fades and color modeling feel anachronistic to the period piece. Plus, although effort is made to color the protagonist as a native American, many color decisions are counterintuitive, for instance in the pink jacket of the thug also seen on the cover.

Left: xerox from the original printing. Center: IDW version. Right: color comic version.

Granted, the pages needed repair, but work so pared to its essence is subverted by overt interference, much less the overkill of the comic package. Fortunately, Jon Fury in Japan also contains Toth’s final interview, significant for its emphasis on his animation career. Other than a few questionable photos, this has a good selection of panels by Toth and his influences and the coloring imposed on these is more appropriately restrained. (Paul Power, $11.00)

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“Red Tide” in Dark Horse Presents #3

Chandler: Red Tide was released to the  book trade in 1976 as the first American original full-color mass-market graphic novel. It represents Jim Steranko’s longest, most ambitious auteur effort in the comics medium to date. The two-panel-a-page layout with dual type blocks underneath is constructed in such a way as to be unusually immersive; in the act of reading, the obviously separated art and text come to simultaneous apprehension. The art was drawn in pencil without feathering and with minimal holding lines; Steranko’s excellent comics-like color separations often define the forms. The original book has a pulpy chiaroscuro feel that echoes the great noir films to which the story effectively pays homage. The representations are likewise mostly typical of the hard boiled dick genre; for instance, the protagonist and the leading lady have a prior history and her passion is reignited when she senses “something more than anger behind” his slap. On the other hand, there are appearances by a lesbian cab driver.

A reissue of Red Tide enhanced by the author has been looming  for years and now here’s a taste with an excerpt of the first chapter, in Dark Horse’s slick house anthology title. Steranko expands the possibilities of digital color while reiterating that cartooning devices like holding lines, heavy outlines developed to contain badly-registered color inks, are no longer essential with tight full color printing. He transforms and rebuilds his images into layered digital paintings that greatly resemble the airbrushed Art Deco graphics and advertising art of the period depicted. There is an impressive depth to some of the images that far outstrips what he was able to do in the method of the first printing.  He is able to amplify the visual connection to Chandler’s milieu with contemporary tools while exploring the intrinsic qualities of those tools with imaginative verve.

Perhaps this new version puts undue emphasis on the images, in terms of the time involved in the readers’ perception of them relative to the reading time of the text. The expanded density of the art as well as the altered justification of the type blocks conspire to disrupt the 2/1 art-to-type ratio which is key to Steranko’s immersion formula, one of the most important virtues of the book.

Still, any new (or newish) comics by Steranko are welcomed. What he did with these pages is very interesting and no doubt the completion of the augmented edition will be impressive. I can see the amount of time and effort he has to put in to finish the whole book to the level of this excerpt though, and so perhaps in the meantime, Red Tide can be put out in a nice facsimile edition so it can get the attention it has long deserved and he can finish this new enhancement as he will, without pressure. (Dark Horse, $7.99)

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Is That All There Is?

I recently read a review of Joost Swarte’s collection of most of his comics work that complained of the scale of this small hardcover, but I think it has a jewel-like quality. It is a beautiful little book that one can delve into periodically to simply enjoy Swarte’s exactingly rendered, beautifully colored comics pages.

The art is the thing here. While there are some engagingly animated sequences, the stories seem mostly clever, sometimes flimsy cause-and-effect variations created as supports for Swarte’s meticulous cartooning science. As with Toth, the more interesting aspect of the work is the way that the art manifests the ideas, such as they are—Swarte is a master of page architecture and image construction and he also has a tendency to reflexively expose his practice, which is why he is so revered by comics structuralists such as Art Spiegelman. The Franco-Belgian clear line derived from Herge and his forms of representation have their most refined outlet in Swarte’s short absurdities, reprinted from his Modern Papier and a host of other comics periodicals here and abroad including Metal Hurlant, Charlie and Raw. (Fantagraphics,$35.00)

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Madwoman of the Sacred Heart

I love the recent translation of Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius’  Madwoman of the Sacred Heart. A black and white version published in the USA in 1996 contained only the first two parts (it was completed in 1998). This  full color trade paperback of the complete Madwoman shows the best efforts of both men, far outstripping their earlier collaborations on The Eyes of the Cat and The Incal trilogy. Jodorowsky’s scenario is hilarious, an incisive and compulsively readable satire of sex and religion, for starters, that offers Moebius the opportunity to draw his single most immersive work of comics storytelling. The seemingly effortless flow of Moebius’ panels here rivals the reduced clarity of the best of Alex Toth’s 1950s Dell comics.

The book is a prime example of text and art reading together as equal forces at the service of the narrative. There are plenty of places for writer and artist to shine, but one is rarely brought out of the narrative to marvel at the construction, even when it frequently veers to philosophical discourse or transcendent visualization. I usually complain if Moebius does not do his own coloring, but here several colorists did an effectively punchy but tasteful, organic job of it; even if it is digital, most of the color looks like painted bluelines.

My first impression was that it takes some considerable suspension of belief to accept that the Heinleinesque protagonist (who is apparently an amalgam of the authors) holds such sexual magnetism for beautiful young women (and men), but Marguerite informs me that the French have such high regard for their intellectual heroes that an elder philosophy professor from the Sorbonne might indeed be considered quite sexy. At any rate, Jodorowsky and Moebius’ trangressively libidinous epic is played out so beautifully, without ever feeling forced, that the ride is taken willingly and has many rewards. (Humanoids,$24.95)
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Paying For It

Chester Brown has represented freedom to me for such brilliant improvisations as his original complete version of Ed the Happy Clown and The Little Man and I also admire his Biblical adaptations and Louis Riel—but Paying For It is a constricted,  joyless business. As a comic by Brown this has a certain mastery of form and the art is technically as good as ever, but the reader barely notices it, because to a large degree the art serves only to drive the reader through the book. It is primarily a reading machine and one is driven to focus on what is being said in Chester’s voice in the form of a memoir.

I would have little interest in reading such a john’s-eye view in prose form and as johns go, I am not made to feel sympathetic to Brown. He frets briefly about the possibility of an undercover sting, but where prostitution is a crime, it is one that prostitutes are prosecuted for, not johns. He worries a lot about being robbed and the expense, the money. He is concerned about girls that look too young, but for his  liability alone, one assumes, because he can hardly tell if they are of the age of consent, or not:  he declines to have sex with any women above a very young age, although he himself is forty and stretched a bit tight, at that. I’m no oil painting either, but really, it can’t be much of an aesthetic experience for the women that have to deal with him and they could be his daughters.

The exhibitionism here is similar to his ruthlessly honest explorations of his teenage years in the later Yummy Furs, but here, the whole gives off an aura of creepiness on the part of its author. Sex is to Brown reduced to a physical function, it’s all about him and his pleasure or release. Brown doesn’t draw the faces of the prostitutes he visits—well, except for panels such as those I scanned. Ostensibly for the reason of preserving their anonymity, his ploy effectively dehumanizes and reduces them to 3-dimensional versions of the bodies of the Playboy playmates he masturbated over in his youth. He essentially jerks off with real people! Actually, drawn as cartoons, they again become 2-dimensional and there is little variation to distinguish the progression of faceless women at all.

I don’t dispute the case he makes in his comic and annotations for the escorts, but the show of concern he makes for their circumstances. One gets the sense that Brown wouldn’t care about or do art about any of it, if he wasn’t trying to justify his involvement. In practice he seems devoid of empathy or affection. We are treated to many panels drawn from an overhead, Brueghelesque perspective of Brown banging away hell-bent for leather, getting his money’s worth. He can motivate himself to solicit prostitutes and then do the years of work involved in a graphic novel and share himself with the world, but he can’t get it up to fight for love. All the effort that goes into a relationship…who needs it?  In this case, listening to his friends might have helped; they all try to give him good advice. But, as his pal Seth says, “Chet’s a robot.”

He’s also a cheapskate:  he’s not the one “paying for it.” We who buy the book are and in addition, this thing was subsidized by generous grants! It’s fucking depressing. (Drawn and Quarterly, $24.95)

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“Amber Sweet” in Optic Nerve #12

Adrian Tomine uses his work to thoughtfully explore multicultural and  interpersonal relations. His work exemplifies the reader immersion and simultaneous cool remove that a refined visual orchestration can lend to a narrative.  “Amber Sweet” is an expanded version of Tomine’s great piece from the massive Kramer’s Ergot #7. His concise and elegant drawings and color give a measured, airy tone to his ironic tale of the torments endured by a young woman because of her resemblance to a well-known porn star. When they meet, the contrast is telling: the real Amber is self-possessed; she handles her admirers with a blithe “Hey! What’s up?” or poses with them for a picture, butters them up a bit and then brushes them off. It is her choice to do what she does, but her choice has inadvertently isolated her doppleganger, who is continually harrassed by aggressive men. This destroys the relationships of “not-Amber,” whose eventual distrust of all men is often justified. This is underlined by Tomine in the scene below, in which two young men impose themselves upon her, denying the implications of their simultaneous wanking while assuming her companion’s complicity in their homosocialism. (Drawn and Quarterly, $5.95)

 

Can the Subaltern Draw?: Reframing Caste in Indian Graphic Novels

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I have not yet been to India. Unlike Belgium, China, or Egypt — who’s respective comics’ scenes I feel comfortable writing about at length predominately because I’ve lived in those places with the time afforded to trace how the Ninth Art relates to their national histories — I am coming at the Indian landscape of comics with little more than the information provided by Internet strangers. I also know a paltry amount about the socio-economic issues historical and currently facing Indian people (save what is to be learned from a New Yorker article or two). To recap: I know who Nehru was the and the jackets he wore, I understand the concept of caste, I enjoy the writing of Amartya Sen, I’ve watched Krrish, and I weirdly had dinner with Salman Rushdie one time. As one might imagine, this admittedly makes me a very poor candidate to write at length about Indian Comics and history with any sort of authoritative voice. However, my lack of India credentials does make me the ideal candidate to consume the graphic novels recently released by New Delhi based publisher Navayana.

Navayana — translation: “New Vehicle” — was founded by S. Anand and Ravikumar with the explicit interest of being, “India’s first and only publishing house to exclusively focus on the issue of caste from an anticaste perspective.”  To that measure they have released an impressively diverse catalogue of books since 2003 addressing the issues of caste in India through critical essays, poetry collections, nonfiction novels, and, most recently, graphic novels. Today I will look at the two politically charged English-language graphic novels Navayana has published in the last year under the creative direction of S. Anand: Bhimayana (2011) and A Gardener in the Wasteland (2012). In particular, their relative successes at addressing issues of caste dating back to the 18th century for a global comics audience in the 21st century.

Before readers get into the innards of Bhimayana: Incidents in the life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, they must first process a helping of expectations-building praise from an impressive cadre of writers. Scattered along the jacket sleeve are pull quotes from John Berger (who also pens a fawning Forward), Arundhati Roy, and Joe Sacco. “Extraordinary” writes Berger, “Unusually beautiful” writes Roy, “Distinctive” writes Sacco, and from the flip of the first page these accolades have a context that makes sense. The story itself, as the title indicates, weaves together snapshots from the life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) — one of India’s fiercest opponents of the caste system who is best known for crafting the language of India’s human rights constitution. Bhimayana assumes the reader has no knowledge of Ambedkar at the onset and proceeds to provide an education of the events that shaped his life and how he in turn shaped the lives of many in India.

Born as a Dalit (the lowest of castes known as untouchables), Ambedkar faced a great deal of hardship in his youth before a generous Maharaja Sayaji Rao-sponsored fellowship afforded him the opportunity to study abroad at Columbia University and the London School of Economics. After returning to India with a Western education (problematic, I know!), Ambedkar devoted his life to an anticaste agenda which he realized through impassioned speeches, books, law briefs, a controversial series of debates with Ghandi, and a latter day conversion to Buddhism. But while the particulars of Ambedkar’s story are as inspirational as any other of his few civil rights leader contemporaries, they are not what makes Bhimayana ground-breaking. In most hands a story like this could come out as a boring and by-the-numbers graphic biography, but thankfully those are not the hands of married artists’ Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam, who bring Ambedkar’s story to graphic novel.

 

A young Ambedkar is denied the right to water as an untouchable.

In a beautifully abstract way, the Vyams take a story scripted by S. Anand and Srividya Natarajan and strip it of many signifiers of Western sequential art through their own heavily detailed illustrations. For example, Ambedkar (the only constant character between vignettes) rather awesomely does not appear in a consistently drawn way throughout the book. As S. Anand recounts in Bhimayana‘s afterward — actually its “Digna” — while he dutifully provided the Vyams with a primer on graphic novel luminaries ranging from Eisner to Spiegelman to Tezuka to Satrapi, they rejected these influences: “We’d like to state one thing very clear from the outset. We shall not force our characters into boxes. It stifles them. We prefer to mount our work in open spaces. Our art is khulia (open) where there’s space for all to breathe” (p. 100). The result of this determined openness is a narrative that weaves different moments from Ambedkar’s life in a loose chronological order and produces a collection of pages that function both as a “graphic novel” and a distilled showcase of Pardhan Gond art.

An example of how the Vvyams abstract notions like travel (this scene is of a re-caste affirming train conversation Ambedkar has after returning to India from the England) into a single page which serves as both a Pardhan Gond art painting and a narrative sequence.

While the larger Gond tribe of central India has a centuries long heritage of oral story telling, the Vyams are members of a more recent subset clan of artists called the Pardhan Gonds. The Pardhan Gond bards were formed in the early-1980s as artists that were dedicated to transmitting older Gond ritual performances into narrative visual art using everything from silkscreen prints to acrylic paintings to detailed ink drawings. Therefore, the most ingenious part of Bhimayana is Navayana’s idea to pair two talented Pardhan Gond artists — who were already creating a distinct form of “sequential art” — with the globally buzz-worthy format of “graphic novel”; effectively repackaging the forgotten and overshadowed legacy of a civil rights leader in India into something worth tweeting about. Case in point: I, resident of California, didn’t know who Ambedkar was before reading Bhimayana, and I surely wouldn’t have heard of Bhimayana if it weren’t a comic. And let’s say I had been curious enough to skim a biography of Ambedkar on Wikipedia, that medium wouldn’t have provided me with the ample space to connect with India particular issues like Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism through powerful artwork:

The clever conceit behind Bhimayana is a striking example of how Navayana lives up to its name of being a “new vehicle” for old ideas. Put differently, the book makes critically talking about caste sexy in the way that social justice topics rarely are. The salience of framing an issue for a global audience is one that Ambedkar himself seems to have understood very well throughout his struggle to challenge the caste system. After a 1923 decision by the Bombay Legislative Council to allow untouchables to use all public resources as basic as education and water — services that Ambedkar had been denied growing up as a Dalit — he gave a speech asserting the inalienable rights known in the Dalit movement as the “Declaration of Independence”:

“If we seek for another meeting in the past to equal this, we shall have to go to the history of France: the revolutionary French National Assembly convened in 1789 that set new principles for the organization of society. … People forget that if the rulers of France had not been treacherous to the Assembly, if the upper classes had resisted it, it would have had no need to use violence in the work of the revolution. We say to our opponent too: Please do not oppose us. Put away the orthodox scriptures. Follow justice.”

Just as Ambedkar frames an Indian human rights struggle in the context of a recognizable Western one, Navayana’s editor-in-chief S. Anand seems to understand the value in reframing intellectual human rights arguments in the medium of comic art. In this way S. Anand is like the protagonist of the story he wrote: using universal signifiers to address an India-specific issue. This point dredges up a deeper favorite question of mine: who exactly is the intended audience of Bhimayana? As with some of its more relatively famous contemporaries (par example Persepolis) reading Bhimayana can bring up a lingering fear that the book is seeking “First World” readers to make money from “Third World” problems. Ultimately, this line of questioning doesn’t hold enough weight against the beautiful education that Bhimayana provides to non-Indian readers like myself. Although, it should be noted that a similar thought might have been pondered by Navayana, who announced ahead of their 2012 Angoulême appearance that Bhimayana will see new editions in five Indian languages later this year.

This brings us to A Gardener in the Wasteland (2012), Navayana’s most recent stab at providing a forum for anticaste ideology in the world of comics. A Gardener digs back even further into the history of anticaste reformers to tell the story of Jotiba Phule (1827-1890) and his wife Savitri Phule (1831-1897). The Phules were fierce critics of caste-based exploitation by brahman’s (the highest caste in the Hindu system) under British rule and lifelong campaigners for women’s education in India who opened the countries’ first school for girls in 1948. A Gardener is written by Canadian-based Srividya Natarajan and is drawn by New Delhi-based artist Aparajita Ninan, with the text itself based predominately on Jotiba Phule’s 1873 work Slavery. Impressively, the female transglobal team bring Phule’s 1873 writing to life in a way that feels like a product that is relevant in 2012.

Throughout the book Natarajan and Ninan engage in the same sort of re-framing that is prevalent in Bhimayana, this time building on Phule’s comparisons of archaic notions of Caste hierarchy to slavery in the United States. Where Phule saw the way the brahman’s exploit those in lower castes as akin to slavery, Natarajan and Ninan extend the metaphor to compare the lives of the Phule’s to those of U.S. civil rights leaders. For example, the hardships Savitri Phule endures trying to educate women is met with an echo panel of segregation in the the South, in effect tying the histories of oppression to one another:

While the American history shorthand gets the point across efficiently, it is when re-framing moments like this that Natarajan and Ninan hinder their otherwise strong debut. At several points A Gardener in the Wasteland produces comparisons that feel overly heavy-handed, instead of letting the fascinating tale of the Phule’s fight against an established hierarchy subtly speak for itself. While it is easy to understand why the creators felt the need to draw somber parallels when telling such a reverential story, those parallels leave the book overly stuffed with asides that weaken the narrative flow for the benefit of readers like me. Put differently, I rather feel lost in the world of an artists’ imagination and grapple to find meaning than be spoon fed educational antidotes from my own frame of reference.


A spread which compares brahman lawmakers to the Klu Klux Klan

If A Gardener in the Wasteland feels like a mediated success, it is predominately mediated by the innovation on display in Bhimayana. While Bhimayana uses artwork to interpret a narrative loosely, A Gardener often skews towards using its strong art for straightforward exposition. The moments where A Gardener succeeds at becoming a “new vehicle” are when it forgoes panels and Westward analogies in favor of the cleverness found in the pages of Phule’s anticaste arguments. The best example of how A Gardener takes a risk with content to produce something unique is an extended midsection which walks readers through a socratic discussion between Jotiba Phule and his friend where Phule challenges many of the assumptions on which the brahman base their caste based view. In what has become the lynchpin of the book’s marketing campaign, A Gardener illustrates an argument that has Brahma (the father of the brahmans) menstruating out of his mouth. It is in the moments like this where Ninan is having clear fun with her art that make Phule’s 19th Century argument feel 21st century compatible.

The success of both of Navayana’s graphic novels is recasting biography of anticaste leaders as intriguing graphic novel. Bhimayana and A Gardener work towards this goal from different starting points, but they both end up as strong debuts in the global comics landscape. For a long-form comic to balance entertainment, technical skill, and Theory is not easy, which makes it somewhat remarkable that out of the gate Navayana has two comics that pull of such an act. Bhimayana and A Gardener in the Wasteland are worth receiving the spotlight not just because they are Indian, but because they are good.

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Navayana books can be purchased from Scholars Without Borders.

Garth Ennis: Anti-Messiah, or just a very naughty boy?

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At first glance, Garth Ennis’ writing on Preacher appears to be edgy and heterodox, at least for a Direct Market comic from DC. And not just in the superficial stuff that makes for a ‘Mature Readers’ label –swearing, ultraviolence, loyal canine sidekicks. No, it appears to be edgy – at least for its cultural context and intended readership – at a deeper level of content and theme. The Catholic Church is portrayed as venal and corrupt. There’s a savagely funny send-up of the idea of a messianic bloodline, as made famous in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (and even more famous in The Da Vinci Code).

Oh, and God is a narcissistic, selfish prick.

So, yeah, Preacher seems to be pretty ‘far out’. But a closer look reveals that Ennis’ morals are, in fact, deeply conventional. At its heart, the book is a sort of love story, and an effectively sweet one at that. And Ennis endorses in Preacher the same old-fashioned kind of masculinity that he valorises throughout most of his work, represented here with only a moderate dose of irony by John Wayne. A man, Ennis as much as out and tells us, should be strong, self-sufficient and upstanding. He should treat his lady right, do good by his friends, keep his word, and look after them critters what can’t look after themselves.

Excuse me while I ride off into the sunset.

There’s nothing wrong per se with this kind of conventionality, I think. Stated thus baldly, the book’s morality is prima facie unobjectionable.* And the book itself is easily my own favourite among the long-running series published by Vertigo.

(Suck it, Sandman and The Invisibles! And seriously don’t even bother, Y and Fables)

What is worrying, however, about Preacher — and it’s another theme that runs throughout Ennis’ work — is its conventional, even reactionary, sexual morality. Time and again, Ennis reveals that he is fundamentally uncomfortable about any sexual activity outside a very limited range. Time and again, he attributes to his villains sexual proclivities outside this range. Time and again, he uses sexual perversion as a shorthand for moral perversion.

Consider: the book’s secondary villain Herr Starr, who wants to give Margaret Thatcher a golden shower, and can eventually only reach sexual satisfaction through liberal application of a strap-on.

Or: Jesus DeSade, whose unbridled hedonism leads to pedophilia.

Or: T.C., whose unconstrained libido matches his moral and intellectual savagery.

Or: Miss Oatlash, the dominatrix and Nazi apologist. ZOMG! The uptight professional woman is secretly into BDSM – smile, you’ve just been Shyamalanned!

Or: Odin Quincannon, the evil businessman who…well, no, I won’t spoil that gag for those who haven’t read the book.

Or:

[CASSIDY SPOILER!!}

 

That the depths of Cassidy’s decline are marked when he’s coerced into giving his drug dealer a blowjob.

 

[END CASSIDY SPOILER!]

By contrast, there are only three occasions when the main good guys – viz. protagonist Jesse Custer and girlfriend Tulip ’Hare – engage in anything remotely kinky. First (chronologically at least — it occurs in a flashback), Jesse idly considers asking Tulip and her best friend Amy to join him in a threesome. He decides against it, not wanting to jeopardise his relationship with either of them—incidentally, this could well be the smartest thing Jesse does in the whole series.

Second, Tulip handcuffs Jesse to a bed, leading the poor sap to think that they’re going to get their kink on. But no such luck; it’s just revenge for one of Jesse’s misdeeds. Tulip just leaves him there while she goes out drinking with Amy.

Finally there is some suggestion, later in the series, that Jesse and Tulip do eventually use the handcuffs in the manner intended, viz. very mildly kinky sexual practices. So even when the good guys do get down and dirty, it’s about as vanilla as you could imagine.

Now, to be fair, Ennis rarely presents any of the villains’ sexual deviancies as evil in themselves (with the obvious exception of DeSade’s pedophilia). Their perversions are funny, not wicked. We’re supposed to laugh, not boo. And Ennis is under no obligation to proselytize for sexual adventurism.

But Preacher does deliberately set out to undermine some central parts of Christian morality — in particular the value of faith, and the doctrine that God deserves our worship. So it’s a bit of a let-down to find that Ennis’ views on sexuality are barely more liberal than that famous neologism, Rick ‘man-on-dog’ Santorum. And it’s even worse that Ennis perpetuates the myth that only bad guys like to get kinky.

Preacher may be a good comic but, when it comes to sexuality, it brings to mind what Homer Simpson once said about the bible: talk about a preachy book!

 

* but maybe not, uh, seconda facie. A while back, someone called ‘moose n squirrel’ accused Ennis of fascism, in a comment thread at Tim O’Neill’s whenwillthehurtingstop.blogspot.com. (Because I, evidently, suck and am stupid, I can’t find the post or comment now) Among the evidence was the fact that Ennis almost always presents weakness as contemptible, meriting either scorn or ridicule or both, while the good guys are almost always adept at chewing bubblegum and kicking ass. But it’s for good, of course, not for evil, so that’s A-OK. I find this a persuasive reading of Ennis, in Preacher as much as anywhere else. Those who favour a more charitable interpretation carry a heavy burden of proof, or so it seems to me at any rate.

Not that fascism would necessarily invalidate Ennis’ work, even if it is there. I like all kinds of comics with dubious ideological contents: e.g. Dave Sim, Harold Gray, Raymond ‘boo hoo nuclear holocaust somebody call a waaambulance’ Briggs etc.

Post to Incestuous Sheets

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The Rub at Magic Futurebox

This last weekend I traveled into the depths of Brooklyn to witness The Rub, a re-envisioning of Shakespeare’s Hamlet done by a small troupe, the Tremor Theatre Collective, which includes my wife and fellow Hooded Utilitarian Marguerite Van Cook in the role of the young prince’s mother, Queen Gertrude. After Marguerite’s many late rehearsals, she’d tell me of the unusual methods of director Nessa Norich, an innovative theatrical force emerging from France’s Jacques Lecoq International School of Theatre. Norich’s actors formed the production from improvisation, from physically interacting with each other and with the deep columned space of the host theatre Magic Futurebox. From weeks of coaxing and collating the freely invented dynamic interpersonal movement and gestural variations of her cast and imposing a anachronistic montage of verbal and visual references, Norich finally introduced a script in the last week of rehearsals. As I was trying to help Marguerite run her lines, they seemed almost peripheral to the source text with only scattered bursts of Shakespearian diction, but Norich’s presskit describes a “surreal and playful investigation of the frustration, anxiety, passion, complacency, selfdoubt, delusion, isolation and desire that come with being heirs to a state rotting from the inside out.” That’s basically what our Will was on about, as well as where we Americans seem to be at. When I actually saw the results of Norich’s intriguing construct, I found that Shakepeare’s narrative is well represented even as it is made part of something contemporaneous and electrifyingly involving.


The Rub: Gerson, Van Cook and Stinson. Photo by Nessa Norich

The character of Hamlet is effectively played by several actors: one (Micah Stinson) sulks and simmers while another (David Gerson) adopts a keenly fearsome, sinuous aspect of outrage held barely in check. Three more Hamlet alters argue by turns and interweave at breakneck speed through the cavernous room (Colin Summers, Daniel Wilcox and Steven Hershey, who also flow seamlessly into a mellow-voiced Laertes, a loquacious Polonius and an opportunistic King Claudius, respectively). Queen Gertrude’s role is here expanded to be a fiercely comedic whirlwind of Freudian complication. I can’t claim objectivity, but it’s awesome to see Marguerite use some of her many performative skills. As Gertrude she works the stage like a vaudevillian; she stalks with limber, cartoony malevolence, she flummoxes a game reporter (Chas Carey) like a Danish Ghaddafy, she purrs, cajoles and overtly schemes with her new husband against Caitlin Harrity’s earnestly vulnerable Ophelia. Site-specifically mapped projections cunningly use the architecture of the theatre to add ominous, surreal narrative elements. The audience is brought out of their seats to follow the scenes into the depths of the room, making them complicit in the action as it boils to its inevitable final conflagration. While it certainly adheres to the spirit of Shakespeare’s intent, The Rub also shows a freedom of conception that to me is the essence of Art. I love it and so does Magic Futurebox, who have extended the production through next Friday and Saturday.

The Rub @ Magic Futurebox: 55 33rd Street, 4th Floor, Brooklyn, NY (D, N, R trains to 36th St) on Friday Feb. 17th at 8pm and Saturday Feb. 18th at 8pm

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Before Watchmen: Too Sullied Flesh

Shakespeare’s plays are in the public domain; he left no heirs but he is always credited as the source of any use of his works because his efforts are of undisputed quality and value. I suppose it is possible that the more extreme liberties taken by the Tremor Collective might put some Shakespeare purists’ noses out of joint, but theatre is by its nature an act of interpretation. It is a given that a source play is subject to adaptation.  Plays are meant to be reimagined through the efforts of the director, actors, set designers and other members of the ensemble putting up the production.  This is not the case with the current news cycle bummer about DC Comics’ reworking of co-authors Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, a book that was not conceived with the intent that it should be re-interpreted by other creative talents, on the contrary: Watchmen could not be a more deliberately complete work than it is.

As it has stood for 26 years, Watchmen has gone through many editions and enriched DC Comics financially and in terms of credibility. In fact, this multifaceted work is virtually the jewel of their crown. It is one of the key books that began to give comics a degree of critical acceptance, and it is one that deserved such attention—it gave the company a cache to build on, which they have sometimes tried to do with their more ambitious efforts such as the Vertigo line and their similarly convoluted graphic novels, story arcs and miniseries. They could have continued to profit from Moore and Gibbons’ book and striven to emulate their example of excellence, without violating the bounds of decency. But that was not to be. First, Moore disowned the adaptation of Watchmen to a film by Zack Snyder and for a good reason: the comic stands as a finished and hermetic work of Art in the form of a comic. I doubt that he could anticipate how bad the movie would be, though; it reglamorized the violence which Moore and Gibbons had taken pains to deglamorize, changed the ending entirely and amplified what I see as the flaw of the book.


Watchmen: Sally Jupiter is sodomized offpanel; and the “cover-up.”

Make no mistake, what Edward Blake does to Sally Jupiter is not attempted rape, it is rape. He assaults and beats her, then sodomizes her. This is a DC comic and so we are not shown explicit penetration. Instead, the rape happens in a space of indeterminate timing between the first two panels shown above and outside the cropped image of the second panel, where the two characters’ relative positions, Sally’s choked scream of pain and the symbolic bestiality represented by the ape’s head in the case make abundantly clear what is happening. In panel 3, Blake isn’t removing his pants, he’s pulling them up. The colorist has obscured where Gibbons drew Sally’s shorts and stockings pulled down in panel 4, which represents a typical male reaction to rape, at the time and often still. Hooded Justice’s harsh direction to Jupiter to cover herself can be seen as an indicator of why both her daughter Laurie and Hollis Mason (in his book excerpt within the book) are unaware that the rape was actually perpetrated in full: the truth had been suppressed.


Laurie is given clue #1 that Blake is her father.

Jupiter’s previous flirtations with Blake are used as justifications for her contemporaries to think that she had somehow “brought it on herself” and Jupiter’s own feelings of shame and what can be seen as typical victim psychology cause her to diminish the crime, to the extreme that a decade later she has an affair with Blake, which produces a child: Laurie.


In Laurie’s childhood memory, Sally tries to explain to her husband why she has a tryst with Blake, the rapist; confronted by Sally, Blake gives out with clue #2; and their daughter’s epiphany on the moon.

 


Hammering the offensive flaw: Sally loves her rapist.

Sally kissing the photo of the late Blake amplifies the flat note in what is otherwise one of the most carefully and sensitively composed comics ever done. In a medium predominantly directed to males, an often overtly misogynistic form oblivious to the consequences of sexual violence, this rare realistic depiction of rape in comics comes to represent a offense a woman could forgive, that she even might even come to love her rapist. Even more offensively, Snyder in his film made the fact of Laurie’s very existence through Sally’s forgiveness be the salvation of the world. This concept unfortunately lurks in the book, but shorn of the larger rationale of Moore and Gibbon’s ending which involves the human race uniting in the face of a manufactured outside threat, in the film the forgiveness of the unforgivable, the purpose of conception superceding a woman’s rational sensibilities, the “miracle” of the existence of even the product of a rape, all become the primary lynchpins of a narrative seemingly altered to pander to Christian Americans.

For his part, Moore removed his name and refused to profit from this adulterated mess, while he ensured that his collaborator and co-author Gibbons was the sole beneficiary of any royalties. Moore and Gibbons always steadfastly declined to do any more comics with the characters of the book and for 26 years DC respected their contribution to DC’s standing enough to let it go. It should be noted that a production of new comics like Before Watchmen did not happen under the watches of the more sensitive Jenette Kahn or Paul Levitz. No, it takes a corporate pitbull like Dan Didio to make such a decision. With the recent announcement, Moore immediately registered his protest and Dave Gibbons—well, unlike Moore, he still works for DC on occasion, so I’d guess that he couldn’t risk anything but a vague “good luck with that” statement. DC’s behavior, along with Marvel’s recent anti-creative legal victories, should send a cold chill through comics professionals.

And that brings one to question the involvement of all participants. Now, I shudder to imagine that I was more of a “team player,” that I hadn’t bitterly complained about such things as inequities of cover credit, that I drew in a still gritty but somewhat prettier style and had somehow “moved up the foodchain” of artists who draw for DC, or that Brian Azzarello in a generous mood had decided to throw me a bone for drawing his very first professional script, the results of which pleased Axel Alonso so much that he made his new writer a star, and Azzarello had actually recommended me for a gig. Okay, that’s a little poke at Brian, but let’s pretend that for any of these reasons I had been actually offered the Rorschach title. Then I would have been faced with the painful prospect of turning down such a very high-paying, high profile job for reasons of ethics. It’s hard to come down on people who need work. “Tough economic times” can be a powerful incentive to ethical compromise. But one wonders whether people as successful as Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke and J. Michael Straczynski need the work. Rather, they seem to all believe that they are entitled to presume on Moore and Gibbon’s masterpiece, because they are bursting with their own “stories to tell” about the characters. One wonders how they would feel if the shoe is on the other foot and it was their brainchildren at stake. Regardless, their presumption shows a disregard for comics as an art form of any significance and disrespect for the accomplishments of their contemporaries.

It gets worse: given that the actuality of the rape has been debated, one wonders how the re-interpreters will further mangle Moore and Gibbons’ intent. One might dread Cooke’s version of the adolescent Laurie in Silk Spectre, even if it will be drawn by Amanda Conner, because Cooke, known mainly for his reinterpretions of others’ creations, in his first adaptation of the appallingly misogynistic Parker books invalidated any claims of sensitivity or irony in his approach by having the lack of taste to render all the female characters with his typical cute Batman Beyond template. What one gets is interchangeable, expendable girls dying cutely for no reason at all, while the main character could care less. It doesn’t bode well and the covers of the new comics released so far carry out a theme of disempowerment, some directed deliberately at women, as Noah showed in his HU post yesterday. A general theme of uncaring seems to blanket Before Watchmen; as Azzarello stated in The New York Times what seems to represent mainstream comics’ overall regard for their audience’s intelligence: “a lot of comic readers don’t like new things.” Jack Kirby must surely be spinning in his grave. Perhaps Azzarello in his case was being ironic, but he couldn’t be more clear that one won’t be seeing anything new in Before Watchmen.