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Alan Moore: Conversations Hype

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Thanks to Noah and HU for agreeing to shill my new book, Alan Moore: Conversations, now available in paperback (and hardcover) from The University Press of Mississippi. As the name suggests, it’s an edited collection of previous Alan Moore interviews, spanning from 1981 to 2009. I tried to collect the interviews that were most enlightening in terms of Moore’s creative practices, and/or most revealing about the meaning and significance of his oeuvre. The book contains lengthy discussions of most of his major works and many of the minor ones as well. There is also an introduction be me and a chronology of Moore’s career. My goal was to make the book an indispensable one for Moore scholars, critics, and readers. You can only judge my relative success by buying a copy at retailer!

Below, I’ve included a series of quotes (one from each interview) to whet your appetite and make you ache desperately to have the book in your sweaty palms, now driven mad by the spirit of capitalism, and the wisdom of Alan Moore, who speaks at length on comics, sex, drugs, brain science and bad movies.

On the struggle of writing comics: “I find writing comics to be staggeringly easy.” (from David Lloyd’s 1981 interview in the SSI Newsletter)

On the complexity of Marvel characterization: “That’s characterization the Marvel way. They’re neurotic . They worry a lot. If they haven’t got anything wrong with them like that, something physically wrong will do— perhaps a bad leg or dodgy kidneys, or something like that. To Marvel, that’s characterization.

…[Chris Claremont’s] thing with characterization is that he makes all his X-Men foreign. One’s a Russian. One’s a German. Russian! They’re incredibly Russian. They sort of sit there and let you know how Russian they are by thinking:

“How I long for my Ukrainian homeland. How I miss my poor dead brother Thiodore.”

And then:

“How I miss the happy camaraderie of the bread queues and the surprise purges.”

(from David Roach’s 1983 interview in Hellfire fanzine)

On the social function of comics: “Comics, when I was growing up, were part of the working class tradition. Mothers gave them to their kids to pacify them. Instead of a Valium, it would be a copy of The Topper or The Beezer.” (from Guy Lawley and Steve Whitaker’s 1984 interview in Comics Interview)

On influences: “If I had to single out one major influence on my work, it would probably be [William] Burroughs. I would never attempt to duplicate his style of writing….I do admire his style, but I suppose the biggest influence is his thinking, his theoretical work, some of which has been wild and extreme, but the relationship he draws between the word and the image and the importance of both, I think, is significant. Burroughs tends to see the word and the image as the basis for our inner, and thus outer, realities. He suggests that the person who controls the word and the image controls reality.” (from Christopher Sharrett’s 1988 interview in Comics Interview)

On paranormal experiences: “I have only met about four gods…a couple of other classes of entity as well. I’m quite prepared to admit this might have been a hallucination. On most of the instances, I was on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the logical explanation — that it was purely an hallucinatory experience. I can only talk about my subjective experience, however, and the fact that having had some experience of hallucinations over the last 25 years or so, I’d have to say that it seemed to me a different class of hallucination. It seemed to me to be outside of me. It seemed to be real. It is a terrifying experience, and a wonderful one, all at once. It is everything you’d imagine it to be. As a result of this, there is one particular entity that I feel a particular affinity with. There is [a] late Roman snake god, called Glycon. He was an invention of the False Prophet Alexander. Which is a lousy name to go into business under. He had an image problem. He could have done with a spin doctor there. “ (from Matthew de Abaitua’s 1998 interview in The Idler)

On brain science and comics: “They found that comics was far and away the best way for people to take in information and retain it. I think people would remember the picture and that would cue the words they had read going along with that picture. I think that this might be because comics engage both halves of the brain simultaneously. One half is concerned with words. One half is concerned with images. With comics, you do have single static images, single clumps of words. Maybe the two halves are engaged in a different way than they are with other art forms, and this accounts for the kind of imprinting that comics are capable of. This is only speculation. I try to keep up with science and neurology, and how the brain works, but at the end of the day, I am largely a comic writer, so you probably shouldn’t trust me to perform extensive brain surgery or anything like that.” (from the edits of Tasha Robinson’s 2001 interview in The Onion)

Looking back at Watchmen: “Watchmen was kind of clever. I was going through one of my clever periods— probably emotional insecurity. I thought: ‘People will laugh at me ‘cos I’m doing superhero comics. I’d better make ‘em really clever, then no-one will laugh’ [laughter]. So, we’ve got all this sort of thing with the metaphor of the clock face, and yes, it is a kind of clockwork-like construction— a swiss watch construction— where you can see all the works of it. Different areas where the text reflects itself, different levels— I was showing off…I kind of decided after Watchmen that there was no point ever doing anything like that ever again…” (from Daniel Whiston’s 2002 interview in Zarjaz)

On sex and censorship: “Sex—we all got here because of sex. We all do it, if we’re lucky. We’ve been doing it for millions of years. It’s perhaps time we got over it and moved on. A couple of million years, that should be time for us to have gotten over our understandable panic at the idea of sexual reproduction.” (from Jess Nevins’ 2004 interview in A Blazing World)

On the mainstream comics industry: “…I think that the comics industry, really, if it wants to attract, if it wants to be talked about as a grown-up medium, then it ought to be a medium that will attract grown-ups, in terms of [the] rights of the artist.

It ought to be a grown-up medium. It ought to grow up its business practices, rather than have them all rooted in the prohibition-era gangsterism of the 1930’s. If it really wants to be an industry that’s proud of itself, then it really shouldn’t go around alienating the talent that has actually lifted it up our of the quagmire.

That is obviously something that is not in my control. It is purely in the industry’s control. I think that having spent 25 years laboring within the comics industry, that has probably reflected better on the comics industry than it did on me. Probably the comics industry got more out of the association than I did. (from Chris Mautner’s 2006 interview in The Patriot-News [Harrisburg])

On the Watchmen film: “Sure, I’ve heard it’s great seeing Dave Gibbons’s images reproduced on the big screen. ‘They’re exactly the same as in the comics, but they’re bigger, moving, and making noise!’ Well, putting it cruelly, I guess it’s good that there’s a children’s version for those who couldn’t manage to follow a superhero comic from the 1980s.” (from Alex Musson’s 2009 interview in Mustard)

Troll On- God, Natural Disasters, and the Powers of the Internets

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A version of this article appeared on Splice Today in March.

She recorded and posted the video quickly and impulsively—from concept to upload, the process took less than 20 minutes. Her eyes are gleaming and her face beams happiness and smug satisfaction. “God is such an amazing God,” she tells us, peering through the screen and into our eyes, so close to the lens that her face distorts. “On Wednesday, at the start of Lent, believers all over the world came together, and we have been praying specifically for God to open the eyes of atheists all over the world.” And, she tells us with excitement and pride, “Just a few days later, God shook the country of Japan. He literally grabbed the country by the shoulders and said, ‘Look! I’m here!’” TamTamPamela is overjoyed by the quick and emphatic response of her deity to her prayers, and encourages her audience to redouble their efforts. “Just imagine what will happen at the end of the 40 days!” she says with a beatific smile.

The video went live the morning of March 14, and began spreading almost immediately, thanks initially to a link on Ignorant and Online, a Tumblr account dedicated to “exposing the worst […] online comments, Facebook posts and internet posts. What was once anonymous is now revealed.” Started only two days before, Ignorant and Online had so far almost exclusively displayed screen caps of status updates of Facebook users linking the Japanese disaster to Pearl Harbor, or other off-color remarks related to the crisis. Perhaps it was her invocation of God, or the nature of video itself, but for whatever reason, this clip carried more weight. Within hours it was everywhere, and atheists and Christians alike seemed none too happy with the contents of the video.

That night I watched her YouTube channel with amusement, and then alarm, as thousands of comments flowed in, ranging from cries of “troll,” to threats of death, rape and pizza delivery. The alarm came when addresses, full names and phone numbers began appearing as well, first for a woman in Florida and then for another name in California. A sample of the comments:

b17ches like you makes me literally wanna start a crusade. mark my words that you’ll die a horrible horrible death.. — buyungwidhi

how about I fuck-start your face you stupid cunt.— heavysweater

Lady, if I held your head under the water for 17 minutes, I would quickly show that he either: A – Hates you B – Doesn’t exist— Notjustbonez

can anybody tell me who this girl is? name or location can help cause i can just look her up. Ill give her a religious wake up call myself and shoot this bitch.. private messg me any info on her. first person to do it ill give 1K. thanks— vietnameseJKT

you need to get raped — abaebae1

Yout such a dumbshit. fuck you get a fuckming life. i pray u fucking die u dumb bitch. i beleive that oh my god i cant begin how to think how much pain people will cause for u. your so fucking dumb. do understand anything? go die u fucking cunt. id llove to see u die. go to hell. do you not understand people are dieing. LETS ALL PRAY THAT YOU DIE! be encourage that god will crush you. Ill be overjoyed when you die — djmattzz1

Japan will come get u for this. — nova123

And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. TamTamPamela posted one last brief video, “Coming Clean,” in which she stated that she’s been “making troll videos for a while,” but that at this point she’s “kind of tired of pizza,” and so she’s calling it quits. Her account, along with all of her videos, disappeared shortly after.

Although deleting the account put out most of the fires, death threats and links to both somewhat correct and completely incorrect personal information continued to promulgate for days after the video. Surveying the wreckage, at the virulence of the reaction to her video, I tracked down the real person behind the character of TamTamPamela to find out, in her own words, what it’s like to be hated by a million people. What are the consequences of having your address and phone number, the names of your family members, even photos of your house linked to on dozens of web sites containing death threats on your life?

“Nothing,” she said over the phone, five days after having posted the most disliked video in YouTube history.

Really? Nothing?

“Nothing in real life,” she said, except that, “Tuesday morning a pizza was delivered to my house.”

Has anyone recognized her?

“If they did, they didn’t come up to me and say anything.”

A college student named Tam is the real-life person behind TamTamPamela, her self-described “character” that she played for more than a year on YouTube and on various religious message boards, both real and satirical. She was surprised by the reaction to her video, given that up until that point her videos had hovered around 10,000 views only. She ultimately outed herself, she says, because of the inaccurate private information being spread about the woman in Florida. “It wasn’t until late Monday night that my boyfriend told me that people were posting another woman’s information all over the Internet, saying the other woman was me,” she said. “And that was when I got worried. I started thinking that people were going to take this way too far.” Once she had outed herself, she said, there would be no point to maintaining the videos—the satire would be ineffective—and so she closed the channel.

I watched the year’s worth of videos before their deletion, and seeing them chronologically, one can see the rapid development of the craft of satire. The early videos are rambling, meandering, rarely getting to their central topics right from the start but instead approaching the arguments as part of a larger fabric of personal history. As they progress Tam warms to her character, and the videos have a lot more direction, arriving at the theme early and spending the bulk of the time developing the concept. One video discusses the season of Lent, and how it is the will of the Holy Spirit for TamTamPamela and her dog, Rambo, to fast together for the entirety of the 40-day period. In another video TamTamPamela has been visited by an angel who told her that she “must pass on this message to the sinful people of Massachusetts. If you don’t vote for Scott Brown today, God will be very angry. The wrath he poured out on Haiti, the wrath he has poured out over the world in small doses—let those be an example to you. Don’t give God a reason to be angry. Vote for Scott Brown.” In a more vulnerable moment, TamTamPamela reaches out to her YouTube audience and asks them for advice about how to resolve her impasse—the Bible instructs her to obey her husband in all things, but her fiancé doesn’t want her posting any more videos. She knows the Holy Spirit has instructed her to continue her evangelization. What’s a good Christian girl to do?

But something was different about the Japan video. Part of the reaction was undoubtedly due to its proximity to the crisis itself, but some of the extremity could come from the craft and the delivery of the satire. Almost all of the previous videos have slight tells to clue their audience into the intent. “I always had the same people watching and the same people commenting,” Tam said. “There were two groups—the one group that would watch it and argue amongst themselves whether I was being serious, and there was the other group who knew my intention was to bring attention to the subject of the video.” The difficulty of determining the authenticity of statements of a religious fundamentalist nature is a well-observed phenomenon—called Poe’s Law, named after and coined by Nathan Poe: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”

In fact, if there is a “tell” in TamTamPamela’s penultimate video, it’s that most fundamentalists aren’t as direct in general conversation about these kind of feelings, and certainly not on video. That doesn’t mean that those thoughts still aren’t there or expressed. The earthquake connection readily brings to mind Pat Robertson. In 2010, shortly after the devastating earthquake in Port Au Prince, Haiti, Robertson had this to say on his show, 700 Club:

… something happened a long time ago in Haiti—people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon III or whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you free us from the Prince.’ True story! And the Devil said, ‘Okay, It’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out, the Haitians. But ever since that they’ve been cursed by one thing after another. They’ve been desperately poor…. They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God, and out of this tragedy I’m optimistic that something good may come.

It’s a spectacular bit of reasoning, tying the woes of a stricken nation to the perceived Godliness of its people. And, for a Bible literalist, it’s a perfectly reasonable position as well. If one believes that God has agency in the world, that He in fact has opinions about the conduct of the human beings he has created and rewards them and punishes them in turn, it’s natural to assume that such a devastating event is in fact the will of that deity. This assumption is made explicit throughout the Bible, as God selectively destroys individuals, cities, kingdoms, and at least once, the entire world. In fact, the Bible instructs those faithful to God to carry out the work of eliminating unbelievers for him:

If you shall hear say in one of your cities, which the LORD your God has given you to dwell there, saying, Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which you have not known; Then shall you inquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is worked among you; You shall surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword. And you shall gather all the spoil of it into the middle of the street thereof, and shall burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for the LORD your God: and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again.

— Deuteronomy 13:12-16, American King James version

Did Tam approach her videos from an atheistic perspective? Like much good satire, it’s hard to pin the perspective down completely, but Tam sees herself as religious. Yet, “I really don’t like calling myself a Christian, because these people who are the face of Christianity have painted Christianity in such a terrible light.” From her perspective, the satire is directed at “the Christians who really don’t care what’s going on around them, and the kind of people who are representing them. Most Christians would never blame these natural disasters on God. But these same Christians let these crazy wackos lead them and let them be the face of Christianity. I kept posting the videos because I wanted to bring to light that if we actually followed these leaders, this is what we would be saying.”

Her faith did not seem to change the digital wrath directed at her, wrath similar in tone to the wrath God has instructed his people to visit upon the unbelievers. Reading the words directed at her, it’s hard not to see the reaction as the wrath of the righteous. And yet, in this world of screens and distance, of pulsing light and little physical proximity, what does the righteous indignation of a million people mean? Thousands of threats of death and rape. Your name and address and phone number. A single pizza, turned away at the door.

Tam is guilty of poor taste—she is guilty of indiscretion, and of tremendously bad timing. But mostly, she’s guilty of not winking at the camera often enough, and not couching her character’s speech in the language of diplomacy.

Professional provocateurs, meanwhile, have the line down perfectly, and know how to use indignation and outrage to gain audience and advantage. The same day that TamTamPamela’s love letter to God spread across the Internet, Glenn Beck shared his thoughts about the crisis with his radio audience of millions.

I’m not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes … Well, I’m not not saying that either. [Laughing.] What God does is God’s business. I have no idea. But I’ll tell you this—whether you call it Gaia or you call it Jesus, there’s a? message being sent. And that is, ‘Hey you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it. [More laughing.]

Negative reaction to Beck’s calculated raving was mostly of the “what type of God would kill thousands of innocent people to punish them?” variety of indignation. Well, if you are a Christian or Jew who believes in the literal truth of even a fraction of your religion’s holy scriptures, then the answer is simple—your God kills people innocent of all but not loving him. He instructs his followers to do the same. Much worse than that, he’s set up a system of eternal torment to punish the slain unbelievers and sinners of all other stripes. That kind of petulance makes Beck, or even TamTamPamela, look like the very model of grace and understanding.

Not actually existing has advantages: TamTamPamela will suffer no eternal torment. But though she’s passed, her creator lives on. “I’m still definitely going to keep doing what I’m doing. I’m not going to stop,” Tam said. “It’s in my nature to troll people, to get a reaction out of people, to say, ‘Look, you see what’s going on, why don’t you do something about it?’ ”

Isn’t she worried about reprisal? What about applying for jobs in the future—isn’t she worried that searches using her full name might turn up all of this material? She reminds me that her state of residence has a law forbidding hiring discrimination based on religious affiliation. So she might be in the position of defending her character’s viewpoints in order to get a job? She laughs. Seriously, I tell her, the stuff I’ve written has been seen by such a small fraction of the people that have seen your videos, and yet I have constant anxiety about someone out there calling me out for the asshole I am, hating me for what I’ve written. Do you just get used to the hate? Are you and I just built differently?

“Everyone always says that it’s part of my natural personality to have that ‘I really don’t care about anything’ [attitude],” she said, her normally fast cadence of speech slowing down slightly. “But I know what people are like in real life versus the way they are on the Internet.” She paused, and then spoke again, a smile in her voice. “And I think I’m the perfect example of that.”

The Eyes Have It: The Sublime & the Precognitive Graze.

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For certain of us, the thrill of opening a comic book cannot be overstated. Particularly if the page is crammed with dynamic lines, swirls of motion, color and a plethora of panels. Instantly, our pulses race. Immediately, synapses begin to fire. We are overwhelmed by the scope and variety of the material before us and we savor the moment before our rational, superior divided-self checks the terror of confusion and steps over the direct and unarticulated response to the material to communicate the simultaneously terrifying and exciting instant of speechlessness. We perhaps articulate that moment with “Cool” as we hover between pain and pleasure. We experience the sublime.

Edmund Burke, a clever man, thought at length about the sublime[1] and developed certain theories about how humans take in visual stimuli:

VISION is performed by having a picture, formed by the rays of light which are reflected from the object, painted in one piece, instantaneously, on the retina, or last nervous part of the eye. Or, according to others, there is but one point of any object painted on the eye in such a manner as to be perceived at once; but by moving the eye, we gather up, with great celerity, the several parts of the object, so as to form one uniform piece.

The unknown writer of Bernard Krigstein’s final comics work 87th Precinct thought about this too and produced the following intersecting and bizarrely Saussurean  commentary :

But to return to Edmund Burke for the moment, he wants to think about a painting, and more importantly for us, a single object and how its representation would be taken into the eye:

If the former opinion be allowed, it will be considered, that though all the light reflected from a large body should strike the eye in one instant; yet we must suppose that the body itself is formed of a vast number of distinct points, every one of which, or the ray from every one, makes an impression on the retina. So that, though the image of one point should cause but a small tension of this membrane, another and another, and another stroke, must in their progress cause a very great one, until it arrives at last to the highest degree; and the whole capacity of the eye, vibrating in all its parts, must approach near to the nature of what causes pain, and consequently must produce an idea of the sublime.

Today Burke’s ideas on the function of the eye in apprehension seem amusing, but he raises interesting points that touch the optic nerves of many comic book artists and readers.

There is some theoretical talk out “there,” in the sublimity of discourse concerning how the comic page is perceived, but I find that like our eighteenth century predecessors who made admirable attempts to codify or to supply language to visual experiences, there remains a dearth of language available with which to tackle certain experiences. I remain unable to find any language that addresses the moment before we begin the instinctive work of decoding what we see. That it is a form of the sublime I am sure, but this does not give language to the effect. After the first consumption of the page in its entirety comes a focus to determine the form of the page, a first step in the decoding. Yet, it seems there is not diction for these interstitial movements and this will become a greater problem, because it will affect how we understand comics and the relationship of the image to text into the far-foreseeable future. It will limit how we are able to articulate the seminal first moment.

Our inability to express how we see text and image in relation to each other still requires work. I am not suggesting that this necessitates an infinitude of new expressions; we do not need to find a thousand ways to say white, although perhaps the Alaskan Inuit were onto something. (In previous posts, I have shown white panels, and there are many examples from which to choose, whether empty or filled with white.)

In considering this issue, I recalled the use of Flash cards, which became an annoying part of my life when my son was in Pre K, inasmuch as other parents felt free to flash them at random during any conversation. Here, the act of offering an image to symbolize text is described by flash, but the action of the child upon whom this ocular violence was enacted was given no particular name for their reception of the image. So that from early childhood we are left without words to accommodate that primary moment, before assimilation. The next step of what was meant to happen, “learning,” found linguistic form, but again the first step in the process has no particular vocabulary to describe it. One does not hear: “when I thrust my flash card into the range of sight for my child he or she immediately perceived the textual, spatial, object relations to supply language.” It would be silly since it would be out of place, but where it would be helpful in the discourse of comics, when we avail ourselves of the pleasure of the first flash, our response remains unnamed.

Chris Ware’s Lint: a diagnostic of the acquisition of language: in the startled / blank eyes of the infant can we register prelinguistic sublimity?

“Apprehend” might be close to what is required, but still it seems too much tied to the first stage of interpretation of the material. Andrei Molotiu produces some interesting abstract comics that extend that moment of apprehension, since the mind is unable to rest, or find comfort in the ciphers that it makes. There is a suspended moment that recalls the sublime in certain respects. The work at the very least challenges the limits of reception and formal responses to comics. Douglas Wolk [2]writes of the anthology of Abstract Comics compiled by Molotiu that “it’s a fascinating book to stare at, and as with other kinds of abstract art, half the fun is observing your own reactions: anyone who’s used to reading more conventional sorts of comics is likely to reflexively impose narrative on these abstractions, to figure out just what each panel has to do with the next.” Wolk’s observation is helpful  as he grapples with the first response and the challenge that abstract comics present. His use of the word “stare” both signals a stalled but receptive state, yet it allows one to return to the way that we experience a page before we enter into its complexities. The moment that presages the “stare,” whether in abstraction or narrative comics does not yet differentiate between the two. We have not had time to seek faces, identify text, or to participate in the experience of the page on any level than that of its visual inter-kinetic.

Andrei Molotiu provides a space in which we can linger on the verge of  another mental state of apprehension.

Part 2. Focus on the Eye.
Edmund Burke’s insistence upon the physical response to visual stimuli in the outside world has remained more entrenched than one might suppose, particularly within the realm of cartoonists and artists. Artists whose work relates singularly to representation of objects seen or imagined, frequently draw upon, or just draw images of the eye to connect their characters with their constructed outside world. Perhaps for artists there is a deep-rooted fear in any trauma to the eye, which informs their identity as their livelihood requires that they “look” and “see,” which I understand as separate actions. This is not solely my distinction, it is a Miltonic reference, in that man must look and see his world, the second part, see, meaning comprehend, or internalize the meaning of what man is shown by higher powers. We expose ourselves to the pleasure of the page in anticipation of that experience of catharsis. And here I will diverge from any more highly aesthetic or spiritual understandings of what is happening, to suggest instead that we are animalistic in this pursuit. We act primarily to satisfy the limbic brain; to fulfill the impulse of the deep primitive brain. This brain causes us to pre-cognitively, visually graze for stimulus so that we can trigger the pleasure response. Comics are part of our system of desire. Animators apparently made this link and described the anatomy of the active “graze” that prefigures the “gaze” to hilarious effect. In Tex Avery’s brilliant depiction of the wolf looking at the songstress there is a pause before the wolf gathers the import of what he is seeing. There is a pause before his eyeballs pop out of his head. Sex and comics…well, both are sometimes both painful and pleasurable.

 


Avery’s wolf scans the female form as some of us do the page; hungrily before we can calm down to think rationally about what we are seeing.

Doselle Young/ Tony Salmons/ Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh,  Jericho, HeartThrobs :

Out of control: Already consumed in the pleasure of reception.

Elsewhere, the tension of sight and meta-engagements in depictions of eyes as signals of human responses litter the pages of comics with a startling degree of anxiety. Recall my earlier quotation of Burke’s:

So that, though the image of one point should cause but a small tension of this membrane, another and another, and another stroke, must in their progress cause a very great one, until it arrives at last to the highest degree; and the whole capacity of the eye, vibrating in all its parts, must approach near to the nature of what causes pain…

Archie Goodwin/Steve Ditko, Collectors Edition, Creepy #10 famously demonstrates anxiety about the eye’s pain sensitivity .

Al Feldstien/B Krigstein/Marie Severin, You, Murderer,  Shock Suspenstories #14 offers a representation of the ineluctable power of the eye and its ability to penetrate the human body and mind and to override our deeper impulses and will.

Hugo Pratt’s Banana Conga allows us to perceive how much of own volition and active consciousness is accessible to us in respect to the gaze.

Perhaps, finally, one must consider the agreement of the reader to the contract between himself and the comic artist; a relationship much desired by the artist who craves the interchange. The many demonstrations of ocular distress in comics perhaps reveal how deeply the artist is aware of the commitment of this particular form of intimacy, or the risk of abandonment.  Conversely, for readers there is an agreement to relinquish part of our civilized nature when we agree to look at a comic.  The anticipation of pleasure that precedes the viewer’s acquiescence to employ his powerful sensory aperture, the eye, is a self-revelatory act. Every time we open a comic, we stand before it in our savage nakedness. As readers, we too risk disappointment; that the pages might fail to deliver. Let us not forget that in comics we want the words as well as the pictures; we want it all. We want the whole package.

[1] Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry. Part IV. section 9. UK : Oxford University Press, 1990.

[2] Douglas Wolk, New York Times Book Review, Holiday Books edition, December 6, 2009

Wilfred Santiago and the Strategic Offense

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I picked up Wilfred Santiago’s In My Darkest Hour (Fantagraphics, 2004) from the last-chance, all-sales-final, please-get-it-out-of-here longbox at my local comics shop. It was $4, and the lettering was interesting. I’m a fool for typography.

When I sat down to read it, I was turned off immediately. It is the decline-and-fall-and-get-back-up-again story of a rather repulsive young man named Omar — his horrible treatment of women and his attempt to get his life together. Toward the end of the book, we discover that he’s not a repulsive jerk, he’s mentally ill (or possibly both, but definitely mentally ill).

The visuals are impressive but frequently disturbing. Santiago describes himself as “Painter of Shadow™,” and he is indeed the anti-Thomas Kinkade. Mutilated women and distorted horrifying images of himself form the bulk of Omar’s hallucinations, visions, and insomniac fantasies, which are scattered among the diegetic scenes the way that Newsreels and Camera’s Eyes punctuate Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy.

And so I put it back down, thinking, “Oh, well, at least I’m not out a lot of money.” And it sat on my shelf, because I was too lazy busy to weed out unwanted comics.

Then, a couple of years later, I was scouring my shelves for new material to teach in a first-year seminar on comics, and I picked it up again. Knowing in advance that Omar was a demeaning, abusive jerkwad with delusions of horror, I could read it with new eyes – and I was blown away. Santiago does things with a page that few can match, taking advantage of almost all the possibilities of the form, and the narrative arc is subtle and fascinating as well.

Upon rereading In My Darkest Hour, I remembered another work that had offended me on first encounter, only to become a favorite: Jamaica Kincaid’s essay “In History,” in which she considers botanical nomenclature, colonialism, and the triangularity of the Middle Passage, all in a format that is radically ungrammatical. It too I had picked up, thrown down forcefully, picked up again, and embraced. And in both cases, my offendedness (re the treatment of women and re the treatment of the English language, respectively) blinded me to the splendors of the work.

I love a surprise ending, and in my dreams, you will think, “Well, if Meg likes it, I’ll run right out and read it,” but the world doesn’t work like that. So here are some of my favorite images:

I include this one not only as a sample of Santiago’s basic diegesis but also for the way he foregrounds and backgrounds the action. I particularly admire the final panel on this page and the way that it uses human pigmentation metaphorically (i.e., not to demarcate the Cambodian, the Japanese, and the Caucasian in the scene.)

 

 

Here is an example of Santiago’s ekphrastic use of geography. You could sketch out the environs of the University of Chicago using his locational references, which are straight photographs in some scenes, heavily-manipulated photos in others, and pure drawings in yet others.

 

 

Obviously, this is one of Omar’s hallucinations. Santiago deploys different techniques for different interludes of derangement, sometimes making use of the background surface as he does here. I continue to marvel at the way that this image pushes buttons of dread that I didn’t know I had. I particularly like the photographed human tongue in the dog’s mouth in the upper-right inset.

 

 

Here Santiago reveals his influences more clearly than usually, particularly Ralph Steadman, Alan E. Cober, and in the calligraphy, someone whom I can’t recall for the life of me. The juxtaposition of the tinted main scene, with its interplay of images and written voice, and the bright white memory of the doctor’s office is what I consider a signature Santiago touch.

 

 

Finally, I include this image as an example of the exegetical demands that Santiago makes of the reader, particularly with his page architecture.

 

 

I confessed my love of surprise endings, and In My Darkest Hour has one – but it only appeared to me after several readings, resolving itself like the Magic 8 Ball prophesy gradually appearing through the murk. Far be it from me to give it away, but pay close attention to the different lettering styles, physical traits and objects, and the way that color structures the narrative.
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Let this be a lesson to you, as it was to me: If you find yourself offended (as opposed to bored or unimpressed) don’t break off contact but examine your objections. It’s a standard teaching ploy to force students to articulate why they didn’t like something, and I regularly need a dose of my own medicine. It’s particularly important for us to do this in cases where the offending material is in the voice of the Other, which may violate our formal conventions and literary/artistic expectations not out of ignorance or disregard but for strategic reasons.

In My Darkest Hour and “In History” are now frequent guest stars in my syllabi, but I know better than to assign them without comment. It makes all the difference (and I learned this the hard way) to tell the class that In My Darkest Hour is one of my favorite comics of all time but that I hated it on first reading. They are free to hate it, I tell the students, but they must at a minimum come back to class with a theory about why I came to love the book. So far, formulating this hypothesis has converted every hater.

Since I’ve already invoked conversion, I’ll end on a missionary note. Go get yourself a copy of In My Darkest Hour, by hook or by crook, and spend an afternoon with it. See what amazing things Wilfred Santiago can do with color, lettering, illustration, photography, dialog, geography, and narrative. And while you’re at it, read Jamaica Kincaid’s essay too.

Me, I’ll be daydreaming about a Wilfred Santiago graphic novel version of “In History.”

Caniff: Momentum

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Click on images to enlarge.
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“The impacts of both pictures and words drive more deeply into human awareness than any anthropologist has yet cared to note.”
-Milton Caniff
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I just read four of IDW’s collections of Terry and the Pirates back-to-back. They comprise one of the most gripping narratives I have seen in comics. They are essential reading for anyone who loves the medium of cartooning and enjoys exciting, involving storytelling. These gorgeous, thick hardcover volumes edited by Dean Mullaney each print two years worth of black and white daily strips and color Sunday pages. The stories certainly read differently in book form than they could have with the protracted exposure of serial doses. Once I was hooked at the outset, I had a hard time putting down any given volume. The relentlessly powerful engine that Caniff stokes pulls the reader along helplessly.

A lot of what Caniff accomplishes here has not been surpassed in comics. Many of the characters resonate strongly with the reader. Throughout, the sensitive handling of Terry’s “coming of age” is impressive. So is the villainy of a host of despicable scoundrels, some of them quite believable as is the case with the wretched Tony Sandhurst. I cared about what happened to Burma, Raven Sherman and Rouge; in this Caniff’s nearest correspondent is Jaime Hernandez. Their characters’ appeal is not only due to their motivation and dialogue but also to the way that the artists are able to put forth their nuance of expression and gesture. Like actors, cartoonists such as Hernandez and Caniff must believe their characters to be able to convey credibility to the reader.

The books boast excellent reproduction and fascinating supplemental essays by Bruce Canwell, Jeet Heer, Russ Maheras and others, Terry-related promotional art and photographs of the artist and his circle. There’s only one down note, in his introduction to Terry V. #2, Pete Hamill repeats a claim that he made in a letter to The Comics Journal (#135, 1990, p.34) years ago, that the millions of people who read the strip did so for the writing rather than the art, citing that because Caniff’s friend Noel Sickles’ strip Scorchy Smith was beautifully drawn but dead in the water story-wise, ergo the story (“that is, the writing”) is what is primarily significant. Hamill seperates the art from story as if the story lies only in the text. Yes, Caniff is a good writer, and yes, there is almost nothing that I can compare to this in scale and quality, but the fact is that the narrative in comics is carried by both text and art. Caniff is one of the greatest exemplars of this.

Sickles WAS missing part of the equation—both text and art signify to the reader, both are “read.” Caniff was prodigiously talented at both and it is their interlocking orchestration that marks his mastery. The story would not have had anywhere near the same impact and import to his huge audience if it had been drawn by another artist, if it had been done without Caniff’s sometimes oddly stiff but still expressive figuration and clearly differentiated likenesses, his sense of deep space, composition and dramatic lighting, his facility for exacting observation and reference, his pen and brushwork, his color, the level of developing skill involved in his amazingly nuanced renderings of his characters and their world.

The powerful impact of imagery in Caniff’s work is made clear, though unfortunately in a negative way, by the fact that the work is so tainted by racist depictions. Connie is no more forgivable than is Will Eisner’s Ebony. These characters permeate and compromise the works of their respective creators. To forestall apologism, I do not believe Caniff and Eisner were forced to include these depictions. Both also tended to draw non-racist ethnic characters next to absurdly caricatured ones—as in Eisner where one sees Ebony attempting to woo a more realistically cartooned African-American girl, in Caniff one sees racist depictions of Japanese people and the Chinese Connie interacting with more realistically-rendered images of Chinese people. Connie is omnipresent in Terry and often displays ingenuity and courage, but his visual depiction is irrevocably abhorrent, even if one could find a way to tolerate the obvious glee Caniff invests in the character’s mangling of English.

9/18/38: Connie at his worst in a page that resembles the later works of Will Eisner, Johnny Craig and Wally Wood.

Still, if one can somehow ignore this mitigating factor, there is much of great value to be found in Terry and the Pirates. At this moment, the work in Volumes 2, 3 and 4 resonates most strongly to me. I have yet to read the final volume, but so far I prefer the stories done before Caniff became more intrinsic to the American war effort. The later stories, as well as those in Caniff’s subsequent strip Steve Canyon have a feel of military formalism that seems a bit less free and alive than the more imaginative earlier adventures. But when it is Pat, Terry, Connie and Big Stoop blasting through stories that are driven by the artist’s superlatively developed female characters such as Burma, April Kane and the Dragon Lady—this is the stuff of great comics.

I scanned pages from several of the volumes to post here, which represent moments that struck me as particularly well-articulated, amazingly drawn or fabulously colored, or that showed places in Caniff’s trajectory that I feel had to have been seen and loved by certain artists, who I may or may not have known were profoundly influenced by Caniff.
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9/17/39: I think that Jack Kirby stared at this page long and hard.

I also think Kirby took some inspiration for his visceral fight scenes from the shockingly abrupt bursts of ultraviolence by the mute Big Stoop.

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1/27/39: I speculate that these particular dailies were catalysts for Jesse Marsh.

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1/7/40: here we might see some of the roots of Hugo Pratt.

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7/10/38: a patch of roughly hewn strips from mid-1938 apparently formed a model for the style of Frank Robbins and also look a lot like Craig.

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11/21/43: Alex Toth greatly admired Caniff’s work. This page anticipates Toth’s approaches to The Land Unknown and Hot Wheels.
A model for the oblique simplicity of Toth.

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7/04/43: this page is an early manifestation of the type of psychological coloring that Jim Steranko would later pioneer. Caniff’s color is one of the best things about his work.

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1/31/37 and 8/26/44: as influential as Caniff was, he himself was inspired by his friend Noel Sickles, whose hand was in Terry occasionally, as I am guessing is the case in these strips.

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3/30-4/2/38: the Dragon Lady displays her incredible potency in my favorite speech in the whole of Terry.

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9/27/39: Pat’s chauvinistic response.

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6/27/40: Caniffian feminism: women must lie.

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A series of Sundays 7/28-9/8/40: at this moment in 1940, Caniff’s work takes on a notable elegance in drawing and color.

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4/18/43: a intriguingly composed, beautifully colored page.

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4/30/44: another….this one is just great. You get the idea.

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Anti-Simitism

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As somebody who didn’t get reacquainted with comics until six or seven years ago I came pretty late to Dave Sim’s Cerebus series. It might have been old news for everybody else by then but it was new to me.

The best part of twenty years previously, I had dismissed my once beloved Asterix albums (plus the illicit stash of Commando digests that I had so painstakingly acquired and smuggled past the watchful eye of my decidedly anti-militaristic mother) as the stuff of childhood and exiled them to the attic.

I hadn’t entirely lost touch with comics since then – I’d borrowed Maus and Watchmen at some point, I’d acquired a handful of old Gilbert Shelton undergrounds and a set of Ben Edlund’s The Tick somewhere along the way, and I was vaguely aware of a few of the alternative comics that were around – but they weren’t really something I thought about a lot or sought out. I had a whole bunch of other things to spend my time and money on.

At least, that is, until the fateful day came that, poking around in the dusty corners of a second hand bookshop for something different to read, I found a pile of cheap, old, graphic novels and decided to buy a few of them on a whim. The three books I picked up that day were an old Love & Rockets collection (Music For Mechanics), the first (and only) colourised volume of Akira that Mandarin published in the UK and the second of Sim’s Cerebus “phonebooks” – High Society. I was blown away by all three. In fact, I was so impressed that I’ve been reading comics and reading about comics and filling up my house with comics and boring other people to tears talking about comics ever since.

That copy of Music For Mechanics prompted me to throw myself into thirty years worth of Love & Rockets collections and that messed about with edition of Akira ensured I’d go on to pick up all of Otomo’s work in English and then lament that there wasn’t more of it to adore.
My love affair with Cerebus, on the other hand, was rather shorter in duration. I picked up a few more volumes – everything from High Society to Melmoth, I think – and it was still pretty good. I don’t think I enjoyed any of them as much as the first I read but I never stopped appreciating Sim’s technical abilities and I was set on working my way through the lot. Gradually, though, looking for info on the internet and perusing old mildewed copies of The Comics Journal and picking up on things on message boards and whatnot, I was confronted with, well, with Dave Sim. Intrigued, I investigated further.

Oh dear.

I didn’t really want to give Sim my money anymore. And I didn’t really want to read Cerebus any further – didn’t want to sully the memory of that first eye-opening, rainy weekend, curled up in front of the fire next to my precious stack of used bookshop finds with the knowledge of the misogyny and homophobia and religious obscurantism that I now knew followed those earlier volumes.

So I forgot about Cerebus and got on with trying (with varying degrees of success) to filter a century’s worth of comic book treasure from a century’s worth of comic book dross.

A few years later, however, I heard about Judenhass and decided to give Sim another chance. I wanted to see how Sim’s art had changed since midway through Cerebus and how it would work in a non-fiction context and I guessed its subject – anti-Semitism – was such that Sim’s more…outré…ideas wouldn’t be likely to get a chance to present themselves. Also, the nice man at the comic shop said it was awesome.

Sadly, the nice man at the comic shop was wrong and Judenhass turned out to be a well meant but bizarrely misconceived work that disappointed on pretty much every level.

Sim opens by telling us that many of the most important figures in the history of comics have been Jewish and that, consequently, it’s particularly incumbent upon creators in the comics field to remember and record the Holocaust.

He’s right, of course, that many of the great names in comics – or at least American comics, which I think, to Sim, are the only ones that matter – were Jewish and he emphasises the point with a page given over to portraits of Will Eisner, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and various of their peers along with a reminder that “but for geographic happenstance and the grace of God”, those men could just have easily been the ones in the gas chambers.

There seem to me to be a couple of problems with this. The first is simply that by framing his work in such a way, Sim seems to be limiting the target demographic of his work to those mostly middle-aged superhero comic fans who are immersed in the history of the form. It’s hard to imagine Palestine or Persepolis, let alone Maus, reaching so wide an audience as they did if they had they set out to appeal specifically to the mylar and backing board brigade.

The second problem is that the idea that people involved in a field in which Jews have traditionally prospered are the ones who need to be particularly aware of anti-Semitism seems to me to be a little counter-intuitive. I’m not saying that comic creators shouldn’t cover the Holocaust, of course – and there are a number who have done so over the years – I’m just not quite sure why it should be more important that cartoonists do so as opposed to artists working in any other medium.

Moving on, Sim tells us that the victims of the Holocaust included non-Jews but that we must, nonetheless, not fall into the trap of seeing it as anything other than an exclusively Jewish issue.
Indeed, he writes that attempting to embrace the other groups that suffered in the death camps under the Holocaust banner “points to a central and malignant evasiveness on the part of non-Jews”.

Are the Third Reich’s other victims any less deserving of remembrance? And does remembering them make the horror of what happened to Europe’s Jews any the less shocking? Doesn’t what has happened since 1945 in Cambodia and Rwanda and Bosnia and, dare I say, Israeli-occupied Lebanon indicate that “never again” should not be a phrase exclusive to Jews?

Having laid down his condemnation of those who would embrace non-Jewish victims, Sim chooses not to answer any of these questions – one is merely left with the impression that anything other than absolute exclusivity in victimhood would, in and of itself, be anti-Semitic.

It doesn’t seem to occur to Sim that there are Jews who are more willing to reach out to those fellow sufferers than Sim himself is. Just as the anti-Semites damn the Jews en masse, Sim defends them en masse – there is never any indication that we are talking about a diverse group of individuals with divergent opinions, beliefs and attitudes, some of which may not line up with his own.

Following the introductory pages the bulk of the book consists of text boxes over backgrounds comprised of drawings painstakingly but counter-productively traced from Holocaust photographs (sometimes accompanied by rather stiff head and shoulders portraits from Sim’s rogue’s gallery of prominent anti-Semites).

I say “counter productively” because Sim’s drawings lack the impact of the photos they’re taken from. Those photographs never cease to draw a visceral response, no matter how many times you’ve seen them. They are truly horrifying, truly moving, each and every time. I didn’t get that reaction from this artist’s rendition. There’s some very well done composition, some effective use of repetition but the images themselves don’t provoke as they should. Rather than trusting to his considerable skills as a cartoonist Sim seems to be on a quest for absolute accuracy (“photo realism”, in his words) but that obsession has robbed his panels of life and the familiarity that most readers will have with Sim’s reference materials only emphasises the difference. The relentlessness of the imagery – the vast majority of the work is an endless succession of tangled piles of corpses and walking skeletons – goes some way towards compensating but ultimately it feels like Sim is trying desperately to pummel his own (obviously heartfelt) emotional response to the imagery into your skull. Repeatedly.

So, what of the contents of those text boxes accompanying the art? After a few pages of anti-Semitic phrases and sayings taken from various languages at various times, Sim devotes the rest of the work to a chronological series of quotes and historical events from around the world, ranging from 70BC to 2007. By this point, though, he’s only left himself 28 pages to work with (excluding the end notes) – this is a very slim volume for such a big subject – and there’s very little text per page. The result is that we get next to nothing in terms of context. There’s no explanation of the roots of anti-Semitism, no exploration of how it was harnessed and promoted by the Church, no information given on where insidious myths about Jews originated from or how they developed, nothing about how the treatment of Jews has compared and contrasted with that of other religious and ethnic minorities through history, nothing about the ups and downs of the pre-Israel relationship between Judaism and Islam. It’s all incredibly lightweight.

As with the art, the quotes resemble the drip-drip-drip approach of the Chinese water torturer and just as the art makes you think you’d be better off looking at photographs, the text makes you wish you were reading a prose book on the subject – something with a bit of heft to it, something with a bit of depth.

Uncomfortably (for me at least), as the quotations enter the 20th Century, Sim begins to sometimes conflate Zionism with Judaism (or, more particularly, anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism). I don’t think it ever occurred to him that there might be objections to the concept of Zionism, or to the state of Israel and its actions, that aren’t rooted in hatred of Jews (let alone that Jews themselves might hold those objections).
Indeed, one of the last quotations he offers up, entirely out of context, originates from an anti-racist campaigner and academic arguing not against Jews but rather in favour of an academic boycott of Israeli universities in protest over Israeli breaches of international law. How is that anti-Semitism?

Sim devotes about as large a portion of the text to President Truman’s procrastination over the establishment of Israel as he does to the Final Solution, which seems a strange weighting.

His position seems to be that Truman’s initial resistance to the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine was anti-Semitism pure and simple and that the eventual reversal of his position was him finally seeing the light. Sim himself seems unsure as to whether or not the words he puts in Truman’s mouth belong there or not, writing in the end notes that he found a key passage “suspect” but decided to use it anyway, the better to make his point.

In any case, the reader is left in little doubt that the foundation of Israel was right and proper and that any that argued otherwise – or protest its actions today – belong, incontestably, to the same line of thinking that gave us Auschwitz. Moreover, the impression given is that Israel was Truman’s to found or not found, as simple as turning a light switch on or off – nothing is said of the reservations of the British government then running the Palestinian protectorate, let alone of the Palestinians themselves.

In his end notes, Sim expresses his wish that Judenhass be used in schools as teaching material. Sadly, I don’t think it’s remotely fit for the purpose. Sim claims school children “in this age of diminishing attention spans” aren’t capable of concentrating for more than the 25 minutes he thinks it would take them to read his book. But what academic use is a scattergun assemblage of quotations without context or elaboration? What use in the modern world is a book for a general teenage audience that attempts to suck the reader in emotionally with the presumption that all kids not only read superhero comics but also know (and care) who created them 60 or 70 years ago?

Moreover, putting its other problems aside, speaking as somebody who lives and works in an inner city area where a substantial proportion of the population is made up of first and second generation Muslim immigrants, I really don’t think I could reasonably recommend this book to any of the local teachers or school librarians I come into contact with (despite the fact that some of the Muslim kids they teach are the only people I ever hear bandying about anti-Semitic remarks and so should, in theory, be just the people to benefit from it). In order to begin to tackle the prejudices so many of those kids were raised with, they need a book that teaches them that “Jew” and “Israeli” are not synonymous, not one that encourages them to think that they are.

I’m grateful to Sim – along with los bros Hernandez and Katsuhiro Otomo – for bringing comics back into my life. But if Judenhass and the brief preview of Glamourpuss I saw when it was first getting started are any indication, I’m rather afraid that the quality of his comics output has now descended to the same level as that of his philosophising.

So I’m afraid it’s a case of “so long, Dave – it was fun to begin with but now I think we should see other people”. And this time I mean it.

Here and There and Gone Again

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What follows is self-reflective, self-indulgent, and only tangentially related to comics. Topics covered—paralysis, instant gratification, illustration, the nature of desire. Not covered—ranking, freelancing, the problems of failure versus the problems of success. Consider yourself informed!

Regular readers to this website may know that this March, an article co-authored by Joy DeLyria and myself had a round of unexpected exposure, linked to and written about on dozens of sites, and seen by an unfathomable (to me) number of people. The experience and its aftermath was surprising, gratifying, but also paralyzing, and I was left for a long time afterward with a great difficulty in drawing at all. Leading up to the article’s publication I had been drawing upwards of ten hours a day, so this was a dramatic change, to say the least.

I had only been writing at all for only a few months at that point, having been asked to contribute to the Hooded Utilitarian after arguing with editor Noah Berlatsky on various topics both educational and aesthetic. A handful of my initial articles attracted some attention, at least at the scale of the modestly-scaled comics scene. Most, however, disappeared after a few days, as quickly as they came, the reaction to them in proportion to the moment that made them.

But this one seemed different.

It’s difficult now, some months after the fact, to describe the elation, giddiness, and eventual panic that set in as our Wire article went from casual blog post to high traffic blog post to server-breaking feature article. The excitement is perhaps most understandable. The panic, however, might require some additional explanation.

The article itself was written and illustrated so quickly, so impulsively, that the reaction to it seemed impossibly outsized, exaggerated. In particular, my confidence in my own illustration skills was tenuous enough that I felt a certain pain at their exposure, despite the delight I had taken in the few brief hours of their creation.

The speed at which everything moved was its own kind of hazard. In a few strange, bewildering weeks I went from a mostly unpaid comics blog contributor and unpublished cartoonist, to a writer/illustrator with a smart, sympathetic agent, a publisher, and a book deal. The transition and all of the ensuing attention was a heady experience, but the comedown, when it finally arrived, was harsh.

In short, I found it very difficult to draw anymore.

Because of the amount and nature of the links to the article, the exact numbers are hard to arrive at, but let me just skip over the particulars and say that it is very likely that more people have seen my drawing of Omar walking down a narrow Bodymore street than will see or hear anything else that I will ever create in my life. A set of drawings I created in the span of a few hours, drawings that reflect both my strengths as an illustrator (pastiche, virtuoso ink technique) and my weaknesses (virtually everything else), will most likely be, measured in numbers, the most significant thing I’ll ever be part of. This was a slow realization for me, made over a painful few weeks that also happened to contain the break up of my marriage of five years. It was during these weeks of weakness and personal turmoil that I would be required to create about two dozen new illustrations in a similar vein, this time for print, a medium that for me feels as permanent as any ever created. We are, after all, still reading the two-thousand year old garbage of the ancient Egyptians, them having successfully captured their thoughts and feelings and business transactions on papyrus in ink. (“Don’t worry about it,” my friend Shanna told me. “I mean, what percentage of people that read the initial article will even see the book? It’s no biggie, right?”)

It’s interesting to compare today’s fractured, specialized media environment to the vast undivided audiences of the previous century’s newspaper cartoonists. The early newspaper cartoonists had tremendous audiences for their work, audiences that would be unheard of today for any similar form of entertainment. They also had the illusion, though, of impermanence, a kind of impermanence that can nurture a certain kind of risk taking and impulsivity that can be invaluable to someone’s creative development. These early cartoonists worked knowing that, no matter how flat a single installment fell, no matter how many copies made it into print, a week later a hundred thousand copies of a strip would be a few thousand folded on a few thousand night stands and bureau tops. Two weeks after initial publication, how many copies would remain? A month later and anything could be forgotten. Newsprint was the most transitory of mediums, powerful but temporary, a bright flare turning in a flash to chalk message scrawled on the sidewalk.

Up until March I’d actually felt this way about virtually everything I’d written for public consumption, which amounted to an article a month at HU and a handful of articles and interviews for the Comics Journal. All of these brief works could be changed, edited if the need arose, always the possibility of elimination or correction. But even if I had wanted to do so, there was no way possible to put Victorian Omar back in the bottle. He now wandered this Wired world on his own power, untethered from the tongue in cheek piece of criticism that spawned him.

As for the actual problem of drawing all those illustrations through my own insecurity, I was greatly helped in this task by that old friend of the newspaper strip cartoonists—the regular deadline. Having five weeks to complete thirty illustrations and my portion of the text, I was forced to set concrete, daily completion goals, and these goals enabled me to power through my restlessness and difficulty and actually complete the drawings required. If I hadn’t had such a hard (and, now, seemingly arbitrary) deadline, I have no doubt that I would still be fussing with the details of the illustrations, re-imagining and re-evaluating, redrawing, planning…anything to avoid that dreaded sense of disappointed completion.

Finishing the book, however, didn’t make my desire to draw come back, nor did my eventual satisfaction with the illustrations. Something inside me seemed to have been switched off, some key part of me that was capable of self-satisfaction and confidence. I wondered if I would ever draw again on my own impetus.


Months went by. I drew, always through necessity or obligation. Illustrations for friends’ wedding invitations, contributions to round tables or one-off art shows, fulfilling promises made before my great freeze. But about a month ago, something changed again, something that seemed unrelated to drawing at the time. I met an extremely skilled fiddle player at a party of a mutual acquaintance, and after briefly getting to know each other, she invited me to busk with her at the local market. We had our first rehearsal on a Sunday afternoon in her backyard, putting together ten songs in about an hour and a half. We were performing the next day.

Busking, it seems, was the cure for my debilitation. When you’re playing in public, train wreck or triumph are equally fleeting, both erased minutes after the moment is over. No safety net, but no lasting impression, no pressure to be worth it; to be worth the lives of the trees that died to bring your drawings to life, to be worth the twenty dollars someone impulsively plunked down for your strange piece of cultural critical pastiche. In short, no pressure at all.

It’s not just the transitory nature of the performance that’s so appealing—it’s also the immediacy, and literal representation of the audience’s reaction. Joy and I worked all of May to write and illustrate a book that won’t be read by its intended audience for several months still. Even this informal blog post was composed over the course of a few days, and any reaction to it will necessarily follow that period of composition. How can this compare to the instant feedback, and judgment, of a crowd? When Rachel and I play at the market, we know when someone’s not interested, or actively dislikes what we’re playing–they pass right by. Someone that’s enjoying themselves stays, listens, puts money in our case or buys a CD. There’s a kind of cleanliness to it, art or entertainment made transactional again, unabashedly so, no confusion of role or purpose. We place Rachel’s fiddle case in front of us, open, as we play, a little bit of seed money at the bottom to function as change, grey-green on faded red velvet. In some ways, it’s the promise of those utopian Internet prognosticators of last decade made flesh–a perfect meritocracy where the best survive and thrive and the rest go home with empty cases. I grasp, stab at a comics comparison, desperate for justification for this article’s existence– witness the meteoric rise of Kate Beaton, which seems to be due solely to her making some really, really funny comics.

But of course, it’s not as simple as that–it’s not necessarily the best players that succeed, but the flashiest, the loudest, those most suited to the noise and bustle of the environment. One of the best buskers in the market, a man famous in Seattle while remaining virtually unknown by name, isn’t known for his unarguably charming songs, but because he has the unusual ability to hula hoop while playing the guitar, singing, playing percussion with his feet and balancing a second guitar on his chin. The parallel holds–the main breakout successes in web comics have primarily been gag strips, short punchy and easily digestible, able with sheer volume and verve to cut through the noise of the crowded environment.

When we are actually playing, though, the mechanics of the act itself, the social analogies and all the other possibilities, are the last thing on my mind. Virtually all of my attention is occupied by the moment, in sharing music and time with a person I am delighted by, and sharing that happiness with the people around us. And maybe this is ultimately what had been missing for me from drawing–creation without obligation, a sensual engagement with the world, the glorious moment of sticking your face in the dirt and remembering that you’re alive and doing the things that you want to be doing solely because it is what you desire. I might get tired of busking in a month or two–I might keep doing it for years. But either way, I know for sure that when it feels like an obligation, it will be time to change things again.

I’ve been sketching again, in brush, bolder and quicker than I’ve worked in the past. I don’t know if anything will come of it, and I don’t seem to care if it does.

from the forthcoming Down in the Hole

Addendum-

I filled Rachel in on the general premise of this article a few days ago, and she had a good laugh. “You can think about it being that way if you want,” she told me, “but it isn’t temporary like you’re describing. You just think that because you haven’t being doing it very long.” Video cameras and phones are everywhere, she explained. People are filming us all of the time. People take our picture hundreds of times a day. We don’t have any way of knowing where or when any of those things will show up.

She continued. “If you Google my full name one of the first things that shows up is this stupid article about the Seattle busking program that appeared in a million different places.” She can’t escape it, she says, nor the photo depicting her and another busker in an awkward high-five.

Me? I’m still choosing ignorance, and the gratification of the moment. It seems like the only sound strategy available.