Darkness Blazed My Name: Basquiat’s Poetics

Posted on July 15, 2011 by James Romberger

Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger. Aimé Césaire

I never knew Jean-Michel Basquiat, although we were of the same time and place and had friends in common, but I recognized his abilities the moment I saw his work. I can still recall how his painting resonated from the wall in a closely hung group show at CHARAS in the early eighties. It rivaled the intensity of the Alice Neel portrait across from it. Although his paintings have singular appeal in terms of their brilliant coloring alone and their marks always feel fresh, there is much more going on than just a painterly surface. They articulate a position in regards to art and history, often elucidated in a textual form where what is obscured or erased is given the same weight as what is visibly spelled out.

Basquiat’s work emerged in the early 1980s as his contemporaries in Graffiti achieved their too-brief moment of American Art world acceptance, but even when he was spraypainting on the street he did not share that movement’s form and goals. The graffiti entity SAMO created by Basquiat and his friends Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson wrote poetic sentences on the streets of Soho, with a obliquely critical tone directed at the wealthy people who lived and shopped there. Basquiat’s work was never about the evolution of illuminated lettering forms that characterizes aerosol art. The late theorist of weaponized letters Rammellzee commented that his friend’s writing was “unreadable…(he) crosses out words, doesn’t spell them right, doesn’t even write the damn thing right.” Nor does Basquiat have common ground with the decorative confections of his friends Keith Haring and Kenny Sharf, despite that he is most often placed in their context by Art pundits.

Instead, his paintings relate better to the guerilla subversions practiced by another of his East Village peers, David Wojnarowicz. Basquiat and Wojnarowicz were both subject to inversion of identification. As Wojnarowicz’s multimedia works expose and excoriate a culture that refuses to accept or acknowledge his homosexuality, Basquiat’s paintings layer and refashion the racist cultural signifiers imposed on him that did not reflect his image. Like Wojnarowicz, he used his art to highlight the disparities, omissions, and lies in the histories of Art and Civilization. According to bell hooks, to reach his goals Basquiat “assumed the role of explorer/ colonizer,” he “journeyed into the heart of whiteness. White territory he named as a savage and brutal place.” Our mutual friend the painter Stephen Lack says, “Jean-Michel gave his paintings great import.” Once ensconced in the pantheon, Basquiat pursued the purposes of information dissemination. His messages were radical but effectively composed within specific referents to pass through the filtering apparatus of white art appreciation as guided aesthetic missiles.

The textual aspects of Basquiat’s works incorporate a sophisticated multilingual approach. His use of Spanish relates in poetical terms to the linguistic claims of the Nuyorican movement, in that he deliberately use languages and the purposeful obscuring of written text to address, or privatize his words from, specific aspects of his audience. This paradoxical offering and withholding of understanding is seen in the painting “Despues De Un Puno,” where the text prominent in the piece is intended to block comprehension, as in comments he was known to make in Spanish to acquaintances in the presence of presumably ignorant patrons. Conversely, Basquiat does not close off the option of expansion of language. Typically his text operates in the opposite direction too, in order to self-proclaim his multilingual fluency and expand the linguistic possibility of his reach. On the interchange of language, the fluid switching between Spanish and English within a sentence seen in bilingual Puerto Ricans, Juan Flores writes, “rather than compensating for monolingual deficiency, code switching often signals an expansion of communicative and expressive potential.” As such a code switcher, Basquiat is able to draw from a wider reservoir of signifiers with the languages at his command.

: Basquiat, Despues De Un Puno, 1987

Basquiat knows the history of the conqueror and the actualities of his current position within it, how it relates to his body. His quoting of corporate symbology and recurring impositions of trademark and copyright symbols speak to issues of ownership: of the land, of his ancestors, of himself, his body and the products of his brain and hand. His methodology is a form of layering of textual and visual signifiers that resembles the approach of other artists of his generation such as Wojnarowicz and Christof Kohlhofer, whose images consist of a profuse visual and textual “namedropping” invested with a multitude of sub-signifiers of shared experience. Basquiat communicated directly with the art world using their referents, their signifiers. In his paintings Basquiat links the significance of words or phrases set in proximity to each other in their context within the pictorial field. This allows associations to be followed by the viewer/ reader in a type of narrative of assimilated ideas. Basquiat contexualizes the Diasporan experience with the Western canon as Aimé Césaire did with Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” while he also bridges the gap between visual and textual signification.

In the relatively spare piece “Per Capita” large lettering in Latin dominates the background field or storefront space. Basquiat uses Latin like other poets to point to his scholarship and to place himself amongst the great classical poets, but perhaps also like Elisabeth Barrett Browning, who as a marginalized female poet uses a Latin header on a poem to demonstrate her equality to the male Victorian poets, Basquiat claims equality across racial lines. He affirms that he knows the canon and claims a stand on even ground. Further, the work is surmounted on the left by the inscription “e pluribus,” or “out of many” (sans unum or “one”) as on coins and currency and on the right by “per capita” or “per head.” In this way he points to the way white classicism hides the ugly truth of people counted like numbers, in a nation built with slavery.

: Basquiat, Per Capita, 1981

Down the left side are listed the names of states and figures in dollars. The highest amounts are tallied by predominantly white states, Connecticut and Alaska and the lowest to states with large African American populations such as Alabama. This listing taken with the title might indicate a sliding scale of income or funding allocation for each individual in the respective states. It might also reflect a type of ordering that allays the anxiety of those who are displaced. On a pictorial level, the painting depicts a boxer with a halo holding the torch of liberty. The shrunken, attenuated black figure with blank eyes wears oversized shorts with the logo “Everlast” emblazoned on it conspicuously. It is typical of the ambiguity and self-ironizing of Basquiat’s work. “Everlast” places the black male as enduring forever as the champ, who can withstand a pounding as well as deal one out, yet in the end still answer to the sponsors and handlers who see him only as a commodity. Basquiat points to the endurance of people of color as they are used by the dominant culture. The text qualifies the terrible skepticism of the piece with extreme brevity.

In “Leonardo Da Vinci’s Greatest Hits,” on four vertical strips of canvas Basquiat arranges distorted renditions from “Gray’s Anatomy” and Leonardo’s notebooks with an emphasis on legs and feet. The title suggests that Da Vinci also was pressed by his patrons to produce on demand and even repeat his most popular works, his “hits.” Basquiat refers to “the bad foot, the left foot” and with “Return of the Prodigal” he identifies as the bad son. “Heel” is repeated, which might define as being under a heel, or down at the heel, a heel in the sense of bad, a villain, or a flaw or weakness as in an Achilles’ heel. In the bottom left is a muscular figure with a mallet like John Henry, building the railroad tracks that the whole is crossed with, “hits” to make tracks perhaps as references to drugs, tracks that mark a slave to a habit, marks which take on the form of text themselves, used semantically to represent history. They unify the piece and lead on one path to Latin again with “Latissimus”, muscles of a strong back, on the other track to “studies of human leg plus the bone of the leg in man and dog.” A dog can be trained to “heel.” Perhaps the influence of Césaire’s line, “that it is enough for us to heel the world, whereas the work of man has only begun” is here as Basquiat feels the inherited burden. Yet perhaps it also recalls the anxiety caused by the sense of alienation from the body as a legacy of slavery.

: Basquait, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Greatest Hits, 1983

The sense of the physical body is also in the piece as he refers to Shelley’s poem, “Prometheus Unbound” about the bringer of fire Prometheus’ emancipation from torment as “Prometheus Bound,” prefiguring release and again locating himself within the framework of revolutionary poets, but here insisting himself as both Prometheus the bringer of fire, a metaphor for the fire of his message and a reference to freeing himself from the long suppression, now pushed back into even earlier times. The poem cements the images of fighting back and rebellion together with flight and escape. The flight might be seen like Prometheus to claim his due or perhaps as away from the brutalization of exploitation. Basquiat trades in ambiguity and this is a hallmark of his work.

Correspondences can be found throughout the text of Basquiat’s work, as in “Hollywood Africans,” a caustic piece painted mostly yellow with the footprints and portraits of his writer friends, Toxic and Rammellzee, with his own likeness simultaneously valorized as “hero.ism,” villianized as “heel #3” and animalized with “paw.” There were few Africans in Hollywood that were not racist representations of savages and servants. The reader is asked, “what is bwana” in the form of a question as in the TV game show “Jeopardy” and crossed out. Basquiat is ventriloquizing white concerns, it’s not real. The lines of races and assimilation are crossed and blurred. Seven stars is too many, it’s pop, it’s corn, Idi Amin may be a black dictator in the real Africa but the sugar cane in Haiti is incorporated and copyrighted to be exploited, it all adds up to the sum of white on black “gangsterism,” it’s real and the piece is priced at 200 yen.

: Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983

Belying the portrayal of him in Julian Schnabel’s film biography as a mumbling, bumbling junkie, the volume of work Basquiat produced in his short life is that of a dedicated painter, with little time for anything but work. Stephen Lack suggests that when Basquiat’s dealers requested that he switch from painting in acrylics to make more valuable products in the medium of oil, the prolonged drying time of oil paints adversely affected the artist. Lack posits that Basquiat then had to wait for a layer of pigment to dry before adding successive layers, depriving the work of spontaneity and the artist of his most valued rush, the more immediate pleasures and gratifications of creating large-scale works quickly in fast-drying acrylic. And, the paradoxes of his position and the fickle and judgmental nature of celebrity in the art world overwhelmed him. Frances Negron-Muntaner observes,

While Basquiat envisioned commodification as a way out of the racialized body to the extent that it socially valorized him, the requirements of steady output undermined his independence and relationship to painting, making the artist fatally aware of his shameful status as a racialized subject, even under privileged conditions.

Basquiat had truly believed that he would be able to scale the heights on his abilities and worth, but the tipping point was reached when the critical reaction to his collaborations with Andy Warhol hurt him. He was othered, treated as a novelty brought to life by Warhol’s divine intervention. He could not accept the sidekick role, could not be subordinate—it was he who had invigorated Warhol with his love and energy. It was now clear that in order to continue he would have to subsume himself and his art further into a system which did not regard him as an equal.

In less than a decade, Jean-Michel Basquiat sealed his fame with a large body of work and sacrificed himself in the process. He felt the oppressions of millenia, he internalized the damage done no less than did the tragic Puerto Rican poet laureate Julia Burgos. Like Burgos, in the end he died alone, and although they didn’t cut his limbs off to fit him into a pauper’s coffin as was done to her corpse, he was also dismembered. Parts of him are in many public and private collections. His art stands as a painterly, eloquent, accusatory text, a litany of sure marks which express the weight of centuries of dislocation, testimony and evidence presented against the culture that ate him.

It’s as if I’d like to return,
and yet can’t discover why, now where to.
Julia Burgos

____________________________________________________________________

Thanks to Marguerite Van Cook, Frances Negron-Muntaner, Stephen Lack and Sur Rodney Sur.

Super-Violence and Sexual Dysfunction

Posted on July 13, 2011 by David Bitterbaum

Many writers have, “that story”; the one where superheroes are taken to their logical conclusion in an orgy of tyranny and blood. Alan Moore did it in, “Miracleman/Marvelman,” Mark Millar has done it to varying degrees in, “The Authority,” and, “The Ultimates,” Frank Miller with, “The Dark Knight,” and the list goes on. “No Hero,” by Warren Ellis and Juan Jose Ryp is another take on this concept — with sexual dysfunction thrown in.

“No Hero,” was a mini-series published by Avatar comics and collected as both a trade and hardcover. It is set in an alternate universe where the world was exactly like ours until June 6th, 1966, when a man named Carrick Masterson announced he had created super humans through his discovery of a drug called FX7. The series is mostly set in the alternate present, and focuses on a superhero organization organized by Carrick called Frontline, made up of people who have taken the drug.

As the series begins, Frontline is in trouble; the heroes are getting killed off in oddly precise ways despite it supposedly being incredibly hard to kill them. To replenish their ranks, Frontline approaches a young vigilante named Joshua Carver. Carver takes the pill that makes him a hero — and at this point we get some of the most bizarre imagery ever put to paper in a superhero comic courtesy of artist Juan Jose Ryp who is really a beautiful illustrator (good enough that Marvel comics snatched him up to pencil a quite dreadful Wolverine comic).

Carver’s transformation leaves him a hideous mess. His skin is falling off to be replaced by some hard purple material and he’s become, “castrated.” Another hero named Ben/Redglare tries to comfort him but Carver starts to freak out and break everything before realizing he can do so because he has powers at which point he’s…happy. Either Carver was so desperate to achieve his ideal of a hero he was willing to sacrifice a huge aspect of it, or something else is up.

After rescuing people from a plane crash Carver is let in on the big secret, Frontline orchestrates a lot of problems and runs the world. Carrick admits that, “It does people good to have super-powered heroes. It makes them think they’re incapable of doing anything for themselves. That forms the basis of a society that’s useful to me. Yes Joshua, we do save people. It’s good for business.” For Ellis, a world with heroes is one where some jerks who are more powerful than us run everything.

It turns out that Joshua was a plant via the US Government, and he is working with a bunch of other world agencies to take out Carrick. In depicting the conflict, the comic becomes the most gory thing I have ever read. Perhaps the high point (or low point?) of the carnage is when Joshua literally rips a man apart, takes his spine, and wears it like a strap-on penis, declaring, “Now I look like a real fucking superhero.”

We learn later on that Carver had parents who were murdered by a serial killer and he was raised by this killer before the FBI found him and made him their own personal monster used to catch other monsters. Carver became a deformed and hideous creature because FX7 shows what is inside you, and what was inside him was hideous. His serial killer father “father” was someone who did terrible sexual things to him and this resulted in Carver being incredibly sexual dysfunctional—why would he want a penis when he saw one used to do so much harm?

The advertising tagline to “No Hero” asked “How much do you want to be a super human?” The phrasing is telling; “super human”, not “super hero.” The characters here aren’t heroes. In fact, Ellis pretty much concludes that only the completely fucked up would want to be superheroes in the first place. It isn’t that super powers corrupt; it’s that only the corrupted want super powers.

The super-hero as a representation is a male ideal; strong and muscular, able to beat up the villain and save the woman all by the end of the issue (or in this era of decompressed comics, multi-issue story-arc). Yes, there are some female heroes and this formula gets switched up, but you can still look at many heroes as the perfect man—strong, smart, and able to save the day.

In some contexts (like James Bond, for example) the perfect man would have perfect bits, enabling a perfect series (and perhaps even a perfect storm) of sexual conquest . But American comics has a strangely stunted development when it comes to sexuality —its perfectly fine to show as much violence as you want, but dare show an exposed breast and you’re looking at a Marvel Max rating or Vertigo label.

In “No Hero,” Ellis suggests that the sexlessness of the super-hero is a feature, not a bug. To want to be a super-hero is to want to gain powers…and to lose your penis. Superheroes — and those who want to be superheroes — replace their sex with violence.

Tom Gill on Tsuge and Tatsume

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Tom Gill has posted a lengthy comment on his essay about Tsuge and Tatsume and fetuses in the sewer from a bit back. I thought I’d reprint it here just to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the internets.

To all the readers who commented on my paper “Fetuses in the Sewer: A comparative study of classic 1960s manga by Tatsumi Yoshihiro and Tsuge Yoshiharu.”

First, many thanks for taking the trouble to read my paper and comment on it; and apologies for taking a very long time to get round to responding. I moved back to Japan from England in April and all my manga and stuff were on a ship for two months, and then there was the Great Tohoku Disaster as an added distraction. Anyway, let me respond now as best I can.

Several people asked how come Tsuge does not get translated into English more. I have heard the following theories, some here at HU, others from friends:

1. Some say the work is too challenging to interest mainstream publishers. Indeed, it is does make more demands on the reader that Tatsumi’s punch-in-the-face approach. Who’s to say whether it would sell?
2. Some say Tsuge has usually refused to allow his work to be translated because of bad experiences in the past. It probably did not help that The Comics Journal got his name wrong on the front cover of their 2005 special issue on Manga Masters. Calling him “Yoshihiro” (that being Tatsumi’s name) may have made it a teeny bit worse.
3. Someone here on HU said that Tsuge does not like the damage done to the flow of the visual narrative when manga get “flipped” when translated into English, though as Ian S pointed out, he has had a substantial chunk of work translated into French.
4. Yet another rumour has it that Tsuge promised the translation rights to some long lost friend in America who has never made use of them.

If anyone knows the truth of the matter, please do share.

Noah Berlatsky says: Here the representation and the reality are both in flux and swimming around each other.
— A very astute comment, and one that speaks to other Tsuge comics too. One reason why people have such a hard time responding to his famous work Neiji-shiki (Screw Style) is because they want to decode it, to refer symbols to reality when in fact neither is solid enough to allow such a reading. My main objection to Masashi Shimizu’s Freudian commentaries on Tsuge is that he thinks such a systematic decoding is possible, which sometimes leads him into far-fetched assertions.

Noah Berlatsky says: I was thinking about Anne Allison’s book Permitted and Prohibited Desires…
– Yes, it is interesting to speculate that the “absent father” may be hovering off-stage in these productions. Theories emphasizing Japan’s uniqueness are deeply unfashionable these days, which may explain why Shimizu never references Kosawa Heisaku (Anne Allison’s principle reference for alternative non-Oedipal development in Japan), or Doi Takeo, another absent father theorist well-known outside Japan, preferring to follow a relentlessly orthodox Freudian line in his analyses. In my paper on Tsuge’s ‘The Incident at Nishibeta Village’, recently published in IJOCA (spring 2011) I describe how Shimizu makes a large boulder stand in for a father figure in one of these forced interpretations.

Anyway…it seems like that might link up somehow with the fascination with fetuses you’re talking about here. It’s more direct with Tatsumi; the flip side of his misogyny is disempowerment fantasies; identifying with the fetus as revenge against the all-powerful feminine and as a capitulation to it. The bleak vision seems less like a look at the dark realities of life than an excuse to crawl back into the womb.

– Identifying with the fetus? A lot of horrible things are done to fetuses in Tatsumi’s comics. And also there are moments of tenderness – the window-cleaner carrying his daughter’s baby on his back in The Washer, for instance. I think a careful look at the role of fetuses/babies in these Tatsumi works shows that he is not quite as blunt and predictable as some readers seem to think.

>> Tsuge it’s harder to pin down…he’s more playing with the notion of returning to the womb than he is in thrall to it, perhaps?

– I think you are probably on target there.

>> As you say, the salamander seems like both sperm and fetus. If it’s pushing the fetus out to be born, it could also be in some sense the mother, or associated with the mother. A sperm dreaming it’s a mother, maybe? Or at least dreaming it’s gone back to the womb…though a womb reimagined as post-apocalyptic eden, too.

— With Tsuge, all is possible.

Maybe that makes sense of the womb/freedom symbolism you’re seeing in the water? That is, if the Oedipal relationship is reimagined so that mothers are actually the lawgivers, then it makes sense to think of the womb as not just safety but freedom.

— I don’t really get this.

ryanholmberg says:
Tom, I enjoyed your piece. Nice to read a baseline analysis of Tsuge and Tatsumi’s heavy-handed symbolism.

— I think you are rather unfair to both authors to call their symbolism heavy-handed.

>> There’s an interview between Tsuge and Tatsumi in Garo in 1971 that you should read. There Tatsumi more or less admits that Tsuge’s Garo work is what inspired Tatsumi’s circa 1970 stuff.

— Any chance of a photocopy?

>> The knocking-off is painfully obvious in some cases, and the work you have analyzed is not even the most extreme. Tatsumi produced some interesting things in the 50s, but most of his 60s material is just plain junk. Were it not for Tsuge, Tatsumi would probably have disappeared.

— I would not call Tatsumi’s 60s work plain junk. I much enjoyed reading these works. They are page turners. Then again, I also enjoy listening to loud, repetitive punk rock music. For me, Tatsumi is Johnny Rotten to Tsuge’s Roger Waters. That said, there does some to be fairly obvious ripping-off going on here. I am beginning to wonder if Adrian Tomine ever reads the postings here, and if so, whether he is going to jump in and launch a spirited defence of Tatsumi.

>> A couple corrections: Tsuge was not plucked out of oblivion by Nagai in 1965. He had already been making comics for close to a decade and was well-known in the kashihon circuit and even published work in mass-print magazines.

— I do of course know that Tsuge had already published a lot of stuff, Ryan, but is it not also true that Tsuge’s career was fairly moribund by 1965, and that Nagai heard he was struggling, wanted to help, couldn’t find anyone who knew of his whereabouts, and finally had to find him by putting a notice in Garo asking him to come forward and make himself known? Such at least is the legend… I’ve read it several times.

>> You also write that both artists wrote plenty of gangster yarns, ghost stories, and samurai bloodbaths in the 50s. I have not read everything by either of these artists, but from what I have I would to say that this incorrect. Tatsumi wrote very very few pieces set in the premodern period, and the one that I have seen was most certainly not a samurai bloodbath, but rather a ghost story set in the Edo era.

– You are probably right about Tatsumi. I wrote rather casually there, I must confess.

>> Tsuge also to my knowledge did not write that many gangster pieces (that was more a Gekiga Studio thing). He did write a number of samurai swashbucklers in the 50s, but the bloody samurai pieces didn’t come until around 1960, after Shirato Sanpei’s Ninja bugeicho made dismembered and splattered blood a prerequisite for the genre. Now that most of Tsuge’s pre-Garo work is in bunko (paperback), it should be easy to check this.

— Tsuge’s 1950s samurai bloodbaths include ‘Namida no Adauchi’ (The Tears of Revenge, 1955, 128pp.), ‘Sen’un no Kanata’ (Beyond the Clouds of War, 1955, 144 pp.), ‘Norawareta Katana’ (The Cursed Sword, 1958, 12pp.), leading into a series of four stories derived from the life and legend of swordsman Miyamoto Musashi in 1960. OK, that’s not strictly the 50s. His gangster yarns include ‘Hannin wa Dare da?’ (Who is the Criminal?, 1957, 40pp.), ‘Akatsuki no Hijousen’ (The Dawn Emergency Line, 1957, 66pp.), ‘San’nin no Toubousha’(Three Escapees, 1958,48pp), ‘Oyabun’ (The Boss), 1958, 20pp..
On the matter of bloodiness, I think you perhaps exaggerate Shirato Sanpei’s originality here. Tagawa Suiho has plenty of heads and limbs flying around the place in his 1930s Norakuro comics, for instance; Shirato’s contribution is more in the brilliant penmanship than the old ultraviolence itself, no?

ryanholmberg says:
I agree with Noah that if one is going to pursue some sort of psychoanalytical frame for Tsuge, you have to deal with the general absence of fathers. The wrench-carrying suit in Nejishiki could be read as a father figure, but otherwise they are pretty absent from Tsuge`s work, no? And when they do appear, they seem to be background color and not allegorical symbols.

— I think that in this Garo period, Tsuge typically has a male protagonist trying to come to terms with women, represented by actual women/girls he encounters on his travels, or by a feminized landscape, such as that of the Marsh (Numa). It is an obsession, and doesn’t seem to leave much room for fathers – or indeed for mothers, save as attenuated symbolic wombs like the one the salamander has found himself in.

>> Second, I think the Ibuse Masuji short story (which non-Japanese readers can read in Ibuse`s Salamander anthology) deserves more than a footnote, regardless of what Tsuge says about it himself. There is obviously more than a passing resemblance, and it is certainly more important than Western existentialist writing.

— You are right about this, though I wondered whether Hooded Utilitarian readers had enough interest in Japanese literature to warrant a full discussion. Tsuge freely admits borrowing from Ibuse – it is a famous story, a cameo literary classic, and by using the same title for his own work, Tsuge invites comparison. The offhand comment I mentioned him making about the Ibuse story in conversation with Gondo is typical of his sometimes infuriating reluctance to seriously grapple with his influences. I would make the following observations:

1. Tsuge has certainly borrowed the basic idea of the salamander as an existential figure from Ibuse’s story (first written around 1919; published in 1929). Both salamanders are literally in a hole, and forced by their predicament to reflect on the meaning of life. Even the way Tsuge’s salamander talks – or thinks out loud – sometimes recalls Ibuse’s salamander. Both are reflective, lugubrious voices, moody and sometimes capable of humour.
2. But this is creative adaptation, not plagiarism. Ibuse’s salamander is trapped in a very small cave, where Tsuge’s is relatively free, to wonder through the high-ceilinged labyrinth of a massive system of sewers. And where Ibuse’s salamander goes through a series of moods over a period of two years, we see Tsuge’s in a fleeting moment of his existence. His reflections make it clear that he has made a distinct progress, from disgust at his fetid environment to acceptance and even pleasure at the chance encounters that come his way. The final frame, in which he swims off into an ethereal light, is far from the image of permanent entrapment in Ibuse’s yarn. Whether that light signifies death/rebirth/enlightenment or what, it is probably better than just being stuck in a cave. So Tsuge’s salamander enjoys a lot more freedom of movement than Ibuse’s.
3. On the other hand, Ibuse’s salamander is considerably less isolated than Tsuge’s. He has a series of encounters with other animals – some killifish, a shrimp, then a frog. Tsuge’s salamander is completely alone – all the other animals we see are dead, except possibly for one water-rat glimpsed in a single frame. Hence the nightmarish, post-apocalyptic atmosphere of Tsuge’s piece. Ibuse’s salamander, though trapped, is at least in a familiar natural world. Outside his cave is a bright pool teeming with life. Who knows what lies outside the sewer inhabited by Tsuge’s salamander?
4. Both salamanders show a malicious streak, Ibuse’s trapping a frog to share his confinement, Tsuge’s head-butting the fetus he encounters. Despite his brutal behavior towards the frog, who is dying of starvation by the end of the story, Ibuse’s salamander is finally forgiven by the frog, and the story fades out ends on a note of quiet resignation. At least they have each other. In Tsuge, the fetus is not so much bullied as discarded, being too alien to the salamander’s experience to be understood. Again, there’s a deep isolation here that we do not find in the Ibuse story. Going back to Noah’s comment about use of metaphor, if Tsuge’s story is a metaphor for the human condition, then the arrival of a real human, albeit an unborn/still-born fetus, is a gross intrusion by the signified upon the world of the signifier. This may help to explain the deeply unsettling atmosphere of the Tsuge story.
5. Ibuse’s story is told through several voices: that of the salamander, those of the shrimp and the frog, and an authorial voice which invites the reader to laugh at or sympathise with the salamander. Tsuge has boiled the narrative down to a single interior monologue as the solitary salamander ruminates in solitude. The absence of authorial voice or other characters leaves the story more intense and focused than Ibuse’s.

In short, I think the interplay between these two salamanders adds a fascinating further layer of complexity and density to this little 7-page vignette for those who are familiar with the Ibuse story.

>> This isn`t the only story Tsuge borrowed liberally from.

— Tell me more!

>> Also, I feel like an artist can get that “existential” feel from anywhere, from life as much as from books. Probably a better track of interpretation would be to go back to the beginning of your essay and try to explain this through demographic or historical context.

— I don’t quite follow. Please tell me more.

>> I will probably post a related piece about Numa on TCJ sometime in the summer, so I will leave my thoughts for now at that.

— I look forward to seeing that piece.

>>e reason I made the comment last week about what sorts of genres who was working in in the 50s was because I think it’s important to see how both Tatsumi and Tsuge started in a detective-thriller mode. However they diverged in the early and mid 60s, I think their re-convergence in the late 60s is in part a return to those 50s origins.

— Thanks for the clarification.

Ryan Holmberg has responded here.

I’ve closed comments on this post. If you have a response, please put it on the original post.

Robert Crumb: Survivor

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Sean Michael Robinson

I was a teenager the first time I saw a drawing by Robert Crumb, and I had an immediate, visceral reaction, a feeling of nausea, a slightly floating, psychic displacement from my physical self. I don’t remember now what the specific image was, nor does it really matter at this point—it wasn’t the content that repulsed me, but the neurotic, shaky, compulsive lines, invading every form, erratic, descriptive of the hand that made them as much as the subjects themselves.

My disgust deepened after my first exposure to his comics—they seemed so tightly drawn, so cluttered and cramped that I felt anxious, trapped in neurosis. And when I did, finally, make it past the surface to the actual content, I found nothing to reassure my trembling stomach—even in the less overtly challenging short stories, I found the neurotic aggression overwhelming, overpowering. I moved on and found work to read that didn’t make me physically ill.

A few years later, a film about the cartoonist himself changed all of this. Crumb, a 1994 documentary directed by Terry Zwigoff, transformed Robert Crumb’s work permanently for me, by providing context, nuance and even ambiguity to work that had up to that point seemed alien and severe. The movie opens with gentle upright piano music and a close-up shot of a sculpted, hand painted statue of a woman’s muscular butt, and in a slow, shaky pan takes in row after row of wooden spools to which faces have been elaborately, lovingly drawn, remarkable objects that, it slowly becomes clear, seem to have no practical or commercial purpose. From the very first shot the film suggests that Crumb creates because he must. His artwork is a need, the spools say, open-mouthed, eyes agog. The shot continues, and lap dissolves into a pile of sketchbooks and records, and finally Robert himself, back to us and facing his stereo, knees to his chest, rocking slowly to the music.

Cut to a drawing, and a hand with brush moving rapidly across the surface of the paper. “If I don’t draw for a while I get really crazy. I start feeling really depressed, suicidal.” These are Crumb’s first words in the film, delivered in a quiet, distant voice. “But sometimes when I’m drawing I feel suicidal too.”

“What are you trying to get at in your work?” someone, presumably Zwigoff, asks off-mic.

“JESUS,” Crumb says, suddenly animated. “I don’t know.”

Robert Crumb’s drawings are unflinching in their taut, sweaty grotesquerie, but the man himself flinches—he laughs nervously, stutters, cringes, equivocates.

He continues. “I don’t work in conscious messages. I can’t do that. It has to be something that I’m revealing to myself when I’m doing it, which is hard to explain. Which means that while I’m doing it I don’t know exactly what it’s about. You just have to have the courage or the… to take that chance. What’s gonna come out of this? I’ve enjoyed drawing, that’s all. It’s a deeply ingrained habit, and it’s all because of my brother Charles.”

Because of the powerful presence of his brothers, particularly Robert’s older brother Charles, the movie almost inevitably focuses on Crumb’s childhood, seemingly the source of both his obsessions and prodigious skill. By both their accounts Charles forced Robert to draw comics with him from a very early age, and was a domineering and seemingly crazed and competitive presence in young Robert’s life. Despite appearing for what probably amounts to about twenty minutes of screen time, Charles dominates the film, an intelligent, witty and doomed ghost of a man who seems in a way to have already passed on. So much of his life seems to be over, so many of his desires extinguished, that it seems inevitable that he will not last the duration of the movie.

We see examples of Charles’ and Robert’s comics from their childhood and teenage years, and get a glimpse at how these two remarkable young talents developed in parallel. Robert discusses his interest in other forms of art, and how it was his brother’s dogged persistence that kept him making comics, that in fact, it’s his brother who he still thinks of as his audience when he’s creating comics.

Young Charles’ work is truly remarkable, the work of someone who’s internalized at a very young age a whole host of cartooning skills and already developed his own visual style. But as Robert narrates the work chronologically, we slowly see that something seems to have gone awry in Charles’ mind. His style blossoms slowly into a collection of strange, grotesque visual tics, and pictures give way to more and more words, at first a rush, and then a torrent, panels and finally pages dissolving into microscopic scribble. And then, finally, his marks are nothing but scribble at all—content-less, without thought, finally, just tic. We watch as Robert flips through page after page of his brother’s illness made physical via pen and paper.

In the movie Charles serves as a harrowing parallel to his younger brother, a brilliant young cartoonist turning ever more inward, until there’s no communication left, no outside at all. He is the brother that could not escape the orbit of his childhood, who was unable to find a way to free himself from whatever it was that held him in thrall for so long.

What type of shared experiences shaped these three brothers? The movie hints at the edges—an abusive, withholding father, a mother who was either mentally ill, a drug user, or possibly both; but it presents no easy answers to these questions. What it does do, however, is provide a context for even the most extreme of Crumb’s works, and present a compelling argument for a man being saved by his art. Is it possible, the movie invites us to ask, that the difference between Robert and his brothers is that Robert found both release and escape?

Context also comes from the aesthetic decisions by Zwigoff himself. An early sequence of some of Crumb’s most violent, arguably mysogynistic drawings is accompanied by a haunting, keening voice, backed only by a circular, searching guitar and a blanket of hiss and pops. It is a song of “calamitous loss,” as Robert said earlier, and to hear such a song as the camera slowly pans and zooms across the twitchy surface of the drawings changes the experience of the drawings themselves from one of naked animal aggression to one of bewildered, pained loss. Where have these thoughts come from? the music seems to suggest. What has happened to this man?

Through its use of music and its austere, uncluttered editing and cinematography, the movie has great rhetorical power, great enough to reframe and even change the art that is ostensibly at the center of the film itself. A sequence mid-film presents an Angelfood McSpade strip with no narration, accompanied solely by a jaunty piano ditty that helps create a satirical tone that might be more arguable or problematic without the aural reinforcement.

The film also gives significant screen time to Crumb’s detractors, a strategy that defuses some of the uncomfortable edge of the work presented, which has the curious effect of allowing the viewer, or more specifically this viewer, to take his side again. Objections stated, points duly noted, we can return to the man himself and his obvious, almost palpable, need to create his work.

And that naked need, and the remarkable story of his brother Charles, are the reasons I’ve returned to Crumb so often, why despite a host of reservations, I showed the film, admittedly highly-edited, to my high-school cartooning class. Because Crumb is, in a winding, fractured, way not just the story of an artist, but a portrait of a survivor.
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Update by Noah: This post is loosely affiliated with an ongoing roundtable on R. Crumb and race.

Bewitching: Metaphor Made Literal

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Sean Michael Robinson

Those of us who have made a commitment to popular culture are inevitably faced with a choice—to take a bit of entertainment at its face value, ignoring or discarding the aspects we find problematic, or to reimagine, rework or otherwise engage with the raw material to make it relevant to ourselves and our experiences. English-language comic book or television fans from virtually any time other than the past decade or so will be well-acquainted with this conundrum.

Bewitched, that sixties stalwart of witchery and sexual politics, is no exception to this dilemma. For those not in the know, the show is a 1964 situation-comedy about a witch of almost boundless power that willingly submits to life as a mortal to please her new husband. I’ve recently been rewatching the first season with Joy DeLyria, whose not-so-favorable appraisal of the show is heavy in omission and metaphor. And there’s plenty of metaphorical territory to be mined– Samantha’s inherited magical powers and other-ness could conceivably be stand-ins for a whole host of perceived problems; perhaps Samantha is Jewish, or Catholic, or is a Communist, or possesses an advanced degree, or some other similarly distancing and disturbing fact that must be hidden from the neighbors. But to look at the show’s premise metaphorically is to deny the deliciousness of the high-concept conceit itself—the delight of the metaphor made literal.

As Joy suggests, Bewitched is so thorough in its concept that invoking magical powers is hardly needed to suggest Samantha’s superiority to Darrin. She is literally, demonstrably, smarter, more attractive, more worldly and experienced, and even more creative than her bumbling, ineffectual husband, who, we are told, is a successful creative man at a fairly successful ad agency. (The evidence on the ground, however, is weak—some anemically rendered, under-realized concept sketches for campaigns that Pete Campbell himself would laugh out of a meeting room).

Samantha’s mother Endora effectively extends this argument for womanly superiority. Like her daughter, Endora is witty, intelligent, broadly skilled, and almost painfully attractive. Unlike her daughter, though, Endora is self-actualized, having taken her skills and self-assurance and tempered them in the crucible of independence. Endora does as she pleases, how and when she pleases, and with whom she pleases, for as long as it should please her. It’s this fierce, dangerous unpredictability that makes her a threat to the ineffectual Darrin, and to the social structure in which her daughter has chosen to play, if only for a little while.

And although it does so in a hesitant way, episodes of the show are not above teasing out some of the implications of the premise, including the radical concept that two beings with such powers and such long lives might look upon human beings in the way that humans do dogs — as animals that we have aligned ourselves with, are capable of having regard and even affection for, but will never truly see as equals. The show implies in several episodes that Endora is at least several millenia old, and that Samantha is already several hundred years old herself. Her husband, this man who desires normalcy so strongly that he will deny his wife her true self and the full realization of her abilities, and will even deny himself the luxury and power her skills might bring them, will himself age, quickly, gracelessly, a time-lapse photo, a blurry imitation of life compared to the richness of experience and pleasure that awaits Samantha. How can she possibly love this may-fly, this transitory creature, this animal that says so much and thinks so little? The only conclusion that is possible, a conclusion only occasionally made explicit in the show, is that Samantha is playing at being a human, not the way that a little boy and girl might play house with aprons and plastic food and furniture, rehearsing their future worlds, but the way an Olympic athlete might sit in on a pickup game of basketball, or an acclaimed novelist might pen some ad copy for her church potluck. And if Daren lives until he’s eighty, well, what’s fifty years to someone that will live for millennia? Samantha can be patient with all of Darrin’s whims, with his insecurities and his need to control every aspect of her action, because it’s part of the game of being human.

It is at this extreme that a metaphorical take on the show necessarily breaks down. Samantha might evoke the plight of intelligent, capable women of the early sixties and the lengths they had to go to conceal their true selves from their husbands, and cultures, but she’ll never literally be that woman. Samantha is ultimately safe from censure, from the consequences of the culture around her, even safe from physical harm, because of her magical powers.

At this point a different kind of literalist than myself might invoke intention. “The show’s not on their side!” this contrarian might insist. “Listen to the laugh track. Endora’s supposed to be funny, not right. She’s a caricature of the nightmare mother-in-law.” And while I’d have to concede that, yes, the presentation of the show can be problematic, I would argue that what a show seems to be saying through its laugh track, through its cinematography, is not necessarily the only thing it is saying. Some of this (mostly unrealized) potential for nuance is due to the writing, which can be quite sympathetic to the characters, but a great deal of it seems to rest on, and perhaps be inspired by, the outstanding performances of Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha and the remarkable Agnes Moorehead, who positively sparkles as the noctiluminescent Endora. It doesn’t matter how you cut your footage or mix your laugh track– in a scene between Darrin and Endora, Darrin will forever be the bloodless, schlubby husband, Endora the preening, confident cat, a goddess in a world of garbage.

The Mad Men comparison is natural due primarily to Bewitched‘s setting and Darrin’s job as an ad man—the comparison is also instructive. It would be interesting to see what the unflinching eye of Mad Men would make of Darrin and Samantha’s relationship, what other consequences could be teased out of Samantha’s forfeiture of her powers. What would a merger of Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price and McMann and Tate look like? How would Don Draper react to Samantha? His physical reaction is self-evident, but in addition to his much-remarked interest in the female form, he has a track record of recognition of the unrecognized, an ability to ferret out the abilities of others, and, when it is in his own interests to do so, help those others develop those abilities. But what would he make of a woman truly more than his equal, not only blessed with intelligence and insight and grace, but magical powers as well?

As for Samantha’s reaction to Don, I have no doubt she would have little interest in him, just as she shows little interest in her mother’s offers of setting her up with “some nice warlock”. Don is, after all, not unlike the warlocks we see on the show, in his arrogance, his swagger. It’s the arrogance that comes with true, unchallenged superiority, with having won every battle for a very long time; of being a god among the mortals.

No, Samantha would be content to do as she’s always done since she began to play in the sandbox of the flesh and blood—she would continue to love and care for her controlling, but doting husband, to play by his rules, in letter if not in spirit, for as long as he lives, caring for and condescending to him until he dies, at which point she can return once more to her mother, to her freedom, the world of the unbound.

Kirby: Approaching the Threshold

Posted on June 13, 2011 by James Romberger

: Click on images to enlarge

The status of American comics pioneer and creative fount Jack Kirby slipped badly in the space of a few short years in the early 1970s. His highly successful resume at Marvel had led DC to promote his defection to them as their greatest triumph, but their support quickly waned. There was some resentment directed at Kirby by people who were highly placed at DC, that contributed to making his time there uncomfortable. For instance, DC’s production manager and excellent colorist at the time, Jack Adler, considered Kirby to be an “egotist.” And, the company was struggling to deal with the fact that reader’s tastes were changing, largely due to the revolution that Kirby had created with Stan Lee. DC’s lack of faith was not not solely with Kirby, though. Many DC books were begun, then rapidly canceled at that time. That DC would ask or allow Kirby to waste his talents on Jimmy Olsen is indicative of the level of taste and sensibility they had going on. The audience was more sophisticated, DC was seen as conservative and staid and they were. In addition, Marvel broke away from the distribution deal they had with DC in 1968 and tripled their production by the mid-1970s, from 20 to 60 titles. After Kirby left Marvel, they flooded the market with reprints of his work. So, there was a deluge of old Marvel Kirby on the spinner racks, drowning out his few new DC books.

For their part, DC used Kirby as Marvel had. He initiated multiple titles, each full of ideas and characters that could and would be later exploited, but all of his books except for Kamandi were canceled and by the end, DC expected him to invent first issues for series concepts for a title called 1st Issue Special. He did not renew his DC contract, but made an also initially-promoted but ill-supported return to Marvel. By 1978, a dispirited Kirby had retreated from the “snake pit” of Marvel into the television animation industry, where he was well paid for his conceptual efforts and finally got a health plan. However, in making animation presentations, little of what he drew made it to the small screen and in fact few people actually saw his drawings, meaning that neither his storytelling Jones nor his ego were served. So, in 1981 he returned once more to the comic book format, with a pair of titles for the fledgling independent publisher Pacific Comics.

To some, Kirby had fallen far. Captain Victory and Silver Star were the butt of many jokes and disparagements in their time. However, Kirby’s work for Pacific Comics was potent enough to launch the direct market system, which became the predominant structure of comics distribution and began the dissolution of Marvel and DC’s dominance over American comics. He was also concurrently involved in legal battles with Marvel involving his original artwork and it has been alleged that he was the victim of corporate slander and blacklisting. Often cited as evidence of Kirby’s failing powers at the end of his career, the Pacific books are rarely examined, but they can sustain a closer look. They are about freedom, Kirby’s freedom to do comics as he pleases, after a long career of creating to please others. Yes, they are often extreme and inconsistent, but they also offer some awesome pleasures and some of what seems ridiculous is the artist reaching to convey concepts that are beyond his (or perhaps anyone’s) powers of description.

At Pacific, Kirby fully realized his transformation into a proto-alternative comics auteur, as he wrote and drew stories that were free of editorial interference. In Captain Victory, Kirby displays extremes of his personal textual and artistic tics that might not have survived an editor’s scrutiny, for better or worse. His writing and art can be obtuse and is sometimes parodic of his own stylistic tropes and of what became of his prior work, now out of his control. Some of the sloppiest panels he ever drew are in direct proximity to panels as good as peak work on Thor. Kirby’s writing veers wildly from unbelievable silliness to heartbreaking irony. There is much that it would be deceptive to praise, but there are also moments that offer an unrestrained expression of his magisterial vision. One has the feeling that Kirby owes nothing, but is still giving.

In Jack’s late work a different set of priorities emerge that diverge from the aims of his earlier efforts. Kirby’s drawings often seem to be as much about the nature of his marks on paper as they are about the narrative, which further confounds matters. Marks that denote abstracts like movement and energy take on the same weight as those representing bodies in real space, light becomes patterns which interlock in a dialogue with marks and patterns in other panels. The pages are drawn small, so the work cannot have the sweeping space of his great twice-up original Marvel masterworks. Kirby’s own physicality has diminished and so he does not draw the lithe, bulging, hyperenergized forms that pressed the borders of the pages in his prime, now he makes stressed, compressed figures that sometimes seem to barely hold together, crushed into hermetic tableaux. It is the comic book as an encrypted and encoded personal illumination.

As can be seen throughout Kirby’s career, the ink interpretation of his drawings is largely dependent on the ability of the inker to understand the principles of volume, space and light that are imbedded in his deceptively simple lines and shadings. If an inker does not understand, for instance, that the interior “blobs” on a Kirby figure are meant to represent lighting from multiple sources, they will ink them as arbitrary abstracted marks. Artists like Joe Sinnott, Frank Giacoia, Syd Shores and even Vince Colletta are on solid enough ground in drawing and composition as pencillers themselves to reinforce and even enhance the structural solidity and linear nuance of Kirby’s drawings.The accomplished Mike Royer inked the initial pages of Captain Victory, that had been completed years before as a proposal for what would have been an early graphic novel. These were split between the two first issues. Royer’s own style is essentially flat and cartoony, but he is able to realize Jack’s intent and add a polished, professional sheen. The inking on the newer stories done for the Pacific series is by Kirby’s inexperienced protege, Mike Thibodeaux. All of the inking at Pacific is true to Kirby’s pencils, but Thibodeaux does not have the knowledge and skill of Royer; he traces Kirby’s lines carefully, but often misses the nuance of good drawings or even weakens the structure.

Captain Victory displays furious energy. It is not hard to imagine that Kirby might have seen the contemporaneous work of Gary Panter, that he absorbed some of the structuralism of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s Raw. Kirby often reflected the state of the culture around him, borrowing from popular books and films. He would also reabsorb the influence taken from him by another artist, as he was known to have evolved his work to suit the interpretation of his inkers like Joe Sinnott, or as in Kirby’s appreciation for Phillipe Druillet from his sojourns to Richard Kyle’s well-stocked comic shop. Both Mister Miracle #2 and Hunger Dogs reflect the influence of the in-turn Kirby-influenced Druillet’s ornate borders.

: Druillet influences Kirby in The Hunger Dogs

Likewise, the heavily and aggressively cartooned and patterned, nearly abstract linear quality of Jack’s Pacific work has an overtly self-aware surface that seems to me to be similar to that of Panter’s Jimbo.

: Gary Panter spread from Raw One-shot #1: Jimbo, 1982.

: Kirby and Royer spread from Silver Star #3, 1983.

Panter has not only spoken of Kirby’s impact on his work, it is clearly visible. The fierce, slashing, almost punk energy of both Captain Victory and Silver Star drove me to speculate that the influence was reciprocal, that Kirby had been looking at Panter, when I first saw them at the time. Now, I have not found the smoking gun, in that I haven’t yet been able to place that 1982 cardboard-covered Jimbo in Kirby’s hands. But at any rate, the faithful, flat surface of Thibodeaux is not altogether inappropriate on Kirby’s late efforts and regardless, the young inker does manage some very strong pages and passages.

The first six issues of Captain Victory boast some of the most dramatic and effective coloring that Kirby ever got in comics besides his own, by Steve Oliff. Kirby rarely had sympathetic colorists, nor did he often have control of the coloring. When he did, he was brilliant but he rarely had time to do it. The same rules apply: if a colorist comprehends the space and light in Kirby’s art, they can enhance it greatly.

: Thibodeaux and Oliff make Jack look pretty good in Captain Victory #4.

Oliff’s color is often inspired, but he was replaced by Janice Cohen, who did a fine if standard job. For the final issues Pacific changed over to fully rendered color while they simultaneously experimented with paper stocks, causing a mutating product which made Tom Luth’s late airbrushed efforts appear garish and inconsistent.

The initial 48 pages of Captain Victory were intended by Kirby as a response to the Steven Spielberg film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Dogface Pvt. Jack Kirby could not assume that aliens intrepid enough to cross the galaxies would be any less opportunistic that we humans would be in a similar situation.

: Not cute: I don’t feel very tasty, from Captain Victory #2; (panels reconfigured for continuity).

He advocated a full defensive mode. He envisioned an attack on Earth by an aggressive species and created Captain Victory as the vanguard of an advanced force that guards the galaxy from such predatory races. Though the lead character resembles two of Kirby’s signature heroes, Thor and Kamandi, he is a less an individual than a soldier tool of an interplanetary governmental body, like Captain Kirk of the Federation but with a harder, dehumanized edge more like the recent series of “Battlestar Galactica.”

“Victory is sacrifice, sacrifice is continuity, continuity is tribulation” is Captain Victory’s mantra. This might relate to the fact that all the characters Kirby created for Marvel Comics were sacrificed by their creator to the corporation to become properties, to be continued by other artists. By making them successful, Kirby was shut out of his creations, time and time again. Kirby places Captain Victory as belonging to the Galactic Rangers, his being is their property. The current version is a clone. He sacrifices himself to the Rangers’ cause by repeat-offending suicide. He dies, but there is no real continuity… when he is killed in combat, his recorded memories are transferred via a “storage unit” to a fresh clone of his body. A new Captain Victory arises, a thing that thinks it is him but is a copy (incidentally, this is also a compelling argument against “Star Trek”-style transport). The moment of the previous incarnation’s death has been erased, so the copy has no memory of suffering, that might give it pause before it re-ups.

: A never-ending tour of duty, from Captain Victory #1.

The emphasis on characters as properties that is seen in the most prominent comics publishers is entirely deliberate. Conceptual ownership by way of work-for-hire gives the advantage to the publishing corporation and devalues the unique talents of the individual writers and artists who make the work. The producers of the work are considered to be expendable, other writers and artists might do just as well concocting variations of a given set of ideas and also be more malleable to the corporation’s control. Artists who are kept busy retreading concepts created by others are less invested in the work. They might add new characters within the established parameters (disowned as work-for-hire), but have less time to develop properties of their own that they would be invested in (and the corporation will often stick to safe, proven ground and discourage innovation).

: Just good business, from Captain Victory #11.

Thus, a narrow pool of concepts is tightly controlled, harnessed and milked, an endless serial produced through collective effort to become, the corporation hopes, a “new mythology for our times.” A myth is a construct, not a person. The myth is The Silver Surfer, not Jack Kirby. In a corporation, there can be no individuals—no one person can be responsible for success or failure, there are no ethics involved, the overriding consideration is the profit of the collective of stockholders. But, with the last part of the Ranger’s creed, “continuity is tribulation,” Kirby implies empathy with those souls tasked to continue the adventures of the properties he has lost. They must work hard, to have no autonomy. They are clones of himself, who must endure after he is gone. And, Kirby sometimes rejects continuity in these books, he does not seem to care if there are holes in the story or inconsistencies in his drawings from panel to panel—and nor do I. Finally free of micromanagement, Kirby makes some of the most spontaneous comics of his career.

Captain Victory #s 3-13 were drawn in brief bursts, when Kirby could fit them in between his commitments to his animation work, but they still show a high level of conceptual vigor, there are a lot of ideas put forth. To be sure, there are many weak passages, but there are also killer panels and pages and quite a few double-page spreads that rank with some of the finest Kirby ever did. The first storyline extended from the initial novella. Elaborations of the “Bugs” from the New Gods series that yield many fabulous designs which outshine their previous incarnation, the Insectons come to Earth to exploit its resources. They feed on life energy and the bloated bodies of their human victims are stored in fluid “food-channels,” shown to chilling affect in #5.

: A disturbing sequence from Captain Victory #5.

The Rangers waste no time in making a full-on assault on the infestation. Some of the Rangers remind the reader of Kirby’s earlier creations, as in the resemblance of Orca to the Inhuman Triton and Tarin to Kamandi‘s tiger Prince Tuftan, but they are also less individuals than parts of a well-oiled machine, disciplined and equalized in military service. The books are militaristic but it would be a mistake to assume a hardening of Kirby’s humane outlook. Kirby was in the infantry in World War II and did not enjoy the experience. The Rangers’ dialogue is seldom the sort of action patter found in the comics of Marvel and DC, rather Kirby ascribes to them a bizarre mix of poetical expositions of the metaphysical and ethical dilemmas that can be spun from his sci-fi premise, with a sometimes silly and/or anachronistic humor, meant to represent the absurdities that those in dangerous situations indulge to leaven their trauma.

: The spread from Captain Victory #6

The Insecton “story arc” culminates in the double-sized and stunningly covered #6, a nearly apocalyptic scenario that sees the good guys win but the Captain first partially blinded, then killed yet again to save our planet, in this case through an overdose of life energy by his operation of a giant “drainer” that sucks the enemy’s essence from their husks. The violence in Captain Victory is more “real” than in other Kirby comics, here he shows the consequences.

In the arcs that follow, the stories begin to take on the quality of tales told late at night by an ancient relative with a thick accent—it’s hard to hear or they don’t quite make sense, but a disquieting enormity is felt, a sense of the weight of millennia and of infinite forces outside one’s control. One cannot understand, but one wants to, because it feels important.

: Kirby unstoppers the bottle in Captain Victory #9.

The second, four-issue storyline deals with the Wonder Warriors, four disparate villains who obey the dictates of a disembodied Voice, that include the cooly armored Bloody Marion and Finarkin the Fearless, Ursan who decomposes matter with his touch and Paranex the Fighting Foetus, an overt reference to then-contemporary challenges to Roe v Wade spurred by right-wing Senator Jesse Helms. The famously liberal Kirby sidesteps the issue of women’s bodily autonomy entirely as the oversized telekinetic embryo inspires moral qualms in the Captain, who says it is not fair to kill something before it officially exists, despite its aggression and that it is independently free-floating, encased in armor and has already been named.

: Spread from Captain Victory #10.

The most cryptically magnificent passages in the series take place in #10. In an incredible spread, the sexually indeterminate pre-being Paranex assaults the Ranger’s dreadnaught. Victory’s concern for the criminal Foetus is revealed as a sham intended to draw out the Voice, who the Captain mysteriously knows, and when it does, they proceed to an unclear endgame.

: Legerdemain from Captain Victory #10

In language dripping with portent, Kirby has his Captain order his crew to remain passive as he is apparently dragged senseless off into space by the Wonder Warriors. Of course that also is a trick and perhaps an excuse for Kirby to draw more unsettling images of his creations pulled to their doom by floating cubes that have all of the “presence” of Donald Judd’s Specific Objects. They all blow up but Victory is fine, he has sent out a robot of himself and he prepares to explain to his crew his prior knowledge of the Voice.

The final story arc is a flashback spread across three issues; these contain themes seen elsewhere in Kirby’s work: a critique of militarism as evolutionary barometer, as in his extrapolations from Kubrick and Clarke’s “2001”; and the question of “nature versus nurture” that he would later return to for his rejected conclusion to the New Gods, “On the Road to Armagetto.”

: Who says Kirby can’t write? From Captain Victory #11; (panels reconfigured for continuity).

Captain Victory #11 shows a literally monstrous side of the hero as he relates with Shakespearean cadence the story of his (original’s) childhood in the court of his cousin Big Ugly, who has horns and multiple mouths. Though Victory is human and so apparently incompatable with his demonic relative, the 8 year old child easily suggests cruelly innovative ways for Big Ugly to conquer the known universe. Ugly and the rest of the royal family are in thrall to the Voice, which is revealed to be that of Victory’s dead grandfather, Blackmass. Victory’s family follow this incorporeal spirit’s foul will and justify their actions to their victims in religious terms. With typical prescience, Kirby makes the kid’s best friend a computer. The child is the instigator of some of Big Ugly’s most heinous actions, yet seems to find it all horrifying/boring. Victory is a precociously talented architect of genocide, but he disassociates and is able to blame his cousin as if the acts are unconnected to him and then has no problem betraying the bond of blood to murder Big Ugly, heralding his coming of age as a soldier.

Cases have been made for possible correspondences of issue #12 with the New Gods saga by John Morrow and other Kirby fans. It depicts the boy as with the aid of his (um, huge) digital pal he destroys his ancestral planet Hellicost (Apokolips) and flees into space, only to crashland on a planet that is home to yet another militant psychopath, Captain Flane, who may or may not be his father.

: A favorite page, from Captain Victory #12.

Flane plays God to the indigenous population, forcing their evolutionary development by facilitating their development of military technology, leading to his own death at the hands of his “students.” For Morrow et al, the issue represents Kirby retaking his creations to give them a more fitting end. They believe that Flane represents Orion and Blackmass represents the ghost of Darkseid. Perhaps, but it also seems appropriate to note that Victory’s future state of serial martyrdom is foreshadowed by Flane’s suicidal manipulations. Victory seems to be the carrier of a murderous genetic package, but Kirby also rejects predisposition to violence with the implication that such an ingenious race as the one Flane corrupted might have used their natural curiousity to more constructive ends, had they been influenced by a less aggressive mentor.

The series ends in a distinct affirmation of the creative power of the artist. In CV #13, Victory cannot act on his clumsy love for his fellow Ranger recruit Lieutenant Alaria. In fact, all of his more individualistic impulses are suppressed and superceded by the demands of his duty.

: A little awkward, from Captain Victory #13.

Kirby finally allows Victory to meet his maker, the true “Source:” the hub of the Rangers is depicted as a surreal abstraction of the artist, a humongous floating hand which surmounts an eye and is a container for a brain.

: Just so we know who’s in charge, from Captain Victory #13.

Victory and Alaria are revealed as easily manipulable pawns, to be split up for dramatic purposes or “reassigned” to be given yet “more complex duties.” Flashes of compressed adventures follow the ambitious yet loveless career soldier to Alaria’s death and his Captaincy, as he “achieves the reason for his existence,” that he is a cog in a wheel and also the starring hero of the last Kirby epic. He will not procreate, but be a copy of a copy of a copy etc. He is pre-genericized, the comic is self-aware and takes on the aspect of a loop, we are back where we started and Jack Kirby is done. He has given us a look at our own worst impulses and into the far reaches of his mind.

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SOURCES

Amash, Jim. Interview with Jack Adler. Alter Ego #56.

Brown, Andy. “In Defense of Our Galaxy.” Monster Island Three. Conundrum Press, 2007.

Lewis, Jeremy. “In Defense of Our Galaxy.” Jack Kirby Quarterly #8.

Taylor, Stan. “Why Did the Fourth World Fail?” The Jack Kirby Collector #31.

Manga Legends: Just What Are They Selling?

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Yoshimichi Majima and Timothy Finney

A Japanese company, Manga Legends, claims to sell original artwork by many of Japan’s greatest comic book artists. However, the executive in charge of publishing at Tezuka Productions, a company created by the legendary artist, Osamu Tezuka, has stated that there is a “high possibility” that at least some art sold by Manga Legends is a copy.

Further, Manga Legends claimed in an email that their company was affiliated with Animate, a nationwide anime/manga chain store in Japan. However, an employee at Animate’s customer service center had never heard of the company. Later, after looking at Manga Legends website, the employee notified us that Animate had taken legal action against them.

“It really is incredible to see all this stuff coming out of the woodwork.”

In recent months, on a community website that allows collectors to display pages of original comic book art – including the art used in the production of actual comic books, called Comic Art Fans, known to its members as CAF, various members had begun posting original panel pages from what appeared to be very significant Japanese artists and manga series.

Unlike their American counterparts who often sell their art to fans, manga artists are well known for keeping their art. With a few exceptions (and the occasional known gift), little of it ever makes it into the open market. The little that does tends to be sold at special auctions run by companies such as Mandarake, one of Tokyo’s largest vendors of used anime and manga-related products.

As an example, art from the artist, Rumiko Takahashi, the creator of such successful series as “Ranma ½ “and “Inu Yasha,” is considered to be so rare in Japan that an inked sketch of Lum, a character from her “Urusei Yatsura” series, drawn on letter paper, sold at auction on April 13, 2011 for JPY 3,267,500 (US $40,650 at the current exchange rate).

Sketch of Lum by Rumiko Takahashi.sold at auction in Japan

However, since November 2009, CAF members have posted two published interior pages from the “Urusei Yatsura” series on the Comic Art Fans site. Many Japanese would find this hard to believe.

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Two Urusei Yatsura pages posted on Comic Art Fans.

Since the initial pieces of manga art started showing up in late 2009, a steady number of key or prime pages have continued to be added to CAF by various, though mostly European, collectors. These have included pages from series such as “Blackjack,” “Tetsuwan Atom” (“Astro Boy”) and “Adolf” by the so-called “God of Manga,” Osamu Tezuka, “Nausicaa in the Valley of Wind” by famed animation director, Hayao Miyazaki, Dragonball by Akira Toriyama, a “Lone Wolf & Cub” page by Goseki Kojima (a major influence on the American artist, Frank Miller) and many others.

After seeing the “Lone Wolf & Cub” panel page posted to CAF, fan and art collector, Felix Lu, said, “It really is incredible to see all this stuff coming out of the woodwork. As someone who searched furiously over a six-to-seven-year period for published LWC pages, this latest update is a stunner. My understanding, through multiple sources, was that all the interior pages were held by (series writer, Kazuo) Koike. Given all that – and seeing zero evidence to disprove it, I just came to accept it as fact.”

Two of the most stunning examples posted on CAF come from the same series, Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira,” considered by many to be one of the most influential comics ever. These two pages show key scenes from the comic – one shows the story’s main character, Tetsuo, meeting the titular, Akira, while the other shows the shockingly memorable scene where Tetsuo loses his arm to a laser blast from a military satellite.

Comic art collector and Akira fan, Satyajit Chetri, said, “I was really excited about the manga art and tried making inquiries. When I heard some of the numbers being thrown around, my first instinct was to go for them by any means possible – it was Akira, after all, something that I really loved and I thought there would be a limited supply of pages available only for a short period of time. But then more and more pages started popping up, good ones, and suddenly the exclusivity factor seemed to go down a little. (There are) 3000-plus pages of (the) Akira (comic book), and if there were some collectors getting PRIME pages, it was inevitable that more pages would turn up, as would a secondary market.”

At first, the source of this new vein of art seemed to be a secret. When asked by one of the authors by email, one collector stated that he had a relative living in Japan who acquired it for him. The authors also heard from various sources that the Akira pages had been auctioned by Mr. Otomo himself to raise money for Japan’s recovery after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami devastated much of northeastern Japan in early March.

“Strangely, Google searches for original Akira pages (from an auction or a store) do not turn up anything,” said Mr. Chetri.

Discovering Manga Legends

Recently, however, the authors received a link to a website called Manga Legends from an art collector living in North America who does not wish to be named. “Please keep it between us,” he wrote.

According to its URL information, the site was created in 2009. However, on its website, the company states:

“Manga Legends will celebrate its 25th anniversary on 2009. Our online shop and members service is celebrating now its 7th anniversary. From the manga store in Koenji-Tokyo to the homepage, a long way has been walked. Our goal is more than ever to be with you to live your passion at the best price end the best service.” (sic)

A URL search on June 5 listed the website as being owned by Alexandre Bodecot and it was located in Fukuoka. As of June 7, “Mita tomoki” (sic) was listed as the owner and the address had been moved to a Tokyo P.O. Box.

Manga Legends’ website advertises that it sells “Collectibles, old editions, signed mangas, original art…,” and listed available services in English, French, Spanish, Italian and German, but not Japanese. Since it is a Japanese company, this appeared odd.

[A screenshot of Manga Legends’ homepage. The colors are similar to that of a Japanese company, Animate, which Manga Legends claimed affiliation with.]

Mr. Chetri, who has participated in public comic art auctions in Japan, noted, “Japanese collectors are willing to pay a LOT for original art, as public auctions show. It seems disingenuous to target a European market when there is an eager fan-following right outside your door, unless you are a seller who is making claims that you do not want cross-verified.”

As part of Manga Legends’ service, the authors learned that the company issues certificates of authenticity with each page that they sell. The company claims that a “sworn expert” issues each COA.

The North American collector, who was in the midst of a deal for an art page drawn by Osamu Tezuka and his studio assistants, wrote an email on June 3, 2011 to Mami. Watanabe, an employee of Manga Legends expressing “concerns about manga-legends.” The collector also wrote in this email that he had already bought one page by Mr. Tezuka, a “Blackjack” panel page that he had bought from an unnamed “French collector,” and asked if the page had previously been sold by Manga Legends.

Ms. Watanabe answered the same day, writing that Manga Legends had indeed sold the page in question:

“Yes, after checking our datas, it happens that this page was sold to one of our French members last year. To my surprise, it appears that this page was sold with a COA to this member. When you exchanged this page with this person, he didn’t give it to you ? Please let me know and if necessary, we can ask to our sworn in expert to reissue a COA for you. The point is, our COA specifies that our original arts can’t be resell without the written agreement of the author or it’s agent, through our company. Let me be sure that this person, in France, didn’t sell the page to you but exchanged. ” (sic)

Also, Ms. Watanabe stressed the genuine nature of the art. In an email from June 2, 2011,for instance, she noted that Manga Legends acquires all its original art from “collectors in Japan,” and “agencies such as Kashima Agency, Morita Ippei Inc. …etc.”

Just what is Manga Legends selling?

The authors contacted Ippei Morita through an address provided by Manga Legends and he wrote back in an awkwardly worded Japanese message (one of the authors is a native Japanese speaker), “Your friends from overseas can purchase from us without any suspicion.”

However, Akira Kashima, CEO of Kashima Agency, emphasized that his company is a translation copyright agency for multiple publishers and does not handle art. On the phone, he was audibly upset to learn that Manga Legends was using his agency’s name as reference.

Mr. Kashima, whom the authors contacted on their own, told us that one of his clients is Tezuka Productions. Mr. Tezuka, who died in 1989, started the company after his animation company, Mushi Pro, went bankrupt. The company continues to publish his works posthumously, to license the many characters he created and to produce animation based on those characters.

The authors asked Mr. Kashima to send officials at Tezuka Productions links to artwork on CAF credited to Mr. Tezuka., including the “Blackjack” page bought by the North American collector that Manga Legends admitted to selling with a COA to another collector.

Tezuka Production’s Chief Publishing Officer (author’s translation) replied that while the company will not authenticate individual pages of art, he said there was a “high possibility” the “Blackjack” page is a forgery. He added that Tezuka Productions has virtually all the art to the “Blackjack” and “Adolf” series making it highly unlikely that any page from either of these series was genuine.

(Tezuka Productions did not release the name of the official who responded to the author’s questions. In Japanese corporate culture, releasing the full names of employees is not recommended unless both parties know each other. In this case, Mr. Kashima could not release the name of the Tezuka Production official because he had not dealt with the authors personally.)

An official from Tezuka Productions reported that there is a “high possibility” this “Blackjack” page, which Manga Legends admits selling, is a copy.

To find out more, one of the authors joined Manga Legends, filling out a membership application and providing a list of Japanese artists in whom he had an interest. Soon afterward, he received an email from Mami Watanabe containing scans of available panel pages from luminaries such as Osamu Tezuka, Katsuhiro Otomo and Go Nagai as well as a splash page by Goseki Kojima along with a set of prices for each page.

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[Scans provided to the authors by Manga Legends of art the company had available for sale. From top left (clockwise), the pages are purported to be from “Adolf” by Tezuka Osamu, “Akira” by Katsuhiro Otomo, an unknown samurai manga by Goseki Kojima and “Devilman” by Go Nagai.]

Getting Animated

Because the company would not provide better scans of the art, the authors asked if it would be possible to visit Manga Legends’ galleries in Tokyo. Ai Oonishi, using Ms. Watanabe’s company email address, replied:

“Of course, our head company’s called Animate, you can find our stores everywhere in Tokyo. I give you the link to our stores maps. Please visit us when you’ll come to Japan.”

The Animate company logo.

The email clearly indicated a relationship with Animate, the largest retailer of anime games and manga in Japan. Unaware that Animate had expanded into the original art market, the authors contacted the company’s customer support center and a telephone operator, who did not release her name, stated that the company only deals in “new, mass-market products,” not “specialized products.” After requesting a link to Manga Legends’ website, the operator visited it and informed the authors that the site “looked highly suspicious.”

The operator then forwarded the information about Manga Legends to a company official who then sent a warning letter to Manga Legends regarding its use of Animate’s company logo. The logo disappeared from Manga Legends’ website on the following day. (This information was provided to the authors by the telephone operator at a later date.)

Afterward, the authors gave this information to the North American collector who had provided the original link to the company. He wrote to Manga Legends and asked them to clarify their status with Animate.

He received a reply from Ms. Watanabe that read, “About the company’s affiliation, it’s a little bit complicated and I can’t really explain to you in details, our company is now independent after a long legal ‘fight’ with the original creator of our stores. That’s why we changed our logos and mark color.” (sic)

This remark appears misleading. According to Animate employees, there was never any relationship to become independent from.

[Manga Legends current homepage after links to the Japanese company, Animate, were removed. Also, the color of the company’s logo, which was similar to Animate’s, has also been changed.]

As we are collectors of original art ourselves, both authors know that one of the reasons we acquire comic art is nostalgic delight, the ability to hold dreams made tangible in our hands. Manga Legends sells dreams and the lure of those dreams is strong.

When informed that Manga Legends had misled him about its affiliation with Animate, the North American collector wrote back that he admitted that he was probably naïve, but he still wanted to believe that the art Manga Legends was selling was genuine. “I still want to believe it is true.”

Update; This is a somewhat altered version of the original article.

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