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The Crisis of the Collaborative Cartoonist

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By James Romberger

Thought forms in the mind as a combination of word and image. For that reason, cartooning is a direct, intimate means to communicate subjective thought to a reader. This is why many of the greatest comics are by artists who write their own narratives. Still, it is rare that a single person can both draw and write well, much less produce a work of blinding genius; one can spend a lifetime mastering either discipline. However, a writer’s words can be brought to life by an artist of the prerequisite abilities, one who can accomplish what in a film might require an unlimited budget and even pass beyond, to the unfilmable. The comics form offers infinite possibilities to writers and artists who are willing to work together. But the focus on autonomy in alternative comics has left collaboration largely in the hands of comics’ mainstream, where it has been greatly influenced by the economics and labor/management relationships of periodical publishing. The reader’s indulgence is asked for a short history of those relationships, as a prelude to an explanation of the artist’s contribution to the collaborative process in comics.

Bullpen variations

“Bullpen” comic book production was initiated in 1936 by groundbreaking cartoonist Will Eisner and his partner Jerry Iger to meet the rising demand for content in the new medium of the comic book. Studio staff was divided into an assembly line of piece-workers: writer, penciller (which might subdivide to layout, character and/or background artist), inker, letterer, and colorist. The bullpen became standard for comics because it was expedient to publish books on time and made it so no one creative person was wholly responsible for, or entirely invested in, what was claimed by publishers as properties done by “work-for-hire” employees. Comics history is crowded with “ghost” creators like Carl Barks and Bill Finger, who worked in near or actual anonymity and were not compensated fairly for their contributions. For many years, that was the accepted status quo.

In the early 1950s at E.C. an odd exception to the standard sweatshop mold led to some of the best comics published to date. Editor Harvey Kurtzman recognized that in comics, the crux of storytelling is in the layout or breakdown that integrates text with image, the pencil drawings that establish the structure and style of the design. The layout finds the flow of viewpoint and character interaction. Kurtzman made articulately composed page diagrams for all of his stories with every basic element drawn roughly in place, which his artists then rendered to finish. Still, individual stylists like Wallace Wood and John Severin did some of their finest work for Kurtzman’s war comics “Two-Fisted Tales” and “Frontline Combat.” Kurtzman demanded a high degree of accurate detail for period stories; his artists respected his guiding intent and invested their drawings with research, observational realism and great passion. Kurtzman also grasped the importance of color and worked side-by-side with colorist Marie Severin to enhance his narratives immeasurably. In these atypical collaborations, Kurtzman was the writer and also the primary storytelling artist. His finishing artists acted more as elaborators, but it was they who signed the stories, Kurtzman only took credit as editor.

Another version of the Bullpen was introduced with what became known as the “Marvel method” in the 1960s. Editor Stan Lee enlisted artists such as Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Gene Colan to draw their stories from brief plots outlined by Lee in a short note or phone call, or to invent the stories from whole cloth themselves and make notes that described the narrative and suggested dialogue in the page margins. After the fact, Lee added captions and balloons based on those notes, in his words a job often “like filling in a crossword puzzle.” Lee was able to do this because on their own, these experienced storytelling artists could initiate and motivate characters, construct their environments and produce complete comic book page sets. For what often amounted to copy-writing, Lee claimed full writer credit and pay. In this arrangement, the pencillers were also uncredited plotters and co-writers.

Jack Kirby writes continuity, which Stan Lee ignores, from the original art for Fantastic Four Annual #3, 1963

In particular, Kirby was the single greatest driving force in the foundation of Marvel’s popular multimedia empire; his creative input on “The Fantastic Four” alone encompassed a multitude of imaginative characters and settings. To be fair, Lee helped make the books successful with his unifying voice; in the letters pages and in his “Bullpen Bulletins” he created an illusion of family that resonated with young readers. He did plot and write some of the stories and he credited his artists (for their art) prominently. But Lee also failed to defend his collaborators’ interests to management. According to Kirby biographer Mark Evanier, promises were made to Kirby about royalties that were not kept and Kirby found no one to address his concerns to but Lee, who said, “I have nothing to do with that.” Kirby subsequently left the company rather than be further exploited. Kirby’s children still struggle to gain any portion of the multibillions Marvel makes from the comics, films and merchandising derived from their father’s work.

Too many battles were fought by the artists and writers of comics for their rights to be detailed here, but in the early 1980s, major publishers instituted “creator-owned” contracts for special projects in which artists and writers share copyright as co-authors, on an equal footing. Mainstream comics are still closely overseen by an editor, who selects teams and then acts as intermediary to writer and artist, even in creator-owned projects. The editor can facilitate their best efforts and contribute greatly to the storytelling by honing the creator’s individual contributions, depending on the sensitivity and sensibility of their recommendations or dictates. Some other holdovers from the bullpen days are still present in mutated form. While some artists finish their own pencil drawings in ink, others still have their pencils inked or finished by other artist. Inexplicably, though color makes a profound impact on the reader, the colorist still holds the lowest-paid job in comics. Perhaps as a consequence, few artists in comics do their own color, which is now most often applied by digital artists, with mixed results. Also, while alternative cartoonists often prefer to letter in their hand, mainstream artists do not and digital fonts have supplanted hand lettering almost entirely, not least because digital balloons and captions are editable until the last moments before publication. Whatever the rationale for their use, digital typesetting loses the qualities of illumination that are an important advantage of the comics form. Inkers, colorists and letterers of varying degrees of skill and artistry can greatly enhance, or ruin a book. But, it should be reiterated that the penciller controls the layout and storytelling and so is the primary artist.

Make It So

Currently in mainstream comics, an editor works with a writer to provide an artist with a document that resembles a movie script. This text describes the settings, the personalities, speech and actions of the depicted characters, as well as the trajectory and intent of the scenes. However complete this may sound, it’s not; the artist’s job is daunting. In a film, the lion’s share of the credit does not usually go to the writer, but to the director, the person in charge of the product of a largely visual medium. In comics, the artist must engage complex skills that approximate everything that would be involved in making a movie: direction, cinematography, casting, actors, production design, set design, lighting, costume, makeup, special effects and every other function, including that of the person who tapes around the actor’s feet to mark where they were standing.

One challenge for the cartoonist is that one’s “actors” must play their parts with well-timed reactions and believable emotions, expressions and gestures. That is no small feat of itself. The characters must reflect the diverse variability of human form. They must also be recognizable (“on-model”) from all angles or lines of sight, as must the settings, objects, vehicles and fashions, which also must all be true as possible to the time and place depicted, down to the smallest necessary detail. All of the depicted persons, environs and objects must also be executed in perspective and reflect the influences of light and the natural elements. In other words, the artist must understand and render everything that in a film is recorded by a cameraman. Like animators, cartoonists visualize movement within three-dimensional space as they simulate the viewpoint of a weightless steadicam; they engage a complex form of draftsmanship that can be described as “motion perspective.”


Alex Toth, motion perspective from the original art for “Torpedo.”

Quintessential moments must be chosen to freeze in panels. A further complication is that the characters must be composed in each panel in their order of speaking, as indicated by the script. The refined composition of each panel acknowledges not only the design of the images viewed simultaneously in direct proximity on the page and on the facing page (a two-page “spread”), but also those throughout the entire narrative. The illusion of movement occurs in the spaces between panels, where positive and negative space flip, creating visual rhythms that sync with the beats of the broken-down blocks of words, as the reader’s eye is led where the artist wants it to go. At the layout stage, artists might expand upon, or deviate significantly from a script in order to make a story work effectively. For instance, the addition of panels can serve to compress time or make actions clearer, captions can be bumped to panels behind or forward in order to gain room for a larger drawing, captions can be added or deleted to clarify character. In truth, it would be difficult if not impossible to find a cartoonist who did not add many acting characters, objects, architecture, flora and fauna of their own device throughout the execution of a given story, all of which contribute substance to the narrative.

Artist Tony Salmons notes three seemingly innocent words often seen in scripts, “a crowd gathers.” Salmons says, “A writer scripts or merely plots this line down on paper and goes on to the next scene. I spend an entire day researching, casting, lighting and acting out that crowd. Is it an opium den? SF or Hong Kong? Texas? German beer garden? Rainbow room at 30 Rock? What kind of crowd? If I do it with total commitment the considerations can go way beyond this. And the writer’s contribution is 3 words, ‘A crowd gathers.'” No matter what the story requires, the artist must make it so.


Tony Salmons, detail from the original art for “The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft.”

Additionally, ideas occur in the process of drawing. The artist may see a better way to articulate a scene after it has been laid out, when the story has achieved sufficient form that new visual potentials emerge. Artist P. Craig Russell has detailed one of the artist’s many unique contributions to comics storytelling, a technique he aptly calls “parallel narrative,” sequences invented by the artist that diverge from the script to depict scenes that are not in the text, that are intended by the artist to counterpoint the text. In comics, the onus is on the artist to make the story work. For that, the artist must find ways to “believe” what they are drawing, to feel the motivations of the players, the touch of a lover, the heat of battle or the cold night wind of the desert and express them to the reader.

Comics demand an immersion on the part of the artist that goes far beyond the job description of an illustrator. Illustrations are derivative entities that are subordinate to text, isolated visualizations which can operate either as redundant to the words or as commentary on the words, ranging from literal to oblique. In comics, the text is most often visually subordinate. The images are imbedded with far more information than the words. The words represent sounds and qualify the images. The text need not say something that is clearly shown in the pictures. Illustrations can enhance or challenge the reader’s visualization of prose, but comics are a full-blown realization of narrative, with the intimate interactivity of a book and with more potential for expansive spectacle than film.

For most of comics’ short history, the writing was often the weakest element and so highly skilled interpretive cartoonists have longed to work with better scripts. As the graphic novel gains ground in the book trade, more serious writers will want to explore the form. This could result in more sophisticated and revelatory collaborative efforts. It should be made clear that comic artists are usually paid more per page than writers, but for as long as credits have been given, artists have willingly shared them equally with writers. But now, the equilibrium of credit has slipped askew. Increasingly one sees collaborative books credited and publicized with the emphasis on the writer alone. Such selective crediting causes further chain reactions. In the catalog listings of libraries and booksellers, the “Author” is listed first. In the case of graphic novels, it is assumed that the name credited as “writer” is the “author,” unless specified otherwise. The artist might not even be included in bibliographic data unless credited by the publisher as a “co-author.” Amazon’s default system for graphic novels lists writers as “author” while artists are diminished to “illustrator”, a subordinate creator and in no way a “co-author.”

This diminution of the artist’s perceived role in comics has repercussions for alternative and mainstream artists alike. Artist Jillian Tamaki spoke of her process collaborating on the graphic novel “Skim” with her cousin, the writer Mariko Tamaki: “(Mariko) was not precious about it. It was basically just a play and there was no description of what they were doing when they said something, or where they were…it was me putting the pacing in, and the rhythms and the timing and the backgrounds….it took about two years.” But when “Skim” was nominated for a Canadian book award, the writer was the only one cited for the honor. Writer Alan Moore makes sure that his artists share equal credit, but Neil Gaiman’s name dominates the cover of the exquisite book P. Craig Russell made of “Coraline.” It can and has been claimed that it is Gaiman’s name that sells books, but a case can also be made that Russell’s mastery of the comics medium is such that his adaptations of Gaiman’s prose stories are more resonant in their form than the comic books that the writer has scripted. Even as the medium is poised to evolve into a sophisticated art form, critics often closely analyze what they perceive as “the writing” of a given book, but ignore or barely describe the art, perhaps because they are unaware of the interrelativity of text and art in comics, or perhaps because the publisher’s packaging and promotion tells them that the writer is the primary creator.

This trend will discourage thoughtful non-writing or interpretive artists from involvement with the medium. Because of the labor-intensive nature of comic art, a graphic novel can take an artist years, even decades to complete. In the current climate, collaborative comics become much less worthwhile for the artist. The remedy to this situation falls to the individuals who work in comics. Artists should avoid the “illustrator” label and stipulate a co-authorship credit for themselves in their contracts. They might find that there already is a co-authorship stipulation in their contracts, which has not been honored by the publisher’s packaging and publicity arms, or that there is some ambiguity in the distinction between “co-creator” and “co-author,” or they could discover that there is a contractual clause which calls for “credit according to current practice.” This means that the more artists allow themselves to get less credit, the more it becomes current practice. Also, writers could heed Alan Moore’s positive example and not allow their credit to override that of their partners. Both creators should ensure that their publishers direct their design and promotional departments to incorporate the contractually stipulated credits and see that book trade entities correctly list them. The alternative is that artists accept a diminished role and lose their hard-won rights.

In the end, the credit issue is about more than just the bruised egos of artists and writers. Debates about the validity of authorship itself are set aside when the realities of book publishing and movie deals come into play. A great comic need not ever be made into a movie if it resonates sufficiently within the parameters of its form, but when films are made and when book royalties accrue, artists and writers should share in the credit and proceeds as co-authors. For the artist, comics are a difficult form and the work involved in a graphic novel is not undertaken lightly. If his or her contributions to the whole experience of reading are seen as expendable tools of the writer, the evolution of comics is at risk.

Sources

Jack Kirby scan courtesy of the Howell-Kalish collection. From the Jack Kirby Museum’s Original Art Digital Archive.

Evanier, Mark. Kirby: King of Comics. New York: Abrams, 2008. p. 157.

Green, Karen. Words and Music…er, Images. Comic Adventures in Academia, column on Comixology website, 4/3/2009:
http://www.comixology.com/articles/212/Words-and-Music-er-Images

Lee, Stan with George Mair. Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee. 2002. New York: Fireside/Simon and Schuster, p.146.

Russell, P. Craig. Parallel Narrative. Video series posted online: www.pcraigrussell.net
or http://vodpod.com/watch/1296908-pcr-tv-parallel-narrative-murder-mysteries-part-1

Salmons, Tony. Quote from private correspondence. August, 2010.

Tamaki, Jillian. Quote from transcript of panel discussion: Inside Out: Self and Society in Comic Art. Moderator: Calvin Reid. St. Mark’s Church, Howl! Festival, 9/10/2008:
http://www.comicsculture.net/

Review: The Playwright

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Warning: Spoilers Throughout

The latest comic by Eddie Campbell is conventional in a number of ways peculiar to the form. It is a collaboration with a writer, in this instance Daren White, the editor of the Australian anthology DeeVee.  Also familiar is the presentation which is not dissimilar to what you might find in a newspaper strip collection with the panels laid out in single file across a squat rectangular book. The pages only lack the closing punchlines once deemed so necessary to such endeavors, but these occur frequently enough so as to negate any  perceived differences; the temporary conclusions and logical ellipses between the pages being the very stuff of modernity (see Campbell’s remarks on the rearrangement of the strip from 9 panels per page to its current format in the interviews below).

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Bombs in NeverNeverland

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I wrote this almost twenty years ago for a course on representations of war when I was a junior in college. It touches on some issues raised in the comments section of Alex Buchet’s recent post on war comics, so I thought I’d resurrect it. I think I still agree with the main points, though the prose would probably be a trifle less earnest if I wrote it now. But, for better or worse, here it is.
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“All children, except one, grow up,” writes J.M. Barrie at the beginning of Peter Pan. In many ways, the fictional constructions of war created by Tennyson, Kipling, Remarque, and Zola, appear to be attempting to deny this insight; appear to be attempting to suggest that war provides a return to an idyllic youth and innocence which allows the men who participate in it to escape from the mores and constrictions of adult society and return to an idealized childhood in which manners and restraint are cast away and replaced by simplicity and exuberant enthusiasm. War, for these authors, is an arena in which adventures can occur; in which heroism and enthusiasm triumph over the stodgy grind of day to day life. One can almost hear the cavalry in Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” declaring, with Peter Pan, “I’m youth, I’m joy” as they thunder towards the artillery guns, can almost hear Peter’s cocky self-assurance in Kipling’s breezy assumption that “of course” the British forces broke the “Fuzzy-Wuzzies”. The soldiers of which Kipling, Tennyson, Remarque and Zola speak have no fear, they have no doubts. They live, like children, in their own world with their own rules, in their own “NeverNeverland” separated entirely and forcibly from the reach and understanding of adult society.

Yet, despite this separation, the soldier is not ostracized, not attacked or unaccepted by the society which he seemingly rejects. He is not, in fact, a threat to civilized society, but is rather a delightful dream, an idea with great appeal both to the emotions and to the imaginations of people of the time, as the popularity of Charles Gordon demonstrates. Thus Kipling’s “Tommy” is a man (or, perhaps more correctly, a boy) who should be admired and loved even though he does not really fit the mores and norms of society, even though, as Kipling puts it, his “conduck isn’t all your fancy paints”. It is, in fact, Tommy’s separation from fine society which make him an attractive figure; his very simplicity, the very fact that he does not want luxuries but only wishes to be treated “rational”, composes his glamour. Tommy does not want “better food”, but only to be accepted by society without having to conform to its rules. He wants (and appears to receive from Kipling) to be given the freedom not to conform and to be admired for his very possession of that freedom; wants, like Peter Pan, to receive unconditional affection and yet to never have his mind cleaned.

It should, of course, be impossible to be at one and the same time independent and dependent, impossible to be heroic for the sake of the sympathy and admiration which that heroism brings. Only if one is capable of a total lack of self-reflection and self-awareness is this contradiction resolvable; it is only through his total naivety that Peter Pan is able to both expect admiration and receive it. Through war, Kipling, Tennyson, Zola and Remarque appear to suggest, through becoming a soldier, this simplicity can be (re)gained, this idealized childhood can be (re)found. Soldiers, like children, are, for these authors, not concerned with whether what they do is correct or incorrect, they do not agonize–they simply are. The soldiers whom Zola describes are “Like children and savages, their only instinct…to eat and sleep in this rush towards the unknown with no tomorrow”, Remarque’s Paul notes that “The national feeling of the tommy resolves itself into this–here he is.” The soldier is unthinking; in fact, thought is his enemy, his destroyer. The self-reflection which connotes adulthood, the loss of innocence and unselfconsciousness, results, in these fictions, in age and death. When the soldier begins to think, as Lapoulle does after killing Pache, he is destroyed. As Remarque’s Paul says, “we [the soldiers] are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.”

Remarque, of course, is contending that it is the horror of war, not of adulthood, which makes this jollity necessary; that to think about war would cause madness, insanity. But in many ways Remarque’s novel makes a statement not that war is too awful to think about, but that it is, in fact, aging which is the greatest horror. It is for this reason that the older men in the War are not as tragic as the men of Paul’s generation, for the older men have no youth to lose. For Remarque, the tragedy of the war is a loss of childhood, is the fact that through the war, Paul discovers death and sexual initiation (“the curse of a soldier” as Kipling writes), fear and vulnerability. Yet all of these discoveries are, in fact, not unique to wartime; as Paul himself realizes, they are instead the necessary adjuncts of adult life, the manifestations of a superficial society which delivers coffins punctually before a battle and places you under the arbitrary control of a postmaster. The war is the extension of civilian societies cruelties and artificialities, stupidities and absurdities. But even as it is so, the war also provides a means of escape, a strategy of resistance, a means whereby youth can be retained through “the finest thing that arose out of the war-comradeship.” Through this camaraderie, the trappings and foolishness of civilization, the unnecessary clutter of the school room, can be shrugged off and subsumed in the contentment of a good meal tasted among good friends. Paul relishes the experience of sitting with his comrades on their makeshift toilets not in spite of the primitiveness of the facilities, but because of it. Remarque views culture and civilization with suspicion, and finds in war a way to sidestep them, to return to the idyllic childhood which Zola describes the young intellectual Maurice finding in the arms of the simple peasant Jean when “Maurice

…let himself be carried away like a child. No woman’s arms had ever held him as close and warm as this…Was this not the brotherhood of the earliest days of the world, friendship before there was any culture or class, the friendship of two men united and become as one in their common need of help in the face of the threat of hostile nature?

Through his relationship with Jean, Maurice regains infancy; he is tended too, sheltered, cared for. War in The Debacle provides Maurice with a way to return to simplicity, with a means of becoming both noble and tragic. He becomes one of the “poor boys, poor boys” to whom his sister refers; he becomes innocent. In its creation of an arena in which life becomes more simple and true, war also, then, absolves of guilt even as it confers naivete. The soldier makes a sacrifice for crimes he did not commit. Like the men of the Charge of the Light Brigade, he goes unquestioningly to his death, following orders to the last. The betrayal of the soldier by civilians and generals is made all the more poignant because the soldier has done nothing wrong; has, in fact, placed his whole trust and hope upon civilian assurances of glory and easy victory. The betrayal is, in fact, like the betrayal which Peter Pan experiences at Hook’s treachery on the rock in the lagoon, the betrayal of a child’s total trust by a parent’s unfairness, after which, Barrie writes the child “will never afterwards be quite the same boy.”

It is this betrayal which Paul feels has robbed him of his youth when he says that, “I am young, I am twenty years old yet I…see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. [italics mine]” Remarque claims, then, both that the soldiers have lost their innocence, and that they retain it. Remarque says that their parents have failed them, and yet he still conceptualizes them as children. They have discovered that the world is unfair, and yet Remarque, through Paul, still perceives them as innocent. Paul repeats over and over that his generation is lost, it is useless, it is old and destroyed, but he never once decides to stop fighting, and even pushes Himmelstoss forward when the former drill master falters. Self-consciously martyred, Paul cannot solve, but can only revel in his troubles, just as Mr. Darling revels in his sojourn in the kennel.

Mr. Darling is, of course, not really comparable to Paul. He is not as young, nor in as much distress; he was not in the trenches of the First World War. Yet, in a deeper sense, Mr. Darling is very much like Paul, very much like Maurice, very much, for that matter, like Charles Gordon. He is a man who wishes more than anything to be admired, as Paul and Maurice did when they joined their respective armies, but who, through that very wishing, has condemned himself to an unadmirable existence. He is a conceited fool, a whining incompetent, a desperately contemptible figure when placed beside the apogee of unconscious grace and youthful innocence which is Peter Pan. And yet, while no one would want to be Mr. Darling, no one can wish to be Peter Pan either, because the very wishing dooms the attempt. One either has “good form” or does not have it. To have good form is to be young, unconscious, free. But “All children, except one, grow up.” And that one, as Barrie surely knew better than anyone else, was not real.

This is, I think, Barrie’s central insight, is the reason that Peter Pan , if it does not really oppose war, offers a way to oppose war that none of the other pieces of literature we have studied manage to suggest. For if, in fact, childhood is unattainable, if simplicity is gone, then the attempt to recapture that simplicity and childhood through war is not only misguided, but is actually dangerous, futile, and pitiful. Barrie loved children, he loved childhood. But he knew that he was not a child, and that he could not become one by travelling to some foreign field with a rifle and a battalion of comrades. Childhood games played by adults are not touching or cute; they are pitiful and even terrible. When Mr. Darling pours the medicine into Nanna’s bowl, he does not appeal to the reader in the same way that Peter does when he plays the game of question and answer with the pirates. Similarly, Peter’s comment that “to die will be an awfully big adventure” is charming and witty only when uttered by Peter’s naive voice. Kipling’s effort to capture what appears to be a similar sentiment sounds incredibly cold-hearted and callous, advising as it does that a soldier wounded on the field of battle and facing imminent mutilation ought to “Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains.” On the other hand, the French mutineer’s letter telling his sweetheart that, “I love you, and I don’t want to die”, is touchingly painful, and would be just as out of place in Peter Pan as would Kipling’s injunction. Real horror (though apparently Kipling, whose brain may itself be scrambled in some anomalous fashion, does not know it is real horror), and real fear are not part of the world which Barrie describes.

This is, of course, because Barrie’s world is not real. NeverNeverland is named so for the obvious reason. Tennyson, Zola, Kipling, and Remarque, in attempting to locate it within the context of reality, in attempting to suggest that NeverNeverland is obtainable within a historical rather than an imaginary framework, trap themselves within the very mundane existence that they wish to escape. In trying to escape adulthood, in trying to leave behind their responsibilities, they succeed only in making Mr. Darlings of themselves, only in placing themselves in a continuum where they refuse to face their problems because they wish so badly to transcend them. Tennyson cannot feel outrage or shock at the death of the Light Brigade, Zola can create only shallow caricatures in the place of real characters, Remarque can not move past self-pity and gruesome imagery to register any deep and meaningful moral objection to the carnage he witnessed, and Kipling appears to have buried any decent human compassion at all beneath a glut of imperialist fervor. Each is left romanticizing stupidity and horror in the hope that in doing so they can rediscover the childhood that they have lost.

Barrie offers no alternative to this quest. He, too, cannot turn from childhood, cannot stop seeking Peter Pan. But he knows, as Tennyson, Kipling, Zola, and even Remarque do not seem to, that the quest is futile, knows that Wendy and John and Michael and the Lost Boys must grow up eventually, must take up a mundane existence no matter how boring or dull it appears. And once it is recognized that war is not a return to some idealized NeverNeverland of childhood, then perhaps a convincing opposition to it can begin to be formulated.

Creation Redux: Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated

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Few comics in the last year have elicited as much critical attention as Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated. Most of these notices have been positive with a number of publications affirming Crumb’s status as a cartooning god. Such has been the adulation that even the most ardent Crumb enthusiasts no longer clamor for more recognition but are now asking for deeper and more contemplative readings of the comic. Consider Jeet Heer in a recent post at Comics Comics:

“As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been disappointed by the critical response to Crumb’s Genesis book. It is not so much a matter that the book hasn’t won enough praise, but rather that the critics, with a handful of exceptions, haven’t had the intellectual resources to tackle the challenge presented by Crumb’s handling of the Bible.  Ideally, the critics of the book should be well-versed in both comics and Biblical scholarship.”

Heer’s statement suggests that Crumb’s book is of such learned complexity that only individuals of the greatest experience and intellect would be able to do it justice. Suffice to say, I found this statement to be at odds with my own experience with the comic which I felt offered more superficial pleasures.

In order to ascertain the truthfulness of this and various other statements in praise of Crumb’s comic, I’ve decided to examine his handling of what may be the two most famous chapters in Genesis, namely chapters 2 and 3 which concern the creation and fall of man. The importance of these two chapters in the context of Judaism and Christianity is such that their substance is widely known even by those with only a cursory knowledge of Genesis. They have also been the  subject of innumerable explorations and appropriations in art, film, poetry and literature. These factors will make the ascertainment of the extent of Crumb’s achievements in The Book of Genesis that much easier.

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In some recent blog comments, Heer advised his readers that “Crumb was performing exegesis through his adaptation and thus is part of a long tradition of Biblical commentary”.  In another posting he writes that The Book of Genesis “deserves to be seen not just as an important work of art but also a significant commentary on the Bible.”

Of course, such an adaptation could not be anything else. For one, the practice of illustration itself presupposes the act of interpretation [exegesis: from Greek, from exegeisthai to interpret, from ex-1 + hegeisthai to guide]. The artist must provide expression, posture, dress, setting and reaction where the text is silent. He may even choose to provide a useful contradiction between word and imagery if he is so moved. We see this in the plethora of considerably less elevated Bible-related adaptations Charles Hatfield lists in his survey of a Genesis exhibition at the Hammer museum. Secondly, as the noted scholar, critic and translator, Robert Alter, states in his initial comments on Crumb’s book in The Nation:

“I stress that it is an interpretation, because the extremely concise biblical narrative, abounding in hints and gaps and ellipses, famously demands interpretation.”

Rather, the issue at hand here is whether Crumb’s adaptation of Genesis is “significant”, that is a work which cannot be ignored in any consideration of the art or literature connected to the Bible.

To be sure, the bulk of the praise extant has dwelt upon the artist’s reputation and his distinctive execution. Henry Allen of The Washington Post can hardly contain himself at the thought that the pope of impiety, political incorrectness and hedonism has decided to take on the Bible and God. Alter embraces this as well and has the following to say about the opening verse of chapter 2 of The Book of Genesis:

“Perhaps the most winning aspect of Crumb’s Genesis is its inventive playfulness… God’s resting on the seventh day of creation is shown by his sitting with his eyes closed, fatigued, his back against one of the trees of the Garden, while naked Adam and Eve in the background cuddle together in sleep.”

The scene is, of course, not so subtle satire; a reimagining of that unblemished garden as a kind of Disney cartoon (and every bit as ridiculous and fictional) with Bambi, Thumper and Faline in attendance.

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[Left: Bambi and Faline; Right: Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder; note the Christian iconography with the stag representing Christ]

The woodland creatures who espy the sleeping creator bear comparison with those which surround Snow White in her most popular incarnation. This gently mocking tone reasserts itself periodically throughout Genesis.

Crumb’s oft cited depiction of pure sexual disinhibition towards the close of chapter 2 is another example of this frolicsome spirit which in this instance seems almost self-referential in its longing.

 

[Gustav Klimt’s Adam and Eve (unfinished)]

 

[Fritz Comes on Strong”, 1965]

 

[Cave Wimp”, 1988]

 

As for the artist’s rendering of the creation of Adam, it has some similarities to that found in Basil Wolverton’s The Bible Story, a connection elaborated upon by Charles Hatfield at Thought Balloonists.

This solution was not an uncommon one during the Italian Renaissance, here made fresh by showing the stages in this act, in particular the breath of life given to Adam (the word “breathed” or “blew” here suggesting the intimacy of a kiss). Crumb’s adaptation is also notable for showing Adam in his clay-like state, a reminder of the Egyptian (see The Hymn of Khnum and Hekat) and Mesopotamian (see Enki & Ninmah, and Bel) myths which carry the same motif.

[The creation of Adam and Eve, Giusto di Giovanni de’ Menabuoi]

 

[Elohim created Adam (1795), William Blake]

 

As articulated in his short commentary found at the end of The Book of Genesis, Crumb is particularly interested in these ancient tales of creation and periodically inserts them while neglecting to emphasize the many internal consistencies, dilemmas and word plays in the Biblical narrative. Thus, for example, the “dirt of the ground” is linked to pagan tradition and not to a play on the words “man” (adam) and “ground” (adama) where “man is related to the ‘ground’ by his very constitution (Genesis 3:19), making him perfectly suited for the task of working the ‘ground,’ which is required for cultivation…his origins also become his destiny” (Kenneth A. Matthews).

The stated “literalness” of Crumb’s adaptation as well as its generally bland imagery will lull many readers into the false impression that Genesis intends a deep consideration of centuries old biblical scholarship. It doesn’t, an important point which I will address in more detail later.

What follows is God’s prohibition and warning concerning the consumption of fruit from the tree of knowledge. The Lord’s brows are knit, his figure towering over Adam. It is interesting to note the number of times Crumb portrays God from this standpoint in his comic; that of a person standing at the edge of reality who seems of human proportions, but who then takes on the space and terrifying air of something other worldly when provoked.

There is the instance of God’s act of creation…

…his anger as he calls to Adam & Eve who are seen hiding in some shrubbery…

…his curse on the ground and Adam…

[Genesis 3:19]

 

…his cogitations concerning the ambitions of man…

…his decision to invoke the great flood…

…and his sanction against murder.

In explication of his choice to so portray the Almighty, Crumb writes:

“After closely reading the beginning of the Creation, I suddenly imagined an ancient man standing on the shore of a sea, and gazing out at the horizon, and seeing only water meeting the sky.”

Much criticism has focused on Crumb’s use of the traditional image of a bearded old man to depict God. There are certainly glaring problems with this. For one, it conjures up all kinds of unflattering comparisons to his artistic forebears.

It also conveys an all too facile understanding of Adam being made in the “image of God” (imago dei), whether this is rooted in the theories and debates surrounding the terms “likeness” and “image” (e.g. in the writings of Irenaeus and Thomas Aquinas), the existential and relational readings of Karl Barth or the functional readings which altogether dispense with the idea that the “image” must consist of non-corporeal features (i.e. the “image of god” as seen in man’s dominion over the earth and animals). This is but one indication that Crumb’s journey through Genesis was more personal and instinctive than cerebral.

Hence we have Marc Sobel’s complaint that “part of the problem [he] had with this adaptation [was] the overly literal interpretation and the complete lack of insight about the actual ideas underlying Genesis:

“Thus, the depictions of God as an old man, the creation story, etc. that you [Derik Badman] commented on represent a very childish understanding of Genesis. That would be fine if this were a children’s book, but the problem is that, by presenting the entirety of the dense text… no child will be able to penetrate this book either. Thus, its an interpretation doomed to disappoint any potential audience other than fans of Crumb’s art.”

On the other hand, some might argue that Crumb’s portrayal of the creator (fleshy, interactive and emotional) is an acknowledgment of  the capricious Mesopotamian gods the artist is so enamored of. Crumb had the following explanation concerning his approach in his interview at Vanity Fair:

“I had several different approaches to making God. One was a tall thin man with no beard and another was a young looking man with long straight hair that looked more like an angel than a god. He had pupil-less eyes that were beaming light. But I decided to go with the standard, severe patriarchal God. It just felt like the right choice. That just seems to be what the God of Genesis is all about. He’s older than the oldest patriarch.”

Crumb’s almost anti-intellectual approach to Genesis continues to pose difficulties throughout the rest of these two chapters.

While few would question the rigor with which the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is drawn, it remains at best only a fruit bearing tree. One might view the central image of the tree of life (many branched, filled with knots and ramrod straight) as a representation of the masculine ideal and the tree of knowledge in the background as the curvaceous and deadly feminine, but there is little beyond this to recommend it.

What we don’t find in these illustrations is any evidence of the speculative richness the idea of the tree of knowledge has evoked through the ages; be they the ideas concerning sexual awareness proposed by Ibn Ezra, the capacity for moral discrimination, the granting of paramount knowledge or the bestowal of a divine wisdom. All that we find in The Book of Genesis is a personal mythology influenced in sections by the somewhat discredited theories of Savina Teubal (which I should add is still preferable to the alternative of unthinking transcription; see R. C. Harvey’s summary of this as well as another feminist perspective).

In much the same vein, the encounter with the serpent in Genesis chapter 3 is reduced to a flaccid conversation with a walking reptile. Adam is absent throughout this version of events, though the presence of the plural form of “you” in 3:1-5 suggests he is with Eve but not deceived like she is. Crumb sticks to his vow of straight illustration, refusing to explore the reasons for Adam’s acquiescence despite his absence from the serpent’s exchange with Eve in this account. Genesis Rabbah 19.5, for example, posits the administration of cold logic and tears by Eve, which while clearly offensive in this day and age would still be better than this bland reading.

[Right: The Fall of Man by Hugo van der Goes]

 

Eve’s look of consternation at Adam’s betrayal and shifting of blame (he is actually indirectly blaming God) in Genesis 3:12 is better for it shows at least some artistic involvement with the terse text.

The entirety of God’s judgments from Genesis 3:14 to 19 are depicted without comment or analysis. The artist’s hand here is as distant as a machine-operated drafting tool. In response to Genesis 3:15 (“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”) we get a somewhat cursorily drawn snake wriggling away. It is common knowledge that Christians look upon these verses as the protoevangelium (for example, some church fathers saw the “woman” here as the virgin Mary and the “seed” as representing  the church and/or Christ in particular) while Jewish commentators sometimes view the “seed” as a metaphor for humankind.There is little evidence of a response to these or any other interpretations here.

All this can be easily explained by constraints of time, space and artistic lassitude, but it should also be noted that Crumb (a self-proclaimed Gnostic) has little interest in Genesis as a religious or sacred text, a tremendous hindrance in adapting a book which has been largely interpreted in that context. As he clearly states in his interview at USA Today:

“To take this as a sacred text, or the word of God or something to live by, is kind of crazy. So much of it makes no sense. To think of all the fighting and killing that’s gone on over this book, it just became to me a colossal absurdity. That’s probably the most profound moment I’ve had — the absurdity of it all.”

Nor is there any suggestion that he took it upon himself to find out why the book in question has remained coherent and relevant to a multitude of very rational artists, philosophers and scientists through the ages. One hardly needs to believe to read closely and with an intent to understand. Thus stripped of emotional and mental investment, Crumb’s Genesis frequently degenerates into half-digested pabulum.

As would be expected, these issues have generated a modest amount of discussion online. David Hajdu writing in The New York Times adopts a more religious approach in his disagreements with Crumb and The Book of Genesis:

“For all its narrative potency and raw beauty, Crumb’s Book of Genesis is missing something that just does not interest its illustrator: a sense of the sacred. What Genesis demonstrates in dramatic terms are beliefs in an orderly universe and the godlike nature of man. Crumb, a fearless anarchist and proud cynic, clearly believes in other things, and to hold those beliefs — they are kinds of beliefs, too — is his prerogative. Crumb, brilliantly, shows us the man in God, but not the God in man.”

Points with which Dan Nadel of Comics Comics disagrees:

“I can’t see how, as an irreligious reader, you come away with that interpretation. I mean, there are two conflicting accounts of creation. Not exactly orderly. Also, Crumb is not, as far as I know, an anarchist, but he is, by his own account, spiritual. Which is to say, Crumb seems to be exploring the sacred. Maybe not Hajdu’s sacred, but sacred nonetheless.”

Hajdu wants Crumb to add a spiritual dimension to his reading of Genesis, something which is clearly irrelevant in the context of creating a fine adaptation based on modern day archaeology or biblical scholarship. Nadel seems more offended by Hajdu’s suggestion that Crumb lacks a certain spirituality which is equally of no consequence to this project, since Crumb is far more interested in the historical and mythological aspects of Genesis (i.e. not a journey of the soul but one of personal discovery).

***

It should be understood that while in-depth exegesis of the sort discussed above is frequently beyond the means of the single image (in painting for instance), it is certainly not unimaginable in the context of comics.

Failing to see this, Alter complains that “the foreclosure of ambiguity or of multiple meanings is intrinsic to  the graphic narrative medium, and hence is pervasive in the illustrated  text…The image concretizes, and thereby constrains, our imagination.” Then referring to the example of Genesis 9:20-27 where Ham sees “the nakedness of his father” he states:

“The most innocent reading, which is the one that Crumb chooses to  follow, is that Ham simply saw his father exposed, thus violating what  those who adopt this view assume was a grave taboo in Israelite society.  This reading may well be right, though the report that when Noah wakes  from his wine “he knew what his youngest son had done to him” might  suggest that an act more palpable than mere seeing was perpetrated. Some  interpreters in late antiquity, encouraged by these words and probably  thinking of the Zeus-Chronos myth, imagined that Ham castrated his  father, though this notion has always seemed to me rather unlikely. My own preference as a reader is to relish the shimmer of murky possibilities, including the more lurid ones, even if I am left without a  concrete or confident picture of what actually happened. Pictorial  representation forces you to decide one way–which, however appealing or  plausible that way may be, imposes a limit on the story told in words.”

What Alter fails to realize is that the presentation of a host of concomitant possibilities is not beyond the reach of a comics adaptation. This is true even if pictorial representation will never possess the elusiveness, comparatively speaking, of spare sentences on a page. If there is a weakness here, it lies with the choices and abilities of the artist not the medium.

It may be that a trace of this hoped for ambiguity can be found in one of Crumb’s more successful passages in The Book of Genesis, one which Alter bring ups for special mention in his review. Genesis chapter 34 tells the story of Dinah (the daughter of Leah), her defilement by Shechem (the son of a Hivite Prince), and the terrible vengeance wrought on his people by the sons of Jacob.

The story is rich in possibilities: the ethical questions are right at the forefront, the underlying textural discourse plentiful.

There is the question of the narrator’s attitude (for, against or ambivalent) towards the events, the episode here being a mere prelude to a host of base acts perpetrated by Jacob’s sons until they encounter Joseph in Egypt. There is a cohesion which is implied in this arc that suggests a descent into moral degeneracy before a final redemption in the land of the Pharaohs. We also have the views of some early Jewish interpreters who saw divine sanction in the acts of Simeon and Levi (the prime movers in the slaughter of Shechem’s people). The Book of Jubilees, for instance, states that “judgment is ordained in heaven against them that they should destroy with the sword all the men of the Shechemites because they had wrought shame in Israel.” We also learn by way of Jubilees that Dinah was a girl of 12, a “fact” which has been used to justify the vengeful extermination of the Shechemites and to rehabilitate the victim, Dinah (by Luther; she had been used by early Christian interpreters as an example of idle curiosity and lust).

Lyn M. Bechtel’s suggestion that Dinah was not raped is alluded to but not confirmed in Crumb’s comic. Her tears in the penultimate page of The Book of Genesis have been taken for those of sorrow though it is not so hard to imagine them as tears of relief. In Crumb’s rendition of Genesis 34:3 (“And his very soul clung to Dinah, daughter of Jacob, and he loved the young woman, and he spoke to the young woman’s heart.”), an enraptured Shechem looks down on a woman who is caught somewhere between ardor and hopelessness (most reviewers have chosen to see the former). The greatest delights to be found in this section of The Book of Genesis may lie in this subtle play of facial and bodily expression.

This has some connection to a short comment by Tim Hodler (at Comics Comics) who takes a different tack in his response to Alter’s criticism stating that:

“Alter doesn’t then go  on to recognize that the choices Crumb makes enable an entirely new set  of ambiguities and artistic effects that aren’t present in the original  text, and make the  book worth evaluating as its own entity, and not  strictly as a one-to-one  translation.”

It must be said, that this an argument which I find of somewhat limited use in relation to The Book of Genesis, for the comic largely conforms to the circumscribed borders of traditional illustration impugned by Alter.  To be more precise, the “effects” Crumb presents his readers with are considerably poorer than those suggested by the text and subsequently developed upon by scholarship. A number of reviewers have strayed on the side of leniency in considering these issues, not once remarking on the mere utility of Crumb’s choices. Alter who is sometimes cited as being unduly critical towards the end of his essay was in fact being inordinately kind. He censures Crumb for the “hackneyed” depiction of “God as an old man with a white beard” but then compares his drawing of the expulsion of Adam and Eve to Masaccio’s fresco in The Brancacci Chapel in Florence without comment.

___

[Right: The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden by Masaccio]

 

Even those possessed of untutored eyes should be able to see the difference in ability and insight at work here. Masaccio’s Expulsion may be deficient in textural fidelity but its spiritual immersion cannot be disputed. The rigidity of Crumb’s chosen style in The Book of Genesis makes it difficult (he does succeed occasionally) for him to adequately convey anguish, pain or psychological depth in isolation from the text.

I suspect much of this critical kindness is due to a barely realized condescension towards both form and artist. Thus we find the following account in Alter’s review:

“When some chapters of the book were published in The New Yorker in June, a few people with whom I have spoken about them expressed disappointment. Just the same old R. Crumb, they objected: he has not succeeded in developing a visual style that is adequate to the power of the biblical text. Such criticism does not seem to me justified. Crumb has always been an artist with a single style, a distinctive and emphatic one–in this regard as in others he is certainly no Picasso; and so it should neither surprise nor disappoint us that he has used his style to interpret the Bible.”

It is clear from these lines that Alter’s conception of the possibilities of comics and one of its greatest cartoonists is very low indeed. It is impossible to be disappointed if we expect so little.

In fact, in terms of sheer technique, there is nothing in Crumb’s earlier adaptations which can compare with The Book of Genesis. The amount of detail and rendering lavished on each page dwarfs virtually any other in Kafka for Beginners for example. Yet compared to some of this earlier work (such as “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” or his excerpt from Boswell’s London Journal 1762-1763), it suffers from a certain stifling of the imagination. The Boswell adaptation proved a success for two important reason. Firstly, its length (the comic is only five pages long and the simple but fascinating artistic counterpoint at work would have become tedious at a greater stretch) and, secondly, the perfect alignment of subject and adapter.

As with his adaptation of Genesis, Crumb tailored his presentation to fit the elegant but ribald narration; the scenes are proffered at a discrete distance and only periodically punctuated with close-ups of Boswell’s excesses. This is in stark contrast to the paranoia and claustrophobia of the Philip K. Dick adaptation which is marked by subjective phenomena, mystical emanations and frank representations of insanity. Neither of these adaptation bring a substantial amount of analysis to the text but create frisson by way of ironic juxtapositions and personal proclivities. These comics suggest that Crumb’s gifts do not lie in deep inquiry or inquisition but in his idiosyncratic approach; his talent for revealing the extremes of human behavior. Jeet Heer identifies another engaging aspect of Crumb’s art when he writes that:

“…Genesis is a book about bodies, a book where men and women constantly grapple with one another, where a servant swears an oath by putting his hand under his master’s thigh, where even angels are threatened with sexual violation. Crumb has long been the preeminent cartoonist of the body. His women are notoriously full-figured, with ample butts and protruding nipples (a motif he uses in this book). But more significantly, the bodies he draws—whether they are quivering or standing still, dancing or drooping—have a visceral impact few artists can match. That’s why he was the perfect cartoonist to illustrate the Book of Genesis…”

A survey of the reviews online would suggest that it is these elements which critics have derived the most pleasure from as far as The Book of Genesis is concerned. I would suggest, however, that this is mean recompense for a full engagement with the intellectual treasures of Genesis. This explains why any suggestion (made in all seriousness in the comments of a recent review) that Alter would feel threatened (the words used are “nervousness” and “professional jealousy”) by Crumb’s awful biblical scholarship is laughable if not symptomatic of a deranged comics provincialism.

As Robert Stanley Martin indicates in his disappreciation of The Book of Genesis, this project (Crumb’s largest to date) cannot be accounted a success even if viewed purely as an act of storytelling. In fact, it conspicuously reveals the artist’s limitations as far as long form works are concerned:

“The overwhelming problem with Genesis is that Crumb doesn’t seem to have thought it through as a dramatic piece. The scenes are not played off each other for dramatic effect, and he doesn’t imagine the characters as distinct, idiosyncratic personalities whose interactions are greater than the sum of the parts…The refusal to see the project as a challenge in terms of orchestrating dramatic choices led him to repetitiously wallow in hackneyed treatments of the material, with most of the clichés of his own making.”

Crumb can be seen as a master of bizarre and transgressive imagery; a self-lacerating maniacal comedian; or a lewd, boisterous and cynical poet of modern living but his personality and disposition have lent themselves poorly to this undertaking. The individuals who are likely take the most satisfaction from this book will be those with a prior interest in comics. It is, after all, a work by a cartoonist of immense stature in the field. If  this book does stand the test of time, it will be largely on that basis. For those with a serious interest in the original text and the rich tradition of biblical illustration, on the other hand, Crumb’s comic can only be seen as a well crafted curiosity.

__________

__
Update by Noah: This has started an ongoing series of posts on Crumb’s Genesis. You can see them all here.

Visual Languages of Manga and Comics

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Hello!  I’m known as Telophase in various places online, and when I dropped a couple of comments about the visual language of manga on a post a couple of weeks month or so back, Noah asked me to make a guest post (originally during the time that HU was down, and rescheduled for today).  So here I am! My day job is an academic librarian, but I wrote a few posts on manga layout back in 2005-2006, when I was trying to figure out how to improve my own comics, and served as Tokyopop’s manga columnist for a while back in the day.

As a convenience, I’m going to use the shorthand of “comics” to refer to American comics, and “manga” to refer to Japanese comics, although there’s a strong argument to be made that “comics” is just “manga” in English translation. (What do Japanese call Spider-Man?  Manga!) It just means fewer chances for me to typo “American” and “Japanese.”

I also want to stress that I don’t consider either of the trends I’m going to discuss to be better or worse than the other – they’re both effective ways of telling a story, depending on the needs of the story, the audience, and the industry.

Usually when discussing the visual language differences between manga and comics, manga is discussed in terms of higgledy-piggledy shoujo panels, speedline overload, sweatdrops, and nosebleeds, and nobody pays attention to the way the art elements and speech balloons are structured to steer your gaze through the page, but I think this may be a more defining characteristic of manga than all the sweatdrops and nosebleeds in the world.

Comics appear to have a much less obvious push through the page, often relying on American readers’ style of reading left to right first, then, if needed, secondarily directing the reader’s gaze through the page by use of action lines and other cues in the art.

I think these differences, more than the art styles, form the core of the two visual languages of manga and comics.

Let me see if I can simplify these to some guidelines:

Japan: First, follow where the art and speech balloons are pointing you. If that fails, read right to left, then up to down.

U.S. First, read left to right and then up to down.  If that fails, follow where the art and speech bubbles are pointing you.

This is not to say that these guidelines are slavishly adhered to! There are many examples of the rules being broken, but I think they represent a general trend (and, perhaps, fundamental difference) in each industry.

How did this come about?  I think the structure of the manga industry is a major factor.  Many of the most popular (and thus influential) manga are published weekly in chapters of 15-30 pages, collected with other manga into phone book-sized anthologies called tankoubon. (Edit: I misremembered – tankoubon are the books the chapters get collected into later. Zasshi are the magazines.) Shounen Jump is one you’ve probably heard of if you’ve paid any attention to manga being translated and published in the States.  The publishers of tankoubon have an economic motive to get you to consume as much manga as possible as fast as possible, because they want you invested enough in the stories to purchase next week’s tankoubon. Because of this, there’s often strong editorial control over each manga, leading to more uniform layout techniques (and possibly even house styles, although I haven’t done any comparison between publishers).

Here’s an example, a spread from Bleach, one of the Shounen Jump properties and one of the most popular manga in Japan. The first image has the spread itself, while the second traces the action lines through the page, the path your eyes take as you read.  Note how every important facial expression and image is included in that line.

Bi-weekly and monthly manga are not as subject to this editorial control, and the mangaka have a greater degree of freedom to diverge from the standard and to experiment. I still see similarity to the weekly manga layouts, though – the biggest of which is that the main action lines through a page tend to steer your gaze across characters’ faces, or across important items or spaces in the art.

You can see this in the following spreads from a manga about ekiben otaku (ekiben = regional specialty bento [boxed meals] you can get in train stations; otaku = obsessive fans). I’m not sure of the title because I don’t read Japanese, but a friend thinks it translates to The Solitary Love of Ekiben.  I want you to note how the speech balloons often frame the character who’s speaking, or the piece of food being discussed.  (Also note the speedlines of AWESOME surrounding the bento in the second spread. The entire manga is nothing but ekiben porn, train porn, and landscape porn. It is the geekiest and yet best thing ever. And there are four volumes of it!)

Something in manga layout that I have yet to find in comics is the action line forcing you to read backwards through part of a page.  Note this spread from Fruits Basket.  At first glance it’s chaotic and if you’re not well-versed in the visual language required to read this, you may get lost.

But if you look carefully, you’ll notice that not only are the speech balloons positioned to pull you through the page, often the characters themselves are pointing you at the next stop on the journey through the page.  The characters’ bodies and speech balloons break panel boundaries deliberately, not randomly, and drag your eye across the portions of the art that emphasize the characters’ emotions or tell you what is going on.  In the third panel of both pages, you even read backwards – left to right – through the panel.

(As an aside: now that more and more Japanese are reading manga on their phones, I expect the layouts are changing to fit the new medium. I visited Japan in 2007 and a Japanese woman showed me a yaoi manga she had on her phone.  When you paged to the bondage scene, the phone vibrated.)

In the U.S., until the recent Graphic Novel Revolution the most common way to get comics was by purchasing individual monthly chapters (I am not familiar enough with older comic practices to know what the usual release schedule was before the 1970s and 1980s).  There’s no economic motive to push the reader through the book as fast as possible, so the layout doesn’t need to focus on reader speed and the artist can do other things with page composition and action lines.  I might even be able to make an argument that there’s a motive to slow reading down a bit, so that the reader feels she got her money’s worth. (That would be one reason I cut down my comics reading when I had to start paying my student loans back after grad school – I couldn’t justify $2.99 for ten minutes’ entertainment!)

Here’s a couple of examples from Whiteout and V For Vendetta. I acknowledge that these aren’t quite comparable to Bleach – I should be using a current bestselling comic for a true comparison, but I’m stuck with what’s on our shelves at the moment.  I think the general idea will hold, though.

In Whiteout, the speech balloons tend to float to the top of the panels as if they’re filled with helium.  In most of them, the reader is expected to read the narration or dialogue and then look at the art in the panel before going on to the next panel.  It reads in a more staccato way than the easy flow through Bleach, or even the less-easy but still flowing line through the panels in The Solitary Love of Ekiben.  V For Vendetta bookends many of the panels with speech balloons, but the action lines that draw your attention to the important bits in the art are subtle, and the pages as a whole are subsumed to the rhythm of the grid that the panels are based on. In neither of the comics are the faces of the characters or specific pieces of the action deliberately highlighted in the way speech balloons frame characters and items in the manga examples I’ve shown you (forgive my wonky scanning: I’d rather not break the spines of the books).

This isn’t to say that comics don’t use dynamic action lines at all!  Witness this spread in Kingdom Come:

There’s a strong zig-zag action line in the artwork on the left-hand page that swings your gaze across and up directly into the splash-page layout of the right-hand page. The only sour note I detect is the placement of the tiny “Indeed,” speech balloon on the right-hand page. I believe it’s supposed to be right in your path as you read through the bottom panel on the left and scan over the faces, but the superhero splash page is so strong that you tend to skip it. (I didn’t even notice it was there until I drew the redline!)

In Transmetropolitan, I often find that cigarette smoke is used to highlight action lines or characters’ faces and emotions, as in this spread.  There’s an action line anchored by speech balloons, smoke, and white highlights that drags your view across Spider’s face several times in the left-hand page, but the action line through the right-hand page is not as active, even causing confusion in the transition from panel 1 to panel 2, because the figures in panel 3 are pasted on top of panels 1 and 2.  This is a perfect example of “read from left to right first, then read following the cues in the art,” because if you followed the cues in the art, you’d read panel 1, then panel 3, then panel 2.   (I  like how Spider’s and Yelena’s smoke trails flow off the page.  If you look closely, your mind connects them into one flowing line off-page.)

I think that’s a reasonably good illustration of what I see as the core of the different visual languages of manga and comics, and how if a reader is used to one language, it may take a little bit to get into the mindset of the other.

Thanks for letting me blather here!

Review: The Times of Botchan (Part 2)

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A Review of The Times of Botchan (Part 2)

[Part 1 of this review can be found here]

(3) The Times of Botchan Vol. 1 & 2

The closing pages of the fourth volume of The Times of Botchan are the high point of the first half of the manga series. It is here that the authors begin to present conversations that defy easy explanation and sequences that engender poignant contemplation. The first two volumes by comparison are unfocused and tentative, veering haphazardly from comical to more deeply intellectual episodes — as if the authors were uncertain of their audience’s ability to stick to a tale devoid of levity. Some might say that these transgressions are a function of the manga’s attempt to portray the birth of Soseki’s Botchan (which is a comic novel) but they also seem to be grappling with the immensity of the task ahead of them, as well as the ambiguous long-term future and direction of the project. There are some residual traces of this inconsistency in Volumes 3 and 4 of the series but all marks are virtually extinguished in the more focused, patient and sure-footed later volumes.

That this series is aimed at a select Japanese audience is evident very early on. While a casual Western reader might be expected to know of or even read some Soseki, it is doubtful if many would have knowledge of the poet, Ishikawa Takuboku. It is equally doubtful that this kind of knowledge would be available to the typical young Japanese manga reader. Yet Takuboku is mentioned five pages into the first volume of the book with nary an explanation and merely as a reference for Soseki’s comfortable salary.

Sekikawa’s professed intention in the first two volumes of the manga — to fashion a story about the writing of Soseki’s Botchan — is less problematic since this novel is a much more popular work, particularly in Japan. At various points in their tale, the authors insert vignettes of Meiji life to suggest sources for Soseki’s ideas in Botchan. There are references to jujitsu just as there are in the novel where a character boasts about his abilities in that martial art.

The barroom brawl in the manga is perhaps meant as a precursor to the fracas between normal- and middle-school students toward the close of the novel. These sections will mean little or nothing to a person who has never read the novel. No such knowledge is required to appreciate the narratives of Volumes 3 and 4 of the series, which concern Ogai and Futabatei.

An uninformed reader perusing the manga in isolation could be forgiven for thinking that Botchan was a novel specifically about the modernization of Japan and the clash between Eastern and Western mores during the turbulent years of the Meiji era. In fact, it is, superficially at least, a somewhat gentle if satirical story of provincial life and its idiosyncrasies. Narrated by the eponymous hero, Botchan begins life as a self-proclaimed “great loser” who has done many “naughty things.” He is neglected both by his father and elder brother and is cared for, from the period of his mother’s death, by a kindly servant called, Kiyo.

As a young adult, he earns a college degree and accepts a teaching job far away from his native Tokyo in a provincial school. In a series of amusing encounters with his students, fellow teachers, hotel staff and landlord, he finds them almost without exception (at least initially) repulsive, giving them nicknames like Badger, Green Squash, Porcupine and Red-shirt (the “villain” of the story). Far from simple yokels, many turn out to be tasteless, backbiting, sexually unrestrained barbarians, even in comparison to his own brash and impulsive self.

At the start of Chapter 11 of the manga, the authors provide us with a letter from Soseki to his editor, which reads, “Many things in the way the young men around me act have inspired me so the subject keeps on growing.” The young men we see around Soseki at the start of the manga are substitutes for the kind of men Soseki might have met during the writing of Botchan. Translator Umeji Sasaki attempts to point us in the right direction in his foreword to the novel:

“Old Japan with her polite, yet often deceptive, ways is passing to return no more, and New Japan with her honest, simple, frank democratic ways must come to speak and act in world terms. Botchan … is in many respects a young man embodying the new ideals of New Japan.”

Writing in 1922, Umeji does not question the desirability of the new ideals, nor is it entirely clear from our present-day perspective if the Old Japan he specifies has in fact passed away.

In the novel, the repulsive aspects of the New Japan are embodied in the character of Madonna, who was at one point engaged to Green Squash. As a consequence of some financial reversals suffered by her fiance, she has since drifted towards the villain of the piece, Red-shirt. This scenario is played out in the manga with real life individuals taking the place of literary ones. When Soseki sees the feminist writer and activist, Raicho Hiratsuka (a historical person) abandon one of his young friends for another of greater prestige, he can only say, “I knew it, Red-shirt wins”.

The authors close the first volume of The Times of Botchan with the image of Kiyo standing at the train station as she sees Botchan off to his new job. As Sekikawa explains, she “belonged to the previous era and symbolized spiritual peace and Soseki’s dream woman.” Soseki’s feelings as to this personification of a better time is apparent when Sekikawa reproduces the final sentences of the first chapter of Botchan in the manga:

“The locomotive began to move with its usual puff, puff. Thinking it quite safe now, I looked out of the window and turned to the spot where she had been standing. There she still stood, looking after me with a longing eye. She appeared so very small.”

Soseki’s vision of Kiyo toward the close of the second volume is that of a motherly woman with a patch over her right eye — a metaphor that doesn’t require much explanation.

At the end of the novel, Botchan and Green Squash catch Red-shirt and his lackey Noda red-handed following a sexual escapade with some geisha. They beat them up but finally return to Tokyo where Botchan sets up house with his old servant (and surrogate mother), Kiyo. She dies soon after and asks to be buried in Botchan’s family graveyard. The second volume of the manga closes with Soseki gazing into his garden as Sekikawa’s narration melds subtly into commentary:

“Botchan had a place he could go home to. The house where Kiyo lived, that is, a place where an old fashioned spirit reigned.”

It should be stressed, however, that the authors never suggest that the values of Kiyo are inherently superior to those of Madonna — the Soseki of the manga is always sympathetic but he is not always right.

***

In his capsule review of the first two volumes, Chris Mautner suggests, quite rightly, that The Times of Botchan is “a book where your enjoyment is in direct proportion to your familiarity with the subject matter.” He offers this comment without criticism, but I would suggest that this is not only a failing but one that originates from inexperienced writing rather than any large deficit in the reader. In short, the first two volumes lack a certain universality born of a cluttered narrative and an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach — in particular the endless parade of peripheral historical personages who distract rather than enrich or engage. It is clear that many of the early sections of the book read too much like a textbook.

As it is, The Times of Botchan contains a procession of coincidences where the lives of historical characters somehow intersect in the same way that Kenneth Toomey seems to know every important personage of his time in Burgess’ Earthly Powers. For example, in the first volume, Soseki bumps into both Hideki Tojo and the man who would one day assassinate Hirobumi Ito (the first Prime Minister of Japan), Jung-Geun An. In the third volume, Futabatei encounters not only Elise Weigert, but also the feminist writer, Ichiyo Higuchi, (who currently appears on the 5000-yen note) all in the course of a single day. The latter meeting results in Futabatei’s adoption of Higuchi’s dog, which continues to pop up in the course of the entire series — sometimes as a passive observer and, at other times, simply hounding Soseki.

This is, of course, a perennial problem facing adaptors who try to shape and distill a basic structure from the denser whole of a novel or age. A similar dilemma faced the screenwriters for Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard when they attempted to explain the significance and flow of events during the Risorgimento to a modern Italian audience. A comparable situation can be found in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Rikyu, a viewing of which can only be enhanced by a working knowledge of Warring States period Japan, though this information is never a prerequisite for one’s enjoyment of the film.

In the same vein, while certain readers may find the “simplicity” of Soseki’s writing style (as cultivated by his knowledge of classical Chinese literature and poetry) somewhat distancing, any inability to appreciate his works cannot be adequately blamed on cultural ignorance so much as a failure to perceive the complex undercurrents and structural intricacies which he is so skillful at hiding. One can read Botchan without once suspecting many of its underlying themes — the characters never become mere symbols. As Damien Flanagan in his introduction to Soseki’s The Gate writes:

“What is remarkable about the novel — indeed about all Soseki’s later novels — is that, although the structure of the novel is ultimately profoundly ironic, the portrayal of the characters is so sympathetic and realistic that this overarching scheme to complex ideas becomes almost invisible.”

The first two volumes of The Times of Botchan would have been much finer and more coherent works had they been pared down to the essential aspects of the genesis of Soseki’s novel. Thankfully, readers will find that these problems recede quite swiftly with later volumes in the series, which bring on a fine maturing in both art and writing. The third and fourth volumes of the manga rarely betray the fine network of references and metaphors that lie over the series like a tapestry.

(4) The Times of Botchan Vol. 5-10

The forthcoming volumes of The Times of Botchan are biographies of other famous men and women who have responded to the changes of the Meiji era.

The fifth and sixth volumes tell the story Takuboku Ishikawa (1886-1912), a master of tanka, from his earliest days to his life as a newspaper editor. This section closes with some of the more startling episodes from his Romaji Diary (kept from April 7 to June 16 1909), which was never published during his lifetime. The most disquieting of these is the moment where he describes a misogynistic dalliance with an 18-year-old prostitute, in which he puts his fingers into the woman’s vagina and “roughly [churns] around inside” only to find that the sleeping woman only responds with pleasure when he begins to fist her. A month or so later he is cutting himself on the chest with a razor as a pretext for staying away from work. The manga describes the struggles and sheer dreariness of a poverty-stricken literary existence. His life, as vividly described in Romaji Diary, is often so filled with depression, bitterness and pain that it engenders a certain sympathy from the reader. The sixth volume ends with the same scene that closes Romaji Diary: the arrival of Takuboku’s mother and his wife, Setsuko, in Tokyo. (They had been living under the care of his friend in Hakodate up to that time because of his inability to support them.) This is not the happy circumstance one might expect. As Sandford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda write in their introduction to their translation, “that key moment in Takuboku’s life was to prove a kind of breaking point. Several tanka in Sad Toys … the collection of poems written in the last year and a half of his life, record the conflict between Setsuko and Takuboku’s mother.”

The seventh and eighth volumes of the manga are the most overtly political of the entire series. They recount the lives of Shusui Kotoku (1871-1911) and Suga Kanno (1881-1911), whose response to the changing times was anarchy and rebellion. Together with nine others, both were executed after a trial for their parts in the Kotoku Incident (or High Treason Incident) which Goldstein and Shinoda call “the most revealing example of despotism during the Meiji era.” The detail with which their lives are brought to the attention of the reader bears comparison with the works of Jack Jackson and Chester Brown’s Louis Riel. Perhaps symbolically, Soseki begins to develop a more severe gastric problem in the closing pages of these two volumes. By the end of Vol. 10, Takuboku is writing about the death sentence of the anarchists involved in the Kotoku incident and experiencing the first signs of the peritoneal tuberculosis that will kill him in 1912.

Both volumes nine and ten take in the closing years of Soseki’s life beginning with his sojourn at Shuzenji hot springs in 1910 to his coma and near-death experience following a massive hematemesis.

He is nursed by his estranged wife, Kyoko, who remains faceless throughout the narration as if in silent commentary on the hostility she has received from some students of Soseki. Soseki gives a kinder and much more complex portrayal of his wife in Grass on the Wayside. These volumes also record his vehement refusal of an honorary doctorate from the Japanese government on ethical grounds.

Making periodic appearances throughout the entire series, including its conclusion (if only spiritually) is a black cat. At the most basic level, this cat is the physical manifestation of Soseki’s inspiration for his first novel, I Am a Cat. Early in the novel, a massagist visits Soseki’s home and identifies it as a “lucky cat.”

More than this and as explained in the introduction to the Tuttle edition of I Am a Cat, Soseki was himself a kind of “stray kitten.” It has been suggested that both financial considerations and the advanced age of his parents at the time of his birth made him a source of embarrassment. As a result, he was placed in the care of a foster family till the age of 9 before rejoining his parents again upon the divorce of his adoptive parents. The cat thus represents both Soseki’s inner voice (at times playful, at other times serious and combative) as well as the vanishing times.

Of particular note in Vol. 10 is the 100-page discourse in the realm of dreams which begins in the chapter titled, “What are you doing here, Teacher?”

 

[Read from right to left]

The initial moments of this dream are presented as a plausible reality, with Soseki attending to his morning toilet and meeting up with Takuboku. They discuss his present financial circumstances — a pet topic of both writers — and the progress he has made in his poetry. In the hotel restaurant, he encounters an older Ogai as he meets up with Elise many years after the events that inspired “Maihime”. Then, while employing various means of transportation, he meets his old teachers, political figures and the women who have enriched his days and writings in a grand summation of his life, his art, the times he has lived in and the manga series.

Readers familiar with Soseki’s novel Sanshiro (1908) will recognize this device; specifically a dream narrated by Professor Hirota toward the close of the novel where he encounters “a pretty young thing maybe 12 or 13.”. What follows in the manga is a partial transcription of this dream sequence with Soseki taking the place of Hirota. From the novel:

“Then I asked her, ‘Why haven’t you changed?’ and she said, ‘Because the year I had this face, the month I wore these clothes, and the day I had my hair like this is my favorite time of all.’ ‘What time is that?’ I asked her. ‘The day we met twenty years ago,’ she said. I wondered to myself, ‘Then why have I changed like this?’ and she told me, ‘Because you wanted to go on changing, moving toward something more beautiful.’ Then I said to her, ‘You are a painting,’ and she said, ‘You are a poem.'”

That day twenty years ago was the date of the funeral procession of Minister of Education, Arinori Mori (in 1889), where Hirota first caught a glimpse of the girl in her carriage. In his translation of Sanshiro, Jay Rubin indicates that “Soseki’s use of a public incident like the assassination…would seem to indicate that as he undertook to write the novel, he was thinking about a time in his life when he himself experienced a major disillusionment”. The girl in the manga differs from the girl in Sanshiro by the lack of a mole on her face, and the insertion of this sequence may hint at the authors’ intention to highlight Jun Eto’s thesis that Soseki had an affair with his sister-in-law, Tose, sometime around 1890.

It is also clear that they mean to suggest that Soseki the writer will “go on changing” as his works are interpreted and reinterpreted over the years, remaining as eternal as the cat, once thought dead, who appears alive again at the series’ close. The Times of Botchan is full of instances like these and more: there are incidental points hiding references and meaning; sociopolitical and literary analysis; vivid imaginings of long lost lives; and moments of ethereal beauty and mystery. There can be little doubt that it is one of the finest historical manga available to the comics reader today.

END

Review: The Times of Botchan (Part 1)

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I’ve decided to reprint an old review of The Times of Botchan to tie in with the recent release of the fourth volume in the series. The article was written about two years ago and was first published in truncated form in The Comics Journal. Those seeking further guidance on whether or not to buy these books should read the reviews I’ve listed below.

 

The central figure which unites the 10 volumes (five volumes in Japan and Asia) that make up The Times of Botchan is Natsume Soseki, one of Japan’s greatest writers. The series may be viewed as a history of the closing years of the Meiji era, a biography of various literary and political figures which emerged during those times, and a meditation on the impact of that period on the Japanese psyche.

The series as a whole was awarded the Osamu Tezuka Culture Awards Grand Prize in 1998.

Further reading:

Katherine Dacey’s review (2010). I am inclined to agree with many of the faults enumerated by Dacey, in particular the unwieldy writing and the uneven quality of the first two volumes.

Joey Manley on the first volume and translation issues (from 2006). A somewhat messy rant but he brings up valid issues concerning the distancing elements in the narrative. He also takes down Leo Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak at one point.

Derik Badman’s review (2006) of Volumes 1 and 2. Badman is a much more patient reader than Manley. He describes the general tone of these books and provides a nice summary of the various plot points.

Matthias Wivel’s review (2003) of the earlier volumes in the series (in Danish).

***

 

A Review of The Times of Botchan (Part 1)
by Jiro Taniguchi and Natsuo Sekikawa
Toptron Ltd. /Fanfare (B&W, Softcover)

Vol. 1: 144 pp., $19.99 ISBN: 9788496427013
Vol. 2: 128 pp., $19.99, ISBN: 9788496427099
Vol. 3: 156 pp., $19.99, ISBN: 9788496427129
Vol. 4: 144 pp., $19.99 ISBN: 9788496427136

(1) Introduction

The Times of Botchan is a historical manga concerning the end of the Meiji era in Japan. The manga begins in the early twentieth century and uses as its fulcrum and lens, the life of Natsume Soseki.

The heart of the series is neatly stated in the second chapter of the first volume and bears putting down in whole:

“The roots of Soseki’s illness were the same as those of the malaise of the Japanese who had awoken for the first time to consciousness about their own national identity within a modern social order and of the dilemma faced by the intellectuals, who had no choice but to learn from the West even though they hated it.”

Natsume Soseki (pen-name of Natsume Kinnosuke; 1867-1916) is generally recognized as Japan’s foremost modern novelist. In the manga and to a certain extent even in present day Japan, he is the embodiment and voice of the spiritual conflicts that emerged during the Meiji period.

During his lifetime, Soseki was one of the most respected authorities on English literature in Japan. He brought the modern Japanese novel to fruition through his study of Austen, Dickens, Sterne and Swift. Yet, as the introduction to Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson’s translation of I Am a Cat indicates, he appears to have been largely unimpressed by Western enlightenment; “throughout his career, he remained essentially and uncompromisingly Japanese.” His two years in London were wretched and his views of the English twisted by anemic social contacts. In My Individualism, Soseki writes, “To tell the truth, I do not like England very much, but in spite of this, I must allow it one thing, reluctantly: probably, in no other part of the world, are the people both as free and as policed.”

As is made clear by authors of the manga, this ambivalence was not solely restricted to Soseki. The third and fourth volumes of The Times of Botchan are essentially about the other great literary voice of the Meiji era, Mori Ogai (1862 — 1922). In his story, we find a conflict between the individuality so prized by the West and the sense of duty and honor that was fast being encroached upon in Japanese life during that period.

These volumes also take in the intertwining life of Shimei Futabatei (1864 — 1909), the author of what has been described as Japan’s first, albeit incomplete, modern novel, Ukigumo (The Drifting Cloud). His other great distinction was as a translator of Turgenev. In her commentary on Ukigumo, Marleigh Ryan quotes Futabatei as he reflects on his formative years:

“I had as my ideal in those days the word “honesty.” I wanted to live a life free of shame before Heaven or man. This concept of honesty had been nurtured in me by Russian literature, but an even greater influence was the Confucian education I had received. … The oriental Confucian influence and the Russian literary or Western philosophic influence became bound up together. To these were added an interest in socialism. From these various influences my moral philosophy was formed.”

This statement stands in contrast to Futabatei’s views on unbridled Westernization. In the opening pages of Ukigumo, for example, he describes a thoroughly frivolous and spoilt girl called, Osei, who is under the tutelage of the “loathsome” headmistress of a finishing school:

“Things went from bad to worse after she started studying English at school. She switched from a Japanese under-robe to an undershirt and adopted a Western style hairdo, strangled herself with a scarf and donned eyeglasses which ruined her perfect vision. Her self-approved transformation was perfectly ridiculous.”

 

In the first volume of the manga, Sekikawa and Taniguchi provide us with some instances of this tension between tradition and modernization. Soseki is first seen potting around his house in a traditional Japanese housecoat and then clothed in Western dress as he navigates the streets of Tokyo. At one point, he is found formulating a scene for his novel Botchan in which the protagonist both physically and intellectually humiliates a European. He then suffers a bout of crippling dyspepsia when he discovers that his job as a lecturer in Tokyo Imperial University has been acquired at the expense of a noble foreigner (the irony here being that Soseki is destined to die of a stomach hemorrhage in 14 years time).

The foreigner in question was Lafcadio Hearn, the Irish-Greek writer and translator who became a naturalized Japanese citizen. He is best known in the West through Masaki Kobayashi’s film, Kwaidan, which is an adaptation of four supernatural tales from his collection of the same name. Of Hearn, Roger Pulvers in an article for The Japan Times writes:

“Even today, Hearn is considered in this country the foreigner who understood the Japanese in the most profound way. … Name a field of study of traditional art or life and Lafcadio Hearn was intrigued by it, swept away by it. He is the founding father of the school of Japanese uniqueness, the fountain that provides the spiritual and aesthetic nourishment … that Japanese people require to convince themselves that they are more than the sum of their borrowed and mechanically transformed parts.”

But Hearn was interested in the “Old” Japan, one which officials (including those at his university) were eager to put aside. This realization would come to haunt him in his later years and Pulvers quotes him as writing, “I felt as never before how utterly dead Old Japan is and how ugly New Japan is becoming. I thought, how useless to write about things which have ceased to exist.” Hearn died in 1904. Eight years later, the death of the Meiji Emperor would prompt what was perhaps the most famous act in response to this sense of passage and change.

In 1912, shortly after the death of the emperor, General Nogi Maresuke committed seppuku, ostensibly in expiation for his military mistakes and specifically for having lost his regimental banner in Kyushu during the Satsuma rebellion over 30 years earlier. His death would leave its mark on the writings of both Soseki and Mori Ogai. In Soseki’s most influential work, Kokoro, we find what may be his own thoughts in the words of one of the protagonists called, Sensei:

“I felt as though the spirit of the Meiji era had begun with the Emperor, and had ended with him. I was overcome with the feeling that I and the others, who had been brought up in that era, were now left behind to live as anachronisms.”

In his introduction to the novel, Edwin McClellan writes that, “Soseki was too modern in his outlook to be fully in sympathy with the general; and so is Sensei … however, he could not help feeling that he was in some way a part of the world that had produced General Nogi”.

(2) The Times of Botchan Vol. 3 & 4

Nogi’s death had an even greater impact on Mori Ogai, and it is this sense of nobility and responsibility that informs the third and fourth volumes of The Times of Botchan (even if the events depicted within occur a number of years before the death of the general).


At the start of these interconnected volumes, it is 1909 and Shimei Futabatei is dead. In five years, the Meiji emperor will also have passed on and, in seven, Soseki will collapse from a stomach hemorrhage. Futabatei’s funeral is attended by some of the most famous writers and thinkers of the time, among them Soseki, Ogai and Ishikawa Takuboku, the three writers whose lives are most developed upon in these series of manga.

As with the first two volumes, this section of The Times of Botchan is also about the creation of literature. The cover description tells us that the book focuses on the relationship between Ogai and Elise Weigert, the inspiration for Ogai’s story, “Maihime” (“The Dancing Girl”), but it is also the story of Futabatei and Ukigumo.

“Maihime” was written in 1890 and has been noted for bringing “a new dimension to the literary expression of personal emotions in Japanese literature.” The story is narrated by the protagonist, Toyotaro Ota, who is the top student in his university and a civil servant of three years. He is sent to Germany to “study matters connected with [his] particular section.” At first he finds himself reading law but soon turns to the arts and history, much to the displeasure of his superiors. The opening pages of the story allow us to look deep into his soul. From Richard Bowring’s translation:

“Some three years passed. … I had studied willingly. … But all that time I had been a mere passive, mechanical being with no real awareness of myself. … I realized that I would be happy neither as a high-flying politician nor as a lawyer. … I felt like the leaves of the silk-tree which shrink and shy away when they are touched. … Ever since my youth I had followed the advice of my elders and kept to the path of learning and obedience. If I had succeeded, it was not through being courageous.”

Toyotaro’s first meeting with Elise differs little from Ogai’s own encounter in the manga. She is a dancer whose father has just died. As she is penniless, she has asked for aid with the funeral expenses from her employer who has sought to take advantage of her. Toyotaro promises to help her and produces his watch for her to pawn. Their feelings for each other deepen and soon turn to those of love. His superior is irked by his diversions and tells his “legation to abolish [his] post and terminate [his] employment.”

Toyotaro improves himself through journalistic activities and soon becomes a skilled translator. The arrival of a prominent Japanese minister in Berlin leads to an opportunity to redeem himself but he is urged “to give her up” by a friend and assistant to the minister called, Aizawa. Upon hearing this advice, Toyotaro is struck by severe misgivings: “When he mapped out my future like this. I felt like a man adrift who spies a mountain in the distance. But the mountain was still covered in cloud …”

This passage from “Maihime” may be compared with Sekikawa and Taniguchi’s depiction of Ogai’s vision of Mount Fuji early in Vol. 3. To be precise, there are two visions of note at the start of the third volume. The first is that of Elise Weigert, the German dancer who Ogai has promised to marry following his four years of study in Germany — a symbol for Western self-sufficiency and exuberance. The second (the one that applies here) is that of Mount Fuji, a symbol for Japan, first glimpsed upon Ogai’s return from Germany in 1888.

Upon the exhortation of the ship’s captain to look “higher, look much higher up,” Ogai does so only to see the peak of Mount Fuji appearing through the clouds. This image of Fuji is repeated again in a brush painting that hangs behinds his emotionless parents during his first audience with them since his return. To emphasize his point, Sekikawa narrates:

“At that moment Ogai felt for the first time, that he was back in Japan. In the country, individualism was not regarded as a personal virtue, the “family” had to be considered.”

Toward the close of “Maihime,” Elise becomes ill and discovers that she is pregnant just as Toyotaro is asked to travel to Russia to work as an interpreter. His duties “suddenly [lift him] from the mundane and [drop him] above the clouds into the Russian court.” Elise writes a loving and beseeching letter to Toyotaro and he encounters yet another crisis of confidence amidst his own joy:

“Was my passion cooling? … I thought I had discovered my true nature, and I swore never to be used as a machine again. But perhaps it was merely the pride of a bird that had been given momentary freedom to flap its wings and yet still had its legs bound. There was no way I could loose the bonds. The rope had first been in the hands of my department head, and now, alas it was in the hands of the count.”

Toyotaro, wracked with guilt, falls ill, and Elise learns of his betrayal indirectly from Aizawa even as she nurses him. She goes mad and becomes a “living corpse.” At the end of the story, Toyotaro leaves for Japan with the minister, leaving behind some money to pay for the birth of his child.

There are other links between Ogai and his protagonist not mentioned above: as with the story, the real Elise only learns of Ogai’s betrayal indirectly through his friends; the ornithological metaphor that Toyotaro uses in “Maihime” correlates with Ogai’s use of a captive bird to describe the conflict between dreams and reality in the manga. These connections are weaved into a tangle of fictions juxtaposed for effect. There are also some significant differences between Ogai’s experiences as depicted in the manga and the prose story: the Elise of the manga never becomes pregnant and her exact fate remains unknown.

By way of short interludes interspersed between this story, we see the birth of Futabatei’s novel, Ukigumo, and the difficulties that caused its curtailment. Futabatei would later be the first to translate “Maihime” into Russian but in these early days of struggle, we see Futabatei hard at work on the upper level of a storehouse behind his father’s house. His mother, who considers his novels nothing more than storybooks, makes disparaging remarks about his chosen vocation. Ogai compares Futabatei’s mother to the calculating, shrew like aunt in Ukigumo, but Futabatei is more understanding.

Sekikawa and Taniguchi are engaged in the recreation of the world in which this famous literary work was created. On the streets of Tokyo, we see the dispossessed members of the samurai class who are the main characters of Ukigumo. As Marleigh Ryan informs us:

“By 1868 samurai were often reduced to extreme poverty. … Whether rich or poor, however, in theory at least they shared a common ethical and moral code. This has as its basic tenets a belief in loyalty to one’s family and superiors … devotion to propriety and restraint in social behavior.”

Ukigumo has as its central character a man by the name of Bunzo who lives with his aunt Omasa and cousin Osei. As related by Futabatei, “[Bunzo’s] father had served in the old feudal government receiving a stipend under it.” This feudal order had collapsed with the establishment of the Meiji era. At the beginning of the novel, Bunzo loses his job. He has also fallen in love with Osei, but his current situation puts an end to any dreams he may have had of an early marriage. He watches on helplessly as his smooth-talking, sycophantic colleague Noboru, who is also of samurai stock, inserts himself into the household with the blessings of his aunt and proceeds to seduce Osei. Of Bunzo, Ryan writes, “His are the traditional Confucian values. … It is impossible for him to yield to the fashions of his time, and, as a consequence, he is crushed by the age.”

The events of Ukigumo become a topic in Ogai’s long conversation with Futabatei toward the close of Vol. 4 in which he establishes why he cannot marry Elise. In his opinion, a life without restraints or respect for authority will leave the Japanese, in times to come, with a bitter aftertaste. In so concluding, he compares himself to Noburo who “burns with desire to rise socially” but “[holds] on to the hope that Noboru Honda has self-control and a conscience” and “will not rob Bunzo Utsumi of his fiancee Osei.” Ogai does not identify with Bunzo’s inaction and indecisiveness (the real Ogai labeled Bunzo both “anemic” and “neurotic” in an essay written many years later); rather, he has sympathy with his values and sadness.

As with “Maihime” and Ukigumo, the manga reflects the triumph, hollow as it may seem to some, of giri (duty) over ninjo (emotion). By the time Elise and Ogai meet at the manga’s conclusion, their decisions have already been determined by force of circumstance. She has already booked a ticket on a steamer leaving Japan and he has already rejected the possibility of love. In Vol. 4, we see Elise’s presumably fictional adventures with a pair of lovers and assorted underworld characters. The lengths to which the young man is willing to go to free his lover from a life of sexual slavery is clearly to be contrasted with Ogai’s Old World hesitancy and reserve. Elise compares Ogai unfavorably to the uninhibited, self-sacrificing lovers she has been helping. Her experiences have shown her a Japan capable of forceful and spontaneous passions, but he can speak only of his obligations to the greater entities of family and country.

In the final pages of the fourth volume, Elise says that she can accept his reasons for abandoning her but not his lack of honesty with his emotions. In the manga, Ogai has no real answer for this. “Maihime,” on the other hand, contains a damning self-description by Toyotaro:

“If I did not take this chance, I might lose not only my homeland but also the very means by which I might retrieve my good name. I was suddenly struck by the thought that I might die in this sea of humanity, in this vast European capital. I showed my lack of moral fiber and agreed to go. It was shameless.”

Sekikawa and Taniguchi provide no hints as to which character has made the superior choice, for their struggle is merely a reflection of the conversations and debates that began in the Meiji era and preoccupy Japan to a lesser extent today.

Shimei Futabatei died in May 1909. On July 1, 1909, Ogai’s book Vita Sexualis (a thinly veiled account, in part, of his own sexual life) would be published in the literary magazine, Subaru. The issue would be banned by the authorities on July 28 and Ogai officially reprimanded by the vice-minister of war in August. Ogai and Elise’s conversation in The Times of Botchan is a counterpoint to that more fervent text, a marker on the road to the creation of a famous story and a literary master.

(Continued in Part 2 tomorrow)