Utilitarian Review 6/8/13

“You think they [comic books] are mostly about floppy-eared bunnies, attractive little mice and chipmunks? Go take a look.”
—cover flap of Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent

Erotic comics first surfaced in the dim dawn of pre-history among cave-dwelling ungulate-fetishists who, in animistic rituals, drew upon the stone walls choice mammoths with whom they wished to have congress. Some time thereafter, in the early 1800s, the Japanese developed…SHUNGA! Which is pretty much what it sounds like.

Perhaps the most famous shunga illustration is Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, which, coincidentally, also features a rape-by-mammoth. Ha ha. No, of course it doesn’t. It actually features a rape-by-octopi.

Lascivious, decadent Europeans, inspired by such hot-and-heavy Japanese print-making, erected sophisticated fantastic visions of their own. Here, for example, turn-of-the-century Brit Aubrey Beardsley makes a subtle phallic reference.

Can We Get More Animation Down There, Please?

If you studied the pictures above very closely, you probably need to stop and take a deep breath. If you examined them somewhat more cursorily, you probably noticed that they’re not actually comics — just influential genital progenitors, as it were. Comics as we know them coalesced as a form in the early 1900s. At first, of course, they were mostly aimed at kids, so sexual content tended to be muted. Winsor McCay drew the occasional picture of a woman in bed with a warthog, but that was about as racy as it got.

No form can escape filth forever, though. By the 1920s, cutesy childhood icons were frolicking like hardened whores across the pages of crude 4″ x 6″ pamphlets known as Tijuana Bibles. Violating propriety and copyright with equal vigor, these eight-page narratives featured such familiar faces as Popeye, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon and the eternally underage Little Orphan Annie demonstrating the use of heretofore unillustrated appendages.

Tijuana Bibles were most popular during the Great Depression, when most people were too poor to afford orgasms. During the late 50s, though, men’s magazines began to publish real photographic evidence that anatomy existed, stimulating the poor Tijuana Bibles right out of existence.

Balling with Gags

Luckily, the girly mags were a fickle bunch; photos may have been their true love, but they inevitably had a passel of mistresses on the side. These included gag cartoons. From Eldon Didini to Jack Cole (of Plastic Man fame) to Dan DeCarlo (of Archie fame), some of the biggest names in comicdom set their work atop clever captions like “The job is yours, Miss Bigelow, providing you fit just as well on my partner’s lap!” and “Two aphrodisiacs please!” Not that anyone was looking at the captions, exactly.

The pinnacle of men’s magazine cartooning is generally considered to be Little Annie Fanny, a strip cartoon which ran sporadically in Playboy from 1962 to 1988. Written by Mad-magazine alum Harvey Kurtzman and lavishly painted by Will Elder the titular character (in various senses) was an empty-headed naif who kept stumbling into preposterous situations, upon pop cultural tropes ripe for satire, and out of her clothes. Mostly that last one.

Under Where?

Men’s magazine illustrations were aimed at a broad, mainstream audience, and so were fairly tame by earlier illustrational standards; visible penises were a no no, much less octopus rape. With the late sixties underground comix movement, though, more idiosyncratic perversions became available from a head-shop near you. S. Clay Wilson’s raunchy fornicating bikers, satyrs, and pirates led the way, but even more influential was R. Crumb, whose comics indulged his fetish for large, powerful women and their hindquarters.

In Europe, one of the most influential underground cartoonists was Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. His well-endowed, pumped-up, and frequently pumping leather-clad, uniform-sporting men were hugely popular through the 60s and 70s, and remain widely recognized and (ahem) utilized today. Laaksonen was even an important influence on the visual style of the Village People. Eat your heart out, Jack Kirby.

The undergrounds opened the way for independent comics in general, and for more sexual and personal material in particular. At the extreme is Johnny Ryan, whose supremely and surreally filthy comics have at various points featured disembodied invisible anuses, severed butt-cracks, quarts of Dracula piss, and sex with midget Hitler. Much more literal is David Heatley’s “My Sexual History” which, like the title says, is a chronicle of every sexual encounter the author has ever had. Other autobio creators, from Jeff Brown, to Julie Doucet, to (my favorite) Ariel Schrag, have also chronicled their sexual lives in detail that veers between the arousing and the more-information-than-I-really-want-to-know-thanks.

One of the most acclaimed independent adult titles is Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s 80s series, Omaha the Cat Dancer, a sexually explicit soap-opera with funny animals (the title character is actually a feline…more or less.) Equally idiosyncratic is Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s 2006 Lost Girls, which features Wendy from Peter Pan, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Alice from Alice in Wonderland musing on matters philosophical while engaging in a marathon of sexual trysts.

Porn actually played a vital part in the survival of one of the most respected independent comics publishers. Fantagraphics — whose catalog includes Dan Clowes and Los Bros Hernandez — was poised to go out of business in the early 90s. It was saved in part by the launch of its adult-oriented Eros line. It’s kind of funny to think that there would be no Chris Ware as we know him without concupiscence and gushing bodily fluids (though that’s true for all of us, I suppose.)

Foreign Trollops

Influential European comics with sexual themes began to appear in the early 1960s. Guido Crepax’s character Valentina started her erotic run in the Italian comics magazine Linus in 1963; Crepax would go on to work on graphic adaptations of porn classics like Histoire d’O and Justine.

Another Italian, Milo Manera, is perhaps Crepax’s most famous heir. Both artists have had work appear in Heavy Metal, an American offshoot of the early 70s French magazine Métal Hurlant. Heavy Metal’s Europulp-fantasy-smut remains a touchstone in American comics, from Frank Thorne’s Lann to Michael Manning’s ongoing fetish, gender-bending, humidly romantic, paranoid cyberpunk opus In A Metal Web.

The real top in recent foreign-on-American porn, though, has been Japan. Manga, or Japanese comic books have penetrated…er…pushed their way into…um…stickily saturated? Anyway, they’re very popular in America, and porn manga is no exception. For those who want to be taken seriously by your local otaku, Japanese porn is usually referred to as hentai. Hentai can refer to any number of fetishes, some of which (giant breasts) are fairly mainstream, others of which (girls-with-penises, tentacle rape, or sex with underage-appearing girls, known as lolicon) are less so.

From a western perspective the most unusual hentai genre,is probably yaoi. Yaoi depicts homosexual relationships between beautiful men, but it is created by and marketed mostly to women. In contrast to gay porn for gay men, yaoi tends to feature complex characters and intricate relationships — it is, in other words, a romance with lots of gay sex added. Pundits often like to claim that girls like yaoi because identifying with boys is more distant and somehow safer. Probably the real appeal is more straightforward (ahem) — if you like to look at pictures of hot guys having sex, surely two is better than one? In any case, yaoi has proved quite popular with het- (and not-so-het) female readers in the U.S. Among the most popular titles featuring boy-romance are Maki Murikami’s Gravitation and Sanami Matoh’s Fake. More consistently explicit fare includes Youka Nitta’s Embracing Love and Fumi Yoshinaga’s Gerard and Jacques.

In the Future, There Will Be Only Virtual Sex

Paper publishing is currently in the middle of a death-spiral, and porn comics have certainly taken a hit as well. Yes, a wide array continue to be available for all tastes, from furry-friendly-fare like Richard Moore’s Short Strokes to trans fetish fare like Roberto Baldazzini’s Bayba: The 110 BJ’s and Christian Zanier’s Banana Games to always-popular vampire erotica like Frans Mensink’s Kristina Queen of Vampires . But it seems likely that in the near future most explicitly pornographic comics will be online — like current Indian semi-sensation Savita Bhabi series. Dirty drawings never die…they just digitize.

The Hollywood Superhero vs. 9/11

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

The culminating twist of Iron Man 3, declared Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, “signals both the making of Iron Man 3 and, with any luck, the possible unmaking of the genre.” It was an early review, so Lane had to be coy about specifics, but a few weeks and a few hundred million box office dollars later, we can take the spoiler gloves off and just say it:

“This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat.”

Oh, wait, sorry, that’s not Iron Man 3. That’s Glenn Greenwald on Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Sheehan’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the twelve-year-old foreign policy franchise formerly known as the War on Terror has another two decades of sequels left in it.

What I meant to write is completely different. That Iron Man 3’s supervillianous corporate technology genius invented his own Osama Bin Laden to mask his R&D and drive up government demand for his ever-expanding arsenal of military products, locking American and the rest of the planet in a self-perpetuating cycle of unwinnable war. But that’s just a movie. The kind that now pretty much defines the Hollywood blockbuster. Director Shane Black even goes the extra metafictional mile and includes the villain’s blue screen movie studio, the same corporate tech keeping Tony and his pals alive.

“From here on,” writes Lane, “the dumb-ass grandeur around which superheroic plots revolve can no longer be taken on trust.” Greenwald thinks the same about Obama. The war on terror, like the Hollywood superhero, will never end on its own because so many “factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation.” Black lifts the edge of the curtain, but that glimpse will hardly unmake or even marginally slow the onslaught of forthcoming productions. Captain America 2 is shooting in D.C. as I type. That’s D.C., our nation’s capital, and so not technically a Warner Bros or Marvel Entertainment branch office.

The modern superhero movie first took flight in 1978 with Superman: The Movie (the subtitle says it all), with the total number of productions tipping just over forty in 2001. How many since 9/11? Fifty. In less than half as many years. So, no, 9/11 is not the box office superhero’s origin story. It’s merely the transformative accident that doubled his powers. Like the Golden Age’s Blue Beetle. When his comic book incarnation debuted in pre-war 1939, the Beetle was just another mystery man in a domino mask and fedora. Listen to his first radio broadcast a worn-torn year later and the guy’s ingesting the power-inducing 2-X formula from his pharmacist mentor.

Novelist Austin Grossman recently told my Superheroes class that when he started writing his supervillain-narrated Soon I Will Be Invincible in 2001, he had to ask himself, “Am I just writing about a terrorist?” Austin’s brother, The Magicians author Lev Grossman, penned his own superheroic response, “Pitching 9/11.” The short story is a sequence of failed pitches for adapting 9/11 to screen. Here’s my favorite:

“Lonely, misunderstood Dominican elevator repairman (John Leguizamo?) finds himself trapped by fire after the second plane hits. In agony from the heat and smoke, near death from asphyxiation he jumps from the 83^rd Floor. Instead of falling he hover in midair, then rockets upward. The trauma of the attack, and of his impending certain death, has awakened latent superpowers he never knew he had. A handful of others have undergone similar transformations—they hover in a cluster over the collapsing buildings, like so many swimmers treading water. As the roof sinks away below them into nothingness, they choose colorful pseudonyms and soar away together in formation to take vengeance on evil everywhere.”

Lev’s other pitches include scifi thriller, Discovery Channel documentary, and a filmed performance piece, but superheroes are the ready-made absurdity 9/11 was meant for. Diverting the path of an airliner? That’s a job for Superman. The pre-emptive prequel would star Batman. According to The 9/11 Commission Report, President Clinton was so annoyed with the lack of options for taking out Bin Laden he said to one ofhis generals: ‘You know, it would scare the shit out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.’”

Substitute “ninjas” with the superhero team of your choice and you’ve got your very own dumb-ass grandeur plot. But according to Blake Snyder (a friend leant me a copy of his Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need), the Superhero genre isn’t just about “guys in capes and tights.” It’s what happens when an extraordinary person is stuck in an ordinary world. In addition to Bruce Wayne and the X-Men, Russell Crow’s Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind are his go-to examples of misunderstood Gullivers shackled by Lilluputians.

I’m more than a little skeptical about Snyder (he argues Miss Congeniality is a better film than Memento), but he has a point. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. Superheroes soared after 9/11 because Hollywood cast America as the planet’s mightiest super being and the rest of the word population as those moron Lilluputians willfully misunderstanding him. Weren’t they listening when Bush Sr. explained the New World Order?

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was the lone superpower, to be loved and respected by a planet of grateful mortals. When some of those ingrates go and topple the Fortress of Solitude, what choice does America have but to declare a War on Lilluputianism? “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war,” laments Greenwald, “has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation.”

But then in his own superheroic plot twist, Obama, days after his Assistant Defense Secretary was arguing for an unlimited renewal of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, declared: “This war, like all wars, must end.” The Associated Press boiled the President’s 7,000- word speech down to a sentence: “Barack Obama has all but declared an end to the global war on terror.”

Congress is balking of course. And so is our Democracy’s fourth branch of government, Hollywood. While Obama declares war on perpetual war, Marvel has two superhero franchises in post-production (Wolverine, Thor), three filming for 2014 release dates (Captain America, Spider-Man, X-Men), and another four announced for 2015 (Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four, Avengers, Ant-Man). Throw in the S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show that premieres next fall, and the superhero war isn’t dialing back—it’s surging.

But all those capes and tights flying across our screen have been an inverse shadow of real troops on the ground. So what happens when we finally leave Afghanistan? What happens if the drone war on al Qaeda really does die down? I’m no pre-cog, but the pop culture tea leaves are telling me 2015 will be the last big year for dumb-ass superhero grandeur. Though I wouldn’t underestimate Hollywood’s shapeshifting powers either. Both Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness were already in theaters, literally blowing up their representations of the U.S. drone armada, when Obama dropped his own policy bomb of a speech.

Box office superheroes will endure. Just scaled back to their pre-9/11 levels, where they belong.

Upstream Color: Less Than Meets The Eye

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Isaac Butler

Almost a decade ago, Shane Carruth’s film Primer took the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Shot for only $7,000, and looking like at least a million bucks, Primer was a low-key, hyperrealistic take on the time travel film in which two friends invent a machine that allows them to go a handful of hours backwards in time. They end up playing the stock market and becoming increasingly paranoid and sociopathic, betraying first their business partners and then each other.

Primer is a textbook “has potential” movie. Written, directed, produced by and starring Carruth, it displayed a great command of atmospherics and visuals while not quite working as a story. All time travel narratives must eventually either cheat or collapse under the weight of their own paradoxes, and when Primer eventually falls, it falls hard into a swamp of incoherence that borders on incompetence. Yet the movie seems to add up to something at the end, and is shot and edited in a fashion that makes it appear as if the filmmakers understand what is going on, even if you the viewer do not. This led many to mistakenly infer that Primer was smarter than they and anoint it a deep and meaningful film. Still, it was a first film, and made for next to nothing, and showed that Carruth was a filmmaker of promise. It also helped give rise to a new strain of low(ish)-budget, small-scale, personal science fiction films. Films like Brit Marling’s Another Earth or Duncan Jones’s Moon were both better than Primer, but it’s hard to imagine either would’ve gotten the attention they did without it.

Now Carruth is back with Upstream Color, another low budget, contemplative science fiction movie in which he wears even more hats, directing, writing, starring, cinematographing, composing, casting and designing the film. Upstream Color is a rare beast, a true auteurist science fiction work where every detail is the result of one man’s vision. It also demonstrates conclusively that Carruth’s skeptics were right. Upstream Color is ultimately an empty experience that squanders an interesting premise on meaningless beauty and mood.

Upstream Color is about a parasite that goes through three different life cycles. In the first, it’s a small white worm growing in plants. In the second, it grows inside humans, making them, in the immortal words of Khan Noonien Singh, highly susceptible to suggestion. In the third, it grows inside pigs. When the film opens, we see a man (he’s billed simply as “Thief”) cultivating the plant-stage parasites. He drugs a woman named Kris and infects her with it. Thief uses his total control over her to force to do all sorts of ponderous stuff like writing down passages of Walden on pieces of paper and then making paper chains of them. He also cleans out her bank account and gets her to pull all the equity out of her home and give it to him. Sometime later, a man billed only as The Sampler uses low frequency sound waves to summon her to his farm, where he extracts the parasite and puts it in a pig.

Soon, having lost everything and gone to work at a copy shop, Kris meets and finds herself mysteriously drawn to Jeff, a disgraced businessman who works for a hotel chain. Jeff, of course, is a victim of Thief as well, and we soon learn that their parasites were put into pigs who have since mated.

This is not a bad premise for a sci-fi film. Mind control parasites are, of course, an old saw, used in everything from Star Trek to Bodyworld to Fringe, but the added side-effect of the human-pig connection is a nice twist. One could imagine any number of things that could be done with the idea, from a Dickian paranoid parable of loss of control in love to a Michael DeForge freakout about the human body, to a searing indictment of the food industry.

Upstream Color decides that the best thing it can think of to do with this idea is to have Kris and Jeff fall intensely, cinematically in love, which is to say they stare at each other in intensely lit locations, sometimes breaking from this to either have emotional breakdowns or say ponderous bushwa into the ether. Then it digresses into a long segment featuring The Sampler wandering around nature recording various sounds and turning them into musical notes and spying on people (apparently he can turn invisible). In the end, Kris and Jeff are able to defeat The Sampler through means that make no sense but prominently feature a quinoa salad, retrieving rocks from a swimming pool, and more quotes from Walden. After killing the Sampler, they track down all the other victims of the parasite and start a cooperative farm.

Carruth tries to save the rapidly-deflating soufflé of Upstream Color’s plot by shooting the whole thing like The Tree of Life, constantly cutting between images, highlighting subjectivity, using deep-focus, voice-over, and a rapidly circling camera to overwhelm the viewer with beauty. The problem is that, love it or hate it, The Tree of Life is actually about something and the cinematic techniques on display in the film are part and parcel of the philosophical inquiry into which it enters. Upstream Color, meanwhile, is deploying these techniques to paper over a fundamental emptiness, just as Primer deploys the climactic-montage-with-recycled-voice-over trick of The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense to make it seem as if it’s headed towards some kind of revelation in its conclusion.

In many ways, Carruth might better be understood as a composer who works with images than an actual filmmaker. But as the film defaults to mood every time it should head towards meaning, the various gestures begin to feel manipulative, cynical rather than creative. As the friend I saw it with quipped to me over e-mail, “it was like a bad and spooky techno arrangement which seems at least to have the benefit of ambiguity until you realize it’s a cover of Riders On The Storm.” Upstream Color, then, exists at the intersection of The Beauty Problem and The Weird Shit Problem. Like a lot of so-called experimental art, it substitutes compositional beauty and oddballity for substance. It has the perfect alibi, “you just don’t get it, man,” which is, in its own way true. You don’t get it, man. There’s nothing to get.

Comics Tourism: Destination Brussels

Posted on June 4, 2013 by RM Rhodes

If you are at all serious about the comics medium and you have not visited and/or thought about visiting Brussels, you should really start to reconsider your thinking. It’s one thing to read that Belgians regard Bande dessinée (BD) as an important artform and it’s another thing entirely to actually experience a mature, mainstream comics culture firsthand in a European setting that’s more alike than alien to an American visitor.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t speak French and it’s probable that you don’t speak Flemish, either. But because the country is bilingual, most signage is printed in English (and often in German as well) on the theory that it’s just as easy to print things in three or four languages as it is to print in two. English is prevalent because of the sheer variety of international visitors – Brussels is the capital of the EU, the headquarters of NATO and is a major international banking, business and convention center. Still, learning another language because you want to has the net effect of making you look less jingoistic and xenophobic than your peers and it opens up an entire world of comics you probably know less about than you think.

Brussels bills itself as the capital of the ninth art, but it was also the epicenter of the Art Nouveau movement. Several prominent Art Nouveau architects designed buildings in and around the city center that still stand. One of the more famous architects was Victor Horta, who designed a wholesale fabric store that now houses the Belgian Comic Strip Center. Lovingly restored in the 80s and beautifully maintained, the building is a work of art in and of itself.

The museum features a permanent exhibition about Herge and Tintin, along with exhibits on other prominent Belgian creators, most notably Peyo and EP Jacobs. The top floor is dedicated space for rotating exhibitions – it’s currently dedicated to a retrospective of Willy Vandersteen and a celebration of the 75^th anniversary of Spirou. The reading room contains over 3,000 albums and is open to anyone who has purchased admission to the museum. The museum bookstore is fantastic and has token English, German and Spanish sections. If you only have time to visit one thing in Brussels, this should be it.

Scattered throughout the city center are a variety of BD-related murals that have been commissioned by the local government, private businesses and associations. These murals are indicated on maps that are handed out by the Brussels tourism board and they are considered to be a major tourist attraction. The city center looks huge on the map, but the blocks are not very big and are very walkable; wandering around looking for murals is a great way to see a large part of it.

Many of the major characters created by Belgian artists are featured in these murals, but Tintin shows up more often than most. Herge is the favorite son of Brussels and is easily one of the city’s biggest claims to fame. There is an entire Herge museum found just outside Brussels, not far from Herge’s house. If you are a Tintin fan, it is very easy to gorge yourself on the character – the Tintin Boutique is just around the corner from the Grand Place de Bruxelles and features every Tintin related piece of merchandise you could ever want, including (but not limited to) towels, dress shirts, figurines, framed prints, stuffed animals, keychains and playsets.

My favorite part of the BD culture in Brussels is the sheer number and variety of stores. From the random boutique book store in the St Hubert Gallery that had Jordan Crane, Alec Longstreth and a translation of Duncan the Wonder Dog to the big stores on the main drag, BD seems to be everywhere. The local FNAC store (sort of like Best Buy, with much less emphasis on household appliances) had more space dedicated to BD than it did to either DVDs or CDs.

The real destination stores, however, are Brüsel and Multi BD. They are obviously aimed at different demographics and approach the sale of BD in completely different ways. Brüsel has a gallery in the basement and top floor and seems to have a much more curatorial approach to what they sell – they don’t try to have everything in stock, just those things that they think are worthwhile to carry. They also have comics in English, Spanish and German as well as the obligatory Flemish.

Multi BD is a lot more comprehensive and is your go-to destination if you are looking for book three of that fantasy series from Dargaud that you cannot seem to find anywhere else. Interestingly, Multi BD seems to have a better selection of alternative/small press comics in both English and French than Brüsel does – and places this material right in the front of the shop as the first thing that a customer encounters when they walk in the door.

Neither of these is in the kind of space where you’d find the local Games Workshop franchise – both occupy two fairly large storefront spaces on a major thoroughfare and are within easy walking distance of each other. And neither seems to be hurting for business. More importantly, their primary demographic is not children, but adults of all genders with money. The market is centered around 48 page hardbound albums (although there is a greater flexibility in formats than there used to be) which tend to run about 12 Euros apiece and go up in price relative to the page count.

Another shopping destination is the Comics Village on the Grand Sablon, which features a store downstairs and a pretty good restaurant upstairs. If you go here, make sure you buy your books after you eat, to take advantage of the discount. The book selection here overlaps what you can find at Brüsel or Multi BD, but is much less robust and aimed at a much more general audience, as you would expect from a venue that markets itself as a theme restaurant and sidewalk café that happens to have a store. They also have copies of Tintin lying around in the restaurant so that kids have something to read while they are eating lunch.

What I found most interesting about all of these stores is that it’s easier to find manga than it is to find American superhero comics and there is usually a better selection of the former. Manga often gets its own prominent corner while American superheroes generally get an out-of-the way shelf. Other English-language comics are found in translation more prominently – Strangers in Paradise, Prophet, Whiteout and Making Comics – to name only a few titles. It is almost as if these stores considered superheroes to be just another genre instead of the foundation of the market and stocked them accordingly. Also of note: American floppies are almost completely absent, probably because graphic novels fit the local buying patterns better.

The other place to look for BD in Brussels is among the used bookstores along the Rue du Midi – only a few blocks from Multi BD and Brüsel. Most second hand bookstores have a large selection of used BD albums which are worth flipping through, if only to see the sheer volume and variety of material that you have never heard of (often for good reason). Along the same street is Le Dépôt, a used bookstore that is entirely dedicated to BD. Here, more than anywhere else, I got a real sense of the depth of the French BD market and how much of it was completely unknown to me. As with the best stores of this kind, it is entirely possible to spend hours lost in the stacks, constantly surprised by things you had no idea could be considered commercial.

Once you have exhausted all of the obvious options, one of the more off the beaten path attractions is a house that was also designed by Victor Horta called Maison Autrique. This townhouse is now a museum that has hosted a variety of small, comics-related exhibits. The whole endeavor of restoration and curatorship of the townhouse is obviously a labor of love and among those lovers are local creators François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. Albums from their Obscure Cities BD series is available in the museum’s blink-and-you’’ll-miss-it bookstore and there is a major callout to one of the characters in that series hiding in the attic of the house. Schuiten’s artwork is heavily influenced by Art Nouveau and he has also authored a book with Lonely Planet that suggests possible walking tours of the city’s architecture. It is possible to get a greater appreciation of their work just by wandering around the more beautiful buildings of the city – including this one.

François Schuiten, from the Belgian Comic Strip Center

More than anything else, what Brussels offers a world-class city that features comics as a foundation of their tourism and local identity year-round and not just for a week a year. What other city does that? Besides, they sell fresh waffles in the streets and have good beer. And make sure you try the mussels.

Oddity: Uderzo and Jacobs

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Alex Buchet

The Frenchman Albert Uderzo attained international fame as the cartoonist half of the team that produced one of the most successful comics characters of all time: Asterix the Gaul. Prior to drawing Asterix, however, Uderzo had spent some 15 years drawing other characters — most of whom are presented in this montage:

Wait a minute… up there in the right-hand corner…that blue-clad superhero looks suspiciously like an American character, Captain Marvel Jr., as published by Fawcett Comics in the U.S.A.

What gives?

It seems that in 1950, the Belgian comics weekly Bravo (fl.1936 — 1950) licensed Captain Marvel Jr. and decided to create its own stories:

The serial ran for sixteen issues and was seen no more. Here’s some of Uderzo’s original art:

Young Albert Uderzo

Bravo was also responsible for another odd artistic pairing.

In 1942, Bravo was serialising the famed comic strip creation of Alex Raymond (1909–1956), Flash Gordon. Belgium was then under Nazi Germany’s occupation; so when Germany declared war on the United States in 1941, the supply of strips from the U.S.A. dried up completely. This was awkward, as Bravo was right in the middle of a storyline. So Bravo commissioned another artist to finish the story, and five final episodes were written and drawn — after which, the occupiers banned all American comics outright. A sample of this ersatz Flash:

Nazis and Fascists had an ambiguous relationship to American pop culture. On the one hand, they officially loathed it for its cosmopolitanism, its supposed degeneracy.

Typical is this German poster attacking degenerate (‘entartete) music, i.e. jazz; note the Star of David on the stereotyped Negro’s lapel:

And yet…the German army, the Wehrmacht, had its own official touring jazz bands! American pop culture continued to be prized, and the authorities had to make uneasy compromises.

For instance, Mussolini’s Fascist government once banned the Popeye comic strip. but the popular uproar of protestation was so intense that soon the adventures of “Braccio di Ferro” returned to Italian newspapers.

And Hitler’s favorite movie, reportedly, was Disney’s Snow White, of which he owned a personal print. Indeed, the popularity of Mickey Mouse and company was so great in Germany that Nazi propaganda circulated the notion that Walt Disney wasn’t American, but Spanish!

To return to that faux Flash Gordon: the author? Edgar P. Jacobs (1904–1987).

Edgar P. Jacobs

Jacobs was the creator of another tremendously successful and influential comic, after the war: Blake and Mortimer.

The blanket Nazi ban on American strips turned out to be a boon for Jacobs, as he was asked to replace Flash Gordon with an original science-fiction strip; the result was the highly imaginative Le Rayon U, a major step in his development as a cartoonist.

from ‘Le Rayon U’

Jacobs was also key in “re-looking” Tintin, the famed creation of George‘Hergé’ Remi (1907–1983) — and the war was largely responsible for that, as well.

One effect on comics of the war was an acute paper shortage. Herge’s publisher, Casterman, informed him that it could no longer print his usual 100-plus page albums; henceforth they were to be limited to 62 story pages; to compensate, they would switch from black-and-white to color. This set a standard format for French and Belgian comics albums that endures until today.

Jacobs standardised the pastel color schemes typical of Tintin and other “clear line” comics; he also extensively redrew the older albums for the new format. His influence on the look of Tintin is second only to Hergé’s.

Edgar P. Jacobs, Jacques van Melkebeke, and Hergé in 1944. Van Melkebeke was Herge’s editor during the Occupation, and served time for collaboration.

I hope to post on occasion other oddities of artist/subject matchups… and would be grateful for any suggestions!

John Hennings on How Country Music Got More Racist

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I really liked this comment John Hennings left last week about Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist”, so I thought I’d highlight it here.

Noah, I agree in general with your points about this song, and I enjoyed this essay, but I think you got the title wrong. You correctly assert that country music got more racist, but you don’t explain how. At the risk of stating the obvious, I think it was an unfortunate side effect of the polarization during the Civil Rights Movement. But I don’t think that’s the whole story of what happened to country music, and I don’t think racism, per se, is the problem with the song.

You and my fellow commentators are right to point to country’s current vacuity as one source of the trouble. Country music is far from uniquely Southern and Western, but it is identifiably so. Like other forms of music from the poor, rural places, it is borne of hard times. Despite the current economic struggles, times aren’t as hard for most of us hillbillies as they were in Hank Snow’s day, so country music now has less to say. We’re also not as isolated, so country music is less distinctive.

The culture that made Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong the men they were is severely endangered. The Starbucks reference in “Accidental Racist” is a good indicator. Prosperity and progress have made the lives in the flyover states (regardless of color) more similar to those on Long Island or in Orange County than to those of Roy Acuff or DeFord Bailey. Many rural kids listen to pop, hip-hop and rock growing up. They don’t start voluntarily listening to country until they get jobs and families. Country music now talks about the responsible grown-up lifestyle more than other music, so we mature into people for whom country music speaks.

Had “Accidental Racist” been the integrated, honest modern equivalent of “Blue Yodel #9?, Paisley and LL Cool J would have commiserated over the petty politics of their homeowners’ association, or the difficulty of getting your children into the best schools. Those aren’t compelling issues, but they’re genuine.

In the South, we also listen to country because it is identity music. So are related forms like southern rock, gospel, blues, dirty south hip-hop, and gangstagrass. We associate country with our traditional culture — the slower pace of Southern life; the connection to the land; and the greater emphasis on family, community, hospitality, and faith. The attraction is even more powerful if none of those things describe our lives anymore. The irony of this nostalgia is that when we were children, the homogenization had already begun.

I grew up in classically (not to say stereotypically) rural Southern surroundings and circumstances. I love “The Ballad of Curtis Loew” maybe more than any other Lynyrd Skynyrd song. For me, that is saying a lot. The Ballad is about a homeless, black, blues guitarist and the white child who would scrounge money and defy his parents to hear him play. It could easily have happened in the racially mixed town I grew up in. In my mind’s eye, it did. It is an honest song that makes a statement about human equality. That statement may not be quite as organic or “accidental” as the statement in Blue Yodel #9, but it is nearly so, and it is neither preachy nor flat-footed. “Accidental Racist,” in contrast, seems more like the narrative of a frustrated suburbanite, awkwardly stumbling through race issues for which his primary preparatory life experiences were those very special episodes of “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life.”

On second thought, maybe it is an honest song, after all.

I’ll add one more word of defense for Brad Paisley. When he and I were kids growing up, white and black Southerners considered the Confederate battle flag a symbol of the South and Southern culture. More defensively, it was a badge of our us-against-them attitude toward those who believed themselves our superiors. White supremacist groups actively re-branded the flag and made it a symbol of slavery and racism. Where I lived, that took effect a little before I graduated high school, much to our vocal lament. I don’t know if that was contemporaneous with the rest of our society. This was pre-internet; we were frequently behind y’all when it came to zeitgeist awareness.

Interestingly, with the notable exception of England, Southerners in many European countries also lead simpler, more agrarian, lifestyles than their more cosmopolitan countrymen. So when football teams from southern Italy or southern Germany play their northern rivals, you can expect some fan to fly the Confederate battle flag.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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