Anti-Manga, The Anti-Classics Way

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Josselin Moneyron

This October, London’s Breakdown Press published Masahiko Matsumoto’s The Man Next Door, the second in their new art manga collection. Curated by art historian Ryan Holmberg and featuring Breakdown’s characteristic risograph technique, the anthology of four stories highlights much of what makes the young collection such a unique aesthetic proposition.

The collection is heir to the “Masters of Alternative Manga” line, one of the two that Holmberg helmed for Picturebox, Inc. Only one volume came out before Picturebox announced that it wouldn’t produce any new books, an anthology of short stories by cult author Seiichi Hayashi called Gold Pollen and other stories. (Two books came out in the other collection, called “Ten Cent Manga” : Tezuka’s highly entertaining The Mysterious Underground Men and the less accessible Last of the Mohicans, by underappreciated pioneer Shigeru Sugiura.)

While the Ten Cent Manga series remains orphaned, the Alt Manga collection has sparked the interest of other publishers, and what should have been the follow-up to Gold Pollen, an anthology of shorts by Tadao Tsuge titled Trash Market, will be published by Canada’s venerable Drawn & Quarterly. Tadao, the younger brother of alt manga superstar Yoshiharu Tsuge, was a fixture of the GARO magazine in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and an obsessive chronicler of social anxieties in a Japan still haunted by the war.

The D&Q connection makes perfect sense in the light of their previous interests in manga publishing. The Breakdown Press one is less intuitive, and the particularities of its inception are a big part of what makes it so original and exciting.

The London-based publisher is distinctly inspired by zine culture. They printed all their first books using a Risograph machine, a piece of Japanese office equipment that blends screen printing and photocopy, and which has proved very popular recently among underground publishers. They met Holmberg while he was in England for a fellowship at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Art & Culture. The institute and the Japan Foundation were looking to invite Hayashi to England, and “I wanted to do something to commemorate the event”, says Holmberg. Breakdown Press happened to be looking for that kind of projects, and the planets aligned. They settled on a 1969 story of loneliness and rural exodus, Flowering Harbour ; Holmberg wrote an introduction and translated an article by Hayashi, while Breakdown Press’s first published author and de facto art director Joe Kessler handled the design and printing with Victory Press. The result, a 40-page, 5.4” by 7.6”, perfect-bound book, resembles neither the mass-produced commercial manga nor the large hardcovers of other classics collections. As Breakdown’s Simon Hacking explains, “What we really loved about the Flowering Harbour project was the opportunity to work with a cartoonist who is much more established and revered than any we’d worked with before, but to do so in a format that matched our existing output. Printing the book using a Risograph at the printer we’ve used for all of our books, and getting Joe Kessler […] to design the book allowed us to make a 40-year-old comic from the other side of the world feel like part of our line.”

On September 23rd, the Cartoon Museum in London launched the “Gekiga” exhibition, an occasion for Holmberg and Breakdown to publish another short piece of comic history. The Man Next Door collects four stories (including the titular “Man Next Door”) by Masahiko Matsumoto, the least known but most discreetly influential of the members of the Gekiga Workshop (more famous peers being Golgo 13 creator Takao Saito and comic giant Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who later told – and in a way rewrote – the story of the gekiga revolution). Again, Holmberg wrote an introduction and translated a 2004 article by the author himself. Kessler designed the book and the Risograph was put to good use. Each story is printed in its own colour, a great detail since all anthologies nowadays are printed in black, while the magazines themselves often used colored ink.

The homemade touch of the books and the “opportunistic” character of the line-up manage a strange feat : they make the works feel current. Their origins and historical context are obviously explained, but the articles in the books themselves are introductions : short, to-the-point and easily digested. They don’t break the spell that preserves these strange little books from the “glass dome” curse of patrimonial anthologies. And for those who would like to delve much deeper than that, Holmberg actually accompanies each release with lengthy and much-researched discussions on the authors and stories as part of his TCJ column “What was alternative manga ?”.

But as fascinating as the experiment has been so far, its most exciting developments are still to come. Because Breakdown Press are at exactly the right moment in their history, in terms of size and ambition, to tackle some big, crazy projects. Starting with a reputedly unpublishable masterpiece of alt comics, the experimental anti-manga of Sasaki Maki. Despite the enduring success of Maki’s Complete Comic Works in Japan, Holmberg had up to now failed to have an anthology edited in English. “I remember pitching a Maki collection to Dan Nadel at PictureBox many many years ago, 5 or 6 years ago, and he said, no way! no story = no sales.”

Admittedly, the short stories Maki drew in the 60’s and 70’s are among the most abstruse ever produced, but strolling through this seemingly meaningless interweaving of political, symbolic and pop imagery is an experience like few others. For every fan of the psychedelic era, or anybody interested in seeing what Japanese counterculture looked like at the height of its creative drive, this is essential reading. And it’s no wonder that the best-selling (though himself often obscure) novelist Haruki Murakami defines the artist as the defining voice of the period. “With my novels, he confesses in the foreword to Maki’s Japanese collection, I try to do for this generation what Sasaki Maki did for mine.”

Though the anthology, scheduled for the beginning of 2015, won’t have the same look as the mini-manga published so far, it will certainly have the Breakdown feel, especially since Joe Kessler is now their official house art director. And if their latest offerings, printed in offset for greater versatility, are any measure, it is going to look gorgeous. Of course, it’s not like anybody involved is hoping for great financial success, but even if it all goes terribly wrong, let’s hope that the initiative will spark many copycats. Because these little classics feel different, and new, and imply in their own humble way that the range of what small press can do has suddenly broadened.

Let’s Play Make Believe

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

Last summer, I wrote about a time I encountered sexism in comics. The piece received nearly 200 comments, most of which were some version of that didn’t happen. Funny enough, the one that stands out in my memory was left by another woman—one of maybe five or six who participated in a thread that was almost exclusively men talking to other men.

Even in the context of a blatantly sexist comment thread, her words really bothered me. That critic is unimpeachable, she wrote. I know because he’s been supportive of me. You’re inexperienced and you should toughen up. P.S. Comics is perfect!

Which: good for her. (Genuinely, I mean it.) But I still have no idea what her experience had to do with mine. What you’re saying about you isn’t correct because it’s not what happened to ME is a weird way to filter the world.

Yet people do it all the time. Her comment is a really mild example of an ugly problem I have seen elsewhere in comics: the inability to imagine that life even exists in someone else’s shoes. As a semi-casual observer who has witnessed this, this, and this—a small sampling against which my own experience literally pales in comparison—it’s clear to me that this industry is dominated by straight white men who are constantly finding new ways to discount the perspectives of people of color, women, and queer people just because they are different.

It is hugely important, now more than ever, to listen to those perspectives. One of the most respected publishers in comics is about to launch his new imprint with what he calls transgressive art, a comic that contains some of the most racist and misogynistic imagery I have seen anywhere, ever. That he is doing so in the name of “a publisher’s obligation to take risks” is not just a travesty; it is a crisis.

We talk about racism and misogyny in comics as though these are problems that belong to a bygone era. Meanwhile, in the last six months, The Comics Journal ran a column defending imagery that could have come straight out of a Wikipedia entry about black stereotypes, and Fantagraphics promoted its glorified white supremacist comic with folksy words like “innovative, quirky, idiosyncratic, oddball, experimental, [and] downright crazy.” It is no doubt a mark of my paltry knowledge about comics that I am so astonished by these incidents. My guess is that people much more involved in the industry aren’t even remotely surprised.

I was thinking about all of this as I watched a different crisis unfold in the literary world with regard to serial harasser Edward Champion. Some would call him a book blogger or a literary critic, and who knows, maybe he was those things once. In any case now he’s a person who says really despicable (and sometimes criminal) things under the banner of criticism. He has finally been denounced by the publishing world—a process that began in June, when he published a misogynistic nightmare screed against Emily Gould, and ended recently when he harassed another female novelist on Twitter.

One weird thing I observed as that scandal unfolded was how some corners of the Internet tried to dictate the terms of how people talked about what he did. In many ways, Champion served as his own chief of propaganda; his public suicide threats caused many people to privilege his mental health over the well being of his victims, which included women who have been afraid to attend their own book events or even leave their houses at all. Watch what you say about him, these people implored. He’s clearly not well.

From a diametrically opposed point of view, I confess I felt a similar urge to dictate the terms of the Champion conversation as I watched some critics place what I believed to be undue emphasis on the question of his mental health. We should focus on the known quantity, which is the abusive behavior, for both his sake and for the sake of his victims. That’s what I want to talk about. That is the story I see.

But the weirdest (and maybe the saddest) thing about the whole sick sorry spectacle was watching women that Champion harassed chastise each other for deviating from the narrative as they see it. The most jaw-dropping display of this was, of course, Sarah Weinman, Champion’s ex-partner, who publicly scolded (and maybe privately threatened) everyone from Porochista Khakpour to the entire population of Twitter for not responding to Champion’s behavior in a way she deemed appropriate. Laura Miller at Salon, who was once the subject of Champion’s ridicule, weighed in with a “don’t feed the trolls” take that downplayed the violent imagery and threats in his rants and implicitly blamed Gould and Khakpour for his harassment. And most recently, I saw Khakpour call people out for being tough on Weinman, minimize threats that were of a different nature than the ones she received, and even (tentatively, ambivalently) defend Weinman as on-the-record reports of her abuse of power began to trickle in.

I don’t mean to suggest that these three women’s situations are analogous (and am especially anxious to seem critical of Khakpour, who I admire, and who was the victim of a crime). Weinman, Miller, and Khakpour are all quite different from one another—and that is exactly my point. Not one of their stories can stand in for another’s, just as the woman’s story I mentioned at the top of this essay can’t stand in for mine.

It has been a few weeks since I wrote the bulk of this post—time enough for the Champion thing to have become old hat. Time enough, in fact, for an entirely unrelated literary scandal to have unfolded. Time enough for another woman writer to publish a truly despicable essay that is a much more flagrant example of the me-first phenomenon I’m describing. Time enough for all of that to have become old hat, too.

While those events already feel far behind us, you will see the same pattern elsewhere, if you look. It seems like an understatement to call it a lack of empathy. It’s more like a Tyra Banks-level solipsism. David Foster Wallace has described it as a default setting that has to be actively overcome:

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted,” which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

A bold choice, I know, to quote extensively from someone’s commencement speech in a screed against “edgy” comics, but I find myself returning to these words all time. The central task of adulthood, DFW suggests, is to push past the boundaries of self. A lot of people will dismiss or diminish this enterprise with accusations of political correctness or pretentiousness or whatever, but the truth is a more stripped down and simple and fundamental to being human. And I’m pretty sure that a lot of us are failing at it.

It’s natural that we use our own life experience to relate to other people. (You may have observed this essay is itself an act along those lines.) But we should never wield those experiences as some sort of testimony that diminishes, discredits, or replaces some other person’s. The “my story is somehow more real and correct and relevant than your story” response is not just an act of ego and faulty logic; it is a form of sabotage, however well intentioned. This sabotage may be innocuous, like my example of that woman’s self-involved comment on my essay. Or it can be something much, much more serious and damaging, like discrediting a rape victim.

It could be, say, publishing gore so dim that Danzig himself wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot demon dick. It could be dismissing the concerns of readers who clearly and calmly point out the blatant racism and misogyny in the work. (This narrative is not about them, after all. It’s about you and your bravery and your “obligation to take risks.”) It could be capitalizing on that controversy even as you’re dismissing it (as any savvy businessman would), hoping that your customers will buy the thin excuse that it heralds a return to your punk rock ethos, or something?

No need to think about that last part too hard! These wild and zany comics will practically sell themselves to other white men who will not recognize that this “return to your roots” masks a profound lack of imagination.

I think a similar lack of imagination fuels all those contentious comments threads that come up whenever the issue of diversity in comics is broached. Increasingly, I suspect that many, if not most, of those comments can be boiled down to solipsism more than hate. They represent a total failure to see past the self that is then reinforced by people who largely—and by no coincidence—look exactly the same. And to borrow a term from their Pale King, I can scarcely think of anything more square than a bunch of white guys quacking at each other about their own perceived edginess, a self-image that has relied on the same old shit for nearly half a century.

Are you a white man in comics who has received a critique regarding your treatment of a different demographic? Instead of merely reacting, try to step outside yourself.

Imagine for a moment that there are other people in the world whose experiences exist independently from your own. Imagine that those experiences are valid, and that the people reporting them aren’t just confused, or overly sensitive, or stupid, or lying. Imagine yourself as a person who’s capable of listening to what they have to say. This is our real obligation—not just as publishers, or cartoonists, or critics, or readers, but also as humans.

Or, hey, we can play a different game of pretend. Let’s make believe that Gary Groth is doing something noble by building his brand on some bigot’s stupid garbage art.

Up to you!

The Shadow Done Gone

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Alice Randall’s “The Wind Done Gone” is superior to the Margaret Mitchell novel it is based on in many respects. Though Mitchell’s prose is quite good, Randall’s is better , earthier and more poetic at once (“It’s a pissed bed on a cold night to read words on paper saying your name and a price.”) Randall’s economical, short book also avoids Mitchell’s tendency to ramble. But perhaps most surprising in a sequel/parody, Randall’s book makes more sense.

It’s a staple of fan fiction to fill in the blank spaces and plot holes. Still, Randall manages to do so with unusual grace. Much of Mitchell’s drawn out plot and her surprise twists are built on her characters lack of self-knowledge. Rhett is so afraid of giving power to Scarlett that he won’t tell her he loves her, even after they marry — and then, finally, he falls out of love with her, thump. Scarlett, for her part, thinks she loves Ashley and hates Mellie, until Mellie dies and she realizes, no that was all a mistake. Ashley has a similar storyline; he loves Scarlett until he realizes he doesn’t and never did. Mellie thinks Scarlett is her best friend even though Scarlett spends most of her life loathing her. Everyone seems utterly severed from their own emotional life. It strains credulity that one character could be this gob-smackingly dumb; but two? three? four? It starts to seem like carelessness.

In Randall’s book the source of the stupidity isn’t carelessness. It’s racism. The main characters in Gone With the Wind can’t know themselves, because if they knew themselves, they’d have to know about black people, and then their world would collapse. Mitchell’s characters, as seen by Randall, aren’t dumb; they live in a society of secrets and lies, in which not knowing is the basis of their existence. So Rhett doesn’t just fall out of love with Scarlett; rather, he always was in love with her half-sister, Mammy’s daughter Cynara, and his vacillations in love are the result of his painful uncertainty about marrying, or loving, a black woman. Ashley, for his part, never declares for Scarlett not because he’s a dishmop, but because he’s gay; Mellie has his black lover whipped to death at one point. And Scarlett, so set on not knowing herself, is not just stubborn, but has a real secret or two — a lifetime spent refusing to think about the fact that her beloved maid and surrogate mother slept with her father, and a lifetime spent refusing to think about her sister.

You’d think that looking unflinchingly at the racism in Gone With the Wind would make the white characters unsympathetic. In fact, though, Randall’s Scarlett, and Rhett,and Ashley are all significantly less awful than Mitchell’s. In Mitchell’s version, they’re all just horrible people, indecisive, whining, opaque to themselves, and fighting ceaselessly on behalf of slavery because they suck. Randall, in contrast, grants them the context that has deformed them. Rhett’s decision to become a Confederate soldier at the last minute, for example, is seen in GWTW as a triumph, and is therefore unforgivable. In Wind Done Gone, it’s portrayed as a painful lapse; a mark of how much racism touches even a man who, in many respects, has been able and willing to get beyond the prejudices of his society. (“R. fought and tried to die in a Confederate uniform to save this place,” Cynara thinks of her lover, and later husband. “I have tried to forget this, but I remember.”) Scarlett’s blank self-centeredness becomes more understandable when we see her parents’ marriage as loveless, and lack of self-knowledge seems more understandable when we learn her life was in no small part a lie. Her mother was partially black,and concealed her past and her own emotional investments from family, and especially from her daughter. GWTW famously (and counter-intuitively for a romance) concludes in bitterness and the break-up of a marriage; Randall’s is the book with the not exactly traditional, but still happy ending. The Wind Done Gone can manage forgiveness because it is able to talk about what needs to be forgiven; GWTW is filled with too much hate to arrive at love.

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Ruthanna Emrys’ novella “The Litany of Earth is version of “The Wind Done Gone” for evil fish-creatures. Where Randall presents GWTW from the perspective of the slaves and freed blacks, Emrys looks at H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos, particularly his Innsmouth stories, from the perspective of the monsters — and from the perspective of Lovecraft’s own vile racism. The main character, Aphra Marsh, has had much of her family hunted down and killed by the authorities, who also subjected them to brutal medical testing. Innsmouth people are still regularly policed by government spies; the parallels to the U.S. Japanese concentration camps, and to Hitler’s genocide, are drawn explicitly.

In discussions of Lovecraft, I’ve often seen fans argue that the horror in his stories is not linked directly to the racism. Instead, they say, the terror is tied to his atheism — to the apprehension of an infinite, indifferent cosmos, which was not built for humans and does not care about them.

Emrys keeps the cosmic emptiness in her story. Marsh’s people repeat a litany, in which they number the people of earth, from the distant past to the distant future, who have lived and will live and will all pass away. ““After the last race leaves, there will be fire and unremembering emptiness. Where the stories of Earth will survive, none have told us.” But the emptiness and meaninglessness don’t lead to horror. Instead, “In times of hardship or joy, when a child sickened or a fisherman drowned too young for metamorphosis, at the new year and every solstice, the Litany gave us comfort and humility.”

I think that’s right; knowing the universe is alien isn’t a horrible or fearful thing unless you first believe, as Lovecraft did, that the other and the alien are terrifying. The cosmic horror is horror not because the cosmos is intrinsically horrible, but because Lovecraft was racist. The indescribable gibbering darkness, the unnameable monstrosities; they’re indescribable and unnameable for the same reason that Scarlett and Rhett are irritatingly dense — because racism means you’re not allowed to know those other people, over there, which means you also can’t know yourself. Racism poisons Gone With the Wind, and it poisons Lovecraft’s world too. In Lovecraft and Mitchell that’s the shadow that can’t be named, and that neither wind nor war can blow away.

Fabrice Neaud’s Journal and Autobiographical Comics

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

The following post is a barely updated version of a paper I presented at the International Bande Dessinée Society in London in 2007, entitled “Fabrice Neaud’s Face Work.” What drove the paper was two combined hunches, that 1) comics are generally concerned with, and comics are the newest instantiation of, masks as a social phenomenon (presentation of self, social roles, etc.) and 2) Fabrice Neaud’s unique focus on his face, and the faces of others in his autobiographical comics, is essentially a kind of “face work” an artistic effort to portray his “self” through a work on his “face.” I’m not sure how successful my argument was, and it may seem out of date at this point, but I have been thinking about autobiographical comics in more depth lately and I continue to believe that “face work,” while not unique to the comics art form (Proust, for example, was a master of face work while a certain number of comics artists, of course, avoid the face as a focal point), is nonetheless intimately bound to comics as an art form. If this essay seems out of date or irrelevant, I hope, at the very least, that it will encourage readers to become intimate with Fabrice Neaud’s Journal and, eventually, that editors will consider publishing an English translation. It is, from my point of view, one of the greatest works of autobiographical comics that has been published to date, certainly up there with David B’s masterpiece, L’Ascension du Haut-Mal (1996-2003).
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Fabrice Neaud’s autobiographical project, Journal, spans 765 pages total, covering the period of Neaud’s life from February 1992 to July of 1996 with a fifth volume that Neaud finally decided not to publish. What distinguishes this project from other autobiocomix is the fact that Neaud conceives of it as a journal. There is no preconceived unity to the project, no preconceived end. Unique to French BD at the time, Neaud is uncompromising in representing his sexuality. Also, there is a very persistent meta-bd level of discourse throughout the Journal, a constant interrogation of the conditions of representation, which makes Neaud’s work interesting for any scholar interested in the question of autobiocomix.

The title of this conference, The Innovative Form, inspires all manner of questions about the novelty of the medium. To begin with, “what’s new in BD?” that is to say, what new kinds of things are happening in the medium, but also “what’s new about BD?” that is to say, what is the potential of this form? But of course these two questions are dialectically related: we need innovations in the form before the potential of the medium itself can be fully realized. And I think Fabrice Neaud has some interesting points to make on the question posed by the title of this conference. His own discourse about BD both asserts optimistically the potential of the form and maintains a cautious provisionality as he works to reveal the potential of BD to do new things. In the fourth volume of his Journal he writes the following:

Dans le meilleur des cas, ils [les post-modernists] nous feraient même croire que la bande dessinée est le dernier refuge du dessin académique. Je ne me sens pas pour l’heure capable de démontrer le contraire. Mais j’ai bien l’intuition qu’il s’y passe autre chose, une autre façon de percevoir le réel. Une nouvelle manière de hiérarchiser les souvenirs. (Tome IV)

[In the best case scenario, they (post-modernist academics) would have us believe that comics are the last refuge of academic drawing. For the moment, I am not in a position to prove the contrary. But I sense that something else is happening here (in comics, as an art-form), another way of perceiving the real. A new way of classifying and prioritizing memories. (Volume 4).]

Neaud asserts that the potential of the form lies in its capacity to give a new and singular mode of access to the real. In the case of his own Journal, the question of perception of the real is directly connected to the enterprise of autobiographical self-representation, to the “real” of Neaud’s own life. For Neaud the mode of representation must always remain in a kind of dialectic with the “real” of the “represented,” in this case, his life. Or to put it otherwise, the work he does with the constraints and potentialities of this mode of representation is also part and parcel of a certain work on the self. He explains this process in an interview with Jérome Lepeytre:

Ainsi le journal est-il, en plus d’etre un simple témoignage ou compte-rendu d’un vécu, d’une experience, d’anectotes, un travail formel qui interroge les moyens qu’il se donne et le medium qu’il utilise: la bande dessinée: C’est un laboratoire: laboratoire sur le “moi”, laboratoire sur la vie et laboratoire formel allant jusqu’a utiliser des contraintes “oubapiennes” quand j’en ressens la nécessité.”

[Thus my journal, beyond simply being the account of a life lived, or of a personal experience, or of anecdotes, is a formal work that interrogates its own means of representation and its own medium. Comics are a kind of laboratory, a laboratory of the “self,” a laboratory of life, and a formal laboratory that will go to the extreme of using “oubabien” constraints when I feel the need to do so.]

The Journal is subject to a certain kind of work. More to the point, Neaud conceives of the journal as a laboratory. This is a very strategic choice of words here. A laboratory is a place where work and experience (and I’m thinking of the double meaning of the word expérience in French) come together to produce new perceptions of the real. I also want to underline Neaud’s use of the word travail, because this is where my reading of his Journal begins. For Neaud, it is only through the painful process of work, through an intense engagement with representation, that BD will be able to reveal its novelty, its potential to provide any kind of new access to the real. In the same interview, when trying to describe the singularity of his project, (the open-ended nature of a journal as opposed to an autobiography) he uses the English expression, “enfin, c’est un work in progress … les outils qui servent à l’élaboration du projet sont élaborés au fur et à mesure des besoins de ce projet.” He insists on underlining the contingent and improvisational nature of the project, using a language that makes one imagine Neaud’s work on the journal more along the lines of manual labor. Further on, Neaud describes the way in which the project of the journal has altered his way of “taking notes” sur le vif. Whereas he began by drawing from a written journal, supplemented by photos and a sketchbook (“carnet de croquis”), the work of the Journal has brought him to begin “thinking” within the representational constraints of the form. This is how he describes the process:

C’est-à-dire que nous n’y avons plus simplement des croquis accompagnés de notes écrites, mais bien un prédécoupage direct en sequences, quitte à ce que celui-ci soit extremement sommaire et ne se charge que de légender des cases parfois vides. Ce travail de notes me permet au moins de penser en bande dessinée. Il me parait important de souligner ici ce qui est à l’oeuvre: le travail de la bande dessinée.

[In other words, we are no longer dealing with sketches accompanied with written notes, but rather a direct pre-breakdown into sequences, even if it is true that such a pre-breakdown is cursory and is concerned with not much more than the labeling of often empty panels. This work of note-taking allows me, at the very least, to think in comics. It seems important to me to underline what is at stake here: the work of comics.]

For Neaud the work proper to BD, “le travail de la bande dessinée,” is a way of thinking in the form “penser en bande dessinée,” and it is a working towards the realization of the medium’s potential to reveal a different perception of the real. His description of his work method makes it clear: Neaud’s own perception of reality is filtered through the medium – his initial representations of recent memory are already distributed into panels. As he works on the journal, it works on him.

This “work” then happens in the journal across a broad range of representational fields: rhythm, place, word-image relation, register, symbol.

What I would like examine here is Neaud’s work on the face. There is a marked, idiosyncratic, kind of work being done on both the autobiographical face and the face of the love object (called “image” when it is the face of the other) in his Journal. [We might even say that this is the signature of Neaud’s work, this attention given to the face]. It is a kind of work that takes place both on a verbal and visual register. And it is a work that is engaged with the possibility of representing the real of Fabrice Neaud’s life. The face asks, it interrogates, the question of the real. Thierry Groensteen in his preface to vol. I of the Journal refers to Neaud as a face, as “ce visage qui nous interroge” [“this face that questions us”]. What kind of access to the real of the life of Fabrice Neaud does the face of Fabrice Neaud give us? While his more or less realistic (as the French would say, “classique”) style of drawing would seem to promise a relatively straightforward autobiographical representation, the particular attention he gives to his own face, suggests he is concerned with the way the autobiographical face might authenticate self-representation (like a signature), and thus complicates the presumed simplicity of self-representation.

We have from the very first pages of volume I of the Journal a complex discourse on the face. When he writes about his nocturnal sexual encounters in the jardins publiques, he criticizes the safe hypocritical anonymity of the kinds of sexual encounters that take place there, encounters that happens without face. Neaud claims to refuse the anonymity of faces, “je refuse l’anonymat des visages” [“I refuse the anonymity of faces”]. And a few panels later, “je tiens à assumer jusqu’au bout: circuler à visage découvert sans être obligé aux clichés que ceux qui viennent … se sont imposés à eux-même” [“I am committed to claiming my identity to the extreme, to circulating with an exposed face, without being forced to acquiesce to the faces that those who come [to the cruising park] have imposed on themselves”]. Neaud’s discourse on the face is haunted by a metaphorics of masks. As he explains it, while he claims to show his “true” face, in other words to fully assume his homosexuality, he nonetheless also refuses to “wear the mask” of gay clichés. But this is hard to do when faced with an insistent deontologizing heterosexual gaze, a gaze that itself imposes masks on its other. Confronted daily with a heterosexual gaze, he steadfastly refuses to present a legible face – refuses to provide a comfortable or digestible face for the other to have a (faux) ethical encounter with.

The legibility of the homosexual face is presented as a question in the opening pages of the Journal. A sort of “flash back,” the scene takes place in a park, 1975, where the young Fabrice is chased and violently forced to pull his pants down to “show that he’s not a girl.” [And here already at the beginning he is very deliberate in his representation of the face]. This primal scene of the journal returns to haunt another scene that takes place, significantly, also in a park. Discussing his nocturnal wanderings, describing the various types of men who frequent the park in an anthropological (or almost more zoological) manner, Neaud describes a certain type of married man who frequents the park. A set of four panels show a faceless, anonymous man, presumably a married man seeking easy sexual gratification in the safety of his car. When Neaud refuses him, the man insults him, calling him “pédé” [“faggot”]. The insult, is both an interpretation, that is, a reading of the face, and an interpellation, that is, a giving of face. Here he compares these faceless men to his childhood bullies:

Ce sont eux. Ce sont les mêmes qui me traitaient de “tapette” alors qu’ils ne savaient même pas ce que ça voulait dire … tout simplement parce que je n’aimais pas leurs jeux … Ce sont les mêmes qui m’ont fait tant douter quand “tapette” je suis devenu, et que j’ai cru qu’à m’insulter de la sorte … ils l’avaient lu sur mon front.

[“Those are the ones, the same ones who called me a queer even though they didn’t even know what that meant… just because I didn’t like their games… the same who made me doubt myself when I did become queer and who, in insulting me thus, convinced me that they had read it on my forehead”]

[Neaud is haunted by the thought, this childhood conclusion, that his homosexuality is “written on the face.” And here we have a rewriting of the primal scene in which he gets up from of his abject (fetal) position and faces his interpellators returning the insult… But although he able to rewrite the scene and “face” them, his face here is scratched out, de-faced. Why does he do this here? At least one way to read this is as part of a general project to render his face illegible in the face of this interpellation of the heterosexual gaze – here the gaze and the insult are one and the same, by the way]

And this is a general condition of Neaud’s life, both in private and in public, he finds himself fighting constantly against the deontologizing tendencies of the straight people in his milieu. Even his “liberal,” non-homophobic friends expect Neaud’s work to “reveal” a certain truth about homosexuality (the word dévoiler (reveal, unveil) is used a lot in relationship to the word pudeur (prudishness) as though only Neaud, the only gay person in the association, must bear the sole burden of confronting societal taboos). His friend and collaborator Loïc Néhou, now the general editor Ego Comme X, suggests that Neaud might tell the story of his “petites ballades nocturnes” [“little nighttime excursions”]. In a rather funny scene that takes place in Journal IV, Neaud depicts a radio interview in which the radio announcer claims that the subject of his journal is “homosexuality.” Neaud responds violently.

“Sinon, faut dire quand meme que ton sujet principal, c’est l’homosexualité. T’as un message à faire passer? // Je n’ai aucun message à faire passer sur l’homosexualité!! Il n’y a plus grand’chose à dire sur l’homosexualité!! Est-ce que Roméo et Juliette a pour sujet principal l’hétérosexualité? NON! … Je parle de mon quotidien … // […] Et mon sujet principal, c’est plutôt … le portrait de mon modele: “Stephane”!

“In any case, your main subject is homosexuality. Do you want to convey a message [to my listeners]?” / “I don’t have any message to convey about homosexuality. There’s nothing left to say about homosexuality!! Is heterosexuality the main subject of Romeo and Juliette? NO!!! I just write about my daily existence… and my primary subject is more precisely that of my model, Stephane.”

So I would suggest that Neaud’s work on the face resists presenting any kind of intelligibly gay subject, and in resisting the imposed “masks” succeeds in presenting a new perception of the real. In effect, all of Neaud’s most intense face work appears in the chapters of his Journal most explicitly concerned with the question of gay identity. His resistance to and cynicism towards the autobiographical signature is finally impossible to separate from his refusal to produce the effect of an intelligible gay identity in his autobiographical Journal.

On a visual level, the face-work occurs in a number of different modalities. I will describe four of those modalities, although there would be many more, and these could and should be further nuanced:

1) The photographic punctum, the “snap” photo effect. Neaud does not hide the fact that he works off of photographs to draw himself and those in his entourage. In fact, in all four volumes of the journal he shows himself photographing those around him. Also at various moments we see him sorting through his archive of slides and printed photographs. In one very memorable panel, he shows himself projecting a slide of his love object. He stands inside of the projection so that his face is distorted, almost monstrously, by the image of his love object’s face projected onto and overlapping with his own. But it is not just through the narrative that we learn about his use of photographs. We can also see it very clearly in his drawing of the face, from his choice of photographs to draw from… Neaud uses a lot of bad, “snap” photography, in which eyes are closed, the face is caught awkwardly in the moment, or made to appear monstrous through unflattering angles, bad lighting, flash, etc.

But why incorporate the photographic into his face work when photography would seem to only reflect the deontologizing gaze of the other? In other words, all of the photos Neaud uses to draw of his own face were taken, that is framed, by others. If Neaud is working to resist the heterosexual gaze, making his face illegible, as I’m claiming here, why use photography? I think the answer lies in the way he uses photography – using it in such a way as to refuse to suture the inhuman eye of the lens. So more than using photography, he marks this use in interesting and even radical ways. By choosing bad, unflattering, snap photos, the autobiographical face is made ugly, not through a process of distortion but on the contrary through the photographic process of representing too faithfully. Making reference to the inhuman eye of the camera lens is one way of resisting the appropriative gaze of the other, because it reveals the extent to which that gaze is subjectivized. It’s like he’s saying “yes, you ultimately frame me, but I can also continue to remind you that you are doing this, that this is not a “natural” process but rather an imposition”. The bad snap shot also highlights the dramatic fleetingness of the moment (rather than “capturing” the moment, the bad snap photograph marks the moment as “past” “dead” already lost… etc. therefore there is no “face” that could be said to transcend time, etc.).

2) Defacement: At various moments throughout the journal, Neaud defaces himself, erasing parts of his face (his mouth or eyes or both), rubbing out his facial features so the face is smudged, scratching it out, or leaving it blank. This is a more “obvious” way of rendering the face illegible and I interpret this particular mode of face work in the vein of a refusal. By defacing the autobiographical face, Neaud is simply saying “no” every time the reader might need or want the attenuation of a face.

3) Displacement, metonymy: Another modality of face-work could be called the displacement of the face. There are a number of scenes in which the rhythm of the panels creates the expectation of a face when we have, appearing in its place, something else, another body part, a concrete object, a blank panel, sometimes enacting a complete shift of representational orders (like going from faces to mathematical formulas, which occurs in a few panels)… The use of other parts of the body – such as the back of the head or of a hand, or in one case a stomach –where his face is expected.

4) Mask, prosopopeia: the trope of the mask (highly specific to the form and history of comics) in Neaud’s Journal includes his use of caricature, borrowings of representational modes (such as that of Francis Bacon), and his self-consciously recycled repertoire of facial gestures. As much as he claims to “circuler à visage découvert” [“circulate with an exposed face”] he also reminds the reader that there is a process of “masking” that happens in the writing of the journal (a kind of medieval idea, masking in order to unmask, in order to show the true self … this could be said in a way to be the most important aspect to his process of self-representation … and also points to something specific about bande dessinée, that if there were a master trope of bd, it might be said to be prosopopeia, the trope of the mask, the talking mask.)

Rather than concluding, I’d like to gesture towards a more critical reading of Neaud [more critical of Neaud, I mean] that would have to do with a different kind of face-work — his work on the faces of others, and more specifically the faces of his love objects (namely Stéphane and Doumé). Recall the radio interview, when Neaud angrily denies that the subject of his journal is homosexuality, he suggests instead that the true subject is more likely his love-object, or as he puts it “Et mon sujet principal, c’est plutôt … le portrait de mon modèle: “Stephane”! [this is in reference to volume one]. I think his use of the word “portrait” (which implies the representation of a face) is significant here. I suspect that his work on face of the other ultimately comes to obscure his work on the autobiographical face. On a purely visual level, his work on the face of the love object (esp. in vols 1 and 3) is most elaborate. He works more on the face of the other. Both on the visual and verbal levels. He deflects the deontologizing gaze of the other by intensifying (and justifying) his own.
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I’m sorry to recycle old work but I also hope that there might be some useful nuggets for those interested in autobiographical comics who might not have access to the franco-belgian tradition.

Microcombobulated at SPX

Posted on September 26, 2014 by James Romberger

When I first came to live in New York City in the early 1980s, I worked for a while as a low-paid xerox temp at the World Trade Center. It wasn’t a job I loved. The WTC elevators were unnerving, the vertiginous stairwells even worse and both towers swayed perceptibly in the wind—and I wasn’t overly thrilled with my fellow laborers, at least not with the male “suits” who tended to elbow past the female workers to direct me to do their copy orders first. But in my off-time, I managed to do a little surreptitious production, of several street posters for bands and of art that would find its home in my roommate Seth’s then-new political comics zine World War 3 Illustrated—and also to print a few minicomics (well, I didn’t call them that, but that is what they were), which I consigned to St. Mark’s Comics for a dollar or two. I was eventually fired for serving secretaries before executives and after the WTC blew up the first time, I never went near the place again. That was the end of minicomics for me for some years.

A few weekends ago, I roadtripped with several cartoonists to Bethesda, Maryland for the Small Press Expo (SPX). Besides my usual occupation of Tom Kaczynski’s Uncivilized Books table to flog the ebbing supply of my collaboration with my son Crosby, Post York, I was there to debut my minicomic called “Daddy” written by the very, very scary Josh Simmons and published in two colors by Oily Comics. Also, I wanted to be present for the premiere of the print magazine Study Group #3D, for which I contributed a way-too-personally revealing essay/comics adaptation of a William Burroughs piece, a project that had its genesis in an aborted posting for this site. And these things I did do.

SPX resembles the MOCCA Festival and Comic Arts Brooklyn in that like them, it is bereft of the fetishistic superheroes that taint the American mainstream comics industry and also of the Hollywood movies, wrestlers and porn stars that tend to drown out comics at mainstream ComicCons. SPX and other alternative/literary comics gatherings are comprised of people who do comics apparently for the sheer love of the artform rather than to advance obviously mercantile impulses. A significant percentage of the audience at these shows is comprised of the vendors, who patronize each other and form mutual support networks. A good part of the product of these shows are minicomics, quite small xeroxed or offset pamphlets much like the ones I made at the WTC, but often printed on a copier called a risograph which allows for multiple colors. Occasionally, these budding talents will print a comic book “floppy” in full color on slick paper just like the slick output of DC, Marvel or Image, but the effect of alt/lit concept in mainstream drag can be disconcerting. As well, many publishers seem to do well with small prints, limited edition silkscreen booklets and also, many surprisingly young artists have completed graphic novels in a variety of styles, genres and formats.

Lord knows that I held back from long-form efforts for many years—I preferred to hone my skills in short stories. However, publishers balk at anthologies these days. “They don’t sell” is the mantra they chant, despite a comics history that includes such anthology “failures” as decades of romance, war and horror comics at many publishers, all of E.C.’s output including Mad, Warren’s Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, Zap and other underground titles, Heavy Metal, Weirdo, Raw, MOME, Kramer’s Ergot, etc…in other words, many publications that not only sold well for extended runs, but moved the artform ahead. So people are expected to labor for years in isolation (since the default mode in the alternative is for cartoonists to work solo as auteurs) to make 100-page-plus books, for which they have few sounding boards and little or no income in the process.

At any rate, after an period spent in the mainstream in which I drew a few long books but under restrictive circumstances and unhappy with the results, I have forsaken page rates to regain control over my work. In order to immerse oneself in this brave new world of long or short literate art comics for the small press, one needs to frequent shows like SPX, and of course being who I am, I feel the need to share the details with everyone. And so, I present the following set of minireviews of minicomics and books, which represent but a fraction of what I came back with from my trip to Bethesda.
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It Never Happened Again: two stories by Sam Alden
Uncivilized Books $11.99

I didn’t buy the book by this young cartoonist that won the Ignatz award at the show, Wicked Chicken Queen from Retrofit, but I got two of his earlier efforts, Haunter from Study Group and It Never Happened Again from Uncivilized Books. Both books have an improvisational feel; the bright yet moody watercolors of Haunter carry a large part of the impact of the narrative and the sweet and loose-appearing, but apparently lightboxed, pencil drawings of It Never Happened Again provide atmospheric effects that enhance the delicacy of Alden’s stories.
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Houses of the Holy by Caitlan Skaalrud
Uncivilized Books $6.00

This mini is made up of a series of full-page, nicely rendered surreal drawings accompanied by poetic snatches of text and punctuated by regularly-paced numbered panels. They tell an oblique narrative that despite its title, doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Led Zeppelin. It is a dark fever dream, sort of on the order of The Cage, Martin Vaughn-James’s nightmarish masterwork that was recently reissued by Coach House Books. Tom K tells me that the artist of Houses of the Holy was an outstanding student of his at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and that this is an excerpt from a much longer work that Skaalrud has in process. Uncivilized Books will publish it upon completion and I will be anticipating it.
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Reptile Museum by Cody Pickrodt
RayRay Books #2: $4.00 #4: $2.00

Cody Pickrodt’s post-apocalyptic saga Reptile Museum reflects the artist’s knowledge of martial arts and his effective storytelling is comprised of pages that take the form of fluid series of free-hanging vignettes. The precise lines and rubbery high-speed physicality of Cody’s comics remind me of nothing so much as the frenetic crime stories of the tragic Plastic Man creator Jack Cole.
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Eye Sees Eye by Kate Lacour
self-published $8.00

One of several people who felt the need to inform me of how fucked-up they found “Daddy” to be (I’m totally aware of this and in fact, it is why one would work with Josh Simmons!), this artist came to the Oily table to eyeball me and give me a creepy body-revulsion pamphlet called Hole/Human. Later I passed by her table and examined this book. I didn’t buy it, but it has stuck in my head enough to include it here because it reveals Lacour to be quite accomplished; her anatomical renderings are striking.
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Little Tommy Lost by Cole Closser
Koyama Press $15.00

I got a copy of this at SPX, but I had perused it earlier this year when I was an Eisner judge. It ended up as a nominee and deservedly so: Little Tommy Lost replicates the look and tone of clippings of a daily/Sunday strip from the late 1930s quite beautifully. The story of abused urchins does seem as if it might well have been someone’s grampa’s favorite serial strip, now lovingly preserved for posterity.
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Jesus Christ, Jared! by Rainy
self published $10.00

This comic is an example of slick printing applied to alternative content to odd effect, but the cover is a compelling use of Photoshop. Of course I am known to be not much of a fan of digital color; still, if it must be done, let it be used to render tears in such an extremely visceral way! The comic is a highly emotional reaction to the persecution of Middle American gay youth by fundamentalist Christians. It is disconcerting to see teenagers who are drawn to look otherwise hip ostracizing the protagonist for furthering the “gay agenda.” This also reflects a phenomena that I saw at SPX that I hadn’t noted at previous comics events: a preponderance of overtly LGBT participants who are finally welcomed to this most intimate and personal of mediums. Rainy and her also talented partner F. Lee positively glowed at their table. SPX’s aura of inclusivity was extended when later, the Ignatz awards ceremony was officiated by a host in drag.
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Fuff #9 by Jeffrey Lewis
self published $2.50

I first met Jeffrey Lewis in the early 2000s, when he would visit my partner Marguerite Van Cook and I in our old studio in our building’s basement, a refuge that we lost when our landlord freaked out after 9/11 and decided that restaurants were preferable tenants. Even then, Jeffrey’s work had a fully developed sense of place and he would draw some of the most carefully-rendered buildings in comics. In the time since, Jeffrey has stayed the course to produce one of the last standing alt floppy comic books Fuff, while simultaneously pursuing a healthy career in music with his band The Jrams. His strong grasp of the urban landscape is on display, as well as an acute ability for self-caricature, as in the current issue wherein he engages in pitched discourse with his drawing table and imparts the complexities of his love life, in the grand tradition of revelatory alternative autobiographics.
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It Will All Hurt #2 by Farel Dalrymple
Study Group Comics $8.00

Farel Dalrymple was selling the original art for his First Second book The Wrenchies at SPX and they are very pretty efforts indeed, complete in ink and watercolor. It Will All Hurt is a floppy edition of his ongoing webcomic at Zack Soto’s studygroupcomics.com, also executed in watercolors, but with a very extemporaneous storyline. Farel also did the art for a few of the most effective issues of Brandon Graham’s version of the Rob Liefeld Image Comics title Prophet, or at least I found them so; my feeling is that kids would totally love to pour over these comics again and again, each time finding new details in the densely packed pages.
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Titus and the Cyber Sun by Lale Westvind
self published $7.00

I’m beginning to see other young alternative cartoonists who, like Dalrymple, are not afraid to use the trappings of science fiction and fantasy, as can be seen in the success of Prophet and other genre-ish efforts. The more recent books of Lale Westvind are in color; those brought to my mind something of the psychedelia of Victor Moscoso, but I was mainly drawn to her black and white comic Titus and the Cyber Sun, which in its ornate stipplings is reminiscent of the French cartoonists of Metal Hurlant and the underground works of the seminal graphic novelist George Metzger.
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Captain Victory #2 by Joe Casey, Nathan Fox, Michel Fiffe and Brad Simpson
Dynamite $3.99

This isn’t a minicomic or even alternative per se, but it is a continuation of a title begun by Jack Kirby in the early 1980s for a fledgling publisher, Pacific Comics—-that just as I was making my little minicomics at the WTC, literally began the direct market in comics that led to the scene I am describing here—and Captain Victory was the final significant expression by that great cartoonist and brilliant founder of so many comics concepts, as I wrote on this site here. An earlier revamp of the title by Dynamite appeared a few years ago, but it was a cheesy regurgitation of Kirby overwhelmed by what I would term “rainbow unicorn barf” art by Alex Ross and others. This slick new version also seems a rehash of Kirby’s ideas, but the art this time out is done in a vigorously explosive fashion by SVA illustration czar Nathan Fox, working in tandem with some of the alt/lit scene’s more adventure-comics-oriented talents such as Jim Rugg, Ulises Farinas and (pictured) Michel Fiffe, maker of the popular sci-fi series Copra.
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Middle School Missy by Daryl Seitchik
? $3.00

I’ve found Daryl’s Oily Comics work to be very amusing and well-drawn; this particular issue of her title Missy doesn’t name its publisher, but it manages the neat trick of being both slick and a minicomic at once! I wouldn’t be surprised to see her rolling in bucks like Scrooge McDuck after Missy becomes one of those edgy, not-really-for-kids animated shows on TV at some point.
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Comics Workbook #5
Comics Workbook $1.00

For five bucks, I was able to buy all five issues of this fascinating interview zine, which incidentally resembles my only other self-published effort, the xeroxed zine Comic Art Forum from the early 2000s that I produced with Marguerite. Comics Workbook is a by-product of Frank Santoro’s comics-making classes. The various issues include conversations with Sam Alden, Dash Shaw, Lala Albert and others as well as original comics by Derik Badman, Sarah Horrocks and more, plus articles and reviews by Warren Craghead, Nicole Rudick and the list goes on. In particular, I enjoyed Zach Mason’s exchange with “Ladydrawers” Melissa Mendes and Anne Elizabeth Moore about nonfictional activist comics. I also appreciate Melissa’s poignant Oily production Joey, which details a parental disruption and its effect on the children involved; the art is finished in watercolors and the book looks to be printed by color laserjet, pressing the limits of the minicomic format.
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The Tiny Report: Micro-Press Yearbook 2013 by Robyn Chapman
Paper Rocket $3.00

Unfortunately, I missed all of the panels at SPX and I especially regret not seeing artist and Paper Rocket publisher Robyn Chapman’s presentation about micropublishing, but her Tiny Report (cover above by Chuck Forsman) provides a well-organized orientation to the world of small press comics and independent publishing. Robyn rode back to NYC with us and so I was able to quiz her on the way about what is perhaps the most serious issue facing micropublishers today: distribution. Diamond distributes most mainstream comics, but they refuse to carry a lot of smaller publishers’ books, which makes their stranglehold on the business look monopolistic. In NYC, for instance, it seems that in Manhattan, minicomics and other products of the alt/lit scene are only carried by Forbidden Planet, Jim Hanley’s Universe and Carmine Street Comics and in Brooklyn, only Desert Island and Bergen Street Comics. Those are distributed mostly by the apparently overextended Tony Shenton. It sure looks from here like there is a void to be filled by some enterprising distributor, given the vitality of the micropublishing scene.

Some of the biggest mainstream comics publishers do not use Diamond for bookstore distribution of their graphic novels and collections; for instance, both DC Comics and Dark Horse have deals with Random House. More recently, the book trade distributor Consortium Books has been placing the graphic novels of alt/lit publishers Uncivilized Books and Koyama Press in major book retailers around the country—and the word is that the British artcomics imprint NoBrow and Françoise Mouly’s Toon Books have now joined with Consortium, which ups the ante somewhat.
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Do You Teach Banned Comics?

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Qiana Whitted

Lynda Barry (2008)

Earlier this year I was asked to lead a workshop on comic books for 4^th and 5^th graders. I had organized activities like this for kids in the past, but never for a group quite this young. So I trimmed a few points in my presentation notes about comics history and highlighted examples of how the art form is used to tell different kinds of stories. I simplified the drawing exercises and group activities in order to encourage the students to make comics of their own.

While I was preparing for the workshop, news broke that that South Carolina House Ways and Means Committee had approved budget cuts against the College of Charleston that would effectively penalize the school for assigning Alison Bechdel’s comics memoir, Fun Home, for their freshman reading program. The state representative that proposed the bill claimed that the comic’s depiction of homosexuality “could be considered pornography” and that the college’s selection was tantamount to “pushing a social agenda.” Shocked and outraged by this move, I complained to friends and colleagues. But I also looked again at the packet of course materials I had prepared for the elementary school students in my comics workshop. Along with a new Adventure Time comic, I had included excerpts from Krazy Kat, Astonishing X-Men, American Splendor and a short comic by Lynda Barry. It was this last one that began to worry me.

Barry reflects upon the self-doubt and judgment that can paralyze creative expression in “Two Questions” from her 2008 collection, What It Is. She recalls the playfulness and experimental energy of her own childhood drawings, drained by the onslaught of those two questions: “Is this good?” and “Does this suck?” The doodles, vines, and swirls of text that surround Barry in the four-page comic make her internal conflict visible in a way that beautifully illustrates the interplay of the word and image. But reading it again, I became concerned about how the vernacular phrase “Does this suck?” would be received. I worried, too, about the moment when Barry’s describes the monstrous manifestation of her insecurity as a pimp that says, “I don’t steal nothing from the girl except her mind!” Would I be prepared to address these references and if asked, to explain the sexual connotations that shaped their meaning? What might their parents think? Or the South Carolina state legislature? Would I allow my own kids to read this comic?

As it turned out, the workshop was incredibly successful. The kids were enthusiastic and full of ideas, excited mostly about superhero comics and anime, but open to learning about other genres too. During the first break one started talking about The Walking Dead. Other kids sat up in their chairs and nodded in agreement. I was stunned by how many knew (or claimed to know) the comic and the TV series. Soon they were reeling off their favorite characters in comics. Deadpool was a huge hit, along with the Dark Knight (the movie). A couple had read Watchmen. But some of these comics are incredibly violent, I teased – do your parents know you’re reading this? The students nodded and shrugged, although there were a few guilty smiles.

By the end of our day together, it became clear to me that these 4^th and 5^th graders had been handling more mature material than I could have ever imagined. They negotiated the complexities of the page impressively too. We had fun playing around with interpretations of aesthetic and formal elements in our readings of comics. I realized that Barry’s “Two Questions” would not be too much of a challenge for this group — that is, if I had let them read it. I had taken the story out of the course packet at the last minute and told myself that I would find something better. I never did.

The Walking Dead

Comics and graphic novels are the focus of this year’s Banned Books Week, an initiative supported by organizations such as the American Library Association and Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to celebrate the freedom to read by calling attention to titles that are being challenged in schools and libraries across the country. That Jeff Smith’s Bone, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Craig Thompson’s Blankets, and other comics by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, and Howard Cruse have been targeted may come as little surprise to comic book readers and critics. Often the issue of age-appropriateness is the central question for the complaints against the violence, sexuality, or cultural conflict depicted in these titles. I’ve had the opportunity to teach many of the comics that have been challenged over the years in my university classes where I try to approach controversial material as a source for an enriching exchange of ideas and to consider how discomfort can enable deeper inquiry into the world we all share.

But when I had the chance to put these ideals into action with a younger audience through “Two Questions,” I made a different, safer choice. It felt all too complicated, especially since I was dealing with elementary school students and their parents in a volatile political moment. I didn’t want to invite unnecessary scrutiny or cause problems for the program director that asked me to teach the workshop. My excuses all sounded reasonable at the time. The proposal to defund the College of Charleston’s first year reading program did not succeed in its original form, but I had reacted as if it had. Now I feel more than ever that I cheated the students by censoring my own reading list. Does this suck? Yes. Yes, it does.

The horrible irony about all this is that creative freedom is exactly what Barry’s comic is about. Her images speak directly to the risks we don’t take and the limits we place on ourselves out of fear. Ultimately the comic celebrates the courage to make mistakes, to create even when you don’t have answers to the two questions at the ready: “To be able to stand not knowing long enough to let something alive take shape! Without the two questions so much is possible.” It would have been a terrific lesson for those kids, but now I guess it’s turned into a different kind of learning experience for me.

So in honor of Banned Books Week, I’m asking about your encounters with banned or challenged comics. Are there controversial comics that you have chosen not to read or share with others? If you’re an instructor, how do you assess the risks and rewards of using this material in the classroom? How do your students respond? And while you’re thinking: read Lynda Barry’s “Two Questions” here.

How to Read Hilda

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

(with apologies to Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart)

Luke Pearson’s Hilda series seems to have fallen into that strange fault line lying between comics elitism and wide commercial acceptance. The comics series’ wholesome embrace by the mainstream press seems to have been met by a less than commensurate response by comics critics in particular; this despite an Eisner award and the occasional short but glowing review by the specialty press.

The attractions of the Hilda series are quite easily surmised. There is the clever knitting together of various northern European traditions, the artist’s increasing competency with page composition, his good ear for simple but humorous dialogue, his pleasing character designs, and his consistent and attractive line which has achieved a fine flowering in The Bird Parade and The Black Hound.

Reviewers have found it useful to compare Pearson’s work to that of Tove Jansson, Jonathan Swift (with regards Hilda and the Midnight Giant) and, more often, Hayao Miyazaki. This is understandable considering the independence and confidence of his heroine, her love of nature, her devoted pet (Twig), and her navigation of a mythical Nordic landscape (which might be compared with Miyazaki’s work on Spirited Away). One presumes that the series also owes some debt to the work of Bill Watterson in its formation of an all-consuming world of uninhibited fantasy, as well as the central relationship between parent and child (though I feel it is no accident that Hilda is being brought up by a single parent). Hobbes in Pearson’s creation is a series of not so imaginary friends crawling out of the wood work. In fact, at one point, Hilda is shown to be delighted at the possibility that the invisible voice in her head could be an imaginary friend (it is actually an elf).

Suggestions that Pearson’s series has nothing to offer adults should not be entirely glossed over. There is every reason to believe that the classics of children literature offer something tangible to adults reading them (written as they are by grown ups); even if we might be tempted to think this an illusion brought on by melancholic nostalgia. As with many children’s books, there is an overarching sense of morality in Pearson’s comics, sometimes overt but frequently more subtle and veiled. The former instance can be seen in various passages from Hilda and The Bird Parade where Hilda consistently resists pressure from her peers to commit acts of nuisance and finally of violence. There is also a gentle study of prejudice in the form of Hilda’s friend, the Wood Man, who is greeted initially with indignation at his domestic intrusions until he helps her find her way back home when she is lost in a deep forest.

Pearson’s more clandestine evocations can be most clearly seen in the second book in the series, Hilda and The Midnight Giant.

The cover to The Midnight Giant is clearly a reference to Goya’s (or Asensio Julia’s depending on your point of view) The Colossus.

Goya’s work has been appropriated by various cartoonists over the years; sometimes in the service of frank homage—as has been the case with Mike Mignola—and in other instances for reasons somewhat antithetical to Goya’s own politics—as has been the case with Attack on Titan. The exact nature of the giant in Goya’s painting is ambiguous and there have been arguments positioning it as a figure of tyranny, a protector, or a mysterious force.

In The Midnight Giant, Hilda and her mother suddenly come under attack by invisible foes throwing stones through their windows; these acts culminating in an attempt at forced eviction by these minute malcontents. The attack is largely ineffectual and the perpetrators are swiftly chased away with a broom.

Only when Hilda (with the help of an elven sympathiser) signs a large sheaf of papers representing a kind of legal authorization can she finally be allowed to see the entire Elven civilization upon which her home has been built. In tiny Kafkaesque vignettes, Hilda works her way up the chain of command from the town mayor, to the Prime Minister and finally to the Elf King—all of whom repeat the same mantra of lacking hands (literally) to change things and their being “lots of forms” signed in the discharge of this silent war. Summarized in this manner, Pearson’s intentions would appear both bald and facile. In reality they are buried beneath a surface which exudes color, European tradition, adventure, and a comfortably large world of the imagination. Any sense of oppression or linkage between invisibility and intellectual blindness is barely hinted at.

Part of the trick of writing and drawing a children’s comic is that balance between charm and terror. The tone of the Hilda series is such that we feel confident that Hilda and those closest to her will never be in any real danger. Yet there remain moments of contained sadness as when the elven communities predicament is brought home to Hilda and her mother on the penultimate page of The Midnight Giant.

“They haven’t even noticed what they’ve done…”

If there are any concerns about the subjugation of the weak or even the amnesiac qualities of our basic histories (the editor of this site likes to mention James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me), then these are made flesh when the gentle giants step on Hilda’s house and nearly kill her mother. These unseen calamities also form the basis of Pearson’s Everything We Miss (a more adult-oriented work).

Hilda’s inability to see at the start of The Midnight Giant is part of a more extensive meditation on knowledge and perception in Pearson’s comics. Hilda’s next adventure finds her in Trolberg which has been built in the middle of trollish lands with bell towers built at strategic points in order to dissuade violent incursions by trolls. These trolls —a wide-mouthed monstrosity in the tradition of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son—have a notorious reputation for eating humans but are also described as being rather peaceable in book 1 of Hilda (Hildafolk, since retitled Hilda and the Troll).

This leads us to another one of the underlying questions in the Hilda series—the tension between the knowledge and experience of others (as captured in the first book we see Hilda reading, “Trolls and other dangerous creature”) and our own perceptions of reality. I suppose one could also see in this the relationship between hermeneutics and empiricism. In Pearson’s first book, Hilda is convinced of the danger posed by trolls and bells a troll rock which she wants to draw. Much like belling a cat, she expects to be alerted if and when the troll rock stirs to life. As it happens, she falls asleep and wakens to find that the troll rock has disappeared. That night she is woken by the “jingle” of the belled troll who she imagines has come for some form of retribution. Her friend, the wood man, on reading her guide to trolls informs her that the practice of belling is now “commonly accepted to be rather cruel” and that she should “always read the whole book.”

Hilda doesn’t really have the time for this of course. After all, there’s some concern that she’s about to be eaten by a troll—a concern which proves to be totally unfounded since the troll not only leaves her alone but returns her sketch book to her. The guide book has been useful in revealing her mistake but is eventually found to be somewhat faulty (at least in this instance) with regards to the nature of trolls. Hilda encounters a similar situation in Hilda and The Black Hound where cursory knowledge and the fear of otherness lead inevitably to the wrong conclusions concerning the existential threat facing Trolberg (as well as more forced evictions). There is everywhere the suspicion of single points of knowledge and second hand paranoia. One might also wonder why the first inhabitants of Trolberg decided to name the city after their infamous enemies (apart from its descriptive utility of course). I presume for the same but varied reasons the first European settlers decided to name their cities in deference to the languages used by the first Americans.

I should note here that this focus on ignorance, invisibility and careless destruction is so light that the interviewer at Der Tagesspiegel crouches his question concerning the relevance of The Midnight Giant to the situation in modern day Israel with another question concerning “over-interpretation.”

Pearson’s concerns are naturally much greater than this single issue but point to every instance where ignorance creates chaos and ghostly eradication (see for example the way in which Hilda and her mother step through the Elvish town without damage when they are ignorant of its existence).

In so doing, Pearson carves out even more questions concerning the nature of good and evil. For instance, are the actions of Hilda and the giants excused because of their ignorance and obliviousness to those around them, or is there more to our moral calculus then mere intention?

This fascination with the ambiguity of life is carried over to other aspects of the series. Pearson is perhaps most pointed on this issue in Hilda and the Bird Parade. The parade in question has been formed to celebrate the arrival of a big raven seen to be an earthly manifestations of one of the ravens know to sit astride the shoulders of the Odin-like god whose statue lies at the center of Trolberg. The raven makes clear to Hilda that its arrival (or failure to arrive) has no effect whatsoever on the town’s harvests, but that is not what the townsfolk believe. Yet like a priest suffering the superstitions of his parish, the raven has been returning faithfully to the town each year in order to allay their fears. A perfectly fine message for a world supposedly grown tired of the irrational, but a somewhat paradoxical conclusion to reach in a world filled with elves, giants and a raven which can change its size at will. The raven, in fact, finally reveals that it is a thunderbird which hardly seems a great argument against the supernatural.

All this would seem to suggest a world weighed down with uncertainty, conflict and cares; hardly ideal reading material for under 10s. Yet as virtually every review of this series will attest, this is almost never the case. Hilda may make mistakes but she is never cynical; her universe is large and filled with hidden wonder and mystery.

…her family ties are uncorrupted and enduring, the wilderness occasionally frightening but kind. The world we live in can sometimes appear loathsome and hideous, but once we were children.

___________

Further Reading

Chris Mautner interviews Luke Pearson:

Pearson: “I wanted a character who was very positive and who would get caught up in adventures as a result of her own curiosity, empathy or sense of responsibility. The kind of character who has an adventure because she really wants to, not because she’s forced into it…I knew she should be interested in everything and constantly questioning the things that happen to her…The only firm “don’t” I gave myself is that she should be non-violent and that she never resolves anything with a fight.”

“Mautner: Many of the Hilda books thus far, especially the new one, involve creatures and characters that seem menacing or meddlesome at first but turn out to be harmless or beneficial. I was wondering how conscious you were of this theme and how it ties into your desire to have Hilda avoid violence.

Pearson: I’m very conscious of it and worry about how quickly that could (has?) become trite…It’s definitely connected to avoiding violence but also to avoiding antagonists in general…I’m not against depicting violence or anything and it does occur to some extent…I tried to show that the Hound is dangerous; it’s not a misunderstanding or anything. I’m inclined to finish each book on a positive note because they’re standalone stories and everything needs to be resolved in some way. I just don’t want the resolution to ever be Hilda bashing some evil creature’s head in and for that to save the day.”

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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