Category Archives: Voices from the Archive

Voices From the Archive: Prose and Eddie Campbell’s Alec (and also Peanuts)

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So for a change I thought I’d highlight one of my own comments from way back when. This is in response to a piece by Caroline Small talking about the prose in Eddie Campbell’s Alec. Here’s what I said:

Ack! I’m reading along and grooving on Caro tossing around comics and space and time and then I get this [passage by Eddie Campbell] as an example of stellar prose:

“But hey! to cultivate a separate life from the one happening in front of you. There’s a thing to pursue. An inside life, where Fate talks to you, sometimes in the charming tones of a girl singer with old Jazz bands.
Othertimes in a naive wee voice in which all things are still possible.”

And I just want to bang my head against the wall.

I just…to me that’s such romanticized, sub-Beat, stentorian self-dramatizing bosh. If I never, ever, hear anyone reference girl singers in Jazz bands as some sort of ne plus ultra of authentic wonderfulness again, then I will have died only hearing it about fifty billion times too many. And “a naive wee voice in which all things are still possible.” Fucking gag me.

Really, I have a visceral loathing of that passage. It’s slam poetry crap.

And part of what I hate about it is exactly the time slips that Caro describes. Maybe I suffered too much damage from my youthful immersion in contemporary poetry, I dunno…but so many, many ungodly contemporary poems (and maybe not just contemporary, but…) end in this lyrical future tense. And it’s supposed to do exactly what Caro says here:

“This is the “potentiality of being” specific to the artistic mindset: “to cultivate a separate life from the one happening in front of you.” That describes an ecstasy of art, and part of the brilliance of this book is the recognition of that ecstatic potential in the mundane life story.”

The world is cut off from the world and made poetic; the mundane is made lyrical. Or, alternately, you could say that the world is picked up and dumped in the poetry machine and then you turn the crank. And out comes ecstasy, hoorah.

I don’t think there is an artistic mindset. I don’t think there should be. I don’t think artists are priests, who make the world ecstatic through their transcendent quiet inwardness; who cast a glamour on the earth through their numbing recitation of important aesthetic touchstones (girl singers! Krazy Kat!)

I think this quote points to what made this book so unpleasurable for me:

“Solipsism is alluring, but impossible. Art comes from other people, and other art, and from experiences in the world. ”

The thing that interferes with solipsism is that it doesn’t fit with art. You start with the need for art, and that leads you to realize that the world has to be there too. But the problem is…for me, in this book, the world is *always* there for the art. The experiences are all there to be chucked into the poetry machine. That’s what happens to his wife and his baby; new fatherhood gets transmuted into standard-issue poetry tropes. That’s what it’s there for. Which I find both, yes, solipsistic, and also really depressing.

Obviously that’s not what others are getting from this, and
I appreciate that, and I think this essay is lovely, but…man, it makes me like the book even less, not more.

___________

And just because this comment isn’t long enough…and I want to say something positive….I think the discussion of prose is really interesting…but I think that you’re kind of missing out on what Charles Schulz is doing if you’re arguing that he’s using condensed meaning in images as a substitute for prose. I think Peanuts is probably as prose the best-written comic, period — certainly better written than Alec, to my mind, though not as wordy obviously. Better written than Delillo too, by a long shot. Schulz had a really idiosyncratic ear for language and a love for words. Some of his strips are sight gags, but a lot of them would pretty much work without the pictures; they’re about puns and verbal dead ends and misunderstandings and different registers of language. He’s usually thought of as a minimalist because of the drawings obviously; but thinking about your essay, you could also see the sparseness of the drawings as a way to give room for the language; as you say, the drawings become a kind of rhythmic device rather than a meaning making one.

Voices From the Archive: Trina Robbins on Selling Marvel’s Barbie Comics

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Trina posted this comment comment during our Wonder Woman roundtable a while back:

The problem definitely seems to be that the mainstream two do not know how to market to girls and women. Back in the 90s when I was one of the writers on Barbie comics for Marvel, their only advertising was in their own comics. Then, on Barbie’s 30th anniversary, my editor got an agreement with Toy R Us to have various Barbie creators do a one-day signing and appearance in their various stores and of course sell the comics. (The comics had NOT been for sale at those toy stores or at ANY toy stores, only for sale in comic book stores!) So I showed up at our local TRoys R Us and they had a nice display with the comics and a cute throne-like chair for me to sit, and people came in and saw the comics and went “Wow, I never knew there were Barbie comics! And look, they’re only 75 cents! Let’s buy some for our daughter/ neice/ granddaughter, etc.” and the comics sold out! Marvel did NOT follow up and start distributing the comics through toystores, and of course eventually they cancelled the line because it wasn’t selling enough. Makes you want to bang your head against a wall!
Noah, while some books in the Minx line were [perfectly fine, others made me wonder if the editor understood whom she was selling to. The books got edgier and adgier until there was one (I think it was called “Shark Girl”) about a surfer girl who lost her heg to a shark — a potentially great premise — but it included erotically charged scenes of girls in the world’s briefest bikinis, the kind of stuff that parents, if and when they saw the books, would have a fit.

 

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Voices form the Archive: Tucker Stone on 100 Bullets

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Way back when I wrote a post about my disappointment with 100 Bullets. There was a small internet brouhaha. Tucker Stone pitched in with some thoughts on the series in general and the Dave Johnson cover I criticized in particular. Here’s what he said.

You know something? I don’t really like that drawing of Megan on the cover. But I do like the red boxes. They look like something out of Mannix, or a movie poster of the Rat Pack, and considering that I read a good portion of the crew of 100 as a mix of Rat Pack hard men as well as being indebted to the overall weirdness of the Mannix backstory, I think it works within the confines of what the story is. I know you probably saw the cover to the first issue, which I always thought looked like some combination of a Conan movie poster, or the National Lampoon’s Family Vacation poster, where it’s basically a pyramid with Graves ugly mug at the top. Or if you want something more up your alley, it’s looks like a cheap 70’s road flick. Mean guys! Hot ladies shooting stuff! Fuzzy soft focus painting!

Another part of your argument I like–that it’s not good enough that something look better then Ryan Benjamin’s work on Batman & The Outsiders, it should look good independently on its own, and there’s definitely some merit to that idea. At the same time, there’s a limit somewhere in that for me, because it’s easy enough to say “Hey, is this pulp noir is good as Rififi?” and then say “of course not”, but for christsakes, I don’t just want to keep watching Rififi every day anytime I want some pulp noir. Some people might be slow readers or not care, but fuck it: i’ve read all of Jim Thompson’s books, even the terrible ones, and I’ve read as many EC crime comics as I can find, and you know what? I still want some more pulp noir. I want some more that isn’t like something I’ve seen before, and 100 Bullets fills that gap. Hell, some of the complaints I see leveled at the book–like Johanna Draper Carlson’s recent comment about Azzarello’s “love of the metaphor tortured beyond its weight to bear.”–that’s part of what makes the book a fun piece of entertainment. That it does go to these weird dialog extremes, these points where you can’t help but say “god, that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense.” Although I don’t think 100 Bullets (really, anything in Azzarello’s catalog) goes a far as his goofy Deathblow series, a comic I’m an unashamed fan of, I think it definitely does more to expand and experiment with that standard “pulp noir” language then anything else I’ve seen recently. There’s plenty of films that take the appearance, and the structure, of pulp noir, but when it comes time to put words in people’s mouths, it’s either the exactly the same as Double Indemnity or they dump the entire conceit of a false language entirely and everybody talks like–well, like any standard cops and robbers movie. 100 Bullets doesn’t. It doesn’t sound like Jim Thompson, like Ed Brubaker’s Criminal, none of that stuff. That doesn’t make it “The Greatest Comic Book Ever Made,” it doesn’t make it “The Most Mature Tale of Guns and Shit”, it just makes it fucking pulp noir, and it makes for pulp noir that isn’t exactly the same as the stories it’s in love with.

In regards to Risso–you know, I’m not really sure there’s anything to be said about that. A lot of people have said “risso gets better” and that the change in coloring makes the book stronger, and that’s all true, but really: if you didn’t like Risso before, you’re not going to like Risso later. You know what though? Thats. Fucking. Great. The idea that we’re all supposed to get off on the same comic book art is just–it’s fucking tragic and stupid. The idea that we’re all even supposed to RESPECT the same comic art is just as bad.

Voices From the Archive: Charles Hatfield on Why Maus Is Not Glib

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In a post a while back I claimed that Maus was glib. Charles Hatfield refutes me thus:

Noah, ach, this is more of your tendentious, hammer-blunt, idol-toppling perversity at work.

Your method, from my POV, is to work by comparison/contrast to things you esteem, find fault on the basis of those personal points of reference (as in, Spiegelman isn’t Celan), then point out that, besides the much-idolized comic in question, lots of other artists, in other media, other forms, have engaged in the same things — in this case, self-reflexive and metanarrative feints — so that these are, ho hum, hardly new (even though Spiegelman’s way of doing them was decidedly new to comics). Then you elevate the comic’s use of such common devices to a moral failing, as in, Spiegelman is glib. Then, when confronted, you persist in dissing the comic in question as, here you go again, “tiresome,” old hat, and inferior to works in wholly other forms, works whose agendas and burdens and formal affordances are light years away from the comic in question.

FWIW, you’re entirely wrong about Maus being merely glib. This was the tack I took as a reader initially, back in the mid-80s, due to my own initial resistance to work that exploded or ignored the boundaries of comic book culture as I, an ardent fan, understood it. But when I finally read, years later, the completed Maus, I realized that this was a moving, indeed for me deeply affecting, work that used intellectualized conceits and circuitous method to earn, and make the reader earn, a stunning emotional effect. Maus moves many people for a reason, something your dismissive posturing cannot account for.

In hindsight, there’s nothing glib about Maus at all, and you’re condemning it (condemning is not too strong a word) precisely for its use of the comical, its word/image tensions, its aesthetic effects. You’re condemning it for not rising to the ontological heights, or depths, of Celan, for being something other than what your straw argument insists that it must be. You’re faulting its medium-specific complexities as simplicities. In essence, you’re adding your voice to the chorus of shallow ad hominem criticisms based on a dislike of Spiegelman’s persona, the kind of obtuse, tone-deaf criticism seen in, for example, Harvey’s willful misreading of the book in his The Art of the Comic Book.

Spiegelman will always be subject to arguments that he is “glib.” His refusal to tack away from the comical, his refusal to deliver what others expect of a Holocaust account, and his deeply fraught portrayal of his father are bound to rub a few readers raw. But the charge is itself glib, unearned.

Note that Spiegelman never affirms that his portrayal is “real” in any straightforward, uncomplicated sense. Not even his words do this. Attention to the text, the whole text, verbal and visual, reveals that, as Vol. 2 speeds to its end, Maus unpacks layer after layer of hopeful artifice, and ends on a deliberately deceptive note, whereby father and son together fantastically reconstruct the absent mother who, we know full well from earlier chapters, cannot be restored, indeed is the irrevocable and constitutive absence, or loss, around which the book is built. You haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of this layering.

Again, from my POV your considerable writerly gifts are being sabotaged by your crushingly obvious yen for idol-toppling. The way you swing that truncheon of ideological criticism, in predictable and predictably unsympathetic ways, is a stone cold drag. You’d give us much more if you stopped trying to enrage fans and instead applied your needle-sharp intelligence to actually reading the comics with due attention, without trying to make the alleged limitations of the comics into a warrant for swinging that stick.

 

Voices From the Archive: Matt Thorn on Bianca and Other Moto Hagio Stories

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Matt Thorn, the translator and editor of Moto Hagio’s Drunken Dream from Fantagraphics, commented on a number of my posts about that volume. I thought I’d reprint one of his discussions here.

Wow! I just found this today. Sorry to come so late to the party. I’ll respond to your reviews the same way you did to the stories, i.e., as I read them.

I don’t want to argue the merits of the works, because if you don’t like something, you don’t like it, and no amount of exegesis can change that.

But just some factual clarifications. 1977 is the *copyright* date of the first stories, not the year they were published. “Bianca” was published in 1970, when Hagio was 21, but was actually written/drawn a year or two earlier. “Girl on Porch with Puppy” was published in 1971, when Hagio was 22, but this one, too, was actually created a year or two earlier. “Autumn Journey” was also published in 1971.

And now for some cultural/historical background. This was a time, both in Japan and throughout most of the developed world, when youth culture was pretty melodramatic and more than a little self-indulgent. Things that seem clichéd and embarrassing today were seen as “real, man,” and the kids could “grok” it, you dig? Just think about “Easy Rider.” It is worshipped by Baby Boomers as anthem of their generation, but most young people watching it today would probably think, “What the hell are these people doing and why the hell should I care? And what’s with the random redneck drive-by shooting ending?” The Baby Boomer response is, “You had to be there.” Ditto for these stories. Perhaps I should have written a brief introduction to each story in order to provide this sort of context, but it never occurred to me, probably because I’m too close to the work.

As a social scientist (of sorts), this context is interesting to me, and it is a matter of historical fact that these stories were considered to be groundbreaking and fresh in the world of shoujo manga, and were extremely influential. If you’re going to measure them against something, it would be more fair to measure them against 1) other shoujo manga of the day, or 2) English-language romance comics of the same period, keeping in mind that the target audience here was considered to be girls aged 8 to about 15.

On a personal level, I chose these stories not only because Hagio aficionados consider them representative or her work at the time (they are), but because, 1) “Bianca” is just damned pretty to look at, and showcases her technical skills as a young illustrator (if not storyteller), 2) “Girl on Porch with Puppy” captures the kind of quirky, Twilight Zone, sci-fi/fantasy element that was influenced by such male artists as Shinji Nagashima, but which was practically taboo in shoujo manga of the day, and 3) “Autumn Journey” embodies the vaguely-European adolescent boy romance that was influenced by European cinema of the day, and which Hagio went on to develop in more sophisticated ways, in works like “The Heart of Thomas.”

In short, I wanted to represent her whole career, not just collect a bunch of first-rate stories that modern anglophone readers today can easily appreciate. If I had wanted to do that, I would have selected very different stories, and there would probably be none from the first few years of her professional career.

But, hey, at least nobody dies in “Autumn Journey.”

Voices from the Archive: Chris K in Defense of Kirby

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After I wrote a post about my disappointment with Jack Kirby’s run on Jimmy Olsen comics, Chris K wrote a lovely defense of Kirby, which is reprinted below.

I would pretty unhesitatingly call Kirby my favorite comic artist of all time, but I freely admit his limited-to-nil appeal to anybody who hasn’t been completely marinated in his approach.

A lot of the writing on Kirby has a “drunk the Kool Aid” quality about it, and, to some degree, I think that’s kind of unavoidable. If you haven’t already internalized all of the style and eccentricities of Kirby, if you haven’t attuned yourself to his rhythms early and often, if you haven’t adjusted to the fact that his ADD is a feature, not a bug… well, you probably just aren’t going to. If I sat down and really tried hard to articulate what it is I love about Kirby’s work, I could probably come up with something that sounded reasonably convincing on paper to a neophyte, but I strongly doubt it could convince one to actually like Kirby upon reading it.

I don’t disagree with anything you say about the Jimmy Olsen comics; I’m just more forgiving than you, but I’m inclined to be.

You’re absolutely right about the flaws. I was actually just thinking about this the other day, having read the Team Cul-de-Sac “Favorites” zine (hey, I love that Brave and the Bold, too!) and Matt Brady’s review of Mister Miracle #9, which is my favorite Kirby comic,(and one of my favorite comics period) starring my favorite Kirby character… yet paradoxically, Mister Miracle is probably my least favorite Kirby series overall. (Which is to say, it’s pretty good…) It’s mostly because the same syndrome you describe in the Olsens is also present in the MM series, and while I find it charming in Olsen, I think it hurts MM. The premise of the series – “Super Escape Artist” – really needs to have some perfunctory tethering to reality to work, and the flights into Cloudcuckooland undermine it. As a result, I always found myself wanting to like Mr. Miracle’s comic as much as I liked him.

But, that’s the price of admission for Kirby. Pretty much all of his comics really are unsatisfying on a fundamental level – unfinished, poorly sketched out, compromised… I know, I’m making a great case, right? But that’s the appeal for me, seeing Kirby strain against the constraints of the industry, the medium, his own talents — and fail as often as not. His work’s a little capsule of comics at the time when he was working: the personality of the artist pushing back against the formulaic patterns of the artform, win or lose. That’s a big part of why Mr. Miracle is such a resonant character to me. But I get that it’s a lot to buy into for someone wanting to, you know, get a story and shit. But for me, there just aren’t a lot of experiences like this in comics, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

 

Voices from the Archive: L. Nichols on Getting Excited About Comics

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I recently featured Jason Overby’s post on the Concerns of Comics. Jason’s essay prompted a long comments thread. I thought I’d highlight some comments from it by L. Nichols.

First this”

When the people I talk with say ‘this comic had minimal impact on the comics world’ they don’t just mean ‘oh it wasn’t talked about on the 2 or 3 comics blogs i read.’ They are primarily talking about how none of the comics people they talk to in real life are talking about these books. Or, at least not talking about them in the “wow, I’m really excited about this book” sort of way. I feel like this excitement is something that is often missing when I hear conversations (real life, not just the internet) about comics like “Wilson” or “Genesis.”

Maybe this excitement (or lack thereof) is something to think about? Something to talk about? Maybe excitement is the wrong word, because strong feelings against something can also be a big motivation for change, for thought. Maybe it’s just the lack of people demonstrating strong feelings one way or another. A lot of times I feel tired of the comics scene because people just act like they’re too cool to care.

I can’t divorce myself from the creation aspect of things, seeing as that’s what I spend the majority of my time doing. But I know that for me, what I’m excited about either at the time or in my past has a lot of bearing on what I produce. Sometimes it is wanting to explore an idea. Sometimes a technique. Sometimes I am so angry I want to just make something better, something that states my view of things. But strong feelings are the reason I make art and the reason my art changes.

I remember a while back Frank talking about jazz, how he was missing the interplay in the comics world, the building off of each other. Sometimes I feel the same way. Not necessarily that we (as creators) should only play from/with the past, but maybe that we should play more off of each other as peers. Maybe we should talk more about what we’re excited about and how it’s influencing our art, whether it’s in the comics scene or not. Maybe we should not be afraid to say that we disagree something without worrying about stepping on toes.

Maybe if we talk more about our influences, our excitements, our ideas, then we can make a space for comics in the greater sphere of creativity instead of an maintaining the idea of an insular world that is only influenced by itself.

I noted in response that ““If there’d been stronger feelings about the Genesis comic on this blog, we would have had fistfights.” L. Nichols replied:

Sure. But that’s just this blog, one blog, a blog with a history of people who like to get in long arguments about comics. I was more talking about people in real life. What’s the number of times I’ve heard Genesis being mentioned in real life by real life comics artists? I talk to comics people all the time and I’ve heard MAYBE one or two of them talk about Genesis. I’ve heard more non-comics people talking about it than I have any comics people I know!

I was more trying to say that people aren’t excited enough about comics to REACT to them in their work. I mean the type of excitement that wakes you up in the morning, keeps you up at night. The kind of excitement that makes you want to go draw “Exodus.” Or maybe the kind of excitement where you’re SO upset about Genesis that you just have to react some way against it in your own work. Excitement on the creation side of things.