Why do I do this to myself? the Brave & the Bold #33

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Wonder*Woman, Zatanna, and Batgirl

J. Michael Straczynski & Cliff Chang

It looked good on the stand in the Borders, I swear.  Three female superheroes, linked arm in arm, strolling over a bunch of fallen villains (including a monkey with a ray gun!).  How could I go wrong?

Well, to start off with, Wonder Woman makes yellow light explode out a man’s pants, and not in a good way.

First, I couldn’t tell which direction the yellow stream is even supposed to be going.  And what’s with the old duffer’s flying trucker cap?  Isn’t it enough to be disrobing one person per panel with unfortunately pee-yellow light explosions?

Grand Ballroom, this way to the yellow pants!  It’s like a Dr Suess, except not funny.

Anyway.  Zantanna pops by via a mirror and tells Wonder Woman she wants a ladies night out.  No, I’m not kidding.  Eight minutes later we watch Batgirl capture some purse-snatchers.  Purse-snatchers!  The cover promised me monkeys with ray-guns, dammit!

As Batgirl leaves the scene, we get this:

I stared at this page and tried to figure out what the heck is happening.  Finally, I decided that her bike flies between panel 4 and 5, although I don’t know why.  Apparently so we can see Wonder Woman hanging onto the middle of the bike?  I don’t even know.  Where the hell is my armed monkey, dammit?

Zantanna and Wonder Woman convince Batgirl that even supes need to relax or the stress puts them off their game.  They need to go dancing to relax!  I’m not making this up.  By now, I have resigned myself to never seeing the ray-guy monkey and to reading lame jokes about shoes, and in that respect, I am not disappointed.  Alas.

When the get to the club, Batgirl doesn’t dance, because her shoes are too tight, but she doesn’t want them magicked because her dad bought them for her.  Aw.  Or something.  Besides, no one asked her dance!

Whereupon the handsome fella below gets hit in the back of the head with a pink paintball and the action resumes and the monkey appears and–!  But no.  I’m afraid not.

Instead, as you can see, there’s some pathetic hipster dancing with a guy who might as well be wearing gold disco chains.  Blah, blah, blah dancing.  Blah, blah, blah girls eating fries in a diner.  Blah, blah, blah heartwarming talk about Batgirl’s dear old dad.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?  When Wonder Woman starts talking about “her people” the Greeks and how they used oracles as a kind of pretechnology super-computer for getting intel, I just wanted this stupid comic over.  I wasn’t getting my monkey, I wasn’t getting girl-group fighting, I got a comic book with family scrapbooking and a cheap plot twist at the end that made me roll my eyes.  You know it’s bad when the most interesting thing in the comic is an ad that appears to be for puffer-fish.

Monthly Stumblings # 1: Pierre Duba

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 Racines (roots) by Pierre Duba

Sometimes I mumble an inner “Wow!”… It happens when I stumble upon a book that I find great. It’s quite possible too that, upon rereading, months or years later, I also say to myself: “How could I like this stuff so much?!”

The thing is that we need the right mood, the right brain wave connection to the work in order to truly like it. That, needless to say, is highly subjective and unconveyable. If our past selves can’t agree with our present selves, how can we (the journalist critics and reviewers) agree with people (the readers) whom we have never met?

There’s only one answer for that rhetorical question: the critics are always preaching to the already converted. Critics explain, analyse, synthesize, extrapolate, digress, etc… These are intellectual operations that have nothing whatsoever to do with love. Critics dissect and people (them included, I suppose, even if opinion is divided on the subject) enjoy living, breathing things, not corpses, as it were…

That being said criticism may also be very enjoyable. Conversely to the proof at hand (namely, this foreign’s poor attempt at writing in English) it can be very well written. It can also give the readers some food for thought after their consumers’ experience. (I don’t really like the word “consumer,” but it was too awkward to write: reader/viewer/listener… etc… you get the picture…)

In fact, the critic begins by simply enjoying the work, I suppose… What twisted mind picks up the scalpel after love? That’s what we do folks, but don’t be too harsh passing judgment on the judges: we do it because we are a curious lot (we are like children opening up their favorite toy); plus, we may unbury hidden treasures: discover highly ingenious mechanisms, work with the artist to reflect on the human condition, etc…

The title of this monthly column is too ambitious? Am I expecting to stumble on a comics masterpiece every month? Not really, true greatness (even if perceived in a subjective way) is rare. I will write about some “Hmmms…” instead of some “Wows!” most of the time, I guess… (I will also use the title to excuse myself: what do you expect? I’m stumbling here!)

For my first column I chose an author that I feel, since my TCJ’s messboard days, I’ve unwarrantedly neglected: UK born, French comics artist Pierre Duba. Here’s what I said in my blog’s first post:

It was February 24, 2004, 08:27 AM, on the Comics Journal Messboard. I’m not sure if this was the first time that I listed these comics there (probably not), but that’s what I did in that particular occasion. If I remember correctly (unfortunately I didn’t write a crib sheet at the time) I did previously post what I now call “my canon” because I was fed up with the accusation of not liking comics at all because I found children’s comics (and I do like Carl Barks’ oeuvre) somewhat wanting (melodrama and manichaeism in particular bother me plenty).”

A list followed, but I vaguely remember saying something like: I could add a couple more names and, then, I cited Pierre Duba.
Duba’s last book is titled Racines (6 pieds sous terre, 2010), but instead of trying an interpretation I will follow Susan Sontag’s advice and I will try what I say above is impossible to do (“unconveyable”). As Sontag advices in Against Interpretation I’ll try an erotics of art instead of a hermeneutics.

 

To truly experience the above page we need it to be just that: the original paper page (material aspects are the basis for a sensuous experience). Here, on a screen, it lacks the glossiness of the paper (and it is glossy) . Even touch and smell are an important part of the process (I wonder if the internet and ebooks are going to establish the same relation with books as repros in art books established with real paintings and sculptures: it all comes down to a reduction of experience, substitutions of the real things by simulacra). This page is very appealing because it achieves the feeling which psychoanalyst Marion Milner called a close relationship with objects. It does that using three devices: 1) the black gutters (I miss Chester Brown’s stories, but I also miss his black, large, gutters) which “compress” space and unite as much, if not more, as they divide; 2) the panels lack a clear distinction between background and foreground giving us a closeness with whatever is represented (blood, methinks); 3) moduled forms that tend to be viewed as texture (en masse) rather than as individual shapes. The visual rhythm is also very appealing: we’re going along with the hypnotic movement marvelously and smoothly flowing from panel to panel. The colors’ muted contrast is also an important part of the whole effect.

 

In this page a certain creepiness appears (Racines is a bit creepy, to tell you the truth). The hands morph into the roots of the title. We’re still close, and I don’t need to repeat what I said above, but closeness isn’t always a good feeling.

 

This page is here because of the black and blue contrast. The foreground has holes that let us see a few steps, the doll, and a rabbit. (What’s the deal with Pierre Duba and rabbits, anyway?). But I’m falling into interpretation again. I told you that this was an impossible task…

Pierre Duba’s pages function better as double-page spreads, as you can see here.

Duba explains himself.

Pierre Duba’s site.

Monster and Paragon

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I just finished the first volume of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster, and that’ll probably be the last one I read. Partly, I’m annoyed by the conspicuous and painful contrivances — I mean, how many times can simultaneous brain surgeries on a poor person and a rich person be required in the same German city in the same week, anyway?

But while the melodrama is over-determined, the real problem is that the book is glib in other ways. The point of the first volume is the various moral dilemmas faced by Dr. Kenzo Tenma, a amazingly accomplished Japanese brain surgeon living and working in Germany. The stumbling block is that the book never really contemplates for an instant presenting Tenma as anything but a moral paragon, which rather undercuts the efficacy of said dilemmas. Really, Tenma’s big bad sins in the first volume are to (a) be mildly ambitious, and (b) to spout off out loud to an unconscious person about how he’d like to kill the folks who wrecked his career and life. Those are barely even sins, and the rest of the time we see him running himself to exhaustion to save lives, neglecting his own career advancement and romantic life, and generally being a paragon of virtue.

Having such a strong moral beacon in the central role pretty much vitiates the ethical questions that appear to be the heart of the book. In Middlemarch, as a contrast, the doctor, Lydgate, is both really likable, morally upright — and actually swayed by money and romance to do some fairly awful things. Because Lydgate is a flawed human being, his choices are much more involving; the fact that he occasionally falls makes his occasional triumphs — and those of others — have an actual weight and beauty.

Tenma, on the other hand, comes across as a hollow prig; the dilemmas he faces have to be ridiculously contrived, because he simply, and improbably, isn’t subject to normal human failings. The result is sententious and irritatingly stupid; every demonstration of Tenma’s nobility just makes me want to say, “give me a fucking break.”

Adding to the annoyance is a fairly strong suspicion that part of the point of the manga is to allow the Japanese to pat themselves on the back for their purity and general moral superiority. The giant noses of all the Caucasians are fun to look at, but the standard noble-Japanese-struggling-to-retain-his-purity-in-corrupt-old-Europe thing is a lot less enjoyable. Nor am I all that taken with the hoary idea that serial killers have something important to tell us about the human condition/human morality/our inner selves. I’ve seen that film, thank you, and as far as I”m concerned Kevin Spacey and Anthony Hopkins can be sealed in a concrete container and dropped in the Mariana Trench where they can overact at each other and various species of deep-sea fish for all eternity.

I know lots of folks have liked Monster, and it’s certainly possible that things get less stupid at some point later in the series. And the art is quietly skillful in a Tezuka vein. But I think I’d much rather pursue the trashier Gantz, which manages to be a lot more thoughtful and truthful about morality by the simple expedient of not idolizing its central characters.

Utilitarian Review 5/22/10

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On HU

Kinukitty started her monthly column by pointing at KISS lyrics and laughing.

I interviewed critic Tom Spurgeon about comics and criticism. In comments, he tells me what he really thinks of me. It’s fairly unpleasant.

Richard Cook contemplates the Ant-Man, She-Hulk, and Cable films on the way in 2013.

Art critic Bert Stabler does a guest post in which he discusses bodies, essentialism, and feminist performance art.

I review Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle.

And I talk about racism in my favorite terrifying Tintin dream sequence.

Also, we’re going to be using captcha words for comments from now on in order to try to cut down on the crazed deluge of spam. You can avoid having to type in random characters when you comment by signing up in the upper right corner of the sight.

Oh; and I’ve uploaded a classic Scandinavian black metal mix.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I talk to Bert Stabler about Kant and God and other stuff over at his blog.

Bert: A God that pursues us, that moves in and out of us, is not an abstract principle of wisdom, nor a form of primal electromagnetism, but something else that contains elements of both of those things. Our wanting and changing and experiencing and relating are the things that are most relevant to God and to faith. I’m not totally satisfied with the way Kant addresses this, but he certainly tries, and for faith after the death of God, that’s an important start.

I review a passel of reissues of Johnny Cash’s 70s albums over at Madeloud.

Still, the real standout here is the title track. Built around an irresistible banjo hook, swirling swings, and a cheesy but somehow still aching horn riff, the lyrics neatly invert the standard gotta-ramble-baby trope, as Cash laments the fact that his woman won’t stay with him. “I know she needs me about as much as I need someone else. Which I don’t,/ And I swear some day I’ll up and leave myself. Which I won’t,” he sings, with plainspoken helplessness. Cash has always had an admirable willingness to look like a fool, and here the overblown, foofy production seems to emphasize his emasculation. “I know the only reason that she ever has to leave me is she wants to.” The song is, like unequal love, both ridiculous and heartbreaking.

Other Links

This is one of my favorite of Tom Crippen’s reviews so far.

Robert Boyd has some interesting speculations about the impace of criticism on theater productions embedded in an (also interesting) discussion of Jules Feiffer.

New Comments Protocol

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In an effort to stem the rabid tide of spam flowing into the blog, we’re going to try to fiddle with the comment protocol a little. My understanding is, if you aren’t logged into the site, you will now have to type a word (captcha) to show that you’re human. Hopefully this will not be too big a pain. Please feel free to try test comments on this post, and to tell me how it’s going. Thanks.

Update: Incidentally, creating an account just takes a second, so if you comment somewhat regularly, you might want to take a second to do that rather than filling in the captcha every time.

Tintin and the Racist Dream

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Bert Stabler was talking over in another thread about imperialism, art, and taste and how the three interact. In that vein, I thought I’d reprint one of my favorite sequences from Tintin.

This is an avenging Inca Mummy, summoned by the conflation of ancient magic and the sacrilege of European explorers.

The moments I most like in Tintin are almost invariably the creepy, surreal ones. I find Herge’s humor repetitive and precious in general — and for me the clear line style only emphasizes the clean, scrubbed, antiseptic cuteness of the slapstick. The weird dream moments, on the other hand, are all the weirder for their pristine perfection. The clarity itself becomes frightening. In the second panel above from “The Seven Crystal Balls,” the Inca mummy’s face at the window, almost unnoticeable but still preternaturally distinct, seems more real than real, it’s perfect finish giving it an undeniability. Even though this is (sort of) only a dream, as it turns out, the dream looks as solid as the mundane window the mummy climbs thorugh. The fact that different content is presented so rigorously through the same form becomes in itself uncanny.

But what is the difference in form? Well, it’s pretty clearly racial difference. A lot of pulp narratives, from Sherlock Holmes to Fu Manchu, draw much of their spark from colonial fever dreams, and that’s certainly the case for Tintin as well. In “Seven Crystal Balls,” the Inca curse, and the mummy itself, are the parts of the story I remembered best from my childhood, and still find most compelling. They’re creepy and cool and unsettling, with an emotional depth that isn’t there, for me at least, in, say, the drawing room comedy of the Castafiore Emerald.

This, then, is really a case where I don’t like the sequence despite its racism and imperialism. As far as I can tell, I like it because of them. The fascination/repulsion Herge feels towards the strange gods of colonized cultures generates real creative frisson. Which makes me wonder if maybe that’s true of racism and stereotypes in general. It seems like, beyond their other uses, they sometimes have an appeal which might be called aesthetic. A certain amount of cultural creativity goes into shaping the person in front of you into a phantom monstrosity, and that creativity can itself be exciting and fascinating. The dream’s appeal is its vividly imagined ugliness; the exhilaration of imposing on the world the gothic products of one’s skull.

The Thrizzle Will Be Televised

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An edited version of this essay ran in the Chicago Reader a while back.
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One of the gags in Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume 1 is a three panel comic strip featuring “The Head”. As his name suggests, “The Head” is a disembodied…well, head. In the first panel, he announces “Someday I will rule the world!” In the second he admits that “But for now, I have been reduced to flipping burgers with my telekinetic powers! Bah!” And in the third, he sits on a couch watching Three’s Company and muttering “Bah! Such foolish television!”

The lurch from comic-book super-villain cliché to boob-tube homage nicely encapsulates Kupperman’s methods and influences. Alt comics creators may be turning for cred to more respected mediums like literature and memoir, and mainstream creators may be praying for a movie contract, but Kupperman has other telekinetic burgers to fry. On the one hand, he’s steeped in the clunky traditions of comics past — the barmy testimonial pitches (“Men! Is your penis a urine-leaking, chronically unreliable threat to your mental well-being?”), the breathless pulp adventure titles (“I Bothered a Big Fish!), the doofy super-powers (“Under-pants on his head man!”) But on the other hand his overall rhythms — the narratives which turn into advertisements, the skits which end with some whacko randomly barging through a window, the gags which get abruptly dropped and then recur out of context only to be instantly dropped again — all of that seems borrowed, not from his print predecessors, but from the least cred-bestowing of all possible sources. Forget literature and forget film: Kupperman takes his cues from Monty Python and the Cartoon Network: the surreal humor of the small screen.

Television/comics cross-overs aren’t exactly new: the TV show Buffy is currently being continued in comic-book form, as just one example. But Kupperman may be unique in being inspired as much by TV’s form as by its content. In part, this is due to his source material: Monty Python was, in many ways, meta-television. Each show was cobbled together from a mélange of genres — newscasts, sit-coms, dramas, documentaries, cartoons. The humor wasn’t just in each individual section, but in watching the different modes stagger into and over each other. Thus a drawing-room mystery ends with a scoreboard (Constables : 9; Superintendents: 13) and wildly cheering sports crowds, or the BBC end credits are dropped into the show halfway through.

Monty Python, in other words, replicated the heterogeneous feel of television; the sense of switching from show to show and channel to channel; of serialized narratives eternally fractured just because they’d run out of time. This style of humor is fairly familiar now on TV, but it’s still somewhat unusual in comics. In any case, it’s rarely done in any venue with the panache that Kupperman brings to it. In one strip, for example, he segues vertiginously from boy band infomercial to nature special, informing us first that “Tony is the fun one of the group,” moving on to let us know that “Primo is an Australian desert frog!” and concluding that “Alan is too small to be seen by the human eye — but he becomes visible in this close-up view of the human sneeze!”

The boy band skit is an honest-to-God television parody: it works off of documentary genres that are rarely seen in American comics, and the jokes are predicated on abrupt shifts between panels that are formally analogous to camera cuts. But many of Kupperman’s jokes work by adapting the style of surreal juxtaposition to a specifically comic-book context. Instead of using time sequence, for example, Kupperman often arranges abrupt shifts through layout and space. A mostly text choose-your-own space adventure is illustrated with random drawings that have nothing to do with the story. An advertisement for 4-Playo, a robot that provides foreplay, takes up most of a page except for an unobtrusive, dark-colored banner at the bottom that announces: “Let’s All Go to the Bathroom! A message from the Bathroom Council.” As in Chris Ware’s early comics, many of the book’s pages are designed not around a single narrative-driven punch-line, but rather as a carefully arranged clutter of fake ads, strips, text blocks and random gags. The result is a clankily retro tribute to the days of comics past when the medium was, like television, a mass art form, and so had more in common with television’s hucksterism and heterogeneity (these days most comics don’t even have outside ads.)

Not that every one of Kupperman’s lay-outs looks like those old comics. On the contrary, one of most impressive things about Tales Designed to Thrizzle is the creator’s versatility, as artist, writer, and designer. Kupperman’s art is always instantly recognizable; his drawings are deliberately stiff, and his figures pose oddly against his backgrounds, so that everything looks like collaged clip art. Yet from within those self-imposed limits, he manage to create an enormous range of variation. On some pages, he utilizes a heavily detailed black and white cross-hatch style which almost creates moiré patterns; on others, he uses stencils; on others, he places relatively simplified colored figures against plain backgrounds. His designs too are extensively varied, from full-page splash panels to fake text ads with faithfully reproduced fonts, to the beautiful repetitive wallpaper patterns at the end of each issue.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle, in other words, is a monument not only to silliness, but to craft….which is perhaps the way in which it most clearly departs from its television inspirations. Not that there wasn’t a lot of skill and talent involved in creating Monty Python sketches or Adult Swim cartoons. But (with the exception of Terry Guilliam’s segments, of course) television very rarely pays attention to visual aesthetics in the way that Kupperman does here. His ad for Indian Spirit chewing gum, with its patterned background, bizarre conflations of scale (a tiny Indian about to be swallowed by a giant Caucasian) and stark cut-out feel has a constructivist look which flirts perilously with high art.

Several of Kupperman’s bizarrely lyrical Cousin Grampa strips do a good deal more than flirt. In one of these, “Old King Grampa”, the titular elderly monarch watches a bird fly out of his pie and then out the window.

The bird then hatches an egg, inside of which waits a tiny king. Finally in the last panel the king and two baby birds sit in a nest, mouths gaping open for a worm from their mother. The way in which deferred oral pleasure leads seamlessly to infantile fantasy is queasily Freudian, and the page is entirely wordless, giving it a serene wrongness that Terry Guilliam’s cartoons, with their aggressive muttering and laugh track, never managed. Further, the drawing is in Kupperman’s detailed, cross-hatched style; you can almost feel the baby birds’ beaky cheeks pressed up against the king’s bearded jowls. In the panel where the mother bird is hatching the egg, Kupperman has her beak parted and motion lines behind her head. She’s giving a little silent squawk and jerk of joy as her bearded devourer/child is born. In that little detail, the cheerful violation of Monty Python bleeds seamlessly into the cheerful violation of something like Un Chien Andalieu or Kafka. Not that Kupperman needs to appeal to film or literature. Why would he, when he can just as well make television into art?