Utilitarian Review 3/6/10

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On HU

We started the week off with my six-year-old son commenting on Peanuts.

Suat offered an appreciation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.l I still didn’t like it.

Richard surveyed current horror comics.

I explained why I hate Chip Kidd’s Peanuts book.

Vom Marlowe reviewed the manga A Wise Man Sleeps.

And this weeks download features mashups and more.

Utiltarians Everywhere

On Splice Today I review Johnny Cash’s last album.

At the Reader I survey my neighborhood’s bookstores.

And on tcj.com I review The Cartoon History of Economics.

Other Links

Tucker’s been on fire recently.

Shaenon has a highly entertaining take on the idiot copying panels from Bleach controversy.

Comics Comics brutally pwns TCJ.com again (and the rest of the comics blogosphere too) by doing the so-obvious-it’s-brilliant, and asking Jog to do his weekly previews on their site.

Alyssa Rosenberg is so so wrong to prefer Solange to Beyonce.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Cautions for the Girl

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I’ve been somewhat obsessed with mashups recentl, especially DJ Lobsterdust, who is pretty great. So there’s some of that, and Thai music and other things….

1. Yvonne Fair — Love Ain’t No Toy (The Bitch Is Black)
2. DJ Lobsterdust — Always Single (Beyonce vs. Lenny Kravitz)
3. King of Pain — Badd to Me (The Cure vs. the Ying-Yang Twins)
4. Trevor Dandy — Is There Any Love (Good God! A Gospel Funk Hymnal)
5. Madline Bell — I’m Gonna Make You Love Me (Soulful Divas vol. 1)
6. Salak Siathong — Suang Nang (Cautions for the Girl) (Siamese Soul)
7. Siriporn Umpaipong — Sao Electone (Jumbo Hit)
8. The Alan Parsons Project — One Good Reason (Ammonia Avenue)
9. J.-P.M & Co. — Baby Topless (Jean-Pierre Massiera – Psychoses Discoïd)
10. Lenlow — Orinoco Bitch (Enya vs. The Prodigy)
11. Sugarcubes — Deus (Remix) (LIfe’s Too Good)
12. Wilhelm Kempf — Beethoven Piano Sonata #31 in A. Flat, Op. 110 – 1. (Late Piano Sonatas)
13. DJ Lobsterdust — Baby Arrow (Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells vs. The Album Leaf vs. The Carpenters)
14. The Country Gentlemen — The Fields Have Turned Brown (Folk Songs and Bluegrass)
15. Johnny Cash — Redemption Day (Ain’t No Grave)
16. Johnny Cash — Sam Hall (The Man Comes Around)

Download: Cautions for the Girl.

A Wise Man Sleeps

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By Mick Takeuchi

Go Comi, vol. 1

This is a fun and strange little manga by the author of Her Majesty’s Dog.  In this story, Miharu is a girl with a strange ring, a gift from her dead mother.  Her father has abandoned her to deal with his business debts, held by the Yakuza.  The story begins by a strange black clad man asking Miharu about her ring, which he tells her is the reason for all of her bad luck.  He wants her to give him the ring, which is very valuable.  She denies the possibility that it is bad luck, goes home, and is promptly confronted by graffiti and the creepy old Yakuza boss’s sexual harassment.  Ewww.

There’s a fun argument with the Yakuza boss that results with Miharu swallowing the ring to save it.  Which is quite the flavor of the manga right there. 

The socially awkward black-clad man is an alchemist with a ring of his own that allows him to turn into a gorgeous, blond sleazy lovey-dovey weirdo who can throw a punch, fight a fight, and act courageous–for exactly three minutes.

It’s no surprise to say that Miharu and the angel-guy deal with the Yakuza boss and free her and that they end up working together to solve alchemy-related jewel problems.  My favorite thing about this series is Miharu:

She’s great.  Unpredictable, capable of taking care of herself, and fun.  The plots aren’t always the greatest, but they’re interesting and the art is cheerful and beautiful.  In one story, just when I suspected the villain to be possessed by a rock, it turned out his jewel was in fact plastic.  When I suspected the doll was–  Well.  But I wouldn’t want to spoil it.  If you enjoy episodic fantasy-horror magic stories with a romantic subplot, this one is worth checking out.

Chip Kidd and Peanuts and Kids

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Over at Comics Comics Tim Hodler dislikes the use of cropping in art books devoted to comics.

This probably demonstrates my ignorance, but I don’t like this trend of cutting up images, like an old movie pan ‘n scanned for VHS. (The same thing was done in Blake Bell’s Ditko bio and Chip Kidd’s Peanuts book, among others.) It’s an especially unwelcome practice in a “The Art of ______” book. I want to see ______’s art! I want to see how the artist composed the image, and I don’t really care if it looks good or bad. (Pretty much everything Jaime draws looks good, any way.) That is in fact a big part of my interest in such a book: tracking the artist’s development.

It’s unsettling to agree with Tim…but I agree with Tim. I have a fair number of fine art books in the house, and you know, I don’t see any of them doing this crap. If you have a book about constructivist art posters, say, they show you the whole damn poster, because they figure that’s what you’re there for. Books about Japanese prints show you the lovely Japanese prints. Sometimes they crop to show you close-up details, but it’s a far cry from the aggressive layouts you see in a lot of comics productions.

And you know what? I don’t actually know the names of the designers of any of those art books I own — almost as if everyone involved thought the artist in question was more important than the designer.

Anyway, there’s a long comments thread at Comics Comics, and designer Jacob Covey disagrees strongly with Tim. You can read Jacob’s whole impassioned comment at the link, but there were a couple of revealing remarks. First:

A lot of people bought that book [that is, the Chipp Kidd Peanuts book] precisely because of the design decisions and a lot of those people had a light shined onto the genius of Schulz. (In no small part because it gave some of his “edge” back after decades of sappy marketing.)

Got that? People bought it for Chip Kidd, who introduced a whole new audience to that unknown outsider artist, Charles Schulz. Because, you know, nobody had actually ever heard of Schulz until Kidd unearthed him and made him safe for hipsters (an idea which, among other things, is an insult to hipsters, most of whom are, like everyone else, perfectly capable of loving Schulz without having him spoon fed to them by a indifferently talented curatorial vulture.)

I did agree with this by Covey, though I don’t think it points quite in the direction he seems to think it does.

And, remember, this was a daily strip for the masses. It’s not the property of comics people. Schulz belongs to everybody and there’s a lot of ways to read him.

Schulz does belong to everyone. And you know who he especially belongs to? Kids. The thing I like least about the Chip Kidd Peanuts collection is that, with all the pictures of tschotzkes and all the cropping and all the strips produced at minute sizes, it’s very difficult to read the book to my son. I gave it a try or two because the boy is so obsessed with Peanuts at the moment — but the whole endeavor was an exercise in eye strain and frustration. Eventually I just put the collection back up on the shelf and vowed to stick with the also-overdesigned-but-at-least-user-friendly fanta complete collections.

Basically, if you create a Peanuts book that parents can’t easily read to their kids, I think I’m justified in saying you’ve failed. And I further think I’m justified in suggesting that you’re a pretentious fuck who deserves a swift kick in the pants.

Anything But Capes: Blog of Terror

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This week, I’m reviewing five recent horror comics. Unlike barbarian comics, which I discussed back in January, horror comics are not scarce. It seems every publisher has at least a couple horror titles, and in the case of some of the smaller publishers (IDW, Devil’s Due), the majority of their comics are horror. However, as many as a third of these titles are licensed properties (that is, they’re based on movies or video games). I chose to review only original creations, not because they’re inherently good, but because I’m more interested in stories that are specific to comics. These five titles aren’t necessarily the best or the worst, but they are indicative of what American publishers are releasing in 2010.

Reviews:

Hellblazer #264
Publisher: Vertigo
Writer: Peter Milligan
Layouts: Giuseppe Camuncoli
Finishes: Stefano Landini
Colors: Trish Mulvihill

What’s the division of labor between the artist who does layouts and the artist who “finishes?” I assume the layout artist determines the shape and number of panels on each page, and perhaps also the contents of each panel. The finishing artist then adds the necessary details (or is my assumption completely wrong?). This could lead to some awkward, ugly comics if the two artists have different styles. But this is a Vertigo comic, and most of the artists who work for Vertigo tend to use the same semi-realistic, functional style that effectively conveys the story without drawing attention to itself. Camuncoli and Landini work well together, and they produce a comic that’s clear, consistent, and bland.

As for the story, this issue is the final chapter in a storyline within a book that’s been published continuously for two decades, so it isn’t exactly a great jumping-on point (and no recap page, because DC/Vertigo thinks recap pages are for wimps). Still, Peter Milligan is an experienced mainstream comics writer, and he knows that every issue is someone’s first, so he provides narration at the front of the book that helps new readers catch up. The plot, in a nutshell, is about John Constantine fighting a Victorian-era demon in Mumbai. Like the art, the writing is polished and professional, though not particularly memorable.

While it’s also tempting to complain that the story is predictable, predictability is really the whole point. Hellblazer, like most long-running titles, is comfort food for fans, and Milligan knows where and when to deliver the expected beats of a John Constantine story. There are demons, spells, smoking, and British profanity. But the old, reliable formula that makes it good comfort food also makes it terrible horror. Horror works best when it exploits the fear of the unknown and the unexpected. This is why horror film franchises quickly descend into self-parody – once the monster is revealed in the first film, the audience no longer fears it, so the sequels are just the repetition of events that are humorous and comforting precisely because they’ve lost the ability to scare. Milligan’s take on Hellblazer avoids becoming a self-parody by simply abandoning any pretense at being scary. It’s a magic-themed action/adventure that’s indistinguishable from the superhero titles published by DC, except that the characters get to say “fuck” instead of “#&$%.”

The Walking Dead #70
Publisher: Image
Writer: Robert Kirkman
Artist: Charlie Adlard
Gray Tones: Cliff Rathburn

According to the Direct Market sales charts posted at The Beat, The Walking Dead is one of Image’s best-selling monthly comics. Which is bizarre, because if there was ever a comic that should only be read in collected volumes rather than monthly issues, it’s The Walking Dead. Kirkman’s pacing ranges from leisurely to glacial, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in a longer book. The horror of The Walking Dead has less to do with the zombies than with how their ever-present threat transforms the survivors. Over the course of a trade, readers can appreciate how all the characters (or at least the ones that don’t get offed) slowly change, usually for the worst, in response to the collapse of civilization. But it’s hard to get any sense of that in a typical monthly issue, which has only a small portion of the plot and character development. Issue #70 is a perfect example: the survivors are welcomed into a walled, zombie-free community and meet the community leaders (who will probably turn out to be evil). That’s it. In another six to twelve months this might become an interesting story, but I can’t imagine paying $3 a month for snippets of content.

The art in the issue is easier to discuss. Adlard’s style is thoroughly mainstream, meaning a realistic aesthetic and a simple panel layout that moves the narrative forward. The one unusual aspect of the art (by the standards of mainstream American comics) is that it’s in black-and-white.

This was a clever creative decision, as the black-and-white gives The Walking Dead an earthy, retro vibe reminiscent of the classic zombie film, Night of the Living Dead. But setting aside the pop culture homage, Adlard rarely does anything interesting with the black-and-white format. On occasion, he’ll use dark inks and sharp contrast to evoke a film noir tone, but most of the panels wouldn’t be harmed by the addition of color. In other words, the art does what the story requires of it, nothing more and nothing less.

The Unknown – The Devil Made Flesh #4
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Minck Oosterveer
Colors: Andres Lozano and Javier Suppa

The first thing I noticed about The Unknown is that it has a recap page that efficiently summarized the previous three issues. As a new reader, I liked this feature. I will never understand why DC and a few other publishers refuse to include recap pages. If you insist on publishing monthly issues, then why not throw new readers a bone? Not everyone can jump in on the first issue.

The story centers on Catherine Allingham, a detective who’s slowly dying from a brain tumor. On top of that problem, she’s been dragged into a mystery involving a small town serial killer and a ghost that keeps possessing the townspeople. It ends with a big battle in a cave and some revelations about future storylines, which may involve the Devil (made flesh). Like most contemporary comics, The Unknown has a “decompressed” pace, meaning that the plot and characters are gradually developed over multiple issues. But unlike Robert Kirkman, Waid knows how to squeeze as much content as possible into 22 pages. Reading a single issue of The Unknown feels like reading four issues of The Walking Dead.

But more content doesn’t equal better content. Waid’s writing has always beens mechanical and generic, like he’s working from a genre checklist. Characters do exactly what readers expect of them, and plots resolve themselves in the simplest manner possible. The Unknown is no exception: the central conflict ends with a violent climax, the villains get their appropriate comeuppance, and a sufficient amount of information is revealed to move the larger story forward.

The art doesn’t help matters. Oosterveer attempts a straightforward, mainstream style, but his art comes across as amateurish. Spatial relationships are confusing, backgrounds will be drawn in detail in one panel but disappear in the next, and the characters’ faces frequently go off-model. To put it simply, the entire comic just looks half-assed and rushed.

Devil #1 (of 4)
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writer/Artist: Torajiro Kishi and Madhouse Studios

Someone at Dark Horse decided that they needed a new horror comic, something fresh and original. And where are all the fresh and original ideas coming from? Japan! So Dark Horse formed a partnership with manga-ka Torajiro Kishi (best known for the yuri title Maka Maka) and anime producer Madhouse Studios (Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust). The fresh and original idea they came up with was a story about cops who hunt vampires … which admittedly sounds like every third comic published in the 1990s.

But there are two twists. The first is that the vampires are called devils, because in a post-Twilight world, “vampire” is no longer hardcore. The second twist illustrates why Japanese creators are always the smarter choice. I’ll let the main characters explain:

“When a victim is raped by a devil, the victim dies from the poison contained in its sperm.” And by die, they mean burst like a water balloon.

This is why Dark Horse needed Kishi and Madhouse Studios. Any American hack can write a story about cops who hunt vampires. They might even throw in some misogyny. But when it comes to uncensored depravity, American creators are actually quite timid. You need a Japanese creator to get a story about poison sperm that causes women to explode. It’s not any good, of course, but extraordinary sleaziness has a way of concealing every other flaw.

We Will Bury You #1 (of 4)
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Writer: Brea Grant with Zane Grant
Artist: Kyle Strahm
Colors: Zac Atkinson

Brea Grant plays the character Daphne on Heroes. That’s a red flag: when an actor starts slumming in the funny book industry that usually means they’re pitching a movie script disguised as a comic.

Though perhaps I’m being unfair to Grant, because I can’t imagine a major studio ever producing a film adaptation of this comic. The pitch: in 1927, a cross-dressing Ukrainian immigrant and her taxi dancer girlfriend are planning to flee New York after murdering the girlfriend’s husband, but they get caught up in a (Communist-themed) zombie apocalypse. Now that’s what I call high concept.

As this is only the first issue, it’s hard to say whether it will turn out to be a original zombie story. The zombie sub-genre has been thoroughly explored in every medium, and Grant is hardly the first writer to link zombie scares to the Red Scare. On the other hand, there’s never been a zombie story featuring flappers, and who doesn’t like flappers?

Plus, the comic has some engaging artwork.

Kyle Strahm’s style, with its distorted physiques and bleak backgrounds, is well-suited to horror. And the use of numerous thick lines gives his art a coarse, disheveled look. It effectively captures the grime and poverty of New York City tenements in the early 20th century. Zac Atkinson uses color to great effect too, as key characters are given more vibrant outfits so that they stand out from the darker backgrounds. More than a few panels, however, are rough around the edges in ways that Strahm probably didn’t intend. There’s a thin line between bleak and boring, and Strahm’s backgrounds occasionally step over it, and the facial features of the heroines seem to change on every other page.

Despite some misgivings, I liked the first issue of Brea Grant’s comic. It’s certainly better than her TV show.

State of the Genre

Overall, the horror genre is doing quite well. It has its share of shitty comics, but there are a few decent titles in the mix. And despite the dominance of superheroes in the Direct Market, horror comics have carved out a stable niche. There’s a broad selection of titles available in a variety of sub-genres (though zombies are far and away the most popular). It’s also worth mentioning that there are several genre hybrids that I passed over for reviewing, including Hellboy (horror/superheroes), Locke and Key (horror/fantasy) and the recently released Choker (horror/crime). On a less positive note, there’s an awful lot of licensed properties, but that’s hardly surprising given that an established brand with a built-in fanbase is always the safer bet. Fortunately, the horror genre hasn’t yet become an endless parade of Freddy v. Jason v. Chucky one-shots.

The Price of the Ticket

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In the comments to Suat’s post on Fun Home, Uland notes;

The milkman bit is interesting, but I think it bears pointing out that a literary allusion isn’t an allusion at all if it’s being pointed out in the text. It’s a reference.

It isn’t that I have a problem with the drawing or the subject matter. It’s more that it all seems so prescribed . The author refuses to allow mystery to intrude upon her strategy. The literary references seem like a huge part of that strategy. Employed in a less on-the-nose kind of way, I think it could’ve been really effective.

I get the sense that Bechdel pulled back and , reminding herself that it’s just a graphic novel, tried to pull all these different schemes into nice little packages. Problem is, it’s a story about confusion, mystery, shame, secrets, etc. Rather than letting them loose, she seemed to want to conquer them..

Agreeing with Uland is always disturbing…but I agree with Uland.

I think the comparison with Likewise is pretty interesting here. Both Bechdel and Schrag have an ambivalent attitude towards literariness and art. Bechdel associates it with her father; Schrag associates it with Joyce (and through Joyce with Ariel’s girlfriend, Sally.)

Schrag uses that ambivalence structurally; her desire to embrace Joyce and distance herself from him is incorporated into the storytelling, both through her use of or dropping of stream of consciousness, and through the artwork, which is in some ways obsessively ordered and in some ways deliberately random. Chaos and confusion are important thematically, so Schrag makes them part of her storytelling

Bechdel doesn’t do that. She criticizes her father for his artificiality and for wanting a neat bourgeois existence — but her own work never gets beyond insistent artificiality and the conventions of a decidedly bourgeois genre. Everything is neat and in its place; if she’s referencing Icarus, she tells you she’s referencing Icarus; if the house is a metaphor for her dad’s obsessions, she tells you the house is a metaphor for her dad’s obsessions. And if she wants to show a parallel between herself and her father, she does it in the most obvious ways possible — look, it’s a split screen! And also…mirrors!

I find Bechdel’s writing itself almost intolerably clumsy…but I think the narrative and thematic flaws of the book are in many ways more crippling. This is a story about the dangers of deliberately acclimatizing yourself to a typical middle-class existence. But the book…deliberately acclimatizes itself to a typical middle-class narrative. Bechdel fits her book about queer fathers and queer daughters neatly into a classic father/son memoir dynamic. As I said in another context:

The American memoir is a fairly simple formula. Clearly identify your colorful ethnic heritage (Chinese, Jewish, Irish…even Appalachian will do.) Milk said heritage for all it is worth. Discuss your simultaneous love of and resentment of said heritage. Milk your ambivalence for all it is worth. Feel deeply. Stir well, then appear on Terri Gross.

Suat notes that “Much of [Fun Home’s] appeal to general audiences must lie in the way it gently eases readers into the comics medium.” Fun Home did appeal to a lot of people. The irony is, of course, that it’s ingratiating in much the same way that Bechdel’s dad is ingratiating. It uses bourgeois and literary trappings to present a familiar and comforting front. Thus, readers can safely condemn Bechdel’s father for his capitulation to convention while reading a book that goes down so easily by virtue of obsessively cleaning up all its messes. Bechdel takes her quirky, colorful past, dabbles it with knowing commentary, and serves the results to a literary audience eager to smack its lips over delectable, safely contained difference. A rich, unusual, ideally painful childhood is the spice that both validates one’s present normality and makes it worth consuming. Sacrificing your ancestors is, as James Baldwin acidly put it, the price of the ticket.

Fun Home: Technically Speaking on the first 86 pages

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The recent roundtable on Likewise and Ariel Schrag produced a number of helpful comments but there was one in particular which made my ears prick up:

“I actually think Fun Home works best as prose (not sure about Schrag’s work). It’s a beautifully written novella/short story, really…and rarely (to me) does the art add much to that. For that reason, I kind of think it’s not really such a great “graphic memoir”–It doesn’t really use the “graphic” tools to great effect–as Maus, for instance, does (sorry Noah).”

These comments were made by Eric B. in relation to my own concerning the difficulties I had with Schrag’s art. Fun Home was not a work which I read particularly intently at the time. In a sense, I let it wash over me like any average reader would. Still my memories of the work were far from unpleasant and Eric’s statement did seem a bit at odds with what I experienced.

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