I began reading comics intensely as intellectual escapism from grad school. My other escape was film theory. So I had many elaborate, comics-form dreams starring Eisenstein.

Last night I mixed the two again, dreaming an R. Fiore column in The Comics Journal. In just a couple of short pages of copperplate prose, no plosives, he eviscerated all the Journal‘s writers for not liking Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. Gibson’s poor treatment at their hands was a case of “wholesale intellectual fraud,” he wrote. Then he cut the writers down, one by one.

Since I’d regularly sniped at Gibson in my column, calling his movie “a pornography of violence” and such, I skipped ahead to see Fiore take me down. Seeing my name in the last paragraph, I flipped back to finish the article. But my eyes got stuck in a loop in the second-to-last column, going over the text without seeing anything.

So I set it down and started on the new Kevin Huizenga book. It’s a new direction: movie reviews as comics short stories. After reading his cheerful take on that Mayan Gibson movie, I skipped to the book’s end. He starts to use empty pages as he goes on, two or three tiny panels hovering over nothing garnished with type at the very bottom (Helvetica Neue, mind). Then the same problem; I couldn’t finish the book for strange reasons.

So I looked over my shoulder at an old pen-and-ink drawing of mine. It didn’t look half bad.

***

The seeds for this weren’t Rick Veitch’s dream comics, which I admire, nor Iou Kuroda’s movie review comics, which I don’t. Most likely one seed was Fiore’s long, precise dismantling of once-columnist Bart Beaty’s book. The Comics Journal: They Eat Their Own.

The other seed has been watching the comments threads for Noah’s posts on fanfic and Wonder Woman. I know little about either, so I just watch, impressed with Noah’s modulation of snark and patience as 700 Anons drive-by to tell him he sucks. Social media! Were I more of a business ninny, I’d start quoting Seth Godin’s latest while huffing venture capital.

Except that as tribes go, this blog’s more of a confederacy.¹ I know that whenever I post something, likely the first comment will be from one of my comrades, taking apart whatever I said. Three of us write for the Journal, which means precious little in terms of sharing a critical lens.

Talking about which, I need to pick at Noah’s argument here in lieu of full review today.

¹ J. K. Toole jokes, go to town.

Footnote to our roundtable and especially Tom’s fine dissection of Helter Skelter‘s art.

I noted the lack of patterning in the book compared to other manga for women. I meant not the hand-drawn composition of Okazaki’s pages so much as large, flat areas of design. Like the pattern on the dress and tights in this image from Nana:

(Image nicked from Let’s Fall Asleep, a manga & comics blog for librarians.)

The patterns are typically screentones (though I imagine more studios are doing this with computers). Either way, they’re applied, not drawn. (Though at least one artist, Shizuka Nakano, draws with screentone specifically. ActuaBD has a couple of small samples.)

And you can get screentones for just about everything:

Limpid pool and doily patterns:
Clouds and trees:
City at night and magical feathers:

From the Beginners’ Pack at IC, Inc. Pollocky splotches, your family’s tartan, celestial fuzz of the kind that clouds your judgment when you see a really hot girl with bad morals? They’ve got it all.

Some unsorted thoughts on Helter Skelter, based on Noah’s post and its comments:

1. Noah notes the the absense of fashion for a comic about the fashion world. The art lacks the patchwork quilt of pattern common in girls’ and women’s comics; the clothes are pretty bland, too. I suppose it’s a statement. Okazaki was a fashion illustrator, so she chose not to show that off. And some of the most fashion-conscious artists at the time were men drawing women for men, like Kousuke Fujishima. Ririko’s like, screw all you guys, I’m naked.
2. Another current: the body as fashion canvas, as this article on plastic surgery in Asia points out. Even the non-surgical version can be seen just walking around Shibuya (or Amerika-mura, as I prefer), with the ganguro girls’ tanning. (Scroll down in Wikipedia to read about “Blacky,” a ganguro girl who became iconic and then quit the lifestyle from public pressure.)
3. Japanese fashion made sense to me once someone told me it’s all just uniforms. Everything has its place: white gloves for driving trains, track pants for teaching kids, and punk stylings for the weekend. I always felt like a shabby barbarian until I picked a store and bought some uniforms. They keep the surface placid, everything in its place. Ririko’s place is looking better-than-human, another uniform enabled with surgery. I’m not from LA so I don’t have a nose for who’s had work done. I suspect the unwritten contracts require it in Tokyo.
4. In my essay on Dousei Jidai in a recent TCJ, I pointed to Ian Buruma’s Behind the Mask for a nuanced discussion of women’s bodies in Japanese art. When everything has its place, transgression and expression have to take place behind closed doors. That’s why In the Realm of the Senses is a political movie, other than one about sleeping with scissors.
5. Until it started to feel like actual research, I pottered around in my bookshelves for some “reception history,” as it’s known. I skimmed through a manga encyclopedia from Helter Skelter back to 1980 or so. Having found dozens of books I never want to read and a couple I absolutely have to (Natsuko’s Sake and Shouta’s Sushi in particular, maybe I’m just hungry), I saw dozens of stories of old-fashioned romance. None other like Okazaki’s whatsoever. And an article noting that Okazaki’s 1989 work Pink was one of the first comics for women to get a crossover audience, garnering a lot of praise from all kinds of readers and critics. So there’s that.

Anyway, I’m off to work in Louisville tonight, which in a couple of weeks will be flooded with millinery.

Congrats to Utilitarian Miriam Libicki on her multiple nominations at this weekend’s Stumptown Comics Festival in Portland.

I’ve been fiendishly busy and scattered besides, with a mind to post on myth & pop or the spate of great semi-comics anthologies of late or butter or something. Then my mind crumbles and, oh, not so much. I am that of the title, melted on couch and floor.

Better just to look at the images of Laura Park. I could say comics, since that’s what she does. But she also doodles, draws in her Moleskine, and fits none too well the frameworks I have for evaluating comics.

Like this image, the cover of her mini Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream:
Buoyed by soporific mumblings. I can relate.

I pointed to the mini in my best of ’08 in TCJ, though not on the strength of its stories. It’s a 90s-style one-person anthology with short strips and doodles. The only longish story I recall is a sort-of parable that felt like a false start.

But the drawing, the line, the fine hatching, the fact that she balances her compositions with all that detail. The mini’s remarkable for that, and better as a point of entry to her Flickr page, where she’s posted a trove of art.

For a critic, it’s hard to frame. There are drawings, a few strips. Really, she jots down bon-mot doodles, a kind of artist’s daybook. Sometimes they hint at diary or autobiography. While most such works pare events into a literary form, Park’s comics dart from moment to moment, focusing on atmosphere and sensations. So the recipes and drawings of food seem like key parts of her work, not petty indulgences. I think trying to fit her talent into a “graphic novel,” at least with the implied primacy of a capital-S Story, would suck.

Instead I have this image of her much like the drawing above, leaving a trail of exquisite drawings wherever she goes. Like Johnny Appleseed, only the trees are flat and dead.

When I first read Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream, having long been an admirer of her drawings, I thought it the work of a gifted artist looking for something to say. In other words, I missed the small things. Now I hope Park doesn’t find a story. Not a capitalized one, anyway.

***

Also: Kristy Valenti on same, with depth and interviewing.

Checking email, something new from the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater. Not sure how I got on their list, since I’ve been to LA just once, but the theater seems worth another trip. Movies for the month:

• 70s Queersploitation for Noah
• Late Dreyer for me (Ordet‘s a favorite)
• Nerosubianco for Tom, Miriam, Kinukitty (I have no idea if you’d like it, but I’d read the roundtable with baited breath

Actually, I just wanted to point everyone to the glorious Kevin H. cover for the March-April 09 cover. Funny how Keaton’s Great Stone Face doesn’t look Kevin H. at all while everything else does, and works so well.

And to put off finding Form 8903.