Tag Archives: Bill Randall

Copyright Insurgency

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One of Noah’s Wonder Woman posts elicited this comment from Cole Moore Odell:

…it shouldn’t be controversial that some characters simply don’t work, or they don’t work past the idiosyncratic spark of their original creators. There’s nothing wrong with limited shelf life. Yet this simple reality is warped by trademark holders who have unlimited interest in making money off of limited concepts, and by readers who refuse to let ideas go, even in the face of continued creative failure. … the same can be said for most superheroes. Most popular culture, really.

Reading the WW essays, I got the sense of an original vision both odd and personal; later attempts at the character, not so much. But it has enough cachet that people want to keep trying their own version. It could just be positioning (“the first female superhero”). Readers who won’t let go, I think, shouldn’t be faulted. They see untapped potential. (The Cubs could win the World Series; it’s not the fans’ fault for buying tickets.)

And the corporation’s a facilitator, never an author, no matter what the law says. The law’s the most interesting thing here, I think. Totally arbitrary and usually absurd, Odell’s right that it warps reality.

Without going into a laundry list of Boggsian aburdity, I’ll point to the English scrum over Lost Girls. Moore & Gebbie used Peter Pan characters still under copyright in the UK & EU. The hospital that owned the rights objected, so M&G waited to publish there until the copyright expired. An amicable solution, but still:

Why on earth does a hospital own Peter Pan?

(Yes, I know there are reasons. I could have my reasons to leave my fortune to a dog.)

So, my big question: at what point can a work be said to have reasonably escaped its author and been taken over by the culture? It makes less sense to say one person hospital owns & controls Peter Pan than it does to say Peter Pan’s just out there somewhere. I think this question especially important to comics works, which rely more on “characters and situations,” as at least one comics copyright has it, than on any particular story. Certainly, the superhero genre’s founded on the character more than the situation.

(Uninteresting side note: yes, lots of money is involved. So? Granite mining is a cutthroat industry.)

Finally, this is silly:

Screw you, Sonny Bono’s ghost. Say I want to make creative use of the culture I’m in, works speaking in the language I grew up with. For a lot of people, pop’s the only language they have. And that language is owned & operated by companies. So I’m left with parody, the collective unconscious of the 1860s, or the lawless Mississippi kids who didn’t know they couldn’t remake Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Better than the original in every way, you can only see it through pirate versions as a legit release is a legal tangle.)

In film criticism, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson started the practice of using film stills without asking permission because studios routinely asked crazy fees for reprint rights. Now everyone reprints stills without permission, so a murky legal precedent’s set even if no case has been tried.

So, shouldn’t organized fan-unrest be able to destroy copyright? “24-Hour WW Fanfic Comic Day.” Or cosplay sit-ins, I don’t know. It might be worth it just to have thousands of people dressed as Amazons, going about their business. Maybe Moulton’s ghost would be pleased, if not as much for “24-Hour Hogtie Day.”

Surrrrrrrreal

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So I doze off and miss the first 15 minutes of the UK game. Surreal. And Meeks only has 10 points. Surreal.

Real weirdness: at halftime, I decide to catch up on the WW by typing in the title of this site.

Only I leave off the S: http://hoodedutilitarian.blogpot.com/

At first I thought we’d been hacked. By the Lord. Now I’m wondering whether Google really is all-powerful. Don’t they buy all the typos?

The Sex Element, part 4

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Sex, comics, porn… they don’t go together in my mind. Setting aside porn (as a mechanical solution to a problem of mechanical societies, not something I find critically interesting), I still struggled to come up with comics that I’d call sexy.

Two works stood out from my shelves. The first, an American underground from 1972, shows its Catholic hero plagued by the penii of his mind. His unrelenting adolescent libido turns everything he sees into phalluses, which send out raybeams befouling all they touch. Especially churches. At one point he’s caught between two churches with a phallus-ray shooting ahead from his crotch (this is just before his fingers undergo penitization into rayguns.  And his feet). As he turns and lops off a steeple with the ray, he says,

“All I can do is hope the one on the left is Lutheran!”

The book’s Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. It’s not sexy at all, just tortured by sex. And religion, or least how both infect the adolescent imagination. It’s a stunning work, the greatest of all the undergrounds. And it’s the best example of the debased confessional, the dominant strain of sex in American art comics: squeeze something embarrassing out of the pen and then hide publish the results.

The second work, Baudoin’s Terrains Vagues. If the tortured mix of sex and religion is terribly American, this book’s terribly European. A man & a woman, lots of talking, lying in bed naked talking. Sex, too. I think there’s some cigarettes, seashores, luscious drawings of old towns.  Cafes.

(I need to move to Europe.)

Baudoin abstracts everything with sumptuous brushstrokes. He constrasts their sweep with intricate pen-and-ink, just as he contrasts the sex with his protagonist’s introspection: “Quand je penetrais une femme j’avais l’impression d’etre un vandale commettant. Une profanation.” Their relationship’s falling apart, reflected in the narrator’s drawings of her.

I guess breakups aren’t that sexy, either.

Still, the book’s much, much sexier than any other comic on my shelf. (The closest comparison is Le Portrait, Baudoin’s companion piece of a few years earlier.) It also works on the artist-model theme, which has been around for centuries, if mostly unexplored in comics. Of course, comics doesn’t have the tradition of the model stripping down while the artist draws 450 portraits in tiny boxes every month.

Comics also have no tradition of seduction.  Once those 450 portraits are done, the moment’s passed. But a poem, painting, or just a camera can serve to get someone in bed, or at least naked. Donne’s poem “The Flea” or Goya’s Majas, whose myth I prefer to believe. Comics share more with the diary, where you write about how you felt when it did or didn’t work. Hence the memoirs and confessions, or just the secret fantasies of sexy trombones with TV sets for heads.

Imaginary Comics: Tea-Time #1

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Review of Tea-Time #1
By Anonymous?
From a tea farm in Taiwan
Four leaves, $9.95/2 oz
Green Oolong

Like everyone else, I wake up with hot caffeine. Lately, it’s been loose-leaf oolong tea. The leaves’ pellets unfurl in the water. Usually I reinfuse them a couple of times and toss them in the compost.

Today the sun caught them just so and I noticed lines. Puzzled, I laid them flat on a screen and air-dried them. I was surprised– nay, astonished– at what I saw.

Each leaf has drawings on it.

And you can arrange them into a story.
Because the lines are thinner than the flesh of the leaf, they catch the light. I can’t tell if they’re hand-scrawled or genetically engineered, like those Chinese pears biotweaked into volleyballs. I also don’t know who the artist is. The characters on the side of the package read ? ??– I know the first means “leaf,” but is it the art form? The artist? Is it a marketing gimmick or Labor’s cheeky revenge?

I do know the critic’s job is vicious precision, so I must say I’m disappointed. The drawings suck. No verve, no bounce in the line. And the story’s just a four-panel gag. With all those leaves, ? ?? could have told a multigenerational epic. Love, death & tea on Tung Ting Mountain, spanning from the Occupation through martial law and the Kaohsiung Incident to the uncertain present? Instead it’s just the parable of a pleasant cup.

Drink and you miss it, I guess. But it raises a problem for the diligent reader: that everywhere around, comics wait to be discovered. A bored dentist’s doodles on the panels of your teeth, Fibonacci storytelling on sunflower seeds. No word on whether Sebastião Salgado’s printing his worker-saint photos on each ground of Illy’s coffee, but I’ll keep my eyes open.

Mangafication I

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Before the manga roundtable, our Tom Crippen asked why manga adaptations sucked. No helpers appeared with either generosity or bile, just me.

And this is my response, half-answer, half-question. Purely from the stance of what’s pleasing, not what’s good business, since Japanese cross-marketing is pretty ridiculous. I mean, cow catchers.

First, classic-to-manga. (I’m saving manga-to-movie for another day.)

Like Tezuka’s Disnefications of Crime and Punishment and Faust. Both kids’ works from the early 50s, they’re strange marriages, like the Otto Preminger-Jackie Gleason acid-trip movie Skidoo. Once Groucho Marx shows up as God, you can’t stop wondering how such a thing ever happened. There’s Faust, cute as a button! There’s the devil, a nice doggie!

Worse yet:

Yes, that’s him. Thank East Press.

They publish a few books you might know, like Travel and Disappearance Diary. They also do Comic CUE, the flashy, infrequent cousin of the alt-manga anthology Ax everyone’s talking about lately.

They been mangafying the classics. Rashomon, War and Peace, freaking Marx, Machiavelli, Hitler. With twice as many books as the last time I looked. They’re shameless: the series is entitled, more or less, “Finish reading them with manga!” Since no-one would ever read all those words, certainly not illiterate youths. Cliff’s Notes and all that.

I’ve only read their version of Sakaguchi Ango‘s essay ??? (“On Decadence”) and story “The Idiot.” He’s a writer I treasure, whip-smart and wry, the first to read Japan’s utter failure in the war as a gift. I particularly love his ?????? (“My View of Japanese Culture”), in which he decimates German architect Bruno Taut for finding “the Essence of Japan” in temples and palaces rather than a piss-stained toilet in the back of a nightclub. (His point’s far more nuanced, but you get the idea.)

So his outrage and sense of the absurd might fit in manga. I paid my money and I took my chance.

Ouch. I was going to post about manga’s tilt to melodrama, and how Manga-Ango running around screaming would fit better in issue #53 of the Sub-Mariner rather than a version of a classic. About how just drawing a writer this mercurial as a cartoon character, fit for a model kit, betrays his technique. Then I started rereading the source works and wondered if I should write a column about this.

At least the manga has modern-day Shibuya crossing in flames.

So as I see it, the question isn’t whether manga/comics/macrame can or can’t do nuance. They all can when the artist isn’t “Variety Art Works,” who takes all blame for the East Press books. The question is, in an ideal world, what do you get from mangafication? More than just quick & easy consumption? Are some things (stats books, LotR, weddings) better-suited to manga than others (wakes, House of Leaves, Georges Bataille)? What in your life should be mangafied, and why?

Manga: What IS the Point? Part 4

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I’m batting cleanup. & I think Tom, Miriam, & Noah are perfect just as they are. So no suggestions for what they just have to read (outside every manga column I’ve ever written for TCJ).

Just three bunts, written listening to Animetal Lady:

The Point of Manga Is…

…to cocoon. Not just in shelves & shelves of 40, 50, 100 volume series– in character goods, posters, costumes, movies, soundtracks. Pencil boards, cel phones, cow catchers. You can use the new Kramers Ergot as a pup tent, but all of Dragonball could build the Great Wall.

The rest of it could fill the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

On land, people cocooned in manga cafes, even living them. Hikikomori, humorously presaged in Otaku no Video, who fear the sun. It’s all rather urban, where life’s a series of little boxes. Like the model-builder in Otomo’s Domu, the best comic on Brutalist architecture.

Also like the great wall of Mao’s Little Red Books in La Chinoise. But for fantasists, not ideologues. Otaku don’t conceal & carry.

…to Globalize the Youngsters (aka “The Daihatsu and the Olive Tree”).

If the 21st Century City is Asian, at least 20th Century Pop was American.

Every other country just imitates our pop culture, or at least they did. (I’m sure someone will comment me down. Knock yourself out, but give specific examples of a non-American pop scene that has spread worldwide like syphillis. What’ve you got, Godard? Scandinavian metal? Okay, Brits have a point if the Beatles leapt whole from Chuck Berry’s skull.)

The few robust pop pockets– Bollywood– usually traveled only with the diaspora. Anime & manga, though, had precious few immigrants to spread them. So foreigners stepped up.

They did well: you can find manga-style pop everywhere from Kuala Lumpur to Krakow.

I don’t know what the next non-American All-World pop culture phenom will be. My money’s not on Eurovision. I do know that there will be one. If it’s like manga, following it will take a big commitment– it’s two full-time jobs keeping up with translations and nobody’s hiring. It will have its own language and rules that make it seem exclusive. It will be modern but not Western, just like Japan.

And it will be some kind of sexy.

All of which explain part of Western manga/anime fandom. I always thought the point was to get all the non-prom kids to dress in notional wisps of spandex and pack them in steamy hotels at the height of summer. Good for them!

The only problem is, they’ll teach their kids to like Japan better than the US of A, so when Taro Aso shows up and peels off his skin to reveal the Reaper, we’re doomed. Unless we got a new president yesterday and our foreign policy’s changed.

Finally: the point of manga is best explained by Asian Steve.

He’s subtle Yin to blackasthenight‘s husky Yang. He has a radio show on a college station somewhere in the sticks. He plays K-Pop, though I doubt he’s from Incheon.

I caught it in the car, not long after a stint working on farm in Kurume with a trio of Korean college kids who belted songs at the pears all day. They spoke of Boa, so I called the station.

"This is Asian Steve."
"Hi, Asian Steve.  Do you take requests?"
"YES!  YES!  What do you want to hear?"
"Boa?"
"Which album?"
"I don't know!"

Then Asian Steve and I rocked to Boa as I drove into the sun. You weren’t invited, but we preferred it that way. Soon I arrived at the gent’s club, where I toasted in High Latin as we all tried to forget we’re surrounded by tobacco fields planted with crystal-meth users.

Conclusion: manga breeds Asian Steves. Great explainers, evangelists. But their chief should have the Christian name of Ron. “Manga Ron.” Get it?

???! I’m hilarious.

Anyway, that’s part of the point, right? Finding your own private ecosystem and then explaining the biodiversity within is a joy. Of course, that perspective dates me. Many readers younger than me don’t see the divisions, I think. And a handful of cartoonists, like Hilary Florido and Laura Park, effortlessly mix influences. They both lift from manga stuff that suits them, ditch the rest, and draw with a sense of Western cartoon history in their lines.

Sweet. Global culture, here we come.