Tag Archives: Canon

A Picture of Krazy Kat

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Last week Eric Berlatsky (that’s my brother!) left a comment on the PPP Krazy Kat roundtable in which he argued that one of the hallmarks of the strip is the way that settings and backgrounds are so unstable. “Everything “behind” the characters is constantly changing and in flux without any rhyme or reason,” he says. ” “Instability” seems to be the watchword of the strip, with the possible exception of the “solidity” of Ignatz’s brick itself.”

Eric talks about this in regards to the strips’ social positioning; the queer BDSM Kat/Ignatz/Pup triangle, and/or Herriman’s own fluid, possibly closeted or masked relationship to African-American identity. However, it seems to me that it could also be read formally rather than culturally.

For example, take this strip I pulled from the internet at random:
 

KrazyKat_2-6-38_lg

 
As Eric says, the background here shift insistently. In the first panel, Krazy and pup are positioned at night beside a tree on a straight road, with a curved rock formation off in the distance. The two panels below seem to be in daylight (the color of the sky blurring into the color of the ground from the panel above(. The tree disappears, and there are different rock formations (and what looks like a volcano) off in the distance. Then, in the next large panel, we see the (formerly straight) road curving off towards the obelisk, from behind which a gold moon rises. The sky is no longer the solid black of the first panel, but is instead a mass of cross-hatchings, almost ostentatiously referencing the hand that drew it. All this time, Officer Pup is explaining, with much assertion and repetition, that the waiting Krazy will never see a blue moon; declaring his faith in a natural order even as the world around him haphazardly shuffles trees and roads, creativity sliding out from under the rotund figure of law and order, who looks not unlike a big blue moon himself. Finally, Pup exits, and as Krazy lurches into quasi song (“Bee-Ell-oo-oo-oo Blue”) we see behind the monument (or did the monument just move over?) where Ignatz prepares to launch an ersatz blue moon balloon. Surely Krazy here is the reader, not so much gullible as eager to be gulled, while Ignatz is Herriman, the artist arranging and rearranging the props for the delight/confounding of all us waiting Kats. The arrangement of the two moons, one above the other on the page despite the alteration of all other visual cues, is perhaps the tell; the real paper moon is as fake as the fake paper moon, or perhaps even slightly more fake, since the blue acknowledges its artifice.
 
Stumbling on such a clearly self-referential strip wasn’t an accident I don’t think. Here’s another I picked out.
 

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Again, Kat as reader, Ignatz as creator, with the changing delights before the lens mirroring the giddy changes in background, as day swaps for night, trees replace rock formations, and the road arcs one way and then the other. Krazy even guesses that one misshapen piece of tschotskes is a “Komic”, in case we missed the joke. And then, the final turn-around, officer pup calls an end to the proceedings and the comic, returning to one of the strip’s most stable iconic images; Ignatz locked up in the dull jail, the world all bricked up and stolid till Ignatz (or Herriman) gets out to draw the next page.

And then there’s this:
 

KrazyKat_5-24-36_lg

 
That center second line panel tilts to create a straight frame within a crooked frame, a deliberate drawing of a drawing, created this time by Pup and placed in its jailhouse place by Krazy — even the creator is unstable, and who is creating who. In the final row, the left-hand panel is inset, like a painting against the black sky, so that the prison wall with the fake Ignatz painting looks itself like a cardboard facade. Krazy and the duck walk towards the fake painting on the fake drawing, burbling garbled names of masterpieces, while Krazy throws that brick against the left to right run of the reading. Roy T. Cook suggested that the brick’s reverse zip “highlights the artificiality” of Ignatz’s action. Everything, in short, is what it shouldn’t be; the genius of the artist is to krazily wrong all rights.

Adrielle Mitchell talked in her post about the way that George Herriman reshaped the comics canon; in comments Alex Buchet points out that Krazy Kat is in many ways in the high art canon, much loved by people like Juan Miro and Gertrude Stein.

Given that, perhaps Krazy Kat’s place in the canon is in some ways to create the notion of a canon,or to make a strip which demands a kind of canonicity. Art presents itself as art through the assumption of individual afflatus — the vision as meme. Krazy Kat, in the insistence of its artifice, is almost(?) a parody of avant garde brio, virtuosically creating a new world with every panel. Herriman makes a space for comics creator as genius because he drew himself as genius, high art in a blue moon.

Robert Stanley Martin Announces Best Comics Poll

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So after all the talk of canons on HU over the last week or two, Robert Stanley Martin and HU have decided to organize a poll to determine the greatest comics of all time. Here is Robert’s announcement of the details:

Would you like a break from all the incessant, pretentious squabbling here at The Hooded Utilitarian? Well, so would we! And we’re going to have a party!

We’ve already started sending out personal invitations to comics creators, members of the comics press, and various others to participate in a poll. We want to know their favorite comics of all time. In early August, we’re going to start counting down the top vote getters until we get to the winner of our little popularity contest. We will then publish all the submitted lists so everyone can see who voted for what. You may find your taste in comics is simpatico with people with whom you never thought you agreed.

The specific question of the poll is this:

What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?

We want lots of participants, lots and lots of them. We want more than we can ever hope to think of inviting. So we’re making a public announcement. If you can make any real claim to being a member of the comics press or comics academia, to being a professional creator in the comics, cartooning, and illustration fields, or an owner or employee of a comics-related business, you’re eligible to participate as long as we can easily verify your status. If you’re a comics blogger, no problem! A web-comics creator? No problem! An English professor who has assigned comics in your classes? An employee of a book publisher that handles comics? No problem! We want your list. And please pass our request on to eligible people whom you think might be interested!

If you send your list, and you are interested in writing a short appreciation of one of your favorites, we ask you to let us know. However, please remember that The Hooded Utilitarian is a not-for-profit writers cooperative and cannot pay for published submissions.

Here are the submission guidelines:

Send your list in an e-mail to bestcomicspoll@gmail.com.

Please don’t send your list in an attachment. E-mails with attachments will not be opened.

If you haven’t been sent a personalized invitation, please include a brief note explaining who you are and a website where we can go to confirm your status. If you send your list from an employee e-mail account from a comics-related or otherwise suitable employer, that should be sufficient. (Though don’t do anything that might get you into trouble with your boss.) Please keep in mind that if you have not received a personalized invitation, we cannot guarantee you will be participating in the final vote.

Please send your list by June 22, 2011. If you have received a personalized invitation, and we haven’t heard from you by June 15, we’ll send you a reminder notice asking you to please get it in by June 30.

Here are the guidelines for preparing your list:

First, here’s a sample list:

Barbarella, Jean-Claude Forest
The caricatures of Victor Juhasz
Curtis, Ray Billingsley
The editorial cartoons of Bill Day
The single-panel magazine cartoons of Rowland B. Wilson
The Mystery Play, Grant Morrison and Jon J Muth
Samurai Executioner, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima
X-Men, Roy Thomas and Werner Roth
X-Men, Chris Claremont, John Romita, Jr., and Bob Wiacek
The Zap Comix stories of Robert Williams

Your list may include any newspaper strips, comic-book series, graphic novels, manga features, web comics, editorial cartoons, and single-panel magazine cartoons. These works can be from any country of origin. Please do not include an entry that has yet to be published.

Each of your list’s entries should consist of the name of the work and its author(s).

With newspaper strips and corporate-owned comic-book features, we ask that you list runs by different creative personnel as separate entries. Do this in the manner of the two X-Men entries in the sample list above. If your list includes an entry like “X-Men, Roy Thomas, Werner Roth, Chris Claremont, John Romita, Jr., and Bob Wiacek,” we will print it as part of your list, but it will not be counted as a vote towards the final one.

In the case of features in alternative-comics series that were later published as distinct graphic-novel collections, please use the graphic novels when preparing your list. For example, if you would like to vote for work by Daniel Clowes that was originally published in Eightball, we ask that you vote for Ghost World, Ice Haven, or Caricature & Other Stories, etc. as separate entries.

With a manga or graphic-novel series by a single author (or author team) that stars continuing characters, please vote for this as a single work instead of for individual volumes. If you vote for multiple volumes, it will only be counted as one vote for the feature.

With caricaturists, editorial cartoonists, and single-panel magazine cartoonists, we ask that the entry be for the cartoonist’s body of work in that mode.

Please do not vote for anthology publications. Please vote for an individual piece or a continuing feature in the anthology. Voting for a single author or author team’s body of work in the anthology is fine, such as the entry in the sample list of Robert Williams’ body of work in Zap Comix. The rare anthology in which the editor played a primary creative role in the featured material, such as Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad, is also fine.

While you are free to rank your lists (we will show your rankings when we print your submissions), your rankings do not weight your votes in the tally for the final list. Each of your entries will be counted as one vote.

If you send a list with less than ten entries, all will be counted towards the final tally. If you send a list with more than ten entries, we will likely write back to ask that you restrict your entries to ten. If you do not reduce your list to ten, we will count none of your entries as votes in the final list, although we may print your list with an explanatory note in the submissions posting.

We reserve the right to count votes towards the final tally as we see fit.

Don’t get stressed preparing your list. The point is to have fun!

If you have any questions, please e-mail them. We’ll do our best to help.

Please feel free to reprint this, link to it, and otherwise pass it around. We’re attempting to get a wide range of contributors!

Dyspeptic Orobouros: Who Let That In Here, Anyway?

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Robert Stanley Martin’s post from a few days back has me thinking about comics and canons. Specifically, I’ve been trying more or less idly to figure out what my favorite comics are. Peanuts of course. Maybe Watchmen. Possibly Little Nemo. Those would all irritate Domingos, but they’re solidly mainstream choices.

I was a little disturbed though to discover that Marley’s Dokebi Bride may make my list.

Probably most people reading this haven’t heard of Dokebi Bridge. It’s a Korean manhua YA coming of age story that I read a couple years back. It was never finished; it ends on a cliff-hanger at the end of volume 6. I wrote a very enthusiastic review at Comixology.

The book, like many ghost stories, is about grief and dislocation and how the two circle around each other like black, exhausted smudges. The first volume opens with Sunbi’s father carrying her mother’s ashes back from the grave; that volume ends with the death of Sunbi’s grandmother, who raised her and cared for her. The central loss of a parent, and therefore of self, returns again and again through the series, a literal haunting. Sunbi can’t function without putting the past behind her, but the past is everything she is — she can’t let it go. When a fortune teller offers to read her future, Sunbi rejects the offer angrily. “No, I don’t want to know about my stupid future!” she bites out through her tears. “Just tell me what all this means to me! Tell me why they’ve all died and left me, why they’re even trying to take away my memories!”

So, yes, I liked it a lot — more than any other reviewer I’ve seen, I’m pretty sure. Michelle Smith, for example, has a much more mixed reaction. (Interestingly, the things she dislikes — the way the plot stutters back and forth without seeming sure where it’s going — is something that kind of made the series for me.)

But anyway. The point is, there’s a pretty big gap between saying, “I liked this,” or even “I loved this” and saying, “You know, I think this is one of the best comics ever. It’s going in my canon!” People can forgive the first as a harmless eccentricity. The second, though, starts to look like carelessness.

I’m not going to try to make the case for Dokebi Bride as one of the all time all times here. It’s interesting to think about why making that case is futile though. What exactly could I say that would make Dokebi Bride seem like it deserved canonicity, anyway? I love the series, and (as in my essay) I think I can make a pretty sustained argument as to why it’s good or even great (not that I’d convince anyone, but I can make the argument.) I could even point out that many things that have actually made it into the canon to some degree (like, say, Herge’s Tintin or the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man or Maus) are less thoughtful or moving than Dokebi Bride (at least in my opinion.)

But canonicity is about more than just quality. It’s also about influence and centrality — it’s about the art forms’ narrative. And it’s very hard to make an argument in which an unfinished Korean genre series with middling reviews is important to comics.

This brings up a question which I’ve thought about in some other contexts,namely — could the best comic ever written be something that nobody’s ever seen? Could some random mini-comic in a drawer somewhere be the best thing ever? Can the quality of an aesthetic object be abstracted from its context and its place in history? If Tintin appeared now as a children’s book, largely ignored by the comics mainstream, would it be a classic? Would Tsuge?

Of course, no one thinks Dokebi Bride is better than Tintin, much less Tsuge. I look ridiculous for suggesting it. And that’s part of what canons are there for too. Canons legitimize the works of art, but they also legitimize, or deligitimize the people making the canons. Canons are a way of determining who is and who is not with the program. They’re lines in the sand.

Choosing Dokebi Bride for a canon is its own kind of line; it suggests a perverse contrarianism, perhaps. To pick as canonical something no one else thinks of as canonical doesn’t mean you’re any less beholden to the conventional wisdom. It just means your defined through opposition. You may not be onboard the truck, but that just means you’re tied to the bumper (possibly screaming impotent obscenities.)

Which brings me to the reason that I, in general, both dislike canons and find myself fascinated by them. Robert pointed out that canons change over time. They’re not fixed; people alter them. Which is certainly true. But, at the same time, canons alter art, and, by extension, people. The things that are considered great and important affect how you relate to new works, how you relate to the art form….and even how you relate to yourself. I noted above that I was a little disturbed to discover myself thinking about Dokebi Bride as a canonical work. That disturbance didn’t appear out of nowhere; it was put there by the canon, which functions in this situation as a kind of conscience or superego.

So should we just get rid of canons then? Throw off the beady-eyed superego and frolic joyfully in whatever pop pleasures of the id present themselves? Well, maybe. If people don’t want to think too much about canons, that’s reasonable.

On the other hand, canons do, like superegos, provide a shared set of norms — a communal way to talk and think about art. If canons are sometimes worth resisting or challenging, it’s because the canon itself provides a context in which resisting or challenging has meaning. Canons are rigid…but flexibility becomes meaningless if there’s no structure to flex. It takes a small amount of gumption to say that something — whether Dokebi Bride or anything else — should be in the canon. Maybe that’s why it’s worth saying in the first place.