Tag Archives: Imaginary Comics

Comics of the Future…Today!

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Best American Comics 2053
Edited by Philoctetes Crumb, Jr.

Yes, it’s still got the same title, even though the Galacticon/Cylon Confederacy officially conquered the planet five years ago. I guess it’s a nostalgia thing? Or a political statement? Because nothing says, “Fight the power” like fourth-generation underground comics royalty editing a boring fucking anthology, I guess.

So what do we got here anyway? Hip, Viagra-addled eightysomethings whinging about their artificial nether-prosthetics? Check. Ivan Brunetti with a raw, tasteless strip about how he’s sorry he can’t kill himself now that he’s transplanted his brain into an invulnerable titanium computer? Yep. Some Frank Miller clone (yes, literally ) writing the newly public-domain Jimmy Corrigan as a two-fisted Wolverine knock-off (“I’m the most complexly ambivalent at what I do…but what I do isn’t very nice”)? You betcha. (Actually, that last one is pretty funny. I knew the orphaned works law would be good for something.)

Naturally, there’s still no manga coverage. At least, though, the venerable series has finally, finally, finally decided to acknowledge the existence of Psycomics. Guru McCloud himself is represented with an excerpt from his latest: Defibrilating Comics. With the new lasex surgery laws, his icon doesn’t have glasses, and it’s hair is white — and, of course, it appears on the inside of your eyeballs. But never fear, it’s still blocky and ugly and it still won’t shut up! “Gosh, gee, the brain stem is just another medium to deliver the ever expanding, ever inventive world that is comics and I’m going to show you all of its wonderful potential by standing stock still and nattering on and on just as if I’m one of those hideous nanotisements from the twenties! Ain’t progress grand!”

As has been the case since the early forties when the remnants of the big two merged, there’s one entry devoted to the latest DC/Marvel crossover kerfuffle. The average super-hero reader is, of course – well, actually, there are only two of them. They are both 98 and male and have been reading comics for approximately 90 years a piece. Apparently what they want are comics entirely about Hulk rape. “Hulk rape Thing! Hulk rape Ms. Marvel! Hulk rape Dr. Light! Hulk rape Jughead!” That’s all this strip is; 35 pages of Hulk rape. I think that makes it sound maybe more interesting than it is, though. Because while Hulk is raping the text is mostly devoted to a lot of explication about how the heroes are the greatest heroes ever, and then they’re still the greatest heroes ever and aren’t the Justice League of Avengers the best? Then in the middle Hal Jordan explains why Bruce Wayne isn’t Green Lantern, which has to do with Superman being depowered and eating Galactus (hopefully not in a sexual way. Ugh.) And Sue Dibny is resurrected as Caspar the friendly Ghost III. Or maybe she’s actually the Phantom Girl or something; there was a mini-series they were all telling me to read over at Occasional Superheroine because, you know, it featured a woman, but…well, I didn’t. Sorry. Anyway, as it turns out, Hulk can’t rape you if you’re incorporeal, so that’s a plus.

I know, I know…the Beat’s gonna be on my case for not being sufficiently nice. And I have to admit, it’s not all downside. Sure, the content in Best American Comics 2053 is wretched. But at least you can’t actually buy it anywhere. Thank God for the ongoing economic contraction and the horrific, systematic destruction of our civilization. No race that produces crap like this deserves to live, anyway. All Hail the Cylons!

imaginary comics, part 3: “portnoy’s complaint”

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I guess it’s not surprising that Philip Roth is the latest literary darling to jump on the trend of adapting his work to comic-book form. Perhaps inspired by David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik’s City of Glass or Asaf Hanuka’s Pizzeria Kamikaze, or in a bid to seem relevant amongst younger Jews-about-town like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, Roth has commissioned a graphic novel of his 1969 opus Portnoy’s Complaint.

What is surprising is his choice of artist. Rather than R. Crumb or Art Spiegelman, artists with similar enshrined statuses in their fields and somewhat Rothy down-and-dirty semi-confessional aesthetics, he tapped prince of the pretty-boys Craig Thompson.

Portnoy’s Complaint the graphic novel is a fairly slim volume (it was apparently drawn right before Thompson began the final pages for Habibi) coming out next year from Houghton Mifflin. I was of course able to get a galley due to my mad connections in the jewy/comicky/academic world.

Thompson’s drawing style fits the narrative seamlessly sometimes; his swoopy expressionism sets off the various flashbacks well, and the scenes set in the psychologist’s office show Alexander Portnoy (Good Bye Chunky Rice style) adrift on his couch in a swirling sea, while Spielvogel looms like an impassive, wooden dock. Thompson also has had a lot of practice conveying acute shame on pious young boys, which make the bar mitzvah lesson scenes and the liver masturbation scene even more tortured and memorable than in prose.

But in the adult flashbacks, there’s a real tension between the approaches of the two authors’ literary personas: Roth the great misogynist and Thompson the rapturous girl-worshipper. Despite a lot of similarities one can draw between Thompson’s oeuvre and Portnoy (flashbacks, childhood trauma as a key to adult dysfunction, outsized sexual longing), I got to wondering if Roth chose Thompson for the book just to watch him squirm.

The squirm of the artist is practically palpable in the oral sex scenes (man do I wish I was allowed to scan and post those). And when portraying the shallow, illiterate supermodel lust/hate object known as the Monkey, Thompson, without veering from the text, makes her a lot more human than Alexander can see (maybe as a working class small-town Midwestern boy himself, Thompson identified with her more than the protagonist).

Sometimes Thompson goes too far in trying to pretty everything up; the Portnoys mostly seem like nice, vaguely ethnic people rather than the “Jewish joke” Roth described them as. But the mis-fit of Thompson and Portnoy makes a really fascinating text and counter-text (or second text) interplay. Thompson foregrounds the fight that is often overlooked in the text, by embodying with his art style the Nice Jewish Boy masking the Dirty Jew-boy inside.

It’s a bit rocky in places, but I think it’s my favourite Roth creation, and just might be my favourite Thompson creation as well. You should look out for it.

Imaginary Comics, part 2: “Uneven Hills”

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Bill made up a cartoon sketched on a series of tea leaves. What I have is a set of pages that were not published as part of the Absolute Sandman series. Neil Gaiman, hitting the crest of his early comics career, did not contact an aging Jack Kirby and, in a fit of sentimentality and cross-talent brand promotion, persuade him to illustrate the gala fiftieth issue of Sandman, which was not titled “Uneven Hills” and did not concern Morpheus fallen among the Amazons and embarrassed by his long-ago affair with Hippolyta, Wonder Woman’s mother, with implications for Lyta Hall’s eventual vendetta against him.

Kirby did not draw a Morpheus with doorknob-sized cheekbones and a forehead reaching three feet above his nose. The following elements did not appear: Amazons with cantaloupe-sized muscles and shoulders the width of Victorian cabinets; sly references to Kirby’s part in creating the previous Sandman, Lyta Hall’s late husband; playful juxtapositions of Morpheus’s cheekboned languor and the Amazons’ beefy force; a four-page sequence, tailored to Kirby’s skills, in which Amazons hauled the stricken Morpheus on a massive chariot past trophies of the ages.
Kirby did not balk at Gaiman’s idea, which he did not have, of a row of Amazons archers, each one missing a breast because of Gaiman’s fidelity to classical sources. Roz, Kirby’s indomitable wife, did not have to intervene and did not spawn a winsome anecdote Gaiman retailed in later interviews about a telephone being wrestled from one Kirby to the other while Neil reasoned with the elderly artist. The nonresulting Amazon chests did not resemble the Astrodome standing next to a parking lot.

The nonexistent project did not have to be aborted because of Kirby’s illness, and there were no rumors that Walt Simonson would finish the art so the issue could appear in a  Sandman trade paperback. In the late 1990s, Vertigo did not transplant a character from the nonexistent issue, a spunky and undernourished teen Amazon named Hy (for Hyacinth), into The Dreaming and then give her a pocket-size manga series written and drawn by Jill Thompson.
The 17 more or less fully drawn Kirby pages and three remaining penciled roughs were not given pride of place in volume 3 of Absolute, the lines’ charcoal black not glowing against pages the color of whipped cream.
All that happened was that I wrote this post.
UPDATE:  Big Barda should be in there someplace, possibly a big fight sequence between her and an Amazon (some old rival of Wonder Woman’s?) in which Kirby could draw big fists and Gaiman could do some destabilizing of gender patterns. 

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.