Tag Archives: Ng Suat Tong

Original Art: A Kat in the House

Posted on by

“Too much ink has already been spilled on Herriman’s passing for white, and how the strip’s shifting perspectives and mutable characters reflect that decision. And none of it is worthwhile. Doubtless there is a relation, and I’m certain it’s too complex to be formally drawn out and distilled.” [Emphasis mine]

Harry Siegel at the New Partisan


The 16th Krazy Kat Sunday published on 6th August 1916. It has an image area of 18″ by 21.5″ and a water stain marking its lower border.

Background. I’ve been searching for a Krazy Kat Sunday for some time, and I managed to acquire this example only because none of the usual players were interested in it. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, there’s the water damage at the bottom of the page which is a minor problem in my book. The other factors are the lack of a brick gag (which I’m not particularly interested in) and the fact that the formal elements in this Sunday are not front and center.

That last point is of importance to me, but this page has other elements which make up for that deficiency. It comes from a period of great creativity for the artist, with some of the most famous episodes crafted during the space of a few years. It is the intricate inking from the early years which I am most fond of: the light touch delineating the characters, and the gentle hatching describing the illuminated night sky above the pueblo. It didn’t take long for Herriman to find his way around the large space of a Sunday page, and here we see him showcasing the wide vistas and deep perspectives so typical of the strip. Most of the major characters are represented here including Joe Stork and Ignatz’s family; all coupled with a constant movement towards the right side of the page.  The final panel is a pretty good summary of Herriman’s eternal triangle.

The Plot. Alderman Tsheez is announcing a “sad event to his constituents” who remain determinedly unimpressed if not hostile — the disappearance of Ignatz Mouse (here enjoined by the multifarious sorrow of his wife and children). A mercenary with a walking cane and ten gallon hat listens to all of this and is soon traversing the canyons and mesas of Coconino county. The reward if he succeeds is a pound of the best cheese. His cooperative guide is a “Mexican bandit” called Don Kioty; the quest which the soldier of fortune is about to undertake will take on the color of that guide’s name. The bandit points him towards the Mesa Dedo del Pie Grande which lies in the distance like a stubborn windmill; a big stub of a toe scratching the vault of the sky, and a distant cousin of the oppressive thumb which presses firmly down on Krazy in the Sunday of 2nd December 1917.

His ultimate destination is a land of humor and fear. There is a darkness on the horizon, and it is the process of enveloping the pueblo he has to visit to complete his mission.

George Herriman, so we’ve been told on numerous occassions, always wore a hat when he went out.

The better to hide the curled locks of his “mixed” heritage. A man in disguise just as his much beloved kat is in disguise in this Sunday. Krazy’s mask is a polished beard and a crumpled tail covering his/her ebon caudal appendage, now all burnished white. A cane — a comedienne’s aid — is held firmly in his hand; the tool by which she will make that connection with her desired audience both in the happy end we see on the final panel of this Sunday and the deployment of Herriman’s craft.

The mouse from whom she desires love and affection is a rascal; always mean, treacherous, and selfish in the pursuit of his own ends. The periodic beaning of the kat’s head is unambiguous to all but the love struck feline; the crowd of disgruntled onlookers in the first expansive panel is a chorus announcing the only possible diagnosis when it comes to their relationship. Offissa Pup never suspects, half in love yet always on guard; the tenacious attendant of a system of denigration — the very well from which the kat and her master derive sustenance on a daily basis.

The harsh desert glare which opens this chapter is in stark contrast to the night enveloping the pueblo on the third tier of this page. The walls of Joe Beamish’s store on the next line show a progression from watery shadows in the first instance to fuliginous night in the last, quite perceptible in the original if not on the printed sheet. The moment of confrontation is anticipated with relish by the offissa with his truncheon, and there is an evocation of tenebrosity in his words (“I’ll be made a Captain for this night’s work sure.”)

It is a forbidden place of dangerous transaction; a cage with an irresistible bait, easily resisted with the “crutch” of Herriman’s artistry and craftsmanship.

And then, that persistent dream of a safe and blissful conclusion…

…seen once again in this panel of solemn pining from 1917…

…never to be resolved even at the very end, the kat fading quietly into the arms of time and its inquisitions.

NOTE: Some images taken from the collection of Rob Stolzer.

The Travelogue as Masturbation

Posted on by

In her article on Graphic Journalism, Erin Polgreen states that:

“[Travelogues] are often meditative explorations of a foreign landscape in which the reader unpacks their cultural baggage with the author, exploring a strange land with them. The key here is in viewer identification: The comics creator has a strong voice leading the narrative, and we trust them to impart facts and dissect stereotypes for us. Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less is a near flawless example of the travelogue. Glidden isn’t going for an objective non-fiction work here, which can seem counter-intuitive to journalists. Rather, she’s looking to use her experiences as a lens for dissecting her own cultural (mis)perceptions and takes the reader along for the ride.” [Emphasis mine]

There are many words which come to mind when I think of Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, but “flawless” doesn’t even come close to capturing the essence of any of them.

 

An overwhelming emptiness developed in my gut as I was reading this slim volume of tightly arranged panels depicting a young woman’s frankly insipid account of her first trip to Israel on a “Birthright Israel” tour. Glidden’s comic condenses the “promised land” into a  series of flat, non-descript images and dialog sequences. Hence Masada becomes a mound of amorphous light brown soil, its history and controversies distilled to a shallow recital comparing the works of Josephus to her guide’s Zionist spiel. Would that she had read better books and developed a better mind for such analysis.

Where Matisse once suggested that “one square centimeter of any blue is not as blue as a square meter of the same blue,” Glidden proposes that a systematic dabbing of color will do the trick. Her vistas are almost infallibly debased to non-entities. Here a village landscape becomes only a momentary pause — an empty space —  and quite secondary to the dialog preceding it.

The following montage of a street parade has much the same problem, passing fleetingly before our eyes like a colleague’s holiday slideshow.

Only close to the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock do we see a some recourse to the establishment of atmosphere and place, though still to somewhat hollow effect.

Once free of the strictures of the tour (and in the final chapter of the book), the cartooning which was once crudely serviceable begins to display a bit more polish, a dividend from weeks of practice and, perhaps, a process of trial and error. A more skillful practitioner might have used variations on the nine panel grid to engineer some points of conjunction and disjunction between text and image, but Glidden uses this device largely to preserve the steady voice of the storyteller and hence an effortless flow in her account. This is a hallmark of the plain narration advocated by autobiographical stalwarts like Harvey Pekar and his ilk. As such, Glidden’s authorial voice resides largely in her simple drawings and not in whatever talent she has for narrative or language.

What follows is a summation of Glidden’s entire experience (and conclusions) in the form of a series of conversations between the author and various people: citizens, both young and old, who have made Aliyah; a progressive rabbi delivering a message of reconciliation and calling for a striking of archaic laws from the Talmud; and, finally, an Israeli with whom she finds the peace to disagree. Those who have a place in their hearts for Glidden’s comic will undoubtedly point to these exchanges as the basis for their affection; the author’s heart always on her sleeve, her emotions ever on tap, her youthful idealism and barely formed intellect crushing all before her. This is a vision of comics journalism as a mediator for those who have little interest in reading.

I was about three quarters of the way through this comic before I realized that there was a fatal flaw in my approach to this comic. I was half expecting a travelogue in the tradition of Theroux if not Levi-Strauss. But the potential reader will need to reorient herself to the requirements of this cartoon journal for the best results. It is altogether more pleasing if one sees it as a self-lacerating memoir impaling the author’s younger and more foolish self  (of course, Glidden recently celebrated the revolution in Egypt with all the superficiality of a 10 word Twitter missive, but I suppose that too could be seen as self-satire.)

Nowhere is this more evident than in Glidden’s visit to Yad Vashem. The author is justifiably irritated by one of the more prevalent experiences you might find on a package tour — the headlong rush through a famous museum in order to get to a meal (or some shopping). Yad Vashem is quite naturally reduced to that complaint, probably a purposeful disclosure of her rather mean spirit at that point in time.

The guide’s voice becomes a consistent drone, and the sights and sounds of the Holocaust distilled into an understated bitching session.

When all is over and she is given some time to herself, a moment of tranquility in the Hall of Names; Glidden’s tribute to what the Holocaust experience is all about:

What lies beneath this is of course much more insidious and encapsulated in the following sequence of panels:

Here Glidden yearns for the “true” Holocaust experience; to connect and emote with the inhumanity dealt to some 6 million Jews  — she wants to be that crying child in the group in front of her. Perhaps she wanted to be struck with awe at the incalculable evil and misery; to feel deep in her heart of hearts the tragedy of it all.

Like a friend who once told me eagerly about his tour of Auschwtiz, this is Yad Vashem as an amusement park ride; that all too familiar cry of, “What can I get out of it,” from cattle on a drive through unfamiliar territory. More damning than the reams of sexposès or masturbatory fantasies in the indy comics of the early 90s, for here Glidden reveals herself as a tourist and travel writer with absolutely nothing to say. That dullness captured in the ironic title of her book — How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less — for the creator knows full well that the country of her visitation is impossible to capture in that period of time. Glidden’s comic is a work of self-condemnation; a “warts and all” cautionary to all those who would seek to traffic in their trifling insights, for therein lies undistinguished banality. It is the rotting carcass of the autobiographical genre in comics.

Memories of Old Hong Kong

Posted on by

(Two Comics by Stella So)

The cartoonist, Stella So, is the last entry in Chihoi and Craig Au Yeung’s 2007 survey of “25 Years of Hong Kong Independent Comics” (Long Long Road) — a brief stopover for this small but vibrant scene.

Au Yeung’s blurb at the back of the 2010 reissue of So’s Very Fantastic describes her as one of a new generation of born and bred Hong Kong cartoonists; an artist who has a singular eye and feel for the life and character of that city.

The book in question is an early sign of that promise. It documents the entire process through which she created her 7 minute animated film of the same name which won a gold medal at the 2002 Hong Kong Independent Short Film & Video Award (IFVA). It is in many ways the more interesting project of the pair, revealing her working methods and the components which make up her art.

Very Fantastic was done as a graduation project from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2002, and describes the fading world of old Chinese tenements (tanglou in Mandarin). Her travels through the corridors and byways of these old structures make up the bulk of the book, combining sketches, photos and description in a kind of careful collage. Hence the distortions in this view of a row of bird cages…

…and this sketch of a dark iron door crowned with frosted glass funneling a warm orange intensity.

So’s book is not only a record of grizzled castaways — faded electronics, old furniture, and tiles — but also a collection of chromatic reminiscences, not least from the fiery glow of the humble incandescent light bulb. The quality of light in a stairwell is noted at one point and is seen to transport that space back 30 years.

The most vital elements collected during her expeditions are selected and assembled into a whole which is curious yet evocative.

The rest of the book chronicles the process of character design, sound recording and animation; every page formulated on a grid design which is typical of practice books for writing Chinese characters. These don’t merely act as guidelines but also as flexible panels to which she fits her sketches. As such, the book becomes not just an exercise in cartooning and the deployment of the imagination, but also one of using the practical qualities of the page. The final shot of the cartoon shows the protagonist walking down a staircase lodged in the thin gutter between the four rows of calligraphic squares, the paper now turned on its side to give a long vertical space instead of a horizontal one. The paper lodges the proceedings firmly in a Chinese past, the fading green lines hardly being the stuff of modern printing (and modern Hong Kong). A reasonably common practice in the East, and one which is not unknown even in America (for example, in the work of Lynda Barry).

The large fold out panoramas which inhabit the first section of the book are not only functional in design, but calculated to draw readers into the centuries old tradition of Chinese scroll painting.

The most famous example of this must be Zhang Zeduan’s Along the River During the Qing Ming Festival (QingMing Shanghe Tu; 11th-12th century) which, to this day, is reproduced in scrolls and collapsible books like the one shown below.

The ultimate expression of So’s longing can be found in City of Powder -Vanishing Hong Kong, an oblong-shaped book of illustrations and comics published in 2008. So is fascinated by the sensory environment of the city, and the chapter titles of this memoir reflect the colors, smells, and sounds she experienced during her excursions. As with her earlier project, the drawings here are an amalgamation of the real and the imagined; a compression of time, place, and meaning.

A lyrical article at Honey Pupu is as detailed an analysis of So’s art as you will find online. The author doesn’t see her as any sort of conservationist — she hasn’t the influence or the training for this — but as a nostalgist, the poetry of whose images convey something of the truth of memory. These comics are free from narrative and the flow of time; the saturated hues and imaginings not suggestive of history, but of something instinctive and almost incontrovertible.

The chapter describing “Wedding Card Street” could be described as a burst of synesthesia captured on paper. The first page shows an accumulation of sensory and emotive detail harvested from various points in space and time, all focused on the central area of the artist’s work sheet.

The next two are mythical constructs depicting flowering Wedding Card trees and the romance of manufacturing.

So is especially concerned with the latter aspect of city living, and dwells at length on the preparatory steps involved in cooking a bowl of noodles at a favorite noodle stall, and the logic of the signs which litter her vistas. The building cutaways reveal a progress from the joys of union to the intermittent pleasures of old age. It is not a story with a happy ending. The first drawings in this series are dated 2004, the last showing beshrouded buildings, withered trees, and gaping maws is from 2008, the last act in a place now consigned to dust.

City of Powder ends with the origins and customs of the Chinese Ghost Festival; a not surprising conclusion in view of the theme of So’s book. It begins with a description of Maudgalyayana’s (a disciple of Gautama Buddha) quest to liberate his mother from hell where she has been transformed into a hungry ghost, a creature in a perpetual state of longing due to its inability to consume any food. The food offerings which are sometimes found at various houses and temples during the Ghost month relate directly to Buddha’s solution to this dilemma. The Indian elephant is a reminder of this cross-cultural fertilization; the dialog between the little girl lost and the boy, a not so subtle call to remember tradition amidst modernity.

When the boy asks the girl how she came to be lost, she replies that she couldn’t find her way home because of the rapid changes to the city. The ceremonies and offerings which make up innards of the mechanical pachyderm are reminders of an urban past, a ritual of rebirth which recalls Maudgalyayana’s efforts to ensure his mother’s reincarnation.

This is awkward and yet so charming in its delivery that it becomes convincing and emotionally satisfying; much more so than some itinerant stories concerning the destruction left in the wake of the Three Gorges Dam that I’ve seen. Because the sadness of displacement, and the sweat and tears of the dispossessed are not the only reasons why we cherish a hard but now desolate past. The artist of City of Powder captures that rose-tinged spark of remembrance, and while her portrait is sometimes tinged with sentimentality, it is one that should not be casually dismissed.

Further Reading

A profile of the artist in Chinese.

An interview with Stella So at HK magazine.

Commercial Press online where the comics of So and her contemporaries can be purchased.

The “real” Wedding Card Street (culled from Google images):

 

Short Thought for the Day: What Art Will Last?

Posted on by

“When the critic has no delicacy, he judges without any distinction, and is only affected by the grosser and more palpable qualities of the object: The finer touches pass unnoticed and disregarded. Where he is not aided by practice, his verdict is attended with confusion and hesitation. Where no comparison has been employed, the most frivolous beauties, such as rather merit the name of defects, are the object of his admiration. Where he lies under the influence of prejudice, all his natural sentiments are perverted…Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty.”

“Of the Standard of Taste”, David Hume

 

Continue reading →

The Years Have Pants: Preamble

Posted on by

Part of the Eddie Campbell-The Years Have Pants Roundtable

This one’s too big to really get a good grasp of. It’s a wizened but lively old cat at 600 pages and 30 years long. You can hold it up by the scruff of its neck with the strength of one hand, but not for any reasonable duration.

Then again, you don’t really need to. There’s a summary provided by the author himself (and who else better to do it) — a pilgrimage to Hugo Pratt’s breakfast table during a comics festival in Sierre, Switzerland. The words are Pratt’s but they weren’t spoken to Campbell during that meeting. Instead, depending on your faith in the narrator, they were taken from an “older interview” with him where he recounts a kind of third person autobiography, which in turn describes everything that we have read up to that point.

Continue reading →

Agreeable Fascism: Oishinbo

Posted on by

Oishinbo by Tetsu Kariya (writer) & Akira Hanasaki (artist)
(Pages read from left to right)

A very serious discussion awaits HU readers next week, so I’ve decided to dwell on one of the more simple-minded manga series published in the last few years — the info-food manga, Oishinbo. The sole purpose of this manga mutate is to entertain while conveying information. So not exactly the equivalent of Jeremy Issac’s The World at War, but certainly a distant cousin of Anthony Bourdain eating a warthog anus.
Continue reading →

Reconsidering Tatsumi

Posted on by

EARLY TATSUMI: The Push Man and Other Stories (1969)

Everyone has to start somewhere.

For Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Drawn and Quarterly that beginning was the collection of short stories titled The Push Man and Other Stories, an anthology of stories dating from 1969 which was translated and published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2005 [1].

It comes with a prodigious list of accolades. Chip Kidd calls it a “revelation” which “[peels] away the lacquered layers of Japanese social and sexual surfaces to reveal the elemental heart beneath, and with such fearless depth of feeling.” Paul Gravett proclaims Tatsumi “a master of frank, unsentimental exposés of the human condition”, and Jaime Hernandez suggests that “Tatsumi’s comics are clean and straightforward without pretentious tricks. Storytelling at its best.”

The evidence on the ground is less convincing.

Continue reading →