Comics and the Indispensability of Kitsch

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

“The dream has grown gray. The gray coating of dust on things is its best part. Dreams are now a shortcut to banality. Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value. It is then that the hand retrieves the outer cast in dreams and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours.

…which side does an object turn toward dreams? What point is its most decrepit? It is the side worn through by habit and patched with cheap maxims. The side which things turn toward the dream is kitsch.”

“Dream Kitsch“, Walter Benjamin

The destructive effects of time especially in an era of rapid advances in technology and industrialization; making the implements, furnishings and fashions of not so long ago or even the generation before seem old and “musty.” It is a problem which doesn’t seem to have left us in the intervening years since Walter Benjamin wrote extensively on kitsch and its relevance to history, nostalgia, objective truth, and art.

Like the seemingly deficient 19th century artistic draperies Benjamin cites (via the architectural critic, Sigfried Giedion) in The Arcades Project, these rejected artistic mannerisms of an earlier age were then taken up by the Surrealists active during Benjamin’s life time. They, far from casting aside these old, tired forms embedded them in their work. We in turn, Benjamin adds, “would recognize today’s life, today’s forms, in the life and in the apparently secondary, lost forms of that epoch.”

* * *

Krazy Kat Sunday 4-30-1916. The second Krazy Kat Sunday to be published and the oldest one known to exist in the form of its original art.

It is easy to think of cartoonists from an earlier age as being purely instinctual, producing images on a treadmill and dropping images on to the paper even as the ideas occurred to them; never completely conscious of their abilities to create lasting art. Perhaps it is a feeling gleaned from our experience with the flaccid strips of our modern age.

Yet even the true grind of a daily strip like Frank King’s Gasoline Alley—where readers were expected to be more interested in character and event than formalism—suggest otherwise, often allowing a level of sophistication which can be surprising. Consider the Gasoline Alley daily of 3-26-1935 where Walt Wallet frets over the adoption of his eventual daughter, Judy.

Judy was found in Walt’s car in much the same way Skeezix was discovered at his doorstep over 10 years prior, a point which King affirms by reproducing the same naming sequence for Judy which he once used for Skeezix 15 years before on 12-3-21.

One wonders whether readers at the time would have been able to remember this without a personal collection of newspaper clippings. This mirroring seems to have been done largely for the artist’s personal satisfaction (both strips were kept by King till his death).

Those seeking examples of symmetry in form and story in comics might point to the Schuiten brothers work on Nogegon or Moore and Gibbon’s “Fearful Symmetry” from Watchmen #5, but King’s daily presents itself as an early American example of this type of formalism. Walt’s strutting gait and anticipation in the first two panels are mirrored in the final two panels depicting despondency and hesitation. The shape of the panels direct the reader’s mind to this intention which is reflected fully in Walt’s posture and his words.

So it is with the Krazy Kat Sunday first mentioned above with Krazy at rest or plummeting in every other panel on left side of the Sunday page, and airborne in all the panels on the right (one should not doubt that the figures sleeping with their heads together in the final panel are in fact in flight). Herriman separates dreams from reality by means of a boldly rulered box joining the final four panels but this line of demarcation is an illusion—the dream in all its anxiety, desire, and fulfillment has not ended.

The Sunday is dedicated to Mrs. Helen Dirks (the cartoonist Rudolph Dirk’s wife) and is the very picture of conjugal bliss—the perfect kiss coupled to an absolute faith that love has been requited. A moment reiterated nearly a century later in the pages of Kevin Huizenga’s story in Ganges #1 where a lover thinks silently through the night about the person sleeping beside him—a captive moment reiterated six times on a single page where readers are asked to remember and think to themselves, “I have seen this” or “I have experienced this.” Or “Yes, this can happen” or “I wish it did happen.”

The movement and progress of the balloon which draws the mouse, Ignatz, away from Krazy may seem like an exceptional example of Herriman’s absolute control of the Sunday page and composition, but at its heart it is a vaudevillian depiction of the fear and the pain of separation; perhaps even of grief, a feeling which C. S. Lewis once described as being “like fear…[perhaps], more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting, just hanging about waiting for something to happen.”

Which makes that consummate final panel altogether more poignant, especially if one thinks back to the final Krazy Kat Sunday in which Krazy is seen drowning alone in a pool riddled with the tremulous ink lines emanating from the artist’s arthritic hands. The relationship between Krazy and Ignatz so close to a metaphor for the marriage of Herriman to his art; the strip like an artistic statement or autobiography, on a lower pedestal than Rembrandt’s numerous self-portraits perhaps but certainly from the same school of ideas.

* * *

Somebody Loves Me

Those hesitant, shakey lines can bee seen again in Jack T. Chick’s seminal tract, Somebody Loves Me, but here less a product of age and illness than artistic insensibility. This was a best seller by all accounts and one which has been endlessly dissected (or should I say derided) and repudiated. A seemingly impoverished work of cartooning dropped in countless mailboxes all over the world and given to me as a child by a Seven Day Adventist presumably because of Chick’s interest in eschatology.

In Chick’s comic, an abused child is viciously beaten by his drunken father before finally withering away in a cardboard box on the streets of a nameless city (some hopeless Sodom or Gomorrah one presumes). But not before hearing the Good News that somebody loves him—”JESUS LOVES YOU!”

The line is untrained, the art of the ultimate outsider cartoonist where others can only pretend to this throne. So despised and rejected, and yet utterly indelible as far as the history of comics is concerned. I don’t know if Chick’s most famous tract ever worked on me but that final image of an angel carrying the abused boy to heaven seems quite grotesque when viewed today.

It is as if Chick had supped on medieval images of the Madonna and child and decided that anti-naturalistic disproportion was fundamental to demonstrating the maturity (or infantilism; it is quite hard to tell) of a newly received Christian soul. This is at odds with a much finer image of an angel kneeling at the box-home of the boy; a drawing filled with the artist’s absolute conviction, that mysterious energy of an outsider determined to promulgate the truth, to communicate by any means possible.

Yet like the works of Richard Wagner—that gross anti-Semite with his apparent caricature of European Jews in the words and actions of Alberich and Mime in Der Ring des Nibelungen—this comic seems impossible to read in isolation. Or so it would appear, for there will always be contrary opinions. The conductor, Daniel Barenboim, who is both a Jew and once led a magnificent Ring cycle at Bayreuth (with Harry Kupfer) recently denied any obvious anti-Semitism in Wagner’s Ring in an interview with Ivan Hewett:

“That’s bull—-,” he snorts. “Do you think I could bear to conduct his music if that were true? Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner’s writings, but I can’t accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise.”

The task with Somebody Loves Me is considerably easier. When Dan Raeburn (writing in The Imp) articulates his vacillation between seeing Chick as either the abused child or the abusing father at the end of his impressive study of the works of Jack T. Chick, he is reappropriating Somebody Loves Me as a metaphor for Chick’s career. For Chick is an artist fascinated with violence (by the Catholics and Jesuits etc.) and pain (the suffering Christ), as well as the forgiving power of a Christian God. One who not only seeks to spread the Gospel (one expects out of dutiful obedience to Mark 16:15-16) but who would also shake the dust off his feet (Matthew 10:14) when faced with those who would reject his message. Hastening the day of the Lord with tough love, those tracts are not merely tools of conversion but also instruments of condemnation to those who would disbelieve.

This mixture of wrath…

…and forgiveness is the thread which links the Old and New Testament and also the entirety of Chick’s oeuvre.

There is nothing inherently offensive about Somebody Loves Me. To see it in aesthetic terms is probably beside the point. One suspects that if but one person had accepted his premise and was sufficiently convinced, it would have satisfied the author. And Raeburn presents us with ample evidence of the tract’s effectiveness (one presumes for good) if largely from the author himself:

“It’s the worst thing Chick has ever done;it’s also as effective as anything he’s ever done. In fact, it’s really well-done. Forget the creation myths—Somebody Loves Me is Chick’s most basic tract, the ur-tract. He’s always had a soft spot for Somebody Loves Me; it’s his favorite of his many little paper babies, sentimentally speaking. For years he’s plugged it with these words: “Hardened men have wept over this tract.” In a 1994 open letter Jack described the first time he showed it to a coworker, a “well-educated and gifted artist,” in aerospace. “Immediately I knew it was a dumb idea,” Jack wrote.“He’ll only laugh.To my shock he burst into tears and told me of his horrible life as a kid….Years later an artist working with us”—and we know who that gifted artist was—“got a call to pick up a homeless girl….He and his wife took her into their home and loved her like a daughter.When they met her she had a copy of Somebody Loves Me clenched in her hand. She had read it over one hundred times.”

What then separates kitsch from true heart rending sentiment or artistic achievement? Is it fully in the eye of the beholder? Is it simply that moment of recognition (of truth)? Or can the answer be found in the imposition of the intellect? Is it even possible to separate the two? Winfried Menninghaus in Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity offers the following definition of kitsch:

“Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation. It usually presents no difficulty in interpretation and has absolutely nothing to do with an aesthetics of negativity. It is unadulterated beauty, a simple invitation to wallow in sentiment…”

“Defining kitsch in terms of a saving of intellectual effort and the suspension of normative taboos is rich in implications. For Freud, these behavioral mechanism are typical…, more broadly, of the libidinous regression to infantile gratifications which have normally fallen victim to the reality principle and cultural prohibitions.”

While Chick’s devotion to the true nature of violence defies this definition of kitsch, he embraces it wholeheartedly in the denouement of Somebody Loves Me, an unequivocal statement of intent and mercy. Brushing aside any questions concerning the problem of pain and suffering, Chick’s “ur-tract” is entirely subservient to the final plan of salvation. If we place the Krazy Kat Sunday and Chick’s comic on a weighing scale, there can be little doubt that it is Chick’s comic which shows the most contempt for taboos in its depiction of violence. Yet its ending indulges quite completely in a type of emotional diarrhea (I would say far more than the revered Herriman strip).

Whether Herriman’s cartoon straddles that uneasy place between formal and intellectual rigor, and “instantaneous emotional gratification” I leave to the reader to decide. I should add that Menninghaus further states that unlike other writers of his time, Benjamin “while never fully embracing kitsch, found something not just understandable and admittable in it”, but also “a phenomenon of utmost political significance” and a factor of central concern to art itself:

“Kitsch…is nothing more than art with a 100 percent, absolute and instantaneous availability for consumption. Precisely within the consecrated forms of expression, therefore, kitsch and art stand irreconcilably opposed. But for developing living forms, what matters is that they have within them something stirring, useful, ultimately heartening—that they take “kitsch” dialectically up into themselves, and hence bring themselves near to the masses while yet surmounting the kitsch.”

For me then, Herriman and his creation surmount any would be accusations of kitsch while the Chick comic, despite its florid appeals to realism, wallows in it. For many, that moment when the boy is cradled to heaven would break any illusions of truthful artistry, suggesting the hand of a rampant fool or maniac. For others, that smiling girl offering help in front of the box home clutching a bible would be a moment steeped in delusion and falsity running counter to every experience in their lives.

But those angels are real to Chick and his adherents. His bursting anti-Catholic paranoia and unrelenting bigotry not even sensed here; that spark of creativity and unimaginable artistic acceptance a mere glint in his eye, like an angel’s kiss at twilight.

Thunderjet! Revisited!

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

**All text from The Korean War: A History (2010) by Bruce Cumings**

Scans taken from Frontline Combat #8 by Harvey Kurtzman and Alex Toth. A story based on fact….

______________

Curtis Le May …said that he had wanted to burn down North Korea’s big cities at the inception of the war, but the Pentagon refused—“it’s too horrible.” So over a period of three years, he went on, “We burned down every [sic] town in North Korea and South Korea too, …Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening—a lot of people can’t stomach it.”

General Ridgeway, who at times deplored the free-fire zones he saw, nonetheless wanted bigger and better napalm bombs…in early 1951, thus to “wipe out all life in tactical locality and save the lives of our soldiers.”

The Pujon river dam was designed to hold 670 million cubic meters of water, and had a pressure gradient of 999 meters…According to the official U.S.Air Force history, when fifty-nine F-84 Thunderjets breached the high containing wall of Toksan on May 13 1953, the onrushing flood destroyed six miles of railway, five bridges, two miles of highway, and five square miles of rice paddies…After the war, it took 200,000 man-days of labor to reconstruct the reservoir.

One day Pfc. James Ransome, Jr.’s unit suffered a “friendly” hit of this wonder weapon: his men rolled in the snow in agony and begged him to shoot them, as their skin burned to a crisp and peeled back “like fried potato chips.”

…Operation Hudson Harbor…part of a large project involving “overt exploitation in Korea by the Department of Defense and covert exploitation by the Central Intelligence Agency of the possible use of novel weapons.” This project sought to establish the capability to use atomic weapons on the battlefield…lone B-29 bombers were lifted from Okinawa…and sent over North Korea on simulated atomic bombing runs, dropping “dummy” A-bombs or heavy TNT bombs.

After his release from North Korean custody Gen. William F. Dean wrote that “the town of Huichon amazed me. The city I’d seen before-two storied buildings, a prominent main street-wasn’t there any more.” He encountered the “unoccupied shells” of town after town, and villages where rubble or or “snowy open space” were all that remained.

Meray had arrived in August 1951 and witnessed “a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital,” Pyongyang. There were simply “no more cities in North Korea.”…A British reporter found communities where nothing was left but “a low, wide mound of violet ashes.”

…at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the North’s twenty-two major cities were obliterated.

…the pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do.

Utsubora: The Erotic Exigencies of Authorship

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

“Utsu…means “depression” or “melancholy.” Tsubo…mean “urn.” …in addition to connotations of a hinter emptiness, the title strongly echoes nouns with a contrary impression of crude vitality… Utsubora is baffling yet familiar; negative yet animate; empty yet organic.” — the editor, Utsubora.

The word online is that Asumiko Nakamura’s Utsubora has had dismal pre-orders. First published in 2008-9 in the pages of Manga Erotics F, it has been released to a patter of enthusiastic notices (see reviews listed below) but little else. While eroticism might sound like a sure seller, this is less the case when it is sold under the guise of “literary” seriousness (the English language edition is by Vertical which does a lot of well-designed Tezuka). And there is certainly a vague kind of high-mindedness trying to crawl out of Nakamura’s manga which is ambiguously subtitled “The Story of a Novelist.”

In the opening pages, a pallid statuesque beauty jumps head first from a tall building leaving an unrecognizable mess on the pavement below. A famous novelist, Shun Mizorogi, is called in by the investigators to identify the body (thought to be that of Aki Fujino) a clearly impossible task since only her lower limbs are well preserved. As it happens, he is one of only two names on her phone contact list and hence a suspect. At the morgue, he meets the victim’s twin sister, a sphinx-like creature going by the name of Sakura Miki, a cipher who leaves a list of false contacts for the police but somehow clings to him in a symbiotic or perhaps parasitical relationship. He has been plagiarizing her sister’s (a budding authoress) manuscripts and becomes dependent on Miki for the remainder of his serialized novel which is also titled, Utsubora. The rest is a metaphorical ramble around questions of authorship and creation, played out in the mystery surrounding the lives of Aki and Miki.

One could be forgiven for assuming that the novelist of the subtitle (an editorial addition or in the original?) is the male protagonist whose fate structures the story, but Nakamura’s ambiguity is purposeful—that appellation refers not only to Mizorogi (the male author) but also the plagiarized suicidal authoress (Aki Fujino), and Nakamura herself. Aki and Miki are not so much characters but personifications of author and story. The “true” author of Utsubora is the woman (Aki) seen flinging herself head first to the sidewalk, a shadowy figure who is seemingly plain and unadorned but then transformed by means of surgery to the physical likeness of her friend and self-professed sister, Miki (the female protagonist of the tale).

This plastic surgery has less to do with soap opera conceits than the way an authoress’ appearance and personality is transformed ( in the imagination of her readers; and personally and insidiously) into something else—a physical likeness of similar, angelic temperament; mysteriously distant yet welcomingly sexual; a hidden, mythic, and unaging figure. A vision of how personal experience when turned to fiction can lead to the molding of the writer herself. We can detect a plot of similar temperament in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant where the actor-director becomes the object and victim of his fears in a movie of his own conception. In the structure and premonitions of Utsubora, we can see an echo of the fatalism of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now—Donald Sutherland’s almost authorial paranoia in that film being the impetus of the plot and entire movie. It is this mixture of grief, writerly fixation, and eroticism which creates that tinge of horror in Nakamura’s manga.

Miki is the personification of Aki’s (and Nakamura’s) story. In deference to this, she is frequently seen conveying handwritten manuscripts to either Shun Mizorogi or his editor. At other times she is depicted against scattered sheets of drafts. The moment Utsubora is released in its final form by Mizorogi is also the moment she disappears from the manga as a character—turning at once into a caricature of the typical cheerful manga heroine—her job and reason for existing finally brought to a close. That segment of the manga where Mizorogi’s editor debates the primacy of the story over authorial credit seems a moment of metatextual self-realization, one might even say a kind of sentience on the part of the manga. It is easy to see a trace of personal experience in that conflict between the physical availability of a story and the act of plagiarism.

As for the eroticism, the authoress seems to take a singular delight in finger fucks but appears more abashed by actual coitus. Scenes involving the latter are broken up and defused through her panel work and other forms of obfuscation. The blow jobs depicted are undeniably squalid and damp; it is an act which is depicted with contempt and disgust.

One might see in this a decidedly feminine approach, the use of lengthy fingers being more readily available or even more attractive than the male sex organ (I have yet to read any of Nakamura’s Boy’s Love manga to confirm this). The reiteration of this device in comics will undoubtedly suggest the work of Guido Crepax to a Western audience—that arch student and adapter of all forms of literary smut. That penchant for gnarled, stringy hands inserted into orifices, as well as a boundless attraction to the sopping juices of a tight cunt are all hallmarks of that Italian cartoonist.

Nakamura’s delicate minimalism and elongated figures suggest the work of Aubrey Beardsley and the smattering of reviews I’ve read offer up an amalgamation of this Western eroticism and that found in Ukiyo-e in explanation of the final product (though examples from the latter seem considerably more frank).

Crepax’s vision suggests violence and control while Nakamura’s allows for desirability and fulfillment; an almost feminine coyness about the penis which is quite the reverse in Crepax where the male organ is an erect weapon.

Despite all this, there are immense difficulties for the would be reader before we get to that final moment of legerdemain. There are about 50 pages of scattered plot here fluffed out to 450 pages of mind numbing repetition of figuration and expression, as well as pointless nudity and pin-ups. All to often this is a suspense novel without any suspense, an exercise in eroticism without sensuality, a depiction of authorial obsession with nary any artistry—a torrent of metaphors with almost no consequence or real depth. It’s as if you bought a comic and all you got was paper and ink. The high page count and, one suspects, the pace of publishing has resulted in far too many pages of quite insipid mood, depiction of place, and composition. Only at the end does some form of concentrated artistry rear its head.

The flurry of barely developed plot devices is oppressive and infuriating. For instance, the incessant cradle snatching and the reassertion of the “natural” attraction of young girls for boring wrinkly, old farts (especially when they spend all day cooking for them)—all this clipped from the celebrated annals of incest in Japanese Adult Videos. Yes, even female mangakas can be idiots (or maybe ironic, it’s hard to tell). Tired tropes abound, it is almost as if dutiful eroticism had anesthetized creativity. And thus we have Aki as an assertive succubus, entrapping the author with her wiles and literature, her form transformed not by smothering the devil’s bottom with adulation but by heeding the surgeon’s knife.

The tear jerking moment when Nakamura lifts a plot point from episode Z of your favorite police procedural crap—the cop who gets overly involved because the victim reminds him of his sister (or was that wife, mother, or child)—is certainly incitement to book burning.

A trying experience then but one alleviated by a lengthy and well inscribed denouement—the solitary reason one might pause in the act of casting a copy into the outer darkness to mention this work at all.

_____

Other reactions

There aren’t many to choose from as yet but there’s a review by Sean Gaffney, another at Otaku Champloo, and finally one by Connie C..

Good Dogs and Fickle Gods

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

[Spoliers throughout]

Twenty years is quite a length of time in the world of comics but it has been nearly that since Graham Chaffee last published a comic. Some old timers do remember him however, and he does retain a measure of respect for two books he drew back in the 90s namely, The Big Wheels, and The Most Important Thing and other stories. I wrote a review of those two publications way back then but I have to say I can barely remember what I wrote or even much about those books.

Of the cartoonists offering the author support on the back cover, James Romberger comes closest to the truth when he suggests an alternate history where the art form was not shuffled into a nether world of superheroics:

“…a book seemingly lost in time…his clean appealing storytelling and expressive brushwork evoke an alternative golden age of comics; an age perhaps in which superheroes never existed and the medium told more straightforward, poignant stories.”

The approach here does seem to hark back to an earlier age of cartooning and pacing—not so much in comic books but in newspaper strips and the woodcuts of Lynd Ward—one which might in fact be compared to an earlier age of film making where structural clarity and a vague kind of verisimilitude was of the essence; a kind of doggy neorealism of the Italian school. Chaffee largely eschews panels which are filled with multifarious meaning and intricate correlations, adopting congenial, unsensational storytelling, evoking time, place and character; the gentle rhythms of a nostalgia associated with the early to mid twentieth century. And as with the meaningful look of the dog, Ivan, in The Most Important Thing (see third image from top), the artist has lost none of his powers of observation, all the requisite emotion of his characters channeled not so much into words but the gentle strokes of his brush.

The publicist statement comparing the comic favorably to Animal Farm and Watership Down seems quite unnecessary if not a bit pompous. It is evident that we are to see our foibles in the actions and fates of the dogs which populate Chaffee’s comic. The central questions being tackled here appear to be those of belief, ideology, and faith. A tangential discussion of deist philosophy may not be out of the question as well.

The third page of Chaffee’s debut comic, The Big Wheels, shows a kindly dog licking a man lying in a drunken stupor on the pavement, and the “good dog” of his new book is clearly a reiteration of the dog in the title story of The Most Important Thing, a tale which I remember comparing to Tolstoy’s moralistic fables. Two pages from the latter story should help to elucidate the mysteries presented to us in Chaffee’s latest offering:

In answer to the cat’s question (“What’s the most important thing?”), Ivan answers “faith.” The cat’s answer is “independence–freedom of thought and deed.” A raven, not seen in these two pages, offers a third unspoken answer which appears to be despair and hopelessness. In Chaffee’s new comic, the responses of the cat and dog take center stage.

The initial scene in Good Dog shows our protagonist in the midst of a dream where a shepherd instructs him in the act of herding. Ivan seems quite successful at his task but in a cruel twist, all the sheep are transformed into rabbits. He gets a stern scolding from his master and the shepherd’s eyes even turn into little crosses.

In this master-dog relationship, we can see a mirror for our own relationships with our earthly and, if one is so inclined, unearthly masters. There is the question of correct and incorrect action; of duty; and a projection of “original sin” which has little to do with justice or any blessed theodicy than with pure chance and bloody-mindedness.

Once this premise is set up, our dog carries on in his good way leading the vexatious life of a stray, a seemingly hand to mouth existence. The key incidents from this period in his life can be narrowed down to two encounters. The first is with a young black woman called, Babe, who works at a bar called Ray’s 8 Ball (a character culled from the first few pages of Chaffee’s The Big Wheels and a short story in Drawn and Quarterly Vol. 2 #3). It turns out that she needs a watch dog for some chickens in her backyard. His second encounter of note is with a pack of strays led by a Malamute (with wolf ancestry) called, Sasha. The Russian sounding name is probably no accident recalling that hotbed of irreligious brotherhood which is the antithesis of the master-worker dynamic promoted by the bar proprietress.

Sasha’s sole purpose is a kind of heroic striving against merciless life, cruel fate, and unnatural masters—to leave a mark in this world. There is, of course, nothing unusual in this, especially among men of ambition. A familiar example might be Lincoln who was accused in his early political life of being merely a deist and not a proper Christian (he was not a member of any church). We can see in his remarks to his law partner William Herndon that mixture of belief and purely temporal concerns, the urge to be remembered in ways which seem out of keeping with any firm acceptance of a creator:

“…oh how hard it is to die and leave one’s Country no better than if one had never lived for it.”

The black woman—not the usual wizened bearded Ancient of Days—tempts Ivan with kindness, water, and food. The impermanence of this arrangement is highlighted earlier in the comic in the story of a dog called, Oliver—leashed to a harsh horse riding instructor who he deserts for the pack upon his death. Another canine friend of Ivan’s, Kirby, is found tied to a tree by his drunken master-god. He is the very image of the foolish, all-trusting believer.

Since this is a comic, one could be forgiven for seeing in that faithful bulldog a metaphor for that greatest of superhero artists. The correlations only go so far though Kirby’s gluttonous, intoxicated, and cruel master may be viewed in some quarters as an accurate portrayal of Marvel.

Chaffee’s presentation doesn’t question the existence of the otherworldly; it is as tangible as the humans which walk around the dogs in his comic. And these creatures are certainly without written creeds or ossified revelation. What matters to them is that single moment of physical comfort and emotional sustenance, ephemeral as it all may be. The death of the pack leader, Sasha, at the hands of the female bar owner leads to the dispersion of the pack and an existential crisis. Some continue their lonesome wanderings but Ivan finds his place at a water bowl left as a token of friendship by Babe—the cryptic epistle written above that bowl as mysterious to him as any divine apocalypse.

Perhaps it is a mark of man’s strange and natural religiosity that he is attracted to it.

At this point, Ivan encounters the Malamute’s right hand dog, a terrier by the name of Sawney. He looks enigmatically at Ivan at rest by his water bowl, presenting us with the singular mystery of the comic. Is that look a sign of disapproval and disgust? Or is it one of longing and satisfaction that Ivan has finally found his place in this world. The answers to these questions, so obvious to many, are in the end quite beyond mere human understanding.

Best Online Comics Criticism 2012 – The Final List

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

Late is better than never. Presumably.

The truth is that I almost chucked this whole thing into the trash heap because of a number of last minute exits from the voting process. I lost 3 judges in the early months of 2013 but, thankfully, Jacob Canfield stepped in at the last minute to give this year’s judging an extra voice and hopefully more diversity in taste. So diverse in fact that there was very little agreement as to which articles should make it to the final list in the initial voting.

The jurors this year were Jacob Canfield, Ken Parille, Caroline Small, and myself.

Looking back on the final list for 2010, I have to say that, in general, I’m happier with the final selection this year. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that this is the first year I’m actually participating in the voting (while restricting the number of votes I actually use). The voting process for 2011 was a wash but my personal feeling is that 2012 was a better year for comics criticism than 2010. Perhaps readers here will pipe in with their own thoughts.

As for the final list, let me just remind everyone again that there is nothing less dependable than collective taste.

Three Votes Received

Craig Fischer – “Taniguchi Blossoms”

Fischer received a vote each for “The Lives of Insects: On Photography and Comics” and “Devils and Machines: On Jonah Hex and All Star Western” as well. So the final choice here is a bit of a compromise. Of these three articles, I would say that Fischer’s piece on the intersection(s) between photography and comics has the most to say about the art form. It is divided into 3 sections, moving from traditional photo comics, to the synthesis of both art forms and hence to the photo comic as “found” object (hinging on the indefinability of comics). I have little little doubt it was the most poorly received of the three in view of its intellectual content and semi-obscure sources.

“Taniguchi Blossoms” is a close and passionate reading of one of Jiro Taniguchi best comics, The Walking Man. The pleasurable emotions Fischer derived from that manga are communicated with a deft touch, though I will say that I disagree with his concluding comments where he cites Taniguchi’s A Zoo in Winter as another example of “the frisson between the perfection of [Taniguchi’s] diagrammatic art and the pressed by percolating emotion of the characters.” That latter manga has an obviousness and predictability which I associate with pot boiler Japanese romances.

Matthias Wivel – “New Yorker Cartoons: A Legacy of Mediocrity”

Wivel also received a vote for his article, “Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes.” The Barks-Donald Duck essay is a detailed run down of the comics being reprinted, giving historical background and story detail, before throwing light on past editorializing and the issue of recoloring.

The New Yorker article seems to be the more interesting selection, not least for the thoroughness of its negative criticism. It probably helps that I personally find The New Yorker to be a bright shining repository of shallow cartooning (with the usual exceptions). The publication targeted is certainly august, pays well, and is seen by many as the holy grail of paid cartooning work. It has attracted very little cogent negativity over the years. The article is a welcome corrective.

Two Votes Received

Corey Creekmur – “Remembering Locas”

This was part of a Locas roundtable in early 2012. The title is self-explanatory and takes in the long tradition of continuity and fan memory in comics with special emphasis on the intricacies of this mechanism in Locas. Creekmur extends this act of remembrance to all aspects of the work: the publisher-gods; the demands on Jaime’s readers; the action of memory and time on the characters; the essence of nostalgia in Locas; the purposeful and inescapable recollections on the part of the artist.

Heather Love – “The Mom Problem”

This is a lengthy article at Public Books about Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? I think it is safe to say that of the dozens of articles written about that comic in 2012, this is one of the better ones, providing basic background information before moving on to more detailed analysis. The focus here is less on Bechdel’s command of comic language but the Freudian aspects of Bechdel’s relationships and the structural importance Donald Winnicott’s work plays in the comic.

The article is a useful example of the dichotomy between comic criticism written for an intellectually serious site meant for general readers and that for a specialist comics site. While the latter sites often contain a mixture of traditional literary and more comic-based readings, it is only in recent years that more extensive, less technical reviews have appeared in the other type of publication.

Sean Rogers – “Flex Mentallo and the Morrison Problem”

Rogers is one of the best new(-ish) writers that the editors of TCJ.com have decided to employ and his article on Grant Morrison probably his most discussed piece of comics criticism. Bad Morrison (of which there is plenty) is certainly all too easily maligned, but what of the more “canonical” works (Animal Man, Doom Patrol, All-Star Superman etc.) For Rogers, the problems with Flex Mentallo are representative of a much deeper rot and Morrison’s soulless insularity.

Peter Wilkins – “Pluto: Robots and Aesthetic Experience”

This article was cited by Caro as “probably” being her favorite. The title is once again self-explanatory. The article succinctly ponders the nature of humanity, intelligence, and the aesthetic imperative. It ends with an insoluble question concerning the transaction between violence and art.

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A short comment on a notable omission.

2012 was probably the best year on record for TCJ.com in terms of comics criticism so it’s a bit strange that so few pieces managed to get enough votes to pull through to the final list. Part of this has to do with the fact many of the more impressive critical endeavors at TCJ.com this year were the result of accretion and accumulation. I would say that the best writing on Chris Ware’s Building Stories in 2012 was probably at the roundtable at TCJ.com. There was a more superficial blessing to be had as well. In contrast to many of the mainstream reviewers, most of the writers eschewed boosterism while remaining overwhelmingly positive. For this small mercy, I am grateful.

Articles at TCJ.com which received a single vote include Joshua Glen on “The Pathological Culture of Dal Tokyo“, Glen Gold on the Hand of Fire roundtable, Jeet Heer on Crumb, Ryan Holmberg on Tezuka Osamu, Dan Nadel on Born Again, Nicole Rudick on Frank Santoro’s Pompeii, and Dash Shaw on Jeffrey Brown’s Cat Comics.

Of these, I would single out Ryan Holmberg’s articles on manga at TCJ.com for special mention. His work follows in the long line of comics historical scholarship which has been the primary mode of engagement for much of the history of comics criticism. The exception in this case being that the subjects being discussed—vintage manga—have never had a “popular voice” in the English language.

Most of the judges won’t have time to write about their choices this year so I’ll list one other writer who was considered during the voting process. Two articles by Nicolas Labarre found favor with one of the judges. One on City of Glass at Comics Forum and the other on Art and Illusion in Blutch’s Mitchum at The Comics Grid.
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Update: Judge Jacob Canfield discusses his selections here.

Hawkeye: Best Superhero Comic of 2012?

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

Hype always works on me

Even when I know the ultimate source of it all is as sick as a demented chimpanzee, I still get sucked into it. The straw which finally broke the proverbial camel’s back this time round was a host of Eisner nominations by a group of esteemed judges: Best Continuing Series, Best New Series, Best Writer, Best Penciler/Inker, and Best Cover Artist.

I managed to avoid every single review of Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye so as not to contaminate my ultimate pleasure in reading it. But there were still some whispered rumors that managed to creep through; that this wasn’t your usual superhero comic; that there was some new method at work, some new insight into the genre. And the first three issues of Hawkeye do hold that line to some extent.

It is possible to see an attempt to move away from the usual strictures of the superhero form, a settled and ceaselessly visited structure which has provided the template for most of the “classic” superhero storylines since the 1980s—the world or the superhero’s existence in great peril.

We see this in Daredevil: Born Again where a way of life is extinguished and The Dark Knight Returns where age is the great antagonist. The world is collapsing in Watchmen and that supreme god of goodness is taking his final steps in Alan Moore and Curt Swan’s Last Superman Story. Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Elektra: Assassin seems to break this pattern—the world is never really in danger of being nuked, the heroine enigmatic and never in any real danger; the ultimate premise being to watch Elektra fuck every person in existence to hell. Just one of Miller’s many wet dreams which he decided to share with us all.

The glue which binds most of the superhero “classics” of the late 80s is that atmosphere of persistent oppression, a mood thoroughly rejected by Grant Morrison in his take on Superman a decade later. But much earlier than that, J. M. DeMatteis, Keith Giffen, and Kevin Maguire were reimagining the Justice League as a sitcom in a series which still manages to strike a nostalgic twinge in a few older readers. Maguire’s facility with facial expressions was the foundation of that effort, and the new Hawkeye holds strongly to that sense of comedy though it has a different shtick: there’s the penile obstruction (a sly suggestion to those who would name their genitalia after superheroes)…

…the metafictional digs at language perception; and the fact that all the baddies have a penchant for the word “Bro” (among other things).

David Aja is the dominant partner in this collaboration, especially when it comes to the look and feel of the comic; showing enough chops to take on the mantle cast upon the closet drawer by David Mazzucchelli when he left superhero comics for good. If you don’t sense the evocation of late issue Born Again and Batman: Year One in the following page, then God help you.

The first page of the second issue shows that it wasn’t a fluke when Aja worked with Ann Nocenti on “3 Jacks.”

Fraction and Aja strip out the elements of a single action sequence: the symbols which mark the villains and the heroes; the graceful diagonals of the page broken into small panels and moving from left to right; the bodies swaying in a danse macabre; the twins guns ringing out like a silent soundtrack; an evolved form of Steranko stylishness and page breakdown. It’s all as sweet as the candy which J. H. Williams III used to lace his Batwoman in times past. You and I could care less about the story.

But there it is, weaved thoroughly into the mythos of the Marvel empire. Right from the start, we get the hints and the nods, the insider knowledge needed for the insider fun. The ability to link descriptions of the Avengers with their likenesses and their names; the ability to identify a Marvel rogues gallery; the ability to know who Iron Fist is (and that Fraction and Aja once worked on the character); the ability to thrill at the sight of a third string villain like the Ringmaster because you read The Incredible Hulk and Steve Ditko’s Amazing Spider-man as a kid; the ability to actually care who these people are.

The Ringmaster’s stage is a homage to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (the third issue pulls in The Italian Job) and Aja’s action scenes are consistently stylish…

…the spell broken only by the words and ideas. The second issue seems as well plotted as television’s Arrow, the youth oriented, touchy-feely version of Green Arrow. When Clint Barton (aka Hawkeye) thinks, “Thieves. Working a very long con,” you wonder whether you missed anything apart from the obvious, television-lite set-up which preceded the unveiling of a forgettable super villain. Those expecting Mamet-like moments of intrigue following on those words will be sorely disappointed.

Barton in these issues is a bit like Chandler’s Phlilip Marlowe without the cool dialogue, machismo, and active mind—he’s basically a plains clothes knight of the city who gets beaten up a lot. He uses fists not words and is bereft of any trace of deep intellectual content or motivation. He’s just another nice guy in an unending stream of nice guys in popular culture. He never dies; no, he can’t die because no one actually wants to kill him. They just want to tell him that he’s going to die like every weirdo in the Marvel universe. If readers came here even remotely excited that this was a comic which takes the superhero into hitherto unknown territory, let me dampen that down right now.

The excitement here is that Hawkeye doesn’t wear his costume all that much and acts like a real life human being once in a while. He cracks some jokes and has some sense of his own mortality when he or his friends get shot at. He is hopeless at superheroics (i.e. fallible). He also has to make rent for his poor neighbors, just like a rich Peter Parker would do (except that, you know, Spider-man was poor). Also, he gets to hang out with a bunch of babes. The bar has been lowered to the level of a Munchkin.

The collected Hawkeye (which reprints #1-5) helps us ascertain where Matt Fraction ends and David Aja begins. Issues 4 and 5 of Hawkeye remain as empty of story interest as issues 2 and 3 but stand in stark contrast due to the absence of Aja. Javier Pulido stumbles hard in his first issue and Clint Barton comes out looking like a paper doll in parts.

Pulido retrieves a bit of his dignity in some of the action sequences in issue 5.

That fifth issue did make me read up a bit on Operation Eucritta (say this with a Southern accent if you will). Apparently it’s this:

“An Avenger? On tape committing the assassination of the world’s most wanted criminal terrorist?”

Hawkeye has to retrieve this tape before it’s released to a mass audience of baddies assembled at a private auction in Madripoor.

Before confirming the real line of reasoning behind this plot, I had imagined that it would be just bad PR all round for an Avenger to be seen killing the Marvel Universes’ equivalent of Osama bin Laden, one Du Ke Feng. Of course, doing the same has been such excellent business for President Obama that he’s decided to extend the program to any Tom, Dick, or Harry acting suspiciously. So out with that!

The Marvel database tells us that the Avengers doing the assassinating were Captain America, Wolverine, and Hawkeye; except that those tapes were fakes created to obscure the identities of a bunch of Navy SEALs (the real hit team) and to flush out a spy in SHIELD. Hawkeye has to prevent the auctioning of his personal tape (lost accidentally) because it would put his life in danger.

What?

People need an excuse to kill Cap, Wolvie, and Hawkeye? I thought supervillains did this for free every day of the week but mostly on shipment days? I think they usually arrange to destroy the universe at least once a year as well. No extra charge.

The end of issue 5 is where superhero fantasy meets “real” life, a special corner of heaven where Fraction becomes as solemn as Denny O’Neil in his Green Arrow drug issue:

“The guys that actually did this — they’re doing what they think is right. They didn’t sign up to get their families and friends killed as retribution.”

Except in real life, the terrorists, freedom fighters, and soldiers attached to the individuals assassinated don’t need names to enact “retribution.” They simply kill and maim the soldiers and citizens of the offending nation(s)—a simple and evident fact that is erased in favor of platitudes and cameos by the Kingpin and Nick Fury. In this make-believe world where bad men practice evil for indefinable or ridiculous reasons, violence becomes necessary and inconsequential. The only reasonable answer to violence is more violence.

The new Hawkeye comic is barely acceptable to aging fans and a thorough going embarrassment to those who have promoted its excellence. I would liken it to going back to a middling diner you haven’t been to in decades and discovering that they’ve changed the uniforms. The food? Probably just as bad as ever.

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Further Reading

Sean Collins on Hawkeye #2-3

“…it feels like Matt Fraction poured a bunch of unrelated ideas into a Hawkeye-shaped vessel because that’s what was available. I’m not saying there’s some One True Hawkeye out there, I’m saying I don’t think Hawkeye, One True or otherwise, is anything but an extraordinarily flimsy frame on which to hang surface-cool writing like this.”

Tucker Stone on the first issue of Hawkeye.

The Comic Books Are Burning in Hell gang thinking out loud on the possible reasons for the prodigious levels of adulation heaped on the comic (starts around 19 min).

David N. Wright at Graphixia – “Hawkeye and the Problem of Comics as Art.” Comparing a later issue of Hawkeye (not reviewed above) to the work of Chris Ware. The real kicker comes at the end. Doesn’t this all sound rather familiar:

“Fact is, comics stand in relation to art like the internal combustion engine stands in relation to the steam engine: they may well be andecendants, but to think of them in this way does nothing to help us understand either. That comics are often a collaborative, usually repetitive, almost always recycled endeavour opens spaces for new conversations about the nature of the medium. These conversations must occur outside the already established aesthetic principles of artistic production in precisely the same way that a discussion of the steam engine must stand outside a discussion of an internal combustion engine. Comics are a multi-mediated and re-mediated form of practice and cultural production that can only be defined within its own contexts—a context that more than justifies its significance as the most relevant form of twenty-first century aesthetic practice—and that means it can’t be art or Art… or, mercifully, stand in relation to either.” [emphasis mine]

The Freewheelin’ Daredevil

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

The Comics and Music roundtable index is here.
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In his notes on Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Born Again, Brian Cronin writes:

“And it all ends with a likely Bob Dylan reference, so how much better can you get?”

Cronin is of course donning the cap of coyness here. The final page of Born Again isn’t a “likely” Dylan reference, it’s a bare faced homage to the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan—the ultimate evocation of tenderness for a certain generation of record collectors; the knight in lusterless armor finally getting his girl.

Karen Page’s one time junkie whore has kicked her addiction and is now in the arms of her destined love or as Wikipedia helpfully tells us:

Critic Janet Maslin summed up the iconic impact of the cover as “a photograph that inspired countless young men to hunch their shoulders, look distant, and let the girl do the clinging”.

Of this description I have my doubts. Perhaps the word “reinspired” would work better here. It seems to me that women have been depicted (by men) clinging to men long before Dylan and his photographer got their hands on this quintessential moment.

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” seems overly sentimental musically but correct lyrically for much of this comic, the song apparently written by Dylan when Rotolo left him to study in Italy. The album cover captures that point in time when she had returned safe to his arms in a trench coat and two sweaters, the fire escapes and tenements like a pastoral landscape in the background.

Born Again may be seen as an apocalyptic text divining this fleeting state of heaven…

…a paradisaical condition always on the edge of disaster; a state of perfect goodness where stories are perpetuated when no more need be told—a testament to the prescience of Miller and Mazzucchelli. The comics boom of the late 80s, that period which ushered in Miller’s Daredevil, was followed inevitably by bust and then capitulation; the present day sales figures befitting nothing less than high end toilet paper. The superhero form now even rejected by that one time font of spandex adulation, the Eisners (though this last rejection is most likely an aberration born of the judges doing the nominations.)

But such an interpretation would be to mistake apocalypse (a revelation of god’s divine will) for prophecy. The two may be intermingled but should be seen as distinct.

Suze Rotolo wasn’t a junkie who needed saving, that part is clear. No, that junkie whore was the America of sex and drugs, that 60s VW van of lust and freedom gone mad.

The new Jerusalem is one where strength and patriotism has triumphed over the nuclear threat; the hard rain has ceased to fall. The world is in the process of being reconstructed just as the sign (a tribute to Mazzucchelli’s own partner, Richmond Lewis) on the right hand side of the comics page indicates. Nuke (as coarse a symbol as any) has been defeated by that bastion of American patriotism, Captain America—all this as illusory as the life and death of a secondary character in a second tier superhero title; everything as ephemeral as Matt Murdock and Bob Dylan’s happiness.

Karen Page—manipulated to the end by her gods—”died” in 1998. Suze Rotolo died of lung cancer in 2011. That evocation of joy, as transient as a fading photograph, now extinguished; that VW van of protest now disappeared, replaced by the dumpster truck of progress, capitalism, and acquiescence.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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