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.

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.

_______

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]

Review: The Crackle of the Frost

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Ng Suat Tong

Lorenzo Mattotti and Jorge Zentner’s The Crackle of the Frost begins with a separation.

Over the course of three pages, the protagonist, Samuel Darko, recounts the circumstances under which he breaks from his partner, Alice. The disruption occurs the moment she announces that she wants to have a child with him; his seeming lack of commitment or existential terror announced by a flurry of pterosaur-like shadows and a roar in his ears. By the time he regains his senses, she has already left him. Darko receives a letter from her some time later—”mailed from a faraway country”—not quite asking for him, yet somehow enticing him in its self-possession, inspiring him to set out on a extended journey in search for her

The four panel sequence which relates this decision is a strange union of image and text, not merely illustrating but mystifying the process of description.

“Alice’s letter had been mailed from a faraway country…very far away indeed. I pulled out an Atlas…”

The “atlas” described in the first panel is displaced to the second panel of the following page with its billowing continents. Instead we see Darko’s face superimposed over his former lover’s nares. The protagonist’s distance from his lover is suggested by a hook of memory, plunged deep into his olfactory bulb (“…if I could somehow bring back, on a map, the smell of her skin.”)

The strange flame scorching through his nostrils in the second panel creates a nebulous map of memory which recurs fitfully throughout the comic. There are the forest animals burnt to cinders on the first leg of his journey…

…the black smoke from which soon cast him into darkness, closing his eyes and ears, leaving him with the disembodied hand of his nurse, Isa, and “the mystery of her hand in my hand.”

When his mask is removed and he is returned to a world filled with “shapes that elude our touch”, everything is a shade lighter, the shadows cast out by a flood of rhodopsin.

The flame of memory returns again in the form of a Virgin’s crown seen on the night of her festival…

…and then in the involuntary memory of a tree encased in fire—our protagonist’s senses clarified by hunger brought on by that feast day (all the restaurants in town are closed).

The narrative reinforces this symbolism and is interlaced with fables from another time: a Chinese emperor destroying his kingdom to keep it alive in myth and within his “…memory.”

“It alone cannot be vanquished.”

And later, the story of a flute player and his cage which contains “all the truth of the world.” The musician treads gently above the waves of a pool which will cure the protagonist’s eyes forever.

The cage he bears before him so gingerly is a recurrent motif first seen at the start of Mattotti and Zentner’s tale where Darko is told that “loneliness can be a cage within which we keep our fears locked away,” the pastel hues forming lines on his shirt like a prisoner’s dress encasing and straitening him.

The cage is seen again in the walled city of the aforementioned Chinese emperor, and even further on, superimposing itself on Darko’s pregnant wife who is seen in profile as she ascends in a caged elevator; the protagonist silently wondering to himself just when his journey had begun, his life suffused with a multitude of starting points and hints of irretrievable knowledge.

And even if the metaphorical aspects of the comic are announced a bit too brusquely about a third of the way through the book…

“Welcome, to the light, Mister Darko.”

…it can be excused as one of the few times the authors allow a pat explanation seep out.

The scene in question has echoes of Debussy’s (after Maeterlinck) Symbolist opera, Pelléas and Mélisande, in particular Act 3 Scene 2, where Golaud leads Pelléas into the depths of a castle situated in a land of perpetual night, forcing him to glance into a cavern rich with the stench of death.

This before allowing him to emerge on to the ramparts—to the bright sun where “the scent of the wet grass and the roses is drifting up. It must be about noon…”

There is a counterpart to Darko’s impaired vision in the “Blind Men’s Well” described in Act 2 Scene 1 of that opera as well—a place where the stirrings and fate of the doomed lovers are first made plain.

Pelléas: “Since the king is almost blind himself, people don’t come here any longer”

Mélisande: “How solitary it is – there’s not a sound to be heard…I’m going to lie down on the marble. I want to see the bottom of the water.”

The opera consists of dream-like scenes of almost disconnected action, the unifying thread being Debussy’s music; its fellow in the comic being Mattotti’s masterful use of color. And if the an audience wonders whether Maeterlinck’s play concerns love and death, the cycle of creation and destruction, or simply “the presentiment of disaster at the moment of happiness and calm…”

“…the characters in his work do not act; they await action, and if we are not convinced of the certainty of that action, we would be distracted by the resignation.” (Joan Pataky Kosove)

…then the comic reader is allowed to wonder about all these things as well.

Darko’s fear is banished by an act of creation—a lotus-like flame emerging from the darkness like a Buddhistic totem symbolizing love and compassion. But his journey only ends when he meets another man—his father bent with age and sheathed in the same prisoner’s dress as his son, a reflection of himself; his memories reeled in once again by his sense of smell—of his “father’s nakedness”, his father’s “breathing”.

And there it ends, the questions as unanswerable as the mystery of life itself. In the hospital grounds, Darko spots a “bright light in the darkness”—another man “taking [his] worries for a walk among the trees” who can only talk about his as yet unborn daughter, Matlida; the protagonist’s father joining them in his thoughts as they push through the breaking cold in search of intangible yet nascent rest.

Further Reading

Sarah Horrocks with a more traditional review The Crackle of the Frost.

Review: The Man Who Grew His Beard

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Ng Suat Tong

The Man Who Grew His Beard is a somewhat unexpected offering from Fantagraphics, a publisher known for its broad interests in classic American and European reprints, grungy undergrounds, “reality-based” dramas, and autobiography. The chief aspect which surprises in this anthology of stories by Olivier Schrauwen is its deeply entrenched formalism. Perhaps the closest thing to it in the Fantagraphics catologue might be Kevin Huizenga’s periodic forays into formal playfulness in Ganges, but even here the mood is much closer and more empathetic; not so much the arm’s length mental instability that can be found in Schrauwen’s narratives.

Schrauwen’s stories demand a certain degree of rereading, a flipping back and forth between pages and stories to decipher the playful code keys elaborating on the language of comics — the cartooning short hand, the persistent thematic fixtures and their variations. The story “Hair Styles”, for example, gives us a 6 fold division of grooming which is then further subdivided into a kind of follicular phrenology — a visual depiction of a kind of cartooning determinism where form dictates function.

Thus, a character with “crazy hair” ultimately acts in a wild and disinhibited manner before being put in his place.

In contrast, the taxonomist among these practitioners is singled out for effusive praise by a bespectacled onlooker (one presumes an analogue for that species of writer now known as the comics critic).

The besuited illustrators are very far from the general conception of cartoonists and take on the semblance of academicians in a drawing room. The task at hand (the aforementioned taxonomy of cartooning hairstyles) and the nature of their dressing are intentionally incongruous. On the one hand, the story could be seen as mere playful nonsense. On the other, a wry comment on rigid or fanciful cartooning systems; a gentle poke in the ribs for those taken with definitions and categorizations, a reminder of the medium’s humble roots.

The rest of Schrauwen’s stories suggest that this is as much self-criticism as a humorous review of cartooning practices, for much of the work in this collection has a jaunty yet “high-minded” tone. This attitude is carried over to Schrauwen’s next story, “The Assignment”, where the participants are now challenged to create a story featuring a cat, a table, a bottle of milk, a mouse, a piece of cheese, and Mr. Peters.

Part of this is a transposition of Mattioli’s Squeak the Mouse which is itself derived from Tom and Jerry. The final drawing of a dead cat is deemed unacceptable by the instructor-critic whereupon a graphic dissection of everything that has preceded this point is carried out — the gradual peeling back of the layers of skin and intestine of a dead cat to reveal a point of origin.

This codifying and deciphering of different realities is seen again in the story “Outside/Inside” which presents us first with the physical interactions of Schrauwen’s familiar bearded protagonist before proceeding to the multi-colored ramblings of a deranged mind to explain everything that has gone on before.

___

This motif is recalled in the penultimate story in this collection, “The Imaginist”, where the shadowy hues and lines capturing the broken, shriveled body of humble reality are juxtaposed with the kaleidoscope of hues which make up a stroke victim’s imaginary world. In all of these tales, there is the suggestion that there is nothing quite so shabby as reality.

These exercises are diverting but fall short when compared to the first story in Schrauwen’s collection (the wordless “Chroma Congo”) where the barriers are flexible, mutable, and barely discernible; a world perched precariously on the edge of dreams and the fantasies of Leopold II (who appears again as a mystical talisman in “The Imaginist”).

___

The protagonist (that familiar bearded figure again) is sensitive yet solitary, compassionate yet complicit. His rotting mind is conjured up in an ant-ridden slab of Belgian chocolate, the over-sized bilious faces, and the stunted monstrosities which inhabit the African landscape. It will come as no surprise that Schrauwen’s work has been compared to that of Winsor McCay (the colors, the permissive attitude towards perspective and proportion) both in reviews and in his publicity material.

The chromatic shakiness — that disavowal of shadow in favor of bright, light pastels — recalls Herge’s Tintin, the riverboats which stream before our eyes, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There is not one glimpse of an actual African. This world of menacing hippos, screaming monkeys, and rifle safaris seems a silent comment on the validity of Conrad’s vision of a dark continent of swaying “scarlet bodies” wearing mangy skin[s] with pendent tail[s], shouting “periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language”, “like the responses of some satanic litany”.

___

All of this far away from that semblance of normality (the Belgian sausages and cold beers at sundown) and civilization built on the banks of the Congo as seen in the final pages of the story.

The Royal Belgian Express “heading for its damnation”, the tracks seeming “to lead right into the hole of a giant witch.”

Further Reading

A review by Bart Croonenborghs

A review by John Dermot Woods at Faster Times

Tatsumi: The Facsimile as Homage

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Ng Suat Tong

A review of Tatsumi. Directed by Eric Khoo. In Japanese with English subtitles. Released 17 May 2011. Un Certain Regard 2011 Cannes Film Festival. [Comics reproduced in article read from right to left.]

Tatsumi (a cartoon adaptation of the manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi) could be described as something of an anomaly — a project originating from Singapore which was made on the tiny island of Batam, Indonesia; a project no Japanese animation studio would have taken up if only because of its subject matter: slow, serious, immodest, and unsafe for children. The project’s unlikely instigator is one of Singapore’s most prominent directors, Eric Khoo, whose eighth feature this is.

Tatsumi represents Khoo’s first foray into animation. He dabbled in cartooning in his younger days, and those early works often reflect the urban angst and alienation found in many of his movies. As with Adrian Tomine (editor of the new Tatsumi translations published by Drawn & Quarterly), Khoo developed a passion for the gekiga of Tatsumi through the 1988 Catalan edition of Good-Bye and Other Stories. The motivation behind this project would appear to be simple. When asked about the impact of A Drifting Life (Tatsumi’s autobiographical manga) on him, Khoo had this to say:

“I could not stop thinking about it after reading it for three days and that’s when I decided I had to make a tribute film for Tatsumi.”

At 98 minutes, this is a bare bones version of A Drifting Life, charting in short and somewhat cumbersomely narrated sections his beginnings as a young artist, his meeting with Osamu Tezuka, his family travails, and the birth of gekiga. The film is remarkably faithful to the source text with Tatsumi’s comics panels providing the key animation frames and serving as a near rigid storyboard. Interspersed with the snippets of autobiography are adaptations of at least five works from the author’s 70s oeuvre, namely “Hell”, “Just a Man”, “Occupied”, “Beloved Monkey”, and “Good-bye”. These stories can be found in the collections Abandon the Old in Tokyo and Goody-bye, and are derived from the best period of Tatsumi’s work. There are also short sequences from Tatsumi’s pulp comic, Black Blizzard, highlighting and fetishizng its trashy roots by means of a faux four color process not dissimilar to the effect found on the cover of the Drawn & Quarterly edition of the same manga.

Despite Khoo’s personal affection for A Drifting Life, the fragments in the film derived from that novel are undoubtedly the weakest sections, serving largely as somewhat forgettable links to the five main manga adaptations found therein. Even cut down to its basics these segments will try the patience of viewers with any familiarity with the source material. The segment on Tatsumi’s meeting with Tezuka are the most coherent, the rest is inconsequential filler with little emotional drive. Worst of all is the clumsy and melodramatic episode depicting the destruction of the young Tatsumi’s art by his ailing brother.

The real aesthetic failure of Khoo’s film occurs in the differentiation between the autobiographical scenes and the fictional story elements. This blurring of lines may in fact be intentional — a reflection of the largely unvarying style Tatsumi uses for all his projects and also a subtle suggestion that Tatsumi’s violent themes emerged from his own torn psyche. The autobiographical sections are done in a kind of animation short hand (undoubtedly the product both of intention as well as budgetary constraints) and are shown in color for the most part. The fiction adaptations are done in raw black and white, and are more purposefully two dimensional to indicate the source material. Blurred elements intrude into the frame to mimic a camera lens’ shallow depth of field, and the figures are designed and drawn in a vigorous scrawl typical of Tatsumi’s pre-70s comics. They have none of the refinement of Tatsumi’s ink work found in stories such as “Sky Burial” and “Abandon the Old in Tokyo”. The light and breezy tone of A Drifting Life barely registers, and the segments covering it remain resolutely stiff and leaden, no different from the pre-70s strips they unwittingly mimic. The overall effect is not unlike a slightly evolved motion comic. The lack of aesthetic separation between the two narrative strands leads to a certain monotony; life and art inseparable yet flat in affect.

Sound is the one enhancing element in Khoo’s film. While the dubbing of the American soldier in “Good-bye” is calamitous (imagine John Wayne in a sex scene), the panting and gasping of coitus is wisely heightened to a pornographic hyper-reality which is totally in keeping with Tatsumi’s narrative ethos. Where Tatsumi shows us no more than one page of incestuous licentiousness, Khoo’s version is a loud, drawn out fucking.

It surpasses its source material because of its perverse animalism and utter lack of subtlety. The central hook of incest in “Good-bye” might have been sufficient in Tatsumi’s era but no longer. Producing an adaptation some 40 years later, Khoo periodic attempts to intensify the audience’s disgust and revulsion is largely a successful one.

This isn’t the only time that the film adaptation highlights minor weaknesses in the original. The words streaming across the panels in an apartment scene in “Beloved Monkey” (see below) fall short of the more effective and annoying repetition of a stuck record player in Khoo’s movie.

Similarly, the crowd in the final moments of the same story is considerably more threatening — closer, less accommodating, and more menacing — in the film version .

This may be a case of creative licence. The placidity of Tatsumi’s pedestrians suggest an over-reaction on the protagonist’s part, a festering agoraphobia. Khoo’s adaptation assures us of the validity of this fear. Whether these divergences simply reflect the relative strength and weaknesses of the respective mediums is a subject for another day.

The decision to animate the pornographic graffiti in “Occupied” also yields good results; coarsening the almost asexual nature of Tatsumi’s depictions of female nuditity.

Yet Khoo oversteps the material near the end of his adaptation, introducing a cacophony of siren sounds where none exist in the manga; dampening the faint ambiguity of the manga’s conclusion. It is never clear from the manga whether the protagonist of “Occupied” is apprehended by the police. The film makes certain of this by adding the sound of handcuffs.

The subjective lengthening of the material which works so effectively for the scenes of lasciviousness has its occasional drawbacks. For instance, the opening scenes of a bombed out Hiroshima in “Hell” which are tediously drawn out and which quickly outstay their welcome. Every scene Khoo includes in his adaptation may be found in the original comic, and those 3 pages of ineffectual drawing are faithfully refashioned into a ham-fisted opening sequence only likely to impress the naive and uninitiated.

One might say that the weaknesses in Tatsumi’s stories are brought to vivid life in Khoo’s animation. The manner in which the secretary (Okawa) propositions her elderly boss towards the close of “Just A Man” drew giggles of disbelief from the audience on the night of my screening. In contrast, the panel work in Tatsumi’s manga simply slips past the reader in a matter of seconds causing little if any consternation.

More damaging than all of this is the frigid depiction of creativity; devoid of any sense of the artist’s passion except through the histrionics of the young Tatsumi (in the animation) and the personal claims of the narrator. The final act — that final moment of artistic revelation — where Tatsumi creates a drawing of his old neighborhood falls flat on its face due to the consummate mediocrity of the final product.

Still, the sheer faithfulness of Khoo’s adaptation makes it a perfect tool for publicity, particularly in reference to those who still see comics and animation as the province of children. As Khoo suggests in his interview at Indie Movies Online:

“Because I’m such a fanboy, I hope that people will see Tatsumi and realise “Hey, there’s something to these stories,” and maybe go and buy A Drifting Life, and read 800 pages-worth of his life.”

This is a perfect encapsulation of the film’s worth — a paean to a cartooning deity, a devoted act of promotion, and middling entertainment for the most discerning.

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Related Material

A substantive interview with Eric Khoo at Indie Movies Online

EK: What I told everyone is that, “We will use all his panels as the storyboard of the film.” We do not create any additional shots. Everything must be from the source. And what that meant was that some of the stories I had to edit. The hardest was his life. 800 pages! I had to condense it down to 35 minutes!

Big Questions: Our Father, Where Art Thou?

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Ng Suat Tong

A review of Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions. Limited edition signed and numbered hardcover, 7.25 x 9.25, colour, 658 pages.

Synopsis: A group of finches begin to consider the form of their sustenance and the structure of their lives; both of these governed by men who take on the stature of gods. One is a worldly, hallucinating fighter pilot delivering mystery in the form of a bomb — impatient, anhedonic, and destructive. The other is an “idiot” who takes what he can from nature; giving and removing life with the mercurial judgement of deity. An old and a new testament. The birds begin to take sides in keeping with their intellectual dispositions. The former figure attracts a complex theology, the latter, almost simple faith, trust, and finally devotion. There is a war of the gods and a hopeful denouement. The birds end up where they started, finally settling the big question they began with. Or have they…

“Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”

Matthew 6:26

Those looking for an encapsulation of the ingenuity and promise of the 90s small press — that calculated rawness, that sense of adventure, that palm-sized aesthetic object — could do worse than read Ron Rege Jr.’s Skibber Bee-Bye. Anders Nilsen’s collected Big Questions ,itself a product of the 90s, re-imagines this for the new millennium — that slow, hesitating shuffle away from Fort Thunder and its adherents into a world of hefty Smyth-sewn tomes heavy enough to kill a small animal. This world is more laid back, engineered, and formal; as thick and traditional in its narrative as Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button (a younger cousin of sorts), yet more sprightly and clever, and difficult to envision in any form except comics.

This new edition of Big Questions is easily digested in a single sitting and is the only sensible way to read Nilsen’s work. The individual issues suffer from a certain brevity and disconnect wrought through drawn out publication schedules, yet remain ultimately necessary for those interested in supporting independent comics artists and their publications. It is, perhaps, only in this collected edition that the inter-species relationships of Nilsen’s comic thicken and caramelize, only here that the pitched battles acquire any degree of emotional tension, only here that the scope of the entire work can be appreciated.

Nilsen describes the genesis of Big Questions some fourteen years ago in his afterword, recalling an artist’s workshop where a “very simple story…emerged [involving] a lost soldier in a barren landscape, a group of birds, and a plane crash”. He describes the process of learning how to draw comics over the course of this project, and that growth is clearly evident even within the first 100 pages of this collection. It is within these pages that we see ideas introduced and then discarded as they are found to be less useful (the somewhat clumsily drawn squirrels replaced by more vicious carrion eaters for instance); something we find not infrequently in comics which begin in a more freewheeling spirit before gaining concentration and more straightened purpose. Long dissertations give way to space and silence; static points of view are replaced by movement across panels and the use of the full expanse of the comics page; hesitating stippled backgrounds progress to detail and increasing complexity. All this mirroring Nilsen’s increasing confidence and conviction as a storyteller.

The “talking birds” come to Nilsen quite early and form the cornerstone of the early issues and chapters of Big Questions. The imagery seems at first to thrive on the curious irony of having birds consider impossible mysteries. The first of these (reiterated once again at the close of Nilsen’s comic) concerns nothing less than predestination and free-will.

[The first big question]

Crystallized ideas and inquiries are pressed on the reader through this act of reduction. Our own wants are seen in the light of specks of indistinguishable food; our destinies seen more clearly and simply in the threads of fate that envelop the humble life of birds.

[Food and Life according to the birds]

Nilsen’s comic is a fable and parable asking us to reflect on where we are. The simplicity with which these ornithological forms and the distilled elements of their lives putting into sharp focus our own frailties and needs. The forms are delineated with a few strokes of Nilsen’s pen and brush but their direction, posture, and deployment suggest compassion, anger, and depression.

“I kind of like the idea that they are, in a way, all the same bird, just reacting to different situations and contexts. The sameness of the birds was an accident in a way, but ultimately I decided to embrace it as part of the book’s content.”

Anders Nilsen in an interview with James Romberger

These quickly drawn shapes almost never suggest the identity of the speaker. This can only be determined through deduction, dialogue and setting; a device which instills that sense of allegory which is itself reinforced by the author’s use of emblematic marks and legend. All this slowly coalescing into a grand narrative of interweaving lines — planned, symmetrical, and increasing in complexity — suggesting forms like a star of Bethlehem or the “Ley lines” and fractals which cut through nature; the meandering flight of birds; the by-ways of fortune.

At one point, an airplane (a bomber) casts a dark shape over a pastoral landscape — an outsized shadow of the birds and hence ourselves.

Much later we find a short journey into the underworld and Orphic myth.

When Nilsen recalls the places and settings of his tale in the final pages of his work, we find both symbols and a microcosm: an Arcadian field; a fallen tree; a bomb crater containing the shadows and bones of the fallen scavenged by crows and wild dogs; a snake’s burrow guarding the entrance to the underworld; a river which is both the Jordan and the Styx; and life in cold relief.

Religious themes punctuate the narrative consistently and continuously. The leader of a group of Messianic finches is called Zwingly (presumably after the reformer Zwingli), the proselytizing concerning the new religion is done by birds identified as evangelists. It is a mystery play with birds (Betty and Charlotte) standing in for the faithful-doubtful women kneeling at the foot of the cross or waiting faithfully at the empty tomb. There is an aged and kindly reptile guarding the gates to the underworld…

…and an erstwhile deity emerges like Wally Wood’s spaceman from the husk of a giant bird (a “miraculous visitation”) — a virgin birth; an Athena springing forth from the head of Zeus; a parthenogenetic celestial appearing before their eyes.

[“Jesus” by Wally Wood; “He Walked Among Us”]

A centerpiece of this exploration is the Lazarene miracle surrounding a finch called, Bayle. Raised from the dead even as he is killed by his faith — that ridiculous and dangerous longing to be held in the hand of an unknown force.

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).

There are other correspondences. The biblical narrative suggests that Jesus tarried for 2 days after receiving word of Lazarus’ illness (“This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.”) only then starting for Judea and Bethany. And so it is in Nilsen’s narrative, where death is almost an act of capriciousness and, more than this, devoid of compassion. Here, the author suggests that both life and death come from the same source, one so distant and unapproachable as to seem to emanate from an imbecile, monster, or saint.

Nilsen’s standalone illustrations often depict wastelands, roadside accidents, and dumps. Disemboweled bodies centered in image and yet anonymous in their deaths; touched by some unseen pastel hand or angel; a vision of our fickle lives.

[Illustration work by Anders Nilsen]

Of course, Bayles’ death (a drowning) is made doubly significant for being a baptism from which he rises like the Holy Spirit above his messiah’s brow.

[Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ]

The ornitho-Christological theme is pressed to its limit: a feeding or, perhaps, a preaching to the birds by St. Francis occurs at one point; and a latter day Elijah is fed by the same winged beasts at journey’s end.

The doughnuts and crumbs upon which the finches feed become nothing less than the elements of the Eucharist, laced with the meat and blood of transubstantiation; a meal which is cursorily ridiculed as it has been through the ages.

Like Eurydice and her pomegranate seeds, the bread is tainted not only by innocence but war and regret. “You are what you eat, little bird.” proclaims a carrion crow,

Nilsen never answers the big question he begins with, only jabbing lightly at the fabric of existence. If there is an answer in his puzzle and construct, it is the answer provided by the lives which writhe and weave before us in his tale; now seen from a factual and atheistic distance. A world governed by intention, coincidence, accidents, and foolishness. We can see some similarities with the work of Kevin Huizenga in that artist’s own “sermon notes” comics, philosophical inquires, scientific discursions, and theological musings.

Plato’s Cave is for the birds

Neither is particularly dismissive but Nilsen is the true skeptic. He peppers his narrative with religious absurdities while occasionally leavening them with more kindly interpretation. His non-existent God is something which we feed and give life to, a concept which sometimes give us strength through blind chance and misplaced faith. As he states in his interview with Romberger:

“I think about that word, Asomatognosia, as a kind of metaphor for the religious impulse. I heard about the condition while listening to an interview with the neurologist Oliver Sacks. He described it as a condition where one loses one’s sense of ownership over a limb, usually an arm or hand…That sort of alienation from one’s own sense of control, our own agency, to me works as a kind of metaphor for the displacement of responsibility that a belief in the supernatural, or in god can sometimes entail. “

We can detect that appreciation for Sacks’ wry humor throughout this comic, not least in a skeletal evangelist reciting a Panglossian homily to a former friend.

“Everything will turn out right in the end…”

…and the triumph of worldly “faith” and enlightenment.

The flower pots arranged and rearranged making us more keenly aware of their fragrance and color; the investigations and queries handled broadly rather than in depth; removing mystery from life. Nilsen would be the first to admit this and does so in his interview with Matthias Wivel at the metabunker:

“Nilsen: No, I haven’t read a lot of philosophy…I’m just curious about the world. Most of what I read is non-fiction; not philosophy explicitly, but I’ve always been interested in those kinds of issues, the heart of the matter…So I don’t think I approach these issues with a lot of knowledge about what philosophers who dealt with them before me thought about them, I don’t have a strong grasp of the history of them, but they’re just interesting questions and I’m learning. Also, my grandfather, my mother’s father, was a Lutheran minister of a very universalist stripe, so I think that some of the issues that I’m interested in are theological and stem from that…

Wivel: Are you religious?

I’m not religious at all, but I’m interested in thinking about religious issues, the nature of the world, meaning, things like that.”

If there is a problem with Nilsen’s comic, it would be this marginal interest — not so strange and wonderful to behold as the belief bordering on insanity we find in films like Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, and yet not so supremely intellectual in its contempt as to engage the reader’s mind fully. What remains is the emotional and aesthetic core of the narrative: the gradual mastery of form and narrative; the heat of battle; the sweetness of conversation; the pain of parting; and that sadness spoken through animals. And, perhaps, this is just enough to make us believe.

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Related articles

An interview with Matthew Baker at Nashville Review concerning his entire oeuvre.

An interview and introduction by James Romberger at Publishers Weekly. The initial discussion focuses on the spontaneity of the comics’ creation and its graphic design.

Matthias Wivel’s 2007 interview with the artist.

An interview at Comic Book Resources. “Using animals characters gives you a shorthand for personality and automatically connects them to some kind of symbolism. Birds are symbolic of transcendence or flight. Snakes have this history in Western culture, whether it’s the Garden of Eden or the way snakes are portrayed in Greek mythology. You get this extra material that just sits there in the background. You don’t have to be explicit about it but it can inform the story and inform the character.”

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Review

Utsubora: The Erotic Exigencies of Authorship

Good Dogs and Fickle Gods

Hawkeye: Best Superhero Comic of 2012?

Review: The Crackle of the Frost

Review: The Man Who Grew His Beard

Tatsumi: The Facsimile as Homage

Big Questions: Our Father, Where Art Thou?