Complaining about the Zinn-Buhle-Konopacki People’s History of American Empire put me in mind of a side issue. I refer to Rius’s works and the Beginners series as comic books. But they aren’t, because in my view a comic book must center around a narrative or argument conducted by a series of pictures. Words will be involved too, in most cases, but the chain of pictures really makes up the comic’s spine. Rius and the Beginners series do something else. The text, skimpy as it is, carries the reader from point to point; the pictures, big as they are, provide a counterpoint to the text. What do you call a book like that? A comic, if you’re blogging and in a hurry, but the term doesn’t really fit.

Realize that there are exceptions to this rule. Steve Gerber or Neil Gaiman or a bunch of other guys may take a break from image-to-image sequencing and bung in a number of pages where text carries the day and pictures are there as dressing. You might then argue that a given issue of Howard the Duck or Miracleman is a comic book from pages x to xx, something else for a while, and then back to being a comic again. But life is tedious enough.

I couldn’t get thru this thing. A People’s History of American Empire carries left-wing comics to their logical point: the conclusion that the left should try some sort of trading-card arrangement and leave comics alone. The motive behind Empire — and the Beginners books, and even Rius, who’s a lot more visually adept — seems to be to liposuction away all those gunky words and details and leave a few talking points bare to the reader’s view. You might as well park each factoid on its own card with a decent illustration. You could do the thing in quiz form. “Q: How did the United States bring peace and freedom to the Philippines? Look on the other side!” “A: By killing more than 200,000 men, women, and children! This early counterinsurgency campaign shocked the conscience of,” etc. There’d be room for a picture there someplace, and a logo along the lines of “Prof. Zinn’s U.S. Empire Fact Parade,” with an eagle wearing an eye patch and clutching a round, black anarchist-style bomb, its fuse burning down like a sparkler.

For people who live to get their particular truth across, left wingers generate lousy propaganda. Nowadays only Michael Moore has the touch. Howard Zinn certainly doesn’t, not in print, in the theater (catch his Marx in Soho sometime), or in comics. Empire is a big, hardbound coffee-table book adapted by Paul Buhle from Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the world’s most earnest volume not to involve flossing or Jesus. The art is by Mike Konopacki, who did a job that’s as adequate as adequate can get. Like anyone who has ever drawn a comic book, Konopacki isn’t much good at drawing recognizable public figures. His particular style reminds me of ads for small-time bank chains or of pamphlets for junior high kids in need of advice on healthy living. Doe-eyed, perky-nosed little chaps stand around as the bloody mechanism of American history chomps its way thru the peace of the world. But the book’s biggest formal problem is that the art is there to fill space. Sticking a quote by Woodrow Wilson next to a picture of Woodrow Wilson doesn’t really do much. The same points could be communicated just as well by text alone. Take out the pictures and you’d have a sequence of subpar op-ed pieces, but at least there’d be fewer pages to turn.

The best parts of Empire are the reproductions that pop up here and there of political cartoons from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There’s one calling upon the U.S. to take up the white man’s burden in China, a very elaborate affair involving a giant Uncle Sam setting foot on a miniaturized Chinese coastline, with tiny Chinese residents representing various aspects of Chinese life and society that the cartoonist thought ought to be corrected. A whole argument and fleet of sub-arguments are summed up by picture-making. You’d think somebody who wanted to do a comic book analyzing U.S. history would have something like that in mind. But such is not the case. Instead we have the elaborate dental care pamphlet that is the left’s idea of effective communication. The left is like the tourist who raises his voice so foreigners will have an easier time understanding English; pictures take the place of shouting, but the principle is the same and pretty soon you just want the guy to shut up.

In short, I couldn’t get thru this thing.

EDITED because I got Rius’s name wrong first time out.
UPDATE: Rius and the Beginners books aren’t really comics. See here.

How long before hearing a white say, “Oh yeah? I voted for Obama” becomes an occasion for eye-rolling and exaggerated sighs among our black citizens?

Most likely as of a week ago Thursday, would be my guess.

I’m reading James Thurber’s The Years with Ross. It turns out that for a while Thurber’s rejects from The New Yorker were being bought for the special hip/with-it page of the New York American, a newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst. Apparently a lot of them were of dogs (no surprise) because Hearst sent the editor this note:

Stop running those dogs on your page. I wouldn’t have them peeing on my cheapest rug.

Damn. The weird thing, of course, is that Hearst liked George Herriman so much. It’s hard to imagine one man being able to appreciate George Herriman but not James Thurber, or vice versa. But, given that such a man existed, I suppose it was inevitable that someone made a movie about him.

Every comics blog probably had this 5 minutes ago. My distinction is I called it.

From the Huffington Post‘s 50 fun Obama facts:

He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics

Yeah.

UPDATE: Looking thru Dreams from My Father, I find the comics-related sentence. Young Obama has encountered racism. And:

… from that day forward, a part of me felt trampled on, crushed, and I took refuge in the life that my grandparents led. After school let out, I would walk the five blocks to our apartment; if I had any change in my pockets, I might stop off at a newsstand run by a blind man, who would let me know what new comics had come in. Gramps would be at home to let me in, and as he lay down for his afternoon nap, I would watch cartoons and sitcom reruns.

Yikes, that is one downbeat tableau. And probably the Conans he read were John Buscema and not Barry Smith, and the Spider-Mans were written by Gerry Conway.

UPDATE 2: Fortuitously, Andrew Sullivan steers us to this post by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I’ve been busy and therefore not blogging. So I’ve dug out this miniscule bullet item, a review of
Ronald Reagan: A Graphic Biography, a Hill and Wang book written by Andy Helfer and drawn by Joe Staton. For readers in a hurry, here’s the gist: It’s not bad!

And now:

If you have to fit the life and career of Ronald Reagan into 102 pages, this isn’t a bad way of doing it. Andy Helfer drew on five biographies, Reagan’s two autobiographies and a collection of the late president’s letters to produce a picture of the old man that, to this liberal, appears polite but not deferential. Steve Buccellato demonstrates that he can’t draw Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon or John F. Kennedy, but his Ron and Nancy do the job and Buccellato definitely has a knack for page layouts that are packed with content while not being crowded.

The book skimps on the contras (as opposed to the Iran-contra scandal), leaves out Reagan’s unfortunate activities in the area of civil rights and the environment, and gives a fairly spotty explanation of the impact of the waiver Reagan granted MCA while he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. More about how Walter Mondale sucker punched the president in the first 1984 debate would have been nice too, if only to make old progressives happy. I also spotted a historical error, namely the assertion that Democrats regained the House in 1982; they already had the House but added 20 or so seats to their majority that year. These faults vary in size, but none could exactly be called huge. All in all, Ronald Reagan provides welcome evidence of the job nonfiction comics can do in tackling political history.

Update (by Noah): Bizarrely, I’ve got a capsule review of this as well: it’s here for those who want to compare and contrast….

I’ve read/skimmed a half dozen for TCJ pieces and they have all let me down. I mean books that are about superheroes in general. There are some good books about the superhero comics industry, a caveat I lob in only to take care of Gerard Jones’s work and a few stray items like the Spurgeon/Raphael biography of Stan. But most books I’ve seen about the industry have been bad, as have been all the books I’ve seen about the superhero genre. You can have Yale University Press, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Costume Institute, Conde Nast, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Chabon wade in together and what they pull into existence is Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, a book dedicated to demonstrating the absence of any link between superheroes and fashion while pretending to illustrate said link. The writing is pompous and trivial at the same time, as if you were listening to an Ohio congressman at a 4th of July picnic in 1856, only instead of speaking about the immortal Union he’s going on about Hot Wheel cars. It’s like these guys feel entitled to be boring about absolutely anything.

Update (by Noah): On the theme of bad-books-about-superheroes; my review of Tim Callahan’s Grant Morrison, the Early Years