Tag Archives: Virtue of Ignorance 2008

Virtues of Ignorance 2008 — part 4

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In 2008, I was in one place for a long time for the first time in a long time. And I had a library. So I caught up: Mahler, Hope Larson, The Golem’s Mighty Swing, Dash Shaw, Bardin. I could make a list from Jeffrey Brown to that excruciatingly unreadable autism manga. Or I could list online reads, from “Pictopia” (finally) to Kate Beaton and critical writing, most of which melts together.

Instead, I’ll just note the new comics of Finland. “Com of Finland,” why not? I discovered the anthology Glomp this past year, and have since written about works by Amanda Vähämäki and Katja Tukiainen for TCJ‘s special section of Finnish comics coming soon. And I actually found a copy of the Finnish anthology KutiKuti‘s first issue, colors pulsing on newsprint, in a stack of my old papers. Don’t know where I got it. Can’t read it. But it’s fun to look at (pictured above).

So: Finnish comics, far more vibrant and essential than I could have imagined. But it could have been another pocket of comics, as the landscape looks much more vast than it did just a few years ago. There are dozens of new artists I don’t know, and even more I never will. Good. Before I started writing on comics in 2000, I had spent three or four years reading all the touchstones I could. Then it seemed doable. Now, keeping up with everything seems quite impossible, and ignorance a sure thing going forward. Good.

Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — part 2, addendum a

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Ok, all I had was Bechdel. Miriam had Carla Speed McNeil and Kate Beaton. Here’s one I just remembered: Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. I read issues 1-16, or like that, on download for a TCJ column about Spider-Man (“Face It, Tiger,” issue 291). They were a case of a commercial comic book working exactly the way it should, no contortions or gimmes, no jumble. It’s like intelligent people knew what they were doing and did it. The target here is modest, but I’ll settle and hitting those can be hard enough.


It helps if you don’t mind sitcom and girl stuff. As I recall it’s very quiet-times storytelling, with superheroes kept off on the skyline, more or less. I like that mix: for some reason I like superhero comics and action movies more for their incidental elements than their main elements, and a title like Mary Jane puts the incidentals center stage. The so-called civilian school of superhero comics, I suppose. I loved Bendis’s Alias, though that was meant as psychological noir and Mary Jane is teen comedy. Kind of strange, two such different outcomes from the same genre development. 

The art/writing seems designed for maximum ease of eye movement, which I take to be a manga kind of thing. The images, as I recall, are simple and figures are positioned for maximum scannability. Dialogue skims along but without the pop-pop banter effect found with most superhero dialogue nowadays.

Which brings me to a key point: a big part of the comic’s appeal is relief. I would have liked it anyway, but set against most superhero product, it was a relief. Quiet skill is something we don’t get a lot of.

As to the Manga point above, the original artist was  Takeshi Miyazawa, a Canadian but Wiki says he has a Manga sensibility. Then came David Hahn. As I recall, I liked Miyazawa better. Writer: Sean McKeever. Sample plot: girl gets jealous because Mary Jane wins lead in school play. Title: “The Jealousy Thing,” because every issue is “The [whatever] Thing.” You get the idea. It’s simple stuff, but it works.

Further, we get one more example of Mary Jane being rewritten into a character entirely unlike the Mary Jane in the main Spider-Man series. Offhand I can’t think of any time her personality has made it intact into an alternative Spider-Man version. Noah has more here for those who have ever tried to figure her out.

virtue of ignorance 2008 — part 3 (chock full of ego edition)

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There are some definite perks, as a comics fan, to being a comics creator. Traveling the con circuit, I’ve gotten to meet a lot of my heroes, from Eddie Campbell to Batton Lash to Sergio Aragones (the best things about having my picture with Sergio Aragones are, first, that he totally looks like a Sergio Aragones drawing, and second, people in my civilian life tend to have heard of him, unlike everyone else I’ve ever been excited to meet at a con). I also see a lot more new books than I would in my ordinary course of life as a quasi-hermit.

The drawback is that I have a harder time enjoying comics in an ego-less fashion, without analyzing the artwork and storytelling to ascertain whether it’s better or worse than mine. and if it’s better, trying to figure out how to steal it or despairing of ever being able to make something as good… and if I decide it’s worse, then I get to engage in bitterness at their (relative, sometimes very relative: it is Northamerican alt-comics we’re talking about here) success.

So both my favourite comics revelations of 2008 came to me through being on the con circuit, and my enjoyment of both of them is mixed with sweet jealousy.

I’ve been hearing about Finder for a few years, mostly through the women-in-comics world. But I didn’t start reading the series until McNeil was at the same artists alley at Wizard World Chicago this June. I bought two volumes, and then she was at several more cons I was at, until I’m almost caught up on the series, getting two books at a time. I’m late on the bandwagon, but I’m addicted now.

And yeah, it’s soft science fiction with a Gary Stu/noble savage protagonist (which McNeil makes fun of, but Jaeger is ten times smarter, more competent, and prettier than everyone who surrounds him). But here, like in Preacher, the author succeeds in making you share their infatuation with their creation.

McNeil’s worlbuilding is also enthusiastic in an infectious manner. She has her cake, and eats it too, by making her stories circular, cryptic and dreamlike (some would say indecipherable) and then appending fifteen pages of endnotes to each volume, giving away background about the Finder universe as well as notes on the creation of the book. But I’m an endnotes kind of gal, growing up on Terry Pratchett and David Foster Wallace.

Another area where Finder was created with me in mind, and that I wish my stuff was more like, is that it’s drawn like the love child of Dave Sim and Terry Moore. It is fortunate it wasn’t around when I was a teenager, cause I would probably have drawn terrible, terrible fanfic. Yes, Finder is a success in the category (discussed here) of enthrall-fans-in-your-characters over be-enshrined-as-important, which I also covet.

You know who else has a scary amount of fans? Kate Beaton. She’s only been doing comics for two (I believe) years, but she has more people subscribed to her comics feed on livejournal than went to her university, and I had the table next door at her SPX debut, the one where she sold out of everything in, like, a day, and had a dozen-deep autograph line every second she was at her table.

She does mostly unconnected history comics (I think her most famous one is this one) whose humour is often the stilted-language non-joke, in a way that feels very “now” (and this is my only complaint about her work, because I feel that part won’t age well), and the funny drawing of dignified personages.

Her drawing represents the opposite end, from McNeil’s, of the spectrum of drawing which I wanted to kill and eat in order to gain its powers. It’s not lamely naïve like David Heatley or Jeffrey Brown, it’s dashed-off and open and precise. The eyes on a character’s face are never the same size, but you instantly recognize exactly what expression the character is making.

Like with James Thurber, the shock of something very bare and messy instantly becoming something very detailed and specific in your mind, can be much more joyous than having the details all laid out for you. And no matter how much I work at tight drawing (and I am no Carla Speed McNeil) I cannot fathom how to draw loose like that.

Damn her. Damn them both. Happy new year.

[edited, to correct title]

Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — part 2

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Noah started the ball here. What was my personal discovery in comics for ’08? I could have done Steve Gerber’s all-text issue of Howard the Duck, but I’m beat and will settle for my experience reading A. Bechdel’s Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. In effect the experience means I read the series from start to finish, or almost. The book drops 137 strips, leaving 390 to take you from 1987 to last year. Good enough to get me from one end of the series to the other.

It was the first time I’d seen more of the series than isolated bits here and there. Since the early/mid-’90s I had read a couple of the individual collections put out by Firebrand Books (now with great new covers), plus strips here and there that surfaced in the New York Press. (The paper’s right-wing proprietor ran Bechdel’s leftist genderqueer menagerie as filler in his back pages.) I very much liked Bechdel’s earliest cartoons, done before Mo and Lois and the rest of the cast showed up, and I sort of liked the installments I’d seen of the continuing series. But Essential allowed me to follow the series from start to finish and for most of the middle.

When I read the series all the way thru, I found that I’d been harboring a delusion. Since the mid-’90s I had believed that Bechdel’s inspiration had been used up with the early strips. I thought that the continuingDykes story was a mere money-making effort and that it had become increasingly mannered and lifeless. Well, it is mannered, not to mention engineered. The pages are crowded with panels, the panels crowded with figures, the figures’ mouths jammed with words (and, yeah, sometimes the effect is like school librarians trying to be clever). But lifeless the strip is not.

Bechdel is compulsive and methodical, and these traits aren’t a replacement for spent inspiration; they’re how she gets the job done. The figures line up in tight, shallow friezes, and it’s evident that Bechdel drew each one from a posed snapshot. But she knows how the characters should pose, and what they should be saying and doing. From about 1994 on, when you read a few of the strips you very quickly come to feel like you’re looking at a crowd of people you know doing what comes naturally to them, even if they all have Edward Gorey eyes and a tendency to hold themselves in profile. She’s a good caricaturist, which you wouldn’t expect from Fun Home. She pops out one bit player after another, and they have the good bit player’s ability to look and behave like no one else on earth without seeming like a stunt. Bechdel has also developed a fine touch for visual dynamics — her zero-depth friezes are a concession to storytelling needs, not signs of a skill deficit — and the way she draws a rainy morning is a pleasure to the eye.

I leave out my favorite aspects of the strip: the sociology, characterization and story. I don’t want to sound like a well-meaning dork liberal or a middlebrow lover of the lose-yourself-in-the-characters fictional experience. But I am both those things, and my two days of reading Essential Dykes were a pleasure in just the ways I could have wanted

Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — part 1

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I find the flurry of year-end best-of lists a little oppressive. In the first place, they remind me that, for a self-proclaimed cultural critic, I really don’t keep up with anything. And for the second — there’s just a kind of tyranny of news that seems crystallized in those lists. This moment you must think about All Star Superman! Jeez, ma…do I have to?

So anyway, I thought it would be fun instead of a typical best of list to maybe talk about some comics-related things that I discovered in 2008 that I’d never known about before. This has the added bonus of making my general ignorance of everything an advantage, since the more I don’t know, the more I have to write about. (The rest of the Hooded U bloggers thought it was an entertaining idea as well, so they’ll be providing their own lists as the week goes on.)

So to start:

–in mainstream comics, the creator I stumbled upon who made me happiest was probably Jeff Parker. As regular blog readers know, Parker writes a bunch of all-ages titles for Marvel. I just got his Marvel Adventures: Avengers vol. 4 collection and he was totally in the zone. The first issue has the Avengers fighting MODOC, and they all get turned into giant-headed MODOC’s themselves. The best part is when they (inevitably) fight the Leader, and they all make fun of him for having such a small head. And how do they make fun of him? By suggesting he become a teacher! And then they suggest that he can’t even get tenure. Then the Abomination, who is the Leader’s ally, gets really ticked and starts shouting “He does too have a big head!”

Macrocephalic jokes combined with sneers at the educational establishment. That’s all I really want from my super-hero books. Is it wrong?

–in manga,the thing I read that I didn’t know about that kicked my ass was the Korean mahwa yaoi series Let Dai, which is fantastic. I wrote a forthcoming review of it, so I probably shouldn’t enthuse too much here, but it’s brutal and preposterously romantic at the same time, and it literally made me cry.

–for art comics…well, this is probably a definitional stretch, but the thing that springs to mind is Hokusai’s manga. I’d known about Hokusai of course, but I’d never heard of his series of drawing books until this year when (I think) R.C. Harvey wrote about them in the Comics Journal. Beautiful, energetic line-work, filled with character and wit and…actually, heaping praise on them is just kind of silly. It’s just about the best drawing anyone has ever done; if you care about illustration at all, it’s the holy grail. You can check out some amazing images here. Or I’ve put a couple below if you’re too lazy to link:

Hokusai is hard to beat. Still, the vaguely-comics-related-thing I discovered this year, though, that most thoroughly rocked my world was the amazing Sur La Lune fairy tale website. Specifically, I’m talking about the massive collection of fairy tale illustrations available on the site. It was through Sur La Lune that I found out about Arthur Rackham’s unbelievable silhouette work for Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. That’s only the beginning of it though. The site introduced me to

Kay Nielsen

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Margaret Evans Price

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Elenore Abbott

Harry Clarke (who is a God)

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And a bunch of others. It’s a fantastic place to get lost in.

So there you have it. Check back on Monday for Tom’s favorite comics discovery of 2008; Miriam and Bill will post later in the week.

Update: Minor edits for consistency.