The Comic Book Holocaust
by Johnny Ryan

It would probably not be much of a stretch to call The Comic Book Holocaust Johnny Ryan's magnum opus. It's hard to imagine Ryan topping this one, even if he lives to be 110 years old.

Ryan's technique is built on minimal application for maximum effect. While there is no doubt that he is a supremely confident cartoonist, his style is so simple and straightforward that it would be easy to mistake his economy for sloth. He knows exactly how to draw what he's drawing in order to put across his jokes with as little extraneous content as possible. When your primary vehicles are scatology and obscenity, it doesn't really matter how well drawn the feces is.



The Comic Book Holocaust is comprised of a number of self-published minicomics produced by Ryan over the last few years. The only material in here I'd seen before was the Marvel Comics-specific gags produced for the Marvel Super Pages volume. By compiling all this material together between two covers, Ryan has elevated what would have otherwise been fairly throwaway gag pages into something resembling a significant statement. Of course, you can only take it so seriously considering the fact that it's a bunch of jokes about shit and boners, but considering Ryan's skill as well as his absolute and unflinching commitment to the subject matter, it reaches a level of zen stupidity almost unparalleled in comics history.

The key to the book lies in its repetition. Every page contains a single strip, and every strip consists of exactly twelve panels. Every single panel contains either a joke, a set-up for a punchline or a punchline. Every single inch of real estate on the page is dedicated to the goal of producing a joke -- even the cross-hatching is funny, used as it is to parody artists who overuse the technique.

The first fourth of the book is dedicated to famous comic strips -- "Little Orphan Ass Hole", "Krazy Kunt", "The Baboondocks". The second portion reprints the Marvel Super Pages material, with strips devoted to mainstays like Spider-Man (here spelled without the hyphen, for comedic effect I'm sure), Thor, Rom (Rom?) and all the rest. The third takes on the crop of serious "graphic novels", stuff like "Rectal Nerve", "Ghost Turd" and "American Spleandouche". The fourth section is a catch-all, featuring a little bit of everything not covered in the first three sections, a couple token manga, as well as some oddballs like "The Cross & The Switchblade", 1970s romance comics and, er, "Silver, the Lone Ranger's Horse".

Considering how repetitive many of these gags can be, it's amazing that Ryan is able to get so much variety from such a basic formula. Sometimes he alters his basic drawing style in order to parody the artist in question, with simple calligraphic brush-strokes to ape Ivan Brunetti's later style in "Shitzo" or George Herriman's skewed art-deco for "Krazy Kunt". But he's hardly the stylistic chameleon that someone like R. Sikoryak is -- more like, his facile adaptations are the kind of primitive aping you'd expect to see if a small child was replicating the drawing style of their favorite sunday cartoons.



But Ryan is also pretty canny at switching the focus of his punchlines, running the gamut from merely putting familiar characters through their scatological paces (Spider-Man putting together an Ikea bookshelf to hold all his tranny porn), to lodging clever satirical broadsides. "Shitzo", for instance, takes on the perpetually depressed Ivan Brunetti: sick of hearing Brunetti whine about wanting to kill himself, another character urges him to get it over with and put himself out of his misery. Brunetti does not actually kill himself, however -- he decides to procrastinate suicide because he "just thought of a really funny child rape comic I want to draw!" Joe Matt gets it in the shorts for being such a hopeless loser, Art Spiegelman is repeatedly mocked for being a pretentious egomaniac, and Chris Ware's disturbing lack of self-esteem is similarly lampooned. Even the seemingly anomalous "Silver, the Lone Ranger's Horse" page has a purpose: those with fairly long memories might remember that Steve Weissman of Yikes fame* once wrote a glowing tribute to Silver in the pages of The Comics Journal. And, come on, anyone who has ever been creeped out by the very concept of "Casper the Friendly Ghost" will be amused by the thought that Casper was really the aborted child of rape.

The repetitious format produces a hypnotic effect on the unwary reader. Ryan's comics are so easy to read that it is impossible to resist turning the pages. It may be filled with shit and fuck and anal rape and giant sky pussies (wow, that's surely one of the oddest recurring motifs in the history of literature), but I'll be damned if The Comic Book Holocaust isn't one of the most satisfying compendiums of pure cartooning I've seen in many a year.

(For whatever reason, I can't find a copy of this for sale at good old Amazon.com. So if you want to buy it, I suggest you go here - although, it must be noted, I get nothing from the transaction. Sorry.)

*Thanks for the correction, Milo - that's what I get for depending on my memory.

Pineapple

Placid were the heavy waters far from shore. In the middle of the deep ocean where it was impossible to see another soul for hundreds of miles in any direction, a small craft ran across the surface of the still sea. The slow, flirtatious ripples emanating from the rear of the boat gradually disappeared as the craft sped onward, energy expended and absorbed.

There were only three people visible on the boat. A large man of indeterminate age sat at the wheel, silently scanning the horizon. Despite thr tropical heat he was dressed immaculately in a white suit and duster. He did not seem to be sweating, or even to notice the heat at all. The hair on his head was white to match the white of his clothes. There was another man at the rear of the boat, hunched over in his seat and visibly unhappy. He was much younger than the first, still almost a boy, and was visibly uncomfortable in the tropical climate. He has stripped down to a thin white tank-top but still sweating; a half empty bottle of sunscreen sat on the seat next to him. There was music in his headphones, and that appeared to be the only thing keeping him from being far more unhappy than he already was.

The third person on the boat seemed much more comfortable. She was very tall, with a dark, slightly caramel complexion and a face that revealed an indeterminate ethnicity. She was lying across a row of seats set into the prow, wearing nothing much in the way of clothing except for a small string bikini and a white sarong encircling her hips. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, and except for her taut athletic frame she would not have stood out on any beach resort on the planet. The man at the wheel stared across her figure as he steered the boat, stirred less by any incipient lust than by mere curiosity -- who knew what designs lays beneath the darkened sunglasses which covered her eyes?

"Are you thirsty, Drums?"

The boy sitting at the rear of the boat nodded imperceptibly. At the best of times he was not a particularly verbose companion but now, alone in the middle of the ocean, separated from any forms of electronic communication except for the phantom wisps of low-frequency radio signals and distant satellite communication, he had become positively laconic.

"You should drink more water." The man in white reached over to a small miniature refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of water. He concentrated for a moment and the bottle was covered in a thin icy crust, no more than a few millimeters thick, but enough to ensure the drink was as cold as possible. He tossed the water to the boy.

A small island grew larger on the horizon. It was almost entirely flat and covered with sand, and nothing large appeared to grow on the surface.

"We're here," the man in white announced to no one in particular. "Jakita, you're going to want to see this."

The woman sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. "It's an island," she said, nonplussed. "And a particularly flat island. There is nothing here."

"That's rather the point," he replied. "There used to be something here. It was written up in the last guidebook, but it's gone now."

They sat in silence as the boat neared the beach. Up close, it was obvious that the island was not as barren as it had initially appeared -- there was small vegetation and a few spindly palm trees scattered across the beach. But the landscape did not seem particularly hospitable to life. Despite the tropical milieu, there was something tortured and burnt in the landscape, as if the island had been scoured and set to wither in the sun.

"It's so still," the woman said. "There's nothing in the air. No life, no movement. Not exactly death but . . . stasis."

They drifted to within a hundred yards of the shore and set the anchor in the water. The woman dove in the water and swam the remaining distance to shore, her strokes long and fluid. The two remaining men pulled a canoe out from a cavity in the rear of the boat and set it in the water.

By the time they reached the shore the woman had already been there for quite some time. As the men were pulling the canoe onto the beach she approached them with a large plank of wood under her arm.

"Is this what you wanted to see?" She threw the plank on the sand in front of them. It was weather-beaten and faded, but there was still writing. In large white letters the sign read DANGER, DO NOT ENTER. There was an equally large radiation symbol, and smaller writing underneath that read BY ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY.

"It hasn't been dangerous in years", the man said. "Radiation doesn't linger like that, not from those bombs. But they had no idea what happened here after the bomb went off. They didn't understand it, they couldn't quantify it, so they sealed up the area as tight as they could. Not so tight that we couldn't get in."

"Just a nuclear bomb? What's so fancy about that."

"Nothing, in particular. But any explosion of that magnitude is going to create some disturbances. Any time you mess with the fundamental forces of nature there are going to be unintended consequences. Especially when the means are so brutal and violent . . . things get pulled through from other places and other times. Things that weren't supposed to be alive, at least not here."

They began to walk across the beach, following the curve of the island over a few short, windblasted dunes. After about a half a mile they stopped at a small inlet. There was a large wooden mast set out of the sea at an odd angle, broken and splintered but still recognizable.

The man in white knelt down at the waterline and touched the water. Something seemed to sharpen, to come into focus, and the inlet froze. Steam immediately appeared over the ice. As the moments passed the frozen inlet began to recede like sand being blown back from a momentous wind, sweeping back further and further to create a solid wall against the sea. An area which had previously been hidden by tens of thousands of gallons of water was revealed.

"Neat trick," the woman said. The made their way into the area of the inlet, walking towards where the mast had originally stuck out from the water. In the light of day the mast revealed itself to be attached to a larger apparatus, a shattered remnant of an ancient boat's prow and pieces of a hull.

The woman paused a minute before speaking. "Shipwreck. Looks to be about four hundred years old."

"You're partly right," the man answered. "It was built around four hundred years ago. But it's nowhere near that old. This was a pirate ship. The explosion took them forward but it also changed them as well."

"So a nuclear bomb in 1945 affected a boatful of pirates in the seventeenth century? Again, neat trick."

"Rules in a place like this are changed. Borders become porous, definitions not so clear. It's not the only strange thing that ever happened here. But the most recent."

"So what did these pirates do in the twentieth century?"

"They didn't know they were in the twentieth century, for one. Their minds were warped by the transit, so they were different . . . they became fixated on a colony of very strange undersea creatures. They developed something of a symbiotic relationship with these creatures, because they believed them to be magical. They weren't magical. Just something else that had come through the Bleed . . . something that warped the laws of nature around themselves. These pirates died after a few years of circling the island and singing strange sea-shanties."

The man in white walked away from the shipwreck, towards the ice wall that he had created to keep the sea away. He placed his hand on the wall and it receded backwards again. A concave aperture slowly opened in the ice, and the aperture became a tunnel, large enough for a man to walk through. He walked into the aperture and under the sea.

It was a long tunnel, stretching from the site of the inlet out a few hundred yards to the sea. The ice walls were mostly transparent, and they could see the sun shining down through millions of gallons of water above their heads and into the refracted ceiling and walls of the passageway.

"There aren't any fish," the woman said after they had walked for a time. "I would have expected to see lots of fish."

"They know to keep away from this region."

They came to a large cavern which had formed in the ice, covering an area approximately the size of a baseball field. The uniform blankness of the ocean floor had given way to sprawled heaps of debris -- scrap metal, driftwood, stone. But, oddly enough, the scraps appeared to be organized into some sort of order, perhaps even a grid.

There was a large structure near to the entrance of the ice cave. It was a transparent dome, perhaps twenty feet in diameter, ten feet tall. It had been created with enviable skill: it was a marvel of engineering, an airtight bubble built to withstand the pressures of deep sea depths. There was a thin layer of silt and sand obscuring a clear view of the interior of the dome. The woman wiped away the muck and peered inside.

"Look at this. There's a tree in here. And it's still alive."

Sure enough, there was a small tree, oak from the looks of it, sitting at the center of a sprawling green lawn. Everything was overgrown, nothing had been mowed in decades. There appeared to be a miniature picnic table of some kind as well.

There was an airlock on the far side of the dome. The door opened easily enough to a small decompression chamber separating the sea from the oxygenated atmosphere inside.

"Oh my God." The woman leaned down and pulled something from inside the airlock. There was a small humanoid figure in her hand, in what appeared to be a white space suit, with a clear helmet and an opening at the rear for a tail. There was something still in the suit, however . . . a small skeleton of what appeared to be a rodent. Perhaps a squirrel.

"This is too bizarre," she said. "Squirrels don't live in space suits at the bottom of the sea."

"It gets better," he replied. They walked away from the dome and towards what appeared to be the center of the ruins. A few structures here seemed almost intact. There were three buildings placed in a row. On the left, there was a what appeared to be an enlarged coconut shell, about two feet round and set into the sand. the middle structure could have been mistaken for a piece of debris, a metal pipe jutting up at an odd angle from the ground.

But the strangest sight by far lay to the right of the other structures. It appeared to be a large pineapple, about three feet tall and constructed out of metal and glass. There were doors and windows and even what appeared to be a small mailbox at the end of a pathway leading to what must have at one time been a road. It seemed a perfect scale-model dwelling for a person eight or ten inches tall.

"Who the hell lives in a pineapple under the sea?" the boy finally spoke up. He had turned the music in his headphones off and stared, with the other two, at the strange spectacle before them.

The man in white knelt down and opened the tiny door to the house. He reached and pulled out a small object. At first glance it appeared to be nothing much, perhaps a small block of coral. But it was also completely rectangular, with sharp angles and straight lines. It had the rough dimensions of a large kitchen sponge.

There were small limbs extending from the bottom and the sides of the rectangle, wispy arms and legs barely the size of toothpicks. The creature was fragile, dead and desiccated -- whatever its flesh had been composed of had dried and cracked like a fossil. Now, exposed to the air, it seemed especially breakable. But the fossil also wore clothes. They were little more than rags, eaten away by time, but they were clearly pants -- small, square shortpants that covered the bottom third of its rectangular body, as well as what appeared to be a white shirt and tie.

"These creatures had no idea why they were here. They were probably native to a liquid dimension inconceivably different from our own. The strange properties of the Bikini Atoll allowed them to survive for a time here, at the bottom of the sea . . . but they warped the minds of all who approached them, anyone who tried to make contact. That's why the pirates who followed them from the past were irrevocably insane. We could never study the phenomenon up close before, because their existence violated the fundamental laws of our universe. Now . . ."

"Now they're dead," the woman spoke up.

"It took a while for the laws of our universe to effect them, but gradually they began to fade away. They must have been able to harness some kind of fire or flame in order to create this level of civilization. Perhaps the universe began to correct itself, so the unique properties that allowed them to create fire underwater would have faded with time. That must have been the first sign of their impending doom. I suspect from the state of his corpse that the creature in my hand was the last to die. It must have been terrifying, to see your friends and comrades die around you and not know why. They couldn't have been very advanced, but they apparently knew enough to make a world similar to what they had known. And then that world fell apart."

"Creepy."

"Yes, quite so. But I'm glad I got to see it with my own eyes."

With that, they returned to the surface and their boat. But they also took with them the small skeletal sponge, placed in a small box and filed away in a warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of town.

Looks Like Chocolate, Tastes Like Shit

For a while now I've been trying to explain just how cool the Jerkbeast is to certain of my friends. It's one of those things that you really need to experience firsthand, because otherwise trying to explain the whole phenomenon makes you seem slightly retarded:

It's a dude, right, in a weird homemade monster costume, and he just rides around on a bike insulting people and beating up those weaker than himself . . ."

Just the bare description does little to prepare one for just how funny the proceedings actually are. Well, now thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I can spread the gospel of the Jerkbeast the best way possible: through direct experience.

Witness the glory of Jerkbeast The Movie (or at least the trailer for said movie):



And here he is doing what he does best - mere scraps of brilliance, but enough for the uninitiated:





This apparently has some connection with the Jerkbeast, even though he does not appear within:



And of course, here is the Jerkbeast's band, Steamign Wolf Penis, performing the greatest song ever written, "Looks Like CHocolate, Tastes Like Shit". It's not a good video but if you squint you can see the Jerkbeast himself pounding the skins.



Go to the Jerkbeast's website to hear and see some better clips of the man, the myth and the legend in action. He's also got a MySpace page with more examples of Steaming Wolf Penis music.

The Great Comic Book Covers



Now this is a God-damned comic book cover. The Amalgam books were pretty much the definition of a mixed bag, but at their best they were really fun doses of hardcore fanboy pandering. Used to be that kind of thing was fairly rare, so whenever the companies tipped their hat to the proverbial "lifers" it was pretty neat. Now that the big mainstream companies are pretty much doing this type of thing all the time, it's not so special. In fact, it's kind of repulsive.

But Lobo the Duck was not. Whereas most of the Amalgam matchups at least tried to make some sort of sense -- Dr. Strange + Dr. Fate = Dr. Strangefate -- the pairing of Lobo and Howard the Duck seemed merely to be an exercise in smushing two of each company's most unusual properties together in as obnoxious a way as possible. Considering that neither character was ever a stranger to the bizarre, it worked surprisingly well. (perhaps not as well as a potential matchup of Mr. Talky Tawny and H.E.R.B.I.E., M.R. T.A.L.K.I.N.G. R.O.B.O.T. T.I.G.E.R.)

I haven't read this probably since it came out, and I don't remember much about it, except that it was pretty fun. Like peanut butter and a kick to the teeth, two great tastes that taste weird together.

(PS - Why the fuck is Momma's Family still on TV? I thought there were international treaties against these kind of things.)

Hansel & Gretel
by Junko Mizuno

Very rarely have I encountered a book as bizarre as Hansel & Gretel, produced by a cartoonist as willfully eccentric as Junko Mizuno. As someone with, admittedly, a layman's appreciation of Japanese comics and culture, there is something unmistakably alien about Mizuno's approach to constructing a story that sets it significantly apart even from the most iconoclastic western creators, folks like Mat Brinkmann, Ron Rége, Jr. or Anders Nilsen. There's a reason why Mizuno's work has gained such critical traction in America: she is one of those rare cartoonists whose work seems, in the eyes of her audience, to remake the act of reading comics.

I have to wonder how much of my reaction to the work is based on my unfamiliarity with certain segments of manga culture. The manga I'm most familiar with would probably be considered fairly traditional by aficionados, the type of work that most clearly resonates to familiar western aesthetic prerogatives -- Lone Wolf & Cub and Tekuza and Akira*. There's an old saw (whose actual provenance I am unaware) about how the dominant manga style evolved from a Japanese interpretation of Walt Disney's big-eyed animation work -- a familiar source being translated through an unfamiliar culture to become something different, an amalgam of two distinct aesthetics. In this way we can examine the history of certain art forms as an extended game of telephone, with every new audience producing an imperfect translation of the source material in such a way as to graft their own preoccupations onto their interpretation of the original object. French filmmakers influenced by early American auteurs and postwar B-movies create the Nouvelle Vague and export it back to us as an entirely novel and unfamiliar phenomenon.

But Mizuno represents an appreciable advancement from the original template. It seems -- and this is merely a theory which could easily be proven wrong by someone who knows better -- that the work in question is the product of a cartooning culture that has grown into its own at a significant remove from its original influences. The game of telephone that began decades ago with the influence of American cartooning on Japanese illustrators has returned, and the signal has bounced back and forth among Japanese interpreters for so long that the end result is, from an American perspective, a hideous mutant.

That's hardly a moral judgment -- some of my best friends are hideous mutants. But the fact remains that this is potently alien work. The notion of "cuteness" as it is fetishized in Japan has advanced to such a logical extreme that even the most fiercely disturbing notions can be successfully rendered in high faux-Sanrio dudgeon. The juxtaposition of frightening ideas communicated with unbearable cuteness is obviously intended to have a bracing effect on the reader. I was particularly taken with the notion of the giant talking pig who casually eviscerates himself for the sustenance of local villagers, only to be magically regenerated. It doesn't seem like an eternal purgatory in the context of the story, but the image is enough to make anyone seriously consider vegetarianism.

But aside from the symbolism at work here, which is complex enough to warrant its own examination, the way Mizuno tells a story is the most striking aspect of the work. The whole concept of mise en scene (to use a potentially contentious term from the world of film criticism) as it has evolved over the last hundred years is totally demolished. The page is not subdivided, as in the west, into discrete geographical units which represent separate ideas existing in an established continuity. These units of territory -- what we would call panels, but panel borders need not necessarily apply -- allow the cartoonist to establish an imaginary mental landscape in which the action in a narrative is placed in a cohesive whole. Even a relatively adventurous cartoonist like Kevin Huizenga or Ron Rége, Jr. still follows these basic rules. You have to get pretty far afield from even the most unorthodox cartoonists before you get to artists with a total disregard for the "rules" of mental geography that undergird most cartooning. Even someone as far out in leftfield as Anders Nilsen is still aware of the connection between what his readers see on the page and how they construct a narrative between seemingly disparate elements against a contiguous background context -- in fact, some of his most experimental work is almost entirely dependent on the reader's complicity in building imaginary context in their mind.

All of which could be taken as a fancy way of saying that Mizuno doesn't like drawing backgrounds. It does not appear as if she does, but that is neither here nor there. The most apt way of describing Mizuno's narrative would seem to be that she does not envision her stories in any sort of context whatsoever, merely as a continuously unfolding present tense. The overriding ideal is one of fantasy run rampant, of actions dictated merely by thought and executed without effort. It's a frictionless universe where thoughts can become reality, and the very notion of reality is hopelessly elastic. Therefore the actions of the characters on the page, as well as the pages themselves, are translations of pure emotion interpreted as color and shape. Mizuno's universe is nothing more than swathes of pastel with random design motifs interspersed throughout.

The character designs are the real focal point of Mizuno's storytelling. Her characters fill the panels, often so large as to become obscured, only partially visible at abstruse angles. Rather than seeming to be in literal motion, the characters are presented in static tableau. All the normal signifiers of intangibility in cartoon form are rendered as concrete realities -- aromas, speed lines, thoughts themselves assume literal character. It's all quite vertiginous for the unprepared reader. The alacrity with which Mizuno flouts and contradicts the "rules" of comic storytelling make her work seem impossibly dense, a lattice of symbols and shapes to be painstakingly deciphered. There's something familiar but just not quite right, like a document translated into another language and then retranslated into its original language. Her use of color is vital to the effect. Whereas someone like Ron Rége, Jr. can can achieve a similar effect in terms of a flat field of vision with universally thin lines that mask depth of perception, Mizuno relies on vivid pastels to create an imposingly flat canvas. All the normal rules of contrasting and complementary colors have been thrown out the window. Every element of the narrative is very self-consciously preoccupied with being a flat object in static two-dimensional space -- not an element in a continual narrative, but in no ways a series of static images a la Prince Valiant. The result is something entirely new, a way of comics that substitutes a preoccupation with objective observation with entirely subjective perception. The dense thicket of baroque iconography that forms the basis of her storytelling requires an active complicity on the part of the reader. Subtracting the signifiers of conventional narrative, deconstructing the way a reader perceives a narrative, is one of the most fundamental ways a cartoonist can challenge their reader -- Mizuno defies expectations by presenting a narrative shorn of anything but the most malleable and unreliable context.

Reading The Comics Journal's interview with Mizuno in preparation for this review was a disconcerting experience. Her work is in some respects sharply primitive, but in many other ways she betrays an extremely sophisticated understanding of the rules she systematically subverts at every turn. Unfortunately, almost none of this understanding comes across in her interview. There's only so much you can read into the transcript of a brief interview conducted by telephone, conducted by a person who didn't even write the interview questions** . . . but still, Mizuno's resolute refusal to engage the interviewer in any significant explication of her work is interesting. Perhaps we're spoiled, accustomed as we are to opinionated and in many cases grossly autodidactic creators with no shortage of ideas about the medium. Hell, when even the guy who writes New Avengers grounds his work in a thoroughly formalist understanding of contemporary foreign film, we've definitely got a surplus of smartypantses.

But Mizuno's reluctance raises another distinct possibility -- the notion that instead of intending her work as a canny commentary on formal convention, she is working with a more or less uncritical interpolation of established norms, and the bizarre nature of her work simply comes as second nature. Her uncritical acceptance of the rather repulsive marketing culture of "cute" merchandising spawned by the Japanese and heartily adopted by America is telling in this regard. Could it be that she honestly doesn't know just how weird this stuff reads to Americans? Is this the product of a manga culture so far removed from our own that the alien storytelling techniques go unmentioned by the practitioners? Is there a whole world of artists working in Mizuno's school in which this style could somehow be considered de rigeur? The very idea boggles the mind.

My musings on manga are, at the end of the day, just that: musings, uninformed and quite possibly fundamentally unsound. But I can say with little fear of contradiction, based on a comparatively firm understanding of the underlying mechanics of conventional comic storytelling, that Mizuno is one of the most unique storytellers currently being published in the United States. It bears further scrutiny from anyone interested in the further edges of contemporary comics.

---

*Is Akira considered passe? I never see it mentioned anymore. I still quite like it.

**Having conducted a fair amount of interviews myself I speak from some small experience . . . some subjects just don't care to look that deeply into their own work, but as a general rule people whose work betrays significant understand of formal mechanics can expound on these properties, whereas artists who work within ascribed generic guidelines tend to be less introspective. Could Mizuno be be one of the former who acts like one of the latter? If I ever had the chance to ask Mat Brinkmann about the underlying anxiety and mythic structure of his work, would he respond with a hearty "duuuude, it's all about Iron Fuckin' Maiden!"