Are We Feeling Safe?

I only wish there were a thousand cartoonists like Keith Knight . . .

There aren't many political cartoonists of any persuasion who can afford to be as tirelessly provocative. Knight seems to have found some modicum of success while remaining independent for just that reason - he is independent. If you go to his website and look, his strips are being syndicated in a remarkably low number of venues. I am certain that each paper or website represents something of a personal commitment on the author's part.



It took a while but Aaron McGruder finally figured out that there were more effective venues for harsh political commentary than the comics page. I don't blame him at all for leaving newspapers: there was always going to be resistance to an "Angry Black" voice in Everytown, USA; without even so much as the friendly, deceptively rounded exterior of the very caucasian Doonesbury to hide behind, Huey Freeman was always going to be a hard sell*. It's difficult not to see Knight, and like-minded fellow-travellers like Ted Rall and Ruben Bolling, as slightly Quixotic figures, fighting hard to get a liberal perspective heard in mainstream outlets. It's not so much that conservatives have a lock on the cartooning arts (they obviously don't), but the centrist perspective is so hardwired into all but the most adventurous editors and news institutions that anyone tilting even slighty to the left of, say, Shylock Fox, faces an uphill battle from the start.

All of this would be besides the point if the strip weren't funny, but thankfully it is. Humor depends to a large part on shock, the sudden, bracing confrontation with the unexpected that elicits laughter. Knight's best panels are can be pretty bracing: like the best political cartoonists, he doesn't seem very willing to give the world a break. Injustice and stupidity are all around us, and it takes a keen eye to not only pinpoint said injustice and stupidity in the cosmic world of politics and society, but to trace it back to its roots in the behavior of everyday people. Like McGruder, Knight's harshest invective is reserved for the short-sided and harmful behavior inside the black community, the kind of behavior that chronically hinders attempts at serious political discourse on matters of race on anything but the most piecemeal basis.



Sure, white people can be stupid and racist, but black people are stupid and racist too; the army may use predatory recruitment tactics in the face of increasing attrition, but every soldier in the Armed Forces faces needless death on a daily basis; and everyone can agree that George Bush is a moron. The reason Knight is so effective is that, unlike a good many political cartoonists (Gerry Trudeau included), you really get the idea that Knight is as mad at himself as anyone else. You get the feeling, reading a large sequence of these panels in one sitting, that Knight is fully aware of the fact that folly and tragedy are human conditions, not merely black or white or male or female, and that subjects such as racism and poverty and AIDS and war impact every single one of us. He's not excluding himself from any measure of blame. That's the message - and you can forgive Knight for the occasional didactic turn - let's every one of us get the fuck off our asses and stop being so stupid. An admirable sentiment for one and all; it would be even better if you didn't get the sinking sensation that with such a circumscribed audience he's preaching to the choir.



If I have one criticism, it's that Knight is a strong cartoonist who appears to be purposefully hobbling himself. It looks as if he draws with a Sharpie marker and ballpoint pen - it does the job, but limits his vocabulary. I can see what he's going for, but I can't help thinking that he wouldn't become a vastly more interesting cartoonist - as opposed to polemisict - if he started working with a brush. All you need to do is look at James Kochalka's early work compared to his current work. In the beginning Kochalka was famously anti-craft, and his early strips reflected this primitivist ethos. Once he started using the brush, however, he gained a much firmer control over his work - he didn't become a different artist, he merely became a more focused and elegant artist. Elegance isn't really Knight's bag, but I'd still like to see what he could do if he gave himself the opportunity.

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*Not so on late-night cable. It took a few episodes to hit its stride, but the Boondocks cartoon is already a far superior vehicle for McGruder's political commentary than the strip ever was or ever could be. In a perfect world the "Return of the King" episode would win an Emmy.

Seven Sons
by Alexander Grecian & Riley Rossmo

I should preface this review by pointing out that I have essentially no interest in repurposed fables or fairy tales. For some people, I know, finding historical lineages and modern parallels for ancient stories is simply an irresistible pastime. I don't have a lot of patience for allegory, period, and the layer of metaphor and legend that accumulates around fairy stories is, for myself and I suspect to most, simply an obfuscating fog of historical detritus - as opposed to some romantic historical-literary saga*.

So I am perhaps the last person who should be reviewing Seven Sons . . . but, I am willing to put aside my personal prejudices in the name of criticism. As the text piece at the back of the book makes abundantly clear, Seven Sons is something of a labor of love for writer Grecian: a retelling of a favorite story from his childhood, built from extensive study of the tale's history and varying incarnations. In choosing to place the Chinese fable in a western context, and specifically that of an actual western (as in, horses and guns and such), Grecian is consciously placing the facts of the country's racist history into the foreground of his story. The seven Chinese brothers are here presented as expatriates, living abroad during the time of the Taiping Rebellion, having fled the Asian turmoil for the quieter but no less dangerous shores of California during the mid-century Gold Rush (an event that all California children must learn about extensively**).

The problem is that the western historical subtext really doesn't add anything to the story itself. As presented, the miners and settlers during the California Gold Rush are very racist, yes, but selectively so, according to the needs of the story. This pinpoints one of the basic problems with the book: as is often the case with retellings or "updatings" of classic fables, the story itself becomes little more than an elaborate pageant, less a logical series or events or character-defined actions than a procession of things which occur for no reason other than that they must occur. So we've got seven brothers who each possess a different fantastic power, and in a certain situation each power is presented as exactly the antidote to the problem at hand at that specific moment - the man who can stretch is unsuccessfully hung, the man who cannot burn is trapped within a burning house, etc. Perhaps this would work in a straight fable or a childrens' book (apparently it has for hundreds of years), but by stretching the core concept to fit into a novel historical setting, the authors strain credibility - the specificity of the historic setting works to directly contradict the supposed "mythic" connotations of the repurposed fairy story. By combining different approaches, the actual finished product possesses all of the weaknesses inherent in the approach, but none of the strengths.

Riley Rossmo's art is interesting, but he is still struggling under the weight of a number of influences. The most obvious of these would be Ashley Wood (himself influenced by Sienkiewicz***). But the kind of stories Ashley Wood draws are very specifically suited to his extravagant style. Here, Rossmo's elaborate presentation - mixing what appears to be uninked pencils with bold swathes of black and various muted graytones - seems too ostentatious for the actual story on display. This kind of presentation is best for design-heavy, more laconic storytelling, not necessarily concise action storytelling. The heavily-stylized design work overwhelms the story, to the point where often it is difficult to follow the progression of events. That is not to say there aren't some striking setpieces - but you can't tell a story simply by leapfrogging from setpiece to setpiece.

I could go on****, but ultimately it will suffice to say I am not the intended audience for this book. I supposed there is a large audience who will probably be able to accept the trappings of the genre with a lot more ease than myself - I just don't care for fairy tales.

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*I have so far escaped entirely unscathed from the Fables phenomenon, save for a free copy of a recent overprinting of the first issue slipped into my bag by a friendly comic shop owner - not impressed.

**When I was a kid I had to participate in this massive historical pageant in fourth grade. It paid a little bit of lip service to all the mountains of dead indians killed in the 19th century by western encroachment; little or no mention of the thousands of abused Chinese workers who built the railroads, except to give them credit for participating in the grand experiment of American nationalism - yay Manifest Destiny! And boy, what few crumbs they did throw to the Indians - "paleface is coming with iron horse!" Jeezum Crow.

***Who was in turn influenced by Adams, who had been influenced by Kirby - it all comes back to Kirby in the end.

****Why, for instance, are they shown in kung-fu poses on the cover? None of them do any kung-fu at any point within the story! And the "surprise" next-to-last page twist - if you didn't see it coming on page eight I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you . . .

My Humps

There's something I've been wanting to rant about for a while now.

I believe it was Mark Evanier who once observed that an artist should never draw a naked woman unless they've actually at some point, you know, seen an actual naked woman. It's a good rule of thumb, I believe, but the problem is that there are so many gross inaccuracies inflicted on the female figure by male comic artists on a weekly basis that it's almost impossible to begin to parse where the institutionalized sexism ends and where overt titillation begins.

Howard Chaykin is an artist to whom I will extend the benefit of the doubt in assuming that he has indeed seen a naked woman once or twice in his life. Chaykin's work is famously sexualized, but somehow it never seems dishonest or particularly exploitive (except, of course, when it is purposefully meant to be exploitive in the context of a story). Of all the people who've worked regularly in mainstream comics the past few decades, he seems to be one of the few who actually understands sex as more than a theoretical pastime. What a concept!

That said, he's recently committed a singularly weird faux pas, a hideous gaffe that I can only imagine was intentional. I speak, of course, of Hawkgirl's breasts, one of the most bizarre running visual gags to his comics these past few years.

Now, it's accepted that Hawkgirl, like many superheroines, has an above-average bustline. OK, fine. But - there are ways to draw large breasts and ways not to draw large breasts. Dirk Deppey coined the term "boob sock" for good reason: many (male) comic artist seem to think that all women's blouses automatically conform to the shape of the individual breast, forming a kind of "sock", giving the impression of something that has been painted on rather than an item clothing that drapes across the figure in a semi-naturalistic fashion.



See this woman here, modeling the nice sky blue ("French Kiss") New Balance T-shirt for the JC Penny catalog? Notice how that works? Even something relatively form-fitting still obscures part of the breast, because the fabric is pulled across the body in such a way as to not necessarily obscure the chest, but hardly defining every curve, either.

OK, that's Exhibit A. Exhibit B is what you would expect a woman participating in regular athletic activity to wear, a sports bra:



See what's that's doing? Supporting and confining. Because when you're running around, flying above the city, spearing ancient demons and wrestling with Kite Man, you really want to be supported. Especially if, say, you've got a larger than average cup size.

Assume your average superheroine is wearing tight form-fitting spandex. The "boob sock" phenomenon is actually less likely to occur with spandex, because the material stretches more than, say, cotton or wool. So while it can still accentuate the chest, you don't see a lot of cleavage. In fact, tight fabrics tend to support and confine - which is one reason why a lot of athletic wear is made out of spandex.



Now let's take a look at Chaykin's Hawkgirl:



It would appear based on the evidence on this picture that Hawkgirl's breasts, in addition to being unnaturally round, in addition to having preternaturally erect nipples, are also independently leaping up and away from her body in opposite directions.



This is where our good friends at the Scheudenfreud Clearinghouse, AKA Awful Plastic Surgery, come in handy. It would seem, rather than merely presenting an elevated and unrealistic idealization of the feminine form, Hawkgirl has actually been the victim of a bad boob job.



Hey! It's Hawkgirl! Er, no, it's some random model I found when I typed "bad boob job" into Google's image search.




But I can see how you might have trouble telling the difference...

It's long been accepted as the norm that superheroines have large busts - so much so that every time a woman in comics was presented with anything less than a C-cup, it was practically a news item. Hawkgirl, in both her comics and cartoon incarnations, has usually been drawn with semi-rational sized breasts.



This is a picture of Hawkgirl drawn just last year. Notice the normal breasts? Relatively well-proportioned?

I wonder if 52 will show the part where Hawkgirl goes to the hospital for saline implants, because obviously One Year Later her breasts were much bigger.

Rock Bottom
Joe Casey & Charlie Adlard

For a while now Joe Casey has been quietly building a career as one of the most versatile writers in comics. It probably helps that he never reached the level of popularity that circumscribed the careers of many of his peers. He's written a few popular comics but many unpopular ones as well. This has enabled him to settle into a satisfying career as a dependable mid-list writer, highly respected but by no means a marquee attraction. Thus even when he's writing books like Avengers and Fantastic Four he can still devote a sizable amount of effort towards independent work. I can't begin to speculate which is more fulfilling, but just the fact that he continues to hoe parallel fields when he could easily have abandoned publishers like AiT/Planet Lar for (no doubt) greener pastures speaks volumes. So many creators of similar stature seem to be more concerned with signing exclusivity deals than producing more personal work - not my place to castigate anyone for the kind of work they choose to pursue, but as a consumer and a critic it is still slightly disappointing that careers like Casey's are more and more a rarity*.

Rock Bottom is, at least on the surface, a familiar story: the idea of a man turning or being turned into rock has a long pedigree in comics, all the way back to the Thing and it, The Living Colossus and Concrete (although, of those three, you can probably guess which one is least fondly remembered - hint: it's the same one who got crushed to powder by the Hulk). The volume at hand tackles the question, albeit from a different angle: whereas the Thing and Concrete are essentially forced to make their peace with their conditions, living lives that have been fundamentally altered by their transformations, the protagonist of Rock Bottom is faced with a slightly more pressing predicament. Thomas Dare wakes up one day to discover that he is slowly turning to stone. There's no cure for this condition. It can only be fatal.

Dare hasn't lived a particularly good life. He is filled with regrets and surrounded by loose ends. As the end comes, he is given cause to reflect on his own fatherless upbringing, and how his situation - both medical and moral - reflects that of his long-dead father. How much of a person's life is dictated by their heritage? Of course, this would be a wonderful opportunity for Dare to rise above his own limitations, to use his final days to become something better - but Casey resists the temptation, for the most part, to wrap the story in some kind of redemptive arc. The "message", as such, is far less upbeat, but in its own way more reassuring: regardless of the ways they live their lives, the casual cruelty and neglect with which they inflict each other, people still contain the potential for kindness. Reality is often messy, filled with ambiguities and uncertainties - but at least we contain the potential to rise above our circumstances if given the opportunity.

For the most part, Casey succeeds by remaining close to the proverbial ground. There are no cosmic explanations or weird plot twists, this is essentially the story of a man in his final days, attempting to face an inevitable end with some modicum of dignity. Dare isn't a saint and he leaves life with more than his share of regrets. Casey overreaches in the book's final act, pushing for a far more cosmic resolution than the story perhaps called for. Undoubtedly the ending is much more in line with how such events would actually play out in the "real" world, but ultimately it's more than a little unsatisfying to see Dare's story subsumed by the demands of ostensible reality. Thankfully the last few pages regain the book's equanimity, allowing Dare and the reader to leave with something resembling grace.

Although he's been one of the industry's best-kept secrets for quite some time already, Charlie Adlard's work here represents perhaps the best of his career. Like most all AiT/ Planet Lar books, Rock Bottom is presented in black & white - interestingly, Adlard has chosen to work exclusively in fine ink lines, with a line so even and unvaried that it could have been produced by a technical pen. There is no cross-hatching, no spotted blacks, just black lines on white paper - with the sole exception of the creeping graytones of Dare's petrification. It's a pretty ballsy move, considering everything that could have gone wrong: a black & white page relies on balance and contrast much more so than a color page, and unvarying line weights can blend together without the leavening influence of color. To his credit the composition is never anything less than crystalline in clarity. The effect is peculiarly clinical, framing Dare's story in as unsentimental a context as possible.

This is not a happy story or even a very sympathetic story, but regardless of a few extraneous detours it is most importantly a surpassingly human story. It is definitely significant achievement for all involved, and a resounding rssponse to any who had written off the publisher after recent setbacks.

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*Props to Peter David and Brian Michael Bendis, however - two of the most mainstream of mainstream writers, both of whom have also pointedly kept their toes in creator-owned work. The opportunities are there for those who seek to pursue them.

The Crossover You Demanded

Thanks to the tireless research of Mr. Mike Sterling, we can finally catch a glimpse of the single greatest crossover of all time: