Gah.



Computer problems had me wrestling with the great digital beastie all evening. So, since everyone's in San Diego anyway, how 'bout we just call it a week.

Part One – The Interminable Introduction

I’m about to cause a ruckus.

Everybody’s talking about Eightball #23. Well, I haven’t read it yet. As I get older and the comics industry metastasizes further I find it eminently easy to procrastinate these things. It’s not going to fall out of print anytime soon.

Instead of debating why Eightball #23 is the single greatest issue of any comic book ever since Marvel Two-In-One Annual #7, I have been deeply involved with Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography. I am surprised more people haven’t been talking about this since it was completed and collected in 2003.

Perhaps it strikes some as a particularly odd work. Based on Brown’s past track record, a historical biography is perhaps the last thing anyone could have expected. Or maybe it wasn’t.

Let there be no doubt, it is a slightly odd work, but I mean that in the best possible way. Brown is that rarest of cartoonists, able to create and elaborate a fully functioning and cohesive reality in the confines of a strict six-panel grid. It’s odd because everything Brown does takes us deeper into his head. Even a seemingly dispersonal work such as Riel succeeds in pulling us deeper and deeper into his mind. The process only stops when we realize we are seeing the world through his eyes and no longer through our own.

I believe that Chester Brown is the greatest English speaking cartoonist alive today.

It’s not that there aren’t many who could offer a reasonable claim to the title. Of course, there is Crumb, the legend and the celebrity. But his glory days are behind him. Art Spiegelman could perhaps have been a contender if he hadn’t spent the fifteen years following Maus basically jerking-off and doing covers for the New Yorker. I haven’t read more than isolated strips from the In The Shadow of No-Towers series yet, so I can’t offer any opinion as to whether this is as compelling an artistic rebirth as R. Fiore would have us think.

Los Bros Hernandez are both incredibly talented, but the fact is that we have been lulled into complacency by the fact that their work is consistently great. As much as I feel slightly ashamed for saying so, I almost take them for granted now that Love & Rockets comes out on a regular basis again. Gilbert still manages a way to work on ten zillion projects on the side. They’re all fantastic, more or less, but predictable in their greatness.

Dan Clowes and Chris Ware are the two great formalists of our time. But unfortunately their recent works have seemed to be spiraling into an abyss of increasingly constrained asceticism that threatens to extinguish all light and hope from their horizons. Take Rusty Brown or David Boring for example: two undeniably great works (one still in progress), but on that same token, you couldn’t find two more alienating and spiritually oppressive works on your entire comic book shelf. It’s a tonal limitation that they need to outgrow.

Seth’s work has always seemed similarly atonal, albeit from a slightly different perspective. It says something that my favorite work of his is his Sketchbook. Joe Matt is disqualified as a result of having spent the last five years literally jacking off, to the detriment of any output.

Alan Moore would be a contender if he knew how to draw.

Joe Sacco is strong candidate. Hmmm, better move on.

Phoebe Gloeckner’s work is good, but the best from her is yet to come. I get the same feeling from Debbie Dreschler and Richard Sala. Jim Woodring and Kim Deitch, however, have probably peaked. Considering the undeniable and unimpeachable strengths of The Frank Book and The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, its hard to see either of these artists topping these magnificent achievements.

Eddie Cambpell could conceivably be considered a contender if he ever finishes his History of Humor. I haven’t read Jimbo in Purgatory yet so I’ll refrain from judgement on Gary Panter – it looks like his definitive work to date but from what I’ve seen it also looks to be an incredibly dense and adversarial reading experience.

Barry Windsor Smith is limited by his subject matter. Likewise, Lynn Johnston, Erik Larsen and Kyle Baker are all effortlessly adept craftspeople, but similarly limited by their formalistic dedication to the idioms of their specific genres.

Thankfully, Dave Sim is retired, which saves an awkward pause as the members of the Feminist-Homosexualist Axis shuffle their feet and fidget in their seats.

There’s not a syndicated strip cartoonist active today, save for Johnston, to even be considered.
Jessica Abel, Charles Burns, Dave Cooper, James Kochalka, Tony Millionaire . . . all excellent, but none essential.

Which leaves us – or me, at any rate - with Mr. Chester Brown.

Brown’s work has evolved by broad strokes since his humble beginnings. The disturbing, surrealistic comedy of Ed The Happy Clown transformed into the ravishingly painful intimacy of The Playboy and I Never Liked You. Although I’ve always preferred to regard these last two works as two parts of a whole narrative, there is a marked change in tone and content between them. I Never Liked You succeeded in stripping the comics medium down to its barest raw nerve, a slowly throbbing membrane pulsing in a swelteringly claustrophobic darkness.

From these successes Brown entered a period of rapid artistic growth and expansion. The narratalogically ambitious Underwater strips started with the simple goal of charting the growth and progression of language and perception in human life. Unfortunately, his pacing proved far too ambitious and the project was subsequently abandoned. His strip adaptations of the New Testament proved similarly explorative. If these projects were met with varying degrees of bafflement by his fans and critics, one can only surmise that towards the end of the Underwater experiment he began to feel similarly unmoored.

The reason for this supposition is merely the existence of Louis Riel. Although Brown had been no stranger to heavily-researched non-fiction comics, the impetus to create a 240 page graphic novel on the life of a reasonably obscure figure of Canadian history must have been daunting. Brown remedied the problems which had eventually derailed Underwater by working from a full script in advance. Amazingly, by confining himself to a rigid stylistic formula and committing to a prior blueprint, Brown was able to create his most confident and kinetic work to date.

Chester Brown has made a career out of consistently defying even the highest expectations placed on his work by prior experience. More than any other cartoonist alive today, he has never stopped growing and changing and improving since the day his first strips were published. Louis Riel is a work of impossible virtuosity, an example of formalistic rigor almost unparalleled in the medium’s history. The worst part is that it’s easy to imagine that Brown yet has it in him to surpass even this magnum opus.

Louis Riel is quite simply one of the greatest comics ever produced. It enters a rarified sphere, side-by-side and shoulder-to-shoulder with works such as Peanuts, Maus, From Hell, Gilbert’s Palomar and Jaime’s Locas, Woodring’s Frank strips and Jimmie Corrigan as the vanguard of the English-speaking world’s contribution to the cartooning arts. It’s just a damn fine book.

And now that the puffery of this Interminable Introduction is over, perhaps now the real fun can begin.

We Are All The Sluts of Trust

I admit I'm a little bit tired because I didn't get any sleep last night. Plus, we have to get up in the morning. So, any elaborate posting will have to wait another day. I'm planning to run the first installment of my examination of Chester Brown's Louis Riel tomorrow, so check back in for that. Also, perhaps we shall see a Very Special Episode of Travels With Larry... or perhaps not, maybe on Friday.

But I'd just like to let everyone know I have just been informed that I have been selected to participate in the Village Voice's Fazz & Job Critic's Panel. I've only been working for Popmatters for three bare months and I think that's pretty amazing.

That is all.

Does Whatever A Catfish Can
 
OK, I am not an Aquaman fan. Truth be told, I just have no opinion on the character one way or another. But strangely enough, some of the other members of this here blogosphere are downrigth obsessed with the fellow in ways which would seem unhealthy. But that's just me.
 
Anyway, one of the side effects of this group dementia is the fact that Alan Davis' covers for the current Aquaman series are reprinted everywhere ad nauseum. Which is, you know, not a bad thing since Davis is a damn fine artist. But the cover for the most recent issue gave me pause:
 

 
Does is not seem that if someone were really swimming that fast their skimpy yellow tube top would, um, slide off? 
 
Anyway.
 
Postmodernbarney has stepped up to the plate in the defense of Identity Crisis here.  He makes a few very cogent points, and if this conversation is of any interest you should probably read up on what he has to say. But I would like to offer a few clarifying points:
 
1) I have no attachment to Sue Dibney's character whatsoever. I guess I liked her in the Giffen/DeMatteis books, but again, she's hardly a fan favorite by any stretch of the imagination. My reaction to the story would have been the same if it had been a totally new character or Lois Lane.  
 
2) I think the fact that this is not explicitly targeted at kids is a weak argument. True: It doesn't have the JLA logo on it. True: It doesn't have any media tie-in that would make it attractive to younger kids. But the fact remains that the books is filled with characters who are regularly featured in kid-friendly books as well as frequent media tie-ins. You can't publish a kid-friendly Spider-Man and then turn around and publish a Spider-Man: Child Molester book, because regardless of whether or not the books are marketed at the same audience, they both have a garishly clas crime-fighting superhero who has appeared in two of the most popular family movies of our times on the cover. DC has long walked a fine line here with their variety of Batman books... there have been many Bat-related titles over the years that have been very seriously not for kids, but these haven't really been much of a cause for worry because they have mostly been priced out of the range of most kids, and also featured darker subject matter that wouldn't interest younger fans (ie: not a lot of garishly clad do-gooding).
 
3) I also don't see any profit in comparing IC with books like Fables or any other revisionist/reimagined fairy tale/children's book stories. It's not the same thing at all. It would be one thing if Disney had followed up Snow White and the Seven Dwarves with Snow White Gets Raped By A Negro  (or whatever would have turned on that kinky old racist Walt Disney) and then insisted that it wasn't aimed at children .  But if someone wants ot do a story where Snow White is a "dirty girl" or whatever, that's OK because Snow White has been public domain for centuries. A very important part of art is the constant reimagining and recontextualization of old ideas. Saying that disliking IC means we have to boycott Lost Girls is just silly. By the same token, I love Dan O'Neill's infamous "Air Pirates" books (I even own a copy of Dan O'Neill's Comics And Stories which I found through sheer luck, let me tell you). But if Disney had published the O'Neill books it would have been irresponsible, because they have a brand and an interest in ensuring that that brand retains a stable, family-friendly image - which is the same situation I think DC is in with their DCU superhero brand. You can't have it both ways, because an inconsistency in tone and subject matter across a disparate line of related books will inevitably come back and bite you on the ass. If Identity Crisis is as important as they say it will be, it will have repercussions on books like Teen Titans and JLA and Batman and Superman - all of which do have ongoing media tie-ins and do attract readers of multiple age groups. 
 
4) Basically, for me, it boils down to this: would you want your eight-year old to stumble upon that rape scene in a comic book? If you have Superman and Batman on the cover of your comic book, you have to presume that regardless of what the current market realities may be (which is certainly a subjecton which  I bow to Postmodernbarney's eminent knowledge), that book is instantly attractive to children on that basis. Are you willing to gamble with the future of this industry that no kid is going to read this comic, and that no angry parents are going to make a stink and call Bill O'Reilly and organize protests against Time/Warner for publishing "filthy misogynistic pornography"? That's the world we live in. Bill O'Reilly has a list of comapnies on his website that are partly French - provided so that his listeners can boycott them. I checked that myself because I thought it was a joke. The way this country is right now, this was the exact wrong comic book to publish at the exact wrong time.   
 
5) I do not presume to say whether Metzler's intentions were misogynistic or not. But regardless of his intentions, and regardless of the fact that - by definition - a murder must occur in a murder mystery, the events in this story happen in a tradition of stories which have featured an overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of violence against women throughout its history. Why couldn't they have killed the Elongated Man and thus brought Sue to the forefront? Well, I guess because then they wouldn't have gotten to draw a neato-keen rape scene! I am not a woman (obviously) but you don't have to be a woman to feel uncomfortable around this topic. Abdicating moral responsibility simply because you cannot presume to judge what a theoretical member of an opressed group may find offensive is just, I'm sorry, a cop-out.
 
6) I think Supreme Power is probably the best mainstream title being published today (excepting Kyle Baker's Plastic Man, considering the two books are on totally different plateaus of greatness). I am quite surprised at this since I've never liked any of Straczinsky's (sic?) writing anywhere else I've encountered it. But it keeps me riveted month in and month out. It's hardly wank material.
 
Well, hmmm. That's a bit more than I wanted to write about that!
 
But before we lay the topic to rest, I would like to say that Rose at Pieratikos has unwittingly inspired a brilliant, if kooky thought, when she asked "why isn't anyone concerned abotu Zatanna's boyfriend." Well, the only boyfriend of her's we've seen with any regularity is none other than John Constantine, who for many years has been a "friend with benefits" type. I'd love to see Dr. Light try to snag John Constantine... that would make for fun reading.
 



Travels With Larry Part XVII
True Story, Swear To God: 100 Stories

I have but one problem with this book, and it’s a simple enough problem to address: I can’t stand it when strip collections fail to include even rudimentary publication info for the strips they reprint. Even just a little "Originally published on XX/XX/XX" would be helpful. This strips are printed out of chronological order, so it’s quite difficult to pay attention to things such as artistic growth and stylistic change. Sometimes he signs the strip with a date, sometimes he doesn’t. It makes life difficult for those, such as myself, who care about these things.

But that said, I like Tom Beland’s work. I like it quite a bit. He seems to have mastered a deceptively simple tone that allows him to deal with everyday reminiscences in a baldly emotional fashion without crossing over into the realms of treacle or sap.

If Beland were anything but a cartoonist, he would be a millionaire. There’s nothing really that difficult to grok here. True Story, Swear To God is the story of Beland’s life, told in anecdotes across the course of many years. While sometimes the sentimentality may seem cloying, I never doubt that it is 100% heartfelt and sincere (some cynics would probably say that was worse).

Anecdote is not autobiography. Autobiography is the accumulation of anecdotes into a narrative. The cumulative effect of reading 100 of Beland’s strips between two covers gives an enviable view of his thoughts and preoccupations. Usually comics autobiography carries a disproportionate weight, as if the cartoonists are attempting to convey matters of the profoundest importance through the reiteration of their lives. Beland doesn’t fall prey to this, despite the fact that his life is full of weighty occasions. His life is merely what it is, and he wisely leaves any conjecture on any deeper themes to his readers, to parse together from the disparate strips or not, as their temperament suits them.

By presenting his life in the format of a daily gag strip, he escapes much of the burdens carried by more profound cartoonists such as Eddie Campbell or Chester Brown. In terms of tone, he is much closer kin to Carol Lay and Lynn Johnston. While neither Lay’s strips For Better or For Worse are strictly autobiographical, Beland seems to do a good job of combining Lay’s mannered lyricism with Johnston’s keen grasp of the mundane. True Story, Swear To God doesn’t quite achieve these heights, not yet, but there’s every indication that he’s the kind of dedicated craftsman whose technique and approach will only improve as the years go by.

As it is, its strictly impossible to dislike this strip. I’m not going to tell you its perfect or anything, far from it. But Beland seems to have a dose of humility far in excess of most current cartoonists of any stripe. As such, True Story, Swear To God succeeds as that rare artifact that is exactly what it presents itself to be.

I confess that I felt a tug of kinship with Beland as his story unfolded. Although it wasn’t a bus stop at Disneyland, I met my wife through similarly far-fetched circumstances. I moved across the country as well, and I will disagree with anyone who doesn’t think that Oklahoma is about as foreign to a Californian as Puerto Rico. So, on a personal note, I saw nothing untoward or unrealistic about Beland’s casual and unassuming reaction to his changed circumstances. Life is strange.

Identity Crisis #2

Whether or not the series is well written is totally beside the point. Whether or not the art is pretty is totally beside the point. Whether or not the characters are in character is totally beside the point.

The fact is, one of the longest running female characters in all of superhero comics was brutally murdered. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she was raped in a flashback in the following issue.
This is a superhero comic, full of brightly clad costumed characters who right for truth and justice. This is the kind of comic book that children would love to read: all the cool characters from all of DC’s coolest books, together in one place and kicking ass. And yet, somehow they have taken the unmistakably wrong step of taking their superhero universe forever out of the province of children’s entertainment and into the realm of brutal, misogynistic snuff books.
It would be one thing if this were a Vertigo book. It would be one thing if this were labeled a Mature Readers book. But it’s not. This is a general audiences book. Did anyone notice the fact that Identity Crisis hasn’t carried the Comics’ Code Seal of Approval? The Seal never really meant much, but DC made such a big deal out of keeping it after Marvel dropped it. Most DC books still carry the Seal, but not Identity Crisis. Isn’t it a bit odd that the biggest thing to happen to their Superhero Universe since . . . well, probably Zero Hour . . . shouldn’t be read by the target audience for most of their superhero comics in the first place?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t tell superhero stories that deal with mature themes. But I don’t think it’s really appropriate to have the Flash and Green Lantern and Hawkman mulling over the morality of lobotomizing rapists. I don’t think its appropriate to have a big bright superhero story where a prominent female character is brutally raped on-panel.



Do you want to explain to your child what is happening in these panels? Do you think it’s appropriate for DC to abdicate their responsibilities in making children’s comic books actually child-friendly just because kids don’t buy the books anymore? Well, its obvious from this that they don’t want kids buying the books, because there is no way any responsible parent is going to let a young child read this comic.

Comic book villains have grown coarser and harsher since the 80’s. The stakes have been raised. There is no better way to get to a hero – at least for a few issues, until the death is conveniently forgotten - than the death or dismemberment of a loved one.

Of course, Gwen Stacy died first. But somehow, as bad as that was, it was acceptable in the context of the story because it was obvious that it was an unbelievably Bad Thing. Furthermore, Norman Osborn paid the ultimate price for his crime one issue later. But things went downhill from there.

Barbara Gordon was shot and crippled by the Joker.

Alexandra DeWitt, Kyle Raynor’s girlfriend, was murdered and stuffed in a refrigerator by Major Force.

Vesper Fairchild. Sarah Essen. Joanna Pierce. Donna Troy. Jean DeWolff. Queen Hypollita. Betty Banner. Karen Page. Mockingbird. Hell, even Ultimate Gwen Stacy.

Do I have to go on?

I’m not the first person to mention this. I’m not even probably the one-hundredth. But there’s something wrong here, something very, very wrong.

What is wrong with this industry? Why is it considered OK to kill, maim and rape females by the boatload, when most male supporting characters breeze on by?

But most importantly, why is it OK to have a graphic rape scene be the centerpiece of your massive intracompany crossover event?

It’s not. Period.

(Of course, if you want the whole depressing litany, check this out.)

(And seriously folks, what is the big frikkin’ mystery here? Does no one remember the last Big DC Event, Batman & Superman #1-6? Here’s a hint:


It was L*X L*TH*R!!! People, it's not that hard!

Oh no, I just gave away the mystery! I hope in doing so that I saved you some hard-earned money. And no, I didn’t actually pay for these books myself either. Neither should you, they’re exploitive crap.)



Travels With Larry Part XVI

Ursula

I am torn by this book.

On the one hand, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba are obviously very talented. I don’t know how they manage their division of labor, but the end result is a very smooth and likeable product. Occasionally, they get a bit ambitious with angles and POVs, but such stylistic missteps are hardly hanging offences.

On the other . . . I think their story is callow and unconvincing. If I didn’t know, I would have guessed that Moon and Ba are young. Sure enough, they’re just twenty-eight. They seem to have a clear understanding of the kind of stories they want to tell, but a faltering instinct as to how to actually go about telling these stories.

Ursula is the story of Ursula and Miro, two children growing up in a magical kingdom. From an early age they are affectionately in love with one another. Then, Ursula is forced to leave Miro, and return to her kingdom. Miro grows up as the prince of his father’s realm, and when the time comes for him to choose a suitable bride he leaves in search of Ursula, who we have just learned is actually a fairy.

I can see what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to craft a fable, a modern-day fairy tale on the nature of true love. They want the reader to walk away in a romantic swoon, swept away by the passion on display.

I can see the bare bones of this, but they just don’t have the chops necessary to pull it off properly.

In a story, everything has a reason for happening. It may seem unfashionable to talk about narrative in terms of nuts and bolts, but I’m not giving away any magic tricks here. One thing happens because of another thing. Cause creates effect.

There are no real obstacles keeping the lovers in Ursula apart. They separate when they are young, but they come together again at the end. They have a couple problems, but really, nothing worth mentioning. They are absolutely convinced at every step of the power and purity of their bond, and this has the unfortunate effect of rendering everything that passes from about page 10 to about page 70 moot.

One of the great existential problems in art – all art, not just comics – is the question of how to communicate momentary, transformative epiphany. We’ve all seen movies about artist where a painter is struggling in his studio, grappling with some intense creative dilemma. They have a furrowed brow, they steam and fuss and act generally upset . . . and then, blammo, there’s a lightbulb over their head and they somehow, in an instant, get it.

The problem is not that the world doesn’t work this way. It does. The problem is that that showing why and how someone changes their mind, or has a creative epiphany, or falls in love, is almost impossible. This is why Crime and Punishment is still such an important work in the history of literature, all these years on. But it’s also slightly depressing. Character is, and remains, absolutely indefinable.

So, most stories wisely don’t deal with the intangibles of character. Most authors – even brilliant authors – avoid the subject altogether (to say nothing of the postmodern insistence that all art be funneled through the restrictive prisms of mimesis and semiotics). Fairy tales and fables, because they mostly hail from a time before naturalistic character examination became fashionable or even conceivable, tackle character on faith: that is, there is faith on the part of the author and the reader that character is a tangible and unchanging attribute. Characters in fairy tales act on their motivations as a matter of autonomic reflex. There is no hesitation. There is no waiting fifteen years and saying "Oh yeah, I loved that little girl that I haven’t bothered having any contact with whatsoever since she left". Even Romeo and Juliet knew how to write letters.

Which brings me to the problem at the heart of Ursula. The book doesn’t play fair with readers because, ultimately, things happen for no reason and the characters ring false. If Miro loves Ursula, why did he wait until they were both grown - from the looks of things in their mid-20s – to track her down? She’s obviously not in school anymore. She’s working in a bar by herself. If his love for her was as solid and unyielding as we are supposed to believe, why didn’t he do anything until his father told him it was time to find a mate?

All these questions point to instability at the very center of Moon and Ba’s conception of romantic love. We just aren’t given any reason to believe that these two people want to be together, other than the fact that they say they do. How do you communicate such an indefinable feeling, such an intangible and incommunicable character trait? Through action.
Lets look at Snow White. There’s not a lot of deep character examination here, but the characters are perfectly believable at every step of the line. Snow White is awakened from a death-like sleep by Prince Charming, because she has been waiting all her life to be delivered by a handsome prince, in one way or another. She was singing about it at the beginning of the movie. It makes perfect sense in the context of Snow White that a magic kiss would restore the sleeping maiden to life and that they would instantly fall in love and live happily ever after. She wanted to fall in love because every thing that happened to her in the course of the story illustrated the fact that she needed someone to love her, to save her from situations both demeaning and perilous.

But Ursula puts the falling in love at the very beginning of the story. This isn’t a very effective plot mechanic because, ultimately, if we are supposed to believe that they are in love, then nothing else should matter. And yet many, many years pass before they are reunited.

When he finds Ursula, we learn that the reason for her absence all these years is that when fairies fall in love they explode. Um, OK. She explodes, and yet no one is hurt. There are at least three people and one bird caught at ground zero of a two-page explosion, and yet none of them, even the girl who exploded, are harmed. In fact, it isn’t even mentioned that she appears to have destroyed an entire city block.

And instead of answering for his absence by performing a great deed, he basically hops aboard a helicopter and goes straight to her. Sure, he’s caught in an explosion, but that’s hardly a massive feat like slaying a dragon or something – he is caught unawares and, anyway, no one is hurt in the conflagration to begin with. Anyone can get caught in an explosion, especially if they’re magic explosions that don’t hurt people. And if they don’t hurt people, um, what’s the big deal?

Couldn’t this have been covered in a letter? They’ve given the story an indefinable time period, with high technology and modern fashion commingling with mythical elements such as fairies and talking birds. Don’t they have a post office or telephones or even fax machines? Why was someone who was considered fine enough stock to be a childhood companion to a royal prince stuck tending bar in a small diner?

All of these little problems add up to a very big problem, and that is the fact that this story just doesn’t hold together. All the pretty pictures in the world don’t mean anything if you have based your story on a faulty premise.