I have a profile up of artist Wafaa Bilal Here’s the first paragraph.

A year and a half ago, Wafaa Bilal made himself one of Chicago’s best-known artists when he shut himself in a room at Flatfile Galleries in front of a paintball gun. The gun could be controlled remotely, over the Internet, and Web surfers and gallery visitors alike could aim and fire it, blasting Bilal with yellow paint. By the end of the project, titled Domestic Tension, more than 60,000 people had shot at him from more than 130 countries, and he had been featured in media outlets from NPR to Newsweek.

Also…for those who missed it, the Comics Comics roundtable discussion of David Heatley’s comics is here.

If you didn’t click through Bill’s link to Akino KONDOH you should; she’s pretty great.

Update: All right, and one political link too. I really like Ta-Naheshi Coates. Yes, he likes contemporary poetry…but, well, nobody’s perfect.

David Heatley responds to my comixology takedown of him here by insinuating that I wrote it in bad faith and that the highlights of my career are bitter attacks on unassailable figures like Art Spiegelman, so who cares what I have to say anyway. (I’d prefer, personally, to see the highlight of my career, such as it is, as the Gay Utopia — but that isn’t about David or his friends, so I presume he hasn’t read it.) Beyond the defensive ad hominem (and as they say, right back atcha), he argues that in “Sexual History” he’s aware of, and commenting on, the unpleasantness of the sexual ethics portrayed, rather than promoting them.

Noah Berlatsky, an acquaintance of mine, and a talented, but bitter writer living in Chicago, wrote about my “Sex History” strip on a site called comiXology. The highlights of his career so far have included well-written, but scathing attacks on Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman with titles like “In the Shadow of No Talent”. For the record, back in 2002 I almost illustrated one of his poems as a comic strip, but had to abandon it because it seemed too similar to a Marc Bell strip at the time. He also contributed to an incoherent failure of an anthology I produced while living in Chicago called The New Graphics Revival. I stand behind the idea of that book, which was that given the time and materials, most anyone could produce an interesting comic strip. But I’m embarrassed by almost all of the work that was sent to us, mostly by a middling, call-for-entry gen-x set. I’m not saying that my failing to promote an anthology that contained work by him or my inability to finish a strip based on his writing could have led him to write this line: “Whether through pointlessly tangled continuity, repetitive autobio dreck, aggressively ugly art, or reflexively irrelevant literariness, [Heatley’s] comics seem determined to find some way, any way, to keep out all those readers and creators who might otherwise, and naturally, see comics as their own.” But anything’s possible!

More to the point, he claims that in the anecdotes about bad sex, longing and one night stands that make up “Sex History”, I’m depicting ciphers, not real women. “He occasionally wonders what is up with one of them — why is she behaving so oddly? Why didn’t she get me off? But he never really cares enough to find out — or, at least, not enough to waste one of his tiny panels telling the reader about it.” Unfortunately, he missed the fundamental idea behind the piece and took the work at face value. The “me” character is something of an unreliable narrator. I’m asking the reader to imagine an alternate universe where the details of falling in love and getting married deserve a single panel and where obsessive thinking about a meaningless crush or one-night stand deserve dozens. I’m certainly not defending the behavior or even the thinking shown, quite the opposite. Something I tried to expound on in the strip’s new epilogue.

I find this pretty unconvincing. There’s nothing in the strip itself that suggests this level of self-awareness or distance. I do believe that David was intending to have the reader believe that he’s self-aware, certainly…but I’m not sure that the evidence of the strip supports that reading. (I haven’t read the new epilogue, so perhaps that changes things radically — though I’m skeptical.)

I think my essay is pretty clear that I was disappointed with David’s repudiation of New Graphics Revival. His characterization of the work therein as “middling-gen-x” seems to me deeply unfair, and far more applicable at this point, and alas, to David’s own oeuvre than to the broad range of people who contributed to his book.

I didn’t mention my collaboration with David mostly because, when I put it in in an earlier draft, it sounded like boasting. But as long as he’s brought it up…. Yes, we did take a stab at collaborating, in part because David had at the time expressed admiration for my writing and for some of the zines I’d been working on. I could be mistaken, but I believe he even defended them to Chris Ware (and no, Ware’s (quite possibly apocraphyl) lack of enthusiasm for my efforts is not why I don’t, in general, like his recent stuff.)

Anyway, for collectors of Heatley ephemera, I believe the story David was thinking of illustrating was this one:

Triangle Hospital

You might not know that but sometimes a triangle does wrong. Like one once had porcupine hair. So they took her to the triangle hospital so she would not keep sticking the scientists. Science is hard enough! They cut off her hair with a sponge because a sponge is the one opposite weapon that makes triangles vulnerable. She had wanted to be in a museum or a zoo but she wasn’t interesting anymore. That’s how it goes if you are a triangle.

I certainly was sad not to get to work with David, for both personal and career reasons. But that’s the way it goes, and I was, and remain, grateful for his past interest in and enthusiasm for my writing and art, as well as for the chance to participate in the anthology he edited, an experience I still treasure. So thank you, David. Best of luck to you.

Update: Well, my comments once again seem to have prompted a message board thread shut down; the comics comics guys killed the discussion right after I posted. I guess I have a gift. (Update 2: Tim Hodler wrote to assure me that my posts were not the reason for the thread getting shut down. So no super-thread-shutting-down-powers, apparently; just garden-variety paranoia on my part.)

I was going to add one thing there, but I guess I’ll put it here. Reading back over David’s post, the one thing that really kind of depresses me is his off-hand, and kind of cruel, dismissal of the contributions to the New Graphics Revival Anthology he edited. I guess if that’s the way he feels, that’s the way he feels…but I do love that book,and part of the reason is, as I say in my essay, it seemed like a real act of faith and love — reaching out to people who don’t usually participate in comics, and asking them to trust the medium, and (by extension) the editors. It feels like David just kind of shit on a bunch of people who trusted him. It depresses me in the way that reading the “Sexual History” depressed me. I don’t really have the heart to elaborate further, except to say that I wish he’d just stuck to insulting my work and my morals.

The Guin Saga, story by Kaoru Kurimoto, is “Japan’s leading heroic fantasy series” according to the back cover blurb. Vertical is putting it out in bits and pieces, starting with a short story called “The Seven Magi.” I read the first two of the three volumes.

So…as Tucker would have me say, this is certainly no Little Nemo in Slumberland. It’s more like Judge Dredd. Not the comic, but the godawful movie. It’s got that what-the-hell-is-going-on-oh-whatever-let’s-just-have
-everybody-shout-loudly-and-then-maybe-kill-something bad action movie thing down pat. The story, such as it is, is about a leapord-headed king called Guin, and the city he protects is cursed with the black plague, so he goes to seek out a sorcerer to help, and then he finds other sorcerers, and there’s some sort of evil spider thing, and his consort back at the palace gets possessed and wanders around with a knife killing random people, which is a lot more boring than it sounds; and there’s a pimp who is supposed to provide comic relief, and a prostitute who’s supposed to provide tits, and another evil sorceress who provides the ridiculous pseudo-Indo fetish-wear, and also more tits. Oh, yeah, the possessed consort has tits too. Also, the art is eager to inform us, an ass. And everybody keeps shouting “Guin” in case you forget the title character’s name. (He’s supposed to have amnesia, I think, so maybe they’re trying to help him out, I don’t know.)

The art, by Kazuaki Yanagisawa, is pretty good — which means he’s awesome by typical Western comics standards, I guess. The story-telling is clear and the battles (even with the amorphous icky giant spider) are easy to follow; the leapord-head is cute and nicely rendered. The character designs are kind of dull and clumsy though — that indo-fetish sorceress is an aesthetic atrocity. And the art hews to a more naturalistic, less cartoony mode that tends to highlight some drafting problems (the leopard head tends to look too small for Guin’s body; hands are often out of proportion.) I’m not hugely conversant with samurai manga, but of what I’ve seen Rurouni Kenshin, Inu-Yasha, and Banya: The Explosive Deliveryman all seem more accomplished and distinctive. (Rurouni Kenshin’s cartoony style is masterfully supple and memorable; Inu-Yasha has scores of beautiful, twisted demon drawings; the Banya artist is a phenomenally accomplished draftsman.)

From what I’ve read of manga-consumption patterns in Japan, most books are read at breakneck speed. This certainly seems designed for that kind of skimming; even if you flip through it really fast, you won’t miss anything, and you’ll get to see a bunch of more-or-less professionally rendered gore and fan service. It’s the comics equivalent of mediocre prime-time television, meant to be turned on for empty stimulation while you’re — I don’t know, eating dinner or clipping your toe-nails or sinking into a turgid stew of ennui and despair. If you read six or seven samurai manga a day, I guess I could see why you’d put this in rotation. Personally, though, my desire to read the third and final volume is nil.
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If you would rather get your manga criticism from someone who actually knows what he’s talking about, rather than from a dabbler like me, you should check out Bill Randall’s recent post

So I got another Jeff Parker digest — Marvel Adventures Fantastic Four Volume 2. The first three stories are fairly pedestrian: the FF battles dinosaurs in the first, then they fight something else in the second, and then they battle Namor the Sub-Mariner in the third. It’s standard-issue super-adventure, told professionally but without any particular spark.

The fourth one is the charm, though. Titled “It’s Slobberin Time”, it features a super-villain called the Street, who is, like the name says, a sentient piece of pavement, with a fire-hydrant stuck in him and everything. How did the Street come to be? Well, he tries to explain, but the FF is so busy bickering they can’t hear him…then the Thing goes off to get a specialty sandwich…Reed zaps the Street with some doohickey which makes him fall apart…and the subsonics summon Lockjaw, the giant dimension-traveling dog with the weird thingee on his head. Lockjaw is intensely and ominously interested in the Street’s fire-hydrant (“put that leg down!” wails the hapless supervillain.) But then the Thing comes back with his sandwich, Lockjaw eats it, which screws up his digestion, and then he starts burping himself across time and space, taking the FF with him.

My son loved, loved, loved this issue…or, as the boy himself put it, “I laughed so hard I farted!” I laughed out loud at several points myself, and even the rather indifferent artist seemed inspired; Lockjaw’s look as he tries to digest the sandwich is, for example, adorably hang-dog. Awwww.

In other words, “It’s Slobberin’ Time” isn’t so much an adventure with funny parts as it is a joke with loopy bits of adventure stuck on to create some sort of narrative. It’s not a tale of super-heroics, but a parody of super-heroics.

In thinking about super-hero stories, parodies are often seen as a kind of peripheral sub-genre — super-hero stories, qua super-hero stories are adventure pulp; parodies may be liked or disliked, but they aren’t really what the genre is about, either for its supporters or detractors.

But I’ve got to say that, at least for me, much of my sincere and long-term love of super-heroes is linked precisely to the way the genre is not only made for, but actually made of, parodies. All genres include parody of course, but for super-heroes, parodies are really central in a way that they’re not in…for instance, romance, or detective fiction. The earliest worthwhile super-hero comics were probably Jack Cole’s Plastic Man and C.C. Beck’s Shazam, and ever since then, super-heroes have consistently been at their best when going for laughs. The Mad Magazine parodies like “Superduperman,” Ambush Bug, Flaming Carrot, the Adam West Batman…even, say Super-Grover from Sesame Street. As far as public profile, and even, I think as far as aesthetic success, super-heroes are as likely to be parodic and silly as they are to be serious. Frank Miller’s Dark Knight drew a lot of its charm from its constant teetering on the verge of self-parody; Grant Morrison’s Animal Man was often indistinguishable from parody; even the dark, grim, Watchmen brought up classic super-hero parody tropes with some verve (how do you pee in that costume? and, of course, there’s the Silk Spectre Tijuana Bible….) On the alt comics side, it seems like everybody near about works with super-hero parodies Crumb, Ted Rall, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes (at least sort of), Jeff Brown, Johnny Ryan, Jaime Hernandez (I believe…I could be misremembering that one….). And, indeed, despite the ascendance of largely straight-faced movies like “Dark Knight,” parody remains extremely popular as a super-hero mode, whether within comicdom (Marvel Zombies) or outside it (Captain Underpants) (both of which, incidentally, are pretty bad…but that’s the way it goes, sometimes….)

In a lot of ways, I think, super-heroes are most adult (and somewhat contradictorily, most accessible to a varied audience) not when they’re violent or sexy or nostalgic, but when they’re funny and parodic. All those goofy powers and nutty costumes and bellowing about truth and justice while beating each other over the head… super-heroes are just funny. Which isn’t quite the same thing as saying that they’re stupid. Sure, lots of super-hero comics are witheringly and unforgiveably dumb, but the genre itself has virtually from the beginning also had practitioners who embraced and celebrated its own goofiness. The whole Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex thing…that’s not making fun of the super-hero genre; it’s an exercise occuring well within the boundaries of the super-hero genre itself.

I guess the point here for me is twofold; first, the super-hero genre really is smarter and more worthwhile than it’s often given credit for being; and, two, mainstream super-hero comics don’t take advantage of that as much as I wish they did. Maybe we are moving past the low water mark, though. I’m sort of hoping for the day when the Marvel Adventures line is the — parodic, smart — flagship for the company, and the continuity cluster-fucks are the undermarketed backwater. Dare to dream.

I keep meaning to link to this: if you have any interest in classic illustration, you should check out SurLaLune’s amazing fairy tale illustration archive. It is to die for.

Also, Tucker Stone has nothing better to do than parody obscure comics bloggers. I feel I have achieved true fame.

So one of the comics my son is currently into is the digest-sized compilation of Franklin Richards stories; titled Lab Brat The stories focus on Franklin, son of Reed and Sue Richards, as he causes trouble with his father’s inventions. Basically, it’s a Calvin and Hobbes rip-off; Franklin, with his big-head and light-hair, even looks rather like Calvin, and like Calvin he’s completely impossible and always causing trouble (usually, in Franklin’s case, by playing with his father’s dangerous inventions.) Herbie, Franklin’s Robot nannie, fills the part of Hobbes, the quasi-adult voice of reason who tries to keep Franklin out of trouble.

I tend to think that Calvin and Hobbes is somewhat overrated, so the desecration aspect of the endeavor doesn’t annoy me as much as it might — though, don’t get me wrong, this is significantly less enjoyable than even a mediocre Watterson strip. Writer Marc Sumerak’s stories are formulaic — Franklin gets in trouble with his dad’s inventions, Herbie tries to help him, hi-jinks ensue, problem is solved,wry closing joke is uttered. Within this fairly saccharine formula, though the gags are genuinely loopy — Franklin turning all of his classmates into fruits and vegetables is an especially bizarre highlight (and why exactly has Reed Richards created a device that turns people into vegetables anyway?) The riffs on old FF tropes are very entertaining as well — the gag where a six-inch tall Dr. Doom helps Franklin clean his room is pretty hysterical, as is the Thanksgiving cartoon where the FF is replaced by turkeys (you haven’t lived till you’ve seen the orange-brick turkey-Thing.)

The art is…well, it’s okay. Chris Eliopoulos works in a generic, animated cartoony vein — both the drawings and layouts are serviceable. Basically, it’s uninspired but professional — which, admittedly, puts it yards ahead of most mainstream super-hero fare. Eliopoulos is good at avoiding situations he can’t deal with; for instance, the transformation of Franklin’s friends into fruit happens off-screen — you see the friends, you see the fruit, but there isn’t any effort to show one morphing into the other. A more accomplished artist might have seen this sequence as a challenge…but there’s something to be said, too, for knowing your limitations.

There’s a back-up strip too; “The Masked Marvel”, which is drawn in a more typical mainstream style, though with hideous coloring that makes it look rotoscoped. Also, it’s unreadable; it was all I could do to skim it, and so I can report to you only in general that there are lots of pointless guest-shots (Wolverine gives a particularly pointless pep-talk) even more pointless industry in-joked (Bendis and other writers get mentioned.) Who wants to read this crap? Why do you think it’ll appeal to the same kids who want to read “Lab Brat?” Is anyone at all paying attention over there?

Ah, well. Anyway, my son loves “Lab Brat,” and even my wife (not a western comics fan) can stand to read it to him, so that’s a pretty good recommendation.