Monthly Archives: July 2010

Utilitarian Review 7/31/10

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Announcement!

Alex Buchet, who wrote a lovely series on Tintin and racism last month, is going to be joining us as a regular columnist. His column will be called “Strange Windows” and will run the first Monday of every month except when it runs at sometime different because our scheduling is wiggy. In any case, we’re very glad to add Alex (who resides in Paris) to our multinational cast, and look forward to his first column (on Harvey Kurtzman’s war comics) which will run later this week.

On HU

Last week on HU began with Domingos Isabelinho’s discussion of the boys’ comics of Argentinian comics writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld.

Ng Suat Tong looked at whether or not the interviews of Gil Kane could qualify as criticism.

Richard Cook continued his look at Silver Age Flash comics.

As part of our slow-rolling roundtable on R. Crumb’s Genesis, Alan Choate offers a lengthy defense of the book (to enthusiastic plaudits form Jeet Heer, Matthias Wivel, and others in comments.)

Also, at his own site, Ken Parille discusses some further thoughts on Genesis.

And Ng Suat Tong offers a brief reply to Alan.

Vom Marlowe finds a mainstream comic that does not suck and there is much rejoicing.

And Caro talks about what comics can learn from film archivist Henri Langlois.

Also, because you demanded it an evil metal download!

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I discuss the new Angelina Jolie vehicle Salt.

Perhaps this ties in to the most unexpected result of having a female protagonist: it seems to have completely drained all the sex from the film. The film is amazingly circumspect; Jolie is dressed sensibly throughout, and even at times (as when she disguises herself as a man) more than sensibly. There are no sex scenes, and barely even any romance—there’s one mildly intense kiss with her husband, but that spy-thriller staple, the seduction of the enemy, is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps part of the problem is the old double-standard; men can seduce lots of women and that makes them rakish; if Jolie were falling opportunistically in bed with the enemy in order to manipulate them, her character would be far less sympathetic. So instead the film opts to make her traumatized, humorless, and almost neutered; she might as well be in some sort of earnest movie of the week weeper.

Other Links

What the rest of the world thinks of Comic Con.

History for the Future: Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Francaise

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Comics needs an Henri Langlois.

As collectors, most comics geeks have nothing on Langlois. I don’t care how many storage units you have. I know the longboxes block the closet. But from the ‘30s through the ‘70s, back in the days when a single film could take up several cans and a couple square feet of space, Langlois and his wife accumulated and preserved over 60,000 films, using primarily their own money, creating out of his collectors’ obsession the institution known as the Cinémathèque Francaise.

His scope was omnivorous: “People, intent on triage, who think they have taste, me included, are idiots. One must save everything.” He rescued numerous nitrate prints of silent movies and the only existing negative of The Blue Angel; he saved early Soviet cinema and “decadent” films from the Nazis; he stole film prints from the back rooms of movie houses that were about to destroy them (theaters destroyed their film prints to prevent piracy). For decades, he screened three films a day in his house in Paris, carefully selecting the films for the resonance of their justaposition. His screenings introduced the auteurs of the French New Wave to the American cinema that would define them and to the early European art cinema that would inspire them to transcend Hollywood.

But his archival impulse, and even his passion for sharing his films, are not why comics needs a Langlois. (Bill Blackbeard has all that mostly covered.) Comics needs a Langlois because of his particular inspired belief, poetic, imaginative, and non-didactic, about how cinema’s history should inspire its future:

An art form requires genius. People of genius are always troublemakers, meaning they start from scratch, demolish accepted norms and rebuild a new world.

An odd sentiment for an archivist – to “start from scratch, demolish accepted norms.” Especially an archivist so intent on screening and programming, whose model for training in cinema was to organize one’s life around watching films, to complete immerse oneself in cinematic heritage and in conversation with other people who are equally immersed. This is the man who comforted Buñuel after the disasterous premiere of El at Cannes (and who introduced the film to Lacan), the man selected to pin the Legion of Honor on Alfred Hitchcock’s lapel. When protests broke out after the French government shut down the Cinematheque in 1968 for bad bookkeeping, Godard took a punch from a policeman on Langlois’ behalf (it broke his glasses, not his face, but still…)

Leaud speaking to the protesting crowd, 1968

 

How can we reconcile the historian archiving the past with the poet advocating the genius’ new world? Langlois himself suggests the answer in a story he tells about his childhood experience viewing Mèliés’ 1899 film Jeanne d’Arc:

As a boy in Turkey, they told me Joan of Arc took Paris. Knowing my dad was posted there, when I saw Jeanne d’Arc, I believed he was living in Joan’s Paris. Told that was wrong, I began to imagine parallel Parises: Joan’s, my father’s, etc. Hence, in my somewhat odd view, time isn’t time: it’s space.

Although the concepts are surely related, Langlois is not describing the relation of time and space found in Chris Ware – Ware’s use of space to evoke time, to transform our sense of time, and to highlight both pointed and sequential continuity through time, is still ultimately an exploration of temporality and its effects: of an experience living in history. Langlois’ formulation is the denial of time: an idea of history not as something past, things having happened and remembered, but something entirely now, aggregated all together, present – meaning both presence and in the present tense.

This idea of “history in the present tense” — omnipresent history — is both very French and very characteristic of Langlois’ time and his circle of friends. Forming in the years after WWII, the idea was influenced not only by Surrealism and Dada but by Sartre and Levi-Strauss and Lacan and their project of reimagining realism without materialism – the bloody, painful materialism of the wars and their aftermath. Structuralism’s forgetting of “history in the past tense” was an effort to find inspiration and humanity despite that trauma, and the result of their efforts was a concept of history that serves human imagination rather than subordinating imagination to the dictates of history and materialist historical thinking.

This sensibility is nowhere more apparent than in the Museum of Cinema that Langlois assembled in the last decade of his life.

An exhibit room at the Musée du Cinema

 

Langlois’ curatorial choices, although rich with minute historical detail, were almost completely non-chronological and non-genealogical. He cared about establishing composite effects among the films and artifacts, emphasizing thematic contiguity, resonance and suggestion. The result was a Museum that was itself a work of art, not of history, an experience that inspired questions and curiosity rather than a lesson that offered canned, approved answers. The 2004 documentary Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque (from which these English translations of the Langlois quotes are taken) posits convincingly that the museum itself was as much the work of an “auteur” as any New Wave film.

Notions of resonance and suggestion and composite seem very at home in comics, even more so than film. Images accrue meaning through juxtaposition far more than in the dynamic cinema or even in prose text, which always retains at least some small echo of the temporality of spoken language. Langlois’ approach to history – never for its own sake but always in the service of imagination, not the trace of the past but the texture of the present, always pointing toward the future – is particularly inspirational as an antidote to nostalgic minutiae, the biggest obstacle to the troublemaker’s new world:

There are cinéphiles and cinéphages. Truffaut is a cinéphile. A cinéphage – a film nerd – sits in the front row and writes down the credits. If you ask him whether it’s good, he’ll say something sharp. But that’s not the point of movies: to love cinema is to love life, to really look at this window on the universe. It’s incompatible with note-taking!

The documentary from which the quotes and stills in this essay were taken is worth every minute of the time spent watching it. It’s currently available on DVD and Netflix on Demand.

Face Down In the Mainstream: What if? Astonishing X-Men is Astonishingly Good

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What if Ord Resurrected Jean Grey instead of Colossus?  Written by Jim McCann, Art by David Yardin, Ibraim Roberson, and Kai Spannuth.  February 2010 One-shot.  (It contains two other stories, but I don’t care one way or another about them, so I’m leaving them out.)

I admit that I didn’t read the story about Ord resurrecting Colossus (whenever that was…), and I have only vague white-noise understanding of the main plot points here, but it didn’t matter.  I’ve gotten a certain amount of flack for failing to understand continuity plot points in the past, and I maintained then and maintain now that if comics are to get new readers, they’re going to have to accept that some folks won’t have read all 80-gazillion crossover title storylines, and that a good, a strong comic will clue in new readers or find other ways to engage them besides the longer plot throughlines.

And this comic is a perfect example.

We start off with a lovely page explaining the set-up of the one-shot story.  In our world (the main continuity world), Colossus was resurrected instead of Jean Grey, and he united the X-Men.  In this alternate world, it works differently.  Dun-dun-dun.

I’m going to mangle this, because I have bare-minimum knowledge, but it seems to be:  The planet Breakworld has a prophecy about a world-destroying force tied to mutants.  Sensibly, they’d rather not be destroyed, and this ends up in some sort of complex involvement with Jean Grey and Phoenix and the X-Men.  And Emma Frost thinks that Jean Grey is going to kill the planet and–look, it’s all too complicated, I’m sorry.  There’s a baddy named Cassandra who looks like one of those old pickleheadjar people, and a dude/lady named Ord with a white sausage wrapped around their head who they’re interrogating.  Just go with it.

Let the plot flow about your heart like a river, it’s relaxing.  Promise.

So, we’re following this inner X-Men fight.  Look at this composition:

See how the colors shift from warm, muted tones to icy gray at the bottom?  The figures are lovely, well drawn with interesting poses and good features, but it’s the colors that caught my attention.

While there is linework here, it’s in a very painterly style.  The colors of the lines shift with the colors of the painting–in the top panel, the lines are soft, warm browns but at the bottom, there is cool gray and even white.  Lovely stuff.

That’s a pretty obvious example, and is the one that first caught my eye, but as we move through the story there are other examples.  Flashes of cool gray taking over everything, dark icy eyes turning into fiery hot flames when Phoenix starts possessing Emma.  I wish I could scan the whole darn thing, but there’s those pesky copyright issues, and besides, I want everybody and their cousin to rush out and buy this thing.  (Go, I shall wait right here until you’re done.  Have it in hand?  Good.)

So in the plot, Emma holds hands with three hot blonde schoolgirls in cute preppy schoolgirl skirts, as if this was a twisted porno.  They all channel the Phoenix, and then the power turns the pretty girls into zombie looking corpses.  At which point….

The girl heroine is awoken by her plucky dragon!  And my heart soared.  This is what comics is about folks.  Awesome girl, plucky dragon, great art, cool things happening.  Check out the more subtle color shifts in this one.  We start with darkness, but it’s tinted with the warmth of the sky.  The girl is soft brown and her dragon is soft red, and it’s all sweet and warmth, slowly awakening…and then, as they encounter the horror, the colors shift to pale grays.  Neat!

Also, check out the beautiful painted slouchy socks next to the harsh metal surfaces.  Really, really well done, I thought.

So, this being a comic, Kitty runs to check out the problem, Jean Grey awakens, and there is a big battle with Emma Frost, who is possessed by the Phoenix.  There’s some awesome shots of Jean and Emma fighting, and Jean’s pink power makes for a wonderfully feminine power touch to the fierceness and the battle.  But Jean and Wolverine and the X-Men can’t fight her completely, and Kitty…  Well, let me show you.

She rips out her heart.

It’s gorey and fierce and wonderful.  I was talking a bit about the heroines of comics in my WonderWoman pants rant, and one of the problems I see is that the women aren’t allowed to be as fierce in their defense of worlds as I would like.  Now, I’m not saying that, oh violence is hunky dorey per se, but I am glad to see that in this case, a young woman, with the help of her female mentor, did what needed doing to take out a planet-killing monster.  This particular comic is a battle of females, and it was beautifully done.  Kitty looks powerful and good, strong and young and feminine, saving the world.

There’s a kind of warmth and sweetness in the painting of Kitty.  Powerful, violent, but sweet and tough.  The expression and curves reminds me of the best of the Pepper Project series.

Which means, naturally, that she dies.  Freaking bad villains and their stupid power backlashes, dammit.  (Since it’s the Phoenix that killed her, I’m just going to assume that she gets to come back.  Don’t disabuse me of this notion, OK?)  Anyway, the whole comic really has a lovely feel to it, a warmth and intensity that I deeply enjoyed.  I’m sure that since it’s a painting style that it must have taken a gazillion hours to do, but I hope that more like these come out.  I’d buy them in a heartbeat.  Highly, highly recommended, even if you don’t know the plot.

A Response to Alan Choate’s Defense of R. Crumb’s Genesis

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Once again, Alan, thanks for taking the time to write your essay and fully articulate the pleasures of Crumb’s adaptation.I have a number of minor disagreements about which I won’t go into much detail since it would merely be a reiteration of my previous discussions with Ken and yourself. In this particular response, my disagreements have less to do with Crumb’s Genesis than with our differing approaches to the comic and comics criticism in general.

There is, for instance, the flawed understanding that the “tendency of modern biblical scholarship to pull apart narrative threads has been disintegrative to the religious sense of the Bible as a unified, divinely inspired whole.” I’m afraid that quite the opposite is the case and no person (of a serious intent) who has read a good commentary would tell you otherwise. Just as scholarship enriches the experience of any dense literary text, so too does it refine our understanding of the Bible and Genesis. The best commentaries provide the context which you lament as being lost to modern readers: historical setting, social mores, linguistic complexities and turns of phrase. The “remoteness” of this text, which is well hidden by many modern translations, is precisely what scholarship brings forth and elucidates.  The “detective work” which Crumb engages in has been done many times over and with far greater ability. But I doubt if this is the real area of disagreement between us. More likely, you find this journey of discovery exceptionally fruitful, while I for the most part do not, if only because I have already experienced it.

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In Defense of Crumb’s Genesis

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It is rare to see an adaptation come under attack from followers of the original for being too faithful. Dramatizers regularly compress and invent for what they hope will be the strongest statement in another medium, then defend their interpretation as being in the spirit, if not the letter, of the source. The devotees’ essential reply is that the failure to respect detail, or honor the letter, lost the spirit, leaving some creature that had no right to go out under the same name. Did the adapters think they knew better than the writer?

That secular attachment is a pale, fleeting image of what the Bible can mean for readers, yet here we have seen some furious attacks on a groundbreakingly faithful treatment. People with long relationships to the original are insisting that the Book of Genesis demanded an interpretive, even editorializing approach. According to one critic, the Bible is right there if anybody wants to read it. R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated needed to reshape and select its material. The artist should have pushed his opinions in front, even lampooned it because that’s what he does, and instead gave us a boring, stodgy, completely unnecessary work that never, ever should have been made. (Though why is the mirror-universe review so easy to write: “Had Crumb been able to restrain his clowning urges, he might have learned a ‘“not-so-” secret’ that we who know the Bible have known for years of watching these acts go by: nothing could have been more shocking than a straight adaptation.”)

Given the deaf ears turned to it in these discussions- the point is denied until corrected, then was never at issue and isn’t important anyway- the pioneering nature of a comprehensive illumination bears repeating up front. As Crumb told Comic Art Magazine at the outset of the job,

“I’m going to be doing all fifty chapters of Genesis, including every word. Straight from the original- I’m not leaving out anything… you’ve got to do an extremely close reading. It’s really interesting and full of surprises, what is actually in there when you read it closely. And, you know, believers tend to gloss over the stuff that makes them uncomfortable or that they don’t get. But it’s in there, you know, so it’s going to be illustrated, so…”

But such a believer is not the serious student of theology, who wrestles with these problems until they grant him understanding. Crumb prepared for heat from religious fundamentalists, who claim the Bible as literally true history, instruction, prediction, and absolutely present a major cultural force that would be foolish to ignore (“If I’m going to be doing this and don’t want some Christian fanatics to kill me, I’ve got to say ‘Look, it’s all in there, I didn’t change a single word, it’s in your holy book…’ so we’ll see if they want to kill me or not,”) but this left his flank open to condescension from those who are dedicated to exploring its deeper meanings. Another commenter:

“Part of the problem I had… [was] the overly literal interpretation and complete lack of insight about the actual ideas underlying Genesis. Virtually all scholars, rabbis, clergy etc. in the modern day, even those with more fundamentalist leanings, use the bible as a starting point to interpret the metaphors and stories and apply them to the modern day… Yet I would suspect that very few, if any, clergy believe in the stories as literal, historical facts.

“Thus, the depictions of God as an old man, the creation story, etc… represent a very childish understanding of Genesis. That would be fine if this were a children’s book, but the problem is that by presenting the entirety of the dense text… no child will be able to penetrate this book either.”

We can all understand how a treatment could cling to the letter, lose the spirit, and end up flat. From Ng Suat Tong’s essay, posted here on July 14, a reader might get the impression that Crumb has given us a soulless, mechanical transcription that recycles Sunday-school figures (a white beard, a cuddly Garden of Eden) and only superficially engages the work it was based on. It’s easy to take Suat’s accusations of a lack of intellectual and spiritual involvement in Genesis in a still essentially worldly sense, and a genially agnostic member of the public might see no harm in letting the religious and literary meanings blend. But his fault-finding refers to a lack of dedicated application in a religious framework that none of us should wish to see confused with the “soft” intellectual and spiritual experience of a great book.

(I gave a detailed response to his points in the comments thread for his essay, which was collected here.)

The overriding problem is his persistent call for Crumb to do something with his adaptation that he’s not trying to do. Suat’s characteristic complaint is that Crumb fails to explicitly incorporate centuries of Biblical scholarship, for which the evident rejoinder is that these were not books he chose to adapt. As just one example,

“In response to Genesis 3:15… we get a somewhat cursorily drawn snake wriggling away. It is common knowledge that Christians look upon these verses as the protoevangelium (for example, some church fathers saw the ‘woman’ here as the virgin Mary and the ‘seed’ as representing  the church and/or Christ in particular) while Jewish commentators sometimes view the ‘seed’ as a metaphor for humankind. There is little evidence of a response to these or any other interpretations here.“

These objections are so consistent they have an emergent property as a fairly clear request for a comic that would travel through Genesis (if it got out of Eden) with a chemistry of text and symbolic imagery, discussing the interpretations of the ages. Perhaps some cartoonist out there is looking for a project. A highly routine style of Biblical adaptation that tricks out the narrative with new scenes and dialogue could also work in some scholarship (again, we can hear the response: “Crumb’s is the latest in a long line of reworkings of the Bible,”) but this was not his project either. As he told The Paris Review,

“In all the comic-book versions I was able to find, they just made up dialogue, pages of it that are not in the Bible. I was reading this one thing and I thought- did I miss this? And I went back and checked against the text and it’s not in there. And they claim to be honoring the word of God, and that the Bible is a sacred text… the most significant thing is actually illustrating everything that’s in there. That’s the most significant contribution I made. It brings everything out.”

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Nostalgia-Fest, 2010

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Last week, I bashed the nostalgia-ridden Flash Rebirth, by Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver. My main complaint was that the comic was less a narrative than a creepy love letter to Barry Allen and Flash stories from the Silver Age (roughly 1956-1970). Most of the comments more or less agreed with my criticism, but Alex Buchet indirectly defended Johns and Van Sciver by mentioning that he too appreciated the old Flash comics. I had never actually read the comics myself, though I was vaguely familiar with the stories thanks to pop culture osmosis. In an effort to understand why these comics inspired so much affection, I decided to read the first few Barry Allen appearances. For this week, I go all the way back to the character’s debut in Showcase #4.


Showcase #4 (Oct. 1956)
Writer: Robert Kanigher
Penciler: Carmine Infantino
Inker: Joe Kubert

A quick history lesson: the first superhero named the Flash was Jay Garrick, who deputed in Flash Comics #1 (1940). The superhero genre suffered a decline of popularity in the late 1940s, and Flash Comics was canceled in 1949. Jay Garrick completely disappeared from DC Comics’ publications by the early 1950s. But in 1956, DC launched a new superhero, a re-imagining of the Flash created by Robert Kanigher, John Broome, and Carmine Infantino.

The story begins with police scientist Barry Allen sipping homogenized milk with a straw (???) while reading an old Flash comic starring Jay Garrick. As early as 1956, there was already superhero nostalgia…

Though it’s worth noting that Jay Garrick was a fictional character in the world of Barry Allen.

The comic quickly proceeds through Flash’s origin story: he was struck by lightning while messing with volatile chemicals (what are the odds!). Rather than dying a horrible, burning death, Barry gained superpowers. And he got the exact same powers as his childhood hero (what are the odds!).

The key panel is a great example of Infantino’s skill…

I particularly like the use of onomatopoeia. The extension of the lightning “craaaaaack,” the brilliant blue contrasted against a yellow background, and the use of jagged lettering all increase the intensity of the moment.

The comic then moves through several scenes where Barry shows off what he can do with his new-found speed. He outruns a taxi, stops a diner waitress from dropping her tray on the floor, and saves his girlfriend, Iris, from getting shot in the head.

Infantino does great work with the bullet scene. As the bullet moves closer to Iris, the panels transition to a close-up of Barry’s face. It’s a great way to highlight Barry’s emotional reaction while maintaining the focus on the physical threat to Iris.

It turns out that Iris, a reporter and Lois Lane knockoff, was targeted by the criminal Turtle Man – The Slowest Man on Earth! Barry Allen decides to follow in the footsteps of Jay Garrick and becomes the new Flash,  and being a superhero in the 50s means you get a sleek, Space Age costume. But even snazier than the costume is the capsule ring where he stores it…

Our hero runs around town and confronts the Turtle Man, who proceeds to humiliate the Flash “looney tunes” style. By that, I mean Turtle Man draws a silhouette of himself against a wall and Flash runs right into it. It may sound stupid, but the unabashed silliness of the comic is actually rather endearing. And then there’s the fact that Turtle Man’s costume is (are you ready for this?) – a turtleneck sweater.

It’s easy to understand why this book appealed to young boys. Action-adventure, sci-fi, cool toys, goofy humor, eye-catching art: this story has nearly everything a young reader could want.

Unfortunately, the second story in Showcase #4 is much less impressive. A generic villain from the future (who looks exactly like Lex Luthor) steals some stuff and the Flash stops him. The art remains decent, but none of the pages stand out.

I’m still on the fence regarding Silver Age Flash. I can see its potential. It’s light-hearted, unpretentious, briskly paced, and produced by competent (if not brilliant) professionals. But I can also see why the Flash never enjoyed the stratospheric success of characters like Spider-man. Barry Allen is a blank slate, lacking even a rudimentary personality. And I question whether super-speed can ever be visually compelling enough to sustain reader interest over the long run.

But I’ll give the Flash another try next week, when I read the first few issues of his solo comic.

The Interview as Criticism: Gil Kane

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“One cannot overstate how significant [Gil Kane’s] 1969 interview in Alter Ego(conducted by Benson) was to those of us floundering around trying to make some critical sense of comics. I’ve spoken to literally dozens of people over the years who read that interview when it was originally published and they all had pretty much the same reaction: Kane’s was a jaw-droppingly invigorating way of looking at comics. He took the only intelligent path a critical mind could given the comics he had to work with; he dismissed the scripting out of hand and focused on the distinctive but theretofore recondite visual virtues of specific artists. He articulated what many of us impressionistically loved about Jack Kirby and John Severin and Alex Toth but couldn’t put into words — or even into cohesive thought. He provided a ray of hope that comics could indeed be admired without abandoning one’s brains.” Gary Groth

“To be more concrete, some of the best comics criticism has come in the form of interviews done by artists like Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman.” Jeet Heer

“FWIW, I also tend to agree with Jeet that, in practice, much of the best comics criticism has been through the interview form…just because of the history of comics criticism (which has been pretty spotty).” Eric B.

“I agree, Noah, but notice how much communication interference there continues to be: the assumptions that led to the interference in the original post go very deep. And they’re the same, deep assumptions that lead to the point you originally noticed: the valorization of interviews over analytic essays… The comments thread here has largely been about decoding the resistance to the ideas in both your original post and here, rather than decoding the ideas. Although I think your explication is indeed productive, I think the resistance is still pretty strong…this is a resistance deeply tied to nostalgia and to nostalgic identification — the “retrospective idealization” of the author or creator as the anchor and truth of meaning. That’s one thing you lose if you topple the interview from its pride of place. I think this is probably the mechanism by which the art comics subclique has managed to reproduce the dynamics of the larger superhero subculture: they’ve simply replaced the superhero with the Author, without actually disrupting the nostalgic relationship to the comic art form. That’s how you get the “fetishization of interviews” you reference in the original post.”  Caro

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