Monthly Archives: October 2010

New Tricks

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Hello!  You may remember me from such insightful posts as Visual Languages of Manga and Comics and, er, well, just that one, really.  You shall all be subject to me on a regular basis for a while, as Noah has asked me to be a monthly columnist.  At the moment, I’m not sure what direction I’m going to go with this, but I’ll play it by ear.

This month, as I’ve just come back from a vacation to the UK and am still jet-lagged, I’m going to just blather on a bit about a current favorite TV show of mine and why I think one of the main characters is the most fantastic female character I’ve seen in a long, long time.

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Monthly Stumblings # 6: Otto Dix

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Der Krieg (the war) by Otto Dix

When I think about German Expressionism the Isenheim Altarpiece (1506 -1515) by Matthias Grünewald comes quickly to my mind. I know that it isn’t exactly an Expressionist painting (I’m aware of the anachronism), but all expressionism (and some Surrealism too: Max Ernst, for instance) is there already.

One of the topics explored by Matthias Grünewald in his altarpiece is ergotism, as we can see in the polyptych’s wing shown below:

 

It represents Saint Anthony being harassed by demons, but if you look closely on the lower left corner of the painting you will see a patient afflicted with Saint Anthony’s fire. This disease was caused by the ingestion of ergot infected rye and other cereals. Ergotism produces  seizures and hallucinations (hence the demons) as well as gangrene of the limbs and peeling. Ergotism also explains the strange look of Matthias Grünewald’s Christ in the aforementioned altarpiece. There was a spiritual connexion between the son of God’s suffering and the suffering of the diseased.

The depiction of human pain (often psychological pain instead of physical agony) isn’t the only theme explored by Expressionist painters (and it certainly isn’t this artistic movement’s monopoly), but it certainly is an important part of the aforementioned style. Otto Dix remembered Matthias Grünewald and the polyptich form (a tryptich with a predella: a gallery comic) when he painted Trench Warfare, 1929 – 1932, his own version of human suffering in WWI:

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Utilitarian Review 10/23/10

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On HU

Kinukitty reviewed the yaoi manga How to Seduce a Vampire.

Andrei Molotiu examined how it changes our view of comics to see original comics art in a gallery context. (This is the first in a new series edited by Derik Badman reprinting academic articles and essays.)

Richard Cook examined 80 years of Asians on mainstream comic book covers.

I talked about Moto Hagio’s short story Angel Mimic.

Vom Marlowe talks about the novel Blackout by Connie Willis.

Caroline Small discusses Alexis Frederick Frost’s wordless minicomic Voyage.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Madeloud I review doom metal band The Body’s album All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood.

Other Links
I quite like science blogger John Horgan.

This article, with Sesame Street appearances by Destiny’s Child, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon, is great.

Here Be Lovely Monsters: Alexis Frederick-Frost’s Voyage

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A couple of categories dominate mini-comics at SPX: the quick-and-dirty ones with simple drawings and simple or no text, usually photocopied, and the visual-artifacts-with-really-nice-art ones, which are beautifully drawn and decently- to well-printed, but often with “stories” that are rarely more than journal entries or slice-of-the-mundane or just random patter – hat racks for the high-quality art.

Exceptions to the hat rack problem are most often found in wordless mini-comics. The best example in my stash is Alexis Frederick-Frost’s simple but gorgeous “Voyage.” (I originally didn’t think this comic had a prose name: it’s not on the comic and I didn’t immediately locate it on his blog; I’ve been calling it “The Here Be Monsters Mini-Comic.” I was a little disappointed to discover that it did have a title!)

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Still not a comic, Blackout by Connie Willis

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It’s been a long time since Connie Willis, author of To Say Nothing of the Dog, has come out with a book.  She’s been working on a book about World War II for years, and it is finally finally out.  It was so large that it had to be divided into two volumes, in fact.  Blackout was released in spring and the conclusion, All Clear was released this week.

Today I’ll be talking about Blackout.  This review contains some spoilers for Blackout, but (because the mysteries are fairly crucial ones), I have tried hard not to include any spoilers that go through to All Clear.  All spoilers (which are general and I hope minor) for Blackout are beneath the jump cut.  If you want to know whether you might enjoy Blackout and haven’t yet bought it, or if you bought it but kind of gave up because you became confused, bored, or puzzled, here’s what I loved:

Blackout is about war.  Not war in the trenches, which is ably covered elsewhere and which I hope (fervently) that I will never see, but a war at home.  It is about the civilian side of war, where everyone, in a sense, becomes a soldier.  It covers the Blitz in London and it covers the Evacuation of the children to the country, and it covers that most amazing of events the evacuation at Dunkirk, where the British Expeditionary Force was rescued by a lot of Sunday sailors and fishermen.  (If you don’t know about this, go find out.  It always makes me cry.)

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Moto Hagio: “Angel Mimic”

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I’m blogging my way through Fantagraphics’ Moto Hagio collection, “A Drunken Dream.” You can read the whole series of posts here.
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Hanshin: Half-God and A Drunken Dream were both more plot hole than story; odd broken fairy tales with glimpses of trauma breaking through the prevailing aphasia. They’re unique, bizarre, and lovely.

“Angel Mimic” is, alas, much better constructed. There’s foreshadowing, thematic development, a final shock reveal — in short, all the elements of a traditional plot. As for what that plot is… Joe McCulloch over at Comics Comics has a good summary.

while a double-barreled blast of soap opera sees a suicidal girl hauled off death’s doorstep by a rough but handsome man who *gasp* turns out to be her new biology professor, resulting in detailed, evolution-themed educational segments (not unlike the learning bits in Golgo 13 or a Kazuo Koike manga) inevitably lashed to Our Heroine’s Dark Secret. “I wonder if humans will evolve into angels?” she muses, probably gauging the reader’s appetite for comics of this tone.

Joe’s a kinder man than I, so he doesn’t quite come out and say it, but — yeah, this is godawful. In her better stories, the fact that Hagio’s characters never for a second seem real gives her world an eerie air of unreality, like they’re pasteboard props erected to conceal an abyss. Here, though, more of the cracks are filled in, and Tsugiko ends up seeming less like a mask concealing wells of emotion and more like a hollow doll being pushed by rote towards the inevitable epiphany. There’s initial tension with the man who saves her — he wanders back into her life — they are thrown together by circumstance — they happen to meet her ex — they separate — they come back together — the secret is revealed — happy ending.

That secret (and hey, I’m going to spoil this crappy story now, so be alerted)….

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