Monthly Archives: August 2011

Here and There and Gone Again

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What follows is self-reflective, self-indulgent, and only tangentially related to comics. Topics covered—paralysis, instant gratification, illustration, the nature of desire. Not covered—ranking, freelancing, the problems of failure versus the problems of success. Consider yourself informed!

Regular readers to this website may know that this March, an article co-authored by Joy DeLyria and myself had a round of unexpected exposure, linked to and written about on dozens of sites, and seen by an unfathomable (to me) number of people. The experience and its aftermath was surprising, gratifying, but also paralyzing, and I was left for a long time afterward with a great difficulty in drawing at all. Leading up to the article’s publication I had been drawing upwards of ten hours a day, so this was a dramatic change, to say the least.

I had only been writing at all for only a few months at that point, having been asked to contribute to the Hooded Utilitarian after arguing with editor Noah Berlatsky on various topics both educational and aesthetic. A handful of my initial articles attracted some attention, at least at the scale of the modestly-scaled comics scene. Most, however, disappeared after a few days, as quickly as they came, the reaction to them in proportion to the moment that made them.

But this one seemed different.

It’s difficult now, some months after the fact, to describe the elation, giddiness, and eventual panic that set in as our Wire article went from casual blog post to high traffic blog post to server-breaking feature article. The excitement is perhaps most understandable. The panic, however, might require some additional explanation.

The article itself was written and illustrated so quickly, so impulsively, that the reaction to it seemed impossibly outsized, exaggerated. In particular, my confidence in my own illustration skills was tenuous enough that I felt a certain pain at their exposure, despite the delight I had taken in the few brief hours of their creation.

The speed at which everything moved was its own kind of hazard. In a few strange, bewildering weeks I went from a mostly unpaid comics blog contributor and unpublished cartoonist, to a writer/illustrator with a smart, sympathetic agent, a publisher, and a book deal. The transition and all of the ensuing attention was a heady experience, but the comedown, when it finally arrived, was harsh.

In short, I found it very difficult to draw anymore.

Because of the amount and nature of the links to the article, the exact numbers are hard to arrive at, but let me just skip over the particulars and say that it is very likely that more people have seen my drawing of Omar walking down a narrow Bodymore street than will see or hear anything else that I will ever create in my life. A set of drawings I created in the span of a few hours, drawings that reflect both my strengths as an illustrator (pastiche, virtuoso ink technique) and my weaknesses (virtually everything else), will most likely be, measured in numbers, the most significant thing I’ll ever be part of. This was a slow realization for me, made over a painful few weeks that also happened to contain the break up of my marriage of five years. It was during these weeks of weakness and personal turmoil that I would be required to create about two dozen new illustrations in a similar vein, this time for print, a medium that for me feels as permanent as any ever created. We are, after all, still reading the two-thousand year old garbage of the ancient Egyptians, them having successfully captured their thoughts and feelings and business transactions on papyrus in ink. (“Don’t worry about it,” my friend Shanna told me. “I mean, what percentage of people that read the initial article will even see the book? It’s no biggie, right?”)

It’s interesting to compare today’s fractured, specialized media environment to the vast undivided audiences of the previous century’s newspaper cartoonists. The early newspaper cartoonists had tremendous audiences for their work, audiences that would be unheard of today for any similar form of entertainment. They also had the illusion, though, of impermanence, a kind of impermanence that can nurture a certain kind of risk taking and impulsivity that can be invaluable to someone’s creative development. These early cartoonists worked knowing that, no matter how flat a single installment fell, no matter how many copies made it into print, a week later a hundred thousand copies of a strip would be a few thousand folded on a few thousand night stands and bureau tops. Two weeks after initial publication, how many copies would remain? A month later and anything could be forgotten. Newsprint was the most transitory of mediums, powerful but temporary, a bright flare turning in a flash to chalk message scrawled on the sidewalk.

Up until March I’d actually felt this way about virtually everything I’d written for public consumption, which amounted to an article a month at HU and a handful of articles and interviews for the Comics Journal. All of these brief works could be changed, edited if the need arose, always the possibility of elimination or correction. But even if I had wanted to do so, there was no way possible to put Victorian Omar back in the bottle. He now wandered this Wired world on his own power, untethered from the tongue in cheek piece of criticism that spawned him.

As for the actual problem of drawing all those illustrations through my own insecurity, I was greatly helped in this task by that old friend of the newspaper strip cartoonists—the regular deadline. Having five weeks to complete thirty illustrations and my portion of the text, I was forced to set concrete, daily completion goals, and these goals enabled me to power through my restlessness and difficulty and actually complete the drawings required. If I hadn’t had such a hard (and, now, seemingly arbitrary) deadline, I have no doubt that I would still be fussing with the details of the illustrations, re-imagining and re-evaluating, redrawing, planning…anything to avoid that dreaded sense of disappointed completion.

Finishing the book, however, didn’t make my desire to draw come back, nor did my eventual satisfaction with the illustrations. Something inside me seemed to have been switched off, some key part of me that was capable of self-satisfaction and confidence. I wondered if I would ever draw again on my own impetus.


Months went by. I drew, always through necessity or obligation. Illustrations for friends’ wedding invitations, contributions to round tables or one-off art shows, fulfilling promises made before my great freeze. But about a month ago, something changed again, something that seemed unrelated to drawing at the time. I met an extremely skilled fiddle player at a party of a mutual acquaintance, and after briefly getting to know each other, she invited me to busk with her at the local market. We had our first rehearsal on a Sunday afternoon in her backyard, putting together ten songs in about an hour and a half. We were performing the next day.

Busking, it seems, was the cure for my debilitation. When you’re playing in public, train wreck or triumph are equally fleeting, both erased minutes after the moment is over. No safety net, but no lasting impression, no pressure to be worth it; to be worth the lives of the trees that died to bring your drawings to life, to be worth the twenty dollars someone impulsively plunked down for your strange piece of cultural critical pastiche. In short, no pressure at all.

It’s not just the transitory nature of the performance that’s so appealing—it’s also the immediacy, and literal representation of the audience’s reaction. Joy and I worked all of May to write and illustrate a book that won’t be read by its intended audience for several months still. Even this informal blog post was composed over the course of a few days, and any reaction to it will necessarily follow that period of composition. How can this compare to the instant feedback, and judgment, of a crowd? When Rachel and I play at the market, we know when someone’s not interested, or actively dislikes what we’re playing–they pass right by. Someone that’s enjoying themselves stays, listens, puts money in our case or buys a CD. There’s a kind of cleanliness to it, art or entertainment made transactional again, unabashedly so, no confusion of role or purpose. We place Rachel’s fiddle case in front of us, open, as we play, a little bit of seed money at the bottom to function as change, grey-green on faded red velvet. In some ways, it’s the promise of those utopian Internet prognosticators of last decade made flesh–a perfect meritocracy where the best survive and thrive and the rest go home with empty cases. I grasp, stab at a comics comparison, desperate for justification for this article’s existence– witness the meteoric rise of Kate Beaton, which seems to be due solely to her making some really, really funny comics.

But of course, it’s not as simple as that–it’s not necessarily the best players that succeed, but the flashiest, the loudest, those most suited to the noise and bustle of the environment. One of the best buskers in the market, a man famous in Seattle while remaining virtually unknown by name, isn’t known for his unarguably charming songs, but because he has the unusual ability to hula hoop while playing the guitar, singing, playing percussion with his feet and balancing a second guitar on his chin. The parallel holds–the main breakout successes in web comics have primarily been gag strips, short punchy and easily digestible, able with sheer volume and verve to cut through the noise of the crowded environment.

When we are actually playing, though, the mechanics of the act itself, the social analogies and all the other possibilities, are the last thing on my mind. Virtually all of my attention is occupied by the moment, in sharing music and time with a person I am delighted by, and sharing that happiness with the people around us. And maybe this is ultimately what had been missing for me from drawing–creation without obligation, a sensual engagement with the world, the glorious moment of sticking your face in the dirt and remembering that you’re alive and doing the things that you want to be doing solely because it is what you desire. I might get tired of busking in a month or two–I might keep doing it for years. But either way, I know for sure that when it feels like an obligation, it will be time to change things again.

I’ve been sketching again, in brush, bolder and quicker than I’ve worked in the past. I don’t know if anything will come of it, and I don’t seem to care if it does.

from the forthcoming Down in the Hole

Addendum-

I filled Rachel in on the general premise of this article a few days ago, and she had a good laugh. “You can think about it being that way if you want,” she told me, “but it isn’t temporary like you’re describing. You just think that because you haven’t being doing it very long.” Video cameras and phones are everywhere, she explained. People are filming us all of the time. People take our picture hundreds of times a day. We don’t have any way of knowing where or when any of those things will show up.

She continued. “If you Google my full name one of the first things that shows up is this stupid article about the Seattle busking program that appeared in a million different places.” She can’t escape it, she says, nor the photo depicting her and another busker in an awkward high-five.

Me? I’m still choosing ignorance, and the gratification of the moment. It seems like the only sound strategy available.

Solipsistic Oneness

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This essay first appeared on Splice Today.
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One of my favorite recordings is the Hilliard Ensemble’s CD of Perotin’s vocal music. Perotin was a 13th century composer; he’s perhaps the most important pioneer of polyphonic music. In contrast to earlier Gregorian chant, which followed a single melody line, Perotin’s compositions weave, and elongate — time stretches as syllables are pulled out and the voices detach, rising up and rushing down, harmonies wrapping into supple crystal knots. The comparison with cathedrals and their flying buttresses is inescapable; monumental structures which seem to lift miraculously up to heaven. God is as dense as stone and as light as air; His creation is so solid it flies.

Juliana Barwick clearly is a fan as well — or, at least, I’d be surprised if she hadn’t listened to a good bit of medieval choral music at some point. Like plainchant, her songs are obsessively focused on the voice, albeit multi-tracked and abetted with keyboard plinking in her case. The tracks on her latest release, The Magic Place, all slide into each other in a long, slow dream of echoey inhalation and exhalation. As with Perotin, the melodies rise and crest, pushing upwards off the earth towards an explicit transcendence.

The exact nature of that transcendence, though, is a little tricky. I was once discussing the K Records sensation Mirah with a good friend, and he observed acidly that her songs always begin with the sound of the singer taking a breath.

It hurts because it’s true; for Mirah, as for Barwick, the breath, the sound of the voice singing or not, is fetishized. The music attempts to dissolve the body or self in a New Age pantheistic rapture of oneness. But it doesn’t reach outside the self; rather it pumps the self up in an excess of steroidal tweeness. You can hear this in Barwick’s “White Flag,” which, with its repetitions and polyphony, can sound almost like a Perotin number. The difference, here, though, is that the main dynamic tension of the track is provided not by the composition, but by variation in volume. As in the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” different elements are added and looped as the song unfolds; Barwick starts at a whisper and hits an almost painful loudness by the midway mark. Then things disperse again, fading out towards the end. The human voice, technologically multi-tracked, fills the world and then breaks down into nothing. In contrast, the end of “Viderune Omnes” ends as solidly as it began; it does shift to monophony for the last bar or two, but the feeling is of an anticipated and gentle rest, not of dissolution.

In Perelandra, C.S. Lewis comments at one point that what “Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell.” For Lewis, dissolving isn’t a rapture, but a nightmare; a kind of final, self-immolating triumph of the ego, which in its longing to be everything swallows the world, blotting out the difference between it and other and so turning itself into naught.

There’s a way in which listening to Barwick, then, is less like listening to Perotin, and more like listening to, say, Darkthrone or Emperor. In black metal’s raspy shrieks, there’s a similar emphasis on voice stripped of personality, the celebration of generic life rather than of a particular human. Black metal is also, fairly explicitly, the flip side of Barwick’s gentle paganism — the universe tearing you to pieces and devouring you rather than gently unfolding to dissolve you. Either way, though, the point is a self that vanishes, whether into a chorus or a hail of knives.

Perotin’s apotheosis is different. God in polyphony doesn’t blot out personality; he uses it. At the beginning of “Sederunt Principes” some of the intervals are close to microtones, creating shimmering, rapturous echoes. Yet each voice is still distinct. Individuals are still individuals. It’s just that, in the structure of their communal effort, there’s something else — an additional spirit. In comparison with that mysterious presence, Barwick’s Magic Place seems mundane, no matter how much of herself she puts in it.

Shapeless

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As I’ve said many a time before, I’m a big fan of the Bob Haney/Jim Aparo Brave and Bold. I’ve long been interested in reading Haney’s Metamorpho — it seemed like, if Haney was brilliant with other people’s characters, what would he do with his own? The hints I had seemed good; multi-colored shape shifting hero; bizarrely coiffed quasi-evil-scientist father-in-law; lovesick prehistoric frenemy; bombshell love interest. What’s not to like?

And there are certainly lots of enjoyable moments in the Showcase Metamorpho volume. Haney’s vertiginous blend of garbled patois, not-quite-hip references, and aphasiac plotting is as enjoyable as ever. I love this Beatles tribute for example, complete with crazed fans and artist Ramona Fraden supplying what I want to think, at least, is a subtle Ringo caricature:

There’s also opportunities for Haney to unleash his mangled Spanglish (Hombre Elemento!) And best of all there’s the Thunderer, the world’s greatest midget one-eyed Galactus parody:

All of which is much appreciated.

And yet…I have to say, while it’s still recognizably Haney in many lovable ways, as a whole it’s not great. I don’t know that I can say that most of it even rises to “good”. Certainly reading the entire thing was more a chore than a pleasure. Even the Thunderer issue wasn’t as much fun as I was hoping.

So what’s the problem? Well, basically, the series is too formulaic — and the formula isn’t that interesting to begin with. In every issue, Metamorpho fights an evil scientist. Occasionally, for variation, he fights an alien threat. Along the way, Metamorpho whines about how he can’t return to human, Java (the prehistoric frenemy mentioned above) whines about how Sapphire Stagg loves Metamorpho instead of him, Sapphire and Metamorpho smooch, and Simon Stagg (the quasi-evil-scientist figure) boasts about how smart he is. During battles, Metamorpho gives a brief lesson in the properties of various elements, presumably to trick parents into thinking something vaguely educational is going on. Then the same thing happens in the next issue. And the next. And…

I don’t want to give the impression that Haney has no ideas. He’s still got bunches of ideas. In one bizarre sequence, Metamorpho plays football against a bunch of element robots; in another, he battles a renegade shape-shifting-building constructed by the gloriously named Edifice K. Bulwark.

The problem, though, is that all the ideas are contained within the same basic narrative structure. The Haney Brave and the Bold issues were great in large part because of genre slippage; Batman kept finding himself unexpectedly in the middle of a noir with Black Canary playing the femme fatale; or horror with Bats himself playing the possessed psychotic antagonist; or politicized sci-fi with the Metal Men in the middle of a robot uprising; or of a boxing story or a war story or whatever. Batman himself veered erratically from friendly crossing guard to murderous vigilante to incompetent doofus to monomaniacal whacko, sometimes in the course of a couple of pages. The strain of writing stories for such a various series of different characters made Haney chuck even minimal vestiges of consistency. He needed to get Batman and one other DC character together in the same story; in the interest of that, he could do anything.

But Metamorpho’s a bit different. The character himself shifts through various polymorphous physical permutations, but his personality is always the same; altuistic, courageous, mildly whiny do-gooder. And the plots, too, stay within definite bounds — superhero adventure narratives. Which are fairly entertaining, but never attain the revelatory insanity of Haney’s best work.

So part of what’s going on is that Haney himself just seems more inspired in his Brave and the Bold scripts. This is an intuition confirmed by the fact that the Brave and Bold’s included in the Showcase volume — a team up with the Metal Men and a team up with Batman — are more focused, and more successful, than almost anything else in the book.

Another reason that the Metamorpho material seems weak, though, is the art. Ramona Fradon, who drew most of the early issues, isn’t horrible or anything — in fact, her Saturday-morning cartoon approach is charming and fits neatly with Metamorpho’s goofy powers.

Despite its virtues, though, the art doesn’t have a whole lot of narrative drive from panel to panel. Instead, you tend to jump from image to image, with Haney’s text gushing along. For example, the tension of the chase in the sequence above is mostly squandered by the wild swings in perspective and camera position. You’re looking down so you can barely see our hero, then you’re right beside him…and then all of a sudden you pull out and swing around and the missiles going through him. It’s energetic and charming, but not particularly suspenseful…and over a whole comic, it ends up seeming like one damn thing after another, rather than like a story with any direction.

On the other hand, here’s a scene from the Haney/Aparo Brave and the Bold #101, guest starring Metamorpho (included in B&B Showcase #2).

Aparo stays at basically the same perspective for both panels, heightening the spinning impact of that fist as Metamorpho slugs Java.

Or in this scene:

The perspective shift here is more like that in the Fradon image, but the deft use of speedlines, the positioning of the sound effect scream, and the real suggestion of terror on Sapphire’s face makes the sequence compelling and kinetic in a way Fradon rarely manages. As a result of the stronger narrative line Aparo puts down, Haney’s nutty ideas (a calcium crash couch? what?) seem like genuinely incongruous flights of insanity, rather than simply woozy meanderings. Similarly, Sal Tripiani adds immeasurably to Haney’s script with this hysterical Kirby pastiche from Metamorpho #16 (the one about the Thunderer).

And in the last story in the Metamorpho volume, Mike Sekowsky’s rubbery Bat-Hulk gives the action a squickily solid plasticity, which gives solid form to the utter wrongness of Haney’s writing.

Yes, I said “Bat-Hulk.” I do love Haney.

Last week, Marguerite Van Cook had a post about the problem of assigning credit in the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby team. In comments, Alan Moore was discussed too. For me, I tend to feel like Alan Moore’s work is defined in the greater part by his writing; the story in an Alan Moore comic is not likely to be ruined by bad art — in part because Moore is good at choosing collaborators, and in part because his scripts control pacing and narrative to a very high degree. On the other hand, while I like Lee’s writing okay, it seems clear that he’s extremely reliant on his artists for plotting, pacing, ideas, and tone.

Haney it seems like is somewhere in the middle. His writing is instantly recognizable; nobody else is going to write, “Rex Mason — the Real McCoy; Simon Stagg — the Real McGenius; Sapphire Stagg — the Real McGirl; Java — the Real McApehead”. But at the same time, he doesn’t control transitions and space on the page the way Moore does, and as a result his scripts feel quite different depending on the artist he works with. In particular, it seems like he needs someone to provide a narrative backbone that he can riff off of. Nick Cardy and Jim Aparo gave him that on Brave and Bold, and perhaps that in turn inspired him to some of his best writing. The artwork on Metamorpho fits less well, and so the stories suffer too.

Die Hard, the Last Man

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Die Hard (1988) presents itself as a movie sympathetic to feminism. The protagonist, John McClane (Bruce Willis), is estranged from his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) essentially because she moved to Los Angeles to take a high-powered corporate job. John, a New York cop, can’t handle her success. The film takes care to show that John’s attitude is ridiculous and stupid — John’s limo driver from the airport calls him on it; Holly handily wins their big onscreen argument which John assholishly starts; and even John himself admits that he’s in the wrong (“very mature, John,” he mutters out loud to himself after Holly stomps out the door.) Throughout the film, Holly is shown to be a competent and successful manager, and it is never suggested that she should, or will, give up her career for her husband.

Moreover, Die Hard goes out of its way to ridicule and reject machismo. During the terrorist/hostage standoff that takes up most of the film, the cops and FBI continually act like impulsive dicks — much the way, in fact, we first see John acting in his argument with Holly. The cops and feds all are much more interested in being, as John terms them, “macho assholes” — swaggering around at the top of the pecking order, impressing their male compadres, and kicking terrorist butt. The parodically homosocial FBI agents Agent Johnson and Agent Johnson let out adolescent yawps as they fly around in their helicopter, boasting to each other how they can “live with” 25% hostage casualties. Their cockiness is presented as both idiocy and sin, and the film gleefully executes them for it. McClane survives precisely because he’s more cautious and more intelligent; a feminized action-hero who constantly exhorts himself to “think! think!” before unleashing the inevitable uber-violence.

But despite the critique of traditional action-hero masculinity, Die Hard is in the end extremely ambivalent about the idea of autonomous women. Holly wins the argument with John — but the result of that victory is not that John acquiesces. Instead, the result is that Holly and all her coworkers are immediately captured and held hostage, allowing John to cast aside the role of idiotic, defeated husband, and adopt the much more congenial and testosterone-fueled persona of heroic savior.

Coincidentally, as the plot unfolds, all those against whom John might be presumed to harbor a grudge are systematically and efficiently punished. Holly’s coworkers, of course, are all terrorized. More particularly, Holly’s Japanese boss Mr. Takagi — a fatherly executive whose warmth, manners, and calm all contrast painfully with McClane’s bad temper and working-class manners — is shot through the head by the terrorists. Later, a slick coke-snorting dealmaker who had earlier hit on Holly is similarly dispatched. The terrorists are then, not so much John’s enemies as they are his avatars — the catspaws which eliminate the other men in Holly’s life so that McClane can sweep her off to renewed bliss at the end of the film.

In the way that its feminist trappings concealing male apocalyptic fantasies, Die Hard reminded me strongly of Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s “Y: The Last Man.” In that series, too, a relationship crisis (in this case Yorick’s breakup with his girlfriend) is interrupted by unexpected violence which eliminates potential rivals (in this case a sudden disease which kills *all* rivals, as all men on earth but Yorick keel over.) And, like Die Hard, “Y: The Last Man” presents itself as feminist while actually treating the egalitarian relationships, with the concomitant possibility of rejection, as an occasion for anxious and protracted male posturing of a very familiar kind.

I go back and forth on whether I prefer Die Hard or Y. On the one hand, Y is clearly a lot smarter about gender politics; on the other hand, I find the straightforward male violence of Die Hard a good bit less off-putting than the SNAG self-pity that permeates Y, especially at the end. In either case, though, I think the parallels between them are pretty telling. Men, it seems, in different mediums and over several decades, have a tendency to turn feminism into a male growth experience. With guns. Or, in other words, don’t trust the patriarchs, even when they say they love you.

Overthinking Things 8/29/2011

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All Roads Lead to Thermae Romae

When most people think of Japan, they have a relatively limited cultural palette from which to chose. Samurai, sumo, wacky mascots, big-eyed anime characters, shrines…and baths. Japanese baths are, to many Westerners, an exotic mix of hedonistic luxury, voyeuristic public nudity and, (because we all watched James Clavell’s Shogun mini-series when we were young,) an indication of how civilized the Japanese are.

But the Japanese are hardly the only culture to revel in the various joys of bath-taking. One of the most famous cultures to embrace and refine the architecture of bathing was the Romans. Roman bath structures have been found everywhere the Romans themselves held sway. At their peak of power, this meant that Roman bath-taking was a cultural relic being spread over huge swathes of Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa and AsiaMinor.

 

Roman baths are amazingly sophisticated things. In the north of Britain I visited a bath substructure that had survived many millennia, more invasions than you can imagine and was still in good enough shape that you could see how water was brought in, heated, circulated and drained. I find Roman baths amazing and fascinating. And, clearly, so does Yamazaki Mari, creator of one the strangest, yet most charming manga I have ever read, Thermae Romae.

Thermae Romae is set in 129 AD, during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, when the Roman empire was at relative peace, under an Emperor who saw building and economic expansion as a better use of Roman money than war. Lucius Modestus is an architect of baths. His friend Marcus is a sculptor and they are both moderately successful men. Lucius is young enough that his reputation has room to grow.

While Lucius and Marcus are relaxing in a public bath, Lucius finds himself drawn under the water, through a water tunnel deep underground, only to rise out of the water once again…in a public bathhouse in 21st century Japan. If this seems wackadoodle to you, that’s only because it is. And it makes a rollicking good yarn every time.

In every chapter, Lucius is confronted by a conceptual problem – how to make an outside bath, how to create a better atmosphere in a public bath, how to please a wealthy, but aesthetically challenged patron, how to create a bath for soldiers in camp with no running water? And in each chapter, Lucius dives under the water, finds inspiration in a Japanese bathing concept and returns to Rome where he blows the Romans out of the water, as it were, with his amazing ideas.

In between chapters, Yamazaki discusses and shows photos of actual ruins of Roman baths that contain these concepts – everything from posters of popular gladiators on the wall to makeshift bathing contraptions in military camps.

The art in Thermae Romae is part of its charm. Lucius is drawn to resemble a Roman statue of a mature man. Rome itself is rendered with accuracy and sophistication.

Japanese characters are drawn with slight caricature, but recognizably to Western eyes as “Asian,” which sets this manga apart from the big-eyes crowd.

The art is attractive, but what keeps me reading is the fact that Lucius is a fantastic character. As his experiences in Japan become more normal to him, he begins to seek out the stimulation and bring home more ideas. But he’s still human and his fame and fortune comes at a price – he loses his wife, who is tired of being left behind. (And those rumors that Emperor Hadrian favors him aren’t helping any either….)

Thermae Romae runs in Enterbrain’s Comic Beam, a magazine that has the tagline “…a MAGAZINE for the COMIC FREAKS” in English on every cover. This comic is for a sophisticated, adult manga-reading audience. Comic Beam is most notable here in the west for publishing Wandering Son by Takako Shimura, currently published by Fantagraphics. Appreciation for Yamazaki’s eclectic story is not limited to comic freaks, she has won the 3rd Manga Taisho Award and the 14th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize for this work. A live-action movie has just been announced for this title, as well…although it looks like they are going with an all-Japanese cast, which will dilute the visual impact of the story. The visual contrast between Ancient Rome and the Romans and Modern Japan and  the Japanese is the one of the main strengths of the art.

Yamazaki’s story, characters and art combine to create a completely unique, complex and fascinating story. At three volumes so far , Thermae Romae is the kind of manga it’s worth learning Japanese to be able to read

 

Utilitarian Review 8/27/11

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Sean Michael Robinson on Choose Your Own Adventure books.

I discuss Rienhold Neibuhr and the egotism of pragmatism.

Erica Friedman on why she loves anime and manga, and the relation of both to Japanese culture.

I talk about the Hernandez Bros, Kirby, Barefoot Gen, and other disappointments in summer reading. A long rambling but entertaining comments thread ensues.

Marguerite Van Cook on Kirby, Lee, class, text, and credit.

I argue that schools should not be prisons.

Qiana Whitted on Blues Comics.

Interviews with J.R. Brown, Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, and Shaenon Garrity on the effect of Borders closing on manga.

Vom Marlowe on Monet and gardening.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I talk about Sly Stone’s disappointing new album.

Also at Splice, I review the mediocre Troll Hunter.

Other Links

Dan Nadel smacks down Grant Morrison.

Jog on his selections for the best comics poll.

And Boing Boing linked our best comics poll. People in comments hate Peanuts. Who knew such sacrilege was possible?

Waterlilies: Paintings in Context

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A couple of weeks ago, I returned to my roots.

As a kid, I grew up in an art-poor community.   Mom didn’t believe in letting us watch much TV.  And the local libraries were typical of the bible belt–big on religious stories, low on art books.

Mom had a few books, though, and if I was very, very good, I was allowed to sit under the window, in the good light, with a huge art book in my lap and carefully page through it.  Many were the rainy days spent that way, in the VM’s childhood.

Many were the days, and many were the paintings I grew to love.

Now, we didn’t have much money.  Mom’s art books were mostly Time Life books bought at garage sales.  The World of Leonardo, The World of Cezanne, The World of Vermeer.  They brought a lot of joy to my life–their slightly off-color, overly orange and green reproductions with their odd smell and the grainy texture and the slight smeariness.  Today I know they were done cheaply, but at the time, they amazed me and moved me.

We had many late night conversations, my mom and I, when it was too hot to sleep and the world was quiet.  We would sit in the kitchen and eat icy-cold oranges from the frig and enjoy them sweet segment by sweet segment while she told me about these strange painters.  Cezanne, who loved trees.  Van Gogh, whose mind was beautiful but a bit broken.  Degas, who drew the most amazing horses and the most tired dancers.  Marie Cassat, who first taught me that women could paint, too.  Monet, who painted haystacks at every time of day and night, just to catch the light.

I understood that people made art.  I’d watched my mom make contour drawings.  I’d seen her use watercolors and I’d played with them myself.  (I’d even experimented with the smelly oils from the paint by numbers that my grandmother gave me with great disapproval from my mom, who told me I was not at all required to paint within the lines, or even depict the picture as stated.  Naturally, I changed the cheerful kittens to glorious horses and then ran out of gray paint.  But I digress.)

I understood, as I say, that people made art.  That they put pigment on paper or paint on canvas and so created a piece of art.  But what I experienced as art were…small things.

Most of them were reproductions the size of an adult’s hand.  Many were reproductions the size of my own childish hand.

I’d been to the local museum before, to see the knights in their armor when my brother was interested in swords and Camelot, and we’d gone on school trips to see those rooms full of fancy furniture or old relics dug up from the ground.  And sometimes we’d even gone to rooms where the paintings were.  But the paintings I saw were, well, mostly boring pictures of dead guys in black suits and funny hats, looking like they had a bad stomach ache and never laughed.

So when mom took me to see Monet’s Waterlilies, all three, together, it was like a whole new world.

These were paintings as big as trucks.

Bigger!  Bigger than trucks.  And it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen.

Those paintings took up so much space it was like the whole world had gone blue and green and full of light and weedy flowers and if you got close you could see all these brushstrokes.

The brushstrokes were a revelation.

Up until then, I’d never known that you could make a painting that actually showed brushstrokes.  I mean, in a reproduction that’s 2″ by 3″, even the boldest Van Gogh looks like it leaped out of a head fully formed.  But these waterlilies now, they were….different.

They were so big, so grand, so loud, in a watery garden kind of way.

And they didn’t even have people in them!  No lines, either!  Just colors.  But they were so beautiful.  Like walking under the sea should be.

Those paintings moved me and touched me and somehow imprinted on me the idea that it was OK to let the world see that a real hand was involved in making the image, that it was OK to paint as big as you needed, and that art could be a little messy, a little undomesticated.

I’d been drawing even before then, but it had always been hard for me to create any kind of link between the Big Real Art in the books and the carefully crafted pencil and crayon work I made on endless sheets of lined notebook paper.

Years passed, as years do.  I learned more about art.  I visited the museum many times after that, and mom provided me with more supplies so that I graduated from crayons to markers and conte and watercolors. I learned how to check art books out from the adult section of the library, and so learned about more modern artists.   When I had the chance to take a class in high school on art, I leaped at it.  To my initial joy, one of my teachers was an expert on the Impressionists.  She told us that there were three qualities that they had: they were interested in light, they never used lines, and they did not use the color black, ever.

She was furious when I helpfully (I thought) brought in a library book where I’d carefully marked all the paintings that had black.

I ended up barely passing that class, but my love of the art never diminished.  Mom and I got to see the touring Courtauld Collection when it came, but nothing quite surpassed that first rush of awe when I came across those huge three paintings all together, big as the world.

My life grew and changed some more, but weaving through it all was this love of art.  I went back to the museum many times, seeing the single waterlily painting on its lonesome, seeing other art works, falling in love with different pieces, and going home to try my own things, time and again.

In the thirty years since those three paintings were together, I picked up a love of Caravaggio and a fondness for black and white pen work.  Something else changed.

I came to understand something more about these paintings, from an utterly different direction.  I’d heard, in that god-awful class so many years ago, that Impressionists were obsessed with light.  And they were.

But for two decades now, I’ve been not just an artist, but a gardener.  I know the shift that comes at the turn of mid-August, where the high hot sun goes to the right a bit, shading more and burning less, even though the temperatures are high.  I know the dawn cold light that creeps from the East.  I know the warm, sleepy light of dusk as it moseys back down beneath the crown of the world.

Winter’s brightness, pale lemon and cold.

So different from the mellow, long light of Summer.

And I know the feel of dirt under my nails, the endless sweat on the back of my neck, bent to sow seeds or trim, to weed or loosen soil.  The way the toads hang in the shade under clay pots, the chirrup of crickets and the long endless slide up and down drone of cicadas.

It’s a world I can slip into, free from thought, and just be.  Taking in endless variations of the color green, satisfied completely by the visual beauty of a mixed patch of double-dug earth planted with chards and zinnias and silver beet and kale and cottage marigolds.

Picture of a garden

I have not only basked in its beauty, I have run out into it, bare feet slipping on wet leaves, yelling at the top of my voice and shaking my fist, a five foot four whilwind in silly pajamas, chasing off the rabbits from my tomatoes.

I’ve fought slugs with little tins of beer, I’ve stood ankle deep in water where none should be, I’ve planted and ripped out and walked and walked and walked, through all the seasons.  I know my plants in ice, in snow, in the first green blush of returning spring, as well as the glory of summer.

So when I went back to the Water Lilies, I was a different person.

The museum had gone to considerable effort to make it a good experience.  It’s not easy to host a forty-five foot long, fifteen feet tall triptych worth millions, but they did a lovely job.  The wing where it was housed is the ultra-modern add-on, very sleek, all white flat paint and long, sweeping graduated floors.  Frameless art, big windows, quiet thermostat controlled air.

They’d given the Water Lilies their own space and in front of them, they’d grouped benches for seating, upholstered in gray and almost rock-shaped.  The lighting was soft, but focused.  I took my mom and we went on a quiet weekday.  It was possible to sit and look and just enjoy, as if you were at a real pond.  You can see what the setup looks like here.

With all this lead up, perhaps you’re hoping for explosions! Revelations!  Amazement!

But no. Or at least, not of the exciting kind.

I sat down on a pebble-shaped bench and looked at the huge paintings in front me.  So blue and so lush.  It really did feel a bit like stepping into another world.

As I gazed at them, I found my breathing slowing, and I stretched out my bad leg and let out a long, comfortable sigh.  My eye traveled up the painting, to the left, up to the corner, to the right, and back down again, never feeling the need to focus in on only one spot, never feeling the impulse to stop looking, just moving my gaze naturally from place to place.

A bit like I would look on my own garden back home.

Formally, the water lilies are a little off.  The perspective is almost as if from a bridge looking down, but the eye moves up to what should be a sky, but never is.  But I couldn’t care less.  For me, it feels only as if I’m inside the garden.  Feeling it around me, the way my own clayey soil feels sticky and scratchy under my bare feet.

The context that existed in real time–the stark white and gray paint, the smell of controlled air and mingled perfumes, the soft squeak of guard shoes on marble–slipped away.  Instead, I was in a garden, caught in a patch of sleepy shade with the certain knowledge, brought by the tickling breeze and my inner senses, that outside the shade would be hot sun.  The smell of wet, brackish greenery, rotting and decomposing in the summer.  The soft drone of the ever-singing cicadas, nature’s orchestra that serenades late summers and leaves its empty carapaces as bodily echo.

I sat for a long time, content.

*

There are other contexts for these paintings.

I know that the Water Lilies I saw exhibited were only one of the many water lilies Monet painted.  The Museum of Modern Art in New York has another triptych which is even permanently displayed together.  There are beautiful books about the paintings, the techniques, the influences, the painter himself.

The gardens at Giverny are open to visitors, and a good friend of mine visited there just two weeks ago.  She shared the pictures she took (one and two) and I was able to drink in the bright flowers and even note, with a gardener’s eye, the invasives that were going to be giving them trouble in another few years.

I can use an online web tool to view the painting in great detail.  I can use my academic research tools to find out detailed critiques and formal investigations into meaning, technique, history.  I can buy as many books with reproductions of his paintings as I’d like or get myself poster-sized reproductions to hang on my own wall.

In a few years, the parts of triptych I saw will return to their homes, and I’ll be able to visit our panel, as I might visit an old friend.

Monet painted them in his studio together and kept working on them for years until his death in 1926.  I don’t know that he’d have particularly imagined them in that huge, modern white building.  But I think he’d have been pleased that they were together and that they brought about not just critical insights, but also that indescribable summer outside feeling, sleepy and peaceful, soft sky and wet marshy greens.

Nor I do think he’d mind that when I want to recapture that feeling, I might wander outside into my own garden to feel the mud squelch under my toes, and sit under a heavy old oak, and watch the breeze play games with the flowers.