Non-Canonical

Posted on April 24, 2013 by mouse

The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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Black Metal Fandom

In the framing of the documentary “Until the Light Takes Us,” the pheonomenon of Black Metal was born and died in the same instant as the publication of sensational reports in the Norwegian media of the activities of Varg Vikerness and the supposed “inner circle” of musicians and agitators retroactively called the second wave of black metal. The aesthetic and thematic trappings of the world-wide scene to come, including, paradoxically, the adherent reverence to the supposed ideals of the original inner circle who despise and disavow all those who follow them, are cribbed almost entirely from these (mostly false) accounts of Satanism, Anarchism, and (unfortunately true) pointless grisly murder.

Punk Rock died in Los Angeles in 1986, according to some sources. It emerges, Elvis-like, on the underside of skateboards coasting across uneven gravel mall parking lots, or in communal houses in the suburbs of Rangoon, and in endlessly concurrent music documentaries about the life and death of Punk Rock, year after year.

Disco died when white people started making it and other white people got real mad. The whole scenario is pretty embarrassing in general. I’m glad I hadn’t been born at the time.

&The children’s television program My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic something something bronies blah blah siiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Superheroes never die. They just get new writers who sometimes kill them. But later, new writers – and who knows?!

My favorite manga should have ended like, ten volumes agooooo. It just doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere.

***

What bugs me about semi-autobiographical works is that an author can always ascribe the lousy parts of their stories to the fixed continuity of the supposed “autobio” part. Jonathan Lethem’s toad of a novel “Fortress of Solitude” sets its story against the backdrop of Brooklyn in the waning of the 20^th century. So it makes perfect narrative sense that after the dissolution of the possibility and wonder of the childhood friendship of the book’s two heroes, Mingus gets chewed up and his talent suppressed by the intertwined terrors of drug addiction and the criminal justice system as his neighborhood is gentrified in real time. Dylan, the more privileged of the two, more or less becomes a dried-up old turd from the moment he begins to monetize his passions, to value things over people and to vaporize his yen for music and culture into the loveless prison of obsessive collection and curation. The fact that the former character is black and the latter white is no accident, it’s just fate. Too bad the semi-autobiographical author was only semi-interested in designing a universe with less banal systematic cruelty along with the addition of magical rings of power.

***

Being a fan draws a lot of people into happiness and/or success as creators in comics. But as fandom becomes more visible and defined in our consumer culture, a vocal following can blur the line between fan/participant and master and enforce rules that no one can remember writing in the first place. Just like the lions eat the antelope and the lions turn to a grass lot which gets built up into a boutique for silk-screened baby onesies and the antelope get pushed out of their neighborhoods by rent hikes, whole artforms can be scuttled by the arbitrary curation of its fans when the joy of discovery becomes the rote drudgery of collection.

I didn’t mention furries in this essay-ette, so it’s not canon.

“Don’t call me a fucking BRONY, ok?”

A Review of Reinhard Kleist’s Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Marc Sobel

The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.

A version of this review first appeared at The Comics Journal.
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“A comic for me is something between a book and a movie. It can do all the good things in both media. If it is well done, you can even hear the sound of the music.” – Reinhard Kleist

On the opening pages of Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness, German cartoonist Reinhard Kleist’s English language debut, a young, possibly strung-out Johnny Cash guns down an innocent man, then sits down and smokes a cigarette as the man fades away beside him. It’s a striking interpretation of one of Cash’s most famous lyrics from “Folsom Prison Blues” (“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”) and it sets the tone for the rest of the book.

That tone, of course, is darkness, and as Michel Faber points out in his excellent review in the Guardian, “Kleist’s imagination is fired by darkness.” This is evident not only in the stark black and white images that saturate the book in shadows (Faber refers to it as a “220-page portfolio of inky expressionism”), but even in the choice of a subtitle – Will Oldham’s “I See a Darkness,” a song Cash covered late in his career.

Rather than a straight-forward biography, Kleist’s artistic goal is to capture the emotional experience of Johnny Cash’s music in a visual medium. In an interview with Paul Gravett, Kleist explained that, “I wanted to give the reader a feeling of what I had in mind when I listened to his last albums.” These “last albums” he’s referring to are the legendary American Recordings, Cash’s final six releases (a box set of four additional discs worth of music were also posthumously released) which featured quietly intense covers of some of the most haunting songs ever written, recorded in Cash’s personal studio with producer Rick Rubin. These records were responsible for Cash’s return to the summit of the music industry late in his career, and for introducing the country music legend to a whole new generation of music fans.

Rather than “make music visible in a comic book,” what Kleist actually accomplishes is adapting the underlying stories in some of Cash’s most famous songs into mini narratives. Thus, interspersed throughout are cartoonish episodes featuring Cash, a dashing young comic book hero, seeking revenge against his long-lost father for naming him Sue, or foolishly getting himself killed for “taking his guns to town” despite his mother’s pleas. These mini-strips work fine in terms of illustrating the underlying stories of each song’s lyrics, and do a nice job of breaking the book up into sections, providing an overall sense of structure, but they lack any kind of noticeable pacing, panel rhythm, or other formal technique that actually conveys the sensation of music in the silent medium of comics.

But Kleist is not an experimenter. The action is largely confined to traditional panels and the page layouts rarely venture outside of familiar grid structures. Kleist himself admits that “I’m not a big comic expert! When I am thinking of a storyline or a scene, my first thoughts are like movie scenes and then I try to translate them in the form of comics by using things like camera movements or cuts and so on. That is why my books often have a more cinematic approach and don’t play so much with the possibilities of comics like other comic artists do, like Art Spiegelman for example.”

What makes Cash stand out from the pack, however, is Kleist’s stunning brushwork. Time and time again throughout the book he captures, in swaths of black ink and gray tones, the essence of coolness that permeated Cash’s persona. Kleist clearly studied hundreds of images of Cash and does a great job recreating his subtle mannerisms (e.g. his smirking half-smile, his pompadour hair that always seemed just a little unkempt, the way he played his guitar with his shoulders hunched, etc.).

There are also several wonderful scenes in which the artwork transcends reality for the sake of a visual metaphor. The most stunning is when Cash, sequestered in his home in order to cleanse his system of prescription drugs, endures a profound out-of-body experience. Kleist’s beautiful illustrations show a disembodied nervous system rising from Cash like a phoenix from the ashes, then hovering above him, the visual embodiment of his addiction and a powerful symbol of his spiritual death and rebirth.

In his review at Comics Bulletin, Jason Sacks described a similar scene which demonstrates Kleist’s skill with a brush. “At the nadir of his drug addiction, [Cash] wanders blithely into a cave with just a flashlight that’s low on batteries. Using blacks almost as a second character in the scene, Kleist literally shows the blackness that has come to envelop Cash’s soul at that moment in time. When Cash literally and figuratively emerges into the light, that light seems to shine straight from Heaven–a deeply healing light that reflects Cash’s emergence to finding some measure of peace.”

For all its critical acclaim (Cash won the 2007 Sondermann Prize and Germany’s top comics prize, the Max und Moritz Award, in 2006), Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness reads like an expanded version of the 2005 Hollywood blockbuster, Walk the Line. The book deepens certain elements that the movie glossed over, but rarely explores beyond the carefully cultivated image of “the Man in Black.” Like the film, Kleist focuses extensively on the Folsom Prison concert in 1968, devoting nearly a third of the book to this one event; however, unlike the movie, Kleist does a much better job capturing the tension and emotions of the day. “I think the Folsom Prison concert was one of the most exciting concerts in the history of music,” Kleist told Shaun Manning, “so that was an idea I wanted to put into the book in a large sequence. I could have done like they did in the movie, where there’s just a short sequence of the concert, but I wanted to tell the whole story of the concert.”

One of Kleist’s best embellishments was the addition of Glenn Sherley, the little known Folsom prisoner who penned “Greystone Chapel,” as the story’s primary narrator. The inclusion of Sherley, both for his relevance to the legendary concert, but also as an everyman voice for the legion of fans who felt Johnny Cash’s music spoke to them, grounds Cash’s larger-than-life story and offers a side of the man that the movie glossed over – the kind-hearted gentleman who cared deeply about his fans.

Following the trajectory of his music career, after the Folsom concert Kleist propels the story forward several decades, picking up where Cash, now an elderly man, has begun working with producer Rick Rubin on the American Recordings. This final section, although brief, allows Kleist to move past the “man in black” persona, to an extent, and show Cash’s human side.

Finally, the story ends as it began, with an adaptation of one of Cash’s songs, this time, the classic “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” the somber elegy of a cowboy left to face his demons alone. As appendices, the book also includes a ten-page “Cash Gallery” featuring gorgeous painted portraits of Cash and a bibliography of sources and song lyrics used.

As a biography, Cash is, at best, unbalanced. Like the movie, there are large gaps of time that are simply glossed over or ignored (Kleist transitions from the Folsom Prison concert in 1968 to the American Recordings, the first volume of which appeared in record shops in 1994, skipping nearly three decades). Of course, these gaps are intentional. Kleist was more interested in re-telling the legend of Johnny Cash than the complete mundane facts of his life. Kleist’s book is a compelling read – the story is boiled down to its dramatic essence – however, these omissions also leave glaring holes in the narrative. For example, there are few references to Cash’s devout Catholicism, his Cherokee heritage, no mention of his gospel recordings or wonderful children’s album, and the only time we see Cash as a family man is when he clashes with his ex-wife Vivian over their deteriorating marriage. There’s also very little about his loving, decades-long second marriage to June Carter or their children. In pursuit of the myth, Kleist’s “outlaw-worshipping spin” on Cash’s life falls far short of the real man behind the music.

Of course, none of this negates the fact that Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness is a very satisfying read, particularly for fans of the singer’s music. At its core, Faber argues that the book is “…a work of visual art and, as such, arguably has no obligation to be true or comprehensive or fair or any of the other things that we might demand of a biography.” In other words, it is enough just to gaze at Kleist’s beautiful renderings of some of the key events of Cash’s life. But the curious reader looking for a more rounded and insightful portrayal of the singer’s life might be better served by the many biographies (Kleist himself recommends Franz Dobler’s The Beast in Me) or his multi-volume autobiography.

Phantom Music

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Kailyn Kent

The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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Forgive me– as if to make this piece as dilettantish as possible, I am going to bring film into a discussion of comics and music.

The first pages of New Treasure Island by Sakai Shichima and Tezuka Osamu, much praised for its cinematic quality

It’s seems to me that when a comic’s flow of panels and pages works ‘musically,’ it also behaves cinematically. The artist’s shifting of perspective and the rhythm of the ‘cuts’ echo filmic sequences that are usually accompanied by a score. Sometimes, when I come across these sequences, it feels like phantom music– like a phantom limb– underscores the comic. It’s a struggle to read along to, or to figure out how the melody goes. Going back to re-read or dwelling on an image too long disrupts the phantom score irrevocably, and forfeits some of the emotional impact of reading the comic. As a teenager, I tried unsuccessfully to hum along or deejay background music while I read comics, hoping to discover total emotional absorption.

Today I better appreciate comic’s more complicated relationship with time and space. I believe I was stupidly hoping to watch– or listen– to comics as opposed to reading them. I wanted to be passively taken in, when I had to stake my own way through a comic book. If watching a film is like having a dream, reading comics is like lucidly dreaming– there’s an exchange of vibrancy and intensity for control and self-awareness.

Cinematic pacing still confuses me. It’s found a natural home in many comics, yet it is a very anti-Greenbergian hold-over from another medium. Cinematic pacing does not accentuate the qualities that are most fundamental to comics, and instead channels comics’ unique handling of time, space and design into straightforward, uncomplicated narrativity. That’s not to say some overlap hasn’t occurred– cartoonists often work as storyboard artists. I don’t think cinematic pacing should be avoided, or that it poses a threat to ‘native’ comic pacing. But I do feel that the relationship of comics and film is worth examining, especially as the value of comics is increasingly understood in terms of their adaptation into film– where the story is finally told with real-life music.

I’ll clarify what I mean by cinematic comics. Comics are cinematic when they follow established film and cinematographic formulas of conveying time and space in a dramatic, rhythmic, and unambiguously linear fashion. I am also tempted to add ‘decompressed,’ yet some film conventions are highly compressed, (montages without establishing shots, for example.)

Not all films follow the same cinematographic formulas, and the great ones complicate or invent them. Some formulas are grammatical, like how a bird’s eye view/pan/combination is used to introduce a story, as in American Beauty or Blade Runner. An easily identifiable variation, like Citizen Kane’s No Trespassing sign, is copied intentionally through homages and parodies, and if it becomes prevalent enough, it’s recycled unintentionally. Another example are the fantasy battleground scenes that flooded theaters after the run of Lord of the Rings. These formulas are most often accompanied by music to heighten the emotional effect, and the style of the music is included in the formula.

There are many stirring music-less film sequences, yet the connection between music and emotion in narrative is pretty well established, (and necessarily predates the term melo-drama.) To keep things as simply and as overly-generalized as possible, I will vaguely refer to commercial moviemaking scores from the last fifty or so years– think John Williams, Thoman Newman, Elmer Burnstein, Joe Hisaishi and Howard Shore.

Cinematic comics isn’t a discreet category as much as a collection of traits. Very cinematic comics will more frequently carry more of these traits. Panel proportions offer one example. A panel’s size usually determines the time a reader will stare at it. In cinematic sequences, the panel size will echo the legnth of a cut. Smaller panels dispaly a smaller fraction of time, which is not always the case in comics where the page’s design, or other criteria, are more important than the linearity or pacing of the reading. Small-size, low-content panels allow the eye to ‘bounce’ across the gutter, like a script’s ‘beat,’ without twisting the amount of time the panel naturally represents.

Non Cinematic– Panel size determined by design, not by the length of the time it represents. From Adam Hine’s Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One

Non Cinematic– The third panel is small, but designed to be dwelled upon for some time. From Invisible Hinge by Jim Woodring

Cinematic — Panels represent one cut, and small wordless panels work like ‘beats’
From Bodyworld, by Dash Shaw

Cinematic — Panels represent one cut, the size suggests the length of time represented, and small wordless panels work like ‘beats’ From Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together by Bryan Lee O’Malley

In a cinematic comic, a panel’s text to image ratio is usually small, and corresponds to how much dialogue belongs inside one ‘cut,’ or between moments of physical acting. Reading the panel aloud, this is often under thirty seconds. A preponderance of textless panels showcase ‘beats’ of the character’s wordless performances, and occasionally more panographic panels and splash pages demonstrate setting or spectacle. These are sometimes an exception to the rule: splash panels and pages can be three to twelve times larger than an average panel, yet unless there is text they don’t necessarily take that much longer to read. Nevertheless, the moment depicted is mentally understood to last longer, and that it eludes to a build-up and follow-through that wasn’t drawn. Larger, more detailed panels with multiple speech bubbles work like a ‘pan,’ where the camera scrolls across a larger field of vision.

The cartoonist’s perspective choices share commercial filmmaking’s desire for clear communication. If the character is about to step on a rake, a successful cartoonist will most often show the ‘build-up’ and ‘event’(approaching and stepping on the rake,) within the larger environment, and only afterwards show a close-up of the character’s reaction, etc.

The cinematic comic’s cuts are determined largely by dialogue, and by fight-scene and slapstick choreography, and when there is neither, by the comic’s internal rhythm. In film, this rhythm is determined by the score, which needs to match, the pacing of the talking/fighting/comedy scenes as well. As long as the cartoonist obeys cinematic conventions, the more rigorously rhythmic the pacing, the more strongly a phantom score can adhere to it.

Certain comics rhythms/formulas recall certain filmic rhythms/formulas, and by association, inadvertently acquire phantom film scores. Cartoonists are a little helpless– while a filmmaker could pick an iconic or untraditional song to accompany a sequence, a cinematic comic only triggers a super-conventional-hodgepodge-memory of what song ‘should’ go there. Friends hanging out on a summer afternoon demands calls for a low-key, chirpy groove. A troop’s noble suicide mission demands the Lord of the Rings bombast. A sad remembrance cues violins. And if the comic’s pacing is cinematic enough to strongly suggest a score, its absence is distracting. The tingling of a phantom limb is most often painful.

In conclusion, a meandering examination of some cinematic comics:

Scott Pilgrim!

Music plays an even larger role in videogames than it does in film. And when I think of a ‘cinematically paced’ comic, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s videogame-infused Scott Pilgrim series immediately comes to mind. Coincidentally, the characters play, discuss and listen to a lot of music. What does Sex Bob-omb sound like?

The books toggle with several cinematic genres and conventions. O’Malley showcases a playful mastery of anime and martial-arts cinematoraphic formulas. At two points the comic frames itself with a few vox pops, but I guess that could be as much of a homage to Dan Clowe’s Deathray as Boondock Saints or Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Most impressively, Scott Pilgrim uses hyper-condensed styles of cinematic storytelling, as when a whole relationship is traced over a series of pages. As long as filmmakers establish iconic characters and settings, audiences can easily follow a scattered montage. In comics, the specificity of the background often sacrifices the clarity of the characters, and a drawn interpretations of places are often unfamiliar and stylized. It’s a testament to O’Malley’s craft that this scene (below) is so effortless to follow. O’Malley uses this technique at several points in the series– pointedly never for athletic training ala Rocky, but always for relationships.

From Scott Pilgrim Versus The Infinite Sadness

Reading comics, I’ve often felt that manga reads more cinematically than American comics, because of the smaller text to panel ratio. I don’t have any hard evidence for this, but manga is thought to be a major influence on the development of decompressed and widescreen comics.

Read Right to Left:

From Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2: Volume 3

From Daisuke Igarashi’s Children of the Sea #8

Akira, (the quintessential decompressed comic,) and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind are slightly higher brow (and arguably Westernized) examples, and coincidentally are better known for their film adaptations. As comics, both read like gorgeously realized, meticulous storyboards. Reading Nausicaa, I found myself mentally humming pieces of classic Hollywood war and western scores, and occasionally, (appropriately,) a little Hisashi. Yet I’ve never seen the film adaptation with his score.

Read Right to Left:

From Nausicaa of The Valley of the Wind, Book 3

I’ve written a bit about the cinematic quality of Jason Lute’s Berlin: City of Stones here. Lutes comes as close as Miyazaki to making a ‘movie in a book.’ He doesn’t push the boundaries of comics narrativity, and focuses on virtuosically recreating the mis en scene, pacing, and character management of films like Wings of Desire. I’ve complained that Berlin’s ironies alienate readers from the characters, and perhaps a little background music could have sweetened the deal.

Skim by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki is an intersting example. While sometimes (unintentionally) dismissed as a teen comic, it is temperamentally aligned with the quieter side of Hollywood epics- adult coming-of-age dramas like American Beauty, The Shawshank Redemption, A River Runs Through It, and The Cider House Rules, (which are often literary adaptations.) The wikipedia page for The Shawshank Redepemtion contains a great note on Thomas Newman’s score:

…the main theme (“End Titles” on the soundtrack album) is perhaps best known to modern audiences as the inspirational sounding music from many movie trailers dealing with inspirational, dramatic, or romantic films in much the same way that James Horner’s driving music from the end of Aliens is used in many movie trailers for action films.

“End Titles” is probably a good candidate for Skim’s phantom score. Unfortunately, this makes Skim sound heavy-handed, and I’m relieved that “End Titles” doesn’t accompany the book’s heartbreaking, graceful layering of voice and images. Not to say that they don’t sometimes suggest it.

The following pages are in sequence:

Comics like Tintin are a little more complicated. Herge’s ligne clair extends to the pacing of the comic, and complicated action sequences are detailed moment by moment, like key frames in a storyboard. Yet Herge is so ungratuitous that when he get’s the chance to skip a few key frames, he does.

From TinTin: The Black Island

The phantom score between the last two panels experiences skips like a warped record. Otherwise, I’m not sure why I don’t find Tintin very cinematic– I guess I want to blame the page size. You can pack a lot of panels and text onto an album page, as opposed to the small leaves of most manga books. By the virtue of their size, manga pages automatically resemble dramatic splash pages, and the act of constantly turning pages creates a breathless momentum that exaggerates the cinematic pacing. Tintin is literally less of a page turner.

from Morrison, Truog, Hazelwood, Costanza and Wood’s Animal Man #5

My piece is sorely missing examples from mainstream superhero comics. I’ve spent hundreds of hours scanning, assembling and digitally correcting them at Marvel, and have read a decent amount of them myself… but I don’t own any, and I don’t consider myself well-read in them. I’ve enjoyed Alan Moore and Grant Morrison’s work, but I get the feeling that they encourage cinematic pacing more often than other writers. I remember putting pages together on a stunning Hulk comic– it was printed sometime in the fall of 2009, and it opened with panel after panel of the Hulk charging at the viewer in darkness. When I saw the finished book, the whole thing had been slathered with first person captions. I couldn’t bear to keep it. Perhaps I’m being unfair; heavy-handed voice-over is also cinematic in its own special way.

Children of Chaos

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

Bob Kane first drew the villain Two-Face in 1942 (Detective Comics #66). But it wasn’t till 2008 that the Nolan brothers got his origin right. My favorite scene from The Dark Knight is Heath Ledger’s Joker convincing Aaron Eckhart’s brutally disfigured Harvey Dent to embrace the dark side. How’s he do it?

With the flip of a coin.

Javier Bardem made similar use of a quarter the year before in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men. Live or die? Ask JFK and the eagle.

Rewind two more years, to Woody Allen’s 2005 Match Point, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers spells it out: “People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control.”

Meyers’ character (he later gets away with murdering an inconvenient lover) fascinated Roger Ebert because, like all of the characters in the film, he’s rotten: “This is a thriller not about good versus evil, but about various species of evil engaged in a struggle for survival of the fittest — or, as the movie makes clear, the luckiest.”

Bardem’s Anton Chigurh is a hitman, so at least he’s supposed to kill people. But that’s not what makes him so damn scary. The movie’s nihilism is contained in those coin flips. When Chigurh tells a gas attendant to “Call it,” the man says he didn’t put nothing up to bet. “Yes, you did,” Chigurh answers. “You’ve been putting it up your whole life you just didn’t know it.”

Myers’ tennis pro plays the same game: “There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.” Near the film’s end, when he tosses an incriminating piece of evidence (his dead lover’s ring) toward the river, it takes the same fate-determining bounce. He wins.

When the gas attendant wins his toss, Chigurh congratulates him and tells him not to put the lucky quarter in his pocket where “it’ll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is.” Chigurh’s last victim already know this and so refuses to play: “The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you.”

“Well,” says Chigurh, “I got here the same way the coin did.”

The Nolans’ Joker embodies the same anarchic philosophy: “I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.” And in the true spirit of anarchy, he points the gun at himself. “I’m an agent of chaos,” he explains to Harvey Dent as he leans his forehead into the barrel. “Oh and you know the thing about chaos, it’s fair.”

The Joker survives his coin toss too, but not Dent. He’s Two-Face now. He worships Chigurh’s god.

My wife and I were recently catching up on the last season of the British cop show Luther. It opens with Idris Elba (we liked him as a gangster in The Wire too) sitting on a couch, playing Russian roulette. He learned the game from a homicidal army vet, not the Joker, but his character is relinquishing his will to the same higher Non-Will as the others. Except Luther is a (mostly) good guy. So by the season’s end he’s traded in the gun (he rarely carries one anyway) for an ice cream cone with his newly adopted teen daughter. What got him there?

Not a coin toss.

It wasn’t a roll of the dice either. That’s the device of chance preferred by the season’s ugliest villains, a pair of identical twins (two people, one face) playing a real-world game of D&D. They earn experience points by killing people. You can do it anywhere, a gas station, subway, a lane of stopped traffic. Just open your backpack, spread out your bat, hammer, and squirt gun of acid, and roll the dice.

I bought our twelve-year-old his first D&D game this Christmas. (He learned about the game last year from a particularly hilarious episode of our family’s favorite sitcom, Community.) So while Luther’s evil twins were rolling their dice, our son was upstairs rolling his. I can now differentiate between the thump and skid of dice on floorboards and the smack and skitter of dice in a D&D box lid.

I asked him once, if instead of killing the various trolls and orcs and armored whatnots he has to battle, could he just knock them out, tie them up, and leave them for the authorities to incarcerate?

He said, “What authorities?”

Right. There’s no government in D&D. It’s literal anarchy. Even at the metaphysical level. There are plenty of supernatural beings, but no Supreme One. Gods but no God. Even the Judeo-Christian Lord is only the sum of the numbers in the Dungeon Master’s hand. And the DM isn’t God either. He (yes, in this case, DMs are almost as uniformly male as Catholic priests) must obey the Dice like everyone else.

Roll them to determine the whims of heredity, what skills and proclivities you’re born with, which you’re not. The Dice control every important moment of your life, every struggle, the literal blows of chance. Sure, my son admits to ignoring the occasional bad roll, but he said it gets boring if you do that too much. Real life is random.

So why is randomness overwhelming portrayed as “evil” in pop culture?

First time I saw Two-Face as a kid (October 1976, The Brave and the Bold #130), he bewildered me. Instead of just killing Batman and Green Arrow, he and the Joker flip a coin? (Allowing the Atom to secretly climb on and alter its fall.) At some point in the story, Two-Face betrays the Joker—and not because Heath Ledger killed his fiancé. It’s just what his quarter tells him to do. So why, my ten-year-old self wondered, is the guy considered a supervillain?

When those D&D twins bend down with a 20-sided die, only the ugliest options are in play. Shouldn’t your backpack have more than murder weapons? Where’s the wad of twenties for homeless people’s cups? Why does Chigurh only flip a coin when he’s thinking about plugging someone in the head? A true worshipper of chance would be Mother Theresa half the time.

So it’s not randomness that makes hitmen, supervillains, D&D players, and tennis pros scary. It’s the deification of randomness. The abdication of responsibility. A true nihilist (like Alan Moore’s Comedian) embraces the absence of God and so the permissibility of everything. But that’s an abyss too deep for the Two-Faces of the world. They can’t fill that God-sized gap with themselves. They can’t hack that much free will. So instead of randomness, they invent Randomness and pretend they’re just following order. Pretend that’s not really your finger on the trigger.

You can take comfort in the illusion that the bullet in Russian roulette chooses you. But an ice cream cone, that’s something you have to go out and get. It’s a scheme. You have to choose to want it despite the uncontrollable probabilities of your getting or not getting it. If life’s a crap shoot, the only question is how you cope with that fact.

I do know one writer who flips Randomness to make us see it not as a force of evil but of good. Or, more accurately, of helpful change. Glen Dahlgren’s A Child of Chaos spins a D&D-inspired world where the lazy gods of Charity, Evil, War, etc. have gotten a bit too complacent. What the universe needs is the smack and skid of a die. Literally. That’s the magic instrument of Chaos, how the promised one will restore some much needed disorder, unlock all that magic the privileged class keeps hogging. No more homicidal lunatics. Chaos is our hero.

Unfortunately you don’t get to read Dahlgren’s novel yet. My copy is a Word file in my laptop. The manuscript (like my own third novel) is still mid-spin in the seemingly random universe of the publishing industry. I’m rooting for the unmarred JFK side of the coin. But there are no guarantees. Right now my agent is battling the forces of Evil and trying to land my manuscript in a New York house. It’s a chaotic process (stalled by the randomness of a hurricane and jaw surgery so far), but the dice keep bouncing.

Glen and I aren’t complaining. Like Chigurh’s last victim, we understand the rules of the game: “I knowed you was crazy when I saw you sitting there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me.”

God bless chaos.

The Unheard Peanuts

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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Charles Schulz famously loved drawing (or writing?) musical notation. Schroeder was always playing “real” measures of Beethoven in the strips.

In part, the notes are there simply as a design element, the same way Schulz draws lots of inky slashes of rain. They’re intricate and pretty and fun to look at; they add visual interest. Often, though, the notes also become a visual joke; their presence as design or as visual is incorporated into the visual narrative. So, above, the notes dangling over Lucy hang over her like an oppressive cloud.

In this image, the joke is even simpler. It’s a visual pun that barely rises to narrative — though the subtext (that pop music is paw music for dogs) is cute.

Part of the point for Schulz is surely the simple virtuosity of the drawing. Schroeder wowing the girls here can’t be that far removed from Schulz wowing his audience; another reminder, perhaps, that Charlie Brown is not necessarily, and often not really much at all, the Schulz analog in the comic. This gag can be seen as a kind of extension of this one — both play with the gendered potency of high art virtuosity. That look Violet gives Schroeder at the end has maybe more intent behind it than is entirely comfortable in a six year old.

If the musical notation is a metonymy for high art, to be contrasted, in many cases, with low art insufficiency, then that high-art signalling functions in various ways.

On the one hand, Schulz, as I said, is the high art creator — he’s the one making the notes, after all. On the other hand, though, the high art gets contrasted with the low art of the comics strip — Snoopy’s paw music, or Charlie Brown (the older boy) still plinking away at kids’ stuff, as all those younger high artists pass him by. In this sense, Schulz again collapses into Charlie Brown — locked out of high art virtuosity and romantic opportunities, disappointed in art as in love.

Another reading, though, might be to see the use of musical notation not as a way to contrast high and low art, but rather as a way to show their similarities. Musical notes, like comics, are pictures that carry a message. They are images you read — as made especially clear in Linus’ whistled stanzas, where speech bubble and notation are literally fused into one. High and low art, music and comics, function as sequences of images, running in parallel across the page.

Those parallel messages, though, are different from each other in at least one important way for me, as a particular reader. I can read the comics; I can’t read musical notation. With comics, you have the ease of pictograms; with musical notation you are confronted with a code requiring specialized knowledge, which either shuts you out or ushers you into the inner circle with Schroeder.

Again, you could see this as a high-art/low-art distinction — though, after all, the high art isn’t outside low art, but in it. Schulz has, perhaps, found a way to invert Lichtenstein. Instead of low art providing content and energy and accessibility by being incorporated into high art, high art provides content and energy and, perhaps, validation, by being incorporated into low art. Beethoven’s the inverted pop in Peanuts for those who can hear it…and maybe even more for those who cannot.

Utilitarian Review 4/20/13

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

News

HU contributor James Romberger and his son Crosby received an Eisner nomination for Best single issue for their Post York #1. All the Eisner nominations are here.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: I review Reinhold Kleist’s Johnny Cash biography.

I explain what Escher and Dr. Manhattan have in common.

I explain why Tim McGraw sucks.

We kicked off our comics and music roundtable. Posts this week:

Bert Stabler, Re(Dis)Membering Pushead, The Cheerful Blasphemer

Craig Fischer, “Poster Boy”

Brian Cremins, “Gil Kane, Memory Drawing, and Bob Dylan’s Self-Portrait

Betsy Phillips, “A Theory of Why the Two Iron Men Became One”

Qiana Whitted, “Sound and Silence in the Jim Crow South”

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about:

—Shulamith Firestone and feminist utopian literature.

—Willie Nelson’s jazzy new album.

—Feminism’s conflicted hisotry with advancing day care.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

—who should own children.

—Chris Connor’s classic Gershwin album.

Other Links

Sarah Kendzior on academia’s indentured servants.

Jonathan Bernstein on how to stop torturing, maybe.

This Week’s Reading

I finished Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, read Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, started a book about parking reform (no seriously), read some articles and book chapters about the Oneida community. Also still reading The Two Towers to my son.

Friday Utilitarian Music 4/19/13 — Midnight Girl in a Sunset Town

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

With some help from Derik Badman, I finally figured out how to upload zips to HU…which means I can provide music downloads again. This one is Midnight Girl in a Sunset Town.

Here’s the playlist

1.Don Quixote — Gordon Lightfoot
2.Man in Need — Richard Thompson
3.Something to Talk About — Bonnie Raitt
4.Midnight Girl/Sunset Town — Sweethearts of the Rodeo
5. Bluebird Wine — Emmylou Harris/Rodney Crowell
6. Lonesome, On’ry and Mean — Waylon Jennings
7. Little Chapel — Heahter Myles and Dwight Yoakum
8. Diggin’ Up Bones — Randy Travis
9. Hurt Me Bad (In a Real Good Way) — Patty Loveless
10. Love in Store — Fleetwood Mac
11. Bring Love — Carlene Carter
12. Double Knots — The Living Sisters
13. Matchbox — Willie Nelson
14. Witches Hat — Incredible String Band
15. Our Town — Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin
16. Little Matty Groves — Norman and Nancy Blake
17. The Needle and the Damage Done — Neil Young

You can download Midnight Girl in a Sunset Town here.

And let us know in the comments what you’re listening to.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: April 2013