Sussing out religion and science deep in a comments thread, Eric B. goes way, way back to Sir Edmund Gosse’s father Philip for this tidbit:

…he argued that God planted all of the dinosaur fossils, etc. as an attempt to trick and tempt people into the sin of rejecting creationism.

(That’s kin to the “omphalos argument,” from the navel, i.e., “Did Adam have one?” And Edmund chronicled their relationship in the classic Father and Son, predicting the evangelical-science strife to come.)

I’m struck by the theatrical, literary flair of the argument. God matters more than the world He created, so we can assume it’s a stage set. Quit teasing and raise the curtain. I love the image, which is especially good for fantasy/SF, as in the beginning and ending of the Chronicles of Narnia (religious), the first Matrix (faux-philosophic), or Dark City (intertextual). And others, like Electric Warrior.

I’ve never forgotten it since reading it as a kid– it’s a DC comic about a rogue robot in a futuristic city. Doing stuff. That is, I’ve never forgotten the ending. It ran for 10? 12? issues until the plug got pulled. Rather than just stop, or even resolve the plotlines set to run on and on, its creators sent down a spaceship to tell the cast their whole world was an elaborate stage set. Hop on, let’s get out of here. I even think they asked about the dinosaur bones, and they spaceship captain was like, “we planted them! Come on, I’m gonna miss my shows.” I guess it’s a meta way of flipping the bird at editorial.

So I don’t remember it very well (and I much prefer the dust on my memories to Google blotting out yet another part of my mind.). The ending floored me, though. Life hadn’t yet pulled any rugs out from under me– I was very young, my family all still living, and as to Santa, losing him didn’t stop the toys. And stories, for a kid miles from any other kid but his brother, offered a consistent escape in exchange for being given life by my attention. Having that attention betrayed made a mediocre work linger. The first one hurts. The next few times, as with Blazing Saddles‘ ending, I just got mad. Mel Brooks was flipping the bird at me! Then I got jaded and in on the joke, which meant I gave less and less to stories. (Until much later, when I needed them again.)

Now, like everyone else, I’m just navigating the huge swath of competing, contradictory stories without much dissonance. It’s a condition of media, spin culture, whatever comes after postmodernism. I’d love to wipe out the stories I disagree with and so reshape the world and school board to my liking, but in the end it might be all I can do to ignore them. Others disagree, and go through mental acrobatics that put Adam on a dinosaur, impressive to say the least.

I missed the good news that Drawn & Quarterly’s bringing over Susumu Katsumata’s short story collection Red Snow. It’s surprising, as nobody remembered his work until Seirinkogeisha put out the collection in 2005. Unlike also-forgotten stablemate Tatsumi, Katsumata can’t claim to be historically important.

His stories are better than Tatsumi’s shorts, though: timeless, bawdy, mysterious, like an earthy Kwaidan. Cartoon figures sneaking bits of pleasure in the grass, water sprites breaking things. They reveal a handmade craft that fits next to the Moomins and Monsiuer Jean.

If timeless, these stories feel old, too. They appeared mostly in the anthology Manga Goraku between 1978-80; the feeling of reminisce echoes Tatsumi’s rue. Both are old men’s manga in their way, best read over milky homebrew and several packs of borrowed cigarettes. In August, under a fluorescent light, while grumbling over back pains.

Not too much to my taste, unlike the also-announced collection of Imiri Sakabashira. I’ve liked Sakabashira’s manga and artwork a good long time. It feels a lot less fusty than either Tatsumi or Katsumata. Actually, it’s more kin to Yo Gabba Gabba. With cigarettes. I’ll give some to the nephew when he’s considerably older.

I began reading comics intensely as intellectual escapism from grad school. My other escape was film theory. So I had many elaborate, comics-form dreams starring Eisenstein.

Last night I mixed the two again, dreaming an R. Fiore column in The Comics Journal. In just a couple of short pages of copperplate prose, no plosives, he eviscerated all the Journal‘s writers for not liking Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. Gibson’s poor treatment at their hands was a case of “wholesale intellectual fraud,” he wrote. Then he cut the writers down, one by one.

Since I’d regularly sniped at Gibson in my column, calling his movie “a pornography of violence” and such, I skipped ahead to see Fiore take me down. Seeing my name in the last paragraph, I flipped back to finish the article. But my eyes got stuck in a loop in the second-to-last column, going over the text without seeing anything.

So I set it down and started on the new Kevin Huizenga book. It’s a new direction: movie reviews as comics short stories. After reading his cheerful take on that Mayan Gibson movie, I skipped to the book’s end. He starts to use empty pages as he goes on, two or three tiny panels hovering over nothing garnished with type at the very bottom (Helvetica Neue, mind). Then the same problem; I couldn’t finish the book for strange reasons.

So I looked over my shoulder at an old pen-and-ink drawing of mine. It didn’t look half bad.

***

The seeds for this weren’t Rick Veitch’s dream comics, which I admire, nor Iou Kuroda’s movie review comics, which I don’t. Most likely one seed was Fiore’s long, precise dismantling of once-columnist Bart Beaty’s book. The Comics Journal: They Eat Their Own.

The other seed has been watching the comments threads for Noah’s posts on fanfic and Wonder Woman. I know little about either, so I just watch, impressed with Noah’s modulation of snark and patience as 700 Anons drive-by to tell him he sucks. Social media! Were I more of a business ninny, I’d start quoting Seth Godin’s latest while huffing venture capital.

Except that as tribes go, this blog’s more of a confederacy.¹ I know that whenever I post something, likely the first comment will be from one of my comrades, taking apart whatever I said. Three of us write for the Journal, which means precious little in terms of sharing a critical lens.

Talking about which, I need to pick at Noah’s argument here in lieu of full review today.

¹ J. K. Toole jokes, go to town.

Footnote to our roundtable and especially Tom’s fine dissection of Helter Skelter‘s art.

I noted the lack of patterning in the book compared to other manga for women. I meant not the hand-drawn composition of Okazaki’s pages so much as large, flat areas of design. Like the pattern on the dress and tights in this image from Nana:

(Image nicked from Let’s Fall Asleep, a manga & comics blog for librarians.)

The patterns are typically screentones (though I imagine more studios are doing this with computers). Either way, they’re applied, not drawn. (Though at least one artist, Shizuka Nakano, draws with screentone specifically. ActuaBD has a couple of small samples.)

And you can get screentones for just about everything:

Limpid pool and doily patterns:
Clouds and trees:
City at night and magical feathers:

From the Beginners’ Pack at IC, Inc. Pollocky splotches, your family’s tartan, celestial fuzz of the kind that clouds your judgment when you see a really hot girl with bad morals? They’ve got it all.

Some unsorted thoughts on Helter Skelter, based on Noah’s post and its comments:

1. Noah notes the the absense of fashion for a comic about the fashion world. The art lacks the patchwork quilt of pattern common in girls’ and women’s comics; the clothes are pretty bland, too. I suppose it’s a statement. Okazaki was a fashion illustrator, so she chose not to show that off. And some of the most fashion-conscious artists at the time were men drawing women for men, like Kousuke Fujishima. Ririko’s like, screw all you guys, I’m naked.
2. Another current: the body as fashion canvas, as this article on plastic surgery in Asia points out. Even the non-surgical version can be seen just walking around Shibuya (or Amerika-mura, as I prefer), with the ganguro girls’ tanning. (Scroll down in Wikipedia to read about “Blacky,” a ganguro girl who became iconic and then quit the lifestyle from public pressure.)
3. Japanese fashion made sense to me once someone told me it’s all just uniforms. Everything has its place: white gloves for driving trains, track pants for teaching kids, and punk stylings for the weekend. I always felt like a shabby barbarian until I picked a store and bought some uniforms. They keep the surface placid, everything in its place. Ririko’s place is looking better-than-human, another uniform enabled with surgery. I’m not from LA so I don’t have a nose for who’s had work done. I suspect the unwritten contracts require it in Tokyo.
4. In my essay on Dousei Jidai in a recent TCJ, I pointed to Ian Buruma’s Behind the Mask for a nuanced discussion of women’s bodies in Japanese art. When everything has its place, transgression and expression have to take place behind closed doors. That’s why In the Realm of the Senses is a political movie, other than one about sleeping with scissors.
5. Until it started to feel like actual research, I pottered around in my bookshelves for some “reception history,” as it’s known. I skimmed through a manga encyclopedia from Helter Skelter back to 1980 or so. Having found dozens of books I never want to read and a couple I absolutely have to (Natsuko’s Sake and Shouta’s Sushi in particular, maybe I’m just hungry), I saw dozens of stories of old-fashioned romance. None other like Okazaki’s whatsoever. And an article noting that Okazaki’s 1989 work Pink was one of the first comics for women to get a crossover audience, garnering a lot of praise from all kinds of readers and critics. So there’s that.

Anyway, I’m off to work in Louisville tonight, which in a couple of weeks will be flooded with millinery.