Voices from the Archive: Bill Randall and the Distorted Image of Tatsumi

This is a comment Bill left on an article by Ng Suat Tong.
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I’ll add that Tatsumi’s story in English is about marketing and a lack of context. D&Q has marketed Tatsumi and “gekiga” very well, though it’s worth noting that the term “gekiga” first appeared in issue 12 (1957) of “Machi,” a rental manga, as a blurb on a Tatsumi title page: “GHOST TAXI” has the title, “Mystery Gekiga” (Encyclopedia of Contemporary Manga, p. 62). It feels closer to “Ghost Taxi Mystery Theater” to me than, say, an equal of any of Kurosawa’s gendai-geki or jidai-geki from the period. Decades later, the gekiga “brand” and an unimpressive body of work have Dwight Garner in the NYTimes saying of Tatsumi’s work, “It’s among this genre’s signal achievements.” (At least Gary Groth, to his credit, never bought it: “I usually only interview artists whose work I like, and I didn’t feel entirely comfortable interviewing Tatsumi. I was troubled by a number of tics that comprised the backbone of Tatsumi’s aesthetic…” TCJ #281, p. 37)

I wanted to add a footnote from a couple Japanese sources: The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Manga, 1945-2005 (Shougakukan), ends its sole entry on Tatsumi with with the fairly tepid, “Recently, his esteem has also grown abroad.” (Just before its publication, in 2003 AX #34 presented an unpublished Tatsumi story with a full-page ad proclaiming his work would be published in the West. AX is from Seirinkogeisha, now the Japanese publisher of his work as well as others in that tradition.)

The rest of the encyclopedia’s entry was a plot summary of the short story “Man-Eating Fish” and a sentence noting how Tatsumi “deeply expressed the dead-end circumstances of men living in society’s lower reaches” (clunky offhand translations mine). A true documentary of those men would be more interesting, but he prefers tidy immorality plays. Even his images, some fine examples of which you selected, no more than equal those of his peers. It’s telling that another Japanese work, the critic Natsume Fusanosuke’s formalist critique “Why Is Manga Interesting,” chooses artists like Nagashima, Tsuge, and Sait? in describing the old gekiga style, but not Tatsumi. Would that D&Q had published five volumes of Shigeru Mizuki and a slim one of Tatsumi. The rest of their gekiga line’s quite strong, but the word’s not very helpful, and the brand even less if it means Tatsumi’s the touchstone for excellent artists like Ouji, Sakabashira, and Mizuki. Mizuki’s a giant; Tatsumi was forgotten until D&Q picked him back up. The result has been a distorted image of his work’s importance more than a valid reassessment, one that even the New York Times repeated uncritically.

 

Bill Randall’s List: Best Online Comics Criticism 2010

Critic and one-time HU writer Bill Randall was one of the judges for this year’s Best Online Comics Criticism. He asked to run his essay about the selection process here — and we’re very pleased to have him back under the Hood, however briefly.
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by Bill Randall

How did he know?

Real critics are as pure as new snow, with eyes of a child yet minds learned like the eldest philosopher. They castrate their creativity to write from the place of total mental stillness. Able to see through all walls of personal agenda. They use their pen of young lamb to judge what’s best not for themselves, but for all humanity. Such is the powerful power, the terrible responsibility of the true critic.

I have fasted for three centuries, nailed myself upside down to the Tree of Woe, drained my body of every ounce of blood and replaced it with the freshest plastic-bottled spring water. …I am ready to speak of comics with the furiously unpoliticized gaze of the Real Critic.

Spot on, B.C., as I’ve spent a meditative month staring down Phyllis Hodgson’s 1944 critical text of Þe Clowde of Vnknowyng, in þe whiche a soule is onyd wiþ God, by the unknown author of the Cloud of Unknowing, good for inspiration and revelation as I selected my Best Comics Criticism 2010 votes. Prophetic, you prophet! as I like you and all true critics strive ascetic to write apophatic– kenotic– apocatastatic words, good for instruction and reflection, more sacred than the sacred texts of “Maggots,” “If’n Oof,” and “Þe Book of Priue Counseling.” Words of Groth in red, and remember the worst a comics critic can do is hurt some feelings. It’s not like we excommunicate, move product, make reputations, or stand at the kitchen gallery door with Hans Ulrich Obrist and his flaming sword. I can’t even resurrect the dead, may my essay on Kamimura Kazuo burn in hellfire for all eternity while A Drifting Life glows transfigured on your bookshelf.

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Bill Randall Provides Free Professional Advice for TCJ.com

I still haven’t reconciled myself to Bill Randall’s departure from this blog…so I’m going to pretend he’s still here by stealing his comment from an earlier thread and making it into a post against his will.

Especially since I occasionally hope that someone form tcj.com reads this site, and I wanted to put this where they’d see it, just in case.

So here’s Bill:

My quips aside, here’s an online marketer’s perspective, since I do that in real life. And I am snowbound & procrastinating, unlike Vancouver.

(My first draft turned into an online business plan. Split-testing, Crazy Egg, conversions. Madness! If you’re interested, drop me a line and I’ll have you selling acai berry in an hour.)

Short version: the design gaffes suck, mainly for framing the launch as TCJ/Fail. Yet they can be fixed… install the Disqus comments manager here, move the RSS feed to the top there. “Continuous muddling” becomes “continuous improvement,” as Toyota would have it.

The big problem?

The “interminable stream of content” favors clicks, while TCJ is (and should be) written for readers.

For clicks, sell ad space. Split articles up over multiple pages. Tell advertisers you get X unique visitors and X^2 pageviews. Put the ads in the hotspots for ads.

For readers, find out what they want, watch what they do. Give them free stuff (essays, TCJ-Date, Krypto-Revolution of the Age with tween trolling & RickRolling in the comments) and they give you time & attention, eventually as a reflex. Everyone reading this has sites you check 5 times a day, and TCJ’s main page is not one of them. HU might be.

Right now TCJ’s design favors clicks over readers. Johanna Draper has pointed out it needs just a few small fixes– the commenting thing is the main one, easily fixed with a plugin like Commentluv or Disqus. Read her post, though, for her accurate take on the mismatch in Gary Groth’s opening shot and the reality of the site’s execution.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned since Noah invited me to HU, since I left, and from hanging out, is the very real degree to which the internet is about conversation. Its whole damn architecture favors conversation. Whoever fosters that will thrive, whoever stomps it out or ignores it will fade. Noah’s very, very good at fostering it. TCJ was when people wrote letters. If it can translate the spirit of the old Blood & Thunder into curated blog comments, six months from now everyone will be reading it first thing in the morning for the spit & gristle.

And buying acai berry from their email list.

And here’s a question: what are some sites to model?

PS
I left out the best thing.

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Update: And while we’re on the subject: why the hell is Eric Reynolds writing this for the Comics Reporter rather than TCJ.com? (Link by Sean Collins.

Update 2: Just to be clear; there’s nothing against Eric. It’s a fascinating essay, and Tom’s to be congratulated for getting it and putting it up. But it just seems like gross negligence that tcj.com can’t even get important news features and scoops from Fantagraphics own publishers.

Stepdown

So I’m back from my summer gig as a teacher to feral high school students and I’m stepping down from blogging here at the Hooded Utilitarian.

No juicy gossip behind it, unfortunately.

I’m just joyously busy with business and life, requiting this & that, and setting aside most of my critical work. Instead I’ll pull some creative projects out from their dust clothes. Also, I’ve learned some very nice swears in Arabic (unrelated).

I have some articles & reviews coming from TCJ, as well as my desultory blog at my own site. I will change its focus from reviews into a freer, more personal notebook. Which had already happened, actually.

As to the Utilitarian, it’s been quite a pleasure to spend a while here in the company of these writers. Noah’s great to work with, and everyone else is a joy to read and spar with in the comments. I always enjoyed that I never had any idea what the next post would be about, or what angle it might take. Some ways of reading, like those informed by gender, don’t come naturally to me, so I’ve profited from them. And I never found my own critical perspective flattered. Which is why I’ll still be reading. And why I’m sad I to go.

I want to leave on this note:

In the Summer 2009 issue of Bidoun, a magazine of arts & culture from the Middle East, there’s an interview with the four cartoonists behind Samandal, a trilingual comics anthology published out of Lebanon. (You can download the first three issues of the young, so far middling anthology– I liked Sandra Ghosn’s entry in #3, anyway.)

A lot of the interview’s childhood nostalgia between Fdz and Hatem Imam. Some standard fare about comics’ junk status meaning political freedom, about censorship. This and that.

And there’s this:

NA: Who’s your youngest contributor?

FDZ: Hashem Raslan. He’s in high school. He sent us a comic about killing his teachers. I think he’s the youngest. Then there are the girls in Tripoli– they’re maybe nineteen.

NA: Who are the girls in Tripoli?

OMAR: They contacted us with a submission. They are very shy and quiet– three veiled girls who are influenced most by yaoi manga, which are Japanese comics about beautiful boys that fall in love with each other. It’s a genre. I found it very peculiar.

NA: Do they know Japanese?

OMAR: No, they were reading online fan translations, which have horrendous English. …The girls submitted tales of unrequited love!

TCJ 298: Percy Crosby, too

The new Comics Journal is out with a diverse lineup. The interviews are with twins Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon and Perry Bible Fellowship creator Nicholas Gurewitch. R.C. Harvey weighs in & in on Obama caricature in political cartoons, while Tom Hart critiques Ron Regé’s first big collection. (I wish more cartoonists wrote criticism.)

Noah & Tom do not appear, more’s the shame, but I’ve got two pieces on very different manga.

One’s an introduction to a sample from Jiro Taniguchi’s A Distant Neighborhood, forthcoming from Fanfare/Ponent Mon. The other’s a review of the October 2001 volume of the alt-manga anthology AX, the one with the Jim Woodring cover. It’s my contribution to the discussion of the Top Shelf’s orthcoming AX collection prepared by Mitsuhiro Asakawa & Seán Michael Wilson. My article’s half review, half overview, with a look at the scuttlebutt from the end of Garo and the birth of AX.

One of the joys of print, other than shelving, is that I wrote it so long ago that it feels like somebody else wrote it. I’m not saying I read the whole thing nodding and got surprised at the byline, I’m just saying.

Fandom Confessions: Ultra Klutz

So far in this roundtable, Noah’s fessed up to Freudian SF and Tom to… Nabokov? If that’s the bar, let’s limbo.

My Younger Self (not drawn by Kate Beaton, sadly) had the first sin of reading lots of comics without reading the words. When you’re indiscriminate in the 80s with a forest out back, you cut to the chase. So I never suffered through John Byrne’s captions. My dutiful brother actually read all the words and some Hardy Boys to boot, so he could fill me in if the plot got confusing. I don’t remember if I made up the plots or inferred them, though I spent hours copying the drawings. I still have vivid memories of certain pages and panels, like silent cinema dreams.

I did, however, read both the words and pictures for a few choice comics. Most were newspaper strips, like Bloom County and those B.C. paperbacks. Others I got at the store, in particular a Canadian parody of network TV called To Be Announced. And the one I remember best: Ultra Klutz by Jeff Nicholson.

This comic, a black-and-white slapstick parody of Ultraman that quickly became a sprawling epic, is my second confession. I don’t know that I can recommend it. I do know that it is one of my favorite works from childhood. While other kids read Tintin and Raymond Briggs, I read Ultra Klutz over and over. I’m sure UK is no Tintin in Tibet, but for me it was a perfect substitute for the Godzilla movies our UHF antenna could only pick up on a clear day.

Even though I read all the words, I didn’t get the drunk jokes. It didn’t matter. The buoyant art transfixed me with clear, easy to copy forms. The story I liked as well: a fast food worker from planet Klutzoid ends up on earth, basically becomes Ultraman, and starts fighting the monsters popping up in Japan. He’s not very good at it. The monsters get odder, going from a Godzilla clone to a giant tin can and the Devious Yuffle Worm, looking smart with a handlebar moustache and Mickey Mouse gloves. The plot gets odder too, with parodies of whatever was current in the Comics Buyers’ Guide. There’s a continuity agent, some off-DC heroes, and plenty of metafiction. I think the plot’s tangle didn’t offend my younger self because the main characters were still pretty dumb. Nicholson has a gift for drawing boneheads, which I mean as a compliment and hope he would take as one.

I’m sure there are a dozen ways to criticize Ultra Klutz. Its art shows Nicholson learning when he switched from pen to brush. It might have had a Cerebus infection. And its ideas are so messy, so bursting and scattered, that it needs a lot of generosity from its readers. I can’t even call it representative of its time. I don’t care. If I pull it off the shelf I end up reading the whole thing. I don’t do that with any other comic from that time, and only a few from my first few years of getting back into the form.

I stopped reading comics for almost ten years when adolescence hit, trading CBG for CBGB’s. Coming back, I found Jeff Nicholson starting to come into his own. I enjoyed his psychological horror series Through the Habitrails, originally in the anthology Taboo. I also enjoyed his solo issue of The Dreaming, with the pumpkin-head guy. But tastes change. By the time he started Colonia, a pirate fantasy, he seemed to have found a stride that would finally bring him a wider audience. I had to labor to read fantasy at all, so I wished him well in my head and dug into something more convoluted which I’ve since forgotten.

Nicholson wasn’t working that whole time, though. He’d actually quit comics more than once because of how its market punishes artists who fall between its mainstream and counterculture. He’s been nominated for Eisner Awards and Colonia had positive reviews. Now a trip to his Colonia Press website finds nothing but that girl with a backpack and a clutch of ads. It’s done.

He’s moved on to a new site for a cartoon based on his Father & Son comic. However, on his “Chronology” page, you’ll find a page and some covers from Ultra Klutz, as well a very personal overview of his career. At the least, read the last section, “Leaving Comics,” which starts with:

Facing the fact that I had invested my entire life in a dying medium was a very painful thing to do

He breaks down the numbers that show why he never finished Colonia. It seems like a good decision. He also explains how he realized he was done with the form, which feels like a confession itself. It’s strange to read with a child’s affection lingering in me. I’m not particularly nostalgic, so I think I’ll just stop.