Monthly Archives: January 2009

Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — part 2, addendum a

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Ok, all I had was Bechdel. Miriam had Carla Speed McNeil and Kate Beaton. Here’s one I just remembered: Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. I read issues 1-16, or like that, on download for a TCJ column about Spider-Man (“Face It, Tiger,” issue 291). They were a case of a commercial comic book working exactly the way it should, no contortions or gimmes, no jumble. It’s like intelligent people knew what they were doing and did it. The target here is modest, but I’ll settle and hitting those can be hard enough.


It helps if you don’t mind sitcom and girl stuff. As I recall it’s very quiet-times storytelling, with superheroes kept off on the skyline, more or less. I like that mix: for some reason I like superhero comics and action movies more for their incidental elements than their main elements, and a title like Mary Jane puts the incidentals center stage. The so-called civilian school of superhero comics, I suppose. I loved Bendis’s Alias, though that was meant as psychological noir and Mary Jane is teen comedy. Kind of strange, two such different outcomes from the same genre development. 

The art/writing seems designed for maximum ease of eye movement, which I take to be a manga kind of thing. The images, as I recall, are simple and figures are positioned for maximum scannability. Dialogue skims along but without the pop-pop banter effect found with most superhero dialogue nowadays.

Which brings me to a key point: a big part of the comic’s appeal is relief. I would have liked it anyway, but set against most superhero product, it was a relief. Quiet skill is something we don’t get a lot of.

As to the Manga point above, the original artist was  Takeshi Miyazawa, a Canadian but Wiki says he has a Manga sensibility. Then came David Hahn. As I recall, I liked Miyazawa better. Writer: Sean McKeever. Sample plot: girl gets jealous because Mary Jane wins lead in school play. Title: “The Jealousy Thing,” because every issue is “The [whatever] Thing.” You get the idea. It’s simple stuff, but it works.

Further, we get one more example of Mary Jane being rewritten into a character entirely unlike the Mary Jane in the main Spider-Man series. Offhand I can’t think of any time her personality has made it intact into an alternative Spider-Man version. Noah has more here for those who have ever tried to figure her out.

Grinchiness of Christmas

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I have an essay up at Culture 11 about Dr. Seuss, consumerism, and polymorphous perversity. Here’s a quote:

Indeed, the American spirit galumphs and galerks through every one of the Doctor’s works. Like his fellow citizens, Seuss is boisterous, hearty, optimistic, profligate in invention, and not too heavy on the thought. “Yertle the Turtle,” a fascistic terrapin, forces all his pond-fellows to stack themselves in a tower so he can climb to the top. The solution? Not collective action, nor courageous resistance, but a single fed-up burp by a turtle named Mack, who just isn’t going to take it anymore. In “The Sneeches,” the sneeches with stars dislike the sneeches without stars. The solution? Not understanding, or non-violent resistance, but simply a machine which removes stars! In Seuss’ universe, there is no problem that cannot be solved by old-fashioned practicality, good will, bizarre new-fangled machines, or some combination of all three.

This was somewhat inspired by the conversation here about Seuss and Sendak, incidentally. (And more of it here.

Update: James Poulos paints me as an anti-Lockean here.

virtue of ignorance 2008 — part 3 (chock full of ego edition)

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There are some definite perks, as a comics fan, to being a comics creator. Traveling the con circuit, I’ve gotten to meet a lot of my heroes, from Eddie Campbell to Batton Lash to Sergio Aragones (the best things about having my picture with Sergio Aragones are, first, that he totally looks like a Sergio Aragones drawing, and second, people in my civilian life tend to have heard of him, unlike everyone else I’ve ever been excited to meet at a con). I also see a lot more new books than I would in my ordinary course of life as a quasi-hermit.

The drawback is that I have a harder time enjoying comics in an ego-less fashion, without analyzing the artwork and storytelling to ascertain whether it’s better or worse than mine. and if it’s better, trying to figure out how to steal it or despairing of ever being able to make something as good… and if I decide it’s worse, then I get to engage in bitterness at their (relative, sometimes very relative: it is Northamerican alt-comics we’re talking about here) success.

So both my favourite comics revelations of 2008 came to me through being on the con circuit, and my enjoyment of both of them is mixed with sweet jealousy.

I’ve been hearing about Finder for a few years, mostly through the women-in-comics world. But I didn’t start reading the series until McNeil was at the same artists alley at Wizard World Chicago this June. I bought two volumes, and then she was at several more cons I was at, until I’m almost caught up on the series, getting two books at a time. I’m late on the bandwagon, but I’m addicted now.

And yeah, it’s soft science fiction with a Gary Stu/noble savage protagonist (which McNeil makes fun of, but Jaeger is ten times smarter, more competent, and prettier than everyone who surrounds him). But here, like in Preacher, the author succeeds in making you share their infatuation with their creation.

McNeil’s worlbuilding is also enthusiastic in an infectious manner. She has her cake, and eats it too, by making her stories circular, cryptic and dreamlike (some would say indecipherable) and then appending fifteen pages of endnotes to each volume, giving away background about the Finder universe as well as notes on the creation of the book. But I’m an endnotes kind of gal, growing up on Terry Pratchett and David Foster Wallace.

Another area where Finder was created with me in mind, and that I wish my stuff was more like, is that it’s drawn like the love child of Dave Sim and Terry Moore. It is fortunate it wasn’t around when I was a teenager, cause I would probably have drawn terrible, terrible fanfic. Yes, Finder is a success in the category (discussed here) of enthrall-fans-in-your-characters over be-enshrined-as-important, which I also covet.

You know who else has a scary amount of fans? Kate Beaton. She’s only been doing comics for two (I believe) years, but she has more people subscribed to her comics feed on livejournal than went to her university, and I had the table next door at her SPX debut, the one where she sold out of everything in, like, a day, and had a dozen-deep autograph line every second she was at her table.

She does mostly unconnected history comics (I think her most famous one is this one) whose humour is often the stilted-language non-joke, in a way that feels very “now” (and this is my only complaint about her work, because I feel that part won’t age well), and the funny drawing of dignified personages.

Her drawing represents the opposite end, from McNeil’s, of the spectrum of drawing which I wanted to kill and eat in order to gain its powers. It’s not lamely naïve like David Heatley or Jeffrey Brown, it’s dashed-off and open and precise. The eyes on a character’s face are never the same size, but you instantly recognize exactly what expression the character is making.

Like with James Thurber, the shock of something very bare and messy instantly becoming something very detailed and specific in your mind, can be much more joyous than having the details all laid out for you. And no matter how much I work at tight drawing (and I am no Carla Speed McNeil) I cannot fathom how to draw loose like that.

Damn her. Damn them both. Happy new year.

[edited, to correct title]

Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — part 2

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Noah started the ball here. What was my personal discovery in comics for ’08? I could have done Steve Gerber’s all-text issue of Howard the Duck, but I’m beat and will settle for my experience reading A. Bechdel’s Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. In effect the experience means I read the series from start to finish, or almost. The book drops 137 strips, leaving 390 to take you from 1987 to last year. Good enough to get me from one end of the series to the other.

It was the first time I’d seen more of the series than isolated bits here and there. Since the early/mid-’90s I had read a couple of the individual collections put out by Firebrand Books (now with great new covers), plus strips here and there that surfaced in the New York Press. (The paper’s right-wing proprietor ran Bechdel’s leftist genderqueer menagerie as filler in his back pages.) I very much liked Bechdel’s earliest cartoons, done before Mo and Lois and the rest of the cast showed up, and I sort of liked the installments I’d seen of the continuing series. But Essential allowed me to follow the series from start to finish and for most of the middle.

When I read the series all the way thru, I found that I’d been harboring a delusion. Since the mid-’90s I had believed that Bechdel’s inspiration had been used up with the early strips. I thought that the continuingDykes story was a mere money-making effort and that it had become increasingly mannered and lifeless. Well, it is mannered, not to mention engineered. The pages are crowded with panels, the panels crowded with figures, the figures’ mouths jammed with words (and, yeah, sometimes the effect is like school librarians trying to be clever). But lifeless the strip is not.

Bechdel is compulsive and methodical, and these traits aren’t a replacement for spent inspiration; they’re how she gets the job done. The figures line up in tight, shallow friezes, and it’s evident that Bechdel drew each one from a posed snapshot. But she knows how the characters should pose, and what they should be saying and doing. From about 1994 on, when you read a few of the strips you very quickly come to feel like you’re looking at a crowd of people you know doing what comes naturally to them, even if they all have Edward Gorey eyes and a tendency to hold themselves in profile. She’s a good caricaturist, which you wouldn’t expect from Fun Home. She pops out one bit player after another, and they have the good bit player’s ability to look and behave like no one else on earth without seeming like a stunt. Bechdel has also developed a fine touch for visual dynamics — her zero-depth friezes are a concession to storytelling needs, not signs of a skill deficit — and the way she draws a rainy morning is a pleasure to the eye.

I leave out my favorite aspects of the strip: the sociology, characterization and story. I don’t want to sound like a well-meaning dork liberal or a middlebrow lover of the lose-yourself-in-the-characters fictional experience. But I am both those things, and my two days of reading Essential Dykes were a pleasure in just the ways I could have wanted

Someday soon…

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if I’m lucky I’ll start getting some more freelance work again, and will have less time to draw. In the meantime, you must suffer along with me. (These are for the Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible site, so I’ve appended the corresponding verses.)

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Judith 12:11
Then said he to Bagoas the eunuch, who had charge over all that he had, Go now, and persuade this Hebrew woman which is with thee, that she come unto us, and eat and drink with us.

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Job 38:41
Who provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of meat.

Still, you’ve got to admit: Bagoas is a hell of a name for a eunuch.

Gray Future

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Dan Urazandi, a retailer, suggests that comics need to cut costs:

Lower production values. I remember when Baxter paper, cardstock covers and the like were brought in to justify higher cover prices. Let’s cut them now to help keep prices down.

Okay. Here’s another suggestion; stop printing in color. The computer coloring that’s industry standard sucks anyway. Manga has shown pretty clearly that Americans (or at least some Americans) will buy black and white comics.

I don’t know. Why not try a couple black and white titles at lower prices and see how they do? You could even print some big title issues (Batman, Wolverine, whatever) in both b&w and color, with the b&w a good bit cheaper, and see if there’s a market for it.

Maybe the savings on b&w aren’t big enough to justify such a step. Maybe super-hero fans just need that color. But, given the desperate situation the industry faces, it seems like it would be worth thinking about, at least.