The new Comics Journal is out, with a long review by Bill of Danica Novgorodoff’s Slow Storm, a short review by Bill of Comic Book Tattoo (“Why did this book happen? Tori Amos knows Neil Gaiman. Next question.”) and a short review by me of Carol Lay’s “The Big Skinny,” which is one of the more vicious things I’ve written recently. Also interviews with Mort Walker (which I have to admit I don’t really care about) and a special comics section of the works of Thomas Rowlandson (which should be great.) Also looking forward to Shaenon Garrity’s review of Black Jack and an article on comic art in Kenya…so check it out.
Monthly Archives: April 2009
Happy Headline of the Day
It’s right here.
UPDATE: Believe it or not, there’s a minor tiff in the right-o-sphere about the rescue. The normally ferocious Ace of Spades noted that Obama gave the go-ahead for force. A blogger called The Other McCain answered with a lampoon headline suggesting that Ace wanted to rob the SEALs of their credit (scroll down to the big purple letters). Ace’s blog has this quote by H.L. Mencken: “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” In fact the logo includes the skull and crossbones: maybe he’s squishy on pirates. But he celebrates the Easter rescue with a photo of a skull surrounded by crawling flames; I’d say he’s really glad those pirates are dead. Still, he mentioned Obama without attacking him, so that means he’s gay.
Reading the fellows is like watching bright 10-year-olds play in a tree fort. They’re so lively! Ace’s logo isn’t a plain “Ace of Spades,” it’s “Ace of Spades HQ.” You have to appreciate the touch.
If liberals could be like wingnuts, we might describe Obama’s role this way, with a terse rat-a-tat: POTUS told the SEALs to do what they had to do, and they went ahead and did it. In other words, way it should be.
But we’re liberals. So we clear our throats, lean into the mike, and read from a wilted piece of paper that the system has worked appropriately, including the dispensation of presidential authority for the use of military force, and we’re happy that the operation has concluded successfully and with no loss of innocent life. Our best wishes to Captain Phillips and his family.
The Ace-McCain contretemps comes by way of Moderate Voice, a blog that is pretty much what you would expect from the title.
Rorschach and Genius
You don’t see any scenes of Rorschach hitting people and the people hitting back. That is, there are no Rorschach fight scenes. Instead he conducts exercises in violence: he applies violence and obtains a result, such as information, punishment, an end to a threat on his life. For the reader, it doesn’t make much difference if the victim in the scene is helpless; for example, the manacled child killer and pervert whom Rorschach burns alive, or (even more so) poor forlorn Moloch, a cancer victim of 60 whom Rorschach shoves into a refrigerator. His ruthlessness is fun; even more, we like his ingenuity. He’s short, smelly, and socially maladroit, but he’s elegant: he employs a minimum of action to get maximum effect.
Watchmen is by way of being a superhero epic, the way War and Peace is an epic. By “epic” I don’t mean “long, good and important,” I mean it covers the waterfront. War and Peace covers just about every experience that goes into human life, from a girl’s first dance to a battle heaving its way along a battlefield. Watchmen sweeps along different and more narrow territory. Its subject is the superhuman vs the human, superiority vs inferiority. But it covers that subject very well. A big blue man landing on Mars and deciding to create life, an ill-favored runt jumping on a prison cot at just the right moment — Watchmen has it all, and there’s quite a distance from one pole to the other. In most ways Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach couldn’t be more different, but they belong together and that’s chiefly because they’re smarter than we are. Dr. Manhattan’s overwhelming superiority doesn’t take the form of overwhelming strength, as is the case with Superman, Thor or the Hulk. Instead he sees reality at a level the rest of us can’t comprehend; he’s tuned in to the ultimate story, that of atomic particles and their dance. Rorschach isn’t stronger than the underworld types he breaks down in their hangouts. Instead he’s faster, more precise, more resourceful and inventive.
The thing is, a reader of Watchmen is in a similar position to that of a Rorschach victim. Not that we suffer, but we’re in Alan Moore’s hands and there’s not much we can do about it. His technical skill is so great that we don’t stand a chance. His skill takes the form of intelligence and ingenuity; Kirby blasts the reader,
Great Book Title
Things I Know About Kings, Celebrities and Crooks by Tufnell LeQueux
A great byline too, come to think of it. Anyway, he was a reporter for The Globe, a London newspaper, and covered the Ripper killings.
Source: From Hell by Alan Moore
Tax Prep Music
Back to the abacus…
Good Man
I’m reading The New Yorker profile of David Foster Wallace. In 1990 he was feeling burnt out and low, and he wrote in a letter to Jonathan Franzen that he envied any young literary type who was producing pages: “Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David fuckwad Leavitt.” I like that, the “fuckwad” thing. These literary guys talk just like me!
The thing is, I have nothing much against David Leavitt, nothing sizable. I really liked “The Term Paper Artist.” There’s a lot of good in it, though I admit that I must help the piece across the finish line by invoking the Woody Allen Principle. This holds that any pervasive flaw in a favored work is actually meant as satire. (The term gets its name from Interiors, Allen’s Bergman ripoff, which is as dull and cold and solemn as a night in a parking lot with a stringy-haired girl who thinks she has read Kierkegaard. Confused diehards wanted to think Allen was making fun of dim pretentiousness, a project he has apparently stuck with.) To me, “Artist” makes the most sense as an elaborate fuck-you to Stephen Spender and others who objected when Leavitt hijacked one of Spender’s books in the interest of gay outness. I mean, I think that’s how Leavitt saw the controversy; Spender may just have felt he was being plagiarized. Anyway, “Artist” piles on the proud-out-gay touchstones, right down to the boy who gets in touch with his desires, starts doing it with guys, decides his lifework will be helping HIV patients, and takes his next vacation in Florence. He’s even a Mormon; very Angels in America. [UPDATE: I wrote Stephen “Spencer” first time out and just noticed my mistake. Oh well.]
I haven’t read much D. F. Wallace, just a few of the stories in Girl with Curious Hair. They weren’t my sort of thing, but one had a great line. An unlikable girl in a graduate writing program keeps bugging her professors with elaborately postmoden stories. One has the line “Nouns verbed by, adverbially adjectival,” which Wallace’s narrator follows with this one-word interjection: “Imagine!” Or so I remember it.
UPDATE: Another thing about that New Yorker piece. It says that when Wallace really hit bottom, he did manage to find one book that perked up his interest in writing. The article identifies this as “Flight to Fear, a teen adventure book.” You might think it was quite a book, given that it helped revive an intelligent young author going thru clinical depression. You might think it deserved a few words of description, or at least a byline. But it gets none of that, I suppose because it was written as entertainment and not as literature. For the record, the Library of Congress says the book’s author is Tom Belina and that it was published in 1979 by Children’s Press.
UPDATE: A fellow who taught with Wallace at Illinois State says he learned “really, really quickly” that when talking with Wallace it was better “not to go beyond the equivalent of ‘How’s the weather?'” Why? Well, because the guy told Wallace he liked one of his essays and Wallace “did this gesture of wiping the butt with one hand and pointing at his mouth with the other.” So maybe this profane, Beavis and Butthead, “fuckwad” style of discourse isn’t so great after all. At least a guy can be polite.
More About Sylvia Plath’s Son
I posted a while back about the regrettable Plath and Hughes and their poor son, who recently committed suicide. Now the New York Times profiles the son and describes his life as a scientist in Alaska. Given his horrible background, it sounds like he took exactly the steps that were needed for his life to become something good. But in the end, for some reason, things didn’t work out. So it’s a shame.