Monthly Archives: June 2009

If I Had a Canon

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There’s been a bit of a go round on the blogs about canons and what they’re good for. Via Dirk as always. James Sturm started things off by arguing that children’s book illustrator Virginia Lee Burton should be a great source of inspiration for young cartoonists, and that the Masters of American Comics exhibition from a couple of years back should have included more women. Tom Spurgeon then chimed in saying that Burton, while cool, doesn’t really seem that relevant to comics (or at least that she doesn’t seem like the godmother of comics, as Sturm claimed) and that if you’re going to accuse the Masters of Comics exhibition of not having any women you need to say what women you’d put in there and who you’d take out. Peggy Burns said this sounds like a cage match, which seems silly. Tom said he didn’t really want a cage match just more specificityHeidi said okay, let’s take out Feininger and replace him with Lynda Barry. Dirk chimed in to say he’d pick Phoebe Gloeckner over Art Spiegelman.

Phew.

So, starting from the bottom then: I don’t really know Gloeckner’s work, but I’d pretty much pick a stale dog turd over Art Spiegelman, so replacing him with whoever is fine with me. I love Feininger’s work, and I have little if any interest in Lynda Barry’s. So if I were curating that show, that isn’t the substitution I’d make.

However, if I were curating the show, there wouldn’t be a need to make one for one substitutions anyway. And that’s because the canon presented in that show just isn’t one I care about. Pretty much at all. The artists in the show were:

Will Eisner
Jack Kirby
Harvey Kurtzman
R. Crumb
Gary Panter
Chris Ware
Winsor McCay
Lionel Feininger
George Herriman
E. C. Segar
Frank King
Chester Gould
Milton Caniff
Charles M. Schulz

The artists on that list that I would absolutely keep are Schulz and McCay. I’d probably chuck everybody else. I like Feininger and Kirby and (with reservations) Crumb and Panter and Eisner and Ware well enough, but if I were choosing my best of the best, they wouldn’t be there.

A lot of this is just because I’m not that interested in early newspaper strips, which form the center of curator John Carlin’s vision of what comics are. Segar, King, Gould, Caniff…eh, whatever. It’s true that, because of my lack of interest, I haven’t really studied their work all that closely…but then, I’d wager Carlin hasn’t closely studied (or probably even heard of) the work of Edie Fake or Dewayned Slightweight, two genderqueer artists I would quite possibly include if I were going to be made king for a day. (Who else? Um…Dame Darcy, definitely. Art Young. Marston/Peter. Berni Wrightson. Bob Haney possibly. Ariel Schrag. Dugald Stewart Walker, perhaps. Maybe Calef Brown; that man is a genius.)

So I’d have more women than Carlin’s line-up anyway. But…that’s not really the point. And I don’t think the debate about whether cage matches are worthwhile or about whether you need specificity in these kinds of arguments are really the point either

Tom was irritated because Sturm didn’t say who, in particular, he would replace. But Sturm didn’t say who he would replace in particular because he was making the argument that the criteria were altogether flawed in the first place. At the end of his retrospective he says:

But it’s increasingly clear to me, as I watch my students struggle to bring nuance to a medium that has historically lacked it, that they have as much (if not more) in common with children’s book artists like Burton as with the men who worked in the sweatshops in the early years of comic books. It is time to stop looking at the history of comics as the history of the comic industry. We need to make room for more masters, Burton among them.

I mean, I guess he could be more pugnacious about it, but I think it’s pretty clear that he’s saying that children’s book artists like Burton are a superior model for comics creators today. The comic strip creators in the sweatshops weren’t as good. We should chuck them as models and go with folks like Burton instead. So he’s not saying, take this one out or the other one out. He’s saying, rethink how this canon works from the bottom up. In particular, let’s replace the comic-strip guys with children’s book artists, many of whom, as it happens, were women.

The point here is that canons aren’t actually just a list of who’s the best or most important. They’re a list of who’s the best and most important to somebody in particular using particular criteria. Carlin’s into old newspaper strips and into folks who take those strips as a model or an inspiration (Eisner, Ware, Spiegelman, Kurtzman) with a few other folks tossed into the mix as well for balance. That’s a particular view of the industry. It’s an especially well-established view of the industry (in part because it gets institutional support like the Masters of Comics show, which is why that show matters, yes, even two years down the road.) But you could have other views of the industry, which are, say…more open to certain kinds of craftsmanship, or certain kinds of storytelling, or certain kinds of ideas about what comics are, or certain kinds of creators. Like women.

Articulate

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Way back at the start of the ’08 campaign, Joe Biden caused a flap by describing Obama as “articulate and bright and clean.” From Richard Wolffe’s book Renegade: The Making of a President, via Talking Points Memo:

Bush was so taken aback with the public criticism of Biden that he called in his African American secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Condi, what’s going on?” Rice told him what everyone else had said: that white people don’t call each other articulate.

  Yeah, I’m pretty sure we do. When talking about someone who gets words out of his/her mouth for a living, it strikes me as not uncommon to describe such a person, if he/she is good at the job, as being articulate. “Articulate” becomes condescending when used to describe someone who is not expected to be able to speak well: an athlete, for example. Then the implication is “Hey, he can talk.” In the old days reporters found it especially surprising that black athletes, entertainers, cops, etc., could speak well; hence the dragging out of “articulate” in enough racial contexts for the word to pick up the air of a backhanded slur. The reporters learned the word’s racial pitfalls a while back; I first heard about its implication when reading a copy of the New York Times stylebook from the 1970s. But Biden has an invincibly active mouth and just about anything is bound to come out of it at one point or another.
TPM posted the above anecdote because it’s supposed to make Bush look bad. But I think he comes off okay. He was confused about something racial, so he asked his black friend what was up. Seems reasonable to me. Yeah, yeah, Bush is a rich, white, sheltered conservative who doesn’t have a clue. But when it comes to race, most of us have half a clue at best. Part of being black or white in America is being confused about blacks and whites. I was confused by most, not all, of the racial charges that flew about during the early primaries. (Like, it’s wrong to say Lyndon Johnson should get a lot of credit for America’s civil rights laws? He passed the damn things!)
 The two races are a pair of riddles riding side by side in a ball of confusion, and — how to put this? — away from the office we don’t hang out all that much. Hence Steven Colbert’s very funny jokes about his “black friend” — every white American wants one and they’re harder to come by than you might think, in large part because centuries of racial oppression have bred a certain distance and distrust between the two groups. But if you have a good friend, and you’re confused about something she might be able to explain, then go ahead and ask her. 

Phallus Dei Part 7: Don’t Show Us That

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Man Thing Part One;Man Thing Part Two;Man Thing Part Three; Man-Thing Part Four; Man Thing Part Five; Man Thing Part Six
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So Tucker is definitely liking these more than me, which is to say, he is liking them at all. In Man Thing 9 and 10 he provides a really reasonable defense of Mike Ploog, whose work nonetheless continues to leave me almost entirely indifferent. Tucker even has affection for the geezers in the swamp and their thwarted love affair and their hillbilly hi-jinks and the improbable and yet nonetheless totally predictable tale of jealousy and stupidity and….

Aw, fuck it. I just want it to be over. I begged Tucker…please, man, let’s stop. It’s not worth it. But he was like, no, no we can’t admit defeat. So I’m trudging on…but everyone will suffer for it, damn it.

Anyway, for this round I waded my way through Giant Sized Man-Thing #2 and Man-Thing 11, 12, and 13.

For some time now I’ve been hoping that Steve Gerber would stop writing like a putz and suddenly show me why he’s so well-beloved. It hasn’t happened though. I have come to the end of my portion of the blogging, and, if anything, Gerber has only gotten worse. Giant-Sized Man-Thing #2 is at least blessed with some nice pulp art by John Buscema; his obligatory hot female actually looks cuter than his Man-Thing, which is, as Tucker points out, something that is not really in Mike Ploog’s skill set. As far as the scripting on these issues goes though….you got your tortured scientist with a conscience; you got your wounded Vietnam vets trying to draw attention to their plight; you got your monster who behaves like a big friendly puppy dog. I guess somebody could go through and point out all the moments of egregious idiocy (A museum is going to expose its patrons to a giant monster with unknown attributes as a money-raising gimmick? Really? Their insurance company is cool with that, huh?) But it’s hardly worth the effort. Sneering at this book doesn’t even rise to the level of shooting fish in a barrel. It’s more like dropping dynamite into a fishbowl. And the lone fish was already dead to begin with.

Still, I suppore Man-Thing 12, entitled “Song-Cry…,” merits special mention. This is probably the worst effort of the book so far. Indeed, even amidst the many egregious, shambling mounds of slime that make up mainstream comics, this issue is a noticeably repulsive specimen. I know Gerber is only 25 or something here, and many commenters have promised that he gets better. But I think I’m more or less determined never to find out. You write something like this, your audience is entitled to leave and never come back.

We start off, inevitably enough, with Man Thing mooning around, a helpless slave to the contrivances of plot and the ominous, low-hanging blocks of narration. He empathically feels someone in pain and discovers a poor schlub (named Brian) writing portentous prose at a table. “The time was coming,” writes Brian, “when I’d just stop functioning like a burned-out machine…a dead computer, which was, I think, what I’d become.” Wow, man. Heavy. But Brian can’t finish his blindingly poetic effusion because he’s being attacked by ghostly bill collectors! Man-Thing is sympathetic…when he was a man, bill collectors came after him too, and he still remembers the pain, the horror, which was, after all, comparable in many ways to being betrayed by your fiance, injecting an experimental formula, being transformed into a shambling mockery of a man, and then being forced to serve as a dripping nanny to a series of self-pitying baby-men who, for reasons best known to themselves, insist on doing their whining in the middle of your swamp.

Anyway, as I said, Man-Thing feels bad for the guy, and saves him, and there’s a more or less pointless confrontation where Brian yammers on about how he needs to get down the words to stop the hurt and Man-Thing just sort of stands there, flagrantly refusing to disembowel him. Fucking Man-Thing. What good are you anyway? Jason would have killed him for me, god damn it.

So, having not been disemboweled, Brian wanders off and…

Oh, holy crap. I just realized that his name is “Brian Lazarus.” Because he’s going to be rejuvenated and rise from his “dead computerness”. That’s just peachy. Way to go Steve. No wonder everyone thinks you’re a genius.

So we cut now to loose ends from last issue. There’s this hot dancer named Sybil who you can tell is a dancer because she’s wearing leotards in the swamp. You can tell she’s hot because she’s wearing leotards in the swamp. Otherwise you wouldn’t know; all the hideous things that I’d hoped would happen to Brian seem to have spared him, and been inflicted instead upon the unsuspecting and defenseless art. Poor, sad art. Klaus Janson took John Buscema’s layouts, then hit himself in the head with a large heavy hammer, spun himself around three times, and then drew the entire issue using a pencil shoved far enough up his nose to cause brain injury.

All right, it’s not that bad. But it’s not good, either.

Where was I? Oh, right, Sybil. Unfortunate things happened to her last issue; her brother kidnapped her because the plot said so, but he seemed sorry. Still, she was stung…or maybe she had other problems. Anyway, she says, “I make it a practice not to involve myself too deeply with anyone…ever.” Ooooo. That’s so, so sad. Pretty girl like that (well, wearing leotards anyway)…that’s a darn shame. What happened to her to harden her heart like that? Thank God we’ll never know, because she’s a girl, and only guys rate extended explorations of their tragic backstories. Sexist? Sure. But if my choice is between sexism and twice as many tragic backstories, I know which way I’m going to vote.

As fate would have it, the hard-hearted Sybil and the too, too tender-hearted Brian run into each other. Sybil takes Brian in and Brian repays her by telling her about the deep meaningfulness of Beatles albums. No, he really does. Then he shows her his poetry. “Song-Cry of the Living Dead Man” is the title, so you can see it’s sure to wow the chicks. Here’s just a taste: “I work for a living. I live to work. Every morn at six a.m. the grating clangor of the orange clockwork drives a spike into my ear, and I rise from not-sleep and prepare to confront a new demon-day.”

This is perhaps a good time to mention that Steve Gerber, like Brian Lazarus, was an advertising writer. And Brian’s song-cry is, of course, Gerber’s song-cry, inasmuch as Gerber wrote it. So when Gerber has Sybil’s hard heart just melt right through her leotards upon hearing this drivel, it is difficult to see it as anything but the most self-indulgent of adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasies. “Th-there’s such terrible pain in these words…” Sybil stammers. “I never dreamed anyone could feel so…so…” and then she babbles on “You touched something in me…that I wasn’t even sure was there. I think…I care about you.” Yep, Steve, your poetry is so true, so powerful, so raw, that random babes will fall in love with you after a single recitation. Your pain is so deep, so fascinating, that all the shallow people (“I’ve always been a pretty happy person myself” Sybil gushes) would have to acknowledge your genius if only they would listen to you…I mean, really listen. You’re beautiful Steve Gerber; you’ve seen the true underbelly of capitalism, and you’ve risen above all that. Money? Hah! All you desire in return for your utterly pedestrian creative effusions and grinding self-pity is the abject adulation of some boring fantasy honey. Who could possibly begrudge you that?

Not the mindless Man-Thing. Oh sure, he takes a swipe at Brian at the end, but only so Sybil can interpose herself and make Brian see that someone cares about him. “It took something as unhumans as that monster…to show us both our humanity.” Sybil earnestly declares. And so Man-Thing wanders off, to touch other worthy, poorly-drawn souls with his sodden transcendence.

Tucker will have to deal with that, though. I’m done.

Another Day, Another Future Past

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This review initially appeared in The Comics Journal.
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Alan Moore/Travis Charest et. al.
Complete WILDC.A.T.S.
Wildstorm
color/softcover
392 pages/$29.99
ISBN: 13-978-1-4012-1545-3

Alan Moore/et. al.
Wild Worlds
Wildstorm
color/softcover
320 pages/$24.99
ISBN-13: 978-1-4012-1379-4

In Watchmen, Alan Moore answered the question, “What if super-heroes were real?” In his work on WildC.A.T.S., he asks instead, “What if Chris Claremont were real?” Like Claremont’s X-Men and its many imitators, Moore’s WildC.A.T.S. is basically a soap-opera with tights, complete with love triangles, amnesia, false deaths, and gobs of interpersonal angst. The difference is that Claremont’s characters always behaved like a twelve-year-old’s melodramatic fantasy of adulthood. Moore’s tend to act like an adult’s melodramatic fantasy of adulthood. This is perhaps most apparent in the approach the two series take towards evil. In Claremont’s world, good guys can be egotistical and abrasive, but they’re still essentially good— which is why much of the bickering in the classic X-Men series seems peculiarly unmotivated. The characters tend to argue simply because its good drama, not because they actually have different goals or even perspectives. When Jean Grey goes over to the dark side, it’s a result of mystical Jungian gobbledygook, not because she’s prone to recognizable human impulses like greed or hate.

Moore’s characters, on the other hand, are, in fact, greedy and petty and cruel and even bigoted. You can see why they dislike each other, because they do in fact have unlikable traits. This isn’t quite the same thing as saying that they are true-to-life. This is pulp adventure, and the merciless grinding of the plot is a lot more important than the coherence of any individual caught up in it. Would Zealot really repudiate her teammates and friends after a few days of flattery? Is Majestic really dumb enough to fall for Tao’s elementary reverse psychology? Probably not — but the way the corruption works is true-to-life, even if the characters themselves aren’t.

As with the philosophy, so with the plotting — where Claremont relies almost exclusively on a handful of gimmicks (how many times do the X-Men get captured and then break free, anyway?), Moore is actually able to come up with intelligent, surprising twists on a regular basis. The two central arcs of the WildC.A.T.S. series (Tao’s machinations and the fact that the war with the daemonites is not at all what it seems) are both infinitely more coherent, surprising, and affecting than anything Claremont ever came up with.

In other words, and to no one’s surprise, Moore is a vastly better writer than Claremont. And yet, despite its limitations, I think Claremont’s run on X-Men actually holds up better than Moore’s stint on WildC.A.T.S. In part, it’s the art. Many illustrators worked on Moore’s stories, but there’s little point in separating them. The pages are a jumble of cluttered panels, garish colors, and improbable poses. In comparison, John Byrne’s X-Men work looks startlingly good — the layouts are clear, the faces pleasant, the bodies stylized in a consistent and professional way. It’s not Jack Kirby, but it’s not embarrassing either.

Indeed, Byrne’s open, even innocent art fits easily into Claremont’s story-telling. Yes, Claremont’s moral sense and plotting skills are, to put it kindly, not of the best. But that’s part of what gave the X-Men its directness and freshness. Though it’s obviously genre hack-work in some sense, you get the feeling that Claremont really believes in his tropes. It would be churlish to sneer at him for telling us, for the fiftieth time, that Colossus is just a Russian farm boy, just as it would be churlish to roll one’s eyes at the cookie-cutter descriptions of Nancy Drew’s friends placed at the beginning of each book in the series. The formula is the formula; its simple-mindedness is also its simplicity, which is to say, its charm.

Moore really believes in these tropes too, but in a way that’s a good bit more abstract and circuitous. When he tackles straight-forward genre hackwork he’s always performing a kind of intricate shell-game, moving back and forth between irony, nostalgia, and a complicated sense of wonder. When it works, it’s a marvel. For instance, my favorite character in the series (and Moore’s as well, I think) is a murderous, foul-mouthed killer cyborg named Maxine. It’s only at the end of the run that it becomes clear to both readers and WildC.A.T.S. that Maxine is less Wolverine than Kitty Pryde — and that moment of revelation is probably the most moving sequence in the comic.

At least in part Moore’s hand is so sure here because Maxine is his character. He’s interested in her, and so he’s paying attention to what he’s doing. When his concentration slips, though, the results are ugly. The Voodoo mini-series in the Wild Worlds volume can be seen as a bland desecration of Moore’s Swamp Thing zombie story from the mid-80s, replacing that tale’s subtle take on race and time with a dull serial killer yarn tricked out with exoticized voodoo touches. The Majestic spotlight, with the hero the lone survivor at the end of eternity, is more entertaining, though it too feels second-hand — Neil Gaiman, for example, did much the same thing, and did it better, in his Books of Magic mini-series.

As always, though, everybody saves their worst efforts for the crossovers. Moore participates in two, and they both do indeed suck. The first is a generic company-wide crisis event, filled with meaningless battles and lots of stentorian bellowing about self-actualization. The second — a WildC.A.T.S./Spawn crossover included in the Wild Worlds volume — is even worse. In a riff on Claremont’s “Days of Future Past,” we are treated to a time travel story in which we see the coming apocalypse and our heroes’ hideous fates. As an emblematic moment of crappiness, I give you… The Harem of Super-Heroines! Yes, Moore has gone there. Former heroes are forced to put aside their degrading, revealing costumes and put on degrading, not-quite-as-revealing bikinis. Then they are raped by evil guards and ogled by evil fanboys who, I guess, have never seen actual women and so aren’t put off by the glaring anatomical inconsistencies in the illustrations.

Claremont’s classic X-Men was for kids. It never quite tipped over into adult themes and as a result, it never managed to produce anything as stupidly, ineffectually tasteless as this. Moore’s Watchmen was basically for adults, and its handling of sexuality was sensitive and thoughtful. Moore’s WildC.A.T.S., on the other hand, is, like most super-hero comics these days, intended for adults who want to pretend they’re kids. And while I appreciate the man’s craftsmanship and genius, nostalgic self-aggrandizement is a lousy foundation for art.

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For more recent Alan Moore blogging, check out Tom on Miracleman.

Oliphant Watch: Careful There, Obama!

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The idea is clear: Obama isn’t keeping his promises and he’s getting high and mighty. A very simple point. Yet the cartoon makes no sense. Oliphant bounces his point off the fact that Obama now has a dog and dogs leave shit around the place. So?

Obama: “Promised? What did I promise?”
Axelrod: “That you wouldn’t tread in anything.”
What? What promise was that? I mean, even metaphorically, what promise was that? Obama promised that he wouldn’t get into trouble? Like, when?
Oliphant has his metaphor exactly reversed. If Obama decided he was so powerful and popular that he could now wade into every messy issue and get it resolved exactly the way he’d like, then this idea of loftily stepping into dog turds would make sense. But Obama is now as he has always been: daring in a few big things, cautious in many others. He keeps the shit off his shoes unless he sees some great, compelling reason that makes the mess worthwhile.
UPDATE:   Bryan guides us here for the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times’ meter of kept/unkept Obama promises; looks like we’re at the too-early-to-tell stage. Matthew outdoes me with a roundup of recent Oliphants:

I would vote for something like this, if you want recent inscrutability. I have no idea what he’s trying to say here (bigots live in New Hampshire, even if they do legalize gay marriage?); the point seems to be a funny drawing of a grizzled hillbilly type in a wedding dress. And I agree, that’s funny, but there’s little point. …

But the drawings are as good as ever … look at Obama running some guys over with a steamroller, or these hideous human-headed vultures, or the big ass on the banks. And I can even follow what he’s trying to say with those. It’s when he tries to do some actual humor that he usually loses me. This one (which does have some charmingly simple depictions of its characters) seems to be saying that Rush Limbaugh is a hypocrite because he won’t gay-marry Dick Cheney. That’s silly. And here’s another bit of slang that recalls the “Texas tea” thing from a few weeks ago; apparently Oliphant isn’t aware of the term “rugmuncher”, but that’s what I thought of when I saw that one.