Monthly Archives: October 2009

Sequential Surrender Monkey (Part 1 of 5)

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(or the HU Bande Dessinée Roundtable Part 1)
(or Noah wrote it and Kinukitty meowed in approval, so don’t ask me what the title means.)

This is the first entry in the Hooded Utilitarian BD Roundtable. Vom Marlowe, Derik Badman, Kinukitty and Noah will be along later in the week with their own articles on various European comics.

I wrote the following article in the early 90s. It has never been published and the yellowing manuscript has been sitting in a dark closet for the last two decades.

The first third of the article is presented below (with some editing). The latter parts of the article concern two other books in the series namely, Fever in Ubricand and The Tower. Both of these are far superior to The Great Wall of Samaris and show off Benoît Peeters’ and François Schuiten’s abilities to a much greater extent. Anyone who has the slightest interest in European comics owes it to themselves to check them out if they haven’t already.

Second hand copies of The Great Walls of Samaris go for about $40 to $100 at on-line second hand book retailers. NBM has been publishing the albums in the series at a slow pace. I suspect that they aren’t big sellers for them as they’ve never been reprinted. Still, they are to be congratulated for printing and translating them at all. The latest books in the series to be translated are Brusel and The Invisible Frontier Volumes 1 and 2 both of which are still in print.

François Schuiten received the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême in 2002.

Philosophical Cities (Part 1): The Great Walls of Samaris

The English speaking world was introduced to the comics of the Belgian artist, François Schuiten, nearly 30 years ago. His first album, Aux médianes de Cymbiola (Heavy Metal 1981-82; created with Claude Renard) was done as a sort of graduation piece from Saint-Luc. His short stories have been published in the pages of Pilote and Metal Hurlant, among them the acclaimed Carapaces. It is, however, upon his more recent work on Les Cités Obscures (co-authored with writer Benoît Peeters) that his fame rests.

Parables are designed to simplify, persuade and to communicate spiritual truths. To a certain extent, the stories in Les Cités Obscures seek to do just that. These albums represent intriguing introductions to a world of ideas and are sparkling illustrations of basic philosophical tenets. The architectural motifs which can be found throughout the series are not merely functional but highly expressive of the societies which produced them. The architectural content of the buildings illuminate the personalities of the people who inhabit them and provide valuable clues as to the meaning of these tales.

Les Murailles De Samaris (The Great Walls of Samaris, English edition published by NBM in 1987) is the first album in the series and like the other albums, it is steeped in allegory.

It concerns the latest exploratory mission from the city of Xhystos to the enigmatic city of Samaris. Xhystos is an Art Nouveau fantasy with twisting, organic architectural forms and heavy ornamentation: a lounge seems to suggest a tribute to Victor Horta’s Hotel van Eetvelde; buildings are framed by metal girders and stanchions bent into shapes reminiscent of Hector Guimard’s Metro entrances.

Indeed Schuiten’s sensibilities permeate the entire album with Art Nouveau furniture, floor patterns and book covers. The city, however, is monstrously huge and impersonal; overcrowded but underpopulated. “Stifling” is the way one citizen descirbes it. The flamboyance and complexity of the buildings embody the values of its inhabitants who, while aesthetically astute, appear superficial and careless.

At the story’s start, the protagonist, Franz, is invited to undertake a mission to Samaris to dispel the fears and questions which are circulating among the citizens of Xhystos about the city. He accepts but his reasons for doing so are a mystery even to himself. His overwhelming fascination with Samaris belies a surface attraction for wealth and position. Though rejected by friends because of the dangerous nature of his mission, his mind is filled only with the promise of the unknown.

Franz reaches the strange and bewitching city after a journey across vast wastelands via train, altiplane and boat. His observations concerning the city and its inhabitants provide a wealth of useful information for readers interested in unraveling the conundrum the authors have set before them. For one, Samaris sports elements of the Romanesque, Classicism, Neo-Classicism and Art Nouveau. As Franz describes:

“Many different architectural styles seemed to merge together, as if the city had conserved traces of all the civilizations she had sheltered.”

Samaris is shrouded in mystery: a constant humming pervades the entire city; walls lie behind open windows; secret alleys open up in unexpected places and familiar buildings with similar details appear along unexplored paths. Her inhabitants wander aimlessly through the streets following routines which are never departed from. By his own account, Franz’s faculties are similarly dulled as soon as he enters the city. A woman named, Carla, who he meets everyday at the same time and the same place bears a striking resemblance to Anna’s sister, Clara, who has been presumed lost on a previous mission to Samaris. Yet Franz fails to recognize her and has absolutely no idea why they meet at all. Their conversations are at once banal, strained and repetitive.

This last point proves useful in deciphering the theme of Peeters’ and Schuiten’s tale for it seems to be a direct reference to what Martin Heidegger called “idle talk”. Arne D. Naess describes it as a situation in which:

“… talker and listener do not stand in any genuine personal relation or in any intimate relation to what is talked about…”

Gradually, Franz comes to “look and act” like all the other “lethargic wanderers” of Samaris. He pursues his mission with all the zeal of a sloth and becomes increasingly disenchanted with his discoveries. This reflects what Heidegger called “curiosity” which is described by Naess as:

“… a form of distraction, a need for the “new”, a need for something “different”, without real interest or capability of wonder.”

Realizing this and rousing himself by an act of will, Franz decides to leave the city with Carla. The violent scene that ensues when she refuses to comply reinvigorates him and leads to a renewed determination to find out the inner workings of Samaris.

What he discovers is at once shocking and horrifying – a rude awakening from a lifetime’s slumber and a revelation which brings new meaning to all his future dealings. For behind Samaris is a vast labyrinthine complex where the streets circulate according to his needs and where buildings are mere facades. Her inhabitants are two dimensional cut-outs committed to sustaining an illusion solely for him. The city represents a world of lies and alienation; a deterministic society as depicted by a clockwork town.

With this penultimate revelation, an echo of Søren Kierkegaard’s “three spheres of existence” or “stages in life’s way” may be perceived. The first is an aesthetic stage (Xhystos’s Art Nouveau) where one lives “for the moment” and develops one’s skills. It is a life symbolized by the casual love affair which ends in despair (a situation which Franz has found himself in). The next stage is characterized by an ethical life where one shows commitment and duty (the routine existence and comparatively sober architecture of Samaris) which results in the recognition of one’s shortcomings. The final religious stage is left undepicted but not without reason.

At the centre of Samaris, Franz discovers an ancient tome filled with images of the “sprawling” Drosera, a carnivorous plant upon which Samaris has been based. Here is a metaphor within a metaphor, the interpretation of which becomes clear only with the demystification of the rest of the author’s imagery.

Franz escapes from Samaris but returns only to social and political rejection in the city of Xhystos. The pattern of existence within that city no longer holds its charms for him. His friends and lover have never existed and in a final revelation he discovers that the citizens of Xhystos are little better than those of Samaris, puppets controlled from without by some impersonal force. The story ends with Franz stumbling back to Samaris, “the city [he] should never have left to begin with”.

The Great Walls of Samaris paints a picture of utter hopelessness and an eternity of searching. There are no answers given to Franz’ dilemma. Certainly, Samaris does not hold the key for Franz would only be returning to superficial friends and trivial, monotonous pastimes. Samaris represents a kind of existence described by Heidegger as inauthentic and anonymous (ethical stage). It is a world where people try to hide the “nothingness” of existence or the non-reality of its possibilities behind the mask of daily concerns (Nicola Abbagnano). Heidegger saw an escape from this in a recognition and embracement of death, and through this the acceptance of “the possibility of the impossibility of existence” thus leading to the appropriation of the authentic existence (religious stage).

This authentic existence, however, remains undefined by Peeters and Schuiten. In fact, the authors have rejected all firm ideas as to what exactly constitutes this state. Hence the complete absence of all religious edifices and acceptable alternatives in Samaris. Kierkegaard found his answer in Christianity and the acceptance of salvation through faith and not by works. A humanistic existentialist might devote himself to revolution and social change but Franz, like so many others, must continue his search.

When Franz fully comprehends the nullity of his existence in Samaris, his response is one of “dread” (“the sentiment of the possible”), a situation which leads to the apprehension of a “common destiny to which all men are subject”. His return to Samaris at the end of the story demonstrates the methodological importance and consequences of an awareness of death and its associated feeling of dread. From Abbagnano’s concise commentary on these two factors:

“…they offer to him, therefore, the possibility of remaining faithful to his destiny and of freely accepting the necessity that all men share in common. In this fidelity consists the historicity of existence, which is the repetition of tradition, the return to the possibilities from which existence had earlier been constituted, the wanting for the future what has been in the past.”

This statement becomes meaningful if one recalls the diverse architectural styles in Samaris and the quotations from the ancient tome Franz discovers at the centre of the city. In Peeters’ own words, Samaris is “free from impurities”, “will have always been and will always be” and will “seize the images” of those she has captured. She is “never changing yet always different” and her roots will always grow “further and further”.

Thus Franz’s returns to Samaris constitutes a faithfulness to the common destiny shared by all men since Samaris, as judged by her architectural content and characteristics, encapsulates the history of man. This last point in itself represents an interesting idea for it suggests that mankind’s existence has hitherto been singularly inauthentic.

Allegory is not an unfamiliar tool in the realms of existentialist thought. Kierkegaard created a series of books under various pseudonyms (embodiments of the aesthete, the ethical person and the religious person) to fully express his ideas on the three stages of life. Writers such as Albert Camus have chartered similar territory in The Rebel and The Outsider, dwelling mainly on the ultimate futility of one’s efforts, “the absurdity of existence” and the meaningless of life.

This would appear to be the message of The Great Walls of Samaris if one fails to consider the themes of the authors’ later albums…(cont’d)

Update by Noah: You can see the entire roundtable so far here.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: A Yoke of Oxen

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Psychy droniness and such.

1. Fathmount — A Yoke of Oxen (Anthology of Experimental Chinese Music)
2. Michio Kurihara — The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (Sunset Notes)
3. Mariah Carey — H.A.T.E.U. (Memoir of an Imperfect Angel)
4. Magic Hour — Jonathan and Charles (Will They Turn You On Or Will They Turn on You)
5. Sonic Youth — The Diamond Sea (Washing Machine)
6. Nadja — No Cure for the Lonely (When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV)
7. Burmese — Lady Killer (A Mere Shadow and Reminiscence of Humanity)
8. Li Jianhong — Sod (Anthology of Experimental Chinese Music)
9. Artur Rubinstein — Chopin: Mazurka #26 in C Sharp Minor (Chopin: 51 Mazurkas)

Download: A Yoke of Oxen.

And if you missed it you can get last week’s thrash mix here.

Update: At least one person has said the download isn’t working. If you’re having trouble as well (or, for that matter, if you’re not), please leave a comment to let me know.

Utilitarian Review 10/2/09

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On the Hooded Utilitarian

The week started off with my review of Wonder Woman #18 of the Marston/Peter run, which I compared to John Carpenter’s Christine.

Vom Marlowe continued her perusal of Batwoman.

I sneered at The Long Halloween.

KInukitty explored her tortured love affair with Kazuna Uchida’s I Shall Never Return.

And I reviewed the collected black and white Zot.

And you can see the tracklist and download my Thrash by Thrash mix here.

Next week, by the by, we are doing a bande desinee roundtable, with special guest blogger Derik Badman.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Over at Comixology I compare comics sales figures to those of other entertainment products.

Also to my surprise, big-event books appear to actually outsell big-event CDs and DVDs. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold more than 8 million copies on its first day on sale in the U.S., which makes Lil’ Wayne’s 2.8 million albums over a year look pretty puny. And, of course, 8 million copies is just about the total bookstore sales for all graphic novels in all of 2008, according to Brian Hibbs’ figures. Obviously, Harry Potter is exceptional…but Dan Brown’s most recent book was also selling in the hundreds of thousands on its first couple of days. Breaking Dawn, the last Twilight book, sold 1.3 million copies on the first day.

I talk about some of my favorite less successful contemporary R&B albums from the last ten years or so at Madeloud. Among them, Brandy’s Afrodisiac:

The commercial failure of this album is altogether a mystery. Brandy and Timbaland — how could that go wrong? The problem isn’t the music, anyway; this is indisputably Brandy’s best album…and it may be Timbaland’s as well. Brandy’s rich, resonant, slightly burred vocals fit perfectly with the washes of sound in Timbaland’s mature style. Far from being overpowered, Brandy instead becomes the most potent effect in Timbaland’s arsenal. On “Who Is She 2 U,” Timbaland opens with some patented funky/goofy stuttering and then Brandy slides in with her patented heart-stopping vocals, one of the sexiest sounds in R & B. The whole album’s like that; idiosyncratic genius and funky wit fused with absolutely unironic heartbreak and desire. Maybe Brandy’s fans just weren’t ready for her to go avant-garde and Timbaland’s weren’t ready to see him embrace the sincerity of the slow jam. Which is said fan’s loss; this is one of the great syntheses of black music in the last twenty years at least.

I review The Anthology of Experimental Chinese Music at Madeloud as well.

And I have an enthusiastic review of the great new Mariah Carey album up at Metropulse.

Other Links

I’ve been reading a bit of rock critic Carl Wilson. Some highlights are his article on why only hipsters make fun of hipsters, and also on why for indie rock class is more important than race.

Shannon Garrity is doing an epic series of posts on yaoi; this one about why yaoi is popular is a balanced and thoughtful look at the subject.

No Past, No Present, No Future

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Zot! 1987-1991: The Complete Black and White Collection
Scott McCloud
Harper
black and white/ 575 pages
softcover/$24.95

Zot! is timeless. The story of a super-powered, improbably good youth from a dimension very close to ours, its landscape is the landscape of nostalgia — a funnybook past of futuristic wonder which becomes brighter and more exciting the more it recedes. Zot is all the super-hero comics from your childhood as you remember them, rather than as they actually were — with the excitement and the goofy villains and the action; without the fusty clubhouse odor, or the grinding, bleary sound of middle-aged men pandering to children, and doing it badly. Alan Moore and Frank Miller made super-heroes more adult by giving them sexual hang-ups and nasty dispositions. Scott McCloud, contemporaneously, made them more adult through a self-conscious, insistent wonder — the very insistence of which introduced a kind of adult uncertainty, an acknowledgment of illusion and eventual loss.

The Moore/Miller, R-rated path to super-hero maturity is still very much alive in comics like Marvel Zombies, or, for that matter, All-Star Batman and Robin. Zot!’s take, on the other hand is — still, and somewhat surprisingly, very much alive. In its quiet way, Zot! was, if not an inspiration, then at least a forerunner of a whole school of intelligent-naif storytelling. There’s a little bit of McCloud in the Morrison/Quitely All-Star Superman, certainly. And Alan Moore’s Tom Strong even looks like Zot, down to that skin-tight red shirt.

Moore and Morrison both justify their fetishization of the funnybook past through complicated — or, if you prefer, batshit crazy — theories about the mystical significance of fictions. For Moore, dumb super-hero adventures are, literally, magical; for Morrison they’re analogues for the structure of reality. McCloud likes to talk about his formalist and system-building tendencies too – in the volume’s copious notes, he eagerly explains that his characters are based on the Jungian functions of the human mind. But, compared to the Kabbalah-spouting, pomo paranoiac crankiness of his successors, he’s just a piker — or, more accurately, just a humanist. There’s no shamanic, theological reference point for McCloud. Zot!’s too-perfect-to-be-true, sunlit future-past is a story with literary ambitions, but not with cosmological ones.

As a result, McCloud can sometimes be what Morrison and Moore almost never are: low-key. Especially in the black-and-white comics collected here, heroic fantasy has never looked so much smaller than life. Arch-enemies come back from the dead to attend a New Year’s party; friends catch up on small talk while super-battles are waged just off-panel; everybody on earth, it seems, takes interdimensional portals completely in stride. The art, too, is winningly erratic, with detailed, cross-hatched backgrounds populated by frankly stiff figures. In the notes, McCloud frets about his artistic limitations, but to me, at least, the amateurishness is charming, and sometimes more than charming. A half-page picture of Jenny (McCloud’s normal-girl protagonist) asleep in the water, with a diving Zot reflected in the pool that covers her lower belly, is sensual and clunky — sensual, in fact, because it’s clunky. The sexuality of the image is displaced by the mediocrity of the draftsmanship; Jenny really doesn’t look real enough to reach out and touch, and that distance infuses the image with an awkward poignancy.

McCloud’s technical limitations don’t always serve him well, of course. Especially when Zot’s world drops out and we’re stuck on earth, the author’s weaknesses as a storyteller are sometimes painfully apparent. Bereft of super-villains, we’re stuck with nerds with hearts of gold, evil jocks, the closeted lesbian, the alcoholic mother, the divorcing parents, the jerky older brother who comes through in a pinch. Reading the second half of the volume is like going through a YA problem-novel checklist.

When Zot is on its game, though, the amazing and the mundane, the clichéd melodrama and the pedestrian detail, are constantly wrong-footing each other. Zot’s comic-book world and Jenny’s more realistic one bump one another off-course, so that the reader can look at, and appreciate, both from unfamiliar perspectives. The best example of this is probably the moment when Zot, Jenny, and some other friends watch the New Year’s celebration on Zot’s earth. The year changes from 1965 — to 1965. Nobody on Zot’s earth realizes that the new year is the same as the old; only Jenny and the folks from her (or our) world notice that time is essentially standing still. It’s an odd and unsettling metaphor for the way super-hero comics constantly erase their pasts in order to maintain their eternal futuristic presents; a kind of mini-ret-con. Zot’s world suddenly seems much less substantial, its goodness and excitement built on amnesia. But where Grant Morrison would embrace this meta-fictional insight, McCloud just leaves it there; the characters are curious about the oddity of a world without history, but that’s about it. No further apocalyptic revelations follow; it’s just another inexplicable fact about Zot’s world, like space-travel or invisibility. It’s fun to think about, but it doesn’t have to lead anywhere in particular.

The anti-climax of this revelation is nicely done, and certainly fits with McCloud’s general tone. But at the same time, there’s an audible “thunk” as he lets the issue drop which reverberates uncomfortably backwards and forwards through the book. The contrast between history and historylessness seems like it is, or should be, at the core of the series. The past is what gives weight to moral actions; without it there’s no right, no wrong, and no love. Zot’s lack of memory, his innocence and self-certainty should, logically, also be his cruelty and uncanniness. Various characters do pay lip service to Zot’s egotism, but again, McCloud never really follows up — there’s never a moment when Zot does something that could actually be construed as mean. The closest he comes is when he agrees to do a Cola commercial for money. But then he apologizes. And gives all the money to charity.

McCloud does try to “educate” Zot — the hero fails several times in the course of the book, and each occurance is treated as an emotional end-of-innocence. One instance, in which a young girl is introduced and then gratuitously killed off in order to give Zot an excuse for rampant emoting, is particularly unfortunate. But unfortunate or not, none of these episodes really makes any difference; Zot comes back each time as cheerful and self-confident as ever. Moreoever, not only does Zot seem unaffected by his experiences, but the book does as well. The reader is supposed to accept Zot as a moral innocent even as his past is silently and continuously erased.

The difficulty here is not that Zot isn’t sufficiently real. It’s that he’s insufficiently unreal. He’s stuck with the cheerful verisimilitude of Superman, when he needs a bit more of the creepy unhumanness of Peter Pan. McCloud toys with this perspective only once, when Zot asks Jenny casually if she’d like to have sex. The scene has an eerie, prelapsarian tinge — a hint that total innocence has some very disturbing implications. But the comic quickly pulls back; Zot’s just a nice, forthright kid, y’all. He even carries around condoms! Everything’s safe and above-board here.

Zot’s perfecttion should, in short, have a dark side. McCloud isn’t willing to give him one and as a result the series goes subtly but decisively out of whack. A major theme of the last half of the book is that Jenny wants to go live permanently in Zot’s world. This is presented as a terrible idea — running away from her problems, turning her back on the beauty of the world, etc. etc. etc. But all of these counter-arguments sound a lot like special pleading. The fact is that running away is a sound strategy for dealing with one’s difficulties; it’s not foolproof or anything, but on the whole it works better than holding on to them. And if Zot’s world is just a kind of egalitarian paradise — like Sweden with rocket cars — then why not move there? Jenny can even visit home whenever she wants. What, exactly, is the big deal?

Perhaps the big deal has to do with losing your past, and therefore your soul. In his concluding notes, McCloud remarks that Zot! is “a world where looking back and looking forward are one and the same. The far flung future, the distant past, and every moment in between.” That sounds like fairie; eternity is flattened out, nostalgia suffuses reality, and all the happy, super boys never grow up. To be out of time is to be dead. Zot! circles around this insight and then, with a whoosh of rocket boots and an impish smile, it flies away.
________________

This review first appeared in The Comics Journal.