This is an incredibly depressing story about the guy who bought the reader and has been running it into the ground. Argh.
Yearly Archives: 2009
Comics of the Future…Today!
Best American Comics 2053
Edited by Philoctetes Crumb, Jr.
Yes, it’s still got the same title, even though the Galacticon/Cylon Confederacy officially conquered the planet five years ago. I guess it’s a nostalgia thing? Or a political statement? Because nothing says, “Fight the power” like fourth-generation underground comics royalty editing a boring fucking anthology, I guess.
So what do we got here anyway? Hip, Viagra-addled eightysomethings whinging about their artificial nether-prosthetics? Check. Ivan Brunetti with a raw, tasteless strip about how he’s sorry he can’t kill himself now that he’s transplanted his brain into an invulnerable titanium computer? Yep. Some Frank Miller clone (yes, literally ) writing the newly public-domain Jimmy Corrigan as a two-fisted Wolverine knock-off (“I’m the most complexly ambivalent at what I do…but what I do isn’t very nice”)? You betcha. (Actually, that last one is pretty funny. I knew the orphaned works law would be good for something.)
Naturally, there’s still no manga coverage. At least, though, the venerable series has finally, finally, finally decided to acknowledge the existence of Psycomics. Guru McCloud himself is represented with an excerpt from his latest: Defibrilating Comics. With the new lasex surgery laws, his icon doesn’t have glasses, and it’s hair is white — and, of course, it appears on the inside of your eyeballs. But never fear, it’s still blocky and ugly and it still won’t shut up! “Gosh, gee, the brain stem is just another medium to deliver the ever expanding, ever inventive world that is comics and I’m going to show you all of its wonderful potential by standing stock still and nattering on and on just as if I’m one of those hideous nanotisements from the twenties! Ain’t progress grand!”
As has been the case since the early forties when the remnants of the big two merged, there’s one entry devoted to the latest DC/Marvel crossover kerfuffle. The average super-hero reader is, of course – well, actually, there are only two of them. They are both 98 and male and have been reading comics for approximately 90 years a piece. Apparently what they want are comics entirely about Hulk rape. “Hulk rape Thing! Hulk rape Ms. Marvel! Hulk rape Dr. Light! Hulk rape Jughead!” That’s all this strip is; 35 pages of Hulk rape. I think that makes it sound maybe more interesting than it is, though. Because while Hulk is raping the text is mostly devoted to a lot of explication about how the heroes are the greatest heroes ever, and then they’re still the greatest heroes ever and aren’t the Justice League of Avengers the best? Then in the middle Hal Jordan explains why Bruce Wayne isn’t Green Lantern, which has to do with Superman being depowered and eating Galactus (hopefully not in a sexual way. Ugh.) And Sue Dibny is resurrected as Caspar the friendly Ghost III. Or maybe she’s actually the Phantom Girl or something; there was a mini-series they were all telling me to read over at Occasional Superheroine because, you know, it featured a woman, but…well, I didn’t. Sorry. Anyway, as it turns out, Hulk can’t rape you if you’re incorporeal, so that’s a plus.
I know, I know…the Beat’s gonna be on my case for not being sufficiently nice. And I have to admit, it’s not all downside. Sure, the content in Best American Comics 2053 is wretched. But at least you can’t actually buy it anywhere. Thank God for the ongoing economic contraction and the horrific, systematic destruction of our civilization. No race that produces crap like this deserves to live, anyway. All Hail the Cylons!
imaginary comics, part 3: “portnoy’s complaint”
I guess it’s not surprising that Philip Roth is the latest literary darling to jump on the trend of adapting his work to comic-book form. Perhaps inspired by David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik’s City of Glass or Asaf Hanuka’s Pizzeria Kamikaze, or in a bid to seem relevant amongst younger Jews-about-town like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, Roth has commissioned a graphic novel of his 1969 opus Portnoy’s Complaint.
What is surprising is his choice of artist. Rather than R. Crumb or Art Spiegelman, artists with similar enshrined statuses in their fields and somewhat Rothy down-and-dirty semi-confessional aesthetics, he tapped prince of the pretty-boys Craig Thompson.
Portnoy’s Complaint the graphic novel is a fairly slim volume (it was apparently drawn right before Thompson began the final pages for Habibi) coming out next year from Houghton Mifflin. I was of course able to get a galley due to my mad connections in the jewy/comicky/academic world.
Thompson’s drawing style fits the narrative seamlessly sometimes; his swoopy expressionism sets off the various flashbacks well, and the scenes set in the psychologist’s office show Alexander Portnoy (Good Bye Chunky Rice style) adrift on his couch in a swirling sea, while Spielvogel looms like an impassive, wooden dock. Thompson also has had a lot of practice conveying acute shame on pious young boys, which make the bar mitzvah lesson scenes and the liver masturbation scene even more tortured and memorable than in prose.
But in the adult flashbacks, there’s a real tension between the approaches of the two authors’ literary personas: Roth the great misogynist and Thompson the rapturous girl-worshipper. Despite a lot of similarities one can draw between Thompson’s oeuvre and Portnoy (flashbacks, childhood trauma as a key to adult dysfunction, outsized sexual longing), I got to wondering if Roth chose Thompson for the book just to watch him squirm.
The squirm of the artist is practically palpable in the oral sex scenes (man do I wish I was allowed to scan and post those). And when portraying the shallow, illiterate supermodel lust/hate object known as the Monkey, Thompson, without veering from the text, makes her a lot more human than Alexander can see (maybe as a working class small-town Midwestern boy himself, Thompson identified with her more than the protagonist).
Sometimes Thompson goes too far in trying to pretty everything up; the Portnoys mostly seem like nice, vaguely ethnic people rather than the “Jewish joke” Roth described them as. But the mis-fit of Thompson and Portnoy makes a really fascinating text and counter-text (or second text) interplay. Thompson foregrounds the fight that is often overlooked in the text, by embodying with his art style the Nice Jewish Boy masking the Dirty Jew-boy inside.
It’s a bit rocky in places, but I think it’s my favourite Roth creation, and just might be my favourite Thompson creation as well. You should look out for it.
The Reader Still Has It
A reduced amount, admittedly…just enough, really, to make me sad at how much it’s shrunk, and how much more it’s likely to shrink. There are several great stories in the current issue though; maybe the best is a discussion of the ways in which Barack Obama is indebted to Harold Washington, and how Chicago’s racial politics have and haven’t changed.
Never-Ending Swamp
I haven’t read anything by Brian K. Vaughn, though I’ve been tempted by Last Man a time or two. Anyway, he’s got a long interview in Comics Journal 295 which I was flipping through. One passage caught my eye, in which the interviewer (Sean T. Collins) noted that Vaughn often writes long serials with endings, and wondered why that was, since most ongoing comics don’t have a set completion point. Vaughn responds:
I would say it’s interesting tht it’s only people who love comics who ask me that, whereas it’s a bizarre question to ask someone “Why do your stories have endings?” Because it’s a story. Isn’t that how they work? But because I think we’re all weaned on Spider-Man and Batman and these things that have the illusion of a third act that never completes, that seems strange. But I guess it always felt natural to me. Both Sandman and Preacher were so influential, and I love that they ended and they were better because they did end and the endings gave meaning to everything that came before it. Yeah, it felt right to tell your story and leave and that’s always been appealing to me. I’ve always loved writing endings more than I loved writing beginnings.
Obviously Vaughn isn’t the first one to point this out, but he does put it well — particularly in the way he emphasizes how unusual comic are in this regard. Super-hero comic-books really are unique in the way that the iconic characters not only keep going and going and going, but do so in the context of what is supposed to be a single never-ending story. Mickey Mouse or Beetle Bailey or Tarzan or the Long Ranger or King Arthur or Sherlock Holmes — they all dodder on forever, but it’s all in the context of episodic or separable adventures that don’t presume continuity. While, on the other hand, there are long-running dramas that do have continuity — but even the hoariest of those hasn’t been up for anything like 40 years, I don’t think, and even if they are, characters have to shuffle in and out along the way if just because actors age.
All of which means that the super-hero world is really about the only place you’ll find narratives that, almost literally, never end. And, as Vaughn says, this is bad in a lot of ways. In the first place, endings are fun. Endings are good. Not always, of course — Hollywood endings are often trite and stupid, and sometimes endings can be a dumb pratfall or an over-obvious attempt at bombast or…well, lots of things can go wrong. But still…in a lot of cases, endings are really the best parts. The end of Don Quixote for example, where he briefly regains his sanity, is one of that novels high points; the apocalyptic ending of the Narnia series absolutely kicks ass; the end of James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” one of the great paragraphs in all of literature; the end of Middlemarch, where, after some 1000 pages, we learn that Dorothea never does become the great woman she wanted to be, and why that’s okay; the end of Paradise Kiss for that matter, with its bittersweet anticlimax…I mean, yes, I could have done without the stupid miracle cure ending to Bleak House, obviously –but that doesn’t mean I want to read about Esther Summerson for the rest of my natural life, either.
Ultimately, I think this is why non-comics iterations of super-hero characters are almost always better. I’m not a huge, huge Dark Knight fan or anything, but it has a beginning and a middle and even an end (and yes, there will be a sequel — but not an infinite number of sequels.) Or the animated super-hero cartoons for kids; they’re episodic rather than continuity based, so there isn’t one long wearisome narrative you have to keep up with. Or, for that matter, something like Dark Knight Returns got a lot of its power from the fact that it was out of continuity, so it finished. (And this is also what really distinguishes regular fan fiction from the corporate super-hero kind. Fan fiction stories don’t all link up; one person writes them and they start and they’re (more or less) coherent and then they end.)
This is why, back in th early 90s, I really and truly thought that mini-series would be the salvation of comics aesthetically. Self-contained stories with ends; that had to be good, right? Eh, shows what I know; instead mini-series have turned into a way to advance the mega-Plot, with crossover continuity up the wazoo, bleeding one into the other (infinite secret crisis on multiple identity wars 5) with never a stop.
It’s interesting in this context; Vaughn also talks about working on Swamp Thing, and how Alan Moore was such a hard act to follow on that title. I was reading Swamp Thing every month at the time when Moore left the title, and I remember reading for a few more months (I think Rick Veitch was working on it) but it was really a let down and deeply stupid and…they should have just ended it when Moore left, is the point. His last issue was really a beautiful conclusion, I thought, with Swamp Thing basically retiring, and it was an end, and that’s enough. If somebody else wants to take a crack at this character and this world from a different perspective or in a different medium in ten years…that’s fine. If fans want to do there own thing with this world (Swampy/Constantine slash!), okay. But don’t tack more numbers onto the series and pretend you’re still telling the same story, because that story is done.
Matthew Surridge Hears from Christopher Sorrentino
My friend Matthew reviewed the essay anthology Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers: Writers on Comics and heard back from one of the writers in question, novelist Christopher Sorrentino. Sorrentino wanted to convince Matthew that actually the collection was a good book. I read it a few years back and thought it was spotty. Basically, some of the guys tried and some of them didn’t. If my memory is right, Sorrentino’s essay was one of the better jobs.
On a personal note, he might have been the fellow referenced in the lead paragraph of my heartbreaking memoir of Marvel reading, “True Believer.”
Imaginary Comics, part 2: “Uneven Hills”
Bill made up a cartoon sketched on a series of tea leaves. What I have is a set of pages that were not published as part of the Absolute Sandman series. Neil Gaiman, hitting the crest of his early comics career, did not contact an aging Jack Kirby and, in a fit of sentimentality and cross-talent brand promotion, persuade him to illustrate the gala fiftieth issue of Sandman, which was not titled “Uneven Hills” and did not concern Morpheus fallen among the Amazons and embarrassed by his long-ago affair with Hippolyta, Wonder Woman’s mother, with implications for Lyta Hall’s eventual vendetta against him.
Kirby did not draw a Morpheus with doorknob-sized cheekbones and a forehead reaching three feet above his nose. The following elements did not appear: Amazons with cantaloupe-sized muscles and shoulders the width of Victorian cabinets; sly references to Kirby’s part in creating the previous Sandman, Lyta Hall’s late husband; playful juxtapositions of Morpheus’s cheekboned languor and the Amazons’ beefy force; a four-page sequence, tailored to Kirby’s skills, in which Amazons hauled the stricken Morpheus on a massive chariot past trophies of the ages.
Kirby did not balk at Gaiman’s idea, which he did not have, of a row of Amazons archers, each one missing a breast because of Gaiman’s fidelity to classical sources. Roz, Kirby’s indomitable wife, did not have to intervene and did not spawn a winsome anecdote Gaiman retailed in later interviews about a telephone being wrestled from one Kirby to the other while Neil reasoned with the elderly artist. The nonresulting Amazon chests did not resemble the Astrodome standing next to a parking lot.
The nonexistent project did not have to be aborted because of Kirby’s illness, and there were no rumors that Walt Simonson would finish the art so the issue could appear in a Sandman trade paperback. In the late 1990s, Vertigo did not transplant a character from the nonexistent issue, a spunky and undernourished teen Amazon named Hy (for Hyacinth), into The Dreaming and then give her a pocket-size manga series written and drawn by Jill Thompson.
The 17 more or less fully drawn Kirby pages and three remaining penciled roughs were not given pride of place in volume 3 of Absolute, the lines’ charcoal black not glowing against pages the color of whipped cream.
All that happened was that I wrote this post.
UPDATE: Big Barda should be in there someplace, possibly a big fight sequence between her and an Amazon (some old rival of Wonder Woman’s?) in which Kirby could draw big fists and Gaiman could do some destabilizing of gender patterns.