Yearly Archives: 2009

Utilitarian Review 11/14/09

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On HU

This week started out with my review of Young Schulz, a collection of Charles Schulz’s comics featuring young adults at church.

Kinukitty reviewed Way to Heaven which is not as good as the rock band Angel.

I reviewed a handful of mahwa and manga, including Click, Bizenghast, and a collection of Hiroki Endo’s short stories.

Vom Marlowe reviewed the electronic art program Corel Painter and its official magazine.

I insisted that superheroes aren’t dead, despite the best efforts of Marvel and D.C.

And finally this week’s droney music mix is available for down load. Also, in case you missed it, you can still get the discoey mix from last week.

Utilitarians Elsewhere

A bunch of stuff this week, starting with:

Something completely different over at Splice Today, where I attempt to get in touch with my long denied genetic destiny as an NPR confessional essayist.

As a child, I was told that I mumbled. And, as kids will, I believed it—and went on believing it well after I had left home. In fact, I don’t think I fully realized this deception until well into adulthood. I was 28, I think; my parents had come into Chicago to visit and we were having dinner in a restaurant with a cousin and my wife-to-be. My cousin showed up late, bearing a relatively spectacular bit of news: My grandmother had caught her eye on a car door and was in the hospital. My mom sat up straighter in her chair, lifted her chin, and with that east-coast Jewish nasal edge that sounds like a jackhammer pulled across a blackboard, bellowed out, “Holy Fuck!”

Over at comixology I discuss ukiyo-e prints and Satoshi Kitamura’s children book “When Sheep Cannot Sleep.”

Kitamura’s book reads like a Japanese print series in a number of ways, from his off-center compositions, to his subtle use of blank space, to his lovely color palette, all the way to his clever, intentionally humorous use of visual puzzles. You’re always wondering from page to page what you’re supposed to be counting and where it is, just as in Yoshitoshi’s series you’re always looking for (and not always finding) the moon.

On Madeloud I discuss a number of unusual christian albums, including the Violent Femmes’ Hallowed Ground.

Anenoidal weirdo Gordan Gano played up his adolescent angst and played down his religious inclinations on most Violent Femmes releases — except for his second effort, 1984’s aggressively bizarre Hallowed Ground. Starting off with a plunking tale of child murder and ending with a joyful plea for watery apocalypse, the album recasts the fire and brimstone of old timey country as manic, off-kilter stagger: it’s Christianity as bi-polar disorder. Nowhere is this clearer than on “Black Girls,” a concupiscent vaudeville-meets-free-jazz paean to interracial affection, featuring a guest-spot from John Zorn’s Horns of Dilemma and the immortal lines “You know I love the lord of hosts/father son and the holy ghost/ I was so pleased to learn that he’s inside me/ In my time of trouble he will hide me….I dig the black girls!” Just like the squeaking saxophones and the bluegrass banjo, the cheerful lust and earnest faith exist side by side — angular, dissonant, incongruous, and perfect.

Bert Stabler has posted some more email conversations between the two of us, this time about Slavoj Zizek and God. Here’s me snarking at Zizek:

Aha! Just got to Zizek on the resurrection; it’s apparently a metaphor for the way an inspirational example lives on in a community of radical believers. “I may die, but what I stood for will inspire you…and so I live on!”

Which seems like really weak tea. Zizek goes to a lot of effort to read the death of God literally…and then we’re supposed to take the resurrection as not just a metaphor, but a cliched metaphor? Joan Baez on Joe Hill is the meaning of the resurrection? I mean, I like Joan Baez, and labor organizing is cool, but…why are we talking about Christ at all then if this is the point, exactly? And if this is indeed the point, why aren’t you out there organizing rather than having a debate about God?

Finally, over at the Knoxville MetropulseI review the recent release by Belgian psychedelic weirdos Sylvester Anfang.

Other Links

This is a great Wonder Woman cartoon by Kate Beaton.

Absolutely gorgeous Beardsley-like opium illustratons by Attila Sassy. I don’t say this enough, but thanks to Dirk for the link.

Ariel Schrag has a statement about a middle school pulling her anthology about middle school kids, Stuck in the Middle, off its shelves.

And your Thai pop video of the week, featuring Mangpor Chonticha:

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Little Red Drone

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Mostly droning and buzzing.

1. Robert Wyatt — Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road (Rock Bottom)
2. Terry Riley — Anthem of the Trinity (Shri Camel)
3. Mazzy Star — So Tonight That I Might See (So Tonight That I Might See)
4. Teenage Filmstars — Lapse (Rocket Charms)
5. Suishou No Fune — The Storm of Light/Cherry (Shining Star- Live)
6. Nihill — Aard (Grond)

Download Little Red Drone.

And if you missed it, last weeks discoey mix is here.

Ain’t Dead Yet

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Steven Grant (who guest blogged here last week) declares the super-hero dead dead dead:

it’s patently clear to anyone studying market history that the fans are disinterested too. They don’t buy new superheroes. They don’t want them. Maybe it’s economics, maybe they’ve been burned too many times to come back for what might be more, maybe they’re waiting for Something Truly Different and don’t feel like spending more on what are basically variations on themes they already buy, but reasons don’t much matter. They do not buy them, and haven’t for a long, long time.

So even logical ways of introducing new superheroes are right out the window. Theoretically (and ignoring all issues of creator rights for the moment) the best way to intro a character would be in an existing top character’s book. Let the readers get to know the new superhero that way, then spin him into his own book. That should work. It doesn’t, even with characters readers respond well to, like The Silver Surfer….

The superhero genre may not be the Titanic, no icebergs in sight, but everyone’s still just rearranging deck chairs now. That’s how the companies want it, because they’re no longer marketing creations. They’re peddling brands. Branding is everything now, and it’s almost always more profitable to cash in on a long-established brand than to create, develop and market a new one. The superhero as brand name might be with us until the end of time, now, but the superhero as expression of genuine creativity is pretty much dead.

Steven’s argument is fun both because it’s so devastatingly true…and because it’s completely wrong. Yes, yes, Marvel and D.C. and the handful of smaller comics companies peddling traditional super-heroes are so creatively bankrupt that you wonder how it’s possible that the “creatively” doesn’t just disappear from that formulation. Neither of them has had any success introducing new characters in forever, and it’s equally clear that the don’t have any idea what to do with the ones they’ve got other than continue an unending soap-opera playing to fewer and fewer true-believers. That’s absolutely right.

But the reason it’s right isn’t because nobody likes super-heroes. People love super-heroes. Here, for example, is a partial list of some of the most successful super-heroes introduced in the past twenty odd years.

Ben 10

Sailor Moon

Captain Underpants

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Edward (from Twilight)

Neo (from the Matrix)

all those folks on Heroes

You get the idea. The concept of a character with some combination of unusual powers and abilities and/or a secret identity and/or a costume, maybe, is hardly dead. On the contrary, it’s been essential to some of the most successful media properties of the last couple of decades

So the question then becomes, not why are super-heroes unpopular, but why are the super-heroes parlayed by Marvel and DC so darn unpopular? Why can everybody and their idiot cousin create successful super-heroes except for the companies that spend all their time, 24-7, writing about super-heroes?

Well, when you look at the successful super-heroes above, you notice a couple of things:

1. Almost all of them are genre blends. That is, they’re super-heroes and something else — fantasy in Sailor Moon, sci-fi in Ben 10, satire in Captain Underpants, goth horror in Buffy and Twilight. That doesn’t make them less about super-heroes — pulp genres cross-hybridize all the time (detective and romance, for example, mix so often it’s become positively indecent.) But what it does do is make them more creative. Steven says:

Don’t forget, the original context of the superhero was a poverty-stricken America heading into World War II. Superheroes were basically a big pep talk, later a big jingoistic pep talk as the country went to war. The earliest superheroes, cats like Superman and Batman, were hardly law-abiding citizens, but the ’30s weren’t a great time for staunch belief in the law. The notion that anyone could stand against presumed widespread corruption, could stand for a higher, nobler morality, that was heady stuff, especially at a time when whole nations seemed to be going nuts. Didn’t last long; before long, and once war was declared, superheroes were mostly chatting up the policeman as Our Friend and how all good Americans should follow the rules, take their vitamins, say their prayers, collect tin and aluminum and buy war bonds and that was a message the time was ready for, but it was no coincidence that the end of the war was almost an end of the superhero. It was the end of any semblance of relevance for the superhero.

And yes, sure, there’s something to that: superheroes started in a certain time and place, and they had to change to continue to be relevant. But…that’s how genres work. Tolkien started modern epic fantasy as a response to WW II. When WWII was over, fantasy was less relevant…so folks like Ursula K. Le Guin came along and did something else with it that made it speak to changing gender roles and race and other stuff that made sense to the people of the time. That’s how genres work; they’re not carved in stone. You pick them up and do something new with them that’s grounded in tradition but makes sense for a different time and place.

And that’s what folks do with super-heroes too. Buffy shows how to use super-hero stories to talk about contemporary high-school and girls coming of age. Captain Underpants shows how to use super-hero stories to talk (or at least snicker) about contemporary elementary schools. The Matrix uses super-heroes to talk (dumbly but popularly) about modern paranoia around technology, among other issues.

The only ones who can’t figure out how to gracefully use super-heroes to talk about anything that matters is the big two. And maybe, you know, that does in fact have something to do with the fact that they’re using the same damn heroes from 40 to 70 years ago. Though, on the other hand, Smallville manages to update Superman effectively, and the Batman cartoons are fine…. I don’t know. Maybe, on second thought, DC and Marvel are just catastrophically stupid.

2. The other thing about all of the most popular super-heroes is that they come complete with their own worlds. That is, the super-heroes aren’t just random folks who happened to gain super-powers and then go off to fight random evil stuff. Rather, the super-hero’s powers, their missions, and their enemies are all part of a single story and a single world. One of the most satisfying parts of Twilight is the geekily thorough way in which Stephanie Meyer apportions powers and weaknesses to her vampires and werewolves and such, and then has those powers drive the plot in particular ways (there are always incredibly intricate plans to stop the mind-reading Edward from picking up thoughts he shouldn’t hear, for example.) I don’t know much about Ben 10, but I do know that his powers and the DNAliens he fights are all tied together in a single backstory.

All of which suggests that people do like reading super-hero stories…but they most of all like reading stories. Folks are willing to suspend their disbelief if you give them a reason to — but DC and Marvel don’t even bother. Their titles just assume, pretty much, that all these various randomly powered, disconnected super-folk are running around, fighting similarly disconnected super-villains. In some ways, the lust for crossover that we’ve seen in recent years is an effort to get around this — to provide the narrative and the rationale that most people reading a story naturally want. But it’s too much of a mess, and mired in too much backstory, to actually be all that interesting to anyone beyond the small core of true believers.

________________________

On the one hand, you might argue I guess that Steven’s tendency not to see the super-heroes all around him is of a piece with the status quo among the big two; that is, if they could only start to think about super-hero stories in different ways, maybe they wouldn’t be so perpetually shitty. Perhaps they could finally start telling stories somebody cared about, and maybe even come up with some new heroes that were different from the old heroes in ways which would allow them to appeal to a broader audience.

But really, I think that’s too harsh on Steven and not sufficiently harsh on DC and Marvel. The truth is, DC and Marvel seem pretty thoroughly irredeemable. Steven was right; they’re creatively D.O.A. They’re going nowhere and changing nothing, and the chances of either of them ever coming up with an exciting, marketable new concepts is roughly the same as the chances of a monkey crawling out of my butt and handing me a power ring. So, yeah, I think it’s important to recognize that super-heroes are still popular, but not because doing so will help DC and Marvel. On the contrary, I think it’s important because, until you realize that super-heroes are doing just fine, you can’t really understand how truly lame Marvel and DC are.

Corel Painter Official Magazine

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www.paintermagazine.com
With especial emphasis on the tutorials of Wen-Xi Chen.

For those who don’t play in the fields of digital art, Corel Painter X (or XI, which has just been released) is the big “other” art program. Unlike Photoshop, Painter is designed to mimic the natural materials so many artists use. Sure, Photoshop has some natural material brushes, but it doesn’t have a mixing palette or blending brushes or brushes which naturally and intuitively pick up the underlying paint and mix it, or make impasto, or a dozen other things. For the curious, here is a shot of the desktop:

See all the color options and the palette?

The mixing of paints, the vast variety of brushes, and the intuitive nature of color choices and ease of vast color picking make Painter a very strong program. One of the biggest flaws I see in digital art today is the tendency to use a very dark, very gray palette, with a photo-realistic, brush-stroke-less style for the people and a lot of green-gray-yellow shadows. This isn’t so much an artistic choice as it is a habit induced by some curious features of Photoshop. Art created in Painter has a tendency to be much livelier in color and to have unexpectedly quick and fun brushstrokes. It’s easier to do certain kinds of paintings spontaneously in Painter and it’s deeply easy for an artist decently skilled in craft but relatively new to digital tools to create something worthwhile:

This is a study of a gingko that I did about a year ago; it took me about an hour total in Painter. The entire time I just focused on what I wanted the piece to convey, and none of the time was spent mucking about with filters or complex low opacity blending techniques that Photoshop would have required. I did not know Painter then, I just picked up a bit of a tutorial, flipped through it, thought, how hard could it be, and did this piece.

Painter doesn’t get much respect at times, but I think that’s a shame. One reason that it doesn’t always appeal to artists (digital and traditional) is that it’s a rather powerful program and with great power, as we all know, comes great responsibility. Or at least the need for a tutorial or two. Which brings us to Painter Magazine.

Painter is so utterly different than Photoshop and so full of yummy options (a dizzying array of brush types and brush tips and watercolors that require special layers and some paints that interact and others that don’t) that a guide is delightful and necessary. Unfortunately, many of the traditional guide options suck. The books are either old or too complicated or are pretty much how to turn photographs into ‘art’, which is all very boring. Some of the Deviant Art tutorials are good, but they’re insufficient, by their nature.

Which is why I really like the Painter magazine. It’s one of those beautiful English magazines that comes with a CD full of goodies and some ads for cameras I’d never be able to afford. I have to buy mine at the Borders and they’re always a month or so behind the English release date, but it doesn’t really matter. The magazine isn’t cheap: It retails for fifteen bucks (14.99), but it’s well worth it.

The magazine is divided up into some regular sections and features. It’s designed to appeal to Corel Painter newbies as well as some really advanced artists. The format is roughly:

  • A tutorial on cloning a photo into art
  • A tutorial to create a painting in a famous artist’s style, using media brushes that the artist favored, like Baroque portraits or Sargent or Vermeer.
  • A tutorial on a brush family, like Sumi-e or art markers
  • A tutorial on creating the cover art
  • A traditional art tutorial (such as drawing skills)
  • A few more tutorials on differing subjects (like portraits, landscapes, color use or seasons)
  • Some reviews and interviews

The CD goodies always include a trial version of Painter, often a trial version of another software, and stock images, underdrawings from tutorials, brushes or special settings, and often a video tutorial

The tutorials are well done and have some unique features. My favorite is that they are graded by difficulty (easy, intermediate, and advanced) and have a suggested time. Five hours is a common time, but there are also tutorials that list 36 hours. I love that.

There are many fine artists who are, to put it politely, less than stellar instructors. Fortunately, Painter chooses its artists carefully. My favorite tutorial writer by far is the artist Wen-Xi Chen. Her art is stunning, but equally important, her tutorials make sense and help me make my art better. She is a frequent writer for Painter and has done at least two covers, the lush and beautiful feature on portrait painting eyes and the latest issue with Sumi-E.

This eye isn’t perfect, by any means, but I think it’s turning out rather well, and it’s all down to Wen-Xi Chen’s fine tutorial.

The latest issue of the magazine (at least the one available in the states) has another Chen cover. Her tutorial on Sumi-E brushes has me excited to try another simple portrait and test out some new brushes and tools. The program is lovely, but having this kind of solid, useful guide is fantastic and makes it possible for someone like me, who just does this as a hobby, to enjoy it more fully. I highly recommend the magazine. It’s not necessary to get it every month, but I hope if you’re interested that you’ll pick it up and give it a look see.

Manga! Manga! Manga!

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Youngran Lee
Click 1-2
NetComics
B&W/softcover
ISBN# 978-1-60009-202-2

Click is a comic about a transexual and his/her heartache. If it were American, that would make it an alternative comic, probably with some sort of feminist agenda. Instead, it’s a Korean comic in shoujo style — which means its romance for girls, with its eyes on a mass market audience and its heart in a soap opera narrative.

Gender-bending is standard in shoujo. Still — and especially for an American audience — *Click* takes the trope to a bizarre extreme. Our hero, Joonha Lee, is a dreamboat guy — until one day he turns into a dreamboat girl. His comically detached parents explain that a chromosome shift runs in the family, and, after several desperate trips to the bathroom, Joonha accepts his fate.

And yes, that’s all the explanation we get. The rest is all unrequited love and teen angst. Oh, and did I mention the unrequited love? Everyone, male or female, falls for Joonha, including deceptively deep playboy Taehyun, Taehyun’s ex-girlfriend Yoomi, and all the girls in two separate high schools. Meanwhile, Joonha herself pines romantically for Heewon, a girl he once had a crush on, and for Jinhoo, his best (male) friend growing up. His tragic transformation separates him from both of them, resulting in many longing looks from dewy, close-up eyes. Forget love triangles, we’re talking love tesseracts here.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with the experience of actual transsexuals. Nor does it have much to do with the series’ ostensible message of gender-blind empowerment for all (“What does it matter whether you’re a girl or a guy? What’s important is how you live your life.”) Instead, Lee, like many shoujo creators, is simply (or not-so-simply) fascinated and, indeed, titillated by gender slippage. It’s not just Joonha whose sex is ambiguous; virtually all the characters are drawn as glamorously languorous ectomorphs, posed angularly beneath their seductively swirling hair.

And yet, the more androgynous the trappings, the more decidedly female the core. The story is a haze of floating crushes which obscure and then obliterate genital reality. It evokes the hot-house emotional atmosphere of a stereotypically feminine pre-adolescence — the powerful affections involved with, but not quite synonymous with, gender identity — and presents it as gay utopia. The whole thing is completely ridiculous, and more than a little brilliant. I’d recommend it for girls, of course, but also for boys — and, indeed, for everyone else as well.

__________________________

M. Alice LeGrow
Bizenghast vols 1-2
Tokyopop
B&W/softcover
$9.99 each

Western efforts to imitate manga tend to range from middling to execrable, so when I first saw Bizenghast, I was thrilled. Others have figured out the psychic connection between shoujo and goth, but creator M. Alice Legrow actually has the chops to render the detailed filigree and sumptuous outfits which are crucial to both genres. Moreover, she’s a smart writer, with a quick sense of humor and a knack for character interaction. Dinah and Vincent are types we’ve seen before — young, earnest, beautiful, and burdened with melodramatic backstory and Victorian wardrobes. But they’re rendered with enough love that they can occasionally surprise you — as when Vincent glances up Dinah’s skirt and blushes for all he’s worth, or when Dinah traps a human-headed spider under a glass and then coldly and unconcernedly watches it asphyxiate.

Alas, for all its virtues, the series doesn’t bear up under close inspection. LeGrow has a good feel for horror tropes, and I could see Bizenghast really working as a psychological chiller. But instead of exploring the inside of Dinah’s head or the interior of her ghost-infested house, LeGrow gets enmeshed in a truly tedious plot. Dinah and Vincent discover an old graveyard and must come back every night to free various trapped spirits, for reasons which are about as unconvincing as you might imagine. After releasing a certain number of these ghosts, the pair are rewarded with a “cute” mascot named Edaniel, who appears, hideously enough, to be voiced by Billy Crystal.

Both the video-game narrative and the totem animal are staples of shoujo fantasy series like Cardcaptor Sakura. But LeGrow’s imitations lack the breathless conviction and intricacy of the originals. In fact, the free-one-spirit-a-night routine becomes so, well, routine that LeGrow appears to be boring herself — some adventures are shown only in truncated form, and some are skipped over altogether . LeGrow does manage a few creepy moments by playing against shoujo expectations: my favorite is probably the scene in which the cuddly Edaniel takes human form and aggressively attempts to make out with a disgusted and freaked-out Dinah. But more often LeGrow’s efforts to add psychological weight and urgency are undermined by the repetitive structure. For instance, LeGrow, like many fantasy writers, is fascinated by the breaking of taboos. In well-told stories (like the movie Pan’s Labyrinth) breaking a taboo is the terrifying emotional center of the tale — a moment that encapsulates the arbitrary relationship between magic and death. But when Vincent gives the guardian silver instead of gold, nothing happens except that he has to go on yet another brief, lame quest.

These failings aren’t the fault of the shoujo genre itself, which is perfectly capable of producing moving, complicated narratives. The problem instead is that LeGrow’s hand with the shoujo is a lot less sure than her hand with the goth. I have no doubt that in a few years, we will see many, many excellent shoujo titles produced by Western writers. Bizenghast is a harbinger of a glorious future — but it’s also a sign that we haven’t quite gotten there yet.

_____________________

Hiroki Endo
Tanpenshu
Dark Horse
230 pages/B&W
ISBN 10:1-59307-637-1
ISBN 13: 978-1-59307-637-5

This collection of three short stories is my first exposure to Hiroki Endo’s work…but reading it, I had a sinking sense of familiarity. I mean, philosophizing gangster spiritually saved by innocent girl; sexually conflicted high-school student revealed as violent powder-keg; teen ensemble reveling in bittersweet profundity — haven’t I seen these movies somewhere?

It would be one thing if the genre exercises were rendered with insight, or even enthusiasm. But Endo’s story-telling style is flat almost to the exclusion of affect; characterization is reduced to perfunctory, Freudian backstory and the mouthing of quasi-Buddhist aphorisms. The exception is“For Those of Us Who Don’t Believe in God,” in which a group of university drama students engage in witty sit-com banter. The inevitable tragic revelations are delivered with clunky ineptitude, but at least a couple of the interactions here do seem sweet and unforced — one male-male kiss, punctuated by bystanders chanting “yaoi, yaoi, yaoi”, made me laugh out loud. Unfortunately, the serial-killer-behind-bars-confronts-victim dialogue in the play the students perform is such unconscionably derivative piffle that it rather ruins the whole. Here’s a breaking bulletin from Dark Adolescent Pessimism 101: “…words like ‘God’ don’t save us from anything. When we die, that’s it.” Maybe this sort of thing is all the translator’s fault, but I kind of doubt it.

Though I’ve had enough of Endo’s writing to last me for the duration, I’d be happy to see more of his art. His layout and composition skills are strictly okay, but his drafting is first rate, and when he gives himself something interesting to draw — like the alternately silhouetted and subtly-detailed crows in “The Crows, The Girl, and the Yakuza,”,— the results are gorgeous. The shoujo set-pieces in “Because You’re Definitely a Cute Girl” are less involving —aping full-bore romanticism, even ironically, probably isn’t a good idea for a creator this detached. On the other hand, the play the students perform in the third story allows for some nice uses of space and pattern — a two-page spread of a spot-lit chain-link fence is especially arresting. To be fair, if I saw this level of skill and professionalism in a mainstream — or even alternative — American comic, I’d be pretty thrilled. But I expect more from manga.

_______________

All of these reviews ran at one point or another in the Comics Journal.

Gluey Tart: The Way to Heaven

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way to heaven

The Way to Heaven, Yamimaru Enjin, 2009, Digital Manga Publishing

Why don’t I like this book? Well, for starters, the backward E in Heaven. Let me share my thought process with you. I said, good lord, that’s a beautiful cover. Those young men are gorgeous. Must read pretty book! What’s it about? Oh, who cares! What lovely art! Why the hell is the first E in Heaven backward, though?

I found that E annoying, and I should have resisted the lure of pretty tie-boy and gone with my initial misgivings. (I’m drawn to the tie itself, not just the prettyboy wearing it; the color, the rendering – it’s a very nice tie. It’s the best thing about the manga, so I urge you to take another look and fully enjoy it.) Unlike the guys in this story, though, I haven’t been plucked from my painful personal drama by a hot and annoyingly playful alien who agrees to give me another chance by allowing me to go back in time for an additional fraction of a second for every test tube I can fill with blood or semen. Looking deep into my heart, I find that I’m really, really OK with that, though.

I’m sorry, I can’t advance the narrative because I keep going back to that damned E. You know what it reminds me of? The logo for Angel, a sort of proggy glam rock band from the 70s. I had pictures of them on my wall and was especially enamored of Punky Meadows.

angel

In fact, this picture right here might have been the initial building block of my lifetime interest in prettyboys. This post is starting to have a monumental, historical sort of feel, isn’t it? Wow. I feel so close to all of you right now. I hope you’ve enjoyed this sharing thing as much as I have. Anyway, I used to have an Angel t-shirt that pleased me immeasurably, partly because I really liked Angel, but mostly because the logo reads the same upside down as it does right-side up.

angel

I drew it on my notebooks and stuff. Nifty, isn’t it? Well, you, The Way to Heaven, are no Angel logo.

Where does this book go so wrong? It isn’t like the plot isn’t clinically insane. There’s the afore-mentioned gathering of fluids. Also, the alien riffs on Sailor Moon. (This gets pointed out, by the mangaka or by the translator, but I was already on it because, in the spirit of over-sharing I’ve just established, yes, I read the whole Sailor Moon series – and no, I can’t explain myself; it’s just one of those things, like Us Magazine and peach Fresca). The drawing is nice throughout, and the two main characters fall in love, just like they’re supposed to. By the way, one of them gets turned into a vampire, all the better to collect the blood, and the other one gets turned into a werewolf (not that he ever turns into a wolf or uses any werewolf powers), the better to collect the semen. Wait. Huh? Don’t ask me – I don’t know.

Here’s a plot sketch. A former boxer, who was forced to quit the sport because of an eye injury, walks across a pedestrian bridge and falls off it while trying to rescue a puppy. Pretty tie-boy sees this happening and tries to save him. They both go overboard and get hit by a truck. A lovely alien lady, who’s been sent to save the earth by setting up an energy recycling system, tells them she’s chosen them for her pilot project. For every vial of blood and semen they collect, she’ll let them go back in time a fraction of a second from “ground zero.” That setup didn’t push any buttons for me – I mostly was just upset because it looked like the dog died. Also, I don’t know – going out and collecting vials of blood and semen for a really, really long time (especially when it’s made clear that semen-guy would rather not – which doesn’t seem like the wrong response, I don’t think) – not sexy. Just isn’t. I realize there are no absolutes in what people find erotic, or in anything else, really, but – this isn’t an especially hot setup, is it? Maybe I’m missing something.

Or maybe that’s supposed to be the funny part. Because the back of the book says “The Way to Heaven passes through comedy, drama, and steamy passion on its way to spiritual Shangri-La!” I assume they mean Shangri-La as in finding true love after a life spent searching, rather than in the sense of the Nazis looking for an ancient master race that hadn’t been ruined by Buddhism. Although, who knows, really. I wouldn’t put anything past this book, and to tell you the truth (since we’re sharing so much already in this post), I had kind of stopped paying strict attention by the time I got to the end. So maybe they slipped some kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark subplot in there and I just missed it.

So. There are plot complications, but the boys find true love. The set up and plot complications made it impossible for me, however, to give a damn. I mostly just wanted the book to end – and, there, at least, it did deliver. If what I’ve described sounds like just the thing to you, I’d suggest you run over to Amazon.com and buy it now because even though it was just released in February, it seems to be out of print. While you’re there, you might want to read the five-star reviews, which compare this to The Matrix. It doesn’t especially remind me of The Matrix, but I didn’t especially like that, either, so maybe this book was just a bad fit for me. The art is certainly pretty, and there is sex and romance. Either way, go in peace.

You’re a Decent Church-Going Adolescent, Charlie Brown

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Charles Schulz
Schulz’s Youth

The publishing world is doing right by Charles Schulz; virtually everything the man did is making its way back into print. So now, alongside Fantagraphics’ steady reissue of all the Peanuts strips, we also have available a wealth of side-projects. That includes this series of cartoons which Schulz drew in the ‘50s and early ‘60s for Youth, a magazine aimed at religious teens in the Church of God (Anderson) movement, with which Schulz himself was affiliated.

The content of the strips doesn’t seem especially promising — I mean, cartoons about church socials and god-fearing teenagers? That sounds pretty dull even by the unexacting standards of The Lockhorns or Marmaduke. But Schulz is an expert at finding the point where the bland meets the loopy. And besides, he clearly has a real, albeit wry, love for the world of the faithful, in which cosmic themes and mundane concerns wander confusedly about each other until their heads conk together. “The topic before the panel tonight is ‘What do you think it was that was bugging ol’pharoah?’” declares one puzzled-but-earnest-looking youth. “My girl and I have a religious problem, Mom. She says Ah-Men and I say Ay-Men,” explains another. A third tells a young woman, “Last night, just before I went to sleep, I prayed that if I asked you for a date, you’d accept… Sort of puts you on the spot, doesn’t it?” A fourth stands up clutching a notebook and, as the characters around him stare forward with blankly bemused expressions, declares “The minutes of the last meeting were read and accepted. Isn’t that wonderful? That sort of gets me right here!”

That last is a perfect Schulz non-joke — the funny bit isn’t so much a punchline as an aphasiac misfiring of neurons. But for all its genius, the timing feels a bit off. In his Peanuts strips, Schulz was working towards perfecting an idiosyncratic mastery of comic flow — obscure, methodically unfolding in-jokes delayed from panel-to-panel; offhand, mistimed punchlines followed by flat expressions of exasperation; space-slapstick-space-space. Schulz tries to cram this effortlessly wrong-footed approach into a single panel, but it doesn’t quite work. What he ends up with instead are really long captions, which take a moment — or sometimes several moments — too long to detonate. And not in a good way.

Still, there’s no cloud that doesn’t have its pot of silver lining, as Linus might say. At the time he was working on these cartoons in the ‘50s, Schulz had not simplified his drawing as much as he would in later years. The larger format, and the use of full-sized people instead of children gave him a chance to really strut his stuff, and he enjoys it fully. You can almost feel his delight in some of the scenes which feature six year-olds being instructed by teenagers. The adolescent’s whole body is folded at the waist and knees; if the teacher stood up, he’d be (a) about twice times the height of an actual adult human and (b) completely unable to fit in the panel. The kids, of course, all have enormous heads and quizzical expressions. It’s a look at what would have happened if one of those off-camera adults in Peanuts had ever been squashed down to fit in the strip.

As this suggests, many of the best moments here rely on playing with scale in a way that was more or less impossible in Schulz’s regular feature. Everywhere lanky teenagers stretch up to the ceiling or drape out across furniture in a rush of long, fluid pen lines — in one gag a diminutive mother is forced to hurdle her sons’ surreally extended appendages in order to get from one side of the living room to the other. In another panel elegant enough to make Hank Ketcham jealous, a teen lies on his back with his legs extended way, way up in the air. He’s talking on the phone, and the gracefully curving cord contrasts with the slightly wavy motion lines extending from the boy’s shoe, which has fallen off his foot. “Could you hold the line for just a moment?” he asks. “I think I’m about to be hit on the head with my own shoe.” Or there’s the one with the over-sized African mask which seems about to swallow its wearer’s entire torso (as far as I can tell, from the gag, the mask is there entirely because Schulz felt like drawing it.) Or, my absolute favorite, a picture of a teen shouting off into the distance “Okay! All set for the wieners!” Beside him, and dwarfing him, is an illustration of an absurdly gargantuan, semi-stylized fire, set against a quietly spectacular night-time background of slanting brush strokes and blots(.

Toward the back of the book is a separate group of cartoons, again with a church theme, but this time featuring children. It’s from 1965, when Schulz was at the height of his powers, and the problems he had working in single-panel strips have largely evaporated. The art is pared back, and a couple of the captions still drag a bit. But, for the most part, the writing has the whimsical, absurdist economy of Charlie Brown’s best gags. Indeed, the panels are almost indistinguishable from Schulz’s more famous work. You can easily see Linus extending his hand and walking across a room declaring, “Hi! I’ve just been told that I am one of God’s children…who are you?” or Sally furrowing her brow in frustration as she exclaims “Just when I was getting strong enough to be able to defend myself, they start telling me about sharing!” Nobody writes cynical/sweet fuddy-duddy koans like Schulz. Someday, no doubt, we’ll get a book of his margin doodles, and they’ll be great too.

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This review first ran in the Comics Journal.