Monthly Archives: April 2010

Muck Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable: Swamp Fear

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(Part 1 of the Swamp Thing roundtable can be found here and Part 2 can be found here).

In addition to being part 3 of the Swamp Thing roundtable, this post is also a follow-up to last week’s post where I questioned whether comics could ever be scary.

To recap, I asserted that horror comics could never incite the intense, visceral fear that horror movies so easily manage. Horror comics would be better off if they had more in common with horror novels, which generally have slow-burn stories that exploit common fears and social anxieties. There were a lot of great comments to the post, and I want to go through a couple of them before I get to Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.

While I argued that the static nature of the comic page undermined any attempt at being scary, Michael DaForge offered a different take:

“Comics can use their “static-ness” to their advantage, I think.
I’m jumpy and easily manipulated by music or loud noises in
a movie. In Anti Christ, the genital mutilation startled me (or
grossed me out or whatever it was supposed to do?) But it didn’t
stay with me the way the scene with the stillborn fawn did from
earlier in the film. Or this sequence did from Uzumaki:

… [W]hen it’s 5 am and I’m having a hard time getting to sleep,
I’ll remember stuff like that.”

That’s a good counterpoint, and Uzumaki demonstrates why having the right kind of art is essential for a horror comic. Unfortunately, the art in most mainstream horror comics is simply too indifferent to tone and mood to instill any feelings of fear in the reader.

Aaron Ber commented later that there should be a distinction between “creepy” and “actual fear”. He went on to say:

“Not to keep making this a comics vs. film thing, but horror is one
of the most demonstrable ways I can think of to show how effecting
film can be. People experiencing fear in a film can have physical
reactions on an involuntary level, as if their safety is actually being
threatened. I just don’t think comics can work that directly – to the
point where on some level you are no longer conscious of the fact
that what you are experiencing isn’t actually happening to you.”

I think Aaron Ber is right to the extent we’re discussing heart-racing, hands-over-your-eyes scary. Comics will never be able to provoke that kind of reaction from the reader. However, I don’t think there’s an clear distinction between what people find creepy and what they “actually” fear. Fear encompasses a broad range of emotional responses: sometimes it’s an immediate physical reaction, as when something startles you, but other times it can be a lingering sense of unease or a recurrent anxiety. A comic with a creepy story and disturbing imagery can potentially stay with the reader longer than a movie about a chainsaw-wielding psycho. So perhaps comics can’t be “scary” as the term is commonly understood, but creepy is a good alternative.

And now I’ll finally start discussing the actual topic of this roundtable. Not every issue of Swamp Thing is a gem. Not every issue is creepy (nor were they all intended to be). But Alan Moore could write an unsettling story when he wanted to, and he collaborated with a team of fantastic artists, particularly Stephen Bissette and John Totleben. And one of the best stories during their run on Swamp Thing also happened to be one of the creepiest.

The vampire storyline in issues 38 and 39 was part of a larger arc where Swamp Thing had to run errands for John Constantine (of Hellblazer fame). One such errand took Swamp Thing to Rosewood, Illinois, an entire town submerged beneath a lake. And the only residents of this underwater hamlet were vampires. In Alan Moore lore, running water is lethal to vamps, but the stagnant water of the lake provided the perfect environment to avoid the sun while still hunting dumb teenagers who went for a swim.

It’s a simple, pulp monster story, but Moore was absolutely committed to making it as creepy as possible. He accomplished this partly through some plot details that were equal parts eerie and gross. The one that immediately springs to mind is the morbidly obese vampire bride.

There’s just something so repulsive about a fat monster that spends her day wallowing in the filth of an abandoned movie theater.

Another way to make a monster story creepy is to be as ruthless as possible. In other words, anyone can die in any number of awful ways. But in an ongoing series like Swamp Thing, it’s nearly impossible to convince readers that the titular character is in any real danger. Moore wisely evaded this problem by introducing lots of supporting characters that could be offed in short order. He had no reservations about killing a teenage boy at the beginning of the story. And it only got worse from there, especially when the undead boy was reunited with his mother.

While Moore may be a great pulp writer, in the hands of a different art team his script would have come across as a nothing more than cheesy monster plot with overripe narration. As the above panels make clear, the unsung heroes behind Swamp Thing‘s success are Bissette and Totleben. Along with Stan Woch in issue 38, they gave the comic a brooding tone with their heavy use of hatching and black space. And the colorist, Tatjana Wood, enhanced Bissette’s and Totleben’s work with murky greens and blues for the underwater scenes.

The above page is a great example of how their work set the mood of the comic. Plot-wise, this page is nothing more than the vampires descending into their hidden city, but the depiction of the city is terrific. Readers can recognize the details of any American street, but those details are only partially drawn or deliberately obscured by hatching as well as black and near-black colors. It’s an ugly, lurid mockery of a small town, where light from the surface can only barely penetrate the foul water. And the dead fish designs in the gutters add to the sense of muck and decay. It’s easy to see why young readers in the 80’s found Swamp Thing so affecting.

Even when Moore’s scripts aren’t very good, Bissette and Totleben are there to elevate the material. Suat and Noah beat me to the punch with their debate over issue 40, a.k.a. the PMSing-werewolf issue. It’s easily one of the silliest issues in Moore’s run, but it has one of the nastiest werewolf transformations that I’ve ever seen in any media.

To borrow a point from Michael DaForge, the static nature of comics, along with the ability of readers to linger on each panel, actually makes the scene much more effective than a similar transformation in a movie. The intensity and horror of the moment are emphasized by the stillness of each image. And I agree with Noah that Bissette and Totleben draw a great-looking werewolf.

Swamp Thing is never scary in the way a great horror movie is scary, but it doesn’t need to be. Instead, Moore, Bissette, and Totelben created a few short stories with creepy plots and nightmarish imagery. And those stories were, at least for me, far more memorable and affecting than the last few zombie/slasher/haunted house movies that I’ve seen.

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Update by Noah: The whole Swamp Thing roundtable is here.

Muck Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable: I…Won’t…Stop…Talking

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Suat notes acidly that any discussion of Swamp Thing is likely to be mired in nostalgia. I think we’ve actually got a couple of folks on the roundtable reading them for the first time…but Suat’s certainly got me pegged. In high school, I read and reread and rereread all the issues of Alan Moore’s run on more times than I can probably count. However, when we went off to college, it was my brother who got most of the issues (I got Watchmen) and, since I knew them so well already, I never did get the trades. As a result, it’s probably been 15 years since I’ve read last part of Moore’s run; issues #57 to #64, from way back in 1987.

So…contra Suat, are they as good as I remember? Well…no and yes. It’s certainly true that, as Suat suggests, they’re, massively, massively overwritten. I think as a kid I just skipped over most of the giant glaring gobs of text boxes. As an adult I’m more conscientious, or stupid, or some combination of both, and I actually tried to read them all — and, yeah, that really doesn’t benefit anyone. I think the interminable, tortuous extended metaphor comparing the emergency care ward of a hospital to a forest is probably the absolute low point of this volume— “in casualty reception, poppies grow upon gauze, first blooms of a catastrophic spring…a chloroform-scented breeze moves through the formaldehyde trees…” yeah, yeah, we get it already, you’re a poet, now would you mind shutting the fuck up?

The painful thing is that one or two of the images might actually work — “his body’s the grave of his mind” is nice; the idea of the EEG screen as “steep green hills”. But Moore’s entranced with the fertility of his own pomp; why stop with one sharp image when you can carry the thing through from too much to toweringly tedious to self-parodic and beyond. Moore’s road to hell is paved, not with good intentions, but with loose-bowelled facility. Rereading this, it becomes clear that Promethea’s self-absorbed cleverness isn’t a decadent falling off, but an unfortunate potential that Moore indulged, to some extent, throughout his career.

Still…Moore’s language certainly has an upside as well. He lets his sentences take over and run amok because he loves them; his self-indulgence is really in a lot of ways an indulgence of words, which he likes to stroke, and cuddle and giggle with in the back of the car seat. The first (two-part) story in this volume, for example, opens with a pound and a half of completely gratuitous Aussie dialogue, tossed in, it feels like, just because Moore couldn’t resist once the idea had popped into his head.

“bleedin’ peroxie pooftah” “ponder on the porcelain” — that’s enough goofy alliteration to make Bob Haney blush.

Once he gets started, of course, Moore just can’t stop…which is why, a couple of pages later, he just goes ahead and literally invents his own language:

When you first look at this, it feels like a tour de force. Moore doesn’t just throw in a few words of dialogue; he keeps going for page after page in a consistent, invented language. You can understand just enough of it to tell that the language does work; Moore actually knows what these people are saying — and you could figure it out too, if you had just a little more information.

That’s Adam Strange talking to his wife Alanna. For those not in the know, these are both old, old dc space opera characters. Adam Strange is this random earth guy who gets hit by a “zeta beam” which transfers him across billions of light years to Rann, where he becomes a hero. But the beam wears off over time, so he’s always getting dumped back on earth, and having to run all over the planet to find the next zeta beam (they come with some frequency) to zap him off to the stars again.

Anyway, in Moore’s story Adam knocked up against swamp thing (whose consciousness has been forced off earth — long story) in the zeta beam and was injured, and has now recovered. That’s where we are with the panel above. And after a reread or two, you can translate that first sentence at least; Alanna is saying, “Adam, what happened?” And Adam I think answers, “Uh…I’m not sure exactly what happened,” or something like that. I especially like the “Uh…” there — I think Adam is pausing in order to shift into thinking in another language — these are the first words he’s spoken that aren’t in English (he says his wife’s name a couple panels up, but that doesn’t really count.)

So, again, the effect initially is dazzling. But…think about it a second, and the whole thing seems more than a little ridiculous. This isn’t Tolkein spending a lifetime or thereabouts creating another tongue. This is Alan Moore pulling a language out of his ass…and that’s exactly what it looks like. It’s not Japanese, !Kung speech, or even German. Really, it’s not another language at all; barely more alien than the Aussie dialect we started with. It’s really just a kind of code. Moore seems to have written out his text and then substituted made-up words on a more or less one to one basis. In some sense, even more embarrassing than just having all your spacepeople talk English. Why try at all if you’re going to do a half-assed job?

And the answer to that, as Moore shows, is that sometimes, if the job is big enough, or original enough, or cool enough, it is in fact worth doing a half-assed job just to see where you end up. The language is nonsense — but then, this is a pulp space story, which means the whole thing is nonesense. After all, we’re in the middle of trackless space; why on earth (as it were) does everybody look human?

Besides, and what is the main point, having these silly out-of-place humans speak in silly out-of-place code allows Moore to do some things that he couldn’t have gotten any other way.

I think this page just brilliantly evokes the strangeness…not of another world or planet, necessarily, but of being far away, in a different culture. The best touch is that, after a couple panels of alien speech, Moore has Adam speak in English. Because at first you’re trying to figure out the alien dialogue, the moment when Adam talks “normal” comes as a small shock. For a second you get to see him, oddly, as the alien, the one out of place. It reminds me of a scene in C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy where Ransome, after spending some months with aliens, sees a bizarre creature and then a second later realizes that it’s himself in a mirror — he’s had the “privilege” (I think he uses that word) of seeing himself as the Malacandrians see him.

The way Moore uses his “language” in the sequence below is great too:

Again, the juxtaposition of the Rannian and English is basically the whole point of the page. “You speak English!” “So..do…you.” It’s such a hyperbolic ex-pat moment…and again, there’s that weird disjunction as you go from trying to follow the Rannian dialogue to realizing that everybody is suddenly speaking English. And then Moore switches the character’s positions, as Adam and Swamp Thing talk to each other, and Alanna is the odd one out:

I find that whole bit really charming. In the first place, I like the ex-pat camaraderie; Adam Strange wouldn’t necessarily have palled around with Swamp Thing on earth, but here they are infinite miles away, and suddenly (once they’ve stopped killing each other) they’re friends.

The other thing that’s hard to resist about the use of the Rannian language here is how much faith Moore puts, not so much in his reader, as in himself and in the comics form. Moore isn’t a high modernist here; he’s not Joyce or even Joanna Russ — he’s telling a pulp adventure story and he wants his audience to follow a pulp adventure story. But he’s still willing to write large swathes of his narrative in untranslated code, because he just thinks he’s bad ass enough to do it. And…hey, presto, he can.

Again, one of the best parts is that you can almost parse what they’re saying, even though, thanks to the clarity of the drawing and the clarity of the pulp tropes, you don’t really need to. In fact, one of the things the comic allows you to do that you might not be able to do as easily in a movie is teach yourself the language. The ability to stop and go back and reread means that you can recapitulate Adam’s immersion in Rann, and learn the language just as he did. Cross-cultural understanding becomes a kind of puzzle (though certainly an artificially easy one.)

I go back and forth on how much I like Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala…they don’t tend to send me, but they are certainly professional, and fully up to conveying action and even nuances of emotion without the help of dialogue:

That may be my favorite panel in the comic; it’s total cheesecake for girls, and Alanna’s half-proud, half-I’m-going-to-get-that-shortly expression is just priceless. It’s a pretty great thing to have in a comic aimed primarily at guys; you get to look at the main character form the perspective of his wife. It’s analagous (and somewhat deliberately so, I think) to seeing yourself as the alien sees you — the distance Moore talks about in the story is not just of place, but of gender and love.

That’s Swamp Thing’s narrative too; his separation from earth, like Adam’s sporadic separation from Rann, is more about being removed from his wife than about being away from a particular place. Language is wrapped up in love and identity; when Swamp Thing finds Adam Strange’s bag on Rann and sees the word “Seattle,” we know that part of the impact is that the word to him reads “Abby.” Words are how we know each each other…and yet, at the same time, as Alanna’s expression above tells us, theyr’e kind of not, or at least not solely. That’s a very appropriate ambivalence for comics to have, it seems like — to see words as the metaphor for our lives and loves while simultaneously drawing a bubble around them.

In that vein, the last panel has some of Moore’s loveliest writing (as Adam contemplates his inevitably distant relationship with his newly conceived child) and its most doofy symbolism (as Alanna’s water pets form the shape of a heart.)

It’s certainly heavy-handed — but so is caring for your wife or for your kid, or, possibly, for your own chattering. Moore’s too in love with his own imagination to worry about looking dumb, which means that Swamp Thing is filled with dumbness, but also with love. It’s not a bad trade-off.

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You can read the entire roundtable thus far here.

For another take on the final volume in the Swamp Thing series, you can check out Robert Stanley Martin’s review.

Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable Session 1: Preamble and Introduction

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(The Swamp Thing Roundtable Part 1)

Context. It’s 1983 and you’ve just picked up the latest issue of your favorite monster magazine. You feel pretty stupid since Swamp Thing has sort of sucked since Bernie Wrightson stopped drawing it. That’s a nice cover by Thomas Yeates though.

Wasn’t he the guy who drew the first issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing a year back?

Remember. It is the age of innocence. The age of The Warlord and Arion. The age of stupidity. The age of bad taste.

Continue reading →

Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable

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Just to give readers a heads up: we’re going to have a roundtable on Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run starting tomorrow. We’ll have guest posts by Joe McCulloch and comics scholar (and my brother) Eric Berlatsky, as well as contributions from the usual utilitarians. So check back in throughout the week.

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Matthias Wivel on Ware and Rembrandt

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Matthias Wivel wrote an extended response to Caro’s post on Chris Ware and criticism. I hated to see it buried at the end of that long comment thread, so I thought I’d give it it’s own post. Hopefully Matthias won’t take it amiss. So here it is:

Wow, great discussion! I’m not sure where to pick up, but let’s see…

Your basic criticism of Ware seems to me somewhat beside the mark and fairly typical of a ‘literary’ point of view. But comics is a visual medium too, if not first and foremost, and there’s nothing ‘merely’ about concentrating one’s efforts, if that’s indeed what Ware does, in the ‘drawings’ — by his own rather sophisticated, if unacademic, analysis of cartooning, that’s precisely what cartooning is about; a visual language that one reads, rather than looks at.

At a more fundamental level, the whole idea of separating form from content in the way you suggest — in order to locate some intellectual premise — is false. It strikes me as a more advanced iteration of the familiar “the drawings are good, but the story sucks”-type criticism one reads so often in comics reviews. Form and content are one, and attempting to separate them is an abstraction that does not necessarily tell us much of anything about the work.

And even if you could separate them, why is it that works that have an intellectual premise are inherently better than ones that concentrate on emotion, as you say Ware’s do? And, by extension, why does the ability of the artist to articulate this premise independently of the work make it greater? I like Cocteau and Jeff Wall fine (Rushdie less so), but they strike me precisely as the kind of intellectual, ‘literary’ artists, whose work gains from this kind of intellectual parsing, while that of, say, Rembrandt doesn’t. And there is no doubt in my mind whose work is greater.

As to whether Ware has written a text like Wall’s very interesting one (thanks for calling attention to it!) — no, I’m not sure, but he has written and talked at length about his medium of choice, addressing as does Wall both his precursors and his practice. One may well disagree with his take on it, which as mentioned carries a non-academic bias in favor of his own approach, but it is hard to deny that it is an intensely analytical, not to mention sophisticated, one — clearly formulated by a highly experienced and self-critical practitioner.

Regardless, therefore, of whether Ware thumbs his nose at ‘criticism’ — and I agree that the Imp letter is dumb — he practices it himself. The Comics Journal cover tells us as much, it being a commentary precisely on the history and reception of his chosen medium. Reading it straight, as you did in your piece, seems to me to be missing its point; that he places criticism at the bottom of the ladder, along with pornography, is (besides being a dig at Fantagraphics’ livelihood) only natural: what else could he do when covering the a magazine whose stated purpose it has been to drag the still fledgling, and frankly impoverished, discipline out of its primordial state?

The reason I’m engaging your criticism, is because I’m struggling with some of the same aspects of Ware’s work that you seem to. I don’t think the emotional truthfulness of his work is quite as advanced or true to life as he would wish it to be — pace the tenor of his Datebooks — but at the same time I admire him for trying so hard to arrive at it. In this regard, he has matured considerably as an artist, and I find his latest work — especially the “Building Stories” series — promising in terms of presenting a more fully human point of view.

I disagree that he is unwilling to make a mess — I think that’s largely what he’s been doing, by hacking away at the same set of emotions for so long — it’s just that the mess he makes is so neat that one doesn’t immediately notice.

Ware seems to me to be using comics to convey a specific perception of time and space — a kind of visual epistemology that reflects his own inner life and that of his characters, and ultimately speaks to our experience of the world. The ‘premise’ is precisely the creation of ‘a sympathetic world for the mind to go to’ that you deride in your post, ‘however stupid that sounds’, and I believe that we are the richer for it.

Utilitarian Review 4/9/10

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Utilitarian LIVE at C2E2

I’m going to be part of a panel on Old Media, New Media, Comics Media at C2E2 in Chicago, April 16, 7: 45:00 PM – 8:45:00 PM. Heidi McDonald is moderating, and other panelists are Brigid Alverson, Johanna Draper Carlson, Ron Richards and Lucas Siegel. It’s in Room E352.

This will not only be my first time on a con panel, it will be my first time at any sort of con ever, to the best of my recollection. So do come by if you’re not watching the simultaneous Dr. Who screening — or if you’re not seeing my cousin Ben Winters, author of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters who is also, and improbably, on a different panel in the same con at the same time.

On HU

I didn’t like the Tintin adventure The Castafiore Emerald very much.

VM was confused by Song of the Hanging Sky vol. 2.

Richard wondered if comics can be scary.

Caro criticized Chris Ware for his poor handling of criticism, leading to a massive comments thread (some of it critical.)

And finally I killed off Music for Middle-Brow Snobs.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Kind of a ridiculous number of publications this week.

On Splice Today I have a long discussion of Terry Eagleton’s new book On Evil

Eagleton’s objection to the use of “evil” to describe Islamic fundamentalists or Mao or bank robbers seems, in the end, more pragmatic than theological. The word evil, he says “is generally a way of bringing argument to an end, like a fist to the solar plexus.” Eagleton, for reasons which aren’t entirely clear, (his Catholic upbringing? His own common sense?) doesn’t want to chuck the word entirely, but he does want to bracket it off. Evil does have “an intimate relation with everyday life,” he argues, but when it comes to defining what that relation is, he more or less punts, offering a laundry list in place of an actual mechanism. Envy, he says, is kind of like evil, schadenfreude is kind of like evil, Freud’s death drive is kind of like evil, and, hey, by the way, Adolf Eichmann looked like a bank clerk. Evil … it has something to do with us. But not much. Can we talk about something else please?

On Comixology I had an extremely snide review of Grant Morrison’s Batman and Robin.

What Morrison understands, through a Jungian intuitiveness born of years of intensively soldering corporate slogans onto the sacred flesh of his unnameables, is that crazy throw-off moments from the past gain weight and profundity by being repeatedly embalmed and disinterred. Every time Bob Haney hawked up a loogie, Grant Morrison was there, mouth open like a baby bird, ready to ingest, digest, and re-emit it for the sole purpose of waddling his sublimely stained Bat underoos over to the nearest university English Department for professional sterilization and veneration.

At the Chicago Reader I review Diane Ravitch’s new book about school reform.

Everyone knows that teachers have class—but which class that is, exactly, isn’t clear. As educated people working with brains, pens, and paper clips, they look white collar. Those indicators are superficial, though. In most ways that matter, teachers are working class. Charged with controlling a potentially dangerous population, they toil through a regimented workday at the butt end of a faceless bureaucracy. A teacher is a prison guard disguised as a college professor—a combination that gives nearly everyone some reason to despise them.

Again on Splice Today I talk about the confused class politics of the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

The Big Bang Theory isn’t alone in pretending that brainworkers are evolutionarily disadvantaged beta-males. Everyone knows that Bill Gates is (a) happily married, and (b) the most powerful person on the planet, but no one seems to want to generalize from there even a little bit. The fact is, though, that scary-smart geeks are not just smarter than folks like Penny—they’re also in a higher social class.

I have an interview with mashup artist DJLobsterdust over at Madeloud.

Do the mashups have to be songs that are popular, or do you try to put together things that are less well known?

In the beginning I really didn’t care and I’d just use songs that I like. But since I find myself playing in front of crowds…I do mashups for myself, songs that I like, and at the same time every couple of weeks I put something out there that everybody knows just so people don’t forget about me. At the same time — I do this because I like pop music. So I have no problem mixing anything with anything.

I have a short review of the Numero Groups Good God: Born Again Funk compilation over at Metropulse.

And I have a review of the horror/fantasy manga Dorohedoro over at tcj.com.

Music For Middle Brow Snobs: Is Dead

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We’ve got some changes coming to HU in the near-to-mid-term. More about those presently…but to start with, I think I’m going to put this feature mercifully to sleep. It’s been fun playing at being a dj, but all good things, etc. etc. Thanks to all the folks who downloaded and commented. You can still get all the earlier playlists for the forseeable future here.