Monthly Archives: May 2010

The Thrizzle Will Be Televised

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An edited version of this essay ran in the Chicago Reader a while back.
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One of the gags in Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume 1 is a three panel comic strip featuring “The Head”. As his name suggests, “The Head” is a disembodied…well, head. In the first panel, he announces “Someday I will rule the world!” In the second he admits that “But for now, I have been reduced to flipping burgers with my telekinetic powers! Bah!” And in the third, he sits on a couch watching Three’s Company and muttering “Bah! Such foolish television!”

The lurch from comic-book super-villain cliché to boob-tube homage nicely encapsulates Kupperman’s methods and influences. Alt comics creators may be turning for cred to more respected mediums like literature and memoir, and mainstream creators may be praying for a movie contract, but Kupperman has other telekinetic burgers to fry. On the one hand, he’s steeped in the clunky traditions of comics past — the barmy testimonial pitches (“Men! Is your penis a urine-leaking, chronically unreliable threat to your mental well-being?”), the breathless pulp adventure titles (“I Bothered a Big Fish!), the doofy super-powers (“Under-pants on his head man!”) But on the other hand his overall rhythms — the narratives which turn into advertisements, the skits which end with some whacko randomly barging through a window, the gags which get abruptly dropped and then recur out of context only to be instantly dropped again — all of that seems borrowed, not from his print predecessors, but from the least cred-bestowing of all possible sources. Forget literature and forget film: Kupperman takes his cues from Monty Python and the Cartoon Network: the surreal humor of the small screen.

Television/comics cross-overs aren’t exactly new: the TV show Buffy is currently being continued in comic-book form, as just one example. But Kupperman may be unique in being inspired as much by TV’s form as by its content. In part, this is due to his source material: Monty Python was, in many ways, meta-television. Each show was cobbled together from a mélange of genres — newscasts, sit-coms, dramas, documentaries, cartoons. The humor wasn’t just in each individual section, but in watching the different modes stagger into and over each other. Thus a drawing-room mystery ends with a scoreboard (Constables : 9; Superintendents: 13) and wildly cheering sports crowds, or the BBC end credits are dropped into the show halfway through.

Monty Python, in other words, replicated the heterogeneous feel of television; the sense of switching from show to show and channel to channel; of serialized narratives eternally fractured just because they’d run out of time. This style of humor is fairly familiar now on TV, but it’s still somewhat unusual in comics. In any case, it’s rarely done in any venue with the panache that Kupperman brings to it. In one strip, for example, he segues vertiginously from boy band infomercial to nature special, informing us first that “Tony is the fun one of the group,” moving on to let us know that “Primo is an Australian desert frog!” and concluding that “Alan is too small to be seen by the human eye — but he becomes visible in this close-up view of the human sneeze!”

The boy band skit is an honest-to-God television parody: it works off of documentary genres that are rarely seen in American comics, and the jokes are predicated on abrupt shifts between panels that are formally analogous to camera cuts. But many of Kupperman’s jokes work by adapting the style of surreal juxtaposition to a specifically comic-book context. Instead of using time sequence, for example, Kupperman often arranges abrupt shifts through layout and space. A mostly text choose-your-own space adventure is illustrated with random drawings that have nothing to do with the story. An advertisement for 4-Playo, a robot that provides foreplay, takes up most of a page except for an unobtrusive, dark-colored banner at the bottom that announces: “Let’s All Go to the Bathroom! A message from the Bathroom Council.” As in Chris Ware’s early comics, many of the book’s pages are designed not around a single narrative-driven punch-line, but rather as a carefully arranged clutter of fake ads, strips, text blocks and random gags. The result is a clankily retro tribute to the days of comics past when the medium was, like television, a mass art form, and so had more in common with television’s hucksterism and heterogeneity (these days most comics don’t even have outside ads.)

Not that every one of Kupperman’s lay-outs looks like those old comics. On the contrary, one of most impressive things about Tales Designed to Thrizzle is the creator’s versatility, as artist, writer, and designer. Kupperman’s art is always instantly recognizable; his drawings are deliberately stiff, and his figures pose oddly against his backgrounds, so that everything looks like collaged clip art. Yet from within those self-imposed limits, he manage to create an enormous range of variation. On some pages, he utilizes a heavily detailed black and white cross-hatch style which almost creates moiré patterns; on others, he uses stencils; on others, he places relatively simplified colored figures against plain backgrounds. His designs too are extensively varied, from full-page splash panels to fake text ads with faithfully reproduced fonts, to the beautiful repetitive wallpaper patterns at the end of each issue.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle, in other words, is a monument not only to silliness, but to craft….which is perhaps the way in which it most clearly departs from its television inspirations. Not that there wasn’t a lot of skill and talent involved in creating Monty Python sketches or Adult Swim cartoons. But (with the exception of Terry Guilliam’s segments, of course) television very rarely pays attention to visual aesthetics in the way that Kupperman does here. His ad for Indian Spirit chewing gum, with its patterned background, bizarre conflations of scale (a tiny Indian about to be swallowed by a giant Caucasian) and stark cut-out feel has a constructivist look which flirts perilously with high art.

Several of Kupperman’s bizarrely lyrical Cousin Grampa strips do a good deal more than flirt. In one of these, “Old King Grampa”, the titular elderly monarch watches a bird fly out of his pie and then out the window.

The bird then hatches an egg, inside of which waits a tiny king. Finally in the last panel the king and two baby birds sit in a nest, mouths gaping open for a worm from their mother. The way in which deferred oral pleasure leads seamlessly to infantile fantasy is queasily Freudian, and the page is entirely wordless, giving it a serene wrongness that Terry Guilliam’s cartoons, with their aggressive muttering and laugh track, never managed. Further, the drawing is in Kupperman’s detailed, cross-hatched style; you can almost feel the baby birds’ beaky cheeks pressed up against the king’s bearded jowls. In the panel where the mother bird is hatching the egg, Kupperman has her beak parted and motion lines behind her head. She’s giving a little silent squawk and jerk of joy as her bearded devourer/child is born. In that little detail, the cheerful violation of Monty Python bleeds seamlessly into the cheerful violation of something like Un Chien Andalieu or Kafka. Not that Kupperman needs to appeal to film or literature. Why would he, when he can just as well make television into art?

Bert Stabler: Girl Germs

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The following essay is by Bert Stabler, an art critic and sometime contributor to HU (when I can browbeat him into it!) Bert’s own blog is here. His website is here.

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Carolee Schneeman’s “Meat Joy,” performed at The Plagiarism Festival on February 6, 1988 @ Artist Television Access, San Francisco, CA.

Girl Germs: Nature as Abjection in Early Feminist Performance Art

Bert Stabler

Immediately after confessing her “ambivalence” about the politics implied in her re-staging of Carolee Schneemann’s classic 1975 performance “Interior Scroll” (in which Schneemann read aloud from an unrolling script contained in her vagina), Gretchen Holmes goes on to summarize her recent review of Tina Takemoto’s alternately ironic and therapeutic work at SFMOMA thusly: “Takemoto simultaneously engages feminism’s politics and its steaks, and this dual presence argues for the importance of both. “ A more fortuitous typo could not be imagined. Possibly Schneemann’s second most well-known work was the more lavish 1964 performance “Meat Joy,” in which several mostly nude performers cavorted with raw fish and chicken meat, as well as sausage, paint, clear plastic, scraps of paper, and various other items. Schneemann’s use of inert objects alongside exposed flesh in “happening”-style improvisations was established in the 1962 piece “Eye Body”, in which she covered herself in grease, chalk, and plastic, and performed in a “loft environment, built of large panels of interlocked, rhythmic color units, broken mirrors and glass, lights, motorized umbrellas.” This dynamically grotesque and erotic theatricality, typical of Schneemann’s assertion of gendered embodiment, was conceived of in direct confrontation to the uninhabited female bodies in high- middle- and lowbrow art, film, and publishing.


Carolee Schneemann, from the performance “Eye Body.”

Pioneering “feminist body art” is widely recognized as Schneemann’s artistic legacy, which has now been handed down through the gruesome sculptures of Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman’s grotesque theatrical self-portraits, and Patty Chang’s identity-themed actions. But in a way different from these artists, Schneemann, as well as other early performance artists, seemed to take on language itself, not as a weapon but as a target. Much of Schneemnann’s contribution to art may seem to many viewers both now and in the past as simply some sort of empowering avant-garde appropriation of pornography—from her 1965 erotic mixed-media film “Fuses,” to her 1981-88 “Infinity Kisses” photo series, in which she makes out with her cat. The ritual aspects of what Schneemann repeatedly referred to as “shamanic” gestures have been largely smoothed over in the process of her institutional canonization. But despite the anti-essentialist language games of postmodernity, the connection between ecstasy, flesh, faith, and sickness is not hard to see. Indeed, Genesis offers the first female rebel, and a vision of punishment not for nakedness but for shame in nakedness. Connections between femininity, sacrifice, animals, and blood continue throughout the Bible, with the Gospels of Mark and Luke narrating the healing of a man possessed by a legion of demons, dispersed by Jesus into a herd of pigs, followed immediately by that of a woman who had bled ceaselessly for twelve years, and the resurrection from the dead of a young girl. While Schneemann’s attitude toward Christianity is hardly congenial, that hardly mitigates the importance, within a Western religious paradigm, of staking out a religious space within fine art in a way that few others have, in performance art or otherwise.

The influence of Antonin Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” runs throughout Schneemann’s work but also throughout the history of “edgy” performance, from Allan Kaprow’s Happenings to Joseph Beuy’s “social sculptures,” through the ecstatic bloody festivals of the Viennese Actionists, to G.G. Allin, the Survival Research Laboratory, and the good old Blue Man Group. But by unabashedly casting herself not only as a feminist but as a “shaman” (not of the crystal-healing variety, mind you), Schneemann marked as both spiritual and political a practice of staged self-destruction and resurrection that illuminated a particularly female psychic crisis that was no mere reflection of or supplement to the Oedipal scene. Ana Mendieta smearing blood on the wall or immolating her own excavated silhouette, Marina Abramovic enduring the experiences of staring into an industrial fan until passing out, carving a pentagram into her flesh, having a strung arrow pointed at her chest for twelve hours—these melodramatic but thoroughly sincere acts differed in important ways from the Duchampian hijinks of their male performance counterparts like Vito Acconci and Chris Burden (or today, William Pope L or Santiago Serra), the esoteric shrines of Beuys or of Paul Thek, or the brutal austerity of object makers like Richard Serra or Carl Andre (the latter acquitted of Mendieta’s 1985 murder).


Ana Mendieta from the 1982 performance “Body Tracks (Rastros Corporales).”

The bluntness and savagery of Schneemann, Mendieta, and early Abramovic even distinguishes them from the more unambiguously positive performance gestures of Suzanne Lacy, Yoko Ono, or Annie Sprinkle, or the open-ended, research oriented, socially-engaged art of recent years, from artists like Paul Chan, Rikrit Taravanija, Trevor Paglen, and Walead Beshty, or groups like the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Futurefarmers, or Temporary Services.

Indeed, there has been quite a bit of utopian imagining since the millennium, both within and outside the art world, now that the memories of revolutionary massacre, even viewed from afar, are at least a generation removed for most young people. It’s a commendable project, since maybe the greatest thing the art world can offer, and the real world cannot, is a vista of endless possibility within grasp, a horizon brought near by the omnipotence of fantasy. Ideas can be brought forth and realized with few negative consequences– except for perhaps the debilitating psychic effects of narcissism and solipsism, as well as the general alienation and transgression fatigue engendered by the ceaseless breaching of propriety. Nonetheless, spreading blood on the wall or rolling in meat are probably incapable of losing their impact—they are as clear and democratic as a mystical gesture can be. The pre-linguistic vulgarity of early feminist performance is what, in some way, makes it some of the most successful work of the last 100 years.

Every phase of the last century has seemed to singularly exemplify one of the aspects that has made the modern period such a rich antiquity for contemporary art to plunder. The twenties had the technologically sublime and abject, the thirties had apocalyptic populist authenticity, the forties had spastic mystical authenticity. After the alleged end of modernity, the zeitgeists marched onward. The eighties had self-aware commerce, the nineties had identity pastiche, and the oughts had virtual communities. And In between the classical and the decadent, the seventies simply offered charismatic brutality. There was Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Jim Jones, Henry Kissinger—but, more to the point, there was the rise of pulp horror cinema, a vivid and vicious ethos crystallized in films like “I Spit on Your Grave, “The Last House on the Left,” “Lipstick,” and other films of the “rape revenge” genre, which made the castration of patriarchy explicitly public. Similarly, the theme of homicide was certainly a presence in religiously-inflected performance. In “Revolution in Poetic Language, “ Julia Kristeva says, “Opposite religion or alongside it, ‘art’ takes on murder and moves through it… Crossing that boundary is precisely what constitutes ‘art.’…(I)t is as if death becomes interiorized by the subject of such a practice(.)” The ideological weight of such aggressive feral gestures as those of Schneemann and the artists she influenced was momentous, and seems no less epic from here. Going forward, it is worth remembering how political art was temporarily not confined to the linguistic and cerebral, and eroticized pantheistic death-worship was for a moment neither ironic or gleeful, but deadly and political.


Therese Neumann, a Catholic mystic stigmatic who was threatened and intimidated by the Nazis, and reportedly ingested nothing but the communion wafer, once a day, from 1922 until her death in 1962.

2013: Year of the C-List

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Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that Iron Man 2 premiered this month and made a eleventy billion dollars on its opening weekend. Next summer, Marvel hopes to replicate that success with Thor, followed by Captain America, and then an Avengers movie in 2012. Plus there are rumors that the Spider-man, X-men, and Fantastic Four franchises will all get rebooted within the next two years. But with it’s A-list IP’s already locked up in movie deals, what new ideas can Marvel bring to the big screen in 2013? The only superheroes that Marvel has left are the C-listers: characters that, while not completely obscure,  never quite reached the big leagues. And if you want to sell the C-list to Hollywood executives, you need the right pitch. Speaking of which, here are my pitches for some Marvel’s lesser known characters.

 

 

The Immortal Iron Fist

Cover by David Aja

Origin
Wealthy industrialist Danny Rand travels to Asia and discovers the hidden city of K’un L’un. He learns kung fu. He beats up bad guys using kung fu.

The Pitch
Wuxia for the American mainstream.

Demographic Appeal
White males who love everything about kung fu flicks except those pesky, non-white actors.

Main Reason Why This Movie Could Fail
There isn’t exactly a shortage of martial arts movies.

Solution
Lots of stunt casting: Michael Dudikoff will play Danny’s father, Wendell. Chuck Norris is his uncle. Brief cameo by Jackie Chan.

The Savage She-Hulk

Cover by John Buscema

Origin
Jennifer Walters was a shy, unremarkable attorney in Los Angeles until the day a local crime boss had her shot. Fortunately, she was being visited by her cousin, Bruce Banner (a.k.a. The Hulk), who gave her a blood transfusion that saved her life. But it also transformed her into — The Savage She-Hulk!

The Pitch
So you didn’t care about the last two Hulk films, but this one has a giant, green hottie!

Demographic Appeal
Men who are into tall, green women.
Women who desperately want to watch any movie starring a superheroine, even a Hulk-spinoff.

Main Reason Why This Movie Could Fail
Self-sabotage: Hollywood believes that blockbusters starring women will flop, thereby ensuring that they’ll screw it up.

Solution
When in doubt, just rip off something with a proven track record.
Pander to Sex and the City fans. She-Hulk teams up with Spider-Woman, Ms. Marvel, and the Scarlet Witch to talk about life, love, and shoes, all while saving the Earth from the Skrulls.

Werewolf by Night


Cover by Gil Kane and John Romita, Sr.

Origin
Jack Russell was a normal teenager until the day he turned 18, when he learned of a terrible curse that afflicted his bloodline. Jack’s parents had emigrated from Eastern European Country hoping to escape the curse, but curses know no borders. Now, in the light of the full moon, Jack Russell becomes a werewolf — by night!

The Pitch
Are you sick of zombies and vampires yet? How about some werewolves?

Demographic Appeal
Fans of superhero/horror hybrids like Hellboy.
Fans of cheesy dog puns.

Main Reason Why This Movie Could Fail
No evidence that a substantial number of people are clamoring to see a werewolf movie.

Solution
This is a tough one. But even Blade ended up as a moderately successful franchise, so the right idea might be to make it rated-R.

Luke Cage: Hero for Hire

Cover by John Romita, Sr. and George Tuska

Origin
As a teenager, Luke was wrongfully convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and sent to prison. In exchange for an early parole, Luke agreed to be the subject of secret experiments that unexpectedly gave him superpowers. Luke then busted out of prison and decided to clean up his old neighborhood in Harlem — but only after he gets paid.

The Pitch
Shaft with superpowers.

Demographic Appeal
Black males.
White males who fantasize about being black males.

Main Reason Why This Movie Could Fail
Institutionalized racism that pervades the American film industry at every level.

Solution
Will Smith.

X-Men Origins: Cable

Cover by Rob Liefeld

Origin
Here goes … Cable is Nathan Christopher Summers, the son of Scott Summers (a.k.a. Cyclops of the X-Men) and Madelyne Pryor (a clone of Jean Grey, a.k.a. Phoenix of the X-Men (who was dead at the time), though Scott didn’t know at first that she was a clone) who later became the demonic Goblin Queen. Cable was the product of a secret experiment by Mr. Sinister (an evil, immortal geneticist who I think is also an ancestor to Scott Summers), who wanted to create the ultimate mutant that would defend him from his master, Apocalypse (an immortal mutant who wants to start a race war between humans and mutants). While still a baby, Cable was kidnapped by Apocalypse and infected with the techno-organic virus that turned him half-machine. To save their son, Scott and Jean (Madelyne had died by this time and her essence and memories were absorbed by Jean … it’s a long story) decided to send Nathan to the future with a time-traveling group called the Askani (which was founded by Rachel Summers, the daughter of Scott and Jean from another possible future … actually, it’s not that important) who promised that the technology from their era could halt the spread of the T-O virus. In the distant future, the Askani saved Nathan (but only after they cloned a backup baby, which was stolen by Apocalypse and raised to be the villain Stryfe … which is another long story) and the boy became Cable, leader of the resistance against Apocalypse and a lover of huge guns. To save the future (or something equally vague, I don’t remember), Cable traveled back in time to shoot things and put together a team of young mutants who wouldn’t play by the rules. And after that, things start getting complicated.

The Pitch
X-Men! Guns! Time travel! Guns!

Demographic Appeal
14 year old boys.
X-Men completionists.

Main Reason Why This Movie Could Fail
Cable’s 15 minutes of fame ended two decades ago.

Solution
Guest-starring Wolverine!

 

 

The Astonishing Ant-Man

Cover by Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers

Origin
Scientist Henry Pym discovered a new subatomic particle (dubbed Pym Particle) that allowed him to shrink to the size of an ant. He also created a helmet that can telepathically control ants. Along with his girlfriend, The Wasp, Pym fights criminals and Communist spies [replace with Russian Mafia] with the power of being very small. And ants.

The Pitch
There’s trailer for Iron Man 3, but it’s at the end of the movie.

Demographic Appeal
???

Main Reason Why This Movie Could Fail
It’s about Ant-Man.

Solution
Release in February when there’s absolutely no competition.

Tigra: The Motion Picture

Panel by Mike Deodato

Origin
Greer Grant was just another superhero wannabe until the day she was badly injured in a terrorist attack. Rescued by a long lost race of Cat People from Baja California, Greer was given a second chance at life when they magically transformed her into superhuman hybrid. In a bikini.

The Pitch
Sexy cat-chick in bikini.

Demographic Appeal
Bikini enthusiasts.
Neko-girl enthusiasts.
Furries.

There’s probably a couple fetishes that I’m forgetting…

Main Reason Why This Movie Could Fail
See She-Hulk

Solution
Tigra — in 3-D.

 

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Tom Spurgeon on Criticism

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Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter was kind enough to agree to an interview about criticism and art. We communicated by email.
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Noah: Your site seems to work to promote a sense of comics as a community —pointing out events and birthdays and doing collective memory projects like the one involving Frank Frazetta. So I guess the first question is, do you see what you’re doing as encouraging, or serving a comics community? And does criticism work against that sense of community, or is it one way of building it?

Tom Spurgeon: No, I’m not really interested in a comics community in that way. I just write pieces I’d want to read. I can see how you’d think that. For instance, I don’t really care about people’s birthdays, I just think it’s interesting to know how old certain industry players and important artists are, and it’s a handy structure for routinely exposing people to art they might not be aware of. You’ll note I don’t run the birthdays without a birth date, although people frequently ask me to.

I have no idea what role criticism might play towards any sense of community. I would assume any community would want to embrace a self-critical aspect and would ideally value the people that challenge conventional wisdom on a routine basis. At least that’s what my pet unicorn Daughtry tells me.

More generally, what do you think the point of criticism is?

Writing about comics for me is about as deep as that I like writing about comics. As someone who reads some criticism, I know that I appreciate it most when I get some insight into the work being examined and that I encounter effective prose. I know when I was a kid and lacked the tools to find things on my own, criticism was a way to learn about stuff I wouldn’t see otherwise. I wouldn’t be able to speak to your question generally, nor would I presume I could.

If you just like writing about comics, what is it about comics as a medium that particularly engages you?

I do like the medium, although I’m a theater guy first, preference-wise. Just in really basic ways. I like visual metaphors. I like that I don’t understand comics all that well — my big book would be called “Failing To Understand Comics.” I think that having an emotional attachment to comics from my youth is helpful in sustaining interest. I think I’m lucky in that it’s the most intriguing art form in terms of the number of artists over the last ten years making compelling work. Although it’s not a motivation, I think I’m lucky to write about comics because I don’t think I write well enough or am effective enough as a critic to have anyone pay attention to anything at all I’d say about prose or film or theater.

One thing I like about comics as a medium is that you can choose to engage comics while holding a variety of competing notions in mind at the same time. You can read a panel progression but also consider bigger and smaller elements of design. You consider what’s right in front of you but also project fundamental circumstances on things that aren’t portrayed. You can look at an object portrayed as the object it portrays but also as an object itself. I never get tired of that kind of thing. We live in an increasingly literal world, where people don’t like movies because they think the actress is too ugly, rather than being able to see her as attractive because you’re being asked to see her in the story that way. Comics is like the advanced class of the opposite of that.

Do you still follow theater?

I try to see as much live theater as I can, although it’s difficult given where I live. I still read a few dozen plays a year. My favorite playwrights are Stoppard, Pinter and Saroyan, although there are certainly individual plays that I admire, from a lot of playwrights. I like everything that Rebecca Gilman has written except for her hit, Spinning Into Butter. I really liked her play Crime Of The Century, about the Richard Speck murders. I liked reading Paul Peditto’s play Essanay.

I think live performance can be thrilling, and live performance unpacking a sophisticated worldview even more so. That’s the majority of it.

There’s a review of Comic Art Magazine from a while back in which you said approvingly, “Comic Art Magazine is a comics publication that rather than engaging with the good and bad of the medium right now has chosen to investigate the good and interesting no matter when it’s been done.” Do you think that criticism is more useful or worthwhile when it focuses on the good and interesting from all time rather than the shitty from yesterday? And, if so, on what grounds would you defend Tucker Stone’s writing, (which I know you’ve praised in the past)?

I apologize in advance if my memory is faulty here. As I recall, it’s more that I thought that was a particular strength of Comic Art, not that I was making a general principle known with CA as the example. It wasn’t really intended to be a grand theory of criticism in other words. Comic Art helped claim a bunch of works as good ones at a point where it was difficult — for me at least — to track the number of potentially good works coming out. It also gave voice to this curatorial impulse that a lot of interesting writers seem to have. It’s very foreign to my own. I’m sure I was back to trashing some poor guy’s life’s work and making Vinko Bogataj jokes within hours after writing that about Comic Art.

I’m not sure exactly what I’ve written about Tucker’s work. I like how engaged he is; I get the sense it’s important to him. He’s kind of the current paragon of youthful enthusiasm for writing about comics – this generation’s Jeff Levine. He’s one of those critics I find useful because his reading habits are very different than my own. I’m entertained by him, which is a bigger deal than you might imagine when you’re reading like 40-50 people on a regular basis.

As long as I’ve mentioned Tucker, I wondered if you could maybe comment further on this quote of his from your interview with him. This is where he said:

There’s a temptation to label mainstream fans as being lazy for not caring about Swallow Me Whole or Blankets, to call them “bone-ignorant” — that’s just a bunch of horseshit. It’s an attempt by boring assholes to assign an overall meaning to a bunch of personal choices made by a group of people that those boring assholes don’t know anything about. On an individual level, I’ve heard a couple of people say they don’t want to read comics that focus on the mundanities of regular life, but I’m more often exposed to people who just like what they like because it’s what they fucking like….

I read a lot of different comics because I like comics, because I like to see as much contemporary stuff as possible. But I’m pretty sure I don’t deserve a prize for that, the same way I’m pretty sure that nobody else deserves a prize for only liking one type of thing in the first place. The world isn’t going to become a better place if everybody starts reading a wider variety of comics. Not going to happen. It might make the conventions more interesting, that’s about it.

I know you said you disagreed with Tucker there — I’m wondering if you could flesh out why a little. Do you think it is ignorant to refuse to try different kinds of comics? Is the point of criticism to some extent to tell people when they’re being bone-ignorant?

No, I don’t think it’s ignorant to refuse to try different kinds of comics. I think that’s healthy. I’ve always been a proponent of read what you like or read for the purposes you think important. The fact that anyone would NOT be a proponent of that seems pretty crazy to me. I have a brother who’s as smart as they come and every comic in his collection has either Namor, Black Bolt or the Badger in it. I’m not kidding for effect. That is his actual collection. It fits into a couple of beer cases and I think it’s a pretty perfect thing. Comics for him provide a certain kind of entertainment and he knows exactly what he wants out of them. Similarly, I like a certain kind of jazz more than others and prefer early 20th Century novels.

Two things, though.

First, where Tucker kind of irritated me there is that the question of ignorance was asked by me, not presumed by me, and I think he got some points there kind of beating me up on a position I don’t really have. It’s one that I recognize, especially as a first reaction, but not one I share.

Second, I think the ignorance isn’t in limiting one’s reading but in not recognizing that one’s reading is limited, in strongly dismissing things out of hand because they’re not your cup of tea.

I guess that could be the point of criticism to some extent, to call people names or to advocate for the expanding of horizons. It’s not really for me, not most days, but those seem like fine goals all said.

I know you’ve said at some points that in criticism you look especially for writers who deal specifically with the work at hand. I wonder if you could talk about what you mean by that.

One of my favorite writers about comics is Bob Levin, who is kind of a classic case of a guy who’s not always interested in dealing with the work in front of him. I’m very interested in a lot of different kinds of writing about comics. I do find useful writers that are engaged with the text, where it doesn’t seem like you could swap out any number of books and get roughly the same piece. Mostly that’s because I’m not a very strong reader, I don’t think I pick up on the nuances and complexities of a lot of works. So I admire that in others.

I don’t have the time to provide examples of works that are less engaged with the subject matter in front of them, but I think we know them when we see them: reviews that spend the majority of their time repeating general principles about a genre or creator, reviews where the reviewer speaks about themselves more than the work in question.

Could you point to a recent critical article you really disliked and talk briefly about why?

I didn’t like the Savage Critics roundtable on Wilson. I thought most of the opinions were inarticulately expressed, I didn’t understand at all some of the lines of reasoning like when Abhay Khosla brought up Art School Confidential like it should disqualify Clowes from speaking on – having a character speak on, even! – the movie business, and I was left with the overall impression that some of those guys really were just deep-down pissed about that Dark Knight crack.

I basically agree that saying, “Well, Clowes’ character shouldn’t talk about Dark Knight because Clowes was involved in a lousy movie,” seems ridiculous. I do have some sympathy with the irritation Abhay expresses. Which is, there’s a default stance in certain regions of lit comics land which is basically: “life sucks and people are awful.” Which I think is glib and overdone and tedious, a, and which, b, can be made even more irritating by the fact that the people promulgating it are, you know, fairly successful, and (what with various autobiographical elements thrown in) the result often looks like a lot of self-pity over not very much.

So…I’m wondering how strongly you would push back against that characterization of lit comics in general…and also whether you feel it is or is not ever appropriate to think about a creator’s biography in relation to his or her work in that way.

At this point I wouldn’t push back at all against the stance that says the default mode in lit comics land is basically “life sucks and people are awful” because it’s no longer an argument I take seriously. I don’t think it’s true by any reasonable measure and I’m done with entertaining the notion until someone presents the argument in a much more effective or compelling fashion than what always sounds to me like some angry, lonely, re-written Usenet post from 1997.

As for creator’s biographies, I don’t know that I’m the arbiter of what’s appropriate or not, and I’m not sure I understand the use of that word here. I think it’s fine to consider biography when looking at a work. Why not?

Could you talk about a recent critical article you liked?

I liked Jesse Hamm’s short piece on Frank Frazetta. I’m like most comics critics in that I’m poorly prepared to talk about art in that way, and I thought his piece had an admirably clean and straightforward quality to it.

And finally; your enthusiasm for the Jesse Hamm review has a lot to do it seems with the professional knowledge he brings to the discussion as an artist. Do you think that criticism by comics creators is especially worthwhile or useful in general? Do creators bring more insight to their criticism than most critics do?

First, I wouldn’t say “enthusiasm.” I liked the piece, Noah, but I don’t recall getting enthusiastic about it. I didn’t even bring it up until you asked. Also, I clearly stated I liked things in Jesse’s piece like the presentation and tone, which are just as important as the exercise of Jesse’s artistic knowledge in building that piece. You seem a bit over-concerned with pinpointing my passionate endorsements of these things that I like, and extrapolating some principle or set of principles to which I must logically adhere as a result of liking A, B or C. It really doesn’t work like that. I wish I were that disciplined and consistent.

As for the questions: I like criticism from comics creators when it’s good criticism. I don’t think criticism from comics creators has any special quality that makes it any better or worse than criticism generally. One thing that might get underestimated is that the average cartoonist spends way more time than the average writer-about-comics thinking about comics. I get to spend three hours a day with comics; someone like Seth may spend 8-10 hours a day working on them. So I think there’s an advantage that cartoonists have just from time sunk into thinking about the art form.

[On second thought Tom noted that Seth should probably be changed to “a working cartoonist.” He noted:”Seth probably spends most of his time on his illustration work, and I can’t really speak to anyone’s individual schedule.”]

There are trade-offs, too. I think a lot of creators have a hard time not letting their personal outlook on making art bleed into their critical perception of art. I think artists build pantheons for themselves in terms of making art and then are tempted to argue a bigger place for their idols in history because of that rooting interest. Things like that.
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Update: In a somewhat heated back and forth in comments, Tom expands on some of his remarks and questions my integrity, so scroll down if that sounds appealing.

Gluey Tart: Worth a What?

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mean? I’d always assumed it was some bit of sexual innuendo of which I was unaware. I didn’t think that this time, though, because there is no sexual innuendo of which I am unaware. So I thought more about it. (That’s why I haven’t written a column in months. Kinukitty is very single-minded.) And I thought, well, there’s “drop a deuce,” but that refers to pooping. Everybody poops, yes, but that’s not quite right for sexual innuendo. Well, it is in some circles, but Kinukitty does not do scat. This is not a minority opinion on Kinukitty’s part, so I don’t think that’s what Mr. Simmons intended the song to be about. But there is no actual “he’s worth a deuce” sexual innuendo. One assumes he meant that he’s hot enough to do twice in one night, but he has himself pretty much admitted he had no idea what the hell he was talking about (or so said something I read online while meticulously researching this conundrum). It’s all just kind of overblown and clumsy and stupid. Which is one of the things I like so much about Kiss.

It isn’t just Simmons and Stanley. This is a game everyone in the band could play. (Well, Ace Frehley seemed to have his shit sorted out, as it were; “Parasite,” for instance, is a weirdly very sexy song, with a kick-ass guitar riff to boot.) Not so much the case for “Baby Driver,” by drummer Peter “Yes, I’m to Blame for ‘Beth’” Criss (also on Rock and Roll Over). “Go, baby driver/Been driving on down the road/Oh, what a rider/Carrying such a heavy load/Don’t ever need to know direction/Don’t need no tow, food, gas, no more.” The first question, obviously, is what the hell is he talking about? No, seriously. What the hell? And the second thing is, Jesus Christ, what is going on with this sexual metaphor? It is a sexual metaphor, that much is clear. Even if we leave aside the confusing lyrics (in fact, let’s do that, please), what on earth is going on with “go, baby driver”? There’s a fine tradition in ’70s rock of calling the groupies or what have you “baby,” and presumably that’s what Mr. Criss had in mind, but this strikes me as a sort of terrifying misstep.

And Kiss fans know from missteps. I’m going to limit myself to some of the high points from the first six albums because, frankly, I don’t want to hear any of the other albums again, ever. (Well, that doesn’t include the four solo albums released in 1978, of course. They are troubled, troubled records, but I have a completely indefensible yet persistent sentimental weakness for Paul’s solo album, and I might also argue, if cornered, that there are actually some songs worth listening to on Ace’s. Peter’s album is pretty much crap from end to end, and I’ve never actually listened to Gene’s, and I don’t intend to. If you try to make me, I shall be cross.) Here are some of my favorite flubs:

  • “Flaming Youth” (Destroyer, by Gene, Paul, Ace, and Bob Ezrin – I think Ace was drugged and kidnapped and forced to participate in this one) – “Flaming youth will set the world on fire.” That one doesn’t mean to be sexual, but come on.
  • “Room Service” (Dressed to Kill, by Paul) – “Baby I could use a meal.” Oh, my god.
  • “Goin’ Blind” (Hotter than Hell, by Gene) – “Little lady, can’t you see/You’re so young and so much different than I/I’m 93 and you’re 16/and I think I’m going blind.” This song, in which Larry King tells his girlfriend that they can’t be together any more, has always cracked me up. The premise is supposed to be amusing (and it is), but I’m not sure Mr. Simmons knew what he was doing with the going blind metaphor.
  • “Hotter than Hell” (Hotter than Hell, by Paul, who sounds like Jerry Lewis when he sings “Lady, oh lady,” something that I, not being French, find uniquely repulsive) – “Hot, hot, hotter than hell/You know she’s gonna leave you well done.” Am I the only one who gets unpleasant and not-sexy burn unit images from this? This song also features an earlier and inarguably more successful – if not exactly successful, per se – exploration of the Mr. Speed theme, with “I’ll take you all around this whole wide world before the evening is through.”
  • “Mainline” (Hotter than Hell, by Paul) –“ You needed some loving/I’m hot like an oven.” Ah, the merciless overlord of the exact rhyme. The thing is, Mr. Stanley really wanted a phallic reference here, not a yonic one. I’m sure of this.

Ah, good times. Now, I assume Mr. Simmons’ response to all this would be to unzip, pull out his big old bank ledger, and wave it in my face. Which is part of the fun, probably. I don’t care what he thinks, and he doesn’t care what I think. That’s called détente. Go, baby driver.

Utilitarian Review 5/15/10

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On HU

We started the week off with Matthias Wivel’s new column titled DWYCK (in honor of Guru; Matthias has a lovely obit here.) This month’s column on HU focuses on the relationship between cartooning and classical art.

I sneered at the title of Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism. (Prompting Matthias to call me “asinine” in comics — welcome aboard Matthias!)

Suat reviews Dan Clowes’ Wilson.

Richard Cook reviewed Peter Milligan and James Romberger’s Bronx Kill. (James himself weighs in in comments.)

Old HU hand Tom Crippen returned for a guest post about writing criticism.

Vom Marlowe discussed comic character perfumes and the virtues of fandom.

And I digitized one of my old zines, titled “Superheroes I Have Known.

Utilitarians Elsewhere

At comixology I have an essay about pregnancy and homosexuality in Junji Ito’s Uzumaki.

Ito seems to be suggesting that all men secretly want to — that the only thing preventing constant man-on-snail coupling are a few thin taboos which will warp and dissolve like cardboard before the smallest liquid spray of desire. This is, of course, the fever-dream behind the most alarmist kinds of homophobia; the terror, not so much that gays are recruiting, as that, with just a little prompting, men will embrace any excuse to abandon heterosexuality, and with it humanity. From a Freudian standpoint, you can see it as the combined fascination with and horror of the father; a desire for the power of the phallus which must be carefully regulated through totem and taboo if we are not to all slide into cannibalism and anarchy.

I review Pam Grier’s new memoir over at Splice Today.

Foxy: My Life in Three Acts certainly is affecting in parts. As the father of a six-year-old, I found Grier’s account of being raped at that age actually nauseating. Less somberly, Grier’s discussion of one of her visit’s to the gynecologist has to be one of the top gossip anecdotes of the year so far. In her account, Grier explains that the doctor discovered “cocaine residue around the cervix and in the vagina” and asked Grier if her lover was putting cocaine on his penis. “ Grier responds, “That’s a possibility … You know, I am dating Richard Pryor.”

Then she admits to the doctor that during oral sex her lips and tongue go numb because, apparently, Pryor did so much coke that it made his semen an opiate.

Other Links

Tom Crippen sneers wearily (and effectively) at John Constantine.