Monthly Archives: September 2010

Too Much Toth

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During our ominously metastasizing roundtable on R. Crumb’s Genesis, one of the big questions that kept coming up was about whether you should compare comics to other things. Is it fair to set comics next to your meatloaf and say, “You know — comics. Not so tasty”? Is it okay to put them on the wall next to a crucified copy of Kierkegaard and then complain because your cloned angst-ridden philosopher is dripping blood all over a perfectly good Walt Kelly original, and you can’t appreciate the witty swamp patois because of the agonized ratiocinating?

In any case, I was thinking about these issues (more or less) while reading this piece by Matt Seneca. The post focuses on a single panel from Green Lantern #171, drawn by Alex Toth.

Cartooning is a white-knuckle walk down a tightrope with no end. The point of departure is illustrative drawing — the presentation of images from life, as observed in life. Plenty of artists never make it out of that realm, and as far as comics go there’s no reason why that has to be a problem. From Hal Foster to Jim Steranko, this medium has seen some fine realist artwork. But the realists ignore a fundamental challenge of the comics form: the creation of true picture-writing. Making the visuals simple and iconic enough that they carry instant meaning for the reader, with no contemplation required and no illustrative details slowing down the story. This hieroglyphic ideal is one of the more frequently stated goals of comics, I’d imagine because it separates the form from its two closest cousins, prose and illustration. Pictures that tell stories without words put comics outside the realm of the literary; and images used to inform rather than immerse fall beyond the illustrative.

But for all the hypothetical advantages of this “ideal” mode of comics, there’s an aspect of the medium it fails to consider: the sheer beauty of illustrative artwork. Charles Schulz and Jules Feiffer, to name the two artists who’ve perhaps gotten closest to a pure-iconographic realm of comics, read better, more smoothly, than pretty much any illustrative artist you care to name. However, I personally have always found something to be missing from the experience of their work as compared to that of Alex Toth, a devoted minimalist who nonetheless took pains to keep an inoculation level of illustrative information in his panels. All three of these artists searched relentlessly to strip excess pieces from their staging, excess lines from their rendering, excess detail from their shaping of forms. But where Feiffer typically dropped his backgrounds altogether, where Schulz indicated setting with sections of rigid fence post or bits of scrubby grass, and where both essentially drew everything with the same lineweight, Toth (along with the rest of his ilk, Mignola, Crane, Yokoyama) put just enough illustrative variation into devices like line and camera angles to give his version of iconographic minimalism the added verve of pretty pictures, of the visual world’s beauty.

Seneca goes on to argue that the split here between iconic/illustrative can be mapped onto that old standby, mind/body:

Schulz and Feiffer’s works (and those of R.O. Blechman and Ernie Bushmiller and, at times, Chris Ware) are comics of the mind, whether they be emotionally-based wanderings or dialectic ideas or even simple sight gags. But Toth drew action comics — comics of the body, of landscapes, of things that wouldn’t make sense if we couldn’t see them. This was his reason for shying away from the final pare-downs that the great strip cartoonists made: without the scraps of illustrative-comics grammar Toth employed, the environmental richness and kinetic cutting and hyperbolic figurework and variated lines, the material he drew simply wouldn’t have worked.

So, at first glance, you might say that this is an example of comparing comics to other things — specifically, the illustrative tradition.

The initial sentence, though, leads one to doubt. “Cartooning is a white-knuckle walk down a tightrope with no end.” That’s a statement of comics exceptionalism which, to me, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless you’re trying fairly hard not to think about other artforms. Cartooning is more white-knuckle than, say video art, which is poised between film on the one hand and the drop into television on the other? Or more of a tightrope than doom metal, poised between easy-listening fluff and the tectonic obliteration of your worthless soul? Or than performance art, poised between buckets of cow urine and tragic self parody? Any art involves difference — not that choice but this one, not this one but that one. That’s because communication and meaning are made out of difference. You might as well say asking for peas at the dinner table is a white knuckle walk, since you might slip and ask for corn or intimate sex acts instead. Indeed, Freud would actually say that (the bit about asking for peas being a white-knuckle ride, I mean, not the intimate sex acts. Though perhaps that as well, on second thought.)

Seneca then, is seeing comics as special. To do that, you need to don certain kinds of blinkers. In this case, those blinkers prevent Seneca from seeing illustration except in its relation to comics. Specifically, he argues that “The point of departure [for cartooning] is illustrative drawing — the presentation of images from life, as observed in life.” Illustration here, then, is realistic drawings meant to capture the look of life. This makes sense if you are talking about the pulp illustration that is important to the kinds of drawing Alex Toth does. It makes less sense, though, if you look at, say, this.

That’s an ink painting by Jiun Onko, an 18th century Buddhist priest. I wrote about it at length here. In this context, though, my point is simple…that’s an illustration.

Not only is it an illustration, but it’s a kind of illustration that is by no means marginal to the mainstream illustrative tradition. As you can see if you look at the below.

That’s Ooops! by Toulouse Lautrec, an artist who was consciously influenced by Japanese ink paintings…and whose drawings and posters, in turn, certainly seem to have been a forerunner of Toth’s style, even if they weren’t a direct influence.

So, if these are illustrations, then what does that do to the binaries Seneca has constructed?

First of all, it clearly calls into question the connection Seneca is making between illustration and realism. More than that, though, it upends the argument about the rationale for iconographic cartoons. Seneca is arguing that illustrative work is realistic and beautiful, but that cartoonists have to abandon that to make their pictures more readable. For Seneca, minimalism is chosen for ease of reading.

But if you look at the Jiun Onko and Toulouse-Lautrec drawings, it’s pretty clear that this is not a sufficient explanation. Jiun Onko, in particular, is more relentlessly iconographic than Schulz or Bushmiller; he provides less information. Indeed, he almost turns his image into a Japanese letter, or character. In that sense, his drawing is there to be “read” as Seneca suggests — but not in the interest of the sequential ease of information transmission. Rather, the image makes a connection between words, pictures, and reality — it’s an image which demands the reader/viewer/supplicant actively participate in constructing all three. Thus, the choice of an icon here is not utilitarian, but aesthetically meaningful. To draw iconically is not a default failure to incorporate the illustrative tradition. It’s an integral part of that tradition.

Drawings such as Toulouse-Lautrec’s and Jiun Onko’s also strongly call into question Seneca’s effort to make Schulz/Toth equivalent to mind/body. Look at this example of iconic artwork.

That’s a drawing by the wonderful children’s author and illustrator Mo Willems from Pigs Make Me Sneeze! Willems, as you see here, often includes dashed motion lines as part of his iconic, legible style. And what do you think my son often does when I’m reading him the book and he sees those lines?

It’s not hard to figure out; he traces them with his finger. If you look at the Toth panel up at the top there, though, nobody is going to trace that with your finger, because why would you? On the other hand, the Jiun Ito drawing or the Toulouse-Lautrec — you could see running your hand across those curves, in part because you can see the artist’s hand running across those curves. The same is true with a lot of early Peanuts; because the illustration is pared back and the linework is so instantly visible, you have the feeling of interacting directly with the hand of the creator.

On the other hand, slick illustrational work tends to place the viewer as an onlooker, rather than pulling you in for interaction. Take a drawing like Frazetta’s Cat Girl:

You are placed as voyeur; the flesh is on display. The image is a window, the surface the line between two separate worlds rather than the place where the creator and the viewer meet. In this sense, realism can be seen not as body, but rather as body exiled to mind, while the more iconic illustrational style can be seen as mind manifested, or embodied.

The point here isn’t that Schulz and Bushmiller are better artists than Toth, or that iconic is better than realism in illustration or cartoons. Realism can be great; I like Vermeer excessively, as just one for instance. But…well, here’s Seneca’s conclusion.

What’s illustrative is how much of this environment Toth sees, the amount of visual information packed into the panel borders, the panoramic shape of the frame itself. Toth gets to his place of realness, of beauty, by piling it on, adding subtraction to subtraction to abstraction until his minimal world holds as much as the real. As much shadow, as much light, as much texture, as much scope. It’s just arranged more subtly, seen more poetically, changed into something both familiar and strikingly different. It’s art, to make it simple.

Obviously, I disagree that illustration must mean a great deal of information. I also question the parallel made in the phrase “his place of realness, of beauty”, as if realness and beauty are one and the same thing. But the real (as it were) disagreement is that Seneca equates art with muchness. What’s great about Toth is that there is “as much shadow, as much light, as much texture, as much scope” as in reality. Moreover, this muchness is arranged even more muchly than in the world — “more subtly…more poetically…both familiar and strikingly different.” Toth’s art is about getting the whole world and magically turning less into more.

Surely, though, art’s beauty is as much about curtailment as replication; as much about emptying creation as filling it. The minimal is not beautiful because it manages to get all the essential and arrange it better; it is beautiful because of its absences. What makes that Toth illustration art is not that it gives us the big world sensitively arranged, nor that it fools the eye by packing in more than can possibly be there. Rather, the art is that it doesn’t fool the eye. Instead, the blocky shapes, the distant silhouettes, encourage us to participate in pulling something out of everything — the pleasurable act of creation, which is also the act of subtraction.

So now, having disagreed with everything Seneca said, I should, in theory, conclude by lambasting him for his too narrow vision; for relating comics only to comics, and so being confused about the nature of comics, of illustration, and of art. I’m not going to do that though because — well, I’ve just been praising subtraction, haven’t I? Seneca takes a small bit of the world, turns it over, cuts it down, and ends up with a panel of flatter, more circumscribed reality. The pleasure or art in his piece is not dependent on that flatter world including the whole of the real world. Rather, the beauty is in watching and engaging with the mind that moves within the arbitrary parameters. As I suspect Seneca would agree, the point is not just what you manage to include within the lines you draw, but how you draw them.

How To Draw and Paint Anatomy (ImagineFX Presents Series)

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Various artists: Ron Lemen, Marshall Vandruff, Justin Gerard, Warren Louw and more.

One of my favorite things in the whole world is figure drawing.  The human form comes in so many wonderful variations: shapes and sizes, proportions, movements, gender differences and similarities, muscle types, ages.  I love to focus on the form and try (and inevitably fail, because human form is like understanding oceans, ever shifting) to reach understanding.

Comics as a medium embraces many aspects of figure drawing, sometimes well and sometimes (stock cape depictions of women, I’m looking at YOU) poorly.  As someone who draws comics for pleasure, I especially enjoy exploring the craft of figure drawing.

The challenge of comics, in part, is to draw a wide variety of people (including different body types, depending on the comic) in many poses, including action poses, from many angles and foreshortenings.  Plenty of traditional artists use references, either live models (if they’re wealthy or good at bribing friends with baked goods) or photographs.  Alphonse Mucha, for instance, had a stunning collection of reference photographs, including the Divine Sarah, for his paintings and prints.  Even I could make a pretty nice drawing out of this photo (half the work has already been done, really, what with the pose and the costume and the pre-existing anatomy).  Drafting a work from a reference is an important skill, and I am not knocking that skill!  It took me years to be able to do that well, and I’m quite proud of it.  However.

Most of us, unlike Alphonse, do not have a cadre of wasp-waist women who are willing to sit in such poses.  And even if we do have them, it wouldn’t do us much good if we were trying to draw an intersex swordsman in mid leap, decapitating someone with a katana.  (Yes, a recent drawing problem I wrestled with.)

One must be able to draw from the imagination in order to draw certain scenes.  Or have a friend in Hollywood with a Peter Pan flying harness and a willing Wuxia actor, I suppose.

Which brings me to my ever-reaching, ever-striving attempts to understand and embrace human anatomy in all its variations and forms.  The difference in approach is much like working from the inside (such as the spine) to the outside (skin), rather than from the outside (skin/clothes in a reference photo) to the inside.

There are many ways to go about the inside-to-outside approach, such as taking cadaver classes, studying Bridgeman, working with bones, and studying sculpture.

The How to Draw and Paint Anatomy piece that I’m reviewing includes a couple of methods.  The first main method is Industrial Design, which is probably to familiar to many artists but which is given a great treatment here.  The basic approach is to divide the figure into shapes and how those shapes function together.  You’ve probably seen some how-tos that say something like: use a circle for the head, use a box for the chest, use a circle for the hips, and so on.  That comes from the industrial design method.  I’ve used this method in variations for many years, and one of my most successful self-taught drawing projects was redrawing an entire ladies underwear catalog in such shapes, page after page.  (Undies=easy to see the body.)  One of the problems I’ve run into is that it can be difficult to get a good feeling of flow.  Making separate shapes is all well and good, but if they’re put together poorly, you kind of get this static feeling.  The figure might appear three dimensional, but it also appears stiff, even with a dynamic pose.

That’s where Ron Lemen’s series especially shines.  His approach to this method goes all the way back to its roots with Frank O’Reilly.  The first part of his series begins with the history of the method, basic how to steps, and some examples.  What I like about the way Lemen approaches the industrial design method is that he uses a lot of gestural flow and interconnects the working parts of the body that so they work as a functioning, smooth, dynamic flow.  Instead of blocky shapes that are frozen, the bodies begin to show movement.

Here’s a nice example from his section on drawing legs:

See how the muscles are balanced and connected?  There’s some lovely movement there, even though as poses go, it is quite static (just standing).

Lemen begins with the whole shape and then takes a deeper look at each of the main body segments: torso, legs, arms, hands, head.  Each section contains illustrations and suggestions for crafting workable poses from various angles and various movements.  Lemen discusses body types (including natural female anatomy, heavy set men, and so on) and how that impacts the shifting of weight, unlike many of the drawing manuals I have read where the best you can hope for is to stick some melons on the chest and call it done (pro tip: breasts, not actually ball shaped!  Who knew?).  I was enchanted to discover that Lemen realizes that breasts are more comma shaped.  Each of the sections also covers the figure in movement–what happens to the torso, for instance, when the body bends to one side?  The outer line of the curve is smooth, and the inner line of the curve becomes wrinkled.

Here’s another example from the legs section:

Again, you can see the connection from the bottom of the feet all the way up to the buttocks.  There is a distinct flow of lines and balance, as the weight is on the ball of the foot and the thigh muscles are tensed.

It’s a great series of articles.  The other aspect that I particularly find useful in this work is that it is not merely a magazine/book.  It comes with a DVD, and on the DVD are multiple files.  Lemen has includes various poses, so that an artist can manipulate, copy, play with, practice from, or study at larger or smaller sizes.  And the creme de la creme, a series of videos.

To me, the video series included in the work is well worth the entrance fee.  The videos are quite simple, but for someone like me, who learns kinesthetically and visually, it is priceless.  They show a plain shot of an artist’s arm and their large drawing board.  Beginning with blank paper and no references, the artist draws, free hand, a variety of lovely poses in the industrial arts style.  (Some of the poses are later shown in the book.)  There is not any time consuming erasing, it’s almost entirely free hand with dark pencil and the drawings do not take a long time (usually about three minutes or so per pose, even the complex ones!).  I found it utterly fascinating, because it is only by watching the actual process that I truly understand where the artist begins with each piece and how the lines become connected and what follows what.

There are over twenty minutes worth of such drawings on the DVD.  I’ve watched some of them more than once, and each time I learn something new.  (If you have access to a good art school and a great set of life drawing courses, you may not find this useful.   Me, I don’t, so.)

The second half of the book is taken up with Marshall Vandruff’s comparative anatomy series, which is completely different from Lemen’s, but utterly fun.  In it, Vandruff begins with several main body types: human, big cat, horse, and great ape.

(I apologize for the cut-off part in this scan.  I’ll replace it when I’m back to my scanner.)

He compares the bones, joints, and proportions of various types to create a working knowledge of animal anatomy (including human anatomy).  I found myself comparing my foot and my dog’s back foot, bending the joints and pointing my toes, trying to understand how both of us worked.  Ever since reading his articles (and boring my poor, long suffering Pookie), I’ve had a much better understanding of ankles.  My drawings of feet are connected to the legs more properly and no one is wandering around on what would have to be broken ankles.

Like Lemen, this series start with a broad overview and then tackles major muscle/anatomy groups in turn.  Necks, torsos, heads, legs, feet, and so on.  One of the fun parts is the homework assignments, which suggest, among other things, morphing an animal into a human and back again.  Great practice for comic artists doing supernatural works, or for any artist who wants to get a more distinct character feel to their people.   The examples of a woman with more catlike features compared to a man with bearish features was fascinating, even though both at the end had proper human anatomy, the feeling was utterly different.

Unfortunately my me, there are no videos of the artist drawing such pieces off the cuff.  But there are plenty of additional sketches on the DVD.

This work ends with a couple more short workshops and a fun practical Artist Q&A section, where pro artists answer anatomy questions.

It’s hard to say whether this a book or a magazine.  It’s produced by the folks at ImagineFX, the magazine, and I bought it in the magazine section at my Borders.  It does have compilations from earlier ImagineFX issues, but is not itself an issue.  It’s not bound like a book, but a magazine.  I’m hoping it’s still on the stands, because it appears to be out of stock already at its mother store.  I think it’s well worth hunting down, if you’re working on the craft of anatomy.

Strange Windows: Draw Buildings, Build Drawings (part 2)

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What are the links between comics and architecture?

At first thought, not many, other than the banal facts that cartoonists draw a lot of buildings, and that a few modern buildings look like something whacky or sci-fi-like that could’ve come from a comic book.

I believe there are deeper connections.

A strip cartoonist ‘builds’ a complex structure, manipulating space to organise time and impose a narrative.

An architect does much the same thing.

Consider a museum, a cathedral, an airport terminal: there is an implicit narrative in each, with the visitor “reading” the constructed space.

These resemblances even show up in technical vocabulary.

We speak of the “construction” of a script; both a building’s floor plan and the roughs for a comics story show a “layout“.

(Speaking of floor plans, cartoonist John Romita Sr revealed that the first thing he did before blocking out a scene was to draw a floor plan, prelude to his mise-en-scène of characters; doesn’t an architect do the same with regard to a building’s users?).

The Pritzker prize-winning architect Christian de Potzamparc (who collaborated with the cartoonist Joost Swarte on the Hergé museum) said:

“When I made the lodgings of the rue des Hautes-Formes in Paris, in the ’70s, I created a dozen successive perspectives. Like a film. […] It happens that this subjective vision is also the perception of the cinema but above all of comics.”

Rue des Hautes formes: lodgings designed by Portzamparc

Let’s now hear the thoughts of François Schuiten, a cartoonist who over his career has gained renown for his architecture- centred tales:

” [Between architecture and comics] there are identifiable meeting points. For example, one of the primordial things in comics is to bring the eye into the picture, and for this, architecture is a good tool, for it allows one to guide, to orient the gaze through the play of materials and light. What equally interests me is composition. The comics page — it resembles a topography, it plays on the relation between positive and negative space.

One can therefore compare the writing and composition of a page with an architect’s preoccupations.”

Lithograph by Francois Schuiten

“There are,” Schuiten goes on, ” in my stories, practically no drawings without a human character. I don’t get so much pleasure from drawing buildings for themselves. I like them to the extent that they can help me set a scale, tell a story, nurture fields of tension.”

Another Francois Schuiten cityscape

Schuiten often characterizes the city and comics as comparable systems:

“That’s what interests me. Benoit Peeters [Schuiten’s longtime scripter] and I track that: the character caught in a system. How an environment builds us, reveals us or destroys us. What organic links the city weaves to us. Those fractal links that arise between very small and very large things. Comics and architecture are good tools for discussing that. […] Small things must reflect the dimension of the system, detail becomes synecdoche, a carrier of meaning.

For me, there too, it’s possible to establish a link, if one wishes, between architecture and comics. Comics are the art of the sign, and through the staging of a building’s details, a lot can be expressed.”

(quoted from an interview with Stephane Beaujean; tr. from the French by A.B.)

Cover by Schuiten

Schuiten is articulate about architecture and comics for good reason; that has been his theme for over three decades. We shall return in detail to him in a later installment.

Architecture and architects are not that uncommon a theme in comics.

1983 saw the debut of Dean Motter’s comic book Mr X: the eponymous hero being the architect of a utopian metropolis, Radiant City, gone wrong; besides Motter, notable artists to draw it include Jaime Hernandez, Paul Rivoche, and Seth.

Mr X by Paul Rivoche

This dystopian approach didn’t prevent the artists from reveling in retro-futurist stylings; indeed, that seems to have been largely the raison d’être of the comic, whose real hero was the city itself.

Mr X art by Jaime Hernandez

In Hermann Huppen‘s Babette, we follow in great detail the building of a medieval cathedral:

click to enlarge

Jean-Marc Thévenet (script) and Frederic Rebena (art) have crafted a comics biography of Le Corbusier, the great Swiss architect:

The album delves seriously into the process of creating architecture, and avoids hagiography:

Andreas appropriates the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright for his 1995 Le Triangle Rouge, a strangely oneiric multi-layered tale not unlike this year’s film Inception; Wright’s buildings seem the only sure anchor for the reader’s understanding.

The architect as savior from chaos?

2009 saw David Mazzuchelli‘s Asterios Polyp, the story of a “paper architect”– one who never actually builds anything– who has lost his way in art as in life:

(Asterios Polyp was extensively discussed in a roundtable on this blog)

But for a devastating critique of architecture, of urbanism, and indeed of modern civilisation– nothing surpasses Robert Crumb‘s brief, wordless, building-haunted masterpiece, A Short History of America:

I find most admirable in Crumb, here and elsewhere, his unflinching observation of the ugly, the banal, the quotidian of the city that we erase unconsciously from our perception.

There is a telling scene in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary film Crumb where the artist shows an album of photos he’d commissioned, showing freeway intersections, clusters of lampposts, concrete islands… all the most boring and brutalist “invisible” patches of our urban environment. Crumb pointed out that there was no reference accessible for these despised spaces, so he had to have them documented himself.

This is a true artist: one who sees what we don’t want to see, and opens our eyes to it.

Sofia, Bulgaria, 1966, by R.Crumb

Crumb was far from the only artist from the ’60s–’70s underground comics movement to show an interest in architecture. Bill Griffith, in his Griffith Observatory and Zippy strips evinced a fascination with the bizarre and often garish building vernacular that characterises so much of America’s urban landscape — showing affection for the trashy and banal:

Griffith organised a campaign to have the ‘doggie head” sign that so inspires Zippy be landmarked…and lo! It was. Click image to enlarge.

 

 

Architecture, then, can be the subject of a strip or cartoon…but obviously,the great majority of comics do not deal directly with architecture.

How, then, do comics and architecture interface? How do comics use architecture?

The prime use is functional. Architecture and landscape are the setting wherein the cartoonist will stage the actions of his characters.

Many cartoonists will keep the architectural features spare, to the point of minimalism; this stems from a valid aesthetic that heightens the narrative in contrast to its context. ( Others will do so out of laziness or hackery).

Look at the buildings in these panels from Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy:

They are reduced to their barest essence: just enough to convey the idea of “building”.

Consider the economy shown in this depiction of a shopping mall in Archie:

 

Click to enlarge

Just enough graphic information conveyed, and no more, to advance the story.

This aesthetic became a house style at Fawcett Comics’ Captain Marvel in the ’40s, as defined by C.C. Beck and encoded by the Jack Binder sweatshop; this page was drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger:

 

click to enlarge

In Europe, too, this stripped-down approach had many adherents. The ‘ligne claire’ (‘clear line) school of Belgium is famous for the detailed backgrounds of Hergé, E.P.Jacobs, or Jacques Martin; but it also featured more humdrum strips such as Chick Bill, by Gilbert “Tibet” Gascard that kept the architecture fairly spare and functional, though accurate:

 

click to enlarge

Beyond the purely functional, architecture in comics is illustrative. It complements and augments the story; it creates an ambience; it reinforces a fiction’s believability.

This is key for comics of historical fiction.

 

Renaissance Paris; from ‘Les sept Vies de l’Epervier‘, drawn by Juillard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prince Valiant, by Hal Foster. .

 

The above strip is a curious case; it combines scrupulous accuracy in depiction with heedless anachronism in setting. For example, the above drawing shows a typical 12th century castle and contemporary knight; but the action is supposed to take place in the 4th century!

 

Architecture is a capital component of science-fiction and fantasy comics, essential for establishing credibility.

Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud: The Long Tomorrow

The veteran fantasy artist Mike Kaluta notes that the believability of drawn architecture depends on the artist being able to visualise the invisible parts of a building– its hallways, pipes, rooms– even if none of them are shown the reader.

Carson of Venus; art by Mike Kaluta

Sometimes past and future collide, as in Gene Ha’s richly imagined The Forty-Niners:

…where early 20th century architecture is augmented by futuristic buildings; a design approach reminiscent of that of Syd Mead on the seminal science-fiction film Blade Runner.

But Mead was anticipated in this by Enki Bilal, who perfected the “mash-up” of futuristic, contemporary, and past architecture:

Besides the historical past or the fantasised future, of course, architecture establishes the verisimilitude of the present. Certain cartoonists have so excelled at this that they have become indelibly associated with a particular city.

Jacques Tardi is the cartoonist laureate of Paris:

Jacques Tardi, ‘Nestor Burma’: Paris in the 1940’s

Jacques Tardi, ‘La Position du Tireur Couché’: Paris in the 1970’s

London arguably belongs to Carl Giles:

For New York, my choice would be Will Eisner.

I was born in New York and lived there for the first 14 years of my life. I can attest that Eisner’s rendition of the crusty, crumbly, fire escape-festooned tenements and elegant stooped brownstone townhouses of the Big Apple are the real deal.

New York view, by Will Eisner

Eisner’s yenta mom substitute bawling out the Eisner stand-in (en Français in this translation). From ‘A Contract with God’.

The cartoonist Chris Brunner notes about the above image:

“Worth mentioning is the way architecture can be used as a graphic device to create panels within panels. A couple of the images here touch on this (…) the Eisner fire escape shot- the man part of the outdoor environment, the woman framed by the window in a way that suggests its own panel.”

Mark also how New Yorkers appropriate the fire escape as a mixed private/public space.

Eisner again, in French again.. a lucid look at the impermanence of New York edifices. From ‘The Building‘.

There is, of course, a quicker and lazier way to identify a city: landmarks, such as the Statue of Liberty:

The Gift, by Alfredo Alcala

…or the Empire State Building:

A mean ol’ monster emerging from the Empire State Building, as sketched on the spot by Herb Trimpe (The Incredible Hulk), inked by Sal Buscema
… or the Eiffel Tower:

Star Trek, art by Alberto Giolitti & Giovanni Ticci

(This use of famed monuments has been thoroughly sent up by Scott McCloud in his Destroy!, where two rampaging superheroes demolish every famous landmark in New York:)

I call this use of architecture in narrative emblematic.

These landmarks can fulfil a metonymic function:

From Doonesbury, by Gary Trudeau.

The manor of Moulinsart (Tintin) by Hergé. Click image to enlarge.

The Batcave (Batman).


 

Snoopy’s Doghouse, from Peanuts (art by Carl Shulz)

 

The Daily Planet building (Superman) as rendered by Paul Rivoche.
Click image to enlarge.

The bard’s house (Astérix) by Uderzo

The Baxter Building (Fantastic Four) by Jack Kirby

(Compare with the Batcave: a staple of the ’60s superhero comic, the cutaway view of the hero/villain’s headquarters is but a memory now. You kids today…I just don’t know…)

The Money Bin (Uncle Scrooge) by Carl Barks

Pop’s Chocolate Shoppe (Archie).

The above location also functions as what T.V. sitcom writers call a “crossover set” — a place where any of the characters can meet, and any plotlines intersect.

The Marsupilami’s nest (Spirou), by André Franquin

Superman’s Fortress of Solitude; art by Ross Andru and Dick Giordano

These recurring landmarks serve as touchstones for the regular reader, offering the reassurance of familiarity; much for the same reason that Donald Duck always wears a sailor suit, or that Superman wears tights, a cape, and his underpants on the outside.

Sometimes architecture is used to signal a genre.

Arcane’s castle (Swamp Thing) by Berni Wrightson
Big spooky castle = horror comic

Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. by Jim Steranko

Gratuitously futuristic décor = cool spy thriller.

The next function of architecture in comics I call expressive. The cartoonist uses architecture and landscape to evoke specific emotions in the reader.

See the expressionistically twisted yet realistic world of Alack Sinner, by Muñoz and Sampayo:

The harsh streetscape mirrors the sense of doom and injustice that pervades this noir series.

Less baneful, but as subjectively gritty and urban: Will Eisner’sThe Spirit :

Even the buildings are bent to the story– to the very logo:

Or consider Jack Kirby’s stunning imaginary cityscapes, such as Asgard:

click  image to enlarge

…or his Great Refuge:

…or his New Genesis:

Now, note that many, if not most, of the buildings in the above Kirby panels have no discernable function. Or, rather, their function is emotional– to instill awe.

It’s far different emotions that are invoked by the quotidian landscapes of Jiro Taniguchi: peace, melancholy, mixed with a quiet joy.

The last use of architecture in comics celebrates the quiddity of the artist’s vision; for want of a better term, I call this use poetic.

How else to describe the quirky lunacy of George Herriman‘s ever-shifting buildings:

click image to enlarge…or the baroque hallucinations that Jim Woodring conjures up for dwellings?

Five categories, quite subjectively and idiosyncratically arrived at: functional, illustrative, emblematic, emotive,poetic. Of course, most comics architecture features more than one of these aspects, often all of them.

And this is nowhere truer than in Trondheim and Sfar’s Le Donjon series, where the titular dungeon, a seemingly infinite Gormenghastian source of terror and desire, dominates the actions of every inhabitant of its world.

It’s also obvious, merely from all the examples shown above, that architecture in comics can’t be considered in isolation: it relates to design, to landscape, to scenography, to narrative.

In this installment, we surveyed what architecture brings to comics.

But do comics have anything to bring to architecture?
We’ll examine that puzzle in part 3.

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This is part 2 of a three-part series. Click here for part 1 and part 3.

Here’s a link to a great recent post on notable comics places.
If you wish to see the work of one of last century’s true masters, this site collects a stunningly huge, searchable database of Giles cartoons. The “random cartoon” function is addictive!

Random Thoughts on SPX ’10

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Last Saturday, I visited the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland with three of my friends. We spent nearly all our time wandering around the main convention floor, buying stuff, and occasionally chatting with the exhibitors. Here are some quick thoughts on SPX, in no particular order:

I can’t move!

I hope next year’s Expo rents a second convention room or moves to a larger venue. I’m not sure if they underestimated the crowds or if money is just tight, but the convention floor was far more crowded than it needed to be.

But I’ll give them credit for putting Kate Beaton near a door: she was far and away the most popular cartoonists there (she even put Jaime Hernandez to shame), and the line for her signature formed outside the doorway rather than clogging up the convention room.

There are girls! Reading comics!

And women too. Out of all the (nerd) conventions that I’ve been to, SPX had the largest percentage of both female attendees and exhibitors. This is a very rough estimate, but I’d say close to 50% of the attendees on Saturday afternoon were women.

One of my friends at SPX had previously accompanied me to the Baltimore Comic-con. She found SPX to be much more female-friendly. At the Comic-con, she complained that some of the vendors had stared at her like she was some alien creature. When I asked about it, she told me that what made her feel comfortable at SPX was not the number of female attendees, but the female exhibitors and vendors. In other words, if you want to sell comics to women, you need women who sell comics.

It’s all in the presentation, or lack thereof.

Most of the exhibitors seemed content to put a few books on the table, maybe a print or two, and then wait for the crowds to form. This works fine if the exhibitor is already popular, like Kate Beaton or Jaime Hernandez, but it doesn’t work so well for unknown artists. One of my friends was completely unfamiliar with comics, so she had no idea which artists she might like or what kind of content she was interested in buying. In other words, she’s the ideal consumer for an unknown artist, but they have to make an effort to get her attention. To be fair, some of the exhibitors were more than willing to engage with attendees and explain what their books were about, but others seemed either shy or bored. And in that moment when a potential customer is walking by their table, they need to do more than just sit there and wait for the money to flow in.

She wanted more free samples or excerpts from comics, not just so she could look at the art, but so she’d have a better idea what the comic was about and how well it read. Again, to be fair, a few of the webcomic exhibitors were handing out samples.

Another friend sent me her take on the exhibitors in an email:

“I think the thing I liked most (as someone who isn’t exactly a diehard indie comics fan) was the booths that were selling comics and misc. merchandise based off of the artist’s characters.  It was kind of like a comicon meets esty vibe – really neat to see what people came up with.  Some of it I thought ‘wow, I could totally make that myself’ (monster scarves) but the wooden puzzle guy and many of the poster/print options were truly impressive.

I was also pretty amazed by the mix of levels of, for lack of a better word, professionalism from booth to booth.  You could tell some of the folks there are fully supporting themselves on small press comics; others seemed to be using it as a way to show off their artwork – but they didn’t seem all that concerned about heavily promoting the comics part.  Then there was a booth or two where it seemed like the artist was using SPX as a way to promote his/her hobby.
I don’t think you were with me at the time, but I saw one booth with really neat stuff – an alphabet of imagined animals, pseudo-victorian faux scientific language, etc. The guy at the booth did the standard 10-second ‘this is what I do’ that everyone was doing.  He mentioned the alphabet thing was on his blog – so I asked if he had a card.  Apparently he had forgotten to bring any.  He offered me one of the little pamphlets he was selling [more on that below], mentioned suggested donation was $1.  I figured fine, I’ll pay $1 to find out about his stuff, and handed him a $5.  He didn’t have change.  The guy next to him didn’t either, so he gave me the brochure for free.  Very nice and everything, but the highly professional government worker over-achiever in me was *completely* horrified by the idea that someone would show up to exhibit at a convention and be that unprepared.
Also overheard two chicks at a booth chatting about their friend (the artist) who helped them get it set up, stayed a few minutes, then said ‘I got into webcomics so I wouldn’t have to talk to people” and vanished.’

Overall I very much enjoyed it, mostly for the novelty and the ability to nerd out a bit without feeling like the only girl in the room! :P”

Giving money directly to the artist gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling.

On the other hand, I always feel vaguely guilty when I walk by a table and the artist is just sitting there while no one buys their stuff. It’s a sad scene … until I remember that most of their junk is ridiculously over-priced.

Miriam Libicki seems to be doing well.

But she no longer follows the blog (sorry, Noah).

For those of you new to the Hooded Utilitarian, Miriam used to blog on the site back in its Blogspot days, but she’s far better known as a cartoonist and creator of Jobnik!, an autobiographical account of her time in the Israeli Army.

I bought one of her kitchen magnets and the latest issue of Jobnik!.

I love the cover. I haven’t had a chance to read the comic yet, so I can’t offer a review, but the prior issues were quite good. If you’re interested, it’s available for purchase on her website.

Consumerism, hurray!

What I bought:

Parker: The Hunter, written by Richard Stark and adapted into a comic by Darwyn Cooke. It’s not really all that “indie” (and IDW is hardly a small press) but I like detective stories, I like Cooke’s art, and it was being sold by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Support free speech and all that.

Prison Pit, by Johnny Ryan. Violence and crude humor. ‘Nuff said.

Afrodisiac, by Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca. I love blaxsploitation as much as the next suburban white dude, and this book has gotten positive reviews from most of the critics I follow.

Masterpiece Comics, by R.Sikoryak. It’s an odd but potentially funny idea where classic writers are filtered through the tropes of classic comics.

Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories, by Jaime Hernandez. I haven’t read all of Love and Rockets yet, but the Locas storyline is what hooked me on the series (sorry, Gilbert).

Blazing Combat, by Archie Goodwin and assorted artists. Proof that I am susceptible to advertising. They kept running the banner ads for this book on tcj.com, and eventually I succumbed. Though I’ve also been looking for a war comic to review, and this fits the bill.

Pang: The Wandering Shaolin Monk, vol. 1, by Ben Costa. An engaging, cartoony style and a kung fu storyline. But what sold me was that the publisher is named Iron Crotch University Press. Well played, Ben.

What my friends bought:

Trickster, edited by Matt Dembicki with assorted artists. Its a collection of Native American folklore (about Trickster gods, naturally) with each tale illustrated by a different artist. Here’s a blog about the book for the curious.

A print by Emma Rochon, featuring mer-foxy things.

Two prints by Ulises Farinas, including bear-zilla,

and Lego Doctor Who, which efficiently combines two nerdy obsessions.

A large print (couldn’t find an image of it) by Sara L. Turner, author of the webcomic Ghosts of Pineville.

And a pamphlet by Nate Marsh, creator of The Obscure Animal Compendium.

 

Yoshiharu Tsuge’s Red Flowers

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Red Flowers. Sayako Kikuchi is lying in the shade of her tea shop. It is a warm summer day and far too hot to count the meager takings from the morning. There is the sound of cicadas in the background and we gaze up at this incessant activity with the girl. The tree before us is as firm and immovable as nature itself. The tea shop is cradled in its grasp, nestling in a womb-like clearing with tendrils and fruit running through its thatched roof.

Continue reading →

DWYCK: Ishoku

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The opening page of "Screw-Style"

This is a slightly edited and translated version of a piece on the great mangaka Yoshiharu Tsuge that I wrote for the Danish comics magazine Strip! and my website Rackham back in 2004. Considering his importance to Japanese comics, Tsuge remains sadly underrepresented in translation. Plus his name has come up in discussions here at HU several times, so I figured an introduction to his work would be an interesting addition to the mix here.

A boy emerges from the sea in the shadow of a C-47. He presses his right arm against his side where a deadly jellyfish has torn apart one of his veins. Whenever he releases the pressure, blood trickles to the cold ground, which he treads like a sleepwalker, searching for a doctor to help him. He passes a forest of shirts, is trampled by the silhouettes of a marching band, wanders along railway tracks bordered by empty signs. A rusty locomotive runs backward, steered by a boy wearing a cat’s mask. The protagonist hears the faint tingle of a chime in the wind, reminding him of summer. With an old lady who may be his mother, he eats phallic sticks of kintaro candy topped by small, disgruntled faces.

In a bombed-out bunker, he finds a female gynecologist dressed in a kimono and sporting a head mirror. She speaks in white as empty as the signs along the tracks and they play doctor against the backdrop of a Midway-like naval battle. A wrench, seen earlier in the hands of a suit who “almost knew what he meant”, suddenly reappears in the hands of the woman who uses it to fit his torn vein with a safety valve. Thus saved, he sails away in a motorboat with the parting words “And so, whenever I tighten the screw, my arm grows numb.”

This happens in Yoshiharu Tsuge’s most famous manga, the 22-page ”Nejishiki” (”Screw-Style”) from 1968. Like most of his comics, it was published in the legendary alternative comics magazine Garo. It is regarded as a central work in Japanese comics history and its creator has gone from cult-figure to eccentric celebrity in Japan. Born in 1937, he retired from cartooning in 1987, leaving behind a modest but highly significant body of work: around 150 short stories produced over three decades or so.

These are comics of such strange originality that he is often given the sobriquet “ishoku” (‘unique’); it has contributed crucially to the understanding in Japan of comics as a personal and artistic means of expression. Only a few of his comics have been translated into Western languages, but the ones available still enable us to assess the contours of an oeuvre that one might imprecisely but poignantly compare to that of Robert Crumb in America.

“Screw-Style” reportedly records a nightmare Tsuge had one day while sleeping on his tenement rooftop. Characteristically for his generation of cartoonists, perhaps most notably his one-time teacher Shigeru Mizuki (b. 1922), he integrates cartoon characters, whose appearance often changes from panel to panel, into backgrounds that vary from the loosely defined to the carefully rendered, often photo-referenced. The story is a surreal tour de force, strong in its critique of civilization and deeply pessimistic, with the central metaphor being a open wound exposed to a denaturalized, filthy industrial environment darkened by ash clouds and haunted by the shadow of war. It exemplifies Tsuge’s preoccupation with the pollution of the soul, shown through bodily metaphor: the protagonist’s only salvation lies in fusion with a metallic object—the safety valve that numbs his arm.

From "Screw-Style"

Making his debut as a cartoonist in 1954, Tsuge spent the next couple of decades producing genre comics for the large rental comics market, which in the postwar decades functioned as a different and very substantial alternative to the Tokyo-based mainstream publishers who would eventually eliminate it and evolve into the manga industry we know today. From the beginning, his comics operated within the more realistic tradition nurtured in the rental market. These comics were dubbed gekiga by Yoshihiru Tatsumi (b. 1935), which translates roughly into ‘dramatic pictures’, marking a contrast with the ‘whimsical pictures’ of manga as published by the commercial industry and shaped significantly by its great creative dynamo, the “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka (1926-1989).

“Screw-Style” however marked a shift towards the allegorical and the surreal. This has led to a frequent distinction between his “surreal” and “realistic” modes, both of which he continued practicing. But this seems an artificial categorization: his mature (1960s onward) work invariably hews closely to lived life, but simultaneously imbues it with allegory or poetry. His unique blend of these different levels of representation is central to his fame as the originator of so-called watakushi manga, or ”I-comics”—the manga version of literature’s shishôsetsu, the ’I-novel’. It is related to what we understand as ’autobiography’, but considerably broader in scope.

In the sense that it derives quite significantly from its author’s internal life to create a deeply-felt critique of his Japan, ”Screw-Style” is bona fide watakushi manga. In fact, Tsuge’s life and work generally seem so interconnected that his comics, as well as his illustrated travel diaries and other published writings, provide an access point for the public to a more or less consciously constructed mythological narrative of his life. Its foundation is his Tokyo childhood during the war and its aftermath, and in contrast to the post-war optimism of much of his generation, engendered as it was by the country’s reconstruction and modernization, he is strongly pessimistic, at times borderline nihilistic.

From "Screw-Style"

In comics one might compare his contemporary Keiji Nakazawa (b. 1939), who as a child experienced firsthand the bombing of Hiroshima and its consequences and told his story in his masterpiece Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen; original serialization 1973-1974—later continued). Though strongly indignant, Gen is a deeply humanistic work. Tsuge, on the other hand, eschews this optimisim and instead charts the equally pervasive meaninglessness and alienation of post-war Japan, as well as the subsequent boom decades of the urbanized, high-tech 60s and 70s.

The Tsuge myth also includes the story of an absentee father and of a rebellious youth spent in abject poverty and haunted by bouts of depression. Dreams of escape pervade it: when he was 14, he was arrested by the coast guard for stowing away on a ship bound for America; when he was 20, he attempted suicide after a failed romantic relationship.

His 24-page story from 1973, ”Oba denki mekki Kôgyôsho” (“Oba’s Electroplate Factory”) is directly based on his brother’s experiences working at a factory as a child, having left school after the primary years. We witness the appalling work conditions and the inevitable cadmium poisoning suffered by the workers. One older worker literally excretes his life through a hole in floor of his shed while his children look on.


In contrast to the people around him, the young protagonist—who is portrayed with a mixture of sarcasm and genuine affection—is characterized by indomitable optimism. This despite the severe burns he suffers one day from acid used at the factory to sharpen shrapnel for American bombs. Even his eventual abandonment at the hands of the female supervisor, when she finally leaves the factory along with its only other surviving worker, does not faze him.

Among Tsuge’s most finely realized self-portraits in comics is the 200-page graphic novel Munô no Hito (’The Man Without Qualities’, with a possible nod to Robert Musil?). It was serialized in the magazine Comic Baku from 1984-1985 in 6 separate episodes and narrates the life of a man incapable of providing for his family. He dreams of making things work, and his dreams as rendered on the paper are beautiful, but reality ruthlessly confounds him. He simply cannot succeed. He is unable to take responsibility and continually rejects his only real source of income, comics, as a possibility. Instead he attempts unsuccessfully to make his way as a dealer, initially of second-hand cameras, then of rocks found along the banks of the nearby river. This “business” encapsulates the hopelessness of his industry and is—as his increasingly dejected wife never hesitates to tell him—emblematic of his life as a whole.

Tsuge renders this life in fragments, chapter by chapter. Each episode is self-contained, but when read together they form a beautifully structured narrative. The presentation, whether between chapters or within them, is not linear and a clear chronology never emerges. It opens at the nadir of the story, a moment of almost total hopelessness. The man and his wife are utterly estranged—Tsuge never show us her face, and in a heartbreaking scene she passes him on the street as if he were a stranger. The night closes in, the shrieks of the crows sound to him like “Looooser! Looooser!”, and he is drawn to leap into oblivion. His only lifeline is his young son, who every night comes down to his rockseller’s stall on the riverbank and takes him home before dark.

In later chapters we return to earlier times and come better to understand the disintegration of the small family. We meet them in happier times, when moments of warmth, tenderness and fun still occurred, despite the boy already exhibiting disturbing signs of neurotic behavior. We see the wife’s face, but already sense that her esteem for her husband is on the wane. Awareness of where it is all going make these passages painful reading.

Tsuge here renders the curse of poverty as intensely as in his earlier stories, but he is less emphatic in his social critique. The central tragedy is internal, self-inflicted—the story is a subtle, grinding portrayal of depression as both a mental state and a physical condition. It never delivers a conclusive diagnosis, being more self-contemplation than self-criticism. It describes a person in crisis by means of stark realism joined to flights of dreamy allegory, and typically for Tsuge, its poetic tenor is borne of equal parts irreverence and empathy. A fairly long, rather flowery exegesis on Buddhist notions of equilibrium and salvation between the protagonist and an acquaintance is rudely interrupted by a drawn-out fart from the latter’s sleeping wife.


And finally, parable of an alcoholic, flea-ridden mendicant who breathes his last breath reciting an enigmatic poem, his body covered in his own dried-up excrement, becomes the metaphorical shot in the dark that lifts the story from where it started, letting it transcend precariously its own circularity.

Tsuge’s work is animated by this combination of prosaic entropy and contemplative longing. His pessimism is tempered by fleeting moments of possible beauty. Sometimes the feeling is one of nostalgia, as if borne by a sense of loss, but ultimately his position seems to be that beauty, though acutely present, is unfathomable.

A particularly fine evocation of this is the 15-page 1967 story ”Akai hana” (”Red Flowers”). The protagonist is a young girl who has dropped out of school to manage her family’s tea house in a beautifully lush corner of the land, visited only by a lucky few. A man from the big city—apparently a wistful stand-in for Tsuge himself—is there to fish and comes to observe the unfolding relationship between the girl and a little boy two years her junior. He teases her because of her emerging pubic hair and voyeuristically observes her first menstruation. She lets the blood run into the river where it appears to transform into beautiful, red flowers before it disappears into a maelstrom.

With its vibrant depiction of the surrounding environment, its nostalgic but ultimately optimistic tone, and its loving portrayal of its characters, “Red Flowers” seems a distillation of the beauty present in all of Tsuge’s work, even the bleakest. As always, sex is an incontrovertible presence; as in “Screw-Style”, it is the catalyst that resolves the story. In contrast to that dark masterpiece, however, it is here the heart of a poetic celebration of change as a human condition. Tsuge drew these two stories within a year of each other and they combine to reveal the promise of his art.


Tsuge in translation

”Red Flowers” (”Akai hana”, 1967), in Raw vol. 1 #7. New York: Raw Books, 1985.

”Oba’s Electroplate Factory” (”Oba denki mekki Kôgyôsho”, 1973), in Raw vol. 2 #2. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.

”Screw-Style” (”Nejishiki”, 1968), in The Comics Journal #250. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003.

L’Homme sans talent (Munô no Hito, 1984-85). Angoulême: Ego comme X, 2004.

Links

List of works (Japanese language)

Great 1987 interview with Tsuge (French language)

Béatrice Marechal on Tsuge from The Comics Journal 2005 Special Edition.

Domingos on Tsuge and “Nejishiki”.

Gilles Laborderie on Munô no Hito for Indy Magazine.

Images from Tsuge’s early comics.
__________
Update by Noah: Ng Suat Tong just posted another lengthy essay on Tsuge.

Utilitarian Review 9/11/10

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On HU

Erica Friedman started off the week by interviewing Comic Fusion’s Stacey Korn about Wonder Woman Day.

We then had a series of posts on comics and architecture, of all things.

Alex Buchet began with the first of a multi-part look running through the month on a comics and architecture exhibit at the French national museum of architecture.

Ng Suat Tong followed up with a look at the role of architecture in Josh Simmons’ House.

Caroline Small wrote about Morris Lapidus, postmodern curves, and the boxy modernism of comics.

I wrote about Alan Davis’ The Nail and why superheroes hate the Amish.

And I disputed R. C. Harvey’s assertion that criticism and art are about making you happy.

Twilight, Shojo, Genre and Gender

Melinda Beasi’s post from last month on Twilight and the contempt for female fans has sparked a bunch of discussion this week.

David Welsh explains why he agrees with Melinda and Melinda adds some thoughts about why it’s wrong to group all shojo titles together. Brigid Alverson argues that the issue is that genre isn’t that good, not that women are held in contempt. And finally Erin Ptah says she dislikes Twilight for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with female fans.

Murder, Misogyny, Multimedia

I’ve got an article about murder ballads up on Madeloud.

And to celebrate, I’ve uploaded a murder ballad playlist including all the songs I mention in the article. Revel in bloodshed!

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I review the boring George Clooney vehicle The American.

Shortly thereafter, though, I began to have suspicions. So, as I do when such suspicions occur, I leaned over to my wife and whispered low, “He’s going to be redeemed, isn’t he?”

She looked at me over her glasses with mingled disgust and horror. “If he gets redeemed,” she said sternly, “I’m going to be upset.”

At Madeloud I review Wovenhand’s latest record.

Other Links

I enjoyed this essay by Rachel Manija about why it’s okay to write negative criticism.

And R.C. Harvey has a fun article about Wonder Woman’s costume changes over the years. I love the eagle cartoon.

I don’t know anything about Ke$ha, but this is really funny.

Oh, and Caroline Small is going to be on the critic’s panel at SPX today at 3:00 PM eastern time. If you’re attending the convention, go say hi to her!