Yearly Archives: 2010

Doubly Good

Posted on by

There’s a moment in Lilli Carré’s minicomic “The Thing about Madeline” where you really get that you’re reading a real story and not another installment in the Saga of the Mundane. It’s a little later than the point where that story actually begins: not where Madeline meets her doppelganger/self for the first time – that’s just a plot twist – but when Madeline the First gets “into the habit of watching herself through windows”:

Robert Stanley Martin correctly identified this moment as the place where the story’s main narrative idea slips from metaphor into dramatic irony, as the doppelganger is able to find the happiness in her life that Madeline could not. His review is so spot on I’m just going to link to it rather than trying to cover those aspects of the narrative myself.

But those panels also mark the place where the visuals take over doing that metaphorical work that the narrative leaves behind: the images of double Madeline continue to manifest the theme of alienation from oneself and one’s life while the plot (and facial expressions) hold up the ironic narrative.

What’s particularly beautiful and satisfying about this is not just that the visuals effortlessly carry significations that would become increasingly labored in prose. It’s also that the comic itself is now doubled right along with Madeline: the themes of alienation and happiness continue side-by-side formally in the same way that Alienated Madeline and her Happy Doppelganger populate the narrative. What this allows, then, is two separate story arcs: a literal one about Madeline and the Doppelganger, and a sustained metaphorical one about the relationship between alienation and happiness. Toward the end of the book, when Happy Madeline is visited by her own Alienated Doppelganger, the scenes from the beginning are recast – on a second read or in retrospect, it’s possible to see Happy Doppelganger and Happy Madeline as the same “character.” In that reading, self-alienation is always lurking and, as Robert points out, the easy moralizing criticisms of Alienated Madeline are much harder to make. The powers of circumstance and perspective get attention in a way they could not if the story had stayed more personal, eschewing that metaphorical strand.

Carré’s work always balances very deftly on the line between ironic detachment and literary self-awareness, both traditional dramatic irony as well as the more formalist kind. Her characters often have these very distinctive noses that are a mashup of Mary Poppins and Raggedy Ann, and they alone are sufficient to make her drawing style immediately recognizable. In the case of The Thing about Madeline, this stylistic quirk works as support for the formal edifice: they mark the characters as “drawn,” and the effect of this signature is to anchor those characters to the visual plane of the comic. They restrict the universality of the characters and contribute to our sense of detachment from them.

That signature nose is absent from Carré’s most recent animated film, Head Garden, one of the selections for the 2010 SPX Animation Showcase.

Head Garden from Lilli Carré on Vimeo.

Instead, the face carries the metaphor, more directly. The facial features are less “cartoony” and more influenced by “art” faces like the ones discussed here and in comments. For me, the loss of this creative “signature” lets the animation breathe and allows the critical, slighly neurotic self-awareness of ironic detachment to mutate into the genuine double entendre that marks the best literary characterizations. The physical marker of style is less overt, but there is no loss of metaphorical sophistication (relatively at least; the animation’s metaphors are less ambitious than the mini-comic’s). The characters have become less “self-conscious”, although less well-developed in this less narrative piece, and I think because of this, the seams between the form and its significance are better hidden. I don’t think that’s just an effect of the film as opposed to comics. Identification with these characters is less detached even in still frames, despite the much more distant narrative characterization.

It seems to be a one-off, though; Nine Ways to Disappear maintains the signature style, as do Carré’s previous animations. (The nose is put to exceptional effect in What Hits the Moon; watch the way it sustains the character’s identity as her face ages around it.) But I think the comparison illustrates some of the limitations of too much “handwriting”: after awhile, it begins to feel like deliberate self-citation. Unless the handwriting is used in some meaningful way, it can interfere with other effects. Head Garden is still discernably Lilli Carré, but in the absence of that distinctively marked facial feature, her graceful but slightly awkward lines — like the talented too-tall girl in ballet class — get to take center stage. I hope to see a sustained story from her in the style of Head Garden sometime soon.

=========================================================

This review is based on the black-and-white mini-comic version of The Thing about Madeline. More information on the SPX Animation Showcase is available here.

Not a Superhero Comic, But It is Plenty Violent

Posted on by

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Written by Stieg Larsson
Translated by Reg Keeland

Every mainstream reviewer seems to love this novel. It’s an international bestseller that’s spawned two sequels and has already been made into a movie. All this despite the fact that the author is dead and Swedish. My reaction, however, was “meh.” Other than the Swedish names that I can’t pronounce, there’s nothing in this book that sets it apart from any typical crime thriller.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a terrible novel. The mystery at the heart of the story is well-crafted, and I didn’t notice any glaring plot holes. The pacing is brisk, except for a few lengthy discussions of Swedish finance. The translation from the original Swedish produced a few awkward lines, but nothing memorably ridiculous.

 But much of the novel’s appeal depends on whether the reader identifies with the main character, Mikael Blomkvist. As shameless Mary Sues go, Blomkvist could give Superman a run for his money. Blomkvist is a middle-aged, left-leaning journalist and magazine editor, just like Stieg Larsson. He also happens to be one of those courageous and brilliant journalists who’s dedicated to THE TRUTH. And he’s irresistible to the ladies without even trying (I’m not joking about that last part, he gets as much play as James Bond per film). Perhaps if I were a middle-aged Swedish journalist, I might find Blomkvist appealing. As it is, he’s somebody else’s empowerment fantasy, and I just feel left out.

Although Blomkvist is the protagonist, the titular girl with the dragon tattoo is Lisbeth Salander, an anti-social hacker who helps Blomkvist solve the big mystery. The inspiration for Salander is rather odd. According to a longtime friend, Larsson admitted that as a teenager he failed to intervene when he witnessed a woman being gang-raped. So the character of Salander was supposed to be his attempt at redemption, and the writer’s redemption came from the character’s rape-revenge narrative. (Spoiler Alert!) Midway into the novel Salander is orally and anally raped by her legal guardian. Salander eventually gets a fitting revenge, but the novel never spends much time on her reactions or development. Despite his desire for redemption, Larsson is always more interested in the trials and tribulations of his thinly drawn author-avatar. The plot focuses on Blomkvist and the big mystery, Salander becomes his sidekick and eventually his lover, and the rape-revenge storyline ends up being much more exploitative than Larsson probably intended.

The entire novel, in fact, seems like an effort to have a sexy violence cake and eat it too. On the surface, the novel takes the uncontroversial stance that raping women is bad. But this is still a crime thriller, and the genre requires a certain amount of depravity. The numerous instances of sexualized violence are not simply elements of the story, they’re the driving force behind the plot and the novel’s most notable feature (besides the unpronounceable Swedish names). I’d go so far as to say that the sexualized violence is one of the novel’s main selling points. The forbidden thrill of sexual violence can be secretly and safely indulged so long as it’s coupled to the condemnation of the same sexual violence.

But I’d be lying if I said the sexualized violence actually offended me. Mostly, I was just bored. This novel is not some glorious, genre-busting breakthrough. It’s nothing more and nothing less than competent pulp, Scandinavian style.

Twilight & the Plight of the Female Fan

Posted on by

When Noah first asked me if I’d like to write a guest post for The Hooded Utilitarian, he mentioned that he’d be especially interested in something about Twilight. I admit I originally balked at the idea. Though I’ve vocally defended the series’ fans, I haven’t read the novels, and my only significant reaction to the first volume of Yen Press’ graphic novel adaptation was that it was more readable than I expected.

That last statement should not be taken as a condemnation of Twilight by any means. The truth is, I’m simply not its audience. I like a good romance as much as the next middle-aged married lady, but even those who dismiss the genre would be foolish to assume that all romances are created equal. Simply put, I’m too old for Twilight. While my teenaged self might not have fully comprehended Stephanie Meyer’s bloodlust = regular ol’ lust metaphor (not that it’s especially subtle), she would have felt it in a profound way. It would have resonated with her on a deeply personal level. I was pretty innocent as a teen, and the concept of even kissing a boy was both enticing and mind-blowingly terrifying, much like Bella’s first kiss with her sparkly, bloodthirsty suitor, deep in the secluded woods.

Now in my forties, I know all too well that sex is the least terrifying element of romance. Love’s true horrors prey on the heart and mind, and there’s nothing you can buy at Walgreens to help protect them. Looking in at Twilight from the reality of weary adulthood, it’s difficult to muster patience for Edward’s martyred bad-boy act (just as it’s difficult to stomach Bella’s fascination with it) but I can recognize it as something that, if it was written for me at all, was written for the me of a very different time and place.

A second read-through of the graphic novel has only cemented my original opinion of it, but even so, I feel a kind of kinship to the series’ young fans. Having spent my entire life obsessed with some kind of fiction or another–books, television, musicals, manga–I can appreciate their need to experience the series over and over again, to talk about it with friends, and to proselytize everyone they meet. Sure, it’s obnoxious, but how many long-time genre fans can honestly claim that’s never been them? I know I can’t.

Earlier this year, just before the first volume of the Twilight graphic novel was released, I made a post in my blog about the manga and anime fandom’s treatment of Twilight fans. In that post, I cited a few overtly misogynistic comments made by male fans, and proposed a theory that the real “problem” with Twilight fans in the eyes of fandom is that they are overwhelmingly girls. That’s a pretty easy accusation to make against nearly any genre fandom. We’ve all heard stories of women who’ve been ogled, condescended to, or otherwise mistreated in comic book shops, at conventions, in online forums and so on, and most of us have experienced this at some point or another ourselves.

What I think I missed back when I wrote that post, however, is something far sadder than a bunch of paranoid fanboys making an angry fuss on the internet. What’s more disturbing to me now–something I began to see bubbling up in comments and responses to that post–is a trend of women in manga and comics fandoms deliberately distancing themselves from other women (or from works created by/for women in the medium, teen romances or otherwise) as an apparent matter of pride. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that women have an obligation to like works created by other women, or even the women themselves. We like what we like, and there’s not a lot more to be said about that.

The thing is, we are saying more. We’re ranting and denying and over-explaining ourselves, all in an attempt to ensure that we can’t be associated with anything “girly.” Take, for instance, this recent post from Molly McIsaac at iFanboy.com, “Turning Japanese: A Starter Guide to (Shoujo) Manga” (and let me apologize to her now for choosing her as my example). In this post, Ms. McIsaac strives to cut through all the girly stuff and point readers to some shoujo manga with “good, solid stories and strong characters.”

We’ll gloss over the fact that she likens shoujo manga to Craig Thompson’s Blankets (which, as a story of one man’s coming to terms with his spirituality, most closely resembles a particular brand of seinen, if anything at all), and that none of her shoujo “staples” goes back any further than 1996. All any of this indicates is that she’s fairly new to the medium and has yet to really experience its breadth (and hell, some of that older shoujo is pretty hard to find in print). None of this has anything to do with my problem.

What I’m getting around to here is the fact that Ms. McIsaac seems to feel that she has to offer up disclaimers for reading shoujo manga at all. I’m also bothered by the strong implication that manga for girls is antithetic to solid stories and strong characters. “However, do not allow shoujo manga to intimidate you,” she says. “Although it is aimed primarily at young women, there are plenty of good, solid stories that are considered shoujo that I believe most people can enjoy.” If even women feel they need to make these kinds of excuses while recommending manga written for (and primarily by) women and girls, how can we expect any of that work or the fans who read it to be respected by the larger fandom?

Again, I’d like to apologize to Molly McIsaac. This attitude about girls’ comics has most likely been passed down to her by scores of female fans who came before, shuttling around borrowed volumes of Boys Over Flowers to each other with quiet embarrassment, wishing they looked just a little less sweet and sparkly.

Honestly, I’ve done this myself. How many times have I complained about the hot pink Shojo Beat branding on the outside of Viz’s editions of NANA, claiming that it trivializes the series and makes it embarrassing to read on the plane? (The answer is, “Many, many times.”) Yet I can think of several pink, sparkly, decidedly “girly” manga (at least one of which is written for little girls) that are more well-constructed, deftly plotted, and philosophically-minded than many of the comics I’ve seen published for, say, boys or adult males. Though these manga are certainly girly, they’re hardly lightweight. Even so, just two years ago, I sat in on a convention panel at a nearby women’s college, where one of the pro panelists (a female sci-fi writer) told the entire room full of young women that all shoujo manga was plotless high school romance and that whenever she saw girls looking in the manga section at her local comic shop, she’d direct them towards “more interesting things like Bone.”

What does any of this have to do with Twilight? Well, nothing and everything, I suppose. If female manga and comics fans have any hope of adjusting men’s attitudes about our presence in “their” fandom, we really need to start by adjusting our own. I’m probably never going to really like Twilight (in graphic novel form or otherwise)… or Black Bird, or Make Love and Peace, or any number of particular girls’ and women’s comics I’ve picked up and discarded for various reasons.

I’m also never going to like Mao Chan, KimiKiss, Toriko, the Color trilogy, or any number of other comics I’ve rejected that were written for boys or men. Yet the existence of these boys’ and men’s series I don’t like has never made me feel like I have to apologize for or explain why I still read things like Fullmetal Alchemist, Children of the Sea, or Black Jack. “Well, it’s written for guys, but it’s still good, I swear!” That’s a sentiment I have yet to see expressed by comics fans on the internet, female or otherwise.

So what is it about “girly” comics that puts us so on the defensive? Are we seeking approval from male fans? Do we believe we have to publicly reject all things stereotypically feminine in order to obtain (or maintain) credibility in fandom? If so, I submit that we’re actually playing right into the attitudes that kept us alienated in the first place. And if we’re doing it to establish credibility amongst ourselves, we’ve lost to them completely.

– Read Melinda’s reviews and discussion of manga, manhwa, and other East Asian-influenced comics at her blog, Manga Bookshelf.

The Crisis of the Collaborative Cartoonist

Posted on by

By James Romberger

Thought forms in the mind as a combination of word and image. For that reason, cartooning is a direct, intimate means to communicate subjective thought to a reader. This is why many of the greatest comics are by artists who write their own narratives. Still, it is rare that a single person can both draw and write well, much less produce a work of blinding genius; one can spend a lifetime mastering either discipline. However, a writer’s words can be brought to life by an artist of the prerequisite abilities, one who can accomplish what in a film might require an unlimited budget and even pass beyond, to the unfilmable. The comics form offers infinite possibilities to writers and artists who are willing to work together. But the focus on autonomy in alternative comics has left collaboration largely in the hands of comics’ mainstream, where it has been greatly influenced by the economics and labor/management relationships of periodical publishing. The reader’s indulgence is asked for a short history of those relationships, as a prelude to an explanation of the artist’s contribution to the collaborative process in comics.

Bullpen variations

“Bullpen” comic book production was initiated in 1936 by groundbreaking cartoonist Will Eisner and his partner Jerry Iger to meet the rising demand for content in the new medium of the comic book. Studio staff was divided into an assembly line of piece-workers: writer, penciller (which might subdivide to layout, character and/or background artist), inker, letterer, and colorist. The bullpen became standard for comics because it was expedient to publish books on time and made it so no one creative person was wholly responsible for, or entirely invested in, what was claimed by publishers as properties done by “work-for-hire” employees. Comics history is crowded with “ghost” creators like Carl Barks and Bill Finger, who worked in near or actual anonymity and were not compensated fairly for their contributions. For many years, that was the accepted status quo.

In the early 1950s at E.C. an odd exception to the standard sweatshop mold led to some of the best comics published to date. Editor Harvey Kurtzman recognized that in comics, the crux of storytelling is in the layout or breakdown that integrates text with image, the pencil drawings that establish the structure and style of the design. The layout finds the flow of viewpoint and character interaction. Kurtzman made articulately composed page diagrams for all of his stories with every basic element drawn roughly in place, which his artists then rendered to finish. Still, individual stylists like Wallace Wood and John Severin did some of their finest work for Kurtzman’s war comics “Two-Fisted Tales” and “Frontline Combat.” Kurtzman demanded a high degree of accurate detail for period stories; his artists respected his guiding intent and invested their drawings with research, observational realism and great passion. Kurtzman also grasped the importance of color and worked side-by-side with colorist Marie Severin to enhance his narratives immeasurably. In these atypical collaborations, Kurtzman was the writer and also the primary storytelling artist. His finishing artists acted more as elaborators, but it was they who signed the stories, Kurtzman only took credit as editor.

Another version of the Bullpen was introduced with what became known as the “Marvel method” in the 1960s. Editor Stan Lee enlisted artists such as Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Gene Colan to draw their stories from brief plots outlined by Lee in a short note or phone call, or to invent the stories from whole cloth themselves and make notes that described the narrative and suggested dialogue in the page margins. After the fact, Lee added captions and balloons based on those notes, in his words a job often “like filling in a crossword puzzle.” Lee was able to do this because on their own, these experienced storytelling artists could initiate and motivate characters, construct their environments and produce complete comic book page sets. For what often amounted to copy-writing, Lee claimed full writer credit and pay. In this arrangement, the pencillers were also uncredited plotters and co-writers.

Jack Kirby writes continuity, which Stan Lee ignores, from the original art for Fantastic Four Annual #3, 1963

In particular, Kirby was the single greatest driving force in the foundation of Marvel’s popular multimedia empire; his creative input on “The Fantastic Four” alone encompassed a multitude of imaginative characters and settings. To be fair, Lee helped make the books successful with his unifying voice; in the letters pages and in his “Bullpen Bulletins” he created an illusion of family that resonated with young readers. He did plot and write some of the stories and he credited his artists (for their art) prominently. But Lee also failed to defend his collaborators’ interests to management. According to Kirby biographer Mark Evanier, promises were made to Kirby about royalties that were not kept and Kirby found no one to address his concerns to but Lee, who said, “I have nothing to do with that.” Kirby subsequently left the company rather than be further exploited. Kirby’s children still struggle to gain any portion of the multibillions Marvel makes from the comics, films and merchandising derived from their father’s work.

Too many battles were fought by the artists and writers of comics for their rights to be detailed here, but in the early 1980s, major publishers instituted “creator-owned” contracts for special projects in which artists and writers share copyright as co-authors, on an equal footing. Mainstream comics are still closely overseen by an editor, who selects teams and then acts as intermediary to writer and artist, even in creator-owned projects. The editor can facilitate their best efforts and contribute greatly to the storytelling by honing the creator’s individual contributions, depending on the sensitivity and sensibility of their recommendations or dictates. Some other holdovers from the bullpen days are still present in mutated form. While some artists finish their own pencil drawings in ink, others still have their pencils inked or finished by other artist. Inexplicably, though color makes a profound impact on the reader, the colorist still holds the lowest-paid job in comics. Perhaps as a consequence, few artists in comics do their own color, which is now most often applied by digital artists, with mixed results. Also, while alternative cartoonists often prefer to letter in their hand, mainstream artists do not and digital fonts have supplanted hand lettering almost entirely, not least because digital balloons and captions are editable until the last moments before publication. Whatever the rationale for their use, digital typesetting loses the qualities of illumination that are an important advantage of the comics form. Inkers, colorists and letterers of varying degrees of skill and artistry can greatly enhance, or ruin a book. But, it should be reiterated that the penciller controls the layout and storytelling and so is the primary artist.

Make It So

Currently in mainstream comics, an editor works with a writer to provide an artist with a document that resembles a movie script. This text describes the settings, the personalities, speech and actions of the depicted characters, as well as the trajectory and intent of the scenes. However complete this may sound, it’s not; the artist’s job is daunting. In a film, the lion’s share of the credit does not usually go to the writer, but to the director, the person in charge of the product of a largely visual medium. In comics, the artist must engage complex skills that approximate everything that would be involved in making a movie: direction, cinematography, casting, actors, production design, set design, lighting, costume, makeup, special effects and every other function, including that of the person who tapes around the actor’s feet to mark where they were standing.

One challenge for the cartoonist is that one’s “actors” must play their parts with well-timed reactions and believable emotions, expressions and gestures. That is no small feat of itself. The characters must reflect the diverse variability of human form. They must also be recognizable (“on-model”) from all angles or lines of sight, as must the settings, objects, vehicles and fashions, which also must all be true as possible to the time and place depicted, down to the smallest necessary detail. All of the depicted persons, environs and objects must also be executed in perspective and reflect the influences of light and the natural elements. In other words, the artist must understand and render everything that in a film is recorded by a cameraman. Like animators, cartoonists visualize movement within three-dimensional space as they simulate the viewpoint of a weightless steadicam; they engage a complex form of draftsmanship that can be described as “motion perspective.”


Alex Toth, motion perspective from the original art for “Torpedo.”

Quintessential moments must be chosen to freeze in panels. A further complication is that the characters must be composed in each panel in their order of speaking, as indicated by the script. The refined composition of each panel acknowledges not only the design of the images viewed simultaneously in direct proximity on the page and on the facing page (a two-page “spread”), but also those throughout the entire narrative. The illusion of movement occurs in the spaces between panels, where positive and negative space flip, creating visual rhythms that sync with the beats of the broken-down blocks of words, as the reader’s eye is led where the artist wants it to go. At the layout stage, artists might expand upon, or deviate significantly from a script in order to make a story work effectively. For instance, the addition of panels can serve to compress time or make actions clearer, captions can be bumped to panels behind or forward in order to gain room for a larger drawing, captions can be added or deleted to clarify character. In truth, it would be difficult if not impossible to find a cartoonist who did not add many acting characters, objects, architecture, flora and fauna of their own device throughout the execution of a given story, all of which contribute substance to the narrative.

Artist Tony Salmons notes three seemingly innocent words often seen in scripts, “a crowd gathers.” Salmons says, “A writer scripts or merely plots this line down on paper and goes on to the next scene. I spend an entire day researching, casting, lighting and acting out that crowd. Is it an opium den? SF or Hong Kong? Texas? German beer garden? Rainbow room at 30 Rock? What kind of crowd? If I do it with total commitment the considerations can go way beyond this. And the writer’s contribution is 3 words, ‘A crowd gathers.'” No matter what the story requires, the artist must make it so.


Tony Salmons, detail from the original art for “The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft.”

Additionally, ideas occur in the process of drawing. The artist may see a better way to articulate a scene after it has been laid out, when the story has achieved sufficient form that new visual potentials emerge. Artist P. Craig Russell has detailed one of the artist’s many unique contributions to comics storytelling, a technique he aptly calls “parallel narrative,” sequences invented by the artist that diverge from the script to depict scenes that are not in the text, that are intended by the artist to counterpoint the text. In comics, the onus is on the artist to make the story work. For that, the artist must find ways to “believe” what they are drawing, to feel the motivations of the players, the touch of a lover, the heat of battle or the cold night wind of the desert and express them to the reader.

Comics demand an immersion on the part of the artist that goes far beyond the job description of an illustrator. Illustrations are derivative entities that are subordinate to text, isolated visualizations which can operate either as redundant to the words or as commentary on the words, ranging from literal to oblique. In comics, the text is most often visually subordinate. The images are imbedded with far more information than the words. The words represent sounds and qualify the images. The text need not say something that is clearly shown in the pictures. Illustrations can enhance or challenge the reader’s visualization of prose, but comics are a full-blown realization of narrative, with the intimate interactivity of a book and with more potential for expansive spectacle than film.

For most of comics’ short history, the writing was often the weakest element and so highly skilled interpretive cartoonists have longed to work with better scripts. As the graphic novel gains ground in the book trade, more serious writers will want to explore the form. This could result in more sophisticated and revelatory collaborative efforts. It should be made clear that comic artists are usually paid more per page than writers, but for as long as credits have been given, artists have willingly shared them equally with writers. But now, the equilibrium of credit has slipped askew. Increasingly one sees collaborative books credited and publicized with the emphasis on the writer alone. Such selective crediting causes further chain reactions. In the catalog listings of libraries and booksellers, the “Author” is listed first. In the case of graphic novels, it is assumed that the name credited as “writer” is the “author,” unless specified otherwise. The artist might not even be included in bibliographic data unless credited by the publisher as a “co-author.” Amazon’s default system for graphic novels lists writers as “author” while artists are diminished to “illustrator”, a subordinate creator and in no way a “co-author.”

This diminution of the artist’s perceived role in comics has repercussions for alternative and mainstream artists alike. Artist Jillian Tamaki spoke of her process collaborating on the graphic novel “Skim” with her cousin, the writer Mariko Tamaki: “(Mariko) was not precious about it. It was basically just a play and there was no description of what they were doing when they said something, or where they were…it was me putting the pacing in, and the rhythms and the timing and the backgrounds….it took about two years.” But when “Skim” was nominated for a Canadian book award, the writer was the only one cited for the honor. Writer Alan Moore makes sure that his artists share equal credit, but Neil Gaiman’s name dominates the cover of the exquisite book P. Craig Russell made of “Coraline.” It can and has been claimed that it is Gaiman’s name that sells books, but a case can also be made that Russell’s mastery of the comics medium is such that his adaptations of Gaiman’s prose stories are more resonant in their form than the comic books that the writer has scripted. Even as the medium is poised to evolve into a sophisticated art form, critics often closely analyze what they perceive as “the writing” of a given book, but ignore or barely describe the art, perhaps because they are unaware of the interrelativity of text and art in comics, or perhaps because the publisher’s packaging and promotion tells them that the writer is the primary creator.

This trend will discourage thoughtful non-writing or interpretive artists from involvement with the medium. Because of the labor-intensive nature of comic art, a graphic novel can take an artist years, even decades to complete. In the current climate, collaborative comics become much less worthwhile for the artist. The remedy to this situation falls to the individuals who work in comics. Artists should avoid the “illustrator” label and stipulate a co-authorship credit for themselves in their contracts. They might find that there already is a co-authorship stipulation in their contracts, which has not been honored by the publisher’s packaging and publicity arms, or that there is some ambiguity in the distinction between “co-creator” and “co-author,” or they could discover that there is a contractual clause which calls for “credit according to current practice.” This means that the more artists allow themselves to get less credit, the more it becomes current practice. Also, writers could heed Alan Moore’s positive example and not allow their credit to override that of their partners. Both creators should ensure that their publishers direct their design and promotional departments to incorporate the contractually stipulated credits and see that book trade entities correctly list them. The alternative is that artists accept a diminished role and lose their hard-won rights.

In the end, the credit issue is about more than just the bruised egos of artists and writers. Debates about the validity of authorship itself are set aside when the realities of book publishing and movie deals come into play. A great comic need not ever be made into a movie if it resonates sufficiently within the parameters of its form, but when films are made and when book royalties accrue, artists and writers should share in the credit and proceeds as co-authors. For the artist, comics are a difficult form and the work involved in a graphic novel is not undertaken lightly. If his or her contributions to the whole experience of reading are seen as expendable tools of the writer, the evolution of comics is at risk.

Sources

Jack Kirby scan courtesy of the Howell-Kalish collection. From the Jack Kirby Museum’s Original Art Digital Archive.

Evanier, Mark. Kirby: King of Comics. New York: Abrams, 2008. p. 157.

Green, Karen. Words and Music…er, Images. Comic Adventures in Academia, column on Comixology website, 4/3/2009:
http://www.comixology.com/articles/212/Words-and-Music-er-Images

Lee, Stan with George Mair. Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee. 2002. New York: Fireside/Simon and Schuster, p.146.

Russell, P. Craig. Parallel Narrative. Video series posted online: www.pcraigrussell.net
or http://vodpod.com/watch/1296908-pcr-tv-parallel-narrative-murder-mysteries-part-1

Salmons, Tony. Quote from private correspondence. August, 2010.

Tamaki, Jillian. Quote from transcript of panel discussion: Inside Out: Self and Society in Comic Art. Moderator: Calvin Reid. St. Mark’s Church, Howl! Festival, 9/10/2008:
http://www.comicsculture.net/

Utilitarian Review 8/28/10

Posted on by

TCJ.com Kerfuffle

This week on the TCJ.com mainpage Caroline Small, Ng Suat Tong and I participated in a roundtable on the Best American Comics Criticism anthology edited by Ben Schwartz. Jeet Heer, Brian Doherty, and Ben Schwartz himself also participated. In comments other critics joined in, including Rob Clough, Ken Parille, Robert Stanley Martin, and Kent Worcester. So check it out if you haven’t already.

Oh, and there’s a comment thread on the roundtable here as well which includes a discussion of French language and Japanese comics criticism.

On HU

Domingos Isabelinho discussed Dominique Goblet’s and Nikita Fossoul’s Chronographie.

Kinukitty talked about European fashion magazines, Dave Mustaine, and Makoto Tateno’s Yokan Premonition.

In a guest post, teacher and artist Sean Michael Robinson explained that it’s a good thing for art teachers when students are into anime and manga.

JR Brown wrote an extensive article about the history of the pretty boy in Japanese art.

I reviewed Issue #22 of the Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman.

Vom Marlowe talked about gender issues in the young adult prose series Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

And a music download of Beatlesesque pop.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Caroline Small is going to be on the Critic’s Roundtable panel at SPX, along with many other illustrious folks. (Via Robot6.)

Critics’ Panel: How We Judge
3:00 | Brookside Conference Room
The accessibility of online publishing alongside traditional media has enabled a diversity of critical voices who are addressing the broad spectrum of comics being published today. A diverse group of critics will discuss the disparate bases for their own critical opinions, and the extent to which they regard different kinds of work in different ways. Join moderator Bill Kartalopoulos for a discussion with Johanna Draper Carlson (Comics Worth Reading), Gary Groth (The Comics Journal), Tim Hodler (Comics Comics), Chris Mautner (Robot 6), Joe McCulloch (Jog the Blog/Comics Comics), Ken Parille (Blog Flume), and Caroline Small (The Hooded Utilitarian).

At the Chicago Reader I review JimCollins’ Bring on the Books for Everybody.

In The Gift of Death, Derrida concludes that literature is an empty, parasitic untheology, constantly seeking forgiveness for its meaninglessness. Ever the tenured radical, he sees this revelation as an affront to the academic establishment. But cultural studies is a more callow establishment than Derrida anticipated, and members like Collins don’t have a problem with emptiness. On the contrary, Collins is “delighted” just to find that literary fiction “forms part of the cultural mixes” that modern cultural consumers “assemble with such gusto to articulate who they are, and what is crucially important to them.” The content of their identities and concerns is utterly beside the point. Are they Nazis? Misogynists? Drooling idiots? As long as they embrace it with gusto, who cares? The point of literature is to make a statement regardless of what’s said. By the same token, Collins is aware that, say, The Oprah Show is witheringly stupid and the movie version of The English Patient is an apologia for imperialism—but he can’t bring himself to take the next step, which would be admitting that some of the detritus of popular culture deserves to be scorned.

On Splice Today I talk about the new film The Last Exorcism in light of the criticism of James Baldwin.

For Baldwin, the bed floating, the fluid spitting, and special-effects gouting, were all part of a willful disavowal. The little girl with the deep voice uttering curses is an innocent possessed by the devil…but Baldwin argues that the upper-middle-class milieu in which she sits and writhes is anything but innocent, and that the movie is therefore an example of (in various senses) bad faith. Baldwin notes that at the end of the film, the “demon-racked little girl murderess kisses the Holy Father, and she remembers nothing.” This convenient amnesia is, for Baldwin, emblematic of America’s penchant for forgetting what they have done, to whom, and for what ends.

At Madeloud I have some recommendations for sexadelic lounge music. Groovy!

Other Links

R. Fiore was inspired by our Popeye roundtable to write a really entertaining appraisal of the Fleischer Popeye cartoons.

Might as well be a comic: Percy Jackson and the Olympians

Posted on by

So a couple of weeks ago, I had a nasty cold, and I mainlined all of the Percy Jackson books via Audible.  Yes, all five of them.
For those who don’t know, the Percy Jackson series is a childrens/YA popcorn action-adventure-fantasy series about demigods (children of a mortal and an Olympic deity).  Percy is short for Perseus, naturally, and yes, he battles a titan while riding a Pegasus, but  Sir Laurence Olivier is not involved (alas?).

These are not deep books.  They’re silly and fast paced and filled with summer-blockbuster like explosions and sword fights and classic monsters.  I listened to them all, so I was entertained.  I mean audiobooks ain’t cheap, and the reader, Jesse Bernstein, is kind of terrible.  But they have lots of funny moments and Percy is a really likable, regular sort of kid with the kinds of traits I most enjoy reading about (he’s kind, he has some faults, he gets discouraged but bucks up).  However….

When I was in the last book of the series I finally lost patience with some of the recurring themes that troubled me in earlier books.  As longterm readers probably know, I’m a chick.  As longterm readers might not know, I was a classics major so I could  (and did) do things like read all of Homer in Greek.  (The catalog of ships, by the way, is even more borrrrrrring in the original.  Blah blah blah whatever, I do not care how many warriors came from your little town.)  Which is to say, I’ve got a pretty good grasp on some of the original sources that Riordan had to draw on (mostly he used Pseudo-Apollonius, apparently).  Anyway.

I’m going to say upfront that these books have a ton of cool stuff.  There’s a hilarious pegasus named BlackJack who insists on calling Percy “Boss”, for instance.  He lands on Percy’s stepdad’s Toyota at the beach one day and leaves hoofmarks on the Prius, which cracked me up.  Blackjack is always dragging Percy off to help various sea creatures, which leads Percy to help this strange sea-cow-creature that Percy names Bessie.  (It turns out to be a boy cow sea monster, but hey.  It’s still a cool name!)

When they run into the Circe of legend, you know, the witch who turned Odysseus and company into pigs?  She turns the guys into pigs all right.  Guinea pigs.  They all go Reeet Reeet Reeeeeet in the way of guinea pigs in classrooms everywhere.

But, as I said, by the time I reached the last book, I lost patience with the repeating themes.  This series has some massive problems, and I was strongly reminded of Noah’s theory about the backlash against Twilight.  That it isn’t the poor plot (there’s worse plots) or prose or whatever, but that these books are the embodiment of young teen girls, and our culture kind of hates teen girls with a passion.  Hence the Twilight hatred.

And I think that the Percy series suffers from a lot of that kind of hatred, as well as several other truly depressing choices, and so I thought I would inflict my thoughts on them upon you all.

The basic premise of the story, as I said, is that the Olympian gods are alive and well, and they continue to go around, mating with mortals (as one does), and having kids, who are demigods.  The gods sometimes acknowledge these kids and sometimes not.  Monsters in the world, like Cyclops or Harpies or whatnot, sniff out these demigod kids and attack them.  There’s a camp, run by Dionysos and Chiron, who send out satyrs to find these children and bring them to Camp Halfblood for the summer, so they can train in their special powers and learn how not to get eaten by monsters and so that their parents can, if they wish, recognize them.  The Camp has a cabin for each of the major Olympian gods, and it’s on the East Coast in America, because that’s where the heart of Western Civilization now resides (sorry Greece, you’re just not good enough anymore).

The main character is Percy, from Perseus, Jackson and he’s a son of Poseidon.  Through each book we get a chance to meet other children of the gods, and the gods themselves.  Percy’s girlfriend is a daughter of Athena, his early mentor Luke is a son of Hermes, and his nemesis Clarisse is a daughter of Ares, and so on.  Rivalries between the gods tend to result in rivalries between the kids (Poseidon and Athena never got on) and each kid embodies their parent’s prowess or skills or whatever.  Some gods, like Artemis, don’t bear children but go about things differently (she has a hunting pack of maidens that she adopts).  It’s a straightfoward but pretty cool idea.
Except the execution is telling.  And not in a good way.

Artemis, for instance, is a big problem.  She’s portrayed in the book as a pre-teen, a girl who is about ten or twelve.  She’s a maiden, which, you know, fine.  That’s cool.  But Riordan also portrays her as hating boys like she was in an old-fashioned French lesbian separatist novel.  That’s wrong.  Canonically wrong.  The classic  Artemis vs Aphrodite fight is over a guy, Euripides’s Hippolytus.  Hippolytus is Artemis’s favorite hunting buddy.  (It’s also got my favorite line, by the way, which is Forgiveness is for mortals, vengence is divine. )  The reason, by the way, that Aphrodite smacks down Hippolytus is that he is too chaste, too sworn to Artemis.  The followers of Artemis are not singularly female, and this is a pretty classic, well-known work (one of Euripides’ best).

When the Ancient Greeks are more even handed about gender politics, it makes me go hhhhhm, is all I’m sayin’.

Overall, Artemis and her hunters are portrayed as forces for good.  Sexist jerks, yes, but forces for good.  Except, and I admit to finding this troubling, they’re portrayed as good based on traditionally male ideas of good, that is to say bravery in a fight, prowess with weapons and tracking, and since they do not age, they’re often described in ways that do not display their female sex traits (breats, hips, etc).  They’re very much girls, not women.

Which is fine, so far as it goes.  I like positive portrayals of girls.  But.  The next step in the aging line (for most or many females) is to turn into a sexually active young woman.  Which brings us to Aphrodite and Hera.

Aphrodite is portrayed as might-as-well be evil.  She’s shallow.  She’s caught canoodling with Ares (again).  She tricks people and causes problems for Percy’s lovelife.  She appears to have no good traits besides having Angelina’s boobies.  Her children are portrayed in the same way: they run away from fights, screaming about their hair.  They worry about their nails.  They obsess about appearances and generally are jerks.  Except for Celina, who is portrayed as their leader.

I thought, OK, you know, that does balance it some, since one of the themes in the book is that the demigods are better than their parents, are the good side to any power.  But then we hit the last book of the series (where I lost my patience and hurled the ipod at the wall.) Because Celina is the spy who has been betraying them the whole time and it is her betrayal that gets her own boyfriend killed as well as a whole bunch of other people!

Moving right alone, we hit Hera, who has no children at camp, because she’s the goddess of marriage and family.  She’s portrayed as beautiful, which instantly clued me in to the fact that she’s evil.  Sure, she doesn’t side with the villains, but she’s a villainous jerk all the same.

Lots of people don’t like Hera or Aphrodite, and you know, I’m OK with that.  I get it, and I see it, and I can appreciate it, if there’s appropriate balance with other good characters.  Like, say, Demeter and Persephone.  I mean, Demeter.  She’s the goddess of the famous Eleusinian Mysteries, which only lasted two thousand years and were the most important mysteries of all.  Secret worship!  Big party!  Lots of awesome throwing of phallic shaped pig cookies into pits!  Great fodder for a story, right?  Lots of opportunties to balance the nasty old Aphrodite with a warm, mother figure who controlled that little minor thing called the harvest.

But in this series, Demeter is a nagging mother in law who wants people to eat cereal, and her kids are known for the flowers in their cabins.  And that’s it.  That’s all she gets.  Her daughter Persephone, the wife of Hades, is no better.  She’s portrayed as annoyed that her husband slept around and bored with her mom’s cereal obsession and again, that’s it.  Again, Riordan had choices to make, and he chose a more one-sided view of goddesses than even the Greeks.

We do have one goddess to balance the tide, and that’s Athena.  She’s portrayed as wise, and interesting, and smart, and good.  She’s also sexless.  Her children are children of the mind, born from her head in the way that she was born, and her daughter, Annabeth, Percy’s girlfriend, eventually gets a makeover, but it looks wrong on her.  Because Annabeth wouldn’t wear makeup.  Which is fine, so far as it goes, except that the not-wearing makeup has become a sign of Annabeth’s goodness.  The makeover person is Circe, and she’s hosting a spa for lady visitors and turning guy visitors into guinea pigs who go reet.  And you know what?  ENOUGH.

There are only two choices for women in these books.  1.  You can be a psuedo boy: like to fight, stay youthful without secondary sex characteristics, enjoy battle or science.  That’s the ‘good’ choice.  2. You can be a woman: grow breasts and hips, enjoy broad friendships and romantic relationships, wear makeup.  That’s the ‘bad’ choice, and eventually you will betray someone, steal, nag, lie, fuck around, trick people.

I think those are some remarkably crappy choices.  But you probably shouldn’t listen to me, since I’m currently wearing MAC’s Amplified Cream Lipstick in Blankety.

(I had some other issues with these books, but I’ve decided to cover the parenting problems in another essay, since this one is already ridiculously long.)

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #22

Posted on by

As I said in our last installment, Wonder Woman #21 was great. Marston died in May 1947, but you’d never know he was on his deathbed when #21 came out in January/February of that year. One of the high points of the series, it shows Marston enthusiastically grappling with and even more enthusiastically fetishizing the latest, most up-to-date technology of atomic power. Most people would stop adding kinks to their repertoire when they were dying, but Marston is not the sort to let a little thing like cancer get his libido down. It’s an inspiration to us all, I tell you.

But that was 21. In #22, things are…well, they’re not so great. In fact, I strongly suspect that the very, very ill Marston did not have complete creative control over this issue. Marston had sometimes worked with collaborators before, I think — his sons were supposed to have given him story ideas at least — and certainly he’s had less than stellar issues before. But this is the first one that actually starts to look in spots like hackwork.

Among other problems, this is the first issue since the second or third that isn’t a single long story; instead, it’s split up into three shorter tales. The initial one of these is definitely the worst; I’d wager something of moderate value that somebody ghosted large chunks of it. Wonder Woman goes to Hollywood, where a evil mastermind is stealing the color from the faces of actresses and then forcing them to pay to have their color restored. So basically, instead of Wonder Woman saving the world, she’s helping a handful of vain actors deal with cosmetic surgery. The low stakes and the stereotypical focus on appearance is a painful forshadowing of the crappy Silver Age Robert Kanigher scripts to come…and just to drive that point home there’s a completely pointless sequence where WW is taken by the police and thrown in prison, a typical Silver Age twist which here (as in the future) serves to generate some vague suspense in a plot that is basically going nowhere. Towards the second half of the story things start to come alive a little as the Holiday girls and then Wonder Woman are tied up and the evil scientist reveals that he has a brain control ray which he uses to make a bunch of nurses his slaves (not sure I’ve seen the nurse fetish from Marston before?).

And of course WW is almost placed in his thrall too, but Steve comes in in the nick of time and rescues her…and again, having Steve as the deux ex machina just is not Marston in prime form.

The second and third stories are somewhat better — or at least more characteristic. Number two involves the Saturnians again (remember them from way back in issue 10?) They use hypnotism to prevent people from seeing them, and there’s some sort of electrical bonds which makes WW all weak and kitteny and then they can tie her up. Not really covering any new ground, but it’s okay for that.

Three has the most potential; one of the Holiday sorority girls, Gel, is jealous…and her jealousy almost destroys the planet Venus! Before it does, though, she’s punished by…well see for yourself:

That’s the stuff! The jealousy theme is pretty interesting too; it’s come up before in Marston, specifically in #6 in the battle with the Cheetah. In some ways this is actually more successful. In #6, the Cheetah’s resentment of the stuck-up Amazons and their compulsive condescension seemed a lot more sympathetic than I think Marston wanted, whereas in this one, Gel’s jealousy of her fellow students seems pettier and less rationally motivated. (Not that Gel isn’t somewhat sympathetic too.)

It’s also interesting to think about why jealousy seems important to Marston. In my post about the Cheetah, I said that it seemed to be about self-esteem — that is, woman should feel good about themselves and not inferior to anyone. But I also wonder if there’s a sense in which Marston finds jealousy especially problematic because it’s a primary source of conflict between women. Or to look at it another way; the flip side of female-female friendships or female-female desire can be jealousy — wanting to be somebody else instead of wanting to be with them (as friends or…well, you know.) On the one hand, then, jealousy is the acid that dissolves the bonds of sisterly love. On the other hand, it’s a kind of extension of that love twisted into desire. Which means that, for Marston, jealousy is exciting and fetishized — which is why jealous Gel gets placed so quickly in the cat suit. Her punishment is stimulating, but so is her rebellion.

Though not as stimulating as they might be alas. The splash page to this story promises that Gel will bring jealousy to Venus, and I had visions of her somehow spreading jealousy throughout the perfect Venusian society through some sort of ray or serum or other weirdness — which sounded pretty great. But in the end she just shows up and frees some prisoners and causes a garden variety ruckus…and then it all resolves in two really fast pages, as if everyone just ran out of script. Which is maybe what happened; Marston may just have gotten too sick to finish the thing (or they could be using an earlier ms that he abandoned or never completed.)

Along those lines, perhaps the most interesting or revealing thing about this issue is that the art isn’t very good. Not that it’s terrible; Peter still has some nice set pieces, like this weird and funny undersea clump of Holiday girls:

But in general, compared to much of the remarkably adventurous art in this run, this issue is both tame and bland. The layouts are fairly boring, and Peter makes little effort to unify pages visually (using colors, shapes, or themes as he does in many other issues.) The wordless sequences which the duo have been experimenting with are also abandoned. Costuming is less detailed, and layout and rendering are all less imaginative throughout. Peter is still Peter, and the art is still fun to look at, but he seems to have lost much of the visual spark that pushed him from being a very good illustrator to (in my mind) one of the all time greats.

So what was that visual spark? I can’t know for sure, obviously, but I really wonder if it wasn’t Marston. I’ve noted before that when Marston’s scripts aren’t so great, the art also seems to falter. Here I’m pretty sure that Marston was side-lined — and sure enough, the art suffers badly. Which makes you wonder…was it Marston who was specifying those wordless sequences? Was he involved closely in layout? How specific were his scripts?

I suppose it’s possible that Peter was just more inspired when he had good material. But the fact that so much of his more interesting stylistic choices disappear here where Marston seems out of the loop — it just makes me think that Marston (who, as I’ve mentioned before, actually hired and paid Peter himself) may have had substantial direct input into the art. How I would love to get my hands on one of his scripts….
__________________

So…there are in theory 6 more Marston/Peter WW issues left. I know that #28 is very good…but now I’m more than a little worried that the next five are going to be a slog. Marston was supposed to have been writing scripts on his death bed, so it’s possible that he generated some more first class material. We’ll see, I suppose….