Monthly Archives: March 2012

Utilitarian Review 3/17/12

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On HU

Our featured archive post this week was Franklin Einspruch’s illustrated version of Wallace Steve’s poem “Of Mere Being.

Albert Stabler on the metal vs. punk, Arriver’s Tsushima, and Russian military disasters.

Nate Atkinson on how he kept Moebius in his living room.

Matthias Wivel on death in Moebius’ last works.

And we finished the week up with the beginning of our Jaime Hernandez Roundtable. Deb Aoki talked about her experience as a Jaime-loving punk rocker in Hawaii; I talked about nostalgia in Jaime’s work; and Jones, One of the Jones Boys explained how you should like Jaime because he said so. The index to all post is here.

The roundtable will continue through all of next week with contributions by regular Utilitarians and guests.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic, I reviewed Nicholas Cage’s dreadful new movie Seeking Justice, and talked about revenge narratives.

At Splice I sneered at Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher.
 
Other Links

Matthias Wivel on the Hermetic Garage.

If you buy Before Watchmen, Alan Moore hates you, God bless him.

Ken Parille on why male supeheroes don’t show any skin.

Smart Bitches make fun of the nipples in romance novels.
 

50 Million Jaime Fans Can’t Be Wrong

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BOSWELL: Why, Sir, it is bruited through all London that Garrick holds the pictorial efforts of our Mr Hernandez in the utmost esteem.

JOHNSON: Garrick, Sir, can go fuck himself.

***

Sometimes people disagree — NEWS FLASH, right? People disagree about politics, science, religion, sports, the weather, what it’s got in its pocketses…and sometimes they disagree about art. Indeed, as you may have noticed, people around here sometimes politely disagree with other people about art.

So what should you do when you disagree with someone about a work of art? I don’t mean “should you call them fanboys?” or “should you call them vaginas?” or “how can you best persuade them that, on reflection, everything you say is correct and everything they say is STUPID?“; forget about what you should do to the person you disagree with. I’m asking how you should treat your own opinion when you find someone who holds a different opinion.

My question isn’t how you should treat the reasons, evidence, arguments, etc. that they might put forward to bolster their opinion. Leave all that aside, too, and just consider the basic fact that they disagree with you. Is that fact, by itself, important enough that it should make you change your mind, if only a little?

Since the mid-2000s, this question has become a hot topic in epistemology — the philosophy of knowledge. Broadly speaking, there are two answers to the question:

(1) Resolution

and (2) Conciliation.

According to the resolute view, disagreement ain’t shit — you don’t have to do anything when you find someone who disagrees with you. You’re perfectly entitled to maintain your own belief exactly as strongly as you did before you learned that somebody disagreed with you; in other words, you can stand resolute. According to the conciliatory view, by contrast, disagreement is shit — it should make a difference to your belief. Exactly what difference, and how much, is up for grabs among philosophers who hold the conciliatory view; but they are united in believing that disagreement should make you at least a little less confident than you were before. (Stick with me; we’ll get to talking about comics eventually)

Here’s one way to think about what conciliation means. Picture all your thoughts as a big list of sentences written in your mental notepad. They might include:

2+2=4

The Earth revolves around the Sun

Caesar crossed the Rubicon

Barack Obama will win the 2012 US election

The moon is made of green cheese

2+2=5

and so on.

Some of these things you believe, and some you disbelieve. You believe some really, really strongly — like 2+2=4 — some less strongly — like, perhaps, the belief about Barack Obama; and similarly for the sentences you disbelieve. So now imagine that next to each sentence is a number between 0 and 1. 0 means “I think it’s definitely false”, 1 means “I think it’s definitely true”, and values in-between correspond to varying degrees of confidence. Now the list might look like this:

[1] 2+2=4

[0.999999] The Earth revolves around the Sun

[0.9995] Caesar crossed the Rubicon

[0.6] Barack Obama will win the 2012 US election

[0.0001] The moon is made of green cheese

[0] 2+2=5

On this picture, people disagree when they assign different numbers, or credences, to the same sentence. So maybe in my mental notepad, the sentence about Barack Obama has the number 0.6 next to it, whereas in Noah’s notepad it has the number 0.8 next to it. This would mean that I am less confident than Noah that Obama will be re-elected.

What conciliatory views say, in essence, is that when Noah and I discover our disagreement, we should revise our credences towards one another. Noah should be less confident about Obama’s chances, and I should be more — OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL. (We’ll get back to this caveat shortly).

Another name some people sometimes give to the conciliatory view is the Correct View. And by “some people”, I mean “me”, and by “sometimes”, I mean “right now”. I call it the Correct View for the simple reason that it is the correct view.

The basic motivation for holding the Correct View is this: when you find someone disagreeing with you, and you have no reason to think you’re in an epistemically better situation than they are — i.e. you’re not any smarter, or more informed, or less drunk, etc. — then you really don’t have any reason to think you’re more likely to be correct than they are. So the mere fact that someone like you has gone through the same process of reasoning and come to a different conclusion, that fact just by itself is some evidence that you might be wrong. It may be very weak evidence, and you may not have to “adjust your credence” — i.e. become more or less confident — very much, but it is some evidence, and you should adjust your credence to some extent. (As I said, just how much is up for grabs)

Here’s a hypothetical example: suppose Gilbert and Jaime are sitting at the table, trying to add up their joint profits from the most recent issue of Love and Rockets. (I told you we’d come back to comics)

Now, further suppose they go through their calculations separately, but using the same information and each using his own electronic calculator. And, finally, suppose that, at the end of all this, each brother arrives at a different total. Before they share their results with one another, each brother is fairly confident in his own calculation. But what happens when they share their results and realise that they disagree? According to the Correct View, each brother should become somewhat less confident in his own calculation.

And since, by definition, the Correct View is correct, this is just what they should do.

It’s important to remember that OTHER THINGS should be EQUAL when deciding how to react to disagreement. If Jaime knows that he is better at maths than Gilbert, then Jaime should not take Gilbert’s result as seriously, and hence should not reduce his own confidence as much (if at all); and vice versa. Similarly if Gilbert knows that Jaime’s calculator is broken; or Jaime knows that Gilbert forgot to count all the money; or Gilbert knows that Jaime wasn’t really paying attention; or…

The point being that you shouldn’t react to all disagreements in the same way. You should revise your confidence, down or up, only when you find that you disagree with someone who is in at least as good (roughly) an epistemic position as you — someone who is your epistemic peer. That’s why you don’t have to start believing that the end is nigh whenever you pass a religious fanatic on the street, or that global warming is a hoax when you watch Fox News, and so on — because these views arise from people in worse epistemic positions than you (or the proxies from whom you ultimately derive your opinions).

If you’ve followed me so far, you can probably see where this is going. As with opinions in general, I submit, so with opinions about art. In short: if you think a particular work of art is a piece of shit, but lots and lots of your epistemic peers think it’s the bees’ knees, you should seriously consider the possibility that you’re wrong. And maybe you should do this even if they can’t point to any convincing evidence in their favour.

Actually, this aesthetic conciliatory view follows from the Correct View only if we make a few extra assumptions. First, we have to assume that aesthetic sentences express propositions — or, to put it in English, that a sentence like “The Love Bunglers is one of the greatest comics of all time” is actually trying to describe how things are, rather than merely giving voice to your tastes. The former is like saying “I hurt my foot” or “I like ice cream”; the latter is like saying “Ow — my foot!” or “Ice cream — yum!” The former can be true or false, and even debated, but the latter cannot.

The second assumption is that the propositions expressed by aesthetic sentences are not entirely individualistic — that their truth does not depend solely on your reactions during the act of experiencing the art. If “The Love Bunglers is one of the greatest comics of all time” was merely a statement of how you felt about it, then, again, there’d be no room for disagreement. One person — let’s call him “Jeet” — could assert it, another — let’s call him “Noah” — deny it, and both could be speaking truly; just as one could truly say “I like ice cream” and the other “I don’t like ice cream”.

In other words, whatever makes some aesthetic opinions true and others false, it had better not be something that is entirely peculiar to whoever holds them.

Here’s one way aesthetic truth could depend on facts outside the individual: maybe the sentence “The Love Bunglers is one of the greatest comics of all time” is true only if The Love Bunglers properly reflects the Metaphysical Form of Beauty, which exists outside time and space, and doesn’t depend at all on what we humans think about beauty, trapped as we are in Plato’s cave.

Or, since that’s patently preposterous, maybe not.

Here’s a picture of aesthetic truth that is slightly more plausible. You have a set of preferences, values, likes and dislikes when it comes to art — let’s call them your tastes. Tastes are not permanently fixed, but they are usually stable over the short- to medium- term: if you like horror films today, then you’ll probably like them tomorrow. They can be very narrow or very broad: you might like films that are satires; and you might also like films that feature a combination of bicycles, conga lines, and references to Dante — in which case, have I got a film for you… And, crucially, although tastes vary from person to person, they are not entirely unique to each individual; you can share, to a greater or lesser extent, your preferences with other people. When you share your tastes with other people, we can say that you belong to an aesthetic community with those people; since you probably won’t share your tastes exactly with anyone else, you’re probably part of many different, partially overlapping communities.

This, for instance, is considered a thing of great beauty in some communities:

Aesthetic claims, in this picture, are made true by (1) the properties of the artwork in question and (2) the appropriate aesthetic community. The community sets the standards for judging the artwork, and the artwork itself either meets or fails to meet those standards. Which community is appropriate depends, basically, on who is considering the claim. So, in some communities, the sentence “Alex Ross is a great cartoonist” is true; in others, it’s false.

When a critic makes an aesthetic claim, then, it doesn’t make sense to ask whether it is true-full-stop (“true-period” for our benighted Yankee cousins). What must be asked, rather, is whether it is true given the standards of the appropriate aesthetic community. The advantage of this picture is that aesthetic claims turn out to be relative, but not solipsistic; their truth can meaningfully be debated between members of any particular community.

So, let’s go back to the issue of disagreement, with these two assumptions granted, namely: (1) aesthetic sentences can be true or false; and (2) their truth or falsity depends on more than just individual taste. As we saw, how you respond to disagreement depends on whether your disagreer (so to speak) is your epistemic peer. How you respond to aesthetic disagreement further depends on whether your disagreer is your aesthetic peer.

That means that, when you’re confronted with aesthetic disagreement, you need to ask yourself two questions. First, is my disagreer in a better position than me to appreciate the artwork, a worse position, or a roughly similar one? If the answer is “worse”, then you can safely ignore them; alternatively, you can publicly call them out in a blog post.

What sort of thing would determine your relative position to judge the artwork? Any number of things, including (but not limited to): who’s more familiar with the artist’s other work; who’s more familiar with other examples of the same genre; who knows more about the particular techniques involved; who’s wasted more years on a fine arts major; who can cite more passages of Lacan; etc. etc.

Anyway, if you decide that your disagreer is at least no worse off than you from an epistemic perspective — in terms of knowledge, expertise, intelligence, etc. — you can then move to the second question, viz. Is my disagreer addressing what I think is the appropriate community? Naturally, the answer to this depends on what you think the appropriate community is — and, equally naturally, this is a vexed and contentious decision.

Many online folks who talk about comics restrict themselves (knowingly or not) to addressing a very small aesthetic community. And if you don’t care about that community, then you can just ignore their proclamations about, say, the greatest cartoonists of all time.

Breathe a sigh of relief — I just validated your life choices.

More interesting are cases where you and your disagreer see yourself as sharing membership in at least one community. That’s where disagreement bites – – you’re now disagreeing about how the artwork in question (say, “The Love Bunglers”) lives up to, or falls short, of your shared tastes. And you can point to this or that feature in support of your opinion.

But — and here’s where we draw it all back together — if the Correct View is correct —

and it is, by definition

— then you should consider changing your mind even without being shown the opposing “evidence”. Because the fact that a member of the relevant aesthetic community has had one reaction to an artwork, and formed a particular view about it, that fact itself is evidence that your own view is mistaken. It’s evidence that, in fact, the artwork has a different relation to the community’s standards than the one you think: that it’s the bee’s knees, rather than a piece of shit. Or the other way around.

So, in conclusion:

Jaime rules, just because we said so.

Also:

DON’T JUDGE MY LIFESTYLE

—————————————
The Locas Roundtable index is here.

When You And I Were Young, Maggie

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Jaime Hernandez’s “Browntown” has been lauded by everyone from Tom Spurgeon to Jeet Heer, the later of whom states that it is “arguably one of the best comics stories ever”.

It’s a bit of a let-down, then, to actually read the thing and discover a decent but by no means revelatory, piece of program fiction. All the hallmarks are there: the precocious child narrator as guarantor of authenticity; the ethnic milieu as guarantor of authenticity; the sordidness as guarantor of authenticity and the trauma as guarantor of authenticity. Poignant ironies fall upon the narrative with a sodden regularity, till the only landscape that can be seen is the wet, heavy drifts of meaning.

For what it is, “Browntown” isn’t terrible. Jaime’s precocious child narrator is endearing

his ethnic milieu is surprisingly uninsistent and unforced; his traumas are doled out with a disarming lightness — as when Calvin’s years of abuse are limned in the space between panels:

But still; there’s nothing particularly brilliant here, either in the use of language, or in the drawing, or in the use of the comics medium. In this sequence, for example, Jaime uses a series of verbal and visual clichés to present the end of an affair.

“Nothing, I guess I’m just selfish,” she says, as the stylized tears pour down. The camera moves closer, and then we’ve got a shot/reverse/shot. Entirely competent story-telling, sure. Masterpiece by one of the genre’s greatest creators? For goodness’ sake, why?
_________________________________________________

I read a fair bit of the Locas stories for this post — Death of Speedy, The Education of Hopey Glass, The Love Bunglers, bits and pieces of other stories, including Wig Wam Bam. I haven’t exactly grown more fond of Jaime’s work, but I think I have a better sense of what I’m supposed to like about it.

Which would be nostalgia. The difference between “Browntown” and an anonymous short story in a lit magazine isn’t Jaime’s skill, or his handling of plot or theme or character — none of which, as far as I can tell, rise above the pedestrian. Rather, “Browntown” is different not because of what’s in it, but because of what’s outside it: the years and years of investment in the characters, by both the author and his readers. Here, for example:

You see Maggie from a distance, and then in close up. It’s not an especially interesting or involving visual sequence…except that this is the first time in the story that Maggie appears as an adolescent, thirteen years old and post-puberty. For those who have followed Jaime’s work (or even just read the first installment of the Love Bunglers that precedes this piece in Love and Rockets 3), that face is finally, recognizably, the Maggie we know (or one of the Maggies we know). As a result, there’s a charge there of recognition and delight. It’s analogous, perhaps, to Lacan’s description of the mirror stage:

This event can take place… from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial…he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image….

We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification , in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image – whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago.

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.

As always, Lacan is a fair piece from being comprehensible here…but in general outline, the point is that the child sees its image in the mirror — an image which is whole and coherent. The child identifies itself with this image, and so jubilantly experiences, or sees itself, as coherent and whole.

In her book Reading Lacan, Jane Gallop points out that the jubilation and excitement of the mirror stage is based upon temporal dislocation:

…in the mirror stage, the infant who has not yet mastered the upright posture and who is supported by either another person or some prosthetic device will, upon seeing herself in the mirror, “jubilantly assume” the upright position. She thus finds in the mirror image “already there,” a mastery that she will actually learn only later. The jubilation, the enthusiasm, is tied to the temporal dialectic by which she appears already to be what she will only later become.

Thus, there is a rush of pleasure in seeing the woman Maggie in the adolescent Maggie; the future image charges the past.

But the mirror stage is not just about recognizing the future in the present. It’s also about creating the past. Gallop explains that before the mirror stage, the self is incoherent; an unintegrated blob of body parts and non-specific polymorphous pleasures. But, Gallop continues, this is an illusion; the self cannot be an unintegrated blob before the mirror stage, because it is the mirror stage that creates the self. Thus:

The mirror stage would seem to come after “the body in bits and pieces” and organize them into unified image. But actually, that violently unorganized image only comes after the mirror stage so as to represent what came before.

The mirror stage, then, provides an image not just of the future, but of the past. The subject “assumes an image” not just of what she will be, but of what she was; the coherent image of the self is not just an aspiration, but a history. When Lacan says:

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form…

the specular image that is assumed is precisely the infans stage, and the I that is precipitated is precisely the primordial form. The jubilation is not just in seeing a future coherent self, but in seeing a past self that is coherent with both the present and future.

Or to put it another way, the attraction of nostalgia is not the idealization of the past, but simply the idea of the past — and of the future. It’s the romance of self-identity. Hence, nostalgia in the Locas stories isn’t a function of actual time (a reader who has in truth read for decades) so much as it is a projection of imagined history. How many times has Jaime drawn Maggie (or Perla, or Margaret, or…)? All of those images are a part of a self, snapshots of a connected chain of bodies linked from infancy to middle-age to (presumably) death. As Frank Santoro says in his piece about the Love Bunglers:

Something extraordinary happened when I read his stories in the new issue of Love and Rockets: New Stories no. 4. What happened was that I recalled the memory of reading “Death of Speedy” – when it was first published in 1988 – when I read the new issue now in 2011. Jaime directly references the story (with only two panels) in a beautiful two page spread in the new issue. So what happened was twenty three years of my own life folded together into one moment. Twenty three years in the life of Maggie and Ray folded together. The memory loop short circuited me. I put the book down and wept.

The power of the Locas stories, what makes them special, is not any one story, or instant, or image, but the knowledge of the whole — not in the sense that each part contributes to a greater thematic unity, but in the sense that simply knowing there’s a whole is itself a delight. You can read the Locas stories and know Maggie, not as you know a friend but as an infant knows that image in the mirror — as aspiration, as self, as miracle.
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And, of course, as illusion. The reflection in the mirror, the coherent past and present I, is a misrecognition — it’s not a true self. Jaime’s use of Maggie as nostalgic trope, then, functions as a deceptive, perpetuated childishness; a naïve acceptance of the image as the real. Consider Tom Spurgeon’s take on “The Death of Speedy”:

Hernandez’s evocation of that fragile period between school and adulthood, that extended moment where every single lustful entanglement, unwise friendship, afternoon spent drinking outside, nighttime spent cruising are acts of life-affirming rebellion, is as lovely and generous and kind as anything ever depicted in the comics form.

That could almost be a description of “American Graffitti”, another much-lauded right-of-passage cultural artifact noted for its compelling, yearning encapsulation of time. I would agree that this is a major characteristic of Jaime’s work…but whereas for Tom that’s the reason Jaime’s a favorite creator, for me it’s the reason that he isn’t. Hopey’s nightmare hippie girl schtick; the shapeless but coincidence-laden narratives; the sex, the violence, the rock and roll — it all seems at times to blur into that single repeated punk rock mantra, “That was so real, man. That was so real, man. That was….”

But while I don’t necessarily need to read any more of Jaime’s work ever, I do think that there are times when the nostalgia in his stories becomes not just a symptom but a theme. For example, looking again at that image of the suddenly post-pubescent Maggie from “Browntown”.

As I said, this is a moment of recognition. But whose recognition? The panel is from the perspective of Calvin, who is both Maggie’s little brother and the sexual victim of the boy Maggie is talking up. While readers see suddenly the grown-up Maggie they know and love, Calvin is seeing, perhaps for the first time, a grown-up Maggie who he does not know, and who he fears and resents as a potential sexual rival. The reader’s image of Maggie — the shock of her newfound adulthood — lets us see her, to some extent, as Calvin sees her (and, indeed, allows Jaime to subtly tell us how Calvin sees her). At the same time, looking through Calvin’s eyes inflects and darkens Maggie’s new adulthood; the overlapping perspectives capture not just the excitement of growing up, but its dangers and sadness as well. The mirror image is also a primal scene, the discovery of self also a loss of innocence. What Gallop says of Lacan might also be said of Jaime:

When Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge, they anticipate mastery. But what they actually gain is a horrified recognition of their nakeness. This resembles the movement by which the infant, having assumed by anticipation a totalized, mastered body, then retroactively perceives his inadequacy (his “nakedness”). Lacan [or Jaime?] has written another version of the tragedy of Adam and Eve.

Another example of the way nostalgia is thematized is in the ghost scenes in “The Death of Speedy.”

On the one hand, this, like the entirety of the derivative “West-Side Story” plot, is fairly standard issue melodrama. But in the context of Jaime’s oeuvre, there’s something (eerily?) fitting about Speedy’s disappearance into a darkened silhouette, a kind of icon of himself. Speedy’s a projection, a specter given meaning only by his past. But that’s not just true for Speedy — it’s true for everyone in the Locas stories, who appear and then disappear and then reappear further up or down the timeline. A ghost is a kind of distillation of nostalgia, a memory that walks. At moments like this in Jaime’s work, the compulsive authenticity claims become almost transparent, as everyone and everything turns into its own after-image. We cannot see the present without seeing the past and the future, which means that we don’t ever see anything but an illusion, an image of coherence.

This is perhaps one way to read the conclusion of The Love Bunglers. Many people have read it as a happy ending for Maggie and Ray; the final triumph of romance after many trials. Thus, Dan Nadel:

In the end we flash forward some unspecified amount of years: Ray survives and he and Maggie are in love and Jaime signs the last panel with a heart.

And maybe Dan’s right. But it’s also certainly the case that that ending is only reflection; it’s what we want to see in the mirror.

Two Maggies side-by-side look in two mirrors at two Maggies. We see doubles doubled, the Maggies we love seeing the Maggies we love. This is the way cartooning works; one image calls forth another and another, the characters become themselves through sequence and repetition. As Dan Nadel says, “It just works. They’re real.”

But at the same time as it solidifies Maggie, the doubling of the mirror stage also disincorporates her. The second Maggie in the mirror…doesn’t she look younger than the first? Is time passing, or is the mirror image just an image — the future Maggie that present Maggie needs to see in order to make the past Maggie cohere? If the happy-ending Maggie looking in the mirror is just a dream to retroactively solidify the grieving Maggie, perhaps the grieving Maggie looking in the mirror is herself a dream, an image to confirm the tragedy. And so it goes; Calvin’s unlikely assault is an image there to give weight and shape to his childhood trauma; Maggie kisses Viv and is rejected by her to give weight and shape to their past — or and simultaneously the past gives weight to the future, and on and on, image on image, through the never-ending jubilant shocks of misrecognition.
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Jaime’s oeuvre, I think, can be seen as a mirrored engine; turn the crank and nostalgia is infinitely reflected. It’s an impressive delivery system. As with the Siegel/Shuster Superman, or the Twilight books, I can see the appeal, even if, for me, there’s something more than a little off-putting about the efficiency of the mechanism.

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The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.

From Hoppers to Honolulu: A Fan Letter to Jaime Hernandez

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As a comics creator and as a life-long comics reader, I’ve frequently been asked, who are your favorite artists, or which artists are your biggest influences? Time and again, Jaime Hernandez is in my top 10 list.

Given that most of my comics life revolves around manga nowadays, my response often surprises people. And it’s true — Jaime’s work isn’t what most people would consider manga at all, although his work is admired by fans and artists around the world for his draftsmanship, dramatic use of black/white, supple line work, and most of all, his storytelling skills. But discovering Love & Rockets when I was in college was a major turning point for me, and one that changed how and why I draw comics.

Just as being introduced to shojo manga in my tween years and later Elfquest in my early teens showed me stories that were made for me (and not just my brother) and that women could be comics creators, and just as the X-Men, Teen Titans, and Legion of Superheroes introduced me to the excitement of superhero stories, Jaime Hernandez’ work told me that I could and should draw comics about where I live, the things I did everyday, and the people I know and love.

Local Like Me/Punk Like Me

When I was going to high school and college in Honolulu, I had three separate lives: I was a “nice Japanee girl,” I hung out with ‘those punk rock kids,’ and I liked to read and draw comics. These three worlds rarely, if ever intersected.

I’m a third-generation Japanese-American, which means that my family has been in Hawaii since the early 1900’s. Japanese culture is a big part of my life, but being from Hawaii was just as important in shaping how I see the world.

Growing up and living as a ‘local’ in Hawaii is very different than what the Hawaii Visitors Bureau would have you believe. I can’t surf, I only know a handful of Hawaiian words, and dancing the hula? Please, don’t ask. But growing up in beautiful, easy-going, multi-cultural Hawaii was one of the best gifts my parents could have ever given to me.

Besides knowing where the best places to eat, drink, and surf, being ‘local’ means you know about local language/slang, and you grow up with a set of shared values, experiences, and sense of humor that you rarely see depicted realistically / non-stereotypically in movies, TV, and yes, comics too.

In the late 1980’s, I returned to Hawaii after a stint in art school on the mainland (a.k.a. New York City and San Francisco). My time away from Hawaii brought a lot of things into focus – or at least made me look at my hometown and the people who live in it in a new way. I realized that locals talked and acted differently than ‘mainland’ people. This was kind of cool / funny / interesting to observe; being a former insider who could now see this world through the lenses of an ‘outsider.’

At around the same time, I started hanging out with friends in the local punk / indie band scene. In dingy dive bars in industrial areas, high school auditoriums, garages, and in clubs tucked away in not-so-touristy pockets of Waikiki, you could hear punk, hardcore, speed metal, ska and hybrids of all of the above, played by bands like Devil Dog, S.R.O. (Something Really Offensive), The Wrong, B.Y.K. (Beat Your Kids), Mumbo Jumbo, Elvis 77, and Tantra Monsters.

There were parties at crash pads where the only furniture were milk crates, thrift store finds, and a mattress on the floor. There were nights hanging out in strip clubs with my guy friends, because that’s where their girlfriends worked. And there were lots of midnight beer runs to the 7-11’s and early, early mornings at 24-hour diners, eating breakfast while our ears were still ringing from the gig we just attended.

So when I read Jaime’s Locas stories in Love & Rockets, I immediately felt like I was looking into a world that was both familiar and new.

Reading Mi Vida Locas

While I was growing up, there weren’t a whole lot of Mexican-Americans living in Honolulu. Heck, you hardly hear Spanish being spoken, and frankly, now that I’ve been living in California for the past 10 years, the tacos in Hawaii were pretty lousy. But reading Love & Rockets gave me a glimpse into a world I would never be introduced to, much less become immersed in otherwise.

Before Love & Rockets, I had no idea that there were other types of ‘local’ cultures. I didn’t know what “mija’ or ‘vato’ meant. There are gangs in Hawaii, but I never experienced what it was like to be in the middle of the kind of turf wars that Jaime depicted in “The Death of Speedy.” The beautiful thing about Jaime’s Locas stories is that he did it without romanticizing Latino pride or preaching a heavy-handed ‘anti-violence’ or ‘anti-drugs’ message –- he just drew stories about his characters living their everyday (but nonetheless fascinating) lives.

Maggie was a character I could really relate to. She was Mexican-American, and spent time in both her Mexican and American worlds. She was curvy, and was alternately confidently sexy and insecure about her body. She was just as comfortable in a backyard party with her family and friends as she was at a dingy punk club. She was imperfect and complex.

I could also relate a lot to Ray, the guy from the ‘hood who left to see what the world had to offer. Ray came back and saw his childhood friends and ‘the way things are and the way they’ve always been’ in a different light, much as I did when I returned to Honolulu in the last 80’s after my mainland sojourn.

Unlike many comics I read at the time, Love & Rockets depicted a world that was filled with friends, family and acquaintances who were young and old, white, black, Latino, and Asian too.

I remember being particularly impressed to see Asian characters in Love & Rockets, like Daphne and Kiko. Finally! Asian characters who weren’t ninjas or samurai or dragon ladies or glorified boobs on a stick. Daffy and Kiko weren’t there to be the ‘token’ Asian characters or to add an ‘exotic’ touch to the story – they were just regular people like any other who lived in Maggie’s vibrant, multicultural Southern California world. They looked and acted like people I know, or wanted to know.

Perhaps best of all, the female characters in Love & Rockets are just as interesting (well, maybe more interesting) than the male characters. And sexy? Oh yes, they are that too, even without wearing skin-tight clothing or holding big guns. Chew on that, spandex-fetishists.

Draw What You Know

Before Love & Rockets, I drew the usual things that most young comics fans turned creators do: I drew stuff based on what I liked to read. I drew superhero comics. I drew stuff that looked like it was heavily influenced by shojo manga. I drew cutesy animals. I drew gag comics for my high school newspaper.

Jaime’s Love & Rockets stories showed me that comics can be a medium for telling very personal and engaging stories that aren’t just navel-gazing pity parties. His stories set in the lower-middle class suburbs and punk clubs of Southern California made me realize that I could draw stories about the real worlds I lived in instead of trying to tell stories about places that I would never, ever live in (like Titans Tower, or Xavier’s School for Gifted Children, or in my manga-obsessed mind, Neo-Tokyo or your generic Japanese high school where most shojo manga is set).

His diverse cast of characters showed me that there was a spectrum of human experiences and personalities that could be depicted in comics – and that I could draw stories based on people I knew, rather than people I’d never know, like Wolverine or Wonder Woman. He made comics real and relevant to me at a time when I was losing interest in superhero stories.

It’s been months since I’ve been to a club to see a live band. And it’s been over a year since I’ve been back to Hawaii. I still draw my Bento Box comic strip for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (albeit only every few weeks, instead of weekly like I used to). I don’t quite have the passion or time to draw comics full time like I used to when I was in college.

But I can still pick up Love & Rockets today, and it’s like catching up with dear friends who are growing old with me. It’s a comics series that continues to speak to me like no other, and one that I know I’ll enjoy until Jaime doesn’t feel like drawing it anymore (which I hope never, ever happens.)

I’m no where near as talented and prolific as Jaime Hernandez is, but I am grateful for the lessons that I learned from his comics many years ago: just draw what you know, and the rest will follow.
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Deb Aoki is the Manga Editor for About.com. She also draws Bento Box, a
semi-occasional comic strip for the Honolulu Star Advertiser.

The index to the Locas Roundtable is here.“>Locas Roundtable is here.

The Major’s Testament

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Jean Giraud aka. Moebius had been battling cancer for years, cheating death on several occasions before finally letting go on Saturday. His illness marked his creative production in the last decade of his life, leading to the cancellation of certain projects, including two Endless collaborations with Neil Gaiman, and the sad dissipation felt in others, most notably perhaps his last book (2010), in which he revived his classic, mute character Arzak as a talking stiff-headed nobody in particular.

But it is also a strong undercurrent in the late, exhilarating creative surge of his improvised sketchbook comics series Inside Moebius (2000–2008) and his elegiac return to his greatest creation, The Hermetic Garage, in 2008’s Chasseur déprime — works in which he captured for the first time in decades some of the same searching energy that characterized his creative peak in the seventies, delivering it with the urgency of a man with a short lease.

While in a sense youthful, these works are simultaneously very much songs of experience, with Chasseur déprime as resonant a reflection as any in comics on old age. Uncertain, even insecure, and borderline depressed, but also wise. Nothing is ever really over in Moebius and he did love the serial, so it is fitting that the story leaves things open, ending on the obligatory “fin de l’épisode.”

I have previously written at some length about the book and its relation to his 1970s masterpiece, so I will just add a few observations here, pertaining specifically to its character of artistic testament.

The plot — such that it is in this reiterative, oneiric work — concerns the protagonist, and Moebius’ alter-ego, Major Grubert, the demiurge-like creator of the tripartite world of the Garage, taking out a contract on himself, offered by one of his own creations. From the first pages of the book, we learn that there is only one possible ending for him: death.

This prompts a personal mise-en-abîme in which the Major finds himself unstuck from the temporal flux, wandering the desert, which — literally as well as symbolically — was ever Giraud’s creative locus amoenus, only to be trapped in the clinical halls of a museum overseen by a dominatrix task-master, the Overturner. Here, he loses himself in his work or, as he describes one of the pieces on the walls, “plays with fire.” The tone is retrospective, describing a creator who, in the words of one of his creations, never delivered to the arid desert floor of his world the Elysian Fields promised in his prime.

This allegorical narrative is woven through with what is clearly personal detail. At one point, the Major expresses a wish to escape to “Good Old Earth,” more precisely the Mountrouge suburb of Paris where Giraud lived with his second wife, Isabelle. And it is tempting to see in the voluptuous Overturner a complex portrayal of his formidable wife and business manager. While superficially presented as a villain, she is simultaneously the most intriguing character in the book, acting the part of the artist’s dark muse and embodying his desire.


At one point, the action jumps ahead eleven years — eleven years which we sense have personal resonance — and we understand that the Major has spent that time passively as a slumping custodian in the museum of his own work. The initially exuberant and virile, if still menacingly inflected, picture above him (“Playing with Fire”) has morphed into an oppressive conglomeration of biological havoc, reminiscent of the work of Moebius’ fellow designer for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), H. R. Giger.

Central to both compositions are the skulls that anchor much of the imagery in this book, as well as in its direct predecessor, the extended creative mediation 40 Days dans le Desert “B” (1999). The skull in art tends to signify vanitas, a symbol of the transience of life, and Moebius in one instance even makes use of the similarly consolidated motif of the artist working with Death looking over his shoulder, but he gives it all a disturbing personal spin.

The skull in these images is often at the center of the kind of mutating forms for which he is famous, the kernel animating the creative metamorphosis that is at the core of his art, and of his creative self-conception. Once beautiful and inspiring, even regenerative, at other times in his career barren and still, these mercurial forms turn tumorous in old age. Fatal.

As has ever been the rule of his art, Moebius knows he cannot escape. Yet he sees an out. The Major, on the run from the Overturner’s murderous rabbit henchmen (don’t ask), decapitates himself, leaving his body at their mercy (a charged representation of his troubled, always slightly alienated sexuality). Hilariously — the silly was ever a saving grace for him — his noggin drops down a rabbit hole, and as is the nature of such apertures, he changes.

From the resultant cancerous mass emerges once again the good old Major wearing his pith helmet, carrying his overnight bag. Meeting him there is his liberated, non-mustachioed alter ego from the ending of the original Garage, who takes him on a journey not toward Montrouge as he initially wishes, and not out of the dream in which he has been suffering, but toward the “six million” doors it still offers him. We thus leave them as they approach not our Good Old Earth, but another.

What better ending? The artist submitting his creativity as redemptive, finding it ever on the event horizon of the Other.

When We Had Moebius in Our Living Room

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Moebius was one of the weirdest things my roommate had in our living room. He wasn’t weird in the way that the shrine to my former workplace janitor was weird. That is to say, he wasn’t weird in that stupid way early 20’s ironic décor is weird, which is not weird so much as dopey (think a vintage speculum or the rare can of Storm Malt liquor found at Grocery Outlet in downtown Oakland). Moebius was weird by virtue of his incongruity. He was worth more than everything we owned and maybe even the apartment we lived in. He was definitely prettier than anything else we owned, and we took better care of him as a result. My roommate and I destroyed glassware (glass performs poorly in the hands of drunks), three futons, a couple of lamps, a garbage disposal, and a bathroom sink. Most of our other books had coffee stains on them. The ones that didn’t had been soaked in other liquids, and their spines buckled as a result. Our lives weren’t very pretty either, though they lacked the level of degeneracy necessary to make them really interesting. This is all a long way of saying that while we weren’t miserable we weren’t quite happy, either, which is a way of explaining in advance why we kept Moebius around so long.

My roommate found Moebius on the floor of a movie theater in Sand Diego in 1995. Actually, an employee of his found Moebius. Knowing my roommate (who I’ll call Rob, since that’s his name) read comics, the employee brought him to him. He was a little, 4” by 6” black, and hardbound Moebius. He contained a bunch of little drawings on medium press paper that felt slightly rough to the touch. The drawings were put down in shiny black ink, their line weights uniformly uniform, and their subject matter various. The thing about the drawings is that they were so perfect the employee thought it was a facsimile of Moebius that some conventioneer had dropped. For a second Rob thought the same thing. But before he pitched it on the lost-and-found he realized it was real. A weird little colored-pencil doodle by Bob Burden and some children’s drawings in crayon were what gave it away.

The lost-and-found was no place for such a thing. The San Diego Comic convention had ended earlier that day. This was before everybody was on the Internet. It was before everybody knew what the Internet was. Rob did what was maybe the right thing. He put it in his bag and took it home. He moved into my Oakland apartment a few months later.

I was in the process of a protracted breakup and in need of a roommate. Like many young men my age I was a terrible person, though I maintain I had my charms. The least of these charms (but a charm nonetheless) was that I drew well enough to make others think I had a future in drawing. Although I hadn’t read comics regularly in some time, I was still looking for work in the field. What’s more, I had maintained an interest in the things. So when Rob moved in he unpacked Moebius and placed him in my hand. Upon meeting him I knew exactly who he was. Good to meet you in person, Moebius.

Those little drawings had an amazing way of making the tiny pages seem ten-times their actual size. There was a drawing of a canyon that you all but fell into. The drawing of a man plodding through the desert looked vast. The man was less than an inch tall, but he was fully formed and totally lost. There were lots of crystalline landscapes, many exotic hats, some beautiful women and some less than beautiful men. There were no pencil marks, no erasures. It was totally Moebius.

Moebius lived with Rob and me for almost five years. How the hell did we get so lucky? We certainly didn’t deserve him. More often than not he’d just hang out on the shelf. But he’d come out at critical moments, like when one of us was depressed, or when somebody with an interest in comics was over, when we wanted to show off how random the world could get.

Rob and I understood that Moebius couldn’t stay forever. He certainly wasn’t ours, and we knew we’d need to find him a way home. But we were also too lazy to write letters or call France. About two years later we did take Moebius to the local comic convention. We thought we might connect with a friend of Moebius who could help him out. After a few shady dudes offered to take him off our hands, I asked a friend who dealt in original art what we should do. He and a few pros took a minute with Moebius and they all agreed. Do not give Moebius to anyone other than Moebius.

I moved out the next year, but Rob, Moebius and I still spent a lot of time together. I was back in school and feeling better about my life. Ditto Rob. Moebius was the same as ever, though he was also coming to Oakland for a convention. When Rob found this out he called me to ask if I wanted to give Moebius back to Moebius. I had to work (or something) that weekend, so Rob and Moebius headed to the convention together.

When Rob got to the convention he found Moebius at the end of a long line of autograph seekers. He stepped into line. The guy managing the line, a Mr. Rory Root, was asking people what they were getting signed or explaining the rules or doing whatever he was there to do. I wasn’t there, and while Rob has filled me in on the details, they’re the sort of details that derail a good story. Anyway, Rory did eventually get to Rob, and Rob showed him Moebius. Rory took Rob and Moebius to the front of the line.

Moebius introduced himself to Rob, not knowing why he’d been brought to him. Rob, not knowing how to start the conversation simply introduced Moebius to Moebius. He explained really briefly where he’d been, and what he’d been up to. Moebius didn’t bat an eye at the explanation, but he did tear up. “They’re quite good drawings, no?” He thanked Rob, and Rob called me almost immediately after. We were going to miss Moebius.

Tsushima

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Even if rock’s triumphal-film-score concept-album crescendos are generally dedicated to narrating combat of the mythic mock medieval variety, rather than documented events, heroic ballads set against sweeping historical vistas have made a few appearances in rock-opera prog, such as Triumvirat’s Spartacus, and in the occasional power metal suite, like Iced Earth’s The Glorious Burden. But despite not knowing more than a few erratically memorable examples, I doubt that any prog or power “history album” quite compares to Arriver’s long-awaited epic, Tsushima.

Primarily from the viewpoint of the defeated Russian Admiral Rozhestvensky, the album tells the story of the Battle of Tsushima, a landmark 1905 naval encounter in the Russo-Japanese War. Wikipedia describes it as a turning point in modern warfare, as it was the first battle in which wireless electronic communication played a central role and the last in which one fleet surrendered to another. The album opens with “Winter Palace War Council,” a mournful accordion overture interrupted by a vicious staccato assault, in which, although “The Dowager Empress warned us/ Eastern entanglements shall fail,” the vocals growl defiantly states, “We will all die, but we will never surrender!” After balefully adopting the voice of Japan’s victorious Admiral Togo, in the menacing trudge “Togo, Son of a Samurai,” the story resumes in the Russian perspective with “Dogger Bank,” a high-speed stuttering Deicide-esque dirge conjuring the shadow of defeat to the distant conflict in the North Sea. “Our anchorage will be refused in every neutral port of call/ You may turn your backs on us,” the guttural snarl testifies, “but we alone are standing tall!”

In the album’s centerpiece, “Around the Cape,” a fierce, lumbering riff accompanies the background of total collapse, the defeated Russian fleet at Port Arthur and peasant revolts at the Tsar’s palace: “Crocodile hunting and French whores,” shouts the disembodied chorus in the face of their annihilation, “they only serve to slowly weaken our resolve.” A brief, precisely shifting thrash piece, “Dark Clouds Above the Fleet,” evokes mechanized perfection while prophesying the inevitable end: “Misery is all we know/ No solace found in place of sorrow/ Ignore your orders, lashing follows.’ In reverberating harmonic chords, and some actual Russian-language re-enactment, “Singapore” describes Rozhestvensky’s Ahab-like hubris in the face of the looming conflict. A massive swaggering rocker chopped into odd sections by tempo shifts, percussive artillery, bewildering time switches, and ornate finger-picking figures, “Tsushima Trilogy” churns like huge icy waves; in the suite’s last section “The Boiling Sea,” the Admiral exhorts his men to “never lower the flag,” until the battle ends in a whiteout of seasick feedback and the gasping sputter of a dying engine. The devastation is summarized in bleak harmonies over a rumbling funeral march in “Quadrology:” “21 vessels sunk by dawn/ 4000 Russian sailors drowned/ The Tsar’s last armada is lost and with it the war.”

While many loud rock bands deliver arrangements founded on the alternation of chugging riffs and blasts of fury, with Arriver the shifts are more elegant than startling, with dramatic grandeur favored over shock and awe. More classical than fanatical, their chords never simply evoke Satanic massacre or chivalric soundtrack. The uncomfortable relationship between punk and metal is foregrounded with a band such as Arriver– their sophisticated long-form arrangements don’t fail to sound like the French black metal band Deathspell Omega, but without any hint of histrionic horror or the perversion of nature. Or I might think of the melodic arpeggios, whiplash tempo changes, and layered chords of Between the Buried and Me, or the furious mathiness of Converge or Dillinger Escape Plan, but not of those bands’ crisply gated production values, which seem to only make use of death metal tropes in the service of reinventing angsty Gothy industrial music. Arriver’s old-school chops may even occasionally be reminiscent of Vader, but the former’s symphonic nuance is incompatible with the latter’s straight-ahead brutality. Arriver’s warm, tactile sound, both in performance and production, is most comparable with more melancholy exponents of the ‘90s post-hardcore indie-rock spectrum, like Bitch Magnet, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, or Unwound. But, putting the sound aside, the music is convincingly metal.

Merely an agglomeration of tropes, there is no nugget that makes metal metal. But metal fans might concur that, as stridently humorless as metal may be, its lack of irony keeps it blissfully free of sincerity. Metal is not personal but completely internal, not interpersonal but utterly public, magical rather than political, and thus always, in its way, religious. The nature of history as a diverse collectivity of experiences may seem more suited to punk. Still, Tsushima rides the fence admirably, in its unselfconscious apprehension of a totality whose only unifying element is anguish, becoming perhaps less of a “history album” and more of a “war album.”

Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad presents war not as a transcendent individual experience, but an unstoppable gluttonous inertia of force before which conquerors and victims are equally powerless. Weil defines “force” as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” “A man stands disarmed and naked with a spear pointing at him;” she says, “this person becomes a corpse before anybody or anything touches him.” As in Weil’s description of the Homeric epic, the chief tone of Tsushima is bitterness. “The dissonance introduced in the overture, “The Winter Palace,”introduces a dread that lingers throughout the action of the musical narrative”, grimly relating episodes in the admiral’s reflections upon the battle, before, during, and after, with the delusional yet fatalistic determination of Custer at Little Big Horn. “The cold brutality of the deeds of war is left undisguised;” rhapsodizes Weil, “neither victors nor vanquished are admired, scorned, or hated.” On a more modest scale, the same sentiment could be applied to Tsushima.

Glory in struggle, a subtext of all loud white music, is subtly tweaked in the fearful feedback, deformed rhythms, and ominous harmonies that counterpoint Tsushima’s thrashy gallops, surgical barrages, and martial marches, somehow mingling the mournful solemnity of patriotic Russian choral anthems with Fugazi’s insurgent insouciance to create a result that is neither reverent nor skeptical. Almost a straight-faced echo of the miniature Stonehenge proffered by Spinal Tap, the mightiest works and most sublime cataclysms of man are seen in their true ephemeral puniness. Rather than a bestowal of posthumous heroic laurels, the abject defeat of arrogant power seems to be the moral of the story, summed up in the chant that closes the album: “Day by day, like links in a chain, darkness spreads at the edge of the empire.” The torch of triumph and the flame of the fallen warrior must dispel in smoke for any hope to stay kindled.
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Arriver’s website with info about the album is here.