Monthly Archives: August 2012

Grief Without End

Posted on by

This first ran on Comixology.
________________________
 

Dokebi Bride is not easy to categorize. A Korean comic, it’s got the young female protagonist, the cute ancillary pet, the fantasy trappings, the giant-eyed waifs, and the flower-bedecked images typical of shojo comics for girls. But, on the other hand, it’s also got gratuitous, gross-out art — twisted corpses, mottled rotting monsters with faces growing out of their cheeks, crawling chattering things with their intestines on the outside — that are more typical of shonen horror comics for boys. The breathtaking covers, with subtle, luminous colors, also seem to reference children’s book art. The whole is one of the most distinctive manga-influenced comics styles I’ve seen, with clean, expressive layouts that juxtapose the lovely and the disgusting, the realistic and the fanciful.

The comics’ approach to narrative falls more subtly, but just as definitely, outside of easy genre categorization. The story centers on Sunbi, a young girl with shamanic powers that allow her to see spirits and the dead. You’d think, given that set-up, that the book might go one of two ways. It could be episodic, with Sunbi meeting and exorcising a series of ghosts in relatively neat, self-contained sit-comish episodes. Or you could have more of a long-form narrative adventure.

Dokebi Bride, though, refuses to plump firmly for either option. Instead, the story keeps shifting in and out of formula; it will establish a group of characters who seem to be the characters, and then it will drop them, sending Sunbi off in another direction entirely. Rob Vollmar, in a fine review of the series’ first volume at Comics Worth Reading, called that book a “prelude,” which it is. But, not having yet read the follow-up volumes, he couldn’t know that everything is prelude: Over the six volumes, Sunbi goes from a child living with her grandmother in the country to a teenager living in Seoul with her father to a runaway living on the streets without ever settling into a rhythm or routine. The book constantly wrong foots her, and the reader as well.

Early in the series, for example, the aforementioned cute ancillary pet — a dog who we’ve seen grow up from a puppy in the first book — leaps between Sunbi and an evil spirit. The dog is badly wounded, and Sunbi is forced to run out into the street. Later, she sees the dog running towards her in a classic Disney moment. “Solbang! You’re okay! I’m so relieved! I’m so —.” But the dog isn’t okay; its dead spirit has just come searching for her. And, to further twist the knife, Sunbi has been placed under magical protection to make her invisible to the spirit world for a time, and as a result, her dog can’t find her. The cute, beloved animal, which in most shojo narratives would be the series’ most identifiable, constant image, goes on into the afterlife in the second volume without ever saying goodbye.

That departure, I think, points to the core knot at the heart of Dokebi Bride. The book, like many ghost stories, is about grief and dislocation and how the two circle around each other like black, exhausted smudges. The first volume opens with Sunbi’s father carrying her mother’s ashes back from the grave; that volume ends with the death of Sunbi’s grandmother, who raised her and cared for her. The central loss of a parent, and therefore of self, returns again and again through the series, a literal haunting. Sunbi can’t function without putting the past behind her, but the past is everything she is — she can’t let it go. When a fortune teller offers to read her future, Sunbi rejects the offer angrily. “No, I don’t want to know about my stupid future!” she bites out through her tears. “Just tell me what all this means to me! Tell me why they’ve all died and left me, why they’re even trying to take away my memories!”
 

That may sound like a catharsis, and it kind of is. But, again, Marley’s narrative isn’t exactly linear or exactly episodic; instead it’s recursive. Sunbi’s conflict is mirrored on different levels, and in different iterations, in both the people and the spirits around her. In one story, Sunbi meets an old woman from the country looking for her grandson in Seoul; in another Sunbi meets a chef living with her crippled, mute mother, who she appears to hate for her infirmity. Each story ends at an impasse of inescapable, irrecoverable love. The grandmother’s search was precisely and already a year too late before it began; the chef ends the story begging her mother to be reincarnated as her daughter. “I will raise you tenderly, you’re so precious. I will beat up any bastards who make fun of you. So you won’t know any sorrow…so you won’t know any suffering…I will raise you so lovingly, like a flower….” I cry every time I read that. I just cried while writing it, for that matter.

What you’re supposed to do with grief, of course, is achieve closure and move on — ideally in 60 minutes, less commercial breaks. Or, to put it in more eastern terms, as Marley herself does occasionally, too much attachment is a bad thing. Except, of course, and at the same time, it isn’t. Sunbi is constantly being told that she needs to let go, both by people who don’t particularly understand or care about her (like her father and stepmother) and by people who do, like her grandmother. There’s obviously something to this; Sunbi’s attachment to and fears about her past makes her a beacon for unattached spirits, who are constantly trying to possess her. If she’s going to survive, she needs to harden her heart.

And yet, hardening your heart is not necessarily surviving, either. Sunbi realizes this herself, noting, “Grandma told me to live like someone who’s not heard or seen; that it’d be uncomfortable once I got involved in this kind of thing…but…I’m scared that I may not be able to cry, or laugh, if I keep on acting like someone else like this.” This isn’t simply an idle possibility; throughout Dokebi Bride Sunbi shows herself capable of remarkable coldness. When a therapist expresses empathy for the loss of Sunbi’s grandmother, Sunbi responds by using her mystical abilities to first divine and then sneer at the fact that the older woman has had a hysterectomy. This sort of thing happens repeatedly. When somebody tries to get to close to her — whether her father, her stepsister, or a nerdy schoolmate — Sunbi acts like a witch, literally. Sometimes she seems more or less justified; it’s hard to fault her when she uses her mystical connections to take out a number of creepy guys who are threatening her at a club, for example. But the issue isn’t really whether the folks on the receiving end get what’s coming to them, but what happens to Sunbi’s own soul when she reacts from hate and fear. It’s after she has the club guys beaten up that Sunbi first develops a rash on her arm…a rash which Marley clearly implies is a kind of karmic raw spot.

Sunbi defeats her assailants in this sequence by summoning a Dokebi, an ugly goblin spirit with whom Sunbi has a complicated relationship. Dokebi are both powerful and comically hapless. On the one hand, they can cast curses, are physically dangerous, and have access to seemingly limitless gold. On the other hand, they can’t buy anything with their gold because they can’t figure out how to exchange it for money, and they’re so unacquainted with personal hygience that if you smear paint on one, it can’t figure out how to wash it off. Sunbi uses this fact to ensnare her Dokebi, and force him to agree to a contract; she wipes the paint off his face, and in exchange he agrees to come and help her when summoned, aiding her against evil spirits or half-drunk shitheads at a club, as the case may be.

The relationship between Sunbi and her Dokebi is, however, a good bit more complicated than the initial master/servant dynamic would appear to suggest. Sunbi does berate and yell at the Dokebi as if he were an inferior — but for his part, the Dokebi follows Sunbi less for legalistic reasons than for romantic ones. He’s smitten with Sunbi, and while the sexual subtext here is played for laughs, it’s all the more blatant for that. To summon the Dokebi, Sunbi has to lick a ring — and each of those licks has a decidedly pleasurable effect on the Dokebi, who bounces around giggling ecstatically whenever Sunbi’s tongue touches the (ahem) stone.

Just as Sunbi is more than the Dokebi’s master, though, she’s also more than his (parodic) bride. When Sunbi is in trouble, the Dokebi comes and protects her. In a book as obsessed with parental bonds as this one is, that makes him a father-figure. Moreover, when Sunbi asks the Dokebi his name, he tells her he doesn’t have one, and so, as mothers do with children, she names him Gwangsoo, or “hands that shine a light.” No wonder that when Sunbi runs away from home and leaves Gwangsoo’s ring behind her, he falls into a sniveling depression, which is an exaggerated, comic-relief caricature of Sunbi’s own grief at the loss of her parent.

Gwangsoo eventually tracks Sunbi down, and Sunbi greets him gratefully…not so much because he saves her from danger (he actually screws that up) as because she’s happy to have a friend. That reconciliation leads to other, larger ones, as Sunbi seems, at last, to find a balance between protecting herself and caring for others, between holding on to her past and not letting that past consume her. This is a decent thumbnail definition of what it means to become an adult, and by the end of volume 6, Sunbi does, in fact, seem to have grown up.

Or maybe not. Volume 6 ends with a plot-twist that comes out of absolutely nowhere, and leads I have no idea where. I may never find out, either; according to an email from Soyoung Jung, the Vice President of Netcomics, “Dokebi Bride has been “indefinitely postponed…due to the author’s schedule conflict.” That’s obviously really disappointing — but in terms of the series itself, there is a kind of logic to it. Dokebi Bride is definitely a Bildungsroman that never ungs. The issues here don’t get resolved when you reach a certain age; they just change and don’t change. “I have completely overcome my fear of them,” Sunbi thinks near the last volume’s conclusion; a few pages later she’s shouting in terror. The wheel rolls on, and you don’t necessarily get to see where it’s going. Instead, all you can do is watch grief, love, death, and beauty spinning by, familiar and new, no matter how old you are, or how wise you hope you’ve become.
 

A Reading, A Rereading, and a Question

Posted on by

About a month ago, I bought a comic book, read it, jotted down my response thoughts and moved on. As it happens I did not publish these thoughts. A little bit ago, I reread my written response. Then I reread the comic book itself. Then I set about crafting a new response. The second attempt at a response was worse than the first. The second reading of the text was less appreciative than the first reading. Time had passed. My opinion of the work had changed.

Since comic books are rooted in a periodical, serial paradigm, many of them are not even designed to be reread too many times. They become outdated the moment that a new installment become available for purchase. Those first impressions become our sole impressions.

________________________

One of my personal short term goals is to read fewer comics. Read fewer things but read them harder. Read deeper. Soak them up and find things that a Wednesday-evening spree-reader might overlook. Perhaps those somethings that I seek simply aren’t present in many comic books. That’s fine too. I need to do fewer things. I need to be less frantic.

I need to relax. In all possible senses of the idea.

But my enthusiasm for sequential art burns bright as always. What I think that I would like to do is attempt to focus my enthusiasm on a handful (or fingerhold) of things rather than attempting to shovel a stack of magazines into my face every Wednesday evening.

____________________

Cartoonists spend enough time making comics, the least we can do as readers is spend some time reading them.

____________________

What is gained? What is lost? What changes for you as you reread comics? Do you reread comics? I don’t mean skimming or flipping to favored scenes. Do you restart a comic book and read it straight through the way you did when you first encountered it?

Here is my prompt for you: which comics have spent the greatest amount of time reading? For academic reasons, for your job, for fun, for nostalgia, to settle arguments–what are the comics that you personally read and reread?

And why?

Utilitarian Review 8/11/12

Posted on by

On HU

Me on Sean Collins and the cliquishness of HU.

Me on Source Code and the mainstreaming of Philip K. Dick.

Domingos Isabelinho on Marcos Mendes.

Subdee on Araki Hirohiko’s Rohan at the Louvre. (part 1; part 2)

Melinda Beasi on the Bechdel Test and Nana.

Me on the off-putting self-referentiality of Godard’s “Band of Outsiders.”

Me on the slick repulsiveness of Minority Report.

Richard Cook on the checkered history of Batman on screen.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I ask experts for their recommendations on the best detective fiction.

Again at Splice I talk about Total Recall and how Philip K. Dick anticipates his own remaking.

And finally at Splice, I praise Co la’s sublime future-past electronica.
 
Other Links

Craig Fischer on Jonah Hex and All-Star Western.

Robert Stanley Martin on the Help.
 

Bat History

Posted on by

Dark Knight Rises is an odd movie. It’s a mish-mash of Dickens, adventure stories, geek nostalgia, Hollywood bombast, and a smattering of “ripped from the headlines” topicality. The movie manages to be a fairly enjoyable diversion, but as other reviewers have noted, it’s a mess from both a narrative and ideological perspective. But its messiness isn’t entirely the fault of the filmmakers. The latest film is part of a decades-long process where a children’s adventure story was modified to appeal to an older audience, specifically an audience that remained attached to the childish elements of the story. Live-action Batman films (and TV) are required to satisfy both a nostalgic attachment to childish adventure stories while insisting that such entertainment is not childish.

In ancient times (i.e., before I was born) live-action Batman was a simple concept. No one would accuse the original Batman series (1966-68) of being too complicated. It was children’s television at its most basic: bright colors, catchy music, unvarnished plots, and violence that never went beyond a punch to the jaw. The series had no pretensions of being either great art or politically relevant, which is not to say that it was bad. In fact, Batman was and is consistently entertaining. The over-the-top performances of the villains, the deadpan earnestness of Adam West, and the 60’s camp were successfully mixed with the more ridiculous premises from the comics. But while the series became a cult classic, it had its share of detractors. Its unabashed silliness was less appreciated by the aging community of comic fanboys who wanted their Batman stories to cater to their adult tastes.

Comic book Batman entered a “grim and gritty” phase during the 1980s, and this was reflected in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). Significantly darker and more violent than the TV series, the movie was clearly targeted at an older fanbase. It was also the first attempt to turn Batman into a Hollywood blockbuster, along the lines of Jaws or Star Wars. Blockbuster status meant lavish production values, fancy special effects (which haven’t aged well), marketing deals with fast food chains, and an A-list cast, including Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, and Jack Nicholson. But the childish elements of the character remained: the Batmobile, the Batcave, and all those “wonderful toys.” Another director might have produced an incoherent disaster, but Burton cobbled together a reasonably entertaining, if shallow, film that satisfied both the fanboys and mainstream audiences.

The secret to Burton’s success was due to his idiosyncratic vision of Gotham City, a heaping dose of film noir with a touch of BDSM and goth sub-culture. Batman and its sequel, Batman Returns, could be described as noir-lite, lacking most of the typical noir preoccupations but relying on dark, brooding imagery to enhance a plot that relied on mood more than substantive content. The goth and BDSM influences factors more heavily in Returns, particularly during the famous origin sequence of Catwoman. Among the many superhero film franchises, the Batman films by Burton stand out as having a distinctive look.

Burton’s idiosyncrasies allowed the various pieces of the Bat franchise to co-exist, albeit uneasily: the fanboys got their “dark” story, mainstream audiences got an action film that didn’t look like all the other action films they had already seen, and the more juvenile elements appeared slightly less ridiculous if they were bathed in shadow. But in aiming for an adult audience, Burton could never fully embrace the most childish parts of the Batman franchise. Most obviously, Robin is nowhere to be seen (to say nothing of Batgirl, Bat-Mite, or Bat Shark Repellent).

The Bat-franchise went through a number of changes with Batman Forever (1995). Officially a sequel to Batman Returns, Forever could more accurately be described as a soft reboot, given that the film had a new lead actor (Val Kilmer) and a new director, Joel Schumacher. And Schumacher’s movies had a different visual style and a greater affinity for the childish content in Batman comics. This Batman film would have a Robin (Chris O’Donnell). Gadgets and other wonderful toys would be on full display, and Schumacher even worked in a joke with the “Holy ___!” exclamations made famous by the original Robin, Burt Ward. And the dark Gotham of the Burton films was replaced by a much more vibrant and cartoony city.

But many of these features were overshadowed by the presence of Jim Carrey (as the Riddler), who was at the height of his fame when Batman Forever was released. The next film lacked Carrey and his massive ego, allowing Schumacher to shape the Batman franchise to his own preferences.

Batman and Robin (1997) is widely regarded as the worst of the Batman films, and perhaps the worst superhero movie ever made. While my inner contrarian would love to defend the film, in truth it was fairly awful. Bad acting, worse writing, and not a single moment of genuine excitement. But for many fans, the movie’s greatest sin was that it was campy. It had Batman and Robin fighting on ice skates. It had godawful puns delivered by Arnold Schwarzenegger (as Mr. Freeze). And there were nipples on the bat-suit.

Schumacher’s great mistake was in assuming that Batman was a campy character for kids (and maybe adults who enjoy children’s entertainment). It’s an honest mistake, because Batman really is a campy character for kids (and kids are still interested in Batman, as demonstrated by more than one successful animated series). But something big happened over the course of the 80’s and 90’s – fandom got older and became mainstream. And over the past two decade superheroes went from being a niche product sold to young children and antisocial geeks to being a significant chunk of Hollywood’s revenue. People who had never picked up a comic were getting excited about the latest Batman, X-Men, and Spider-man films. But the mainstreaming of superheroes meant the contradictory preoccupations of fandom – a reverence for source material with an insistence that such material be updated for an older audience – also became mainstream.

The change was driven by a number of factors. Comic nerds may be a minority, but they are disproportionately likely to have disposable income and are fiercely loyal to certain intellectual properties, two things which make them an attractive market to the Hollywood suits who own those IPs. Also, the older distinctions between “children’s entertainment” and “adult entertainment” were declining, the result of the creation of the PG-13 rating in 1986. Previously, the MPAA ratings systems drew a stark contrast between films appropriate for children (G and PG) and films restricted to adults (R) because of sex or violence. But the PG-13 rating effectively created new genre of action movie – with just enough violence and sexual content to please adult males but not so violent or sexual that parents wouldn’t allow their kids (or at least their teens) to see them. And the “grim n’ gritty” superheroes preferred by older fanboys fit perfectly into this new rating. Tim Burton seemed to understand the new approach, so he toned down the goofier aspects of Batman. Schumacher highlighted that goofiness, and the fans never forgave him.

Which leads me back to the recent trilogy of Batman films directed by Christopher Nolan: Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and Dark Knight Rises (2012). Superficially, Nolan’s films are similar to Burton’s. The three movies  are dark, both visually and figuratively. They were surprisingly violent, even by the standards of PG-13 movies. And many of the more juvenile elements of the Batman comics were either excised or downplayed. For example, Robin is largely absent from the trilogy (except for a brief reference at the very end of Dark Knight Rises). But the Nolan films went even further in the pursuit of seriousness. Batman was grounded in a realistic world, so his vehicles and gadgets became less fanciful and were explained away as next-gen technology (memory cloth!), persuasive to audiences as long as they don’t stop to think about it. And the outlandish versions of Gotham created by Burton and Schumacher were replaced with spliced footage from real cities such as Chicago and Pittsburgh. Nolan was also determined that his movies touch upon important current events. In other words, he wanted his films to be topical. In The Dark Knight, Batman uses an illegal surveillance system to track down the Joker, referencing the growing “surveillance state” in the U.S. and the obvious risks to civil liberties. Dark Knight Rises includes an homage to “A Tale of Two Cities,” and it’s not hard to see a link to the Occupy movement and growing inequality in the U.S.

Nolan went further than Burton in promoting Batman as a character that adults could appreciate, but at the end of the day he couldn’t ignore the childish roots. The character of Batman is still a boy’s adventure story, and the elements which make the Batman stories juvenile are the same elements that actually make them fun. So Batman still drove a rocket car, used cool (if less ostentatious) gadgets, and fought supervillains. And in the third film, Batman was flying around in a vehicle that was obviously pure fantasy, brawling with Bane, flirting with Catwoman, and prepping a would-be Robin. Altogether, Dark Knight Rises was actually rather “comic booky.” For all their pretensions at maturity, realism, and topicality, the Nolan films are still about a guy who dresses like a bat and fights supervillains.

So Batman can’t escape his goofy comic book origins. The various stabs at maturity will generally be in conflict with the juvenile appeal of superhero stories, namely the fistfights, the toys, and the empowerment fantasies. It is also extremely difficult to address political issues with any degree of nuance or intelligence, because boy’s adventure stories are not known for either of those qualities. But Batman will not be going back to the days of Adam West and the batusi. Given the huge success of the Nolan films (and the bitter hatred directed at the last Schumacher film) it’s clear that mainstream audiences have embraced the preferences of fanboys. Batman is going to be dark, violent, and pseudo-mature for the foreseeable future.

The Future Will Be Stupid…Today!

Posted on by

After watching Minority Report last night, I was surprised to discover that most critics do not consider it to be an utter and complete piece of crap. Roger Ebert, in particular, had an absolutely gushing review, in which he praised the film for being “a thriller and a human story, a movie of ideas that’s also a whodunit.”

Ebert is by all accounts a lovely human being, but every time I read something by him, I am reminded that he does not have the critical sense that God gave a roach. Even an insect that frolics in filth would be hard pressed to find any enjoyment in such a shiny, treacly, turkey of a film. Spielberg as director has found perhaps the perfect outlet for his glibness in this tale of precognitive saviors. The film grinds frictionlessly along, a remorselessly predictable blueprint for itself. Flawed hero, tragic backstory, clever chase scene, cleverer chase scene, cleverest chase scene, false antagonist, twist, real antagonist, reconciliation with perfectly domestic yet also spunky wife. Like the precogs, we can see it all coming and all going too; painful echoes of sentiment past sliding down our brainstems as we float weightlessly in an infinite vat of sentimental horseshit.

The emotional core of the film is (you could predict it) the tragic backstory I mentioned. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is a efficient no-nonsense police guy in the precrime unit, snooping out murders before they happen. Beneath his gruff exterior and Hollywood good looks, though, lurks a sadness; his 5-year old disappeared from a public pool. Anderton’s marriage collapsed, and now he takes drugs (ooooh…dark) and watches 3-D home movies of his son and wife. His heart is tugged while watching them and our heart is tugged while watching him; it’s a testament to the power of film and to “complex human feelings”, in Ebert’s words.

Said complex human feelings being: hey, losing a kid — that really sucks. If that happens to you, you’ve got to be deep, right? That is the extent of the film’s character development; Anderton has no other discernible personality traits; nor does his wife. The film’s stupid, by-the-numbers plot, it’s utterly facile and familiar characters, are all supposed to be redeemed by dropping a murdered five-year old onto them from a great height.

Before I had a kid myself, I found this sort of mindless, self-serving manipulation unpleasant. Now that I have a child of my own, who is actually a person rather than a trope, I find it even more detestable. At the end of the film, Anderton indignantly yells at his stupid standard-issue corrupt boss for manipulating his love for his child. Rarely have I seen a moment of such utterly clueless hypocrisy. The whole film is nothing but a giant machine designed to turn unearned pathos into critical bona fides. The closing scene with Anderton, where reunited with his now pregnant wife he touches her stomach, is a blindingly offensive capstone to a thoroughly offensive film, a smug reassuring happy-ending which obligatorily replaces one blank child-marker with another. The kids are just there to make us interested in the utterly uninteresting “star”; a dead child for motivation in the bulk of the story; a live one to wrap things up neatly. What could be wrong with that?

It hardly seems worth mentioning, but the movie looks dreadful too — all smooth lines and computer graphics, a future as streamlined Disneyland, where even the poverty and grime look like part of an amusement park ride, and cops invade everyone’s civil liberties with cute animated spiders that make you wish you could get warrantless retinal scans too. Maybe the precogs could foresee a worse filmmaker than Steven Spielberg sometime in the far future, but right now, as far as I’m concerned, he’s got no challengers.

“Band” “of” “Outsiders”

Posted on by

Band of Outsiders is generally considered one of Godard’s most accessible and warmest films. In a review here a while back, Robert Stanley Martin, called it “an ode to the joie de vivre of adolescence,” filled with charm, and humor.

Robert’s review was a big part of why I rented the film. And I can see, at least in part, what appealed to him. “Band of Outsiders” is filled with the joy of moviemaking; the rush of turning on a camera and almost magically creating art. You can see this in the bravura sequences that Robert points to — the scene when the three main characters declare a minute of silence, and the soundtrack cuts off for 30 seconds, or the famous dance number, or the giddy race through the Louvre. But it’s there even in less flamboyant moments. For example, there’s one scene, shot from a distance, in which the protagonists have to step around two men carrying a rug. It’s nothing special, and barely visible, but the very gratuitousness of it is a kind of high spirits — a gleeful insistence on imitating the stochastic bumps of reality, and a kind of celebratory whoop that film makes that imitation possible.

But while, as I said, I can at least partially key into why Robert enjoys the film, I can’t say that I actually liked it myself. Part of the problem, perhaps, was that, where Robert appreciated the movie as an enjoyment of youth and adolescence, I had a lot of trouble doing that for the banal reason that the actors just didn’t seem young. Indeed, Claude Brasseur, who played Arthur, was 28 at the time of the filming, and looked older; Sami Frey, who played Franz, was 27; Anna Karina (Odile) was 24. As a result, much of their childish tomfoolery — passing notes in English class, for example — comes across less as cheerful high spirits, and more as a kind of decadent desperation. Karina’s blushing bashfulness and flirtatious eye-batting, which Robert (and I think many other critics) found winning, seemed to me like almost queasily self-parodic camp. The scene where, after Arthur’s suggestion, Odile mincingly changes her hair-style, suggests both drag and Pygmalion; a fantasy in which a woman becomes, or is possessed by, a suggestible girl.

Godard is a filmmaker obsessed with the filmness of film; as such, I’m sure that the discrepancy between the actor’s ages and the character’s ages was not an accident. Rather, I think Godard is celebrating not so much the dance of youth as the filmic potential of a dance of youth. The film isn’t about “real” adolescence, but about faux adolescence — especially about the power of film to provide a playground for adults. Thus, for example, early in the film Arthur and Franz engage in a mock gun battle; when Arthur is “shot” he performs an elaborate thrashing “death scene”. Towards the end of the film, Arthur is really (or should that be “really”?) shot, over and over again, by his uncle — and his death scene is even more ridiculous and extended than the fake scene from the beginning of the movie. That’s possible because, of course, the real scene isn’t any more real than the fake one. The kids playing around in the first are just like the adults playing around in the second, a truth only emphasized by the fact that the kids playing around in the first are actually adults playing kids playing around.

I’ve no objection to self-referentiality in itself — but the way Godard does it always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps it’s the smirking deliberateness of his playfulness. Having the teacher read Romeo and Juliet while Arthur courts Odile couldn’t be much less subtle. And as for that oh-so-cheeky run through the Louvre, turning art into play into (by means of the cinema) art — you just wonder how he manages to even see the footage what with all that winking. The heist tropes, the romantic triangle tropes; their tropeness never functions as critique or even really as comment. They’re just “fun” because they’re “cinema”; nifty elements to manipulate, like the soundtrack. For me, “Band of Outsiders” felt less like an exhilarating romp, and more like an hour and a half of being lectured on what an exhilarating romp I was experiencing. Godard the self-referential lecherous control freak doesn’t entirely thrill me…but it seems at least less oppressively self-congratulatory than Godard the insistently whimsical maestro.

Araki Hirohiko at the Louvre (pt. 2)

Posted on by

A continuation of this post about Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.  With the backstory out of the way, it’s time to talk about Rohan at the Louvre, a standalone art comic published – in English! – by the Louvre as part of its original graphic novel series.

The main character of this book is Rohan, a professional mangaka and assumed self-insert character for Araki Hirohiko, the mangaka of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.  Although Rohan is a character from Arc 4 of Jojo, he is most visually influenced by the themes of Arc 5 (the  Italian gangsters arc). This makes sense as Rohan in the Louvre is a graphic novel commissioned by – and set in – the Lourvre Museum in Paris. As one Amazon reviewer puts it: “The question of what art is, is central to the story. What emotion does art evoke in its’ viewers? What inspired the art? What part does the art play in history?”

I’m not sure I possess the visual knowledge to truly deconstruct this book, drawing as it does from Renaissance and Medieval art as much as from pulp and superhero comics. (That same Amazon reviewer says: “This comes highly recommended for art (almost Gil Kanish)… [it] reminds me of a Poe poem brought to life, almost the Casque of Amontilado”). Instead I’ll just post a bunch of scans and do my best to comment on what’s going on in them.

Here’s the first full illustration:

Araki is well-known for cross-hatch shading, odd poses and gestures, and (especially) garish color combinations. In this case, the book’s first plate continues the pink, green and blue theme of its cover. In a surprise move, however, the rest of the book is fairly restrained (in terms of its color use, anyway). Instead of combining three or four strong colors on a single page, each section of the book is dominated by a single color with perhaps another strong color acting as an accent.

(Read from right to left.)

The book begins in the past, with a young, hot, aspiring (but not yet published) Rohan spending his summer vacation at his grandmother’s inn. The primary color of this section of the story is a faded parchment, fitting in with the flashback and Japanese countryside vibes, with Rohan’s green hair and a mysterious young woman’s pink shoes (and, later, kimono) serving as accent colors. Araki’s black and white art tends to feature a lot of heavy cross-hatch shading, which he draws in himself, by hand, at great speed, eliminating the need for assistants to add screen tone. The cross-hatching adds speed and dynamism to the drawings, but often makes individual pages look heavy and dark. (Or perhaps that’s just the way they look scanned in – the perils of reading unofficial translations.) The watercolor and marker coloring of this book, however, allow for more subtle and lighter shading. Most of the time the drawings look like fashion illustrations.

I’ve been making a big deal out of Araki’s beefcake men (see previous entry), but he is perfectly capable of drawing hot women too. Notably, his women as well as his men tend to have well-defined muscles. The close-up on this page is on a part of the body that’s sensual for both men and women.

From these panels, you might be getting the impression that Rohan at the Louvre is a classy, largely wordless comic without much narration or dialog getting in the way of the visual storytelling. If you thought that, you’d be wrong:

In fact, Rohan talks a lot!

So far all of these pages, while having that strong sense of movement necessary for a popular serialized manga (where the idea is that each page in a 200-page weekly “phonebook” anthology should take less than 10 seconds to read), have been laid out in a straightforward way, with square panels set at right angles to each other. This is the usual way of laying out shonen (boys’) manga, where panels tend to follow a clear sequence – useful for, say, action sequences – in contrast to shoujo (girls’) manga, which tend to play around a bit more with composition in order to highlight the emotional or inner life of the characters. With that in mind:

The panels are mostly still square, it’s just that the borders are bit tilted, giving a sense of action to the page. In this case, though, the action isn’t a battle scene or anything like that: it’s romance. I wanna call particular attention to the middle panel on the page – doesn’t it kind of remind you of that one Roy Lichtenstein painting? The one that’s all about highlighting the melodrama of romance comics as the woman sinks beneath the waves?


Something like this, right?

Actually, the resemblance to Lichtenstein is probably not coincidental:

There are a few things going on here beyond the Lichenstein-level melodrama and (once again) shoujo-style askew borders. This is probably the most intimate scene in the book, as Rohan and his youthful crush gaze into each other’s eyes; it’s also the first scene where Rohan invokes his Stand, which allows him to open people up like books. As a part of this power, he is able to read their thoughts and life stories, and to write in his own words in their place. In Jojo proper, Rohan rarely had qualms about exercising these powers. In this case, however, he is a gentleman and exercises restraint.


Rohan’s unrestrained self in Act 4 of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

Not only are Rohan’s actions restrained on this page, but the art is restrained – or at least clean – as well. Although he is opening up her face, there’s no blood or gore; her face closes as neatly as it opens, with no scars left behind. Even the edges of the “pages” of her face are perfect right angles. People’s heads will explode in much more messy and permanent ways later on in the book, so keep this page in mind as you read on.

When she’s in a better frame of mind, the woman tells Rohan about a terrible painting, said to be made from the blackest cursed ink, which belongs to the Louvre. The painting is a good excuse to draw some great all-black panels, and the all-black panels help to set off the black school uniforms of the characters on the facing page, who like Rohan come from Jojo Arc 4. The connection between Rohan and the Mona Lisa is pretty tenuous, as one of the characters points out on the page (“But that’s a woman! And just a painting!”). But no matter! We are not concerned with the logic of chance in this comic, we are concerned with the logic of works of art, and of memory.

With that tenuous connection, we’re now on our way to Paris to find the painting so “black” it literally curses everyone who sees it. Along with the scene change, it’s time to change the color scheme: from now on the dominant color will be pink, with blue accents. Why pink? Why not? Perhaps it reminds Araki of an old picture postcard of Paris. (Sorry for the bits of paper covering up the art – I was in a rush when I scanned in this page.)

Here it is, the panel we’ve been waiting for! Of course I am talking about the one where a character in Jojo poses like a high-fashion model for no  reason. Although this is still an interior illustration – so the color scheme is still restrained – you can see all of the colors of the issue coming out here – pink Paris, blue accents and sky, some green on the buildings and even some of that parchment color from the flashback scenes. This page is purely a fashion plate, not meant to progress the plot in any way.

This must have been confusing for non-Jojo fans. But anyway, why go through the trouble of making a self-insert character, if not to make that character AWESOME with the AMAZING POWER OF INSTANT DRAWING? And of course, naturally, no authorial fantasy would be complete without adoring fans recognizing you even in another country and asking for an autograph – right?

(In fact, Araki has a lot of fans in Europe, especially in Italy.)

I’ve talked a bunch about how Jojo has a lot of different influences, some high-culture and some pulp. When Rohan arrives, there are a bunch of noir-ish panels, where he leans over the shoulder of a Louvre employee as she looks up the painting he is after on her computer, makes phone calls from her desk, etc. Instead of those panels, though, I wanted to highlight this one because it has the best view of her awesome polka-dot tights.  I want them!

The story is set in the Louvre, but it would be a bit of a drag to have to draw the galleries of the Louvre over and over. So we quickly move the action to the vaults in the basement. There’s a three-dimensionality, a sense of space and perspective, to these pictures. The color scheme shifts to blue, with pink accents. There’s some black here as well, but actually the underground is going to be mostly blue and green. That’s because Araki needs to reserve black for the monstrous cursed painting made from the blackest ink.

Now we’re getting somewhere. The painting is locked up in a dark vault. On this page you can see some great prison bars. Not only was one of Araki’s first manga series, BAOH, a horror manga set in a prison, but he also did an entire arc of Jojo in a woman’s prison. He’s a past master at drawing endless prison bars in perfect perspective, in other words.

Do you remember when I said that Rohan’s power allows him to open people up in a way that is very neat, very orderly, and doesn’t leave scars – there’s no harm because he leaves people exactly as he found them? Well…

Victim #1.

There’s a couple things going on here, I think. One is the black ink seeping out of the security guard’s head, along with his brains and so on. (In case one explosion of viscera is not enough for you, Araki draws this scene three more times, from three different angles.) Another is, as I mentioned, the clear contrast between this scene, where someone’s head messily explodes, and an earlier scene, where Rohan neatly and cleanly opens up a girl’s head to read her memories (before thinking better of it).

In fact, the evil painting doesn’t just make a mess: it ALSO reads the memories of its victims, in order to create illusory zombies of their dead loved ones. These zombies walk around like bombs, killing anyone who touches them in the same way the zombies died themselves. The evil painting, in other words, has powers that are quite similar to Rohan’s powers; except that while Rohan is content to learn people’s secrets and then leave them the same way he found them, the painting wants them die in horrible ways.

In fact, the similarity goes even deeper than that.  When originally introduced, Rohan explained that his powers would only work on the first person who saw a finished page of his manga for the first time, and then only if the other person understood his art.  Eventually, he learned to use his power on anyone.  In a similar way, the painting in the basement of the Louvre exercises its voodoo hex powers only over those people who want to take a closer look.  It’s a dark mirror of Rohan’s powers, in other words; and a fitting power for a cursed Work of Art (which, while it can have good, neutral, or bad effects, does not have any effect on people who aren’t interested enough to really look).

 

Zombies!

Along with prisons, exploding guts and brains, and people turning into cubes – or contorting themselves non-fatally into bizarre shapes – zombies are a reoccurring theme in Araki’s art. Last year, he published a book of essays on horror movies which included a list of his top 20 favorite horror flicks of all time. These films are (courtesy of my friend Sabina):

1. Zombie (‘78 director’s cut)
2. Jaws
3. Misery
4. I Am Legend
5. The Ninth Gate
6. Alien
7. Ring (TV version)
8. The Mist
9. Final Destination
10. Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
11. Deliverance.
12. The Blob
13. 28 Days Later
14. Basket Case
15. Sleeping With The Enemy (yes, the Julia Roberts domestic abuse psycho-thriller)
16. No Country (…surely he doesn’t mean No Country For Old Men?)
17. The Exorcist
18. Funny Games (‘07 US remake)
19. Hostel
20. Wrong Turn

Non-Jojo fans probably don’t care, but this list is interesting if you are a Jojo fan. (Sabina says: I’m surprised Final Destination isn’t higher on the list given it is basically Araki-bait.) You can see that zombies – and people’s exploding innards – have multiple places of honor on this list.

I feel as if I am probably giving too much of this comic away, so I’ll skip the rest of the inventive gore. Suffice to say that Rohan’s companions die in uniquely visually interesting ways. If you’re a horror manga fan, you might want to look into this even if you don’t know anything about Jojo.  The art in this section is awesome.

Eventually it’s Rohan’s turn to die:

This page is probably my favorite. Like the earlier page where the first guard died, it’s dominated by white. The speech bubble of Rohan’s final dying words and the bottom panel’s faceless silhouettes frame the page in a way that turns them into the background, and leaves the actual action of the page in the foreground, where it looks like a bubble. It’s as if Rohan’s final moments are just a thought, about to “pop” and disappear.

Some classic work of art must be the inspiration for Rohan’s pose here, right?

How does Rohan survive this onslaught of white – an unstoppable, all-powerful force that turns your own memories and history against you? I’ll leave it as a surprise for people who buy the book.

In conclusion, I’m really glad I bought this! Fifteen dollars for a full color Jojo standalone story on nice 8.5 x 11″ paper really is a bargain, especially if you’re a fan. The pictures look even nicer at full size.  The plot follows genre conventions fairly closely, but like every Jojo story doesn’t stay within a single genre. Araki’s art is adaptable yet distinctive, changing to match genre requirements while still being unmistakably his own. It’s funny and scary and idiosyncratic and weird.

Bottom line, if you’ve read this far: you really should consider reading Jojo. You can start from the Western comics style series reset (Steel Ball Run) if you don’t want to brave the earlier art. It’s even mostly incomprehensible to new fans, just like a Western comic series restart would be.

Or, of course, you could start with this.