How Clear is the Clear Line in Rutu Modan’s The Property?

Posted on July 24, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

I just got my hands on a copy of Rutu Modan’s The Property after reading some good reviews of it online here and here. Modan is one of those artists who people always seem to describe in terms of her sensibility, and I can see why. She has a singular way of treating heavy subjects with a visual brightness in her coloring and use of clear line, and a levity in her writing of dialogue, that brings the tragic into contact with the everyday without diminishing the reality nor the importance of either. Much like her last long-form graphic work, Exit Wounds, the story recognizes the power and importance of the past without wallowing counterproductively in it, or misappropriating it.

The story follows Mica and her grandmother Regina as they travel to Warsaw to recover property lost to their family during WWII. As soon as Avram, the nosy Israeli acquaintance, Tomasz, the sexy but suspiciously philosemitic Pole, and Regina’s old flame, Roman, enter the scene, a series of omissions and half-truths turn the story into a ~~dark~~ comedy of errors. Mica winds up in a perverse reenactment of a Nazi roundup in the Warsaw Ghetto, she argues with family members she doesn’t realize are family, and she’s mistakenly led to believe that she will inherit a Hilton property. The past always looms present but not always as truth. Modan explains in an interview with Marc Sobel for The Comics Journal that she made the deliberate decision to divorce Regina’s story from those of the Polish Jews who endured the horrors of the war by having her emigrate to Israel with her parents before the war. As Modan explains it, all of the characters in The Property, aside from Mica, have a bad faith relationship with the past and seem bent on trying to exploit it for some form of personal gratification:

MODAN: In the story there is this old couple who are trying to feel again what they lost 70 years ago, and there is the Society of Jewish Memorialization trying to make kids experience the horrors of the war, and these Israeli high school kids going to visit the concentration camps like they go to some twisted summer camp, and Tomasz who’s trying to do a graphic novel, dreaming it would become the Polish Persepolis… everyone, except for Mica, the heroine, is trying, in some way, to revive the past.

SOBEL: But even she is going back to reclaim the property…

MODAN: Yeah, but this is what I think happened to Mica in the end. She does connect to the past, but it’s by giving up the property, not by getting the property.

The past matters to Modan but perhaps because, being Israeli, “connecting with the past” is too closely tied to coercive political rhetoric, Modan’s heroine is only able to make an authentic connection to the past by abjuring any claims to personal gain from it.

What I find most extraordinary about Modan’s artistic sensibility is how she approaches morally complex questions through richly colored ligne claire drawings (in notable contrast with Tomasz’s colorless cross-hatched drawings in the comic-within-the-comic). Glen Weldon’s review of The Property describes her use of ligne claire nicely: “Modan’s deceptively clear and simple line work — she can conjure a face in two dots and a single, expressive pen stroke — is a deliberate artistic choice […] Her clean and often brightly colored illustrative style serves in part to lift the fog of war, allowing us to see these conflicts, be they emotional or military, with new eyes.”

For Modan, the clear line is both a form of irony (i.e. reality isn’t so clear) and of observation, focusing the reader’s attention on human expression without the seduction of bad-faith historical realism. Unlike many comics in the ligne claire style, Modan’s clean line does not shy away from awkward embodiment just as her narrative refuses to shy away from awkward misunderstandings and cross-purpose communication. Modan’s clean line, in concert with her hyper-observant eye for human expression and the grotesquerie of embodiment, aligns her work with the surreal. And if you look at some of her illustrations and non-narrative comics, also in the ligne claire style, it’s clear that she has a surrealist sensibility (see the first two images below). Modan’s surrealism creeps in narratively, for example, during the reenacted Nazi roundup, but also visually in a panel showing Mica crying in which her tears appear like Lichtensteinian waterfalls on her cheeks (see Mica’s tears juxtaposed with Lichtenstein’s famous I Don’t Care! I’d Rather Sink below). Also, in Modan’s case, clean line drawing does not necessarily mean clean panels. The cluttered sensuousness and vibrant color palette of many of Modan’s panels betray a punk (I’m thinking Julie Doucet) and a pop art sensibility (see the two panels above showing the crowded flights to and from Tel Aviv). Of course, pop art drew much of its inspiration from the ligne claire style in comics, advertising, and illustration. And Modan is not unaware of this irony. In fact, this layering of visual histories and appropriations appears to be the visual correlate of the historical narratives Modan works with, a layered and endlessly contested space where she seems to be very much at home.

Twee Nostalgia

Posted on July 23, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

“Twee” and “nostalgia” are two terms of critical obloquy that fit together naturally, like (dainty) dog shit on (soggy) twinky. Apart and even more together, they connote precious, precocious inauthenticity, packaged emotion in the name of infantile regression and souls suffocated in cat pics.

Bob Dylan’s much-lauded, latter-day song/video “Duquesne Whistle” from 2012 is a self-referential exercise in cutesy laurel-resting — and/or a biting satiric refutation of same, depending on which side of the smirk you come at it from.

Dylan’s voice is a ravaged shell of its former ravaged shell; the music a winking Tin Pan alley revival of former Tin Pan Alley folk revival; if there wasn’t a video, you’d imagine a chorus line of hobos knocking their legs together and swapping their hands from kneecap to kneecap while pursing their lips in impish surprise.

Instead, though, the video we’ve got shows us a dapper hipster sartorially channeling ragamuffin classic Dylan channeling Woody Guthrie, while flirting with an attractive passerby. The flirtation shades into stalking and our picaresque hero gets maced…and then his day goes downhill from there. Meanwhile, old Bob in a straw hat walks along with a posse of assorted cool folks, swaggering and eventually stepping over young, stalkery, beat up Bob.

The whole video is an exercise in having your twee nostalgia and spitting on it too; you get to see young Bob dream of handing a rose to his sweetheart, and then get to see him thrown to the curb while old Bob’s vocals mug on and on knowingly. The sepia trickster persona of 60s Zimmerman is rejected for the ironic, up-to-date, uber trickster hipster persona of grandmaster Robert. The old witticism is swallowed by the new witticism; the old smug grin swallowed within a bigger, smugger grin, like one of those James Cameron aliens doing a stand-up comedy routine. “You old rascal, I know exactly where you’re going,” the singer smarms, projecting realism via mime show and mime show via realism. Next album, you can be sure, he’ll bring the Blue Man Group out to convey some hard truths.

John Porcellino’s “Under the Stars” is a lot less coy about its twee; Donovan seems like the soundtrack rather than Dylan. The story, from King Cat 72, is just two pages long.

The nostalgia here is a lot less ironized as well; in fact, the whole meaning and function of the art is explicitly presented as nostalgic. “No matter what happens — please remember the peace of this moment — right now” Porcellino, as narrator, thinks, and then the last panel declares “So I try,” while showing the same scene as in the panel at the bottom of the second page. The comic is Porcellino’s effort not to forget this moment, right now; the artless, unshaded, uniform line weight cartoon preserves the memory, as memory, in deliberately un-virtuosic delicacy. Stars, warmth, insects, frogs, all turn into quiet, lacey reproductions of themselves.

In “Duquesne Whistle,” the multiplication, or reproduction, of Bobs, past and present, is a form of control; Bob past, in all his memeness, is firmly in the gargled throat of Bob senior. Porcellino (or Porcellinos) place in “Under the Stars” is a little less certain. Obviously, it’s the artist’s hand drawing the image. But the memory, the thing he draws second after drawing it first, lacks himself. On the first page, he’s in the panel; when he repeats the drawing, labeling it as memory, he’s not there. The vanishing Porcellino could be seen as a kind of completion of the first image, where the narrator, armless, seems made of the same stuff as the trees; composed, like them, of smooth curved outlines, as if he’s about to disappear or merge into the landscape. But the figure not being there could also mean, not a transcendent onenness, but a failure; trying to capture the moment means putting yourself outside the moment. Porcellino wants to remember, but the act of doing so automatically self-recursively distances him from the memory. He doesn’t get the truth of the moment (including his presence), but only a kind of outline; a surface cartoon scribble.

“Under the Stars” tweely mourns its own tweeness and nostalgically mourns its own nostalgia, just as “Duquesne Whistle” tweely celebrates its distance from tweeness and nostalgically venerates its puncturing of nostalgia. If art is smaller than the world, and if art is always already part of a moment that is past, the ominous takeaway seems to be that all representation, and all consciousness, are always already buried in that time capsule adorned with microscopic calligraphy spelling out the names of your favorite Brit pop bands and lost loves. Under the stars that Duquesne whistle will long ago have blown, serenading that same old stupid self in the backyard of your heart.

Pride and Prejudice and Asteroids

Posted on July 22, 2014 by Ben H. Winters

Since my cousin, The Hooded Utilitarian, guest-blogged for my website a couple weeks ago about eclecticism, I have been thinking about the relative usefulness of the concept of genre, especially as it relates to my own rather unusual writing career. Genre has played a big part in my life as a writer thus far, starting with my first published novel, which was—absurdly, delightfully—Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, a book-length parody of the Austen novel, for which I combined the original text with a bunch of silliness about monsters, pirates, and a giant sentient island. So it was Austen-meets-Lovecraft, Austen-meets-Stevenson, Austen-meets-Verne.

This idea was not mine but that of my publisher, Quirk Books, who had enjoyed a huge unexpected hit with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and hired me to do the followup. (I subsequently did a second, Android Karenina. You get the picture.) These novels spawned a raft of imitators, and a bit of mini-craze for what were labeled “mash-up” books—the idea being that you were “mashing up” a canonical novel with genre elements. Someone did Mansfield Park and Mummies, someone did a Jane Eyre with werewolves in it, I think; the guy who wrote Zombies went on to do Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer.

The only thing I regret about my part in this strange period in publishing history, just a little bit, is that some folks have tended to see my subsequent work through this lens of the “mash-up.” My big project, post-Sea Monsters has been a trilogy of detective novels, beginning with The Last Policeman, set in the last year of Earth, before an extinction-level asteroid strikes the planet. “Genre mash-up master Winters is at it again!” went a typical review—the implication being that this time, instead of smashing Jane Austen together with Jules Verne, I had gone down to my wacky novelist laboratory and put science-fiction chocolate into my mystery-novel peanut butter.

Except that the new stuff isn’t like that at all, not really. The Last Policeman and its sequels are generally pretty serious, pretty straight-ahead crime novels, with the pre-apocalyptic backdrop hopefully serving to heighten the stakes and add an existential element.

Now look, I’m not complaining. I love these reviews. I love all reviews. I recognize that people who write about new work are always going to evaluate it in the context of the artist’s earlier work. What I’m surprised by and interested in is the the idea that any work of fiction (or movie, or comic, or whatever) that combines or juxtaposes two disparate thematic or stylistic elements is a “zany experiment” of some kind—as opposed to just doing what fiction (and art generally) is supposed to do, which is, you know, be interesting.

Obviously, Sea Monsters and its cousins were meant to be a very particular form of element combination, adding action/adventure elements to classics as a form of comedy—but I feel like every successful piece of art finds its power by in some way putting together unexpected things: there are doses of dry comedy in The Maltese Falcon (remember when Spade refers to the titular precious object offhandedly as “the dingus”?), there are doses of swooning romance in Dickens, there are knock-knock jokes in Bob Dylan’s song “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum”.

Interesting artists, especially interesting genre artists— are always looking for ways to baffle and subvert whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing. That’s not writing a mash-up, is all I’m saying; that’s just writing.

Editor’s Note: The last book in Ben’s Last Policeman series, World of Trouble, is available now.

The World’s Largest Comic Book

Posted on July 21, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Angouleme’s Les Murs Peints is the only comic book with literal gutters and panels four stories high. My guidebook adds “Circuit des” and translates it “Graffiti Walk,” but “Murs Peints” means “Painted Walls.” CitéCréation commissioned some of France’s most popular bande dessinee (comic book) artists to design them. It’s a fitting choice for the city that’s home to the Cite Internationale de la Bande Dessinee et de l’Image. The web address abbreviates that to citebd, or, literally, Comic Book City. I spent a couple of days at their research library and museum, so the murs were mostly an afterhours perk. My guidebook thinks there are twenty, but then I saw another dozen online and so kept looking. The tourist bureau has a map, but the city is a medieval maze. Unofficial strolls also produce a range of unofficial additions.

Some of the murals are so large they are hard to miss:

Some you can walk past without noticing:

Some images are literally hidden:

Often you just need to look up:

They started painting them in 1998, the most recent in 2006:

One of my favorites includes its own shadow on the opposite building:

And the rest of the wall is even better:

If you like sequence in your sequential art, this is for you:

While most are cartoons, a few play photorealistic tricks on the eye:

Many are within the ramparts bordering the old city, but some (unofficial ones) are on the outer walls themselves:

One is in the center square of the old city:

More are down narrow side streets:

My walks included actual graffiti:

And sometimes just graffiti tags:

And even the utility and mail boxes joined in:

I didn’t spot this one and the utility box facing it until driving out of the city:

I searched for but somehow did not find the tallest mural:

For others I didn’t photograph myself, visit Angouleme’s site.

Ross Campbell on Endings

Posted on July 20, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Ross Campbell, the creator of Wet Moon stopped by to comment on Qiana’s post about comic series and endings. I thought I’d reprint his thoughts here.

great essay, Qiana! and thank you so much for giving some attention to Wet Moon for it, i appreciate it. :) i feel like serial comics ending is something i rarely see people talking about, or when they DO end everyone just kinda shrugs or is sad or says “the ending sucks!” but they don’t get more into it than that.

not to focus too much on my own work here, but i feel like at this point there isn’t any ending to Wet Moon that will ever be satisfying, regardless of whether it ends at volume 8 or volume 30. there will always be something unsatisfying for readers, and i wonder if other cartoonists who do serial stuff feel that way about their work, too, and maybe because of that they’re scared to end it. i’ve actually never really ended anything i’ve ever written, even seemingly standalone books i’ve done were meant to have sequels that got canceled and never happened, so i have no idea what it’s like to END anything. part of me is excited to finally come up with an ending to something, but at the same time it feels scary and sad.

i think i half agree with Vaughan’s quote and half disagree. i feel like some stories definitely need endings, i can think of a lot of serialized stuff where i wished the ending would happen or that it happened sooner than it did, it always sucks seeing a story you love peter out. but on the other hand i also like stuff, particularly TV shows as i don’t read a lot of serialized comics anymore, that go on and on without an ending in sight because it can create a nice “lived in” feeling and i like following characters when there isn’t a big plot looming over them and when the story doesn’t seem to be in any rush to get somewhere. it’s not comics of course but i’m really into Grey’s Anatomy and it’s about to start its 11th season and i’m loving it more than ever, and after watching 10 seasons it’s like you live with the characters and being a drama show it never ramps up to some epic plot or confrontation or something, so it feels satisfying to just leisurely live in that world with the characters. since there’s no big plot and it’s more about exploring the characters and having fun with them, if it ended abruptly i don’t think i would mind that much because there isn’t really anything that NEEDS to be resolved. so in that sense i don’t agree with Vaughan because i think there can be stories that narratively don’t need endings and are better for it.

Strapping On The Man

Posted on July 19, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

An edited version of this review ran at Bitch magazine.
___________

For a lesbian creator, Ariel Schrag is unusually obsessed with penises.

Schrag started her career making autobiographical comics in high school. Her first two books — Awkward, about her freshman year and Definition about her sophomore year — were insightful, deft, sweet coming of age stories. But as she moved into Potential and her junior year, things got considerably darker. Ariel, the character, began to experiment with her sexuality, and Schrag, the creator began to experiment with comics form, culminating in the mammoth senior-year Likewise, an intense, complicated work using multiple styles and a recursive, allusive structure to chronicle Schrag’s twin obsessions with her way-too-straight girlfriend Sally and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Again, Likewise is an ode to phallicism. Ariel purchases a large dildo for her 18th birthday; she has daydreams about various men with various penises who may or may not be sort of Ariel herself having sex with Sally; she has an intense epiphany while reading Joyce’s description of the ultra-phallic flower Saxifragia stolonifera, “father of thousands.” “Oh my god, that is so perfect,” Ariel in the comic thinks, as Schrag the artist draws the flower in emotive charcoal, one of the loveliest images in the graphic novel.

Given this interest in pensises, it’s perhaps not surprising that Schrag’s first novel, Adam, stars somebody who has one. The title character is not a lesbian, but a nerdy adolescent virgin guy obsessed (like young comic-book Ariel) with girls. He has little luck with them…until he visits his lesbian sister in New York and is mistaken for a trans man. He ends up having to tape his real penis down with Ace bandages in order to use a strap on to have sex with the love of his life, a lesbian named Gillian.

The gender-crossing here quickly becomes vertiginous — especially if you read Adam as Schrag in drag, a gay cis woman pretending to be a heterosexual cis man pretending to be a trans heterosexual man in order to have sex with a cis gay woman. Schrag, for her part, acknowledged in an interview that “Adam is mostly me.” She added:

“I like the idea that 1. Someone reading Adam would find my depiction of a male teen to ring true and that this implies the differentiation between male and female is perhaps less stark than some believe and 2. That someone might read Adam and find that my depiction of a male teen doesn’t ring true to them, perhaps strikes them as more “female” and that this implies that Adam himself is innately “female” in some ways, making his passing as a trans man perhaps less of a (or at least a different nature of) deception.”

The idea of gender as deception is of course familiar from the catchphrase, not-quite-correctly attributed to Judith Butler, that “gender is performance”. Cis-Adam pretending to be trans-Adam can be seen as a kind of dress up. But it can also, as Schrag says, be seen as a kind of truth, since Adam is really Schrag identifying as Adam. Or, to put it another way, you could see Adam as an authentic performance of Schrag’s masculinity.

Schrag herself suggested to me that this was how she sees the character.

“When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, masculinity was very important to me. My hair was cut short, I dressed like a boy, and was often mistaken for one. The primary kind of sex I had with women was using a strap-on and I was always the one to wear it. I would go to strip clubs and get lap dances. I would tell people about going to the strip clubs and be thrilled by their shock and amusement. Acting “masculine” made me feel powerful, and more importantly, cool. It was lame if a guy went to a strip club, but cool if a girl did. I do not have these feelings anymore. Not that I’m anti-strip club, but I don’t think it’s especially cool when women—opposed to men—enjoy them. Much of Adam is about exploring my own relationship to masculinity and the way I observe it functioning in the world.”

Schrag added, “as someone who has sex using strap-ons, I did take a certain delight in forcing this teen boy, all his equipment in working order, to have to use a strap-on as well. ”

What’s best about that last comment is the multi-layered way in which it performs masculinity all by itself. The touch of competitive vindictiveness, the amused-but-still joke about whose penis is better (if not bigger) — those seem like recognizably male tropes.

Which isn’t to say that Schrag wants to be a man, any more than the trans men in the novel are women (despite the claims of one drunk, politically incorrect lesbian in the book.) Rather, it’s to say that the fascination with men, the competitiveness, and even the failure to be a man, are all “definition” masculine, as a younger Ariel might put it. Being a man is about not being a man. And that being a man by not being a man is painful and ridiculous and sad and sweet, much like Adam, or like Schrag, him- or herself.

Utilitarian Review 7/19/14

Posted on July 19, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ng Suat Tong on Asumiko Nakamura’s Utsubora and pornography.

Me on 12 Years a Slave as torture porn.

Me on Nightjohn and slavery as educational uplift.

Chris Gavaler on apes, men, and (no) women.

Charles Reece on Octavia Butler and the virtues of species suicide.

Rahawa Haile on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and not necessarily rooting for the humans.

Qiana Whitted talked about Ross Campbell’s Wet Moon and ending comics series.

Kate Polak and I talked about violence and sexual violence in Garth Ennis’ “The Boys”

Utilitarians Everywhere

Bert Stabler posted this video directed by him and Matt Steinke to which I contributed the vocals of the evil plant brain thing.

At the Atlantic:

—I interviewed genocide scholar Adam Jones about misandry and discrimination against men.

—I interviewed Tressie McMillan Cottom about country rap, hick hop, race, and class.

At Salon I wrote about Gene Yuen Lang and Sonny Liew’s comic The Shadow Hero, and superheroes as assimilation fantasies.

At Esquire I wrote about:

—the female Thor and why making legacy characters more diverse is a good thing.

—black Captain America and what it means for a black superhero to enforce law and order.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

—how the Rolling Stones have sucked for a really long time, and wondered if that mattered to their World’s Greatest Band TM status.

—how the problem with Columbus is not cultural appropriation but cutting off people’s hands and raping 10 year olds

—copyright and Dream Another Dream, a new kickstarter funded collection of Winsor McCay tributes.

At the Chicago Reader I wrote briefly about Soundgarden and rock nostalgia for rock nostalgia.

Other Links

Osvaldo Oyola on the impossibility of the black superhero.

John McWhorter on cultural appropriation, or not.

On Slavoj Zizek plagiarism, and the logistic of superstar scholarship.

Julianne Ross on confused MRA memes.

Noah Gittell on nudity in OITNB.

Elias Light makes the case for Paul McCartney’s solo recordings. Interesting, if not convincing.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Yearly Archives: 2014