Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Dyspeptic Oroborous: The Divine Hobby

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A couple of days ago, my twitter feed displayed the following message from TCJ.com.

Today we worship the latest by @xaimeh with pieces by Dan Nadel http://bit.ly/oZjPF2, Frank Santoro and Adrian Tomine http://bit.ly/mV9U8W

I’ve liked things that both Dan and Frank have written in the past — Dan’s piece on the Masterpieces of American Comics exhibit was probably my favorite selection in the Best American Comics Criticism volume that Fanta published a year or so back. And tcj.com has been doing a lot of good things since they sent us packing (this lovely piece by Craig Fischer, for instance. So I was assuming that that “worship” was just a bit of jocular hyperbole. Obviously the pieces would be laudatory, but I had hopes they wouldn’t be sycophantic.

Alas, if you click the link you get what the tweet says; Jaime’s comics transubstantiated into communion wafers, less to be read and discussed than to be consumed as a path towards union with the divine. Thus, Frank expresses awe, reverence, and wonder, talks about breaking down into tears, lauds the purity and uniqueness of Jaime’s talent, and finishes up with what reads like literal hagiography.

No art moves me the way the work of Jaime Hernandez moves me. I am in awe of his eternal mystery.

Tomine’s piece is more of the same, albeit shorter. In comments, Jeet Heer suggests that it might be worthwhile to compare Jaime’s work to Dave Sim’s. This does seem like an interesting juxtaposition, but Frank nixes it insisting, “Lets be careful to not make this thread about Sim. This is a Jaime celebration.” No criticism at TCJ, please. Only celebration, worship, and gush.

To be fair, neither Frank nor Tomine are making any pretense of trying to explicate, or really even engage, with Jaime’s work. Instead, both of their pieces are testimonials — personal accounts of having seen the light. From Frank’s piece

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.

We don’t need to see the two panels in question reproduced (or, indeed, any artwork from the story reproduced), because it’s not about the panels. It’s about the effect of those panels, and of Jaime, in Frank’s life. Jaime is transformative because Frank says he’s been transformed. It’s a witness to true belief by a true believer for other true believers. The imagery of short circuits and closed loops is unintentionally apropos.

Dan’s essay is nominally a more balanced critical assessment. In practice, though, it’s got the same religion minus the passion, resulting in an odd combination of towering praise coupled with bland encomium. Frank’s piece has the energy of an exhortation; Dan’s, on the other hand, reads like a painfully distended back-cover blurb. “The Love Bunglers”, Dan declares, is the story of Maggie “finally holding onto something.” Jaime’s art is great because it is personal, so that “this alleyway is not just any alleyway — it’s an alleyway constructed entirely from Jaime’s lines, gestures, and pictorial vocabulary.” And the big finish:

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. “TLB” is also a love letter from its creator to his readers and to his characters. It’s a letter from an old friend, wise to the fuckery of life, to the random acts that occur and that we have no control over. Jaime, I think, used to be a bit of a romantic. He’s not anymore, but in this story he gives us something to hang onto: A piece of art that says that you should allow fear and sadness into your life, but not let those things cripple you. That sometimes life works out and sometimes not, but the things we can control, things like comics and storytelling, carry redemption.”

Let fear and sadness into your life but don’t let them cripple you. Sometimes life works out and sometimes not. It’s criticism by fortune cookie. And…signing the last panel with a heart to show us the power of love? Gag me.

The point isn’t that “Love Bunglers” isn’t great. I haven’t read it; I don’t have any opinion on whether it’s great or not. But I wish instead of telling us that this is one of the greatest comics in the world no really it is, Dan would have taken the time to develop an actual thesis of some sort — a reading of the comic that elucidated, unraveled, and interracted with its greatness, rather than just declaiming it.

I’m talking here specifically as someone who is interested in and conflicted about Jaime’s work. I would like Dan, or someone, to write something that would allow me to see why this particular sentimental melodrama dispensing life wisdom is better than all the other sentimental melodramas in the world that are also dispensing life wisdom. But instead all Dan provides is assertion (“It just works. They’re real.”), predictable appeals to vague essentialism (“There are no outs in his work — what he lays down is what it is.”) and paeans to nostalgic retrospection (“As I took it in, I realized that I remembered not just the moments Jaime was referring to, but also the narratives around those moments. And furthermore, I remembered where and how and what I was when I read those moments. I remembered like the characters remembered.”) If I am unconvinced by standard-issue authenticity claims and do not have years and years of reading Jaime comics to feel nostalgic about, what exactly does “The Love Bunglers” have to offer me?

Part of the trouble here may be that it’s difficult to write about something you like as much as Dan likes Jaime’s work. Love can sometimes reduce you to gibbering — which is understandable, though not a whole lot of fun to read for someone who isn’t under the influence of similar giddiness. I think it can also be especially tricky to write about soap-operas, where a large part of the point is personal emotional attachment to individual characters. If the narrative deliberately figures the reader as fan or lover; it can be hard to say anything other than, “I adore this character! I adore this author! I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love! It’s so awesome!”

I don’t have a problem with people writing to say that something they love is awesome. I’ve been known to do it myself even. But this is TCJ,…and it’s Jaime Hernandez — the most prestigious publication devoted to comics criticism focusing on one of the most lauded contemporary cartoonists. If they wanted to run one love letter, I guess I could see it…but two or three? Surely, nobody in TCJ’s audience needs to be told that Jaime is awesome. Everyone knows Jaime is awesome. Except, possibly, for a few weirdos like me who are waiting to be convinced. But if this is the case, why forego actual nuanced and possibly convincing discussion of his work in favor of vacuous cheering?

Partially no doubt it’s because comics remains permanently tucked in a defensive crouch. No matter how unanimous the praise of Jaime is, no matter how firmly he is canonized it will never be sufficient to undo the brutal unfairness of the fact that he’s not as popular as…Frank Miller? Harry Potter? Andy Warhol? Lady Gaga? Somebody, in any case, can always be trotted out to show that the really famous and canonical person you love is not famous and canonical enough.

But there’s also a sense in which TCJ’s tweeted fealty is less about Jaime (who surely doesn’t need the flattery) and more about the celebration of fealty itself. You worship at the altar of Jaime because worshiping at the altar of Jaime is what the initiated do. The sacramental praise both constitutes an identity and confirms it for others. You are in the club and enjoying the hobby in the proscribed fashion. Fellow travelers shall take you to their bosoms, and even the chief muckety-muck shall weigh in with a heartfelt and avuncular hosannah.

Comics was long a subculture first and a subculture second and an art a distant third. TCJ set itself to change that. Certainly, it has altered the list of holy objects. But the rituals remain depressingly familiar.

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Update by Noah: This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

Termite Assault on Precinct 13

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I’m pretty sure I saw this a while back when I was obsessed with John Carpenter films, but somehow I never wrote about it. I can see why; while it’s an enjoyable and neatly-plotted film, it doesn’t exactly require complex exegesis. Evil forces of chaos in the person of a (carefully mixed race) LA gang converges on a soon-to-be-decommissioned police station. Good forces of order (with an equally mixed racial profile) resist. Good takes some losses, but ultimately wins. Yay!

Of course, you always know good is going to win in these sorts of films. What’s interesting, maybe, is how little affect goes along with it. It’s possible I’m just jaded, but the sides were drawn so broadly, and the characters were in general so flat, that it was difficult to really feel especially exercised one way or the other about their survival or lack thereof. Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) is okay as the inexperienced lieutenant in charge — the actor has some charm, but the writers seem somewhat paralyzed by the film’s audacity in choosing a black man for the role. As a result, the romantic heat gets apportioned out to Napolean Wilson (Darwin Johnston), a dangerous killer turned ally, whose ingratiating bad boy swagger works for about twenty minutes less than the film’s run time. I knew these characters weren’t going to get killed, but if they had I wouldn’t exactly have mourned.

For that matter, the emotional motivator of the film, the senseless shooting of a little girl played by Kim Richards, rather spectacularly fails to emote. Richards, who played Disney roles, trots out every ounce of grating cuteness she can muster, and the actor who plays her dad turns in an Oscar-worthy performance when he merely looks mildly pained rather than actually rolling down the car window and retching noisily. When the kid finally gets shot, my reaction wasn’t stark horror so much as relief that somebody had finally shut her up and I wouldn’t have to hear her whining for ice cream anymore. If civilization demands the defense of this sort of egregious mugging, I think I’m on the side of the faceless Mongol hordes.

If the theme is staid and the plot is predictable and most of the characters are still-born, what’s to like? Well, I like the the way shabby bureaucrat Starker (Charles Cyphers) walks, one shoulder tilted up, so his clothes stick up like he’s wearing a cardboard cutout of a suit rather than the real thing. I like the way one of the gang members looks around the table at his fellows slitting their arms to make a blood pact, turns to his own arm, and slaps it with grim decision to make the vein pop up, as if he’s the world’s most farcically determined Red Cross donor. I liked the ice cream man looking nervously in his mirror at the car driving back and forth, back and forth, and the abrupt irritation with which he turns off his music when he tells that damn girl that the truck is off duty. And I liked just about everything Laurie Zimmer does as the unflappable police secretary Leigh, from the way she barely blinks when she gets shot in the arm to how she languidly sticks a cigarette in Napolean’s mouth to the way she lights the match in a single intense motion. Watching her performance, it’s hard to believe Zimmer never became a star; she’s simultaneously bad ass, vulnerable, and sexy as hell. Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton have nothing on her.

So if the film’s virtues are predicated on its individual moments, does the ideological baggage (good! evil! civilization!) just get in the way? That’s Manny Farber’s termite art point, perhaps — that it’s the small instants of beauty that matter, not the lumbering, gross stabs at significance.

But would those small moments exist without the ideology. It’s the film’s rote latness, the starkness and even clumsiness of the civilization-vs.-chaos schematic, that makes Leigh’s match-strike and all its controlled lust echo with iconic urgency and pleasure. It’s the figuring of the gang as feral beasts which makes that guy striking his arm so hyberbolically sublime. It’s not so much that the moments add up to the ideology as that the ideology makes the moments enjoyable. The meaning is there so you can appreciate the form; the signified points to the sign. If something’s behind you in Plato’s cave, it’s there to add a little shiver between your shoulder blades when Leigh lights that match and the shadows jump out, sexy-cool, against the wall.

Lilli Carré’s The Fir Tree

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This first appeared at the Comics Journal.
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Lilli Carrés version of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Fir Tree” functions in general as an illustrated books…but there are many moments which showcase Carrés familiarity with comics. One of the most memorable of these is a page that shows our protagonist, the fir tree, talking to a stork. The layout makes dramatic use of white space and of bleeds; the tree is at the bottom, its lower two-thirds chopped off by the edge. The stork is dead center at the top, its wings spread majestically, its legs extended straight out below it, and its head cut off by the top of the page. In the space between bird and fir, three pale speech bubbles are arranged in a graceful curving tier. The fir’s words reach up on the left-hand side, as if trying to follow the stork up, up, and off the page: “Oh, how I wish I were tall enough to go on the sea. What is the sea and what does it look like?” And on the right, floating down negligently, as if casually dropped, the bird’s speech bubble replies, “It would take too much time to explain.”

I know folks swear by Chris Ware’s complicated virtuoso every-which-way page layouts, or by J.R. Williams’ dense formalist virtuoso page layouts, or by Dave Mazzuchelli’s archly formalist virtuoso page layouts. And, you know, I can appreciate all of those too. But simplicity can be a kind of virtuoso move as well, and if there’s been a more quietly beautiful page in American comics this past year, I’ve missed it. The way the bird’s dark feathers spread out against the top of the page, both emphasizing the vertical movement upwards and dynamically freezing the moment; the way the fir tree is bent slightly back to watch the departing flight, its branches twisted in delicate, eloquently pleading curves; and of course, the blank space itself, across which want and time float and reach and never meet.

You almost don’t need the rest of the book, because Anderson’s whole story is right there. Carré captures The Fir Tree’s fey clarity, the sense of a reality made unbearably vivid by its passing. The stork is more beautiful because it is indifferent and it is gone; the sea is more beautiful because it is blank and unknown; childhood innocence tugs at our heart because of the inevitability of death. Whether you’ve read this story or not, you know what’s going to happen, which is why the temptation is to just stay on this perfect page — even though the end is here, too.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Destined to Fester

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Death metal mix download. Download Destined to Fester here.

1. No Truth — Atheist
2. Veralder Nali — Rimfrost
3. Onward Into Countless Battles — Unleashed
4. The Art of Corruption — Inevitable End
5. Passage — Oppressor
6. Hung, Drawn, and Quartered — Cancer
7. The Ancient Ones — Morbid Angel
8. Eternal Hate — Massacra
9. Beyond the Flesh — Disincarnate
10. Reflections of the Dark — Carbonized
11. Nostalgia — Gorguts
12. Destined to Fester — Autopsy
13. Bonesaw — Autopsy
14. The Lurking Fear — Repulsion
15. Black Breath — Repulsion

Utilitarian Review 10/15/11

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On HU

We continued our roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism with discussions by Ng Suat Tong, Corey Creekmur, Caroline Small, and a short one by me. Lots of comments as well.

Robert Stanley Martin with a lengthy post on Eddie Campbell’s’ Alec: The Years Have Pants.

I talk about manliness and The James Bond comic strip.

Vom Marlowe on the horrible Birds of Prey TV show.

Bert Stabler on the awesome poster artist Keith Herzik.

And I talk about Kate Beaton and the Web.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about men, women, and the remake of John Carpenter’s Thing.

Other Links

Eddie Campbell replies to Nadim Damluji’s post about Habibi.

And Campbell replies to Suat’s post. In comments Milo George credits me with stunting comics criticism for a generation.

Over at Grantland they have what seems like the definitive takedown of the DC reboot. (Thanks to Eric Berlatsky, aka “my brother” for sending me the link.)

Along those lines, this cracked me up.

Bert Stabler has a great essay about two Paul Nudd curated shows at the Hyde Park Arts Center.

And it’s good to see someone arguing with the neuroscientists.

Hark, The Internet

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This piece first ran on Splice Today.
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Kate Beaton is the rock star of web cartoonists. Hark a Vagrant may not be the most popular strip online—I doubt it’s overtaken Randall Munroe’s xkcd or Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins’ Penny Arcade. But, especially with Achewood on hiatus, Hark a Vagrant is probably the hippest web strip around, combining popularity with almost universal critical acclaim. If you’re not familiar with webcomics, there’s a good chance that Kate Beaton will be one of the two or three examples of the genre that you’re familiar with.

Beaton came out with a collected book of her strips last week published by Drawn and Quarterly. The most striking thing about seeing the strips on the page is, perhaps, how un-striking it is to see the strips on the page. In the dim, pre-historic Internet dawn of 2000, Scott McCloud in Reinventing Comics proposed that the Internet would allow comics to spread and morph into fabulous shapes. Creators could take advantage of what McCloud called an “infinite canvas” to produce sprawling images that scrolled across multiple screens.

Some creators have picked up on the hint—McCloud himself has made some comics in this vein—but for the most part, webcomics look a lot like newspaper comics. Beaton’s certainly do; almost all of her strips are three or four panels, like a daily, or else two tiers of three-or-four-panels, like a Sunday. Occasionally she’ll have a slightly different format: for instance, a strip about Vikings collecting souvenir-illuminated manuscripts from sacked monasteries is eight panels arranged as two pages of four-panel blocks. But that’s about as adventurous as the layout gets. Artists like Bill Watterson and Winsor McCay were eager to use every inch of space they had for lush landscapes across which action rolled and sprawled in lavish, kinetic detail. In theory Beaton has a lot more room than Calvin and Hobbes, and even more than Little Nemo, but she’s not interested. Instead, like most web cartoonists, she seems comfortable in the small cramped boxes, which she fills mostly with people standing around with their speech bubbles.

It’s not that the web form has no effect on Beaton; it’s just that you need to squint a little to see them. Most significantly, perhaps, is that you don’t actually need to squint. Comics in the paper have gotten smaller and smaller, encouraging the proliferation of strips like Dilbert—hideously ugly, but readable at even microscopic size.

Many webcomics, like Achewood or xkcd, also feature rudimentary art, but Beaton’s work is much more accomplished. In a strip showing the battle between a giant squid and the Nautilus, the bigger-than-newspaper-size panels give Beaton a chance to play with scale. In one panel, a giant tentacle wraps around one of the men; in another the squid sidles up to the sub. Similarly, in a Sunday-shaped-strip about Queen Elizabeth, Beaton draws the first tier of panels in increasing close-up, allowing us to enjoy the tightly-drawn pattern on Elizabeth’s headdress. Then in the second tier, we pull back, as Bess declares she has the wingspan of an albatross, and goes swooping up, up and over the landscape, until she’s just a butterfly-like squiggle in the sky. It’s not a flashy effect, but it’s nicely done, and it would be difficult-to-impossible to pull off in the space constraints imposed by newspapers.

But Beaton is mostly a creature of the web not so much in her drawings as in the topics she chooses and the way she approaches them. Traditionally, most strips have featured recurring characters (like Peanuts). Some web strips work that way too, but there are others which are more conceptual…. or more gimmicky, depending on how charitable you’re feeling. Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics, for example, re-uses the same clip art dinosaur art in the same six panels every day, altering the text to create different gags. Dan Walsh’s amazing Garfield Without Garfield alters a Jim Davis strip every day, removing the eponymous cat in order to focus on Jon Arbuckle’s life of emptiness and absurd despair.

Beaton’s approach isn’t as formulaic, but it’s still (for the most part) a formula. Rather than inventing her own story lines, she takes characters from literature and history and writes jokes around them. So in “Dude Watchin’ With the Brontës,” Emily and Charlotte enthuse about brooding, violent men (“So passionate.” “So mysterious.”) while Anne points out that these brooding, violent men, are as she says, “alcoholic dick bags.” In another memorable strip, a badass Wonder Woman gets a cat out of a tree by viciously lassoing it and nearly terrifying it to death; in another Marie Curie goofs around by putting little chunks of radium over her eyes.

The joy of Beaton’s work is seeing familiar figures given a half twist and recontexualized—Dracula’s wives discussing women’s rights, or Moses losing the respect of his people because he’s dressed in sandals and socks. As such, her comic fits right in on the web, which has an insatiable love for creating the new out of the bits and bytes of the old. Beaton’s cartoons are like mash-ups or fan-fiction. They’re perfect for an environment in which large communities of people who love, say, Nancy Drew, are primed to send each other links to the new cartoon where Nancy dons a KKK mask, or those who love superheroes are ready to tweet about the strips featuring sexy Batman. Beaton cartoons all feel like Internet memes waiting to happen.

When Internet memes are great, it’s because of their unassuming absurdity; the brilliant ease with which, for example, Beaton makes Charlie the reluctant winner of a trip to a turnip factory, or the quick, biting snark with which she portrays the perfect Dickens heroine as a bland nonentity who looks like her brains have been scooped out with a melon-baller.

When Internet memes are not so great, it’s because of that same swiftness and effortlessness—they can come off as glib. That’s the case for Beaton’s work too, especially over the course of an entire book. One historical figure talking like a valley girl is very funny; when it’s the patois of Elizabethan peasants and Nordic adventurers alike, though, it can start to seem like a tic. Similarly, Beaton’s “isn’t history/literature funny, huh?” schtick gets tiresome after awhile—like those emails from your friend who just can’t help sending you every single “hilarious” link that the Web happened to spit out that day. When Beaton’s good, she reminds you of Gary Larson; when she’s not so good, it feels like Gary Larson domesticated for NPR.

Still, if every hilarious link you ever got was as funny as Beaton’s cartoons generally are, the world would be a happier place. If the Hark a Vagrant collection is, like the Internet, occasionally disappointing, it is also, like the Internet, often delightful, and ultimately worth paying for.

Caroline Small on Habibi, Said, and Heart of Darkness

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Caro posted this in comments earlier today. I hope she’ll forgive me for turning it into a post.
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The classic examples I think of when I think about “good” exoticism are things like World’s Fair pavilions and ’60s musical exotica — all trafficking in stereotypes and generalizations and even caricatures, but also, importantly, drawing on indigenous voices and crafting exotic representations that are, overall, positive, rather than dehumanizing ones. They can create interest in the outside world that’s a valuable counter to jingoistic tendencies.

So without intending any criticism of Nadim’s use of Said’s argument, I think that digging a little deeper into Said might be worthwhile, as it seems like we’re moving toward entrenched positions that really are more axiomatic than anything Said himself said. I take Eric’s point (and I don’t know for sure whether Franklin has read Orientalism or not) but it seems like he might find it more palatable than most French theory — Orientalism is from 1978, and it’s much closer to a traditional textual and historical treatise than the canonical works of poststructuralism or psychoanalytic feminism (and Said’s later work.) There’s a copy of the book online, and even skimming the introduction is valuable.

It’s also interesting to note that by the 1990s, in books like Culture and Imperialism (which were much more overtly theoretical than the earlier work from the late ’70s), Said was putting forth defenses of books like Heart of Darkness specifically on the grounds that Conrad was self-aware, that is, even though he couldn’t really think outside of the discourse of Orientalism, he perceived the places where it was insufficient, and that perception comes across in his writing. Said says:

What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his contemporaries is that, for reasons having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system, he was so self-conscious about what he did. Like most of his other tales, therefore, Heart of Darkness cannot just be a straightforward recital of Marlow’s adventures: it is also a dramatization of Marlow himself, the former wanderer in colonial regions, telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place. That this group of people is drawn largely from the business world is Conrad’s way of emphasizing the fact that during the 1890S the business of empire, once an adventurous and often individualistic enterprise, had become the empire of business. […] Although the almost oppressive force of Marlow’s narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism, and that it has the power of a system representing as well as speaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation.

[…] Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable. For if we cannot truly understand someone else’s experience and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the jungle or that Marlow, another white man, wields as narrator, there is no use looking for other, non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable. The circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aestherica1ly but also mentally unassailable.

Conrad is so self-conscious about situating Marlow’s tale in a narrative moment that he allows us simultaneously to realize after all that imperialism, far from swallowing up its own history, was taking place in and was circumscribed by a larger history, one just outside the tightly inclusive circle of Europeans on the deck of the Nellie. As yet, however, no one seemed to inhabit that region, and so Conrad left it empty.

I think the important next question, therefore, is not whether Thompson’s Habibi traffics in orientalist stereotypes, since Thompson has acknowledged that and Nadim does a good job of highlighting them, but whether it does anything interesting structurally with those stereotypes, whether and how it deepens our understanding of them. His right to use them is rather besides the point, IMO. Of course he can use anything he wants, but is what he does with them smart?

I haven’t seen any arguments that he does anything particularly smart with these tropes, in the sense of the type of insight that Said identifies in Conrad. It seems to me, on the surface, that a “cowboys and indians” perspective isn’t all that likely to get to those types of profound dissections of the sociodynamics of Western prejudice. But that doesn’t mean he won’t surprise me! An argument that he accomplishes something that smart is what I’d like to see, from Thompson and people who appreciate the book, and it’s what I’ll be looking for when I read it.