We’re going to have a roundtable next week on kids comics (featuring a special guest post by the multi-talented Brigid Alverson if all goes well.) To get you in the mood I thought I’d reprint this effort from Culture 11. So here goes.
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For lots of small children, “funny” equals slapstick — and by that standard, the funnies just aren’t all that funny anymore. Kinetic pratfalls, fisticuffs, explosions, characters bouncing about like demented sugared-up toddlers — to draw those things you space which just doesn’t exist anymore on the funnies page. The full-page nuttiness of strips like the Katzenjammer Kids or Popeye are, of course, long, long, gone. But even the four-panel efforts of my youth have shrunk and dwindled. If you get three tiny panels on a daily, you’re pretty darn lucky — and that means that physicality has been mostly replaced by verbal humor and the occasional static silly drawing. Strips like Dilbert (or even the online Achewood) are almost completely paralyzed; clip-art friezes whose inert perfection is unsullied by motion line or sound effect.

Not to despair, though. Non-sedentary funnies still exist. They’ve just hopped, scurried, and rolled off newsprint, and into the children’s section of your local bookstore. Little, little ones can find cartoon hippos and penguins and moose cavorting with the requisite flurry through any number of Sandra Boynton books — most especially the appropriately named Hippos Go Berserk! And for slightly older kids, there’s Mo Willems, whose Elephant &Piggie series is one of our households all-time favorites…possibly edged out by Willems’ series of Pigeon books.

Part of what makes Willems’ books so enjoyable is that his background is not in the funnies, but in television — he wrote for Sesame Street, and was involved in a number of Nickelodeon animated series. Obviously, animation and comic strips have a long history together, but over the years they’ve largely gone their separate ways. Animation has retained its commitment to wacky physical hijinks and the funnies pages — well, as we said, not so much.

This isn’t to say that Willems’ stories are violent. On the contrary, even by children’s publishing standards, these are extraordinarily gentle books. The plots involve straightforward, resolutely unfrightening conflicts; in “There Is a Bird on Your Head!” Elephant Gerald must deal with a bird building a nest on his head; in “I Am Invited to a Party!” Piggie gets a party invitation, and she must figure out (with Gerald’s help) what she should wear. Even something like Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, the title of which at least suggests the possibility of car chases and crashes, in the event involves nothing more hair-raising than a small bird throwing a tantrum.

It is quite a tantrum, though. The pigeon really, really wants to drive the bus. After begging and pleading with the reader to give him a chance (“My cousin Herb drives a bus almost every day!” “How ‘bout I give you five bucks?”) the insistent bird has a full-page fit, hopping up and down, shouting to the sky, and flipping over onto its back in an explosion of motion lines that culminates with it’s head turned around three-hundred sixty degrees, it’s eye inflamed and bulging red, and it’s wings flapping in a multiplied blur, shedding feathers like drops of sweat.

Though Willems simple character outlines and neutral backgrounds are obviously derived from animation, the grainy quality of his chalky lines, their feeling of dashed-off imperfection, gives the drawings a tactile oomph. That sense of contained movement on a static surface, of personality within the line, is one of the great joys of comic-strip cartooning, and Willems’ mastery of it is, I think, part of the reason his books have been so popular with both kids and parents. For instance, in the Elephant & Piggie book, Today I Will Fly!, Piggie is determined to get herself airborne. Willems illustrates her hapless hopping with energetic thick dotted lines, which trace her tergiversations from right to left across the layout, then back from left to right on the next page — and ultimately, through a short hop and uuuuuuup in a flying leap onto poor Gerald’s much-colonized head. Those dashes are, literally, a physical delight: my son likes nothing more than to trace every single one of them with his finger. If I forget and turn the page before he gets a chance to do so, I’ve got something very like a pigeon tantrum on my hands.

Willems makes use of his luxurious space not only in terms of elbow-room on the page, but also in terms of story length. These narratives may not be especially extended, but compared to a daily comic strip, they might as well be novels. With that extra room, Willems reinjects visual cartooning with some of the rhythms of animation. His narratives have the spiraling escalating silliness of good vaudeville. In I Am Invited to a Party! Gerard and Piggie decide first that the party must be fancy dress…then that it must be a pool party…then that it must be a costume party…until at the end Piggie is wearing an evening dress with flippers and a snorkel and a giant cowboy hat. Each costume change is preceded by the same schtick, as Gerald proclaims, “We must be ready! I know parties!” (To which Piggie responds, “He knows parties!” ) The repetition and variation is like a sublime schematic of how humor works. It also makes it easy to anticipate and then memorize the dialogue, which is exactly what four and five-year-olds want from their reading experience.

Ultimately, though, perhaps the greatest advantage Willems has over his newsprint peers is not space, but time. Between Elephant &Piggie, the Pigeon series, and other projects, Willems seems to be churning out somewhere between four and five books a year. That’s quite a pace — but it’s nothing compared to the brutal grind of a daily strip. The truth is, given all the constrictions placed on them, it’s no wonder that the funnies have had to abandon many of the medium’s traditional resources. Perhaps, as newspapers complete their death spiral and content is forced online, the funnies will rediscover some of the possibilities they’ve lost — though goodness knows strips like PvP certainly don’t give one much hope. In the meantime, if I start hankering for more cartoony goodness, I won’t have to look too far. Writing this article has alerted me to the fact that Willems has yet another Elephant & Piggie book out: Are You Ready to Play Outside? As Gerald might say, “We must have it!”
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As a kind of update, we did get “Are You Ready to Play Outside?”, which is maybe the best of the series. It certainly has one of the stand out lines: “I am not a happy pig!” It’s amazing the number of situations for which that quote is the ideal. — indeed, perhaps the only — appropriate response.

My column over at Comixology is about romance and Ai Yazawa’s pre-Nana series, Paradise Kiss. Here’s a quote:

The romance genre, is not, in other words, a fantasy of female disempowerment, but of female empowerment. Which isn’t to say that it’s necessarily empowering. In fact, the insistence that women can save men from themselves is, overall, fairly depressing. Why on earth would you want to save Richard Gere in the first place? I mean, fuck him…and no, adamantly not literally.

And yet, the romance genre can’t get enough of him and his ilk. From Jane Eyre and the moody, violent Rochester to Maggie Gyllenhaal and the utterly emotionally inaccessible James Spader in the film Secretary, the excitement of romance is all wrapped up in the magical power of masochism. Yes, this guy is an abusive shithead…but that very abuse makes the relationship all the more rewarding when I tame him through the power of my redeeming love! No pain, no gain…or, to paraphrase another fairytale, no magic kiss without the frog.

This essay first ran in Culture 11.
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The title of Michelle Williams’ forthcoming R&B album is Unexpected— though judging from the first video, there isn’t actually all that much to be surprised about. As an entirely rote processed beat bangs away, Williams repeats the title “We Break the Dawn” over and over while wearing a short, tight dress and slinking around with a posse of yummy and shirtless male dancers. Oh, and there are lots of jump cuts. I guess that would have been novel thirty years ago.

So the title’s just a case of the usual marketing hype? Well, not exactly. “Unexpected,” refers, not to content, but to career trajectory. Williams became famous when she joined Destiny’s Child in 2000. As a member of the hugely popular R&B act, she wore preposterous dresses and sang about bumping, grinding, sex, and dissing those men while throngs of cheering fans stared at Beyoncé’s cleavage. Then Williams turned around and released her solo debut “Heart to Yours” in 2002 — a very fine contemporary gospel album, complete with guest appearances by Shirley Caesar and Mary Mary. After another solo gospel outing, and one more Destiny’s Child release, “Unexpected” is, finally, her solo R&B debut.

Country singers do this sort of thing all the time, of course. Throughout his career, Johnny Cash would pray to Jesus in one track and murder his woman in the next, and hardly anyone batted an eye. But in the world of black music, shuttling between sacred and secular as Williams has done is a lot less common and a lot more fraught. For African-American audiences living in a segregated America, the gospel/pop line was about more than just faith. It was about loyalty to your people — about whether you were going to stay true to your oppressed community, or kowtow to the ofays who were, often quite literally, trying to kill you.

Changing your musical style wasn’t just an unfortunate marketing decision; it was an exercise in betrayal, sin, and damnation. As such, black audiences and artists took it very seriously indeed. In the early 50s, the gospel star Sister Rosetta Tharpe lost much of her fan base when she started performing in secular clubs — even though she was still singing Christian music. Then there’s Sam Cooke, who started his career as the gospel superstar lead singer for the Soul Stirrers. In the late 50s, he moved to secular music and never looked back — though “A Change Is Gonna Come” had gospel tinges, Cooke’s pop music rarely, if ever, touched on his faith.

Contemporary R&B follows in his footsteps. Virtually every R&B artist shouts out to God first thing in his or her liner notes, but that spirituality is kept tightly under wraps on the albums themselves. Even performers that do express their faith more explicitly do so with a certain care. At the conclusion of her 2005 album “My Story,” for example, Na’sha thanks her God while defensively dismissing those who told her it would be bad for her career to do so. Similarly, on their breakthrough “The Writings on the Wall,” Destiny’s Child sings “Amazing Grace” — but only at the very end of the album. Faith is fine, apparently, as long as you save it for the last track.

This nervous tension between private faith and public salaciousness can have unfortunate repercussions. Several African-American stars have been so torn by the perceived conflict between their faith and their music that they abandoned the latter. At the height of his popularity in 1957, for example, Little Richard turned to God and renounced rock and roll, tragically scuppering his career. In less extreme cases, the intensity of the sacred/secular binary can result in a painfully intense refusal to notice what one is doing — a kind of aphasiac hypocrisy. Item A here is Destiny’s Child single “Nasty Girl” in which the super-group famous for its plunging necklines, ascending hemlines, and borderline-hooker-wear upbraided their peers for dressing like sluts. “Nasty put some clothes on,” they harmonized, “You make it hard…for girls like myself who respect themselves/And have dignity….” Translation: I’m out here in my underwear, but it’s classier underwear than yours.

So the firewall between God and mammon has undeniably wreaked a certain amount of personal and aesthetic damage. But overall, it’s effect has been predominantly positive. White musical forms have had much looser definitions of selling-out, but that hasn’t allowed them to dispense with authenticity. On the contrary, the fact that nobody really knows who is real, or why, has resulted in music which is compulsively, and often rather idiotically, conservative. Country music gets slicker and slicker as it fetishizes an eternal rural past,; rock gets older and older as it fetishizes an eternal Baby Boomer moment of youthful rebellion.

There are certainly black musicians who are mired in nostalgia (and yes, I’m talking about you, Wynton.) Overall, though, African-American music is relentlessly forward-looking. Jazz, rock and roll, funk, disco, hip hop…the zeitgeist moves and you stay with it. Keeping it real, when it’s an issue, tends to be about being cool, or tough, or funky, not about being true to the past.

And a big part of the reason for that is, precisely, that for these artists, there is no past. You don’t explore your roots — you rip them off for gimmicks, and jack them for beats. Little Richard used gospel vocal techniques he learned from the amazing Marion Williams, but he couldn’t be Marion Williams, or even really reference her without some dire consequences. For him to look backwards was not to be validated, but to be turned into a pillar of salt.

If Richard had been able to look behind him, it’s doubtful he could have transformed music the way that he did. Similarly, if Destiny’s Child were more invested in their Christianity, they probably couldn’t have embraced the hip hop delivery and serious bitchiness which allowed them to create some of the most ravishing and influential pop music sounds of the last decade. Beyoncé brings the gospel fire on tracks like “Say My Name,” but — like Ray Charles, Aretha, and many others before her — it’s the way she ruthlessly subverts her religion for secular ends which paid dividends, both literal and aesthetic.

To be rootless is to have no fallback position; it’s a dangerous, exciting, and potentially very creative place to be. That’s not to say that every crass commercial move is going to be great art — Michelle Williams’ new album, alas, looks very much like a dud. But it is to suggest that, as has long been the case, if you want to bet on the future, you should place your money with the sell-outs.