Author Archives: Shaenon Garrity

The Truth, Steve

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Like most nerds, I communicate primarily in quotes from The Simpsons, but I’m old enough that Bloom County makes it into the rotation from time to time.  Nary a San Diego Comic-Con can pass, for example, without a Superman comic or “My Little Pony” display triggering me to say to my husband, “The Truth, Steve, is that ‘Knight Rider’ is actually a children’s program.”  (The correct response: “Can’t be! Can’t *@#!* be!!”)
 

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When Bloom County debuted, it was criticized, often rightly so, for lifting from Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury.  Breathed’s loose, doodle-y early style was a slightly more polished version of Trudeau’s; he later developed into one of the most skilled illustrators on the comics page, more reminiscent of Chuck Jones than any newspaper cartoonist, but that would come later.  Both cartoonists used an eclectic cast of slice-of-Americana characters to discuss current events.  And both were unusually political for the comic strips of the era, which mostly stuck to safe sitcom material.  Early on, Trudeau’s periodic hiatuses from Doonesbury allowed Breathed to replace him in some newspapers.

But in retrospect, Bloom County came from a fundamentally different perspective.  Trudeau emerged from the 1970s late-counterculture tradition of National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live: erudite young left-wingers, trained on Ivy League humor magazines, out to smash the system with subversive comedy as a vehicle for progressive politics.  Breathed’s strip anticipated the next generation, the style that would replace Lampoon-ing: media-saturated, self-referential, political only to the degree that politics is part of pop culture, as surreal and anarchic as a two-in-the-morning flip up the TV dial.  The humor of Bloom County is the humor of The Simpsons and all that came after.

In its original context, the “Knight Rider” line is spoken by Binkley, the only Bloom County character to outpace Opus in gormless naïveté, after mysteriously awakening with a revelation of The Truth in all matters.  The other knowledge Binkley shares: the Monkees didn’t play their own instruments, Opus looks more like a puffin than a penguin, and Reagan will never fulfill his promise to share Star Wars missile defense secrets with the USSR.  That all of these revelations are presented as equal in importance sums up the difference between Bloom County and Doonesbury.

And that was life in America in the 1980s.  The political became the personal, then it became the trivial.  Colors were bright, patterns disorienting, everything expensive and hideous.  The president was a movie star, of course, but more to the point it seemed reasonable for the president to be a movie star, to be just a guy hired to play The President.  Billions of lives depended on a missile defense system named after the movie franchise that had just introduced Ewoks.  We couldn’t handle the truth about the government or our souls, but neither could we handle the truth about David Hasselhoff.  In Bloom County, Bill the Cat, the strip’s Garfield-parodying symbol of half-assed commercialism, has two recurring careers: rock star and presidential candidate.  The careers are close to interchangeable and often inspire near-identical storylines.  In the final years of the strip, Bill switches brains with Donald Trump, the human embodiment of the peculiar mishmash of money, politics, celebrity, and tackiness that could be said to define the decade.
 

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Many of the most successful Bloom County strips make a social observation without making a social statement.  When the characters go hunting for the endangered liberal by baiting a trap with the Village Voice  (“Just let me read the Feiffer cartoon!”), it’s very funny, but it doesn’t express any particular viewpoint about liberals or conservatives or American political debate. (Which is not to say that the artist’s personal views don’t sometimes come through; Breathed seems consistently uncomfortable with women and feminism, for instance.)  One of the most famous Bloom County storylines begins with boy genius Oliver responding to South African apartheid by inventing a “pigmentizer” that turns white people black.  An earlier generation of political humorists would have built this into a moralistic civil-rights fantasy, or followed the premise to disturbing and challenging places.  A story that starts with apartheid has the potential to get dark.  Instead, the gang gets lost at sea on the way to South Africa, leading to Opus eventually returning to Bloom County with amnesia, which is ultimately cured by news of Diane Sawyer’s wedding.  Race relations, soap opera parodies, celebrity gossip: they’re all potential comedy material.  Bloom County’s central innovation was to reject the old-fashioned idea that they should be different kinds of comedy.
 

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The Simpsons played the same tune, ten years later, when it responded to Bush Sr.’s criticisms of the show’s crassness with “Two Bad Neighbors,” an episode portraying George and Barbara Bush as George and Martha Wilson from the 1950s Dennis the Menace TV show.  In the DVD commentary for the episode, writers Bill Oakley and Ken Keeler comment that the older writers on staff were frustrated by the episode; they wanted a show about the President to be a sharp-edged political satire, not a pop-cult parody where the basic joke is “George Bush is old.”  But the younger writers didn’t want to do satire.  And George Bush was old.

To some degree Bloom County, which ran from 1980 to 1989 precisely, is of its time.  In sheer volume of cultural detritus invoked, it certainly stands in stark contrast to the other great 1980s comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, which strove for a sense of children’s-book timelessness.  (My friend Jason Thompson once commented that he always found himself waiting for Calvin to pick up a video game controller.)  Yet Donald Trump is still with us, all these years later, and so is David Hasselhoff, and so is the Bloom County sense of humor, the comedy that comes from collapsing every cultural signifier to a single level of blind, bland confusion and romping through the ruins.

Only occasionally does Bloom County take a coherent political or social stand, most notably in its extended attack on animal testing.  More often, it adopts a “both sides are just as bad” attitude, or simply seems baffled by all the fracas.  When Breathed abandons his post-counterculture cynicism and reaches for a sweet and gentle note, he usually does so by having the characters abandon their pop-culture wasteland entirely for a trip to the swimming hole or the dandelion patch.  In Bloom County, there’s no salvation in political action or cultural revolution; the only hope is to drop out of our oversaturated civilization and go looking for reality.  And that, maybe, is the final truth.
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The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.

The Hooded Utilitarian Comics-Hating List of Love

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I’ve hated hard in my day. Hated hard and long and hot. Hated all day long in the burning sun and come back to hate some more. Most of all, when they’ve deserved it, I’ve hated comics. I once wrote a sitcom pilot based on my life and entitled it “Hating Comics.” (This is 100% true.) But a while back, hating comics lost its luster. I stopped reading comics blogs and message boards, cut back my comics reading to the stuff I actually liked, and renounced comics hate in all its forms. My chakras are now clear and my heart is simple as a child’s as I meditate upon the eventual ascent of my soul unto the Fourth World.

That’s why, when the Hooded Utilitarian invited me to this roundtable, I responded SHAME! Shame on you, Hooded Utilitarian, for promoting negativity! For promoting divisiveness within Team Comics! Comics blogs lead to anger, anger leads to hate, and so on. Personally, I have evolved beyond such base sniping. I no longer hate comics. I have certainly not ranked various comics by level and quality of the hate produced therein, from those which inspire white-hot sputtering rage to those which merely stir intense allergic dislike, nor have I organized my most hated comics into various little categories. Categories like:

Most Hated Comic Strip. You see, this is how damaging hate can be. There was a time, in my youth, when I was consumed by hatred of Frank Cho’s Liberty Meadows. It reached the point that my future husband, when about to introduce me to one of his childhood friends, added, “And please, please don’t mention Frank Cho.” Was this healthy for our relationship? Surely not.

Yes, Liberty Meadows was unfunny, predictable, tidily but lazily drawn, burdened with one of those self-pitying-nice-guy-nerd protagonists I just want to punch until they cry and then stomp on their glasses, and popular only because it featured huge-breasted women drawn in profile, but was that any reason to hate it the way I did? At the time, I didn’t even know about Cho’s “censored” strips wherein his cute-animal characters describe how to perform a donkey punch. My anger was completely out of proportion.

In fact, it was Milo George’s epic takedown of Liberty Meadows in the pages of The Comics Journal, on the occasion of the strip’s reception of an Ignatz Award, that first warned me off the dark path of hate. As an ardent Liberty Meadows hater, I should have basked in sweet schadenfreude, but it didn’t feel meaningful because Milo George hated everything. He’d probably be just as bitchy to Bone. That was my first inkling that hate, when it becomes all-consuming, ultimately loses its power and its meaning.

Most Hated Superhero Comic. Hardcore superhero fans are much better at hating superheroes than I could ever have been, even at my most hate-filled. That said, I confess to being one of the many nerdgirls outraged by DC’s ungentlemanly treatment of Stephanie Brown, a.k.a. Girl Robin. And it all started so well! I’m officially meh on Batman (grim superheroes are just not my thing), but I did always dig the girl Robin in Dark Knight Returns. When, in the mid-2000s, Stephanie “Spoiler” Brown put on the Robin costume and started spunkily kicking ass, I found myself interested in Batman comics for the first time.

So of course Girl Robin got kidnapped and tortured to death.

Then, in an even more hateable and much more bizarre plot development, longtime heroic doctor character Leslie Thompkins took a break from being awesome in the Batman TV cartoons to reveal that she deliberately let Stephanie Brown die in order to teach Batman a lesson. So not only is Girl Robin a textbook Woman in Refrigerator—that is, a female character who is tortured and/or killed strictly to provide the male characters with motivation—the refrigeration was actually engineered in-story. By another female character.

But I don’t hate those comics. Not anymore. I am…irked, perhaps. But hate? Never. Remember how hate can spiral out of control. Keep it down. Keep it way low down.

Most Hated Graphic Novel. OH MY GOD RICH KOSLOWSKI’S THREE FINGERS.

Down. Calm. Down. We don’t hate anymore, remember? We’re past that. Visualize soothing images. Reed Richards entering the Negative Zone. Roger Langridge’s Muppets riding a bus with the Electric Mayhem playing on the roof. Lynda Barry monkeys.

There. Better.

I shouldn’t hate this comic, anyway. Koslowski seems like a nice guy, and he inks a mean Archie comic, and he probably meant well. It’s just that I was suckered into paying hard-earned money for what turned out to be a queasy remake of Who Censored Roger Rabbit with none of the cleverness and deeply inappropriate appropriation of mid-century national tragedies. And having Mowgli from Disney’s Jungle Book as the Toon equivalent of MLK was just a weird choice, and why do I even remember that detail? And then it won an Ignatz Award, which seems to be a recurring theme in comics I hate…

I mean used to hate. Used to. Because I don’t hate anymore. I love. My heart is open and I love comics without judgment or reservation, I welcome all iterations of sequential art into my arms…

Most Hated Webcomic. Okay, I give up. The hate is back. Also? Ctrl-Alt-Del.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

They Die Falling Forward

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This is part of a roundtable on The Drifting Classroom, and also part of the October 2011 Horror Manga Movable Feast.
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Every one of his characters goes full throttle at everything. The pursuer and the pursued, the frightened weakling, the ominously disfigured freak, the snake woman, the crimson spider, all the characters in Iara… Even in death, they die falling forward.


Seimu Yoshizaki
Kingyo Used Books, Vol. 3, “Umezu Salon”

 

Kazuo Umezu may be the strangest cartoonist in Japan, and that’s saying a lot. With his wild shock of frizzy hair and wardrobe of outsized children’s clothing (always including a shirt of red and white stripes, the pattern he painted his house), “Kazz” is instantly recognizable on the streets and subways of Tokyo. Now 75 years old, he has a bouncy demeanor and a mad, relentless grin, giving the impression of an elderly child. He’s best known for horror manga, but is almost as famous as the creator of the children’s comedy series Makoto-chan. Think of the EC horror artists who created MAD. (Umezu’s own description of the difference between the genres: “If you’re doing the chasing, it’s comedy. If you’re being chased, it’s horror.”)

There are cultures where artists are expected to be quirky, but modern Japan is not among them, and the cheerfully nonconformist, happily gruesome Umezu has always seemed adrift from humanity, an astronaut from an alternate reality with its own idiosyncratic laws. And yet his comics bleed out of universal human fears and desires; their logic is the logic of the id.

That’s clear enough in Drifting Classroom, arguably Umezu’s masterpiece (although if I know Jason Thompson, he may make a spirited case for recent works like the probably-unpublishable-in-English Fourteen). Nothing that happens in this manga makes sense. Adults go murderously insane at the first sign of trouble. Children are more reasonable but sometimes do bizarre, suicidal things, like when the younger students suddenly decide to jump off the school building en masse. Monsters come out of children’s minds, and you can hide by covering your eyes. Young hero Sho has a telepathic link to his mother that extends through time and space. Survival depends not just on the familiar tactics of desert-island stories—collecting water, growing food, developing a rudimentary government and fighting to keep it together—but weird rituals, psychic transmissions, and trusting in strange stories told by frightened children.

It doesn’t make logical sense, but it makes id-sense. It’s a child’s logic. When you’re a child, adults are impossible to understand. Other children aren’t much better. Fantasies have power. (In her writing lessons, Lynda Barry advises adults to watch children playing “pretend.” They don’t smile.) And the link to Mother is the realest thing in life. Umezu’s manga often play on primal childhood fears, but in his hands they’re not childish; they’re old. Among his early stories is one with the most fundamentally frightening title in horror fiction: Mama ga Kowai, “Scared of Mama.”

If the reality of Drifting Classroom is a child’s reality, that makes the premise even more deeply horrifying. The children are thrust into the future, the adulthood they will inhabit, to find only a ruined, hopeless wasteland. There’s nothing to be done about it, either; their only hope is to get back to their childhoods, to the time when they were, if not loved, at least fed and sheltered and protected. Nothing waits for them in the future but death.

Yet they keep going. Umezu’s protagonists are constantly overcome with shock, terror, and horror, but never with despair. Characters who give into hopelessness tend to die quickly. (There’s the id-logic again; if you give up, you might as well drop dead.) Sho is constantly running, shouting, ordering and begging everyone around him to press on. That’s the one chance Umezu offers: the chance to keep running.

Umezu’s stiff, old-fashioned, almost childlike art increases the sense of urgency and desperation. Hewn from the page in thick, crude lines, the characters seem to be clawing their way into existence, bent on telling their story even as it dooms them. They hardly seem to have come from a human hand at all.

The theme of soldiering on in the face of existential despair is not uncommon in manga, to the point that it’s become something of a cliché cop-out in some recent trying-too-hard-to-be-deep series. But it’s a theme that’s deeply moving—and deeply disturbing—when done well. The climax of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa manga (not the anime, which ends at an earlier and more optimistic point in the narrative), in which the heroine courageously seals the doom of the human race, is a classic example. So is the entirety of Drifting Classroom, although, as with all of Umezu’s work, it’s pointless to say if it’s “done well” or “done poorly.” It’s done. As done as anything has ever been done. Full throttle.

The HU Lady List

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As a lady who frequently rants about lady issues, I have been selected by the Hooded Utilitarian to write a piece about lady cartoonists that will somehow not make all ladies reading it roll their eyes and groan. This is my punishment for all the ranting. I’ve learned my lesson.

Eleven years ago, when The Comics Journal put out its big Top 100 Comics by English-Speaking White Men of All Time Ever Except Dave Sim Because Seriously, Fuck That Guy, five women made the list: Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet, Carol Tyler, Debbie Dreschler, and Françoise Mouly for her work as co-editor of RAW. When the preliminary votes for the HU list were being counted up, it looked like only four women would make that list. Interestingly, it was four completely different women, which led me to suggest that maybe this stuff has nothing to do with talent or recognition; the comics industry simply has room for only four or five women at a time.

By the time all the votes had rolled in and the final tally was made, the HU 115 included a grand total of nine ladies. Is that better? Worse? Essentially the same? I don’t know. Mining the list for observations on which to pontificate, I notice that most of the artists are fairly recent—or, in the cases of Tove Jansson and Moto Hagio, new to U.S. audiences. There seems to be little love for classic old-timey creators like Nell Brinkley, Grace Drayton, Gladys Parker, or Marge Buell. No women from the underground era made the list either: no Trina Robbins, Lee Marrs, Dori Seda, Carol Lay, or Shary Flenniken, whose Trots and Bonnie is currently poised to take over as the Family Feud #1 answer to “Inexplicably Unavailable in a Sweet Reprint Edition” the moment someone finally does a Barnaby book. Autobio pioneer Carol Tyler, one of the four women on TCJ’s list, didn’t make the HU list, despite recently emerging from semi-retirement with the new graphic novel series You’ll Never Know.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, very recent cartoonists were, understandably, also left out; if my brief skim of the list is accurate, the HU 115 includes no webcomics. I can imagine a future list making room for works by Dylan Meconis, Spike Trotman, Jenn Manley Lee, Jess Fink, Dorothy Gambrell, Kate Beaton (of course), and other webcartoonists.

And Carla Speed McNeil. And Lea Hernandez. And Gail Simone. And Fumi Yoshinaga. And Jill Thompson. And Jessica Abel. And Wendy Pini. And Riyoko Ikeda. And Colleen Doran. And Vera Brosgol and Jen Wang and I am going to have to stop before I get in trouble for everyone I’m leaving off.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For
Eleven years ago, when TCJ’s 100 Comics of the Century came out, I thought Alison Bechdel’s alt-weekly strip Dykes to Watch Out For, one of my favorite comics, was a glaring omission. But then I checked myself. If it didn’t get voted in, I thought, doubtless there was a good reason. It probably wasn’t as good as I thought it was. I just identified too closely with the cast of neurotic, intellectual, painfully liberal East Coast lesbians. I wasn’t a lesbian, but I was a Vassar student, which was about the same thing. At any rate, I figured the guys making the TCJ list knew what they were talking about, and Dykes to Watch Out For was just okay.

Now that I’m older, I realize this was bullshit, comics fans just have terrible taste, and Alison Bechdel had to write a big fat supergenius graphic novel with layered references to Proust and Joyce to get the comics world to realize what an amazing talent she is.

If the HU list is any indication, the critical success of Fun Home has inspired critics to take a second look at Dykes to Watch Out For, which followed its ever-expanding cast for 25 years of hookups, breakups, marriages, kids, desperate efforts to keep Madwimmin Books running, and eye-popping political freakouts. It’s like a For Better or for Worse that never went all weird at the end, and also ranted at you about the Bush administration. It’s also an inspiring work to read from beginning to end, just to see how good Bechdel’s art eventually gets.

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
First published in France in 2000, then translated into English as the U.S. mired itself in two Mideast wars like a giant sloth lumbering into a tar pit, Marjane Satrapi’s autobiography Persepolis hit the zeitgeist where it hurt. Satrapi’s experiences as a girl growing up in a family of intellectuals in post-revolutionary Iran, then as a drifting expat in Europe, were the perfect surface upon which literary critics and political pundits alike could project their ideas about the Mideast. There was the wildly excited reception Persepolis enjoyed, in the mainstream media as well as the comics press, when it first appeared in English. Then, when the praise tipped over the top, the inevitable anti-Persepolis backlash. Then a second wind of support when the movie adaptation came out, support that lasted long enough to win the film an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. (It lost to Ratatouille.)

Persepolis is above all a story of contrasts: East and West, ancient and modern, religious and secular, girl and woman, its title describing both the ancient seat of learning and culture and the city where uniformed thugs harass women on the street. Even the art shows two faces to the world, suggesting either fine Persian miniatures or children’s scribbles depending on which reviews you read. It’s a cleverly constructed puzzle box of a narrative, saved from pretentiousness by Satrapi’s fiery storytelling and irreverent sense of humor. Satrapi has gone on to draw more comics inspired by her Iranian upbringing — my favorite is the 2005 graphic novella Embroideries — but none has matched the cultural one-two punch of Persepolis.

Julie Doucet, the Dirty Plotte stories, including My New York Diary
Of all the countless autobiographical indie zinesters of the late 1980s and 1990s, Julie Doucet has best survived the test of time. Is it her big, swaggering art style? Her unique French-Canadian-punk-in-New-York perspective? Her willingness to get gruesomely confessional in stories brimming with sex, shit, and menstrual blood? Or is it just that she left her audience wanting more? After her series Dirty Plotte and the collection My New York Diary, Doucet stopped drawing comics. In interviews at the time, she expressed dissatisfaction with the comics world, interest in being taken seriously as a fine artist, and good old-fashioned lack of money.

Since then, Doucet has focused on fine art and on mixed-media projects like Long Time Relationship and 365 Days: A Diary, projects that employ elements of comic art but skirt the standard definition of “comic book.” The Dirty Plotte stories survive as a snapshot of this particular woman, in that particular time, gleefully kicking down the walls of an art form. Dirty Plotte is as perfect an encapsulation of the ’90s as Peter Bagge’s Hate, but coming from a messier, bloodier, hairier place. Yeah, that place.

Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket
By far the most popular shojo manga in the U.S., Fruits Basket almost singlehandedly powered Tokyopop for years, routinely trouncing Viz’s shonen juggernauts Naruto and Bleach on the bestseller lists. And yet it’s such a strange manga. Obviously indebted to Rumiko Takahashi, Natsuki Takaya opens her series with a premise reminiscent of Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2: when members of the cursed Sohma family are hugged by someone of the opposite sex, they transform into animals of the Chinese zodiac. Plucky heroine Tohru learns the Sohmas’ secret and moves in with them, inevitably developing romantic connections with the male members—particularly Kyo, the cat, whose patron animal, according to Chinese folklore, was tricked out of his proper place in the zodiac.

It all sounds like the setup for slapstick romantic comedy, but Fruits Basket develops in an entirely different direction, blossoming into a pensive drama about family battles and emotional scars. The supernatural element moves to the background, becoming less a plot point than a symbol of the unresolved tensions haunting the Sohma household. Takaya’s bright, wide-eyed art is like a ray of sunshine into the surprisingly gloomy corners of the story, reflecting the heroine’s upbeat determination to gather her friends to her breast and squeeze out the darkness.

Rumiko Takahashi, Maison Ikkoku
In Japanese comics, men usually draw boys’ manga and women usually draw girls’ manga, but there are exceptions, and superstar manga-ka Rumiko Takahashi — at one time rumored to be the wealthiest woman in Japan outside the royal family — is the exception that shatters all rules. Takahashi first hit it big by inventing the magical-girlfriend sex comedy with her cheeky 1980s series Urusei Yatsura, sadly out of print in English for over a decade, but she makes the HU list for her second manga, Maison Ikkoku, a gentle romantic comedy that originally ran in the not-so-gentle men’s manga magazine Big Comic Spirits.

Maison Ikkoku is less about love than it is about growing up. Hapless hero Godai begins the series as a student “ronin” whose efforts to cram for his college entrance exams are constantly interrupted by his wacky boarding-house neighbors and his crush on the kindly but distant landlady, Kyoko. As we learn more about Kyoko’s sorrows and Godai’s dreams, we realize that, between the comedy hijinks, we’re watching two young people slowly, awkwardly building the paths that will take them into adulthood. After fifteen volumes of romantic complications, sitcom misunderstandings, soap-opera plot twists, and dogs, it’s disarmingly touching when those two paths merge and continue into the future. If this all sounds too touchy-feely, Takahashi is also one of the world’s best illustrators of cute kids and sexy girls, and her art is at its peak in this series, more confident and polished than Urusei Yatsura but lacking the machine-like, assistant-heavy gloss of recent manga like Inuyasha.

Sure, it’s a formula romance. You know how hard it is to write a good romance? I am not ashamed to admit that I cry at least three times every time I read the final volume: at Godai’s “The woman I love” page, when Godai proposes while carrying Kyoko’s father on his back, and the last page, where life at Maison Ikkoku comes full circle.

Lynda Barry, Ernie Pook’s Comeek & the RAW stories
Remember when the “Masters of American Comics” show came out, and some cranky feminists like me complained that there were no women among the Masters, and other people responded with, “Well, what women would you dare put alongside like likes of Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, and the Hernandez Brothers?”

I’m coming out and saying it here: I’d have dumped one of the modern-day Masters to make room for Lynda Barry. In American comics she comes second only to Charles Schulz, the same way Moto Hagio comes second only to Tezuka. Barry’s simple (but deceptively appealing and well-composed) artwork is the perfect vehicle for her harrowing four-panel reports from the bowels of childhood. Seldom have imagos and logos been so perfectly paired, and never has a cartoonist so perfectly captured the voices of her awkward, bespectacled, scribble-haired characters.

In college I didn’t know there were book collections of Ernie Pook, so I used to photocopy the strips out of back issues of the Village Voice in the campus library and make my own. Some of those strips have never been reprinted, so it turned out to be worth it. And few lines from comics have stuck in my head as persistently as lines from Ernie Pook. A single caption from “The Night We All Got Sick” — My land which was gorgeous and smelled like perfume from France — has haunted my skull for ten years.

Moto Hagio, A Drunken Dream and Other Stories

The short-story collection A Drunken Dream isn’t Moto Hagio’s best work, but it’s the only work currently in print in English, so it’ll have to serve as a placeholder for untranslated series like The Heart of Thomas, Marginal, and Otherworld Barbara. A Drunken Dream does provide a nice overview of Hagio’s career, showcasing her development from a conventional 1960s-style artist of cute little girls and flowers into a creator of experimental, psychological fantasies drawn in a delicate but powerfully assured hand.

Hagio, sometimes called the Osamu Tezuka of shojo manga, is the most celebrated member of the extremely celebrated Year 24 Group, a loose collection of brilliant young women who reshaped girls’ manga in the 1970s. Hagio and her then-roommate Keiko Takemiya (who, together, invented the “Boys’ Love” genre with their respective manga The Heart of Thomas and Song of the Wind and Trees) hosted drawing sessions for shojo artists at their apartment, the “Oizumi Salon.” Was Hagio the most gifted of the group? Probably. Not definitely, but probably.

My own introduction to Hagio was through the sadly out-of-print Viz translation of A,A’, one of the first manga I ever read. I’ve spent the past decade immersed in manga — working as a manga editor, writing manga reviews, accumulating piles of stuff about Gundam — largely in the hopes of finding something as good as A,A’. It doesn’t happen often.

Tove Jansson, Moomin
Tove Jansson is best known as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, particularly the internationally beloved Moomin series, but Drawn & Quarterly’s swanky reprints of the Moomin comic strip, which ran in newspapers through a British syndicate for 20 years, have inspired a reassessment of her work as a cartoonist. And it’s worth reassessing: the most successful Finnish comic strip is also one of the smartest, most inventive, and most charming strips ever drawn.

The Moomin characters move through a world that’s both whimsical and hauntingly melancholy. As depicted in the comic strip, it’s also a visual feast, every panel packed with weird flora and fauna. In a touch I can’t recall seeing in any other four-panel strip, Jansson likes to build panel borders out of symbolically relevant objects: knives and forks for a cooking scene, twigs for the outdoors. The plots have the simple profundity of good children’s literature, often revolving around wistful searches for love or identity, and the sequence in which the Moomintroll family sets up a home in a lonely lighthouse strikes me as one of the most beautiful stories I’ve read in a comic. But I always wanted to be a lighthouse keeper.

Pia Guerra (with Brian K. Vaughan), Y: The Last Man
The first sci-fi stories about all-female societies were men’s fantasies: either dystopias where women turned the world into an oversized ant nest or something equally horrific, or else cheesy setups for one-handed Earthman-teach-us-this-thing-called-kissing scenarios. The next batch, in the 1970s, were women’s fantasies: enlightened and rugged lesbian co-ops bristling with sisterhood, like the settings of Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” and James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (a title that gets name-checked in the first issue of Y: The Last Man).

By the time of Y: The Last Man, arguably the best Vertigo comic of the last ten years, the question of women’s place in society had moved beyond fantasies, beyond ideologies, and into practical concerns. Y is an action story, a story of survival. It’s postfeminism as pulp. And it wouldn’t work without Pia Guerra’s tough, earthy art. Guerra’s work has a classic comic-book action gloss, but with an unusual attention to detail and gift for drawing faces and expressions. She captures both the pulpiness and the human element of Brian K. Vaughan’s story. It’s almost too tidy that the third wave of world-of-women fiction should be represented by the collaboration of a male writer and a female artist, but truth is less subtly written than fiction.

Best Comics Poll Index

#6: Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay

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Winsor McCay spoke the saddest and greatest last words of any cartoonist. (Number two is Osamu Tezuka: “I’m begging you, let me work!”) McCay lived to draw; his greatest fear, he often said, was of losing that ability. On a July evening in 1934, the 65-year-old cartoonist called downstairs to his wife, “It’s gone, Mother! Gone, gone, gone!” He had just suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side. Shortly afterwards, he suffered a second stroke, from which he never recovered.

His first thought when the stroke paralyzed him, the last thought he was able to articulate, was that he had lost his drawing hand.

Many cartoonists, even many great cartoonists, find drawing a chore. But McCay loved to draw. He lived to draw. He built a side career as an animator so he could draw even more. Each Little Nemo strip overflows with more careful, lovely illustration than most of us could produce in a lifetime. McCay crowded his strips with duplicates, clones, and herds of identical figures; he couldn’t think of any pastime more fun than drawing sixty kangaroos or a hundred children in clown suits. Figures stretch and warp and bend; the panels themselves strain to accommodate the artist’s imagination, tipping over and reforming into weird new shapes.

This strip, of all strips, could never fill less than a full Sunday page. It’s wild and robust but strangely delicate, as if a strong breeze, or Mama calling from the kitchen, could dissipate McCay’s fine-lined, Art Nouveau fairyland.

This is what McCay loved so much, this Fabergé egg of a comic strip. He took pen in hand and sent readers tumbling into a shifting universe of princesses, dragons, elephants, hot-air balloons, ornate palaces, darkest wildernesses, walking beds, dreams that enter the waking world, and waking worlds that turn into dreams. At the end of each page Little Nemo wakes up and cries MAMA! And it’s gone.

Shaenon Garrity is an editor at Viz Media and the creator of the webcomic Narbonic. She writes about comics for comiXology, Otaku USA, and other publications.

NOTES

Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay received 25.5 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top tens are: Eric Berlatsky, Noah Berlatsky, Jeffrey Chapman, Hillary Chute, Seymour Chwast, Brian Codagnone, Corey Creekmur, Kathleen Dunley, Joshua Dysart, Jackie Estrada, Shaenon Garrity, Geoff Grogan, Danny Hellman, Kenneth Huey, Jones, one of the Jones Boys, Abhay Khosla, Sean Kleefeld, Chris Mautner, Joshua Paddison, Marco Pelliteri, Hans Rickheit, Matt Seneca, Matteo Stefanelli, Joshua Ray Stephens, Matt Thorn, and Mack White.

Hillary Chute specifically voted for the newspaper comic strips of Winsor McCay, which was counted as a 0.5 vote towards Little Nemo in Slumberland’s total.

Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland was a newspaper strip that was first published on October 15, 1905. The original run continued until April 23, 1911. There were two revivals. The first of these ran from April 30 to July 26, 1914. The final run of the strip was published between 1924 and 1927.

The strip is in the public domain. As such, there have been many competing book collections put out by publishers. The best, least expensive introduction (as well as the collection that does the most justice to the original published page sizes) is Dover Publications’ Little Nemo in the Palace of Ice, which retails for $14.95. Click here to view it on Google Books.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

Phooey From Me to You: Six or Seven Things I Know about Popeye

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1. Popeye is old. I don’t mean the strip is old.  Everybody knows the strip is old.  I mean Popeye himself is supposed to be a senior citizen.  He’s a grizzled old sailor, with emphasis on the old, with extra old added on.  Although his official bio now describes him as 34, according to the Segar-era strips he’s in his sixties, and his father (more on him later) is pushing 100.  That’s why Popeye is bald and missing an eye.  Because of the oldness.

2. Popeye’s mythic origin is fundamentally flawed. In his youth, Fionn mac Cumhaill, the trickster hero of Irish folklore, gained his powers by tasting the flesh of the bradan feasa, the salmon of knowledge, which contained all the knowledge in the world.  When Fionn mac Cumhaill burned his thumb cooking the salmon and automatically stuck the burned thumb in his mouth, the knowledge flowed from the salmon into Fionn.  After that, Fionn mac Cumhaill knew everything and could access any information he needed by sucking on his thumb.

Popeye, in his old age, got his incredible toughness by staying up all night below decks rubbing the head of Bernice the Wiffle Hen, a bird with the power to bestow supernatural good luck on those who touched her.  All the luck flowed out of the hen and into Popeye, rendering the hen useless to would-be gambling kings Castor Oyl and Ham Gravy and transforming Popeye into an unstoppable demigod.

Later, as everyone knows, the story was changed so that Popeye gained his strength from eating spinach.  This introduced the crucial element of consumption that gives the core myth its memetic power, but in the process the totemic animal was lost.  It’s a shame we can’t have both, the animal and the vegetable, but everyone forgets about the hen.

3. Popeye is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. E.C. Segar drew Thimble Theatre for ten years before introducing Popeye.  It took him the length of the entire run of Calvin & Hobbes just to find his main character.  Popeye sidled in through the seedy back docks.  He was not the kind of hero you could plan for.  Who could have predicted that a cranky old sailor who looks like he smells funny—everyone in Thimble Theatre looks like he or she smells funny—would become the idol of millions, making Mickey Mouse shake in his polished red shoes and enduring for generations beyond?

If you are a writer, if you are an artist, you have to learn to open yourself to Popeye, to be ready if Popeye should happen.  But at the same time you have to know that Popeye will probably never happen.  Maybe there’s a hen you can rub.

4. Popeye is a dick. He’s a lot more heroic in the cartoons.  In the Segar strips, aside from sporadic and whimsical urges to aid the downtrodden, a.k.a. widders and orfinks what ain’t got none, Popeye devotes himself largely to being an insufferable cuss.  This is, after all, the guy who not only kicked poor Castor Oyl out of his own comic strip, but banged Castor’s sister just to show he meant business.

He’s consistently awful to Olive, of course.

Back in the day, Segar got complaints that Popeye was a bad role model for children.  He solved this problem as every similarly beset writer should: by creating a nearly identical but even more meretricious character to make Popeye look good by comparison.  Thus the strip gained Popeye’s father, Pappy, who looks exactly like Popeye with stubble.  Apparently aware that he lives in a crudely-drawn strip, Pappy sometimes disguises himself as his son by shaving so he can make time with Olive.

5. Bobby London got Popeye. None of the other legacy cartoonists really have.  They love Popeye, I’m sure.  They want to do right by Popeye, to pay just tribute to Segar’s creation, to be responsible bearers of the standard.  London, by contrast, used his run on the Popeye strip to see exactly how much he could get away with before an outraged syndicate, newspaper market, readership, and world kicked him out for the sake of common decency.  He probably made some people cry.  And that’s what Popeye is all about, Charlie Brown.

6. You can go to Sweethaven. The village built for the 1980 movie still stands.  Looks cleaner now, actually, judging from the photos.  It’s in Malta and is open to the public as a tourist attraction, complete with movie props, stage shows, and a movie theater showing clips from the film.

I like the movie.  It’s messy and mumbly and wanders all over the place, which suggests that the filmmakers got Popeye too.  The strange grimness of the musical numbers always makes me smile.  As far as superhero movies go, it’s higher on my list than Iron Man.

7. Popeye Ruined My Life. I found Thimble Theatre in the old Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics in my high-school library.  It was something I hadn’t seen before: a funny adventure strip, a gag strip with a story.  It had long stories, stretching for months or years, with pirates and gamblers and thieves.  I wanted to do that, and I did, and now I’ve been doing it for ten years.  Without Popeye.  All you can do is be ready.

Comic strips, unlike comic books, boast a genteel legacy.  The elegant stagework of Little Nemo, the bohemian poetry of Krazy Kat, the quiet philosophy of Peanuts, the Disneyfied poly-sci of Pogo…it’s all so very convincingly Art.  Even the rugged adventure strips are rugged in a pleasant, Brylcreemed, magazine-illustration way.  And then there’s Popeye, who cusses and fights and brags about cussing and fighting, who comes staggering up drunk from the lower decks inhabited by all those weird old Jazz Age strips with the blotchy art and spindly lettering and betting tips and Yiddish and plop takes and Nov Shmoz Ka Pop? I don’t know what kind of theater Thimble Theatre is, but Winsor McCay probably wouldn’t want to do his quick-draw act there.  Popeye hangs on, indestructible (because of the hen), the last of a tougher, smellier, funnier breed.

He also has a damn catchy theme song.

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Update by Noah: This is the first in roundtable on Popeye. You can read the whole roundtable here.