Author Archives: Tom Crippen

MR3, part 2: Helter Skelter by Okazaki

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MR3 stands for Manga Roundtable 3. We did one on Manga: What Is the Point?, another on YKK by Ashinano. Now it’s our third and we’re doing Helter Skelter by Okazaki. Bill did a free translation of the title and came up with his own freehand version of the title, namely “Blistered Fingers,” which I like better. But since I find the work a bit alien and baffling, I’m going to keep things simple and stick with the original title. It’s a clue and I need clues.

I admire Helter Skelter a lot. As lines on paper, it’s exceptional. As words, well, maybe not so much. But the comic’s layout, drawing, and use of black and white are beyond admirable. All right, not the faces, and good caricature would have been useful for this work. There’s still a lot to look at.

Bill and I talked a bit about how trite I find the book’s theme (look at that hot girl! her values are terrible!). The thing is, I’m willing to buy the theme because it comes with the package. That’s how much I like everything else about the book. I see Helter Skelter as an example of high-style assault, of art that uses velocity, technical skill, and shock to impose itself on the audience. You have to be very good to pull it off, and Okazaki does. I think that even though I read the book, naturally, in translation. The words chosen were not her own, and her high-design pages had to function after having a fleet of prominent design elements — I mean the calligraphy — ripped out and replaced by little piles of English words.

Okay, about Helter Skelter as an exercise in style and shock. In Comments to his post, Bill made this point:

The title’s just “Helter Skelter” transliterated in the phonetic characters used for foreign words. It’s the same as the song.

So Okazaki didn’t use some Japanese word similar in meaning to “helter skelter.” She meant the song title. I would guess she wanted her book to have the same feel as the song; it’s not so much that the Beatles song states some theme or connects to some event that she wants to reference. She’s just telling us that reading her comic will be like experiencing the Beatles song. So, if that is the idea, she’s making a bold claim.

I imagine the comic as being a sensation when it came out. This is all guesswork, but Okazaki appears to have been popular and to have been very distinctive, maybe out of step with most other manga artists aiming at the same audience. I take her audience to have been teenage girls, since Helter Skelter was serialized in a teen-girl magazine 20s-chick magazine. [my thanks to Xavier for the correction. I’ll note here that Bill says the magazine in question has a fashion bent] According to Helter Skelter, and most other sources, teen girls young women who care a lot about celebrities and fashion tend to be on the lookout for sensational new events and personalities to get excited about.

Helter Skelter may have been meant to hit them like a bomb, the way the song hits listeners. The sex scenes (in a kids magazine? no! but those scenes are still, what is the word, a bit nasty), the carving up of bodies, the characters’ default bitchiness and cruelty, the wild surrealism (Bill references it as “the half-flaming, half-tiger rug when the 60s take over”), the way the plot veers at the end … and all this was for kids [no! girls in their 20s].

Another shocker, for the audience in question, would be the theme. Here I’m taking Bill’s word. From the ’70s on we’ve heard a lot about the hellishness of messing with your body so you can look like a model. Bill says the case is a bit different in Japan and that Okazaki’s theme in Helter Skelter was something new for her readers.

The sell-your-soul/vanity-vs-natural theme is all thru Helter Skelter, over and over. Subtle it ain’t, and I don’t see Okazaki adding anything to the idea; if you’ve read a few magazine articles in your life, you’ve probably come across what she has to say. In a way, Helter Skelter is like the world’s most badass Ugly Betty episode.

Still, being the world’s most badass anything isn’t easy. Okazaki did it thru using powerful skills in subtly aggressive, unnerving ways. Which means that now I’m going to talk about her artwork. Or I will tomorrow … hope you tune in.

Update: Noah’s take is here

Update 2: Noah and I agree about the story’s triteness, anyway. A Helter Skelter haiku:

Look at that hot girl.
Her values are terrible.
Keep looking at her!

Oliphant Watch: Obama and Castro

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Looking at this, you’d think it was Cuba that had the embargo on the US, not the other way around. But what a deft way of drawing Obama: the moment is so winning. We see again Oliphant’s gift for fantasy based on characters from the news. (Previous Oliphant installment here.)

UPDATE: Matthew, my leg man in Oliphanting, points me to the latest: 1) Cheney the torturer and 2) the epicene cowboys of Texas secession. And, yeah, those are two freaky cartoons.

The Cheney cartoon takes a big, simple point (Cheney’s a nasty guy who defends torture), lobs in some clutter to put you off balance (the long legend on Cheney’s apron, the Prussian gentleman standing by in his helmet), then sneaks in for the kill with a final touch that is tiny, unobtrusive, complicated and inexplicable. Who is that little guy on a bicycle? Why is he tearing off for the distance? Why does the bike have training wheels and why do the training wheels look so much like legs and feet? Why does the man’s head look like three knuckles? Why is he so blase about torture and, finally, why are we hearing from him? Traditionally, an editorial cartoon will show someone in the news saying something that the cartoonist has put in the person’s mouth, and then there may be some little figure piping up with the cartoonist’s personal wry commentary on the situation. Here we have a third party, a man with a three-knuckled head and a special bike, and he’s popping up to say what he thinks too. Damn, it’s weird, and yet it takes up so little space. It’s a dab of condensed insanity.

Matthew says maybe the little guy is Obama: thus the training wheels and, I guess, the three-knuckled head (big ears). My guess, if it’s anyone we know, is Bush. Bush was always working out and Oliphant drew him with big ears. Oh, the hell with it.

All right, the epicene cowboys of secession. Here’s how I figure Oliphant’s logic chain: Texas wants its federal money like anyone else, so therefore this secession talk is bullshit; the secession talk takes place at tea party rallies or in front of crowds who might turn up at tea party rallies; the British drink tea and are very courtly about asking each other if they want one lump or two; therefore, to express the posturing hollowness of the secession talk, one portrays the Texans as mincing little Percys with tea cups in their hands.

One gets the horrible feeling that Oliphant actually thought his way toward this conclusion. The deranged vision didn’t come to him in a flash; he put on his thinking cap and worked with lunatic clarity to reach his goal.

UPDATE 2: Now Sam and the sharks, again because Matthew brought it up. Clear point, a bit simple but intelligible, and nothing actively weird in the drawing to throw you off.

Matthew mentions how well O draws the sharks, and it’s true. He also draws a lot of them. This brings up a big point about Oliphant. He is so much better at drawing than most of his colleagues that his facility gets him into visual trouble. In the old days, when he was at the top of his game, he created images with a density of detail and complexity of composition that allowed them to take over the reader’s eye. Now he doesn’t manage his detail, he just lets it roll out from his pen, and composition be damned.

The problem isn’t too bad in this latest. But Uncle Sam does get a bit lost among all those sharks; the overall situation takes a few extra seconds to register because Sam, who is its center, has to be tracked down by the reader’s eye. The Cheney cartoon suffers a lot more; even without the little mystery man on the bicycle, the picture is a mess of one thing after another.

The Stranger from Paradise Island

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I’m horning in a bit on Noah’s Wonder Woman action. In comments to the last post, Maddy pointed out that WW would be a natural for a stranger-in-a-strange-land approach to sexism.

… she is coming from a place where she is loved and adored by all, where she has never been a second-class citizen, where she has never faced discrimination or bigotry. Then she enters the “real world”, where there are all those things …

Whereas it might take twenty or so years of life for me to become aware of things like sexism and misogyny, Wonder Woman would be able to recognize it instantly. So if we’re looking at her from a what-does-she-bring-to-feminism point of view, I think she’s very useful in that …

So, if anybody knows, I’m wondering if WW has ever been used in that way, either as an outsider commenting on sexism or an outsider simply commenting on our society as a whole. It’s such a common device that I’d be kind of surprised if it didn’t show up at some point in her career.

Zack Snyder

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What’s the prevailing view of him among comic book fans? My guess is that his stuff has the same sort of standing as Family Guy: it’s popular and its audience includes a lot of comics geeks, but smarter comic geeks (or comic geeks who think they’re smart) look down on it.

I haven’t seen Snyder’s first two films, only Watchmen, and have seen only bits of a couple of Family Guy episodes. So I don’t claim that either Snyder or Family Guy ought to be run into the ground as a matter of principle. I’m just checking to see if my guess as to Snyder’s reputation is correct.

(A joke I saw in a Family Guy episode and have always loved: a talking dog in a bar says, “Hey, whose leg do you have to hump to get a drink around here?”)

Never Cross the Street If You’re Wearing a Beret

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Evelyn Waugh in his diary, worldly wise:

We are all American at puberty; we die French.

Aphorisms like the above close out the book, when he was in his 60s and already about to rot to death. Up until then we get his dissatisfied little records of the day to day. One suspects he played up his selfishness in the entries; a writer that good is always aware of effect.

In 1955, about a servant:

Mario is causing annoyance by losing his reason. He is obsessed like a character from a Renaissance drama with suspicion of his wife’s infidelity, pretends to go out and conceals himself under the bed to spy on her. Under the strain her cooking has become unendurable.

Nine days later:

After much coming and going of magistrates and alienists Mario was removed to the lunatic asylum. It is hoped that the cooking may improve.

The diary is too flat and disgusted to ever give much detail. Writing a given entry, Waugh had just enough energy to list the various peoples and events who on that day had proven to be bird crap on his shoulder. Getting together with a friend: “I took Christopher to the cinema and found him insane.” The next day: “I took Christopher to the cinema and found him more insane.” The day after: “I sent Christopher tiger lilies to acknowledge my faults of the evening before.” Uh oh, something got left out. Well, “Christopher” is Christopher Sykes, author of Waugh’s posthumous biography, and a footnote to the second diary entry fills us in with a quote from that same book. Sykes says he had introduced Waugh to a friend, John, and “a rather uncannily well-placed remark by John excited Evelyn to an outpouring of religious polemics, wholly unsuited to the occasion and grossly insulting to the memory of my father.” Don’t ask me what the father has to do with all this; I’m going to let that lie.

Waugh’s diary suffers because it is life as seen by someone who is depressive and incompetent. That is, he has to leave out a whole lot to get the effect he wants, which is that he’s a victim of universal stupidity and bad manners. In the novels, to get this effect, he could put things in, crazy things. Here that’s the job of the editor’s notes, and the crazy things in question all turn out to be specimens of Waugh’s behavior. “The circumstances of Waugh’s expulsion from Jugoslavia, with which the next part of the diary deals, are not easy to follow from the text,” the editor says dryly of a wartime passage. He adds a little further down:

Waugh’s superiors in any case resented his habit of sending comparatively trivial signals to headquarters prefixed by four ‘Q’s, which meant that a senior officer must decode them; a colonel who had got to bed at 4 am was unlikely to be amused when he was woken up an hour later to decode a Waugh signal about, for example, bars of soap.

Happy Headline of the Day

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It’s right here.

UPDATE: Believe it or not, there’s a minor tiff in the right-o-sphere about the rescue. The normally ferocious Ace of Spades noted that Obama gave the go-ahead for force. A blogger called The Other McCain answered with a lampoon headline suggesting that Ace wanted to rob the SEALs of their credit (scroll down to the big purple letters). Ace’s blog has this quote by H.L. Mencken: “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” In fact the logo includes the skull and crossbones: maybe he’s squishy on pirates. But he celebrates the Easter rescue with a photo of a skull surrounded by crawling flames; I’d say he’s really glad those pirates are dead. Still, he mentioned Obama without attacking him, so that means he’s gay.

Reading the fellows is like watching bright 10-year-olds play in a tree fort. They’re so lively! Ace’s logo isn’t a plain “Ace of Spades,” it’s “Ace of Spades HQ.” You have to appreciate the touch.

If liberals could be like wingnuts, we might describe Obama’s role this way, with a terse rat-a-tat: POTUS told the SEALs to do what they had to do, and they went ahead and did it. In other words, way it should be.

But we’re liberals. So we clear our throats, lean into the mike, and read from a wilted piece of paper that the system has worked appropriately, including the dispensation of presidential authority for the use of military force, and we’re happy that the operation has concluded successfully and with no loss of innocent life. Our best wishes to Captain Phillips and his family.

The Ace-McCain contretemps comes by way of Moderate Voice, a blog that is pretty much what you would expect from the title.

Rorschach and Genius

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You don’t see any scenes of Rorschach hitting people and the people hitting back. That is, there are no Rorschach fight scenes. Instead he conducts exercises in violence: he applies violence and obtains a result, such as information, punishment, an end to a threat on his life. For the reader, it doesn’t make much difference if the victim in the scene is helpless; for example, the manacled child killer and pervert whom Rorschach burns alive, or (even more so) poor forlorn Moloch, a cancer victim of 60 whom Rorschach shoves into a refrigerator. His ruthlessness is fun; even more, we like his ingenuity. He’s short, smelly, and socially maladroit, but he’s elegant: he employs a minimum of action to get maximum effect.

Watchmen is by way of being a superhero epic, the way War and Peace is an epic. By “epic” I don’t mean “long, good and important,” I mean it covers the waterfront. War and Peace covers just about every experience that goes into human life, from a girl’s first dance to a battle heaving its way along a battlefield. Watchmen sweeps along different and more narrow territory. Its subject is the superhuman vs the human, superiority vs inferiority. But it covers that subject very well. A big blue man landing on Mars and deciding to create life, an ill-favored runt jumping on a prison cot at just the right moment — Watchmen has it all, and there’s quite a distance from one pole to the other. In most ways Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach couldn’t be more different, but they belong together and that’s chiefly because they’re smarter than we are. Dr. Manhattan’s overwhelming superiority doesn’t take the form of overwhelming strength, as is the case with Superman, Thor or the Hulk. Instead he sees reality at a level the rest of us can’t comprehend; he’s tuned in to the ultimate story, that of atomic particles and their dance. Rorschach isn’t stronger than the underworld types he breaks down in their hangouts. Instead he’s faster, more precise, more resourceful and inventive.

The thing is, a reader of Watchmen is in a similar position to that of a Rorschach victim. Not that we suffer, but we’re in Alan Moore’s hands and there’s not much we can do about it. His technical skill is so great that we don’t stand a chance. His skill takes the form of intelligence and ingenuity; Kirby blasts the reader, Moore manipulates us. This isn’t at all a bad thing, but it’s a very similar thing to what Rorschach does to a suspect, what Veidt does to the world, or what From Hell’s Dr. Gull does to his victims (skillfully applying a few strokes of a scalpel to advance a scheme no one understands but himself). Alan Moore is the only genius to write superhero comics, and I think that fact shows up not only in the quality of his works but in their nature.