Author Archives: Tom Crippen

The Sex Element, part 1

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We’re doing another series of themed posts, this one about sex and comics. Decades ago Peter Cook did a funny routine about a coal miner who wanted to be a novelist but whose novel got turned down “because it lacked the sex element.” I’ve always loved that phrase.

I can list seven sorts of comics that involve the sex element.

1)  European works that involve fancy drawing and some kind of non-sex draw, such as satirical future fantasyscapes where women in strapless gowns have television sets for heads. This is the Heavy Metal category. The result of the sex element is that everything else in the work gets skipped.
2)  European works that involve fancy drawing and no sort of non-sex draw. This is the Milo Manara category. The result of the sex element is that the reader spends 20 minutes rooted to one spot at Jim Hanley’s Universe and wonders if anyone notices.
3)  Self-revelatory works where the artist gets down to the inner recesses of his being and finds the usual sort of crap we keep there. I guess Crumb is the big example. The sex element in these works might or might not strike you as sexy; it doesn’t have to in order to get its job done. Whereas in the first two categories it does.
4)  Works about daily life that show people having sex because that’s what people do. Alison Bechdel, Alex Robinson, Terry Laban. Robinson’s Box Office Poison has one of the most effective sex scenes in comics, but the scene is not sexy. It just gets across the experience. A problem with these works is that you can feel like the author is demonstrating a point: See how mature and adult I am? 
5)  Tijuana Bibles. I’ve never seen one of those. (UPDATE:  But Matthew J. Brady says you can find them here.)
6)  Japanese pervy stuff. The kindergarten aspect of these works is very offputting.
7)  Lost Girls. Man, did that suck. For one thing, the artwork made everything look like copulating trombones. For another, Alan Moore can be very, very silly. He wanted to do intellectual pornography, which is right up there with wallpaper you can hum or toothpaste that rhymes. Also, his idea of what constitutes an idea can be awfully generous, not to say lax. 

Matthew Surridge Hears from Christopher Sorrentino

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My friend Matthew reviewed the essay anthology Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers: Writers on Comics and heard back from one of the writers in question, novelist Christopher Sorrentino. Sorrentino wanted to convince Matthew that actually the collection was a good book. I read it a few years back and thought it was spotty. Basically, some of the guys tried and some of them didn’t. If my memory is right, Sorrentino’s essay was one of the better jobs.

On a personal note, he might have been the fellow referenced in the lead paragraph of my heartbreaking memoir of Marvel reading, “True Believer.” 

Imaginary Comics, part 2: “Uneven Hills”

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Bill made up a cartoon sketched on a series of tea leaves. What I have is a set of pages that were not published as part of the Absolute Sandman series. Neil Gaiman, hitting the crest of his early comics career, did not contact an aging Jack Kirby and, in a fit of sentimentality and cross-talent brand promotion, persuade him to illustrate the gala fiftieth issue of Sandman, which was not titled “Uneven Hills” and did not concern Morpheus fallen among the Amazons and embarrassed by his long-ago affair with Hippolyta, Wonder Woman’s mother, with implications for Lyta Hall’s eventual vendetta against him.

Kirby did not draw a Morpheus with doorknob-sized cheekbones and a forehead reaching three feet above his nose. The following elements did not appear: Amazons with cantaloupe-sized muscles and shoulders the width of Victorian cabinets; sly references to Kirby’s part in creating the previous Sandman, Lyta Hall’s late husband; playful juxtapositions of Morpheus’s cheekboned languor and the Amazons’ beefy force; a four-page sequence, tailored to Kirby’s skills, in which Amazons hauled the stricken Morpheus on a massive chariot past trophies of the ages.
Kirby did not balk at Gaiman’s idea, which he did not have, of a row of Amazons archers, each one missing a breast because of Gaiman’s fidelity to classical sources. Roz, Kirby’s indomitable wife, did not have to intervene and did not spawn a winsome anecdote Gaiman retailed in later interviews about a telephone being wrestled from one Kirby to the other while Neil reasoned with the elderly artist. The nonresulting Amazon chests did not resemble the Astrodome standing next to a parking lot.

The nonexistent project did not have to be aborted because of Kirby’s illness, and there were no rumors that Walt Simonson would finish the art so the issue could appear in a  Sandman trade paperback. In the late 1990s, Vertigo did not transplant a character from the nonexistent issue, a spunky and undernourished teen Amazon named Hy (for Hyacinth), into The Dreaming and then give her a pocket-size manga series written and drawn by Jill Thompson.
The 17 more or less fully drawn Kirby pages and three remaining penciled roughs were not given pride of place in volume 3 of Absolute, the lines’ charcoal black not glowing against pages the color of whipped cream.
All that happened was that I wrote this post.
UPDATE:  Big Barda should be in there someplace, possibly a big fight sequence between her and an Amazon (some old rival of Wonder Woman’s?) in which Kirby could draw big fists and Gaiman could do some destabilizing of gender patterns. 

Fact

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Fabian took acting lessons from Leonard Nimoy. This was a few years before Nimoy was cast as Mr. Spock. Fabian was getting ready for a guest spot on Ben Casey.


From I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy

Sour, Bitter

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I’m watching the final round of The Sopranos. The series became more and more sour as it went on, which isn’t a bad thing. But I’m surprised the public loves such an unpleasant work. Maybe I’m not as out of step as I thought.


A side point. People keep misusing words, but everyone seems to understand the difference between “sour” and “bitter.” I just checked Mac’s Oxford American Dictionaries and they back me up (or it backs me up). Sourness does not necessarily involve self-pity; bitterness does. The definitions:

sour — feeling or expressing resentment, disappointment, or anger

bitter — angry, hurt, or resentful because of one’s bad experiences or a sense of unjust treatment

Offhand, I can’t recall seeing someone described as bitter without the implication of self-pity; nor have I seen anyone described as sour when his/her resentment over personal mistreatment was being discussed. “Soured on,” yes, but that’s different. People understand right off when to use one word and not the other. Which strikes me as remarkable when you think of all the traps people fall into with word use.

That Fucking Shatner

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From Star Trek Memories:

“The Devil in the Dark” … We shot this particular episode, our twenty-sixth, during the first half of March 1967.

Problem: Star Trek did its shooting from May of one year to January of the next. Never in the early spring. “Devil in the Dark” was broadcast on March 9, 1967.
What’s remarkable: Shatner says that on the second day of shooting he had to take off because his father died. “My beloved father.” But he got the month wrong.
All right, maybe Chris Kreski gets the blame. He’s the “with” guy under Shatner’s name in the byline. Shatner talked into a microphone, Chris Kreski did a lot of typing and organizing, looked up some dates, and got the shooting month mixed up with the broadcast month. These books about Star Trek people are such murky soup.
But we experience this amazing simulated effect:  A man talks about his father’s death, “the tears and the anguish,” and he thinks the death happened months after it actually did.
Oh, that fucking Shatner.