Author Archives: Tom Crippen

Question for Kurt Busiek or Mark Evanier

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If Batman is the best because he makes himself the best, and if the Green Lantern Corps’ special rings are fueled by will power, then how come everyone gets to be a Green Lantern except for Bruce Wayne? He ought to be the greatest Green Lantern of them all.

It bothers me that nobody else has thought of this.

So Long, Loser

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Yes, the headline of this post is directed at everyone’s favorite Republican. But before I am a citizen, I am a copy editor. As our own Kaiser Wilhelm shuffles off to let us deal with the fruits of his truculence, ignorance, laziness, ineptitude and rampant need for ego compensation, the world press has been echoing a phrase from the well-respected center-right news publication The Economist. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, the phrase makes no sense. Here the phrase is:


Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since World War II.


Ok, we know about the current, ongoing collapse in American reputation. But what collapse in American reputation is associated with World War II? Does The Economist mean the time that the country was caught in a men’s room outside Boulogne with that French kid and some chocolate bars? Or, to be more charitable, maybe The Economist has in mind some collapse in American repute that happened before WWII. But that makes no sense either. We had our problems — the Civil War, race — but nothing that made the rest of the world think so badly of us. We were the big young country that was up and coming and kept on being up and coming.

As far as I can tell, the only serious pre-Bush blow to America’s standing was the one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate. The morbid can debate whether that mess was worse than our current mess. But we can all agree it came after World War II.

 So, Economist, what the fuck are you talking about?  

Manga: What Is the Point? — Do Over

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Same thoughts as here, but differently presented. First time around I tried being sprightly and provocative, like a British op-ed columnist fussing about how actually the French can’t cook or TV game shows teach you about life or some other bogus, dumbass lifestyle issue. This time I’ll be straightforward.

So here we go:
I don’t get manga. I look at a page and want to look away. Reason: the stylization of figures appears to me to be highly uniform, and it’s not a particular stylization I like. Solid black hair, googly eyes, the kids who look like adults, the adults who look like kids, etc. The look turns me off. Further, its kindergarten feel makes it hard for me to believe worthwhile stories could be told using this stylization, or at least told to their advantage.
Because my aversion to manga is so sharp and immediate, I have never given the comics a chance. If you ask me about pistachio ice cream, all I can say is I don’t like the taste. But manga ain’t just an ice cream flavor (title of my forthcoming Young Adult novel). Manga’s look is what I react to, but there’s more to manga than its look.
Which is the missing piece from this post’s old version. I should have asked straight out: What am I missing?
Noah has already started to answer the unasked question. Point one: the googly eyes, etc., belong to just one style of manga. The girls’ stuff, apparently. There are lots more out there. Other looks.
One observation I’ll stand by: manga emphasizes high-speed, all-out forward movement of the reader’s eye. US superhero comics have also started to do so, but manga does it more and seems to lack any other approach to word-picture combination. Pleasant as the effect can be, having just one item on the menu seems like a drag. Noah says US superhero stuff is wordy — well, sometimes, because every flaw on earth can be found there except overerudition. But at least a few different verbal-visual gears are available. In manga it seems like there’s just the one.
But hey, maybe not. The fellows will tell me.
All right, I guess that’s it. Xavier, thanks for the links and info. You too, Anonymous — you’re ok. Richard, thanks for the joke. Bill, thanks very much for laughing at my jokes, because somebody’s got to. Blackasthenight, thanks just for being you.

Manga: What Is the Point?

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UPDATE:  Fuck it, I screwed up. I’m redoing the post here. Meanwhile, Noah’s response to the original version is here. 
Now the old version:

We at HU are having our second round of “theme” posts. First time we talked about our comics discoveries of 2008. This time we’re talking about manga: what is it, why is it, why do I hate it so badly I can’t look at more than a page? “Hate” is a strong term, but it’s true that my brain and eye shut down as soon as I encounter a manga specimen. All that solid-black hair, those pie-shaped googly eyes and triangle mouths (with rounded corners!), the stunted pseudo-children, the skimpy few words stranded in fat balloons. And never anything in view but more black hair, googly eyes, and a lonely sprinkling of words against white space. Page after page, book after book, truckload after truckload. Manga makes me feel claustrophobic.


Mind you, I haven’t read any. I’m starting off the round robin because perfect ignorance and unreasoning dislike provide a striking backdrop for the informed and authoritative. My colleagues will soon be along to provide some intelligent content. In the meantime, I’ll suggest the following: manga, all manga, carries to an extreme the formal trend followed by US mainstream comics over the past few decades, which is to streamline word-and-picture arrangements so that the eye is always pinging forward with as little drag as possible, even if a concomitant of drag might be better dialogue or more detailed drawing. [ Preceding sentence is not clear. To Noah it sounded like I was saying manga was imitating new-style US superhero comics. I just meant the two show the same tendency and manga takes it further. ]

Another observation: All the above, right down to my closing suggestion, places me in the same class as some fellow turning on the radio in 1968 and deciding that Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, the Beatles, the Young Rascals, the Four Tops, and the Velvet Underground are all pretty much the same because they have that damn beat and the electrified instruments. So, having set myself up, I now await my education at the hands of those who know better.

UPDATE:  Wait a second, is this manga? Maybe I should rewrite. Nah … double down. Time for the big guns.

For example, over on some message board a guy called  blackasthenight breaks off from frotting his pimples and declares:

ok now honestly, who has ever seen anyone whoes head, eyes, mouth, ect. is shaped like that? to me this just appears as a lack of willingness to studdy anatomy.

and whats with this gay stuff. half the time i see this crap its two dudes about to get it on. i mean wtf japan? also why do 80% of the dudes look like girls? and all the people with tails and stuff? and extra ears???

Yeah, Japan — wtf? 

Dang

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Nobody says that, except prospectors in old cartoons and characters in new cartoons written by women. I have in mind the work of Alison Bechdel, Linda Barry and a young woman doing a webcomic that I saw recently but whose title I forget. (Not a bad webcomic either, but my memory isn’t sharp these days.)

All right, possibly men do use “dang” in their cartoons, but I haven’t caught them at it, just three women. Three’s a trend and I’m calling this one.
Come to think of it, it’s interesting how people nowadays treat expletives. My vague sense is that the following observation applies to men and women, though Bechdel provides the only example I can think of. Here it is: Dykes to Watch Out For shows people waving dildos about and hollering in bed, but the hollering is all #?!@*!!. Which is one of those decisions that are hard to explain but make sense in practice. I haven’t seen much in the way of dildos, yet I don’t mind sex toys in Bechdel’s strip. On the other hand, I curse all the time but suspect I would be annoyed and distracted if “fuck,” “shit,” etc. kept popping up in cartoon dialogue — though not movie or tv dialogue. So, you know, go fucking figure.

I Know That Guy; Or, Oh Dear

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Bill was talking about comedy, and Matthew J. Brady referred in comments to a Daily Show segment about “the asshole who equated community organizers with crack dealers.“


Here the segment is. More to the point, I knew the fellow in question. Years ago I was a copy editor at the newspaper where he worked as a reporter. I tried bragging about this connection when the segment aired, but nobody much cared. Still, I knew him. 

The fellow was … well, how can one put it? I can’t say he meant well. He didn’t; he was the sort of winger who lives to insult liberals. But I can say he didn’t quite know what he was doing. He didn’t process that insulting people inspires dislike, not affection. He seemed to operate according to this syllogism: “If you act as if someone is stupid, that means he is stupid; if one person is stupid, that means the other is intelligent; if a person is intelligent, he is admired; if a person is admired, he is liked; so if you act as if someone is stupid, he will like you.” Yes, the fellow was a treat and we all looked forward to working with him.

And all the while he thought he was scoring a hit. He knew he was being obnoxious, I guess, but he didn’t know what being obnoxious means. Or, at least, he didn’t know the basic facts about the topic that everyone else knows.

Now there he is on The Daily Show, trotting out his party piece about Osama bin-Laden being a community organizer (hey, like Francis Marion! or Captain America!) and having no idea that John Oliver and The Daily Show will not be charmed by his little jeu d’esprit. Oh dear, the timid, confiding half-smile with which he reveals that those poverty activists were mean to him! Oh dear, the sadness of life.