Author Archives: Tom Crippen

Britain

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This is just an impression, because I don’t follow entertainment/culture the way I used to. But …

When I was growing up, it seemed like all the best pop culture was British. I mean the great totems like the Beatles and Monty Python. Nowadays not so much. Still a lot of cultural prestige, and still a lot of very good British actors, directors and musicians, but no super-heavyweights. Any of them could be replaced and the pop culture of two continents wouldn’t shake.

I would say this has been the case since the 1980s, with the exception of US commercial comics. In that field we have a couple of figures whose presence has been game changing: Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.
But the Spice Girls, Guy Ritchie … ? Britain’s record for generating pop phenomena seems to be getting thinner.  Fads they can still do, and as noted they keep turning out tons of accomplished professionals. But not phenomena.
Maybe that’s no big loss, depending on how you feel about phenomena. At any rate, a change seems to have taken place. 

Speaking of Who Spider-Man Loves …

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You must have heard of this: Spider-Man and Obama.

Bonus: my favorite wingnut blogger, Allahpundit, is infuriated and makes a bonehead factual error. Right below the block quote. It’s a corker.
He’s a smart, fair-minded man, but only within the limits permitted by his core belief: that life is all about liberal hypocrisy and media tolerance of same. Funny to see how the idea operates on him; it bends his thoughts around like a neurosis.

Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — part 2, addendum a

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Ok, all I had was Bechdel. Miriam had Carla Speed McNeil and Kate Beaton. Here’s one I just remembered: Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. I read issues 1-16, or like that, on download for a TCJ column about Spider-Man (“Face It, Tiger,” issue 291). They were a case of a commercial comic book working exactly the way it should, no contortions or gimmes, no jumble. It’s like intelligent people knew what they were doing and did it. The target here is modest, but I’ll settle and hitting those can be hard enough.


It helps if you don’t mind sitcom and girl stuff. As I recall it’s very quiet-times storytelling, with superheroes kept off on the skyline, more or less. I like that mix: for some reason I like superhero comics and action movies more for their incidental elements than their main elements, and a title like Mary Jane puts the incidentals center stage. The so-called civilian school of superhero comics, I suppose. I loved Bendis’s Alias, though that was meant as psychological noir and Mary Jane is teen comedy. Kind of strange, two such different outcomes from the same genre development. 

The art/writing seems designed for maximum ease of eye movement, which I take to be a manga kind of thing. The images, as I recall, are simple and figures are positioned for maximum scannability. Dialogue skims along but without the pop-pop banter effect found with most superhero dialogue nowadays.

Which brings me to a key point: a big part of the comic’s appeal is relief. I would have liked it anyway, but set against most superhero product, it was a relief. Quiet skill is something we don’t get a lot of.

As to the Manga point above, the original artist was  Takeshi Miyazawa, a Canadian but Wiki says he has a Manga sensibility. Then came David Hahn. As I recall, I liked Miyazawa better. Writer: Sean McKeever. Sample plot: girl gets jealous because Mary Jane wins lead in school play. Title: “The Jealousy Thing,” because every issue is “The [whatever] Thing.” You get the idea. It’s simple stuff, but it works.

Further, we get one more example of Mary Jane being rewritten into a character entirely unlike the Mary Jane in the main Spider-Man series. Offhand I can’t think of any time her personality has made it intact into an alternative Spider-Man version. Noah has more here for those who have ever tried to figure her out.

Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — part 2

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Noah started the ball here. What was my personal discovery in comics for ’08? I could have done Steve Gerber’s all-text issue of Howard the Duck, but I’m beat and will settle for my experience reading A. Bechdel’s Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. In effect the experience means I read the series from start to finish, or almost. The book drops 137 strips, leaving 390 to take you from 1987 to last year. Good enough to get me from one end of the series to the other.

It was the first time I’d seen more of the series than isolated bits here and there. Since the early/mid-’90s I had read a couple of the individual collections put out by Firebrand Books (now with great new covers), plus strips here and there that surfaced in the New York Press. (The paper’s right-wing proprietor ran Bechdel’s leftist genderqueer menagerie as filler in his back pages.) I very much liked Bechdel’s earliest cartoons, done before Mo and Lois and the rest of the cast showed up, and I sort of liked the installments I’d seen of the continuing series. But Essential allowed me to follow the series from start to finish and for most of the middle.

When I read the series all the way thru, I found that I’d been harboring a delusion. Since the mid-’90s I had believed that Bechdel’s inspiration had been used up with the early strips. I thought that the continuingDykes story was a mere money-making effort and that it had become increasingly mannered and lifeless. Well, it is mannered, not to mention engineered. The pages are crowded with panels, the panels crowded with figures, the figures’ mouths jammed with words (and, yeah, sometimes the effect is like school librarians trying to be clever). But lifeless the strip is not.

Bechdel is compulsive and methodical, and these traits aren’t a replacement for spent inspiration; they’re how she gets the job done. The figures line up in tight, shallow friezes, and it’s evident that Bechdel drew each one from a posed snapshot. But she knows how the characters should pose, and what they should be saying and doing. From about 1994 on, when you read a few of the strips you very quickly come to feel like you’re looking at a crowd of people you know doing what comes naturally to them, even if they all have Edward Gorey eyes and a tendency to hold themselves in profile. She’s a good caricaturist, which you wouldn’t expect from Fun Home. She pops out one bit player after another, and they have the good bit player’s ability to look and behave like no one else on earth without seeming like a stunt. Bechdel has also developed a fine touch for visual dynamics — her zero-depth friezes are a concession to storytelling needs, not signs of a skill deficit — and the way she draws a rainy morning is a pleasure to the eye.

I leave out my favorite aspects of the strip: the sociology, characterization and story. I don’t want to sound like a well-meaning dork liberal or a middlebrow lover of the lose-yourself-in-the-characters fictional experience. But I am both those things, and my two days of reading Essential Dykes were a pleasure in just the ways I could have wanted

Fact

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Burt Ward (tv’s Robin) said he was offered the lead for The Graduate but those dicks at Batman wouldn’t let him do it.

His claim makes sense, in that he looked like Ben Braddock and was about the right age, whereas Dustin Hoffman did not and was not. In a rare fit of coherence, Renata Adler made the point that it’s a strange idea to cast Dustin Hoffman pushing 30 as a golden boy WASP athlete just out of college. She figured that, as a result, The Graduate was just about impossible to swallow. Yet the one time she made sense, she turned out to be wrong.

From Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights by Burt Ward, Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic by Renata Adler