Here’s an old bullet item from The Comics Journal, a review of De:Tales. I think the book got some attention when it came out, so you might know it: a slim paperback volume of black-and-white vignettes written and drawn by Fa?bio Moon and Gabriel Ba?, twins down in Brazil. Dark Horse published it two years ago.

Judging by this book, I’d say Moon and Ba? have talent. But so do lots of people, many of them with more going on inside than the boys apparently have. MoonBa? put me in mind of my old surefire observation about George W. Bush: maybe he’s not stupid, but he might as well be. And maybe MoonBa? aren’t a pair of no-talent poseurs but … all right.

The title of De:Tales doesn’t even make sense. Ok, “tales” and “details,” so you have a pun, but why “details”? The stories don’t have anything more to do with details than other stories do. Someone just wanted to feel clever and didn’t think about what cleverness involves. As I remember, the book’s foreword also contained a clunker. The editor, I forget her name, tittered over how the boys had first approached Dark Horse with superhero art samples. I can see how contributor guidelines might warn against superhero stuff because otherwise a company risks being deluged with nonsuitable material. But if the pages are in front of you, surely you can tell whether they show any talent. Waving them away because of some capes and tights seems like a caste gesture.

There are no superheroes in De:Tales, but it’s a dumb book. The editor couldn’t tell. Why do I care? Basically because I was assigned the book and I wanted it to be good because otherwise I’d be stuck reading crap for an hour or so — and guess what happened. Worse, the crap was prettied up with the scent of the artists’ self-regard. Not to mention the editor’s.

Still, it’s not a bad life the boys have down there in Brazil. They’re working hard, tapping American dollars, turning out professional product. Going by their self-portraits, they’re youngish fellows, lanky and rangy, and Brazil has lots of good-looking girls. It’s a nice thought, the lives they’re hypothetically leading. I just wish the guys would shut up.

And now my bullet:

Fa?bio Moon and Gabriel Ba? are Brazilian twins who share writing and art duties but don’t like using the same last name. The foreword to De:Tales, a collection of 12 short pieces by the team, tells us they picked new surnames off the rack as “reflections of their distinctive artistic spirit.” This isn’t a good sign. The foreword promises stories “of love and loss, of coming of age, of the questions of youth and life’s search for answers”; the collection’s first piece adds to the list “stories with bars and drunk people” and also “fairies and talking birds” and “dreams.” In practice this means stories that are like the old “no soap, radio” joke, except that one of the elephants is a craggy fellow with long hair and the other is a cute girl in a belly shirt and they’re walking down a street in São Paulo instead of sitting in a bathtub. The two brothers can really draw, but they have trouble getting a point into their work. The best they can manage is wistfulness attached to some generalized problem. If the problem has a bit of size (for example, the absence of a dead friend), the story manages a little heft. But most often the problem has to do with the sort of girls you see in beer commercials. It seems the girls aren’t available often enough, or else not on terms that make the brothers feel emotionally cozy.

“Happy Birthday, My Friend!,” the collection’s meatiest story, has charm, a bit of feeling, a decent joke about London. Second place goes to an anecdote (“Qu’est-ce Que C’est?”). Past that point we find notebook entries and exercises in style. In “Outras Palabras,” a beautiful girl lights a candle against the night sky. We move from the candle’s flame to a street light, along telephone wires, past more street lights, and arrive at a dark window where a craggy fellow is gazing out past another candle flame. This isn’t a story, it’s a printed rock video.

The brothers, especially Gabriel, can be too loopy and expressive in drawing individuals, but they do fine crowd scenes and settings. The local color is a big attraction here, and the characters always move through well-paced sequences of well-chosen shots. But the expertly assembled panels convey content so vapid it’s shocking. A beautiful girl with bad teeth doesn’t really cover the effect. Imagine a beautiful girl with no teeth: She opens up and all you see is gums and darkness. Or maybe there’s one tooth, a single gleam against the black, a lonely candle in the night. If that image makes you wistful, read De:Tales.

I had to get this past Noah.

UPDATE: Noah points out that not everyone is registered with the Washington Post. All right, I’ll swallow my pride and offer this.

Complaining about the Zinn-Buhle-Konopacki People’s History of American Empire put me in mind of a side issue. I refer to Rius’s works and the Beginners series as comic books. But they aren’t, because in my view a comic book must center around a narrative or argument conducted by a series of pictures. Words will be involved too, in most cases, but the chain of pictures really makes up the comic’s spine. Rius and the Beginners series do something else. The text, skimpy as it is, carries the reader from point to point; the pictures, big as they are, provide a counterpoint to the text. What do you call a book like that? A comic, if you’re blogging and in a hurry, but the term doesn’t really fit.

Realize that there are exceptions to this rule. Steve Gerber or Neil Gaiman or a bunch of other guys may take a break from image-to-image sequencing and bung in a number of pages where text carries the day and pictures are there as dressing. You might then argue that a given issue of Howard the Duck or Miracleman is a comic book from pages x to xx, something else for a while, and then back to being a comic again. But life is tedious enough.

I couldn’t get thru this thing. A People’s History of American Empire carries left-wing comics to their logical point: the conclusion that the left should try some sort of trading-card arrangement and leave comics alone. The motive behind Empire — and the Beginners books, and even Rius, who’s a lot more visually adept — seems to be to liposuction away all those gunky words and details and leave a few talking points bare to the reader’s view. You might as well park each factoid on its own card with a decent illustration. You could do the thing in quiz form. “Q: How did the United States bring peace and freedom to the Philippines? Look on the other side!” “A: By killing more than 200,000 men, women, and children! This early counterinsurgency campaign shocked the conscience of,” etc. There’d be room for a picture there someplace, and a logo along the lines of “Prof. Zinn’s U.S. Empire Fact Parade,” with an eagle wearing an eye patch and clutching a round, black anarchist-style bomb, its fuse burning down like a sparkler.

For people who live to get their particular truth across, left wingers generate lousy propaganda. Nowadays only Michael Moore has the touch. Howard Zinn certainly doesn’t, not in print, in the theater (catch his Marx in Soho sometime), or in comics. Empire is a big, hardbound coffee-table book adapted by Paul Buhle from Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the world’s most earnest volume not to involve flossing or Jesus. The art is by Mike Konopacki, who did a job that’s as adequate as adequate can get. Like anyone who has ever drawn a comic book, Konopacki isn’t much good at drawing recognizable public figures. His particular style reminds me of ads for small-time bank chains or of pamphlets for junior high kids in need of advice on healthy living. Doe-eyed, perky-nosed little chaps stand around as the bloody mechanism of American history chomps its way thru the peace of the world. But the book’s biggest formal problem is that the art is there to fill space. Sticking a quote by Woodrow Wilson next to a picture of Woodrow Wilson doesn’t really do much. The same points could be communicated just as well by text alone. Take out the pictures and you’d have a sequence of subpar op-ed pieces, but at least there’d be fewer pages to turn.

The best parts of Empire are the reproductions that pop up here and there of political cartoons from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There’s one calling upon the U.S. to take up the white man’s burden in China, a very elaborate affair involving a giant Uncle Sam setting foot on a miniaturized Chinese coastline, with tiny Chinese residents representing various aspects of Chinese life and society that the cartoonist thought ought to be corrected. A whole argument and fleet of sub-arguments are summed up by picture-making. You’d think somebody who wanted to do a comic book analyzing U.S. history would have something like that in mind. But such is not the case. Instead we have the elaborate dental care pamphlet that is the left’s idea of effective communication. The left is like the tourist who raises his voice so foreigners will have an easier time understanding English; pictures take the place of shouting, but the principle is the same and pretty soon you just want the guy to shut up.

In short, I couldn’t get thru this thing.

EDITED because I got Rius’s name wrong first time out.
UPDATE: Rius and the Beginners books aren’t really comics. See here.

How long before hearing a white say, “Oh yeah? I voted for Obama” becomes an occasion for eye-rolling and exaggerated sighs among our black citizens?

Most likely as of a week ago Thursday, would be my guess.

I’m reading James Thurber’s The Years with Ross. It turns out that for a while Thurber’s rejects from The New Yorker were being bought for the special hip/with-it page of the New York American, a newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst. Apparently a lot of them were of dogs (no surprise) because Hearst sent the editor this note:

Stop running those dogs on your page. I wouldn’t have them peeing on my cheapest rug.

Damn. The weird thing, of course, is that Hearst liked George Herriman so much. It’s hard to imagine one man being able to appreciate George Herriman but not James Thurber, or vice versa. But, given that such a man existed, I suppose it was inevitable that someone made a movie about him.

Every comics blog probably had this 5 minutes ago. My distinction is I called it.

From the Huffington Post‘s 50 fun Obama facts:

He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics

Yeah.

UPDATE: Looking thru Dreams from My Father, I find the comics-related sentence. Young Obama has encountered racism. And:

… from that day forward, a part of me felt trampled on, crushed, and I took refuge in the life that my grandparents led. After school let out, I would walk the five blocks to our apartment; if I had any change in my pockets, I might stop off at a newsstand run by a blind man, who would let me know what new comics had come in. Gramps would be at home to let me in, and as he lay down for his afternoon nap, I would watch cartoons and sitcom reruns.

Yikes, that is one downbeat tableau. And probably the Conans he read were John Buscema and not Barry Smith, and the Spider-Mans were written by Gerry Conway.

UPDATE 2: Fortuitously, Andrew Sullivan steers us to this post by Ta-Nehisi Coates.