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Best Online Comics Criticism 2012 – 3rd Quarter Nominations

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(A call for nominations and submissions.)

This is part of an ongoing quarterly process to find the best online comics criticism of 2012. Five comics critics have kindly agreed to adjudicate and create a final list based on the long list of nominations. Nominations from previous quarters can be found here and here.

We’ve just ended a lengthy Hate Anniversary at HU and judging from the results, it would appear that “hate” is both entertaining and popular. On the other hand, it does seem that “hate” isn’t as easy it appears. My feeling is that while the criticism generated in the last few weeks has been useful and informative, less of lasting worth (to comics) has emerged than in previous HU roundtables. In fact, I would not hesitate to say that one of the worst pieces of comics criticism I have read this year emerged during this roundtable.

The usual reasons—as listed by Noah in his introduction to “hate”—apply.  I am also puzzled as to the repeated justifications for “hate” in those articles. Rather, writers should be apologizing to readers and consumers (like myself) for loving so much dreck. There’s always the small possibility that the world of comics criticism is, for the most parts, a happy-clappy world of positive energy with practitioners ill-suited to the arts of ridicule and general nastiness. The preponderance of words of affirmation in this year’s nomination list is evidence of the same. There are far worse things then this to be accused of.

[Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke’s Allegory of Criticism.]

Reiteration: Readers should feel free to submit their nominations in the comments section of this article. Alternatively I can be reached at suattong at gmail dot com. Web editors should feel free to submit work from their own sites. I will screen these recommendations and select those which I feel are the best fit for the list. There will be no automatic inclusions based on these public submissions. Only articles published online for the first time between January 2012 and December 2012 will be considered.

There were a number of good articles on HU this last quarter but I won’t be nominating most of them due to a conflict of interest. Readers (but not contributors) of HU should submit their own nominations for this quarterly process.

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Jordi Canyissa – “Pictureless Comics: the Feinte Trinité Challenge”

Jared Gardner on Joe Sacco – “Comics Journalism, Comics Activism”. This one was recommended by Noah. I will add here that I’m definitely not sold on the idea (suggested in the text) that Sacco is under appreciated or polarizing. If anything, there’s almost universal support for his political positions and comics within the comics critical sphere. He certainly hasn’t been kicked around like Norman Finkelstein for example. This might actually reflect well on comics critics for once but I’m more inclined to put this down to a lack of diversity in opinion.

Laurence  Grove – “A note on the woman who gave birth to rabbits one hundreds years before Töpffer.” (According to the author, the article has appeared as “A Note on the Emblematic Woman who Gave Birth to Rabbits”, ed. Alison Adams and Philip Ford, in ‘Le Livre demeure’: Studies in Book History in Honour of Alison Saunders (Geneva: Droz, 2011), pp. 147-156.)

Dustin Harbin on Steven Weissman’s Barack Hussein Obama.

Jeet Heer on Building Stories (“When is a book like a building? When Chris Ware is the author.”)

Christopher J. Hayton and David L. Albright – “The Military Vanguard for Desegregation” (from ImageTexT)

Nicolas Labarre – Irony in The Dark Knight Returns.

A. David Lewis (writer) and Miriam Libicki (artist) on Harvey Pekar’s Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me. This is a useful Jewish perspective on a comic about Jewish matters. The problem as with most drawn reviews of comics is that it really doesn’t use the tools of the medium in any useful sense.  Much of it reads as if it was adapted from a prose form review as opposed to a comics script. This review didn’t need to be a comic.

Heather Love on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother (“The Mom Problem”).

Mindless Ones on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Parts 1 and 2

Adrielle Mitchell on the relationship between Comics Studies and Comics. (“Mutualistic, Commensal or Parasitic?”)

Alyssa Rosenberg on Doonesbury.

Marc Sobel on Alan Moore’s “The Hasty Smear of My Smile”. Part of a guest written series on Alan Moore’s short form works at Comics Forum.

Steven Surdiacourt – Graphic Poetry: An (im)possible form?

Matthias Wivel – “New Yorker Cartoons – A Legacy of Mediocrity” (as published on HU).

Frank M. Young on John Stanley’s Little Lulu Fairy Tale Meta-Stories.  I’m including this article here despite the rather ridiculous comment near the start that Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant and the Tarzan newspaper strip aren’t comics. It’s an argument from the Land that Time Forgot which Young explains in detail in the following short summary:

“But part of the distinct recipe of comics is the speech or thought balloon. It is a narrative device unique to the form. The creation of this tool, in the 19th century, gave comics the one thing that set them apart from prose, paintings, plays, movies, video games, TV shows and any other visual-verbal container for a flowing narrative.”

The real question here is whether an outdated and eccentric idea about comics should detract from the piece.

 

From The Comics Journal

Rob Clough on Dan Zettwoch’s Birdseye Bristoe.

Craig Fischer – “Devils and Machines: On Jonah Hex and All Star Western”

Richard Gehr on The Carter Family.

Joshua Glenn – The Pathological Culture of Dal Tokyo.

Ryan Holmberg – “Tezuka Osamu and American Comics”

Bob Levin – “To Hell and Back”

Dan Nadel on David Mazzucchelli’s Daredevil: Born Again Artist’s Edition.

Sean Rogers – “Flex Mentallo and the Morrison Problem”

Carter Scholz on Dal Tokyo.

 

 

 

 

Shakespeare Hatred: An Underground Literary Tradition

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Editor’s Note: This post first appeared on Jeet Heer’s blog Sans Everything. Jeet graciously suggested we reprint it here as coda to our hatefest, just as a reminder that everything should be hated, not just comics.
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Shaw:No Lover of Shakespeare He

Over at Crooked Timber, they are having a lively discussion  provoked by George Bernard Shaw’s scorn for Shakespeare. On many occasions Shaw expressed extreme distain for the Bard of Avon. In a 1906 letter Shaw wrote “I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare’s philosophy, to the superficiality and second-handedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him.”

Shaw’s opinions are easy to dismiss, but it is often forgotten that there is a long and venerable tradition of Shakespeare-hatred, a critical tradition that includes not just crank and reflexive contrarians but also some very great writers. Aside from Shaw, Voltaire and Leo Tolstoy were also vociferously hostile to Stratford’s favourite son. Voltaire actually started off as a champion of Shakespeare but turned against the English writer’s plays. More recently the novelist Joyce Carol Oates (in her collection Contraries) and mad-dog essayist Marvin Mudrick have taken aim at Shakespeare.

Below I’ve assembled a mini-anthology of Shakespeare-bashing. Although I myself am rather fond of Shakespeare, I have to say I think this tradition of attacking the dramatist is actually quite valuable. Unlike most of the thousands of volumes given over to bardolatry, the anti-Shakespeare brigade doesn’t assume that every jot and titter that flowed out of the playwright’s quill pen is pure gold. The hostile critics tend to be close readers, alert to the texture of the words and the logic of the plots. They pay Shakespeare the respect of careful scrutiny. The opponents of Shakespeare treat him as a living writer, one whose choices can be argued with, not as a marble statue commemorating universal and immemorial truths. Tolstoy in particular was a very astute critic and his long essay (or short book) on Shakespeare deserves more attention than it’s received.

So here is an anthology of Shakespeare-hatred.

Tolstoy:

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this civilized world attributes to the works of Shakespeare was itself senseless. My consternation was increased by the fact that I always keenly felt the beauties of poetry in every form; then why should artistic works recognized by the whole world as those of a genius,—the works of Shakespeare,—not only fail to please me, but be disagreeable to me? For a long time I could not believe in myself, and during fifty years, in order to test myself, I several times recommenced reading Shakespeare in every possible form, in Russian, in English, in German and in Schlegel’s translation, as I was advised. Several times I read the dramas and the comedies and historical plays, and I invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. At the present time, before writing this preface, being desirous once more to test myself, I have, as an old man of seventy-five, again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the “Henrys,” “Troilus and Cressida,” the “Tempest,” “Cymbeline,” and I have felt, with even greater force, the same feelings,—this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits,—thereby distorting their esthetic and ethical understanding,—is a great evil, as is every untruth.

George Bernard Shaw:

Search [in Shakespeare] for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank verse.

All that you miss in Shakespeare you find in Bunyan, to whom the true heroic came quite obviously and naturally. The world was to him a more terrible place than it was to Shakespeare; but he saw through it a path at the end of which a man might look not only forward to the Celestial City, but back on his life and say: ‘Tho’ with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get them.’ The heart vibrates like a bell to such utterances as this; to turn from it to ‘Out, out, brief candle,’ and ‘The rest is silence,’ and ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded by a sleep’ is to turn from life, strength, resolution, morning air and eternal youth, to the terrors of a drunken nightmare.

 

Marvin Mudrick: Known as the Dirty Harry of Literary Criticism

 
Marvin Mudrick’s Nobody Here But Us Chickens – arguably the most eccentric book of literary criticism ever written by a sane writer – is long out of print. So I’ve scanned in one chapter (“The Unstrung Zero”) dealing with Hamlet. Mudrick write about Shakespeare elsewhere in the book, sometime appreciatively, but here he is at his most tart. (The rest of the book, with discussions of everyone from Lady Murasaki to Leon Trotsky, is very much worth reading).


 

 

 

The End of Hate

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We’ve come to the end of our massive 5th anniversary festival of hate. An index of articles by author is here. We also have a handy index listing all the hated things themselves here.
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A couple days ago, Jones (One of the Jones Boys), put up a post logically proving that it is impossible to have a worst comic ever. He argues that there are so many different ways for a comic to be bad that it is impossible to rate or weigh them. Or, as he puts it:

What I claim is that the ways a comic can be bad are irreducibly plural and literally incommensurable — there is no way to put all these different ways together so that you end up with a single dimension of badness (which, if you recall, is what we need in order to declare something the X-est Y, in this case the worst comic of all time).

I agree that this is a good argument for why there is no worst comic ever. The one flaw is that it uses the term “worst comic ever” in a way in which no one actually uses the term “worst comic ever.”

The point being…it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone participating in this roundtable, or anyone reading this roundtable, really believed when they picked a comic to discuss or read about that that comic was, in an objective or even in a subjective sense, the worst comic ever. Aesthetics isn’t math, and no one (except maybe Jones, in some of his more fey philosophical moods) thinks of it as math. When we talk about the “worst comic ever” we’re not actually talking about quantifying comics linearly. At most, I’d say, the ranking is a metaphor — and understood as such by virtually everyone who ranks any aesthetic object. Even in something like the HU Best Comics Poll, which was based on counting survey results, the organizer of the endeavor, Robert Stanley Martin point out that the ranking is “an interpretation”, not an algorithm — and that the list is therefore a conversation, not a solution.

Again, Jones focuses on the fact that there is no one — nor even two, nor ten, nor ten thousand — way(s) to evaluate comics. He presents this as evidence of the futility of naming the worst comic ever. But on the contrary, I think the impossibility and messiness of the task is precisely the reason that best of (and sometimes worst of) questions are fascinating — and illuminating. In choosing a best or worst, and in defending our choices, we reveal — and not just to others — what matters in art, and why. Of course those revelations are themselves often confused, vacillating, contradictory and vague — but that merely makes them a reflection of the aesthetics with which they’re engaged. Rather than thinking about ranking (or should we say criticism?) as a debased and innately functionless branch of logic, perhaps we could think of it as a genre itself — as useless, as frustrating, as stupid, as partial and as sublime as any other aesthetic effort to represent the world.
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If the worst comic ever is a genre, one can perhaps ignore its possibility, and instead think about its tropes. In that context, and on the basis of this roundtable, I think subdee is dead on when she says, “Though there are exceptions, it seems to me that very often, to hate something you also have to love it.”

In life, real antipathy often has to wait upon love spurned — and that’s often the case in criticism as well. Thus, Bert Stabler writes about his early love and recent disillusionment with Chris Ware, while Jason Michelitch talks about his early love and recent disillusionment with Matt Wagner. Derik Badman and Richard Cook, on the other hand, write about realizing that that first shiny nostalgic love wasn’t so lovable after all. In other cases — for example, Ng Suat Tong, Susan Kirtley, Vom Marlowe, Matthias Wivel — love hovers in the background as a popular or critical imperative, transforming alienation or indifference into a more weaponized dislike.

Selecting the worst comic ever, then, seems to depend not only, as Jones argues, on all the myriad ways in which comics can be bad, but on all the myriad ways in which they can be good — and even more, perhaps, on the ways that it’s difficult to pull the two apart. The purpose or end of hate is love — and so, while this roundtable may be coming to a close, we can all rest easy knowing that as long as we love comics, there will be no end to hate.

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Early on in the roundtable I mentioned that I didn’t think that hate was all that popular. Which just goes to show what I know. This last five weeks has seen far more traffic than we’ve ever gotten outside of the crazy couple months when the Victorian Wire post went viral. Perhaps the world really does love hate…but I suspect instead that the success is due to the genius, time, and care which all our contributors donated to help us celebrate our anniversary. Thanks so much to all those who posted, to those who commented, and to our readers as well. It’s been a great roundtable and a lovely five years.
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The cover is from Fantastic Four #21 by Jack Kirby (who, of course, is hated here.)

Hot For Teacher

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This first appeared at Splice Today.
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Student-teacher relations have been a source of sexual fantasy at least since the time of Socrates.  Across history, the young and the nubile meet the powerful and experienced in the fevered imaginations of both, as well as in a kajillion bad porn scripts.

Probably the most famous modern iteration of the archetype is Van Halen’s 1984 hit song “Hot for Teacher” and its accompanying music video. The latter infamously featured a teacher stripping to her underthings atop a desk and gyrating in front of a group of wildly cheering middle-school students.
 

 
Sex and kids is a sure-fire recipe for controversy, and inevitably the “Hot for Teacher” video inspired protest and condemnation from the usual quarters.  Looking back on it from a couple decades on, though, what’s most notable about it is its resolute unsexiness.  Part of that can perhaps be chalked up to changing styles and perhaps personal preference— the thin-as-a-rail, teased-out eighties models who play the part of eye candy seem more like weirdly dated manikins than like actual fetish objects.  When the camera lingers hungrily on the back of teacher’s skirt, the main impression you’re left with is, “Jeez; that woman has no ass.”

But there’s more to the lack of heat than just changing fashion.  Indeed, considering the subject matter, gyrating female bodies are really on camera for a remarkably limited period of time.  Instead, we get a lot of the Van Halen band doing a consciously campy Vegas dance routine beneath a glowing disco ball and numerous shots of Waldo, a bespectacled Clark Kent of a kid paralyzed with nerdiness.  And, of course, plenty of footage of Van Halen partying.  With kids.

The truth is that the video isn’t really about lusting after the teacher at all. Instead, it’s about lusting after a childhood in which you lusted after the teacher.  The whole short film is focused on adults imagining how cool they could have been in high school if they had known then what they know now — and, simultaneously, on kids imagining themselves as being adults. The Van Halen band members are portrayed both by the real Van Halen and by a group of kids dressed like the adults.  The video unabashedly blends both identities, with the adults sitting right beside their younger selves in class and the kids lip-syncing the lines in the voices of their grown-up doppelgangers.  The hot teacher is just an accessory; a convenient stand-in for the real passions, which are between male adults and their younger iterations.  The adults want the rebelliousness and goofy energy of youth; the kids want the sexual opportunities and confidence of grown-ups.  And both achieve their dream not by sleeping with the teacher, but by rocking out.

Unlike Van Halen, when Ke$ha’s sings about intergenerational sex she really sounds like she wants to have sex with someone other than herself.  Van Halen never even bothered to name the teacher they were hot for; Ke$ha does so right in the title of her 2010 bonus track “Mr. Watson.”  The song is addressed specifically to the object of affection, rather than, as with Van Halen, to a generalized audience of like-minded horn-dogs.  “Oh boy I just can’t wait for history class/ It’s my favorite hour of the day,” Ke$ha coos at the song’s opening.  She’s got the giddy, giggly energy of a high school crush — a far cry from David Lee Roth’s entirely impersonal concupiscence (“I wonder what the teacher is going to look like this year?”)

As this suggests, Ke$ha is much less coy about pretending to be an actual student than the Van Halen guys.  For Halen, the whole point of the song was the frisson between then and now. Ke$ha, on the other hand, comes on as if her wriggling butt is actually in one of those plastic chairs.  Instead of Eddie Van Halen’s swaggeringly virtuoso guitar solo, “Mr. Watson” is all bouncy bubble-gum choruses, chirrupy girl-group harmonies, and Ke$sha’s producer-sweetened, mewling vocals.

Part of the reason that Ke$ha’s song seems less distanced is perhaps that she’s playing an older student — someone of at least high school age. Or at least, I really hope that’s what she’s doing, because the song is significantly more explicit than Van Halen ever dared to be.  “I can’t put my finger on what’s so sexy/or why I want you in my bed/ (or on your desk)/is it your power or authority/or for the thrill of being bad?”   If Van Halen’s version of teacher-sex basically involved having the hot authority figure available as an opportunity for male bonding, Ke$sha’s version is a lot more direct in its desire to seize the rod of puissance. (“I want to get my hands in your khaki pants…mrow!”)

At first glance, Ke$sha’s song seems to serve equally as male or female fantasy (as she says, “I know it’s a fantasy of yours/ you know it’s a fantasy of mine!”)  And certainly, the kittenish yet sexually aggressive school girl complete with Catholic uniform is a male porn staple.  Still, the song vigorously objectifies Mr. Watson in a way that doesn’t necessarily cater to male tastes.  That khaki pants line, or Ke$ha declaring “Up on the chalkboard I just love your ass/ when you write notes it’s just shake, shake, shake” — you get the somewhat uncomfortable sense that she’s making fun of the guy.
 

 
And indeed, though he is named, and gets a specific ass and pants to call his own, at bottom (as it were) it’s not clear that Mr. Watson is any more real than Van Halen’s gyrating eighties manikins.  Ke$sha is explicitly lusting after and somewhat more subtly mocking a stereotype or an icon, not a person.  The excitement of the fantasy is, as she says, the ability to be girlish and innocent while simultaneously seizing sexual power.  The switch in gender and genre changes the exact mechanics, but the point isn’t that far removed from Van Halen’s.   Lusting after a fantasy teacher is a way to make the student more confident, more sexy, and more real.

“Teacher”, a 2009 single by weirdo indie art duo Ina Unt Ina takes a very different approach.  In the first place, it’s not a fantasy.  And, in the second place, it’s not heterosexual.

Two weeks to sixteen
leaning against the wall
kissing boys
but my eyes, my eyes are following you.

Why do I stare?
Why do I care?
Why do I stare?
Why do I care?

Teacher, teacher sexy creature.
I want to die and I don’t know why.

The music here is sparse electropop. The synth hook references girl groups, but without Ke$ha’s anthemic horniness.  Instead, the harmonies here are wistful and the cadences don’t really resolve. Instead the song drifts. The catchy melodies wash up against one another and the song at various points seems to almost stop before picking itself up and moving on again, as if it’s unsure when or where to end.

The point is fairly obvious; from a lesbian perspective, high school sexuality is less about seizing power and more about confusion, questioning, and a swooning loss of self.  Van Halen and Ke$ha know what they’re after, but Ina Unt Ina doesn’t even know why they’re after what they’re after.  “Early morning, on the roof, I’m secretly looking down/ watching you move, watching your hands, I’m secretly looking down.”   The distance between student and teacher which is so exhilaratingly easy to bridge for David Lee Roth or Ke$ha here becomes unbridgeable. Desire doesn’t pull Ina Unt Ina near; instead it pushes them out and up and away. The song finishes with the singers chanting “don’t know how to get close to you/don’t know how to get close to you.”  Desire is never consummated, and if the singers know themselves somewhat better at the end of the song than they did at the beginning, that knowledge only leads to more, and more poignant, uncertainty.

Again, this is obviously, and intentionally, a song about being gay.  Yet of these three songs, “Teacher” is easily the closest to my own experience of heterosexual high school crushes. Said crushes were not, as far as I remember, particularly empowering and/or triumphantly lascivious.  Instead, they were, for the most part, confusing and destabilizing.

Of course, Van Halen and Ke$ha aren’t going for realism.  They’re going for dreams of invulnerability; a kind of super-hero version of hyperbolic heterosexuality.  I get the appeal— both “Hot for Teacher” and “Mr. Watson” are great songs.  But I think we all learned in school that love is queerer than that.

Index of Hated Things

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Charles Addams

Anything you can’t find on the rest of the list, probably

Peter Arno

Nate Atkinson

Autobiographical comics (all of them).

George Booth

Batgirl/Stephanie Brown Women in Refrigerators Story Arc

Betty and Veronica

Buffy: Season Eight

Roz Chast

Frank Cho, Liberty Meadows

The Collection of Sean Michael Robinson

Ctrl-Alt-Dlt.

Dragonlance #3.

Kazuke Ebine, Mahatma Gandhi

EC Comics in general.

EC War Comics in particular.

Will Eisner, The Spirit.

Gardner Fox/Carmine Infantino: Adam Strange/Justice League Team-Up

Neil Gaiman, Sandman

Neil Gaiman in general

Edward Gorey

Fletcher Hanks.

Jamie Hewlett, Tank Girl

Helen Hokinson

Geoff Johns, Blackest Night

Kim Dong Hwa’s Color Trilogy

Jack Kirby

Rich Koslowski, Three Fingers

Regis Loisel, Peter Pan

Jason Lutes

Milo Manara, Fatal Rendezvous

Robert Mankoff

Benjamin Marra, Gangster Rap Posse

Alan Moore/Brian Bolland, Killing Joke.

Alan Moore/David Lloyd, V for Vendetta

Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons, Watchmen

Thomas Nast

New Yorker Cartoons

Tsugumi Ohba/Takeshi Obata, Bakuman

Denny O’Neill/Neal Adams, Green Lantern/Green Arrow

Natsume Ono.

Alex Ross and Mark Waid, Kingdom Come

Johnny Ryan

Dave Sim and Gerhard, Cerebus

David Small, Stitches

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Spirou et Fantasio a New York

J. Michael Straczynzki, Midnight Nation

J. Michael Stracyznski in general

Osama Tezuka.

Craig Thompson, Goodbye Chunky Rice

Craig Thompson, Habibi

Matt Wagner, Batman/Grendel II

Western Civilization

Judd Winick, Pedro and Me

X-Men: Onslaught

Ai Yazawa, Nana #22

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Click here for the post author index.

 

Nana #22

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The last issue of Ai Yazawa’s Nana in English is volume #21. The series stopped publishing in 2010, when Yazawa contracted an unknown illness. She hasn’t been able to work since.

Nana could not have picked a worse moment to come to an abrupt end. In Volume #20, Ren, the lead guitarist of Trapnest and the boyfriend of Nana Osaki, dies in a car crash. Volume #21 is an extended, painful depiction of grief, in all its overwhelming, banal detail. At this point in the series, after hundreds and hundreds of pages, we know all of Yazawa’s characters intimately, and their every characteristic and uncharacteristic action as they learn of their loss takes on an almost unbearable weight.
 

 
For example, it seems like the most natural thing in the world for a husband to grab his wife’s hand for support — except that distant, assholish, controlling Takumi hardly ever reaches out to anyone for anything. Nana Komatsu (or Hachi) knows her husband shouldn’t be behaving like this; she looks down at her hand as if she’s afraid it’s going to fall off. Ironically, soon after this, when Takumi views Ren’s body, he sees that the only part of Ren not badly damaged in the accident were his hands, which, a guitarist to the end, he protected during the crash. Ren’s fingers, carefully preserved, hold nothing, while Takumi and Hachi’s, unnaturally, hold, and are held by, his death. It’s not just that there’s space where there should be presence, but that there’s presence where there should be space. Ren can’t hold anything except those he leaves behind.

In another sequence, Yasu, Ren’s childhood friend who has an intense long term platonic relationship with Nana, goes to tell her that Ren has died. She’s a rockstar in her own right, and is on tour. Yasu has to fly out to get her and then they drive all night to get back home to see Ren’s body. When they come out of the car, Yasu carries Nana, who is draped over him helplessly. Yasu’s girlfriend, Myu, takes one look at them and flees:
 

 
Whereas Takumi’s reaction resonates because it’s not normal, Myu’s is touching because it is. Like Yasu, she’s level-headed and thoughtful. For him, that means being there for Nana when no one else will or can. For her, it means knowing when to get herself out of the way.

The scene that most affected me, though, occurs a couple pages earlier, when Nana’s car pulls up. Earlier in the series, Nana and Ren’s relationship became a gigantic tabloid news story; in fact, Ren’s car crash was caused in part because he was fleeing the papparazzi. Naturally, then, there’s a scrum of reporters waiting for Nana when she arrives, ready to ask her about Ren’s death. Hachi, Nana’s former roommate and one of her closest friends, intervenes:
 

 
Again, the sequence gets its power because we’ve known Hachi so long. She’s a strikingly hapless and needy airhead. She spends the series desperately glomming onto a series of men (and arguably women too) in an effort to get somebody else to provide the backbone and rational decision making functions that she so spectacularly lacks.

And yet, while Hachi is exasperating, she’s also very sympathetic…and this sequence helps to get at why. Over the course of the manga, Hachi develops a huge, somewhat ridiculous hero-worshipping crush on rock-star Nana. This seems like it should be another sign of Hachi’s puppyish infantilism — the nickname “Hachi” is in fact a dog’s name given to her by Nana. But instead of cementing her helplessness, Hachi’s clinging to Nana blurs into a kind of mothering, with Nana, estranged from her own mother, turning increasingly, semi-secretly, and desperately to her friend.

And so, in this sequence, when the worst ha happened, Hachi does what mothers often do, and sacrifices herself for her baby. It reminds me a little of my mother-in-law, who, like Hachi, is in many ways, infuriatingly flighty, and who, like Hachi, married too young. Yet, when my father-in-law (that man she married) was dying of brain cancer, she fed him and cleaned him and struggled tirelessly with a series of indifferent doctors and hospitals to get him the best possible care. Watching her was more than a little awe-inspiring.

Hachi here is awe-inspiring too…but there’s also something heart-breakingly futile about her attempted bargain with the reporters. Nobody takes her up on her interview offer…and indeed, Nana is swept out of the car too quickly for anyone to really get at her, it seems like. Hachi’s sacrifice ends up being superfluous; the story wouldn’t be changed at all without those two pages. Her love and her strength don’t really matter…just like, for all my mother-in-law’s efforts and care, her husband died just the same.

Life is filled with such blind alleys, of course, where the narratives sputter and stall and then go on; where the storyteller seems to have abandoned her work. Genre fiction, on the other hand, always know where it’s going — what’s the point of genre after all if you don’t have a blueprint? Nana, certainly, is as insistently artificial as any soap opera melodrama, packed with tell-tale and impossible coincidences. On the micro level, the two protagonists have the same name; on the macro level, everybody in the manga either becomes a rock star or marries one. That’s the inevitable teleology of fiction, not the stuttering uncertainty of fact.

Yet Nana‘s extended discursive format, and the way Yazawa privileges the characters and their emotions over the steady churn of events, often give the series a feeling of being weirdly aimless and fragile. In Nana #9, for example, Yazawa includes a short story purportedly about Naoki, Trapnest’s drummer. It starts with him dying his hair daringly blond, and then proclaiming to his parents, “It’s the real me, maman!”

That could be the start of a tale about discovering one’s true inner rebel rock star. But instead, Yazawa goes in the opposite direction; Naoki narrates, but what he narrates is almost entirely about other characters — or more precisely, about his misinterpretations of the other characters. He thinks Takumi and Yasu are gangsters, he misinterprets Takumi’s relationship with Reira (the Trapnest singer); he fails to recognize Yasu when the later changes his hair. The story isn’t about Naoki finding his real self, instead, it’s about how he fails to discover everyone else’s.

Finally, towards the end of the piece, we learn that there is a center to Naoki’s life — his relationship with his hometown sweetheart, Haruko.

Or, then again…
 

 
Haruko may be real, or she may not; her drawn image is either the the core of Naoki, or a meaningless surface. Moreoever, the meditation on truth and lies in the pages above is contrasted, not with pictures of Naoki, but with pictures of Nana and Ren. Haruko isn’t real, Naoki isn’t real…and of course, Nana and Ren aren’t real either. They’re just a dream. In the context of a serialized soap opera, this meta moment, where the headlong narrative collapses into itself, is unsettlingly disorienting. These people we know as friends are just visual illusions; line drawings on the top of nothing. The effect is not so much to knock us out of this story, as to knock us out of any story, including our own. Instead of images arranging themselves into a sequence, they seem to hang still, unorganized bits and pieces that refuse to make a whole. Genre falls apart, as ungraspable as life, or as death.

There’s a similar effect in the latter part of the series, when Yazawa begins to let us see glimpses into the future of her characters. But these futures are less a terminus, giving finality and shape to the whole, than a way to extend and double the narrative’s irresolution. Nana-to-come has run away and is living incognito…but perhaps she’ll return. Takumi-to-come and Hachi-to-come are estranged. But that’s not the end of their relationship. It’s simply another stage in it, as subject to change and vacillation as the past. There is no happily ever after, not because there isn’t a happily, but because there’s no ever. The characters keep falling out of the genre narrative, or else the genre narrative falls from around them, like snow dissolving. “After your death, the future we all hoped for was wiped clean,” future Hachi says to the long- passed Ren. “I still can’t imagine my future. I can’t begin again unless Nana is with me.” But while she’s saying that, the future goes on; her daughter plays with Yasu, the waves go in and out, the snow comes down. The plot is gone, but she’s still there, lamenting the fact that death is an end, and also lamenting the fact that it’s not.

Those are the last pages in Nana #21. The series hangs there still, waiting for Yazawa to come back, or never to come back, just as Hachi is waiting for Nana. We’re stuck with grief and a future that won’t tell us what it means. Maybe that’s why sometimes the worst comic book is the one that was never written — the page that you can’t turn, and can’t stop turning.
 
 
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