Category Archives: Blog

Just a Dull Thing In His Dream

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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The Total Recall remake is almost Platonic in that it’s pristinely superfluous. Remakes always feel more than a little pointless, but at least when you watch something like The Thing remake, or the I Spit On Your Grave remake, you get a sense that the people making the film actually liked the original… or at least saw it. Director Len Wiseman, though, has no discernible affection for his source material, nor anything to say to it.  The film is one long, uninvolving chase sequence, through which Colin Farrell (Douglas Quaid) wanders like a mildly confused puppy; in comparison with his bland performance, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1990s original comes across like Laurence Olivier.  Jessica Biel (Melina) is even less involving, if such a thing is possible. Only Kate Beckinsale as Quaid’s “wife” Lori makes any pretense to watchability, throwing herself into the Queen Bitch/assassin role with welcome relish.  She still doesn’t have anything like the vindictive charge that Sharon Stone did in the original—but in this turkey, every flicker of adequacy counts.

What’s odd is that Total Recall‘s utter awfulness is, in some ways, true to its roots—not the 1990 movie, but the 1966 Philip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.”  Dick’s story was not awful in itself, exactly. Rather, it was meta-awful, a semi-parody, dealing explicitly with the crappiness of its own genre.

In the story, loser clerk Douglas Quaid wants to go to Mars, which is to say, he wants to be in a science-fiction story. He clings to this dream even when his wife suggests a real-life vacation. “A dream, I bet,” his wife sneers at him, “you’re always full of them.”

Quaid is indeed full of dreams… and those dreams are all real. This is true in the narrative: when Quaid goes to Rekal, Incorporated to have memories of a Mars trip implanted, he discovers that he has in fact already been to Mars as a mind-wiped secret agent. But Quaid’s vision is true more broadly as well. He imagines that he is a character in a genre narrative—and he is, in fact, a character in a genre narrative.

These are, moreover, idiotic, and are specifically referred to, and thought of within the story, as idiotic. Quaid’s desire to go to Mars is presented as infantile silliness. But even worse is the end of the story, where Quaid sits for another memory implant, this one based on his deepest desires. He apparently has long had a fantasy in which, as a child, he meets an alien race which declares that its plans to destroy the earth. Quaid treats them with such kindness that they decide to wait to destroy the world until he dies. This fantasy of a pious savior is, as one character remarks, “the most grandiose fantasy I ever ran across”—a quintessence of preposterous self-centeredness.  And within the story his self-centeredness turns out to be entirely validated. Quaid really is the center of the universe; he really did meet those aliens, and when he dies, so does the world. Which, again, is not just true, but meta-true: Quaid is the main character, and Philip K. Dick built the story, and the universe, for him and around him.

“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” then, doesn’t so much reveal hidden depths as it flips open to pull the outside in. The title is a promise, not just to Quaid, but to the person flipping the pages. What it promised, specifically, is dreams, and in this case the dream that is promised is a dream of a dream. The story is a fantasy about having a fantasy, which means it’s in some sense not a fantasy at all.

The 1990 movie replaced the story’s recursive puzzle-box structure with camp, but the end effect is not dissimilar. Sharon Stone’s performance, in particular, is a masterpiece of self-referential cheese. She plays Quaid’s wife Lori as a perfect saccharine romantic glob of gush, all kittenish blonde affirmation and vacuous sex appeal—until the moment Quaid leaves for work, when her face goes blank and dull, like a performer after the camera’s turned off. After Quaid discovers that Lori’s a killer spy… she still keeps up the performance, assuring him that he was the best assignment ever and urging him to tie her up (“I never knew you were so kinky,” Schwarzenegger deadpans.) She tells him that their whole marriage is a fake, and it takes a moment to register that she’s speaking the absolute truth. The marriage isn’t real; it’s a staged performance—and so her artificial staginess, rather than undercutting verisimilitude, enacts it. When Stone “appears” on Mars to tell Quaid that he’s in a psychotic fugue state and his whole adventure is happening in his head, she’s acting the part of acting a part. The whole adventure really is in the audience’s head; the performance really is a performance, and Stone’s weirdly context-less over-sincerity, pleading earnestly with Quaid as if they’re both on a soap opera soundstage, rather than on Mars only underlines the truth that they are, in fact, on a soundstage, not on Mars. Genre, in this case, is the lie that tells the truth; if you have a transparent trope, the transparency, at least, is solid.

The half-assed 2012 remake, then, is a fitting addition to the series. It’s nothing but a third-rate genre exercise, but Dick’s story is precisely about the embarrassing appeal of third-rate genre exercises. As the memory programmer comments in Dick’s story:

“Programming an artificial memory of a trip to another planet —with or without the added fillip of being a secret agent—showed up on the firm’s work-schedule with monotonous regularity… ersatz planetary travel has become our bread and butter.”

The remake doesn’t actually involve interplanetary travel, but the point stands. People’s deepest fantasies aren’t individual desires; they’re repetitive genre product which can be purchased wholesale. Quaid’s fantasies are the most real things about him, and they are as generically tedious as the reality from which they are a putative escape. For Philip K. Dick, or some iteration of him, we are just bad remakes of someone else’s dream.

Maranatha, Funeral Mist

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This first appeared way back when on Madeloud.
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The maybe not-so-secret truth about a lot of evil black metal is that it’s not really all that evil. Genuinely disaffected Scandinavian losers burning churches and shooting each other have more or less given way to multi-national art school kids happily orchestrating noisy ambience on their hard drives.

Don’t get me wrong; I generally like the hipster music better, and not just because, atheist though I am I don’t really approve of burning churches. And, you know, some of my best friends went to art school. Perhaps Typhos and Necromorbus of Funeral Mist also attended, for all I know. On the one hand, I could absolutely believe that they did…and yet, even when it seems most like they must have ponied up some tuition at some point, they still sound completely feral.. “White Stone” encapsulates the dichotomy; built around a scraping guitar noise like granite being dragged across granite, it’s heavy in a Melvins-heavy way that really takes some thought and arrangement. And yet, there’s none of the Melvins’ brutal, indie wit here; on the contrary, if there’s a brain in this track, it seems entirely focused on dragging the leaden blasphemies from the singer’s bleeding throat.

Take any twelve black metal albums, put them together, and “White Stone” would be the weirdest track on any of them. On Maranatha, though, its not even the oddest song. That would probably be “Blessed Curse”. For twelve minutes, a dark-robed preacher intermittently declaims ominous verses; the Funeral Mist duo intermittently howl; the music surges and squawls…and the drums lock into a march that keeps threatening to shift just a hair into something syncopated and danceable, presuming you could dance while being crushed beneath a gutted Leviathan. Not much less bizarre is “Jesus Saves!”, which starts out in more traditional full ranting blackened death mode, all racing drum machines and raw voiced shrieks set against a pummeling cathedral of grandiose bleakness. And then, you get five and a half minutes in….and suddenly you’re listening to a repetitive, space grunge guitar figure. It’s as if Darkthrone suddenly got mugged by Sonic Youth…or maybe drank some foul brew and transformed itself into Sonic Youth in order to lull you into a false sense of security. Thurston Moore might create a performance piece about burning a church, but he wouldn’t actually do it, right?

The remaining tracks are all less startling, entrails-on-the-sleeve deathy blackness, though the band’s sense of structure and invention ( the bizarre asthmatic inhalation which opens “Living Temples”; the classical processional which closes “Anti-flesh Nimbus”) never deserts them completely. In a way, the fact that some of the tracks seem closer to the earnest mettalisms of Watain than to the borderline-rock of Nachtmystium only makes Funeral Mist more mysterious. Usually you can tell instantly whether a band is insane or evil, but Funeral Mist seems to be both by turns — either too canny or too fiendish to admit that there’s a difference.
 

Purchase Pleasurable Venus Girdle, Repeat

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A few weeks back I wrote about Dara Birnbaum’s video art piece, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman. Corey Creekmur mentioned in comments that there was an entire book on the piece written by T.J. Demos.
 


Dara Birnbaum – Technology/Transformation… by merzboy

 

So now I’ve read the book…which confirms my thoughts in some ways, and raises some other issues as well.

Demos basically divides critical reception of the work into two waves (analagous to my two takes on the video in my earlier piece). The first reaction — which is close to the intention of Birnbaum herself — views the work as a project of feminist and Lacanian deconstruction. The narrative of the Wonder Woman TV show is broken apart, images are repeated, and the special effects are decontextualized so that they register as studio trickery. Finally, a disco song at the end comments directly on Wonder Woman’s sexuality, showing that she is not an empowered subject but a fetishized object. The video’s purpose in this reading, then, is to defamiliarize the narrative, and to show the artificiality of the transformation from secretary to hero. The effect is iconoclastic, lambasting an oppressive image foisted on women by capitalism and patriarchy.

Again, this is how Birnbaum saw the video herself. Demos quotes her saying that her work was meant to push against “the forms of restraint and near suffocation imposed through this current technological society.” She adds.

all the works completed from 1976-85 are ‘altered states’ causing the viewer to re-examine those ‘looks’ which on the surface seem so banal that even the supernatural transformation of a secretary into a ‘wonder woman’ is reduced to a burst of blinding light and a turn of the body — a child’s play of rhythmical devices inserted within the morose belligerence of the fodder that is our average television diet.

Demos notes that this was in part dependent on the context of the time, when most people did not have access to tools to manipulate video. In a world where you had to take what the studio doled out, repurposing or reshaping the image seemed subversive.

Today, of course, things are somewhat different — and, indeed, over time, the critical take on Birnbaum’s video has changed. Instead of focusing on its deconstructive critique of television, more recent viewers have tended to see it as celebratory. Instead of alienating viewers, Birnbaum’s video itself becomes a source of visual pleasure. The video has, for example, been played in dance clubs…and, as I pointed out in my earlier post, there are video montages of Lynda Carter spinning on YouTube which look a lot like Birnbaum’s video. As Demos argues, late capitalism has “commodified the process of consumerist participation.” (84-85) Mash-ups aren’t critique; their marketing. In this context, Birnbaum’s video looks less like a stinging deconstruction of television, and more like a potentially viral advertisement for it.

Demos acknowledges this…but goes on to insist that while affect is manipulated by capitalism, it still “remains indeterminate”, and he adds that this is especially true because “unlike emotion, it is unstructured by social meanings.” (101)

Which, to me, seems like blatant bullshit. Why isn’t affect structured by social meaning? And if it isn’t structured by social meaning, if pleasure and power don’t have anything to do with each other, then how exactly can pleasure resist or affect power? The whole thing just seems like special pleading; a way to have your shallow media rush and still call yourself a revolutionary. (Or to paraphrase Tania Modleski, “I like Dara Birnbaum, I am a radical, therefore Dnra Birnbaum must be a radical.”) You can try to wriggle and dodge, but I don’t see how you get around the conclusion that Birnbaum’s work has been completely co-opted. She thought she was critiquing, and instead she’s complicit. As Demos says, she’s part of the long history of the avant-garde being assimilated by capitalism — almost as if the avant-garde is a branch of capitalist R&D, rather than some sort of alternative to it.

Of course, the baseline assumption here is that capitalism is evil,and that art which is complicit with capitalism is therefore meretricious. Demos doesn’t question this, but it seems like it might be worthwhile to do so. Specifically, Wonder Woman’s creator, William Marston, believed that new, capitalist modes of reproducible entertainment could be used to change society for the better — specifically by providing new images of powerful, loving women who could challenge conservative ideas about patriarchy and dominance. For Marston (who Demos mentions only briefly), capitalism could be used progressively to change the gendered way in which society functioned.

Marston linked Wonder Woman’s persuasive power to her “allure” — a connection which, as Demos notes, has been controversial with feminists…not to mention with Marxists, for whom the pleasures of capitalist consumption are to be avoided rather than exploited. Yet, in the end, whatever radicalism Birnbaum’s video manages is, at this point, predicated on the libidinous, capitalist, iconic charge that Marston gave to the character. The deconstruction of television tropes has been thoroughly deconstructed by capitalism. All that’s left is the pleasurable thrill of seeing a woman repetitively changed into a sexy hero — and perhaps the rush of creating and controlling that change, manipulating the tools of capitalism not so much for one’s own liberation as for one’s own pleasure. Always presuming that, in capitalism, it’s possible to tell the difference.
 

Comics Have No Value

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This morning on Twitter Steve Cole expressed concern that scholarship would ruin comics.

If comix become scholarship, @comicsgrid, do you not diminish their value? You can study good stuff to death yaknow. Overthinking KEEP OUT!

The good folks at the scholarly website Comics Grid responded by insisting that rather than subtracting from comics, scholarship advocates for (and presumably therefore adds to) comics value.

.@earth2steve why would scholarship diminish comics’ value? On the contrary, comics scholarship is all about advocating comics’ value.

It’s a familiar dialectic…and one which I wish comics could divest itself of.

The base assumption for both Cole and the Comics Grid is that (a) comics have value, and (b) that value has to be protected, or at least highlighted. As critics, as readers, our goal is to preserve and celebrate the greatness of comics as an art.

The problem with this logic is that most comics are crap, and to the extent that anyone values them, those people should be mocked — or at least, you know, gently disagreed with. Comics itself, as a form and a history, is, for that matter, not particularly glorious. I have affection for comics, but if you wanted to make the argument that comics value was low enough that diminishing that value didn’t really matter and advocating for it was silly — well, I don’t know that I’d have a particularly effective defense.

You could say some of the same things about academic scholarship, of course. Much of it is badly written and badly thought through. But whether scholarship is good or bad has little to do with whether or not it adds value to the art it’s analyzing. Some of the scholarly writing I’ve most enjoyed is dedicated to ruining art — Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, for example, which chops up Hollywood cinema in an avowed effort to destroy it. On the other hand, critical writing devoted to advocacy can be pretty boring and pointless (though of course, it doesn’t have to be).

For me, anyway, critical scholarship affects me much the way art does; it can be beautiful, inspiring, exciting, ugly, dispiriting, or dull, depending on form, content, and the way the two coalesce or diverge. Part of the affect/effect is the way that the criticism glances off art…but that’s true for comics as well. I probably wouldn’t despise the vast majority of Wonder Woman comics quite so much if Marston/Peter weren’t so much better. Similarly, Christopher Reed’s Homosexuality and Art rather knocks the stuffing out of avant-garde pretensions, which makes Jackson Pollack, for example, look a little silly and pitiful — but so it goes. I’m sure Pollock’ll manage somehow.

In short, the value of art isn’t some inviolable deity that we have to genuflect to. If thinking about or even ridiculing a comic diminishes its value, then diminish away, I say. Thought and ridicule both have value in themselves, surely. And if your comics are so delicate that you need to be constantly hovering over them or touting them in order to preserve their aura, then I’d suggest that it’s maybe time to invest in some new icons.
 

Voices from the Archive: Chris K in Defense of Kirby

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After I wrote a post about my disappointment with Jack Kirby’s run on Jimmy Olsen comics, Chris K wrote a lovely defense of Kirby, which is reprinted below.

I would pretty unhesitatingly call Kirby my favorite comic artist of all time, but I freely admit his limited-to-nil appeal to anybody who hasn’t been completely marinated in his approach.

A lot of the writing on Kirby has a “drunk the Kool Aid” quality about it, and, to some degree, I think that’s kind of unavoidable. If you haven’t already internalized all of the style and eccentricities of Kirby, if you haven’t attuned yourself to his rhythms early and often, if you haven’t adjusted to the fact that his ADD is a feature, not a bug… well, you probably just aren’t going to. If I sat down and really tried hard to articulate what it is I love about Kirby’s work, I could probably come up with something that sounded reasonably convincing on paper to a neophyte, but I strongly doubt it could convince one to actually like Kirby upon reading it.

I don’t disagree with anything you say about the Jimmy Olsen comics; I’m just more forgiving than you, but I’m inclined to be.

You’re absolutely right about the flaws. I was actually just thinking about this the other day, having read the Team Cul-de-Sac “Favorites” zine (hey, I love that Brave and the Bold, too!) and Matt Brady’s review of Mister Miracle #9, which is my favorite Kirby comic,(and one of my favorite comics period) starring my favorite Kirby character… yet paradoxically, Mister Miracle is probably my least favorite Kirby series overall. (Which is to say, it’s pretty good…) It’s mostly because the same syndrome you describe in the Olsens is also present in the MM series, and while I find it charming in Olsen, I think it hurts MM. The premise of the series – “Super Escape Artist” – really needs to have some perfunctory tethering to reality to work, and the flights into Cloudcuckooland undermine it. As a result, I always found myself wanting to like Mr. Miracle’s comic as much as I liked him.

But, that’s the price of admission for Kirby. Pretty much all of his comics really are unsatisfying on a fundamental level – unfinished, poorly sketched out, compromised… I know, I’m making a great case, right? But that’s the appeal for me, seeing Kirby strain against the constraints of the industry, the medium, his own talents — and fail as often as not. His work’s a little capsule of comics at the time when he was working: the personality of the artist pushing back against the formulaic patterns of the artform, win or lose. That’s a big part of why Mr. Miracle is such a resonant character to me. But I get that it’s a lot to buy into for someone wanting to, you know, get a story and shit. But for me, there just aren’t a lot of experiences like this in comics, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

 

A Poor Investment: Frank King’s Gasoline Alley

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Of late,  much of comicdom has been abuzz with the sale of the original art for the cover to Amazing Spider-Man #328 (by Todd McFarlane) for $657,250. Of this, I shall say very little. Suffice to say that the same auction house will be offering a small but similarly sized painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in November with a high estimate of $700,000. One presumes that this painting will sell for slightly more even if it isn’t the finest work in Renoir’s oeuvre.

Proceeding much more quietly over the last few months has been the gradual disposal of one of the finest collections of Gasoline Alley dailies in existence. The collection is not notable so much for its size (which while large, only numbers in the 100s at last count) but for the absolute significance of what they depict, their vintage, and their aesthetic merit. The auction house handling the sale has stated that all the art comes from the “Estate of Frank King”.

King’s skillful, light ink drawings can be found on modestly sized (about 6″ by 21″) sheets of  aging paper with traces of stains and browning. The paper itself seems roughly cut from larger sheets and is frequently in excess of the requirements of the art. King gave individual titles to each daily, often writing these concise commentaries in cursive pencils at the top or sides of the finished art. Their importance relates to King’s working methods and his intentions. For obvious reasons, these titles aren’t reproduced in the recent Drawn and Quarterly reprints though the original art would have contributed greatly to the quality of that reprinting. The smeared countenance (in the reprint) of the “first Skeezix” strip of 14th February 1921, for example, would also be pleasantly rectified by the original art to that daily (which is soon to be offered at auction).

The more I look at Gasoline Alley, the more it seems to me that it is the kind of strip which is best appreciated the way it was originally intended—as  a daily serial—and not read at length in the book collections which are undoubtedly welcome from an archival perspective. The passage of time is critical to the reader’s engagement with the strip. This can be easily appreciated if one considers that dailies acquired by a Gasoline Alley devotee like the collector C. E. in which we see Skeezix’s developmental milestones—from sitting (22nd September 1921) to standing (15th December 1921)—and his fateful meeting with his dog, Pal.

And if we treasure that moment when Walt finally gets engaged to Phyllis Blossom (the matriarch of a long line of Gasoline Alley characters)…

[Skeezix meets his brother for the first time.]

…it is only because of the couple’s long and chronologically drawn out process of courting, and the nefarious schemes instigated to pull the couple apart. The scenes of dark foreboding…

…contrasting with the almost saccharine, though not wholly preposterous, moments of cuteness.

While we may chuckle at these gentle scenes from another age of romanticism and worldly denial, King’s attention to detail is still striking. In the third panel of the daily above, Phyllis Blossom’s eye is subtly curved into an inverted U denoting delight and in the scene below where she is given her engagement ring, she suspiciously casts an eye out at the reader in the fourth and final panel.

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I should add at this point that the acquisition of any fine collection of art has less to do with taste than with other factors. Far more important in the case of comics, is availability followed by price and financial ability. Only then does the collector face the question of taste. As far as Gasoline Alley is concerned, the choice (in the face of moderate financial impediments) lies between historical significance and aesthetic quality. No doubt the two often coincide in King’s famous strip but there are a number of instances where they don’t. There is nothing especially beautiful about the “first Skeezix” strip but it will surely be the most expensive Gasoline Alley daily ever sold when it comes to auction. Much the same can be said for the daily of 23rd Novemeber 1927 in which Walt gets full and final custody of Skeezix, one which I was hoping to acquire but missed out on due to a lack of stomach. The strip has little going for it in the art department but is pretty significant as far as what it portrays.

By comparison, if we consider the daily of 20th April 1926, we might say that there is almost nothing of significance being discussed; nothing except the fates of two black maids (for the uninitiated, the strip was hardly short of appalling “mammy” scenes in its early years).

Yet there can be little doubt that this is one of the most formally beautiful dailies that King ever drew. It is, of course, daring in presentation with little continuity in the backgrounds except for the impression of a forest. It is the two figures of Walt and Phyllis which push the narrative along, first proceeding down a path dappled with shadows, skirting the edges of an unseen jungle; then proceeding past the harsh vertical and diagonal lines cast presumably by a man-made structure; before settling on an Edenic scene under a tree.

[from the collection of Rob Stolzer]

There was ever this mix of industrialization and nature in King’s early Skeezix strips, the most notable example being the tour of various National Parks in 1921 in which King lightly played out the tension between the old and the new…

…and the concomitant change in values.

The words provide the context for this minor masterpiece in King’s oeuvre—a mild dispute which is finally resolved harmoniously—the interplay of emotions entirely carried by the workings of the forest light which flickers tentatively in the darkness…

…before reaching a kind of balance as Walt and Phyllis arrive at a domestic compromise.

And is it a coincidence that in this discussion of two working class African Americans, we should see the figures of the very white and Caucasian Walt and Phyllis turn from deep black to a variegated pattern of shadow and light?

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But let’s return to the question of price vs. value which I mentioned at the start of this article.

While the sale of the McFarlane cover may seem a losing proposition as an individual investment, there is every reason to believe that the high price will be turned to profitable ends by the main players in this game—the auction houses and retailers who carry art of an equivalent “stature”. The rumor mill has not dismissed the possibility that the art itself will be sold quite magically for a profit in years to come, the highly manipulable art of price ratcheting now coming firmly into play.

In contrast, one of the famous Gasoline Alley “woodcut” Sundays—a masterpiece of the form—sold for just over $20,000 just a few months back. To put things in even finer perspective, if every one of the current crop of Gasoline Alley dailies (about 300 as of 13th August 2012) sold for $2000 (a handful have sold for more, most have sold for much less), the entire proceeds would still be less than the amount achieved for the aforementioned McFarlane Amazing Spider-Man cover.

Even so, this prime set of Gasoline Alley dailies, are very likely depreciating investments which will find it hard to keep up with the rate of inflation. The nostalgia value for these strips is almost non-existent, the collectors of these dailies being well worn and with at least a little toe (if not a foot) in the grave. The decision to sell at this opportune moment when the Drawn and Quarterly reprints have had time to settle in was probably wise though the rate at which they have been released is less possessed of the finest marketing sensibilities. And while it is excellent news for collectors that Americans disdain so much this small corner of their rich cartooning heritage, it does suggest that the greater part of this significant Gasoline Alley collection should have found a home in a comics museum the likes of which does not as yet exist. This rather than being scattered to the winds, bereft of the aesthetic weight of its size and the sheer breath of art, storytelling, and gentle humor.

 

Further Reading

Robert Boyd complains about the hopeless philistinism of the McFarlane purchase.

 

Grief Without End

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This first ran on Comixology.
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Dokebi Bride is not easy to categorize. A Korean comic, it’s got the young female protagonist, the cute ancillary pet, the fantasy trappings, the giant-eyed waifs, and the flower-bedecked images typical of shojo comics for girls. But, on the other hand, it’s also got gratuitous, gross-out art — twisted corpses, mottled rotting monsters with faces growing out of their cheeks, crawling chattering things with their intestines on the outside — that are more typical of shonen horror comics for boys. The breathtaking covers, with subtle, luminous colors, also seem to reference children’s book art. The whole is one of the most distinctive manga-influenced comics styles I’ve seen, with clean, expressive layouts that juxtapose the lovely and the disgusting, the realistic and the fanciful.

The comics’ approach to narrative falls more subtly, but just as definitely, outside of easy genre categorization. The story centers on Sunbi, a young girl with shamanic powers that allow her to see spirits and the dead. You’d think, given that set-up, that the book might go one of two ways. It could be episodic, with Sunbi meeting and exorcising a series of ghosts in relatively neat, self-contained sit-comish episodes. Or you could have more of a long-form narrative adventure.

Dokebi Bride, though, refuses to plump firmly for either option. Instead, the story keeps shifting in and out of formula; it will establish a group of characters who seem to be the characters, and then it will drop them, sending Sunbi off in another direction entirely. Rob Vollmar, in a fine review of the series’ first volume at Comics Worth Reading, called that book a “prelude,” which it is. But, not having yet read the follow-up volumes, he couldn’t know that everything is prelude: Over the six volumes, Sunbi goes from a child living with her grandmother in the country to a teenager living in Seoul with her father to a runaway living on the streets without ever settling into a rhythm or routine. The book constantly wrong foots her, and the reader as well.

Early in the series, for example, the aforementioned cute ancillary pet — a dog who we’ve seen grow up from a puppy in the first book — leaps between Sunbi and an evil spirit. The dog is badly wounded, and Sunbi is forced to run out into the street. Later, she sees the dog running towards her in a classic Disney moment. “Solbang! You’re okay! I’m so relieved! I’m so —.” But the dog isn’t okay; its dead spirit has just come searching for her. And, to further twist the knife, Sunbi has been placed under magical protection to make her invisible to the spirit world for a time, and as a result, her dog can’t find her. The cute, beloved animal, which in most shojo narratives would be the series’ most identifiable, constant image, goes on into the afterlife in the second volume without ever saying goodbye.

That departure, I think, points to the core knot at the heart of Dokebi Bride. The book, like many ghost stories, is about grief and dislocation and how the two circle around each other like black, exhausted smudges. The first volume opens with Sunbi’s father carrying her mother’s ashes back from the grave; that volume ends with the death of Sunbi’s grandmother, who raised her and cared for her. The central loss of a parent, and therefore of self, returns again and again through the series, a literal haunting. Sunbi can’t function without putting the past behind her, but the past is everything she is — she can’t let it go. When a fortune teller offers to read her future, Sunbi rejects the offer angrily. “No, I don’t want to know about my stupid future!” she bites out through her tears. “Just tell me what all this means to me! Tell me why they’ve all died and left me, why they’re even trying to take away my memories!”
 

That may sound like a catharsis, and it kind of is. But, again, Marley’s narrative isn’t exactly linear or exactly episodic; instead it’s recursive. Sunbi’s conflict is mirrored on different levels, and in different iterations, in both the people and the spirits around her. In one story, Sunbi meets an old woman from the country looking for her grandson in Seoul; in another Sunbi meets a chef living with her crippled, mute mother, who she appears to hate for her infirmity. Each story ends at an impasse of inescapable, irrecoverable love. The grandmother’s search was precisely and already a year too late before it began; the chef ends the story begging her mother to be reincarnated as her daughter. “I will raise you tenderly, you’re so precious. I will beat up any bastards who make fun of you. So you won’t know any sorrow…so you won’t know any suffering…I will raise you so lovingly, like a flower….” I cry every time I read that. I just cried while writing it, for that matter.

What you’re supposed to do with grief, of course, is achieve closure and move on — ideally in 60 minutes, less commercial breaks. Or, to put it in more eastern terms, as Marley herself does occasionally, too much attachment is a bad thing. Except, of course, and at the same time, it isn’t. Sunbi is constantly being told that she needs to let go, both by people who don’t particularly understand or care about her (like her father and stepmother) and by people who do, like her grandmother. There’s obviously something to this; Sunbi’s attachment to and fears about her past makes her a beacon for unattached spirits, who are constantly trying to possess her. If she’s going to survive, she needs to harden her heart.

And yet, hardening your heart is not necessarily surviving, either. Sunbi realizes this herself, noting, “Grandma told me to live like someone who’s not heard or seen; that it’d be uncomfortable once I got involved in this kind of thing…but…I’m scared that I may not be able to cry, or laugh, if I keep on acting like someone else like this.” This isn’t simply an idle possibility; throughout Dokebi Bride Sunbi shows herself capable of remarkable coldness. When a therapist expresses empathy for the loss of Sunbi’s grandmother, Sunbi responds by using her mystical abilities to first divine and then sneer at the fact that the older woman has had a hysterectomy. This sort of thing happens repeatedly. When somebody tries to get to close to her — whether her father, her stepsister, or a nerdy schoolmate — Sunbi acts like a witch, literally. Sometimes she seems more or less justified; it’s hard to fault her when she uses her mystical connections to take out a number of creepy guys who are threatening her at a club, for example. But the issue isn’t really whether the folks on the receiving end get what’s coming to them, but what happens to Sunbi’s own soul when she reacts from hate and fear. It’s after she has the club guys beaten up that Sunbi first develops a rash on her arm…a rash which Marley clearly implies is a kind of karmic raw spot.

Sunbi defeats her assailants in this sequence by summoning a Dokebi, an ugly goblin spirit with whom Sunbi has a complicated relationship. Dokebi are both powerful and comically hapless. On the one hand, they can cast curses, are physically dangerous, and have access to seemingly limitless gold. On the other hand, they can’t buy anything with their gold because they can’t figure out how to exchange it for money, and they’re so unacquainted with personal hygience that if you smear paint on one, it can’t figure out how to wash it off. Sunbi uses this fact to ensnare her Dokebi, and force him to agree to a contract; she wipes the paint off his face, and in exchange he agrees to come and help her when summoned, aiding her against evil spirits or half-drunk shitheads at a club, as the case may be.

The relationship between Sunbi and her Dokebi is, however, a good bit more complicated than the initial master/servant dynamic would appear to suggest. Sunbi does berate and yell at the Dokebi as if he were an inferior — but for his part, the Dokebi follows Sunbi less for legalistic reasons than for romantic ones. He’s smitten with Sunbi, and while the sexual subtext here is played for laughs, it’s all the more blatant for that. To summon the Dokebi, Sunbi has to lick a ring — and each of those licks has a decidedly pleasurable effect on the Dokebi, who bounces around giggling ecstatically whenever Sunbi’s tongue touches the (ahem) stone.

Just as Sunbi is more than the Dokebi’s master, though, she’s also more than his (parodic) bride. When Sunbi is in trouble, the Dokebi comes and protects her. In a book as obsessed with parental bonds as this one is, that makes him a father-figure. Moreover, when Sunbi asks the Dokebi his name, he tells her he doesn’t have one, and so, as mothers do with children, she names him Gwangsoo, or “hands that shine a light.” No wonder that when Sunbi runs away from home and leaves Gwangsoo’s ring behind her, he falls into a sniveling depression, which is an exaggerated, comic-relief caricature of Sunbi’s own grief at the loss of her parent.

Gwangsoo eventually tracks Sunbi down, and Sunbi greets him gratefully…not so much because he saves her from danger (he actually screws that up) as because she’s happy to have a friend. That reconciliation leads to other, larger ones, as Sunbi seems, at last, to find a balance between protecting herself and caring for others, between holding on to her past and not letting that past consume her. This is a decent thumbnail definition of what it means to become an adult, and by the end of volume 6, Sunbi does, in fact, seem to have grown up.

Or maybe not. Volume 6 ends with a plot-twist that comes out of absolutely nowhere, and leads I have no idea where. I may never find out, either; according to an email from Soyoung Jung, the Vice President of Netcomics, “Dokebi Bride has been “indefinitely postponed…due to the author’s schedule conflict.” That’s obviously really disappointing — but in terms of the series itself, there is a kind of logic to it. Dokebi Bride is definitely a Bildungsroman that never ungs. The issues here don’t get resolved when you reach a certain age; they just change and don’t change. “I have completely overcome my fear of them,” Sunbi thinks near the last volume’s conclusion; a few pages later she’s shouting in terror. The wheel rolls on, and you don’t necessarily get to see where it’s going. Instead, all you can do is watch grief, love, death, and beauty spinning by, familiar and new, no matter how old you are, or how wise you hope you’ve become.