Category Archives: Blog

Shapeless

Posted on by

As I’ve said many a time before, I’m a big fan of the Bob Haney/Jim Aparo Brave and Bold. I’ve long been interested in reading Haney’s Metamorpho — it seemed like, if Haney was brilliant with other people’s characters, what would he do with his own? The hints I had seemed good; multi-colored shape shifting hero; bizarrely coiffed quasi-evil-scientist father-in-law; lovesick prehistoric frenemy; bombshell love interest. What’s not to like?

And there are certainly lots of enjoyable moments in the Showcase Metamorpho volume. Haney’s vertiginous blend of garbled patois, not-quite-hip references, and aphasiac plotting is as enjoyable as ever. I love this Beatles tribute for example, complete with crazed fans and artist Ramona Fraden supplying what I want to think, at least, is a subtle Ringo caricature:

There’s also opportunities for Haney to unleash his mangled Spanglish (Hombre Elemento!) And best of all there’s the Thunderer, the world’s greatest midget one-eyed Galactus parody:

All of which is much appreciated.

And yet…I have to say, while it’s still recognizably Haney in many lovable ways, as a whole it’s not great. I don’t know that I can say that most of it even rises to “good”. Certainly reading the entire thing was more a chore than a pleasure. Even the Thunderer issue wasn’t as much fun as I was hoping.

So what’s the problem? Well, basically, the series is too formulaic — and the formula isn’t that interesting to begin with. In every issue, Metamorpho fights an evil scientist. Occasionally, for variation, he fights an alien threat. Along the way, Metamorpho whines about how he can’t return to human, Java (the prehistoric frenemy mentioned above) whines about how Sapphire Stagg loves Metamorpho instead of him, Sapphire and Metamorpho smooch, and Simon Stagg (the quasi-evil-scientist figure) boasts about how smart he is. During battles, Metamorpho gives a brief lesson in the properties of various elements, presumably to trick parents into thinking something vaguely educational is going on. Then the same thing happens in the next issue. And the next. And…

I don’t want to give the impression that Haney has no ideas. He’s still got bunches of ideas. In one bizarre sequence, Metamorpho plays football against a bunch of element robots; in another, he battles a renegade shape-shifting-building constructed by the gloriously named Edifice K. Bulwark.

The problem, though, is that all the ideas are contained within the same basic narrative structure. The Haney Brave and the Bold issues were great in large part because of genre slippage; Batman kept finding himself unexpectedly in the middle of a noir with Black Canary playing the femme fatale; or horror with Bats himself playing the possessed psychotic antagonist; or politicized sci-fi with the Metal Men in the middle of a robot uprising; or of a boxing story or a war story or whatever. Batman himself veered erratically from friendly crossing guard to murderous vigilante to incompetent doofus to monomaniacal whacko, sometimes in the course of a couple of pages. The strain of writing stories for such a various series of different characters made Haney chuck even minimal vestiges of consistency. He needed to get Batman and one other DC character together in the same story; in the interest of that, he could do anything.

But Metamorpho’s a bit different. The character himself shifts through various polymorphous physical permutations, but his personality is always the same; altuistic, courageous, mildly whiny do-gooder. And the plots, too, stay within definite bounds — superhero adventure narratives. Which are fairly entertaining, but never attain the revelatory insanity of Haney’s best work.

So part of what’s going on is that Haney himself just seems more inspired in his Brave and the Bold scripts. This is an intuition confirmed by the fact that the Brave and Bold’s included in the Showcase volume — a team up with the Metal Men and a team up with Batman — are more focused, and more successful, than almost anything else in the book.

Another reason that the Metamorpho material seems weak, though, is the art. Ramona Fradon, who drew most of the early issues, isn’t horrible or anything — in fact, her Saturday-morning cartoon approach is charming and fits neatly with Metamorpho’s goofy powers.

Despite its virtues, though, the art doesn’t have a whole lot of narrative drive from panel to panel. Instead, you tend to jump from image to image, with Haney’s text gushing along. For example, the tension of the chase in the sequence above is mostly squandered by the wild swings in perspective and camera position. You’re looking down so you can barely see our hero, then you’re right beside him…and then all of a sudden you pull out and swing around and the missiles going through him. It’s energetic and charming, but not particularly suspenseful…and over a whole comic, it ends up seeming like one damn thing after another, rather than like a story with any direction.

On the other hand, here’s a scene from the Haney/Aparo Brave and the Bold #101, guest starring Metamorpho (included in B&B Showcase #2).

Aparo stays at basically the same perspective for both panels, heightening the spinning impact of that fist as Metamorpho slugs Java.

Or in this scene:

The perspective shift here is more like that in the Fradon image, but the deft use of speedlines, the positioning of the sound effect scream, and the real suggestion of terror on Sapphire’s face makes the sequence compelling and kinetic in a way Fradon rarely manages. As a result of the stronger narrative line Aparo puts down, Haney’s nutty ideas (a calcium crash couch? what?) seem like genuinely incongruous flights of insanity, rather than simply woozy meanderings. Similarly, Sal Tripiani adds immeasurably to Haney’s script with this hysterical Kirby pastiche from Metamorpho #16 (the one about the Thunderer).

And in the last story in the Metamorpho volume, Mike Sekowsky’s rubbery Bat-Hulk gives the action a squickily solid plasticity, which gives solid form to the utter wrongness of Haney’s writing.

Yes, I said “Bat-Hulk.” I do love Haney.

Last week, Marguerite Van Cook had a post about the problem of assigning credit in the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby team. In comments, Alan Moore was discussed too. For me, I tend to feel like Alan Moore’s work is defined in the greater part by his writing; the story in an Alan Moore comic is not likely to be ruined by bad art — in part because Moore is good at choosing collaborators, and in part because his scripts control pacing and narrative to a very high degree. On the other hand, while I like Lee’s writing okay, it seems clear that he’s extremely reliant on his artists for plotting, pacing, ideas, and tone.

Haney it seems like is somewhere in the middle. His writing is instantly recognizable; nobody else is going to write, “Rex Mason — the Real McCoy; Simon Stagg — the Real McGenius; Sapphire Stagg — the Real McGirl; Java — the Real McApehead”. But at the same time, he doesn’t control transitions and space on the page the way Moore does, and as a result his scripts feel quite different depending on the artist he works with. In particular, it seems like he needs someone to provide a narrative backbone that he can riff off of. Nick Cardy and Jim Aparo gave him that on Brave and Bold, and perhaps that in turn inspired him to some of his best writing. The artwork on Metamorpho fits less well, and so the stories suffer too.

Die Hard, the Last Man

Posted on by

Die Hard (1988) presents itself as a movie sympathetic to feminism. The protagonist, John McClane (Bruce Willis), is estranged from his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) essentially because she moved to Los Angeles to take a high-powered corporate job. John, a New York cop, can’t handle her success. The film takes care to show that John’s attitude is ridiculous and stupid — John’s limo driver from the airport calls him on it; Holly handily wins their big onscreen argument which John assholishly starts; and even John himself admits that he’s in the wrong (“very mature, John,” he mutters out loud to himself after Holly stomps out the door.) Throughout the film, Holly is shown to be a competent and successful manager, and it is never suggested that she should, or will, give up her career for her husband.

Moreover, Die Hard goes out of its way to ridicule and reject machismo. During the terrorist/hostage standoff that takes up most of the film, the cops and FBI continually act like impulsive dicks — much the way, in fact, we first see John acting in his argument with Holly. The cops and feds all are much more interested in being, as John terms them, “macho assholes” — swaggering around at the top of the pecking order, impressing their male compadres, and kicking terrorist butt. The parodically homosocial FBI agents Agent Johnson and Agent Johnson let out adolescent yawps as they fly around in their helicopter, boasting to each other how they can “live with” 25% hostage casualties. Their cockiness is presented as both idiocy and sin, and the film gleefully executes them for it. McClane survives precisely because he’s more cautious and more intelligent; a feminized action-hero who constantly exhorts himself to “think! think!” before unleashing the inevitable uber-violence.

But despite the critique of traditional action-hero masculinity, Die Hard is in the end extremely ambivalent about the idea of autonomous women. Holly wins the argument with John — but the result of that victory is not that John acquiesces. Instead, the result is that Holly and all her coworkers are immediately captured and held hostage, allowing John to cast aside the role of idiotic, defeated husband, and adopt the much more congenial and testosterone-fueled persona of heroic savior.

Coincidentally, as the plot unfolds, all those against whom John might be presumed to harbor a grudge are systematically and efficiently punished. Holly’s coworkers, of course, are all terrorized. More particularly, Holly’s Japanese boss Mr. Takagi — a fatherly executive whose warmth, manners, and calm all contrast painfully with McClane’s bad temper and working-class manners — is shot through the head by the terrorists. Later, a slick coke-snorting dealmaker who had earlier hit on Holly is similarly dispatched. The terrorists are then, not so much John’s enemies as they are his avatars — the catspaws which eliminate the other men in Holly’s life so that McClane can sweep her off to renewed bliss at the end of the film.

In the way that its feminist trappings concealing male apocalyptic fantasies, Die Hard reminded me strongly of Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s “Y: The Last Man.” In that series, too, a relationship crisis (in this case Yorick’s breakup with his girlfriend) is interrupted by unexpected violence which eliminates potential rivals (in this case a sudden disease which kills *all* rivals, as all men on earth but Yorick keel over.) And, like Die Hard, “Y: The Last Man” presents itself as feminist while actually treating the egalitarian relationships, with the concomitant possibility of rejection, as an occasion for anxious and protracted male posturing of a very familiar kind.

I go back and forth on whether I prefer Die Hard or Y. On the one hand, Y is clearly a lot smarter about gender politics; on the other hand, I find the straightforward male violence of Die Hard a good bit less off-putting than the SNAG self-pity that permeates Y, especially at the end. In either case, though, I think the parallels between them are pretty telling. Men, it seems, in different mediums and over several decades, have a tendency to turn feminism into a male growth experience. With guns. Or, in other words, don’t trust the patriarchs, even when they say they love you.

Overthinking Things 8/29/2011

Posted on by

All Roads Lead to Thermae Romae

When most people think of Japan, they have a relatively limited cultural palette from which to chose. Samurai, sumo, wacky mascots, big-eyed anime characters, shrines…and baths. Japanese baths are, to many Westerners, an exotic mix of hedonistic luxury, voyeuristic public nudity and, (because we all watched James Clavell’s Shogun mini-series when we were young,) an indication of how civilized the Japanese are.

But the Japanese are hardly the only culture to revel in the various joys of bath-taking. One of the most famous cultures to embrace and refine the architecture of bathing was the Romans. Roman bath structures have been found everywhere the Romans themselves held sway. At their peak of power, this meant that Roman bath-taking was a cultural relic being spread over huge swathes of Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa and AsiaMinor.

 

Roman baths are amazingly sophisticated things. In the north of Britain I visited a bath substructure that had survived many millennia, more invasions than you can imagine and was still in good enough shape that you could see how water was brought in, heated, circulated and drained. I find Roman baths amazing and fascinating. And, clearly, so does Yamazaki Mari, creator of one the strangest, yet most charming manga I have ever read, Thermae Romae.

Thermae Romae is set in 129 AD, during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, when the Roman empire was at relative peace, under an Emperor who saw building and economic expansion as a better use of Roman money than war. Lucius Modestus is an architect of baths. His friend Marcus is a sculptor and they are both moderately successful men. Lucius is young enough that his reputation has room to grow.

While Lucius and Marcus are relaxing in a public bath, Lucius finds himself drawn under the water, through a water tunnel deep underground, only to rise out of the water once again…in a public bathhouse in 21st century Japan. If this seems wackadoodle to you, that’s only because it is. And it makes a rollicking good yarn every time.

In every chapter, Lucius is confronted by a conceptual problem – how to make an outside bath, how to create a better atmosphere in a public bath, how to please a wealthy, but aesthetically challenged patron, how to create a bath for soldiers in camp with no running water? And in each chapter, Lucius dives under the water, finds inspiration in a Japanese bathing concept and returns to Rome where he blows the Romans out of the water, as it were, with his amazing ideas.

In between chapters, Yamazaki discusses and shows photos of actual ruins of Roman baths that contain these concepts – everything from posters of popular gladiators on the wall to makeshift bathing contraptions in military camps.

The art in Thermae Romae is part of its charm. Lucius is drawn to resemble a Roman statue of a mature man. Rome itself is rendered with accuracy and sophistication.

Japanese characters are drawn with slight caricature, but recognizably to Western eyes as “Asian,” which sets this manga apart from the big-eyes crowd.

The art is attractive, but what keeps me reading is the fact that Lucius is a fantastic character. As his experiences in Japan become more normal to him, he begins to seek out the stimulation and bring home more ideas. But he’s still human and his fame and fortune comes at a price – he loses his wife, who is tired of being left behind. (And those rumors that Emperor Hadrian favors him aren’t helping any either….)

Thermae Romae runs in Enterbrain’s Comic Beam, a magazine that has the tagline “…a MAGAZINE for the COMIC FREAKS” in English on every cover. This comic is for a sophisticated, adult manga-reading audience. Comic Beam is most notable here in the west for publishing Wandering Son by Takako Shimura, currently published by Fantagraphics. Appreciation for Yamazaki’s eclectic story is not limited to comic freaks, she has won the 3rd Manga Taisho Award and the 14th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize for this work. A live-action movie has just been announced for this title, as well…although it looks like they are going with an all-Japanese cast, which will dilute the visual impact of the story. The visual contrast between Ancient Rome and the Romans and Modern Japan and  the Japanese is the one of the main strengths of the art.

Yamazaki’s story, characters and art combine to create a completely unique, complex and fascinating story. At three volumes so far , Thermae Romae is the kind of manga it’s worth learning Japanese to be able to read

 

Utilitarian Review 8/27/11

Posted on by

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Sean Michael Robinson on Choose Your Own Adventure books.

I discuss Rienhold Neibuhr and the egotism of pragmatism.

Erica Friedman on why she loves anime and manga, and the relation of both to Japanese culture.

I talk about the Hernandez Bros, Kirby, Barefoot Gen, and other disappointments in summer reading. A long rambling but entertaining comments thread ensues.

Marguerite Van Cook on Kirby, Lee, class, text, and credit.

I argue that schools should not be prisons.

Qiana Whitted on Blues Comics.

Interviews with J.R. Brown, Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, and Shaenon Garrity on the effect of Borders closing on manga.

Vom Marlowe on Monet and gardening.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I talk about Sly Stone’s disappointing new album.

Also at Splice, I review the mediocre Troll Hunter.

Other Links

Dan Nadel smacks down Grant Morrison.

Jog on his selections for the best comics poll.

And Boing Boing linked our best comics poll. People in comments hate Peanuts. Who knew such sacrilege was possible?

Waterlilies: Paintings in Context

Posted on by

A couple of weeks ago, I returned to my roots.

As a kid, I grew up in an art-poor community.   Mom didn’t believe in letting us watch much TV.  And the local libraries were typical of the bible belt–big on religious stories, low on art books.

Mom had a few books, though, and if I was very, very good, I was allowed to sit under the window, in the good light, with a huge art book in my lap and carefully page through it.  Many were the rainy days spent that way, in the VM’s childhood.

Many were the days, and many were the paintings I grew to love.

Now, we didn’t have much money.  Mom’s art books were mostly Time Life books bought at garage sales.  The World of Leonardo, The World of Cezanne, The World of Vermeer.  They brought a lot of joy to my life–their slightly off-color, overly orange and green reproductions with their odd smell and the grainy texture and the slight smeariness.  Today I know they were done cheaply, but at the time, they amazed me and moved me.

We had many late night conversations, my mom and I, when it was too hot to sleep and the world was quiet.  We would sit in the kitchen and eat icy-cold oranges from the frig and enjoy them sweet segment by sweet segment while she told me about these strange painters.  Cezanne, who loved trees.  Van Gogh, whose mind was beautiful but a bit broken.  Degas, who drew the most amazing horses and the most tired dancers.  Marie Cassat, who first taught me that women could paint, too.  Monet, who painted haystacks at every time of day and night, just to catch the light.

I understood that people made art.  I’d watched my mom make contour drawings.  I’d seen her use watercolors and I’d played with them myself.  (I’d even experimented with the smelly oils from the paint by numbers that my grandmother gave me with great disapproval from my mom, who told me I was not at all required to paint within the lines, or even depict the picture as stated.  Naturally, I changed the cheerful kittens to glorious horses and then ran out of gray paint.  But I digress.)

I understood, as I say, that people made art.  That they put pigment on paper or paint on canvas and so created a piece of art.  But what I experienced as art were…small things.

Most of them were reproductions the size of an adult’s hand.  Many were reproductions the size of my own childish hand.

I’d been to the local museum before, to see the knights in their armor when my brother was interested in swords and Camelot, and we’d gone on school trips to see those rooms full of fancy furniture or old relics dug up from the ground.  And sometimes we’d even gone to rooms where the paintings were.  But the paintings I saw were, well, mostly boring pictures of dead guys in black suits and funny hats, looking like they had a bad stomach ache and never laughed.

So when mom took me to see Monet’s Waterlilies, all three, together, it was like a whole new world.

These were paintings as big as trucks.

Bigger!  Bigger than trucks.  And it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen.

Those paintings took up so much space it was like the whole world had gone blue and green and full of light and weedy flowers and if you got close you could see all these brushstrokes.

The brushstrokes were a revelation.

Up until then, I’d never known that you could make a painting that actually showed brushstrokes.  I mean, in a reproduction that’s 2″ by 3″, even the boldest Van Gogh looks like it leaped out of a head fully formed.  But these waterlilies now, they were….different.

They were so big, so grand, so loud, in a watery garden kind of way.

And they didn’t even have people in them!  No lines, either!  Just colors.  But they were so beautiful.  Like walking under the sea should be.

Those paintings moved me and touched me and somehow imprinted on me the idea that it was OK to let the world see that a real hand was involved in making the image, that it was OK to paint as big as you needed, and that art could be a little messy, a little undomesticated.

I’d been drawing even before then, but it had always been hard for me to create any kind of link between the Big Real Art in the books and the carefully crafted pencil and crayon work I made on endless sheets of lined notebook paper.

Years passed, as years do.  I learned more about art.  I visited the museum many times after that, and mom provided me with more supplies so that I graduated from crayons to markers and conte and watercolors. I learned how to check art books out from the adult section of the library, and so learned about more modern artists.   When I had the chance to take a class in high school on art, I leaped at it.  To my initial joy, one of my teachers was an expert on the Impressionists.  She told us that there were three qualities that they had: they were interested in light, they never used lines, and they did not use the color black, ever.

She was furious when I helpfully (I thought) brought in a library book where I’d carefully marked all the paintings that had black.

I ended up barely passing that class, but my love of the art never diminished.  Mom and I got to see the touring Courtauld Collection when it came, but nothing quite surpassed that first rush of awe when I came across those huge three paintings all together, big as the world.

My life grew and changed some more, but weaving through it all was this love of art.  I went back to the museum many times, seeing the single waterlily painting on its lonesome, seeing other art works, falling in love with different pieces, and going home to try my own things, time and again.

In the thirty years since those three paintings were together, I picked up a love of Caravaggio and a fondness for black and white pen work.  Something else changed.

I came to understand something more about these paintings, from an utterly different direction.  I’d heard, in that god-awful class so many years ago, that Impressionists were obsessed with light.  And they were.

But for two decades now, I’ve been not just an artist, but a gardener.  I know the shift that comes at the turn of mid-August, where the high hot sun goes to the right a bit, shading more and burning less, even though the temperatures are high.  I know the dawn cold light that creeps from the East.  I know the warm, sleepy light of dusk as it moseys back down beneath the crown of the world.

Winter’s brightness, pale lemon and cold.

So different from the mellow, long light of Summer.

And I know the feel of dirt under my nails, the endless sweat on the back of my neck, bent to sow seeds or trim, to weed or loosen soil.  The way the toads hang in the shade under clay pots, the chirrup of crickets and the long endless slide up and down drone of cicadas.

It’s a world I can slip into, free from thought, and just be.  Taking in endless variations of the color green, satisfied completely by the visual beauty of a mixed patch of double-dug earth planted with chards and zinnias and silver beet and kale and cottage marigolds.

Picture of a garden

I have not only basked in its beauty, I have run out into it, bare feet slipping on wet leaves, yelling at the top of my voice and shaking my fist, a five foot four whilwind in silly pajamas, chasing off the rabbits from my tomatoes.

I’ve fought slugs with little tins of beer, I’ve stood ankle deep in water where none should be, I’ve planted and ripped out and walked and walked and walked, through all the seasons.  I know my plants in ice, in snow, in the first green blush of returning spring, as well as the glory of summer.

So when I went back to the Water Lilies, I was a different person.

The museum had gone to considerable effort to make it a good experience.  It’s not easy to host a forty-five foot long, fifteen feet tall triptych worth millions, but they did a lovely job.  The wing where it was housed is the ultra-modern add-on, very sleek, all white flat paint and long, sweeping graduated floors.  Frameless art, big windows, quiet thermostat controlled air.

They’d given the Water Lilies their own space and in front of them, they’d grouped benches for seating, upholstered in gray and almost rock-shaped.  The lighting was soft, but focused.  I took my mom and we went on a quiet weekday.  It was possible to sit and look and just enjoy, as if you were at a real pond.  You can see what the setup looks like here.

With all this lead up, perhaps you’re hoping for explosions! Revelations!  Amazement!

But no. Or at least, not of the exciting kind.

I sat down on a pebble-shaped bench and looked at the huge paintings in front me.  So blue and so lush.  It really did feel a bit like stepping into another world.

As I gazed at them, I found my breathing slowing, and I stretched out my bad leg and let out a long, comfortable sigh.  My eye traveled up the painting, to the left, up to the corner, to the right, and back down again, never feeling the need to focus in on only one spot, never feeling the impulse to stop looking, just moving my gaze naturally from place to place.

A bit like I would look on my own garden back home.

Formally, the water lilies are a little off.  The perspective is almost as if from a bridge looking down, but the eye moves up to what should be a sky, but never is.  But I couldn’t care less.  For me, it feels only as if I’m inside the garden.  Feeling it around me, the way my own clayey soil feels sticky and scratchy under my bare feet.

The context that existed in real time–the stark white and gray paint, the smell of controlled air and mingled perfumes, the soft squeak of guard shoes on marble–slipped away.  Instead, I was in a garden, caught in a patch of sleepy shade with the certain knowledge, brought by the tickling breeze and my inner senses, that outside the shade would be hot sun.  The smell of wet, brackish greenery, rotting and decomposing in the summer.  The soft drone of the ever-singing cicadas, nature’s orchestra that serenades late summers and leaves its empty carapaces as bodily echo.

I sat for a long time, content.

*

There are other contexts for these paintings.

I know that the Water Lilies I saw exhibited were only one of the many water lilies Monet painted.  The Museum of Modern Art in New York has another triptych which is even permanently displayed together.  There are beautiful books about the paintings, the techniques, the influences, the painter himself.

The gardens at Giverny are open to visitors, and a good friend of mine visited there just two weeks ago.  She shared the pictures she took (one and two) and I was able to drink in the bright flowers and even note, with a gardener’s eye, the invasives that were going to be giving them trouble in another few years.

I can use an online web tool to view the painting in great detail.  I can use my academic research tools to find out detailed critiques and formal investigations into meaning, technique, history.  I can buy as many books with reproductions of his paintings as I’d like or get myself poster-sized reproductions to hang on my own wall.

In a few years, the parts of triptych I saw will return to their homes, and I’ll be able to visit our panel, as I might visit an old friend.

Monet painted them in his studio together and kept working on them for years until his death in 1926.  I don’t know that he’d have particularly imagined them in that huge, modern white building.  But I think he’d have been pleased that they were together and that they brought about not just critical insights, but also that indescribable summer outside feeling, sleepy and peaceful, soft sky and wet marshy greens.

Nor I do think he’d mind that when I want to recapture that feeling, I might wander outside into my own garden to feel the mud squelch under my toes, and sit under a heavy old oak, and watch the breeze play games with the flowers.

Borders and Manga: Interviews with Shaenon Garrity, Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, and J.R. Brown

Posted on by

A few weeks back I published a story over at the Washington Times about the effect of the closing of Borders on the manga market. Several of the people I interviewed had such great thoughts that it seemed a shame to just use a quote or two. So I decided I’d reprint them all here. Thanks to Shaenon, Lillian, and J.R. for agreeing to let me do this!

I’ve edited down my comments in several places, since they’re the least illuminating parts of the dialogue.
______________

Email interview with J.R. Brown, BL expert and occasional HU contributor.

Noah: Hey JR. I’m writing because I’m currently working on a piece for the Washington Times about the effect of borders closing on manga. I was interested in the post you made on twitter about how this would have a big impact on the availability of BL titles. I wondered if I could ask you a couple more questions about that.

JR Brown: Hi Noah;

More than happy to talk, although I’m not sure how much help I’ll be, since I’m merely a reader with no inside info. The people at Digital Manga Publishing (the biggest standing BL publisher) seem to be quite responsive to academic/journalistic inquires; you could try giving dropping them a line.

My comments were based on 1) statements made by Digital Manga staff on their forum saying that availability of their BL titles in bookstores (as opposed to online / comic book shops / elsewhere) is a significant driver of sales, 2) remarks by DMP and other BL publishers indicating that Borders was a major component of their bookstore sales, and 3) in the Boston area, Barnes and Noble (our only other major chain) does not carry BL titles in its physical stores (the downtown location stocked the Junjo Romantica series briefly after it made the NYT bestseller list last year, but dropped it even before Tokyopop disintegrated). B&N in my area also just carries much less manga generally, with a more specific focus on the best-selling series and new releases biased towards the larger publishers. I have heard that B&N stores elsewhere in the country do carry BL, but even so it appears that they do so less consistently and to a lower extent than Borders did.

We do have a couple of very good local comic shops that carry BL, and of course you can get everything online, but I think the loss of Borders is going to make it less likely that the casual and especially the new reader will come across the books. And of course the same goes for other manga, especially less-popular series and the output of the smaller publishers.

I’ll be happy to take a stab at any questions you have.

Hey JR. That’s super helpful already, thanks.

Here are a couple more questions if you don’t mind…

—Do you know if Borders moved early on into BL sales? And did they help popularize that genre in the US, or at least make it available?

—Have there been any public censorship efforts aimed specifically at BL? My sense is that it’s mostly been self-censorship when the books have become unavailable, but I don’t know for sure….

—Do you think Amazon is unlikely to attract new readers to manga or BL?

JR: Oh wow. A full discussion of all this would be more than I can knock off tonight, but hitting the high points:

Borders was a major player in manga sales when the format was really taking off in the 2000s, thanks in large part to their graphic novel buyer at the time, Kurt Hassler, who was deeply gung-ho on manga and especially on the idea that girls would buy it. Borders went big and deep into manga in the mid-2000s, just around the time that publishers really started to tackle full-on BL. Several publishers had tested the water with hint-and-innuendo-only BL-esque series previously (and there had been two extremely obscure e-book releases of “real” BL by a tiny company), but around 2003 Tokyopop’s “Fake” and especially “Gravitation” series came out and did extremely well in stores (by manga standards). Borders was a major outlet for Tokyopop’s books (and continued to be so up until their joint demise), so they sold a lot of those series. I don’t know how much Borders supported the first sexually explicit books (from smaller BL publishers like CPM’s BeBeautiful, Media Blaster’s Kitty), but they did carry explicit material a few years later, including Tokyopop’s BLU line once they launched it around 2005. And as I mentioned Borders was apparently a large component of DMP’s BL sales. I don’t know of anything Borders did to popularize BL as such, beyond making the books available, but they definitely did that.

I’m not sure what you mean by “public censorship”. Many BL titles have been censored by the U.S. publisher, either because of legally/morally questionable content (particularly underage characters) or, frequently, to make the material tamer and more acceptable to bookstores. Usually it’s a question of a few panels being retouched, or dialog or character ages changed, but occasionally a page or two is left out entirely. DMP folks have talked on their forums about this, and apparently they regularly consult with bookstore buyers about permissible content for their less-explicit June imprint; it appears that said buyers prefer an absence of visible genitalia or body fluids, and the art is frequently retouched to obscure such content. Fans hate this, of course, especially in books that are 18+ anyway. Fortunately, it seems that this sort of adjustment is becoming less common, perhaps under the influence of certain very strong-selling explicit titles (Junjo Romantica, DMP’s Viewfinder re-release).

Also, this is only part of more general trends of censorship in manga; Japanese publishers have rather different ideas of how much nudity, sexual innuendo, etc is appropriate for different age levels, not to mention stuff like smoking and “hand gestures”, and quite a lot of manga gets “tweaked” for the American edition. An article that mentions some examples (mildly NSFW):

http://io9.com/5383540/dragon-ball-spice-and-wolf-and-low+class-filth-in-manga-nsfw

If you mean taking books off the shelves completely, I don’t know of any case where books were actually pulled by the publisher (more that they go out of print, or the entire publisher folds), but there have been several public flaps where specific books have been removed from certain sales channels. In 2007, Walmart.com pulled some BL after complaints about the series Yaoi Hentai (a made-in-America, explicitly pornographic OEL comic):

http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/9968.html

And just recently, Amazon.com pulled a large number of Kindle titles including BL from several publishers as part of an apparent purge of Kindle porn, but also removed a few print BL books (no specific reasons were ever given, and some of the removed stuff was quite tame):

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2011/05/too-hot-for-kindle-amazon-pulls-yaoi-from-kindle-store/

In regards to Amazon bringing in new readers: online bookstores work great for people who already know of the material and are looking for it. For someone who hasn’t ever heard of BL, or is vaguely aware of it but hasn’t actually seen any, I don’t think it’s effective. Anecdotally, for people not already familiar with slash fanfiction and so forth, entrée into BL tends to come from one of three places: indoctrination by friends; exposure to a popular “almost-BL” series like Loveless or The Betrayal Knows My Name, followed by looking for “more like that”; or just tripping across the stuff at random. Amazon.com doesn’t really facilitate the latter, except via the Kindle books, and I don’t think the Kindle Store has the degree of market penetration Borders had.

____________________

Email interview with Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, a former senior editor at Tokyopop

Noah: I know Tokyopop had a close relationship with Borders initially when the manga boom started. Did that relationship continue over time? Did Tokyopop develop similarly close relationships with other stores, or did Borders always do better in carrying manga?

Did the problems at Borders (which I know has been struggling for years) contribute to Tokyopop’s struggles? Or were they mostly separate issues?

Have other companies taken up the slack left behind by Tokyopop’s disappearance? Or are there just less titles out there now and for the forseeable future?

Will places like B&N or Amazon or digital services fill the space left by Borders? Or will there just be less products available for manga fans?

With the end of Borders and Tokyopop, is this the end of the manga boom?

Lillian: 1. Credit where credit is due—a huge part of the influence that Borders had on the manga market was thanks to Kurt Hassler, who was the buyer for the section for quite some time. He was a great supporter of manga, and brought a lot of things into the section that might not have been there otherwise (boys love being the prime example, but there are others as well, including what we called original global manga, and a variety of merchandise). After he left to run Yen Press, there were still good connections with the buyers, but that was coincidentally the start of a long downward spiral in terms of how we worked with the chain. But we had great relationships with the other stores as well, even from the start. We did very solid business in the South, for instance, thanks to the Books a Million chain—and with a lot of the mature titles, too, which was the unexpected part. But B&N, for example, was generally a little more conservative in terms of what they would bring in. They were happy to take loads of Fruits Basket and the like, but took in fewer mature titles overall, and no mature-rated BL until last year when they tried Junjo Romantica as a test. That may be changing now, with the hole in the market (anecdotally, my local B&N has a nice, diverse line-up—but then, I live in Los Angeles), but I still see that initial risk-taking attitude on Borders’ part as a significant part of what helped grow the market back in the day, and that has never really been duplicated elsewhere.

2. Yup, Borders’ troubles most definitely affected us. Waldenbooks had always been a strong market of ours, so those stores closing down was a significant blow, and that was just the beginning. Over the last three years there were a variety of issues that we were dealing with, from how they were handling bill payment versus returns, to how aggressive they were with promoting new series, to how reliable their order numbers were. They still remained about 1/3 of our market up until the end, though, so the final impact of the bankruptcy troubles from the beginning of this year were significant (it directly led to me being laid off, for one). And every minute that your sales team is spending trying to work out problems with one distributor is a minute when they’re not thinking of new strategies to be competitive in an increasingly tight market. That’s certainly not to say that TP didn’t have its share of other problems (because it did), but that was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back.

3. Speaking from experience, “rescuing” dropped titles is a tricky business, especially since manga is a very trend-driven market, so I wouldn’t expect to see many of TP’s old series out in print release from our former rivals, if that’s what you mean. (What the J-Manga consortium has up their sleeves in that regard is anyone’s guess, though.) There are a few that are probably worth the effort to obtain, but for the most part I think the remaining companies are going to stay the course, rather than try to usurp the corner we’d been clinging to. Or rather, I think they’re better off exploring new avenues and new business models, instead of trying to regain TP’s past glory.

But to put this in perspective, the big manga market adjustment really happened in 2008 and 2009, when we went from publishing 40-odd titles a month to 20, and then to 10-15. Borders or no Borders (and Borders was definitely a factor in that decision for us), and whether we’re talking supply or demand, the US market just doesn’t support two companies printing 40-plus volumes a month, with several smaller publishers adding another 20 or 30 to the pile. TP learned that lesson the hard way three years ago, and everyone else followed shortly thereafter in one way or another, and that’s not going to get un-learned any time soon. If TP’d gone under in 2008 there may have been more of a rush to fill the vacuum, but at this point, except on an individual title level, I don’t think our catalogue is going to be that sorely missed by the market overall (Our charming personalities and flamboyant marketing campaigns, maybe, but that’s another story!). VIZ’s shojo titles may get a little bump from the people who aren’t buying Maid-Sama and Gakuen Alice anymore, and Yen may see a little uptick from people with no more Trinity Blood or Deadman Wonderland to buy, it’s not the gaping void it might have been if we’d gone under sooner.

4. If you mean print sales through Amazon, that’s certainly not going to make up the difference (people are generally surprised to know what a small percentage of our revenue came from Amazon—but remember that the manga market is primarily teenagers, and even now most of them don’t have credit cards), and I think B&N is going to stay comfortably where they are for the time being. Digital opportunities are definitely there, though. And I think it’s a very legitimate question to ask whether people whose local store was a Borders will now go further afield to buy print manga (and in some cases, it may be significantly further afield), or if they’ll just turn to the internet to get their fix.

To combine this question with your final one, in my mind, the print manga boom hit a plateau with the rise of the aggregator scanlation sites, when a tremendous volume of content became easily available for free. Borders closing may have been the nail in the coffin for TP, but if a huge portion of your potential customer base is just as happy reading comics on their computer (which they are), that has to be addressed. I love print books, and I believe there will always be a market for them, but the serialized and addictive quality of manga means that this is a crowd with a thirst for getting new content as quickly and easily as possible, and for a variety of reasons the traditional publishing model makes it difficult to satisfy that demand. Providing a compelling alternative to the scan sites is a major challenge on every level from tech to marketing to licensing, but especially after San Diego Comicon, it’s obvious that publishers are painfully aware of this, and are actively trying to come up with that new model. If all goes well, there may be a new manga boom! I just don’t know if it’ll be in the chain bookstores anymore…
______________

Email interview with Shaenon Garrity, cartoonist, critic, and a freelance editor for Viz

Noah: How important was Borders to manga outside of Tokyopop? Was it a major venue for other companies as well, or were they already more focused in B&N or Amazon or other locations?

Will the closing of Borders damage the sales of manga generally, and of Viz especially? Or do you think other venues (like B&N or Amazon or ebooks) will pick up the slack?

Does the twin demise of Borders and Tokyopop mean the manga boom is dead?

And maybe last…I’m curious if the end of Borders will have a particular effect on some niche manga. I saw some talk that it might be especially hard on BL readers…while on the other hand I assume there won’t be a ton of effect on higher end art manga. Is that your sense as well?

Shaenon: I don’t know all that much about the business end of manga, but I can answer these questions:

> Will the closing of Borders damage the sales of manga generally, and of Viz especially? Or do you think other venues (like B&N or Amazon or ebooks) will pick up the slack?

Publishers have been preparing for the Borders collapse for a while, so they’re already expanding into other venues. In the brick-and-mortar world, that includes Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores and small chains, and the comic-book direct market. There’s also a lot of interest in ebooks, especially Kindle and iPad editions, and in online comics in general, as evidenced by Viz’s big rollout of vizmanga.com at Comic-Con last week.

> Does the twin demise of Borders and Tokyopop mean the manga boom is dead?

I’d say the bubble has burst, but the big manga titles are still popular and selling well; it’s just that publishers’ overall output is settling to a less artificially inflated level. Instead of scrambling to flood the market with every available license, publishers are cutting back and being cautious in picking up new titles. I hesitate to point to Tokyopop’s situation as proof of the boom times ending, since Tokyopop’s business problems had little to do with sales of its manga, and ultimately the company folded because the guy running it just had interests elsewhere. I’m more concerned about the precarious status of smaller publishers, but with Viz still huge, DMP on the rise, and Japanese publishers getting directly involved in the American market, the industry keeps marching on. I get the impression that last year was the toughest year.

> And maybe last…I’m curious if the end of Borders will have a particular effect on some niche manga. I saw some talk that it might be especially hard on BL readers…while on the other hand I assume there won’t be a ton of effect on higher end art manga. Is that your sense as well?

For me, personally, the biggest problem with Borders closing is that Borders was very open to stocking yaoi/BL, and Barnes & Noble is not. I hope this situation changes, and that more bookstores get interested in BL. I’m saying this as a BL fan, of course, but also as someone who’s in the industry and believes that BL is going to be increasingly important as a steady seller to keep manga publishers profitable, just as romance novels keep print publishers profitable. Also, there are a bunch of awesome BL I want to see translated.

No Place for Children

Posted on by

An edited version of this article appeared in the Chicago Reader.
_____________________

Prisons are not the ideal venues for education. Therefore, it is not a great idea to turn schools into prisons. As a corollary, treating children as if they were hardened criminals does not imbue them with the joy of learning. If you brutalize students and treat them with contempt, they will not buckle down to their work with renewed vigor and enthusiasm. On the contrary, they will start to react to school the same way that prisoners react to prison. Which is to say, they will want to get. out.

In short, schools should not be prisons. Surely that shouldn’t be controversial. And yet, controversial it is, as Annette Fuentes documents in her dismally depressing book, Lockdown High: When the School House Becomes a Jail House. Since the 1980s, and especially since the Columbine shootings in 1999, the U.S. has experienced a rolling moral panic, sparking increasingly draconian security measures in schools across the country.

Fuentes’ prose is fairly flat, and structurally her book is investigative journalism boilerplate — description of outrageous exemplary incident, generalized problem illuminated by incident, report from convention devoted to evil-doers who profit from generalized problem, highlighting of inspirational activists promulgating inspirational solutions. But the very banality of the form adds to the despair. Metal detectors, random drug testing, SWAT teams busting kids’ heads, zero tolerance, suspensions, racism…it all tromps by in a numbing parade of idiocy and futility. Violent homicides in school are vanishingly rare; study after study shows that kids are less likely to be harmed in school than at home; study after study shows that violence in schools has been falling since the early ‘90s; study after study shows that heightened security measures do little if anything to reduce violence or drug use. And yet, the militarization of schools goes on, oblivious to argument or logic. If you didn’t know better, after reading this book you might come to the conclusion that, as a society, we are looking for an excuse to torture our children.

Indeed, Fuentes provides a certain amount of evidence that schooling has always been about torture. Her first chapter, titled “A Brief History of School Violence,” begins, not with school shootings, but with a discussion of corporal punishment. As she notes:

“as long as there have been public schools…there has been chaose and control, crime and punishment in the classroom…. The rhythm of switch and ferule — even the cat-o’-nine-tails — provided the meter by which the early schoolmaster or –mistress imparted the three Rs and obedience to misbehaving youngsters.” (page 1)

Fuentes adds that such violence involved not only teacher’s beating students, but often students fighting back; older boys tossing the teacher out of the classroom was almost a ritualized right of passage. Thus, from the first, schools in America trafficked in, and taught, violence.

This violence, according to Fuentes, was often entangled with class and racial animosities. She points out that the first compulsory schooling laws in 1852 were aimed at dumping the children of Boston Irish immigrants into reform schools — the connection between prison and school written into law from the very beginning. And of course, in the 60s and later, “school violence” was most often associated with racial tensions around desegregation. Fuentes doesn’t even mention one of the most shocking incidents, the Kanawha County textbook wars of 1974, in which the adoption of controversial reading materials led irate rural West Virginians to bomb school buildings and shoot at school buses.

Fuentes’ aim in highlighting this history is, I think, to show that violence is not in fact on the rise in schools. Kids aren’t worse than they used to be; school aren’t more dangerous than they used to be. The increasingly hysterical approach to security in schools is, therefore, not a response to a real problem, but rather a self-reinforcing exercise in ideological hysteria.

Fuentes hopes that parent activism can help end that hysteria, which in turn will mean an end to the lockdown high phenomena. She points hopefully to examples like Chicago Public School’s decision in 2006 to move away from zero tolerance policies. Chicago, she notes, is “modeling positive change.”

It seems like I’m always hearing that Chicago schools are at the forefront of something or other. As a Chicago father, I suppose this should make me happy. And yet, somehow, my warm fuzzy feeling is limited. And not just because of the incident Fuentes relates about the five-year-old being taken out of a CPS school in handcuffs.

The problem is, the history of discipline and violence which Fuentes discusses does not give me a lot of hope. On the contrary, it leads me to suspect that the lockdown high phenomena is a not an aberration, but a logical extension of longtime public school philosophy. School has always been a prison, though it is, as George Bernard Shaw says, “in some respects more cruel than a prison….. In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don’t understand and don’t care about….” Nor, to update Shaw slightly, are prisoners subjected to unending, compulsive, mindless testing. Fuentes presents evidence that schools are relatively safe places for student’s bodies, but she doesn’t address the issue of what they do to their souls.

I had initially hoped to send my child to CPS because…well, it’s free, mostly, and within convenient walking distance. What dissuaded me was not the story about the five-year-old in handcuffs (which I hadn’t heard) but two other factors. First, most Chicago public schools don’t have recess. Second, when I went online to read about Murray Language Academy, the school my son was thinking of entering, the first thing I saw on the website was that all students (presumably meaning kindergartners too) would have homework every night. This was presented as being a good thing.

I’m not sure that even Fuentes would consider a lack of recess or ubiquitous homework to be aspects of the lockdown high phenomena. But to me it all seems to be of a piece. If you were kind, you could say that public schools have always struggled to balance the desire to control kids with the desire to teach them. If you were more cynical, you might say that the balancing has never been all that difficult, because the desire to teach has always been easy to stifle.

So my seven-year-old does not go to CPS. Instead he goes to a Waldorf private school where they have no metal detectors, no hand-cuffs, no homework, and two recesses a day. I’m lucky to be in a financial position to send him there; obviously, for many people, public schools are the only option. For their sake, we as a society have, as Fuentes indicates, a moral obligation to roll back the worst excesses of lockdown high. Even if we manage to do that, though, our public schools in general, and Chicago schools in particular, will still be no place for children.