Category Archives: Blog

Gluey Tart: Is Disgruntled

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manhattan love story
Manhattan Love Story, by Momoko Tenzen
March 2009, Digital Manga Publishing

god of dogs
God of Dogs, by Satoru Ishihara
September 2008, Digital Manga Publishing

romantic illusions
Romantic Illusions, by Reiichi Hiiro
September 2008, Digital Manga Publishing

love knot
Love Knot, by Hiroko Ishimaru
February 2009, Digital Manga Publishing

I don’t necessarily want to write about manga I dislike. This isn’t my naturally sunny disposition rearing its ugly head; I just don’t want to spend any more time with it than necessary. I read it, I failed to enjoy it, and the last thing I want to do is think about it for another thirty minutes. I’ve been on an unlucky streak, though, and decided I should share the pain – I mean, discuss what makes these yaoi titles the varying shades of bad that they are.

That reminds me of one of my favorite Edgar Allen Poe stories, “Berenice”:

“Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch – as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? – from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.“

So true, yes? “Berenice” kicks ass, by the way, because the protagonist (whose name is Egaeus, for heaven’s sake) disinters his lost love to remove her teeth. She might not have been dead when she was buried, either, but of course that’s a given.

I am obviously not holding any of these poor books up to the standard of “Berenice,” because in that context, most things come off pretty badly. The thing is, every time I pick up a yaoi manga, I’m hoping to fall in love. I’m hoping something will work for me and leave me with a happy, stupid-looking smile on my face. And I’m really pretty easy, too. I’m usually happy enough if the art is pretty, even if the story isn’t great. Conversely, if the story is nice, but the art isn’t ideal, that’s still OK. And even if the art and the story are both a bust, sometimes the mangaka will hit one of my kinks, and that’s enough for me, too. So a title really needs to succeed on only one of three levels for me to feel like I got something out of it.

Sadly, despite my low standards, I am still disappointed more often than not. Manhattan Love Story, for instance, just pissed me off. I’ve read worse, but that’s the only positive thing I’m prepared to say about it. Well, that, and I like the cover design. That’s what suckered me into this mess in the first place. Too bad I ordered in from Amazon and couldn’t turn it over to see the illustration on the back.

manhattan love story

That would have sobered me right up. I intensely dislike gay stories in which one of the pretty boys looks and acts like a girl. The whole point of reading romance stories about men is that they’re about men. In the first story, the main character, Diamond, is having a discreet affair with his boss, Rock. I kid you not. Diamond and Rock. That could probably be funny, under other circumstances, but trust me when I tell you that these are not them. Diamond is a tiny, timid, uncertain little florist with ridiculous amounts of hair. Rock is a hugely successful captain of industry who appears regularly in magazines and, for reasons that are unclear to me, his important business ventures include the little flower shop where Diamond works. I could overlook all of this, I think, if a) there were anything to the story, and b) if Diamond didn’t look and act like a big bundle of annoying feminine stereotypes. He’s flushed, he’s flustered, he has some bizarre physical condition that causes him to become very ill if he works too hard. To which I roll my eyes and mutter profanity. Perhaps his condition is caused by the strain of growing all that hair.

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There are a couple of other stories in this book, and poofy-haired, overly feminine uke syndrome does turn up again. (Uke = bottom; in yaoi, the bottom is often drawn smaller than the top, or seme.) In one particularly creepy instance, the syndrome manifests in the form of an angelic little cherub, who is named Raphael, for Christ’s sake, and also has too much hair and is drawn to look about 7 but is said to be 13 or so (I don’t remember, and I refuse to look it up).

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Raphael sees his teacher having sex with one of his fellow students, and later, the teacher confesses his love for Raphael. To clarify, this is presented as cause for celebration rather than a call to the Department of Children and Family Services. This kind of thing is not unheard of in yaoi, but it’s a couple of bridges too far for me. There are other problems, too, but I’ve had enough. No mas. Let us never speak of this manga again.

God of Dogs is a disaster, but not a fluffy, weepy, eighth-grade-idea-of-romance disaster. A completely different kind of cock-up, as it were. I blame the cover for this one, too, but not just the cover. The description, which promised brutal Chinese mafia action and a mysterious stranger, pushed some buttons for me. Nice art, favored kink – as the big man said, two out of three? Ain’t bad. I thought I couldn’t loose.

The art is in fact pretty good. That isn’t always a given – the cover art is not necessarily representative of what’s inside the book. In this case, there’s no subtlety to the lines, and the faces look overly Neanderthal (I realize they’re supposed to be gangsters, but geez). But overall, it’s fine. I can appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the pretty boys, tough as they are. And as a bonus, there’s a body dissolving in lye or something in a bathtub, which is always a pleasant surprise.

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You’re sensing a “but” in here somewhere, aren’t you? To paraphrase a personal hero of mine, “Everybody I know has a big but. What’s yours?” (That’s from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. It’s a classic.) Well, yes. The manga looks pretty good, and it’s about gangsters, BUT it doesn’t make any damned sense. There is sort of a plot, and yes, you can pick out some of the salient points thereof, but my brow was furrowed in the WTF position pretty much the whole time I read this book. Maybe I was trying to think too much about the details, but God of Dogs felt like a three-hour movie cut down to 90 minutes, and like maybe they went too deep and excised a certain amount of connective tissue along with extraneous dog reaction shots.

The back cover says:

“The notoriously vicious Chinese Mafia has lost its next rightful heir… to sudden suicide! Now, the esteemed “God of Dogs” Tsai family must race against the ticking clock and hunt down the child of the deceased eldest son in order to preserve their ancient, sacred legacy. Meanwhile, the mysterious Archer has been convicted of killing his father and is on his way to jail. What will fate reveal for the powerful Tsai clan’s criminal dynasty AND this strange young man?”

Your guess is as good as mine.

Next! Romantic Illusions is a cheerful screwball comedy-ish title that explores the humorous and, yes, romantic possibilities inherent in multiple personality disorder. How could you go wrong with that? Right? Yu, the main personality, is a mild-mannered florist. (There were florists in the first book, too. What’s the deal with all the florists?) His other two personalities are a rockin’ tattooed playboy and a brilliant young lawyer (who has brown hair, when the other two are blond, which is a pretty impressive trick, when you think about it). (The less dominant personality is drawn shorter in some panels, as well, which I also found disconcerting.) Yu created the other two personalities so someone would love him, and yes, Hiiro does, er, touch on the possibilities for, um, physical humor inherent in this situation. Not very well, but at least she reaches for it. (Ahem.)

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Ultimately, each of the personalities ends up with a boyfriend of his own, one of them another person with multiple personality disorder. That should be pretty good – funny, sweet, kinky, perhaps slightly disturbing, but potentially in a good way – but it isn’t. It just kind of falls short. How is that even possible? I don’t know.

Which leads us nicely into Love Knot, which is made of meh. The art doesn’t thrill me, but it isn’t bad enough to actively annoy me, either. The story sounded like a good bet – Keigo, a detective by day/assassin by night (and I do love me an undercover assassin), takes in overly effeminate, on-the-run psychic Emiya and discovers that Emiya had been held against his will as part of a secret government project. Keigo falls in love with Emiya and vows to protect him always. Complications ensue, but they wind up in a happily-ever-after situation that includes Keigo discovering that Emiya’s long-lost mother is dead, yes, but always loved him. Aw.

There’s a little bit of heat between Keigo and Emiya, so I was moderately happy with that. And there’s a hint of darkness due to the assassin and repressive secret government project angles, but it isn’t played out, so no payoff there. I put the book down and said, “Well. That was deeply mediocre.” In retrospect, it was probably sub-mediocre.

I blame myself, really. It’s not like I didn’t have adequate warning. Upon reflection, I remember that Momoko Tenzen also wrote Paradise on the Hill. Oh, yeah. I didn’t like that, either. Satoru Ishihara wrote Dost Thou Know? and Hiroko Ishimaru wrote Total Surrender. Nope, didn’t like those, either. Too bad I can’t reliably access my vast database of disappointing manga. It all blurs together. (I wasn’t familiar with Reiichi Hiiro, so I’m giving myself a pass on that one.) I have to admit that I’m a bit worried about what I’m going to read next. Because this has just been disheartening. Still and all, you have to get right back up on the horse that threw you, right? Take the huge, towering stack of unread manga by the horns and all that. Or maybe I should reread a classic, just to restore my faith in manporn.

Review of Ariel Schrag’s Likewise

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By the good folks over at the Inkwell Bookstore.

To me, Fun Home’s sole shortcoming was it’s almost complete lack of comics magic. There are so many storytelling devices unique to comics, it seemed a waste of the artform for Bechdel to stick to a basic picture-describes-words/words-describe-picture template. You can open up to any page in Fun Home and see what I mean. In its 240 pages, I can count only a handful of instances where the illustrations actually add anything to the narration (or visa-versa). While Bechdel’s words do an amazing job of expressing her emotions and experiences, I can’t help but feel that Fun Home would’ve been just as effective as a 50 page prose story. Contrasting this, Likewise could’ve only been a comic book.

I had the opposite problem with Bottomless Belly Button. Shaw clearly has a mastery of/fascination with the many possibilities of a comics page. Open up BBB to almost any page and you’re sure to be wowed by his technical trickery. But the story itself? Pretty predictable. Part of it, I think, is the fact that Shaw was attempting to tell a highly emotional story while having never experienced any of those emotions himself. That’s not to say that a writer needs to have lived everything they write about, but if you’re making up a story from scratch, you’d better have one helluva an empathetic imagination. Shaw, at least in BBB, does not. The tale he tells contains zero surprise details or up-til-then unidentified emotional nuances. It’s almost as though he was attempting to re-tell a divorce-themed family drama he’d seen on TV or heard from a friend of a friend. It never feels authentic. Likewise, on the other hand, is so much weirder, so much messier, so much more full of insightful observation and — I don’t know — realness?

If I Had a Canon

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There’s been a bit of a go round on the blogs about canons and what they’re good for. Via Dirk as always. James Sturm started things off by arguing that children’s book illustrator Virginia Lee Burton should be a great source of inspiration for young cartoonists, and that the Masters of American Comics exhibition from a couple of years back should have included more women. Tom Spurgeon then chimed in saying that Burton, while cool, doesn’t really seem that relevant to comics (or at least that she doesn’t seem like the godmother of comics, as Sturm claimed) and that if you’re going to accuse the Masters of Comics exhibition of not having any women you need to say what women you’d put in there and who you’d take out. Peggy Burns said this sounds like a cage match, which seems silly. Tom said he didn’t really want a cage match just more specificityHeidi said okay, let’s take out Feininger and replace him with Lynda Barry. Dirk chimed in to say he’d pick Phoebe Gloeckner over Art Spiegelman.

Phew.

So, starting from the bottom then: I don’t really know Gloeckner’s work, but I’d pretty much pick a stale dog turd over Art Spiegelman, so replacing him with whoever is fine with me. I love Feininger’s work, and I have little if any interest in Lynda Barry’s. So if I were curating that show, that isn’t the substitution I’d make.

However, if I were curating the show, there wouldn’t be a need to make one for one substitutions anyway. And that’s because the canon presented in that show just isn’t one I care about. Pretty much at all. The artists in the show were:

Will Eisner
Jack Kirby
Harvey Kurtzman
R. Crumb
Gary Panter
Chris Ware
Winsor McCay
Lionel Feininger
George Herriman
E. C. Segar
Frank King
Chester Gould
Milton Caniff
Charles M. Schulz

The artists on that list that I would absolutely keep are Schulz and McCay. I’d probably chuck everybody else. I like Feininger and Kirby and (with reservations) Crumb and Panter and Eisner and Ware well enough, but if I were choosing my best of the best, they wouldn’t be there.

A lot of this is just because I’m not that interested in early newspaper strips, which form the center of curator John Carlin’s vision of what comics are. Segar, King, Gould, Caniff…eh, whatever. It’s true that, because of my lack of interest, I haven’t really studied their work all that closely…but then, I’d wager Carlin hasn’t closely studied (or probably even heard of) the work of Edie Fake or Dewayned Slightweight, two genderqueer artists I would quite possibly include if I were going to be made king for a day. (Who else? Um…Dame Darcy, definitely. Art Young. Marston/Peter. Berni Wrightson. Bob Haney possibly. Ariel Schrag. Dugald Stewart Walker, perhaps. Maybe Calef Brown; that man is a genius.)

So I’d have more women than Carlin’s line-up anyway. But…that’s not really the point. And I don’t think the debate about whether cage matches are worthwhile or about whether you need specificity in these kinds of arguments are really the point either

Tom was irritated because Sturm didn’t say who, in particular, he would replace. But Sturm didn’t say who he would replace in particular because he was making the argument that the criteria were altogether flawed in the first place. At the end of his retrospective he says:

But it’s increasingly clear to me, as I watch my students struggle to bring nuance to a medium that has historically lacked it, that they have as much (if not more) in common with children’s book artists like Burton as with the men who worked in the sweatshops in the early years of comic books. It is time to stop looking at the history of comics as the history of the comic industry. We need to make room for more masters, Burton among them.

I mean, I guess he could be more pugnacious about it, but I think it’s pretty clear that he’s saying that children’s book artists like Burton are a superior model for comics creators today. The comic strip creators in the sweatshops weren’t as good. We should chuck them as models and go with folks like Burton instead. So he’s not saying, take this one out or the other one out. He’s saying, rethink how this canon works from the bottom up. In particular, let’s replace the comic-strip guys with children’s book artists, many of whom, as it happens, were women.

The point here is that canons aren’t actually just a list of who’s the best or most important. They’re a list of who’s the best and most important to somebody in particular using particular criteria. Carlin’s into old newspaper strips and into folks who take those strips as a model or an inspiration (Eisner, Ware, Spiegelman, Kurtzman) with a few other folks tossed into the mix as well for balance. That’s a particular view of the industry. It’s an especially well-established view of the industry (in part because it gets institutional support like the Masters of Comics show, which is why that show matters, yes, even two years down the road.) But you could have other views of the industry, which are, say…more open to certain kinds of craftsmanship, or certain kinds of storytelling, or certain kinds of ideas about what comics are, or certain kinds of creators. Like women.

Articulate

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Way back at the start of the ’08 campaign, Joe Biden caused a flap by describing Obama as “articulate and bright and clean.” From Richard Wolffe’s book Renegade: The Making of a President, via Talking Points Memo:

Bush was so taken aback with the public criticism of Biden that he called in his African American secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Condi, what’s going on?” Rice told him what everyone else had said: that white people don’t call each other articulate.

  Yeah, I’m pretty sure we do. When talking about someone who gets words out of his/her mouth for a living, it strikes me as not uncommon to describe such a person, if he/she is good at the job, as being articulate. “Articulate” becomes condescending when used to describe someone who is not expected to be able to speak well: an athlete, for example. Then the implication is “Hey, he can talk.” In the old days reporters found it especially surprising that black athletes, entertainers, cops, etc., could speak well; hence the dragging out of “articulate” in enough racial contexts for the word to pick up the air of a backhanded slur. The reporters learned the word’s racial pitfalls a while back; I first heard about its implication when reading a copy of the New York Times stylebook from the 1970s. But Biden has an invincibly active mouth and just about anything is bound to come out of it at one point or another.
TPM posted the above anecdote because it’s supposed to make Bush look bad. But I think he comes off okay. He was confused about something racial, so he asked his black friend what was up. Seems reasonable to me. Yeah, yeah, Bush is a rich, white, sheltered conservative who doesn’t have a clue. But when it comes to race, most of us have half a clue at best. Part of being black or white in America is being confused about blacks and whites. I was confused by most, not all, of the racial charges that flew about during the early primaries. (Like, it’s wrong to say Lyndon Johnson should get a lot of credit for America’s civil rights laws? He passed the damn things!)
 The two races are a pair of riddles riding side by side in a ball of confusion, and — how to put this? — away from the office we don’t hang out all that much. Hence Steven Colbert’s very funny jokes about his “black friend” — every white American wants one and they’re harder to come by than you might think, in large part because centuries of racial oppression have bred a certain distance and distrust between the two groups. But if you have a good friend, and you’re confused about something she might be able to explain, then go ahead and ask her. 

Another Day, Another Future Past

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This review initially appeared in The Comics Journal.
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Alan Moore/Travis Charest et. al.
Complete WILDC.A.T.S.
Wildstorm
color/softcover
392 pages/$29.99
ISBN: 13-978-1-4012-1545-3

Alan Moore/et. al.
Wild Worlds
Wildstorm
color/softcover
320 pages/$24.99
ISBN-13: 978-1-4012-1379-4

In Watchmen, Alan Moore answered the question, “What if super-heroes were real?” In his work on WildC.A.T.S., he asks instead, “What if Chris Claremont were real?” Like Claremont’s X-Men and its many imitators, Moore’s WildC.A.T.S. is basically a soap-opera with tights, complete with love triangles, amnesia, false deaths, and gobs of interpersonal angst. The difference is that Claremont’s characters always behaved like a twelve-year-old’s melodramatic fantasy of adulthood. Moore’s tend to act like an adult’s melodramatic fantasy of adulthood. This is perhaps most apparent in the approach the two series take towards evil. In Claremont’s world, good guys can be egotistical and abrasive, but they’re still essentially good— which is why much of the bickering in the classic X-Men series seems peculiarly unmotivated. The characters tend to argue simply because its good drama, not because they actually have different goals or even perspectives. When Jean Grey goes over to the dark side, it’s a result of mystical Jungian gobbledygook, not because she’s prone to recognizable human impulses like greed or hate.

Moore’s characters, on the other hand, are, in fact, greedy and petty and cruel and even bigoted. You can see why they dislike each other, because they do in fact have unlikable traits. This isn’t quite the same thing as saying that they are true-to-life. This is pulp adventure, and the merciless grinding of the plot is a lot more important than the coherence of any individual caught up in it. Would Zealot really repudiate her teammates and friends after a few days of flattery? Is Majestic really dumb enough to fall for Tao’s elementary reverse psychology? Probably not — but the way the corruption works is true-to-life, even if the characters themselves aren’t.

As with the philosophy, so with the plotting — where Claremont relies almost exclusively on a handful of gimmicks (how many times do the X-Men get captured and then break free, anyway?), Moore is actually able to come up with intelligent, surprising twists on a regular basis. The two central arcs of the WildC.A.T.S. series (Tao’s machinations and the fact that the war with the daemonites is not at all what it seems) are both infinitely more coherent, surprising, and affecting than anything Claremont ever came up with.

In other words, and to no one’s surprise, Moore is a vastly better writer than Claremont. And yet, despite its limitations, I think Claremont’s run on X-Men actually holds up better than Moore’s stint on WildC.A.T.S. In part, it’s the art. Many illustrators worked on Moore’s stories, but there’s little point in separating them. The pages are a jumble of cluttered panels, garish colors, and improbable poses. In comparison, John Byrne’s X-Men work looks startlingly good — the layouts are clear, the faces pleasant, the bodies stylized in a consistent and professional way. It’s not Jack Kirby, but it’s not embarrassing either.

Indeed, Byrne’s open, even innocent art fits easily into Claremont’s story-telling. Yes, Claremont’s moral sense and plotting skills are, to put it kindly, not of the best. But that’s part of what gave the X-Men its directness and freshness. Though it’s obviously genre hack-work in some sense, you get the feeling that Claremont really believes in his tropes. It would be churlish to sneer at him for telling us, for the fiftieth time, that Colossus is just a Russian farm boy, just as it would be churlish to roll one’s eyes at the cookie-cutter descriptions of Nancy Drew’s friends placed at the beginning of each book in the series. The formula is the formula; its simple-mindedness is also its simplicity, which is to say, its charm.

Moore really believes in these tropes too, but in a way that’s a good bit more abstract and circuitous. When he tackles straight-forward genre hackwork he’s always performing a kind of intricate shell-game, moving back and forth between irony, nostalgia, and a complicated sense of wonder. When it works, it’s a marvel. For instance, my favorite character in the series (and Moore’s as well, I think) is a murderous, foul-mouthed killer cyborg named Maxine. It’s only at the end of the run that it becomes clear to both readers and WildC.A.T.S. that Maxine is less Wolverine than Kitty Pryde — and that moment of revelation is probably the most moving sequence in the comic.

At least in part Moore’s hand is so sure here because Maxine is his character. He’s interested in her, and so he’s paying attention to what he’s doing. When his concentration slips, though, the results are ugly. The Voodoo mini-series in the Wild Worlds volume can be seen as a bland desecration of Moore’s Swamp Thing zombie story from the mid-80s, replacing that tale’s subtle take on race and time with a dull serial killer yarn tricked out with exoticized voodoo touches. The Majestic spotlight, with the hero the lone survivor at the end of eternity, is more entertaining, though it too feels second-hand — Neil Gaiman, for example, did much the same thing, and did it better, in his Books of Magic mini-series.

As always, though, everybody saves their worst efforts for the crossovers. Moore participates in two, and they both do indeed suck. The first is a generic company-wide crisis event, filled with meaningless battles and lots of stentorian bellowing about self-actualization. The second — a WildC.A.T.S./Spawn crossover included in the Wild Worlds volume — is even worse. In a riff on Claremont’s “Days of Future Past,” we are treated to a time travel story in which we see the coming apocalypse and our heroes’ hideous fates. As an emblematic moment of crappiness, I give you… The Harem of Super-Heroines! Yes, Moore has gone there. Former heroes are forced to put aside their degrading, revealing costumes and put on degrading, not-quite-as-revealing bikinis. Then they are raped by evil guards and ogled by evil fanboys who, I guess, have never seen actual women and so aren’t put off by the glaring anatomical inconsistencies in the illustrations.

Claremont’s classic X-Men was for kids. It never quite tipped over into adult themes and as a result, it never managed to produce anything as stupidly, ineffectually tasteless as this. Moore’s Watchmen was basically for adults, and its handling of sexuality was sensitive and thoughtful. Moore’s WildC.A.T.S., on the other hand, is, like most super-hero comics these days, intended for adults who want to pretend they’re kids. And while I appreciate the man’s craftsmanship and genius, nostalgic self-aggrandizement is a lousy foundation for art.

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For more recent Alan Moore blogging, check out Tom on Miracleman.

Mr. Cream’s sapphire teeth

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Since I’m writing about Miracleman, I might as well mention my favorite bit in the series so far: the assassin Mr. Cream, an elegant fellow with black skin and sapphire teeth. I wonder if a writer, at least a white writer, could invent him now. A big part of the character’s gimmick is that he’s black but named “Cream” and dressed in white. To tell the truth, I suspect that even 27 years back only Europeans, not Americans, could have gotten away with that gag. Racial etiquette is stricter here because we were a slave-holding society whereas the Europeans were slave-trafficking societies. Blacks and whites have spent much more time side by side in America than in Europe, giving American blacks more time to speak up and combat the idea that the white perspective is the only perspective.

Also part of Mr. Cream’s gimmick is that he’s black and yet elegant, cultured, the owner of an original Hockney, etc. Sadly, I think this gimmick still gets trotted out today. It has a patina of well-meaningness that allows it to get by.
But I’m getting off track. The point of this post is that so much of Miracleman concerns itself with dragging silly old superhero tropes into the light of day and exposing them to adult notions of probability: Dicky Dauntless is a silly name, Miracleman can’t just pick up his wife and fly her thru the air because the wind resistance would kill her, and so on. But it’s completely improbable that a cunning, stealthy, highly secret assassin would have sapphire teeth. In fact it makes no sense. People would see him coming; after he left the scene of the crime, anyone anywhere who had seen him that day would remember him. So the idea is absurd. But it’s still great. An elegant black man dressed in white and with sapphire teeth and he goes about killing people thru use of his superior, icy cold intellect — I don’t care if it’s laughable and borderline racist, I still dig it.
Which goes to show that our notion of cool doesn’t care about anything but itself (for me, even using the word “cool” is a horrible concession, since I hate it, but the phenomenon needs a name and I can’t think of any other). And also that genre realism is all relative: the point isn’t to be realistic, it’s to be more realistic than some well-acknowledged cultural touchstone, producing an unexpected contrast (familiar story, everyday facts) that gooses the reader. Which is, oh God, cool too. In writing this post I don’t mean to debunk Alan Moore or Miracleman, just to bring out what they actually offer, as opposed to what we imagine they offer.