Ted Rall is fed up with Obama and says he should quit: “This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.” It’s an op-ed piece, not a cartoon.

The Dawn Of Love, by Kazuho Hirokawa
November 2008, Digital Manga Publishing

I had one of those moments, when I saw this on the shelf. I often go trolling for yaoi, and I’m often disappointed. But every once in a while, I spot a cover that makes me suck in my breath and pause a moment, building the anticipation. Is this going to look as good when I pick it up? Flip through it? I sort of circle the book for a moment, glancing at other titles, trying not to rush the moment. Flirting with it. Then I pick it up and find out if it’s love or what.

Different things attract me. Sometimes it’s the design; sometimes it’s the art. Pretty colors, even. (I’m just a magpie of a yaoi enthusiast.) Maybe a combination thereof. When I saw The Dawn Of Love, I laughed out loud. It’s the gayest looking cover I have ever seen. Really. Look at it. Oh, wait; you need to see the back, too.

ZOMG, as they say. Big, pink flowers, frilly clothes – and, holy shit, a pink velvet suit! – classic romance novel pose, pink nail polish. So gay! I was delighted. Delighted, I tell you. I didn’t even look at the plot synopsis – I didn’t care. It’s not like I wanted to discuss string theory with it, right? I am capable of being incredibly superficial in cases like this, and after staring at the cover of this book for a few seconds, I was ready to buy it a drink and take it home.

Or to a love hotel, which would be appropriate for this title, since there’s a lot of sex, and almost all of it happens in love hotels. That’s significant to the plot, by the way. The author’s notes include this adorable bit: “Unbelievably, [the main characters] spend 45% of the time naked! The story still manages to progress somehow, thanks to these two characters, the love hotel guidebook I obtained several years ago, and my photo-illustrated manual of sexual positions, The Shijuhatte.” (The Shijuhatte, known as the Japanese Kama Sutra, is a trip by itself – there’s a Japanese version you can browse on your cell phone, but for English speakers, this NOT EVEN REMOTELY WORKSAFE but strangely hilarious site will, er, fill you in.) Anyway, there’s a lot of sex in this manga. A lot. Well-drawn sex, in my opinion. And lots of it. All in service of the plot, mind you. (That was a little joke there. Get it? Service?)

There is a plot, really. Masahiro, who’s a goofball, but studly, falls head over heels for Takane, who’s a man-slut, but – well, that’s all. It must be the perm. He’s appealing, no doubt about it, but we don’t find out a lot about why someone would fall so hard for him. No matter! Masahiro has enough personality for both of them, and Takane does eventually come around (presumably that isn’t really a spoiler; for the love of God, look at the cover!). The characters really are endearing, in part because their faces are so expressive. Kirokawa really has a knack for capturing broad swathes of emotion and telling little nuances.

Within the first few pages, Masahiro convinces Takane to have sex with him. (How? He asks.) After being with Takane once, Masahiro decides he must have him, and Takane agrees to be more than casual “sex friends” if Masahiro can keep him entertained for an entire week. Masahiro is up for the challenge, and his condition, upon winning his prize, is that Takane kiss off the rest of the guys he’s been seeing. Complications ensue. Complications are resolved. It’s satisfying. Masahiro and Takane sail off into the big gay romantic sunset. Happy sigh. (And suddenly I’m thinking of that Lemonheads song from the ’90s – “Big Gay Heart.” I like that song.)

You can’t really tell from the plot synopsis, but this manga is full-on charming. Takane is sultry and comes across as a free spirit. Masahiro is kind of an idiot savant. He’s loud and profane and kind of embarrassing, but he understands about love, and he’s arrogant, self-assured, and smart enough to make Takane understand, as well. His asides are the kind of thing that usually make me wince – and I did wince a few times, but I always laughed. Maybe I’m more in touch with my inner Kiss t-shirt wearing 13-year-old boy than I should be, but “relieve my errant wood” cracks me up. And “But your wiener’s pretty good, too, right?” “Of course! Another guy could never beat my wiener!” I mean, it’s painful, but it also made me laugh so hard my coffee came out through my nose. (Beat my wiener. Heh.)

There’s also an older story, “A Flower Awaits Summer.” The art is much less subtle (in the author’s notes, Hirokawa laments this: “Why? Why are the lines so thick, me of three years ago?!”). It’s still cute, though, and those expressive faces are already in evidence. The theme is not drastically different from that of the main story – a younger man who’s afraid of being hurt is convinced to give love a chance. (In the main story, which is rather nuanced, strange as that might sound, the one who needs convincing needs convincing because he’s never been in love and doesn’t understand what it means.) It’s short and sweet, despite the thickness of the lines.

Romantic sex. Sexy romance. Character development. Happy endings. Lots and lots of flowers. Wee!

My good friend and occasional collaborator Bert Stabler makes the case.

In a market society, art’s function, content, and exchange-value are all connected by the idea of excess. Art, like the rest of us, announces its place in the world in predominantly economic terms. In the dreams and desires of the unconscious mind, as in an unfettered free market, boundaries are meaningless, and enough is never enough. As we consume and produce, the excess currency—the profit we create—is another form of what is left over when we consume. Depending on how you take “consume,” this could mean sacralized cultural fetishism. Or, on the other hand, excrement. Either way, we long to contain it or to manipulate it.

Read the whole thing as they say.

Six-months back or so I posted about how much I disliked Kim Deitch’s cover for The Comics Journal. Kim himself responded with a ridiculously gracious comment or two. Anyway, I promised at the time to try more of his work…and while it took me a while, I’ve finally gotten around to it.

So…my reaction to Alias the Cat was mixed. On the one hand, there is some undeniably beautiful artwork. The cover image is particularly striking; the contrast between the color background with the blurry lettering and the sharply rendered stiff black and white image is really arresting, and the cat (or, as you learn from the book, the guy in the cat suit) is seriously creepy; he looks like a zombie. I like the way that the front arm is way too long, and seems to be made out of rubber, too — it’s just so wrong.

And this apocalyptic panel, with the incinerated cat toys blasting out of the volcano is pretty great.

The fact that the supposedly “real” people in the boats look as much like dolls as the cat toys makes the image even more disturbing somehow. Deitch definitely ties into something unsettling about the obsession with kitsch. Look into the banal empty icon, and the banal empty icon looks also into you. This particular money shot speaks in some ways, I think, to my discussion of All-Star Superman. Where Morrison and Quitely see the old fetishized trademarked icon as redemptive, Deitch finds something a good bit less comforting. My favorite part of the book was when Waldo, the pseudo-imaginary semi-plush cat, ends up on a tropical, Edenic island, and proceeds to act the imperialist snake, turning the simple natives into cogs in his capitalist machine. Like some updated Kipling fantasia, they worship him and work in his factory, creating more and more Waldo dolls…until they inevitably turn on him, leading to the apocalyptic volcanic eruption in the picture above.

Deitch’s vision here plugs into several unpleasant racial stereotypes — natives as innocents, native as fools, natives as exploitable and natives as dangerous and unpredictable (even natives as trophy wives, alas.) Again like Kipling, though, those stereotypes give the narrative an unwholesome energy; Deitch is circling around something nasty about the way that fetishized icons are tied into other kinds of fetishes around, for example, race and imperialism; about how fantasies of simplicity and childhood are also fantasies of corruption. If the Morrison/Quitely Superman is a dream of comics’ past as larger-than-life utopia, this is comics’ past as trivial, furtive unpleasantness — Mickey Mouse as a puerile devil.

The problem is that where Kipling (for example) could be quite ruthless, Deitch tends not to be. The apocalyptic volcanic explosion does no real damage; Waldo doesn’t really do anything all that bad on the island, as far as I can tell. The narrative wanders off into a melodrama involving a half-gypsy fireworks manufacturer and his tragic love affair. This is told through narratives and meta-narratives; Deitch puts himself in the story, and he’s investigating events from the beginning of the century, while trying to find out about/deny the existence of the imaginary cat creature who seems to pop up everywhere in his life. His researches bring him in contact with various other characters who are all insistently “colorful” with a repetitive and tedious preciousness — reminiscent, indeed, of all those cat dolls that Deitch’s wife buys on ebay.

Essentially, while Deitch’s art and writing occasionally point towards something darker, overall he plumps for woozy hippie nostalgia. Is the cat real, man? Am I insane? What about all those weird coincidences where that old comic strip from the teens duplicated exactly what was happening in real life?! Trippy…but not, you know, too trippy. Deitch’s unreliable narrator is never actually unreliable; he never really tries to fuck with the reader the way, say, Philip K. Dick does in Valis. You never get the sense that he’s really questioning what’s real and what isn’t; it’s all just a comfortable, cute, in-joke. At the end it’s all about the same stuff as the Morrison/Quitely Superman after all: “y’know, to me that’s the wild beauty of this comics thing. I can re-create the world my way! Half remembered, half imagined. A wonderful place! Where midgets make bread softer than the pillow you lay your weary head on at night and deliver comic books once a month to all the kids in the neighborhood.” Infantilization as apotheosis — woo hoo. There’s a new place for a comics creator to go, huh? And good lord, isn’t there someone out there who just is so, so obsessed with, I don’t know, the Elizabethan era, or cave dwellers, or some time other than the early twentieth century? I know it’s hard to find another era quite as racist or generally unpleasant but…just for variety’s sake? Maybe?

So overall, I think I still have a lot of the same problems with Deitch that I had going in — mainly the insularity, the easy nostalgia, and a self-conscious goofiness that just isn’t all that goofy or unexpected. On the other hand, his art here is in many places very nice indeed, and there is definitely a story here that I would like to read…though it’s not quite the one that interests Deitch, alas.

Just as an end note, I wanted to add that one of the things I quite appreciated in the book was Deitch’s treatment of his wife. Often when you have a somewhat aubtobiographical story about a self-consciously eccentric guy in pursuit of idiosyncratic knowledge/bliss/whatever, the wife ends up more or less written out (as in Hideo Azuma’s “Disappearance Diary,”) or else figuring as the “normal” foil, who puts a brake on our hero and/or pulls him back from the dark side. (as in David Heatley’s My Sexual History) Deitch’s wife Pam has a touch of this; she’s occasionally exasperated with his goofy pursuit of Waldo. But though she’s definitely more sane than he’s supposed to be, she also gets to be a bit of a freak herself, trolling for cat toys on ebay and even dressing up in a cat costume herself at one point. She seems to have her own life and her own nuttiness, in other words, and while Deitch doesn’t go into it in great detail, he does treat it respectfully, rather than just as an appendage to his own. I appreciated that.

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And for a contrast, Bill has a lovely appreciation of Deitch’s work in Kramer’s Ergot.