Category Archives: Blog

Childish

Posted on by

The Onion, by way of Daniel Radosh:

STOCKHOLM—In recognition of her groundbreaking work treating life- threatening diseases of the privates, renowned hoo-ha specialist Dr. Victoria Lazoff was awarded the Nobel Prize in Lady Medicine this week.

The thing is, Lady Medicine would be a good name for an Alan Moore superheroine.

UPDATE: Thought of another: Alterity Girl

And another! High Horse. That could be a superhero based on Moore himself, since he’s a big, long-legged fellow who likes to get high and who enjoys the occasional fit of moral dudgeon.

Better Money Shots

Posted on by

I’ve mentioned in a few places (most recently here) that Japanese comics artists are in my view by and large better than American ones. I should probably expand that to just be “Eastern artists” or maybe “Japanese and Korean artists.” I just started the series Dokebi Bride, by Korean creator Marley. So far, I’m liking it, if not loving it. I’m a little wavery on some of her drawings of people; the occasionally look awkward in a way that doesn’t seem thematic or intentional. However, when she needs to pull out the big guns and draw something that really rocks you back….

Photobucket

Even with my shitty scan, that’s pretty impressive.

On the other hand, here’s one of mainstream comics’ leading lights:

Photobucket

I think both of these images are supposed to be doing similar things. They’re supposed to be spiritual/aesthetic money shots, inspiring awe, reverence, and wonder. In Marley’s, it’s the summoning of a dragon spirit; in Quiteley’s, it’s the contemplation of Superman’s sacrifice/inspiration.

I don’t know. Maybe somebody out there prefers the Quitely drawing. I don’t hate it or anything, but compared to the dragon, it seems fairly unambitious and staid, relying on fairly pat cues (goodness = light!) to convey its spiritual oomph. I think it’s going for a 30s constructivist/socialist feel, probably as a homage to the characters roots — which is fine, but the use of it doesn’t seem especially adventurous, which leaves it feeling cliched, almost advertising. You look at it and think “tum ta-daaaah”, which I guess is the point, but how exciting is that, really? Whereas I feel like Marley is much more full-bore about her embrace of traditional printmaking; the dress the woman is wearing, for example, is beautifully detailed; the dragon’s horns and hair are carefully designed; the use of scale is very nicely managed…. She’s just a better artist and better at using that art to convey the emotions and themes of her story.

Or maybe I’m just sick of super-heroes and prefer water spirits. I don’t know. I can say, though, that I looked at that Marley picture and said, “holy shit,” which happens to me somewhat frequently when I’m reading manga (like YKK for example), but just about never when I read contemporary mainstream stuff. Make of that what you will.

Update: I know somebody out there was hoping this was about hentai. Sorry about that.

Update 2: Follow up post here.

Best Cynical Interjection

Posted on by

It’s by David Horowitz, a right-wing publicist who gets impatient with his side’s “over-the-top hysteria” about the red reign of Chairman Obama:

I have recently received commentaries that claim that “Obama’s speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history” and “never has a politician in this land had such a quasi-religious impact on so many people” and “Obama is a narcissist,” which leads the author to then compare Obama to David Koresh, Charles Manson, Stalin and Saddam Hussein. Excuse me while I blow my nose.

Bonus pleasure: Brendan Nyhan, the very earnest left-of-center moderate who linked to the post, cannot figure out the “blow my nose” bit.

TCJ’s Best of — Now WIth More Manga!

Posted on by

I thought I’d reprint my best of list from the current issue of the Comics Journal.TCJ #296, just in case anyone was interested.

_____________________________

As I say every year about this time, I don’t actually make any effort at all to keep up with new releases, so this is more a list of things I happened to see and love this year than an actual best-of.

Ai Yazawa’s Nana #8 (Viz Media) is my favorite volume of the only ongoing series I follow.

Hitoshi Iwaaka’s Parasyte was one of the first manga I read, and it’s still a marvel — I haven’t seen all the volumes of the ongoing Del Ray reissue yet, but the translation is definitely superior to the earlier TokyoPop edition.

Ariel Schrag’s Potential (Touchstone) is a reissue of one of the best (and most underrated) comics of the last couple of decades.

Lilli Carré’s The Lagoon (Fantagraphics) is a great first book by an extremely talented artist; a lyrical mind-fuck of time, identity, and genre.

Lyrical mind-fuck also describes the opera/graphic thing/poem/performance that is Dewayne Slightweight’s The Kinship Structure of Ferns (self-published). Seeing Dewayne perform it live is something else, but for the vast majority of folks who missed it, the hand-bound book comes complete with a play-along CD of his original music.

Dame Darcy’s “We Are the Fae and There Is No Death,” from Meatcake #17, is a horror story masquerading as a fairy tale, and is also about as beautiful an example of either as I ever hope to see in comics form. It made me wish Darcy would adapt some Lovecraft or Poe…though I’ll settle for the illustrated version of Wuthering Heights she promised us a few years back.

Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four: Silver Rage (Marvel) actually came out at the end of 2007, but what the hey. Artist Mike Wieringo’s art is okay as super-hero fare goes, but Jeff Parker’s smart, goofy, all-ages writing is the thing. He’s more-or-less single-handedly restoring my faith in the super-hero genre.

Also helpful in that regard is Showcase Presents: The Brave and the Bold, reprinting the series’ classic 1970s heyday in 500-page plus black-and-white phone books. Volume 2 came out at the tale end of 2007, and while it’s a bit uneven, at it’s best it’s stunning. It would be worth getting for Bob Haney’s brilliantly nutty scripts alone, much less the eye-popping art by the likes of Nick Cardy and Jim Aparo. Issue #104, “Second Chance for a Deadman?” is probably the best Batman story ever written, for my money. Volume 3 of the series, which should be every bit as good, is scheduled for December 2008.

Dan Walsh’s inspired alterations of Garfield comics at www.garfieldminusgarfield.net made me laugh so hard I got hiccups. Basically, Walsh simply removes the titular cat from the strip, leaving Garfield’s owner, Jon, talking to himself in an arid suburban wasteland. Thanks to Davis’ good humor — and his eagle-eye for promotional opportunities — the site has spawned a book, Garfield Minus Garfield from Ballantine which features excerpts from the site, as well as a few détourned strips by Davis himself.

Mr. Door Tree at Golden Age Comic Book Stories this year published a jaw-dropping portfolio of illustrations by Dugald Stewart Walker for the 1918 book “The Boy Who Knew What the Bird Said”. I’d never heard of Walker before, but he is now one of my favorite artists; his fairy-tale illustrations are unbelievable. Unfortunately, that post seems to have been deleted. As of this writing, there is another selection of Walker’s art on the site at this address

Finally, and most self-indulgently: my favorite comic of 2008 was Edie Fake’s “Call the Corners,” which he created as his submission to the online forum The Gay Utopia, which I organized and edited. “Call the Corners” is a single, enormous image; onscreen, you scroll down it, following an elliptical message, more poem than narrative. It’s influenced by Fort Thunder and by tattoo art, but the synthesis is completely unique. I was deliriously happy to be able to publish it — it sort of made me feel my existence was justified, at least for this year. You can find it here.

______________

Like pretty much every other hipster drone, I like to preen myself on the eclectic idiosyncrasy of my taste. Normally, therefore, I’d be thrilled to report that, unless I missed something (which I could have), of the nineteen other folks who contributed lists, none of them picked any of the books I did. Not one. This is me taking a victory lap….

Okay, done now. But in every apple there is a thorn, in every worm a cloud…or something like that. The point is, I figured nobody else was going to choose Edie Fake or Dugald Stewart Walker, and I wasn’t surprised to see that nobody else picked Parayte, but I was really hoping that Lilli Carré would get more love. I mean…Fantagraphics-issued, totally alt-comics friendly, weird, beautiful book. Maybe it came out too late in the year? (I got an advance copy because I wrote this ecstatic review for the Chicago Reader.)

I also wanted to talk a little bit about the manga coverage. Last year I noted that the Journal’s best of list was very, very light on the manga coverage. I think the journal has actually done better with manga coverage in general since then, and this year’s selection seemed to be somewhat more manga friendly. Partly that’s because Johnny Ryan picked almost entirely manga for his list. Kristy Valenti had a few selections as well, too. (Bill didn’t choose any manga, I don’t think — presumably because, as he mentioned a bit back, he doesn’t really read manga in translation so much.) Another factor is that there were two big arty manga releases that made a lot of people’s lists — Travel by Yuichi Yokoyama (which might have made my list if I’d read it at that point — I have a review of it forthcoming in the Journal) and Red Colored Elegy (which I haven’t read.)

As a sort of balance, there was less coverage of mainstream American super-hero stuff in the lists this year than last, I think. Someone (Rich Kreiner, I think) picked a couple of DC’s reprint collections, but other than that, if you weren’t Grant Morrison, you didn’t show up on anybody’s scorecard. So, really, the pulpier regions of manga and the mainstream both got similarly short shrift, making it less a “the journal doesn’t care about manga” thing than the more familiar “Journal not all that into pulp, necessarily” thing.

I must say, I also just wondered in general…best of lists in March? Why? I mean, I understand why it’s worthwhile or interesting to have Kim Deitch and Lynda Barry and Johnny Ryan say what they’re into at any time of the year. But someone like me — I don’t know. Best of lists seem like the whole point is to be timely and newsy, and if it’s not that, is there really a reason to bother? It seems like the Journal’s competitive advantage is in having longer, in depth pieces, not short, news driven lists (unless those lists are from industry figures, like Kim Deitch and Lynda Barry and so forth.)

But, on the other hand, it’s not like I know anything about marketing. And I read through the lists and enjoyed agreeing (always happy to see somebody fawn over Clamp) or disagreeing (somebody chose that crappy Howard Zinn comic?!), or just learning about something new.

There were also a couple of really nice longer articles in this issue about topics I know nothing about: Matthias Wieval wrote about French comics, and Tim Kreider had a long essay about Bill Mauldin. Matthias has a new regular column in TCJ, apparently, which sounds like it’ll be great. And I don’t remember seeing Tim Kreider’s stuff before, though I hope he keeps writing for them.

Gaijin Love, Slight Return

Posted on by

I posted yesterday about the fact that Japanese Vogue uses almost all Caucasian models, and wondered how that jibed with Matt Thorn’s contention that manga characters are not supposed to represent Westerners despite the big eyes. There were a bunch of interesting points in comments, and I’ve thought about it all a little more. So here are my conclusions as a largely clueless Westerner.

— I think Matt Thorn has to be right about the manga. I never really doubted that actually, but Bill weighed in to confirm it. When Japanese people look at the characters in manga, they see Japanese people, not aspirational Westerners. I accept that.

— Matt moves from this point to argue that the Japanese don’t have an inferiority complex re: the West, because they were never dominated by the West the way other parts of the world were. I think that this is trickier to argue. Japan was, in fact dominated by the West; the U.S. occupied it. That was a really big deal in Japanese culture and politics.

The point is, there would have had to have been some sense of inferiority at the time; they did get conquered, after all, and in an extremely memorable and humiliating fashion. That’s not to say that Japan *now* is laboring under a massive inferiority complex that inflects every part of their culture. I’m quite persuaded that feelings of inferiority don’t have much to do with the fact that the Japanese draw their characters with big round eyes (except for the possibility that Tezuka’s fascination with Disney was tied up with the general fascination with America that came out of the war, maybe.) But, if you’ve got any kind of cultural issues around bodies and beauty, you probably will see them in fashion magazines. And as W. David Marx points out here, there do seem to be some “lingering issues of perceived racial inferiority” in the way the Japanese relate to fashion — a sense that clothes look better on Europeans, which means that many high fashion magazines use European models (as opposed to most Japanese magazines, which use Japanese models.

So, to recap: manga iconography is not evidence of feelings of inferiority. However, that doesn’t mean those feelings don’t exist at all, and there seems to be some evidence for them in the Japanese preference for European models in certain kinds of fashion magazines.

I should add that there’s also a good bit of evidence in all parts of Japanese culture for feelings of *superiority* in reference to Westerners. And lord knows, it’s not like you can’t find evidence of weird body/beauty issues in American magazines as well. And obviously, if Japanese are fascinated with the West to some extent, Westerners are also fascinated with Japan — thus this post.

Update: Incidentally, while I don’t think I have feelings of inferiority re: the Japanese in general, I do think they make better comics than we do.

The Month That Was

Posted on by

Last month was our busiest ever here at the Hooded Utilitarian, I think. In case you missed it, some of the highlights were:

More Wonder Woman blogging, including the conclusion (for now, at least) of my Only One Can Wear the Venus Girdle series and (somewhat overlapping) liveblogging of the Wonder Woman animated film.

A roundtable on Hitoshi Ashanano’s tranquil sci-fi pastoral YKK, featuring special guest instigation by Dirk Deppey.

A roundtable on Female Characters, featuring discussions of Jaime Hernandez vs. Terry Moore, Stan Lee’s romance comics and Mary Jane, Perfect Girlfriends in manga and Shungiku Uchida’s “Minami’s Sweetheart”, Laurie Juspeczyk from Watchmen, Kathy Kane, and maybe others I’ve forgotten.

A fair bit of discussion about the Watchmen movie and comic.

Various political nuggets, mostly by Tom, some about Rush Limbaugh.

Lots of other stuff too if you want to scroll on back.

Gaijin Love

Posted on by

I’ve mentioned before Matt Thorn’s great article about why characters in Japanese manga are not, in fact, meant to represent, or even to suggest, Westerners, despite those round eyes.

Japan, however, is not and never has been a European-dominated society. The Japanese are not Other within their own borders, and therefore drawn (or painted or sculpted) representations of, by and for Japanese do not, as a rule, include stereotyped racial markers. A circle with two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth is, by default, Japanese.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Japanese readers should have no trouble accepting the stylized characters in manga, with their small jaws, all but nonexistent noses, and famously enormous eyes as “Japanese.” Unless the characters are clearly identified as foreign, Japanese readers see them as Japanese, and it would never occur to most readers that they might be otherwise, regardless of whether non-Japanese observers think the characters look Japanese or not.

… the notion that the Japanese harbor an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the White West seems to me based on the largely unconscious assumption that non-Western peoples envy the West, and more specifically on the American fantasy that everyone in the world naturally wants to be American. Of course, the scholars and intellectuals who note such tendencies in Japan do not applaud it; on the contrary, they cluck their tongues and wring their hands and wish loudly that the Japanese would shun the temptations of the West and remain true to and proud of their heritage. But the eagerness with which they seek out evidence of a desire to be “white,” and the stubbornness with which they ignore evidence to the contrary, suggests to me that their apprehension of social reality is heavily filtered through an unintended ethnocentrism.

Matt points out, among other things, that the characters in the comic are stylized; they don’t look all that much like people of any ethnicity. Definitely read the whole thing if you haven’t already. I found it very convincing.

And yet….well, look at this:

Photobucket

That’s the cover of Japanese Vogue from January, purchased on ebay by my fashion-magazine-obsessed-significant other. Probably the first thing you’ll notice in the picture above is that the woman is clutching her crotch. After that, though, you might observe that she’s not Japanese. Furthermore:

Photobucket

Photobucket

Photobucket

Photobucket

All the covers from Japanese Vogue I found seem to feature Westerners. Most of the interior pictures do too.

(And for those wondering, no, all foreign issues of Vogue don’t feature Western models. Indian Vogue is mostly devoted to Bollywood, for example.)

Photobucket

Obviously, none of this refutes Matt’s argument about manga. And Japan (as my significant other pointed out) is something of a mecca for magazines; there are far more per capita than there are in the U.S., and the vast majority of them feature Japanese models. Maybe Vogue just uses Western models because it has overseas connections, and it helps it stand out on the shelves? Still, it’s hard not to conclude that there’s some suggestion here that the Japanese are taking beauty standards and beauty cues from Western models. It seems, anyway, a little more thoroughgoing than the Western fetishization of Asian women, which definitely exists, but probably wouldn’t be indulged quite so exclusively in an entire mainstream publication.

I don’t know. Anybody have other thoughts? Like maybe Bill, or somebody else who, unlike me, actually knows something about Japan?

Update: Pallas in comments points me to this fascinating link by W. David Marx about Japanese fashion magazines. Here’s part of what he says:

High-end fashion magazines, on the other hand, mostly feature clothing from European houses and luxury brands, pegging the center of legitimacy in the West. In order to ensure that the presentation harks back to the larger Eurocentric fashion world, magazines like Spur or Ginza — almost without exception — use non-Japanese and mostly Caucasian models. This prevents Japanese female readers from self-association, but that’s the point. Like the old Groucho Marx quote, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member,” Japanese high-fashion fans do not want to see the clothes they desire on real-life Japanese people. There may be a tad bit of self-effacement in this sentiment, but it generally questions more elite Japanese consumers’ feelings about their own locale. The fantasy, therefore, requires a staff of non-Japanese models.

ViVi and Glamorous‘ overwhelming use of half-Japanese and three-quarters-Japanese models like Fujii Rina, Hasegawa Jun, and Iwahori Seri begs a more pointed question: what does race mean when it’s not a pure reflection of either here nor there? These magazines are not targeting some massive half-Japanese readership, nor do these models look foreign enough to recenter the magazine atmosphere outside of Japan.

Herein lies lingering issues of perceived racial inferiority. I’ve been told numerous times in Japan that “clothes look better on foreigners,” by which they mean “white or black people.” This is not objectively true (nor subjectively true, in my view), but editors have long used half-Japanese models on this principle to bridge the gap between Japanese self-association and cool “foreign” fashion. A half-Japanese model looks “foreign” enough to enhance the image of the clothing, but close enough to the reader to send a message of commonality. Things are changing, however. Male fashion magazine Popeye previously used only half-Japanese models but moved to more foreigners once readers voiced less need for racial similarity in considering the clothing.

So that would be at least a qualified vote for some level of “lingering issues of racial inferiority.” Though, again, that doesn’t mean that such lingering issues are reflected in manga iconography, necessarily.

Update 2: I just wanted to point out as well: Matt says that Japan “never has been a European dominated society.” That’s not true, if Europe includes America. Post-war Japan was absolutely American dominated. It was occupied; it’s government was restructured; cultural changes were handed down by fiat; etc. etc. Admittedly, that all took a relatively brief amount of time compared to the experience of a long-time colonial possession like, say, India. Still, it was pretty important, and had long-term consequences, both structural and, I would assume, psychological. To say that Japan was never under Western domination is not a supportable statement, I don’t think.

Update: And I’ve got a follow up post here