Category Archives: Blog

Blogathon

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So over the next few weeks the Hooded crew (that’s me, Tom, Miriam, and Bill) is going to do some group theme blogging to kick off the new year. This next week (starting tomorrow) we’re going to blog on the Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — each of us is going to talk about our favorite comics thing we discovered in 2008 that we hadn’t known about previously.

I think the week after that we’re going to write about Manga (I believe that the working title, offered by Mr. Crippen, is “Manga: What the Hell?”) After that we may talk about comics we wish existed …and then we’ll stop or keep going, depending on how the spirit moves us.

So in that vein: are there any topics that folks out there would like to see us have at? Let us know in comments and if something sparks our fancy we’ll pick it up.

Constructionism: What the Hell?

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I’m reviewing of Essential Dykes to Watch Out For and it’s taking forever. Here’s one snag I just noticed. In her introduction, Bechdel recounts her discovery of constructionism, which she defines this way: “Apparently no one was essentially anything!” But in Dykes we find a frail little boy named Jonas who insists on taking hormones so he can be a girl, at which point he becomes quite a sassy, self-confident little creature. But if no one is essentially anything, what’s the point of messing around with your body?

Does Jonas/Janis mean:

1) Alison Bechdel is no constructionist?
2) Constructionism makes an exception for transsex operations because those are transgressive enough anyway?
3) [ some undefined third option ] ?

Lachrymal Ducts of Old Shanghai

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Reading Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Abhay Khosla confirmed why I don’t read Khosla: I don’t know 90% of the comics he covers. But I do like the tension in these two quotes:

[#1] With art comics, the conversations that I tend to see, it’s not as much about actually caring about what happens to the characters who live in the four-corners of the page. … I’ve never seen anyone go nuts on the internet over what happened to Crying Asian Man from some Adrian Tomine comic. “I’m going to predict what happens to Crying Asian Man in the next issue of Optic Nerve.” Never seen that. I’ve never seen a Crying Asian Man fan-site, or anyone dressed as Crying Asian Man at a comic convention, or Crying Asian Man slash-fic.

(Now, since “Crying Asian Man” sounds like “Crying Freeman,” from now on I’ll see Adrian Tomine’s deathly still hipsters threatened by a yakuza assassin’s speedlines.)

And:

[#2] Comics, animation, both seems to dis-empower the artists even though they’re art-driven media.

(He’s drawing a distinction here between writer-as-creator and artist-as-creator, but I think the former point informs the latter in a slanted way.)

Think of Nancy. There’s Bushmiller’s Nancy, the Gilchrists’, and John Stanley’s comic-book Nancy. Bushmiller’s defines the character, but didn’t create her. She’s almost Platonic:

She doesn’t need the artists who drew her, or the writers who wrote her: model sheet immortality.

That’s seemed to me like a condition of cartooning. The characters tend not to change, and actively resist it. So they transubstantiate into models, toys, and character goods, and any one artist’s intentions are just a footnote. (Cartooning as iconography, as opposed to drawing as record-of-seeing).

But prose fiction, Optic Nerve‘s model, can be read as a record of a character’s change. The payoff’s often enough the character realizing the change, epiphany at the end. In comics, as in genre fiction, I think the stability of the characters works against this– Optic Nerve and many of the 90s wave of literary graphic novels have paralysis as a theme, full of characters frozen in ice.

This could be a fundamental difference in the media. The comics that deal in time have done so over decades: Cerebus, Gasoline Alley. Even the Palomar stories seem to return to state whenever Gilbert does one of those episodes where all the characters show up for a big party.

(Nitpick: Edmund Gosse was a hack just as a scholar! Father & Son lives on.)

Anita The Swedish Nymphet

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So, yeah, I brought the new year in by doing an illustration and then watching this 1978 Swedish exploitation flik starring Christina Lindberg. And wow, what an utterly bizarre movie. Anita is literally a nymphomaniac — that is, she has a psychological compulsion to have sex. So far, it could be a porn set-up, and obviously soft-core is a lot of the point here; Lindberg is extremely good-looking if you have any interest at all in the innocent waif look, and she seems to take her shirt off every other scene or so. And obviously, the clinical set-up is more or less an excuse to have her do that. But the movie never quite treats it as an excuse; instead, Anita’s compulsion is played for sympathy/psychological drama as much as for thrills — Lindberg is a decent actress, and she seems genuinely distressed by sleeping with all these guys, having her reputation destroyed, her horrible relationship with her parents. The sexual encounters are also played really grimy and depressing and sordid for the most part, more depressing than arousing.

The exploitation elements and the pyschological drama and sordidness collide in some (I think intentionally) hilarious ways. There’s one scene in which Anita starts out singing a demure series of songs at a dinner party with her parents — and then she does a striptease for all their friends. And her parents are just like, oh, gee, what should we do now that our daughter is thrusting her crotch at Dad’s boss?! And they don’t do anything! It’s completely surreal and weird; like Bunuel just wandered in, directed one scene and left. There’s also a laugh-out-loud funny moment where a young, earnest psychology student explains to Anita that to save herself from nymphomania, she must have an orgasm as soon as possible — and he’s telling her this at the breakfast table with two other female roommates present! I guess since he’s a student he can’t afford a room with a couch….

That psychology student, incidentally, is pretty much a sweetheart and fairly good-looking to boot; his obsession with Anita is certainly creepy, but compared to most of the guys she deals with he’s obviously a gem. So…he screws her into orgasm and she is cured, right? Uh uh. The end of the movie is somewhat incoherent, but as near as I can tell, Anita manages to obtain an orgasm…by sleeping with a woman. Then she joins a lesbian sex show, and thereby discovers she has lost her compulsion to sleep with men. Only then does she screw the psychology student, and they live happily ever after.

Obviously, this is an example of Fanny, and it’s icky fascination/disavowal/lascivious sympathy with female deviance/psychology isn’t any kind of feminist message. And, inevitably, the cure for lots of sex is better sex, rather than, say, no sex, or less sex, or, you know, taking up a hobby. But there’s also (and somewhat out of left field) an acknowledgment of the importance of female-female relationships (the movie passes the Bechdel test). And there is some effort to find a man for the heroine who is moderately attractive. Though, of course, we never exactly see her falling in love with him (rather than vice versa.) He just sort of gets her as a prize for being such a good guy and sticking with her and not having sex with her when she couldn’t control herself and generally being there for her over a long period of time, all of which is cool but not necessarily a reason in itself to have sex with him. Though that’s better than having sex with someone for being a nerdy loser with no redeeming qualities, I guess.

Freeing Your Bushel and Your Bible Will Follow

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…or something like that. Anyway, I’ve linked to a couple of my drawings, over the last couple of days, but I decided I’d just post them here because, damn it, man’s uploads must exceed his bandwidth, or what’s a blog for? So here they is, with links to their pages on the Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible Site, so you can see which Bible verse I have arbitrarily attached to them if you so desire:

Daniel 12:6

I Corinthians 11:15

Leviticus 18:25.

speaking of jewish exceptionalism….

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… I don’t think there’s a book called The Irish Catholic Graphic Novel, do you?

I drew an essay for this book, which came out last month from Rutgers University Press (on amazon here). (I also did the painting for the cover but I did not do the overall design or add the balloons.)

The essay is a much-abbreviated history of American autobio comics and their Jewish influences (Freud is clearly an influence on all of the early stuff, and I argue that creators in the early ’70s, like R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, & Justin Green, were influenced by Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint), what defines the genre, a theoretical exploration of how confessional comics are an expression of American-Jewish thought, and a bit of “how I got started in comics” as well.

If those sorts of things interest you, and if scholarship about Jewish-themed comic books (which is the rest of the book) interests you, you should check it out. If my essay sounds interesting but not scholarship about Jewish-themed comic books, I’ll be printing just the essay as a zine in the next couple of months. I’ll post when I have them. meanwhile, here is the first page (click to enlarge):

(Disclaimer which I kind of can’t believe I’d ever need to make: No, I don’t believe i’m superior to anybody because i’m Jewish. And I’m not really interested in discussing whether the Jews control all the world’s money or whatever.)

Happy New Year!

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I just confessed to Noah by e-mail that I’m socially retarded. To continue my coming out, I’ll share what I did a few years ago, the first New Year’s Eve when I didn’t try to pretend I had a social life. What I did was spend a couple of enjoyable hours reading this material right here.

UPDATE: And what I was reading last night, among other things. To care about this controversy, it probably helps to be a copy editor, or what the Brits call “subeditors.”