Eagle-eyed readers will notice that we’ve added another blogger. Miriam Libicki (aka Miriam Beetle) is the creator of jobnik!, a comic about her experiences in the Israeli Army. She’s also a longtime reader of this blog, where her comments have, with some regularity, been more interesting than my posts. We’re very pleased to have her join us as a regular blogger. Good to have you aboard, Miriam!
Category Archives: Blog
Xoth — The Intro
Stefan Dinter, the man behind German comics company Zwerchfell Verlags, got me to write an intro for Xoth –The Unspeakable City, a new Lovecraft pasticheby Anna-Maria Jung. Here’s a bit of press info about author and book:
On ANNA-MARIA JUNG:
Anna-Maria Jung was born in Graz, Austria, where she started to draw comics during her teens. She started to study Multi-Media Arts, then went on to work at Bill Plympton‘s animation studio in NYC (for the short film
»Shut Eye«). Returning to Austria, she began to to write her master‘s thesis in Multi-Media Arts at the Fachhochschule Salzburg on the theme of »The Creation of a fantastic world, based on H.P. Lovecraft‘s Cthulhu Myth«. The Thesis deals with, amongst others, »background information on the author, the cthulhu myth and the meaning behind the stories, as well as examples of lovecraft-inspired media and a discussion of how these different kinds of work deal with Lovecraft‘s stories«. During the work on the thesis, Anna-Maria started to work on conceptional artwork for a fictional city named XOTH and its inhabitants, inspired by Lovecraft‘s creations. From this grew the idea for a comic book – XOTH, The unspeakable city.
On XOTH:
On one of his many uneventful, boring evenings, Jacop O‘Damsel, freelance nerd, drunkenly decides to fall asleep in a back alley. Bad timing, since an intergalactic Dimensional Shambler apears right there and then. And before Jacop gets the faintest chance to even be hung-over, the thing whisks him away.
Jacop awakens in XOTH, a strange world full of weird creatures – or are they unutterably blasphemous? Anyway, there are also the »Humanists«, a gang of stinky fisheads whor worship Humans and need Jacop for a certain – if unspecified – mission. And if that wasn‘t madness enough, Mayor Cthulhu orders his best killers, Nub and Shang to rub Jacop out of existence. Thanks be to the Old Ones, because Jacop finds Yen Niggurath,a nice goat-girl, who decides to help the hapless human. Together with
her, Jacop will get to the bottom of the »Ordus Humanus« affair, since – Cthulhu‘s fat ass! – he‘s in no mood to run for his life forever.
Set against the background of H.P. Lovecraft‘s Cthulhu Myth, Anna-Maria Jung tells a tall tale full of monsters, nerds, monstrous nerds and nerdy monsters. And the man from Angell Street is in there, too.
XOTH! Die unaussprechliche Stadt, an 80 page hardcover with a foreword by ill-tempered critic Noah Berlatsky is published by Zwerchfell Verlag. more on http://www.xoth-comic.net/ and http://zettgeist.blogspot.com/
——
…and because I’m a lame-ass American monoglot, and can’t read German, you now know about as much about Xoth as I do. Luckily, Stefan wanted the intro to be an intro to Lovecraft rather than to the comic per se. So anyway, the intro is below…and if you buy the book, you can see it in German too! (Which I think may be my first translated work!)
—–
Horrid Replication
H.P. Lovecraft loathed and feared degeneration with an intensity hardly distinguishable from lust. With obsessive, leering repetitiveness, his stories imagine man as a kind of vulnerable waxwork, constantly in danger of melting into a suggestively amorphous travesty of itself. In Lovecraft, there are no sexual references, no women, and virtually no dialogue. Every man is trapped in his own skull, quivering with impotent emotion as gaping atavisms engulf him, swallow him, have their way with him and discard him, leaving behind as progeny an animalistic cannibal, an undead zombie, a croaking brachian, a friable gray powder, or a slithering mass of protoplasm. Lovecraft in his actual life had very unpleasant racial views, and the spectre of miscegenation, of impure violation and alien congress, slithers through every page he wrote. Behind his constant use of adjectives like “nameless”; “unspeakable”; “inexpressible”; “indescribable” it is hard not to see a massive, leaden repression. Like the devolving narrator of “A Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Lovecraft’s horror shades ominously into fascination — a desire to slough off humanity altogether, and bathe in defilement for all eternity.
Whether Lovecraft actually desired such a fate, he’s certainly achieved it. Perhaps more than any other twentieth century writer, his work has inspired, not reverence or criticism, but twisted doppelgangers. All art tends to propagate itself, of course, whether in homoerotic Star Trek fan fiction or Jane Austen movie adaptations. But even by these standards, Lovecraft is something else. Whether you’re Stephen King, Alan Moore, or …well, me, in some of my earliest and most benighted prose efforts, the allure of Lovecraft is infinitely irresistible. Cthulhu pops up incongruously in comics, books, movies — for that matter, I’ve even got a plush Lovecraft monster doll (it’s starfish shaped, with too many eyes, and it kind of scares my four-year old.) To merely glance through one of the man’s unholy books, it seems, is to want to create a blasphemous imitation.
There are lots of reasons why it’s fun to steal from Lovecraft. His unwieldy vocabulary is addictive. Once you’ve been introduced to “Cyclopean,” “opalescent”, “bizarrerie”;” and “Archaen,” — all on one page, no less — you’re bound to start using them yourself. Similarly, his invented, unpronounceable neologisms — Cthulhu, Yog-Shothoth, Necronomicon — are both so instantly recognizeable and so ill-defined that you can’t help but want to make them your own.
Indeed, even in Lovecraft’s own stories, the names of these creatures are dropped with such forced emphasis that they seem borrowed — as, indeed, does most of the prose and plot. His tales are a glutted agglomeration of incoherent genres; faux anthropological treatises, swipes from Poe, shock-twist endings more hoarily ancient than his own Elder Gods; all tied together with looping strings of polysyllables, leaden pacing, and a keen disregard for characterization, narrative tension, or consistency. Original Lovecraft feels remarkably like pastiche, and the most perfect Lovecraft parody is simply Lovecraft — which is what makes Lovecraft parody so hard to resist.
And yet, despite their silliness, the best Lovecraft stories have a submerged emotional coherence — a deep pool of hysteria and anxiety which, at moments, overpowers the clumsy, plodding structure which seems designed more to contain than to explicate it. The narratives are filled with horrors unspoken, revelations half-revealed. In “At the Mountains of Madness”, Danforth looks back from the plane and sees something — we aren’t told what — which causes him to shriek aloud “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” This is a decidedly goofy reference to Poe. And yet, at the same time, there is something meaningful and affecting in the glance backwards that causes madness. The nonsense noise and the literary reference almost seem designed to bury the core effect — the evocation of a mythical primal scene, that turns men to weeping children.
Or look at the following passage, in which, Lovecraft describes one of his patented monsters; a shoggoth.
Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes — viscous agllutinations of bubbling cells — rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile — slaves of suggestion and builders of cities — more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative —Great God!
There just isn’t anything especially frightening about a rubbery fifteen-foot spheroid — I mean, what is it, a gigantic football? But preposterous as the start of the quote is, the end has an evil lyrical force in its nightmare vision of slave uprisings, of rightful rulers overthrown by indistinguishable, ungrateful, utterly unhuman underlings. It’s like a more repressed, more foaming version of Carlyle’s French Revolution.
Lovecraft (suggestively) hated Freud. But what is most compelling about his narratives is the sense that they are unavoidably Freudian — that the story’s thin, precarious consciousness is stretched above an unexplored abyss. Like Lovecraft’s characters, his readers and imitators are drawn on by the allure of undiscovered truths, unexplored passages, unnamed horrors. The stories resolutely refuse to explore their own implications; their meanings don’t reveal themselves easily or naturally, but rather slither out, half-formed, oozing a foetid miasma, before lurching back, half-seen, into the blackness which spawned them. Did you really see that? Did Lovecraft?
Perhaps…or perhaps not. Certainly, few writers have written so obsessively about the desirability of ignorance — and, especially, of self-ignorance. Anna-Maria Jung hits on something profound in Xoth when she switches the brains of Lovecraft and a Yithian. Not that Lovecraft’s work is especially alien, but it does sometimes seems written as if it’s author had deliberately asked his brain to leave the room. The stories seems disavowed by their creator — which is why so many other people have tried to claim them.
The result is invariably, to quote the master out of context, “degenerate work…coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail.” But, as Lovecraft knew ( or, perhaps, tried not to know) degeneration has its own perverse attractions. So prepare to enjoy the debasement that is Xoth — and I hope it inspires you to explore the debasement that is Lovecraft as well.
——–
If you want to read more of me on Lovecraft, you can check out my review of the Eureka’s Graphics Classic comics adaptation of some of his stories. (I believe Stefan read this review, which is why he asked me to do the intro for Xoth.)
And if you’re unholy yearning is still not sated, you can see some of the art I did for an exhibit based on quotes from Lovecraft’s Commonplace book which is still shuttling around Europe as we speak:
Send Back Sendak! Boost the Seuss!
I find Donald Phelps’ writing style maddening; circumlocution is piled on parapraxis until all you can really see is the giant, rather desperate sign waving back and forth: “Kiss me! I’m erudite!”
Nonetheless, his new column in TCJ is tackling interesting subjects. Last time out he talked about the classic pulp occult novels of Manley Wade Wellman, which look pretty fabulous. In TCJ 294, he compares Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss, which is a fun topic to think about, even if, (to no one’s astonishment) I disagree with everything he says.
Phelps’ basic point is that Sendak is better than Seuss because Sendak is more of a formalist. In the selection below, he’s talking particularly about a 1934 comic strip by Seuss which is fairly chaotic and ignores panel borders.
An object lesson, I might suggest, in the liabilities of kindergarten chaos as practiced ad infinitum by Giesel. It involves the jettison of form, embodied, in the example just cited, in those ubiquitous panel boundaries: expandable (as Hal Foster and Billy DeBeck variously demonstrated) but very, very seldom, if ever, dispensable or, challengeable, at least, as obtusely as Seuss challenged them. Form: that which delimits, that which demarks, that which identifies, in children’s art especially — like that of Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. Form entails a sense of the imagination’s geography and its component laws.
Such a geographic sense, along with the commitment it would appear to involve, has never been evident for me in the fantastical outpourings of Theodore Giesel. One recalls once more — somewhat querying — the little homilies embodied in some of the later books: How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears a Who, Horton Hatches the Egg. Aren’t such sermonettes the occasional warning or symptom that the author, albeit with whatever benign and public-spirited sentiments — recognizes (make that: re-recognizes) the work of his hands as a Marketable Commodity. And one might observe: a symptom of the deficiency of form, one might say, the integrity of the artist’s work, as manifested in laws, not homilies.
Phelps then goes on to laud Sendak for being more restrained and controlled:
The stories of Sendak unfold themselves in gravely exact segments of action, by soberly defined anatomies, enacting the fables in compact but soberly graphic pantomime. The pictures as a rule are not enclosed save by the pages’ white margins, the concentrated imagery suggesting a dream’s flickering vignettes. Yet, I can not sufficiently mark the tone of earthy, almost prosaic reality that Sendak bestows on his visions.
So to sum up, Seuss is uncontrolled, overly commercial, and kind of gauche. Sendak is controlled, brimming with artistic integrity, and classy.
The difference between Seuss and Sendak, in other words, isn’t only, or primarily, that Sendak is more interested in form. Phelps can natter on all he wants about the link between homilies and formlessness,capitalizing “Marketable Commodity” just to make it look more official, but that doesn’t change the fact that the central claim is complete bullshit. An interest in neat moral packages doesn’t have jack to do with how much of a formalist you are. Hogarth and Grunewald have pretty solid formal virtues I’d argue; so does Art Young. And for that matter, as far as language goes, Seuss, with his strict doggerel rhythms and rhymes, is much more interested in form than Sendak, who works in much looser verse or in prose, and who includes frequent asides and narrative wavering. Phelps is merely the victim of a common modernist critical confusion; the assumption that if an artist is willing to put meaning in his work, then that work must be formally bankrupt. This is a pernicious doctrine, and it should be hooted.
No, what Phelps is really getting at, undercover of his muddled cry of “form!”, is that Sendak is — definitively, self-consciously — high-brow. Sendak references Winsor McCay. He fetishizes volk culture (folk tales, nursery rhymes, his own ethnic roots.) He likes tweaking the bourgeoisie with a little bit of nudity here, some impish rebellion there. His books thrive on an improvisatory cleverness akin to that now thoroughly high-brow music, jazz (as in, say, “Hector Protector”, where the nursery rhyme “As I went over the water”, where the most memorable image is of a sea-monster mentioned nowhere in the text.)
Seuss, on the other hand, is a big, fat, middle-brow. He doesn’t tweak the bourgeoisie; he embraces them, with long screeds about how great democracy is and what a wonderful thing it is to celebrate Christmas. The volk he loves aren’t ethnic; they’re the deracinated Americana, with their lovely rituals of high-school graduation and self-help rhetoric. He doesn’t bother with old, fusty nursery rhymes…why should he, when he can make up twelve of his own just as easily?
In other words, I think that, in choosing Sendak over Seuss, Phelps is just proving that which should come as a shock to no one who has read his prose; namely, that he prefers the pose of an aesthete to the pose of an entertainer. That’s certainly not always the wrong choice, but I think it is in this instance. Sendak has done a lot of great books, and is a wonderful artist, but for me, at least, his pretentions can start to grate — he certainly *is* clever, but I wish occasionally he’d spend less time pointing it out, and more time telling a story that my son actually wanted to pay attention to. Seuss, on the other hand, may reek a bit of greasepaint and the uplift, but he sets off so many verbal and visual fireworks that I find it impossible to take offense.
Plus, Fox in Socks is, hands down, not-even-worth-discussing, my favorite book to read aloud ever…with the possible exception of Seuss’ very entertaining tongue-twister follow up, Oh Say Can You Say.
Was George Herriman a Pothead?
I’m posting the same question on the Comics Journal message board. Maybe a passer-by here will also have some info.
Anyway … Krazy Kat sure reads like it was marijuana inspired. Of course it’s tedious to assume that pot lies behind anything strange and original; I wouldn’t say Dr. Seuss or Thurber were stoned. But Krazy Kat has that air, don’t ask me why.
Googling turned up nothing but this mention by, I think, Skip Williamson (scroll down a good ways or do a word search). And the Library of Congress lists a book on Herriman that I may track down someday.
Resources aside, what’s the comics-world conventional wisdom on the question of Herriman as pothead?
Amerie: Because I Like It
I’ve finally gotten rid of my ten-year-old-plus imac and purchased a Macbook, which means that blogger is much, much easier to deal with. To celebrate, I figured I’d start posting highlights from the back catalog (or I like to think of them as highlights, anyway.) To start I’ll be reprinting some of the music reviews I wrote for Bitch magazine in 2007.)
Amerie
Because I Like It
Columbia Records
This is Amerie’s first album without producer Rich Harrison, and she takes the opportunity to demonstrate that the signature style they perfected together was more her than him. “Forecast”, “Hate to Love You,” and “Gotta Work” are brutal, unrelenting funk, built around percussive horn samples and beats so jagged that you expect James Brown to jump out of his grave to say “Huh!” Amerie has writing and arranging credit on most of the numbers, and she certainly sings as if she owns the material. On the retro-hip “Make Me Believe,” she gets within testifying distance of Ann Peebles; on “Take Control” she declares “I love the way you kiss my neck in public” wth a sexy-tough exhalation that’ll have you fanning yourself. The cover art may be fashion-shoot girly, but R&B doesn’t get much more cockily virile than this — in comparison, both Justin Timberlake and R. Kelly sound like 11-year olds who haven’t quite figured out which end of the toy is up.
That’s the first part of the disc, anyway. The second degenerates into a bland, ballad-heavy mush, relieved only by “Paint Me Over”, a break-up song with a decent tune and a bit of actual pathos. Some day, I sincerely believe, Amerie will figure out how to deal with slow tempos and the result will be an absolute masterpiece. Till then, half a perfect record will do nicely, thanks.
Svengali?: We don’t need no stinking Svengali.
Columbia Records: Needs a good talking to: as of mid-September this record had not been released in the U.S. Luckily, it has been available by import — and, of course, by download.
Updated fun fact: This album never did get a U.S. release. Stupid Columbia records….
Omega the Unknown’s Lesson for All of Us
I read the Lathem Omega the Unknown revamp and liked it. Not much to say on the subject until the day comes that I’ve read the original. For now I’d like to underscore a valuable insight presented by the new Omega. At one point the poor schmuck high-school kid who gets pushed around by the bullies confesses that he’s not really the class brain because he’s not actually smart, he’s just a dumpy fellow who wears glasses and is no good at gym and therefore must consider himself smart because otherwise he’s got nothing else. There are a lot of guys and girls like that, and they’re not represented much by popular lore; or, if they are, it’s with the omission of their defining factor, which is that they lack brains. I know that if you work in reference publishing or for a trade newspaper you’ll run into them, lots of them. Maybe they’re in other walks of life too. It sure is fun listening to them talk about movies!
Unifinished Comics: The Eternals by Neil Gaiman and J. Romita Jr.
I couldn’t get thru this thing. The Eternals is a snooze. It is to boredom what a head-on auto collision is to fear and pain: a cataclysm that can be outlived but never analyzed. So don’t ask me why this comic is so bad; just chip in to my hospital fund.
John Romita Jr.’s stuff is fine; he’s not the problem here. Neil Gaiman is, and he baffles me. A few years ago I did a piece about him for The Comics Journal, one that featured a lush aria detailing all the ways a Gaiman script can run aground. As far as I can tell, none of those ways are present here. The Eternals features straightahead, streamlined storytelling with the occasional imaginative touch that … Christ, it’s still boring.
Years ago I worked for a bright, energetic fellow who screwed up everything he touched. He had incompetence in its purest form; no other factors assisted him in his production of disaster. Gaiman has a similar isolated gift for producing boredom. He didn’t use to: about 40% of his Sandman run counts as the most entertaining bunch of comics I’ve read. Then the rot crept it and then it spread and then I had finished The Kindly Ones and never got around to The Wake.
Some people you just can’t appreciate, but I sure used to appreciate him and it’s not like his new stuff is so different from what came before. In fact it’s too much the same old but with the removal of key elements that I’m pretty sure include fresh dialogue, unexpected ideas, and interesting balloon-caption-picture interplay. So maybe there’s the problem. But why did those elements go missing? He isn’t even 50 yet; Wodehouse kept churning out his formula for half a century and it stayed fresh.
An additional mystery: I have never met anyone who said they liked Gaiman’s post-’93 comics, but figures indicate that people buy the stuff in great quantities. 1602 was top seller for its year, I believe, and won some sort of award.
His books aren’t so bad, those that I’ve read. They rehash his old ideas, but I can get thru them. Coraline underwhelmed me, but American Gods was all right; a friend found the reverse. Whatever. They’re still a long way down the slope from the Sandman issues that I liked. Maybe I’m just older; then again I really liked “A Study in Emerald,” so I think I can still respond to what he’s got when he bothers to bring it along. He just doesn’t bother, and why not?
Anyway, I took The Eternals out from the library, so no money was lost. That fucking thing … I couldn’t get thru it.