Category Archives: Roundtables

Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable: Clever Is As Clever Does

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Reading Richard’s last post I was reminded just how clever Moore was to put his vampires in the water. First of all, it allowed for some incredible visuals…and second it’s just a really smart idea. Vampires don’t need to breathe…so a pond would be a perfect place for them to form a community. Why didn’t somebody else think of that first? (Maybe they did…but even if that’s the case, Moore’s clever for lifting it. (Update: …and he lifted it from Marty Pasko’s earlier Swamp Thing story, according to Alex Buchet in comments — which makes it maybe a little more obvious a lift than I was thinking. Sort of invalidating the whole point of this post. But oh well…that’s blogging for you. Update to the update: no, apparently the idea of having vampires in the lake was Moore. Carry on then.))

One of the things about Moore that’s very unusual for horror writers and for certain kinds of pulp writers is how carefully he thinks things through. He’s got all these ideas about how stuff fits together — if you start here, then that means this, which means you get to that. Steven King, for example, doesn’t do that. His stories make no sense — or they sometimes make sense, but you definitely get the feeling that he’s making it up as he goes along (in Salem’s Lot, for instance, the vampires are sort of solid, sort of not — it just depends on what the story calls for.) Neither do Lovecraft’s, really — it’s all unnameable this and unmentionable that and you know he doesn’t care whether the Yog-shoggoth works or not so long as he can work in a Poe reference. Moore really does care about the mechanics, though — which can end up really badly when he tries to deal with gender anxiety (which Lovecraft, for example, manages to do a lot smarter by being a lot less aware/explicit about what he’s doing). But it can also give you a tour de force like the Anatomy lesson, where everything you think you know about the character gets turned inside out.

Basically, Moore seems like a very deductive writer — which seems like perhaps not the best fit for horror, which tends to work best when it deals with subconscious inklings and anxieties rather than with ratiocination. Moore really hit his stride when he moved towards works which had a greater focus on ideas rather than on the half-formed dream world of horror.

Though those vampire issues are still scary. And the monkey-king was pretty bad ass…. Moore could do horror if he put his mind to it, even if it did work against his strengths in some ways.

Update: The whole swamp thing roundtable is here.

Muck Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable: Swamp Fear

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(Part 1 of the Swamp Thing roundtable can be found here and Part 2 can be found here).

In addition to being part 3 of the Swamp Thing roundtable, this post is also a follow-up to last week’s post where I questioned whether comics could ever be scary.

To recap, I asserted that horror comics could never incite the intense, visceral fear that horror movies so easily manage. Horror comics would be better off if they had more in common with horror novels, which generally have slow-burn stories that exploit common fears and social anxieties. There were a lot of great comments to the post, and I want to go through a couple of them before I get to Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.

While I argued that the static nature of the comic page undermined any attempt at being scary, Michael DaForge offered a different take:

“Comics can use their “static-ness” to their advantage, I think.
I’m jumpy and easily manipulated by music or loud noises in
a movie. In Anti Christ, the genital mutilation startled me (or
grossed me out or whatever it was supposed to do?) But it didn’t
stay with me the way the scene with the stillborn fawn did from
earlier in the film. Or this sequence did from Uzumaki:

… [W]hen it’s 5 am and I’m having a hard time getting to sleep,
I’ll remember stuff like that.”

That’s a good counterpoint, and Uzumaki demonstrates why having the right kind of art is essential for a horror comic. Unfortunately, the art in most mainstream horror comics is simply too indifferent to tone and mood to instill any feelings of fear in the reader.

Aaron Ber commented later that there should be a distinction between “creepy” and “actual fear”. He went on to say:

“Not to keep making this a comics vs. film thing, but horror is one
of the most demonstrable ways I can think of to show how effecting
film can be. People experiencing fear in a film can have physical
reactions on an involuntary level, as if their safety is actually being
threatened. I just don’t think comics can work that directly – to the
point where on some level you are no longer conscious of the fact
that what you are experiencing isn’t actually happening to you.”

I think Aaron Ber is right to the extent we’re discussing heart-racing, hands-over-your-eyes scary. Comics will never be able to provoke that kind of reaction from the reader. However, I don’t think there’s an clear distinction between what people find creepy and what they “actually” fear. Fear encompasses a broad range of emotional responses: sometimes it’s an immediate physical reaction, as when something startles you, but other times it can be a lingering sense of unease or a recurrent anxiety. A comic with a creepy story and disturbing imagery can potentially stay with the reader longer than a movie about a chainsaw-wielding psycho. So perhaps comics can’t be “scary” as the term is commonly understood, but creepy is a good alternative.

And now I’ll finally start discussing the actual topic of this roundtable. Not every issue of Swamp Thing is a gem. Not every issue is creepy (nor were they all intended to be). But Alan Moore could write an unsettling story when he wanted to, and he collaborated with a team of fantastic artists, particularly Stephen Bissette and John Totleben. And one of the best stories during their run on Swamp Thing also happened to be one of the creepiest.

The vampire storyline in issues 38 and 39 was part of a larger arc where Swamp Thing had to run errands for John Constantine (of Hellblazer fame). One such errand took Swamp Thing to Rosewood, Illinois, an entire town submerged beneath a lake. And the only residents of this underwater hamlet were vampires. In Alan Moore lore, running water is lethal to vamps, but the stagnant water of the lake provided the perfect environment to avoid the sun while still hunting dumb teenagers who went for a swim.

It’s a simple, pulp monster story, but Moore was absolutely committed to making it as creepy as possible. He accomplished this partly through some plot details that were equal parts eerie and gross. The one that immediately springs to mind is the morbidly obese vampire bride.

There’s just something so repulsive about a fat monster that spends her day wallowing in the filth of an abandoned movie theater.

Another way to make a monster story creepy is to be as ruthless as possible. In other words, anyone can die in any number of awful ways. But in an ongoing series like Swamp Thing, it’s nearly impossible to convince readers that the titular character is in any real danger. Moore wisely evaded this problem by introducing lots of supporting characters that could be offed in short order. He had no reservations about killing a teenage boy at the beginning of the story. And it only got worse from there, especially when the undead boy was reunited with his mother.

While Moore may be a great pulp writer, in the hands of a different art team his script would have come across as a nothing more than cheesy monster plot with overripe narration. As the above panels make clear, the unsung heroes behind Swamp Thing‘s success are Bissette and Totleben. Along with Stan Woch in issue 38, they gave the comic a brooding tone with their heavy use of hatching and black space. And the colorist, Tatjana Wood, enhanced Bissette’s and Totleben’s work with murky greens and blues for the underwater scenes.

The above page is a great example of how their work set the mood of the comic. Plot-wise, this page is nothing more than the vampires descending into their hidden city, but the depiction of the city is terrific. Readers can recognize the details of any American street, but those details are only partially drawn or deliberately obscured by hatching as well as black and near-black colors. It’s an ugly, lurid mockery of a small town, where light from the surface can only barely penetrate the foul water. And the dead fish designs in the gutters add to the sense of muck and decay. It’s easy to see why young readers in the 80’s found Swamp Thing so affecting.

Even when Moore’s scripts aren’t very good, Bissette and Totleben are there to elevate the material. Suat and Noah beat me to the punch with their debate over issue 40, a.k.a. the PMSing-werewolf issue. It’s easily one of the silliest issues in Moore’s run, but it has one of the nastiest werewolf transformations that I’ve ever seen in any media.

To borrow a point from Michael DaForge, the static nature of comics, along with the ability of readers to linger on each panel, actually makes the scene much more effective than a similar transformation in a movie. The intensity and horror of the moment are emphasized by the stillness of each image. And I agree with Noah that Bissette and Totleben draw a great-looking werewolf.

Swamp Thing is never scary in the way a great horror movie is scary, but it doesn’t need to be. Instead, Moore, Bissette, and Totelben created a few short stories with creepy plots and nightmarish imagery. And those stories were, at least for me, far more memorable and affecting than the last few zombie/slasher/haunted house movies that I’ve seen.

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Update by Noah: The whole Swamp Thing roundtable is here.

Muck Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable: I…Won’t…Stop…Talking

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Suat notes acidly that any discussion of Swamp Thing is likely to be mired in nostalgia. I think we’ve actually got a couple of folks on the roundtable reading them for the first time…but Suat’s certainly got me pegged. In high school, I read and reread and rereread all the issues of Alan Moore’s run on more times than I can probably count. However, when we went off to college, it was my brother who got most of the issues (I got Watchmen) and, since I knew them so well already, I never did get the trades. As a result, it’s probably been 15 years since I’ve read last part of Moore’s run; issues #57 to #64, from way back in 1987.

So…contra Suat, are they as good as I remember? Well…no and yes. It’s certainly true that, as Suat suggests, they’re, massively, massively overwritten. I think as a kid I just skipped over most of the giant glaring gobs of text boxes. As an adult I’m more conscientious, or stupid, or some combination of both, and I actually tried to read them all — and, yeah, that really doesn’t benefit anyone. I think the interminable, tortuous extended metaphor comparing the emergency care ward of a hospital to a forest is probably the absolute low point of this volume— “in casualty reception, poppies grow upon gauze, first blooms of a catastrophic spring…a chloroform-scented breeze moves through the formaldehyde trees…” yeah, yeah, we get it already, you’re a poet, now would you mind shutting the fuck up?

The painful thing is that one or two of the images might actually work — “his body’s the grave of his mind” is nice; the idea of the EEG screen as “steep green hills”. But Moore’s entranced with the fertility of his own pomp; why stop with one sharp image when you can carry the thing through from too much to toweringly tedious to self-parodic and beyond. Moore’s road to hell is paved, not with good intentions, but with loose-bowelled facility. Rereading this, it becomes clear that Promethea’s self-absorbed cleverness isn’t a decadent falling off, but an unfortunate potential that Moore indulged, to some extent, throughout his career.

Still…Moore’s language certainly has an upside as well. He lets his sentences take over and run amok because he loves them; his self-indulgence is really in a lot of ways an indulgence of words, which he likes to stroke, and cuddle and giggle with in the back of the car seat. The first (two-part) story in this volume, for example, opens with a pound and a half of completely gratuitous Aussie dialogue, tossed in, it feels like, just because Moore couldn’t resist once the idea had popped into his head.

“bleedin’ peroxie pooftah” “ponder on the porcelain” — that’s enough goofy alliteration to make Bob Haney blush.

Once he gets started, of course, Moore just can’t stop…which is why, a couple of pages later, he just goes ahead and literally invents his own language:

When you first look at this, it feels like a tour de force. Moore doesn’t just throw in a few words of dialogue; he keeps going for page after page in a consistent, invented language. You can understand just enough of it to tell that the language does work; Moore actually knows what these people are saying — and you could figure it out too, if you had just a little more information.

That’s Adam Strange talking to his wife Alanna. For those not in the know, these are both old, old dc space opera characters. Adam Strange is this random earth guy who gets hit by a “zeta beam” which transfers him across billions of light years to Rann, where he becomes a hero. But the beam wears off over time, so he’s always getting dumped back on earth, and having to run all over the planet to find the next zeta beam (they come with some frequency) to zap him off to the stars again.

Anyway, in Moore’s story Adam knocked up against swamp thing (whose consciousness has been forced off earth — long story) in the zeta beam and was injured, and has now recovered. That’s where we are with the panel above. And after a reread or two, you can translate that first sentence at least; Alanna is saying, “Adam, what happened?” And Adam I think answers, “Uh…I’m not sure exactly what happened,” or something like that. I especially like the “Uh…” there — I think Adam is pausing in order to shift into thinking in another language — these are the first words he’s spoken that aren’t in English (he says his wife’s name a couple panels up, but that doesn’t really count.)

So, again, the effect initially is dazzling. But…think about it a second, and the whole thing seems more than a little ridiculous. This isn’t Tolkein spending a lifetime or thereabouts creating another tongue. This is Alan Moore pulling a language out of his ass…and that’s exactly what it looks like. It’s not Japanese, !Kung speech, or even German. Really, it’s not another language at all; barely more alien than the Aussie dialect we started with. It’s really just a kind of code. Moore seems to have written out his text and then substituted made-up words on a more or less one to one basis. In some sense, even more embarrassing than just having all your spacepeople talk English. Why try at all if you’re going to do a half-assed job?

And the answer to that, as Moore shows, is that sometimes, if the job is big enough, or original enough, or cool enough, it is in fact worth doing a half-assed job just to see where you end up. The language is nonsense — but then, this is a pulp space story, which means the whole thing is nonesense. After all, we’re in the middle of trackless space; why on earth (as it were) does everybody look human?

Besides, and what is the main point, having these silly out-of-place humans speak in silly out-of-place code allows Moore to do some things that he couldn’t have gotten any other way.

I think this page just brilliantly evokes the strangeness…not of another world or planet, necessarily, but of being far away, in a different culture. The best touch is that, after a couple panels of alien speech, Moore has Adam speak in English. Because at first you’re trying to figure out the alien dialogue, the moment when Adam talks “normal” comes as a small shock. For a second you get to see him, oddly, as the alien, the one out of place. It reminds me of a scene in C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy where Ransome, after spending some months with aliens, sees a bizarre creature and then a second later realizes that it’s himself in a mirror — he’s had the “privilege” (I think he uses that word) of seeing himself as the Malacandrians see him.

The way Moore uses his “language” in the sequence below is great too:

Again, the juxtaposition of the Rannian and English is basically the whole point of the page. “You speak English!” “So..do…you.” It’s such a hyperbolic ex-pat moment…and again, there’s that weird disjunction as you go from trying to follow the Rannian dialogue to realizing that everybody is suddenly speaking English. And then Moore switches the character’s positions, as Adam and Swamp Thing talk to each other, and Alanna is the odd one out:

I find that whole bit really charming. In the first place, I like the ex-pat camaraderie; Adam Strange wouldn’t necessarily have palled around with Swamp Thing on earth, but here they are infinite miles away, and suddenly (once they’ve stopped killing each other) they’re friends.

The other thing that’s hard to resist about the use of the Rannian language here is how much faith Moore puts, not so much in his reader, as in himself and in the comics form. Moore isn’t a high modernist here; he’s not Joyce or even Joanna Russ — he’s telling a pulp adventure story and he wants his audience to follow a pulp adventure story. But he’s still willing to write large swathes of his narrative in untranslated code, because he just thinks he’s bad ass enough to do it. And…hey, presto, he can.

Again, one of the best parts is that you can almost parse what they’re saying, even though, thanks to the clarity of the drawing and the clarity of the pulp tropes, you don’t really need to. In fact, one of the things the comic allows you to do that you might not be able to do as easily in a movie is teach yourself the language. The ability to stop and go back and reread means that you can recapitulate Adam’s immersion in Rann, and learn the language just as he did. Cross-cultural understanding becomes a kind of puzzle (though certainly an artificially easy one.)

I go back and forth on how much I like Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala…they don’t tend to send me, but they are certainly professional, and fully up to conveying action and even nuances of emotion without the help of dialogue:

That may be my favorite panel in the comic; it’s total cheesecake for girls, and Alanna’s half-proud, half-I’m-going-to-get-that-shortly expression is just priceless. It’s a pretty great thing to have in a comic aimed primarily at guys; you get to look at the main character form the perspective of his wife. It’s analagous (and somewhat deliberately so, I think) to seeing yourself as the alien sees you — the distance Moore talks about in the story is not just of place, but of gender and love.

That’s Swamp Thing’s narrative too; his separation from earth, like Adam’s sporadic separation from Rann, is more about being removed from his wife than about being away from a particular place. Language is wrapped up in love and identity; when Swamp Thing finds Adam Strange’s bag on Rann and sees the word “Seattle,” we know that part of the impact is that the word to him reads “Abby.” Words are how we know each each other…and yet, at the same time, as Alanna’s expression above tells us, theyr’e kind of not, or at least not solely. That’s a very appropriate ambivalence for comics to have, it seems like — to see words as the metaphor for our lives and loves while simultaneously drawing a bubble around them.

In that vein, the last panel has some of Moore’s loveliest writing (as Adam contemplates his inevitably distant relationship with his newly conceived child) and its most doofy symbolism (as Alanna’s water pets form the shape of a heart.)

It’s certainly heavy-handed — but so is caring for your wife or for your kid, or, possibly, for your own chattering. Moore’s too in love with his own imagination to worry about looking dumb, which means that Swamp Thing is filled with dumbness, but also with love. It’s not a bad trade-off.

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You can read the entire roundtable thus far here.

For another take on the final volume in the Swamp Thing series, you can check out Robert Stanley Martin’s review.

Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable Session 1: Preamble and Introduction

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(The Swamp Thing Roundtable Part 1)

Context. It’s 1983 and you’ve just picked up the latest issue of your favorite monster magazine. You feel pretty stupid since Swamp Thing has sort of sucked since Bernie Wrightson stopped drawing it. That’s a nice cover by Thomas Yeates though.

Wasn’t he the guy who drew the first issue of Saga of the Swamp Thing a year back?

Remember. It is the age of innocence. The age of The Warlord and Arion. The age of stupidity. The age of bad taste.

Continue reading →

Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable

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Just to give readers a heads up: we’re going to have a roundtable on Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run starting tomorrow. We’ll have guest posts by Joe McCulloch and comics scholar (and my brother) Eric Berlatsky, as well as contributions from the usual utilitarians. So check back in throughout the week.

Cuckoo for Copyright Comment Roundup

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To finish up our roundtable on copyright I thought I’d highlight some of the more interesting comments.

First, Nina Paley very kindly stopped by. Her comments start here. In one of the most pointed she said:

My focus is not on changing the laws – that is extremely unlikely. Copyright will become increasingly draconian, because of of our rather corrupt congress and campaign finance system.

Interestingly, I mentioned in the interview that back in the day, when women criticized misogyny in certain underground comics, they were accused of “trying to censor.” As I demonstrate viable alternatives to copy restrictions, people argue back as if I’m somehow trying to “remove copyright entirely.” I can’t remove copyright, and even if I could, I don’t support dictatorial, unilateral legislative changes that don’t reflect the will of the public – that’s how we got the copyright mess we’re in now.

What I am trying to do is increase public awareness of what copyright is (an artificial monopoly), how it works (through censorship), and what we can do in the midst of a broken system. Many wonderful opportunities exist for artists right now, but no one needs to take them. I win either way: if more works are freed, I live in a freer society, and if more works are locked up, my free works enjoy a competitive advantage.

Over at his blog, animator Mark Mayerson touches on some issues particular to film.

I agree that Paley has something of the “zealousness of the convert.” Because a copyleft approach worked for her, she assumes that it is the right way to go and will work for everyone else. I think the Newman interview in the roundtable makes some very good points in refuting Paley.

There are so many issues wrapped up with this. First is the length of the copyright term. What’s the right length to benefit the creator and his/her heirs while still allowing for a vibrant public domain? Right now, it’s an open question as to whether anything will ever again be added to the public domain except by accident.

Then there’s the issue artists and corporations. Newman, as a composer, is creating complete works without the aid of others. It’s natural for him to hold the copyright. Even though Paley made Sita by herself, she included other works on the soundtrack. Paley is a rare case in that the majority of films are created by more than one person. In that case, who should hold copyright or how should it be split? What rights do financiers have relative to creators?

I think we can all agree that artists should have more ownership of their work (as opposed to corporations owning it), but should corporations vanish, we’re still left with some difficult questions.

There’s a fairly lengthy comment thread over at Sequenza21 inspired by Jonathan’s post. One interesting comments from composer John Mackey.

I’m also of the belief that your potential performer, like any person, has a mindset that you get what you pay for. If you don’t believe enough in your music to feel you should be compensated for it, how good is your potential performer going to think it is when they happen upon it online? If you, literally, can’t even GIVE it away, why would somebody think it was going to be good enough to take the time to even listen to the MP3 or look at the free score? It goes to something Eric Whitacre said once, and I’m going to get the quote wrong, but it was essentially, “nobody wants a free futon from Craigslist, but a whole lot of people would pay $50 for that same futon on Craigslist.” (I think his quote was actually more along the lines of “nobody will pay $10 for a futon, but everybody will pay $100 for a futon,” but the point is the same.) Charge something for it — and that’s a right that copyright law provides — and suddenly it’s “worth” something. A free futon is just gross.

And another from Chris Becker.

I do know from friends who have or currently write music for television (and I’ve done this as well…) that big corporate media entities have made every effort to cut down on the amount of money they are willing to shell out to composers because of the availability of license free music. Their attitude is: “Look, we can get this music for free OR my kid can spit it out using a loop CD, so YOU punk ass composer should be grateful we’re even considering funding a day of recording sessions…”

Back on HU, commenter plok, a singer-songwriter and supporter of freer copyright, had a whole slew of entertaining comments, which you can scroll back and forth for. I’ll point particularly this one.

I wish you would stop saying “stealing”, though — we’re talking about copyright infringement, not theft, and it’s an important difference. What the record company’s doing to me isn’t the same thing as what downloaders are doing to it — it’s a lot worse. In the grocery store of my music, the downloader’s taken a grape and popped it in his mouth; the record company’s taken cash from the till.

Also, a very important thing I would like to communicate to you is that the downloaders are mailing me a cheque — in fact they’re mailing me several different cheques, just by doing what they do. The people who download are avid music fans, they attend concerts and purchase records and T-shirts and sometimes even beer for the musicians, but more importantly than any of that they make new fans…and every time they do, they pay a Blank Media Levy designed to compensate artists for copying activity that can’t be monitored or controlled. Although I don’t know how much I’d be getting from it, because I can’t bring myself to take that money as long as individual downloaders are not just paying it, but also being prosecuted for what we all know they’re paying it for. And especially not if it’s my music they’re downloading, because nothing says they have to download my music instead of somebody else’s!

I mean, I’m grateful they like it enough to want to own, and even share, a copy of it! Make no mistake, that is support, and if the RIAA was interested in monetizing the Internet as a promotional resource instead of as a retail outlet, that support would translate to a couple different kinds of new income for me…but the word “stealing” stands in my way, stands between me and that new revenue.

Short form: I see downloaders as radio listeners, not shoplifters. Which is why every time someone expresses outrage that those people are getting away with murder, I always make a point of saying “well, why not join ‘em?” Radio listeners successfully send money my way even though they don’t pay user fees; I don’t see why Internet listeners should have to pay anything more than that. If you don’t want to buy the CD or go to the show, I can’t make you do it by shaming or threatening you out of listening to the music…and I don’t want to do any of that anyway.

Eric B. addressed the question of whether those who download illegally are petulant infants

As for the “petulant infants” on the internet–I think it’s a bit trickier than that. I mean, if I see a dollar bill floating along the street, I’m likely to pick it up and put it in my pocket, if the rightful owner is nowhere in sight (This actually happened to me the other day). I’m not going to undertake a worldwide search to return the dollar bill…nor am I going to leave it floating around. While the internet downloading thing isn’t really equivalent, it does have that feel. There’s so much crap floating around out there, that it’s kind of like picking it up in the street. I have yet to download for free music that in my former life as avid CD purchaser, I would have purchased. That is…I try to ask myself, “would I be buying this” under other circumstances, and if the answer is yes, I’ll probably buy it (on iTunes or in physical form, or whatever)…But if it’s a matter of trying something new–or obtaining something that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have bought–well, I’ll let your imagination wander. Sometimes this kind of sampling leads to purchases (concert tix, other CD’s, songs by the artists I especially like) and sometimes it doesn’t. My income is very limited (or has been over the last 5 years or so)–but my appetite for music isn’t really, so I try to resolve those things. I buy a lot of blank media, so I guess some of my money finds its way back to those who profit, or whatever…Maybe this makes me a “petulant child” –but I’m guessing I’m not an atypical one. I don’t think I should be able to get anything I want for free…and I do support my artistic favorites…but I do think that it’s unwise to take a pie-in-the-sky view of this kind of thing. Just because it may be ethically “wrong” to download without paying, it will continue to happen regardless of changes in copyright law unless there is a way to stop it. Currently, there isn’t really.

And artist and critic Bert Stabler summarizes my discomfort with the Paley’s movie Sita Sings the Blues:

The word you all are looking for is “patronizing.” Whenever NPR profiles the latest Ry Cooder musical fusion crossover between Mongolian throatsinging and Cherokee nose fluting, with an electronic cumbia bassline, the reason your stomach should churn with shame as an educated privileged cultural consumer is because, ever so quietly, guilt is being atoned for with tokenism. There are worse things than trying to atone for sins, but hardly a more irritating way of going about it.

Caro has an impassioned defense of Sita in that thread too (she gets to compare me to Hindi fundamentalists.) And there’s lots more from Caro and me and lots of other folks if you click about.

Thanks to all of those who commented and to our guest posters, Pallas, Jonathan Newman, and Alan Benard. And thanks especially to Caro for inspiring the whole thing with her interview of Nina Paley — and to Paley herself. You can find the whole roundtable here.

Sunday Funnies

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To wrap up the roundtable, some Nina Paley cartoons. The full run of Fluff and a selection of more Nina’s Adventures, along with other cartoons, interviews, and miscellaneous materials related to Sita Sings the Blues, are available at the Internet Archive.

Click through the thumbnails below to read.

“Art vs. Commerce” from Nina’s Adventures

“Sheep Reincarnation” from Nina’s Adventures

“Urbana, Illinois vs Santa Cruz” from Nina’s Adventures

“That Little Weasel!” from Nina’s Adventures

Empire of the Godzillas from the Daily Illini (c. 1983, University of Illinois Student Newspaper)

Godzilla PDF

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Update: You can read the whole roundtable on copyright here. Despite Caro’s promise that this is it, we’ll actually have one more post on the topic tomorrow….