Category Archives: Roundtables

Sequential Surrender Monkey: Le Petit Vampire fait du Kung Fu!

Posted on by

little vampire

Le Petit Vampire fait du Kung Fu!, Joann Sfar, 2000, Guy Delcort Productions
or, if you prefer,
The Little Vampire Does Kung Fu!, Joann Sfar, 2003, Simon & Schuster
(because, despite the offensive roundtable title, we at the Hooded Utilitarian are all about ensuring your happiness and comfort)

I started reading French comics in high school (which was eons and ages ago, I will freely admit), at the suggestion of my French teacher. Magazines, too. Asterix and Paris Match. I haven’t picked up the latter in a while (although as a sheltered Midwestern teen in the Age Before Internet, damn, it did help to open my eyes to a few things), but Asterix, written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo, certainly holds up. I have a small stack of French comics that I love, but I no longer read French very often, or very well. I do love me some Paris Vogue, but the secret to fashion magazines is to do the opposite of what you do with Playboy and never, ever read the articles, because that will make you want to kill yourself and take everyone you can reach with you.

So, approaching this roundtable, I had to do some thinking. I hate that. There are a couple of Little Vampire books I prefer to this one (although it does feature nunchucks, the eating and subsequent disgorgement of a small child by monsters, and a bizarre Jewish Zen parable, so I obviously do like it quite a bit), and there is a less amusing but still palatable Le Grand Vampire series, and there’s Donjon, an awesome series by Sfar and Lewis Trondheim. (You are, perhaps, noticing a theme in my post-high school French comics reading. Vampires and dungeons. I will also admit to suffering a certain amount of Goth-damage.) I am writing about the kung fu book, though, rather than any of these other books, because I had an auxiliary English copy of it that I could actually find. I have auxiliary English copies of a number of the vampire books (vampires both big and small), but they have vanished. Poof. Perhaps they flew out the window one windy evening to fly into the dark night sky and skulk around the dense and forbidding Carpathian forest with the wolves, remarking about the children of the night and the beautiful music they make. I wish them well. Fly and be free, big and little vampires!

It is only a minor setback, really; the sort of small frustration we all deal with every day. We do have the kung fu book in English, which means I can figure out what’s going on without getting out my dictionary, and it is in fact a pretty neat book, so off we go.

The plot is bland and soothing, like blancmange. A little boy, Michael, is visited late at night by his friend, the Little Vampire, and the Little Vampire’s posse, three monsters (my favorite is the Frankenstein-ish Marguerite, who loves poop). Michael explains that he’s being bullied at school by a loutish brat named Jeffrey and says he wishes the kid would die. Then the Little Vampire whisks Jeffrey away to his haunted castle so they can visit Rabbi Soloman, the kung fu master. Rabbi Soloman tells Jeffrey he’s left his kung fu book tied to the back of a dragon on top of an Angkor Wat-like temple, just through that door at the end of the hall, and that if Michael will bring him the book they’ll be set. Off Michael goes, getting his butt kicked repeatedly by monkeys, the temple itself (it is hard to climb and he keeps falling off), and by the dragon itself. Eventually, Michael gets smarter and better and he gets the book. Which of course says, “If you have managed to steal this book from the dragon, you are very skilled at kung fu. This book will teach you nothing more.” Because, you know, the only Zen on the mountain is the Zen you bring there. Anyway, now that Michael is all confident and proud and ready to take on the world and shit, he and the Little Vampire find out that the monsters went off and ate Jeffrey.

Zut alors!

The Little Vampire does what anyone would do when faced with this situation – he makes the monsters cough up all the Jeffrey bits, and then they sew him back together. Then they go off looking for a magician to reanimate him. That doesn’t go entirely smoothly, as anyone who’s ever read any cautionary tale about magic would predict. But the ghostly pirate dude who’s kind of in charge takes pity on the boys and lets them off with time served. He gives the little boy, little vampire, and variously sized monsters the means for fixing Jeffrey. This involves what is without doubt my favorite panels of the book:

little vampire]

Moo!

The next day at school, Michael, now a kung fu master, picks a fight with Jeffrey, who remembers nothing of the previous night’s romp. And Jeffrey kicks his ass. It all works out, though, because the girl Jeffrey has a crush on beats Jeffrey up and nurses Michael’s wounds. So, the moral of the story is that it’s better to be an overconfident idiot than an actual martial arts expert. A lesson for all times, really.

Now, I know what you’re saying. “That’s a bit gluey, isn’t it? I can’t read that much treacle; I have blood sugar issues.” Fair enough. The bit at the end makes me gag, and not in a good way. I think the parts are better than the sum thereof, though, and some of the gags are worth the cutesy ending. The monsters coughing up the little boy they ate, for instance – that’s the kind of priceless I’m after. And the cow. God, I love the cow. So, there you go – the other side of Joann Sfar. (Assuming you read Vom Marlowe’s post Monday on The Rabbi’s Cat.)I hope you are moved to go forth and consume French vampire comics, in the language of your choosing.

Sequential Surrender Monkey (Part 3 of 5): Rupert and Mulot’s Le Tricheur

Posted on by

Hi all, Derik of MadInkBeard here. Thanks to Noah for inviting me to participate. For this roundtable, I thought I’d write about a bande dessinee that hasn’t been translated into English (I am such a comics nerd that I actually self-improved on my two years of high school French just so I could read French bd and write about it). The comics (or should I say bande dessinee) duo of Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot have made only two appearances in English: a two page spread in Kramer’s Ergot 7 and also a short comic (“The Pharaohs of Egypt”) that was translated at the Words Without Borders site. The latter does give a decent example of their work: long strings of word balloons, protagonists that tend to be less than savory, long sequences of McCloudian “moment-to-moment” transitions with a close attention to body language and movement, dry humor, and layouts that mix really large panels with long sequences of small panels.

I first learned of their work from Bart Beaty’s column at The Comics Reporter where he’s raved about their first two books Safari Monseigneur and Panier de Singe. Le Tricheur (L’Assocation, 2008) is their fourth book. In comparison with the earlier works of theirs I’ve seen, it is a fairly tightly organized narrative set within a detective/police/heist genre framework. The story is told non-linearly through multiple timelines. In a timeline that is in the “present”, a police detective interviews four characters: a private detective (“Short Hair”), an art collector (“Batman” because he wears a Batman shirt), a gallery owner (“Tie”), and his niece (“Handbag”). (Yes, all the characters are given names based on some aspect of their physical appearance.) The longer parts of the book take place in an earlier time and show these characters and their companions through a sequence of actions that are part heist, part revenge play, part art project. The logic, meaning, and interrelation of all the events in the story reveal themselves slowly. Each time I reread it (I’m at my fourth or fifth time through) more elements click into place, more layers start to make sense (admittedly, part of this may have been the accretion of vocabulary words as I looked them up and began to remember them).

The police interview scenes provide the only dialogue or narration in the book (excepting the final epilogue). Ruppert and Mulot make use of long strings of word balloons floating above the characters in tall panels. While most comic artists, when using long conversations, try to mix in changing views of the characters or setting and attempts at body language or facial expression, here, the dialogue is the focus. The characters serve as little more than indicators of who is speaking in the panels. One interesting use they make of these long strings of word balloons is branching off a balloon that acts as a kind of aside to the main string of dialogue.


An “aside balloon”. This is one of the smaller dialogue panels, most are much taller (this is an unusually tall book).

Mixed between these conversations are longer scenes taking place previous to the police interviews. These scenes are told without words of narration or dialogue and tend to use a large number of panels to show characters acting with great detail. Where the interview scenes are all dialogue, these scenes are all action. I say “action” more in the sense of movement and acting than in the “action movie” sense, though, this being a heist type story, it does feature its share of violence (and one completely absurd gun fight).

Most of the action scenes have the quality of animation: using numerous small panels in a sequence of unvarying composition where the only change is the movement of the characters. The artists attention to body language and posture is impressive and expressive, particularly in light of the complete lack of facial expressions. You see, the artists don’t draw faces. The characters all have a kind of wide V line on their face, like eyebrows except more in the center. This cuts off the possibility for facial expression, putting that much more emphasis on the body language. (It also tends to give all the characters an vaguely angry look.) The expression possible without facial expressions or close-ups (they don’t use them) or even variable angles (none of those either) on the characters is quite impressive, all due, no doubt, to the body language in the drawings.

The viewpoint on the characters is set at a consistent visual distance: they are always the same size on the page. When it is necessary or desirable to show more of the background or set the scene, the artists simply enlarge the panel, including the use of the unconventional (in the West at least) “L” shaped panel (see below). This changing panel size on a fixed scene emphasizes the sense of the panel as a window on the world, a small cropped segment of vision which hides all that is outside of view, all that remains unseen and unsaid. This feeling is quite apt for the story itself which slowly reveals flashes of motivation and background outside of the immediately seen actions. You have to pay attention to the small panels, important events pass in a single panel, and many events are elucidated only through earlier or later events/words.


Characters (Hat, Handbag, and Cap) stay the same. Framing changes with panel size.

The relationship between the dialogue scenes and the pantomime scenes is vaguely ambiguous. Are the pantomime scenes the visual representation of the dialogue? Are they thus colored by the narrator? Or are they completely separate, objective views of events which gain some elucidation through the dialogue–dialogue which is not necessarily true. The title “Le Tricheur” is literally, “the cheat,” and there is a certain amount of tricking and game playing going on here. As the story unwinds through the dialogue, the majority of the events seen in the book are revealed as part of a grand plan of the gallery owner, Tie. He has hired almost all the other characters and given them orders as to what they should be doing.

Ruppert and Mulot’s drawing style is all thin, almost scratchy lines, reminiscent of an etching (yet without that gray glow seen in works like those of Frederic Coche). They use no solid blacks and very little tone or texture, yet everything has a realistic appearance. Characters are naturalistic and proportional. Backgrounds are rather simple line drawings, setting and re-setting the scenes in large panels, yet only sketched out by a few brief lines in the smaller panels.


I love the way they draw the strip club in this scene with all the lines representing lights.

What we learn (yes, I’m spoiling it for you, you can skip this paragraph) is that the gallery owner is doing all this as a kind of art project, promotion for his gallery, and revenge scenario. Two hoodlums, named “Hat” and “Cap” (I’m translating these names), are hired to perform strange activities on their own or with the gallery owner’s niece (“Handbag”). Many of these activities bear some close metaphorical resemblance to a series of paintings in the gallery which the owner (“Tie”) shows to his “friend” “Batman” (he wears a Batman t-shirt). Two private detectives (“Beard” and “Short Hair”) are hired to follow and photograph the two hoodlums, thus creating a photographic record of their activities. The story culminates with Hat and Cap breaking into the gallery to steal paintings and kill “Batman”, all of which is recorded by the security cameras. In this way, the gallery owner organizes these activities but also creates an inter-related visual document revolving around the paintings in the gallery and the gallery itself, with twofold goal of art production and revenge.

The comic “Le Tricheur” becomes, in a way, another level of this interaction/documentation as if the comic itself is part of the whole series of actions and representations of actions that fill the book, with Ruppert and Mulot as the real orchestrators of the whole scheme. This image of the two artists as schemers fits with the image of them seen in some of their other projects. For instance, for this year’s Angouleme festival they organized a collective project with 20 other comic artist called “Maison Close.” Wherein they created a scene (a house of prostitution), drew all the background images, and organized the participation of the other artist. All the participants (including the two organizers who act as the proprietors of the house) drew themselves (or their comics stand-in (ie Trondheim as the bird-self from his autobiographical works)) into various interactions with each other on top of the existing backgrounds. If you’re interested in see more of their work, you might visit their website.

(See all the this roundtable’s posts.)

Sequential Surrender Monkey (Part 2of 5): The Rabbi’s Cat

Posted on by

(or the HU Bande Dessinée Roundtable Part 2)

I admit it. I bought this for the cat. I read this for the cat. And I don’t really care about much except the cat.

The Rabbi’s Cat by Joann Sfar
Color by Brigitte Findakly
Translated by Alexis Siegel and Anjali Singh

This is an odd little book. It’s sort of a parable style story about a talking animal who has adventures and learns things. In the spirit of the parable, perhaps, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Or maybe it’s just too French for me.

There’s this cat, drawn with wonderful inky spontaneity and rough enthusiasm, who eats a parrot and thus learns to talk. The cat happens to live with a rabbi and his daughter in Algeria. As soon as he learns to talk, the cat denies killing or eating the parrot, and thus begins the philosophical discussion of the purpose of having speech. Why have speech if all you do is lie? Or, as the cat does later, tell only those truths that cause pain?

Honestly, I didn’t care. I like philosophy just fine. I’ve read Aristotle and Aquinas and the Baghavad Gita and those lot, and I’m sure they would have been improved by the addition of a cranky and silver-shadowy-gray Oriental Shorthair with Views. And yet, to me, the cat was everything and the philosophy was nothing.

The funny and eccentric art kept me reading, for the most part, but I was sometimes bogged down by arguments and parables, much as the cat appeared to be. Sometimes he would weary of the talk and try to get back to his mistress to be petted or convince her to give him a fish, and I confess, I think he had the right approach.

The cat gains speech and loses it, follows the rabbi, learns of people and religion, laws and rules, different religions, reads, and hangs out with the rabbi’s cousin’s lion. I liked the lion. And the cousin, who liked to go around threatening anti-Semitic waiters with his rifle and his lion.

There’s a bit about a guy with plays what seems to be a banjo and another part that’s about shopping on forbidden days, but I just wanted to know if the cat would get his mistress to love him and care for him and feed him milk. I am a shallow creature, I suppose.

The art is delightful for the most part, and the story is strange and puzzling with those sharp turns fairy tales make, and I’m not sorry I read it. But it does feel very French. Or perhaps Italian, in the style of Calvino’s Italian Folktales. Which isn’t bad. At all. I’m sure.

It’s just that I don’t really feel like being enlightened. I want to sprawl around instead. Lazy as the cat. Who is portrayed as pretty wise in the book, so who knows.

Update by Noah: You can see the entire roundtable so far here.

Sequential Surrender Monkey (Part 1 of 5)

Posted on by

(or the HU Bande Dessinée Roundtable Part 1)
(or Noah wrote it and Kinukitty meowed in approval, so don’t ask me what the title means.)

This is the first entry in the Hooded Utilitarian BD Roundtable. Vom Marlowe, Derik Badman, Kinukitty and Noah will be along later in the week with their own articles on various European comics.

I wrote the following article in the early 90s. It has never been published and the yellowing manuscript has been sitting in a dark closet for the last two decades.

The first third of the article is presented below (with some editing). The latter parts of the article concern two other books in the series namely, Fever in Ubricand and The Tower. Both of these are far superior to The Great Wall of Samaris and show off Benoît Peeters’ and François Schuiten’s abilities to a much greater extent. Anyone who has the slightest interest in European comics owes it to themselves to check them out if they haven’t already.

Second hand copies of The Great Walls of Samaris go for about $40 to $100 at on-line second hand book retailers. NBM has been publishing the albums in the series at a slow pace. I suspect that they aren’t big sellers for them as they’ve never been reprinted. Still, they are to be congratulated for printing and translating them at all. The latest books in the series to be translated are Brusel and The Invisible Frontier Volumes 1 and 2 both of which are still in print.

François Schuiten received the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême in 2002.

Philosophical Cities (Part 1): The Great Walls of Samaris

The English speaking world was introduced to the comics of the Belgian artist, François Schuiten, nearly 30 years ago. His first album, Aux médianes de Cymbiola (Heavy Metal 1981-82; created with Claude Renard) was done as a sort of graduation piece from Saint-Luc. His short stories have been published in the pages of Pilote and Metal Hurlant, among them the acclaimed Carapaces. It is, however, upon his more recent work on Les Cités Obscures (co-authored with writer Benoît Peeters) that his fame rests.

Parables are designed to simplify, persuade and to communicate spiritual truths. To a certain extent, the stories in Les Cités Obscures seek to do just that. These albums represent intriguing introductions to a world of ideas and are sparkling illustrations of basic philosophical tenets. The architectural motifs which can be found throughout the series are not merely functional but highly expressive of the societies which produced them. The architectural content of the buildings illuminate the personalities of the people who inhabit them and provide valuable clues as to the meaning of these tales.

Les Murailles De Samaris (The Great Walls of Samaris, English edition published by NBM in 1987) is the first album in the series and like the other albums, it is steeped in allegory.

It concerns the latest exploratory mission from the city of Xhystos to the enigmatic city of Samaris. Xhystos is an Art Nouveau fantasy with twisting, organic architectural forms and heavy ornamentation: a lounge seems to suggest a tribute to Victor Horta’s Hotel van Eetvelde; buildings are framed by metal girders and stanchions bent into shapes reminiscent of Hector Guimard’s Metro entrances.

Indeed Schuiten’s sensibilities permeate the entire album with Art Nouveau furniture, floor patterns and book covers. The city, however, is monstrously huge and impersonal; overcrowded but underpopulated. “Stifling” is the way one citizen descirbes it. The flamboyance and complexity of the buildings embody the values of its inhabitants who, while aesthetically astute, appear superficial and careless.

At the story’s start, the protagonist, Franz, is invited to undertake a mission to Samaris to dispel the fears and questions which are circulating among the citizens of Xhystos about the city. He accepts but his reasons for doing so are a mystery even to himself. His overwhelming fascination with Samaris belies a surface attraction for wealth and position. Though rejected by friends because of the dangerous nature of his mission, his mind is filled only with the promise of the unknown.

Franz reaches the strange and bewitching city after a journey across vast wastelands via train, altiplane and boat. His observations concerning the city and its inhabitants provide a wealth of useful information for readers interested in unraveling the conundrum the authors have set before them. For one, Samaris sports elements of the Romanesque, Classicism, Neo-Classicism and Art Nouveau. As Franz describes:

“Many different architectural styles seemed to merge together, as if the city had conserved traces of all the civilizations she had sheltered.”

Samaris is shrouded in mystery: a constant humming pervades the entire city; walls lie behind open windows; secret alleys open up in unexpected places and familiar buildings with similar details appear along unexplored paths. Her inhabitants wander aimlessly through the streets following routines which are never departed from. By his own account, Franz’s faculties are similarly dulled as soon as he enters the city. A woman named, Carla, who he meets everyday at the same time and the same place bears a striking resemblance to Anna’s sister, Clara, who has been presumed lost on a previous mission to Samaris. Yet Franz fails to recognize her and has absolutely no idea why they meet at all. Their conversations are at once banal, strained and repetitive.

This last point proves useful in deciphering the theme of Peeters’ and Schuiten’s tale for it seems to be a direct reference to what Martin Heidegger called “idle talk”. Arne D. Naess describes it as a situation in which:

“… talker and listener do not stand in any genuine personal relation or in any intimate relation to what is talked about…”

Gradually, Franz comes to “look and act” like all the other “lethargic wanderers” of Samaris. He pursues his mission with all the zeal of a sloth and becomes increasingly disenchanted with his discoveries. This reflects what Heidegger called “curiosity” which is described by Naess as:

“… a form of distraction, a need for the “new”, a need for something “different”, without real interest or capability of wonder.”

Realizing this and rousing himself by an act of will, Franz decides to leave the city with Carla. The violent scene that ensues when she refuses to comply reinvigorates him and leads to a renewed determination to find out the inner workings of Samaris.

What he discovers is at once shocking and horrifying – a rude awakening from a lifetime’s slumber and a revelation which brings new meaning to all his future dealings. For behind Samaris is a vast labyrinthine complex where the streets circulate according to his needs and where buildings are mere facades. Her inhabitants are two dimensional cut-outs committed to sustaining an illusion solely for him. The city represents a world of lies and alienation; a deterministic society as depicted by a clockwork town.

With this penultimate revelation, an echo of Søren Kierkegaard’s “three spheres of existence” or “stages in life’s way” may be perceived. The first is an aesthetic stage (Xhystos’s Art Nouveau) where one lives “for the moment” and develops one’s skills. It is a life symbolized by the casual love affair which ends in despair (a situation which Franz has found himself in). The next stage is characterized by an ethical life where one shows commitment and duty (the routine existence and comparatively sober architecture of Samaris) which results in the recognition of one’s shortcomings. The final religious stage is left undepicted but not without reason.

At the centre of Samaris, Franz discovers an ancient tome filled with images of the “sprawling” Drosera, a carnivorous plant upon which Samaris has been based. Here is a metaphor within a metaphor, the interpretation of which becomes clear only with the demystification of the rest of the author’s imagery.

Franz escapes from Samaris but returns only to social and political rejection in the city of Xhystos. The pattern of existence within that city no longer holds its charms for him. His friends and lover have never existed and in a final revelation he discovers that the citizens of Xhystos are little better than those of Samaris, puppets controlled from without by some impersonal force. The story ends with Franz stumbling back to Samaris, “the city [he] should never have left to begin with”.

The Great Walls of Samaris paints a picture of utter hopelessness and an eternity of searching. There are no answers given to Franz’ dilemma. Certainly, Samaris does not hold the key for Franz would only be returning to superficial friends and trivial, monotonous pastimes. Samaris represents a kind of existence described by Heidegger as inauthentic and anonymous (ethical stage). It is a world where people try to hide the “nothingness” of existence or the non-reality of its possibilities behind the mask of daily concerns (Nicola Abbagnano). Heidegger saw an escape from this in a recognition and embracement of death, and through this the acceptance of “the possibility of the impossibility of existence” thus leading to the appropriation of the authentic existence (religious stage).

This authentic existence, however, remains undefined by Peeters and Schuiten. In fact, the authors have rejected all firm ideas as to what exactly constitutes this state. Hence the complete absence of all religious edifices and acceptable alternatives in Samaris. Kierkegaard found his answer in Christianity and the acceptance of salvation through faith and not by works. A humanistic existentialist might devote himself to revolution and social change but Franz, like so many others, must continue his search.

When Franz fully comprehends the nullity of his existence in Samaris, his response is one of “dread” (“the sentiment of the possible”), a situation which leads to the apprehension of a “common destiny to which all men are subject”. His return to Samaris at the end of the story demonstrates the methodological importance and consequences of an awareness of death and its associated feeling of dread. From Abbagnano’s concise commentary on these two factors:

“…they offer to him, therefore, the possibility of remaining faithful to his destiny and of freely accepting the necessity that all men share in common. In this fidelity consists the historicity of existence, which is the repetition of tradition, the return to the possibilities from which existence had earlier been constituted, the wanting for the future what has been in the past.”

This statement becomes meaningful if one recalls the diverse architectural styles in Samaris and the quotations from the ancient tome Franz discovers at the centre of the city. In Peeters’ own words, Samaris is “free from impurities”, “will have always been and will always be” and will “seize the images” of those she has captured. She is “never changing yet always different” and her roots will always grow “further and further”.

Thus Franz’s returns to Samaris constitutes a faithfulness to the common destiny shared by all men since Samaris, as judged by her architectural content and characteristics, encapsulates the history of man. This last point in itself represents an interesting idea for it suggests that mankind’s existence has hitherto been singularly inauthentic.

Allegory is not an unfamiliar tool in the realms of existentialist thought. Kierkegaard created a series of books under various pseudonyms (embodiments of the aesthete, the ethical person and the religious person) to fully express his ideas on the three stages of life. Writers such as Albert Camus have chartered similar territory in The Rebel and The Outsider, dwelling mainly on the ultimate futility of one’s efforts, “the absurdity of existence” and the meaningless of life.

This would appear to be the message of The Great Walls of Samaris if one fails to consider the themes of the authors’ later albums…(cont’d)

Update by Noah: You can see the entire roundtable so far here.

Morpheus Strip: Dream Is Dead (All Hail Dream)

Posted on by

This is the last in a roundtable on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. There’s lots of good stuff in the previous posts (too much good stuff, perhaps, but such is the danger of going last). If you haven’t already, take a look at:
Noah’s “Dream Lovers,” Suat’s “Impressions of Sandman,” Tom’s “Post-modern Something,” and Vom Marlowe’s “Revisiting Old Lives.”

****

Like everyone else in the world, I loved Sandman when it first came out. I have all the collected volumes but one (more on that later), and while I haven’t reread any of them, I do still think of some of the stories and characters sometimes. (Which would especially impress you if you had any idea of the mental chaos I fight daily just to remember to, say, eat lunch – although if you’ve followed Gluey Tart at all, you no doubt do have some idea.) So, I remember the whole thing fondly but was a bit worried that stirring it up again would just make everyone unhappy, like visiting my home town or listening to ‘80s Aerosmith (and ‘90s or, quelle horreur, ‘00s Aerosmith is obviously not even on the table).

Mostly, though, I was just excited about figuring out where the hell that enormous stack of Sandman books was and digging in. On top of a bookcase, it turned out, and not under a huge, dusty, towering stack of God knows what, like almost everything else I look for. And I realize that there are books on top of these stacks, and everything can’t always actually be on the bottom, but sometimes I wonder if they don’t migrate there on their own, trying to hide from me – something that could easily happen in Sandman, now that I think about it. I decided to look at the two Orpheus stories because I particularly liked those. (They’re in Fables and Reflections and Brief Lives, if you’d like to read them yourself.) Or maybe I’d pick something else – I didn’t know. (I often don’t; I prefer to think of it as being flexible.) But I flipped through the books in order and, good lord, that is some lousy-ass art. I mean, a jittery, shifting every few pages, unnervingly bad collection of art. A Game of You is the worst – that one doesn’t just make me just cringe but also makes me fucking angry about its really excessive badness. I kept thinking no, this is really so bad I can’t quite bring myself to spend quality time with it.

sandman

I remember having problems with a lot of the art in Sandman the first time around – the overall quality (by which I mean the lack thereof), but also the startling shifts in style and character design in mid-arc. Like these three consecutive pages:

sandman

sandman

sandman

No, of course it isn’t all horrible. (I like two of the those last three pages, and don’t mind the other.) But a lot of it is. And if it bothered me then, it freaks me the hell out now, having since discovered manga and becoming accustomed to the joys of consistency and artistic whatsit. So I riffled through every volume until I found one that I liked the look of pretty consistently.

Unfortunately, that volume was the second to the last, The Kindly Ones. This is unfortunate in several respects:

1) It is an endgame sort of volume that heavily references and wraps up a number of previous storylines, few of which I remembered as well as I needed to.
2) Morpheus fucking dies. I hate that.
3) See point 1. This collection isn’t boring, but it does feel like more of a settling of accounts than an exciting bit of fantasy, and you kind of have to read the whole thing – there isn’t a shorter piece that holds up on its own in this volume.
4) Morpheus dies. Did I mention that already? I loved Morpheus, in all his enigmatic, usually barely there but always wonderfully Goth manifestations. Morpheus dying is counter to my personal agenda.

Let us tackle these points in order, you and I.

1) Reading Sandman always reminded me of reading Ezra Pound, except that I like Neil Gaiman, while I always sort of wanted to kick Ezra Pound’s ass. What I mean is that Gaiman throws in all these allusions to various mythological and historical high points, and you won’t really understand what’s going on if you don’t get those connections – much like Pound, of course, but ramped down a couple hundred decibels. Gaiman doesn’t reference anything really obscure, and, you know, nothing’s actually written in Greek. So that puts it in a whole other and hugely more acceptable level of pretentiousness right there. Also, Gaiman has so much fun with it, you wind up having fun with it, too. It isn’t “See ye these literary allusions and weep in terror at my big old brain.” It’s more like, “Oh, my God, and then the ravens, the ravens are so cool, and wait, wait, Loki! See what I did there! Oh that’s so cool! And that could tie in with…”

2) I was, and remain, in love with Morpheus. He was written beautifully, if not always drawn beautifully. He is ambiguous – his relationships with the other characters aren’t often clear, or his motivations, or his intent. I often want to scream at writers to please shut up – stop telling me about the damned character. I don’t need to know everything. I want there to be some mystery in our relationship, just like in real life. It’s hard to retain the ambiguity and keep hold of the character, I know – too much information and you feel like a six-year-old has been tugging at your arm and filling you in on all the complexities of the Transformers for several hours; too little information and you don’t care because you never connected with the character in the first place. More people should try, though. Reading Sandman might help.

Morpheus talks a lot about the rules, and the following thereof, and the doing of what must be done. A beautiful example of this is the action that drives the last nail in his coffin. He gives Nuala a pendant when she leaves the Dreaming, telling her he’ll come if she calls him. To grant a boon of some sort. This is one of the many complicated plot points that lead directly to Morpheus’ death. I’m not saying much about any of them because who has the time? This one, though, might bear some explication. Nuala, a fairie who’d been given to Dream in an earlier story, loves Morpheus and mopes around a lot, pining for him. When her brother shows up unexpectedly to take her back to Fairie, she lets Morpheus decide if she stays or goes. He cuts her loose. As a result, later, when Nuala learns Morpheus is in trouble, she summons him – at the worst possible time – hoping to save him by getting him to stay with her. By asking him to love her. Well, who hasn’t had the impulse? It never works for any of us, and Nuala is no exception. This is all very poignant, etc. etc. What I love about it is that Morpheus comes when she calls him. The Dreaming is being pulled down around his ears, but he’d be safe if he stayed put. He tells her the timing sucks, but when she insists, he goes, knowing the furies will take the Dreaming in his absence. I don’t love this because, oh, it’s so romantic (wibble wibble). I mean, it’s hard not to be annoyed with both of them, on that level. I love it because I believe Morpheus when he gives his reason for doing it – there are rules, and they must be followed. Some might say, well, perhaps an exception might be made in this case. I see the logic, but I’m utterly charmed by Morpheus’ failure to compromise. I have a great deal of sympathy for that position. Of course, he sort of does become someone else in the end, anyway. But it’s all, you know. Ambiguous.

dream

3) The Kindly Ones isn’t the most exciting Sandman collection, but it is still fantastic fantasy. It’s the kind of thing you read on the train for fifteen minutes, and then you get off the train downtown and walk onto the dimly lit platform and start looking around for Norse gods or sentient crows or faeries or something.

4) Morpheus’ death comes as no surprise. There’s a lot of foreshadowing in all shades from really obscure to ham-fisted like an ultra-conservative Republican state representative, but it’s still a shock when it happens. I like the way it’s portrayed, too. A light flashes, and goes out. And Dream the Endless is gone. And everything else goes on. Which is just exactly how death works.

Whenever Death (the character) tells someone they got what everybody gets – a lifetime – I think of the Stephen Crane story, “The Open Boat.” The theme of that story being, basically, “it is what it is.” The tie-in is obvious: nature doesn’t care, and death does her job, because that’s what she is. In The Kindly Ones, Morpheus talked a lot about fulfilling his responsibilities, and many characters questioned his motives. Did you do this on purpose? Do you want to die? One of the many bits of foreshadowing comes via Loki, a divine trickster, but not in a fun, gentle, let’s exploit Native American legends and wear dream-catcher earrings sort of way. Morpheus is the reason Loki is out in the world and wreaking havoc (on Morpheus, as it turns out) instead of being tied by his son’s entrails under the earth with snake venom dripping down on him for eternity, where he belongs. The Corinthian (sort of the ultimate walking nightmare, which Morpheus recreates toward the beginning of this collection) steals Loki’s eyes and breaks his neck, and Odin and Thor take Loki back to the underworld to tie him back down. Loki tries to get the dim-witted Thor to kill him, but Odin intervenes, and Loki isn’t able to escape his fate worse than death. Because Loki is a god, and that’s what’s proper. Morpheus (who is not a god, but the distinction is – well, indistinct) is able to escape, though. What does that mean? I don’t know. That’s how death works, too.

I refused to read the last Sandman collection, The Wake, when it came out. At the end of The Kindly Ones, another character takes over the dreaming (Daniel, who’s never done anything to me, but I hate him anyway – see points 2 and 4 – even though he becomes basically a new version of Morpheus – but it’s sort of like reincarnation in Buddhism, where the flame goes out, and the flame is reignited, but it’s not really the same flame). Sandman was about Morpheus for me, and when Morpheus died, I didn’t want anything else to do with it. Which was really quite emo of me. But it’s also a testament to what Neil Gaiman did with this series, even saddled with a collection of crappy art he had to drag around behind him like the rotting carcass of a castrated ox (or some other foul, unwieldy dead ungulate of your choice). I hesitate to use the “t” word, but in Sandman, Neil Gaiman created something transcendent, in its way. Not “I’m going hire a lawyer to help me set up a religion” transcendent, but something that somewhat extends the limits of ordinary experience.

sandman

Morpheus Strip: Revisiting Old Lives

Posted on by

It’s ten years ago, and I’m thousands of miles from home, living in a teeny room with a bed that’s been lopped short to fit and a slanting roof, like some medieval scholar monk. I don’t know anyone and I’m spending my days, and my nights, reading cramped texts in Greek and Latin; so much so that my grasp of English is getting stilted and my voice cracks from lack of speaking. I can’t seem to read for pleasure anymore, the words zip past on the page, too fast to catch.

But I stumble into a comic shop, for reasons I no longer remember, and I buy Sandman, and I take it home. I curl up on my too short bed, where my feet stick off if I stretch out, and I read about Andros climbing up the hill. Aner, I think, genitive, Of Man, and keep reading. The beautifully drawn art slows me down and the stories feel familiar, rich and strange and interwoven with layers of meaning and metaphor, like a country garden’s roses gone wild.

*

Looking back, I’m sure I didn’t read Brief Lives first, despite this picturesque memory. If I rattle my brain, I can remember reading Preludes and Nocturnes, at my small and cramped desk, and being delighted and appalled and pleased, especially by Death. I read all the notes, too, and I’ve always wondered who Cinnamon was.

But let’s return to this me, this depressed and lonely grad student, steeped deep in Greek stories of destruction and desire told in lush rhythm with beats that seem inevitable and Latin tales of debauchery and conquest told in spare and elegant prose. I sat there and read through the book, a chapter a day, reading slowly and carefully, slowed down by the beautiful art and puzzling over each word.

Did you know that the Greeks had a word for ritualistically ripping people apart, limb from limb, and eating them while alive? (sparagmos)

They did. And you know what? It showed up in the Sandman. The Bacchae there were the Bacchae of my beloved Euripides, at least a little. A force of nature that is both benevolent and strange, cruel and violent, and at times nurturing.

Each week, usually on Sundays, I would walk to the comic store, down a long and forested road full of blind curves and no sidewalks but cut granite curbs. It almost always rained, since Pennsylvania rains a good deal, and eventually it snowed. I walked it anyway, buying, slowly and carefully, each volume.

Except that I didn’t buy them all. A friend told me that Dream dies in the Kindly Ones (and I certainly was wary, with a title like that) but this is not how the story ends. I know this in my heart. The story does not end with Dream killing himself. That never happens. And thus I never bought that volume and I haven’t read it and I won’t, because that plotline does not occur. I’m difficult, and stubborn, as, er, some of the readers of this blog have no doubt guessed, and I sometimes make a decision about how a story as itself should go. And that is the story that lives in my head. Thus it was with Sandman. Sometimes authors are wrong about how the story goes and it is better to live with the story’s own ending.

But what, you may ask (quite reasonably), is the point of a long tale about the sad girl who read Sandman except for skipping the end? How is this useful criticism? What the hell?

And so I will tell you.

Well, so you know that Sandman was a good friend to me, back when I needed one. A beautiful and difficult tale that I savored and cherished. And this week, I was, like many of you, afraid to reread this story lest it look dusty and crumpled and turn out to have atrocious art that could only appeal to the few, the proud, the naive.

But no! Due to a flood, I lost my personal library (about thirty boxes worth) and all my Sandman, so I wasn’t able to reread the whole opus. But I picked up a copy of my favoritest favorite of them all, Brief Lives, and I was pleased and cheered to discover that it was just as good, if not better, than I remembered.

Let’s start with the art, because I love art and I read comics for art, more than for words. This volume has Jill Thompson’s pencils and inks by Vince Locke and Dick Giordano, with color by Danny Vozzo.

Check out this page:

I love this. It’s so unabashedly emo Goth. The dark colors! The fuzzy black hair! The despair! It’s touching, but it’s also kind of funny, because who among us hasn’t had a love affair that felt like this?

After this, of course Morpheus stands outside in the rain. Of course he does! I hear a lot of people (here and elsewhere) complain about the art, and it’s true that there’s better art and worse art, but look at this and tell me that it doesn’t make you laugh:

The art is evocative, and speaks more than the words do alone, which is exactly its job. It conveys a feeling that you can’t get with words alone.

I’d like to turn now to a bit of plot. Delirium, one of the Endless and Morpheus’s sister, misses her brother, Destruction. She’s trying to find him, and she’s asking her siblings for help. She asks Desire first. Desire, ahhhh Gaiman’s Desire. What a tricksy character zie is. In this first piece, Desire is portrayed as petty and cruel, sending an adoring fan to a dire fate for no apparent reason and then behaving unpleasantly, if not deliberately maliciously, to hir sister. Desire decorates with a vivisected man grinning in ecstasy, sleeps on a squishy pink heart muscle, and floats in an eyeball. Ew. Desire, of all the Endless, is shown as the most scheming.

In some ways, this always bothered me, because the point of love is to be good and kind, but at the same time, that’s not really what Gaiman is about. This isn’t love, it’s Desire. Shown most explicitly as sexual Desire.

Now, Brief Lives is bracketed by the Greek temple and Orpheus. The Endless echo Greek deities, and those beings are expressly cruel and capricious in their behavior towards mortals. Aphrodite and Artemis, for instance, destroy lives left and right in the Hippolytus for no other reason than a sisterly grudge.

Gaiman’s Desire would have felt right at home.

So Desire behaves much as a Greek deity would do, and Delirium moves on to ask Despair, who is portrayed in beautiful accents and with truly horrific touches, as gray. (I’m not as OK with her being fat, though, because I am very tired of fat being shorthand for sad or evil.) Despair refuses to act, perhaps because she is afraid of Desire. And then Delirium goes to ask Dream, and we come to one of my favoritest pages in the entirety of the Sandman. Look at this art:

This is the shit. The body language is spot on. That’s a girl trying very very hard to be polite and adult, when upset and worried, and then perking up when the waiter asks her a question. By the end she’s getting confused and impatient, throwing her limbs around in wriggling social discomfort, The brother is absolutely rigid and offended, pretending to be polite while being very cold and insulting. The body language when he orders his meal is so pretentious—and insulting. Sibling slapfight. And the colors! Look at those colors. They’re so clean and reveal so much.

And because everything else is bog standard normal, the waiter is hilarious.

How is this not an awesome visual display of two different and competing siblings? When Morpheus’s body language changes (on the next page), and softens, all the previous panels’ repetition gives that change a huge amount of force.

And his small willingness to change, while he is clearly still despairing over his own heartache and while he is equally still completely embarrassed by his LOUD SHINY COLORFUL WHACKO sister, is endearing. If he thought, as Destruction thinks, that Delirium is fun or comfortable, his actions wouldn’t be nearly as sweet. No, it’s the fact that this trip is going to ruin his already bad day that the character Morpheus is humanized and thus lovable.

There are other fine pieces of art in this volume. The crazy sequences with Delirium turning colors, her jacket turned white, the frowning secretaries who look absolutely like secretaries everywhere, the fluffy and scruffy dog Barnabus, the strange sequence in the nudie bar, there’s a lot to like about this art.

And a beautifully crafted page that is striking with white and blue and a smear of blood blood red.

The pages between Morpheus’s granting of Orpheus’s wish and the page above are always hard to read. Morpheus hides his hands, and his pain, as he apologizes to the small fairy and is polite to his doorkeepers. He’s keeping the horror from others, as best he can.

The impact of killing his son is here in this page, where Morpheus’s despair and exhaustion are real and revealed with no words, just art. I think it’s beautiful and it always stops me in my tracks.

But in any case. I could talk a bit about the coloring (wonderful) or the inking (mediocre) but why? The art does many things well. It’s a whole. And this is a story I am glad to return to. I don’t regret my revisit of this tale. I hope those who haven’t been there in a while can return, too.

Is Morpheus a cypher? Yes and no. His family is rather difficult, let’s admit. Most of them are comfortable with who they are. Death is all-knowing and wise, but that is…not someone I’m going to be. I’m not all knowing and wise, but flawed and emo. Like Morpheus.

Morpheus is interesting because he’s deeply flawed. He’s got all this power and yet he just got dumped. There’s an annoying and embarrassing sister, who bugs him.

Unlike Desire, who is all powerful and using it the way a Greek god would, or Death who uses her power as we’d like the Greek gods to, or Destruction, who decided to leave the game, or Despair, who just isn’t around much, or Delirium, who’s lost it (literally), Morpheus has his powers and still can’t really cope. He does his best, though, and his muddling around is endearing to see and worth reading about. I like him. And he doesn’t die in the end.

_________________________

Edited to add: Since there’s a discussion going on in some of the other comments sections about the art, I thought I should note that I read the most recent printing of the regular trade paperback (ISBN 13: 978-1563891380) available here. That’s where the scans come from as well.
_________________________

Update by Noah: Other posts in the roundtable: Noah’s “Dream Lovers,” Suat’s “Impressions of Sandman,” Tom’s “Post-modern Something,” and, Dream Is Dead (All Hail Dream).

Morpheus Strip: Post-modern something

Posted on by
It looks like most of what I have to say will be in the Comments threads to Noah’s post, so go here if you’re curious. More important you’ll find Noah’s thoughts on Sandman, and over here is an illuminating discussion by the distinguished Ng Suat Tong.
In this post I’ll add a paragraph from an article about Gaiman that I did for TCJ (namely “My Gaiman Decade,” issue 273, January 2006). And I will add a one-liner that I took out for some reason. It goes like this: Gaiman is so temperamentally averse to big systems of thought that his idea of a cosmology is alliteration (Dream, Destruction, Death. etc.).

The TCJ article was about why I liked Sandman so much and why I felt let down by the series. A lot of me, me, me, which I think was an honest way to approach the subject. For a little while the series had somehow got into the center of my life, and I wanted to figure out why. But I put some ideas in there too, and the paragraph below has a couple.
For instance, wish fulfillment. Here are two secret little payoffs that I got from the series, and I suspect they’re hooks for other people too:

Gaiman’s universe is divided into a crowd of further universes, like folds in a paper fan, and the Endless can materialize in and out among them at will. That’s very comfortable; it suits me down to the ground. The characters can go anywhere, travel through any sort of story, change their surroundings like turning a knob. Not only are they superheroes, they’re media consumers; so am I. Go deeper and there’s a more embarrassing source of attraction. The Endless’s fundamental power is that they matter. Wherever they go, they count, and most often anybody else in the same panel counts for less. (The Endless are aware of this, as shown by Dream’s easy way with a high horse and Death’s ambling among the confused.) Superheroes beat each other up; Gaiman’s superbeings see who can matter the hardest. At their crudest, these contests are expressed through staredowns and well-seasoned rebukes. But what underlies the encounters is mana; to use Gaiman language, what underlies them is the fundamental stuff of mattering. [We have no idea what this stuff is, neither in the series or in real life.] Why some people have more self-possession than others is hard to pin down; so is why the universe cares so much about the Endless. After age eleven, fistfights are a lot rarer than simple contests in outfacing each other, in self-possession. If you’re nine years old and want to matter more, you’ll think of superhuman muscles. Past that age you’ll be thinking of other types of advantage, such as a superhuman source of mattering.

I stuck in the bracketed sentence, the one about “We have no idea what this stuff is,” because I still wonder if that section of the extract really makes its point. Ah well.
I’m going to break down the paragraph and expand on individual points.
1)  “Gaiman’s universe is divided into a crowd of further universes … and the Endless can materialize in and out among them at will … travel through any sort of story, change their surroundings like turning a knob. Not only are they superheroes, they’re media consumers …”
Kind of meta, I guess. These days most of us spend most of our lives being media consumers. Sandman is the only property I can think of whose characters act out a deluxe, all-power-is-in-your-hands version of same. Wotta hook!
A related point. As I read it, around about the early ’70s genre entertainment fans realized they could just pile all their favorite genres into any single work. Underlying the innovation was the idea that a story didn’t really have to take place anywhere, not even Middle Earth. The idea of a solid world was gone; instead there were just entertainment tropes, with nothing needed to house them but the ready-to-hand sf concept of billowing and necessarily undefined dimensions rolling one into the other.  The Man-Thing story that introduced Howard the Duck is the first example I can think of. The two issues had everything: pirates, space men, dragons, funny animals. If I recall right, Gerber shanghaied the idea of the multiverse, pioneered by Michael Moorcock, and refitted it from an assortment of sword-and-sorcery worlds into the broader sort of assemblage I have in mind.
It was part of Gerber’s sad life progress that, having wandered onto this rich territory, he then wandered off it again. Dave Sim took up the idea in the late 1970s, and he didn’t even need dimensions: pretty soon he was having superheroes pop up in Conan-land with no explanation, and eventually Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway too. Terry Pratchett joined in during the ’80s with Discworld, again shoving disparate genre tropes into a place that didn’t really have to be any place. In the late ’80s Sandman came along and Gaiman hauled dimensions back into play as an explanation. To tie in with the paragraph just above: though all these works have settings that are less places than entertainment-trope warehouses, only Sandman simulates the all-powerful-media-consumer experience because the Endless get to flicker in and out pretty much anywhere they want to go. The people in the other series generally have to walk.
2)   “After age eleven, fistfights are a lot rarer than simple contests … in self-possession. If you’re nine years old and want to matter more, you’ll think of superhuman muscles. Past that age you’ll be thinking of other types of advantage, such as a superhuman source of mattering.”
I guess this in line with David Riesman and inner directed/outer directed. I say “guess” because I’ve never read Riesman, he admitted casually. But a muscles superhero gets his way thru straightforward physical instrumentality: he hits something and then it is no longer standing up, it’s lying down. The Endless, on the other hand, have a lot of big moments that rely just on how one person reacts to another, and these exchanges tend to be a matter of who can out-crust the other. It’s a bit like CSI, if you’ve seen that. Every damn episode has a moment where some poor guy has to swallow his gum and shift his gaze, look down and away in shame as a detective stares at him, and often enough these guys aren’t that important to the story. The episodes still make time for them because those moments are money shots. The audience loves the sight of a poor sap wilting in front of another because those are the moments people chase in their daily lives at the office. 
Put the two ideas together and you get, I don’t know, post-modern something. Physical reality downplayed, agreed-upon social realities played up. But to tell the truth, I’ve been up a long time and now I’m going to bed.