Charles Schulz vs. Thomas Hardy…Bonk!

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As regular readers know, over the last month and a half or so the blog has been engaged in a sporadic roundtable on the place of the literary in comics. I was recently reading the 1983-84 volume of Fantagraphics Peanuts collection, and came across a strip that seemed like it had interesting things to contribute to the discussion. Here it is:
 

Hardy_Peanuts

 
So what does this have to say about the literary in comics? Well, several things, I’d argue.

First, and perhaps most straightforwardly, the strip can be seen as an enthusiastic endorsement of literariness. Schroeder — the strip’s most ardent proponent of high art — quotes Thomas Hardy. The second panel is given over almost entirely to Hardy’s words, which take up so much weight and space that they almost overwhelm Schroeder’s earnestly declaiming face. Lucy — Schulz’s go-to philistine — expresses indifference and self-righteous ignorance — for which she is duly and gratifyingly punished by Schroeder, who pulls the piano (marker of the high art she’s rejected) out from under her. Bonk!

In terms of the debate we’ve been having on this blog, you could easily see this as a pointed refutation of Eddie Campbell’s rejection of literary standards and literary comparisons. Campbell’s argument that literariness is not relevant to comics seems to fit nicely with Lucy’s “Who cares?” — while Ng SuatTong’s ill-tempered riposte seems quite similar to Schroeder’s.

On second thought, though, Schulz’s attitude towards literariness can be seen as a little more ambiguous. It’s true that Schroeder, the advocate for high art, gets the last word. But the last word he gets is not precisely high art. On the contrary, it’s slapstick. The point of the strip, you could argue, isn’t the Hardy quote, which ends up essentially being little more than an elaborate set-up — it’s literariness there not for its high-art meaningfulness, but simply to signal “high art meaningfulness.” The real pleasure, or energy, of the strip, is in that last image, where Schroeder pulls out the piano — almost throwing it over his head and off panel, as if to toss aside the very possibility of including high art in a comic strip. From this perspective, the strip might be seen as being in the vein of Michael Kupperman’s “Are Comics Serious Literature?” (HT: Matthias.)
 

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The point isn’t so much to advocate for literature as it is to use comics to giggle at the idea of advocating for literature in comics — a position that Eddie Campbell would probably find congenial.

One last, perhaps less schematic,possibility is to think about the strip in terms of gender. It’s interesting in this context that, while Schroeder is generally the advocate for high art, he’s also generally uninterested in, or immune to, the appeal of romance — he’s one of the few characters in the strip who (as far as I’ve seen) never has an unrequited crush. Lucy, of course, has a crush on him, and it’s usually she who brings up images of marriage or love or domestic bliss, only to have Schroeder disgustedly reject them.

This strip is different, though. Hardy’s words are not just a default marker of high art; they’re in particular a paen to a woman’s (or a particular kind of woman’s) “marvelous beauty,” and a speculation — with more than a little longing — on who such beautiful people marry. It sounds more like something Charlie Brown would say about the little red-headed girl than like something Schroeder would say to Lucy.

Lucy’s lack of interest, then, can be seen as not (or not merely) philistine, but as tragic — Schroeder is finally, finally talking to her about love, and she can’t process it or understand it.

You could attribute this to her soullessness, I suppose — she is blind and doesn’t deserve love. But you could attribute it to Schroeder’s soullessness. Certainly there’s a cruelty in babbling about the beauty of random unobtainable women to someone who you know is head-over-heels in love with you. For that matter, the Hardy quote itself seems to exhibit some of his most maudlin and least appealing tendencies; it’s pretty easy to read it as a self-pitying lament for the fact that beautiful women are human beings, rather than simple objects to be collected by men who admire them in the street. The high-artist idealizes Woman and ignores the woman sitting in front of him. Lucy’s utter indifference could then read as a recognition that Hardy is indifferent to her — and Schroeder’s violence as a tragi-comic extension of Hardy’s violence. In this case, the literary is neither defended nor ridiculed, but is instead a kind of doppelganger — a shadow of meaning cast by the comic, the meaning of which is in turn cast by it.

Literature, then, appears for Schulz in this strip as an ideal, a butt, and a fraught double. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, I don’t really have any problem comparing comics and other forms (Charles Schulz is a greater artist than Thomas Hardy, damn it.) But I do feel like the anxiety around those comparisons, in every direction, sometimes ends up drowning out potentially more interesting conversations about how, and where, intentionally and despite themselves, comics and literature can meet.

Steve Ditko Oddity

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gano022

The above bit of ribaldry may disconcert certain comics fans. Its style of drawing evokes that of Steve Ditko, the creator of Spider-Man and of Dr Strange — wholesome comic-book superheroes for kids. Is there a secret side of Sturdy Steve we don’t know about?

Yes and no.

Ditko attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he made friends with another budding cartoonist, Eric Stanton (1926– 1999). He and Ditko shared a studio on 8th Avenue from 1958 to 1966.
 

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Stanton had a specialty, though — kinky sado-maso bondage comics– his “stantoons”. Legal dynamite in the ’50s, they look oddly innocent in our current porn-saturated times.
 

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Steve Ditko, at the same period

 
The two cartoonists had superficially similar styles, and were given to helping each other out with deadlines. So the above strip has, at the least, Ditko inks in the equation; the next one seems to have been laid out by him, as well.
 

 
Ditko never made a secret of his association with Stanton. With his reputation as a stern moralist, though, he seems open to a charge of hypocrisy.

But Ditko is a conservative of the Libertarian kind, and as such would have a keep-the-damn-government-out-of-the-bedroom attitude.
 

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As for Stanton’s assists to Ditko, it’s long been rumored that he’d contributed to the first Spider-Man story. Stanton does claim to have come up with the idea of webs shooting from the character’s hands. When asked by Greg Theakston about the extent of his contribution to Spider-Man, Stanton replied:

“Almost nil…. I think I added the business about the webs coming out of his hands.”

He elsewhere makes the intriguing claim, though, that he helped Ditko out with “storyboards”.

By that word, did he mean storyboards in the usual sense — for TV or movies? New York was, and remains, a major center for the audiovisual industry, and certainly many cartoonists based in the area, such as Lou Fine and Bill Everett, produced storyboards for TV advertising. Ditko and Stanton might well have done a job or two for the screen.

Or did he use the term “storyboards” to mean comic book layouts? Ditko, at the time, was an astonishingly productive artist, not just for Marvel but also for Charlton and Warren comics. And he certainly wasn’t averse to artistic collaboration: he was sometimes inked by Dick Ayers or Mike Esposito, among others, and he himself often inked Jack Kirby ( a wonderfully quirky pairing.)

Here’s a casual claim by Stanton that seems plausible, in connection with a bondage comic:

“I made ‘Sweeter Gwen’ from John Willie’s ‘Gwendoline.’ I roughed out (penciled) 30 pages and took them over to Burtman and he said ‘great … but then I got another commission and I had to stop on ‘Sweeter Gwen.’ I asked Steve Ditko to ink it for me and we’d split the money 50% / 50%. So then we story boarded like we used to do for Spider-Man. We gave ideas to each other. We came up with a very beautiful story and we finished it and took it over….”

We’ll never know for sure. Stanton is dead, and Ditko is famously adamant in refusing to speak about his career.
 

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Why did the pair break up? According to Stanton’s daughter Amber, her father announced to Ditko he was getting married. Ditko took this as a betrayal of Stanton’s principles… and the partnership, and friendship, were over.

One last sample, and you be the judge: how much is Stanton’s, and how much — if any– is Ditko’s?
 

 
(Nota Bene: the comics in this post were researched for reasons of scholarship ONLY.)

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Timpa

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I think there was a distinct period in my childhood when I believed that the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician were Indian comic book characters. Indrajal Comics had been publishing these (and other King Features characters) in India since the 1960s and on visits to the country I’d occasionally read old issues. But these visits were few and far apart, and by the time I moved to India in the 1990s Indrajal had folded. So I’d never read the Timpa stories that Indrajal serialised as backup features in the late 80s until recently, when Pop Culture Publishing brought out four full-length adventures.
 

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It’s obvious from the style of the art (and from the fact that creator Jhangir Kerawala freely admits to it) that the Timpa stories are heavily inspired by Hergé’s Tintin comics. Timpa is a boy detective as well, though in somewhat more realistic circumstances; he’s an actual child for one thing, and is only taken seriously by anyone because his (alarmingly indulgent) father is a police inspector. Timpa’s Calcutta is one where market shopkeepers sleep half the afternoon, where policemen occasionally take bribes, and where middle-class Calcuttans will always argue with rickshaw or taxi drivers about fares—this is a world I recognise. Tintin flies all over the world (and occasionally into space); Timpa takes trains and buses and doesn’t get further than the Andaman islands. His dog, “Rexy”, is always portrayed as a dog. He may chase the occasional cat but we never know what’s going on inside his head, as we do with Snowy.

Like Tintin, Timpa himself is fundamentally dull. There’s not much to him, other than an earnest need to help, and he stumbles onto things through sheer coincidence more than by any exciting process of deduction. Like Tintin he has a cringingly grateful faithful companion—Kalia, who is of a distinctly lower class, is tellingly dark-skinned, and is apparently incapable of defending himself against children without Timpa’s help.
 

Kalia

 
But the really important character here is the grandfather who joins Timpa on his adventures. Grandpa has Captain Haddock’s belligerence combined with some of Professor Calculus’ talent for misinterpreting a situation. He’s grumpy, convinced of his own misunderstood brilliance, and often imagines himself as a superhero, or at least super-muscled. He’s also convinced that he’s the brains of this operation, though in this he is sadly misguided.
 

Grandpa

 
Grandpa gets all the best lines because in addition to being the comic relief he’s also the background voice snarking at (and therefore somewhat deflating for the reader) Timpa’s heroic plans. At one point Timpa drags him into a grand attempt to break out of prison a friend who has been sentenced to death. Grandpa is seen muttering darkly in the background about the whole thing possibly inspiring real murderers like Charles Sobhraj.
 

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As I write this I realise that in a sense Grandpa is this series’ Snowy as much as he is its Haddock. A wry commenter placed partly outside the text by a refusal to entirely play by its rules: Grandpa rarely accepts the obvious realities of the plot.

Pop Culture appear to have faithfully reproduced the original comics, flaws and all. Sarbajit Sen, the artist for the first two books (The Red-Hooded Gang and Operation Rescue) appears to me to be a far superior artist to Avijit Chatterjee who did Runners of The Golden Horn and Legacy of the Gods. We’re given no clues as to who was responsible for the mystifying decision to have all the text in Operation Rescue be in cursive. And Kerawala’s grasp of the English language isn’t always all it could be. (He has now written a Timpa novel, The Soothsayer of Sealdah. I do not recommend it.)

And yet. Kerawala’s Calcutta feels just right, Timpa’s father and Grandpa are fantastic (his mother, who is usually the sole female character, sort of hangs around in the background weeping about her son’s safety). I complain about the less than perfect use of English, but Kerawala clearly has enough command over the language to make wordplay something that his characters indulge in almost instinctively. Timpa may be a lukewarm Tintin ripoff, but his setting and the people around him feel a lot more real than the people in Tintin’s world. If not necessarily realistic.

Which brings me to the real reason to read these comics – the fourth one, Legacy of the Gods.
 

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Rereading Hergé’s Flight 714 last year I realised that it had first been published in 1968, the same year as Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? Von Däniken’s theory in this book (popular with teenagers around the world, or at least it was in my day) is that in Earth’s far-distant past it was visited by various extra-terrestrials whose far superior technology made them appear as gods or angels to our primitive ancestors. Flight 714 has Tintin and his companions taken aboard a hijacked plane to an island that, the natives claim, was once visited by gods in “fire-lorries”. There are statues that look suspiciously astronaut-like, and a strange man who can communicate telepathically, but aliens wipe the characters’ memories of these events before anyone else can be told.

I’m not sure if it was coincidence or a deliberate continuation of the Tintin theme that prompted Kerawala to do a Chariots of the Gods?-themed Timpa story. Legacy of the Gods opens with a direct reference to the book when we see Timpa’s father reading Von Däniken.
 

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Soon after, Timpa visits an uncle in Murshidabad, stumbles upon a secret underground chamber and finds ancient scrolls written in an unknown script.
 
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As Timpa suffers from a raging fever caused by snakebite he dreams of a strange man (we will learn that he is an alien) who warns him that the knowledge in these 14,000 year old scrolls is dangerous to humans. The alien’s name is … Vladimir. I cannot explain this. I also cannot explain why Vladimir has sparser chest hair and better skin on the cover of the book.
 
EnterVladimir
 
The scrolls, it turns out, are in an old form of Pali. Naturally the Indian government fails to listen to young Timpa’s insistence on the importance of these scrolls. Naturally the Americans and the Russians (this is set in the 1980s) are interested. A series of kidnappings and interchangeable villains follow.

Naturally the Americans almost get away with it. Until the Russians blow up their helicopter.
 
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And so once more, great (or terrible?) knowledge is lost to the world.

The Same Words

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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If you want a glimpse into the sorry state of America’s gun policy debate, look at Brian Doherty’s smugly incoherent pronouncements over at Reason.

Doherty’s main point is in his article’s title: tragedy, he insists, shouldn’t make policy. The shooting at the Dark Knight showing in Colorado is a random incident without any broader lessons to teach us about guns, or assault weapons, or America.  He declares:

Trying to “turn tragedy into politics” feels gross, because the deaths and the grief for the living are real and terrible and demand respect… If I weren’t a professional writer about the Second Amendment (in my 2008 book Gun Control on Trial) on record as believing in the right to bear arms, I wouldn’t dream of weighing in at all.

Or, to sum up, only people with credentials like Doherty should be allowed to draw conclusions from tragedy, and only as long as those conclusions are that we should dismiss the tragedy from theoretical consideration. Refusing to think about how the tragedy might involve our society or us is, apparently, the best way to show respect for those who have died.

In the real world outside the abstract libertarian compound, tragedies do very often lead to political thinking and political consequences. Sometimes, this has horrible results, as in our decade of foreign policy motivated by 9/11. Sometimes, though, it’s necessary and important. Surely it’s not disrespectful to suggest making sure nuclear reactors are earthquake proof after the disaster in Japan. To point out that people died because of inadequate safety features or (in, say New Orleans) because of poor policy response, isn’t callous. It’s acting as if we care about the dead, and about the living. Preventable deaths should be prevented. That’s not an insult to anyone’s memory; it’s simple human decency.

Not in Doherty’s world, though. On the contrary, he’s so myopically certain of his position that, without irony, he quotes himself blandly dismissing Gabby Giffords’ shooting.

Americans understand that even strange people should be able to own weapons, and not just for deer hunting. The very rare crimes of very unusual Americans should not dictate how everyone’s right to self-defense is managed, and even in the wake of tragedy that is fortunately unlikely to change.

Doherty apparently hasn’t noticed that putting “very” in front of “rare” and “unusual” is a rhetorical device somewhat undermined by the fact that such events are, at least, frequent enough that he’s got a canned spiel to pull out every time they happen. When, I wonder, will he notice this contradiction? The third time he reprints it? The fourth? The 10th?

Doherty is correct that it’s politically impossible to change gun laws at the moment, but I don’t think that’s because Americans have decided en masse that it’s a good idea for “strange people” to have unlimited access to semi-automatic weapons.  Rather, it’s because the NRA and the pro-gun lobby has bludgeoned politicians into submission—and, perhaps most importantly, because the Democrats abandoned the issue. Doherty himself notes that at the beginning of the 1990s, 78 percent of Americans supported stronger gun control laws. Then along came Bill Clinton. Without a political party to lead or make the case for stricter controls—without a party to, for example, point out that perhaps we could stop our regular cycle of tragedies if we made an effort—public opposition to guns has cratered. Doherty sees this as a sign of America’s growing wisdom, but it’s just as likely a result of a craven lack of leadership.

That leadership might reappear, though, if people begin to get weary of random yahoos loading up with firepower so they can kill children. That’s why Doherty has taken to the Internet again to wave around airy phrases like, “The endless and unmanageable mystery of the individual’s power and choice to do evil,” as if somehow an evil person’s power to do harm is completely unaffected by the availability of machine guns.

Doherty insists there is no connection between violence and gun possession. That assertion is debatable. James Fallows, for example, points out that after a terrible 1996 massacre in Tasmania, “Australia tightened up its gun laws, and there has been nothing remotely comparable in all the years.” In the U.S., on the other hand, we’ve apparently decided that it’s better to accept the occasional multiple shooting than it is to reexamine gun policy. That’s a political decision. Which is why Doherty is taking the occasion of the tragedy to make his polemical points, and why he will use the next tragedy to do the same, and the next, and the next, and the next, until, at some point, Americans get tired of hearing the same words spoken over yet another grave.

Two Stars for Reign in Blood?

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This first ran at Madeloud.
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imagesI received the Rolling Stone Album Guide, third edition, as a graduation gift from my  brother, who knew well exactly what sort of obsessive I was. I probably looked at it every day, or at least every week, for a couple of years there.  The book’s binding wasn’t meant to sustain that sort of long term attention, and it disintegrated.  The book’s prose wasn’t either, and it more or less disintegrated as well — which is why I never need to read another word by critics Mark Coleman, J.D. Considine, Paul Evans, or David McGee, thanks.  But for all its structural failings, the guide did introduce me to a ton of music I might never have known about otherwise, from the Soul Stirrers to Wanda Jackson to Stetsasonic to Bob Wills.

I haven’t looked at the book in a long time though. In the first place , the thing was published in 1993, so it’s seriously out of date.  And in the second place  — well, the Internet.  Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, and MySpace, have rendered this sort of undertaking really redundant — even precious.  “Oh, goodness,” you say as you flip through the pages, “they thought they were being so completist by including Charles Mingus and Kylie Minogue!” (And so brave for giving Mingus those five-star album ratings!  Oh, congratulations, guys!)

Still, if the Album Guide isn’t exactly useful as reference anymore, it retains sentimental and historical interest.  Consider, in 1993:

—   Nirvana  was a decent band peddling a poppier version of the “metal-edged punk” that typified Soundgarden and Soul Asylum.  “At their best,” J.D. Considine says, Nirvana’s songs “typify the low-key passion of post-MTV youth.” Bleach (three-and-a-half stars) is faulted for  relying on “metal riffage” as much as on “melodic invention,” while the poppier Nevermind gets four stars. Since Nirvana has not yet been named rock royalty, no one needs to trace its bloodline, and bands such as the Melvins and the Vaselines don’t exist.

—   Paula Abdul is the musician with “the most successful debut in history”. That means she’s worth taking down a peg according to Paul Evans, who characterizes her singles as “aerobicized rhythm tracks and sex-chipmunk singing,” and concludes “this was Madonna-cloning at its most plastic,”. As if anyone gives a crap. Mariah Carey is about equally relevant and receives similar treatment (“ersatz soul music…breathtaking in its wrongheadedness”). Brandy, Monica, and Aaliyah haven’t released albums yet; TLC has, just barely, but isn’t important enough to get an entry.

—   Sun Ra is great, but his music is mostly impossible to find. The guide lists and rates less than ten records, a fraction of those discussed on Wikipedia (which is in turn a fraction of his total output.)

—   Eric B. and Rakim are solidly mediocre; their debut, “Paid in Full,” gets two stars; “Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em” gets three-and-a-half.  EPMD is dismissed even more summarily — they “too often play it safe” according to Evans. Tribe Called Quest and de la Soul do better, though neither Low End Theory or 3 Feet High and Rising receive the five stars awarded to Peter Gabriel’s  So. On the other hand, everybody has already figured out that Public Enemy matters. N.W.A. too, though you get the sense that reviewer J.D. Considine rather wishes they didn’t..

—   Johnny Cash is toiling away without much of an audience at Mercury records…though David McGee presciently notes that there’s still life in the singer yet. The 1988 Water from the Wells of Home is given 5 stars, which is probably the first and last time that this (very fine) recording would be considered a pinnacle of Cash’s career.

—   Bruce Springsteen is humongously important. Way more important than the Pixies.

Of course, there are a lot of performers who looked pretty much the same in 1993 as they do in 2010 — even after the twelfth time their music has been repackaged, the Beatles are still the Beatles. But it is amazing, when you flip through this guide, to think how much the future influences the past, rather than the other way round. Where’s Bathory in this book? Where’s Judee Sill? From our perch, it’s easy to see that Kraftwerk should have more column inches than Lenny Kravitz, but from the offices of Rolling Stone in 1993 — hey, they probably hoped this electronica shit would just go away.

Instead, it was them who went away. Rock critics and rock criticism have proliferated like roaches and roach eggs, of course — and a 2004 edition of the Rolling Stone guide itself is still available, according to the internets. But the dream of a single, massive, authoritative critical touchstone is gone. An infinite number of monkeys could write a more perspicacious record guide . And so they have.

Utilitarian Review 3/23/13

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ng Suat Tong looks at Gary Groth’s interview with Gil Kane.

Iron Man vs. Bataille.

I review an album of post-war hillbilly music.

Matthias Wivel weighs in on the debate over literariness in comics.Eddie Campbell clarifies his position in the (lengthy) comments thread.

Alex Buchet on Peanuts, as you’ve never seen it before.

Chris Gavaler looks at eugenics and the House of Slytherin.

I compared the poetry of Zen poets Basho and Ryokan.

Robert Stanley Martin provides an audio download of Pauline Kael lecturing on the auteur theory.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

I was on the Charles Adler Show talking about Persepolis and censorship in schools (in reference to my Atlantic article below.)

At the Atlantic, I talk about:

—The Client List, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and cultural images of sexy, deviant single moms.

—debt and housework.

— Persepolis and school censorship.

—Steubenville, I Spit on Your Grave, and failures of imagination about rape.

— what Andrea Dworkin would,and would not, have liked about the new film Ginger & Rosa

— Olympus Has Fallen, which is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, and makes me despair for my country.

— what Rush Limbaugh got right about Beyoncé.

At Splice Today, I talk about

— how the internet ate my dream job. Whine, freelancer, whine….

—the left wing pro-war pundits and how they sucked.
 
Other Links

Jessice Luther on feminism and romance novels.

C.T. May on CPAC.

Mallory Ortberg on CNN”s coverage of Steubenville.

And then there’s the Onion on a courageous athlete who overcame raping someone.

Philip Cohen on gender segregation in the workplace.

Alex Pareene on awful local news reporting.

Ronald Reagan was a traitorous thug.
 
This Week’s Reading
I reread Persepolis, and started David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years. Also still working on LOTR with my son; we’re in the middle of the Two Towers now.
 

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