The Years Have Pants: Preamble

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Part of the Eddie Campbell-The Years Have Pants Roundtable

This one’s too big to really get a good grasp of. It’s a wizened but lively old cat at 600 pages and 30 years long. You can hold it up by the scruff of its neck with the strength of one hand, but not for any reasonable duration.

Then again, you don’t really need to. There’s a summary provided by the author himself (and who else better to do it) — a pilgrimage to Hugo Pratt’s breakfast table during a comics festival in Sierre, Switzerland. The words are Pratt’s but they weren’t spoken to Campbell during that meeting. Instead, depending on your faith in the narrator, they were taken from an “older interview” with him where he recounts a kind of third person autobiography, which in turn describes everything that we have read up to that point.

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Utilitarian Review 3/5/11— The Roundtable Has Pants Introduction

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The Roundtable Has Pants

Next week we’re going to have a roundtable on Eddie Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants.

Or at least, it was supposed to be on The Years Have Pants. We’ve had a slight bit of mission creep. Specifically, the good folks at have agreed to join us, and over the course of the week they’re going to talk about The Playwright and some other Eddie Campbell works. Also, Robert Stanley Martin writing here is going to talk about The Fate of the Artist.

So it should be a feats for Campbellphiliacs! Hope you’ll join us, both here and at The Panelists! (We’ll link to their posts as they go up, just so you don’t miss any.)

Here’s the ongoing roundtable.

And now for your regularly scheduled Utilitarian Review.

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If Spiegelman Says It, It Must Be True

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I’ve been tussling with a blog full of academics over at the Comics Grid (they even quoted my brother at me!) on the subject of Maus and metafictional conceits. Ernesto Priego in the post argued that Maus smartly employs self-reflexivity and irony, particularly in its use of comic-book tropes like caricature.

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Don’t Bore the Children

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This was first published on Splice Today.
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I check Matthew Yglesias’ blog semi-regularly. He’s smart and a decent writer, and he hews close to the progressive party line. I’m a progressive myself, so that works out okay, and I happily click over to his place to find out why the United States isn’t as good as Scandinavia and why the Senate should be scrapped and why health care reform was a good idea.

Unfortunately, Yglesias also sticks to the progressive wisdom on education, where, as it happens, the progressive party line is now exactly the same as the conservative party line. This makes education that holy grail of punditry for progressives — a topic on which they can appear to buck conventional wisdom without offending anyone who matters. All the edgiest wonks agree: down with teacher’s unions; up with charter schools; and when in doubt, bore the kids.

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Frazetta’s Barnyard Comics

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HU alum Tom Crippen (who wrote with us in our blogspot days) sent us this piece. It’s good to have you back here, Tom!
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by Tom Crippen

Frank Frazetta (1928-2010) is probably the world’s best-known illustrator of fantasy adventure. He hit it big during the 1960s when his covers played a key part in the paperback boom that did so much for Conan the Barbarian and the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He stayed big all through the decades that followed. If you’re a dumb kid, or if any inch of you is a dumb kid, his paintings will overwhelm you. They’re like Led Zeppelin, premarital sex, or getting a driver’s license and driving fast enough to risk spinal injury. They’re as intense as psychedelic art but located at the other end of experience, the one where nothing matters but the juices flowing through your body. Look at them and your mind gets blotted out: there you are, hypnotized by muscle on muscle, shadow on shadow, detail on detail, and by the snakelike power that twists through his composition, because behind the whallop lies a superior degree of art.

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Agreeable Fascism: Oishinbo

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Oishinbo by Tetsu Kariya (writer) & Akira Hanasaki (artist)
(Pages read from left to right)

A very serious discussion awaits HU readers next week, so I’ve decided to dwell on one of the more simple-minded manga series published in the last few years — the info-food manga, Oishinbo. The sole purpose of this manga mutate is to entertain while conveying information. So not exactly the equivalent of Jeremy Issac’s The World at War, but certainly a distant cousin of Anthony Bourdain eating a warthog anus.
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Overthinking Things 03/02/2011

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One of the barriers for anyone wishing to begin reading comics for the first time is to figure out *where* to begin. This is true for manga, as well.

In Japan, the manga market is not organized by subject or genres as we speak about them. There is no “romance” or “mystery” section in a manga store. Manga is organized by audience based roughly on gender and age. Shoujo manga are “for girls,” Shounen manga “for boys,” Josei manga are “for women” and Seinen manga are “for men.” To buy a manga series in Japan, you must know the gender/age of its intended audience, the publisher and then the name of the author. Individual magazines might focus slightly more on a genre type (romance, action, sports, adventure) but they are more likely to focus on the perceived overall interests of the intended audience.

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