DWYCK: Word Made Inky Flesh

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Besides being a major publishing event in comics, Robert Crumb’s comics adaptation of Genesis is an interesting example of the medium’s intersection with literature and its potential to engage fundamental discourse in our culture. It offers itself as something of a lightning rod for the discussion of the suitability both of comics and one of comics’ most respected practitioners to handle such weighty material. Here at Hooded Utilitarian, the book has been hotly debated for over a month now; discussions have largely concentrated on Crumb’s specific qualities or failings, but one cannot help but feel that somewhere more fundamental questions are at stake. In the following, I will attempt to address some of these while offering my own commentary on Crumb’s work.

The book tells us a few things about the critical reception of comics: Crumb has chosen to retain the complete text of Genesis (mostly in Robert Alter’s modern American translation) and has meticulously sought to follow literally it in order to execute what he, with characteristic obfuscation and to the apparent frustration of many critics, calls a “straight illustration job”. The onus therefore is placed primarily on the images and their arrangement to carry Crumb’s contribution to biblical exegesis. But just as importantly, it is placed on the reader—and the critic—who wants to understand and appreciate this contribution seriously to consider these images, not merely to regard them as dressing for the text.

Several commentators on this blog and elsewhere evidently would have preferred a different book, one in which Crumb did not ‘just’ act as illustrator, but offered a literary reading of the text, dealing with theological questions and biblical scholarship. But this is not that book, and Crumb, not being a prose writer, scholar or theologian, was not equipped to write it in the first place. He is a cartoonist, and his five decade-long career should demonstrate that his expertise lies elsewhere, namely in his interest in people, or—if one wants to get all lofty—the human condition. Seeking literary exegesis from a book that in its very premise, ‘straight illustration’, eschews it, will necessarily mean coming up short, but that does not mean that the book does not have another kind of exegesis to offer, namely a visual one.

The fact that the textual narrative is given, forces critics to focus on that much appreciated, but chronically under-analyzed, aspect of comics: the visual. While few, I’m sure, would accept at face value Crumb’s disingenuous claim to neutrality—‘I just drew what’s there’—some seem nevertheless to be asking the wrong questions of his drawings. For reasons still under-examined, and in any case too complicated to go into here, the literary aspects of comics have been, and continue to be, subjected to much greater scrutiny than their visual counterparts in the fledgling field of comics criticism and scholarship. And when you undercut the former, as Crumb does here, it would appear that the critical demands placed upon them tend to be transferred to the latter. The preference, it seems, is for images that mean something fairly specific—‘literary images’, we might call them. Symptomatic of this attitude, critics often compliment or disparage in general terms ‘the art’ of a given comic, while critiquing ‘the story’ much more carefully. The present book has been subjected to a particularly notable short-circuit of this tendency, in which Crumb’s abilities as a draftsman have been praised, while his illustrations at the same time have been dismissed as heavy-handed, rote, and unenlightening.

This raises a number of fascinating questions about comics and cartooning. One is how we address the potential artistic autonomy of an image that simultaneously refers to a text. Another has to do with the specific characteristics of cartooning as a tradition of making images—a tradition to which Crumb clearly belongs. In a key passage of Robert Alter’s erudite and insightful review of the book, the biblical scholar and translator writes:

“Western art is of course rich in paintings that represent specific scenes from the Bible, and many of the stories in Genesis have attracted many painters. The banishment from the Garden, the binding of Isaac, the wooing of Rebekah, Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, Jacob blessing Ephraim and Manasseh: these have all been the subject of memorable and even great paintings. But all paintings isolate particular moments in the narrative for pictorial representation. They do not portray the whole tale, but only that part of the tale that has for some reason engaged them. And they do not tell, they show.”

And further,

“A visual representation of a character or an event is inevitably a specification. When we see Er as a cutthroat who gets his own throat cut, the meaning of “was evil in the eyes of the Lord” and the mechanism of “the Lord put him to death” are strongly stipulated, and other possible meanings are closed off. This foreclosure of ambiguity or of multiple meanings is intrinsic to the graphic narrative medium, and hence is pervasive in the illustrated text.”

Alter attempts to make a distinction between single images, i.e. painting, and ‘the graphic narrative medium’, i.e. comics, and further on he emphasizes that the bible unlike the novel, “does not use minute specification, but its very concision elevates ambiguity to a fine literary art”, making the problem of a comics adaptation doubly problematic. But the distinction he makes in both cases remains undefined, and ultimately is one of degree rather than kind, resulting in an absolutist statement that images ‘inevitably flatten’ the ambiguity of text. Although it presumably is not Alter’s intent, this argument ultimately asserts that language, somehow, is superior to images, in extreme consequence espousing iconoclasm.

His basic observation, that visual representation is more concrete than text, is clearly true; the mere fact that Genesis would need his translation for it to be intelligible to the English reader, while anyone would be able to recognize at least the basic forms and figures of, and to experience an emotional response to, say, the 6th-century mosaics illustrating it in San Vitale, Ravenna, bespeaks this. However, this has not prevented artists from illustrating the bible and other texts for millennia, nor has it prevented people from appreciating them without feeling hampered by their alleged ‘flattening’ of the source. Images, it would seem, have something to offer that language cannot deliver.

Where language is linear and unfolds over time, an image is much more immediate in effect, unfolding less logically. In terms of analysis, the coding of language demands a more specific kind of foreknowledge and a more logical approach than images, which—at least when mimetic—have a more immediately recognizable correlation to phenomena. Because of its more abstracted coding, language on one level is more ambiguous than images, which are forced to show their hand. However, because this coding to a large extent is symbolic, generally with no recognizable link between signifier and signified, its grasp on reality is determined more firmly. Images, while also coded, are less constricted in this respect, and therefore attain a different level of ambiguity unavailable in language. We experience this when trying to put into words something seen: how do you describe, for instance, exactly the facial expression or gesture of a person? Or how do you explain in words how an image just ‘works’, whether in terms of surface or space, color or line? These are essentially non-linguistic qualities, which makes putting them into words a difficult, inevitably inexact endeavor, which often requires great poetic skill satisfactorily to achieve, and even then it often ends up seeming to pin down and attempt to control something much less definite about the image, indeed ‘flatten’ it. This does not mean we should not try—the interplay of language and visuality is essential to us, but the problem of ekphrasis, is clearly a two-way street.

Returning to Crumb, what is interesting in this context is that he works in the tradition of cartooning, an approach to design that combines the observational with simplification and, often, exaggeration. It is more coded than more mimetic forms of image-making and is in this respect closer to text: it has, for example, developed certain types of shorthand more easily to suggest invisible phenomena or emotional states: speed-lines indicate movement, serpentines evoke smell, beads of sweat jumping off the brow of a character denote nervousness, etc., just as it has means of integrating graphically sound and language through sound effects, varied calligraphy, speech balloons, etc. Crumb makes plentiful use of this sophisticated vocabulary and in doing so situates himself in a tradition going back to the beginnings of written language, which itself evolved partly from pictograms. Hieroglyphics are the most obvious example: when we see Anubis or Hathor holding the ankh in an Egyptian mural, we are dealing essentially with the same synthesis of text and image that takes place in this modern vocabulary of cartooning.

Despite concerted attempts to break with it over the last century, naturalistic visual representation remains the dominant paradigm. Just like the separation in high art of text and image, however, it is a fairly recent, initially Western phenomenon, originating in the early modern period. The majority of world art throughout history shares with cartooning the simplification and codification of mimetic form. Indeed, as I have argued recently, even the lofty classical ideals that underlay the empiricist-naturalist approach to art of the renaissance are concerned with basic principles very similar to those of cartooning.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Village Kermis, c. 1567, oil on panel, 114 x 164 cm., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Crumb’s efforts to synthesize naturalism and simplification descend directly from the renaissance. The great paragon, and one of Crumb’s stated favorites, is the Flemish draftsman, printmaker, painter and, yes, cartoonist before the fact, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525/30-69). When he paints a Village Kermis (c. 1567), he gives us an acutely realistic rendition, in that it evokes a specific place and time better than just about anything else from the period, but it is not strictly naturalistic. Rather, it is possessed of a broadening of form and physiognomy, and a slight and humorous, but never mocking, exaggeration of same, which capture with remarkable acuity the gesture, expression and sheer life of people in the Flemish countryside in the second half of the 16th century. And indeed at any time—the people are recognizable not merely in historical or ethnographic terms, but as human beings. Their behavior is sufficiently if not fully consonant with our own experience: shouting drunkenly across a table for your mate’s attention, ebulliently pulling the girl you’re sweet on from whatever she’s doing to dance, losing contact with your inebriated dance partner, trying to communicate something profound to a sloshed friend taken with the music… We all know it.

Bruegel might not have achieved the same level of basic recognition if he had gone with more individualized characters, not to mention straight portraits, because these would introduce information in surplus of what he wanted to communicate, making them harder to process—especially today, four-and-a-half century later. Although such representations carry their own interest, this dissonance is evident in the donor portraits inserted into so many religious and allegorical scenes of the period. Instead, Bruegel is channeling the archetypes that modern neuroscience has posited as a model for how we understand the world, with scrupulous attention to the naturalistic detail that makes the scene real to us.

Rembrandt (1606-69) is another major artist who shared these basic concerns and worked analogously, if less broadly, with distilling his observations into potent, calligraphic form. His searching, selflessly confident hand works with abbreviation to suggest the world. His work with archetypical physiognomy can be seen, for example, in his character studies, probably drawn without reference—like a true cartoonist—but retaining a lifelikeness that derives from observation.

Rembrandt, Figure Studies, c. 1635, pen and brown ink, 178 x 184 mm., Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett

His drawings were rarely preparatory of works in other media, though types similar to the ones in the cited sketch often populate his narrative drawings, many of which are biblical. In addition to his substantial production of religious paintings and prints, the bible was an inexhaustible source of human interest for Rembrandt the draftsman throughout his life. Almost 700 sheets, or roughly one third of the surviving corpus, are devoted to biblical subjects. Unrelated to any commissions, this was a sustained, personal creative endeavor. He evidently had no ambition to cover the entirety of the bible, choosing instead to focus on the passages that interested him the most, to some of which he returned again and again over the years. This extended work is clearly more sophisticated, dedicated and emotionally complex than Crumb’s Genesis, but it is nevertheless instructive to compare the two, because of the intersection of their methods and goals.

Like Bruegel and Rembrandt, Crumb is a humanist (in the modern as opposed to the renaissance sense of the word), observant of human behavior and—as his richly varied sketchbooks demonstrate—clearly attentive to the world around him. At the same time he is a comics geek, who internalized the cartoon idiom of his idols at a very young age and has largely remained faithful to it, albeit increasingly implementing his observational insights to create comics with a rich texture of life.

To be sure, there is a misanthropic strain running through his work, which has occasionally approached the nihilistic, but his immersive preoccupation with the more problematic aspects of his psyche has a healthy, almost wholesome feel about it. Plus it is rendered with a genuine curiosity and interest both in the complex psychological issues involved and the physical reality of it, almost as if he were actualizing the cliché of art as exorcism. Add to this the interest in other people, how they live and behave, which was apparently catalyzed by his collaboration with Harvey Pekar in the mid- to late 70s through the 80s, and which surges through his work of the last few decades, through his biographies of blues musicians, his more sedate autobiographical comics, and his adaptations of Philip K. Dick, Charles Bukowski, James Boswell and, yes, Genesis.

The latter is his most extended actualization of these interests to date. It is intensely preoccupied with imagining the human reality of these stories, not just in the clearly perceived material terms, but also psychologically. By sustained effort, his imagery reminds us in a way that the text could not, lest it become repetitive, of the arid environment, the dependence on livestock, the toil of the fields, of the people who populate the pages in all their individualized glory, acting within the framework of this foundational narrative. Never a mere ‘illustration job’, Crumb’s Genesis is a work of visual exegesis. While the text is the text, the drawings are his specific interpretations of the events, experiences, and emotions of Genesis, and as thus place themselves comfortably in a lineage of bible illustration dating back almost two millennia.

Jeet Heer has already sketched out the imposing physicality of Crumb’s interpretation, while Ken Parille has emphasized its lack of idealism—both important aspects of it. And Alan Choate’s sensitive essay provides a closer reading, amply demonstrating its originality, while also pointing out some of the undeniable weak points. In the following, I will therefore limit myself to a partial reading of his take on the life of Abraham, which exemplifies beautifully his subtle visual exegesis. I apologize in advance for the inevitable flattening of the visual ambiguity of Crumb’s drawings, but will do my best to render them justice.

Spanning a human lifetime, the story of Abraham offers Crumb ample opportunity to examine the growth of a person in physical, psychological and spiritual terms. We first meet him in virile adulthood, setting out with slight trepidation written on his face, after a shocking but inspirational nighttime vision (12:4). Crumb poignantly mirrors this formative experience at the start of chapter 15, when Abraham, now an aging man, once again is called by God to venture forth, humble and with an air of resignation, feeling a creeping despair at his destiny. Misery awaits in the wilderness, and the ordeal he goes through at God’s command marks his face and body. Particularly moving is his broken, watery glare as God wakes him from his fitful slumber, telling him that his seed shall be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. Even if Abraham’s personal state at this point renders him incapable of pondering their meaning fully, God has made him internalize his words physically (15:10-15).

Then, later, in chapter 17 we have the covenant, the details of which God lays out with care to a much more sharply focused Abraham.

Crumb zeroes in on the prostrated patriarch, conveying his thoughts through changes in his facial expression. The page narrating 17:8-17 is particularly arresting in its flickering portrayal of alternating disbelief, doubt, anger, surprise, and contemplation of the ramifications of God’s words, ending the page with an image that, in seeming contradiction of the text’s description of Abraham laughing to himself, shows him staring out at the reader, as if addressing us, not in disbelief but rather with a dawning awareness of his position in God’ plan. He puts this awareness to immediate use when pleads for Ishmael in presumed humbleness, which gives way to genuine relief when God hears him.

There is humor in this passage. Crumb seems to be expressing his own incredulity at God’s stipulations, but also manages to convey a more genuinely existential feeling of sensing your destiny. After this, Crumb’s Abraham is clearly emboldened and ends up negotiating with the Lord about the fate of Sodom, exhibiting a craftiness akin to the one he showed much earlier in his encounter with Pharaoh (12:11-20), but simultaneously aware of the risk. When it (seemingly) works, he wipes his brow in typical cartoon fashion, beads of sweat leaping from his head (18:22-33).

A fitting payoff to the pedagogical gesturing of the preceding conversation, this is typical of Crumb’s synthesis of subtle expression and cartoon breadth. To some, this might be off-putting in much the same way as his choice of a consolidated visual archetype—the white-bearded patriarch—for God, instead of something more original. But Crumb is working in a tradition of biblical illustration that predates modernist notions of originality and the concomitant, almost pathological fear of cliché. The old masters had no compunction about stating the obvious when necessary, having God point at his subjects when giving them instructions, or having the latter point to the sky when invoking His name. These are tried and tested conventions for conveying vital information—for storytelling—that may be used to enhance the power or resonance of an artwork, just as well as they might diminish it.

Rembrandt, Abraham Dismissing Hagar and Ishmael, c. 1642-43, pen and brown ink, brown wash, 184 x 23.5 mm., London, British Museum

Rembrandt provides an illuminating example. His c. 1642-43 rendition of Abraham Dismissing Hagar and Ishmael employs a number of such loaded shortcuts: the patriarch placing his hand on young Ishmael’s head in blessing, Hagar drying her eye, the instigating Sarah peeking from behind the door in the background. And yet, this does not undercut the emotional charge of the scene—the tender, trembling weight of the hand on the boy’s head, itself turned from the viewer in emphasis of the child’s youthful impeccability. He is dressed for the road ahead, perhaps grasping only vaguely its ominous significance. And at the center is Abraham, clearly torn.

Of course, such things are subjective and our tolerance of expressive gesture surely varies. To my mind, Crumb’s resort to cliché is a problem especially when accompanied by lack of imagination: Suat has already pointed out, for example, how his slightly ironic depiction of the Garden of Eden as a sort of rustic Disneyland would have been better served by a more evocative interpretation (plus Crumb kind of sucks at drawing animals).

And the portrayal of Hagar also has its problems, especially in the instances where the use of cartoon shorthand clashes with a subtler approach: the thick, gelatinous tears sliding down her cheeks, for example, disrupt Crumb’s attentive work with body language and framing in an otherwise effective sequence; though it may not carry the resonance of Rembrandt’s depiction, his version of Abraham’s dismissal is nevertheless quietly powerful.

Crumb’s rendition of the scene in chapter 22 of Abraham’s sacrifice has understandably been the object of special scrutiny. Comparison with one of Rembrandt’s versions, his 1655 etching, elucidates how comics offer a different set of possibilities to single illustration.

Rembrandt, The Sacrifice of Abraham, 1655, etching, 156 x 130 mm.

Working for public consumption here, Rembrandt is less abbreviated than in his drawings, but he still works with distillation, condensing the whole story into one situation, unifying the figures into a Trinity: Abraham’s profane and sacred love are embodied in his right and left hand, respectively—one carefully but firmly shielding the eyes of his son, who is propped rather harshly against his knee, the other resolutely wielding the knife (it should be noted that it is contested whether Rembrandt deliberately designed the composition with the print process’ reversal in mind). The angel’s intervention releases softly the hardened despair written in Abraham’s face, drawing a beginning tremble.

Though not a Rembrandt, Crumb brings his own affecting interpretation to this story of faith and love, narrating sequentially the emotional and spiritual trial of Abraham. The punctuation of his three responses, “Here I am”, given by Alter’s translation (22: 1, 7, 11) and organized by Crumb at one to a page, takes us through his transformation from old-age contentment and confidence through the threat of loss of faith to spiritual tremor when it is upheld.

While the portrayal of Isaac is erratic—his youthful enthusiasm as they leave the servants is touching, his teardrop when being tied unnecessary—the inner turmoil experienced by Abraham is sensitively handled: the doubt creeping in as his son calls him, making him stop and ponder, is empathetically observed, as is the resigned guile in the following panel. With this in mind, the rage clearly gripping him in the last panel of the same page seems in part a way for him of tempering and controlling his doubt.

Lastly, the expression on his face as he hugs his son after God’s intervention is rich in conflicted emotion, while strong in faith. God’s words about how his seed shall bless all the nations of the earth recalls the earlier scene of misery in chapter 15, emphasizing the growth of Abraham’s insight and the resolution of his covenant.

With the story of Abraham, Crumb thus provides an involved interpretation of man’s relationship with God and his negotiation of the sacred and profane in himself. Crumb draws from the text profane implications of self-interest and -awareness, highlighting the issue, central to Judeo-Christian theology, of personal agency in the interaction with God. Crumb’s Abraham retains a dominantly profane position through most of this narrative of power and responsibility, but the shock he experiences at the sacrifice, and especially that moment of insight at its end, he ends up acknowledging, if perhaps not exactly embracing, the transience of these concerns and the meaning of faith.

Crumb gives lends all this further context through his very different accounts of the other such constellations in Genesis: Noah’s frank, almost innocent trust in his course of action, Isaac’s softer, more placid acquiescence, Jacob’s self-awareness and determination, Joseph’s troubling inspiration and his increasing control of it, etc. The result is a wonderfully rich response to the text.

Crumb’s visualization of Genesis actualizes a set of potentialities in the text that points our reading of it in certain directions. Ultimately, this has less to do with its form than it is a condition of all interpretations: Kierkegaard’s multiple retellings of Abraham’s sacrifice in Fear and Trembling, previously cited here by Noah (B.), also spin their source, emphasizing and making more concrete certain aspects, thereby opening us to new ways of understanding it.

From an art historical point of view, Crumb’s treatment is interesting in that it self-consciously and unabashedly employs a visual vernacular—cartooning—for a purpose to which it has only rarely been used in the modern era, as well as a form—comics—which has only recently started embracing this kind of material, and being transformed by doing so. Although this is all part of a revolution in the medium to which he himself helped laying the foundation, the work inscribes itself in a tradition much older than that, finding the new in the old. Crumb’s Genesis is, to paraphrase Chris Ware’s oft-quoted line, an attempt to express human complexity with the tools of jokes, but like his younger colleague he is simultaneously recalling that this might have been its purpose all along. Emblematic of comics’ current state of evolutionary flux, it is a compelling demonstration of some of the central issues with which cartoonists are increasingly dealing these days, surely with fascinating developments to come. A masterful piece of cartoon exegesis, it makes inky flesh of the bible’s word that encourage us to return to the source with new questions.

The image at the top is: Rembrandt, Abraham Conversing with the Angel, c. 1636-37, pen and brown ink, 108 x 114 mm., formerly London, private collection.

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Update: The whole Genesis roundtable is here.

Phooey From Me To You: I Yama Lonely Cowboy

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“I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye.”  —Jack Handey

Popeye was pretty far removed from his Golden Age when I was first introduced to him, probably through some combination of Hanna-Barbera’s The All-New Popeye Hour (1978-81) on Saturday morning television, whichever Famous Studios shorts were packaged for syndication at the time, and the various coloring books and toys that piled up around our house.  This was a Popeye who rarely hit Bluto, was a doting uncle to his nephews Peepeye, Pupeye, Pipeye and Poopeye (Huey, Dewey and Louie got off easy, didn’t they?), and was pretty much a total chump unless he managed to down some spinach, which always happened just about a minute before the cartoon ended.

Despite these shortcomings, I was a dedicated Popeye fan, and could draw a fair likeness of the character before I could write my own name.  I’m not sure when I first heard about the Robin Williams Popeye movie, but I do remember it feeling like years for it to reach our local theater (and it probably did take the better part of a year for it to reach our second-run movie house), and I remember being blown away when I finally saw it, all of five years old at the time.  Great scenery, great actors, great characters, fun songs—and Robin Williams as Popeye and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl are still two of the best-cast live actors-as-cartoon characters in movie history.

Jules Feiffer’s goal with his screenplay was to pay tribute to E.C. Segar’s original comic strip, with a back-to-basics approach.  Popeye was an unpredictable tough guy, Bluto was a creep, Wimpy was selfish, and Olive was so fickle that you really had to wonder why people were trying so hard to impress her.  Toss in Poopdeck Pappy, who was an out-and-out bastard, and you had some of the greatest characters in comic strip history.  (Well, not Bluto, who only figured prominently in one Segar Thimble Theater storyline, but I’m sure we’d have seen more of him in the comics eventually.)

So what was the end result of this return to Popeye’s roots?  Underwhelming box office, immediate attempts from Robert Altman and Robin Williams to distance themselves from the picture, and a relaunch of the Saturday morning cartoon which included Olive Oyl and Alice the Goon in a shameless Private Benjamin knockoff.  As if that weren’t enough to kill off these characters, four years after that, Popeye and Olive were married off and settled into suburban life in Popeye and Son, a premise which turned me off so much that I never watched a single episode.

There were signs of life along the way, however.  Fantagraphics’ reprint series The Complete E.C. Segar Popeye ran from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, which roughly matched up with underground cartoonist Bobby London’s tenure on the strip.  While I was sadly oblivious to Popeye’s print adventures, the rise of cable television and the need for cheap programming meant that Ted Turner was filling about six hours every day on each of his networks with old cartoons, and the Fleischer Popeye cartoons featured heavily in the rotation, with nary a Famous Studios or a Gene Deitch Prague-produced Popeye to be seen.

The early Fleischer cartoons were even better than the live-action film, with random acts of violence, oddly synched vocal tracks which didn’t match up with the characters’ on-screen speech, and the broad personalities which made Segar’s characters popular in the first place.  Popeye always tries to do the right thing, whether he’s capable or not; Bluto always tries to stop Popeye, whether he should or not; Olive’s out for attention, whether she deserves it or not; and Wimpy could care less, as long as his stomach’s full.

Watching the earliest Popeye cartoons again in preparation for my contribution to the roundtable, I was struck by just how much care and effort the Fleischer studios put into them.  Popeye was incredibly popular with American audiences when the first animated cartoons were released, and the Fleischers probably would have cleaned up with an average or even subpar product.  But they put their best crew on the job, wrote some great songs, cast some brilliant voice actors and created some classics that are still fun to watch more than 70 years later.

But better still, better than Robin Williams on the big screen, better than Jack Mercer and Mae Questel voicing the Fleischer cartoons, better than all of that were Segar’s original strips.  One of the great pleasures in being a comics fan is discovering something new and unusual, unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.  And even better, in my book, is finding out that the original incarnation of a favorite cartoon or comic was significantly better than the stuff that you thought you’d been enjoying.  I experienced that by going from Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends in the early 1980s to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man reprints in the late 1990s.  I’m pretty sure that Chris Claremont’s late 1990s version of the Fantastic Four was hitting the stands around the time that Marvel decided to issue the Essential Fantastic Four collections, reprinting the original series by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.  And my main exposure to Plastic Man before reading Art Spiegelman’s New Yorker article on Jack Cole was the Ruby-Spears animated series of the early 1980s, Hula-Hula and all.

And I had the same reaction to Segar’s strips that I had to the aforementioned examples:  “Where has this been all my life?”

Since I can’t (as yet) go back in time to drag my younger self away from The All-New Popeye Hour, Pac-Man and The Snorks and beg myself to read Segar’s Thimble Theater instead, there’s still time to save some of the unitiated out there.  If you’ve only seen the Popeye animated cartoons, and God help you if you actually watched Popeye and Son, pick up one of the Segar reprints as soon as humanly possible.  Start in the mid-1930s, when Popeye finds his long-lost father (and finds out that he should probably stay long-lost).  Or when Popeye takes over a local newspaper, and decides to spice up the headlines by beating up townsfolk and blowing his entire payroll on staff cartoonists.  Or the time Popeye becomes “dictipator” of a small island nation.  Or the fact that Popeye’s first plan of attack in any complicated situation almost always involves him dressing in unconvincing drag, which is guaranteed to fool his intended target.

Or better yet, dive right in at the beginning.  “’Ja think I’m a cowboy?” is still one of the all-time great first lines of any cartoon character ever, and it still holds up 80 years later.  Segar grows as a storyteller by leaps and bounds throughout the 1930s, and it’s easy to see why just about every cartoonist who grew up in that decade worshipped him.  Thimble Theater is one of those rare strips from the early 20th century that I don’t need to qualify with “it’s pretty entertaining for its time,” or “you have to remember that humor was different then.”  Popeye’s mangling of the English language (and his mangling of people) is as entertaining now as it was during the Hoover administration, and that’s why his legend endures.  It’s a real testament to Segar’s original work that no amount of terrible animation, kid sidekicks and general neglect can keep a good sailor down.

Utilitarian Review 8/13/10

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On HU

This has been a chaotic week for me, and so things are a little out of sync. Thanks to both our readers and guest posters for bearing with us. And thanks to Caro for keeping the trains running on time.

This week has mostly been devoted to our Popeye roundtable. There are going to be a couple more posts in the roundtable next week by Andrew Farago and Robert Stanley Martin.

Sunday incidentally will also see the delayed but much anticipated post in our series on Crumb’s Genesis by Matthias Wivel.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I have a post on Splice Today about my enthusiasm for the Bangles

That’s the point of pop music in some sense, though; it’s addictive. Not like heroin that’ll land you in prison with the cool kids, but like sucking down a bagful of jelly bellies and then feeling sick and ridiculous before going out and buying another one. And part of the addictiveness and the ridiculousness is, really, that it’s jelly bellies; they’re right out there. Everyone can do it. It’s not a subculture you can call your own; it’s pop—it belongs to everyone. The Bangles don’t give you any cred. Everybody loved them and that was the point, and now everybody’s moved on and if you still love them you’re either remembering your youth or (like me) you’re subject to a meaningless and harmless idiosyncrasy. The ingratiating hooks are there to be ingratiating. What else could they be for?

Also at Splice I have a short essay about E. Nesbit’s wonderful Book of Dragons.

At Comixology I writer about the Oprah comic book.

With comics, I’m never taken aback by lousy quality. After all, most things are lousy — maybe comics are a little worse than everything else, but not enough to squawk about. But the marketing confusion in even comics that have no point other than their marketing: I can never get over that. Why churn out this horrible Oprah Winfrey piece of dreck if not to make money? And how can you make money if you don’t even know who you’re trying to sell to? I mean, I bought this in a direct market store. What are they doing even selling it through the direct market? What venue could they find where folks would be less likely to pick this up?

Other Links

Tucker’s Comics of the Weak this week is one of his all time all times, I think.

And Tucker and David Brothers are blogging their way through some interesting looking Black Panther stories. Good week on the Factual Opinion!

Phooey From Me to You: Huh

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Back in the day, I used to watch Popeye cartoons.  I liked them OK, although I enjoyed Scoobie Doo more.  Olive Oyl was feisty, and she didn’t wait around to be rescued.  She was a force to be reckoned with.  I never really liked Popeye himself, since he was kind of dumb and kind of violent.

I never got a chance to read Popeye in comics form as a kid, and that’s kind of a shame, I think.  As a youngun I would have really enjoyed the strange story lines and the occasional random slapstick.  The art’s pretty good and the ink is interesting.

As an adult though…  I’m going to admit upfront that I just don’t enjoy slapstick humor.  I like when bad guys get smashed because they’re bad, but I don’t find it funny.  I can’t watch reality TV because it makes me intensely uncomfortable and embarrassed for the people on the show.  I always hated the Three Stooges.  For me, Popeye was an uncomfortable read.  I just didn’t enjoy it much.  I could see why people loved it, because as I said, the stories do go interesting places and the art is pretty good, but I spent so much time cringing because Popeye beat up a cow or a random person.  It’s just…not for me.  I ended up thinking I’m such a girl, but that’s not really it.  It’s not about being a girl and not enjoying this comic.  It’s just not my kind of art.

Like Noah, I would read a bit and realize that what I really needed to do was scrub the bathroom.  Or do laundry.  Or weed the garden.  Get the oil changed in the car.  And once you’re starting to look forward to battling the garden slugs, it’s probably time to set down the comic, no matter how beautifully presented in the Fantagraphics book.

I wish I had something weighty to add, but I don’t.  I can see the appeal, and I didn’t hate it.  I just didn’t connect with it.

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Update by Noah: The whole Popeye roundtable is here.

Phooey from me to you: Who cares about Sappo?

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For me, E.C. Segar’s Popeye remains, no matter what Noah says, not only one of the great comics of the 20th century but a great piece of Americana as well. It manages to combine hilarious slapstick, daffy absurdity, high adventure, sentimental melodrama and still create genuine emotion and care for the cast’s well-being. It deserves every ounce of acclaim and high regard it’s earned over the years.

But I’m not going to be talking about any of that today. Instead I’m going to be talking about Popeye’s less benighted comic strip brother, Sappo.

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Phooey From Me To You: Masters of American Television

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I organized this roundtable as an excuse to look at some of the E.C. Segar Popeye strips. I’d never read them, and many people love them, obviously, so I figured this was a good chance to catch up. After reading a couple of reviews, I tried the Plunder Island volume, often mentioned as the highpoint of the series.

And after reading through the Plunder Island strips, I can say with some assurance that, man, this is not for me. Though I enjoyed the energy of the drawing, and the Sea Hag and Goon provided some evocatively creepy moments early on, the limited range of the humor, and its empty-headedness, quickly becomes numbing. Wimpy is lazy, Wimpy eats a lot, Popeye is noble, defends the underdog, and always wins. It’s like Garfield meets Superman. And, you know, I don’t hate Garfield or Superman…but I’ve read enough of both to last me the rest of my life. Honestly, I couldn’t even finish the book. I got distracted by Kierkegaard, and then by Derrida — and when you’re procrastinating by reading Derrida, you know you really, really don’t want to be reading what you’re supposed to.

If I had read the whole book, I’d probably be really thoroughly irritated and be spitting piss and vinegar (that metaphor isn’t exactly right…but onward.) As it is, though, I don’t have much resentment built up. Popeye isn’t at all pretentious — punch, eat, mangled English, laff. I don’t find it that funny, but I can’t get mad at it either. As I said, I even appreciate the art in a generalized way (cute cows!) If people like this, I’ve got no beef (as it were.)

While I’m not that interested in the content of Popeye, the strip does raise some interesting issues. Specifically — well, as I said, this is a very unpretentious strip, which relies almost entirely on the most basic kind of repetitive gastronomic and pugnacious humor. Whatever the drawing’s charm, there’s none of the sweeping formal adventurousness of Little Nemo here. I guess you could compare it to Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplain…but it seems to have at least as much in common with sitcoms; the same zany characters performing the same zany routines week after week in a timeless round of entertaining tedium.

Comics is often compared to film and literature and visual art, but it’s much less frequently linked to television. There are certainly many parallels between TV and comicdom, whether in method of delivery (they’re both among the few contemporary art forms that are serialized as a matter of course), or in material for adaptation (Buffy in one direction, Smallville in the other), or in creator overlap (Brian K. Vaughn, Joss Whedon, Dave Johnson.) But nobody wants to make a big deal out of it since nobody but nobody wants to be linked to television, a medium which has gone more than half a century without ever attaining even a morsel of aesthetic credibility.

People do wax enthusiastic about individual shows, of course, whether it be the Wire or Mad Men or Battlestar Galactica. But that enthusiasm is perpetrated with an amazing lack of ambition or anxiety. When people say that Lost is awesome, they rarely do so by saying “Lost is awesome — and worthy to be compared to the achievement of the Coen Brothers!” People love Joss Whedon, but nobody says he’s Quentin Tarantino, much less Orson Welles. Similarly, there’s virtually no effort that I’ve ever seen to solidify television’s bona-fides through canon formation. I’m sure someone has made a list of the best 100 television shows (here’s one, for example) but such lists don’t get tons of press and tend to be presented as much as personal preference as “this is what all educated people must be familiar with.”

Even the criteria for creating such a canon seems almost completely untheorized. What are the aesthetics of great television? What would a great television show look like? What issues would it address? How would a canonical television show distinguish itself from film, or from video art? Could great television be video art? Could there be a gallery show of television video art, the way there are gallery shows of comic art? What would that be like? What would be chosen?

Of course, some people will probably argue that there couldn’t be such an exhibit because television is a wasteland and the whole medium should be dropped in a well or eaten by bears. (Domingos, I’m looking at you.) But…I don’t know. I look at Popeye, which has good visual aesthetics and competent jokes and has been firmly placed in the comics canon, and I think — television could do that.

The classic Sesame Street animations are brilliant and weird; I don’t see how they’re aesthetically any less accomplished than E. C. Segar’s drawings, and they’re certainly more conceptually adventurous. The Batman TV series is visually bizarre; those giant freeze cones, the slanted villain hideout with the girl in the cage in the background — it seems infinitely more inventive than many of the comic book sources, and the dialogue and plotting is so arch it’s a wonder everyone’s eyebrows don’t just fall off. The Abbott and Costello routine does nothing in particular with visuals, but the escalating insanity of the dialogue seems, at least to me, much more manic and witty than the Popeye strips.

My point here isn’t that these are all superior to Popeye and therefore deserve to be treated as canonical culture. Nor is it that television in general should be seen as a (potentially) serious art form. Rather, I’m just saying that what is and isn’t considered art is really arbitrary. Comics critics have spent a lot of energy for the past decades trying to get comics accepted as high art. They’ve had definite (if not unqualified) success, and now even frankly pulp, unpretentious works like Popeye can be put up in galleries, given lavish reissues, and hailed as canonical examples of the form. And, of course, the critical zeitgeist has created room for more explicitly highbrow work by everyone from Chris Ware to Lilli Carre.

At some point, you do wonder, though…what if comics had taken television’s route? No anxiety, no ambition, no real critical battles over whether it could be high art or whether that would be a good idea. Would that have been categorically worse? The anxiety is certainly a spur…but it can be a cage as well. In any case, I don’t think I do comics in general any harm by saying, you know, it doesn’t really matter that much whether Popeye is or is not great art.

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For a more enthusiastic take on (among other things) Popeye’s relation to artsy-fartsy comics, read Shaenon Garrity’s appreciation.

This is part of a roundtable on Popeye. All posts in the series can be read here.

Phooey From Me to You: Six or Seven Things I Know about Popeye

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1. Popeye is old. I don’t mean the strip is old.  Everybody knows the strip is old.  I mean Popeye himself is supposed to be a senior citizen.  He’s a grizzled old sailor, with emphasis on the old, with extra old added on.  Although his official bio now describes him as 34, according to the Segar-era strips he’s in his sixties, and his father (more on him later) is pushing 100.  That’s why Popeye is bald and missing an eye.  Because of the oldness.

2. Popeye’s mythic origin is fundamentally flawed. In his youth, Fionn mac Cumhaill, the trickster hero of Irish folklore, gained his powers by tasting the flesh of the bradan feasa, the salmon of knowledge, which contained all the knowledge in the world.  When Fionn mac Cumhaill burned his thumb cooking the salmon and automatically stuck the burned thumb in his mouth, the knowledge flowed from the salmon into Fionn.  After that, Fionn mac Cumhaill knew everything and could access any information he needed by sucking on his thumb.

Popeye, in his old age, got his incredible toughness by staying up all night below decks rubbing the head of Bernice the Wiffle Hen, a bird with the power to bestow supernatural good luck on those who touched her.  All the luck flowed out of the hen and into Popeye, rendering the hen useless to would-be gambling kings Castor Oyl and Ham Gravy and transforming Popeye into an unstoppable demigod.

Later, as everyone knows, the story was changed so that Popeye gained his strength from eating spinach.  This introduced the crucial element of consumption that gives the core myth its memetic power, but in the process the totemic animal was lost.  It’s a shame we can’t have both, the animal and the vegetable, but everyone forgets about the hen.

3. Popeye is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. E.C. Segar drew Thimble Theatre for ten years before introducing Popeye.  It took him the length of the entire run of Calvin & Hobbes just to find his main character.  Popeye sidled in through the seedy back docks.  He was not the kind of hero you could plan for.  Who could have predicted that a cranky old sailor who looks like he smells funny—everyone in Thimble Theatre looks like he or she smells funny—would become the idol of millions, making Mickey Mouse shake in his polished red shoes and enduring for generations beyond?

If you are a writer, if you are an artist, you have to learn to open yourself to Popeye, to be ready if Popeye should happen.  But at the same time you have to know that Popeye will probably never happen.  Maybe there’s a hen you can rub.

4. Popeye is a dick. He’s a lot more heroic in the cartoons.  In the Segar strips, aside from sporadic and whimsical urges to aid the downtrodden, a.k.a. widders and orfinks what ain’t got none, Popeye devotes himself largely to being an insufferable cuss.  This is, after all, the guy who not only kicked poor Castor Oyl out of his own comic strip, but banged Castor’s sister just to show he meant business.

He’s consistently awful to Olive, of course.

Back in the day, Segar got complaints that Popeye was a bad role model for children.  He solved this problem as every similarly beset writer should: by creating a nearly identical but even more meretricious character to make Popeye look good by comparison.  Thus the strip gained Popeye’s father, Pappy, who looks exactly like Popeye with stubble.  Apparently aware that he lives in a crudely-drawn strip, Pappy sometimes disguises himself as his son by shaving so he can make time with Olive.

5. Bobby London got Popeye. None of the other legacy cartoonists really have.  They love Popeye, I’m sure.  They want to do right by Popeye, to pay just tribute to Segar’s creation, to be responsible bearers of the standard.  London, by contrast, used his run on the Popeye strip to see exactly how much he could get away with before an outraged syndicate, newspaper market, readership, and world kicked him out for the sake of common decency.  He probably made some people cry.  And that’s what Popeye is all about, Charlie Brown.

6. You can go to Sweethaven. The village built for the 1980 movie still stands.  Looks cleaner now, actually, judging from the photos.  It’s in Malta and is open to the public as a tourist attraction, complete with movie props, stage shows, and a movie theater showing clips from the film.

I like the movie.  It’s messy and mumbly and wanders all over the place, which suggests that the filmmakers got Popeye too.  The strange grimness of the musical numbers always makes me smile.  As far as superhero movies go, it’s higher on my list than Iron Man.

7. Popeye Ruined My Life. I found Thimble Theatre in the old Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics in my high-school library.  It was something I hadn’t seen before: a funny adventure strip, a gag strip with a story.  It had long stories, stretching for months or years, with pirates and gamblers and thieves.  I wanted to do that, and I did, and now I’ve been doing it for ten years.  Without Popeye.  All you can do is be ready.

Comic strips, unlike comic books, boast a genteel legacy.  The elegant stagework of Little Nemo, the bohemian poetry of Krazy Kat, the quiet philosophy of Peanuts, the Disneyfied poly-sci of Pogo…it’s all so very convincingly Art.  Even the rugged adventure strips are rugged in a pleasant, Brylcreemed, magazine-illustration way.  And then there’s Popeye, who cusses and fights and brags about cussing and fighting, who comes staggering up drunk from the lower decks inhabited by all those weird old Jazz Age strips with the blotchy art and spindly lettering and betting tips and Yiddish and plop takes and Nov Shmoz Ka Pop? I don’t know what kind of theater Thimble Theatre is, but Winsor McCay probably wouldn’t want to do his quick-draw act there.  Popeye hangs on, indestructible (because of the hen), the last of a tougher, smellier, funnier breed.

He also has a damn catchy theme song.

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Update by Noah: This is the first in roundtable on Popeye. You can read the whole roundtable here.