Fandom Confessions: Ultra Klutz

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So far in this roundtable, Noah’s fessed up to Freudian SF and Tom to… Nabokov? If that’s the bar, let’s limbo.

My Younger Self (not drawn by Kate Beaton, sadly) had the first sin of reading lots of comics without reading the words. When you’re indiscriminate in the 80s with a forest out back, you cut to the chase. So I never suffered through John Byrne’s captions. My dutiful brother actually read all the words and some Hardy Boys to boot, so he could fill me in if the plot got confusing. I don’t remember if I made up the plots or inferred them, though I spent hours copying the drawings. I still have vivid memories of certain pages and panels, like silent cinema dreams.

I did, however, read both the words and pictures for a few choice comics. Most were newspaper strips, like Bloom County and those B.C. paperbacks. Others I got at the store, in particular a Canadian parody of network TV called To Be Announced. And the one I remember best: Ultra Klutz by Jeff Nicholson.

This comic, a black-and-white slapstick parody of Ultraman that quickly became a sprawling epic, is my second confession. I don’t know that I can recommend it. I do know that it is one of my favorite works from childhood. While other kids read Tintin and Raymond Briggs, I read Ultra Klutz over and over. I’m sure UK is no Tintin in Tibet, but for me it was a perfect substitute for the Godzilla movies our UHF antenna could only pick up on a clear day.

Even though I read all the words, I didn’t get the drunk jokes. It didn’t matter. The buoyant art transfixed me with clear, easy to copy forms. The story I liked as well: a fast food worker from planet Klutzoid ends up on earth, basically becomes Ultraman, and starts fighting the monsters popping up in Japan. He’s not very good at it. The monsters get odder, going from a Godzilla clone to a giant tin can and the Devious Yuffle Worm, looking smart with a handlebar moustache and Mickey Mouse gloves. The plot gets odder too, with parodies of whatever was current in the Comics Buyers’ Guide. There’s a continuity agent, some off-DC heroes, and plenty of metafiction. I think the plot’s tangle didn’t offend my younger self because the main characters were still pretty dumb. Nicholson has a gift for drawing boneheads, which I mean as a compliment and hope he would take as one.

I’m sure there are a dozen ways to criticize Ultra Klutz. Its art shows Nicholson learning when he switched from pen to brush. It might have had a Cerebus infection. And its ideas are so messy, so bursting and scattered, that it needs a lot of generosity from its readers. I can’t even call it representative of its time. I don’t care. If I pull it off the shelf I end up reading the whole thing. I don’t do that with any other comic from that time, and only a few from my first few years of getting back into the form.

I stopped reading comics for almost ten years when adolescence hit, trading CBG for CBGB’s. Coming back, I found Jeff Nicholson starting to come into his own. I enjoyed his psychological horror series Through the Habitrails, originally in the anthology Taboo. I also enjoyed his solo issue of The Dreaming, with the pumpkin-head guy. But tastes change. By the time he started Colonia, a pirate fantasy, he seemed to have found a stride that would finally bring him a wider audience. I had to labor to read fantasy at all, so I wished him well in my head and dug into something more convoluted which I’ve since forgotten.

Nicholson wasn’t working that whole time, though. He’d actually quit comics more than once because of how its market punishes artists who fall between its mainstream and counterculture. He’s been nominated for Eisner Awards and Colonia had positive reviews. Now a trip to his Colonia Press website finds nothing but that girl with a backpack and a clutch of ads. It’s done.

He’s moved on to a new site for a cartoon based on his Father & Son comic. However, on his “Chronology” page, you’ll find a page and some covers from Ultra Klutz, as well a very personal overview of his career. At the least, read the last section, “Leaving Comics,” which starts with:

Facing the fact that I had invested my entire life in a dying medium was a very painful thing to do…

He breaks down the numbers that show why he never finished Colonia. It seems like a good decision. He also explains how he realized he was done with the form, which feels like a confession itself. It’s strange to read with a child’s affection lingering in me. I’m not particularly nostalgic, so I think I’ll just stop.

Hideo Azuma: Disappearance Diary

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Hideo Azuma
Disappearance Diary
Fanfare
softcover/$22.99
B&W/194 pages
9788496427426

The Lady and the Tramp

I probably tend to idealize manga a bit — Japanese comics often seem to me to be less insular, less exclusively male-oriented, and overall better than their American counterparts. Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary is, in this context, a nice corrective, for it is as monotonous, as self-absorbed, and as relentlessly guy-fixated as the work of any interchangeable American autobio wunderkind who ever snapped his arm in half while trying to simultaneously lay out a grid and pat himself on the back.

Admittedly, Azuma’s style is more polished and expressive, and his boxy layouts more inventive, than you’d find in the work of most of his American peers. His cartooning chops are impeccable, and many of the small moments are great: he learns how to tie his boots like a laborer in a flurry of expressive motion lines, for example, and his dts summon up a host of adorably blobby hallucinatory critters. Alas, these bright spots are methodically buried under the steady drip-drip of the tiny panels and the mundanity of their content. I’m willing to look at one drawing of Azuma vomiting; three or four seems a bit excessive; twelve and I’m wondering why in hell I offered to review this book.

If the art is repetitive, it’s got nothing on the writing. Reading Disappearance Diary is like being locked in a room with that boring guy (you know the one) who can’t tell the difference between an interesting detail and his own belly-button lint, and who is constantly telling the punch line in the middle and then going back to it three or four times to explain why it’s funny. The pages drag on and on — Azuma gets up, Azuma does random uninteresting thing, Azuma does other random uninteresting thing, Azuma goes back to tell you about the uninteresting thing he did yesterday, Azuma goes to sleep, Azuma wakes up…..

What’s most frustrating is that it seems like there really is a worthwhile plot buried here somewhere under the soporific storytelling skills. The narrative focuses on a decade long period of crisis in Azuma’s life during which the successful manga-ka quit his job to become homeless, returned to work and quit again to become a gas pipe-layer, returned again and then descended into alcoholism. Obviously, something worth hearing about was going on in his head — and just as obviously, he doesn’t want to discuss it. Azuma avoids introspection with an intensity and vigor that is positively incriminating. Instead, of explaining himself, he focuses on the details of daily life, apparently under the assumption that there is something intrinsically funny or interesting about the life of a homeless man, or that of a pipe-layer, or that of a hospitalized alcoholic. In other words, the lumpen proletariat is supposed to have innate anthropological interest, a theory which is both offensive and, as it turns out, false. It’s no more revealing to see Azuma search for cigarette butts every day than it is to watch him dig a hole every day than it is to watch him trying to meet his deadline as a manga artist every day. Whether you’re a big-game hunter, an international spy, or a garbage man, without emotional context the routines of daily life are just routines.

So what is the emotional context or background? What would give this drab plod some meaning? There’s not a ton to go on, but it seems to me that the big, unanswered question in the manga is about Azuma’s relationship with his wife. We hear very little about her. In the opening sequence, when he talks about quitting it all and running away to live in the woods, he mentions his editors and friends, but never his wife. Over the course of the whole book, though, a few details come out. We learn that she puts out a missing persons report on him both times he disappears. We learn that she acts as his assistant on his comics, and that she makes some effort to get him to handle his assignments in a responsible fashion. In the last chapter, we see her committing him to an institution for alcoholism. While he’s there, he mentions briefly that he is afraid she will divorce him, though she apparently never does.

In a couple of bonus interviews, we find out a bit more. Azuma’s wife apparently thought he was dead at one point during his first disappearance, and during his second she remodeled the house, eliminating his studio. Also he has kids, and they didn’t recognize him when he came back the second time. Oh, and his wife was apparently kind of pissed at the way she was so thoroughly excised from the manga.

The most telling moment though, comes in the comic itself, towards the end of his second stint away from home, when he’s working as a pipe-layer. The police pick him up for having a stolen bicycle, and discover his identity. Azuma relates:

“After that they took my fingerprints, gave me a stern talking to, and my wife came to get me and took me home (abbreviated because none of this was funny.)”

Of course, if Azuma was going to cut everything unfunny, he’d be in big trouble. Virtually nothing in the book elicits a laugh; on the contrary, it’s all deadly dull. The suspicion, then, is that he cut the discussion about his wife not because it was serious, but because it might have been interesting. Indeed, once he and his wife are reunited, he continues working his blue-collar job, commuting from home. Surely there would have been some revealing conversations there. They might even, one would think, have had comic potential.

Azuma’s reticence here also casts light on the first words of the comic: “This manga has a positive outlook on life, and so it has been made with as much realism removed as possible.” In this context, “realism” would seem to indicate grit, misery, and so forth. But, in fact, Azuma is perfectly willing, and even eager to retail the sordid facts of his existence — scrounging through garbage cans, vomiting all day every day, etc. What he isn’t willing to talk about in the manga is his wife, or his kids, or, for that matter, any of the important relationships in his life. Instead, we see him interacting with a series of men for whom he expresses insistent disdain. As a pipe-layer, for example, he works with a guy named Yanai. Yanai is bossy and disgusting and most of his partners drop him after only a week. Azuma, though, sticks around much longer. He attributes this to the fact that “whatever nasty things [Yanai[] said to me, I had my own pride.” That’s one interpretation, I guess.

As it happens, Azuma is best known, not for autobiography, but as one of the creators of Lolicon, a manga genre which depicts young girls in sexualized situations. The fascination with unavailable girls, the apparent preference for relationships with emotionally stunted men, and the refusal to discuss his own marriage — all these form a rather suggestive triangle. No doubt it’s impolite to psychoanalyze… but then, it’s also bad manners to relate endless strings of wearisome anecdotes. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who wades all the way through this deliberately tedious volume is owed a little payback.

_____________

This piece first ran in The Comics Journal.

Love Wonder Woman Right Now

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A couple weeks ago, Megan Fox said she didn’t like Wonder Woman that much. This sparked the usual blogospheric foofarah. You can read all about it here.

I was going to say something more, but I don’t know that I have the heart for it. I’ll limit myself to noting, maybe, that Megan Fox comes off as perfectly reasonable and articulate, while Brian Michael Bendis, who is, supposedly, a writer, sounds like a barely sentient chimp, gibbering triumphantly because he’s just befouled himself.

Fandom Confessions: Books I didn’t understand

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The storm passed quickly. The rain, which had been a mass of violently descending water wherein the trees writhed and rolled, was reduced all at once to oblique lines of silent gold breaking into short and long dashes against a background of subsiding vegetable agitation. Gulfs of voluptuous blue were expanding between great clouds — heap upon heap of pure white and purplish gray, lepota (Old Russian for “stately beauty”), moving myths, gouache and guano, among the curves of which one could distinguish a mammary allusion or the death mask of a poet.

I read Speak, Memory when I was fifteen, in the spring. I passed out, then awoke a few years later in college. In between was a period when my brain became about as useful to me as a shoelace knot that has tightened until no fingernail can pick it apart. I wanted to write like Nabokov and my brain cramped. The problem, the cramp, had been years in the making, and I’ve had similar problems since, just because I am the way I am. But that particular episode was long and severe, and preferably people spend 15, 16, and so on in discovery and adventure, not in sitting on the edge of their bed and feeling real fear because they missed the whole point of Pale Fire (the narrator is really what?).
The best part of Pale Fire, as far as I know:
I am the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure of the window pane
Is that how it goes? Close enough. When I read the book, that bit was all I could find to like. I dragged myself thru page after page, hunting for bright language like birds hunting for seed on frozen ground. Let me be clear that I’m not pronouncing judgment on Pale Fire. For me, having read the book is pretty much the same as not having read it; brain cramp will do that to you. I do know that I found less bird seed scattered about than was on hand in Pnin, The Defense, Sebastian Knight, and my favorite (though largely by default) The Gift. Then there was Ada. I guess Ada bored me even worse than Pale Fire.

Even when a book had what I was looking for, the images, the turns of phrase, I had no interest in anything else there. His books, for me, were made up of long dullness broken by bits of sparkle that nobody else could match. I was always bored, like a kid with his chin against the window during a long car trip, waiting for a gas station to flash by so he can see it lit up against the night.
Possibly Nabokov was too much of an adult for me. Forget his symbolism and aesthetic philosophy and so on. Even just his humor might have been above me; as I recall, underneath all the surface stylistic play and along with whatever advanced symbolic patterning he indulged in, he also went in for a lot of social comedy: the absurd behavior of the emigres at their literary gatherings, the self-satisfied unspoken quote marks around a foreigner’s use of slang (“the Pond” for the Atlantic). Then again, those are the bits that made it thru to me alongside the sparklies. It’s everything else that’s faded. And what all that was, I can’t say. Everything’s a blank.
Bottom line: I read out of ambition driven by fear, and I made my brain and soul hurt. I did pick up some useful knowledge of how to write sparkly bits (I really pored over the samples I found), but one can only wish I had been slightly more positive in attitude. 

Fandom Confessions: Jack L. Chalker

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Update: Well, pooh; I wasn’t supposed to post till tomorrow; but then I hit the wrong button. Duh.

Anyway, we’re doing a roundtable on Fandom Confessions — embarrassing things we liked back when. Other folks will be posting through the week.
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For a while there, Jack L. Chalker was probably my favorite sci-fi writer — maybe even my favorite writer, in some sense. I probably had…oh, lord, maybe 20 of his novels? Maybe more? I had the Four Lords of the Diamond series (4 books); the Well of Souls series (5 or 6 books); the River of the Dancing Gods series (3 books); the Changewinds Series (2); the Soul Rider series (5 or 6 books)…and there was another 4 book series I can’t remember the name of. Oh, yeah, and the two-book Shadow Dancer series. And a bunch of stand alone novels. So, yeah, more like 30 novels plus. I read most of them multiple times, too.

So what was the appeal, you ask? Chalker was a decent enough writer and plotter, with a fertile imagination. The Four Lords of the Diamond, series, for example, featured a single assassin whose mind was placed into four different bodies (one per novel) to kill the rulers of four different planets. The Well of Souls was about a single world divided into a bunch of individual (and I think for some reason hexagon shaped) territories, each of which was controlled by a different species, and often had different climates, different natural laws, etc. So, you know. It was kind of clever. Sort of. Right?

Whether or no, that was hardly the point. The point was…how to put this? Kink. The point was kink. Chalker was obsessed — literally — with sexualized mind-control, body-alteration, body-swapping, gender-swapping; pretty much the works. In the Four Lords of the Diamond series I mentioned above, for example, there’s an entire planet where people can swap bodies just by sleeping near each other for the night. The Well of Souls series features a computer that can alter reality, giving some of the characters tails, turning others into perfect sex slaves — that sort of thing. That’s nothing to the Soul Rider series, though, which includes bushels of magicians all transforming each other in spectacularly perverse fashion. In the first volume, one guy has his penis cut off; sometime later it’s magically grafted onto the privates of his girlfriend. Later, several women have male members magically placed in their throats (they poke out of the mouth when aroused. This makes conversation difficult, as you’d imagine, so the women are fitted with magic voice-boxes to allow them to speak.) And, yeah, there’s plenty of semi-explicit sex as well. Much of it involving mind-control of some sort.

So… I don’t know that I can very convincingly disavow my investment in these novels. Certainly, these are kinks I’m still interested in, in various senses. In writing about fecund horror or about women in prison movies or about Marston’s Wonder Woman, I’m still thinking about the kind of relationship between fetish, gender, control, and perversion which fascinated me in Chalker’s writing.

On the other hand, I’d have to say that I do think, at this point, that Chalker has a lot less to offer than Marston, or than Jack Hill, or than horror creators like David Cronenberg or online erotic horror writer Tabico. All of those folks, in various ways, acknowledge their personal stake in their fetish, while at the same time connecting the fetish to politics, to utopias, or to gender and feminism. The fetishes, in other words, open in and out at the same time; self and society mirror, conceal, or reveal each other. For Marston, submission is both a personal turn-on and the key to a more loving, more peaceful, female-ruled world; for Tabico, the annihilation of personality is both a kink and a vision of an apocalyptic annihilation of social taboos and (effectively) of gender; for Jack Hll, women in prison is both a feminist metaphor and an exploitation fantasy.

All of these artists are able to move back and forth between metaphor and kink, self and universal, in part through their use (more or less deliberate) of Freud, or of a milieu that accepts part of what Freud did. I have pretty mixed feelings about Freud myself…certainly, were I ever to see a therapist, I would not seek out a Freudian. I think overall that Freud was more an artist than a physician — which is why he tends to be a useful thinker for artists. For Freud, individual drives and desires were transposed onto more universal narratives. Freud had a belief — perhaps a faith — that one person’s obsessions had meaning. For Freud, narrative and character matter. It is narrative and character which link isolated dreams to universal myth. And when you read Marston, or Tabico, or watch Cronenberg or HIll, you do get the sense of both dream and myth; of narratives and characters that shimmer between personal fantasy and archetype. I guess this is most obvious in Marston’s Wonder Woman, with its gestures towards the same body of Greek myths that fascinated Freud.

Chalker very deliberately rejects all that, though. He’s not a Freudian; he’s a behaviorist. His books insist, over and over, on the maleability of human nature, and on the primacy of body over mind. The Four Lords of the Diamonds series, where the assassin’s mind gets placed in four different bodies — the ultimate point of that series is that the bodies win. The assassin, separated from his original body, subject to a different set of hormones, a different balance of brain chemicals, and a different set of experiences, becomes a different person. Chalker’s novels feel less like dreams, and more like experiments…or the hectoring arguments of some know-it-all pseudo-expert. Desire, personality, identity…for Chalker they don’t exist. It’s all just chemical reactions and deteministic happenstance. His own fetishization of control is just….

Well, that’s the thing. What is it? It’s clear why this kind of obsessive behaviorism would appeal to someone with a control fetish. You can make anyone do anything with a few chemicals and a little conditioning? Awesome! But when you start pushing a little, and wondering what’s so exciting about the control in the first place — well, Chalker doesn’t have much of anything to offer except a facile cynicism. “People suck, everyone wants to be a dictator” seems to be his philosophy, more or less…which, of course, elides the fact that it’s not everyone, or not just everyone, but him in particular who is obsessed with control.

Chalker’s books, in short, come across as deeply duplicitous. As a hard-core (ahem) materialist, his philosophy doesn’t really have a space for fantasy. But what he’s doing, obsessively, is fantasizing. The contradiction closes the novels off. Instead of weird, apocalyptic/utopian dream visions which open onto the mind of the author and the dreams of the reader, the books just sort of sit there in a self-satisfied oblivion of irrelevant crankery. The characters have philosophical and political debates (“is it okay to make someone a sex slave as long as they’re happy about it?” is a favorite theme) but they seem to mostly miss the main point (like, perhaps, “why are we, writer and reader, so eager to talk about sex slaves in the first place?”) There’s something of the neo-con about him; he’s always claiming to be facing up to the grim realities no one else will acknowledge, while simultaneously spinning out the most preposterous and transparent delusions.

Perhaps that explains, in part, my own relationship with Chalker’s novels. As I said, I read book after book, and I certainly knew why I was reading them…and yet, at the same time, I didn’t. I am, and was, a very verbal person, but I don’t think I ever, quite, articulated Chalker’s appeal, either to myself or to anybody else. With Chalker, I never had the exhilarated desire to explicate that I did after, say, seeing Cronenberg’s “Shivers”, or reading Tabico’s “Adaptation,” or reading Marston’s “Wonder Woman.” Part of that was no doubt being younger and generally less comfortable with sexuality. But part of it was that while Chalker’s books certainly had kink, they didn’t have any context for that kink, or any language in which to talk about it. As a result, he didn’t really point anywhere. When I saw “Shivers” I didn’t think — “hey, this is what Jack L. Chalker was talking about!” — and indeed, I don’t know that my reaction to Shivers, or Marston, or anything would have been especially different if I’d never read Chalker at all. I continue to have affection for his work, but considering how much of his prose I consumed, it’s amazing how little I seem to have gotten from it.

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Just in case that wasn’t sufficiently humiliating, I should add that my all-time most dubious aesthetic faux pas was probably Billy Joel, with whom I was obsessed through much of high school and college. I had all the albums memorized; and even went to see him in concert. And yes, I was moved by the heartfelt rendition of Piano Man.

We shall not speak of it again.