Steve Breen of the San Diego Union-Tribune won for cartooning, the second time he’s won the Pulitzer.
(Whole Pulitzer list is here.)
MR3, part 2: Helter Skelter by Okazaki
MR3 stands for Manga Roundtable 3. We did one on Manga: What Is the Point?, another on YKK by Ashinano. Now it’s our third and we’re doing Helter Skelter by Okazaki. Bill did a free translation of the title and came up with his own freehand version of the title, namely “Blistered Fingers,” which I like better. But since I find the work a bit alien and baffling, I’m going to keep things simple and stick with the original title. It’s a clue and I need clues.
I admire Helter Skelter a lot. As lines on paper, it’s exceptional. As words, well, maybe not so much. But the comic’s layout, drawing, and use of black and white are beyond admirable. All right, not the faces, and good caricature would have been useful for this work. There’s still a lot to look at.
Bill and I talked a bit about how trite I find the book’s theme (look at that hot girl! her values are terrible!). The thing is, I’m willing to buy the theme because it comes with the package. That’s how much I like everything else about the book. I see Helter Skelter as an example of high-style assault, of art that uses velocity, technical skill, and shock to impose itself on the audience. You have to be very good to pull it off, and Okazaki does. I think that even though I read the book, naturally, in translation. The words chosen were not her own, and her high-design pages had to function after having a fleet of prominent design elements — I mean the calligraphy — ripped out and replaced by little piles of English words.
Okay, about Helter Skelter as an exercise in style and shock. In Comments to his post, Bill made this point:
The title’s just “Helter Skelter” transliterated in the phonetic characters used for foreign words. It’s the same as the song.
So Okazaki didn’t use some Japanese word similar in meaning to “helter skelter.” She meant the song title. I would guess she wanted her book to have the same feel as the song; it’s not so much that the Beatles song states some theme or connects to some event that she wants to reference. She’s just telling us that reading her comic will be like experiencing the Beatles song. So, if that is the idea, she’s making a bold claim.
I imagine the comic as being a sensation when it came out. This is all guesswork, but Okazaki appears to have been popular and to have been very distinctive, maybe out of step with most other manga artists aiming at the same audience. I take her audience to have been teenage girls, since Helter Skelter was serialized in a teen-girl magazine 20s-chick magazine. [my thanks to Xavier for the correction. I’ll note here that Bill says the magazine in question has a fashion bent] According to Helter Skelter, and most other sources, teen girls young women who care a lot about celebrities and fashion tend to be on the lookout for sensational new events and personalities to get excited about.
Helter Skelter may have been meant to hit them like a bomb, the way the song hits listeners. The sex scenes (in a kids magazine? no! but those scenes are still, what is the word, a bit nasty), the carving up of bodies, the characters’ default bitchiness and cruelty, the wild surrealism (Bill references it as “the half-flaming, half-tiger rug when the 60s take over”), the way the plot veers at the end … and all this was for kids [no! girls in their 20s].
Another shocker, for the audience in question, would be the theme. Here I’m taking Bill’s word. From the ’70s on we’ve heard a lot about the hellishness of messing with your body so you can look like a model. Bill says the case is a bit different in Japan and that Okazaki’s theme in Helter Skelter was something new for her readers.
The sell-your-soul/vanity-vs-natural theme is all thru Helter Skelter, over and over. Subtle it ain’t, and I don’t see Okazaki adding anything to the idea; if you’ve read a few magazine articles in your life, you’ve probably come across what she has to say. In a way, Helter Skelter is like the world’s most badass Ugly Betty episode.
Still, being the world’s most badass anything isn’t easy. Okazaki did it thru using powerful skills in subtly aggressive, unnerving ways. Which means that now I’m going to talk about her artwork. Or I will tomorrow … hope you tune in.
Update: Noah’s take is here
Update 2: Noah and I agree about the story’s triteness, anyway. A Helter Skelter haiku:
Look at that hot girl.
Her values are terrible.
Keep looking at her!
Oliphant Watch: Obama and Castro
Looking at this, you’d think it was Cuba that had the embargo on the US, not the other way around. But what a deft way of drawing Obama: the moment is so winning. We see again Oliphant’s gift for fantasy based on characters from the news. (Previous Oliphant installment here.)
UPDATE: Matthew, my leg man in Oliphanting, points me to the latest: 1) Cheney the torturer and 2) the epicene cowboys of Texas secession. And, yeah, those are two freaky cartoons.
The Cheney cartoon takes a big, simple point (Cheney’s a nasty guy who defends torture), lobs in some clutter to put you off balance (the long legend on Cheney’s apron, the Prussian gentleman standing by in his helmet), then sneaks in for the kill with a final touch that is tiny, unobtrusive, complicated and inexplicable. Who is that little guy on a bicycle? Why is he tearing off for the distance? Why does the bike have training wheels and why do the training wheels look so much like legs and feet? Why does the man’s head look like three knuckles? Why is he so blase about torture and, finally, why are we hearing from him? Traditionally, an editorial cartoon will show someone in the news saying something that the cartoonist has put in the person’s mouth, and then there may be some little figure piping up with the cartoonist’s personal wry commentary on the situation. Here we have a third party, a man with a three-knuckled head and a special bike, and he’s popping up to say what he thinks too. Damn, it’s weird, and yet it takes up so little space. It’s a dab of condensed insanity.
Matthew says maybe the little guy is Obama: thus the training wheels and, I guess, the three-knuckled head (big ears). My guess, if it’s anyone we know, is Bush. Bush was always working out and Oliphant drew him with big ears. Oh, the hell with it.
All right, the epicene cowboys of secession. Here’s how I figure Oliphant’s logic chain: Texas wants its federal money like anyone else, so therefore this secession talk is bullshit; the secession talk takes place at tea party rallies or in front of crowds who might turn up at tea party rallies; the British drink tea and are very courtly about asking each other if they want one lump or two; therefore, to express the posturing hollowness of the secession talk, one portrays the Texans as mincing little Percys with tea cups in their hands.
One gets the horrible feeling that Oliphant actually thought his way toward this conclusion. The deranged vision didn’t come to him in a flash; he put on his thinking cap and worked with lunatic clarity to reach his goal.
UPDATE 2: Now Sam and the sharks, again because Matthew brought it up. Clear point, a bit simple but intelligible, and nothing actively weird in the drawing to throw you off.
Matthew mentions how well O draws the sharks, and it’s true. He also draws a lot of them. This brings up a big point about Oliphant. He is so much better at drawing than most of his colleagues that his facility gets him into visual trouble. In the old days, when he was at the top of his game, he created images with a density of detail and complexity of composition that allowed them to take over the reader’s eye. Now he doesn’t manage his detail, he just lets it roll out from his pen, and composition be damned.
The problem isn’t too bad in this latest. But Uncle Sam does get a bit lost among all those sharks; the overall situation takes a few extra seconds to register because Sam, who is its center, has to be tracked down by the reader’s eye. The Cheney cartoon suffers a lot more; even without the little mystery man on the bicycle, the picture is a mess of one thing after another.
Wonder Woman’s Costume
There’s an interesting discussion about Wonder Woman’s swimsuit here by Parsimonia (who I think is Maddy) and Bluefall, both of whom have commented here recently.
My take, FWIW, is that the suit is indeed silly, though it makes perfect sense in the context of the Marston/Peter run. (And Harry Peter’s virtually the only one who has ever drawn it in a matter that made it seem both natural and not hideously unflattering.)
Kyoko Okazaki’s Blistered Fingers: Part I
Our latest rountable, the subject of which you can read in Book-Off without paying or just find the scanlation on the web. I recommend the first.
Kyoko Okazaki, still recovering from the car wreck that ended her career, plastered “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on one of her books. It wasn’t Pink, the work that made her name, which features a girl who buys brand goods in her favorite color by selling her body. It wasn’t her last book Helter Skelter either, though the Stooges would fit it better than the Beatles.
Helter Skelter, serialized in FEEL YOUNG in 1995 & 96, follows Ririko, a model and “talent,” as the Japanese call their starlets (without irony). You get new models like sushi on the kaiten. They pose, pout, squeal. The lucky ones marry their managers; the unlucky are disappeared on their expiration date. Everything’s managed by a paternalistic network of talent agencies. It’s quite efficient, as if Hollywood applied kaizen, Toyota’s art of continuous improvement. Starlets assembled by robotic arm.
The story’s part TMZ, part theater of cruelty, as Ririko goes from spoiled brat to unhinged maniac. She rebels against her manager, seduces her makeup artist, breaks things. Her fall starts in three deft pages, when she finds a bruise near her hairline. Jump to Tokyo Tower scraping clouds while she screams; then the broadcast needles on top of a TV studio, echoes of the surgeon’s needles that can no longer freshen up her plastic body.
Things get arch and ragged. The melodrama occasionally seems telegraphed to this jaded member of a media culture. Fame’s Faustian, yes, and the odd subplot with a detective/stalker seems grafted on. He’s stalking Ririko because something’s amiss at her plastic surgeon’s, with hints of Fruit Chan’s 2004 movie Dumplings if not its logical conclusion. An opening and almost-closing page do what they have to: frame Ririko’s story with materialistic girls nattering over the fashion magazines she used to rule.
What they don’t do is prepare you for the off-the-rail moments, like the what-the-hell coda. Or the half-flaming, half-tiger rug when the 60s take over. Or Ririko’s kinky sadism, a WTF smack in the face for the jaded.
Or, most of all, the signature. Okazaki’s an auteur, this is her handwriting. The art reminds that she worked as a fashion illustrator. Her line’s lively and precise: Ririko’s body, for instance, seems plastic yet inhabited. Compare most manga’s art, lifelessly stamped out on an assembly line to fill those 23 volumes in 3 years.
And Helter Skelter feels like a very personal work. If it were “about” celebrity, then it would be seriously dated by real-life stars’ ever bizarre meltdowns. If it were just groundbreaking, it would look weak, since latecomers always finish the excavation. Since it’s about whatever on earth goes on inside Kyoko Okazaki, it’s still fresh. Rather like Iggy Pop, slathered in burning wax, no pants, reminding all the youngsters they have no idea what punk is right before the saxophone (the saxphone!) kicks in.
***
Dovetail! Seemed appropriate to listen to Ringo Shiina while writing this, because she’s the anti-Ririko in just about every way. Then I found out that Shiina recently did the music for the movie Sakuran, adapted from a Moyoco Anno manga. Anno was Okazaki’s assistant, and helped prepare Helter Skelter for publication.
Update (by Noah): Tom’s contribution to the roundtable is here; Noah’s is here.
The Stranger from Paradise Island
I’m horning in a bit on Noah’s Wonder Woman action. In comments to the last post, Maddy pointed out that WW would be a natural for a stranger-in-a-strange-land approach to sexism.
… she is coming from a place where she is loved and adored by all, where she has never been a second-class citizen, where she has never faced discrimination or bigotry. Then she enters the “real world”, where there are all those things …
Whereas it might take twenty or so years of life for me to become aware of things like sexism and misogyny, Wonder Woman would be able to recognize it instantly. So if we’re looking at her from a what-does-she-bring-to-feminism point of view, I think she’s very useful in that …
So, if anybody knows, I’m wondering if WW has ever been used in that way, either as an outsider commenting on sexism or an outsider simply commenting on our society as a whole. It’s such a common device that I’d be kind of surprised if it didn’t show up at some point in her career.
Zack Snyder
What’s the prevailing view of him among comic book fans? My guess is that his stuff has the same sort of standing as Family Guy: it’s popular and its audience includes a lot of comics geeks, but smarter comic geeks (or comic geeks who think they’re smart) look down on it.
I haven’t seen Snyder’s first two films, only Watchmen, and have seen only bits of a couple of Family Guy episodes. So I don’t claim that either Snyder or Family Guy ought to be run into the ground as a matter of principle. I’m just checking to see if my guess as to Snyder’s reputation is correct.
(A joke I saw in a Family Guy episode and have always loved: a talking dog in a bar says, “Hey, whose leg do you have to hump to get a drink around here?”)