Matthew Surridge Hears from Christopher Sorrentino

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My friend Matthew reviewed the essay anthology Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers: Writers on Comics and heard back from one of the writers in question, novelist Christopher Sorrentino. Sorrentino wanted to convince Matthew that actually the collection was a good book. I read it a few years back and thought it was spotty. Basically, some of the guys tried and some of them didn’t. If my memory is right, Sorrentino’s essay was one of the better jobs.

On a personal note, he might have been the fellow referenced in the lead paragraph of my heartbreaking memoir of Marvel reading, “True Believer.” 

Imaginary Comics, part 2: “Uneven Hills”

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Bill made up a cartoon sketched on a series of tea leaves. What I have is a set of pages that were not published as part of the Absolute Sandman series. Neil Gaiman, hitting the crest of his early comics career, did not contact an aging Jack Kirby and, in a fit of sentimentality and cross-talent brand promotion, persuade him to illustrate the gala fiftieth issue of Sandman, which was not titled “Uneven Hills” and did not concern Morpheus fallen among the Amazons and embarrassed by his long-ago affair with Hippolyta, Wonder Woman’s mother, with implications for Lyta Hall’s eventual vendetta against him.

Kirby did not draw a Morpheus with doorknob-sized cheekbones and a forehead reaching three feet above his nose. The following elements did not appear: Amazons with cantaloupe-sized muscles and shoulders the width of Victorian cabinets; sly references to Kirby’s part in creating the previous Sandman, Lyta Hall’s late husband; playful juxtapositions of Morpheus’s cheekboned languor and the Amazons’ beefy force; a four-page sequence, tailored to Kirby’s skills, in which Amazons hauled the stricken Morpheus on a massive chariot past trophies of the ages.
Kirby did not balk at Gaiman’s idea, which he did not have, of a row of Amazons archers, each one missing a breast because of Gaiman’s fidelity to classical sources. Roz, Kirby’s indomitable wife, did not have to intervene and did not spawn a winsome anecdote Gaiman retailed in later interviews about a telephone being wrestled from one Kirby to the other while Neil reasoned with the elderly artist. The nonresulting Amazon chests did not resemble the Astrodome standing next to a parking lot.

The nonexistent project did not have to be aborted because of Kirby’s illness, and there were no rumors that Walt Simonson would finish the art so the issue could appear in a  Sandman trade paperback. In the late 1990s, Vertigo did not transplant a character from the nonexistent issue, a spunky and undernourished teen Amazon named Hy (for Hyacinth), into The Dreaming and then give her a pocket-size manga series written and drawn by Jill Thompson.
The 17 more or less fully drawn Kirby pages and three remaining penciled roughs were not given pride of place in volume 3 of Absolute, the lines’ charcoal black not glowing against pages the color of whipped cream.
All that happened was that I wrote this post.
UPDATE:  Big Barda should be in there someplace, possibly a big fight sequence between her and an Amazon (some old rival of Wonder Woman’s?) in which Kirby could draw big fists and Gaiman could do some destabilizing of gender patterns. 

Imaginary Comics: Tea-Time #1

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Review of Tea-Time #1
By Anonymous?
From a tea farm in Taiwan
Four leaves, $9.95/2 oz
Green Oolong

Like everyone else, I wake up with hot caffeine. Lately, it’s been loose-leaf oolong tea. The leaves’ pellets unfurl in the water. Usually I reinfuse them a couple of times and toss them in the compost.

Today the sun caught them just so and I noticed lines. Puzzled, I laid them flat on a screen and air-dried them. I was surprised– nay, astonished– at what I saw.

Each leaf has drawings on it.

And you can arrange them into a story.
Because the lines are thinner than the flesh of the leaf, they catch the light. I can’t tell if they’re hand-scrawled or genetically engineered, like those Chinese pears biotweaked into volleyballs. I also don’t know who the artist is. The characters on the side of the package read ? ??– I know the first means “leaf,” but is it the art form? The artist? Is it a marketing gimmick or Labor’s cheeky revenge?

I do know the critic’s job is vicious precision, so I must say I’m disappointed. The drawings suck. No verve, no bounce in the line. And the story’s just a four-panel gag. With all those leaves, ? ?? could have told a multigenerational epic. Love, death & tea on Tung Ting Mountain, spanning from the Occupation through martial law and the Kaohsiung Incident to the uncertain present? Instead it’s just the parable of a pleasant cup.

Drink and you miss it, I guess. But it raises a problem for the diligent reader: that everywhere around, comics wait to be discovered. A bored dentist’s doodles on the panels of your teeth, Fibonacci storytelling on sunflower seeds. No word on whether Sebastião Salgado’s printing his worker-saint photos on each ground of Illy’s coffee, but I’ll keep my eyes open.

Fact

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Fabian took acting lessons from Leonard Nimoy. This was a few years before Nimoy was cast as Mr. Spock. Fabian was getting ready for a guest spot on Ben Casey.


From I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy

Rough Beast Slouching Towards Apocalypse to be Censored

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I review Beasts, Lynda Barry’s Best American Comics, and a big art book called “Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture” in this week’s Chicago Reader. The first line of the review was supposed to be:

“For the latest Best American Comics anthology, guest editor Lynda Barry has selected works that are richly literary, deeply felt, and fucking boring.”

Something got lost in the editing process, alas. It’s still pretty mean, though, so I guess I can’t complain.

On the other hand, I liked Beasts a lot.

Culture 11 No More

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Culture 11, for whom I have been doing a lot of writing over the last five months or so, very suddenly went out of business yesterday.

This really makes me sad for a number of reasons. First and most selfishly, the site had quickly become my favorite place to write for. My editor, Peter Suderman, was a joy to work for, and I got to write about a whole crazy range of things, from C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, to gospel music, to bluegrass, to the Indian Cinderella. I was looking forward to publishing an essay on the Friday the 13th series (which should appear somewhere else, I hope) and an essay on the just-released Bob Wills boxset (which will probably never get written) and one on Barack Obama slash fiction (which really, really will probably never get written.)

Second reason this sucks is that the editors at Culture 11 are all out of jobs. They were a smart, thoughtful bunch of people, and I enjoyed working with them and (occasionally) debating them. I wish them all luck.

Finally, I think Culture 11 was just a great site. It was basically a center-right conservative website, but one which was willing to print and engage in conversation with a socialist-pomo-whacko like myself. I really appreciated that. Conservatism in general seems to have been hijacked in this country by a lot of insular hacks (to an even greater extent than is usual in politics.) Having a place dedicated to using conservative ideas to challenge and interact rather than to hunker down and fulminate was, to me, extremely heartening. I was honored to be a part of it.