Unsolicited Advice

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I hardly ever blog about politics qua politics, because…well, basically because it’s not clear to me that anyone cares what I have to say on the matter.

BUT. I’m going to make an exception and offer an actual, official HU Political endorsement (other HU bloggers, are, of course, in no way implicated.)

Thomas Geoghegan is running for Congress. He’s a labor lawyer and a writer — I reviewed one of his books here actually. He’s a smart guy and is vocally committed to democracy and equality in a way that I find pretty inspiring. I think it would be a great thing to have him in the House.

Anyway, his website is here. You can make donations here

And if you want to hear someone else make the case better than I can, Tom Frank has an op-ed about Geoghegan in the Wall Street Journal, of all places.

Virtues of Ignorance 2008 — part 4

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In 2008, I was in one place for a long time for the first time in a long time. And I had a library. So I caught up: Mahler, Hope Larson, The Golem’s Mighty Swing, Dash Shaw, Bardin. I could make a list from Jeffrey Brown to that excruciatingly unreadable autism manga. Or I could list online reads, from “Pictopia” (finally) to Kate Beaton and critical writing, most of which melts together.

Instead, I’ll just note the new comics of Finland. “Com of Finland,” why not? I discovered the anthology Glomp this past year, and have since written about works by Amanda Vähämäki and Katja Tukiainen for TCJ‘s special section of Finnish comics coming soon. And I actually found a copy of the Finnish anthology KutiKuti‘s first issue, colors pulsing on newsprint, in a stack of my old papers. Don’t know where I got it. Can’t read it. But it’s fun to look at (pictured above).

So: Finnish comics, far more vibrant and essential than I could have imagined. But it could have been another pocket of comics, as the landscape looks much more vast than it did just a few years ago. There are dozens of new artists I don’t know, and even more I never will. Good. Before I started writing on comics in 2000, I had spent three or four years reading all the touchstones I could. Then it seemed doable. Now, keeping up with everything seems quite impossible, and ignorance a sure thing going forward. Good.

Speaking of Who Spider-Man Loves …

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You must have heard of this: Spider-Man and Obama.

Bonus: my favorite wingnut blogger, Allahpundit, is infuriated and makes a bonehead factual error. Right below the block quote. It’s a corker.
He’s a smart, fair-minded man, but only within the limits permitted by his core belief: that life is all about liberal hypocrisy and media tolerance of same. Funny to see how the idea operates on him; it bends his thoughts around like a neurosis.

Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — part 2, addendum a

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Ok, all I had was Bechdel. Miriam had Carla Speed McNeil and Kate Beaton. Here’s one I just remembered: Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. I read issues 1-16, or like that, on download for a TCJ column about Spider-Man (“Face It, Tiger,” issue 291). They were a case of a commercial comic book working exactly the way it should, no contortions or gimmes, no jumble. It’s like intelligent people knew what they were doing and did it. The target here is modest, but I’ll settle and hitting those can be hard enough.


It helps if you don’t mind sitcom and girl stuff. As I recall it’s very quiet-times storytelling, with superheroes kept off on the skyline, more or less. I like that mix: for some reason I like superhero comics and action movies more for their incidental elements than their main elements, and a title like Mary Jane puts the incidentals center stage. The so-called civilian school of superhero comics, I suppose. I loved Bendis’s Alias, though that was meant as psychological noir and Mary Jane is teen comedy. Kind of strange, two such different outcomes from the same genre development. 

The art/writing seems designed for maximum ease of eye movement, which I take to be a manga kind of thing. The images, as I recall, are simple and figures are positioned for maximum scannability. Dialogue skims along but without the pop-pop banter effect found with most superhero dialogue nowadays.

Which brings me to a key point: a big part of the comic’s appeal is relief. I would have liked it anyway, but set against most superhero product, it was a relief. Quiet skill is something we don’t get a lot of.

As to the Manga point above, the original artist was  Takeshi Miyazawa, a Canadian but Wiki says he has a Manga sensibility. Then came David Hahn. As I recall, I liked Miyazawa better. Writer: Sean McKeever. Sample plot: girl gets jealous because Mary Jane wins lead in school play. Title: “The Jealousy Thing,” because every issue is “The [whatever] Thing.” You get the idea. It’s simple stuff, but it works.

Further, we get one more example of Mary Jane being rewritten into a character entirely unlike the Mary Jane in the main Spider-Man series. Offhand I can’t think of any time her personality has made it intact into an alternative Spider-Man version. Noah has more here for those who have ever tried to figure her out.

Grinchiness of Christmas

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I have an essay up at Culture 11 about Dr. Seuss, consumerism, and polymorphous perversity. Here’s a quote:

Indeed, the American spirit galumphs and galerks through every one of the Doctor’s works. Like his fellow citizens, Seuss is boisterous, hearty, optimistic, profligate in invention, and not too heavy on the thought. “Yertle the Turtle,” a fascistic terrapin, forces all his pond-fellows to stack themselves in a tower so he can climb to the top. The solution? Not collective action, nor courageous resistance, but a single fed-up burp by a turtle named Mack, who just isn’t going to take it anymore. In “The Sneeches,” the sneeches with stars dislike the sneeches without stars. The solution? Not understanding, or non-violent resistance, but simply a machine which removes stars! In Seuss’ universe, there is no problem that cannot be solved by old-fashioned practicality, good will, bizarre new-fangled machines, or some combination of all three.

This was somewhat inspired by the conversation here about Seuss and Sendak, incidentally. (And more of it here.

Update: James Poulos paints me as an anti-Lockean here.

virtue of ignorance 2008 — part 3 (chock full of ego edition)

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There are some definite perks, as a comics fan, to being a comics creator. Traveling the con circuit, I’ve gotten to meet a lot of my heroes, from Eddie Campbell to Batton Lash to Sergio Aragones (the best things about having my picture with Sergio Aragones are, first, that he totally looks like a Sergio Aragones drawing, and second, people in my civilian life tend to have heard of him, unlike everyone else I’ve ever been excited to meet at a con). I also see a lot more new books than I would in my ordinary course of life as a quasi-hermit.

The drawback is that I have a harder time enjoying comics in an ego-less fashion, without analyzing the artwork and storytelling to ascertain whether it’s better or worse than mine. and if it’s better, trying to figure out how to steal it or despairing of ever being able to make something as good… and if I decide it’s worse, then I get to engage in bitterness at their (relative, sometimes very relative: it is Northamerican alt-comics we’re talking about here) success.

So both my favourite comics revelations of 2008 came to me through being on the con circuit, and my enjoyment of both of them is mixed with sweet jealousy.

I’ve been hearing about Finder for a few years, mostly through the women-in-comics world. But I didn’t start reading the series until McNeil was at the same artists alley at Wizard World Chicago this June. I bought two volumes, and then she was at several more cons I was at, until I’m almost caught up on the series, getting two books at a time. I’m late on the bandwagon, but I’m addicted now.

And yeah, it’s soft science fiction with a Gary Stu/noble savage protagonist (which McNeil makes fun of, but Jaeger is ten times smarter, more competent, and prettier than everyone who surrounds him). But here, like in Preacher, the author succeeds in making you share their infatuation with their creation.

McNeil’s worlbuilding is also enthusiastic in an infectious manner. She has her cake, and eats it too, by making her stories circular, cryptic and dreamlike (some would say indecipherable) and then appending fifteen pages of endnotes to each volume, giving away background about the Finder universe as well as notes on the creation of the book. But I’m an endnotes kind of gal, growing up on Terry Pratchett and David Foster Wallace.

Another area where Finder was created with me in mind, and that I wish my stuff was more like, is that it’s drawn like the love child of Dave Sim and Terry Moore. It is fortunate it wasn’t around when I was a teenager, cause I would probably have drawn terrible, terrible fanfic. Yes, Finder is a success in the category (discussed here) of enthrall-fans-in-your-characters over be-enshrined-as-important, which I also covet.

You know who else has a scary amount of fans? Kate Beaton. She’s only been doing comics for two (I believe) years, but she has more people subscribed to her comics feed on livejournal than went to her university, and I had the table next door at her SPX debut, the one where she sold out of everything in, like, a day, and had a dozen-deep autograph line every second she was at her table.

She does mostly unconnected history comics (I think her most famous one is this one) whose humour is often the stilted-language non-joke, in a way that feels very “now” (and this is my only complaint about her work, because I feel that part won’t age well), and the funny drawing of dignified personages.

Her drawing represents the opposite end, from McNeil’s, of the spectrum of drawing which I wanted to kill and eat in order to gain its powers. It’s not lamely naïve like David Heatley or Jeffrey Brown, it’s dashed-off and open and precise. The eyes on a character’s face are never the same size, but you instantly recognize exactly what expression the character is making.

Like with James Thurber, the shock of something very bare and messy instantly becoming something very detailed and specific in your mind, can be much more joyous than having the details all laid out for you. And no matter how much I work at tight drawing (and I am no Carla Speed McNeil) I cannot fathom how to draw loose like that.

Damn her. Damn them both. Happy new year.

[edited, to correct title]