Yeah, how about this — get the fuck away out of here, you goddamn fucking creep.
I mean, come on. The guy’s a creep.
Source: Zune ad copy
Virtue of Ignorance 2008 — part 2
Noah started the ball here. What was my personal discovery in comics for ’08? I could have done Steve Gerber’s all-text issue of Howard the Duck, but I’m beat and will settle for my experience reading A. Bechdel’s Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. In effect the experience means I read the series from start to finish, or almost. The book drops 137 strips, leaving 390 to take you from 1987 to last year. Good enough to get me from one end of the series to the other.
It was the first time I’d seen more of the series than isolated bits here and there. Since the early/mid-’90s I had read a couple of the individual collections put out by Firebrand Books (now with great new covers), plus strips here and there that surfaced in the New York Press. (The paper’s right-wing proprietor ran Bechdel’s leftist genderqueer menagerie as filler in his back pages.) I very much liked Bechdel’s earliest cartoons, done before Mo and Lois and the rest of the cast showed up, and I sort of liked the installments I’d seen of the continuing series. But Essential allowed me to follow the series from start to finish and for most of the middle.
When I read the series all the way thru, I found that I’d been harboring a delusion. Since the mid-’90s I had believed that Bechdel’s inspiration had been used up with the early strips. I thought that the continuingDykes story was a mere money-making effort and that it had become increasingly mannered and lifeless. Well, it is mannered, not to mention engineered. The pages are crowded with panels, the panels crowded with figures, the figures’ mouths jammed with words (and, yeah, sometimes the effect is like school librarians trying to be clever). But lifeless the strip is not.
Bechdel is compulsive and methodical, and these traits aren’t a replacement for spent inspiration; they’re how she gets the job done. The figures line up in tight, shallow friezes, and it’s evident that Bechdel drew each one from a posed snapshot. But she knows how the characters should pose, and what they should be saying and doing. From about 1994 on, when you read a few of the strips you very quickly come to feel like you’re looking at a crowd of people you know doing what comes naturally to them, even if they all have Edward Gorey eyes and a tendency to hold themselves in profile. She’s a good caricaturist, which you wouldn’t expect from Fun Home. She pops out one bit player after another, and they have the good bit player’s ability to look and behave like no one else on earth without seeming like a stunt. Bechdel has also developed a fine touch for visual dynamics — her zero-depth friezes are a concession to storytelling needs, not signs of a skill deficit — and the way she draws a rainy morning is a pleasure to the eye.
I leave out my favorite aspects of the strip: the sociology, characterization and story. I don’t want to sound like a well-meaning dork liberal or a middlebrow lover of the lose-yourself-in-the-characters fictional experience. But I am both those things, and my two days of reading Essential Dykes were a pleasure in just the ways I could have wanted
Someday soon…
if I’m lucky I’ll start getting some more freelance work again, and will have less time to draw. In the meantime, you must suffer along with me. (These are for the Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible site, so I’ve appended the corresponding verses.)
Judith 12:11
Then said he to Bagoas the eunuch, who had charge over all that he had, Go now, and persuade this Hebrew woman which is with thee, that she come unto us, and eat and drink with us.
Job 38:41
Who provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of meat.
Still, you’ve got to admit: Bagoas is a hell of a name for a eunuch.
Gray Future
Dan Urazandi, a retailer, suggests that comics need to cut costs:
Lower production values. I remember when Baxter paper, cardstock covers and the like were brought in to justify higher cover prices. Let’s cut them now to help keep prices down.
Okay. Here’s another suggestion; stop printing in color. The computer coloring that’s industry standard sucks anyway. Manga has shown pretty clearly that Americans (or at least some Americans) will buy black and white comics.
I don’t know. Why not try a couple black and white titles at lower prices and see how they do? You could even print some big title issues (Batman, Wolverine, whatever) in both b&w and color, with the b&w a good bit cheaper, and see if there’s a market for it.
Maybe the savings on b&w aren’t big enough to justify such a step. Maybe super-hero fans just need that color. But, given the desperate situation the industry faces, it seems like it would be worth thinking about, at least.
With Great Power Comes…Wait a Minute. That’s Not My Responsibility.
My wife irresponsibly purchased the Spider-Man movie for my son even though it was PG-13. (Way to go, significant other.) But he desperately wanted to see it, so I figured I’d better watch it with him and make sure it wasn’t too frightening or icky or whatever. (It wasn’t — I’m actually not sure why it was PG-13. I guess the violence? Even that didn’t seem too over the top though. Maybe I’m just jaded.)
Anyway, it was pretty good, I thought — William Dafoe isn’t as much fun as a villain as Heath Ledger, but Toby McGuire’s spider-man is so, so much better than the stupid Dark Knight Batman that It more than makes up for it.
But what I wanted to talk about was that — watching the movie reminded me of something I’d often thought of with Spider-Man’s origin story. In both movie and comic, we see Spidey refuse to stop a robber, and then that robber goes on and kills Uncle Ben. And, in both cases, there’s a moment when the cop in pursuit of the robber turns to Spidey after the bad guy has gotten away and cusses him out for not helping. (I think in the comic he asks him why he didn’t trip him.)
So the thing is, that’s completely preposterous. In the comic, the bad guy doesn’t have a visible gun…but we know he has one later on with which to shoot Uncle Ben. So it could be concealed…which is why, if you’re a cop, you don’t expect, or even want, random passers-by to fuck around with fleeing felons. I mean, maybe I’m completely confused, but it seems like, even if (especially if) said random passer-by is wearing a weird red and blue suit, what you’d really want them to do is stay the fuck out of the way. Don’t be a hero, don’t get yourself shot, let the professionals handle the problem, seems like the logical attitude. What happens if he trips the guy and the robber pops up with a gun and shoots him? That’s exactly the sort of thing the police are trying to prevent, right?
The assumption that the man-on-the-street has some sort of moral obligation to attempt to stop a fleeing and possibly armed criminal — I don’t know, it’s a perspective, I guess. Of course, Parker could feel guilty himself, knowing that he’s got super-powers and so on and so forth. But in both comic and movie, it’s not just Parker himself, but the law enforcement officers who think he screwed up — and in reality it’s hard to see why they would.
I know, I know…a plothole in a Stan Lee script! What a surprise! But I think it does speak to the whole super-hero idea, and to the “great power, great responsibility” meme as well. Basically, taking responsibility that isn’t yours is often a stupid idea, and can, not inconceivably, make things a lot worse. Sometimes being responsible involves sitting down and shutting up and figuring out which problems aren’t yours and when it might really be better to leave well enough alone. Lee and Ditko, for narrative and possibly Objectivist reasons, rigged the game against poor Peter. But he really didn’t necessarily do the wrong thing.
Kanye West: What the hell?
I haven’t paid a ton of attention to Kanye West; I’ve heard a couple of productions and been like, eh. So I finally thought, well, maybe I should try to figure out what I think of this more thoroughly.
So I listened to Stronger on YouTube. Jesus Christ what a turkey. The beat is totally whack, it’s got a kind of whiny electro-nineties thing, the lyrics are incredibly stupid (what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger — thanks Kanye. I’ll write that down). And his voice is whiny, his flow is — he sounds like a slightly more ept Kid Rock, really; it’s dumb and thudding.
Love Lockdown at least sounds a little weirder I guess. I’m supposed to be grooving on the minimalism, is what all the critics tell me. But I hate that fucking whiny Akon male R&B shit. And the fact that it’s minimal can’t really change the essential lameness of the lyrics. There is a good beat on the chorus; why not run that through the whole song? It could totally be Beck if the singing weren’t so crappy.
It is totally a white aesthetic. It’s like Devo or something, if Devo really sucked. It’s punk even. No wonder they love him on Sound Opinions; it sounds like it was done in a shed by a completely useless poseur with a trust fund and that sense of entitlement that says, “Hey! I’m a guy with skills! I should get accolades even when I’m not trying, just for being so special!”
Yeah, it really pisses me off. What a pile of crap.
All right, I’m done. No more music blogging for a while, I promise.
Fact
Burt Ward (tv’s Robin) said he was offered the lead for The Graduate but those dicks at Batman wouldn’t let him do it.
His claim makes sense, in that he looked like Ben Braddock and was about the right age, whereas Dustin Hoffman did not and was not. In a rare fit of coherence, Renata Adler made the point that it’s a strange idea to cast Dustin Hoffman pushing 30 as a golden boy WASP athlete just out of college. She figured that, as a result, The Graduate was just about impossible to swallow. Yet the one time she made sense, she turned out to be wrong.
From Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights by Burt Ward, Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic by Renata Adler