It took me an hour and a half to cast my ballot in Chicago, half a block from Barack Obama’s house, where, thanks to the Electoral College concocted by our senile and drooling founding fathers, my vote matters, basically, not at all. But forget that. By this evening, if all goes well, my neighbor will be President Elect, and a new era of prosperity and peace will have begun. Snark, then, will be no more…so I thought I’d get the last little bit out of my system while the getting is good.

As I mentioned in the last post, I’ve been poking at the latest Comics Journal (that’s 293 for those keeping track.) The major interview this time round is with S. Clay Wilson, ye’olde underground cartoonist. It’s conducted by Bob Levin.

I’d never really given much thought to Wilson; when I’d seen his stuff before my reaction tended to be, “eh…whatever.” His art pretty much blurred into the overall underground aesthetic. I’m somewhat partial to crowded images, but his drawing didn’t do anything special for me, and the subject-matter seemed kind of rote — I don’t know. I guess I figured if it left me alone, I’d return the favor.

Skimming about in this TCjinterview really allowed my indifference and irritation to grow and take meaningful shape. Obviously, I don’t know what S. Clay Wilson is actually like. But the persona he’s got going here for public consumption is pretty thoroughly insufferable — from the name dropping to the constant I’m-really-too-cool-to-be-doing-this-let’s-just-get-drunk schtick to his defensive “Art is therapy” crap when Bob Levin mentions that somebody doesn’t like his work. Though the interview makes clear that Williams does read a lot and looks at a lot of art, the one influence he’s willing to specifically cop to, the thing he says that taught him that comics could be about anything, is acid.

And, on closer inspection of his work, that really makes sense. His drawings do have a cartoony energy, and they can occasionally make me smile. But overall, they look like he hasn’t really thought about much of anything, ever, and then he dropped a bunch of acid and suddenly had this amazing insight that all the incredibly mundane stuff in his head was really…far out! He’s exploring the limits of his imagination, and finding those limits extremely quickly — he doesn’t even need to take a sandwich or a bottle of water. The sex and violence is so repetitive and staid it makes the latest lame super-hero pamphlet look like a work of idiosyncratic genius. Hey…it’s a demon…and it’s fucking a woman in the ass! And…there are some scabby pirates! Wow, this is sure something else, isn’t it?

In the interview, Wilson gets compared to Bosch — but the thing about Bosch (and, for that matter, about Crumb) is that their cluttered images (A) resolve into a whole with some compositional integrity, and (B)have individual details which show invention, or at least thought. In Wilson’s pictures, it’s just a bunch of frat-boy gross-out and off-color clichés bunged together as best they can fit. It’s lazy and deeply unimaginative. The misogyny is the least of the troubles; sure it’s degrading to women, but really it’s so consistently pedestrian that it’s degrading to everyone. It’s degrading to demons.

I guess I should be grateful; it’s always good to be reminded of the extent to which the baby boomers are a blight on the landscape. Wilson genuflects to the 60s zeitgeist so obsequiously that it’s a miracle his spine isn’t permanently curved. The interview is all about self-aggrandizement; Wilson talks about making money, he talks about fame, he talks about personal fulfillment via the therapeutic act of drawing boring pictures of demons having sex and then about how he sells those pictures for money and gets famous. Parading your banal inner-life for fun and profit — the beats and hippies sure gave us the gift that keeps on giving. It kind of makes you want to join the Moral Majority, not out of outrage, but simply because those folks have to be more fun than this droning wannabe crank.

So reading the new issue (293) of The Comics Journal, one thing that caught my eye was fellow HU blogger Bill Randall’s review of a couple of new Chris Ware titles, the Acme Novelty Date Book and Acme Novelty Library #18. Bill’s review begins with a discussion of Ware’s penchant for self-critique in the Datebook, which is basically a sketchbook/diary. Bill says:

Among its snippets of comics and drawings, it contains diary passages of unrelenting self-criticism…. I hesitate to do more than note that these passages record, with bald honesty, a portion of Ware’s inner life. They are complex, conflicted and self-obsessed. They likely mix honesty with self-deception. Having never met the man, much less related to him over time, I can’t say for certain. nothing in these passages, however, strikes me as particularly unusual. Such feelings are common; only the bravery, or foolishness, of making them public is not. Some readers, especially fellow cartoonists jealous of his success, will grow impatient with them. Others will likely feel great sympathy.

I don’t think you have to be jealous of Ware to think that his constant whining is stupid. I mean, it’s incredibly self-absorbed and just indecent to be going on and on all the time about how bad your art is. Newsflash here — nobody cares if your art is bad or good. It just doesn’t matter that much. We’ve all got our own troubles. Do the best you can and fucking move on. Really, wailing on and on…it’s not a whole lot different than constantly talking about how great you are. It’s in horrible taste, and it’s boring and it kind of suggests that you don’t care about anyone but yourself.

I want to make clear here — this isn’t about Ware’s personal life. As Bill says, all artists have moments (or more than moments) of self-doubt, and really, how you relate to your own art in the privacy of your own home is strictly your business. But Ware’s self-flagellation is a central part of his public persona. It’s tied up in his presentation of himself as an honest, deep artist; it’s a central theme in the work and aesthetic of the sincere, deep-feeling, alt-cartoonist mafia which he more or less helms. Basically, it’s how he fetishizes tedium and selfishness as aesthetic goals. It’s pernicious, and it deserves to be hooted.

Of the latest Acme Novelty, Bill writes:

Scott McCloud’s criticism in Reinventing Comics that “Ware’s outrageously complex pages often do no more than deliver a single morbid “gas” as payoff,” off-targe then, now applies not at all. The pages remain outrageously complex, like the task of sorting through one’s life. Though difficult to read, the overall effect is neither morbid nor a gag. It is simply a wish that this young woman would see the good in herself.

I disagree with the McCloud quote too, but for almost opposite reasons. A lot of Ware’s early work was, at least somewhat, gag driven; a lot of it was morbid. Gags and morbidity were what gave it a lot of its energy and appeal; it was darkly, blackly funny, and often mean-spiritedly satirical. Now, though, it’s much more about lit-fic sincere meaningfulness. Oh, the complicated sadness…. Oh, the humanity…. As a result, where Ware used to consistently delight me, my reaction to his work over the last few years has ranged from loathing (the horrible Branford the Bee series) to more sedate disappointment and mistrust (which is pretty much my reaction to the Building Stories series, which Bill discusses in his review.)

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I’m not sure I’ve told this story before, but…several years ago I was at a party/art event thing to see my friend’s work. As it happened,I’d just purchased an issue of TCJ. I didn’t have anywhere to put it, so I was carrying it. A woman saw me with it and asked what it was, and I told her, and my friend then outed me by telling her that I wrote for the magazine. To which she responded, “Oh…so that means you write about whether you like Chris Ware or not, right?”

The truth hurts.

Update: More on TCJ 293 here.

I have a profile up of artist Wafaa Bilal Here’s the first paragraph.

A year and a half ago, Wafaa Bilal made himself one of Chicago’s best-known artists when he shut himself in a room at Flatfile Galleries in front of a paintball gun. The gun could be controlled remotely, over the Internet, and Web surfers and gallery visitors alike could aim and fire it, blasting Bilal with yellow paint. By the end of the project, titled Domestic Tension, more than 60,000 people had shot at him from more than 130 countries, and he had been featured in media outlets from NPR to Newsweek.

Also…for those who missed it, the Comics Comics roundtable discussion of David Heatley’s comics is here.

If you didn’t click through Bill’s link to Akino KONDOH you should; she’s pretty great.

Update: All right, and one political link too. I really like Ta-Naheshi Coates. Yes, he likes contemporary poetry…but, well, nobody’s perfect.

David Heatley responds to my comixology takedown of him here by insinuating that I wrote it in bad faith and that the highlights of my career are bitter attacks on unassailable figures like Art Spiegelman, so who cares what I have to say anyway. (I’d prefer, personally, to see the highlight of my career, such as it is, as the Gay Utopia — but that isn’t about David or his friends, so I presume he hasn’t read it.) Beyond the defensive ad hominem (and as they say, right back atcha), he argues that in “Sexual History” he’s aware of, and commenting on, the unpleasantness of the sexual ethics portrayed, rather than promoting them.

Noah Berlatsky, an acquaintance of mine, and a talented, but bitter writer living in Chicago, wrote about my “Sex History” strip on a site called comiXology. The highlights of his career so far have included well-written, but scathing attacks on Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman with titles like “In the Shadow of No Talent”. For the record, back in 2002 I almost illustrated one of his poems as a comic strip, but had to abandon it because it seemed too similar to a Marc Bell strip at the time. He also contributed to an incoherent failure of an anthology I produced while living in Chicago called The New Graphics Revival. I stand behind the idea of that book, which was that given the time and materials, most anyone could produce an interesting comic strip. But I’m embarrassed by almost all of the work that was sent to us, mostly by a middling, call-for-entry gen-x set. I’m not saying that my failing to promote an anthology that contained work by him or my inability to finish a strip based on his writing could have led him to write this line: “Whether through pointlessly tangled continuity, repetitive autobio dreck, aggressively ugly art, or reflexively irrelevant literariness, [Heatley’s] comics seem determined to find some way, any way, to keep out all those readers and creators who might otherwise, and naturally, see comics as their own.” But anything’s possible!

More to the point, he claims that in the anecdotes about bad sex, longing and one night stands that make up “Sex History”, I’m depicting ciphers, not real women. “He occasionally wonders what is up with one of them — why is she behaving so oddly? Why didn’t she get me off? But he never really cares enough to find out — or, at least, not enough to waste one of his tiny panels telling the reader about it.” Unfortunately, he missed the fundamental idea behind the piece and took the work at face value. The “me” character is something of an unreliable narrator. I’m asking the reader to imagine an alternate universe where the details of falling in love and getting married deserve a single panel and where obsessive thinking about a meaningless crush or one-night stand deserve dozens. I’m certainly not defending the behavior or even the thinking shown, quite the opposite. Something I tried to expound on in the strip’s new epilogue.

I find this pretty unconvincing. There’s nothing in the strip itself that suggests this level of self-awareness or distance. I do believe that David was intending to have the reader believe that he’s self-aware, certainly…but I’m not sure that the evidence of the strip supports that reading. (I haven’t read the new epilogue, so perhaps that changes things radically — though I’m skeptical.)

I think my essay is pretty clear that I was disappointed with David’s repudiation of New Graphics Revival. His characterization of the work therein as “middling-gen-x” seems to me deeply unfair, and far more applicable at this point, and alas, to David’s own oeuvre than to the broad range of people who contributed to his book.

I didn’t mention my collaboration with David mostly because, when I put it in in an earlier draft, it sounded like boasting. But as long as he’s brought it up…. Yes, we did take a stab at collaborating, in part because David had at the time expressed admiration for my writing and for some of the zines I’d been working on. I could be mistaken, but I believe he even defended them to Chris Ware (and no, Ware’s (quite possibly apocraphyl) lack of enthusiasm for my efforts is not why I don’t, in general, like his recent stuff.)

Anyway, for collectors of Heatley ephemera, I believe the story David was thinking of illustrating was this one:

Triangle Hospital

You might not know that but sometimes a triangle does wrong. Like one once had porcupine hair. So they took her to the triangle hospital so she would not keep sticking the scientists. Science is hard enough! They cut off her hair with a sponge because a sponge is the one opposite weapon that makes triangles vulnerable. She had wanted to be in a museum or a zoo but she wasn’t interesting anymore. That’s how it goes if you are a triangle.

I certainly was sad not to get to work with David, for both personal and career reasons. But that’s the way it goes, and I was, and remain, grateful for his past interest in and enthusiasm for my writing and art, as well as for the chance to participate in the anthology he edited, an experience I still treasure. So thank you, David. Best of luck to you.

Update: Well, my comments once again seem to have prompted a message board thread shut down; the comics comics guys killed the discussion right after I posted. I guess I have a gift. (Update 2: Tim Hodler wrote to assure me that my posts were not the reason for the thread getting shut down. So no super-thread-shutting-down-powers, apparently; just garden-variety paranoia on my part.)

I was going to add one thing there, but I guess I’ll put it here. Reading back over David’s post, the one thing that really kind of depresses me is his off-hand, and kind of cruel, dismissal of the contributions to the New Graphics Revival Anthology he edited. I guess if that’s the way he feels, that’s the way he feels…but I do love that book,and part of the reason is, as I say in my essay, it seemed like a real act of faith and love — reaching out to people who don’t usually participate in comics, and asking them to trust the medium, and (by extension) the editors. It feels like David just kind of shit on a bunch of people who trusted him. It depresses me in the way that reading the “Sexual History” depressed me. I don’t really have the heart to elaborate further, except to say that I wish he’d just stuck to insulting my work and my morals.

The Guin Saga, story by Kaoru Kurimoto, is “Japan’s leading heroic fantasy series” according to the back cover blurb. Vertical is putting it out in bits and pieces, starting with a short story called “The Seven Magi.” I read the first two of the three volumes.

So…as Tucker would have me say, this is certainly no Little Nemo in Slumberland. It’s more like Judge Dredd. Not the comic, but the godawful movie. It’s got that what-the-hell-is-going-on-oh-whatever-let’s-just-have
-everybody-shout-loudly-and-then-maybe-kill-something bad action movie thing down pat. The story, such as it is, is about a leapord-headed king called Guin, and the city he protects is cursed with the black plague, so he goes to seek out a sorcerer to help, and then he finds other sorcerers, and there’s some sort of evil spider thing, and his consort back at the palace gets possessed and wanders around with a knife killing random people, which is a lot more boring than it sounds; and there’s a pimp who is supposed to provide comic relief, and a prostitute who’s supposed to provide tits, and another evil sorceress who provides the ridiculous pseudo-Indo fetish-wear, and also more tits. Oh, yeah, the possessed consort has tits too. Also, the art is eager to inform us, an ass. And everybody keeps shouting “Guin” in case you forget the title character’s name. (He’s supposed to have amnesia, I think, so maybe they’re trying to help him out, I don’t know.)

The art, by Kazuaki Yanagisawa, is pretty good — which means he’s awesome by typical Western comics standards, I guess. The story-telling is clear and the battles (even with the amorphous icky giant spider) are easy to follow; the leapord-head is cute and nicely rendered. The character designs are kind of dull and clumsy though — that indo-fetish sorceress is an aesthetic atrocity. And the art hews to a more naturalistic, less cartoony mode that tends to highlight some drafting problems (the leopard head tends to look too small for Guin’s body; hands are often out of proportion.) I’m not hugely conversant with samurai manga, but of what I’ve seen Rurouni Kenshin, Inu-Yasha, and Banya: The Explosive Deliveryman all seem more accomplished and distinctive. (Rurouni Kenshin’s cartoony style is masterfully supple and memorable; Inu-Yasha has scores of beautiful, twisted demon drawings; the Banya artist is a phenomenally accomplished draftsman.)

From what I’ve read of manga-consumption patterns in Japan, most books are read at breakneck speed. This certainly seems designed for that kind of skimming; even if you flip through it really fast, you won’t miss anything, and you’ll get to see a bunch of more-or-less professionally rendered gore and fan service. It’s the comics equivalent of mediocre prime-time television, meant to be turned on for empty stimulation while you’re — I don’t know, eating dinner or clipping your toe-nails or sinking into a turgid stew of ennui and despair. If you read six or seven samurai manga a day, I guess I could see why you’d put this in rotation. Personally, though, my desire to read the third and final volume is nil.
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If you would rather get your manga criticism from someone who actually knows what he’s talking about, rather than from a dabbler like me, you should check out Bill Randall’s recent post

So I got another Jeff Parker digest — Marvel Adventures Fantastic Four Volume 2. The first three stories are fairly pedestrian: the FF battles dinosaurs in the first, then they fight something else in the second, and then they battle Namor the Sub-Mariner in the third. It’s standard-issue super-adventure, told professionally but without any particular spark.

The fourth one is the charm, though. Titled “It’s Slobberin Time”, it features a super-villain called the Street, who is, like the name says, a sentient piece of pavement, with a fire-hydrant stuck in him and everything. How did the Street come to be? Well, he tries to explain, but the FF is so busy bickering they can’t hear him…then the Thing goes off to get a specialty sandwich…Reed zaps the Street with some doohickey which makes him fall apart…and the subsonics summon Lockjaw, the giant dimension-traveling dog with the weird thingee on his head. Lockjaw is intensely and ominously interested in the Street’s fire-hydrant (“put that leg down!” wails the hapless supervillain.) But then the Thing comes back with his sandwich, Lockjaw eats it, which screws up his digestion, and then he starts burping himself across time and space, taking the FF with him.

My son loved, loved, loved this issue…or, as the boy himself put it, “I laughed so hard I farted!” I laughed out loud at several points myself, and even the rather indifferent artist seemed inspired; Lockjaw’s look as he tries to digest the sandwich is, for example, adorably hang-dog. Awwww.

In other words, “It’s Slobberin’ Time” isn’t so much an adventure with funny parts as it is a joke with loopy bits of adventure stuck on to create some sort of narrative. It’s not a tale of super-heroics, but a parody of super-heroics.

In thinking about super-hero stories, parodies are often seen as a kind of peripheral sub-genre — super-hero stories, qua super-hero stories are adventure pulp; parodies may be liked or disliked, but they aren’t really what the genre is about, either for its supporters or detractors.

But I’ve got to say that, at least for me, much of my sincere and long-term love of super-heroes is linked precisely to the way the genre is not only made for, but actually made of, parodies. All genres include parody of course, but for super-heroes, parodies are really central in a way that they’re not in…for instance, romance, or detective fiction. The earliest worthwhile super-hero comics were probably Jack Cole’s Plastic Man and C.C. Beck’s Shazam, and ever since then, super-heroes have consistently been at their best when going for laughs. The Mad Magazine parodies like “Superduperman,” Ambush Bug, Flaming Carrot, the Adam West Batman…even, say Super-Grover from Sesame Street. As far as public profile, and even, I think as far as aesthetic success, super-heroes are as likely to be parodic and silly as they are to be serious. Frank Miller’s Dark Knight drew a lot of its charm from its constant teetering on the verge of self-parody; Grant Morrison’s Animal Man was often indistinguishable from parody; even the dark, grim, Watchmen brought up classic super-hero parody tropes with some verve (how do you pee in that costume? and, of course, there’s the Silk Spectre Tijuana Bible….) On the alt comics side, it seems like everybody near about works with super-hero parodies Crumb, Ted Rall, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes (at least sort of), Jeff Brown, Johnny Ryan, Jaime Hernandez (I believe…I could be misremembering that one….). And, indeed, despite the ascendance of largely straight-faced movies like “Dark Knight,” parody remains extremely popular as a super-hero mode, whether within comicdom (Marvel Zombies) or outside it (Captain Underpants) (both of which, incidentally, are pretty bad…but that’s the way it goes, sometimes….)

In a lot of ways, I think, super-heroes are most adult (and somewhat contradictorily, most accessible to a varied audience) not when they’re violent or sexy or nostalgic, but when they’re funny and parodic. All those goofy powers and nutty costumes and bellowing about truth and justice while beating each other over the head… super-heroes are just funny. Which isn’t quite the same thing as saying that they’re stupid. Sure, lots of super-hero comics are witheringly and unforgiveably dumb, but the genre itself has virtually from the beginning also had practitioners who embraced and celebrated its own goofiness. The whole Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex thing…that’s not making fun of the super-hero genre; it’s an exercise occuring well within the boundaries of the super-hero genre itself.

I guess the point here for me is twofold; first, the super-hero genre really is smarter and more worthwhile than it’s often given credit for being; and, two, mainstream super-hero comics don’t take advantage of that as much as I wish they did. Maybe we are moving past the low water mark, though. I’m sort of hoping for the day when the Marvel Adventures line is the — parodic, smart — flagship for the company, and the continuity cluster-fucks are the undermarketed backwater. Dare to dream.