Speaking of canons, I’d dust off a place for Dan Zettwoch in mine. Half of it’s me being a homer, half me liking familiar people and places. The other half’s that his characters have the old can-do spirit of the US in the Depression, the wars, maybe just mowing down the wilderness for suburbs and parking lots so Kevin Huizenga can have something to draw.

One more half: they might use their can-do spirit to cut down trees with their chins, not knowing it can’t be done. That’s how he draws them, the football blocks in his Kramers spread, the ’37 flood’s boatman, or the actors in his painting on the cover of the new Cinefamily brochure (detail):

That it’s of Jerry Lewis, the seminal infantile American comic now widely loathed and painful to watch because he’s so damn naked, even better. His sketches are all angles and elbows, the final version softer, with Lewis’ wound-up energy below the surface.

(I like his Sanford & Son drawings even better, since that’s my middle name.)

Kramers Ergot 7 opens with the denoument and ends with the descent. Sammy Harkham’s front cover shows an idyll after the apocalypse, while Shary Boyle’s back cover shows a leap into Hell. Or just a volcano’s less epic torments. So the book points to a narrative scale equalling its size. A few of the pieces inside (Ryan, Hernandez) can’t be asked, others just go for epic images (stunning works by Xavier Robel and Will Sweeney). The best mix grand stories with grand images.

Two in particular tell whole epics in their two or three pages. The first, a delightful sad myth by Shary Boyle, follows a bride cursed with a dead groom and an elephant mask. As these things go, she sets out to find a graveyard. Like leathery elephant skin, caves and nighttime enclose youth’s bright colors. There she finds an old Bavarian, blood-stained linens, and the crone of the moon. After a mere two pages, the final couple of panels are deeply moving. You’ve been somewhere. This is a old folktale, one with their full complexity, a myth with no dust. The title? “Grow Old.”

The second visits Kim Deitch’s America. Some years ago he met a man who’d known Louie Armstrong. The man was a counterculture visionary, aiming to create a whole new culture in the underground. His startup mixed LSD sodas until the Man put him down. He fled, only to be found years later mummified on a boat with his last disciple, still tripping. (This all has to be true.) Bottlecaps sprinkled in the margins tie the whole together. It hints at those quintessentially American stories: the Hardy Boys, Terrytoons, Horatio Alger. For all the graphic bravado in Kramers, Deitch’s piece left me the most slackjawed. It’s a creation myth with destruction besides for one generation of Americans. Its images burned into my eyes, and Deitch wraps it in layers and layers of tawdry pop culture whose meanings open up and out.

Both these stories strike me as myths in the best sense. They’re origin stories. The details of a character’s life get hoisted onto a larger stage and bleached by the lights. The song & dance tell us who we are. Compare Tom Gauld’s version of Noah’s Ark in Kramers, where myth’s emptied so that Shem and Ham can gripe about their crazy dad. Gauld’s story pits the grand scale of Noah’s project, drawn in huge tableaux, against smaller panels sized for his kids’ complaints. The entire hassle of listening to God, who knows who you are and what you should do, gets drawn as a Rube Goldberg contraption with animals two by two. Shem & Ham can’t be bothered. Once they’re surrounded by the flood, they can’t understand how Noah was right after all. Gauld’s vision is contemporary: even if there’s a miracle, it just won’t scan. Without seeming fusty, Boyle & Deitch tap into something primordial.

Of course, calling things myths can get out of hand. Some weeks ago, someone around here (me?) took a swipe at Joseph Campbell– a critic I haven’t read in some time as I feel I know him too well. He’s the guy whose ideas, a stew of Jungian archetypes and Perennialism, gave screenwriters a way to sound more important. The prime mover there is Star Wars, a Western I grew up on. I loved it; it’s vivid enough in my memory that I haven’t revisited it for years. To hear 1000 faces talk, though, it’s the Iliad teamed up with the Mahabharata.

I’ve never been comfortable with that reading. The film, along with its sequels, imitators and any other screenplay mainlining Campbell and Robert McKee, tells me all about the stuff George Lucas grew up on rather than the place he grew up. (You have to go to American Graffiti for that.) Star Wars reads as John Ford-via-Kurosawa, Errol Flynn, everything a middle-class kid or film student would know. He wouldn’t know the veins flowing beneath John Ford’s work, though, the details in the archetypes. I think of my parents’ generation, who spent very little time in front of a screen, but got Westerns in a way I can’t. Go out and tame the wild, bend nature, build dams and damned superhighways. They’re America’s creation myth.

My generation couldn’t be asked. Everything was built for us, so our stories often trade bleached-out details for no details at all. Fortunately, Joe Campbell’s there to give us a reason why. Yet his entire project differs considerably from the aesthetic shorthand it’s become. A poorly drawn character’s backstory becomes “mythos,” when “mythos” should refer just to the fundament Campbell believed was common to all. How odd that now creation myths like the Western have given way to Life After People, three dozen climate change movies, or the scrubbing bubbles of civilization-eating zombies. Destroy the foundations, then. Which is why I love the pieces by Deitch and Boyle so much. They’re small gestures, reminders of those delightful, sad ways of feeling human.

Darren Hughes of Long Pauses on the cliché epidemic in music reviewing:

Eh, no excerpt. He just quotes a dozen or so music writers all saying this album’s like Disney. Funny to see them all with no pants. And while not endemic to music reviewing, it’s probably worse there as most writers have no technical knowledge of microphones or sheet music. So no A-flat sonority above contra D, a line taken from the notes to a Silvestrov symphony. I only vaguely know what it means, like whenever I find Harvey Pekar liner notes in a jazz CD. He writes lucid, technical music criticism that I, as an illiterate musician, can barely parse. Mea culpa. For better or worse, I learned playing & reading about alt-rock and noise– back when I read reviews, they were all texture and pose. Lots of nice prose, often with nothing whatsoever to do with the disc. I.e., performance crit, the music of words, not music. I doubt much has changed.

One of these day’s I’m gonna take this up on my other blog about Japrocksampler, the *cough*-titled book about 70s freakrock on the earthquake islands. Until then, I’ll wait for the day when all us online comics critics trip over ourselves to post at the same time the exact same thing in the exact same words about, I don’t know, some book that doesn’t exist yet, like New Uncle Scrooge Adventures.

Sussing out religion and science deep in a comments thread, Eric B. goes way, way back to Sir Edmund Gosse’s father Philip for this tidbit:

…he argued that God planted all of the dinosaur fossils, etc. as an attempt to trick and tempt people into the sin of rejecting creationism.

(That’s kin to the “omphalos argument,” from the navel, i.e., “Did Adam have one?” And Edmund chronicled their relationship in the classic Father and Son, predicting the evangelical-science strife to come.)

I’m struck by the theatrical, literary flair of the argument. God matters more than the world He created, so we can assume it’s a stage set. Quit teasing and raise the curtain. I love the image, which is especially good for fantasy/SF, as in the beginning and ending of the Chronicles of Narnia (religious), the first Matrix (faux-philosophic), or Dark City (intertextual). And others, like Electric Warrior.

I’ve never forgotten it since reading it as a kid– it’s a DC comic about a rogue robot in a futuristic city. Doing stuff. That is, I’ve never forgotten the ending. It ran for 10? 12? issues until the plug got pulled. Rather than just stop, or even resolve the plotlines set to run on and on, its creators sent down a spaceship to tell the cast their whole world was an elaborate stage set. Hop on, let’s get out of here. I even think they asked about the dinosaur bones, and they spaceship captain was like, “we planted them! Come on, I’m gonna miss my shows.” I guess it’s a meta way of flipping the bird at editorial.

So I don’t remember it very well (and I much prefer the dust on my memories to Google blotting out yet another part of my mind.). The ending floored me, though. Life hadn’t yet pulled any rugs out from under me– I was very young, my family all still living, and as to Santa, losing him didn’t stop the toys. And stories, for a kid miles from any other kid but his brother, offered a consistent escape in exchange for being given life by my attention. Having that attention betrayed made a mediocre work linger. The first one hurts. The next few times, as with Blazing Saddles‘ ending, I just got mad. Mel Brooks was flipping the bird at me! Then I got jaded and in on the joke, which meant I gave less and less to stories. (Until much later, when I needed them again.)

Now, like everyone else, I’m just navigating the huge swath of competing, contradictory stories without much dissonance. It’s a condition of media, spin culture, whatever comes after postmodernism. I’d love to wipe out the stories I disagree with and so reshape the world and school board to my liking, but in the end it might be all I can do to ignore them. Others disagree, and go through mental acrobatics that put Adam on a dinosaur, impressive to say the least.

I missed the good news that Drawn & Quarterly’s bringing over Susumu Katsumata’s short story collection Red Snow. It’s surprising, as nobody remembered his work until Seirinkogeisha put out the collection in 2005. Unlike also-forgotten stablemate Tatsumi, Katsumata can’t claim to be historically important.

His stories are better than Tatsumi’s shorts, though: timeless, bawdy, mysterious, like an earthy Kwaidan. Cartoon figures sneaking bits of pleasure in the grass, water sprites breaking things. They reveal a handmade craft that fits next to the Moomins and Monsiuer Jean.

If timeless, these stories feel old, too. They appeared mostly in the anthology Manga Goraku between 1978-80; the feeling of reminisce echoes Tatsumi’s rue. Both are old men’s manga in their way, best read over milky homebrew and several packs of borrowed cigarettes. In August, under a fluorescent light, while grumbling over back pains.

Not too much to my taste, unlike the also-announced collection of Imiri Sakabashira. I’ve liked Sakabashira’s manga and artwork a good long time. It feels a lot less fusty than either Tatsumi or Katsumata. Actually, it’s more kin to Yo Gabba Gabba. With cigarettes. I’ll give some to the nephew when he’s considerably older.