comiXology | Articles & Interviews

Panels in the Ivory Towers

Karen Green — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0600

Last month, the eye, the arts magazine section of the Columbia Spectator (Columbia University's student paper since 1877), published an article on the graphic novels collection in Butler Library. The reporter—a tall, lanky, and enthusiastic fellow named Tommy Hill—interviewed Ben Katchor, Columbia professor Richard Bulliet, and me. It's a terrific piece of writing, engaging and thoughtful; you can read it here.

I was pretty chuffed when the piece came out, not least because it was so much better written even than I'd hoped (despite a sporadic use of "illustrator" for "artist" that may irk some). The true source of my delight, however, was in the approach the article had taken. When the article appeared in the eye, I had sent the link to a variety of family, friends and acquaintances, some in the comics biz, and one industry professional had replied, "Pow sock comics aren't for kids anymore!" At first I thought this was a gently humorous jab, but I eventually realized that this person had dismissed the article as yet another mainstream-press piece that marveled, "Golly gosh, look what's happened to comics; they're all grown up!" Lord knows there are a lot of these CAFKA articles out there (hat tip for the acronym coinage to The Beat and its commenters), mostly written by people who are still stuck in some kind of Frederic Wertham mindlock, assuming that all comics are read by budding juvenile delinquents, even comics that win National Book Awards or special Pulitzer Prizes.

But this wasn't a simplistic "comics aren't for kids anymore!" slant on the collection; this was about the role that a comics collection can play in an academic milieu. Academic libraries contain hundreds of thousands of books that can be read either for entertainment value or in close-readings for study. They can be explored for their artifactual qualities or for the cultural or social historical weight they bear, as I discussed last year. The money quote for me was from Hill's interview with the brilliant scholar and fanboy Dick Bulliet:

Bulliet has a theory that posits comic books as keenly accurate depictions of the inner lives and imaginations of the teenage boys of that particular era. "What distinguished the comic book industry of the 1960s and '70s from the book publishing industry was that it was more demand-driven than supply-driven," he says. "Stores were very cautious about what they stocked. Owners knew their stock very well, and they paid attention to what boys were buying." The output of the industry became totally reflective of the desires, fears, and dreams of the boys who were fueling it. "You can watch, in the comics of the era, the evolution of a sensibility that is specific to a demographic," continues Bulliet. In Bulliet's view, comics provide a window onto an otherwise undocumented history.

This isn't about comics being not just for kids. This is about comics having a meta-life as objects of study. Columbia is not, of course, unique among universities in valuing comics on this level; really, we're just in the embryonic stages. I've written before about the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University, the Comic Art Collection at Michigan State University, among others, where enormous resources are devoted to preserving comic and cartoon art for research. And now Japan is kicking our collective academic asses with the planned Tokyo International Manga Library at Meiji University, expected to hold fourteen million items, starting with Yoshihiro Yonezawa's collection of 140,000 comic books. Shucks, Columbia's only spent about $27,000 on comics so far; Meiji is sinking the kind of cash that represents more than just an interest in scholarly study, but an investment in Japan's patrimony.

During the time I spent with reporter Hill, I took him on a tour of our collection. In Butler Library, oversize books are shelved in a special folio section at the west end of every floor of the stacks, so after I showed him the bulk of the collection in the regular stacks, we walked down to the large-format area. There one can find books like Little Nemo in Slumberland: so many splendid Sundays! or The World on Sunday: graphic art in Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper (1898-1911) or Storeyville. I pulled out some Winsor McCay to show him and his response to it was immediate and almost visceral. One could argue that Little Nemo was never simply for kids, nor for that matter were most of the early newspapers comics. Nor are many newspaper comics today, although we tend not to have cultural critics of the standing of Gilbert Seldes trumpeting the virtues of For Better or Worse, as Seldes did for George Herriman's Krazy Kat, saying "With those who hold that a comic strip cannot be a work of art I shall not traffic" and comparing Herriman to the Primitive painter Henri Rousseau. The comics published in the New York World, the jewel in Joseph Pulitzer's crown, appealed to readers across all economic, social, ethnic, and generational boundaries. The World page below, by George McManus, features characters from his strip, The Newlyweds, which was based on McManus' own family life—making it more akin to today's sitcoms than to Saturday morning cartoons.

It's this aspect of comics in the university—not comic history, not why comics are for grown-ups, but comics as scholarly object—that informs work such as Dave Purcell's recent Columbia master's essay in American Studies, Superheroes of the pastoral: the development of American mythology through the landscape's liminal spaces, in which he traces the development of American mythological archetypes from western frontier heroes through urban noir superheroes, paralleling the nation's transition from rural to urban pre-eminence. Academic prose isn't going to be to everyone's taste, obviously: I'm thinking of Tucker Stone retching as he pages through A comic studies reader (see 1:06, 4:13 and 7:36); yeah, this kind of writing is definitely not for everybody. Even I….well, my job is to help scholars with their research, so you could probably say I'm more of an enabler than a practitioner. I mean, there's a reason I prefer to write these columns rather than present papers at the Modern Language Association on the meta-narrative of Pogo as a multivalent transcultural signifier. But my point is that the eye article—along with my own efforts—isn't about comics being read by different audiences, it's about their being read for different purposes.

This is the impetus behind an exhibition that will soon be on view in Butler Library at Columbia. This past summer, I was asked to plan a display on graphic novels to be mounted for the spring 2010 semester. I was given total freedom on how it should be framed, and I sketched out some rough ideas, all of which I trashed after a fruitful discussion with friend-of-comics and tenured faculty member, Jeremy Dauber. Dauber pointed out that I didn't need to explain the history of comics or talk about why they were worth reading. I had unwittingly created a fairly CAFKA-esque concept, but we decided that that was altogether too defensive—too much "why" and not enough "how." Why not operate on the principle of how comics can be used in an academic setting?

So, when the exhibition goes up in January, it will look at themes that are explored in college-level curricula. Each of the eight display cases will present a concept and then trace how artists have addressed it, both in more traditional art and in comics. So, for example, one theme might be "didacticism," or works created for the purpose of instruction. First up could be an image from the 1735 Hogarth series, A Rake's Progress. In this series of eight paintings, later rendered as engravings, Hogarth presents wealthy ne'er-do-well Tom Rakewell, who fritters away his inheritance on wicked and wasteful pursuits, ending up first in debtors' prison and finally in an insane asylum. In the first engraving, below, Tom is busy: he's getting measured for new clothes while ignoring both the servants who are preparing his father's office for the wake and also his pregnant fiancée and her outraged mother. Hogarth fills the image with telling details, such as the defaced leather binding of the Bible in the lower left, out of which Tom's penny-pinching father has cut a new sole for his shoe, and the anthropomorphic family arms on the wall at upper right, three vises (vices; get it?) over the word "Beware."

Did comics embrace such didacticism? Short answer: did you grow up reading Mary Worth? I know I did, and I always resented what seemed like the endless busybody-ism of that silver-haired know-it-all. While early strips establish that her advice was not always unsought, and was often clearly on-point—witness the panels from a 1947 strip below—when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s she tended to come off as a more genteel version of the voice of the Establishment.

Another example, with a far more serious intent, is a recent comic developed specifically for returning war veterans who face difficulty in reintegration to civilian life. Coming Home: what to expect, how to deal when you return from combat, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón—the same team that created the graphic novel adaptation of the 9/11 Report—was commissioned by Military OneSource, a resource created by the Department of Defense to offer support to current and former members of the armed services as well as to their families.

The 32-page comic tells the story of a three friends, Iraq War vets who are experiencing various symptoms of PTSD, rage, alcoholism, alienation—a virtual mini DSM-IV of psychological trauma—and when, where, and how they get help. Two final pages list contact info for a variety of support services—from the Veterans Administration, from individual branches of the military, and from independent organizations. The comic is free in print to members of the military, although anyone can read the online version.

All of these images both tell a story and provide a lesson, in the same tradition as John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress or Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. There are a host of other options for this theme, and a host of other themes, as well, many of which I've referred to here from time to time: perceptions of war, sexuality and gender, religion, visual rhetoric. In fact, I'd love to hear from you all, in the comments or in emails, about themes and examples you think would work, too. Let's make this a group effort, shall we? Because exhibitions aren't just for kids anymore!

The Manga Cargo Cult: How Manga Got Long (and Short Again)

Jason Thompson — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:00:00 -0500

Almost every comic artist I know wants to write really, really long stories. Hundred-page stories. Thousand-page stories. Jeff Smith's Bone at 1,300 pages, Dave Sim's Cerebus at 6,000 pages. Long page counts are a comic creator's badge of honor, and they also speak to something fundamental about comics: they are a solitary art form (unless you share a studio) and they take a long time to draw. During those days hunched over the drawing board, with ideas transferring to paper at slow upload speeds, your thoughts wander, simple plots get more complicated, and soon you're plotting a life-consuming epic, like Philip Seymour Hoffmann's character in Synecdoche, New York.

While not generally as introspective as a Charlie Kaufman movie, manga gives people even more role models for really long comics: Dragon Ball, One Piece, Glass no Kamen, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Lone Wolf and Cub are just a few of the story manga to reach over 8,000 pages in length. What Warren Ellis once called "decompressed" storytelling, with pages upon pages to set the scene or show moment-by-moment action, is now accepted and welcomed by most comics readers (even ones who don't like the big eyes and other stereotypical signifiers of 'manga'), and a 200 page graphic novel, what would have been an epic in the 1980s, might even seem short.

But there's a problem; the American market does not necessarily bear long-running, creator-owned comics. Such lengthy works are a big risk on the part of publishers, and require a lot of work time on the part of artists, who don't necessarily have teams of assistants like Masashi Kishimoto, creator of Naruto. In America, sales of multiple-volume manga generally drop with each new volume, making 10+ volume series a very risky publishing venture. Some publishing trends seem directly opposed to the nature of traditional manga; with paper prices rising, and gorgeous color printing of the Flight and Popgun style becoming ever cheaper and easier (not to mention that color is free online), there's less and less incentive to create lengthy stories in B&W print. Will the American market ever encourage truly epic, zillion-page stories in the style of manga?

In a word, no. In more words, even the manga market doesn't really encourage zillion-page stories as much as we think it does. The format of manga—the bones of manga beneath the flesh of art and story motifs—is created by publishing and economic factors, and out of the thousands of manga which debut in Japanese magazines each year, only a few dozen make it to a second or third graphic novel volume.

With a few exceptions, mostly from established artists who have proven themselves with shorter works (such as the novel-like works of Kazuo Umezu and Naoku Urasawa), even the longest running manga were not conceived from the beginning as bookshelf-destroying behemoths. Published in anthology magazines, the typical manga has the story structure of a TV pilot—the first chapter sells the "pitch," and only if it's successful does the manga keep going. If Eiichiro Oda's One Piece had scored poorly in reader polls, instead of reaching 50+ volumes, the characters would never have gotten off the first island. (On the other hand, sometimes a manga intended as a one-shot, like Azusa Izumi's The Lizard Prince, is picked for expansion into an ongoing series—never mind if all the loose plot threads have already been tied up, make some new ones!) Sustaining interest over the long haul is not easy; Dave Sim's Cerebus is the longest Western comic book series written by a single creator, but as Sim himself has pointed out, he didn't set his grandiose goal until after he'd built a readership and cut his teeth on 25 self-contained, 20-page issues. Throughout his epic, Sim also kept trying to bring in new readers, usually by parodies of then-popular comics such as Moon Knight, Spawn and the Sandman—parodies which date the comic and make it harder to read today (though arguably less so than Sim's infamous conversion to right-wing religious fundamentalism, speaking of isolation and thoughts wandering).

In manga, as in all things, format and medium determine the structure of a story. Creating a long-running series is a balancing act of keeping the readers' interest with every individual installment while also keeping your eye on the "big plan" (assuming you have one). Within manga, there are several different publishing formats which steer towards several different types of stories—not all of them towards the super-long, decompressed mega-manga which Americans know from Dragon Ball, Fruits Basket and Bleach.

(1) Weekly manga. There are scarcely more than a dozen weekly manga magazines, but among them number the highest-circulation manga magazines in Japan: Shonen Jump, Shonen Sunday, Shonen Magazine, etc. With an average of 20 pages a week, 80 pages a month, weekly stories use more pages than almost any other manga. The drawn-out fight scenes of manga like Dragon Ball, Naruto and Bleach are a product of weekly manga. Weekly manga also has the luxury of not having to tell a complete story in every chapter; when the reader is coming back in just a week, it's okay to end in the middle of a battle or on an outrageous cliffhanger. When collected in book form, the result is usually a very smooth, "cinematic" read, like flipbooks that go on for thousands and thousands of pages.

Weekly manga magazines were introduced around 1959 to compete with television shows, another traditionally weekly medium, which was just beginning to be introduced in postwar Japan. Weekly manga can also be compared to American newspaper comic strips in the first half of the 20th century—they're designed to be as cheap, B&W, disposable and widely read as possible. Until the 1960s, before the heyday of weekly manga, most manga was not unlike American and European comics; very short works of a few chapters or volumes at most. But with weekly manga, page counts grew and grew; the goal is to hook the readers in and keep 'em reading. Akira Toriyama, it's said, wanted to end Dragon Ball long before volume 42, but was pressured into continuing by the sheer popularity of the series, like Douglas Adams cranking out yet another Hitchhiker's Guide novel.

But for all their cultural clout, weekly manga, like newspaper strips and network television, is a fading medium. Except for Weekly Comic Bunch (which skews towards an aging readership anyway), all the existing weekly magazines in Japan are at least 20 years old; recent attempts like Comic Gumbo have been failures. Publishing a weekly manga magazine requires tremendous resources, and with the fragmentation of media, perhaps the generalist audience required to sustain these massive magazines is dwindling. Oddly, there are no weekly shojo manga magazines (although there are several biweekly ones), possibly a sign of shojo's smaller economic footprint; a few weekly shojo magazines were published in the 1960s but never caught on.

(2) Biweekly or monthly manga. The vast majority of manga magazines are monthly. Individual comics run approximately 30 pages a month, approximately the same as American comics. A monthly manga has to make tighter use of its pages than a weekly manga, and it's arguably due to this format that monthly manga—such as Gunsmith Cats, Blade of the Immortal, Fullmetal Alchemist—have traditionally been some of the most popular manga in America, particularly in the 1990s before the massive page counts of weekly manga had been accepted by the American publishing marketplace.

Biweekly and monthly manga have tremendous variety, but the monthlies have one major difference from weekly manga: they're more likely to be the work of a single person. "Weekly manga requires at least 4-5 assistants," says Hideki Egami, the editor of Shogakukan's monthly magazine Ikki. "Monthly is close to the maximum frequency that a manga came come out and be drawn entirely by one person." Although popular manga artists often have massive staffs of assistants, there's a sizeable number of manga artists who, either by choice or poverty (drawing a monthly manga series is not necessarily a get-rich-quick scheme), have no full-time assistants or just call in their friends for help when a deadline looms. Some artists, like Hitoshi Iwaaki (Parasyte), draw everything themselves on principle; some artists, like Hiromu Arakawa (Fullmetal Alchemist), employ large studios.

(3) Bimonthly, quarterly or irregular magazine manga. Magazines with such an infrequent publishing schedule tend to be subculture mags: the lesbian manga magazine Yuri Hime, yaoi magazines such as Be x Boy Gold, or spinoffs of more frequent magazines such as Dengeki Teioh and LaLa Dx. These magazines are often the easiest to break into, with yaoi in particular being an entry point for many female manga artists, much the way that male-oriented pornographic manga in the 1970s was a breeding ground for underground manga artists like Hideo Azuma (Disappearance Diary). As long as you deliver the goods, you have a certain amount of freedom, and it was in this environment that artists like Fumi Yoshinaga and est em developed.

The general consensus in manga publishing seems to be that, if a magazine comes out this infrequently, the manga should be one-shots since it's almost impossible to keep readers' attention for an ongoing story. (Shhh…don't tell any American indy comics artists…) If bimonthly manga do have an ongoing story, such as Natsume's Book of Friends, Land of the Blindfolded, and Palette of 12 Secret Colors, it's necessary to re-explain the basic story premise in each episode and make each episode as self-contained as possible. The result is handy for a reader randomly picking up the magazine, but makes for a repetitive experience when the manga is later collected in graphic novel format.

(4) Standalone mange. Although it's still rare in Japan, a growing number of manga are published in standalone books without magazine serialization, like most American graphic novels. One example is Taiyo Matsumoto's 448-page graphic novel Go Go Monster. The real problem with standalone graphic novels in any country, of course, is how long they take to produce, during which time the artist has no reader feedback and, possibly, no source of income.

(5) Yonkoma (four-panel) mange. Four-panel manga, such as Azumanga Daioh and a bunch of books recently published by Yen Press, are the equivalent of American newspaper/web comic strips. Aside from a focus on cute girls, they eerily parallel the dynamics of Western gag strips: they are character-driven, rather than story-driven, and they rarely have much ongoing plot.

Yonkoma manga is easy to make, easy to read, and—surprisingly considering its low profile in the U.S.—very successful. While other manga magazines' circulations dwindle, yonkoma manga is the fastest growing area of the manga industry. Four-panel series such as Lucky Star are increasingly being adapted into animation and merchandise. There are many magazines devoted solely to four-panel manga. Online and cellphone manga is overwhelmingly four-panel-oriented, as it's the easiest type of manga to read on mobile devices, and some yonkoma webcomics, such as Hidekaz Himaruya's Hetalia Axis Powers, have even become hits and made it into the big time.

The 8,000+ page manga mega-epics are the result of a very specific, monolithic publishing culture, and as circumstances change (for instance, into the casual culture of webcomics and cell phones) the nature of "manga" will change with it. On the other hand, the fragmentation of media means more opportunities for creators; there's no reason you can't tell an epic, 1,000+ page story on the web. The trick is not to do it blindly, thinking that by mimicking the traditional print-derived structure of manga (or to give another example followed by way too many young artists, by drawing your manga right to left), you'll have the same success as mega-manga which arose in Japan's magazine boom years of the 1980s and early 1990s. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but creating a manga cargo cult won't necessarily cause riches to fall from the sky.

Phil & John

Tucker Stone — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:35:00 -0500

Phil Schaap hosts a daily radio show on Columbia University's radio station called "Bird Flight". It's roughly 90 minutes long, and it's about Charlie Parker, and that's been true for nearly 30 years. If you've ever heard it, you know it's not just about Parker--it's also about Schaap, a man who knows more about Charlie Parker and jazz than just about anybody on the planet. (The article about Schaap in Da Capo's Best Music Writing anthology includes multiple anecdotes to back this up; the best one is undoubtedly when Sun Ra "kidnapped" Schaap so that Ra could find out his own biography from the guy prior to a club date.) Schaap's memory is beyond even a comic-obsessive's definition of remarkable, and his desire for more--Charlie Parker music, Charlie Parker information, Charlie Parker facts, What Happened to Charlie Parker on That Tuesday--remains just as strong.

John Peel died in 2004. He was an English radio disc jockey, although he did quite a bit of other stuff as well. His career is one that encompassed a much wider strain of music than Phil Schaap, but it had a similar sort of obsessive quality to it--Peel was always on the hunt for the new. He brought entire genres to radio listeners before anyone else, he extolled the virtues of unknown artists and bands, and while Peel was more than willing to call out to the past for quality, Peel's shows weren't the sort of thing that could randomly be moved across the decades indiscernibly.

There's something of immense value in both Schaap and Peel's approach to music, although it's probably easier to praise Peel. After all, he was the guy in the trenches, a man who was aging in a medium that extols youthfulness above all other qualities. But constantly moving forward has its negative marks against it as well--if you're constantly digging new holes in the back yard, you'll never make it to China. If that's your goal, you have to throw down in one location. While Peel probably took more knowledge of the long view to his grave than Phil will, Phil's depth of specific knowledge is just as worthwhile. But what was lost with Peel--and it's not hard to call it lost, when you consider how splintered the audience for music criticism has become--was that sort of breadth. Few go to one individual for everything anymore--you get your rap writing from one, your treacly nu-folk writing from another, a list of aggregate numerical ratings from others, or you just get everything from your brother.

So which one are you?

Comics has a lot of Phils. That's not an insult, although the more aggravated stereotype of the "every Frank Castle appearance ever" does exist and probably shouldn't be a model for any sane person to follow. Delving into self-defined buckets of obsession, churning and turning every aspect of a specific fictional character that--if we're going to be honest--is rarely going to have that same depth of thought put into its creation and maintenance as can be found in its audience. That's a part of comics, and it's not only the purview of the Thunderbolts reader--there's a subset of comics readers who, like Phil, can tell you more about George Herriman's life than George Herriman knew himself. Phils are the type who loudly reject casual reading, surreptitiously using the phrase "just looking to be entertained" while secretly pursuing the Holy Grail of completionist intake. There's a Jim Aparo Deadman that retells the death of Jason Todd from an alternate perspective? There's a Frank Miller back-up story that pre-dates 300 but uses a similar character design? I mean, sure. If it's cheap. (Even if it's not.)

Meanwhile, the Diamond distribution system forces a John Peel consumption. It's not just the latest issue of Stormwatch that "comes out" on Wednesday, it's also the English translation of "You Are There," the latest collection of 20th Century Boys. It's new, even when it's just new to us. And due to the low print-runs and the difficulties inherent in re-orders, some of that new stuff will disappear off the shelves within weeks of release, the same way that copies of Parker or Asterios Polyp entered a weird period of "we're waiting on a new printing" within months of their initial appearance. It doesn't take that many trips to the comic store before the buyer realizes that some of this stuff--the good, yes, although sometimes it's just "the popular"--may disappear into the secondary "collector's" market the same way that a first printing of Chew might. Like Phil, they want to take it all in, but like John, they want to keep up with all of it as well.

Theoretically, this would be the moment where one would point to the professional comic Peels, the men or women who do the trawling and trolling for the reader, the ones who voraciously plow into the swamp of comics to find the Ones That We Should Care About.

Theoretically, yes. Realistically?

Not so much.

See, people like Peel were rare, and today, they're rarer still. They weren't just critics, they were Tastemakers, Trendsetters, and they were paid to do it. They found the stuff that only a few obsessive Phil types could, but they had a receptive, vocal audience that attacked that "stuff" with the same voracity with which the recommendation had been delivered to them. It wasn't that the actual Peel had an audience who only did what he said--track down his listeners' yearly "favorites" and listen to the excitement with which Peel responds to the choices he didn't care for--but that Peel was somebody that the audience trusted enough to take chances on. Not just for reggae, or punk, or The Fall, or electro, or girl group pop, or soul, or drudge, or scludge, or fill-in-the-blank. For everything music. He was somebody who knew what he was talking about, and even when you disagreed with his choice, there was never a doubt that it was a random lark, a favor for a friend. He cared about where music was going, and he fired his estimable intelligence towards convincing his audience to do the same.

Comics doesn't have Tastemakers, maybe they did once, but that time is gone. It's always been a fractured landscape anyway--initial chunks of comics criticism doled out in fanzines or fan clubs, with the occasional academic polemic turned out for audiences in the low hundreds--and the Internet was able to finish the job of fracturing quicker than it's been able to on music and film. We all do it, you, me, the guy at the store--reading only those who agree with us up until they say something we don't like, we burn bridges, blog ourselves, trusting no one. After all, That Guy likes Guggenheim's Blade series--what's he know? That Girl's favorite comic last week was some manga about dating--all the smart kids know it was the GI Joe/Cobra Special!

The one place where the Peel style of "look upon this perfect diamond" survives is, sadly, in the dusty archives. Like their parents--or really, anybody's parents, or just the Platonic ideal of "parents"--before them, there's more than a few places where old comics are found and resurrected with the type of fervor and detailed exposition that only a fan could be capable of. Speaking of the virtues of the old newspaper strip, the Golden Age crazy, the EC horror, there's plenty of excellent, smart people doing neglected classics a service. Good for them. But they aren't Peels. They're Phils, and as smart, funny and intelligent as they can be, we've got plenty of them already--if there's one thing comics has too many of already, it's people obsessed with the past.

What about the rest of it? Where's the individual who will dive into Wednesday's delivery of cardboard boxes, dash their hands across the distended shelves, pulling and opening the new classic we haven't heard about yet, the comic that wasn't written by the ex-editor who knows all the big bloggers, the comic that couldn't make the Diamond catalog due to its lack of pre-orders?

They're never coming. There will never be a website that has a comics writer like Peel. Like movie reviews and music criticism, the internet has destroyed all of the potential jobs available for future John Peels. As the old guard of film & music die off, they'll join in line with comics, with a wide swath of user-generated content and aggregate "score" based reviews taking all of the eyeballs. But because of the nature of it, the fact that it's user-generated content--you can control it.

You just have to decide which model you want to follow.

Shaenon's Top Five Untranslated Manga (The 2009 List)

Shaenon K. Garrity — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:00:00 -0500

I don't seek out untranslated manga. I can't read Japanese, I'm too lazy to hunt for scanlations, and most of the interesting stuff doesn't get scanlated anyway. Beyond that, I fear that collecting manga I can't read would push me over the event horizon into total weeaboo-hood. When I started work at Viz, I made a solemn pact with myself: I wouldn't get into untranslated manga, I wouldn't travel to Japan, and I'd never, ever pay money for yaoi.

But just last month I bought Red Blinds the Foolish, the frikkin' sweet matador yaoi by est em (one of the backup stories in the volume is soccer hooligan yaoi). And somehow, especially since my two visits to Japan this year, I've accumulated a stack of untranslated manga. Sigh.

The good news is that, even in the current constricting manga economy, a lot of good stuff is getting translated—possibly more good stuff than at the height of the American manga boom. Vertical keeps chugging along (Black Jack!), Drawn & Quarterly published A Drifting Life, Viz launched its SigIkki titles and is beefing up its Signature line in general (Saturn Apartments! Oishinbo! Pluto!), and Dark Horse has editor Carl Gustav Horn working his magic (tricked-out CLAMP reprints? For me? Why, thank you!) So I have faith that eventually I'll get to read most of this stuff and can stop staring at the untranslated pages in slack-jawed incomprehension.

5. Soil, by Atsushi Kaneko

Most of the manga on this list are old manga, because less of the classic stuff gets translated into English, and also because I think old manga is better than new manga. But Soil is recent (launched in 2004, still ongoing), and I'm surprised no American publisher has picked it up. It's basically a David Lynch series in manga form. Two mismatched detectives—a foul-mouthed, stinky old pro and a hipster-nerdy young woman—descend upon a pristine suburban planned community. Their investigation turns up endless weird conspiracies beneath the town's idyllic surface, all spiraling further and further away from the case that brought them there. To give you a sense of the manga's tone, the case in question is the disappearance of an entire family, including the hamster, on the same day an enormous pile of salt materialized in the school parking lot.

Kaneko's earlier manga Bambi and Her Pink Gun, a surreal, hyperviolent fantasy strongly flavored by American underground comix, was partly translated by DMP before disappearing into the ether. Soil is more restrained and focused, digging into its bizarre mysteries with a deadpan tone. I can't think of another manga artist remotely like Kaneko; the guy's a mad genius.

4. Galaxy Express 999, by Leiji Matsumoto

Way back when, Viz published the Galaxy Express sequel series, but they never translated the original 1970s manga or, as far as I can recall, anything else by Matsumoto (although one of his short war comics was translated by Fred Schodt for his indispensible history Manga! Manga!). I really like Matsumoto's loopy artwork, and the shared sci-fi universe he created for such series as Galaxy Express 999 and the Harlock saga is one of the great comic-book settings, not to mention a major influence on later artists like CLAMP. Also, he draws the longest eyelashes in the business. I have no deeper reasoning behind my Matsumoto love.

3. Noboru Ohshiro's Trilogy of Awesome Old Mangas

Yoshihiro Tatsumi's glorious manga autobiography A Drifting Life, which, let us all give thanks, is available now from Drawn & Quarterly, includes a sequence in which the teenage Tatsumi corresponds with Noboru Ohshiro, who was essentially the top name in manga until Osamu Tezuka came along. Ohshiro published the first book-length comics in Japan, notably the three graphic novels Kisha Ryokô (Train Journey), Kasei Tanken (A Voyage to Mars), and Yukaina Tekkôsho (The Delightful Steel Mill, although I like the translation suggested by one of my coworkers at Viz, "The Happy Cog Factory"). All three are peppy journeys through semi-educational settings (Kasei Tanken includes photos of Mars pasted into the artwork, while Yukaina Tekkôsho features monkeys teaching you how to smelt steel), drawn in a style reminiscent of early American newspaper strips and colored in vivid watercolors.

These books look nothing like modern manga, and, although it was probably for the best that a beret-loving medical student would soon blow the collective minds of Japan's youth with New Treasure Island (a development also covered in A Drifting Life, as an awestruck young Tatsumi gets to visit the barely older Osamu Tezuka at home), looking at these pages does make me a little sorry that no one draws like Ohshiro anymore.

2. The Compleat Moto Hagio

Moto Hagio is my favorite, of course. A, A', still the only book-length Hagio manga published in English, was one of the first manga I ever read and remains among my very favorites. The most celebrated member of the revolutionary Year 24 Group of shojo artists, Hagio has dabbled in science fiction, Gothic horror, psychological drama, and, of course, some of the earliest shonen-ai.

There's a seventeen-volume Moto Hagio retrospective collection, reprinted a few times in Japan, that provides a good overview of her classic 1970s work, including the melancholy vampire series The Poe Family, the pioneering boys' love melodrama The Heart of Thomas, the much-loved (and translated long ago by Viz) sci-fi story "They Were Eleven," and a selection of early Hagio from back when she drew like a frilly old-school shojo artist. That'd be a good starting point for Hagio translation. After that we can move on to Marginal, A Savage God Reigns, and the deeply peculiar Otherworld Barbara, the last of which I bought at Nakano Broadway last week and cannot stop staring at.

1. Atagoul, by Hiroshi Masumura

My current obsession. Nobody has heard of this damn manga (also sometimes romanized as Ataghoul or Atagoal) and it's the greatest thing in the world. Since I cannot read Japanese, and there are no English-language websites about Atagoul, I have only the fuzziest idea what it's about. It's set in a forested fantasy world populated by anthropomorphic cats. The lead cat is a big yellow guy who loves to drink sake and eat squid and almost never stops smiling, not even when he and his androgynous human friend get impaled on icicles or rays shoot out of their bodies or something equally disturbing. Which happens a lot, but somehow things always work out okay.

Typical plot: the characters go hunting for snails at a lake, but the snails start levitating, which troubles them. Everyone finds their way into a disturbingly vaginal cave, which transports them to an equally phallic tower. There, they're attacked by a gypsy woman who shoots slime at them from a flute, then rides around on the head of a dragon. Fortunately, a cat with an eyepatch shows up to fight her. The fight takes them back to the cat village, where they burst into the local pub (which is shaped like a giant apple), but somehow they've shrunk and they plunge, dragon and all, into someone's beer glass. Part of me doesn't want this manga to get translated because I'm afraid it might start making sense, which would kind of ruin it for me.

Anyway, from what little I can piece together, Atagoul first ran in the 1980s, but there's a sequel series from the 2000s that follows the tradition of alternating between whimsical, dreamlike fantasy (at one point Studio Ghibli considered adapting Masumura's work) and HOLY CRAP WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED. The characters are cats because Masumura is aware that he's much better at drawing cats than humans. The one Masumura-related work that's been translated into English is the haunting anime Night on Galactic Railroad (put out by the now-defunct CPM and, sadly, long out of print), based on Masumura's manga adaptation of the classic children's novel by Kenji Miyazawa. If you've ever seen Night on Galactic Railroad and wondered why the main characters are drawn as cats, that's why. Because it's based on Masumura's version, and Masumura likes cats.

As do I.

Runners-up:

The Rose of Versailles, by Ryoko Ikeda. The seminal "Why hasn't this been translated?" manga. From what I've heard, the answer to that question is that Ikeda is asking, quite rightly, for a lot of money. Two volumes of this cross-dressing shojo manga set in the court of Marie Antionette were translated, way back in the 1980s, for an edition published in Japan. This just whetted the nerd intelligentsia's appetite for more.

GeGeGe no Kitaro, by Shigero Mizuki. This oddball monster manga about a one-eyed boy who lives in a graveyard and fights yokai (traditional Japanese monsters) enjoys eternal popularity in Japan. Like a lot of other old manga, it was partly translated for the Kodansha Bilingual manga series, published in Japan a few years ago for students learning English, but is basically unavailable in the U.S.

Saint Young Men, by Hikaru Nakamura. Otherwise known as "that manga where Jesus and Buddha are nerdy twentysomething roommates in Tokyo." I'm sorry, I just find the whole thing impossibly cute, especially when they go to Disneyland or some girls on a train mistake Jesus for Johnny Depp.

Nijigahara Holograph, by Inio Asano. Viz has already published the disgustingly young Asano's two earlier works, Solenin and What a Wonderful World!, so I have some confidence that this twisty, Donnie Darko-like ghost story will get translated too. I hope so, because I broke down and read it in scanlation, and it's one of the best graphic novels I've ever read.

Seattle Bookfest: Graphic Novel Panel

Kristy Valenti — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Full Disclosure: this panel was composed of my employer and two cartoonists published by Fantagraphics. Therefore I am going to paraphrase what was said with no additional commentary.

Seattle Bookfest held a graphic-novel panel on Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009, which took place in an elementary school converted into an event center. It was standing-room only in the portable building when Fantagraphics' Gary Groth introduced two cartoonists he publishes, Megan Kelso, creator of the minicomic and website Girlhero and the collections Queen of the Black Black, The Squirrel Mother, the serial Watergate Sue and the upcoming full-length graphic novel Artichoke Tales; and Ellen Forney (Monkey Food, I Love Led Zeppelin and Lust, illustrator of Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian) who also teaches at Cornish, a local arts college. Top Shelf's Leigh Walton, who handles marketing and edits the website Top Shelf 2.0, was also on the panel.

Forney kicked things off by explaining that she had taught a studio graphic novel class, which was composed of art and design students; however, she recently began teaching a graphic-novel lit class, which focuses on reading and discussing comics with students from different majors. She said it was a different experience: that the students weren't as versed in the language of comics. Groth said that they weren't acculturated to comics, and since they weren't habituated, they didn't have the skill to know how to read them.

He took an informal poll of the room: about 10% had had difficulty when they first began reading comics; about 80% of the room currently read them frequently. Kelso, who did not grow up reading comics, commented that she used to read the words and forget to read the pictures. She noted that comics are like a foreign language: when one sees words that are familiar, one tends to neglect the rest. Absorbing pictures is a skill, she explicated: and, again like a foreign language, children learn it more easily, and it becomes natural. She said that before she goes to bed she would rather read a book than a comic, because a comic feels like more "work": a comic feels more like conscious effort.

An audience member asked the panel if, when they used the word "comics," they were making a distinction between newspaper strips like Calvin and Hobbes and graphic novels, and they said no. Another audience member remarked that she found manga easier to read than American graphic novels, because the paper was cheaper, so they use more of it and the art is more "spread out."

Walton clarified that American comics are denser, and then responded to Kelso by saying that, since he's always read comics, he feels that comics are less draining to read. After a disclaimer in which he established that none of the panelists were neurologists, he went on to say that research suggested that reading comics taps into more parts of the brain that simply reading text alone. He also mentioned that manga is influencing the current generation of cartoonists, who are creating hybrids.

He followed up some of Kelso's other points by saying that it's easier for kids to read a comic than a chapter book, because kids read the images first, then go to the language. Kelso supported that statement by explaining that her 3 ½ year-old daughter likes to "read" the Peanuts books by herself. Even though her daughter can't technically read the words, she can visually recognize some of them: in this way she learned the word "ahem."

Forney broke in that there's a middle ground between words and comics. She used Alison Bechdel's Fun Home as an example, saying that every time she reads it, she gets more out of it. She said that the first time, she read it for the story, but when she reads it more than once, she slows down and pays more attention to the pictures, because there's so much going on in them, such as visual references to the minotaur (Bechdel compares her father to the minotaur, as well as many other things).

Groth posed the question: does a graphic novel fail if you can read it without looking at the pictures? Forney pointed out that comics can just be pictures too, or "silent." Groth asked Kelso if she thought "silent" comics were more work, and she said yes. Walton said that you should ask yourself "What am I meant to get out of this image?" In Jeff Lemire's Essex County, he went on to say, a dialogue-heavy sequence will be followed by a wordless landscape, which is the view out of one character's window.

An audience member brought up how there was two types of imagery in comics: the representative, exemplified by sweat drops, etc., and the realistic. Kelso replied that she was thinking that comics were a foursquare thing: there's realistic drawing, but sweat beads function more like writing. On the writing side, words can be used in a pictorial way (for example, by lettering): both the pictures and the writing function on at least two levels each, on multiple channels. Walton agreed, saying that they're operating on at least as many levels as text, we just haven't learned how to talk about all the levels as a culture.

Forney brought up the visual language of comics and contrasted the spare, more realistic drawings of Daniel Clowes with the cartoony style of Peter Bagge. She pointed out that if Bagge's Buddy Does Seattle, a book her class is studying, was drawn in a realistic style it would have a different effect. She said that in Fun Home, the chapter intro pages are drawn in a realistic style, while the chapters themselves are cartoonier, and that Bechdel uses these styles deliberately.

Kelso said that people read comics really quickly, and that cartoonists always complain "I spent 10 years on this, and it was read on the toilet!" Kelso expanded by saying that many people think of comics as throwaway, like a romance or spy novel, they're not going to linger over it. Groth interjected that comic books, when they were invented in the '30s, were intended for G.I.s, children and morons. (Walton joked, "We're raising the prices so that you'll take them more seriously.")

An audience member, who teaches grades 5-8, said that students understand sweat drops unconsciously, it's part of their knowledge. Groth said that many of these conventions are used in the newspaper comics too, which are still fairly widely read. Forney stated that what she has to offer her students is that she's a cartoonist. She went on to say that she taught her students to look at colors, such as the almost-hospital green in Clowes' comics. She also said that she had them read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. Comics are compared to film, with good reason, she went on, but they're different.

Walton held that visual organization is helpful for keeping things organized in our head. He cited Understanding Comics also, saying that McCloud would condense complex ideas into an icon, and then use that icon to represent that idea for the rest of the book. "I'm a visual learner," Walton began, and then said that they're doing more research now as to the different kind of learning styles, and that certain comics pages will always stay in his memory.

Forney recommended Understanding Comics. Kelso said that the book was really helpful for her. She said the book came out when she first started cartooning (in 1993, Walton threw in). She didn't understand the conventions of comics at that time, and via the book, she learned what visual tools cartoonists use. She said she would never forget the sequence where McCloud illustrated the use of space in two panels. He had drawn the same objects, drawn identically, in both panels: a person, a lamp and a table, but in one the space was tight. In the other panel, there was more distance between the panels, and this gave it a different feeling. I was going "doing!" she said. The use of the space is the tool, is the writing. Though it's a technical concept, it was the key to understanding for the reader: it's not about the ability to render, it's like writing. Forney concurred that texture is also part of the story that the cartoonist is trying to tell, like the soundtrack of a movie: you don't notice it, but it has a huge impact.

Walton also suggested Jessica Abel and Matt Madden's Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, and commented on comics as a hybrid art form, where it's not about image for the sake of image, but in service of a story. He said that comics are still in their infancy, that more people are making comics than ever before and the vocabulary is still being worked out. An audience member asked how many comics were being created by groups, and Groth said probably the majority.

Forney expressed surprise, saying that she was used to comics created by one person. Walton said that comics is a big enough house that it has many rooms, and it's possible for someone to stay in one room. Forney mentioned that DC turned over their beloved characters to alternative cartoonists in its Bizzaro anthology, but the cartoonists weren't allowed to both write and draw the strips. She said she was told it was for copyright reasons. Kelso said it was to keep you down.

Groth responded to Walton's earlier point by saying that the biggest advances in comics in recent decades, since the undergrounds of the '60s, are probably because single creators are driving the work. An audience member then asked the cartoonists about their process. Kelso told her that her process had changed over the years: at first, she would write out an entire short story, because she didn't "think" in comics. As she became more fluent in the visual language, she would make more screenplay-y scripts, and only in the last three years has she begun to do little panels and drawings.

Forney said that she was the opposite, that she began as more of a drawer than a writer, and it just depends on the creator when it comes to process. She finished the panel by saying that in her class, she taught a version of her own process, which was to get an idea, do research, do some sort of script, and then thumbnail, pencil, scan and tweak.

The Winding Road to Diddie Wa Diddie

Joe McCulloch — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:00:00 -0500

It was a great and terrible time for the American underground comics in 1973, or so the books tell me. Certainly the viability of the form had been proven, with independently published pamphlets securing sufficient distribution outside the newsstands and drug stores of square society to rack up some considerable attention. New, young artists were rushing in. Patrick Rosenkranz notes in his Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975 that the first underground comic-con was held in Berkley, at the famous University, in '73, April 20th to 22nd.

Greg Irons designed the three-day admissions button, while Spain Rodriguez and Trina Robbins drew one-day stickers. It maybe wasn't totally unlike today's Small Press eXpo or the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art festival, although I trust there was no comics critics roundtable, which is a surefire symptom of decadence. There were over 200 underground-or-thereabouts comics titles in print then -- and Rosenkranz emphasizes that the scene was beset by infighting and philosophical disagreement over what ‘underground' comics even were by that point -- so maybe decadence was nonetheless close. Peril certainly was.

Almost exactly two months later, on June 21, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision in Miller v. California, establishing the Miller Test for determining obscenity, which was reaffirmed as not protected speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Under the Miller Test, state regulation of forms of expression was permitted when a work: (1) lacks "serious" literary, artistic, political or scientific value; (2) depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct or excretory functions as defined by state law; and (3) appeals to the prurient interest as found by an average person, taking the work as a whole and applying "contemporary community standards." This marked a helpful change of pace for the beleaguered Court, which by that time had found itself conducting weekly screenings of allegedly obscene films so as to assess said obscenity or lack thereof.

As a result, the Court could not possibly have enjoyed a private showing of 1973's Up in Flames, maybe the greatest contemporaneous seal of the cultural penetration of underground comix: a feature-length hardcore porno "parody" of Gilbert Shelton's Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural. And since those characters were already comedic, it actually wasn't so much a parody as a full-blown movie adaptation, unfaithful as movie adaptations often are, albeit also totally unauthorized and with no-faking sex scenes.

The Freak Brothers (created in 1968) were an obvious target, having been maybe the most popular characters of the era: a comedic trio of dope-smokin' good-timers, always scheming over another score and getting mixed up in satirical slapstick hi-jinx. And Crumb's Mr. Natural (first appearance: ‘67, Summer of Love) fit in even better as a funny, sometimes horny mystic straight out of the sometimes mystical and very horny mind of Robert Crumb, who didn't need no goddamned "community standards" to get 1969's Zap Comix #4 and San Francisco's legendary City Lights Bookstore -- also famous as a publisher for the late ‘50s prosecution of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems -- raided by the fuzz over Joe Blow, an infamous parody of polite American family life, in which everyone in the polite American family has sex with each other. I mean, the porn just writes itself!

I've had a good history with Robert Crumb. I remember walking into a comics store on my 21st birthday in 2002, having just finished my first legal drink, and setting down a copy of Mystic Funnies #3 on the counter. "You know who drew this?" asked the owner. "Robert Crumb," I replied, the wisdom of 21 years and alcohol on my breath. "Hell," he said, "if you're old enough to know who he is you're old enough to read it." Then another guy in the back asked if that was a new comic or a reprint. "Nah, it's reprints," answered the owner, incorrectly, "he died years ago."

Just this past month, the undead artist and the big fancy publisher W.W. Norton & Company released The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, a big fancy hardcover of hot, heavy Bible adaptation, capturing every word of the sacred text on the comics page, though the result is still not unlike Crumb's Franz Kafka comics, or even his short biographies of blues musicians. After all, the artist is a child of the wordy, stolid layouts of vintage Mad, calmly laid out to facilitate the Harvey Kurtzman or Will Elder madness inside even panels. Naturally, Crumb's own pages are more varied, but there's nonetheless a textual/visual density present that's attributable, I think, to mid-century comic book styling. As the old saying goes, the division in ‘60s underground comics was mostly between those who liked the ‘funny' EC comics and the ‘serious' EC comics, though Crumb's influence stretched deep into the funny animal work of the period, the stuff upon which Coulton Waugh, one the early comics critics (among many other things), in his landmark 1947 study The Comics, pinned the funnybook medium's hopes for salvation from gross realism. Whoops?

But let's not pretend 2009 isn't a very different time for comics, and that Crumb's Genesis isn't his belated entry into the "graphic novel" scene, primed for shelf space in a Borders or Barnes & Noble near you. There isn't a damn thing wrong with that -- and anyway, a small stack of Crumb collections and retrospectives have scattered roses on the road years in advance -- but the old-fashioned elements of the new book keep pushing my mind back to the underground days, when comics distribution via head shops was susceptible to drug busts (another sign of the times in the early ‘70s), and the comics themselves were as likely to get shoved around by the Miller Test as porn. In this way, an honest-to-God '70s porno based on those very underground comics makes sense.

The thing about porn, though, is that it's always been around. There were porn movies in the Silent Era, and porn comics (the famous Tijuana Bibles) were among the first-ever pamphlet-format comics. Appropriately enough, there was always union. And of all genres, broad genres, your comedies and tragedies and melodramas, erotica is the most imposing. Of all entertainments, it has the most direct facility. You really can ‘review' porn as if evaluating whether a refrigerator keeps food cold. To apply the wonderful manga euphemism: is it useful?

Porn, if useful, or even if recognized as potentially useful, can be anything. You wouldn't call many cell phone videos ‘drama,' but they absolutely can be porn. Drawings on a bathroom wall. Drawings on a page. Joe Blow.

It's no surprise then that underground comics -- the big pushback against the square society and mainstream publishers that demanded no comic book story could question the wisdom of judges or bear the word Weird on the cover -- shared an outlaw appeal with cinematic porn, which had spent much of the ‘50s and ‘60s in a bifurcated existence, pressing gently aboveground against legal allowances as burlesque movies gave way to nudist films and no-touching nudie-cuties segued into softcore (simulated, or at least ‘no evidence') sex pictures, while underground works lurked in city peep shows and private clubs stocked with illegal purchases. Underground comics weren't illegal, but heck - they might as well have been.

Deep Throat wasn't the first hardcore picture to play in movie theaters, but it was the hit, the media event, the icon to commemorate the reunion of the two streams of movie porn. That was in 1972, the year before they cleared out space at a university to have an underground comics convention. You see the cultural moment? Comics and movies are almost the same age, but porn movies would last longer than underground comics, because comics are small and movies are big, and anyway pictures of people and the impression of reality the cinema projects are probably more ‘useful' than drawings. Underground comics withdrew into the nascent Direct Market, while porn movies were eventually knocked back by videotape.

Looking at Up in Flames -- obtained on beautiful DVD-R from Something Weird Video -- you can sense a kinship between the comics and movies of the time. I've been conflating the ‘porn' in movies with the ‘underground' in comics for a few paragraphs now, which maybe has some of you rolling your eyes; we're not all like my brother, who was told my Checkered Demon comics were underground and immediately said "so, porn?" N… no! Porn is something else! It's… it's mechanical sex scenes, doled out with rhythmic frequency! Sex is the whole point! Joe Blow is satire, man! Lost Girls is erotica! Porn is a device! A mechanism! Useful!

Yet Up in Flames (its title a solid half-decade ahead of Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke) wants to be funny too. Comical. It throws down the gauntlet in its title sequence, shamelessly plopping its performers and credits into details from Gilbert Shelton's artwork while blasting the Grateful Dead's One More Saturday Night, no doubt used 100% legally. There is no credited director, although actor John Se[e]man (as Mr. Natural) seems a possible culprit, having helmed several pictures of the type (and indeed ‘directing' two of his female co-stars during a crucial scene). It's a rip-off, make no mistake; it's taking other people's work and piggybacking, in a way that Crumb's legal counsel would have tried to put a stop to, I presume, as he did with many other unauthorized uses.

It's also oddly clever, however, in linking underground comics to movie porn, disreputable #1 to disreputable #2. The plot of Up in Flames concerns the Freak Brothers' attempts to scrounge up some cash to avoid being evicted from their apartment; useful scenes ensue. Fat Freddy's Cat is present and accounted for, although he's black & white instead of orange. Indeed, Fat Freddy is dark-haired and rather slim - he looks about as much like his comics counterpart as I do Jake Gyllenhaal, and I am so much more handsome than him. Characters often over-emphasize how fat Freddy is, because obviously they know. Mr. Natural also sometimes removes his fake Santa Claus beard, though his glasses and hair stay on.

The banter seems mostly improvised, though I liked a bit with an upstairs drug dealer pouring oregano into a dime bag and going "Hmm, a little Colombian. That'll make ‘em happy." There's a lot of walking around in live, stolen footage on the streets of the city, Phineas decked out in a flared jacket and a trucker cap. I'm not convinced anyone read many of Crumb's comics, since Mr. Natural keeps making goofy puns on the word Natural, and his main useful scene is accompanied by saxophone jazz instead of obscure acoustic recordings. On the other hand, the plot is resolved when Mr. Natural -- ever the scurrilous modern guru -- loans the Freak Brothers some potent Vita-Beans that drive women (such as their landlord) wild, which seems about right.

The useful scenes will maybe stun folks used to today's Evan Stone epics, in that they're not continuous; comedy and antics and bits of other useful scenes typically interrupt. One of the encounters takes place mostly off-screen(!!) and another focuses on the missionary position, in an odd echo of the countercultural backwash of some porn of the time, providing for the enjoyment of the performers as much as the viewer.

Movie/video/cinematographic porn is not like that today, not in its mainstream. Every image is designed to be useful, no matter how uncomfortable it truly is. It is fiction, iconography. Closer to drawings traced for superhero comics. David Foster Wallace once wrote of a man who looked at porn to see fragility register, to see performers lose control for just a second, because so much is performance. I think reality television operates the same way, because everyone knows it's as faked as balloon boy, most of the time, but it offers the possibility of ‘real' emotion and unguarded reaction to appear in a polished setting, like all the polished settings on television, which we cannot escape, like porn.

Maybe that's what people try to warn us of when they say literary comics and big publishers are sapping the vital fluids of comics art. If porn movies are everywhere, comics are only around in specific places still, and their power comes partially from marginality while porn draws from its omnipotence, now cultural (thanks to the internet) rather than merely formal. So Robert Crumb draws the Bible, and it's strange to see his doubly-old style, ‘50s informed and ‘60s bred, blown up so big, taking on a big book for big box distribution. The underground got big too, back in 1973, but that was a different time and those were different comics, if still tipping on American comics' slapstick tendency to screw up at the most crucial moments, with the soul of a clown. Ah well. I keep reading and watching and studying, like a one-man Supreme Court with no binding authority.

Oh, and the Something Weird DVD-R release has a second feature called A Star is Born, wherein some guys encourage women to try and make an effeminate guy a real man. They succeed.

Tale as Old as Time: Picture Stories from the Bible

Kristy Valenti — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:00:00 -0500

There's something very contemporary about Picture Stories from the Bible: Complete Old Testament Edition, copyrighted in 1943 to M. C. Gaines, publisher of EC Comics, even though the comics therein are more than 60 years old. It begins with the back cover copy, which is clearly attempting to create synergy with filmic Bible epics and superhero comic books: "The complete Old Testament Edition of PICTURE STORIES FROM THE BIBLE offers for the first time in one volume, all of the glamorous, romantic stories of the old familiar heroes — told in faithful detail — carefully illustrated in fast-moving action continuity — brought to life in glorious full color." (The back cover even jauntily features its cast of characters, such as Noah, Solomon, and Ruth, in circular portraits.)

The educational bait and switch is familiar too: if one swaps out some of the objects in this sentence in the inside cover blurb by Dr. William Ward Ayer, a member of the comics' editorial advisory board composed of 10 Jewish and Christian religious leaders — "Millions of young people in the United States are growing up without the Biblical knowledge that their parents had. I feel sure that PICTURE STORIES FROM THE BIBLE will be ‘eaten up' by these boys and girls, and I hope and believe that this book will cause many of them to go The Bible and read the original stories" — you have the 2009 battle cry of many a librarian and educator. And unfortunately, today's well-meaning comics publishers, writers and artists still haven't learned from PSftB: COTE's major pedagogical pitfall, which is to turn something essentially very interesting into something very, very dull.

Some of PSftB: COTE's overcautiousness might be attributed to the comic-book burnings which, according to David Hajdu's The Ten Cent Plague, began in some Catholic schools as early 1945 (before this volume was completed); and, a reluctance to show some of the gore and violence of the Biblical stories depicted (Moses committing murder, animal sacrifice, Sodom, etc., etc.) because the horrors of WWII were just too immediate. That panel of 10 must have played no small part.

Still, so much of the Bible is such marvelous raw material for visual narrative (it hardly needs to be mentioned that it continues to inspire cartoonists as idiosyncratic as Basil Wolverton, Chester Brown and Robert Crumb), that it seems like some of the blame must fall squarely on writer Montgomery Mulford and artist Don Cameron. Cameron's art is stiffly graceless: his six-panel-grid page layouts contribute to Mulford's plodding pacing. (The contrast between the dramatic stories being told and the pedestrian tone can lead to some unintentional humor, such as when David comes home from a hard day of work, complaining to his wife that the King threw a spear at his head — again. The wife responds that she's going to help him escape, probably sick of hearing about it.)

The comic features a lot of unnecessary caption boxes ("So-and-so Speaks" — is suspended over a headshot of a character with a word balloon) and close and medium shots of characters talking, talking, talking in Biblese. Entire wars are depicted by a few off-kilter men in a single panel, and judging by the execution, the tableaux that usually set fire to creators' imaginations, such as loading animals two-by-two into Noah's Ark, failed to excite Mulford and Cameron. The Pharaoh's defeat at the Red Sea, with disgruntled-looking men (and horses) armpit-deep in water, could easily be a Michael Kupperman panel [1].

Absent a muse, Cameron borrows visuals, probably from films, which can occasionally work for him — his Jezebel owes something to the Evil Queen in Disney's Snow White, and there are times when his pages evoke a Western, which works well to depict the wandering of the tribes as they are enslaved, evicted, battle hostile environments and war over territory with others — and can occasionally work against him, such as Esther's just-below shoulder-length waved coif and blue eyeshadow.

After spending 232 pages with Cameron's art, though, his male characters' expressions, which generally vacillate between blank, devilish and dyspeptic, start to become a source of humor: on page 116, when God is commanding Samuel to fulfill the people's demands and find a king, it's obvious he's giving the prophet a migraine. (It's even funnier because Cameron chose not to draw God, but his word balloons have wiggly letters, which is probably supposed to make God "sound" impressive, but really gives the impression that he's brassy, hard-of-hearing or possibly a mentally off character, so one can just imagine those words vibrating right into Samuel's aching head.)

A terrible blankness afflicts some of Cameron's men and all of his women (which, again, can lead to hilarity, such as a panel where two men are panicking, afraid for their lives, while a woman stares unconcernedly away). (Although, looking very carefully, a Cameron woman's wickedness can be signaled slightly by the arch of her eyebrows, or if her hair color contrasts with a good woman). Visually, grief and fear are expressed via a single tear on otherwise unchanged faces.

Aging, too, is a bugbear for Cameron: with the males, he can cheat that some of his characters are 110 by gradually increasing their facial hair and subtly changing the color, but he's at a loss with his females. When Sarah has a baby at an advanced age, it's proof of a miracle: if the writing didn't clue readers in, it's possible they could have missed it, since the 90-year-old Sarah doesn't look a day over 25.

In fact, and a little tragically, it's hard to see how Gaines, Mulford and Cameron couldn't have failed in their goal to "educate the children," since not only is the comic seemingly a chore for everyone involved, the very basics of many of the stories are not clearly communicated, such as why it was so very brave of Esther to confess to the King why she was Jewish (which, as a side note, I only know the basics of because I had access to an excellent and much-beloved Bible graphic novel as a child, which I read and read again until the covers fell off. So I actually have a soft spot for comics adaptations of the Bible).

In 1947, M.C. Gaines died: Picture Stories from the Bible, the title that EC was best known for at the time, became his son William's birthright. "Bill" Gaines and EC, in turn, left a very different legacy: he would go on to publish comics vastly more Entertaining than Educational. And God bless him for that.

Advanced Common Sense Season 2!

Tucker Stone — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:30:00 -0500

The Rule of Three: Logicomix

Kristy Valenti — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:00:00 -0500

In Logicomix, writers Christos Papadimitrou and Apostsos Doxiadis, depicted by artists Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna as characters in the book, have an argument about what kind of story their graphic novel is: Papadimitrou claims that it's a story about ideas and logicians' quest for the foundation of mathematics, while Doxiadis states that it's a story about characters, specifically Bertrand Russell, and also an examination of how logicians are more prone to madness than other types of mathematicians, with the lives of Georg Cantor, Gottlob Frege, Kurt Gödell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, et al. offered as evidence.

Seattleites were able to watch this argument carried out half-live, half via Webcam at Town Hall Friday, Oct. 9, at 7:30 p.m., as part of a science lecture series. Papadimitrou, a professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley who has also taught at many prestigious universities such as MIT and Harvard, was in person, manning the Power Point presentation, while Doxiadis, an equally credentialed mathematician, director and fiction writer, weighed in remotely by way of a laptop and a projector. The pair couldn't have found a more appreciative audience: there were nods; gasps of horror (when the tragedy of Alan Turing, formative computer scientist, was revealed)[1]; and laughter at the mention of the Turk Chess Player.[2] The specter of Microsoft loomed large over the proceedings.

Papadimitrou's presentation began with a rather pointless (considering the book's writers were (somewhat) in attendance) four-minute video intro (the writers used three-act structure! And a bulletin board with index cards tacked on it to organize the books' themes!), explaining the concept of philosopher, logician and political activist Bertrand Russell = hero = superhero = graphic novel. (Although, in all fairness, it was good to see artists Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna, also characters in the book, get some face time, albeit prerecorded. One wonders how the book could have been improved had their visual flights of fancy been given more rein – such as the sequence involving sets and cartoony, unshaven barbers.)

Papadimitrou then identified the three intellectual roots of computers and the Internet: calculation, artificial intelligence, and logic. (The number three got a lot of love that night, as it does in the book: not only is the book written in a three-act structure, it is a story about Papadimitrou, Doxiadis, Papadatos and di Donna telling the story of Bertrand Russell elucidating his historical relationship to the field of logic to war protestors on Sept. 4, 1939; in his story, Russell and his partner, Alfred Whitehead, gaze at a painting of three Danaides; the book concludes with a excerpt from the Oresteia trilogy.)

Also as in the book, many pioneering mathematicians were name-checked, such as algebra's namesake, Al-Khowarizmi, philosopher Chrysippus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, proponent of behavior modeled on logic, and George Boole, creator of Boolean logic, which brought the discussion from BCE to the period discussed in Logicomix, the latter half of the 1800s to the second world war. After sketching out some of the logicians' conflicts, as depicted in the book, Papadimitrou and Doxiadis explained their sad endings. (Doxiadis made the point that mathematicians, despite their reputation, have lower instances of serious mental illnesses than other pursuits … except for logicians, and postulated some reasons for that.) Papadimitrou and Doxiadis also included a disclaimer about the factualness of Logicomix, saying that, although the discussions were very much in the spirit of what was said, the details and events were not necessarily true. (They also used themselves as Devil's Advocates, voicing opinions in the book they don't really believe, so as to create a Socratic dialogue.)

The pair then fielded questions from the audience regarding self-referential math, and why the story, which took eight years to create, was told in comics. Doxiadis conceived of it that way; it was obvious he was hoping to draw in some non-mathematicians as readers, as he polled the audience as to how many had come just as comics fans. (5%-10%, reported Papadimitrou, although an audience member insisted that he poll for people who are interested in math, logic and comics, which raised the tally to 50%.) Doxiadis also confessed that he liked history, and novels, but he didn't like historical novels, so he wanted the artists to do the heavy lifting on the period detail so he could concentrate on the characters and story.

The talk, and the book, raised questions about pedagogy in comics (though Papadimitrou disclaimed that he taught students, so for him the book was more about telling a narrative); scientific apparatus (basically, that there is no such thing as an impartial observer; subjectivity will always affect a scientist's empiricism); how these dead white men's arguments led to computers and the Internet as they are known today; and how to reach an audience of laypeople about the ideas behind the field of logic. It pinpoints and gives context to a moment that has shaped contemporary thought — Gödell's 1931 incompleteness theorem, which destroyed Russell's and many others' search for a complete and consistent set of axioms (self-evident truths), by proving them impossible. Basically, as Logicomix points out, there are not only unanswered questions, but unanswerable ones. Which, perhaps, is why Logicomix, Papadimitrou and Doxiadis still can't quite figure out if it's a story about ideas, or a narrative about characters and madness.

You've Got to Suffer If You Wanna Sing the Blues

Karen Green — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:00:00 -0500

"Ma and Pa were down in the cellar;
Don't know what they were doin', but I heard my mama bellow:

Take your finger out of it
Take your finger out of it
Get your finger out of it, because it don't belong to you."

And now that I've got your attention….

I've been back to Mississippi! More fried dill pickles on my very first night, at Rusty's in Vicksburg. Yum! So happy to be back! And, speaking of dill pickles, did you know they've got dill pickle-flavored potato chips in the south? How righteous is that?

Was it the fried pickles that brought me back? Well, not exactly. In great part it was the friends I made on my last trip. But, just as much, it was the blues. The amazing, heartbreaking, soul-warming blues. Because September is the month for the Delta Blues and Heritage Festival, and that, my friends, is an event not to be missed.

There are only a few art forms that we Americans can unequivocally call our own. We can't even claim comics, much as we'd like to. But the blues? That's all ours, steeped in African-American suffering, oppression, and persecution. Born out of the growing pains of Reconstruction, the blues, in the words of one bluesman, "ain't nothing but a good man feeling bad." The form of the blues isn't hard: it's a simple 12-bar progression, usually with the first line repeated, so as to give the singer time to figure out a third line. But it's not about the writing, it's about the content: the life experience that goes into the singing. As David Bromberg sings, "You've got to suffer if you wanna sing the blues." Maybe your baby has left you; maybe you lost everything you owned in a craps game; maybe your life of vice is hurrying you to an early grave. The blues burrow deep into the singer's soul and reveal where it all went wrong.

Clifford Gibson (1901-1963) sang about those Bad Luck Dice:

I lost all I had, everything I had to lose
I lost all I had, everything I had to lose
Even lost the one I love, but I swear I can't lose these blues

Blind Lemon Jefferson (1893-1929) pleaded to See That My Grave Is Kept Clean:

Well, there's one kind favor I ask of you
Well, there's one kind favor I ask of you
Lord, there's one kind favor I'll ask of you
Please let my grave be kept clean

[SPACER]

Big Joe Williams (1903-1982), playing on his 9-string guitar, implored, Baby Please Don't Go:

Turn your lamp down low
Turn your lamp down low
I begged you all night long
Baby, please don't go

But it's not all heartbreak; the form supports humor and even triumph over adversity. Mississippi Slim's sly verses open this article, and the Mississippi Sheiks were Sitting on Top of the World in 1930:

Going to the station, down in the yard
Goin' get me a freight train
Worked some, got hard.
But now she's gone, I don't worry
I'm sitting on top of the world

You can hear the resemblance to Mississippi Fred McDowell's You Gotta Move, probably better known from the Rolling Stones' cover version on "Sticky Fingers." That Stones cover was my own introduction to the blues, when I was in junior high. The blues spread long tentacles through all the American music forms that followed it, from jazz to rock'n'roll. In fact, British musicians in the 1960s were to a great extent responsible for bringing the blues back to popular consciousness, from the Rolling Stones to Eric Clapton to Led Zeppelin.

But at the height of the blues' popularity, it was Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, who well-nigh reigned supreme. Her one screen performance was in a film named for her most famous song, the St Louis Blues, in which she sings that her "man's got a heart like a rock cast in the sea,"

I hate to see that evenin' sun go down
I hate to see that evenin' sun go down
‘Cause my baby, he done left this town

The images above come from R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country, a labor of love the artist first conceived as a set of musical trading cards. Crumb's affection for early 20th-century music is legendary—between Crumb and Harvey Pekar, it can be difficult to dissociate jazz or blues from comics. The images Crumb created were based on photos he was able to locate, but perhaps also a preference for the obscure: Bessie Smith makes no appearance, and neither does the legendary Robert Johnson. (Images of Johnson weren't widely available when Crumb was working on this project around 1980, but there were certainly plenty of photos of Smith.)

The book version of Crumb's cards comes complete with a CD of songs, and the volume serves as a kind of reference work—each image comes with a brief bio written by a scholar of the musical genre. The CD's tracks were picked by Crumb himself, but nowadays such an extra is hardly necessary. You don't have to haunt secondhand record shops and flea markets like the Crumb-alike character in Ghost World to find obscure blues songs: 90 seconds with YouTube and almost any song you want, from Robert Johnson's Me and the Devil Blues to Bo-Weavil Jackson's You Can't Keep No Brown, is buzzing through your headphones.

Music and comics aficionado Rob Vollmar, who had worked previously with Pablo G Callejo on Castaways, wanted to tell a story about the blues, a form he's loved since he was in his teens. He chose a twelve-chapter format, to mimic the 12-bar blues progression, breaking each chapter into twelve pages as well. Callejo's art on Bluesman evokes the stark, scratchy, WPA feel of the linoleum-cut images in the 1930s Scottsboro Alabama, which I wrote about a few months ago. The opening image of the first book is a pair of worn, fraying shoes—a poignant symbol of hard work and hardship. The story Vollmar tells, of a couple of traveling bluesmen names Lem and Ironwood, is filled with the pain, the loss, and the longing that pours out of the blues, this lyric of the human condition.

Lem plays a guitar he carries with him, while Ironwood can tickle the ivories of any piano he's allowed to sit at. Lem is a gentle soul, whose preacher father steeped him in gospel traditions, and this allows him to slide more gracefully between these two poles of African-American community. ‘Wood, on the other hand, has a hotter temper and a shorter fuse; he dumps the pair into scrapes and Lem pulls them back out—when he can. A chance gig in Arkansas leads the two men deep into a story of lust, murder, racism, lynching, and more. One panel in the second book, of two white men holding a chain near their pickup truck while they wait to "talk" to a black saloon owner, chillingly evokes the 1998 story of James Byrd, Jr, illustrating how our fetid, ugly past has continued into our present. Vollmar avoids cheap dialect effects which could coarsen the story, and occasionally cedes the narrative role to Ira Deldoff, author of a 1961 article on southern blues musicians, who offers observations such as this: "While life on the road could be arduous (and sometimes even deadly), the benefits of playing in jukes surrounded by bootleg liquor, women, and song in an environment where their imagination and creativity were actively encouraged often represented the better of two situations, the alternate being a life of hard labor and uniform squalid poverty." Yeah, that sounds about right.

But juke-joint life was also not without its dangers and temptations and as Lem finds himself separated from his friend, running for his life, hammered by rain, and with his guitar lying in a creek, he lets loose the cry that lives at the root of the blues: "Why us? Why now?"

Because the blues are such an integral part of the history of music, I was excited about how these two books, Bluesman and the Crumb anthology, could fit into Columbia's Core Curriculum music course. Columbia University boasts one of the handful of surviving rigorous Western Civ curricula in America and a required course for all undergraduates, "Music Humanities," explores the history of music in western civilization. Imagine my dismay, then, to find no sample of the blues in the online music reserves (although, in fairness, there is some early jazz) and no mention of the blues in the curriculum. In fact, from what I could tell from Music Department staff, no courses on the blues are taught at all.

This just seems so strange to me. No matter how one parses the history of music—that a) America is the culmination of western civilization and so her unique musical forms lie at its pinnacle or that b) the history of music is the history of regional musical forms that have traveled and metamorphosed via colonialism, slavery, or immigration, which therefore gives all those regional forms equal validity—it seems that the blues, which evolved from African call-and-response work songs through field hollers to become uniquely American, has to be part of that story. There are so many threads to follow for social and cultural history that one hardly knows where to start. One bittersweet fact I garnered from browsing in the Grove Dictionary of Music is that plantation owners outlawed drum-playing but permitted the playing of string instruments—the significance of which was hammered home by image after image in Crumb's book of blues singers holding their guitars.

I don't have the energy to become as strong an advocate for the blues at Columbia as I have for comics—I need to pick my battles. That's going to have to be a fight for someone else. But I feel the importunate tickle of Lem's cry, slightly transformed: "Why not us? Why not now?"

In other news, if you're in Chicago next weekend: the International Comic Art Forum (ICAF), an academic conference on comics and cartooning, will hold its fourteenth annual meeting on Thursday through Saturday, October 15-17, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

ICAF conference events will take place at the SAIC Ballroom on Thursday and Friday and at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Saturday. Programming will begin at 9:00 a.m. each day. In addition, a special event will be held on Thursday from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Cervantes Institute of Chicago, featuring talks by Spanish artists Max (Francesc Capdevila) and Pere Joan (Pedro Juan Riera), who are appearing under the sponsorship of the Cervantes Institute.

ICAF will also present talks by three other artists, including American artists Guy Davis (Sandman Mystery Theatre, The Marquis) and Sara Varon (Robot Dreams, Cat and Chicken) and UK artist John Miers (winner of the Web & Interactive Design category at the inaugural Digital Artist awards for his website www.johnmiers.com).

More info here: http://www.internationalcomicartsforum.org/