Girl Comics #1 gets off to a shaky start on the cover, with the first in a series of clichés that run throughout the issue.
The “battle of the sexes” joke might have been relevant in the days of Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs or as a late ‘60s image on Marvel's superhero parody comic Not Brand Echh, but it doesn’t work here. The editors likely want us to think of the concept as fun or campy, but it seems like an approach that would have been suggested and quickly rejected. Not only is it too obvious for a female-creator anthology, the unimaginative way it’s executed undermines the otherwise (hopefully) good intentions of the collection. It’s a hackneyed way to think about gender, taking the focus off of the artists as artists and putting it onto the fact that they are women who compete with men for work at Marvel (perhaps this focus is inescapable . . .). Also, we know that the female character will win the contest (could you have a Girl Comics cover that shows Iron Man beating a distraught She-Hulk or a teary-eyed Dazzler?), just as we know this victory will be short lived: the male–centered rules of the Marvel Universe demand it . . .
In this contest context, even the phrase “Women of Marvel” feels sketchy -- see here for why. (And is “women” added to compensate for a possible reading of “girl” as demeaning?)
Colleen Coover’s introduction has nicely drawn and colored art, but the clichés return in the dialogue and draw attention away from the attractive images.
The heroines’ phrases are less than inspiring: “we each are unique” and “We strive for excellence.” A Google search for “We strive for excellence” reveals over 19 million uses -- it’s one of the great expressions in uninspired self-promotion/advertising. And I don’t believe that Spiderwoman is really motivated by striving for excellence -- it’s got to be deeper, and stranger, than that . . .
The sexes battle again in the collection’s second story, which is driven by one of the cover’s clichés -- machismo under assault:
The male gods and superheroes have something at stake -- the thing that always seems to be worrying them: their masculinity. Why should it matter to Spiderman that She-Hulk is stronger than Iron Man? But he’s upset, as is Wolverine, who grabs his belt buckle; he’s got to keep it together. And why should it matter to these female creators?The story “Moritat,” which features Nightcrawler, is the most ambitious in the collection, referencing the 1930 Marlene Dietrich movie The Blue Angel in a number of ways. But it’s hard to follow the narrative thread -- I’ve read it a number of times and can’t follow the logic from panel to panel (Why is there an explosion on page 2? or is this what happens when Nightcrawler teleports? But why would he be teleporting? When he reappears he’s only a few feet away from where he was . . . Could the bad guy really get knocked out by a shoe? What is the woman doing backstage? Is the audience unaware of the battle that’s taking place backstage -- isn’t the curtain open? Why don’t they seem worried?). The story is compressed into too few pages (the editor should have given it more space), and its ending is odd for a female-centered anthology. Nightcrawler saves the attractive young woman (who is a double for the cabaret singer -- both of whom look like Dietrich) and the last panel suggests they might have sex as his reward. The old “male saving the endangered female and screwing her” is an odd choice for a female-centered anthology. I always thought that, perhaps wrongly, this was a fantasy only a male would write.
Early in “Moritat,” a character tells the cabaret audience that “Tonight we return to the old standards. The songs that have served us for decades -- ”.
But are the comic's readers -- and the creators -- really served by a return to clichés that have been around so long?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Girl Comics 1 and Lost
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Casper, Formalism, and the 'Great' Search Party
For a revised and expanded version of the piece that was here,
please see The Comics Journal.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Teaching Comics: Describing Style
Recently in my American Writers class we read three comics: "Hazel Eyes" by Adrian Tomine, "Near Miss" by David Mazzucchelli, and "Island of Silk and Ectoplasm" by Matthew Thurber (all from Ivan Brunetti’s Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, Vol. 2). In the hour and 15 minute class period, we discussed many aspects of these comics, but our particular focus was on “style.”
I find that the best way to begin to talk about something as amorphous as style is to talk about small samples of at least three artists/texts at once. It’s easier to see the traits inherent to one object when you compare it to two others; similarities and differences stand out more clearly. I selected these comics because I wanted stories that were generally analogous (all are representational, narrative comics), but were different stylistically, without being radically dissimilar.
Tomine:
Mazzucchelli:
Thurber:
I wanted students to look at questions of "basic visual style" within a panel, not at style as related to things like dialogue, the pacing of the plot, page layout, the recurrence of certain images, etc . . .
To start, I had the students review each story (which they had read prior to class) and then look at one or two panels from each that featured a main character, side by side with panels from the other stories. I asked them, "On the most basic visual level, what non-thematic elements do they have in common, and how could we describe them?"
I’m sure that many lists of terms could result from this question. We generated a lot of ideas and agreed upon the following as important, forming a list that’s far from exhaustive. (It actually helps discussion to have a somewhat narrow set to focus upon.) And then I asked for "descriptive ranges" for each:
Line: smooth to rough; loose to tight; thin to thick
Texture and pattern: (what kinds?); sparse to dense, loose to organized
Panel density: sparse to dense (amount of empty space relative to filled space)
Light and shadow: use of black and white (or colored) areas
POV – “camera” angles: close-ups to long shots; below the focal point to above it
Because these narrative comics involve many human figures, we came up with some specific terms/ideas for the figure drawing aspect of the style:
Line: smooth to rough; loose to tight; thin to thick
Gestures, face and body: compare with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Body proportions: within the figure and when compared with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Density of character detail: in particular we looked at the number and kinds of lines used to draw the faces
In our discussion of the three artists, we most often returned to these ideas:
Line: smooth to rough; loose to tight; thin to thick
Texture and pattern: (what kinds?); sparse to dense, loose to organized
Panel density: sparse to dense (amount of empty space relative to filled space)
Gestures, face and body: compare with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Body proportions: within the figure and when compared with “reality” -- realistic to exaggerated
Density of character detail: in particular we looked at the number and kinds of lines used to draw the faces
When students used terms like "realistic," "life-like," "exaggerated," or "cartoony," I asked them, “In what ways?” or “Where and how?” And we tried to distinguish, as much as possible, between descriptive and impressionistic terms (though ones like “rugged,” which one student used to describe Mazzucchelli's line, seemed to fit in both categories.)
Before we could be sure that our descriptions were accurate and helpful, we looked at other panels by the same artist to determine if we were oversimplifying things. Style is hard to pin down . . .
Part of the purpose of class session was to come up with terms we could use when reading style in comics throughout the semester, and to realize that words like “realistic” can be useful -- but we should ask “realistic in what specific ways?,” given that a figure can be realistic in its proportions but be drawn in a gesture that seems cartoony. Or the body might appear realistic, but some aspect of the face (perhaps, the eyes) appear more cartoony.
All of this led us into a productive conversation in which we were able to talk about the relationship between stylistic and thematic issues within each comic. Most of us are confident when discussing themes, so when talking about style we often strayed into thematic concerns; part of my job was to keep us focused on style for the first part of the class and then open it up to the relationship between theme and style for the remainder. It’s not as if the two are really distinct within a text, but it’s helpful to treat them temporarily as if they are. It gives students a greater appreciation of an artist’s scope and method if you do, I think.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Frozen Morisi
A revised version of what was here is now here:
http://www.tcj.com/dont-move-the-still-life-of-pete-morisi/
Cartoon Ecology
It can be "entertaining and enlightening" to look at similar words/objects/scenes as drawn by different artists. The following pairs of images are from "Benny Beaver," which appeared in Casper, The Friendly Ghost #1 [1949], and "Ecology Beaver," which appeared in Comic Art #9, by Tim Hensley [2007].
Opening Panel:
Gnawing:
Holding a book:
On his dam:
Friday, January 22, 2010
Abstract Ditko
Those interested in Steve Ditko and abstraction in comics should check out this post by Andrei Molotiu and the comments on the Abstract Comics blog.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
I Shoot Myself Being Interviewed
Here was an exercise in disorientation. It seemed I could either concentrate on speech or filming, but neither at once. The result at least follows in the online clip tradition of puppy antics. Witness Lisa Hanawalt, Paul Hornschemeier, Sammy Harkham, and John Pham under similar duress here.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Richie's Ledger: Money Sex Power
Money Aura
The single-mindedness of Harvey Comics' characters -- Little Dot’s obsession with circles, Casper’s desperation to find a friend -- is matched only by the intense repetition featured in the design of Harvey comics. Nowhere is this better seen than on the cover of Richie Rich Bank Book$ #32.
Symbols for money – dollar and cent signs – appear 13 times, gems 6 times (9, if you count the 3 in "Richie Rich" in the upper left corner), and “Rich” appears 10 times. Add to this a glittering gold bank, a wad of bills in Richie’s hand (certainly not fives or tens), 2 bank books, and a very large account book in the shape of a dollar sign, with dozens, perhaps 100s of dollar-sign shaped pages (that's at least 34 representations [symbols, words, objects] of wealth).
A house ad for Harvey Comics in the issue ratchets up this financial frenzy even further.
During the month this comic came out (August 1977), Harvey released 13 different Richie Rich titles: Vaults of Mystery, Cash, Jems, Riches, etc . . . But as the weeks passed, the value went up for the "giant" comic in the final column: week one was Millions; week three Billions, and the final week culminated with a wealth so vast it couldn’t be named with a word that corresponds to something: Zillions (even the Zs echo the shape of a dollar sign.)
If the comic has a hero with riches beyond measure, the perfect antagonist must be a threat to this wealth, which was built on the energy of the workers. His antithesis:
It's no wonder that on the first page Richie expresses the capitalist-hoarder's worst fear -- a workers' revolt:
"Gasp! Have the estate workers gone crazy?"
Luckily, things are not what they seem. The workers are only carrying out Mr. Rich’s orders, no matter how crazy they are.
And what are we to make of the cover's exchange between Gloria and Richie, or perhaps more accurately, between her and his money book? Given that Richie Rich is a children’s comic, it might seem crude to suggest that the account book and its placement are sexually suggestive.
But children’s books are usually written by adults . . . If the characters were adults, we might say:
The phallic shaped book represents the male’s totemic power; he uses his superior access to wealth (his ‘inheritance’ as a male) as a form of seduction. The male occupies the literal ‘seat of power,’ sitting in a purple chair ( the color of royalty, which in the US means Rich People) and he is positioned in a Masonic mystic triangle formed by three gems. And the female is off to the side, looking on excitedly and admiring his ‘account.’ His masculinity is a form of exaggeration and ornamentation (gems even have their own tassles), like a male bird’s mating dance. Gloria’s face and hand gestures communicate her surprise at, and her appreciation of, the phallus/book’s ostentatious size and shape, saying, ‘I’ll bet I know what kind of book that is.’ She is responsive to the ritual display he enacts for her benefit -- and for us, as he looks at the viewers, for we are the third party in this love triangle. Had she placed a 'bet' as she suggests, she would have won. She certainly knows what kind of book it is in a literal sense: a book that records and displays the Rich family's riches. But does she know what kind of book it is in a symbolic sense? Like the superhero comic, the children’s humor comic can often explore an erotic power fantasy, playing out a cultural script about gender, money, and desire -- a sexual economy that the child (Richie, Gloria, the reader) intuits yet cannot articulate.
But they're not adults; they're just kids in a kid’s comic . . .
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Gallows Humor Exhibit in Detroit
You know the year is off to a good start if I'm searching for myself on Findagrave.com; I'm listed more than once! I also have a small drawing in the exhibition "Funny/Not Funny" at the University of Michigan's Work-Detroit Gallery: January 22, 2010-February 26, 2010.
Monday, January 11, 2010
The Smartest Kid in China
Courtesy of Tim H. comes this link to a flicker set of 54 photos of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan ("Traditional Chinese Edition").
Friday, January 1, 2010
Friday, December 25, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
A Book of the Decade: Ice Haven
It’s a moment of real anxiety for Charles: he believes that if he is found with the book, he will be linked to a murder he didn’t commit. Giant beads of sweat hover over his head; his hands and arms are drawn multiple times to simulate the act of tearing; and the word “SHRED” appears twice above torn pieces of the book. Charles’s head is as big as his torso. His mouth—like that of many comic characters drawn in profile (Little Lulu, Henry, Charlie Brown)—is nowhere to be seen. The panel is funny in the way we expect a cartoon drawing to be—full of exaggerated effects. But because Clowes has carefully unfolded the plot and put Charles in a web of troubled relationships, the reader experiences the force of his anxiety.Many graphic novels distance themselves from their “funny page” origins: to be legitimate, the argument goes, comics need to imitate as much as possible the realism of film. Clowes, however, reveals no discomfort about the seriousness of his predecessors.
Applying a warehouse of cartooning techniques in traditional, unusual, and poignant ways, Clowes again shows himself to be the foremost practitioner of the literary comic.Ninety pages long and composed of 37 stories, Ice Haven has at its center a crime story—the kidnapping of a boy. But around this plot nearly a dozen others circulate, some of which have little or no connection to the crime. The method of narration, too, constantly changes. Some stories are told in the third person,
others by one of five main characters who function as first-person narrators. Some speak directly to the reader,
one narrates through letters,
and another rambles aloud—is he talking to the reader or to himself?
For visual inspiration Ice Haven looks to the Sunday funnies, in which different genres of strips drawn in distinct styles sit side by side, combining in the reader’s field of vision (in a way film frames never could) to create a kind of imaginary cartoon world.
Clowes draws on his knowledge of American comic-strip techniques to vary word balloons, lettering, and coloring to reflect the different modes of narration. A vignette with Leopold and Loeb (whose crime haunts the novel as it did Clowes’s Chicago childhood)
features a classic big-nosed style of cartooning on beige pages meant to resemble faded newsprint; a story about a prehistoric resident of the town of Ice Haven borrows the look of The Flintstones; and the vignette “Our Children and Their Friends” mimics the ground-level, static perspective of Peanuts.
The result is like a prose novel written by a dozen different authors. Taken alone, each of the stories might remind you of a cartoon you’ve seen before. But much of Clowes’s innovation lies in the interplay of styles.The technique succeeds because of Clowes’s obvious affection for a range of genres and formats that cover the history of American comics. His use of these forms is never clichéd, like the work of so many literary and cinematic postmodernists who engage in genre-hopping. Instead, Ice Haven evokes the pathos that can make such genres as, say, detective fiction compelling. Recalling Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Clowes’s PI Mr. Ames desperately seeks but fails to find a satisfying relationship, in part because he unwittingly lives out hardboiled clichés: his desire to rescue troubled women makes him blind to the troubles in his marriage.
Even stilted genres such as teen romance are mined for genuine emotion. Like the heroines of the romance comics Clowes read as a child, the teenager Violet is sympathetically portrayed as a victim of family problems who yearns for marriage as an escape. She is both an idealist who sings songs from musicals and a self-absorbed stepsister who is cruelly unaware of the devotion she inspires in a younger brother. On Ice Haven’s back cover are portraits of its “cast of characters” with an exhortation (written by Clowes): “You will feel as though you know them!” The exclamation point might make the line seem ironic, but it’s not.
Clowes has found a home for his writing in Hollywood, but Ice Haven is decidedly unlike a film. Its pacing often seems a conscious reaction to the rapid-fire editing used in so many current films, TV shows, and video games. Mainstream comics rarely go too long before crowding pages with dozens of motion lines emanating from flying superheroes or frenetic teens to compensate for lacking film’s action; Clowes embraces the medium’s stillness. We are asked to examine each character and each panel carefully, looking for subtle shifts in facial expression and wondering what happened to the characters between the panels. We must contemplate them and our own responses. In scenes in which Charles stands still, nearly silent, holding the same blank facial expression, Clowes gives the reader information through other, subtle details: the speed at which Charles bounces a tennis ball, for example, conveys his emotional state as he reacts to other characters’ speech.
You always need to read Clowes with a kind of attention that comic strips have rarely demanded, or even wanted.On repeated readings, Ice Haven’s crime plot recedes into the background, revealing the book as a story about its peculiarly American namesake (its name on the title page is lettered in stars and stripes) and a kind of Midwestern melancholy, where people wander the streets and talk with neighbors but rarely understand each other. When the poet Random Wilder meets Vida Wentz (the granddaughter of his poetic rival), she awkwardly delivers a prepared speech about her admiration for his writing, handing the poet her self-produced zine. The pompous Wilder accepts it with appreciation, but when safely indoors, tosses it aside: “Hasn’t one Mrs. Wentz done enough damage to the world of letters? Must her befouled lineage carry forth the tradition?” He later reads it and is deeply moved, so much so that he “can’t bear to have it in the house”; unfortunately for Vida, she finds it when searching through his garbage—she has been stalking him. Such strained, disappointing encounters are at the heart of Ice Haven. When characters offer a friendly greeting to the convenience-store clerk, Kim Lee, they get silence and a blank stare in return,
and when a “throng of Ice Havenites” crowd the street to learn about the crime, few of them even look at each other. Only two female characters are able to escape the pull of the town’s melancholy: as the comic ends Violet leaves her distant husband for Hawaii and Vida follows Clowes to Hollywood to become a writer and “the biggest whore ever!!”In Ice Haven’s second panel Charles reads a manual entitled Do It Yourself.
Perhaps this is Clowes’s reference to the DIY ethic of the 1960s underground “comix” movement in which cartoonists such as R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, and Art Spiegelman exercised almost complete control in the creation of their comic books. The vast majority of comics are today, in contrast, corporate products. The art, writing, coloring, lettering, and book design are done by different hands, a team assembled by and subservient to a corporation’s editorial apparatus, whose primary concerns are the marketability and licensing of characters. Clowes is Ice Haven’s auteur, taking responsibility for every aspect of his book: he even hand-lettered all the mundane publication information and chose the kind of paper.
The only mark that Clowes didn’t make himself is the back cover’s mechanically generated price code, which he incorporates into his design by putting it into a hand-drawn word balloon spoken by Clowes’s shill, a cigarette-smoking comedic bunny who hypes the book. It’s not surprising that the most important graphic novels (which include works by Clowes, Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Chris Ware) have been created in this time-consuming and solitary way. Clowes even prefers to be called a “cartoonist,” a term that evokes a vision uncorrupted by collaboration and connected to past masters such as Charles M. Schulz, George Herriman, and Frank King.Even those who see comics as an important art form often worry that the medium will always be limited in its ability to express the nuance we expect from great films or literary fiction. In his manifesto Modern Cartoonist, Clowes writes that the graphic limits of the form are not something to lament but to exploit. One of our earliest experiences with art, he writes, is drawing cartoons—so reading intentionally cartoony comics such as Ice Haven can conjure up our childhoods. The town’s comic-book critic, Harry Naybors, offers a more abstract, but equally compelling explanation of comics’ appeal: “While prose tends toward pure ‘interiority,’ coming to life in the reader’s mind, and cinema gravitates toward the ‘exteriority’ of experiential spectacle, perhaps ‘comics,’ in its embrace of both the interiority of the written word and the physicality of image, more closely replicates the true nature of human consciousness and the struggle between private self-definition and corporeal ‘reality.’ ”
In a self-referential moment, Clowes has Naybors explicate the cartoon world he lives in; he notes that Clowes has a reputation for misanthropy. Ice Haven refutes this claim. The book’s final story features 12 nearly identical panels—a young boy lies almost motionless on his bed—interrupted only by occasional short lines of dialogue.
It is in this kind of stillness that Clowes’s humanity—his tenderness toward the loners and misfits that populate Ice Haven—comes through. Ice Haven demonstrates, perhaps more so than any other graphic novel, the great range of the medium. Clowes’s comic is complex, absurd, funny, touching, and profoundly cartoony.[This essay first appeared in the Boston Review, Jan. 2006. The text has been changed slightly, and images have been added.]
