Gabba gabba hey,
or, Vootie!
The climax of the First American Transcendental Exhibition comes early—it’s the eighth of eleven stages: “God’s Universal Form.” When “Krishna’s Transcendental Manifestations” winds down, your dhoti’d guide will appear, flashlight in hand, to lead you into the largest room in the tiny museum. There’s three folding theater seats (for Jenn, Lori, and Lori’s friend Sara, though I might be misremembering the name), and he’ll close the door, revealing a padded bench that unfolds from the wall and hooks onto the last theater seat. —On a little stage in front of you is a miniature of the statue you’ve seen once already, of Krishna and Arjuna on the chariot, talking theology and philosophy while the two greatest armies ever assembled await the trumpet blast. Those bedevilled by that hobgoblin of subcreation—continuity—can see if Krishna’s wearing the same necklaces of flowers and if Arjuna’s crown matches the one he wore in “Setting the Stage”; me, I’m looking at the big black curtain behind them. Something is about to be Revealed.
And sure enough, as the synthy Hindipop remix of the Firebird Suite’s finale gets up a head of steam, the curtain is drawn back, revealing the godhead in all its multitudinous forms: “I see Brahma,” cries Arjuna, “sitting on the divine lotus!” (In English, or Spanish, French, Hindi, or Japanese, depending.)
That’s what Comic-Con is like. Except bigger.
You’ve got to understand: I was always a New York City kind of guy. LA? Please. —It wasn’t just the Woody Allen movies, though those didn’t help: New York City is a goddamn city, with skyscrapers and subways and yellow cabs and Central Park and all the other signs that say you aren’t on the farm anymore. LA is hellish, sunsoaked, shallow sprawl. Wake me when there’s a there there.
It also doesn’t hurt that when we visit Lori and John in LA, we see things like Soapy Smith’s only honest roulette table and the First American Transcendental Exhibition. We go shopping for inflatable furniture in an art gallery full of Taschen books and pieces by Kaz and Baseman and some creepy Struwwelpeter pen-and-inks (pause for a lengthy confab via cell phone with Scott, and Jenn isn’t kidding when she says she can give him the Pantone color of the chair we’re looking at, to match the ones he’s bought). We eat bubbling hot soon tofu and some incredible conveyor-belt sushi.
So LA is very much a city, after all.
I mean, it’s the sort of city where you go into a bar (the door is too hot to touch outside and the inside is conditioned to an admirably arctic degree) and as you’re drinking the Mai Tais that the bartender agreed to make despite not having the the recipe, Lori asks you who does the voice of Spongebob Squarepants, because maybe it’s that guy there at the bar, the one from Mr. Show.
But still.
(Also: lychee martinis.)
The less said about driving from LA to San Diego, though, the better.
(Lori: here’s a song by Regina Spektor, and here’s a song by the Dresden Dolls. Sorry we couldn’t arrange an iTunes party en route.)
I think it was Scott who said they were competing for “least desperate booth in the Con.” Or maybe it was Patrick. Whatever—a cool blue cloudy backdrop, lots of computers, nothing to sell, plenty of room to hide out behind the table, splayed out on inflatable chairs, a small plot of grass: they didn’t call it Tranquility Base for nothing.
It is highly recommended that you secure one of these as a base camp on the floor. Makes walking a third of a mile up and back again conceivable. Heck, I must have done it three or four times, myself! (I saw Dylan, crouched at the back of the Flight booth, mouth downturned, eyes raccooned. “Dylan!” I cried. “Why aren’t you out on the floor? Seeing what’s to be seen?” —This was on Saturday. Saturday was among other things Star Wars Day. 45,000 people were in the room on Saturday. That’s as many people as came to the con all four days total back in ’98. They had contingency plans in place in case the fire marshal showed up. They dimmed the lights on Saturday because it was getting too hot. So Dylan rolled her eyes, her mouth souring around a grin too wry to bother showing up. “Kip,” she said, “I was out there. Pushing through the crowds. Trying to make it across the hall. Kip—I’m armpit height.”)
Anyway: you’ll have to find your own base camp. Ours was pretty full.
Here’s what I know, economically speaking: I went to buy a copy of the single-volume Bone collection on Sunday morning, and they’d sold out. We wanted to buy some Scary Go Round collections. John Allison had blown through his inventory. Kazu Kibuishi had to keep going over to the Viper booth to steal more copies of Daisy Kutter #1 because he couldn’t keep them from flying away. Whoever was taking money for Flight had a hell of a job, wadding all those twenties and finding a pocket somewhere to stash them (Vera did the money dance, her cargo pants swaying like bells); they’re saying it came in second in the bestseller sweeps, after that Bone volume, and even with the hype that’s something. —Artists’ Alley was smaller this year (“This is the year Artists’ Alley truly became an alley,” said Heidi “The Beat” MacDonald), but it wasn’t sealed away behind a giant screen, and it wasn’t a deserted wasteland: Rebecca could barely stop sketching and chatting to laugh, and Parker’s audio posts (“This is me, trying again”) capture something of the progressive degradation the Con will work on you no matter where you are, and if Steve was as resigned as ever, well, it’s part of his shtick, and anyway, Comic-Con lost his table application, the bums, and besides, it was only Saturday morning, and the storm had not yet achieved perfection. (I never saw them again, but hey: check in with him and Parker in a bit for the traditional Only Report You’ll Need.)
A lot of people are talking about how this is the con where the movies finally stopped being ashamed of the comics and embraced the geekiness of it all, which is strange: the movies don’t give a damn about comics. The movies give a damn about 100,000 people showing up to buy stuff and get jazzed with that all-important viral buzz marketing stuff. The 100,000 people were showing up for the Star Wars pavilion and the video games and the trading cards and the Sky Captain robots and Jude Law and Eliza Dushku and The Incredibles and Smallville and, yes, the comics: the comics were there, too. But you could have cut the comics away and it would have hurt, but half of that 100,000 wouldn’t have noticed a thing, except maybe that the manga was missing. —This was the year Comic-Con became Pop-Culture–Con, or at least this is the year I’m saying it finally happened. Comics rolled over and stopped pretending it was all about them: this is escapism and empowerment and the promise of hundreds of worlds built just for you, and comics is just one of a dozen ways to make good on that promise. (Happy trivia fun-time: when Diamond muscled Capital out of the comics distribution biz, and reigned supreme [and pretty much still does] as the only mainstream comics distributor to the direct market, they came up with a unique defense against accusations of monopoly: they aren’t a comics distributor. They distributed collectibles, you see, such as statues, dolls, special DVD editions, sports and non-sports trading cards, and games and books; comics were just another item in that broader category, and there’s lots of distributors of collectibles. —This was back in 1997. Comic-Con has just now finished catching up, in a weird sort of way. —Then again, they’ve been subtitling it as “a celebration of the popular arts” for how long now? Maybe it’s just us that’re catching up. Except with the stuff I’ve seen some folks saying, maybe we aren’t. Of course, the Beat’s all over “Hollywood’s Summer Sundance.” So she is, at least.)
But: this is not necessarily a bad thing for comics.
For one thing, there’s always going to be a place for comics at San Diego, and not just in the name. (The Eisners, for one.) —The pop culture (or popular art) being celebrated is a very specific one: highly visual, escapist adventure stories with the sort of whacked-out goshwow eyekicks that comics pioneered—had to pioneer, because for years film couldn’t do it and video games didn’t exist. Now they do, and film and television and video games can do it better, faster, cleaner, purer, and 100,000 people will mill back and forth over a third of a mile for a taste. Comics will always have a place at that table, with the superheroes and the crime comics and the supernatural adventure yarns and the farm teams testing properties and the tie-ins and marketing opportunities before the big bucks go all-in, as well as whatever mad experiments are swirling around Grant Morrison’s fevered brain.
But these other things have their festivals, too, and we shouldn’t let the ginormity of San Diego eclipse them: APE, MoCCA, SPX, and can I be cheeky and mention Stumptown in the same breath? Not yet? Ah, give us a bit. —The immediacy of comics is lauded in the New York Times; formal techniques pioneered in comics are taught to web designers and usability mavens every day; Chris Ware just curated an edition of McSweeney’s, you might have heard of it. I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep on saying it: for all the shakiness of comics-the-industry (as we know it: watch those bookstore numbers!), comics-the-art has never been better.
And that includes the art of goshwow eyekicks. —Do I need to point out that the eyekicks in comics have an intimacy and immediacy, depend on and have created and honed fantastic formal conventions, can become beautiful, lasting works of art and design? That intimacy and experimentation and craft have eyekicks of their own?
Probably. Anyway. That’s what it all looks like from where I am, but I’m not that much taller than armpit height, myself. (You’ll notice how I’ve left out the bit about how all this affects webcomics, and how Flight is cleverly—savvily? inevitably?—reaching out to all the various factions that don’t really exist when you stop and look at them closely enough. This has gone on too long already. Maybe next time. —Tranquility Base didn’t sell much of anything, though. Then, they didn’t set out to.)
Jenn Manley Lee; Tracy White; Patrick Farley; Daniel Merlin Goodbrey; Scott McCloud.
Terry Rossio wants to know what the Next Big Thing will be.
“Entertainment used to be appointment-based,” he says. We just had dinner for 20 or 30 or so at Bucca di Beppo’s. It’s Friday night. We skipped dessert. I should maybe have had some coffee but I didn’t and it’s not like I need coffee. “You’d wait for opening night or the next episode or the next issue. You’d make an appointment to see it. Now, with DVDs and the internet and trade paperbacks, you can see it whenever you want, the whole thing, or just a piece here and there.” He didn’t make the point about trade paperbacks, but it fits, so I’ll make it for him. But maybe I should stop putting words in his mouth, since I’m bound to get his argument wrong. I didn’t take any notes. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should have gotten some coffee anyway. —The point is this: appointment-based entertainment builds buzz because it builds community. You’re all waiting for everybody else for the same damn thing, and then you’ll talk about it after, and not a little of the drive to see it in the first place is that hankering to talk about it after. (Half the appeal—a third?—of preordering the next Harry Potter is knowing you’re reading it at the same time as how many millions of people? Hundreds of thousands? It’s shivery cool, if ultimately evanescent.)
But the advent of 500 channels and niche publishing and the death of radio—the turgid stop-and-start media revolution, the guerilla war of many-to-many against all manner and model of broadcast, to draw a megalomaniacal analogy—has caused appointment-based entertainment to wither away, if not yet die. There’s so much out there, and the barriers to get it out there are lower than ever, are falling away to nothing, and this is good, this is fantastic, phenomenal—but there’s so much out there. How are you going to get noticed? Get everyone picking your signal out of the glorious noise? How are you going to line ’em all up for the Next Big Thing?
Momus says Warhol got it wrong: we’re all going to be famous for fifteen people. And that’s great, that’s fantastic, that’s phenomenal—but fifteen people can’t feed a family of four. Much less draw up the standard rich-and-famous contract. Fifteen people can’t even keep you in beer money.
Terry notes the fervor hardcore fans bring to things like fanfiction; he talks about how people will follow sports teams, even though there’s no set story: any given Sunday, and all that. So I pick up on the threads he’s dangling and suggest a soap opera following the members of various teams in a, say, quidditch league. Thinking sports because you could stage the games on a regular basis (rotisserie-baseball–style), which supplies the (I’m thinking) necessary appointment basis, but also limits the wild cards: there’s no set story in sporting events, but that doesn’t mean anything goes—rather, a pre-set number of possible outcomes have a greater or lesser chance of occurring. (Storytelling is always about rules: horses and harnesses, tennis and nets. You abstract a set of rules from the larger storytelling set and dance with them, and adhering too them too slavishly is as bad and dull as ignoring them utterly.)
But he’s smiling at me. “You’re taking the sports thing too literally. Imagine a castle. When you first see it, it’s full of people. You don’t know any of the relationships, any of the alliances, how anything works. And you don’t get told who to watch or follow. You can go anywhere, see anything that happens, but as you’re doing that, something else is happening somewhere else. You can go back and catch up, but you can only watch one thing at a time. That way, you can come home, pop it in, follow a little bit here or a little bit there, you don’t have to live in it eight hours a day to pick it up. But it’s big enough to have that draw.”
So not anything goes— there’s a set storyline, but it’s multilayered, multivalent, and the uncertainty comes from the happy accidents each reader makes as they see this scene or that scene first, followed by something else; each reader writes their own path through. And appointments can be made with story and setting updates. “Did you get part three? Oh, man, you know that bit with the princess—you’ll never guess what happens—” It’s a video game with a narrative flow, it’s interactive fiction with a budget: call it a MMOTE. (Massively Multi-audienced Online Theatrical Event. Okay, maybe not. For the record, here’s a primitive something of what it is he’s on about.)
But whatever: the deeper thing we’re talking around is worldbuilding. It’s no longer enough to sit around a campfire and just tell a story. People want us to give them worlds to escape to and the tools they need to climb into or even make up their own stories there. They write fanfiction about their favorite characters. They build levels for their favorite video games based on scenes from their favorite movies. They mashup pop songs and remix them and make playlists for their own personal soundtracks. They roleplay in the settings of their favorite TV shows, and they dress up as their favorite superheroes for a day. (Or they want to, but don’t have the time. Or the energy. They want to make a gesture in this direction. They want something close to it, closer than they can get now.)
—New pop culture technologies. Fiction suits. Worldbuilding. This is what the Next Big Thing looks like.
So I mutter something (once again) about Dylan Horrocks’ essay, and look over at Scott, at the other end of the table, who’s waxing theoretical about Classicists and Iconoclasts, Formalists and Animists.
It’s a good dinner.
It’s on Saturday, I think, that I nearly trip over one of the Haradrim. And you have to ask yourself: what is it, exactly, that you desire, when you dress up as a spear-carrying bad guy seen in medium shots for less than a minute’s worth of footage, total?
I did try to warn you: “one thin layer of parody or pastiche,” I said, “and this whole house of cards of mine collapses into a merry war.” And fans are parodists and pasticheurs: they can’t help it. Those are the iron-clad forms of sub-subcreation.
Trouble and desire: it’s a refrain from a Hal Hartley film, which is why it sticks in my head, and I think I did a better job of laying out what I’m on about with it last year, though that fit’s not much more coherent than this year’s, which went on about desire at the expense of trouble, which is to slight one half of the engine’s kick: you have to have trouble, so you can unleash your power; you have to have desire, or you’re not going to give a good God damn about the trouble. (And I should warn you that I get lost in the nuances of that peculiar, Lacanian sense of desire: “When all the elements of need are satisfied in the situation of want, the remainder is desire.” Seems straightforward enough? Well, watch it: it gets slippery fast. —So I don’t even know what the hell I’m on about, myself. I just take comfort in the way Barbara Johnson bitch-slapped Lacan and Derrida with a purloined letter.
(Um. As described by John Irwin. God, you think I’ve done any of the actual reading myself? I cribbed the Lacan quote above from Delany. Oh, hell, let’s climb out of this pit and get back on the con floor.)
But don’t think we’ve banished sex and the appetite for sex from our equation. Just because you’re lost in the trees doesn’t mean there isn’t any forest. —There was not only the Elvis stormtrooper this year, there was also an Elvis Ghostbuster.
See?
(I’m reading House of Leaves again, and just thought I’d mention how cascadingly funny it is that just about everything is cited to articles written in hundreds, thousands of magazines and books, as if the central events of the book were covered in one facet or another by everybody from Newsweek to Outdoor Life to Ladies’ Home Journal, and all those Tweely Clever Title: Wretchedly Explicatory Subtitle books from all those academic presses. Worldbuilding again: the story, and the space around the story, its echo, the wider world, and suddenly it’s not so funny anymore: it’s creepy, it’s obsessive, it’s weirdly claustrophobic, it’s frightening. —Good book, that.)
Comics?
Well, sure: Flight, of course, which sold more copies than anything else on the floor except the giant all-in-one Bone. It remains to be seen, time will tell, but in this reporter’s opinion, here and now, I think it can be said the promise is being fulfilled. (Volumes 2 and 3 are underway.) Picked up a copy of Kwaïdan because, ooh, pretty; it ended up as just about the most European Japanese comic I’ve ever read, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. But I also picked it up because the size and format—slightly smaller than a regular comics TPB, but not manga-tiny; good thick matte paper; the spine was a little stiff, but the price—$14.95—was just about perfect: it’d be ideal for (say) print runs of Dicebox. (Know anybody who wants to publish a 90-some-odd–page comic? Second most popular strip at Girlamatic…) —Finally dropped some money for the Darwyn Cooke Catwoman trades, because cons are where you finally break down and buy the stuff you’ve been dickering over for a while. The cartooning—like Matt Wagner in his prime, and that’s a very good thing—was almost enough to make me overlook the mawkish noir. (I was surprised to find Cooke’s solo effort a much more appealing story than the regular Ed Brubaker-written stuff: I haven’t kept up with Brubaker’s capecapades, but back when the Comics Journal accused him of drawing like Chester Brown he could, you know, write. But this, this was warmed-over treacle: hookers in danger, a cheap Clayface knock-off, some awkward hand-waving about what sounds like a ridiculous bit of retrocruft [Selina Kyle ran for mayor of New York? When Gotham City was going through that we’ve-been-destroyed-by-an-earthquake crossover? What?]—I realize that when you’re working on something like a Batbook, you’re largely rearranging deck chairs on a Titanic that will not sink, and there’s some deep fucking grooves in the deck that it’s hard to yank the chairs out of at this point, but still. Better was expected. Thank God for the kinetic jam-kicking cartooning.)
What else? Daisy Kutter #1, because what Kazu Kibuishi’s doing with Bolt City is a thing of wonder and delight. But it’s a number one. A nice-enough opening; we’ll see what happens next. Jenn ended up with a Wigu collection, and what little I’ve seen is inspired sophomorosity. Clio dropped her sketch ’zine in our hands at the last possible moment, and Lord, but the girl can draw. (Those fish!) —I’d say something about all the other Pants Pressers, but they’re all in Flight, so go look at that, and anyway, Clio was the only one who gave us freebies. Street Angel? No, wait, we picked that up at APE…
Oh! Right. Isaac the Pirate, vol. 1, because Dylan made us. (And Chris.) Which I still somehow haven’t really sat down with yet. Hmph. Oh! And we saw the Incredibles preview and the Farscape preview and I won’t tell you what I was thinking during the Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean panel on Mirrormask because Ivy would glare at me and we leaped to our feet when Joss Whedon came out and said, “I’ve got something to show you,” and then when he said, “I’ve got something else—well, actually, nine somethings,” we leaped to our feet again and whistled and I think Jenn even stomped, because nothing says that indiepop cartoonists and British invasion formalists and bootstrap bricolagistes can’t let themselves get swept away by the razzle and the dazzle of the Cannes for Fans, the Summer Sundance.
There was going to be more, because there was more. More about the dinners (the second one, which had less theory and more sketching, and had more laughter but only because there were three times as many people), and the people I’ve slighted horribly, like Ivy, and Winter and Sky, who’s taller than you remember; Merlin, who was there to assure us that Spaced lived up to its hilarious promo; Steve, whose head is bumpier than mine; Tracy and Lakshman and Lauren and Tammy and Heidi and Anne and Jen and Bill and, um, and— I don’t even think I mentioned the grass! (Oh. I did. Briefly.)
Me, Ivy, and my hat.
There was going to be more, but the music’s falling away. The lights dim, the halogens fade, leaving red and green light-smears to chase the edges of all those dancing arms, those beatific faces. There’s a rattle of rings as the curtain jerks its way back across the stage, and all that’s left is the little statue of Arjuna and Krishna on the chariot, talking theology, there between the two largest armies ever assembled, waiting to crash together in the greatest battle for righteousness and against tyranny that the world has ever known. Sandals slap, and the flashlight comes bobbing. It’s our guide. “I’m sorry,” he says, as he asks you to stand. He fusses with the bench you’ve been sitting on, lifting it up and hooking it back against the wall, opening the door it had blocked. “I have to put this back now,” he says, “or I’ll forget, and I’ll run through here in the dark and bang my shins and end up with my dhoti over my head.”
We can’t have that.
There’s more—three additional stages, in fact: “Ocean of Birth and Death,” “Lord Caitanya’s Sankirtan Festival,” and “Goloka—The Spiritual Realm.” But don’t follow him out into the next cramped hall just yet: stop a moment in the doorway, turn, look back. There’s a gap between wall and curtain, and you can just see the forms of all those gods: clay statues, brightly painted, carefully dressed, standing perfectly still under all those mirrors in the dim light.
And then even that’s gone. —Our guide’s about to start the next display. Go on. We can’t keep him waiting.
And this, this I don’t say often enough.
The Spouse, ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Jenn Manley Lee? She’s a bona fide rock star. If you aren’t reading Dicebox, well, now you have no excuse. Start here. (It’s where everybody came in.) The main site has the first 40-some-odd pages up for free; after that, you can subscribe to Girlamatic and get caught up. (Be sure to mention her when you do: she gets a bonus.) It’s $2.95 a month for an excellent assortment of fine new mainstream comicking, and that’s less than most 22-page super-pamphlets, and it includes a page a week of one of the most important SF comics of the past, Christ, good long while, and I’m not entirely swollen with spousal pride on that score.
I’m telling you, folks. Rock star. Go pay your respects.
I’m working on it.
I’ve been sick. (Stupid canned con air.) It’s at about 4600 words. Maybe another 1000 to dig my way out of it, and then the links, and the photos. (Christ, that’s a lot of theoretical bloviating. Maybe I’d better pull out the red pen—) It was going to go up last night. It might go up tomorrow. But I have to work tomorrow. And Sunday. We’ll see.
So Selina Kyle actually ran for mayor of New York City? What the fuck was up with that?
Sorry. Anyway: Bill and Vera and Erika and Clio and Anne and Patrick and Lori were all on the scene in one way or another, so you can go spoil yourself there. I might yet beat the titans of con reporting, though, so there’s that. —But they’ll have better pics.
One last thing: I just re-read Whedon’s original script for Alien: Resurrection, and was startled and amused this time to notice how much Firefly is in there. It’s a stretch to say that Firefly redeems his famously scuttled Alien script, the way Buffy redeemed Buffy, but it’s not that much of a stretch. Certainly, it’s a more intriguing lateral comparison than City of Lost Children.
We done? For now.
Der Tod und das Mädchen.
A little more on bodies, and hucksters, and being taken for a ride: when you wear a black fedora at every opportunity; when you absolutely forbid photography so you can sell more art books and fridge magnets and mouse pads; when you gussy up a host of various biotechnological processes (some pretty, some not, some elegant, some brutish) with a puffily vague neologism like “plastination”; when you protest a bit too much in your brochures about the scientificity of your purpose, its grandeur, its magnificence; when you trumpet your records broken with eyebrow-kicking statistics; when you dedicate your exhibit to its donors with a large multilingual stone plaque—any one of these may not in and of themselves say huckster or mountebank or aggrandizing four-flusher, but put all of them together, and your nose starts to itch. At least, mine did. And again, this is not a crime: I’m not averse to a wee bit of razzle-dazzle to get ’em in the door. Science, especially biology, badly needs some showmanship these days, and if some niceties are glossed to buff up that dazzle, well, we’re only human. We like us a good story (something the Democrats also need to learn), and we can save the rough edges for the footnotes, and if somebody walks out with a wrong idea, well, there’s no guarantee that arrant pedantry would have prevented it.
But there’s æsthetics, and then there’s ethics.
DALIAN, China (AP)—Hidden in a maze of factories in the heart of this northeastern Chinese port city is the house Gunther von Hagens built—and, for many, a place where nightmares are created.
Inside von Hagens’ sprawling, well-guarded compound, behind a leaning metal fence pocked with holes, are more than 800 human beings—200 of his staffers and 645 dead bodies in steel cases from almost a dozen nations.
The anatomist, whose exhibits of preserved human corpses have riled religious leaders in Europe and attracted the curious and the outraged across the world, set up shop here three years ago to process bodies for his shows.
Last month, media reports from von Hagens’ native Germany asserted that at least two of the corpses, both Chinese, had bullet holes in their skulls—the method China uses for execution. It’s a charge that von Hagens rejects vehemently, saying all his specimens were donated by people who signed releases.
“I absolutely prohibit and do not accept death penalty bodies,” von Hagens, a tall, thin man in a fedora, said this week during a rare tour of his Dalian facility.
But, he added, “Many things can happen. . . . I cannot exclude that (possibility).”
Von Hagens launched his Body Worlds exhibits in 1997 and has shown them to nearly 14 million people from Japan and Korea to Britain and Germany. Shows are running now in Frankfurt, Germany and Singapore.
The displays feature healthy and diseased body parts as well as skinned, whole corpses in assorted poses—a rider atop a horse, a pregnant woman reclining—that show off the preservation technique von Hagens developed in 1977.
Dubbed “plastination,” the process replaces bodily fluids and fat with epoxy and silicone, making the bodies durable for exhibition and study.
Thanks to John & Belle for the tip. —Nothing appears to have come of any charges —“German prosecutors said that as the institutions were legal custodians of the bodies if relatives of the dead did not claim them, Hagens was allowed to buy them,” says this article, which doesn’t do anything to make any of the above come any closer to proper. Nor is this the first time that Körperwelten has raised these sorts of questions. And I’m not exactly thrilled at the idea of a Chinese knock-off—even if the knock-off rather primly disavows the very profit motive that one might maintain has driven von Hagens into graymarket grave-robbing. (There’s other appetites than money-lust, after all.)
If I were snarkout, I might use this as a launchpad for a deftly curated smörgåsbord of links on autopsies and body-imagery and death fixations and the humorously contingent history of corpse-squeam. But I’m not. And I’m at work. And in a mood. von Hagens has done a Bad Thing, but not, apparently, an Illegal Thing (though Germany, perhaps pettishly, is fining von Hagens for “abuse of an academic title”). The people who didn’t explicitly sign on with this project should never have been used—that multilingual dedicatory plaque now thumps like a tell-tale heart—and yet, the harm’s been done: what good would it do to take them down in an essentially symbolic gesture? Æsthetics, to assuage our ethics? (Presuming, of course, that we could even find them.) —The show is loopy as art, and no great shakes as science—but there’s literally nothing else like it (well—except the Chinese knock-off). And there ought to be. Is that enough? (Enough for what?)
Maybe I’ll just end by linking to the lyrics of “The Cowboy Outlaw.”
And so we return and begin again.
Oh, there’s a lot to go through, like the creepy coolth of dessicated, plastinated corpses when arranged with surgical precision by a gentle German huckster, and what it’s like to crack an egg into a bubbling hot pot of soon tofu, and then there was the Con, but I want to just take a moment here and now to register my disbelief at something we saw on the drive back from San Diego to LA, and it wasn’t the $2.25 a gallon we were paying for regular unleaded. I get out of the car to stretch my legs and what I hear is somebody telling me to call now, because operators are standing by. It was the gas pump. There was a little screen on the gas pump over the screen you use when you’re paying for gas with a credit card. It was a television screen. It was playing commercials to a steady stream of momentarily captive audiences.
And then came the Fox News update.
We have no shame. None whatsoever.
Now that we’re all enthused.
Yeah, so, the Spouse and I are off to Comic-Con, where we’ll be crammed into an exhibit hall a third of a mile long with tens of thousands of speculators and cosplayers and the occasional cartoonist. And you shouldn’t take my grousing too seriously: fun will be had, of a serious and determined sort, and I don’t doubt that photographic evidence will surface after the fact that makes or breaks more than one reputation.
We will also talk comics, I imagine. At least once.
If you’re in the neighborhood, drop by: I’ll be spending at least some of my time at Tranquility Base, where Jenn’s hooked up with Scott McCloud, Patrick Farley, Daniel Merlin Godbrey, and Tracy White. That’s Booth #1230, across from the Image Comics pavilion, which will include a booth for Flight. Plus I’m sure at least a third of the Pants Press will be in the vicinity at any one time. Should be a blast.
I’ll leave you with a pointer to the latest review of Jenn’s Dicebox, and contrary to Kevin’s snark, I’ve got no nits to pick. (Where on earth did I get this reputation for persnicketiness?) —Anyone who realizes an opinion formed in the middle of a work-in-progress will doubtless be changed by later readings of later material is A-OK in my book. (And anyway, us critics ought to stick together.)
Men are from Mars; women are from Mars, too, just a different part.
John Holbo is doing some heavy lifting with the capecapades set over at John & Belle Have a Blog, most recently with the one-two punch of “Superbeing and Time” and “Crisis on Infantile Earths,” peering at superheroics through a mock-pastoral lens to good effect. So pardon me as I swipe an epigram from him:
I do not know just how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the the world crystalizes for us …. They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life … Such images constitute a program, establish our soul’s fixed fund of capital, which is allotted to us very early in the form of inklings and half-conscious feelings.
And then I’ll cite Delany citing Freud :
Freud told us that a perversion was the opposite of a neurosis: In the childhood machinations of psychic development, either we sexualize something or it becomes a neurotic character trait.
Oh, San Diego!
It is and has been for decades the comics convention. It’s the gathering of the tribes: indie auteurs, fan favorites, corporate hacks and shills, visionary geniuses, that guy who did the make-up for the demons on that episode of Buffy, and of course tens of thousands of fans themselves, they all wash up in the great big barn of the San Diego Convention Center for four or five days toward the dog days of every summer. And you can crack jokes these days about how hard it is to even find comics at the Comic-Con these days: sure, the con’s expected to draw 80,000 people this year, as opposed to 40,000 back in 1998, but those 80,000 people are there for the movies and the video games and the toys and the anime and the manga.
And the comics. Yeah. Sure. But if you walk into the middle of the hall you’d be hard-pressed to figure that out at first.
The first is of a woman, long and lean, young, her belly and thighs bared by a gaspingly, laughably fetishistic costume (take your pick: lingerie’d angel; latexed demon; Catholic schoolgirl stripper; battle-thonged nun; tank-topped and hot-panted soldier of fortune; extreme-sports paramilitary cop; strategically splattered with creepy alien encrustations; dolled-up in crotch-floss and body paint). She usually carries a long slender sword, or a gun, or some kind of arcane Japanese farm-implement-turned-weapon, but not always. She sneers, she glares, she’s defiant, she’s angry; if she grins, it’s some kind of feral rictus; sometimes, occasionally, she’s serene, gazing expressionlessly off into nothing at all. She hangs there, on the covers, on the banners, in mid-air, mid-fall, mid-leap, mid-splash; she’s poised, her weapon of choice at the ready, up and back from the follow-through.
The second? Lemme grab At Swim-Two-Birds:
Too great was he for standing. The neck to him was as the bole of a great oak, knotted and seized together with muscle-humps and carbuncles of tangled sinew, the better for good feasting and contending with bards. The chest to him was wider than the poles of a good chariot, coming now out, now in, and pastured from chin to navel with meadows of black man-hair and meated with layers of fine man-meat the better to hide his bones and fashion the semblance of his twin bubs. The arms to him were like the necks of beasts, ball-swollen with their bunched-up brawnstrings and blood-veins, the better for harping and hunting and contending with the bards. Each thigh to him was to the thickness of a horse’s belly, narrowing to a green-veined calf to the thickness of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was wide enough to halt the march of warriors through a mountain-pass.
We are so far beyond wearing the underwear outside our tights it’s not even funny.
So let’s sniff and dismiss: it’s simple enough. Comics (cartooning in general) is a perilous shorthand: it traffics in those filament-images of Bruno’s, drawing on them for inspiration, generating them in return, and feeds it with the raw and heady energy of demiurgic subcreation. You draw what you want to draw (if you’re lucky, or at the very least you draw what other people in their wisdom have decided the pop semi-conscious wants you to draw), and you’re making them do exactly what it is you want them to do (or ditto): and any time desire is involved, things get funky fast. We just need to note that mainstream comics (like action-adventure movies, like genre television) is still a heterosexual white man’s game to explain why the images of women are all things to be desired, and the images of men are all things to desire to be.
“The thing about superhero stories,” says John, “is that they make no sense whatsoever, not even a tiny little bit, and never will; but once—when you were small—this made so much sense that nothing else seemed to.” Indeed, except we bemoan the lack of comics for children these days: superhero stories don’t cater to the small as their audience of choice. They fell from grace into a seething pit of that other time when you’re overwhelmed by something that doesn’t make sense, and yet means so much that the rest of the whole wide world can go hang—adolescence. Love and sex; trouble and desire. Those pop-bright demiurgic subcreations are powerful tokens, imagos and eidolons for stuff we couldn’t bear to tackle directly: desire, sex, being desired, having sex, and the world-shaking power it seemed was the only way we could ever get anywhere near the stuff, and yet which required crippling responsibility to keep the rest of the world safe from our terrible might. (Whether this is why superheroes wear their underwear outside their tights, or wearing the underwear outside their tights is why superheroes came to take on this role, is one of those delicious chicken-and-egg questions.) —The battle-thonged Beauties and brawn-strung Beasts on the comics and posters and banners all around us are just those tokens run wild, unshackled from the schoolmarmish constraints of Marketing and Editorial, fastbred at hyperevolutionary speeds to monstrously logical extremes, like bizarre ocean-floor life fished up from a ruthlessly capitalist hotzone. We’re trapped in a straight boy’s daydream, and nothing makes any sense, and it won’t stop grabbing us by the collar and gibbering that attention must be paid, and the post-adolescent fans (and artists, and writers, and editors) all trafficking in this stuff? —Let’s pick up Delany again:
For one thing one learns in fifty years is that, though most of us eventually learn to ask, more or less, for what we want, it is always more or less impossible to ask for what we need. (If we could ask for it, by definition we wouldn’t need it.) That can only be given us. Finally, we are left to conspire, inarticulately and by our behavior alone, to make sure there is as much of it available in the landscape as is possible, in the hope that, eventually, we will be fortunate enough to receive some.
Oh, but that’s mean, that’s cruel, and unfair. Look away from the comics and the posters and the banners we’ve been talking about and watch the people go by. Ignore the costumes for a moment—we’ll get to them—and note how many people who aren’t male and who aren’t white are walking past. It doesn’t look like America—not yet—but it looks a hell of a lot more like America than it did five years ago. Much less ten. —And as for the costumes, well, no one can quite manage battle-thongs, though the occasional Vampirella will come close (with lots of spirit gum in uncomfortable places), and nobody’s brawn is strung quite like that. Still: there’s women dressed as the Beauty we’re all supposed to want, and men dressed as the Beast we’re all supposed to want to be. Dozens of Lara Crofts, a couple of Vampirellas, merry-widowed dominatrices with electrical tape over their nipples, a smattering of Shis, a Lady Death, fresh from her boudoir; Punishers by the score, and that guy from that vaguely western anime with the long red duster and the angular blond hair, Agent Smiths with their hands on their earpieces, and your more faceless Beasts: Imperial stormtroopers in hardcore hardshell, proletarian Ghostbusters toting unlicensed nuclear accelerators, Federation officers and redshirts from a variety of eras. Except—there’s women in those Ghostbuster coveralls, and Federation uniforms; there’s women under the hardshell, and that was a woman walking past in full-on conquistador plate. And if there aren’t any men in battle-thongs, well, there’s the guy in the amazing Las Vegas floorshow fire demon get-up, and the long-haired bare-chested dark wizard-priest guy, in the long black sarong, and—well, maybe we’ll skip over the guy in his boyhood Spider-Man Underoos. (To be wanted? Or wannabe? He doesn’t look like he’s mocking, which is good: one thin layer of parody or pastiche and this whole house of cards of mine collapses into a merry war.)
We’re outside of the simple maps of Beauty and Beast now, the banners and comics that are running lower than the commonest denominator after some ur-image that will make the passersby stop and stare and spend. These people are bodying forth their own filaments, those mysterious, contingent images around which so much that is vital and necessary crystalizes, and if none of them deal directly with sex, still, they’re all tokens of sex and power, trouble and desire, and desire is inherently anarchic, and yet—“The power involved in desire is so great that when caught in an actual rhetorical manifestation of desire—a particular sex act, say—it is sometimes all but impossible to untangle the complex webs of power that shoot through it from various directions, the power relations that are the act and that constitute it,” says Delany. (If the John Birchers up in the valleys knew what was going on down here, they’d be out in force with pitchforks and torches.) And then:
During such power analyses we find just how much the matrix of desire (the Discourse of Desire and the matrix of power it manifests here and masks there) favors the heterosexual male, even if there is no such actor involved. Whoever is doing what the heterosexual male would be doing usually comes out on top. Though his 1915 footnote makes perfectly clear that, by the use of the word “masculine” he simply meant “active,” this may nevertheless have been part of the thrust of Freud’s statement: “that libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespective of whether its object is a man or a woman.”
Women taking on their own pop culture images of things to be; men toying with the idea of being wanted—oh, but this is desperately simplistic, a dreadfully reductionist reading of a small little piece of everything that’s going on around us. And to read it all as “sex” (/sex/; «sex»; you know, sex) is to miss the terrible, wonderful, obliterating utility of trouble and desire. (Still: to read it as sex is not to insult capecapaders and cosplayers as somehow stunted, deficient, maladapted: we all need something to get us past those terrible shoals, whether it’s football or ponies, and just because we’re on the other side doesn’t mean we don’t still have a use for boats.) —This is something of what Grant Morrison’s getting at when he talks about fiction suits and pop culture technologies, and it’s rich and strange and powerful.
It’s also enervating and headache-inducing and frankly boring, after a while. (I get it.) Which is when I want to get off the floor and find a dark corner somewhere with some friends I haven’t seen in a year to talk about, you know.
Comics.
Together again for the first time.
I already told you the one about the guy who bought the most expensive copy of that Superman comic because, y’know, it had to be the most valuable. Well, here’s what we did the last time Liefeld and Nicieza and X-Force rode into town:
It was June of 1991, and I was clerking for New England Comics, splitting my time between the Allston and Brookline shops. Allston was the shop for the hardcore regulars, selling probably 60 – 70% of each week’s new books out of subscribers’ boxes rather than off the shelf to walk-ins; it had the most wallbooks (the valuable collector’s issues, kept safe in mylar sleeves, hung from hooks on every vertical square inch) and a whole room filled with grimy once-white cardboard longboxes on folding tables, crammed with comics going back decades. Brookline was more of a kids’ shop: the sort of friendly neighborhood brightly colored shop full of comics and toys that most people thought of when they thought of comics. It had its regulars, too (one of them a disreputable chap who subsisted on issues of Cherry Poptart and Dan DeCarlo reprints; Barb liked to slip him copies of Real Girl from time to time, but we’ll get to her in a minute).
And Marvel had noticed, to be sure, and was wildly casting about for the next Next New Thing, and the next #1 to give him. They fingered Rob Liefeld, whose style—well, it was idiosyncratic, at least—had gotten noticed on New Mutants, and they decided to let him loose on X-Force.
What was it about? Who knew? Who cared? It was going to be big. Everybody knew it. So everybody ordered accordingly, and comics clerks all over the country sighed accordingly, and heavily. —I was scheduled to work the Brookline shop on the Wednesday X-Force would debut, which was fine with me. The Brookline shop was managed by Barb, who was as much about fuck tha superheroes as I was: Sandman was okay, and she could tell Hayao Miyazaki from Masamune Shirow, and she liked Zot!, but mostly she liked the underground and its descendents: Los Bros. Hernandez, Dave Sim, Dori Seda, Mary Fleener, Donna Barr. (She also lived in a Buddhist monastery where she rather seriously pursued the art of kendo. So I had a crush. So deal.)
As per our plan.
We left the shop (opening the door, exciting the somewhat longer line of kids, dashing their hopes when we locked it up again) and headed across Beacon Street to an upscale supermarket (this being Brookline), where we picked up orange juice, a couple of pastries, a bottle of champagne, and some plastic cups. Back at the shop (open, excite, lock, dash), we mixed a couple of mimosas, toasted the coming day, and tossed ’em back.
Then.
Barb ceremoniously pulled a buck-fifty out of her pocket and rang up a sale as I grabbed a copy of X-Force #1. We walked up to glass front door where the head of the (longer still) line had a good clear view of us. I held up that copy of X-Force #1 to general oohing and aahing and yaying. Then Barb pulled out her lighter and set it on fire.
And then we opened the shop.
Image was born out of a feeling that I had that [the days of] our positions at Marvel were numbered. We had become too big for the system. Marvel didn’t want a star system, but with Todd’s, Jim’s and my books selling millions of copies, that’s what we were becoming. They were trying to reproduce the success of our books. They were going to put out a Cage #1 with an acetate cover. Like, “We’ve got to prove it’s the gimmicks, not the creators.” But the truth of the matter was Spider-Man happened because Todd had heat on Amazing Spider-Man and X-Men happened because Jim Lee had heat. They were trying to replace us already, and we hadn’t even talked about leaving.
—Rob Liefeld, on why he decided
to take part in Image Comics
That was July of 1991. In December of 1991, Marvel’s hotshot Next New Things marched as one into the office of the president of the company and made him an offer they knew he’d refuse: give them—all of them—creative control of their own properties, or they’d walk. All of them. (They never joined the Wobblies, but they figured out what it is about a union: it’s a way of getting done together what you can’t get done alone.) —Marvel said, roughly, shyeah right, and so Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee and Jim Valentino and Erik Larsen and Mark Silvestri and Whilce Portacio and Rob Liefeld walked and founded Image Comics. They nearly killed Marvel, and they came even closer to killing the direct market itself, and you should go read Michael Dean’s “The Image Story” to savor the rise and the fall. They put out hundreds of shitty comics and ran a handful of superhero æsthetic trends out past their logical extremes and over a cliff, and it’s as much their fault as anybody else’s that the big Comic-Con is all about movies and videogames now, and they changed the course of history and the flow of capital; nothing was ever the same after they did what they did.
I used to say that the punchline to the story above was that later that day, after we and everybody else in the country had just about sold out of the first printing of X-Force #1, this guy offered to pay five dollars for the ashes of the copy we’d burned, which we’d slipped into a mylar sleeve and hung from the counter by the cash register. (Hey. Five bucks.) I used to point out that a near-mint first print of X-Force #1, which once was bought at $50, $60, $100 a throw, by people who forgot to buy low and sell high, could now be had for the low, low price of, yup, five dollars. Whoa. That irony’s a bitch.
But I found out that isn’t the punchline. The punchline is reading this:
This fall, Rob Liefeld, Fabian Nicieza and X-Force return for a six to eight issue miniseries as announced at WizardWorld LA’s “Cup O’ Joe” panel with Marvel E-I-C Joe Quesada.
And hearing Liefeld say this:
Oh yeah, there was plenty of trepidation. In fact I turned it down twice before finally convincing myself to do it because I was really intimidated and let’s face it, it is a gigantic, daunting challenge to see if we can restore this book to anything resembling the glory days when this book was a top seller and the characters were extremely relevant to the Marvel Universe. It’s been quite some time since this franchise was a water cooler book and I’d be lying if I told you I have doubts about what we can accomplish. We’re giving it our best effort though, trying our hardest to make this as exciting as possible.
And this:
The situation is as follows: there is a terrorist group from the future that is hell bent on awakening a terrible menace from our past in the present. One really cool monster, ninjas, assassins, barbarians, time-travelers and plenty of intrigue. All the ingredients that set X-Force apart from the pack 13 years ago are front and center here. The sins of Cable’s past really come back to haunt him this time around…
The punchline is this:
And you know what? Rob Liefeld is an ass. He’s a shitty cartoonist in every conceivable sense of the term who thinks ninjas and assassins and time travel are innovations. He isn’t unsubtle when it comes to slamming peers and burning bridges. His popularity then and now is an occulted mystery, even to his fans (perhaps especially to his fans). The comics he’s produced are without exception qlippothic works, darkly sucking away from superheroes whatever magic and wonder and naïve dignity they can muster. Him, and Marvel, and X-Force—they all deserve each other, and good riddance.
Still: that story isn’t nearly as funny as it used to be.
Your very blood screams indifference towards defining the need to fight versus the desire to fight. You have failed in your mission, Gaveedra-7. You must leave the Sacrarium.
Why, yes. I would jump off a bridge just like everybody else.
Kelly; Gatsby; Ellington; cats; Picasso; Yeats; Keaton; O’Connor; To Have and Have Not; de Kooning; The Who; Larkin; dunno from Trollope, so pass; Holliday; can I pass without admitting that I’ve yet to go through a Russian phase; I think I’d prefer Greene, but pass; Graham; vegetarian, but burgers; Letterman, for fuck’s sake; Cat Power; Verdi; Monroe; Cash; I’ll punt the Amis question; Mitchum; Morris; Vermeer; Tchaikovsky; this is like a question between wine and, you know, that light stuff you drink when it’s hot; Coward; Grosse Pointe Blank; pass; and pass again; Turner; also, I’ve never really gone through a ’50s revisionist Western period, so pass; comedy; fall, though we prefer autumn; Sopranos; Gershwin and Gershwin; James; sunrise (one loves more the rarer seen); Porter; Mac, for God’s sake; New York ditto; um, pass; Van Gogh; Elvis Costello; blog; Olivier; which one has “Luck be a Lady”?; Chinatown; Election; minimalism; Daffy; the very question is telling, but hey: post, baby; Batman; Emmylou Harris has really long hair, and I like her voice, but I know little else and nothing at all about Lucinda Williams, so pass; Johnson, because, hey, dictionary; I’m going to, um, pass; Dick Van Dyke; Eames; I love Double Indemnity, but I haven’t seen Out of the Past, and I want to, so pass; Die Zauberflöte, so pass; green; Midsummer’s; opera; theatre (theater is the building, dear boy); one could not possibly decide this one without more context, so pass; Northwest; Sargent; I haven’t even read enough Kundera, so pass; Music Man (another head-scratcher); I’m a vegetarian, I eat sushi, do the math; I’m going to punt this one, Alex; Albee; I haven’t read Dove, so pass; who? what? (pass); Wright; again with the who and the what and the pass; watercolor; subway (when I can get it); Stravinsky; neither, but crunchy, if I must; mumble mumble (pass); Mozart; the ’20s; Moby-Dick; I need to get a grip on Mann, so pass; I’ve heard one, I think, but not the other, or maybe I have, but anyway, pass; Dickinson; Lincoln; Mann; Italian; and I think I’ll be blasphemous and agree: piano; ate them once in Italy and, well, that’s not why I’m a vegetarian, but I’ll have to go with no; long—no, longer—keep going, no, I need some more—a bit more—another epilogue? Sure—oh, a few more pages couldn’t hurt anybody—is that it? Are you done?; swing (which feels like a failing); Judgment, baby. —Which gives me a TCCI of 55%; that, and a buck-fifty, and I can get a 16 oz. coffee tomorrow, with a little room for cream.
Avast.
Just a quick note, in case y’all don’t pay much attention to the “Commentations” box in yon left sidebar: The Poet, one of the deejays for The Crystal Ship pirate radio station (1982 – 1984), has posted a neat little oral history of their piracy as a comment to an old post on Portland’s own Subterradio, and pirate (harrumph: “micropower”) radio in general. Check it out.
So here’s another one up for the Crystal Ship, and the PRA, and Free Radio Berkeley and Subterradio, and Liberation Radio, Radio Free Radio, the Voice of Laryngitis, the Crooked Man, WGHP (With God’s Help, Peace) and the Voice of the Purple Pumpkin, Secret Mountain Laboratory, the Voice of Voyager, Radio Ganymede, the Voice of FUBAR (Federation of Unlicensed Broadcasters on AM Radio), and WUMS (We’re Unknown Mysterious Station, perhaps the longest-lived pirate ever, who broadcast from 1925 – 1948, and whose equipment, upon retiring, was requested by both the Ohio Historical Society and the Smithsonian).
Smoke; mirrors.
We will continue to differentiate ourselves from the industry by:
- Delivering value propositions that target end-user appearance and industrial [commodity] markets worldwide using our consultative selling approach;
- Focusing on product and service (customer value differentiation) to maximize margins;
- Building and maintaining inter-functional coordination between facilities, functions and customers to create and deliver value proposition requirements.
—key points from a marketing strategy for a [commodity] corporation
The word /smoke/ refers to a portion of content segmentation which we will conventionally designate as «smoke». At this point, we have three alternatives, whether intensional or extensional: (a) «smoke» connotes «fire» on the basis of an encyclopedia-like representation which takes into account metonymic relationships of effect-to-cause (a case grammar accounting for “actants” like Cause or Agent can represent rather well this sort of meaning postulate); (b) the sentence /there is smoke/ expresses as its content the proposition «there is smoke» which, always by virtue of an underlying encyclopedic representation including frames or scripts (see 3.2 of this book), suggests as a reasonable inference «there is fire» (notice that we are still at an intensional level, since the possibility of the inference is coded among the properties of smoke, independently of any actual world experience); (c) in a process of reference to states of the actual world the proposition «there is smoke», on the grounds of the aforementioned meaning postulates, leads to the indexical proposition «therefore here is fire», to be evaluated in terms of truth values.
—Umberto Eco, “1.7. The Stoics”
from Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
Biff, pow, yadda yadda.
A good first effort, Mr. McGrath; I particularly like the group shot of some of comics’ eminences grises. There’s a couple of nuggets of genuine insight. Well done. Definitely a step up from “Bang! Zowie!”
But there’s still room for improvement:
- Your opening, for instance: the question of declining or expanding literacy is complicated enough at the present moment that fashioning from whole cloth a poetry-like decline of the novel in favor of comics makes you look a wee bit poltroonish. Also, if you’re going to cite highbrows that claim comics are “perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit,” do be so good as to name them and quote them directly. Otherwise, the brickbats we’d throw at them for snobbish provincialism and sloppy sloganeering will end up aimed at you, instead.
- Also, try to be a bit more au courant in your examples. I think the last Broom Hilda collection was printed in the mid-’70s? Your point is taken, and could as easily have been made with Foxtrot, or Zippy the Pinhead. (We’ll let the manga punt slide: authorities within the industry can’t wrap their brains around this phenomenon, either, so expecting more from a source like the New York Times is, perhaps, unfair.)
- If you’re going to set up an equivalence between “graphic novels” and “‘literary novels’ in the mainstream publishing world” (scare quotes sic), take care that later quotes don’t directly undermine your point.
- Regarding the “minor flowering of serious comic books in the mid-80’s”:
This is, without a doubt, the single most breathtakingly heartbreaking summation of the comics industry’s boom and bust that I have ever read.But the movement failed to take hold, in large part because there weren’t enough other books on the same level.
- Kudos for noting Watchmen was drawn by Dave Gibbons. Points deducted for failing to note that From Hell was drawn by Eddie Campbell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was drawn by Kevin O’Neill, and Lost Girls was drawn by Melinda Gebbie.
- Have you seen many Persian miniatures? Have you seen the art for Persepolis?
- “Many practitioners of the form” do not prefer the term “comix.” Art Spiegelman prefers the term “comix.” The man deserves our respect and admiration, but there are limits.
- His name is Scott McCloud. Will Eisner is the cartoonist who prefers “sequential art.” You mention neither Eisner nor Jules Feiffer, nor their seminal comics A Contract With God or Tantrum. This is inexcusable. Failing to note McCloud’s Understanding Comics is less of a crime—you’re dealing with the literature itself rather than the criticism of that literature (stop trying to join split hairs, you in the back)—but it is suggested that you arrange to have read a copy before next tackling this subject.
The graphic novel is a man’s world, by and large, though there are several important female artists (not just [Marjane] Satrapi, but also Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet and Debbie Drechsler). And to a considerable extent it is a place of longing, loss, sexual frustration, loneliness and alienation—a landscape very similar, in other words, to that of so much prose fiction.
This is a worthwhile insight, unless I’m misreading “the landscape” when I apply to it the conditions noted throughout the paragraph, and not merely those ascribed directly to “a place.”
Many more are set in the slacker world—the skanky Washington Heights neighborhood of Doucet’s My New York Diary, the coffee-shop Portland and East Village sublet of David Chelsea in Love, the diners, card shops and apartment complexes of Adrian Tomine’s West Coast—where people are always hooking up and breaking up and feeling both shy and lousy. It’s the pictorial equivalent of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.
This, on the other hand, is cheap and pandering. (Also, see above re: au courant.)
- Not every graphic novelist—to wed ourselves momentarily to the terminology out of necessity—has drawn stories about their masturbation, excessive or otherwise. (What works as a one-off joke should not be stretched into a paragraphs-long case study.)
- Ghost World the comic was, indeed, better than Ghost World the movie. (It’s surprising how many people get that one wrong.)
- Become more attuned to the ironies within your own work: on the one hand, you have highbrows sniffing at comics as “perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit”; on the other, you speak with graphic novelists (still wed) who describe their art as “an incredibly inefficient way to tell a story,” and note of their working process:
“It involved maybe 8 to 10 seconds of actual narrative time,” he said. “But it took me three days to do it, of 12 hours a day. And I’m thinking any writer would go through this passage in eight minutes of work. And I think: Why am I doing this? Is the payoff to have the illusion of something actually happening before your eyes really worth it? I find it’s a constant struggle and a source of great pain for me, especially the last day when I’m inking the strip. I think, Why, why am I doing this? Whole years go by now that I can barely account for. I’m not even being facetious.”
- You have your reasons, yes, or rather there are reasons why it probably never occurred to you; nonetheless, I’m feeling parochial, and so I will dock you for not mentioning Grant Morrison when you name-check Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.
- Given the context, you don’t need to explain what “a fair cop” means.
- Your point re: Blankets is well-taken, although you make precisely the same point a paragraph later, re: Adrian Tomine.
- Excepting (the astounding, the amazing, the incredible) Joe Sacco and Joe Sacco alone from your single paragraph summation of the strengths and weaknesses of the graphic novel makes you seem parochial, as if you’ve only read the books you’ve mentioned in this piece. It also lends too much emphasis to Sacco-as-exception, which is a recurring theme. The narrative that emerges—R. Crumb, social outcast and chronic masturbator, revives comics as a niche form of self-expression; many cartoonists who follow in his footsteps are also social outcasts and chronic masturbators; Joe Sacco is a well-spoken cartoonist with a comendable panoply of social skills; comics as a medium (or is it graphic novels as an idom? Or genre? Sloppy!), as practiced by these social outcasts, is not well-suited to lyricism or strong emotion, and does not take itself seriously (look at all those wanking jokes!); it therefore follows that only the comics of Joe Sacco, smooth, confident, jet-setting journalist that he is, are capable of proving this rule—this is just plain ugly, and detracts from the value of what has gone before.
- Admit it: you only read City of Glass because Paul Auster wrote the prose novel.
Defending marriage.
One of the reasons maybe why I’ve been quieter than usual of late is Creeping Disaffection. When Multnomah County first began granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples (including a number of friends and acquaintances of mine), I said something not unlike the following:
It’s brilliantly savvy theatre—every marriage solemnized in this blazing spotlight (as opposed to the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, that have been solemnized in Unitarian and MCC congregations and liberal synagogues and in the sitting rooms of bed and breakfasts and barefoot on the beach; wherever straights have gotten married, gays and lesbians have as well, for all you did to manage not to see them)—every marriage on the sidewalk outside the county offices in the rain with a news camera present puts a human face on this (thus far) largely abstract battle.
Gays and lesbians are an invisible majority, after all; the only time most of the country has to see them is acting up in sitcoms, or on the news, where every year the coverage of the pride parade skips over the gay police officers and the gay librarians and the gay government clerks and the gay senior citizens and the straight allies and zooms straight for the freakshow eyebite: the drag queen in the feather boa, the bare-breasted diesel dyke. (To trade in unfortunately broad stereotypes, which they do, of course; ignoring the obvious benefits these individuals bring to the world, which we shall take as read: we’re all choir here, for the most part, and this is going on too long already.) —Instead, the media has to focus on long lines of people just like everybody else lining up around the block for the same rights and the same dignity enjoyed by everybody else. Professionals and parents, besotted college students head over heels and sober old folks seeking recognition for half a century together, all of them just like everybody else, except—gay. (Meanwhile, in the background, a scattered handful of protesters behind yellow police tape holds up hateful signs. Radio pundits scream incoherently about intangibles, pushing buttons that don’t work as well as they used to. Respected conservative pundits in the field tell us we must oppress these people because gay sex is so much better than straight sex. It’s like heroin. No, really!)
(Which is why I’m not yet that worried about backlash this fall: Oregon is bigger than that, honest it is, and if the sky hasn’t fallen in because of same-sex marriages, we’ll leave well enough alone. —Always reserving the right to be bitterly disappointed, of course.)
Good thing I reserved that right. Oregon is not only not bigger than that, we’re downright petty little shits:
Not to be cynical or anything, but we’ve always sort of assumed that should the initiative to constitutionally outlaw same-sex marriage in Oregon get onto the November ballot, it was all over. Well, it seems that this afternoon anti-marriage forces submitted a record number of signatures:
Backers of a ban on gay marriage turned in more than 244,000 signatures Wednesday to place the issue before Oregon voters this fall. It was twice the number needed and the highest number of signatures ever submitted for an initiative measure in Oregon.
While there of course will be challenges to the initiative, the signature-gathering process, and the validity of signatures, the proposal needs only 100,840 valis signatures to qualify. That more than twice that number were submitted virtually guarantees that voters this Fall will have the option of enshrining discrimination and unequal protection into the Oregon Constitution.
Oh, there’s been good news since then, and one can always hop up on a soapbox and unleash a hail of thundering invective—and there’s nothing like stupid, heartless, thoughtless bigotry to fuel some truly inspired mockery. But it’s sound and fury in the face of implacable fear and ignorance, which will enshrine bigotry in our constitution and strip (largely theoretical, yes, but) rights from neighbors, friends, family members. And the certain knowledge that this is nothing but a freakshow reflex, a thrumming of nausea through the body politic that will pass and leave its fervent supporters and ridiculous logic clinging to the liner of the dustbin of history is cold comfort; it’s hard to look forward to yet another Measure 14 at some point in the years to come that will strip this foulness away (and we will pat ourselves on the back once more: isn’t great we’re so much better than we used to be?) when what we want is decency now, goddammit.
When I’m directly engaging whatever it is I’ve chosen as the Other Side of the Moment, I’ve lately been trying hard to keep Tarantino 25:17 in mind: I try, real hard, to be the shepherd. (Not least because it means I’m actually the tyranny of evil men, and the Other Side of the Moment is weak; we all need our power fantasies.) —It’s hard to make the Other Side of the Moment see the light when you’re sneering at them, and this is why 90% of all internet punditry is less useful than a hill of beans (at least you can eat the beans). But when it comes to the anti–same-sex–marriage crew, I’ve got nothing but a sneer. (I take some little solace in the fact that folks much better than I have lost their patience on this score—and quite eloquently, to boot.)
Now, if you’re a snowball that’s somehow chanced upon this particular hell, and you for whatever reason can’t countenance same-sex marriage, well, I’ll apologize for my sneer; I’m craven enough in my convictions to feel badly about doing it to your face. But you’re backing the wrong play, morally, historically, pragmatically—if you really want to defend marriage, for God’s sake, it makes much more sense to throw your weight behind something like this—
Stigmatize adultery. Roll back no-fault divorce. Rail against quickies, planned at midnight for a 1 a.m. wedding. I’ll still fight you tooth and nail, but at least I could have some little respect.
(Defend marriage? You pathetic, deluded fools. Same-sex couples have been getting married all around you for decades, and they’ll keep on doing it, long after you’ve passed your little amendment. Men will kiss their husbands as you clap yourselves on the back, and wives will continue to feed each other cake, whether you will it or no. They’ve always had the love and the cherish and the honor, and the recognition of their friends and family, and nothing you can do will take that from them. Nothing. All you’ll manage to do is rewrite the tax code. Make it more of a grinding hassle to deal with insurance and wills. Keep loving families apart at times of illness and accident and death. Condemn children to needless, nightmarish legal quagmires. You will tarnish all our rings, and when we open our mouths to take our vows, we will taste ashes. —In order to save marriage, you will destroy it. Fools.)
All this and ego, too!
It’s a miracle traditional American comics get made at all (and still with the same characters they’ve had since the fucking Boer War or something. Mister Terrific! How can these things still exist? What monstrous act of love and will keeps a comics ‘universe’ alive for so long, against the odds?). They’re the last bastion of something, that’s for sure, but it’s hard to imagine them, through the compound eyes of future eons, as anything other than a curious example of primitive, hand-drawn ‘virtual reality’ technologies. Most of the people who do this kind of work, do it out of love, like the love you’d show to an ailing friend.
That’d be Grant Morrison, and this helps explain why he’s on my shortlist of all-time favorite comics writers ever.
Revolver (six).
“I don’t have any whisky,” may be a fact but it is not a truth.
—William Seward Burroughs
Where were we?
Adam Roberts wrote a good book badly, or at least wrote a book that wasn’t the sort of book I’d wanted to read, and thought it was. Hagen, son of Alberich, pointed out a couple of ravens to Siegfried, and when Siegfried turned to follow their flight, Hagen stabbed him in the back with a spear. Roberts, in the guise of one Kurt Soldan, managed rather thoroughly to misunderstand not only the point but also the particulars of Schrödinger’s cat. Shocked and awed by their defeat at the hands of the French and British and Americans, humiliated and demoralized by the crushing cavils of the Treaty of Versailles, various disparate elements of German society enthusiastically took up the image of the heroic German soldier, stabbed in the back by dastardly November criminals: trade unionists, communists, Jews, liberals. (General Erich Ludendorff sneered, “I have asked His Excellency to now bring those circles to power which we have to thank for coming so far. We will therefore now bring those gentlemen into the ministries. They can now make the peace which has to be made. They can eat the soup which they have prepared for us!”) Incensed at the defacement of a Time magazine cover, Cerdipity drew a cartoon which showed a Democratic peacenik running away after having stabbed an American soldier in the back. (Journalist Joel Engel sneered, “Someday, though, a populace provoked by the left’s constant fire-breathing may look for a dragon slayer who won’t go quite so easily.”) Soured by the world as it is, humming those lines Morrison stole from Morrisey—“There is another world. There is a better world. There must be”—I picked up a book by Adam Roberts and was profoundly disappointed right from the get-go, so I sat down and tried to figure out why. What was I looking for? What was I missing?
I swear to God there was a there in that the last time I looked.
Let me try again: you’re watching television, and this commercial comes on. There’s a guy sitting in a chair. He’s obviously uncomfortable. Something’s poking at him. He shifts and squirms and reaches down, under the cushion, tugging and pulling until something rips free. He holds it up. It’s that tag: “Do not remove under penalty of law.” SWAT cops burst suddenly through his windows, kick his door in, hold guns on him, bellow his rights at him through a megaphone as he desperately swallows the tag. (I think it was for a chocolate bar. There’s another one which stars those Wallace and Gromit sheep.)
Does it bug you when you remember those tags actually say “Under penalty of law, this tag not to be removed except by consumer”? That they were first put in place to assure the squirming guy that the cushion in question was fresh off the lot, never previously owned, that it was stuffed with specific stuffing? That somehow the meaning of that tag has slipped and shifted from consumer protection to Brazilian harrassment?
And sure, everybody knows that curiosity killed the cat. But: did you also know that satisfaction brought it back? —Imagine two playgrounds, alike in every particular but one: in the first playground, only the first line is allowed. In the second, the entire couplet. Can you chart the resulting differences?
And Siegfried was an arrogant, hubristic ass, a rapist, a murderer, a thief, and his death was necessary to help wash away the curse on the treasure of the Nibelungen and return love to the world, yet look at him now: an heroic soldier, a knight of the realm, the realm itself, struck down in its prime by those who ought to have supported it, our last hope of greatness thrown away by treacherous fifth columnists who should have known better. —And only a dancing Wu Li master would try to insist on the literal ambiguity of Schrödinger’s cat: you can turn an experiment into a metaphor, but you can’t take the gedanken out of the experiment.
And yet—what about Schrödinger’s Knight?
The PCs encounter a knight in an inn. There is a chance of the knight being killed in a combat which erupts at this location. If the knight survives the battle and gets into a conversation with the PCs, then they learn that he is X and they get to hear his story.
If, on the other hand, the knight is killed in the battle, then he is not X, but Y, a messenger carrying a letter for X. In this case, the PCs can learn the same information by finding the letter that Y was carrying on his person.
I think that it might have been Mark Wallace, who in a discussion of this plot technique referred to the knight as “Schroedinger’s Knight.” The reasoning, of course, is that until the in-game events unfold, it is impossible to say whether he is X or Y; until the battle takes place and the PC’s relationship to this character is established, he is effectively both X and Y.
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
It’s not getting Schrödinger’s cat wrong that wrecked Stone for me, any more than it’s a seeming ignorance of the dolchstoßlegende that wrecks Cerdipity’s cartoon. Getting things wrong is what we do, after all, and sometimes we do it brilliantly. Meanings shift, stories change: signifiers point ever and always to nothing but other signifiers. If people remembered the same they would not be different people.
And that’s what’s wrong with Stone. The world within those pages is what it is: all signifiers point to thuddingly designated signifieds. In that world, there is only one model, useful or not: the map is the thing mapped. (And thus difficult to fold.) —I’d wanted a labyrinth; I got a tree. I want an encyclopedia; this is a dictionary.
That it is a stunted tree, a mealy dictionary, is a much less shattering disappointment.
—Oh, he also uses “alright” and says things like “It matched the intense yearning of my heart too closely. But then again, I reasoned, it would not be hard to determine that such might be my dream,” and he says things like “To kill so many people! People, true, I had never met before, and whom therefore didn’t truly exist, but nonetheless!” and there’s his thing for noses. But this is stupid stuff.
Until next time, ponder this: why should we cheer when Stephen Hawking reaches for his gun, but hiss and boo when Hermann Göring releases the safety-catch on his Browning?
Some context.
Oh, hey: if you’re swinging by from the Willamette Week story, and you’re wondering about the tersely cryptic excerpt, well, here; and here’s the reason why my desk is groaning today:
He was very afraid, very alone. He had the thinnest arms I had ever seen. His whole body trembled. His wrists were so thin we couldn’t put handcuffs on him. As I saw him for the first time and led him to the interrogation, I felt sorry. The interrogation specialists threw water over him and put him into a car, drove him around through the extremely cold night. Afterwards, they covered him with mud and showed him to his imprisoned father, on whom they’d tried other interrogation methods.
They hadn’t been able to get him to speak, though. The interrogation specialists told me that after the father saw his son in this condition, his heart was broken, he started crying, and he promised to tell them anything they wanted.
—Sgt. Samuel Provance, 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion
Of course, I don’t know why I’m so angry today. We’ve known we were capable of this particular damnation for over a year now.
(This is, indeed, more of a literary blog than anything else, I suppose. But what passes for politics these days has a nasty habit of getting in the way.)
