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Saturday, December 14, 2002 ( 12/14/2002 04:10:00 PM ) Bill S. “I AMASSED THIS GREAT FORTUNE INVESTING IN ALTERNATIVE COMIC BOOKS” – This week when I saw the cover to Love and Rockets, vol. 2, #6 (Fantagraphics) on the racks of our local comics shoppe I immediately felt a fannish glow. Most of us have artists or musicians who do this to us: just the sight of fresh work by ‘em lifts our spirits, makes us feel better about the world. (Hey, life can’t be that bad if a new Love and Rockets is in it!) Los Bros Hernandez do it for me. L&R number six delivers the goods: superb black-&-white art, stories that range from urban real to sci-fi surreal, heroines who pointedly defy the pin-up conventions of mainstream comic art, an unvarnished overlay of Hispanic culture as well as the periodic head-scratching moment. Over the years Gilbert & Jaime (w./ an occasional assist from brother Mario) have created a comic book universe that’s unsurpassed in its inventiveness & breadth of emotional experience. The newest issue is a blend of serial stories plus stand-alone tales – though with the exception of the latest chapter of an extended South American adventure written by Mario and illustrated by Gilbert, you can read each entry by themselves. Three pieces, in particular, stand out. “Toco,” the four-page opener, is a Beto work: a disquieting slice-of-Southern-Cal-street-life whose hero – a bald-headed kid in an oversized sweatshirt – has appeared on the sidelines in a lot of Gilbert’s stories. In this solo outing, Toco encounters a stranger on the beachside streets, is taken to a slasher flick where the stranger fondles him in the darkness. Though the boy appears unfazed by the experience, the stranger is afterwards attacked by a group of outraged adults. As for Toco, we’re unsure if he even knows what’s been done to him. He watches his perpetrator get beaten without saying a word; only thing he says about his experience is he wishes he could go to the movies every day. Is he too young or developmentally delayed to comprehend? The cartoonist lets us draw our own conclusions. Gilbert’s other four-page opus is even less clear-cut: an improv piece featuring Roy, a fat security guard with a bowl haircut that’s meant to recall sixties cult comic book hero Herbie Popnecker. Built on a series of tiny panels (fifty-five to a page) that admittedly were a strain for this bifocal-wearing reader, “30,000 Hours to Kill” follows Roy’s misadventures as he is unjustly jailed for a crime he didn’t commit. Packed with fantastic details – a bear-like monster with a large snout, a mysterious experiment in the bowels of the earth, and (most improbable of all) a guy who becomes a millionaire selling alternative comics – it has the to-hell-with-plot energy of early undergrounders at their loosest. In one sequence, a prison riot breaks out, and assorted snitches & stooges are ruthlessly dispatched. Among the first to go: a “film, rock music and comic book critic” who gets his head crushed in a press. (Yikes!) "I'm always right," the bespectacled critic states, just before his eyes pop out. As a character, Roy tends to react more than initiate – in this sense he’s much like the aforementioned Herbie (though Roy typically has a more avuncular affect than the expressionless fat boy). “There’s a lot negativity in the world,” he tells the man who’ll steal his girlfriend while he’s imprisoned, “but honesty and integrity aren’t dead.” With his naiveté & capacity for animalistic violence, Roy is basically a roly-poly man-child. But, as in the Toco tale, Gilbert is unsparingly unsentimental about what this can entail. The issue’s longest entry is a thirteen-pager by Jaime starring Maggie, the full-figured mechanic from East L.A. who’s stuck in a dead-end life and has seemingly even lost the ability to dream her way out of it. Back when the first series of Love and Rockets began, Maggie’s sci-fi daydreams were presented full-tilt, with very little undermining ‘em. As the series progressed and we got to see the world she was really inhabiting, Jaime began to deliberately undercut our suspension of disbelief. All those early stories that we took at face value turned out to be the imaginings of a pudgy punk grrl. This ploy may’ve cost the artist some readers, but it also made his comics world richer for the rest of us. In the years since, Maggie & friends have evolved into models of naturalistic characterization that have been studied (and, in some cases, just plain swiped) by savvy comics scripters. The Bros put L&R on hiatus for a few years. But when it returned, the quality of Maggie’s fantasies seemed to've taken a turn toward the gothic: closer to the nightmarish realm of a schizophrenic writer than the glistening space age dreams of before. This grim trend continues in the most recent chapter. Maggie, working as an apartment manager, is forced to clean-up following an earthquake, picking up the shattered artifacts of their lives. Still separated from her former constant companion, Hopey, she fruitlessly yearns for a seemingly unattainable towering tenant and indulges in unresolved flirting with another. (Jaime’s a master at illustrating unspoken sexual tension.) The dream that follows is of a menacing costumed figure (the tall lady tenant), a headless crucifix & a mutilated cat – no love or rockets here. Whether Maggie’s dream is a portent or merely a reflection of her own dissatisfaction is not resolved. Neither Jaime nor Gilbert are interested in too-neat explanations for either their characters’ actions or their imaginings. Which is as it should be. Love and Rockets is more about character, mood & moments than it is about long-winded exposition. It’s about comics in a world where scrabbling for joy is a daily chore. Ain’t a lot of graphic artists that are comfortable in this gray world – and even fewer suffused with the sheer love of comics storytelling that radiates from the Bros Hernandez. For fans of unadulterated grown-up comics, Love and Rockets continues to be as good as it gets. # | Friday, December 13, 2002 ( 12/13/2002 10:53:00 AM ) Bill S. LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORIES – The most recent Comics Journal (#248) has a sharp column by R.C. Harvey on Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning novel about the early years of the comic book industry, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Picador USA). In it, comics scholar Harvey basically fact-checks Chabon’s book – which focuses on the fortunes of two young superhero creators in the era referred to as comics’ Golden Age – and only finds two comics-related items to refute. First is the existence of a plainly fictional building that Chabon asserts once housed Al Capp before the cartoonist struck it big w./ “Li’l Abner.” Second is a description by Chabon of the 1954 testimony by cartoonists Walt Kelly & Milton Caniff before Estes Kefauver’s infamous Senate committee hearing investigating the spurious links between comic book reading and juvenile delinquency. Chabon characterizes this testimony as a betrayal by the National Cartoonists Society of its “brothers in ink,” but Harvey (who writes the intros to the current book reprints of Kelly’s seminal “Pogo” comic strip) demurs somewhat, straining to put a different spin on Kelly’s appearance before the committee. That a diligent scholar like Harvey was only able to take issue with two relatively small details in Chabon’s book speaks well of the writer’s research as well as his evocation of setting. The novel is clearly written from the perspective of someone who has loved comic books (the acknowledgement at book’s end concludes with a statement about the “deep debt” the writer owes to artist Jack Kirby). This appreciation informs every page of Chabon’s work, which is unblinking in its look at the process of early comic book creation and packaging – as well as the shenanigans that permeated this low-rent industry. Kavalier & Clay focuses on two young Jewish boys who strike it big by creating a superhero character called the Escapist. Sammy Klayman is a Brooklyn-born boy who does the scripting; Josef Kavalier is a young refugee from Prague, who has left his family in Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia. Young Joe is gifted as a pen-and-ink artist, middling in the art of Houdini-esque escape. Together, the two develop a hero whose main métier is escaping devilish traps that’ve been set by Nazi-inspired comic book baddies. This proves to be both a source of commercial success and dark irony for both men: while Joe is able to cache enough money to fund his younger brother’s escape from Europe, for example, he remains unable to ultimately rescue him. The subject of escape – its allure and traps – permeates the book. There’s a line in literary criticism, which asserts that physical escape has long been a motif in American fiction: think of ol’ Huck Finn heading out west at the end of his book. One of the questions that Kavalier & Clay repeatedly asks is where do you go once all the frontiers have been mapped? Is the escape of fantasy sufficient when it’s the only uncharted realm remaining? For Joe, clearly it isn’t. Drawing an ongoing series of comic books where his hero gets to beat up on Nazi surrogates isn’t sufficient; he’s driven out into the streets of New York where he picks fights with any man he encounters who looks vaguely Germanic. When he learns of his brother’s death, he enlists in the service only to find himself stationed at an isolated Arctic post (really out in the territories!) slowly going mad. Sammy, meanwhile, sequesters himself in a passionless marriage in a futile attempt to escape his homosexuality; his wife Rosa, trapped in the post-war suburbs, turns to illustrating romance comics. For the protagonists of Chabon’s novel, the glorious & tatty fantasies that juvenile comic books portray are intertwined w./ their own lives. The author is especially adept at pulling in key pieces of comics history – the moment when Citizen Kane, for instance, opened young artists like Will Eisner to the visual possibilities of their medium; the lawsuits filed by the owners of Superman against Captain Marvel & other superhero imitations; the publication of Frederic Wertham’s alarmist anti-comic book screed, Seduction of the Innocent; the Kefauver hearings – and making them intrinsic parts of his characters’ story. The sequence where closeted Sammy is forced to publicly acknowledge his predilections during the televised hearings is particularly heartbreaking, as is his later private refutation of the simplistic homophobia that fueled so much anti-comic book sentiment. The novel ends in the mid-fifties, a period generally considered an ebb for superhero comics. Discussing the sorry state that these once-proud characters are in, Chabon makes an uncharacteristic anachronistic error by describing the desperate “attention-getting” measures writers have been driven to, listing such goofy plot gimmicks like Bat-Mite & Bat-Hound. This reference is being made for comics in 1954-5, but Bat-Mite – to get profoundly geekish here – didn’t show up ‘til 1959. (Hah! I found a flub on my own!) But though the industry is down, the book ends on a cautiously positive note. Joe's returned from the territories with a graphic novel that anticipates art comics yet to come, while Sammy has finally gotten up the nerve to himself embark on a trip out west where he’ll doubtless put his pulpish talents to work in the nascent TV medium. As for superhero comics, they’ll experience their own bright rekindling in the 60’s by a crew of writers & artists old enough to be Chabon's heroes. Chabon’s novel is well written (though at times I felt that his agile elaborate sentence construction drew more attention to itself than was necessary), and it does much to honestly illuminate a pop culture world that frequently gets treated with unnecessary condescension. Like many bulky books these days (Kavalier & Clay clocks in at 600-plus pages), there are times you get the sense that the writer’s love for his material has sent him down digressions not entirely fruitful. But because his characters are so clearly realized, because his world has so much sparkling detail, I followed Chabon to the end. When I’d finished, I had the not-unfamiliar urge to go and read some superhero comics. And why not? # | ( 12/13/2002 06:08:00 AM ) Bill S. ETC., ETC., ETC. – Over at The Comics Journal’s message board site, there’s an extended to-do about the recent decision to kill its “Etc.” general-topic message board, leaving just three boards devoted to News, Medium and The Comics Journal itself. Over the last year I’ve visited all the TCJ message boards on a regular basis (though I found my attendance/involvement decreased significantly once I started working on this here web log). Though I’ve hardly been a prolific board poster, I suspect I contributed to the “Etc.” section more than any other: enjoyed its threads on pop music and movies, in particular. The board had a lot of personality-focused crap on it, but over time I learned to skip that particular noise. (Some of the Ted Rall fight threads were like comicdom’s attempt at replicating the famous Fred Allen/Jack Benny feud – without any of the wit or jokes.) I also stopped reading most of the political threads as they quickly grew too predictable. I can understand the administrators’ decision to axe the board, however. I regularly visit another periodical-connected board, and over the years I’ve also seen that one spark periodic cleansing by the board’s webmaster due to the presence of posters whose main raisin d’etre was to piss all over everyone else. If one of your goals as a publisher is to keep folks positively in tune w./ your magazine, the last thing you need is a site that promotes more ill will than good. Yammer all you want about free speech: the bottom line is that TCJ’s message boards are a business expense. Will I miss “Etc.”? For a time, I suppose, but its absence won’t keep me from TCJ’s mess boards completely. Where else, after all, am I going to get to read Coop’s thoughts on the latest ish of Love and Rockets? ADDENDUM: Just checked my TCJ message board profile on the board before posting this and saw that I’ve been a registered member since October of last year – and that I’ve contributed 275 total posts: no breakdown of where these posts specifically went, however. . . # | Thursday, December 12, 2002 ( 12/12/2002 12:48:00 PM ) Bill S. GASTRIC DISTRESS – A few weeks back, reflecting on NBC’s dramedy Ed, I expressed hope that the series would once more get on track now that the fallow triangle between Ed, Carol & principal Dennis Martino has been resolved. Last night, the show shifted its focus away from its oppressive will-she-or-won’t-she? marriage plotline only to stumble once more. At issue: a holiday storyline featuring fat high schooler Mark (Michael R. Genadry), an appealing character who we first met through the series’ center adolescent figure, nebbishy Warren Cheswick (Justin Long). When Mark’s father suffers a heart attack, the three-hundred-plus pound senior (at one point we’re told he’s 250 pounds overweight, but I’m less sure about that) is pressured by the show’s family doctor into considering gastric bypass surgery. Our hero is resistant at first – he knows all the risks and lifelong downsides. But after repeated prodding by Warren (who unconvincingly has stolen Mark’s chart from Dr. Mike’s office and, even more improbably, knows how to read it!) plus the sight of his fat father sneaking a pepperoni snack, he changes his mind. Thanx to the endorsement of celebs like Carnie Wilson & Al Roker, gastric bypass has been receiving a lot of media play. It’s a controversial procedure, though, and there’s plenty of debate – even within the size acceptance community – about its merits or demerits. And even if you support the procedure, you’ve got to wonder about the advisability of prescribing it for an adolescent. The only serious medical issue Dr. Mike mentions is the boy’s high blood pressure, but we’re never told if less invasive procedures (medication, say) have been attempted. (In fact, it's a script point that Mark hasn't been to the doctor in some time, so it’s likely that even so basic a tack as restricting salt intake hasn’t been tried.) Makes you question Mike’s competence as a physician, actually. Word is that the 24-year-old Genadry who plays the character actually had the procedure over the summer, so the producers were forced to write an ep to account for the physical changes we’d be seeing in the character. While I can appreciate the difficulty this presented for the show’s writers, that doesn’t change the fact that they bobbled the thing. I’m not even talking about the automatic assumption within the script that fatness irrefutably equates with gluttonous behavior & poor health. Even if you accept that presumption (as many in the audience do), presenting surgery as the first solution available to Mark is dishonest. My guess is the writers wanted to get through this forced plotline as expediently as possible. The strain definitely showed. # | ( 12/12/2002 04:51:00 AM ) Bill S. JESUS IS PACKIN’ – Even in South Park terms, the cosmology of this year’s Christmas show got pretty twisted. Spurred on by Eric Cartman, Santa Claus attempts to deliver Christmas to Iraq. When the right jolly old elf is shot down over Baghdad, Jesus (who's long been hosting a cable access show in South Park, Colorado) leads a Ramboesque rescue effort. He & the boys save Santa from being further tortured (more holiday torture for our entertainment!) But on the way out Jesus is mortally wounded. When the group returns to South Park, we see that perpetual victim Kenny McCormick (dead almost a year) is once more alive. So, apparently, Jesus’ death made it possible for little Kenny to return to his weekly cycle of death-then-resurrection. “Things are back to normal,” we’re told. So that's what normalcy is, the flummoxed audience thinks . . . # | Wednesday, December 11, 2002 ( 12/11/2002 03:19:00 PM ) Bill S. NOT FADE AWAY – Reading Heidi MacDonald in Pulse, I see that the Superman-emblazoned water tower in the center of Metropolis, IL., is in danger of being torn down. I visited Metropolis last April, and at the time the tower was lookin' pretty sad & neglected (as was much of Metropolis, for that matter.) Update: The Superman Collectors’ website has more on the water tower story here. # | Tuesday, December 10, 2002 ( 12/10/2002 05:29:00 PM ) Bill S. ALL JUST A PACK OF CARDS – Last night, for the first time in several years, we hosted the monthly Unitarian men’s poker group at our house. It’s the first time we’ve had it at our current address – which sez something since we moved into the place December before last. When the group first started, six or seven years ago, it floated from member house to member house, but for a good three years it remained at the house of our church treasurer because Ned had a nice felt-covered poker table. When he passed away last year, the game once more started moving. But as I already noted, it took some time to make its way to our house. I became a part of this august group at its onset: I was into a second term as v-p of the Bloomington Unitarian Church board at the time, and the then-president was recruiting to get a group together. The poker group has seen members come and go (the ex-president included), but it’s generally stayed at around seven, the membership divided between retired U.U. geezers & middle-aged working stiffs like yours truly. Spent some time getting our li’l Sears craft house ready for the game: even did some painting and reupholstering of some crappy kitchen chairs that’d been hiding in the basement so we’d have enough dining room seating. I also took the afternoon off from work to do some last-ditch cleaning. Though we usually start our season decking on Thanksgiving weekend, this year we held off because the dining room is where we put our tree. Would’ve made a heck of an obstacle dealing seven-card stud around it. At one point my wife Becky offered to place a busy holiday tablecloth on our beat-up dinner table. “Are you kidding?” I told her. “Most of us wear bi- and tri-focals! It’s hard enough seeing the cards as it is!” The final item of bizness was the snacks. We went with Gardetto’s, red-&-green M&Ms, honey-roasted nuts and candy canes – only the candy canes were a bust. For drinks: soda, fake beer (Sharp’s) & lotsa half caf/decaf coffee. (Yeah, I’m back on the caffeine – thanks for asking!) Occasionally, someone’ll bring beer or wine, but, in general, the group stays away from booze: we have enough trouble keeping in control of our faculties as it is. All told, the night was a success. We had a full house for most of the night, though one guy had to leave early because he still was recovering from surgery on his shoulder. Though I started out on fire – winning three hands in a row – by night’s end I was down thirty cents. I’ve certainly had worse nights. Becky, who was in and out most of the evening, tells me that we sounded like we were having a great time: lotsa laughing & trivial discussion. We tend to tell many of the same jokes from month to month, and they always get a good response. Ain’t the jokes, it’s the company. . . # | Monday, December 09, 2002 ( 12/09/2002 04:14:00 PM ) Bill S. WAITING FOR THE U-FOES – Halfway into the ten-part Taken, Spielberg’s mini-series has established a herky-jerky rhythm: ten minutes of rotely written soap opera followed by ten of good ol’ Muldery paranoia followed by scenes of melodramatic villainy that would probably be called “comic book” by a viewer less appreciative of well-realized comics wickedness. Moving from the mid-forties to the early eighties, the story structure remains on the three families we met in the premiere outing, though by Ep Five the focus shifted to second and third generation family members. Snaky Owen Crawford, for example, is superceded by his wannabe snake son Eric (Andy Powers); former pilot Russel Keys turns out to be just the first in a family line of abductees, leading giggly overactor scientist Matt Frewer to theorize that the alien perpetrators are engaging in some form of genetic research/manipulation; while the offspring of a liaison between lonely waitress Mary Clark & that mysterious stranger spends much of his screen time running/hiding from nasty govt. types. In all, the results have been mixed: in part due to the divers directoral hands that’ve been overseeing the series, but also due to constant scripter Leslie Bohem’s inconstant focus. In Ep Four, when a large chunk of screen time is devoted to Jesse Keys’ drug addiction, you could practically hear the American TV audience rustling in its couches. When slimy Owen sets up his alcoholic wife and weaselly assistant Walter, so he can kill ‘em both and make it look like a lovers’ quarrel, there's a momentary kick in seeing the actor from Monk get icily dispatched ‘til you realize that, hey, this doesn’t really add anything to the story. (We already knew that Owen was an s.o.b.) When son Eric attempts a futile romance with half-alien Jacob’s half-sister, the whole premise feels dubious and ho-hum – in part because the only real thing we know about Eric is the fact that he’s living under his father’s shadow. As for the big money SciFi moments, these too were variable. A plotline featuring two victimized alien hybrid kids in Alaska comes across like refried Twilight Zone (the monsters . . . they’re us!) while a disastrous attempt at removing an alien implant from poor Russel’s brain is neatly gruesome. A recurring sinister carnival truck pleasantly recalls Bradbury more effectively than the series’ bobbling voiceover narration. I also enjoyed a palpably ludicrous scene where two sister psychics are enlisted to raise a downed UFO: may not’ve made a whole lot of sense, but it had a suitably tabloid feel to it that momentarily, at least, had me missing SciFi’s short-lived parody series, The Chronicle. In our house, we’re planning on sticking to the end, though I wouldn’t fault anyone who decided to give up on the whole she-bang. A good TV mini-series can be an addictive pleasure; a bad one can feel like a nattering obligation. At this point, I still haven’t decided where Taken lies on that particular continuum. . . # | Sunday, December 08, 2002 ( 12/08/2002 09:03:00 AM ) Bill S. RATTLING THEM DOORS OF PERCEPTION – Sometimes you write a line you just know is gonna get a rise out of someone. My Foo Fighters/Nirvana piece contains such a sentence, and it yielded small results when I posted the article on Blogcritics. For those who’ve arrived late, the line in question comes in paragraph two in reference to Nirvana: “If the band produced only one fully solid studio album, well, that’s one more than the Doors ever did.” An admittedly wiseass comment that really wasn’t necessary to the review as a whole – the mini-flap that ensued can be accessed here. But for those of you too lazy to click the link, basically the sentence drew fire from at least one Doors fan who took issue with my calculatedly curt dismissal of this beloved band’s oeuvre. (Mike Finley adds a neat critical overview of the group at the end of the Blogcritics comments thread.) I like the Doors, though I also think that the band is overrated by many of its fans. (If asked, I’d state that Love’s Forever Change is the pinnacle of Psunspet Pstrip Psychedelia.) Nothing wrong with fannishness, of course: one of the imbedded conflicts in all forms of criticism is that we’re usually driven to criticize stuff that appeals to us. Good pop culture writing involves a conscious balancing of our uncritical love for something with the intellectual impulse to pick it apart & see how it works. This can get tricky when you’re dealing with an artist like Jim Morrison – or Kurt Cobain, for that matter – whose tragic lives add additional fannish baggage that color our appreciation of their work. Should I have included the Doors crack in my article? Probably not: its presence clearly skewed some readers away the review’s true focus. Would I do it again? Probably. Expend too much energy trying to be respectful about pop culture, and you run the risk of earnestly flattening it beyond recognition. Another balancing act: I’ve read (and admittedly written) reviews that appeared more concerned about squeezing in a good bon mot than with actually looking at the work in question. I suspect that this dynamic is most prevalent in rock criticism, though you can find it elsewhere, too. Sometimes, when I read other critics getting snarky, I know they’re doing so as a means of keeping their own pretensions at bay. “Look,” they say, “don’t take this stuff too seriously – it’s only entertainment.” Other times, of course, I just think they’re being assholes. . . # | |
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