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Saturday, September 11, 2004 ( 9/11/2004 07:46:00 PM ) Bill S.  STUNNED PIGEONS – Dealing with as politically charged a review subject as Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon), I feel the need to open with the following: I accept much of Spiegelman’s political take on 9-11 and its aftermath even if I don't agree with all of the specifics. I suspect that many readers less in tune with the cartoonist's shared assumptions will have a difficult time with this book. Unfortunate, but inevitable.Spiegelman's book collects a series of ten Sunday Funnies-sized pages describing the artist's reactions to the attack on the World Trade Center. Completing the first strip in February 2002, the artist continued to produce his "weekly" strip on a monthly schedule, even though he was unable find a mainstream outlet in this country for the work. As Spiegelman himself notes in his intro, the only publisher outside of a more sympathetic European market was a small-circulation Jewish paper called Forward. By airing his own free-floating pissedness and paranoia so openly and unconcerned with nuance, the onetime Arts Comix darling has suddenly reverted into an underground cartoonist. Disconcerting for those who first came to the cartoonist through his Pulitzer winning Maus volumes or his New Yorker covers, perhaps, but bracing to those like me who first grew to love the man's work through his strips in funkier comix titles like Arcade or Funny Aminals. Sure, this hardback's coming out under a big American book publisher, but it still feels as immediate as the undergrounds where Spiegelman first cut his teeth. Last page of story even references the recent Republican Convention in New York. Spiegelman's style in No Towers owes much to the deconstructive underground comix he produced in the 70's and 80's. The book, which is comprised of heavy cardboard pages, is designed to be read sideways to accommodate single page compositions that'll fit on two 10"-by-14½" pages. Each page is a compositional statement in itself – more than one strip frequently commenting on different aspects of the same topic as they frequently reflect the visual motif of each page. First page of the series, for instance, opens with a three-panel sequence showing a family's shocked reactions to viewing the events of 9-11 on television, with a two-tiered strip immediately below dramatizing the joke origins of the phrase "waiting for the other shoe to drop;" below this is a three-panel strip showing the television screen from the viewer's perspective, as Spiegelman ruminates on how diminished these images appear ("the towers aren't much bigger, say, than Dan Rather's head.") On the right side of the page is a vertical strip showing a pixeled version of a skeletal tower collapsing in flames, which is taken up on the lower left side, too. Planted in the bottom middle is a large circular panicky New Yorkers as a giant shoe ("Jihad brand footware," an advertising blurb notes) drops from the sky. The approach hearkens back to Spiegelman's pre-Maus collage style of strip composition – where he comically deconstructed newspaper strips like "Rex Morgan, M.D." or "Dick Tracy" by placing their panels in absurdist situations – only here he utilizes early 20th Century comic characters as both a source of personal comfort and satire. "While waiting for the other terrorist shoe to drop," the cartoonist notes in his final page, "many found comfort in poetry. Others found solace in old newspaper strips." (A dubious declaration, but never mind.) Thus, he anthropomorphizes the two towers by recasting them as the Kin-der-Kids, a decision that at first seems dubious until the fifth page when he uses them in an eight panel parody to slash against the Iraq War. Spiegelman has long been masterful when it comes to dissection and stretching the conventions of graphic layout, but where once he did this to examine the limits and conventions of form, now he utilizes it to convey his own intellectual fragmentation. No Towers is not the book to read for a measured discourse on either 9-11 or its political aftermaths. At one point, the cartoonist describes designing a poster for a parents' protest to get the air ducts cleaned at his daughter’s school, but it's rejected by the other parents for being "too shrill." He's prone to political broad strokes: at one point in a discussion of red and blue states, for instance, he characterizes the red zones as places where "44% of the Americans who don't believe in evolution tend to gather." (Beware the misplaced modifier, my son!) But one of Spiegelman's themes is the way that the events of 9-11 have driven so many formerly reasonable people into realms of irrationality that they'd never expected to visit. And so our hero, a man of many comic strip guises (personalized caricature, older "maus," even Happy Hooligan) contradicts himself throughout the book: bridling when someone suggests that he might be suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, yet later utilizing a pop psych concept like Displacement to discuss the War in Iraq. Does Art contradict himself? He contains multitudes. . . Reading and rereading this volume over the course of this anniversary day, I found myself recalling Lou Reed's great op-ed rock opus, New York, which was originally recorded during the Reagan Administration. A non-stop free-associative rant against the excesses of the era, Reed's album was scattered and frustrating, heart-felt and brilliant. For every deeply incisive lyric on the disc, there was an equally off-the-mark overstatement. Same goes for No Towers, which moves from the intensely personal (a sequence where Art and his wife Francois look for their daughter in a school four block south of the towers effectively conveys both parents' dread) to scattershot political analysis to touching evocations of the city itself all over the space of a single page. Is this big, bulky book an unmitigated success? Probably not. But it sure makes for good provocative comix. Welcome back to the underground, Art. (UPDATE: For other bloggish takes on this volume, check out Jog and Spatula Forum.) # | Friday, September 10, 2004 ( 9/10/2004 01:38:00 PM ) Bill S. SALT PETER – Last night, as the debut of NBC's new Medical Investigation crawled to its finish, my wife turned to me and said, "Boy, it's a good thing Mom Fox isn't around to watch this." My late mother-in-law was notoriously germ-phobic: she'd grown up in the shadows of the big flu epidemic and was overly familiar with such early medical forensic tomes as The Microbe Hunters. Watching NBC's team of medical investigators desperately search for that "just one thing" responsible for the deaths of innocents would've been more than she could handle – even if the series is as rote and uninteresting as last year's swiftly cancelled Threat Matrix. M.I. (not to be confused with the much more diverting Mission: Impossible) revolves around a team of National Institutes for Health investigators – and here you thought the NIH was only good for issuing regular scare quotes about the "obesity epidemic," right? – led by Dr. Stephen Connor (Noel McDonough, playing the role with so much pissed-off urgency you're worried he's gonna bust a blood vessel). First time we see Connor, he's sparring with his estranged wife at their son's Little League game; he receives the inevitable cell phone call, but not before he's able to give his boy some much-needed batting advice. Our hero gets choppered out of the game to the big city, where a host of average folk just like you and me are mysteriously collapsing and turning blue. It's the team's task to track down the cause of this mysterious ailment as a growing number of urbanites are brought in for treatment by Dr. Natalie Durant (Kelli Williams, formerly of The Practice, still pretty whiny). Aided by a horrorflick loving former cop named Frank Powell (Troy Winbush), Connor tracks the source of this fatal medical emergency to a diner called Dobro's, where they painstakingly attempt to uncover a common element among the stricken customers. Off on the sidelines, the team's leggy Press Relations gal, Eva (Anna Belknap), is busy using her prep school girl wiles to distract a podgy newspaper reporter on the track of this immerging story. As a smaller side plot, team neophyte Miles McCabe (Christopher Gorham) gets sent into the wilds to investigate an infant with mysterious bruises on his body. Both social services and the attending physician are convinced these marks are the results of parental abuse, but because both officials are played so self-righteously and self-importantly, we know that there's gotta be another explanation. Our investigative ingénue finally cracks it, much to the relief of the child's unjustly accused parents. Like C.S.I. and Navy N.C.I.S., the series' main focus is on problem solving with only a minimal nod toward characterization. Unlike the other two shows, though, M.I. proffers no engaging eccentrics – nothing like N.C.I.S.'s improbable goth gal Abby or C.S.I.'s Gil Grissom – unless you consider horror fannishness a sign of eccentricity. (I don't, but perhaps I'm unduly biased on that score.) Team lead Connor, meanwhile, has to be the biggest no-nonsense bastard since Vince Edwards. (Okay, who in the room got that reference?) He's prickly and demanding, without any of the game's afoot sparkle of either William Petersen's Grissom or Mark Harmon's Jethro Gibbs. Sure, we get that this is life-&-death stuff here, but let's not forget the thrill of the hunt. . . # | Thursday, September 09, 2004 ( 9/09/2004 11:56:00 AM ) Bill S. THE NEW FALL SEASON SO FAR – Okay, so I've viewed two episodes of Father of the Pride and two of Hawaii. On the latter, let me first note that I was never much of a Hawaii Five-O fan, though I'll admit that lead Jack Lord's legendary woodenness had a certain Zen purity and that recurring villain Wo Fat had one of the coolest names on teevee ever. So an updated take on island teevee cop procedures has gotta give me more than the obligatory jiggling hula dancer interstitial shots to hold my interest – and retread stories featuring carjackers in Steve McGarrett masks ain't the way to go. Michael Biehn, the putative big name for this ensemble show, continues to blow the last vestige of audience good-will he generated as the stalwart goodguy in The Terminator lo those many years ago. Some of his scenes with co-star Sharif Atkins are so poorly staged and disconnected that they have the unrehearsed one-take feel of a Coleman Francis movie. Is this the new net response to reality teevee: scripted series that are so poorly performed they might as well not be scripted? As for Pride, I've already noted that I was underwhelmed by the computer aniamated sitcom's premiere, though I found a few more giggles to be had in the second outing: most of it around a silly subplot featuring animal trainers Siegfried & Roy's feud with Today host Matt Lauer. But the second ep's primary plot revolving around nervous lead lion Larry's debut on live television was something that The Muppet Show would've handled in half the time with twice the jokes. I'm not particularly anticipating the upcoming ep with Eddie Murphy's Donkey as guest star. . . # | ( 9/09/2004 07:05:00 AM ) Bill S. COMING SOON: A SEMIOTIC CRITIQUE OF DAFFY DUCK IN "SNOOPER IN A STUPOR" – In a hoax almost as egregious as his perpetration of a faux history of Dick Van Dyke comics, Mark Evanier has recently tagged this blogger a "very smart guy." As a result of this blatant misuse of at least two words, my hits more than quadrupled yesterday. So now I'm considering putting up a positive posting about ME on a weekly basis. . . # | Wednesday, September 08, 2004 ( 9/08/2004 02:42:00 PM ) Bill S. "THE NEW AWARENESS IS ALL RIGHT HERE . . .IN THIS FOLD-OUT!" – Received my contributor's copy of The Comics Journal #262 yesterday – and, after egotistically double-checking my submission to see how many lines I'd want to rewrite (not too many, but there are some – as when I misidentified a Panic parody as "Squiddy," instead of "Smiddy"), I sat back to read the unadvertised reprint (wouldn't even know it's in the issue from the front cover!) of the legendary "Goodman Goes Playboy." The story, which originally appeared in Help!, had been long out of print due to legal machinations on behalf of the Archie Comics company, and I was anticipating finally having a chance to read it. Well, you know how it when it goes with that legendary status stuff (remember actually seeing Ernie Kovacs' teleshow after years of being told how hysterical he was?) Simply put, Kurtzman & Elder's satire hasn't aged that well. Though the basic focus – a sardonic look at the faux freedom being promoted through Hugh Hefner's consumer-driven Playboy Philosophy – remains apt, the satiric detail has definitely dated. Scripter Harvey Kurtzman, for instance, belabors a joke where Candide-like hero Goodman foolishly assumes that the loose-living mock Riverdale couples populating the story are married, a joke that would barely raise an eyebrow these days. Placing our hero and the parody version of Archie in the midst of a (beautifully rendered) swinger bacchanal, Kurtzman raises a Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire comparison that was fairly hoary even in the early sixties. Will Elder's art remains wonderful, though. (I'm betting that huge and comically crowded orgy panel helped sell Hefner on the duo's later "Little Annie Fanny," since Elder did variations on it for the Playboy strip.) He even includes a version of the classic Veronica pose that he parodied in the duo's earlier Mad comics parody, "Starchie." And a sequence where "Archer" leads Goodman through a series of rooms containing an "unlimited supply of everything" has an appreciably darker edginess than Elder's earlier color comics. Too, the story's punchline panel, featuring a line of comic strip characters signing up to sell their souls for a dose of the Playboy Life, shows Elder at his mimicking best. Did Archie Comics have a legitimate copyright beef with this story? Well, I'm guessing that publisher John Goldwater was considerably less happy with the Help! story's depiction of "Bette" and "Joghead" having a baby out of wedlock than he was with the earlier Mad comic take showing the Riverdale gang as a group of fifties era juvenile delinquents. But Kurtzman & Elder's work remains an obvious parody: one of the central jokes is the way that the "hipster" former teenagers confound Goodman's expectations by no longer partaking of the "typical" teenaged activities depicted in Archie Comics. ("Daylight activity?" Archer and Roggie sneer. "Ugh!") The Help readership, by and large, didn't overlap with the core audience for the Archie Comics Group, so it's also unlikely that anyone would confuse the two sets of characters. My sense is that the company was less concerned with any so-called copyright violation and more just plain pissed about the trenchant way that the Help!ers twisted their source material. If "Goodman Goes Playboy" isn't the apogee of the Kurtzman & Elder collaboration – or even the best Goodman Beaver story (I'd nominate the duo's Superman deconstruction) – it's still great to see this critically significant story back in print. A hearty thumbs up to Fantagraphics for reprinting it. . . # | ( 9/08/2004 02:25:00 PM ) Bill S. "SHE CLOCKS IN AT 202; THAT'S FINE WITH ME - I'M PORTLY, TOO!" – Those few readers who come to this blog for the ultra-sporadic fat collectibles post may be glad to note that my nom-du-zaft-erotica, Wilson Barbers, has updated his Haus of Fun pages devoted to comic plus-sized postcards. Lots of thirties & forties era cartoon images of alternately cutesy-pie or matronly women, if that's your wont. If it isn't, then let's talk about Goodman Beaver! # | Tuesday, September 07, 2004 ( 9/07/2004 11:06:00 AM ) Bill S. "JUST CALL ME FALLEN ANGEL OF THE MORNING. . ." – My absence last week has me behind on noting hot blog action like Johanna Draper Carlson's Fallen Angel Contest, which attempts to drum up interest in this unfortunately underselling DC title. I've been following Peter David's dark series from the get-go, and while I'm still rather murky on its underpinnings, there's enough solid creepiness and noiry angst in the book to keep me reading it. So consider this a plug for both book and contest. Contest deadline's tomorrow, so don't dilly-dally if you're interested. . . # | ( 9/07/2004 09:12:00 AM ) Bill S. POINTS FOR INCLUDING FRED SCHNEIDER'S "RAWWWWK LOBSTER"! – Thanx to Johnny Bacardi, here's a link to retroCRUSH's Fifty Coolest Song Parts. Unfortunately missing from this list (though the band gets two other slots): the guitar barROOM from the Who's "I Can See for Miles," a sonic flourish that still gives me chills decades after first hearing it. . . # | Monday, September 06, 2004 ( 9/06/2004 11:46:00 AM ) Bill S.  LUNCH AT DENNY'S AND STUPEFYIN' LADIES – Mark Evanier's newest collection of essays and reminiscences, Superheroes in My Pants (the Sergio Aragones cover does a swell job illustrating this title) is both dedicated to and packed with front and back recollections of Julius Schwartz. With good reason: the DC editor was arguably the foremost initiator of the superhero comics revival through his shepherding of the Silver Age Flash, Green Lantern and Justice League revamps (t'was the latter which sparked the Marvel Comics line of costumed characters). Without Schwartz, Evanier's pants would doubtless be much less crowded.Evanier's initial take – which originally spanned five entries of his PoV column (first published in The Comics Buyer's Guide, before the paper foolishly haggled its star columnist off its pages in 2002) – follows his usual approach: a historical overview of the subject's career laced with pithy anecdotes both from the writer’s own career in comics and the memories of his peers. With Pants, the third collection of columns following Comic Books and Other Necessities of Life and Wertham Was Right! (all from TwoMorrows Publishing), Evanier maintains his title as comic fandom's foremost raconteur. Among the other topics tackled in this outing: comic book conventions and the foibles of fans (a funny piece on dining at conventions which will be familiar to anyone who's ever been in a con group attempting to gather for lunch), appreciations of artists ranging from Superman main man Curt Swan to Gary Trudeau, several considerations – positive and negative – of the Magic Kingdom, columns co-starring his regular collaborator Aragones, plus a common-sense reflection on why most of today's superhero comics don't work for him. He also includes a three-part warning piece on Unfinanced Entrepreneurs, those figures on the fringe of most creative communities who have a knack for pulling both writers and artists into fiscally dubious projects, that I half wish my alter ego Wilson Barbers had read before getting talked into crafting a still un-optioned movie script. But if he had, he probably wouldn't have heeded Evanier's advice, anyway. If this third volume falls down, it's in the relative paucity of stories from the writer's comic club youth that made Necessities such a treat. (He has a canny knack for recreating boy behavior, though perhaps you could argue that he continues that tradition by describing older fanboys in action – but it's not quite the same.) Too, a report from the 1996 San Diego Con comes across as slighter than the rest of the book because it's not much different from con reports any number of Internet reporters could have produced today (though he does include a sharp appreciation of Mad caricaturist Mort Drucker in the middle of the piece). But these are minor grumbles. Superheroes in My Pants remains an addictive read: a clear-eyed look at the comics industry and fandom from Both Sides Now – with an occasional side glance at such pertinent pop culture topics as the force of nature that is Julie Newmar. Don't know how many more books Mark'll be able to get out of his finite run of newsprint columns, but I know I'll buy 'em all. # | Sunday, September 05, 2004 ( 9/05/2004 12:36:00 PM ) Bill S. "HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A LOADED GUN?" – Lotsa stuff to catch up on from the past week, so let's do a round of bullet-points to target a few. . .
(Background Music for this Round o' Pointing: Jellyfish, Spilt Milk.) # | ( 9/05/2004 06:49:00 AM ) Bill S. FRESH-GROUND COFFEE, LAW & ORDER RERUNS – (Note: The following piece will most likely be of little interest to those who’ve come here looking for pop culture bloggery.) Early this week, on the penultimate day of August, as my wife and I did the five-minute drive from our home to Bro/Menn Hospital in Normal, IL, Becky's mother Coralie Fox died in Intensive Care. As we were riding over, the Zombies' Odyssey & Oracle playing in the car, the ICU nurse futilely attempted to phone us at home. We arrived at the hospital with a bag of cassette tapes (Pavarotti, Jose Carreras, Dvorak's "New World Symphony," a few more) and a Walkman. Becky had seen a show on Discovery Science that described several studies on how music can help in the healing process, so we'd brought a selection of sounds that we knew her mother loved. When we got to ICU, the room was curtained shut, and it was clear that the musical selection we'd taken pride in collecting was un-needed. The death was not a surprise, just the timing. Mom Fox had moved in with us twenty months before, and from the beginning, it was obvious her time was limited. She'd come out of her own elder care apartment after a series of repeated hospitalizations made it clear she could no longer live by herself. She'd been a widow for over thirty years, had largely made it on her own as a maid and housecleaner for some of the moneyed folk in Peoria, but now she needed help from her family. A lifetime of smoking had left her with emphysema and a congested heart. The latter was working at 20 per cent capacity on good days; she spent her days and nights hooked to either a breathing machine or a portable canister of air. At least four times a day, she had to use a nebulizer to get her breathing back under control. Medical science was prolonging her life, and she wasn't always happy about it. For one thing, she had bad hips, which pained her most of her waking hours. Doctors were reluctant to do any replacement surgery because her heart was so frail, though she wouldn't stop trying to cajole one into doing the procedure. At 82, she was on an elaborate regimen of medications, and I was impressed by her ability to keep them straight. When she first came to live with us, I did a chart of her meds for her, and it was something like twelve different prescriptions. Lasix, zestrel, trazadone, theodur – a catalog of names that sounded like a Professor Irwin Corey spate of doubletalk. Yet she diligently sorted and kept up with them all. She moved in upstairs, into a guest bedroom that took up two-thirds of the floor (the rest was attic plus a spacious bathroom). I shared closet space with her: our old Sears craft house does not have a lot of downstairs storage room, so I’d always used the capacious built-in upstairs closet. Every morning, I'd trudge upstairs with the first of two cups of fresh-ground coffee: it became part of our daily ritual. Those mornings she still was in bed, I'd watch for signs of life – a deep breath, a shifting of the body, a sound. It often took a long time for me to catch one. The first months of her stay, she used to come down from her "apartment" regularly to talk, eat dinner and watch television – thirty-plus feet of clear plastic tubing trailing behind her – but either through emotional disinclination or growing physical debility, these treks grew less frequent over time. Leaving the house for doctor or psychiatrist appointments was a major excursion, taking up to an hour to get from bedroom to car, with even longer to return upstairs. The family worked to have a chair lift installed to make these trips easier, a process that took months of badgering once we'd acquired a used lift. But by the time we finally got an elevator company to actually anchor it, she was in the hospital for the last time. Before she became a part of our household, I'd primarily known Coralie Fox as the woman who'd driven my wife to distraction. Becky's mother was mentally ill and had been so through most of her adult life; she was institutionalized several times during Becky's childhood. I've seen several diagnoses given for her illness – schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder – and while the symptoms had been largely managed with medication for years, at times you saw them coming out in the form of fits of prolonged hopelessness and irrationally hurtful diatribes that she'd aim at her daughter. Becky, who'd lived through these spells since childhood and had taken them to heart for years, was finally able to see them as symptoms of her mother's illness and not something really connected to her. Afterwards, Mom Fox would never remember what she'd said to her only daughter. Getting to know her more fully over her stay with us, I found her to be more than just the maddening mother-in-law. Coralie Fox was a quirky and sensitive woman who'd not been given an easy life: a frail woman in her eighties, with paper-thin skin and a haunted look about the eyes. She could be stubbornly provincial in some of her beliefs, yet totally openhearted in others. A lifetime of struggling to hold her life in control kept her heavily focused on routine and neatness (which doubtless made her an exemplary housekeeper), and she often chafed against our hippie-esque attitude toward household maintenance. Fortunately for all concerned, we were able to secure a companion from the YWCA to come in to help Mom Fox keep her place up to her own specifications and be a companion during those times I was at work and Becky unable to make it upstairs herself. Occasionally, I'll read an essay – by some pundit eager to score points through simplistic overgeneralization – about the selfishness of the Baby Boom Generation. Looking at my wife, I just can't see it. During her mother's stay, she didn't work so she could remain at home. This turned out to be a round-the-clock commitment, and while having Mom Fox around could be a delightful experience, the first time we were able to actually get some time away we spent three months setting up arrangements with other family members – only to have the old woman hospitalized in Peoria three days into our vacation. Despite years of rocky memories from growing up under a mentally ill parent plus her own medical issues with arthritis and fibromyalgia, she opened our home to her mother. I'm in awe at her willingness to do this. It wasn't all duty and responsibility, of course: Mom Fox could be a charming person. She had an inexhaustible memory of friends and family history, plus an appreciation of small pleasures. She enjoyed a good homemade meal and the feeder we hung from a flagpole off the back porch so she could see the birds from her window. She was addicted to Law and Order reruns plus professional poker tourneys on television; she had a good-sized VHS collection that ran from Disney to concert tapes of the Three Tenors. She was a sucker for charities and a long-standing friend to those she met along the way. Though at times, she'd get stressed, close up and shut those same friends out, she always came back. At least she always came back until now. . . We'll miss you, Mom Fox. # | |
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