Emphasis Added

Monday, July 10, 2006

Heroes

The cartoonist Sergio Aragonés is probably best known for the often-hilarious doodles in the margins of Mad magazine, which he�s been doing since the mid 1960s. But behind his simple style, Aragonés is an accomplished storyteller (as evidenced in his long-running barbarian humor strip, Groo, with writer Mark Evanier). He�s also a man with something to say.

DC Comics recently devoted an issue of its Solo series to the work of Aragonés. About halfway through is a story called �Heroes,� a really remarkable piece of work. Aragonés, who was born and raised in Mexico, compares the historical heroes he was taught about in school with those his kids are learning about here in El Norté.

If you live in the US, chances are you never heard of the St. Patrick Battalion � a group of Irish immigrants who were recruited right off the boat into the American army to fight in the Mexican-American War of 1848. When the soldiers arrived at the front, they quickly realized that not only did this war have nothing to do with them, but it involved fighting on behalf of a brutal and atrocious, mostly Protestant force (the Texas Rangers) against fellow Catholics in Mexico. Consequently, under their officer Riley, a large number of them switched sides and joined the Mexicans. After several battles, Riley and his men were captured by the Americans, imprisoned, and hung as traitors.

The Batallón de San Patricio are national heroes in Mexico. According to Aragonés, �it takes two holidays in Mexico to honor them � monuments, ceremonies�� Here in the US, the entire war of 1848 gets probably a day or two in 8^th grade history (unless you live in Texas, where one can only imagine how it must be taught). The account in Aragonés�s daughter�s history text read, in its entirety, �During the Mexican-American war, a battalion called St. Patrick made up of drunken Irish deserters bought by Santa Ana fought for Mexico. They surrendered and were summarily executed.�

Mexico and the US are neighbors, with a shared history and a growing social, economic and political interdependence. Yet, on both sides of the border, the relationship seems driven almost entirely by mythology, ignorance and stereotypes. Aragonés, in a simple four page story, presents one eye-opening example that seem to stand for a whole raft of misunderstandings � the correction of which rests on coming to a common perspective on our shared history. This strikes me as an incredibly powerful insight which is rarely expressed without bitterness or didacticism. Yet a cartoonist with the simplest, least threatening style imaginable is able to bring it across with complete clarity. We need more heroes like that.

9:59:39 AM

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Monday, July 03, 2006

Super/Sonic

It�s going to be one of those slow periods around EA the next couple of weeks. I�m finding the events of the world wearying lately, outside of sports and entertainment. My writing style on the blog is starting to drive me crazy � I can�t imagine what it must be doing to the non-me people out there. And it�s heavenly July weather here in the Northwest, I�m off work for a few weeks, and Comic-Con is right around the corner. So, just a few quick notes of interest.

Saw Superman Returns last night at the Imax in 3D. If you have an Imax in your town that�s playing Superman, this is head-and-shoulders the way to see it. When the picture is six stories tall and coming at you in 12,000 watts of surround sound, plus 3D, it�s a lot easier to ignore the many annoying problems in the film and just let the spectacle wash over you.

What made last year�s Batman Begins so good is that the filmmakers deliberately freed themselves of the baggage of the previous Batman series, particularly the last terrible installments directed by Joel Shumacher. By contrast, the shadow of Richard Donner�s great Superman movie from the 1970s hangs heavily over Brian Singer�s Superman Returns.

Most noticeably, the unknown Brandon Routh, in the title role, doesn�t play Superman so much as he plays Christopher Reeve playing Superman. He looks the part to an eerie degree, but the performance struck me as hollow and charmless. Routh, unlike Reeve, was totally unable to sell Clark Kent as a critical facet of Superman�s identity, rather than just a plot device. If you miss this in the performance, you�ve shot wide of the target and drained the Superman character of a considerable portion of his humanity and mystery. Everyone else was pretty good. Kevin Spacey made a serviceable Lex Luthor; Kate Bosworth�s multi-dimensional Lois Lane was about the strongest factor holding the film together.

The plot was silly and full of holes. Yeah, it�s a Superman movie, but comic fans (as well as other sentient beings) demand a certain internal logic, even when the premise is utter fantasy. Singer seems to have gone for a more juvenile conception of Superman, making him powerful beyond measure, then taking an inconsistent approach to his vulnerabilities. That�s not an indefensible approach: it worked well enough in the 1950s and 60s, the period of many of the Man of Steel�s most charming and fondly-remembered comic book adventures. It was just a bit disappointing considering the success of more sophisticated approaches taken in Spider-Man, Batman Begins, and Singer�s own X-Men films.

Despite all this, on an Imax screen, late at night, in the right frame of mind, Superman Returns was dandy entertainment and above the threshold for a summer spectacular. Too bad it wasn�t better. But it does give the franchise something to build on.

In other blast-from-the-past news, I saw Sonic Youth play on Friday night at the Moore Theatre here in Seattle. In the 1980s, Sonic Youth literally changed the way I listen to music. Sister and Daydream Nation rocked my world, and I saw them play live in New York and Seattle at least a dozen times.

But that was a long time ago. Going on 20 years, even. Although the band remains active, I haven�t paid much attention to their music since the mid-90s. I wasn�t even aware they were playing until Mepriser brought it to my attention and snagged us some tickets.

If Sonic Youth is some kind of Gen-X nostalgia band, no one bothered to tell them. They played a fearsomely great set, mostly of material from their new album. They�ve managed to maintain and improve the best part of their approach � the balance of energetic melody, chaos and volume dynamics � without becoming stale or boring, which is no mean feat for a band that�s been around since 1981. Every so often, they reached back into their catalog for an old favorite pleasing to the fogies like me up in the balcony. Their final encore, the epic �Expressway to Your Skull,� effortlessly conjured up the spirit of 1986 and brought down the house in a squall of brain-melting noise and white hot intensity.

So, capsule summary: Superman Returns, eh. Sonic Youth: yeah, baby!

12:15:47 PM

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Monday, June 26, 2006

The Fatal Bullet

Shortly after he took office in 1881, James A. Garfield became the second US President to fall to an assassin�s bullet. Garfield was gunned down in the waiting area of the Baltimore and Potomac train station in Washington DC by Charles Guitteau, usually described as a �disgruntled office seeker� who did not receive an expected patronage position in Garfield�s government.

For anyone who has the slightest interest in this colorful bit of history, or just enjoys a wonderfully-told, well-illustrated story, Rick Geary has obliged with The Fatal Bullet, an installment in his ongoing series, �A Treasury of Victorian Murder.� Geary has a clear, almost diagrammatic art style with a gift for caricature. In The Fatal Bullet, he uses linework that mimics the look of a 19^th century woodcut, giving the book an appropriately old-fashioned feel.

Geary is economical with his prose, but manages to tell a gripping and very human story. Garfield was apparently a reluctant candidate and governed during an undemanding and not especially honest period of American history. Guitteau comes alive as a deluded, frustrated fanatic who takes credit for Garfield�s victory and is mortally insulted when the President-elect fails to notice and reward him for his service. Most unfortunately for Garfield, Guitteau was a poor shot. Instead of killing the President on the spot, the shooting left a wound that festered over the hot Washington summer before causing a painful death from infection. Geary, with black humor, spares us none of the clinical details.

The Fatal Bullet is a great example of the emerging comics genre known (optimistically, perhaps) as �the new mainstream.� Neither conventionally super-heroic nor self-consciously artsy and �alternative,� work like Geary�s aspires simply to tell a good story for all readers of all ages in a style that happens to include both words and pictures. It�s an important project for the future of the comics arform, and Geary, in his modest way, moves it forward a giant step with work like this.

Note: This review initially appeared on the Comic Base website, where I write a weekly column reviewing graphic novels and reprints.

11:39:52 AM

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Sunday, May 28, 2006

Comic and Tragic

Two quick comic-related items. First, just saw the new X-Men movie. It's great. If you see it, stay till the very end of the credits.

Second, on a sad note, another of the great comic artists of the 20th century has passed on. Alex Toth was the master of design - a true visionary whose compositions brought dynamism and excitement to the comic book page. He also created the desgin look for many familiar animated cartoons, including Johnny Quest and Super Friends. He died yesterday in Los Angeles at the age of 77.

2:18:42 PM

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Monday, May 15, 2006

The Fate of the Artist

Philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto has suggested that for the last 150 years, western art has become more an object lesson in self-discovery than an medium of aesthetic representation. That is, the basic question that has interested art has been �what is art?� rather than the traditional "what is beauty?" When Andy Warhol obliterated the distinction between �high art� and commercial design with his soup cans and Brillo Pad sculptures in the early 1960s, he arrived at the conclusive position that art is anything the artist says it is. Once art achieved that degree of self-consciousness, its progressive history (in the Hegelian sense) was essentially finished.

Artists in the last 35 years have had to struggle with this sort of post-historical drift. Movements in the art world now have the quality of artificial waves generated in a swimming pool rather than the celestial pull of the tides. While the artists of the 1920s and 30s had no doubt that they were participating in a Very Important Mission to expand the boundaries of human perception, artists today just produce work. They are drawn, often much against their temperamental and ideological preferences, into the unified field of commerce, entertainment and pop culture that characterizes our era.

Even the artistic persona itself has become grist for the culture mill � adopted as a pose to substitute for a lack of authentic talent, or else reduced to a facile stereotype: in either case, drained of its mystery, power and authority. The true artist has become almost a pitiable figure � driven by a quaint, outdated romanticism, either pathetically unable to manage the basic responsibilities of a modern middle class consumer or else possessed of calculated, unseemly ambition for commercial success and popular acceptance. And, often, an uneasy mixture of both.

The role of the artist in these uncertain times is the subject of Eddie Campbell�s ongoing series of autobiographical graphic novels, beginning with The King Canute Crowd and Alec: How to be an Artist, and arriving at his latest contribution, The Fate of the Artist. Campbell is perhaps best known to the general public as the illustrator of From Hell, Alan Moore�s mystical-historic interpretation of the Jack the Ripper murders that was subsequently made into a film starring Johnny Depp. A rising star in the British underground comics scene in the late 1970s, Campbell earned a reputation as a temperamental, hard-drinking rogue with a reliable propensity for self-sabotage. Campbell decamped from the UK in the late 1980s to take up the life of a family man in suburban Australia. In his advancing years, he has turned into a �lovable eccentric� within the comic community � the kind of figure that the Gen-X editors now enthroned at the various publishers will give some work to when they want to seem edgy and adventurous.

The contradictions and frustrations of this existence drive Campbell mad. He�s a man of keen intelligence, refined tastes and great ambition. The casual colloquialism of his art is the product of intense labor and careful craft. I suspect he yearns, guiltily, for his talent, genius, taste and wit to get the recognition he is certain they deserve.

The accoutrements of �respectability� and �responsibility� that come with his age and circumstances sit uneasily on his shoulders. He recognizes his obligations to the material world, his role and reputation within the fan-based culture of comics, and the expectations placed on him by his family and conventional society, but his accommodation to these things causes him great existential pain. He finds, more often than not, than even when he attempts to �sell out� in various ways that are tremendously important to him, there are no buyers.

�So what?� you might think. �We all have our troubles.� Campbell�s work incorporates that response as well. The whole Artist series elevates such meta-meditations to dizzying heights of self-consciousness. Campbell seems to take delight and inspiration from puncturing his own pretensions, reveling in his inadequacies, making fun of his contradictions, and above all, questioning the fundamental importance of his entire project.

The Fate of the Artist takes this self-negation to the ultimate degree. The book jacket blurb announces that �the author will conduct an investigation into his own sudden disappearance.� Campbell�s customary role of protagonist is usurped, he says, by an actor playing the role of Eddie Campbell. His family and friends are interviewed discussing him, quite bluntly, in the third person (the interview with his daughter Hayley, done in photo-collage, is hilarious). Campbell explores his apparently complicated marital relationship through a series of faux-vintage domestic comedy comic strips (think �Blondie� meets Who�s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) called �Honeybee� by A. Humorist.

The Fate of the Artist is, among other things, a tour de force of stylistic collage. Parts of the story are told in prose, part in Campell�s pleasing watercolor style, part in photographs and found imagery, and part in the 1920s comic strips. Campbell manages this all with a light touch. You don�t get the sense that he�s trying to impress anyone with mere formalism or keep his audience coldly at a distance, as in the arch and constipated work of someone like Chris Ware. He�s not trying to appear Artistically Serious by asking Important Questions in Difficult and Challenging Ways � or at least, that�s not all he�s doing.

Like all of Campbell�s best work, The Fate of the Artist is redeemed from its solipsism and pretensions by an irresistible core of genuine humanity. Underneath the misanthrope, the befuddled family man, the affable drunkard, the frustrated artist playing the role of the Frustrated Artist, and the self-conscious philosopher driven to the brink of nihilistic despair, is someone unafraid to embrace all the messy contradictions of life without reaching for pat answers or a comic-book ending.

Reading The Fate of the Artist is one of the most life-affirming activities I�ve done all year. Every page gives you something to think about if you�re so inclined, or you can sit back and enjoy Campbell�s skill as a storyteller (and appreciate his craft as an excellent and inventive illustrator). But in my opinion, it�s always worth celebrating when someone at this late date in our decadent era of cultural exhaustion still finds the motivation to explore the knotty issues of art and philosophy, and is able to pull it off in such grand style.

Campbell immodestly set out to make an important statement about his own vanishing unimportance, and pulled us all through the slip-knot with him. Self-consciousness may have turned art into philosophy, as Danto claims, but it is only an artist who can undo the alchemy and turn self-consciousness back into a larger truth about ourselves and our times.

10:30:12 AM

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Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Art and Comics Criticism

A few weeks ago, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl deigned to address himself in print to this curious new trend of serious comics, in an article entitled �Words and Pictures.� As longtime EA readers know, I have little patience for the condescending tone most mainstream publications use in talking about comics. But this went beyond the usually-trite �Zap! Bam! Pow! Comics Grow Up!� story. It represented the appearance, in an extremely visible and influential spot, of a really nasty tendency in comics criticism that is seeking to hijack the comic artform and drag it from popular culture into the margins of the avant gard.

Emblematic of this effort was Schjeldahl�s berserk and utterly baseless personal attack on the recently-deceased dean of American comics, Will Eisner. In it, he wrote:

Eisner created a masked crime-fighter comic book, "The Spirit," in his youth; he was not a modest man, but his legion of admirers forgave him that, as they forgave his work's cornball histrionics. Rooted in German Expressionism but more reminiscent of MAD-type burlesque than of George Grosz, his characters rub their hands, tear their hair, and, if they happen to fancy something, slaver�

..never leaving well enough alone is apparently a principle for Eisner. Over-the-topness is endemic to comics of course - and industry standard for popular action and horror titles as well as for manga, and the default setting for Crumb's work. But it is ill-suited to serious subjects, especially those that incorporate authentic social history. [emphasis added]

Clearly the level of snide and personal abuse in this piece goes well beyond normal critical reaction. It seemed, for lack of a better term, politically motivated. Where, for example, did a writer with such an obviously shallow understanding of the comics medium and comics history come up with the idea that "Will Eisner was not a modest man, but his legion of admirers forgave him that..."? That doesn't strike me as the kind of observation you can make from his work, his biography, most critical writing about him so far, or the testimony of 99% of the people who ever met him. That sounds to me like something whispered in the writer's ear by someone who has an axe to grind.

But regardless, it was really sad to see Will Eisner get this kind of ill-treatment in one of the premier literary forums in America. Reading the piece inspired me to pen a reply to the New Yorker, which they have published, in edited form, in the current issue (sorry, not online). My original note reads as follows:

Peter Schjeldahl's piece on graphic novels� gives voice to one of the more unfortunate sentiments popular in some circles: the fashionable disdain for the work of the late comic book pioneer Will Eisner. While Eisner's work may not be to everyone's taste, this is a man who was making the case for sequential art as a viable medium for serious narrative in the 1940s! Eisner was a principle architect of comics both as an art and a business, and literally invented much of the visual language that Clowes, Ware, Spiegelman and Crumb employ so fruitfully in their own work. Yet there seems to be a kind of patricidal compulsion on the part of some would-be "serious" creators and critics to distance themselves from Eisner's sentimental "cornball histrionics" and old-fashioned craft, as if associating themselves too closely with his earnestness might puncture their postmodern pretensions. It is especially distasteful that Schjeldahl delivers a kick in the teeth to a man who is, sadly, no longer here to speak for himself, and whose recent loss is much felt both personally and historically by genuine appreciators of the graphic narrative artform. Eisner, and New Yorker readers, deserve better.

So what�s really going on here? To understand, it helps to know some history.

Eisner was the first great talent that the comic business produced. His work in the 1940s on his strip, The Spirit, revolutionized the visual language of comics in the same way that Citizen Kane revolutionized film. As early as 1941, he was talking about comics as a literary medium and serious artform. In the 1950s, Eisner retired from the business and stayed away until his work was rediscovered by fans in the early 1970s. At a comic convention in New York, he was approached by two young artists in the then-popular underground movement, who urged him to return to comics and start doing more serious work. The two artists were Denis Kitchen and Art Spiegelman.

Kitchen became Eisner�s friend, publisher and agent. He helped bring the Spirit back to the newsstands in reprint editions, and its success encouraged Eisner to undertake a more ambitious project: a �graphic novel� composed of four serious short stories set in the Bronx during the Depression. It was called A Contract With God and other tenement stories, and when it appeared on bookstore shelves in 1977, it became the first graphic novel to attract serious critical attention in the United States. Spiegelman followed Eisner to the bookshelves with his own graphic novel, Maus, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Spiegelman now contributes art to numerous mainstream magazines, including the New Yorker, where his wife Francoise Mouly is art director. In fact, coincidentally, Spiegelman had a piece published in the same issue that ran Schjeldahl�s review.

Following the success of Contract with God, Eisner, then in his 60s, became a spokesman and ambassador for comics. His mission was to raise public perception of the artform, which he did by continuing to produce his own outstanding work for the next 25 years, and by tirelessly championing the work of anyone using sequential art as a vehicle for personal expression, even when the subject matter might not be to his taste. His genius became proverbial within the comics community; the industry award for excellence is named for him. He was universally respected and genuinely adored, especially by those fortunate enough to have contact with him in person.

Beneath the façade of universal admiration, however, a faction of opinion in the comics community had long been uncomfortable with Eisner's visibility and reputation as the "living legend." They feel that whatever his importance, his talents and his contribution to the medium, he represented a sensibility that was too old-fashioned, too unhip and un-ironic, and too close to the "juvenile" impulses of the Golden Age and superhero genres. Many of them believed, and continue to believe, that as long as Eisner is put forward as the primary exemplar of the "serious graphic novelist," the medium would never be fully respected among the post-modern, avant gard art and literary worlds whose approval they desperately seek.

As long as Eisner was alive, these folks were flummoxed by his personal charisma and his uncritical support of their efforts, even if those efforts weren't always to his tastes. Also, the comics community was still the bedrock of support even for the artsy graphic novelists, and criticizing Eisner in places like The Comics Journal was too contentious. But now that mainstream journalism is starting to take comics seriously, there's a new opportunity to shape the debate. And now that Eisner is gone, they can begin their project of rewriting comics history in ways that better suit their pretensions � that is, without him as a looming presence against which they are all compared.

I think many of these people have a sincere desire to elevate the status of comics beyond the prevailing stereotypes of superheroes and funny animals. But what they are doing is reminiscent of the misguided tactics of jazz aficionados in the 1950s. Back then, the more difficult styles of bebop and West Coast cool jazz were supplanting the more commercial forms like big band swing that had been popular before. The critics not only championed the new, more confrontational artists like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, but also felt the obligation to disparage the classical style. Figures like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were treated like embarrassing anachronisms even as they continued to produce great work in more accessible, traditional forms. The poverty of critical imagination exhibited in those debates looks ridiculous to modern eyes, but it had a tangible and deleterious impact on the music. Modern jazz developed away from popular tastes into more involuted, cerebral �art� and eventually ceased to be a popular music. Its practitioners are celebrated, but their work rarely reaches even a sliver of the mass audience.

That is the fate in store for comics if influential critics cannot discover the vocabulary to intelligently discuss work that is not self-consciously arty, ambitious and pretentious. Right now, all kinds of excellent and entertaining graphic storytelling is happening both within and at the margins of the commercial comics business. Some of it is genre work; some uses traditional styles and techniques, like Eisner�s. Lots of it is terrible and always will be, but the standard of judgment should be broader than industry politics and superficial points of style and subject matter. By narrowing the discussion to the same tiny cannon of �important� names, critics like Schjeldahl and their supporters behind the scenes are turning a living artform into an artifact of hipness and a curious accessory to the worlds of �serious� art and literature.

5:51:22 PM

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Monday, July 18, 2005

Conned

OK, I promise this will be the last word on comics here for a while. But we just got back from the annual San Diego Comic-Con and I need a day to decompress. We�ve been down there since Tuesday, which accounts for the blog silence, engaged in our usual orgy of indulgence in all things fun and fantastic. Here are a few of the highlights.

The Con this year was shadowed by the passing in January of the great Will Eisner, who bestrode the American comic book medium like a Colossus. Quite a bit of the Con was dedicated to celebrating his life and work, including several tribute panels by his friends and colleagues, the screening of a handful of documentary films currently in production, the announcement of a major Hollywood movie based on his signature character, �The Spirit� (produced, encouraging, by the team responsible for �Batman Begins�), the announcement of a new Spirit series from DC, and a series of lengthy remembrances at the annual Eisner Awards, honoring the best work of the past year.

On Wednesday night, we had dinner with Denis Kitchen, Eisner�s long time friend, publisher and agent. As the man behind the underground �Kitchen Sink Press� in the 70s and 80s, he is a fount of comic lore, historical anecdotes and scurrilous gossip, and is still an active participant in all aspects of the industry. He�s also a terrific guy and great fun to hang out with. Developing these kinds of friendships is one of the enduring virtues of the comic hobby in general and Comic-Con in particular.

Another couple we�ve become friends with is Batton Lash, creator of the fiendishly-entertaining Supernatural Law series, and his wife, Jackie Estrada, one of the original denizens of the San Diego Con in the early 70s and now the organizer of the Eisner Awards. We saw them on Tuesday night, where they celebrated Eunice and my recent nuptials at a great seafood restaurant by the Bay. Batton and Jackie are inveterate party-hounds, and tagging along with them at the inevitable after-hours soirees has been a great way to meet many of the good and crazy folks in the business.

A third crowd we�ve come to enjoy at the Con is a group of old-time collectors and art enthusiasts, including my old high school classmate, Steve Stein. Art collectors are a strange bunch. A couple could themselves be characters in a comic book, if not a David Lynch film. But at San Diego, they�re in their element, able to indulge their obsessions to the fullest, brag on their collections, one-up each other in person instead of on-line, and drink like fish. Socializing with such folks is, to put it mildly, not everyone�s cup of tea, but it makes for some memorable stories.

For me, the highlight of the Con came shortly after the Eisner Award ceremonies. Michael Chabon was on hand to collect the award he won for the book based on his character, �The Escapist.� I had talked to him before and knew he was a friendly, approachable guy, so I walked up and introduced myself. He looked at my badge with a quizzical �do I know you?� expression, and as we began talking about the state of comics criticism, he suddenly looked up and said, �yes, I read what you wrote about that.� I was a bit puzzled and stunned. �I recognized your name � someone sent me that piece you wrote about my letter to NYRB the other day,� and proceeded to discuss it as if he may, in fact, have actually read it. If so, how very cool! And if he was just being polite to a random fan, well, that worked too.

The Convention itself was the usual insane sprawl, with several miles� worth of dealers and exhibitors, fans wandering around in costumes, giant screens blasting out previews from upcoming movies, cartoons and video games, artists scribbling away at their tables, and every manner of things for sale. Came back with a fat suitcase and a thin wallet, as usual, plus an afterglow that will carry me through the rest of the summer.

12:32:16 PM

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Monday, July 11, 2005

Revenge of the Nerds

I�ve been scouring some corners of the non-political blogosphere this morning in preparation for our annual pilgrimage to the San Diego Comic-Con this week (no, not our honeymoon, just a coincidence�). Michael Chabon, comics maven and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavallier and Clay, has a great post over at his blog of an unpublished letter to the New York Review of Books, which had run a generally complementary but typically condescending piece on several graphic novels back in 2004.

In the letter, Chabon complains that the NYRB writer, David Hajdu, inappropriately labeled comics as the �rock and roll of literature.� Not only is the comparison inaccurate in nearly every important way, Chabon argues, but it betrays a kind of corrosive contempt for the entire medium of comics:

What lies at bottom of Hajdu�s ridiculing, as hopelessly pretentious, of the whole idea of quote-unquote graphic novels, is the way that they are �printed between hard covers or glossy soft-cover� on �heavy paper stock.� It�s the very aspiration of comics, to be more than they have been, that makes Hajdu smile. As if, somehow, the medium were�as if any medium could be!�inherently unworthy, déclassé, incapable of genuine art. In arguing for the built-in unworthiness of comics, Hajdu not only shows disrespect to artists, such as Will Eisner, whose work he has claimed to admire; he also commits the grievous error�an error one would have expected the NYR to know better than to make--of confusing a medium with one of its genres, as if all dance were to be condemned on the basis of the Macarena, or all painting treated with the gloves of irony because of a few thousand black-velvet Elvises. It is cruel, and fundamentally adolescent, to mock someone for the way he aspires endlessly to the good opinion that you have decided, a priori, never to grant him.

What Chabon identifies in Hadju�s article is apparently a highbrow specimen of the �Biff! Bam! Pow! Funnybooks Get Serious!� school of criticism, a staple of the mainstream media�s approach to comics since the mid-1980s. In such pieces, the reviewer makes the tedious observation that adolescent superhero fantasies are not the only available subject-matter for sequential art, and that, hey, a few artists are actually trying to tell serious stories in a format that we all know is just for kids. Isn�t that special?

This style of review, while perhaps fresh and apt during the moment of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns nearly 20 years ago, has long atrophied into cliché and been the subject of mordant chuckles among comic cognoscenti. Frankly it�s shocking that it can still be presented as an original approach to criticism in a publication with such otherwise-high standards as the New York Review of Books.

The New York Times fell into a related trap in a lengthy, generally accurate and respectful piece by Charles McGrath published last year and discussed here at the time. The Times wasn�t as blatantly condescending of the work under review; however, they were so careful to make a distinction between �serious� and �commercial� styles of comics that they ended up in almost the same place.

McGrath seemed to be saying that comics in fact could aspire to (and achieve) a place as �high� art and literature, but only if the artists invested such ambitions in their work in its inception. That is, creators such as Daniel Clowes (�Ghost World�), Chris Ware (�Jimmy Corrigan�), Craig Thompson (�Blankets�) and the dean of this particular school, Art Spiegelman (�Maus�) deserved to have their work taken seriously because they themselves took it seriously; because they approached it with a sensibility deemed to be appropriate to a contemporary artist (e.g., ironic, detached, vaguely political, self-referential). This art-by-intention position is very convenient for the clique that spends so much effort cultivating its credentials and credibility, and indeed, much of this work is extremely interesting and accomplished.

Still, the whole enterprise reeks of the former high-school nerd who is trying to be a social climber by picking on the crew he used to hang out with. You get the feeling that it is urgently important for the Spiegelmans of the comic world to never ever be confused with that low-brow superhero nonsense. As such, it is imperative to never recognize the possibility that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby�s phenomenally popular and enduringly-entertaining Fantastic Four could be anything but juvenile, commercial kitsch, enjoyable perhaps on its own (base, mass cultural) level but insulting if compared to the mature genius of, say, Ben Katchor (�The Jew of New York�).

It is definitely true that a lot of comic book work produced for the mass audience is strictly commercial and unworthy of consideration, same as much television programming and movies. It�s also true that there is serious art being produced by serious artists in comic book form. What�s not true is that there is a hard bright line between the two. Comics is a continuum that spans the crudest superhero fanboy nonsense to some of the best illustrative art and literature of the past 60 years. In the middle is a whole range of material: imaginative, technically-accomplished, well-realized genre work, failed experiments, powerfully-told conventional stories, modest offerings that transcend their limited ambitions.

The �comics as high art� school has no vocabulary to discuss Eric Powell�s rauccus monsters-and-mayhem strip, �The Goon,� Batton Lash�s witty �Supernatural Law,� the loose and cartoony but increasingly sharp work of Sergio Arragones, or Chabon�s own not-quite-ironic-enough-for-high-art superhero pastiche, �The Escapist.� Someone like Frank Miller perhaps makes the grade for his auteurist ambitions in �Sin City,� despite wallowing in the worst sorts of genre clichés, while Neil Gaiman must seem far too mannered and earnest (and panders far too much to his adolescent readership) to be seriously regarded, despite the literary quality of his prose and his best ideas.

Chabon in his letter seems to be arguing for a broader critical perspective on comics. Such a perspective must certainly transcend the �serious funny book� style of discussion, with its dismissive contempt for the entire enterprise of sequential art. But it also needs to get past this superficial standard for distinguishing which works are worthy of serious critical attention solely on the basis of the perceived �seriousness� of their creators.

Comics are not strictly speaking the same as fine art or literature; they come out of a more straightforwardly commercial tradition that is part of their uniqueness, and there�s nothing wrong with acknowledging that. It doesn�t diminish the accomplishment of Clowes or Ware to place them in a pantheon that also includes Steve Ditko and Alex Toth, and it does no discredit to Jaime Hernandez to point out the similarities between his style and that of Jack Kirby. But that won�t happen until the �kool kidz� feel secure enough to stand next to the nerds. The day when comics can be discussed intelligently in the organs of serious criticism without making a conspicuous display of their pretentious ambitions will be the next great step forward for the artform.

11:20:48 AM

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Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Batman Begins

Last night, courtesy of our good buddy Wayne, we scored tickets to the preview screening of Batman Begins. Not much need for detailed commentary on this one. Just a brief, essential though: Best�comic book� movie� ever!

Seriously, they got it all the way right on this one. And just so you know where I�m coming from, my top-ten list of best comic book action movies:

Batman Begins
X-Men 2
Spiderman 2
The Phantom (1996)
X-Men
Sin City
Spiderman
Superman (1977)
Batman (1989)
The Rocketeer (1992)

Honorable mention: The Road to Perdition, Batman Returns, Popeye (1980), From Hell, Creepshow (based on �Tales from the Crypt�).

Note: list does not include movies made from superhero characters who did not originally appear in comics (Conan, the Shadow) or comic book movies based on non-action comics (Ghost World, American Splendor, Crumb � all of which are classics).

Update: Ron, the proprietor of the estimable Real Art, Politics and Culture blog, reminds me that I shamefully neglected last year's Hellboy, which clearly belongs in the top 5. My bad. Hellboy is a keeper, and a good candidate for a sequel. Ron also says he's having trouble leaving comments, receiving the dreaded "404 - Forbidden" error. I have no idea what causes this and regret the frustration it causes readers and commenters.

3:32:46 PM

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Saturday, April 02, 2005

The Town With No Pity

�Worry not: there ain�t no stinking Sin City movie in the works.�

- Frank Miller, Sin City letter page, 1998

Frank Miller is a romantic. A throwback. A control freak.

In an age of focus groups and market testing, corporate content and �intellectual property,� Frank Miller does it his way. The sequential art renegade who electrified the medium in the 1980s with his work on Daredevil, Elektra (his creation), Wolverine and Batman (he wrote and drew the apocalyptic and iconic Batman: The Dark Knight Returns in 1987) decided he�d had enough of the status quo: pouring his talent and vision into stories that were, ultimately, the property of giant corporations with no commitment beyond the bottom line.

In 1988, he struck out on his own, aided and abetted by renegade publisher Dark Horse Comics. Miller had big stories to tell. Big, ugly stories full of hard men and lying women. Stories of violence and betrayal, hopeless love and foolish honor. He called his world Sin City.

The corny dialogue and stock plots were more Mickey Spillane than Raymond Chandler, and Miller�s art and storytelling at times seemed little more than a catalogue of authoritative influences, from Milton Caniff and Chester Gould to Will Eisner, Jack Kirby and Alex Toth. But at the same time that Sin City was shamelessly, joyfully derivative, it was also powerfully original in the unity and passion of Miller�s vision. You may have seen these characters before, but you never saw them quite like this. And even those who admired the classic noir style for its subtlety and restraint couldn�t help but be astonished by Miller�s compulsion (and ability) to push the clichés so far past their breaking point, again and again and again.

Across the years and the story arcs, Miller allowed the tangled underbrush of Sin City to grow dense and lush. The plots crisscrossed back and forth over familiar terrain and incidents, adding layers of significance as they appeared from the perspectives of different characters. As such, the story drew inevitable comparisons to contemporaneous reimagining of the crime genre, Quentin Tarantino�s Pulp Fiction, and began raising the inevitable question: �when is the Sin City movie coming out?�

For more than a decade, Miller resisted � fiercely � the clarion call of Hollywood. He had two very good reasons for doing this. First, he had had unsatisfactory experiences in the movie business in the late 80s when, flush from the success of The Dark Knight Returns, he was recruited to write the screenplays for the Robocop sequels. A loner by trade and temperament, Miller grew frustrated with the bullshit, compromise and cowardly group-think endemic to the production of a major motion picture. Life, he figured, was too short to be bothered with that much hassle to produce a substandard product, no matter how much money was on the table. The recent Daredevil and Elektra movies, in which Miller�s powerful original vision was systematically run through the creative shredder and strip-mined by corporate greed, must have only intensified his loathing of the entire process.

Sin City is Miller�s baby, and he takes conspicuous pride in its ownership. �If it says Sin City, then I wrote it, I drew it,� has been his consistent pledge to readers over the 15+ year life of the series. There has never been so much as a collaborator, much less a guest writer, artist, or fill-in issue, and that�s as much a part of the Sin City allure as the blondes and the bullets. The idea of surrendering it to the inevitably-collaborative process of film-making must have held remarkably little appeal.

Second, Miller was and remains one of the most vocal proponents of the sequential art (�comic book,� if you must) form. Like the late Will Eisner, who repeatedly spurned offers to bring his signature creations to the screen, Miller believes strongly that the graphic narrative format was necessary and sufficient to tell his stories, and that it was demeaning to assume that the ambition of all decent comics was to someday be made into movies. If people were interested in Sin City, they should buy the comic or graphic novel.

According to an article in last month�s Wired magazine, Robert Rodriguez finally convinced Miller to relent by solving both his problems. First, Miller was guaranteed total creative control. He participated extensively in the production, even being credited �co-director.� And second, through the use of cutting-edge digital technology, Rodriguez was able to fully realize the sequential art aesthetic on film.

The result, for better and worse, is perhaps the purest realization of a single artist�s vision in the history of comic book movies. Not just the story, but literally every shot and every word of dialogue come straight off the printed page. Rodriguez�s use of black and white, occasionally dramatically tinted with a spot of primary color, precisely captures the distinctive high contrast black-and-white style Miller has perfected in the comics. Key recurring graphic motifs such as the use of silhouette, the rendition of rain as white or black jagged streaks running diagonal to the plane, shadows cast across bricks or tile, migrate seamlessly to the screen. For fans, it�s an astonishing experience.

The flip side of Sin City�s faithfulness to Miller�s vision is that it is strictly constrained by the limits of that vision. If there is a major flaw in this movie, it�s that Miller so distrusts the medium of film that he allows for no opportunities for film-making art (beyond the simple techniques of editing and effects) to make itself felt on his material. As a result, there is perhaps too much expository voice-over narration, too many occasions where the expression of action and drama are stifled by the need to precisely mimic Miller�s graphic storytelling style, and too many points of friction where the familiar conventions of crime comics butt uncomfortably against the clichés of crime films.

Miller seems obsessed with the desire to perfectly capture the Sin City graphic novel experience for film. That�s a worthy artistic goal and one that he and Rodriguez succeed at brilliantly, but it�s a goal that�s ultimately of interest only to himself and a very small sliver of his audience.

Since I count myself in that sliver, I enjoyed Sin City almost without reservation. That said, viewers less familiar with the original material should really calibrate their expectations properly to enjoy this film. Like the comic, the over-the-top quality of Sin City is abrasive at first, but grows on you. However, if you are expecting something as transcendently-poignant as Kill Bill 2, for example, you are bound to be disappointed. Likewise, those who have trouble separating exaggerated violence of the martial-arts film variety from violence meant to be taken seriously may have trouble stomaching the numerous graphic scenes of torture, menace and mutilation.

I am genuinely curious to see how Sin City plays out in the wider commercial and critical arena. If audiences can see past its idiosyncrasies and appreciate it on its own terms, it will be a real triumph of the single artistic vision over the corrupting corrosion of compromise. And that would be worth cheering for.

11:35:51 AM

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