Satrapi blev født i den nordvestlige by Rasht i 1969 og voksede op i hovedstaden, Teheran, som enebarn i en sekulær, venstreorienteret og velbeslået middelklassefamilie med aner i de politiske samfundslag; hendes grandonkel Fereydun Ebrahimi var medlem af centralkomiteen i den kortlivede aserbajdsjanske folkerepublik (i dag i det nordlige Iran) og blev henrettet af shahen i 1947. Hans nevø Anoosh, bror til Satrapis far, var en del af det kommunistiske Tudeh-parti. I Persepolis erindrer Satrapi det nære fortrolighedsforhold, hun som barn udviklede til onklen, og hvordan hun som den sidste besøgte ham i fængslet, før det islamiske regime myrdede ham.

Hun beskriver selvkritisk den naive revolutionsromantik, som dette forhold til familiens eneste »martyr« nærede i hende, et barn med ambitioner om at blive profet. Men også, hvordan det nærede den politiske og menneskelige indignation, som præger hele hendes værk. Persepolis lokaliserer således nogle af vor tids store politiske og kulturelle konflikter i et enkelt, skarpt erindrende, intenst følende menneske.

Læs også min korte anmeldelse af Persepolis-filmen fra 2007, samt min anmeldelse af hendes sidste tegneserie, Poulet aux prunes, fra 2004, samt Julie Paludan Müllers anmeldelse af Persepolis fra 2003 og Thorhauges af Broderier fra 2005.

Spanning more or less exactly the life of the Journal, Moebius’ greatest invention, the Hermetic Garage, has been a constant in his creative life. A set of concepts to which he has returned intermittently through his career and which has found new life in his most recent book—an exhilarating return to form.

I
It begins with a breakdown. The top is blown off the Rigger when the Engineer Barnier tries to hook it up to a particle projector. Now everything will be askew when Jerry Cornelius returns. There is something eminently fitting about this episode. Two throwaway pages drawn in a flurry by Moebius, with no particular intention of continuation. The year was 1976, the venue was the sixth issue of the seminal comics magazine Métal Hurlant, and the incident triggered a revelation of comics.

Editor-in-Chief Jean-Pierre Dionnet encouraged the artist to follow it up and to create from it a series. Thus the year of the Journal also became the year of the Garage. The second episode—entitled “Le Garage Hermétique de Jerry Cornelius”—appeared in the following issue. In it, we see Cornelius’ tanker truck rolling across the barren tundra towards the capital city of Armjourth, promising a reckoning when it arrives at is destination. Cornelius, an immigrant from Moorcock’s Multiverse, acts out the disembodied part of mysterious foil to the series’ primary protagonist, Major Grubert, who makes his appearance in the third episode.

The Major had previously appeared in a number of short pieces published elsewhere, but this was his as well as Moebius’ first outing in a longer series. The Airtight Garage—as it is called in the tone-deaf English translation, which loses entirely title’s esoteric connotations—continued serialization for the next three years. (It has since also become known as Major Fatal). The Rigger blown, the story ran its aleatory course. Like much of Moebius’ work those years, it was part of his ongoing response to a transcendental experience with hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico more than a decade earlier, and was developed in accordance with the propitiously skewed perspective provided by the ongoing use of cannabis. Manifesting its creator’s attempts at ‘automatic cartooning’, a steering principle—at least initially—was to dispense with the plot at the beginning of each episode to start afresh somewhere else, with different characters and a different drawing style, but simultaneously to retain enough common elements to make the whole ultimately accrete into something greater than the sum of its parts, epic in scope.

Moebius, who under his given name Jean Giraud (b. 1938) had been drawing the western strip Blueberry to the solidly crafted scripts of Jean-Michel Charlier for over a decade, had simultaneously been experimenting on and off with a more freeform approach to comics in short pieces published at first in the seminal counterculture magazine Hara-Kiri, then in its spiritual offspring L’Echo des savanes and Fluide Glacial, as well as the home Blueberry itself—the well-established humor- and adventure comics magazine Pilote, run by Charlier and Astérix co-creator and comic genius René Goscinny.

Here, he published in 1973 the story “La Déviation” (‘The Detour’) in which he, his wife, and their young daughter leave on vacation in their small car and soon find themselves on a dreamlike trip through the creator’s mind. Eschewing the fluid brushwork of Blueberry, he rendered it exclusively—and almost obsessively—in pen and ink, obtaining the uniformity of linework and concomitant sense of artifice that was to characterize his work as Moebius. This story was a watershed for the artist—its basic conceit of self-discovery through drawing and the motif of the journey as the central structuring device have been constants in his work ever since, and especially in the Garage.

Frustrated by the creative constraints they experienced at Pilote, he and fellow artist Philippe Druillet joined with Dionnet (and business manager Bernard Farkas) to found Métal Hurlant in 1974. With this new science fiction-oriented platform, Moebius stepped up his game in a number of groundbreaking short stories, including the freewheeling SF & sex romp “Le Bandard fou” (‘The Horny Goof,’ 1974)—his most acutely “underground” piece—and the silent adventures of his most iconic creation, the stoic bird rider with the pointy hood, Arzach (1975:76).

II
The Garage is a map of creation. It goes beyond world-building to explore the creative act itself. The grand metaphor it proposes is the Hermetic Garage of the title—a meteor shaped into a womb-like world by a fallible demiurge, the Major, residing outside it in his phallic space vessel, the Ciguri, with his sorcerer wife Dame Malvina. The details of this creation myth are rich, but simultaneously clearly on-the-spot improvisation for the occasion. Like any self-respecting model of human consciousness—most prominently Freud’s—the structural concept of the Garage is a division into three levels, passing from the unconscious to the super-conscious. By virtue of his visual inventiveness and attention to detail, the Garage becomes a journey through this inner space, describing its territories, its flora and fauna, its peoples, its monuments and cities, its workings. Traveling at the speed of the reader’s discovery.

Where Blueberry required of him adherence to a certain standard of realism, a homogeneity of style, the Moebius comics played more directly to his strengths as a draftsman. Less an observational artist than an inventor, the fantasy world of the Garage accommodated any idea he could come up with and any representational style—from exquisitely rendered illustrative tableaux to bigfoot cartooning. Almost exclusively drawn in pen, the crispness of the images imbues them with a slightly unreal quality, the sense of perfection that he would later cultivate further at the expense of the anarchic, rough freedom that animates his drawing in the Garage.

In his 1989 in-depth interview by Numa Sadoul, the artist himself says that in contrast to Blueberry, in a Moebius drawing “there is no such thing as a mistake”, which is evident because the world he draws is so emphatically his, shaped to his temperament. Everything in a Moebius drawing is constituted of the same raw, imaginary artifice—an example is the memorable image of the two supporting characters, Sam Mohab and his fiancé, looking out a train window at a small, lumpy, downwards swooping fighter plane. Recalling the western setting of Blueberry, the image would never work in that comic—there is no naturalist rationale for the giddy linework describing especially Sam’s back. These lines follow their own logic and enter into dazzling juxtaposition with the hyper-rendered, wavy hair of the two characters. At such moments the marks converge with their own living, breathing meaning. The Garage is a living construct.

It is an entirely pliable world. The Major can be a square-jawed hero one moment and a dithering buffoon the next; genres intersperse unassumingly (from SF to gag-based humor to colonial adventure to western to straight-up superhero comics); ever-changing episode headers pay homage to everything from Little Nemo in Slumberland to The Spirit. Inconsistency is a ground rule in the Garage, but is always contained within the lyric fathom of the artist. Individual images are enhanced by the insertion of symbolic imagery—a painting of satyr poised over a fallen rose, cropped by the panel frame to show us only his lower body, the Major dreaming of a submarine-shaped tomb, skulls—the meanings of which remain open but affords the work a visual richness far beyond the narrative itself.

Strongly influenced by the mad Will Elder, Moebius adds a flourish of sight gags to his richly rendered backgrounds—at different times, we are visited, for example, by inconvenient-looking versions of Captain America, The Thing, and Charlie Brown. He also draws images within the images—photos, picture books, comics—often reflecting or referring imprecisely to the narrative itself and thus emphasizing its nature as a construct. At other times a visual idea assumes a punktum-like poetry of its own. There is a moment where a woman, eyes heavily shaded, looks down at three bloodstains on her white dress, one companion pointing double-fingered to the blemish, the other’s dome topped by a neat black curl. This happens in a panel where the separately framed protagonists—the aforementioned Sam with a gaping exit wound in the back of his head, cursing “Shit! Shit!”—orient themselves towards the right of the frame in which a big “TANG” erupts. The poetics of the comics image laid out with eloquence and humor.

Into this world of meaning walks the Major in his pith helmet, carrying his overnight bag, ultimately to ascend to a higher state of consciousness, and to the third level of the Garage, along with his counterpart, Jerry Cornelius. There they face the nihilist threat of the mysterious Bakalites, before the plot twists and folds back upon itself and—in one of the great endings in comics—lands the Major in the Parisian metro. A world he never made. The overarching title of the work, Major Fatal, is no coincidence: the creator does not believe in chance. Everything, including his own improvisation, unfolds according to a plan, and the Garage would remain his most powerful engine for the exploration thereof.

III
“After that, my ejaculation was over”, says the artist with a laugh in the 2007 documentary Moebius Redux. He refers to the period of “La Déviation”, “Le Bandard fou”, Arzach, and Major Fatal—the four works in which he found himself uniquely attuned to his cultural moment, and indeed the comics which established the matrix for all of his subsequent work. Not only does most of his later work use and develop upon their themes and motifs, the characters themselves reappear in different roles, as if they were players in a Tezuka-like ‘star system’—giving the sense of a strangely shared universe.

Although permeated by the esoteric ethos of their writer, this extends even to the books he produced in collaboration with author/ filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky through the eighties and nineties. The most significant of these, the six-volume Incal (1981:88), sees Moebius evolve from the energized cartoonist who emerged from the Garage and the never-realized Quixotic film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune—helmed by Jodorowsky and allegedly involving at different times such entities as Salvador Dalí and Pink Floyd—into a more ascetic, spiritually itinerant and ultimately less confident artist. The same period saw his deepening involvement in the cosmologist sect of Jean-Paul Appel-Guéry, and subsequently a profound interest in psychotherapy and instinctotherapy. His time with Appel-Guéry had him attempting to transform his art away from the “morbid and overall negative feelings” that he felt had hitherto permeated it. And in the years following his departure from the sect, this developed into a search for a more “objective” mode of drawing, a search for purity through sublimation of the ego, with echoes of Buddhist thinking.

In other words, a development away from much of what makes the Garage great. This is evident in his work through the nineties, permeated as it is by a new age ethos of postulated enlightenment, in which the art is increasingly pared down, the line perfected and serenely still, with lots of crystals, spheres and cosmic jellyfish. It is a pretty arid place, even if certain works such as the initial books in the five-volume parable of the enlightenment of the primordial archetypes Stel & Atan, Le Monde d’Edena (‘The World of Edena’, 1985:2001), and the over-the-top Catholic exegesis Le Coeur couronnée (‘The Crowned Heart’, 1992:98), written by Jodorowsky at his most hammy, have their moments.

The Garage itself did not come through this period unscathed either. This is essentially because Moebius decided to consolidate its world into a more coherent cosmology. First, he signed off on a thoroughly forgettable spin-off series called Le Monde du Garage hermétique (‘The World of the Airtight Garage’, 1990:92), written by his friend and agent Jean-Marc Lofficier and drawn by Eric Shanower and Jerry Bingham. Then he himself returned to it with Major Fatal vol. 2 : L’Homme du Ciguri (‘The Man from the Ciguri’, 1995), which picks up the story at the moment the Major emerges from the Parisian metro.

It does not work. The fact that it is clearly scripted leaves attempts at evoking the improvisatory spirit of the original dead in the water, and the injection of yet another metathematic level in the form of the artist’s long-haired alter-ego from “La Déviation”—mutely hunched over the drawing table with his back turned to the Major—only momentarily serves to distract from the distinct feeling that we are witnessing a number of ineffable, wondrous concepts trotted out for an encore no one asked for. This particular storyline continued in what was intended as a third installment in the series, the first 22 pages of which saw American publication in the short-lived Moebius Comics from Caliber between 1996:97, before it was abandoned.

IV
Through the second half of the nineties and the first years of the present decade Giraud was on the ascendant. His major work of this period was his first independent Blueberry story after Charlier’s death in 1989, “Mr. Blueberry” (1995:2005). Our hero arrives at the town of Tombstone in the days leading up to the showdown at OK Corral, only to be shot in the back immediately and spend the rest of the story bed-ridden in a room at the town saloon, reading Moby-Dick. Here he reminisces about his first meeting, as a youth, with the Apache chief Geronimo. Interviewed by a hack writer from the East Coast, who has come in search of the Wild West, he describes the legendary Apache as his “red whale”, while a myth is in the making outside their windows. In other words, an elaborate conglomeration of clichés in service of what essentially is a rather flimsy story offering little insight into the myths it purports to probe. Sumptuously executed and packed to the gills with playful intertextual references, its very life on the page becomes its point. A delightful folly. Very ‘Moebius.’

In terms of work actually signed ‘Moebius,’ these years were very slim pickings. Slowly, however, and perhaps fueled by the inspired work he was doing on Blueberry, he was rediscovering a vitality of vision and a liveliness of line in a number of self-published, largely sketchbook-based comics. The first where things started clicking is 40 days dans le désert B (’40 Days in the Desert B’, 1999). 70 individual, thematically connected pen drawings are strung together to form a vague narrative. A kind of wide-screen production of R. Crumb’s classic “719th Meditation of Mr. Natural” (1970), it describes an extended vision of creation and death experienced by a lone figure—garbed in the characteristic Moebius pointy hood—seated in the desert. Like a lot of what came before, the work still suffers from a slightly haughty pretension, suggesting profundity in what seems essentially superficial, but highly imaginative visual ideas. What is remarkable, however, is the development it marks in the artist’s approach towards a clean, yet textured idiom, synthesizing the serenity of his 80s and 90s work and the organics of his underground roots.

The theme of the desert as a kind of Locus Amoenus from where springs creation has been a constant in both Giraud’s and Moebius’ work since the beginning. It is a manifestation of the momentous experience of visiting the deserts of Mexico as a young man in 1955. Through the series as a whole, Mike Blueberry probably spends more page time in the desert than anywhere else, and it is no coincidence that the landscape of the Garage is largely desert. The Desert B is the ‘Désert bis’, or the ‘B-Side Desert’, another concept developed by the artist as a means of self-examination. It is also the setting of his introspective sketchbook series Inside Moebius, of which he has published five volumes so far (2000:8). Combining loose drawing and rich coloring, they are improvisational comics in which he plays bigfoot cartoon versions of himself at different stages in his life off the main characters of his oeuvre—Blueberry, Arzach, the Major, Malvina, Stel & Atan, Geronimo, and others.

It is based around the kind of exploratory template used in the Garage, where anything can happen. Executed swiftly, however, it downplays the kind of visual discovery central to most of his previous work in favor of character-based humor and occasional detours into personal or political reflection. Osama bin Laden, for example, plays an important role and is alternately confronted with Arzach—who actually talks!—and Geronimo. At one point—much to his horror—he is turned into a woman and therefore decides to cover himself up in a typically pointy hood. Then he sits there, in the desert, a nexus of nihilism rather than insight. ‘Moebius’ himself experiences literal flights of fancy, Crumbesque episodes of sexual tension, and sequences of infantile regression, all the while whimsically referring to important moments in the creator’s life without revealing much to the reader.

While highly self-indulgent and probably primarily of interest to the dedicated Moebius fan, these books nevertheless exhibits an infectious exuberance—an exuberance that I am pleased to say also marks his recent and rather triumphant return to the Garage: Chasseur déprime (a wordplay on ‘Depressed Hunter’ and ‘Bounty Hunter’) was released last year as the first of a new series dealing with the Garage. In contrast to the Ciguri storyline, which it seems to jettison almost entirely, it takes the Garage not as a set ‘universe’ but rather a set of rather fuzzily defined concepts that act as creative catalysts to their creator. The approach is not the same as the original story, but that is part of the point. The plotting is less evidently improvised and deal not so much with a developing narrative as a series of variations on an idea and an interconnected set of motifs.

The preamble finds the Major in the pueblo of Chatalong, somewhere in the desert of the second level of the Garage. He accidentally overhears two or three strangers discussing a contract they will put on his head. Evidently ignorant of his iconic appearance—they are familiar only with the clean-shaven, suit-wearing version from the end of the original, and the Ciguri story—he addresses himself to them and offers to take out the contract. Arriving in Armjourth to meet his contact, he encounters an ‘overturner’—or perhaps ‘fishtailor’ (Moebius likes his silly plays on words). Of the dominatrix type so typical in Moebius’ work, she offers to overturn his mind. He accepts. The central part of the story, thus, is a series of nested dream sequences, in large part laid out in full-page tableaux, in which the Major finds himself alternately in the desert and a Kafkaesque art gallery run by the Overturner and populated by rabbit-like creatures, experiencing again and again menacing transformations, enmeshed in throbbing organic patterns with crystalline skulls emerging in increasing profusion. Towards the end, he meets his aforementioned clean-shaven self, who offers to show him the way out.

Much of the imagery was established in 40 days dans le désert B, but Moebius here adds to the mix a series of motifs derived from Pre-Columbian art, some of it drawn scratchily with what looks like a Rotring pen. These marks, soaking into the paper, constitute a compellingly tactile contrast to the typically cool runnings of the rest of the penwork. The desert scenes offer gloriously textured juxtaposition to the sterile, ruled architecture of the gallery. Emphasizing not only the dreamlike quality of the narrative itself, but also its status as construct, Moebius demonstratively disrupts consistency between panels, changing the appearance of both characters and settings in a manner worthy of George Herriman. Notoriously having long been unable to preserve continuity between panels and episodes in Blueberry, he here makes of this a virtue, creating an ever-shifting world on paper.

As is the case with the symbology of Major Fatal, the imagery here is suggestive rather than enunciative. Where he then employed it in the service of youthful discovery of possibility, Moebius this time around has donned his pith helmet to probe the fault lines of old age. The repetitive dream threatens an abysmal loss of self in the creative impulse—a loss we might understand as the desert Moebius has been roaming these last decades and from which he has now so marvelously returned, but ultimately, and more importantly, the kind of loss we may all fear and need to negotiate in our own lives.

Current editions of the works mentioned: Le Garage hermétique, Les Humanoïdes associés, 2006; 40 days dans le desert B, Éditions Stardom, 1999; Inside Moebius vols. 1-5, Éditions Stardom, 2000-2008; Chasseur déprime, Éditions Stardom, 2008. The quotations are taken from Numa Sadoul, Moebius, Casterman, 1991, Moebius Comics #1, Caliber Comics, 1996 & Hasko Bauman (director), Moebius Redux, Germany 2007. The Hermetic Garage was originally serialized in the American Heavy Metal in the late 70s. It was republished by Marvel/Epic in garishly colored form in Moebius 3: The Airtight Garage, 1987 and Moebius’ Airtight Garage #1-4 in 1993. The spinoff series was published by Marvel in 1990 as The Elsewhere Prince #1-6. The Man from the Ciguri was published by Dark Horse in 1996. Read also my 2012 obituary on Giraud/Moebius at Hooded Utilitarian.

Nikoline Werdelin for the win!

The Ping awards is an annual set of awards given to comics in Denmark in the manner of the Angoulême Fauves or the American Eisners. Founded by the Danish Comics Council, the awards are a revivification of a differently conceived, hall of fame-type award of the same name which was bestowed on single creators through the early nineties, as well as of the awards programme hosted by the comics biennial Komiks.dk from 2004-2010. The Pings are named after one of the best known characters created by one of the greatest Danish cartoonists, Robert Storm Petersen, aka. Storm P. (1882-1949).

The Pings are a collaboration between the comics site Nummer9, the comics magazine Strip!, the Animation Workshop in Viborg (where a major new cartooning programme was launched last year), and the Storm P. Museum in Copenhagen, and the comics festival Copenhagen Comics. They are awarded in a number of categories in the same manner as so many other awards of their kind.

Ping statuettes lined up, waiting for the winners

Among other notable awards, the one for best editorial cartoonist (which was a new category added to the roster this year) went to the incomparable Philip Ytournel who has done more than any other to innovate within his genre in the last half decade or so with his hilarious, formally inventive and frequently intelligent work for the daily Politiken. Last year he upped his game when he wrote and drew an entire installment of the paper’s books section devoted to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Minister of culture Marianne Jelved and Nikoline Werdelin

Best Danish Comic: Homo Metropolis 2010-2012 by Nikoline Werdelin

Best International Comic in Danish: Alans krig by Emmanuel Guibert

Best International Comic: The Great War by Joe Sacco

Best comic for children/young readers: Pssst! by Annette Herzog and Katrine Clante

Editorial Cartoonist of the Year: Philip Ytournel (Politiken)

Best Danish online comic: Det sarahkastiske hjørne by Sarah Glerup

Best Danish Debut: Troldmændene fra Vestmannaeyjar by Thomas Mikkelsen

Hall of Fame Award: Nikoline Werdelin

Full disclosure: I sit on the organising committee of the Ping awards and was part of the jury. The Ping is a critics award: nominations are made by contributors to Nummer9 and Strip! while the jury is composed of three more or less continuing members (representing the Danish Comics Council, Nummer9 and the Copenhagen Comics) and four rotating members selected for variety and expertise.

Philip Ytournel with his award

Read more and see photos from the show (there will also be a special video at some point) at the Ping website and Facebook page. Photos by Alexander Almegaard and Niels Larsen.

The dicussion also touches upon the media kerfuffle a few months back over the projected removal of Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo to the adult section of the Kulturhuset library in the same city, as well as — inevitably — the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s a complicated set of issues that have implications of cultural integration and free speech and I’d love to hear your opinion, so pop over there and have a look.

Fischer’s distinctions and honors are many: among other things, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen in 1991, became an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 2000, and, already a knight of the Order of Dannebrog, was awarded its special Cross of Honor in 1997. This is because he, arguably more than anybody else of his generation, put Danish art history on the international map as a great humanist, scholar and teacher of the old school.

Never particularly prolific in terms of publications — he seemed perpetually plagued by a perfectionist writer’s block — the work he did publish is exemplary, both for its erudition, its sensitivity and its originality. His explication of the scientific worldview of Danish Golden Age painter C. W. Eckersberg (1783-1853) was the first really to begin explaining that painter’s remarkable approach to a nature in which he saw the divine, and his analyses of the painter’s almost obsessive geometric approach to composition application of perspective are eye-opening; even if somewhat hard fully to believe, they lay bare the deliberation of a highly reflexive artist, and suggested how, in this, some of the most rational image-making conceivable, lies a rare surreal poetry.

His life’s work was the five-volume monograph on the Danish Renaissance printmaker Melchior Lorck (c. 1526/27-after 1583), a great and often overlooked artist who spent four crucial years in Constantinople at the court of Suleiman the Magnificent where he created a number of highly realistic, yet strangely suggestive images of daily life. The work, which the notoriously dilatory Fischer had pushed ahead of himself, unfinished, for most of his career finally saw publication in 2009, after he accepted the able assistance of two younger colleagues. A fitting testament to his career in art history, it would have been a great pity if the knowledge it offers had remained locked in his mind.

Fischer was perhaps most influential as a teacher. His lectures on Dürer, Titian, Rembrandt, and many others were formative to a large part of the generation of art historians that came of age in the sixties, when Fischer was keeper of prints and drawings at Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. Of the many young students who benefited from his inspirational teaching were my parents, and he became something of a mentor to my father, who later introduced him to me, as I was starting down the trodden path.

On several occasions, Fischer shared with me his insights into the field, emphasizing the value of looking, of engaging as closely and directly as possible with the works themselves, while of course familiarizing oneself with their context at the same time. As he rightly suggested, no amount of fancy theoretical speculation can make up for the value of this. In my first published work as an art historian, on Eckersberg and his immensely talented pupil Christen Købke (1810-1848), I tried to follow this advice and was happy to receive Fischer’s encouragement. This remains an early touchstone in my work as a scholar and critic. I now wish I had had the opportunity to discuss my current work on Titian with him. On reflection, it owes more than a little to his example, even if I came too late into the game to attend his lectures on the subject back when my parents were young.

C.W. Eckersberg, View from Kuppelsalen af Charlottenborg toward the Botanical Gardens, 1845, pen, black ink and gray wash over pencil, 210 x 210 mm., Statens Museum for Kunst, Den kongelige kobberstiksamling

The icing on the cake was an all-star line-up of guests that included Monie Love (reluctantly performing “Monie in the Middle” before quickly absconding), an on point Sean Penn (not the mopey-faced actor), Black Thought from The Roots (spitting “Love of My Life and “The Next Movement”, tight as always, then backing up Tip on a crazy rendition of “Bonita Applebum”), Busta Rhymes (the crowd went wild when he appeared for “Scenario”, but it quickly turned into call-response; the real fyah was his insane verse from Chris Brown’s “Look at Me Now”) and Kanye West (rapping “Dark Fantasy” down among the crowd, dropping a couple of his pop joints, then acting plug 2 for Tip on “Award Tour”).

For me the most enjoyable parts were elsewhere though. It was great seeing Tip just perform his stuff: he delivered “We Fight/Love” beautifully, with DJ J. Period providing an exquisite turntable chorus, and his rendition of “Sucka Nigga” was inspired — by weaving his flow between the declamatory and the exclamatory he restated compellingly the enduring resonance of that song (the ambiguity of the n-word has rarely been stated better).

Which brings me to the other reason I’ve been time traveling lately: Michael Rapaport’s new documentary on A Tribe Called Quest, Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest. Its premiere at Sundance was surrounded by a certain amount of uneasy shuffling amongst the concerned parties, and since its release it’s been subject to somewhat mixed criticism.

It is easy to see why. It is an incoherent film that shifts radically in tone about midway through. While initially an attempt to chart the story of how A Tribe Called Quest became one of hip hop’s defining acts, it is backloaded with the story that unfolded within the group as Rapaport shot the film in 2008-10: estranged friends and musical partners uneasily reuniting off and on again for tours a decade after the fact, reigniting the conflicts that split them in the first place.

The film never quite manages to explicate what made A Tribe Called Quest so seminal. The fans know, but what about the larger audience one would hope for? It is clearly a fanboy movie, made by a first-time director with little sense of stringency or coherence, assuming a fair amount of prior knowledge on the part of its viewers and misrepresenting historical details. Worse, it is too busy ever to let the music play and act as exhibit A, choosing consistently to cut to the next interview. Yet it is a pretty great film. How is that possible?

It just so happens that the fanboy who directed the movie managed to shoot some great material and had the good sense to let it dictate the film he ended up making, instead of downplaying it in favor of the surely more bland film that would have resulted, had he gone the traditional VH1 route. The interviews with the four members of the group, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Q-Tip, and Jarobi (“A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y”) are excellent. Each of them speaks with honesty, wearing their hearts on their sleeves, not shying away from the difficult issues at the heart of their friend- and fellowship.

And then there’s the harrowing footage from the fateful 2008 tour, backstage and -front, as well as from Phife’s private life as he goes through a particularly difficult and threatening phase of his struggle with type 1 diabetes. And passages of the interaction between Tip and Phife preparing soberly and amicably for a show in Japan in 2010, peppered through the film, capture perfectly the interplay of their personalities that one senses generated their chemistry as well as their conflict (Q-Tip mock-interviewing Phife about the Lakers and the Knicks is both hilarious and revealing of how one’s assurance plays off the other’s earnestness).

Add to this a number of other great moments: Ali loosing his train of thought mind-interview as a kid scoots by, Tip giddily telling the story of how he discovered the break for “Can I Kick It”, Black Thought characterizing the rather dubious Tribe wardrobe as it looked back in 1990, former manager Chris Lighty addressing Tip’s perfectionism and refusal to part with a final mix using a champagne bucket, Phife describing how to properly dose his insulin (“you go above that, you might bottom out and play yourself”), and so on.

It is not the definitive Tribe documentary by any means, and it does too little to address the group’s contribution or legacy, and the continued resonance of the music they made together. However, it does touch upon the post-Tribe difficulties experienced by most of the group as recording artists, showing Q-Tip to be the most driven and musically talented — and relentless — of the group.

To be sure, he has experienced his own problems, creative as well as business-oriented, in years since Tribe broke up, first baring his pecs with the schizoid cash grab Amplified (1999), then seeing an ambitious if never fully realized album, Kamaal the Abstract, shackled by record company paralysis and dispersed through internet leakage, but it all seemed to come together for him again with 2008’s The Renaissance, which gets as close to what one would hope for mature, evolved hip hop to sound like. And as he continues to demonstrate with shows such as the one on Saturday, he may just have the right stuff eventually to achieve that most difficult of feats in hip hop: artistic longevity.

More clips from the Brooklyn show brought to you by the group mind of the interwebs.

To make matters worse, the magazine had been almost two years in the making, mostly because I was learning the ropes of producing such a thing, and had to rely on a designer who understandably had better things to do than work on a sophomoric vanity project for the gutter of a subcultural niche. So it actually felt a bit old when it arrived, focusing as it did almost exclusively on the 1990s apotheosis of the so-called “British Invasion” in American comics — Alan Moore’s masterwork From Hell, Neil Gaiman’s triumphant finish of Sandman, and Dave McKean’s flawed, but still pretty great and now inexplicably overlooked Cages (to my mind, none of these creators have burned as brightly since then, though Moore still occasionally sparks).

What was starting to happen, however, was comics reaching a critical mass as the diverse art form it is becoming acknowledged as today. Chris Ware’s long-serialised game changer of a graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan, was published in collected form, Dan Clowes kindled pale fire in David Boring, David B. was in the middle of his oneiric magnum opus L’Ascension du haut mal, Anke Feuchtenberger was expanding the field of comics into the uncanny, Fabrice Neaud was making the personal political in his Journals, and Joe Sacco had gone to former Yugoslavia.

This, really, was the development we foremost wanted to chronicle, and we caught up with it as well as we could manage in issue 2 that October, an issue that more reliably set the tone of what was becoming both an aesthetic and political project, and which culminated in our book, Forandringstegn — De nye tegneserier (‘Signs of Change — The New Comics’), at the very end of 2004. Originally intended as our issue 6, this book introduced to Danish readers much more emphatically the new wave of comics, both through in-depth interviews with and short comics by a number of key creators (David B., Ben Katchor, Anke Feuchtenberger, Martin tom Dieck, Jim Woodring and Dylan Horrocks, to be precise).

But to return to that first issue, it expressed — inarticulately, but still — what we wanted to do. Rereading the editorial, I realise to what extent the ideas it expresses embryonically anticipate our thinking about comics to the present. Here’s an excerpt:

“God rest his dark soul!

It was with these words that the ancestor of Captain Haddock, the Knight of Haddock, dispatched the villainous pirate Rackham the Red. While Haddock was on the floor, ecstatic, with a painting around his neck and a cutlass in his hand.

For yours truly, that was between fifteen and twenty years ago, and it made a big impression. The kind of irreverent, yet sophisticated humour, combined with an exquisite sense of adventure and the imaginary that Tintin represents should not be underestimated. The fine arts are torn off the walls and unabashedly employed in the service of storytelling. Ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”

While we were certainly aware of the central characteristics of postmodernism, I don’t think we quite realised at the time how important the still ongoing revaluation of the heritage of modernism and the dissolution of high and low distinctions in culture was becoming to the evolution of comics in the following years. What we did believe was that the aesthetic relativism of postmodernism was a theoretical and ultimately suffocating cul-de-sac. Rackham was always about judgement, aesthetic and beyond.

What the editorial further evinces was our commitment to comics history and its importance to understanding the medium today, something we dealt with especially in our third and fifth issues — the former mashing up Carl Barks and Prince Valiant with Joe Sacco, the latter examining superhero comics as a tradition. The rediscovery, redefinition and revaluation of the classics and their peregrinations through modernity are naturally foundational of the creation, but also crucial to the understanding and appreciation of comics today. This is evident not only from the glorious wave of reprints of historical comics through the past decade, but their creative resurrection at the minds and hands of a new generation of cartoonists.

The only image I have of myself and Thorhauge together is this authors’ photo from Forandringstegn, taken by Rasmus Dengsø in the summer of 2004.

Rackham was our contribution to the ongoing conversation about comics in Denmark, such as it was — an attempt at rejuvenating the at the time faltering and always rather modest tradition of comics criticism in the country. To what extent we succeeded or not I’m not really in a position to say, but it certainly got hot once we strode into the still but troubled waters of the Danish comics scene. Our fourth issue was an attempt critically to catalogue the work and career of a selection of our most significant cartoonists of the last 30 years. Let’s just say that not everyone sympathised with our selections.

This project became an ongoing concern for us, first in 2003 with an exhibition of Danish comics in Paris accompanied by an anthology published by the great people at Le Frémok, and since with the 2006 anthology BLÆK, which united 28 Danish artists, many of them working the field between traditional comics and the fine arts tradition, to suggest where (Danish) comics might head when guided by creativity and innovation.

This unfortunately happened just as the shit hit the fan in the depressing tragicomedy surrounding the so-called “Danish cartoons” on the theme of the Prophet Mohammad. Our rejection of a contribution from the great strip cartoonist Ivar Gjørup, which we found below his usual standard, led to a minor cartoon crisis of our own, as our act of censorship was suddenly plastered all over the Danish media for what amounted to a short week before it was forgotten again.

Needless to say, the Danish cartoons occupied much of our time through 2006. Rackham had been running as a website since 2002, which expanded our critical mission to include news coverage and debate. We still believe that we created a lively resource somewhere at the centre of Danish comics culture during those years, and that the website in many ways succeeded in generating the critical discourse around comics that the magazine had not to the same extent. This is no surprise of course, seeing that those were the years when the comics press was gradually but surely leaving print behind.

The double whammy of cartoon crisis and BLÆK-related controversy, plus the fact that I am living abroad, however led to our choice in January 2007 to close down Rackham as a publisher and website. Though a little sad, this was also a liberating decision, resulting amongst other things in the creation of this blog and my being able to devote more time to writing about comics elsewhere. And Thomas, whose remarkable debut as a cartoonist, Det der går forud (‘What Goes Before’), more or less coincided with the launch of Rackham, was finally able to complete his second, more ambitious, and critically acclaimed graphic novel, Kom Hjem (‘Come Home’) last year.

In the ten years since Rackham was first published, comics have changed immensely, not the least in Denmark. Shortly after we commenced publication, the later contributor to Rackham and editor-to-be of Kom Hjem, Julie Paludan-Müller, started pushing a certain comic named Persepolis on the Danish publishers. It eventually became the first in a by-now fairly impressive wave of Danish translations of the best international graphic novels by several publishers. Concurrently, manga arrived in force on Danish shores, for a while energising the market for kids’ comics. Although we did our best, it remains our biggest regret that we never managed to devote as much time to Japanese and East Asian comics at Rackham as we wanted — an ambitious project was in the pipeline for a while, but went nowhere.

Not even manga, however, has been able to revive what remains a small, fragile market. The big two mainstream publishers, Carlsen and Serieforlaget, fused a couple of years ago, which led to an EU-prompted monopoly investigation, resulting in a large part of their comics division being separated into a new, independent publisher, Cobolt Comics. The consequence has been an increasing apathy on their part; they seem practically to be shutting down comics publication these months, firing or reassigning their editors and keeping on keel only their faltering flagship Disney comics. Add to this the problems experienced by newspapers worldwide and the concomitant problems for the newspaper strip, which has always been a strong tradition in Denmark.

Fortunately though, a number of independent publishers have shot up in the interim, most interestingly Aben Maler, run by Steffen Rayburn-Maarup, another occasional Rackhamite who has joined the by now venerable house of Fahrenheit as a guarantor of new quality comics in Danish — most recently, remarkably, and indeed poignantly, with a beautiful Danish edition of Jimmy Corrigan. And more importantly, a new generation of cartoonists are coming to the fore, bringing ambitious new ideas to the medium, expanding its potentialities in new directions, even if Denmark is still somewhat lagging behind its Nordic brethren as a comics nation.

Thomas and I have continued our work in Danish comics, co-founding last year the Danish Comics Council, a grassroots organisation working to increase and promote the knowledge of, and appreciation for, comics in Denmark. We are also part of the group behind the new Danish comics website Nummer9 (‘Number 9’), which unites a broader range of viewpoints and brings a more egalitarian sensibility to criticism and journalism than did Rackham. On its editorial board, among others, sits also Henry Sørensen, who for years has been an invaluable part of the Rackham team. An occasional contributor to this site, he remains one of the best writers on comics in Denmark. If only we could get him to write more…

And its (dis)appearance notwithstanding, Rackham is not quite dead. As it did continuously through its years of high activity, it is merely in the process of mutating further. Soon, a major book project, which once again has me collaborating with Rackham‘s brilliant and award-winning designer Frederik Storm, will see the light of day. It’s significantly bigger than us, both in scope and in terms of who is involved, but it retains the core values of our operation and I for one believe that it wouldn’t be as good had it not been for our decade in comics.

To celebrate Rackham‘s decade in comics, the Metabunker will be running English translations of a number of our pieces on key works of international comics in the naughts for the next months. This should give an impression not just of Rackham as it evolved, but more importantly of some of the great achievements of the comics form of the past decade. To alleviate somewhat the embarrassment that our youthful scribblings is sure to bring, we will be supplementing the offering with a few fresh texts as well.

For an overview of Rackham‘s publications, see our ‘works’ section. The illustration at the top is Thorhauge’s interpretation of the Tintin sequence from the Secret of the Unicorn that inspired that first editorial.

Man kan spørge sig selv, om det er et tilfælde, at Roskilde Festival ligger på nogenlunde den tid af året, hvor mange hedenske religioner fejrer, og fejrede, midsommeren. Og selvom festivalen har et skær af fejring af lys og livskraft over sig, så er det nok at trække den lidt rigeligt ud i romantiske anskuelser at forestille sig, at en skandinav fra år 900 ville kunne trække ligheder mellem nutides festival og fortidens midsommerfest : og så måske alligevel. Som den fejring af fællesskabet og livet Roskilde Festival også er, må man spørge sig selv, om ikke der et eller andet sted findes et urinstinkt i behold i de fleste mennesker, der for en tid byder os at sætte alle regler og normer ud af spil, og beruse os med hinanden og trygheden i, at vi alle er sammen om at afsøge virkelighedens grænser, lade tid og sted smelte bort, og opleve universalsproget musik i rammer, der giver små glimt af total samhørighed med alle man møder under solen og for et øjeblik bringer os tæt på drømmen om, at vi alle sammen kan eksistere i fredelig fordragelighed med hinanden.

For mit eget vedkommende har oplevelserne, både med og uden musik, været mange og forskelligartede. Ligesom de fleste andre har jeg været hele møllen igennem, fra at drikke varme dåseøl under en stegende sol og koge i teltet klokken 7 om morgenen, til at gå i opløsning i den silende regn og pissefryse i et utæt telt klokken 3 om natten. Jeg har oplevet en perlerække af koncerter, både alene og sammen med mennesker jeg aldrig siden har snakket med. Sammen med to finner, der ikke snakkede andet end finsk, oplevede jeg i 1996 Neil Youngs skovhuggerguitar pløje sig vej gennem 60.000 forsamlede mennesker, og jeg sværger at det var skideligemeget om jeg kunne finsk eller ikke, de to finner forstod alt hvad jeg sagde og omvendt, og vi var enige om, at dette var et øjeblik, vi ville huske for evigt. Et par år senere oplevede jeg det samme, men i mindre målestok, på en af de mindre scener, hvor en israelsk bassist ophævede samtlige kendte dimensioner foran en flok festivalgæster, der var hårdt ramt af lørdag formiddag. Der har, med andre ord, været oplevelser i både stor og lille skala, der alle har det til fælles, at de har formået at samle de tilstedeværende og skabe magi i øjeblikket.

Hvor er vi så på vej hen anno 2009? Lad os stille os oppe ved Orange Scene og se, om vi kan besvare det spørgsmål. Fredag klokken 17 mødte jeg her mine gamle helte, Faith No More, der i øvrigt var det allerførste band, jeg oplevede under den orange presenning. Her 17 år efter har tiden vist sig mere end nådig over for deres blanding af avantgarde rock og selvironisk sarkasme, end over for mange af de etablerede navne, der kom forbi i løbet af de næste dage. Men selvom Faith No More leverede en kraftpræstation af en koncert i år, der rev alle fordomme om hvad en genforening kan være op med rode og lod dem forsvinde ned i en stor pastelfarvet sæk, så kan man ikke lade være med at tænke lidt over festivalens fremtid set i lyset af, at Faith No More trods alt havde deres storhedstid i 90’erne. Nuvel, jeg ville nok aldrig have tænkt denne tanke, hvis ikke mange, eller rettere størstedelen, af årets navne på Orange Scene var bands, der havde deres storhedstid for 10-20 år siden, og ikke siden har præsteret noget, der for alvor gør dem relevante.

At man lader Oasis være fredag aftens hovednavn, er simpelthen en brøler af rang. Gnider man dertil salt i såret og sander, at festivalens bookinggruppe lod være med at hyre det gendannede Blur, selvom chancen bød sig, så nærmer vi os det direkte utilgivelige. Af de to kamphaner fra 90ernes britpopscene må Blur klart siges at være det band, der har vist sig at være det mest interessante og relevante i længden. Ligeledes beviste det noget sløje fremmøde til Nine Inch Nails også, at det simpelthen ikke er godt nok at man var et progressivt band for ti-femten år siden. Derfor kan man kun bekymre sig, hvis festivalen insisterer på at blive ved med at satse på Orange Scene som centralt fikspunkt. Fortsætter udviklingen fra i år, vil Orange i fremtiden forvandle sig til en mellemting mellem en elefantkirkegård for rockens ringvrag og showroom for det gårsdagens unge ville ha’. Det kan ingen være tjent med, og i sidste ende kan det true festivalens eksistens som et af Europas flagskibe blandt musikfestivaler.

I diskussionen “hvorhen Roskilde” kan jeg således ikke lade være med at tilslutte mig dem, der mener, at Roskilde Festival måske er ved at nå en skillevej, hvor man bør overveje at slagte nogle hellige køer. Festivalledelsen har flere gange været fremme med meldingen om, at man er nødt til at have en stor scene, hvor man kan have de navne, der trods alt er det der trækker mange folk til, men ved nærmere eftertanke klinger dette synspunkt på mange områder ret hult.

Selv har jeg haft mange af de helt store oplevelser ved Orange Scene, og når det er rigtig godt, så er det her at selve festivalens sjæl åbenbarer sig under sommerhimlen, når et band rammer lige præcis den rytme, der får 60.000 menneskers hjerte til at slå i takt så porten ind til en anden verden bryder sammen. Eksemplerne er sikkert lige så mange, som de folk, der ved hvad jeg taler om. For mig personligt er Neil Youngs føromtalte koncert i 1996, og gensynet i 2008, fikspunkter i denne del af sagaen om Roskilde. Få andre forstår som han at agere køkkenchef, når bryggen med rockekstase skal tilberedes og der er sære ting i gære ved Orange. Ligeledes leverede Rammstein i 1998 et mastodontisk svovlspyende show, der sparkede døren ind til hedeste helvede, REM var månesyge i ’99, og sådan kunne jeg blive ved. Pointen her er ikke mine egne minder om Orange, men nærmere at festivaloplevelsen er forskellig for hver eneste gæst, der driver rundt i støvet mellem scenerne. Lægger man dertil, at alle altid kommer hjem med en posefuld koncertminder fra de mindre scener, som har været mindst lige så stærke som dem ved Orange, så nærmer vi os måske noget, der kan danne bund for videre overvejelser.

Lørdag aften var det dog ikke lige så slemt. Slipknot beviste, trods dårlig lyd, at der stadig er bands tilbage i den klasse, der kan fylde Orange Scene uden at tømme festivalens bookingkonto, og som er relevante bidragsydere til nutidens musikscene. Mere interessant var dog det amerikanske sigøjnerpunkband Gogol Bordello, der beviste, at man sagtens kan være stort set ukendt blandt de fleste gæster og samtidig sparke gang i en fest, der når helt ned til madboderne i den anden ende af pladsen og får gang i dansefødderne hos selv de sorteste norske black metal-fans. Senere på aftenen fandt man tilbage i den gamle gænge og lod has-been popbandet Pet Shop Boys lukke lørdagen med en efter sigende temmelig kedsommelig koncert. Jeg ved det ikke, ligesom omkring 50.000 andre var jeg til Malk de Koijn på Arena, hvor man startede ud med at takke for det store fremmøde og bede folk om at passe på hinanden, når nu vi var så mange.

Her kommer vi til et par andre sider af problemstillingen med Orange Scene, nemlig festivalens ide om, hvad der rent faktisk skal til for et band for at kunne begå sig her. Gogol Bordello viste med al tydelighed, at man ikke behøver at være hverken genforenet, guldsælgende eller gammeldags for at kunne udfylde scenen under den orange teltpressening. Ligeledes må placeringen af Malk de Koijn på Arena siges at være et fejlgreb af de helt store, der lader en tilbage med fornemmelsen af, at festivalen måske ikke er helt så skarpe på, hvad der rører sig blandt gæsterne, som de burde være. Malk de Koijns genkomst har været ventet lige siden de sidste gang forlod Arena, og dermed for en tid hinanden, der har været talt og skrevet om forventningerne til deres koncert lige siden den blev annonceret, og de har heltestatus langt uden for hiphop miljøet. At man alligevel lader man dem optræde på Arena, der er beregnet til 12.000 mennesker, imens et popband, der havde deres storhedstid for omkring 20 år siden, betræder Orange, vidner simpelthen om manglende føling med publikum. Det siges at Malk de Koijn havde afslået et tilbud om at optræde på Orange, men den beslutning må til hver en tid ligge hos arrangøren, der vel har til opgave at fordele bands efter potentielt fremmøde. Handler det i virkeligheden om, at festivalen har svært ved at finde ud af, hvordan man skal bruge Orange Scene på nutidens festival, hvor musikkens sværvægtere har bevæget sig uden for rækkevidde af bookinggruppens checkhæfte?

Jeg er uenig i, at man skal være et stort navn for at kunne trække Orange Scene. Som Gogol Bordello beviste, så handler der nok nærmere om at spille den rigtige musik på det rigtige tidspunkt. Og som Malk de Koijn beviste, så handler det om at være sig sine valg bevidst og frem for alt udnytte dem optimalt i stedet for at bruge energi på diskussionen om, at Madonna er blevet for dyr til at hyre og satse på det, man tror er det sikre. Man kan lige så godt se i øjnene, at der bliver færre og færre bands, som garant for et stort fremmøde inden for festivalens budget, og derfra begynde at se på, hvordan man så kan tilpasse programmet på Orange.

Nutidens musik er svært definerbar, i konstant og vild vækst, præget af forandring, og vigtigst af alt fragmenteret ud i det absurde. Det der er in i dag, er yt i morgen, men in igen i overmorgen, det hedder bare noget nyt, der gør det yt dagen efter, hvor det alligevel er in, det er bare smeltet sammen med noget sygt, der gør det helt nyt indtil det ender med at blive yt. Moralen er, at selvom det bliver sværere og sværere at skabe en festival, hvor et enkelt musiknavn kan sende 60.000 mennesker ud på fælles færd i musikkens dimension, så udvikler musikken sig også på en måde der gør, at der er mange fælles fikspunkter. Kunne det tænkes, at fremtidens festival formår at skabe et fællesskab, der byder på mange musikalske indslag på flere mindre scener og derigennem skaber en oplevelse, der i højere grad er baseret på, at folk driver rundt mellem mange musikalske præferencer? At man ikke længere definerer sig som hiphopper, headbanger eller popdreng, men som festivalgæst på jagt efter en fælles oplevelse og nye indtryk? Måske trækker fremtidens festival stadig med løftet om den fælles ekstase, men båret af et program der tilpasser sig det faktum, at nutidens musikaficionado sagtens kan have Malk de Koijn liggende på sin iPod sammen med både Capleton og Sigur Rós, og et par numre med Tomahawk.

Hvis man skulle vælge det lige nu utænkelige, at nedlægge Orange Scene til fordel for flere mindre, så vil det uden tvivl forandre Roskilde Festival til ukendelighed, men dermed er vi også tilbage til det, som jeg mener er kernen i festivalen. Hvis Roskilde skal være relevant som oplevelse for fremtidens publikum, så er tiden simpelthen ved at være inde til at man tænker sig om og sander, at nutidens progressive musik i overvejende grad opstår som resultat af mange møder og påvirkninger de udøvende musikere imellem.

Måske er det i dette krydsfelt mellem en masse genrer og bands, at vi finder ind til fremtidens fællesskab imens vi nok engang rejser os fra svineriet ude på teltpladsen og traver gennem støvet til en af scenerne. Som en fejring af livskraften er festivalen en institution, men skal den blive ved med at være relevant, må den også sande, at livskraft bevæger og forandrer sig, og at man kun kan skabe fællesskabet ved at være der, hvor festivalgæsterne er. Vi kommer til Roskilde, ikke omvendt.

On the other hand such utter mediocrities as Jean Graton’s Michel Vaillant, Tibet’s Ric Hochet and Eddy Paape’s Luc Orient are available in archival editions. It’s depressing. Macherot is a
a master on the level of his distinguished colleagues Peyo, creator of Johan et Pirlouit and the Smurfs, and Morris, the co-creator and artist of Lucky Luke. His best work is not only immaculately crafted, but intelligent, personal, fun and not a little unsettling.

The evident lack of current appreciation for his work may in part be due to the puzzling dearth of funny animals in Franco-Belgian comics. An integral, defining part of American comics and cartooning, anthropomorphised animals are conspicuously absent from comics written in the language of La Fontaine. Don’t ask me why. I’ve never quite understood how certain superficial genre trappings can make such a difference for an audience, regardless of the more fundamental qualities of the work in question. Why was the bathetic, smarmy and mostly unfunny The Lion King one of Disney’s biggest grossing successes in recent history? There are surely several reasons, amongst them probably what remains in the picture of Tezuka’s superior paragon, but it seems to me obvious that animals played a part.

But I digress. Macherot made funny animal comics, and while Disney must certainly have been an inspiration, his art has more in common with the aforementioned La Fontaine or such modern masterpieces of the fable form as George Orwell’s Animal Farm. His first and arguably best series Chlorophylle thus right out the gate presented a story of small animals struggling against an encroaching horde of black rats, whose brown shirts are only just left to the imagination. (Chlorophylle contre les rats noirs, published in the magazine Tintin in 1954). With the war still fresh in memory, Macherot crafted for kids of all ages a gripping allegory of fascist oppression, almost epic in tenor and fully on par with Peyo and Yvan Delporte’s similarly themed masterpiece of the Smurf cycle, Le Schtroumpfissime (1965).

When it comes to Chlorophylle (1954-71), I’m something of a purist in favour of the early works that take place in the Belgian countryside, but several of the later books, set in Croquefredouille — a miniature society mirroring our own, but populated by animals — definitely have their qualities. Their political undertones are generally deftly handled, never getting in the way of suspenseful yarns that at times veer into the slightly, but delightfully absurd in their humor. And the fact that these animals, or at least the ones that don’t subscribe to the self-imposed vegetarianism of the general populace, eat each other becomes even more unsettling because of the setting.

His other main series for Tintin, Clifton (1959-63) — about a British detective — was something of a departure in that it featured human characters and, while entertaining, decidedly less interesting than his other work. It was quickly taken over by other, rather capable but conventional hands and ran for a good while. I’m less conversant with what eventually became his main series, Sibylline (1965-85), which was ostensibly geared more for girls (which is why I, stupidly, didn’t pay as much attention). Here, Macherot’s taste for the absurd occasionally broached the surreal and he clearly did some of his most imaginative work on this series, even if the later episodes are forgettable.

Sibylline was created for Tintin‘s more energetic and contemporary competitor, Spirou, to which Macherot moved in 1964. But he started out there with what is hailed amongst connoisseurs as his masterpiece, Chaminou et le Khrompire (1964). It is indeed his most sophisticated work. It features a secret agent cat in a traditional mystery tale, but it is almost acerbic in its satire of modern society and the spectre of war haunts the proceedings, as so often in Macherot’s work. Only one episode appeared, but it was later revived under lesser hands, with the creator supervising their work.

During the course of the 80s, Macherot gradually turned his attention to painting, but his legacy remains tied to these masterful fables, with their pessimist worldview, their wry humour and their high adventure. His comics live, despite what one might think upon entering a Parisian comics store…

Image from Chlorophylle et les conspirateurs (1956). The arch-villain Anthracite and his thugs suddenly have a mutiny on their hands…

Det lyder som en fornem løsning på den helt naturlige situation, at der måtte komme et generationsskifte i denne, en af de ældste og væsentligste institutioner i dansk tegneseriekultur. Rolf og Søren fortsætter i butikken nogen tid endnu og kan nu se frem til at se deres forretning videreført, også når de velfortjent trækker sig tilbage.

Jeg tænkte jeg ville skrive lidt om, hvor meget Fantask har betydet for mig, og for dansk tegneseriekultur, men har ikke det store at føje til den tekst jeg skrev i anledning af butikkens 30-årsjubilæum tilbage i 2001 (oprindeligt trykt i Rackham #4), så den bringes hermed i ganske let redigeret udgave.

Tillykke Rolf, Søren og Marit! Alt det bedste i fremtiden.

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“I en kælder sort som kul/aller dybest nede/lå en lille bitte biks/hvor man fyred’ fede”. Sådan lød åbningslinierne til en aldrig færdiggjort selskabssang i anledning af en af den københavnske tegneserieforretning Fantasks årlige firmafrokoster (læs: “den årlige julefrokost, der ikke holdes ved juletid og derfor ikke kan kaldes en julefrokost”). De citerede linier trak naturligvis deres veksler på biksens ‘alternative’ ophav i 70ernes første år. Billederne af det langhårede stifterpar i kælderåbningen er efterhånden blevet en del af dansk tegneseriehistories kanon. Og med god grund.

De to deltidshippier og universitetsdropouts ville nemlig andet end blot sidde og inhalere tossetobak. Rolf ‘Gespenstet’ Bülows forretningssnilde og stoiske overblik i forening med Søren ‘Praktiske Gris’ Pedersens viljestærke hyperdrive af et gå på-mod viste sig at være den rette formel for foretagendets usædvanlige sejlivethed. Grundpræmissen var fra starten at lave en rigtig biks — i ordets bedste forstand. Et sted interesserede mennesker kunne komme og få afløb for deres tendenser i kulørt retning, men også et sted der udviklede sit eget miljø, et sted man kunne få sig en sludder med ligesindede om alt fra de mest nørdede spidsfindigheder til tilværelsens store spørgsmål (I kid ye not!). Et sted med stemning. Til dette har en række ansatte i foretagendet bidraget på altafgørende vis — uden ‘Marvel’ Morten Søndergård, ‘Redaktør’ Mads Stoumann, ‘Boghandler’ René Tang (alias ‘Corben-varulven’) og alle de andre kendte ansigter, ville det ganske enkelt ikke have været det samme. Deres unikke personligheder har, i lighed med stifterne, sat sine uudslettelige præg på biksen, der i dag er verdens næstældste, stadig eksisterende tegneserieforretning.

Endvidere må det konstateres, at Fantask efterhånden er blevet et af branchens faste holdepunkter herhjemme — en bastion, der står for nogle afgørende værdier i det danske tegneserieland. Til trods for at de to Founding Fathers forlængst har taget ved lære af de gamle viisdomsord, “don’t get high off your own supply”, og nu fordriver fritiden med at spille henholdsvis kontrabas og golf, i stedet for at sidde med næsen begravet i en kulørt serie eller en fremtidsroman, har de ikke givet køb på ånden i forretningen. Det kan godt være, at personalet i biksen til en vis grad har mistet følingen med, hvad der sker på markedet i dag, men det er selvsagt helt naturligt og, hvad vigtigere er, så forsøger de at holde sig åbne. Og, i modsætning til visse andre danske seriepushere for hvem profitmaksimering i nuet synes at være både den største og eneste dyd og for hvem unge serieskaberes arbejder mest af alt forekommer at være et stadigt irritationsmoment, tildeles danske undergrundspublikationer i Fantask ofte hæderspladsen midt på disken, når de udkommer. Biksen har ikke glemt hvor den kommer fra.

Fantask er, til trods for en række fine konkurrenter og sine 30 år, stadig den suverænt bedste tegneserie- og science fictionforretning i Danmark og må betragtes som et eksempel til efterfølgelse. En institution i den danske serie- og SF-verden. Lad os hæve glassene for folkene bag. Bunde eller resten i håret!

Hayes was the whole package. A writer of great songs, especially the early sixties when he and co-writer David Porter provided Sam and Dave with their two biggest hits, “Soul Man” and “(Hold on) I’m Coming.” A fine instrumentalist, especially on the keyboard. But first and foremost he was a composer, arranger and producer, notable for taking often relatively banal material and crafting soul masterpieces from it. And then there was his voice. Though never a singer of great nuance, he brought a form of high pathos to his love songs that imbued the emotions expressed with an epic sense, without ever losing that loving feeling.

At the same time, he was one of the most iconic personifications of black power in music, not just in his self-styling — shaved head, sun glasses, bare chest bound in chains — but through the emancipatory expressive character of his almost symphonic arrangements. He could make a love song sound revolutionary by the intense conviction he brought to his performance. It’s no coincidence that he quickly earned — and came to embrace — the moniker Black Moses.

His music from the early 70s issued on the seminal Stax label and most of it recorded with the tightly-knit and edgy rhythm section of the Bar-Kays, represents a singular achievement in soul music. The eccentric debut Presenting Isaac Hayes (1967), the magnum opus Hot Buttered Soul (1969), the double codex of The Isaac Hayes Movement and … To Be Continued (both 1970), his signature soundtrack for the film Shaft (1971), and his live performance at the legendary WattStax concert in 1972 were instrumental in cracking open a hitherto rather restricted popular genre to a freer and much wider range of expressive possibility.

This is supremely exemplified by his covers of songs written by others. His versions of classics such as Jimmy Webb’s incontrovertible “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” Jerry and William Butler’s emphatic “I Stand Accused”, and Bill Withers’ gripping “Ain’t No Sunshine” are sprawling explorations of the raw material provided by the given words through compositions utterly transcending the pop standards to which they were originally written.

Most notable in this respect, however, were his renditions of several of Burt Bacharach’s most pristine pop songs, especially “Walk on By” and “The Look of Love” — polished and rather cheesy pop songs, which he turned into symphonic soul epics. Since the words were, in a sense, secondary, these recordings are of a piece with his own pieces of the time, not the least the excursional 20-minute manifesto “Do Your Thing” and the tune he is most famous for, the “Theme from Shaft”, which remains one of the enduring musical statements of black empowerment from that fraught, politicised era of outrage and optimism.

His subsequent recording career saw a waning of his musical prescience and an increasing reliance on manners derived from his early musical discoveries. It’s already apparent on the magnificently produced, but slightly overconceived double album Black Moses (1971), the energetic but fairly inconsequential Joy (1973), and the blaxploitation soundtracks Tough Guys and Truck Turner (both 1974). All of these records would be exceptionally strong had they come from almost any other artist, and they contain classic material, but following as they did the tour-de-force of his first years as a solo artist, they can’t help but underwhelm somewhat.

In the late 70s and beyond, he descended into disco and like so many of his peers — great and not so great — lost his way somewhat. But never mind, already established as a legend, he remained amongst the coolest cats of his generation until the very end, becoming something of a icon beyond the music. He was cool as The Duke in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), and he was cool as Chef in South Park (until his decidedly uncool departure from the show), and he remained a terrific live performer to the very end. Both times I’ve heard him live in concert were authoritative displays of both professionalism and presence, and especially his show at Roskilde in 1997 was an uplifting affirmation of the Power of Soul.

To paraphrase Ossie Davis’ famous words, Isaac Hayes was the living black manhood of soul music. His admonition at the end of “I Can’t Go to Sleep” (2000), the Wu-Tang Clan’s inspired re-configuration of his version of “Walk on By,” would have been fitting last words: “Don’t like the game, nigga use your head/ You should be callin’ the shots instead/ The power is in your hands/ Stop all this cryin’, and be a man.”

Photo: Hayes with Jesse jackson at WattStax.

This 2006 essay, posted here to supplement the review of the Spring 2008 Titian show in Venice, is an attempt, firstly, to analyze the loose finish of Titian’s late pictures as a natural development in his art with roots as far back as the beginning of his career, and, secondly, to provide a contemporary theoretical framework for it in order to assess its aesthetic implications for the cinquecento beholder.

There has been a lot of scholarly controversy surrounding the late Flaying of Marsyas, surely painted in the 1570s and now in the Episcopal palace in Kromeríz in the Czech Republic. Much of this has to do with whether it is finished or not, and whether the studio might have added to it and tried to finish it, in order to sell it, after Titian’s death. Now, the painting is signed “TITIANUS P” at the rock near the lower right corner, which — unless it was faked — shows that the master considered it a finished work. It has also been asserted that the painting is a modello of an earlier, lost composition, probably of the 1550s, preserved in a copy in a private collection in Venice. The signature itself makes this highly unlikely, as does the execution of the painting, as we shall see. It is, however, quite possible that the painting is based on a riccordo, or a lay-in, of the composition of the lost painting, taken up and finished in the last years of the master’s life, just as was presumably the case of other late pictures such as the Munich Crowning with Thorns and the Prado Saint John the Baptist. We know nothing about why it was painted. There is no record of a commission, but the signature indicates that it was dispatched. It is not impossible that it was made for the Spanish court or another part of the extended Imperial family or court.

Titian’s so-called ‘late style’ encompasses paintings of remarkably varying states of finish, even within individual pictures. This is apparent in the Marsyas. While it has been claimed that such finely detailed elements as Midas’ crown are posthumous additions by Titian’s assistants, made to finish an unfinished painting left by the master at his death and sell it off, it contains many areas where strongly varied states of finish are juxtaposed and belie this claim.

An alternative explanation is that he had an assistant specializing in these elements. This carries some weight in that the precision of certain details is crisper than other, similar details in Titian’s late work. There seems, for example, to be a similarity of handling between the jewellery worn by Lucretia in the Fitzwilliam Tarquin and Lucretia of 1569-1571, the still life elements in the Escorial Saint Jerome of the early 1570s, and the armour and helmet in the foreground of the 1572-75 Spain Coming to the Aid of Religion, as well as details of Pilate’s clothing and jewellery in the 1570s Saint Louis Ecce Homo.

An example of the high variety of finish of elements in the picture, surely painted by the master himself, is the finely glazed, richly coloured ribbon running off Apollo’s much less defined back and lower body — one of the most thinly applied areas of paint in the picture. While indeed of very low finish, the overlay of the clearly finished ribbon indicates that Titian did not mind the rough state of it. It should be noted that the left edge of the painting is damaged, which might at least partly account for the lack of definition of the forms along it. A similar juxtaposition to the one between the ribbon and body of Apollo occurs between the roughly executed hand of the small satyr holding the dog by its collar and the more detailed head of the dog, which is clearly finished with Titian’s characteristically pasty lead white highlights.

The thick strokes of yellowish white picking out the flowing locks of the god, as well as the modulations of green on his wreath are typical of Titian’s finish. Nothing could be added there. The fine build-up of the hand, from the rusty brown underdrawing to the thickly applied dabs of pink and white highlights, are similarly typical of the more detailed finish found in parts of many of Titian’s late paintings, such as Lucretia’s foot in the Tarquin and Lucretia, delivered to Philip II and thus surely finished, and a painting which has been held up by some scholars as an example of what a painting like the Marsyas would have looked like had it been finished by the master. Again, one does not have to point to the meticulously painted ring on Apollo’s finger to determine that this part of the painting has been brought to its final state of finish.

Though looser, the broad expanse of Marsyas’ flesh is also clearly finished. The tender pinkish area of flesh running from his navel towards his head is partly achieved by glazing the darker ground with pinkish colour. Care was taken to avoid this area when the more thickly applied strokes of warm yellowish brown, as well as some white, was applied in the surrounding areas afterwards. At some point, a brown glaze was also added to most of the chest area, accentuating the glow of the highlights and deepening the nuance. A similar strategy has been pursued in the rendering of the even looser, almost abstractly rendered patches of sky in the upper part of the painting. Why would Titian have taken such care glazing these areas if he intended to return to them later and “finish” them in the way of, say, the bedsheets of Lucretia?

As a matter of fact, even the Tarquin and Lucretia contains remarkably varied levels of finish; the legs and right foot of Tarquin are for example much looser and less defined than the faces of the protagonists, further displaying Titian’s differentiated approach to finish in this late part of his career. A good example of Titian’s less-is-more aesthetic at this point in his career, evident in both paintings, is his rendering of the blade of a knife. In both paintings, he simply applies a few strokes of thick lead white highlight to a black shape. Especially the blade of Apollo in the Marsyas shows his astonishing economy — a single white line running along a loosely applied black wedge. What more could be added there?

This development towards a looser handling of the brush and a more syncretistic use of colour, where individual elements tend to blend together through the loosening of contour and, at times, restricted colour range that at first glance may appear as almost monochromatic, strikes me as a completely natural development in Titian’s art, which as mentioned goes back to the earliest years of his career. While his works of the first three decades or so are generally bright and brilliant in colour range and demarcation of coloured areas (example from the Feast of Venus, 1518), their subtlety of colouristic modulation and bleed between individual areas is very similar to what we see in the later work. This approach originates at the time of his work with Giorgione and is related to Leonardo’s radical dissolution of contour, but is much less intellectual in its rationale and more varied in its execution.

The pittura a macchia — the thick application of paint Titian would become so famous for only came later. While Sebastiano del Piombo was already applying paint thickly in the first decade, for example in the highlights on the figures of the organ shutters executed for the church of San Bartolomeo in Rialto in 1510-11, Titian only really began doing it in this way in the early 1530s. Looking at copies and considering Aretino’s awestruck description of it from 1537, one gets the sense that the Saint Peter Martyr-altarpiece may have been executed very boldly, possibly with areas of thick macchie. In any case, Titian most likely painted the much smaller, but very boldly executed Saint John the Almsgiver in the early 1530s, and also probably did the thickly rendered New York Saint Sebastian, extracted from the Saint Nicholas-altarpiece, in the mid-1530s, showing that he was on the way to developing this aspect of his technique around this time.

Initially, this development seems bound up with Titian’s treatment of dramatic and pathos-filled scenes, of gigantesque figures, and of his channelling of Michelangelo in particular. He worked intensively with the heroic male nude in the 1540s especially, though the michelangelesque influence as such went back to such early works as the Jealous Husband in Padua of 1511 and the Averoldi Polyptych of 1519-22, and passed by the already mentioned John the Almsgiver, which recalls the majestic prophets of the Sistine ceiling. What we increasingly see in his work during the last three decades or so of his career is a gradual dissolution of the areas of colour in some of his paintings towards the kind of miasmic, all-permeating quality of colour seen in many of the late works, such as the poesie of the 1550s and early 1560s (such as the Rape of Europa, 1559), and especially the late canvases similar in character to the Marsyas, in which it at times becomes almost abstract. One of the first, large-scale instances of the full integration of the michelangelesque (and tintorettesque) figure and dramatic subject-matter is the Gesuiti Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, finished in 1557, in which the spiritual pathos is made palpable through the unified range of colour, with ample use of the kind of ‘dirty’ veneer so often seen in his later work, and the luminosity achieved partly through a dark ground, strong contrast, partly through the thick application of yellowish white in pertinent areas.

The representation of light is crucial. The painting of both natural and divine manifestations of it in Titian’s hands becomes an almost ontological endeavour. This is not the place to offer a detailed examination, but a comparison between what is probably his first major exploration of light, the Frari Assunta completed in 1518, and the representation of light in his late work, supremely exemplified by the San Salvatore Annunciation, finished 1566, will serve to illuminate how Titian’s approach to the phenomenon develops, and demonstrate how this development is one of painterly necessity.

Both pictures describe an irruption of divine light. The Assunta is clear in its articulation of both form and colour. The light, emanating from behind God the Father’s manta ray-like figure, bathes everyone in its glory, from the heavenly choir and the Virgin to the apostles below her, differing in intensity depending on how far it radiates from its source. Being a depiction of the moment of transcendence, this is central to the picture, which engages this premise on several different levels. The downward-radiating light is met by the Virgin’s rapturous upward movement towards the heavens — a movement between the earthly and the divine. She is at this moment of both worlds. Such devices as the apostle reaching towards the sky, barely strafing the heavenly cumulus clouds with his fingertips, and the at first glance rather awkwardly posed — but therefore memorable — putto whose foot almost touches the forehead of another of the apostles, further underscore the notion of transcendence being within us, and therefore of both worlds. Central however, is the sphere of golden, divine light framing the Virgin, which reconfigures the traditional golden mosaic backgrounds of Byzantine imagery through pigment. Possibly inspired by Raphael’s Foligno Madonna (c. 1511-?), this device becomes the very embodiment of transubstantiation in Titian’s hands, in that he has the fleshy angelic choir emerge ever so subtly from it — light becoming flesh through the physical agent of paint.

Titian returns to this device on several occasions through his career, the most notable being the Gloria sent to Charles V in 1554, and the lost early 1530s Annunciation for the convent at Muraro, which provided the basic template for the San Salvatore Annunciation in which it reaches its zenith. For this treatment of the quintessential scene of divine incarnation, the effect is palpably physical because of the way it is rendered in not just colour, but paint. Titian’s handling itself has become part of the point. Calling attention to itself, it engages the viewer’s senses and reflection simultaneously. While the Assunta is more illusionistic in that it, though sensually painted, does not openly show off its artifice, the San Salvatore Annunciation rather than attempting to represent nature, unabashedly replaces it with art.

The notion of the artist replacing sensed nature with a higher nature of his own, his art, was important in Renaissance aesthetics. Most contemporary criticism of art — be it Giorgio Vasari, Paolo Pino, Lodovico Dolce, or Pietro Aretino — stresses the importance for the artist of staying true to nature, but this is never meant in strictly mimetic terms. A famous example is Vasari’s account of how Donatello fashioned a wooden crucifix and was admonished by his friend Brunelleschi for having made Christ look like a peasant, entirely inappropriate for the representation of the body of Christ, which should rather be “…highly refined, and in all respects the most perfect human being that ever lived.” This sentiment is echoed throughout the literature on art of the period, but its precursory example is Pliny’s story of Zeuxis painting the ideal woman on the basis of a number of live models. Pure imitation was generally dismissed as insufficient for achieving the ultimate goal of art: beauty. What was emphasized, ultimately, is the individual artist’s interpretation of nature through his creative genius. It is through this faculty that the artist brings out the ideal truths in nature and thus replaces the imperfection of the sensed world around us with a creation of a higher order, a nuova natura.

Further demonstrating the emphasis on individual genius, the notion that artists would invariably produce images of themselves had generally become acknowledged as a truism in the Cinquecento, where it was condensed into the popular aphorism “ogni dipintore dipinge se” — every painter paints himself — and became essential to Leonardo’s theory of art. For many critics, and certainly for Leonardo, painting was essentially regarded as automimetic — self-representing — without it compromising the quest for truth and beauty in art. At the core of the understanding of art was therefore the creating subject, which consequently also made the appreciation of art a fundamentally subjective endeavour. Although the problem of normative aesthetic judgments versus completely subjective relativism was no less present than it is today, the subjective nature of aesthetic judgment was acknowledged by almost all critics in the period.

In this context, the most famous example is the description in Vasari of how Titian’s mature works “… are executed with such large and bold brushstrokes and in such broad outlines that they cannot be seen from close up but appear perfect from a distance.” And further that “… it is obvious that his paintings are reworked and that he has gone back over them with colours many times, making his effort evident. And this technique, carried out in this way, is full of good judgement, beautiful, and stupendous, because it makes the pictures not only seem alive but to have been executed with great skill concealing the labour.” While the active participation of the beholder is true of any work of art, what is here recognised is the role of not just the senses, but the subjective dispositions of the beholder herself in looking at art. Additionally, it is pointed out how Titian’s art provokes a particularly cogent reaction in the contemporary beholder because it, through its style, calls special attention to the subject who painted it.

That Titian was acutely conscious of his personal style is indicated by an anecdote told by Imperial ambassador Antonio Pérez in 1603, recounting the visit of Charles V to Titian’s studio in 1553. Asked why he painted so broadly and thickly, Titian answered: “I am not confident of achieving the delicacy and beauty of the brushwork of Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio and Parmagianino; and if I did, I would be judged with them, or else be considered to be an imitator. But ambition, which is as natural in my art as in any other, urges me to choose a new path to make myself famous, much as the others acquired their own fame from the way that they followed.” While the authenticity of the anecdote cannot be verified, it at least shows the awareness of how personal this style was in the late 16th Century, and in any case corresponds well with the development we see in Titian’s work in the latter part of his career.

The paragone he himself invokes with the greatest Northern and Central Italian masters is not only instructive when trying to understand his self-reflexivity, but, in the case of Michelangelo especially, provides an illuminating counterpoint to his approach to finish in the last decades of his life. Michelangelo left behind an extraordinary number of high-profile unfinished works (example: The Fourth Captive, 1530-33). With the exception of Leonardo, this was unprecedented in the Renaissance, where great importance was almost universally attached to finish, even by Michelangelo himself who, according to his biographer Ascanio Condivi, disapproved of Donatello’s often rough finish. In the case of Leonardo, who was notorious for leaving his works incomplete, it is clear that the many incomplete works left behind were indeed unfinished for practical or technical reasons, whereas with Michelangelo this is much less obvious. Leaving aside the complex discourse on inconsistent patronage, over-ambitious projects, and notions of the artist’s personal aesthetic and temperament, the fact remains that Michelangelo through his many unfinished works was the prime contributor to a new aesthetic of the creative process. As had been the case with Leonardo, it is furthermore clear that Michelangelo’s non-finito quickly became associated with his personality and particular artistic genius.

According to the account in Vasari, Michelangelo abandoned such a large number of works because he recognized that he would not be able to bring them to perfection. While obviously hagiographic, this still to an extent rings true when one considers his propensity for taking on impossible projects like the Tomb of Julius II, as well as the works themselves which often reveal ambitions on the part of the artist that the blocks cannot concede him, and just as often exhibit constant revisions. The passage also resonates well with Michelangelo’s famous sonnet, “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto…,” stating that the block contains every potentiality the artist’s creative intellect can conceive. Adding to the picture of Michelangelo’s reflection on these issues are the opening lines of one of his madrigals, postscripted “for sculptors”, which, coinciding with the notion of automimesis, states that the ideas of the artist already rest within the marble, waiting to be seized and liberated. Whether the act of creation fulfils a potential or realizes a pre-existing idea, it seems clear that Michelangelo thought in terms of some kind of projection of his self into the form exterior to him. Into the Other.

The non-finito of Titian’s ‘late style’ arises out of the same essential issue of self-projection. The absolute control of the brush and the utter self-confidence evidenced by his late work is testament to an artist who had reached and mastered a profoundly personal idiom. Like Michelangelo’s, it is one where the creative process becomes an essential and obvious part of the work as it appears to the beholder. This process further shares with Michelangelo a pattern of constant revision and change, not the least in late works such as the Marsyas and the National Gallery Death of Actaeon, both of which contain many pentimenti (ie. revisions). There are however crucial differences between Titian’s and Michelangelo’s non-finito.

There is a famous letter to Titian from Aretino of 1545 where the poet describes the sunset over the Gran Canal as seen from his window. Summoning the full range of his poetic language, Aretino likens what he sees in nature to a painting by Titian, lamenting that the master was not there to see it and transpose it into paint. Throughout, Aretino emphasizes the modulation of colour and dwells on transient and ephemeral phenomena such as clouds and atmospheric distortion of colour, even going as far as to describe how houses of stone appear to him as if unreal in the evening light. This indicates his understanding of the evanescent quality of Titian’s work and his non-finito, as opposed to the widely accepted Tuscan finito. It also reflects the difference in general conception of nature between the two regions, where the Central Italians, roughly put, conceived of nature as Natura naturata — statically created by God — the Venetians saw it as Natura naturans — a living organism in constant flux. Titian’s non-finito should be seen in this light. Where Michelangelo’s seems to arise from a recognized inability to give the original idea form and thus complete the work, Titian’s emerges from an intuitive attention to the life of the work on the artist’s part, acquired through a life-long engagement with it. One essentially remains forever unfinished, while the other is perpetually in a state of creation.

Aretino already seems to have recognized this in 1542. In a letter of that year, sent to the Novarese architect Giambattista Torniello, probably on Titian’s behalf, in answer to complaints about lack of care in the now lost Nativity altarpiece made for the Cathedral of Novara, which the confraternity had sent back to the master for correction, he writes that if Titian put his hand back on the panel, as they wished, the work would end up “more like a miniature than a painting” contrasting excessive meticulousness with proper painting. Titian’s eye and great experience had taught him when to stay his hand. When to stop.

This is the reason there is such a variety of finish in much of Titian’s work, especially in the last decade and a half or so. If we are to trust his paintings, it seems that he had a very process-oriented approach to them. This is borne out by Palma Giovane’s famous description of the master at work, as relayed by Marco Boschini in 1674, where we learn how Titian would leave his roughly laid-in paintings facing the wall for long periods of time before returning to them and fleshing them out, imbuing them with life, animating them through glazing, blending and dabbing, often using his fingers directly. It should be added that this overtly romanticising description, written many years after the fact, has to be read with caution, but its description of both the process and the build-up of the paintings corresponds well to what we know of, and can infer about, Titian’s late works. Considering these sources while scrutinizing the wide variety of finish in the late paintings reveals to us a mercurial creative process where a painting was finished when it was finished, so to speak. It was a question of Gefühl. Beyond a certain point where the essentials were still lacking, such as in the lira at the lower right in the Metropolitan Venus, and possibly also that of the Fitzwilliam one, both of the early 1560s, this could occur anywhere between the looseness of the Marsyas and the relative polish of the Tarquin and Lucretia.

We do, of course, have unfinished paintings from the final years. The prime example is the Munich Crowning with Thorns, which we are fairly sure was left in the studio at the master’s death and which Palma, via Boschini, described as unfinished. The undefined boy carrying the hooks at the extreme right is markedly less defined than the loosely rendered figures at the left of the Marsyas, and should probably be considered unfinished. But apart from that, the rest of the painting is probably very close to finished. The same goes for the cuirass at the lower left of the Hermitage Saint Sebastian, which was possibly awaiting treatment at the hand of the “still-life painter” in the workshop. It is, however, inconceivable that either of these works were ever intended to look like the Tarquin and Lucretia or other similarly polished pictures of the period. This would simply require too much work antithetical to what had already been put down to achieve.

It should be noted that the remarkable loosening up of Titian’s style during the last decade or so of his career probably at least partly arose out of necessity. He must surely have experienced a deterioration of his eyesight with old age that could only be partly offset through the use of the spectacles he would probably don when picking out details and final highlights of his compositions with a fine brush. There are several contemporary sources that indicate that this was the case, chief amongst them the account in Vasari, in which Titian’s natural faculties are described as being in decline by the time of writing. This is a curious contradiction of the earlier defence of Titian’s contemporary, loose style, which I have already quoted in part.

Charles Hope has suggested that this might be indicative of his theory that parts of the Lives where ghostwritten by Vasari’s literary associates and were not always checked for consistency. While this is an interesting and generally probably correct hypothesis, I do not think it applies in this case. As we have seen, we have documentation going back to at least the early 1540s that Titian’s loose handling caused consternation. Even Aretino himself was taken somewhat aback by the boldness of execution in the portrait Titian painted of him in 1545 and admonished his friend for it in a letter. It is likely that Vasari was making a distinction between this earlier work and what he saw in Titian’s studio when he visited him there in 1566.

Titian’s art is one of synthesis. As we have seen, this synthesis emerges from a conflation of signifier and signified — what we see irrupt from the heavenly breach in the Annunciation is simultaneously light and paint. That this synthesis extends to the more cerebral level of iconography and narrative content in the picture is only natural. The very facture of the paint and the way it is applied to the canvas is constituent of this depiction of the moment of incarnation. Titian is not merely representing but creating one of the archetypical instances in Christian theology of the synthesis of high and low, Man and God. It is one of his supreme statements on a theme that permeates all of his work, and indeed most Renaissance art.

Formulated through Plato’s sundering gesture, the notion of the ideal and the real, which is so central to Western culture and significantly permeates the soul-body dichotomy vital to Christian faith and thought, became the object of renewed focus in the Renaissance, where it was challenged by the new, radical understanding of the autonomous subject as the epicentre of reality. With roots in contemporary synthetic reconfigurations of Platonism and Christianity, as well as new understandings of Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, a new discourse on the subject emerged, of which Titian’s art constituted a natural but highly original part.

In charting the development of Titian’s treatment of the theme, it is instructional once again to go back to the time when he painted the Assunta. A few years earlier, probably in 1514 or 1515, he painted the so-called Sacred and Profane Love, which is now in the Borghese collection in Rome. The object of much scholarly controversy, this painting was commissioned to commemorate the marriage between secretary to the Council of Ten Niccolò Aurelio, whose escutcheon is painted on the front of the well, and Laura Bagarotto, and thus surely comments on that marriage. Many theories have been advanced in defiance of the canonical one by Erwin Panofsky, which is still by far the most convincing. In these times when there is a tendency to take away from Titian too high a level of reflection and iconographic sophistication, one does well to remember a painting such as this one, and by extension to keep in mind that although he did not read Latin, he was part of a social circle of prominent intellectuals throughout his life and by all accounts held his own among them. One of these was the prominent Neo-Platonist Pietro Bembo, who was a life-long friend of him as well as of Aurelio, and who could very well have been directly influential on the picture’s iconography.

Panofsky holds that the two women — who despite various scholarly efforts to assert the contrary are obviously twins — are twin Venuses. One, the nude, divine; the other, richly clothed, natural. That is, two different embodiments of the same basic principle. The concept stretches back to Plato, was employed by Pliny, appeared in different configurations throughout the Middle Ages, and was reactualised in the Quattrocento by Marsilio Ficino and the Neo-Platonists. In Ficino’s Christian interpretation, the Heavenly Venus is the divine intelligence of what he calls the ‘Angelic mind,’ while the Earthly one embodies the power of procreation in the ‘World soul.’ The former embraces divine splendour, while the latter transfers that splendour into the world where, according to their receptivity, the bodies of the world come to be beautiful to the human soul, as it perceives them sensually. We have in us both aspects — one recognizes and worships beauty as it appears to us, while the other induces in us the desire to procreate that beauty.

The pool in the basin can be seen as the pool of Venus with Cupid agitating the waters to have the two principles flow together in this synthesis. That Titian’s understanding of the allegorical conception of the image runs deeper than the mere presentation of the salient elements becomes evident when one examines the composition further. The fact that the Divine Venus looks across to her Earthly twin made Panofsky construe the scene as a dialogue; and while the composition of the painting is clearly dialogical, in the sense that it unifies and balances two positions across a frontal field, the Earthly Venus, however, not only does not look back at her twin, but seems entirely oblivious to her presence. This makes sense when one reads Ficino’s account of the Heavenly embracing beauty and the Earthly promulgating it in the physical world. Central to his argument is the ascension of the human spirit, in the pursuit of divine love, from the physical towards the unity that is God. The physical becomes a gateway to higher things, which in the painting accounts for the typically titianesque outward gaze of the earthly Venus. In meeting our gaze, she — who is closer to our basic level of consciousness — invites us in, so we, through her, can set out on the higher road, whose embodiment is glancing back at us, waiting at the right.

At the same time, the painting is acutely sensual. From the verdant landscape and magnificently evocative late afternoon sky to the precious materiality of the containers on the rim of the pool, and the crystal clear water stirred by the hand of Cupid, the scene is simultaneously vividly sensual and coolly exalted and timeless. And witness such subtle painterly details as the light, undulating dashes of ginger that evoke hair caressing skin, or the sensual depiction of a bare foot sinking into a bed of moist grass. The composition appeals to our senses, but only enough to allow us to fully contemplate its ideal beauty.

There is a third love in Ficino’s cosmology, the bestial, which is a form of insanity, where Man changes to beast — a part of human nature that is detrimental to divine ascension and must be transcended. In Titian, what could be described as the painterly equivalent of bestial love, the purely physical, plays an important role. This is not the least the case in the Sacred and Profane Love; Panofsky, for one, sees the unbridled horse and the violent beating shown in the relief on the front of the basin as representative of this level of consciousness. Set in stone, it has no place in the warm-blooded but sublime synthesis prompted by the stirring of the fresh water, and the hierarchic look of love instigated by the twin Venuses, but it is nevertheless present as a physical intermediary between the two higher forms of love.

Titian’s painting, which invariably straddles the gap of sensuality and closeness to nature and idealization, is here put in service of a theme dealing with the synthesis of real and ideal. There is nothing unusual about this in itself — most Renaissance art deals with this dichotomy on some level, but Titian’s synthesis of the two and its development through his career is both unique and profound. Returning to the Marsyas provides some indication of why. The subject is a fusion of two different myths recounted by Ovid, involving Apollo winning a musical contest against a feral opponent. One is that of Marsyas, who, having found a flute left by Athena, challenged Apollo to a musical duel. Apollo, playing his lyre, won and punished Marsyas for his impudence by skinning him alive, and Marsyas’ blood flowed together with the tears of his people creating the river Marsyas. The other is that of Pan similarly challenging Apollo and winning by the erroneous judgment of Midas, who grew ass’s ears as a consequence of his foolish decision.

While the subject of the painting is easily identifiable, the meaning, intended or otherwise, of the iconographical configuration remains, as befits Titian, ambiguous. But returning to the ideas of the Neo-Platonists and Titian’s treatment of them in the Sacred and Profane Love provides us with an interesting starting point. For Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and other Neo-Platonists of the Florentine Academy, the myth of Marsyas had in the 16th century broadly came to be understood as an allegory of purification and liberation of the soul. Marsyas, half beast, becomes a lucid figuration of the split in Man between bestial and divine. A follower of Bacchus, he as mentioned played the flute, which had long been regarded as a lower instrument, appealing to the uncontrollable, instinctual side of Man. His defeat by Apollo, who played the more sophisticated lyre, an instrument regarded as playing the music of divine order, thus became an allegory of the relative power of Dionysian and Apollonian values, the subsequent flaying being a rite to rid Marsyas of his bestial side — accentuated as it is in the painting by the apocryphal, bloodthirsty dogs (simultaneously reflective of Titian’s humour) — to liberate him from the cage of his body and release his soul to ascend toward the divine. The cosmological significance of music in this context is apparent in the painting. Playing his lira da braccio with his lips parted in song, the musician : sometimes, surely incorrectly, identified as Apollo, sometimes as Orpheus, which makes some sense though I will not go into that here — accompanies the rite with music reflecting divine harmony.

The painting carries deep Christian connotations, the most obvious being the Crucifixion and the concomitant release and ascension of the soul. Marsyas, though he can clearly be seen as a prefiguration of Christ, is however more deeply steeped in carnal reality than Christ is usually considered to be. Titian seems to acknowledge this by hanging him upside-down. This brings to mind the crucifixion of Peter, the most humane and fallible of the apostles, which corresponds well with the physical, profane nature of the composition. Titian has made the figure of Marsyas the central axis of the painting, placing his navel at its centre. He can thus be seen as an inversion of the Vitruvian Man — as most famously depicted by Leonardo — becoming the imperfect man at the centre of all things. In the opening paragraphs on the creation of Man in his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man, written c. 1486, Pico della Mirandola describes how God placed Man in the centre of the world in order for him to better observe it and fashion himself in relation to it. Neither of heaven nor earth, Man is bestowed the free will to both degenerate into the lower, brutish forms of life there, or through the judgement of his soul, to be reborn into divine form.

The insistence on the physical in the painting is incontrovertible. If Titian merely wanted to show Marsyas being freed from his mortal coils to soar towards the heavens, one would think the emphasis on his suffering would have been less visceral. Far from stoically accepting his transfiguration, as some scholars have suggested, Marsyas is depicted as an animal in the throes of death, beyond the point of resistance. His smouldering glare, tellingly directed at us — the beholders — seems acutely observed. It is the dark, empty stare of mortally wounded deer seconds before its life expires. It is perhaps Titian’s most relentless, moving, and real rendering of suffering. The painting is a powerful rumination on the bestial side of human nature. Like the very physical agony of Christ’s Passion, Marsyas is simultaneously suffering the reality of existence and ascending to a higher place. The painting — and Titian’s art in general — is a representation of human aspiration, but also of the physical as a condition of that aspiration, and of the bestial as an inextricable part of it.

The ideas articulated by Pico are true on an even more basic level in Titian’s art, however, and especially in his late work, where it reaches its most profound. The present canvas thus goes further towards achieving the synthesis promised by Sacred and Profane Love through its complex and rich amalgamation of artifice: from the wild, almost abstractly suggested sylvan setting, with a riverbank immediately behind the figures, to details such as the splendid, dark purple mantle that runs over Apollo’s back and gently brushes against the ground beneath him — it is very telling that Titian, who often interpreted his sources freely, picked up on this detail, which is vividly described in Ovid. Most remarkable, however, is the rich, deep conglomeration of tone in the torso of Marsyas. Nature has been replaced with something man-made, but equally live. Acutely sensual, this appeals to us not only visually, but to our senses in general, and especially the baser one of touch. It reminds us of our bodies, of our physicality. Congenially monochromatic and dissolute, all figuration in a picture such as this emerges from the same clay. It is an acknowledgment of reality, not unlike the one implied by Leonardo’s sfumato, were we, as beings, are inextricably incarnate in the middle of the world and it is impossible to precisely say where one thing ends and another begins. This is the condition of our existence and Titian’s painting emphasizes it: where Michelangelo’s empty, flayed hide in the hands of St. Bartholomew in the Last Judgment is expressive of a self-aware, emphatic hope for and belief in transcendence, Marsyas is here separated from the skin usually considered to constitute the boundary between us and the surrounding world, only to reveal the throbbing, physical artifice from which he was created.

It is in this engagement with the material world of which he is part that the artist creates. Through his free will, man creates art. Partially congenial to Neo-Platonic ideas of the propagation of love, the Leonardean notion of automimesis holds that the creation of art is an act of love, as the artist creates something true to himself. The creation of beauty is a reproduction of one’s own inner beauty, a projection of the love innate to the subject. But where Leonardo stresses the importance of observation, of external mimesis coupled with logic, the notion of mimesis developed by Titian seems to stem from the recognition of the body as the basis of any transcendental aspiration. In imitating nature, the artist is imitating himself. He simultaneously observes reality around his immediate physical form and projects his self into it, asserting it as his own while regarding it as an Other.

We have seen how Titian’s self-assertive late style is inherently meta-reflexive — the work reflects its own creation. The Marsyas furthermore seems to extend this into the dissolute figuration itself. The contemplative Midas, often seen to be a self-portrait of the artist — can be seen as an figural embodiment of this reflection, while the figure of Apollo vividly recalls Palma’s and Boschini’s account of the master at work, scrupulously moulding the pigment with his hands. His hands concentrated at the richest concentration of colour on the canvas — an area in which Titian possibly used his fingers to smoothen the edges of the brushstrokes and make the colours coalesce — Apollo’s does, upon further scrutiny, not solely seem as an act of destruction, but also one of creation, of love even. This interpretation becomes even more poignant when comparing the picture with the late Pietà, now in the Accademia in Venice. Intended by Titian as the adornment of his own tomb, first in the Church of the Frari, and subsequently probably for the family chapel in his hometown of Pieve di Cadore, this painting is a solemn devotional statement which provides a resonant contrast to the exalted, but grisly Marsyas.

The analogies between Marsyas and Christ have already been touched upon and account well for the similarities in composition. Representing as they both do a moment of transcendence, the paintings approach the issue of incarnation in similar, yet quite different ways. While Marsyas, as explained, is mired in the physical, his exposed flesh densely rendered with tender carnality, the body of Christ — painted with equally abstract, but less smooth touch — is almost ephemeral, as if dissolving into the Lux mundi emanating from within it. Where the Marsyas is a still, almost stifling scene of contemplative horror, the Pietà is open and airy while covering the extremes, being simultaneously a scene of outrage and peace. This makes for quite different end results; while the two pictures are in a way equally sombre, the Pietà carries with it a more explicit promise of resurrection and redemption.

The Pietà clearly must have become a personal painting for Titian. It was initiated in agreement with the confraternity of the Frari, but was, as mentioned, meant for his personal tomb. Just as is the case with the Marsyas, Titian emphasizes his personal stake in the Pietà by inserting himself into it. In addition to the ex-voto propped against the base of the statue of the Hellespontine Sibyl — which shows him and his son Orazio kneeling before the Virgin and the dead Christ, probably in a petition of succour against the plague raging in Venice at the time, which would shortly claim both their lives — the figure of the penitent St. Jerome prostrate before the body of Christ is generally accepted as a self-portrait by the artist. When compared with the Marsyas, the mirror-like parallels between this figure and that of Apollo become apparent.

The Pietà is likely Titian’s ultimate gesture of devotion and plea for forgiveness, while the Marsyas seems to provide further insight into the nature of that plea. The God Apollo, prostrate before tormented Man, is also the artist before the canvas, and thus Man before Christ. By nature, the automimetic creation of art is analogous God’s creation of Nature and Man in his own image, which was the central conceit of any artist working in the period. In addition to whatever human failings Titian might ask forgiveness for, these paintings are addressing the hubris of his — the artist’s — creative acts. The punishment Marsyas received for his hubris ultimately led to transcendence, as well as to the creation of the clearest river in Phrygia, showing that suffering and transcendence are continuous. This is the truth that Titian’s art reveals to us — like God, man is continuously creating his world.

Other writings on Titian at the Metabunker: Late Titian in Venice, Incarnations (Titian in Vienna), Titian — The Last Act (Titian in Belluno), Titian Country (Pieve di Cadore), The Gilding’s Titian (newly discovered portrait), Prototype or Parallel? (on a perennial problem of connoisseurship

I was first introduced to the idea of the roleplaying game by a good friend who was not only more streetwise than I, but had an older brother and through him a bunch of hoodlum-in-the-making big friends that also happened to enjoy imaginary worlds. What they were doing at this time was edgy, not nerdy. I simply didn’t get how all this was possible, but it sounded cool. So he invited me along to one of their D&D sessions, as an onlooker and -listener, and that was all I needed — everything clicked. The very next day in school, I drew up a map of a fantasy world in imitation of the one I’d seen the night previous and recruited a bunch of my friends as players to my gamemaster, establishing the pattern of most of my roleplaying since then.

Over the next few years, we each took turns inventing our own worlds and involving each other in them. There was a lot of dice-rolling hack’n slash, kill-the-monster-get-the-treasure type stuff going on, of course, but we very quickly realised how the possibilities were defined by our imaginations and nothing else. At this point, we didn’t even play according to a game system, but just made things up as we went along. Much to both the frustration of our teachers — we were literally playing in class — but for the same reason also to their relief — we weren’t being pests doing it. If they left us alone in the back, we were more than happy to entertain ourselves, so they didn’t have to.

This was the time when concerned parents and religious nuts on both sides of the pond were voicing the inevitable concerns — back with a vengeance today — that we children might get lost in our imaginary worlds and no longer be able to tell them apart from hard-knock reality, eventually worshipping Satan, burning down our houses and killing our families, as had allegedly happened somewhere in the States. Although I interviewed the Evangelical spearhead of these concerns in Denmark — a rather nice, but terribly serious man — for a school radio project, I never quite understood it. To me, it was always about seeing reality in a different way, letting your imagination loose on it and finding in it images and stories. And roleplaying was as much an education as what was, or was not, going on in school.

The following decades, through high school, idling days, military service and college, my roleplaying activities played a central role in building my interest for the world around me and its history. It was through roleplaying that I came to look into such things as the geography of Norway, modern Indian history, the Russian spirit world, the city planning of old Copenhagen, the native populations of the Pacific Islands, life in Victorian London, and, even initially, the Italian Renaissance, which has now, as I write this, once again brought me to a Venice shrouded in fog. True magic.

Roleplaying — tabletop as well as live — created a carefree environment for the channeling of my interests in world-building, the creation of fictional characters, storytelling and even acting. To me, it remains one of the ultimate immersive experiences for challenging your imagination, as well as an ideal common ground for social interaction with peers. It’s basically a damn good time with friends and strangers alike.

Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax’ co-creation, arrived in our circle a year or so into our lives as roleplayers. A friend was given the red Basic Set (Levels 1-3) as a gift. The one with the great Larry Elmore illo on the box cover, of a viking-type hero, back turned, sword drawn, fighting a huge, red dragon hoarding glittering treasure. Although I would eventually come to recognize the flaws of the level-based system of D&D, the promise held in that box, with all its freakish monsters and strange lands, remains a stirring memory to this day.

This was the concept: as you advanced through your gaming experience, you achieved greater capabilities and knowledge. Although I’m not sure it was Gygax’ idea — I think he’d left TSR, the game company he’d founded, at this point — the advancement scheme of the game was at this point in time ordered, commercially, into a number of individual gaming ‘sets’ that each revealed more about the gaming world and its principles as you went along.

We only got as far as the blue Expert Set (levels 4-14) before graduating to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which was basically the same game but with oodles more information available at once and a presentation that made more sense. It still retained the ordering of your gaming life into ‘levels’ attained through the accumulation of ‘experience points’, however. Though I definitely tired of this rather restrictive and unconvincing structuring principle, I still recognise that it somehow provides a perhaps crude but nevertheless poignant summation of man’s search for insight — Platonic, Buddhist, the lot — and is, as such, quite a beautiful conceit.

Beyond the blue set were the green Companion Set (levels 15-25) and the black Master’s Set (levels 26-36). As mentioned, we never managed to venture that far before leaving D&D, and eventually also AD&D, behind for other systems and ways of roleplaying, but I still remember imagining how it would surely take a lifetime of playing to reach level 36, beyond which apparently lay a kind of demigodhood, the distant, incomprehensible order of which was sketched out in the gilded Immortals Set. Following his own logic, I would kind of like to think that Gygax has now arrived there.

Thanks Gary, you made worlds of difference.

Gygax Obits: The New York Times, game designer Monte Cook, Wired, Tom Spurgeon. Also, check this 2004 interview. Photo from Associated Press.

Comics are both an affirmation of something old and an offer of something new in art. During the early modern era in Europe, comics became separated from the ancient narrative and pictorial practices to which they belong and with industrialization, and modernity they began a new, turbulent life as one of popular culture’s most obstinate bastard children. This existence outside the perimeter of high culture relegated comics to a relatively limited range of expression and genres, which they however cultivated in a way that ensured their survival as an independent and powerful art form. At the same time, comics served as one of the most fertile hibernation grounds for figuration and archetypical narration in times when these were having difficult times in high culture. Although the distance between them has always been short and it has been a long time coming, we have in recent years been seeing a confluence of comics and fine art so pronounced that the traditionally rather clear boundaries between them will have to be re-positioned, if not eliminated altogether. Not surprisingly, this all leads to highly interesting new work.

This development is part of a more comprehensive one that Western comics are undergoing at present. In the past few decades, the changes introduced by the countercultural American underground of the 1960s — in the exhibition represented by one of its central practitioners, Robert Crumb — and European adult comics of the 1970s, have spawned a second and a third generation of comics creators who no longer perceive themselves as being in opposition to a narrow tradition of humorous and genre narratives. To these younger artists, comics are a completely natural choice as a means of expressing whatever they wish. The present landscape of comics is thus characterized by an unprecedented diversity, both in terms of expression and choice of subject matter. You can find anything from journalistic reportage and travel journals to biography, historically derived fiction, realistic depictions of contemporary life and fantastic, lyrical pictorial sequences. You can find frivolous humour and self-searching reflection, exquisite irony and existential seriousness, experimental formalism and dark social satire, political commentary and philosophical essays.

This whole development can be seen as the result of a typical, Darwinistic evolve-or-die scenario. The territory occupied by comics for more than a century and a half as a popular mass medium — in stapled as well as squarebound format, and in newspapers and magazines — is strongly reduced today, not just quantitatively but, more importantly, in terms of cultural significance and impact. This is not to say that the days of comics as a mass medium are numbered; a considerable number of newspaper strips are, after all, still read daily by hundreds of thousands of readers, and the great Japanese comics tradition is now becoming a presence to be reckoned with in Western publishing, with the next generations of readers and artists — the children — as its most important, but by no means only customers. But at the same time, Western comics are coming into their own as a diverse and versatile art form and as a high-culture medium — roughly a century after their younger relative, cinema.

In recent years, many of these new “high-culture” comics have been marketed by publishers under the somewhat misleading generic term “graphic novels.” This usually designates comics published in book form and aimed at an adult audience. However, these works are rarely “novels in the form of comics” or a revival of Classics Illustrated, but unmistakably comics. The symbiosis of narrative image and text offered by the medium make possible forms of expression that are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in other media, and this is made evident by many of these new comics. At the same time, however, they are often concerned with subjects that have traditionally been the domain of literature and other narrative media. Put simply, the new developments in comics over the past ten or twenty years can therefore be said to have tended toward the ‘literary,’ rather than the ‘pictorial.’

There are several reasons for this, and understanding them calls for a certain familiarity with the formal characteristics and history of comics. Comics have always been a predominantly narrative medium, and it is therefore natural that the exploration of their pictorial potential by many of the contemporary innovators has been conducted primarily on narrative terms. In this respect, artists such as David B. and Kevin Huizenga, included in this exhibition, have taken comics in entirely new directions. The images of David B’s autobiographical masterpiece L’Ascension du Haut Mal (1996-2003, eng. Epileptic) serve as a symbolic-allegorical mapping of his inner life and self-fashioning against the backdrop of his brother’s epilepsy, all of which is anchored by the straightforward, unassuming prose he uses to narrate the facts. Huizenga’s pictures are more prosaic, while at the same time often containing allegorical meaning, and he occasionally foregoes causal sequentiality in favour of impressionistic juxtapositions of images, and from time to time, he employs such visual storytelling strategies as the frame-within-a-frame in order to convey complex ideas about our experience of time.

What these two artists have in common, however, is that their imagery is always simplified and clearly legible — as is Crumb’s, incidentally. They work within the classical tradition of cartooning, making use of the pictorial and narrative conventions developed in comics over the past hundred and fifty years — since the Swiss cartoonist and author Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846) in the years between 1833 and 1845 published seven extraordinary comics albums and if not invented, then more or less established the formal language of modern comics. This was all a development of a much older tradition of caricature and a direct offshoot of the popular prints of the time. Amongst the central characteristics of this approach to drawing is a clear, actively assertive use of contour and an iconically simplified representation of reality. This tradition has always constituted the main track in the development of comics and newspaper cartoons, forming an anti-mimetic counterpoint to the developments in fine art through the modern era, from the Renaissance on. A popular, low-culture pictorial tradition that seeks to condense and typify, rather than to describe and specify.

This pictorial style was developed to serve the purpose of storytelling. Because it eschews naturalism, it is well suited to depict the passage of time, not just from panel to panel, but within the individual panel. Thus action and reaction, or the questions and answers of a conversation, can be shown within the same panel without causing confusion. This form of “elastic” time is much rarer in, for example, painting than in comics, where it usually occurs in almost every panel. Furthermore, the formal language of cartooning easily incorporates idiomatic symbols such as speed lines, flying beads of sweat, or smelly serpentines that would invariably seem out of place in a more naturalistically founded image.

All of this does not mean that more naturalistic styles have not frequently been used in comics. A distinguished illustrative tradition exists within the medium, modelled on classical illustration and, through that, on the images of the Renaissance tradition. Even so, the best draughtsmen working in this tradition — artists such as Hal Foster (1892-1982), Alex Raymond (1909-1956), Milton Caniff (1907-1988), Jijé (1914-1980) and Jean Giraud (born 1938) — have always to varying extents adapted their pictures to the representation of time demanded by their sequential narrative in a way their colleagues in the fine arts did not need to do.

Another decisive factor in the historical development and identity of comics is the sophisticated interaction in them of image and text. Just as all writing springs from an idiomatic abstraction of images, the cartoon is an abstraction of reality, and in comics these two go hand in hand. One thus often sees the overall artistic idiom of comics, the combination of images and words, described as the cartoonist’s “handwriting.” Although reaching back as far as antiquity, this synthesis has been ill-favoured through most of the modern era. The sundering of image and text followed the revival in the Renaissance of the classical paragone (the comparison and evaluation of different forms of art), of which the most canonized — that of painting and poetry — has to a large extent been concerned with how the former unfolds in space and the latter in time. Following this, a dominant tendency in modern discourse on this subject has been the claim that, due to this allegedly fundamental difference, the two forms of art enter onto each other’s territory at the peril of losing their artistic integrity. Artistically, both narrative painting and descriptive poetry are dead in the water, and it follows that combining them accelerates the plunge.

Inherent in the modern paragone were the seeds of a hierarchical ordering of the arts. With the classicizing, elitist art of the Renaissance tradition and the establishment of the academies came much clearer ideas of “high” and “low” culture than had been known earlier, and, as already noted, the combination of image and text came to be maligned in high culture. Fine arts moved in one direction, and the other art forms — including what would develop into comics — went in the other. In the course of the 19th century, with the advent of new printing technologies and the growth of a reading, urban bourgeoisie, comics grew into a mass medium and thus to a great extent had to conform to the terms of production dictated by the market. While other narrative media such as literature, theatre and film to varying degrees strove for the illusion of reality, comics — because they had to be easily legible and accessible — preserved their archetypical idiom, with stock-character comedy and idealized adventure stories as its basic narrative forms. The unpretentious, current-interest platform of comics — the satirical journals and, later on, especially the newspapers — helped engender a sophisticated meta-reflexivity (i.e. the reference to their own creation and nature) in comics. Characters in comics are often shown to be conscious their nature as lines on paper, or of the frame around them, and they frequently break the “fourth wall” and address the reader directly. These strongly anti-naturalistic features, combined with the more often than not generally humorous tenor and the connection to low-culture fictional genres (and in the 20th century also to children’s culture) ensured the low cultural standing of comics as well as their development in extensive isolation from the fine arts.

This is not to say that there was no exchange between these different traditions. Comics have intermittently influenced the pictorial arts; Pop art is the most obvious example, but also artists of such stature as Goya and Gustave Doré, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, Frans Masereel and the Dane Palle Nielsen, have worked in comics and sequential pictorial narrative to varying degrees. On the whole, however, this sort of thing is quite rare — the exception that proves the rule. Comics, on the contrary, have always found inspiration in fine art, though mainly on their own premises, as when Winsor McCay (1867-1934), in his monumentally realized dream scenarios in Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905-1914), looked back to the organic lines of art nouveau, or when Cliff Sterrett (1883-1964) incorporated modernist abstract forms and patterns as emotional cues in his surreally charming, daily comic strip Polly and her Pals (1912-1958). And Picasso, who was a comics fan and drew a handful of comic strips himself, has had a significant influence on several generations of comics artists who have often imitated his cartoony line and approach to the human figure. In many ways, the simplified forms of modernist art actually seemed to affirm the pictorial world of the cartoon. The latter, however, insisted on figuration throughout the 20th century, while it in fine art was questioned, challenged, and eventually became an outright problem.

It was inevitable that a new rapprochement between the two would eventually occur, and this started happening in the 1960s and 1970s. As already noted, comics have primarily followed the example of literature in their development towards greater scope and diversity, while the most significant graphic innovations to a far greater extent were based in their own tradition. Modern classics such as Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s interpretation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1994), Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth (1993-2000), David B’s L’Ascention du Haut Mal, mentioned above, and Charles Burns’s Black Hole (1995-2005) — just to mention a few that either are, or soon will be, available in Danish — are great, innovative pictorial works, but all developed in continuation of the traditional visual language of comics.

In North America and especially Europe, painted comics emerged as a new trend in the 1980s, but most of these reflected conservative and superficial approaches. Often characterized by a kind of fine art snobbery, or notions of heightened production value, they have mostly proven inadequate in conveying the kind “elastic” time that drive traditional comics sequences. This is especially true of naturalistically painted series, but to some extent also applies to less naturalistic ones, and even accomplished creators of painted comics have found it hard to capture the life and representation of time that characterizes the classical, drawn comics story.

There are, of course, artists who demonstrate that a less narrative, more pictorial approach to the medium — whether painted or not — can produce results that are just as interesting as the traditional forms of comics storytelling. One of these is Anke Feuchtenberger, seen in the exhibition. Her looser treatment of such things as causality endows her work with a distinctly different feel. Clear narration is eschewed in favour of more suggestive, evocative flows of images. Killoffer — whose work is also displayed in the exhibition — works with the traditional formal properties of comics with an artistic sensibility derived from modernist art. Sometimes this results in straightforward narrative comic strips, sometimes in less narrative works that may take the form of comics, illustration or painting. In his work, narrative is often blown apart to form images that at one and the same time work as cacophonic, spatially unfolding vistas where everything happens simultaneously, and as stories extending through time.

Phoebe Gloeckner, also exhibiting, works in prose and film as well as comics. She has for some years been experimenting with photo-comics — a notoriously difficult narrative form that deservedly enjoys a reputation worse than that of painted comics. In her upcoming documentary work on a series of murders of women in the Ciudad Juárez region of Mexico, she uses photographed, digitally manipulated sequences, with straw dolls as actors, in her reconstruction of some of the central events. Instead of imitating the typical comics image : which when done with photographs almost invariably appears rigid and stops the narrative flow — she stages the images as a kind of constructed documentary photographs, integrating them in a narrative that also incorporates drawings and text.

As mentioned at the outset, the number of young artists who do not distinguish between comics and fine art has grown in recent years. A handful of them are present in this exhibition: Anders Nilsen is first and foremost a draughtsman, but also works in photography. In his most recent work, he has increasingly distanced himself from the traditional comics sequence, using instead very loosely drawn, sometimes abstract juxtapositions of image and text. Also presented is the artist’s collective Paperrad who stage cartoon characters derived from the cornucopia of popular culture — including comics — in naïvistically drawn and often wildly digitally manipulated comics, whose narrative and pictorial worlds are at times extended to photography, video and installation.

This relatively new tendency in comics can be seen as a reaction against the highly narrative — or “literary” — comics that in the last decade have changed the medium to such a significant degree. But above all, these artists’ work in comics seems a natural choice. Rather than rebelling against previous orders, they merely use comics as a form of expression fully on a par with the other pictorial arts. The distinction between high and low culture is much less important to them than it was to their predecessors, and it is not hard to see why. The special way in which comics approach the archetype and their non-naturalistic insistence on figuration was what attracted the Pop artists (even if their creative agenda had more to do with fine art than with comics) and remains a rich, and in a fine arts context of largely unexplored, resource for artists. Furthermore, the self-conscious, meta-critical use of comics images by the Pop artists were steps on the way to the proliferation of these qualities in our time — qualities that comics have always kept in ready supply. Last but not least, comics — with their complex narrative systems — offer a radical alternative to other art forms when it comes to the representation of time and space. Another story, old and new.

Images from Cliff Sterret, Palle Nielsen, David B., Hal Foster, Goya, Phoebe Gloeckner and Anke Feuchtenberger. Please note that this essay is written in the context of the exhibition and the Danish comics market, which to an extent influences the works discussed, and also that the work of Kevin Huizenga is discussed briefly even though he lamentably did not end up in the exhibition. Read my speech from the opening of the exhibition here and see pictures from the opening here.

The Super F.O.O.L.S, produced in 1985-1986, wasn’t the first comic I drew, but at the time seemed like an ambitious step forward — a team-produced comic, “published” by our own structure, AJKM, and hawked around the corridors of our school and at family gatherings for 5 DKr. (a steal, even at that time). It was even available at the nexus of all Danish comic book realities, Fantask, where they have always supported the fanzine scene, no matter how little promise the product showed.

If I remember correctly, I plotted and drew, Jesper Noachsen wrote a lot of the dialogue, Anders contributed additional artwork and hand lettered most of the comic and Kain Sebastian Victor was the main inker (ie. technical pen-wielder), assisted by Jesper, whose mom had access to a photocopier that could print both sides of a sheet, so she became our printer while he took care of the stapling. We had an entire line of comics planned, with the F.O.O.L.S being our flagship, collaborative title and each of us doing our own projects on the side. We were a real comic book operation!

Why we chose to work with pre-existing characters instead of our own, like we had in our previous efforts, was because of the many fascinating, utterly unfamiliar characters we encountered through immersion in the wondrous character dictionaries published by Marvel and DC at the time — the former’s Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and in this case especially the latter’s Who’s Who — Dictionary of the DC Universe. Our lack of familiarity with these characters allowed us to fill in the blanks, to imagine who these amazing-looking guys were and what their stories could be.

Besides being firmly in the grip of American superhero comics, we retained a strong fondness for funny animals — above all the duck comics of Carl Barks. These remained the bedrock of our fascination with the medium. We therefore immediately took to Roy Thomas’ and Scott Shaw!’s funny animal superheroes, Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew. Imagine that, the best of both worlds combined! We had yet to discover the actual Zoo Crew Comics, but work on this comic made Anders crazy for them, and he subsequently collected all the back issues (except the elusive #7). He even started work on a sadly never completed comic starring the snake-cum-bullwhip, Whipley, of Shaw!’s throwaway Indiana Jones-parody from Captain Carrot.

Actually, reading this first issue, it is evident that the publication of Who’s Who hadn’t even progressed beyond the letter ‘F’ as we started work on it, resulting in Zoo Crew members Little Cheese, Pig Iron, Rubber Duck and Yankee Poodle (as well as that latecomer tool, American Eagle) being left out of the initial lineup.

Those tomes of endless comic book lore also gave us Detective Chimp — another character we’d never heard of, but figured was a great fit, being an animal character with a Deerstalker and all (I must say I’ve been able to contain my enthusiasm for DC’s current, appropriately ‘dark’ version of the character…). Also, I had stumbled upon a back-up story in an issue of Green Lantern featuring the chipmunk Lantern Ch’P. Additionally, I was familiar with Howard the Duck from the infamous Lucas movie (and The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe), and knew Bat-Mite from and old 60s Batman comic in my possession (though on the cover here, he’s obviously copied from his entry in Who’s Who, as are Captain Carrot and Fastback).

Furthermore, Anders and I had greatly enjoyed the Keith Giffen character Ambush Bug (whereever did he go?) featured in some of the Superman comics published in Denmark at the time. And we’d also been ogling the wierd swashbuckler-themed Nightcrawler miniseries from Marvel at the stands in Fantask and had thus noticed the cute baby Nightcrawler featured in it. This gave us the lineup for our new funny animal/comic character supergroup, the F.O.O.L.S!

It is evident that — through further consultation of the character dictionaries as well as an issue of the Oz-Wonderland War featuring the Captain Carrot characters — we discovered, and remembered, more characters worthy of inclusion as we went along. This prompted an improvised denoument where the group combined with all these newcomers — everyone from the Italian superhero version of Donald Duck, Paperino and Kirby and Lee’s Impossible Man, to Hoppy the Marvel Bunny — to form the Legion of F.O.O.L.S! To cap things off, we ended with a cliffhanger where Cain from DCs House of Mystery comics (also recruited from, where else? Who’s Who) appeared and kidnapped Ambush Bug.

A second issue, retitled Legion, was planned. It featured a cover showing a roughed-up, bleeding Bug lying lifeless on the floor of the House of Mystery in a spotlight (we were apparently going gritty even before any of us had dared read Miller’s ugly-looking Dark Knight). Work on it never got past the first couple of pages. Our group broke up, not due to creative differences, I’m sad to say, but rather less romantically, because of our defective attention span. AJKM’s other comics — the Whipley one-shot, a spy-themed Howard the Duck series written and drawn by Kain, and probably one or two additional projects, never went anywhere. We did, however, manage to produce a prequel to The Super F.O.O.L.S, called First Issue Special, the contents of which I cannot remember for the life of me. Maybe Anders has that stashed away somewhere as well.

Reading the actual comic, it’s pretty damn crude, even if there are moments of slight comparative sophistication. There’s obviously not much besides personal nostalgia that warrants this excessively detailed piece of reconstruction, besides the general resonance these recollections might have for others who’ve had similar experiences. But what the hell, I quite like the fact that the central passage in the book, once the ludicrously protracted fight scene (part of the genre!) is out of the way, is concerned with our heroes dodging the bill at a restaurant that only serves stale bread and duckweed. We at least managed a moment or two of decent comedy there.

I’m rather fond of the panel where Howard — the only duck of the bunch and thus the only one to have actually enjoyed the meal — punches out the restaurant owner, appalled at the suggestion that he do the dishes. Never having actually read a Howard the Duck comic, we kind of nailed the character anyway. I also quite like the fact that we started the story in media res with our heroes running along for no apparent reason (as far as I remember, the aforementioned prequel actually explained why). Also, I love the centrespread, ‘fan-picture’ of Captain Carrot by Anders, and the order form for similar pin-ups (1 Dkr. + postage a pop!) that we put in the back. What optimism.

And then, of course, there’s the double-page spread of our heroes suddenly arriving at New Duck City (well, yeah) across what appears to be a snow-covered mountain pass. I clearly remember swiping that from a comic that had blown my mind a year or so earlier: the first Danish issue of the Claremont/Byrne X-Men, published in the fall of 1984, more specifically the Savage Land story where Ka-Zar and the X-Men arrive at the Golden City of Garokk the Sun God (Uncanny X-Men #116, 1978). High fantasy of the sizzling kind.

After AJKM folded, I went on to do a bunch more comics, some of them with Anders, most of them by myself. But I stopped drawing altogether a few years later. Though my love of comics, and drawings, is undiminished, I never again picked up the pencil. I don’t know why, never figured it out. Just didn’t. I may, one day, but it sure would be painful starting where I left off.

In any case, those were the high-powered days when fooling was super, and you can’t go home again. Happy New Year!