From Jim Woodring's Fran, a comic Joe McCulloch made me appreciate more, even if the cartoonist's recent work has left me a bit cold

And once again, I’m flattered to be included on his list, especially considering just how little I’ve written in the past year. I’ve kept wanting to, but other things just kept getting in the way, and much as I want to say things are going to be different, that probably won’t change much in the coming year. Anyway, it was nice to see my piece on Abel Lanzac (aka. Antonin Baudry) and Christophe Blain’s Quai d’Orsay and Willem’s Degeulasse, written for The Comics Journal last August, mentioned. Especially since so many really excellent pieces (as well as some fairly mediocre one, it has to be said) were included.

Suat’s taking stock, which has now been running for five years, remains a valuable service to the corner of the comics internet interested in serious writing about the art form, and I for one am grateful that he still makes the effort. Also, he continues to write outstanding comics criticism himself: from the last year, I particularly liked his critique of Michael Deforge(‘s critics), his appreciation of The Trigan Empire, his essay on Daniel Clowes’ because of Shia Laboef now rather famous “Justin M. Damiano”, his examination of Suehiro Maruo’s The Strange Tale of Panorama Island, and his head-scratching dissection of a particularly lauded xkcd story.

Now, don’t waste more time here — go check out the list.

Michael Kupperman on the issue at hand

It should come as no surprise that I’m sympathetic at least to the second part, having long thought that the visual aspects of comics tend to get short shrift in serious comics criticism. So… well, do pop over and take a look at my column. And do comment — it’s a difficult issue and one that needs more thought, so I would love to hear what you think.

Julie Christie and Oskar Werner in François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

The week in review

This week I have a Danish-context comics-related grievance I want to address, so please excuse the shift in language here. International links below!

Bogtillægget til denne uges Weekendavis skæmmes af et fejlinformeret og tendentiøst opslag. En ærgerlig plet på en ellers som regel velredigeret og seriøs publikation. Kan det overraske, at emnet for begge artikler på opslaget er tegneserierelateret?

På venstresiden får vi en kommentar til sidste uges tildeling af Kronsprinsparrets Kulturpris til tegneren Jakob Martin Strid, skrevet af Bo Bjørnvig, der tydeligvis stadig ikke er kommet sig over halvfemsernes skingre presseopgør med tressernes venstrefløj (kan læses online her). Bjørnvig pointerer det pudsige i, at folk — herunder kunstnere — bliver mere konservative med årene, mere specifikt at Strid (og Bjørn Nørgaard, og givetvis også, ad åre, dilletanterne i kunstnergruppen Surrend) fralægger sig tidligere tiders ekstreme holdninger for mere samfundsbevarende af slagsen. Der bliver minsandten også plads til en stikpille til Carsten Jensen.

Alt er, med andre ord, ved det gamle. Og Bjørnvig tager da heller ikke fejl i sin observation, om end hans inddragelse af de andre kunstnere forekommer irrelevant. Problemet er imidlertid, at han hovedsageligt baserer sine anklager mod Strid på et groft redigeret, misvisende citat. Med henvisning til den berygtede episode i Politikenstriben Strid fra 2000, hvor tegnerens alter-ego tog til genmæle mod Carsten Jensens udtalelser om, at den tyske stat havde hans fulde sympati da de jagtede Rote Armee Fraktions medlemmer til døde, skriver Bjørnvig:

I sin daglige stribe i Politiken roste tegneseriepersonen Strid Rote Armee Fraktions »likvidering« af »tidligere nazister, erhvervsfolk og politikere «. Var det terrorisme? »Gu er det ej : det var fedt!!!«

Bjørnvig udelader her broderparten af Strids tekst. I den omtalte stribe, som kan læses her, forklarer Strid ikke alene hvorfor han syntes de omtalte likvideringer var retfærdiggjorte, men refererer specifikt til RAFs angreb på den amerikanske militærbase i Frankfurt i 1972 — en aktion, som han mener reddede utallige nordvietnamesiske liv, fordi den stoppede de amerikanske napalmbombninger der i over tolv timer (om det så er korrekt er en anden sag). Det er det, Strid fremhæver som “fedt.”

Det kunne ikke ligge mig fjernere at forsvare de likvideringer Strid tydeligvis støttede dengang, ej heller har jeg nogen som helst sympati for Rote Armee Fraktion, men jeg synes det er trist endnu engang at se Strids ungdommelige idioti blive gjort alvorligere end det var og samtidig se alle de ganske væsentlige mellemregninger skåret fra, mellemregninger der trods knytter an til en kontekst, der bl.a. omfatter USAs krigshandlinger i Vietnam og den Persiske golf. Fordrejende kritik har vi nok af, uden at Weekendavisen behøver at hoppe på vognen.

(Derudover vil læsere af Strid helt roligt kunne afvise Bjørnvigs spekulationer om, at tegneren i sin stribe måske også kunne have fundet på at springe Amalienborg i luften: Strid har altid udvist en god gammeldags, småborgerlig begejstring for kongehuset).

På højresiden af bogtillægget finder vi en anmeldelse af Tim Hamiltons tegneserieudgave af Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit 451, som forlaget Fahrenheit har udsendt på dansk i anledning af sit 20-årsjubilæum. Anmelderen, Damian Argimbau, tager fat i Bradburys påstand — sent i livet — af, at bogens centrale tema er mediernes fordummende virkning på os. Selvom han godt kan lide tegneserien, fører dette nærmest Pavlovsk Argimbau til at konkludere:

[det er] lidt ironisk, at netop Bradburys roman præsenteres som tegneserie, primært henvendt til en målgruppe, der bruger flere timer foran skærmen end den bruger på bøger. I den forstand fik den gamle forfatter ret: Fjernsynet og skærmen har i den grad taget over, at ældre klassikere nu må genudsendes med masser af billeder og færre ord, så man kan sikre sig, at de stadig bliver læst.

Argimbaus fører altså en hel række historisk konsoliderede fordomme om tegneserier og unges brug af medier til torvs: at tegneserier primært er for børn, at tegneserier er mindre udfordrende og værdifulde end “rigtige” bøger, at børns medieforbrug er skadeligt og — må man formode — at tegneserieformen grundlæggende rummer fordummende karakteristika. Jeg ved godt det er naivt, men jeg troede vi efterhånden var nået lidt videre, i hvert fald når det kommer til kulturelt sofistikerede medier som Weekendavisen. Vi skriver, trods alt, 2012.

Links:

The week in review

Hip hop’s making bullshit headlines again. This time over the reaction to the murder, last month, of Chicago MC Lil Jojo. After news hit that the 18-year old had been shot in a drive-by, his rival Chief Keef — with whom he had been beefing, seemingly in a grab for quick fame — went on twitter to gloat. When the shit hit the fan, Keef — perhaps advised by his record company Interscope — started claiming his twitter account had been hacked and started posting “uplifting” PC boilerplate. He also claimed not to be responsible for threats of violence against his older colleague Lupe Fiasco, who had spoken out against his behavior on the radio.

Whether Lil Jojo’s death has anything to do with Keef or not, that’s just pathetic. Now, I know that violent rhetoric in rap has a lot to do with a violent culture, and is more a symptom than a cause — a symptom that occasionally proves to be a way out for people, and one that tells us volumes about the social breakdown of parts of American society. Attacking rap music for very real problems in society that are far bigger than hip hop is not necessarily productive, but on the other hand you sometimes miss the days when more people in the community did what Lupe, and fellow Chicago MC Rhymefest, just did and spoke out against the bullshit being perpetuated by a lot of hip hop artists, the vast majority possessed of no talent and lacking the intelligence to convert their rhetoric into hard truth. Player hating is now a bad word in hip hop, which has increasingly become a laissez-faire subculture impressed first and last by money. It used to make hip hop proud.

If you don’t believe me, check out Keef’s biggest hit “I Don’t Like” here. It’s basically a series of inarticulate grunts over a generic beat with a sort-of effective, repetitive hook. The most interesting part is the curiously homosocial video and what it tells us about how these guys want us to see them. This cut from Lil Jojo, which was part of his PR dis campaign against Keef, is just as telling. All the same: RIP.

Links:

Another great drawing by Raphael is coming up for sale. Like the Female Head, which broke all records when it sold for £29 million in 2009, it’s a so-called auxiliary cartoon for his last great, large-scale work, the Transfiguration (begun 1516, finished after the master’s death in 1520) now in the Vatican. Coming from one of the greatest private collections — accessible to the public — of drawings in the world, that of the Duke of Devonshire, it’s a well-known and justifiably famous drawing. It’s kind of sad that the Duke occasionally sells off his drawings in this way, potentially occluding great work such as this from public view.

It shows the head of one of the apostles, and was probably used as a visual supplement to the drawn cartoon used in the studio to transfer the composition to the panel. Like the Female Head, it shows pounce marks (the little dots along the contours), which one would expect to be evidence that it was transferred off the present sheet, probably to the final panel (coal dust is pounced through little holes, transferring the composition in outline), but the marks do not seem at all to follow the contours of the drawing, which seems to me indication that an outline design was transferred onto the present sheet and then reworked into the drawing we see.

Not having seen the drawing in the flesh, I’m far from certain about this, and I haven’t consulted the literature either, so I may just be talking nonsense here. I just find the drawing exciting, with its smoky chiaroscuro suggesting strong light falling from the right, picking out the cranial features and accentuating the melancholy aspect of the young man. Lips parsed, tussled hair, young beard, intelligent but passive.

The drawing’s estimated price of between £10-15 million reflects the kind of drawing we’re dealing with here: a large, highly finished piece by one of the defining artists of the Western tradition — the kind of work that only comes up for sale extremely rarely, despite what the 2009 sale would seem to indicate. One question is whether it’ll reach the same, frankly unbelievable price that sheet fetched. Judging by quality I think it should: it appears to me a more finely rendered and subtly beautiful drawing than the Female Head, which is beautiful but slightly rote by Raphael’s standards. This is the same type of drawing, but shows more invention and, I think, carries a greater emotional charge.

Anyway, let’s see what happens at the sale. I hope the Getty or some other wealthy public institution steps in.

Links:

The week in review

Not much to report from this angle this week, apart from the fact that the Jewish new year reminds me that I’ve been back in the ole home country for over a year now. Last year’s Rosh Hashannah kind of marked a fresh return to new beginnings here and it’s been a great ride since then, one of the best years I’ve had. Thanks to everybody taking part.

Links!

Above: Edgar Degas, Grande arabesque, Time One, Two, Three, c. 1880-85.

Anyway, the essay I have up now is on Craig Thompson’s remarkable new comic Habibi and on its discouraging reception by comics critics. I touch upon several of what I perceive to be key issues in the criticism and analysis of comics and hope it will stimulate some discussion. Go, read.

The Week in Review (a.k.a. the feature formerly known as Picks of the Week).

Over at Hooded Utilitarian this week, there’s been an interesting discussion of Orientalism in comics, prompted by the publication of Craig Thompson’s mammoth graphic novel Habibi. It’s an interesting issue and one that warrants attention like Nadim Damluji gave it here, but several HU writers’ sensitivity to offensive material — mostly racist or xenophobic in nature, but to an extent also sexism — is turning a bit predictable. There’s a tendency there to conflate ethics and aesthetics, which is threatening to make a contentious and thought-provoking site something it never was: boring.

One of the sad consequences of this is that the good tends to get more attention than the better. Ng Suat Tong wrote an intelligent, but rather strongly-worded piece on Habibi, which irked cartoonist Eddie Campbell so that he raised the issue of decency in criticism on his blog. I understand and sympathize with this reaction, but don’t really agree with it — sometimes harsh language is the right way to go for a critic, although I’m not sure it was in this case. Anyway, this is my very long-winded way of calling attention to Suat’s other, and far superior recent piece at HU, an essay on Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions — one of the most interesting comics releases this year. So far it has netted all of four comments, and presumably far fewer readers, than the one on Habibi. I wish people would pay more attention to this kind of writing, even if it doesn’t push the hot buttons in the same way.

All right, with that out of the way, here’s some other interesting stuff I came across this week:

Robert has an excellent evaluation of the final list and proposes a number of conclusions one might draw from it. The fascinating thing about comics as an art form right now is that it is such a state of flux, that so much is happening artistically at a time when its popular and cultural stature is also changing radically. I didn’t expect to see this reflected in the final list exactly, which predictably is largely a conservative affair, but it doesn’t reproduce the somewhat stodgy fandom consensus of yesteryear either. Signs of change are creeping in: Watchmen‘s cultural stature has become undeniable; the generation that grew up with Calvin and Hobbes rates it as highly (or higher) than Peanuts, the masterpiece that defined their parents’ generation, Jack Kirby’s “Fourth World” is edging in on the Marvel Age, and Jaime Hernandez is slowly but safely situating himself at the heart of the canon.

The real takeaway from all this, however, is that comics don’t really have a canon. When one looks at the individual contributors’ lists they’re all over the place. Yes, the brief called for ‘favorites’ as well as ‘best,’ prompting many to play loose and fast with their lists and then often apologize that they hadn’t gone for ‘objective’ quality, but is there really a point in making a distinction? It seems to me that beyond a few rock solid classics — Peanuts, Krazy Kat, and perhaps a few other of the top ten — there simply isn’t much of a consensus on what constitutes comics’ greatest works, or even how one might go about conceiving of them in the first place. (Add to this that the list is far from as international in scope as one might have hoped: it’s very predictably Americanocentric and reveals just how spotty the knowledge of other traditions continue to be in America).

Domingos Isabelinho has an article up that points to the problems of definition and how the orthodox institutional framework by which comics have been understood continues to wield strong influence in a time of redefinition — how do we reconcile in a canon a tradition of children’s literature with one of adult concern, and — beyond that — works of art from throughout human history, from cave paintings to Picasso, that share the formal qualities of comics, but aren’t generally considered as such?

And the discussion that spun off from Shaenon Garrity’s survey of the sparsity of female creators on the list pointed to a further challenge to the fledgling comics canon: to what extent is it going to be determined by the patriarchal discourse that has governed much of its history, especially since the art form is now attracting more women creators than any time in its history.

Etc.

There have been quite a few comparisons between this list and the one put together by the editors and contributing writers to The Comics Journal a decade ago, despite their very different premises (half a dozen informed people of similar taste doing top 100s of exclusively English language works vs. over 200 very different and often rather undisciplined listmakers doing top 10s of anything and everything). It is striking how similar they are, but it’s more interesting to think about where they differ. The “new arrivals” in the top 10 (Watterson, Moore, Hernandez; Kirby doesn’t really count) indicate not just whatever bias one might attribute to the TCJ contributors, but that there is a shift happening in how we perceive comics as a tradition and what its greatest achievements might be. I suspect that a similar list made ten years from now will be more substantially different than are these two lists, because whatever canon was formed for comics in the twentieth century is undergoing the same sea change these years that comics themselves are experiencing. This is a period of redefinition and almost everything is up for debate.

The picks of the week from around the web.

Dominique Goblet depicts her father as a late medieval Madonna, nurturing his child, right hand in blessing. Drawn on disparate, pasted-together pieces of paper accompanied by shakily calligraphed Gothic handwriting, it is simultaneously a mockery and an illumination.

The image is from Goblet’s Faire semblant c’est mentir (‘To Pretend Is to Lie,’ 2007), a work that the author spent more than a decade creating. In it, she recounts episodes in her life to explicate, or at least represent, truthfully parts of its relational structure and emotional involvement. In this scene, Dominique visits her estranged father for the first time in five years. He is a drunken retired fireman and divorcé, now living with a rickety woman, Cécile—prone to hysteria bordering on the paranoid and drawn like Munch’s Screamer—a precarious stack-up of damaged goods. Dominique brings along her young daughter, Nikita, whom she leaves reluctantly in the hands of Cécile to walk the obliviously chipper dog.

The conversation turns serious, and the father starts blaming the daughter and her mother for the family’s misfortune. The icon mock-up marks a crescendo of his self-righteous diatribe: “And when she left, who took care of you? Wasn’t it me, perhaps? Didn’t you have your little packed lunch every day for school?” It is largely a comic image, but crafted as a question rather than a condemnation, because how can she deny the factual accuracy of that statement?

A collage of clips, rips and palimpsests, rendered in nervous, uneven line, the image emphasizes its limitations and shortcomings. While certainly pathetic, the father crucially is basically sympathetic; his soft facial features and mismatched almond eyes reveal an inner vitality, if also a lack of awareness. The child, in contrast, appears shrewd and present. This is her interpretation, ironic and reverent.

On several occasions in the book Goblet risks hyperbole in this way, employing dramatic juxtapositions and symbolic imagery to accentuate expression and enrich observation. It’s a risky strategy, but one she clearly feels is merited by the material, mundane as it might seem. The book is an attempt to engage a set of issues less by narrative and more by perspective. Goblet finds truth in reiteration, approaching her relationships from different angles and extending the focus beyond herself to the people around her, attempting to make sense of their experience: her father, her mother, and her boyfriend, Guy Marc Hinant, who co-wrote two of the chapters. She interweaves fact and fiction to expose the experiential, emotional truths behind the pretense of autobiography, attempting as well as she can to sidestep solipsism and mythologizing—the ophthalmic migraines and temporary blindness she suffers at a point of severe stress unassumingly accrue metafictional connotations.

Her portrait of her father is essentially a loving one. Despite their estrangement, she cracks convulsively when she learns from a friend of the family—after everyone else—that he was hospitalized days ago and is apparently dead. He isn’t, and he ends up comforting her in the hospital waiting room instead of the other way round. She is suffering from crippling anxiety that her budding relationship with Guy Marc is failing before it has even fully started, and given the juxtaposition, it is hard not to interpret this in the light of her familial disjunction.

As we’ve seen concurrently, Guy Marc has left his previous relationship unsolved. He wavers and relapses, wearing thin Dominique’s need to trust. Goblet draws the specter of his ex haunting them as they go about their daily business, lending a sense of sad menace to her portrayal of the beginnings of a relationship. She captures attentively the ambulatory conversations by which we get to know each other and the sense of promise they hold. In this case—perhaps a little too appropriately—it starts with a ghost story told in exacting, captivating detail, and continues with a no less carefully delineated recipe for pasta with tuna. And situations like Dominique tucking in Nikita in the graffiti-covered room of Guy Marc’s teenaged son (he’s with his mother) have an acute sense of reality to it. The book breathes lived experience.

Though basically expressive, relying on externalizing emotion and broadening character to great effect, Goblet’s painterly pencil-and-chalk drawing at times captures more subtly revelatory moments of insight. This is especially true of the chapters involving her relationship with Guy Marc, in which her endeavor to step outside herself is most fully realized. The distracted, slightly troubled gaze with which he looks at her as she is telling him the ghost story beautifully illustrates the sense of displacement from the present tense that unaddressed problems may visit upon us, yet also suggests his dawning infatuation with the remarkable new person in front of him. And later Goblet depicts herself at her drawing table, against the light of the blinds, as seen from Guy Marc’s point of view, his desire and affection for her almost palpably immanent. An extraordinary instance of empathetic projection through drawing.

Goblet generally excels at displacing emotion, by metaphor as seen in the symbolic portrayal of her father, but also, and perhaps more notably, through transposition. Some of her most intense instances of emotional disclosure about both her father and her boyfriend are expressed not in this book, but in Souvenir d’une journée parfaite (‘Recollection of a Perfect Day,’ 2001), which she wrote and drew while work on Faire semblant was ongoing. Her father eventually did die, and Souvenir is in part a way for Goblet to express her feelings and reflect upon his significance to her shortly after it happened.

Instead of addressing her relationship with him directly, as she does in Faire semblant, however, she uses the conceit of looking for his gravestone at a mausoleum in the cemetery of the Brussels suburb of Uccle. Scanning the many names, she happens upon one of them, Mathias Kahn, and creates a fiction of this anonymous person’s life, which she interweaves with places, instances, and emotions from her own—”fiction as an extension of autobiography,” as she calls it in the brief afterword. The book concentrates primarily on thus charting her relationship with her father, but the “perfect day” she imagines for Kahn also contains a particularly moving, indirect declaration of love that simultaneously becomes redemptive of the old fireman’s flawed life and indicative of hers with Guy Marc.

Souvenir is a compelling work even when read without full cognizance of this metalepsis, but it is still a rather distancing conceit with which to engage personal matters. One understands why Goblet moved on to the more risky, and ultimately more difficult, direct form of representation in Faire semblant. Yet, as the title indicates and as the symbology already discussed should make clear, displacement is also central to this book.

The most emotionally fraught scene describes a traumatic instance of abuse inflicted upon the young Dominique by her mother, against which her father failed to intervene. Characteristically, Goblet seeks not to condemn but understand, describing the exasperating childish antics of her young self mostly from the point of view of the mother, making the latter’s momentary loss of control all the more understandable. Only when their full ramifications become apparent do we switch unequivocally to the child herself in a shocking full-page exclamation.

Concurrently with, and extenuatingly of this, we’ve been watching the father watching Formula 1 on TV, drinking beer. It’s the fateful 1973 Dutch Grand Prix, in which the gifted young English driver Roger Williamson perished in a violent crash. This juxtaposition is a fiction, devised by Goblet symbolically to represent her father’s crucial moment of neglect—a moment of which he had no recollection, as we learn from the conversation between Dominique and himself in the book’s diegetic present.

The heartbreaking spectacle of watching Williamson’s colleague David Purley attempt to extract him from the flames, drawn from video stills, becomes a potent placeholder for the author’s inability to address exhaustively this key episode of her childhood. Unfortunately she almost (but only almost) ruins it by ironically having the inebriated father loudly proclaim how he—the professional fireman—would have been able to save Williamson’s life had he been present, oblivious of the familial conflagration that mother and child are still reeling from. It is a didactic explication of an otherwise perfectly pitched, powerfully moving sequence of empathetic exegesis.

But then, Goblet’s strategy of pretense in the service of truth is a fraught one, and whether the individuals implicated—especially the father and the relatively vaguely defined mother—would recognize fully the events as depicted is of course questionable. But it is a noble, involved, and beautifully realized attempt at illuminating the vagaries and ultimately inexplicable realities of the relationships that shape and define our lives.

Published simultaneously at The Hooded Utilitarian. Other installments in this series: David B.’s L’Ascension du haut mal (Epileptic), Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Sammy Harkham et. al. Kramers Ergot 4, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven and The Death Ray, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan — The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, Gary Panter’s Jimbo in Purgatory. For Danish readers, I wrote briefly about Goblet and her daughter Nikita’s latest book, Chronographie here.