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.

The Best Online Comics Criticism is an annual feature at The Hooded Utilitarian, run by Ng Suat Tong. It’s been interesting to follow it, and I must say this year’s edition has been the most convincing yet, in execution if not in the final selection. Suat has been really thorough, running quarterly reviews in order to reduce the risk of missing significant pieces in the final round. Those are great overviews in themselves and also rather hilarious for Suat’s pithy comments on the nominations.

One thing that’s unfair about the feature is that Suat himself will never be in the running, for obvious reasons. To my mind, he wrote several pieces in 2012 worthy of consideration. His meticulously sourced approach proves illuminating on Mattotti and Zentner’s The Crackle of the Frost, for example, while his skill at ideological criticism comes to the fore in his review of Joe Sacco’s Journalism. His command of visual reference is on display in his piece on Lovecraft in comics, and his critique of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? is commendable for its dissection of the book’s complex if also smothering structure.

Anyway, the Best Online Comics Criticism is your one-stop linkage to a lot of great comics criticism. It kind of makes one optimistic on behalf of this still fledgling discipline. Go and explore.

The image at top is from Craig Fischer’s fantastic essay on serial photography, photocomics, and memory, which is also (kinda) among the year’s selections.

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

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!

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:

— Jim Woodring

The picks of the week from around the web.

Recovering from the long weekend, I have a quick bunch of comics links. Some of them are old news, but so good that I still want to call attention to them: