Beyond, Beyond, Beyond

Very, very busy with school at the moment but some more real posts are coming up in the next few days. For now, another roundup of things I wrote elsewhere.

Here's a Zoilus guest post about Toronto jazz group Canaille: http://www.zoilus.com/documents/general/2009/002415.php

Any regular reader has probably seen this already, but for the sake of comprehensiveness, my interview with Yoshihiro Tatsumi: http://comicscomicsmag.blogspot.com/2009/10/tatsumi-in-toronto.html

And, uh, this is me on Twitter, many months after I started nattering there: https://twitter.com/randlechris

They also wrote comics criticism, no. 2

A while back I posted about a writer-on-comics primarily known and acclaimed as a novelist/playwright, trolling for more examples of this species in comments. Several rolled in, but no one suggested Angela Carter. Just 51 when she died of cancer in 1992 and slighted before then - most of the British literary establishment treated the author like her friend J. G. Ballard, as a curio - Carter's reputation only thrived posthumously. Her severely creepy modern fairy tales are an obvious antecedent of Guillermo del Toro's. (More sex, though - The Bloody Chamber throbs with perverse intensity.) I knew she'd written plenty of essays and criticism but never read any of it until I picked up a cheap used copy of her non-fiction collection Expletives Deleted earlier this week. And there next to considerations of Edmund White and Grace Paley is a piece on Gilbert Hernandez.

It was apparently published as the introduction to an early British edition of Duck Feet from Titan Books, which I imagine is now out of print. Here's a sample: "Gilbert Hernandez' comic strips in the series, Heartbreak Soup...are about gossip. Especially, about yesterday's gossip, about the memories our parents share with us so we almost come to think that they are our memories too. The intimate folklore of family. Gilbert Hernandez' family, of course, is not my family, or your family, but this kind of folklore has a cross-cultural similarity, most of all in cultures where people often find themselves short of a bob."

"...The daily life of Palomar is a cruel parody of the chaste suburbia pictured in that family newspaper strip of my childhood, Blondie. It is a world of brawling kids and feckless, licentious, drunken men, dominated in every sense of the word by endlessly fecund earth mothers, furiously sexy women who might have come undulating straight out of the crudest kind of male fantasy if they didn't pack such big punches...Sexiest and most furious of all is Luba of the big breasts and uncertain temper."

"...There are things about Heartbreak Soup that make me think Gilbert Hernandez must respond sympathetically to the politics of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but of course, he didn't have to know about Macondo to invent Palomar. They are both places that existed once, in a continent caught between post-colonialism and neo-imperialism; but to think of Heartbreak Soup as a sort of Classic Comics version of Garcia Marquez is to do Gilbert Hernandez a great disservice. What Heartbreak Soup is most like is life."

Some bits could almost be written by a '00s comics blogger. Carter says that Heartbreak Soup "is easy to talk about as if it were a novel; and it isn't, of course. But it is fiction, a category that includes novels, movies, soap opera, sitcom, tragedy, comedy, and comic strips." Even more ahead of its time was her essay "Once More Into the Mangle", which examined Rapeman-esque gonzo manga all the way back in 1971. A feminist outsider drawn to Japanese culture, Carter writes that the quasi-porn comics "would appear to be directed either at the crazed sex maniac or the dedicated surrealist" (coming from her, this was probably a compliment). I feel like we should revive "mangle" as a critical term in tribute. Ineptly flipped localizations, maybe?

Seth on Thoreau MacDonald and Kramers Ergot 7

not Seth. Thoreau MacDonald

Well, I guess that was the right month for me to fall off a cliff, since almost everyone else writing about comics online seemed to take a late-summer vacation as well. (I did visit NYC and MoCCA for the first time, but a dying hard drive deserves more blame for the radio silence.) And now, after my sloth coincided with absolutely nothing happening, I get to return as Disney buys Marvel and DC's proprietors violently shake its organizational Etch-a-Sketch. I doon't have anything new to say about either of those things yet, though. This post is about the past.

Around the end of last year, I spoke with Seth for this Eye Weekly piece on Kramers Ergot 7. Background-y interviews normally remain on my tape recorder, not archived online, but his description of the KE editorial process and heartfelt elaboration on Thoreau MacDonald in this one made me reconsider. I hope he gets a chance to write that book about the man. We talked just after Seth was filmed for a possible NFB documentary; there's a slight parallel to the framing device of his new book George Sprott in that, but perhaps not one that he enjoyed.

(Note: I still edited out large chunks of the conversation, devoted to aspects of Kramers 7 that soon became common knowledge or me rambling about Matt Baker, for reasons of banality.)

*****

CR: How are you? How was being filmed?

Seth: Oh, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m exhausted, to tell you the truth. It’s not really a very pleasant experience in a way. It’s not the filmmaker’s fault. I just don’t really care for that much attention being focused on me.

Is it for that NFB documentary?

Exactly.

Is that a feature-length thing, or…

It is, and we’ll see what happens, I don’t know. There’s still a little time to go ‘til they get it together. Maybe it’ll work out. I feel nervous about it, I’ll tell you that. But it's out of my hands, so there's only so much I can do about it.

I guess you're sort of helpless, but you don't have to do anything.

It's a funny thing, you know - a documentary when you're watching it you feel like it's just someone filming someone, but it's incredible when they're actually filming you how much pressure you feel to...perform. Which is really difficult, because I'm not an actor. Having a camera aimed at you and having people constantly talking to you, asking you questions...it's worse than being on stage, actually. I know this, I'll never agree to do another one.

...

Have you ever worked on something approaching that size before, or…because I’m assuming nothing in the book will be blown up.

I guess – yeah, exactly. I guess I’d worked on a few things in the National Post when it first started – I did a few comic strips there that were like the size of two pages of the newspaper put together. But I think at that point I wasn’t using the space to the optimum, how I might like to have used it, because of the fact that I was working in the newspaper you had to deal with an editor and even though they weren’t interfering with the work I didn’t have that sense of complete freedom, that I could do whatever I want. And also the deadlines were a hell of a lot tighter. So this was the first real opportunity to do something that big and have the time to work on it to do whatever I wanted.

Right. I’ve seen very small jpegs of the pages – did you change something from what you would normally do in a page of Clyde Fans or whatever?

Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, the thing that excited me about working on this is that I wanted to do something that was super-dense. I wanted to be able to get 120 or 150 panels on a page. That’s what I was really excited about.

That’s what you can see in the samples, a million tiny panels on this landscape.

Every once in a while, you’ll see a few comic pages of your work gathered up somewhere in a catalogue or something, sort of just stacked up. I like the way that looks, they’ll shrink them down and you’ll see there’s a lot of little panels stuck together because of that. Normally when I’m working on my own comics, I don’t usually go over 20 panels on a page, and even that’s really pushing it. Just for clarity’s sake, I don’t want to go any smaller than that on the page. When you’ve suddenly got a page as big as a newspaper page you’ve got the same clarity you’d have in a comic book, but you can really expand out, and to me that’s what was exciting. For some people it was like, “here’s a chance to do a really big drawing,” or to do some comics that have very large elements to them. That’s great too.

I expect that there'll be a mix of people doing very, uh, elaborate fragmented things and then people doing ridiculously huge splash pages.

Yeah, exactly. It’s tempting. If I’d had another couple of pages I might’ve considered putting some huge images in there too. But even as it was, by the time I came on the project Sammy only had one page to offer to me, so as I started to work it out I had to say to him “I cannot possibly do this without two pages.” I got two pages, but I think it would’ve been pushing my luck to ask for four. Basically it came down to – to get the amount of story into it and the level of density I wanted, there wasn’t going to be any space for giant drawings.

What were they like as editors? Did they just assign you a certain number of pages and then act completely hands-off, or…

Yeah, exactly. I think they were rigorous in their – what came in had to be up to whatever standards they wanted. I guess I’m just lucky that whatever I sent them, they liked it, because I think they did reject a thing or two. It just wasn’t using the space in any manner that made it worthwhile, I don’t really know the details. But they certainly didn’t get involved in any sort of preliminary stages, making you send them a pencil version of the strip or anything. I think with most of the cartoonists that they asked they trusted them to know what to do, which is usually a good policy, I think.

I saw in one piece about it that there was an unnamed cartoonist who had to redo their pages, which sounds horrible, but…

It happens. I mean, in a situation like this where you’re working with so many artists there’s definitely going to be a case where something’s gonnna come in that you just don’t care for. I’ve had that happen myself with other anthologies and things I’ve worked in. You always end up hating the editor, but, I mean, that’s their job, that’s what they gotta do.

...

[loses train of thought, apologizes] I’ve googled around and I’ve looked at some of MacDonald’s drawings and I saw that he was colour blind, which is interesting…what made you choose or alight on him as a subject for the strip?

I think it just has to do with the growing interest I’ve had in his work over the past…eight years, I suppose. I’ve been progressively more and more interested in what he did and finding that, you know, you have certain paths you go down in your interests. Thoreau MacDonald is an artist I’ve been very interested in and I knew that eventually I would get around to doing some piece of work on him. It’s part of the process of…you go from being interested to being influenced and then starting to dig into their past, discovering their work in more detail. That usually leads to some project or other, when it’s an artist that’s at the top of your list of things you’re interested in. I certainly find lots of artists and cartoonists of the past that I have a passing interest in, but a few of them will stick around and become more personal, where you sort of take them on as your own, and he’s certainly fallen into that category for me. I would probably put him at the top of my list for the last five years or so, as someone whose work and life I’ve been very interested in. And I just see it as part of an ongoing project. I’ve written about him, I’ve certainly collected his work, I’ve done a strip about him now…I imagine that probably it’s going to end up somewhere down the road doing a book about him. The work appeals to me on a very basic level: I think it’s beautiful work, it’s really sensitive and solitary and it relates to the cartoonist’s art. And I think as a person he’s fascinating, because he was a very humble and self-effacing but – a very deep person. Even looking into him I’m having a hard time figuring out the details of his private life. I mean, there’s a couple diaries published that are very interesting, which is where I got a lot of the information for these strips, but I still don’t know the real intimate details of his life. He seems to have been an unmarried man, but I’ve heard some clues that there was some woman he lived with for years. The funny thing is that there’s just no source material to look this stuff up, so I’m seeing this as part of an ongoing process where I’m probably going to continue looking into him. There might even be material for another strip in there too. But certainly I think a big book of his work is somewhere in the works in my mind, somewhere down the road.

I thought it was…almost Greek levels of tragedy to be the son of this Group of Seven painter and to end up colour blind.

[chuckles] Well, the funny thing is, I’ve seen a few of his paintings and he did well for someone who was colour blind. What’s great about him, I think, is that he didn’t try to compete in the exact same sphere. His work is more about drawing, which I think is probably why I was more attracted to him. I mean, I certainly enjoy the work of his father and the Group of Seven in general…I like their work, especially Lawren Harris, but I think Thoreau’s work spoke to me more than any of them just because it’s close to the actual trade of a cartoonist. He’s working in simple black-and-white images. He’s using them the way a cartoonist uses them. It’s more about a cartoon language or an iconographic language than it is about trying to draw nature. He’s using black-and-white drawing – and he used to say it himself, he never went out into the field and drew - what he would do is come back into his studio and draw from memory. And I think that kind of ink drawing - where you’re creating iconic images to stimulate the viewer’s memory and make them plug in the actual details - that’s very similar to a cartoonist’s art. That’s what attracted me to him.

I just looked on Google Image Search, basically, and unfortunately there isn’t a lot there—

Yeah, it’s funny that there isn’t, actually.

It’s striking how he did these very abstract – well, not very abstract, but unexpectedly abstract renderings of wildlife and the natural environment.

He was a fascinating character. The work really appeals to me, and he was a great graphic designer, but personally too, reading his diaries, he was a very sensitive and humble person, which is always very appealing when you’re reading about someone. Occasionally you’ll read about some particular genius like Frank Lloyd Wright or something and you will think it’s kind of great that they were such an asshole, but generally I think we’re drawn to people that we would want to like and he seems like a person that I would like.

And so those diaries are basically the only primary sources on him?

Well, they’re the only primary sources I have access to. I come across slight bits of information that I don’t have my hands on, a few old magazine articles and stuff, but generally there doesn’t seem to be any written material that really goes into the details. Because he was a nice person I have a feeling that the majority of people did what he would’ve liked, and that’s that they didn’t write about him much. He didn’t want that kind of attention. I think to find out the real details of his life would mean going out and interviewing some people who have first-hand information. I know a great deal about his life up until 1960 or something but I have no idea about the details of his personal life, or what went on between that period and when he died in the ‘80s. I’m very curious, but I don’t have access to anyone who knew him personally, so I don’t really know.

Rewind, Rewind, Rewind

I haven't done one of these roundups in a while, and they make me look like somewhat less of a slacker, so here's all my recent music writing from EYE WEEKLY. Four concert reviews:

Chain & the Gang at Whippersnapper Gallery, April 24
Clues at Sneaky Dee's, May 21
Joel Plaskett at Massey Hall, May 23
Micachu & The Shapes at El Mocambo, July 14

And one album review: Immaculate Machine - High on Jackson Hill

There are also a few larger, collaborative works in the works. One of them is this, where I am now the assistant/permanent intern/galley slave. The other project is still top-secret, and too nascent for much detail anyway, but it's going to be awesome. Another music-related thing, only differently music-related!

Michael Redhill: award-winning author, man about town, secret nerd

probably the only Booker nominee who ever wrote a letter to The Comics Journal

I still need to catch up on the well-named Wednesday Comics (good luck finding a copy on any other day of the week), and I definitely don't want to write about Asterios Polyp yet, so here's a distraction in the meantime. I recently flicked through the first issue of The Beguilling's short-lived in-house magazine, Crash, subtitled "The Quarterly Comic Book Review" and featuring an inauspicious cover story on Chester Brown's Underwater. It was published in 1994 and very much of its time (one that preceded both the current management regime and my entry into first grade), but what caught my eye was a number of credits for Michael Redhill.

Redhill is a local novelist, poet and playwright who currently edits the Canadian literary journal Brick; his 2006 novel Consolation won the City of Toronto Book Award and was longlisted for the following year's Booker Prize. I knew that he writes criticism on the side, and vaguely remembered/imagined an affinity for comics, but I was unaware that the two ever dovetailed. Here's a chunk from one of his articles in Crash #1, a comparison of Jeff Smith's nascent Bone to Walt Kelly's Pogo:

We may begin by asserting that there are no funnier animals than people, and here is where Kelly and company began their explorations. Pogo, Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge were antropomorphications of recognizable types of their day, namely Americans, living in America. The creators of these books were connected to their time and their place, and these comics proceeded out of a secreted, but powerful, concern for the issues of the day. Barks is an out and out capitalist (cf. any number of theses and tracts critical of the Disney Ducks for inculcating ruthless capitalism in young children), and Kelly more of a crypto-socialist, but he's more concerned with political systems than he is with parties. The Pogo strips, comics and books are some of the best populist criticism we have of American politics in the fifties...Here is the main point of conflict with Bone. Addressing little more than itself, it gives the illusion of having the kinds of concerns those Golden Age stories did, but it does so without taking those kinds of risks. It's gorgeously shallow.

The next issue included a rambling, amusing letter from Robert Crumb: "...Who's this Michael Redhill? I found him rather sophomoric (but then, so am I, huh?)" Has Redhill written comics criticism more recently, post-Crash? I'm curious about any and all writers-on-comics who found renown with different subjects (writers-of-comics too: hi, Mr Delany), so feel free to post other examples of the genre in comments.

The Man-on-the-Moon

I've seen more than one eulogy that quoted Jay-Z circa 2001: "Mike was a superhero when I was a kid." It rings true, not just in the trivial sense that he read comics avidly or the comical one of his mid-90s attempt to buy Marvel but with a central resonance. Michael was far beyond normal people as a performer yet desperately apart from them as anything else, emerging from a childhood trauma with both titanic powers and crippling vulnerabilities. He wasn't human. Or he was metahuman. Earlier this year I read that, in what must be the most poignant act of cosplay ever, he was auctioning off a life-size statue of himself dressed as Batman.

Anecdotes like that can subsume his extraordinary talent, and they shouldn't. At an age when most musicians are churning out chirpy kitsch and most other children are dozing through fifth grade, he sang one of pop's most perfect songs, a sonic equation for pure joy. Later, he led the integration of radio, the charts, whole mediums, along with the music they broadcast. He made Thriller, apotheosis and template. He could walk on the moon. Part of a post-consensus generation, I was born too late to witness the zenith of his hegemonic fame, but I feel a strange, fleeting pang for that dissipated cohesion all the same. Every public song I've heard these past few days is one of his, singing the mythical monoculture's last words at its own wake.

The post I wanted to write this week was going to be about Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart's very Adorno, very funny comics project Seaguy. It's set in a amusement-park utopia that isn't, a Disneyfied world where the blissful comforts everyone's provided with by adorable, viscera-trailing Mickey Eye barely disguise their dissatisfied misery and routine exploitation. The magic kingdom is undergirded by wish-processing sweatshops and asylums full of numbed superheroes. It reminds me of the delusional man's extravagant simulacrum, but also the cruel bridling of that radiant boy. I don't mean to suggest that every group like the Jackson 5 is necessarily controlled by an abusive tyrant like Joe J. , or that their brutal backstory makes a single note of "I Want You Back" or "ABC" sound false. There are moments when love really is that simple and that easy, no further layers or ambiguities, nothing else worth saying. I just don't think Michael Jackson experienced very many of them.

On Facebook my friend Carl quoted John Darnielle: "there is no monster without somebody who made him that way." As he added, the maxim could be extended to allow social/historical forces in; sometimes the somebody is a something. The basic truth stands, though. To me Jackson's grim final decades resemble another Morrison creation, Quimper, the tragic Invisibles villain. Once a soothing visitor from a higher dimension, the otherworldly "little light" is dragged into our solid world by the authoritarian nemeses of the piece (who ultimately prove to be equally captive). They crush and corrode the friendly alien into a creepy, white-masked freak. He begins seeding his personality inside unwitting thralls...which is probably where the parallels end. But the King's twitchy imitations of everyday behaviour had their own sad monstrosity. At one point during the second Seaguy miniseries, a character says: "Mickey's everyone's friend and no one's." So was Michael.

Comics Critics Cry: "Context!"

The panel I looked forward to most at this year's TCAF was the Critics' Roundtable near the end of the final day, and it didn't disappoint, except in the sense that I left wishing it had been at least twice as long. They'd assembled a great lineup: Jeet Heer, Douglas Wolk, Dan Nadel and Bart Beaty, plus moderator Bill Kartalopoulos. The latter began by goading everyone with this quote from a review of Rutu Modan's Jamilti in The Guardian: "It's no longer necessary to convince people that comics can be more than Batman or the Beano. On the other hand, anything with any merit tends to get overpraised and is routinely spared the sort of critical scrutiny brought to bear on everything else, from a new Zadie Smith novel to the latest Star Wars flick. The mainstream press almost never measures a graphic novel's actual achievement against its unfulfilled potential. New converts, reluctant to show their cluelessness about the ninth art, merely parrot the publishers' hype."

Beaty broadly agreed with the sentiment, noting that when he writes non-scholarly articles (like his "Conversational Euro-Comics" series for The Comics Reporter) his role is typically the enthusiast or tour guide. Douglas added a point he's made before, which could be stressed more often: most mainstream or non-specialist publications still don't cover comics routinely enough to make critical broadsides feasible there, let alone pieces about older works. I write a fair number of negative music reviews for EYE Weekly, because their coverage of the medium in Toronto aims to be comprehensive. Anything about funnybooks is more sporadic, so I tend to pitch articles about comics I expect to be good, or at least interesting - and EYE already gives me more space for my ramblings than most alt-weeklies would. There is no perceptive critic writing regularly about comics at the New Yorker or whatever, but then there aren't many of those left in dance or classical music either.

Anyway! After describing his past life as a film reviewer, Jeet Heer came up with a fantastic analogy for the comics critic's dilemma (it's a heavy burden to bear). This is paraphrased at best, because I couldn't scribble it down verbatim, but here you go: "We're almost like religious missionaries...If you're speaking to an outsider you'll say 'wow, isn't this cathedral great?' but if you're inside the church we'll talk about how such-and-such priest is a pedophile." When everyone had stopped laughing at that Kartalopoulos changed the panel's structure a little, introducing various new/recent/upcoming books to see how the roundtable responded to them. The first one was Drawn & Quarterly's opening volume of The Collected Doug Wright, and Kartalopoulos quoted a promotional blurb from Chris Oliveros (which I can't actually find to quote here) making the case for Wright as an undiscovered Kurtzmann/Crumb/Schulz-level figure.

Heer replied: "I would have to say Chris' comment is hyperbole...he's not a new Kurtzmann or Crumb or Schulz. But I would say he's a new John Stanley." (That is, a cartoonist who did remarkable and brilliant things within a circumscribed commercial substrata.) And if he's only coming to light through the idiosyncratic lens of Seth, well: "Artists invent their ancestors...We now read Donne differently because of Eliot." Heer ended up placing Wright below masters like Schulz but above extremely talented craft guys such as Hank Ketcham. Beaty argued that Wright and Ketcham are "almost peers," but Heer distinguished the former as an observational cartoonist, portraying the actual lived experience of suburbia. All of Ketcham's housewives wear high heels; Wright's wear pants.

Around this point Kartalopoulos changed the topic to Fantagraphics' Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941. It was the first time Dan Nadel really leapt into the discussion, so much so that all my notes from this segment are about him. Both crotchety and self-deprecating, he said that Supermen! was "very blatantly influenced by a book I wrote called Art Out of Time, which is fine." But he criticized the newer anthology for having no "curatorial verve," reprising a theme he's sounded in his own book and elsewhere: that critics should locate strange old pulpy types like Fletcher Hanks within their historical and aesthetic contexts instead of simply gawking at how "weird" it all is (later on, Heer characterized the latter as the "Look at all this wacky stuff!" approach to comics writing). Even some giants are susceptible to those fannish lines of criticism; when talk turned to Jack Kirby and the many, many words devoted to him, Nadel groused: "There's so much written about Kirby and it sucks so bad."

He was just as cheery when Kartalopoulos introduced Craig Yoe's Boody: "Here's an example of the absolute worst tendencies in contemporary comics publishing." Nadel's jihad against the book mostly followed his earlier attacks at Comics Comics' blog, but being harsh doesn't make you wrong, and I still agree with most of what he said. I'll co-sign this: "If you want to be taken seriously, be serious." He also suggested that Boody "makes a great argument for the role of archives and universities in comics." The general sentiment at this point seemed to be "fuck camp, yo."

The last book under consideration ended up being Jules Feiffer's The Explainers, which made this focus on history oddly appropriate - as Beaty noted, Feiffer has sort of been written out of it. He was apart from the Mad crew and an older generation than the undergrounds. According to Douglas, Fantagraphics got about three volumes into a complete Feiffer by the early '90s and then just stopped. Sometimes the context defies its surveyors. I'll give the last word to Jeet: "The history of comics is a history of clubs...and Feiffer was an unclubbable man."

(OK, the panel did take up Asterios Polyp briefly, agreeing that it's the kind of book which will take months to fully digest and frustrate immediate reviewers, but this post is already long-winded to the point of self-indulgence. I can hear birdsong outside my window.)