“Very Casual” is Unsurrealistic

Tags

artcomics, comix, michael deforge, surrealism, very casual

I’m still reading “Very Casual: Some Stories” by Michael Deforge.

People told me that dude’s work was an example of “surrealism,” but it’s not — at least according to my understanding of the term. Surrealism exists outside of story. There’s no possible hint of a reasonable, sane explanation for Dali’s melting clocks, or the day it rained bowler-hatted men.

The best of Deforge’s stuff, though, often reads as if it could make sense, somehow, in some context, if only we knew the context. It implies a story in ways that the Surrealists never wanted to. You don’t ask questions of the Surreal, because juxtaposition and disjunction are all that it is. Narrative is one of several things that the Surrealist rejects.

(Of course, somebody who is an expert on Surrealism is likely to come along and give us definitive proof that what I’ve just said was bullshit — I am willing to be wrong on this, but I don’t think I am).

Deforge’s stories (when they are really good, which they often are) leave us constructing scenarios where what we have just read might actually fit into a post-Enlightenment understanding of the world and still be meaningful and sane.

For example: why is the snowman made of meat? What is the connection between the snowman’s body and the sleeping man’s body, and why is there a connection? How did the kid know that eating the snowman’s flesh would cause a psychedelic experience — had he done this before? Was it his goal to seduce the other kid? One can imagine an entire seven-volume Dark Fantasy series of novels explaining all this. That Deforge doesn’t give us the One True Explanation for the events in the story allows us to construct (or at least vaguely imagine) our own — but that’s not the same thing as Surrealism.

I like Surrealism, and I like Deforge, too, even though they are not the same thing as each other.

Quick Notes on Rutu Modan’s “The Property”

Tags

drawn & quarterly, israeli, rutu modan, the property

Rutu Modan deserves all the hype she’s getting, though the work itself (I’m talking specifically about “The Property” here, but this applies to her previous book, “Exit Wounds,” as well) is more low-key and subtle than the bombastic reviews might lead you to believe. She doesn’t feel like she’s reaching for any kind of Major Literary Genius Awards — which is good. She even points one of her jabs in that direction, with a character who wants to create “the Persepolis of the Warsaw Uprising.” She’s just telling a story, well.

The first thing you’ll notice, even if you’re not much of a comics fan, is the Tintin-ishness of her line and her layouts. It’s undeniable. The biggest key to Modan’s success as a cartoonist, for me, though, is not the clearness of the line, the beauty of the drawings, nor the economy of the layouts (and they are clear and beautiful and spare), but the “acting” of the characters. Each character is so distinct and realistically rendered — their reactions to one another, their reactions to their own thoughts — that you forget they are drawn so simply. Most comics, even most good ones, rely on the short-hand of cartoon conventions (sweat beads, lines radiating from faces, etc), stock poses, and expositional words (in dialogue, caption, or thought balloons) to get across the kind of subtle emotional message that Modan’s characters can express with a glance or a shrug. You “read” their movements and thoughts the way you do those of real people. At least, I did.

What’s the Difference Between a Graphic Novel and a Comic?

Tags

comic books, graphic novels

I’m on record as being uncomfortable with the term “graphic novel,” but it has become so ubiquitous that it can’t be avoided anymore, if you want to communicate with actual people. For example, the other day I referred to “Maus” as a comic, and this confused a friend, who said, “I thought it was a graphic novel? What’s the difference between a graphic novel and a comic?”

His question was sincere, because he wanted to understand.

My quick answer: all graphic novels are comics, but not all comics are graphic novels. For example, “Peanuts” is not a graphic novel.

This leaves open the obvious follow-up question: “What is a graphic novel?”  Which I was hoping he wouldn’t ask, but he did.

Different people use the phrase to mean different things. Here’s what I told him. For me, a “graphic novel” has to:

1). … be a complete work in one volume. “Sandman” is a serial comic, and at the highest possible level it is complete, but most individual volumes of it do not qualify as “a graphic novel.” This isn’t to say that serials like “Sandman” or “Love & Rockets” have no value. It is just to say that they are not graphic novels. They bear the same rough relationship to graphic novels that the entirety of the television series “The Sopranos” bears to a movie — similar, but not the same.

2). … have narrative unity from beginning to end, and tell a complete story. Item (1) eliminates books that tell one story over multiple volumes. This eliminates books that have multiple stories in one volume — story collections, anthologies, and strip reprints. 

3). … be presented to me in book-form: cover, spine, and physical pages. As ebooks become more common, this will matter less and less in the future, and I may change my mind, but for now, a graphic novel needs to exist somewhere as a bound paper book before I consider it a graphic novel.

4). I’ve been picky about things so far. There’s one area where I’m not. A graphic novel can be fictional or non-fictional, even though, in the prose world, where we borrowed the term from, “novel” always means “fiction.” Technically, “Maus” is a “graphic  history,” and “Persepolis” is a “graphic memoir.” Neither would be shelved with the novels if they were written in prose form. But the practice of calling nonfiction books “graphic novels” is so widespread that even I can’t imagine correcting it at this point.

I know many of you probably have slightly different definitions in your head for the term “graphic novel,” and I am not trying to make my definition canonical, so don’t get mad at me or anything. It’s still a young category, and the boundaries of it are still being staked out, in part by conversations like this one.

Fortunately, my friend didn’t ask “What are comics?” Because that’s an even bigger can of worms!

A Note on Genre

Tags

art history, genre, writing

Whether we’re talking about heavy metal music or science fiction or alternative comix or anything else, genre is a conversation, an ongoing back-and-forth. The best genre works aren’t “timeless”– they are very much of a particular moment in the history of the genre that gave them life. They build upon what came before, and point to what comes next. That is exactly what we respond to and why we like them. What’s good about a good genre work is often the way that it bends or breaks the conventions it is supposed to abide by. That particular way of bending and breaking then becomes a part of the genre.

That is why someone new to a genre may have a hard time appreciating it. How can you understand Star Trek without knowing Heinlein, Limp Bizkit without Loverboy, David Foster Wallace without Raymond Carver? Sometimes the new thing is an extension of the old. Sometimes it is a rejection and a negation. But always it is connected to, and dependent upon, what came before.

Yes, I include “literary fiction” as a genre.

Re-Reading (and Re-Re-Re-Re-Reading) Starstruck

Tags

books, graphic novel, IDW, kaluta, starstruck

I remember reading in TCJ, a long time ago, that a good comics page was just as dense as a good page of prose, and that if you didn’t spend enough time on a page — if you just “skimmed for story,” you would miss out on most of what the comic was telling you. I believe Gary Groth may have written this (that’s how long ago it was!), or maybe Kim Thompson.

So I set to staring at my comics pages after the first “skim.” It didn’t help me any. I just felt stupid, staring.

When I was a kid, I used to read my comics over and over and over and over again, each re-read in rapid succession (as in: finish the comic, start over reading the comic). I was reading some pretty sophisticated — for a second-grader — comics back then, like Bob Haney’s Brave & the Bold. I believe that the re-reading was what allowed me to comprehend these comics.

Copyright (c) MW Kaluta and Elaine Lee, all rights reserved. Used for illustrative purposes in the context of a commentary/review.

I’m doing the same thing now with Starstruck by Elaine Lee and MW Kaluta (which, by the way, I read in the 80s for the first time, but had mostly forgotten): re-reading each chapter six or seven times before moving on. It’s a dense, dense book, one that actually could justify Groth’s statement that a comics page can contain as much information as a prose page, and should be read as slowly as one. Staring doesn’t help, though. Re-reading is the key. Each time I re-read a chapter, I definitely catch something I didn’t catch before, and these aren’t just little detail-schmetails, these are big story elements that I totally glossed over in my usual quick-read-the-word-balloons-and-glance-at-the-artwork manner. For example, I didn’t realize, the first few times I read the page above, that the dude who shot the android’s head off was the boy’s father, even though I had already met the father, a very distinct and memorable character, just a few pages before. A stupid thing to not realize, but there you go. There was a lot going on in addition to this plot thread, and I got distracted. Anyway.

Do you like dense, “difficult” comics that are also beautiful to look at? If so, you will like Starstruck. If not, you won’t. There’s an easy way to find out: you can give Starstruck a try for free. Creators Elaine Lee and MW Kaluta have been posting the pages of the original book online in low-rez webcomic form at starstruckcomics.com. Despite my past heralding of the webcomic form, though, I have to say that Starstruck, of all the graphic novels I’ve ever read, really suffers from web-based presentation. It really needs to be consumed in book form. Fortunately, IDW has put out a gorgeous collected edition for you to read, and re-read, and re-re-read, etc.

Elsewhere on the Web

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Lee and Kaluta recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund production of a new Starstruck graphic novel. Yay!

The contemporary TCJ writer John Hilgart does a great job of close reading Starstruck:

As important, there are no explanatory boxes of narrative copy to be found in Starstruck, urging you along, making everything obvious. Anything that’s not dialogue in a speech bubble is either raw data (time, place) or a quotation from a notable figure or book from within the Starstruck universe, casting a provocative or oblique light on events. Together, Lee and Kaluta have engineered a comic book storytelling mode that approaches documentary. No one is in a rush here. As a reader, it’s easy to be a spectator, to step inside and linger.

Comics That Aren’t Mainstream: What to Call Them?

Tags

alternative comics, art-comics, comics, comix, underground comix

“Alternative” was the word for a while, but that fell out of use. There was (and suddenly there is again) a publisher named “Alternative Comics,” so it always sounded like you were talking about their catalog, for one thing. Besides that, everything is an alternative to something else — Spawn, Archer & Armstrong, and Judge Dredd are clearly alternatives to Batman and Spider-Man, but they do not represent the comics we want to talk about.

Spawn is an alternative to everything that is not Spawn.

“Art-comics” or “artcomics” took hold for a while, but calling a comic an “art comic” always seemed a). snooty, and b). repetitious, like calling a particular glass of water “wet water,” or a particular movie “filmic,” which people do, but people do all kind of silly things. Comics are an art form, so every comic is an “art comic.”

“Literary” was my personal favorite for a little bit, and while it’s a term that definitely describes a large and important subset of the kinds of comics we want to talk about (Fun Home is decidedly literary, for example), it does not begin to be usable for most of them (the stories in Johnny Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix, for example, are as literary as the Ramones were, which is to say not at all, but kinda, but definitely not).

Great literary insight from Johnny Ryan

Most of the “graphic novels” that people talk about a lot aren’t “novels” — book-length works of fiction — at all. Maus and Persepolis and Fun Home are nonfictional, for example. Sandman books and Love & Rockets collections are episodes in an ongoing serial, more akin to DVD collections of great television shows like The Sopranos or I Love Lucy than to novels. And so on and so on and so on. Which is fine. Many of the comics we want to talk about are not in any way novelistic, easy enough to understand — so why force that expectation upon them?

“Comix” with an “x” has been promoted as a term by no less a figure than Art Spiegelman, but that word, when spoken aloud, is indistinguishable from “comics” with a “cs,” so we are only able to talk about the comics we want to talk about when we are writing. That eliminates this solution. In spoken conversation, it would be annoying to have to keep saying, “with an x” every time, you know? Though I do like to annoy, so maybe I’ll try that.

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Elsewhere on the web:

I think Darryl Ayo might be trolling the fanboys a little bit with his thoughts on the nomenclature of non-mainstream comics:

I look at a lot of the so-called “alternative comics,” and–I don’t expect that I’m blowing anyone’s mind here–find that they are perfectly normal. They should be called “normal comics” and marketed as such. They should be called “normal comics,” and people can say “oh, are you into Spider-Man?” and you’d respond “nah, I only read normal comics.” Read more …

In the course of his obituary for the great Spain Rodriguez, Robert Boyd tries to make a case for the term “art comics” by using it to define works that are not created with commercial intention, which seems like a slippery slope to me (he immediately has to account for works that clearly were created for commercial gain but which are considered masterpieces of the form, like Krazy Kat and Little Nemo in Slumberland). Still, his distinction is close to what I am trying to get at when I talk about “comics that are not mainstream,” so if he’s guilty of oversimplifying his case, I’m as guilty as he is.

Link-Blogging: Howard Chaykin on Carmine Infantino

Tags

books, carmine infantino, comics industry, Howard Chaykin

Howard Chaykin’s memories of the recently-passed comic artist and publisher Carmine Infantino are interesting because they are Chaykin’s, written in his inimitable, irascible voice, as much as they are interesting because they are about Carmine Infantino.

“Back then, when I was in my early 20s, the fact that the publisher of DC Comics disliked me simply because I was associated with his lifelong nemesis [Gil Kane] seemed like the end of the world. In the long run, it didn’t make a damned bit of difference, but I made a commitment to myself that I would never fall into the kind of distaste for my contemporaries to which Kane and Infantino’s generation was clearly prone. Needless to say, things didn’t quite work out that way: there are a number of my contemporaries that I hold in the same high disregard that those men shared amongst themselves, and I’m certainly loathed by quite a few of my colleagues in return.”

No shit! Ha!

I know people who are scared of Chaykin because they’re afraid of his sharp tongue. You should hear him on the subject of the much-beloved-by-everyone-else Will Eisner. To hear that he imagined he, Howard Chaykin, would try to spread love and togetherness throughout the industry is especially delightful, knowing his reputation as a trouble-maker. None of us end up becoming who we thought we wanted to be.

 

I should mention that Chaykin’s refusal to suck up to the Common Gods of Comics is one of the reasons he is a hero of mine. That, and the amazing, seminal, artform-redefining work he has done throughout his career (I ignore the crappy work he has done throughout his career, as best I can). Please don’t hurt me Mr. Chaykin!

In Which I Go All Comic Book Guy on The Washington Post’s “Top 10 Graphic Novels/Comics of 2012”

Dear Washington Post,

Including “DC Comics: the New 52” in your list of “Top 10 Graphic Novels and Comics of 2012” makes you look stupid and/or disingenuous. It seems like you said to yourself, “Ooh, the fanboys are going to complain about all these highbrow, literary, and even journalistic books we’ve selected. Let’s be sure to throw them a bone, too.”

Which is actually fine. I understand the need to be able to say you have Covered the Field Adequately — and it’s a sure thing that action/adventure stories, and specifically superhero action/adventure stories, are an important part of the commercial comics scene.

There are choices you could have made that would have looked less lazy, that would have demonstrated a far greater understanding of the field and a stronger editorial viewpoint. As it is, it looks like you very carefully and diligently selected most of these books, then Googled to find out what the most-hyped thing that happened to happen in commercial comics was in 2012, and wrote that down.

There are plenty of superhero and/or genre adventure comics you could have picked that are good. It’s not that. It’s that you selected a marketing gimmick rather than a work of art. If you’re really committed to this New 52 thing, you could have narrowed in one one particular New 52 item that you thought was particularly good. I’ve heard the relaunch of Batman by Scott Snyder is brilliant, for example. But you didn’t do any of that.

“The New 52” is not a graphic novel. It is not even a comic. Choosing it is like saying that “The New Deal” was your favorite President, or “Season 2” was your favorite comedian on Saturday Night Live. There’s no sense to be made of it.

 

This is probably good, though, and I hadn’t heard of it, though I should have. So thanks for that.

Most of the other 9 items are interesting, and some of them I hadn’t heard of before now. The “Pearls Before Swine” collection, though it’s probably good, also looks like an example of tokenism (“D’oh! We’ve got to include at least one newspaper strip to make it seem like we understand the whole field!”) But at least it is a discrete item of artistic effort, and a critically acclaimed one at that — and not a corporate marketing gimmick.

(Updated): Reversion Revulsion and Superman

Tags

copyright, DC Comics, legal, siegel and shuster, superman

I agree with Hooded Utilitarian blogger Robert Stanley Martin that Siegel and Shuster were better-treated by DC than the histrionic mythology perpetuated by the comics press would lead you to believe.

Where Martin’s “The Superman Case, and Best Outcomes for Writers in Comics” falls apart is where he calls reversion rights — the legal mumbo jumbo that Superman’s heirs have used to regain some control over the Superman franchise — “idiotic.”

“Apart from public-domain laws, I personally see little difference between a copyright and a piece of tangible property such as a car or a house,” says Martin. He goes on to compare the situation to buying a Camaro and having General Motors want it back after a few years.

Note: “Apart from public-domain laws,” says Martin.

That’s like saying, “Apart from the blueness of the sky, I see no reason not to say that the sky is orange.” You can’t argue with that, but you also can’t let somebody get away with saying it, either. (Well, actually, I can argue a little bit: there are no public domain laws. There is only the public domain, and there are copyright laws.)

To have a conversation about copyright — and copyright reversion — and leave the public domain out of it is not playing fair ball. The public domain can’t be brushed aside. Copyright, like patent law, was intended originally to give creators a limited-time monopoly on the use of their creations, but not, at all, eternal ownership of those creations. Here’s what the Constitution says (emphasis added by me): “The Congress shall have Power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

In other words: the public domain is the natural state for all ideas and their expression. Copyright is a temporary reward for the people who created those ideas and expressions, instituted by Constitutional fiat, and changeable at will by Congress, but always — by design and conception — temporary. Once the creators (or the people the creators assigned their rights to, like DC Comics) have had a chance to exploit a property as long as legally permissible thanks to this convenient and useful legal construct, the material goes back to the culture itself, where it would have been all along except for this legal construct, owned by everybody, along with the works of Shakespeare, Homer, and Da Vinci.

The fact that items of intellectual property like Superman (or, more specifically, the stories Siegel and Shuster created featuring him — you can’t copyright ideas, only expressions of ideas) are supposed fall into the public domain after a certain period of time is the crux of the matter, the dog that wags the tail, not the other way around.

When Congress, at the request of Disney and other megacorporations, extended the period of time that it would take for an item to fall into public domain — not once but several times, and not in small increments but by decades — it was very aware of the fact that it was retroactively changing the value propositions of the past deals that creators like Siegel and Shuster had made, too. If I think I’m selling you something that is going to last you 25 years (or whatever the term was), and can’t possibly do you any good after that 25 years is up, I might sell it to you for a fairly low price. If I had known you were going to be able to legally exploit it for an extra 50 or 75 years, or even 100 (Superman will be 100 before most of us reach retirement age) I would probably have asked for more money, because something that lasts 25 years is fundamentally less valuable than something that lasts 100.

While it’s true that a Camaro has an expected lifespan, which its owner can expand or shrink based on how he treats the car, the term of copyright is a legal construct and will be precisely what the law says it is, no matter what. If copyright law had stayed the same, no amount of spit and polish and oil changes would have kept the copyright to Action Comics # 1 in DC’s exclusive hands for as long as it stayed there. It’s not a car. It’s just not. It was, literally, an Act of Congress that extended the lifespan of this property, not anything DC had done.

By changing the term of copyright retroactively — not just for future works but for things created in the past, like Superman — Congress caused every copyright sale prior to the change to be weighted far more heavily in the buyer’s favor than either buyer or seller had originally intended. Rights reversion opportunities were meant to remedy this situation, by allowing creators, presumably, to negotiate for more money to reflect the new reality.

Which the Superman heirs did do, and did receive. But that’s another story for another day.

Edited to add: I hadn’t read the comments thread below Martin’s post when I wrote this. Many of the points I make here were made better by Kurt Busiek and Noah Berlatsky over there. One final bone of contention, though: in the course of arguing with Busiek, Berlatsky and others, Martin argues that Congress clearly intends, with its recent changes in copyright law, to make intellectual property permanent, like “real” property. But it doesn’t matter what Congress (or Sonny Bono, whom Martin seems especially fixated upon) intends, because Congress can’t exceed its Constitutional mandate here. The Constitution doesn’t give Congress the power to do anything except to secure copyright “for limited Times.” To make “intellectual property” a real thing, as permanent and enforceable and solid as “real” property, you’d have to amend that document. I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Books: “Marvel Comics: the Untold Story” by Sean Howe

Tags

book review, history, marvel, Marvel Comics, sean howe

One of my friends complained to me about this book that it gave “short shrift to the really interesting years at Marvel” — which years were, by his lights, the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby years, essentially the 1960s, give or take a few years on either end. I disagree. Yes, those years are really interesting, but they’ve been pounded into the ground, in the fan press and elsewhere. I’ve heard that song, over and over and over and over. That song had already played out several times by the time I even got to the dance floor.

“My” Marvel was 70s Marvel, post-Stan, post-Jack, an era when every other month, it seemed, there was a new editor-in-chief, and the company sold itself a few times, to a few weird-sounding other companies. “My” Marvel culminates in the Jim Shooter era, with most of the talent that fans had always associated with Marvel — even Rascally Roy Thomas! — decamping for DC, the cross-town competition, and the company falling into bankruptcy. I’ve always found that era fascinating, and not just because it coincided with my fanboy years. What was Marvel without Stan Lee (who remained nominally in charge, but nobody, nobody, nobody — not even a 12-year-old kid in Alabama — believed that)? What was Marvel without Jack Kirby? What was Marvel without what had made it Marvel? That’s the question those people — Roy Thomas, Marv Wolfman, Steve Gerber, Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema, Klaus Jansen, etc., etc., etc. — had to try to answer for themselves, and for the fans. It could be a tremendous story: keeping the dream alive when the primary dreamers have woken and walked away.

This book covers all that stuff more systematically than I’ve seen it covered elsewhere, though I personally had already read quite a bit of Howe’s source material. And that’s maybe the thing about this book that ultimately disappoints a bit: it’s not a massive undertaking of original, dispassionate, even-handed research, the way that Gerard Jones’ history of DC Comics, Men of Tomorrow, was. Howe collects and summarizes information that was already publicly available, mostly from interviews in The Comics Journal. Having someone comb through all that fan cruft (yes, TCJ, I still think of you as a fanzine) and create a step-by-step narrative of the disparate and contradictory pieces is helpful, though. And that, along with conducting a bunch of interviews with many of the still-living primary figures himself, appears to be the extent of what Howe has done. Which is a lot. Let me be clear. I liked it, and I recommend it, but the definitive history of Marvel Comics — the one that steps past public statements and the self-aggrandizing memories of comic book creators talking to sympathetic fan interviewers, and gets down and dirty into real historical research — has yet to be produced.

Elsewhere on the Web

Robert Stanley Martin reviewed the book in more depth than I have, for The Hooded Utilitarian:

Howe is also apparently a fan of several 1970s and early ‘80s Marvel titles, such as Doug Moench’s Master of Kung Fu and Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck, and he loses all perspective when it comes to them. His discussion of the events leading up to the 1982 cancellation of Master of Kung Fu is the low point of the book: poorly researched, manipulatively written, and borderline libelous. (The passive-aggressive effort to blame Marvel for the death of artist Gene Day is repugnant.) The amount of attention given to Howard the Duck co-creator Steve Gerber is excessive, to say the least. And ironically, the most historically significant aspect of Gerber’s relationship with the company–his 1981 lawsuit to regain ownership of Howard–is only referred to a few times in passing. A reasonably detailed account would seem essential. …more

Panio Gianopoulos interviewed Howe for Salon Magazine:

In an interview with Salon, Howe discussed his landmark account of American mythmaking — along with his quasi-Shakespearean portrayal of Marvel as it moves from spirited upstart to ruthless corporate colossus. We also chatted about more lighthearted topics, such as Stan Lee’s prophetic powers, the noir-ish appeal of Daredevil and how the X-Men were conceived in the Apple store. …more