Dicebox.
Being the science fiction comics novel the Spouse is working her way through page by page over at Girlamatic (the first chapter and a half available for free, starting here). —Anyway, Jen Contino (Heidi MacDonald’s better half over at the Pulse) has been working her way through interviewing the various Girlamatic cartoonists; yesterday was Jenn’s turn.
It’s probably the booze.
I mean, this is funnier than it has any right to be. —Assuming, of course, you know who Galactus is in the first place. Or Norrin Rad. Or Uatu—no, wait—this one. (They do not pay me enough to explain this stuff. They don’t pay anyone enough, really. —Original link thanks to Andrew Ducker.)
Another bitter laugh.
You take them where you can find them: there’s something about the sight of Canadian cartoonist Colin Upton, glowering like some constipated Buddha, ruminating on the sheer stupidity of the zipless cakewalk, that makes me stifle a giggle. —Via Scott McCloud, Upton’s Gulf War Diary in comics; well worth blogrolling or bookmarking.
Remember, kids, dissent is wrong.
You get used to that bitter tang and there are some delicious moments, these days. Who’d’ve thought that Marvel Comics would ever possess a more sophisticated and nuanced approach to history and the big moral questions of the day—good, evil, the place of dissent and the responsibility of all citizens of a democratickish government to know and understand the consequences of the actions it undertakes on their behalf—than, oh, the National Review? —Well, me, for one. But I’m a weirdo.
Remissal.
I would be remiss, that is, if I didn’t mention the Girlamatic launch in somewhat more detail. It’s the latest in the Modern Tales family of subscription-driven webcomics sites: a low, low monthly fee gets you a passel of strips updating weekly in a variety of new fresh flavors. —Girlamatic caused some little controversy when it was first announced; comics shouldn’t build its own ghettos, women don’t need special help, we should judge comics on their merits and not the gender of the cartoonists; that sort of thing. (Oddly enough, a great many of the skeptics, while feeling that congregating comics by the gender [or race, or ethnicity, or religion, or culture, perhaps] of the cartoonist or the [largely] intended audience was a mistake, did not feel that congregating comics by genre—science fiction, gag, autobiographical, pervert suit, etc.—was itself a similar error.) Well, now that Girlamatic has launched (and is no longer vaporware, mere fodder for messageboard speculation), it can be judged on its own merits.
I don’t think it comes off too terribly badly. The gravitas of Donna Barr, say (almost ridiculously self-indulgent, poorly scanned in spots, and in German to boot, but it is Donna Barr, so); the kickass one-two punch of Shaenon “Narbonic” Garrity and Vera “Cartooning Goddess” Brosgol (yes, that Vera Brosgol); Kris Dresen’s gorgeously drawn “Encounter Her”; I’ve read the first fit of The Stiff by Jason Thompson, and it’s going to creep the holy fuck out of you; I like what I’ve seen of Layla Lawlor’s Raven’s Children, so I’m curious to poke around in Kismet: Hunter’s Moon; Harley Sparx is apparently out to do some sort of shonen ai piss-take on Dante, so you know I’m in the front row with popcorn; Andre Richards brings the old skool minicomics vibe; Dylan Meconis (yes, that Dylan Meconis) is bringing Bite Me to the party; and while I can say nothing at all either pithy or penetrating about Lisa Jonte at the moment, she’s in heady company, is she not?
Which leaves us with two of the current roster as yet uncommented. First being Spike, and another of those whereinnahell-did-she-come-from moments. The woman has a gorgeous design sense (a curious shortcoming in comics as a whole) and draws like some unholy combination of Charles Burns and Chris Ware; check out her own website, for instance these beautiful little character studies, and then check back for more Lucas and Odessa. —The second as yet uncommented, of course, is the Spouse: and allow me to set aside any pretence of setting aside any pretence to objectivity, because I do think it’s clear enough without spousal bias that Jenn’s a sharp writer with an ear for witty dialogue, an excellent cartoonist in the illustratorly school, inspiringly cheeky in her symbol-games and pattern-making, with a yen for futures that are lived in and not just dreamed up. Add to which her gorgeous color sense and a world-building skill with perspective (a behind-the-scenes hint: David Chelsea’s Perspective! will teach you everything you need to know), and—well, Dicebox alone is worth a buck ninety-five a month. —Much less everything else, and more on the way.
But! Enough with the hype. We now return you to your regularly scheduled bitching and moaning.
Dream is dead.
(Here at Long story; short pier we continue our exhumation of the corpse of one Anodyne magazine [1996 – 1999, requiescat in pace]. Why? Damned if I know. An attempt to distract myself, perhaps. —Tonight, spurred mostly by an email from a friend idly wondering in what order, exactly, one ought to read it, we present my review of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman written on the event of its completion, back in November 1996. It’s impossible to overstate the impact Sandman has had on comics, but even as I type that sentence I realize I have no idea how it’s regarded in the here and now. History moves fast, these days; even faster in a world at once as fickle and monomaniacal as comics. People still know it, yes; people still read it; editors and publishers still fling together er-you-dite UK writers and this or that upstart cartoonist and a mishmosh of julienned Bullfinch’s and double-handfuls of Golden Age continuity in the hopes of bottling that much lightning again. But—but. Comics is also still enthralled [though there’s hope for the first time in years] to the longjohn [pervert-suit] superhero set, to a bewildering degree. Insular tropes that make no sense to readers not steeped in their mysteries derail the highest of concepts, while the stupid exigencies of 22-pages-a-month like [gummy] clockworks that dictate industrial cartooning pretty much put the kibosh on consistency in art and storytelling over any long haul. —All this, you see, is what makes good comics so miraculous to the embittered fan. [Imagine, say, what might have happened to the vital American prose short story, if it had squandered its rich variety of genre and marketplace by focusing tightly on, oh, closely observed, naturalistically quotidian epiphanics, produced to the increasingly bewildering dicta of insular journals and dwindling grants programs.]
(—That bit of savage irony riffed shamelessly off of Michael Chabon’s semi-coherent, ill-reasoned, and doubtless mistaken but nonetheless delightful introduction to McSweeney’s No. 10, a mixed bag—which was, one imagines, rather the point.
(I’d thought of a weblog for myself as a way of getting back into comics criticism [among other things]. This was back when I was thinking of calling it something else, like Blue Elephant Gun. Like a lot of other things, that’s been sidetracked. [I’m still tickled to see this blog-thing listed under “political sites” or the equivalent on this or that blogroll.] So maybe this is also a way to get back into the harness a little; toss the pill in the backyard with the old man or something. There’s a lot going on in webcomics, you know, and a lot to be said about it—a lot of people are linking today to Patrick Farley’s “Our Leader Speaks,” and more power to ’em, but fewer are clicking into the site itself to read [say] the richly strange and [now] bleakly haunting road-not-taken, “The Spiders” to note the amazing metatextual games he’s playing with Salon mockups and message board debates; fewer still would get any Colin Upton references I’d make regarding it.
(I should maybe get out of my own way, except to note that I was mad not to list A Game of You as among the best of the “books” of Sandman, and that some little credit for “surviv[ing] the debilitating collaborative process” is due to Karen Berger, without whom, I do not doubt. And one last note: for more old Anodyne comics fun, I can’t let pass an opportunity to recommend Barry’s Pre-Structuralist Funnies. Go, see what he was like back in the day.)
Neil Gaiman is not God. We’d best get that out of the way up front.
Not that this claim has (yet) been made in print, but some have come awfully damn close—like Mikal Gilmore, who writes, “To read The Sandman is to read something more than an imaginative new comic; it is to read a powerful new literature, fresh with the resonance of timeless myths.” (One imagines he had not yet read the wooden “Orpheus” issue.)
Or Frank McConnell, who claims that “Gaiman has invented, out of whole cloth, a mythology not just of comics but of storytelling itself.” (Really. This patchwork of pastiche and Shakespearean reference and obscure etymologies was invented out of whole cloth? I don’t think we were reading the same thing.)
So when one encounters something so bald-faced as Peter Straub’s assertion that, “If this isn’t literature, nothing is,” the temptation to do a little debunking becomes overwhelming.
But that would be the easy way out. Gaiman isn’t responsible for what people say about him or his work, merely the work itself: The Sandman, the comic he’s been writing for eight years, which just came to an end with its 75th and final issue. I gathered together the disparate volumes which collect the entirety (Preludes & Nocturnes, The Doll’s House, Dream Country, Season of Mists, Fables & Reflections, A Game of You, Brief Lives, Worlds’ End, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake) and sat down to read them all in one fell swoop. I went in intending to poke some holes in this grandly gloomy balloon I turned the last page feeling immensely satisfied, sated, full—the sort of feeling you get after finishing a good, meaty novel, and feel so rarely when reading comics.
One could state impishly that the moral of the story is, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Sandman is about Dream, the anthropomorphic incarnation of dreams and stories, one of the seven Endless—Destiny, Death, Dream, Despair, Desire, Delirium, and Destruction—who are patterns, ideas, echoes of things older than gods. They have their realms and their responsibilities, and they touch the lives of every living thing.
Which doesn’t make them nice people. Dream, for instance, is a cold, unfeeling bastard, who takes his responsibilities far more seriously than the lives and feelings of the people around him—or seems to: “What does it mean to you?” asks Delirium once, when Dream mutters one too many times about his responsibilities. “The things we do make echoes,” she tells him. “Our existence deforms the universe. That’s a responsibility.” But Dream is so callous that he once condemned a pickpocket to spend the rest of his life dreaming of the gallows-tree. Nada, a queen in prehistoric Africa, once spurned his affections; he damned her to ten thousand years in Hell, and three black women die during the course of the comic, in falling buildings and in fires, echoing the destruction of her city and her damnation. Dream never notices.
Or rather, Dream was. The story begins with his imprisonment for almost seventy years by a Crowleyesque mage; when he escapes and begins to reclaim his realm, it slowly becomes apparent that something changed, somewhere. When he gets his hands on Dee, the rather silly villain of the first few issues, who has perverted one of Dream’s own tools and driven the world mad for a night, Dream merely returns him to the asylum and tucks him into bed. Not quite the epicly petty revenge one might have expected.
Dream spends much of the rest of the comic coming to terms with who he is, and not liking what he sees; two important stories revolve around his attempts to set right something he had thoughtlessly done in the past. “You’ve changed,” he is told more than once by friends and acquaintances. “I doubt it,” is his response. He is one of the Endless, after all, who are merely ideas, patterns, echoes; echoes can’t change, can they? This seeming paradox—that he does not like what he is, but feels he cannot change—ultimately drives Dream to destroy himself, to obliterate his own existence, his “puh-point of view,” so that another Dream, a different Dream, can take his place. A better Dream.
“I don’t know if it’s good,” Gaiman is fond of saying about Sandman, “but I do know that it’s long.” Which is precisely why it’s good. The length, the space, the luxury of two thousand pages of comics give Gaiman room to explore, play, to set up echoes of his own: Lucifer, who retires from Hell and becomes a night-club piano player; Haroun al-Raschid, who gives up his magical city of Baghdad to Dream to keep it safe from history; Shakespeare, who lays down his pen for the last time upon writing The Tempest (a play, of course, about a magician who sets aside his magic forever) to try to live life instead of merely writing about it. He has the space to do something like Worlds’ End, a collection of travelers’ tales of happy endings, narrow escapes, destinies averted; a tantalizing glimpse of roads not taken before turning down The Kindly Ones, the final act of Dream’s tragedy. He has room for not one, but three elegiac epilogues, three last shimmering echoes of the story to savor before closing the book for good.
Sure, the beginning is weak. There is an air of self-indulgence about much of the comic. The art, in places, sucks (Dick Giordano inking Colleen Doran with what looks like a scratchy ball-point pen, or Robbie Busch’s colors, at once muddy and garish). But there are beautiful moments, in both writing and art—Charles Vess’s issues, or John J. Muth’s, or the gorgeous Erté-esque designs and colors of Marc Hempel and Daniel Vozzo; “Sunday Mourning” or “The Golden Boy,” Brief Lives or The Kindly Ones as wholes. I understand the adulatory impulse which drove those reviewers to such giddy excesses: comics require more labor, and of more intensity, than just about any other medium. The fact that something as long and as structured and as cohesive as Sandman survived the debilitating collaborative process of today’s industrial comics is startling enough; the fact that it is good seems miraculous. But to refer to this story as “among the most extraordinary of all time in any medium” (Gene Wolfe, but he was writing an introduction, and so we will forgive him) is silly—and more than a tad defensive.
Gaiman isn’t God. He just wrote a good comic book.
Which is enough.
Kelly J. Cooper knows the score.
I’ve been meaning to link to Comixpedia for a while now (and add them to the ever-burgeoning linchinography to the right there); the folks thereabouts are rapidly building a solid rep as the go-to gals and guys when it comes to writing about webcomics. (Is it a one-word neologism at this point? We do seem to have cast aside the usual coy engagement period of hyphenation, leaping alacritously from two words seen together [and gossiped about] with ever-increasing frequency straight to the cohabitation of portmanteaudom—still technically illegal in four Bible Belt states, or so I am given to understand.) —But recent events have forced my hand: they’ve gone and published a review of Dicebox which nets a three-pointer when it’s fourth and ten, a beautiful hanging birdie from just outside the paint. —Um. I should probably point out that a) I am married to Jenn, so objectivity flies right out the window on this one (but we’ve long since laid that myth to rest, surely), and b) I often affect to know nothing at all of sports, or the metaphors thereof.
(Psst. Kelly: “Peh” is a gender–non-specific pronoun [as opposed to gender-neutral], used when you do not wish to assume the gender of the person you’re addressing. The media in Dicebox use it as a regular formality, says Jenn [hear, hear, says I]; it’s also common to use it when addressing someone in authority [again with the hear, hear]. —Not there’s any way for you to have known this from context [yet], which is fine, which is perhaps part of the point; immersion and all, and I’m reminded of a post about reading The Hobbit at a young age and missing most of the big made-up words but loving it anyway, which cited information theory, but I’m not going to link to it because it already looks like I have a massive crush on the languagehat, so. —But! Three cheers for kicking the puzzle around. It’s what it’s there for. Right?)
—Um. Lemme just get out of the way. Go, read the review; read the comic; if you haven’t started it yet, I’ll even shove you straight into Chapter 1, Scene 1.
I’ll just leave you to it then, shall I?
Oulipo, oubapo,
OuLiPo, OuBaPo,
Let’s call the whole thing off.
Actually, let’s not. Languagehat is priming the pump to run oulipo up the Daypop word burst chart (and here, by the way, is a site that presents you with one of Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, in English, every 60 seconds); I just thought I’d slip in a mention of comics’ version: oubapo. Ouvroir de la Bande Dessinée Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Comics, was founded in 1992 by Thierry Groensteen and various members of the Parisian publishing collective L’Association, which included the always-divine Lewis Trondheim. The Oubapo-America site is a wee bit out-of-date (there’s still some traffic at the message board), but is nonetheless a nice little collection of links to some formal considerations of comics and experimentations with form—such as Matt Madden’s takes on the basic idea behind Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style.
Be thou an honest pro-war cartoon?
Dirk “Diogenes” Deppey over at ¡Journalista! is combing the marketplace, raising his lantern high: he’s looking for a single recent pro-war editorial cartoon, and can’t think of a one. —Myself, I figured this was a gimme: I cunningly expanded the definition of “editorial cartoon” to include that bulwark of the underdog conservative, Mallard Fillmore, held my nose, and went trawling through the past month or so of strips. Figuring, you know, what with a January full of aluminum tubes and material breaches and troops standing tall to defend the American Way and Dr. Blix’ report to the UN chastising Saddam, surely the duck would have something to say.
Well, I found a lot of Trent Lott jokes. (Apparently, Mr. Tinsley is still bitter over the whole affair.)
I did find two strips that could be construed as pro-war, in that one asserts Saddam is merrily working away at nuclear weaponry (even as it tags Bush for pronouncing “nuclear” as “newkewlar,” and can I just stop a moment and roll my eyes at this, whether it comes from the left or the right? I mean, say “comfortable,” so I can more likely than not razz you for saying “comfterbul”), while the other is anti- those who are anti-war, which, I suppose, makes it pro-war. Objectively speaking.
But this is weak fodder, especially since arguing that Mallard Fillmore is an editorial cartoon is strictly speaking a bit of a stretch. —Anyway. Rack your brains and comb your papers and email whatever you find to Dirk. There must be some out there. Right?
Irony’s failing, Captain. Satire’s offline.
You ever read Frank Miller?
Skip DK2. (I did.) Forget all of Sin City (aside from the first, before it was obvious he didn’t get the wickedly bleak joke). Go back to Dark Knight, if you ever liked Batman comics; go dig up some old Martha Washington—not really worth the time and trouble, but it had its moments; go strike the motherload and pick up the bound collection of Elektra: Assassin, which is for my money the best he’s ever done. (Writing-wise. Ronin’s another kettle of fish, and anyway, has no bearing on what we’re about to bring up.)
But if you haven’t read any Frank Miller, then a certain rich load of let’s be charitable and say unintentional humor will—well, it’ll still waft off the upcoming passage, but it won’t pack the same redolent stomach-dropping funhouse what-the-fuck deja vu wollop as it does for those of us who remember all the tough-talkin’ sound-bitten politicos from those ’80s (and early ’90s) comics, back when what Frank was writing was satire, was black comedy, was over-the-friggin’ top, a top which was still a ways up yonder, out of reach. I mean, if you don’t remember his take on the Surgeon General, then this—
Frist: I don’t know how good of a majority leader I’ll be. I just don’t. It would be presumptuous for me to say that. About being tough enough? What I did before coming to the United States Senate was to split people’s chests open, to open the chest, to reach in, operate on the heart, and if that wasn’t the right operation, actually cut that heart out. And go to another individual and open them up and take a heart out and put it in. And that’s not being aggressive, but it basically shows that I want results, I’ll do what it takes to have it done, and at end of the day, somebody is going to have a better quality of life because of it.
Well, you just won’t be able to appreciate it in quite the same way. —Shame, really.
Over there.
First a clean line passed; now, a grittily muddy one. Damn. —Bill Mauldin, ladies and gentlemen.
What I have in common with Dylan Meconis.
We both, apparently, have a thing for unmitigated evil. —Or so says this.
—Who, you ask, is Dylan Meconis? Why, only one of the Four-Who-Must-Be-Named-For-Easier-Linking, recently added to the radar screen of Scott McCloud’s inestimably powerful links page: that’d be Vera Brosgol, Jen Wang, Erika Moen, and, well, Dylan; four scarily talented cartoonists just out of high school and looking for trouble—lock up your sons and daughters and step away from the Wacom Tablet.
The trouble with the whole Four-Who-Must-Be-Named-For-Easier-Linking shtick (Fwoombuneffel?) is that there’s really six. Or that’s how I think of them, anyway: the Mostly Acquisitions crowd, the six cartoonists who with this 24-page $2.00 ashcan had put together maybe the neatest thing (aside from the Junko Mizuno postcards and the Eddie Campbell original) we’d picked up at the 2002 San Diego Comic Con: Brosgol and Moen and Meconis and Wang, yes, but also Bill Mudron and Kevin Hanna.
People at the con couldn’t stop talking about Mostly Acquisitions: “Have you seen the minicomic with the story about the girl who buys a vibrator?” they’d say. They were talking about Vera Brosgol’s story, “Babeland,” which is, well, a piece about a girl buying her first vibrator: marvellously expressive cartooning with a slyly subversive political kick. But they were all being lazy, referencing the the memorable high-concept hook, and giving unforgiveably short shrift to the rest. There’s Bill Mudron’s loopily obsessive pencil work (check out those plaids!), like one of Al Columbia’s apocryphal Merrie Melodies kicked loose in time. Erika Moen manages to channel Ellen Forney with cheeky assurance (for all that she was seven in ’90, not ’75. Added bonus: I now know what a GeoSafari is. The heart bleeds). Kevin Hanna’s appealing characters with their skinny lines and grey toning and expressive body language manage the neat trick of finding something compelling in the oeuvre of Michael Bay. And Dylan Meconis rounds it all off more than nicely with a beautifully oblique tone poem of hands and words. (There’s not enough poetry in comics, I think. Or is it vice versa? Maybe it’s vice versa.) (Jen Wang did the cover, which just means you have to go spend extra time yourself oohing and ahhing at her impressive command of spacing and timing, which are of course in comics the same thing.) —And this is not to say that there aren’t rough patches and places where an informed critic might suck his teeth and make That Face and say gently chiding things that can’t help but come across as patronizing, but that’s not important now, and that’s not what I’m on about here. (Of course, the fact that an informed critic might choose to gloss over these rough patches could itself be construed as patronizing, so let me just reiterate that it’s not important now and it’s not what I’m on about here.) It’s the joy this Kinko’d minicomic was steeped in, the sheer love of the medium radiating from it, a palpable zing that (with no small amount of craft) reached out and grabbed your collar and kicked you in the pants and goaded you in the ribs. Who the hell were these people? you asked yourself, because you had to. And more importantly: where the hell did they come from, out of nowhere like that?
Well, right here. Mostly. Head back to the Mostly Acquisitions homepage and scroll down to the list of contributors and note how each and every one of them has a LiveJournal. Now follow the various links and note how interconnected they’ve been, across dozens of states and thousands of miles: trading links and tips and posting art for critiquing (or just oohing and aahing) and arranging con trips and sharing their various audiences—hell, having and building audiences of their own by having a way to cheaply and quickly distribute their work far and wide, by the dozen or the thousand, next door or overseas…
Kids these days. —Let’s back up a decade or so. In and around Boston and Amherst (and New York City and northern New Jersey, the Monmouth County area), there’s four cartoonists who are ten years younger than they are right now, and when they go to cons in the New York area they usually end up hanging with Scott McCloud (ten years ditto), who’s doing a funky little black and white comic called Zot! After trawling for back issues of Byrne/Claremont X-Men and Star Wars (Marvel, not Dark Horse; y’all remember that funky green rabbit?) they’d all join Scott at a table at McDonald’s and he’d let fall extemporaneously a chunk of the science inside his head that would eventually become Understanding Comics. (Scott would demonstrate his passion for Naming Things for Easier Linking by dubbing this clique as variously the McDonald’s Club, the McDonald’s Supper Club, or [for obscure reasons] the Haberdashery.) —Heady times, heady times. They all had the religion, then, because Scott is a mighty evangelist for comics, and they did their own minicomics and traded them at cons and through the mail (this was before you had to differentiate it as snail-mail), and whenever they got together (at a con, or at someone or another’s apartment for a massive chips-and-funky-salsas party, say), the sketchbooks would come out and be passed around. Ooh, that’s nice, you maybe should have tried this, look, here’s how I did that. And they did 24-hour comics and collaborated on the occasional anthology and even put together some proposals and shipped them around, but the black-and-white boom they’d come of age with had blown away, and Eclipse was dead and Fantagraphics wasn’t biting and not one of the four of them was interested in doing the sort of chromium-plated super crap that passed for hot comics in those days, and it’s hard, doing your art when no one but your friends is looking (and them only now and again, when you can get together); harder when it’s something as laborious as comics, and as marginalized. And so one by one they slipped away, and Paul went back to music, and Amy went on to collage, and Barry went sort of sideways and eventually into political cartooning, and the only real evidence of this flurry of comics from back in the day is in a couple of boxes in this basement or that attic or underneath the bed.
Of course, there were four. Jenn stuck it out. Which is not to say that the other three were fools or cowards or lacked some Bill Bennett morality-play virtue. This isn’t a parable, and Paul’s music is vivid and funky and beautiful and Amy’s collages are stunning and boggle the mind and Barry is pretty much a Jules Feiffer for our time. (Yes. I am well aware that Barry almost always uses the central technique of comics—juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence—to finesse the timing of his monologual political strips, so he is, indeed, doing comics; don’t muck up my lovely rhetorical point with niggling little facts, okay?) —But what Jenn really wanted to do could only be done in comics; comics was all she really wanted to do; and so she soldiered on (off and on) for ten years or so: ditching her color symbolism off the bat, because what publisher would spring for a color SF comic about female space hobos? Working on her inking, despite the ways in which it wrestled with her more textured, illustrative style. Trimming or padding each installment to fit the 24 pages mandated by the current market and 4-page printer’s signatures. Writing the first issue through four times over to make it fit and drawing it start to finish twice (and a couple more aborted attempts) and all of it in isolation. “The fact that Jenn Manley Lee isn’t making comics professionally today is proof positive that this industry is screwed up beyond repair,” said Scott McCloud once, but who knew? Who cared? Who else could see the work? Fantagraphics still wasn’t biting, and Dark Horse wouldn’t have been interested in the first place. Making copies down at the Kinko’s yourself is expensive, and lugging a portfolio full of artboard from one reader to the next gets tiring, after a while.
But on the web, none of this is a problem. Color? As easy and inexpensive to display as line art, or grayscale. Story or chapter or episode length? Whatever you can get away with. Content? Whatever you like: vampires and the French Revolution, or autobiographically contemplating life after high school over coffee, or reincarnating Anne Frank to fight vicious Moon Nazis, or creepily synchronous letters appearing out of nowhere in a creepy apartment, or the Chinese Zodiac come to life, or pop culture deconstruction and sexual angst. (Or, well, hobos in outer space. That are women.) Whatever you want: write it, draw it, scan it and upload it, then cheaply and quickly distribute it far and wide, by the dozen or the thousand, next door or overseas…
—The more astute among you will have noticed you can do much the same thing with collages and music and political cartoons.
Whatever my purpose in setting these various tops spinning, it isn’t to state that the web is the be-all and end-all, the Omega point, the One True Medium. Paper is still king. For all their LiveJournal notoriety, after all, it was Mostly Acquisitions—6 pieces of 8 1/2” x 11” paper xeroxed on both sides and folded in half and saddle stapled twice—that got them noticed at the 2002 San Diego Comic Con. (Of course, Jenn and I knew to be on the lookout for Mostly Acquisitions thanks to online links and email correspondence, but life is full of little ironies.) Nor is it to state that without the web, comics would soon enough have lost the sparks of the Six-Who-Must-Be-Named-For-Easier-Linking (Swoombuneffel. I think we’re on to something with that—); comics is a harsh mistress, after all, and there’s still plenty of time for one or another or most of them to go back or onwards or sideways and eventually into something else: Vera Brosgol to the harsher and even more demanding mistress of animation, say, or Bill Mudron to the relative respectability of online film (and genre television) criticism; Jen Wang could chuck it all tomorrow for film school and a groundbreaking series of diet soda commercials; Kevin Hanna could become a behind-the-scenes player in Big Content; Erika Moen could renounce the frivolity of comics for a lifetime of committed political activism; there’s still time for Dylan Meconis to become an ambitious multi-hyphenate with a knack for interesting new neuroses. Life is terribly contingent, especially for the (harrumph harrumph) young, and having done comics on the web and done them well doesn’t necessarily doom you to a life of juxtaposing pictorial and other images in deliberate, even narrative, sequences. (And it isn’t even the web necessarily that got them where they are; it’s also having come of age in comics at a time when Understanding Comics and the conversations it spawned are still ringing in the air, when the range of what comics are and can be is far richer than the spectrum from Claremont/Byrne X-Men to Marvel’s Star Wars, when Time has a comics critic and Dan Clowes has a movie. —The industry may be ailing, but the medium’s never been better, and yes, that has a lot to do with it, too.)
But—
I pick up Mostly Acquisitions and get that eat-my-dust oldtimers zing off it, the potential that tingles my fingers and makes me grin—
And I go online and look at how they’ve been able to share their work, and what they’ve said about it, the fanbases they’ve built and the names they’ve checked and the links they’ve shared, and I trace the network from Pittsburgh to Seattle to San Francisco to New York to mishmow to artstrumpet to fartsofire to covielle—
And I can’t help but wonder: what kind of comics would they have made, ten years ago, Paul and Jenn and Barry and Amy? If there’d been a world-wide web? —Also, cheap color scanners.
And I can’t help but ask: what kind of comics might they be making now?
But Christ, I’m nattering like it’s 1997 and Mondo 2000 and instant communities and gift economies and paradigm shifts and the paperless fucking office. The web? Change anything? You give people a way to talk to each other cheaply and easily and they’ll figure out the darndest things to do with it. This is news?
I mean, we all know what the web is really for: Who’s Your Secret Hogwarts Lover quizzes. ’Fess up, y’all.
It’s a good reading, Charlie Brown.
Still smiling at this, which I found thanks to Sara Ryan’s weblog. —The question that immediately leaps to mind: would you rather use this deck to play a terribly archetypal game of 5-Card Nancy (I mean, Peanuts)? Or see a Nancy Tarot deck? (As yet non-existent. Collageurs and forgers take note!)
London and France and Bruno’s underpants.
So Bruno’s stripping.
(You don’t know from Bruno? Possibly the oldest and one-of-if-not the best daily strips on the web, originally published in the pages of the UMass Daily Collegian [Amherst] and in painstakingly hand-assembled books and now seven years’ worth online and counting [though the books are still available, yes], about the daily misgivings and peregrinations of a 20-something—no, now 30-something woman who thinks not wisely but too well, who pissed off her parents and dropped out of college and corrupted her niece and ran away to New Orleans and discovered girls and invited a circus to stay in the house of a reclusive crank and helped her fondest enemy find the love of his life and worked for a newspaper and forgot to feed her cat and travelled across country with a theatre troupe and dissed Ginger Spice and moved to Portland on a whim and fell in with a philosophy group at the Pied Cow and didn’t so much try polyamory as get involved with more than one person at once and it didn’t so much work out and she got hit by a car and she traveled across Europe and for a while there she’d been optioned by Jeremiah Chechik and she has these dreams, and all of it in gorgeous black and white, and lately she’s taken up stripping. Exotic dancing. Ecdysiasting. —Thus, Bruno.)
The thing about Bruno stripping—and yes, I see your furrowed brow; let’s drag this out in the open: there is something (inherently?) salacious about a gynephilic artist writing and drawing stories about a woman working in the sex industry; all the good intentions in the world can’t change that fact. (There’s something [inherently?] salacious about androphilic artists doing stories about shirtless Foreign Legionnaires in the Algerian desert, too.) Luckily, Chris doesn’t try to hide this salaciousness; “Me, I’m really attracted to naked women,” as he puts it in a recent journal entry. —But there’s nothing inherently wrong with this salaciousness. As most budding artists sooner or later get around to figuring out, one of art’s great, brute-force purposes is giving shape and form to inchoate desires—or, as Howard Cruse puts it in the delightfully screwball “Unfinished Pictures” (from Dancin’ Nekkid With the Angels):
Ah, for the newly-ripened sexuality of pubescence, the high-voltage horniness of youth! Yech, for the agonies of not being able to do anything about it! Artists have an advantage, though… I was thirteen when I realized I could draw dirty pictures anytime that I wanted to!
Don’t scoff. It’s a heady, potent feeling: you may not be able to control your desires, or the objects of those desires, but you can at least use words or pictures or both to effect some control over images of those objects, and those desires. It’s a damn sight better than nothing. —When done badly, of course, you end up with Victoria’s Secret commercials and Lady Death and everything else on the TV and the radio and the internet that reminds you marketers think there’s nothing cooler in this world than to sell to 13-year-old boys; when done well—in comics, at least—you end up with delightful trifles like Colleen Coover’s girly porno and Dylan Horrocks’s beautifully dirty stories and oh, I dunno, a decent chunk of early Desert Peach. So let’s make sure we’re clear on this: there’s nothing inherently wrong with salacious art.
that that’s what Chris is doing, per se.
He’s done his homework. He has an appreciation of the ironies and the cognitive dissonances; he knows something of what it feels like to have this as a job and something of what goes through your head on stage and when you don’t want to tell your boyfriend what it is you’re doing because he’s at least doing a pretty good job of faking it on paper. He isn’t (or isn’t just) playing salacious games with an object of his desire (“Me, I’m really attracted to naked women,” he says, disingenuously); he’s actively putting himself in her shoes (much as he has been the whole seven-year run thus far). It’s a more richly ambivalent incoherent text than it maybe first appears.
But more to the point: it’s only a small part of her life. —She’s been doing it for four months now, and it’s something of a part-time job; she’s also just self-published her novel and hates working in a mail room and hangs out with her friends and still forgets to feed her cat. And even moreso: we’ve seen seven years of her life so far. We’ve gotten to know Bruno like an old friend, or more importantly, a favorite character in a long-running serial. And for a variety of reasons that with hindsight we can see nudging here and there the past few months, she decided to challenge herself by trying to do this thing. Stripping. And she seems to have found something in it or about it she likes more than not. This person we know has become for the moment a stripper; this stripper is a person we know.
Think of all the strippers and hookers and sex workers, all those bit parts in all those movies and books and comics, good, bad and indifferent, all those calculating sexpots and hearts of gold with dark and violent pasts. How many of them were strippers first, and people only as afterthoughts? How many of them do you think had writers who knew or even gave a damn about what they’d done in college and the other crap jobs they’d had and the time they’d hitchhiked across the backwoods of Massachusetts and why they’d dumped their third boyfriend and the orrery they’d spent the night under and whether they still forget to feed their cat?
That, I think, is what Chris is doing with Bruno and the stripping, at least in part. Or finding himself doing. And I think that’s far more good than not.
—The reason I bring this up, though: since Chris did a lot of his research for these strips at Mary’s Club, he’s going to be doing a little giving back. He’s going to be hanging out there a week from yesterday (at this point): 11 December, from 7 till at least 9, and he’s encouraging all and sundry who are in the area and so inclined to stop by with books to be signed and dollar bills ($2 for each 3-song set at a minimum, apparently). Myself, I’ve never been to a strip club (I don’t think catching the Porcelain Twinz at Dante’s counts; that’s more of a cabaret setting). It’ll be interesting to see if my money’s where my mouth is.
Figuratively speaking. Geeze. You have such dirty minds…
24 hours and 11 years.
In 12 hours we’ll probably be on final approach to San Diego.
In 24 hours, asleep on the floor of someone I haven’t met yet.
For about four or five hours in there, at least, I imagine we’ll be wandering around a very large room filled with 50,000 fans of various and sundry genre entertainment products, some of which can be called comics. That’ll begin in about 14 hours or so, I think. Give or take. We’ll do it again in about 36 hours. And again in about 60. And one more time—
Just over 11 years ago, I did two 24-hour comics. Not in a row. Between the first 24-hour comic and the second 24-hour comic, we sat huddled in a room around a black-and-white TV for hours and hours and watched news reporters duck and wince at loud noises against a fiery Middle Eastern night and talk about Scuds and American air strikes. We scribbled things on a couple of pages of a sketchbook, interlocking and interacting comics that were making black jokes about what was going on in front of us because what else could you do?
Scott McCloud invented 24-hour comics about 12 years ago. In about 14 or maybe 15 hours, Winter McCloud is going to kick my ass in Pokémon.
Barry is the only person who actually “owns” a piece of Kip Manley original art. It was a page from my first 24-hour comic. It hung on the wall of the room we shared in the apartment we were living in 11 years ago or so. It was an odd metafictional piece starring the first cartoon character I ever created. (The next time you’re around when Amy’s around, she’ll ask me to draw him for you. I guarantee that.) And I kind of liked it, even if I stole the whole “Bigby” thing shamelessly from Sarah, who has no home on the internet just yet. (Go read some of her chapters in Herschberg. They don’t suck.) And I did do a third 24-hour comic. It was my first attempt to come to grips with autobiography and love and sex and magic and not and pretty much the whole big snarling mass of What Happened at Oberlin. But since I didn’t finish the 24 pages in 24 hours, it doesn’t really count. (Barry and Paul and Jenn and I all did 24-hour comics at the same time in pretty much the same room, that time. And we were all on our third 24-hour comic. But Paul didn’t finish his in 24 hours, either. Barry and Jenn, who’d never finished within the time limit before, did.) This third round was maybe eight years ago? Nine? Whatever. Not too many people have done three 24-hour comics. There’s reasons.
But it’s the second one I did that I like the best. Barry kept telling me I should put it up on the web, why not. And Jenn, too. So thank them if you like, but blame me if you don’t. You will probably like it a little better if your monitor is set to 1025×760 or bigger. Mine’s set to 800×600, and I have to scroll up and down, and I didn’t mind so much myself, but it’s my comic. You might not be so patient.
I should have been asleep two hours ago. I probably won’t be asleep for another two hours, at least. We’re both waking up in about five and a half hours, give or take.
But here and now, ladies and gentlemen, what the hell: 24 pages drawn in 24 hours straight; my second ever 24-hour comic; an 11-year-old story that remains near and dear to my heart—
If you’re visiting from Bruno—
Hey. Welcome. Thanks for stopping by. Place is still a mess, yeah, I know, I was just trying to clean up, and I probably don’t have enough ice. There’s snacks hereabouts, and mostly just a bunch of random stuff—you might enjoy the essay on Buffy, or you might not, and you might enjoy the serial, though it’s far from complete and really strange and there’s maybe ten people on the planet who get a lion’s share of the jokes (I’ve forgotten most of them, myself), and there’s some links you might enjoy visiting, and hey, that Bruno’s pretty fuckin’ cool. Chris is a great guy, he’s up to book seven, can you fuckin’ believe it, and I must say it was a real honor having him ask me to write the foreword, and—
What? What did you say? Did I know I misspelled Delany’s name as “Delaney” in the Bruno foreword? Is that what you’re asking? Jesus, what do you take me for, an idiot? You think, what, I have all these books by Delany on my shelves, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and all the Nevèryon books and even (shh) Hogg and of course Jewel-Hinged Jaw and both Shorter and Longer Views, I mean, the man’s a fuckin’ hero to me, a literary god, and you think I couldn’t be bothered just once to look up and check the spelling of the name, I’m so arrogant I don’t think I could possibly be misremembering it? Is that what you’re saying? —Well, yes, goddammit. I was. Arrogant idiot, that’s me. Dipshit and dumbass. There. You happy? You satisfied? Is that what you came here for? Huh? Huh?
—Um. Aheh. Um. Sorry. I was just—uh. You know. Nerves. I just—sit down, sit down, I didn’t mean to blow up like that, no, no, please. I insist. Let me pour you a drink. Mint julep? Gin and tonic? I, uh—aw, shit! I’m out of fuckin’ ice!
