Michael Fleisher
My grandfather amazed me one day, after asking about my enjoyment of comic books, by saying that he knew the artist of Spider-Man. Turns out he was friends with the parents of Rick Leonardi, who — by my reckoning — was the most dynamic and interesting Spidey artist, particularly in the way he would draw splash pages capturing his speed and agility by having multiple images without panel breaks. My stepfather, however, was able to do my grandfather one better. In his profession as weird wood artist, he has met a whole host of comparable borderline personalities that have glommed on to him, and one of them was Michael Fleisher, writer of Jonah Hex.
Fleisher was even a sufficient fan of my stepfather’s that he drove out to New Hampshire to visit him, and brought his monthly box of DC comp titles for us kids to enjoy. We read and re-read them all, despite being titles we didn’t remotely care about, and despite that they were all in the midst of storylines of which we wouldn’t buy the next issues. He was a real comics writer, and this complete catalogue of every DC book from September 1987 was proof. Long before comics at large temporarily transitioned into their “auteur theory” period of considering writer uber alles, the fact that a comics writer had stayed in my house had already elevated their collective status in my eyes.
My stepfather would keep vaguely in touch with him. I heard about the announcement of the transition from Jonah Hex to Hex before I read about it in Direct Currents or the like. I heard about his weird, failed sex novel, and his move to England to work on 2000AD for a time (when I visited England myself, I asked about his “prog”s, and was told in no uncertain terms that they didn’t pass the smell test). And a couple of years ago, I was told that he was living in hospice and not doing very well. Read the rest of this entry »
Scientific Progress goes “Moo”*
Sometimes the internet astonishes me: you put money into it, and you get stuff out of it.
Obviously, this is both most people’s common experience and a completely foreign experience to many. Amazon, eBay, iTunes, Etsy, etc. wouldn’t all exist and thrive if people weren’t putting money into the internet and then receiving something in return. And also a great number of people turn to the internet in order to acquire things without having to spend any money on them. This ranges from the relatively innocuous — MP3s and digitized images — to a significant trade in films, software, books, credit card numbers, and the like. And as much as we use the internet to reinforce our pre-existing worldviews, creating streams of personalized content that provide us with feeds and pings and alerts about the things and people we already like, it is the surprises that drift across that are the most wonderful, the unexpected pleasures.
Last summer at the Boston Comic Con, I commissioned sketches from attending artists for the first time. Travis Ellisor had been trumpeting his expanding Karate Kid vs. commission gallery for a little while, and I liked the concept: a single factor of commonality, but the opportunity to allow the artist to also feature his or her chosen creation. (I also have a bit of a soft spot for the classic LoSH Karate Kid, whose solo title was the first comic I actively tried to collect as a kid, saving up for back issues from the archive bins of local stores.) And the final grace note is that the character is a bit odd. Many people have con sketchbooks of obvious corporate populist characters, but finding that odd tertiary character that people fondly recall but haven’t thought about in ages is the real cherry on the sundae. I’d finally decided, after much musing, that my own original sketch collection was going to be different interpretations of The Tick‘s Chainsaw Vigilante engaged in combat with DC Comics’ Ambush Bug. Then I did some research on how much two-figure commissions tended to run, and I decided to start by just getting some drawings of the Chainsaw Vigilante to start with and to work my way up.
So I went to the Con, and I experienced a strange anxiety: I was going to be handed a drawing by the artist, and I was going to have a reaction, right there in real time, of exhilaration or disappointment in the result. In front of the creative person who was asked to interpret a paid command for which he or she may have had no particular artistic inclination. This is a character I like, but it doesn’t necessarily inspire or movie the person drawing it. Would I be able to tell by the composition? Would my face visibly blanch as I took the commissions from their hands?
My Advanced Art teacher in high school often said that she thought the worst thing a person could say was, “I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.” As willfully ignorant of a statement as that may be, I believe people have strong, instinctive opinions about aesthetics, regardless of their ability to articulate or contextualize them. I think that comics will forever be a minority art form simply because the presentation of the visual narrative either will or will not appeal, aesthetically, to the reader, and one can’t read the story without looking at artwork that either pleases or assaults the eye. Obviously, if one is commissioning a drawing, one would surely only pay out money to an artist whose work one finds appealing, but that still doesn’t mean that the selection of infinite artistic choices made will end up being those one would prefer. Will the drawings be the sort of thing one would automatically reblog in one’s curated stream of aesthetic content, or not?
Luckily, all of my commissions have hit the sweet spot of surprise (which I believe is also a channel on RedTube). They have combined the familiar visual voice of the artist, the comforting content of the form of the character, and the simple act of not being what I would have done. Surely it’s this last misdirect, this last moment of dissonance that is what makes getting something from the hands and minds of other people the most worthwhile, the sudden veering into unpredictability. And while there may be some anxiety about cost and result, the most important bit is that whatever the result it sprang from someone else and is therefore something that would have been impossible for you to acquire or create or establish on your own.
Which is why the internet is wonderful. You put money in, and you get something unexpected out of it. This week I received two commissions: one virtual and one physical. Read the rest of this entry »
Full-Frontal Prescience
There are those who don’t like Doonesbury, finding it too political and too unfunny for the “comics” page. I contend that these people have never read the rest of the comics page, which regularly drives me unerringly to the crumbling cliff’s edge of depression. Doonesbury has wit and vigor, and I hope that anyone who disagrees reads some of the plaudits that creator Garry Trudeau received upon the arrival of the strip’s 40th anniversary, as they go a long way towards showing that his admirers are not just praising his longevity, but his depth, complexity, and journalism.
Perhaps the strip’s strongest asset is its ability to remain current. This happens in part because Trudeau apparently has a legendary deal where he is able to submit his work much closer to when it actually runs than other cartoonists. And in part, this happens because he is a keen observer of humanity and history, and in such observation some truths are immediately recognizable as universal. But Trudeau is also a remarkably canny bastard. In July of 1980, he included the following question on the back of a draft registration form that Zonker was required to fill out: “If called upon by your country, would you be willing to give your life to protect the interests of U.S. oil companies?” Canny, and uncanny. Funny, and — with perspective, while in the midst of the second of two Gulf Wars — impressively depressing.
Which leads me to a story that I saw gracing the crawl of New York magazine’s arts & entertainment column, The Vulture: NBC may be planning to deliberately include nudity in a upcoming show set in the Playboy Mansion. The show will obviously have to restrain itself, pixilate itself, or edit judiciously for primetime broadcast, but Variety speculates that this is to amp up the prurient interest in any potential future DVD releases.
Interesting news, you might say. Envelope pushing, even. But Doonesbury effectively covered this already… in 1978. At the time, Freddy Silverman, former president of ABC, came over to NBC to sex up their programming, and Trudeau produced a few strips to satirize the timbre of the possible consultation.
I’m not entirely sure why I carry this stuff around inside my head. Except that as a teen, reading this in collected form, the idea of that kind of television having potentially been possible, and that — if so — I had missed it burned itself into my brain. It’s no fun being a man out of sync with time. Unless you’re the far-seeing mind of G.B. Trudeau, and perhaps not even then.
BRIEFLY: Toastmaster General
If I were still using the “melbatoast” domain name and web-handle, I would have loved these photos from Paul Cornell‘s blog entry about the seeing geek chic fliers for local “virtual eatery” the House of Toast at CONvergence. And if that doesn’t mean anything to you at all, don’t worry, just enjoy this:
I know some of you quite enjoyed the mild confusion you felt about why I’d chosen “melbatoast” (or even “m3lbatoast”) as my online identity, and some of you haven’t successfully transitioned from the old page to this one (especially since I just killed it with nary a transitional announcement). In any case, I hope you haven’t found your lack of toast disturbing.
Bloom County: Michael Jackson
Bloom County was an extraordinary comic strip during its storied, hilarious, multi-year run. If I were to list the most important influences on my sense of humour and language, right after Walt Kelly’s Pogo would come Bloom County, which had a similarly sprawling anthropomorphic cast, political bent, and a strong sense of word play — centering particularly on the way words simply sounded. Despite two revivals in the Sunday funnies, some animated specials, a couple painted gift books, a line of greeting cards, and an iced tea flavor, Bloom County has not successfully established itself as a fixed, indelible part of day-to-day pop culture. The fact that it continues to be referenced and resurrected in one minor way or another is testament to its cult belovedness, but that it’s not a referential throughline, not a cultural touchstone is frankly beyond my reckoning.
A woman approximately my age just confessed on a public social networking board (gasp!) that she’d never heard about the whole Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial where his hair caught on fire. My first reaction was to be startled, until I realized that my knowledge of it came not from the event itself, not from the incident, but from the cultural commentary that followed. Specifically, I remembered the way in which it was satirized in Bloom County. A brief internet search produced similar memories on various people’s blogs, but no reproductions or scans of the strips themselves.
While we still wait for the IDW collection of the entire Bloom County library, we can at least partake of Andrews McMeel’s online offerings. Since this archive isn’t searchable except by date and user-created keywords — and then only by members — I don’t claim to present a comprehensive collection of every one of Berkeley Breathed’s Michael Jackson references, here’s what I’ve been able to piece together (Remember other Jackson/Bloom crossovers? Mention them in the comments). For those of you not inclined to wait for IDW, most of the following can be found in the classic 1985 assemblage, Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things:
+ March 18, 1984: Steve Dallas sings “Billy Jean” to an imaginary audience. (one strip)
+ March 22, 1984: In a satire of the Pepsi commercial accident, Steve Dallas burns off his chest hair while making a rock video. (three main strips, but a segment of about a 20-part ongoing story)
+ May 2, 1984: Oliver’s mother gives him a Michael Jackson makeover. (two strips)
+ June 25, 1984: Oliver’s mother wallpapers his entire room with Michael Jackson’s face. (three strips)
+ August 17, 1984: Opus visits Neverland, and he and Michael reenact The Prince and the Pauper (15 strips)
+ September 27, 1986: Interestingly, this is reprinted in the Billy and the Boingers collection with the punchline, “..Don’t you think it’s high time Michael Jackson got interested in girls?” A sliiiight alteration there. (one strip)
Funny Face, Funny Books
I’m not going to work more often than I can help it, so my exposure to my traditional Audrey Hepburn calendar is considerably less than daily. I’ve purchased a number of these calendars over the years — although this is the first year I’ve noticed that the name Audrey Hepburn is followed by a ™ symbol… has the estate of the late Ms. Hepburn really trademarked her likeness in this age of mass copyright infringement? — and enjoy the mild cheesiness of the almost total absence of cheesecake in the images.
I watch for repetition of images over the years, and notice that certain promotional headshots tend to make frequent reappearances. This is a pity. With appearances in twenty-nine films, surely Audrey Hepburn™ LLC must be able to license stills from her films or photos from her magazine appearances. I mean, it’s probably not possible to reproduce stuff by, say, Philippe Halsman, but there’s only some many years that I can stare for a month at that particular black and white coquette by Bud Fraker from 1953. The recent “Remembering Audrey” by Bob Willoughby for Life magazine had a number of photos that were new to me, so we shouldn’t be hitting the end of variety just yet.
So I am particularly pleased to submit the following for consideration: Audrey reading a reprint album of Captain America with her son. Audrey and Comics: two great obsessionsinterests in my life, together in one grainy image. Now that’s something I’d like to see for a month in some future wall-hanging. May I suggest November 2009?
RETRO: Fifty-State Initiative
Marvel Comics has announced that, after the events of the much-touted Civil War series, the super-hero universe will be enacting a “Fifty-State Initiative” project, creating a set of locally-themed super-heroes for each state. Because, much like the Department of Homeland Security, they believe that each state is vulnerable to attack and needs gobs of money thrown at the problem to pretend that it’s been solved.
Regardless of how many super-hero stories have taken place in New Hampshire (come on, eager readers… I challenge you to name just one), this is simply part of Marvel’s schizophrenic approach to their world management. A very short time ago 99% of the world’s super-powered mutants were de-powered in an “event”, leaving a scant 198 costumed characters still viable for a bout of spandex violence. This was done, apparently, because in order to fill the plotlines of several dozen comic books every month, Marvel writers had gotten into the lax habit of simply creating a new batch of villains and making them mutants. Easy! If mutation is a massive shortcut that means we don’t have to think out origins or motivation, but only have to come up with some cool-sounding codenames and a bunch of vaguely-distinct costume designs, then it’s as simple as “ta-dah!” The Marvel comics universe was hugely overpopulated with these shortcut villains, and getting rid of them in a broad sweep matched well with the editorial tone of the current administration, mixing the super-real with a grounded, human series of character studies. It made the setting of the comics more mundane, and therefore should make the super-powered abilities of the remaining characters seem more spectacular by contrast.
It didn’t and it’s not difficult to intuit why, but as a basic idea as to the tone that Marvel comics should be setting, it’s not a bad idea. But that’s why this Fifty-State Initiative doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. We’ve just gotten rid of hundreds and hundreds of super-characters. And now you want to create, out of whole cloth, hundreds of super-characters? I mean, with the exception of Rhode Island, you can’t have just one super-dude patrolling an entire state… it’s geographically unmanageble. So you have to have teams in each state, which means four or five new characters time fifty states… And you’re right back with the overpopulated universe you just got rid of. Well done, Marvel.
Why do I bore you with all this nonsense? Merely to mention that I greatly prefer Threadless‘ fifty-state project. Threadless has chosen 107 national and international locations, spectacles, and landmarks that they want people to stand in front of whilst wearing their fave Threadless t-shirts. Bizarrely, the New Hampshire location is the little-known Museum of Family Camping. Still, we’re on the map! And I have trundled off the Museum to dutifully have my picture taken in its environs. Additional pictures may be taken in front of Massachusett’s Salem Witch Museum and the Ben & Jerry’s flavor graveyard in Vermont, if I am able to get my act together. Still more pictures, for those people too far away from a particular locale: on a roller coaster, submerged under water, with a celebrity, in front of your city’s welcome sign, or with any Paul Bunyan statue. Now that’s an initiative I can get behind.
Lower the Speculator Boom
Just a brief couple notes to wrap up the Fun Home experience.
I waited a while to read the book because I wanted Ms. Bechdel’s live presentation of the material to stay with me as long and as clearly as possible. It was a performance, in the classic theatrical connotation of the word, and despite the fact that she performed the same slide show and the same narration at bookstores and colleges around the country, it was a live reading that had its own foibles and tremors and delicacies. And it was an affecting experience. And I knew that when I read the book on my own, the stillness and the solidity of the images in my hand would quickly begin to overwrite my memories of momentary experience of having the graphic novel read to me. Just as my memories of watching Suzanne Cryer as Tracy Lord have been blurred and conflated with repeated viewings of Katherine Hepburn as just as the mystic glory of hearing Natalie Merchant perform “Verdi Cries” as a duet with piano and violin has almost totally been supplanted by the oft-spun recording, I know that my memories of the event will soon be overwhelmed by my re-reading of the graphic memoir. And so I tried to solidify and preserve the live memories of Ms. Bechdel’s reading before I read the book for myself. Time will tell whether that will be successful.
It’s an interesting read. Meticulously structural in places and with an elevated literary scaffolding, the essential technique of the interwoven visual and captioned narratives works well throughout the book. There’s a scrapbook quality to many of the reminiscences that provides a particular blank honesty to the storytelling and which helps offset (and highlight) the acknowledged distance that creeps into the narrative voice. A stupendous vocabulary and the regular occurrence of introspective, borderline epistemological queries occasionally make the narrative musings feel as if they could fly off into abstraction, and the connection to the curious domesticities over which they hang seems as if it could snap. The book never spirals off on such a zephyr, and the juggling of tone, perspective, and timeline make the overall work feel like quite an accomplished act of dexterity… but not, overall, an effortlessly masterful one. Affecting and effective, but not yet with the fine grace that belies the effort that went into it. But that’s only in terms of the overarching written structure of the work; visually, it is indeed a meisterwerk that is deceptively simple and elegantly complex. And that is almost certainly due to the meticulous prep and reference that Ms. Bechdel used in order to capture a natural, casual line in the figure work, particularly, but also in the scenery and layouts.
However, to be ridiculous for a moment, I must say that one of my favourite parts of the volume is the dust jacket. During the early nineteen nineties, comic books were plagued with an overabundance of gimmickry in their selling points, and a frequent offering were covers that were die-cut (like a classic V.C. Andrews paperback) or embossed with a metallic or fluorescent inks, foils, holograms, and prismatic papers to give the cover image that extra glimmer of collectible value. Fun Home is, in concept, scope, and execution, about as far from Ghost Rider #50 as it is from an eggplant, but the covers for both have shiny foil paper and die-cut hollows revealing pieces of the sub-cover beneath. Many people have looked askance at the current resurgence in ’90s-esque marketing techniques in the world of superhero comics, but I don’t think that anyone would have guessed that Alison Bechdel would have presaged a parallel collector’s movement within the autobiographical and literary graphic novel community.
Comics For Which to Watch Out
Every so often, life conspires. How often have you gotten a summary of posts to a listserv that seem wholly irrelevant? For those of us who subscribe to listservs, the answer is “daily”. So it’s especially joyous when those collections of announcements and updates and queries and classifieds actually contain something of note. Case in point: despite the fact that I have well and truly graduated from Simmons College, I still receive daily updates on the parking construction, upcoming campus events, and job opportunities in Boston. Now, considering that I don’t live in or around Boston, these announcements are less than useful, and have been for two years now. And the fact that I didn’t unsubscribe from this list the moment after I’d joined the alumni association would be an utter mystery, if the universe hadn’t rewarded me for my patience. Because midway through last week, the was an announcement that comic-strip artist Alison Bechdel would be giving a lecture on campus. A quick glance at her website indicated that she would also be heading westward for a stop in Northampton, thus making herself available to the twin poles of the Massachusetts women’s college communities.
Northampton used to be home to the Words and Pictures Museum, as well as other brainchilds of Kevin Eastman and Denis Kitchen, and has therefore been the New England seat of a thriving comics community (which may have moved north up Interstate-91 these days), but aside from the occasional hosting of a 24-hour comics event, it hasn’t been the most happening comics or “comix” spot in the recent past. So it was nice to hear that Ms. Bechdel was choosing to stop there on her promotional tour for her new graphic novel, Fun Home.
It also gave me the opportunity to do something that I don’t do very often: be exposed to something about which I know nothing.
I am very review conscious. I don’t always allow myself to be influenced by critical response, but I read trade magazines and hype magazines and reviews and large swathes of the internet, and so it is seldom that I come across a film or a comic that I know absolutely nothing about. I have usually encountered early gossip or a plot summary, or I know something about the directors, actors, or creators. I have some degree of context and familiarity. However, I had never read anything by Ms. Bechdel. I’d heard of Dykes to Watch Out For, but never encountered it, and therefore had no previous exposure to its content as comic material, as fiction, or as artwork. And because I am conscious of the fact that I am very review conscious, I occasionally try to make sure that I read or watch something about which I possess no pre-knowledge. It’s harder than it sounds, and the fact that I even recognized Ms. Bechdel’s name could be construed as a bit of a cheat, or at least of compromise.
However, I was once again glad of the vicissitudes of circumstance. I’m not sure I would have been so impressed with the artwork or the multimedia presentation that was the heart of Ms. Bechdel’s appearance had I been familiar with her earlier work. As it was, I found the linework, the compositions, the color, and the overall technique to be marvelous and moving. The fact that she blew up each panel to be projected upon a screen allowed for one to see with considerable clarity the intricacies of the artwork. Also fascinating was the presentation itself. Comic books, as a medium, are perhaps singly effective at being able to present to the reader two parallel and interactive narratives simultaneously. The words, usually in captions, can tell one story while the images tell another. The intersections and echoes between these two narratives is often what demonstrates the most clever and evocative comics work — pristine examples can be found in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, for example. Bechdel read the captions from her narrative in tempo with the pictures, and allowed the audience to “read” the images on the screen. This was an extremely effective way of recreating the experience of actually reading the book. Comics are difficult to give live readings of, as the interplay of caption, dialogue, image, and voice don’t create the flow that reading from prose can have. And Bechdel’s presentation would not work for every graphic novel… But it was astonishingly effective for her parallel narratives.
For those interested in her creative process, Ms. Bechdel gave a brief presentation in between the two chapters she read from in order to give a visual demonstration of her artistic process. She had given a similar demonstration in a streaming YouTube video, detailing the sort of modeling she does in order to capture body language so effectively. While this video doesn’t demonstrate the second half of her interlude — the transformative process of layering in lineart, word balloons, and an ink wash — it still gives an interesting view into her particular artistic endeavors.
Central Dogma
Many, many, manymany people have written about the recent New York ComicCon. They were, mostly, people who were in attendance, and therefore had something interesting to say. I wasn’t, so I’ve waited for the furor to die down somewhat before I felt it was safe to comment upon something that I really don’t have much experience in. That and, well, I had already blogged this week, and I find it hard to break the habit of storing up entires for those long, cold stretches when one really doesn’t have much to add to the global commentary.
Publisher’s Weekly does a — shock! — weekly newsletter about the comic book scene, and they covered a conference of librarians at the NYCC to discuss the issues surrounding coded and overt depiction of sexuality in manga. Manga is hot in bookstores these days, and so it’s also hot in libraries. And because it’s hot. many publishers have jumped on the bandwagon and purchased the U.S. reprint rights to all sorts of speed-lined, zip-a-tone garbage that is well and truly thought of as ephemeral if not disposable in its country of origin. And librarians, despite the fact that they claim to be experts in evaluating sources and resources, are apparently all higglety-pigglety about being able to distinguish which manga is actually worth reading, and which manga might cause the average parent to transform into a short, stumpy, superdeformed caricature of steaming wrath.
So, the article says, librarians would like ratings on manga. They acknowledge that some manga is rated already, but what they’d really prefer are the kind of ratings that the MPAA has been supplying recently — the kind where the reader is also provided with a laundry list of all the purile reasons why someone might want to go see this particular flick. (I’m being snide, of course, but mostly about the MPAA.) Certain librarians at this panel did feel like the ratings were insufficient in allowing them to anticipate content. And one interesting and accurate point was that even initial readings may not be an accurate gague of future content: “A manga series will start out clean and age-appropriate and later in the series will develop more mature themes.” Of course, due to the delay between domestic publication and U.S. publication, it shouldn’t be too difficult to see if a particular series has turned blue in Japan before volume one is printer over here.
But that’s not really the key point of why I bring up this whole sundry tale. Librarians aren’t supposed to want ratings. According to the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, “Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” This has, in fact, been specifically interpreted to indicate that it would be unethical for a librarian to not stock or to deny the circulation of Rated-R films to youth. “Policies that set minimum age limits for access to any nonprint materials or information technology, with or without parental permission, abridge library use for minors.” Whoops. Guess you weren’t supposed to ask for that. No wonder the PW article described her as “hesitant”. BURN THE HERETIC! BUUUURRRNNN HEEEERRRRR!!!
Of course, the real reason why this pinged my radar is because I think that particular proscription of the Library Bill of Rights is the best self-defeating statement since “All generalizations are false”. If the ALA make a dogmatic statement of doctrine stating that libraries aren’t allowed to follow dogma or doctrine, then they are obligated not to select or proscribe materials based upon the Library Bill of Rights. Whoops, again.
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