THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

Maggots: notes from a hypothetical comics class

Here is a transcript of what happened in a comics class that will take place sometime in the future:

OK, folks, the next book we're going to be discussing is Brian Chippendale's Maggots. Here it is. See?

(Many of you have it already.) Note that the book has a sewn-in bookmark. I advise you to use it. If your experience of reading the book is anything like mine, you'll NEED the bookmark, because you won't be able to get through the book in one or even two sittings. Sure, it looks small, but don't assume it's a quick read.

Of course I don't want to tell you how you're going to feel about this reading -- that's not for me to say -- but I can tell you that the book is regarded by some (remember that Hatfield essay?) as "experimental" and a challenge to the ways we ordinarily read comics.

I'm not even sure if it has a story. I mean, it has storytelling in it, and it has recognizable characters that repeat from one chapter to the next, but I'd be hard-pressed to paraphrase the story or even to say whether or not the book has one overarching storyline. Seeing how, or if, it all fits together is part of the "challenge."

RIP Will Elder (1921-2008)

My father has vivid memories of reading Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's "Robinson Crusoe" (Mad #13, July 1954) on a hot, hot afternoon at Texas A&M sometime back in the late mid-50s. That story, in particular its riff on Crusoe's drinking ("I took another cup of rum..."), has stayed with him ever since as the quintessence of cartoon hilarity. I agree; more than fifty years later, it's funny as hell.

Will Elder died yesterday (May 15) and there's hardly a way to make sense of that fact. Elder's career was long, winding, extraordinary; his influence on comics and comix, humorous illustration, and popular satire was deep. More to the point, the best of his work is just plain delightful.

In the course of writing an essay on Mad (for Greenwood Publishing's American Icons) I realized that one of the distinctive things about the early Mad, and the work of the Elder/Kurtzman team in particular, was the way it pulled the reader in different directions at once. Kurtzman's sense of timing, whether in comedy or in his grimly realistic war comics, was relentless: he pulled the reader along ceaselessly with his visual rhythms. The rhythms of Mad, as I wrote in that essay, added a comically deflating rimshot to the inexorable timing of the war comics: a sudden, surprising abruption to trump -- to burst -- Kurtzman's intense building-up of suspense. Will Eisner liked to refer to "reader discipline"; Kurtzman practiced it ceaselessly. You HAD to read ahead, and quickly. At the same time, though, you wanted to linger on a Kurtzman/Elder page; you wanted to absorb all the tangential background humor -- which wasn't really "background" at all, but essential to the experience of reading. Your eyes had to spend a lot of time on every page, usually on every panel. Elder rewarded your eyes, and your brain, for the effort. Collapsing the foregound/background distinction with all his chicken-fat extras, Elder kept you in the thick of it, caught between wanting to hurtle ahead to catch Kurtzman's punchlines and wanting to stay and savor the delicious detailing. No wonder reading Mad was such a tense (in the best sense) experience.

Along with Carl Barks, the Kurtzman/Elder Mads of the early '50s are the perfect comics of that era -- and they presaged a long and fruitful collaboration between the two artists. A match made in heaven, as the saying goes. To me the taproot of comics satire can be found in their early teamings, both the pop-culture character parodies ("Woman Wonder," with its knowing, devastating mockery of the original's feminist subtext; "Shermlock Shomes," in which the detective's mania matches the artists' own) and their miscellaneous humorous tales ("Mole" is perfectly constructed, practically a primer in comics form; "Restaurant" bust my gut when I read it as a kid, and it's still a howler).

I've often taught the Elder/Kurtzman "Starchie" (Mad #12, June 1954) alongside period Archie comics, as a study in prevailing ideas about teenagers in the '50s (the well-scrubbed Archie vs. the scuzzy JD Starchie), and it never fails to get a rise out of my students, not least because Elder's canny visual gags add so much, and so hilariously, to the strip's total effect of squalor and viciousness. Wonderful.

RIP, Will Elder.

(I refer everyone to Tom Spurgeon's substantial obituary for Elder, an excellent place to start if you want to explore further.)

Alter Ego #77

May 2008. Edited by Roy Thomas. TwoMorrows Publishing, $6.95.

I buy every issue of Roy Thomas' Alter Ego that appears at my comics shop, but I sometimes have mixed feelings about spending the money. I realize that I'm not part of the zine's target audience--I don't own a single Golden Age comic book, and I'm not a big fan of superheroes much these days either--but my ambivalence about Alter Ego goes beyond demographics. I don't think the AE interior pages are well designed: images are arranged helter-skelter on the pages, text is awkwardly squeezed around the images, and the overall layout lacks white space and visual appeal. AE began as a mimeographed zine in 1961, and Editor Thomas may want the contemporary AE to retain a page vibe that reflects those roots, but other TwoMorrows publications, most notably The Jack Kirby Collector, manage to crackle with fannish energy and still be pretty to look at, and I wish similarly good graphic design for AE.

I have some misgivings about AE's text features too. Jim Amash, an inker for Archie and other companies, has apparently (and nobly) devoted his life to hunting down and interviewing everybody who's worked in comic books since the late 1930s, but these interviews vary in quality. Amash's talks with rowdy, opinionated creators are a blast, but he sometimes has trouble getting more reticent subjects to go beyond pleasantries. (In #77, Amash interviews Tom Sawyer--really!--who has funny stories to tell about his jobs as Leonard Starr's assistant and as head writer for the Murder, She Wrote TV show.) Each issue of AE also features a section for "The Fawcett Collectors of America (FCA)," and I can take or leave the FCA pages, partially because I'm not a hardcore Captain Marvel fan and partially because FCA editor P.C. Hamerlinck will publish anything, any unrevised article, half-baked story idea or shopping list, left over in C.C. Beck's estate. (In AE #77, it's a Beck story titled "Merciful Heavens," which would've been rejected by the worst pulp editor.) Most annoyingly: TwoMorrows claims that AE is 100 pages long, but at least the last 10 pages are nothing but ads for AE back issues and other TwoMorrows publications. Finishing off each issue with such an inedible wedge of advertising leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I have to say, though, that I enjoyed--almost without reservation--AE #77.

Maggots: a sort of reply

Maggots, by Brian Chippendale. PictureBox, publisher. $21.95.

...and so Charles hands the Maggots ball off to me, and what a strange, fur-covered, octagonal-shaped ball it is. What language is this book speaking? Can I understand it?

No, I can't. I can't say anything useful about Maggots. It's such a unique (and troubling) book that any credible evaluation will come in about 50 years or so, after we see how Brian Chippendale's career plays out and how influential Fort Thunder is on successive generations of cartoonists. (Maybe in 2058, Marvel and DC artists will lay out their pages according to Chippendale's snaking panel flow. Or maybe not.) Below, then, are nothing more than some provisional, personal observations on Maggots, to be taken with a bucketful of salt.

Maggots: a sort of introduction

Okay, we’re building up to something here, but let me come at it the long way around, by way of analogy:

Scholar and teacher Paul Wells, in a very useful book titled Understanding Animation (1998), posits three approaches to the art of animation:

1. Orthodox animation: This would be mainstream narrative animation as practiced in most animated features and TV shows -- animation in the manner of Disney, of course, and also Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera, the Cartoon Network, and so on. At the time Wells wrote his book, orthodox animation was, essentially, cel animation, but today the category would include the dominant Pixar/Dreamworks/Blue Sky CG approach to animated features. (I gather a revised edition of Wells is due this fall.)

2. Experimental animation: This would consist of animated works far outside of, or at odds with, traditional narrative approaches, works whose narratives are fragmentary or nonlinear as well as works that are not narrative at all but based on other aesthetic principles. I think here of avant-garde animation by Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith, and Norman McLaren. This would also include, presumably, the recent move toward digital animation by some working not in film or TV but in the fine arts field.

Whereas orthodox animation leans toward the figural, experimental animation leans toward the abstract; whereas the core of orthodox animation is narrative, “[t]he bias of experimental animation is aesthetic and non-narrative” (43). Rather than narrative form, experimental animation veers toward interpretive form; rather than favoring paraphrase-able “content,” experimental animation privileges the very materiality of the art work itself. Obviously, then, experimental animation is non-commercial in nature, based on the assertion of artistic autonomy, and often distributed / exhibited by non-traditional means. It is typically auteurist if not avant-gardist in outlook.

3. Developmental animation: An unfortunate choice of term, perhaps, since the word developmental so often implies remedial, but what Wells has in mind is something else entirely: “a mode of expression combining or selecting elements of both [orthodox and experimental] approaches, representing the aesthetic and philosophical tension between the two apparent extremes” (35). Developmental animation may cleave to traditional aspects of animation, but it also seeks to refresh the tradition with innovative new approaches. It draws on but also “resist[s] or redefine[s]” the vocabulary of orthodox animation (51). In other words, developmental animation is unorthodox or contra-mainstream in some sense -- say in terms of technique, style, or ideology -- but is nonetheless fundamentally narrative. To borrow a phrase from Ann Miller’s recent book Reading Bande Dessinée (a phrase viciously ripped from context, I confess), developmental animation seeks “not to abolish narration but to diversify narrative strategies” (46).

We're Sorry...

...but it looks like we won't be able to update the TB blog this week. Both Charles and I are struggling with end-of-the-semester grading, and I'm getting over a particularly nasty bout with kidney stones (too much information?), so we're taking this week off to recover and regroup.

We'll see you on May 13th with our most outre "Twosday" yet, and thanks for your patience.

¡Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

...and a tip of the King's crown to Frank Santoro's Comics Comics post on this issue of Maxisol, el Hombre Milagro. (Check out the battle over comics aesthetics between Santoro and Dustin Harbin in the comments section!)

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Diaz. Riverhead/Penguin Books, 2007. $24.95.

I'm always glad to hear about cartoonists winning prestigious grants and awards--congratulations on your Guggenheim, Phoebe Gloeckner!--so I wonder why the comics blogosphere isn't abuzz about Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao netting two of the literary world's biggest honors, the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for best novel and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. After all, Oscar Wao is as much a "comics novel," as much informed by comics history and culture, as Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude (2003). Diaz gives himself away as a fanboy right up front, in his choice for Oscar Wao's epigraph:

"Of what import are brief, nameless lives...to Galactus??"--Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (Vol. 1, No. 49, April 1966).

Our Eddie: The King Canute Crowd

by Eddie Campbell. Eddie Campbell Comics, 2000. $14.50.

I'm not trying to make ordinary life interesting: it is interesting. It's unbelievably exciting.

-- Eddie Campbell, The Comics Journal #145

Welcome to the second installment of our series on Eddie Campbell's Alec MacGarry/autobiographical graphic novels. (Our first episode, mostly a dialogue on Campbell's collaborations with Alan Moore, is here.) Today our subject is Alec: the King Canute Crowd.

Tōnoharu; That Salty Air

This month Top Shelf Productions is putting out new books from two Minneapolis-based cartoonists, Lars Martinson and Tim Sievert. The two artists recently appeared together at a book launch party at Minneapolis’ Big Brain Comics and have promoted each other on their respective blogs.

   

This is interesting because Martinson’s book, T­ōnoharu: Part One, and Sievert’s, That Salty Air, though similar in size and heft, differ drastically in tone, narrative technique, and style. With that caveat in mind, what follows are twinned reviews of these Twin Cities comics: