THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

Highlights of 2008: My Favorite Panel of the Year

My favorite single comic book panel of the year is a sentimental choice. It's one that almost made me cry, from All-Star Superman #10 (May 2008), written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant (click to enlarge on all the pictures below):

This panel appears near the climax of both issue #10 and the series as a whole. (I need to describe both, so spoilers ahead, though I suspect that most TB readers have read All-Star Superman.) The 12-issue span of All-Star Superman is a prolonged epitaph for the Man of Steel; the first issue opens with Lex Luthor luring Superman into a trap that poisons his cells and slowly kills him. By issue #10, titled "Neverending," Superman, almost dead, has begun to dictate his "last will and testament." In straightening out his affairs, he searches for a definitive answer to the plight of the Kandorians, a population of Kryptonians who survived the explosion of Superman's planet only because they were shrunk to microscopic size, squeezed into a bottle, and kidnapped by the intergalactic villain Brainiac. Superman's friend Leo Quintum, a Morrison/Quitely creation that combines Einstein's brilliance with a dandified fashion sense, makes a bold suggestion to the Kandorians: just live as creatures "smaller than germs" among us humans. After much debate, Quintum's suggestion is accepted, and the Kandorians break their bottle open and settle on Mars.

Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi

Alas, the review below is not part of our "Highlights of 2008" series. I'll be pitching in with Highlights commentary (on The Explainers, Tamara Drewe, and my single favorite comics panel of 2008) beginning next week. --Craig

Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi

by Jon M. Gibson and Chris McDonnell. Foreword by Quentin Tarantino, afterword by Ralph Bakshi. Universe/Rizzoli International, 2008. $40.

Today, a Midnight Movie is usually a screening of a film the multiplex shows at other times during the regular business day, but it wasn't always thus. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was in my late teens and early 20s, Midnight Movie slots were reserved for the non-mainstream, cult films programmed at odd hours to attract an odd audience. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) is, of course, the quintessential example of the weird-as-shit Midnight Movie--and the weird-as-shit audience--but there were many others, including El Topo (directed and written by future Moebius collaborator Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970), Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972), Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978) and Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1979). (These examples and more are discussed in depth in J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum's superb book on the late-night phemonemon.) I'm grateful that I saw as many bizarre Midnight Movies as I did on the big screen. I'll never forget scratching my head over the violent surrealism of a late-night El Topo/Viva la Muerte (Fernando Arrabal, 1971) double-feature at the University of Buffalo in '82, or watching a witching-hour revival of Supervixens (Russ Meyer, 1975) with my friend Tim Madigan at a downtown Buffalo grindhouse in 1984. Now that's entertainment. 

I saw three of Ralph Bakshi's movies during the midnight hour too: Fritz the Cat (1972), Wizards  (1977) and American Pop (1981). Even though the Midnight Movie experience didn't encourage critical reflection--most of the spectators, including me, were stoned or drunk, and willing to settle for cheap laughs and thrills--I was clear-headed enough to realize that I didn't like Bakshi's movies very much. In my less discriminating teens, I loved books like Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara (1977) and Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane (1977), but I still found Wizards a thin Tolkien/Bode riff whose evocation of a futuristic fantasy world is undermined by Bakshi's cheap-looking Rotoscoping. I also wasn't impressed with American Pop, whose mixture of ugly Rotoscoped footage of performers like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and stories set in various historical locales (Tinpan Alley, the battlefields of WWII, 1980s Coke-fueled NYC) is a sprawling mess.

So reader beware: I'm not the most sympathetic reviewer of Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi, a new coffee-table book by Jon Gibson and Chris McDonnell. In fact, given my antipathy towards Bakshi's movies, I'm not sure why I checked Unfiltered out of the library. One reason, perhaps, is that it's a pretty book, full of beautiful, candid photographs from Bakshi's mid-century Brooklyn upbringing, sketches and paintings by Bakshi, and work done by other artists as part of the pre-production development of various Bakshi features. I've written about Jim Engel before (and I'm grateful for Jim's response to my Fandom Confidential piece), so it was fun to find in Unfiltered a picture that Engel did for Bakshi Productions on a proposed Deputy Dawg revival: 

Other creators with art in Unfiltered include Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel, Gray Morrow, Mike Ploog, and Wally Wood. That's a heavy-hitter line-up, but my favorite pictures are by Louise Zingarelli, whose pre-production portraits for American Pop so impressed Bakshi that he used Zingarelli's sketches as the visual backdrop for the film's opening credit sequence. Here's a lovely Zingarelli drawing of a street urchin:

Despite the book's visual pleasures, I had a lot of nits to pick with Unfiltered. Bakshi's most famous film is perhaps his animated version of The Lord of the Rings (1978), but Unfiltered doesn't include any development or cel art from Rings. Instead, the Tolkien chapter is illustrated with stray art from the span of Bakshi's career, including "fantasy drawings by Ralph from the late 60s and early 70s," a painting called Allies from 2007, and several pieces from Tee-Witt, an animated elves-and-sorcery TV show Bakshi pitched to CBS while at Terrytoons early in his career. If there's a rights problem here, if Gibson and McDonnell couldn't get permission from United Artists (or whoever owns the film now) to reproduce Rings material, that fact should be noted somewhere in the text.

Another problem: sometimes the book is oddly put together, with the illustrations curiously out of sync with the art. Bakshi's first wife gets her first mention in a heated rush of prose on page 38: "Though Ralph was thriving at Terrytoons, his home life was deteriorating. His first wife, Elaine, wasn't too keen on his early morning exits and late-night returns, which often left their son, Mark, in the care of Grandma Bakshi. It was a sweetheart marriage--knot tied at 21, baby at 22, and the constant rumble of the gathering storm. While his nuptials were going stale, Ralph's meals were taken at Brooklyn bars." This is a bizarre passage--the impending dissolution of the marriage is described before the fact of the marriage itself--and it gets weirder on page 43, where a photo of Bakshi with his arm around a woman is captioned like this: "The gleeful, new couple, Liz and Ralph, pre-marriage, drinking their poison of choice at popular New York jazz club, The Five Spot." I read page 43 and thought, Who's Liz?; no answer is provided until page 49, where Gibson and McDonnell describe Ralph and Liz's meet cute at an auto body shop. Wouldn't it make more sense to put the photo on the same page that Liz is introduced?

The order in which Bakshi's films are presented in the book is also problematic. After finishing his stereotype-flaunting Coonskin (1975)--and getting in trouble with the Congress of Racial Equality(CORE)--Bakshi quickly made a rough cut of Hey Good Lookin' for Warner Brothers, who balked. As Gibson and McDonnell write:

Warner Bros. refused to release Lookin', insistent that audiences wouldn't be able to grasp a live-action/animation hybrid picture. But that wasn't all. "Lookin' has a black gang in it," Ralph explains. "The bullshit racist heat from Coonskin was too much for the studio to swallow. They got scared and demanded that I animate most of the live-action out--on my own dime." Warner was betting that Ralph would bail. "They smothered it." (132)

Bakshi continued to work on the Lookin' footage for the next seven years, and finally Warner Brothers released the film in 1982. In Unfiltered, Gibson and McDonnell follow the 1982 date and place their chapter on Lookin' after American Pop, even though the bulk of the Lookin' animation was done in 1975-76 and even though Lookin' is profoundly similar to the earlier live-action/animated Heavy Traffic (1973) and Coonskin. The trajectory of Bakshi's career is further distorted by the fact that only one of his features, Cool World (1992), isn't given it own separate chapter in Unfiltered (though it is lightly discussed in a catch-all chapter titled "Ups and Downs"). Maybe Bakshi would just as soon forget how Paramount personnel rewrote his Cool World script and diluted his vision. It's telling, though, that storyboard artist Conrad Vernon says that none of the Cool World animators ever saw a script; Vernon characterizes Bakshi's advice to the animators as, "Do a scene that's funny, whatever you want to do!" (227). Had I been a Paramount executive circa 1992, I'd have worried about the loosy-goosiness of the script and production too.

My biggest quibble with Unfiltered is its shallow presentation of Bakshi as a truth-tellin' badass whose films were suppressed by The Man. Gibson and McDonnell never go deeper into the auteur or his times; they never try to figure out why Bakshi's movies are so "good" (scare quotes because I find claims of their "goodness" highly debatable) and why they outraged audiences and censors. From the very first page, the tone is hipster hagiography, as in these words from Gibson's introduction:

Ralph said, "Fuck the system!" He made animation personal, poignant, and whirled it into a frenzy like Rosa Parks with a shotgun. He didn't want to create blockbusters; he wanted to tell great, honest, beautifully brutal stories that came from the underbelly that is really real life. And that's why we refer to him as Ralph on these pages--not Bakshi, not Mr. Director Man--because to truly understand his legacy, the legend's gotta be your friend. (15)

Gibson's beat patois is working overtime here, but I disagree with everything he writes. I don't think "Rosa Parks with a shotgun" would descend into a murderous "frenzy." I question the all-too-common assumption that "the underbelly" is more authentic, more real, than positive artistic visions. And to truly understand Bakshi, his films, and his legacy, you should do more than simply reflect the director's own us-vs.-them pieties; you need to stop chumming around with "Ralph," establish your own point of view, and say something new about your subject. Unflitered reads like it was written by two stoned, indiscriminate Midnight Moviegoers, and that's too bad. If the text had been the equal of the pictures, Unfiltered would be a fine book instead of a missed opportunity. Recommended only for those who remember Wizards with a lot more fondness than I do...if they can remember it at all.

Highlights of 2008: Goddess of War, Volume One

by Lauren Weinstein. PictureBox, publisher. $12.95.

Goddess of War is a beautiful, delirious mess of a book, a playful, leapfrogging experiment in genre-grafting that reads like a dream on paper: big, grandstanding, outrageous, comic, scary, and at times even poignant. The book represents a febrile gushing-out of images and ideas that, I swear, has an interior logic, though after three readings I'm still grasping after that logic without complete confidence in my understanding. I've never read anything quite like it.

What Goddess is, physically, is a 10 x 15-inch, 32-page squarebound booklet -- Weinstein calls it a "mega-sized picture-reader" -- printed in two colors, black and green. Graphically, it's both a nonstop design challenge, with each page laid out differently, sometimes extravagantly, and a feast of rough, sometimes technically ragged drawing, fetchingly organic and undeterred by niceties of rendering (reminding me of David Collier in a hurry).

Narratively, it's all-stops-out bizarre, a stitching-together of history (the story of Cochise and the Apache uprising of 1861) and what seems to be a personal mythology of Weinstein's: a dreamworld centered on the statuesque character of Valerie, the Goddess of War, who, though worn-out, disaffected, and dissolute, does the work of intervening in human affairs, sowing death and chaos.

Sexy but disheveled, Valerie looks a bit like a nightclubber the morning after: high heels, scanty clothes, a huge blonde mane of hair, and an air of muzziness and dissipation. But at key moments she transforms from shaggy blonde bombshell to frightful death's-head, a grinning, ravening corpse-goddess:

 

This personal mythos boasts the kind of freewheeling conceptual strangeness, the because-I-say-so logic, that only comics can sustain: Val lives on a planet of her own in a head-shaped headquarters called, naturally, the Headcave, where she receives instructions via "compcaster" from her bosses, "Brainstein" (a disembodied brain with spectacles) and "Number Two" (a disembodied godlike face, or mask). They inhabit the faroff "Milky Way Godplex." The story begins when Val gets pissed off about work, takes the day off, and gets drunk on the bottled blood of 150 Mayan virgins. She then begins to dream of her long-ago love affair with Cochise, a transition that effectively reroutes the story and turns Goddess of War into a historical war comic (!), albeit with mythic backstory and hallucinatory interludes. From here the story pitches toward the kind of tragedy that seems obvious with historical hindsight -- until Val wakes up and decides to go find Cochise (how?). She deserts her post, leaving Earth in chaos. End of Volume One (cliffhanger).

So, okay, this is some weird shit. As invented worlds go, Weinstein's reminds me of the unapologetic otherness of, say, George Carlson or Ted Stearn. (Or, for that matter, Will Sweeney's Tales from Greenfuzz. Remember that one?) It also has something of Henry Darger's myth-making obsessiveness.

The commercial appeal of all this, obviously, will be limited. It's probably not helped by the seeming nervousness and crudity of the drawing. Weinstein doesn't go for that sinuous smoothness of line sought after by so many cartoonists; her brushwork has a hectic, uneven quality, and her lines are thick/thin seemingly at random. (Gary Panter would be an apt point of reference.) Nor is Weinstein's drawing textbooky: the figures are often doughy and unarticulated. Certainly they lack the hyperbolic extension typical of comic-book bodies. Hands look like mitts, fingers like knackwurst. Impassioned faces at times are scratchy and indistinct (as if white-out were involved behind the scenes). The people are flabby. The horses and mules fare even worse. What's more, architectural and scenic particulars are mostly vague. In fact the characters are vague too; some are difficult to tell apart. Everything looks dashed-out and trippy.

But you know what's cool about this? Everything looks dashed-out and trippy. There's a lovely organicism about the whole project. Weinstein works fearlessly, not allowing any overbearing concern with technique to stop her from drawing from every conceivable angle and distance. She draws myriad things from myriad vantagepoints, staging action dynamically, framing and cropping unpredictably, making big pictures and small. This is not an example of that stereotypic mid-nineties alt-comix aesthetic, in which the drawing is self-effacing, secondary to and largely separable from story. No. Goddess is gorgeous to look at, an overspilling of uninhibited, crazily free narrative drawing, out of which a haunting, weirdass story emerges.

Design-wise Goddess is a riot. Again, every single page is configured to do something different, often something very interesting. Layouts vary from single-panel splashes to teeming constellations of images, often more than twenty on a page (I count twenty-seven at the maximum). And these aren't uniformly-sized panels, either, but variously-shaped, ever-shifting panels. Many pages are rectilinear comics grids in the traditional sense, some of them very tightly packed; other pages, though, are cut across by diagonals or overlaid with nonlinear intensifiers. One hazy-mazy page, a tour de force, abandons the grid entirely, depicting lovemaking as a kind of cosmic trip (rife with psychedelic and Ditkoesque details) that follows a serpentine reading path that finally loops back on itself, to replay eternally in the mind:

This page alone is proof positive that Weinstein sure as hell can draw. (Images from Weinstein's current exhibition at NYC's 92YTribeca knock the stuffings out of the very question, yow!)

Best of all graphically are the seven large drypoint etchings, mostly of the Goddess and her surroundings, which punctuate the book. These are lovely, dreamlike etchings, evocative and delicate, but also creepy (again, Darger springs to mind). Somehow these images are central. In fact the story seems to be a sort of exhibition catalog for the sake of framing and presenting these etchings, which would look almost as cool on their own:

One wonders if the mythology of the Goddess didn't take shape first around these etchings, before Weinstein actually committed to bringing it all together as a story. In any case, the book's wedding of small cartoon panels and oversized etchings is something to see.

My initial reaction to Goddess was that it was a fine stunt: a series of visual gambits passing as a story, or, rather, a graphic exploration that was interested in story only insofar as it needed a story to justify itself. But this is not right. Goddess in fact IS a story, albeit passing strange. In the interweaving of the Goddess's story and Cochise's -- in the lover's tryst that ties these stories together and the terrible consequences that come after -- Weinstein finds terror and poignancy. The Goddess may begin as a joke character, but her story deepens. Reading that story made me wonder about the awful attractiveness of war, about the intertwining of desire and death in our imaginations, and about the inexhaustibility of comics. A great, wiggy, overgenerous book.

Highlights of 2008: Burma Chronicles

Whew. After a long and, to me, painful drought,I'd like to help kick Thought Balloonists back to life with the first of a series of posts reviewing some of the highlights of our comics-reading over the course of 2008.

First off, though, deepest thanks to my partner in crime, Craig, for carrying the torch with a series of splendid posts between mid-August and late October, during which I was pretty much in a cocoon. Craig's concept of "A Week of Wonderful Comics" is something I hope to revisit and try my hand at, and, again, I thank him for keeping up the energy and the output when we sorely needed it.

The rules for our "Highlights of 2008" series are simple:

• We'll be talking about comics actually published (or translated and republished) in English during calendar year 2008.


• We'll make no pretensions to a comprehensive "best of" list. Speaking for myself, there remains a lot of promising comics from 2008 that I have not had a chance to read, including titles I've been looking forward to for a long time. Scheduling issues this season have been murder, so I've got a wealth of comics reading to catch up on. With that in mind, we won't presume to identify the "best of" the year.


• We'll confine ourselves to comics that we have not already written about here at Thought Balloonists. So, no Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, no Little Vampire, no Look Out!! Monsters, even though these were among the highlights of the past year for me. Just new stuff -- new to us, that is.

With that in mind, I'd like to present my first contribution to our series, regarding a recent favorite of mine:

Burma Chronicles

by Guy Delisle. Drawn and Quarterly, publisher. $19.95.

 

 

Guy Delisle is a comedian. He's also a sharp observer and, implicitly, a political journalist. With his unglamorous, decidedly unheroic autobiographical persona as a conduit, Delisle has a way of sidling up, in offhand, nonchalant, but insinuating fashion, to issues of heartbreaking gravity.

The recently published Burma Chronicles continues this strategy, once again using Delisle's persona, that of a self-absorbed and obtuse tourist, to wring bitter humor from the telling routines of everyday life in a despotic state, in this case Burma (rechristened Myanmar by its ruling junta). The strategy has its risks -- we are likely to get impatient at times with Delisle's self-involved manner and seeming insensitivity to Burmese circumstances -- but through it he is able to lure us into a deeper portrait of the country, by short-circuiting the wariness with which we might read a more sober, obviously journalistic account. At the same time, Burma Chronicles does something Delisle's previous books in this vein (Shenzen, Pyongyang) have not done, which is ground his account in domestic comedy by way of bringing in his family, including his wife Nadège and his infant son Louis, to enrich the story. The result is an accessible, disarming book that starts with the most basic of domestic riffs -- watching TV, taking care of the kid, napping with the kid, suffering the usual indignities of traveling with a kid and his abundant baggage -- and then opens out into a surreal account of what is clearly a complex and cruelly oppressed culture.

Loose, ambling, and generous, Burma Chronicles surprises with its sly, circling treatment of its subject. It's funny and revealing, playing up the disconnect between Delisle's at times narrow personal focus and the larger cultural milieu of Burma/Myanmar. After what seems like a blinkered, unthinking opening -- supermarket shopping, house-hunting, strolling with the baby -- the book brings that milieu gradually, poignantly, to light. Delisle's method is telegraphed by the quiet surrealism of the situation on the book's cover:

As in Delisle's Pyongyang, an incremental piling-up of events serves to conjure the absurd and paranoid vibe of living in a police state. It's a slow-motion avalanche of disclosures: the operation of censors and the monitoring of communications; the suppression of dissidents; the pressure placed on Burmese artists to avoid any taint of political critique, a demand that makes Delisle himself a danger to his fellows; the sudden, arbitrary and bizarre moves of the military regime, for example abruptly relocating the country's capital from Rangoon to Naypyidaw; the terrifying conditions in Kachin State, where miners are paid in shots of heroin and addiction is pandemic. Against these wretched particulars, Delisle pits the unflagging character of the Burmese themselves, whose gift for survival and improvisation is figured at book's end by the sight of a ferris wheel literally powered by hand (click the thumbnail to get a bigger, better view):

At the same time, Burma Chronicles contains masterful cartooning, looser and more minimal than Delisle's prior efforts in this vein but targeted for maximum effect. Wordless sequences, as above, enliven the story at intervals. Scenic particulars are vivid, and the occasional very detailed drawing of a building, vehicle, or tool lends a dose of verisimilitude to Delisle's cartoon world. Body language is minutely observed, despite the spareness of the drawings. The art is at times self-reflexive, playfully pointing to its own making: variations in line convey the effects of an injured hand, or of Burma's monsoon season weather (you're really going to need to click the thumbnail this time):

Here is a favorite page of mine, from the chapter recounting the Burmese celebration of the Water Festival, a ritual observance of the Buddhist new year. Guy tries to avoid being festively doused by the locals, but you can see the results for yourself (click it!):

Burma Chronicles consistently combines this kind of charm with an astuteness of observation and an implicit seriousness of purpose that together add up to an admirable and captivating book. Handily  translated by Helge Dascher and beautifully designed and presented, this is a first-class project, for me one of the year's true highlights.

[A complimentary review copy of this book was provided by Drawn and Quarterly.]

CH contemplates six-plus weeks without a Balloonist post

(and much longer than that without CH stepping up to the plate). Sigh.

But, not to fear, folks. More to come soon, promise!