THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

Will Crime Pay?

At the 2008 San Diego Comicon, DC announced the formation of a "subimprint" of Vertigo called Vertigo Crime, which would, in the words of Senior Editor Karen Berger, specialize in "smart, edgy, sexy, crime noir fiction in graphic novel form." The first two Vertigo Crime books will reach stores in late August 2009, but I've got early promotional copies, and...

Dark Entries by Ian Rankin and Werther Dell'Edera. DC/Vertigo, 2009. $19.99.

Dark Entries is written by Rankin and drawn by Dell'Edera. I was unfamiliar with Dell'Edera's art--the jacket copy notes that he's "illustrated a number of American comics, most notably Vertigo's Loveless"--but I do know Rankin's writing. I've read and enjoyed a couple of his Inspector Rebus novels, mysteries with sprawling, Dickensian casts set in Edinburgh. Obviously, DC is hoping that Dark Entries will have crossover appeal with fans of Rankin's prose, since Entries' cover features Rankin's name in gigantic type, and in the same font and design as the covers of the British editions of his books:

It's easy to trace other similarities between Rankin's novels and Entries, particularly Rankin's use of rock and roll as the soundtrack for his fictional world. Resurrection Men (2003), for instance, is peppered with references to the Stooges, Led Zeppelin, Wishbone Ash, REM, and many other bands. Here's a sample bit of dialogue:

    "Career opportunist," Jazz said, nodding his understanding. He went to the sink and ran his hands under the cold tap. "What was that Clash song again...?"

    "'Career Opportunities.'"

    "That's the one. I always felt I wasn't supposed to like The Clash: too old, not political enough."

    "I know what you mean."

    "A good band's a good band, though." (Chapter 15)

The title Dark Entries is borrowed from an early Bauhaus single, and a character in the graphic novel brags that he can assemble "a pretty mean '80s mix-tape--Cure, Smiths, Cocteaus." The list of bands continues in "voice-over," providing a commentary on the suffering of other characters in the story (click on images to enlarge):  

The man with the mad mix-tape skillz is none other than Hellblazer's John Constantine, here to provide long-time Vertigo readers with a bridge to the Crime line. The narrative begins as Constantine meets Matthew Keene, the producer of Dark Entries, a reality TV show that combines the premise of Big Brother--let's isolate sexy but emotionally dysfunctional young adults from the outside world and see what happens!--with the aesthetics of a haunted house. As Keene says, the house "has been designed with one thing in mind. Fear." The show spirals out of control, however, when the Dark Entries participants are tormented by real ghosts and horrors in addition to the ones manufactured by the show, and Keene hires Constantine to masquerade as a contestant and investigate these real-life visions.

This story would've been perfect for a couple of issues of the monthly Hellblazer book, but Dark Entries isn't worth the $19.95 hardcover treatment. My sense is that Dell'Edera is still searching for his own art style, and he's still unduly influenced by Frank Miller. One character, Stephanie, wears a bandana, and Dell'Edera draws her like a freckled Elektra:

The above scene takes place during a blackout: hence the spot blacks. When the lights come back on, though, Dell'Edera continues to ink very heavily, and his art settles into a combination of Miller's chiaroscuro and John Buscema's low-key, gestural naturalism. These influences are straight from American mainstream comics, though, and I was naively hoping that Vertigo Crime might find new ways to represent the noir aesthetic. That's been my problem with Vertigo for a long time: comics like Preacher, Sandman and Y the Last Man never struck me as sufficiently different from mainstream comics in their visuals (and, usually, in their stories) to deserve the label of a separate, "alternative" imprint.  

The Amityville-Horror-as-reality-show conceit of Dark Entries allows Rankin to take some satirical (if predictable) shots at TV culture, and Rankin deftly escalates the situation into a 21st-century version of Sartre's No Exit (1944), actually quoting "Hell is other people" at one point. But about halfway through the graphic novel, the plot takes a twist so hoary and so lame that it would make Rod Serling blush with embarrassment. (If you don't plan on reading the book, and if you're curious about the twist, go here, where, appropriately enough, a beloved TV character will spill the proverbial beans.) Dark Entries never regains its footing after this seismic pratfall. 

Filthy Rich by Brian Azzarello and Victor Santos. DC/Vertigo, 2009. $19.99.  

I liked Filthy Rich, the other book launching the Vertigo Crime line, better than Dark Entries. Filthy Rich is a straight-up crime novel rather than an occult thriller--Rich's characters hang out in urban locales like used car lots and run-down bars rather than haunted houses--and I like my crime fiction lean and Stark (capital letter intended), without magical mumbo-jumbo. Also, Victor Santos, Filthy Rich's artist, has a goofy, exaggerated style that's more fun to look at than Dell'Edera's naturalism...which is not to say that Santos is more original than Dell'Edera. In fact, Santos is even more of a Miller acolyte. Note, for instance, how Santos goes nuts with the Venetian blind shadows, a la Miller's Daredevil and Sin City:

And like Miller, Santos will often imply a shape, rather than use a contour line to define boundaries, as with the shoulder of the woman in the panel below:

Looking beyond these Miller flourishes, I do like aspects of Santos' own style. He draws heads that are too big for their bodies, and he seems driven to fill in pages with a dense thicket of details: a black eye consists of dozens of little lines ringing the eye socket, the lead character has a cartoony chin than juts out like Bruce Campbell on steroids, and Zip-a-Tone effects thicken every page. Dell'Edera's art is a cross between Miller and John Buscema, but Santos mixes Miller with, of all people, Joe Staton, and the result is entertaining in a "What the Hell?" kind of way.

Filthy Rich is scripted by Brian Azzarello, who as much as anyone is responsible for the Vertigo Crime line: the success of Azzarello's recently completed series 100 Bullets (with art by Eduardo Risso) persuaded DC that crime comics can sell. (Yesterday, DC released The 100 Bullets #1 Vertigo Crime Sampler, featuring a reprint of 100 Bullets #1 and sample pages from Dark Entries and Filthy Rich, at the "first-taste-is-almost-free" price of one dollar.) The protagonist of Azzarello's story is Richard Junkin, a has-been football player nicknamed "Junk," but undoubtedly the book's title refers to Rick too, because he's a nasty piece of work. One of the most common characters in noir is the weak-willed man who gives into fatal temptation--think of Walter Neff abandoning caution when he see Phyllis Dietrichson's ankle bracelet in Double Indemnity (1944)--and Junk's downfall begins when he takes a job as a bodyguard for Victoria Soeffer, a femme fatale and "heiress to the largest automobile dealership on the Eastern seaboard" (38). Crosses, double-crosses, unspeakable violence and wild sex ensue, all of which I found dirty fun, but, frankly, not as cool as such recent crime comics as Darwyn Cooke's Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter or the Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips Criminal collections.

Both Dark Entries and Filthy Rich are competent, but so were several of DC's Minx graphic novels, and maybe competence isn't enough in an increasingly competitive graphic novel market. I'll definitely pick up one or two of the future Vertigo Crime books--especially Jason Starr's The Chill--but I have a feeling that this imprint might be in the morgue before too long.    

Diagramming the Heart

Time keeps leapfrogging on, days yielding to weeks, yet I'm still pondering highlights of the year gone past. Man, we Balloonists are slow. Me in particular. Lately I can post only fitfully, with big yawning gutters between. I have to say, though, that Craig's excellent posts (from Tamara Drewe to his wonderful "Gifts" entry) have shamed me back into action. Notwithstanding a grinding work schedule and loss of rhythm, I've just got to post!

Besides Craig's stuff, another thing lighting a fire under my ass is the recent arrival in my mailbox of The Comics Journal No. 296, their Best of 2008 issue, which includes picks by many correspondents (sadly not including me, not this time) plus cool interviews with Lynda Barry, Dash Shaw, et al., an impressive gallery of Finnish comics, and an enticing preview of Carol Tyler's You'll Never Know. I count 140-plus best-of works in this issue's pages, and I'm shocked, in a slow-motion carwreck sort of way, to realize how few of these works I've sampled, let alone read all the way through. Ach, I am out. of. it.

Let's move on. What follows is another of my faves from 2008 that I haven't already written about here. I'll be brief, by Balloonist standards, because I hear time's winged chariot pulling into the driveway, etc.

Bottomless Belly Button, by Dash Shaw. Fantagraphics, 2008. 720 pages. $29.99

Shaw is very good and getting better. His book Goddess Head is fascinating and his contributions to Mome are among that series's highpoints. With Bottomless Belly Button he has pulled off something remarkable: a 700-plus page book that doesn't feel like a stunt but rather is perfectly proportioned, intimate, and subtle, a privileged entryway into a private world that nonetheless feels universal in its emotive resonance and applicability. Like Craig Thompson's Blankets, this is a hefty, brick-like book that can be read easily in a few sittings, but Shaw's work is tougher and more astringent than Blankets, as well as more formally inventive.

Essentially, Bottomless Belly Button is about navigating a site saturated in memory: a house that becomes not only a locus of family history and reminiscence but also the setting for the painful disintegration, or at least fracturing, of said family: the Loony clan, who converge on their old beachhouse for one last get-together before the breakup of Mother and Father Loony, married some forty years but now fallen out of love. Shaw takes a generous, multi-sided view of this narrative problem, exploring it from multiple characters' perspectives and in the process suggesting what the dissolution of family, or rather the renegotiation of the idea of family, feels like for all parties.

Highlights of 2008: De-Naturalizing Drewe

Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds. Serialized in The Guardian newspaper, 2005-6. Revised and collected in 2008 by Mariner Books, $16.95.

The first couple of times I read Posy Simmonds' Tamara Drewe, I took the book for granted. That's not to say that I was disappointed. Actually, I found Drewe a slightly stronger book than Simmonds' Gemma Bovary (published in the US by Pantheon in 2005), even though Simmonds' debut graphic novel for American audiences had the advantage of novelty. Bovary introduced us (or, at least, me) to both Simmonds' playful approach to literary "adaptation"--Bovary is a contemporary, recklessly unfaithful riff on Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary (1857)--and to Simmonds' gift for expressing personality and sensuality through cartoony renderings of the human body. In Drewe, a cheeky update of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Simmonds again uses facial expressions and posture to define character, as in this small, wordless sequence that shows lust and jealousy bubbling up at a book signing:

Those four panels are direct and straight-forward, and it's precisely this directness that I took for granted in Simmonds' art. While reading Drewe, I felt like Simmonds was providing me with the ideal vantage point on the secret lives of her characters. I felt a bit like a Peeping Tom. (Voyeurism and violations of privacy are central to Drewe: early in the story, a man using the bathroom inadvertently overhears a private conversation between a husband and a wife, and later in the book two teenagers sneak into a house and read and respond to e-mails sent to someone else.) Drewe seems natural and unforced; Simmonds immerses her readers in the narrative without calling our attention to how she tells her tale. By my fifth time through Drewe, however, I realized that Simmonds puts into play several sophisticated artistic and narrative techniques to achieve her clarity and naturalism. A colleague of mine, a professor of writing, has a sign on his office door: "The writer works hard so the reader doesn't have to." In Tamara Drewe, Simmonds works similarly hard, but I want to put a little effort myself into burrowing beneath Drewe's naturalism to figure out what makes the book function. Specifically, let's look at two of Simmonds' techniques: her use of text blocks to represent the inner thoughts of various characters, and her penchant for embedding climatic moments of Drewe's narrative in subjective flashbacks. 

To talk about these techniques, I need to do close readings of panels and pages, a process that'll reveal important twists and turns of the plot. Insert generic "Spoiler" warning here. Also, while you're reading, please click on the images to enlarge them

"Re-reading Watchmen" (a guest gig)

 

Two respected comics retailers in my area, Carr D’Angelo and and Atom! Freeman, are collaborating on a series of columns for Comic Book Resources regarding Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons' classic Watchmen. Carr is the co-owner of Earth-2 in Sherman Oaks (the 2007 winner of the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailer Award), while Atom! is co-owner, with his wife Portlyn, of my local shop, Brave New World in Newhall (the 2008 winner of same, and one of my favorite hangouts). Their series, "Re-reading Watchmen," consists of  weekly conversations around each successive issue of Watchmen, timed to serve as a countdown to the expected (?) spring release of the much-hyped Watchmen film adaptation.

Carr and Atom! have been recruiting friends to join them in the conversation. Atom! asked me if I would like to take part, and, if so, which issue I'd most like to discuss. I happily said yes, and, oh, could you make it issue #4, please?



So, click here to read our dialogue about the classic "Watchmaker." (And, for the first three installments of the series, click here, and here, and here.)

My thanks to Atom! and Carr for inviting me to be part of this experiment. Rereading Watchmen was gratifying -- the book has held up very well, thanks -- and good preparation for teaching the book this term in my "Comics & Graphic Novels" course at CSU Northridge. (I've never taught Watchmen before.)

I was glad to be part of the mix. In fact they could hardly get me to shut up!

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.]

Our Eddie: The Fate of the Artist

   

When we launched our Eddie Campbell series, I observed that Campbell "approaches cartooning as handwriting” and praised the looseness of his work, “the way he sketches and scratches on the knife's-edge between deliberation and happy accident”:

He brings dignity to the idea of drawing as doodling, as a means of idling, of thinking through one's fingers. Especially in his autobiographical comics [...], Campbell works with a raw spontaneity of line and the offhand logic of association.

I should say that he seems to do this; actually, there's a deliberateness, an insinuating narrative logic, behind even his most ragged images. Campbell the designing artist peeks slyly out from behind Campbell the doodler [...]. Sitting at the doodler's elbow, this ulterior Campbell has larger designs on you as a reader, but lets everything fall into place easily, with a fetching looseness of style and manner.

I stand by the above (hell, I just quoted myself), but the problem of pronouncements like this is that artists like Eddie Campbell don’t sit still.

Our Eddie: After the Snooter

by Eddie Campbell. Eddie Campbell Comics, 2002. $14.95.

This is the latest installment in our series on Eddie Campbell's autobiographical comics. Previous posts are here, here, here, here and here. Whew!    

At first, After the Snooter reads as a straight-forward collection of domestic vignettes and memories from Campbell's childhood and adolescence. (The first thing you notice is that in Snooter Campbell finally abandons his "Alec MacGarry" alias and calls himself by his real name.) As ever, one of Campbell's primary virtues as an artist is his skill in choosing funny and/or poignant stories from his life. A single pager titled "Grooming Yocky's Arse" features Campbell's long-suffering wife Anne, who makes the alarming discovery that the family cat has grass sticking out of its ass. Anne gradually cuts the grass "until the problem works itself out," and the strip ends with Yocky breaking the fourth wall like this:

ALA: Reading Pictures: The Language of Wordless Books

 

   

On Saturday, June 28, I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel on wordless books, particularly woodcut novels and pantomime comics, at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA. This was my first proper introduction to the ALA and its Conference, both of which are huge. I and my wife Michele had a wonderful, breathless, dizzying time. What follows is my report on the event...

Our Eddie: How to Be an Artist (Craig Responds)

Hey, go read Charles first.

Re-reading and writing about Eddie Campbell's graphic novels reminds me how dense and complicated the books are. In my post on The King Canute Crowd, I mentioned a panel where Campbell drew himself arm-wresting with Alan Moore, with both men spouting their primary influences:

While writing that post, I remembered that panel from Campbell's interview in The Comics Journal #145 (October 1991), but I forgot about that panel's subsequent appearance in How to Be an Artist, page 38, where it represents Campbell's deepening  friendship and artistic collaboration with Moore (and  captures an occasion where both men "tape a conversation for Escape"). I've learned to never underestimate Eddie. His art is shot through with details, reoccurrences, motifs, characters and themes that rise above individual books and cut across his entire oeuvre; maybe Campbell's life is the work of art, and the books are the tracks of his passage (Garooga!), and it's a stupid critic who reaches conclusions before the life and art are done.

Still, though, let me be stupid for a bit and address one of Charles' observations.

Our Eddie: How to Be an Artist

by Eddie Campbell. Eddie Campbell Comics, 2001. $13.95 US.

Welcome to the third installment of our series on the comics of Eddie Campbell, in particular his autobiographical "Alec MacGarry" graphic novels. (Previous episodes can be found here, then here.) Today our subject is Alec: How to Be an Artist.

How to Be an Artist is a book I've considered, and am still considering, using in my comics classes as a critical text as well as a “graphic novel” in its own right. A personal, not to say biased, life-and-times account of the comics and graphic novel revolution of the 1980s, the book serves as a historical/critical study as well as a memoir. Inevitably, it’s partly fictive in manner (Campbell’s memoirs always own up to their use of organizing and distancing devices), but, still, How to Be an Artist looks like an attempt to get down the facts of the time in a scrupulous if idiosyncratic way. I’d say one of the book’s many virtues is that it completely destabilizes the putative distinction between primary and secondary texts.

In other words, How to Be an Artist manages to be, all at once, literary autobiography, autofiction, history from the ground up, the biography of a scene (that is, the British small-press comics scene), an acidic commentary on the passage from scene to pop culture fad, a too-hasty postmortem on a movement that in fact has not died (the graphic novel movement), an anthology of Campbell’s influences and critical opinions, a constellation of character studies (some of them stiletto-sharp and quietly devastating), and a protean, unpredictable, often barbed yet delightful, and still somehow very sad, cartoon narrative. It’s one of several books in Campbell’s catalog to play hob with generic distinctions, and, like a lot of Campbell’s stuff, its tone is tough to place.