Jean "Moebius" Giraud, the brilliant and uber-influential French graphic artist/comic book auteur has died. This is a huge bummer. His sci-fi visions influenced filmmakers and fans alike, and his Western work is legendary. He just had such a huge imagination and such a clean yet personal style, sparse yet voluptuous, his panels and pages blow open the doors of the reader's imagination.
Tom Spurgeon has the best obit I've yet seen. Just one selection, about his name and Heavy Metal magazine (the American import of Metal Hurlant, how I came upon his work:
Giraud created the powerful "Moebius" handle for the loose, satirical work he had done for the magazine Hara-Kiri in the early to mid-1960s. He simply liked the name, and didn't even know if it referred to a person with whom he might have to share the appellation. In 1975 he resuscitated the name for the new group he co-founded Les Humanoides Associes and their magazine Metal Hurlant. Described by Giraud as a natural reaction to a groundswell of storytelling from comics-makers that had no natural place to put this material -- you can see precedents in some of the short stories Giraud did for Pilote just proceeding these newer comics -- and therefore needed to create a new press to do so, all in the tradition of the French avant garde. That magazine would become the home of two of Giraud's best-remembered series, Arzach and The Airtight Garage. Giraud would later describe the revolution driven by his work and others as one of creative choice rather than content, that the feeling of the artist inhabiting the work was more important than the kind of work being done. He drew a connection to the undergrounds and cartoonists like Robert Crumb, although he felt that the work of he and his peers existed in an entirely different cultural context.
Even his one Silver Surfer story, with Stan Lee scripting, is legendary:
I posted this on a blog I read daily, Jeffrey Wells' excellent Hollywood Elsewhere. While I don't always agree with Jeffrey, I do most of the time, and he provides an open forum in this post comments for readers to disagree with him, or each other.
Jeffrey did a blanket put-down of Comic-con which has some basis in fact but is really the Hollywood view of the show even in his negativity, no real feel for why the convention was so good in the years leading up to now or that the good core survives. Ditto for the first few comments I saw, snarky (though not noticeably witty) chime-ins agreeing with Wells.
So I felt it my duty, after attending yesterday and having a successful, life-affirming trip:
I have to put in a few words of defense of Comic-Con.
I go for a single day each year, mainly for business but also because I love the creative community that's the backbone of Comic-Con. I attend maybe one panel a year, prefer lesser-attended events, think the lines are for fans or chumps. I like that Comic-Con taught H'wood that they had to bring the talent close to the fans, that if they're going to make stupor-hero movies that they actually consider the fans now (unlike, say the first Star Trek movie), I like that the artists old and young, publishers big and tiny, are in the same huge room with movie studios, TV networks, videogame publishers and toymakers.
I love the huge explosion of creativity and available new-old art, books, comics, videos, etc., like the two Harvey Pekar graphic books gifted to me by the publisher, one on The Beats, the other on the Students for a Democratic Society. I like talking to independent publishers, creators, even smart people working for the big corporations who actually care.
I love that at its core Comic-Con is about the low barrier to entry to create a potentially huge IP, just pen and ink, good ideas, wit and talent.
And I adore that there were three anti-homosexual protesters across the street and everyone at the convention was laughing, shaking their heads and taking pictures like they were cosplay attendees instead of grumpy/smug middle-aged women with offensive "God Hates Fags" signs.
The core community that comes together at Comic-Con is an accepting bunch, who know the misfit in themselves and have made community.
It's all over now, the voice of Cleveland, Harvey Pekar has passed on at age 70. His sarcastically named autobiographical comic book series, American Splendor, which he wrote and had a variety of artists starting with the world-famous R. Crumb illustrate, entered the mass culture with the hilarious, inventive, reality-fiction mixing movie version released in 2008, starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar and Hope Davis as his wife, Joyce. Per Giamatti today:
"Harvey was one of the most compassionate and empathetic human beings I've ever met," Giamatti said in a statement. "He had a huge brain and an even bigger soul. And he was hilarious. He was a great artist, a true American poet, and there is no one to replace him."
The obits above are well-worth reading, as is his perhaps most notable work, Our Cancer Year, about his struggle with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was also famous for his guest spots on David Letterman, until he went on to tirade against NBC owner General Electric's labor practices and got himself banned from the show, also well-documented in the movie.
For all his success, here's where Pekar netted out:
Success did not seem to ease Mr. Pekar’s existential predicament. “Of course I don’t think I have it made by any means,” his alter ego said in a cartoon in Entertainment Weekly in 2003. “I’m too insecure, obsessive and paranoid for that.”
Now that this great American original has gone to the great comic book store in the sky (the afterlife being something he surely never believed in), he's now American legend. I predict a long afterlife for the fine works he left behind, even as he has changed the perception of comic books forever and inspired others who have already followed in his path.
I'm endlessly fascinated by the website, Comic Book Bondage Cover of the Day. It's a combo of the relentless stream of covers featuring women in trouble -- you start to realize it's the norm much more than the exception -- as well as the fact that they're almost all from "yesteryear," as far back as the first few decades of the 20th Century.
The posted covers change daily. Here's one from today:
Is it okay now to look at these old illustrations with joy? After all this time, are they art? Found objects? Or just crossed over into kitsch?
It's the end of the Jewish High Holy Days, the atonement climax, Yom Kippur. And as much as I'd like to atone for saying not nice things about certain rightwing factions, I can't do so if their goal is assassination of our fairly elected Commander-in-Chief:
A poll was posted on Facebook asking users to vote "should Obama be killed?"
The responses include: "yes," "maybe," "if he cuts my health care," and "no.
Over 730 people had taken the poll, which was later removed from Facebook. The poll is now being probed by the Secret Service, reports the Associated Press.
This category of agitators for violence include all wingers who call healthcare reform anything approaching creeping Nazism, and advocate buying more weapons to battle oncoming Nazism and feminism:
Especially when now a part-time census worker appears to have been lynched, with the word "FED" scrawled across his chest.
I'm always a big fan of the annual San Diego Comic-Con, the largest such event in the world. The comics industry taught Hollywood about giving fans access to the creators and talent. There is still an Artists Alley on the main floor, which is several football fields long. And the coverage is everywhere, particularly where the entertainment industry at large is driving the economy.
However, the Hollywood-ization of Comic-Con has brought it's dissenters, and none more eloquent than Keith Boesky in his always insightful, funny, pointed A Tree Falling in the Forest blog, where he takes aim and makes another one of his all-too-likely predictions. The set-up:
Every year I start to get calls around this time asking whether I am going to attend comic con. As you may have read in last year's post about the rise and fall of the con, I've been going for over twenty five years and have seen some change. This year I am noticing the change in the people who are calling and I am starting to wonder whether it is a good thing. I used to get calls from artists or comic fans who could not afford to pay the fee. Then I got calls from writers and directors who did not know where to look to get a badge. Now I get calls from game folks, agents, executives, all thinking I can get them a badge to the sold out show. Sure, hold on a second, I'll just lift Shakespeare's head, push the button, and pull one out of my ass, just give me a second to clean it up for you. Let's just stop right here for a second. Sold Out. For years, Pre-Hollywood Takeover, tickets were always unspokenly voluntary. By that I mean you never really had to buy them. We would buy tickets because it supported the Con, but if you didn't and just kept walking, the security guards never stopped you. Because in the PHT days, the Con was inclusive. The concept of fans being turned away from a convention where sales in the tens of thousands of units are celebrated is somewhat wacky.
Here's the edge-of-seat thriller in Hollywood tonight:
In a surprise ruling, a federal judge in Los Angeles said he intended to grant 20th Century Fox’s claim that it owns a copyright interest in the “Watchmen,” a movie shot by Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures and set for release in March...
...“Fox owns a copyright interest consisting of, at the very least, the right to distribute the ‘Watchmen’ motion picture,” the ruling said.
If you want to piss off a million militant fanboys, just try screwing with the release of this long-awaited adaptation of Alan Moore's epochal graphic novel, illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Messing up the story could be worse, and there's talk of director Zack "300" Snyder having to cut his film down to a potentially damaging running time (and saving the consolation version for DVD). But what's really interesting here is who's going to get what out of this final distribution arrangement, and if it'll be solved in time to hit the March 2009 release date.
For those who may not have seen the most recent trailer, YouTube doesn't do it justice like the infinitely superior Apple's Quicktime Trailer version, but here goes:
So will Warner Bros get their fair share for taking the risk of making the movie? Will Fox get what the judge says is their due?
Heading into our first full week with President-Elect Obama, it feels like a fresh start for America even though all the hardcore economic problems that existed a week ago are still here, and the other party is still in power.
That said, you'd be hard-pressed for a photo that better captures where we are right now in relation to our ecstatic history than this one at BAGnewsNotes, and equally able to enjoy David Brooks' honest depiction of where that other party is right now:
You've got a whole slew of babies who just got named Barack, Michele, Malia or Sasha. You've got a post-mortem by the team that helped their boss win the election that's filled with all the great moral attributes you'd like to hear -- no drama, no infighting, no hanging on race, win good.
And you've got 50 count'em 50 facts you may not know about our incoming President.
For example, did you know that he collects both Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comic books?
I wonder if he has any of the early Steve Ditkos or Barry Windsor-Smiths in his collection.
The Joker first entered my consciousness four decades ago when I watched the third week, ergo the fifth and sixth episodes, of the original Batman series on ABC. Because they had rather wisely started the show with The Riddler, followed by The Penguin, and only then tackled Batman's arch-nemesis, the Joker, I didn't realize just then that that this super villain sat at the top of the pyramid, that ever since he was created in 1940 by (arguably) Jerry Robinson, he's been the one to watch.
While co-writer/producer/director Christopher Nolan and his co-writers Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer (co-story) and all the money and technical expertise imaginable certainly gives The Dark Knight plenty to look at, its their interpretation of the Joker, as channeled and conjured by Health Ledger, that's the clincher for seeing it. There hasn't been a better Batman story put on the screen, no matter the flaws anyone might find in this one, and it's because their Joker has given them the handle for synthesizing so many relevant aspects of the Batman canon stretching all the way back to that first appearance in Batman #1, and synthesizing so much of the post-9/11 terror that runs under our American life since that day in 2001.
The artistic success of The Dark Knight, the thing that makes it so unnerving and hard to come to grips with, is this ripping anxiety, this unstable world where bigrigs flip ass-over engine and buildings collapse in hell-on-earth flames, and The shadowy Batman may be the cause of it all.
As the end of Batman Begins made clear, this new hero's success caused a breakout at the asylum (Arkham, to be exact) as the most psychotic criminals of all wanted their fair shot at this new crime-fighting freak. So in the post-9/11 world, where many of us have long had questions of blowback for global military, C.I.A. and economic hitman-style U.S. actions both well-intentioned and not-so-much, the question becomes whether the center can hold at all. Batman is supposed to right all wrongs but in Nolan's vision, it's too big a job for any one man. Or two, as the tragically well-meaning District Attorney, Harvey Dent, provides momentary service as well.
The trick of this movie is that Ledger's Joker is the smartest, wiliest, savviest, most committed character in the movie. Like Keyser Soze, he does the things nobody else would have the guts to do, or could even think to do. He doesn't care about money, he doesn't care for power in the traditional sense. He's only interested in chaos, a kind of major league asshole Situationalist who's Theater of the Absurd is 100% reliably always a Theatre of Cruelty. Each and every one of his larcenous, homicidal "pranks" is a social experiment, much like the 9/11 bombings didn't bring down Western capitalism as it created interpersonal panic.
Genre pictures generally have the duty of both satisfying the traditional expectations and trappings, but twisting them just enough that the formula feels refreshed. Genre pictures that stand astride and ultimately transcend their genres have to do more than twist, they have to turn the genre on its head -- satisfy us that they know their stuff, then burst the bonds in dazzling ways.
The Godfather is more than a gangster picture -- it's about the depths of family loyalty. The Matrix is more than a sci-fi film -- it questions perception and reality. The Dark Knight is more than a superhero movie (and no one in the movie has super powers, albeit some movie magic) -- it's actually an uber-powered crime film asking how can you ever expect to clean up a world where human nature breeds new criminals faster than terrorists after a mosque attack.
Much of the picture plays as a series of heists, starting with the bravura bank robbery (with full nod to Michael Mann's Heat) that sets the tone for the unexpected. And this is where the IMAX experience kicks in as well. If you're fortunate enough to have access to an IMAX theater near you, reserve your ticket several days early, as they are selling ahead and selling out for the primo evening and weekend shows. I can imagine the movie playing in IMAX as long as in the regular theaters, as it's a unique, new experience. The screen officially opens up for six action sequences, but there are a number of unheralded establishing shots, aerial cityscapes both day and night, Hong Kong and Gotham (Chicago), that add such edgy grandeur to the experience.
So you feel like you are right there in the bank as the guns go off and Ledger shows up, first in a mask, the other big subtextual theme to the movie. One of the first shots is a man, maybe the Joker, standing on a street corner, his back to the camera, waiting for the criminal pick-up as the camera glides down to the clown mask dangling from his hand. Ledger's Joker's face is a mask, of greasepaint over scars, a mocking attempt to mask his own hideousness, the fractured but somehow more honest doppleganger for the billionaire with the rigid cowl. But it's what he says, licking his scars like a wolf, that scare the most, his knowing dissection of human behavior, flipping the pathologies of the good guys against themselves in a more credible way than previous filmed Jokers. It's the grit of the movie working for it, as when the Joker makes good on his word of making a pencil disappear.
I can't imagine how the vertiginous motif of the film translates to the regular aspect ratio, as all the skyscrapers scraps and escapes, the graceful dives through glittery cityscapes, seem crucial for the film's scale, it's desire to burst free of genre by any means necessary. The widescreen ratio works well for things like the homage to Stanley Kubrick in the underground Batcave, a spacious, mostly vacant, laboratory lit by wall-to-wall white panels above. It works for some of the scenes with Christian Bale in Bruce Wayne mode and either Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes or Aaron Eckhardt as Harvey Dent. But it puts you into this disturbing picture in an intoxicating (like absinthe) way when it goes full square eyeball-filling screen.
The biggest shock about The Dark Knight is that this is the most relentlessly downbeat huge budget Hollywood movies ever made. The Godfather was warm in comparison. That this most famous of superheros, the one with whom it is so much easier to identify than the supernaturally powered visitors and mutants, is the vessel for such a pessimistic portrait of urban civic life (almost like a comic book Wire) is strange combination -- again, a synthesis -- of events.
So what's the zeitgeist this time?
If, as Sir Michael Caine (Wayne's butler Alfred in the movie) has been quoted as saying, "Superman is how America views itself. Batman is how the rest of the world views America,” then maybe the success of this movie, directed for an American conglomerate by an Englishman, means America is somehow interested again in how the world views us, not just in how we impose our will upon the world.
Then again, maybe, like Joker and Batman alike, we're just drawn to fiery chaos.
Doc Bruce Banner, Belted by gamma rays, Turned into the Hulk. Ain't he unglamo-rays! Wreckin' the town With the power of a bull, Ain't no monster clown Who is that lovable? It's ever lovin' Hulk! HULK!! HULK!!"
So went the lyrics to the first Hulk theme music ever, back with the Mighty Marvel Marchin' Society cartoon omnibus. Well, the gamma rays have been turned into the more contagion-like gamma blood serum, and the brand new Incredible Hulk would throw puny bull clear across the farm, and as Marvel has taken over control of their intellectual property film productions starting with the refreshing Iron Man, I think they're onto something.
Which is to say, I enjoyed the hell out of this new Hulk movie.
While it may not strive for the admirable but elusive profundity of the Ang Lee version, essentially just a quality popcorn movie with the integrity to run hard past the plot inanities inherent to the comic book genre, I felt more empathy for the protagonist in this movie than in any prior superhero genre offering, including the estimable Tony Stark by Robert Downey Jr.
The filmmakers wisely keep us in the emotional flow of Bruce Banner's journey, a large part because of how Ed Norton shaped his performance and the story, and even Liv Tyler in the thankless Betsy Ross g.f. role elicits sympathy. She owns the most human moment in the movie (and the only one that approaches the frisson of Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow's Cary Grant/Irene Dunne quality scenes in Iron Man), when they start to get down and get stopped by Bruce's racing pulse.
The Hulk fascinates because he's simultaneously the most and the least powerful of all superheroes. In a sense he's not a superhero at all, more the origin and pathology of a super villain, an accidental creation who's emergence can never be fully controlled, nor his return to human form. Bruce Banner never asked to be Hulk, although he has the ability to call on it by self-provocation, and part of the emotional realism of the film is how well it depicts the absolute bummer of being Hulk.
Since the Jekyll/Hyde nature of the hybrid means that Hulk and Banner are two entirely different people, one only barely remembering the experiences of the other, and because Hulk tends to retreat to nature (green to green) to escape or recuperate from battle, the result is not unlike amnesia or perhaps, in movies, lycanthropy. Banner wakes up in jungles, barefoot, shirtless, holding his pants up by hand, with no resources or compass. This will always be the result. There's nothing good that comes from being Hulk.
Except for the destruction.
One of the unique pleasures of cinema is indulgence in the illicit urge to destroy. That's why we keep going to see Terminator movies and dinosaurs. There's watching people make love, watching them drink and smoke and hallucinate, watching them exert power over others or come back from bottom to win, but there's nothing any other medium does better than the movies than to break things. Lots and lots of big big things.
Louis Leterrier, Zak Penn, et al get that right this time. All of the builds to the Hulk sequences are right, and the explosions of rage, of righteous rage, are deeply pleasurable. Y'see, Hulk is clear about it: all he wants is to be left alone, and for you to treat his girl right.
You mess either of those up, you pay the big green consequences.
Tonally, with the doomed man theme (Banner can never be completely cured or it's the end of the Hulk story), this version of the story is for the most part noir, at times bordering on horror (this is a much scarier PG-13 than the new Indy movie, if you're thinking of taking a kid). The story picks up in the slums of Brazil, where the last version left off but five years later, and the first act is part-City of God, part Jason Bourne. Norton does a great job of bringing us along with Banner, a good guy still paying for his original sin of creating the serum, who makes mistakes but never errs with his integrity. By relating to his concrete work on controlling his anger, it's easier to identify with the limits of his surroundings and means, staying hidden from the military force that wants him for dissection and replication.
As for the CGI, there's a few moments in the middle of a fight where I wasn't sure how Hulk and opponent got from here to there, but they've taken pains this time to give CG Hulk weight and physicality, and motion captured Norton and Tim Roth to give corresponding character to the monster movements. Most gratifying, the final battle in particular has a touch of that classic Ray Harryhausen feel, just enough stylization to embed these giants in the subconscious.
Traditionally, action movies get analyzed long after the fact, whether as phallic festivals or metaphors for social history of the time. The resonance is deep in the subtext or affect, not so much in the self-evident plot or dialogue. What always draws fans to the Hulk are his power and his anger, the sense of an avenging golem who's actually you, somehow righting the injustices visited upon you every day with the ultimate punch.
Yes, we begin to gauge Banner's mounting anxiety every time it peaks at 200 and spills over into transformative anger, but the metaphor at the heart of this picture is actually not anger but, to put a point on it, aggression. It's not a huge or particularly profound statement, but it gives the film its emotional through-line.
Bruce and Betsy are the very definition of peaceful, thoughtful, scientific people. When the movie opens Bruce is leading a monklike existence, as Zen as it gets. On the other hand, Betsy's father (William Hurt, confessed longtime Hulk fan) is deeply aggressive, and the silliest thing about the movie is how he keeps attacking when the result is pretty much always the same. Sound like any War we know?
But it's Tim Roth's Emil Blonsky, soldier by nature and rarin' for a fight, obsessed with finding a worthy opponent, who juices the latter half of the story. Hulk's anger is the MacGuffin -- it's the cowardice of aggression that the movie rails against.
Tellingly, Hulk tends to turn and run towards his attackers. When hit by powerful fire, Abomination is seen running away, trying to evade. Hulk is essentially a mensch, while those that attack him -- the General, the super villain -- don't give a damn about anyone who gets hurt in their ego-driven pursuit of peaceful Banner/Hulk. They hide behind the military machinery or their father-status or their hopped-up super power. It's the last defense their egos have.
Fitting for the past 8 years?
Ah, well, maybe it's best not to read too much into such entertainments. Maybe Hulk breaking police car in two is only Hulk breaking police car in two. All in all, it's just gratifying that the Hulk has morphed from this:
Of all the original Mad Magazine artists, Will Elder may have had the biggest influence. His parodies including "Superduperman", "Starchie" and "Mickey Rodent" set the standard for both Mad's take-no-prisoners satire as well as filling the panels with enough irreverent throwaway gags that you just had to read the parodies again...and again...and yet again, with no diminution of pleasure.
Elder (born Wolf Eisenberg) just died at age 86 and leaves behind a wealth of fine work, some terrificinterviews, as well as his notorious "Little Annie Fanny" series with writer (and Mad co-founder) Harvey Kurtzman for Hugh Hefner's Playboy. In fact, watching this short film about Elder's work (in two parts via YouTube), you'd be forgiven for thinking that Kurtzman and Elder were the same guy.
With the originators of the Mad sensibility on the way out, leaving the few like Al Jaffee and Dick DeBartolo still producing (still first-rate) work, it's the end of an era for sure, but this usual gang of idiots has influenced our culture beyond measurement, essentially providing the bedrock sense of humor that continues to grow today.
Did someone in the Hillary Clinton campaign (Harold Ickes? Maggie Williams? Howard Wolfson?) abruptly pull the plug during Bill Maher's live interview with Campaign Chairman Terry McAuliffe last night, just as Bill was hitting the hard questions about Hillary's relationship to the truth and her husband as liability?
Judge for yourself -- at 5:53 when you see a few techie frames rarely seen on television:
With her huge-margin loss today in Wyoming and news that she, in fact, did not bring peace to Northern Ireland, did not appear to push her husband to intervene in the Rwandan genocide, and did not have anything to do with peace in Bosnia...other than, perhaps...singing?
Ironically enough, the very girl who's in the stock footage used in Hillary's now infamous "red phone" ad is, in fact, an Obama precinct captain.
Stay cool, Barack. It's the Sybil-like Hillary Clinton who strews panic, in the manner of someone who shouldn't be anywhere near the red phone at 3:00a.m.
In fact, maybe Sen. Clinton should leave the red phone to the professionals:
I didn't see the first movie made from the uber-classic Marvel Comics signature series (first issue Nov. 1961), Fantastic Four, but I heard some negative things about it, particularly from longtime comic books fans, and because I just took our two sons (ages 7 and 4) to see the new Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, I'm betting we'll catch it on video soon.
Again, I can't speak to the first film, and I know reviews have been better but still not ecstatic for this first sequel. Maybe ecstatic wouldn't be appropriate. After all, it doesn't have the angst of Spider-man or the hippitude of the X-Men movies. It's not about character depth, either.
What this one is, however, is a very cool-looking, straightforward, essentially faithful superhero movie with lots of big screen "wow" shots, that I can take my kids to. There were a couple of "craps" and "asses," but hopefully all the boys remember is the ultra-cool Silver Surfer himself (Laurence Fishburne voice, Doug Jones mo-cap) and that bitchin' chase between him and Johnny Storm, a.k.a. The Human Torch.
One of my favorite shots is a God's-eye view of their two streaks, silver and orange-red, high above forested landscapes, two whizzing dots in furious pursuit around the globe. The resolution is good, mind opening stuff: SS takes HT up where he doesn't belong.
Yep, it's square, but it is also faithful to enough key plot points of the original story (three issues starting #48, March 1966, often called "The Galactus Trilogy") that I can get the sense of sharing a significant epic that shaped my childhood with my guys. Maybe getting the reprinted stories is next.
My only complaint was that I had heard some rumor about The Watcher making a cameo at the end, but although there are a couple of moon shots in the picture, including one in the appendix ending (interrupts the credits), he's not there, and I made us all wait until the last copyright.
For some reason I recall The Watcher, his race the oldest and most advanced in the universe, evolved beyond interfering with anyone else, lending a sort of mythic third of fourth dimension to the story. He tells this Silver Surfer/Galactus tale, and at the beginning it's almost like the FF are supporting characters, but of course it turns into their biggest challenge maybe of all time.
In any case, the most welcome presence onscreen was Stan Lee in cameo, trying to get into the Richards/Storm wedding and getting turned away -- the guard is "yeah yeah right right" when Stan claims to be Stan.
What's funny is that the gag acknowledges Stan Lee's place as household name and in association with Fantastic Four. The movie credits give Stan and artist Jack Kirby equal credit for creating the FF, pretty similar to how they used to bill themselves in the comic, albeit without the modifiers. (Smilin' Stan Lee! Joltin' Jack Kirby!)
That something these gents created nearly fifty years ago in their 40's is hitting the screen with the effects necessary to translate the original comic book experience, and resonating with little kids now is heartening, to say the least.
Yep, some of the my favorite parts of that American Century continue to bear fruit for our own children.
The date in the small print on the inside cover of Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve #9 is 2004. It was the first part of a three-issue story that continued in 2005 with issue #10 and has finally, after an agonizing wait, concluded with issue #11 right here in the middle of 2007. The wait was worth it.
In October his publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, will put out the collected issues, as story once entitled "White on Rice", as a hardcover now entitled Shortcomings. You can pre-order your copy here, and unless you've bought or are planning to buy all three comic book issues, do it.
Tomine, 33 years old, recently moved from his longtime Berkeley home to Brooklyn, and while he hasn't changed his deadpan, wry, semi-tragic story voice, he's upped the ante bigtime.
Tomine's original Optic Nerve comics were usually four stories, give or take, each in a kind of post-punk, post-grad Raymond Carver style where, as Elizabeth Chou writes:
Adrian Tomine has a way of taking his already lonely characters and ripping them even further away from society, even as they attempt in socially weird ways to reach out. With the exact same motion, he sets up a psychological wind tunnel that pulls unsuspecting readers into the minds of those isolated characters. Though I wouldn’t call this a formula of his, this is usually the thing about Tomine’s work that gets me.
That's his meal ticket, such as it is. The first major descendant of 50% of the Love & Rockets team, Jaime Hernandez, and somewhat mentored by Dan Clowes of Ghostworld fame, Tomine combines a graphic black & white look (no greyscale, just crosshatching) that strives for perfection with a flirtingly cynical realism about modern lives and our countless tiny deaths of the spirit.
Ben Tanaka, the emotionally stunted protagonist of the three-issue series, is a West Coast American of Japanese descent, like Tomine himself. He's living in a relationship with a young woman of similar ethnicity who's helping put on Asian-American film festivals and thinking of bigger things. Ben manages a rundown movie theater and acts like the bitter moral superior intellect in his world, clearly afraid of growing up but pretending that through his cynicism he's already there and doesn't have to actually allow himself to be touched, the way we all must in order to grow.
At the end of the first installment Ben's girlfriend, Miko, leaves for a promising internship in New York City, and during their "break," in the second issue, Ben indulges his hankering for white girls all through his ongoing debate with his best friend, a grad school lesbian named Alice, about his heavily sublimated racial issues. What's been clear from the start is that Ben's narcissism is the mirror of his self-loathing, kind of a modern Asian-American version of Jewish self-loathing.
It's Alice's move to NYC and a call to him from the streets of Manhattan with "something here that you have to see with your own two eyes," that provides the turning point into Act III, Ben joining Alice (now co-habitating with a half-Asian lesbian professor) in New York to track down Miko, who hasn't been returning his phone calls, and coming to face his worst fears.
Considering that Tomine's seductive line imagery and hard blacks often draw us into a claustrophobic psyche, while never showing us more than the surface of actions (no internal monologues or Freudian dream sequences), it's a relief to have a whole issue where he's freed himself from Northern California and opened up into New York locales. While his pages still lay out like Edward Hopper in Bento boxes (each ingredient just as delicious and just as spare), the character bar has been raised, with rays of actual truth coming from Alice's girlfriend, Meredithe, and in the climax itself.
As for the ending, Metamorphostuff has something to say about another Tomine trademark:
And they all lived happily ever after.
Or not. Adrian Tomine doesn't do happy endings. He barely even does "endings" in the usual sense: His stories tend to be snapshots, moments in the life of the protagonist that keeps going on after the story ends. Epiphanies and revelations are in short supply, and those that do come along don't always change someone's life for the better. Often, the life-changing moment comes only in the final panels, and the audience never sees what effect it ultimately has.
It's almost always an emotional Rorshach Test with Tomine, sometimes less successfully, more obscurely than others. When it works, it's a masterly counterpoint to his clean drawing style, the graphic look a secret weapon driving home his cold, lean knife into the reader's heart. This one is more Kuleshov Experiment, your reaction to the final page based on your reading of whether or not Ben has cut through all his anxiety and shown maybe a glimmer of true understanding.
Yep, this is Tomine's best work to date, and since all of his work is good, that's great news.
The reason for this artistic development, and maybe why it took a span of four years to write, draw, ink, letter and publish the story, comes from Tomine in a Nichi Bei Timesinterview last September:
NBT: Last year you said in an interview that the material for your three-part story (formerly titled “White on Rice”) had been in your head since college. What is it about the story that’s stuck with you over the years?
AT:The biggest motivation for doing this particular story was my frustration with the fact that I’ve spent my entire career very much in the shadows of my influences. I always felt like the kind of watered-down, less interesting version of the cartoonists I learned from. And I know first-hand that it’s nearly impossible to just snap your fingers and suddenly come up with a completely original way of drawing. Believe me, I’ve tried and it just doesn’t happen for me. So I think I probably tried to focus more on the content of my work, and searched for a story that those other guys would never write, just because of the fact that the particulars of the story are so tied into my own life experiences.
There you have it. A master draftsman telling his most personal story to date. Maybe it took four years because its literature.
Keeping it short tonight, just a few links, starting with a primo Tom Tomorrow strip in Salon, impeachable White House scandals then and now (hat tip to Phase).
Then there's this version of Clippy, the animated Microsoft help assistant, vs. Karl Rove's cursor.
Finally, unrelated directly to the "missing" emails but somehow a perfect metaphor for the gang that couldn't shoot straight, a story more jarring due to yesterday's tragedy and one that might not have been so buried in the news on another day:
Two Secret Service officers were injured on Tuesday after a gun held by another Secret Service officer accidentally fired inside the White House gate, according to a spokesman, Darrin Blackford.
Their injuries are non-life threatening, the spokesman said.
One officer suffered a shrapnel wound to the face, and the other was wounded in the leg.
As far as I know the Secret Service is a non-partisan, independent security force...but are we about to find out that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove purged this department as well and installed their hacks?
