I’ve got a new entry in my Event Horizon column over at The Comics Journal. This on is about Batman: Son of the Demon (BSOTD) by Mike W. Barr and Jerry Bingham. I did a lot of writing around this episode, much of which didn’t make the final cut. Here’s a bit that got left on the cutting room floor. One thing I found myself struggling with is the large body of Batman literature. Much of this literature is very similar to itself, with small differences. The more I thought about it, the more it resembled a fractal structure. And when zooming out on this fractal, Batman and superheroes in general acquire a fractal self-similarity. But I get ahead of myself.
Ba(TM)an
How do you write about Batman? How do you write about a property like Batman? Specifically, how do you write about a single episode of one of the longest running comics properties in the world? How do you write about something like Batman: Son Of the Demon ?
After 80 years of continuous publication — after countless issues, series, specials, graphic novels, novelizations, TV & film adaptions — what is Batman? Which Batman do you write about? Batman the character or Ba(TM)an the franchise? When you write about BSOTD, which Batman do you compare him to? Is it possible to evaluate BSOTD on its own merits? How can you evaluate Batman’s behavior and story arc in this book? If you don’t know the history between Ra’s al Ghul & Batman will this make any sense? If you know it only in-part, is that enough?
More Than You Can Read
If you’re critical of a work like this, is it because you don’t ‘get it’? Is it because you’re not a fan, and haven’t taken the time to become more familiar with Batman mythos? Is it not for you? Or, is it possible to consider BSOTD out of the general Batman context and say something meaningful about it? This doesn’t even begin to tackle Batman in the context of the broader DC Multiverse; all of his guest appearances, his relationships with Superman, Wonder Woman, The Justice League, and many of the other DC superheroes. Does any of that matter? Or, can you just write about BSOTD?
I have read many Batman comics, seen most of the ’66 TV show and all the Batman films since Tim Burton’s. Even with all this, I have not read more Batman, than I have read. This of course is true of just about anything. During our lifetime we will have not read more than we will have read.
One way is to just not worry about it too much. Each Batman incarnation fits the era in which it was created. Each Batman era owes as much to the general cultural context, as to the writer/artist/editor team that worked on the comics.
Batman Fractal
Fractal Self-Similarity of Superheroes
All that said, when you read a Batman comic, no matter how out of continuity, and how random, if you have read other Batman comics, and other superhero comics, most likely it’ll have a quality similar to those other comics.
There’s a self-similarity to superhero stories in general. A self-similar object “is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself (i.e. the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts).” [Wikipedia] Batman is like that. On transcendental level, Batman is a set of characteristics and story tropes. When looked at from a distance each part of the Batman canon is like another part. As you zoom in there are differences of course. But the differences circle around repetitions; like a fractal.
Pawn of the Demon
Anyway, back to the column. In this episode I start to zero-in on some of the general qualities of comics of the Event. (What is the Event? Read the introduction) This time I read Batman: Son of the Demon (BSOTD) by Mike W. Barr and Jerry Bingham. It’s a more traditional entry into the Event Horizon narrative.
I created a handy little chart that maps various Event titles onto art-narrative axes and with an experimental-to-traditional scale for each.
Comics of the Event can be mapped onto a fourfold structure of two intersecting axes. On the horizontal axis, we have the ‘art’ continuum, which ranges from experimental (or innovative) on one end, to traditional on the other. The vertical axis is ‘narrative,’ which has a similar range.
Because comics are a unique melding of narrative and image, the intersections between these two continuums can result in unusual juxtapositions. Traditional narratives can be executed in experimental art styles, and experimental narratives might be assigned a traditional artist. These discrepancies were intensified during the Event, especially in commercial comics published by Marvel, DC, and other publishers where writer and artist are distinct figures.
The distance between the
present and utopia is measured in centuries. We locate utopian societies in the
future, and prefigure them with premonitions of apocalypse; the dysfunctional
order of the present must be swept aside by some vaguely grasped apocalyptic
event to allow a new and better world to emerge. Every generation faces their
own unique brand of the end of the world: religious rapture, nuclear
annihilation, natural disasters, clash of civilizations, Malthusian
overpopulation, and so on. Ecological collapse caused by industrial pollution
fuels the horror in Kazuo Umezu’s inventive, eleven-volume manga horror epic, The
Drifting Classroom.
Adults As Part of the Problem
The titular classroom is
actually Yamato Elementary School, which due to unknown circumstances finds
itself ripped out of time and flung into a devastated future. The school,
housing 863 students and teachers, becomes an ark adrift on the sea of toxic
sand that covers the remains of Tokyo and the rest of the world. The school’s
temporal realignment brings the kids and adults face to face with the deadly
consequences of Japan’s famed “economic miracle.” They become the last remnants
of civilization and, at the same time, the last hope for humanity’s survival.
It’s clear that Umezu
perceives adults as part of the problem, for he dispenses with the teachers
early on. One by one the grown-ups succumb to madness and die off quickly. They
can’t process what is happening to them—the idea that the school might be in
the future is utterly impossible—and unable to imagine the impossible they have
to die off, like dinosaurs. The children, not yet saddled with dogmas of
adulthood, are able to imagine the possibility of time travel and thus
grasp the reality of their predicament. Their capacity to imagine the
impossible becomes their salvation, but also the source of the horrors to come.
Devolution
By the third volume the kids
are on their own, allowing Umezu to present a kind of post-apocalyptic Lord
of The Flies, with several hundred Piggies. Led by the idealistic sixth
grader Sho and a few of his friends, the children try to survive both the
inhospitable environment and themselves. The body count grows rapidly as they
face toxic mushrooms, vicious plagues, freak floods, mutated spider-humans,
mummies, bizarre starfish, gigantic sand worms, and starvation. This degraded
future sharpens the children’s connection to the environment in several ways;
for example, they can no longer take things like clean water for granted, and
they have to conserve what meager supplies they have (a swimming pool with
water, lunch room food, etc.).
These are just the more
obvious lessons of ecology, however—Umezu’s genius is that he broadens ecology
to include the social. To survive, the kids form the Nation of Yamato
Elementary and elect Sho as the Prime Minister. But, like its counterparts in
the present (their past), the nascent nation quickly succumbs to infighting and
breaks into rival factions. Their society devolves from an idealistic democracy
through various stages of feudalism to a band of starving nomads. For Umezu,
the Nation of Yamato Elementary becomes a stand-in for the present world and
shows the fate of civil society deprived of its ecological base.
Cyclopean Ruins
Working in the tradition of
H.P. Lovecraft, the horror of The Drifting Classroom is purely material—it
isn’t mystical, as it tends to be in earlier Umezu works like Cat-Eyed Boy.
He dispenses with ghosts, spirits and unexplained monsters, locating the real
sources of “evil” in our ignorance of the workings of the world and the hubris
of technological progress. And buried under the desert wasteland around the
school are the remnants of human civilization; Umezu thus turns our own world
into something akin to Lovecraft’s cyclopean ruins of some ancient antediluvian
civilization (like the corpse-city of R’lyeh). Seen through the prism of the
destroyed future, the industrialized world we live in seems like an apocalypse
in slow motion. The skeletons of our cities seem bizarre and alien, the
fossilized bones of a civilization choking on its own success.
Gods and Mutants
Umezu does break with
Lovecraft in some ways. Lovecraft’s universe is completely indifferent to the
fate of humanity. His gods are cosmic entities that have crossed into our world
from unknowable dimensions. The destruction they wreak is almost accidental. In
Umezu’s universe, the fate of humans and the planet is more intertwined and
symbiotic; a poisoned planet leads to a toxic society and vice-versa. In one
revealing sequence, the children decide to create a religion, and the image of
Sho’s mother becomes a benevolent Goddess designed to give the kids hope in a
hopeless world. Meanwhile, a small group of children slowly mutating from
having ingested toxic mushrooms (!) create their own god: a one-eyed devil.
Religion is not something divine and eternal—it’s a product of the environment
and our imagination, and it offers both comfort and destruction. But neither
can be our salvation. One leads to a debased existence as mutant spider-humans,
the other only offers temporary relief. Ultimately, we have to listen to the
planet and use our imagination to avoid the kind of future The Drifting
Classroom posits.
Techno-Eden
Unfortunately, according to
Umezu, the imaginative powers of the present are tainted by our “miraculous”
industrial society. When we first meet Sho, he’s a typical kid. He covets toys,
especially a “future car”—a sleek UFO-like automobile. And he has a conflicted
relationship with adults; he tries to be nice to his mother, but ends up having
a childish argument with her about some thrown-out marbles. Enraged, Sho runs
off to school discarding an unwrapped present his mother gave him (it contains,
of course, the “future car”). For both of them, futurity is embodied by the
toy, a shining symbol of Japan’s relentless economic progress and technological
prowess. Yet later in the series, after the children are forced to evacuate the
school ahead of a toxic cloud and have been wandering through the lifeless
desert, the starving kids end up in a UFO-domed amusement park—an impressive,
automated relic from Japan’s industrial peak. At first it appears like paradise
to the famished children, but the techno-Eden isn’t as benign as it seems.
Everything is artificial—there is nothing that the kids can eat—and the park’s
helpful robots, damaged by the ravages of time, have turned into deadly
Terminator-like killers.
Japanese Miracle
In fact, both the UFO-domed park and car had real world counterparts at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair Expo. Housed in part under a space-age dome by architect Kenzo Tange, the Expo presented Japan with an airbrushed techno-utopian vision that was becoming increasingly preposterous to the visitors. The Drifting Classroom was serialized in 1972-74. Japan at that time saw the emergence of its nascent environmental movement. Up until then, a single-minded pursuit of economic strength, characterized Japan’s post-war years. The “Japanese Miracle,” as it came to be known, saw a decades-long increase in the industrial output of the nation and a corresponding increase in the wealth of its citizens.
But the counterpoint to the economic miracle was a high level of environmental degradation. Japan’s industrial might was tainted by ecological disasters, increasing occurrences of birth defects, and a string of incurable disease outbreaks: Morinaga Milk Powder Poisoning (arsenic), Yokkaichi Asthma (sulphur dioxide), Minamata Disease (mercury), Itai-itai Disease (cadmium). All this led to a greater ecological consciousness, the emergence of the environmental movement, and eventually, the creation of the Japanese Environmental Protection Agency in 1971.
Future Present
Until the disappearance of the school, both Sho and his mother are oblivious to the ultimate fate of the planet. They haven’t realized the damage their way of life was doing to the Earth. Paradoxically, when they become separated by centuries their relationship grows stronger. Through a handicapped girl, Nishi, who appears to have unexplained powers, Sho is able to communicate with his mother. Several times she is able to help her son, by strategically placing valuable objects (a knife, vaccine, etc.) in the past for Sho to excavate and use in the future.
Once the future cataclysm is made concrete by Sho’s time travel, his mother can finally take steps to try to avert that catastrophe. Her love for Sho enables her to overcome adult skepticism, bear the ridicule of others, and put her mind to work. If she can’t bring Sho back, at least she can change the present to make his future a better place.
Sadistic Glee
If this makes the book sound didactic and preachy, it’s not. The themes and ideas outlined above simmer beneath a shimmering surface of a fast-paced and slickly drawn comics narrative. Since The Drifting Classroom was serialized in weekly episodes, it’s chock-full of cliffhangers and surprise twists and turns. It’s a compelling page-turner designed to move the reader efficiently through the narrative. Umezu’s detailed art skillfully builds tension in series of cinematic sequences. He uses darkness very effectively: sequences comprised entirely of panicked dark silhouettes can go on for page after suspenseful page.
Finally, when he unveils the bizarre mutant monsters of the future, they’re lovingly embellished with detailed renditions of blood, bone, and peeling skin. Also, the 863 inhabitants of Yamato Elementary give Umezu ample opportunity to rack up a high body count, and he doesn’t flinch; the students die off quickly, dispatched in new and inventive ways. He often lingers on a violent scene with sadistic glee, just to make us feel a little queasier. With a few deft pen strokes he can change an innocent child into one possessed by some unknown menace.
Stephen King of Japan
Often called the “Stephen King of Japan,” Kazuo Umezu is a giant of Japanese horror. A steady trickle of his comics has begun appearing in the US since the 2002 publication of Orochi: Blood, yet The Drifting Classroom remains his best-known work. Regardless, this is an opportune time for its appearance on American shores. It’s an artifact of a fertile period in Japan. The eco-awareness of the Japanese was mirrored by a growing sophistication of their manga.
Umezu’s sprawling epic dates from the same period that saw the rise of mature comics known as Gekiga (see the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi). Around the same time, Osamu Tezuka, the “god of manga” and creator of Astro Boy, serialized Ode to Kirihito, his first mature work. As American comic books make their steady climb into respectability and the specter of global ecological collapse appears imminent again, the horrors of Kazuo Umezu’s The Drifting Classroom are a useful glimpse of a strange parallel world not that different from the one we encounter today.
The Drifting Classroom Volumes 1-11 Kazuo Umezu VIZ Media ($9.99 each) by Tom Kaczynski
I’m not a professional comics reviewer, so this list is simply based on personal preferences. I’m not looking for objective metrics of quality, I’m much more interested in how a specific work makes me feel or think, or if it surprises me. There are a LOT of 2018 comics I haven’t been able to read, so this also isn’t comprehensive. This list also doesn’t contain any Uncivilized Books titles (all of which I loved, naturally, but I’m biased), for obvious reasons. This list originally appeared as part of a massive round-up on The Comics Journal. There a some spoilers below. Here are my 10 favorite comics of 2018, in no particular order:
Young Frances by
Hartley Lin (Adhouse)
Hartley
Lin created a stunning graphic novel. The cartooning is flawless, with
incredible attention to detail. The story is about Frances, a young legal clerk
pulled into the orbit of the menacingly charismatic executive Castonguay. It
has some familiar beats about trying to hold on to an authentic self without getting
lost in a messy corporate world of petty power struggles. But the execution elevates
the story. Hartley’s precise drawings, his framing, sly references (Castonguay
as Daddy Warbucks), surreal touches, and great propulsive editing kept things
alive and a pleasure to read.
Passing for Human by Liana Finck (Random House)
I was
already a fan on Liana’s Instagram feed and her New Yorker cartoons. Passing
for Human is beautifully told, via a series of re-starting narratives. One
thing that stood out is Liana’s drawing ability. Her drawing style is raw and resembles
doodles, but she is fearless and can draw anything with it. A complete world
emerges: tiny houses, animals, humans and their lost shadows. Mythical,
magical, and absorbing.
Brat by Michael DeForge
(Koyama)
Brat contains the word art. One way to read DeForge’s Brat is to substitute Art for Brat; art performance for prank; critical cynicism for temper tantrum; artistic calling for juvenile delinquency. Brats are artists. The titular brat, Ms. D, is an juvenile delinquent/artist struggling with relevance. Once the hero of all brats, Ms. D finds herself older, and no longer a ‘juvenile’. Is she still relevant?
Ms. D embarks on a new project, that, at first glance, appears as a mysterious terrorist plot. Finally, her big performance turns the audience, an entire town, everyone, to become brats! The entire population of the city loses it’s collective mind. The results are at first predictable: graffiti, property damage, zoo animals on the loose, and at least one death (the Mayor gets eaten by a lion). But then, the loss of collective control produces a kind of utopia. In the aftermath, the town rids itself of instruments of control that turned out to be unnecessary. Banks and police? No longer necessary. Hunger? Gone. These things were just accrued, stratified historical layers of a society weighing us down. Once you release the brat, it all falls away. We don’t need these things.
What happens day after brat Armageddon? DeForge alludes to it. But things don’t seem to have changed much. Our hero remains rich, so even if some banks are gone, wealth remains. The world didn’t change all that much. Her former intern, Citrus, is now a star delinquent. Delinquency still exists. Maybe we need a bigger temper tantrum? Or the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Blammo by Noah Van Sciver
(Kilgore)
No one
does the one-artist anthology like Noah Van Sciver. Blammo is the heir of the 80-90’s single artist anthology comics
like Eightball, Optic Nerve, or Dirty Plotte.
Every issue fills me with joy and nostalgic pangs for that time.
Tinderella MS
Harkness (Kilgore)
MS Harkness has emerged as a vital member of the Minneapolis comics scene. Her incredible work ethic has already yielded many mini-comics and her first graphic novel, Tinderella. Self-deprecating, self-abasing, fearless and fun, there are few books out the like it. It’s not a perfect book by any means, but it’s a promising foreshadowing of things to come.
Sabrina by Nick Drnaso (Drawn & Quarterly)
I
didn’t know what to think of first when I to started read Sabrina. I was repelled by it’s quiet abandon, it’s cold artwork,
and it’s meandering repetitions. But half way through, something flipped in my
brain. I did a 180 and absolutely fell for this book. It reminded me of Tom
McCarthy’s Remainder. Both books
revolve around damaged characters trying to recapture something utterly lost
and unrecoverable. It’s an impossible task. We’re placed in an uncomfortable
voyeuristic position – watching the characters grasp at memories and fragments
as they slowly evaporate – and we can’t look away.
The Complete Julie Doucet by Julie Doucet (Drawn & Quarterly)
While working on Sweet Little Cunt: The Graphic Work of Julie Doucetwith Anne Elizabeth Moore, I re-immersed myself in Julie Doucet’s comics of the 80’s and 90’s. It was another reminder of the incredible versatility of the one-artist anthology format. It enabled the artist to experiment, take detours, and continue on a primary narrative at the same time, while producing regular work, on a (somewhat) regular schedule. Julie filled every page of Dirty Plotte with incredible one-page bizarre experiments, ongoing stories (My New York Diary), and small one-off masterpieces of short comics. It’s really great D&Q brought this important work back into print.
Older
Comics read in 2018:
Anti-Gone by Connor Williamsun (Koyama)
It
took me a while to finally read this book. It was very much hyped after it’s
release last year. When something is hyped, I tend to tune it out. I’m glad I
finally read it. Connor’s minimalist cartooning is the perfect match for the
absurd vacuous characters literally floating around a dystopic post apocalyptic
world. It hits close to home. We are these characters. We are empty beings,
getting stoned, floating easy as the world burns. Beautifully executed. Near
perfect graphic novel.
Arsene Schrauwen by Olivier Schrauwen (Fantagraphics)
Olivier Schrawen has an incredible ability for the absurd. Arsene, ostensibly a Schrauwen ancestor – gets involved in an absurd folly – a Utopian city in the middle of a tropical jungle. The book comes with explicit instructions to pause reading between certain chapters: a week, two weeks. I followed the directions to the letter, and I must say it enhanced the reading enormously. By the time I’d return to read the next chapter, the previous chapter had receded in my mind, like a dream. It perfectly suited the book. Finally, when Arsene and crew reach the jungle site of the utopian city, the absurd world had wormed itself into my unconscious, providing the perfect imaginative fuel for the finale to come.
Eddy Current by
Ted McKeever
I wrote about Eddy Current in my column and here on this blog. It remains one of the best comics I read in 2018.
I read a lot of books and I like to think about the books I read. But, I never do enough of either. That will change this year as I plan to engage more with what I read and think about. What better way to start than with a list. Here’s are five of my favorite books from 2018 that had a big impact on me last year. They were not necessarily published in 2018, although one of them was.
Hav by Jan Morris
It’s no secret that I’m a connoisseur of architectural things. Rooms, buildings, structures, cities; urban areas in general. Hav is a fictional trading city located somewhere in the Mediterranean. It’s old. It has been around for centuries, if not millennia. It’s rumored to be on the site of ancient Greek Troy. It is ostensibly European, but has been conquered by Arabs, Turks, Russians, Venetians, British, and others. Each administration has left an indelible stamp on the city through buildings, urban planning, and population resulting in a labyrinthine conurbation with many distinct parts. It’s also a trading port. It’s most famous export is Hav salt, valued for its aphrodisiac qualities. Like other commercial hubs, it is populated by a varied mix of people that first arrive to do business, but end up staying, settling, and creating enclaves that add to the exotic richness of the place. The Hav Chinese built the most impressive structure, the tower of the Chinese Master, that boasts young Sigmund Freud as a one-time resident. Languidly paced, but hard to put down, Jan Morris’ Hav is a place I wish I could visit again.
The Future Won’t Be Long by Jarett Kobek
This is a prequel to I
hate the Internet, which I loved. Set mostly in 80’s New York, against the
backdrop of its waning hedonistic club scene, with short detours to Midwest and
California, we get to see the origin and evolution of the friendship between
Baby & Adeline. As someone who lived in New York for a few years, it was an
easy novel to like. Revisiting old haunts and places I wish were still around
was a nostalgic treat.
ATTA by Jarett Kobek
This is a short and incredible book. It’s the fictionalized life of Mohamed Atta, the mastermind of 9/11. I resisted this book for a long time. Having lived in New York during 9/11, it’s hard for me to revisit that moment. It’s probably some kind of generalized PTSD, although I was never near the worst of the action. ATTA is revelatory. His life unfolded like a dark version of my own. I grew up in Poland, he grew up in Egypt, both were outside the western prosperity sphere at the time. We emigrated, and arrived in the west in Hamburg, Germany. We both studied architecture and urban planning. Then our path crossed again in New York, 9/11. A haunting mirror of our world.
1491 by Charles C. Mann
I was aware of 1491
since its release. I read the first 100 pages or so, a couple of years ago at
my sister’s wedding. A copy was available at the Airbnb I was staying at. I
didn’t want to leaved it, and contemplated stealing the copy. I finally
finished it this year when I finally got a copy of my own. This book is
incredible on so many levels. From the deep history of the Andean and
Mesoamerican societies, through the plagues that wiped out a mind-boggling percentages
of Native American populations, to the astonishing ecological impacts of the
native populations, this book was filled with incredible history, much of which
was completely unknown to me. I say this as someone who’s read fairly
extensively on all these topics, and yet 1491
surprised me again and again.
Unamerica by Momus
I’m a big fan of Momus; not just Momus the musician, or Momus the writer, or Momus the blogger, or Momus the YouTube lecturer. I’m a fan of ALL of those incarnations of Momus. I’ve listened to his music since the late 90’s, read his Click Opera blog in Oughts, I watch his YouTube channel now, and I read his books when they come out. I devoured and loved The Book of Scotlands and the Book of Jokes.
Parallel World
For some reason it took me a few years to get to Unamerica. Momus can really turn a phrase: The Book of Scotlands’ ‘motto’ is “Every Lie Creates a Parallel World, a world in which it is true.” The back cover of Unamerica announces that, “God doesn’t love America. Quite the reverse.” The book begins with a revelation. God speaks unto Brad, and asks him to go a voyage of discovery, but in reverse. God says: “Brad, Americans have become the opposite of everything I intended humans, especially Christians, to become. If I still could, I’d smash this nation to potsherds, or flood the entire continental basin from sea to shining sea. […] America has to become undiscovered. […] Now it’s the rest of the world that needs to become the shining example, the Tir na nOg, the Shangri-La, the Golden Fleece. You Brad, and your twelve hand-picked companions must learn-and teach the world-how to become as unAmerican as possible.”
Meander
Eventually, Brad embarks on this voyage, but he takes a lot detours and meanderings. Momus is not afraid of language, he frequently makes use of vocabulary that is difficult, and willfully obscure. He relishes it in fact. It’s a slim volume, as are all of Momus’ books, but it’s densely packed with invention, adventure, absurdity, and fun. It feels like a much larger book. It doesn’t play by any narrative rules (that I’m aware of).
Utopia
Above all, Momus’ work revolves around the concept of Utopia. He himself has moved from Britain to France to America to Germany to Japan, and back. It has made him a keen observer of social norms, how they are constructed, and how they differ from place to place. We’re often told of the impossibility of Utopia, or of the impossibility of changing the society we live in for the better. But we only have to step outside of our borders to see that even small changes can produce big results. Humans have been creating different ways of living for millennia, it’s just something we do. It’s nice to have Momus remind us of this ability.
I hope you enjoyed this short list of my five favorite books of 2018. I will have more to say about some of these books in the future. Stay tuned!
It’s difficult to hype your own work. I should know, I started a whole publishing company just to avoid hyping my own work! But, it’s very gratifying to see your own work on any best of list. When the list written by a writer you admire, well that’s even better! Cartoon Dialectics Vol. 3 makes it on the Best of 2018 list at Your Chicken Enemy. Here’s what they have to say:
Cartoon Dialectics #3 looks like a humble, unobtrusive work– it’s packaged like a zine, printed in purple, black and white with an occasional splash of yellow on somewhat thick, matte paper. But what Tom Kaczynski and Clara Jetsmark provide between its covers is powerful, invigorating stuff, connecting the dots between our society’s retromania and the rise of neo-fascism, while also acknowledging how easy it is for anyone to fall prey to the dangerous allure of nostalgia.
[…]
Bold in its aesthetic and literal simplicity and paradoxically educational and surreal, Cartoon Dialectics #3 did a far better job investigating where we are now and why in its few pages than the entirety of the New York Times this year.
Nick Hanover
A big thank you goes to The Nib for commissioning the piece in the first place. Another big thank you goes to Clara Jetsmark who bravely agreed to draw it on a very tight deadline when I ended swamped with other work.
Here’s a short few page preview of this comic for those who haven’t seen it yet:
I stumbled on the following a while ago on Blissblog:
“Along with the many cross-contaminations between rock-etc and s.f., one thing that Heller’s book reminded me of was that many of the very earliest rock criticism publications were started by people who had previously done science fiction fanzines.
Intensely self-reflexive fields, rock criticism and science fiction share a strange mix of inferiority and superiority complexes. Painfully aware of their marginal position vis-à-vis “proper” journalism and “respectable” literature, they nonetheless believe that they are doing the Most Crucial Writing of Our Time. I can remember from my own days as an adolescent s.f. fanatic being struck by the s.f. writer’s culture of workshops and conventions – by how the writers loved to write essays defining s.f. as a genre, proclaiming its unique contribution to literature. There were even a few volumes of essays by s.f. writers debating s.f. that I remember reading.
Simon Reynolds | Blissblog
This. This exactly describes me during High School. Except replace music with comics. I took pains to let everyone know that comics were the most important thing. I’m sure it was very annoying. Whenever I had to write essays about books in English class, I tried to convince my teachers to let me write about X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and whatever else I was reading at that time. Most of the time I was shut down, but a few teachers indulged as long as I could ‘prove’ to them that comics weren’t just kid’s stuff. Actually that was crucial. It challenged me to look at comics somewhat differently, and probably led to my actively seeking out better comics to impress my teachers.
Every Page a Painting
I have a pretty intense memory of showing Kid Eternity to my teacher. This is the Grant Morrison & Duncan Fegredo 90’s revamp with fully painted art. I remember challenging my teacher to look closely at the art. “It’s all painted” I’d say. “EVERY page is a full painting! Imagine if Michaelangelo had to paint the Sistine Chapel, over and over again, and tell the whole story in that famous painting.” I was definitely already a Science Fiction fan at this point. In Poland, I’d collected the magazine Fantasyka, which serialized sci-fi novels and comics. In the US, I read whatever sci-fi my library had on hand. Harry Harrison, Asimov, Pohl, Piers Anthony, David Eddings, Heinlein, Lem, etc.
Sub-Genre of Utopia
To speculate wildly here… if we follow Fredrick Jameson’s assertion from Archaeologies of the Future, and think of Science Fiction as a sub-genre of the utopian novel (not the other way around), then sci-fi retains a utopian imaginary somewhere underneath all of the technological dress up. Sci-fi at it’s core imagines and extrapolates different worlds/futures based on different customs, different technologies, different environments (planets), etc. It’s easy to imagine young brains blown to bits by science fictional speculations.
I don’t think that I was consciously doing this at the time, but in retrospect, I must have been thinking about comics as some kind of major human innovation. The comics I was reading were not perfect, but I imagined a different future, where comics were the dominant literature. It’s a science fictional extrapolation. Take something small and insignificant from today, and imagine it as a dominant form in the future. Or at least, as something that has the capacity to become that.
Inventing a Future
I imagine young Gary Groth in a similar mode. He takes over The Nostalgia Journal, a fantasy, sci-fi, comics, fanzine, and turns it into The Comics Journal, the most important magazine in the world. There was an inkling there already, a belligerent insistence on the importance of the medium. And all this without clear evidence for that importance, as The Comics Journal kept reminding us, while frequently berating the industry for failing to make great comics. It comes out of that same era. Sci-fi fanzines, pop/rock fan-zines, comics fanzines – popping up everywhere – creating new critical appreciation for debased art forms; art forms that were new and vital and popular. There was no rule book on how to write about these things. They had to invent it in real time. They were inventing the future in real time.
My brief was to do a poster for Highrise Mayhem, a double bill featuring Dredd (2012) and The Raid: Redemption (2011) (coming to the Trylon Jan 18-20)… it turned into a bit more of a Judge Dredd Poster.
I’d never seen The Raid, so I focused on Dredd. I wanted to show off the roots of Judge Dredd by drawing a more comic book version of him. Specifically, I was looking at the Brendan McCarthy version. McCarthy drew the Judge helmet much more flared out on the bottom. It has a bit more impossible look common to most comic book costumes. When they translate to film, they become ‘practical’ and often lose what made them distinctive in the first place.
In the background I just wanted to add some bonkers multistory ‘mayhem.’ It’s no secret I enjoy drawing large architectural scenes when I can find the time.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy looking at this Judge Dredd Poster as much as I enjoyed drawing it.
If you’ve read my Comics Journal column on Ted McKeever’s Eddy Current (and the outtakes here), you probably saw a brief detour I took to discuss the relationship between superheroes and cities. I’ve expanded that topic a little more on my twitter account. Check out this thread:
0/ I’m going to attempt one of those protean @HeerJeet style threads that bring together disparate topics. I’m going to bring together architecture, urbanism, Capitalism, suburbanization, and American superhero comics. pic.twitter.com/WlYTrhQpCM
— cartoon hermeneutics (@BetaTestingTomK) July 16, 2018
My Comics Journal column about Ted McKeever’s Eddy Current is live! See how Eddy fits into the 1985-87 Event. Also, I couldn’t help myself, but I go into a fun tangent on the portrayal of cities in superhero comics. Here’s a taste:
As required by superhero conventions, Eddy lives in a fictional city with a ridiculous name: Chad. The city resembles New York, especially the New York of the 80’s: grimy, with underfunded infrastructure, populated by lowlives and criminals, and loomed-over by gleaming towers of the ultra wealthy ruling elites. Chad is Metropolis and Gotham in one. This is where McKeever really shines. His keen eye really brings the city to life. He finds moments of stillness and quiet beauty in studied depictions of abandoned warehouses, gas stations, desolate alleys, and diners. Clean lines, attention to detail, exquisite framing. These moments make Eddy stand out from other comics of the Event.
Some of you probably have seen it, some of might not have, but I have a column, called Event Horizon, on The Comics Journal where I write about comics from the Event. What is the Event? Here’s my explanation from the inaugural column:
For a while now I’ve had the idea that something unusual happened in American comics between 1985 and 1987. The period was marked by a unique set of circumstances that encouraged a new level of seriousness about comics as an art form. Comics from this short timespan are something else. The direct market was booming. Marvel and DC were joined by a legion of smaller publishers which released comics in a dizzying array of genres and art styles. Foreign comics became much more available through European graphic novels, and they were joined by some of the first instances of serialized manga, leading to an exuberant experimentation and cross pollination. Beyond the now classic (and thoroughly analyzed) Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns, many of the comics from this period are marked by thematic and formal ambition. The roots of this moment stretch back to the late ’70s and early ’80s but it seems to reach apotheosis precisely during this short span. Something happened in comics between 1985 and 1987. Let’s call that something the Event. The Event influenced comics for decades…
My next column is on Ted McKeever’s Eddy Current. Here’s a little preview:
Gritty, deliberately grotesque, messy, and challenging; these days you don’t see comics like Eddy Current. Many comics from the time of the Event had this quality. It was a deliberate distancing from the dominant styles established between the 50’s and 70’s. the tight, abstract, dynamic pulp modernism (Kirby), and the elongated slickness of pulp neorealism (Neal Adams). In the 80’s, McKeever—along with his peers from that era, Kevin O’Neil, Bill Sienkiewicz, Kyle Baker, Howard Chaykin, Keith Giffen, and others—were developing new stylistic innovations that mapped closely to what was going on elsewhere in culture and art: postmodernism.
For more you’ll have to wait until the column is live. I’ll post a link when it’s live. In the meantime enjoy some of the images from the book. These ended up unused in the column, but all are great examples of Eddy Current‘s gritty urban nightmare lovingly depicted by McKeever.
Also, I will be on a panel discussing Graphic Novels in translation. It’s today (Thursday) at 10:30 AM, Room 205 A&B, Level 2. Here’s the description.
R141. The Voyage of Graphic Literary Forms. (Mercedes Gilliom, Erica Mena, Tomasz Kaczynski, Brian Evenson, Diana Arterian) Four panelists who work at the intersection of graphic literature and translation discuss the challenges and benefits of transporting graphic literary forms from one language and culture to another. These writers, artists, and translators with backgrounds in comics creation, translation, editing, and publishing come together to share their experiences in reaching new audiences and markets for this expanding element in the creative writing landscape.
