Tagged: Art Spiegelman

DENNIS O’NEIL: Christmas Gift Fun

The good news is, the Christmas gift list is shorter this year.

The bad news is, the Christmas gift list is shorter this year.

But enough gloom, for ‘tis the season to be jolly, ‘tis it not?

And judging from the number of cars in the mall parking lot, the season ‘tis jollier’n hell. Don’t these shoppers know about the mess the economy’s in?

Did I mention fa la la la la la?

And now a quick trip into the Chamber of Curmudgeons, significantly emptier since Andy Rooney’s gone. But (entering the chamber) I am the guy who once commissioned a magazine cover depicting a skeleton in Santa Claus garb holding an empty sack, so my curmudgeon cred is intact. And I proclaim:

It used to be so much easier, dang it!

Buying gifts for comics geeks, that is. Because there really wasn’t much choice. Back in the Pleistocene, when I was reading my first comics, Batman or a Superman might serve as an also-gift, what’s called a stocking stuffer, but even a not-too-bright gradeschooler knew that a comic cost only a dime and there had to be something else under the tree.

Later, much later, after the first Batman hardcover graphic novels turned out to be good sellers – best sellers in the limited world of comics – an editor or two was yearly tasked with producing a hardcover for the holiday trade. It was sometimes difficult for the editors, but a good deal for people seeking a present for that snotty nephew who always had his head in them funny books. A couple of sawbucks and – problem solved.

Now… big changes. As a stereotype, that kid with the buried head no longer exists. Comics have attained full parity with other forms of story delivery. You’re not expected to be dumb if you read the stuff. You can, with good conscience, buy a graphic novel for almost anyone you know who likes to read. Or use something comicy to introduce a reader to something he/she hasn’t yet discovered, and might enjoy. You doubt? Hey, Maus won a Pulitzer.

But your choices aren’t limited to Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece. Lordy, no. The monster book mart in the aforementioned mall has a wall full of comics stuff: manga, hardcovers, paperbacks, reprints, originals…that’s not counting the novelizations of movies over in the science fiction section and…that’s not counting the growing list of books about comics.

Cost? All the way from four-five bucks to – brace yourself – four hundred American dollars for the deluxe edition of Star Wars comics published by Abrams and also available in a more modest edition. (Okay, I wrote the introduction. But I don’t get royalties. We’re honest curmudgeons here in the Chamber.)

My recommendation? How about, all of the above? Or: if you’re a book person, you probably like to browse. So browse, on online or off. If you’re likely to be the gift recipient, drop hints. You know how to do that. You’re smart. You’re a comic book reader.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

Frank Miller Defends ‘Spirit’ Film

  • News
  • July 21, 2008

If you watched the first full trailer for Frank Miller’s upcoming adaptation of The Spirit, you could be forgiven for thinking it had little more than the title in common with Will Eisner’s comic series.

Miller insists that’s not the case, though, in a story in the New York Times.

“The only ways they resemble each other are the ways that I learned from Will Eisner: the use of black and white, certainly the rapturous approach to women.” Mr. Miller spoke after an editing session in Culver City in June, wearing a straw hat, a gray shirt and a loose black jacket; his voice, faintly adenoidal, stems from a long relationship with Winston Lights.

Where “Sin City” was bleak, “The Spirit” seems playful, quirky. For someone who exalts Ayn Rand and has vigorously defended America’s military response to 9/11, Mr. Miller seems to have tempered his cynical machismo. As for the strip’s most nettlesome character — Ebony White, the black sidekick with the Stepin Fetchit patois— he has been jettisoned.

But, as is always the case, not everyone agrees:

But the current film-comic infatuation isn’t for everyone. “I think they once made a movie out of ‘Ulysses,’ the Joyce novel, and it can’t be done,” said Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novelist behind “Maus.” “I’m not saying that Eisner is Joyce, but the things that are great” about “The Spirit” “are likely to be lost in translation.”

Comics and Chris Ware in Virginia Quarterly Review

Comics have long battled against proponents of "serious literature," who have often decried comics as a less intellectual medium than prose.

In the past few years, comics have become increasingly accepted into popular culture, and now it seems they’re well established in the literary world too.

The Virginia Quarterly Review, one of the elite literary magazines, ran a special comics issue this spring, which I just happened across on a recent trip to the bookstore.

It features a cover by Art Spiegelman (seen at right) and, best of all, a new story from Chris Ware. The fictional biography of Jordan W. Lint shows the character’s life through a glance at single days of his existence.

You can see a preview at the VQR Web site, right here.

Barefoot In The Dark, by Dennis O’Neil

Barefoot In The Dark, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • June 17, 2008

I don’t know when I first saw an English edition of Barefoot Gen. It was probably sometime in the mid 70s, when I was editing for the modest enterprise that has become the mighty Marvel Entertainment. In those days, a lot of stuff crossed editorial desks and we read most of it, if not all. So: Japanese comics? Sure, I’ll give it a look. It was probably my first experience with manga and I remember feeling a mild taste of cognitive dissonance – a perceived disconnect between subject and form. (I am choosing to ignore, because it’s a bit off-subject, the hybrid of cartooning and illustration that’s most superhero art.)

The subject was grim. Barefoot Gen is the autobiographical tale of a child who witnessed and survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. But it was presented in a visual style I would have described as “cartoony.” Like most American pop-cultch consumers, I associated bright, simple, exaggerated drawings – cartoons – with material that was at least supposed to be humorous, and there was nothing remotely funny about Barefoot Gen. It was, and is, a powerful anti-war document and, because it is that, deeply humane.

It’s creator, who did both art and copy, is named Keiji Nakazawa, and Barefoot Gen is his story. He had this to say about it: “People should be told what happened. If you live through something like the A-bomb, you know that war is too horrible not to be avoided at all costs, regardless of the justifications offered for it.”

The work first appeared in 1972 as a serial in a mass market Japanese publication, Shukan Shonon Jampu (and perhaps some kind reader will translate that for us). Later, it migrated to smaller magazines, and later still, it was published in English as a paperback book series. The most recent English iteration appeared in 2004, with an introduction by Art Spiegelman.

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Stanford Class Creates Graphic Novel

In what is being billed as the first full graphic novel to be created as a classroom project, a group of Stanford students this past year completed Shake Girl, a fictional story about a Cambodian woman who is attacked with acid as revenge on an affair.

The 224-page book came from a writing class taught by Tom Kealey, and signalled a new step in the advancement of graphic fiction into traditional college campuses. The San Francisco Chronicle has a nice long story on it.

"In a normal writing class, you’d write a poem or finish a chapter and you’d own it," Kealey said. "In this class, we had to collaborate every step of the way, every idea, and make compromises. It was the most difficult and rewarding class I ever taught."

While the study of comics and graphic novels has steadily become an acceptable part of college curricula – "Maus" creator Art Spiegelman taught a course at Columbia University last year – the project-based graphic novel class offered at Stanford appears to be the first of its kind.

In case you’re interested in the project, Stanford has made Shake Girl available online, so click right here and grade it for yourself.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Super Spy

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Super Spy

The life of a spy is a cramped, paranoid, fear-ridden thing, not one of derring-do and adventure. Matt Kindt knows that well. His second graphic novel Super Spy is set during World War II, in England, France, Spain, and other places, and features a large cast drawn from all the nations of the European theater. Some of the spies use fancy gadgets and many of them have a mystique about them, but they’re all mortal, all prone to making mistakes, all caught up in something much larger and more deadly than themselves.

The production design of Super Spy might lead the reader to expect one kind of story – the front cover shows a woman, crouching, with circles explaining bits of spy paraphernalia and events in her career. The back similarly depicts a man. Both are obviously cramped, forced into an uncomfortable position, with their hands at the edges of the cover – perhaps the walls are closing in on them? It’s a strong visual metaphor both for the life of spying – constrained, constricted, having ones life shoved into a box – and for the hardships of WW II itself. So far, so accurate. But the cover also hints that this will be a story primarily about these two people. We don’t know their names on the cover, but the tags on “his” picture refer to “her,” and to their shared experiences.

Super Spy is not the story of two people; there are at least six major characters, of whom these two are only the ones we meet first. These two are not even necessarily the most important characters. And, given the dangers of spying in wartime, it’s wise not to get too attached to any character in this book. Kindt knows that spycraft is a very dangerous profession, and he shows us all of those dangers.

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