Tagged: The Past Is a Foreign Country

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin by Stan Sakai
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Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin by Stan Sakai

We all have holes in our reading, some more surprising than others. I started reading “comics” seriously about 1986, when I went off to college to a town (Poughkeepsie) with a good shop (Iron Vic’s) and bought mostly the weirdest stuff I could find on the racks at that time. There’s a lot that I’ve read since then, sometimes by following the same creators and ideas, sometimes by deliberately paying attention to new things (manga! YA! Eurocomics!). But no one can read everything – no one wants to read everything, to begin with, and it’s not physically possible now, if it ever was.

So I’ve known who Stan Saki was almost since that first trip to a comics shop in 1986 – maybe even earlier, since my kid brother might have already been reading Groo before then – but I’ve never sought out his central series Usagi Yojimbo, which started in anthologies (the old-fashioned kind, single issues published on a semi-regular schedule) in the mid-80s. As I’m writing this, I looked up the details , discovering that there are thirty-eight Usagi collections to date – well, I don’t know if I’ll make it to the end, but let’s see if I can read at least a few of them.

To make clearer my ignorance: I think the only Sakai book I’ve read – I have read his stuff in anthologies and collections, and works he contributed to but doesn’t own, to be clear – was The Adventures of Nilson Groundthumper and Hermy , a pre-Usagi short series of stories I saw a decade ago.

So this is a thing I could have paid attention to, and maybe should, but didn’t. And, nearly forty years later, I finally got to the beginning: Usagi Yojimbo, Book 1: The Ronin .

It collects eleven stories, originally published in random single issues, mostly the anthologies Albedo and Critters – all of the scattered Usagi stories from before the main series began in 1987. (This book was also published in 1987, back in the era when trade paperbacks were random and occasional rather than the expected next step of every series. That’s a sign of the initial interest or importance of Usagi, I think.)

The stories are episodic, but the world and backstory is clear from the beginning – it’s an anthropomorphic version of late Edo-era Japan, with different clans and groups drawn as different animals. Our hero is Miyamoto Usagi, a rabbit samurai formerly in the service of an (I think unnamed) lord who was betrayed by one of his generals at the battle of Adachigahara and died there. Usagi now wanders the country, working as a bodyguard (Yojimbo). I gather Lord Hikiji, the evil feudal leader who betrayed Usagi’s master, is the major background antagonist of the series, and he shows up here, both in person and through his minions.

So this book is a mixture of early world-building – the very first story tells us the story of Adachigahara in flashback – and random wanderings, which I gather stays the pattern of the series throughout, with longer stories that seem to fall into both categories (“mythology” and “monster of the week,” to use not-quite-accurate borrowed terms).

The art is crisp and clear from the beginning, though some angles (especially Usagi looking up) and some of the smaller panels of battle scenes are not as clear as I might like – these are shorter stories, that likely had page limits, and Sakai was trying to tell expansive stories from the beginning. 

I often have a quizzical reaction to anthropomorphic stories – wondering why that style was chosen, and if there are world-building hints buried in the choice of creatures – but this seems to be the old, traditional style of anthropomorphism: the creator’s style aims this way, he’s leaning into it, and that’s all it means. The style is slightly disjoint from the bloody, mostly serious and mostly historical matter, but that doesn’t seem to be meant as a source of irony: it’s just the way Sakai tells stories.

These are good stories, though they seem somewhat derivative (of samurai movies, mostly) at this point in the series’ history. That’s not a fatal flaw – lots of things are derivative, maybe most things – but it is pretty central. On the other hand, going in any reader knows this is a long-running comic about a rabbit samurai, so all of the potential deal-breakers are right up front. The good news is that it was strong and assured from the first page: if you are interested in rabbit-samurai stories, you can start with Book 1 very easily.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

One Hundred Tales by Osamu Tezuka
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One Hundred Tales by Osamu Tezuka

It’s tough to be a fan of someone when you’re not quite sure what aspect of their work you’re a fan of. I read a big bunch of Osamu Tezuka books, mostly published by Vertical, more than a decade ago – MW, Ayako , Ode to Kirihito, Apollo’s Song, a few others – and liked them all a lot. They were smart, sophisticated, serious books for adults, with a striking depth of expression and focused imaginative power.

Vertical might have published everything Tezuka did in that vein; I really don’t know. But I haven’t seen anything else similar from Tezuka in my scattered reading since then. The latest attempt was One Hundred Tales , originally published in Shonen Jump magazine in installments in 1971 under the title Hyaku Monogatari and translated by Iyasu Adair Nagata for this 2023 Ablaze edition. (It was part of a series called “Lion Books” that some awkwardly-worded backmatter in the this book attempts to explain, but doesn’t do a great job of – they don’t seem to have been “books” in the first place, but multiple-segment manga stories published in SJ; the narrative slides from talking about this series to other manga projects to anime projects without a whole lot of clarity; and there’s no explanation of what “Lion” is meant to mean in this context.)

Tales is, I think, part of the main flow of Tezuka’s career, the huge flood of stories mostly for teen (and younger) boys that he created for so long at such volume. There are elements that resonate with adults, but it’s mostly an adventure story with minor pretentions of philosophical depth, with the usual random Tezuka comic relief and contemporary cultural references thrown in willy-nilly.

The title makes it sound like a retelling of the Arabian Nights, but it’s actually a loose retelling of Faust, set in a vaguely historical-fantasy Japanese setting. The main character is a mousy accountant/samurai (shades of “Office? Submarine!” ), Ichiru Hanri, sentenced to commit ritual suicide for his very minor role in a coup plot against his feudal lord. He doesn’t want to die, and offers his soul if he can survive – so a demon (yokai, more accurately) in the form of a beautiful woman, Sudama, offers to buy his soul in exchange for three wishes.

Ichiru wishes to live his life over again, to have the most beautiful woman in the world, and to rule his own country and castle. And so the episodic story moves forward – first Sudama makes Ichiru young and handsome, then he visits (in his new face and under an assumed name) his horrible wife and lovely young daughter, then he chases his choice for most beautiful woman (Tamano no Mae, a powerful yokai) with no good result, then has the requisite training montage to become a stronger and better sword-fighter, and finally spends the back half of the story working for another minor feudal lord, massively enriching that lord and then overthrowing him.

It’s all pretty zig-zag. It does add up to a coherent story, but it only maps to the wishes fairly loosely. Sudama is also vastly more “helpful attractive supernatural woman” than she is “powerful scary demon” – the Faust parallels are mostly superficial, and drop away for the required happy ending.

Tezuka was an energetic cartoonist – sometimes too much so, to my eye, since this book starts off with Ichiru in full comic-relief mode, all goofy panic and silly faces, and the tide of comic relief comes in several more times as the book goes on. But, if you think of this as an adventure story made very quickly for publication in a massive weekly comics magazine for boys – which is exactly what it is – it’s admirable and pretty accomplished in that context.

Whether that context is enough to overcome the negatives is up to every reader to decide. Tezuka is a world-renowned creator of stories in comics form, but his standard mode is very idiosyncratic and very tied to the specifics of the Japanese market and audience at the time.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls
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Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

We are all haunted by history, one way or another. For some, it’s personal; for others, it’s public. After the 20th century we had, for all too many it’s both, intertwined.

Tessa Hulls is in her thirties, the second child of two first-generation immigrants to the US, brought up in a tiny Northern California town where she and her brother were  the only people at all like them. Her mother Rose is mixed-race, born in tumultuous 1950 Shanghai to a Swiss diplomat who had already run back home before the birth and a Chinese journalist, Sun Yi, who thought she could weather any storm.

Hulls tells the story of all three women, over the last hundred years, in Feeding Ghosts , a magnificent, impressive first graphic novel all about the ways Tessa and Rose, and Sun Yi before them, are haunted by history.

Hulls is the one telling the story, and that frames it all: she has those core American concerns of “who am I?” and “where did I come from?” Making it more complicated, she’s here exploring her Chinese identity as the daughter of two generations of Chinese women who had children with European men, and as someone raised in America entirely in the English language.

One more thing: one very big thing. Sun Yi was moderately famous: she escaped China for Hong Kong in the late 1950s, when Rose was a child, and wrote a scandalous memoir of her life under the Communist upheavals of the previous decade. She got her daughter, Rose, accepted into a very highly regarded boarding school in Hong Kong, despite not really having the money to pay for it. And then she mentally collapsed. Sun Yi spent the next two decades in and out of mental hospitals and was eventually cared for by her daughter in America starting in 1977, when Rose was 27. Rose spent her teen years in that boarding school, alternately worrying about her mother’s care and being molded to be part of an internationalist elite. And then Rose fled to America, first for college, then for a brief nomadic freedom that her daughter would eventually emulate.

Let me pull that all together: Tessa Hulls, whom a lot of Americans would cruelly call “one-quarter Chinese,” grew up in a town with no other Chinese people. Just a mother, quirky and specific and tightly controlled, the kind of mother who has Rules for everything that are rarely said explicitly, never explained, seemingly arbitrary, and core to her concept of the world. And a grandmother, trapped in her own head, scribbling every day as if she was eternally re-writing that famous memoir, and speaking only the smallest bits of broken English. That mother and grandmother spoke a different language together – I think mostly the dialect of Shanghai – which they never taught Tessa. “Chinese” was that language, that mysterious past, the symbol for all that was hidden and frightening and different for Hulls growing up.

Hulls has a lot to get through in Feeding Ghosts: a lot of family history and related world history, a lot of nuance and cultural detail that she learned as she was researching her family’s past. She tells it all mostly in sequence, after a brief prologue, but “Tessa Hulls” is present throughout, our narrator and filter, the voice telling us how she learned the story almost as much as she tells the story itself. This is a story unearthed and told, not something pretending to be purely dry and factual. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s primarily about Tessa’s journey, how she decided to figure out this tangled knot of her family history, to do it with her mother as much as possible, to reconcile the two of them and try to come to a place here they could better meet and understand each other.

Hull’s pages are organic, specific, inky. She uses swirling white outlines on a black background as a visual element regularly – the pull of all of those ghosts, if you want to be reductive – to open and close chapters, and more subtly in the backgrounds of fraught moments.

One of the hallmarks of a great big book is that it leaves you wanting to know more. I was enthralled by the stories of young Sun Yi and Rose, and how Tessa learned what they did and what it meant. (The latter is the more important thing, in an ancient, rule-bound, formalistic society like China – maybe even more so in a time of such transition and upheaval as the early Communist years.) But I felt that she was less forthcoming about her own youth. This is very much a story of these three women, but I wondered about other figures: Hulls’s father is almost entirely absent, signposted as a British man with a thicker accent than Rose and seen only a handful of times. And Tessa’s brother, just one year older, growing up in this same house and environment, is even less present – did he feel any of these pressures? Or was this so much a matrilineal thing, tied into those cultural assumptions of what men and women do, that he was able to “be American” in ways more closed to Tessa?

But that’s not the story Hulls is telling. And every story casts shadows: the story that-is dimly showing flickers of other stories that could have been, or might yet be. The brightest, most brilliant stories cast the clearest shadows – that may be why I wonder so much about Hull’s father and brother; they’re dark, mysterious shadows just outside the circle of these three women, brilliantly illuminated and seen in depth.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Michael T. Gilbert’s The Complete Wraith!
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Michael T. Gilbert’s The Complete Wraith!

Sometimes there’s a creator whose work you like, and you keep checking to see if they have anything new, and they just don’t. For a decade or two. You’re pretty sure they’re still out there, and you hope they’re doing something fun and interesting. You may have the secret hope, most famously centered around J.D. Salinger, that the creator is just piling up lots of Good Stuff, kept unpublished for idiosyncratic reasons, and you will eventually get to see all of that on some glorious future day.

Michael T. Gilbert is one of those, for me. I liked his Mr. Monster stories both in the ’80s, with goofy, near-parody humor/horror style, and in the ’90s, when he retooled in a more serious mode for an “Origins” series. And I gather he’s had some random Mr. Monster stories since then, but nothing regular. I keep hoping there will be a book, since I mostly read books these days, but that seems unlikely. (I gather most of Gilbert’s comics work for the last two decades has been scripting Disney comics for European publishers – nice work if you can get it, but apparently completely unseen in his own homeland.)

But I did just see Michael T. Gilbert’s The Complete Wraith! , which collects the major work he did before Mr. Monster, in the late ’70s. And I’ll take what I can get.

Wraith is an anthropomorphic version of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, created as such to be a feature in the all-anthropomorphic anthology series Quack! in 1976. Quack! had six issues, with eight Wraith stories, over the next two years, and there was one more Wraith story in a 1982 solo Gilbert comic – add in a new comics introduction featuring Mr. Monster, some explanatory text-and-photo pieces between the stories, and extensive story notes from Gilbert, and you have this book. It’s designed well, and showcases what does seem to be the entirely complete Wraith: it’s a model of what a book like this should be.

On the story side, Gilbert is very clearly aping Eisner, in story structure, twists, ironic reversals, and even cast. That’s not a bad model, since Eisner’s Spirit was a lot more ambitious than it might look, and Gilbert is always entertaining here, even if not all of the stories make full use of the Eisnerian materials.

Gilbert was already experimenting with washes and Craftint and other texture and background effects that I can’t really describe adequately – I’m no artist, or a serious scholar of comics art. But his pages, even at the very beginning of this book, were carefully constructed, from panel layout to art tools to textures, and towards the middle of the book, it begins to look pretty much the same as Gilbert’s mature Mr. Monster style. (And, aside from the first story, which is pretty thin, the storytelling holds up as well, too – they’re short kicker stories about a dog adventurer in an Eisnerian world, admittedly, but they do good work within that tight structure.)

This is a fun ’70s exercise, collecting energetic work from a then-young creator working out some of his influences and seeing how different kinds of stories can work on paper for him. It’s not a lost classic, and the tone is pretty different from both Mr. Monster eras, for anyone looking for more of that. Oh, and he gets testy if you call him “Wrath,” which I expect a lot of readers did. With that in mind, this is a lot of fun, presented in a well-made package.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television by Koren Shadmi

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television by Koren Shadmi

When I was a lad, the standard bio-for-young-people format was a small hardcover, heavily illustrated but written in prose, in short, punchy chapters and topping out at maybe a hundred and fifty pages. There were a lot of them: I recall shelves in classrooms and school libraries full of the things, some of them in specific series from particular publishers.

At some point since that dim misty past, the format seems to have shifted – or maybe a new format has been added, but I think the old style is at least declining if not dead – into a graphic novel that covers roughly the same territory but in a more visually exciting (and reluctant-reader-appealing) way.

Now, let’s be clear: the new style is not just for middle-schoolers who need to do a report on Random Famous Dead Person a couple of times a semester. But that is a large and powerful audience, with vast collective library and school budgets seeking books to buy all the time, so it’s not surprising that things tend to be published that will fit that model, even if they were conceived for different purposes and audiences.

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television , a 2019 book by Israeli-American cartoonist Koren Shadmi, fits pretty comfortably into that category: it covers Sterling’s whole life, with a Twilight Zone-ish frame story where most readers will guess the payoff very early (which is very Twilight Zone, and so deeply appropriate), tending to play up the drama and struggle to give a clear arc of a life.

It’s crisp and clear and sweeping, covering Serling’s fifty years with a central focus on what every reader really wants to know: how he got to create Twilight Zone, what those years were like, and how it affected him afterward. To be reductive: he was an award-winning writing superstar for the then-popular TV anthology-show format; super-busy and stressful, with increasing network trouble over the five-year run; he didn’t live long enough to get a real third act, and his second act was all reaction and scrambling for any, usually tawdry, work as the anthology-show format entirely disappeared.

Shadmi has been doing this sort of historical non-fiction book fairly regularly the past few years – I’d previously read his Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Dracula , which came out two years after Twilight Man. He’s good at it: it takes a lot of research and synthesizing to present wads of historical context and full conversations (or large chunks of TV-show dialogue) in an engaging way, and Shadmi does that consistently here.

He tells this story in Serling’s voice, which is appropriate for the man who so intensely narrated his most famous production but presents certain potential pitfalls. As far as I could see, Shadmi avoids them all: Serling comes across as understandable but clearly a man of his time, with the right cadence and style in his speech. Shadmi also keeps his trademark cigarette in hand consistently – I wonder if that was less of an issue in this book because it came out from Humanoids, a dedicated GN publisher, rather than the young-readers division of a major house? I would not be surprised if some school districts avoided buying it because it has a cigarette on the cover.

Twilight Man aims to tell the story of this one guy, and somewhat show what writing for TV was like in his heyday of the ’50s and ’60s – it does the former well, and gives at least a Serling flavor of the latter. The second half of the subtitle is more expansive than the book itself; it really is just about Serling. I see Shadmi has a couple of other similar books I haven’t found yet; I’ll be looking out for them.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Maids by Katie Skelly

Maids by Katie Skelly

The most interesting creators are the ones you have to learn how to read. They tell stories their way, making their choices but not going out of their way to explain. And it can take reading a few books to figure that out: not all readers will want to spend that much effort.

I think I’m beginning to understand how to read Katie Skelly’s comics. I’m getting more excited, more interested, with each new book I read, which is a good sign: creators should be engrossing, should be exciting, as you learn what they care about and how to see things through their angles. So I may not have quite clicked with My Pretty Vampire , but there was something unique there, which brought me back for The Agency .

And now I’m back again for Maids , Skelly’s 2020 book. I think this is her most important book to date; it’s also her most recent major graphic novel, which might be saying the same thing in a different way.

This is a true story, at its core – a true crime story. As I think is her standard, Skelly works in a cinematic fashion, connecting scenes through images and having a clear “camera” that views the action on her pages. Also as usual, she doesn’t go out of her way to explain things: she’s not one for captions, and her people talk to each other in the ways real people do; they’re not going to explain themselves for your benefit.

It is 1933 France. Christine and Lea Papin are sisters, who grew up poor – dumped in a convent school by their mother. Christine has been a maid for the wealthy Lancelin family for some time; she’s just gotten them to hire Lea as well.

The hours are long, the work both endless and tedious and never enough. The Lancelins – mother and daughter – are not actively oppressive or cruel out of proportion to their station and time, but that still leaves a lot of ground for oppression and cruelty. It is a horrible life for the young Papin sisters. They see no other options, no ways to get any better life. And Lea has visions or breaks; if she was living in the modern world she would probably get medical treatment, but a poor woman in 1933 just has to muddle through.

Skelly’s work is about women, always. The murderers and victims here are all women; all the violence, in both directions, physical and emotional and economic, is from women to women. The anger and scorn and fear and disgust are all between women.

And I think Maids is the purest, most extreme expression of that so far from Skelly, the book where her cinematic eye and genre-fiction influences click together to tell one crisp story of death and revenge and oppression and horror. I don’t know that I’d recommend this book for people who haven’t read Skelly before, but I do recommend it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Man in the McIntosh Suit by Rina Ayuyang

The Man in the McIntosh Suit by Rina Ayuyang

The publisher describes this graphic novel as a thriller, but I’d put it solidly in noir – that may seem needlessly nitpicky, but if you’re the kind of reader who has strong opinions on the location of the border between mystery and thriller, it may be helpful.

It’s written and drawn by Rina Ayuyang in a soft, mostly blue palette – I am not an expert on art or tools, but it looks like some kind of art crayon or soft pencil to me, with lots of texture and shades of a few colors but relatively muted lines drawn with a quick, energetic hand.

It’s 1929, somewhere in an agricultural field in Northern California. There’s a group of fruit pickers, who seem to be all Filipino. They aren’t exactly mistreated directly, but the larger white society is prejudiced against them, worker protections are scanty to begin with, and these guys do the poorest-paid, lowest-skill work: it’s a hard life. They all, we think, came here to the US to make money to send back home, either intending to return once they made “enough” or to bring more family members over, one by one, to make a new life in the USA.

The story starts centered on three of the workers, but one quickly becomes central: Alessandro “Bobot” Juaňez, trained as a lawyer in the Philippines and married to Elysia, who he hasn’t seen since he emigrated and hasn’t heard from in longer than he’s happy about. (The other two workers are Angel and Edison; they’re not unimportant, but Bobot is our viewpoint character.)

Bobot is mercurial, with a strong sense of justice and a tendency to do things when they come into his head rather than thinking them through. He’s clearly smart, but doesn’t always let his smarts guide him. His life hasn’t gone the way he hoped it would, but he seems to still be looking forward, planning a better life in California. But he wishes he would hear from Elysia: it’s not clear if he even knows whether she’s in the Philippines or America.

Bobot gets a delayed letter from his cousin, Benny, saying Elysia is in San Francisco; he steals Angel’s fancy suit – this gives the book its title, The Man in the McIntosh Suit , though the suit itself isn’t as important as the weight that title seems to give it – and heads out to find her.

And that’s where it gets noir – or more so, since “migrant workers looking for better lives among prejudiced locals” can already be pretty noir, and there were hints of that plot in the first pages – as Bobot looks for Benny, and gets caught up in the local Filippino community in SF. He gets a job in a small restaurant, alongside Danilo and Dulce, who know Benny – he’s away on some sort of trip, vaguely explained, when Bobot arrives.

He sees the woman Benny wrote him about: La Estrella, the star of the late-night Baranguay Club (probably a speakeasy of some kind, illegal in at least one way), the center of the nightlife of the Filipino ghetto. His impulses get the better of him, and he runs afoul of Renato, who runs the Baranguay and, as he says, pretty much all of the Filipino community in SF.

Bobot wants to get La Estrella away from the Club, and she’s…not uninterested in him. But it’s more complicated than it seems, and Renato might either just swat Bobot down or have work for him to do. And some other players have aims that are not entirely aligned with Bobot’s – for instance, who did send that letter, and why?

All that adds up to noir: people living tough lives, with tough choices, random violence, and outbursts of anger. Men and women in relationships sometimes hidden, sometimes not what they seem. People not who they seem, hiding or mistaken for others. All of them looking for more, for better, and willing to go to extremes for it. And, above all, people making bad choices: that’s the core of noir.

Bobot makes it out at the end of this book; the very last pages imply he will return again. Ayuyang is not done telling the story of this 1929. But McIntosh Suit tells a full story: it stands on its own. It’s a deep dive into a murky world, focused on that essential noir hero, the man who can’t stop himself from his impulses and keeps getting dragged deeper into problems.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Grosz by Lars Fiske

Grosz by Lars Fiske

Today I’m going to try to describe a nearly wordless book about an artist I’m not all that familiar with, by an artist I’m not all that familiar with. If I descend into potted history and bland statements, that will be why.

George Grosz – I probably could force Blogger to display the original German spelling of his name, but I don’t have the energy for that this morning – was a German painter and caricaturist of the early 20th century (1893-1959). As you probably can guess from the intersection of the time, place, and field, Grosz was artistically radical and politically engaged: he was strongly anti-Nazi from the earliest days, moderately Communist (but, like so many others, disillusioned after a visit to the Soviet Union), and generally anti-clerical and anti-“high society.” He escaped Germany with his family just as Hitler rose to power, living in the US for the last twenty-five years of his life before dying in an accident in postwar Berlin very soon after his return there.

Lars Fiske is a cartoonist and artist and maker of other kinds of books; he’s Norwegian. His cartooning style is not a million miles away from Grosz’s paintings: both are complex, full of overlapping elements and extreme caricature. And, maybe a decade ago, maybe not quite that long, he made a book about Grosz’s life. In 2017, Fantagraphics published a US edition as Grosz . I didn’t see any indication of a translator, but the text is minimal: Fiske may have done it himself.

Grosz is a potted life, made somewhat more elliptical by being wordless. We see Grosz doing things, and have chapter titles (with what I think are quotes from Grosz) and place/time tags, but we’re not told the meanings of events and have to piece it all together ourselves. But we can follow it pretty well: Gorsz was a dandy of a young man, with big ideas for art, served in the army in the Great War where he apparently was wounded, loved American culture and strongly criticized German society, was involved in radical movements both artistic (Dada) and societal (Communism), ran afoul of growing oppression in Germany throughout the ’20s, and eventually got away to the US, where his life calmed down substantially.

Fiske’s art is extremely energetic, mostly black-and-white with some pops of color (red in particular) and a beige-ish overlay with geometric shapes of white cut out. Gestures are large, faces are caricatured, and he uses strong diagonals throughout – sometimes to divide actions into overlapping panels, sometimes as defining elements, sometimes as vanishing-point lines that he leaves in the drawing, sometimes just to be there. His drawings are visually dense: this is not a book to scan quickly.

I found I got a decent sense of the high points of Grosz’s life, and came to like the hawk-nosed guy, who is a bit of a sex-mad loose cannon in Fiske’s telling. Probably not just in Fiske’s telling, too, and to the end of his life, frankly: Grosz died from injuries sustained by falling down the stairs after a long night drinking. Which is definitely a colorful way to go, especially in your mid-sixties.

Even if you don’t care about Grosz – I didn’t before I read this – Fiske’s strong, assured cartooning and his aggressive linework make this a really visually interesting comic to read.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Cheech Wizard’s Book of Me by Vaughn Bode

Cheech Wizard’s Book of Me by Vaughn Bode

When you get The Complete Something, you expect some kind of explanation of what Something is, maybe a potted history, maybe an appreciation by an illustrious colleague or someone famous from a younger generation. Sure, the audience mostly knows the details of Something, but there’s always a host of commonly misremembered and mythologized factoids – plus makers of books do want to draw in new readers every once in a while.

Cheech Wizard’s Book of Me  is, I think, The Complete This. And there is a foreword by cartoonist Vaughn Bode’s son Mark Bode – himself a reasonably notable cartoonist – as by “Da’ Lizard” – which does, in its single page, give a few details. And there’s some scattered text here and there with some other context.

But Book of Me starts out with about thirty pages of sketchbooks and similar non-story material, which admittedly does include a lot of character explanations and even a map of Cheech’s world, but lacks a certain focus. (It also seems to memorialize a whole lot of material that, from the evidence here, were never actually created as stories.) Then there’s some multi-page stories, I think mostly from ’60s undergrounds, before we transition to the mostly single-pagers from the National Lampoon run in the early ’70s, the bulk of the continuity and the pages here.

Last is a clutch of stuff that I think is all by Mark Bode, long after Vaughn’s death in 1975, since all the copyright indications I can find start with “20.” These are obviously different in tone and style and manner, though also clearly in the Vaughn tradition.

All in all, it comes across as a whole lot of stuff, with only a minor through-line. The NatLamp material has a continuity, with characters being added, events building from one story to the next, and so forth. But that’s maybe fifty pages in the middle, roughly a third of the total. The rest is all less focused and more scattered, with festival posters, full-page illos and what might be a couple of graffiti installations in addition to the sketchbook stuff up front.

All that said: you might be asking what is the This here.

Vaughn Bode created the character of Cheech Wizard in his mid-teens, around 1957, and the character bears the usual hallmarks of an author-insert: he gets the last word all the time, he always wins, he gets all the hot babes with essentially no effort, and he’s the center of everything. He also talks a lot. Well, undergrounds are relentlessly talky to begin with, but this one is mostly Cheech, using Vaughn’s oddly clipped and somewhat distracting abbreviations all the time.

Cheech is a hat. We can see what seem to be legs in tights coming out of the bottom of the comically oversized be-starred wizard’s hat, but he’s basically a hat and a voice – no arms, no face. He claims to be the greatest wizard ever, but never does any magic. He never does much of anything – this is an underground comic, again – other than lazing around, drinking, tormenting his anthropomorphic lizard assistant, and fucking. As noted before, the women here are all gorgeous semi-nude fleshy creatures – other than a foul-mouthed four-year-old girl whose dialogue and character have not aged well – who exist pretty much just to be available for Cheech to fuck.

I should note yet one more time that this is an essentially underground comic. In my cynical opinion, undergrounds were about a cluster of a few things: drinking and drugs, free love, sophomoric philosophical musings, and agitation against anything considered “the Establishment” – sometimes vague, sometimes specific. Vaughn Bode ticks off a lot of drinking, only a bit of drugs, lots and lots of free love, fairly bland philosophy towards the end, and only some scattered anti-Establishmentism.

It is about as sexist as you would expect, from a comic that appeared in the early NatLamp. Not horribly so – the characters pretty much would all claim to love women, especially the friendly ones – but the idea that women are people is somewhat alien to all of them. It’s also occasionally racist as well, with two notable “Asian” characters. The first is a one-note, one-appearance Vietnamese ninja assassin stereotype; the second is his brother, equally stereotyped but at least on the positive side, with traditional insight into The Wisdom of the East.

This is a heaping helping of You Had to Be There, aimed mostly at Boomer nostalgia, with some spillover into my generation. (I collected NatLamp not too long after this era, but never really gelled with Cheech Wizard when I saw those strips.) It is The Complete This, though, so if you’re at all interested in “the hat,” this is where to go.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Blood of the Virgin by Sammy Harkham

Blood of the Virgin by Sammy Harkham

Literary fiction is identifiable in any format: the story of unhappy people told with care and grace and close attention, from outside.

It’s not necessary that it be set in the recent past, but that helps: sometime just long ago to be before the working lives of the audience, but still familiar – say, fifty years or so.
It’s not required that the main characters be married, but they probably are. They probably have young children – a baby, preferably, to have someone they need to care for, to care about, who is not old enough to be another character. If they’re married, they fight. They probably separate, at least temporarily, at least physically. At least one of them sleeps with someone else during the story. And there are conflicts between their married lives and the work of at least one of them – probably the one whose work life is closest to the creator, the one who does something vaguely artistic.

Sammy Harkham’s Blood of the Virgin  is a major literary graphic novel: it does all of the things expected of the genre, and does them well. It has a novelistic heft and scope, even including very loosely related flashbacks to earlier people and times. There may be something slightly obvious about it: it does hew really closely to the conventions of its genre. But it’s a strong entry in that genre, a book that has a good version of the core story to tell and that tells its story with energy, passion, and a precise eye. More importantly, it’s not a genre that comes up all that often in comics to begin with, so it looks fresher and more exciting as it is that it would have as a movie or a prose novel.

Seymour edits movie trailers for a cheapie horror-movie production company; it’s the fall of 1971. He’s twenty-seven; he’s had this job three years; he’s ambitious in the sense that he loves movies – unabashedly loves horror movies – and that he wants to keep doing them, to get closer to the core of filmmaking. I don’t know if he has grandiose artistic visions that he wants to see on screen; I get the sense that, at this point, he has changes he wants to ring on established ideas and that his ideas will keep iterating, keep developing, as he works and learns and gets better.

Assuming he gets those opportunities. Assuming he takes them and does well.

He’s written a script – “Blood of the Virgin” is his title, of course. There’s a hole in the company’s schedule that script can slot into. As usual with a business like that, the hole is right now. Seymour has to finish the script immediately, and then dive into being one of the on-set producers for that movie, during the hectic three weeks it films. All of that is a big opportunity, a chance to move up in the business, to get public credits and be part of something real. But it’s also a hell of a lot of frantic, demanding work, right now.

Time is money. Nowhere more so than the movie business. Nowhere more so than in marginal, low-budget businesses.

Harkham gives a great view of the contingent, improvisational, scrambling nature of low-budget filmmaking: Blood of the Virgin is about a lot of things, but central to most of them is what it’s like to make a movie. To be in a location for that day, chasing shots, wrangling actors, fighting with effects, tracking time as the sun inexorably chases across the sky. Planning and strategizing, directors and producers and moguls and assistants, figuring out what they need and what they can get done and what might need to be abandoned. (And “what” always includes “who.”) The big parties afterward, where everyone goes a little crazy, where they all mix more freely. We see all of those scenes, different times during the course of the creation of this movie, as Seymour tries to handle his new responsibilities and to do them the ways he thinks movies should be made.

Meanwhile, his marriage is…well, I don’t want to overstate it. In the annals of literary-fiction marriages, Seymour and Ida are pretty good. They snap at each other angrily only some of the time; they talk past each other only as much as any couple does. They have real affection for each other, when there’s time around hectic movie shoots and a demanding baby. They fuck other people for the usual literary-story reasons, but not often, and pretty far into the book. They are not “doomed” in any way: they can get through this if they want to.

Harkham here is putting it all on the page; this is a big story stuffed with ideas and characters and insights and ideas. There are pages jammed with panels, filled with dialogue, and pages of long quiet late-night drives – it’s set in LA, so freeways are at least a minor character. It’s a hugely ambitious book that largely lives up to its ambitions: there are probably a half-dozen themes I haven’t even touched on here. It’s a big book, a rich one, that tells its story well and has a big, compelling story to tell. It is literary fiction, and we can use more of that in comics: the ambition, the depth, the scope.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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