The Crib Sheet

O Eternauta

2012-01-13T18:01:00.000-08:00

O Eternauta de Héctor Germán Oesterheld e Francisco Solano López finalmente em português, editado no Brasil pela editora Martins Fontes. Terá distribuição portuguesa?

Solano - Coda

2011-12-29T08:43:00.000-08:00

Here's Solano López in his twenties on the cover of the magazine Dibujantes (draftsmen; issue # 22, September, 1956).

Solano

2011-08-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

Un mal presentimiento, si!

Stolen Art / Arte Roubada

2011-07-29T18:33:00.000-07:00

Someone at the Portuguese customs or postal service stole me the original art for these two Ray Bailey / Milton Caniff pages (# 13, 14 of Strictly for the Smart Birds, 1951). If you bump into them anywhere, please let me know! Thanks!

Alguém da alfândega ou dos CTT roubou-me a arte original destas duas páginas de Ray Bailey / Milton Caniff (# 13, 14 de Strictly for the Smart Birds, 1951). Se as virem por aí agradeceria muito que me avisassem. Obrigado!

Shannon Gerard Part 2

2011-06-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

YYZ Birds from Shannon Gerard on Vimeo.

Shannon Gerard at Inkstuds

Joan Crosby Tibbetts

2011-05-12T03:52:00.000-07:00

If you remember Changeling, a film with Angelina Jolie (Catherine Collins) directed by Clint Eastwood, you can certainly recall how the main character is imprisoned in a mental institution just because she's a political nuisance to the LAPD. She is (and the film is based on a true story) a political prisoner in a supposedly democratic and free country. (Unfortunately I'm not naive enough to believe in the democracy charade, but I'll spare you my rant about it.) Psychiatry facilities were political prisons in disguise.

The same happened to Skippy's creator Percy L. Crosby who passed the last 16 years of his life confined in Kings Park Psychiatric Center in New York. Meanwhile he was robbed of millions because Skippy became a peanut butter brand belonging to crooked corporations. Read all about it.

In Skippy vs. The Mob Percy Crosby's daughter, Joan Crosby Tibbetts wrote:

My father did not live to obtain his freedom, and died in poverty, but his courageous spirit lives on in his famous Skippy character. In his place, I have taken up Skippy's struggle for freedom from his captors, who tried to sue me into silence while seeking restitution for an unquestionable miscarriage of justice. To bow down to corporate fascism is the antithesis of Percy Crosby's patriotic concerns and purpose in using Skippy to satirize Capone and his racketeers: to expose the dangers of "criminal supremacy" gnawing away at American values. Corruption is everyone's business, whether in the courts, government agencies, Congress, or among Wall Street bankers and corporate oligarchs. It is the evil today that has left millions unemployed, hungry, with foreclosed homes; justifiably angry that their life savings have been depleted.

Hear, hear! Truer words were never spoken! Corporate and financial fascism is what we're enduring in our beloved plutocracies.

Image:

Skippy comic strip published August 27, 1930 (original art).

Carlos Trillo

2011-05-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

Another member of The Crib's pantheon passed away (last May 8 this time), Argentinian writer Carlos Trillo. I especially like his work with Alberto Breccia: Un tal Daneri, Buscavidas, Viajero de gris (the gray dressed traveller). Needless to say that these are the books that people mostly forget in the obituaries on the www (they prefer to mention more commercial work). That's why The Crib is different, of course...

Image:

The cover of Un tal Daneri, Doedytores, 2003.

I'm Back at The Hooded Utilitarian

2011-05-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

Since my impediment was removed, I'm back at The Hooded Utilitarian. I hope to post at The Crib also though. The last time that I said the above I didn't comply. I hope to post at least once every two weeks or so this time. Not a great rhythm, I know, but it's better than nothing, I suppose.

Jackie Cooper & Bill Blackbeard - a sort of coda

2011-05-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

Jackie Cooper, who played Skippy on the silver screen in 1931, died last May 3. Cooper was nominated for an Oscar at the age of nine.

Bill Blackbeard, without whom my Crosby & Schulz post wouldn't be possible, died last March 10. A big thank you to you, gentlemen!

Crosby & Schulz

2011-04-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

Charles Schulz worked single-handedly, or legend has it, in his newspaper comics series Peanuts for almost half a century. This means that Schulz produced an impressive number of Peanuts dailies and Sundays (18.020, if I'm not mistaken). Such a huge amount of work needed a creative method. This means that Charles Schulz had recurrent narrative formulas: the football gag, Linus and the great pumpkin, Snoopy against the Red Baron, and many others... These formulas, repeated over and over again, are one of the explanations for the series' success: as Umberto Eco noted (The Role of the Reader: 160):

Under the guise of a machine that produces information the criminal novel produces redundancy; pretending to rouse the reader, it in fact reconfirms him in a sort of imaginative laziness and creates escape by narrating, not the Unknown, but the Already Known.

And yet, Umberto Eco also said in "The World of Charlie Brown" (Apocalypse Postponed: 39):

[...] [some] artists, working within the system, performed a critical and liberating function. As usual, it is a matter of individual genius: to be able to develop a language so incisive, clear and effective as to dominate all the conditions within which the language must operate.

I agree with Umberto Eco, but I fail to see why the double standard? Aren't newspaper comics series as formulaic and redundant as crime novels? If, as Eco also wrote (44) "[Charles Schulz showed] us, in the face of Charlie Brown, with two strokes of his pencil, his version of the human condition[,]" how often did he do so in his 50 year run on the strip? How many of his 18.000 plus comic strips and Sunday pages convey new relevant information, go beyond innocuous gags or avoid escapist fantasies like lots of Snoopy strips and pages? Not many I suspect...

Charles Schulz didn't repeat his formulas ipsis verbis and ipsis imagines though: the former functioned as themes to his variations effectively approaching Peanuts to traditional jazz music. What amazes me is how often Schulz borrowed (mostly) visual themes from Percy L. Crosby.

July 1, 1925.

November 4, 1954.

As we can see above Charles Schulz swiped his baseball and rain theme from Percy Crosby, but things are a bit more complicated than that. Let's see what's different first... Percy Crosby did basically a daily that's really a single panel cartoon: it's funny because the answer to Skippy's question is quite obvious. Charles Schulz did a Sunday page in which the plot is different from the above mentioned strip: Charlie Brown tries to retain his players repeating like a mantra, "It's going to clear up." (Skippy and Charlie Brown are quite different characters being the former a lot more feisty than the latter.) Charlie Brown is also more neurotic than Skippy: whenever his team is in question he gets quite anxious, that's why he wants to stay in the field in spite of being raining cats and dogs. What's the same in the two examples above (hence the swipe) is the last panel. Percy Crosby was a great visual thinker: he used the huge empty space around Skippy to convey loneliness. Schulz did the same thing. Percy Crosby did one panel comic strips frequently. What's amazing is that each time he did it the space meant something different. For instance: in the image below the empty space helps to characterize Skippy as someone who's always restless (other times it's just a gag or a beautiful landscape).

January 20, 1928.

The genesis of the rain gag can be found in Life magazine (as seen below).

Image as published in Life Presents Skippy, 1924.

A few years later Charles Schulz did (sort of) swipe the text, as seen below.

April 2, 1962.

The little red-haired girl is another recurrent theme ripped-off by Charles Schulz from Percy Crosby.

August 12, 1925.

May 17, 1968.

Again, as we can see by their reactions Skippy Skinner and Charlie Brown are very different from one another, but there are two swipes, in the above and in many other strips: one is verbal, the other one is visual. The former is the name of the nameless characters: the girl in the reddish pink dress for Crosby and the little red-haired girl for Schulz. The latter is only visual because we can't see it: the two girls are alluded but they're never shown.

In the strip below we can see both the losing baseball team (also used and abused by Schulz) and the girl in the reddish pink dress themes.

August 14, 1925.

Swipe or no swipe, inspiration or not, I don't care. I find the below page one of the best of the Peanuts series and one of the best Sunday pages ever created, period.

November 19, 1961.

There are a couple more visual solutions that Schulz picked up from Crosby. The most important one is the "kids' talking heads behind the stone wall." It's just that Percy Crosby put his characters talking behind fences.

May 30, 1931.

March 7, 1982.

(I miss the Sunday pages' colors in the Fantagraphics reprints!)

Finally here's another baseball swipe (or "inspiration" if you, sacred cow worshippers, prefer).

April 27, 1926.

August 8, 1954.

As seen above Skippy is absent minded and jealous while he's in the outfield. He gets beaned by a baseball. Charles Schulz put Lucy in Skippy's place in one of his most confusing and weak Sunday pages. Truth be told she would come to the mound to talk to Charlie Brown a lot more often than she stayed in the outfield being inept.

If this post aroused your curiosity re. Skippy buy this beautiful book. You won't regret it, I can assure you:

Rutu Modan's Mixed Emotions

2011-04-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

For a brief time The Crib's favorite Rutu Modan wrote and drew a blog at The New York Times site. I'm so glad that women saved this childish and adolescent art form (I'm exaggerating again, sorry!, but an exaggeration is part true, right?). Here I give you Mixed Emotions.

Shannon Gerard's Unspent Love

2011-04-16T15:30:00.000-07:00

My personal canon has a new star: Shannon Gerard. Check her out online at Top Shelf (I hate the stupid backgrounds).

Manuel Caldas: Um Editor Independente - Coda

2011-04-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

Imagens:

1. Segunda edição de Foster e Val por Manuel Caldas (1993). Enquanto a fantasia é monocromática (aqui a azul, na primeira edição a preto) o desenho em que Hal Foster caricaturiza as suas preocupações quotidianas (a falta de ideias e o deadline que se aproxima, a vaidade da mulher e a necessidade de a alimentar, as exigências da sua personagem) é pouco colorido, é certo, mas é colorido...

2. No Atelier de Aurélia de Sousa (s/d). Cena de género tardo-romântica em que a pintora se retrata desalentada num ambiente soturno e quase monocromático. O que é colorido é a fantasia colorida da arte. De notar que a pintora, uma das maiores figuras do naturalismo português, criou um jogo complexo entre a feia realidade que o quadro mostra e a fantasia balofa que o quadro dentro do quadro nos dá. Pode ler-se tanto uma crítica ao impressionismo (desde um ponto de vista realista, ou seja, desde um ponto de vista político) como uma desistência decadentista.

3. Terceira edição (muito alterada) de Foster e Val com o subtítulo: "Os Trabalhos e os Dias do Criador de 'Prince Valiant'" (Dezembro de 2006). A inversão cromática das duas primeiras edições é aqui corrigida. A prancha de "Prince Valiant" (a número 117, de 7 de Maio de 1939, em vez da número 19, de 19 de Junho de 1937) apresenta-se ligeiramente torcida no seu eixo. Questão de dinamismo da composição, sem dúvida, mas também sinal, talvez, de que a série mudou a vida do autor do livro. A troca de pranchas também não é inocente: a 19 representa o maravilhamento do jovem Val ao chegar a Camelot, a 117 representa um Val mais adulto atormentado com a ideia do envelhecimento.

I'm Back

2011-04-15T15:08:00.000-07:00

After posting at The Hooded Utilitarian I'm back at The Crib. It was fun while it lasted and I thank Noah and Suat and Caro and Derik and Matthias and Robert. I left because I can't be in the same room with a fanboy (or is it a babyman?).

Manuel Caldas: Um Editor Independente

2011-04-15T13:06:00.000-07:00

1989

Conheço o Manuel Caldas já vai para vinte anos, mas, infelizmente, os dedos das duas mãos são demais para contar as vezes que nos encontrámos pessoalmente. A sua proverbial fobia a viagens e o final do Salão Internacional de Banda Desenhada do Porto atiraram a nossa relação de amizade para o espaço virtual. Na verdade, foi aí, no espaço virtual, ainda antes da Internet (ou seja, por carta), que nos fomos mantendo em contacto. Tenho ainda uma resma de papel com as missivas do Manel (suponho que ele não se importará com o tratamento informal), mas desenganem-se aqueles que, na posteridade, queiram publicar a nossa “importante” correspondência. Aposto que as minhas mensagens já foram parar, há muito, ao ecoponto azul numa das também proverbiais limpezas que o Manel decide fazer de vez em quando.

Não estive presente no início das publicações de Manuel Caldas, naquele já algo longínquo ano de 1986 (no mês de Março, para ser exacto) em que o Manel publicou o primeiro número do seu fanzine Nemo. Tive no entanto a sorte, anos depois, de lhe poder comprar o Nemo A5 o qual, entretanto, tinha crescido para A4 “ganhando” como colaborador regular quem a vós se dirige. Na “Introdução ao número 1 de Nemo” pode ler-se: “De modo algum fruto de um labor criativo tão talentoso e artesal [sic] como o que assiste à confecção de uma banda desenhada, num trabalho delicado e longo não deixou, contudo, de assentar a realização deste fanzine. Mas, em lugar cimeiro, ele é fruto essencial de um imenso entusiasmo pela Banda Desenhada.” (Caso extraordinário e único: a capa foi paciente e delicadamente pintada a aguarela exemplar a exemplar!; se dúvidas houvesse quanto à veracidade da paixão acima declarada este facto, apenas, seria mais do que suficiente para as dissipar.) Na apresentação que lemos já está o Manel como ele é e foi: com a sua modéstia e a sua dedicação (o erro ortográfico só demonstra que ele também é humano). Talvez agora, vinte e cinco anos depois (alguém festejou estas bodas de prata?), quando decidiu ser um editor profissional, depois de traições (em Portugal) e desenganos (em Espanha) o Manel actual já não seja o mesmo Manel ingénuo daquele tempo. Mas de uma coisa tenho a certeza: quando o Manuel Caldas inicia um projecto é com a mesma integridade, empenho, honestidade, atenção aos detalhes, em suma, é com a mesma paixão e respeito pelos leitores que o leva a bom termo.

No início foi uma paixão comum pela série norte-americana “Prince Valiant”, o Príncipe Valente do muito nosso Mundo de Aventuras (não sou do tempo de O Mosquito e só brevemente comprei O Primeiro de Janeiro), de Harold R. Foster, que nos uniu. Foi com enorme prazer que li as duas primeiras edições e a terceira de Foster e Val (contribuí até, muito modestamente para esta última). Esse livro é central no trabalho editorial do Manel e pode servir-me para, simbolicamente, o colocar como peça primeira nas duas fases dessa obra: a artesanal e a profissional. A primeira (Edições Emecê) é impressionante em dedicação e carolice: relevo nela, para além dos já citados e históricos fanzine Nemo e das duas primeiras edições de Foster e Val, a edição comemorativa da revista O Mosquito de Como Nasceu e Viveu (é inegável o amor do Manel pela banda desenhada infantil portuguesa, amor esse que não compartimos, aliás); Béquinhas Beiçudo & Barbaças de Fernando Bento (na mesma linha); A Trilogia das Mouras de Raul Correia e Eduardo Teixeira Coelho (todos em formato fanzine); bem como o fanzine Zero e alguns livros artesanais: As Capas de Eduardo Teixeira Coelho Para “O Mosquito” com douta introdução de António Dias de Deus; Moira A Escrava de Roma de Alberto Salinas (conforme publicação no Jornal do Cuto); Max e Moritz de Wilhelm Busch (uma breve incursão pela banda desenhada do muy rico século XIX); Anita e Filipim também de Fernando Bento; Sunday por Victor Mora e Victor de la Fuente (uma das publicações mais importantes desta fase a merecer nova edição restaurada e a cores).

Setembro de 1994.

Outubro de 1993.

Não chamei “histórico” ao fanzine Nemo porque fiz parte dessa aventura extraordinária, a que mais prazer me deu como crítico de banda desenhada (nunca mais vou esquecer os dias que eram, para mim, de festa, quando um novo Nemo me chegava às mãos…). Chamei “histórico” ao Nemo pelas contribuições do Manel o qual, infelizmente, foi cedendo cada vez mais, e com o passar do tempo, o espaço do fanzine aos seus colaboradores…

Com o advento da informática surgem as edições Livros de Papel e Libri Impressi. Recordo a estranha sensação que tive ao desembrulhar em casa um livrinho que escrevi e que Manuel Caldas editou no mesmo formato do seu fanzine Nemo (anunciado na capa como edição extraordinária deste). Refiro-me a Winsor McCay Visita o País do Sonho Pela Mão de Little Nemo, 22 Pranchas de Um Pioneiro da B. D.. Olhei para a capa e tive uma sensação esquisita de familiaridade e estranheza ao mesmo tempo. Durante uns segundos fiquei confuso e não percebi lá muito bem o que estava a acontecer. A referida capa tem duas vinhetas da famosíssima prancha da cama andante da série “Little Nemo in Slumberland” de Winsor McCay. O que o Manel fez foi eliminar o espaço intericónico e apagar as personagens na segunda vinheta a fim de produzir uma única imagem. Isto que parece fácil dito assim não o é de todo porque não bastou apagar: Manuel Caldas teve de reconstituir, no estilo de Winsor McCay, note-se, tudo o que ficou a faltar no “novo” desenho. É um feito notável de camaleonismo gráfico. É precisamente esta capacidade em encarnar outros estilos que não o seu que permite ao Manuel Caldas reconstruir, qual cirurgião plástico, aquilo que técnicas de impressão primitivas ou o tempo ou o que seja apagaram, pensava-se que, para sempre...

Março de 1992.

Desta nova e última fase sublinho o já citado Foster e Val, Os Trabalhos e os Dias do Criador de ‘Prince Valiant’ e as extraordinárias reconstruções, admiradas internacionalmente, sobretudo em Espanha, do inevitável Príncipe Valente de Hal Foster (nunca ninguém tinha verdadeiramente visto os desenhos de Foster antes da reconstrução levada a cabo por Manuel Caldas). A publicação a cores de Lance de Warren Tufts é também absolutamente notável. Para além disso há também a referir o humor com as séries Hagar, O Horrendo de Dik Browne e Ferd’nand de Mik ou, ainda, com desenhos de Hal Foster, o seu seminal Tarzan dos Macacos. Nas notas finais do referido livro Manuel Caldas escreveu: “Argumentar-se-á que não se justifica tanto trabalho para se poder ter das coisas uma visão melhorada apenas um pouco. Depende da proximidade a que ficarmos da plena visão dessa coisa. Depende, no fundo, de com quanto se satisfaz o nosso espírito. Mas se não nos aproximarmos das coisas nunca as veremos melhor.” O Manel percebe que os outros podem não sentir a mesma paixão que ele sente pelas obras que restaura e tem necessidade de se justificar. Como todos os visionários antes dele há momentos em que a incompreensão e o desalento o devem assaltar, sobretudo num mundo, como ele diz: onde há uma “classe em vias de extinção [a] dos que ainda compram e lêem livros de banda desenhada”. Somos cada vez menos e isso, infelizmente, é um facto insofismável…

Setembro de 2009.

Nos anos mais próximos o Manel também publicou dois clássicos norte-americanos em restauro exemplar: Krazy + Ignatz + Pupp de George Herriman (com tradução de João Ramalho Santos) e Os meninos Kin-Der de Lyonel Feininger (em formato tablóide!). Mas termino com um livrinho que me é caro, um dos raros a ser publicado duas vezes nas duas fases da vida de editor de Manuel Caldas: Dot e Dash de Cliff Sterrett (na primeira versão a preto e branco), Dot & Dash (na segunda a cores). Escrevi a introdução com o título mais simples em tempos mais simples: “A Poética da Simplicidade”, título esse actualizado para ““Dot & Dash”: a Poética da Simplicidade” na edição mais recente a qual tem o meu texto traduzido para duas línguas estrangeiras, inglês e espanhol (castelhano). (Lamento que no último caso haja uma gralha em “simplicidad”.) Não é aqui o lugar para defender um texto, que escrevi há já dezassete anos, do ataque cerrado que lhe foi dirigido por um dos cronistas do Jornal de Letras. Direi apenas que, como é óbvio para quem ler o que vou escrevendo, se me afastei de um certo gosto nostálgico pela banda desenhada infantil ou infantilizante mantenho as ideias que expressei no velho texto em causa, como é também óbvio ou, caso contrário, é de bom senso pensar-se que não permitiria a sua republicação.

Março de 1994.

Outubro de 2010.

Finalmente quero falar do projecto comum que não se concretizou (ninguém sabe quem detem os direitos dos desenhos): o meu muito admirado "Randall: The Killer", dos grandes Héctor Germán Oesterheld e Arturo del Castillo. São sobretudo quatro episódios publicados na modesta revistinha argentina Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal no final dos anos 50 e que nunca foram, que eu saiba, reeditados (a não ser quase contemporaneamente, e duvido que estejamos a falar de toda a série, no Reino Unido com o título de Ringo; ao facto se ficou a dever o pseudónimo do beatle Ringo Starr). Outras reedições com o título Randall não passam de confusão com outras séries do Oeste em que del Castillo participou: Garrett ou Madigan, Don Rover ou Dan Dakota, Kendall ou Larrigan, Joe Barrow ou Bannister, El Cobra ou “Loco” Sexton (um dia gostaria de ver alguém desemaranhar este novelo).

Número 21, 22 de Janeiro de 1958: a única capa desenhada por Arturo del Castillo para as revistas Frontera.

Lamento Manel, mas termino com nova exortação para que publiques “A Lei da Selva” de Eduardo Teixeira Coelho tal como surgiu n’O Mosquito (esquece, por favor, o Jornal do Cuto). Sei que é fácil falar quando não estou a arriscar o meu dinheiro. Sei também que tens toda a razão: nós, os leitores de banda desenhada, somos uma espécie em vias de extinção e não há World Wildlife Fund que nos salve.

O Mosquito # 921, 21 de Abril de 1948.

PS O que é que passou pela cabeça dos editores de Quim e Manecas de Stuart Carvalhais para dispensarem os serviços de Manuel Caldas? Nisto eu e o cronista do Jornal de Letras estamos de acordo: se não tivessem dispensado os serviços do Manel não teriam publicado a bodega que publicaram. A relação qualidade / preço penderia facilmente para o primeiro factor. Assim… meu rico dinheirinho!...

Post integrado na justa homenagem promovida por Manuel Santo.

O site de Manuel Caldas.

Stolen Art / Arte Roubada

2011-03-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

Joe Sacco Talks About His Latest Book

2011-02-04T04:48:00.000-08:00

Award winning journalist and cartoonist, Joe Sacco, talks about his latest book, Footnotes in Gaza.

Joe Sacco - Footnotes in Gaza, Jan. 12, 2010 from pdxjustice Media Productions on Vimeo.

The Hooded Utilitarian

2010-05-23T15:24:00.001-07:00

Dear Readers:

I'm at The Hooded Utilitarian, now (I write a monthly column there titled Monthly Stumblings):

http://hoodedutilitarian.com/tag/monthly-stumblings/

I will continue to write at the ol' Crib though! More soon, I hope!...

Fanta's It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi

2010-04-01T13:08:00.000-07:00

It's always great when a publisher (Kim Thompson) agrees with me and publishes a book that is in my canon:

How Jacques Tardi does it:

i

2010-02-25T01:05:00.000-08:00

(Note: this post is in Portuguese because it mostly concerns my Portuguese readers - all six of them.)

Duas notícias: uma excelente, outra nem tanto...

Diz-me textulmente Breixo Harguindey: "Uma empresa de produção editorial de Barcelona encarregou-me elaborar um projecto de colecção sobre BD Bélica e política para o jornal português I (http://www.ionline.pt/conteudos/home.html)". A lista de títulos que Breixo escolheu dificilmente poderia ser melhor:

- Watchmen - Moore e Gibbons;

- Maus - Art Spiegelman;

- Safe Area Gorazde - Joe Sacco;

- To the Heart of the Storm - Will Eisner;

- Selecção de Two Fisted Tales incluindo "Corpse on the Imjin": http://www.beaucoupkevin.com/imjin/index.html - Kurtzman et al;

- Poison River - Beto Hernández;

- Berlin - Jason Lutes;

- Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi;

- Les mauvaises gens - Étienne Davodeau

- Le cri du peuple/Varlot soldat - Jacques Tardi;

- Partie de chasse/Les phalanges de l'ordre noir - Christin e Bilal;

- Deogratias - Stassen

- MW - Osamu Tezuka;

- Hitler - Shigeru Mizuki (ou Operation mort)

- I Saw It - Keiji Nakazawa

- Perramus/El Eternauta/El Che - Sasturain, Oesterheld, Breccia - Ernie Pike - Oesterheld e Hugo Pratt;

- Paracuellos (I e II) - Carlos Giménez;

- El arte de volar - Antonio Atarriba e Kim;

- Las memorias de Amorós - Hernández Cava e Del Barrio;

- Salazar - Cotrim e Rocha;

- Estórias Gerais - Srbek e Colin.

Infelizmente a dita empresa não chegou a acordo com Breixo, mas, ao que parece, a colecção sempre vai p'rá frente. Aguardemos, pois, novos desenvolvimentos...

Se se confirmar a edição de El Eternauta estamos perante um grande acontecimento editorial!...

Imagem:

Cartaz da exposição "50/30: 50 años con El Eternauta... 30 años sin Oesterheld" (50 anos com o Eternauta... 30 anos sem Oesterheld), Francisco Solano Lopez, Hernán Cabrera, Pablo Maiztegui, 2007.

PS ...Back to English: a couple of people (or was it just one buyer?) spent one mil and one mil + dollars on two superhero comic books. My question is: who's an elitist now?

Roberto Altmann's Zr + 4HC1 → ZrC14 + 2H2U + 3F2 → UF6 - Coda

2010-02-17T16:28:00.000-08:00

3.

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13.

Images:

1., 2., 3., 4., 5., 6., 7., 8., 9., 10., 11., 12.,13. Zr + 4HC1 → ZrC14 + 2H2U + 3F2 → UF6 by Roberto Altmann in its entirety as published in Signos [mag] # 3 (Consejo Nacional de Cultura [of Cuba], 1970). Comics, as mixed media, is a perfect vehicle to practice hypergraphics. Roberto Altmann's drawing style is not far from psychedelia.

Roberto Altmann's Zr + 4HC1 → ZrC14 + 2H2U + 3F2 → UF6

2010-02-02T03:59:00.001-08:00

"At one time Roberto Altmann was a famous artist. Who remembers Roberto Altmann now?" asks another Roberto (Bolaño) in the book Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions, 2006 [Anagrama: 1997, 2001]: 173; translation by Chris Andrews). If you thought, reading this post's title, that the name is a typo exclaiming something like: "-Hum, Robert Altman did comics?! Who knew?", I must inform you that Roberto Altmann is a Cuban artist who adhered to the Lettrist (or Letterist) aesthetic movement in Paris. (To muddy the waters a bit more "Roberto Altmann" is also an Italian painter.) Altmann did comics inspired by the Lettrist idea of hypergraphics.
Lettrism was created in Paris by Romanian émigré Isidore Goldstein (aka Isidore Isou) in 1946 (his Manifesto was published in 1942, when he was still in Romania though). "Lettrism" played an important role as one of the first neo avant-garde aesthetic movements. "Lettrisme" comes from the word "letter" (or "lettre" in French). Isou defended a poetry in which the visual aspect of signs and sounds were more important than conventional meaning. You may hear some of his poems, here: http://www.ubu.com/sound/isou.html. Lettrists wanted to create a revolution in all the arts, they didn't want to confine themselves to literature. Isidore Isou, for instance, did avant-garde films starting in 1951 with Traité de bave et d'eternité (Venom and Eternity).
As Craig J. Saper put it: "Maurice Lemaître coined the term hypergraphics to describe the puzzlelike works, including his "Memory aid" [his crib sheet] [...]. These works drew on comics and a pop art tradition in their effort to produce a new language system. They mark the emergence of a tradition of producing a language from signs without phonetic equivalent." (Networked Art, University of Minnesotta: 101). Stephen C. Foster defined hypergraphics as "communicating through the union of various forms of communication, as an "ensemble of signs capable of transmitting the reality served by the conscienceness more exactly than all the former fragmentary and partial practices (phonetic alphabets, algebra, geometry, painting, music, and so forth)." (Lettrism: Into the Present, Visible Language, 1983: 7).

This is, briefly, the creative context of Roberto Altmann's Zr + 4HC1 → ZrC14 + 2H2U + 3F2 → UF6.

Images and Sounds:

Self-portrait by Isidore Isou published in the original cover of Amos ou Introduction à la métagraphologie (Amos or introduction to the metagraphology - Arcanes, 1953 -, "métagraphology" is "hipergraphics"' first name); part of Isou's first film Venom and Eternity in which Daniel (Isou) discusses his ideas about cinema.

David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp - Coda

2010-01-12T03:44:00.001-08:00

Images:

1. Couples by Saul Steinberg with men and women drawn differently to match their respective selfs (or, as I said below, the viewer's perception of their personalities; my reading - from left to right-: formless, insipid; childish; rational, stiff, imposing; creative, a little affected - Ursula Major? -; blunt, imposing; undistinctive, feeble, but not deprived of rational thought; airy, gaseous; brainy, but unimposing; The Passport, Harper & Brothers, 1954); men are more imposing and rational than woman; a cliché or a relic of the fifties?

2. this particular drawing (ditto, above) is a perfect example to describe the relationship between Hana and Asterios: David Mazzucchelli used a spotlight shifting from Hana to focus on Asterios as a metaphor of the latter's egotism and the former's wishy-washiness; here, Steinberg (besides attributing rationality, etc... to the man) drew the woman on the verge of being pushed out from the page;

3. Hana and Asterios are separated after a quarrel; they're radically different now; the blending is over...; the void space conveys Hana's loneliness;
4. Ignazio's theory: our self seriously constrains our worldmaking, our perception of the world; (and vice-versa, I would add?);

5. the "blockhead" nose (Scott Bukatman) in Blankets by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf, 2003);

6. New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg (March, 29, 1976): it's a satire of New Yorkers' parochialism...;

7. in David Mazzucchelli's version time substituted space, memory is "a recreation, not a flashback" (Asterios Polyp); the latter is also highly selective, of course...;

8. David Mazzucchelli extended Saul Steinberg's expressive technique to the lettering (typography) and the balloons' shapes; here we can see both linked to three characters: Kalvin Kohoutek (a musician), whose speech balloons and lettering vaguely remind a musical notation; Asterios Polyp (an architect) whose lettering and square speech balloons underline geometry and rationality (modernism); Willy Ilium (a theatrical producer and director) whose fluid forms are an allusion to post-modernism; another fine touch in this particular page is Hana's face in panels one and two, looking left and right, conveying her disorientation among such competitive and egotistical male egos (this fact is underlined by her quasi-wordless participation in the sequence: if one inflated male ego - Asterios Polyp - is more than enough, what's there to say if her problem is multiplied by three?);

9. harmony arrives again at the end, but, this time, David Mazzucchelli didn't use the blending of her form and his structure (he did blend what they're saying - meaning that they've talked at the same time - and the speech balloons' shapes): he also used the same color for their faces (yellow; see below); plus: Asterios approached Hana by being yellow; Hana approached Asterios by becoming blue; the three primary colors are also a sign of a unified situation.

David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp

2010-01-10T12:25:00.000-08:00

This isn't a review or a criticism of David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp (Pantheon Books, 2009; I'm not a reviewer, god forbid!)... I'm doing a bit of metacriticism instead, again... Reviewing the reviews, I suppose, but it's not even that... It's just a brief note stating my amazement...
I am perplexed because, once again, I realize how comics are truly an art form almost without memory. I say this because only two critics and a reporter (Matt Madden: http://tinyurl.com/yfh9rdk) mentioned Saul Steinberg in the reviews of Asterios Polyp that I read on the www and only one noticed how "Mazzucchelli’s visual quotations of comics history, too, allow him to adapt techniques innovated by other artists, and explore these approaches to their limit. So he nods to Saul Steinberg’s pioneering use of diverse styles to convey subjectivity" (Sean Rogers at http://tinyurl.com/mr3sqn; Pedro Moura mentions an homage to a famous Steinberg New Yorker cover: March, 29, 1976 - more about that later - in Portuguese: http://tinyurl.com/yb2oh6t). Apart from Rogers' and Moura's reviews Saul Steinberg's name can't be seen in reviews by: Hillary Chute (http://tinyurl.com/ycdntjp), Ng Suat Tong (http://tinyurl.com/ye379bd), Charles Hatfield (http://www.tcj.com/?p=2568; who cites comics artists' names left and right...), Derik Badman (http://tinyurl.com/yagzcfz; but he just wanted to talk about the graphic novel's ending), and others... like Scott McCloud (http://tinyurl.com/ksjkf3)... Not even in the very exhaustive Stumptown Notes (http://tinyurl.com/mmkhxo) is Saul Steinberg's name seen anywhere.
Matthias Wivel (http://www.metabunker.dk/?p=2134) pointed out a problem with this visual short cut: "To the uncharitable eye, this might be considered reductive, and thus a weakness of a work that ultimately seeks to convey truth." Agreed, it is a short cut, so, on the one hand it's truly a great visual find, but on the other hand it can't go beyond the surface (it's how others see us in a social situation, not what we really are at a particular point in time - if it's possible to pin down such a thing). (That's how I read Saul Steinberg's drawings, anyway...) David Mazzucchelli copied Steinberg's idea to use it from the other side: "What if reality (as perceived) were simply an extension of the self? / Wouldn't that color the way each individual experiences the world?" In other words: that's not how others see us, that's how we see ourselves and the world around us (enter: Matthias' problem). Mazzucchelli solves it, in my humble opinion, when he states that "[...] these constructions [...] are not immutable." The same characters are identified by different colors and different shapes throughout the book: their mood changes, their behavior changes too (Besides, Asteryos Polyp is the story of a personality transformation: colors being also symbolic, "enlightenment" Asterios is cold cyan blue, but the "new" Asterios is warm primary yellow, the color of death, but also the color of renewal - among the Aztecs, for instance... More importantly though, because of some visual allusions to the Tai Chi in the graphic novel, in ancient China everything in the nuptial bed was yellow to guarantee the fertility of the couple: at the end Hana and Asterios were suposedly on the verge of finally becoming parents.)
Polyp's geometrical shape reminds me of an exhange of opinions at The Comics Journal Messboard, eons ago, about Blankets by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf, 2003) between yours truly and Scott Bukatman: he thought that the shape of the main character's nose looked strange sometimes (all geometricized and all... I told him that it was a visual metaphor and, then, he said something like: of course, he's a blockhead). That's what I think our Asterios is too...
Anyway, I'm sure that you read enough about dualities and Platonic polyhedrons and whatnot, so, I won't bother you with that. I just want to add that those reviewers above are some of my favorite comics critics. Their reviews are in no way less accurate or less good because they failed to see from where David Mazzucchelli came from. It's a bit of a left field comics-wise, I have to concede...
Oh and, is Asterios Polyp going to be part of my canon? Sure, why not?, even if I have to admit that I continue to prefer his shorter stuff in Rubber Blanklet. Even if, again, his best story also came from somewhere else: http://www.metabunker.dk/?p=690.
By the way: did I mention that both Asterios and Saul were architects?...

Images:
At last: after citing Saul Steinberg so many times I posted one of his cartoons (as published in The Passport, Harper & Brothers, 1954) on The Crib: the characters are drawn according to their personalities (or, as we perceive them); we see in the outside (ocularization) what the characters are inside (subjectivism); we can even imagine that Asterios Polyp and Hana Sonnenschein are right there, on the center-right, calmly seated on the couch; David Mazzucchelli didn't copy Saul Steinberg's work faithfully: he used Steinberg's device as a starting point, but, after that, he explored his own ideas (as Sean Rogers put it above): in Mazzucchelli's version of the heterogeneous party Asterios and Hana are really connecting, his blue structure and her red form creating a united morphology.

Anke Feuchtenberger's Somnambule - Coda

2010-01-02T22:20:00.000-08:00

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Images:
1. Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (the young women of Avignon) by Pablo Picasso (1907); demoiselles two and three (if we count left to right) are usually linked by art historians to Picasso's inspiration in two 5th century Iberian idols stolen from the Louvre by his friend poet Guillaume Apollinaire's lover Géret Pieret and probably sold to the painter; I don't say that they're wrong, but I also say that these figures are caricatural, highly simplified drawings; are these the first example of "serious caricatures" in the history of art?;

2. another giant of 20th century art, Paul Klee, did these caricatures of birds (Zwitschermaschine - the twittering machine -, 1922); if you look closely you'll notice that Saul Steinberg is not very far away;
3. A Woman on the Beach Holding a Starfish in Her Outstretched Hand by Nuria Quevedo (2009, methinks);
4. "The blood colors the water red." "Die see jungfrau," Die kleine Dame, Jochen Enterprises, 1997; the young woman from the sea cuts her fish tail in two halves; Anke Feuchtenberger's graphic style is wonderfully textured, her compositions are elegantly balanced;

5. If you find yourself in a relationship with a snowman, you’re the one who’s running the risk of melting down: "Barmi und Klett IV Schneewehen" (Barmi and Klett IV snow pain, according to a www translator again): Die kleine Dame - the little lady -, Jochen Enterprises, 1997;

6. there aren't many stories by Anke Feuchtenberger translated into English; as far as I know there are: two stories published by Actus Tragicus from Israel: "The Crossing" (the beautifully colored image above belongs to this story; Happy End, 2002); "Old Rose: Rose's son wants to go abroad" (Dead Herring, 2004); and two W the Whore books published by Bries in Belgium: W the Whore, 2001; W the Whore Makes Her Tracks, 2006;
7. an haunting image (to me it refers to hidden desires or hidden fears, most likely) from Der Palast (the palace), Jochen Enterprises, 2000; someone should study what the twins mean in Anke Feuchtenberger's oeuvre;

8. 9. after reading (yes, seeing a comic is reading it especially if, to quote Timothy Callahan here: http://tinyurl.com/yb44kg2 , the artist used "images that mean and don't simply show.") "Somnambule2" (published in the catalog of the Mutanten exhibition: Hatje Cantz, 2000) I doubt that the moon in "Blind Schleich song," (blind creep song) loves the bunny rabbit; maybe it had no escape and this is its revenge (?): when we fly too high on the wings of imagination madness eats us up...

Anke Feuchtenberger's Somnambule

2009-11-12T07:15:00.000-08:00

Anke Feuchtenberger is a German graphic designer and comics artist. In a recent interview by Mark Nevins (European Comic Art, Volume 2, # 1, Liverpool University Press: 65 - 82) she talked about her influences (67, 68): "Well, I grew up in East Berlin, in a house full of art books. My father was a graphic designer, and my mother was an art teacher. So rather than children's books, I spent a lot of time looking at art books. These were strange books for a five-year-old girl, things like the posters of John Heartfield, books about Käthe Kollwitz and Rodolphe Töpffer, and collections of paintings from the Italian Renaissance. My father had a lot of catalogues from the 'Poster Biennales' in Warsaw and Finland, and I loved to look at those posters. I also really liked the work of some of the Renaissance painters, especially Matthias Gruenewald [sic] and Hieronymus Bosch. Those images filled my imagination every day. [...] One of my early very serious experiences with art came when I was 15 years old. I got up all my courage and visited a female painter I adored, and I showed her my drawings. Her name is Nuria Quevedo [http://www.galerie-berliner-graphikpresse.de/?page_id=153]. She's Spanish, and was in exile in East Germany." Anke Feuchtenberger also says, in the same interview, that she doesn't like Picasso's work. That's strange though: Nuria Quevedo's influence is easily traceable in Feuchtenberger's style, and Picasso's influence is also easily traceable in Quevedo's paintings. Quevedo did serious caricatures like, for instance, Chago Armada. I wonder if that's one of the usual features in Second World graphic artists. Maybe José Alaniz's book on Komics (comics from Russia: http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1199) will talk a bit about the subject. I also wonder who started doing that? My bet is Pablo Picasso, but I could be wrong (George Grosz and Saul Steinberg are other possibilities and Paul Klee and William Steig come to mind... but maybe Gus Bofa is the real name to cite here; I guess that an historical investigation is in order...). Anyway... there's a thin line between caricature and expressionism... It would be very difficult to determine which expressionist drawing is no longer expressionist, but a "serious" caricature and vice-versa... Besides, who can say for sure if William Steig's lonely ones (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942: http://tinyurl.com/ygcwhln ), for instance, are funny or "serious," or both?...
Talking about one of her most famous books, with Katrin de Vries (Die Hure H, Jochen Enterprises, 1996; W the Whore, Bries, 2001), Anke Feuchtenberger seems to confirm the idea that her work may be labeled "feminist" (ditto: 81): "Her name [Die Hure H] should create fantasies about danger, pleasure, sexuality, and so on. We used the character as a door which opens up wide possibilities for thinking about the female body, the history of the female body, and the opportunities for a woman in society [...]."

The "message" in "Die see jungfrau" (the young woman from the sea, according to my translation: published in Die kleine Dame - the little lady -, Jochen Enterprises, 1997), a story also written by Katrin de Vries (and inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's "Den lille havfrue," the little mermaid, published in Eventyr, fortalte for Børn, fairy tales told for children: C. A. Reitzel, 1837), focuses on the politics of the female body. Unfortunately I don't speak German, but it seems to me that the young woman from the sea refuses her identity and wants to be a normal (or should I say: standardized) woman. In order to become one she doesn't hesitate to bleed to death because she cuts her fish tail in two.
Anke Feuchtenberger's Somnambule (an almost wordless book, by the way; Jochen Enterprises, 1998) goes the other way around destroying the simplistic feminist labeling... Here we can find one of Feuchtenberger's more recognizable visual metonymies: the detached (flying) head (strangely enough this is the second time that this metonymy appears at The Crib: the first one it belonged to - with some differences nonetheless - Edmond Baudoin). In "Gewächs haus," the greenhouse (a story inspired by Katrin de Vries), a man is the victim because, even if he tries to fly away using his propeller head, he can't do it. Two women keep him captive shaping him in their way, planting him, really (hence the title).

These stories are about power and domination, about killing what one loves (it's the mystery of the vowels again: another link to Edmond Baudoin: cf. my post about him). To confirm everything that I said so far you may read/see "Blind Schleich song," something like "blind creep song," acording to an internet translator (a story that's part of Somnambule), here: http://www.feuchtenbergerowa.de/gal.htm (a male human caterpillar tries to flee using his head propeller, but the human female bunny character doesn't let it; the caterpillar's head detaches itself from the body functioning as the moon, or a night light; in order to read this story you just have to think about the caterpillar as a stage before a metamorphosis occurs - the body turns into a butterfly - and a head detaching from the body as a sign that the latter can be imprisoned - in this case: prevented from growing up -, but our imagination can't be contained; even so, the head loves the bunny because it stays with it nonetheless).

It downs on me now that this post should have been called something like: Anke Feuchtenberger's and Katrin de Vries' beautiful stories... The latter isn't really the author of Somnambule, but she greatly influenced Anke Feuchtenberger's work during the mid to late nineties.

She also deserves to be in The Crib's canon.

Anke Feuchtenberger's site: http://www.feuchtenbergerowa.de/

Anke Feuchtenberger's and Stefano Ricci's boutique publishing house: http://www.mamiverlag.de/

A bio: http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/prj/com/cav/cpf/enindex.htm

Images:

Somnambule's wraparound cover cut in two halves like the see jungfrau's tail (Jochen Enterprises, 1998): our old selves are falling behind us all the time while new ones are born...

PS Feminists are, to me, the best critics of mainstream comics writing today. This happens because, being mostly male, other critics overlook misogynous messages and buy every stupid fantasy that passes for art in mainstream comics. That said I strongly endorse a visit to this particular post ("Bingo: The Callers Enclue You") in Karen Healey's blog: Girls Read Comics and they're pissed:

http://girl-wonder.org/girlsreadcomics/?p=4

Reviewing a Review

2009-11-05T01:11:00.000-08:00

I began writing about comics in a fanzine published by my good friend Manuel Caldas: Nemo [in the subtitle's last version], O Fanzine Dos Que Gostam Da Banda Desenhada (Nemo, the fanzine of those who like comics - March, 1986 - June, 1998). This is a strange concept: no one likes music or cinema (i. e.: all music or all films). Anyway, it was back then, in Nemo # 21 (March, 1996), that I initiated my campaign against most mainstream comics (the exceptions being Carl Barks' duck stories, Matt Marriott by Reg Taylor, James Edgar and Tony Weare, lots of stories written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and a couple of David Wright's Carol Day story arcs; I'm not sure if comics by Carlos Trillo and Alberto Breccia are mainstream or not). I tried to explain my reasons, of course... but Manuel wasn't kidding when he put that subtitle on his fanzine's cover: some people do like all comics, especially the mainstream ones (they think that alternative comics are badly drawn, so, I'm not sure if they like all comics or just the "for the youth from 7 to 77" kind). Needless to say that I was "the enemy within" subsequently ... I was bitterly expelled from the escapists' (aren't they all?) paradise...

Most of what I wrote back then I recently found in a review of Martin Sheridan's Comics and Their Creators (Hale, Cushman and Flint, 1942) by the New York Intellectual David T. Mazelon. It was published in Dwight MacDonald's Politics magazine (May, 1944: 117 - 118). Unfortunately some of us are condemned to reinvent the wheel, I suppose...

Bazelon opens his review writing that: "Mr. Sheridan has something to say about some seventy-five comic strips. But what he says is singularly unimposing. Each of these strips is covered by a thumbnail biography of the creator, or an interview in the worst newspaper manner. The histories of the cartoonists and their work are presented by banal anecdotes, salary figures, and relative merits at golf. Sheridan's understanding of the comics and the men who draw them really seems to be limited to a hungry appreciation of their salaries." This is a criticism of the author's approach (from the point of view of the social critic and art lover), not a critique of American newspaper comics and comic books (that comes later). (Bazelon also quotes Sheridan's publishers when they say that his book will appeal to "every young-minded American" - it's the "from 7 to 77" cliché again -; he counterattacks stating the existence of the "undiapered reader;" as a huge fan of the "babymen" epithet I have to add that I laughed with gusto when I read the expression.)

He goes on quoting Sheridan and sandwiching comments: "The comics cartoonist "is expected to please everybody." He believes that readers "will follow the strip which offends no one." With these directives, the tendency, of course, is to produce vacuous stereotypes." I could not say better...

I also agree with Bazelon's aesthetic ideas (if they were born with Romanticism, so be it): "One of the greatest effects of good art is to make people see themselves differently, by identification in new, fruitful perspectives. This is the other side of artistic creativeness, for it is the expression of such perspectives which provides the artist's essential worth. However, when the needs of class control determine the material of art, and when these needs are reactionary and disease-like, creativity is sharply limited or completely smothered. Art is dangerous; it tends toward freedom." In the highly commodified world of the 21th century this statement seems a bit naive, but I believe in its core idea: the stereotype can never be great art. And mainstream comics are stereotype-ridden...

To see how the New York Intellectuals changed their minds about mass consumption of the arts from 1944 to 1960 we just need to compare these two quotes... Bazelon (being a revolutionary idealist): "This approach [by Sergei Eisenstein who roughly says that if we give something good to the people they will like it] conflicts with the Philistine attitude that good art is for a small section of the population, while any trash can be tossed to the masses." MacDonald (being a post-revolution realist): "the great majority of people at any given time (including most of the ruling class for the matter) have never cared enough about such things to make them an important part of their lives. So let the masses have their Masscult, let the few who care about good writing, painting, music, architecture, philosophy, etc., have their High Culture, and don't fuzz up the distinction with Midcult." ("Masscult & Midcult," Against the American Grain, Vintage Books [Partisan Review, Volume 17, # 2, Spring, 1960 - Volume 17, # 3, Summer, 1960], 1962: 73). As Neil Jumonville put it: "[the New York Intellectuals] disliked mass culture partly because the working class never turned out to be as revolutionary, noble and cultured as radical intellectuals had hoped. Some of the Partisan group had assumed that, if unimpeded by capitalist commercial values, the mass of citizens would voluntarily seek out high culture themselves. When it became evident that would not happen, most New York Intellectuals deplored middlebrow as much as lowbrow culture." (The New York Intellectuals Reader, Routledge, 2007: 205.) Pierre Bourdieu confirmed scientifically what Dwight MacDonald suspected: high culture is not the culture of the dominant class, high culture is the culture of the dominated fraction of the dominant class (La distinction, Les Editions de minuit, 2002 [1979]). In a word: the intelligentsia. Large parts of the dominant fraction of the dominant class have middlebrow or even lowbrow taste because these "things" are not "an important part of their lives."

Bazelon likes Krazy Kat by George Herriman and that's about it. I put no American newspaper comic strips in my canon, but being forced to do it I would also choose Krazy Kat (see header above), some Sunday Pages from Gasoline Alley by Frank King (the dailies' story arcs seem as bowdlerized as the Sunday Pages, but they're not half as poetical), Dot and Dash by Cliff Sterrett (for their formal ingenuity), some Skippy by Percy Crosby (and not Peanuts... having to choose between the master and the apprentice I choose the former), but not much else... David Bazelon condemns Bringing Up Father (by George McManus): "[Jiggs] prefers corned-beef-and-cabbage and poker with the boys to the life that wealth offers. The sop here is patent[;]" Radio Patrol (by Ed Sullivan and Charles Schmidt) because: "Almost tautologically, art serving banalities itself becomes banal" (I'm not sure if I agree with this one, but that's a story for another time); The Timid Soul (by H. T. Webster): "an extreme caricature against which the pin-point ego of any harassed petty-bourgeois can release itself."

After saying that "Politically, Superman is a pre-fascist creation" David T. Bazelon ends his review contradicting what psychiatrist Lauretta Bender (who was part of Superman's publisher, National Comics' - later DC -, editorial board) has to say about said character: "(He) would seem to offer the same type of mental catharsis Aristotle claimed was an attribute of the drama." Bazelon: ""Superman" gives vicarious satisfaction to explicit social frustrations. It cannot be tragic or displeasing, nor can it contain that essential realism which is a quality of all good art. For it has a purpose: this is art in the service of social neuroses. And that service is the meaning of most comic strips... Pearls are produced not by serving but by opposing disease."

Image:

The cover of Politics, May, 1944.

PS A page about David T. Bazelon: http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/findaids/bazelon/index.htm#bio

PPS This is post # 100. I'm amazed that I arrived this far, really...

Yvan Alagbé's Nègres jaunes - Coda

2009-10-19T06:17:00.000-07:00

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Images:
1. The page layout as a meaningful device: the triadic rhythm in Jacques Tardi's C'était la guerre des tranchées refers to the French flag (as exemplified here by page 48 in Casterman's graphic novel, 1993);

2. in Jacques Tardi's latest book about WWI (Putain de guerre - fucking war -, Volume 1, Casterman, 2008; with Jean-Pierre Verney) he repeats the same mechanism, but... since Tardi also focuses on foreign soldiers (no problem when representing the Germans because their flag is also tricolor) it doesn't work when he depicts the Brits (the Union Jack isn't); in this particular page (8) soldiers are compared to sheep heading to a slaughterhouse: "Human meat was needed to satisfy the insatiable appetite of our masters! / Meat was needed to feed those who were going to die disemboweled, with their bellies still full of the beasts' smelly warm meat! / Meat was needed, it was unavoidable, because they turned us into slaughterhouse sheep!" - the tone of the text has a Celinian touch (my translation);
3. the series of drawn blank pages in The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James to which the previous double-page spread belongs: as published in La Cage, Les impressions nouvelles, 2006 (unpaginated); translation by Marc Avelot;

4. Yvan Alagbé changes his drawing style abrubtly in the last panel of page 26 of "Nègres jaunes"' second episode (Amok, Le cheval sans tête # 4, January, 1995);

5. Comparing these two panels (the first one published in the serialized version of "Nègres jaunes" - Le cheval sans tête # 5, May, 1995: 38) it's safe to conclude, I guess, that Yvan Alagbé created the subjective, racist, representation of Alain when he decided to redraw the whole story (the second panel was published in the graphic novel of the same title: Amok, 1995); note also how Yvan Alagbé simplified the panel;
6. Claire is "color blind" only when Alain says that he doesn't want to marry her just to get a green card (Le cheval sans tête # 5, Amok, May, 1995: 39);

7. Mario's mother mumbles something unintelligible, but looking at how she obliterates Alain's face, we know what she's saying: Nègres jaunes, Amok, 1995;
8. Mario rambles about how the world should be organized in order to function properly ("[...]each in their place, it all works better like that..." - translation by Ellen Lindner and Stephen Betts); looking at the second panel we have no doubts about Martine's place (Nègres jaunes, Amok, 1995).

Nègres jaunes is unpaginated.

PS I read in a couple of www pages some "outraged" comments (the word is too strong, hence the quotation marks) because I said that "Chris Ware's comics in The ACME Novelty Library # 18 are not mass art." I will not deny that I tend to prefer what's usually not considered mass art, but, in this case, if I remember correctly, I was just underlining the story's focalization in the main character's subjectivism, the story's lack of spectacular actions and Chris Ware's assertive layout style. There's absolutely no value judgment attached whatsoever...

Yvan Alagbé's Nègres jaunes

2009-10-13T11:18:00.000-07:00

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I read a lot of essays, reviews, articles about comics over the years... Sadly these still form most of my "to read" pile (I say "sadly" because, time not being stretchable and all... comics criticism expelled poetry, for instance, from my reading habits; yes Lídia, if you're still there, this still happens!). Comics scholars come from a few different fields and I enjoy every approach, but my favorite one is the formalist with a link to content (i. e.: someone who discovers a clever formal device with a communicative purpose that I, in my absent minded reading - or, some would argue, if they cared, my I. Q. impaired condition -, had not noticed).
From the top of my head I remember a few essays of the aforementioned kind by: Jan Baetens (about Hergé's Le secret de la Licorne - The Secret of the Unicorn), Pascal Lefèvre (about Kiriko Nananan's "Kisses"), Thierry Gröensteen (in his book The System of Comics), Joseph Witek (about Dean Haspiel's "91101" and a Brian Biggs' untitled short 9/11 story - even if I don't buy his essentialism entirely), Bruno Lecigne (about "La bascule à Charlot" - the guillotine - by Jacques Tardi, for instance), Pedro Moura (about Dominique Goblet's Souvenir d'une journée parfaite - remembrance of a perfect day)... you know?, the heavy weights!... but also by others that are more obscure critics (like Sylvianne Rémi-Giraud about Fabrice Neaud's Journal). Even so there were three occasions in which I said to myself: wow!, that's impressive! I mean:
1) Jacques Samson, "Stratégies modernes d'énonciation picturale en bande dessinée" (modern strategies of pictorial enunciation in comics) in Bande dessinée récit et modernité (comics, narrative and modernity), Futuropolis, 1988: 117 - 138; in which the author discovers a triadic rhythm in Jacques Tardi's C'etait la Guerre des tranchées ("It Was the War of the Trenches", published in English by Drawn & Quarterly - in Drawn & Quarterly Vol. 2, # 1 - 3, Autumn, 1994 - May, 1995; translation by Kate Sibbald; originally published as a graphic novel by Casterman, 1993, after prepublication in (A Suivre) magazine (to be continued - # 50, 53, 54, 58, 1983, # 181, 185, 189, 1993, and Le trou d'obus - the shell hole - Images d'Epinal, 1984); most of C'était la guerre des tranchées' pages are composed of three equal strips as wide as the hyperframe; Jacques Samson links this layout (and other triadic instances) with the French flag, the tricolor, which symbolizes the values of the French bourgeois revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity): grand words totally subverted in this absurd war (WWI); in the end what really happens in most wars is that poor people die to defend rich peoples' interests (soldiers die to defend the right of their people to be exploited by someone talking their own language?);
2) Marc Avelot, "L'encre blanche" (the white ink) in Bande dessinée récit et modernité (157 - 173) in which the author does a close reading of a blank double-page spread (!) in Martin Vaughn-James' The Cage (Coach House Press, 1975); in a book about how ephemeral and inadequate our communicating devices are, how can the writer/artist be self-referential about the book and the page?; as Marc Avelot pointed out in the aforementioned essay it can be read as a real page - in Saussurian terms a signifier - that's also a fictitious page - a signified); the thing signifies (it stands for) itself: Vaughn-James managed to write with no ink, hence "the white ink" of the essay's title; brilliant!;
3) and more recent: Hugo Frey, ""For All To See": Yvan Alagbé's Nègres jaunes and the Representation of the Contemporary Social Crisis in the Banlieue" in Yale French Studies number 114: Writing and the Image Today, 2008: 116 - 129. Hugo Frey comments that the black people's faces in the book are depicted by thick black brushstrokes when they're with white people (the gaze of the racist who's obsessed by color) and they're just outlined when they're among each other. (I will refine his thought saying that there are degrees of racism and "color blindness" in the book: Mario's mother is the worst racist and Claire - a revealing name -, Alain's girlfriend, is the least racist; even if she dates a black man she's not totally oblivious of his skin color...)
"Nègres jaunes"' (yellow black people) first version was published in Amok's Le cheval sans tête magazine (the headless horse) # 3 - 5 (October, 1994 - May, 1995). It was considerably altered by Yvan Alagbé for the definitive album edition (Amok, October, 1995).
The characters are all a bit lost in Nègres jaunes because they have to adjust to an hostile new culture. Mario is an ex-harki, an Algerian who sided with the French during the Algerian War (1954 - 1962). He's also a very lonely old man who is in denial of his latent homosexual desire for Alain. The latter belongs to a Beninese family who suffer because of a racist society and because they've lost their roots (Sam, the draughtsman, an Alagbé's alter ego?, we don't know that well; he's a very private person, lost among his drawings, lost in his own fantasies). I may be wrong (if one can be wrong when interpreting a polysemic text), but that's how I decode the title: African immigrants living in Europe didn't turn white, but they're not entirely brown anymore, they've been a bit bleached, they're "yellow." No one in the book is more "yellow" than Mario though... He wants desperately to reconnect with Africa, but he can't... Like Adam expelled from paradise after the original sin, Mario can't be a true African again after being a traitor. Traitors, as Dante reminded us, were put on the ninth and last circle of hell... their sin, like Judas Iscariot's, the worst traitor of them all, can't be redeemed... Despised by both sides their exile is absolute because it is an exile from the human race...

Images:
1. Jacques Tardi's "C'était la guerre des tranchées" as the cover of (A Suivre) # 185, June, 1993;
2. Martin Vaughn-James explains in this drawing how to link a The Cage blank double-page spread with the next one in order to interpret the former as a page that signifies itself because it turns out to be an extreme close up of one in a series of drawn pages: Bande dessinée récit et modernité, Futuropolis, 1988: 172.
3. Nègres jaunes' cover: Amok, October 1995; Alain is torn because Claire is his sun, but she's a cold sun ("he dreams of women with wide hips" - translation indicated bellow; all other translations are mine except for Hergé's book title, "It Was the War of the Trenches," "The System of Comics.")

PS Ellen Lindner and Stephen Betts translated Nègres jaunes:

http://comixinflux.com/influx/show/4.pdf

Carlos Roume

2009-09-28T17:03:00.001-07:00

The Crib is one year old, but, unfortunately, I'm not in the mood to celebrate because, according to Mariano Chinelli at the Eternautas discussion list, Carlos Roume passed away last week. I'm very sorry because another of the greats has disappeared. I love his work (I think that he's highly underrated - almost no one cared enough to talk about his passing), but I never met him... Now I never will...

Images:
Another great comics artist (a writer: Héctor Germán Oesterheld, I bet...) says goodbye to Carlos Roume when he left Argentina to work for Fleetway in England (Frontera Extra # 11, September, 1959). He says, among other things: "He's going away, but "his" Old Homeland [Oesterheld plays with the title of one of their series: "Patria Vieja"] goes with him. He wants to turn our gaucho themes famous in Europe. We are sure that he will succeed. He has more than enough talent to do it."

It seems to me that Oesterheld was wrong though: as far as I know Carlos Roume never found another writer like him. As many others during most of the 20th century he may very well have wasted his talent doing mediocre genre comics for children...
A more recent portrait of the maestro, found here: http://tinyurl.com/yb96z8b (photo by Rubén Pinella, Tandil, October, 2007).

Rius' Las historietas (Los Agachados # 66) - Coda

2009-09-28T13:36:00.001-07:00

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1. Las historietas starts with an highly flawed history of the medium; in this first image Rius almost falls into the temptation of what I call the nationalistic fallacy (he says that the first comic was created in Mexico: it's the codex Borgia: http://tinyurl.com/y8dse9n)...

2. ...but he refrains himself saying that the first comic was published in Germany by Wilhelm Busch: Bilder zur Jobsiade (pictures to illustrate the saga of [Hieronymus] Jobs; my flawed, I'm sure, translation); not only did Rius say that the book was published in 1860 (predating Max und Moritz - 1865; Bilder zur Jobsiade was published in 1872), he also ignored Rodolphe Töpffer (and I must add the disclaimer that I don't believe that Töpffer did the first comic); other names were ignored and facts mistaken;

3. even if Rius liked some American comics (Prince Valiant, for instance) he had a strong dislike of the superhero genre: "With Superman comics began to "degenerate." They became the herald of violence; of collective (and productive) stupidity" / "Be tough with him: he's a poor pinko!!" (my translation as in 4., 5., 6.);

4. "After the superheroes came the supercowboys, the superdetectives, the super-secret agents, the supermonsters... All perfectly and cinematically executed.. In a veiled or openly biased intention against Blacks, Latinos, Yellow or Red people." / "We White people are the only goodies!" / "In all American comics the hero is always white.. and the baddies are always Blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Russians, Cubans [are these red?, ed.], or Redskins.. (When they're not baddies they're idiots or lazy)."

5. I'm no expert in comics from the former communist countries, but we seem to have to believe Rius' word when he sez that great comics were produced in Czechoslovakia, Poland, et al!... I agree with more than one of his criticisms (as you can guess reading The Crib), but this manichean belief that everything was bad in Capitalist countries (and Rius doesn't say that, mind... as I said before he states his fondness for a few American comic strip series) and everything was great in the so-called communist countries is far from an intelligent and critical position...
6. Rius also wrote in Las historietas about Mexican comics; he's critical of them because either they're imported from Gringo country or they're done in Mexico copying Gringo's ways; "In the same way as fumettis [telenovelas] Mexican comics serve the publishers' only interest" / "To sell." / "And what sells? What's gruesome, vulgar, what gives people violence, sadism, "love," false values, fantastic adventures, in a word..As Mr. Bertrand Russell (R.I.P.) put it: Opium of the best quality!"

Rius' Las historietas (Los Agachados # 66)

2009-08-13T00:54:00.000-07:00

Eduardo del Rio (aka Rius) is a left wing Mexican political cartoonist who edited two comic book series: Los supermachos [the supermachos - one hundred issues: 1964 - 1967 - in Spanish: http://supermachos.toliro.com/] and Los agachados [the stooped ones - two hundred and ninety two issues: 1968 - 1977: Bob Agnew's translation, here: http://tinyurl.com/p2dsh8 (I also saw this title translated as "the underdogs")].

"Las historietas: El método más barato para embrutecerse... (o cultivarse... según...)" [comics: the cheapest way to stultify oneself... (or to cultivate oneself... it depends...) - my translation] is issue # 66 of Rius' Los agachados. It was published on april, 4, 1971, by Editorial Posada. In the first page of the comic book Rius wrote: "Historieta hecha por la tribú Rius © 1969." This suggests that Rius wasn't the only person involved in the creation of this essay in comics form.

Cultural studies is a discipline that started in England by the hand of Richard Hoggart during the fifties. Even if it mostly relies on almost the opposite view now (mainly because of theories developed around Bowling Green University in the United States), Hoggart "lament[ed] the loss of an authentic popular culture and [...] denounc[ed] the imposition of mass culture by the culture industries." (As we can read in his wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hoggart). The previous decade Dwight MacDonald expressed the same ideas in his mag Politics (there's also the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno: http://tinyurl.com/oqxtqk). Rius follows these views, but he was a comics artist so, he has to see some good in comics too (ditto Umberto Eco, more or less around the same time). What he denounces are the violence and stupidity of some comics made in U.S.A. (superhero comics, mainly; in France he denounces the cheap use of sexploitation), the greediness of publishers and the stupidity of the audiences: "Mientras peor es la pelicula. Más larga es la cola..." (the worst the film is, the longer the line to attend it - my translation).

Anne Rubenstein's Bad language, naked ladies, and other threats to the nation [about Mexican comics]: http://tinyurl.com/qb4ft8

Image:

Los Agachados # 66 (cover, April, 4, 1971). Alley Oop, a caveman (!), is at the helm of the comics ship.

PS The Crib is on a hiatus, but I hope to return to work in September (in almost a year I did only half of what I intend to do with it).

Martin Vaughn-James

2009-07-08T15:19:00.000-07:00

This is the stuff life is made of, I guess... I'm sometimes happy at The Crib for receiving a brilliant original page (like that Carlos Roume one, just the other day)... sometimes, like today, I'm very sad because another artist in my canon passed away. Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter announced the passing of Martin Vaughn-James: http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/martin_vaughn_james_1943_2009/
This is a text that I wrote for the Summer, 2004, issue of Indy Magazine online (by the way: many thanks to Bill Kartalopoulos for being such a great editor at a time in which I had a bit of a writer's block): http://www.indyworld.com/indy/summer_2004/isabelinho_cage/
What can I say more, but thanks Martin?!... I'll never forget you!...

Images:
Martin Vaughn-James' The Cage's cover (Coach House Press, 1975; a little strip is missing at the bottom); Martin's inscription in my copy of The Cage: For Domingos, in Lisbon, city of dreams..

Repros - Coda

2009-07-05T05:21:00.000-07:00

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Images:

1. a Prince Valiant (by Hal Foster) panel as published in a Portuguese edition (Príncipe Valente, volume 1, Editorial Presença [presence publishing house], 1972); what a mess!... (and, yes, in case you're wondering: the panel was published crooked as shown);

2. when I first saw my good friend Manuel Caldas' Príncipe Valente edition (Livros de Papel [paper books], 2005) I thought: I've been disrespected by publishers who were selling comics in about the same way as they very well could be selling potatoes (and they would sell rotten potatoes if people were dumb enough to buy them: are comics readers somewhat less bright than potato buyers?, I guess so...); if you like Hal Foster's art (or Warren Tufts') do yourself a favor and buy Manuel's editions in Spanish and Portuguese (http://www.manuelcaldas.com/) or in English (http://tinyurl.com/l8qcxr; http://tinyurl.com/l252ck: scroll down a bit, please...); these are labors of love; (only now, after all these years, did I notice that Hal Foster used aerial perspective in this spectacular image!, thanks Manel!);

3. a Winsor McCay self-portrait as published in Winsor McCay Early Works Volume VIII (Checker Books, 2006); nothing excuses such bad resolution and such bad design and production values!;

4. the same drawing as published in John Canemaker's Winsor McCay His life and Art (Abbeville Press, 1987); it's not Manuel Caldas repro quality, but, at least, it's a decent one;

5. this is a messy edition of Héctor Germán Oesterherld's and Alberto Breccia's Mort Cinder (Colihue, 1997); the repro quality is not the only problem: notice how a balloon content mysteriously disappeared in panel three;

6. the same page as in # 5. above as published in the excellent Italian edition: Mort Cinder, Sacrificio alla luna, L. F. Bona Editori, 1977; the repro is so good that it maintains an original art feel;

7. the last panel of an absolute comics masterpiece: "Un tenente tedesco" [A German Lieutenant] by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Hugo Pratt (Mondadori, 1976 - one of two pirate editions; the other one was by Ivaldi); not only was the panel published crooked as shown, it also lost almost all the washes (the lines aren't that greatly reproduced either);

8. the same panel as originally published in Hora Cero (monthly) # 3 (July, 1957); no comments needed... (the original title of the story is "Un teniente alemán..."; as an aside: I can't understand why the Laconia became the Lacinia either?, it's not even a case of laconism...);

9. people blame technology sometimes (or the lack of it) for bad repro, but how can a body explain this superlative color edition of Flash Gordon done back in 1980!?, Flash Gordon, Le peuple de la mer (Slatkine B. D.); the only thing that I know is that the book was printed in Switzerland; if anyone can give me more details I will be much obliged...

Repros

2009-06-29T03:26:00.000-07:00

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It's great at my crib, pardon me, at The Crib, when I can get my greedy, fetishist, mitts on some original art mentioned in my canon or thereabouts. Unfortunately these occasions are very few and far between because, either these artists aren't selling their art at all or I can't afford it.

Anyway, last June 23 was a happy day for yours truly indeed because I received from Mauro Barreiro in Argentina (don't forget to visit his CAF - Comic Art Fans - gallery at http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryRoom.asp?GSub=67500) a Carlos Roume page from Nahuel Barros' last story in Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal (# 92, June, 4, 1959; it's the 28th page of the story) and a stunning Alberto Breccia portrait. Looking at these beautiful drawings I found myself thinking about how bad repros have been and how carelessly publishers have treated comic art. In the next coda I'll post some more good and bad examples...

Images:

1. original drawing by Carlos Roume and...

2. ...published repro: Carlos Roume drew with a thin brush on light weight matte, coated paper; this technique gave his lines a wonderful impressionistic fluidity; the lines' values vary from light grey to deep black; all this is lost in the repro on cheap pulp paper;

3., 4., 5., 6., 7., 8. more examples;

9. a wonderful felt-tip pen drawing by the great Alberto Breccia (done 23 days before he died).

Chris Ware's The Acme Novelty Library # 18 - Coda # 2

2009-06-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

Images and Sounds:
A Chris Ware's Quimby the Mouse animation by John Kuramoto; music: Eugene by Andrew Bird.

Chris Ware's The Acme Novelty Library # 18 - Coda # 1

2009-06-12T03:22:00.001-07:00

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1. "Ticonderoga"'s first two pages (two tiers each in landscape format) by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Hugo Pratt (Frontera mensual [frontier monthly] # 1, April, 1957); In the first caption we can read (my translation): "I was hit by a bullet in the head on September 4, 1812, when Captain Decatur, in command of the "United States," captured the "Macedonian," one of the most powerful British frigates;" at a certain point the story is a long flashback narrated by a seventy five year old Caleb Lee; the first person narrator violates one of Greimas' three rules to define mass art (socio-literature): the non interference of the narrator (this is, however, the only rule that Oesterheld dared to break: sometimes I wonder if Oesterheld knew that he could do a lot better, but refrained himself from doing so because he was writing for children?); we can even see Caleb Lee in the next page, but that's a problem: if we're in first person mode, how can we see him?...; when a comic is constructed using the polyphony of words and images there's always the possibility of two simultaneous narrative modes; in the case above the homodiegetic narrator (Gérard Genette: Figures III, Seuil: 225 - 227) in the captions contrasts with the, apparently, heterodiegetic narrator of the ocularization (André Gaudreault and François Jost, Le récit cinématographique [narrative in film], Nathan Université, 1990: 129) - excepting the third panel of the second page, clearly a subjective point of view; in the last panel of the second page Caleb addresses the reader (even if in a slightly slant way), s/he is the one who ultimately sees: the problem is that the reader can only watch what Caleb narrates; on the other hand, could Caleb see the roofs in the first panel of the first page?, or his granddaughters in the fourth panel of the second page?; certainly not: he could only imagine such things; in the end, if the narrator is Caleb Lee, we must also consider other instances: above all, André Gaudreault's meganarrator (Du littéraire au filmique: système du récit [from literature to film: the system of the narrative], Méridiens Klincksieck, 1988:113);

2. detail of "Binky Brown Makes Up His Own Puberty Rites" by Justin Green as published in Binky Brown Sampler (Last Gasp, 1995 [Yellow Dog # 17, 1969]); one of the first autobiographical underground attempts is completely heterodiegetic in a traditional way; even so it's successor Binky Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) remains one of the milestones of the history of comics; the hairy title is one of those iconic-diagrammatic signs that underground artists seemed to like so much;

3. "An Idea" by Chris Ware (The ACME Novelty Library # 18, The ACME Novelty Library, 2007) mimics old newspaper comics pages with their mastheads (Daniel Clowes did the same thing in Eightball # 23, Fantagraphics, 2004; Chris Ware is always juggling with traditional aspects of the art form and innovative ones); again, the ocularization is the meganarrator's point of view, but there's no verbal narrator; what happens is that there's an internal focalization since we can read the main character's thoughts; plus: quoting Joris Driest (Subjective Narration in Comics, Secret Acres, Critical Ends: http://www.secretacres.com/snicone1.html): "Film images are commonly focalised. Point-of-view shots [...], in which the viewer literally adopts the spatial orientation of a character seem the ultimate example of it. However, focalization is not restricted to these point-of-view shots. A shot from a neutral (non-character) angle can still have elements originating from character experience. [Edward] Branigan ([Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film, Mouton,] 1984) notes that 'the look of the viewer is not equivalent to that of the camera'. […] Thus we may very well see space from a neutral angle while simultaneously holding an aspect of that space – say, colour – apart from the image and attributing it to a character’ (96). A classic scene is that of a thirsty man seeing an oasis in a desert. As he tries to dive in the water, the fata morgana disappears, and he lands in the sand. A viewer sees both the man and the oasis from a neutral angle, but still understands that the image of the oasis originates from the man’s mind;" this is a kind of subjectivity that's used a lot by Chris Ware in The ACME Novelty Library # 18: in "An Idea" we see empty word balloons attributed by the main character to all sorts of plants... and the cat too...;

4. in "A Feeling" (The ACME Novelty Library # 18) Chris Ware plays with the fragmentary side of the comics layout to perfectly convey the awkwardness felt by the character towards her body; Chris Ware placed the drawings in the panels strategically to allow (or force) a tabular reading: strange changes of scale from panel to panel glue the character's limbs to her body in a very strange way; if we look again nothing stranger than different framings mixed together is occurring (the ninth panel is different though: since the balloon has white lettering over a black background indicating that she has her eyes closed -, this scene was imagined by the character - see above);

5. in this page (also from The ACME Novelty Library # 18) we can detect Belgian artist Edgar Pierre Jacobs' influence; according to Renaud Chavanne (my translation): "[in Jacobs] the principles of composition [of the layout] are organized at the level of the strip in the first place without forgetting the page and, sometimes, the double-page" (Edgar P. Jacobs & le secret de l'explosion [Edgar P. Jacobs & the secret of the explosion], P.L.G., 2005: 259); Jacobs used the method of dividing the panels to create reading rhythms, guiding the reader through a sort of maze; here we can see five strips (with some fragmented panels - others are the result of a fusion of the gutter) that both convey the monotony of what's happening and the diversity of the imagined situations (again): the character "changes" clothes, she's sleeping with her boyfriend again, she's on a different bed, she's a child again, etc...

6. a page from "Le secret de l'Espadon" (the secret of the Swordfish) by Edgar-Pierre Jacobs, Tintin magazine, third year, # 8 (February, 19, 1948); the three strips are clearly visible and the use of fragmentation to convey a rhythm (and the passing of time with the images of the clocks) as well as to reinforce the changing perspectives helps to explain some of Chris Ware's more intricate page layouts; Jacobs also payed a lot of attention to symmetry (the two men in the first strip, the similar forms of the mountain and the submarine in the second, the two images of the same plane in the third); as for focalization and ocularization this is a seventy five percent traditional, children's comics page (there are three subjective points of view: panels two, five, eight - symmetry again); in a good action comic manner the meganarrator seems to have gone mad, jumping all over the place; (Edgar-Pierre Jacobs is part of what I call, the great stylists: their work can only be appreciated for their formal qualities, nothing more; for instance, here we can detect the racism that's in so many comics for children: in this particular case: the yellow peril.);

7. the first page of "Monotony" by Bernard Krigstein (as published in Crime SuspenStories # 22, February, 1998 [Crime SuspenStories # 22, April / May, 1954]); here we can see the same repetition of the point of view (the opposite of the action packed Jacobs page) to help to convey boredom as seen in so many Chris Ware pages;

8. page from l'Ascention du Haut-Mal (Epileptic) Vol. 4 by David B. (L'Association, 1999); David transformed Jacobs' strips into a whole page; the reading path has the form of an "N" with the counter slashed left to right, bottom to top; thus, the reader encounters the guts of Jean-Christophe and his heart before arriving, at the end, to David's penis pissing; jealousy is a gut feeling: instead of being just a layout virtuoso, like Jacobs, David B. (and Chris Ware) go way deeper than style and surface;

9. in this masterpiece of comics layout composition (The ACME Novelty Library # 18) Chris Ware doesn't limit himself to suggest a reading path, he clearly indicates it; the closed hand is a metaphor for the character's heart, but it also serves indexical purposes pointing to the two last panels of the first strip; at the end of the aforementioned strip we see another subjective point of view (the birds); then the black arrow sends us back to the left side of the page; after that, and following a white arrow, we go directly to the heart at the center; here, something spectacular happens: we have to beat our tendency to obey indexes going against our will and against another white arrow (plus: there's a menacing black circle waiting); now another arrow leads us to two images of the character masturbating and two images of absence at the bottom of the page; then we continue a path that leads us from the character's rectum to her head; going to the left side of the page (following a red arrow) we end up in a foot shaped like an erect penis; from health, or the lack of it, to libido (or libido repression; the "no, broken" that we read immediately can be interpreted in two related ways: what broke was her leg and her heart; that's why she fantasizes with childhood, a time when she was whole) to stream of consciousness daydreaming; Chris Ware strips his character to the bone, as seen in this page, but he also gave her a distinct voice, a life story, and a fleshed out personality rarely seen in comics form.

Chris Ware's The Acme Novelty Library # 18

2009-05-24T03:57:00.000-07:00

In his panel presentation "A Socio-semiotic Approach to Underground Comix" at ICAF (International Comic Arts Forum: http://www.internationalcomicartsforum.org/) '98 Alvizze Mattozzi wrote the following: "mainstream comics belong to what A. J. Greimas [Greimas, 1976], the french-lithuanian linguist and semiotician, called socio-literature, that is the mass culture version of ethno-literature like myths and legends. Greimas thinks that socio, as ethno-, literature is characterized by three features: - non interference of the narrator; the narrator or any relation with the enunciation level is hidden, so that facts, events, look as they are narrating themselves [;] - lack of, what Greimas called, "semantic codes"; that is the absence of instruction[s] about the use of the text [;] - fixed forms and genres."
Mattozzi compares socio-literary comics to underground comics which, according to him: "tend to give relevance to the enunciation, whereas mainstream comics tend to give relevance to the enunciate." Mass art tends to "be transparent" (hiding its style). The narrator is impersonal (it's the third-person omniscient narrator if one exists at all) and the action is underlined. There's no place for the first-person subjective narrator and, obviously, an intimate confessional mode is totally unacceptable and immediately labeled as "boring" (yes, you may use an Homer Simpson tone while reading the word).

I don't agree with everything of the above (Jack Kirby didn't hid his graphic style, not to mention the "in your face," "rock star" attitude of Image comics). Héctor Germán Oesterheld (see P. S. below, please) used a first-person narrator (Caleb Lee) in "Ticonderoga" (a series of connected short stories beginning in Frontera mensual [frontier monthly] # 1, April, 1957, with drawings by Hugo Pratt at first, Pratt and Gisela Dester, later, and Dester alone at the end: Frontera Extra # 39, February, 1962). The problem of generalizations such as these is that they may not be totally wrong (I, for one, think that this one isn't...), but what happens when we stumble on mass art that doesn't fit the theory? Maybe we prefer to say that it isn't mass art at all rather than to acknowledge that our theory is simply wrong? (Here's the instructive example of critics Lawrence Langer and Elisabeth Hess in denial, as cited by Robert Witek on Imagetext vol 1, # 1, Spring, 2004: http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_1/witek/.)

In one of my last posts I wrote: "the best visual artist isn't someone who just has technical abilities (that's a virtuoso), a great visual artist is someone who uses visual thinking in a remarkable way." By "remarkable" I not only mean "intelligent," I also mean "relevant."

Chris Ware's The ACME Novelty Library # 18 (The ACME Novelty Library, 2007) uses a first-person subjective narrator, the tone of his stories is diaristic, his layouts are very innovative and bold, his narratives belong to no recognizable genre (maybe we could try "Confessionalism," I guess...).

In conclusion: Chris Ware's comics in The ACME Novelty Library # 18 are not mass art. We'll take a closer look at why in our next coda...

Image:

The ACME Novelty Library # 18's cover by Chris Ware. His sobering, austere graphic style seems almost ironic if we put it in the context of the childish, garish, unfortunate, history of comics covers...

PS I must apologize to all the regular followers of The Crib for this long gap. It happened because I dedicated myself lately to file my comics in a database. I started with Editorial Frontera and that's why it hasn't been easy to detach myself from Héctor Germán Oesterheld's (Hugo Pratt's, Arturo del Castillo's, Carlos Roume's, etc...) great creations.

Héctor Germán Oesterheld's and Carlos Roume's Nahuel Barros' Last Story - Coda

2009-05-05T08:08:00.000-07:00

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Images:

1. Tintin teaches Congolese children all about their homeland: Belgium, of course (Tintin au Congo [Tintin in the Congo] by Hergé, Editions du Petit «Vingtième» [the little «20th Century» publishing house], 1931; the "wonders" of colonialism!); in the Portuguese edition published in O Papagaio [the parrot] # 230 (1939), the story was titled "Tim-Tim em Angola" [Tintin in Angola]; Tintin teaches Angolan kids all about their homeland: Portugal, of course (as an aside: O Papagaio was the first mag in the world, Belgium included, to publish "Tintin" in color);

2. African women were "naturally" servants to their colonial mistresses (panel from Tim Tyler's Luck newspaper comic strip by Lyman Young, 1933);

3. panels from the Tarzan newspaper comic strip by Burne Hogarth (page 445, September, 17, 1939; as published in Tarzan in Color Vol. 9, NBM, 1994): after my detection of Lavater's physiognomy theory in the series Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond (cf. my April, 19, post) and Tarzan (cf. above), I must conclude that it was important as a visual short cut to newspaper (and comic book, I'm sure) comics artists (I also detected it in the Asterix albums, by the way); to see how it works we just need to compare the good guy's appearance (athletic and handsome, even if approaching middle age) with the baddies' mugs (the African baddie is a mean looking "savage;" the Caucasian baddie isn't in very good physical shape and looks like a rat: baddies rarely shave); the captive woman is young and attractive and, in the first panel, has the pose of a Christian martyr;

4. more panels from the Tarzan series by Burne Hogarth (page 356, January, 2, 1938; as published in Tarzan in Color Vol. 7, NBM, 1994): the word "savages" (and "horde") is actually used to define the African attackers (the name "Ishtak" sounds like a whip cracking); they're depicted as an ugly bloodthirsty lot while the colonists are "pious folk" (the Christian iconography couldn't be absent; there's even a Moses figure); the colonial popaganda can't get more obvious than this; forget slavery, forget the exploitation of Africa's natural resources by the colonial powers, forget reality: when Francis Lacassin compared Burne Hogarth with Michelangelo (in a cliché that became famous: "Tarzan rencontre Michel-Ange" [Tarzan meets Michelangelo], Giff-Wiff # 13, first quarter of 1965) he could only be kidding!;

5. panel from "The Tall Man," Cowboy Comics # 144 Buck Jones, September, 1955, Charles Roylance (a), writer unknown; American Indians are seen as superstitious children that are easily deceived by the Caucasian hero;

6. page from the "Nahuel Barros" series (Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal # 95, June, 24, 1959); Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Carlos Roume depict this peaceful meeting of two different worlds beautifully (Pedro becomes friends with Chonki; this one and the following quotes, my translation): "...[Pedro] didn't know it at the time, but there, near the thick blackness of the grazing, something was happening. Something big. The birth of a friendship.";

7. another page from the "Nahuel Barros" series (Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal # 96, July, 1, 1959); Chonki answers Pedro's question "Why do you, the Pampas, attack the Christians' settlements?": "the huincas, the Christians, taught us... [...] we still own the desert! But we don't own ourselves anymore... [...] The huinca says that we are savages, that we're beasts... the Pampas, it's true, aren't the same [as the Christians], we aren't better or worse than the huincas..."; (to those who defend that comics are primarily a visual medium this page may seem too wordy; I don't understand such a logophobia though: why be against words if they're greatly written?; are mediocre drawings better than great words?; besides: the best visual artist isn't someone who just has technical abilities (that's a virtuoso), a great visual artist is someone who uses visual thinking in a remarkable way; in this page Carlos Roume delivers his own messages: he uses the thistle as a symbol of the Pampa: the plant's thorns are a reminder of how hard life in the desert is; the bird (an howl) represents freedom and knowledge; the moon (the circle: Pedro) represents perfection (the unity) and change (because of the moon's phases);

8. Sgt. Kirk sez (Héctor Germán Oesterheld - w -, Jorge Moliterni - a -, Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal # 101, August, 5, 1959): "Do you know doctor, what I've just learned?... / That there are no palefaces, or indians... there are just men... just men [...]";

9. Nahuel Barros says that he also wants to explore Patagonia (Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal # 101): "That's how Pedro, Chonki and Nahuel Barros began travelling southbound. Their backs turned to civilization, facing the unknown..."; Carlos Roume repeats the symbolism of the thistles (Nahuel, Chonki) and the moon (Pedro) between them.

Héctor Germán Oesterheld's and Carlos Roume's Nahuel Barros' Last Story

2009-05-02T09:24:00.000-07:00

Children's adventure comics in the 20th century were frequently colonial popaganda. The examples are quite numerous, but I'll just cite the American newspaper comic strips "Tarzan" (1929 - c. 2000) and "Tim Tyler's Luck" (1928 - 1996) or the Belgian album Tintin au Congo (Editions du Petit «Vingtième», 1931; British edition: Tintin in the Congo, Sundancer, 1991).

In the formulaic and manichean children's western comics genre the indians were "the savages" whom the white hero needed to defeat in order to save the good guys from some barbarous torture and death. (See: http://www.bluecorncomics.com/savagena.htm.)

I knew all of the above when I recently read the "Nahuel Barros" series (nine stories in Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal: # 7, October, 16, 1957 - # 101, August, 5, 1959; two stories in Hora Cero Extra!: # 6, February, 1959, # 7, March, 1959) by the greats Héctor Germán Oesterheld (w) and Carlos Roume (a).

Roume is one of those graphic artists that are enormously underrated. His loose brush depicted faces with great Naturalism. He was more of a portraitist than a landscape artist though. His landscape views of the Pampa were always evocative, but a bit sketchy for this scribe's taste...

On the other hand I stressed admiration for Héctor Oesterheld on this blog already, but I also know that he was a workaholic. He wrote almost all of the stories that his Editorial Frontera (frontier publishing house) put in print. Some of them undoubtedly suffer because of that: they're either rushed, or formulaic. The point is: when he was good, he was very good, and even in his less inspired moments we can find some phrase that's the mark of a genius.

"Nahuel Barros" is kind of an Argentinian western set in the Pampa region. It isn't exactly revolutionary when we compare it with its northern cousin. The Pampa indians are presented more as an abstraction against which the white guys have to fight than anything else, good or evil (to Carlos Roume's credit, some of the lower class "white guys," soldiers and settlers, of course, look more like the Indians they are fighting against than they look European - whatever that means). Nahuel is uneducated, but he has a great practical intelligence and a great knowledge of the Pampa (he is a "baqueano," a quiet expert on everything related to the region). Also: in a typically Oesterheldian way he's very modest: he just believes in doing his job, he doesn't embark in the hero mythology.

So, I was disappointed... until the untitled last story, that is...

I wrote about the absent hero before on The Crib. I referred at the time to another Argentinian comics character, Alack Sinner. Here's what I said: "Alack Sinner is part of that meagre gallery of what I called elsewhere "the absent hero." Against North American inspired mass art hero mythology, the true anti-hero that is Alack Sinner disappears gradually to show the world around him. This is an Argentinian tradition that goes back to the often lauded Oesterheldian "collective hero" (what we have here is the anonymous collective anti-hero)."

I can't say the same thing in Nahuel Barros' case, but it's true that he's just dead weight in his last story. Writing in a commercial medium for children Oesterheld knew that he had to follow some genre rules. Even if he couldn't forget his hero completely, in order to go beyond those rules he could, and did, tone down his actions...

On the other hand it seems to me that Oesterheld wanted to surpass manicheism jumping to the "wrong" side. In this story we (the readers and main characters) aren't hunters (Nahuel and friends are the pursuers), we are the hunted.

Is this story worthy of the best Oesterheld? Maybe not... In the end it's just a simple story about a boy growing up, that's all... Why is it here as part of my canon, then? In the same issue in which the story ends Sgt. Kirk (drawn by Jorge Moliterni) says, while being delirious (my translation): "...there are no palefaces, or indians... there are just men... just men..." Such a clear anti-racist statement put in the context of the late fifties' commercial comics culture is amazing. And it deserves to be remembered.

Who were the Pampa Indians? I found the following on a www site (http://tinyurl.com/cpfm85): "The designation of "pampas"; to the aborigines who were populating the pampas was not [...] self-imposed, but came imposed by the Spanish. The word isn't even from their own language, but Quechuan, and means "plain". So, all the Indians who were living in this geographical territory known as pampas were called pampas, in spite of the fact that they belonged to different cultures." The same site mentions a substitution of Puelches-Guenaken for Mapuche and Araucanians: "(it is good to remember that this phenomenon of ethnic substitution here in our country was called Araucanizacion of the Pampas and Patagonia)."

Nahuel Barros' last story narrates the discovery of the Pampas by a boy from Buenos Aires and his friendship with Chonki, a Pampa Indian. In the end both characters go South to explore the mysteries of Patagonia. Meanwhile, where's Nahuel Barros? Instead of bringing the boy, Pedro Quiroga, back to "civilization" and his family, he accompanies both friends in their exploration trip... An unrealistic turn of events, no doubt, but a telling one, nonetheless: in a surprising escapist ending they turn their backs to the ugly reality (the huincas - new Incas, meaning: "invaders" - and their shock against the "Pampas)"; but a "savage" goes with them this time... Even more telling: it was Chonki's idea in the first place...

Images:

Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal [zero hour's weekly supplement]'s covers by Carlos Roume: # 73 (January, 21, 1959), # 87 (April, 29, 1959).

Caricature - Coda

2009-04-19T16:54:00.000-07:00

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Images:

1. caricatures by the supreme genius of the second millennium: Leonardo da Vinci (after 1490);

2. the last panel of a "Flash Gordon" sunday page (April, 24, 1938) by Alex Raymond (as published in Flash Gordon, "The Tides of Battle," volume three of the Kitchen Sink reprints, 1992); the caricature in this image is more a plot problem than a matter of drawing style: following the pseudo science of physiognomy many comics artists in manichean children's adventure comics used their characters' outer appearance to convey their personality; the Edward G. Robinson look-alike above is obviously a villain; this absurd theory is a caricature of science, of course, so, even if the image is not what I, for one, call "a caricature," the use of physiognomy to tell a story is a narrative caricature through visual means (another problem that I have with "Flash Gordon" and other strips like it is how racist these comics are when beauty canons are chosen to combat evil: the hero is a blond, athletic, upper class, Caucasian stereotype, the villain, Ming, is the stereotype of a 19th century Chinese ruler);

3. James Gillray was a better artist than Alex Raymond; he proved it mocking physiognomy one hundred and forty years before the "Flash Gordon" page above was published (print, 1798);

4. Honoré Daumier did this comic (the metamorphosis of king Louis-Philippe into a pear; a slang for "idiot") after drawings by Charles Philipon (c. 1831): Le Charivari, January, 17, 1834 (where the images appeared with a text); after being condemned they had to publish the judges' sentence in their magazine (they gladly complied, as we can see): Le Charivari # 58, February, 27, 1834;

5. Thomas Nast's "The Brains," Harper's Weekly, October 12, 1871; the drawing represents corrupt New York politician William Marcy "Boss" Tweed;

6. one of the worst racist stereotypes to ever appear in a comic: Chop-Chop, a character in the series "Blackhawks" by Reed Crandall (here in a detail of a drawing published in the History of Comics, vol. 2, by Jim Steranko, Supergraphics, 1972); what's shocking is the contrast between the way in which the other characters are physiognomically represented and the crass Chop-Chop stereotype (besides from Chop-Chop I could cite Will Eisner's Ebony White and many other "mammies," "coons," etc...);

7., 8., 9. contemporary comics artists are trying to use caricatural drawing styles in new, creative, serious (believe it or not), ways;

7. page from Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library # 14 (Spring, 2000); we must distinguish between caricature and caricatural drawing; the character Jimmy Corrigan can't be a caricature because it doesn't exist (there's no referent); but he was drawn in a caricatural way; Chris Ware views the drawing in a comic as a kind of writing; these are more like puppets than complex representations of people; emotional connections with the reader come more from the story itself than from these cold, distant, visual representations (the mask effect of Art Spiegelman's animal heads in Maus comes also to mind); or... we connect with their alienation precisely because they are apparently disconnected from the world around them;

8. page from Malus by Jochen Gerner (Drozophile, Spring, 2002); Jochen Gerner uses the ironic tactic of applying caricatural representations (and his drawings are even more schematical than Chris Ware's) in ways that are unexpected (but mostly ironical): here he applied it to the news of real road accidents;

9. page by Seth published on the front cover flap of the dustjacket of An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories (edited by Ivan Brunetti, Yale University Press, 2006); the last panel may be the punchline, but I completely agree with it because, even if I like them, I don't follow Kantian aesthetics into art-for-art's-sake-land.

Caricature

2009-04-13T16:03:00.001-07:00

Comics and caricature are two very different things. If images are used in most comics this means that the whole array of visual styles may be used by comics artists. This is rather obvious, but not on the minds of those who view comics through stereotyped colored eye glasses. They simply link comics and Saturday morning cartoons or something similar: comics are funny; comics are silly pictures; comics are childish... etc... comics are caricatures...
There are reasons why caricature was used in such a massive way in comics since the 18th century. Some have to do with the medium of distribution: the newspapers. Caricature was once a powerful tool to satirize politicians (e. g.: the Boss Tweed affair, the Louis-Philippe affair) and, until the recent crisis, editorial cartoonists called newspapers their home (comics artists were their "compagnons de route"). Plus: since politicians lost all power, making fun of them is like satirizing the court jester (what's the point?). On the other hand, inasmuch as economy is the only real game being played, no one laughs at those who really detain power because: 1) maybe (I certainly don't) we really don't know who they are (?); 2) they own the media and they aren't very fond of the idea, to say the least...

But, to quote Peter David, I digress...

Other reasons to explain the above are practical (or technical if you wish): comics are very hard to do; in order to be efficient and deliver his or her work on time a cartoonist has to rely on visual shortcuts. Caricaturing is about exaggerating certain features, sure ("caricature" comes from the Latin word "caricare," which means "to charge"), but it is also about simplifying situations. Sometimes it's about stereotyping (as we all know there's an ugly history of racial caricaturing out there). (These deadline problems shouldn't worry alternative artists with day jobs, I suppose...)

Ernst Gombrich wrote about caricature's history (see link below) having just positive things to say about it. He asked himself why did caricature appear so late in the history of art (?). Gombrich's answer makes sense to me (at least the part that's rooted in Sociology, not psychoanalysis; i. e.: it's not Ernst Gombrich's conclusion, it's Rudolf Wittkover's and Heinrich Breuer's: Die Handzeichnungen des Gianlorenzo Bernini [Bernini's drawings; Bernini was, after the Carracci brothers - & cousin -, one of the first and, duh... best caricaturists ever...], H. Keller, 1931): "The other explanation [...] seeks a solution in the evolution of civilization and society. The spirit of witty criticism and mockery on one side, the sense of the individuality of people on the other, were not developed in a way which would lead to the appreciation of the joke of caricature. Certainly there is truth in this explanation. The social atmosphere of the beginning of the seventeenth century is marked by a culture of wit, esprit and an insight into human nature which created the immortal types of Don Quixote and Falstaff." Gombrich goes on contextualizing caricature as part of the newfound artist's freedom during the Mannerist period: "we are now able to describe caricature in the psychological terms which cover the whole ‘Manneristic’ conception of art. In caricature, too, the artist projects an image transformed by the primary process [the "transformation, ambiguity and condensation" of dreams], giving it as his view of the man. He consciously alters his model, distorts it, plays with its features, and thus shows the power of his imagination — which can exalt as well as degrade. Instead of an objective portrayal of the outer world he substitutes his subjective vision, thus starting an evolution which leads by a winding road to its culmination in modern art."

All this is fine and dandy, but it seems to me that caricature debases its subject most of the times. That's what Pierre Bourdieu says in Distinction (La distinction, Les Editions de Minuit, 2002 [1979]: 229), Harvard University Press, 1984: 208 (translation by Richard Nice): "authority of whatever sort contains a power of seduction which it would be naive to reduce to the effect of self-interested servility. That is why political contestation has always made use of caricature, a distortion of the bodily image intended to break the charm and hold up to ridicule one of the principles of the effect of authority imposition." Why have comics artists persisted (something that they continue to do, as a matter of fact) in using caricature as their chosen style if they want to be serious artists, then? My guess is that tradition is a mighty force to reckon with. Comics artists admire and follow other comics artists before them and this is a very difficult thread to break. As difficult as the obsolete mandatory use of India ink on white paper...

Images:

1., 2. in the images above I compare the imposing mass of Agathla's Needle in Monument Valley

(1. painting by James Swinnerton, a pioneer of American newspaper comics; image published in Jimmy Swinnerton, The Artist and His Work by Harold G. Davidson, Hearst Books, 1985) with a completely deflated image of the same monument

(2. caricature by George Herriman, c. 1925; as published in Krazy Kat, The Comic Art of George Herriman by Patrick McDonell, Karen O'Connell, Georgia de Havenon, Abrams, 1986); it's exactly because caricature debases things that Chris Ware said the following: "Artists like [...] myself, are all trying to tell potent stories with the tools of jokes. It's as though we're trying to write a powerful, deeply engaging, richly detailed epic with a series of limericks." (Dangerous Drawings by Andrea Juno, Juno Books, 1997: 33);

3., 4. the same comparison may be done here between a serious painting by Lyonel Feininger

(3. Vogelwolke [bird cloud], 1927) and one of his comics pages

(4. Wee Willie Winkie's World, 1906; detail; I find Wee Willie Winkie's World quite charming, though...).

PS Ernst Gombrich on caricature:
http://www.gombrich.co.uk/showdoc.php?id=85

PPS According to this site:http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/ The Crib is worth exactly $0.00. That's very disappointing! I thought that it was worth at least $1,00. Darn!...

Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds Interview

2009-04-08T05:09:00.000-07:00

Images and sounds:

my third post on this blog is titled "Rutu Modan's Jamilti." Here's, as a distant kind of second coda to that post, an interview with Rutu about her great graphic novel Exit Wounds

Art Spiegelman's Maus - Coda # 2

2009-04-07T16:30:00.001-07:00

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Images and sounds:

1. the cover of Breakdowns, From Maus to Now by Art Spiegelman (Belier Press, 1977);

2. "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" (page published in Breakdowns: 1977 [Short Order Comics # 2, 1974]) quotes a Duke Ellington song to give the reader (with the "dripping faucet" continuous bass allusion), a sense of rhythm; in this page Art Spiegelman also experimented with collage, Cubism, out of sync word / image combos, the back-and-forth eye movement of the reader following the ball bouncing, etc...; Spiegelman explained this page panel by panel in Alternative Media magazine (Fall, 1978);

3. Art Spiegelman did some graphic experiences while creating Maus (The Comics Journal # 65 - where this image was also published -, August, 1981: 116): "One solution I thought was interesting involved using this Eastern European children's books wood engraving style that I'd seen in some books of illustrations. But I found myself thoroughly dissatisfied with these woodcut illustrations. [...] The cat, as seen by the mouse, is big, brutal, almost twice the size of the mouse creatures [...]. It tells you how to feel, it tells you how to think, in a way that I would rather not push."; this is a definition of kitsch according to Umberto Eco (The Open Work, Harvard University Press, 1989: 181; translation by Umberto Eco and Anna Cancogni): "the prefabrication and imposition of an effect.";

4. Art Spiegelman at Auschwitz: photo published in the first "Maus" pamphlet (Raw, Volume 1, # 2, December, 1980);

5. Art Spiegelman's cover of booklet five of the "Maus" serialization in Raw (Volume 1, # 6, May, 1984);

6. the cover of Maus, A Survivor's Tale, book one (My father Bleeds History) of two, by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon Books, 1986);

7. as many New Yorkers (see topper "The New Normal" in the first page of the book, below), Art Spiegelman was greatly affected by the 9 / 11 events; the same haunting image was used as a cover of The New Yorker (September, 24, 2001) and as the cover of his book In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon Books, 2004);

8. In the Shadow of No Towers' first page;

9. Animation film by Lars Edwards (and crew; music by Pat Carney, The Black Keys) publicizing Art Spiegelman's latest (sketch)book(s; three to be exact) (Be A Nose, McSweeney's, March, 2009).

Art Spiegelman's Maus - Coda # 1

2009-04-02T02:40:00.001-07:00

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Images:

1. Raw, Volume 1, # 1's cover (July, 1980) by Art Spiegelman ("The Graphix Magazine of Postponed Suicides," quotes my favorite philosopher, E. M. Cioran, who said: "A book is a postponed suicide," The Trouble With Being Born, Viking Press, 1976 [De l'inconvénient d'être né, Gallimard, 1973]: 99 - translation by Richard Howard; the colored scene on the window - and logo - is a collage; sorry for the low resolution);

2. Raw, Volume 2, # 1 (1989; cover by Gary Panter; another type of "collage;" yes, those are Popeye's, huh, nuts...);

3. page by Cathy Millet as published in her book Show (Le Dernier Terrain Vague, 1980); the same story was published in Raw, volume 1, # 2, December, 1980 ("09.26.79. In the hall. It's hot and I feel like a vantage" / "01.07.80. (4 P. M.). I finally get to the living room. No cigarettes. I leave." / "04.21.80. Nor are they in our bedroom whose stucco ceiling is painted salmon. The bed is covered with a whiskey-colored polyester and cotton quilt. Only the cat is there."); slightly skewed geometrical drawings, half-tone dots and text used to create a nouveau roman (Robbe-Grillet) effect;

4. another European artist who published in Raw was the Spaniard Mariscal (image from "Little Mr. Horseman," Raw, Volume 1, # 4, March, 1982); charming as his work may be sometimes, Mariscal created some of the frivolous trendy imagery which was the worst of the eighties' visual culture;

5. on the opposite side from Mariscal, Yoshiharu Tsuge is one of the best artists who ever drew and wrote comics; without wanting to reveal too much: capital page from "Red Flowers," Raw, volume 1, # 7 (May 1985);

6. Jimbo tells it like it is: "Subtlety has no place in this world!!!"; Raw one-shot # 1: Jimbo by Gary Panter (1982);

7. Raw one-shot # 3: Jack Survives by Jerry Moriarty (1984), frontispiece page (detail); here's what Jerry himself had to say about his character: "Jack died in 1953. He was my father. [...] I see Jack as a witness of constant change adapting to each newer world with less understanding. Former values become obsolete and are a burden to him. Yet they remain underneath it all. My Jack forgets experiences so he innocently repeats mistakes.";

8. page from Sue Coe' X (Raw one-shot # 6, 1986; Art Spiegelman participated in the writing - the credits don't explain how, but, anyway: great text!);

9. first page from "The Bowing Machine" by Alan Moore (w) and Mark Beyer (a); Raw, Volume 2, # 3 (1991).

Art Spiegelman's Maus

2009-03-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

At the mid-seventies American underground comics were, as Art Spiegelman put it (The Comics Journal # 65, August, 1981: 106) "going through a slump. [...] [T]he underground comix market was shrinking, and we [Spiegelman and Bill Griffith] felt it was necessary to create a life raft of some kind for the artists that we thought belonged in print." Said "raft" was Arcade the Comics Revue (issue # 1, Spring, 1975 - issue # 7, Fall, 1976). The artists who "belonged in print" were, with editors included, Robert Crumb (who gave permission to use the title of an old mimeographed comic book that he did with his brother Charles back in the sixties - issue # 1: April, 1960 -; Crumb also agreed to draw the covers of the new Arcade; he drew five of them), Kim Deitch, Spain Rodriguez, Justin Green, Jay Kinney, Jay Lynch, etc... old glories of the dying underground movement, all of them... Here's an excellent text by Alan Moore about Arcade: http://www.readyourselfraw.com/recommended/rec_alanmoore/arcade/arcade.htm.

After the Arcade experience Art Spiegelman "swore [he'd] never be involved with a magazine again" (The Comics Journal # 145, October, 1991: 97), but (97, 98): "[he met] Françoise Mouly and she wanted to do a magazine[.]" Said mag was the amazing Raw (volume 1: # 1, July, 1980 - # 8, September, 1986; volume 2: # 1, 1989 - # 3, 1991).

Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly chose to publish the work of both American and European artists. The first issue of Raw exemplifies this perfectly: a text by Alfred Jarry (Raw starts under the sign of the Pataphysique...) illustrated by Gary Panter (...and Punk aesthetics), is followed by Kaz and "Manhattan" by Jacques Tardi. Joost Swarte, Ever Meulen, Mariscal, the Bazooka group, Marc Caro, Pascal Doury, Cathy Millet, Francis Masse, Europeans all, also published in Raw magazine. The Americans were: Bill Griffith, Justin Green, Kim Deitch, Robert Crumb, Jerry Moriarty, Charles Burns, Mark Beyer, Ben Katchor, Drew Friedman, Mark Newgarden. There's also a South American exception: Muñoz & Sampayo. Issue # 7, "The Torn-Again Graphix Mag" (because the cover was, you know?, torn) included a special section dedicated to Japan with the work of: Teruhiko Yumura, Shigeru Sugiura, and... the great Yoshiharu Tsuge with his marvelous "Red Flowers." A few artists from the first half of the 20th century, like George Herriman and Winsor McCay, were also remembered now and then...

Volume two of the magazine brought us all of the above, plus: Richard McGuire, with his great story "Here," Mattotti & Kramsky, Lynda Barry, with "Sneaking Out" and "The Most Obvious Question," Chris Ware, with "I Guess," Alan Moore, writing for Mark Beyer (!) a memorable "The Bowing Machine."

Raw's first volume was graphic arts oriented in a way that may very well be behind Chris Ware's control of his books as art objects. From the size of the mag (10,5 x 14 inches) to the different papers chosen, everything showed an enormous attention to detail and great taste. Raw Books also published some extraordinary one-shots like Jimbo (Raw one-shot # 1: 1982) by Gary Panter (whose covers were corrugated cardboard while the interior was printed on newsprint; as strange as it seems this is a highly sophisticated, beautifully designed book - not to mention that the "cheap" materials match Panter's ratty aesthetics perfectly) and Jack Survives (Raw one-shot # 3: 1984) by Jerry Moriarty (in which the colors were printed on the cover while the black lines were printed on an acetate dust jacket).

Raw mixed the old school undergrounders and the (back then) new alternative comics artists, but their aesthetics didn't clash because Raw wasn't satirical (even if some satire could also be found in its pages). Raw has been accused of being all about style, not substance. There's some truth in the allegation, I guess, but one just has to remember Sue Coe's highly politicized work or, obviously, Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus (which began serialization in Raw # 2, December, 1980), to recognize that Raw wasn't always about experimentation and form.

Maus (published in book form in 1986, with the subtitle "My Father Bleeds History," and 1991, with the subtitle "And Here My Troubles Began)" is both an autobiography and a biography. It portrays Spiegelman's difficult relationship with his father (the heritage of trauma, so to speak), Vladek, a survivor from Auschwitz, while narrating the latter's life story.

Art Spiegelman explained Maus' birth (The Comics Journal # 65, August, 1981: 103): "somebody was putting together a comic book called Funny Aminal [sic] Comics, and I was invited [by Justin Green] to do a story for that book, whose only guideline was that it involve anthropomorphic characters. [...] I was looking at some films that were being shown at a film course [...] that included a lot of early animated cartoons. I was really struck by the cat and mouse cartoons. I saw that the mice in those cartoons were very similar to the negroes in the other cartoons that were being shown in the same days, and realized that this cat and mouse thing was just a metaphor for some kind of oppression. I wanted to do a comic strip in which the mice were blacks and the cats were the whites[.][...] I was never going to be able to give this any authenticity, because I just didn't know the material [.][...] On the other hand , there was an involvement with oppression that was much closer to my own life: my father and mother's experience in concentration camps, and my awareness of myself as a Jew." (The "[sic]" above is in the original text.)

At first view "Maus" was at odds with other Raw comics and Art Spiegelman's previous work (e. g.: what was collected in Breakdowns, Belier Press, 1977) because the former was more formalist and more visual oriented. With "Maus" Spiegelman wanted to (The Comics Journal # 145, October, 1991: 98): "feel more like [he] was writing than drawing." On the other hand Raw's first volume's size wasn't right for an intimate, low profile story like "Maus" (The Comics journal # 65, August, 1981: 119): "The final solution [I hope that no pun was intended!] was a separate small-sized booklet[.][...] Seeing these small pages of kind of doodle drawings, almost - they're rough, quick drawings - mounted together makes it seem like we found somebody's diary, and are publishing facsimiles of it. And that's kind of nice."

At second view, though (The Comics Journal # 180, September, 1995: 76): "all the things I had been interested in from 1970-78, had to be used and deployed, but deployed in such a way as to make something fairly seamless happen. [...] I'm talking about things like panel size, the rhythms that happen on a page, where your eye is driven across a page." Sometimes Spiegelman uses the old Dell children's comics eight panel grid to depict scenes from the present and completely unpredictable page layouts (with diagrams or some panels blown up, for instance) when he's depicting Vladek's recollections. We can't compare our daily routine in times of peace with the disruption of that same routine when a war is going on and we're in the eye of the storm.

Images and sounds:

1. Robert Crumb's Arcade # 26, September, 1962, featuring Fritz the Cat (the contrast between Fritz's colorful life and the bleak black and white around him is indication enough of Crumb's mastery); one aspect of Robert Crumb's art that's not mentioned very often is how good he is designing types; the arc in the letter "A" above is a touch of class;

2. Arcade the Comics Revue # 1's cover also by Robert Crumb (Spring, 1975);

3. editorial for Arcade the Comics Revue # 1 by Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman (as published in The Comics Journal # 65 - August, 1981): both editors mean well ("arcade is gonna be a comics magazine for adults!," but they predict financial hard times: "just a couple of deadbeats!!" concludes the booth owner;

4. one year later Murphy's law proves to be right once again (editorial in Arcade # 5, Spring, 1976, as published in Rebel Visions, The Underground Comix Revolution 1963 - 1975, Fantagraphics, 2002);

5. Art Spiegelman (or "John") self-deprecatingly feels a little embarrassed for choosing comics as a medium for self-expression (Print vol. 35, issue # 3 - Print, a graphic arts magazine, published 6 issues per volume, so, this is issue # 207; a small strip at the bottom is missing);

6. "Maus music" as Art Spiegelman called the Comedian Harmonists' work (The Comics Journal # 180, September, 1995: 105), stormy weather over Germany indeed; Stormy Weather is a song written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler (1933).

PS A Raw history by Bill Kartalopoulos: http://64.23.98.142/indy/winter_2005/raw_01/index.html

An online Print mag interview with Art Spiegelman:

http://www.printmag.com/design_articles/ArtSpiegelman1/tabid/461/Default.aspx

Barthélémy Schwartz's, Balthazar Kaplan's and Others' Dorénavant - Coda

2009-03-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

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Images:

1. Thierry Lagarde's STP # 0 (cover; first quarter, 1977); I don't share Lagarde's taste, obviously;

2. Bruno Lecigne's Controverse # 1 (cover; May, 1985);

3. "Accident" by Barthélémy Schwartz (Dorénavant # 3, September, 1986); the work is not only the graphic part (an Hergé's détournement), but also the Balthazar Kaplan's explanation (5; my translation): "In this page (a remake of a sequence from L'affaire Tournesol [the Calculus affair] by Hergé), the global surface is considered. The division, by its austerity, puts in relation every image with the whole. The result is an impression of echoes between panels, of visual rhymes which emphasize the scene's dramatic tension.

The link between the images is not exclusively narrative. It partakes in a superior logic: the dialectics between the fragment and the whole. Every image is a fragment of the scene. The latter can only be felt by a global vision of the page, by a synthesis of the fragments.

It also gives an impression of rhythm: the time represented is a syncopated one.

The pleasure of reading: this page functions as a whole. We may scan it endlessly in all directions. It contains both emotion and vertigo."; Balthazar Kaplan describes what Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle dubbed the tabular reading ("Du lineaire au tabulaire" - from the linear to the tabular -, Communications # 24, Seuil, 1976: 7 - 23); it exists in every comic, but it's also true that some comics artists (mainly with a tendency for description: e. g.: Guido Crepax; or practicing what Thierry Gröensteen called "tressage" - braiding -: Système de la bande dessinée, PUF, 1999: 8) stress it more than others; I would say that Schwartz's page is innovative in another way rather than as an example of the tabular: it's a synchronic instead of a diachronic page; it invites a vertical instead of an horizontal reading, amplifying the emotional charge of the event;

4. the first thirty titles and authors in a list of a Dorénavant's putative comics anthology; the first seven entries belong to the restrict comics field; number eight is a poster, but, from number nine on, all the entries belong to what I called the expanded field and Barthélémy Schwartz described as "bande-dessinée non consciente de son existence en tant que telle" (comics without a conscience of being comics; "Dorénavant et la bande-dessinée," Dorénavant # 2, June, 1986: 5; my translation);

5. number ten in the aforementioned list: Textuel (textual) by Michel Seuphor and Piet Mondrian (1928); speaking of which, Barthélémy Schwartz: "in [Broadway] Boogie-Woogie, the gutter plays an active role, like images themselves." (Dorénavant # 2: 20; my translation);

6. poster announcing a Dorénavant exhibition (Dorénavant # 2) and showing Joost Swarte's influence;

7. satirical drawing by Frank Le Gall (Les cahiers de la bande dessinée # 70, July / August, 1986), it isn't clear who's being satirized: Schwartz and Kaplan, who supposedly wrote a "difficult" book about the gestalt theory?; or the comics milieu (personified by Louis Forton's the Pieds Nickelés) which is too stupid to understand them?;

8. Jean-Christophe Menu was the managing editor of the satirical mag Globof (# 9's cover by Charles Berberian, January, 30, 1988); it mainly made fun of the Angoulême comics con; two years later Labo was published (Barthélémy Schwartz participated with the text "Une période de nuit, l’idéologie bédé" - a night period, children's comics ideology): L'Association was born and the rest is history;

9. Matt Konture's page (Globof # 8's back cover; January, 29, 1988) satirizing the low standards of comics readers (children, young adults, old hippies and babymen); the comics author herein depicted is forced to sell-out "juste pour buffer" (just to eat).

Barthélémy Schwartz's, Balthazar Kaplan's and Others' Dorénavant

2009-03-14T18:10:00.000-07:00

Everything started with Thierry Lagarde's article "Pour une critique nouvelle" (for a new criticism; STP # 0, first quarter of 1977: 4, 5). Lagarde saw what he called a paranoia in comics criticism: on one hand comics critics wanted comics to be legitimized among the other arts as the ninth in the elitist club; on the other hand they refused to judge comics using external criteria: "comics are what they are, i. e.: children's entertainment [little mickeys], and I don't want them to be anything else" (Philaz in Sphinx # 9 / 10, 1974; as quoted by Lagarde, my translation). It's possible to find this anti-intellectualism in the comics milieu, even today. The so-called "comics specificity" is a good excuse to mask the babymen's canon's mediocrity. In the end this attitude can be summed up as follows: I want to win, but I don't want to play. Grow up, indeed! To be fair: the former and the latter may not be exactly the same individuals...

I find particularly interesting those comics critics who, knowing nothing about the arts because they just read children's comics and humor, praise mediocre or so-so comics artists and writers as if they were the cats pajamas. These critics practice what Thierry Lagarde called "le gonflage" (the inflating; ditto: 5).
Another good point in Lagarde's article can be named (as Bruno Lecigne did in "De la confusion des languages" - on the confusion of the languages -, Controverse # 1 - controversy -, May, 1985: 5; my translation) the "amalgame" (the blending): "formerly undervalued in toto, comics are, today, valued as a whole. [...] [W]e don't know what we mean exactly when we talk about comics, or, we don't refer to the same things. The practice of the blending leads to the confusion of the languages." What this mixture entails to comics critics is a well known phenomenon (ditto: 5): "everything is valued in a bulk, according to undifferentiated criteria."

The mingle applied by babymen readers is Team Comics (Tom Spurgeon: "Editorial: Martin Wagner Owes Me Fifty Bucks," The Comics Journal # 211: 2: "comic fans are often paralyzed by nostalgia and the need for self-identity." http://www.tcj.com/250/e_spurgeon.html.) Lecigne, again (5): "there's a sub-cultural practice of the ghetto, limited by a common mood, on the margins of the official culture." It's an "us versus them" mentality that views any discriminating critical practices as a threat to the whole. The rest of the world, on the other hand, does a mix of its own: comics are children's entertainment garbage (and I'm stirring too, of course).
Bruno Lecigne's concept of blending has consequences when we distinguish hacks from true authors (something that mergers usually don't do). These classifications are constructed, but they have meaning inside the system that produced them: namely Modernism since Romanticism. Lecigne acknowledges this (and I think that he would also grant Postmodernism's Anti-Individualism), what he doesn't accept is the dishonest confusion of commercial criteria (the stereotypes and formulas that do well in the box-office again and again) with aesthetic judgment. The author may be dead, but some authors are a lot more dead than others. Besides (ditto: 23; my translation): "facing a process of fetishization, peculiar to a para-cultural ritual, every analytical distance or any conceptual ease are seen as a psychological menace." This threat may very well explain elitist accusations and the politics of fun. Babymen will be babymen.
Étienne Robial, publisher of Futuropolis (the original one, not today's Futuropolis) tells it better than me ("La bande dessinée se meurt: merci la «critique»!" - comics are dying: thank you "critics" -, L'année de la bande dessinée 81 / 82, Temps Futurs, fourth quarter of 1981: 241): "we witness the burial of every really interesting experience to satisfy the narrow taste of a fistful of juvenile hacks dressing shorts under their suits and keeping lollipops in their pockets while they wait for recess."

Meanwhile... Balthazar Kaplan and Barthélémy Schwartz appear on stage. Barthélémy Schwartz remembers (L'éprouvette - the test-tube - # 2, L'Association, July, 2006: 354, my translation): "In January 1985 we sent a false Swarte to Angoulême comic con titled Anton Makasar présente: misére de la bande dessinée [Anton Makasar presents: the misery of comics]. The following March we sent to several critics the détournement of a comic by Hergé which we titled L'Affaire Balthazar Kaplan. It had a long subtitle describing our agenda: "a few simple thesis in favor of a modern debate; the one that will allow comics to truly be an original art form or misery of comics."" "De la misère"(on misery) by Barthélémy Schwartz was published in Bruno Lecigne's Controverse # 3 (January, 1986: 15 - 19) and it was reprinted in L'éprouvette # 2. In this short text the author, not exactly a critic, but an author who questioned comics (and, unavoidable fact: flew the milieu and its putrid waters after a few years), attacked the market and wrote things like "saying that a certain comic is commercial and another one is an author's creation means nothing today" (L'éprouvette # 2: 328; my translation). In other words: 1) it's too easy to be an author in the amalgamated comics milieu; and 2) Kaplan and Schwartz refused to apply the aforementioned epithet "author" to those who practiced what they called "the storyboard" (i. e.: those who did narrative comics: they were true avant-garde modernists who wanted to produce formalist comics, devoid of narration; the narrative was wrongly seen by them, methinks, as belonging to the realm of literature and film). In "De la misère" Schwartz also states that comics artists should stop trying to make a living doing comics if they want to be true authors. With Revue Dorénavant (henceforth magazine; # 1, March, 1986 - # 7 / 8, January, 1989) Barthélémy Schwartz and Balthazar Kaplan put their money where their mouths were. (Stéphane Goarnisson and Yves Dymen joined Schwartz for the last issue - Kaplan had already left.) Both continued to write their theoretical texts (something rarely seen among comics creators), they gleefully registered the angered reactions of the babymen to the mag and, finally, they did their non-narrative comics. For that alone, they deserve to be in any serious comics canon.

Image:

the cover of Dorénavant # 5 (March 1987).

PS Barthélémy Schwartz's Flickr and Picasa albums:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/barthelemy-schwartz/

http://picasaweb.google.fr/barthelemy.bs

and blog:

http://barthelemybs.wordpress.com/

Alfonso X's and Others' Cantigas de Santa Maria - Coda # 2

2009-03-07T06:11:00.000-08:00

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Images:

1. Alfonso X's portrait: Libro de los juegos (the book of games; 1283);

2. cantiga # 256 in the Florentine codex (facsimile: Edilán, 1989); some of the comics in the Florentine codex are unfinished letting us see the cantigas' early stages: with one exception (eight panels), everything started with a six panel grid; in this cantiga the Holy Mary heals queen Beatriz;

3. panel from cantiga # 42: Medieval baseball?, no, but its the juego de la pelota (the ball's game); this huge repro let's us see how detailed the art in the miniatures is;

4. two panels of cantiga # 63 depicting the battle of San Esteban de Gormaz against Almansor; the split panel, another supposedly modern feature is, actually, more than seven centuries old;

5. the second panel above in which the artist depicted Almansor's troops; it's fine to note that, unlike modern war propagandists, the 13th century artist didn't caricature the enemy;

6. if you thought that there were no moment-to-moment transictions (to use Scott McCloud's classification) in Medieval comics, think again: cantiga # 74 (detail);

7. cantiga # 142: "King don Alfonso and his men were hunting on the banks of the Henares River. One of his falcons injured a heron and broke its wing. The heron fell into the river. The dogs could not retrieve the bird because the current was too swift. One of the King’s men jumped into the river to fetch the bird and was swept under the water. He was repeatedly submerged, but he called on the Virgin. The King assured his men, who were also beseeching the Virgin, that she would save the man. The man emerged from the river carrying the heron. He presented the bird to King Alfonso who blessed the Virgin for the miracle."; the artist who did this cantiga sacrificed the reading direction to symmetry (the last two panels are read from right to left), but he let us a clue in order to read the page in the appropriate manner: the fly of the falcon (Breixo Harguindey: "As Cantigas de Santa Maria: obra mestra das orixes da historieta" (the Cantigas de Santa Maria: a masterpiece from the origins of comics; Boletín galego de literatura # 35, 2006: 47 - 59; image as published in said essay);

8. cantiga # 183: "In Faro, there was a statue of the Virgin. It had stood on the seashore since the time of the Christians, and captives prayed to it. Christians called the city “Holy Mary of Faro” because of the statue. The Moors resented this and threw the statue into the sea. As long as the statue lay in the water, the Moors could not catch any fish. When they realised this, the Moors recovered the statue. They placed it on the wall between the merlons. Afterwards, the Moors caught even more fish than they had before.";

9. cantiga # 207; read it, here (read cantiga # 63 as well): http://www.jessicaknauss.com/kzoo/. (The summaries above were taken on The Oxford Cantigas de Santa Maria Database: http://csm.mml.ox.ac.uk/.)

PS You may find many cantigas, here (the resolution is mediocre, alas): http://www.oronoz.com/oronozframeset.html: just search for "Cantigas de Santa Maria" in "Buscar Imágenes."

The Cantigas de Santa Maria are also the first (but we can never be sure about firsts, can we?) autobio comic. Joseph F. O'Callaghan wrote a book on the subject: Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa Maria: A Poetic Biography (BRILL, 1998). Even if the author talks about "biography" instead of "autobiography" he says very early in the book (1) that it may also be an autobiography. What happens is that we can't be sure that the king himself wrote any cantiga. One name in particular needs to be cited here as a co-author of the book: poet Airas Nunes. Anyway, as you can read in the summary to O'Callaghan's book on the Google Book Search engine page: "Declaring himself Mary's troubadour, [Alfonso] appeals to her as his advocate and consoler as he recounts specific events in his life and that of his kingdom. As he tells us about his family, his war against the Muslims of Granada and Morocco, the treachery of the nobility, his frequent illnesses, and his fear of hellfire and damnation."

Alfonso X's and Others' Cantigas de Santa Maria - Coda # 1

2009-03-06T06:25:00.000-08:00

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Images:

1. scenes fifteen and seventeen of Ilias Picta (or Ilias Ambrosiana; c. 493 - 508) as published in L'illustration - the illustration - by Michel Melot (Skira, 1984); the Ilias Picta is a Byzantine codex depicting Homer's Iliad; you may find a few more images, here: http://rubens.anu.edu.au/htdocs/bytype/manuscripts/survey/00061.html;

2. page from Charles le Chauve's Bible (c. 846) as published in L'illustration; as Danièle-Alexandre Bidon put it: "There was, during the first centuries of the Middle Ages [...], a confrontation between two figurative narration systems: the panel and the strip." (Le collectioneur de bandes dessinées - Hors série: Les origines de la bande dessinée, 1996: 13; my translation); Carolingian bibles, as the image above shows, privileged the strip;

3. another strip: scenes from the Joshua Roll: a 10th century Byzantine rotulus almost four hundred inches long (ten meters), as published in Michel Melot's book who added (34): "images and texts overlap closely to tell, in a comic-like way, the first twelve chapters of the Book of Joshua;"

4. Romanesque image by Facundus (1047); page from Comentarios al Apocalipsis (commentary on the Apocalypse) by the Beatus of Liébana (w; 776);

5. page from the Moralia in Job (12th century); the characters talk with each other using phylacteries (the shepperd on the left tells Job and his wife how something bad happened; we see the event, in flashback, in the upper panel); Töpfferians love to say how phylacteries don't have the same function as modern balloons because they're more like labels; well, sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't: we can clearly see here how phylacteries serve the purpose of conveying direct speech (just like speech balloons do);

6. page from the Maciejowski Bible: http://www.medievaltymes.com/courtyard/maciejowski_images.htm (c. 1250); the architecture has the same function as the modern gutter in this four panelled page;

7. page from Al-Maqamat (the assemblies; 1237) by Abu Muhammad al Qasim ibn Ali al-Hariri (w) and Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti (a);

8. October in Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry (the very rich hours of the Duke of Berry; 1412 - 1416) by the Limbourg brothers; all twelve months are illustrated in this famous book (the palace that you see in the image is the Louvre in Paris);

9. the Liber de herbis (the book of herbs) by Monfredo de Monte Imperiali (14th century).

PS From Cave Paintings to the Internet, Manuscript Illumination Timeline: http://www.historyofscience.com/G2I/timeline/index.php?category=Manuscript+Illumination

Alfonso X's and Others' Cantigas de Santa Maria

2009-03-02T14:07:00.000-08:00

"The realm of the images began way before the 20th century." That's how the world's most renowned Middle Age comics specialist, Danièle-Alexandre Bidon, started her article "La bande dessinée avant la bande dessinée" (Le collectioneur de bandes dessinées - Hors série: Les origines de la bande dessinée, 1996: 11 - 20; the comics collector - one shot: the origins of comics; my translation). (Another Medieval comics scholar worth noting is Eckart Sackmann - in German -: http://www.comicforschung.de/tagungen/06nov/sackmann/06nov_sackmann1.html.)

Bidon's text and title were, later (2000), used as documentation and virtual exhibition title at the Bibliothèque nationale de France's site (the National Library of France): La BD avant la BD (http://expositions.bnf.fr/bdavbd/index.htm; there's an English, more abridged, version). Danièle was right. All through Medieval times (476 - 1456) books (codices) were illustrated (illuminated, sometimes copiously; according to her, a Bible could attain 5424 panels; ditto: 11). Since the Vienna Genesis (c. 540) or the codex Purpureus rossanensis (the purple codex from Rossano; c. 555) until later examples like Paul's, Hermann's and Jeantrès' (the Limbourg brothers) Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry (the very rich hours of the Duke of Berry; 1412 - 1416) the Middle Ages are a boon to great comics and great illustration lovers. My personal favorite work, among all this great corpus, was done by Romanesque Spanish artists, particularly the Comentarios al Apocalipsis (Commentary on the Apocalypse) by the Beatus of Liébana (w; 776), also known as the Facundus Beatus' (a; 1047) or the Fernando I's and Doña (lady) Sancha's Apocalypse (the patrons): http://www.moleiro.com/base.php?libro=BLFIYDS&idioma=en.
Another important phase in the illuminated manuscript's history is the Carolingian era with Vivien's Bible (or Charles the Bald's Bible; 845; abbot and king, respectively: http://expositions.bnf.fr/livres/vivien/index.htm) or the Moutier-Grandval's Bible.
Anyway, are all these books comics? As we must know by now, it all depends on our definition of the word. Danièle-Alexandre Bidon's definition is too orthodox to go beyond the proto-comics cliché. Besides, she published her essay in a magazine that significantly, and in a rather provocative way, accompanied the panel that occurred during the Rodolphe Töpffer exhibition in Angoulême (January, 26, 1996). Quite obviously, said exhibition tried to be an anti-comics centennial celebration, establishing Töpffer as the "father of the comic strip" at the same time. At such an undoubtedly French party, elitist Medieval comics were as unwelcomed as American mass distributed newspaper strips (Töpffer was a Swiss artist, by the way, but he wrote in French).
Even so the Cantigas de Santa Maria (songs to the Virgin Mary; c. 1270) by Alfonso X (the sage; 1221 -1284; king of Castile, Léon, Galicia) and other artists, were described by Bidon as "sequential narrative's [...] perfection." (14; my translation.) Whoever wrote the captions under the images on the La BD avant la BD exhibition asked, in a rhetorical way, if the Cantigas are: "The first comic book?", adding: "[It's]the Medieval manuscript that's closer to a Modern comic" (my translation).

The Cantigas de Santa Maria are four hundred and twenty seven poems narrating the Virgin Mary's miracles and lauding Her. Four books contain the cantigas (two have comics: one at the Escorial, the other in Florence). Music notations complete this Medieval "multimedia" book. The words are in Galician-Portuguese, one of the languages more frequently used to write poetry in the Iberian Peninsula at the time.
The Cantigas are an extraordinary window into life in 13th century Europe. Apart from that they are the result of an incredible comics skillfulness. Who were these comics artists from long ago, then? It's hard to tell, obviously... Gonzalo Menéndez-Pidal registers a few possible names (La España del Siglo XIII - 13th century Spain -, 1986: 35): D. Andrés, Pedro de Lourenço, Bonamic, Juan González (John Gundisalvi), Martínez Pérez de Maqueda, Juan Pérez, Pedro de Pamplona. The books were probably created in Seville showing a strong Arab influence. Menéndez-Pidal detected similarities between the Cantigas and Al-Maqamat (the assemblies; 1237) by Abu Muhammad al Qasim ibn Ali al-Hariri (w) and Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti (a). Lourenço, Gundisalvi (of those names we are certain), and the others, proved to be worthy of their Oriental inspirers. Like them, they were great visual storytellers... Their work remains unsurpassed, more than seven hundred years later...

Images and sounds:

1. a fragment of cantiga # 10, "Rosa das Rosas" (rose of all roses; Rose of all roses, Flower of all flowers, / Lady of all ladies, Liege of all lords, / Rose of beauty and truth / And flower of joy and of youth, / Lady enthroned in great holiness, / Liege Lord who bears our sorrows and sins.); The Renaissance Players (Mara Kiek, singer), translation by Jack Sage; this is, in my opinion, the best vocal interpretation of a cantiga that I have ever listened to; an ancient music performer still has to bring the primary material to life, it's not enough to be archeological; that's what the great Mara Kiek does... no one seems to achieve this goal quite like her; here's another example (Martin Codax, Galician poet, 13th century): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhrtApWvyjg&feature=related;

2. this is a moving curio: the caption at the beginning tells us that Françoise Atlan (a French singer of Jewish descent) is going to sing a certain Cantiga Morena (brown song), but what she really sings are two songs being the first one "Rosa das Rosas;" this is erroneously presented as a Sephardic song ("Sepharad" is Hebrew for "Spain"); Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, so, for me it's moving to see "Rosa das Rosas" sung and played in Morocco; it kind of brings the Moorish influence back, five hundred years later, by the hand of a Jewish tradition; call me a Romantic, but, to me, it's the very best of three cultures!; a contemporary reminder of a brief period in Toledo's history when the three Monotheistic religions coexisted peacefully (I kind of miss Mara, though);

3. cantiga # 101 by Eduardo Paniagua's Musica Antigua group (a man who was mute and deaf went to Soissons; at the altar, he moaned and gestured, asking for the Virgin to come to his aid; the Virgin appeared to him and touched his face; She loosened his tongue and opened his ears; blood flowed from them; the man praised the Virgin; summary found, here: http://csm.mml.ox.ac.uk/index.php?p=poemdata_view&rec=101);

4. a facsimile of the Escorial's Códice Rico (the rich codex; Edilán, 1979) showing the three art forms in presence: comics, literature, music.

Peter Blegvad's Leviathan - Coda

2009-02-26T15:49:00.000-08:00

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Images:

1. illustration by Peter Blegvad's father, Erik: The Last of the Wizards by Rona Jaffe (Simon & Schuster, 1961); as found, here: http://www.vintagechildrensbooksmykidloves.com/2008/08/last-of-wizards.html; 2., 3. two of Leviathan's comic strips (The Independent on Sunday, 1992 - 1998);

2. Levi is amazed when he discovers his real ancestors in this self-referential strip;

3. Leviathan's author, Thomas Hobbes, speaks his mind;

4., 5. two The Pedestrian playful strips (The Independent on Sunday, 1999 - 2000);

6. Filling Tooth's cover (Amateur Enterprises, 2001); in the last two pages of this mini-comic Peter Blegvad plays with an afterimage; it's amazing how the afterimage phenomenon has been completely forgotten by comics creators (I can only thing of another example: two pages in Andrzej Klimowski's The Secret (Faber and Faber, 2002);

7. page from The Ganzfeld # 2 (The Kaput Press Inc., 2002);

8. the ugly "Anatomy of a [musical] "Hit"" (detail; Cartoonists on Music: The Comics Journal Special Edition, Volume Two - Summer, 2002); I especially like the "shred of decency" on the right;

9. strip from the "Sir Bold" series (Cartoonists on Patriotism: The Comics Journal Special Edition, Volume Three - Winter, 2003).

PS There are one hundred and twenty comic strips in The Book of Leviathan (if I'm not mistaken). Three hundred and seventy seven were published in The Independent on Sunday during the strip's run. Where are the remaining two hundred and fifty seven?...

Fantagraphics? Drawn and Quarterly? Anyone?...

Peter Blegvad's Leviathan

2009-02-22T02:00:00.000-08:00

Peter Blegvad is a musician who also makes comics. Or is it the other way around? Either way he's brilliant creating in whichever medium he chooses to do so. Blegvad is highly intelligent, playful, and always fun. In other words: he's pretty much the opposite of what I usually put in my canon (dead serious geniuses). In The Book of Leviathan's (Overlook Press, 2001 [The Independent on Sunday, 1992 - 1998]) inside cover's blurb, someone wrote: "Quirky and referential, dark and droll by turn, [the strip] follows the faceless baby Levi's journeys [Levi's short for the ironically dubbed Leviathan] into and out of the world. They are escapes, but as some sage once observed, only a jailer would consider the term "escapist" pejorative." She's or he's right: being one of the "jailers" I definitely want to grasp greatness. The problem (if there's one) is that The Book of Leviathan is far from being an escapist book. One needs just to read Levi's first "adventure (http://www.leviathan.co.uk/orpheus/orpheus01.htm)," an incredibly dark take on Orpheus' myth, to easily understand that. Rafi Zabor nailed Blegvad's style in the book's intro using just two words: "intelligent surrealism" (in case you didn't notice it, the expression is, in a rather Blegvadian way, an oxymoron, or so wanted the surrealists to make us believe...). A fine observer of what surrounds us, it seems to me that Peter Blegvad turns the world inside out to see its linings.In the book The Education of a Comic Artist (Michael Dooley and Steve Heller, eds., Allworth Press, School of Visual Arts, 2005), Peter Blegvad described his background (98 - 100): "My father, Erik, has illustrated more than a hundred children's books. My mother, Lenore, has written several. My education began with their examples and encouragement." He goes on to cite the artists that were represented in the family's library: Saul Steinberg, James Thurber, Maurice Sendak, Edward Gorey, Palle Nilsen, and many others....Blegvad described Leviathan, the character, as (according to this article by Mike Zwerin:http://www.iht.com/articles/1999/07/07/bleg.2.t.php): "a quizzical and querulous infant whose most distinctive feature was his lack of features. His face was a tabula rasa, symbolic of his embryonic identity. It was a sort of willfully esoteric, woozily stoned subversion of the genre of which 'Calvin and Hobbes' is perhaps the mainstream paradigm. [...] 'Leviathan' sometimes baffled readers, as it did myself. My narratives frequently failed completely. In such cases, I told myself, 'understanding is overrated.' I think I mystified and alienated a lot of people. But the English like to be mystified, as long as you do it with the right poetic spin." The Book of Leviathan's first edition was titled Book of Leviathan (Sort of Books, 2000)."The Pedestrian" (The Independent on Sunday, 1999 - 2000) was inspired by Baudelaire's and Robert Walser's concept of the Flaneur. I called "The Pedestrian" a kosuthian strip on this blog already. Speaking of which: Narrative Art (one of the branches of Conceptual Art) and this post, remind me that Jochen Gerz and Jean le Gac should also be part of my comics canon.

Images and sounds:
Slapp Happy (Peter Blegvad, Dagmar Krause, Anthony Moore): "Mr. Rainbow," "The Secret," "Slow Moon's Rose" from the album Casablanca Moon (1974); "Nine Mineral Emblems," from the progressive rock album Kew. Rhone. (1977): Peter Blegvad, John Greaves, Lisa Herman; other collaborations: Andrew Cyrille, Mike Mantler, Carla Bley, Michael Levine, Vito Rendance, April Lang, Dana Johnson, Boris Kinberg.

PS Blogs and etc...
http://www.amateur.org.uk/
http://www.amateur.org.uk/blegblog.php

Leviathan:
http://www.leviathan.co.uk/

Peter Blegvad's Eartoon:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/freethinking/2007/playback/

The Pedestrian (even if you don't have to, please pay € 1.50; I did):http://www.electrocomics.com/weekly/weeklydata/Blegvad/html/en_Blegvad46.html

A bibliodiscography:
http://idiot-dog.com/music/blegvad.peter/indexb.html

Frans Masereel's La ville - Coda # 2

2009-02-18T13:17:00.000-08:00

Images:

1. illustration for Roland de Marès' book La Belgique Envahie (Belgium invaded), George Cres & Co., 1915; as published in Frans Masereel (Kunst und Gesellschaft - art and co. -, 1990); Frans Masereel's early, more detailed, style: it was in Switzerland, where Masereel lived (1916 - 1922), that his Expressionist graphic style flourished;

2. image from "Les morts parlent," (the dead talk) as published in Holzschnitte gegen den Krieg (woodcuts against the war) Insel-Verlag, 1989 [Les Tablettes - the tablets -, 1917]); Masereel's Anti-Capitalism dully explains his Pacifism (and vice-versa); WWI was, in his view, just a squaring of accounts among Capitalists; I fully agree with him: poor people die in rich people's wars, that's all...; all other considerations are just well orchestrated lies; "Les morts parlent" is a a dance macabre, a totentanz, a dance of death;

3. the last page of Frans Masereel's most celebrated book: Mon livre d'heures (A. Kundig, 1919)... as published in Passionate Journey (Penguin Books, 1987); I fully agree with Nick Mullins on this one: "Passionate Journey is still an important work and it's a fun romp that celebrates life while thumbing it's nose at authority. However, The City gives us a broader and deeper look at the human experience.": http://www.nijomu.com/reviews.html ;

4. image from Grotesk Film as published in Grotesk Film (Nautilus, 1996 [J.B. Neumann, 1920]); a great portrait of greed;

5. image from La ville (Albert Morancé, 1925) as published in The City (Schoken Books, 1988); over the factory's main entrance (and in other parts of the city linked to entertainment) Masereel drew concentric circles denoting the spread of light, but also connoting an hypnotist's disk (only alienation prevents blue color workers from revolting against exploitation);

6. Place Pigalle in Paris (detail): painting done in 1925 (La ville's year of publication); the disks, again...;

7. an elliptical suicide as published in Von Schwarz zu Weiss (from black to white; Zweitausendeins - two thousand and one -, 1989 [Du noir au blanc, Verlag Oprecht, 1939]);

8. WWII inspired a new totentanz (in Masereel's "white style," this time): image (detail) from Dance Macabre (Büchse der Pandora - Pandora's box -, 1981 [Herbert Lang, 1941]);

9. Die Passion eines Menschen's (one man's passion) last page as published by Zweitausendeins, 1989 (Images de la passion d'un homme, self-published, 1918); if you claim for justice: they fire at you in a dictatorship, you get fired in a democracy...

Frans Masereel's La ville - Coda # 1

2009-02-16T10:45:00.000-08:00

Images:

1., 2., 3. two Expressionist woodcuts and an etching with aquatint; Kirchner and Dix are examples of the cultural zeitgeist that was highly influential in Frans Masereel’s work;

1. the 4th annual Die Brücke’s portfolio’s cover by ELK (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner), 1909;

2. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Frauen am Potsdamer Platz (women on Potsdamer Platz; 1914);

3. Otto Dix: Sturmtrupp Geht unter Gas vor; shock troops advancing under a gas attack; Der Krieg (the war; Nierendorf, 1924);

4. Page from Maestro, by Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré’s nom de plume) as published by the Musée de la Bande Dessinée (the comics museum) in Angoulême, 1999; Maestro is an unfinished (and unpublished) novel in pictures drawn at the end of the 19th century;

5. a curio: drawing by Balthus as published in Mitsou (Payot & Rivages, 2001 [Rotapfel-Verlag Erlenbachm, 1921]); Balthus was thirteen years old when he drew this book;

6. page from Schicksal, Eine Geschicte in Bildern by Otto Nückel as published in Destiny, a Novel in Pictures (Farrar & Rinehart, 1930 [1928?]); the novel’s main character contemplates suicide; these Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) beautifully done verist leadcuts remind silent films; the fact that we rarely see the woman’s face counterbalances the sometimes excessive melodramatics of the story;

7. page from Alay-Oop by William Gropper as published in David Beronä’s Wordless Books (2008 [1930]); in the same way as Otto Nückel, William Gropper shows lower working class women’s difficult lives;

8. three images from "Vertigo" as published in Storyteller Without Words, the Wood Engravings of Lynd Ward (Abrams, 1974 [Random House, 1937]); as we can see, words weren’t completely absent from this storyteller’s oeuvre; Lynd Ward’s art deco inspired drawings are frequently kitsch, but many of his compagnons de route, Masereel included, are also guilty of the same sin (mainly because they were left wing idealists, of course);

9. a new Masereel?, page from Eric Drooker's Flood! (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1992); Flood! isn't completely wordless because it has four pages with captions and direct speech; two other artists who could be included on this post are Peter Kuper and Chris Lanier.

Frans Masereel's La ville

2009-02-15T04:01:00.000-08:00

3.

4.

5.

As many other terms in comics the expression "wordless comics" is a misnomer (we've seen "comics" about the holocaust and "comic books" that are magazines, for instance). Words may appear in these comics as part of the drawings (as store signs, hotel signs, letters, etc...). Another possibility is "mute comics," but it's another misnomer because the characters are allowed to talk to each other. We just don't read what they're saying, as in most comics, or we read what they're saying as images or visual metaphors. "Pantomime comics" is even worst because the characters don't communicate through sign language. I could call them "iconic comics," I suppose (if the image of a written word is still a pure icon, that is), but I kind of like the word "wordless," so, "wordless" it is, misnomer and all...
Another related problem is: can I call these comics, "comics?" Most people call them "picture stories" or "woodcut [or engraving, or etching] cycles." But, in the latter case, they're just describing the technique which produced the images. It's as if I called a comic: a drawing cycle. Anyway, even if I'm the only one to call many of these stories "comics" (including them in the expanded field), Frans Masereel's woodcut cycles are frequently co-opted to the comics field. The same thing happens to Otto Nückel's Schicksal, Eine Geschicte in Bildern (destiny, a story in pictures; Delphin Verlag, n. d. [in Wordless Books, Abrams, 2008, David Beronä conjectures: 1928] or Lynd Ward's oeuvre). Since I mentioned Wordless Books, the subtitle is: The Original Graphic Novels (see what I mean?).

Schiksal's original drawings were leadcut prints (István Szeguedi Szütz's My War's [John Lane, 1931] and William Gropper's Alay-Oop's [Coward-McCann, 1930] original art are drawings) but Frans Masereel and almost all the others (Lynd Ward, Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová, Giacomo Patri, James Reid, Laurence Hyde) did their original art with woodcuts or wood engravings. I don't know if it's correct to join all these different artists, living in different countries, under one label and call them an artists' group (?). Probably not, but they were pacifists and their politics (maybe with James Reid's and Bochořáková-Dittrichová's exception) leaned to the left. Talking about Masereel, then, there are two reasons for his chosen technique. One is pratical (used with broad lines woodcut is adequate to the urgency of his drawings during WWI in Geneva's newspaper La feuille; the leaf). The other is cultural and related to Germany (even if Frans Masereel was, not Hergé, the best Belgian comics artist that ever lived): "under the influence of the paintings of Vincent van Gogh and the Fauves and the prints of Munch, and inspired by the early German workshops of Lucas Cranach I, Albrecht Dürer and others, the artists of Die Brücke ([the bridge] first in Dresden, then in Berlin) brought about the most significant revival of the woodcut as an avant-garde expressive in the 20th century. Rejecting (and rejected by) the formal academies and Secession group (Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, Max Slevogt and others), whose leading artists produced sumptuous and painterly etchings and lithographs during the 19th-century printmaking revival, the artists of Die Brücke set up the Neue Secession, an exhibition group, and, while also working in other printmaking media, adopted the woodcut as their most powerful means of expression. They quickly abandoned a decorative fin-de-siècle style (c. 1906), and, combining European influences with African motifs and forms known to them from the recent discoveries of European explorers and exhibits in the ethnographic collections in Dresden, they worked aggressively on the woodblocks to produce sharp angles, broad diagonals and roughly hewn, shaded patches. Each of the four leading artists of Die Brücke (Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff) all created primitive nudes of haunting beauty or savagery, startling and intense portraits, and vivid and dynamic landscapes and townscapes. [...]The woodcut flourished all over Germany until World War II in an explosion of printmaking activity that included the production of numbers of fine portfolios, such as German Graphics of the Present (Leipzig, 1920) and Ganymede (Munich, 1919–25), and the inclusion of original woodcuts in literary publications, such as Der Zweemann (Hannover, 1919–26) and Genius (Leipzig, 1919–21) and Socialist political pamphlets including Revolution (Munich, 1913) and Die Aktion (Berlin, 1911–32), in which woodcut was considered as a medium worthy of proletarian political art." (Katharina Mayer Haunton, here: http://www.moma.org/collection/details.php?theme_id=10219&section_id=T092193). The woodcut was humbler, cheaper, more democratic than oil painting.

Frans Masereel's La ville (the city; Albert Morancé, 1925) not only could fit the above formal description, it also shared Die Brücke's ambivalent view of the city. On the one hand they believed in Nietzsche's critique of modern life, on the other hand they, like the Futurists, were fascinated by its energy.

Frans Masereel's La ville is, like Hokusai's Fugako hyakkei, an example of the panoptical view that we can find in what I called: the locus. What he mostly sees though, is exploitation, alienation, poverty, sickness, despair, death, desire, drunkenness. Conversely he just puts on the other balance plate: love, poetry, and not much else... (he certainly liked cats...) Masereel's city is as black as woodcut ink. I can't say, after all these years, that I disagree with him... greed continues to be the creed...

Images:

1., 2., 3. Frans Masereel's self-portraits:

1. at twenty in Art Nouveau style: 1909;

2. 1925 (detail);

3. 1957;

4. La feuille's front page with a politically naive cartoon by Masereel (November, 23, 1917);

5. still from Berthold Bartosch's animation film L'idée (The Idea) (1932; music by Arthur Honegger) based on various picture stories by Frans Masereel.

PS Frans Masereel's La ville:
http://www.graphicwitness.org/historic/s01.html

Frans Masereel's Geschichte Ohne Worte (story without words; K. Wolff, 1922):

http://picasaweb.google.com/bremaneur/GeschichteOhneWorte#slideshow

Aristophane's Les soeurs Zabîme - Coda

2009-02-10T15:44:00.000-08:00

Images:

1. Jun and Edith (aka Reggae-Sweeky) on Aristophane's first book's cover: Logorrhée (Le Lézard, 1993 [drawn in 1988, 1989]),

2. Loghorrée's first page cites Little Nemo by Winsor McCay (even if it isn't a bad book at all Logorrhée is far from hinting at what would come next...);

3. the first episode of Aristophane's "Le vieux Samson" (old Samson; Le cheval sans tête - first series - # 3, September, 1994); a similar process happened to Aristophane's drawing style and Edmond Baudoin's: both loosened their ways using brushes only; in this story Aristophane uses washes, but they appeared too dark in Le cheval sans tête's pages...;

4. ...maybe that's why he gave up the aforementioned washes to create his distinctive black and white impressionist technique: "Le vieux Samson Crow" (the old Samson Crow; Le cheval sans tête - first series - # 5, 1995); Samson Crow's daily life stories remind Robert Crumb's musicians' bios;

5. Aristophane revisits Logorrhée in his new style already; Jun and Edith are Quiaozhen and Mouna, now: "La mauvaise odeur" (the bad smell), Bananas # 3 (Summer, 1995);

6. "At dusk the bodies dress in warm colors." / "The sun bids them good-bye in a pompous way, wishing them a good rest." / "They will greet it at dawn in a new set, in a new warmness." / "But some who are tired of greetings lay on the ground and never see the sunrise again." / "That's how old myths die.": Faune by Aristophane, Amok, 1995;

7. page from Conte démoniaque (L'Association, 1996); it's in this epic story that Jack Kirby's influence is detectable in Aristophane's oeuvre; some panels quote Kirby's famous machinery, but, here, what's being quoted is Kirby's igneous matter; the ecstatic hate, to quote one of the book's chapters ("Haine extatique"), reaches its logical conclusion: total destruction (the human form is Leviathan; Aristophane inverts the goat, Marduk, instead of inverting the pentacle);

8. Les soeurs Zabîme's frontispiece illustration and book dedication: "This modest work is dedicated to the divine / to the only one whose substance is the whole / and is in all of us. / As a sign of my devotion." (Ego comme x, 1996); Aristophane's work is one of the few in comics to seriously address religious matters;

9. page from Les soeurs Zabîme: by varying the brush strokes' thickness Aristophane got visual contrasts, defocusing effects, and chronochromatisms (cf.: last panel); the body language of his characters is always remarkable.

PS Hail, hail, the gang’s all here:

http://tinyurl.com/46q2rrk

Aristophane's Les soeurs Zabîme

2009-02-07T04:24:00.000-08:00

"I was born in 1967 in Guadaloupe and I arrived in Paris in August 1975.

It was while reading American comics [just "comics" in the original text], particularly those by Jack Kirby, that I have begun loving comics ["bande dessinée" in the original text]. Kirby is my first and indelible influence.

I attended different art schools over six years, two of which at the fine arts school in Paris where I discovered what's drawing really about and the importance of an expressive research.

A friend of mine told me a phrase by our teacher, it was roughly like this:

"Everything was already explored in painting, everything was already done. The future lies in comics."

I have, after hearing them, those words always on my mind."

That's how Aristophane (Firmin Aristophane Boulon) presented himself in the pages of Critix magazine (It wasn't a fanzine because critics are rational beings and fanatics are not), issue # 2 (Winter, 1996 - 1997, my translation). The best year in comics, ever, 1996, started with Aristophane's great Conte démoniaque (demonic tale; L'Association - the association -, January) and ended, always under Aristophane's sign, with an extended dossier about him in the aforementioned Critix # 2.

Critix (1993 - 2001), with Bruno Lecigne's Controverse (controversy; 1985 - 1986) and, more recently, Jean-Christophe Menu's L'éprouvette (the test piece; 2006 - 2007) are my canon of specialized non-academic critical magazines about comics (Barthelemy Schwartz's and Balthazar Kaplan's - two noms de plume - Dorénavant - henceforth -, 1985 - 1989 - is in a class of its own and deserves a post on The Crib). The Comics Journal (1977, ongoing) and Les cahiers de la bande dessinée (the comics notebooks; the Groensteen years, of course: 1984 - 1988) are missing links with some hits, but also with a lot of misses. Both mags do (and did, respectively) too many concessions to children's comics (the so-called mainstream) and other utterly mediocre stuff (that's, in my humble opinion, one of comics criticism's main problems: for comics critics everything is equally mature, equally ambitious, equally good; in a word, the main problem with comics criticism is: overrating). 9e art (ninth art; 1996, ongoing) isn't bad, but the institutional weight of the CNBDI (national centre of comics and images) didn't help. (Two other great comics mags were Thierry Lagarde's STP - 1976 - 1979, and Franck Aveline's L'indispensable - the indispensable -, 1998 - 1999; Bang!'s last years, around 1975 - 1977, isn't bad either.) My mag's canon inclusion above doesn't mean that Critix was totally overrating free though. Nobody's perfect...

Its a rare privilege to read a critical text by one of the best comics artists in the pantheon. That's what a body can do in Critix # 2: Fabrice Neaud reviewed Conte démoniaque (37 - 53) and he did it superbly. In the same issue Renaud Chavanne also reviewed Conte démoniaque (54 - 64) and Évariste Blanchet wrote a short note about Aristophane's Les soeurs Zabîme (65, 66). Les soeurs Zabîme (the Zabîme sisters) was published by Ego comme x (a word play meaning "ego comix") in 1996; three short stories were also published in Ego comme x magazine - # 2 - 4, 1994, 1995.) If we don't take into consideration his short stories, published in various anthologies and his first book Logorrhée (logorrhea; Le Lézard, 1993), Faune (faun; Amok, 1995 [Lapin # 2, July, 1992]) completes Aristophane's major oeuvre. A very short list, unfortunately...

In his three great books Aristophane touches the same theme: evilness is an important part of being human. Conte démoniaque is a three hundred pages epic set in hell, but all the demons' cruelty, hubris, will to power, unequivocally remind us of our own world. Faune's subtitle is self explanatory: "L'histoire d'un immoral" - an immoral one's tale. The reason why I like Les soeurs Zabîme so much is because you expect a demon and a faun to obey their own evil instincts. What's a bit unexpected, at least in comics' bowdlerized world, is to find the exact same reactions in children. The Zabîme sisters and their friends are simply some of the best characterizations in comics. The subtlety of the situations and the truthfulness of the characters' reactions are on a par with Proust's best pages.

In Aristophane's short story "La prière du voyageur à la mère universelle" (the wanderer's prayer to the universal mother; Ego comme x, # 5, 1997) the traveller begs (my translation): "Oh, divinity, purify me. turn me into a perfect man, worthy of you" / "As all answer he listened to the same eurythmic murmur: "Your goal is not human, your goal is superhuman.""

Aristophane died prematurely in 2004, he was thirty seven years old. In the doubtful assumption that he wouldn't quit comics, like so many did, and continue to do, I can only imagine what this great artist would give us in his future. Our present...

Images:

Critix # 2's cover showing Marduk, one of the demons in Aristophane's Conte démoniaque; Aristophane in a 1994 photo caught, here: http://www.old-coconino.com/sites_auteurs/aristophane/index.html

PS The first article in Critix # 1 (second series; Fall, 1996) by Jean-Philippe Martin (in French):

http://www.bananas-comix.com/archives/theorie-du-zero-pourcent.pdf

A short story by Aristophane done during his years at Angoulême (in French):

http://www.old-coconino.com/modules/aristophane/gossesbig/gossesbig00.htm

Katsushika Hokusai's Fugaku hyakkei - Coda

2009-02-01T16:38:00.000-08:00

Images:

1. "Sumo Wrestlers" by Hayashi Moriatsu: Gasen (the painting hoop net), vol. 5, 1721, as published in Hokusai, First Manga Master by Jocelyn Bouquillard and Christophe Marquet (Abrams, 2007 [Seuil, 2007]); not only didn't Hokusai coin the word "manga," he didn't even invent the concept... he was "just" stunningly talented, that's all...;

2., 3. they may be done in a descriptive rather than narrative spirit, but comic sequences are definitely part of Hokusai's Manga:

2. vol. 10, 1819 (as published in Hokusai, First Manga Master): travelling performers: the game of the hundred grimaces and the high jump (Hokusai was obcessed by the number; he wanted to achieve, at least, one hundred years);

3. vol. 12, 1834 (ditto): Daruma, founder of the Ch'an sect, grimacing;

4. a truly narrative sequence of two images in Fugakku hyakkei (all the following images, but the last two were caught on the link below): "Fuji no yamaaki" (the opening of Fuji), "Suberi" (sliding down): Fujikō religion pilgrims slowly ascend and rapidly descent Mt. Fuji (the images as well as the image sequences must be read from right to left);

5. right: Hokusai represents the daily work of the common people ("Hizami no Fuji" - Fuji carved; soldiers preparing a meal); left: as written on the Emerald Tablet: "that which is inferior, or below, is as that which is superior or above" (translation by John Everard); Hokusai repeats the form of the Fuji in the people's bodies: here ("Sōchū no Fuji" - Fuji in a window), Kawamura Minsetsu forms the triangle with his arms while yawning;

6. two of Hokusai's favorite topics: water and work ("Shinshū Yatsugatake no Fuji" - Fuji and Yatsugatake in Shinshū); Yatsugatake is a volcanic chain of mountains; the water is lake Suwa; 7. "Kaijō no Fuji" (Fuji at sea): Hokusai returns to his famous great wave, but he inverts the reading order; now, the eye flows with the water, it doesn't confront it; plus, the visual poetry suggests the visual metaphor: bird/foam... the harmony of nature...;

8., 9. original drawings (check out this great site: http://www.hokusai-drawings.com/):

8. Chinese hero overpowering three tigers (mid 1820's);

9. a comparison of an original drawing by Hokusai and the printed work: Bei bei kyōdan (a rustic tale of two heirs) vol. 4, 1815 (words by Bakin Kyokutei).

Bibliography re. Fugaku hyakkei: Hokusai, One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji by Henry D. Smith (George Braziller, 2001 [1988]).

Bibliography re. Hokusai manga: Hokusai, First Manga Master by Jocelyn Bouquillard and Christophe Marquet (Abrams, 2007 [Seuil, 2007]).

PS You may read Fugaku hyakkei, here: http://www.degener.com/a_1606.htm;

Hokusai manga (abbreviated title) Vol. 1: http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/1834/manga1/index.htm ; Denshin kaishu Hokusai manga (complete title: education of beginners through the spirit of things, random sketches by Hokusai; "random sketches" is another possible translation for the word "manga"); translation found on the link below;

Here's how Hokusai Manga looks like: http://www.akantiek.eu/print/hokset.jpg.

Katsushika Hokusai's Fugaku hyakkei

2009-01-29T10:37:00.000-08:00

One of the more enduring myths in the comics milieu is the one that states Katsushika Hokusai's coining of the word "manga" around 1814 (the word today means "comics," but it meant "sketches," to say it simply, or, according to Frederik L. Schodt in Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, 1989 [1983], Kodansha: 18: "whimsical sketches"). Mitsugu Katayori explained (International Journal of Comic Art, Vol. 7, # 2, Fall/Winter, 2005: 48): "The word manga in the phrase Hokusai Manga [a generic title to designate fifteen woodblock-printed volumes - manuals to painters - published between 1814 - # 1 - and 1834 - # 12 -; three posthumous volumes were published between 1849 and 1878] comes from the word manzen, which means browsing aimlessly. A long time ago, in China, there was a bird called Mangachuko. It had long legs and ate shellfish from the river. Hokusai imaged the bird when he named the collection of his drawings. He sketched as much scenery as possible, like this bird that picked up anything and everything, browsing in the river." Santō Kyōden used the word "manga" before Hokusai in the kibyōshi (yellow covers) picture book: Shiki no yukikai (seasonal passersby), 1798 (Adam L. Kern, International Journal of Comic Art, Vol. 9, # 1, Spring, 2007: 23; see above). Adam even registers older uses of the word: "the term appears even earlier than Seasonal Passersby, within the text of Suzuki Kankyō's Miscellany of Comic Scribbles (Mankaku zuihitsu) of 1777 -- well over three decades prior to Hokusai's use in his title. And a couple years earlier than that, Hanabusa Itchō (1652-1724) used the Chinese graphs for manga -- though glossing them to be read as mankaku -- in the title of a work (Mankaku zukōgun chōkakukei, 1769)" (ditto: 24). The little rub that made me wonder in the above quote was: how come someone who died in 1724 wrote a book in 1769? That's when I put the www to good use and asked the excellent essay's author on the Plat list. Here's what he answered (Jun, 22, 2007): "Hanabusa Itcho produced "Mankaku zukogun chokakukei" as a manuscript sometime during his lifetime -- nobody knows precisely when -- but it was only published posthumously in 1769." Thanks again for your kind answer, Adam! This proves that trying to find firsts is a tricky business. If asked though, I would say now that, until proven wrong, Hanabusa Itchō coined the term, probably during the late 17th to early 18th century.

Fugako hyakkei is a religious book. As Henry D. Smith put it in his great intro to One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji (George Braziller, 2001 [1988]: 7): "One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji is a work of such unending visual delight that it is easy to overlook its underlying spiritual intent. Hokusai was, as he prefaced his signature, "Seventy-five Years of Age" when the first volume of the work appeared in 1834, and his effort to capture the great mountain from every angle, in every context, was in the deepest sense a prayer for the gift of immortality that lay hidden within the heart of the volcano. By showing life itself in all its shifting forms against the unchanging form of Fuji, with the vitality and wit that inform every page of the book, he sought not only to prolong his own life but in the end to gain admission to the realm of the Immortals." Fugakku hyakkei was published in three volumes. The colophon of book one has Katsushika Hokusai's famous declaration (henry D. Smith's translation, ditto: 7): "From the age of six I had a penchant for copying the form of things, and from about fifty, my pictures were frequently published; but until the age of seventy, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice. At seventy-three years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects, and fish. Thus when I reach eighty years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at ninety to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at one hundred years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive. Those of you who live long enough, bear witness that these words of mine prove not false. Told by Gabyō Rōjin Manji" (Manji [Hokusai's last name in a long list], old man mad about painting; see the original Japanese text in image # 4, above).

Fugaku hyakkei is part of comics' expanded field, I guess. I see no reasons, other than the usual sociological ones, to exclude this marvelous book from the restrict field though. Comics are both narrative and descriptive. This is a descriptive book: it depicts life, in all its forms (even the imaginary ones). Descriptions are usually on the background while the story unfolds in the foreground. Hokusai brings the former to center stage, but, as we'll see below, he did even more than that...

In the chapter "The Impossible Definition" of his book Système de la bande dessinée (Presses Universitaires de France, 1999) Thierry Gröensteen starts almost rejecting essentialism ("it has become almost impossible to retain any definitive criteria that is universaly held to be true": 14; translation by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen) to later invoke a "foundation principle" ("their common denominator and, therefore, the central element of comics, the first criteria in the foundational order, is iconic solidarity:" 18). If that's not hardcore essentialism (not to mention old school Structuralism) I don't know what essentialism is. But, anyway, to be as incoherent as Gröensteen, I'll use his "foundational principle" to say that, there's no doubt about it: Hokusai's images in Fugaku hyakkei show iconic solidarity in the highest degree. The link between all the one hundred and two images being the triangular form of the mountain. I also want to put a geometry concept on the comics theory table (Hokusai loved geometry, by the way...): the idea of locus (the totality of all points, satisfying a given condition; the locus, as applied to comics, is a third way between narration and description). That's certainly what Hokusai did around Mt. Fuji: he searched for geographical points, hither and yon, from where the mountain could be seen. But that's also what every other comics artist does... all the time... even if their Mt. Fujis are called Mongo, or Metropolis... even if their points are just figments of their fertile imaginations...

Images:

1. page from Shiki no yukikai by Santō Kyōden (w) and Kitao Shigemasa (a) (1798); the word "manga" (漫画) can be seen in the fifth column from the left (second) at the bottom (as published in the aforementioned page of the IJOCA);

2. a "Falcon Feather" (first edition) copy of Fugaku hyakkei (hundred views of Mount Fuji, 1834; cover);

3. "Kanagawa oki nami ura" (the great wave off Kanagawa): print # 1 of Fugaku Sanjūrokkei (thirty six views of Mount Fuji; 1826 - 1833):

4. Fugaku hyakkei's colophon's first page as published in One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji (George Braziller, 2001 [1988]): the fifth column (second) includes the declaration translated above; the seal (originally in red) represents Mt. Fuji and the I Ching trigrame for lake; in the fourth column (third) appears the name of the engraver: Egawa Tomekichi.

PS Book twelve of Katsushika Hokusai's Manga (sketches; 1834):http://www.touchandturn.com/hokusai/default.asp?lang=english
Richard Kruml's ukiyo-e (images of the floating world):
http://www.japaneseprints-london.com/index.html

Felipe Hernández Cava's and Pablo Auladell's Soy mi sueño - Coda

2009-01-25T10:57:00.000-08:00

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Images:

1. El Cubri's take on Neocolonialism in comics (Burne Hogarth's "Tarzan," obviously); "Este es su heroe," - this is your hero -, Bang! # 10, 1973); in El Cubri's opinion the real heroes are the Africans who fought colonialism;

2. more from El Cubri: "One small step..." / "for a man..." / "...one giant leap..." / "...for mankind."; the third world waits for the benefits of such a great leap (after all these years it's still waiting, in fact); El Cubri's creations are closer to visual poetry than they're closer to children's traditional comics; what's interesting is that, even if they worked with expanded field's precepts, they viewed themselves as part of the restrict field (i. e.: the comics milieu): "Apolo XI," Bang! Trocha # 2 (July, 1977);

3. Wounded Knee, December, 15, 1890 - February, 1, 1973 (my translation): "That's where a people's dream ended" / "No, we say. The dream of the Indian people isn't dead. Today, more than ever, the dream is open." "De un genocidio... De un etnocidio" (on a genocide... on an ethnocide..."), Felipe Hernández Cava (w), Luis Garcia (a): Bang! Troya # 5 (September, 1977); the composition reminds me of Il quarto stato (the fourth state), a painting by Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo, 1901;

4. "Chicharras" (cicadas), Bang! # 13 (1977); an early autobio comic by Luis Garcia with the collaboration of Felipe Hernández Cava in the dialogues;

5. Cava in an humorous tone: drawings by Raúl (Fernández Calleja): Medios Revueltos (mixed media) # 1 (1988);

6. Federico del Barrio at the height of his powers: a great page from Lope de Aguirre, La conjura (Lope de Aguirre, the conspiracy), Ikusager, 1993; Felipe Hernández Cava, w;

7. the final page of Lope de Aguirre, La expiación (Lope de Aguirre, the atonement), Felipe Hernández Cava, w; "Rebel until I die because of your ingratitude, Lope de Aguirre, pilgrim;" Aguirre's last words in his famous letter addressed to king Philip II of Spain (1561; my translation); great art by Ricard Castells: this quasi-abstract page sums up all the drama in a brilliant way: it reminds me of Milton's last words in Samson Agonists: "And calm of mind all passion spent." (Milton, Penguin Books, 1985 [1671]: 288); this is the calm of death, as the desolate landscape proves, drawing a cross (but the seed was planted for Bolívar and Martin, as the script hints);

8. Que Podemos Fazer? (what can we do?, 2000): a comic published in Portugal with script by Felipe Hernández Cava and drawings by Monique Bruillard; it's a very short story about two International Brigades' volunteers (one from Germany, the other from the UK); the story ends exactly when they're entering Spain by train: it's as if Felipe Hernández Cava is reluctant in addressing the big one (is he?);

9. page about the war crime that was the bombing of Dresden; Soy mi sueño, Edicions De Ponent, 2008.