Dressage

It's always a special day when I receive a great comic...

Gustave-Henri Jossot, "Dressage," L'Assiete au Beurre # 144, January 1904.

PS  I forgot Harvey Pekar in my last post, but I don't consider American Splendor to be an underground publication. For me it's the first alternative comic book.

Weird Facts - Coda

This is an anti-coda, really... In a true Derridadian spirit I'll try in this post to deny everything I wrote in my last one. I will not be able to do it completely (sorry Derrida!), but I will surely try...

So, here are, according to yours truly, the great exceptions that prove the rule...

Weird Event # 1: 19th century: comics are associated with humor and caricature.

I can't say that humor and caricature produced great works of comics art during the 19th century, but there were great artists trying (or not, I guess...). I mean Gustave Doré, when he was really young unfortunately, or the Chat Noir people, for instance... In the 20th century though, there's the towering figure of Saul Steinberg and one of his great disciples (THE great disciple surpassing the master?), Chago Armada. But I'm cheating because their work is very thinly disguised poetry (the humor, if it exists at all, is a very secondary byproduct):

Chago Armada, "Salomon," 1960s (as published in Signos # 21, 1978).

Weird Event # 2: 19th, early 20th centuries: comics are children's literature.

Two words: Carl Barks. All he did is not great, of course, but when he was good he was really good.

Carl Barks, "Uncle Scrooge in The Second Richest Duck," Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge # 15, September - November 1956 (as published in Another Rainbow's The Carl Barks Library Set 3, book 1, 1984).

 Weird Event # 3: 1930s: comics are escapist manichean literature.

This is a tough one. How can one find great exceptions in idiocy? Even so, some pearls may be found among all the trash.

Milton Caniff, "Terry and the Pirates," (daily, October 17, 1941).

Weird Event # 4: 1960s: wanting to do other things with the medium underground cartoonists can't go beyond parody (or the same stupid adventures with sex added) because they grew up with the mediocre stuff and knew nothing else (in the end they behaved like spoiled brats):

Two words again: Juastin Green. Or... Binky Brown meets The Holy Virgin Mary, to be precise.

Justin Green, Binky Brown meets The Holy Virgin Mary, March 1972. I'm not sure if the Undergrounds produced more noteworthy comics (?).

 Weird Event # 5: 1960s and on, until today: also growing up in the midst of all this trash the so-called comics critics can only write hagiographies that incense the producers who churn it out:

To be clear, I have a lot of respect for comics scholars in Academia; I have nothing against Comics Studies. The above was meant for journalists only. Even so the three words that prove the rule are: Ng Suat Tong, but I may also mention Bruno Lecigne, I guess... For the life of me I can't think of anyone else. Almost everybody incensed mediocrity at some point...

Carl Barks:

At the end of the 1920s there were two kinds of American newspaper comics: the comical comics which used caricature, and the "realist" adventurous comics. The genius of Carl Barks, and a few less talented others, like Floyd Gottfredson or Georges Remi (aka Hergé), was to join the two genres. The consequences for Barks' best stories was a parodic manicheism in which the bad guys, The Beagle Boys are a good example, were cartoonish baddies, not to be taken seriously...
On the comical side there's no slapstick. Barks' Donald Duck, for instance, is very different from the hot-tempered, always squawking, character of the animated movies. His characters are thinly disguised "real" people with all the human foibles imaginable (sex excluded, for obvious reasons). 
More later, perhaps...

Weird Facts

As time passes I feel less and less inclined to write about comics, and I don't mean on this blog only...

The reasons are varied and have mainly to do with aging and the loss of energy... Most importantly though, I see no point in continuing a lost fight: comics will never be a real art form, I can see that clearly now... Don't get me wrong, wonderful comics have been made, and I don't mean in the expanded field only. Oesterheld's and Tsuge's and Buzzelli's oeuvres are out there to prove what I'm saying, but if we look past the huge promise that the 1990s brought us, the only conclusion must be that the mountain gave birth to a mouse.

Anyway, this doesn't mean that I will stop writing on this blog completely, I'm doing it right now, after two months... So, I will come here once in a blue moon, whenever I feel like venting or something...

Today I just want to clarify the phrase that I posted on TCJ's site: "By the way, the comics comics criticism is just one of the last, in a long list of weird events, that helped to indefinitely postpone this art form."

What are those events exactly? OK, here we go:

Weird Event # 1: 19th century: comics are associated with humor and caricature:

Loÿs, "Vilain toujours a tort," 1884.

Weird Event # 2: 19th, early 20th centuries: comics are children's literature:

Wilhelm Busch, Max und Moritz, 1865 (I'm proud to say that this scan was taken from a book that once belonged to the great Carl Barks).

Weird Event # 3: 1930s: comics are escapist manichean literature:

Chester Gould et al, "Dick Tracy" Sunday Page, Februray 14, 1954.

Weird Event # 4: 1960s: wanting to do other things with the medium underground cartoonists can't go beyond parody (or the same stupid adventures with sex added) because they grew up with the mediocre stuff and knew nothing else (in the end they behaved like spoiled brats):

Richard Corben, Fantagor # 3, 1972.

Weird Event # 5: 1960s and on, until today: also growing up in the midst of all this trash the so-called comics critics can only write hagiographies that incense the producers who churn it out:

 

Les cahiers de la bande dessinée # 72, November - December 1986.

The comics comics critics were formalists, but that doesn't excuse anything. All of the above is how comics are viewed by the laymen and laywomen. Who can blame them if they see comics as part of trash culture? I, for one, don't!

No hemos progresado nada. Al contrario, hemos decaído.

Citação

Cito João Ramalho Santos no último JL a propósito de A Balda [é gralha, mas adoro gralhas "significantes", por isso, esta fica mesmo assim] do Mar Salgado de Hugo Pratt.

Apesar de leituras do livro mencionarem a influência de Joseph Conrad, Jack London ou Robert Louis Stevenson, a inspiração para esta história terá sido "A Lagoa Azul" do irlandês Henry De Vere Stacpoole [...][.]

Pergunto-me em que revista terá The Blue Lagoon sido publicado, mas nunca se sabe (?). Se calhar até foi...

Enfim, isso não interessa absolutamente nada. O que me levou à transcrição acima foi simplesmente isto: detecta-se tanta influência mais ou menos erudita, num esforço demasiado evidente para legitimar o ilegitimável, e esquece-se o que é óbvio: Hugo Pratt era um Oesterheld de trazer por casa. É isto e não é mais do que isto. 

Clyde Fans 1997 - 2017

1997, indeed! Seth, "Clyde Fans," Palooka Ville #10 (April 1997).

Seth, "Clyde Fans," Palookaville # 23 (July 2017).

I wrote about this before. What you see above are the first and last pages of Seth's masterpiece "Clyde Fans" (or, at least, I hoped that it would be a comics masterpiece and, before reading it all, I still do). On retrospect it's kinda ironic that the first page clearly indicates the date, more than twenty years ago, when it all began. As I said before, I don't know why it took Seth this long to end what I anticipated would be his masterpiece by far. Whatever the reason there's only one that really worries me: its status as box office poison. If that's the case comics are doomed and... you know... deserve to die!...

Fantasy?

I always hated the fantasy genre and mainstream fanboy or babymen geek, nerd, comic book culture in general. My problems with the genre were varied: cardboard characters, escapism, manichean and predictable plots (1 - against everything and everybody the hero wants to right a few wrongs; 2 - the hero loses his fight against the villain; 3 - against all odds the hero rises from dire straits and finally wins; 4 - the end), absence of everyday situations, no sex, looney tunes violence, etc...

Flash forward to 2017, listen to George R. R. Martin's interviews on You Tube. What does he say? He thinks that good vs. evil is cardboard; that genre is just the furniture and what really interests him is creating complex characters (both good and evil are inside all of us; he quotes William Faulkner: "[...] the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."); that sex and violence are part of life and shouldn't be bowdlerized (we must see the real consequences of violence; art is about emotions and we should feel bad when a character dies; George wants us to vicariously feel the whole emotional spectrum). Also, his plots are unpredictable because everyone is in danger and actually may die when less expected (one of the first reasons that made me hate genre fiction was, and I can't understand why people don't feel the same way, the fact that I stopped believing the hero was in any real danger: I KNEW that he would win at the very end - it's usually a "he," but I don't get all excited when they produce the same ol' shit with a heroine instead of a hero, as feminists do: if I listen one more phrase with the expression "strong women characters" in it somewhere I'm sure that I will throw up...).

OK, maybe I could go on, but it's enough already. I could surpass my visceral hate of everything that exists in fantasyland and read A Song of Ice and Fire, I guess... On the other hand, probably not... I will never read the saga because I'm sure that I'd rather read other things. This whole situation made me think though: maybe I didn't hate the fantasy genre, maybe what I really hated were mediocre and childish fantasy stories. Kind of like other people think about comics, right?, if you know what I mean...