David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp

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.

Yvan Alagbé's Nègres jaunes

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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.

Comics Criticism? What's That?

It was inevitable, sooner or later I had to write about comics criticism, or, to be more accurate, I had to write about what passes for comics criticism in the media. Why now, exactly, though? Because we're approaching the end of the year and "best of" lists tend to pop up here and there (preferably at the beginning of December to permit readers the joyful act of penning their gift lists for Christmas). Also, because Marcos Farrajota at Lisbon's Bedeteca (comics library) always asks me to examine the year in comics criticism (this time I'll just translate this post into Portuguese; neat!). Don't laugh, please, but doing such a thing, year after year, reporting nothing, is incredibly tough. Last, but not least, because I read this very finely written and, more importantly, very finely observed, piece of metacriticism by Xavier Guilbert at Du9 (in case you are wondering, the cryptic cypher and letters mean both, "about what's new" and "about comics," the ninth art, according to Claude Beylie - Lettres et médecins magazine, January 1964; in French): http://www.du9.org/Vues-Ephemeres-Decembre-2008

Especially for you, French language impaired people, I'll summarize what Xavier Guilbert says in one sentence: he compares the nominees in literature, film... and comics... for the Globes de Cristal yearly prizes (twelve categories given by the French press to the arts) concluding that the latter, are simply ridiculous. The "ridiculous" part is mine, by the way, but Xavier is a lot less naive than myself. He doesn't believe that the journalists (those who, according to the jury, are the best informed to judge) are aesthetically impaired: he simply noted that the holy elected are the biggest at the box-office. A coincidence, I'm sure...

To add a personal note: it always was with dismay that I used to stumble, while reading the cultural section of the newspaper, with an inane review about some mediocre French mainstream comic (i. e. a comic for children very much liked by babymen also) juxtaposed with real criticism about Paul Celan, for instance. Needless to say that I'm more than happy when, in these days of economical crisis we're living in, there's less and less space to waste with comics criticism in the newspapers. I prefer nothing to inanity.

Anyway, more than a year ago Sean T. Collins wrote an article in The Comics Reporter about the comics criticism panel at SPX 2007: http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/cr_first_person_sean_t_collins_on_the_criticism_panel_at_small_press_expo/

Here are a couple of quotes that may help to explain comics criticism's place in mainstream media: ""fewer words, more bullets, more lists, more entry points," tying reviews into the PR cycle for new releases to the exclusion of works that aren't new or upcoming, tight word counts, limited space for comics coverage" (the inverted commas mean that Collins is quoting Douglas Wolk); "I wish the phrase "the dumbing down of American culture" were removed from this discussion. A look at the top-grossing films and best-selling books during the so-called Golden Age of Criticism indicates that America has always been pretty dumb, a state of affairs not at all unique to America, hey by the way." PR is the mantis that kills criticism after using it for its personal pleasure. Newspapers have a tough time just keeping afloat these days. Dumbing down is, perhaps, a necessary strategy in order to survive. This pet theory of mine tells me that things never change... Collins is right: fortunes are made in these barbaric days we're living in, selling what's dumb, not what's difficult, challenges our preconceptions, confronts us with the real world. What he doesn't seem to acknowledge is that critics back then weren't tied to PRing what sells like they do today. If that doesn't happen to older, more established criticism fields, like literature, yet, I dread the day in which babymen critics will laud Harry Potter as the greatest book ever written.

Image:

If asked, I would elect this book as winner of the Globe de Cristal for comics (Un voyage by Philippe de Pierpont - w - and Éric Lambé - a -, Futuropolis, 2008).

PS This post has nothing to do with comics criticism in academia. I just received the latest International Journal of Comic Art and it's huge with 872 pages. I'm sure that I'm going to enjoy every one of them.