Chester Brown's The Playboy - Coda

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1. Chester Brown's first autobio story "Helder" was published in his comic book Yummy Fur # 19 (Vortex Comics, January 1990); "The Playboy" (titled "Disgust" and "The Playboy Stories") began serialization in Yummy Fur # 21 (June 1990); "Fuck", or, the more commercially viable, but less accurate, "I Never Liked You" began serialization in Yummy Fur # 26 (Drawn & Quarterly, October 1991);

2., 3. pages from "Mathew", an adaptation of the Bible which is respectful of the original writing, but, being caricatural (Chester Brown admires Harold Gray) avoids any kind of visual Idealism: page twenty one, Yummy Fur # 24 (April 1991), page twenty five, Underwater # 3 (May 1995; the loneliness of the prophet is similar to the loneliness of the artist); worthy of note are Chester Brown's innovative layouts: he drew separate panels constructing the pages afterwards;

4. a curious experiment that reminds, in this cover (Underwater # 7, August 1996), Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay because it shows the psychological and physical development of a pair of twins: they can't understand what the adults are saying at first (they can't understand social conventions, either) and confuse dreams with reality; unfortunately Chester Brown decided to stop this series with issue # 11;

5. Chester Brown's acclaimed graphic novel Louis Riel started here: Louis Riel # 1, June 1999.

Chester Brown's The Playboy

It was 06-24-99 08:18 AM on The Comics Journal Messboard and I posted the following (minus a pathetic attempt at humor and a few changes):

"I submitted only two of my poorly written articles to TCJ. As for the second one I can't even remember what it was about. I'm posting part of the first one here. Keep in mind that this was written in 1994, or something like that...

PATHOS IN CURVES

In page 17 of Yummy Fur # 21 Chester Brown (the character) decides to hide an issue of Playboy magazine in the bushes near his parents' house. This apparently simple action becomes a nightmare because of Chester's guilty complex: he imagines the neighbours spying on him with binoculars, someone hiding behind the trees, his recently deceased mother looking down on him from the sky with a reproving look on her face. All those menaces are well expressed in the twisted drawings of the skeletal branches. On page 11, panel 6 of Yummy Fur # 22 Chester goes into the woods again in order to hide another issue of Playboy magazine. The trees on the superior half of the panel look so twisted that they seem like a spider's web, waiting there to catch the uncautious Chester. Sigmund Freud, who first explored our unconscious mind (the hidden meanders of our brain), talked about Eros and Thanatos as the supreme entities that rule our obsessions. If said trees possess a menacing aspect it is not less true that they emanate a certain feminine erotic power: the tree that is closer to Chester looks like an inverted woman's body.

(First symbolic digression: in the centre of the world is the Tree of Life. It loses its leaves to regain them again, in a perpetual regeneration process. Sometimes it is represented in an inverted way in order to permit life to come from the sky and penetrate the earth. In the Upanishads, the Universe is also an inverted tree.)

In the first panel of page 12 of Yummy Fur # 22 it is remarkable that the branches are twirled as if in an erotic ballet. After being surprised by someone hiding in the bushes, Chester leaves the place extremely upset. The same trees that we have seen before gain an even more frantic movement now. The most poetic of all the stories by Chester Brown is, without a doubt, the one that he dedicated to his girlfriend Sook-Yin Lee (published in Yummy Fur # 31). In this brief story without words Sook-Yin's alter-ego assaults a deserted town in which center is a round garden with only a tree in its inner point. She lays down near this lonely tree sleeping there all night while being embraced by the branches. Next morning the town disappeared giving place to a desert. The tree is, now, Chester's alter-ego.

(Second symbolic digression: the symbolic town is always square. It represents a crystallization of the vital cycles. The town is related to mineral symbolism, it is a symbol of stability. The circle represents perfection, the unity, the world. The Earthly Paradise is round and is associated with vegetal symbolism too. The tree is a fertility's symbol of such power that, in certain nomad tribes of Iran the young girls are tattooed with a tree on their bodies, the roots on the pubic zone and the branches on their breasts. The tree is, at the same time, a phallic symbol and a motherly one. It is the hermaphrodite and so the unity.The desert is the origin, the purity of things.)

Chester's town is square and deserted. The only living thing in there (the only thing in there that's not crystallized) is the tree/Chester. Sook-Yin's alter-ego assaults Chester's alter-ego's crystallized self in order to reach and free his center. All the eroticism that is suggested by the drawings in Yummy Fur # 22 is openly showed here. All the adolescent pathos is now gone to give its place to adult love.

(Third symbolic digression: the night is the time for gestation, for the liberation of the unconscious mind.)

All the symbolic digressions were taken from the Dictionnaire des symboles. A collective work supervised by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant."

My Comics Journal messboard post ends here, but the story goes on with a curious ut pictura poesis discovery. A poem by Argentinian poet Roberto Juarroz that has affinities (the same atmosphere and similar meanings) with Chester Brown's story (my translation):

We arrived at a sacred city.
We prefer to ignore its name:
in that way we can call it all the names.
We don’t find whom to ask
because we are alone in the sacred city.
We don’t know which cults are practiced in it.
The only thing we realize is that here there’s only one thread
uniting all the music in the world
and all the silence.

We don’t know if the city greets us or says goodbye,
if it's just a stop or the end of the journey.
No one told us why it’s not a forest or a desert.
It appears in no guide or map.
Geography keeps its location silent or it never knew it.

But in the center of the sacred city there’s
a square where all the silent love inside the world is opened.
And only now we understand:
what’s sacred
is all the quiet love.

Images:
page eighty two of The Playboy as graphic novel (December 1992): panels five and six of page eleven in Yummy Fur # 22 (September 1990); page seven of Yummy Fur # 31 (September 1993): the city, the woman, the tree.

Hectór Germán Oesterheld's (and others) Ernie Pike - Coda

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1. Héctor Germán Oesterheld's name in nowhere to be seen in this Italian Ernie Pike edition (1976);

2., 3. Hugo Pratt was one of the best artists in comics with the ability to convey body language (he was great with the characters' facial expressions), but it was Oesterheld who, in Ernie Pike, was more interested in the dog face, on both sides of WWII, than in the big stupid "heroic" picture; because of his complex characters (Oesterheld refused children's comics usual manichaeism) he was accused of sympathy for the German side; two masterpieces by this unforgettable duo: Hora Cero Extra!'s covers for # 1 (April 1958), and # 5 (December 1958);

4. Oesterheld's credo (my translation in last post below); on the lower left hand corner we can see Frontera's famous logo, created by João Mottini;

5. years later, Hugo Pratt became an international star; to achieve success he relied on a juvenile Oesterheldian narrative surface (he couldn't replicate the master's touch; Pratt's female characters are his own, though) and a rampantly mannerist drawing style (in the end, long gone is Realism): Saint Exupéry, Le dernier vol (1995).

Hectór Germán Oesterheld's (and others) Ernie Pike

In 1961 Argentinian comics writer and publisher Héctor Germán Oesterheld sold his publishing house, Editorial Frontera. He suffered serious economical difficulties since the end of 1959. That's why, trying to minimize his debts, he sold Hugo Pratt's original pages in his possession. Retaliating Hugo Pratt published their stories in Europe without acknowledging Oesterheld's co-authorship.

I'm saying this not as some sort of gossip (Buenos Aires Babylon, or something...). I'm saying this because comics critics in Europe never acknowledge Hugo Pratt's debt to Oesterheld's writing mastery. If their excuse is ignorance because they never saw the writer's name in Sgt. Kirk, Ticonderoga, Ernie Pike, it's a weak one because critics should know what they're talking about.

Franco Fossati in the Spanish mag Bang! # 9 (1973), for instance, is clearly operating in bad faith: in an article about Hugo Pratt, Oesterheld's name appears once, in a list, among many other names (talking about Ernie Pike - the name comes from American war correspondent Ernie Pyle, the face is Oesterheld's - he says that Pratt "was inspired by a friend's face to create Pike's"). Fortunately Spaniard editors read Argentinian mag Dibujantes # 21 and added a note or two restoring the truth.

Closer to us in time it's not possible to feign ignorance: there's simply too much information circling around and Héctor Germán Oesterheld is the creator of adults' comics in the restrict field (the comics milieu, I mean). Not that he intended to do so. In his mag Hora Cero Semanal's cover, he stated: "Historietas para mayores de 14 años" (comics for people over 14 years old). What happened was that he worked a lot. Some of his stories are just average, but when they're good, they're very good. Here's what Oesterheld wrote on Hora Cero Semanal # 1's back cover (September 4, 1957; my translation):

"LET'S DEFEND COMICS

There are bad comics when they're badly done only.

Denying comics all together, condemning them as a whole, is as irrational as denying cinema all together because there are bad films. Or condemning literature because there are bad books.

There are, unfortunately in a huge ratio, lots of bad comics. But these don't disqualify the good ones. On the contrary, by comparison, they should underline their quality.

We believe that our comics are good comics. By good comics we mean strong comics, comics that are stout and cheerful at the same time, violent and human. Comics that grab the reader with fair, reliable, means. Comics that baffle the reader because they're new, because they're original, because they're modern, they belong to the present day, they may even belong to the future.

FRONTERA and HORA CERO are proof enough of what we're saying: the readers know it because they chose our stuff.

With HORA CERO SEMANAL we believe that we've outdone ourselves: we are sure that we assembled quality comics in a way that's hardly repeatable.

It's with legitimate publishers' pride that we bring to you HORA CERO SEMANAL knowing that it is a new valuable addition to our magazines which, turning their backs to cheaper, inferior, imported stuff, open their pages to Argentinian stuff. Said stuff (someone has to say it sometime) conquered, without protection or help of any kind, a dignified place among the best stuff done in the world.

To the readers, to the publishers of good comics, our sincerest regards.

EDITORIAL FRONTERA"

I don't suppose that Dominique Petifaux is ignorant when he makes this outrageous allegation in Casterman's tome 1 of the series, 2003 (I may be wrong though; my translation): "Silence is a very important theme in Ernie Pike. When we know those long mute sequences in Hugo Pratt's oeuvre, it's easy to guess that those panels without words were created by the draughtsman who wanted to counterbalance the beautiful, but long dialogues - and sometimes useless captions - written by the scriptwriter. If the silence after Mozart is still Mozart, silence after Oesterheld is Pratt." To be fair, he wrote the word "guess" somewhere in his diatribe. But guess work is incredibly unprofessional for a so-called critic. The truth is that Hugo Pratt is a sacred cow and Oesterheld is no one outside of Argentina. Videla's thugs killed this great master, European critics killed his memory and usurped his rightful place in comics history.

Image:

Sgt. Kirk page written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and drawn by Hugo Pratt. Where are those long dialogues and useless captions? By the way: even the name "Corto" (yes, as in "Corto Maltese)" was used first in Sgt. Kirk by Oesterheld.

What's a Comics Fake? - Coda

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1. a "Mort Cinder" page (by two South American greats: Argentinian writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Uruguaian artist Alberto Breccia) as it was published in Misterix magazine # 749 (March 22, 1963); verdict: genuine;

2. the same page as it was reprinted in Mort Cinder (Colihue edition, 1997): the logo disappeared and, in order to fill the blank, a "brilliant" editor decided to blow up a detail from the page's first panel; verdict: fake;

3. said page as reprinted in Mort Cinder's Planeta DeAgostini's edition (2002): the logo remained, but it's a different one; the hand lettering was substituted by computer fonts (god knows why); verdict: fake;

4. another "Mort Cinder" page as printed in Misterix # 719 (August 24, 1962): verdict: genuine;

5. the same page as it was reprinted in the aforementioned Colihue edition: many reprints disrespect page layouts (don't let me start on colors), this is just one example among thousands; notice also how the editor butchered panel two (editors also used to pay hacks in order for them to add details in drawings if the panel was too small to fit the new hyperframe); the last "panel" is another blow up; verdict: fake.

What's a Comics Fake?

In Languages of Art (1976 [1968]) Nelson Goodman states: "Let us speak of a work of art as autographic if and only if the distinction between original and forgery of it is significant; or better, if and only if even the most exact duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine." (113) [...] "an art seems to be allographic just insofar as it is amenable to notation" [...] "Amenability to notation depends upon a precedent practice that develops only if works of the art in question are commonly either ephemeral or not producible by one person." (121, 122)

Thus: painting and sculpture are autographic (one-stage, perennial, not amenable to notation), music and literature are allographic (two-stage, ephemeral - the former, I mean -, amenable to notation).

What about comics, then?...

Reading Goodman's book a bit too fast, people tend to say (comparing comics to literature) that comics are allographic. See, here, line 44, if I'm not mistaken (I'll discuss Carrier's book at another occasion):

http://www.markstaffbrandl.com/by_brandl/carrier.html

(Does all this seem to be going in a "discussing the sex of angels" kind of direction, again? Maybe, but, please, bear with me, I'm heading someplace, I promise...)

That said, autographic arts are fakeable, allographic arts aren't: "There is no such thing as a forgery of Gray's Elegy. Any accurate copy of the text of a poem or novel is as much the original work as any other." (114)

Does Nelson Goodman speak about comics in his book? Of course not: no philosopher, or any other thinker, for that matter, even remotely remembers that comics do exist (they may cite culinary or puppetry, but comics are never mentioned). He scrutinized printmaking though: "The etcher [...] makes a plate from which impressions are then taken on paper. These prints are the end-products; and although they may differ appreciably from one another, all are instances of the original work. But even the most exact copy produced otherwise than by printing from that plate counts not as an original but as an imitation or forgery." [...] "not all one-stage arts are autographic and not all autographic arts are one-stage." (114, 115)

This means that comics, instead of being allographic (unfakeable), being reproduced from original art, are, like printmaking, a two-stage autographic art form. Words in comics (lettering), being part of the original art (even if they're a notation), are, in my humble opinion, autographic too. (If you don't agree, you may say with Nelson Goodman: "The architect's papers are a curious mixture." (218); for you, then, comics are a curious mixture...)

Anyway, besides lettering, there's no doubt that comics and printmaking aren't exactly the same art forms (even if the former may be reproduced using the latter; It also seems to me that printmaking is a technique: the real art form is drawing - or photography...). Comics are rarely printed in the exact same size as the original art; if comics are autographic which is the right published size, then?, the first one, ever? Are Peter Maresca's Little Nemo books the real deal being all the other editions just fakes?, it doesn't matter because huge or small they all came from the same original piece of art? And what about a repro of a repro?, are comics an n-stage art form or is the first edition the only authentic one? What about translations?, are these faked comics too? What about the cover?, does a reprint have to duplicate it (even if the publisher is a different one, with a different logo)? What about the printing technique?, do old genuine comics have to be reprinted using old machinery?

I think that the drawing, original color (when it exists), page layout, lettering, are autographic features; print size doesn't matter, comics are an n-stage art form and translations are faked comics (traduttore tradittore and all that...) albeit acceptable ones. Other elements, covers included, are paratextual. Newer printing techniques are OK if they photographically reproduce the images, but they cease do be kosher if they alter or renew the original work. (I don't intend to answer these questions in a definitive way, though; arbitrariness rears its ugly head again?)

All of the above autographic characteristics of comics have been subverted by publishers. Their lack of respect for the artists' work (artists were many times viewed as just hacks) or the readers' right to buy the real thing put the comics industry in the dubious honor of being the hugest purveyor of faked goods on the face of the earth.

Images:

Graham Rawle is a UK writer who did Woman's World (2005) using around fourty thousand collaged mag fragments: autographic literature?: the book's cover; two interior pages; the artist at work.

PS Graham's website: http://www.grahamrawle.com/

PPS Some generalizations above about intellectuals and publishers are slightly exaggerated for comic effect...

Jacques Callot's Les Miseres et les malheurs de la guerre - Coda

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1. self-portrait as a war correspondent in The Siege of Breda (1628. detail; a couple of "miseres de la guerre" can already be seen in the background);

2. The Fair at Imprunetta near Florence, Italy (1622);

3. A humorous caprice (c. 1617);

4. scene # 4 of Les Miseres: "Their brutal spirit prompts them to thefts in the wayside inn, which they cover with the fine name of booty. These disturbers of the peace deliberately quarrel in order to avoid paying their host, and even steal his pots and pans. When they have been properly primed with food and drink, they become prone to help themselves to other people's property.";

5. scene # 11: "These damned, infamous robbers, hanging like miserable fruit from the tree, prove in the end that horrible crime and evil purpose is itself an instrument of shame and vengeance, and that it is the destiny of vicious men to undergo sooner or later divine justice." (a similar scene happened in Kirscheidt a year later, in 1634; the Swedish army hanged the population);

6. scene # 17: "When the soldiers have committed so much damage, their enemies the peasants finally ambush them and kill them, stripping them to their shirts. Thus they revenge themselves on these miserable men for their lost property, for which the soldiers alone are to blame." (All translations: David Kunzle.)