Barron Storey's The Adjustment of Sidney Deepscorn - Coda

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Images:

1. "The Adjustment of Sidney Deepscorn"'s last page (Tales From the Edge! # 1, June, 1993): the original page is too tiny, but, here, you can amplify it reading Barron Storey's amazing words;

2. the last page of "Refried Eyes" (Tales From the Edge # 5, February, 1995): Barron Storey imagines two readers: the father, on the left, is a mature person who understands what he's seeing and reading (his life experience enables him to do a a sophisticated decoding); the son, on the right, understands nothing; the panels tell the story of Barron's deteriorating relationship with Kelly B.;

3. Barron Storey's frustrations with the comics market are distilled into the last page of "Slidehouse" (Tales From the Edge # 7, July, 1995); the text below - on my November, 14 post - is white in the black square;

4. The Marat Sade Journals' cover (Tundra Publishing: 1993);

5. Barron Storey stated many times that he admires his former teacher Robert Weaver (who was an important illustrator: he helped to freed illustration from Pompierism and saccharine à la Norman Rockwell advocating a painterly and personal approach, without denying communication); it's only natural that Barron Storey's visual journalism excludes Naturalism to be highly symbolic (it's painterly in technique and reminds collage in its kaleidoscopic effect; the word "postmodern" comes to mind); at first glance I find Barron Storey's style more suitable to illustrate science fiction or Homer's epic tales than to illustrate simple, plain life (I also have a problem with the excessive use of quotes); what happens is that, as I said before, the content of his comics and journals (the same thing in the expanded field) is so personal that the use of symbols (both to show and to conceal) or words and images from other artists, is perfectly understandable; this also leads to a fascination with masks (Life After Black, Graphic Novel Art: 2007);

6. canvas # 14 from the Victims exhibition (Anno Domini gallery: February 1 - March 15, 2008).

PS A Robert Weaver slideshow (a visual reportage, way before Joe Sacco: February, 1962):

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/24/opinion/20080224_WEAVER_SLIDESHOW_index.html

Barron Storey's The Adjustment of Sidney Deepscorn

It's a well known rule: mediocrity perpetuates itself. While hacks are celebrated as "great artists" there's no money and fame to anybody else. This has two consequences: (1) the art form has no capacity to attract the real great artists; (2) it pushes away those incautious few who make the mistake of trying out the field (either that or they end up doing second rate work after very promising debuts). Barron Storey is a living proof of all this.

More details, here, in an article by Robert Wilonsky:

http://www.sfweekly.com/1996-01-17/news/barron-storey-s-life-is-an-open-comic-book/

I chose this telling quote on the above site:

"When Storey made his comics debut in 1993 with the publication of The Marat/Sade Journals, and then with the release of the completely autobiographical "The Adjustment of Sidney Deepscorn" in the first issue of the Dallas-produced comic anthology Tales From the Edge, Storey thought he would revolutionize comic art. His style - a blend of painting, drawing, and photography, so much text and narration flowing in and out of the dark and twisted images - looked like nothing in modern comics or the so-called graphic novels that emerged in the mid-'80s. Storey was convinced it would cause a furor within the industry.
But nothing happened. And when he followed it up with his epic "Slidehouse" series over the next year in Tales From the Edge, he imagined movies and dolls of the story's main character, Assassinada. He would make big money [I may be wrong, but I think that Wilonsky misreads "Slidehouse"'s last page, here]. But again, nothing, just the occasional "fanboy" who would show up at a comic book convention and tell him the art was "cool." Storey, who's already self-deprecating when he speaks about his art, was crushed."

I had a certain taste resistance to Barron Storey's art style. What totally sold me to his comics were the words: Storey is a great writer. In the below quote (from the same Wilonsky article) he shows how words are important to him and pretty much sums up my take on mainstream comics (remember: Storey said "crap," not I):

"Acknowledged as a master of commercial art, Storey has in recent years ventured into comic books - a field for which he holds contempt.
"A friend of mine, a former student, just sent me a comic that he did for Marvel, which I think is beautifully done," Storey says, presenting a copy of the brand-new Tales to Astonish featuring the Incredible Hulk.
"He called one day, and I told him, 'It's gorgeous. I'm so proud of you.' Then he asked what I thought of the story, and I told him I hadn't read it. It's stupid. I told him I could read any line from it at random and make the point."
Storey flips open the glossy book and reads the first line he sees: "'You have enraged my father beyond all imagining, creature, and you'll most surely die.' Or, 'Believe it or not, honey, when the dust settles you'll thank me for this.' That is crap, and I told my friend so."

Barron Storey's magnum opus are his journals. He sees them as a way to illustrate his life, as he puts it. I think that he's such a great writer mainly because he's brutally honest. Robert Wilonsky (in the link above) summarizes Storey's work beautifully: "Sidney Deepscorn is a poor disguise, hiding nothing - his anger with a comic book industry interested only in two-dimensional superheroes; repressed memories of a childhood spent running with "gun-toting idiots" who liked to shoot at the "niggers" in South Dallas; his conflicting feelings about his mother. Reading "Sidney Deepscorn," or most any of Storey's works, is voyeurism.
Storey fills the final page of "Sidney Deepscorn" with thousands of nearly unreadable words that actually divulge much about his past. He recounts the guilt he experienced when one of his friends bragged about shooting a black man in Dallas and Storey did nothing about it. He recounts his three bad marriages, how he talked the true love of his life out of getting an abortion, how the love of his life walked out on him."

I'll let you, for now, with another example of what I'm saying, even if not from one of Barron Storey's journal's (needless to say that I subscribe to every word... but one: I couldn't read it):

"Take a note: what you are looking at. but are you?
was created throughout in drawings. I point this [...]
this paraphrase of Bertolt Brecht’s Song of
the Cut-Priced Poets to ask again the question of his
poem of nearly 70 years ago: why won’t you pay?
Have you forgot what drawings look like? We try
to offer you something to look at that will remind
you of drawings that are not knocked out, though[t]
that has not been simplified and stories that are
derived from experiences that occurred in life. Why
then have you abandoned our market? Tell me:
has nothing in our work struck you? We tried to
speak to you in the language you seem to admire
even though you persist in overrating that lan-
guage and the practitioners thereof. And yet no-
one speaks truths any more in that language &
no one does drawings that cannot be done easily.
And no one ever thinks of doing stories that ask
questions that cannot be answered by displays
of will of force. That’s the pass you have brought
things to. You won’t pay - even though you have
become more affluent - or so we’re told. When I
began Slidehouse I wanted it to be excellent
all through. But. That’s too hard. Who will pay
me? This will just have to do.

No? How 'bout this one: Did anyone notice the Brel lyrics in this episode? No? Is anybody out there? No? Well, ya'll have a good time with your Batmans, y'hear?" ("Slidehouse:" Tales From the Edge # 7, July, 1995.)

An homage site:
http://www.geocities.com/negsleep/main/links/barron/barron3.html

The Inkstuds interview:
http://www.inkstuds.com/?p=173

The Victims exhibition:
http://www.galleryad.com/past_exhibits/barronstorey08/

The Journals blog and the site:
http://barronstorey.blogspot.com/
http://www.barronstorey.com/

Images:
Barron Storey's commercial work: the famous Howard Hughes Time magazine cover (April 19, 1976); Barron is pissed off with the babymen for obvious reasons...

James Edgar's and Tony Weare's Matt Marriott - Coda

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Images:

1. newspaper clippings glued by Tony Weare in a scrapbook: "Belle Benson's Daughter"'s two first strips (1956);

2. Tony Weare's drawing style would get looser in time; it was a nice mix of impressionism, hatchings, cross-hatchings, anatomical and emotional accuracy (looseness and preciseness): panels from strip ten of "The Territory," I think; early seventies (original art);

3. a rare one panel strip in what is, in my opinion, the series' best story: "A Man Called Shannon" ("Tragedy on the plain" - 29 - as it was published in Camillo Conti's Matt Marriott: November 1978 [1965]);

4. Matt Marriott's stand against manichaeism: "Gospel Mary," last panel of strip seventy three as it was published in Mundo de Aventuras Especial # 12 (October 1976 [1973]): "-It is a confusing world, with good people and bad people. When money is involved most good people become bad people!..." Shadows and light underline the characters’ words;

5. in a great essay about Superman, Umberto Eco noticed how strange time in a series is (it's a compromise between the frozen time of myth and the consuming time of fiction; he called it the iterative scheme: from an adventure to the next it's as if nothing happened before: it's a continuous of successive beginnings); in this image, dated 1989, Tony Weare gets a revenge against said limitation (published in Ark magazine # 31, undated, c. 1990);

6. Tony Weare: "I eventually developed a technique of my own when I did Matt Marriott (1955 - 1977). I wouldn't draw the outlines of objects and people but would have two different shades meet." (Ark # 31: 45.); "Rookwood" by William Ainsworth and Tony Weare: Look and Learn # 961 (August 9, 1980).

James Edgar's and Tony Weare's Matt Marriott

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If Matt Marriott was a series of films instead of a British newspaper comics series it would be compared with Howard Hawks' and John Ford's Westerns. Things being what they are Matt Marriott isn't even known, let alone celebrated as the comics masterpiece that it is. To begin with the good news, here's a great text by David Lloyd (it explains exactly why this series is so good visually; scroll down a bit, please): http://www.cartooncounty.com/cartoonstripped.html A few years ago I championed Matt Marriott on the Comics Journal's messboard (as usual, I did some changes, mainly because I wanted to tone down my Dom - sorry for the pun, it's also how it's written in Portuguese - Quixote day's rhetoric):

"September 16, 2003 04:36 PM

Matt Marriott is a British comic and it is forgotten there. We can't really expect it to be remembered elsewhere. It seems that what they remember the most are children's comics: The Beano, "Dan Dare," "Judge Dredd," etc... The Journal did publish an obituary page remembering Tony Weare: issue # 174, February 1995, page 34. It was (very well) written by comics connoisseur, Steve Holland.

September 19, 2003 07:25 AM

Milo George: Domingos: Why in the world would you champion Matt Marriott? That strikes me as a particularly odd pick from you. What makes it so great?

I, like everybody else, forgot all about Matt Marriott for the last couple of decades or so (same for Guido Buzzelli, as a matter of fact). While discussing on this board about the putative greatness of Giraud's Blueberry (the best comics Western, ever!), I said to myself: it can't be true; Giraud is a great craftsman, but the series is poorly written (just formulaic children's comics). Jeet's title for this thread is: What deserves reprinting, aside from Peanuts? For some strange reason I read: What [post fifties newspaper comic] deserves reprinting, aside from Peanuts? Putting two and two together, I remembered Matt Marriott. So, why is it so great? First of all, why isn't it so great? Because it is a piece of masscult (I'm reading McDonald right now, ah ah). I. e. the hero and his sidekick can't die in a fight, for instance. Because of the unfortunate occurrence that I lost my innocence long ago, whenever Marriott fights a criminal, supposedly being in danger, my reaction is: yeah, right! I fail to see why grown ups don't say the same thing when they're reading every superhero comic ever made, but I digress... The greatness of it all: Tony Weare's art is gorgeous! His people look like real people. Their body language is just perfect. The shading is masterful. Etc... Also: Jim Edgar's writing. It's miles and miles away from Charlier's mediocre stuff. Even when there's a formulaic fight he gives a reason for what happens (not solving the problem, of course, no one working in a commercial milieu - or in a commerce before art milieu, to be exact - can do that, but he tones it down). His characters are some of the best characterizations in comics history. Their feelings are real, the story is never manichaean (Marriott is too perfect, of course, but oh well...). I particularly remember Marriott saying good bye to Sister Eulalia. It's as great as Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese (a character I have no sympathy for, but don't get me started) saying good bye to Changai Li in Corto Maltese in Siberia. Both Weare and Edgar do it with just the right doses of detachment and melodrama. A difficult cooking to be sure, but masterfully done here.

February 24, 2004 08:27 AM [the ed. down there is yours truly, not the interviewer]:

Tony Weare (who did Matt Marriott and is one of the few artists in my list who worked in the mainstream sez: "Paul: We were talking earlier about how you would have liked the characters in Matt Marriott to develop. Tony: Yes. I would have liked the characters to have been fallible, but, of course, being cowboys they have to be infallible. If there was a scene where Matt and Powder were camping out in the bush at night and they heard a noise, Powder would ask Matt if that noise meant there were Indians. Matt would calmly announce that it was an owl, and he'd be right. In another episode, Powder would say it was an owl and Matt would say it was Indians, and Matt would be right again. I always wished that they'd change it around for once. That side of cowboys is very boring. It's the same with Batman. He can't make a mistake either. Paul: They pretend he makes a mistake, but he doesn't really. Tony: That's right. In the first Matt Marriott story Matt had to shoot someone for the first time and he felt sick. I would have liked to have continued in that manner and have Matt lose fights so that he would have to find other ways to win. He might have triumphed in the end [of course, being this a mainstream strip and all... ed.], but I didn't want it easy for him all the time. In the gun fights the baddies shoot ten bullets and they all miss whilst the goodies shoot one bullet and it's on target. I hated that side of it. If you had to be your own law in the west you wouldn't go around showing off, you'd shoot people in the back to get revenge. You'd also feel bad about it. It's those sort of human values which should have been in the strip, but weren't allowed." [Interview with Paul Duncan: Ark magazine, # 31, undated, c. 1990] Even so Matt Marriott has enough human values in there to fill the lack of them in all the rest of the world's mainstream. The proof? In a milieu that just values simplistic children's comics, Matt Marriott is completely forgotten and was never reprinted."

Images:

1. part of a sequence as it was originally created (Matt Marriott, Futura, 1988 [the [London] Evening News, 1955]);

2. the same series of panels as they were published in the children's magazine Knockout (1961): to show violence to kids is perfectly all right, but to show the "hero" feeling sick after killing a man, is unbearable to watch - or was it censorship because of powder's last remark? (In the missing panels: "Then, the tension of the last weeks suddenly ceases.”; “- Excuse me.” / “- Are you all right, Matt?” / "I think that I'm no good as a gunman! To kill a man - even Carper - makes my stomach turn!"; "- The same thing happened to me, but now it's as natural as killing a fly!)";

3. ...aaand... another cut (these were definitely panels unsuitable for children: Mundo de Aventuras # 446, February 25, 1958).

Fred's Le Journal de Jules Renard Lu Par Fred - Coda

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Images:

1. no, you're not seeing Will Elder's drawings and reading Harvey Kurtzman's words in Mad magazine... it's Jean Giraud (aka sacred cow Moebius) in Hara-Kiri # 35, January 1964 (the first Moebius signature appeared in issue # 28, May 1963);

2. the daily life circus in "Le petit cirque" (Hara-Kiri # 39, May, 1964);

3. first strip of page 27 as it was published in Le Matin de Paris (image caught, here: http://miiraslimake.over-blog.com/archive-11-27-2007.html);

4. the same strip is now a faked two pager in the Flammarion book (the panels of the verso page lost their continuity - in the newspaper they were a split panel - and the repetition is awkward; a tree was added to tidy things up, perhaps?);

5. Jules and Fred at their most poetic ("Fish appear above the water glittering briefly... / ...like recollections when they climb to our memory."): see what I mean?;

6. "Yes, crow, God didn't do badly when He created nature... / ...but He miscreated men." (My translations.)

PS In his blog La Cárcel de Papel Álvaro Pons says that a lot of my ideas are radical: http://www.lacarceldepapel.com/2008/11/03/luneros-nuff-said/. I'm not quite sure if I understand what he means (and I accept my radicality if he meant that I'm far away from the comics milieu's spectrum's center), but I've been accused of something similar before: João Miguel Tavares said that my statements are too definitive: http://www.bedeteca.com/index.php?pageID=recortes&recortesID=725. Matthias Wivel said the same thing: http://www.metabunker.dk/?p=1590#more-1590.

Two points: (1) I said that what I called "the cow herd" (the artists behind the comics milieu's children's comics canon) are great draughtsmen (no women in there, I suppose) and great storytellers; this doesn't seem too definitive and too radical to me; (2) if they're the sacred cows who worships them?, who doesn't accept a single criticism in these gods' direction? Aliena vitia in oculis habemus, a tergo nostra sunt, and all that?...

Fred's Le Journal de Jules Renard Lu Par Fred

Too many times have I read the historically misguided version that juvenile Pilote was the first adult comics magazine published in France. This is wrong for three reasons: (1) youth is not adulthood; (2) there were, during the 19th century and early 20th, adult comics magazines like L'assiette au beurre; (3) even if we dismiss those old grandfathers there was Hara-Kiri.
Hara-Kiri was a satire magazine, in the vein of Mad, created by Georges Bernier (alias Professor Choron; the mag was situated at 4, Choron Street, Paris, France), François Cavanna and Fred. The early artists where: Jean Cabut (aka Cabu), Roland Topor (the Panic draftsman), Georges Wolinski, Georges Blondeaux (Gébé), Jean-Marc Reiser. It was in the pages of Hara-Kiri that Jean Giraud created his nom de plume, Moebius, while ripping off Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. Hara-Kiri's first issue was dated September 1960. Satirizing everything in French life (politics included) Hara-Kiri was the true heir of L'assiette au beurre. The mag's targets were the same old authority figures: organized religion, the police, the army... But also the more modern worlds of advertising, mass culture, sexploitation (Hara-Kiri ridiculed them all). In 1961 and 1966 the mag fell victim of censorship legislation (law 49-956, 16 July 1949, modified December 23, 1958). The above infos, by Stéphane Mazurier, can be found, here (in French): http://www.harakiri-choron.com/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=109 It is ironic, on retrospect, that this law, supposedly destined to protect children and teens, was applied to the first adult comics publication in France after what I call, the half a century children's comics debacle.

Fred (Othon Aristidès) did a lot of cartoons and covers for Hara-Kiri magazine, but apparently he was a kind person among the evil beasts (the magazine's subtitle was: journal bête et méchant: the evil beast journal). If we search info about him on the internet we'll see that the word more associated with his name is "poetic." His masterpiece in Hara-Kiri was "Le petit cirque" (# 38, April 1964 - # 64, June 1966). Le petit cirque is a series of surreal two-pagers (the first episode had three) published in 1973 as an album by Dargaud. It is indeed an absurdist and poetic work, but that's just a superficial reading. In the series' second episode (Hara-Kiri # 39, May 1964) the little circus (just a Gypsy family: father Léopold, mother Carmen, their son - they just call him "petit", little one) performs for the first and only time. In this "monde à l'envers" (the world upside down) their performance is just Carmen hand-washing clothes and Léopold bending his son over his knee and spanking him. Everyday life is fantastic, but a circus performance is quite prosaic. Reading between the lines we can see how sexist Léopold mistreats his submissive wife or how difficult the family's relations with bigoted peasants are.
What one almost can't find on the internet are people praising Le journal de Jules Renard lu par Fred (Le Matin de Paris, 1983; graphic novel: Flammarion, 1988) as Fred's absolute masterpiece. Jules Renard's words are wonderful, of course (few comics scriptwriters, if any, could write at that level), but a slow pace and Fred's landscapes (the leafless trees, the tormented clouds, for instance) add a marvelous melancholic mood to what's being said. The little bent lonely figure of Jules Renard, lost in his thoughts, lost in the scenery is, to me at least, absolutely unforgettable. The crow, à la Ucellaci e ucellini by Pier Paolo Pasolini, is just a bonus...

Image:
Hara-Kiri # 23 (December, 1962): cover by Fred.
PS After Art Spiegelman's success with Maus huge mainstream publishing house Flammarion decided to try a graphic novel collection. Le journal de Jules Renard lu par Fred was one of their choices and I thank them for that. But... (and this is a big one) in order to accommodate the newspaper Le Matin de Paris' pages to Maus' format they created some faked images. It's obvious that my canon is the kiss of death at the box-office (I'm very proud of that fact, actually), but, this time, I which someone would publish the original version.
PPS I didn't mention Philémon...
PPPS Thanks a lot for your PR Lídia!... Thanks also to Álvaro Pons, who mentioned The Crib on his blog La Cárcel de Papel: http://www.lacarceldepapel.com/

Pablo Picasso's Songe et Mensonge de Franco - Coda

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Images and sounds:

1. Guernica by Pablo Picasso, 1937; Guernica is a Basque town in Northern Spain that was bombed by the German Condor Legion (more than two thousand people died); according to Juan Antonio Ramírez the lamp at the center is another Surrealist "jeux de mots:" the Spanish word for "light bulb" is "bombilla" (little bomb; by August 6 and 9, 1945, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombs were already the biggest, ever);

2., 3. Neoclassical comics by Picasso (1931, 1933);

4. the process was more important to Picasso than the final product; here's what he said (quoted in El "Guernica" de Picasso by Rudolf Arnheim, Gustavo Gili, 1976 [Genesis of a Painting: Picasso's Guernica, University of California Press, 1962]): 43: "A painting isn't planed in advance. While it's being done, it changes in the same way as our thoughts change."; in this film (part of Le Mystère Picasso - the Picasso mystery - by Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956) we can see a flower bouquet transformed into a fish, the fish transformed into a chicken; and the whole with a fawn's face and human figures on top; it's a pity that this incredible innovator couldn't get rid of the single image (a western tradition since the Renaissance) juxtaposing images instead of superimposing them.