Joshua Malbin

I’ve got a big backlog of comics piled up to review, so rather than try to give them all a fair shake I’m going to do quick takes on all of them, starting with the ones I like.

The movie version coming out on Friday looks like it’s going to be bad, but at least it’s prompted Dark Horse to bring out a fat new collection of the classic Italian comic Dylan Dog, written by Tiziano Sclavi. Starting in the late 1980s, the collection proceeds through seven increasingly off-the-wall Twilight-Zone-like horror tales. The best is the fifth one, which is bonkers metafiction, but all are good fun.

Preview here.

Carla Speed McNeil doesn’t have a movie deal yet, but she’s still my new hero. She’s been self-publishing her sci-fi comic Finder since the mid-1990s, and since about five years ago publishing it on the Web with print versions only for the equivalent of trade paperbacks. Like many readers, I’m sure, I’ve only just now learned about her from the new Dark Horse collection of her first three books.

A lot of science fiction builds worlds intended to reflect real-life political concerns. McNeil’s stuff is much more character-centric. She tells stories that could be told in a realist mode, only they happen to be set in a rich, complex alien society. There are pages and pages of endnotes that reveal the depth of intention behind every tossed-off detail (and that helped me make sense of motivations and assumptions McNeil barely touches on). It’s grown-up sci-fi without any hand-holding. I love it.

Preview here.

Blue Estate has nice enough art, but essentially it’s a by-the-numbers noir detective story that spends far, far too much time on exposition. Isn’t the point of detective fiction to show the detective finding clues rather than having him reveal the full story in an omniscient flashback? Scriptwriter Andrew Osborne needs a review on point-of-view characters.

I wanted to like The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd, and it does give the satisfaction of popping Maureen Dowd into lingerie every few pages. I like the idea of her being a gun-toting badass, even. But the premise that she’s a crusading journalist with an insatiable need to expose the misdeeds of the powerful—that’s too much to swallow. This is a woman whose stock in trade is high school metaphors, who wrote a whole book about how feminism is to blame for her shitty dating life. She’s not out convincing Scooter Libby to spill his guts about exposing Valerie Plame. She’s just not.

Preview here.

In Empire State: A Love Story (Or Not) a boy loses the girl he has a crush on when she moves from Oakland to New York. He decides he must have her, writes her a love letter, and hops on a Greyhound bus across the country. But when he arrives he finds she already has a boyfriend and his letter has been lost.

I didn’t have strong feelings about the book one way or another, to be honest. I identified with Jimmy, the main character, in that I’ve also written ill-advised love letters in my life, albeit at a much younger age than he. And I appreciated author Jason Shiga’s out-of-order storytelling as an experiment. But I didn’t feel there were any consequences to anything that happened, so nothing in the story mattered, told in order or not. So as long as we’re doing remedial courses, Jason Shiga needs a review on storytelling structure: he has a good ground situation, vehicle, and building conflict, and yet no resolution at all. A character who’s been inert through age 25 goes on a cross-country odyssey to declare his love—and nothing happens.

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Let’s say we think of Chris Ware as the comic book medium’s James Joyce. Like Ulysses, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth used a pathetic Everyman as a focal point for wildly disparate formal pastiches drawn from its medium’s whole history. Joyce reenacted the history of Western prose; Ware combined elements of old magazines and comics—everything from Little Nemo in Dreamland to the ads in Silver Age comic books—to reflect his middle-aged hero, stuck in the present day but fantasizing imaginary pasts and futures. Jimmy Corrigan even delves into many of the same themes as Ulysses: fatherhood and the lack thereof, alienation, the disconnect between desire and reality…

That makes modern-day Chicago the equivalent of Joyce’s Ireland, and Anders Nilsen comics’ Samuel Beckett. A writer who joined a literary scene that already had a reigning Joyce and ran full-tilt in the opposite direction.

Like Jimmy Corrigan, Nilsen’s long-running series Big Questions had a small, independent origin. The first Jimmy Corrigan pages were published in Newcity, the Chicago alternative weekly, and Nilsen self-published early issues of Big Questions cheaply, using grant funds from the City of Chicago and the Illinois Arts Council. He switched to Drawn & Quarterly with issue #7 and his popularity has slowly grown, but it’s been limited by the fact that you couldn’t read the first part of the story unless you could somehow get your hands on those early issues. (I have most of them, but I’ve never even seen #1 and #2.)

At last, though, Nilsen has wrapped things up, more than a decade after he started. The final issue just came out and a full collection will be published in July, giving readers who aren’t obsessive collectors the chance to appreciate the whole sweep of the thing.

And like I said, what we get to see is his bid to be comics’ Beckett. Where Ware elaborated, Nilsen strips away: Big Questions is drawn in black and white, with scarcely any shading. Its backgrounds consist of a few trees, or some debris, or a blast crater. Quite often, especially in later issues, he does away with panel borders, leaving his figures afloat in a sea of white. He likes to show long sequences of repeated motion broken down to simple snapshots, which can have the same comedic effect as, say, the sucking-stones sequence in Molloy.

He follows Beckett, too, in reducing characters from Joyce/Ware’s full people in a complex world to simplified, stunted beings in a world of limited possibilities. Think of the distance from Stephen Dedalus and Leo Bloom to Didi and Gogo, or Hamm. The main characters in Big Questions are mostly finches, living in a forest that could be anywhere and trying to come to terms with inexplicable disruptions in their lives. An airplane drops a bomb that fails to explode. The birds gather around it and some believe it’s a magical egg. They stand guard over it and it explodes, killing many of them. The same airplane crashes into a farmhouse and the pilot emerges. Now there’s a schism among the finches; some worship the giant bird and its mysterious human chick, while others, a minority, follow the idiot boy who used to live in that farmhouse.

The themes are, indeed, the Big Questions: the nature of existence as apprehended by beings of limited knowledge. Just as the finches struggle to make sense of the giant bird and its lethal egg, so, by implication, do humans struggle to make sense of their world and its creator, if it has one. One of the birds even conceives a finchly version of Plato’s Cave to drive home the parallel. God could be an idiot, wandering the forest eating bugs. He could be as unhinged as the pilot, who can’t tell reality from his dreams. Or He could be a pair of swans who appear in the dreams of all creatures and welcome them to death. Some react to these possibilities with false certainty and rigid faith, others with skepticism, or with bewilderment and guilt, or with simple hedonism, or with a search for ecstatic transcendence.

Think Beckett meets Beatrix Potter, adorable little creatures on a bleak, featureless plain, staring into the abyss—but hopeful nonetheless, in its own way. “We can’t ever really know the outcome of our actions,” one of them concludes, “but if we act earnestly, and do our best, everything will turn out right in the end.” Of course the bird saying that happens to be responsible for the deaths of many others. And dead herself.

The complete Big Questions will be available in July from Drawn & Quarterly. Download a PDF preview here.

UPDATE: The collected Big Questions is here. Buy it.

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The best thing about The Listener is its art. I’m not exactly sure how writer/artist David Lester achieved its effect, maybe some combination of pen for outlines and brush for the smeary shading? In any case, the pages all look like the rough studies a serious artist might draw when preparing a painting or a sculpture, and that fits perfectly with the framing story, which follows an artist making such drawings.

The story contained within that frame is also fairly compelling: an account of an election in the tiny German state of Lippe that saved the Nazi Party in 1932 when it appeared its popularity was about to collapse. That story is nominally told by a couple who had supported a competing right-wing party in Lippe and felt betrayed when their party leader struck a deal with Hitler, but it doesn’t delve into them terribly deeply as individuals. I’m okay with that because Nazi history carries inherent drama.

The hangup, for me, came only with the framing tale. (I say “framing tale,” but it gets as much attention and as many pages as the story it contains.) It focuses, as I mentioned, on an artist, a political sculptor named Louise. At the beginning of the book there’s a death: a man falls from a height while trying to hang a banner. For most of the book I assumed that man was Louise’s boyfriend, but in fact it turns out he was a stranger inspired by her art. Following the death she leaves Vancouver and travels around Europe, looking at and discussing art. She also listens to the old German couple’s story.

There’s a really compelling idea in all this struggling to get out, I think. The Listener wants to be about how history isn’t foreordained, that individual acts of protest, even artistic ones, can make a real difference. I believe that’s the purpose of focusing so much attention on an election in a small state early in Hitler’s rise to power, when he still might have been derailed. Another character in the story offers the parallel to Orson Welles, who always regretted not running for the Senate in Wisconsin when he might have beaten Joseph McCarthy before McCarthy’s first term.

Unfortunately, that message is undermined because I simply can’t get invested enough in Louise. Her motivations are frustratingly vague; I never really understand why she feels so responsible for this stranger’s death nor what she’s seeking in Europe. None of the conversations she has in Europe even touch on that, not even when she takes a lover. They’re mostly abstract discussions about art and responsibility, and while it’s possible to connect those to her feelings, it’d be much more powerful and engaging if she made those connections herself. I want her to be a striver, not just a listener.

Her passivity, and the passivity of the couple in the frame tale, together leave Hitler himself as The Listener‘s most dynamic, compelling figure. I really don’t think that’s what David Lester intended.

The Listener comes out this Friday, April 15. Check out preview pages here and see what you think.

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For forty years Larry Gonick has had a nice little niche for himself writing well-researched, engaging comics about history and science. They’re thoroughly enjoyable and informative, and there’s no reason why he should have kept the field to himself for so long.

That’s why I’m so glad to have discovered Evil Twin Comics, the work of writer Fred Van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey. They have a previous collection out about the history of philosophy (which I plan to check out). I discovered them through their current project, though, Comic Book Comics, which recounts the history of the comic book industry itself.

Other such histories exist, of course, without pictures. Just like world histories existed before Larry Gonick made comics about them. It simply happens to be more fun to read about all this stuff with little figures and world bubbles.

For a comic book buff it’s also fascinating to read tidbits like the series of events that led from the Frankfurt School, to Fredric Wertham’s testimony before Congress, to the creation of the Comics Code Authority (which I’ve mentioned before), to the death of EC Comics, to the birth of Mad magazine. (See, the publisher of EC realized that a glossy magazine wouldn’t be subject to a code applying to comics.) Or how the increasing crackdown on drug paraphernalia in the early 1970s put head shops out of business and thereby killed the distribution network for underground comix artists like Robert Crumb.

The most recent issue, #5, even manages to make interesting reading out of nothing but the many intellectual property ripoffs and lawsuits that have plagued the medium since its birth.

When the collected version comes out I’ll certainly try to remember to mention it. In the meantime, though, these guys are doing great stuff and publishing independently (right in my neighborhood, coincidentally). The first two issues are available print-on-demand from IndyPlanet, the rest you can get through their website, where you can also find lots of previews. Or you can buy all their stuff even cheaper for your Kindle or iPhone or whatever from Comixology. Show them some love.

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Jay Cantor and James Romberger’s Aaron and Ahmed is a confounding book. It asks a big question on its inside flap—What Causes Terrorism?—and then gives an answer that makes sense from certain angles, and that from others seems utterly mistaken.

Aaron Goodman’s wife is in the second plane to hit the World Trade Center. Motivated by revenge he transfers from his post as a VA psychiatrist to the interrogation unit at Guantanamo, where he oversees the torture and degradation of prisoners. Since these methods aren’t reliable in getting the information his superiors want, he experiments with a prisoner named Ahmed, one of the camp leaders. He doses Ahmed with estrogen and is nice to him, hoping to trick him into forming a bond.

And the two of them do bond. Ahmed reveals that the terrorist cell run by The Old Man in the Mountain (as Cantor names bin Laden, just as he calls al Qaeda suicide bombers Hashishiyyin) uses infectious “memes” to turn men into martyrs.

Memes, as you may already know if you read the internet, are a concept invented by Richard Dawkins in the last chapter of his great The Selfish Gene. The idea is that just as genes should be considered the unit of biological evolution, rather than the organisms that carry them, so “memes,” or reproducible units of thought, might be considered the functional unit of social evolution. Genes succeed if they induce the organisms that carry them to pass on more copies of themselves; memes succeed in the same way, by being passed on.

Aaron is so intrigued by this possibility that he reads between the lines when a general tells him not to pursue it, breaks Ahmed out of Guantanamo (absurdly easily), and together they make their way to Pakistan, to join a Hashishiyyin training camp.

Now, meme theory and murderous fanaticism do make an interesting combination. Or they could. But Cantor immediately starts treating this whole “meme” idea like a religious version of The Manchurian Candidate. Martyr trainees pray together, smoke hashish, and are programmed with trigger words and images that make them want to blow people up.

Aaron and Ahmed then return to New York as part of a cell charged with a mission they don’t yet know. Aaron wants to escape to the Army and share with them the terror brainwashing secrets he’s learned. Ahmed too wants to stop the new attack, but is afraid the U.S. will simply appropriate these mystical mind-control techniques and use them to program their own suicide bombers.

Aaron comes to believe that his “meme” infection has transmuted into a physical virus, and he’s therefore now a walking pathogen. Ahmed tries to tell him that this is the most powerful meme of all that’s taken hold of him:

They want you to think your body’s unclean because you want to fuck. Or you want to fuck the wrong sex. Or you eat pork. Or you don’t eat pork.

(By this point, by the way, Ahmed has confessed his love for Aaron, and they’ve kissed.)

Like I said, from certain angles this makes great sense: terrorist ideology is fueled, ultimately, by the idea that our bodies are unclean. I don’t think that’s an adequate explanation for what makes a terrorist, of course, since body shame is common to all the Abrahamic religions and few religious Jews, Christians, or Muslims turn into terrorists. But it’s a rich possibility, and I wish it could have been the focus of the story rather than being introduced at the end, as it is. For example, what if it turned out that terrorism was merely ancillary to the self-perpetuation of the body-shame meme? That would have been interesting.

Instead, memes are treated as these brainwashing tools, and we wander through a Manchurian Candidate scenario that ultimately doesn’t lead anywhere. It would have worked better if that brainwashing, rather than being a mystical, half-remembered experience that implanted an idea of infection, could have been more explicitly about what Ahmed says:

Religion, it’s the disease, Aaron. It’s the one and only viral meme. These priests and rabbis, these mullahs and imams, they make you think your food’s dirty, your body’s dirty, your appetites are dirty—and tey have te only way for you to feel clean again.

Still, all things considered I’d rather have this book, aiming for big themes and landing close, than another less ambitious one.

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Over at Balloon Juice they’re justifiably fascinated with the spectacle of Andrew Sullivan and others fawning over Paul Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program. Writes Tom Levenson:

“Serious” clearly has a meaning to Villagers and the political elite utterly distinct from anything the rest of us understand by the word.

…[T]he word has become code, several posts here have already pointed out.  Its use signals that the weaker party to any bargain is about to get screwed. The claim that enduring others’ pain is “serious”  is as archtypical an example of rhetorical deceit as one could hope to find.

Sometimes, as a mostly atheistic Jew, I forget that a lot of Christians, especially Catholics but also a whole lot of more religious Protestants, have a fundamentally different outlook than I do on many matters. I was reminded of this when listening to Marc Maron interviewing Conan O’Brien on his podcast. Says Conan at one point:

…I probably have a Catholic need to suffer. That helps me. So the trials and tribulations that I went through in 93-94 probably was my way of paying whatever dues I felt I needed to pay to keep that show, and then once I had suffered enough there was part of me that was like “All right,” and then I could move on to another level.

Suffering is redemptive, right? Suffering is something you gain from?

This is horseshit, of course. Suffering in and of itself gets you nothing. What you suffer through may be valuable in other ways—as a learning experience, or because you’re an adult who can delay gratification as you work toward goals—but in and of itself it is worthless.

Yet many, many people in this country have had it drilled into them from childhood that suffering itself is worthwhile. So government policies that alleviate suffering are worse than just a drain on my pocketbook, they’re robbing sufferers of their chance at redemption.

I don’t for a minute claim that this is a prejudice held consciously, but I think it’s a small contributing factor toward disdain for policies that help the poor, or even the not-so-poor. Especially when the suffering is borne by others.

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When I reviewed the first issue of Meta 4 I wrote: “okay, Ted, I’ll give you five issues’ worth of rope. Try not to hang yourself.”

And when I got and read this last issue, I thought Ted McKeever had pretty well hung himself. The story seemed too bizarre, too packed with competing weird ideas. Most problematically, this was a book that explicitly billed itself as an “allegorical series,” yet I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be an allegory for.

But just like I gave the series a chance in the first place out of respect for McKeever, I decided I should read all five issues straight through to see if they made any more sense like that.

And they did. Everything clicked into place. I think (and this was never my strong-suit philosopher so I’m not sure, but I think) that McKeever has written a Heideggerian allegory in comic-book form.

A lot of what distracted me initially were the details: why was the unnamed amnesiac hero in a spacesuit? Why did his Amazon protector speak only in pictograms? Why did bullets talk to him and tell the story of a SWAT team raid on a hostage crisis? The main character is obsessed with these details too, at first.

The amnesiac is perhaps Dasein. As this gentleman explains:

The “there” of there-being may be disclosed by attunement or by understanding. The “there” of there-being is also the thrownness of its being, in that Da-sein always discovers that it is already in-the-world.

Instead of figuring them out, though, our hero slowly comes to realize that their reasons do not matter. We never come to fully understand the hero’s past or his world, and neither does he. “My past no longer fits me,” he says. “Time enough to let it go.”

And when the amnesiac stops struggling, he ends up experiencing transcendence, alone on a desert mountaintop. He tells us:

I no longer have even the slightest desire to find out or figure out how I came to be there in the first place. It no longer makes any difference connecting every single thread that bridges all the dots of my past: It brings about not one change to this moment of translucent elevation.

All of which is not to say that everything said is exact. All human stories are subject to interpretation regardless of intent—only that is as true as I could make it.

Or:

Da-sein understands itself by projecting itself as its thrown possibility. The thrownness of Da-sein is its “having been,” and the projected possibility of Da-sein is its “already being” and its “not yet.” Thus, Da-sein unifies the past, the present, and the future. The past, present, and future are referred to by Heidegger as the “ecstacies” of temporality. Temporality is “ecstatic,” and is the meaning of there-being. Da-sein temporalizes itself in its being-in-the-world. Da-sein reveals the “ecstatic” unity of temporality.

McKeever’s art has always been distinctive. He used to always draw his characters blocky, with long squarish limbs, in childlike pen-and-ink cityscapes, and there are traces of that style in the first couple issues of META 4. But META 4 is at least partially painted, I think, not drawn, and by the end of issue #5 he’s doing these incredible negative desert landscapes in stark white and black, rock faces he turns into abstract Modernism. It echoes the final moments of the story beautifully, especially when the hero stands atop his mountain, naked, as perfect as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. It’s an entirely different level of power than what he could get out of two-dimensional Eddy Current, for example.

Since its a book that does have to be read all at once to be appreciated, I hope Image does do a collected version.

Preview below the fold.

(continue reading…)

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