Animals Were Harmed in the Making of This Story (for the Sake of Allegory)

It’s a sad state of affairs when a man has to travel to Japan before he can be exposed to the beauty of European comics.

While I was in Tokyo for two months on a fellowship, I found myself drawn to similarly bemused outsiders.  I felt such a profound sense of culture shock, having never even left the East Coast before then, that I truly needed to vent this sense of strangeness with others who were outside of the fold.  I met the perfect fellow expatriate in Béatrice Maréchal — a beautiful, brilliant, chain-smoking Frenchwoman who was putting together a thesis on comics at the University of Tokyo.  Béatrice and I would hang out at Manga Kisas (comic cafés) for hours, comparing misunderstood moments, commenting on the utterly uniqueness of Japanese culture, dreaming of the artist who could unite the strengths of each sequestered sequential art form, and sharing wonderful comics.

Béatrice got wind of a shop downtown that was holding an exhibition.  She didn’t even tell me the theme until we arrived.  When we opened the door, her face lit up as if she were encountering a bevy of old friends.  Spread across three tables in the center of the shop were gorgeous French graphic novels.

I had never seen such artistry.  Here were finished books.  These were not whims an artist serialized and made up as he went.  These were projects that clearly took years, designed as a thorough examination of an idea, the way an artist’s show would be — or an author’s novel.  I had seen Moebius in the States and been floored, but even that did not prepare for the bulk of these tomes, and the perfect delineations contained within.  They were opuses.  Completely confident, fully realized, masterful.  I plunked down tens of thousands of yen.

Béatrice first pointed me to the work of Nicolas de Crécy, one of her personal favorites.  Her taste, as always, was impeccable.

In France, she explained, comics were considered an Art form.  As such, their creators could receive funding from their equivalent of the N.E.A.  These grants would enable them to devote entire years to seeing the work through in the exact way their visions demanded.  There was no need for compromise.  No arbitrary deadlines that led to rush jobs or slapdash work.  De Crécy clearly earned every cent of the grant that allowed him to make Foligatto, an utter masterpiece.  Comic’s openings, in the American mold, are often relatively weak.  The artist is still finding his footing or testing the waters.  You can see a drive to get past the exposition to the “good stuff.”  This is the first four pages of Foligatto:

art: Nicolas de Crécy book: Foligatto publisher: Les Humanoïdes Associés © Les Humanoïdes Associés

art: Nicolas de Crécy book: Foligatto publisher: Les Humanoïdes Associés © Les Humanoïdes Associés

art: Nicolas de Crécy book: Foligatto publisher: Les Humanoïdes Associés © Les Humanoïdes Associés

You can see the careful consideration and planning that went into every line and color and choice of this intro.  This functions like the Abstract of a scientific paper, the dumb show of early theater or the overture of an opera: here is the story in miniature, veiled in symbolism, wordless.  All the themes are introduced, the tone is set, the aim established.

And with those Hemingway-esque sentences and the previous discussion of ex-pats, I suppose it’s inevitable that I mention The Sun Also Rises.

There is a long history of internal suffering getting its external catharsis via man’s cruelty to animals.  The bullfight in Hemingway’s tale of repressed ambitions and unfulfillable love springs immediately to mind.  In Hemingway’s deft hands the plunging swords and plunging horns are the sex and violence kept simmering for two-hundred pages exploding in one.  As much as I love that book, I think my favorite violence-with-animals-allegorically-playing-out-the-tribulations-of-our-protagonists scene in a novel would in fact be from Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust.  Chapter 21 is an absolutely excruciating account of a cock fight.  The conclusion is foregone from the start, but the sadistic destruction is so protracted as to become unbearable.  West undertook this same mission at a full novel’s length with the Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin in A Cool Million, but that work was a farcical parody.  Here, “distanced” by non-human combatants, West allows the tone to be one of merciless annihilation.  One bird, belonging to a dwarf, is slowly and literally torn apart while it is time and again made to re-enter the ring for a fight that becomes ever more fruitless.  It is not hard to see how Todd Hackett, our East Coast artist adrift in L.A., feels his every day amounts to the same.

De Crécy’s cockfight is equally allegorical and equally suited to its story.  But the aim of Foligatto is much different.  The tone is just as dark, as can be seen in the deep ink shadows of the linework and the Eliot bone imagery that opens the work.  But quickly the bones are assembled into a harp by “children” of indeterminate age.  And those shadows are covered with luscious, warm browns that unite the shakey lines and bathe the whole in a beautiful glow.  This is not the sepia of nostalgia.  There is a dichotomy here of danger and playfulness.  As the violence gets racheted up to the extreme of decapitation, the childish glee responds in kind with Family Circle-like cartoony dashes for thrown objects.  The reconciliation of these two extremes is only possible in the land of the absurd, and when the severed head happily is carried off as its body lights its cigarette, it is patently clear that is where we are.  Foligatto is profoundly bizarre, while being at once bizarrely profound.  Nonsense, as it is in Don Quixote, becomes divine art when exalted.  Gaze deeply into the perfection of every tone, design, character and mark on these pages and you must admit this art is divine.  Pull back to look at the framing of the panels themselves to see there altarpiece shapes, both the curves of the first page and the widened inner panel of his tiers on the third, and you realize De Crécy intends to be exalting this madness.  This drastic shifting between these opposing poles keeps the reader constantly on her toes.  The absurd, this defiance of all expectations, in a master like De Crécy’s hands, makes the horrors are all the more disturbing and the flights of inventive childish fancy all the more delightful.

This perfectly realized scene, by virtue of being quite different from what follows, is the perfect introduction to a perfectly realized book.

Murder before Motorbikes and Meltdowns: Otomo’s pre-Akira oeuvre

One afternoon in the summer of 1999, I found myself in Kichijoji sitting on the floor across from a respected manga critic (who will remain nameless) attempting to discuss my reasons for exploring the comic culture of Japan.  During most of these interviews, I came with a translator, but this man, I was assured by other Japanese-speakers via said translator, spoke perfect English.  I had come alone, and now found myself completely lost in a lecture that for all I knew had the depth of Hegel, but I was too busy struggling to make sense of the “perfect English.”  Switching to my FAR FROM PERFECT Japanese would have been less than useless and the height of rudeness.  So I sipped my tea and nodded, peppering pauses with “naruhodo” as I had observed my mentor do with me when floor tables were turned.  When I realized, at one point, that he was asking for names I admired, I replied, “Otomo Katsuhiro.”  He retorted, “You mean Akira, I assume.”  I was American, reading only the few manga that had been translated and ended up in the tiny comic shop I worked at in Caribou, Maine.  Of course I meant Akira.   Add Shirow Masamune to that list (another whose creations had found there way to popular anime features) and you had nearly the complete extent of my pre-Tokyo first-hand knowledge of manga.  “Yes, Akira is grand, isn’t it?”  I asked.

Now, again, my understanding of the exact words and minor points the man then explicated was minimal, but the brunt of the argument came through loud and clear:

“No.  Akira is boring.”

A 2000 page, multi-volume epic addressing the atom bomb, telekinesis, and body distortion horror that would make Cronenberg salivate, filled with mind-blowing art was “boring”?  Who was this pompous tool?  His mustache began irking me even more than before.  “You think it’s uninteresting?”

“It’s drivel.  Childish wish-fulfillment trash.  It’s such a shame that he turned his back on creating something meaningful, because his early short stories showed such potential.”

I left the man’s house angry, muttering to myself under my breath about “perfect English,” ashamed at my own pitiful command of his language, but worse, ashamed that perhaps my very love of this medium, one that I was busy purporting to all who would listen was an Art form, was juvenile and adolescent.  I vowed I would prove this uptight, stick-in-the-mud pedant wrong.  I hopped a train to Mandarake rather than going straight back to my host home as I planned and hunted down a collection of Otomo’s early work entitled Short Peace.  The initial flip-through showed just what I expected: autobiographical sketches that lacked any of the ambition or formal innovation I had come to love.  A story with the length, breadth and character count of a Russian novel was somehow wasting this potential?!?  Because sometimes they move things with their minds?!?  Ha ha.  Score one for the undergraduate art student foreigner.  Wrong, sir.  Wrong.

I was on the train home when I found this hidden towards the end of the book (I have flipped this through the magic of Photoshop, so the direction of the read is American.  Sound FX are still mostly backwards, as that is haaard.):

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

This was probably not the sort of piece to which the critic had been alluding.  I would guess he would find horror to be just as automatically worthless as sci-fi.  A genre seemed to be a genre in his book.  (I wonder where MacBeth falls?  A Midsummer Night’s Dream?  Oh, I’m being simplistic.)  And to be fair, my Japanese has never been even close to good enough to allow me to actually read any of these stories.  For all I know, the other stories in this collection have words that give them the insight of Chekhov.  But the pictures are just of people standing around talking.  The layouts are unremarkable.  The linework is clean but predictable.

I had a film teacher who insisted that she should be able to shut off the sound on our videos and still find them compelling.  I wholeheartedly agree.

I have never championed comics as literature.  I feel viewing them as such and asking their contents to adhere to the rules and standards of what works in fully-text novels leads one to look at some pretty dull comic books.  I leave discussions of our young medium’s literary merits to others.  There are certainly some stories that have risen to that challenge, but I teach English literature.  I cannot seriously argue that the story of any issue of X-Men, or just the story of any Adrian Tomine short, moves me in the same way as those of James Joyce or Flannery O’Connor or Ivan Turgenev, that it deserves the same analysis and depth of thought.

But I have, and I continue to argue through this blog, that comics, by virtue of being a collection of lines on a page adding up to form, are art.  And in the hands of a master feeling his oats, are even Art.  And we should view them through this lens.

The appeal of the other comics in this collection, if there is one, must reside in their words and the story those create.  As such, they are like films with bad lighting and pat cinematography: formally flawed.  Despite what some will try to argue, good art cannot possibly hurt a good story.  It is not a distraction.

On the contrary, the above piece proves that innovative artwork and storytelling (which is achieved in comics via art) can heighten a simplistic genre (groan) story to the level of a masterpiece.

Over the course of these pages, the minimal story is abundantly clear.  A man killed someone who was probably a former friend, freaks out, and then eventually begins to clean it up.  By the end of the story, which I did not include, he has become comfortable enough with this whole deal as to be eating him.

Not exactly Kafka.

No, a better point of reference would be the much-loved by tortured teens Poe.  The execution here has “Tell-Tale Heart” written all over it.

The first two page spread puts us inside the murderer’s mind and as such is absolutely unbearable.  This is accomplished by way of McCloud’s aspect-to-aspect transitions and sped up by including many panels per page and peppering it all with the killer’s heavy breathing.  It becomes hallucinatory.  The aspect transitions make perfect sense because in a split second we did not witness, this man’s entire world changed.  It is as if he is scanning the room, looking for a sign of this momentous shift, wondering if the sky is about to open up and smite him.  Instead, the perfectly repeated dialogue hammers home that the world is the same, it will not vanish, and thus there is no escape.  We can barely make out his face by the last panel on the spread, so trapped behind his own breath.

And placing the friend’s head upside down is such a brilliant move.  It allows for the blood to run down from it in future panels, but since the initial violence was not shown, it also gives a slow reveal to what has actually happened.  It indicates something is off here, but what that is only becomes clear as we piece together the bits of the surroundings.  The spilled coffee is rightly suggestive of blood.  The bloody hammer a tier later let’s us in on it, so when the head reappears on the next page slightly tilted, we are not surprised at all that a river of blood is flowing from it.

This inverted head shot keeps repeating throughout the course of the scene; it’s changes mark time for us.  Otomo’s art is so subtle that towards the end we can make out stages of decay, shrinkage, and rigor mortis in the shot.  This shows us better than the clock that this tormented killer has been sitting far too long with this corpse.

This scene is visual poetry, and that sort of repetition reminds me, appropriately, of this poem:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

BREAK

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Technically, this piece by Alfred Lord Tennyson called “The Eagle” is a fragment, but I’m not sure he could have made a better poem with more.  The comparison I would like to make here is one of construction.  I draw your attention to the last lines of both stanzas.  In the first, all potential energy and mounting power, “he stands.”  At the end, as the eagle, familiar of Zeus, dives like a lightning bolt, “he falls.”  There is another faint echo in the lines implying nature’s subservience to him, the “sea…crawls.”  These verbs place the poem and give it it’s tension and power.  This would not be discernible if they were dressed up and hidden.  The starkness of their words, placement, and repetition allows them to reverberate with one another.  Their echoing motif helps us navigate the poem.

Otomo does the same thing visually here.  From the breaths, to the upside down head shots, to the crouching killer panels, to the standing profiles that frame pages six and seven, to the layout choices — everything is repetition.  We understand the subtle, and not-so subtle, shifts in the killer’s mind because we have reference points we return to which anchor the scene.  The murderer moves through the Seven Stages of Loss (adding a final one, 8. Mastication) violently and unpredictably, up and down the scale and back again, and we can track this thanks to those visual motifs.

The lack of symmetry on any page keeps us as off-balance as he.  The fact that vertical gutters never form a line between tiers also keeps us constantly shifting.  We are given nothing stable to cling to aside from those horrific repetitions.  Only the beautiful wide shot of the light through the window gives us that stability we lacked: it is symmetrical and implies the nice, comfortable Kirby six panel grids that are so absent.  Appropriately, it is that same cold light of day that is the turning point.  The only symmetry comes at the bottom of the penultimate page of this selection.  The killer’s head is buried in his knees deep in contemplation, and then it rises in acceptance.  “He stands/He falls” has become “He hangs/He rises.”  The unwelcome light and contrasting simplicity leads the narrator to the conclusion he had to eventually reach: Well, I guess I’d better clean this mess up.

The End of the World as We’ve Never Known It

Regardless of one’s faith, the Apocalypse of St. John is an absolutely terrifying vision.   I remind us of this fact to pose a question: which is further afield of Biblical doctrine — beatific cherub guardian angels on our shoulders or metallic angels with guns?  The presence of the latter is but one reason to pick up Ted McKeever’s astounding Metropol.  Others are his tonally perfect disturbing art style (on which I will elaborate elsewhere on this site), his literally gritty depictions of city life (be it in the throes of hell on earth or just the everyday hellish), the sheer ugly horror of an unstoppable pandemic that leads to the quarantine of an entire metropolis, and scenes of such formal experimentalism and hallucinatory eeriness as this:

art: Ted McKeever  book: Metropol  publisher: Epic Comics  © Ted McKeever

art: Ted McKeever  book: Metropol  publisher: Epic Comics  © Ted McKeever

art: Ted McKeever  book: Metropol  publisher: Epic Comics  © Ted McKeever

art: Ted McKeever  book: Metropol  publisher: Epic Comics  © Ted McKeever

art: Ted McKeever  book: Metropol  publisher: Epic Comics  © Ted McKeever

art: Ted McKeever  book: Metropol  publisher: Epic Comics  © Ted McKeever

What’s important to notice is that this whole sequence is “one take”: it’s one long pullback.  We begin across from those loading dock steps as a car pulls away, pan over to the man on crutches, pullback as a mysterious woman peers out her window, round the corner to the Hotel Ankh, back into an alleyway with working girls, fall back into a bar, hit the john, exit backward out the window reflected in the bathroom mirror into a tiny storeroom, back down a hallway, turn and back away from an employees only door, descend some steps, decline the invitation to an opened door, watch the offerer fade into nothingness, sidestep trucks peeling across the desert, linger on their dust, remove ourselves further to try to discern the breadth of some sort of smokestack filling our field of vision, and finally exit out the pupil of a deranged soul who is vainly trying to reassure a hanged man that he acted properly.

So few comic artists have attempted this film technique, but McKeever just takes the feeling of that continuous movement from this movie trope.  He’s too smart an illustrator to simply try to ape another field without realizing what is vital to his own.  The ending is pure illustration.  I’m not sure I can think of another comic book artist who has so boldly and effectively used negative space.  The overwhelming use of black deepens the mystery of the sequence, giving us holes to fall into.  The shape formed by the little white on the ultimate panel of the second to last page also suggests an eye and therefore foreshadows the ending. And very rare is the artist who can combine outright simplicity with spot meticulous rendering and filthy textural fills in only those inches they are called for.  To continue with the film theme, the cumulative effect is similar to the unease created by David Lynch’s unsettling oeuvre.  McKeever transcends this by doing it with images so strong and perfectly selected that we don’t need them flying by at 30 frames per second: we can linger on their haunting beauty indefinitely.

Reinvigorating the Form

I guess I should be embarrassed to admit that I did not learn a working definition of the term “sublime” until junior year in college. I suppose the dictionary version is something akin to “beauty beyond description.” I take that somewhat literally and think of it as something so moving it would honestly be useless trying to describe through words: an intensity of beauty so profound as to be a transcendent, quasi-religious experience; wheels within wheels, vibrating within one and throughout the ether that unites us. Tears would be histrionic and superfluous. The joy is all subsuming.

I say working definition because, again, the Sublime is something one must experience.

Junior year I stood in front of a Rothko.

Now, to preface this, I was a painting major at Yale creating narrative works with a mind towards commercial art and illustration. To put it mildly, the art department and I did not exactly see eye to eye. My teachers encouraged me to move towards some sort kitsch or avant-garde — to abandon my instincts or to treat them as ridiculous or ironic — and I continued to ignore them and accept C’s. This back-story is simply to explain that the Abstract Expressionism of Mark Rothko should have been the type of work I would be happy to name-drop derisively during a critique of one my classmates transparent attempts to just spill their souls on the canvas, man. Let it all out in a cathartic ecstasy, you know. They can’t even remember creating it, for real, they were in such a fervor of artistic emesis. I only had respect for those artists for whom the act of creation was obviously a struggle, a clear struggle. That ran a gamut, from Rembrandt to Richter as well as Dore to Darrow, but self-satisfied ironic or abstract post-modernists were largely excluded. To be honest, I didn’t get it. This holds true for some to this day.

But standing in front of a Rothko, one finds all arguments of aesthetics inconsequential. I’ll post a useless image here just to reiterate my definition of sublime:

art: Mark Rothko

Seriously? Yeah, again it’s a real-life experience, not a series of pixels on a blog. What can I say? They are bigger than you are? That this size allows them to envelop your periphery and function as doorways? That the chromatic relationships are in perfect harmony? The brushwork… The inevitable bisecting razor of the horizon line…

This is fluff. Go to a museum. Ask the security guard where the Rothko’s are. Stand in front of one.

This is how an atheist communes with God. I am sorry the internet is not very accepting of this sort of thing, but I am not meaning these words to sound even slightly tongue-in-cheek or hyperbolic. I am serious as death. I felt things opening inside me. Things falling away. Thrilled to be alive and not-quite alive at the same time.

And dumbfounded that another human being could create such an experience.

Since I found that working definition, I started using the word constantly. I am sure my praising of works perhaps went a little over the top in those days. I mean, Fight Club’s pretty frickin’ great, but…

These days I reserve the word for those experiences in art that reorganize my entire being at once. Sort of pick me up and shuffle me. Take me out of myself and back, aware that something is now profoundly different in the pathways of my thoughts, the way I will interpret and see my world.

When my fiancée and I read Song of Myself together one summer evening in our sun room, windows open, warm breeze, bottle of wine, (all of that welcome, but unnecessary), that was sublime. The poem was so overwhelming to me, so all-encompassing, that I, a non-smoker, forced us to pause halfway through our reading of it so we could go down to the gas station and get cigarettes. I needed that stereotypically post-coital drag. I was that tingly and buzzing. (It was one glass, all you cynical haters.)

Some sublime experiences are repeatable, assuming they are reserved for moments of necessity: beauty emergencies. These occur mostly in the musical milieu, given its experiential nature. The chiming, interlocking guitars that begin at the three minute eight second mark of Interpol’s “P.D.A.” are sublime. Nothing else matters with a pair of good headphones over your ears and that transcendent dissonance to gorgeous harmony up and over and away and back again bouncing inside your soul. I now try to save the end of that song for drives into work on days I know will be especially trying, when I need to be reminded that we humans can sometimes escape the strangling clutches of this mortal coil.

Chris Forgues, known as C.F., sets out to illustrate this sublime experience and ends up creating one:

art: C.F. book: Kramers Ergot publisher: Avodah Books © Chris Forgues

art: C.F. book: Kramers Ergot publisher: Avodah Books © Chris Forgues

art: C.F. book: Kramers Ergot publisher: Avodah Books © Chris Forgues

art: C.F. book: Kramers Ergot publisher: Avodah Books © Chris Forgues

art: C.F. book: Kramers Ergot publisher: Avodah Books © Chris Forgues

Now, I’m not going to even bother trying to put into words what occurs in that gorgeous visual cacophony towards the end. All I will attempt is to point out that here Forgues found a way to brilliantly bind the energetic doodly assemblages of the rest of the Kramers krowd to narrative purposes. And with what results! With this piece, Forgues legitimately pushes the form forward in a deliberately boundary-stretching album and, more impressively, beats out Sammy Harkham’s early-favorite (its around page 100) and astounding “Poor Sailor” as the most vital work of Kramers Ergot 4. I should add that all readers who have not simply must buy a copy of the whole volume, both because my pal Sean T. Collins is absolutely right in saying that one cannot overestimate its importance to the future of comics (see his Dark Side of the Moon comparison in the link in the sidebar) and because I have chopped off the beginning and end in deference to what I’m sure are Forgues wishes of selling more books. I cannot in good conscience put up an entire work, even if it is a short story. This consideration has meant that the brilliant explanation that Forgues himself provides for the above has been excised. The brilliance you see here, or all its glory, is actually diminished by its lack of punchline. I assure you, the humor and absurdity that follows in the original does not detract from, but rather heightens, the profundity.

Forgues found a way to inject jet fuel into a then somewhat stagnant art form by doing what the Fauves and Picasso did before him, looking to the unabashed creative chutzpah of children’s art. This sequence begins innocuously, and its placement in the center of a volume housing other more straightforward stories employing this art school faux-naivete makes the reader completely awestruck by the turn it takes. The artistic chops that come in the climax should not catch the careful viewer completely unawares. Forgues tips his hand ever so slightly with his one “background” in the second page of this selection. That blue “wall” should strike anyone who has ever attempted to rein in the beast that is watercolors as far more accomplished than the untrained kid-with-crayon-box look he is attempting. It is the first hint that Forgues is not simply aiming for surreal, juvenile, ironic or nostalgic. And when this pays off, we the reader are rewarded with that indescribable, ineffable, unknowable experience our stand-in protagonist (the beautifully named Quiet Grace) is given. C.F. makes us want to believe that any child, given the typical skills and tools associated with the age, could create a spiritual epiphany his or her parents would hang by a magnet to the fridge.

I suppose it was no accident that one year both Chris Ware and the Fort Thunder Kids, a collective from Providence with which Forgues has been associated, had their own rooms at the Whitney Biennial. Thanks to gentlemen like those guys, I still have no regrets about choosing this corner of the Art world to explore. And yes, sorry Yale, that is Art with a capital A. We’ve touched the sublime.