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Opus 167: Opus 167 (August 14, 2005). This time, a report on the recent
disturbance in Chicago, Wizard World, and reviews of Clyde Fans: Book 1 and the 22nd collection of Baby Blues
comic strips. In order, here's what comes next, in order: The Wiz -Alberto Ruiz and
Andy Lee in Artists Alley; NOUS R US -Animated editoonery, Alex Ross's methods, Gumby's 50th,
Linda Carter at 54; Comic Strip Watch -new strip, Humble Stumble and twins in Jump Start; Funnybook Fan Fare -reviews of Kyle Baker's daring Nat Turner,
Amanda Conner's visual comedy
in JSA Classified No. 1, sex and violence
in The Ride (both TPB and
No. 1); Baby Blues book reviewed; Grafic Novelz -Clyde Fans: Book 1; and, at last, GeeDubya's mysterious appeal explained
and more duplicity than we should have to tolerate. Don't forget, in
your haste to consume all these tasty tidbits, our "Bathroom Button":
when you get to the Members' Section, click on our useful "Bathroom
Button" (also called the "print friendly version") of
this installment so you can print off a copy of just this installment
of Rancid Raves for reading later, at your leisure while enthroned.
Without further adieu-
THE WIZ AND OTHER DISTURBANCES For
the first time in memory, Wizard World Chicago Con did not feature professional
wrestlers at work. In previous years, a wrestling ring stood at the
edge of Artists Alley, and wrestlers cavorted in the ring all day long,
grabbing at one another and flinging each other around. The usual murmuring
din of a convention was punctuated by the thumps of bodies falling on
the canvas of the ring-a regular chorus of thuds and groans. This year,
however, we were spared this grotesque cacophony; we could bask, quietly,
in the steady aural hum of a milling crowd. It was a blessed relief. Probably there were more people at
this year's Wiz than there were last year. It is a Truth about comicons
that every year's con is more successful (which means, "attended
by more people") than last year's. What these sky-rocketing numbers
are this time I don't know. The Sandy Eggo conclave purportedly reached
95,000. The Wiz is always smaller. It is smaller in part because its
venue, the Rosemont Convention Center, is smaller than the San Diego
Convention Center. That's scarcely unusual: the known universe is smaller
than the San Diego Convention Center. Being smaller, the Wiz is homier.
You can actually stroll down every aisle in a single day; in two days,
you can stop and shop at almost all the booths that might interest you.
In three days, you can also browse Artists Alley. According to one report, the Sandy
Eggo extravaganza is now about movies based upon comic book characters;
it is no longer about comic books, which, alas, were the basis of the
Con's being for its first two decades. I didn't go this year, but I
went last year, and even then, you had to work at it to get to the comic
book parts. Movies, toys, T-shirts and games have nearly elbowed four-color
fun off the exhibit floor. The same is true of the Wiz, but since the
Wiz is smaller, it's easier to find the comic book parts. And you know
the con is still about comic books when you wander Artists Alley. There are collected an array of professional and amateur talent such as you'd seldom find under one roof anywhere else. And most of the artists are flogging books of one kind or another as well as "original art." Some of the specimens on display are startlingly crude and ugly, the work so amateurish that I can't imagine anyone paying anything for samples of it. Here we see the logical extension of Cathybert in a parade of self-published scrawlings that are worthy of the name of Art only because such things are never found in nature: if it's man-made, it must be Art. Against all odds, considering the environment, I always find two or three (and sometimes more) artists whose work astonishes me. This year, for instance, I happened upon Alberto Ruiz, whose sketchbooks ("observational drawings of the female figure from a cartoonist point of view") present renderings of the figure that are triumphant works of graphic design. Ruiz has both flare and confidence, and his work, which appears often in the pages of Draw magazine, is unique in pin-up art. In Draw, you can find his finished art-fully rendered and colored, serving as a lesson in computer coloring. "I use flat colors," Ruiz told me, "because I can't paint." But his deployment of flat colors is sweetly expert. The layers of flat color achieve a nuance many painters would envy. Ruiz wild inventiveness in a array of rendering approaches is stunning in its variety and consummate skill. He doesn't merely draw the figure: he interprets it in terms of graphic design and, sometimes, in loving geometry. He claims to be retired now from a career as a graphic designer, but I say, he's still a graphic designer-an exemplar of the profession even. (Draw is published by TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614 or e-mail twomorrow@aol.com; $20/four quarterly issues. And the magazine also regularly includes lessons in figure drawing from Bret Blevins, a champion at his craft.)
For
more Ruiz, visit www.brandstudio.com
Elsewhere in the aisles of Artists
Alley, I watched the performance of Andy
Lee. Lee was producing several commissioned drawings, and his way
of drawing was, indeed, a performance. The blank sheet of paper lies
on the table before him; on the right, a pan of water colors and several
glasses of water, each discolored in varying degrees from black to gray.
Lee dips a Chinese brush into a glass of black ink, then stabs at the
drawing paper with the brush, creating a swoosh of a stroke. Then another
and another. Then, before laying down the next stroke, he swipes the
point of the brush on his shoulder quickly, lightening the load of ink
by depositing some of it on his t-shirt. The shoulder of his t-shirt
is wet and black where he has daubed with his brush repeatedly as he
paints. "What happens to the t-shirts?" I asked. "I throw
them away," he says with a grin. The next stroke is almost dry-brush.
Then another dip into a dish of black ink. After laying down another
stroke, he smears the result with his fingers, smudging the edges and
spreading the black until it turns gray. More stabs at the paper's surface
with the brush-a jab here, a hook there. You don't want to stand too
close: Lee doesn't draw so much as he splashes, flinging his brush at
the paper. Another stroke with the brush, another swipe at his shoulder.
He mixes a shade of green by dipping into the green first, dabbing his
forearm with the color, then into the white, dabbing it again on his
arm and then mixing the two colors on his forearm. Preparing another
sheet of paper for a drawing, he dabbles his fingers into pots of gray
wash at his elbow and then pats the paper with his fingers, creating
a dappled background.
NOUS R US Byron Preiss, who made a career of publishing high-quality comics
and graphic novels, was killed in an automobile accident on July 9.
The industry was thereby robbed of a pace-setting connoisseur of the
arts of cartooning who dared to do something different and inspiring.
... Time magazine has been running a page of
the Five Greatest Somethings for a few weeks. Five Fantastic Graphic
Novels are Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes, Ordinary Victories
by Manu Larcenet, War's End by Joe Sacco, Why Are You Doing
This by Jason, and Little Lulu by John Stanley, this last, one of the current on-going series from
Dark Horse reprinting the moppet's comic book adventures, not, strictly
speaking, a graphic novel at all.
Time posts regular reports on graphic novels at www.time.com/comix.
... Political cartoonist Scott Bateman announced early in August
that he will produce and post on his website, www.batemania.com, a short
animated film every day for a year. "Am I nuts?" he asked,
rhetorically. "You bet!" Bateman recently parted ways with
a syndicate which he felt was not aggressive enough in marketing his
work. Not all of his next year's work will be political, he said, "but
I'm sure a good portion will turn out that way." ... For more animated
political 'toonery, check www.markfiore.com : Mark Fiore is a pioneer in the genre, and his animations are often
accompanied by music and songs. ... The
New Yorker, having experienced some success publishing its entire
cartoon content as book and CD last year, will bring out a similar production
this fall embracing all the published magazine in eight DVDs containing
high-resolution digital images of every cover, every piece of writing,
every drawing, listing, newsbreak, poem and advertisement -every page
of the 4,109 issues from February 1925 through last year's 80th
anniversary issue; cover price, $100. Cheap, considering the encyclopedic
content. The financial state of the cartooning
industry is, depending upon who you talk to, great or not-so-great.
Pixar reported a dip in its financial fortunes last quarter, due largely
to there being no major release of either film or product during the
period. The Comics Buyer's Guide waxes forever
enthusiastic about the forever spiking business, and at Diamond, Shelley
Myers says comic shops did over $550 million of business in 2004, a
good thing, surely. Meanwhile, Marvel is reported to have limped through
a lame quarter. It depends, as I said, upon which set of statistics
(and which explanations thereof) you use. But whether the business is
spiraling upward or has reached a plateau, it is probably not slowly
sinking into the West. These outfits wouldn't still be in business if
they weren't making money. The London Times online announced a few days ago that manga will, at last,
be available in Britain, released by Orion Publishing Group. Up to now,
most manga in England have been imported via U.S. sources. The article's
focus is on the seeming pornographic content of manga: "The content
is not aimed at, and is usually unsuitable for, children." The
author of the piece has clearly not researched his subject very thoroughly:
while some manga is risque and some outright erotic, much of it is entirely
innocuous, seems to me. Osamu Tezuka is invoked as "the father
of modern manga"-an incurable Disney fan, rumored to have watched
"Bambi" more than 80 times. The current issue of The
Comics Journal, No. 269, is a vast symposium on the subject. The first issue of a 12-part Justice
League of America mini-series, Justice,
another of Alex Ross's incredible
painted masterpieces, is, by now, out. Interviewed at the Plain Dealer by Michael Sangiacomo, Ross said he hopes someday to
move beyond merely co-plotting and painting his books. "I want
to write, draw and paint an entire work," he said. "I want
to do everything from start to finish. I don't know when I will get
to do it. I just want to." He has story ideas for many of the characters
he loves-"I want to work on everything I was exposed to in my childhood"-particularly,
Captain Marvel. But not Wolverine. "I'm not interested in Wolverine,"
Ross said. "A guy with claws that slaughters people is not high
morality. I love the purity of the great heroes and what they represent.
That's why I do this." Ross works 10-hour days; it takes about
two months to paint a complete issue. For this series, he enlisted Doug
Braithwaite to do the initial pencils in order to speed up the production.
"Our styles are similar," Ross said. "Doug penciled the
pages, and I do my photorealistic painting over the top of his work." Gumby,
that animated asparagus with arms and legs, will be 50 next year,
but the celebration has already begun. Special exhibits in two art galleries
in San Francisco and at the Museum of Moving Images in New York opened
earlier this year. The character first appeared on tv's "The Howdy
Doody Show" in 1956 and got his own program a year later. Gumby's
"tilted, bumped" head came from an old photograph of creator
Art Clokey's father. Taken when the senior Clokey was a teenager,
it shows a cowlick sprouting from one side of his head. Says Joe Clokey,
the creator's son: "If you superimpose an outline of that portrait
over Gumby, you will see that the heads coincide perfectly." ...
Scott Roberts' comic book creation, Patty Cake, a genuine cartoon character,
is ten years old. "Genuine" because she behaves like a cartooned
kid ought to behave. Nifty stuff. ... Scott
Hinze is a 25-year-old comic-book evangelist, "passionately
preaching his message that comics are culture and not just little-boy
stuff," writes Robert Philpot at the Fort
Worth Star-Telegram. Hinze conducts a twice-a-week radio talk show,
"Fanboy Radio," on Forth Worth's KTCU/88.7 FM, a non-commercial
college station, where he launched the show on Thanksgiving Day 2001
"more-or-less by accident" when he started talking about comics
on the air. "Radio Fanboy" airs at 6 p.m. on Sundays and 1
p.m. on Wednesdays; and there's a website, www.fanboyradio.com.
Hinze has entertained such guests as
Mike Wieringo, Brian Michael Bendis, Stan Lee, and Joe Quesada. Hinze gave Philpot his list of the five best current
comics: DC All-Star-Batman and
Robin, the Boy Wonder; The Goon; Fables; The New Avengers; and,
at the top of the list, Ex Machina.
Linda
Carter at 54 is making a come-back. The one-time Wonder Woman (at the tender age of 24, too young perhaps: her fame
doubtless exacerbated a tendency to alcoholism) plays a principal at
a superhero school in "Sky High" and a family friend who helps
the Dukes escape Boss Hogg in "The Dukes of Hazzard" (originally,
she was to be the love interest for the Boss and Uncle Jesse). But she'll
never escape being Wonder Woman, a role she fell into after wining the
1972 Miss World USA pageant. "Fame," she says, "is a
vapor. You can't grab hold of it." But she doesn't mind: "I
think Wonder Woman is fantastic for women, and I think she's fantastic
for the gay community, and she was great for young guys seeing a beautiful,
strong woman." Wonder Woman is a great role model, she believes.
And being identified with the character is fine with her: "It's
much easier to embrace than to resist-and what's not to like?"
At the same time, she told Jonathan Padget at the Washington Post, she welcomes the prospect of a new Wonder Woman on
celluloid. Whoever plays the part, Carter said, "I hope she's warm
and wonderful and knocks 'em dead. I think it's time. I think it's good
there's a new Wonder Woman."
Quips
& Quotes "Whenever
I look at a coin, I instinctively want to look at the other side."
-Peter Jennings "I
lived for a long time in the Middle East, and it taught me that there
is no one absolutely essential truth for all people." -Peter Jennings
again As
I've been saying for years (borrowing from someone else)-it's all true.
All of it. I miss Peter Jennings. I've missed
him ever since he announced his cancer on April 5 and disappeared from
the evening newscast into chemotherapy. He gave tv newscasting a gentlemanly
tone. (Dan Rather was doggedness; Tom Brokaw, grim youthfulness.) I'll
remember Peter Jennings for his elan, for his relentless curiosity (he
wasn't afraid to ask questions that revealed that he didn't know everything),
for his matter-of-fact reassurance, for the way he cocked his head to
one side and looked at us, just a little bemused by it all.
COMIC STRIP WATCH Last
time, I mentioned the "anniversary" continuity that is running
in Blondie this summer. The earliest publicity
spoke of a "three-month" storyline but never got beyond September
4 as the culmination of the story, so I supposed the "three-month"
part was merely promotional exaggeration. Not so. Turns out that the
third month of the continuity, the rest of September, will carry us
through the Bumsteads' "anniversary" trip to Hawaii. In Funky Winkerbean, John's comics store goes to court in November, and
Tom Batiuk takes his turn
at unveiling just how ludicrous the censors are when they assume that
comic books are always for children and that anything not infantile
in comics must perforce be corrupting the youth of America. ... The
Humble Stumble, a comic strip about a single father and his daughter,
begins August 15. The strip's creator, Roy
Schneider, took his inspiration from his own life: in 2000, he found
himself, after twelve years of marriage, single and responsible for
the rearing of his nine-year-old daughter. He found the best therapy
for the trials of his new station was laughing at himself-while grocery
shopping, for instance, "stumbling" back and forth from one
end of the store to the other, spending an hour-and-a-half finding six
items. Now, we are assured, "Schneider lives in South Florida with
his daughter (now 14) and nas successfully learned to cook, clean and
shop (although the shopping must wait until every conceivable scrap
of food is gone and the two of them are starving)."...
FUNNYBOOK
FAN FARE The
second issue of Kyle Baker's
telling of the life story Nat Turner, the slave who led an armed
rebellion in early 1800 America, is listed in this month's Previews.
The first issue, which came out a month or so ago, is a stunning launch.
Entirely wordless, the issue depicts the horrors of the slave trade-the
capture of Africans in Africa, their branding and their exportation
to the New World under the most brutal and inhumane conditions. Although
the pictures are in Baker's caricatural style, he has give them a texture
in both line and tone that raises the drawings to Art. Turner doesn't
appear in this issue except in a concluding text paragraph in which
he alludes to slave trade customs that he seemed, as a child, to have
knowledge of without have experienced them directly himself; his fellow
slaves, hearing these tales, thought "I surely would be a prophet
as the Lord had shewn me things than happened before my birth."
Adam
Hughes provides the decorative cover of JSA
Classified, No. 1-a picture of Power Girl apparently flying prone
on her back shot from her feet upwards, a perspective challenge of no
small order, but she is, even from this absurd angle, a beautiful and
voluptuous representative of the curvaceous gender. I'm tempted, from
this evidence, to suppose that Hughes is getting tired of drawing zaftig
women. There are only a few hundred ways to depict feminine embonpoint
before you've exhausted the possibilities and are therefore driven into
a cycle of endlessly repeating yourself. To prevent this graphic boredom,
talented artists often seek out unusual angles and poses. And Hughes
is, without a doubt, a talented artist. Hence, my speculation. The interior
of this book is as visually delightful as the cover. Written by Geoff
Jones and drawn by Amanda Conner, who is faithfully inked
by Jimmy Palmiotti, the story
displays Conner's customary comedic sensibilities and, probably, Jones'
too. Conner's humor is revealed in the facial expressions she gives
to Karen Starr and in Karen's hand gestures. The puzzle here is that
Power Girl isn't Superman's cousin, as she was once introduced, but,
it turns out, she doesn't want to know who (or what) she really is.
She undergoes some tests, though, and which she doffs the testing costume
and dons her own costume, Conner gives us some charming poses, including
the one where Karen has to stuff her considerable bosom into that tight
one-piece Power Girl tunic. The best joke, however, combines word and
picture. Explaining why she never wears a mask as Power Girl, Karen
says, "It's because most of the time, they aren't lookin' at my
face." And at that self-same instant, Conner focuses out attention
on Power Girl's brimming decolletage. Gun
Candy, No. 1 is a flip book, the other half of which is The Ride, No. 1. I recently finished reading
a graphic novel with the latter title-a collection of short pieces that
perhaps appeared, unbeknownst to me, in single issue comics before being
compiled. All in black and white, another manifestation of the grim
and gritty school so deftly exploited by
100 Bullets, The Ride is
equally adept in both story and exemplary art, both from an array of
writers and artists; about which, more in a trice. The concept, by Keven
Gardner, is the automobile that the personages in these stories
use or encounter, "a particular 1968 Camaro," he explains.
The car is passed from person to person, and while it is not responsible
for the ensuing violence, all the blood and gore is spilled in its immediate
vicinity. In Gun Candy, we meet a thoroughly a-moral
young beauty in a schoolgirl's mini-skirt and short T-shirt, lovingly
and beautifully rendered by Brian
Stelfreeze in crisp-lined black-and-white-and-gray. The action in
Doug Wagner's story is non-stop, violent and spectacularly conceived
and executed. The flip story, written by Chuck Dixon, is likewise well-served visually, although Sanford Greene, in the first part, should
have used a dot-pattern gray with smaller dots because these biggish
ones actually swallow up the line-art and often obscure the visual narrative.
The second part, though, drawn by Jason
Pearson, is expertly done, as most of Pearson's stuff is. (And it's
a delight to see him back in comics: I'm assuming he's been away because,
as a fan of his work, I'm sure I'd have picked up anything he'd done
since Body Bags.) In the compilation tome, we meet the same writers and
artists, plus Cully Hamner, Rob
Haynes, Adam Hughes (covers), Georges
Jeanty, Dave Johnson, Ron Marz, Rico Renzi, and Dexter Vines. In the first stories, the McGuffin is established: a
couple of cops go off on a private errand of do-gooding, using the senior
cop's personal auto, the aforementioned Camaro. Hamner's pictures are
every bit as crisp as Stelfreeze's, his blacks as dramatic and stunning.
In Stelfreeze's story, we meet the teeny bopper assassin Laci, the "gun
candy" of the later comic book, and Stelfreeze manages in a single
picture of flaming wreckage to reveal unambiguously sexual thrill that
her passion for violence is forever fomenting. As a truck capsizes and
explodes behind her, Laci is depicted holding her pistol aloft with
one hand while she reaches ecstatically into her panties with the other
to fondle herself. Explained Stelfreeze: "At some point we decided
that there was something seriously wrong with her. Dressing up like
a bat and fighting crime is crazy, but dressing up like a Catholic schoolgirl
to kill people is a whole new category. ... When I started doing the
pages, I made it a point to push [the sexual side of the character]
back to the front. The exploding bus was our maximum level of gratuitous
violence so I also thought that this should be the point of maximum
gratuitous sexuality." Stelfreeze says he wasn't sure Gardner would
publish the page so while transmitting the art via e-mail he phoned
him in order to get his initial reaction. "Silence," Stelfreeze
reports, "followed by an occasional 'oh man' then he slowly started
laughing. That's when I realized we had a winner. That page always created
a visceral reaction. ... I enjoy watching someone flip through the story
for the first time. It's great to see that bloom of realization. As
an artist, it makes me feel like I've done my job." The story rendered
by Pearson employs a somewhat grittier manner than his usual clean-cut
linear treatment. Said he: "My style needed to change to fit the
brutality of this chapter. ... You can't have a dirty fight with a clean
style." And so he didn't.
Great decision. Just as DC is getting going on its
latest Infinite Crisis series, here comes Marvel with a 12-part Spider-Man
cross-over arc that we can properly fathom only if we can follow the
sequence through twelve successive issues distributed among different
titles, written by three writers over four months. Dunno about you,
but my enjoyment of such epics diminishes the more complicated it gets
to follow the narrative, and jumping back and forth and sideways is
pretty complicated. Okay, it involves successive issues of only three
titles (Friendly Neighborhood
Spider-Man, Marvel Knights Spider-Man, and Amazing Spider-Man), but it still seems a little more convoluted
a proposition than it should be for storytelling. Oh-I forgot: we're
not talking storytelling here; we're talking marketing. No wonder I'm
confused.
OUT AT THE STRIPPERY Comic Strip Reprints Baby Blues, the comic strip that finds parenting hilarious instead
of harrowing, is approaching that hyperspace threshold of 1,000 newspapers.
Fewer than twenty of the approximately 200-250 syndicated comic strips
and cartoons appear in more than 1,000 papers, a number that, once Baby Blues attains it, will certify the
strip's stratospherical status. Its popularity has not been in question
since it started in 1990; since most of the world's population originates
in families, the universality of the strip's appeal was guaranteed from
the start. And the latest-the 22nd-collection
of the strip, Driving Under the
Influence of Children (244 8.5x11-inch pages; paperback, $16.95),
amply demonstrates the enduring appeal. It's another "Treasury"
tome that recycles the content of two previous volumes of reprints,
Two Plus One Is Enough and Playdate:
Category Five, this time with the Sunday strips in color. Once again,
the wonders of adulthood pitted against infancy. Here's Zoe, the eldest
of the three MacPherson offspring, explaining to her younger brother
Hammish why showers are better than baths: "If you're careful,"
she says, "and stand really close to the wall, you hardly get wet
at all." Father Daryl, overhearing this fragment of juvenile wisdom,
yells for help, calling on his wife, "Wanda!!!" And here's
Zoe, working on her coloring book; annoyed by her brother's presence,
she tells him to "scram." He leaves. She watches him leave.
She looks after his departing form. In the last panel, she approaches
him: "Oh," she says, "so now you're just going to ignore
me!" The pictures often contribute information vital to understanding
the joke. Sometimes the pictures just time the action. When Zoe, asking
her father for an allowance, explains that an allowance is "money
somebody gives you that you can spend on whatever makes you happy,"
Daryl goes to his wife and says, "I need an allowance." That's
mildly amusing: the cause-and-effect relationship is, in itself, funny.
But in staging the strip, writer Jerry Scott and his drawing partner Rick Kirkman put one panel between Zoe's explanation and Daryl's request
of Wanda. It's a silent panel: Daryl is depicted staring at Zoe as he
ponders what she's said. We can almost see the wheels turning in his
head-"money you can spend on whatever makes you happy." This
long pause which gives us time to imagine what Daryl is thinking enhances
the logic of the sequence and transform amusement to comedy. Scott and Kirkman invented Baby Blues
shortly after Kirkman's second child, a daughter, was born. "She
was a handful," Kirkman remembered. "She was very colicky
and didn't sleep through the night until she was three-and-a-half years
old." The two cartooners were brainstorming ideas for a new comic
strip but were making little progress. "Every time we got together,"
Kirkman recalled, "the conversation degenerated into me spilling
my guts about what was going on at home with the baby." Suddenly,
the two men realized that the best idea for a new strip was lying there
in that crib, screaming her head off. With that experience as an object
lesson, Scott and Kirkman have mined their family life for ideas ever
since. Kirkman's two kids are now grown up, but Scott filled the void
by becoming a parent himself. Said Kirkman: "He'll do anything
for a gag." This Treasury comes equipped with a
page of stickers depicting the strip's characters and two bumper stickers
that warn other drivers: "Caution-Driver Under the Influence of
a Baby." The Baby Blues strips
are more than enough for the price, but the sticker material is a gratifying
bonus and will surely contribute to parental sanity somewhere. Still,
the mind boggles in contemplating what might happen if this sort of
superfluity represents the birth of a trend, adding appendages to reprint
volumes.
CIVILIZATION'S LAST OUTPOST A
28-year-old South Korean man died of exhaustion in an Internet café
after playing the battle-simulation computer game "Starcraft"
non-stop for 49 hours. The man had been fired from his job last month
because he kept missing work to play computer games. After he collapsed
at the café, the man was taken to a hospital but died soon after arrival,
presumably of a heart attack. ... The
Portsmouth Herald in New Hampshire reported that an emergency operation
to remove a padlock from a man's testicles was successful. The man explained
that a friend had put the padlock on him while he was passed out, drunk;
then the so-called friend disappeared. The man tried unsuccessfully
to remove the padlock with a hacksaw, but after two weeks, he gave up
and turned himself in to the local police, seeking aid. They took him
to the hospital where a locksmith removed the padlock. All this time,
I didn't know locksmiths were on-call at hospitals. Pepsi
Cola is available in a new "patriotic" can with pictures
of the Empire State Building on it and the Pledge of Allegiance, the
latter without the words "under God." Management said it didn't
want to offend anyone, which prompted several of my friends to say:
"We don't want to offend anyone at Pepsi either; so if we don't
buy any Pepsi products, they will not be offended when they don't receive
our money that has the words 'in God we trust' on it." The lesson:
you can't take a political position by saying you don't want to offend
anyone. GRAFIC NOVELZ In
Clyde Fans: Book 1 (160 6x9-inch
pages in hardback; duotone, $19.95), we find word and picture blending
unobtrusively, almost unnoticeably, to enhance and complete the portraits
of two brothers, Abraham and Simon Matchcard, who, for years, have operated
a fan business out of the building at No. 159 King Street. Air-conditioning
has supplanted the fan as a way of cooling interiors, and the brothers'
Clyde Fans enterprise, although ostensibly producing a superior product,
has withered and, finally, died. Our storyteller, who gives his name
as Seth on the title page but who supplies what he claims is his given
name, Gregory Gallant (surely as phony a monicker as his monosyllabic
pen name) on the dust jacket, divides Book 1 into two parts. In Part
One, set in 1997, we meet Abraham, who has living quarters in the back
and upstairs at No. 159. We spend the better part of a day with Abraham,
watching as he gets out of bed, makes and consumes breakfast, takes
a shower, steps outside the shop to watch the snow fall for a short
time, visits the storeroom where boxes of Clyde Fans are piled up, and
putters around the office of the faded enterprise. Abraham talks constantly
as he goes about his routine. He discusses the secrets of good salesmanship,
saying he was a good at it despite lacking a certain personality trait
normally deemed essential to the role-"I just didn't like people
enough," he says; "it's not that I hated people. I often liked
them just fine. It's simply that I wanted to get away from them. A client
can sense that sort of thing in a salesman. And let me tell you, it's
not an attractive trait." He knows he could never have been a great
salesman because of this failing; but he believes he was fairly good:
"I had to be smarter, more inventive. I had to work much harder
to make it. And I could sell! ... I was good at deluding myself,"
he goes on, "slipping into the roles of salesman, wheeler-dealer,
pillar of society. I could play the game." Abraham also talks a great deal about
his brother, who, as Abraham puts it, "just wasn't ... able."
Simon became a collector of postcards about freaks. Simon "wouldn't
or couldn't" play the game: "He saw things clearer than I
did, I'm sure," Abraham says. In Part Two, we meet Simon. But it's
now 1957, forty years earlier, and Simon is on a sales trip. We see
Abraham giving Simon instructions, and it's clear that Abraham has no
faith in Simon's sales ability. And he's right: Simon's activity in
this portion of the book proves that Abraham's opinion of him in the
previous portion is accurate. What Simon does in 1957 justifies Abraham's
opinion in 1997. Simon is much too meek a personality and takes "no"
for an answer to readily. We watch as he fails time and again to sell
fans to a succession of potential clients. We watch as he wanders the
streets of a strange city, looking for addresses; we watch as he sits
alone in his hotel room at night. At the end, remembering the withering
stare of his brother, Simon wanders off into the countryside, "a
sort of enchanted place" a caption tells us. He sits down at the
foot of a tree and, at last, smiles. Seth's storytelling mannerisms in this
book add substantially to the meaning of his tales. Almost every panel
in Part One has a speech balloon; Abraham seldom shuts up. In Part Two,
Simon almost never speaks, and many pages flip by without any verbiage
at all. In the contrast, we see the personalities of the brothers: one
verbose, even garrulous (a feigned conviviality if we believe his self-assessment),
certainly aggressive; the other, silent to the point of grimness, a
hesitant, insecure and ineffective personality, lost in the world of
convivial salesmen and clients. Seth's graphic style, on ample display
in previous works, is now familiar to us. He draws with a simple, flexible
line that waxes and wanes to model shapes and forms; no feathering,
shading or crosshatching. Wrinkles in clothing are sparely indicated.
The drawings are embellished, however, with hues of gray and light blue,
a treatment that gives the simple artwork texture and depth. Part One
is nearly a textbook demonstration of how to create visual interest
in highly verbal sequences. Seth varies the pictorial content, panel
to panel, as Abraham drones on in an endless discussion of personal
trivia that seem almost irrelevant to anyone else. Almost nothing is
happening except the ordinary activity of daily life. So Seth changes
perspective and scene and camera distance constantly. The drawings hold
our interest. We watch Abraham fill a coffee cup of steaming coffee;
then he wanders off for awhile, returning, finally, 20 pages later,
to the coffee cup, now no longer steaming-now, cool enough to sip. Abraham
starts running his bath water on page 54; returns to turn it off on
page 61. Seth's rendering of visual details is meticulous, simply done
but attentively accomplished. And he is fully conscious of the light
sources in every picture, casting shadows realistically throughout.
Over-all, the effect is encyclopedic: we have the impression that we
are seeing-have seen-everything in Abraham's life. (Indeed, we have:
he never ventures out of the shop anymore, and by the end of Part One,
we've seen all of it, all of his world.) The pictures, coupled to Abraham's
confessional discourse, give us the whole man. Similarly, Seth's visual treatment
in Part Two completes the picture of the ineffectual Simon. We see him,
panel after panel, trudging the streets in a strange city. We see a
few other people from time to time, but not many. Mostly, we see Simon,
usually against the sterile facades of buildings lining the streets.
There is no sound; no one speaks to him. The silence of these sequences
and Simon's visual solitude emphasize his sense of isolation, of not
belonging. He seems lost in this city-overwhelmed by the buildings that
seem, so complete is their indifference, nearly hostile. In contrast, we have seen Abraham at
home, moving easily through familiar surroundings, the complete master
of all he surveys-even though he never ventures out of his domicile-as
he prattles on and on, relentlessly. In the Simon narrative, silent
sequences portray this brother's isolation and his inability to communicate.
But neither brother, to judge from what we see here, is able to "close,"
to complete a sale-to make a connection with anyone else. Simon is immobilized
by his timidity; Abraham is thwarted by his lack of human feeling, of
compassion, which makes him seem an outsider. Not much happens in either
Part One or Part Two of Book 1,
but Seth's deft deployment of both the visual and verbal resources
of his medium gives us provocative portraits of the personalities of
his two protagonists-high art, more Emily Dickinson than Francis Drake,
comic-book born expectations for physical action to the contrary notwithstanding. Book
Two, which Seth is presumably putting the finishing touches on,
will, doubtless, complete the portrait of this sad, even disastrous,
relationship. Did Simon's 1957 sales trip culminate in a stormy confrontation
with his unfeeling brother? Did either brother marry? Simon, Abraham
tells us, had a daughter. How did that come about? How do the brothers
with their differing personalities manage a working life in nearly daily
contact with each other? Mysteries abound. Seth is no stranger to mystery. In
one of his previous graphic novels, It's
a Good Life If You Don't Weaken, his protagonist goes on a long
quest to find a New Yorker cartoonist,
who seems to have dropped out of sight after a brief fling at fame.
The book includes samples of the cartoonist's works, ostensibly reprinting
some of his magazine cartoons. But Seth's elaborately detailed story,
it developed in the months after the book's publication, was a hoax:
there was no such cartoonist. But Seth had mounted a marvelously persuasive
case, convincing us that such a person existed. In Clyde
Fans: Book 2, we may, perhaps, discover who Clyde was. And maybe
we'll learn whether Gregory Gallant is as fictional a name as Seth.
UNDER THE SPREADING PUNDITRY When
we consider that our current President is a liar and a law-breaker,
we are stupified at his seeming popularity. Well, we were stupified
until we finally chanced upon the explanation f or it all. GeeDubya's
seemingly unaccountable success can be explained quite simply. Consider
the pop culture fictions that have been the most popular in recent times-J.R.
Ewing, Darth Vadar, Al Swearington, Tony Soprano. We love the bad guys.
And every time GeeDubya comes out with another Big Lie that he knows
no one can possibly believe (like allowing industrial pollution to increase
under the aegis of something called "Clean Air Act"), he just
enhances his appeal as a slimy bad guy. Oh-the law-breaker part? Some years
ago, Congress passed a law dictating that Presidential papers be released
to the public after a designated time period had lapsed. One of GeeDubya's
first acts as Prez was to issue an Executive Order contravening the
law: Presidential papers are no longer released to the public. You want
another one? In 2001, Congress appropriated money for the Afghanistan
War; GeeDubya used a huge hunk of it ($70 million comes to mind) to
build military bases as staging areas in Kuwait for the invasion of
Iraq. That's misappropriation of public funds. And he did it long before
announcing that Sadam had WMD and that therefore we should invade Iraq.
In other words, the Bush League was executing plans to invade Iraq well
before raising public consciousness of the need for the invasion. Duplicity,
thy name is George W. ("Whopper") Bush. And while we're on the subject of deception,
what is the actual number of American soldiers who've died as a result
of the Iraq invasion? Ted Rall did a cartoon about it on August 4 in
which he alleged the number is closer to 9,000 than to 2,000, the latter
being the usual number bandied about by the Pentagon. The other 7,000
or so died en route to military hospitals in Germany or in those hospitals. Just before we went into the digital
ether with this installment of Rancid Raves, we received word that Rall
had retracted the cartoon, saying, "The battery in my BS detector
must have been running low last week." He explained: "I read
a story that came off as possible, sourced it using previously reliable
informants, and ended up doing a cartoon that I wouldn't have done had
I known then what I know now. So this is a retraction of the cartoon.
Did 9,000-plus soldiers get killed in Iraq? Maybe, maybe not. But as
a cartoonist friend of mine points out: The relatives of those hidden
7,000 dead troops sure would be raising hell if the Pentagon were trying
to hide them." We don't know what Rall knows now that
he didn't know before, but this much we do know: it was easy for us
to believe Rall and Harring because the Bush League has so systematically
dissembled on matters that would embarrass them or undermine the efficacy
of their policies. They've lied so often that it was easy to believe
they'd lied about the war dead, too, because a larger number makes them
look bad. This administration, remember, is the one guided by Karl Rove,
who once told a reporter that "reality" would be determined
by the White House, and that if the White House changed its mind about
what reality was, then next week, the reality would be different. This
is the presidency of a man who said a year ago that he'd fire whoever
leaked Valerie Plame's CIA status to the press, then said he'd fire
whoever leaked that information only if the leaker had broken a law.
The White House's reality changes by the week, the day, the hour. No
one there would hesitate for an instant about manipulating the reality
of the war dead. Maybe there aren't 7,000
unreported dead being returned from the deserts of Iraq. (And maybe
there are only 2,000 unreported.) But the logic of Rall's cartoon is
persuasive, and it's persuasive, alas, because it's of-a-piece with
the usual pattern of Bush League behavior. And that sad fact is almost
as terrible a truth as the alleged number of hidden dead. To find out about Harv's books, click here. |
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