Assuming you wanted to stick with a modern-era superhero artist, Howard Chaykin is one obvious (and arguably more apt) choice. The late Jack Cole, who is referenced often in the story itself, would have been pretty much perfect, though obviously he was unavailable for cover duty. While we’re dreaming, Jack Kirby initially seems like a good fit, but there’s a certain nobility in even Kirby’s saddest comics that would be far out of place in the corrupt, fallen world of GR. That thought leads, of course, to perhaps Kirby’s greatest descendant, Gary Panter, who is ultimately the one and only obvious choice for the assignment.

But there’s no reason to restrict this game to just one book. All of the entries in the “Graphic Penguin Classics” series present ideal speculative fodder for the armchair designer-hirer. I’m a fan of most of the pairings (some, such as Tony Millionaire on Moby-Dick, are pretty close to the Platonic ideal for this kind of thing). When I congratulated one prominent cartoonist on a cover in the series which I thought similarly well-assigned, I was surprised when he replied by saying that he in fact “despised” the book in question. I still believe the resulting cover was one of the best in the series so far, so clearly the book and artist don’t always have to be simpatico for these things to work.

With that in mind, let’s waste some time now matching up books and potential cover artists. Feel free to disagree, add your own, or ignore this misuse of internet entirely.

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
Is Al Capp too obvious? How about Norman Pettingill?

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
R. Crumb is almost too easy, but also feels so right.

In that same on-the-nose spirit:
Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex
Dave Sim

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
For some reason, Kim Deitch seems like a good fit here. Or maybe even better for Deitch would be Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Penguin has already done Dumas, unfortunately, but I once heard Deitch express interest in drawing a cover for The Count of Monte Cristo, which would be pretty amazing, too.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Moebius. Or Philip K. Dick’s Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Actually, what I would really love to see would be a series of pulp sf novels, all chosen and designed by Moebius.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Al Columbia

Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Frank Santoro

Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned
Mack White would be work well with this here, but maybe even better: Kevin Huizenga.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Debbie Dreschler. (Judging by its publication history, most publishers think the “sexy” route is the way to go with this novel, but I think that’s not only uninteresting, but also the result of a pretty grievous misreading.)

Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children
Lynda Barry

Then there are two cartoonists who I know would be perfect for some book, but I can’t figure it out yet. Maybe one of you can help me out. Mike Diana. Gerald Jablonski.

I may add to this list later, but feel free to go to it in the comments section yourself, if you’re so inclined.

UPDATE: To make things more interesting, here are a few more books that might be fun to “cast”:

1984
The Canterbury Tales
A Fan’s Notes
The Second Sex
The Maltese Falcon
The Song of Solomon (both the Toni Morrison version, and the Biblical)
The Book of Job
Leaves of Grass
War and Peace
The Iliad
Gilgamesh
The Tale of Genji
Catch-22
Le Morte Darthur
Madame Bovary
Blood Meridian
The Cantos of Ezra Pound
The Sot Weed Factor
Cosmicomics (Johnny Hart?)

Okay, that’s enough. This is getting ridiculous.

UPDATE II:

Books:

Naked Lunch
The SCUM Manifesto
Animal Liberation
Robinson Crusoe
The Brothers Karamazov
The Gay Science
A Brief History of Time

Cartoonists:

Phoebe Gloeckner
Mark Beyer
Mort Drucker
Saul Steinberg
Tim Kreider
Julie Doucet
Clare Briggs
Geo. Herriman

First, in the immortal words of Paul Hardcastle: 19.

Rocketman, like comic books, is assembled by the Raketen-Stadt in order to serve Their designs. When he no longer serves Their ends, They dismantle him. But fragments of him survive in Pynchon‘s text. No one who reads Gravity’s Rainbow will forget the legend of Rocketman, the greatest preterite super-hero of the postmodern world. For a moment, he defied Their will and fought for truth, justice, and the Pynchon way.

—H. Brenton Stevens, “‘Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s . . . Rocketman!’: Pynchon’s Comic Book Mythology in Gravity’s Rainbow“

I haven’t actually done more than skim that essay yet, by the way, as I am currently nearing the halfway mark in Gravity’s Rainbow, and don’t want to spoil things for myself. From a cursory perusal, it looks like Stevens may miss or downplay some of the subtler comic-book connections going on, such as the repeated Plastic Man references, but more knowledgeable others (and a future me) are better positioned to determine that. I will say that at this point I better understand why Thomas Pynchon tapped Frank Miller for the cover, a move that no longer seems intentionally perverse, but rather extremely apt—I just wish Miller hadn’t ultimately turned in such a relatively restrained image.

And now, 20:

At first I was read to. My grandfather had taught Greek and Latin at Columbia, and he read to me from a book that had abbreviated versions of The Odyssey and The Iliad—plus a lot of classic fairy tales, which, as you know, are extremely disturbing. Then I began reading on my own. I read mostly Westerns. My parents approved of that, because at least they were books. But when I got into comic books, they disapproved. I would read them by flashlight under the covers. No one realized in those days that 1930s Action Comics and DC Comics, Superman and Batman, would become legendary in American culture. They taught me a great deal about narrative—lots of invention and no pretense of realism.

—Harry Mathews, interviewed in the Spring 2007 issue of The Paris Review

Also no real surprise, considering the various Ou-X-Po connections, but there you go.

[Tip of the hat to DB for the latter.]

P.S. I finally got a copy of Neonomicon #3, so anyone interested in the CCCBC should find and read a copy before next week if you want to follow along.

UPDATE: Since I posted this, I found a more up-to-date and comprehensive article about Pynchon/comics connections online at The Walrus, written by Sean Rogers. I recommend it and you can read it here.

—J.A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms

In his 1987 essay “What’s so Funny about the Comics?” (reprinted in Comics as Culture), the scholar M. Thomas Inge defends the validity of the term “comics,” despite the fact that so many of the art form’s admirers express resentment for the pejorative connotations of that name, by basically claiming that the term is literally true, and implies very strongly that all comics are comedies.

He accomplishes this primarily by appealing to a fairly broad definition of comedy:

Not all things “comic” are necessarily funny or laughable. Comedy implies an attitude towards life, an attitude that trusts in man’s potential for redemption and salvation, as in Dante’s Divine Comedy or Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Since comic strips always conclude with resolutions in favor of morality and a trust in the larger scheme of truth and justice, they too affirm a comic view of the social and universal order. While Krazy Kat and Smokey Stover may appear absurd, they do not reflect on the world around them as being irrational or devoid of meaning, as in the drama of the absurd. Comic art is supportive, affirmative, and rejects notions of situational ethics or existential despair.

Inge’s definition is obviously a bit idiosyncratic—not least in that Hamlet is generally considered a tragedy—but his larger point is an intriguing one. The essay was written some twenty years ago, before many of the comics that might be said to disprove his argument were made, but even now I find myself struggling to come up with examples of comic strips or stories that express a truly tragic, as opposed to comic, view of life.

This all leads me to wonder three things, two of which I will share with you now:

This doesn't count.

1. Was Inge right? Was it true even at the time of his writing that there were no tragedies in comic form? Inge himself brings up the most famous possible counter-example, Maus, but seems to reject it as tragedy on the grounds that Spiegelman uses “the satiric tradition of animal fable and the imagery of funny animal comic books and animated cartoons.” In my mind, a more pointed reason not to define the book as tragedy can be found in its subtitle, “A Survivor’s Tale”.

But satire is certainly different than tragedy. As Inge puts it, “To satirize life and institutions is to believe in a better mode of conduct which people fail to live up to, and humor may serve as a gentle but sometimes bitter or angry corrective.” Until recently perhaps, satire and black humor have been (along with absurdism) the premier genres of “serious” cartoonists. Clowes, Crumb, Doucet, Brunetti, et cetera: No matter how dark their subject matter and tone of their stories might sometimes be, they aren’t tragedians.

I have a few comics in mind that might legitimately be considered tragic, but will save them for another post. Nominations are welcome, though. Perhaps things are different in Europe?

2. To the extent that Inge is right (if he is), just why would that be so? Is there something inherent to the art form that makes it so? (I personally doubt it, though Inge claims that “all comic art draws upon and clearly belongs to the tradition of caricature and comic exaggeration. There is no such thing as realism to be found in the comics, either in the photographic sense or the sentimental sense of a Norman Rockwell.” Inge includes Hal Foster and Noel Sickles in that assessment, by the way.)

I think it more likely comes down to historical and commercial reasons, but it does make you wonder. It’s not as if the twentieth century wasn’t represented by a boom in tragedy in other arts.

In his opening essay, “The Comic of Cthulhu: Being a Letter of Reminiscence and Recollection Concerning The Courtyard”, scripter Antony Johnston discusses the problems he faced when retelling Alan Moore’s original prose story in comic-book form:

One of the main challenges is adapting prose to a visual medium such as comics is that in prose, it’s perfectly acceptable to engage the reader with an inner monologue, and often for some length. These are necessary for exposition, feeding the information vital to understand the story, because in prose you can’t simply show something as you would in a film or comic. You must describe it.

There’s just one problem; during such passages it’s also perfectly acceptable for nothing to happen.

Even more so than the task of condensing a narrative, or deliberating over dialogue, this is the biggest challenge in any such adaptation. In a comic, something must always happen. It can be mundane, it can be remarkable, it can be somewhere between the extremes. But something must happen, visually, in order to justify the form’s usage and make the story feel like it belongs in the medium.

With a few exceptions, this wasn’t too hard a task with “The Courtyard.” Where Moore makes leaps to new locations in a single carriage return, the comic can make the same journey at a more leisurely pace, using space and sequence to pace out a relevant monologue over something so ordinary as Sax lighting a cigarette, or donning an overcoat.

This sounds like a somewhat plausible solution in theory, but turns out to be a mostly deadening misstep in practice. Sax’s Harrison Ford-in-Blade Runner voice-over generally doesn’t interact with the visuals (which, as Johnston admits, mostly involve uninteresting stage business, not important narrative information), it simply dominates them. For much of the comic, you could cover up the panels and understand everything that is happening without even looking at the drawings. (Incidentally, setting this comic next to Crumb’s Genesis shows just how wrong-headed those critics who found Crumb’s illustrations too literal really were—any panel of that book puts this entire comic to shame.)

It’s no accident that the four pages Avatar has chosen to offer as an online preview illustrate one of the very few sequences in Moore’s story where something actually happens. Let’s compare.

First, here’s the episode as it appeared in Moore’s original story:

Club Zothique: a strange neon cancer grown out from the crumbling stone of a waterfront church, a cheap dance-hall and immigrant dive since the late 1920s, a toxic and lurid agaric of light bulbs, enduring the centuries.

Straight from the street I plunge into an amphetaminefield of concussive music and light, full of underage heat. A support band from Cleveland, The Yellow Sign, are wrapping up a cacophonous set as I make for the bar.

Joey Face, sitting heaped on his stool as if shoveled there, eyes my approach. thin blonde hair in a ponytail; green-tinted glasses. He’s probably my age, which is to say thirty. I’ve known him a week.

Joey used to deal Ecstasy under the nom-de-guerre “Rex Morgan, M.D.M.A.”, but it’s agony now. Joey suffers from amphetamine psychosis; drinks without getting drunk to keep hallucinations at bay. It’s too bad. I’m informed he was once a great dancer.

I buy him a drink. We scream amicably at each other above “Leng”, The Yellow Sign’s encore. I ask how he rates them. ‘They’re plastic. They’re riding this Ulthar Cats thing, but they’re posing. They’re not using aklo. It’s obvious.’

Aklo. Some new kind of drug, or its streetname? I risk a bluff, sneer at him knowingly. ‘Aklo? These pussies? Where would they get aklo?’ He looks briefly puzzled. ‘Why, same place as everyone else.’ Here, he glances beyond me.

I turn. By the front of the stage where the tired hippy light show is vomiting crayola puddles across the remains of the audience, someone is standing. Hispanic; flamboyantly dressed; seventeen. Joey screams in my ear: ‘His name’s Johnny Carcosa.’

The boy’s hair is huge, piped like slick black ice cream in a towering pompadour. Cold little eyes, and a yellow silk handkerchief hiding his face from the nose down. His forehead is boiling with acne.

To scattered applause from their girlfriends and pets the support band go off and the floor is engulfed by a riptide of puberty casualties, all wearing Ulthar Cats T-shirts or swastika drag. They surge forward, obscuring the undersized spic.

I turn back towards Joey and try not to shout, momentarily thrown by the sharp sonic pressure drop after The Yellow Sign’s set. ‘He looks young. Did you ever get aklo from this kid?’ Joey shakes his head.

‘Fuck, no. I got enough problems already with flashbacks and booze. As for young, someone told me that Carcosa was forty.’ He nods here emphatically. Highlights dance in his green lenses like fire-flies drowning in creme-de-menthe.

Now let’s look at the same sequence as it appeared in the comic:

Setting aside “amphetaminefield” and the overwrought final metaphor—lame puns are Moore’s Achilles heel, and the metaphor can be perhaps excused on his subject matter’s origins in Lovecraft—the prose version is clearly superior to the comic pages. Even physical details such as Johnny Carcosa’s acne and oil-slick pompadour are lost in the drawings, let alone such subtle business as Joey’s confusion when first asked about aklo.

Possibly the biggest mistake Johnston has made is to structure his pages into single, rigid layout of two vertical panels. There’s a reason this particular page layout is uncommon–not only does it lack a visual “center,” it forces the artist to squeeze his figures into unnatural perspectives, and almost unerringly wastes much of each panel in dead space.

Jacen Burrows’s style is reminiscent of Steve Dillon and Frank Quitely, and while his drawings aren’t as expressive or accomplished as that of either of those artists, it is only fair to point out that he has a somewhat thankless job when straightjacketed into this format. It is interesting to compare his work here with that of Neonomicon, where Moore also requests a fairly restrictive layout, but one that has been deployed with more thought and finesse, allowing Burrows to compose his images with far more care and power. (This will probably be worth talking about on Monday—a semi-related post of Frank’s, and its resulting comments thread, might reward revisiting.)

In reality, the entire project is somewhat thankless for Johnston as well: “The Courtyard” is no prose masterpiece, but it was conceived in such a way that adapting it into comics would require a beginning-to-end restructuring to succeed. After all, the climax of the book revolves around words and concepts that are deliberately and explicitly impossible to visualize! But when that moment comes here, we get just a two-page splash full of fairly conventional horror imagery, reminiscent of nothing so much as old Lovecraft cover art.

Johnston’s simple “let’s just use the original story as a voiceover narration” solution was doomed to fail. That being said, on at least once occasion Johnston goes further than this, and actually takes an effect of Moore’s prose story and re-conceives it with his own comic-book purposes in mind. At the beginning of the comic, Aldo Sax is depicted in closeup, face lit up by nearby fireworks, while performing an act just off-panel that the reader does not fully comprehend until the end of the story. These same images are repeated at the end, and it somehow feels as if the comic has temporarily slipped the moorings of time. The feeling replicates the atemporality of Moore’s final sequence perfectly. If only the rest of the story had been adapted with this much ingenuity.

Okay, so that post wasn’t worth waiting a month for! But now at least we’re through with the preliminaries, and the CCBC proper can begin. After Jog’s earlier post, it doesn’t seem like it would make sense to do a full-on review, so Monday will likely be more like a discussion starter than a complete essay. For any of you who would like to participate, please remember your assigned reading. (Bobsy’s comment from last post needs a better response, too.) Until next week.

Exceptional one-person comic strips like “Little Nemo,” “Krazy Kat,” and “Peanuts” were among the first to be championed as high art partly because standard industry practices such as “ghosting” and assembly-line production obscure idiosyncrasies, freeze evolution, and desiccate scholarly and fannish narratives. Our impulse to uncover a human source — to project from reproducible artifact to traceable performer, so that we might begin to speak of cinematographer “John Alton” as we would of “Humphrey Bogart” — isn’t just a taxonomic convenience. It also reflects frustrated feelings of gratitude and intimacy, as evidenced by the career of Walt Disney comics artist and writer Carl Barks. Although Barks wrote, drew, and inked his own work for decades, his employer blocked fan mail and withheld contributor credits on the theory that sales would decline if children thought anyone other than Walt Disney was involved in the comic books. As a result, Barks wasn’t successfully contacted by readers until 1960, and his first interview (conducted in 1962) was only allowed publication in 1968. Given no clues other than style, loyal fans identified and collected Barks as “The Duck Artist,” “The Good Duck Artist,” or simply “The Good Artist,” the last eventually inscribed on his gravestone.

—From “High, Low, and Lethem”, a just-posted, confidence-killing essay in which the great Ray Davis takes nearly every subject I’ve written about for Comics Comics over the last five years—from Steve Gerber and Carl Barks to Jonathan Lethem’s Omega the Unknown and the auteur theory’s connection to comics, among others—and writes something actually worthwhile, intelligent, and stylish about them. He shows me up as a lazy halfwit actually. The funny thing is that I’m fairly certain he’s never heard of me or Comics Comics at all, and the confluence of thought is purely coincidental. Oh well, I guess I need to try harder.

Garth Ennis, of Preacher and Punisher fame, introduces the comic with some effusive praise:

Here he is now with his latest effort, ably assisted by Antony Johnston and drawn by the always excellent Jacen Burrows: Alan Moore’s The Courtyard. And yes, it’s brilliant, and yes- sob- he’s as good as he ever was, but what The Courtyard really does is confirm the effortless quality of the man’s talent. A story bursting with ideas and characters and nice lines and spooky twists, enough to keep most writers occupied for a couple of years—but where just about anyone else would stripmine a concept like this to death, what does Alan devote to it? Forty-eight pages, no more.

Actually, Moore actually didn’t even devote that many pages to the concept, because Moore is not in fact the author of this comic; his “able assistant” Antony Johnston scripted the book on the basis of a short prose story Alan Moore wrote for the 1995 H.P. Lovecraft tribute anthology The Starry Wisdom, which also included contributions from the likes of J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, John Coulthart, Grant Morrison, and Ramsey Campbell. (“The Courtyard” has since been reprinted in Alan Moore’s The Courtyard Companion. How many comics inspire this much ancillary material to be published?)

That particular overestimation is only the most obvious of the ways in which Ennis’s introduction may mislead the unwary reader (I am tempted here to make a joke about the “effortless quality” of Moore’s work here), and if he is right that other comic-book writers would have “stripmined” the wealth of ideas herein “for a couple of years,” then that is a damning indictment of contemporary genre comics.

The original prose story does in fact display flashes of Moore’s trademark wit and invention, but it is end still fairly typical of Lovecraft pastiches (of which thousands have been written), from its inside jokes (a band named The Ulthar Cats) right down to the story’s final phrases, in which the narrator’s language inevitably devolves into unintelligible invocations of the Old Ones: “N’gaii fhtagn e’hucunechh R’lyeh. Iä, G’harne ep ygg Rhan Tegoth …”, etc. There’s no harm in that kind of playing around—nearly every fantasy or horror writer succumbs to the temptation to parody Lovecraft at one time or another—but it’s not really worth Ennis’s breathless enthusiasm either.

So what’s the story actually about? It’s basically a near-future sequel to Lovecraft’s most notorious and distasteful story, “The Horror at Red Hook”, in which the ultimate horror is not so much the cultic rituals hinted at and described but rather the great unwashed immigrant hordes of New York’s slums. (Representative quote: “Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor … The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another… It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles.”) Lovecraft had lived a reclusive, bookish life in Providence before a brief marriage, during which he moved to New York and was overwhelmed by the multitudes there, and after which his already present “genteel” racism suddenly got much, much uglier.

As the French novelist Michel Houellebecq (who knows from literary offensiveness) puts it, “racial hatred provokes in Lovecraft the trancelike poetic state in which he outdoes himself by the mad rhythmic pulse of cursed sentences; this is the source of the hideous and cataclysmic light that illuminates his final works.” Houellebecq believes that Lovecraft’s descriptions of the monstrosities of his fiction “spring directly” from his racial animus, and compares his fictional terrors to a letter Lovecraft wrote to his friend Frank Belknap Long describing the 1920s Lower East Side and its citizenry:

The organic things—Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid—inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption…

It gets worse from there.

But there’s time for more on Lovecraft later in the club. For now, let it be simply stated that Moore has chosen Lovecraft’s most infamously indefensible story as his model. The protagonist of “The Courtyard” is himself a virulently (if not quite credibly) racist federal agent named (also incredibly) Aldo Sax. Sax isn’t very likable, but apparently he has “high abstract patterning skills,” which in theory has something to do with “anomaly theory” and the ability to recognize obscure clues that other detectives would overlook, but in practice means that he has the magical propensity to choose the perfect actions which will help Moore resolve his plot.

Anyway, Sax has gone to Brooklyn to solve the mystery of fifteen identical murders, in which the victims have been decapitated, been relieved of their hands, and had their torsos carved into exact replicas of the same elaborate rosebud-like pattern. Various clues lead Sax to a Red Hook establishment called Club Zothique, where the aforementioned Ulthar Cats perform, and where patrons indulge in what is apparently a popular and dangerous new drug called “aklo.” Sax meets up with a mysterious pusher named Johnny Carcosa, who agrees to sell him the aklo later that night, in a—you guessed it—courtyard. Various creepy things happen until Carcosa finally drugs Sax with a mild hallucinogen, and then reveals the secret of aklo: it is not a drug, but a language. In the true Lovecraftian spirit, this language has rather indescribable effects, which Moore goes on to try and describe anyhow, in very Lovecraftian purple prose (“a pinwheel of nautilus fronds is dissolved into sparks by my vitreous humour as huge old grammatical structures collapse into place”). These effects involve time and destiny and other things to big for puny humans to understand, but the most terrifying result (SPOILER) is that Sax is moved to murder his neighbor, and kills her in the same elaborate fashion in which the earlier victims were dispatched.

All in all, “The Courtyard” is a gimmicky and flawed but sorta fun pastiche, one that captures Lovecraftian atmosphere and themes well without moving them anywhere particularly novel. Sax often sounds a lot more British than he should (“What I’m bothered about is the depth of my cover on this”), but that’s easy enough to overlook in a story as unambitious as this. More seriously, I am not convinced that Moore successfully integrated his protagonist’s racism into the story as a whole—the racist remarks seem more exploitative than relevant. (I am curious to hear if any readers disagree on that.) Still, in its original context, “The Courtyard” is an unremarkable but largely unobjectionable lark, and if not for Moore’s position in the marketplace, it is more or less impossible to imagine a publisher being moved to adapt it into comic-book form nearly a decade later. But that’s what happened, and that adaptation will be the subject of the next session of the CCCBC.

Look familiar? Let me help you out. Here’s some artwork from the title page:

It’s Mat Brinkman. The book already sounded intriguing, but one that uses Brinkman’s art—I’m sold. I don’t think the author is influenced by Brinkman’s work, but there are certain similarities (granted, I’m only about thirty pages in). However, she evokes metaphorically concepts that are made literal in Brinkman’s work: for instance, an underground, semi-wilderness setting (in her case, “underground” street culture, and in his, literally underground), a strange creature as the central protagonist (in the novel, her heroine is a “hobo junkie vampire teen”), and an often abstract narrative whose coherence is strained by the formal complexities of storytelling/art.

The novel also bears resemblance to Black Hole, not least in its tale of teen runaways afflicted with something that’s more than your run-of-the-mill STD; Krilanovich refers to her teen hobos as vampires, but it’s not yet clear what that really means. She writes, “They distribute sexually transmitted diseases like the daily newspaper but they will never succumb, they will never die, just aging into decrepit losers inside a teenage shell.” Is it coincidence that both stories are set in the Pacific Northwest?

And then there’s this gross-out line: “The world would explode and settle on the surface of another planet in a brown paste, is what. Cockroaches would lick it up and a new wave of narcissistic gypsy-slut shitheads would hatch out of tiny pores on their backs.” I am so looking forward to Prison Pit 2.

(He also weighs in on the recent terminology conundrum. Unfortunately, I am forced to respectfully disagree with his suggestion, which I think sounds too much like “colicky,” and evokes unpleasant physical sensations.)

By the way, I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you readers. In the last month, this blog seems to have reached new heights. Particularly in the comments threads. Every time I log in, I know I’m in for a series of surprises and insights. You guys are really bringing it. Thanks for participating, and for helping to build this site into something exciting and unique.

1. Jay Lynch interview, Comics Journal #114:

Lynch: Sure. Sometimes, I think that Nard N’ Pat is pretty much derived from James Joyce’s Ulysses and that Phoebe is nothing more than improvisations that spin off from Nabokov’s Ada.

Lait: How many times have you read Ada?

Lynch: Eight or nine. Jackie has known me for years, so he knows that I think Nabokov’s Ada is the greatest, most complex piece of fiction ever written. Once I did a thing for RAW called “The Goodnight Kids.” It’s full of Ada references. I figured if one person deciphered that, I’d be fulfilled.

“The Goodnight Kids” can be found in Raw vol. 1, #5 (1983).

2. Dan Clowes interview, Comics Journal #233, discussing his graphic novel David Boring:

Clowes: I was certainly inspired by Pale Fire, I think, with his undependable narrator, or maybe he is a dependable narrator, it’s hard to say. The way he sort of references this text, that being the old comic book, and sort of re-imagines it into what he wants it to be.

When I was reading Pale Fire, I remember the thing I really responded to was the idea that I had, as a kid, read comics that my brother had left lying around, and I had tried to take from them some unconscious message that wasn’t necessarily there. I thought that was such a great thing in Pale Fire how this unreliable critic who’s sort of mis-analyzing this whole epic poem that John Shade has written, is actually creating this whole new work of art that’s possibly even superior to this great poem itself.

Clowes also included a Nabokov joke in Eightball #17: a gag cartoon titled “The Lepidopterist.” David Boring is full of allusions to Nabokov. Perhaps the most subtle is a statement made by the hero to his lover, “You’re the original of Wanda.” (p. 92.) Nabokov’s last, unfinished book (which will finally be published this fall) is titled The Original of Laura.

3. Chris Ware interview, Comics Journal #200:

Ware: There is a segment in Lolita where Humbert Humbert is trying to describe the accumulative effect of a number of events going on in his visual field as he comes upon an accident scene in his front yard. He has to go through three or four paragraphs to describe what’s happening, and he excuses himself and the limits of his medium for its inherent lack of simultaneity. This is, of course, something you could presumably do in a comic strip, though it wouldn’t be nearly as funny.

4. In his novel Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov described a fictional animated character named “Cheapy the Guinea Pig.” In the anthology Zero Zero, issue #27, Al Columbia did a one-page strip imagining what Cheapy looked like.

Anyway, in the comments to Friday’s post, gentleman Jeet Heer recommended an essay about Nabokov and comics by the scholar and cartoonist Clarence Brown. Coincidentally, in the piece in question (which mostly concerns instances in Nabokov’s writings which Brown believes are informed by the aesthetics of comics), Brown advocates for another possible contender to the comics-adjective crown:

I needed a word that conveyed the sense of “comicstrippishness” but that would be less clumsy, a word that conveyed something like the soul or essence of the comic strip. …

Chess is essentially an abstract play of force and counterforce constrained within a rigidly measured grid of relationships; as such, it is quite independent of its material incarnation in patterned board and pieces. Similarly, the procedures of pictorial narrative, the left-to-right movement of figures against a ground and in sequential frames, can be adumbrated in verbal patterns. That, at least, is what I attempted to name when I came up with the term “bédesque.”

The French call a comic strip “la bande dessinée,” or popularly “la BD.” My coinage bédesque has passed the test of satisfying the linguistic intuition of native speakers. I tried bédesque on Alain Besançon, the writer and political philosopher, who was on an opportune visit to Princeton. He first countered with bédique but then decided that he liked bédesque better.

“Bédesque” has the advantage of a French etymology, as “cinematic” did, but also has a disadvantage in that “la BD” isn’t as commonly used in English as “cinema” has been. Somehow I don’t think this will take off, though I can’t think of any practical objections offhand other than that comics fans are likely to reject it as pretentious. In any case, I haven’t been able to find any other references to the term online. Oh well: More grist for the mill.