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From A Drifting Life

No messing around – the book I’m most excited to see this week is Drawn and Quarterly’s annual Yoshihiro Tatsumi release, Black Blizzard. I’m always glad to see further Tatsumi in English, although I wonder if my enthusiasm for the the raw nerve agony of his in-the-thick-of-it gekiga work is especially transferable. I’m reminded of a short, critical piece Bill Randall, my choice for the best manga critic writing in English, did on D&Q’s 2008 story collection Good-Bye; he cites the deluxe format lavished on the work by its North American publisher, a real whiff of prestige given to obscure-in-their-time comics, mostly forgotten in Japan and “as subtle as pissing in someone’s face.”

Yes! Exactly! That’s why I like Tatsumi’s work: it’s unrefined, maddeningly dank stuff, the work of an early comics pioneer staggering bleary-eyed into a terrifying, uncertain future and lashing out nervously at every envisioned hell in a titanically blunt manner. One of the best things about 2009’s autobiographical doorstop, A Drifting Life — as lulling and-this-and-this-and-this-and-this a steady rolling comics memoir as one can imagine — is how it contextualizes Tatsumi’s status as a comics innovator as coming much earlier: a post-war, post-Tezuka appreciative reaction from longing for bigger, stronger comics, mostly ‘darker’ genre things like crime and mystery stories. Only at the very end of the book (which is apparently still continuing in Japan) do we get a hint of where Tatsumi’s dramatic picture obsessions might take him, and from that we can infer a most idiosyncratic development from slightly-more-mature genre comics into punch-to-the-mush city terror and perpetually radiating war.

Funny how American and Japanese comics seemed to link up just a little bit in the ’50s – two takes on a medium gradually maturing by way of increasingly harsh genre comics, albeit with manga a little ways behind. I think a close examination of some actual Japanese work of the time will nicely emphasize the substantive differences in formal approach, not the least of which was Tezuka’s fascination with cinematographic principles, inspiring I think an especially potent visual emphasis on early manga that facilitated the decompressed, atmospheric style Tatsumi develops (as a character) in A Drifting Life. Or, if comparative studies isn’t your thing, at least the speculation can become more informed as to how Tatsumi’s own crime/mystery/adventure comics mutated into… Yoshihiro Tatsumi as introduced to North American readers, as opposed to the sleeker genre stuff of peer Takao Saito’s Golgo 13, which started up in 1969 – the same year as the work collected in The Push Man and Other Stories.

This is why Black Blizzard may prove to be the most valuable ‘classic’ release of the year, even though some will regard it as plain juvenilia. It’s an old crime comic from a young Tatsumi, who blew through its 100+ pages in the space of 20 days in 1956, while also working on the monthly proto-gekiga anthology Shadow. A pianist is falsely imprisoned for murder, and escapes while shackled to a more dangerous man, all in the midst of highly inclement weather. Expect many slashing diagonal lines and cinematic techniques, and a perfectly handsome $19.95 softcover treatment. A few sample pages are here.

And there’s plenty more where that came from.

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Clowes' "Wilson", from The New Yorker

Joe’s excellent post on thought balloons got me thinking about comics balloons (or text frames) in general: not just thought balloons but also word balloons, narrative boxes, and labels (like the famous arrows in Dick Tracy which diagrammatically call attention to two-way-radio-watches and other items of interest). It would be great to have a history of text frames in comics. There have been stabs here and there by scholars. Thierry Smolderen’s “Of Labels, Loops, and Bubbles” in Comic Art #8 is a good start.

About thought balloons: When did they emerge? I know Harold Gray was very chary of using them: he only used thought balloons a handful of times in his 44 year run on Little Orphan Annie. I think this was deliberate. While his characters where gabby they were also secretive – this is true not just of Warbucks but even Annie, who never says all she knows. Gray wanted to keep his characters mysterious, hence he avoided thought balloons.

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Russ Manning, one of the great California cartoonists whose work, like his mentor Jesse Marsh‘s, stands apart as a West Coast alternative to the more chaotic New York-based artists, made a case for Dell as a key 20th century comic book publisher in Richard Kyle’s brilliant Wonderworld #9, (1973). The two-page article is below. One thing I enjoy about Wonderworld is that it offers an entirely different point of view on comics history — mostly avoiding superheroes and advocating for other genres and approaches in comics. Some of the artists who loomed large for Kyle, like Dan Spiegle and Hermann (whose two-volume Survivors album series was an early Fantagraphics project), seem largely forgotten today, but the samples published in Wonderworld offer a look at another course for character-based comics in the 70s. By the way, you can see an entire early issue of Wonderworld, when it was called Graphic Story World, over at the Jack Kirby Museum. Look closely for the amazing photo of Jaunty Jim Steranko.

Russ Manning text copyright Estate of Russ Manning.

Russ Manning text copyright Estate of Russ Manning.

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I went to the March 18 Edward Tufte seminar on “Presenting Data and Information” in New York. He tours around doing these one-day courses occasionally.  This latest tour continues into Pittsburgh (April 9) and Arlington, VA (April 12,13, and 14.)

Edward Tufte wrote and self-published four ridiculously beautiful books on information design: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (the first and probably most famous one), Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, and Beautiful Evidence. He’s also a sculptor and does a million other things. He was recently appointed by Obama to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Recovery Independent Advisory Panel and he spoke at the seminar about working on the design for the forthcoming website where you can see how the Recovery Act is using its funds.

What does this have to do with cartooning? Well, his books are primarily about presenting visual evidence as truthfully and clearly as possible. He told me that his two latest books, Envisioning Information and Beautiful Evidence, are the most relevant to cartoonists. Besides that, if you’re just into incredible books or self-publishing they’re definitely worth looking into.  He writes in the introduction to Beautiful Evidence:

My books are self-exemplifying: the objects themselves embody the ideas written about. This has come about, in part, because my work is blessedly free of clients, patronage, or employers.

At the seminar they give you a box with all four of his books and a pamphlet about his sculpture works. I don’t know who the majority of the people there were, but I suspect they were mostly business people who have to give a lot of presentations. There was a lot of talk (and jokes) about PowerPoint, which Tufte hates and said should be used only as a projector. But I got a lot out of it.

Here were some of the repeating themes:

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This appraisal of Garage Band by Italian cartoonist Gipi, first appeared in Windy Corner Magazine.  Thanks to Austin for letting me run it here on CC.

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Garage Band  by the Italian cartoonist Gipi is a remarkably deceptive comic. Originally titled Five Songs when it was released in Italy a few years back (2005), it’s a breezy read, quite enjoyable – arguably the most beautiful of his available works in English. Soft watercolor tones and thin contour lines that unite with marvelous energy and skill. Gipi has an amazing ability to capture the essence of each scene, to articulate all the important details without overwhelming the reader with such details. Yet, it’s a relatively “empty” read if one is looking for a solid story in the traditional sense.  And this is what I mean by it being a deceptive comic.  It’s 114 pages of strung together notes, poetic silent passages and bursts of energy. In that sense, it’s sort of like watching a great band practicing their songs. We see the stops and starts, the rehearsal of new material and the easy way in which some old songs are played effortlessly.  It’s all there, but somehow, I’m left wondering if the real show in front of an audience will be better and I’ll get to see, hear these songs played to perfection. And then I wonder if that really matters, and that maybe, seeing the band practice, hearing the demo tape is closer to some sense of perfection.

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Along with my friends Frank Young and Gail Singer, I just recorded an Inkstuds episode devoted to John Stanley. You can listen to it here.

And below are some excerpts from my John Stanley notebook:

 Stanley as Lulu. Month after month, Lulu had to improvise a story to please that pesky small-fry Alvin. Lulu was adept at spinning out burlesque yarns featuring stock characters – poor girls, kings, witches — and coming up with new scenarios for them to enact. Wasn’t Lulu’s plight the same as Stanley’s? He was on a story tread mill, he had to keep running to make the kids happy, there was no let up or relief for nearly thirty years.

Mummy as Enabler. Is it too much to see Melvin Monster as an allegory about child abuse? Melvin’s always under the threat of violence, sometimes death itself. His chief persecutor is his father, Baddy. The name says it all: Baddy equals bad daddy (a pun related to Blake’s nickname for the God of organized religion: Nobodaddy). Melvin’s mother, Mummy, is all wrapped up in the Egyptian manner. That means she has no eyes to see what is happening. She turns a blind eye to Melvin’s situation. That’s the way it often is with abusive families: one parent is violent, the other a blinkered or self-deceived enabler.

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A few days ago Robot 6 directed me to probably my favorite piece of comics publishing hype in a while, a short interview with Stephen King promoting the new Vertigo series American Vampire—King is scripting a back-up feature for issues #1-5, his first-ever original work for comics (as opposed to the various adaptations of his prose over at Marvel). Specifically, I was fascinated by a short bit concerning the comic’s editing process and how it bumped up against King’s take on the form:

One example:Thought bubbles—those puffy, dotted clouds that were a staple of early comics—have been phased out. “I got this kind of embarrassed call from the editors saying, ‘Ah, Steve, we don’t do that anymore.’ ‘You don’t do that anymore?’ I said. ‘No, when the characters speak, they speak. If they’re thinking, you try to put that across in the narration, in the little narration boxes.’” So King happily re-wrote to fit the new style—though he still laments the loss of the thought bubble. “I think it’s a shame to lose that arrow out of your quiver. One of the nice things about the written word as opposed to the spoken word in a movie is that you can go into a character’s thoughts. You do it in books all the time, right?”

This is great for several reasons, not the least of them being the mental image of our ky?-level candidate folding his legs and meditatively accepting instruction; I mean, forgive the presumptuousness, but I think that Stephen King maybe, probably, almost certainly could just petition his editor for a special thought ballooning exception, but he won’t, because he wants to understand how comics are done. Indeed, King was brought on to the project after its initialization, and is duly credited below primary writer Scott Snyder and artist Rafael Albuquerque on the cover, in keeping with a supplementary scribe’s status—by all visible indication, he’s going native.

But that got me thinking—which tribe? And what’s their damn problem with thought balloons (as I call ’em)? It’s helpful to take closer look at what’s being said, and—since the comic in question was released just today—what’s being done.
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Tezuka’s Mushi Production produced a trilogy of adult animated features in the early seventies known as the “Animerama trilogy.” They’ve been floating around online for years untranslated until recently Cleopatra has been fansubbed and posted on YouTube. As the intro explains, it was based on a machine-made translation of the Chinese version and it didn’t make any sense and so they tried to subtitle it in a way that made sense even though they don’t know any Japanese. “Every attempt has been made to convey the original story as we assume it was intended. Though some artistic liberties have been taken to ensure the story makes some sort of fucking sense.” Pretty funny. It starts here.

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Joe Matt's Beguiling days.

More notebooks:

My Favourite Shop. When comics-friendly guests are in town, I like to show them The Beguiling. I’ve given tours to Kent Worcester and Bill Kartalopoulos among others. Like a well-packed suitcase, The Beguiling contains more goodies than one can easily imagine being squeezed into so small a space. Tucked away in odd corners are the real gems, especially the frame original art, which includes McCay’s Dreams of a Rarebid Fiend page, a Krazy Kat Sunday, and a Jesse Marsh Robin Hood Sunday. In the book side of things, the genuine riches are the volumes that almost no other comic book store would think of carrying. The French language selection in particular must be unparalleled in the Anglophone world, and I’ve met people who have driven hundreds of miles to find bande dessinee not otherwise available. There is also a smaller but still impressive selection of Japanese books; and of course the English manga collection is dauntingly large. I love how some choice out-of-print books are mixed in with the new books. If you wanted to supplement the Fantagraphics Peanuts series with a dose of nostalgia, The Beguiling offers paperbacks by Holt Rinehart Winston and Fawcett reprinting Schulz’s masterpiece.
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Art by Torajiro Kishi, from Devil #1

Isn’t it always? To your left is a panel from issue #1 of a mostly unheralded experiment in cultural interplay: Devil, a four-part, Dark Horse-published comic book miniseries created for the North American market by mangaka Torajiro Kishi and anime fandom favorite Madhouse Studios. Both entities are credited on writing and art, with Madhouse acting collectively, like in that one segment of the Batman: Gotham Knight dvd where everyone apparently had their names removed. Issue #2 is due this week, and from the looks of it I’m expecting more of the same prolix exposition and stilted dialogue — interestingly, nobody is credited with an English translation or adaptation — married to a distinctly flat visual style.

That latter aspect is what’s most interesting to me, and possibly to the creators. Kishi is best known (if at all) in North America for his full-color lesbian sex comic Maka-Maka, which picked up some good notices from Dirk Deppey (scanlated form) and Chris Mautner (2008-09 Media Blasters publication, two volumes). And while it’s tempting to observe that Kishi’s arrival on the American scene has transformed ladies kissing into smoking badasses and blazing guns and MUTANTS and VIRUSES and sperm! that makes! people! explode!, the artist himself has described the American comic book approach as “uniqueness in shadow and flattered colors,” in contrast to manga’s “detailing the lines.” Also:

I feel myself more as a creator than an artist. As a creator, I try to keep my focus on the message, and I change/adapt the style, depending the type of the story and the message… I believe that it is more important for the creator to have flexibility in his visual style in order to interpret and deliver the main theme and story of the project, rather than stick in one single style, or to try to protect some kind of ‘visual signature.’ Otherwise, I am afraid that the story itself may end up confined by my personality and patterns.

It’s worth going through the whole interview; I was especially piqued by Kishi’s decision to ensure that every issue has some conclusion to it, given that the ‘decompression’ often discussed a few years ago in collection-focused comic books seemed of a piece with action manga serialized in magazines. In necessitating rising and falling action as serving the story, in adapting his style to a ‘comic book’ approach, Kishi appears to associate broadly Western pop comics style with density, even going so far as to state that American comics are made for readers “who really want to get into the story,” which, from the tenor of the rest of his comments (and frankly the comic itself), relates visual compression with absorption – shadows and colors causing the eye to hang on the page, forcing consideration of the ‘text’ by non-writerly means.

Devil is still a pretty airy, fast-paced comic, though, and a very predictable story (so far) about a cigarette-smoking dude who doesn’t play by the rules in battling a terrible infestation turning people to monsters. As much as I appreciate Kishi’s perspective as looking in on American genre comics from probably a more visually-intensive scene overall, the experiential association I make is with the second credited author, Madhouse, which occupies a special historical place in appealing to a certain generation of anime viewers through accessible, violent works like Ninja Scroll and Wicked City, Yoshiaki Kawajiri pictures that still form the aesthetic basis for U.S.-Japan animated collaborations today — always lots of action, fantasy, even as anime in Japan becomes more and more of an ultra-specialized niche — and reflected a lot of the manga available in English translation at the time, sci-fi and shooting, often published by… Dark Horse.

In this way, the project is both up-to-the-minute and very old-fashioned, in both form and content, an every-issue-an-experience comic book comic that poses like the old anime that wagged the dog of manga. What nostalgia! What a letdown! You know who’s the target audience for this? People like me, exactly my generation of catholic nerds! I wonder if any of the Madhouse old-school are involved on that end? Like, maybe it’s Rintaro working in full script and the plot’s a huge allegory for the production of Yona Yona Penguin.

Hmm, I don’t think a lot of those last words made sense, particularly together. How about some other selections?

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