Fumbling around on the internet recently, I came across some scans of Yoshiharu Tsuge’s 1968 story “Nejishiki” (translated in the Comics Journal 250 as “Screw-Style”). I have a great fondness for the short story form in comics, and I love seeing anything translated from the Japanese avant garde comics magazine Garo, so I thought I’d highlight the story’s existence here. (A quick note, though, to point out that, unlike the other two Tsuge stories published in English, this one is still in print. So you should probably buy that thick and lovely issue of the Comics Journal, even if only to direct some money toward the folks who went to the trouble of importing the story in the first place.)
We have so few western authorities on manga, god bless ’em, that they can only begin to map out the traditions and history of Japanese comics for us; thankfully, “Nejishiki” is one of the landmarks they’ve flagged. The June 1968 issue of Garo, they tell us, was given over entirely to Yoshiharu Tsuge. (more…)
A couple books, so far, have really stood out among my purchases from last weekend’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and they couldn’t be more different from each other. The first is a lurid looseleaf folder of oversized story pages from (I’m guessing) the former singer of the Load Records band Coughs, providing a free-associative tour through education reform featuring sci-fi Buddhist monks, or something. The second collects webcomics by a Toronto-via-Nova-Scotia cartoonist, who pulls off high-concept lo-brow hi-jinx with brassy aplomb. With both, though, I’m having a disconcerting amount of trouble trying to figure out what exactly it is that I like so much about them. So let me have a think on this… (more…)
If you’re any sort of normal person, you’re probably one of the zillions who stayed the hell away from last summer’s X-Files movie, I Want to Believe. It featured a very angry Xzibit in a prominent role, and hinged on the magical psychic connection created when a Scottish comedian priest shares a very, um, special relationship with a little immigrant boy who grows up to become a black market organ harvester. So, yeah, it’s garbage. Which is to say, even if you did see it, its overwhelming rubbishness probably didn’t incline you to pick up the comic book spin-off series that was released to coincide with the film. Likewise, publisher Wildstorm is probably wondering why they ever secured the X-Files comic book licence, though the seventh issue of the series dutifully came out last week. (more…)
Last week the nominations were announced for the 2009 Doug Wright Awards, which celebrate excellence in Canadian cartooning. By no means are the DWAs the only Canadian comics awards, but they are certainly the awards whose nominees are easiest to review. Finalists for the more mainstream/genre-friendly Joe Shuster Awards are named next week, but these awards go to individuals rather than books, making capsule reviews a smidge difficult. Nominations for the Prix Bédéis Causa came out this week, but I have been a bad Canadian and an unlettered anglo and haven’t tracked down any of the nominated works. Enough with excusing my laziness, though—let’s start off by delving into the titles nominated for the Doug Wright Awards’ Best Book. (more…)
Hard to believe, but there was in fact another comics-related movie that opened in Toronto this past weekend. Fear(s) of the Dark, a French animated film, enlists the styles and sensibilities of six international alt-comics stars and “auteurs graphiques” in the service of exploring notions of, well, fears and darkness (or, in French, the more unequivocal noir). Each of the artists contributes either a narrative short or a framing sequence, playing formally with the notion of darkness versus light, illustrated either in sharp black and white or greasy scratchy shades of grey, while the stories they tell delve into what scares us, with varying degrees of success. Now, the horror anthology film is always a beyond-dodgy enterprise—most horror films miss the mark with just one try, so anthologising horror often only multiplies chances for failure. While this particular attempt never really succeeds in being scary, it does sustain a certain creepiness, and rarely ever comes off dumb—no slight accomplishments, in this genre.
First off, credit Blutch’s framing story with maintaining that creepy air. (more…)
So I don’t know if you’ve heard but there’s this movie coming out this weekend. It looks like it’s dead serious about taking superheroes deadly seriously—an artistic strategy that the original Watchmen comics were smart enough to equivocate about. That panel up top may be moody and reflective, a key dramatic moment, but it also depicts a grown man wearing a cape, and a purple and gold cape, at that. Neither writer Alan Moore nor artist Dave Gibbons ever glosses over such facts: Watchmen the comic is a serious superhero narrative, yes, about sex and death and politics, but it is also a serious superhero narrative, about men and women who for some bizarre reason wear tights and dominos. Even before the knotty plotting and blueprint-precise artwork, the friction between two such disparate modes and moods—the serious, the frivolous—is what grants the work its awkward fascination in the first place.
Who knows what the movie will or won’t do, but it should be noted that the history of Watchmen‘s reception by its artistic followers is too often a history of wilful misunderstanding. (more…)
In last month’s Walrus, US cartoonist John Porcellino riffed on his adventures north of the 49th, casting himself and his travelling companions as explorers into this untamed wilderness. It’s an autobiographical strip from one of the longtime greats of the autobio genre, and it’s a hoot. For this previously undocumented exploit, Porcellino has gone back to the mid-’90s period covered in his recently released King-Cat Classix, a fat and unfussily gorgeous book compiling the best of his seminal lo-fi mini-comic King-Cat Comics and Stories.
Since 1989, King-Cat has felt like an intimate venue where Porcellino shares the goings-on in his life with a close circle of friends, whether through his minimalist black and white line-drawings, his lists of things he’s enthusing over this month, or his typed or hand-written anecdotes and reveries. His most recent book, though, is Thoreau at Walden, a quiet and generously paced adaptation of Thoreau’s writings, a project that might seem a departure if it weren’t such a perfect match for Porcellino’s sensibilities, so attuned to King-Cat‘s cadences of everyday life. I probably mistakenly thought some of Thoreau‘s two-colour work and historical flavour may have carried over into his strip for the Walrus–I asked Porcellino to straighten me out about this and a few other things by email, and he was kind enough to supply the following responses. (more…)
This blog has lately been looking at Matt Groening and his seminal alt-weekly strip Life in Hell, thinking about his place in contemporary cartooning and about the mechanics of his strips and his humour; this will be the third and last instalment. Last time, I ended up thinking that Groening’s brand of relentless non-humour, when it masks a kind of nonchalant despair, can often prove liberating. But if Life in Hell arrives at its sense of humour by coming unmoored from all hope, it’s at its most humourous when it floats free of all logic as well. For Groening, childhood is the least hopeful, least logical time of life—and so, it’s the time that yields up the most to his brand of humour. His funniest book through-and-through is his first in ten years, Will and Abe’s Guide to the Universe, comprising cartoon transcriptions of conversations with his young sons on topics ranging from violence to monsters to girls to birthdays. The evident and deep affection for Will and Abe on display here can’t help but leaven the tone of the typical Life in Hell strip of decades past—indeed, Groening says the strip has lately been retitled Life is Swell (though I haven’t been able to come across any other evidence of this). (more…)
In the first of our considerations of Matt Groening’s Life in Hell comic strip, Four-Colour Words looked at the inclusion of Groening’s work in the latest volume of the well-respected comics anthology Kramers Ergot. His presence in those pages, we saw, encourages a novel understanding of his place in contemporary cartooning, while his contribution itself points toward his work’s strengths and its difficulties, which often amount to the same thing. For this installment of our week-long look at Hell, we’ll see how Groening’s strips, like his anthology contribution, are often easy to gloss, but trying to read: like, that Kramers page may look busy and crowded on your computer screen, but matters don’t change much even when printed in the tombstone-sized book itself.
Remarkably, Groening is one of the few cartoonists in that volume who doesn’t approach the enlarged 16×21 inch canvas any differently than he would his regular work—any one of his strips, any week, at any size, could look just as impenetrable. This kind of sheer density is compelling, in an OCD kind of way, but the repetition and tedium of it all rarely yields any real yuks. To be fair, that’s sort of the point—what should we expect from a book called Work Is Hell other than a mind-numbing belabouring of the point that, well, work is indeed tedious, repetitive hell—but what lets Groening get away with it is how stylish his densely-packed work can be. (more…)
Thanks to a couple of other comic artists I admire stumping on his behalf, lately I’ve been revisiting and reconsidering Matt Groening’s cartoons. Not his television cartoons, mind you, but his pen-and-ink ones, which feature a rotating cast of doomed and bickering rabbits and have been appearing in alternative papers since the early ’80s under the name Life in Hell.
I’ve gone back to The Simpsons, too, but the episodes I’ve rewatched have for the most part confirmed my earlier opinion of the show as complacent, predictable in its unpredictability, far from pointed in its social commentary, and comforting and permissive where it wants to come off as damning and critical. I had feared I would find the same schmaltzy problems in Groening’s comics work. It seems that, in the years since Toronto’s NOW ceased publishing the strip, and in the absence of any online presence or new print collections, I’d allowed Life in Hell to become unduly blackened by the Simpsons associations sullying my recollection of it.
I’d also started accepting much of the received wisdom I’d hear about the strip — that it lost its bite after Groening went commercial (it didn’t), that it looked xeroxed or repetitive or lazy or favoured text over art (well, it does, but those aren’t bad things), and that regular characters Akbar and Jeff kind of suck (um, okay, so they kind of do). But talking recently with Lynda Barry, and reading Sammy Harkham’s latest volume of Kramers Ergot, had me ready to approach Groening’s work from more sympathetic, less dogmatic directions. Reading Life in Hell in the specific contexts those two cartoonists provide, I’ve been rediscovering an incisive, authentically bilious strip carried off in distinctive visual shorthand. I value the strip not a little, and have ended up with not a little to say about it: this will be the first of three posts I’ll devote to Life in Hell over the next week or so. This time out, we’ll start with my latest “in” to Groening’s work—namely, his Kramers Ergot page. (more…)
Four-Colour Words greets the new year by looking into a pair of new Canadian comics!
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Une piquante petite brunette, by Albert Chartier
You could say this about any number of comics released during the last decade mirabilis, but it bears underlining here: how wild is it that this book ever even saw publication? It consists of dozens upon dozens of rejected and unpublished try-out strips by a cartoonist best known, when he’s known at all, for limning the misadventures of a milquetoast in a strip that ran in a monthly bulletin serving rural Québec.
Which isn’t to imply that this book’s existence is undeserving—far from it, since this is accomplished, attractive work. It’s just that when comics so seemingly destined for obscurity nevertheless wend their way toward publication, forty years after their completion, it should behoove us to remark upon what we’re gaining now, in comics’ current golden age, that we’d been missing out on all these years, in the absence of such archival projects. And in the case of Une piquante petite brunette, what we’re gaining isn’t so much an undiscovered classic as it is an instructive glimpse into the processes of a working cartoonist. (more…)
In this conclusion of the Four-Colour Words interview with What It Is author Lynda Barry, the novelist/cartoonist/teacher/guru talks about the ins and outs of her writing classes, worries about the editing process, wonders about where characters and creepy pictures come from, and gushes about how awesome comics are.
* * *
Have you thought of doing drawing classes the same way that you do your writing classes?
I have, if I could find a way to do it. I said to the audience [at her book festival talk], “Think of your first phone number,” and for most people it’ll come spontaneously and then they have a feeling about it. That’s what I’m trying to have happen when you write—unexpected memory. The memory is so strong that you write about it without thinking about your writing, just like people said their numbers out loud but nobody was going, “Now, did I use the right voice when I said that?” You know what I mean? It just happened. So with writing, I can demonstrate much more easily and privately that state of mind that I’m talking about. What I do in my class is, I have them start with unexpected memories and then by the end of the two days we’re writing fiction. Once they’re used to how that feels I pass out envelopes that have pictures in them, like from National Geographic, and they’ll be somebody in a flood, or somebody running from a house on fire, or somebody just sitting there smoking a cigarette. But the students are so used to it that I can say, “All I can tell you about this picture is either you’re in it, or this is what you’re seeing,” and I ask them to go through the exact same exercise we do when we’re writing from actual memories. What’s amazing is how seamlessly they’re able to get into it. With drawing, I haven’t yet quite figured out how to do that same thing—to make people able to instantly make spontaneous images. (more…)
The Walrus HOOPP Pension Debate
Be It Resolved That Canadians Are Incapable
of Saving for Their Retirement Needs Alone
12 pm, Wednesday, May 30 at
Hart House Debate Room, Toronto
The Walrus Glenbow Debate
Calgary’s Cowboy Culture:
Living Legacy or Just History?
6:30 pm, Thursday, June 7 at
Epcor Centre: Max Bell Theatre, Calgary
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