The responses to yesterday’s plea for help getting into Love & Rockets continue to flow in. The leading candidates seem to be 1) Palomar 2) The Death of Speedy 3) Getting the hell off the Comics Journal message board before it saps your last bit of enthusiasm for great comics. I’ll probably be heeding all three bits of advice.
Ha ha, seriously folks, Palomar and The Death of Speedy are far and away the frontrunners for the best way to dive into the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez respectively; after trying those two, folks have suggested trying Gilbert’s Poison River next, followed by Chelo’s Burden, X, Flies on the Ceiling, Chester Square, and Wigwam Bam to varying degrees. In other words, I’ve got a nice plan of action, and as long as I can wean myself off of my chronological-order-of-release fixation, I should be all set. Thanks to everyone who’s written in or posted suggestions, and please keep those recommendations coming (especially folks who wrote in yesterday with ampersands, since my submission form ate whatever you tried to tell me!).
Also on the Hernandez beat is Eve Tushnet, who’s blogged her own recommendations, and Johnny Bacardi, who’s a rare dissenting voice in the chorus of praise for Palomar. Alan David Doane is representative of the majority opinion. (How often do you get to say that?)
Big Sunny D advances his theory that Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is a horror comic. Horrifying, I’ll grant him, but horror? I can’t buy it. I agree with pretty much everything he says, but I think horror is more than just a sense of despair and futility–much as we’re supposed to think they need to be subverted or destroyed if a given work is to be any good, genre conventions do count for something, and I think that certain conventions of structure, imagery, and message are what enable us to stop the slippery slope that leads us to label as “horror” anything that’s bleak or disturbing. On the other hand, Steve Bissette (scroll down) agrees with Mr. D; it’s definitely a topic worth examining. (I touched on it in a footnote in my senior essay on horror.)
Alan David Doane weighs in on the dangers of the (as Barton Fink might put it) “merely adequate.” I’m not terribly familiar with Geoff Johns’s work so I can’t comment there, but it’s certainly true that there’s more at stake when you buy something that’s “okay for what it was” than just that vague sense of let-down-ness you’re feeling.
Will Franklin find his findings to be factual in the future?
Shawn Fumo unearths a truly shocking statistic from a Time Magazine article on Borders Bookstores–female-centric shojo manga comprises fully 60% of their graphic-novel sales! Speaking anecdotally, I have yet to visit the graphic novel section of the local Borders without seeing books picked up for purchase by teenage girls or elementary-school-aged kids or both. Every single time, people. But surely this manga craze in my Borders is just a fluke–after all, Shonen Jump just won’t sell!
Bruce Baugh has some thoughts on the extent to which righteous anger is an integral part of fandom; he also counters the fandom-supported argument that change is inherently bad. He cites the case of Ang Lee’s Hulk, and he’s right–it’s not the fact that Lee changed the Hulk’s origin that was bad, it was the way he changed it. (That is, needlessly and incomprehensibly complicating it, thereby stripping it of its allegorical resonance. And oh yeah, who gave a damn about any of those characters? The fact is that any time the Hulk wasn’t on screen, or those panel-border dissolves weren’t being used, the movie was dull as hell, and making a dull movie out of the Incredible freaking Hulk is pretty inexcusable. But that’s a topic for another day.)
Note to John Jakala: Nuh-uh! (Translation: there’s an interesting debate going on in that post’s comments feature about the merits of Mark Millar and Brian Bendis.)
J.W. Hastings tries to find where comic books as containers of literature end and comic books as art objects begin. He’s not all that happy with the latter conception of the comic book, no sir. Frankly, I think he’s targeting the wrong book by the wrong publisher–Top Shelf has some vaguely design-y books, sure, but that most recent anthology isn’t really one of them, at least insofar as it garners praise from the artcomix crowd; it’s too hit-or-miss an affair. Most of Top Shelf’s best books are nice to look at but are ultimately valued for their content, not their design–the works of Alan Moore, Craig Thompson, and Jeffrey Brown come to mind. A far more artsy publisher would be Highwater (who, in fairness to JW, are distributed in some capacity or other by Top Shelf); it draws a lot of its energy from Fort Thunder alumni, and NON anthologizer Jordan Crane, who are all leading proponents of the comic-book-as-objet-d’art school. Frankly, I’m tickled if a book is as neat-looking as, say, the hand-silkscreened and die-cut NON #5, but I’m really interested in the comics themselves, you know? Which is good, because Highwater happens to publish some of the best comics made by anyone in the last few years (Teratoid Heights, Shrimpy & Paul and Friends, Skibber Bee-Bye, The Last Lonely Saturday, and yes, the much-maligned-by-JW Kramers Ergot 4. JW, take another look at Kramers–yes, the endless collages are pretty much pointless, but check out “Lonely Sailor” by editor Sammy Harkham, the Sisyphus stories by Anders Nilssen, “Don’t Look Them in the Eye” by Jeffrey Brown–those I remember off the top of my head, and they’re good comics any way you slice it.)
Eve Tushnet responds to David Fiore‘s call for an eye-level aesthetic, which she interprets to eschew both reverence and cynicism. Sounds good to me–reverence and cynicism tend to be totally subsumed into horror in the works I admire…
In a post script to something of a running debate on the potential ameliorative effects of manga on American comics, Dave Intermittent notes that two American-made manga-style books, the Sandman spin-off Death: At Death’s Door and a Lizzie McGuire tie-in, have done well enough at bookstores to suggest that the manga market will, in fact, buy American manga. In other words, it’s not just Japanophile fetishism. This bodes well.
More on manga (hey, isn’t there always?) from Ron Phillips, focusing on manga’s role as sequential-art training wheels for America’s little kids.
Jim Henley, you are not alone!
Jason Kimble points out that amidst all the recent furor about mediocre comics, no one seemed to remember that the crap: gold ratio in other media is just as bad. Hey, I remembered–you don’t see me renting Charlie’s Angles: Full Throttle or running out to buy Britney Spears’s In the Zone today, do you?
Finally, in a recent message to his mailing list, Warren Ellis mentioned that he’d been surfing through “the comics blogosphere” the other day. While that explained the strange feeling I got a couple days ago that someone, somewhere, was exposing my dark American underbelly, it did more than that, too: it led Ellis, apparently, to give up on bitching about the state of the comics industry altogether, because it’s all been said before (by him, and now by the bloggers). Christopher Butcher is apparently going to follow suit. Though I wasn’t reading comics, let alone comics-related websites, when Ellis was at the height of his influence, it seems to me that his advice tends to be quite good; but there have been people saying there’s nothing new under the sun for as long as there have been people, if not as long as there’s been a sun. Personal Comics Burnout hits all of us at one time or another, and the joys of complaining are certainly susceptible to yielding diminishing returns, but don’t let’s mistake momentary fed-up-edness with unshakeable insight. If we don’t complain about the stupidities of this medium we love so much, who will? Not the people perpetrating the stupidities, I can assure you of that.