Clive Barker’s Seduth

Clive Barker, Chris Monfette, writers

Gabriel Rodriguez, artist

Ray Zone, “3-D conversion”

IDW, October 2009

32 pages

$5.99

Ordering information from IDW

“Surprise”: I love Clive Barker. Actual surprise: I was not looking forward to reading this Clive Barker comic. Despite its being touted as Barker’s first straight-to-comics work in two decades, the presence of a co-writer dampened my enthusiasm. So too did the 3-D aspect–we’ve all been burned by gimmickry. As for IDW’s involvement, I’d been mightily impressed by Kris Oprisko and Gabriel Hernandez’s lovely, lyrical Thief of Always adaptation, but Seduth artist Gabriel Rodriguez’s cartoony art on the company’s Great and Secret Show–admirable though it may have been for committing a full 12 issues to the effort–struck me as project-deflatingly wrong for the work. In my head, I see Barker as his own adapter, whether as filmmaker or painter or drawer; after that, I cut to the Gothy Hellraiser/Tapping the Vein aesthetic of the Epic Comics days, or to an altcomix style like C.F.’s that has never actually been applied to his stuff. Dude’s transgressive; let’s keep him that way.

Rarely have I been as happy to be wrong as I was about Seduth. Story first: Holy smokes, is this dark. It’s as savagely nihilistic as anything Barker’s done since the Books of Blood, or the story of Hellbound: Hellraiser II, which in its potentially apocalyptic nature and certain specific geometrical and extradimensional imagery is perhaps its closest point of comparsion. Heck, Seduth‘s done-in-one short-story nature makes it feel like an adaptation of a lost BoB outtake. But whereas most adaptations belabor the point, ladling unnecessary prose atop redundant illustrations for an oomph-sapping length of time, then suddenly eliding entire sections, this thing just leaps out of the gate and proceeds at an inexorable pace to its hopeless conclusion. If anything, it’s almost too rapid-fire, rather than the usual tedious legato-staccato juxtaposition you’ll find in comics versions of prose writers’ works. And whatever the division of labor between Barker and Monfette, the transitions are seamless, even to this seasoned observer of Barker’s work. After well over a decade of fantasy from the man, not even of the “dark” variety in many cases, I’d all but forgotten he had this kind of thing in him.

Meanwhile, whatever his deviation from my platonic Barker-adpatation ideal, Rodriguez steps up big-time. Yes, his work is cartoony rather than romantic or abstracted, the directions I’d go in, but its cartooniness is rock solid and reminiscent of some of the form’s most skillful current practitioners–some Tony Moore here, some Philip Bond here. Most of all it relies on a thick, confident line, which turns out to be perfectly suited to 3-D. From what I’ve been told, 3-D effects specialist Zone was involved in the project nearly from its conception, consulting with Barker, Monfette, Rodriguez, and project major domo Robb Humphreys on what kind of effects he’d like to employ in a perfect world. Barker appears to have given him carte blanche, because there’s nary a jump-scare “look out, a hand’s reaching out at you and a knife’s flying at your face!” cliche in sight. Instead, it’s all about layering, playing off the congruences and tangents of Rodriguez’s line to draw the eye in and around the page; the effect is dazzlingly unpleasant in all the right ways. Perhaps it’s just all the Chippendale and Rickheit I’ve been reading talking, but it struck me as an extremely effective and, yes, alternative way of exploring space on the page, to the point where I’m now curious to see what a Fort Thunder alum might do with this particular toolkit. But it can be used for spectacle as well, and it is, particularly in one back-to-back splash-page sequence in which Rodriguez, Zone, and colorist Jay Fotos produce an effect reminiscent of Dr. Manhattan’s line about the light taking him to pieces in Watchmen. Barker, who’s been vocally mainlining the work of Grant Morrison, was surely inspired by Morrison’s Final Crisis tie-in Superman Beyond both in the use of 3-D in the first place and its narrative role as a sign of extradimensionality, but I think the special effect is more nuanced, more effective, here.

So three cheers for Seduth; it made a believer out of this skeptic. Barker has long been thwarted by obstacles in terms of getting his ideas out to the public, from a studio sitting on his movie to a publisher rejecting his photography collection as too explicit to his own overflow of ideas getting the better of him to the point where he advances many projects but completes few. Comics famously has one of the lowest idea-to-finished-product thresholds in the arts; here’s hoping he continues to make such good, focused, no-nonsense use of it as he does in this short, sharp shock.

Gangsta Rap Posse #1

Benjamin Marra, writer/artist

American Tradition, 2009

14 pages

$2

Buy it from BenjaminMarra.com

Or: “What If N.W.A. Weren’t Making All That Shit Up?” The idea of a Bush I-era hardcore hip-hop outfit who actually are gun-toting, ho-pimping, mass-murdering drug kingpins as outlined in their platinum-selling rap career is so fucking brilliant a high concept I’m stunned I’ve never seen it in action before. It’s difficult to remember now, in an age when Jay-Z has more number-one album debuts than anyone but the Beatles and the President jokingly banters about Kanye West’s antics, but when my generation of white kids was growing up, “rapper” was a career that took on the same sort of quasi-mystical air as “cowboy” or “ninja.” Obviously there really were people who did those things for a living–okay, maybe not ninjas so much anymore–but the word, the concept, had a totemistic quality above and beyond “performer who composes and recites rhymes over beats.” Now, I was never a huge gangsta fan, but the less criminally minded but equally angry Public Enemy were one of my favorite groups of any kind during middle school, and from Flav’s accessories to Chuck D’s barn-burning baritone to the marching, uniformed S1Ws to that crosshairs logo, P.E. came across like a black G.I. Joe squad. The kinds of hip-hop that politicians and parents groups rent their garments over back then were tailor-made for action-hero status, and that’s what Marra delivers here. Watching his N.W.A. manques roll up on a rival MC’s compound and strafe his bodyguards with machine-gun fire fulfills a long deferred desire to see the larger-than-life lyrics of such groups made real, or at least as real as an action comic would make them.

It’s so effective in that regard that it’s tempting to overlook the obviously problematic racial territory we’re in. What we have here is a white guy taking Easy, Cube, Ren, and Dre’s lurid cop-killing, bitch-fucking, crack-pipe-illuminated fantasy world and drawing it, and that’s a bit of a sticky wicket, innit? It’s an ugly portrait, even if you’re just painting by the numbers left by the subjects. Fortunately, aside from the all-too-real hairstyles of that era, the visual stereotyping is kept to a minimum; Robert Crumb’s “When the Niggers Take Over America” this isn’t. But the irony is that while, to me, Crumb’s comic is an obvious parody of white racism, Gangsta Rap Posse‘s lack of Crumb’s corrosive irony and sarcasm might make it tougher for some to take despite its simultaneous lack of Crumb’s most outre visuals. Similarly, the dialogue’s ebonics are a far cry from Crumb’s pidgin dialect, but it’s also never half as clever, say, the lyrics from Straight Outta Compton, which were so wickedly funny that they came across like the group letting you in on the joke. Here, it’s a little tougher to tell if the joke’s on them.

But it seems to me that what Marra’s doing is simply taking vintage gangsta and treating it like any other kind of genre fiction. Perhaps the big clue is the sequence where the GRP’s manager complains that the record label’s been waiting for their new album for two years–how could they possibly have time to maintain their recording career when they’ve got an organized crime empire to run? The Gangsta Rap Posse doesn’t exist in continuity with Malcolm X or the Last Poets, they’re in the tradition of Robert E. Howard or the film library of Golan and Globus, and Marra’s using “Fuck tha Police” here the same way he used exploitation cinema in Night Business, or maybe even the same way Bryan Lee O’Malley uses Mega Man in Scott Pilgrim. He’s working much, much edgier territory here than either of those works–it has a lot more in common with Johnny Ryan than O’Malley–but you get that same thrill of cross-pollination and unexpected magpie influences. So I’m down. And I’m really hoping the GRP come up against a fictionalized black-nationalist paramilitary organization version of Public Enemy in the next issue.

Night Business #1 & 2

Benjamin Marra, writer/artist

American Tradition, 2008-2009

24 pages each

$3 each

Buy them from BenjaminMarra.com

I had a whole long tedious review of these comics written out and five seconds ago I deleted it. Didn’t even copy it to the clipboard first! I think it’s stupid to write a boring review of an exciting comic. (Not that it’s stopped me in the past…) And Night Business is definitely an exciting comic, the kind of thing you want to sneak into the hands of all your teenaged cousins or spill beer and pizza grease on during the Crank 2: High Voltage/Road House/Predator movie marathon you’re having this Friday night.

The point I was trying to make in the scrapped review was that Night Business isn’t a pastiche of ’80s trash-culture thrillers as found in straight-to-video late-night-cable exploitation movies or “adult” independent comics from fly-by-night “publishers” so much as it’s a re-creation of them. Dolly Parton (whom, coincidentally, Marra has drawn) famously said “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap”; while I doubt that Night Business cost anyone a lot of money, its cheapness is clearly hard-earned. Benjamin Marra’s art is studiously amateurish and ugly in a totally consistent fashion–precisely the way that the art of someone whose natural talent is totally outgunned by his boundless enthusiasm and obsession bordering on dedication would be. These blocky, blockheaded, stiff figures–everyone, male and female, looks like their bodies are 85% gristle–seem like the thought-through product of a worldview, like they’re the output of someone who’s drawn page after page after meaty, pulpy page of these people without ever thinking twice about what anyone will think of it (beyond, perhaps, “they’ll fuckin’ love it!”). The layouts are simple, all business, as if to say “enough of all the frou-frou, let’s just see what happens next.” Every outfit is peeled from some hair-metal or porno fantasy world where men are either leather and denim street toughs or sharp-dressed sharks in suits, and where women routinely walk around in lingerie and heels. The City (capitalized like a motherfucker) consists almost solely of strip clubs, alleys, morgues, and the preposterous offices of an exotic-dancer management empire; everything is lit by streetlights or neon. In order to offset some of the icky taste that might be left in your mouth by doing a story about the serial murder of strippers while spending page after page depicting the naked bodies of those strippers (necessarily, I think; look how toothless Robert Rodriguez’s strangely prudish grindhouse homage Planet Terror ended up being without it), the series takes a page from every bard of the urban nightpeople since Steve Perry’s small-town girl took the midnight train going anywhere and builds up the hopes, desires, and dreams of each dancer as she takes it off to the leering crowds. Sure, they’re all pure-dee hokum, but in a world where the men’s emotions can all be expressed by grimacing and never rise above the complexity level of a Blackest Night tie-in issue’s Lantern Corps appearances, they’re the most psychologically fleshed-out characters in the book. The effect isn’t just reminiscent of some bargain-bin Scarface, it’s identical. If it weren’t for the ironic author photo and bio giving the game away at the back of each issue you’d never know that Marra is, on some level at least, kidding. And by that point, who cares? Smoke ’em if you got ’em and bring on issue #3.

The Squirrel Machine

Hans Rickheit, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2009

192 pages, hardcover

$18.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

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Given what I’ve been reading lately I can’t help but compare Hans Rickheit to Fort Thunder. Like Brian Chippendale, Mat Brinkman, Brian Ralph et al, Rickheit spent the late ’90s and very early ’00s living and working in a combination art gallery/performance space/flophouse in a New England college town–theirs, Fort Thunder, in Providence; his, the Zeitgeist Gallery, in Cambridge. Like them, he saw his one-time shangri-la end before its time–theirs by municipal diktat, his by fire. Like them–and, like them, perhaps unsurprisingly given his years-long conflation of room and board with bristol board–he creates comics centered on the exploration of space, rooms, houses, environments. And like them, he fills that space with marks, so that reading one is almost a tactile, exploratory experience itself.

But the similarities are not complete. Unlike Ralph’s cavemen or Brinkman’s monsters or Chippendale’s warriors, Rickheit’s Edwardians are observers at least as much as explorers. Though they move about in his strange, gristly world, they are not of that world. More often than not they’re limned by a fine white void; it serves the purpose of making them pop against his often overwhelming backgrounds, yes, but it also reinforces their separateness, their otherness. They wander through strange environments constructed by unknown architects, gazing through lenses and orifices at any number of bizarre transmixtures of human, animal, and machine. They are constantly seeing things, to borrow the title of a book by Rickheit’s visual and thematic kindred spirit Jim Woodring. When we see what they see, the effect is reminiscent of catching a glimpse of an older family member as he or she masturbates, or strips to reveal what Rickehit’s friend E. Stephen Frederick refers to in his memorably Kenneth Smithian introduction to The Squirrel Machine as “secondary hair.”

In the comics of the Fort, exploration is, at worst, value-neutral. In Ralph’s comics they lead mostly to mischief and lessons learned (though that changed somewhat in the bleak zombie comic Daybreak), in Chippendale’s they usually lead to freedom or adventure, and in Brinkman’s, for every bleak wordless parable of creatures lost in an endless maze, there’s another LOL-inducing story of a beast barging into a castle to take a dump on the king’s throne. In Rickheit’s comics, though, the explorations and the visions waiting at their conclusions are unmistakably disturbing. They reveal creatures and creations of arcane origin and dubious value, frequently hidden inside a smoothly artificial or warmly organic surface like a grotesque parody of birth, or a Cracker Jack prize. When you end up at the end of one of Rickheit’s wonderings, there’s a sense that, to quote Trent Reznor, “Now I am somewhere I am not supposed to be, and I can see things I know I really shouldn’t see.” That’s no less true for our desire to see them. In this, he has more in common with Josh Simmons than with the Fort, though unlike the House author, up until this point the damage incurred in Rickheit’s characters’ travels is more psychological than physical.

This changes in The Squirrel Machine, Rickheit’s Fantagraphics debut and for all intents and purposes a simultaneous coming-out party and summation of all that has gone before. In the past–his Xeric-winning erotic coming-of-age nightmare Chloe, his dewily sexualized surrealist gag strip Cochlea & Eustacea–Rickheit imbued his character’s journeys into what he refers to as the Underbrain with a sliver of redemptive power. Chloe finds something that replaces what she lost; Cochlea and Eustacea’s antics are as funny and horny as they are freaky. But here, the downbeat direction hinted at by C&E’s fate in the last issue of Rickheit’s self-published anthology Chrome Fetus emerges in full flower, and the result is awesome to behold.

In Rickheit’s story of the brilliant brothers Torpor, William and Edmund, art does not provide the antidote to the encroaching cruelty of the civilized world, as it does in Chippendale’s Ninja. On the contrary, the art of William and Edmund is wholly dependent on the taking of life. Their childhood games aren’t free-spirited enactments of the struggle of good against evil, and they’re not really games, either. They’re attempts to follow their brains as far as they can take them. Other beings–the animals who are their chosen medium, their hapless mother, the angry townsfolk and mocking bullies–factor in only as means rather than ends. Even exploration itself is represented as a frightening loss of control by its most prominent exponent here, Edmund’s sleepwalking. There seems to be no escape from the power structure of oppressor and oppressed.

The one exception to that rule is for those with whom they can form a sexual connection–but even that will only be allowed to take them so far. Visually, Rickheit tips his hand after the book’s first big sex scene. It’s weird, hot stuff as always from Rickheit, rooted in memorable details that serve to knock you off balance and make you vulnerable like the characters themselves. But in the middle of the act we cut to a stunning two-page spread, silent, no people present–simply incredibly byzantine images of the Torpor family home, utterly cluttered with the detritus of their inventions. Pipes and chains and ropes and stairs and beams and wires crisscross the panels, creating along with the gutters a dense thicket of tangents and congruences. The eye is led everywhere and nowhere all at once. The message is clear: Sex offers no escape. And like art, it can, and likely will, destroy and degrade and subjugate. When life and love, of a sort, finally do reassert themselves at the book’s end, it’s horrifying and drawn in a fashion that makes it look less like a natural thing and more like a terrible apparition, or a special effect.

It’s strange, but of all the dizzying details Rickheit deploys in The Squirrel Machine, the one that stood out the most to me came early on in the book: A distant water tower topped not with the usual tank, but with what looks like a giant version of the old-fashioned, grated helmets divers once wore. It sits atop a tower and beside a train trestle that are both as realistic as you please, but there it is, a mute monument to illogic. In Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum, Amadeus Arkham recalls his fateful initiation into his mad mother’s “other world”:

A world of fathomless signs and portents. Of magic and terror. And mysterious symbols.

This has long been the world Rickheit has chronicled. The allure in both cases is that these portents can be scryed, these symbols can be decoded, this world can be mapped. But it’s only in reading this book–a painstaking chronicle of the lack of solace provided by art to the powerless–and thinking back on the diver’s-helmet tower that I realized that in our darkest moments, it’s easy to see that world as our world too–only the symbols can’t be read. When exploration is punished, when everything we see feels like something we oughtn’t, when theoretically life-affirming forces are either nipped in the bud or exposed as brutal frauds, doesn’t it all seem as maddeningly inscrutable as a giant diver’s helmet on top of a water tower? That there’s some reason for it all, something lurking beneath the surface, something we will never, ever get to?

Ninja

Brian Chippendale, writer/artist

PictureBox, 2006

128 pages, hardcover

$34.95

Buy it from PictureBox

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Starting off a review of a Brian Chippendale comic by talking a plot seems like the laziest most wrongheaded way to start off a review of a Brian Chippendale comic, like an unwitting parody of all the lame comics criticism that other comics critics criticize for focusing on writing rather than art. Shouldn’t I be saying something about markmaking or snake-style layouts? Maybe, but much more so than with Chippendale’s Maggots, the creation of which predated and the publication of which followed this book, the plot of Ninja matters. Not just as a driver for the imagery, but to Chippendale, and to me.

The book starts with these silly little comics about a ninja–basically, fighting against Cobra from GI Joe–that Chippendale drew when he was 11. They look like a child artist’s representation of a sidescrolling Nintendo game, like Ninja Gaiden: After breaking into a bad-guy base, the ninja will move forward or up or down and discover a new opponent, and we watch as he figures out a way to defeat or avoid each enemy. Most of these strips end when the ninja, having stolen some valuables from the evildoers, successfully escapes from their lair and returns to his home (complete with its incongruously normal front door). What Chippendale does in this collection is every so often insert a brand-new, recently drawn strip between the stuff he drew as a kid, fleshing out the Ninja’s home life and world at large. Meanwhile, in the world of the kid strips, the bad guys become less involved with…whatever it was they were up to before the Ninja showed up, and more and more fixated on capturing and killing the Ninja in retribution for all the havoc he’s caused them.

The problem for Chippendale is that his younger self was apparently less dedicated to making art than his grown-up incarnation–like many kids who spent their youths creating their own, enthusiastically derivative fantasy worlds to play in, he eventually ran out of steam, and his final Ninja strip from that era is unfinished. The solution? A new penultimate strip, in which the bad guys build a doomsday device that gets out of control and begins absorbing reality as we know it. Now, when 11-year-old Chippendale’s last Ninja strip abruptly cuts off mid-page, leaving rows of blank panels unfilled beneath it, it’s not just a kid losing interest and putting his pencil down to go play Nintendo or skateboard–it’s the end of a world as we know it.

Cut to 18 years later, and to the bulk of the book. Now, in typical Fort Thunder fashion (prefigured to an astonishing degree by the space-based action of the kid stuff) we explore the city of Grain and its surroundings, where the Ninja and his enemies once lived. Only now, with the Ninja gone and his “killing villains for fun and profit” activities curtailed, the city’s gone to hell. Not the openly dictatorial hell that the old Bad Guys might have ushered in–they seem to have been consumed by their own device, unless I missed something–but a quotidian nightmare of corrupt public officials, rapacious corporate raiders, callous resource thieves, brutal cops, and relentless, even violent, gentrification and homogenization. Everyone may still look like refugees from Super Mario or the Masters of the Universe, and the level of violence and dimension-hopping and overall weirdness remains consistent with that, but in essence their concerns are the same as those of an artist who returns home from a tour with his noise-rock band to discover the place he’d lived and worked in for years had chains on the doors so the city could raze it and install a supermarket parking lot.

Of course none of this is super-apparent from the get-go. I spent a decent amount of time waiting for the Ninja to show up again after the 18-year jump, storming back into town to take it back. But as we watch Chippendale’s little groups of characters–good, bad, and ugly alike–go about their zany business, it becomes apparent that there’s a build to the eventual reveal of “What happened to the Ninja?” to rival any slow-burn mystery-villain storyline Marvel or DC have done this decade. And once you find out, the solution is elegantly simple, childlike, charming, and utterly inspiring. I’m not going to spoil it, but suffice it to say I closed this book feeling better about humanity than I’ve felt in quite some time. Maybe there is a solution after all.

Okay, so, the art. The collage material is an eye-candy orgy as you’d expect, one of the purest distillations of that aspect of Chippendale and the whole Providence scene’s output as I’ve seen so far, though for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what role it was playing in the narrative–it didn’t seem to pop up at logical reality-warping breaks, like when the Bad Guys’ machine ran amok and caused a House of M style fade to white–until I read in PictureBox’s synopsis of the book that they’re just chapter breaks. More immediately grokkable and impressive to me were the many, many bravura moments in the comics themselves–painstakingly delineated Dore-style deserts, a city covered completely in OCD stripes, characters becoming aware of a spy camera filming them in a scene simultaneously “shot” from their perspective and that of the camera, two scenes taking place at the same time but on different vibrational planes suddenly smooshed together in strips as though they were pieced together from two separate shredded documents, a brutal torture sequence and hot sex scene both showing up in the book’s final act. And Chippendales back-and-forth panel flow is so addictive (and much more consistent than in Maggots) that I found myself trying to read other comics that way after finishing Ninja. There’s a certain magic to these elements that feeds into and plays off of the narrative even when it doesn’t have any strict narrative cause, like any great spectacle.

But ultimately this is a book about an idea: the need to persevere in your pursuit of fun, which in most of the ways that matter is a synonym for Good with a capital g. Sometimes, compromise may be necessary–after all, the Ninja was slicing up bad guys not just because in the world of the comic it’s the right thing to do, but for their loot; and (still trying to avoid being spoilery, though this may skirt the edge) his ultimate fate does not necessarily provide a happy ending for everyone. But you can reclaim the comics you made when you were a kid and build them up into a statement on where you are as a grown-up without sacrificing the buoyant illogic and unfettered imagination that came through originally. You can hang on to the important things you found in your arts-commune idyll even when the outside world finally smashes down the walls around you. You can still think ninjas are cool.