Gluey Tart: I Shall Never Return

I Shall Never Return, by Kazuna Uchida, 2007-2008, Deux Press

I don't know. This five-volume series is like a love affair that you try to describe to someone a few years later, and you open your mouth to explain your actions, and nothing comes out because you're just thinking, no, I was into that person, I'm sure of it, but the details somehow elude me. And yet, I can give you a plot summary for any episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So what I'm saying is, it's not you, I Shall Never Return. It's me.

I'm pretty sure. This is "a true masterpiece of early yaoi," the back cover tells me. It was originally published starting in 1992 (through 1995 or so – I seem to have misplaced Volume 5, God knows what happened to it, but surely nobody really cares anyway – what's a year or two among friends?), and it does have an old-school feel about it. Which is fine. It doesn't feel particularly dated to me, either in look or content. I'm sure the disaffected young hottie turning tricks because he just doesn't care what happens to him theme played a little fresher seventeen years ago – I mean, it had to – but I'm a fan of that particular yaoi cliché, so no harm, no foul, either way.

It's a very small story, for five volumes. And I'm OK with that as well. I never met a good obsessive bit of character development I didn't like, and if there's one thing this series does, it's develop it some characters. Convincingly, even. I'm not going to say much about what or how because I don't want to give it away, and details won't help you decide whether you want to read it or not, anyway. There's a torrid romance between two high-school age boys, with some love triangle action that gets resolved one way or another. Normally I think nothing of providing spoilers, but it wouldn't be right for this story because there are a number or moments where things could go either way, and the fun comes in wondering what path the character will pick, and how you feel about it. I will say that the ending won't leave you depressed and sad and cranky and casting about for some stale bit of forgotten chocolate at the back of your desk drawer.

Looking back over our days together, I Shall Never Return, what I appreciate most is that your characters are genuinely sort of complicated in a real-life-ish sort of way. They make unexpected choices, some good and some not so much. And the two main characters love each other. Not in a swoony and completely unrealistic-outside-of-yaoi way (and I'm not putting that down, either), but in a kind of believable real-people-making-real-life-choices sort of way that maybe isn't exactly swoony but does feel good, especially because the feeling good thing isn't a foregone conclusion. (Sort of like the love story between Wharf and always-surprisingly-no-matter-how-many-times-you-see-the-reruns stacked Deanna Troi.) (Look, I wove in a Star Trek: The Next Generation reference!) (Also, I ask you, why should the Germans get to have all the hyphenation fun?)

I cared enough about the characters and was curious enough to see where their lives would take them that I wound up reading all five volumes of this series. This isn't so unusual, in itself. What kind of a Gluey Tart would I be if I weren't good for five volumes? Damn straight. Here's the weird thing, though. I bought them one at a time. This may not sound at all weird to you. That would mean you potentially have a healthier and less obsessive relationship with manga than I do. I buy the first one, and if I show signs of liking it about a quarter of the way in, I take steps to get the rest of the volumes in the series immediately. (Sometimes radical steps, in the case of an older series that I came to late and had trouble tracking down used copies of; there was a tense time there getting hold of volume four, although I see that I eventually wound up with two of them – but that is my way, and I'd like to try and think of it as charming). But with I Shall Never Return, I bought one book at a time. I've never done that in my life, but for some reason I kept thinking each volume might be the last one I'd want to read. Which never was the case, even with the last one.

So, I don’t know what my problem was. Is. Maybe I was in the mood for yaoi craziness instead of a mostly small-scale and quiet romance. I recommend it to you, though. You're less shallow than I am. I think you can really make it work, and it deserves that.

Frank Miller's Not Dead, But That Doesn't Mean We Can't Dance On His Grave

I've been sort of half meaning to read the Long Halloween for a while. I've seen some of Tim Sale's art before...mainly when he did that Comics Journal cover a little while back, I think. Anyway, I like his work; he has a nice clean design sense, with good use of blacks and dark areas especially. His character designs are striking too; he manages to be cartoony in a way that doesn't seem to come either from manga or from humor comics. Instead he seems more directly influenced by art nouveau...or perhaps it's just Frank Miller. I don't necessarily love everything he does. I find his Catwoman design kind of meh, for example; the purple suit seems overly angular and drab, and I don't share his obsession with abs for all.





But even so, the panel is competently blocked and consistently stylized. It's professional, damn it. And some moments are in fact inspired, like this Joker as Christmas- Grinch sequence...



The way the Joker's body is all folded up in that first panel, and then the veins in his eye shot through the magnifying glass...that's fine storytelling. It's worth looking at.

And then there's the story. I think that, maybe, if you really want to appreciate Dark Knight, you should read The Long Halloween. It's easy to look back at Frank Miller's writing and sneer at the grim and gritty Batman, the hard-boiled repetitive dialogue ("this would be a good death"), etc. etc. But, damn it, there was a ton of humor and energy there as well; his Joker, for example, was genuinely, viciously funny (dressing Selina Kyle up as Wonder Woman — what the hell? or calmly stating "I'm going to kill everyone in this room" — to which the David Lettermen analog gives the pitch-perfect response, "Now that's darn rude!") And his Batman had a real voice and inner life — stolen from all those pulp sources, of course, and over-the-top, but still, in part for those reasons, memorable and even nuanced. I loved that moment at the end of the book where he tells Robin to sit up straight for example; he's both this grim avenger and this crotchety father figure. He's perfect, and the perfection is played as a cantankerous tic. Certainly, the book is dark in that people get killed and there's blood and it's for grown-ups, more or less. But it's not dark in the sense of being dreary. It's filled with ideas and weird jokes and satire and a lot of love for the characters and for imaginative possibilities.

The Long Halloween, on the other hand, has no imaginative possibilities to offer. Forget Miller's occasional forays into society and politics and mortality — Jeph Loeb doesn't even have anything to say about Batman or his rogues gallery. Sale makes sure everyone looks great, but that can't hide the fact that the designated writer has the proportional spunk and gumption of an actuary on quaaludes. The Scarecrow wears straw and the Mad Hatter speaks wiTh FuNny caPs — that's about as much personality as Loeb can offer. They might as well all just stand around telling each other, "Um...die, Batman. I'm really nuts. No, no, I am. Die." Except that would be marginally entertaining, wouldn't it? Instead the Joker laughs and the Catwoman does her Catwoman ooh-I'm-ambivalently-evil thing, and Batman wanders around stiffly, sticking out his muscles, muttering the same few lines over and over ("I believe in Harvey Dent."), and painfully clanking forth some insight from the old Frank Miller scripts he probably reads before going to bed (don't wear the costume in the day — check. Got that in Year One. Thanks.) The mafia guys are similarly lackluster,the third-hand Godfather cliches played with so little sense of irony that the best joke in the book ( instead of the good-guy mafiosos refusing to move into drugs, they refuse to move into super-villains) just sort of sits there looking confused and pitiful.

Plopped down in the middle of such dreary, derivative schlock, the book's iterated tagline, "I believe in Gotham City," comes across as neither inspiration nor bittersweet aspiration, but as callow fanboy special pleading. Because you know what? This is going to come as something of a shock, but...Gotham City? It's not real. You want me to suspend disbelief, you need to put in some effort and some genius. Because simply asserting that your little corporate fan-fic fantasyland has profound meaning makes you seem like some kind of aesthetic mosquito, battened desperately on the decaying carcasses of past minimally talented Batscripters. Suck mightily as you will, though, that juice is gone. All you can get out of those corpses is a dry slurping noise, which sounds mighty empty as it echoes about in your doddering edifice of piffle.

And of course since no character in the entire exercise has anything like an actual personality, the inevitable twist ending comes across as utterly gratuitous. Oh my God, the killer is — Harvey Dent's wife! That's so profound because, like, she was such an utterly boring, stereotypical whiny wife throughout the whole book, and now...she's still an utterly boring, stereotypical whiny wife, but with a plot arc cribbed from Scott Turow.

Oh, wait, did I spoil the end? Sorry. Guess you won't want to read it now.

Maybe you could just look at the art?

Face Down In The Mainstream: Batwoman Pt. 2

Eyecandy.

I like it. But it's tough to have nothing but eyecandy. There needs to be a structure, a frame, a skeleton for the flesh to hang upon.

Unfortunately, the skeleton of this week's Batwoman is sort of wimpy and dull. Which is too bad, because the art continues to be very very nummy.

In this episode (#855, Sept 09), Batwoman fights the loli-goth villainess, Alice. It should be tons of fun, but Alice is just regular old crazy instead of being interestingly batshit insane. The two tussle and Batwoman disarms her and then Alice slashes Batwoman with a razor hidden in her mouth. It's laced with poison, which is also sort of boring, really, as villainous feints go, but it does give the artist a chance to do this, which makes is worthwhile:



Isn't that pretty? I love the scrollwork and the design elements and the way everything becomes lush and strange.

So Batwoman has sad but very pretty insane imaginings and then we get to see Alice go back to her minions. Again, there's some interesting play with the layout:


Then there's another little tussle. It's kind of stock and there's a cliffhanger where what seems to be werewolves and octopus creatures show up. I had hoped that maybe they'd do something with the Alice theme, because I'm bored with stock weird monsters. It would be so much more fun if the werewolves were wearing top hats and vests with pockets and if the octopuses had to wear red and white livery. But oh well. Maybe things will be brought to an exciting climax in the last issue, but I'm not holding my breath.

In short: Beautiful art but boring story.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #18

That's a kind of generic cover for Peter; the knight's certainly nicely drawn (love that plume), but overall it's fairly static and boring by his standards. Part of that may be that it's trying to be coy: Marston/Peter have a secret return villain, and they don't want to give it away. But here I come spoiling it 60 years later: the villain in this issue is:

Dr. Psycho!.

Remember him from Issue #5? Little dwarf guy? Hated women so hypnotized them to cause them to send forth ectoplasm so he could take on different shapes? How could you forget, right?

Well, anyway, as so often happens with sequels, this one isn't nearly as much fun as the original. No giant space kangas, for instance. No battle with Ares (who was originally using Psycho to prevent women from getting involved in the war effort.) Instead, there's a much less convoluted plot involving Psycho trying to wreak revenge on WW and her pals. There's as always some nice art, and Marston/Peter do seem committed to the wordless sequences now:






That last one, with Peter showing the movement through ghost images as WW throws herself into a backflip with her hands tied behind her back, is pretty spectacular. Despite such moment, though, this one isn't the best of all possible Marston/Peter efforts.

But even mediocre Marston/Peter has some pretty interesting stuff going on. In particular, this one made me wonder about that all important question: Is the phallus female? (I know you've always wondered.) To answer that, we're going to make a detour and talk about John Carpenter's Christine.

Christine is about Arnie Cunningham, a nerdy, sweet high school kid who discovers a sentient car named Christine. The car possesses him, and he turns into a cool fifties greaser type, who's attractive to girls and emotionally inaccessible and really dangerous. I talked briefly about Christine a ways back:

Christine the car is, of course, supposed to be a woman...but any car is obviously literally genderless, and the secretive nature of his relationship with her, plus her violence and the fact that, hey, she's a car...if she's a woman, she's awfully, awfully butch, is all I'm saying. Arnie,of course, gets more and more manly and tough and evil the more time he spends with the car -- which on the one hand suggests that, hey, he's got a girl now, so he's a man -- but on the other hand suggests that he becomes more of a man by caring less and less about girls. Yeah; total agonized male fantasy of being simultaneously consumed by femininity and consumed by masculinity; the orgasmic collapse/reification of male identity — being castrated so you can turn into a penis (at the close Arnie is penetrated by a piece of glass from Christine's windshield, caressing her one last time before he dies. Being violated by her, having her in control, is what makes him most male; emotionally inaccessible, commanding, finally murderous. Christine is ultimately masculinity itself, which possesses Arnie; but at the same time that masculinity is feminine — since it doesn't reside in a particular body, and ambiguous genders are always coded feminine.

Christine in the movie functions as a phallus; before he gets her, Arnie is a typical feminized nerd; when he gets her, he becomes a manly embodiment of pitiless law, hunting down those who attack his car, or who steal his girl, or who just look at him funny, really. So Christine is what makes him a man. But she's also, obviously, a woman, or at least feminized, which suggests that what makes you a man is a woman.

That's not all that odd a concept...the whole point of the trophy girlfriend, for example, is that you demonstrate your manliness by walking around with a female status appendage. But Christine pushes the idea to an unusual extreme; Christine isn't just a status symbol; she's actually the source of power — not so much a sign of the phallus as the phallus itself. That's part of the anxiety in the movie. Ta-Nehisi Coates has talked at various points about the idea that misogyny stems in part from male fears of being rejected, or being unable to deal with the emotional vulnerability inherent in having a relationship with a woman who can accept or reject you. I can see that...but at the same time I think there's also an anxiety around the fact that women hold the keys to masculinity;men are forced to rely on women to prove that they are as men. Arnie puts himself in thrall to female power, and while that makes him a man, it also makes him a monster.

So, back over to Dr. Pyscho. As I mentioned, Psycho's power, like Arnie's, actually derives from women. The ectoplasm he uses to change form comes out of his female mediums. And you can tell it's female, because it's pink!



Psycho, like pre-Christine Arnie, isn't very masculine. He needs to tap into female power to turn himself into a man's man such as....Tyrone Gayblade, the great lover!





There's a certain logic to that; if male power comes from women, then it should be queer (this is the case in Christine too, where Arnie's secretive relationship with Christine reads as gay in certain ways, as I mentioned above.)

The kind of power Psycho gets from the women is also arguably female in nature. In the first place, he keeps turning himself into women, inlcuding the paragon of womanhood herself:



I bet that Marston really enjoyed the chance to write briefly about an evil WW...and perhaps especially about a man masquerading as an evil WW. (There's another duplicate WW story here. At the same time, it's interesting that the WW double didn't show up on the cover. Duplicate WW clones of various stripes would become an obsession for Silver Age writers — a way, maybe, for creators to express their distaste and distrust of the character, or perhaps just their indifference by throwing oodles of generic clones into the plot. Marston, on the other hand, tosses the idea off and moves on to something else. There is a note or two about how the military brass mistrusts WW briefly because she appears to have stolen their secret weapon...but it's treated as an aside, whereas in the Silver Age it would have been the main focus of the story. Marston isn't interested in having people hate WW; she's not Spider-Man. The point is everybody loves her! That's what being a hero is all about, damn it.

Where was I?

Oh, right.

So Psycho gets to be a powerful guy by deriving power from women. Partly, that means that he's more manly. Partly, it means he's more queer. Partly it means he's more female. But above all, it means he's got the phallus:




I love that; the pastor who is about to perform a wedding dissolves into pink, ropy, sticky tendrils, binding the wedding party in sticky bondage goo. Luckily, though, WW is more of a man, and more of a woman, than Psycho, so she can turn the phallus on him:



Great panel at the end: "You'll live happily in our Amazon prison, Joan." Joyful bondage, hooray!

As in Christine, there's some anxiety here — but it seems more connected to male power than to female power. In Christine, the female power corrupts the man (turning him into an uber man); here, it's more like the man corrupts female power (turning it into a phallus.) The wedding turns into an abject nightmare of goopy penis tentacle rape because the man is in control; once WW reclaims the ectoplasm for femininity, all is well.

You may be wondering who's getting married, incidentally. Why, it's...Etta Candy and Tyrone Gayblade!



Who knew Etta was so eager to get married? It does seem kind of out of character for our butch, independent, entirely orally oriented comic relief. But on the other hand, Etta doesn't seem especially distressed when things don't pan out.



Easy come, easy go. And yes, her long-suffering, nerdy, dominated suitor is named Sweetgulper.

Oh, and I couldn't leave this issue without showing you this:




Psycho hypnotized one of his mediums by drawing his own eyes on a piece of paper and sending it to her. He really is tricky.



____________________

Just as a final thought: Greg Rucka used Dr. Psycho in his run on the issue. Basically, he turns Psycho into a mental rapist, controlling women with the power of his mind for sexual thirlls. The fact that Psycho's power derives from women is entirely lost...making the character a lot more rote and boring, I think. Also, you know, there aren't pink strands of ectoplasm everywhere. Which seems like a missed opportunity.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Thrash by Thrash

Thrash and related bits, like the title says.

1. Slayer — Piece by Piece (Reign In Blood)
2. Slayer — Necrophobic (Reign in Blood_
3. Bathory — War (Bathory)
4. Testament — Do or Die (The Legacy)
5. Metallica — Whiplash (Kill 'Em All)
6. Morbid Angel —Bleed for the Devil (Altars of Madness)
7. Napalm Death — Siege of Power (Scum)
8. Napalm Death — Control (Scum)
9. Celtic Frost — Suicidal Winds (Morbid Tales)
10. Wasted Youth — Bucket Head (Black Daze)
11. D.R.I. — War Crimes (Dirty Rotten LP)
12. Van Halen — On Fire (Van Halen)
13. Unexpect — Another Dissonant Chord (In a Flesh Aquarium)
14. Dead Kennedys — Forward to Death (Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables)
15. Sepultura — Territory (Chaos A.D.)
16. Meshuggah — Vanished (Destroy Erase Improve)
17. Frost Like Ashes — Shattered Gods (Tophet)

Download: Thrash By Thrash.


For last weeks electrodisco download is available again for those who missed it.

Utilitarian Review 9/25/09

On the Hooded Utilitarian

This week started out with me posting on Marston/Peter Wonder Woman #17, the Sailor Moon manga and what parents talk about in the park when they talk about comics.

Vom Marlowe did the first in a series of posts about Batwoman.

Suat wondered why on earth people like to collect racist comic art.

And finally Kinukitty wrote about the yaoi manga Future Lovers.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I've got a long review of Jennifer's Body up at the Chicago Reader. Here's a quote:

Jennifer's Body is different. The film centers not on Jennifer and her male oppressors/victims but on Jennifer and her BFF, Anita, or "Needy." Jennifer and Needy have remained friends since nursery school, even though Jennifer has blossomed into Fox, one of the sexiest women in the world, and Needy is played by the merely gorgeous Amanda Seyfried—a geek by Hollywood standards. Jennifer is shallow, dominant, and demanding; she drags Needy away from her boyfriend and out to bars, verbally shoots down guys, and runs around after indie rockers best left alone. Needy is sensitive, smart, and cautious, always careful not to upstage her friend, and . . . well, you know the drill. Over the course of the movie, Needy realizes that she and Jennifer have grown apart, and that the friend she once loved is now a jealous bitch, not to mention a demon from the pits of hell who wants to eat Chip (Johnny Simmons), Needy's sweet, long-suffering boyfriend.

Also, I'll be speaking at Randolph-Macon college on Wonder Woman at the end of October. I'll probably announce it again closer to the date so you can all leap on planes to attend.

Other Links

I found a really entertaining comics blog by one Michael Buntag called NonSensical Words. Among the articles I enjoyed: a takedown of the recent Wonder Woman arc and an essay about the mistreatment of Captain Marvel.

Jog's lovely review of the upcoming Johnny Ryan battle comic.

I like this Wonder Woman drawing.

Haven't read all of this, but it looks like a great Alan Moore interview.

And finally an awesome retro 80s video by Toya. B-boys in space!

Gluey Tart: Future Lovers

Future Lovers, Saika Kunieda, 2008, Deux Press

Cover: Do not like. Everything else: Love, love, love.

I guess I could stop right there and call it a day, but that would be lazy. Even I see that. And despite lazy being my middle name (Kinu L. Kitty, as it says on my driver's license), this two-volume series deserves better and, by God, I resolve to rise to the occasion. Or at least say something remotely coherent.

(brief pause as I contemplate the existential implications of the endless whirring of the blades of the ceiling fan)

This one does everything right. Except the cover. The art is good, and the faces are so expressive, I was done in by that alone. The stories are well told, kind of silly and harebrained and a wee bit angsty for spice, and utterly romantic in a big, goofy grin-inducing way that is the hallmark of really fine yaoi. This leads us to the third item on the checklist, the sex. Which can be fine, glorious, even, as long as the art is good – the story itself doesn't have to be there for the sex to work. But when it all comes together, you have something that makes you stop and stare, thinking about what you're reading and appreciating what you're seeing, something that makes you reorganize your brain a little bit to make room for something you've learned about life. You want to read it again before you've finished it the first time. That was kind of sentimental, wasn't it? Sigh. That's the thing about falling in love. Ask REO Speedwagon.

The characters in the first story just got me. There's a complicated, sly, sexy uke (who is small and blond and gay) and a big, uncomplicated lug of a formerly straight seme. (Let's call them Akira and Kento, since those are their names.) There are angry grandparents. There are hilarious screwball comedy complications, and there is the word chorkle. There is romance and very, very hot sex.

I went back over some of the sex scenes several times and stared at them for minutes a shot, trying to figure out why they work so well. So I could tell you about it. The things I'm willing to do for you guys, huh? Here's what I came up with, as it were. The drawing is deftly done. Skillful and clever about the details it reveals, whether that's Akira's flushed, upturned face (cliched? yes – but a favorite for a reason, in the hands of a good mangaka), or Kento's hand clutching desperately at Akira's hair after they fall into bed.

The story is filled with revealing touches. The facial expressions are priceless, constantly and fluidly shifting along every nuance of surprise, horror, jealousy, desire, and love. The reactions are played broadly for a sort of zany sitcom feel – sort of like "Three's Company," if "Three's Company" had been any good.



(Spoilers ahead.) The characterizations are also rich. Akira tells Kento that he was only attracted to him because Kento looks like his lover who died three years ago. And then they run into said lover, with his terrifying wife and three kids. Not dead at all. And he looks like a doofus. Akira also does little things to spite Kento's much-loved grandparents, and he's moody and kind of bitchy, but also pretty sweet, sometimes. Sort of like a real person. And Kento is believably kind of a well-intentioned but emotionally clumsy guy's guy who is, at the beginning of the story, firmly stuck in a self-centered and juvenile worldview. And they fall in love and make each other better people. It's funny and exaggerated, but the real power is in how real Kunieda makes these characters.

The second story, "Winter Rabbit," isn't as good as "Future Lovers." It's shorter and less well developed. The drawing isn't as good. It's more hackneyed, and the characters don't feel as well thought out. It isn't a washout, though. The characters don't do exactly what you expect them to, and the well-worn finish – the two characters get together at the end and promise to live happily ever after – plays a little less trite and a little more kinky to me because the couple in question were raised as brothers. (That's a fairly common yaoi plot device and I don't think it's meant to seem as odd as I find it.) Also, the snow rabbit – that is quality cuteness.



The author's notes at the end of Volume 1 deserve a shout-out, too. These are the best author's notes I have ever read. She discusses men's underwear and asks why in the 21st century would a man wear white briefs, and then goes on to discuss what kinds of underwear her characters would wear. This is all illustrated, by the way. Then she moves on to a meditation about men's body hair: "Characters that I think would have underarm hair, leg hair and chest hair really trouble me."



Chorkle.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs Is Dead

In case anyone is trying to download any of my mixes, mediafire appears to have deleted them all for unclear reasons. Not sure why yet.

A Nostalgia for Racism?

A few months ago, I chanced upon a piece of art which was up for sale at one of Russ Cochran's on-line comic art auctions. It was a Hal Foster drawn Tarzan Sunday which is usually an event in original art collecting because of the rarity of such samples.



As you can see, it is a fairly reasonable example of Foster's art on Tarzan. It was, however, a no-go area for me whatever my feelings for Foster's artistry. The reasons are simple: this piece of art would not have given me any pleasure and I would have been embarrassed to put it on display in my apartment. I simply don't have the blindness or nostalgia for racism which allows for an enjoyment of this kind of art. There's the Aryan beauty standing before the squat depravity that is the Cannibal Chief and later the rather simian qualities of the cannibal tribe as they howl for blood. I have as little passion for the subject matter as I would a depiction of bestiality. There are many pit holes in collecting original art but this particular aspect is less often highlighted. After all, wouldn't most comic art collectors salivate over the original art to this Frazetta-drawn cover...



...with its razor-toothed natives within an inch of pawing at the white female's succulent breasts? Any objections would be easily dismissed with the notion that these were more gentle and less enlightened times where such stereotypes were the norm. And clearly they were. The fact that the art displays beautiful draftsmanship and is historically important ensures that such aspects are easily brushed under the carpet. A collector friend of mine who finds such images unpleasant was less happy with this easy acceptance which obviates concerns for subject matter. He placed a comment on this Frazetta cover (when it was displayed on Comic Art Fans) comparing it to Alan Moore and David Lloyd's depiction of Storm Saxon in V for Vendetta.







As many readers will know, there is a whole area of collecting known as Jungle Girl art of which one of the prime examples must be this particular piece by Dave Stevens:



It's all in good fun, both mocking homage and parody. It would seem churlish by some to find these items in any way offensive. There are of course people who collect "coon" art for historical purposes (which is absolutely valid) and others because it gives them pleasure. I don't find the latter aspect particularly respectable.

Another story in the same vein which I chanced upon recently is "Yellow Heat" by Bruce Jones and Russ Heath from Vampirella #58 (Mar. 1977) the scans of which can be found here). The entire story was sold at a Heritage auction for $4370 in 2002



The story is one of Jones’ best remembered from Vampirella in part because of Heath's lovely hyper-realistic art but mostly because of its twist ending. [I would suggest that those unfamiliar with "Yellow Heat" read the story before continuing with this article.] You'll find two appreciations of "Yellow Heat" here and here. The Comics Journal message board regular Mike Hunter describes the effect as such:

"Bruce Jones and Russ Heath wreaking havoc with our "we humans are all alike, after all" expectations in "Yellow Heat"."

Jones uses a number of tricks of sleight of hand to achieve the shock ending in this story. Part of the justification for the ending would appear to lie in the first page where a sort of incipient famine and breakdown in society is described. Jones’ script in the first panel would however suggest that the famine has not arrived and that these are much more bountiful times. The Masai warriors don't look malnourished in the least which lessens the impact of this early description and any expectations of its relevance. There is also the description of the captive lady as a "beauty" and Heath's great depiction of the same which effectively throws off the reader.

The confluence of a familiar coming of age story mixed with an unexpected twisting of facts and sensibilities is also a factor. These issues would be further heightened for readers familiarizing themselves with this story for the first time in the 21st century. With a greater appreciation for distant cultures, many readers would be cognizant of the fact that the Masai do not practice cannibalism and would not expect such a denouement. Others would realize that such accusations of cannibalism were often used by white colonialist as an excuse for their excesses thus eliminating such a possibility from their minds. Nor would the modern day reader (or one during the 70s I suspect) expect any writer to produce such blatantly racist caricatures of Africans in the final two panels. Readers perusing a Warren magazine in the 70s would probably be familiar with the elevated ideals of the EC line where stories like "Judgment Day" saw publication. Few readers would expect a backward looking ethos and this makes the ending that much more surprising. Perhaps it might be a useful exercise for readers to imagine a gentle story about Jews taking care of orphaned children during the Black Death before eating them in the story's final panel. Children aren't as delectable as beautiful African women but you get what I mean.

While I haven't read any interviews with Campbell or Heath concerning the genesis of "Yellow Heat", my suspicion is that there must be some explanation for the strange sensibility on display here. The story was, after all, created during the 70s and not the early 20th century when popular art was considerably less informed. It is entirely possible that “Yellow Heat” was created out of naiveté and plain wrong-headedness but it is also possible that it was born of a flippant underground sensibility - a remark on the excesses of the past (though it has to be said, nothing in the story even suggest this). In many ways, it is much more educational to read these stories "blind" than to rely on any form of stated authorial intent.

There are better examples of these kinds of cultural jibes from more recent times like Robert Crumb's "When the Niggers Take Over America!" which is so hysterical in its excesses, all but the most simple-minded would mistake it for anything but satire.



There's also the notable example of Chaland's An African Adventure where every form of jungle imbued racism is brought forth.

There are the malevolent natives...



....and there's this scene where a tribesman is slapped:



It should be clear to most readers that the only person taking a slap here is Hergé and Tintin in the Congo.

On the other hand, it would appear to many readers that Jones, Heath and Foster were drawing from the same well with respect to their imagery - the corpulent chief and malicious cannibals in both Tarzan and “Yellow Heat” being the prime examples. On a purely textural basis, Jones and Heath's story is truly ambiguous in its racial sensitivity. Is "Yellow Heat" actually quite factual (this seems impossible), the product of a more enlightened age where having fun with racial stereotypes is perfectly acceptable (perhaps a satire; I’m sure certain African Americans would find it harmless enough) or is it symptomatic of something much less wholesome?

Face Down In The Mainstream: Batwoman

Batwoman Reborn: Batwoman in Detective Comics; 854 August 2009 (Part One of Three)

Greg Rucka ,writer

J H Williams III, art

This....This is art.

Beautiful, interesting, compelling art.

I picked this comic up because I heard it featured Batwoman, lesbian socialite by day and crime fighter at night, and I figured that I couldn't go too far wrong there.

The story isn't that exciting, so far, but I don't really care. The art is absolutely exquisite. *flails hands around*

The plot is pretty much this: Batwoman is trying to find the person who is leading this religion of crime in Gotham. They're organized by covens, and sometime in the past they caught her and tried to kill her. The leader is coming into town, and Batwoman plans to be there. Dun dun dun. Or whatever. I don't even care.

The episode starts with a lovely little fight slash victim interrogation. Just look at this page:

The top panel is especially nice. The body torsion is correct and the leg is right, unlike my last foray into current comics, and the pose works well with the page as a whole. There's kind of a weird, bat shaped panel thing going on, which is clever, but which I liked rather than hated. The comic takes some odd approaches to panels in general, but I very much like the way the artist moves into and out of the frames, zooming and then pulling back, choosing key bits—like her hand—to focus on.

What I like about this page is the movement. It goes from frenetic, chaotic, to quiet, wham, focus on her hand and his face, and the whole mood changes.

The comic deals with both sides of Batwoman's identity. Her crime fighter night life, as above, and her daytime self. This is a page where she's talking to Pop (her father I assume, but haven't really read far enough to know for certain).

There are several fascinating things about it. One, she's wearing crummy sweats that make her butt look big. This is not an attractive outfit; it's the kind of thing a real woman would wear to workout in, though, if she was at home. It's intimate and real; showing a different and fallible, human, breakable side of her.

The colors are all of a piece in the home scenes: her bright red hair fits in with the rest of the landscape of skin, wood floors and warm walls, sunlight. Very alive.

It's quite a contrast to the fight scenes where she looks like a fetish dom.

There's a heavy sexual element to this comic, and so far I'm finding it both sexy and well done, rather than skanky (unlike, say, Amazing Spiderman, which I picked up and would have stomped on except then I would have had to buy it). The villain—but maybe I should talk about the villain next week. No, I'm sorry, I cannot resist talking about her now:

Look at this villain! What a fantastic and fun artistic contrast. The previous pages (which I have resisted scanning, but only barely) often focus on Batwoman's dark red lips. The villain also has painted lips. And a fetish outfit. White and innocent, very frilly and girly compared to Batwoman's butch femme dom outfit. The boots, too, are a contrast. These boots are white and tightly laced; Batwoman's boots are red red red with a bat in the sole.

The villain is a beautiful foil for Batwoman. When they fight—Ah, but that is a tale for next week.

In short, I thoroughly enjoyed this comic and I do not care that it was 3.99 and I do not mind the ads or the weird and badly drawn extra or the fact that I had to drive someplace special to get it. I only hope I can talk lots and lots of you into reading it and discussing it with me. My only real complaint was some truly random bolding in the dialog. Nobody would have emphasized those words in speech, but that's kind of a quibble.

Sailor Moon

The manga Sailor Moon is the series that demonstrated, once and for all, that American girls will read about super-heroes with great enthusiasm. It features a young-looking aggressively typical school girl named Bunny. But then, one day, Bunny meets a talking cat, who turns her into... a super-hero Princess! With long hair! Nifty jewelr! Lots of deferential friends, and a handsome, dashing, mysterious true love! And, of course, she gets to keep the talking cat.

Needless to say, this abject wish fulfillment went over quite well with the target demographic; Sailor Moon manga and anime were huge in Japan, and were one of the early big manga successes in the U.S. as well. Thanks to its influence, Marvel and DC quickly leaped at the chance to reach the heretofore untapped female audience. Marvel released a Spider Girl title where the protagonist improbably turns out to be a Princess and seeks for magical jewels with companions like Grasshopper Girl and Ladybug Girl, while DC devoted its entire Minx line to sugary SF adventures in the Sailor Moon vein.

Or, you know, possibly it didn't happen quite that way. But be that as it may...as somebody whose been incessantly blogging about at least one female super-hero, I've been thinking that I should read Sailor Moon for awhile. I finally managed to get to it this week, and....

Well, I wish I could say that I liked it. Obviously, it's not intended for middle-aged guys, so my disapprobation isn't all that surprising. Still, just because something is aimed at teen girls doesn't mean I'll hate it. I appreciated the naked wish fulfillment in Twilight. I adore the sugary glop that is contemporary R&B. I even enjoyed, with reservations, the manga series Cardcaptor Sakura, which is a fairly naked Sailor Moon rip-off.

Sailor Moon itself though, or at least the three volumes I managed to get through, is just not very good. In the first place, Naoko Tekeuchi's art just doesn't do a whole lot for me. It's not horrible, or anything...the drawing is certainly more consistent than is often the case in American comics, and while the cartoony stylization can be a little cloying, it's at least done professionally. Her pages, though, can get really cluttered and messy.



Clamp's work for Cardcaptor Sakura, as a comparison, is a lot better.




As with Sailor Moon, Clamp breaks panel borders and works with different size images all jammed into one space. But they balance that by not using extraneous background detail; by using lovely, controlled patterns (the tree branches with blossoms are especially nice), and by using the panel breaks to move you thorough the story (you follow the girl's body down to oversized legs and into the next panel of the narrative.) It's just much more deftly done; the difference between artists with an aesthetic sense and one without.

The wriitng in Sailor Moon is similarly muddled. Bunny, or Sailor Moon, couldn't be a much more generic or less interesting character. She's really more a collection of traits than a person; we learn she likes video games and sleeping, that she's terrible at school, and that she whines a lot...but cutely (at least in theory.) Her personality, as such, never takes shape beyond these not-especially-appealing tidbits — and, moreover, even these vague delineations are quickly abandoned. By the third volume, we learn that Bunny is actually Princess Serenity reincarnated (or something), and her returning memories more or less obliterate the Bunny we (barely) knew. This would be, perhaps, an improvement, except that Serenity's only character trait seems to be mooning after her crush object, Prince Endymion.

As for the narrative itself...it's really less a plot than a series of disconnected cliches, drawn about equally from video games and mid-drawer fantasy. There's an eldritch evil, there's a crystal that needs to be protected, there's an ever escalating series of helpful sailor scouts who must be awakened, each with their own sailor power; there are battles which inevitably end in victory...etc. etc. etc. There's some vaguely kinky mind-control too, but it's hard to much care as fractured scene after fractured scene rushes by. Is Endymion in thrall to the evil overlord forever? I'll never find out, since I can't stand to read the fourth volume...but, still, I'm guessing not.

So yeah; not good — though it could be worse, certainly. There are certainly appealing moments; the gratuitously cute totem cat, for example, is in fact cute. Sailor Moon's battle cry ("On behalf of the moon, you're punished!") is charmingly corny; the sort of thing you could imagine a little girl actually yelling in battle. And, though the plot is an incoherent mess, it's a welcoming, open incoherent mess. American super-hero comics are often involuted and incomprehensible because they draw on a mass of useless continuity trivia that's (A) stupid and (B) of no interest to anyone who hasn't read American super-hero comics for the last twenty years. Sailor Moon, on the other hand, makes no sense not because it's insular, but because it's so extraneous. Sailor Moon has no background...even from volume to volume, anyone can pretty much start anywhere on any page and you'll be as at home as you would be anywhere else. You've got cute girls fighting evil; you've got crushes; you've got nifty special effects; you've got cute cat; you've got gratuitous wish fulfillment. That's it. There's really nothing else going on — not character, not plot, not themes, nothing. In some sense, I wonder if that's part of the reason for the series' success. If you're a girl, it might be easy to imagine yourself as Sailor Moon, since Sailor Moon is barely there. It might be easy to imagine your own adventures, since the adventures on offer barely exist either.

Sailor Moon gets the pander right, and given that, additional specificity might well get in the way. The books, in short, remind me a little of McDonald's — they aren't good in the usual sense, but you have to admire the way they identify a need and fill it with maximum efficiency and minimal frills.

Comics in the Park

As a parent, I spend a fair bit of time in parks talking to other parents while we all rather desperately try to ignore our offspring. These conversations often start out with "so what do you do when you are not herding rugrats?" And, since at least one of the things I do is write about comics, I sometimes end up talking to strangers about funnybooks.

I had two such conversations this week, both of which were pretty entertaining. The first was with a woman from Columbia, who'd also spent some time living in Mexico. She told me that Wonder Woman in Spanish is "Mujer Maravilla", which is pretty great. She was also interested to know what I thought of the Hernandez Bros. — she said she had trouble reading their stuff because she found it so sad (I think she was talking particularly about the Palomar books.) Maybe most interesting, she told me that there was hardly any native comics industry in Columbia. Instead, what comics there were were all Spanish translations of American super-hero comics. When I asked her if there were any imported Spanish-language comics from Mexico, she said, emphatically, no — which surprised me.

The second conversation was with an English documentary filmmaker; we'll call him D. D. had once been very interested in comics, but hadn't followed them in a long time. He explained that when he was a kid in London, he used to buy 2000 A.D. regularly, often shopping at the great London sci-fi and comics store Forbidden Planet. Anyway, one day when he was 13 or so, D. was in the store when a couple his age walked in. The girl was stunning; D said he looked at her and knew that this was it; a girl like this was what he wanted out of life.

Meanwhile, the guy who actually was with the girl walked over to a wall of comics, spread his arms, and said, half-joking-but-not-really, "Here it is! This is my life." D. was watching the girl's face while her boyfriend made this declaration — and that was it. D. walked out of the comics store and never went back.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #17

Marston and Peter's Wonder Woman 16 may have been the best of the run so far, both in terms of the unusually ominous story and the adventurous art. #17 starts out well, with a marvelous cover.



Peter uses almost all of his favorite tricks here: the bison is out of scale, so WW looks almost like a doll, and even the horse seems bizarrely tiny. The motion lines are incredibly dynamic...in part because the circle is split up, I think. He also uses some of his scribbly linework for the bison's breath...and that little cue cartoony squirrel is hard to resist. Plus, it looks like we're going to get WW in the wild west, which sounds like it has potential. The last time travel episode, with evolving gorillas and dinosaurs and Steve turning into a cave man, was pretty great, so I was optimistic that a second might work as well.

Unfortunately, after that cover, the issue itself is pretty much...eh. Part of the problem is that the entire plot is built around a scientist Lana, her love for the no-good Carl, and WW and the Holiday girls' efforts to cure her of same. Lana's confusion is such that it causes her to whip up time winds which cause all and sundry to fall back into the past and relive former lives in roman and colonial times...but even such full-bore nuttiness can't disguise the fact that this is a pretty staid man-done-her-wrong plot. Marston's fetishes are kept mostly under wraps (as it were); Lana triumphs simply by getting rid of the bad guy in her life, not by teaching him the joys of bondage and loving submission. The feminism is less conflicted, but also a good bit duller. Or maybe the problem is just that pure, naive Lana is not a particularly sparkling protagonist; whether as modern scientist, Roman maiden, or pioneer daughter, her trust in her blandly evil boyfriend and love for her blandly gruff father are equally uninvolving. You can see why Marston didn't care enough about her to even bother tying her up.

As is often the case in this series, as Marston goes, so goes Peter; the artist doesn't seem nearly as inspired as in his last couple of outings. Still, there are a couple of moments. The duo does some more experimenting with wordless action sequences, and again the effect is lovely:



This is an interesting moment too.




Wonder Woman is using a pole to pick up a fan so the blades can cut the ropes tying Etta. I'm not sure the sequence entirely works; it's hard to figure out whether WW is supposed to be moving up or down in that first panel, and the way the image is cropped, cutting off the end of the pole and the bottom two-thirds of Etta, seems awkward. But, again, I like the experiment with wordlessness, and the use of mutliple, Flash-like images of WW to convey motion is intriguing. Again, I wonder if this is something we'll see more of in future issues. (I know we'll see more of bound WW manipulating objects with her teeth — Marston lives for that.)

Going into the past also allows Etta to fully embrace her butchness:



Yep; in a past life, Etta was a gun-toting madam...er, that is, cantina owner. I like this intimation of jealousy as well:



Peter also makes Etta rather handsome there. The borderline men's attire suits her. (More evidence that Marston doesn't necessarily see women in drag as evil.

And...yeah, I think that's really about all I've got to say here. You can tell the issue wasn't firing on all cylinders because I'm not having to stifle the impulse to reproduce every single page. Peter's art is still worth looking at, but there's little evidence here of the breath-taking double page layouts that made last issue so stunning. But that's the way it goes sometimes. We'll see hope for better on the next one....

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Discopolis

This week's download, with lots of krautrocky electro bleepery:

1. Artur Rubinstein — Chopin Mazurka #15, Op.24/2 CT 65 (Chopin: The 51 Mazurkas)
2. Sun Dawei — Crawling State (Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music)
3. Nara — Dream a Little Dream (Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music)
4. Kraftwerk — Metropolis (The Man-Machine)
5. Yellow Magic Orchestra — Technopolis (Solid State Survivor)
6. The Two Tons — I Depend on You (Horse Meat Disco)
7. Aavikko — Computopia (Nov0 Atlantis)
8. The Juan Maclean — A New Bot (The Future Will Come)
9. Legion of Two — It Really Does Take Time (Riffs)
10. Raekwon — Baggin Crack (Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II)
11. Raekwon — Surgical Gloves (Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II)
12. Raekwon featuring Jadakiss and Styles P (Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II)
13. Gene Page— Blacula (The Stalkwalk) (Blacula)

Download: Discopolis.


Last week's download, if you missed it, is here

Utilitarian Review 9/18/09

Goodbye

As folks have seen, the biggest and saddest news on the Hooded Utilitarian this week is the departure of Tom Crippen. Tom came onto the blog almost exactly a year ago, though it feels like he's been here forever. He's been a tireless blogger, about everything from comics to politics to Star Trek. While he's been here, his lovely, thoughtful, and often mean-spirited (and I mean that in the best way) prose has really defined the Hooded Utilitarian.

If you haven't read much of Tom's work, I'd urge you to look back through the archives; there's just tons of wonderful material. Some of my favorites:

-his description of an imaginary Sandman collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Jack Kirby.

-his paean to his days as a Marvel Comics collector

— his contributions to the Helter Skelter roundtable, both in his own posts and in comments.

—his attempts to understand Oliphant

-and maybe the gem of gems, his description of Michael Corleone as a Mary Sue. It's one of the pieces of writing that made me feel like starting the blog was worth it.

Almost all of Tom's posts, with the exception of a few at the beginning, can be found here. You can also read him semi-regularly in the Comics Journal, where he writes a stellar column called "The Post-Post-Human Review about super-hero comics. I believe he's got a long essay on Alan Moore and Watchmen coming up there, which I'm eager to see.

I hope we'll see Tom occasionally in comments still, and I really hope he finds more outlets for his writing, either online or in print. In any case, I feel very lucky to have had him here for as long as we did, both as a co-blogger and a friend.

On the Hooded Utilitarian

This week was devoted to our roundtable on Sandman. Some of us were disappointed, others still loved it, and lots of folks weighed in in comments.

There was also a long post on the inkdestroyedmybrush site in response which is worth checking out.


Utilitarians Everywhere

Vom Marlowe reviews Killer Unicorns over on her LiveJournal page.

Kristy Valenti catches me in an embarrassing error over at comixology. It's like the Dave Johnson thing all over again...except this time, I really do kind of care.


I have a short review of Jennifer's Body at the Chicago Reader.

An essay at Splice Today in praise of lousy art.

On the contrary, if any contemporary figure attains to Bataille's ideal of pure sacrifice it is one particular kind of artist—that is, the failed artist. Note that by "failed" here, I do not mean the artist who has missed commercial success, but has underground cred or aesthetic bonafides, or who is discovered and lionized after his death. On the contrary. When I say, "failed" I mean "failed." I mean an artist who profligately, copiously, obsessively works on creating objects that are, literally—by everyone and forever—unwanted. Creators of tuneless songs who never achieve dissonance; of ugly canvases too self-conscious to be outsider art; of doggerel verse too banal for even the high school literary magazine-in them, the excess of the universe is annihilated. Genius, love, life—they are exchanged for neither lucre, nor cred, nor beauty, but are instead simply thrown away. Failed art is permanently wasted, and it is therefore sacred.

I have a review of Observatory's Dark Folke. It got kind of chopped down for space, so I thought I'd reprint the full version here:

The Observatory
Dark Folke
Self-released

Though this Singapore band may have placed the word “folk” on their album, that doesn’t really capture their sound. Certainly, there are elements of freak folk here; “A Shuffler in the Mud” has sparse lovely harmonies and a gentle acoustic sway that wouldn’t be out of place on a Devandra Banhardt album. Other tracks, like “Lowdown,” though, trip merrily etherwards, heading for the brainy, drony psychedlia of Ghost. For that matter, “Decarn” is almost heavy enough at points to qualify as metal, locking into a head-thrashing trudge while keyboards burble overhead and somebody shrieks from the pits of Hades for a couple of bars before handing it over again to the gentle-voiced harmonizers.

The album feels like a delicate arrangement of shifting textures drawn upon and then erased from a black canvas. Omicron, for example, starts with an acoustic guitar strum that is allowed to fade almost completely; then there’s a second strum, also followed by silence, and then a percussive keyboard figure takes over, building with other instruments and vocals, until again it fades almost to silence…and we go back to acoustic guitar. The track is built around changes in direction, but it’s not the busy post-modern bricolage of the Boredoms. Rather, it’s modernist, fetishizing space and silence. If The Observatory doesn’t adore Webern, I will cease staring at the hardbound liner notes, graced by Jason Bartlett’s Pus-head meets Virginia Lee Burton line-drawings, and eat the whole package instead.

Other Links

Alan David Doane reviews the abstract comics anthology and searches for Sentinels in my contribution. His son finds them.

Comics creator Dewayne Slightweight performs an amazing rendition of Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.

The march of the redshirts ... is over

I've decided to leave the HU. My thanks to Noah, always a patient and generous host and the only man who could get me to look straight on at a page drawn by Harry G. Peter. I will also miss Kinukitty and her reviews of those comics about the skinny fellows who like to hang out together. Her jokes made me laugh, which is a rare thing.

The good news is that Wiki Trek, my personal adventure in OCD, will no longer drape itself over your long-suffering screens. The bad news is that I must sacrifice exposure to treasures of discourse that have brightened my life: the roly-poly prose of stately fangirls, the inane yipping of outraged fanboys, the plaintive truculence of the man who can't draw necks (though he's learning Photoshop), and the sheer stupidity of the clod who came stumbling along five months after the Watchmen movie to tell Noah and me we were Bolsheviks because we didn't like that three-story cloud of stink. Wherever you are, sir, I sincerely hope you go fuck yourself -- for you are the true voice of the Internet.

Morpheus Strip: Dream Is Dead (All Hail Dream)

This is the last in a roundtable on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. There’s lots of good stuff in the previous posts (too much good stuff, perhaps, but such is the danger of going last). If you haven’t already, take a look at:
Noah’s “Dream Lovers,” Suat’s “Impressions of Sandman,” Tom’s “Post-modern Something,” and Vom Marlowe’s “Revisiting Old Lives."

****

Like everyone else in the world, I loved Sandman when it first came out. I have all the collected volumes but one (more on that later), and while I haven’t reread any of them, I do still think of some of the stories and characters sometimes. (Which would especially impress you if you had any idea of the mental chaos I fight daily just to remember to, say, eat lunch – although if you’ve followed Gluey Tart at all, you no doubt do have some idea.) So, I remember the whole thing fondly but was a bit worried that stirring it up again would just make everyone unhappy, like visiting my home town or listening to ‘80s Aerosmith (and ‘90s or, quelle horreur, ‘00s Aerosmith is obviously not even on the table).

Mostly, though, I was just excited about figuring out where the hell that enormous stack of Sandman books was and digging in. On top of a bookcase, it turned out, and not under a huge, dusty, towering stack of God knows what, like almost everything else I look for. And I realize that there are books on top of these stacks, and everything can’t always actually be on the bottom, but sometimes I wonder if they don’t migrate there on their own, trying to hide from me – something that could easily happen in Sandman, now that I think about it. I decided to look at the two Orpheus stories because I particularly liked those. (They’re in Fables and Reflections and Brief Lives, if you’d like to read them yourself.) Or maybe I’d pick something else – I didn’t know. (I often don’t; I prefer to think of it as being flexible.) But I flipped through the books in order and, good lord, that is some lousy-ass art. I mean, a jittery, shifting every few pages, unnervingly bad collection of art. A Game of You is the worst – that one doesn’t just make me just cringe but also makes me fucking angry about its really excessive badness. I kept thinking no, this is really so bad I can’t quite bring myself to spend quality time with it.



I remember having problems with a lot of the art in Sandman the first time around – the overall quality (by which I mean the lack thereof), but also the startling shifts in style and character design in mid-arc. Like these three consecutive pages:







No, of course it isn’t all horrible. (I like two of the those last three pages, and don't mind the other.) But a lot of it is. And if it bothered me then, it freaks me the hell out now, having since discovered manga and becoming accustomed to the joys of consistency and artistic whatsit. So I riffled through every volume until I found one that I liked the look of pretty consistently.

Unfortunately, that volume was the second to the last, The Kindly Ones. This is unfortunate in several respects:

1) It is an endgame sort of volume that heavily references and wraps up a number of previous storylines, few of which I remembered as well as I needed to.
2) Morpheus fucking dies. I hate that.
3) See point 1. This collection isn’t boring, but it does feel like more of a settling of accounts than an exciting bit of fantasy, and you kind of have to read the whole thing – there isn’t a shorter piece that holds up on its own in this volume.
4) Morpheus dies. Did I mention that already? I loved Morpheus, in all his enigmatic, usually barely there but always wonderfully Goth manifestations. Morpheus dying is counter to my personal agenda.

Let us tackle these points in order, you and I.

1) Reading Sandman always reminded me of reading Ezra Pound, except that I like Neil Gaiman, while I always sort of wanted to kick Ezra Pound’s ass. What I mean is that Gaiman throws in all these allusions to various mythological and historical high points, and you won’t really understand what’s going on if you don’t get those connections – much like Pound, of course, but ramped down a couple hundred decibels. Gaiman doesn’t reference anything really obscure, and, you know, nothing’s actually written in Greek. So that puts it in a whole other and hugely more acceptable level of pretentiousness right there. Also, Gaiman has so much fun with it, you wind up having fun with it, too. It isn’t “See ye these literary allusions and weep in terror at my big old brain.” It’s more like, “Oh, my God, and then the ravens, the ravens are so cool, and wait, wait, Loki! See what I did there! Oh that’s so cool! And that could tie in with…”

2) I was, and remain, in love with Morpheus. He was written beautifully, if not always drawn beautifully. He is ambiguous – his relationships with the other characters aren’t often clear, or his motivations, or his intent. I often want to scream at writers to please shut up – stop telling me about the damned character. I don’t need to know everything. I want there to be some mystery in our relationship, just like in real life. It’s hard to retain the ambiguity and keep hold of the character, I know – too much information and you feel like a six-year-old has been tugging at your arm and filling you in on all the complexities of the Transformers for several hours; too little information and you don’t care because you never connected with the character in the first place. More people should try, though. Reading Sandman might help.

Morpheus talks a lot about the rules, and the following thereof, and the doing of what must be done. A beautiful example of this is the action that drives the last nail in his coffin. He gives Nuala a pendant when she leaves the Dreaming, telling her he'll come if she calls him. To grant a boon of some sort. This is one of the many complicated plot points that lead directly to Morpheus’ death. I’m not saying much about any of them because who has the time? This one, though, might bear some explication. Nuala, a fairie who’d been given to Dream in an earlier story, loves Morpheus and mopes around a lot, pining for him. When her brother shows up unexpectedly to take her back to Fairie, she lets Morpheus decide if she stays or goes. He cuts her loose. As a result, later, when Nuala learns Morpheus is in trouble, she summons him – at the worst possible time – hoping to save him by getting him to stay with her. By asking him to love her. Well, who hasn’t had the impulse? It never works for any of us, and Nuala is no exception. This is all very poignant, etc. etc. What I love about it is that Morpheus comes when she calls him. The Dreaming is being pulled down around his ears, but he’d be safe if he stayed put. He tells her the timing sucks, but when she insists, he goes, knowing the furies will take the Dreaming in his absence. I don’t love this because, oh, it’s so romantic (wibble wibble). I mean, it’s hard not to be annoyed with both of them, on that level. I love it because I believe Morpheus when he gives his reason for doing it – there are rules, and they must be followed. Some might say, well, perhaps an exception might be made in this case. I see the logic, but I’m utterly charmed by Morpheus’ failure to compromise. I have a great deal of sympathy for that position. Of course, he sort of does become someone else in the end, anyway. But it's all, you know. Ambiguous.



3) The Kindly Ones isn’t the most exciting Sandman collection, but it is still fantastic fantasy. It’s the kind of thing you read on the train for fifteen minutes, and then you get off the train downtown and walk onto the dimly lit platform and start looking around for Norse gods or sentient crows or faeries or something.

4) Morpheus’ death comes as no surprise. There’s a lot of foreshadowing in all shades from really obscure to ham-fisted like an ultra-conservative Republican state representative, but it's still a shock when it happens. I like the way it’s portrayed, too. A light flashes, and goes out. And Dream the Endless is gone. And everything else goes on. Which is just exactly how death works.

Whenever Death (the character) tells someone they got what everybody gets – a lifetime – I think of the Stephen Crane story, “The Open Boat.” The theme of that story being, basically, “it is what it is.” The tie-in is obvious: nature doesn’t care, and death does her job, because that’s what she is. In The Kindly Ones, Morpheus talked a lot about fulfilling his responsibilities, and many characters questioned his motives. Did you do this on purpose? Do you want to die? One of the many bits of foreshadowing comes via Loki, a divine trickster, but not in a fun, gentle, let’s exploit Native American legends and wear dream-catcher earrings sort of way. Morpheus is the reason Loki is out in the world and wreaking havoc (on Morpheus, as it turns out) instead of being tied by his son’s entrails under the earth with snake venom dripping down on him for eternity, where he belongs. The Corinthian (sort of the ultimate walking nightmare, which Morpheus recreates toward the beginning of this collection) steals Loki’s eyes and breaks his neck, and Odin and Thor take Loki back to the underworld to tie him back down. Loki tries to get the dim-witted Thor to kill him, but Odin intervenes, and Loki isn’t able to escape his fate worse than death. Because Loki is a god, and that’s what’s proper. Morpheus (who is not a god, but the distinction is – well, indistinct) is able to escape, though. What does that mean? I don’t know. That’s how death works, too.

I refused to read the last Sandman collection, The Wake, when it came out. At the end of The Kindly Ones, another character takes over the dreaming (Daniel, who’s never done anything to me, but I hate him anyway – see points 2 and 4 – even though he becomes basically a new version of Morpheus – but it's sort of like reincarnation in Buddhism, where the flame goes out, and the flame is reignited, but it's not really the same flame). Sandman was about Morpheus for me, and when Morpheus died, I didn’t want anything else to do with it. Which was really quite emo of me. But it’s also a testament to what Neil Gaiman did with this series, even saddled with a collection of crappy art he had to drag around behind him like the rotting carcass of a castrated ox (or some other foul, unwieldy dead ungulate of your choice). I hesitate to use the “t” word, but in Sandman, Neil Gaiman created something transcendent, in its way. Not “I’m going hire a lawyer to help me set up a religion” transcendent, but something that somewhat extends the limits of ordinary experience.

Morpheus Strip: Revisiting Old Lives

It's ten years ago, and I'm thousands of miles from home, living in a teeny room with a bed that's been lopped short to fit and a slanting roof, like some medieval scholar monk. I don't know anyone and I'm spending my days, and my nights, reading cramped texts in Greek and Latin; so much so that my grasp of English is getting stilted and my voice cracks from lack of speaking. I can't seem to read for pleasure anymore, the words zip past on the page, too fast to catch.

But I stumble into a comic shop, for reasons I no longer remember, and I buy Sandman, and I take it home. I curl up on my too short bed, where my feet stick off if I stretch out, and I read about Andros climbing up the hill. Aner, I think, genitive, Of Man, and keep reading. The beautifully drawn art slows me down and the stories feel familiar, rich and strange and interwoven with layers of meaning and metaphor, like a country garden's roses gone wild.

*

Looking back, I'm sure I didn't read Brief Lives first, despite this picturesque memory. If I rattle my brain, I can remember reading Preludes and Nocturnes, at my small and cramped desk, and being delighted and appalled and pleased, especially by Death. I read all the notes, too, and I've always wondered who Cinnamon was.

But let's return to this me, this depressed and lonely grad student, steeped deep in Greek stories of destruction and desire told in lush rhythm with beats that seem inevitable and Latin tales of debauchery and conquest told in spare and elegant prose. I sat there and read through the book, a chapter a day, reading slowly and carefully, slowed down by the beautiful art and puzzling over each word.

Did you know that the Greeks had a word for ritualistically ripping people apart, limb from limb, and eating them while alive? (sparagmos)

They did. And you know what? It showed up in the Sandman. The Bacchae there were the Bacchae of my beloved Euripides, at least a little. A force of nature that is both benevolent and strange, cruel and violent, and at times nurturing.

Each week, usually on Sundays, I would walk to the comic store, down a long and forested road full of blind curves and no sidewalks but cut granite curbs. It almost always rained, since Pennsylvania rains a good deal, and eventually it snowed. I walked it anyway, buying, slowly and carefully, each volume.

Except that I didn't buy them all. A friend told me that Dream dies in the Kindly Ones (and I certainly was wary, with a title like that) but this is not how the story ends. I know this in my heart. The story does not end with Dream killing himself. That never happens. And thus I never bought that volume and I haven't read it and I won't, because that plotline does not occur. I'm difficult, and stubborn, as, er, some of the readers of this blog have no doubt guessed, and I sometimes make a decision about how a story as itself should go. And that is the story that lives in my head. Thus it was with Sandman. Sometimes authors are wrong about how the story goes and it is better to live with the story's own ending.

But what, you may ask (quite reasonably), is the point of a long tale about the sad girl who read Sandman except for skipping the end? How is this useful criticism? What the hell?

And so I will tell you.

Well, so you know that Sandman was a good friend to me, back when I needed one. A beautiful and difficult tale that I savored and cherished. And this week, I was, like many of you, afraid to reread this story lest it look dusty and crumpled and turn out to have atrocious art that could only appeal to the few, the proud, the naive.

But no! Due to a flood, I lost my personal library (about thirty boxes worth) and all my Sandman, so I wasn't able to reread the whole opus. But I picked up a copy of my favoritest favorite of them all, Brief Lives, and I was pleased and cheered to discover that it was just as good, if not better, than I remembered.

Let's start with the art, because I love art and I read comics for art, more than for words. This volume has Jill Thompson's pencils and inks by Vince Locke and Dick Giordano, with color by Danny Vozzo.

Check out this page:

I love this. It's so unabashedly emo Goth. The dark colors! The fuzzy black hair! The despair! It's touching, but it's also kind of funny, because who among us hasn't had a love affair that felt like this?

After this, of course Morpheus stands outside in the rain. Of course he does! I hear a lot of people (here and elsewhere) complain about the art, and it's true that there's better art and worse art, but look at this and tell me that it doesn't make you laugh:

The art is evocative, and speaks more than the words do alone, which is exactly its job. It conveys a feeling that you can't get with words alone.

I'd like to turn now to a bit of plot. Delirium, one of the Endless and Morpheus's sister, misses her brother, Destruction. She's trying to find him, and she's asking her siblings for help. She asks Desire first. Desire, ahhhh Gaiman's Desire. What a tricksy character zie is. In this first piece, Desire is portrayed as petty and cruel, sending an adoring fan to a dire fate for no apparent reason and then behaving unpleasantly, if not deliberately maliciously, to hir sister. Desire decorates with a vivisected man grinning in ecstasy, sleeps on a squishy pink heart muscle, and floats in an eyeball. Ew. Desire, of all the Endless, is shown as the most scheming.

In some ways, this always bothered me, because the point of love is to be good and kind, but at the same time, that's not really what Gaiman is about. This isn't love, it's Desire. Shown most explicitly as sexual Desire.

Now, Brief Lives is bracketed by the Greek temple and Orpheus. The Endless echo Greek deities, and those beings are expressly cruel and capricious in their behavior towards mortals. Aphrodite and Artemis, for instance, destroy lives left and right in the Hippolytus for no other reason than a sisterly grudge.

Gaiman's Desire would have felt right at home.

So Desire behaves much as a Greek deity would do, and Delirium moves on to ask Despair, who is portrayed in beautiful accents and with truly horrific touches, as gray. (I'm not as OK with her being fat, though, because I am very tired of fat being shorthand for sad or evil.) Despair refuses to act, perhaps because she is afraid of Desire. And then Delirium goes to ask Dream, and we come to one of my favoritest pages in the entirety of the Sandman. Look at this art:

This is the shit. The body language is spot on. That's a girl trying very very hard to be polite and adult, when upset and worried, and then perking up when the waiter asks her a question. By the end she's getting confused and impatient, throwing her limbs around in wriggling social discomfort, The brother is absolutely rigid and offended, pretending to be polite while being very cold and insulting. The body language when he orders his meal is so pretentious—and insulting. Sibling slapfight. And the colors! Look at those colors. They're so clean and reveal so much.

And because everything else is bog standard normal, the waiter is hilarious.

How is this not an awesome visual display of two different and competing siblings? When Morpheus's body language changes (on the next page), and softens, all the previous panels' repetition gives that change a huge amount of force.

And his small willingness to change, while he is clearly still despairing over his own heartache and while he is equally still completely embarrassed by his LOUD SHINY COLORFUL WHACKO sister, is endearing. If he thought, as Destruction thinks, that Delirium is fun or comfortable, his actions wouldn't be nearly as sweet. No, it's the fact that this trip is going to ruin his already bad day that the character Morpheus is humanized and thus lovable.

There are other fine pieces of art in this volume. The crazy sequences with Delirium turning colors, her jacket turned white, the frowning secretaries who look absolutely like secretaries everywhere, the fluffy and scruffy dog Barnabus, the strange sequence in the nudie bar, there's a lot to like about this art.

And a beautifully crafted page that is striking with white and blue and a smear of blood blood red.

The pages between Morpheus's granting of Orpheus's wish and the page above are always hard to read. Morpheus hides his hands, and his pain, as he apologizes to the small fairy and is polite to his doorkeepers. He's keeping the horror from others, as best he can.

The impact of killing his son is here in this page, where Morpheus's despair and exhaustion are real and revealed with no words, just art. I think it's beautiful and it always stops me in my tracks.

But in any case. I could talk a bit about the coloring (wonderful) or the inking (mediocre) but why? The art does many things well. It's a whole. And this is a story I am glad to return to. I don't regret my revisit of this tale. I hope those who haven't been there in a while can return, too.

Is Morpheus a cypher? Yes and no. His family is rather difficult, let's admit. Most of them are comfortable with who they are. Death is all-knowing and wise, but that is...not someone I'm going to be. I'm not all knowing and wise, but flawed and emo. Like Morpheus.

Morpheus is interesting because he's deeply flawed. He's got all this power and yet he just got dumped. There's an annoying and embarrassing sister, who bugs him.

Unlike Desire, who is all powerful and using it the way a Greek god would, or Death who uses her power as we'd like the Greek gods to, or Destruction, who decided to leave the game, or Despair, who just isn't around much, or Delirium, who's lost it (literally), Morpheus has his powers and still can't really cope. He does his best, though, and his muddling around is endearing to see and worth reading about. I like him. And he doesn't die in the end.

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Edited to add: Since there's a discussion going on in some of the other comments sections about the art, I thought I should note that I read the most recent printing of the regular trade paperback (ISBN 13: 978-1563891380) available here. That's where the scans come from as well.
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Update by Noah: Other posts in the roundtable: Noah’s “Dream Lovers,” Suat’s “Impressions of Sandman,” Tom’s “Post-modern Something,” and, Dream Is Dead (All Hail Dream).