Category: Comics

Without Words: Sarah Howell’s Untitled Squishface Booklet

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 5 Comments

I know that’s an ironic title considering that this is a writing blog, but it is also about a comic and I rarely use graphics on here anyway. The comic I want to talk about–created by Australian artist and cartoonist Sarah Howell–is challenging in this way to say the least.

In fact, I will be honest and say I never heard of Sarah Howell or the group she co-founded Squishface Studio, but I’m glad that I did. I didn’t actually run into Sarah or her work until after the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (or TCAF) a month ago. I’d finished my Volunteer shift there–mostly moving, taking apart boxes, and cleaning stuff up or what I really like to call the Teardown Shift–and after some dinner that was way too expensive I went to Lee’s Palace (which some of you might know from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim, or just by living in Toronto in general) for the post-volunteering celebration.

It was actually Sarah who started talking to me first when she saw my rather bright sort of orange-pink TCAF shirt. She introduced me to her husband and collaborator David Bluemenstein and the rest of her team. They had apparently been on the Caravan of Comics Tour: an event in which Australian cartoonists traveled to comics events throughout the North-Eastern USA and Canada. So then over some very loud conversation and music we somehow managed to cover a wide area of subject matter. And yes, Neil Gaiman did come up. In fact, the ideas that formed my earlier Blog post about Jeff Smith and Bill Watterson came–in part–from our conversation at Lee’s Palace. Really, it was the most I’d talked with anyone at the Festival: before or after.

But at one point myself and another Volunteer asked her about her work (at least I think so over the noise, err music) and she placed in front of me this small chapbook. And now here is where the challenge really begins. Basically, Sarah’s comic is about a 16-paged booklet–double-spaced–with a scene on each page. It has no title and in fact it is a wordless sequential story: a wordless comic.

This is a concept that has fascinated me. I have seen really old woodcuts and copies of said woodcuts that do something very similar in just telling a story in pictures and little or nothing else. In fact, the only words in it were “The End” and Sarah’s professional email addresses on the very back of the booklet. Also, the way each sequential image is on its own page–instead of on different panels on one–is reminiscent of an illustrated book: except without words.

The figures in the book are drawn like glyphs. There is something very elemental and–if I had to choose another word–essential about them. I really wish I could find more bibliographic information on this untitled, wordless comic or even post a link to the comic itself because I feel that by describing it in words, I’m really not doing it justice. I feel also feel like Nevin Martell and his Looking for Calvin and Hobbes book that has no illustrations from the comic strips whatsoever, only even worse because I don’t have anything to really show here from it. It does figure these two characters–these snippets taken from Sarah Howell’s website–in the first and third pictures. There is also another picture in the Gallery of her site, but I don’t want to link to that because I don’t want to create any intentional spoilers. I will say though that the character resembles a well-known comics super-villain but it is not that being.

Sarah Howell’s comic was about two beings that meet and get to know each other: but when one seems to unwittingly overreach everything changes and it takes the third character to step in and change things some more. And he does not change things in the way that you may think he does when you first see him. That is all I can really say: that and even in the relative darkness of the Club, from what I could see then the story was touching enough to still make me cry a little.

It was a beautiful silent comic. Of course the term “silent comic” is a misnomer or a bit of wordplay in itself. After all, even written words do not have sounds unless they spoken verbally. I said something similar in an earlier review I wrote about Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel Signal to Noise. In a lot of ways, and I’m sure Scott McCloud has said this to some extent, comics is a silent art: as is writing in a lot of ways, but works like Sarah Howell’s here are all the more so.

Sarah Howell let me keep this sample of her work after she showed it to me and I will treasure it always. I’m not sure how or if you can order some of them, but I imagine if you query her on her website she will let you know, or have some kind of FAQ that might deal with it. I wish I could be more helpful. In a lot of ways, this comic is one of the most simplified but mysterious ones I’ve come across. If anyone has more direct information, you are more than welcome in posting it here. Also, you should definitely check out Sarah Howell’s works–and works in progress–at her above website.

Whatever the details, I’m glad I have it. I learned new things, met new people and got a comic. It was one of the highlights of my time at–and after–TCAF.

Born this Way or Created: Do You Care About Where your Superheroes Come From?

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I’ve mentioned before that when I was a boy I used to collect comics trading cards. I also used to collect old comic books and I was very fascinated with superhero origin stories which–given what I have become–makes a lot of sense in retrospect. It’s true: I really liked to find out secret identities, but also specifically how these heroes became heroes.

It was always really interesting: from radioactive spider-bites, to solar rays, to cosmic radiation, gamma radiation all the way to specific–and often traumatic–incidents in their lives. They could have been accidentally irradiated like the Fantastic Four and the Hulk, sent away from an alien world like Superman, endowed with power like the Green Lantern and the Silver Surfer, self-made like Batman and Iron Man, or purposefully engineered to be strong like Captain America and his super-soldier serum. And there are so many other examples. I was really intrigued by these heroes and beings that “just are”–that had always had their powers or embodied them such as Eternals or what-not–did not really do it for me. I would call the above kind of superhero an accelerated, endowed or a created being.

These are examples of what I really liked in my childhood. Then along with these I was introduced to superheroes that were actually born with their powers and abilities. To be honest, I didn’t really take to them as much. At the time, the only thing that fascinated me about the X-Men was the fact that they all had different abilities and a story forming between their encounters. Mutants didn’t really have the origin stories with regards to their powers that I’d been so intrigued by and it wasn’t until I was reaching the latter stages of prepubescence that my views began to change with regards to those who were born as mutants or with power.

At this stage in my life, particularly with regards to the X-Men, I saw people born with power who basically were ostracized from mainstream society and lumped together into something of a “race” or group. So at first, I really sympathized with them being discriminated against: especially Rogue and Jean Grey who I had something of a crush on, and their stats on my cards were fascinating. But it wasn’t until I aged a little more that I saw they had their own origin stories and while they hadn’t been endowed with power, they had been forced to live with the consequences of having it–with some of their mutations being such as they can’t afford to even have secret identities because they are their identities–and they also learned how to hone and use their abilities in unconventional ways. In the latter case, I really underestimated what Wolverine was and I have since then realized the scope of a being that ages slowly and regenerates from most damage over time.

After a while I leaned towards the mutants because I felt like an outcast a lot of the time. On the other hand I have also considered this: even though some mutants have had difficult times growing up being different, you have to figure one other fact. Remember, a lot of the endowed or created heroes had “ordinary lives” before they were changed. A lot of these heroes can also be considered to be “freaks” and “outcasts” because of what they can do. Does it really matter whether they were born with a mutant/alien gene or if their genes were changed by outside forces? And where do you draw the line? One can argue that a mutation–whether given at birth or endowed later in life–is an element of fate either way. And we can go into whether fate exists or not, but really–when it comes down to it–just how different are these two classes of heroes?

Do they have different experiences? Yes, and even though X-Men is in many ways a social commentary on group-labeling and racism and rejecting “the Other,” both they and other heroes fight for the status quo. Yet while some other heroes fight on the fringes and others become accepted as part of the status quo, others like the X-Men seek to peaceably change it from within due to acceptance. It seems in that way Superman has it easier in Metropolis than the X-Men have in the rest of the world. But then perhaps these differences are less about the different groups of heroes and more to do with their differences as individuals.

So, while I do tend to still lean towards mutants nowadays, I think that a good story and background can make any superhero–whether born or made–a bad ass. And really, in the end aren’t all superheroes–no matter where they come from–self-made?

Film Review: The Avengers and their Mythology Revisited

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

There be spoilers here. You’ve been warned.

I wrote a very short review of The Avengers film a little while ago, but in light of much more detailed reviews and analyses: such as the relationship between genii Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, and Loki as master manipulator and challenger of the once and future geek status quo I thought that I might expand on some things a little more and maybe even respond to a few of these articles as well.

Remember, this is a spoiler alert: if you have not watched this film–and you should–then you have again been duly warned.

Avengers really reminded me of a lot of the lore that I used to read from Marvel cards and it totally played on the fandom that has generated around the Marvel universe and the superheroes that make up the Avengers team for decades. Again, I was at somewhat of a disadvantage myself in viewing this film because I have not seen Thor, or Captain America. Unlike Ex Urbe in the second link I posted, I knew that this wasn’t an extension of the great Ragnarok event that plagues the Nordic gods and it deals with the Marvel comics mythology instead: unfortunately I have been pretty rusty to that regard and having not been there in a very long or consistent time.

Each character was bang-on with regards to their comics incarnations as far as I remember. But like I said, I really like how they were played for the most part. If Captain America had been created in our time, he would been seen as a very transparent and tasteless living embodiment of propaganda. I know that during his Death in the comics world, there was a whole thing about selecting a new Captain America and showing just how different that Captain in our time would have been from Steve Rogers we know from WWII.

The Captain America in the film was played as a legendary hero–a relic of a certain moral structure that not even many people in his time or country embodied–and I like how he is seen as a piece of history: which for all intents and purposes he is. He is also still a human being who–while he follows orders–does not follow them blindly. After all, even after ages of suspended animation, Cap is not like the enemy soldiers he used to fight during the second World War. In fact, he makes reference to that time at one point in a very poignant but quick way that devolves into another battle.

Tony Stark is still a wise-ass that always thinks about contingencies, while Thor is still a strong being yet also very noble and cautious. I like that portrayal of the Asgard: because while his mythological archetype was generally stupid and little more than an over-sized brute that would have rivaled the Hulk in mentality and action, the Marvel Thor that we see is a being that wants to protect others and actually thinks about the implications of his advanced people’s presence and technology on the people of Earth.

I can’t say much about Black Widow and Hawk-Eye except to say that they seemed more like secondary characters compared to the others. I do like, however, how Loki plays on them: how he plays on both of them and you see as a viewer just how–for all everyone involved are supposedly superheroes–they are not all innocent. Certainly Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury is as no-nonsense and as much of an “inglourious basterd” as ever: though a little more refined than the comics Fury (who I believe was a contemporary of Wolverine and Cap during WWII and he was the one who fought H.Y.D.R.A. instead of Cap) and in some ways very much more underhanded for the “greater good.”

I think though that the performances that really got me were Bruce Banner and Loki. First, let me deal with Dr. Banner. I have in fact seen both relatively recent films created around the Hulk, yet this film does something the others really don’t. Avengers looks at Bruce. You notice how I don’t say the Hulk and there is a reason why I do this in particular. In almost every other bit of media–film or otherwise–the green gamma beast is brought out for his spectacle effect and Bruce Banner simply tries to contain him. But here we see Bruce Banner as a person. We see a brilliant but haunted man who does not want to cause destruction and pain. He has suffered and yet despite this still tries to help people with his knowledge. He is a solitary person by his own perceived necessity if not by choice and in a lot of ways he is a very sad man.

A good portion of the film has people walking egg-shells around him and thinking they have contingencies in dealing with the “green nuclear djinn in a human bottle”: not realizing just how strong Banner actually is and how many “contingencies” he himself has undergone. Beth in her own review shows that the only person who doesn’t treat Banner as an accident waiting to happen or a potential resource is Tony Stark and she gives very compelling parallels between the two: to the point where I remembered Tony Stark taking a drink before dealing with Loki and actually wincing at that segment alone more than anything else in the film. They are both brilliant men that have their own demons. and they can relate to each other. However the difference is that Bruce Banner has a lot more control over the Hulk than people even think.

Personally, I think there is a difference between Banner being agitated enough to release him and purposefully bringing his alter-ego out. When he does the latter, the Hulk is in a lot more control and in fact–when it comes down to it–there is no difference between Bruce Banner and the Hulk. They are and always have been the same person. “The Other Guy,” that kept Bruce Banner from killing himself, is not just anger but a fury for passion and life and ironically as the film progresses you see Banner actually almost coming to terms with that. It is no coincidence how in the comics, Bruce Banner changes into the Hulk permanently yet manages to keep all of his intellect along with the righteous fury. Even in the movie, Banner says that the secret to controlling his power is that he is “always angry.”

And then you have the threat that brings all of these disparate beings together: Loki. Loki himself, like Thor, has his precedent in the Nordic mythological cycle. Loki is a trickster god and an agent of chaos. He is not biologically related to the Asgard deities but instead has Jotnar (or frost giant) blood in him. While Loki begins as a mischievous prankster, he ends up creating Ragnarok: the twilight of the gods. He transforms from trickster to destroyer. Perhaps in Thor, this role is prevalent as well in its own Marvel incarnation, but I want to talk about him in the film: something that I only alluded to in my earlier article on this Blog.

Loki feeds off of chaos and he is not an overt player. Ex Urbe really goes into immense detail with regards to Loki in the film, but let me just reiterate something I said in my last article in that he plays a really good game. He manipulates and feeds on the power of discord that the Avengers feel towards each other. His very presence caused their assembling and exacerbated the cracks between them. In many ways, he arranged it so that they were almost as dangerous as he and his allies were. As to how far his foresight goes–if he knew they and they particular would be chosen to deal with him–is another matter entirely.

As I said, Ex Urbe really looks at how clever Loki is. You notice, for instance, he barely ever fights and he likes to make his enemies think that they can always beat him. The moment Black Widow thought her interrogation strategy had worked on him, I knew she was screwed. Never try to trick a trickster or play their own game because they will beat you with experience. He sat back and let Captain America, Iron Man and Thor fight each other. And then, when he seemed to have failed in his mission to conquer Earth, he conveniently gets captured by Thor and they go to Asgard with the cube away from the wrath of the trickster god’s vengeful allies. All and all, I think he was right to postpone and then later ask for that drink.

I also really like the part where Loki is in Germany and he asks everyone to bow down to him and one old German man won’t who states, “Not to men like you,” and then later adds, “There are always men like you.” The thing that you need to understand is that Nordic mythology really played a powerful role in German culture. Others, including Richard Wagner, played off of these archetypes in the collective unconsciousness of the German and Germanic people. Wagner was also a really well-known anti-Semite and his operas were well loved by various members of the Nazi Party later on. Nietzsche referred to a figure of the “actor” or “demagogue in music.” Looking at Loki forcing everyone to bow in front of him–with the compelling words and presence of a trickster and “god”–with all of that historical resonance the immediate background and that old man standing up to him really put chills down my back.

In this, Ex Urbe might seem wrong in stating that Loki is attempting to help humans and gods beyond the status quo: that he is just another fascist power. Of course, there is another way of looking at this in an analytical sense: that by posing as a dictator (and one really bad at ruling apparently and inefficient in other ways), he is making humanity challenge him and the established order of things. Remember that the role of a trickster deity in mythology is to challenge the status quo and subvert authority. A trickster also helps humanity by giving it something that can potentially destroy itself and stealing it from the divine order, but also creating an order with it. In addition, trickster gods can take a lot of physical punishment–a lot of it–and they almost seem to goad others into delivering it to make them think they have the upper-hand. In this way, Loki is almost a comic mockery of the things he rebels against, a Wagnerian parody and by serving as that cardboard cut-out effigy he helps to subvert it. So perhaps in that way, Loki is more like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra than his “demagogue in music.”

Then there is Captain America’s reply to that–which actually plays well into the above idea: if Loki is leading him and others by the nose. There is also something else Captain America says afterwards. When Black Widow refers to Loki and Thor as virtual gods, he states, “There’s only one God, ma’am. And I don’t think he dresses like that.”

While this last quote can be seen as very culturally chauvinistic, because there are many different beliefs out there, it definitely shows Cap as a relic of his time: as someone who views the world in a certain way. At the same time though, if looked at from a different perspective, Cap could be seen as stating that even these perceived gods and superheroes–least of all himself–are not above a greater morality or law of some kind. He interprets that as God. The others interpret it as something else. Loki probably interprets it as freedom of power and chaos.

Of course, there are other concepts of absolute powers or incarnations of concepts as well. Long after the film is over and Loki is captured, you find out that the invaders were working with someone behind the scenes. The leader of the invaders tells his real master that invading Earth will only bring destruction and Death. Notice how I capitalize *Death.* Neil Gaiman was not the only writer who created incarnations of certain facts of life in anthropomorphic figures. In the Marvel Universe, there are beings called Embodiments and while you do not see Death at the end, you do see the being that … serves her female incarnation. And if you have read the comics, you know who I am talking about and you begin to realize that Loki is not the only being that plans things out. This is the Marvel plots-within-plots structure in film form, social commentary and mythological cycles of sequential drama all done well by Joss Whedon.

I think that I am going to leave this off right here. All and all I really loved The Avengers. I never even thought of a movie based on them and it worked very well. The mythology–both comics based and older–created excellent resonance along with Whedon’s trademark snappy dialogue. I also look forward to its sequel and I wonder … just what was that small dagger that Loki stabbed Thor with towards the end of the film? And just what role will Death and her harbinger play in the scheme of things? I hope to find out soon enough.

ETA: Here is an obligatory and intriguing article by M. Leary on gods in Avengers and Marvel. Excelsior!

Film Review: Joss Whedon’s The Avengers

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

So, after a basically last minute scramble to do no less than two mini-operas for the contest that Neil Gaiman posted on Facebook, I found myself tired yet at the same time also full of energies. I will talk about just what was involved in making the two mini-operas soon enough. But today was Victoria Day in Canada and my dad and I decided to go see The Avengers movie.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie with my dad. I’ve been very preoccupied lately and I had to ignore the impulse not to go out anywhere today. Also, even though many of my friends liked this movie, I was still leery of it and the perfectionist side of me also hesitated: wanting to see all the individual movies of the superheroes involved in this film. Joss Whedon’s name as the Director also helped a lot in my decision and so I went to see what this was all about. So today, you’re going to get a little bit of a film review with very few–if any–spoilers for those of you who haven’t watched this yet.

Before I go on, I just have to add that I’d known the Avengers ever since I was a child. I collected three series of Marvel cards: including the holograms. I also read as many comics as I could get my hands on and any trivia as well. I really loved to read superhero and villain origin stories and information. While I know there were a few cartoons and such, I never gave much thought of an Avengers film on the big screen.

The movie started out in a somewhat confusing way, but was also pretty straightforward. I didn’t exactly recognize the main villain at first, but once introductions were underway his identity made a lot of since. Basically, the plot structure of this whole film was adding one potential catastrophe after another and seeing how the characters dealt with this “series of unfortunate events.” I guess you can say that about any action film, mind you, but then there is another element that was really interesting to see as well.

The best way to explain it is character conflict. Imagine a few super-powered or highly skilled people placed in a single place with differing viewpoints and agendas. This has been done before, and to death, of course but Whedon excelled in bringing this out and actually making it an integral part of the film. Chaos is a central force in Avengers–one which this particular villain is traditionally gifted at causing his foes–and watching it play out was just being able to look at pure, destructive genius. As you continue watching this film, you realize that in some ways, the heroes have just as much potential to be dangerous to the world in their state of disharmony as the villains that are actively and consciously trying to cause mayhem and destruction.

Of course, there is a lot of genius and epic courage in just how that chaos is–for the moment anyway–resolved. And even all of this would have just been slightly above the par of usual events that occur in an action or superhero movie if not for Whedon’s humour, witticisms and pop culture references–especially with regards to the Marvel heroes–that he is so known for in Buffy and all of his other works.

I actually really enjoyed this movie. It was a challenge. There have been many films where heroes and villains team up from different places and become generic cast-off or one-function characters. One character in this film perhaps functioned that way, but Whedon put a fair amount of psychological dialogue and character development in there to more than make up for it.

All and all, I would give this film a four out of five if not a five. Also, I had a few guesses as to whom the real power behind the chaos was and I was not disappointed: just awestruck. And I look forward to the near future when the Avengers assemble again.

It’s Funny: Jeff Smith, Bill Watterson and Cartoons in the Real World

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

I know I promised to write a story after my comic review, but I guess I lied: if only to articulate something else that’s been on my mind for a while.

It is an observation that relates to, well, my last article on characters that someone can relate to and it also brings together some thoughts I’ve had since my own reading and the Toronto Comics Arts Festival where I got to listen to a panel with Jeff Smith: the creator of the comics series Bone. Aside from the fact that Smith is hilarious–and he would have to be in order to write something with enough pacing as he would Bone‘s plot–hearing him talk reminded me of the Bone characters and the world that he made for them.

The Bones are these small blunt-shaped white cartoon beings with beady but expressive black eyes that somehow manage to convey a lot of different emotions. There are three of them: Fone Bone who is a dreamer and likes to read Moby Dick, Phoney Bone who is greedy and always scheming, and Smiley Bone who is tall, silly, and really crazy but has this almost serene “just so” tiger Hobbes demeanour to him. The entire story arc actually takes place in the Valley: a place far from their own home of Boneville filled with talking animals, dragons, rat creatures and humans. Basically, the Bones are not human at all or even animals and we watch them interact with a world with some humans, but not our world.

And somehow, readers relate to the Bones and I never really wondered why. You would think that we would relate to the humans in that world, though they aren’t the primary characters. What is also interesting is how the Bones are so simply–yet deceptively–drawn cartoons, yet the world around them is very dark, detailed, naturalistic and realistic: and–again– it somehow works.

This is also something that Bill Watterson has employed in Calvin and Hobbes: creating the basic exaggerated shape of a spiky haired six year old boy and a cartoon tiger while using the rest of his brush work to depict a very natural world, but also very detailed ones of fancy and imagination. The seemingly simple cartoon character as an icon manages to unify the reader with that world through its own interactions with it.

I’m obviously not the only one to have noticed this, and they are not the only ones to have used this strategy: Tezuka Osamu also does this to great effect in his work in Phoenix, Buddha, Astro Boy and other works as well. In my own studies–both in University and outside of it–I read up on Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and he states something to the effect of how we as viewers tend to find some kind of sympathy or empathy with a simplistic, more essential depiction of a person or an animal than we would a more realistic one. It is a matter of being able to somehow identify with “the cartoon” and by doing so being able to follow that cartoon’s journey into a stranger world: sometimes like, and sometimes not like our own.

In my Images of Animals course, our teacher explained to our class that humans seem to identify with, and be more comfortable around neotony: with animals that are more child-like. In fact, we actively breed them to be this way. This mentality fits well with why “animal stories” exist. I wrote a paper explaining that talking animals in these kinds of stories are “animal-teachers” that serve as a bridge between the natural or unconscious world and ourselves. They somehow manage to shield us from the harsher elements of the world through their appearance–giving us the illusion of distance (because nothing like them can be “real”)–but they also expose us to that world as well. It can be very subversive. Art Spiegelman, in his graphic novel Maus, gives us animal characters to look at his family’s experiences in the Holocaust yet he also makes it clear that these humanoid animals are masks: which he lets slip from time-to-time and even shows how meaningless they are as human labels.

The cartoon is a lens or a focus of reality. It can serve as a protective barrier–a kind of irony–against the dangers of that world, but they all slip occasionally and purposefully to expose us not only to the threats created in those worlds, but the mysteries and joys that lie in them and ourselves. I can just come out and saw that cartoons are archetypes or essential basic shapes that we can identify with to guide us through the alien or the Other that is the world.

You know, when the panel with Jeff Smith was opened for questions I was almost tempted to ask him one in particular. I always wondered that if Bone takes place in a series of worlds–bounded by the Dreaming–and the Bones themselves come from a place that is not Earth or the Valley, then how does Fone Bone even know about Moby Dick, never mind read the thing? I was tempted to ask Smith this question and a part of me regrets not taking that opportunity, but at the same time I also recognize that I would have been somewhat of an asshole if I had put him on the spot like that and I didn’t have the heart to.

I have my own theory: that the Bones and Boneville are another part of the Dreaming or are more Dream creatures than even the ones in the Valley: which would explain a lot about why they are so important. But then I realize that of course they are part of the Dreaming. Everything is. So is Watterson’s Hobbes. So are all cartoon characters. Alan Moore would call the Dreaming “Idea Space”: a psychic space where all ideas and concepts come from, while Carl Jung would call it the “collective unconscious.” So would it be that inconceivable that Moby Dick could exist in that area and be found by a race of Bone-creatures? Or that Hobbes could be a more livelier version of Schrodinger’s cat in–or not in–Calvin’s transmogrifier box?

I just find it remarkable that we can sometimes relate so much more to basic shapes on a piece of paper configured to look like an exaggerated being than to something that we see everyday: that this being can guide us–like a comic psycho-pomp–through so many levels of our own underworld. I also find it intriguing that the very term “comics” refers to the old “funny-pages” of newspaper strips–and comedy–and how comedy has always in some ways been used to recognize the sublime within the ridiculousness. Someone should really examine Romanticism and its influence within the world of cartooning, or with regards to Jungian psychology and mysticism but I’m not going to be the one to do that.

I’ve gone on longer than I thought but like any joke, I do want to end with a kind of punch-line. In ancient Greece, there were nine Muses and nine Arts associated with those muses. Thalia was the Muse of Comedy: of the Comical. The Belgian cartoonist Morris referred to comics as–or at least a part of–the Ninth Art.

And honestly, I think that is just… funny.

Comics Review: Jonathon Dalton’s Lords of Death and Life

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 1 Comment

I know I’m not doing very much Creative Writing on this site yet, but I want to write about this particular work before I forget. I’ve always been interested in comics: both in particular stories and in comics as a literary art-form and accepted medium. A lot of my own academic studies focused on certain comics works, though I will also admit that I’d been studying them long before I ever applied to York’s Humanities Graduate Program.

So this is going to be a comics review: which is something that I like to do from time to time. Like I said in my last review, I appreciate the difficulty in analyzing a comic: especially when you don’t feel comfortable copying or pasting parts of it for others to see in your review. However, I will do my best to make clear references here, but to also not spoil any of the details.

Unlike my last review, which looked at an examination of a cartoonist creator of a comic strip, this review will focus on a comic I picked up not too long ago. I found Lords of Death and Life at this year’s Toronto Comics Arts Festival at the booth of its creator Jonathon Dalton. The cover struck me first: with a fallen Mayan man and a priest above him with an obsidian dagger. They are surrounding by Mesoamerican glyphs or pictographs. It looked like the cover of a children’s storybook or an introductory junior level book into Mayan or Aztec culture: much like something I would have looked at in back when our class examined the Aztecs back in elementary school.

It’s storybook illustrations did catch my eye, but I admit I almost didn’t buy the book: even when talking with its creator for while. Very few books at this year’s Festival intrigued me enough to buy anything with the little birthday money I had left over. However, something called me back to it. And I noticed there was a small review by Scott McCloud on the back cover talking about how Dalton’s book was “an intoxicating fusion of ancient design and modern imagination.” Scott McCloud is not only a well-known cartoonist in his own right, but he is also a comics-scholar that wrote a series of books talking about the comics medium in and through the comics medium–as comics themselves–such as Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Making Comics and the rest.

The reason I mention this is that he, along with the legendary comics creator legend Will Eisner–considered by some to be the grandfather or godfather of the comics medium–point out that many ancient cultures possessed a sequential pictographic format of telling stories, or recording language. I believe both Eisner and McCloud look at Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mayan friezes as examples of a “sequential art” used to depict stories and record information.

This is another thing that I found so fascinating about Dalton’s comic. He actually incorporates Mayan or Mesoamerican glyphs into his comic. There is an entire section of panels that tells a part of the story as if the reader is looking at a Mayan frieze. At first, this can be very confusing until you realize that he has a very handy glossary at the end of his book which also tells you which glyphs he had learned and which ones he also had to make some creative approximations or guesswork for. If you don’t know about this, however, the beginning can be very confusing: especially when the main character Mol Kupul keeps referring to the date of each day from the Mayan understanding of time.

I also don’t know what to say without spoiling the story, but as I read on I was greatly impressed with where the plot went. You begin to see that a series of seemingly unrelated events are actually quite related and there is a truly epic battle at the end of the narrative, followed by an ending more bittersweet than Mayan chocolate drunken out of a golden cup of blood: so much so that I think it really opens itself up to the potential for a sequel and one I would definitely not mind reading.

If Lords of Death and Life has any more issues, it would be that there are many Mesoamerican cultural references and names of which many readers might not be familiar and would have to greatly pay attention to or reread carefully to get full reading comprehension. Also, the speech of the spirit character in this work–the uay companion spirit–is more than a little over the top and sometimes choppy. However, Dalton does succeed in bringing you into a whole other world with the interaction between Mayans and Aztecs and he definitely plays with your expectations as to what will happen. Also know that by the time the story begins, it is already over and you as a reader are only beginning to find out how everything transpired. It is an excellent storytelling device and it gives you a peak into how an ancient Mesoamerican mindset functions as well.

I am very impressed with Jonathon Dalton’s work here. He manages to make a comic that goes back to the basics or the essentials of the form’s creation, and tap into that place where ancient pictographs and modern comics both parallel each other and meet. He has made something special and I wish I had talked with him more about it: though I take solace in that he signed the book I bought from him with an ancient Mesoamerican monster growling out my name. I think more people need to know about his work and more of it–along with information about him–can be found on his website here: http://www.jonathondalton.com/ where he has a few more comics and a work in progress.

I’d definitely give Dalton’s Lords of Death and Life a four out of five stars. I just find it incredible that one person could have done this much illustrative and written work along with all of the research to get there.

Now, hopefully next time, I will have a story of my own to begin here. Perhaps even a series.

First Review: Nevin Martell’s Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Let me begin this by saying that I grew up with Calvin and Hobbes. In late elementary school, a friend of mine was fascinated with the antics of the crazy childhood six year old genius and his lucid–though hungry–tiger friend. I actually didn’t start reading strips through the newspapers–at first–but actually bought Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Snow Goons book from my school’s affiliation with Scholastic Books … and I never looked back.

I loved that book because aside from the other philosophical, silly, wondrously illustrated, touching strips, there was a series of strips that depicted the boy Calvin creating a snowman and bringing it to life: with “dire” consequences. Throughout a series of strips, this snowman builds itself into a mutant “snowgoon” and proceeds to create more of its kind to terrorize Calvin and Hobbes. I think in a lot of ways, this is what others–like Nevin Martell attempted to do by searching for more biographical information on the strip’s creator: Bill Watterson.

Let me just say off the bat that originally I gave Martell’s book five stars out of five. I even disagreed with other reviewers about how he created nothing new in his book. Certainly the work suffered because Watterson declined to let himself be interviewed by Martell–as he had so many others before him–but that was not Martell’s fault. In fact, from his own account of the journey to know more about Watterson’s life, he tried everything but the kitchen-sink to get more information from Watterson himself without any success. I can even understand why Martell didn’t include any visual samples or copies of the strips in the body of his work because Watterson owns all the rights to his creations and–again–seemed less than inclined to even speak of Calvin and Hobbes never mind offer permission to let them be used in another work even in a scholarly fashion. Instead, Martell describes the strips in a written format and references them: something that I can emphasize with as a scholar as well when I referenced comics works in my own papers.

I was intrigued by the process of journey that Martell undertook to understand Watterson: talking to his peers, family members, friends, gleaning as much of Watterson’s own words from his other statements and his Calvin and Hobbes works as he could to make his points, actually going through Watterson’s cartoon archives, and even looking at the area of Chagrin Falls in which he grew up in: which was ironically deep in snow by the time that Martell came there … the same primordial snow from which many of Calvin’s most creative snowmen–and the Snowgoons–sprang from like cartoon spartoi soldiers created by sowing the dragon-teeth of ideas.

This creative conceit aside, I fortunately–or unfortunately depending on your perspective–cracked open a copy of The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book and realized something: much of what Martell says about Watterson’s innovations with regards to the comic strip form, medium, the message of his strip, and his own issues with newspaper publishing and intellectual property was already and very succinctly said by Watterson himself. I also suspect that Watterson has gone into considerable depth on the matter of Calvin and Hobbes in his interview in The Comics Journal and The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. This fact in itself wouldn’t be so bad, except for the fact Martell’s focus is on Watterson as a figure that he wants to write a book on. Instead, Watterson becomes something that he writes a book around: making points that Watterson had already made about the work he left behind a long time ago.

It didn’t have to be that way. Even though Watterson would probably have not given an interview on something he deemed a finished and long-discussed part of his past, Martell could have made this journey into something else entirely. For instance, he has an entire section on how Watterson’s work has affected not only comic strip publishing and the medium itself, but also how his peers perceived him and how he influenced future generations of comic strip and graphic novel writers as well as other artistic figures. It would have been even more interesting if Martell had looked at how Watterson affected popular culture with regards to all of the above subjects.

I was going to say that this could have been summarized into a paper instead of a book, but I actually liked seeing Martell talk about his own journey and dealings with attempting to find out more about Watterson and his creation. In fact, I disagree with one reviewer in that Martell’s book is not at the Undergrad level, but rather at Grad School level. I think that if he had just briefly looked at the elements he could glean from Watterson’s life (with his digressions on trying to contact Watterson) and then moved on to look at a broader perspective–he would have had a different but really interesting book. He could have actually been “finding” Calvin and Hobbes beyond its creator and into the public and artistic consciousness.

Instead, he wrote a book that makes the reader believe he is talking about Bill Watterson and instead talks about himself, other cartoonists, people and other digressions. I mean, I still to some extent respect what he tried to do by trying to piece together facts to say something about Watterson but still maintain the mystery and elusiveness around him–and in that it is unconventional–but I think this happened more from a lack of the facts beyond what already exist than anything else. Martell’s attempts to create a unique snowman from pre-existing material ends much in the same way Calvin’s own attempt does: in something that keeps building on itself and moves further away from its intended purpose though unlike Calvin’s snowgoons or the cartoonists after Watterson, this does not inspire anything more interesting.

At the same time, I still admire his attempt–especially in showing how Watterson’s work related to him … much like I also did in the beginning of this review–and I think there are things in this Frankensteinian thing that can be worked into something about the Spirit of Calvin and Hobbes in culture. So I will give this book a three out of five.

And thus ends my first critical review on this site: though I am sure it will not be the last.