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Richard McGuire’s “Here”

February 6, 2011 in comics

Thank you Google Reader for bringing this great work by Richard McGuire to me (click soon—not sure how much longer this scan will be up).

I don’t recall ever having seen this kind of temporal palimpsest in comics before. “Here” is an excellent example of how inventive the graphic narrative form can be. And is this the same Richard McGuire as was featured in the McSweeney’s Comics issue (sample page) a few years back? His contribution was easily my favorite of the lot.

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The End (of reading) is Near!

December 28, 2007 in comics, the literary conversation

From this week’s New Yorker, an article on declining literacy rates in America, and how the oral mind thinks differently from the literate mind. I find this fascinating stuff, especially in light of the argument I had on Christmas Eve over comics. According to my interlocuter, people are trending towards reading images rather than words, and comics are a threatening indication of this. According to me, people have always been reading comics, and their increasing appearance in “serious” literary reviews is due only to the literati’s growing acceptance of comics as a legitimate narrative form. The upshot of the argument is that my opponent thinks that our civilization is regressing into a hieroglyphics-based pre-literacy, and I think this response is melodramatic. Caleb Crain, the article’s author, falls somewhere in the middle: while underscoring how we spend our free time watching rather than reading (even our e-mails are becoming less literate), he also points out that the benefits of reading are too great for our country to turn its back on.

Edit: On a tangential note, Auden wrote the following about our increasing trend towards shorter bursts of writing:

“Poe’s theory about the necessity of writing short poems is in accord with the Industrial Revolution. As societies grow, their poems tend to grow shorter. A peasant will listen to the interminable epic poems in the village square; the literary man in big cities reads sonnets in his bath.”

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Comics Get Real

December 27, 2007 in comics

Finally, a reason to use my comics tag! In November, The American Prospect ran an article about the politicization of comic books. And I don’t mean “politicization” in an abstract, English major kind of way—today’s superheroes are taking on the Iraq war and civil liberty restrictions. This all makes way for a new superhero narrative: “Great power comes with the responsibility to not use it.”

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This Week in Books

September 29, 2007 in book reviews, comics

It’s been a while! But I had a flimsy reason: I wanted to post about 4 books I hadn’t written about before, as my lasting impressions on the Pamuk essay collection were more or less addressed in my last update. So now! 2 new books that I’ve just finished and two books I’m reading right now!

Books I’ve Recently Read

Silk is the sort of novella-cum-folk tale which you’d be doing yourself a great disservice to not read in one sitting. It’s difficult for me to explain the appeal of novels like these (The Piano Tuner, The Painted Veil—although, to be honest, I thought the latter was quite silly) with their 19th–century white guys voyaging into the interior of the Orient and meeting a mysterious women. The whole plot smacks of the kind of fetishistic orientalism that I hate. Why do books like this continue to be written well-into the 21st–century? These novels are not a part of the new trend towards global fiction; rather, they feel like a nostalgic throwback to when unexplored territories still existed, when the Other truly felt like an Other. I feel somewhat uneasy about what this nostalgia implies—some kind of frustration with multiculturalism? A yearning for the colonial?

But sinister overtures aside, Silk is an enthralling novella. With an tightly-wound economy that borders on poetry, Baricco distills the intensity and intoxication of a passion and obsession that transcends words. Images like the one of birds bursting from an aviary (a symbol of infidelity) have seared themselves onto my memory.

This was a book of mistaken identities. The winsome jacket image of two children gamboling on the beach made me assume that Ammaniti’s follow-up to the celebrated I’m Not Scared was going to be another bildungsroman like the first. But after the first 50 pages, I thought I had it all wrong: we read of the middle-aged exploits of Graziano Biglia, a washed-up classical guitar star who spends his days boozing and cruising while tossing bits of new age philosophy at us like offal. Oh, this isn’t about kids at all! I thought. And then the next 300 pages proved me wrong again: I’ll Steal You Away (for some reason, the jacket above says the novel is called Steal You Away. It’s not) is the captivating and endearing tale of Ischiano Scalo’s small-town residents, a kind of comic-tragic Winesburg, Ohio. All of the characters in this novel demand your empathy: Pietro, the lightweight 12-year-old who finds himself bullied into joining a bunch of asshole kids in vandalizing their school (our George Willard). Flora, the beautiful spinster schoolteacher (our Kate Swift) who finds herself seduced by Graziano, the aforementioned mess of a midlife crises. Once you start in on their troubles, their small victories, and their life-destroying defeats, the book is impossible to put down. And because this is Ammaniti, you can be sure that the children encounter something so disfiguring, yet so heartbreakingly human, that they can’t help but be thrust into adulthood. And meanwhile, the adults in their rural towns are not immune to the influx of cosmopolitan corruption (here in the form of “the most fuckable woman on the planet”). The result is a novel that is even more beautiful, picaresque, and haunting than I’m Not Scared.

Books I’m Currently Reading

This is Art Spiegelman, so I guess I should not be as surprised as I am that In the Shadow of No Towers is replete with paranoid ravings—even by the justified, lived-through-it-all standards of New Yorkers. In part, these ravings are intentional, a way of exhibiting the unraveling trust we place in our surroundings and our government’s ability (or desire) to protect us from harm. Additionally, Spiegelman’s response can almost seem justified, as he makes the connection to the panic felt during the Holocaust. But all in all, I’m finding it pretty hard to relate to No Towers‘s hysteria.

On the other hand, comic fans will get a huge kick out of Spiegelman’s incorporation of comics classics: Nemo, Popeye, Ignatz and Krazy Kat all make an appearance, both in the explanatory notes and examples provided at the end of the book and in the collages he incorporates into his story (Keep an eye out for “The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and the Old Man Muffaroo,” with 12 captions over 6 panels, the final 6 panels being the first panels turned upside down—you rarely see this kind of technical skill anymore). I wonder what Spiegelman intended by incorporating the iconography of well-known classic comics into his bizarre narrative…Is he trying to escape the historical present or subvert the historical past?

I’m only 30 or so pages in, but this is shaping up to be an interesting read. Whereas Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses magical realism to spin transcendentally beautiful tales, Mario Vargas Llosa taps into a darker margic to tell a detective story that reeks of corruption and desperation. Say goodbye to Macondo, where butterflies herald the newly dead, and everyone’s having magical sex with everyone else. This is Peru, where bad shit happens.

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MoCCA!

June 26, 2007 in comics

I’m a pretty big comics nerd.

That’s not to say that I grew up on Marvel and DC Comics (although my dad did bring a few home for us now and then)–I came to comics the way most “indie comics” dilettantes do: by reading Craig Thompson’s Blankets in college. However, while most comics converts stopped at Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware, I fell headlong into comics obsession.

For the past two years, I’ve been longing to go to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s annual comics festival. For one reason or another, this summer, my third in New York, was the first time I was able attend.

And what a CORNUCOPIA OF COMICS! Every comics publisher was there, and a few comics artists put in appearances, too. The aforementioned Adrian Tomine signed his latest Optic Nerve omnibus, and R. Kikuo Johnson (that’s his handiwork at the top of this post) signed me a copy of Night Fisher. Jeffrey Brown, who I’m both ashamed and unashamed to declare as my favorite graphic novelist (there are much more skilled comics artists out there, but few rival Brown’s emotional accuracy), gave a soft-spoken lecture on his work. Best of all, I was able to nab some work by Tom Gauld and Sammy Harkham, two artists whose work I greatly admire, but whose work I find somewhat hard to come by (except for Harkham’s Poor Sailor, which is very easy to come by, and despite having the inevitable heartbreak of an O. Henry story, is one of the best comics short stories around).

Now, my store of comics replenished, I assure you that this post will be the first of many comics posts to come.

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