This Weeks Comics

Daredevil #1

I've read enough shitty superhero comics by this point. Actually, I've not read too many, because I've never been the biggest fan of superhero comics. Apart from reruns of the Adam West Batman tv show when I was a kid, my first introduction to superheroes was Watchman and The Dark Knight Returns when I was a self important teenager. And Zenith, which I encountered with 'Phase IV', the story's climax, during the brief period when I was a regular reader of 2000AD. It was only through following the work of the British writers I liked - Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan, Warren Ellis - that I came to superheroes. Over the last 10 years I've grown to like the genre, when done well. And when drawn well. I've put up with too many badly drawn superhero comics because I was following the writing. I don't doubt that a good superhero comic takes some effort to write well, but at the same time by this point I'm not looking to superheroes for more than colourful adventure.

The writing here, supplied by Mark Waid - a writer whose name I've come across often enough, but whom I've never read apart from his collaboration on 52 - provides a perfectly serviceable plot and dialogue. It's nothing special, but at this point it's just setting up a new status quo following whatever happened previously in the title. He has fun with the fact that everyone seems to know Daredevil's identity, which is the sort of thing that could quickly become tiresome, but is okay for now.

Yes, I've heard about Frank Miller's famous run on the series, and I've read his and David Mazzucchelli's Daredevil: Born Again, another book whose strength lies less with the writing, but have otherwise never gotten into the character. I've glanced through the odd issue in the last decade. I'd dismiss it as being mired in pointlessly gloomy noir stylings if that didn't describe a fair few comics I've read and enjoyed over the years.

But what really got me to buy this was the art. The two page spread up above, which I saw in a preview, is what got me to buy. Marcos Martin's inventive layouts, creating a fully immersive world, which actually feels close to New York in the summer. The bright colours add to the mood, a stark contrast with my earlier impression. Yes, it's idealised, but that fits with the relaxed style of the story. The main story is actually drawn by Paolo Rivera, who if anything has an even better grasp of anatomy and movement than Martin, if less flashy page layouts. Honestly, all superhero comics should be held to this level of craft.

Wolves

A limited edition of 1000 copies of a story which was originally published in a Japanese anthology. Becky Cloonan is again, an artist whose name I recognise, but whose work I've never  encountered before now. A brief tale set in an anonymous medieval setting of a lone hunter's encounter with a werewolf, this works through the visceral intensity of Cloonan's art. It's beautiful at depicting small movements, the layouts and pacing creating a tragic intensity within it's brief span. A lovely little book.

Postscript:

On reflection, and this shouldn't be of interest to anyone but myself, I think I'm currently going through a period of general dissatisfaction with superheroes. Looking at the planned reboot for DC in a few month's time, there's not much that really interests me. I love a lot of Peter Milligan's work, but he can be wildly inconsistent sometimes and in any case nothing is going to make me read a Red Lanterns comic. Ho hum.

Overheard in my dentist's waiting room...

...I wasn't really paying attention, but I was sitting in waiting room where the receptionists and one of the dental nurses were chatting. The bit which stuck in my mind was a point one of them made about a friend who works in the NHS who has seen a great deal of change over the years, but the younger people who are coming into the service now are lucky because they've not got that experience. Consequently, they understand the need for 'change', because that's what we need, 'change'. It's inevitable. It has to happen.

I honestly don't intend to sound snide or superior here, because I'm sure that I'm just as if not more guilty of voicing thoughtless political rhetoric at times, but I found this weird bit of cognitive dissonance fascinating. It's been nagging at the back of my head for the last couple of days. She didn't specify what this 'change' which is so necessary actually is, but that seems particularly common when the word 'change' is used in modern political discourse. Tony Blair was particularly guilty of this, rarely defining for us why the change his government was intending to bring about was really quite so vital.

Indeed, I would respectfully suggest that a major problem with much of our public services at the moment is the 'change' which has been thrust upon them over the last 30 years. Honestly, can we not have some relief from 'change' now? Is it not exhausting when such 'change' is often so unnecessary? So costly. So utterly destructive of what used to be good about our public services. Which is not to say that no change is ever positive, or that there is some idealised golden age in the past to which we can aspire, even reach. There isn't and we can't. But it is to say that any changes made to institutions ought to be considered on their own merits, and that there are plenty of things which don't, or indeed didn't, need to change.

What struck me was the way that such unthinking rhetoric manifests itself in our language. I'm not saying this woman I overheard was foolish. Rhetoric of this type, rhetoric which seems almost designed to preclude thought or reflection, is so easy to internalise.

Americana

I posted the following as a review on amazon last October:

Horse Opera

David Thomson, White Light

Writing about the films of John Ford in His Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson argues about Ford's use of Monument Valley:

"...there is a lust for epic, clichéd panoramas, which forgets or forsakes the real meaning of that location - as geology, for its natives, and for the rest of America living on the edges of the empty quarter, witness, walking, riding, living, and being there, patient enough to see through the first spectacle. It also requires a study of its culture: what it has meant to, say, the Navajo, the Hopi, Willa Cather, Edward Abbey, and Edward Curtis. Ford's eye refused to contemplate history or responsibility."

The 'irresponsible' filmmaker Ford gets a walk on part in this tricksy, fanciful novel, as does his most famous actor John Wayne. As does Willa Cather. As do a whole host of folks. As in Suspects, his earlier `movie-novel', White Light is fiction functioning as film criticism, and for me the better novel. Where Suspects constructed a nightmare alternative history of America through the interconnected biographies of characters all drawn from film noir, White Light draws on only a handful of classic westerns, mixing both some of their characters and the children of their characters with some of the real life figures who stalked the West. Thomson helpfully provides a glossary of all of these figures drawn from history for any of us who might be struggling to distinguish reality and fantasy. Which is precisely the place his novel occupies: the gap between the real West and the fantasy constructed from all of the stories that have been told about it.

Most especially the films. The various stories contained in White Light don't often take the action to Monument Valley, but the profusion of character and story seems designed to attempt something of what Thomson calls for above in its treatment of the American West. Not only does the action look away from such iconic locations, but equally away from such famous stories such as the gunfight at the OK Corral, or the shooting of Billy the Kid, mentioned on the back cover, but which are only ever seen from off to one side, rather than placed in the centre. Thomson's characters are never in the heart of the action, but off stage so to speak. The mythical events happen largely without their help. Like all of us, they are part of an audience. However, they are also intimately involved in constructing an image of the West, whether as pulp author or photographer. Even Mathew Garth, who in Howard Hawk's Red River was actually involved in a cattle run which helped shape the civilising of the West, and whose repeat of that journey in later life occupies a long section of the novel, is here seen only as a figure damaged both by his past and his mythic status.

Thomson's view of the old American West is caustic, but also elegiac. It's never quite clear what has been lost in the civilising of the American West, but that's also true of many of the greatest westerns. It seems that even a writer as subtle and elusive as Thomson is constrained by the myth, for all his efforts to deconstruct it. Which might explain why this is a novel and not formal film criticism: it exists within that tension between reality and myth.

I mostly agree with myself there. White Light is a beautiful book, and a lot of it's power lies in that tension between the myth of the Western and the reality of America's past. Whether Thomson intended it or not, it does contain a strong streak of nostalgia for a time which I can only imagine was often brutal, certainly incredibly hard for many of the people who lived then. When I was younger I had little interest in the Western as a genre, but I've seen my share of films by now. And I've read Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy and Blood Meridian, which have always struck me as being firmly based within the genre. However powerful and beautiful McCarthy's writing undoubtedly is, I still find something troubling about his aesthetic. It goes to the heart of that tension between myth and reality because McCarthy's fiction is engaged with a romantic picture of the past which seems very dependant on violence. It's as if only in extreme violent situations do we become fully alive. Which to me is just macho bullshit, frankly. I imagine he'd also be easy to parody - his writing is far to manly to use any punctuation other than the full stop! - but I also think I'm probably being far too simplistic here. None of that accounts for the hypnotic power of his language, his unpunctuated sentences rolling out like the epic landscapes through which his characters so often travel. And the past that he writes about was incredibly violent. He hardly idealises that violence he depicts but rather presents it in a very matter of fact way. This is simply a depiction of what happened, for all McCarthy's aesthetic.

It is a problem though. In the final book of the Border trilogy the life of the ranch is overshadowed by the presence of the atomic bomb. The ranch is on land which is to be used for an atomic test site, an event which occurs outside of the book's narrative. The bomb is easy to read as a symbol for modernity. It's modernity which overshadows and threatens the dissolution of the life of the ranch. Still, however repugnant one might find modernity, and I've certainly got some sympathy for such a view, that hardly excuses romaticisising a past that was often a struggle against poverty and hardship. I know it's hardly the sort of life I would even be equipped for, let alone want to live.

It's a tension that even appears in documentary. I've just finished watching a series of three films made by the musicologist, photographer and filmmaker John Cohen. Cohen is clearly an important figure in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s whom I've previously never heard of before. The three films are That High Lonesome Sound (1962), focusing on the banjo player and guitarist Roscoe Holcomb, The End of an Old Song (1972), focusing on the unaccompanied singer Dillard Chandler, and Sara and Maybelle (1981), featuring two of the 'original' Carter family. Sara and Maybelle, the shortest of the three films is mostly assembled from photographs and a performance of several songs filmed at the Newport Festival in 1967. It feels odd to describe them as members of the 'original' carter family, since when is a family ever 'original'. To be part of a family is to be part of a continuum, one which stretches into both the past and the future. 'Original' here is a marketing tag, reflecting how much this successfull showbiz family has been transformed into a commercial entity, something which is underlined by the inclusion of a number of their records in the film's collage of photographs and ephemera. It's interesting that these are the actual records, the material object, as opposed to the record sleeves.

Sara and Maybelle is the most conventional of the three films, focused solely on the performers, where the earlier films are much more interested in situating the musicians at their centre in their particular social worlds in the early 1960s, bringing in other performers and footage of the landscapes within which they lived. According to Wikipedia Roscoe Handler subsequently went on to have a career performing within the folk revival, similar to many folk singers discovered around the time, whereas Dillard Chandler has little interest in performing at festivals and on the radio. He lived until 1993. Both of these films are incredibly beautiful with their silvery black and white photography. There's no sync sound, so the combination of image and sound creates a dreamy abstracted atmosphere, enhanced by the way in which the camera is never quite steady, frequently drifting off to observe a detail of the landscape or room. It's a compelling vision which underscores how the music seems to emanate from the past. I also strongly suspect that the aesthetic of these films had an influence on the fabulously titled Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus which similarly creates a composite picture of music of a much more modern American South, rooting the music in the culture as a kind of palimpsest.

Again from Wikipedia, in making the film about Dillard Chandler, John Cohen apparently intended to "debunk stereotypes of Appalachian folksingers being merely the preservers of traditional British and Scottish ballads, with few modern influences or styles", arguing that "much of his work bore more resemblance to the struggles of modern life than to Old World storytelling". Which makes his choice of title rather intriguing. This is not only an 'old' song, but one which has reached it's end, strongly suggesting that we are witness here to the end of a tradition. A tradition with its roots firmly in the past. The film's titles make the connection with Cecil Sharp's collecting in the Appalachians earlier in the century (Sharp apparently collected songs from serveral of Chandler's relatives) and suggest there may be no one surviving who can sing these old songs the way Chandler can. Towards the end of the film there's a moment where Chandler's singing is drowned out by contemporary rock and roll from the nearby jukebox. The presence of radio and recorded music as some form of threat to older musical cultures is present in both of these films, for all that they are situated in the present.

There's an element of nostalgia in both of these films, but what mitigates this is the respect for the hard lives these people live, which is precisely the quality that can be found in so much folk music. Nothing here idealises the past. It presents the past both as it was and as it is. Because we are always remaking the past, whether it is an individual or collective past. Perhaps instead of 'nostalgia', 'elegy' is the word I really want here.

Claire McEachern quote

National sentiment is a form of intimacy. Nations urge connections between past and present, between members of a group and between people and the state. ...the texts that write them also collapse the distance between political identities and the countours of the self.

Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612

Currently Reading

China Mieville, Un Lun Dun

This is actually a rereading as I'm currently reading it to my wife.

Dannie Abse, White Coat, Purple Coat: Collected Poems, 1948-1988

This was originally a gift from my Dad, years ago, when I started my undergraduate degree. Some books take a while to come to, long after you've first heard about them or first acquired them. There's just too much I'd like to read in my threescore and ten. I'm glad in a way this took so long to come to me, as it feels like it's absolutely the right thing for me to be reading at the moment. I wouldn't have enjoyed it or understood it nearly as much when I was 19.

Leigh Brackett, Sea-Kings of Mars & Otherworldly Stories

I adore some of the titles of old pulp science fiction, and Leigh Brackett has some wonderful ones: 'Sea Kings of Mars', 'Temptress of Venus', 'Queen of the Martian Catacombs'.

Patrick Parinder, Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day

Nothing to do with my academic work. I'm just becoming more and more interested in representations of Englishness.

E.M. Forster, Arctic Summer

Speaking of which, I've just recently started watching the famous BBC adaptation of I, Claudius. Or 'I, Clavdivs' as the titles have it. What's unexpectedly struck me is just how English it all is. Now this could simply be because of the terribly precise RP accents that most of the actors sport, but it also seems to be something in the language. Of course, the novel from which it was adapted was written by a poet who came from the English middle classes and Oxford and served as an officer in the First World War. Robert Graves was born at a time when the British Empire was at it's height and, not only for him but for the majority of English people at the time, the Empire was simply an accepted part of the cultural and political background. I know nothing about Graves' personal feelings about imperialism, nor do I think his novel was in any way a hidden allegory of, say, the British in India. It just feels as if a story of the Roman Empire has been 'Englished' by it's author's cultural background, for all that Graves was clearly trying to be faithful to his story's history. Again, perhaps this is nothing more than the process of adaptation at work. It could also be the fact that both societies were Imperialist in nature, and that the national identity of Britain and the British Empire was bound up with depictions of the Roman Empire (it goes back further still if we think of King Alfred's visit to Rome as a young boy and the influence it may or may not have had on him).

It may be nothing more than the coincidence of encountering them at the same time which has linked this in my mind with Forster's uncompleted novel. I can see why he might have abandoned it. The Italian scenes it begins with feel like a retread of his earlier Italian novels and the general theme embodied in the two main characters of reason vs. romanticism is close to that of Howard's End. Forster's fiction has been a love of mine since I first encountered it at 17. Something about his depiction of the chivalric ideal in a modern (early 20th century) scene resonates with I, Claudius for me. They're both conflating the past and present in really interesting ways. They're both fictions of Empire (Forster's uncompleted novel references the Empire at several points) even though on the surface that's far from apparent.

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

I'm going to be teaching Book 1 next term and though this was as good a time as any to finally read a book that's been sitting on my shelves since I was an undergraduate when I only read one or two of the opening cantos and the 'Bower of Bliss' episode from later in the poem. It also gives me the opportunity to post one of my favourite reviews of anything ever. Someone posted this on amazon in 2000:

One of the greatest fantasy novels ever - seriously!

Literature was never this easy! If you enjoyed Lord of the Rings or similar, this is the book for you. The Olde Englishe takes a little getting used to, but it's easier to read than Shakespeare, and the poetry only adds to the vividness of description. All of the standard fantasy elements: giants, dragons, knights, temptations, virtues etc. are present, but in unconventional forms in wonderfully original stories. It really is great fun, and a real treat for the regular fantasy reader. I wish we'd done it at school.

I honestly don't mean to sneer here. I think this is a wonderful review. It amuses me simply because it seems to describe an honest enthusiasm for a book that so many undergraduates studying English Literature must have either cursed or else avoided entirely, assuming they had the opportunity. I love the way this reviewer is able to appropriate Spencer's allegory of Elizabeth I and Protestant poetics to the canon of modern fantasy fiction initiated by Tolkien's famous trilogy.

This Weeks Comics

The Rocketeer Adventures #2

I'm unfamiliar with Dave Stevens' original comics, apart from what I've read about them here and there, although now that they've all been collected into a handsome hardback I may get hold of it some day, funds permitting. Inspired by 1930s pulp adventure fiction and Saturday matinee serials, the appeal is mainly the artwork and the nostalgic creation of an earlier fictional milieu. Dave Stevens seems to be one of a number of comics artists who emerged in the 70s and early 80s whose wrok self-conciously harks back to earlier pulp traditions. A whole raft of stuff about which I am largely ignorant except through its recycled imagery. And frankly, I imagine this is an instance where I'd prefer reading the pastiche to the original. I'd put Stevens next to people like Howard Chaykin or Mike Kaluta, artists whose work similarly invokes and appropriates from older pulp fictions, if for different ends.

The Rocketeer seems to be aiming at little more than entertaining its readers. As is usually the case with tributes of this nature, it's the art which makes the biggest impression. Chris Weston, Darwyn Cooke, Gene Ha: how could it not be visually ravishing? That looks to be the main point of the appeal of Dave Stevens' original comics. Which is not to say that there was anything particularly bad about the writing. Darwyn Cooke, writing for his own art, makes probably the best stab at it, representing his 8 pages as the latest episode in a long running movie serial. It's both a homage to some of the character's original inspirations, and a nod to the way that such adventure characters seem to operate in an eternal present. The story's climax is merely the end of this episode's cliff hanger: Holy Moley!! Will our courageous couple escape? Join us next week for Episode Seven: Nazis in the Hospital!

It's always Nazis of course.

Cooke's story is also the one which is most guilty in objectifying the female lead. Then again, she is modeled after Bettie Page, so it must be a temptation that is hard to resist. Throughout, we are repeatedly invited to lasciviously gaze at and fetishesize her appropriately period style underwear:

This is mirrored by our Saturday matinee lead Cliff Secord who ends up clinging onto the jacket his girlfriend has ended up wearing and enjoying the view of her underwear:

It's not subtle, or even especially politically correct, but it's something that feels hard to get especially worked up about. It's of a piece with the narative's depiction of the past, a point which is underlined in Cooke's story when he presents it as a fragment of a a larger serial. These stories aren't set in the real past of the 1930s but rather in a simulacrum created from memories of 1930s pulp adventure serials. It's the past as a child's playground. And is there anything more childish than a suposedly adult male getting exited by the glimpse of a girl's knickers?

Alias the Cat

Appropriately perhaps, this week I also read Kim Deitch's Alias the Cat. My knowledge of American underground cartoonists is woefully small, but it's not an area of comics that I've ever had much interest in. On the basis of this, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and a couple of other short pieces I love Kim Deitch's work. Alias the Cat was originally serialised as three issues of Stuff of Dreams, which might be the more apposite title since that's what the comic is really about: Stuff. The cultural detritus left behind from earlier eras of popular culture. Spinning out of an apparently autobiographical tale of obsessive ebay hunting the narrative transforms into a fantasy of early twentieth century popular culture where the borders between dream and reality become permeable.

Kim Deitch would hardly be alone amongst alternative cartoonists in expressing a cultural nostalgia. Nostalgia rooted in the objects which have been left behind by earlier cultures seems to be central to the work of many of the most prominent underground and alternative cartoonists, from Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman to Chris Ware, Seth and Ben Katchor. However, in a piece written for the Comics Journal website just this week, Deitch denies that he is a nostalgic person. Yet at the same time, he writess of a feeling of being "born in a world of great popular culture already in decline". It could be that Deitch disavows nostalgia in his article because of a general cultural trend which has tended to dismiss nostlagia as something weak and trivial. We live in a culture which for a variety of reasons tends to privilage the present over the past in terms of its importance for our culture. I suspect that this isn't the case here. As far as these things can be determined, Deitch strikes me as a 60s radical and liberal, given the underground comics scene in which his work originally appeared. And if he feels popular culture was already in decline when he was born, then presumably that decline has gone on unabated.* Or perhaps for whatever reason he just doesn't think of himself as a nostalgic person, for all that the past, and the cultural products of the past, is at the centre of so much of his work.

Personally I suspect there's more than one way to define an emotion as complext as nostalgia, and that the quote above does capture a nostalgic quality. If you're privilaging an aspect of the past over what's available in the present then surely on some level you are partaking of a discourse of nostalgia? Certainly, Deitch's work has a complex relationship with both the past and the cultural objects which his work fetichesizes. Alias the Cat exposes a fantastical secret history of exploitation and oppression which has produced such cultural artifacts and is part of their meaning. Deitch's art, which possesses a stiff but appealing blocky quality, also treats everything the same. The past and the present, whether it's a real past, a drawn past or an imagined past, are all presented on the same level with nothing to distinguish between them. The past isn't a playground in Deitch's work, or not just a playground, but something real, connected to the present, both cosy and threatening.

* On the other hand, in at least one interview I found online, published around the time of the publication of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002), he was also overwhelmingly positive about the quality of then current alternative comics, seeing them as superior to the general quality of the original undergrounds. Whatever I might get from his work, the man himself is clearly no simple nostalgic.