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.