This Weeks Comics: Top Ten

What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?

In imitation of the poll conducted every ten years by the BFI's Sight and Sound, group comics blog The Hooded Utilitarian recently hosted a similar post for comics. Like many, I didn't contribute. Wouldn’t want the attention to be honest. I can understand some of the antipathy some bloggers and commentators have for the blog. General host Noah Berlatsky often produces trenchant critiques, with little respect for the general canon of comics which has been constructed over the past few decades, and posters on the blog such as Caro and Domingos Isabelinho have their own very specific agendas about comics. But I rather like the confluence of disparate and competing voices the site contains. I think in some ways I might respect a critic more in some respects if they dislike (even aggressively dislike) a work that I like. I don’t have to agree with everything they see, but I can respect them as someone who has their own opinion.

Anyway, here are my ten, in alphabetical order so as to avoid privileging one over the other in a top ten. I love then all equally.

Raymond Briggs - Ethel & Ernest

Eddie Campbell - 'Alec' autobiographical strips

Glenn Dakin - Abe: Wrong for All the Right Reasons

Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean - Violent Cases

Tom Hart - The Sands

George Herriman - 'Krazy Kat'

Jamie & Gilbert Hernandez - Love & Rockets

'Ilya' - The End of the Century Club

Frank King - 'Gasoline Alley'

Alan Moore & Jim Baikie - 'Skizz' (2000AD)

It goes without saying that this could easily be a completely different selection on a different day. It’s a fairly quick selection largely off the top of my head, as I suspect were many of the lists supplied in HU’s poll. And it’s weighted towards things I discovered when I was at school and university (the exceptions would be Frank King and Herriman). I’ve chosen 'Skizz' over any of Alan Moore’s more famous works because it was first comic written by him that I read, collected in a single issue of The best of 2000AD. An issue I’m sorry I no longer possess; it got thrown out along with a good many other in my mid 20s (some of which I’ve since replaced).

A couple of things I notice from this list. Firstly, just like Hooded Utilitarian’s eventual overall top ten, and like many of their contributed lists, all are works created by men. This isn’t a conscious prejudice against comics produced by women on my part. It’s likely as much down to me gravitating towards the comics I first fell in love with. Still, there are no superheroes, which is pleasant. I didn’t consciously exclude anything, and almost included Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol. But given my general feelings about the genre at the moment it still feels pleasing. My list leans much more towards ‘slice of life’, although that’s a term I find rather simplistic. There’s fantasy at the edges of several of my choices, but all are ultimately concerned with the representation of reality. 'Skizz' is obviously science fiction, but even in that there’s attention to the real in its depiction of working class life in the mid-80s in Birmingham.

Besides my unconscious gender bias, there’s also no Manga, and no European comics. Again, that's certainly not a concious prejudice. If we divide my list by nationality then we have 4 from America and 6 from Britain, although perhaps Violent Cases is an anomaly with its lyrically evoked memories of Al Capone. It still feels a very English work however. I actually rather like that bias. Part of the reason I settled on this particular title for my blog was because that was one of the things I wanted to focus on here. ‘Old British Stuff’ for want of a better description! And yet it hasn’t quite happened that way. It isn’t that I don’t love a lot of American culture. It’s almost possible to have grown up in this country since the Second World War and not love plenty of American culture since we’re inevitably so exposed to it. I’ve had a number of partly planned posts in my head since before I started this blog, but these things seem to have a life of their own. I think it’s partly because I’ve written quite a few comics posts focusing on weekly releases. So it feels nice to find that there’s a preponderance of British comics on this list.

"Never Been in a Riot"

presumably the guardian thinks its the fault of the tories and mail thinks its the fault of foriegners and melanie phillips thinks its the fault of the bbc and computer games. i have absolutely no intention of adding my voice to the storm of bullshit and anyway i wouldn't be able to make myself heard if i did 

the life and opinions of Andrew Rilstone

Not perhaps the most insightful thing written on the events of the other week but I can certainly emphasise with the sentiment. Inevitably, we all have our reassuring narratives to explain the causes of the riots.

I've seen a few things written on Facebook by both friends and friends of friends which I've had to restrain myself from responding to. It's not that I don't have my own prejudices about what's happened and the causes of what's happened. I just didn't want to get into pointless arguments. So many people on all sides have already made up their minds, and it's rare I think that much good will come from engaging with strangers on the internet, even if I can think of what seem like perfectly reasonable rebuttals of their positions.

Of course, I did mentally write a few responses.

I don't like violence. I'm a middle-class white person with a privileged education who was raised by parents who strongly discouraged any displays of violence in their sons (we were even forbidden toy guns). Which might explain why I've been attracted to so much violent entertainment over the years (although that's also partly the way I think our popular culture has gone, for better or worse). Still, most of the people involved in the rioting are probably the sort of person I'd cross the road to avoid. The sort of person I'm glad I don't have to be around in my daily life. But still, I won't demonise them and I have a lot of sympathy for the anger about social iniquity which is clearly part of the reason behind the trouble, whatever some on the right would like to claim in dismissing this as simply criminality or mindlessness. For sure, that must be a part of it. But it doesn't wholly explain it, and I don't know where you'd draw the line between criminality and all the other, equally plausible reasons.

I think my strongest, most overwhelming feeling was just how little surprise I felt. I read somewhere that both the TUC and Nick Clegg had predicted potential trouble in reaction to the government's current policies, so I know I wasn't alone. It just felt very predictable, even if the actual causes of the riots and their spreading to other cities include a multitude of factors beyond the economic. Which isn't to defend it, just to acknowledge that these things don't happen in a political and cultural vacuum.

I think what underpins my antipathy with so much of the rhetoric expressed by politicians and commentators is the almost wilfull ignorance and refusal to even try to place events in context. They don't know their history. Of course they don't! David Barker, Emeritus Professor at Leeds put this very succinctly in a letter published by the Guardian:

For many years I taught a final-year undergraduate course on the uprisings of the peasants and artisans that swept across large parts of 17th-century France. Buildings were attacked, their contents pillaged, crops destroyed and occasionally a perceived oppressor was killed. Had my students explained it all by simply invoking feral criminality they would have failed.

My own academic research is a slightly different period, England in the late 16th, early 17th centuries, but I'd made exactly the same association before I came across David Parker's letter (helpfully quoted on Facebook by several friends). A point I've come across in my reading seems to be that incidences of social disorder and rioting in early modern society were an instinctive form of protest on the part of the powerless, a means to articulate their grievances and even to 'negotiate' with their social superiors. Perhaps it's easier to make such a judgement when the events are centuries in the past. Or perhaps it's that the distance more easily enable them to be placed in context. I don't really imagine that early modern rioting was any less violent than what we saw this last week. There's no reason to suppose it wouldn't have been worse. And attacks on property and looting has probably always been a part of it.

What's also always been present is people who want to demonise those who threaten the social hierarchy. I'm thinking here particularly about a ballad I've written about in the chapter I'm currently engaged with. It appears in a collection called 'Strange Histories', written by the Weaver and ballad author Thomas Deloney. The earliest extant text is from 1602, although there's reason to believe there was an earlier edition. Personally I would favour the early to mid 1590s as the likely dating of its first publication, but that inevitably remains personal speculation.

I think many people who don't study the period in any great depth forget not only how violent that time was (as any time before the invention of a modern police force must have been) but also how politically and economically troubled the period of the 1590s was. The period when Shakespeare was first establishing himself as a writer of note and when so many classics of English Literature were being written. An aging queen, inflation, poor harvests, an increase in the numbers of the poor, popular discontent about the presence of so many foreigners in the country. I often think the 1590s must have been a pretty hellish time to be alive in England. So what if the greatest dramatist English literature has seen was producing great works for the stage if you couldn't find enough to eat?

The ballad I have in mind, whenever it was actually written, is a history of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Most of the details are derived from Holinshed's Chronicle of English history. It's probably easiest to show what I want to say if I just quote a bit from my chapter in progress:

The rebels are repeatedly represented in unflattering terms. Just over half of the ballad is taken up with describing the violence of the rebels in terms which explicitly condemn them. They are “rude disordered franticke men” (52) responsible for releasing prisoners (22-24, 61-65), intimidating priests (53-54), murdering such figures of authority as the Lord Chauncelor and the Lord High Treasurer (45-7), burning lawyers’ books (33-4), destroying records (58-60) and attacking property. Attributing the motivation of the rebels to ‘envie, malice, and dispighte’ the ballad precludes the possibility that there could be any justice to their complaints. Their rebellion is stigmatized as a violent affront to social hierarchy and monarchical authority.

Excuse the academic language. Hopefully quoting myself doesn't appear too self indulgent. It's my blog after all! The numbers are line references, and I've also taken out a quotation. It's not describing an early modern riot of course, it was history for Deloney and the audience for whom he was writing, but it was probably written at a time when there were riots occurring. It wasn't easy to write about contemporary political events at this time. Deloney actually got into trouble in 1596 over a ballad he'd authored for precisely those reasons. So it's about a historical event but it could also be read as a response to contemporary political events.

As far as I can tell, the actual details the ballad records aren't inaccurate. This was a violent revolt. Which is precisely the problem with so much of the rhetoric which has surrounded recent events. It's always easier to demonise people than to try and understand them. You could take Deloney's rhetoric out of this ballad, modernise the spelling, and would it look that different what what many are saying about the looters? It's not just that riots are always violent, that their causes are always rooted in a complex political, cultural and economic context. It's also that there's always someone around who will demonise the rioters, even if it's more than a century after the events occurred.

Disraeli

It is these institutions which make us a nation. Without our Crown, our Church, our Universities, our great municipal and commercial corporations, our Magistracy, and its dependant scheme of provincial polity, the inhabitants of England, instead of being a nation, would present only a mass of individuals governed by a metropolis, whence an arbitrary senate would issue the stern decrees of its harsh and heartless despotism.

Benjamin Disraeli, 'Vindication of the English Constitution'.

Geoffrey Hill quote

We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. This thought does not originate with me, it’s been far better expressed by others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called “inner exile” in the Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. Haecker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations . . . resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.

 Geoffrey Hill

A.S.Byatt review

I am going to try and get all these amazon reviews up here eventually. Here's A.S. Byatt and how not to write a historical novel. Something's buggered up the formatting here.

A.S. Byatt – The Children’s Book 

It might be a little unkind, but turning to the ‘Acknowledgements’ listed at the back, and a certain amusement can be had from the way seemingly everyone is thanked for having ‘sent books’. Can it be that the reason this large, compendious novel ultimately feels slightly unsatisfactory lie with the fact that it owes far more to books than it does to life? This is of course one of the perennial problems for any author of historical fiction. The reading of history and documentary evidence is surely necessary simply in order to get the facts right? But when it starts to swamp the fiction, it risks choking the life out of the story, whatever the writer’s gifts. Here the novel’s narrative voice repeatedly steps back in order to narrate the historical events surrounding the lives of its many characters, or simply to indulge in luscious description of the many beautiful art objects with which the narrative is studded. A.S. Byatt has always had a powerful descriptive gift. But amidst all this description, all this history, it can sometimes feel as if the characters are getting a little lost, especially when there are so many of them.

The novel takes us from June 19th 1895 through to May 1919, following the intertwined lives of two artistic families and their many acquaintances. The chapter titles – ‘The Golden Age’ is naturally followed by ‘The Silver Age’ which of course gives way to ‘The Iron Age’ – run the risk of making the history feel retrospective. We already know how this story ends. The Edwardian age dies in the carnage of the First World War, and an era of history which was actually riven by social discontent acquires a golden haze. But of course, nobody ever knows they’re living in a golden age, and moreover those who do think they are often seem to be deluding themselves, a point which the novel’s narrative voice at one point attempts to make explicit. But the narrative drive often seems to undermine such insights, and the book is occasionally guilty of such sillinesses as for example when one character assures another that of course Peter Pan will be beloved for generations. 

The First World War, the history we already know, looms over everything. It’s a period of history that was not only been much written about at the time, but also revisited by many later writers of fiction, so that it can come to seem over familiar. We’ve seen so many of the tropes of mud and disillusionment so many times by this point. Here though the relatively brief final section in which we see so many of the character whom we have been following over the novel’s course quickly dispatched amidst the horrors of the Great War remakes these cliches. The length of the novel actually works in its favour here, because by that point we feel we know these characters so well.

And it can start to feel churlish to be criticising a book for being its length and ambitions. Minor failings can surely be forgiven when there are so many riches on offer. The large cast deftly handled. The powerful sense of place(s). A.S. Byatt’s typically wonderful descriptive gifts and facility for pastiche. The juggling of ideas. This is a novel with a thesis, about the potential hazards of art, about childhood and the changing ways in which it was understood in the Edwardian period, which is of course our culture’s inheritance. But really there’s just too much stuff here, so that it can occasionally feel somewhat disjointed. The material on the Suffragettes for instance which comes late in the narrative is as powerfully and effectively written as everything else in the book, but it feels disconnected from much of the rest of the book’s narrative, as if it’s been included only because presumably it ought to be addressed in a fiction about the Edwardian period. Too often the novel devolves into a kind of high class soap opera, with endless talk from characters whom seem ever slightly too self conscious about who they are and their personal beliefs.  Too many of these characters feel too well defined, too easily fitting into a type or a social class. It’s all deeply felt, yet curiously, there’s too little life and too little respect for the way in which people are often mysterious, not only to other people, but also to themselves.

Which is a real shame. Ambition is to be applauded, and A.S. Byatt can be so good. This feels like it could have been such a great novel, and at times it is, but as ultimately it feels as if her ambition has gotten the better of her here.

I started this review, and then substantially rewrote it, and I still didn't feel like I said everything I wanted to. A bit like the novel I was trying to review, I had too much to say perhaps. I also find something a little snide, even pompous, about my tone of voice. It's really not a wholly successful book, but still, I can't deny that I had a lot of pleasure in reading it. As I said, the length of the novel does sometimes work in it's favour. I particularly remember the scene where a group of the younger characters go for a weekend trip in the countryside. They do it twice. The first time is an idyll. The sun shines, everyone gets on with each other, they go swimming, it's a lovely moment of happiness. Then, a few pages later, they're returning the next year, and of course it's completely different. It rains, everyone's miserable, they fail to recapture that golden moment. It speaks to some of the novel's major themes but I'm also glad that she put it the scenes in because of how well she captures that feeling of a simultaneous disappointment at one's failure to recapture a particular moment and the embarrassment of the knowledge that it was probably foolish to think you could.

Something else I noticed was the presence of a 'Lawrentian' artist figure, actually modelled on Eric Gill I think. This is a recurrent figure in her early fiction. I'm thinking of the father in her first novel The Shadow of the Sun, and Frederica and Stephanie's father in the Quartet.* In my head it connects with something about Angela Carter, I was interested to read here that they became friends after a rather combatative first encounter. They must be near contemporaries, with similar interests in history and fairytales, although despite the similarities, in many ways occupying very different literary spaces. Both clearly had a complex relationship with the work and ideas of D. H. Lawrence. In Angela Carter's case that comes through most clearly not in her fiction but in several of her essays. I suspect any writer of that generation who went through an English degree at a British University. The influence of F.R. Leavis. I sometimes wonder if every writer of that generation isn't in some way reacting against the influence of Lawrence. Just look at Ian McEwan's early work. And then you've got a more recent writer like Geoff Dyer, who's younger, but who still I'd place at the tail end of the post war period because of his education (getting to Oxbridge thanks to the 11-plus), and who reveres Lawrence as one of his literary idols.

I recently finished The Game, another early novel. Two sisters, one an Oxford Don, the other a popular novelist, trapped in a destructive relationship based on events of their childhood. Literalist critics might try and related this to the supposedly fractious relationship between Byatt and her sister Margaret Drabble, but it's clear from one of the epigraphs and sereval references throughout the text that it's really about the Brontes' joint imagination. I was interested to see her describe this as 'absolutely appalling' in that interview. Like most people I suspect, when I first encountered the Bronte's and the story of their childhood I found it incredibly romantic, desirable even, although again like most people I hardly think myself and my siblings could have sustained such a joint imagination. Which is perhaps just as well. It is a romantic story, but it's also appalling.

I read a lot of A.S. Byatt's fiction in my mid-twenties. I found a stack of her books in Oxfam a while back, ones I didn't read back then, and will gradually get around to them. She's another writer I feel that I appreciate more now that I'm older and on the other side of a very difficult period of my own life. Anthony Burgess said about Still Life that it conveyed an 'extraordinary compassion', and I don't think I could improve on such a description.

*And thinking about it, there is here again an example of the advantage of a large canvas in the way the rather frightening and domineering figure in The Virgin in the Garden becomes more sympathetic, even pathetic, later on. His children are older and no longer so intimidated by him, he's been left behind by the flow of history. Just as I suppose D.H. Lawrence has by this point.

This Weeks Comics

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century #2: 1969

Moore wants to challenge the popular view of history where it consists of easily identifiable reference points and narratives normally determined by the buying habits of the middle class. In Century history is instead portrayed as a vast, messy splurge, with too many moving parts to be easily reduced into stable, and resultantly dominant, narratives. The guy can’t show free love without showing the non stop woman and Vril show – we’re always asked to accomodate both. Like an endlessly edited and re-edited Wikipedia article you have all these different conversations running at the same time and it gives a really fascinating overview, a highly complex overview, of the culture at the time the comic’s set. 

Amy Poodle from the Mindless Ones blog

 I love the Mindless Ones and their inspired critical takes on comics. One of the blogs that made me want to start my own.

Haven't yet had the chance to read the comic myself.

Postscript (8/8/11): When I finally did read it the following day, my first response was that this must be one of the best things I've read about the 60s. And maybe it isn't quite that good. I've read a fair bit about the 60s by this point if I think about it, but it's still pretty damn good.

Of course, when we say the 60s, we're only really talking about a specific strand of the culture of the 60s. The confluence between the new pop music, youth culture, the occult and the counter culture. Which was I think really only 'the 60s' for a relatively small group of people. It's interesting how, as the series has progressed, the appropriations from (mostly) popular culture of the era at hand have become less focused on interrogating the texts themselves and more about a commentary on the culture and the time of which those texts were a part. As fun and exciting as the first two League adventures were, the series has become a lot richer. Also, if the various online responses I saw to the Black Dossier are anything to go by, much more concerned with Britain's twentieth century culture. More insular. Perhaps a response to Alan Moore's well publicised spat with DC. Who knows. It's interesting that the series has developed this way.