Art & Criticism – Page 19

The issue with Hands

Published on February 23, 20119 Comments

In the comments to the previous post, Tom Spurgeon responded to my criticism of Phil Hands and the idea he deserves kudos for his cartoon:

Martin, this still makes no sense. I’m not praising the cartoon itself in any way, shape or form, so to counter this by saying, essentially, “it’s a bad cartoon; why does it deserve praise” is silly no matter how many paragraphs you say it in. Disparaging every aspect of what a person does because you think little of their political views or their skill as a cartoonist is a Fox News tactic. It’s what Rush Limbaugh does.

To restate: if we take him at his word, this is an honest expression of a specific political idea that runs counter to his general political leanings, and, on top of that, will likely earn him no amount of shit from his readers — and, as we likely both agree, history. He’s also going to have to watch people with whom he generally disagrees praise the cartoon to the skies. Heck, he’s even having his motives disparaged in tweets and blog posts from a guy not even in the US!

I think that specific kind of honesty is brave, whether or not someone is right or wrong, and I’d prefer every editorial cartoonist work the same way even if the cartoons don’t end up hitting on the best side of an issue. We have all sorts of editorial cartoonists in this country that are so terrified of being criticized that they don’t have any opinions at all, let alone ones about which they’re conflicted, and spend their days trying to find the most politically expedient way not to say anything at all. If you don’t agree that this is a virtue, fine, but please disagree with that point, not some made-up fantasy one that I think this is a good cartoon.

That’s what I’ve been trying to do, but I think I haven’t made myself clear enough. We both agree this wasn’t a good cartoon; I never thought Tom was arguing otherwise. What I was trying to do in my original post was showing my reasons for both disliking the cartoon itself and why I thought it was wrong to single out the cartoonist for praise for sticking to his personal opinion. For one thing, I’m not convinced his justifications add up, as I said in the previous post. If it was such a personal and conflicted view on Wisconsin, why did it so badly misrepresent the situation in service of a bog standard rightwing myth about crybaby hippies? It didn’t leave me feeling charitable towards Hands, which is why my interpretation of his remarks is so much more harsher than Tom’s.

But I also do not agree that a cartoonist — or anybody — sticking to their personal opinion is necessarily a good thing, if that opinion is ignorant or malicious. As cian also noticed, Hands is either ignorant or deliberately misleading in his cartoon: not something that should be lauded just because it is his honest personal opinion. To give a Dutch example, Geert Wilders is either sincere or just trolling for votes with his Islamophobia. Should we find it admirable if the first is the case?

So if we do give Hands the benefit of the doubt, will his honesty be a good example to other cartoonists if it still leads to the same sort of cliched cartoons as the one we’ve been discussing? Because from where I’m sitting it differs little from those resulting from cartoonists “trying to find the most politically expedient way not to say anything at all”. It doesn’t tell the truth, it doesn’t say anything new and it uses the same old dirty hippie cliches any other cartoonist could’ve drawn on autopilot.

To conclude, I do understand much better where Tom is coming from and why he wanted to highlight this particular cartoonist, even if I still don’t agree. I’m glad he took the time to comment; he didn’t have to after all.

It takes no courage to draw rightwing cliches

Published on February 22, 20112 Comments

cartoon by Phil Hands showing his take on the Wisconsin labour dispute

I’m not sure I understand why Tom Spurgeon thinks Phil Hands deserves kudos for drawing this cartoon. As a cartoon it’s neither interesting nor funny. The struggle in Wisconsin is about a Republican governor introducing legislation that would take away the right of public employees to organise and withhold their labour, a fundamental right of any worker without which they (we) are not much more than slaves. How does Hands depict this? By making the public employees into a a stereotypical greying hippie screaming his head off because governor Walker (bemused but resigned to the hippie’s childish temper tantrum) is going to cut off a tiny bit of his ponytail. As art it’s mediocre, a cliched, simplistic rightwing take on what’s happening in Wisconsin.

Because Hands’ cartoon is an explicitely partisan political take on Wisconsin, with little intrinsic artistic merit, it has to be judged on its political intent much more than its artistic intent. It’s therefore no surprise that most people will judge this cartoon this way: finding it funny if they agree with its message, not so much so if they disagree. There is no neutral way to view this cartoon, as it is not neutral itself. Which is why I don’t understand why we should worry that people will “discuss the cartoon as the latest salvo in an abstract, unserious political/cultural war far too many people are fighting” — it has already taken sides itself.

Which is also why it doesn’t make sense to praise him for, as Tom Spurgeon puts it “apparently sticking to his personal perspective when making cartoons about the political turmoil in his home state rather than working with points of greater consensus in mind”. Hands is putting forward a reprehensible political view in his cartoon, why should he be praised for expressing this? Especially when he also pre-emptively declares his victimhood by saying: I know this cartoon won’t make me very popular, but that’s OK. I didn’t become an editorial cartoonist to win a popularity contest. I became an editorial cartoonist so that I could use my modest drawing skills to express my political viewpoint.

That’s little different from what every unfunny bigot says at an office party: “I know it’s not p.c., but”, expecting to be praised for his bravery in telling the truth about those people when in fact it’s about the least brave thing they could ever do. It takes no bravery in repeating rightwing talking points, it wasn’t Tobey Keith whose career got in trouble for his pro-war stance, it was the Dixie Chicks for their anti-war message. Hands is not courageous for drawing this cartoon; his career won’t suffer for it. Why should we respect or defend his views when they’re lazy, rightwing cliches that take no great courage to put to the page?

Pavlovian scolding

Published on February 17, 2011

I have a fair amount of sympathy for the idea that you shouldn’t give trolls undeserved attention, even famous trolls, but Cheryl Morgan hacked me off:

Yesterday I launched Salon Futura #6 on the world. Like any publisher, I watched keenly for online reaction to my new baby, and a few people were very kind about it. Thank you, folks. But honestly I didn’t expect much reaction. You see, I hadn’t set out to offend anyone.

What did get a lot of reaction from teh intrawebs yesterday? Well, some ignorant prat wrote a long blog post about nihilism in modern fantasy, which served mainly to demonstrate his lack of knowledge of fantasy’s history, his lack of breadth of reading in modern fantasy (I suspect he’s never read a book by a woman in his life) and probably his lack of understanding of nihilism (though I’ll leave that to people with philosophy degrees to deal with). As journalism it was, to put it bluntly, a foetid heap of steaming dingo’s kidneys. So of course my little corner of teh intrawebs went apeshit over it.

The one thing more tiresome than engaging trolls is complaining about other people engaging trolls, especially when you make it seem that you’re mostly offended that they don’t pay attention to you. Which I’m sure wasn’t Morgan’s intent, but it does come across that way. I’m sure she understands something like Salon Futura with its mixture of short stories and thoughful non-fiction takes time to digest and reflect on, while Leo Grin’s fart of outrage takes no more than five minutes to read and mock. It makes for a nice bit of light entertainment as it does the round of Twitter and sf&f blogs, with e.g. Joe Abercrombie responding to it with some deft skewering:

But why all the fury, Leo? Relax. Pour yourself a drink. Admire your unrivalled collection of Frank Frazetta prints for a while. Wrestle the old blood pressure down. When an old building is demolished to make way for a new, I can see the cause of upset. Hey, depending what’s lost and what’s gained, I might be upset myself. Let’s all take a look at the plans together and see if we can work something out. But books don’t work that way. If I choose to write my own take on fantasy, what gets destroyed? What loss are we bewailing here?

That’s very far from the “pornography of rage” Morgan talks about, more a sort of bemused merriment at the idea that somebody can be so threatened by any kind of fantasy that isn’t like he imagined the “two titanic literary talents” J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard wrote that he has to write such a dumb polemic. It can be interesting to dissect, though I won’t bother myself, to understand why somebody is so insecure that he has to imagine that any fantasy he dislikes is not just to his taste, but actively undermining western civilisation…. To scold those who are interested in doing this seems counterproductive.

Justinian: Threat or Menace?

Published on January 27, 2011

I still own Chris Y. an answer to his comments about James J. O’Donnell’s The Ruin of the Roman Empire

Hmm… Haven’t read O’Donnell’s book yet- I shall get it got for me for Christmas- so take this with a pinch of salt, but I’m unconvinced, at least by your account, that Justinian could have done better if he’d stayed out of the west. Three points occur to me off the top of my head. Firstly, what is O’Donnell’s assessment of the impact of bubonic plague on the eastern empire during Justinian’s reign. It must have been hugely economically disruptive, even if we accept it wasn’t as bad as the 14th century outbreak. If we’re talking about conserving resources for later defense against eastern powers, the plague must have been a serious setback, western wars or no.

Secondly, the book I have read recently, this one, argues that the extent to which Romanitas was conserved in the west can be overstated. Wickham tries to use written and archaeological sources together, and he argues, powerfully to me at least, that the reduction in large scale trade brought about by the removal of the large scale state meant that economic activity in the west was quite different to how it had been during even the latest period of the western empire, with all the social and political consequences you would expect.

Thirdly, we have an example of what an emperor who took security on the eastern front as his priority could achieve in Heraclius, a couple of generations after Justinian. He faced an attack from Persia and won so decisively that the Sassanid state was effectively destroyed. The effect of that was that the Muslims were able to gave the Persian empire its coup de grace and then used their territories as a jumping off point to drive the Romans out of the middle east altogether. Could anything Justinian might have done prevented that? I’d be interested to hear an argument.

I’m not trying to denigrate O’Donnell’s work, which as I say I haven’t read yet, but I do think there’s an argument that in the long run Justinian’s western campaigns were pretty much irrelevant to the larger outcome.

Thoughts?

A couple of good points there. Now O’Donnell’s focus is firmly on the Western Empire, so he doesn’t go into too much detail about anything happening in the East other than how developments there impact on the west. He mentions the plague for example, but only in passing. O’Donnell is only interested in Justinian’s foreign policy so to speak, as well as the religious aspects of his rule, which does leaves some blind spots, the economic impact of the plague being one of them. It’s a weak spot in his thesis. But that doesn’t make it entirely invalid.

To tackle Chris’ third point first, the difference between Justinian and Heraclius is that the latter’s efforts were too late: the Roman and Persian Empires had exhausted each other with centuries of (intermittent) warfare and once a new “barbarian” challenge arouse with the Islamic jihad coming out of Arabia neither was strong enough to withstand it. Had Justinian been able and/or willing to have done the same, it would’ve given the East Roman Empire enough time to recover to perhaps have been able to beat the Arabian tribes. What’s more, one of the reasons that Islam could conquer the Middle Eastern provinces of the empire according to O’Donnell was the distance between the official Byzantine Christianity and the indigenous forms of it that flourish in Syria, Egypt and the other provinces. For the Coptic Church or the Nestorites rule of Islam was no worse than rule by Byzantium, sometimes even preferable as the former had less interest in hassling them.

On the economic side of things, O’Donnell’s beef with Justinian is that his western campaigns impoverished the Eastern Empire for little gain. As Chris notes in his second point, while the collapse of the Roman Empire is overrated, the fragmentation of it into its succesor states did mean a scaling down in trade, if only because traditional trading regions were now separate states… The western parts of the old Roman Empire had always been less wealthy than its eastern core, something that only became worse after the collapse. The wars themselves didn’t help either, depressing the economies of Italy and the other reconquered parts of the western Empire even further. All of which according to O’Donnell explains why the emperor started his reign with a surplus but ended it far in deficit. And Justinian set the trend for his succesors, trying to keep and expand their western holdings, when they did not have the resources to pursue both these goals and keep the Eastern Empire safe.

Could the Roman Empire have survived for longer had Justinian stayed east? It’s hard to say, but it might have left the east, the Byzantium part of it in better shape to survive the coming of Islam. In the west, had Justinian not invaded Italy, the Ostrogothic remnant empire there as founded by Theodoric, may have coalesed into something more akin to the Frankish kingdom — every historian so far I’ve read about Theodoric and his succesors have stressed that their was no reason to assume this could not have happened had the Ostrogoths been left alone. As I said in my original post, I’m certainly not entirely convinced by O’Donnell, but found that his greatest value lay in getting a fresh point of view on some familiar events.

Friday Funnies: The Portable Frank

Published on January 21, 2011

The Portable Frank

The Portable Frank
Jim Woodring
Fantagraphics, 2008
200 pages/$16,99
Get if from Fantagraphics.

The Portable Frank is a collection of fourteen of the black and white Frank stories wrote and drew in the twenty-odd years since Frank first appeared on the cover of Jim issue four back in December 1990. Frank looks like a mutated Felix the Cat wearing Mickey Mouse’s shoes and gloves and even so is the most normal looking of the cast of characters Woodring assembled around him. Two words you’ll hear a lot when describing Frank’s adventures: dreamlike and surreal, as reviewers try to grapple with the world and cosmology Woodring has created with these stories. A copout, but it is difficult to explain Frank to people who haven’t seen these stories.

The best comparison I can make is to finding a collection of legends or fairytales from some unknown mythology. The stories make no sense together, sometimes contradicting each other, characters changing from one story to the next, dying in the one and returning with no damage in the next. At the same time you can see how this mythology must’ve developed over time, how each character has their role to fullfil in it. That’s what these Frank stories are like.

Frank himself is the innocent everyman, kindhearted, a bit naive but capable of shocking cruelty at times. His main nemesis is the manhog, half man, half pig, all rage and id. Manhog often attacks and bullies Frank, but as often is the victim of others, used and abused by the closest figure the strip has to a true evil personage, Whim, the moonfaced grinning devil figure, who acts as the tempter to Frank, warpinghim spiritually as well as physically. His servant (?) Lucky is a human looking figure, but with a hugely elongated face, usually seen manhandling Manhog for some menial task or other. As his protector Frank has Pupshaw, a dog kennel shaped creature with a sort of bushy raccoon-like tail, whom Frank takes for a pet in the first story. Pupshaw largely behaves as a sort of dog or cat like creature, but transforms herself into a monsterous form when needed. There are also Faux Pa and Real Pa, older looking, more heavyset and stubbly versions of Frank, who walk on four paws. Faux Pa, in league with Whim, turns up in several stories to try and transform Frank into something more cruel, while Real Pa only shows up in the last story, guiding Frank out of the dungeons he had landed himself in.

All of Frank’s stories are nearly wordless, told in pantomime, with no dialogue and only a few captoins here and there, usually at the end of a tale. What we see and get to know of the various character’s emotions and their inner life has to be deduced from their expressions and postures. Woodring is a master at this, in drawing attention to a character’s mood by showing it on their faces, slightly exaggerated but never forced. He also uses a lot of reaction shots, where in panel one something happens and in the next panel you see Frank’s reaction to it, acting as a counterpoint.

Woodring’s art is stylised and inventive, as can be seen at Fantagraphic’s official flickr stream. You can run through this book in an hour, but come back to it time and time again discovering new details. Woodring is one of those artists that make you sees the world through his eyes, where you can’t help but see his figures and poses everywhere you look.

As a collection, The Portable Frank is an effort to have an affordable introduction to Frank’s world, the title of course harkening back to Viking’s old collections like The Portable Mark Twain. The format is nice, slightly smaller than a regular comic book in dimensions, but some concessions had obviously to be made to keep the price low. So there’s no bibliographical material, no key to the characters (whose names never appear in the stories and I had to get from Wikipedia), there’s just the stories themselves. But that’s enough.