Comix
Joe Sacco on US torture in Iraq
If you don’t know Joe Sacco’s work, you have missed some of the best and most politically engaged comix of the past twenty years. He started out as yet another autobiographer, a Crumb-lite, but then he got distracted by the first Gulf War. Since then he has pioneered his own brand of comics journalism, going to Palestine and Bosnia, talking to people, getting their stories on paper.
His latest piece, of which the above page is an extract, is available as a 3.3 Mb PDF file from The Guardian website. Sacco talked to two victims of US torture, when they came to the US recently to bring suit against Donald Rumsfeld for their torture. Sacco manages to capture their experiences in a way no photographs could ever do.
Marten Toonder died
Yesterday, Marten Toonder died at the age of 93. For most of you, unless you’re a) Dutch or b) a fanatic comics reader this will mean nothing, but Toonder was one of the pioneers of the Dutch comic strip, who managed to get even the notoriously insular Dutch literary scene to appreciate him. Granted, it was often a patronising appreciation –in those circles his work was seen as illustrated literature rather than comic strip– but even so, they were the only strips found worthwhile enough to teach in literature lessons.
His most famous strip, which brought him this well deserved appreciation was the Tom Poes strip, usually called the Bommel strips. Tom Poes was a white, usually nude cat, clever, smart and utterly bland whose thunder in those comic adventure strips was stolen early by his friend, the brown teddy bear Oliver B. Bommel, “Heer van stand”, in his eternal checkered coat: dumb, vain, but goodnatured and well intentioned and much more interesting to write stories about. The Bommel strips evolved from fairly straight forward adventure stories to a sort of gentle satire, holding a mirror to Dutch society, in the process developing a huge, memorable cast of sidekicks, villains and foils for Toonder’s humour and satire. The Bommel strips appear in the classic two tier format, with the text below the illustrations, which helped in its acceptation as real literature. It also gave Toonder the room to play around with the Dutch language, which in his hands reached a peak of poetry. He created several new words and expressions: from minkukel (nitwit) to denkraam (thoughtframe), still in general use in Dutch today.
But his influence didn’t stop with the Bommel strips. He was also the founder of a long running, flourishing animation and comic studio, Toonder Studios and created several other classic Dutch strips, though none had the same succes as the Bommel strips. Whole generations of comic artists and writers started in his studios.
The studio was as succesful in cartoons as it was in comics, creating a great many short cartoons promoting Philipsmproducts, as well as in 1983 Holland’s first (and so far only) full lenght feature animation film, based (of course!) on the Bommel strips. This became a classic Christmas staple, being shown on tv during the Holidays for years in a row, until the entire country was heartily sick of it.
Toonder had been more or less retired since 1986, when his last Bommel strip, Het Einde van Eindeloos, “the End of Forever” appeared in the Dutch newspapers. He died peacefully in his sleep.
Most Bommel adventures ended with a “simple but nourishing meal”. It seems fitting to use this here as well.
Jonathan Lethem likes Marvel Comics!
The comics Karl and I actually relished in 1976 and 1977, if we were honest (and Karl was more honest than me), were The Defenders, Omega the Unknown and Howard the Duck, all written by a mad genius called Steve Gerber, and Captain Marvel and Warlock, both written and drawn by another auteur briefly in fashion, Jim Starlin.
Jonathan Lethem, My Marvel Years
You cannot fake that level of geekdom. Easy enough to pretend to have liked Howard the Duck, but Omega the Unknown? No way. It’s one of those comics you’ll only known about if you actually care about comics, or were reading them at the right time. One of those weird little comics Marvel threw out in the mid-seventies for a few issues, only to cancel when the newsstand returns came in.
Quickfire round
Kip has reprinted an excellent article on Long Story, Short Pier he wrote in 1998 about why you don’t read comics. I don’t normally link to stories on the blogs in my sidebar (hopefully y’all read them already), but I’ll make an exception for this. For people familiar with the US comics industry it won’t contain any real surprises, but it’s good to see it neatly laid out again why the industry sucks so much.
Via Eschaton comes an article about how Microsoft Word bit Blair in the butt. It seems the infamous UK dossier on Iraq’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and how Saddam’s intelligence services tried to conceal them from UN inspectors still contained the revision metadata. In other words, it’s possible to see when it was revised and who did it. Oops.
Fantasy author Jo Walton talking about Amazon’s blurb for her new book:
I wouldn’t have said myself “You have never read a novel like Tooth and Claw” because in fact it’s a whole lot like Trollope. Indeed, pretty much the only difference is that all the characters are dragons and eat each other.
Not a lot of difference indeed…
Gallowglass, a blog I really should put on the blogroll already, pays some attention to noted nutcase David Icke:
Icke, for those who aren’t familiar with him, has had a roller-coaster career. He came to public attention as a professional footballer, and then sports presenter for BBC. Icke went on to become national spokesperson for the Green party but had to resign shortly after he announced that he was the Son of God (job conflicts).