Comix – Page 77 – Wis[s]e Words

Jim Woodring and Weathercraft — Friday Funnies

Published on February 18, 2011

I’ve talked about Jim Woodring before in my Friday Funnies series. Weathercraft is the newest book in his Frank series. As always, it’s a nearly wordless comic, no dialogue, no captions, just art. Reading it can be done in five minutes, you’ll be able to follow the story from panel to panel, from page to page, but you’ll have no clue as to what just happened. I’m a text orientated guy, I read comics text first, art second and I did read Weathercraft that way first, fast, just getting the bare bones of the story, following it panel to panel, page to page but without taking in it as a whole.

page from Weathercraft

This naive way of reading any Frank story comes natural, thanks to Woodring’s art. There’s nothing difficult or unclear about his artwork, as you can see from the page above. For the reader, the hard work does not lie in following the story from panel to panel, but in coming to some understanding what the symbolism in the story could mean, whether it is representing some deeper meaning or is meaningful of its own accord. For Woodring, the hard work must lie as much in making things so clear to the reader, to making Manhog’s expressions so easily readable, to keep the flow of the story obvious especially when the symbolism grows heavy.

page from Weathercraft

Such as it starts to do here, as Manhog discovers the plasticity of what seemed until now be a solid reality. As might be obvious by now for readers already familiar with the universe in which the Frank take place, the unifactor, this is a Frank story in which Frank is only a secondary character and Manhog is trust into the lead role. His transformation and edification as to the true nature of the Unifactor, the universe in which he lives, is the story of Weathercraft

page from Weathercraft

But what this story is, what Manhog’s investigations reveal, will remain a secret for now. It’s pointless trying to recap it here. More perhaps than any other comic, the pleasure in this lies not with its plot revelations, but with the flow of the story. You do not even need to attempt to understand What It All Means, just reveling in the worlds Woodring has created here is pleasure enough.

For those who still want to know at the very least what Woodring thinks it all means, there’s his video walkthrough over at Fantagraphics. Personally, I find ignorance is bliss in this instance.

They don’t like it up them

Published on February 18, 20113 Comments

One of the least impressive features of Team Comics is how quickly it closes ranks against the Big Bad outside world sometimes. I first noticed this in the ongoing Danish Cartoons debacle, where the question of whether these cartoons were racist/bigoted never played an important part in the narrative that developed around them. What with death threats against the cartoonists involved, that this was never much discussed was understandable, but there was still a worrying lack of self criticism nonetheless. Something similar is going on right now, after MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell attacked a James Hudnall/Batton Lash cartoon for being racist. This cartoon:

What Barack and Michelle Obama look like according to Hudnall and Lash

Which, if perhaps not overtly racist, is keen to use the Big Black Mama stereotype on Michelle Obama, somebody you really cannot accuse of being fat or prone to gulp down a dozen hamburgers in one go (not fried chicken?). It’s an excruciatingly bad cartoon, part of a series that’s published on the Andrew Breidbart Big Hollywood site and which includes entries like this. Breitbart, for those who don’t know him, is waging a personal war agains the socalled liberal elites and media, has a hate-on for Obama and his readers are hardcore wingnuts: racist, sexist and convinced the president is a sekret muslim socialist born in Kenya wanting to unleash sharia law on America. That’s the context in which this cartoon was published: on a site that’s not know for its racial sensitivity, as part of a series that is happy to use racial dogwhistles (one cartoon showing Obama in Joker makeup kniving the statue of liberty) for an audience that eats up stories about Obama being ghetto.

Not surprising therefore that O’Donnell attacked them. And while the emphasis in the comics news coverage is on the alleged death threats the pair have recieved (The Beat, Comics Reporter) , it would’ve been nice if the coverage had also looked at the context in which Lash and Hudnall created their cartoons, their own role in fueling the political anger and hatred on the American right. Because they’re not innocent victims and this is not just about freedom of speech. You cannot pump out hatred and not expect a backlash.

More about the Dutch comics market

Published on February 15, 2011

More grist on the mill for the idea that there’s something wrong with the Dutch comics market for adventure strips comes from Bart Croonenborghs:

Minck Oosterveer combines fluid brush work with high contrast black and white art and is best mostly known in US comic circles for his Boom! Studios work with Mark Waid on The Unknown. After The Exiles of Thoom debacle, Oosterveer just flat out admitted that at the moment the comic strip business in the Netherlands is not really worth the effort anymore. His popular Zodiac and Nicky Saxx newspaper strips both having been retired, Oosterveer finds the process of of actively hunting down new leads on projects tiring and time consuming, doubly so since payments are not what they used to be for these kind of newspaper strips.

Even Nicky Saxx recently winning the Dutch Oeuvre Award 2011 – the most important strip award in the Netherlands – couldn’t budge Oosterveer’s determination in abandoning the Dutch comics field. He has since revealed signing with an American agent, that he will be doing a new series with Mark Waid and is working on a creator owned graphic novel with writer Charles Webb. Having found the American comics work much more rewarding in terms of creator respect and payment, he has decided to focus his efforts on breaking through in the US comics market.

Word Vervolgd, Strip Leksikon der Lage Landen

Minck Oosterveer was the only Dutch comics creator still working in the long tradition of the adventure strip, that he has had to focus his efforts on the American comics market because Dutch comics paid too little to make a living is …not good. The comics market in the USA is after all godawful and has been for years, so to prefer that to the Dutch market means that for creators like Oosterveer at least the market here is worse…

And yet, as I showed last year, the market for “graphic novels” is booming, with books like the translated Robert Crumb Genesis or Logicomics selling well over 10,000 copies, something that for a normal book too would be very respectable in the relatively small Dutch book market.The graphic novel as a publishing phenomenom has indeed become succesful enough to become a bandwagon, with a flood of inferior work released as “graphic novel” which would’ve never gotten any media attention had they been called “comics”. Tonio van Vugt, editor of Zone 5300, Holland’s most prominent alt-comix zine, already warned about the detrimental effect this could and would have on the reputation of comics as a medium, when on the one hand you have an artificial divide in “graphic novels (literature, hip, available in quality bookstores) and “strips/comics” (pulp, oldfashioned, bought in strange little shops normal adults won’t go) and on the other hand much of what’s sold as “graphic novel” is crap, only able to confirm the stereotypes people already have about comics.

But there’s more going on. The Dutch comics market has always been very open to foreign comics, yet at the same time managed to have a strong comics industry itself as well, nourished through publication in a variety of weekly and monthly magazines, as well as newspaper publication. All these outlets slowly disappeared over time however, while the competition of cheaper foreign comics became stronger. There are so many good American, French, Japanese and other comics being translated that few Dutch cartoonists can competite with them. Who will take a gamble on Jan Janssen from Lutjebroek when they can publish e.g Charles Burns Black Hole quicker and cheaper and probably get a bigger audience? It’s the same as what happened to Dutch language science fiction in the seventies and eighties, when for a moment it did seem we could get a reasonable scene going (Eddy C. Bertin, Bob Laerhoven, Felix Thijssen, Wim Gijssen, the Gandymedes anthologies etc.) , but it turned out translating yet another Keith Laumer or Larry Niven novel was cheaper and more profitable too..

There are exceptions to this trend, like Barbara Stok or Maaike Hartjes (here reviewd by Branko Collin), but what they do is slice of life stories rooted in everyday Dutch life; not something you can easily find foreign substitutes for…

“Holland lacks a tradition of realistic comics”

Published on February 13, 20113 Comments

Daily Webhead: Hal Foster Award 2011 from Michael Minneboo on Vimeo.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of the Hal Foster Award before Michael Minneboo posted about it last Tuesday, but it turns out to have been established in 1982, to honour people working in the margins of the comics industry. Last year’s winner was Klaas Knol, for his work with Lambiek comics shop, who is seen in the video above handing over the award to Mat Schifferstein, this year’s winner. Schifferstein is the co-owner and founder of Sherpa, a small press high quality publisher founded in 1985 which has both encouraged local talents like Bert van der Meij and Lian Ong, as well as translated new work from creators like Muñoz and Sampayo, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Sherpa has also been important as a reprint publisher, e.g. reprinting the newspaper science fiction strip Arman & Ilva (Thé Tjong-Khing & Lo Hartog van Banda), in my opinion one of the best sf strips ever created. Sherpa’s catalogue tends to lean towards a traditional sort of comic: well crafted, realistic art, proper storytelling.

Other than you might expect, this sort of comic is not very commercial in the Netherlands. Most people think of comics as, well, comic: the three panel gag strip from the newspaper, the weekly Donald Duck magazine or even series like Asterix being what most people will encouter as comics. There is a market for action-adventure comics here, but it’s dominated by translations, usually from France, with titles like Largo Winch, XIII or Thorgal.

In his acceptance speech Mat Schifferstein decries this lack of a naturalist tradition in Dutch comics. He argues that the Dutch always went more for humouristic strips than for the sort of realistic adventure strips Hal Foster is a good example of, that while even twenty years ago there were still artists like Hans Kresse or Thé Tjong-Khing creating this sort of work and finding an audience for it, this is no longer the case today. He hopes therefore that his win, with the help of “the well-oiled Lambiek P.R. machine”, will be a clarion call for attention within the Netherlands for the realistic adventure comic.

I would hope so too, as I do like that sort of comic, but I can’t really think of any current Dutch artist working in this tradition. The people he mentioned came out of the world of the newspaper strip where, just like elsewhere in the world, there’s no little room for adventure strips. As far as I know the only Dutch creators still doing this sort of strip are Minck Oosterveer and Willem Ritsier, on Nikki Saxx and Zodiak, both for De Telegraaf and both having to make do with the usual three panel space alloted any comic. They work wonders in this limited space, but it hardly compares to a Hal Foster…

Marvano’s The Forever War — Friday’s Funnies

Published on February 11, 2011

page from the Marvano adaptation of the Forever War

The first time I read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, it was in comics form, as a three part adaptation by Belgian writer/artist Marvano. The Forever War was Haldeman’s science fictional treatment of what he went through in the Vietnam War and was originally published in 1974; Marvano’s adaptation came out in 1988, a decade and a half later, yet it fitted the eighties like a glove. As he said in his foreword, what with the Falklands War, Grenada, Reagan talking about winning a nuclear war, a wave of right and leftwing terrorism paralysing Belgium and so on, it still seemed relevant. It seems so today too.

Which is largely due to Marvano’s own efforts, rather than Haldeman’s. Marvano had only three albums of 48 pages each to adapt a 230 page novel and like film, comics adaptations of novels need more room, rather than less. So he had to cut and choose what to keep in and what to adapt. In doing so he created the “good parts” version of Haldeman’s novel. He sharped it up, cut out the more awkward bits and kept the focus tight.

Haldeman’s original novel had two main themes. The first was the absurdity of war in general, as his hero, William Mandella, a reluctant recruit into the UN Expeditionary Force against the Taurans, the first alien race Earth had encountered and immediately went to war with, through the miracle of time dilation manages to be the only man to survive the entire war, from its start in 2010 to its end more than a millennium later, in 3177. In between the three campaigns Mandella fights in Haldeman explores his second theme, that of a soldier’s alienation on his return from fighting an unpopular war to his homeland when he realises it has changed while he remained in stasis. A popular because it was true cliche about the Vietnam War, Haldeman exagerrated these effects by his use of time dilation, having Mandella experience only a few years of war, then coming back to Earth to find decades have past and the world irrevocably changed.

Marvano could not do justice to both these themes in his adaptation and concentrated on the first. He kept the plot lines relating to the second theme as well, but compressed them greatly, spending much less time detailing the ways in which Earth changes during Mandella’s war. In Mandella’s first return to Earth for example, Marvano emphasises the way the UN bureaucracy censored his television interview over his adventures adapting to his new world, where a third of the population is now homosexual. Which is a good thing, as these are the parts of the novel that had dated the most: by making them less explicit, more generalised they keep their relevance. It’s enough to know things have changed enormously without needing to go into detail.

A similar pairing down is done all through the comics series and it works. What Marvano does very well, extremely well in fact for what was his first major comics project, was to let the artwork and narration speak for themselves, each conveying part of the story He lets Mandella tell the reader anything that can’t be put in pictures and let the art carry the action, not needing text to tell you what you can see in the art yourself. Mandella’s narration is almost constant, but Marvano is not afraid to silence him when needed. He’s a good artist, with a good eye for both creating realistic looking future technology and weapons, as well as for creating subtle and not so subtle facial expressions. It’s an eighties future, but still holds up today I think.

Sadly, the Forever War comic is long out of print in English, though can still be had in French or Dutch. It’s my candidate for best sf adaptation in comics ever. Marvano would do more adaptations of Haldeman novels, including The Long Habit of Living for his series Dallas Barr.