Comix

Confusing “available in English” with “worldwide success”

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Earlier this week, Tom Spurgeon linked to an article in The Irish Times on French comics and their supposed failure to become a success abroad:

Perhaps the chief reason for this relative obscurity is that the festival celebrates a cultural product that has, to date, stubbornly resisted any and all attempts to export it. Unlike cinema, or jazz, or any of the other artistic endeavours for which France is regularly feted, Francophone comics have, for reasons mysterious, never quite managed to “cross over” and translate local mass-popularity into success on an international stage.

There are, of course, exceptions – most notably the peerless Franco-Belgian duo of Asterix and Tintin, two series that have conquered minds and markets both regional and global. Yet for all their success, these venerable titans represent but the uppermost tip of a thriving, prolific and progressive creative iceberg.

Which is only true if you define “success on an international stage” as “popular in the UK, US and/or other English speaking countries”. It’s true that Franco-Belgian comics have done badly in English, but that doesn’t go for the rest of Europe, or large parts of the rest of the non-English speaking world. That this sort of success is invisible in the Anglo-American parts of the world is due to the failure of the former to pay much attention to anything outside its own borders, rather than due to the lack of this success.

Friday Funnies: The Portable Frank

Art & Criticism, Comix
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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.

Did he have to be a comics retailer?

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Tom Spurgeon reports that comic retailer and internet hard man J.I. Corcoran is under investigation by his local police force for the remarks he made after the Tucson shootings:

Robot 6 has their usual sterling write-up here about this article from regional Boston media about the police in the community of Arlington (about five, ten minutes northwest of Boston proper) suspending the firearms license of Heavy Ink comics retailer Travis J.I. Corcoran and seizing what they called a “large amount” of weaponry and ammunition from his possession. Both moves were made pending the outcome of an investigation into statements made by Corcoran after the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others on January 8 in Tucson. The main statement in question was “one down 534 to go” in reference to her membership in the House Of Representatives. As tracked by on-line comics media — including at Comics Alliance, where apparently the police encountered the story — Corcoran has thus far qualified rather than backed down from the statement.

Spurgeon also mentioned that several comix creators had “expressed their distaste” at Corcoran’s remarks, some going so far as to call for a boycott, or rather, that he should stop selling their works. His sentiments were, if not nasty or evil, certainly mistimed and boorish. Yet it all seems a bit over the top to try and destroy his livelihood for what at heart is the same sort of half-joke many Americans could’ve made in private about Congress, or other “hated” groups like lawyers. Corcoran’s mistake was his bad timing and his inability to let go of it graciously, rather than dig his heels in. It’s understandable that the police is investigating him in the current climate, but it’s also clear that all he was doing was being a typical, rightwing internet blowhard talking bull when he should’ve kept his mouth shut. Bad publicity for comics, but nothing serious.

Friday Funnies: Scarlet Traces – The Great Game

Art & Criticism, books and books review, Comix
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World War Mars

The War of the Worlds battlefront moves to Mars….

Since I am reading comics again, I thought why not do something with them, though preferably not something as lunatic as last year’s Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days. Instead, from now on every Friday I’ll attempt to spotlight some deserving, newish comics. Comics such as today’s offering, Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’s Scarlet Traces: the Great Game.

In the same year that H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds was published, the first unauthorised sequel Garrett P. Serviss’ Edison’s Conquest of Mars appeared, a jingoistic tale of American derring do overcoming the Martian evil, far removed from Wells’ own intentions. Ever since writers have continued to be inspired by it or swiped from it to enlive their own retro-futures, like e.g. Christopher Priest in The Space Machine In comics, apart from the inevitable Classic Illustrated adaptation, there of course also was Marvel’s great over the top reimagination of it in Killraven and which thanks to Don McGregor and P. Craig Russell was much better than it had any right to be. Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill also used it in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume two, with a particular cynical revelation of what really killed the Martians.

Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’ then stand in a long and sometimes proud tradition when in 2003 they created the first Scarlet Traces miniseries, which asked what would’ve happened to a nineteenth century England suddenly in possession of highly advanced Martian technology in the aftermath of the invasion. England in 1898 of course was still convinced of its divine right to rule the world and it’s new technological superiority made this only worse. Martian technology has also unleashed a new industrial revolution, with the south reaping the benefits while the smokestacks of the North and Scotland fell still, replaced by clean, robotic Martian machinery, the workers left on the scraphead surplus to requirements.

This is the background against which Scarlet Traces: The Great Game is set, jumping ahead to the 1940ties. Martian technology has completely transformed England and the world, leaving London looking as something out of Dan Dare — and D’Israeli’s designs do have something of that fifties English science fiction feel to them, clean and streamlined and bright. England now is not just a world power but has invade Mars and has been waging war for decades, while at home Northern and Scottish terrorists/freedom fighters are the justification for increasingly draconian security measures, overseen by home secretary Mosley, while Scarlet Traces‘ main villain, Davenport Spry is now prime minister.

Enter aristocratic lady photographer Charlotte Hemming, returning to London from an overseas assignment for the Interceptor, one of the few opposition newspapers left in England. When on her way there the BBC building is blown up by a Scottish suicide bomber, she’s on the scene to snap pictures. This lands her and her pulisher, Bernie Goldman, in hot water, hotter still when he gives her her next assignment: to find out what’s really going on on Mars. Bernie is killed by army thugs but Charlotte escapes, rescued by major Robert Autumn, the hero of the previous book. He explains what he had found on his adventures thirty years ago, the great secret behind England’s economic expansion and the mystery of what he and Bernie wanted her to research on Mars. Why is it, that in all these decades of fighting, so few soldiers returned home.

That’s the setup, and the rest of the book has Charlotte travelling to Mars, only to end up in the midst of the heaviest fighting in years, as the Martians attack the main British base at Valles Marineris, a huge city building two and a half thousand miles end to end, build by some unknown race. It’s evident that the military has been hiding the whole truth about the Martians for decades, also that they’re up to something big, a final act of genocide to win the war, but so are the Martians…

Now originally published as a four part miniseries by Dark Horse, this structure is still evident in the story. The first issue has the setup, in the second issue Charlotte gets to know the hidden truths of her world by Robert Autumn and travels to Mars, part three has her arrive and after some confusion starts finding even bigger questions that need answering and in part four all of this has to be tied together and resolved. It doesn’t quite work and feels rushed. Much of the plot is also told through speeches, first Autumn, later the series main villain, another army man, commander James Dravott, as he explains to Charlotte why the war was started and what the stakes are. Some more room for the story to breathe would’ve been nice.

a very fifties looking piece of retrotech here from D'Israeli

But these are quibbles. The main attraction is the world Edginton and D’Israeli have created, which is great. Googling around many reviews call it steampunk, but that’s wrong. This isn’t faux Victorean high tech, this is an alternate nineteenforties and the technology reflects this. As said, the space ships, aereoplanes and equipment could’ve all been designed by Frank Hampton for Dan Dare, sleek, streamlined but round forms as above, yet the various lorries and automobiles we see in the background from the bonnet up look like proper 1940ties British cars, save for the crawler legs instead of wheels. D’Israeli is very good at convincingly portraying this meld of retrofuturism with the almost organic look of the Martian tech incorporated in them.

the background of each picture bears examining

D’Israeli is also good at providing unobtrusive but telling background details and cameos, like the lorry with the “A. Jones & Co Family Butcher” logo above, which help shape and make real Charlotte’s world. Everywhere you look there are mundane examples of Martian tech having been incorporated in familiar machines, while the fashions and office furniture is still recognisably forties in look and feel. Once Charlotte gets underway to Mars, military technology dominates, with clanking big WWI style tanks and soldiers in spacesuits that could’ve been worn in the trenches along side the much cleaner looks of the spaceships and the strangeness and grandeur of the Martian ruins. The use of colour is also superb: D’Israeli apparantly did all this directly on the computer, according to the backpages and this must’ve helped the unity of colour and image. It doesn’t feel computerised though. His people are slightly cartoony, with great expressive faces, clean lines and no unnecessary detailing or shading. Somewhat reminded me of Bryan Talbot’s work on One Bad Rat though of course D’Israeli cleary has his own style, but in the way he uses colour and shape to pop out foreground figures from their background.

A satisfying book and the physical presentation of it fitted it perfectly: hardcover bound, slightly bigger than a standard American comic book with nice clean glossy white paper that make the colouring really stand out.

Crisis? What Crisis?

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the end of Earth-2

Or, why Secret Wars was better than Crisis on Infinite Earths — at least in one aspect. Tim O’Neill has been looking at Crisis again and what it accomplished:

The final accomplishment of Crisis is the most obvious one, and in hindsight the most problematic: the establishment of the new post-Crisis single-Earth status quo. While on paper the post-Crisis integration may have seemed like the most logical solution to proliferating complexity, in actuality the benefits of the streamlined New Earth were severely mitigated by the company’s absolute refusal to disengage from the practice of constantly updating and “fixing” lapsed continuity. Post-Crisis, the smartest thing they could have done would have been simply to stop caring so much about consistency: with a working model New Earth and streamlined continuity, they should have declared Crisis #12 (or, more likely, Man of Steel #1) ground zero and gone forward without so much as a backwards glance, making it up as they went and not worrying so much about the particulars. But of course it didn’t work like that. There were problems immediately out of the gate: Roy Thomas and Paul Levitz, to name two prominent offenders, did not easily incorporate their distinctive and disparate fiefdoms – Earth 2 and the 30th Century, respectively – into the New Earth continuity, and therefore proceeded to pick at the scabs of bruised continuity in such a way that, for many characters and settings, the transplant never entirely took. Hawkman was problematic as well – but again, instead of simply just shrugging and going forward, they insisted on making a big deal of the problem, and thereby drawing more attention to what should have been merely a glitch.

I only read Crisis long after its effects had made themselves felt in the DC universe, sometime in the midnineties or so. That was late enough to know that what Wolfman and co had set out to do, streamline the DC universe and get rid of all the too complicated crap and start fresh, had failed. Individual series like Superman and Wonderwoman had rebooted well, became “hotter” than they had been in years if not decades, at the price of sacrifising all their history, but the universe as a whole was a mess, with the Legion of Superheroes as Tim also mentions fairing the worst, together with Hawkman. Contrary to Tim however I don’t think the problems lay with the execution, but with the concept of Crisis as a spring clean.

The DC universe wasn’t broke and didn’t need fixing. Sure, you had one popular title set in the future, two more on an alternate Earth and the Superman/Superboy “problem”, but none of this required a reboot. These were all things that could be ignored: the real problem was that DC’s flagship titles, like Superman, Action, Wonderwoman, Flash Justice League and to a lesser extent, Green Lantern and even the Batman titles were not very good and hadn’t been for a while. Superman in particular was in bad shape, dull insipid stories and artwork that looked dated and dull too. Something needed to be done with them, but it didn’t need to have been a continuity reset. Just getting Byrne to revamp Supes could’ve been enough: just focus on the present and forget “fixing” Superboy or the zillions of Kryptonians still hanging around or the sillier villains. What DC needed was better comics, not an improved continuity.

But I can understand that it would’ve been tempting back in 1984, when Marvel had been beating DC in sales for years and when it seemed the only successes DC had was with “new” titles like the Titans without too much historical baggage (and usually written by refugees from Shooter), that an universe wide cleanup was needed. But it was the wrong choice and it led to years and now decades of continuing revisions and origin regurgitations and in the end the DC universe is still difficult to get into.