I don’t know why it popped in my head sometime last year, when it went really bad for S. and we were seriously worrying about, you know, that which you do not want to prepare for. Suddenly it just was there … “Don’t you worry about a thing … Every little thing is gonna be alright”. I don’t even like or know much Bob Marley but that was stuck in my head for most of the rest of the year.
Back then it was cynical as much as comforting, but today I can actually start to believe in it, as S. will be coming home on Saturday as a trial, spending a day at home after having been in hospital for well over six months. She’s not quite home yet, but it’s going in the right direction: getting stronger, slightly less vulnerable to infection, better prepared. It can still go wrong, but we’re much more optimistic than we were even a month ago…
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…
As Roy Edrose has shown time and again, to analyse and judge any artwork soley on its political merits is a fool’s game, as he dissects yet another hapless rightwing culture warrior failing to understand why the latest Hollywood blockbuster is not best viewed as a potential liberal propaganda vehicle. You find such naive appraisals of art on the left as well, but its heyday has long passed and most leftist culture critics are more subtle than that, able to both see the political dimension in art and still appreciate it on artistic merits as well.
People call them far-right wing, and you can see where this impression comes from. With the extreme costumes and pyrotechnics, their concerts do have moments that look like some kind of post-modern Nuremberg rally. Till Lindemann’s bunker-busting voice sounds menacing and his long trilled r’s are reminiscent of Hitler.
So one critic called their work “music to invade Poland to”, and the New York Times thought Lindemann exuded such macho aggression that “it seemed he could have reached into the crowd, snatched up a fan, and bitten off his head”. Rammstein once got a lot of flak for featuring Leni Riefenstahl propaganda clips, and neo-Nazis have used their material – without permission. But they responded to accusations of being right wing or neo-Nazi with a 2001 number called Links (Left) 2,3,4 which declared:
Sie wollen mein Herz am rechten Fleck
Doch seh ich dann nach unten weg
Da schlägt es links.
Links!
They want my heartbeat on the right
But whenever I look down
It’s beating on the left.
Left!
Does that settle the question? No it doesn’t, as we’ll see. Neither can you settle it by reading all their lyrics. Firstly the English translations are seriously unreliable (I’ve done my own). But secondly, that’s nobody’s fault, because even German speakers will wrestle with the deliberate ambiguity of just about everything these guys write.
A glimmering of understanding in that last paragraph, but unfortunately O’Lincoln spents the rest of the article just doing that which he himself just said is pointless: analysing Rammstein’s lyrics to see if any clues to their political orientation can be found there. He concludes:
To be on the left means a responsibility to make a clear statement on the issues you raise. This Rammstein often fail to do.
Which is about the worst kind of pronouncement you can make about art, to call for an end to all ambiguity and to want rigidly defined areas of doubt.
Propaganda needs clear, simple statements. Art doesn’t. What Rammstein is doing with their music is much more complex by that and any attempt to find an explicit political message in it, whether fascist or socialist, is doomed to failure, as that’s not what they are interested in. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t anything interesting to be found in looking at Rammstein in a political context, but it does mean more than just a cursory scan of their song texts and actually analysing them, contextualising them and engaging with them. Not just showing that the lyrics in Wollt Ihr Das Bett in Flammen Sehen are misogynistic, not just explaining how they are, but why they are, how the song fits in with the rest of their work.
But that’s much harder than what Tom O’Lincoln did.