Blog fodder for June 5th through June 7th

Blog fodder for June 5th through June 7th:

Gr’unn!

cover of Gromnibus

A can’t miss bargain to be had at De Slegte in Amsterdam right now: copies of Gr’omnibus, a treasure trove of sequential art from Groningen, the Athens of the North; an invaluable treasure now yours for only two euro fifty! Why you should bother? Because you get to sample some 40 odd (some very odd) Dutch (as well as the occasional furreign) cartoon talents, culled from the pages of one of the most consistent of Dutch underground comix zines, G’runn.

Most foreigners might be forgiven for believing there’s not much more to the Netherlands than Amsterdam, Den Haag and perhaps some pittoresque village like (ugh) Volendam, with Zeeland thrown in for free for our German friends who tend to encamp on the beaches there each summer in a more benign re-enactment of the Maydays of 1940, but there are other interesting cities in the rest of the Netherlands as well, even up North. Groningen (Gr’unn in the local dialect) is one of them, a university town big enough not to be overwhelmed by it with a decent local art scene and nightlife, a city in which over the years a thriving alt-comix scene has been established.

In 1996 a few of them started Gr’unn, which since then has published a lot of up and coming cartoonists. People like Barbara Stok, Mark Hendriks, Amoebe, the Lamelos collective, Marcel Ruijters, Reinder Dijkhuis, Berend Vonk, all had strips in Gr’unn. And as such it helped establish, together with Zone 5300 and more amateur zines like Impuls or Iris, the first generation of cartoonists neither interested in going the traditional comics route of magazines or newspapers, nor in consciously rebelling against this, but who just went their own way.

Any anthology of a comix zine celebrating its ten years anniversary will always be uneven and of course Gr’omnibus is this as well. Some of the cartoonists are better or more interesting than others, while there’s a huge mix of styles and subjects represented as well. But there is common ground as well. Autobiographical or fantasy, stick figures or obsessive crosshatching, what most of the stories and artists present have in common is a prediliction for the light ironic and the cynical, short gag stories but with a twist of bitterness and not too much emotional investment. It’s a style of writing I quite like, though it can be a bit wearing in large doses. No real masterpieces here, but still more gems than dross and no real bad stories either.

So if you’re in Amsterdam and you want a cheap way to sample a huge chunk of the contemporary Dutch comix scene, go get Gr’omnibus from de Slegte. It’s in the middle of Kalverstraat so even tourists should be able to find it.

Taking Captain America into strange places

Tom Spurgeon reviews Captain America: the Truth:

While this move/development/whatever takes away the juice of creating Captain America himself from the Tuskegee Experiment-style set-up, it also places the spotlight even more directly on the treatment of African-American soldiers during that period, with the American upper-class embrace of eugenics as a minor undercurrent. History tells us the treatment of black soldiers was routinely abominable, and in The Truth those abuses become the relentless, dour drumbeat of the narrative. In other words, Marvel traded an imaginary story that might have made a black man the first Captain America for an in-continuity one that super-sizes some of the worst behavior of the US government in its long history. Captain America is safe, but the government for which he works has a truckload of explaining to do. The better and more observant histories tell us the real-world abuses were horrible, but I don’t think they were quite as over-the-top horrifying as the exploding bodies and entire units massacred for the control of minor state secrets we see here.

[…]

In the end, this is a hard story to parse because it’s really about the history involved — and the notion of retroactive continuity as it gets portrayed in the press — more than it is a tight, well-paced story of its own. It’s fun to read something this ruthlessly negative about American history coming out during the Bush years, and some of the ideas are enjoyable to mull over, but it’s not something I regret having missed the first time around. It’s admirably odd, that’s for sure.

There’s at least one thesis to be had in analysing Captain America in the Bush years, especially after 9/11. The Truth was one response, the other was seen in Ed Brubaker’s “realistic” approach, a third in the last story in Captain America – Red, White & Blue, tackling the aftermath of 9/11 directly. In general I’ve found Marvel to have become very rightwing post-Bush, the outcome of Civil War going against everything Marvel always stood for (in so far as a obviously commerce driven company universe could stand for anything of course) and Cap shoved up to the right as well. That pseudorealism, with its acceptance of the evil in the world, is a rightwing look at the world, even if the hero is shown as a shining knight in a corrupt world. It’s a far cry from the idealism of the premature anti-fascism of the original Cap…

Which is not the case with The Truth, where as Tom notices, the corruption in the background doesn’t infect Captain America himself. It respected what Captain America always stood for: the myth of America, rather than the sordid reality.

Nerd-r-I

Just saw the new Dr Who, with Matt Smith as the doctor and Steven “Coupling” Moffat as the lead writer. After several seasons with David Tennant and Russel T. Davies in the same roles Dr Who had become stale and somewhat boring, obsessed as it was with telling the same stories over and over. The teasers at the end of the last season already promised a new, lighter approach and I was glad to see this episode making good on this promise. As per usual at the start of a new seaosn much of it was spent showcasing the doctor again, with Matt Smith having the same sort of manic energy as Tennant and some of his mannerisms, but slightly wittier. The alien menace du jour looked cool and different, there were some nice hints about the overarching theme of the rest of the season and a good balance between tension and humour, we got a new companion and surprise surprise it’s another young woman already obsessed by the doctor and there’s nothing creepy about this, honest. All in all, quite an enjoyable episode, if slight.

I’m at my parents for Easter weekend btw. S. came out of hospital on Tuesday and had her son coming round for the holidays, so I could bugger off to Middelburg for some r&r. Which gave me the chance to sort through my comics collection again. I was a serious collector from about 1987 to about 2000, when I just stopped. It left me with some ten thousand or so comics, most in storage at my parents. As S. keeps telling me, we don’t have the storage to keep them all so I need to cull what I got.

Which has been …interesting, a sort of personal archaeology. So much shit I’ve bought over the years. No clue of what was good or not, just looking for a new superhero or following a favourite character and no matter it has crappy art and worse writing. It didn’t help that I started seriously collecting at a time the direct market went crazy, what with Image and Valiant and eight million copies of X-Men #1. So many comics bought because they were hyped up in Wizard or Previews, so many comics bought because they were cheap at a con and looked interesting, so many comics bought thanks to rec.arts.comics.misc or Comix-L. Then end result was a huge sprawling mess, which definitely needed culling.

But it’s hard. Getting rid of the shit comics is easy, but to get beyond that and cull the ones that are sort of okay, or even good, but just don’t fit — so many miniseries I only have two out of four issues of– that’s harder. I managed to lose about a thousand-two thousand comics in a first pass, but doubt I could do more at the moment…