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Breakdowns -- The Unknowing Soldier

December 4, 2003

“It balances on your head like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.”

Bob Dylan, “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat,” from BLONDE ON BLONDE.

Thanksgiving turned out to be a time of some measure of reflection, which can happen when you’re staying with Mormon in-laws and not able to wash down your turkey with six or eight beers. Also, while I did bring the big stack of “floppies” I bought last Wednesday, the only books I ended up reading were the graphic novels PERSEPOLIS and PALOMAR. And, you know, it felt right, just getting into one good book and then moving on to an even better one, but both impressive works with ideas and unique voices. Of course, there are only an armful of other significant graphic novels and collections per year, but it got me thinking that maybe it’s more worthwhile to focus on these than whether CATWOMAN has jumped the shark with the change to the asscracktastic art of Paul Gulacy. I’ve been moving somewhat away from reviewing the mainstream (i.e. superheroes) monthly comics anyway (yeah, yeah, I know there’s one book below that sticks out like a sore thumb), but now I find it’s time to reexamine not just what I choose to review, but the way that I review it as well. That is, commentary from Steven Grant and others has, at the very least, convinced me to drop from my reviews any commercial considerations. I mean, one should be able to infer from my piece whether a book is or isn’t for them, but no longer am I going to come out and say, “well worth your $15!” or “not much story for $3.50.” Particularly in regards to superhero books will it be difficult to put a particular book in a larger conquest or draw parallels to other works, or at least it would be hard to do this more than once, because there’s such similarity to most superhero books. Anyway, though it’s honestly pretty difficult to find great insight into half a dozen books every week, I’ll do my best to improve. Whatever your opinion of any other online comics reviewer, I think you’d have to agree that there are few examples of anyone getting better from year to year, which is a shame. As much as I’m critical of many of them, I don’t want to ever be satisfied with what I myself am doing. Any feedback on strengths, weaknesses, changes in my work you’ve seen since you’ve been reading it, are always appreciated.

While I haven’t finished Gilbert Hernandez’ PALOMAR yet (next week for sure), this week is nonetheless full of interesting and probable award-nominated books for 2003. In the coming weeks, perhaps starting next week, I may do one of those “Best of” lists as well, except I prefer to do “Favorites” instead, discussing books I’ve enjoyed this year without making just one winner per category.

And while we’re on the subject of blah blahdiddy blah, Sean Collins and his blog-fu again foils me with his ability to cover something I wanted to talk about, first, which is The Pulse’s Grant Morrison interview. But in this case, Sean does a rare soft-pedal, skimming over just how awful the questions posed to Morrison are. Whether you like Morrison or not, he’s inarguably an interesting personality and a popular, unique comics writer with varied interests and recognizable themes in his work. But what you get in this interview is at least half generic questions like “If you weren’t in comics, what would you be doing?” followed by almost the same question. I got a laugh by how Morrison goes on for several paragraphs about his views on religion, and the next question is just talk show “tell us about your new projects” stuff. No follow-ups, no indication any of Morrison’s elaborate, zany, provocative answers have registered on the interviewer’s brain. I mean, the guy actually said Alan Moore has been trying for fifteen years to be Grant Morrison, and there’s no follow-up to this?! Clearly, it was an email interview, and I prefer them myself, but you have to have follow-ups for elaboration and a conversational feel. It could be that Morrison didn’t respond in time to the follow-ups, but in that case, you just don’t run it.

Anyway, I’ve got plenty of gripes and sassy commentary, but I’ll let it simmer for the “Favorites” thing, just to keep it lively. Let’s get on with the reviews.

We All Scream for Ice Cream

RIPPLE by Dave Cooper. Fantagraphics Books. $14.95
Dave Cooper’s work has always been infused with an obsessive sexuality mixing the sweaty pathos of R. Crumb with the lush, symbolic settings of Jim Woodring. In this book, however, his storytelling evolves, becomes more direct and self-aware.

Like Cooper, the protagonist of RIPPLE, Martin De Serres (desires? is a physically unassuming comic artist who yearns to be appreciated as a fine artist and a creator of sophisticated “kids books for adults.” Cooper, in fact, offered an elegant coffee table art book / catalog following the conclusion of this story in his WEASEL anthology, rather than more comics, and the author bio in the book makes his aspirations obvious. An example of Martin’s comics work looks suspiciously like Cooper’s own PIP & NORTON, which, while an enjoyable work in its own right, is not written by Cooper himself and seems to be more of an ongoing lark that pays a few bills.

Martin receives some grant money for a gallery art show of “erotic, thought-provoking art,” one of the admittedly half-baked, cynical proposals he’d sent out a while back. He wants to capture the eroticism of regular, even homely, girls, and after some failed attempts to find a model, Tina comes into his life. She’s ignorant, vulgar, toothy and overweight, and she likes to be told what to do. But as the modeling sessions progress, Martin finds himself drawn more and more to this uninhibited voluptuary, and it is her who controls him and ultimately ruins him.

Cooper’s portrayal of obsession and lust-fueled self-deception is utterly convincing and often erotic, and his art style has changed effectively to “dryer” lines for the surroundings, emphasizing the humid passions of the characters, whereas earlier works practically glistened all over. Tina is by turns a voracious monster, a sadly clueless, wounded dolt, and a refreshingly honest, unreflective force of nature, and Martin is deluded but sympathetic, with the decency to leave her alone once she dumps him, content to rot alone. When the story was serialized, the last chapter felt rushed, but it works better in this context, because after all, we cannot choose the way in which someone breaks up with us, and the chapter’s brevity stuns the reader the way Martin himself is stunned, and he still hasn’t recovered.

You Better Watch Out, You Better Not Buy

THE AUTHORITY/LOBO CHRISTMAS SPECIAL by Keith Giffen, Alan Grant and Simon Bisley. Wildstorm Productions. $4.95
Two near-redundant concepts meet and fight in this new special that easily surpasses whatever has become of the monthly AUTHORITY series but doesn’t get a whole lot farther up the quality hill. Giffen has been paying the bills these days revisiting old work like JUSTICE LEAGUE and now LOBO, but with the former there is still a sense of self-deprecating fun, and with this crossover appearance of the latter, there is more of a feeling of trying to push the cynicism around the dial to sincerity again. Not surprisingly, his and Grant’s familiarity with the simple, bloodthirsty bounty hunter Lobo means the character is handled adequately, though with nothing funny to say. The Authority entire are a different story, and while Giffen has apparently done enough research to come up with a plausible, continuity-based motivation for Lobo to go after the team, it’s clear neither he nor Grant have a grasp of the characters or what worked about the book. One of the most appealing aspects of the Ellis/Hitch run was that it was simply cool looking superheroes doing cool things other superheroes didn’t do, in cool settings. Attempts by Mark Millar and other writers that have tried to build on the minimalist characterization by Ellis have only diminished the concept, turning Apollo and Midnighter into a bad, gay domestic sitcom, The Doctor into a one-note druggie and the rest of the cast into regular ol’ superheroes who sit around and wait for trouble. Giffen spends so much time setting up the meeting that when it finally happens, there’s not much time left for anything but a humdrum punch-up, with Lobo having to wear the black (and boring) hat by dint of cheap gay slurs at Midnighter’s expense. That’s one of the big flaws, actually, that the ultimate fascist superteam is forced to be like all the others, when the body counts are probably about equal. The one interesting aspect of the book, and indeed of his entire career, is how a pretty gifted artist like Bisley takes such obsessively detailed delight in drawing the most meaningless, gratuitous comics around.

Everybody Plays Di Fool

THE INCAL VOL. 1 & 2 by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Zoran Janjetov and Moebius. Humanoids Publishing. $17.95
The first of the stories of THE INCAL, which represents the duality of life, appeared in European comics two decades or more ago, by Jodorowsky and Moebius. More recently, Jodorowsky has revisited the material, starting much earlier in the life of lead character, Class “R” Detective John Di Fool, with art by the sublime Janjetov, with the Moebius material soon to be collected in Volume 3.

In the first volume, we meet John as a youth, enticing male visitors to his level of the City Shaft to enjoy his prostitute mother. She’s addicted to a true “love drug” called Amorine, and soon commits suicide, and John blames both on her sluggish (literally) pimp Snailhead. But Jodorowsky is rarely satisfied with conventional, familiar plots, and it turns out the Amorine kept the terrible Meropa Virus at bay, and that Snailhead isn’t such a bad guy at all. John has had his first lesson that all is not what it seems, which serves him well as he grows into a young man, falls for a beautiful, haughty “Aristo” girl, Luz, whose father is Prime Minister, and with the help of robot Kolbo-5, concrete seagull Deepo and a principled “eyecop” (floating surveillance camera robot), uncovers a terrible conspiracy involving missing prostitute babies and addictive Cocoloco soda that goes all the up to the always-cloning Prezident, the heartless Techno-Pope and the huge brain running the show, the Supra-Divinoid. Whew. By Volume 2, John deals not only with increased government pressure to find him, but several reversals and betrayals, while uncovering the mystery behind the floating haloes the Aristo’s are all born with.

It may sound inscrutable, but Jodorowsky’s story structure is solid and though it’s all a wild satire of class struggles, addiction, media manipulation and human debasement, Di Fool is a compelling character whose struggles, heartbreak and short-lived triumphs are our own. As detailed as the world-building here is, THE INCAL remains an influential work of science fiction because of its emotional core.

PERSEPOLIS by Marjane Satrapi. Pantheon Books. $17.95
Tales of the transition from child to adult, “coming of age” stories, are ubiquitous, but while ones with exotic settings may be more immediately attractive, the value of the book ultimately has to do more with the skill in the telling and the accessibility of the character and his or her conflicts. PERSEPOLIS covers a period of Satrapi’s life as an Iranian girl first under the rule of the Shah in the late 70s, and then under the fanatical Khomeini in the 80s. Reared by progressive, rich parents, young “Marji” goes to a French school and wants for little, though outside culture is prized and hard to come by.

With the Shah removed from power, everything changes, and Marji’s natural teenage feelings of rebellion, and her yearning for Western items like blue jeans and punk rock tapes, are dangerously out of step with the new rules, putting both herself and her parents at risk of imprisonment, torture and death every time she is indulged. And at this tender and volatile age, she is forced every day to contend with the realities of war and oppression, losing friends and relatives to SCUD missiles from Saddam or prison sentences from her own government.

As harrowing as the story often is, this is not a political history, but a very personal story of a girl with many of the same hopes and dreams of other girls around the world. As young as she is, she can’t help but be politically aware in her household, so she protests, but she protests her parents as well, naturally. Satrapi remembers well the intensity and tilted perspective of the dynamic between a teen and her parents, and though there is the implication that her parents are foolish and materialistic for staying upper class Iranians rather than becoming, say, blue collar Iranian-Americans, she is tolerant in her portrayal of them, especially in a wonderful scene where they smuggle some rock posters for her from Sweden in the lining of her father’s jacket. The story is an intimate but powerful one, and the artwork is well suited to it, often quite moving in the contrast between simple, almost childish drawing and the horrors it portrays.

Full Bleed: Bitemizer
Just some short items I wanted to blow out and not forget…

BITEM! Earlier this year I hooked a friend on Craig Thompson’s GOODBYE, CHUNKY RICE and she ended up buying one. Then I gave her an extra copy I had of BLANKETS and she loved that as well. Now, while she was at least somewhat familiar with comics before, her roommate isn’t, but now she’s enjoyed both books as well. So who says I don’t give back to comics? That’s…um…fifteen whole dollars going back into the industry. Seriously, though, it’s somewhat gratifying, though the roommate turned down the offer of more comics.

BITEM! I know this retailer, who runs what I’ve heard is really an excellent shop, but he’s totally anti-discount, even to the loyal customers who spend a lot. He feels that he’s adding value with great service and pulling their books, so why should he charge less money? To me, this seems like crazy talk, and a dangerous old Mom ‘n Pop Shop p.o.v. for a businessman whose business is more and more endangered by the easy availability of any comic online, especially trades and graphic novels, which are often discounted by large e-tailors like Amazon. Online shopping is at $820M this year over $735M last year, and I’d have to guess at least a tiny portion of this is from people buying books online when they don’t feel like hunting down a comics shop, while I doubt the direct market itself has seen any significant increase in sales. What do you think?

BITEM! Much as I enjoy Steven Grant’s column, and had no problem with his “let’s make comics the new drug” piece in execution, aren’t comics already too much like drugs? Too expensive; don’t last long enough; don’t want to be caught with them at work; and dispensed by people you generally wouldn’t socialize with if you didn’t have this problem? Why can’t comics be The Second Right Hand? That would be pretty useful, and then we can work up to Comics Are the New Vulva.

Next Week: I suppose I need to get PALOMAR done, huh? I’m halfway through, and it’s already the best, most important graphic novel of 2003, so don’t expect me to slam it just to be contrary. Also, Rebellion sent some nice looking genre graphic novels, all stuff originally published in 2000 AD, so I would expect to review at least John Wagner’s and Arthur (X-FACTOR) Ranson’s BUTTON MAN

Our pretty art this time is by Moebius, from THE MAN FROM THE CIGURI, which I believe is out of print now, though probably not that hard to find cheap. There’s really some beautiful work in here, but what struck me about this simple headshot is how I realize how much John Cassaday’s work seems to have a Moebius influence, at least the way he draws faces. See if you agree.

Chris Allen

If you would like a comic, vulva or graphic novel reviewed, send to:

1451 River Crest Rd.
San Marcos, CA 92078

Chris Allen has written for Comic Book Galaxy, NinthArt and PopImage.

If you would like a comic or graphic novel reviewed, send to:

1451 River Crest Rd.
San Marcos, CA 92078

Chris Allen has written for Comic Book Galaxy, NinthArt and PopImage.

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