Matt Thorn's Reviews of Non-Japanese Comics

Fifty years ago, American comics were almost as diverse in their subject matter as Japanese manga are today. But those days are gone. The rise of television, the decline of public transportation, and the introduction of the direct market (No, contrary to fanboy common sense, I don't think the notorious Comics Code Authority bears much of the blame) killed every genre except the one very stupid genre salvaged (essentially) by Marvel Comics' Stan "The Man" Lee and Jack "King" Kirby in the mid- to late-sixties. I myself was a fan of The Incredible Hulk and The Fantastic Four through middle school, but hadn't looked at anything new until the late 1980's, when I decided to re-educate myself by reading the "critically acclaimed" Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Rereading it now, it seems pretty lame, as a narrative, but at the time I thought, "This is the superhero comic to end all superhero comics; it's a eulogy." How naive I was to think that D.C. and Marvel might trade their scrawny cash cow for a handful of beans that might or might not produce a beanstalk leading to far wider audiences.

Another serious flaw in American mainstream comics: the twin evils of divided labor and work-for-hire. I said earlier that Japan is the Hollywood of comics, but it was D.C., Marvel, Image and others—not Japanese publishers—who adopted the Hollywood system of corporate production. When you've got one person writing the story (and subject to severe editorial restrictions), another doing the pencilling, a third doing the inking, a fourth doing the lettering, and fifth doing the coloring, what do you end up with? I don't know, but it's not a coherent work of art. If they were all working in the same studio, looking over each other's shoulders, discussing what it is they want to achieve, they might come up with something great. But this is never the case in mainstream U.S. comics. The product is passed along, assembly-line fashion, from one pair of hands to the next, overseen by an editor whose primary job is to protect the commercial integrity (which is certainly not to say quality) of "The Property." One glaring flaw that results: redundancy (and occasionally contradiction) of text and image. Ask any Japanese who's seen one: American comics are too wordy, and more than half of the words are rendered superfluous by the images. Add to this the fact that in any given month, one or more members of one of these non-teams is likely to be replaced at the whim of the publisher, and you have a real mess. A good indicator of the degree to which labor is divided, and to which that division is taken for granted, is the absurd categories (30 at last count) in the Eisner Awards.

As for non-superhero comics, I risk harsh rebuttals here, but I have to say that I think the major obstacle (apart from the fact that artists are paid little or nothing, and therefore have to spend time and energy making a living some other way) is the lack of the kind of "quality control" inherent in the commercial marketplace. An independent work is created essentially at the expense of the artist without expectation of much financial reward. If a commercial product sucks, the consumers let the producers know. If a self-published comic sucks, who's going to tell the artist? The ugly truth is that the bulk of work published under the rubric of "indy" or "underground" comics is crap, plain and simple. Most of the artists can neither draw nor tell an interesting story well. It seems almost a miracle when, against all odds, an artist (or team of creators) appears who can both draw well and tell a damned good story.

Turning our eyes to Europe... Setting aside works such as Tintin and Asterix, which are essentially mainstream products geared at kids (and very well executed, thank you), the main problem I see is an attachment to a narrow, oh-so-twentieth-century notion of "art" that can be summed up thus: "I'm depressed, therefore I'm deep." The notion that art must be dark and ironic has pretty much worn out its (early-20th-century) welcome by now, hasn't it? Can we get over this? Surely there must be something more to art, no?

Please indulge me for a moment by reading this lengthy quote from the diary of William Butler Yeats, poet:

I go to the first performance of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, at the Theatre de L'Oeuvre, with the Rhymer who had been so attractive to the girl in the bicycling costume. The audience shake their fists at one another, and the Rhymer whispers to me, "There are often duels after these performances," and he explains to me what is happening on the stage. The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hipping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of King, carries for Sceptre a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more. I say, "After Stephane Mallarme, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God."

He wrote that in 1896, for God's sake. Isn't the Savage God of grimly ironic Modernism dead yet? Apparently not, if some of the most critically acclaimed European albums are any indication. Still, there can be little doubt that some of the most artistically sophisticated work has been done Over There by the likes of Enki Bilal, Jean "Mobius" Girard, Hugo Pratt, etc. Great stuff, but hardly accessible to a wide audience (nor meant to be).

Hmm... Where was I? Oh, yes, this page is supposed to be reviews of non-Japanese comics. Well, here we go, in no particular order.

First, a list of books I hope to review soon (but don't hold your breath):

• Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville (Drawn & Quarterly, 2001 [1998])
• Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Pantheon, 2003 [2000])
• Chester Brown, Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography (Drawn & Quarterly, 2003 [1999])
• P. Craig Russell, Isolation and Illusion: Collected Short Stories 1977-1997 (Dark Horse, 2003)
• James Sturm, The Golem's Mighty Swing (Drawn & Quarterly, 2001)
• Craig Thompson, Blankets (Top Shelf, 2003)
• Will Eisner, Hawks of the Sea (Dark Horse, 2003 [1937-1939])
• Rodolphe Töpffer, various works, 1833-1845 (Töpffer, who was Swiss, is widely considered to be the father of the comics, and I've managed to scrape together a few translations of his works, which are still hilarious and fresh a century and a half later.)
• Juan Diaz Canales & Guarnido, Blacksad/Blacksad Book 2 (ibooks, 2003/2004 [2000/2003])
• Mike Mignola & John Byrne, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (Dark Horse, 1994)

In the meantime, here's what I've written so far:

Gil Kane with Robert Franklin, His Name Is...Savage! (Adventure House Press, 1968—Out of print.)

I had thought this was a book-length work, and didn't think much of dishing out U.S. $35 when I found it through BookFinder.com. In fact, it is a 50-page, oversized comic book—about the same size as the early MAD Magazine. (I then found out the Overstreet guide prices this book at $35 in mint condition, which mine sure aint. If you try to track it down yourself, be careful!) This was Kane's first attempt to break away from the restrictions of work-for-hire, and represents a bold, but essentially failed experiment. The art is solid. It's the text that distracts and annoys. You might think that an artist, given a chance to create a story alone, would rely more on images than on words to communicate to the reader, no? No. It seems the reverse is true. Perhaps they feel, after years of being kept silent, an urge to outwrite the writers. Almost every image is accompanied by a block of text that essentially describes, in the pulp-est prose, what we can plainly see in the image. You could ignore every bit of narrative text in this book, and, reading only the speech balloons, be able to follow the story quite easily. Perhaps Kane thought adult readers (and he was clearly targeting adults) would be put off by something too much like a comic book, and more inclined to read something with plenty of text. He was wrong. Like his later and much better experiment (Blackmark), this "series" ended with issue #1.

Gil Kane, Blackmark (Bantam Books, 1971—Out of print)

The cover copy of this paperback (which never got a second print run) reads, "First in a series of daring adventures featuring Blackmark^TM in the primitive world of the future." Unfortunately, it proved to be the first and last volume in a series of one, and we never learn what happens to Blackmark after his initial victory, which is too damned bad, since it's a great read, beautifully illustrated. I say "illustrated," because it's not layed out in any standard comics format. The format is a bit reminiscent of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant, but reminds me much more of Japanese illustrated stories that were popular in the 1950s. When I first opened the book (which I acquired by searching BookFinder.com), I rolled my eyes, thinking this was going to be even worse than His Name Is...Savage! (see above). Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised. I found the separation of text and images to be no obstacle, and was soon absorbed in the story and art. And speaking of art, this is truly Kane at his finest. Here I think he approaches his own ideal of portraying "life in motion." Melodramatic? Cheesy? Maybe. Blackmark is pulp entertainment at its best.

Gil Kane and Ron Goulart, Star Hawks (Tempo Books, 1979 [1977-78]—Out of print. ACG, 2000—A new reprint in four comic books, available at Bud Plant Comic Art.)

Kane's third break from superhero comics, this time in the form of a syndicated newspaper adventure strip for United Features Syndicate. The strip apparently ran for only about five months, and it's easy to see why. The story is a poorly written string of space opera cliches, and the "buddy banter" between off-the-rack protagonist Rex Jaxan, his partner Chavez, and various secondary characters is difficult to bear. An obvious attempt to cash in the success of Star Wars, as well as various British science-fiction television programs (and a rip-off of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon, to boot), there's nothing remotely original or interesting here. But Kane is at the top of his form. The art slips a bit as the series progresses (Kane must have realized it wasn't worth the effort), but overall his work is superb. It's too bad he wasn't paired with a worthier partner. For fans of Kane's work, though, it's worth trying to track down. I have the old Tempo edition, but I suspect the ACG comic book presents the strips in a slightly larger format, and therefore might provide a better view of Kane's art. WARNING: Don't mistake this newspaper comic strip with the two novels that followed it. Star Hawks: Empire 99 and Star Hawks: The Cyborg King are novels written by Goulart and (scantily) illustrated by Kane. Both were published by Playboy Press and are, of course, out of print. I mistakenly purchased The Cyborg King, thinking it was another volume of the strip, and was disappointed. Kane's art here is just plain shoddy, and after plodding through the original strip, I was not inclined to even try to read Goulart's novel.

Roy Thomas, Gil Kane, and Jim Woodring, Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung (ExPress, 1997—Originally published by D.C. Comics between 1989 and 1991. Purchase from Amazon.com.)

The Slings and Arrows Comic Guide: A Critical Assessment of over 2,500 Titles says, "[...] Thomas manages to retain a sense of the poetry behind the plot, and Gil Kane's dynamic artwork brings the fantastic elements to life in ways that the stage couldn't emulate. [...] Kane's artwork is perhaps too overwrought in places, but Jim Woodring's subtle colouring helps to create an appropriately heroic but tragic atmosphere." "Overwrought"!? Oh, that it were so! The fact is that the drawing—or at least the inking—is downright shoddy throughout most of the work. Kane puts his best work into the first book, but after that it all goes down hill. Same with Thomas' prose. The first pages are wonderful; just try reading them out loud. The meter is almost flawless. I couldn't stop reading...until, well, I could. This was at the end of Book Three ("Siegfried"), by which time Kane's art had become so sloppy, and Thomas' prose so unremarkable (yet hokey), that I couldn't bring myself to turn another page. As for Woodring's coloring, maybe it looked good on newsprint, but on the glossy paper of the graphic novel it looks downright gaudy. The fact that the egocentric, cruel, and witless "heroes" and "heroines" of Wagner's epic look like cookie-cutter Barbies and Kens, while the dwarfs and giants they betray, humiliate, and murder are drawn with individuality and care, is one of the interesting paradoxes of this work. If it was intended, it was brilliant, but it doesn't make up for what is mostly hack work. Dammit, Kane, couldn't you have shown us your full potential just once!?

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell (Eddie Campbell Comics, 2000—Purchase from Amazon.com.)

One reader gave this book two stars on Amazon.com. He had two complaints: 1) Alan Moore is pretentious, and 2) the theory on which this story is based has been discredited. In response to the first point, I would only say...Yeah? So? What does that have to do with the book? Pretentious is as pretentious does, as Forrest Gump might say. Pretentious is what we call someone whose intellectual or artistic "presentation of self" is not backed up by substance. I'm no Alan Moore sycophant (as you'll see when I write my reviews of Tom Strong and Promethea), but Moore and Campbell show plenty of substance here. As for the second complaint, this reminds me of people who complained about the "historical inaccuracies" in James Clavell's Shogun, to which Clavell is said to have responded, "I made it up! It's a novel!" If you're someone who thinks there is really a point in trying to solve a serial murder case more than a century old, there are many volumes out there whose authors try to do just that. From Hell is not such a book. From Hell is essentially an intellectual exercise, exquisitely wrought. If that kind of thing doesn't flip your skirt, well, this may not be the book for you. It took me a few pages to get used to this book's visual and textual style, but once I did I couldn't put it down. U.S. $28 is a bit steep, but even if you don't like it, it'll look impressive on your bookshelf: bold red letters on a wide (572 pages!) black spine declaring "FROM HELL." This might be the best graphic novel I've ever read in English.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (Warner Books, 1996 [1986]—Purchase from Amazon.com.)

This is the only "superhero" graphic novel I would seriously recommend to someone who has never read and has no interest in superhero comics. I know there are those who try to hook "non-believers" into the superhero genre with Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and other so-called "classic" superhero graphic novels, but this seems to me a pointless effort. The last thing we need is to keep the superhero genre on life-support by recruiting new fans. Watchmen stands out from the crowd, because it is a graphic novel that uses the superhero genre as a motif to address themes that have nothing to do with superheroes. My understanding is that D.C. acquired the copyrights to a whole stable of obscure characters from the defunct publisher Charlton, and Moore saw this as an opportunity to do something very fresh by using characters that were so stale D.C. wouldn't care what he did with them. As it happened, though, there were one or two characters in that stable (such as the Blue Beetle) in whom D.C. saw some marlet value, so Moore ended up creating new characters who were largely based on such Charlton characters as Captain Atom (who becomes Doctor Manhattan), Peacemaker (Comedian), the first Blue Beetle (the first Night Owl), the third Blue Beetle (the second Night Owl), etc. Saying that Watchmen is like a Thomas Pynchon novel is like saying frog legs "taste like chicken," but that's the best I can do. For a book less than 400 pages long, it's incredibly dense and complex. It's also thought-provoking and often stunningly clever. (Some might even say "pretentious." ^_^ ) Dave Gibbons art at first seemed to me stiff and nondescript, but after rereading it I see that it is perfectly suited to the content in a way that a more dynamic, more "superhero-ish" style would certainly not have been. There's more depth to Gibbons contribution than may be obvious on a first reading. Highly recommended.

Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (Warner Books, 1995 [1982]—Purchase from Amazon.com.)

The only English-language graphic novel that ever made me weep. (Plenty of manga have made me weep, though.) Can't think of higher praise than that. The art is a bit of an acquired taste (at least it was for me), but once you acquire it, you're hooked. By this point in his career, I think Moore had begun to trust his artists to convey what could be conveyed visually (which was certainly not the case in that much-raved-about Swamp Thing run he did. This is essentially a poetic musing on the nature of nation-states from an anarchist point of view. If, like me, you're an anarchist (or even just interested in anarchism) and also happen to like poetic musings, you'll probably like this. If poetic musings of any kind don't flip your skirt, you probably won't like this. If you like poetic musings, but are antagonistic to anarchism, you may still find this stimulating. If you're a libertarian, and come away from this book thinking "V" is a libertarian, you've missed the point. Go back to "START," do not collect $200.

Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, 300 (Dark Horse Comics, 2000—Out of print already!? Can this be true!? Try Amazon.com anyway.)

A poetic musing on the nature of nation-states from a libertarian point of view. If, like me, you are antagonistic to libertarianism, but like poetic musings, you'll probably find this stimulating. If poetic musings of any kind don't flip your skirt, you might still go in for the plot and the violence (two things Miller does very well). If you're a libertarian, and also like poetic musings, this may make you weep, and what more could you ask for? If you're an anarchist, and come away from this thinking it's about anarchism, you need to rethink the meaning of anarchism. Go back to "START," collect $200 to pay the rent. And do something about your hair, will you?

I know: It's an extremely eclectic selection at this point, but who wants another review of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns? I'd rather talk about books neglected by others, or shed new light on titles that have already been pigeonholed. Much more to come!!