Taking an appreciative look at movies in which a toilet is used as a weapon or for other non-evacuatory purposes (a comic-sized book)
Well, would you look at that?! Them “Propheteers” are at it again. This time they’ve got a Kickstarter campaign to fund a book called “Hot Commode-ity”
I say it’s worth checking out, I mean, it has: @popgunwar, @sandra-lanz, @sayunclecomics, @chipperwhale, @simon-roy, and @royalboiler involved in it, AND it has @ramonvillalobos, @wookjinclark and @effalope, so it sounds beautiful to me.
Check it out, give it a buck, share it with friends, see what happens. I think you’re going to like what you see.
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I think since the Fourth of July is a travel day, that means I’ll be sidestepping the holiday altogether. It’s such a hot, dusty, crowded holiday sometimes and we’re sliding toward authoritarianism right now, so skipping it seems fine. But it doesn’t work out like that on the Coastal Starlight Amtrak train from Salem to Seattle.
By the time we cross the Columbia River and head up into Western Washington, I’ve abandoned my seat in coach and am stationed in the sightseeing car. On those big trains that come all the way up from L.A., the coach cars feel like dormitories. People are really camping out in there. There’s little babies, and odors, and sleeping bags. More than half of the curtains have been pulled shut. The sightseeing car is full of light and windows, with the seats facing out.
A couple of volunteer park rangers are narrating what we see out the windows. They have a lot of good information about rivers, the industrial stuff we pass, ships taking grain to Hong Kong, steel plants. Osprey nests. Local history. It’s a bit cheesy at times, but I enjoy the narration of the ride, and it’s kind of cute how many people are happy to be talked at by the old duffers in vests.
Different people sit around me and then depart. They half listen, half talk amongst themselves. A young man in head to toe Seahawks gear sits down awkwardly in the seat next to me for a while. I take him to be Middle Eastern. Two young Asian women across the aisle seem to just be getting to know each other. I catch snippets of their conversation. “It can be hard. Do your parents speak English?” “No, do yours?”
I wrote this for the Fourth of July… an outcropping of my never-ending thoughts (and never-ending blog at the only way out is through) on the U.S. and our current national emergency.
About a year after U.S. politics ate my interest in comic books, I found myself sitting outside Vancouver Comic Arts Festival, studying a Ben Sears print. It had been the longest, shittiest winter in a hundred years and now I was in the sun, staring at a picture like a child.
I had decamped that morning from Seattle to Vancouver, which is both foreign to me and closer to my original home in Alaska. Trump had decamped to Saudi Arabia. Between the two, my constant IV drip of political news had dried up. My phone didn’t work that well in Canada, so I couldn’t even text anyone for a secondhand hit. The Asian stock markets wouldn’t re-open for another 24 hours. No information was coming in except the colorful details of the Ben Sears print in my hands.
Being in an unfamiliar place in new sandals gave me a feeling from childhood that I’d forgotten. There’s liking yourself, and there’s being all right with the world. As adults we try to do both those things and be reasonably happy. But sometimes when you’re a little kid you have this sensation of liking yourself in the world. Liking the places where you and the world touch.
So that’s where I was, with the sun warming my back and bright artwork in my eyes, when my boyfriend tapped my shoulder and said, “We have to go to this panel—not enough people are showing up!”
I hurried inside with him, out of the sunlight and into a small, dark auditorium. In a pool of light, a woman my mother’s age and a man about my age sat at a table. The woman was Katherine Collins, and the man was Brandon Graham. He was interviewing her about her life and career, and her return to actively working as a cartoonist. A collection of her Neil the Horse stories was being republished in a thick volume after a long hiatus. She held her Neil the Horse book parallel to the table and let it drop with a thud. “That’s my favorite thing about this book,” she said. She had a deep, wry voice and as soon as she spoke, I wondered if she had worked in radio.
The conversation started with her youth and her cartooning inspirations. I didn’t get the cartooning references, but I liked that she set workmanlike goals for herself when she was 9 years old. I liked that she was competitive and bluffed her way into a radio gig even though she didn’t have experience at the time. Among many other things, Katherine adapted old comic strips to radio skits. She said, “All the other people in the skits were much better than me, but I didn’t care. Because I wrote them.”
I didn’t know what Katherine and Brandon were talking about half the time, about cartooning and the CBC, and the scene in Vancouver and Toronto. It was like listening to BBC World Service when you can’t sleep, and letting the enjoyably unfamiliar flow past you. They talk about cricket and you stare at the ceiling knowing nothing about cricket, clenching and unclenching your toes.
When I was a kid, I tried to hear BBC English as a foreign language, reduced to the aesthetics of sounds bumping up against each other, and the texture of voices. We only got one FM station up and down the radio dial—it was static soft and hard everywhere else. That was the local community radio station, relayed by receivers on mountain tops to tiny logging camps and roadless fishing villages. There was also one station on the AM dial—a rightwing commercial Christian radio station.
At night I’d troll slowly through the static on both dials, listening for changes, trying to sift voices out of the noise. Once in a while, if conditions were just right, the CBC came in from somewhere. It was as if aliens made contact, me cross-legged on my bed in the dark, absorbing wisdom from another culture. But the next night, and the nights after that—no more CBC. Just fuzz.
Katherine said, “I’ve always had a great capacity for ignoring things I’m not interested in. It’s called being a snob.” This is the sort of bitchily quotable thing my Grandma Ann was always saying. She had a presence and a deep voice like Katherine. She even had a similar handsome look, with a strong nose and pleasing facial planes.
Ann was big-chested and rangy at the same time. From my bedroom perch, I watched her loping up and down the cannery dock throughout the 1980s. She was a jack of no trades. She did all right as a housewife but wasn’t into it. She was a little disorganized. She helped with her husband’s business and she raised three kids as well as her personality would allow. She liked her grandkids, but not excessively. She scribbled in notebooks. She liked novels, the newspaper, baseball on television when she could get it. She liked playing cards. She was sardonic and opinionated and mellow and mirthful. She walked her dog, admired her cat, and knew the names of wildflowers. She was probably depressed. She was hard on herself in a way that cut other people down too. Ann’s potential was unfulfilled, like everyone else’s I knew, but she had an air of just being and that seemed like more than enough at the time. Nobody at her memorial suggested that she’d been kind, and I was glad they didn't lie just because she was dead.
Katherine isn’t like Ann at all. Besides being a generation younger, she had and has direction, and passion, and ambition. She made Neil the Horse, and she interviewed comic book and cartooning greats on national radio. She wrote songs for a musical version of Neil the Horse that she produced. She was and is the voice of Neil the Horse. And then she'd been sidelined from that by life, circumstances, the publishing world, animation studios. In the early 1990s, when she was in her early 40s, she said she could no longer get published. Katherine said, “It’s kind of sad and ironic and irritating that I was stopped doing my work back when I had momentum."
I’m going on 40 and I feel like I haven’t worked up that initial head of steam yet. I’m low energy and inefficient, I lack confidence and am an all-around foot-shooter. If I were in Alaska, it would matter less. If I were fifty years ago, I would have had a family along the way. I could have been like my grandmother but I was trying to be like Katherine, and falling through the gap between them.
Katherine is trying to get that productive part of her life back, but has less energy and more health problems now. She’d just been granted a big award in Toronto. She said, “Now I have to come alive again and do the work I’d hoped to do.” She said she might only have about fifteen minutes before she keeled over. She was joking, sort of, but she’d been sick and the people in her family tend to get Alzheimer’s and check out by 80.
A man in the audience asked her what she’d done since the 1990s. Even if she didn’t get published, was she still working—did she have a backlog of work to bring to light? She had an answer about a half-finished graphic novel but I understood that she had just been living life and sometimes that’s the thing that takes you away from your work. Meanwhile, you watch people fall off the edge of the world and disappear, and you feel yourself getting older and closer to the edge.
When Katherine said, “The next thing is to see if I can actually do it,” it bolsters me. I need to see other people lack confidence so I know to muddle on despite my own lack of confidence.
She’s going to do more Neil the Horse, but she talked about the contrast between a singing, dancing horse and the state of the world. “The human race is exhibiting the worst characteristics all over the place,” she said. She wants a different point of view than before. “I don’t want it to be somber, but I want it to be a little more aware of what’s happening in the world.”
I don’t want to be somber either, but every day I’m shellacked. All day I feel the fact that we’re living through a national emergency. I listen to political podcasts, show up to marches, attend meetings, and shell out more than I can afford for human rights and life on earth. At night I religiously blog the headlines and the press briefings in a hit and miss, scrapbooky way. I keep this blog under the radar because I work with Republicans in a conservative industry. Still, every few nights a maudlin personal essay finds its way in. I’m flying off the handle and white American men will feel the heat of my scorn.
What I haven’t done is anything else. No Wednesday trips to my local comic book shop. No reading floppies on the bus ride home. No reading comics on a bench by the lake and scribbling notes. No reviewing, no blogging, no musings about comics.
Katherine reminded me of something I did know before—anything you want to say about the world you can say in a cartoon, even one featuring a singing, dancing horse. And more than that, writing about comics was never just an escape for me. Anything I wanted to say about the world, I could say it in essays about comics. Not in a direct, social justicey way. But just about these lives we lead and the things that hit our eyes on the way down.
(P.S. I learned later that night that Katherine Collins is a transwoman who previously published under the name Arn Saba. Although this information did round out my understanding of her childhood and the first part of her career, this essay is just about my experience of watching her and listening to her that afternoon when I didn't know.)
I listened to a slew of political and news podcasts today, including NPR Politics. They play a circus march, Teeter Board: Folies Bergere as their intro and outro music. It’s disturbingly jaunty, retro, nostalgic, and wholesome. I suppose it’s sinister too, if you consider clowns. Still, to me it always comes across as NPR trying to pretend that shit’s not on fire.
An iconic old guy in our town had a radio program on Sunday mornings, on which he would read the weekly newspaper aloud from cover to cover, add a layer of ad lib editorializing, and play pop songs of the 1940s. His theme music was The Stars and Stripes Forever by Sousa. He and the editor of the newspaper were both cronies of the cartoonishly deep-voiced and perturbing doctor/mayor in town, who my dad was so often at odds with. So this reading of the newspaper on air on Sunday mornings was not always a peaceful aural presence in our home. Sometimes the radio host or the newspaper would refer to my dad as the mayor’s “arch rival” or “nemesis” and my dad would bristle at the framing. Once he shouted at the radio, “You’re a WHORE!” Such was my early training in politics and media.
Anyway, the theme music of NPR’s jaunty politics podcast takes me back to that other show. I should mention that we kids loved that show. We loved the songs: Charlie My Boy, Don’t Bring Lulu, Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. We ate them up like only children starved for pop culture in tiny Alaskan towns will do. And we found the harrumphing and paper rustling amusing. We liked it when this old guy said inappropriate things about townspeople we knew. A LOT of the time, it had nothing to do with us. Although once he did mention my sister and me, and said we were lovelier by the day. My mom got this look on her face like “Keep Their Name Out Your Mouth.”
Once in grade school, I happened across this old man in the street. I smiled and said hello. Just as I passed, he whacked the backs of my knees hard with a long umbrella. I was gangly and clumsy and my knees buckled. In his oldest, wobbliest years–I was away at school–he had an accident at the bookstore and my mother helped him to clean himself up, and called for someone to bring fresh clothes. A strong sense of decline and mortality is another thing small towns are good for.
Mirror #1 begins a story of colonization, animals with human qualities, and a mixture of science, magic, and politics. Emma Rios and Hwei Lim give Mirror #1 confidence. Confident stories don't rush to explain, defend or demonstrate. They trust that we will see the whole picture before we lose patience. They trust in their own ability to give us the information in the order we'll need it. There's a lot going on, but we'll get there. And we can latch on emotionally from the first pages.
There are two main things to grab hold of in Mirror #1. First, the dog-girl Sena and the mage Ivan loved each other as children and now they aren't even friends. Sena's dogness makes this undone loyalty cut to the quick. A flurry of scenes give us a glimpse of catastrophe in their adolescence. A phrase rings out twice, first as a threat: "I'll turn invisible and run away." Then, a plea: "Turn invisible and run away!"
The second thing to latch on to is that the little rat-woman Zun has to be brave and take on hard and dangerous tasks for the greater good.
Hwei Lim's watercolors underwrite the floating, trusting confidence of Mirror. She gives us circus imagery and sadness. Softness and primary colors. The love of a boy for his dog against a sterile backdrop of cages and lab gear. Strong black lines that are rounded, incomplete, floating in white space and washes of color.
Lim's figures have the quickness of costume designs--unassuming, economical, fluid. Then the figures speak and Rios nails us to the wall with clean, simple dialogue.
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After reading Scarlet Witch #4, I can’t ignore your writing anymore. There’s no shame in needing to get better at writing. I need to get better at writing. My blog posts need editing, but I don't get paid and I only have a few readers. You, on the other hand, have a lot of readers. As a writer for Marvel, you’ve achieved more writing success than I have. You’ve hustled to get where you are, you’ve put yourself out there, you’ve met your deadlines and you’ve completed your tasks. You’ve given it a shot. You’re a writer.
You’ll need to work harder if you’re going to keep up at Marvel, though. Matt Fraction, Willow Wilson and Tom King have been roaring down the tracks. They’re making it look easy. They’re telling stories so tight and seaworthy that Marvel can say “suck it, Image Comics intelligentsia.” Your writing on Scarlet Witch is like Marvel saying “Comic book readers are kind of idiots anyway.” Or maybe just “No one gives a shit about Scarlet Witch. Let’s really phone this one in.”
After reading Scarlet Witch #4, I put together a list of things to work on:
Words: how many and which ones.
Scarlet Witch #4 is loaded with words, but the ratio of words that mean something to total words is low. This clogs up the works and makes you look like an amateur. Here are some filler words and phrases that you lean on heavily: Although, though, certainly, if I’m truthful, oh, it does seem as if, most notably, it seems, it would seem, I confess, here is where, honestly, that is, I suppose, more accurately, I imagine, as I recall, actually, I’m sure, whereas, apparently. This kind of speech is common in the office world, especially when someone is a) insecure about their intelligence or b) trying to obfuscate their true meaning and avoid being held accountable. So you’ve got a case of business-ese. I think you thought it would add a nice razzle-dazzle of formality or authenticity but you are wrong. It reads as if you originally thought you would make Wanda’s speech biblical or Shakespearean, and then someone was like “Wait. Hold on. Wanda is Roma, and she’s a witch, and this is a comic book. So let’s make her sound like middle-manager in Toledo who is trying to sound more educated than he is while breaking the bad news to the team about health insurance benefit changes.”
Try limiting the amount of word balloon space you’ll allow yourself per page. Usually when a writer is forced to make something shorter, it winds up being better. Then we could see more of the art and the art could do more of the talking.
Working dialogue to death.
The wordiness I mentioned above seems to be your way of trying to make people talking sound like people talking. But it’s backfiring. Agatha trails along endlessly dumping exposition into her dialogue. Wanda over-reports Every Single Feeling she has. She and Agatha have known each other for a long time. Agatha can probably read non-verbal social cues. And so can the readers. Let the art do some of the storytelling. Let Wanda and Agatha’s relationship breathe. And if you’re using dialogue as glue to make your plot followable, maybe your plot isn’t very sturdy.
(Interesting art from Chris Visions)
P.S. When your villain says "I love power" that is what they call "too on the nose."
Overdoing an accent.
Just because someone is Irish doesn’t mean we want to be beaten about the head and neck with a brogue.
The second example also shows an annoying sexist trope without proper sense of irony. So powerful and yet so flawed and broken, yadda yadda yadda.
Tone-deaf tone shifts.
Wanda has JUST had a jarring, life-changing encounter with the ghost of her mother. She’s beside herself. Two seconds later she’s saying “You mean bitch” saucily to Agatha. Makes no sense. Maybe, after getting silly on sidecars, Hellcat says “You mean bitch” in a teasy way to She-Hulk. MAYBE. And even then, I could see it landing with a thud. This just shows that you’re not feeling your own story beats (and maybe that you don't know how women talk to each other, girlfriend).
Notice how Agatha shifts right into dialogue as exposition again.
Neglect and mis-use of available themes.
This run of Scarlet Witch could mean a lot to a lot of people. Aging. Personal demons. Mother-daughter relations. Friendship. Sacrifice. The passage of time. Mortality. It’s so rich with potential themes that all you have to do is get out of the way.
And that’s the hardest thing—learning how to get out of the way. It takes imagination, restraint and skill. If you can learn to get out of the way of your artist, of your characters, of your themes, of your own writing, then you’ll finally be making it look easy. If you can’t learn to get out of the way of all that stuff, then you’ll have to get out of the way of someone who writes sharper and snappier than you do.
For awhile this giant book became just another surface, a substrate, and the life of my kitchen table was carried out on top of it. But then I had to enlist the book in my battle against light pollution. I barricade myself in each night. Between the book and the cardboard it came in, I can block a lot a light out.
But I have to keep going through this book. Ronald Wimberly, Matt Huynh, and Yuko Shimizu await me, deeper in. And though I am often too sleepy at night in my little apartment, I like communing with all these dream snippets.
David Petersen's Little Nemo page has an old-fashioned, vintagey feeling. I think these might be my favorite, because to me they are new and nostalgic at the same time. Unfortunately, it also seems to mean a racist imagining of Imp (again).
But we meet the Princess in a yellow dress.
Her father, the king, sends mice to pick up Little Nemo and the Princess who are out on a children's adventure. There is nothing too scary, and Nemo knows he is dreaming. He wants a lullaby to keep him asleep on his journey. He and the Princess are sweet little friends.
Then, on the facing page, Jonathan Tune and Eleanor Doughty (on colors) tell a very different story of a different kind of dream. It's the same Princess in her yellow dress, but she and Nemo are grown up now and their friendship has fallen on hard times.They are on opposite sides of a war. And through a moment's haste, a misunderstanding, she is shot.
Little Nemo doesn't know he's dreaming, and all the fantastic air ships his mind created turn to dust when he wakes up grieving over the Princess.
In David Petersen's page, the dream whimsy is contained and defined in clean inking and neat colors.The fantasy is safe for children. The orderly, carefully described fur of the mice contrasts with the looser inks and water colors of Tune and Doughty's page. In the war story, the underlying paper is nubbled, the pigment is washed and pooled. The shadows feel contaminating, hard to separate from the bright yellow of the Princess's dress.
These pages make me want to write a series of novels about these two growing up together, growing hardened, growing apart. Like the Harry Potter novels, the tone would deepen and become more emotionally complex from book to book.
(This is part of a series where I go page by page through a large Little Nemo tribute anthology that was published by Locust Moon Press in 2014)
Hair says so much in the first two issues of James Robinson’s Scarlet Witch run.
In Scarlet Witch #1, artist Vanesa Del Rey and colorist Jordie Bellaire frame Wanda’s face with rich dark chestnut waves. Her hair is glossy and full, but a sort of unified force, and full of inky shadows. Her hair is restrained in its power. Its warmth offsets the cool gray of her eyes and acts as an earthy neutral ground between Wanda’s reds and the grayscale of her city surroundings.
In Scarlet Witch #2, Marco Rudy gives Wanda’s hair a life of its own.
It can be chestnut or inky black or dashed with grey. It blows across her face a lot and becomes the gutters between panels. Now her hair represents her loss of control instead of her power. It shows mental and emotional disorder. I think it’s overblown. Too far, Marco Rudy. Too far. To me, his style blows around like Wanda’s hair. But the contrast between the two issues shows some of the different forms of energy that hair can telegraph.
I like that James Robinson is writing a Scarlet Witch series that is all stand-alone stories with a different artist for each story. Vanesa Del Rey and Jordie Bellaire so totally owned the character and story in the first issue, though, I'm not sure anyone else will be able to measure up. Right now it looks like issue after issue will come out, and we'll just sigh and think "Remember that time that Vanesa Del Rey and Jordie Bellaire drew Wanda Maximoff?"
I'm planning to follow the series because I like this sort of thing, where some variables (writer, character, letterer) stay the same and another (art) is switched. It's a good set up for story science. I also like stand-alone stories because I know now that the Del Rey/Bellaire issue is the one that will have to be the benchmark all the others are compared to. What I don't know is if I'm ever going to actually read the words.
I "read" the Del Rey and Bellaire issue several times, poring over the art, before I realized I hadn't actually read it. And then when I went back and consciously set out to read it, I just got bored and bogged down and wanted to stop. A lot of conversation, a lot of reflection, a lot of exposition -- and I couldn't latch on. The art is where it's at.
From the first pages, Del Rey (pencils & inks) and Bellaire (color) lock in this dusky aesthetic. There's the shadowy, magenta-bathed privacy of Wanda's home. And then there's the grey-scale grittiness of the city outside. In both places, Wanda's red clothing pops against the background and her face is made luminous and expressive with minimal linework.
There's a smudgy scratchiness to how Del Rey draws, but there's something sharp, accurate, and reliable about her art. Clean white gutters between murky panels, columnar panels like the canyons of the city avenues, chevron panels coming down in smart Vs like her heroine's angular nose and chin. And most of all -- and Bellaire contributes a lot to this -- the aesthetic creates an uninterrupted dream featuring a particular person in a particular place. You would think that is the definition of a story, but it’s not -- it’s the definition of a GOOD story. And that's why I don't care that I don't care about the writing. This is confident, intuitive visual storytelling, and will be a hard act to follow.
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With Ody-C #9 coming out in a few days, I decided to jot down a few thoughts on Ody-C #8.
When I wrote about Ody-C #6 a few months ago, I suggested that there was something off or untrustworthy about the storytelling. It felt so surreal and gimmicky, and the treatment of gender issues seemed... flip and baffling. Are we supposed to laugh at the dejected He in his gimp suit? Because it reads as silly, whether it was supposed to or not. Alternating He’s glossy little form with the stories of rape and death he was reading just made the whole issue into a confusing stew of uncomfortable images.
Ody-C #8 is a story within a story again, but it's easy to follow its one faithful thread all the way through. We learn about these blood-thirsty brother kings and how they perform the ritual rape and slaughter of virgins. The country's young people were being raised up like livestock to fulfill this bloodlust. Fraction and Ward are straightforward about showing that the victims of this are both male and female. They convey that men and boys are rape victims too, without getting cute about gender-bending and gender roles.
Ward illustrates the humanity of the victims clearly -- from the fear on their faces, to the way one woman reaches down to help the person behind her who has fallen. When one of them actually tries to run, the furious reds and pinks are replaced with the cool blues of night time and the coldness of both the prey's fear and the predators' focus.
Her vivid, fearful face is contrasted with the expressionless, featureless faces of the men who are just watching, from lighted windows above. These aren't even the men who are going to rape and kill her. They're just the ones watching and doing nothing.
But what this issue does next is close this circle of humanity. The brother-kings have turned into deranged, power-hungry killers and they have created an entire rape culture that men are enmeshed in as well as adolescent victims of both sexes. Because this girl happened to be descended from a god, the men are haunted by what they have done. Now Ward draws the humanity into their faces.
One man is shown lying awake next to a woman, like a normal man and wife. This perfectly brings home the point that rapists are normal people, normal husbands and fathers and boyfriends. And rape culture is perpetuated by an even wider circle of completely normal people. In these moments, Fraction's high-flying prose and Ward's fantastical art both circle down to earth. The quietness is more powerful than the screaming red slaughter scenes that I didn't want to include here (though of course they are beautiful too, because: Christian Ward).
The prose and the illustrations both lift off again as we see the men obsessively digging up the girl’s bones, which have multiplied to become an infinite number of bones. They are compelled to build towers and walls out of the bones -- monuments to rape that also serve as a prison that the men can never leave and never stop building.
This is the hardest-hitting comic book treatment of rape that I've seen, including in more overtly feminist series like Bitch Planet. It feels unstintingly brave and, frankly, magnificent.
As soon as I got home from work, I took this daylight photograph of my houseguest Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream laid out on my kitchen table by the window. The way my journal goes with this page has given me outsized pleasure.
Like the best dreams, Andrea Tsurumi makes the mundane surreal and the surreal mundane in her contribution to Locust Moon's Winsor McCay tribute anthology. She takes a simple play on words and flips it into the most charming, distinctive, and weirdly classic page in the book so far. Two mammaried oddballs guide -- or maybe shanghai -- Nemo on this adventure in Slumbraland.
We look down on the scene of the department store floor as these three figures wander through and cross paths with an array of breasted feminoids. Bras and department stores do stretch back just about to Winsor McCay's time a century ago, making this scene both modern and vintage. Tsurumi also strikes a perfect vintage note with her matte pastels (pitched down a step) and her clean noodly lines. Her art reminds me of boomerang formica tabletops:
Tsurumi makes all the bras taupe and telegraphs "fun" by using squiggly lines instead of bright colors. This is how she keeps her whole page locked into a handful of carefully selected hues but still makes it seem so vivid and alive. The color scheme is distinctive, disciplined, and pleasing--the playful black lines neatly corral each flat shape. The page is full of uncluttered movement as a cheerful, anxiety-inducing tangle swallows up Nemo.
Surrounding this little boy with breasts and bra jokes might seem daffily subversive but it's also just what happens to little kids obliged to tag along after mothers and older sisters. It's along the lines of the neighbor woman nursing her baby on the porch on a hot day -- no big deal. This is classic childhood stuff, just the usual nibbling at the edges of the adult world that sometimes turns into a Fourth of July dunking booth. It's a page that's funny because it's true, and funnier because a woman made it as a humorous shrug and a roll of the eyes. That authenticity also makes it laugh-out-loud funny when Nemo takes a peek under his nightshirt in the lower right, "waking-up" corner of Tsurumi's page.
Island is an Image project that Brandon Graham and friends put together. It's part anthology and part comics magazine, and it's full of treasures. Island #6 will be in comic shops next Wednesday (January 27) but today I'm looking back at the first and second issues, which included the chilling, warming, red-inked tale "I.D." by Emma Rios.
I.D. opens with three strangers meeting in a coffee shop in a future that feels familiar. They are all part of a pilot program to have their brains transferred into new bodies. The story quickly zooms out to show a Mars colony beset by political unrest, then zooms all the way back in to the insides of each character's mind, and the smallest moments between them, and the touch of their skin against surfaces. All of it is in red. Some of it is in the stark red and white of a china pattern. Some of it is in the dusty pinks of Mars. In the first panels, the two men learn that prickly 50-something Charlotte is a writer. Themes of the wry, observant writer are spun throughout I.D., turning the story into a fantastic literary mic-drop by Emma Rios, a woman who is largely known as a visual artist.
Charlotte, Mike and Noa start to talk--with awkwardness, diffidence and sparks of chemistry.Each has his or her own reasons for wanting a new body--and none of them thinks the others would understand.
The world beyond their restless broodiness soon comes crashing in--on the television, and through the glass windows of the coffee shop. Rios's art pivots from quiet eavesdropping to slashing, furious shapes and lines. After a dizzying stream of action panels, the three manage to get away from the protesters and militarized police. It's the chaos, not the conversation, that makes them intimates. And this leads to a strange night in Charlotte's apartment, with more conversation, emotion, and hi-jinks. It's the ultimate sleepover.
But all the while, there is this bone-chilling awareness that they are planning to let their bodies die. It's a cold current running underneath the human warmth we see developing between the three. When they part the next morning, Rios wraps us around Charlotte alone in her apartment. We curl like Charlotte's fingers around her cup of tea. Every solitary, visceral moment is allowed to pass in real time. And then she begins to write.
One of the things that makes this story immediately great is that Rios has the restraint to go small when everything big is happening. It's taking place on a partly terraformed Mars, in a time of popular uprisings against an oppressive class system, in a future where science has advanced to the point where your brain can be extracted and put in another body. It is terrifying. And still everyone is just locked in their own skin and in their own experiences, trying to connect through a hailstorm of identity issues.
(I accidentally lapsed into re-cap mode, but there is much more to the story beyond what I described--the disturbing political and scientific details of the program, the outcomes of the psychologically and physically risky surgeries, and of course the arcs of the relationships between Mike, Noa, and Charlotte. Which is all to say, go get Island #1 and #2, and generally get into Island because this is the caliber of work that the series includes.)
There were a couple of Marvel sequences recently that made me think "this is why I read comics." Even though the pages are in two different series with two different artists, they are both colored by Jordie Bellaire and they both feature the white-haired witch, Agatha Harkness. In both cases, we see how a limited palette shows off what Bellaire can do--and how heavily Bellaire contributes to the integrity of the stories she works on.
Scarlet Witch #1 opens quietly with Vanesa Del Rey's dark, scratchy lines soaking up Bellaire's moody colors. Agatha, in ghost form, is talking with her protege Wanda.
Agatha is dry, sardonic, and all in blue gray. Her coloring matches Wanda's sad eyes. Wanda's red dressing gown strikes a minor chord with the magenta of the room. These rich bloody colors work with James Robinson's dialogue to drench the panels in a feeling of privacy and the bond between two women.
In The Vision #3, we go back in time to when Agatha was alive. She and her familiar are performing a ritual to see into the future. The mood immediately shifts along with the time and place because the colors are so subdued after pages and pages of the Vision family's bright green hair against their red skin. The Agatha panels start quietly enough.
The dimmer palette accentuates Gabriel Hernandez Walta's inking in a way the earlier pages, bulging with color, don't. It's a sort of nakedness. Tom King's narration carries through the scene, moving at a different pace--on a different path--than the pictures. The boxes have been magenta all along, but now they seem to presage Agatha's appearance.
As the Agatha panels turn vicious and bloody, the red/magenta juxtaposition appears again--and again it speaks to intimacy between Wanda and Agatha.
The bloodshed reminds us of another supernatural white-haired woman Bellaire colored: Alice in Image's Pretty Deadly by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios.
With a few colors, Bellaire both heightens Rios's lines and stays out of their way. It's one of those things that looks easy when done right--but if everybody could do it, these books wouldn't stand out from the field as much as they do.
(January 17, 2016. Reading Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream. Part Something of Many)
It's important to have fun with objects, and I am having the most fun I've had since I bought a manual typewriter in 2012.
Today's nod to Little Nemo is a crowd-pleaser, and I never miss a chance to be among a pleased crowd. The bull's eye look of Peter Hoey & Maria Hoey's page was already familiar to me because it shows up in a lot of marketing materials for the book. The dream story they tell is serviceable, but the real deal with this page is that it looks good at a glance. It goes down in a big glug. It's eminently quaffable. Clean black lines. Thick white gutters. Creative paneling decisions that don't get tangled. Dark teal dominates the page, with pops of muted red. Not too much is said (what a relief some days, huh?) and what is said is in big clear block letters.
I took a photo from above the page--and even on my phone, with crap lighting, the picture turned out crisp, clear, and legible. So much so that it didn't seem sporting to include that picture! So here is this one instead.
In our next installment, we get excited about that business on the right by Andrea Tsurumi.
(Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream is a Winsor McCay tribute anthology by Locust Moon Press, which I am not affiliated with.)
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(In which I "review" a book with giant pages, page by page.)
Jeremy Bastian's contribution to this Little Nemo project is in black and white and full of pleasing details in the wall paper and around the edges of the panels. It's a few small things done lovingly. Bastian fleshes out the kernel of a dream--"there was a ship that was also a giant shoe... and I think the crew was insect pirates!"
His lettering and word balloons are unassuming, and they go well with Nemo's boyishness. Nemo isn't so much boyish as he is kiddish. His curiousity, his exclamations, the way he tips over the lip of the bath tub and into this dream--everything right up to and including his rumpled "Yikes!" when he wakes up in the last panel--everything is endearing. Everything makes us feel a little tender toward him.
If you think about it, you really only have the patience to hear the dreams of people you feel especially tender toward, like little children. "Any dreams last night?" my mom will ask my nieces at the breakfast table. Her eyebrows will be lofted in receptive encouragement and if one of them nods yes, she will start to beam. Not so for me; I have grown too far past that cherubic phase. If I started to tell my mom how I had to haul a casio keyboard up a slippery ladder to find a skein of yarn, her eyes would glaze over faster than you could say "rapid-eye movement."
I can think of one exception to the general rule that dream-reporting is a child's game. My friend Gina's entire family has a way with dreams and the telling of them. She recently texted me in the middle of the workday: "Uncle Ferd had a dream that he tried to google 'mayonnaise juice' on the piano."
(For this series, I’m reading the anthology Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream by Locust Moon Press. It’s a tribute to the newspaper comic strip by Winsor McCay, which came out over one hundred years ago and is still blowing people’s minds)
Since it was Obama's last State of the Union address, I went to the downtown public library last night to watch it on the big screen with my fellow citizens. I live-tweeted the address by scribbling on a legal pad which I then jammed into my shoulder bag.
A cadaverous white man to my right has feet up on the seat in front of him and keeps muttering "You creep! You weren't invited! No one wants you here!" Not sure who he is talking to.
When Obama comes in, the room claps heartily, and it's fun to feel like we are there. Biden looks so proud of Obama.
It's fun to see this just for Michelle's yellow dress, Ruth Bader Ginsberg hugging Obama with her bird arms, Elena Kagen looking pretty when she smiles, and Sonia Sotomayor's big dangling disc earrings.
The guy who was muttering about creeps sits up straight and takes his hat off when Obama appears on the screen. He seems ready to behave himself now.
Obama mentions the economic recovery and a beefy bearded white guy to my left says "Recovery? What recovery? Who recovered?" He sees me looking over at him and says "Did YOU recover??"
Obama says "...incredible things we can do together" and a man clutching a sleeping bag shouts "ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION!!!"
Titters in the room at Marco Rubio's face. Not sure why, but I get it.
There are clapping types in the room, and non-clapping types. Possibly not an indication of actual relative affection for Obama.
Obama says "...longest stretch of job creation..." and someone behind me shouts "for THEM, not for US."
People are floating in and out. The elderly, teenagers, homeless people. A lot of people seem to have luggage. The children's librarian leans in the doorway, looking blonde and willowy as she gazes up at the screen -- but this isn't a very white crowd.
Paul Ryan and Joe Biden share some kind of moment as Obama says we can cut red tape.
Bernie Sanders appears on screen -- whistles in the room!!
Huge applause line for the room: "Food-stamp recipients did not cause the financial crisis."
Comparing sputnik to climate change gets a chuckle from me and a couple of white guys who are that special brand of Seattle white collar, possibly may have just emerged from 3-day hike in the woods.
"Boston to Austin to Silicon Valley" -- if only this were the sort of speech where Obama could really lift-off and take flight.
"Joe is in charge of Mission Control" -- we can haz cancer cure?! Original muttering guy remains quiet and respectful.
Biggest laugh so far: the Joint Chiefs of Staff laboring stiffly to their feet as they simultaneously realize they're going to have to stand up, even though they don't feel like standing up.
Talking about terrorists now. "We have to take them out" gets a gospel-style "Oh yes" in the room.
Mad bearded white guy yells "Didn't we CREATE Isis, Obama? We did!" I hate that he has a point.
Mad white guy says "Sorry you guys, sorry, sorry"
Everyone seems either bored or uncomfortable during this long middle east section. The person I'd identified as the heartiest clapper in the room has become involved with a package of goldfish crackers.
Still talking about ISIL, and mad white guys says "There's a whole lot of coercion going on!" Slim regretful library employee pads up the aisle and gently asks him to be quiet.
Native American guy in safety orange wanders in and he and the mad white guy greet each other like old associates but don't sit next to each other.
Mad white guy claps with great enthusiasm at the line about stopping Ebola in West Africa, as if to show that he's cooperating now, and not just hate-watching, and also that stopping Ebola rules.
General coming and going continues. A skinny black kid in red track pants and gold chains saunters out as an old white guy in a giant sweatshirt and black watch cap wobbles in.
Obama's talking about leadership and international order as another guy gets up and walks out, throwing a black-power fist in the air in case anyone's watching.
Obama uses the Pope to bash Trump and says "We the people." A black man with an afro shaped like a pompadour has laid his things out carefully on the table near where the children's librarian leans. He is rearranging items from bag to bag, and because he's right down in front of us, it feels like a performance.
In the room, a woman fans herself with a big gold Japanese fan. On the screen, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, looks small and gnomelike peering over Michele Obama's shoulder.
Obama says something about people getting discouraged and thinking "the system is rigged" and the man directly behind me, who had been quiet the whole time, leaned forward and said calmly in a deep bass voice, "IT IS."
The room comes back to life a bit and gives a big hearty clap for "Each of us is only here because somebody somewhere stood up for us."
Obama wraps up by talking a lot about good and decency, but his optimistic words are falling flat in this crowd. Maybe it's just more of a stump speech and he'll be more inspiring again under different circumstances. Or maybe it's just hard to be sanguine about things working out just fine when you're in a crowd with a large homeless component.
A parting note near the end, something to hold on to, something we can really feel good about as we head back out to our bus stops in the rain: Edith Childs' glittering and substantial hat.
Postscript: Seriously considering going back next week to watch the big Seahawks game there.
