African American Graphic Novels

I got slammed by the start of Fall term, so I’m only now finding time to keep up my blog, but I have been reading some graphic novels.

I’ve been trying to decide on a graphic novel to include in an African American literature class I’ll be teaching in the Winter term.  Right now, I’m in the process of reviewing Harlem Hellfighters by Max Brooks & Caanan White and Panthers in the Hole by Bruno Cenou & David Cenou.  Harlem Hellfighters is based on the true story of 369th Infantry Regiment of African American soldiers who served and fought in WWI.  Panthers in the Hole is about the Angola Three (Robert King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace), who were members of Angola Prison’s chapter of the Black Panthers, and who each spent decades in solitary confinement.

In the case of the former, I’m wondering if the structure and handling of the story, including point of view, is literary enough given that it’s inclusion will knock out a more established piece of literature.  Then there’s also the consideration that Max Brooks (the writer) isn’t African American, but Caanan White (the illustrator) is.  What would be the politics of including a non-African American writer when the storytelling is as much in the visual rendering as it is in the plotting and writing?  I’ll mull such questions over while finishing Brooks’ & Whites’ book.

The latter consideration is amplified in the case of Panthers in the Hole, which is written and illustrated by two French artists, but which tells a very important African American story.  I do feel a responsibility to exposing students to the greatest breadth of actual African American writing as possible, so the only real pedagogical justification I can think for its inclusion would be to teach it at the end of the term and pose the question of African American authorship vs. African American story as a final essay project.  At this point, I’m leaning toward just sharing an excerpt for discussion and just assigning a smaller response paper on the same question, but I’ll see how I feel once I finish the piece.

I thought about including the Octavia Butler graphic novel adaptation, Kindred, by Damien Duffy and John Jennings, but since I plan on teaching her original novel, Kindred, I think that pretty much excludes any such thoughts.  If I were teaching on a semester system, I’d probably do it, but in a quarter system with 10 weeks to play with instead of 16, I think assigning both would be indulgent and detrimental to providing coverage of the breadth of African American literature.

What I would like to include is Mat Johnson’s & Warren Pleece’s Incognegro, which is about a light skinned African American journalist who is able to pass for white and who travels to the American south in the early 20th Century to investigate lynchings.  It would fit in nicely with how I’m currently planning out the class, given that I’ll be teaching Mat Johnson’s Loving Day and Nella Larsen’s Passing, both of which deal with light vs. dark skin color and identity.  However, Incognegro fell out of its initial publishing run and is not scheduled for republication until February, so do I really want to plan my syllabus around a book that isn’t even available yet?  For example, what would I do if it were delayed a month or even beyond the Winter term?

If you have other recommendations, please share them in the comments.

Also, I still have one or two more Wendy Pini posts that I had started working on before the start of Fall term knocked me off balance.  I still plan to finish those and post them.

 

Elfquest on Paper

One of the interesting things about visiting the Columbia archives and seeing Wendy Pini’s papers was actually seeing the paper.  I found the following image of pre-production work online in issue #21 found here.  While digital makes many things accessible, you can’t really see the paper.  Not seeing the paper, one might not think that it matters.

However, what I found fascinating was the amount of Elfquest artwork and ideas being worked out on lined notebook paper … the same kind with the three-ring binder holes, blue lines across, and the one red line down the side that I used to draw on when I was bored in high school.  You know the kind where if you draw in ink on both sides you can see the ink from the other side seeping through.

Looking down and seeing her work on that paper was a very grounding moment for me.  It made me feel more connected to Wendy Pini as an artist.  While I’m no great artist myself, it’s nice to see that no matter where we go with our drawings that many of us start our ideas out in the same place on the same kind of paper.

Researching Wendy Pini and Comic Con Culture at the Columbia Archives

I visited the Columbia graphic novels archive collections last week to conduct research on Wendy Pini and her development of Elfquest.  I also reviewed old Con programs to get a sense of Con culture from the 1960s to the 1970s.

More to say soon.  In the meantime, enjoy this vintage video of Wendy Pini staging her famous Red Sonja performance from the San Diego Comic Con in 1978.  One of her actual Red Sonja costumes is preserved for posterity at Columbia.

Hawaii’s First Superhero?

If you had asked me a month ago whether Hawaii had any superheroes, I might’ve shaken my head, but then I found this comic book in the five for a dollar bin when I took my kid to the local comic book shop, Emerald City Comics:

I bought it and read it, fascinated by this story arc of Superboy having local Hawaii roots, which came well over a decade after my time as a comic book reader.  After filling my head with the likes of Derrida, Kristeva, and de Lauretis, I was starting my professional career as a full-time college teacher when this issue was published.

However, reading this comic book brought back memories of Captain Honolulu, who hosted a cartoon show in the islands back in the 1960s.  When I was growing up, kids would form rings with their thumbs and index finger, invert their hands and place the rings across their eyes like a mask, Captain Honolulu style.  It made it hard to climb on the play equipment with no free hands during recess, but we had lots of fun pretending to be Captain Honolulu.

Then I remembered Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s 1993 song, “Maui: Hawaiian Sup’pa Man,” and indeed to many of us growing up in the islands Maui took on super heroic proportions, even if not on the colorful pages of the comic books at the local drug stores.  However, now my kid can watch a cartoon rendering of Maui alongside Moana in the animated feature, Moana.

So I guess I might have been wrong.  Hawaii does have some superheroes.

Second Readings

“And despite the brittle, choppy process of its creation, when the accumulated three or four days of work speed through the mind in the eight to ten seconds it takes to read, it will all, hopefully, acquire a peculiar fluidity, seeming to come ‘alive,’ right there on the printed page.”  — Chris Ware, from his Introduction to McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, No. 13.

Chris Ware goes through a pained description of the creative process of the cartoonist, spending hours on just one or two panels building into a process spanning days, and then he sums up the product of that work as passing through the mind of a reader in seconds, mere seconds in which the artist hopes the piece comes to life.

Just the other day, my kid asked me if I understood a comic strip from the Sunday funnies.  I hadn’t read it yet, and by the time I did and made sense of it, his nine year old attention span had moved on to other imaginative adventures.

A couple months ago, I read the following Sazae-san yonkoma by Machiko Hasegawa:

At the time, I was reading through Hasegawa’s volume at a pace akin to what I used to apply to the Peanuts volumes I used to check out from my elementary school library.  I thought I had understood the four panels and didn’t reflect on it further, quickly turning the page.  My reading of two months ago went thus:  Sazae-san tries to be helpful, but much to her chagrin she has instead created a problem.  That fits with the sub-genre, such that the fourth panel in a yonkoma usually offers a comedic twist or turn.

I was flipping through Hasegawa’s volume again the other day, and I was struck by my previous misreading.  I now noticed the cloud/steam rising from Sazae-san’s head, which along with her facial expression connotes disapproval.  At least one of the men is a foreigner, possibly both are tourists, and both of them are smoking–all or some of which may be contributing factors to her disapproval.  And I now see that she’s reaching into her vest and there is no item yet on the ground in the first frame.  This yonkoma breaks with form insofar as there’s no actual twist or turn; Sazae-san comes across not as hapless (as I may have initially perceived her) but as sly and intentional.

The time we often spend on understanding comics is perhaps a by-product of the larger cultural assumptions about their value.  Perhaps the next time we encounter a comic that proves baffling, we may want to spend more time with it instead of dismissing it, and those comics that we think we already know well, perhaps we should read again.  I know I will.

Graphic Irony

I’ve been reflecting on a form of dramatic irony that I see operative in both Art Spiegelman’s Maus and GB Tran’s Vietnamerica.  In both cases, the graphic storytellers present themselves within the narratives and show how they came to know their respective parents’ stories.  There’s a kind of disjuncture between the mastery and care with which the tragic stories of suffering caused by the Holocaust and the Vietnam War are rendered, and yet both authors/artists choose to present themselves as dismissive or uncaring toward their parents.

In the case of Maus, one such instance arises when his father is sharing his concerns about living alone and needing help with doing a home maintenance chore.  In response to the living alone concern Artie (as his father calls him) is mostly disengaged, and in response to the posing of the chore he seems to express irritation:

Something analogous occurs in Vietnamerica when Tran’s parents express to the young GB a desire for him to visit Vietnam and get to know something about the family’s past.  The young GB responds dismissively with a “pppffftttt” sound from his mouth, not even turning from playing his video game or offering a dialogue bubble worthy reply:

Moments like these recur in both stories.  Spiegelman’s maus-y avatar gets irritated at his father’s cheapness.  Tran’s younger self is put out when his father’s graduation gift to him is a book on the Vietnam War.  Yet the attitude of both authors/artists in rendering their parents’ stories is one of tenderness and respect, so the disjuncture between what we’re learning about the parents’ stories, including the care with which they are told, and the presentation of the authors as characters learning about those stories seems to be a form of dramatic irony.

Dramatic irony is most often associated with theater, cinema, and sometimes television.  For example, in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, when Torvald talks about Krogstad’s past crime and how such moral failings in a person in turn pollute their children, he is unaware that Nora (his spouse) hears his words differently because she has committed a similar crime.  The disjuncture is between the words of a character (Torvald) and the events that bend the meaning of the character’s words in ways that the character is unaware of (Torvald not realizing that he’s telling Nora that she is corrupting their own children, of which the audience is aware).  However, I think the form of dramatic irony operates somewhat differently in graphic stories like Maus and Vietnamerica, where the disjuncture is also between the graphic artists as storytellers and their presentation of themselves as seemingly uncaring toward their parents.

Part of the effect perhaps is one of relatability.  In both cases, most readers of Maus and Vietnamerica probably can’t fully comprehend or truly understand the magnitude of either the Holocaust or the Vietnam War, but we probably can relate to being annoyed by or irritated with parents who want us to help with chores or who want us to embrace their priorities, and on a level of scale we can then in turn better understand how such irritations and annoyances are by comparison trivial.

Watching Wonder Woman

This will be a short post.

One of the scenes in the new Wonder Woman movie jumped out at me, the one where Diana interrupts Steve Trevor while he’s in the Themysciran pool of water.  Steve covers his manhood.  Most online commentary I see on this scene focuses on the humor of Diana asking Steve whether he is a typical man, to which he answers that he’s above average.  However, what caught my attention is when she asks him what is that, and for a moment both Steve and the audience assume she’s referencing his manhood.  Then Steve and the audience realize she’s asking him about his watch.

The reason why the association of phallus and watch stands out for me is that it echoes a moment from Angela Carter’s short story, “The Company of Wolves,” wherein the phallus is associated with a compass:  “This young man had a remarkable object in his pocket.  It was a compass.  She looked at the little round glass face in the palm of his hand and watched the wavering needle with a vague wonder” (145).  In both cases, the female characters are presented as innocent and the watch or compass seems to reflect a different and new way of understanding or being in the world.  It’s as if narratively the feminine resides in a prelapsarian understanding of time and space.

Indeed, Themyscira the island seems to be a timeless space, and the intrusion of Steve and the Germans, all male, introduce a different kind of time, time as finite, resulting in the death of Antiope, as well as other Amazonians and the Germans.  Diana has spent her childhood here since the time of Zeus’ departure, and now that she’s a grown woman she feels compelled to move on.  The watch seems to represent a departure from feminine time/space and a movement into masculine time/space or a phallus defined world.  In both cases, that of Wonder Woman and the unnamed heroine of “The Company of Wolves,” survival seems to depend on not being defined and determined by that world.

On Comics and Audience

In his 1979 interview with Alfred Bergdoll for Cascade Comix, Art Spiegelman refers to comics a “fugitive medium,” saying that “it’s born of the sawdust, you know, rather than the fertile soil.”  He goes on to observe,

There’s a funny thing about comics which is that you’ve got to simplify your drawings because you’re working with, more often than not, sharp black and white.  You can’t even too successfully, usually, work in grey tones.  So you have to simplify drawings for that reason.  You also have the fact that most panels are very small so even if you’re drawing twice as large, you’re still working in an area that would be considered a very small etching, let’s say, with a maximum of five or six inches high.  And you also have the fact that you have to simplify the gesture to make it communicate quickly because it’s a kind of picture writing.  And you have the fact that you can’t fit that much text into any one panel, so you have to simplify your text and therefore, to do something really potent you have to suggest much, much more than you can actually state.  And in that sense, maybe comics have more in common with poetry than with prose.  And that’s merely a limitation that the medium presents …

While his “fugitive medium” comment  could be read as an expressing understanding of the limitations of comics as a medium, I think Spiegelman goes on to clarify that by adding “born of sawdust” he’s also talking about the audience expectations of comics at the time:

… but every medium has its limitations and it’s incumbent on the artist to deal with those and make the most of it.  Limitations can be turned to an advantage.  And on the other hand one, one of the problems with comics is, well, for one thing, they’re called comic strips so they’re expected to give you a boffo laugh, or I guess at most they’re expected to give you some escapist super hero entertainment or something, but they’re not really expected to do more than be a vehicle for mass medium entertainment.  So it doesn’t really attract artists to come along and grapple with the material because that’s not what it’s billed as.  And it doesn’t attract an audience who’s serious for the most part.  Serious audiences are probably at least as important as serious artists.

After Bergdoll points out that “there are not many more serious comics fans than there are comic artists, Spiegelman continues, “I think that the problem of audience is a major one.  It’s very important for people to be willing to stretch themselves to meet the work rather than to have the work poured down their sleeping, open gullets.”

Later, in his 1980 interview with Dean Mullaney for Comics Feature, Spiegelman discusses how prominent segments of the underground comics culture had begun to ossify, due in large part in his estimation to publishers responding to audience expectations that alternative comics were largely about sex, violence, and drugs.  With first Arcade and then the much larger format RAW, he and Françoise Mouly try to break away from historic expectations about graphic storytelling to foster a new audience and perhaps a fertile soil:

It’s just that we wanted to see a new context for the material.  And that’s RAW.  I think it exudes a certain kind of class and elegance.  I think it’s an interesting tension because comics, in America at least, are considered this real gutter medium.  To have that tension between an elegant format and a medium we’re used to thinking of as junk literature makes you look at the work in a different way.  The risk it runs is seeming pretentious.  The risk is worth it because it asks for an involvement on the part of an audience that’s much more intense than the audience is used to giving a comic.  That makes a different kind of work happen.  It’s one possibility of what we want to see happen to comics in the future, and we certainly want to explore it.

The supposition that fostering a new and differently engaged audience would foster and make more possible different kinds of work from comic and graphic artists is an interesting one.  After a back and forth with Mullaney, Spiegelman continues:

An important part of the equation that’s usually left out is that the audience is as important as the artist.  The audience determines what’s possible, and right now the audience expects and receives this stuff that you’re supposed to lean back and let hit you for a second, and then go away somewhere else.  Nothing is asked of you as an audience; you’re not asked to participate in a piece of work and give it your attention, give it your energy and thereby reap a far richer reward than you would from the kind of material that doesn’t require any effort.  Hopefully, we’ll find that kind of an audience.  We’d like to do real art that has an audience.

I’m drawn to Spiegelman’s thoughts about the role of audience and its importance to what can grow artistically within the medium of comics.  I think his observations could be used to build a framework with which to begin a class on graphic storytelling, which I do hope to develop in the coming year.  Getting students to look at expectations and assumptions can form an important part of first week pedagogy.

I’m still developing my formative thoughts on the importance of Con audiences and of cosplay community and culture, bubbling up through my last post, and I’m still reflecting on Bart Beaty’s art world idea as shared in my review of his book Comics versus Art, so I’m sure reflecting on audience roles and functions in the development of graphic storytelling will be a recurring theme of this blog.

Cosplay Community and Culture

Cosplayers at the Wizard World Comic Con in Portland (2017) share their thoughts about cosplay community and culture.

On Fumiyo Kouno

I was thinking some more on Saito Tamaki’s identification of the prevalence of beautiful fighting girls in manga and anime.  To be fair, Tamaki doesn’t really look at it as an issue of what gets represented outside of Japan.  And I’m not saying such representations aren’t popular in Japan, as they clearly are.  I think I see it more like this:  outside of the U.S., many people probably think of American comics as being about superheroes vis-a-vis the Marvel cinematic dominance (and the D.C. desire to become cinematically dominant).  While this is mostly true in the sense of what’s broadly popular in the U.S., Americans also have direct marketplace access to other types of comics, which are non-superhero oriented and offer something different in their storytelling.  The works of Robert Crumb and Chris Ware come to mind.  Japanese artists of analogous import are likewise worth knowing, but maybe we may have to be willing to step outside of what’s popular to get to know them.

For example, continuing in the vein of my last blog post, how many outside of Japan are familiar with Fumiyo Kouno’s Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms?  Kouno’s manga is an astounding work that offers a multi-generational tale of atomic bomb survivors and their experiences with shame, guilt, love, gender, and sexuality.  I’ll write more on it later, but if you don’t know it you should try to find a copy and sit down with it sometime.  It’s has no beautiful fighting girls, but it is a thing of beauty.