In my neighbourhood.

We saw this chap when we went for a picnic recently. He's a goanna, about the size of a small dog. He made love to female of the species who then lay there dead. We felt we should have done something about it instead of just watching, like stopping the bastard or something. Then after about a half hour, while we were wondering what authorities should be called, she pulled herself together, got up a shuffled off.

"But let me caution experimenters and would-be shitheads"

This is a passage from the second page. it's probably worth noting that the book was released in 1971.

We started everything young in the hills of southern New Mexico: smoking at ten, hunting at eleven, driving at twelve, drinking at fourteen, and if you were a virgin at sixteen you didn't admit it. As for me, I started inhaling at ten, but in every other respects pretty well followed the norm, including being a virgin at sixteen and denying it. We even had pot. A coarse grade of it proliferated as a local weed, along with skunk cabbage, morning glories and stinging nettle. personally, I shied away from marijuana, having been convinced by the Reader's Digest and other medical authorities that the stuff wa saddictive and would lead straight to hard drugs such as heroin, which was not indigenous and would cost money- a rare item among farm and ranch kids in the eraly thirties. (Once I concocted a sort of reefer, using coffee grounds, dried horse manure, and it gave intersting sensations: lightheadedness, nausea and a touch of magalomania. But let me caution experimenters and would-be shit-heads- there is no other possible word for it- that our horses ate mostly alfalfa hay and that thier offerings lay baking for weeks under a dry Southwestern sun. Satisfaction is likely to be less than complete in other climates.

© Bill Mauldin. 1971

FROM HELL 14/6 (Articulating pictorial space, part 2.)

An artist plots his way through pictorial space by putting one thing partially behind another. But what if there's no 'nother thing to put a thing behind? Or any receding straight lines with which to lead the eye through a readable perspective? This page of Alan Moore's From Hell script caused a murmur around my studio when we first read it. It required a 3-dimensional hole in the middle of the air some distance away, in the sky high over the sea, with blood issuing from it both toward and away from 'us'. I had the help of the upper and lower panels in establishing an exaggerated dramatic depth of field as well as locating 'up' and 'down'. To an extent you can depend on the white sky at the top of the second tier being read as continuation of the white sky in the first, even though we have now apparently moved some distance upwards, and the three horizons in the second tier being more or less continuous even though the altitude introduces curvature. Pictorial space on a multi-panelled page embraces simultaneous contradictions.


FROM HELL CHAPTER 14. PAGE 6. (673 words)
PANEL 1
NOW A FIVE PANEL PAGE. THERE IS ONE BIG PANEL ON THE TOP TIER, THREE SMALLER PANELS ON THE MIDDLE TIER AND THEN ONE BIG PANEL ON THE BOTTTOM TIER. IN THIS FIRST PANEL WE ARE LOOKING UPWARDS INTO THE BLINDING LIGHT OF THE BRIGHT MEDITERRANEAN SUN THAT HANGS ABOVE US IN A CLEAR SKY, WITH NO MORE THAN A FEW RAGGED AND RAPIDLY EVAPORATING WISPS OF CLOUD AROUND THE EDGES. THE LIGHT IS BLINDING. FLAPPING IN THE FOREGROUND AND BEYOND WE SEE A NUMBER OF SEA-GULLS, REMINISCENT OF THE DUCKS WE SAW ERUPTING IN A FLAPPING CLOUD IN THE LAST PANEL OF PAGE THREE IN CHAPTER TWO. HERE, HOWEVER, WE CAN NO LONGER SEE ANY SIGN OF THE BARGE, OR OF THE YOUNG WILLIAM GULL. WE ARE HIGH IN THE HOT SKY ABOVE THE AEGEAN SEA. IT IS 1888. THE GULLS FLAP AND WHEEL AGAINST THE BLINDING DISC OF THE SUN, UP ABOVE US.
CAPTION: Light. Ecstasy. the sun.
CAPTION: Where am I now?

PANEL 2.
IN THIS FIRST SMALL PANEL ON THE SECOND TIER IT IS AS IF WE HAVE SHIFTED OUR GAZE AWAY FROM THE SUN TO LOOK DOWN BENEATH US. FAR BELOW, WE CAN SEE THE GLITTERING AEGEAN, WITH ONLY GULLS AND A FEW WISPS OF CLOUD BETWEEN US AND THE SHINING WATERS FAR BELOW. UP TO ONE CORNER WE CAN MAYBE SEE PART OF THE COASTLINE OF ONE OF THE ISLANDS ENTERING THE PANEL, WITH A LINE OF SURF BOILING AND RIPPLING AROUND IT. FAR BELOW US, WE CAN SEE A COUPLE OF SMALL GREEK FISHING BOATS MAKING THEIR WAY ACROSS THE STILL AND SHIMMERING WAYTERS, LEAVING V-SHAPED WAKES BEHIND.
CAPTION: A knowledge comes to me that I am high above the glittering Aegean, and it is no longer 1896.
CAPTION: It is instead the year of my achievement. It is 1888.

PANEL 3
SAME SHOT AS LAST PANEL, LOOKING DOWN ON THE AEGEAN WITH THE FISHING BOATS MOVED ON ONLY A LITTLE SINCE OUR LAST IMAGE, AND THE GULLS LIKEWISE WHIRLING INTO NEW POSITIONS. UP IN THE FOREGROUND, HANGING IN EMPTY SPACE IN FRONT OF US, SOMETHING QUITE SMALL IS STARTING TO ERUPT OUT OF EMPTY AIR, AS IF FROM A POINT. IT'S SORT OF LIKE A SMALL AND SYMMETRICAL SQUIRTING OR SPLATTERING OF A DARK AND VISCOUS LIQUID, JUST ERUPTING FROM A POINT OUT OF NOWHERE, THE THICK LIQUID GOBBETS ALMOST LIKE THE RADIATING PETALS OF A TERRIBLE FLOWER.
CAPTION: I hover on the brink of form, incohate and ethereal, filled with a fierce, exultant joy I must make manifest.
CAPTION: I concentrate my being to a single, bloody point.

PANEL 4.
SAME SHOT, WITH THE BOATS BELOW AND THE GULLS MOVED ON ONLY A LITTLE. UP IN THE FOREGROUND, THE SPLATTERING POINT OF BLOOD HAS NOW GROWN MUCH BIGGER, BLOSSOMING INTO A HUGE AND EXTRAORDINARILY LIQUID ALIEN FLOWER OF MOVING, FLOWING BLOOD. WEIRDLY BEAUTIFUL AND SYMMETRICAL, LIKE A THREE DIMENSIONAL RORSCHACH BLOT, IT HANGS SUSPENDED IN THE SKY ABOVE THE AEGEAN, A VISIONARY MIRACLE HANGING THERE IN DEFIANCE OF GRAVITY AND PHYSICS. ITS SHAPE , THOUGH SYMMETRICAL, IS MONSTROUS AND IRREGULAR, GOBBETS AND BEADS OF THE THICK AND GLEAMING PLASMA HANG SUSPENDED IN THIN AIR ABOUT THE EDGES OF THE CENTRAL BLOSSOMING FORM, WHICH IS BOTH GORGEOUS AND APPALLING.
CAPTION: In rapture I explode, a scarlet cloudburst.
CAPTION: Fluids from Buck's row and Mitre square and Miller's Court, rich and sublime they flower against the blue Aegean sky.

PANEL 5.
NOW, IN THIS FINAL WIDE PANEL, WE ARE DOWN ON THE DECK OF ONE OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY GREEK FISHING BOATS BELOW. IT'S RAINING BLOOD. THE SAILORS GAPE UP AT IT IN FEAR AND ALARM; IN STARK BEWILDERMENT. THE HEAVY CRIMSON DOWNPOUR SPATTERS OFF THE DECK AND TRICKLES DOWN THE ARMS AND FACES OF THE HORROR-STRICKEN SAILORS. IT STAINS THEIR SHIRTS AND RUNS INTO THEIR FRIGHTENED STARING EYES. IT PUDDLES THERE IN THE UNEVEN TIMBERS OF THE DECK.
CAPTION: A pelting thunderhead of murder, here I sign my year of panics with appalling miracle.

Articulating pictorial space.

I t's ironic that the most freely available examples of the work of cartoonist Jerry Robinson, who has had a long and illustrious career, are the Batman stories he ghosted under Bob Kane's name. He gets a royalty for them, so I guess he doesn't mind talking them up, as he did in the Comics Journal 2005 interview. It's been written about often enough that he became Kane's assistant in '39 when he was 17 and got the chance to draw stories completely solo from '42 on until '46 when he moved elsewhere. He drew around 23 of these solo outings. The earliest are an approximation of the standard Batman style, while the ones at the end suggest an artist who has arrived at an admirable facility and is coasting. Of the bunch in the middle, the plateau, the third volume of Batman Archives (first released in 1994) (reprinting stories from Detective comics monthly) has three. Beyond that you'd be picking up 230 page volumes for one 12 page story in each, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Based on these three and a few others I have for some time considered Robinson the most advanced comic book artist of this period. He's only 21 at this time, and I'm envious of what he's doing here.


Here's a full page, a final page, composed almost entirely with half-figures in mid-distance, and just conversation. But it ripples with vitality. And note the observation of the 'feet rule' (I never finished listing my 'rules'), with some background characters shown in full figure in the first panel.


The thing I learned most from looking at these stories, or at least the thing for which I was searching in order to confirm my inclinations, was a way of thinking about the articulation of pictorial space. An artist puts a mark on a sheet of paper, but in his mind's stereoscope he is putting it at an imaginary point theoretically pinpointable by three coordinates. I'm not just talking about creating the illusion of depth, which you'll see if you stick with me, though that is the first step.

By way of showing the contrary, here's an example by Kane (inked and with background probably by Roussos, but that's not really relevant). He has the customary three planes, fore-, middle- and background which, if they are identifiably separated, are secured thus by an imaginary girder, or at least nothing more subtle, across which any communication between the parts must pass. In this case it is mapped by the speed line of the hurled object. Without that line an average four year old would read that Batman is shaking the crane by grabbing its lifting-arm, causing the midget driver to tumble from his seat. The manipulation of pictorial space is really that clumsy. Now, finding half-assed drawings in the funnybooks is a sport for mental loafers, and not me, so I do this to underline that I am not just juggling with abstractions.


The ability missing in the above (and verified by the same artist's drawings everywhere else) is the ability to locate a point in space. And to draw it. Contrast with the splash page below, where Robinson, working completely solo, maps a cascade of spacial points between fore and background with a flutter of banknotes. Robinson would have been sensitive to all the spacial points there without needing to demonstrate it.


(that's from the only Robinson solo in The Dark Knight Archives vol. 5 (the stories from the Batman bi-monthly))

Two points: firstly, the perspective lines of the building are superfluous (they're probably also technically 'incorrect,' but let's not get distracted by that). We're talking about an eye knowing its way through pictorial space. This is comparable to being able to find your way around in musical harmony, such as being able to move away from and back to the tonic during an extended improvised solo (not the same as 'reading music'). Secondly, articulating this space is about the perception of smaller and smaller units. Artists of moderate skill may be limited to the finest point they can locate in a picture by the drawing tip of the finest tool to hand, in other words they may be trapped upon that other important plane, the 'picture plane' (the surface of the paper). Skill may access a finer point than that, the space between two marks made by the finest tool, and that is limited only by the artist's perception. Note that this is not leading us toward the subject of painting miniatures. An artist can put nothing in the space and still make us aware of its existence, if only subliminally.

I'll finish by showing an example of how Robinson used this particular artistic insight and intelligence in a way that flatters the comic book medium. The usual way of making variety would be to juxtapose close, long and medium views, but in the following trio the depth of field is similar in all panels. However, observe that the motif of the outstretched hand moves from middle-ground to background to foreground, in the way that a composer might enliven a piece of musical passagework by passing a phrase, or 'riff' in the jazz parlance, among different instruments.


(there are so many other things going on compositionally in those unassuming three panels, but colouring the foreground figures brown in the third panel looks like the work of one who wasn't following the notes.)

Young Robinson's head must have been in a higher place all the while, which I suppose is understandable for a 21 year old, that he should have been content to do all this anonymously under the name of an artist of astonishingly lesser ability. However at the end of the day it's difficult to imagine that all of Robinson's great syndicated newspaper work, Life (sample a few days back), Still Life (sample here), etc. will ever be significantly reprinted, lost forever to topicality. And the comic book field being what it is, dimwits will continue to argue forever whether Kane or Robinson invented the Joker.

Old Robinson I met once and he didn't seem to be a cranky bastard like me. Maybe it passes.

(more on pictorial space tomorrow)

Graphic Witness

This is an important book and should be on your shelf. There is not enough information available on the woodcut novel, let alone buyable copies of the books. Masereel and Ward are represented, as well as the lesser known Patri and Hyde. There was always a political edge to the works of this idiom. It was the vehicle for raising an anguished voice for the world's ordinary people minding their own business, whether the villain of the piece is capitalism (Patri), or the police state or racism and its lynch mob (Ward), or the military machine and its atom bomb (Hyde's Southern Cross: A novel of the South Seas). Masereel's The passion of a man is an eloquent little modern Christ-analogue in only 25 cuts. In appearance it is almost fluid by comparison with the other works here (bottom right on the cover). Hyde's is the most graphically intricate, remarkably finding ways of using pattern to depict at its climax an atom bomb explosion. Patri works through the injustices of the system following the 1929 Wall Street crash. The book is beautifully put together, with big wide margins, and a number of pages at intervals printed in that bold red-orange you see on the small lettering on the cover.

One should not spend a large number of words describing these wordless masterpieces. So I find myself scrutinizing the stuff going on around the important material, watching the presenters get themselves in wormy knots of words, unable to get out. While I can see the purpose in connecting it all to the rise of the 'graphic novel', that there is an audience and theoretically if you whistle they'll all come over for a look, it does spoil things a little to see a perfectly sensible subject get tangled up in the kind of blather that blights everything that comes within spitting distance of our weary subject. For instance, editor George A. Walker writes in his foreword:

'Much later, Will Eisner's Contract With God (1978) and Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer prize-winning Maus (1986) were published to critical and popular acclaim. Although neither is a comic book- and the themes of both are closer to tragedy than to comedy- Eisner and Spiegelman are considered by some to be comic book artists.

Thus does Walker line up behind the first definition (of four mutually exclusive) of 'the graphic novel' (that it is an art separate from comic books) to such a high-thinking extent that he even imagines, bless him, that the word 'comic' still means 'funny'. After that he temporarily loses the plot. He is good in his introduction proper in telling us the names of the artists, the history of the form and its techniques and tools, so I get the impression his editor told him he had to embrace the world of 'comics' in a foreword even though his stomach turned at the very thought having to investigate what that was all about. He should have stuck to his guns and left it out. These intrusions spoil an otherwise wonderful book. The other intrusion, the afterword, is by Seth:

"In my personal evolutionary chart that moves from single panel gag-cartoons to the fully realized comics novel, wordless novels sit in there as an important stepping stone... "
"...but this isn't really true. If you look over these wordless novels carefully you'll see that they have almost nothing to do with today's graphic novels..."
"...Sadly, there is no real evolutionary comics chart. Looking back on the various narrative picture-novel attempts before 1975, you quickly realize that a sustained story in picture form is simply a natural idea..."
"...Whatever their origins and influences, they've still been adopted by modern cartoonists hungry for ancestors. And perhaps, it is the world of today which gets to create its past rather than the other way around."

Seth (whose work I love and would never dare to speak ill of) tells us there about his neat orderly version of history, then gets halfway toward accepting that this kind of 'history' is bogus, but finally backs away from the brink. He flobbers through a few more paragraphs, blathering down the thing he blathered up in the first place. He is too much a person of his time to raise his head above the muddle for long. He imagines he needs a historical context in which to place himself, and if we have to make one up well let's go cheerfully about it. I'm reminded of the quote I used in How to be an Artist:
The truth is that literary history is a modern invention and so is the automatic sense which a modern writer must have of his location in the flow of literary time..." (Pat Rogers, Oxford Illustrated History Of English literature, intro)

Now! The point.

DO you think that Masereel and Ward and the other great artists who summoned up the power to create all those vital suffer-no-nonsense images in stand-fast-never-back-down hard-edged black and white, and who in many cases found their books being banned and removed from libraries for their anti-establishment stances, do you think they would have any patience with all this neurotic namby pamby dithering?

NO THEY BLOODY WOULDN"T.

Bacc in the day.

T he new volume of Bacchus is out in Italy. That's number 6. See the covers of the other five here. This one is the equivalent of my vol. 7 (labelled 7/8), containing Hermes versus the Eyeball Kid, my big tribute to the old comic book 'slug fest' in which two big figures duke it out and destroy half the city in the process. Back in the day we used to think that was the height of jollity. There is also The Picture of Doreen Grey, my story about face transplants, accomplished through the auspices of The Body Corporation. Remember we used to think plastic surgery was invented so that Humphrey Bogart could avoid discovery in Dark Passage, instead of for something useful like reducing the disfiguring appearance of 'port wine' birthmarks. My story preceded the one in which Travolta and Cage swap faces. I distrust any story which ends with everything getting put back the way it was. There is a fundamental lie in that which i will not allow. I couldn't let the subject go without also mocking that other great cliche in which the hero and villain swap bodies, courtesy of the Soul Agency.
**********
Speaking of Bacchus, my pal Diana Schutz, who edited my books at Dark Horse, sends me the link to this theatre review of The Rockae in which The Bacchae of Euripides is turned into a rock opera. I wonder if the author read my version, in which the young Bacchus, upon arriving in an old town to visit his mother's grave, is treated like they treated Rambo and ordered to shuffle along by the local bigwig. Naturally he incites all the dames of the burg to tear the stuffed shirt to pieces and play catch with his head. Oops, no that was Euripides' version.
**********
wee hayley campbell links me to the Millais exhibition, "the first major solo survey of his art since the Royal Academy retrospective of 1967, and the first exhibition since 1898 that examines the entirety of his career."
*********
Alan Moore: the wonderful wizard of... Northampton - Telegraph, UK-7 Oct.
Alan Moore, the undisputed, eccentric king of comic-book writing, made it acceptable for literary-minded adults to enjoy books about superheroes. Will his new book do the same for erotica? Susanna Clarke, the novelist and long-time Moore devotee, speaks to him about sex, magic, and why he prefers his home town to Hollywood
There's no doubt that Lost Girls is stimulating and erotic and that Gebbie's art matches the sensuality of the material, but it feels as if Moore the writer is firing on fewer than usual cylinders – which may say something about pornography's limitations as a literary form. The shape of a pornographic narrative is easily guessable in advance; the climax of the story must be, well, a climax. The early 'vegetable-sex issue' of Swamp Thing and a later issue of Promethea, which explored 'magic-sex' ('Sex, Stars and Serpents'), though considerably less explicit, pack more of an emotional punch, simply because the reader is invested in the characters and has an emotional context to fit the sex into. When the Swamp Thing and his lover pull away from each other they have been changed by the encounter. One of the assumptions of the fantasy world that pornography inhabits is that sex should be consequence-free. Pornography by its very nature has a deadening effect on story.
Moore on 'GRAPHIC NOVELS' 'That pompous phrase was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics.'
Link via wee hayley campbell, who is still missing the shift key, and who liked this bit:
susanna clarke interviewed alan moore. 'why was the first chapter of your book (voice of the fire) unreadable/written in a made up language?'
alan: 'to keep out the scum.'
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LA Times on Gilbert Hernandez- October 7.
novelist Junot Diaz: "In a real world, not the screwed-up world we have now, he would be considered one of the greatest American storytellers."
(link via Tom Spurgeon.)
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Biography of ‘Peanuts’ Creator Stirs Family- 8 oct. NY TImes.
Apparently Schultz was a cranky bastard. He woke up every morning full of gloom and dread. Wha?? But he was a cartoonist and an artist. It canna be so! Tell me it 's not true!!!
“I think Sparky’s melancholy and his dysfunctional first marriage are more interesting to talk about than 25 years of happiness.” She quoted her husband’s frequent response to why Charlie Brown never got to kick the football: “Happiness is not funny.”
For the world to maintain its equilibrium It is neccessary for the world's conveyers of information to tell us that the bloke who had pots of money could not possibly have been as moderately happy as the rest of us who have but wee piddling amounts. 'His wealth did not make him happy' is one of our essential myths, which is not to say that it is or isn't true, but that we are obliged to believe it religiously.

the SnOOTeR---part 2

This is the one we've gone with.



More on this at a later date