This would normally be too sentimental for me (not too mention far too large an image to post on “Alas”), but what the heck, it’s the last day of the year. So by posting this drawing, I’m wishing all you wretches lots of hugs in 2008. Mwah!
Wasn’t that sweet? The drawings are by cartoonist Xiao Lei (門小雷) of Hong Kong. You can see a bit more of her work, and a slightly larger reproduction of the hug drawings, at startdrawing.org.
From now until 2008, I’m gonna have a little fun and post images. Some of them I’ll have comments about, others I’ll just be posting to say “Hey, cool, look at this!”
I don’t know who drew this. I do know that it was commissioned by an ad agency in India, to advertise a health club, which is too bad because it implies that the image is intended to be mockery. I don’t read the drawing that way; it seems to me that the illustrator actually drew Batman with a great deal of sympathy. I like this drawing.
Other ads in the series included a fat Superman and a fat Spiderman. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they didn’t do a Wonder Woman; I think the far harsher way our culture views fat women would have made it impossible to do a Wonder Woman ad that didn’t seem mean-spirited.
This “Bobby Make Believe” cartoon — from 1915 or thereabouts — totally cracked me up. I love how (in the boy’s fantasy) all the townsfolk are so calm and unruffled by a mysterious sniper shooting bullets at them. This was written and drawn by Frank King, who later became famous for “Gasoline Alley.” The drawing in this cartoon is great, but not as great as some of his later work.
Click on the sample panel to read the whole thing.
Hat tip: The Balloonist. For more “Bobby Make Believe” strips, see the “Bobby Make Believe” archive on Barnacle Press.
But don’t go there without being forewarned: There is racist imagery in some of these strips. And sexism, of course. I love classic cartooning — the best cartoons from a century ago are in some ways better than what’s being done today, and of course the best newspaper strips back then were much better drawn than newspaper strips today (due to having so much more space to work with). But racist and sexist approaches were very commonplace in cartoons back then.
It’s easier for me to wince at the racism and sexism, but nonetheless enjoy old cartoons, because I’m white and male. Most current cartoonists whose drawing style is rooted in classic cartooning techniques (For example: Robert Crumb, Seth, Kevin Huizenga, Chris Ware, Tom Neeley, Jeff Smith)1 are white men. I’m not sure how meaningful that is — American comics as a whole are white-male-dominated, although getting less so every year — but it’s at least suggestive.
On the other hand, it’s not like today’s pop culture isn’t full of racism and sexism, too, although the racism today tends to be subtler. This is really just the problem that anyone anti-racist or anti-sexist (but especially us folks in fandom) constantly faces; you find ways to enjoy offensive pop culture, since the alternative is giving up pop culture altogether.
This cartoon is perfect. Go read the whole thing.
This cartoon isn’t by me; it’s by my pal Kevin Moore. Click on the panel to read the whole thing.
Inspired by this post on Hoyden About Town (thanks to Bean for pointing it out to me).
UPDATE: Great comment from the discussion at Hoyden: “What was so unmarketable about a pirate dora doll?”
Last year, I noticed Chris Ware had done a Thanksgiving-themed New Yorker cover but didn’t think much of it, other than “this seems disappointingly simple for a Chris Ware cover.”
Somehow it wasn’t until this week that I found out that Ware had in fact done a series of four alternate New Yorker covers and an online one-page comic strip; the five pieces are strongly interrelated, and the full meanings of the earlier covers in the series can’t be appreciated without reading the later covers and the one-page comic. The first of the series is a single-panel illustration; the second, two panels; the third (which is the one I saw last year) four panels; the fourth, 26; and the online comic page has, I dunno, a hell of a lot of ‘em.
There are some really ridiculously large copies of the Ware Thanksgiving on the New Yorker’s site, which is good because “ridicuously large” is probably the only way to read these. First cover; second cover; third cover; fourth cover; and companion one-page comic. And a brief interview with Ware about the covers can be heard here.
Jenn at Reappropriate writes:
I tag anyone who reads this blog and has seen even a single episode of Justice League: Unlimited. Ha! That’d better be five people.
Okay, that was over a year ago, but this is the closest I’ve ever come to being “tagged,” so I figure I’d better go for it.
1. One comic book that changed your life.
Amazing Spiderman #229 and #230, “Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut,” written by Roger Stern, pencils by John Romita Jr., back in 1982.
After not being into comics for years, this comic turned me into a comics addict. The story — in which Spiderman’s pluckiness, determination and refusal to quit allows him to beat someone much larger and stronger — was sure to appeal to a wimpy, bullied kid like me.
Roger Stern is no Alan Moore, but as I recall the story was tightly plotted and pretty smart, for consisting of very little but a two-issue fight scene. Plus, one running gag — a psychic associate of Spiderman’s calling him at whatever phone he happened to be near — gave me uncontrollable giggle fits. (For instance, after Juggernaut collapses an office building on Spiderman, a phone rings in the wreckage, and a shellshocked office worker picks it up and says “uh — Mr. Spiderman, it’s for you.”)
Plus John Romita Jr’s art, while not as stylized as his later work, already displayed unusually fluid, graceful figure movement for drawing Spiderman, and a good sense of mass and size when drawing the huge villain. I’m not saying that you should put down Fun Home and read this instead, but if you happen to be a 14 year old superhero fan, this was a pretty good choice of comics to read.
2. One comic book you have read more than once.
There are thousands. But among the most recent is Ganges #1, by Kevin Huizenga, whose understated, calm cartooning thrills me like almost nothing else in comics today. From the above-linked review:
Ganges #1 asks the question, “Is it possible to intelligently examine domesticity in a comic book?” The five all new pieces provide the answer, and the answer is, “Yes.” All five focus on the quotidian reality of Kevin Huizenga’s graphic alter ego, Glenn Ganges… and his wife, Wendy. In each of these pieces, thoughts, concepts and stories are converted to images in Huizenga’s trademarked fashion, and combined with text and dialogue commentaries to create a dialectical rendering of the tension between subjectivity and objectivity and a series of various attempts — characterized by their youthful callowness and longing curiosity — at locating a harmonious balance between the two.
A common thread runs through all these stories and that is the concern with projecting one’s self — or at least one’s sense of self — through time. Glenn and, although to a lesser extent, Wendy are both haunted by time’s irrevocable march and struggle to come to terms with it. A vaguely Hinduistic view of time’s inherent cyclicality seems to be the source of some degree of solace for Glenn, and, on an extratextual level, to offer the reader a hint at the origin of his surname.
All of that is accurate, but there’s one more thing the reviewer should have mentioned, which is that it’s funny.
And I love Huizenga’s graceful cartoony drawings and his brilliant, playful page layouts. You can read a complete short story from Ganges, “Time Travelling,” on Huizenga’s website.
3. One comic book you would want on a desert island.
Jenn chose an Alan Moore comic, and I was initially tempted to choose a Moore comic too. If I had, I would have chosen From Hell. What’s tempting about Moore’s works — especially from his 80s and 90s period — is Moore’s combination of complicated, interlaced plots and his attention to even small details; I imagine I could reread From Hell a lot of times and still make new discoveries. But the truth is, From Hell, like all of Moore’s best works, is rather grim. If I’m stranded on a desert island, I want something that’s funny at least part of the time.
I was also tempted to choose Cerebus, because it’s very long, and because for the first 200 or so issues Dave Sim produced some of the best writing and cartooning I’ve ever seen in comics. (I don’t think any cartoonist has done more exploring of the possibilities of the page as a compositional unit while keeping storytelling as a primary goal.) Plus, he certainly can bring the funny, plus beautiful drawings. Plus, it’s really, really, really loooong, which is obviously important for my lonely decades on the desert island. But in later years Sim not only became a misogynistic nuuuuuutball, he lost his formerly perfect sense of story pacing. It would be depressing to have my one desert island book fizzle into bad writing and sexist bigotry in the final act.
So maybe Palomar, by Gilbert Hernandez? Hugely rereadable, lots of characters, lots of details, long page count, brilliant writing, there are some funny bits. But… Although he’s a great cartoonist, I don’t find Gilbert Hernandez to have a visually rich surface, and another thing I want out of my desert island comic book is something that’s appealing not only as a great comic book but also as a pretty surface to look at.
But then there’s Locas, by Gilbert’s brother Jamie, which I think contains everything I want: long length, lots of characters, excellent writing with funny bits, rereadable, and the surface could not be any prettier. So next time I’m on a plane that’s going down over the Pacific, I’ll try to have a copy of Locas in my carry-on.
4. One comic book that made you laugh
I’m currently reading a Little Dee collection by Chris Baldwin, and it’s been cracking me up pretty regularly. Although I think a lot of people would enjoy this (I’m kind of surprised that it didn’t become a nationwide success), I’d especially look to this as a gift for kids the right age to enjoy Garfield, but whose parents want them reading a strip that’s actually good rather than being utter crap. (Full disclosure: Chris is a friend of mine.)
5. One comic book that made you cry
Notes For A War Story by Gipi. Possibly the best comic I’ve read all year. Despite the title, it’s not what people usually think of as a war story; there are no battles, and the characters aren’t in the army. They’re three young men trying to find a way to get by in a region ripped apart by war. It’s a story more about how war interacts with class, friendship, and the hunger of young men for male role models. Plus, Gipi’s drawings are awesome.
There are very cheap copies available on Amazon.
6. One comic book you wish had been created.
From Wikipedia:
Big Numbers is an unfinished comic book series by Alan Moore (writer) and Bill Sienkiewicz (artist). Two issues, out of a planned 12, were published in 1990 by Moore’s short-lived imprint Mad Love. Moore described this series as a potential magnum opus.
In the two issues which were published the broad story is about the effect of a new US backed shopping centre development on an English town, based on Moore’s home town of Northampton. Moore tells the story from a number of perspectives using a range of disparate characters. Another level of understanding is through fractal geometry, chaos theory and the mathematical ideas of Benoît Mandelbrot. The series intended to show that patterns existing at the large scale (the effect of the town) would have existed at a micro scale (the effect on individual characters lives).
7. One comic book you wish had never been created.
Mothers and Daughters, by Dave Sim, and all the Cerebus volumes that followed it. Instead, I wish that another comic had been created; one by an alternative-universe Dave Sim who hadn’t gone insane and woman-hating and lost his writing abilities.
8. One comic book you are currently reading.
The Squirrel Mother, by Megan Kelso. I’m enjoying it; it’s not mind-blowingly great, but it’s well-done and heartfelt.
9. One comic book you have been meaning to read.
I’ve got at least 30 lined up on my “to be read” shelf. One of the ones I’m looking forward to is Gemma Bovery, by Posy Simmonds. I’m also eager to read the second collection of Walt and Skeezix by Frank King. It took me a while to really get into the first collection, but once I got into it I was utterly charmed.
10. Now tag five people!
Okay, I tag Myca (the other huge comic-book reader blogging on “Alas”) and, umn, I dunno. Whoever feels like being tagged, I guess.
Click on the cartoon to see a larger version…
I really don’t like the way the art came out in this one; the figures look stiff and overworked. Oh, well; the next one will be better. (I hope.)
I’m too tired now to remember who sent me the link to this Reality Machine cartoon, so apologies for the lack of credit, because this cartoon totally rocks.
Sugarshock is Joss Whedon’s free on-line comic. If you haven’t read it yet you should: part 1, part 2, and part 3.
It’s an extremely silly, story about a band called Sugarshock. Made up of Dandelion who hates vikings and is authorised to use deadly force by the secret government agency that she works for, Wade, who likes groupies, Robot Phil, who is a robot and L’Lihdra, who seems rather robotic until her absolute awesomeness is made clear. Their music is fantastic (well we only get the lyrics to one song, but they’re hilarious - and I really want to hear ‘God bites Man’ even if Dandelion is off key). After an emissary from another planet falls on their car they enter the international battle of the bands it just gets stranger and there are stoves, squirrels, and lathes in places you’d least expect them.
I’m a big fan of Joss Whedon; I can (and sometimes do) go on at great length about the metaphors, characters, and meaning of his work. Sugarshock isn’t one of those moments, this is more like Doppelgangland - he’s having heaps of fun, throwing in more and more silliness, and it’s joyful.
If that wasn’t enough the art doesn’t suck. There’s a woman in it whose body looks like it might actually move if you touched her. I didn’t even know that was possible in comic book form.
So go read it - it’s free and it’ll make your day better.
Update: Some students at CCSU have started their own blog–Take Back the Recorder– in opposition to the paper’s editorial staff. Go show them your support.
Last February we heard the story of a college newspaper in Connecticut that printed an article saying “rape is a magical experience” and “rape only hurts if you fight back.” The author claims he was trying to satirize rape, which he clearly did not achieve. 1 Well it looks like this bunch is at it again and more emboldened than ever since they managed to survive their last go round. This time, among other offensive diatribes, the Central Connecticut State University newspaper has published a cartoon about urinating on a 14 year old Latina, who is locked in a closet.2
I found out about this debacle from a comment left in the thread on the West Virginia rape and torture case over at Feministing. A commenter named prof/activist provided a link to the PDF copy of the paper. The offending cartoon can be found in its original context if you scroll to page 16, the final page of the PDF file. The cartoon consists of two figures one triangular and the other square. The triangle says that his urine smells like honey after he eats certain cereals, and the square asks if it tastes like urine. Then the triangle says, he doesn’t know he’ll have to ask the Latina girl tied up in the closet. Then, it jumps to the final frame where the square says, “Tell Juanita I said Hola.” The cartoon also has a sentence printed under it that says, “The Recorder Does Not Support the Kidnapping of (and Subsequent Urinating on) Children of Any Age.” I was going to repost the cartoon here, but it’s not worth the bandwidth. You can open the PDF file above to read it.
Students and faculty members, disgusted by the paper’s racist and sexist reputation, protested the cartoon on Friday. The story was covered in the local paper and it received national attention. Here’s a quote from the AP article in the New York Times:
The university’s president vowed on Friday to cut off advertising in the paper, and its critics have planned a protest on Monday on campus to push for reforms, including the ouster of the paper’s editor, Mark Rowan.
“We believe the climate here at Central is one that fosters this kind of behavior,” said Francisco Donis, a psychology professor and president of the university’s Latin American Association, “so we want more systematic changes to create a welcoming environment for everyone to feel safe and secure.”
About 5 percent of the 9,600 undergraduates are Hispanic, according to university figures. The campus is in New Britain, a racially diverse city of 71,000 about 12 miles southwest of Hartford.
Mr. Rowan, 21, was the editor in February, when the newspaper was criticized for publishing a satirical opinion piece titled “Rape Only Hurts if You Fight It.” The satire called sexual assault a “magical experience” that benefits “ugly women.”
The author of the article lost his position at the paper and apologized, but Mr. Rowan was allowed to retain his post.
The university created a task force that recommended providing more training for its student journalists, buying libel insurance and creating a student-run alternative paper or Web site.
Mr. Rowan, who is set to graduate in December, said lingering anger over that controversy was adding to outrage over the cartoon. He said he did not know if he would be asked to resign.
Rowan and his cronies have caused enough trouble for the University, ushering the school into the national spotlight on two separate occasions. It seems clear that Rowan lacks the ability to judge the quality and appropriateness of the paper’s content. Both pieces in question were not only offensive, but they also were of poor quality. Petroski’s rape article didn’t succeed at being satire, and this cartoon didn’t succeed at being funny. In fact, only a person like Ted Bundy would find either of these articles amusing, which makes me wonder if there are some sociopaths running this paper.
Mr. Rowan has shown poor judgment, and has allowed the student newspaper become a bottom feeder with little journalistic integrity. Right now Mr. Rowan holds two journalism related positions. He’s an editor of the CCSU student paper, and he has an internship with the Hartford Advocate, but at the rate he’s going he may never have another position in journalism. How is he going to explain these gaffes to potential employers? Who would want to hire someone, who routinely brings negative attention to their publication? He hasn’t learned his lesson, and that’s going to come back to haunt him in the future. A good editor thinks about getting the story, and getting quality material, not just pushing his political agenda and publishing anything that comes across the desk.
I know the retorts that the student editors will have–We have free speech. We didn’t mean to offend. Lighten up, it’s just a cartoon. You’re being too sensitive. I hear these arguments every time someone engages in offensive behavior like this. Rather than taking responsibility, they try to deflect the criticism by condemning the condemners. At this point, it’s pretty clear, that the University needs to step in and revamp the paper. If the student editors are unwilling to do this themselves, it is incumbent upon the University administration and the majority of students to oust the paper’s editors. This surely doesn’t represent the school, its administrators, and the vast majority of its students.
UPDATE: So I fixed a number of things about the drawing. The big thing is that I redrew the SARWM’s right arm and related areas, just because they were very badly drawn the first time.
But I also changed the shorts from having polkadots (which did make them look like boxer shorts, as Robert pointed out) to looking more like jeans. Then I added polkadots to the shirt of the woman in the foreground, because the sad truth is I just like drawing polkadots. Then I tried to make SARWM’s shoes look like shoes rather than socks, and I added glasses to a character, in response to Dianne’s comments. And I played around with a couple of other small details.
Am I responsive to reader comments or what? No, no, don’t thank me. A medal is enough.
So here is (I think) the final drawing. The original, pre-changes version is below the fold.
I’m in.
I was undecided about whether the comic book was ‘Buffy’. I accepted it was cannon, Joss says goes. But I just wasn’t sure whether I was going to treat it like Buffy. I’m not a comic book person, and a month is a long wait. To treat it like I treated the show I needed it to be like the show was when it was good, not the last few seasons with flashes of brilliance within miles of boring.
Someone actually commented on one of these posts that it must be a new season of Buffy because everyone’s complaining about how the quality has gone downhill. There’s definitely some truth in that. While I have a lot of affection for all the Joss-penned opening episodes, beginnings are not Joss’s forte. They always feel a little like a reintroduction. #5 was, of course, the best comic ever written, with a two page spread which is up there with the end of Becoming II or that bit in Chosen. But I wasn’t convinced it wasn’t a sign of things to come.
If ‘No Future For You’ is a sign of things to come, then I’m sold.
I don’t have particularly strong feelings about Faith - I don’t dislike her, but she’s not one of my favourite characters. This story is good, and that’s what matters. The opening is brilliant, really capturing the horror and aloneness of Faith’s life.* The scene between Giles and Faith captures both their characters spot on (plus Giles was wearing a Yellow Submarine Jersey)**
I’m loving the plot. As the title of my blog suggests, I’m generally pretty pro-Buffy plots where the ruling-classes are the bad. As a metaphor it works for me. Pygmalion is a tad over-done, but going undercover as upper class to kill them, rather than to show your worth works for me (plus there are a few more nice moments of undercutting).
Just over 20 pages a month is still woefully unsatisfying. But I can’t wait to see where we go next.
There are still some issues of course. The dialogue was trying a little bit too hard. Faith never just said anything without turning it into a Faithism. It was almost like Buffy fanfic where every second sentence from Giles contains the word ‘wanker’.*** I think it’s probably justified in this episode from a character point of view, because it’s a sign Faith is on her guard with Giles, she’s thinking before she speaks and acting defensively, but if it continues it’ll get old really fast.
You notice how I haven’t mentioned the drawing yet? I’m putting it off. Actually this was the first comic strip where I felt the art added much to the script. There were a couple of frames where the expression on Faith’s face really captured something about her character and conveyed the complexities of her feelings (I’m thinking ‘So, who is this evil bitch, anyway?’).
But, and there’s always a but, women’s breasts are not balls. They are not round like balls and they’re not solid like balls. While I do appreciate that there was no random female nudity this episode and two characters wore an outfit that wasn’t a crop top (which is some kind of record), the breasts on the cover and the last page bug me. I wonder what it’s about, why comic book artists think that that’s what men would most like to see? Why would men like to see that. I don’t see that it can be a sexual fantasy thing in any real sense. Isn’t the way breasts move a large part of the fun? Obviously it’s partly about turning women into objects, in a very real sense, the less comic book girls look like people, the easier it is to dehumanise them, and then in turn dehumanise actual women.
I’m not saying that this is necessarily going to Geroges Jeanty’s mind when he draws the script (and I choose to believe it dosn’t go through Joss’s mind when he approves it). Just that comic book art must have developed this way for a reason, and I don’t get it. Anyone else got theories.
* Except the fact that Robin Wood is also running a team of slayers. I find it more than a little bit problematic that every male character who survived the season finale is running a team of slayers (even Andrew!). While we have yet to see a female character do so, except Buffy (unless the black dreadlocked slayer from last issue was supposed to be Rona, even so she didn’t appear to be running it alone).
** Although only the second coolest top in the issue - gotta love Xander’s Sunnydale swim team t-shirt.
***Not that I’ve read that much Buffy fanfic. Honest. If we were talking X-files fanfic I would be lying when I said I hadn’t read much. But Buffy fanfic never worked for me. Possibly because every second sentence from Giles contained the word wanker.
Can’t decide if I like or hate the backgrounds.
I actually did draw a cartoon last week, but it’s slated to appear in Dollars and Sense, so I’ll have to wait a few weeks before posting it online.
Anyhow, the cartoon I drew last week (which I haven’t posted) was rather grim, so this week I went for just being silly.
I kinda like how her skirt came out, except in the first panel, but I’m feeling too lazy to redraw that.
I’m trying to do less detailed pencils, instead drawing more in the “ink” stage (”ink” in quotes since I draw the whole thing on computer anyway). Hopefully this leads to a more spontaneous line and a looser feel.
I’m still not certain if I like this caption; if I think of a better one, I might change it.
I’ve gotten several lovely emails in response to the “White Lies” cartoon. This one is notable for its rigorously narrow focus:
Your looks are jewish, your work is jewishily inspired and intended. The results of your agitprop are of benefit to jews alone. You are a jew.
Damn straight my looks are Jewish! At least some of my work is directly inspired by my Judaism. I’m fine with my work benefiting Jews (although I’d be kinda disappointed if no one else benefited). And yup, I am a Jew.
So I’m guilty on all counts, and yet… was any of that supposed to be derisive? It’s as if someone told me off by emphasizing how handsome, likable and well-groomed I am. If that’s the best you can think of for an insult — then for God’s sake, insult me some more.
Along similar lines, one of the folks on this racist site comments:
“Oh, its just another fat liberal man who was deprived of attention during childhood and does whatever he hs to to get his fill, just like Micheal Moore!”. JUST like the big MM.
Oh noooooo – I’m likened to an incredibly successful and popular Oscar-winning movie director! Oh, the horror, the horror!1
Next they’ll insult me by telling me how great I smell…
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