The book’s main conceit– a comics history of photorealism buried within a broad-stroke emulation of fashion magazines– is, prima facie, one of the most bizarre ideas for a creator owned title in the history of Western Comics. Dig deeper and one sees, kinda, sorta, the connection: there’s a subterranean link between the photorealism and fashion. The tradition’s artists spent an awful lot of time drawing women and their clothing; the fashion industry provided both.

When the first issue of glamourpuss was released, I described it as a parody of fashion magazines– the early issues certainly felt like one. Sim’s approach subsequently revealed itself as unfathomably weirder. Issue #8, for example, contains a deconstruction of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen’s book Influence. The humor is buried so completely beneath the glamourpuss (titular character) persona’s attempts at humor that it becomes impossible to claim glamourpuss contains parody or even satire. The laughs are wry and detached, deconstructionist but not. If there’s a word to describe this, I have no idea what it is.

I think the title is suggesting there’s something amiss with the influence afforded the Olsen twins (which is true), but its convoluted methodology obscures the point. All the layers of meta-commentary cancel each other out, leaving the reader wrestling with the Olsens’ ability to genuinely unsettle. The twins are creepy enough that one doesn’t need Sim, glamourpuss or glamourpuss. Meanwhile, Sim intersperses his analysis with stunning photorealist artwork and gossipy meditations on the scandalous early life of Margaret Mitchell, authoress of Gone With the Wind, and how she may have been blackmailed by the Hearst syndicate into writing a 30 page bible for Stan Drake’s “The Heart of Juliet Jones.” The book ends with what has become a trademark of the series– a caustic letters column in which fans write gushing letters to/about Sim, only to be ripped apart by the glamourpuss persona.

So. Basically.

Best comic ever?

Agar Agar in “The Harem of Bacchus” by Albert Solsano. From Dracula Magazine, 1972.

Remarkably, even in context, it don’t make a lick more sense.

Collected in TPB by Warren Publishing. Whose offices were located at 145 East 32nd Street.

I worked in the same building for two years and had no idea. The things you learn with comics.

Here it is, Introducing the New Teen Swinger: Romance Comics in the Summer of Love:

Click Me!

Incidentally, all good people should go here and download the amazing pamphlet that fellow Romance Comics presenter Jacque Nodell brought with her to the confernece. Highly recommended. (As is her blog, Sequential Crush.)

Saturday, July 25th, 2009. San Diego Comic Con.

2:30-3:30 Comics Arts Conference Session #12: Poster Session — Want to go in depth with a comics scholar? On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the PowerPoints of the poster presenters will be available to read in printed “poster books” and then the scholars will be available in this session to discuss their presentations in small-group and one-on-one discussions. Matthew J. Brown (University of California, San Diego) explains how psychologist William Moulton Marston used his creation Wonder Woman to enact his project of emotional re-education about female love-domination. Erica Ash (Henderson State University) explores the circumstances in the 1980s that lead to real world vigilantes and a violent breed of fictional heroes and anti-heroes. Jonathan Brewer (Henderson State University) demonstrates how comic books can assist students in the study of not only American history of the 1900s, but also helps them to understand political atmospheres and cultural trends. Thad Allen (Henderson State University) uses modern science and technology to examine whether some of the ways in which superheroes have gained their powers can actually occur. Marko Head (Marko’s Corner) explores the incorporation of cinematic storytelling techniques into sequential art. Thomas Sepe (Henderson State University) looks at the history of comic books being used as a venue to communicate political propaganda. Evan Moreno-Davis (University of California, San Diego) analyzes the implicit value system in hero narratives that valorize individual achievement as a force for good. Carly Cate (Henderson State University) examines how story-driven characters such as Batman have been usurped by commercial creations like Hello Kitty. Ariel Schudson (UCLA) focuses on the Jon Favreau Iron Man film as a palimpsest for the adaptation and re-adaptation of the Iron Man mythos. Law professors Jamie Cooper and William Aceves (California Western School of Law) show how comics are being used in legal education.

Trauma Poster Panel: Sabrina Starnaman (UCSD) draws on disability studies to see how the facial disfigurement of figures like the Joker, Two-Face, and Jonah Hex makes meaning beyond the stigmatized existence of the impairment. Richard Harrison (Mount Royal College) finds Bill Finger’s hand in the transformation of the destruction of Krypton and Superman’s origin. Fans Poster Panel: Nick Langley (Rocket Llama World Headquarters) examines which personality traits are needed in order to succeed at pursuing a “dream job” such as creating comics. Alex Langley (University of North Texas) assesses addictive behavior in gamers, comics lovers, and other pop culture fanatics. Batman Poster Panel: Tommy Cash (Henderson State Univeristy) asks why the Dark Knight needs a Boy Wonder and finds that the Dynamic Duo exemplify Aristotle’s ideal of the “Friendship of Virtue.” Geri Lawson (CSU-Long Beach) examines how The Dark Knight Returns subverted the dominant voices of 1980s patriotism and the normative rigidity of the superhero’s sexualized body. Romance Comics Poster Panel: Jarett Kobek (www.kobek.com) explores the effect of the counterculture on romance comics and the tendency of American commercial art to easily commodify even the least likely sources. Jacque Nodell (Super Human Resources) unearths the forgotten romance comics work of artists like Winslow Mortimer, Don Heck, and Jim Steranko who breathed life into the beautiful women that grace the pages of romance comics. Room 30AB

I don’t have a lot to say about this story; its continent is self-evident. The publication date on the issue is November 1968, a fascinating fact to keep in mind as one reads the story and encounters the two major motifs of the Sixties Gone Bad– a bearded weirdo looking like Alan Moore reading from The Birth Caul and Evil Bikers denoted by their cross pattées– over a year before the Free Concert at Altamont and the Tate-LaBianca Murders. Furthermore, there’s an amazing cross-country motorcycle sequence that screams Easy Rider– once again, about a year early.

This story traces the general apprehension of America towards its children; that it is completely forgotten speaks to the unique positioning of Romance Comics within the cultural shifts & fluctuations of Vietnam/Psychedelic-era America, and that the books have become a tool, should anyone care to employ them, of genuine cultural history– it’s a narrative of the counterculture written by the losers, rather than the victors.

A note about the comic itself: you can get a sense of Charlton putting some weight behind this story, and perhaps the idea that Jonnie L♥ve might become a lucrative character by the fact that the creators– Joe Gill and Tony Williamson– are both credited on the splash page. This almost never, ever happened.

This does not tell the full story– Secret Romance was in fact one of several titles revived by Charlton in 1979, relying entirely on reprinted material from the company’s back catalog. All of Charlton’s on-going romance titles were canceled at the end of 1976– after that massacre, the only remaining genre title appears to have been DC’s Young Love, running a few months into 1977. To give a sense of how unfortunate things had become, the final issue of Young Love, #126, ran with cover copy that read, “Was Distance The Only Thing That Kept Alive The C.B. [radio] Romance?”

Secret Romance #48 reprints, in its entirety, For Lovers Only #87, cover date November 1976, one of the last individual issues before Charlton’s mass cancellation. This makes SR #48 a double oddity– one of the last romance comics published in the US which itself reprints another of the very last romance comics. It is the real rough stuff– the burning decadence of a genre beyond concern or care, multiplied by two.

I snagged my copy for $1 at the Los Angeles Comic Book and SciFi Convention, a place that scientific consensus has determined as the exact, bi-monthly spot where nostalgia dies a protracted, agony-wracked death. Occurring regularly in the historic Shriner Auditorium, one must arrive on foot, like a pilgrim, to gain understanding. Words fail. There is something exactly right about finding one of the last miserable efforts of a failed genre amongst the tables of mid-1990s comics (all Liefield, all McFarlane, all Ghost Rider, all the time!) and the countless boxes of action figures missing limbs.

Anyhoo, here’s the cover:

This art is actually pretty great, which is why I bought the issue. Unbeknownst to me, the FWB cover attribution is for Frank Bolle.

I scanned the story, “Be Proud, My Love!,” which is almost entirely incoherent. A model gives up being a model and goes back to the farm, where her dad has taken on his secret partner as a farmhand, and the model is constantly being made fun of for being “plain,” whilst the farmhand turns out a rogue academic pulling a Bob Dylan and fetishizing farmlife, who is also capable of beating up two locals while on his quest for meaning. Just like John Berryman! Somehow this ends up with the model becoming a model again on her wedding, which she’s kept secret from the farmhand. I think. She also invited the paparazzi. Just like Samantha Ronson!

Watch a genre die:

Next up is a one-pager– again, it’s totally incoherent. How bad did things get in the romance genre? This is a ONE PAGE story titled, “Cindy’s First Date” about a girl named Elaine. And this is a reprint.

Visually, it’s the best thing in the issue. One of the things about Charlton, particularly in later days, is that their increasingly decaying printing press seriously affected the art– I suspect if we could see the color mark-up of “Cindy’s First Date,” it’d be gorgeous. As it stands, we salute it for transcending its surroundings, and also for giving us this:

Seriously, if I’d gone to a normal high school with dances, instead of a colony for misfits, drug addicts and art kids, and the girls wore outfits like that, standing in front of Chinese Lanterns like that, then good lawd almighty, I’d of gone to Junior Prom. Here’s the full page:

Please find below the first page of the cover story, “The Art of Romance.” Clearly, this was drawn by an artist other than Bolle. It’s incredibly, incredibly ugly.

That’s it. Show’s over. No place to go from here.

I have no idea what the hell this cover references. Janis Joplin had been dead for years, and while my understanding of the 1970s is spotty, I’m fairly certain there wasn’t a mid-decade acoustic acid-haze chartreuse of any particular note. Karen Carpenter this ain’t. Furthermore, what the hell is the dude with the coffee mug doing? Is he dancing? Having a small stroke? Does this all take place in a coffee house? Why does the coffee house have ultra-disco lighting? These mysteries are unsolvable!

This cover is also notable for its complete disconnect from any of the book’s interior content.

I scanned the longest story, but by now it doesn’t matter. They’re all totally bland and horrible– and stuffed with T&A. There’s enough half-naked women in Love Diary #99 that I’m wondering if the comics’ main function hadn’t degraded into a system of low-grade T&A distribution. That said, I cop to adoring this panel, in all of its ineptitude:

Something about the stars and the trashy eye-shadow. The blooming cactus on the right side of the panel don’t hurt, either. Also note the distorted spatial anatomy– whatever they’re doing, it ain’t kissing. But these flaws aside, I am genuine in my affection for the panel. It’s great.

Unfortunately the story is not. Herein a girl finds true love by, well, I’m not sure, really. Being a jerk, I guess. Anyway, her old man is rich and bland, but her new man works on an oil field and gets called a gypsy. Lots of T&A, though. Risque shadowy stripping! Underwater love-making!

As if to underscore the repetition of content, here’s the first two pages of another story from Love Diary #99 with more underwater love-making. This story is way more glam, which is a plus.

I’ve got no final insight on this book. Honestly, I bought it for the ugly, tripped-out cover. It’s bleh in extremis. Instead, let me leave you with an era-appropriate possible solution to the age old mystery of how The Kinks late-60s career mutated into their 1970s stadium rock: what if Ray Davies didn’t like pot or acid, but really, really, really liked cocaine?

Compared with the feature story of Heart Throbs #92, “In Search of Love,” (which if you throw in an ellipses, sounds like an episode of the old Leonard Nimoy program) is instructive in both its differences and similarities. Post-Woodstock, post-Altamont, post-Summer of Love the scene is no longer merely backdrop, but an active and vital part of the narrative. The Wonder Mountain Rock Festival is a destination of both space and spirit, an actual desire of the story’s participants. Our heroine lies to her parents about attending! Just like in the go-go 90s, when I was 13 and lied about going to Lollapalooza!

Ultimately, genre convention consumes everything and our groovy chick meets a happening fella, who not only protects her from a proto-Hells Angel, but also questions her willingness to kiss him so soon and is hip to family. Through this morally upstanding gent, our protagonist finds herself back where she started– at her parents’ pad, but with a twist: she’s in love, a woman tamed. She’ll never run wild again! Can marriage be far?

Dig the crazy look in the eyes of the almost rapist. It gives a sense, forty years after the fact, of how far Altamont and Manson penetrated the national consciousness. The bad ugly of the hippie scene. Check it out:

I scanned two pages from FLO #61′s first story. It’s another example (though less dramatic) of the bleed. I love how the second page is a timeless laundry list of a young woman’s worries in the wilds of New York City. And check out that lingo, swingers!

These two pages of another story are just T&A. Look at how many men she’s taken to the drive-in! There’s a very strange undercurrent in this story.

And, finally, a Charlton house ad. Look at the lettering on each title’s logo. It’s like a hobo camped outside of Victor Moscoso’s studio and picked up tips peering through the window.

That reminds me– for those of you uninitiated in the history and lore of comic companies, Charlton was an ultra-low budget affair, so if you’re wondering why the art, printing, coloring and page orientation of FLO looks terrible compared to Heart Throbs #92, I’ll provide a help qualifying metric. Think of DC as a Rolls-Royce and Charlton as the Ford Escort.

What distinguished Charlton was their ownership of every stage in creation and distribution– originally a magazine publisher, they reportedly got into the comics game when it was discovered that turning off the press cost more than having it print continually. This fostered a spirit in which no one cared very much about what comics went out, so long as it made its money back. This benefited a handful of creators– most notably our own idee fixee Steve Ditko, who got to do pre-Mr. A Objectivist works, in particular the masterpieces Blue Beetle #5 and Mysterious Suspense #1. On the other, the interesting stuff coming out of Charlton represents about 0.05% of total output. The atmosphere mostly created horrible comics of dubious quality.

Charlton was where Romance died, and what a horrible death it was, with the very strange books of the late 1970s/early 1980s looking like ultra-cheap hippie comics of 1970-71 but without the cultural frame of reference. Ugly.

There’s a newish book on Romance Comics called Love on the Racks, authored by Michelle Nolan. We encountered Michelle at last year’s San Diego Comic Con, where I bought the book from her, and a nicer person you could not meet– the book is great, too, a thorough overview of a wildly ignored genre which will never, ever have a critical or popular revival. (Arguments about yaoi put to the side.) Worth the buy.

–

Yesterday, I checked my mail box, and, lo, discovered that my supplier/patron e.j. bought me a copy of a comic I’ve wanted for a goodly long while– Heart Throbs #92. The reason should be obvious, once you scope the glorious cover:

Published in ’64, this cover and its attendant story, anticipate the influx of youth counterculture into the genre– the closest thing would be a year later (#101), when very mop-toppy versions of the Beatles started appearing. The Mod, or the American conception thereof, being a guy who dressed like the Beatles, then became a semi-reoccurring figure in the genre. But The Mod, and the Beatles themselves, were in many ways tailor-made (pardon the pun) for the Romance Comic– they were wooden men in suits, and thus not far from the typical romantic lead. By 1969, youth culture had gone through such changes that the women in Romance Comics were decked out in post-Mary Quant fantasy clothing and the men, well, it depends on the comic in question, but there were plenty longhairs in fur vests waiting to steal a girl’s heart.

The cover story of Heart Throbs #92, “The Nights That Never Ended,” is a very typical tale of love gained, lost and regained that lightly uses an unnamed Greenwich Village as the backdrop for its denouement. Given the year of publication, 1964, I imagine this was an attempt to stay au courant with the interests of the target audience of young, middle class girls. HT #92 was published roughly at the height of the Folk Revival, that strangest of all pop music manifestations. For a brief moment, a band like Peter, Paul and Mary could top the American Charts. The story serves as a fine example of how little the genre changed with time– the inclusion of the Village is a meaningless nod to the assumed taste of audience. This reunion could take place anywhere in the world, even in outer space.

Romance Comics proved exceptional at adopting visual motifs and subsuming them to the core function of value reinforcement. This, by the way, is a microcosm of the fate of so-called underground art within capitalism– your aesthetic is sure to be co-opted, your meaning and intent are sure to be discarded. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t something worthwhile in the comics for what they were– after all, they produced this panel:

I love the formal device of this story– every panel of heightened emotion is a close-up with no background detail, just a solid block of red. It hits like the beat of a drum. Here’s the full thing:

I also scanned the splash pages of HT #92′s other two stories– unlike the cover story, I find both pages disturbing. Was lingerie what girls kept in their hope chests? I thought it was Tupperware!

Pictures of what I assume is the US premiere of Watchmen at Grauman’s Chinese.

This is the second time that I’ve been in the presence of the movie’s big stupid prop Owl Ship. My first time was at the San Diego Comic Con. Even there, I don’t think I got any closer. Today I wondered, as I am wont to do in nearly every circumstance, if this made me Special– how many people have ended up near this thing twice and by random?

But my higher brain took over and I decided, no, I’m just a shitbird for living in California.

I will say this– it is incredibly strange to see that thing in person. Not because I am much a fan of the original comic, a brilliantly drawn and constructed but ultimately creaky work of pink boy Cold War Leftism, an anachronism about as appealing and relevant as coercive interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib, but rather because it looks so much like something from the mind of Steve Ditko. The genesis of Watchmen is common lore– the characters are based on 1960s Charlton superheroes, most of which were drawn by Ditko– but it’s rarely remarked how much the comic (and now, the movie) visually resembles Ditko’s Charlton stuff.

Here’s a few panels of the Owl Ship (in the comic, anyway, it’s called the Archimedes, and yes, I’m a sad person for knowing that):

Here’s part of a page with multiple panels of Ditko drawing Blue Beetle’s ship, The Bug, taken from Blue Beetle #3:

I also scanned a page of that issue’s Question back-up:

Seriously. Pure Rorschach.

–

Directly across the street from the Owl Ship, there were two (2) guys dressed up like Spider-Man. It’s Ditko’s world. We’re all tourists.

Everything is the same, nothing is new. The city as an unchanging entity. Or as W. Axl Rose once sang, way back before he had the therapy you’re soon to hear on Chinese Democracy, “The streets don’t change / but maybe the names.”

Speaking of forever changes: perhaps it is the undue influence of Dave Sim’s glamourpuss– which, despite a queasy veer towards sexism/misogynism/whatever in issue number two, is the best pamphlet comic of the last few years– but I have become increasingly fascinated by the photorealist newspaper strips of the 1940s/50s/60s. The volumes of Leonard Starr’s Mary Perkins on Stage available from Classic Comics are a step in the right direction, but in this era in which every minor cartoonish strip gets gorgeous hardcovers, can’t us decent folk get a little Rip Kirby?

Other things which require collection pronto: new, readable translations of Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese, Pat Tourett and Jenny Butterworth’s Tiffany Jones and Jorge Longeron’s Friday Foster. C’mon Comics Industry, get cracking!

Also, breaking news: the sweetest post ever. By… Warren Ellis?

To my surprise, the text, admirably, never transgresses into the tawdry. Speculation about Ditko’s life has been a staple of the comics industry for almost forty years, so Bell should be applauded for keeping out as much as possible. I wouldn’t presume for a moment to know whether or not Ditko himself approves of Bell’s approach, and, really, why should I? Why should anyone presume, before having any direct evidence, that they know or understand what another individual is thinking?

And yet assumptions of this nature abound through nearly all critical writing about Ditko, and, sad to say, when Bell reaches the Randian-influenced period, there is a bit of the same. This is particularly galling when one considers the direct and unabashedly didactic nature of Ditko’s creator-owned work; one of the obvious themes of this material is an insistence by the creator that the work not be read biographically, or as part of a continuum, but rather as individual statements of the same ideas. A = A requires no a priori knowledge. If the reader is incapable of reading the work in a vacuum, after it has become clear that the vacuum itself is part of the work, then I would argue that this is a failure of the reader and not of the artist. For decades, Ditko has been demanding that his work be read ahistorically; isn’t it time to start considering this insistence at face value?

The last chapter of Bell’s book, in particular, left me deeply unhappy. With its dismissals of Ditko’s later Randian-influenced work and questions about the methods employed– the reduction of characters to outlines, the amount of text, the seeming adherence to the superhero story– I was reminded of a passage in Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, in which the narrator-artist Gully Jimson, now in his elder years, forges a drawing from his earlier period. In the novel, Jimson has entered a phase not unfamiliar to many, if not most, artists with long careers: his latter work has become something entirely different than the earlier work, and the earlier work is judged superior. The passage in question:

Thank God it wasn’t Sunday. And before four o’clock the next afternoon I had the prettiest early Jimson you ever saw. Sketch for the Bath. Or rather, from the Bath, but bearing on its face all those indubitable marks which as the crickets say, testify to that early freshness of vision and bravura of execution which can never be imitated by a hand which in acquiring a mature decision of purpose, has lost, nevertheless, that je ne sais quoi, without which perhaps no work of art is entitled to the name of genius.

The Horse’s Mouth is copyright 1944. Let’s compare and contrast with the final paragraph of Bell’s book:

Ditko failed to acknowledge that while many of his fans may not have appreciated being force-fed right from wrong, almost all of them recognized the decline his increasingly didactic material had wrought on his storytelling and art. Had Ditko been able to maintain the same approach to graphic narrative that informs his best work, his status as a true visionary in the art of visual storytelling would be afforded its due, confirming his place alongside the medium’s serious practitioners who are leading the charge into the new millennium.

(Let me note: I am not likening Ditko to Jimson. Merely pointing out an echo.)

The frustration elicited by Bell’s final chapter is a familiar one. I’ve been feeling it from the first days of my interest in Ditko’s work, dating back to about 1999. I have become royally tired of hearing the Randian-influenced work dismissed and I am royally tired of hearing Ditko discussed as though he were an idiot savant who had a few good years and then disappeared in a fog of reactionary thinking. Thus I am now going to science and knowledge out my thoughts on this matter and be done with it.

Not Siegel and Shuster. Not Jack Kirby. No one.

How badly has the comics industry ripped off Steve Ditko? Last year, Spider-Man 3, a property which Ditko co-created and on which he was promised a royalty share that never materialized, grossed about $900M globally. This year, Iron Man, featuring a visual look based on Ditko’s redesign of the character, has grossed about $560M. Next year, Watchmen is on track to earn at least $300M domestically. (This is a deeply conservative estimate.) The trailer of the film has been well received enough that DC has printed about a million copies of the graphic novel, a work so indebted to Ditko that he might as well have been listed as a co-creator. (This is not to take away anything from either Alan Moore or, especially, Dave Gibbons or John Higgins. But I was looking at Ditko’s issues of Blue Beetle and it hit me. They are Watchmen. Beyond inspiration. It’s all there.)

After 2009, there will have been three solid years of major, headline grabbing films that are by-products of Ditko’s creative work. As much as Kirby was the King of Komics, it’s been Ditko’s aesthetic, primarily, that has translated outside of the medium. This makes a certain amount of sense: although at the center of the Silver Age, Ditko was somehow on its periphery. The easy translation of his aesthetic to a billion dollar industry– and the relative failure of Kirby’s (c.f. Fantastic Four films)– is perfectly logical if you consider that the received wisdom of what makes “good” superhero art is utterly disconnected from the visual values of the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, Ditko’s reward has been scraps from the tables of companies that he personally enriched and forty years of incessant second-guessing by his so-called fans, by other professionals, by his editors and by his critics. How could he leave Spider-man? Why are these new comics so preachy? Why doesn’t he sell his original artwork? Why doesn’t he want to meet his public?

And that last question contains a barb of its own: no comics professional in the 1950s could have envisioned that the industry would spawn a knock-off showbiz stuffed with quasi-celebrity. Creators from later eras who’ve been cagey on the point of their own weak fame should be considered, at best, disingenuous. No one who entered the industry after, say, 1980 can reasonably or honestly say that they didn’t expect what they got. But with Ditko’s generation, and generations previous, this sentiment is completely true. Most of these men viewed themselves, I’m sure, as artists or at least artisans, but none signed a Faustian bargain with the American fame machine.

We should be ashamed that it is considered, amongst some, legitimate to criticize Ditko’s reluctance to engage with his quote-fans-unquote. In an era where celebrity has become a coin as common as pennies, only a depraved jackal would want to see Ditko transformed into another drooling mummy wrapped in wisps of pseudo-celebrity and wheeled out beneath the fluorescent lighting of the Jarvis Center.

The comics industry has always acted as a mortar-and-pestle towards creators who deviate from its central value of lucre acquired regardless of spiritual or intellectual cost. Nothing confuses most mainstream comics creators, or their fans, more than one of the Brethren opting out of easy money. Thus, there is something right and fitting about the current round of disrespect over Alan Moore’s handling of the Watchmen adaptation. You wanted to play with Ditko’s toys, Mister Big Hairy Magician Man, well, watch out, you’ve now become indistinguishable from Mr. A, only another uncompromising creator suffering Ditko’s fate, and washed over by the rage and disgust of sports fans towards a player who refuses the rules of the game.

What I would have liked very much to see in Bell’s book is an analysis of how the comics industry itself may have played a heavy role in shaping Ditko’s beliefs about both business and money. I’ve read enough of Rand’s writing to have a sense of the Objectivist worldview, and while it is one for which I have a certain amount of abstract sympathy, I find that in many ways it engages in a series of self-supporting rhetorical fallacies with little connection to my day-to-day existence. There’s a very distinct reason for this: I haven’t spent my entire life being screwed over by the people for whom I’ve worked.

The comics industy of the 1940s, 50s and 60s– and to a certain extent, as demonstrated by Moore’s endless issues with DC, continuing into the present day– must be one of the very few places in which Randian principles are demonstrably, and consistently, present. Comics were, and are, ground zero for unethical and unconscionable business practices designed to strip Producers of their rewards. Superman’s acquisition by National may have been the industry’s original sin, but it was, and remains, the working template for the intake of intellectual properties.

As the most talented creator of the Silver Age, Ditko suffered its worst indignities. I can only imagine– and this may be wrong– that seeing his work harvested amidst endless broken promises, did to the man what life does to us all: left him in search of an ethical system of thought that could explain his experiences. It’s inconceivable that any individual with a working knowledge of the last seventy years of broken promises, lies and outright theft should then blanch at a creator rejecting the cores values of the companies that produced these abuses.

The recycled canard offered in defense of the Big Two is thus: the creators signed the contracts. This has been demolished a million times over, but I think it’s unnecessary in the case of Ditko, who did what the Apologists are always suggesting was an alternative: he walked away. And was promptly second-guessed for the next four decades.

One of the strengths of Strange and Stranger is in documenting Ditko’s mistreatment not only at the hands of the Big Boys, but also the fan press and some of the smaller companies. This is, unfortunately, off-set by too much hand-wringing about Missed Opportunities in the later years. I understand the impulse to bemoan choices that appear Questionable, but in light of Ditko’s consistent mistreatment by everyone other than Charlton, it isn’t clear that anyone should sit in judgment on which subsequent choices were or were not appropriate.

Bell’s final chapter proceeds from the assumption that because Ditko’s techniques no longer adhere to the standards of the mainstream comics industry, they are somehow lesser or less-skilled than the previous decades of work. This is true only if one presumes that Ditko in any way cares about the collective assumptions about what does and does not make a “good” comic. This presumption is an historical bias based on Ditko’s earlier work and the audience’s unwillingness to allow an artist’s development off established paths. With any creative mind, some of these paths will be terrible and some will be good, but most will be ignored by the Afficinado, who craves nostalgic reminders of Earlier Days like a three-toothed junky longs for her junk. My guess would be that if Ditko’s creator-owned work were being judged independent of What Came Before, it wouldn’t be spoken of as a Decline, but rather in the same way that we have begun to discuss an outsider artist like Rory Hayes. (Note: not likening Ditko’s work to that of Hayes.)

Sometimes it feels like I’m the only person alive of whom this is true, but I enjoy, genuinely, the didactic Randian-influenced work. I’ve own copies of nearly all the Snyder/Ditko publications, and I plan to acquire the new one. I like their look, and I like the direction in which Ditko has gone. I don’t agree with their philosophical underpinnings, but that’s okay. I’m not interested in being reassured of my own rightness, nor am I affronted by the expression of a political and ethical system that is not my own. I’m an adult.

–
UPDATE, LATER: Steven Grant attacks this piece.

This year gave me hardcore deja-vu, but I was prepared by the previous engagement– I managed about twenty photographs and achieved the holy grail of commodity fetishism: the acquisition of a relatively unique object in unrepeatable circumstances. Along with my toilet photograph, this triumph indicates, I believe, that I had a good experience– two Unique Moments in what is, after all, an event dedicated to specific conformity of product.

It’s been many moons since I last read Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and my memory of it is terrible– but I believe that much of its central conceit revolves around the idea of the mass media providing a perverted mirror of actual human relations which then cheapens and destroys the human relations that it mirrors, thus making its own reflection increasingly perverted.

It’s hard to attend an event dedicated to the replacement of personalities with corporate products and not feel a little bit like a freaked-out Left Bank intellectual. The best way to think about the culture of comics fandom, or any fandom, really– and establishing a way of weeding out enemy from friend– is this: are people reacting to the product as a thing crafted and created by individuals and engaging with the communication implicit within that creation, or is the consumer’s interest in the surface aspects like “plot”, “characters” and “story”?

This is what makes the hoopla-hoo about the recent-released The Dark Knight completely repellent; Heath Ledger’s performance requires that the audience care (or pretend to care) about the Joker, a one-dimensional construct with no implicit or explicit meaning beyond its reflection of pulp tropes from the 1940s and an ability to sell related merchandise for the parent owner, Time Warner.

Ledger’s turn is an empty thing– imagine Popeye learning how to method act and channeling Marlon Brando from One-Eyed Jacks– but it could never be anything else. The Joker, in every incarnation, is what the lowest brow entertainment of its origin period had to tell us about criminality and madness: barely anything at all.

We live in the first society in which media narratives are an embedded industry: sheer statistics demand and enforce a hierarchy of consumption. Just as there will always be a certain number of cars sold each season, so too will there always be certain kinds of films achieving varying levels of success. Some will be blockbusters, some will be sleepers. Others will bomb.

The products themselves, being delivery mechanisms for the intake and release of capital, contain surface level narratives that are essentially meaningless and variations on tired themes: this is why the same people who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer are now watching Battlestar Galactica. The analogue with the auto industry again becomes useful: just as young people buy “edgy” cars and mature individuals buy “solid” cars, reasonably above-average nerds watch “smart” television, but avoid “dumb” shows like Enterprise. It’s an interface of marketing and demographics, and, in the case of Dark Knight, Time Warner’s exceptional good luck that its actor sacrificed himself upon Mammon’s Altar of High Marketing.

The lead-in for 2007′s installment– Transformers– was nostalgia for enormous fucking robots that turned into cars; this year it was the actor who went too far into the Darkness of the Joker and Never Came Back. But, really, let’s be honest: there’s about as much depth and darkness in the Joker as there is in the infinitely repeating cliche of the Hollywood OD. These same empty cultural tropes have been recycled forever; and if you don’t believe me, ask Lupe Velez.

The real purpose of Ledger’s performance appears to be a granting of permission for a certain kind of man to smear his face with makeup. You know these people: they had a real hey-hey-hey-day after 1994′s The Crow, another comics property with a lead actor bearing an oddly similar resemblance to Ledger in Dark Knight, who also died tragically before his film’s release. (Memo to Hollywood males: properly apply your eye and lip liners.)

These people, the cosplayers and the costumed, are the blank ciphers on which the spectacle is writ.

And that brings us right back to the San Diego Comic Con, 2008, ground zero of the masquerade, where the most common costume was the Joker. Cosplay and costuming are pretty abstractly interesting– if you think about them hard enough, you start wondering about the basic nature of free will. Each cosplayer makes a specific choice to dress up as a media property, but what if that’s an inversion of the actuality? What if the media property itself– the platonic form of the commodity– is making that choice on a spectral plane of existence? What if some people are genuinely so blank and empty that their souls and their bodies are nothing more than a canvas on which the idea of the Green Lantern is writing itself? And if that’s the case, then what, really, is the Green Lantern trying to tell those of us that see it?

The masquerade is like everything else at the Comic Con– a practical reassurance for all parties, those in costume and those not, that the Hobbies and Interests of the attendees are safe, unchallenging things. There’s a faux-surprise with each outrageous costume; can you believe that chick is half-naked? Can you believe that the fat dude is dressed as Kazaar? But these are rhetorical questions and the shock is faked, another false emotion amidst five days of lucre hiding behind camaraderie. The freak parade is a giant advertisement disguised as a hug.

The only reprieve from the sea of flesh was our attendance of a panel in celebration of Blake Bell’s recently released book on Steve Ditko. Around these quarters, Ditko is a long-term idee fixe– the only comic artist whose work I actively collect. I have my thoughts on the man, some of which are poorly expressed here.

I have a lot of trouble with panels– they conflict with my inability to sit still for more than thirty minutes and my complete unwillingness to shut up– but I always attend at least one of the more obscure. These sequestered, fluorescently lit cells are clusters of ultra-hardcore interests; the panelists and attendees are professionals and specialists in the totally arcane, and generally far removed from creeping product. Last year, I attended one on Disney strike-busting that bored my companion to tears; I was fascinated not only by the topic but by the audience. How was it possible to be in a room of thirty people who cared about attempts to unionize animators in the 1940s? But there it was.

Later, I discovered that the line-up of the Ditko panel as originally announced was Bell, the phenomenal Kim Deitch, Gary Groth, Jim Starlin, Carl Potts and Dean Mullaney. Mullaney– who had published Ditko under the Eclipse Comics banner– did not attend; his replacement was a younger woman Liana K., a Canadian who appears to be “known” for talking to a sock puppet and attending conventions half-naked, but, in the moment, we possessed zero knowledge of her background, nor of Mullaney’s absence, and assumed, in light of the seasoning of the other panelists, that she had been included as a misguided representation of the Female Perspective.

The panel had highlights. Bell projected a nice selection of Ditko art, and Kim Deitch discussed at some length the interest of his brother and collaborator Simon in Ditko; he also dissed on poor John Romita Sr. Sera sera, sez I. But, as all discussions of Ditko must do, the whole thing broke into contention around the topic of the Randian-influenced Objectivist comics, and in particular, Mr. A. (Viewers of the Jonathan Ross documentary might recall Mr. A as the point where Neil Gaiman, a man possessing no small experience with 20th Century American belief systems, started talking about “American barking madness.”)

It was Liana K. who brought the pain– discussing her discomfort with Mr. A and taking, I think, exception to the political didacticism in the work. These concerns fell into a well-honed tradition: most comics cognoscenti lean Left, and Leftism’s enduring problem is its condescension to those of opposing viewpoints. In short, while folks on the Right think that people on the Left are deranged, hell-bound sodomities, folks on the Left appear to believe that people on the Right are stupid.

It seems almost impossible to discuss Ditko’s Mr. A work without giving up a lament that the work “suffered” due to Ditko’s loading it with his politics. The person discussing the work will most often find these politics repellent and thus, indirectly, discuss Ditko as though he were stupid or somehow mistaken. (Not everyone, though: Jim Starlin was just fine.) But what this line of commentary really drives at is the same problem encountered in Ditko’s Hawk and Dove: the rigidity of the superhero genre as a storytelling device, and the limitations of a readership raised on genre expectations.

Ditko’s Mr. A stories only seem like “bad comics” if one expects genre exercises– if, however, one assumes that the works appear as their creator intended, they exist much more comfortably. They’re only “bad” if one’s definition of comics is limited to one genre & its one story, and if one assumes that there is only one potential audience being addressed.

Namely oneself.

(The strange thing about people constantly trying to wedge the Mr. A comics into the superhero genre is that both Dr. Strange and Spider-Man under Ditko were quite far from the genre; Peter Parker was the perpetually unfulfilled female lead of a Romance Comic, and Dr. Strange touristed through a successive series of monster/horror comics.)

Which is a long-winded way of suggesting that the worst possible place in the world to be raising the most obvious and hackneyed objections to Ditko’s Objectivist work has got to be a panel at the San Diego Comic Con. For the record, I also don’t recommend quoting scripture and verse to Christians.

It was not soon after Liana K. had called Mr. A something like “bad comics,” that a man in the audience called out with the most difficult possible question: “What would you have done differently?”

At the time, what stood out was the unfortunate undertone of (perhaps not so) latent sexism; who was this girl on a panel amongst industry veterans, and why was she prattling on about Ditko in such an ill-informed manner? Clearly, such assertions could not go unchallenged! About five to ten minutes of argument and floundering occurred– all of it painful and disagreeable to the eyewitness.

I was of two minds: I had a partial sympathy, knowing how incredibly awful it must be as a woman amongst nerds, but even without my later acquired knowledge, I couldn’t help wondering why anyone with such a surface level understanding of Ditko would sit on a panel of individuals that had published the man, or had hung out in his studio, or had edited him, or, you know, had written a book on the man’s life and art. We each have our interests, but interest alone does not make us an expert.

Coming home and discovering that the individual in question’s major credentials appear to be squeezing into a Batgirl costume and conversing with a sock puppet only made me wonder what in god’s name panel organizer Blake Bell was thinking; why would you ever invite this person? Isn’t it bad enough that the Comic Con is one enormous headsqueeze– must I witness parochial sexism against the ill-informed and often half-clothed?

With the distance of a few days, I have begun to see this moment as emblematic of the entire Comic Con; a collision between the cosplaying media personality, an almost living avatar of the convention’s current direction, and the ultra-nerd contingent, the kind of obsessive old school freak that was once its heart-and-soul.

Much as my basic sympathies fall with the latter camp, it’s also clear that these people are dinosaurs– the comics industry has become raw meat for the grinder of film & television, and there’s an awful day of reckoning not far from now, when the vast majority of youngish comic book fans have come up reading their funnybooks from right to left. Even the outcasts and the arty will be pushing books based on conventions and ideas that have no connection whatsoever– none at all– to that great mass of readers. And then, kids, it’s done.

How much did I like glamourpuss #1? Enough that I wonder how there’s an audience for the book other than myself– if you cracked open my head and looked inside, there’s a very good chance you’d find a fashionable woman drawn in a retro-50s/early 60s art style talking about Process and Method.

But. Given Sim’s notorious Statements on Ladies and Their Brains, an unacknowledged tension runs throughout the book: does one accept Sim’s parody at face value because the Fashion Industry and its Publications are vile things, or does one go further and try to deduce if this satire runs darker than its surface? To wit: is the scorn directed at the Industry’s customers? One constantly wonders whether a pass needs to be issued– and to whom or what. The reader has two options: saying either, “Okay, supposed misogynist, your parody, with all its potentially unpleasant implications, is justified JUST THIS ONCE,” or, “Okay, Fashion Industry, you are the ten percent bloodsucker of the poor, but I’m siding with YOU!”

This tension makes the book. But I prefer my entertainments murky.

Murky is a pretty good word to describe Judenhass. There’s no question as to the nobility of the project– and I think that Sim has an excellent point when he observes that people working in comics, an industry built almost solely by Jews, do have a very real and substantial connection to the Holocaust and the plague of anti-Semitism, two of the biggest evils of the 20th Century.

But. Sim suggests, on a double-page spread depicting the road gates to Auschwitz (“Abreit Macht Frei”), that the Holocaust was an inevitable occurrence. This is followed by pages and pages of quotations from Famous Personages– Martin Luther, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Truman, Roosevelt’s lady cousin– about their discomfort or repulsion or disgust or dislike for the Jews. Judenhass. The inference of the book is that the levels of hatred for the Jews throughout Christian (and perhaps pre-Christian) civilization culminated in the Holocaust; that this hatred was fueled and encouraged by intellectuals and public figures, and that the opinions of these public figures bear a direct trace on the events that followed.

There are two major problems with this thesis: most obviously, the Holocaust was in no way inevitable. Without getting into the incredibly complex question of Who Could Have Done What, I think it’s safe to say that had the Allied powers not botched the Treaty of Versailles, it is highly unlikely that the Nazis would have come to power. Might there have been some kind of horrifically violent treatment of the Jews? Anything’s possible– but I think the final lesson of the rise of the Nazis is clear: fascism is less a political philosophy than a political fantasy in which one accepts a series of falsehoods out of resentment for one’s position in the world, or out of fear that one might lose one’s current position. Thus, it is best not to create an entire underclass of people through your global-political machinations. If anyone doubts the basic truth of this idea, I’ve got one word: al-Qaeda.

The second issue concerns the use of quotations. With at least one– that of Mark Twain– Sim is playing loose and fast. The article in question is linked from Sim’s site, and a reading of it shows that Sim has provided the reader (the ellipses should be the first hint) with a small part of a very long piece. In this essay, Twain explicitly does not condemn the Jews. If anything, he is attempting an even-handed defense. The quotation– to the effect that Christians hate Jews because Jews are better at making money than Christians– is, in its own benignly stereotyping context, more or less praising Jews at the expense of Christians.

Does Twain acknowledge the full humanity of the Jewish people rather than treat them as a monolithic people? Certainly not. Is the article a piece of rabid Jew Hatred along the lines of Himmler or Goebbels? Emphatically no! The article in question is a piece of late 19th Century journalism by one of then contemporary America’s foremost progressives on racial and ethnic issues– to judge it from the context of the 21st Century and find it, as I do, complicated is one matter. To classify it as Jew Hatred is ridiculous. [More on Twain and the Jews here.]

While this could be construed as nitpicking, it points to a bigger problem with Judenhass. (I’m ignoring Sim’s inclusion of H.L. Mencken.) I’m completely unable– with the exception of contemporary statements by the Nazi leadership and apathetic Allied politicans– to see what any of the quotations have to do with the Holocaust. Sim’s method is inference through juxtaposition; in the most shocking pages, we see passages from Martin Luther’s truly reprehensible On the Jews and Their Lies placed over a spread of a photorealistically depicted mound of bodies. But this placement does not mean, implicitly or inherently, that Luther himself, nor his writing, bear a responsibility for the Holocaust or the prevalence of Jew Hatred throughout the Christian World.

Martin Luther was a disgusting, superstitious little man with bad table habits and a belief in gnomes. The people of 20th Century Berlin used forks and knives and didn’t think that the forest was rank with pixies and sprites, so either Luther’s continuing influence on the ideas and practices of Germany society is significantly overrated or there is a choice inherent in people’s horrible, hateful beliefs.

A voice missing in Judenhass is one that, upon reflection, could undermine the text-image-juxtaposition-inference structure. Not one quotation, not one jot or tittle of the writings of Frederich Nietzsche? The Philosopher-King of the Nazi Party? Wasn’t it Thus Spoke Zarathustra that was distributed throughout the military? But here’s the rub: Nietzsche hated Nationalism and wasn’t an anti-Semite. His legacy was sold out by a jealous sister, and Hitler saw what he wanted.

If one takes Sim’s almost-argument to its most logical extreme, there’s a way to read Judenhass in which the responsibility of the average German citizen– the people who, after all, voted the Nazis into power and who put the raw material of their bodies behind the Nazi agenda and war effort– is abnegated. The “inevitability” which Sim sees emanating from a culture of Jew Hatred strikes me as almost ignorant of the true horror: the complicity and willingness of vast swaths of German (and Austrian and French and Polish and etc.) society to believe lies willingly and to support, and often participate in, the abuse, murder and exploitation of their fellow citizens. A full manifestation of Sim’s argument removes any individual choice in the matter, and if there is no choice, then there is no responsibility.

–

Update: This review by Bob Mitchell is about the only other writing that questions Sim’s methods in Judenhass. It’s a fascinating, and justifiable, indicator of the lingering sensitivity of the subject that Sim– a creator whose every jotting and utterance is generally subject to profound scrunity– has had Judenhass largely taken at face value.

I’m fascinated by early representations of mythology in American cartoons and comics– a reoccurring motif in the work of Kirby– but this story holds a special distinction, having served, apparently, as the partial inspiration for the lyrics of “Leave the Capitol,” a song by The Fall.

“Leave the Capitol” is on the Slates EP, released during the band’s early 78-83 period. This is when they were, indisputably!, the best band in the world. The lyrics in question come towards the end of a long historical ramble– who knows its meaning?– and are the proclamation of what sounds like a drunken Scotsman:

“I laughed at the great God Pan
I didnae! I didnae!
I laughed at the great god Pan
I didnae! I didnae! I didnae! I didnae! I didnae!”

This song follows on the lyrics of “2nd Dark Age,” a song found on Early Fall 77-79, the lyrics of which read, in part:

“I am Roman Totale XVII
the bastard offspring of
Charles I
and The Great God Pan”

]]> http://blog.kobek.com/2008/04/25/i-laughed-at-the-great-god-pan/feed/ 0 http://blog.kobek.com/2008/04/02/thoughts-on-the-visual-style-of-from-hell/ http://blog.kobek.com/2008/04/02/thoughts-on-the-visual-style-of-from-hell/#comments Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:20:41 +0000 Jarett Kobek http://blog.kobek.com/?p=542 Continue reading →]]> Huzzah to Craig Fischer & Charles Hatfield for inaugurating a series of monthly articles on the work of Eddie Campbell. Readers of the blog and friends of the blogger know too well my abiding interest in Campbell’s output– Alec: How to Be An Artist remains my favorite work of comic art– and it’s nice to see his efforts receive what promises to be a thorough examination. The first article in the series contains an extended discussion of the visual style in From Hell, with some contention as to the rough, “caligraphic” linework that Campbell employs.

From Hell was where I first encountered Campbell– I had gone in with an earlier fascination with the Ripper crimes (and Alan Moore) and came away with a profound appreciation of the artist. I presume that it’s my familiarity with the Ripper crimes that gives me a sense of what’s missing in the discussion of Fischer & Hatfield: the historical influence.

The Ripper is often called the first serial killer. This supposed emergence of the New Breed has been employed as a dubious metaphor for the Grim & Dark nature of late 19th and 20th Century modernism (including in From Hell itself.) This is, of course, nonsense. There’s been serial killers for as long as there’s been people. What distinguishes the Ripper crimes are their unique positioning: by the 1880s, London had become the epicenter of a globally connected economy with a rapidly developing newsmedia. Unlike, say, the Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1811, the Ripper was killing in a city with numerous daily and weekly papers geared towards a population with a historically high literacy rate, and at a time when the telegraph network had advanced enough to send reports to the entire world. The crimes received an enormous amount of attention, locally, nationally and globally.

The best way to conceive of the Ripper is not as the first serial killer, but as the first serial killer to be covered. The villain became a global celebrity based on the infamy of his misdeeds. (Comparisons to Paris Hilton are dutifully withheld.) Incidentally, there was a second serial killer active in London at the same time as the Ripper– the Thames Torso Murderer, who, as the moniker implies, dumped headless and limbless corpses around the Thames. Sometimes the legs and arms turned up. The heads never did. I mention this only to make the point that even in them olden dayes, certain stories had more traction than others.

Of the tabloids covering the Ripper, most iconic was the weekly Illustrated Police News. This publication’s covers were illustrated with fine line engravings. The socioeconomic status of the Ripper’s victims– doss house unfortunates– did not lend itself to a lifestyle that accrued many visual mementos. (It was not until 2001 that Ripper researcher Neil Shelden miraculously uncovered a photograph of the third victim, Annie Chapman, in life.)

Thus, the paucity of visual materials (other than mortuary and deathbed photographs) created a vacuum that was filled by period illustrations. In particular, those of the Illustrated Police News, which were especially salacious, became the most frequently circulated images. These engravings are the dominant narrative determinants of how the affair was, and continues to be, visualized. I’ve gacked a few images of the Illustrated Police News covers off the indispensable Casebook.org and, oddly, Allposters.com:

Compare these images with the page of From Hell supplied by Fischer:

Ignoring the superiority of Campbell’s compositions and figure work, it’s clear to me that the style of From Hell was intentionally rendered as an echo of the period illustrations. I’ve always assumed that Moore chose Campbell for the reason that much of his work exists in a space that is close to the tradition of British engraving. (This invites an argument not worth having– you’ll note that the Illustrated Police News employs almost every device associated with comics.)

Fischer complains, specifically, that:

And while it goes against prevailing critical opinion–and makes me feel like a persnickety jerk to boot–I think that Watchmen, superheroes, BEMs and all, is a better book than From Hell, because Dave Gibbons’ art perfectly complements Alan Moore’s words. In multiple sequences in Watchmen (remember Tales of the Black Freighter?), Moore’s writing drifts away from the denotative meaning of the visuals, but Gibbons’ pictures are so clear and easily legible that they nail down what’s happening in the sequence without any verbal assist.

This presumes that there is an inherent defect in From Hell– that its apparent lack of visual clarity is an impediment from a final meaning. As much as Hatfield ably counters, I think both sides miss a greater point: From Hell is best understood as a work of comic art that aims at a construction that, theoretically, would have been possible in 1888. This kind of speculation gets very thin, very fast, but there’s an argument to be made that an intentionally messy, contrived formalism permeates the book’s script from beginning to finish– the full title, the seriality, the varying size of individual chapters, the apparent meandering and the length of the work all lend themselves to the idea that we are not reading a Graphic Novel so much as a desultory Victorian Novel done Graphically. (Hair splitting.)

Campbell’s visual approach in From Hell is different than that in his other works– the photorealist architecture, the extremely and unusually fine lines and the enforced awkwardness of panel-to-panel narrative have been called “distancing,” but I’m not sure that’s the right word. Distance from what to what? Considering that From Hell’s basic narrative principle relies on an essential unclarity– after all, Moore started in the muck of Lud Heat and White Chapel, Scarlet Tracings and made it murkier– it’s more than suggestible that the approach of Campbell’s art is another formalist effort at rendering the story within a historically appropriate set of techniques. If the engravers of the Illustrated Police News were putting together a pseudomystical graphic narrative on the history of London and the interconnectedness of magic and death, one suspects it would look very, very similar to From Hell.

–

Two final semi-unrelated notes: from the first, the Ripper murders have been about class. There’s a very radical idea in the visual presentation of From Hell– the style remains the same regardless of the personages being depicted; which means the toffs are treated same as the scum. There’s a lesson for you, me lads.

Secondly, if anyone wants more writing by me on the Ripper crimes, I suggest that they check out “May My End a Warning Be: Catherine Eddowes and Gallows Literature in the Black Country,” on the aforementioned casebook.org.

This idea has been playing in my head for a while, and as a result, I’ve been reading the recent back catalogues of some of the more overtly pulp influenced titles. The two authorial runs that most stuck out were Brian Michael Bendis on Daredevil and Garth Ennis on The Punisher.

I’ve made fun of Bendis’s work for years, and deservedly so; when the man phones it in, he really phones it in. Worse yet, when he believes that he’s writing something serious and important, every single page lets you know that you’re reading something Serious and Important. (Also, he’s unfunny. Sorry. It’s true.) That said, Bendis’s four year run on Daredevil was pitch-perfect and the best anyone’s ever done with the character. Engaging development married to reasonably plausible storylines that were heavy without being Profoundly Consequential For Marvel. And he managed, as I’m sure all have commented, to do what had been impossible since 1986: not taste like Miller Lite.

Ennis’s writing on The Punisher has spanned eight years, two regular titles, several miniseries, multiple one-shots and god knows what else. By the time of Punisher: MAX and Born, Ennis had thrown aside the many, many crutches that have plagued his body of work (emphasis on scatology + corny attempts at humor) and began delivering what constitutes the best work on a mainstream comic in the last five years. The easiest way to describe his achievement is thus: in all 55 (so far) issues of the MAX series, there hasn’t been a bad installment. Not one.

Ennis’s initial handling of the character– a 12 issue miniseries that reintroduced the Punisher after the ugly years of the late Nineties– was pretty god damned dumb. A regular series (Volume 4) followed, of which Ennis wrote the majority. Again, much of it is really dumb. But it gets better with time, and it’s fascinating to watch the process of Ennis moving ever closer towards a more serious idea of what he wants to achieve with the character.

I’d argue that this vision (the one that continues in MAX) had been present all along. It was right there in the first (and best) issue of the original miniseries, something that is seemingly acknowledged at the end of Volume 4 by a direct & exacting quotation:

(From The Punisher, vol 3, #1. April 2000.)

(From The Punisher, vol 4, #37, February 2003.)

Incidentally, this demonstrates how the serial form can be employed in a way that’s rarely, if ever, seen in the mainstream. Superhero continuity is about Massive Happenstances– like, remember when the Green Goblin killed Gwen Stacey?– that are referenced endlessly. By contrast, these two scenes (ignoring the homicides) are about one quiet moment reminding a person of another– and having the most apocalyptic event in recent American history intrude on both. In theory, this is what long form, multi-part narratives should be about: changing with the tides and sways, and providing a quick, visceral response. Bully capital.