Category Archives for: Comics

Arrived at the Bloody Streets of Paris!

12 December 2021 by Rey Armenteros

When I finish the book, the review inevitably becomes a different matter. The ending becomes a bit of a disappointment. We get served the cleanest of resolutions. Everything in the sordid story of Parisians having to deal with the German occupation has a sound reason for being there. What seemed like random events were actually carefully orchestrated links in a perfectly gift-wrapped story. Every strand is conscientiously considered on a web made by a spider called fat convenience.

Another way of saying this is that it was filled with too many perfect coincidences made to provide connections to the array of unrelated occurrences needed. I get the sense that writer of the original novel, Leo Malet, did not have all the details of the crimes ready, and he started the book on interesting impressions that would tickle the reader with curiosity, but when he puts it together in the end, he reaches for some kind of plausible reasons. We don’t learn that coincidence after coincidence is the engine that runs this story throughout the many city blocks we are walking through in our foggy strolls through Lyon and Paris, until the roadmap is produced in the end.

Not only coincidences of the lead detective running into the right people but of him being at the right place at the right time to witness something that would help him later in the mystery. Burma finds the guy with the amnesia who eventually turns out to be someone he knew before the war started. That guy coincidentally bumps into the petty thief when the Germans capture them, and Burma a year and a half later bumps into the petty thief trying to break into his office at just the point in the story when he needed him to walk him through how he found the guy. The house the amnesiac used to live in was still conveniently abandoned. Everything was in its place, including the torture setup that was so important to Burma’s investigation. The petty thief starts to collect American cigarette butts all around that abandoned house, and that becomes an essential clue to the killer’s identity. This goes on and on, coincidences tying the chance meeting with the old colleague of Burma’s at the train station who gets shot before his eyes, when this colleague happens to spout out the same address that the amnesiac gives Burma in the Nazi stalag.

In a most ridiculous ending, the story even takes us through an Agatha Christie setting of the stage where the detective gathers all the participants we have met along the journey by inviting them to his apartment, and of course, they all show up. He goes through his own rendition of Poirot walking among all the suspects, making them nervous with some piece of incriminating evidence or other, after declaring, “Someone in this room committed the murder.”

When the murderer is found out, a shot rings in the room, but they catch him anyway, and we get the rest of the explanations along with the ludicrous idea behind why the actual murderer would show up to this get-together. Art Spiegelman, in the introduction to this book, mentioned the “trash” novel source from which this adaptation came from, and now I understood what he meant by it. It was hard-boiled, but unlike a Raymond Chandler novel, where the detective is not that superhuman and all the answers are not exposed in the end in a parlor room gathering. Even Chandler usually answers for too much. Mysteries are usually such a pleasure to read — until you get to the ending. I long for a mystery without all that perfect reasoning in the end. One that can’t answer for most things and just stares with longing into some setting wondering how it all went.

Story being a disappointment aside, the book is still a beauty! The original may be a trash novel, but the comics adaptation is such an ensemble of cuisine delights to reread and reread. It remains a travelogue that gives you this wise-cracking detective as a guide around the city of Lyon and then moments of Paris during a surreal time in France’s history. The sequences are well-balanced with interior monologue and moments of silence. And Jacques Tardi does pull this out of whatever stagnant story tropes it evolved from and makes it into something quite different, quite special.

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Before Reaching the Bloody Streets of Paris

05 December 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The Bloody Streets of Paris is a Jacques Tardi comic book book-length story that has not yet taken place in Paris because I am not done with it yet. I guess that action in the story will end up moving to Paris. The actual title in French is 120 Rue de Gare. It is an adaptation of a hardboiled French novel by a writer named Leo Malet.

It is set during World War II, where our hardboiled detective, Nestor Burma, is a prisoner of war at one of the Nazi stalags. There, he learns of a man that supposedly has amnesia. One of the inmates doesn’t buy it, thinks the guy is faking it in order to get a free pass back to Paris. One night, the guy dies but not before telling our detective about a woman named Helene and 120 Rue de Gare. And so begins this strange mystery that goes beyond its prisoner of war beginnings and ends up in the free city of Lyon, when Burma gets his pass to get out of the stalag. At a train station, he finds an old friend on the platform, and as they wave at each other, his friend yells “120 Rue de Gare,” before being shot several times in the back.

And our Burma is pulled into this circumstance — a mystery that involves a now-dead former colleague with a mysterious address that keeps coming up and a beautiful woman that looks like a famous movie actress who he spots at the scene of his friend’s murder. He is informally working with the police commissioner of Lyon, calling on old friends he knows in the city. He recruits the help of a reporter and a lawyer friend of his dead buddy. These three men of some acquaintance to one another even tear up the night with wine first, and then bottles of booze at a restaurant in a meandering night that feels so European — living the real life, even under these war conditions.

Lyon is an interesting setting because it is in unoccupied France. There are half-blackouts at night against possible bombings. It is a city that tries to retain order amidst the chaos of the Nazi invasion, and the blackouts and the strange mystery in front of Burma are doused in the city’s perpetual fog. As Burma keeps calling it, “this damn city.” We get many views of the city, sometimes in silent panels of a pensive Burma trying to figure out who could have killed his old colleague.

The caricatures Tardi makes of these various characters tells us so much about them. In one panel where the lawyer lights a cigarette and covers his face with it as he is leaning on the table is worth a few of sentences of prose. Later, he is driving Burma somewhere, and a cigarette is dangling from his mouth in such a way that is hard to even put together in words. The pictures, in fact, flow through the details of the story, and a reader needs to slow down to absorb these people and places and objects and interiors with greater care. After a series of pages, I would go back and scour the panels for such rich elaboration. If reading the novel, it would have been like scanning the descriptive paragraphs to get to the good parts and then at the end of a chapter, you go back to read the aspects offered for the settings and really draw yourself in. In other words, it wouldn’t have been very practical in that other medium. It may be the way most of us read comics, and it may very well be the greatest distinction between reading a novel and long-form comics. Most of us read the things that slow us down in prose but are disposed to merely glance at panels with no words in them.

I do make myself slow down, but I also go back to those pages I had already experienced, not so much to corroborate earlier information, but to take it in once more, walk through those lonely, obscure streets with Burma to hike through my own past explorations of other cities. I am reliving every Raymond Chandler novel I have read. And I am reminiscing on the art I used to see in my youth when flipping through kid magazines and watching certain cartoons in Tardi’s images.

A reader is purportedly filled with nostalgia. I don’t know how much I believe that. Yes, Tardi’s art touches on a few sensibilities from some past zeitgeist, but it is far more subtle than just that. His line is that tight clean kind you get with a bowl-tipped pen nib (and I assume this because those were the lines I would get from it when experimenting with various dip pens). He uses a grainy pencil to indicate the foggy parts. He marries his photo references with his signature caricatures in panels that blend with the story. No reader can take that in if they were casually flying through the pages, focusing on mostly the words. No such casual reader would appreciate Tardi’s characteristics if they were purely just there to get to the end of this yarn. Such a work of art needs the reader’s engagement.

Unlike the proverbial page-turner, which according to the public is the way to go for “successful” books, the books that really have something to say or to show may impose a speed on you. Certain works can only be read slowly because the makeup of their sentences dictates a slower, more methodical read if you are even going to understand them. I am now thinking of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, which showcases sentences that had never existed before.

With comics, the conventional way to slow things down is to inundate panels with captions and thought balloons of verbiage. The reader needs to take the pacing of a string of wordless panels into their circle. Myself, I like to chew on things a little longer, especially when they are this good! It may be that I am reading this book too slowly, but I rue the day I no longer have to look forward to reading Tardi’s rendition of this story. So, I am prolonging it, taking sips of this book a few pages a night, like I swish wine around when it tastes good. Drinking wine is hardly ever about getting a buzz. It is about making the most of that bottle you have opened and cannot unopen. The time is right now, but how I will regret when the last drop, the last page, my final thought on such a stroll through the past has left its mark!

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A Rare Mosaic

24 October 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Prophet graphic novels were made by a team of creators, headed by the popular cartoonist Brandon Graham. It was no corporate work-for-hire — well, not in the standard manner that those kinds of products are built by editors-in-chief, presidents of big companies, and their advertising departments. The team was put together by professional friendships, when a couple of buddies traded ideas while they were hanging out one night, perhaps on one of those drives back home after a big comic book convention, in long conversations to while away the time, throwing impressions back and forth and then coming up — years later! — with a mosaic of countless images running through a storyline that went along a web of interconnected events, and so on and so forth.

I don’t know how true this little backstory was, but it grabbed my attention, and I wanted to read it. I had heard so many good things about this work, that my expectations came high. It took years to finally board the train and go through the ride, myself, after ordering every volume from my local library and having them come in all at once, like serendipity prognosticating the things that were about to be unraveled in this undulating story.

The Prophet from the title was the main character, and yet he was also only a clone. He was in a state of deep sleep when he finally woke up, and the world was nothing like it was when he and his brethren were ruling it. It was time to change that. His mission, as we learn, was to bring back the Earth Empire. He was in the role of a survivor. Armed with tools stored for hundreds or thousands of years, not all of which made it intact, he was hacking his way to the destination. Our eponymous protagonist was a thoroughly ugly human, more reminiscent of a neanderthal than of a more ideal human from the future, hiking along the terrain, snapping off things to chew — always eating just about anything, as we would soon come to understand. If there were a going theme in many of the stories to come, it was about the necessity to eat, and every clone of John Prophet was designed to eat almost anything. He would brandish large teeth and take a bite out of some manner of bloated insect, chewing thoughtfully, sometimes holding a twig in his mouth while he freed his hands to inspect something along his trail.

He was a hero, surely — almost superheroic in his exploits. But he was also a part of the human comedy. There was nothing too serious about how he was depicted, because in the end, he was as human as any of us.

The world was nothing like ours and it had not as many resemblances to the worlds of science fiction that we were used to. It never spoon-fed what was happening either. Much of the story relied on details on the art, and I was reading these dynamics in the story with warm attention. I knew I was going to like most of this epic story in the first few chapters. There was too much creativity at stake to ignore. I felt that it was not just about the story, but it was the way it was delivered. I recognized Brandon Graham’s hand, having read enough of his solo projects that I knew some of the quirky word balloon art and how the ways the technology worked must have come from his singular mind. But it was a large collaboration, and the various creators that would chime in along separate chapters were bringing their own vision into it. It was not just a soup but various soups perilously mixed into one large pot which still managed to have an aroma that made you look forward to the flavors that were coming.

The concept of cloning propounded in the story came from a fresh perspective, where the clones were not exactly like the host or like each other. Some of them were women, and each clone had its own characteristics. Though they were all called John Prophet, they had nicknames that suited their characteristics. The science leaned on bio-technology where body parts and organic objects had useful traits that accommodated its user.

The antagonist to this story was at first the new environment that the awoken John Prophet in the first chapter had to contend with. It was man against his environment. Man triumphed in that first story, and the clones of Prophet were reawakened.

But it soon got more complicated. Some of the John Prophets were not onboard for the changes in store for their take over of this future Earth. Prophets would go to other galaxies. When the good guys won, it was soon shown that the good guys were becoming bad guys. I found parallels with the lessons we learn in real history, and no matter how advanced mankind has become, we still make the same mistakes.

I was taken away into these unpredictable developments, luxuriating in the dynamics of the places and creatures of other worlds and contemplating the story developments from centuries before that were being rationed to us as very important things were happening within our present.

The main characters were several John Prophets, and they were not immune to death. The one with the white beard that was known as Old Man Prophet seemed to eventually become the main character, and it made you wonder if this was the original Prophet from which all the others were cloned. So, was it? And the answer was no, because you learned that he was just an earlier clone. The events of these new stories happened so many uncountable years into the future, you had no link to any past from which they originated.

Simon Roy was the first regular artist, but when the other artists came, they came with styles different enough to have you recognize them, and yet the change of art never felt jarring. Overall, it had an alternative comic book look; the art brought excitement to the stories because of the different styles. The style changes made sense in the story, because if the creator Farel Dalrymple did an issue, it was one where the story was following the Prophet which had a tail. The next time we saw the tail-enhanced Prophet, it was Dalrymple drawing it again. The first half of the epic would parcel out some of the art chores like that, according to which artist was doing what character, and they were divided by chapters.

With later chapters, you’d get a montage of various artists making individual pages, where every time you flipped a page, it was a different look on different characters, depending on which character was being represented. As the series continued and you could start to detect these patterns, they would eventually be broken in favor of even newer creators taking their part to put their spin on the ever growing story. There were individual panels that were so powerful, like a color harmony or piece of figurative distortion. The art might have been the single greatest feature of this incredible experiment if the story itself weren’t so damn thought-provoking! Actually, I still don’t know which one was better. I love the crafted nature of the story, but the art, even with the computer coloring, feels handmade.

Prophet appears to have been a grand experiment, and it made me think that this is one of the true collaborative efforts in comics, where “collaboration” means everyone has a role to fulfill. Though Brandon Graham did most of the writing, it seems to have been something like a duet he was playing with Simon Roy at first, and then with others, as they came onboard. I can see these excited creators inventing the specifics of their macrocosm, as they were fishing for new species, laying out blueprints for new technologies, delving for better ways to tell an innovative story. Not all experiments are successful on all counts, and yet I can find no fault with this series of books. It is so well-put together, you would never think it was made by various minds working in some kind of comic jam session.It must have been serendipity!

The one big question I could not ignore is why did Brandon Graham and company choose to ever do Prophet? This was not their own invention. They chose someone else’s property. The original Prophet was just another Image Comics rehash of superhero ideas by none other than Rob Liefeld himself, the poster boy for comic book inanity of the 1990s. As it stands, there is no resemblance between Liefeld’s Prophet and their work, except for maybe one or two points of connection. My question is why didn’t they just place these stellar ideas into characters of their own making? It could have easily been “John Apostle.” Why touch that old, bad stuff in the first place? And why line Liefeld’s pockets in the process? Could it be they wanted Liefeld’s name so that it could make more money?

The pragmatic answer may in fact be that it is attached to a ready-made audience of aging youths from the 1990s who would like to see their nostalgia served with higher purpose. In that sense, Brandon Graham and Simon Roy and everyone else were serving their great story to a larger readership.

But reading and rereading this impressive work, it eventually hit me that the creative team themselves were the audience for the original Prophet when they were kids, maybe going off into other universes the first version might have inspired in them and consequently made their clones of the work, making their boyish dreams of such work into reality. I have no doubt that is what drove them to make that old makeshift product shine in that way that it does now. That genuine love for this universe that grew out of that simplistic, thinly-made original is what made their imaginations explode, and they had been taking the pieces of that explosion with them since their first contact with it until they day they got together to put it back together.

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Artist Unknown and Iger

15 August 2021 by Rey Armenteros

It was either “artist unknown” or “Iger Shop,” which essentially means the same shit. Horror comics from the 1950s never gave credit to the creators, unless you spot a rare signature by the artist somewhere on the first page. But since those days, comic book archivists and historians have managed to identify creators for some of the work. It follows that we know much of the work of Bob Powell because of documents and witness accounts, but also because his drawing style was so evocative. His work got so popular, that copycats started drawing those muscular faces with the same panache that was such an imprint of Powell’s work. In a manner of thinking, some of these “fakes” were so good, who knows if all of Powell’s alleged work were his or not?

But Powell was an exception. The industry didn’t have many of these. The crap was churned out so that it met with the demand. Comic books were big money taken from little kids. Not everyone that worked them was a first-rate artist. We horror comic aficionados revere Bob Powell, Lee Elias, and Jack Cole today, but they were virtual nobodies in their day. They would hide the fact they worked in comic books. If asked, they would claim they were commercial artists.

Because of our new interest, publishers are collecting these old works in nicely-made books for us to enjoy. Which takes me back to this one book that had so many unknown artists, I was like, “What the hell!” At the start of every story, I would level my eyes to the bottom of the page to see who did it, and it would say “Artist unknown.” About half the stories were “artist unknown.” And many of the others said “Iger Shop.” And they practically meant the same thing — but not quite.

If it declared the artist as unknown, it meant they couldn’t even properly attribute it to anyone. But Iger Shop was a mismatch. It pointed to no style because the system behind Iger Shop took away any inkling of originality.

The Iger Shop was a business run like a sweat shop. It had comic book artists lined up in rows of drawing boards producing the content for comic book publishers, doing it assembly line fashion. If you were an artist working for Iger, you were hired to draw the one thing you were good at: just close up faces of beautiful women, or spooky backgrounds on countrysides, or fast cars, or figures fighting each other, or monsters. From the directions of an editor/scripter, they would get the right artist for the panel needed. Each page was a Frankenstein monster that came from pieces of different artists patched together to make this grotesque thing. Maybe the pages were laid out by one artist designated to lay out pages before it was given to each respective artist to fulfill his duty.

But if you were good at drawing a mangled head or a living corpse, you were used in the specific panels that needed them, even if you were good at other things. This hodgepodge of art chores was put together in the end with perhaps a single inker who gave it a varnish of consistency. It might not hold it all together, but it was all that a system like this could ever hope for.

Iger Shop, believe it or not, has retained a few fans. I have read about those Iger Shop fans holding up this horror comic or that story as paragons of craft and terror. I have read some of these stories, and I recoiled at first reaction. Because before I knew it was an Iger piece of patchwork, intuition was telling me there was something wrong with the art. After digesting these better stories, I started seeing an argument in the ones that the defenders of Iger held up to the light. Actually, I am going to agree with them. But they are the exceptions. The rule for this type of work is that it is not just the trash everybody believed it to be in those days, it was the type that lined the trash bin at the very bottom to collect the ooze that spilled from everything that was thrown in it. Iger was getting his revenues, and that was all that could have mattered to someone who supported such a system. It’s filler material, something to sell to comic book publishing companies that need pages with which to pad their flimsy magazines.

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Tenets and Tangents

18 September 2020 by Rey Armenteros

Tenets shape forms. I’ve been collecting tenets for years. When something falls apart, I make a note of never doing that again. I collect these rules to make my art more precise to my intentions. It works, I think.

But I know that every time you bring up another rule, you separate yourself from everyone that is not employing the rule. I noticed that as my interests hone in on just one type of art, I refuse to include the other types. It could be that I just don’t know enough about installation art for me to even say much about it. It is merely a reluctance. I am open to anything — except for those things that are precluded by my parameters.

I prefer paint over anything else. I like drawings with traditional materials, but I do not draw with such tools; I draw with acrylic paint, and that has suited me enough that I only entertain something like charcoal when looking at somebody else’s work.

When I think of the field of art or the occupation of artist, they are synonymous with painting and painter. I use artist and painter interchangeably, accidentally alienating sculptors, for example. Everybody does this. In class, many of my students interchange the two words as if all art were paintings.

I don’t mean to because I like sculptures very much. I have hardly ever done them. Given my limited studio space, I find the fact that a single work of art can potentially take up so much more space than a flat painting as a liability. And I have noted that many sculptors are not discrete about their feelings of superiority over painters. But I wholeheartedly include them in the realm of art, anyway.

Photography is the newer medium which still has its public questions of if it is art or not. It certainly can be art, but I think it is hard to make art with a mechanical box. There are too many pics everywhere, and they are associated with the universal power of devices and trinkets any non-artist can use. Nevertheless, I can appreciate a well-crafted exception that does cross the threshold into art. It doesn’t matter that I have zero interest in photographs of almost any stripe. My opinions are meaningless here. What matters is that this is definitely a possibility.

Then, there is everything else, and that is where personal beliefs get murky.

I don’t usually go for technological art, unless there is a good reason for it. There is nothing to see in people trying to attempt art with screens and devices if nothing is meant by it.

I like comic books. But I don’t like all of them. The superhero comics are not to even be considered, unless made by a creator that excelled, like Steve Ditko or Frank Miller — and back in the old days, these same comics were considered junk; so it is a distinction that carries a complex value. Aficionados of Ditko know what makes him great, but very few people outside such circles would understand this level of appreciation.

Art comics are good, but too much whining about your own life is bad. A little bit of that can go a long way, and when you get every art comic book creator going on about the life of a comic book artist, it becomes exactly as boring as it sounds.

Weird comics that do something different can generally be good, unless they’re done badly. However, badly-made comics can be good if the craftless “esthetic” somehow works with aspects of the work.

If a comic is too weird, it better have a damn good reason. Weirdness for the sake of weirdness is old news and almost nobody’s flavor. Comics are only as good as how every element comes together as a whole.

And that means that a well-drawn comic that has nothing else to offer is only transient eye-candy because it offers nothing else. If there is something under the surface, a reader or viewer can glean more out of it.

But if a creator is playing with too many secrets, then it is a waste of time, as any reader can attest when they can’t understand something that has too many layers of meaning.

Leave a comment | Categories: Argument, Comics, Essay, ReyA' | Tags: argument, comicbooks, essay

Conflict of Interests

07 August 2020 by Rey Armenteros

This is a response to an article at The Comics Journal (abbreviated as TCJ), published by Fantagraphics Books. The article attempts to belittle a rival publisher (Yoe Books) of classic comics reprints, and it is followed by a long list of scathing comments, most of them against the targeted publisher. Note that R. C. Harvey, who does defend Yoe Books and is mentioned in my comment, is not to be confused with the article’s writer (since their names have a similar construction). The article can be found here:

TCJ Article on Yoe Books

And here is my response:

I am nobody but a fan, and I don’t have as much ideological insight into the ethics behind making reprints of old comic art, but there are a number of things that make a response to this webpage impossible to avoid. Here are the facts as I see them through my personal experience with such books.

I own about twenty Yoe Books that reprint old comic work. As far as production values — quality of paper and other materials, the strength of the binding, the richness of the ink — they are stellar. The printing plates themselves are crisp, so much so that you can read the dots and lines of the color screens without the blur you used to see in older reprints.

After reading the article and the comments, I wondered where all this anger came from. The real culprit in this exchange comes from the question of esthetics. And this could be largely based on opinion. This philosophical debate has no real answers because all conclusions stemming from them will only come from preference. There are those publishing companies that ruin old art by recoloring it according to today’s standards using imaging programs that jazz up the art, and there are people out there who actually enjoy this mistreatment of the old material. Other publishers retain an approximation of the flat coloring but ramp up the intensity, giving us candy-colored versions of the originals, usually on slick papers that feel nothing like the comics of yesterday.

To my mind, the only companies that are doing it right are the ones that come closest to the old colors, and from this, I have found two divergent printing philosophies. There is the one honored by companies like Fantagraphics and IDW, where they come as close to the material without allowing for the blemishes of the slipshod printing of the day. They take the time to clean up the materials in order to give an ideal of what the original publisher might have been going for if precise coloring were possible. And I do appreciate the effects of this approach because it gives us an ideal that never really existed before.

The other one comes from the concept that you shouldn’t have to do this because one of the aspects that we might have enjoyed from those old comics was the imperfect execution of the coloring from the press. I am satisfied when reading book reprints from either approach, but I actually prefer the apparent hands off approach of Yoe Books, and I am going to tell you why.

As a painter who works in a contemporary vein, I can appreciate the beauty that comes from the meeting point of artistic intentions and blind accident. It creates some interesting effects. When I first encountered Yoe Books with the Chilling Archives series, I found pages whose color objectives had been dismantled by age or shoddy printing practices — and I found gold! Many of these pages created optical mixtures of broken colors you might find in a painting by Van Gogh or Monet. On art with such thick paint, dots and dashes of red and blue create purple that mixes in the eye rather than on the palette, without losing the blue and red. Such mixtures have a tendency to move and shimmer. They are by their nature attractive.

Such color mixtures already happen in the traditional CMYK printing of comics because of the coarse nature of the dot patterns in classic comics, but when it is too perfectly aligned, it feels mechanical, and that shimmer is just not there. If unpredictable blemishes and inconsistencies appear, it absolutely scintillates.

This visual delight is exactly what Yoe Books accomplishes. I believe Yoe’s methods appear to be straightforward but they are not simple, since he keeps the original screen patterns in the colors without getting moire patterns or other unwanted printing artifacts. Looking carefully at some of the pages, I find evidence of slight color correction to get harmonious effects that would have been lost if printing the pure scan. Craig Yoe is an artist in his own right. It is evident Yoe takes the time to capture these esthetics; he’s not just grinding these books out.

Which takes me back to this argument being a question of esthetics. It is based on opinion. I love these imperfections, but I understand that not everyone would necessarily appreciate them. The argument should have been centered on this dynamic, not on whether Craig Yoe’s reprint ideals are correct or not, or if “comics history is worse off” for his efforts, which is the conclusion the article posits in the end.

Few of the commenters defend Yoe, and the ones that do don’t really go into the more appealing aspects of his decisions. They just mention things like fun and the old days, and they fail to be very convincing. The only one that does is R. C. Harvey, who places a few good points about Yoe’s scholarship, and who is then subsequently attacked by another commentator, who claims Harvey accuses the writer of this article of attacking Yoe and then resorts to saying Harvey is attacking the writer himself. In fact, the word “attack” is used quite a bit on this webpage, and I don’t think it is out of order. The entire thing is nothing less than bald-faced attack against a publisher who has done nothing to merit such reactions.

When facing an article like this, you have to ask yourself why the producers of the article would agree to publish such charges against a fellow publisher? The immediate thought is that it stems from some form of competitive malice. I don’t think this is the case, but the feeling can’t be shrugged off; it is a precarious position for a publisher to place themselves in. This type of journalism degenerates to mud slinging, and I don’t think that is what TCJ readers came here for in the first place.

Let us take a look at some more facts. I own about fifty reprint books by Fantagraphics. And on the subject of production values, here are some things I found. I bought Roy Crane’s Hurricane Isle put out by Fantagraphics, and it had pages upon pages where the ink was thinned — just gray. I returned it to get another copy, thinking it was a fluke. The replacement had the same problem and in addition, had a flimsy binding. Upon closer inspection, the first copy had a flimsy binding too, and the one I ended up keeping is in worse condition today.

Four Color Fear is a beautiful book, but the cover recently came off completely! I had to repair it with some acrylic medium. Since I baby my books, there was no external reason why the glue simply stopped working. I don’t keep my favorite books in a heated garage, and even those books I have kept in heated conditions do not have this problem.

The L. B. Cole book was sturdy — at first. I have barely looked through the book, and now, the flexicover, which looks like it was stitched, is also coming off the rest of the book, and the reason is because it is actually glued, and once again, the glue has lost its tack.

I have over a dozen of the softcover Krazy Kats that Fantagraphics had put out in recent years. In much of the black and white pages, the art looks like it came off of mediocre photocopies. I understand that this may be because the only source material is the aged newspaper comics pages, and George Herriman’s crosshatching is incredibly difficult to clean up. But since the subject of disrespecting creators with questionable production values had been raised by the article’s writer, I just had to mention this one against one of the medium’s greatest talents.

From where I am looking at this, it is irony incarnate that Fantagraphics would agree to publish this article, when for me, it is doing nothing but pointing the finger right back at Fantagraphics. I never made a big deal about the problems in some of their printing until the day they green-lighted an assault on a fellow publisher who is, by contrast, consistently doing it right.

Understand that I do love Fantagraphics, and I believe TCJ has always been a comics journalism hallmark. I know they are not infallible, but they are certainly above putting out this type of material.

I know not a thing about this RJ Casey. But I do know that this piece of writing under his name is spiteful. And in another bit of irony, the integrity of this article begs the question if TCJ is better off without such “journalism,” and I’ll let you fill in the blank.

Leave a comment | Categories: Argument, Comics, Essay, ReyA' | Tags: argument, comicbooks, comicsjournal, essay

A Short Day at CALA

11 December 2015 by Rey Armenteros

Held in the art space, Think Tank Gallery, in the Fashion District of Los Angeles, CALA is a comic book event that brings together some of the best alternative comics creators. I went in and explored the inspiring work of dozens of creators. It immediately brought imagery that I sought to use in my own work.

Having met Robert Goodin at the Long Beach Comic Con in September, once again, I passed by to talk about The Kurdles. When I discovered Farel Dalrymple was there, I approached his table to give him my thoughts on The Wrenchies, which I happened to have finished just a couple of days before. I wanted to talk to Ryan-Cecil Smith about his work, about living in Japan, and about Tim at the Deconstructing Comics podcast, but he had stepped out. Making it a point to go back and see him later, I stepped into the presentation hall to see the discussion with Jaime Hernandez.

For me, the feature event of the whole program was the talk that Jaime Hernandez was going to give. After the presenter asked him questions about his work, the floor opened to questions from the audience, and I was slowly confounded by how no one acknowledged his status in the field. As Jaime was asked question after question about his working methods, I wondered what the new generation knew about the older comics. Here we had someone who was to alternative comics what Shakespeare was to English Literature. Along with Wendy Pini and Dave Sim and Jaime’s brother, Gilbert, Jaime was one of a half a dozen creators that made the alternative scene come to life when there was nothing else on the map but corporate product. It was not the land of plenty we have around us today. If not for them, we may not have been sitting in that art space partaking of this fine venue of artistic creation.

In the end, a question occurred to me and I asked about the layout he had been using in recent years with the eight-panel grid (which made me no better than anybody else, since what I really wanted to do was give him a standing ovation). In the layout he had been using in The New Stories, I was reading into it things like Alex Toth’s last issue of Hot Wheels and some of the theories that Frank Santoro has brought up about losing the center in certain comic book page formations. But Jaime simply answered that he needed more panels per page when there was more dialogue, which is what he needed during the Hopey and Maggie scenes. Whenever the action returned, he went back to six panels. In hindsight, Jaime felt that it was not fair since Maggie and Hopey were not populating much of the action scenes lately, so they were only ever showed from midsection up.

Since no one commended him, I took the time after the convention panel to approach and tell him how much of an inspiration he was, and I recounted my first Love and Rockets experience (Love and Rockets #3) and how much of a game-changer that was – how much of a revelation in the world of comics. I shook his hand, and when I went back onto the convention floor to speak to Ryan-Cecil Smith, I changed my mind and found that this was the perfect note to end on. I went out onto the pavement and found that I was genuinely joyful, almost as if I didn’t know why.

Showa

02 December 2015 by Rey Armenteros

Two days ago, I wrote this: “Today, Shigeru Mizuki died,” and I didn’t know what else to say to follow it up. Words were not coming to me. What stunned me was that I am now in the process of reading the Showa series, and I was elated by the fact that he had been able to survive an incredible number of life-threatening moments and that he was 93 and still a practicing cartoonist. The very fact that Mizuki as an infantryman survived World War II is nothing but a miracle.

Showa is a series of books that tells the history of the Showa Era of Japan (1926-1989) through all of its tides and developments done in comic book form. It employs Mizuki’s signature style of having simple, cartoon figures populating realistic backdrops. The backgrounds are so realistic that they do nothing to assimilate the simple line drawings of characters. This is important because it may say something about Mizuki’s approach and why he has chosen to work this way in many of his books. The gritty realism is obviously pulled from photo references, and they exhibit a labor-intensive rendering approach that must have been an uphill battle, panel by panel. However, the pages flow quickly for the reader as Mizuki moderates the speed not by the elaboration of the drawings but by how much narrative he places per page; often, there are few words, and the detail of the photo renderings are not enough to slow you down to admire all the work. In fact, these pictures of WWII planes blowing up over rough waters and important leaders signing documents act in the opposite manner: they show familiar pictorial archetypes that can be glanced quickly. These images are covered in crosshatched textures that provide a surface “grime,” that also serve to push the reader back. It is a use of detail made to be ignored rather than pull you in.

The general narrative begins with a plain, third-person treatment that is translated here in present tense. I don’t know if this were the verb tense the Japanese was originally written in, but in English, it feels quick, simple and current. It is one of the reasons some fiction writers use it, so that the events feel as if transpiring right now. This general narrative soon reveals itself as the words of Mizuki’s Rat Man, who eventually comes in to lace the events with a deadpan tone of incredulity. He serves the reader in ways that would show a sardonic, questioning attitude to the decisions made by the Japan’s leaders. At times, the Rat Man interacts with the powerful people, making comments or asking questions, and these historical figures either ignore him or answer his comments with their own cynical replies. The other narrative voice is that of Mizuki himself. In Showa, we have not just a rendition of a chunk of history but a personal account of Mizuki’s life as they were shaped by the times. Mizuki enjoys a special place in that he was a witness to the entire period, and the story of his life and family are interweaved with the larger events.

In the art, the cartoon characters serve as counterpoints to the realistically-drawn movers and shakers that seem so distant by comparison. However, when a famous leader is shown saying something, his physiognomy is reshaped into simpler lines showing bonehead expressions. These moments are interspersed with photo imagery culled from history. Replete with cold, photographic impressions, the series’ use of this strategy is not as effective throughout the work. At its worst, you get nothing more than an image that goes with the text, as when the narrative mentions a return trip for Mizuki that he did by train and it is accompanied by the mundane, redrawn photo of a train doing its thing.

However, as I get to the last book, these techniques begin to feel mechanical. If you read all four books, you will have read 2,000 pages, and it is difficult to sustain interest for that long. In this last book, the war is finally over, and we get snippets of Japan’s rise from the ashes as it climbs into the status of a global economic powerhouse. The episodic nature of events in this book is fragmentary with the only real cohesion being Shigeru Mizuki’s own personal life trials. It feels like now that the war is over, it is more difficult to coalesce a suitable narrative for all the various things that happen over the next thirty to forty years. A much larger timeframe is enveloped in this book than the other three put together. It makes me wonder if tackling on the entire Showa period may have been more than anyone could have worked with and still maintain unity in the work. When the narrative breaks down into one unrelated event after another, I feel that Mizuki is striving to catch up with the rest of the era and end it already.

As I was reading this last book, I was also wondering if he had only shown those aspects of the later Showa period that he happened to have focused on when they were transpiring in his life. There were several bizarre murders that he might have brought up to show the changing psychology of a modernized Japan. The deaths of a couple of famous actors are mentioned. World events are brought in to show how they influence Japan. All of these episodes felt sporadic, and the art did not help. By now, all this grainy photorealism begins to raise ideas in my head that he and his assistants were likely working from photocopies of photos, which would have made the decision of where to place the blacks, for example, already delineated by a machine. Indeed, some of these historic moments were nothing more than a grainy snapshot of the moment without even bothering to copy them in a drawing. A great amount of these images do possess the mark of degenerated photocopies. They’re quite ugly, and I felt in the first couple of books that this was a strength since it was counterpoised with the cartoon drawings. As I’m nearing the 2,000-page mile marker, I’m not even looking at these pictures anymore. It’s just too much of the same process of a very long work.

In sharp contrast, Onward to Our Noble Deaths is a work of his that uses the very same techniques but succeeds on every level. It is a unified story that is a fraction of the size of Showa. There may be something in the respective sizes of these two works and their respective successes; any theme, any technique can overstay its welcome.

One saving grace in this last volume of Showa is the creative way he incorporates fantasy or dream elements into the general line of events. There are moments in his life where he dreams of situations that at first seem real but soon reveal themselves to be dreams or otherworldly moments. Since Mizuki is tied to the world of yokai (ghosts from Japan), this fits with the work he is doing on his yokai manga and the interests he has had in ghosts since childhood. In one inspired moment, he has a writer acquaintance of his who has shown up in the narrative suddenly take over the narration from the Rat Man and claims that he can do a better job. It suddenly brings you out of a stupor and makes you realize that this is a living, breathing account instead of a mere recording of history. In the end, Mizuki’s playful treatment of the material and his warm outlook on the era make these four volumes of his work a notable reading experience and an artistic account of a remarkable life.

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The Kurdles

03 October 2015 by Rey Armenteros

Sally Bear and Pentapus are now household names in our home. For my daughter’s birthday, I decorated her banner with both these characters in tandem with Spiderman and some Korean childhood characters. What has made this book special for us is that I am now reading to her once again after many months wherein she only wanted her mother to read to her. It grips her, but it also holds my attention, especially in the way that it feels like something I had encountered before in my own youth. Every time we finish the story, I recognize it has made inroads for further adventures and I wonder what those will be like and when they will be made available. I keep puzzling over it, imagining events that may not happen but that are feasible in this world Robert Goodin has created. And our copy is extra special in that he signed it for her with a custom drawing he did at the Long Beach Comic Con.

All images in this post copyright Robert Goodin.

Bravo for Adventure by Alex Toth

13 August 2015 by Rey Armenteros

Everyone has a first Toth story. In interviews, creators who are Alex Toth aficionados are always asked when was the time they discovered Toth’s work.

Back in the 80s, when I needed alternatives to the comic books on the spinner racks, when I was looking back at classic strips like Terry and the Pirates and Prince Valiant to compensate for a lack I found in the industry, I found an ad in a reprint of Roy Crane’s Buz Sawyer that was pushing something called Bravo for Adventure. I had the feeling it was recent work, even if it had all the thematic ammunition of an older era in that one drawing: man with pencil mustache and scarf standing next to an early airplane as a young lady walks by. And in a box, I found the name, Alex Toth. The enigmatic thing about it was that the drawing was devoid of detail, which would have been anathema to me in those days because I loved detail, and yet the image and the name stayed with me for years to come.

This very same image is what you get on the cover of IDW’s new reprint of Bravo for Adventure (except they stripped away the charm of the old black and white by coloring it). It is a handsome edition of what many consider Alex Toth’s finest work, his masterpiece.

If Alex Toth would have been able to secure his lifelong dream to be a syndicated adventure comic strip creator, it would have been something like the content of this book with two important differences: the storytelling format would have been that of strips instead of the comic book pages we get here and it would have been a much larger work, comprising multiple, thick volumes the likes of IDW’s Terry and the Pirates or Dick Tracy instead of this one hundred-page sampler.

Bravo for Adventure follows the exploits of adventure pilot, Jesse Bravo, flying in the exciting vistas of the 1930s (which happens to be the golden decade of the adventure strip). The main story is 48 pages long, providing the reader with a glimpse of what could have been if it had continued. The other two stories were created later. One serves as an introduction to Jesse Bravo and his background and is presented here before the main story. The other is something of a dream sequence in which Toth tips his hat to all of his influences of the adventure strip, people like Noel Sickles, Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, and Roy Crane. There are also some extra features at the back of the book.

I grew up learning that the word “pastiche” had a negative connotation, and in the introduction of the book, Dean Mullaney calls this work a pastiche, even if he means it in a good way. It could be a good way, I suppose, if a pastiche is nothing less than an homage to the work of previous creators that have been an inspiration to your own work. Though I catalogue the words “pastiche” and “homage” in two different places of my brain, I entered this book with that mindset.

And when I put the book down after having finished it, I found that it had nothing of a pastiche to it. Of course it was an homage to the old adventure strips but it was more than that. Here we have the blueprint for how to take old material and make it sing once again. Alex Toth took the conventions of those types of stories and played them up here to a higher level of humanism. Unlike the grand adventures of heroes foiling bandit armies or chasing down spy rings, the chief conflicts in Bravo had to deal with gambling debts and smearing someone else’s name. It also dealt a bit with loss as the story unfolds, and it played these more sophisticated themes with greater sensitivity than the classic strips themselves. The dialogue is sharp and to the point, with a level of realism that is appropriate for the specific timescape. Every character had a different set of qualities that set them apart from the others. Even the thugs were sympathetic, almost likable, with real personalities. And personalities were rendered by gestures and facial expressions as much as by a character’s speech patterns and intentions, offering rounded characters in every regard a comic book could offer.

I found there is another important difference between Bravo and the older works it is referencing: as mentioned above, Toth is laying out panels on a comic book page rather than a comic strip, and this naturally grants far more freedom. The flow is not truncated by four-panel dailies, and it visually breathes better on the book page than any collection of Dick Tracy strips.

Alex Toth is known as the master without a masterpiece (at least, a masterpiece of any considerable length). Could this 48-page story be used as his proxy for a masterpiece, even if it were unfinished? Just from the fact that this was a personal work for him, that it represented the adventure genre that he loved so much, and that he created every aspect of it with no editorial obstacles, this story has got my vote.

Leave a comment | Categories: Comics | Tags: Alex Toth, Review

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