ZAPstract - art that zaps!

Category Archives for: Argument

36 Stories versus 20 Stories

14 November 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Myths make exciting stories. But the Myth of Sisyphus is not one of these. Notwithstanding the useful message, Sisyphus is rather droll, and I guess that’s the point. It has a teaching value. Another myth that is just as boring is the idea that there are only a limited number of stories in the world, and that all the stories come from these few stories. Not just another tiresome idea that has become a cliche, it is menacing the way we think about stories and the value we place in stories. It feels fatalistic, as if the meanings we place on life have always been put on an assembly line. Going up the side of the mountain with this great, big story the size and shape of a boulder only so that it comes down as intended. Do we really believe stories have that type of predictability? If so, wouldn’t they have gone extinct thousands of years ago?

According to certain crowds, the “hero’s journey” by Joseph Campbell properly outlines every story since creation. If everyone believes that the hero’s journey is the only story worth any merit, then anything that falls outside of that model may get lambasted for not following form. This happens all the time when consumers of popular material (movies, TV shows, bestselling novels, and such) admit they can’t understand something and then relegate it as a work that is subpar. Or worse, they group all works that represent the real world as “slice-of-life.”

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey brought out the notion that many older cultures followed the same model of telling a myth. His theories raise the idea that there are a number of steps the hero takes along his journey before finally making the right decision and saving his society.

I don’t doubt that there are a great many stories that follow this one model. Just look at Hollywood and how it can’t get past whatever sells, and if the ideas of Joseph Campbell are a hot item with the public at large, Hollywood will base every heroic movie they make on his model.

I ask such people that believe in the omnipresence of the Campbell model if they can fit Proust into that model. Where do you fit Chekhov? Does Hemingway so patly follow this formula for making stories?

I won’t deny it is an interesting idea. Back in the days when I was fascinated by such things, I learned from my first creative writing professor that such an idea even existed — that there were only a limited number of stories ever told in the world. In those ideas, it was fashionable to group conflict into one of three categories: man versus man, man versus nature, and man versus himself. There were others I discovered later like man versus society and man versus machine, but if you were of the disposition of simplifying everything into some core, then you would have to admit that the former sounds like a variation on man versus nature, and the latter of man versus man. And the one known as man versus fate might have been nothing more than a different way of looking at man versus himself. But this was about conflict, which was not the same as plot or “type of story.” 

In those creative writing class days, I learned that there was even a writer that had put a book together that catalogued every possible story ever created. He got it down to thirty-something stories.

My initial reaction was to reject this. To my youthful mind, it seemed just so uncreative to follow the same story over and over. But I was curious. I looked up this dusty book in our college library and actually found it! I looked through it, almost checked it out, but I knew I was not going to read it. It was too old, and the writing was thick with a style I couldn’t understand. I let it go.

Years later, I found myself thinking about such things again. I don’t remember what started me on this return to old ideas, but I looked up the thirty-something stories and found the man and his book. I didn’t have to read the book itself since someone had summarized the thirty-six different story plots of Georges Polti on a convenient website.

I don’t think an audience of today would sympathize with Polti’s catalogue of story archetypes. There was a focus on types of stories we just don’t see anymore, such as stories about “erroneous judgment” and “slayer of kin unrecognized.”  There were two different plots for self-sacrifice: “self-sacrifice for kin” and “self-sacrifice for an ideal,” and though the two are clearly different, you would think that a book looking for the fundamental components of a story would recognize that the two were the same general idea. There was “rivalry of kin” and “enmity of kin,” and Polti distinguished what made the two different. There was “crime pursued by vengeance” and “vengeance taken for kin upon kin,” and again I realize the the flavor of two such stories would be quite different from each other, but they seem to belong to the same type of story. There was “adultery” and “murderous adultery.”

Polti had taken many of his ideas from classical literature and some of the French literature of his day. To our ears, it sounds like ideas from another era. And even so, it is a product of its times. Polti was only cataloguing what made sense to him at the dawn of the 20th Century. If there is a great difference between enmity of kin and rivalry of kin, it is because the difference might have been more pronounced in his day.

A more recent writer came up with his story types. Ronald Tobias was writing books and producing documentaries, and he came up with his leaner list of possible stories. To me, his choices have the smell of Hollywood behind them. This is a more practical look with only twenty types. On the surface, it seems like he had a few redundant pairs. We get “metamorphosis” and “transformation,” but the first one is an actual magical metamorphosis whereas the second is when someone merely changes. We get “love” and “forbidden love,” and again, we know they are obviously different, but in the end, every love story has its challenges, and one possibility is when that love is forbidden. I suppose they are quite different because one of them demands a tragic ending.

Tobias gives us “ascension” and “descension,” which he agrees are two sides of the same coin. I can see the argument for having the extra story type because it changes the character of the story if the character is ascending into a better a life or going in the other direction. But if we are really boiling it down to the core elements, I would have stuck to the logic of giving just the elements and conflating the two.

I was thinking how Tobias’s more contemporary take on the different stories would surely sound out-of-date at some point in the future. This led me to reflect on how times change and how people create new ways to look at things. It could be that story theorists in the future would find the way we look at story all wrong. And like certain stories in Polti’s book seem to have fallen out of fashion, new stories might rise, coming from who knows where? This goes well with the young man that I was, believing that the possibilities in stories were virtually endless.

After reading about this and spending long hours contemplating the different possibilities, it wasn’t long before I started formulating my own story types. I came up with 26 different ones and explained them in an article I self-published long ago, and now that I am looking at them after all this time has passed, I see that some of them are redundant to me today. In the article, I prefaced it by saying that there might be only two possible stories: someone goes on a trip or a stranger comes to town (as it was described to me in some random website). But I then added that you can break it down further into one story, which is the one where there is a problem that needs to be fixed.

When you bring it down to just one story type (about the main character presented with a problem that needs taking care of), I ask what is the difference of that and attempting to define the word, story? You can look up the definition of story and then agree that it describes every story that you can think of, but does that really encapsulate all the different types of stories? It is nothing but a terse explanation.

I don’t fault Polti or Tobias for constructing their theories of story types.I think they are both commendable projects, and such work makes you consider parallels between stories. It also raises the idea of structure and is a great tool for instruction. If we recognize repetitions in their story models, it is because there must be overlap between these distinctions. And the overlap can invade certain stories, provoking new stories. The story type of sacrifice or loss could be an essential component in a love story. A revenge story could also be a quest.

On the surface, categorizations like this, if made well, always sound correct. They are put together by words, and words signify things. But words are often used to sway and to convince and to manipulate, and that enigmatic quality in any jumbled line of thought is what most makes them fascinating, as the words help picture impressions when telling a tale of loss and redemption clouded with mysteries that we hope to unravel on a journey through any story. Words are used to argue a point, yes, but they are best made for the things that make less rational sense, such as a story, because when we ask how many stories there have ever been, we fail to see that there have been as many types of stories as there have been stories told.

Leave a comment | Categories: Argument, Essay, ReyA', Writing Process | Tags: , , , , , ,

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.

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

Proposition: A Good Mystery without Solutions

18 July 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The problem with mysteries is the mystery itself, what culminates in every bad ending with an overly-rational conclusion. This is a shame because the mood, the tone, and situation set up in mystery stories create immediate interest in the reader, who feels that they are being enticed, who cannot help but keep moving onward. Then the ending arrives, and the murderer is found, and every conceivable moment of note in the story is conscientiously explained.

The real mystery should encompass life’s mysteries where the answers sought are metaphysical. Maybe second person point-of-view along with first person to travel disheveled rooms, like those archaic narrative video games that brought you to room after room with clues and that were populated by not a single other person. I enjoyed the calmness of these game mysteries where it was just you and an endless landscape of interiors and exteriors, objects that became keys that led you to more places to find the final clue that would unlock the meaning of it all.

When I think of mysteries, I think of Raymond Chandler. I think of memos to myself, the writer. Just write like Raymond Chandler, I would remind myself. That was my solution, except there was the one thing that pulls his work down a notch. It was the pulp tradition that still held traces of evidence in his stories. Chandler evokes this in moments when his private eye, Marlowe, goes into his desk drawer and straps on the gun. This decision comes after incidences when he gets caught and beaten up, when he meets vampires and ghouls bred in Hollywood in exotic settings from a Conan the barbarian story. Unknowingly, Chandler tips his hand, revealing his sense of Dashiell Hammett, the creator of hard-boiled fiction who happened to write for the pulps like Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan. It was boy’s fiction, in other words. Boys needed to grow up tough to knock out the rival boy and then grab the girl. Hammett did not bother hiding any of these notions, and that is why some of his work is hard to read today.

Chandler is different, more flexible, with greater reach through the decades. Chandler credits Hammett as the source of the hard-boiled strain of the mystery, and it is true that Hammett’s best stories open the curtain for Chandler. Though Hammett created it, Chandler made his entrance afterward and truly perfected the form.

Even though it retains snippets of what I recognize as Conan.

As I have always said, I enjoy mystery novels… until we get to the ending. Perhaps it could be that I am strange, and there is something to be valued in having all loose ends tied up. I don’t know. To me, such clarity does not depict any reality I know. Mysteries in real life almost always remain mysteries, and you find this out eventually, after having sought their solutions for too long.

If a mystery story is like filling out every correct answer in a questionnaire, then the day I write one, I will use the questionnaire as a starting point and keep it close until we get near the ending, where the questionnaire has been cut into smaller pieces with its words reorganized so that it answers itself. I am not going to be the one to answer them. I propose tales that don’t require even half the answers expected, where the mystery goes beyond the crime, where the tone is a spiritual blood relation to the style of Chandler (without mimicking him, mind you), and doing away with that one flaw in every writer who introduces a gun and then is obligated to have it go off — where if you strap on a gun, you never end up shooting it, because if you get a chance to use it, you will see that it mires your path instead of opening it by blowing holes in it. The gun is not the one Chekhov propounded. It is a gun that makes an appearance that does not need to be shot at all, but if it is shot, you could end up merely hitting birds with it. But you still have to strap it on because the possibilities open up the moment you do. I like that kind of story where the possibilities do not narrow as you get to the end, but expand. You don’t know where the story is going, but it takes you…

Leave a comment | Categories: Argument, Essay, ReyA', Writing Process | Tags: , ,

A Little Respect for a Thirty Thousand-Year Old Tradition

22 November 2020 by Rey Armenteros

As an artist who uses paint to make his objects, I take a measure of color and mix it with another measure of color. I try to get it just right, but I often overcompensate so that I have enough. I then choose the right brush for the job. It depends on the size of the area I am covering and the shape of it and the effect I am trying to get.

When I apply paint, there is a three-dimensional aspect that might not be taken into account unless you’ve done this before. The paint goes on a surface that has some form of surface characteristic. It could be a texture, or it could be something more subtle than that. As you apply more paint, you are adding onto this surface. Even with a medium like acrylic paint, which is supposed to dry flat, you get a buildup of layers that add to the surface tension. The next application of paint will be affected by what lies underneath.

The changes of surface can grant different possibilities. If I work a wash of color on a granulated surface, it would spread through the crevices and create a soft cloud of veiny transparency. If I applied pasty opaque colors on the same surface, the colors would skip over the tops of the granulation giving me broken colors. If I scrub the same paint on that surface, it would give a hazy, dirty effect. If I dabbed three different colors from my palette and let them work wet-into-wet onto that surface, it would be and yet another effect that I cannot quite predict right now because it would depend on the proportions of color and the amounts of paint and how diluted they are, among other factors. And that underlying surface would affect my efforts in one of many, many ways that I’m not sure can even be categorized.

Once the painting is done, we have something else that the surface of the painting does. These are the possibilities of the painting for the viewer and not necessarily the artist. The painting catches the light a certain way because of the surface. The viewer detects that surface with every shift of their feet or slightest turn of the head. Light shimmers and plays off the surface making it alive. This painting has a tactility on display that is in every way a part of the painting and that can not be recreated in any reproduction of it, whether in high-quality photographs or video recordings of it. In fact, it is an object that may be mostly flat, but it has a third dimension of depth that is there, even if small and subtle, and this depth creates the agency of life in this otherwise inanimate thing.

Furthermore, the direction of the paint strokes might move along the form of the figures in the painting. They might help to intimate corporeality in the depiction of humans, flowers, buildings, or mountains. In a nonrepresentational painting, globs of paint concoct their own delight. Swirls of glossy paint can look exquisitely delicious for no other reason than to celebrate the combination of colors that may only hint at something else like an old reminiscence, not just through the color palette chosen, but through its transparency and thickness.

Layers of transparent colors create optical effects that can be seen in no other way, as the old masters have shown in countless paintings. A cloth painted in purples and whites and yellows all mixed together would not be the same as the same cloth made with strokes of the same colors in translucent layers. The former is alla prima painting, and the latter is working in glazes. You have the option of one or the other, as well as many other methods. Your alla prima painting can be an impasto work that juts out of the surface in puffs of color like on a birthday cake, or it could be textureless.

I think these are valuable properties in a work of art. It has weight. It takes up space. It possesses the physical properties of an actual object. I can make things happen with these properties. I can appreciate them as a viewer when face-to-face with a painting on the wall. I can hold it and turn it around if I wanted to.

When I think about the limitless physical qualities of a painting, I wonder what about it can be said to be an analog? What does that even mean? Analog? What is the painting analogous to? Since making art is the oldest thing we humans have evidence of doing (as shown in works of art that are far older than anything else that survived antediluvian civilizations), I come to the conclusion that making a painting like this cannot be an analog to anything humankind has any memory to. So why do some people call it analog painting? Yes, there are people out there that call actual painting, analog painting. Where did this inappropriate term come from?

If you are familiar with the term, then you might have a guess about its origins. I have a theory. The software industry responsible for the imaging systems on computers had to come up with new terminology, based on clarifying the products they were releasing. They were touting the line of digital imaging, and under that broad umbrella, there was something they were developing they called “digital painting.” It was basically forming computer “tools” that attempted to emulate the experience of making a painting but solely on a device’s screen. How do you distinguish this from the other kind of painting? You couldn’t call the medium of pushing paint around on a canvas as “real” painting because it made your product sound flimsy by comparison. You couldn’t even call it “physical” painting, because even though it sounded a little more neutral, it still implied the same thing.

As an industry, you want this new term to fulfill two things at once. You want to distinguish that other product from your own product, and you want to put down the older technology because you feel your product is superior to the old-fashioned materials. You reach back in the recent eras of technology to fish around for some word that could sideways label the old stuff and at the same time deliver it a backhanded slap. Other digital industries were already using the old word “analog” to rest its case about what was so inferior about anything that was not digital. What better word?

So, why am I insulted? It is ironic, because if you are not in the business of making art, you probably never heard of analog painting. It is the working professionals themselves — the ones who should know better — that have adopted the term. I doubt most of the public is even aware of digital painting or of that ugly term for real painting.

I have nothing against digital imaging in general. It can produce some innovative images, and on occasion, I get inspired by someone coloring a comic book with a strange palette I had never seen before or by a graphic designer who juxtaposed elements from various images on a poster or website page. There are fine artists that do marvelous things with computer imaging, and my defense is not leveled against any of these areas.

Digital painting, on the other hand, is a branch of digital imaging that doesn’t always bring about the most interesting results. This is when a digital imagist strives to push around pixels in a manner that seems similar to the way that paint is moved. Through an indirect device, “digital painters” try to rehash painting techniques established by physical materials that have always had direct access to these techniques.

This new type of pixel manipulation has a plethora of brush possibilities that can create all manner of effects with whatever color you choose, and you can manipulate them afterward. You can even invent your own brushes and tools in the program. Digital watercolor has wet-into-wet. The strokes of digital pastels admit textural patterns analogous to actual pastels. And so on. But is it the same?

I have always found it a little strange that this growing new technology aspires to emulate a technology that is at least thirty thousand years old — and not doing it too well as I write this. It may one day actually fool everybody, but even if that ever happens, it cannot emulate the physical properties of a painting on a glaring screen. You can’t get those properties when you print it out either. In essence, you are making a painting that does not really exist except as a bunch of colors that come on a device when you summon it with a few clicks. As technologies make their shifts over the coming decades and inevitably supplant older ways of viewing image files, I would be a little concerned if my career were mostly based on work that takes up no space in this world.

If you are a commercial artist that wants to make a painting-like illustration for a client, then I can see the great advantages of “digital painting” over anything that came before it. It is convenient and fast. If something needs alteration, it can be done without tearing down anything from before. Everything is saved, and if you ever have to go to a previous step that might have been buried under some color, then you can. This flexibility is invaluable to someone who is working on the clock, where time is money.

I guess these thoughts are really for those that are aware of digital painting and the other term and have not really thought about why they even use the other term. You can call the work of illustrators digital painting if you want. In my view, you don’t have a painting if you are not in fact using paint, but I can understand the convenience of this term and will not roll my eyes the next time I hear it. But please, please do not call what I do analog painting. There is nothing analogous about it, the term does not mean what it describes, and you are going to risk insulting me and every painter that is practicing today, along with every painter that came before all of us.

Leave a comment | Categories: Argument, Art Concepts, Art Process, Essay, ReyA' | Tags: , , ,

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: , ,

A Dilemma of Time Travel

14 August 2020 by Rey Armenteros

I have given this thought. I think most people don’t realize that if you go back in time, you won’t understand what you are looking at.

In a world of weirdness, you appear in the midst of a place that’s inconceivable. It is not like anywhere you know. You come to think that the people you encounter along the way are dressed as from another time. They don’t speak a language you have ever heard before. They make gestures with their faces and hands, and you can’t register what they mean. They take you in with some reluctance, it seems, and you wonder where you have arrived. You have gone back in time to some other place — or not. This is what you have to piece together. If you witness an actual event that you know about because you have heard about it, how would you ever recognize it? How would you understand that you have just time travelled?

Routine is what makes up our reality, and if you break that, it becomes an event. The event is placed into a nice story later when all the parts you have access to have been given to you, and you have thought about these parts and their relation with each other. That means the story is over. Now, you make the story your own.

A time travel experience can never be like that. You are never sure that what you are witnessing is the event. Or the shadow of an event. Or the mockery of that event. Or a dramatic interpretation of that event, given by a troupe of criminal actors with schemes of robbing the crowd.

You see three men on crosses on some hill and conclude you are witnessing the death of Jesus. You don’t have enough information to come up with such a conclusion. First of all, you don’t know what Jesus looks like. Then, you can’t speak the ancient languages of those days. And in the rare case that you can, a reasonable person would still be in doubt.

Leave a comment | Categories: A Thought, Argument, ReyA' | Tags: ,

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: , , ,