Catching Up

In the end, I made my 50,000 words for November, and the novel's actually progressing nicely. I want to keep going at a high rate, finish it, then research and rewrite it. It feels good, and I'm hoping I might be on to something with this one. Working title: A Treatise on Opticks.

I did buy (or was given as an early Christmas gift) Liquid Story Binder. I'm looking forward to bringing over other things I've been working on, and trying them out in this program. Opticks has benefited from LSB's architecture, but I have an idea some of my other long-term projects might make an even better fit.

I read one book in November, which was also a book I added to the apartment. So no change overall in the reading stats.

Finally, a significant document, courtesy of the Robot 6 blog: The series bible for Batman: The Animated Series. Some interesting notes in there, including character backstory that never made it into the show (Renee Montoya was married?). For its soundtrack and design sense alone, that show was one of the greatest achievements of American TV. Check out the link, and see that sensibility as it was first laid out.

Article up

A quick note to say that my Gazette article about Neil Gaiman is now up.

Worldcon, Neil Gaiman, and Marvelman

Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, is coming up soon — August 6 to 10 — and I, alongside Claude Lalumière, will be blogging about it for the Montreal Gazette's Narratives blog. I've been reading sf all my life, but this'll be my first convention; Claude has a lot more experience with publishing, fandom, and the like, so the two of us will be able to present both an insider's and an outsider's view of the con.

I've written a preview piece for the print version of the Gazette, which I believe will be appearing this Saturday. As part of the story, I got to interview Anticipation's Guest of Honour, Neil Gaiman. Obviously, I spent most of the interview asking him about Worldcon; but, given Marvel Comics had announced only a few days before that they'd acquired the rights to Marvelman, I also felt I should take a moment to ask him about that. And that part of the conversation is now up at the Gazette's blog.

And Now For Something Completely Different: Wahoolazuma!

One of the few pleasures of being young in the 1980s was the thrill that came from wandering into a comics shop when the new comics came out. In those pre-internet days, you had no idea what the hell you were going to find. Similarly, if you went to another city and found a comics store you’d never seen before, you had the chance not only to pick up back issues not available in your home town, but also to be exposed to a new selection of titles. This mattered, because in the heady days around the alt-comics explosion of the mid-80s, all kinds of oddities flourished. Most of these books were awful, some were good, one or two were excellent, and many were just plain weird. One thinks of George Alec Effinger’s Neil & Buzz in Time and Space, or Arn Saba’s Neil the Horse — I don’t know how to begin describing these things.

Even the popular books were almost self-consciously odd; I mean, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Really? And the more self-consciously artistically ambitious books were also made out of unexpected materials: Cerebus, combining parody of old Marvel Conan comics with the Marx Brothers and Canadian politics; or Love & Rockets, mixing magic realism and women’s wrestling and punk and Archie comics. But the point is, whatever the level of artistic or commercial success, you just had no idea what you’d find on a store’s shelves — you’d see some fifth-generation Elfquest knock-off beside a sensitive and realistic story of a young boy in the Depression wandering the country with a tramp calling himself the King of Spain, or a cheap comics bio of a heavy metal group beside a wise-ass story about Christ returning to earth to fight the world’s only super-hero, the Anti-Christ. I’m not saying the comics field was producing better material then than now, only a wilder mix of things; and, somehow, the fact that it was all contained within a single store — that comics specialty stores were the only place you’d find them, mixed in with Marvel and DC on the one hand and The Comics Journal on the other — gave this disparate collection of stuff a sense of unity, of cohesion.

It’s this latter point, I think, that distinguishes comics-as-they-were from the webcomics field of the moment, which is the closest area I can think of to something like the weirdness of the comics field of the 80s. There are a lot of different webcomics out there, covering a ridiculously wide range of genres; but without the store as a place where these things are all physically gathered together, the feel, to me, is much looser. Then again, it may be only that so far webcomics haven’t yet come up with an Alan Moore or a Love & Rockets; a creator or a work that hits the heights of artistic and formal ambition. At any rate, if such a person or creation exists, I’ve not heard of them yet. One assumes it’s only a matter of time.

But if the current era doesn’t have quite the same creative feel of the years past, it does have this going for it: masses of material, from that time and others, are coming back into print (which was certainly a characteristic of times gone by; classics weren’t easily available. Curiously, although this was obviously a hardship in many ways, in some ways it might actually have been useful — not everything hailed as a classic can survive a close look with older and wiser eyes). So this extended trip down memory lane is all by way of trying to begin talking about Larry Marder’s Tales of the Beanworld, which is now being reprinted by Dark Horse, along with all-new material. 

Very roughly, it’s the story of a society of anthropomorphic beans living in a wonderland-like secondary world — simpler than Alice’s wonderland, the sense of the Beanworld as a place which operates by its own rules of logic and character is still vaguely similar. Much of the story of the comics had to do with various members of the Beanworld — its hero Mister Spook, or its artist Beanish, or its scientist Professor Garbanzo, for example — trying to solve some riddle of the Beanworld’s nature or exploring the world in some new direction. With, always, further riddles appearing once one was solved.

The Beanworld has its own logic, but it also has its own feel. It’s a little like what one thinks of as an underground comic, especially in its early issues; but it’s also gentler, Seussian, and more mythic. The first couple of issues, among the nine collected in the first reprint volume Wahoolazuma! (a cry of joy in the Beanworld), have a satirical tone which is immediately abandoned — for the better, as the book actually gets deeper and more involving without it.

Reading Tales of the Beanworld — now just Beanworld, in its new edition — is like nothing else I know. Not only like no other comics experience, but no other experience overall. It’s gentle, but also ominous, in the way a fairy tale is ominous. It’s vaguely like a computer game, as actions have consequences and the world is built on interlocking riddles; but it’s more organic than that, and the characters are stronger. But then again, those characters are archetypal, as in a folktale. But then on the other hand, the vocabulary and sometimes imagery is more modern than that.

So Beanworld is a mix of a lot of things, and the result is something wholly individual. Something compelling, too; it had been years since I’d read an issue of Beanworld — years since a new issue had been published — but everything came back as I read the collection, in a way that’s unusual with old comics. The thing sticks in the mind.

Some of that may just be due to Marder’s way with craft. Beanworld is in a lot of ways a simple book, literally suitable for readers of any ages, but the comics storytelling is very clever, notably in terms of the Marder plays with page layouts and panel transitions. It’s incredibly clear work, which is impressive given that Marder’s laying out the workings of a world pretty far removed from common experience.

In the end, perhaps the most impressive thing about Beanworld is the sense that it’s managed to find a way to do without conflict as a drive for narrative. It’s vaguely like a really good Hayao Miyazaki film, where the more you learn about what’s happening and why, the more you come to realise that apparent conflicts are simply reflections of a lack of understanding; that, in fact, things are unfolding as they should, and our own slow increase of awareness is itself a part of that unfolding process. At its best, this sort of story is involving, teaching us perhaps something about ourselves that can’t be got at in any other way. Beanworld is in that class of stories; it operates at an almost preconscious level. It bills itself as “A Most Peculiar Comic Book Experience”, and it is that. It’s also a valuable one, and one I’m glad to see back on shelves.

Comics Recently Read

I’ve been writing about books on this blog as a way of encouraging myself to cut down on the number of unread books in my apartment. Thus far I've been making slow progress, being somewhat hampered by my habit of taking out books from my local library. But never mind that. The point is, because of this plan, I’ve so far written only about books, not music or movies or other media. But I do have a few quick thoughts on some graphic novels (or as we used to call them, comic books) I’ve read lately, so why not try a quick change-up?

Start of Darkness

by Rich Burlew

This is a spin-off from the popular web comic Order of the Stick, which follows a group of characters adventuring in a world that operates according to the rules of a game bearing a staggering resemblance to one iteration of Dungeons & Dragons. The trick is that the characters know that they’re in a game-world — manipulating rules, pausing fights to argue about interpretations, that sort of thing. It might sound facile, but Order of the Stick makes the concept work. It works because the characters come alive, and because Burlew has a wicked sense of comic timing — although maybe ‘comic layout’ is the more accurate phrase, since we’re talking about comics as a form. The point is: he’s funny.

While the online strip is free, this trade paperback isn’t. It’s all material which hasn’t appeared on-line, one of two such spin-offs (there are several collections of the web-comics as well). This one gives readers the backstories of some of the villains of the piece. It’s an occasionally brutal book, but then Order of the Stick has never been afraid to be cynical. It’s clever, and what’s more, it’s morally consistent. Funny, yes, but funny in the way the best of Terry Pratchett’s humour works — it gets at a larger point. The character work is often touching, and the ending, with one character firmly subjugating another, suitably crushing. Good work.

Zot!

by Scott McCloud

This is a thick volume reprinting issues 11 through 36 of Scott McCloud’s comic Zot!, originally published from 1987 through 1991. It’s some strong material, though I think the decision to omit the first ten issues was ultimately a mistake. Those issues were in colour, while the reprinted work was originally (as it is now) in black-and-white; but they were perhaps more of a piece with the rest of the work than McCloud realised, introducing characters and setting up certain givens of the series. In those issues, Jenny, a girl from our earth, travelled to the futuristic utopia of 1965, where science had eliminated poverty and disease, and where the greatest problems the world faced were the many super-villains which plagued it — but who were themselves inevitably defeated by the heroic teenager called Zot. 

The first ten issues of the series introduced Zot and his villains; the next twenty-six issues contrasted that world with this one, with our world becoming increasingly prominent. McCloud’s interest is clearly in the interaction of his real-world characters, with the issues and complexities of their daily life. He makes it work, but it’s Zot who makes the stories live — he’s what makes the series unique, what gives it its voice. The presence of the larger-than-life metaphor transforms the stories, and lends them a unique sense of scale. McCloud expresses some doubt about the use of the super-hero figure in his commentary on the series, but in fact it’s that element of unreality that makes the “real world” of the series cohere. And without the first ten issues, the collection seems weirdly unbalanced; we don’t have the greatest sense of the contrast between Zot’s world and Jenny’s, we don’t really know the givens by which Zot operates.

Technically, McCloud’s craft is superb, as you’d expect from the man who literally wrote (and drew) the book on the subject of the comics form. His art is pretty to look at his, his stories are structured effectively, and the storytelling gives his material pointed shape. It’s strong material; I wish McCloud was less self-conscious, less Puritanical, about the element of fantasy within it.

Fun Home

by Alison Bechdel

Subtitled “a family tragicomic”, this book is Bechdel’s autobiography and also a meditation on family. It’s interesting, and deftly done. Bechdel’s questioning of gender identity and self-identification as a lesbian is balanced by descriptions of incidents from her youth and her father’s inability to explore his own sexuality. Constant literary allusions help sustain and structure the book, giving Bechdel’s story resonance beyond her own individual experience.

It’s an effective book on a number of levels. The storytelling is strong, and Bechdel’s art is both expressive and realistic — she captures a number of different eras very successfully. I found her language occasionally strained, especially when she reaches for a particular literary connection, but also often quite moving. Crucially, Bechdel understands that autobiography needs a shape to be understood; she’s found a good shape here, borrowing from a number of key texts. Still, one comes away with a touch of regret that the glimpses we get of the journal she kept when she was an adolescent has to be put in context by her adult self; there’s a liveliness to some of the entries, a window onto a developing sensibility that’s quite charming — but then, of course, the realisation hits that the sensibility in question has come to fruition in this book.

The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard

by Eddie Campbell and Dan Best

This is a remarkably strange book about a not-very-good circus acrobat who has a series of improbable adventures ending in an equally-improbable apotheosis. It’s very amusing. Campbell’s humour is wry and absurd, recalling the Terry Gilliam of Time Bandits. This is a clever, fable-like, and touching work. 

It also, without making a big point of it, plays around with comics storytelling. Characters hold conversations in the gutters between panels, or fly through the air off the page and back on. Yet all these things seem natural. It matches the surrealism of the tale itself, which rambles here and there but somehow makes a consistent kind of right-brain sense. Campbell even plays around with his own history, as Inspector Abberline, the Scotland Yard detective who featured in From Hell (Campbell's collaboration with Alan Moore), turns up to investigate Leotard. This is a slight book, in many ways, as character ends up secondary to formal trickery, but worth reading nonetheless.

Readings 2K9: Watching the Watchmen

Watching the Watchmen

by Dave Gibbons

This is a coffee-table book with some process art from Watchmen, the mini-series/graphic novel Gibbons drew from a script by Alan Moore. It’s not uninteresting, but neither is it particularly revelatory. There are no great secrets about the making of Watchmen which come out here. Instead, the core of the book is a series of initial breakdown sketches Gibbons made for the pages of the graphic novel; but since Moore’s script is so intensely detailed, and Gibbons himself is meticulous in his craft, there really isn’t much of a variance between the breakdowns and the designs of the finished pages. Even the original character sketches don’t change that much.

There isn’t much text in the book, either. Most notable are a few chatty descriptions of what the experience of drawing Watchmen was like, a piece by the colourist about the process of coming up with colours for the comic, and some discussion of the book’s reception in the 80s. But Gibbons decided not to include any material about the estrangement between Alan Moore and DC Comics which followed the publication of the book. I can understand his reasons for doing this, but there is definitely the feel of a man skirting the elephant which dominates the room.

Consider the following quotes. Here’s Gibbons (p 237):

Looking back, it seems almost inevitable that Watchmen became one of the first graphic novels, although the fact that it has remained in print and sold consistently well over more than twenty years would surely have been beyond the wildest dreams of any DC marketing executive of the time.

It was certainly beyond the imaginings Alan and I had as its creators. We expected that three years after the original series had gone out of print the rights would revert to us, as stated in our contract. Instead, it has been in print ever since. We’ve received a constant stream of royalties and it has become a perennial presence in mainstream bookstores. Indeed, Watchmen has become ‘required reading’ for any novice comics reader and is widely recommended as the ideal entry point to the medium.

Now Moore, from an interview before the V For Vendetta film came out:

When you're talking about [movies being made from] things like V for Vendetta or Watchmen, I don't have a choice. Those were works which DC Comics kind of tricked me out of, so they own all that stuff and it's up to them whether the film gets made or not.

Gibbons is of course entitled to his perspective, and if he’s happy with his situation vis-a-vis Watchmen and DC, that’s great. But there seems a bit of an odd disconnect here.

Again, consider this quote from Gibbons (p 261):

Far more upsetting to Alan and I [than another DC artist producing a poster to advertise Watchmen merchandise] was a suggestion that we produce spin-off series from Watchmen or, failing that, that DC would produce them without us. Proposed titles were Rorschach’s Journal and The Comedian’s Vietnam War Diary. DC wisely shelved the proposals and, to their credit, have managed to resist the temptation ever since.

— Though one should note that there is a video game featuring the characters coming out in conjunction with the forthcoming movie. At any rate, here’s Moore on the above events speaking to Gary Groth in issue 139 of The Comics Journal, back in 1990:

I suppose if there was a final, tiny straw that broke the camel’s back [and led to Moore breaking from DC], it was when people at DC at one point very subtly made the suggestion that ... We were talking about the future of the Watchmen characters. We had been assured that we would be the only people writing them, that they wouldn’t be handed to other creators just to make a fast buck out of a spin-off series. There was a point where a highly placed person at DC did make a not terribly subtle — I think it was intended to be subtle but it wasn’t — insinuation that they would not give our characters to other writers to exploit as long as we had a working relationship with DC. It’s perhaps just me, Gary, but that was a threat and I really, really, really don’t respond well to being threatened. I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me on the street; I couldn’t tolerate anyone threatening me in any other situation in my life. I can’t tolerate anyone threatening me about my art and my career and stuff that’s as important to me as that. That was the emotional breaking point. At that point there was no longer any possibility of me working for DC in any way, shape, or form.

Different people have different takes on events, but these are fairly widely divergent perceptions. In one case, the company is briefly misguided, perhaps afflicted with an over-eager middle-manager, but on their own sees the error of their ways. In the other case, their attempt to bully creators badly backfires. There’s not really enough information to reconcile these versions; they are what they are.

So Watching the Watchmen does have this going for it: it gives Dave Gibbons a chance to get his thoughts on Watchmen out in permanent form. That’s nice, and interesting reading. But there’s not an awful lot of content of that sort in the book, and what there is to it doesn’t seem terribly significant. It’s likely that in years to come, scholars will appreciate the resource. At the moment, though, the average reader can do without it fairly easily.