From the intro section:

In light of this context, my goal is to discuss KE7 through the lens of scale. With a work this size the overall page takes on a much greater importance, even more so when the individual stories are often only a page or two. These large pages first strike the reader as a totality. The order of perception is more pictorial than textual: the page is seen first as an overall image and second as a left-to-right top-to-bottom sequence of differentiated images.

While this effect is present, to an extent, when reading more conventionally-sized comics, the physical size of the book here make it harder to simply turn the page and start at the top. You can’t read this book on a train or sitting in a chair, at least, I couldn’t. You wish it came with its on stand, like an old dictionary or atlas. I experienced reading the book by laying it out in front of me on a bed or the floor and leaning over the pages to read them. In this type of position, the top of the page is rather far away. Even if the pages were hung on a wall, where issues of position and movement of the body would be obscured, the size of these pages create a reading that is often more pictorial than textual.

With this in mind, a great portion of my discussion focuses on the use of the page as space, on layouts, and on the composition of the page as a whole.

SPURGEON: Darwyn, I wanted to ask you about the shift in presentational modes, right around page 45, maybe the third or fourth major extended scene in the book. You start with this lovely picture of Parker and his wife at a hotel, and from there you move into several pages of this heavy narrative that’s very different than the pantomime that starts the book and the more traditional words-and-pictures comics that come right after the opening. I found it very striking. Why did you change the way you presented the story at that point?

COOKE: When you’re looking at this from a storytelling standpoint, you’re trying to find subtle ways to shift gears and control pacing in a way that a book or a film can’t do. If there’s one thing that you can bring to a book like this that’s perhaps well known, it’s a fresh look at certain things. You can take the time to really blow it out at the beginning and getting to know him visually. You’ll notice that most of the scenes that take place in the here and now have very, very sparse narrative. They’re almost all dialogue and visually driven. Narrative has been stripped down to what I considered essential character or plot stuff that you needed to have. When you go into flashback, which we happened to do twice in the book, I move into a denser narrative. It evokes that sense of someone telling you the story, it allows me to cover more ground in fewer pages, and it gives us a format that distinguishes the flashback from the real-time story, without doing big scallops around all the panels.

(From Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Darwyn Cooke on his forthcoming “The Hunter” book (IDW).)

If I summarized the plot of Dash Shaw’s brick of a comic, Bottomless Belly Button (henceforth, BBB), it wouldn’t sound like much. Three grown-up children return to their family home for a week to learn that their aged parents are getting divorced, psychology ensues, then they all leave. As a basic plot, it’s not anything you haven’t read before. When I wrote about Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings a few weeks ago I criticized his psychological realist work for its lack of invention or daring. Shaw, on the other hand, seems to be as much interested in the form of his story as the content, and he does not disappoint here in taking a rather conventional story and creating an inventive, entertaining, and layered work that demands rereading due to an often unconventional and exploratory use of the form.

The book is forcefully marked as other by its sheer size and weight. At 720 pages this is a massive comic, dwarfed on my shelf only by the 2000 page Comix 2000 anthology (even Blankets is smaller), reminding me of Spiegelman’s talk of a “comic book that needed a bookmark” (Instructions on the volume suggest reading the three parts with breaks in between). This is not a book you enter lightly, yet it is not an overly dense read. Unlike a prose novel where pages, generally, each contain an equal amount of text and a 700 page book would be considered a long term commitment, comics can often be light and airy despite the number of pages. Shaw most frequently uses a 6 panel grid, but he frequently varies the pacing of the narrative by increasing or decreasing the number of panels from 12 down to single page panels. This causes some sequences to run quickly across a large number of pages, while others slow down the reader’s page turning. The varied use of panel size in combination with the number of panels per page is also used to alter pacing.

In a sequence of pages at the end of part two, Dennis, the eldest son of the family, follows his father onto the beach one night. The whole sequence is laid-out with a single panel centered on each page. As it progresses, with the father collapsing on the beach and Dennis carrying him back to the house, the panels increase in size. Starting with panels 1/9th the size of the page and ending with full page images, the panels not only increase the tension in the story, but the rapid flipping through of pages by the reader also adds to the sense of urgency felt by Dennis. Shaw clearly pays much attention to these formal elements and considers how they can add to the reading experience to better evoke the emotion of the characters.

The emotions are also amplified in the way Shaw often ends a gridded page in the middle. A page gridded out for six panels ends after three panels, one set for nine panels ends on panel five. These two cases are punctuated by the words spoken in the last panel of each page: in the first Jill, the daughter of the sister, speaks to Dennis, “You’re never going to see her again,” while in the second the father says to the family, “We’re just not in love anymore.” These statements gain gravity by the blank half-page that follows them.

In a sequence that ends part one of the book, Peter, the youngest son, takes a walk on the beach at night, runs into a girl he saw earlier, and goes swimming in the ocean with her. Each page holds only two square panels separated from each other by a wide gutter and from the page edge by wide margins. These isolated slightly cramped panels echo both the alienation Peter feels in general and the distance between these characters at this stage in the story. Later, their interactions are shown are much denser pages as they become intimate (or at least closer).

At times Shaw pulls the reader back from conventional, externally focalized panels (we are seeing the characters from outside), and shifts to an internally focalized page. In one scene, Dennis, investigating any possible reasons for his parents’ divorce (beyond the simple one they give), pages through a photo album. Shaw draws Dennis’s thumbs at life-size coming onto the page from the far left and right margins of the book with the contents of the album in between as if the book BBB were the photo album itself. This is an effective way for the reader to see the contents of the photo album first hand, but I don’t think it is as effective in providing any identification with Dennis (who, in general, acts so erratically that it is hard to get too close to him).

In this sequence Dennis finds a key taped into the album which leads him to a secret passage in the house. Secret passages, rooms, keys, and codes are all part of the story. Interestingly, the secret and hidden when discovered do little to explain anything at all in the book. All Dennis’s investigation do not offer him any real clues to his parents’ divorce. Shaw incorporates a code for the reader to decrypt in some of the letters between the parents which Dennis discovers, but even these messages do not provide any real revelation beyond an explanation for the title of the book. In a way, these non-revelatory secrets only underscore the simple reasons given in the book for the divorce, as if Shaw were undermining any attempts at hidden explication in his own work.

This general lack of explanatory depth is also found in a few decidedly fantastical occurrences in the story. Claire, the sister, and Aki, Dennis’s wife, spend a night out at a club. During the evening, Claire loses one of her long gloves, and Aki gets bruised in an altercation with a man. The next morning Claire’s glove is in her dresser drawer, and Aki’s leg is unmarred. These events are briefly marked as a mystery by the characters but end up being unquestioned and unexplained.

I haven’t spent time summarizing the events of the story, but I will talk about the structure of the story. The primary focus of the narrative are the three children of the Loony family (that name is one example (of a few) where Shaw’s symbols are rather too blatant) as they deal with (or not) the news of their parents decision to divorce–with subplots for Dennis’s wife and Claire’s daughter. For the most part we don’t see the whole family together except at the beginning and end of the story, where they gather around the dinner table. They live their separate life’s with only occasional intersections. This is stressed in one two-page spread where Shaw gives each sibling a single tier of panels that crosses both pages. The three siblings actions are visually and metaphorically parallel.

Dennis, as I mentioned, tries desperately to find some reason, while Claire seems more accepting, looking back more anxiously to her own divorce. Peter is almost completely disconnected from the rest of the events. His story, a romance with the young woman he meets, almost exists as its own story. This semi-separate story echoes Peter’s alienation within the family and the world. Shaw draws him as a kind of frog-man, evoking the way he sees himself (at one brief panel we see him as he is seen by the woman he meets, and he does bear resemblance to the rest of the family). The separations and reunions of the family create a classically symmetrical structure to the work.

The children’s three paths through the story are hinted at on the verso of the title page where two brief sequences of panels show first three types of mark making (stippling, hatching, cross-hatching) then three images labeled one, two, and three point perspective. Contrary to the normal examples of these perspectives where a single vanishing point causes lines to converge at the horizon, Shaw draws separate vanishing points on the horizon.

These types of metaphors and symbols are laced throughout the book. The first pages go through an illustrated series of types of sand, while a later sequence does the same for types of water. Both speak to the ever-changing, grouped yet separate nature of the family (not unlike the panels of a comic, a la Groensteen’s iconic solidarity/solidarité iconique). The sand sequence that starts the book is followed by a similar sequence on the “types of the Loony family” which makes the connection explicit (perhaps too blatantly). These sections stand outside the rest of the narrative as they are narrated by an external narrator, while the majority of the book is without narrative text. Within the text, water is a prominent symbol. There are a handful of sequences where each primary character takes a shower, in a very different way than say, a shower scene in a shonen manga. While Shaw uses a few sex scenes for Peter’s storyline, they are decidedly anti-erotic, focusing on Peter’s own anxiety and inexperience, which combines aptly with Shaw’s drawing style.

Shaw’s style is neither slick nor refined. It has a looseness to it that occasionally makes represented objects look distorted or too abstracted, yet once you’ve acclimated yourself to this style, it is effective in communicating the story. Shaw makes use of a wide variety of comics tropes and shorthands as well as a variety of mark making techniques to clarify where the simplified representations might be insufficient. In some cases he creates his own shorthands for things like an arm “falling asleep.”

He occasionally veers into less representational abstraction to great effect. At one point Dennis has a hallucinatory vision on the beach, where Shaw pulls out a cubistic style.

I’ve written about it before, but he also makes frequent use of text in his images in a way that is more description or label than the conventional use of text in comics (sound). Examples of this are numerous and varied, as I read I found myself marking a dozen or so examples. Sometimes the text is clarifying an action, sometimes an object, sometimes it seems to be expressing either a character’s or the narrator/artist’s subjective thoughts/opinions. The panel below shows two examples of this from the same page, one expressing subjection another clarifying a movement.

Two non-contiguous panels from Part Two

Even the use of text for sound avoids the usual onomatopoetic sound effect (Bif Bam Pow) for a descriptive label like “Ocean Sounds” or “Loud Music.”

Pardon the crappy scan, the text says Loud Music, not the abstract backgrounds that add to the sense of overpowering sound.

This use of text in BBB fascinates me. It, along with Shaw’s use of layouts for pacing and rhythm are the two areas where his work is most formally interesting in this book.

Dennis feels around in the dark

BBB is an ambitious work. I could go on about different micro and macro level aspects of its structure, pacing, and imagery. With each new work, Shaw seems to be making new strides in his work and new discoveries in the form. I’d highly recommend all his works: Goddess Head, Mother’s Mouth, the Cold Heat Special with Frank Santoro, his webcomic BodyWorld (starts here), and his short stories in current issues of Mome. Shaw is young and ambitious with the abilities to carry out those ambitions. Here’s hoping he keeps up his current level of productivity and artistic progression.

Added praise for Jacob Covey’s design work on the book. It’s an interesting, clear design with covers that feel nice in the hand (important for such a big, heavy book).

Metronome is an unusual and interesting comic, but it’s not as unusual as the back copy on the book would have you believe:

“Just when you thought that nobody could create something new in the comic medium, here comes Metronome – a 64-page debut graphic novel by Véronique Tanaka: a ‘silent’ erotically-charged visual poem, an experimental non-linear story using a palette of iconic ligne clair images. Symbolism, visual puns and trompe l’oeil conspire in a visual mantra that could be described as “existential manga” if it wasn’t for the fact that there is a very human and elegantly structured tale of doomed relationship providing a solid foundation to the cutting-edge storytelling. A gorgeous art/graphic novel from a mysterious new artist. An experience not to be missed!”

Jesus H. Christ! This book has everything. It’s experimental, but it has a human story of a relationship. It’s a poem and its a graphic novel and its manga. Copy that promises everything like that is a real turn-off. Somehow I ordered this despite the copy, trying to overlook the sheer impossibility of anything living up to such a description. In writing about Metronome, I find it hard not to just go through picking apart the copy in light of the actual work, and I probably won’t resist completely. “Existential manga?” What does that even mean?

Metronome is a story of a “doomed relationship.” In fact, its story is an utter cliche. Man meets woman (we don’t see that). Man and woman have sex. Man and woman move in together. Man ignores woman for his work (in this case piano composition). Woman is upset. Man is a jerk. Woman leaves. Man jerks himself. Sure it’s a human tale, but it’s also lacking in anything to make the story unique. The characters are two-dimensional (which does nicely mirror the flat figure drawing) and the plot is easy to telescope. In a publicity interview found online (at various sites) Tanaka mentions a story by Alain Robbe-Grillet as an influence. The story of his that she describes sounds much more atmospheric than the one she has crafted. Robbe-Grillet rarely offers such unambiguous narratives in his work. He does often start from a generic or cliched framework but never leaves them so intact and straightforward.

The story is non-linear, slightly. The relationship unfolds as a flashback within a single scene. Starting at what is effectively the end of a story and looping back to the beginning and through to the present is classic narrative organization, often overused, though Tanaka unfolds the story in such a way that this organization is well motivated.

(The pace is set.)

The book begins with the metronome. Tanaka uses a four row by four column grid of panels for every page of the book, an unvarying breakdown of space that is matched by an unvarying breakdown of time. This is almost a paragon of the time/space idea of comics, carefully regulated. The metronome which starts the book teaches the reader to read each panel as a equal increment of time. Tick Tock Tick Tock, sixteen panels of the metronome’s hand going back and forth in four rows of four beats. This regular rhythm becomes quantified in the next page when a row of the metronome is interspersed with four panels of a watch, the second hand advancing one second per panel. In this way, Tanaka forces the reader to read the panels her way, with a steady rhythm of time.

Page three starts adding other objects: a fly, a phone, a framed photo of a woman, a tribal mask of some kind. The rows show a sequence of four panels starting at an extreme, all black close-up and then reframe the object at equal increments of distance until the object is completely contained in the panel.

(Panning the room.)

Then the space is explored. In four regularly reframed panels, the room containing all these objects is paced out. Further movement is introduced as the fly moves and a fan oscillates. A black drop dripping into a puddle of black liquid reintroduces the second by second pacing. In various rows the dripping is interspersed with the metronome, counting out the drips second by second. Time has not stopped but it has slowed to a snails pace and Tanaka forces the reader to feel that time passing in a distinctly quantifiable way.

Finally, a man is introduced, unmoving. The framing closes in on his face, then it closes in on the woman’s face. A page turn, a white panel, and the woman’s face reappears, framed in the screen of a digital camera. We have travelled into the flashback, the man’s memory, no doubt.

As the story progresses the flashback tells the story of the relationship interspersed with images of the man alone in the present. The segments of the flashback are visually and narratively linked to the objects previously introduced in the room. We see the mask being purchased at the women’s request, and we see her wearing it, naked in anticipation of a sexual act. The tiny figure that sits on top/as part of the mask is shown in a panel transition from the woman as she straddles the man, it’s face and posture echoing hers (see part of that scene below). Throughout, these sorts of narrative connections fill-out the story and the significance of the objects, while visual puns and metaphors help to overdetermine the man’s memory work and flashbacks. Much of the iconic repetition in this book would fall under what Groensteen calls braiding (item ten in this post). These connections are what pull the work together, though in many cases Tanaka is too obvious with them. In a story with such a limited repertoire of images/objects, a lot of the connections can be drawn by the reader. A good example of this is a bird that appears on a painting/poster on the wall of the apartment is later echoed in a real bird flying in the air above the couple as they take a hike.

(Abstraction courtsy of a lava lamp.)

Tanaka’s uses the row as a primary stuctural device. Within each row the four panels make frequent use of McCloud’s moment-to-moment transitions, slight reframings of the same image (zoom out, zoom in, pan), or a simple repetition of the same image four times.

The rhythm, pacing, and visual punning of Metronome is where Tanaka’s work really shines. To say it is “existential manga” or some kind of unheard of revelation of newness is stretching the praise. It is most unusual that the copy doesn’t mention the real interesting part of the story, the rhythm and pacing. Alas.

The copy also mentions the iconic images (though I wouldn’t consider it “ligne claire”), which I can’t argue against. Tanaka’s art is iconic and geometric. The objects and setting are well handled, particularly in the way the visual puns and associations are made, but she really fails in her characters which are flat and amateurish. The comic is supposed to be “erotically-charged” but it’s a little more erotic than drawings of those iconic man and woman restroom sign characters in sexual positions, which is to say, not much.

(A nudity free sex scene with awkward characters.)

Experiments are by nature a mix of success and failure. This is an experimental work in some ways – pacing, rhythm, timing, breakdowns, and in those ways it is successful. The success does not carry over onto the non-experimental, traditional aspects of the work: plot, characters, figure drawing. By trying to have it both ways, the work is not quite the success it could be nor the failure it might be. As a debut work of comics (Tanaka is apparently a conceptual artist in the “fine arts” world using a different name (that’s the “mysterious” part)) it is an impressive attempt.

Edit: It has come out, since my original posting of this review that, Tanaka is a pseudonym for British comic artist Bryan Talbot.

This week’s baseball comic is another work from James Sturm, this time in conjunction with Rich Tommaso. I’m assuming Sturm is writing and making the breakdowns, while Rich is providing the drawings/compositions. Though neither are credited with any particularly duty, the drawing is clearly not Sturm’s, but the breakdown of the story into panels is reminiscent of his other works.

I’m never quite sure how to critique a children’s books. I’m not the intended audience, and I don’t have a lot of background with similar books (I read when I was a kid but not a ton of children’s books and not so as I remember them). This book is, like it’s predecessor in this series Houdini: The Handcuff King, written for children, and not as relevant, in my opinion, to the adult reader. Either way, I’ll do my best, though I can say, right off, that I’m not overly impressed.

I have to start by noting how deceptively titled and marketed this book is. To consider this a book about Satchel Paige is an over statement. To say that this book “follows Paige from his earliest days on the mound though the pinnacle of his career” and that the “author and artist share the story of a sports hero who defied the barriers of race to play the game on his own terms,” as the back of this books does is misrepresentation. This is not a biography of Satchel Paige, who is widely considered one of the best pitchers ever in baseball, nor is it a book about his defying of race barriers.

The bulk of the story belongs to and is narrated by a black man from the south name Emmet (a name which one only infers because his son is “Emmet Jr.”). In 1929 he heads off from Alabama and his life as a sharecropper to play in the Negro Leagues, with one of the all black baseball teams, and tries to earn enough money to support his family and buy a home that isn’t a shack. The main focus of the first part of the book is a baseball game that Emmet’s team plays against Satchel Paige’s team. Emmet manages to score a run off the young superstar but ends up permanently damaging his knee during his slide into home.

The second part of the book takes place over a number of years from 1930 through 1943, as we learn a bit more about Emmet’s life after his injury. He gives up baseball, doesn’t talk about it, and becomes a farmer, trying to support his wife and child in a place that is still controlled by wealthy white men. We see his struggles as the twin white sons of the old landowner exert their power over him and physically intimidate him and his son to keep Emmet, Jr. out of school and working in the fields. During this section we see, less a baseball game than a baseball exhibit, where the twin sons, on their way to join a minor league ball club, hit home runs. This section will provide some historical insight for the younger reader, who might (probably) be unfamiliar with certain aspects of post-slavery repression of blacks in the US: lynching, segregation, and general intimidation through wealth and power.

The third part of the book features a 1944 baseball game between Satchel Paige’s All-Stars and the local white all-stars in Emmet’s town. This scene is explicitly singled out as an example of a black man standing up to and beating a white man(men). Paige strikes out both white twins and one other white player. This example is a kind of a life lesson for the protagonist’s son (“Another first for Emmet, Jr.: Seein’ a black man sass a white” (69)), and rouses Emmet himself from a long silence to his son about his baseball days. They go home and Emmet shares stories with his son. Emmet’s narration references remembering “the type of man” he is, and hoping that his son will remember “who he can be” (85). This is accompanied by Emmet giving his son the baseball which Paige gifted him back in 1929 when he hurt himself. This provides an “uplifting” ending, but I don’t feel that this sense of “who you can be” is really earned. The issues that provide the focus in the second part of the book are not addressed nor do we see any indication how Paige’s striking out a few white men really changes anything for Emmet or his son beyond them bonding over baseball. It’s a simple and simplistic moral to the story, one which is probably suited for an audience of children, but feels hollow to me. In comparison, Sturm’s The Golem’s Mighty Swing’s thematics of identity and spectacle appear much more sophisticated.

One of the most interesting formal aspects of this book–which, somehow, I only noticed after a few readings–is that there is not a single word balloon in use. For some this would actually disqualify Satchel Paige’s identity as a comic, but for me it shows an example of an interesting narrative tactic. The main story is narrated by Emmet in the present tense, though the narration itself shows a certain retrospective view on the events (not unlike the narration in The Golem’s Mighty Swing). Emmet reports all speech and provides commentary on actions. One unusual use of the reported speech comes late in the story where one of the white twins yells a racial slur at Paige during his at-bat. The narration of the man’s words are written in extra large letters, but still maintain their place at the top of the panel where one finds the narration throughout the book. The narration often doubles the images, as if either Sturm or Tommaso were not sure of the images’ ability to tell enough of the story (or maybe it’s a tactic to make the reading easier for a younger reader). Almost every panel contains narration, only the occasional action panel is left silent. The textual narration carries the greatest weight of the story, and it would be nice to see a little more reliance on the images. For the most part the visual narration is as much Emmet’s as the text. I don’t think we need to have his story completely scrolled out as text.

Click for larger.

This sequence showing Paige striking out one of the twins, provides a good example that doesn’t need so much narration. The pitcher set-up and then the three repeated panels of a missed swing say just about all that needs to be said and is a great way to not only show the strike out but also show the speed with which it is accomplished: bang bang bang, you’re out. The umpire seen in panels 2 and 4 helps communicate the information and let us know that the image is not just a static sequence.

Two pages stand outside Emmet’s narration. Both show a montage of images in black and gray (as opposed to the rest of the art’s black and light olive) with typeset text that provide some extra narration about Paige’s activities. These two pages are the entirety of what might be considered biographical information on Paige. Otherwise he appears more as a mythical figure pitching in the two baseball games that bookend the story. These two pages are an odd fit for the rest of the book. They are clearly not coming from Emmet and mostly serve to give some credence to the idea that this book is about Paige.

Reading this volume back-to-back with Sturm’s solo baseball book, it’s hard not to make comparisons with not just the story but the art. Tomasso’s drawing is stiff and awkward in comparison with Sturm’s. The figures seem ill-suited to the action of the baseball games. His style is simpler and more abstracted than Sturm’s, though it has a certain charm that just feels poorly fit to this historical tale. This isn’t to say it’s all bad, there are some well-composed images, interesting figures, and use of lines and sound effects to convey the action of the game. The sequence below shows some of these conflicting aspects. The first panel is a well-done action panel with a dynamic sound effect, but the second and third are more problematic. The fielder in the second panel looks terribly awkward and the composition of the image focuses completely on that figure (he’s so centered). The third panel is just a bit confusing narratively, as the figure (I assume that is Emmet) seems to be running at top speed. Based on the background, he is running back to the plate from first. If the ball were called foul, why is he running like that with some much effort?

Click for larger.

The baseball scenes themselves are not particularly exciting or different than what is seen in Golem. With the subject of Paige, there is a natural focus on the pitcher/batter conflict, which was missing in Cotton Woods. The panel pacing is well done, particularly in scenes where Paige himself uses time as a tool against the batters. We see Paige tying his shoe, walking around, joking with his fielders. In his at-bat, early in the book, against Paige, we similarly see Emmet try to take back some of the pacing of the game (see the sequence below). This is one of those moments you see a lot in a baseball game: the little batter’s rituals that are performed in endless variations. These panels also show a bit of the redundancy of the textual narration.

Click for larger.

All in all, not a great comic nor a great baseball comic. I can’t speak for its effectiveness as a children’s book, though I wonder who this would appeal too. I’m not sure we get enough of a sense of Paige’s greatness to make him the mythic figure he needs to be for this book to really work for a younger audience.

Next week, I’m hoping to have a review of the baseball manga H2 by Mitsuru Adachi. Or at least a review of some part of it as the scanlation hasn’t quite reached all 34 volumes, and I don’t think I’ll even get the 28 that are scanlated read.

Previous Post in my baseball comics series: The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm
Next Post in my baseball comics series: H2

Baseball month continues with this comic by James Sturm, the first of two baseball comics by Sturm I’ll be reviewing. Outside of his work with the Center for Cartoon Studies, Sturm is best known for historical fiction comics, included the recent collection James Sturm’s America (which includes this story). Even his Fantastic Four book Unstable Molecules is firmly situated in a historical context.

(While he shows a debt to Gotto, Sturm takes his own path, in this action panel, the sound effect is beautifully integrated with the ball. Significantly more effective than Gotto’s starbust images.)

The Golem’s Mighty Swing takes place sometime during the Prohibition era (1920-1933) in the American midwest. The main narrator is Noah Straus, the “Zion Lion”, a former major league ballplayer, who leads a barnstorming Jewish baseball team called the Stars of David. The team travels from town to town in a beat up bus, playing local ball clubs and taking abuse from the towns’ folks.

The story is divided into three parts. The first has the team playing a game in Michigan. They stick around town afterwards and a man name Paige approaches Noah about a moneymaking scheme where one of the players would dress up as the mythical golem during games. Noah is against the idea, but later, when the team’s bus breaks down, changes his mind. The second part covers the game and surrounding events when the team uses the golem idea. The golem seems to only heighten the crowd’s anti-semiticism and the game ends in a riot. The team only gets away thanks to a rain storm that washes out the game and disassembles the crowd. The third, and shortest part, is a bit of an epilogue, ten years later, where Noah goes to see another one of Paige’s schemes, a staged game where so-called big leaguers play again a bunch of men dressed as “hay seeds”.

A continuing theme in the book is the idea of spectacle and illusion. The Stars of David are all bearded jews, yet Hershl Bloom is actually Henry Bell, an african-american, and Mo Strauss (Noah’s younger brother) has a beard of shoe polish. The Golem is Henry Bloom in costume. Henry tells a story about a native american who played as an black man on a black ball club. The Stars of David offer themselves as a spectacle, which the crowds love to hate. In one scene a man calls into the bleachers at a women he knows. She doesn’t like baseball, but she’s there to “see the jews.”

The anti-semeticism of the crowds, in this context, seems to be as much about spectacle as any real hatred. A group of children throw stones at Mo and want to knock off his hat to see the horns underneath. They fall for the stories of jews as monsters. Paige plays up this idea with his Golem scheme. If the crowd thinks the jews are monsters, then he creates an even larger monster for them to see.

In the end so much of these spectacles come down to money. The Stars of David are trying to make a living, and Paige wants to make money off of them. The riot at the game with the Golem is even partly mitigated by the intervention of Mr. Putnam, the wealthy factory owner who set up the game. He wants to get his money worth from the game so he sends in the police to keep the crowd away from the team.

The story is mostly narrated by Noah. His words set the scene, act as a kind of announcer for the games, and allows for an easy compression of events which Sturm doesn’t feel the need to illustrate. Most of the story is also focused through Noah’s presence, but there are a few places where the focus travels to other characters and Noah’s narration drops out. At one point we follow Mo Strauss as he walks around town. People look at him suspiciously (though, in their defense, he stands in front of a farm house and watches a woman breast feeding), children chase him and throw rocks, and he ends up chasing one of the kids. The kid runs into a grocer’s sidewalk produce and knocks apples everywhere. Mo ends up talking baseball with the grocer and some other people. This is one of the only positive scenes of interaction we see between the Stars of David and other people. A small respite. In contrast, Noah’s narration drops out as Lev, one of the pitchers, heads into a town to a speakeasy for a drink and gets beat up. A third scene shows a newsboy hawking newspapers, while another, slightly crazy fellow runs around causing trouble and shouting about the golem. The townsfolk seem to look at this guy as a bit of a nut, yet, later, when the riot at the game occurs, he is there amongst the people and not all that different than the rest. They fall to his level as they fall for the spectacle.

This lack of narrative consistency went unnoticed my first time through the book. Once I noticed it, it threw the narration into question. Noah’s narration reads like he was telling a story to someone as if it were the present (i.e. “A fair had arrived yesterday,”). The more I think about it, the more odd and unstructured it is. Sturm complicates matters by occasionally using the narrative caption boxes for dialogue occurring in the story rather than Noah’s narration (which seems to exist outside the story). I don’t think it harms the story, but I wonder if there is something purposeful in it or if Sturm just didn’t consider it that fully. Noah’s narration exists mostly on a surface level, it doesn’t go into his feelings or psychology and I wonder how necessary it is for the first person element to be there at all. In general, I’d have liked to see a little more about the characters. Mo Strauss plays a fairly prominent role in a number of scenes, but the reader never gets a good idea at the whys of his actions, his anger. One even wonders why he plays baseball: for the love of the game? just to make money? to impress his brother? The use of the character hits at these questions, but does not explicitly raise or answer them.

(Sturm plays up the competition between pitcher and batter and the location of pitches.)

Enough about the narration, on to the baseball. In the acknowledgments section Sturm thanks, among others, Ray Gotto. Reading The Golem’s Mighty Swing so soon after Cotton Woods, I did notice Gotto’s influence in a number of the baseball scenes. A few of Gotto’s visual tropes make their appearance–the large foreground baseballs, expressive silhouettes, and the scoreboard as a narrative method–but Sturm shows the game in a much different way. In a 100 page comic book format, Sturm has a lot more space to work with than Gotto’s four panel dailies. We see the result of this in the way parts of the game slowly unfold. An early at-bat by Mo lasts more than 3 pages (25 plus panels). The tension between pitcher and batter is played up more than in Gotto’s work, as is more particulars of pitch number, location, and type.

The atmosphere of a baseball game is built-up through images of the park, crowd, and dug-out, with managers flashing signs. The panels are not focused solely on a star or a primary action; a roving eye, as seen in many manga, provides a greater sense of environment than seen in Gotto. For instance, this evocation of a home run in 6 panels (the panel at the end of preceding page shows Henry, the batter, connect with the ball) really makes the reader see the height of the ball along with the players and crowd. Notice how the ball appears at the same place in the composition for both panel three and panel four, only changing in size. Also note the Peanuts-like composition and style in the sixth panel.

(Click for larger.)

Sturm’s style has a certain minimalism to it. Less realistically rendered than Gotto or someone like Jason Lutes (another comic artist whose primary genre is historical fiction), but less iconically cartoony that Seth or Chester Brown. His work bears a relation to Jaime Hernandez in its (lack of) detail and geometric forms but with a rougher, less clean line. He frequently leaves out backgrounds, bringing them in when appropriate for the action. Note in the strip below how the focus starts on the batter, then the background (catcher, umpire, crowd) is brought in for the second panel to provide context, and the third panel drops out the crowd to focus on the pitch call.

(Click for larger.)

Sturm’s depiction of the game is quite excellent and he avoids the necessity for intense non-stop great plays and unrealistic achievements by using the game as a vehicle for themes beyond the game itself. If I find the themes a little under-developed, the baseball is rich, well-paced, and visually exciting.

We’ll end on this lovely strip. The ball rises in the first two panels and then is just slightly dropping in the third, so simple, yet so evocative.

(Click for larger.)

Addenda:

1) French bande-dessinée site, du9 has an interview with Sturm from while he was working on this book that has some relevant passages:

[Sturm:] Basically, the book is about identity. In all these stories I’ve been telling, I’ve been struggling with the idea of America … a country that has very quickly manufactured an identity for itself, myths for itself … and with the Jews there’s this tradition that extends before the concept of America existed. I’m thinking about the construction of identity of American Jews, and in the story I’m curious about how the media amplifies stereotypes.

What I also want to do with this book is just make a really good baseball comic. I like sports, and it’s been challenging trying to orchestrate the rhythms of a baseball game in comic form. The Japanese do it well.

Eli Bishop: Well, two things you really have not seen a whole lot of in American comics are sports and history. I really can’t think of any examples of sports comics.

JS: There’s Cottonwoods [sic], which was a comic strip from the 1950s by Ray Gotto; it was reprinted in a collection by Kitchen Sink. It’s really beautifully drawn, but a little stiff and hampered by its daily format. Lots of forced dialogue: “Hey, Cotton’s going to steal home!”

Some of the technical challenge of this book is not to have this phony voice-over — which does deliver a lot of useful information to the viewer. So I’m trying to figure that out … I don’t want every at-bat to last ten pages. I’m planning on using a voice-over narrative.

2) An excellent review of the book by Charles Hatfield in Indy Magazine.

Previous Post in my baseball comics series: Cotton Woods by Ray Gotto
Next Post in my baseball comics series: Satchel Paige

The comics that get the most attention in the wider press seem to be those with the most socio-political relevance, those that deal with certain “issues” (think Maus, think Persepolis). Houghton Mifflin’s hit from 2006, Fun Home, was not only a fine literary autobiographical comic, but it dealt with a topic that has a certain contemporary relevance. This year, they publish Blue Pills by the Swiss comic artist Frederik Peeters. Once again, an autobiographical comic that has that “issue” style relevance. I don’t mean that in a necessarily pejorative way. It is just something I noticed. Blue Pills is an AIDS narrative, yet, surprisingly, it seems lacking all the plot points that one would expect of what might be called the generic AIDS narrative. The book is odd in that way, unfortunately it’s not the stellar work I was expecting from all the praise it’s gotten (from it’s original French publication).

The opening scene starts out with a series of abstract images that look like microscopic organisms–from the inside of a body–and morph into planetary bodies and then a sun. Fred (here used to refer to the character) is upset that a doctor said he and Cati (the female protagonist, we later learn) are a “discordant” couple. Fred doesn’t think they are “incongruent”. She smiles and says she loves him. They look out from their balcony as the sun shines down. This seven page opening is a sort of microcosm of the whole book: early bewilderment as one gets situated, a brief bit of tension and then life continues on with a smile.

The idea of the couple as being discordant doesn’t rise again. My second read through the book I looked for some way to connect this prologue to the rest of the book. I expect such an out of place beginning (it clearly does not fit in with the beginning of the narrative timeline, nor does it easily fit in with the end) to offer some relevance to the narrative, some kind of set-up for a later event or theme. It doesn’t and this is not the only structural aspect of the narrative that seems half thought through.

Dates at the end of the different chapters (one month at a time) suggest Peeters was serializing the story, or at least creating it as individual chapters rather than as a whole. The narrative is not chronologically straightforward, though it is not particularly complicated. Twice in the chapters Peeters uses a technique where he jumps back and forth in time from a long “present” scene and a series of scenes from the “past”. These scenes show that the narrative is being manipulated, it is not a diary or journal, yet the purpose of these narrative movements are opaque. The prolepsis (flashforward) and analepsis (flashback) of the plot highlights the constructed-ness of the book. It is a retrospective look at the events rather than a diaristic accounting. With this sort of autobiography, one comes to expect more introspection, perspective on events, feelings, people. You can see this in the work of Chester Brown or the aforementioned Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Peeters narrative reads more like the of the moment diary strips of Jeffrey Brown or James Kolchalka. I feel a certain disconnect between the narrative structure and the lack of depth. Peeters seems to excise so much that little emotion is left.

The world disappears when Fred and Cati finally connect.

The whole book is narrated by Fred/Peeters, and, as such, is focused through his perception. He tells about his first few meetings with Cati, over the course of a few years, how they would run into each other. Then one New Year’s eve they start talking and a relationship begins. She is divorced and has a little boy. They date and then the day comes that she tells him that she is HIV positive. What follows is almost banal. Peeters has no trouble dealing with this news (or very little). They visit a doctor after a broken condom scares them. Peeters and the boy get along with only a little tension. The relationship seems lacking in any strife. He hesitates about telling his parents and discusses it with Cati, but we never see any resolution to the matter. He discusses condoms with a friend. The broken condom scare is the height of tension. One would expect the HIV to be their biggest problem, yet it exists in the abstract. We see no sickness or death. Even the blue pills of the title only appear in one or two scenes involving the boy. Peeters downplays the issue, at least as much as one can when that is also the focus (and point) of the book. This is not melodrama, but it is also not much drama at all. The virus becomes part of the everyday, it sinks into the stream of banality. This is a strange stance for such a book, for such a story. The ending has the three of them headed off for vacation, everything seems fine. The narrative doesn’t really go anywhere. There is no resolution, not even much of a stopping point, just a continuation. In this way Peeters destroys the teleology of the AIDS narrative as it is generally considered (death).

Since the narrative is focused through Fred, Cati is only seen through his eyes. Her feelings are only understood through his interpretation of them. She barely exists as a personality. A more cliched story would zero in on her and the sickness. How did she get it? We never learn. How does she feel? We don’t really know. He gives hints that she “sometimes confused herself with the virus,” but that line is one caption with an metaphoric image of her all balled up surrounded by a scribbled black field. The story isn’t really about her, even, and perhaps I’m wrong to even take it into consideration. The story is about his anxieties and coming to terms with the virus, the world, their relationship? It’s hard to say. I feel like the struggle, the problem, was erased from the middle.

The story is told with narration of events and feelings in between scenes. A number of longer scenes consist of long conversations between two characters. Reading these scenes, one quickly realizes that there is little need to pay attention to the images. Peeters is filling the panels to pace out the dialogue but doing little to involve the images. Long dialogues are a real problem for comics and really not what they tend to do best without some type of formal invention, which Peeters does not use. Similarly, I get the feeling a lot of the “present” scenes, such as a long one of Fred in a cafe writing the narration we are reading, serves more as a way to accompany the narration with images than for any particular narrative or thematic use.

The images are mostly those of the “real” (diegetic) narrative world, though Peeters occasionally employs metaphoric or symbolic imagery: such as a series of images with a judge looming over the couple and “condemning” them “to the condom,” or the white rhinoceros that appears in the doctor’s office when the doctor pronounces Fred’s chance of catching AIDS is as likely as running into a white rhinoceros on the street. At the end of the book, one long scene has Fred engaged in a dialogue with a mammoth in a kind of day dream psychoanalysis of pseudo-philosophy. This scene offers too much too late in a confused manner that left me wanting more “show” and less “tell.” A major element of the dialogue is Fred’s “anger” at the world, an anger that we never see in the preceding 150 pages. I’m also confused by the mammoth itself, a symbol that lacks significance, particularly when Peeters already has an adequate animal symbol in the white rhinoceros.

Peeters drawing is loose, a sketchy yet representational cartooning that allows for moments of real expressive flourish. I really like his style with its thick blacks, loose panel borders, big eyes, occasional extreme close-ups, and harsh croppings. His layouts stick to variations of the six panel grid with long panels used to slow pacing or widen the framing. In one scene he alternates between a panel of Fred and then two panels of something else (a few of the tv in the hospital room where the scene takes place). Over the course of 10 panels, we see 4 panels of Fred each one closing in on his face from a head and shoulders image to a close-up. The rhythm in that scene slowly builds up until we hit the close-up at the end of the page. Then turning the page, a large panel of Cati’s hand ready to place a pill in the boy’s mouth as the narration discusses the inevitability of his death. This is one of the few scenes in the back that really works to bring out a certain emotion in relation to illness and medication, and Peeters handles it skillfully and subtly through the use of composition, layout, and the panel breakdowns. It hints at something better that for the most part this book doesn’t reach.

At times, while reading certain panels or combinations of panels, I would see other hints of a better work waiting to appear, little things that add to the reading experience:

While drunk, Fred’s narration temporarily becomes a half word balloon cropped off the panel (I’m not even sure what the text at the top of the panel is), but it’s a small, rare moment where image expresses something of Fred’s subjective experience.

The world abstracts and drops away, during one of Fred and Cati’s early brief meetings.

The two panels here have a very similar composition. Notice how similar the waitress’s torso is to Fred’s head above it.

An extreme close-up of a lamp across two panels nicely separates the two, making for a strange but visually interesting composition.

Unfortunately, these moments are few, and in the end, while there are parts of this book I appreciate, on the whole, I found it too disjointed, perhaps trying to get a little too much weight from its topic without putting in any work to make the reader feel anything. I’ll be curious to see what others think of it, and if the “issue” overcomes the other problems to become a widely read comic.

Bendis seems to draw from Miller’s story and take up the concept (the hero’s identity discovered) anew, with a more serious state of mind. The story so far is very un-superhero-ish. Very little fighting, very little costumes, and a lot of concentration on people. There is a heavy noir influence (also like Miller’s run) that I find particularly attractive as a reader (and lover of films noir).

I plan on reading more of the series (though from reading certain blogs I know at least some of the ending) so I’ll return to write about it as a whole later. For now a few thoughts.

Maleev’s artwork has a nice angular quality to it, also a great use of texture, which one rarely sees in comics. I do find the style a little too photorealist. It saps the energy from the people and makes the whole thing look too stiff.

There is surprising lack of sound effects, which, for a superhero very reliant on his extra-powerful hearing, is odd. For a quite a while in the story Matt Murdock is suffering from a kind of heightened (even more than usual) hearing. He has trouble filtering it out. Instead of visually showing this with sound effects, word balloons, and such, Bendis has Matt’s interior monologue tells us. That’s missing out on a powerful chance at visual showing the overwhelming sounds.

The sense of pacing and sequencing of the story is also very unusual and interesting. The story jumps around a lot, especially in the beginning. It adds a sense of mystery and suspense that would otherwise be missing. The convoluted plot also adds to the noir-esque atmosphere. The pacing is slow, very slow at times. The twelve issues I read take place mostly over a couple days. This is effective, giving everything a more human scale, but sometimes it’s a little overdone. Bendis has a tendency to use a multi-panel sequence where the viewpoint slowly closes in on the object of interest: here’s a panel of Matt sitting looking serious; here he is, slightly closer; here he is, even closer; here’s his arm and hand. That type of sequence is repeated a few times, unnecessarily an attempt to be a little too filmic.

I love the lack of narration in the story. Other than some location and time cues there is no narrative voice, just dialogue.

More when I read more.