from Journal 3 by Fabrice Neaud

Matthias Wivel: I also wanted to ask you about the choice to draw in this naturalist fashion. It’s very different from the work of many other autobiographical cartoonists, and because you talk about real events, it becomes a very clear choice on your part. You made this choice early on obviously – what were your thoughts?

Fabrice Neaud: It’s very difficult to answer that. Philippe Squarzoni has written an article on my work which answers that question, but I don’t quite recall all of it – it’s a very good article, very precise, and it’s going to be hard for me to explain, but yes, it’s a choice I made a long time ago and it makes all the difference. First of all, and very basically, I used to be a portrait painter and worked in a realist style, so I came to comics with a realist drawing style, based on observation from nature. That’s the basic explanation.

Beyond that, the choice to draw realistically… I’m going to have a hard time explaining it here, but I believe that only from a realistic starting point can you deconstruct your drawing. If you start out with symbolic drawing, you can play around with it like with Legos, you can put it together in different ways, but you can’t move back toward realism. If you create a very cartoony character, like Tintin, you can’t ever draw his face realistically. It doesn’t work. Hergé had this problem: I’m thinking in particular of that spread where he has, I no longer remember which character opening a newspaper, and on that page there is a close-up view of what he is reading, and his thumbs are drawn in very large and very realistically, and it just doesn’t work.

It’s what – using terminology borrowed from photography – I call the problem of going from high resolution to low resolution. If you take a photo of someone far away, someone unclearly defined, very pixelated, you can’t then enlarge the image of that person and make it clear; you can only loose definition. So, in order to give the illusion of deconstruction in drawing the widest possible expressive field, you have to start out with as realistic a style of drawing as possible, then all the levels below that are accessible. Once you’ve degraded, you can’t go back to high definition. With the exception, perhaps, of works like Maus: when you’re evoking very powerful historical events, I think you can make it work by drawing them in a rather minimalist manner and then at some point inserting photographs of the reality depicted, which allow an expanded understanding on the part of the reader.

From an interview with Neaud at The Comics Journal.

I started my post on Mark Laliberte’s Brickbrickbrick by noting the publication’s context as a book labeled “poetry” from a literary press. His most recent publication Grey Supreme 1 is published in a rather different context. That “1″ alone tells us something. This is the first of a projected series of annual issues of Grey Supreme. The publication is a slightly larger than normal 32 page pamphlet from Koyama Press. Koyama is not exclusively a comics publisher, but they have, up to now, published more comics than other books.

Does this context help make the reading experience of Grey Supreme more of a comics-esque one than Brickbrickbrick? For most readers, I think it would. This looks and feels like a comic (a nicely printed on thick paper comic). But inside, we find something that is a bit alien as a comic (well, for most readers, I would think). The comics in Grey Surpreme have more in common with abstract comics than conventional narrative comics, despite the representational imagery used by Laliberte.

Grey Supreme 1 contains two works, which are independent but also offer some thematic connections. The majority of the publication contains “Swallow,” a 19 page series of images showing a single arm reaching out of water. The image is an oft-seen shortcut for a person drowning, a last reach for air as he/she goes down.

The images in “Swallow” are at their heart, two-fold: an arm/hand and the water/ocean. Within each image the styles of these two part are varied, as they are also varied from image to image. Quite like Brickbrickbrick, this appears to be in some way a manipulation or redrawing of appropriated imagery, collaged together. Some of the images have that craggy edge to their lines that speaks to an enlarging of ink of paper. Some of the images are digitally precise; some look like old engravings; some are flat colors; some are digital gradients; some are abstracted patterning; some are traditionally representational rendering. One clearly shows the texture of paper beneath and pale flesh of the arm.

The collage-like stylistic contrast within the same image creates a sense of disconnect between arm and water. The arm and the water are not unified, the arm is like an alien object stuck through the water. The two elements are in conflict visually and narratively. Visually, the arm is winning, as it becomes the foreground, the focal object for each image. In contrast, narratively, the water wins the conflict. The arms struggle to reach out, and, in the last image, there is no arm at all, just the water, with three inverted arcs signifying waves but also looking like an abstracted smiling face. This slightly creepy final image, reading like the final victory of the water, is followed by a poem titled “Swallow” or maybe “Sleepy, Hollow” (“Swallow” is printed in white at the top of the page, while “Sleepy, Hollow” is printed in all caps at the start of the text). The short poem, all short words and rolling rhythm, plays as a fitting denouement to the sequence of images. There is the potential for a poem placed at the tail end of an image sequence to feel tacked on and unnecessary, but Laliberte succeeds at this gambit. The poem faces the armless ocean image and is printed in text the same color as the night sky about the ocean, creating a visual unity to accompany the thematic one.

One other aspect of “Swallow” that adds to its effect is the rhythm of the images. The sequence is made of two single page images followed by a double-page image followed by two single page images, etc. Like the rhythm of the poem, a perhaps another indicator of Laliberte’s poetic background, this adds a rolling water motion to the sequence, a steady pace that becomes familiar and comforting.

The second piece in “Grey Supreme” is a seven image photographic sequence showing a view outside Laliberte’s window titled “Double Rainbow.” A large pit in the earth foregrounds graffitied buildings, construction machinery, and a low skyline. From the expansive sky over the scene, a rainbow arcs just off-center. The image is repeated seven times, each one manipulated to be tinted, in sequence, each of the seven colors of the rainbow (thus the title).

By itself, “Double Rainbow” is a quick recognition of the amusing concept followed by a sense of the thinness of it all. But, in conjunction with “Swallow”, the resonance allows for a greater appreciation. If “Swallow” is a struggle between man and nature, where nature is victorious and fearsome, “Double Rainbow” shows us a more complicated case where man seems to be winning over nature physically, while nature takes an aesthetic lead. In “Swallow”, water is an overwhelming force, in “Double Rainbow”, water is the purveyor of beauty in a single drop.

“Double Rainbow” also ends with a page of text, though this text seems more like a title page/addendum than the text in Swallow. The page lists the location of the photograph and a brief explanation of a rainbow. It’s not clear that’s it meant to be part of the sequence, and it doesn’t read as such.

I mentioned above that “Swallow” has more relation to abstract comics than conventional narrative comics, but I don’t think it is completely divorced from narrative work. Allow me a tentative attempt at explanation… Abstract comics foreground the visual elements of comics as visuals. From panel to panel, or page to page, we read the images qua images, not as a sign of some narrative/diegetic meaning. A more convention narrative comic foregrounds the meaning behind the images. This isn’t to say the images aren’t appreciated or read for their visual qualities, only that that is not the primary motivation.

“Swallow” exists somewhere between these two points. By repeating the same content in a variety of styles, Laliberte pretty much forces the reader to read these images as more than just the signifiers of arm/water. A focus is placed on the way the arm/water are represented, on the formal qualities of the line/color/texture/composition as well as the pacing of the images through the pages. Yet, behind these repeated images there is a narrative, however slight, that can be constructed, read into the repetition. What really makes it a narrative, to me, is that last image, the one without the arm. That shows change on a different level than the rest of the images. They all change on a purely stylistic visual level, but that last image creates a narrative change, and through it retrospectively creates the whole sequence into a time sequence. It is not just a series of arms in water, it is an arm over time, struggling in the water, then… failing.

At least that’s how I read it.

On a broad sense, most writers about comics have some sort of shorthand they use to describe a comic’s style without having to go into too much detail. R Fiore took on this language in a post at The Comics Journal earlier this year. He mostly seems interested in replacing terms like “realist” and “cartoony” with his own terminology “literal” and “freestyle”. His plotting of some kind of continuum is reminiscent of McCloud’s pyramid in Understanding Comics (Chapter 2, p52-3 in my edition), though Fiore’s is a lot less complex (one assumes he didn’t spend a lot of time charting this out like McCloud did). McCloud gives his continuums names (“realistic,” “iconic,” “non-iconic,” “abstraction”) but does not offer much in the way of general descriptive terminology that doesn’t involve a direct reference to the style’s location on his chart (which is how he discusses the work in the rest of the chapter). I do think his two continuums are important to discussions of style, the realistic to iconic and the realistic to abstract, one might say. Though these categories really only address the style fidelity (or not) to representation in relation to what we see, to a kind of ideal viewing of the world, an invisible style of photography and film at its most conventional.

Fiore’s argument with “realist” seems to be based on the idea that many images in comics do not actual exist in reality. This is a rather limiting way to address the issue, and, I think, creates a needlessly confused terminology. If anything, I think “realist” is a term most people can hear and grasp rather easily. To me the descriptor “cartoony” is about caricature, exaggeration, and a certain plasticity that I associate with early Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons. Exaggerated proportions, exaggerated movement, exaggerated features combined with a simplicity of representation.

In a recent comment thread at Comics Comics, Frank Santoro made some style related comments, that offer another stylistic descriptor: mannerist.

What I’m saying is that there is a lack of “naturalness” in the alt/art comics tradition. Think Mazzucchelli’s Year One. Toth’s Bravo for Adventure. Jaime’s Locas. All are “natural” or “realistic” approaches. Frank Quitely is a “natural” approach. What I call mannerism is a style that shuns “realistic” proportions and reduces everything to symbols. Think Clowes’s Ghost World. Realistic but mannered. I looked on the shelves for “unaffected, natural drawing” in comics (think Edward Hopper’s drawings or even, again, Eddie Campbell) and I cannot find much. There’s Jaime. So between photo-realism and Gary Panter there is alot to chose from. Fine. But there isn’t much to choose from on the shelves because most comics artists draw in a highly affected style. Particularly alt/art cartoonists. In fact, I think that is beginning to describe alt/art comics: not realistic. How many alt/art cartoonists “tighten up” and draw “real people” without too much reference and keep all the proportions right? Not many by my count last week when I was at work.

In a later post he further discusses “naturalism” as style: “A clear, observational drawing style based on a study of life as it appears to the naked eye. Stylized, yes, but accurate to life in proportion and feel.”

It seems to me there are multiple factors at work in many of these issues. Fidelity to (a real or imagined) reality can take the form of rendering, details, proportion, shape, or color. I can draw a realistically proportioned figure that is all straight lines and ninety degree angles or I can draw the exaggerated proportions of a Schulz character but render it with realistic shading/tone. Another factor at work, when trying to describe style is how often it is not consistent across the work as as whole or even within the same image (McCloud addresses the issue in relation to figure/background in manga, while Parille (see below) notes variations even within the same figure). Can I say Tezuka’s Phoenix is realistic or naturalistic when he draws an almost photorealistically rendered mountain scene and places a character in the scene who is four heads tall and has a giant bulbous nose?

Style is so much more than just about representation in relation to reality (whether that be a real or imagined reality), which is something Ken Parille addresses in a post about an exercise he did with one of his classes. Parille had his class comparing and describing the “basic visual style” of three separate comics. By “basic visual style” he is excluded issues of theme, plot, words, pacing, page layout, etc. and concentrating on a single panel image, which is certainly a good place to start, though I think addressing issues of style in comics should extend to use of those other elements (particularly pacing and layouts).

He notes the areas focused on in his class’s discussion:

Line: smooth to rough; loose to tight; thin to thick
Texture and pattern: (what kinds?); sparse to dense, loose to organized
Panel density: sparse to dense (amount of empty space relative to filled space)
Gestures, face and body: compare with “reality” — realistic to exaggerated
Body proportions: within the figure and when compared with “reality” — realistic to exaggerated
Density of character detail: in particular we looked at the number and kinds of lines used to draw the faces

One could probably find dozens of more facets to describe in relation to style, any discussion or description is necessarily limited both for time/length and in relation to the works under discussion (we wouldn’t discuss color in relation to a black and white image, though we may discuss tone; we wouldn’t discuss body proportions in relation to a comic without bodies).

I thought Parille’s exercise would be helpful for my own writing and reading, so I’m going to attempt to describe the style of three comics I’ve read recently (or am reading now). All three are French language autobiographical bandes dessinées, which gives them a certain similarity, but each are stylistically different. The three works I will address are: Faire Semblant C’est Mentir [Pretending is Lying] by Dominique Goblet (L’Association, 2008), Journal (3) by Fabrice Neaud (Ego Comme X, 2002; Expanded edition 2010), and 1h25 by Judith Forest (Cinquieme Couche, 2009). (I’ll note all are excellent works and well worth seeking out and reading.)

I’m going to take a single page (or portion of a page) from each book as a representative example. I’ve tried to select panels that include both figures and backgrounds. I should note that Goblet’s and Forest’s books both, to differing extents, use variable styles through their course, while Neaud is much more consistent. For this reason I’ll start with this panel from Neaud’s book.

Most of page 24 of Neaud's Journal (3).

The first thing we note about Neaud’s art is the realism. His figures have realistic proportions; his faces lack the exaggerated features or the extreme iconic abstraction of so much comic art. They look like actual people (and they are, the figure in the lighter coat is Neaud himself). Similarly, the buildings, cars, and other objects in the background are realistically sized and share the figures appearance of being representationally close to an existing reality.

The amount of detail in the characters and backgrounds is variable from one object to the next. The foreground face in panel one shows more detail than the background face in the same panel, but both share what we might call a contour line representation of the features. The objects in the background are primarily outline and texture or pattern, maintaining a simplicity that is appropriate to the importance and size of the objects.

Neaud’s lines are variable but consistent. That is, he uses lines of varying weight, but each line does not change weight (or only very little). He’s either using a number of very stiff pen nibs (so the line weight does not vary) or possibly (though it seems less likely) some kind of technical pens. A variety of line weights are found throughout the image, from the thick lines at the back of Neaud’s coat in the first panel or on canopy of the foremost car in the third panel, to the very thin hatching lines on the face of the foremost figure in panel one or the clouds in panel three.

The lines are precise without being stiff or ruled. Even in the textures, patterns, and tonal hatching Neaud’s rarely becomes overly stiff or creates too flat a surface. The tonal hatching on the face in panel one, the jacket in panel two, or the figures’ shadows on the ground in panel two shifts angles in a way that models the shapes (face, jacket) or adds texture to the tone (ground). The flat patterning found in panel three (the background building, the area in the foreground behind the car) serves primarily as a compositional element, filling in spaces that don’t require detail and creating an illusion of depth of space. The less flat patterning/texture of the stones on the buildings show a looser use of line work.

Dense blacks are spread across the panels, with larger areas serving as compositional foci (the black jacket) or visual direction (note the movement of blacks in panel three from the largest area at the upper left (where we read the first caption) through the smaller but denser areas around it to the car (the second largest black area) which leads into the second caption. The panel ends with the horizontal black area under the foliage which leads off the page.

In general, Neaud uses tone inconsistently. He is not modeling every figure with hatching, nor is he adding texture or pattern to all the spaces. These elements are all applied as necessary to add a sense of realism (this is autobiography after all, and one that is very much about “telling all” in some sense) without overpowering the images.

Compositionally, the panels are filled without being overly crowded. The third panel has a lot of content in it, but it does not read as too busy or crowded. Throughout the book, more often than not, Neaud fills his panels, including background elements behind his characters to keep the scene set, so to speak.

In the end, Neaud’s realistic but simplified rendering of his images, using variable amounts of tonal, modelling, and texture inconsistently, allows for panels that hover between a photorealistic level of detail and a more iconic simplicity. This keeps the sense of reality and the feeling that the images are drawn from life but without bogging down the images in an excessive amounts of line, tone, or detail.

Forest's 1h25, page 173.

Judith Forest’s images are also clearly drawn from life, but have a very different style than Neaud’s. Like Neaud’s images, Forest’s use realistic proportions for the figures and background and she also eschews exaggeration of features. Unlike, Neaud, Forest’s images are less concrete and precise, attributable to a few stylistic factors.

This page (and many in her book) are drawn in pencil, which gives a line of fairly consistent weight but of less consistent density (or tone). The lines are looser, less precise than Neaud, Forest’s images look like sketches more than a “finished” drawing. Lines overlap and overshoot the limits of the object they represent.

Forest uses varying levels of detail in her images. Often, the faces are blank or reduced to just a few features, such as the figure in the first image. The backgrounds have details on the level of shape and outline, but mostly eschew tone, texture, or any kind of modeling. The level of detail despite its sparseness in these areas still retains the sense of being drawn from life, the small details that are often overlooked in fictional recreations. This sense gives the book an immediacy, an intimacy, and a grounding in reality appropriate to a book that is so diaristic.

These two panels feature fuller backgrounds, but many images in the book are less full, showing just a figure (part of a figure) or just a figure and part of the background (a figure at a table, a figure on a bed). In this respect the panels are more or less full, a shifting between the two.

The green tone (a little too bright in these scans, and, for what it’s worth, put in by Cecilia Dos Santos not Forest) simultaneously works to add light, focus, and to help differentiate objects/backgrounds/characters. Here we see the light aspect on the figure in the first image, while the use of a large swath of the green in the same image also emphasizes the light in the window. In the second image, the color adds some visual variety and compositional movement.

Not as obvious in these scans is the texture of both both the pencil and the green (made to look rough and pencil-like around the edges), which gives a softness to the images, most obvious in the cases where Forest switches to a thin black ink line. Dense blacks are almost never used, the closet to such being cases where the pencil line is used to scribble a denser, darker area.

As a whole, Forest’s sketchy pencilled realism grounds her work in reality and emphasizes not only her gaze on events but also her participatory observation through drawing (her obsessive drawing comes up a number times in her narration). The style of the images makes 1h25 feel less constructed than Journals (3) but also less intense, less full.

Goblet's Faire Semblant C'est Mentir, unpaginated.

Goblet’s style in Faire Semblant… is much more varied than either Neuad or Forest. One could say part of the style of Goblet’s book is her shifting styles from an abstracted, iconic style, that is more conventionally comic-like, through a sketchy realist style, to a painterly non-figurative abstraction that ends the book. She also shifts media throughout the book, pencil, ink, paint, collage, some kind of oil crayon (possibly?). The image above is chosen as an example of the most used style.

In general, Goblet’s figures are more simplified and exaggerated than either Forest’s or Neaud’s. They are proportionally off, having larger than real heads and limbs or torsos that are either shortened or elongated (most obvious in the eighth panel where Goblet’s arms are short and her torso is long). They are rendered primarily in outline with the occasional tonal shading. Faces are simplified and exaggerated (Goblet’s large eyes). Yet, even in the distortion, the figures maintain a level of realness to their poses, the way Goblet leans over, hands on her knees in the first panel, the way the man leans towards her in comfort in the second panel.

The backgrounds are consistent with the style of the figures, primarily outlines, though perhaps less exaggerated in size and proportion. As a whole the images have less of a documentary reality to them than Forest or Neaud, they read as made-up or at least not drawn from observation or photo reference (which isn’t to say they couldn’t have been drawn that way).

Goblet’s line is less precise than Neaud’s, tighter than Forest’s. Her lines are simultaneously soft and hard, curved and straight, as if in the drawing process she stopped and started as the pencil moved. Note the line of the older man’s arm in panel two. It is a curve made up of shorter not quite straight lines. The line of Goblet’s back in panel eight is sharper, more angular, while the line of her shoulders and neck in panel five is all curves.

Similar to Forest’s line, Goblet’s pencilled line varies more in tone than width, though Goblet gets a greater tonal variation from her pencil. This is perhaps most obvious in panel seven where there is great difference between the outline of the book, the “dring” lettering, and the fabric pattern. She also makes much use of the pencil for tone, to help create depth and composition, through both tonal shadows and flat tone as color. Note the variation between the coat in panel three, the shadows in panel eight, and the dark window(?) in the last panel. Patterning is also made use of quite frequently, in this page we can see it in the sky in panel three and the bedspread in panels four through seven.

The panels throughout Faire Semblant… are very full. She makes heavy use of tone (this page is actually, rather lighter than most), patterns, line, and text to fill her panels. Backgrounds are present or the panel is filled in with a tone appopriate to the scene (a number of dark/night scenes). The panels are crowded and dense, and rarely feel open and airy (until the very end, a thematic choice that would be worth examining in a more detailed examination of the book as a whole).

It is a disservice to Goblet’s work to just discuss this one page, as the stylistic and media shifts the book goes through are stunning, but this page felt most relevant in comparison with the previous two examples, as an example of a less realistic but still naturalistic style.

In discussing these works at this level, I can’t help noticing all the other elements of style I could discuss. Just in the context of these examples there is lettering, use of text, placement of text, panel borders, use of sound effects, use of emanata (or, in these examples, absence of same). On a more global level of these three works, I could example page layouts, decoupage, stylistic shifts, the use of non-reality based imagery (visuals used for expressive or thematic effect rather than a literal representation of reality (for instance, there’s a wonderful scene in Faire Semblant…, where the ghost of Goblet’s boyfriend’s ex-lover follows them around a grocery story)), and more depending on the work. (Suggestions? Ideas?)

In the end, this discussion of style does little to aid in a generalized description. I’d consider all three works “realist” to some degree and more or less naturalist. Goblet’s is clearly the least naturalist of the three, more what Santoro would call mannerist. But Neaud and Forest’s realism, their naturalism even, is not so very similar that using any one (or two) words feels right as a way to discuss both. There is so much more going on, and the more you look the more you see of their difference, and, moreso–something I was unable to avoid even in this attempt to just be descriptive of style–the more you can see thematic connections between the stylistic choices and the narrative.

I hope to write more on this subject in the future, or at least to pay better attention to these issues as a write about specific works. The works I chose here were rather limited in scope, so they don’t cover all the possibilities for what one could discuss even at this level of specificity (for instance, color gets a pretty short shrift).

The “inconsistent” drawing style of Cave-in [Rakuban, 1959] makes this short story unique. The five memory scenes (free motifs) are depicted in five distinctive styles, ranging from simple, comical line drawings reminiscent of prewar children’s comics to more detailed, “gekiga-like” figures. The degrees of detail in the drawing style represent the reliability of Maehashi’s story. The first version of the story Maehashi gives at the beginning of the story, a simple “cartoonish” rendition, tells a more distorted version of the story than the later versions, told through more representational drawings that use extensive shading. In contrast, the scenes that show the “present,” including the ending, are consistently rendered through Tezuka’s usual drawing style.

Power, Onoda Natsu. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga. UP Mississippi, 2009. 98.

On the whole, I found Power’s book two introductory for my tastes. I wanted deeper analysis of Tezuka’s manga, but there just wasn’t much of that. I was also extremely disappointed in the lack of discussion of Phoenix (which I’ve written about extensively), despite the author noting what a major work it is. But that quote above (and the illustrations accompanying it) caught my eye. This type of stylistic change is something I’m always looking for in comics, as stylistic consistency is still one of those aspects of comics that gets taken for granted. I sure wish I could see this Tezuka story in full.

New York Review Books publishes quite a number of excellent novels, including one of my favorites Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau. This Italian comic from the 1969 is certainly a bit of an odd choice for them. Outside of the works themselves, I’ve come to expect two things from NYRB’s publications: nice consistent design and great introductions. Their books have a very effective and visually distinct design that stands out on a shelf. They also tend to have good introductory materials to put the work in some context (like the amazing introduction by William Gass to the I’ll-never-actually-read-the-whole-thing Anatomy of Melancholy). They dropped the ball on the latter for this book. Who was Buzzati? Where did Poem Strip come from? Was it written more like a poem in the original Italian? Did he do other work like this? Were there other books like this in Italian in the sixties?

I have no idea. The book offers a paragraph long author biography and nothing else. That context would have been interesting to have, so I did some searching in a few literature and art databases. Not a lot out there in English. I did find two 1970 reviews from major publications, which offer an interesting insight into how this comic was considered by critics that were surely used to dealing with text only books.

“This frightening, lyrical and provocative poem in color and black and white is typical of the growing interest of many well known European authors in visual mass media, and particularly in the “superior comic strips,” which are enjoying great success among sophisticated readers in France, Italy and Germany.” Slonim, Marc. New York Times (26 Apr 1970): 49.

“The story is presented in a strip-sequence, made up from stills in which the characters think and talk by means of captions or balloons coming from their mouths. Buzzati makes use of this technique in a most sophisticated way, by accompanying his elegant and slightly surrealistic text on the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice with bizarre and surprising coloured pictures, whose authorship is not revealed.” Anon. Times Literary Supplement (18 Sep 1970): 1029.

At least the New York Times reviewer deigns to use “comic strips” in his description. The TLS review seems familiar enough with comics to know terms like “balloons” but dares not write the word “comics.” I’m also amused that he or she seems to not consider the possibility that Buzzati both wrote and drew the book.

Neither of those offer much context to the book, and all else I found about Buzzati focused on his literary works. So we must read this shorn of explicit context, though its 60s origin is fairly obvious when you get a look at the protagonist.

On my first read through, it took me until page 48 to realize that the protagonist “Orfi” was code for “Orpheus” and that this story was a play on the Orpheus/Eurydice myth (Orfi’s love is called Eura). Buzzati starts with the set-up of a musician and his lover dying, continues with the hero’s trip into the underworld/afterlife, but the story spends much more time on the underworld itself and takes a different path at the end of the story.

Buzzati’s underworld is a land that looks similar to the world of the living, but it is differentiated by certain vital voids: time does not pass and, without the fear of death, many of life’s most powerful feelings are non-existent. I am tempted to say how Freudian it is that Buzzati gives the fear of death such a prominent and driving force in his view of human life and how much it is linked to love/sex. (Though my Freud is only half remembered at this point.)

Not too subtle. And this is one of the more covered-up women in the story.

The most evocative section of the book occurs when Orfi sings a song for the residents of the land of the dead. In it he lists moments of fear and uncanniness that are missing from the land of the dead, where death is no longer a threat and mystery seems absent. In a sequence of full page images, Buzzati’s images are both eerie and lovely, part Surreal, part De Chirico, part comic strip. Here are a few I particularly like.

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The “Autumn Sorcerer” is, for some reason, really disturbing to me. The “Boogie Man” on the other hand is almost comical in appearance, like some kind of cheery and benevolent creature in a Miyazaki movie.

Poem Strip is not at first glance the most traditional of comics. Most prominent are full-page images with textual captions, often long captions, looking more like an illustrated story than a comic. But also found in these pages are multi-panel pages, word balloons, and text that more directly interacts with the images. At times a long passage of text on one side of the spread is accompanied by a large image on the opposite end with a repeated passage from the text placed under/over the image. This strange little shift into a more conventional illustrated text is rather disconcerting. A comics reader used to a steady right-left-up-down reading path stops at a repeated passage of text that is clearly not repeated as a stylistic trait of the text itself.

Buzzati’s images are stylistically inconsistent, veering from figures that were clearly drawn from life or photographs to figures that look like they were drawn by someone who only had a vague idea what a person looks like. While I’m often in favor of stylistic variation that is integral to communication/meaning/theme, in this case I found it often distracting, amateurish, and unmotivated by the content. Thankfully these cases are not too prevalent. More prevalent are stylistic variations that fit the work’s use of embedded narratives to create a sense of different stories (or, often in this case, songs) and perspectives. Some of the images are wonderfully eerie and odd, while others just look silly (again, see those images above). Some are stiff and formal, while others are wild and expressive.

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The book also is the clear creation of a male artist. Rare is the woman in the book who wears clothes (even fewer those with more than some kind of negligee on). Too many of the woman look like they were drawn based on photographs from some kind of softcore girlie magazine. I’ve seen other reviewers reference this book as erotic, but I find it hard to see that in these images. It is also telling that Orfi’s male antagonist, the gatekeeper of the underworld, is a talking empty suit jacket. Yes, you read that right. A talking, rumpled suit jacket is the one who finally lets Orfi search out his love in the underworld. The suit jacket is surrounded and seems to command all the naked temptresses.

Suit jacket tries to tempt Orfi with a woman. Click for larger.

I have mixed feelings about this book, and give it a lot of allowance for its context. Buzzati offers some fantastic imagery mixed with some ugly and poorly drawn imagery. This is certainly unusual for the time period, another book to add to those graphic novels before the case listings.

[This is part 16 of a 30 part series where I am writing daily reviews for the month of December.]

This book has been hidden in one of the “to blog about” piles for almost two years. I read it once and then never got back to rereading and writing. My previous exposure to Kindt’s work was his awesome Super Spy: The Treasure, which was a small box of individual panels with a map to help lay them out (scroll down a bit) (Oh, and look you can read it online now!). This Super Spy is 336 page comic about spies during World War II.

Kindt is a formalist working in a traditional genre. These are spy stories with secret codes, double agents, assassinations, and even a few gadgets, but these stories are far from straightforward narratives. Nor does Kindt offer a James Bond-esque glamorization of espionage. Through a diverse series of 52 interlocking narratives, Kindt shows us the spy’s life and death. The portrayal is not completely bleak, but there are few happy endings. Violence is pervasive and swift. Kindt evokes empathy for many of the characters, those struggling to get along in war torn world, often forced to work for governments to keep their lives. Plus, it’s an entertaining read that requires enough thought and engagement to make it more than a simple genre entertainment.

A wonderful loosening of the drawing to accompany the dancing.

I say Kindt is a formalist for two reasons. For one, the narrative organization of Super Spy is complicated. A note on the indicia page, tells the reader that the chapters are purposefully ordered non-chronologically, but that it is possible to read them chronologically by using the “dossier” numbers attached to each chapter. The numbers are not simply 1,2,3′s, so the reader wishes to get the chronological experience would probably have to do some calculations. The non-chronological organization is highly effective and a propos for the content. In a story filled with spies and espionage, the organization keeps the reader in an expanded state of unknowing. The pieces come together at varying times and with varying amounts of clarity. You have to pay attention to the characters to get the full effect out of many of the chapters. I appreciate that Kindt expects the reader to work a bit in reading the book.

Note the shift to a colored image.

Visually, Kindt offers a surprising amount of variations in the artwork. While many comic artists are comfortable altering the art for some kind of “story within the story” moment, or drawing flashbacks in a different color, Kindt simultaneously manages to keep a consistent style while offering a plethora of visual variations. One chapter is drawn with black lines and a coffee colored wash, except for a single color panel. Another chapter is drawn with black and a solid blue-gray except for one final panel drawn with many colors. One chapter is drawn sort of like a newspaper comic. One chapter intersperses children’s book illustrations into the story. Most of the chapters use black and one color, though that color varies at times. Photographic images of notebooks or postcards make appearances. Some chapters have large blocks of texts, while others are mostly silent. At one point a blue color drawing of a photograph appears in an otherwise brown colored chapter, and the careful reader will note this photo appeared in an earlier blue colored chapter. These little variations add spice to the book and emphasize the different characters and perspectives that the narrative takes on.

One of the more text heavy chapters, here making use of a repeated image of an spy whose identity is unknown.

Kindt integrates all these little variations so skillfully with his narrative, that you don’t give them a lot of thought (except for one or two really blatant ones, like the pages done like old comic books pages (tattered paper edge and all) that forces you to turn the book sideways). This makes it easy to overlook how impressive the book is from a formal perspective. You can breeze through, enjoying the story and not really taking in the skill. At least, I did, my first time through. Second time, I started noticing a lot more.

Love the topographic map in this one.

My main quibble with the book is that a lot of the characters look too similar. I don’t think this is a purposeful attempt to further complicate the narrative (though I could see how that might be done), but rather a limitation of Kindt’s figure/character design. His style is often loose and sketchy, which works great for backgrounds and objects and action, but it misses the mark a bit when the story requires the reader’s ability to infer who is who at any one time.

I’ve thrown a few images into this post that I liked for various reasons as I flipped back through the book. No analysis for now, maybe another time. I need to look up some of Kindt’s recent work (he’s got a recent book from Dark Horse and a forthcoming book from Vertigo).

[This is part 14 of a 30 part series where I am writing daily reviews for the month of December.]

This is going on my best comics of 2009 list, no question. Jason Overby impresses me more and more with each new comic of his I see. (Beautiful piece in the Abstract Comics anthology, by the way.) I’ve been sitting on this one for quite awhile, as I wasn’t even sure where to start writing about this (long) minicomic. I always seem to have that problem with comics that really impress me.

Exploding He[a]d man (It’s “Hed” on the cover and “Head” on the title page) is a long 96 page black and white minicomic that plays off the superhero genre. I know I just wrote the other day about outlawing superhero parodies, so I feel obliged to note that while Overby here uses elements of the genre, his sole purpose is not parody. Plenty more is going on.

The titular character (who is never referred to as such in the comic) is a Sluggo looking guy who somehow (“exotic chemistry”) ends up with a wick sticking out of his head, making it look like a cartoon bomb (the kind black hatted anarchists would throw). He has that origin story, as well as an arch-nemesis, a guy who at the beginning of the story he beats up on the beach (perhaps referencing the old Charles Atlas ads). There’s even the classic Spiderman-esque sewing of the costume scene.

Once he’s got his wick/bomb head, he moves to a life of crime. This life of crime revolves around the idea of inaction. He robs a bank by threatening to light his wick and blow up. It is by not acting (lighting the wick) that he succeeds (“liberate myself from the tyranny of action”). Though, this inaction is in itself action (he’s acting by threatening, by putting himself in the bank), it’s over a quite different sort than most “action” stories. He is confronted by his arch-nemesis (who at one point rides around in a mechanical cowboy), and they have a showdown in a bar, which mostly involves talking. The basic plot fits cleanly into the genre mold, but this is stylistically and thematically about as far as you can get from something coming out of Marvel or DC.

Fight scene.

Unlike many comics, you’ve really got to work at reading Overby’s comics. There’s no easy way to breeze through these panels and pages, you have to decipher the images in light of what came before. Even the word balloons are often drawn as rebuses rather than text. Tiny sequences of images with the larger sequences of images. I’ll admit to being stumped by some of his rebuses (with each rereading I think I’m understanding more of them), just like I’m occasionally completely stumped by a panel, unable to figure out what it’s supposed to be communicating. In many comics, I’d be ready to blame the artist, but with Overby, I end up blaming myself: I’m not paying close enough attention, there’s some detail I missed earlier that would make this make sense, it’s an abstract image not meant to be deciphered. These hard to decipher images are a challenge, a call to reread and rereread, hoping (and, so far, succeeding) each time to get something new out of the panels.

Tired EMT is wishing he were still in bed.

Most comics art is founded on consistency. The character must always look the same (be on model) or else the image is wrong or bad or unskilled. Overby somehow manages to maintain consistency in inconsistency. His images stay within a certain confines of medium (black lines), but vary greatly in detail, weight, movement, flow. One panel may be an almost geometric rendering of a character, another is a chaotic mass of lines, another a hatched close-up of a face, or an almost bare panel marred only by a few wispy marks. Characters are identifiable primarily through context or very specific visual traits (the wick in the guy’s head, the bandages on his nemesis’ head).

Text is used in all sorts of ways, from thought balloons, speech balloons, and narrative captions to description, sound effects, and diegetic text. One panel has a dotted outline of a rounded rectangle within which are the words: “This is a cement mixing truck depositing its eponymic contents into a hole along a stretch of sidewalk.” We never “see” the truck at all, but who needs to, it’s background, it’s peripheral. An early scene has a couple EMT’s coming to rescue the man–after his exotic chemistry origin explosion–and Overby works the “Siren” sound effect into the panels in all sorts of variations, styles, twisting it around, small, large, even at one point having the “N” in a blocky version of the sound, hit the character in the head to wake him up from unconsciousness.

Sluggo-looking protagonist, here rendered sparingly, is woken up by the siren.

A few times during the comic, Overby steps in as the author-narrator to offer a meta-commentary on the pages. One page, he tells us, shows the same events as the previous page: he drew it twice and liked both so left them in. In another sequence, he tells us that the next two pages are just a slow motion reply of the single preceding panel (it’s an important scene at the climax of the plot). These intrusions do, to a certain extent, break the narrative [suspension of disbelief], but I don’t see that as a detriment. The comic is such that it is not leaning towards traditional realism anyway, you can’t not think of it as a comic, as a work of art.

Out of context these panels are almost incomprehensible. Click to see the full page/context.

Comics is, almost inherently, an art of leaving out, of reduction, and Overby pushes at the limits. At what point is an image incomprehensible? Out of the context of a page or a series of pages, some of the panels in this comic are abstractions, shorn of any conveyable information or representation (though not aesthetics), yet, when placed as part of a sequence of panels, the image takes on meaning and significance. A wonderful example of iconic solidarity. Overby also will frequently just draw less. A panel will show only part of a character–glasses floating in the air–or a scene–a few lines to show the edge of a bar–leaving the reader to fill in the rest. This reduction of stuff gives many of his pages a lighter, open composition, that belies the density of the interpretation that goes on in the reading.

Oh, and I shouldn’t neglect to mention there are some really funny parts to this comic, often in conjunction with the rebus speech balloons. As you decipher the images, the humor breaks through.

I encourage you to order a copy from Overby at his website. While you’re there you can download some of previous minicomics I’ve reviewed such as Solipsist’s Doodles and Jessica.

[This is part 10 of a 30 part series where I am writing daily reviews for the month of December.]

This massive autobiographical manga has been appearing on a lot of the early best of 2009 lists, and while I can, to a point see, why, I’m not in agreement. A Drifting Life is, basically, the story of Tatsumi’s early entry into the world of manga and the history of the gekiga movement. Part autobiography, part history, it straddles both without really succeeding as either.

For the autobiographical aspect, Tatsumi keeps a distance from himself. He even changes his own name in the book. I never got the feeling I was learning much about the character at all beyond his passion for manga. It felt both too personal and too distant, as if Tatsumi were so close to the story, he neglected to fill in information the reader would want/need, but at the same time, like he doesn’t want to expose too much of himself, so he sticks exclusively to the subject of manga. He jumps from event to event, anecdote to anecdote, without really drawing out any of them, as if he had too much to say for the space/time allowed. What is this had been a long running serial, with time allowed to let the reader understand what went on, how Tatsumi felt, how the the other characters felt (who the others characters were, as most of them are interchangeable)?

Tatsumi’s distance from the characters is echoed by the visual distance he takes from them in composing his panels. In comparison to much other manga, Tatsumi avoids close-ups. He consistently shows the characters at an almost identical size on the page. I found all of Tatsumi’s manga rather than unattractive and lackluster. It doesn’t draw me in; it doesn’t make me take notice.

As a history of gekiga, a genre of manga created by Tatsumi and others, I felt like I was missing too much context to really get it. Without a knowledge of the manga at the time of Tatsumi’s youth and a clear idea of what his (and his compatriots’) manga was like, their so engulfing struggle to make manga that was different feels lost to me. Tatsumi inserts small panels or cropped pages from various works, but they are never enough to really establish an understanding. The endnotes in the translation don’t help either, as they are almost exclusively there to translate Japanese text in the panels. Historical notes are absent, but would be much appreciated. I’ve had this issue with previous D&Q manga releases (like Red Colored Elegy), where more notes and introductory materials would help fit the work into some context. I would have loved to see Tatsumi insert more full page reproductions of some of the work into the story, so as to better give the reader the feeling of reading the manga that is so vital to his narrative. He does this at one point with a panels from the story “Black Blizzard” (a book from the 50s that D&Q will be publishing in the Spring), and in an early scene he inserts half a page of one of his other stories. These particular scenes are some of the most effective in the book for understanding the manga and the character’s discussions of it. While, at other times, their discussions seem so abstracted.

One aspect I really liked, was the way Tatsumi drew more general Japanese/world history into the comic. Many of the chapters include a few panels of photo-referenced images about historical events of the time. At first these historical panels seem divorced from the rest of the narrative, as if Tatsumi just added them in to mark time, yet as one reaches the end of the book, this sense of disconnection becomes itself part of the narrative. The Tatsumi character finds himself in the middle of a demonstration against the recently signed security treaty between the US and Japan (from mid-1960), and he realizes that while he drifted in his tiny world of manga, Japan as a whole was drifting through a turbulent time. He was disconnected from those historical events, a feeling which Tatsumi’s use of the photo-referenced panels aptly conveyed both through their different style and their almost discordant insertion into the narrative.

Something that jumped out at me, is this brief sequence about some of Tatsumi’s experimentations:

I’d love to see that story.

I have to wonder if part of the draw here for critics is that it’s a comic about comics. There is something special about this type of self-historical work in the medium it references. Similarly to Hicksville, A Drifting Life portrays a kind of heroic devotion to comics, that must be more satisfying to someone engrossed in the world of comics than to an outsider.

[This is part 7 of a 30 part series where I am writing daily reviews for the month of December.]

I knew I’d love this manga as soon as I heard about it, a long running series about food, not where food is just part of the setting but rather an integral part of each story. Oishinbo has been running in Japan since 1983 and totals over 100 volumes. Viz is here translating the “A La Carte” series, a repackaging of stories from across the title’s run into thematic volumes. That immediately tells you one thing: you don’t read this for the larger narrative arc or the character development.

Nor do you read this for the stories themselves. These stories, at least as far as the two volumes I’ve read, fit into three main templates: some kind of food related competition (either formal or informal), convincing someone 1) of the superiority of some Japanese food or 2) just getting them to like the food, and using food to overcome some problem. Sometimes, like in the multi-chapter story that forms the main part of the “Sake” volume, we get a combination of these templates. There’s little suspense: the latter plots always seem to end well, and only occasionally does the protagonist lose his competitions.

You don’t really read this for the art either, though, there are some stylistic elements to it which are worth paying attention to. I’ll get to that in a bit.

You read this for the theme: the food. This is an unusually entertaining educational comic. Kariya and Hanasaki pack a lot of information about food and culture into these stories, and Viz helps out with copious notes (14 pages for a 250 page book). You can learn about cooking technique, historical and cultural backgrounds to various foods, etiquette, and more.

A co-worker is taught to like champagne.

Obviously this is not going to appeal to everyone, or most people, I guess. You have to add an interest in food (Japanese food, primarily) to a tolerance for over-emoting manga characters (they tend to shout a lot about their food). It’s all rather strange at that. Props to Viz for translating such an out of the ordinary series for manga in English. They’ve got six volumes on the slate so far through the end of the year (“Joy of Rice”, “Vegetables”, “Ramen and Gyoza”, “Fish, Sushi, and Sashimi”). According to this post at MangaCast, the “A La Carte” series runs 43 volumes in Japanese with Viz planning to publish seven (“Izakaya” being the one not listed at Viz’s site). I hope they do more, as I’d love to read the one on tofu (I bet they could get some good vegetarian/vegan cross-over appeal there).

As for the narrative set-up of Oishinbo. The stars are Yamaoka and Kurita, who work for a newspaper and have been assigned to work on “The Ultimate Menu” project, which as far these stories show, seems to mean they just go around, eat a lot, and talk to people about food. The character notes at the front let us know that the two eventually are married, and throughout these volumes, they are sometimes married, sometimes not. I can’t get any sense of continuity or chronology (the volumes give no indication of original publication date). Maybe that’s a major subplot in the normal volumes, but here any continuous subplot has been completely excised (though the endnotes fill in a few details). The only continuing plot point that matters is that Yamaoka’s father Kaibara, a notorious gourmet, is hired by a rival paper to work on the “Supereme Menu.” Actually… that plot point almost never comes up either. The real key is that Yamaoka and his father seem to really hate each other. Every time they meet — and meet they do, in most of the stories — they must glare at each other and look angry. There’s a lot of glaring to go around for these two, followed by attempts at one-upmanship.

There are supporting characters and settings aplenty, as well as numerous characters that seem to stop in once or twice. Lurking behind these thematically arranged volumes is the idea that characters recur and change, but we only get hints here. In a sense, it’s like watching a collection of 5 episodes from a 100 episode television series. Perhaps in the original manga there are whole chapters focused on the characters… perhaps not.

Realistic food.

What matters is the food and the education, and Oishinbo shines in that respect, helped a lot by the art. Hanasaki mixes a number of shifts in representation into his work. The primary characters all have a classic manga look to them: caricatural and round with big eyes. The backgrounds have a more structured and geometric realism to them, again, a rather classic manga style. But the food, it is drawn in an almost photorealistic style, forcing the reader’s attention onto the real focus of the manga. Even wine and sake bottles are drawn with extremely detailed labels. Hanasaki also uses a photographic style for certain panels that show backgrounds or scenes important to the education aspect. When talking about sake production, panels show nearly photographic images of sake brewers at work. In a liquor store, discussing how sake and wine are stored, panels show the shelves of bottles in near photographic style.

Note the detailed sake tasters on the left in comparison with Yamoka and Kurita (top right panel).

The shelves at a liquor store.

These shifts in representational style divide the story elements, the fiction, from the reality. While the food exists inside the story (the characters are eating it, discussing it) the food also exists for the reader as reality (you could go eat this food too). Unfortunately, the more realistic images often suffer from poor reproductions, getting a bit muddy. Sometimes I think these is a matter of original color pages (that often start chapters in manga) being printed in grayscale, other times… I don’t know, perhaps the reproductions Viz had to use were poor. Or maybe they just didn’t put the effort in. It’s a small distraction though.

Overall, this is a fun and odd manga series. I’ll be reading more of it.

Paul Hornshemeier’s The Three Paradoxes speaks its theme loudly. To wit, these panels:

A gap between two spaces, a hesitation to movement, stuck in a loop, a mental block. This semi-autobiographical book (or fictionalized autobiography, depending on how you read “Paul Hornschemeier” the character in relation to Paul Hornschemeier the artist) not only reiterates these themes through the multiple narrative plots, but it embodies these issues in form.

“Paul” is home visiting his parents. He seems to be having writer’s block with his current comic story. He’s in expectation of a long distance female friend visiting him in a few days. He dwells upon the past when, as a boy, he was beat up by a bully. He is stuck between past and future, feeling like he is treading water in the present.

The panels above showcase the differing visual styles Hornschemeier brings to the main narrative and the 4 sub-narratives of the story. Each is done with a style that sets it apart. The present of Paul visiting his parents is done with what I consider the normal Hornshemeier style, that which I’ve seen in Mother Come Home and his Mome serial: somewhere between realism and cartoony, flat compositions and flat mostly dulled colors. The comic in progress is all blue pencil lines (which, from seeing pages at Rocketship in Brooklyn earlier this year, is the way he does his layouts). The story of “Paul’s” childhood is cartoony and abstract with off-register four color process colors (a kind of less mature version of his normal style). An intervening narrative about a boy hit by a car and getting his voice damaged is drawn with a style very similar to the present storyline but with a yellowed margins/gutters and even duller, faded colors that give the patina of age. Finally, a story about Zeno the philosopher and his paradoxes is drawn with a big-headed cartoon style and made to look like the pages of an old Dell comic from the 50s or 60s, complete with ragged yellowed “page” margins within the margins of the actual page. This stylistic shifting and virtuosity is the visual highlight of the book and it’s most immediate strength.

All these narratives relate in some way to the main theme of the gap between two spaces. In the present story, “Paul” is back at home with that quintessential sense of being out of time and place. He feels on the verge of something new, particularly with the women that is coming to visit him, yet he is also stuck dwelling on his past.

The past story starts with “Paul” reluctant to climb through a long drain pipe under the street (see panel above), but ends up showing him punished (beat up) for taking a step forward (calling out the bigger, bully kid (who is very reminiscent of Nelson from the Simpsons with his torn sleeve vest)). A second or third time through and I’m tempted to read that as a psychological starting point for the present tense “Paul’s” trouble with stasis. He took that step forward at an early age and suffered greatly for it.

The comic story in process that “Paul” is drawing shows the theme in a few variations, a kind of micro explication of the theme of the larger work, where the character is seen running around in a loop from a monster and then the monster being replaced by gap between two cliffs (this brings to mind Trondheim’s Mister O, which in light of this book, takes on a certain sense of existential punishment for attempts at progress).

The Zeno comic within the comic takes the philosophical approach to the question, showing Zeno lecturing about his paradoxes to a group of Greek philosophers (including a snotty Socrates). These paradoxes are ridiculous, but to “Paul” they trap him in a loop of questioning and mental blockage (as his Dad notes in the panel above).

The levels of narrative and commentary on each other is vertiginous the more I think about it, and, interestingly enough, I can even find a criticism for the book as a whole built into one of the sub-narratives. In the Zeno comic, his partner, Parmenides convinces Zeno to only discuss three of his paradoxes, leaving out a weaker fourth one. In the same sense, I think someone should have told Hornschemeier to stick to three sub-narratives, as the fourth is the weakest, longest, and least relevant (in my reading) of them. This sub-narrative involves a boy who is hit by a car and ends up with speech difficulty. There is the element of his hesitation (be it physical or mental) at speaking, but the story itself takes up a long 14 pages in the center of the volumes for a pay-off that is negligible.

In the end, the book as a whole embodies the theme too well: it exists between two gaps, neither her nor there. With all these building up of levels of narratives to showcase the theme of non-movement, the book itself doesn’t go anywhere. It’s fallen into a gap between form and content. The stylistic and thematic build-up is a grand display of virtuosity that feels empty once one delves beneath the surface. The Three Paradoxes is an experiment that, like many experiments fails, but it fails in an interesting way that will hopefully take Hornschemeier’s work to success in future endeavors. I’ll keep reading Hornschmeier’s work, as even in a failed experiment there is much to appreciate.

As an addendum, this two panel sequence is another example of the experimental mind at work, a simple of shifting style and color for an effect: