Comics & Graphic Novels

Recorded Conversations: Comic Books in Class

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Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. After the annual pop culture festival that is San Diego Comic Con, and shortly before fall semester starts at universities, J. Michael Bestul has posed this quandary:

Question: You’re teaching a class in popular culture, literature, or the like. As part of your curriculum, you need to incorporate one graphic novel or comic book series, and only one. Which one do you use, and why?

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Answering this question was rather easy. There are four graphic novels which have surpassed the level of merely “inspirational” for me, and then it became a process-of-elimination game.

Jeff Smith’s Bone, which I have written about before, is at 1,332 pages—and every one of them densely packed—too long for this purpose. As much as I love Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s work increasingly tips the balance in favor of words over pictures when they should be ideally equal. And Craig Thompson’s Blankets, even though it is the only comic which has ever made me weep, got crossed off for an odd reason. Even though Thompson’s illustrations are of the highest aesthetic caliber, I realized that except in a few places (the breathtaking, I’m trembling just thinking about it image of Craig and Raina’s bodies fused together, for example), the pictures and design augment the impact the reader feels as opposed to being in a symbiotic relationship with the story to create that impact.

(The same goes for Ray Fawkes’s breathtaking One Soul, which I recently finished and highly recommend.)

In comparison to these books, Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli revels in displaying all that the graphic novel is capable of, when not going farther and actually pushing the boundaries.

Every few pages, and sometimes in the same panel, Mazzucchelli will alter the paneling method, the color scheme, even the types of lines he is using to draw, creating a work which is as much a master class on how much variety lies in comics aesthetic and practice as Scott McCloud’s non-fiction titles. (Even Thompson sticks to the traditional one-panel-after-another form.) More importantly, Mazzucchelli is not showing off with this array of choices: every time his drawing and layout undergo a stylistic shift, it accompanies a change of scene and tone in the story; to take only one example, when Asterios and Hana have an argument, curvy florid red lines fill half a very detailed panel and blur into sharp geometric blue lines, reflecting the emotional distance between them. His words and pictures complement each other in a way very few texts in the medium have ever achieved.

But Asterios Polyp is more than a technical marvel. Mazzucchelli also tells a profound and gripping story laden with philosophical and romantic themes, and tells it with all the skill of a great novelist. He ties together multiple plotlines and uses recurring details in ways which make one want to immediately start the book over once finished. Best of all, the storytelling feels impossible without the illustrations. I cannot spoil anything, and do not even wish to talk about the plot to any extent. I will say that on the very first pages, a scene occurs which grows more and more laden with meaning as the reader discovers the many facets of Asterios. The scene’s significance could have been described with words alone, but I doubt this possibility…and even if it could have, it would have been far more difficult and hard to convey without Mazzucchelli’s well-chosen, ultimately heartbreaking imagery.

Asterios Polyp combines superb storytelling and pictorial artistry of the most innovative sort, and does so in a way which displays how words and pictures can work together in the best ways and not merely sit side by side. If I had to teach one graphic novel, pick only one which could encapsulate all that is wonderful and possible with the medium, it would be Asterios Polyp.

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Read the responses from the other editors, J., Bean, and Travis, as they are published throughout today

Recorded Conversations: Comic Books in Class

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Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. After the annual pop culture festival that is San Diego Comic Con, and shortly before fall semester starts at universities, J. Michael Bestul has posed this quandary:

Question: You’re teaching a class in popular culture, literature, or the like. As part of your curriculum, you need to incorporate one graphic novel or comic book series, and only one. Which one do you use, and why?

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I came up with the “one and only one” limit to make this challenging for myself, and to the other sequential art geeks that may inhabit the Recorder’s editorial board. As someone who’s taken a university course that focused on nothing but comic books in culture, and presented a conference paper on them – and whose wife works at a comic book shop – the challenge is in the limitation.

So let’s start with what kind of hypothetical class I’d be teaching. Since I get the unrealistic ability to choose my class in this scenario, it would likely involve American fiction, speculative or supernatural fiction, or mythology in modern — and Modern (and Postmodern) — storytelling. The comic book in question would need to:

  1. tie back to other class readings, and
  2. illuminate other facets of popular culture in its own unique manner.

With that in mind, my series of choice would be Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. I’d prefer to utilize the entire Mignola-verse (Hellboy, BPRD, etc.), but if I could only use one book, it would likely be Hellboy: the Conqueror Worm.

Since there would be a heavy focus (in this hypothetical class I’m teaching) on genre fiction (Bierce, Lovecraft, Howard, Borges, García Márquez, Asimov, Pratchett, Gaiman, Hill), and the theoretical underpinnings of mythmaking & intertextuality (Campbell, Jung, Eco), I would want a superhero comic book that could easily connect with these foci.

Tying the Mignola-verse together with these other readings is the easy part. Hellboy is a variation on our old friend, the heroic monomyth, but it also is a study in intertextuality. Mignola is very open about where he derives his stories from – whether he is retelling a piece of Asian or Celtic folklore, or utilizing the cosmic monsters (and their amphibian/human hybrid minions) that are a direct reference to Lovecraft’s Mythos.

But more than intertextuality, there are other pop culture connections that can be taught via Hellboy. One is the difference in storytelling between media (say, the Hellboy / BPRD books, graphic novels, and films – as well as Geek & Sundry’s “Motion Comics”), and another is the conventions of the comic book medium itself. As fellow Addisonian Alex pointed out in our last Conversation, sitcoms always tend to wrap up by the end of the episode. That is, they are episodic – after the conflict is resolved (or pushed back), the fictional world returns to its neutral state in time for the next episode.

Superhero comics are very, very similar. Even if a series-changing event occurs (e.g., death of a main character), at some point the series will only bend so far before that event must be undone or unwound (e.g., character comes back to life, or was not dead) — thus snapping the series back to its neutral state.

The Mignola-verse series defy that convention. The author has acknowledged this defiance in a recent story arc, indicating that in these series, when something is broken, it stays broken. The first dramatic example of this was with Hellboy: the Conqueror Worm, wherein Hellboy is pushed into a situation that goes against his character. When the tale ends, this causes him to reject the neutral state, thereby moving the narrative beyond episodic conventions.

And in the years since, Hellboy has only further broken from the episodic “return to neutral.” In the latest tales, for example, Ragnarok actually happens. Populations are wiped out. The world doesn’t go back to the old normal:

That’s what Professor Bestul is offering up this semester. How about the rest of you gents?

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Read the responses from the other editors, Andrew, Bean, and Travis, as they are published throughout today.

A Dark Night’s Sorrow: An Addison Recorder Editorial

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To begin, let me just say that, on behalf of all of us at the Addison Recorder, I would like to offer our condolences to all of the victims of the shooting that happened early this morning at the movie theatre in Aurora, CO. These murders are horrifying, a senseless act of violence that might seem like a vast impossibility, and because of the nature of this particular act, many of us around the nation, and the world, are in a deep state of mourning today.

There are many things to be said about this attack. I want to try and keep from politicizing the nature of the event, casting blame about, and making this into something more than it is. Lord knows that I want to rant about several things, and I’ve struggled with this in my mind as I sit down to write out my thoughts and feelings. Therefore, I apologize if this gets wordy, windy, or overly dramatic. If you wish to avoid such thoughts (though I’m trying to avoid getting preachy), close out now and you won’t have to suffer through my thoughts.

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Observing the Observers Verbal Portraits from the Comics: Philosophy & Practice Conference, University of Chicago, May 2012

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The writer needs to think as visually as the artist.

This is especially true in my chosen medium, but even without the presence of graphic narrative’s pictures, any serious writer needs to have characters visible in the mind’s eye. The close watching of human behaviors, physical qualities, and similar traits is a source of detail to borrow and inspiration to run with; the mere imagining of a single physical attribute may lead to a character’s entire backstory being formed.

It took me many years to learn how to pay attention to people, and it is a skill I am still honing, but I will always remember the moment when it became apparent to me how clearly the lesson had been learned. I was interviewing a friend of mine about her life to get some psychological insight for a project I had conceived… which is now, in part thanks to her, taking on new proportions. While taking notes, various aspects of her presence became more and more apparent with time: when her eyes would shift at some memories and glow at others. When she would pick at a small scab on her pristine white skin. And when how, deep in thought, she would finger her necklace. Suddenly, much richer and more textured creations came into my mind than had been imagined before.

The writer needs to be as visual as the artist.

Although for artists the significance level ratchets up. Observation of life and people is the foundation of their entire existence. In particular, the artists whose work has so greatly influenced me, my colleagues in the world of graphic narrative, whose portraiture skills, ranging from the ultra-realistic to the fancifully grotesque, have reinvented the comics world from the DC and Marvel tradition of heroes and action to gripping, emotional stories which break the rules of genre.

There is a lot to be written about the Comics: Philosophy & Practice conference held at the Logan Arts Center of the University of Chicago last month. The archives will preserve all what was said, but when I decided this was something I had to document from my point of view, the idea of truly looking at these luminaries, scrutinizing them a little as they scrutinize others, latched on to me hard.

What follows are my notes from the field.

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David Boring and The Avengers

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My quest to absorb every cultural artifact which piques my interest will occasionally lead to strange convergences. Like the first incredibly depressing night I ever had in Los Angeles, when reading the final chapters of Watchmen coincided with Netflix sending me Requiem for a Dream.

I never want to even REMEMBER that night again.

Most recently, on an enlightening and far more positive note, I watched Joss Whedon’s The Avengers.

(This is not going to be a review of The Avengers. There is not much to say regarding the picture except that any group or individual expectations for the film were met or surpassed. One could not have asked for a more perfect extravaganza, 21st-century style.)

The night before going to the cinema, I finished Daniel Clowes’s 2000 graphic novel David Boring. Written and drawn immediately after his much-revered Ghost World, David Boring is a shorter but denser, more ambitious story, taking on Ghost World’s themes of alienation, aimlessness, and the human desire for emotional commitment from a very different angle. In its medium, it is as much an aesthetic success as The Avengers.

Despite the vast dissimilarity of their works, Clowes and Whedon surprisingly use very similar plot elements, and when considering the novel and film in tandem, a single conclusion is reached.

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A Meditation on Jeff Smith’s “Bone” and the Art of Adaptation

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This article does NOT contain Spoilers.

When I was a teenager and falling in love with movies which went beyond Disney fare and special-effect-laden extravaganzas, one of my touchstones was a frayed hardcover from 1966 in my high school library. Stanley Kauffmann’s A World on Film opened my eyes, through its plethora of reviews of films I’d never even heard of, to how much potential those who work in the medium can achieve. There are still passages committed to my memory, among them his August 29, 1960 piece on Jack Cardiff’s film of Sons and Lovers which created a further obsession of mine: the question of adaptation.

More questions raised than the simple "Where did THIS come from?"

Kauffmann spends the first half of the review pondering why adaptations in general almost always fall short of their source material. His conclusion is that people who have read the book will feel what is lacking, and people who haven’t find adaptations, in his words, “frequently unsatisfactory…for the screenwriters are to some degree hobbled by the book and cannot follow their best cinematic instincts.” What Kauffmann meant by this is that film and literature work in two different ways. Literature, fiction or non-fiction, is an interior art, able to plumb emotional and psychological depths and leaving the look of setting, character, and action to the reader’s imagination. Film is an exterior art of explicit visuals which has developed its own storytelling conventions and means of pacing. Often, the core elements of a great novel—characters, themes, basic plot—would make a great movie if they were used as the basis for a new telling of the story, but adapters so often get hung up on an overly respectful conception of fidelity to the source that instead they produce what Kauffmann describes as “illustrated scenes from a novel.” This is a path which produces no guarantee of success at best and failure at worst.

For example, Sons and Lovers, which ended up a reasonable hit and garnered multiple Oscar nominations, was produced by Jerry Wald, who in the late fifties masterminded a string of films which raked in profits and considerable reviews and awards attention. Wald’s tactic was to create adaptations of well-known novels with reputations for being “adult” and put them on the big screen with enough suggestions of sex and other unmentionables to stay within the bounds of the Hays Code. Besides Sons and Lovers, Wald had smashes with Peyton Place and the William Faulkner-based The Long, Hot Summer, although The Sound and the Fury was not quite as popular.

Did Faulkner know he was breaking the unwritten commandment? And that Yul Brynner with a hairpiece would play Jason?

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