Books

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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A Short Ride on the Wheel of Time

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WoT01_TheEyeOfTheWorld

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.” – The Eye of the World

Modern fantasy[1] is attributed almost exclusively to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and rightly so. The three books laid the groundwork for the mythic traditions that would become high fantasy, as well as bringing the traditional quest narrative into an accessible light inspired by the epic poetry of Homer[2]. Given weight by the heroic structures of Joseph Campbell, the books were Tolkien’s attempt at crafting Germanic myth for the British isles beyond the King Arthur legends, diluted and adapted through many different versions, ranging from Thomas Malory to T. H. White, and later on from Mary Stewart to Marion Zimmer Bradley to Clive Owen. In the process, Tolkien also brought about the creation of dozens of other epic fantasy series of varying quality and number.[3]

Epic fantasy truly came of age with the 1977 publication of Terry Brook’s The Sword of Shannara. A fantastically accessible read, the book spawned the massive Shannara series, eventually turning from a traditionally fantastical world into a rumination on mutation and magic in post-apocalyptic America. However, anyone reading The Sword of Shannara cannot help but notice the more-than-passing resemblance to the plot structure of Lord of the Rings. To sum up, a small child/hobbit/underdog discovers they alone have the means to save the world from an evil dark lord (singular). With the help of a rag-tag band of misfits/warriors/dwarves/strippers (if you’ve been to the burlesque lately), they travel deep into a dangerous world, narrowly thwarting the complete destruction of their beloved, country-style homesteads, usually at the cost of thousands of anonymous soldiers spent during an epic battle sequence that might have been prevented if the small child/hobbit/underdog had HURRIED THE FRACK UP instead of ruminating over the lapse between good and evil in mortal beings for 100 pages while lounging around in an Elvish/Dwarvish/crypto-humanoid paradise.

But I may be getting ahead of myself.

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