The Graphic Novel
Herge's Adventures of Tintin are classic 'ligne claire' comic books,
representing a Continental European style of clean draughtsmanship that
often contrasts with the moodier styles more recently developed in the
US and East Asia. There has been some politically correct
criticism of the Tintin adventures, which amount to 24 comic books
written from the 1930s to the 1970s (the last unfinished from the early
1980s) yet the adventures were often the first introduction of many Britons to the graphic novel (rather than the comic) in school and public libraries and for that Anglo-Saxons should be grateful. The girl in Forbidden Planet in London who took my money was excited to
see that I had bought it because it had introduced her to the world she
now worked in.
Only
the most po-faced critic could object to the vast bulk of the output. Miserabilists who would edit out all past
children's literature because of the political conditions of the day and
different sensibilities are insulting kids' intelligence (they soon
filter out the objectionable themselves). Worse, denying them access to
their own cultural history is a crime because it deprives them of the
right to make their own judgements on 'progress'. Captain Haddock is a
likeable alcoholic - so what? Likeable alcoholics don't cease to exist
because you edit them out of children's history.
Tintin in Tibet
is the acknowledged classic among classics, missing only the Thompson
Twins as characters that include Haddock, Snowy the dog and, of course,
the intrepid man-child Tintin himself. What is remarkable, in
view of the dominance of fantasy in most contemporary graphic design, is
the lack of the fantastic. The world was small enough in 1960 that
Tibet could be, in itself, an exoticism - last frontiers such as the
Amazon, Space and the Pacific Islands still existed for kids at that
time. The story is a succession of classic adventure incidents, any of
which could (except for the comical denouement which will not be spoiled
by me) have taken place in real life. This is a world closer to
Rider Haggard or of Henty, upgraded for 'modern' (mid-twentieth century)
kids, than it is to the usual fantasy fare of today but its general
humanity (the values are primarily ones of concern for others regardless
of cultural origin) and the constant incident still make it perfect for
tweenies.
Dream Country is Volume 3 of the acclaimed Sandman series but stand-alone (now filmed by Netflix with both of the stories in this Volume now in well produced TV streaming versions). My edition
also contained the original script for the first of its four stories, Calliope, which might be of interest to students of illustration. If
we are to be honest, Neil Gaiman was engaged in a project to bring
'Tales from the Crypt' up the literary and artistic food chain. There is
no doubt that he succeeded admirably in his task, aided by a series of
excellent illustrators, but the stories here, with the exception of his
re-thinking of the origins of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream,
are not complex - poetic and suggestive perhaps but not complex.
The
first story, Calliope, tells of a writer's abuse of an incarnated
muse, an exploitation that has its sexual side and which brilliantly
makes a creative reader feel besmirched by the potential for evil in
following an artistic ambition at the cost of everything else. Gaiman and illustrator Kelley Jones'
skill lies in making a captured Greek mythological figure into the type
of sex-trafficked woman and the artist into little more than a sleazy
punter or pimp - a reversal of romantic views of the artist and her muse
that is truly horrific. The TV version is perhaps softer than it should be in this respect.
The second, A Dream of a Thousand Cats,
is a 'take' on another type of dream, not that of ambition but of dream
as magical transformer of reality. This is a theme that we know from The Matrix but here it is expressed as the remaking of reality and
their history by humans and cats in turn and intentionally leaves us
with a sense of unease. It might also be read as a commentary on the
potential power of religious faith, born out of suffering, to change the
world although the unease remains just that, unease - there is no real
evidence here that faith changes anything but the faithful or that the
faithful have anything more to look forward to than homeless wandering
and more pain.
The award winning Shakespearian tale is magical at
two levels. It is English-magical in referring back to the Old Religion
and the ancient countryside in a way that should have earned it a place
at the Dark Monarch Exhibition by the Tate on magic and
modernity in English art. But it also revisits the issue of the price
paid by the artist in his obsessive disregard for a greater personal
creation than his play and his bargain with the Dark Lord of the
dream world for inspiration, a bargain as cruel in its way as that of
the writer in Calliope.
Gaiman is different from all his
contemporaries in questioning here and occasionally elsewhere whether
the imagination and magic are sufficient cause to abandon the world. The
conclusion appears to be that he and other imaginative people can do no
other but that they should be under no illusion that what they do is
somehow inevitably better or nobler than the lives of ordinary mortals. This
seems to be an attitude very different from that of the bulk of the
English School of imaginative and magical writers, of which Alan Moore
is exemplar, where the world of faery, alchemy, imagination and magic
seem to be presented as an alternate reality truer than our mundane
world. It strikes me as no surprise that Gaiman would find himself not
only living happily in America but seemingly welcoming its modernity in
later works. There is an ambiguity in Gaiman that might just, when
history judges him, tip him into the very top rank of authors.
The
final story, Facade, as if to confirm this thesis, is, by contrast
very modern and very American, with a nod to the 'superhero' tradition
that never really embedded itself in Gaiman's homeland. In this case, we
may have an Egyptian mythological back story and visual references to
the Mummy tradition but the core story is one of mysterious government
agencies and advanced bodily transmutation in which science rather than
magic is dominant. This is the world of Superman if seen through a
very dark lens. Ra's magic is as scientific in its way as the
speculations of Stoker's main protagonist regarding the Mummy in The Jewel of the Seven Stars nearly a hundred years before.
Taken
together, the four stories are variations on the theme of dreaming a
myth - of the incorporation of myth into reality, of the use of myth to
change reality, of the creative interplay, with its dangers, of myth and
reality and of science as a dream or myth in its own right. The Dark
Lord of the dream world appears in two of them - where myth and legend
are most obviously in sight. The other two have American settings and
owe their style to the American comic book tradition. As in American
Gods, Gaiman is merging European mythic and American popular cultural
traditions with not a little genius.
It is probably no accident
that Gaiman uses a quotation in a letter from the quintessential English
writer of the supernatural, magic and the Old Religion, Arthur Machen,
to the American James Branch Cabell in 1918 as one of his two
introductory quotations. He also quotes separately that all writers are
liars. The two quotations set the mood - an artist-writer hybridising
two great traditions of magic and modernity but not believing that
anything he creates represents anything bigger than a human imaginative
creation. Pragmatic, sceptical, Gaiman uses but is not part of the
English mystical-magical tradition.
Yet, at the end of the day,
while the style is brilliant and the themes intriguing, the attempt to
go beyond the comic book shows the weakness of the genre in other hands. In general,
high quality books are far better than the films that they derive from -
we think of Moravia's treatment by no less Directors than Bertolucci
and Godard. On the other hand, films made from comic books and
second-rate pulp fiction tend to be superior to their sources. Interestingly, this is not the case with the Netflix production which is very good but still secondary to Gaiman's original - in other words The Sandman series on the evidence of Volume #3 tips over into Moravia country and away from the bulk of the genre from which it comes.
But, in general, there
is still an intellectual hierarchy here whether we like it or not, albeit
with exceptions on all sides including this graphic set of self-contained stories which are far better than
most graphic material and deserve re-reading yet you sense that it
is still a stepping stone to the prize rather than the prize itself. Still,
it has to be in any respectable collection and Gaiman certainly gets the
best out of his illustrators. You will not regret owning it. We will, of course, deal with Alan Moore in a later review.
Blade of the Immortal is different again. It is the ultra-violent but superbly drawn first part of a multiple
samurai manga series which first appeared from 1994 in Japan and then
was reproduced by Dark Horse Manga in the West from 1997. The
introduction in the Western Edition provides useful background on why
Hiroaki Samura's graphic novel of a ronin who must kill a thousand evil
men to regain his mortality is important - because of the use of street
language within the conventions of the samurai traditions. The
introduction, naturally enough, explains to a Western adolscent audience
why the East Asian use of the swastika, an essential part of the
identity of the 'hero' Manji, is not to be confused with its use by
Western national socialists.
As to the graphic design, the brutal
bloodletting and even semi-perversion (and association of violence with
sexual rapacity) will not please those of a gentle disposition but some
of the single full page depictions, of a violence that is fast yet
stylized, are undoubtedly impressive - the nearest graphic equivalent to
the swift motion captured in a samurai movie. This is definitely not
'nice' but it is art.
On the other hand, The Invisibles now looks, in retrospect, a little disappointing as the first volume in a series widely
touted as innovative. Of course, looking at something in 2022 is not
going to be the same as looking at in 1994 when it was first published
but it does not stand the test of time in the way that the Sandman
series of Neil Gaiman or the work of Alan Moore has done. Morrison
is not stupid by any means. He plays well with the tropes of Chaos Magick (never
mentioned but central to the thinking behind the book) and with the
psychogeography of London.
He is well within an English
tradition of mixing magic and public culture, one that has been a highly
fertile source for American popular culture and whose literary output
comprises such luminaries as Ackroyd, Sinclair and, most recently, China Mieville. But the graphics are conventional and
Morrison himself can be wordy. He stretches things out a bit on
occasions so that you end up asking 'where's the beef?'. No graphic
novel should ever permit the stifling of a yawn as one does while
listening to the self-indulgent wittering of 'Old Tom'. It also leaps
around too much with an odd rhythm - too much meandering in one part and
too much jump-cutting in another. I would like to think that
this was some deliberate strategy to mimic Chaos Magick theory but, if
so, it fails. Chaos Magick does not work through external but through
internal narrative. Here, you never get the chance to sustain an
engagement that will shift your mental gear into new paradigms - you
are, too often, being preached at, the exact antithesis of the Chaos
mentality.
So much good work has been done around the idea of a
second magical and sinister London under the skin of the one that we see
(if we are resident) every day that this one seems pale in retrospect.
This first volume is a violent and post-modern concoction that owes a
great deal to the spirit of Foucault - a sort of creative version of
those near-contemporaneous graphic accounts of philosophy provided as
cribs by Icon Books and others. The unfairness of this review is
the unfairness perhaps of a quarter of a century and more years of shelf life. There are striking
images and ideas but there is something adolescent and gratuitous about
it ... a text to show how Vertigo managed to open up new themes and
ideas for the generation born in the 1970s, much different from Alan
Moore's own embedment in that same dystopian decade, but not one that
truly 'enlightens'.
For an example of something that did not even try to be interesting in a literary sense but which relied on its style, we can go to DC Comics' Batman: Hush at the turn of the century (2002). The story line on this Gotham City/Metropolis cross-over is, bluntly,
conventional, predictable and uninspiring but the book is redeemed by
dramatic graphics and superlative inking by Jim Lee and Scott Williams. The
soap opera dynamic between Lois and Superman, Batman and Catwoman and
chief villain Poison Ivy backed up by dim-witted Killer Croc is made
sexy by some frankly erotic (at points) draughtsmanship. The
creative tension is supposed to be between the 'dark' Batman and the
'light' Superman, between vengeance and love perhaps, but it is
overwhelmed by a lack of subtlety and a love of powerful graphics for
their own sake with most shots dominated by the faces and bodies of the
protagonists.
Jim Lee refers in his introduction to the
dreadfully corny old Adam West TV series. You can see its influence, not
in trying to lighten up the Dark Knight (no, this is a Titan production
for DC Comics and Batman is now irredeemably gloomy) but the wonderful
use of brightly coloured explosions, such as Kracsh, Rarrr, Yarrrcxh,
Slam, Sprak and other onomatopeia, in the action scenes. There's even a
Kraka Thoom and a Phtoosh! One quibble was the dreadful quality of
the binding between the cover and the contents in my edition - the
punters deserved better quality control for £7.99 (at 2010 prices).
In the first volume of Fables, the loody disappearance of Rose Red results in a private investigation
into erstwhile boyfriend Jack (without his beanstalk), local magnate
Bluebeard and Deputy Mayor Snow White (working to Mayor King Cole) while
feckless con-man Prince Charming and a squabbling Beauty and her Beast
provide us with the sub-plots. This is utterly implausible,
sometimes obvious and contains every 'noir' cliche in the book, as well a
highly self-conscious post-modern pitch at the revelatory 'parlour
scene' that we know and love from nearly every Hercule Poirot or Miss
Marple on the shelves - only this time it is Big Bad Wolf who is the
City detective.
But it is also a highly imaginative transposition
of old European stories and legends into a new world urban fantasy
environment. It is witty and stylish and it earns its stars despite
the comic book's graphic design being thoroughly conventional. Why
ruin the fun by telling you what happens but if you get a copy, don't
overlook the text prequel to the story at the end of the book. A trifle
over written perhaps and riddled with the dark fantasy cliches of
violence and redemption, it is the story of a wolf who becomes a man for
love and is oddly affecting. This Big Bad Wolf is Twilight out of
Chandler and none the worse for that. Enjoy!
I cannot recommend Manga:60 Years of Japanese Comics highly enough and
on many levels. It explains Manga in almost every conceivable way that
might be of interest - its context in Japanese cultural and political
history, its social role, its development and growth as a business, its
sheer scale and its influence overseas. It does this with a
profusion of examples to illustrate almost every major stylistic aspect
of Manga's development. It is, in short, an essential basic reference
text from an expert author totally confident in his subject matter.
Most
of my reviews try to say
something of what I have learned from a text. In this case, I am tempted
to just refer you to the book itself - by the time
that you have finished it, you will have a good grounding in the subject
and be able to make some sensible choices and aesthetic judgements of
your own. But I cannot resist a few pointers. There is the debt
owed by Manga to American comic book art from its inception. The idea
that it is a wholly indigenous creation that somehow blossoms late out
of pre-Meiji Floating World print-making is just not tenable. It would
not exist if General Douglas MacArthur had not turned Japan upside down
after its defeat in 1945. Manga is uniquely Japanese but it is also
uniquely liberal-capitalist. Its context is the creation of a Japan that
was forced to live or die by the market as it tried to preserve the
best of its traditional values.
The ruthless corporate creation
and management of the Manga market is a constant theme of the book. Most
Manga writers and draughtsman operate in a high pressure factory
environment that is no different from the rest of Japanese corporate
culture. There is little of that free and easy spirit of letting the
artist wonder off and ponder his navel while the marketing men wait for
the fruits of his genius. This is a business with a brutally
direct relationship with a demanding public, part of whom is so engaged
with this world that it will compete to be the next generation of
'auteurs' under conditions that would break the spirit of most
Westerners. The fact is that the whole European comic market is only 10%
of the size of the Japanese Manga market and it is brutally
competitive.
But what of the psychological function of Manga to
its readers. Japan is a culture that is both sex-positive and yet
concerned to keep its non-Christian world-view operating within bounds
that cannot rely on some external force such as God or Kantian flummery.
Japan has to appeal to traditional values without encouraging anyone to
return to the dark side of Bushido. This leads to some strange
ambiguities in regulation and misunderstandings by Westerners who come
into contact with it. The explicit sexual and violent content of Manga
is vastly exaggerated in the West. The norm is, in fact, a wide range of
more or less intense explorations of human interaction and feeling
geared to every age range's innermost drives as they move through life.
Manga
socialises but accepts the human condition for what it is - and this
will leave some space for the darker shores of sex and violence at the
margins of Manga as at the margins of any society. The Japanese simply
have the courage not to pretend the dark side is not present or that it
can be wished away by appeal to the pulpit, including the pulpit that
has been set up inside most Westerners' heads. Watching Manga's
effect on my children, I see the effect as wholly positive. It explores
themes and ideas that are difficult to talk about with peers and
parents, exploring fears and desires in dreamscapes of considerable
sophistication. The Gibli anime series exemplifies the fantasy
non-linear side of Japanese culture but the typical Manga is a tale of
people who can be identified with in all their human complexity. Japan
may use discipline and ritual to restrain and constrain desire and fear
but it does not wish away these feelings and drives or give them
negative or positive moral value in themselves.
The leitmotif of
the Westerner is 'guilt' at failing to meet the standards of some
internal policeman whereas the Japanese will feel 'shame' for failing to
meet obligations that are social if equally internalised. This
difference between guilt and shame is fundamental. Manga plays a
major role in allowing an outlet for feelings that must not be denied
but only so that they may be evaluated and appropriate action
considered. If my children have constructed independently a high moral
code of a rather conservative nature (which they seem to have done) then
I am sure that I can put this very much down to their reading of Manga
from an early age.
The closing chapters of the book move from the
mass market to the almost anarchic artistic fringe of Manga and then to
its export overseas, driven and transformed by market considerations on
the back of anime exports to children's television. What is most
interesting is that the Japanese business community treats export
markets in culture much as it does export markets in consumer durables -
as a challenge in which the best of foreign technology is to be
stripped down, analysed and imported back into Japan to see if it can be
systematised. Westerners, especially the current late teenage
generation, have taken to Manga in a big way, in part perhaps because it
is unique to their generation, a foreign import that most parents
simply cannot understand. Reading Manga is a learned skill,
counter-intuitive to a mass popular culture that privileged first the
word on the page and then the moving image but was dismissive (until
recently) of the comic, now privileged as the 'graphic novel'.
Manga
is positively Wagnerian without the music. It merges visuals and
language in storyboards that are played out in the mind. The Western
separation of text, music and image/sound, of book, of music and of
film, means that the mind leaps from the pure internalisation of reading
and listening to the passive intake of spectacle without finding space
for Manga's half-way house of word and image being internalised as a
tale that can immediately relate to social concerns and feelings. Manga
is at its best when it raises serious questions about what it is to be a
boy or girl at such-and-such a time of life. It means that one is
neither solipsistically engaged in great literature nor lost in the
collective will of the movie or the opera. Kids today like this. Their
concerns are social and internal, not just internal or social - and
Manga works for them at this level.
Part of this younger
generation of Westerners has not only taken Manga to its heart but is
beginning to transform it in a direct dialogue with the Japanese
publishing houses. What the book brings out is the degree to which,
creatively, Japanese-American and Japanese-French ('bandes dessines')
influences are creating new themes and new works for the more
sophisticated end of the Japanese market, as well as for the American
and European markets, alongside the mainstream offers of Tokyo Pop. Bit
by bit, other related Japanese cultural phenomenon, such as Cosplay,
are likely to merge with Western fandom into new cultural forms. No
doubt, the big Japanese brands and digitalisation want to give us new
Western-style blockbusters that are as showy as the Marvel-inspired
productions that now emerge every year. In fact, what seems to be happening is a Western appropriation of Japanese cultural energy to create indigenous versions of its 'ethic', transforming the West as Japan was once transformed by the West.
This is globalisation
driven by the market, but it is not one that creates some standard
universal pap. The complexity and intensity of the Manga community's
response to the market is not resentful but fertile - a frenetic
creativity that matches the inner core of human fears and desires with a
very high level of sensitivity and artistic creation. One can
only hope that priests and 'moral guardians' in the West do not get
their ignorant, restrictive and grubby paws on this surge of creativity
and force it into tramlines that will reduce it to mere brain fodder -
as the Hays Code managed to do to the creative glory that was Hollywood
from the 1930s to the 1960s and as waves of censors have done in the
West since time immemorial. Worse, I fear that the growth of the
importance of the 'three faiths' markets for Manga may come to infect
Japan itself with Western neurosis. This would be a tragedy for Japan
and for the West.
Returning back to the homeland Alice in Sunderland is a most curious graphic novel, graphic non-fiction actually - a tour de
force that melds the personal obsessions of Bryan Talbot into something
that might be called an autobiography without many of the facts of the
man's life. It uses the greatest virtue of the graphic form -
the illustration of what things look like instead of what we think they
look like from the words that are provided - to give us the mental map
of a particular Englishman living in a particular community (Sunderland
in the North East of England) from a particular class (the educated
descendent of workers) in a particular culture (an England that can look
back over two thousand years of continuous history and which has never
been truly isolated as a culture, yet is distinctive in its own right).
Although
so particular in place and person, any American wanting to understand
how so many non-metropolitan English men (not so much women) of a
liberal mind-set actually THINK, this book would make an excellent
starting point. It melds a framing story of the British music
hall tradition with the biography of Lewis Carroll and the history of
his Alice tales with North Eastern history, psychogeography, folklore
and 'famous people' and then with occasional references to Talbot's own
life and the cultural politics of a Sunderland that actually has (or
had) a highly developed arts policy (which is more than can be said of
most of the towns in the English South).
Graphically, Talbot seamlessly uses multiple techniques to match the multiple story lines of
the text. It is bulky to accommodate all this: well over 300 pages. At
certain points we get illustrated short lectures on aspects of the
graphic tradition, including a remarkable analysis of Hogarth's Gin and
Beer Lane prints and an account of the role of Ally Sloper in popular
culture. He is mindful of American readers with the odd tale of
links between Sunderland and the Americas but these come naturally and
at no point can it be said that he panders to commercial expectations.
Sometimes, as with the best graphic material, the book can be seen as a
film documentary until one realises that much of the raw visual content
and the subtle effect of simultaneity of images could not be reproduced
in any other medium. This is triumph of the graphic design
tradition and a worthy contribution from the United Kingdom that places
Bryan Talbot up there with Alan Moore as a master of the genre.
Back to DC Comics and Grant Morrisson, All-Star Superman Volume 1 is a top notch DC Universe contribution from Morrison & Quitely (with the help of Jamie Grant). Clean graphics, an exceptional fertility of ideas (single frames could be spun into entire SciFi novella by someone so minded) and genuine contributions to the Superman canon - including the day Lois found out about Superman's identity, what happened when Lois had superpowers for a day, the day Superman turned evil, a day with Lex Luthor who can't see what is before his face for all his great criminal intellect and what forced Clark Kent to abandon the farm and come to Metropolis. It is humorous and faithful to the spirit of the original with one grim exception - the discovery (it is in the first pages so the fact is not a spoiler) of Superman's mortality which casts a shadow over all that follows. It is recommended for fans even if Lois seems to have become a bit of a bimbo flirt.
Finally, Batman: Noel was a 2011 a reworking of Dickens' 'Christmas Carol' for the Dark Knight Batman mythos. Apart
from a clumsy confusion at the beginning as to who precisely is Bob
Cratchit's 'boss' (either an egregious failure of continuity or a
too-clever-by-half attempt to give the now somewhat cliched message of
the Joker and Batman as two sides of the same coin), this works well. But
the book is not best read for the script which is fairly predictable
(though well drafted and, as we will see, with a message) and really an
opportunity to give star appearances to Cat Woman, SuperMan and The
Joker for the fans but the art work which is dark, Gothic, precise and
magnificent.
It opens with an atmospheric evocation of Gotham
City in which you can see and hear (a remarkable achievement, here) the
crunch of Batman's boots as he walks across a snowy roof. There is also a
useful contemporary reworking of Dickens' moral which we would give nothing away
to state here. Whereas Dickens was castigating lack of
generosity and miserly disregard for others, Bermejo is castigating the
blind hunt for justice that stereotypes those on the margin as a-social
regardless of their circumstances and which uses people as mere tools to
some greater 'good'. Batman is presented as on the very edge of
psychopathy and drifting into the territory of Judge Dredd in a world
where police and petty criminals are simply trying to make the best of a
bad system. Wayne Enterprises is not pictured precisely in its standard
context of beneficence.
This comic book is slight but it
expresses a turn of sorts in the mind-set of a nation, away from
simplistic notions of good and evil and (if tentatively) towards
criticism of a world that has a place for vigilante superheroes with a
cold attitude to the weak and vulnerable. The vigilante trope was
a creation of the Wild West and was urbanised first briefly by Dashiell
Hammett (from a Leftish perspective) in the 1920s and then in Hollywood
cinema during the 1970s with violent protagonists like those in 'Death
Wish' or the Dirty Harry films. The justice trope is standard
American 'beacon on a hill stuff' and Batman was originally a fairly
innocent figure until the tormented 'Dark Knight' figure appeared, while
Judge Dredd always was a satire on America (a fact Sylvester Stallone
may have missed). To see both tropes now critiqued through a
Victorian reformer's message by a relatively young graphic artist and
writer is yet another sign that the younger generation of Americans are
questioning cultural assumptions, even if at one remove.