I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Kurta!

This is written at the request of some readers who want to see more posts outside of comics.

I spent last weekend in southern California at the wedding of one of my oldest friends.  A Hindu/Jewish feminist-updated fusion wedding, a harmonious polyphony that seemed pretty appropriate for southern California, especially since one of the officiants appeared to come straight out of The Long Goodbye by way of The Big Lebowski.

I and most of the other groomsmen spent about half the weekend taking rather peacockish pride in our kurtas, long, collarless shirts/robes ideal for dancing, looking austere, walking menacingly, kung fu fighting, entering the Matrix - all manner of manly endeavors, not the least of which is standing at your friend's side as he is married.  Leave all the fussing over pictures and decorations to the bridal party; as a man you can tell yourself that, although the prospect of a band of raiders swooping in on horseback to steal the bride is distinctly unlikely in the year 2005, you and your kurta'd posse are ready to kick some ass if and when it happens. 

The kurtas also lent an immediate solidarity to a disparate bunch of groomsmen.  One guy walking up Los Robles in a black kurta looks pretty weird.  Three or six are total badasses.  You have no idea how badly I wanted us to stumble across some sort of crime in progress so we could spill out of our kurtamobile and demonstrate our distinguishing gimmicks.

Besides stoking every adolescent male fantasy of redemptive violence (is this really not about comics?) the wedding also afforded a chance to catch up with old friends, something I'm lucky enough to do fairly often, and a chance to settle into a real, sustained groove during the dancing, something I haven't had for years.  (You would think that Nashville, Music City, would have at least one decent club whose idea of "disco" isn't playing the electric slide three times in two hours... no, actually, you wouldn't, would you?)

Unfortunately every period of intense emotion, every suspension of mundane time is followed by that inevitable descent back beneath the clouds - literally in this case as my return flight landed at BNA.  I've been settled back into my normal routine for a couple of days now but I'm still feeling a sort of jet lag, an emotional disconnect equivalent to the ache that I picked up from hiking up and down Mt. Hollywood but didn't even notice until I was back in Nashville.

When I first moved out here I decided, or I told myself, that Nashville was a Los Angeles in miniature.  That the two cities had a lot in common - the decentralized western organization, the local entertainment industry that attracts legions of young hopefuls.  You just have to ignore the factor of seven (or ten, or twenty) that makes it look so much smaller coming back from the real thing.

Almost anywhere would, but Nashville even moreso.  The downtown now looks like a jumble of toy blocks, discarded by some child who's hoarded all the tallest, shiniest buildings a couple thousand miles to the west, and as I drove home after my class Monday night the sudden absence of palm trees swaying against the horizon was gut-wrenching.  The local hills I glimpsed from the plane seemed petty and embarrassing, but even the Appalachians and the gorgeous Cumberland plateau have a hard time competing with the San Gabriels looming over Pasadena or the Santa Monicas folding into the sea.

I first visited Los Angeles eight years ago this week, to see the same friend.  The spring of 1997 marked the beginning of the most (first?) exciting time of my life, and as the memories blur and run together it becomes harder to sort out which parts of that transformative season happened before the trip and which happened after.  Southern California sits at the center of it all, a wonderland of eternal springs and so many beautiful women that you'd even see them at the bowling alley.  California arranged itself to appear extra Californian that week; immediately after all the Oscar frenzy, the Heaven's Gate cult decided to kill themselves and ride out the millennium on the back of Comet Hale-Bopp.

I wrote something about it back then, although it didn't amount to much more than a plagiarism of Soul Coughing's "Screenwriter's Blues."  (There was a journal too, long since lost and that's not much of a tragedy, nothing but bad imitations of Irvine Welsh - but what do you want, it was '97 and I was 24.)  It's been long enough since the last trip that I was able to rediscover many of the things that had so charmed me the first time - the view from Griffith Park, the lights of the planes lined up for approach at LAX, the richness of Los Angeles' early modernist architecture, half Tenochtitlan and half Metropolis.  No matter how apparent the costs are, I know I want more of this only half artificial paradise.  I'll be driving back this summer.

It was, in short, the least noir Los Angeles experience ever.  If I'm looking for disaffected loners drifting despondently in a place of sun-baked corruption, I can find that better right here in Nashville.

And I Really Enjoyed Reading Your "Thoughts"

My thanks to Bill Kartalopoulos, who points out this brief interview with Peter Bagge over at The Comics Reporter.  Tom Spurgeon fishes for comments on this essay I wrote about Bagge's political strips for Indy Magazine last fall, and he gets them:

I was enraged by that "essay." I thought the writer was a self-righteous, sanctimonious twit who put words in my mouth at every turn, and did everything to demonize me simply because he doesn't share my political views, and thus seems to be threatened by them. He also kept saying his criticism was "nothing personal" yet it was entirely personal, to the point that he declared me to be a deeply flawed human being! So much for objectivity. And this guy's a college professor! I shudder to think of the damage he's doing to his poor impressionable students.

I love quotes that aren't actually quotes.  Bagge of course conflates criticism that's subjective, criticism that arises from personal biases or grievances on the part of the critic, and criticism that reveals something about the personality of the subject, none of which are identical, but none of that matters anyway because I didn't write about any of it.  What I said was,

Although I disagree with some aspects of Bagge’s politics (and agree with others), my judgments on his Reason strips are not formed by politics alone. Even on those issues where I share Bagge’s viewpoint, such as his criticism of the nebulous and poorly managed war on terror (“The War on Terror Never Ends,” March 2002), I find his arguments so grossly overstated that they fail to amuse or persuade. The politics are merely debatable; the satire is execrable.

But that kind of criticism would be harder for Bagge to manage, so yeah, it's all because I don't share his political views.

As for the rest of his comments, I'm not surprised that Bagge would play the college radical/"poor impressionable students" card, as it's a popular one to play at the moment and it too frees him from having to engage with any of the actual criticisms I made.  Suffice it to say that most of what I teach my poor impressionable students are skills for critical reading and thinking, so they can reach and support their own conclusions about any text - exactly the kind of reader Bagge's hectoring, simplistic strips wither and die under.

His most bizarre and least defensible claim, though, is his complaint that I put words in his mouth.  My essay is filled with direct quotes, illustrations, and links to his Reason strips; I found it easy enough to hang Bagge with his own words that I certainly didn't need to invent any new ones.  Every judgment or opinion I offered is supported by examples from his writing, which is more than I can say for his tantrum.

Ultimately, Bagge comes across as a satirist (or, to put that in Baggese, a "satirist") who can dish out heaping helpings of slapdash pseudocriticism but can't take a little taste of the real thing.  If this guy is indeed "The best comedy writer working in comics, and one of the best period," as Spurgeon writes, then the medium is in worse shape than I thought.

Happy Anniversary

Celebrating one year of intermittent posts about comics and even more intermittent posts about everything else.

Why Oh Y?

I knew there was going to be trouble when the monkey started screaming.

Let me start over.  I've never been entirely comfortable with Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's Y: The Last Man, a comic about the last male survivor in a world where all the other men have been wiped out by a mysterious plague.  People routinely cite the series as proof that mainstream comics companies can produce mature, intelligent non-superhero work, but while the early issues seemed full of promise, it's never quite won me over.  My problems with the comic finally crystallized, and their origins became apparent, in the most recent issue, the conclusion of a five-part story about Yorick Brown's immunity to the plague and an interminable two-year-plus trek across the United States.

As the concluding chapter opens, Yorick's pet monkey Ampersand, the source of his immunity and therefore the key to saving the human race, has been stolen by a mysterious sword-wielding Japanese woman.  Despite the fact that the monkey has been outfitted with a secret transponder (a plot twist that one of the characters comments is wildly implausible - never a good sign), and despite the fact that the heroes have access to the tracking device, they track him by following his shrieks through the streets of San Francisco.

This pursuit leads our heroes from what appears to be Chinatown (or some other neighborhood with Asian signage and orientalized lampposts) all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge - all that distance, just on monkey shrieks.  That still makes more sense than the beginning of the scene, where Yorick wanders around looking for the monkey, and Agent 355 somehow finds Yorick, with no leads whatsoever.

Incidentally, I've walked to the Golden Gate Bridge from the North Beach/Fisherman's Wharf area, which is much closer than Chinatown, and trust me,

a) the bridge is surrounded by parkland, quite a hike from any area as densely developed as the neighborhood we see on pages 3 and 4, and

b) that's one long-ass way to follow a shrieking monkey.

Fortunately, there's no one else in sight save for our heroes and the nefarious villain.  Convenient, that; the characters' aimless searches almost seem plausible if there's nobody else in San Francisco to get in their way.  The first episode of this story showed a city that was populous enough to host professional sports and fill a stadium doing it, but after the second chapter all the civilians disappear.  In fact, save for a brief walk-on by a doomed police officer they disappear midway through the first chapter - even that staple of bad 70s action sequences, the cable car, is completely deserted, its operator a vague shadow glimpsed in just one panel.

My point isn't that Vaughan and Guerra get the details wrong or that the setting isn't "realistic" enough; my point is that they haven't really constructed a setting at all.  The San Francisco in "Ring of Truth" is a couple of flats, a studio backlot suitable for staging predictable fights in ostensibly dramatic locations like the Golden Gate Bridge (although as Guerra's art never once captures a sense of the bridge's height or scale, any potential drama is wasted).  The rest of the final issue, its plotting and blocking and dialogue, is equally cardboard as Vaughan dutifully recycles action-movie standards with all the excitement of a clerk ticking off items on a checklist:

The hero tries to sound tough by quoting The Untouchables and brandishing a gun.  Mind you, being self-conscious about the quote doesn't actually lessen the extent to which the comic depends on a bad Brian De Palma reference to create what passes for tension.

The villain appears to be dead but she's faking it.

The villain loves sparring with the hero so much that she says "I almost hate to kill you," and then adds, "Catch the operative word there?"  Which is added in case we're fucking morons, even though it tries to cleverly dance around the fact that it's added for fucking morons.

The other hero, who you didn't know for certain was going to be a hero, suddenly shows up and acts like a hero, with a timely gunshot and an action-hero line worthy of nobody this side of McBain ("Rock beats scissors, bitch").

The villain disappears in a puff of smoke... because she's a ninja!

The action scene is followed by a tension-relieving joke we all recognize from a dozen sub-Stallone cop movies:  "Nice shooting..." "Not really, I was aiming for her face."  The contrived moral dilemma that comes hot on its heels (save the partner or chase the bad guy?) is equally hoary, its resolution equally predictable.

The contrived moral dilemma is followed by a denouement in which the friendly but suspicious supporting character delivers a line so awkward ("By all accounts your sister saved at least two lives last night.  All I did was lose the key to humanity's continued existence. I'd say it's my turn to be the villain.") that it reads like either the world's clumsiest foreshadowing, or a truly atrocious pun (Yorick Brown's sister is named Hero, a stone Vaughan never quite stops trying to get blood out of), or a truly atrocious pun that wants to pass itself off as the world's clumsiest foreshadowing so that now Dr. Mann can be the hero who we don't know for certain is going to be a hero.

This isn't mature, intelligent comics, it's Tango & Cash.

Such fundamental stupidity may be a key part of Y's relative success at positioning itself in the comics market.  With this title and Ex Machina, another comic with grand aspirations and a disappointing execution, Brian K. Vaughan has perhaps supplanted Warren Ellis as the most lauded writer of smart comics that aren't actually all that smart. His comics never challenge the reader and they may not even achieve basic technical competence.  (Frothier mouths than mine have already identified Vaughan's poor command of storytelling fundamentals.)  I would say Y teaches us that it's easier to craft a commentary on gender than it is to write a decent fight scene, except that after thirty-one issues Y hasn't said much of interest about gender either.  The ideas are typically as timid as the storytelling, although with this particular issue that would admittedly be difficult.

Perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps not, Vaughan has supplanted Ellis in another damnable if impressive trait; he's figured out how to dollop out the secrets and plot twists just fast enough that, until now, I've kept reading the series despite its many flaws.  This issue is no exception, with a timely revelation that answers old questions while opening up new story possibilities.  Vaughan is quite adept at placing these revelations for maximum impact (usually using another hoary old standard, the page 22 splash, although Guerra's art isn't dynamic enough to fully exploit this superhero comic device), but that's no longer enough to keep me buying this comic month in and month out.  As an ongoing series, Y: The Last Man offers some compelling soap opera; as a series of story arcs, it's pompous, bloated, and much lazier than it ever lets on.

This latest storyline contains some powerful indicators that now is the time to abandon ship.  Just as Vaughan has characters openly questioning his plot twists, he's also got them expressing exhaustion with his stylistic tics.  In the first chapter, Agent 355 begins to rattle off one of the factoids so common to Vaughan's writing:

355: Anyway, the top bitch back there calls herself Anna Strong, name of a revolutionary war spy who used her clothesline to send coded signals to -

YORICK:  Who gives a crap?

Not I, Yorick.  Not I.