I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Infamy? Not Exactly

It's Matt Rossi's birthday.  Matt, this one's for you:

Essentially, you shouldn't ask.  (I wonder if the little guy is Lysenko?)

I've been rereading the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man issues and they've only reaffirmed my appreciation for everyone involved - Lee, Ditko, and the Circus of Crime.  Mock them if you must - and you must - but they're ideal punching bags for a rollicking brawl designed to showcase the hero's prowess and the artist's skill, in this respect second only to the Exiles (a team of Jack Kirby villains composed of - Mussolini, Herman Goering, and an old guy in a chair).

Lee was a genuinely funny writer, scripting scenes like the Spidey/Jameson interactions that still produce laughs forty years later.  But I don't think he was really trying for guffaws the night (and it surely had to be late, late one night, just before a deadline) he and Kirby dreamed up the Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime.  Their unavoidable hilarity shows through even the most sober-minded synopses, like this one:

The Circus of Crime usual modus operandi is the following. They will give a performance before a large audience. At some point the Ringmaster will use the powerful mind-control device concealed in his hat.

And don't forget this essential part of the plan:

The Circus of Crime performs under different names so that audience will not suspect that they are the Circus of Crime.

Stan Lee, you are a FREAKIN' GENIUS.

Oh, and happy birthday, Matt.

We Are The Boys

Dave Gibbons, the co-creator of Watchmen, writes and draws The Originals, a vibrant new graphic novel about youth, maturity, and the need to belong at any cost.  Lel (nee Leslie), a teenager in a retro-futuristic England circa the mid-1960s, desperately wants to join the Originals, a band of hoverscooter-riding Mods in all but name.  He soon gets his wish after he takes part in a bloody feud with a rival gang, the Dirt - and that's when the real story begins.

Gibbons takes a considerable risk by focalizing his story through such an unreflective narrator.  Lel tends to caption his scenes with nonprofundities like "Saying goodbye to Viv was always hard" or "This was going to be some weekend."  These statements don't ring false for the teenage narrator, but they make for a flat narration.  Fortunately, Gibbons can rely on his art to convey all the subtleties of plot and tone that his protagonist can't articulate.

The book's most immediately striking feature is its coloring, in a grayscale so varied it can accomodate both the gloom of postwar England and the hopped-up energy of Mod.  The color's greatest set piece is probably an op-art drug trip initially reminiscent of Steranko, but Gibbons makes the scene his own through brilliant use of silhouettes, diagonal compositions, and random aspect-to-aspect panel transitions that keep the eye moving around the page, endlessly off-balance.

The story is also served well by Gibbons' command of space and detail.  The panels vary from small, intimate boxes to widescreen, full-bleed tiers to awestruck double-page spreads, each size matched to the content.  But the spaces within the panels are even more important, as they flesh out the world Lel is too fully immersed in to describe.

It's a world in which the brutalist modernism of skyscrapers, apartment blocks, and nuclear cooling towers is slowly edging out older architecture that still bears the traces of a devastating war.  (You almost feel sorry for the defiantly retro Dirt; history doesn't seem to be on their side.)  From the hellish cityscape that opens the book to the brief glimpse we get of Lel's cramped home, Gibbons creates a claustrophobic urban atmosphere, yet he also breeds a lifelong resident's sense of familiarity. The book's two most important locations both appear on the first page, and the dialogue tells you how to get from one to the other.  By the end of the book, we know these streets almost as well as Lel does.

But ultimately it's the level of detail that proves most rewarding.  On my second reading - after the first, breathless one to find out how it all turns out - I kept flipping back and forth to follow all the little indicators Gibbons uses to distinguish between otherwise identical gang members and to tell the stories that Lel can't or won't relate. (Watch for Dink's casual abandonment of his girlfriend Sharon.)  Simple things like the reappearance of an expensive outfit or the design of a hover - from Warren's tricked-out ride to Bok's unadorned secondhand model - say far more about their owners than anything Lel could tell us.  The consistency of detail creates the impression of a cohesive world, but more importantly, it also conveys the truths that are too deep or troublesome for Lel to acknowledge.

The sycophantic wannabe Warren, for example, wants in the Originals so desperately that he copies Lel's clothing, an act of plagiarism that doesn't escape Lel's notice and figures prominently in the plot.  What Lel doesn't tell us, though, and wouldn't tell us, is that he's done the same thing with Ronnie, the wealthy, handsome, faintly sinister leader of the Originals.  Lel buys the same style of jackets, takes over Ronnie's old job as an amphetamine dealer, and even purchases his hoverscooter.  His identification with Ronnie is in some ways more total than Warren's with him.

But in a crucial and equally unspoken distinction, Lel goes about it in the right way: earning Ronnie's approval, working his way up the Originals hierarchy, wearing clothes just slightly different from his idol's.  Warren tries to buy his way in with a ludicrously overdecorated hover (it's a gift from his Auntie) and a mantle and shades that directly mimic Lel's.  When that fails to win Lel and Bok's approval he resorts to more drastic measures, trying to cement his reputation with a hideous and cowardly escalation of violence.  These distinctions are so obvious to Lel that, in the truest sign of insiderism, he neglects to mention them.  Gibbons' relentlessly realistic art doesn't just supply the missing information, it quietly alerts us when Lel's hazy, romanticized narration is leaving something out.  We're left to piece it all together and wonder whether, if Lel had treated Warren the way Ronnie treated him, things would have ended differently.

If the book has one major drawback, it's that Gibbons doesn't convey any sense of why Lel wants so badly to be an Original, except that it means being in.  Which is perhaps the point - but why does he want to be an Original, and not a Dirt?  Why this style, this group, this girl, this friend?  We understand Lel's desires in the abstract, but rarely in the particular.

Again, part of this may be Gibbons' point.  The final scene plays out before a blanked-out bit of graffiti:  All _________ are wankers.  Perhaps the names and groups are interchangeable; all that matters is us and them, that you hate someone else and they hate you.  Lel says he's learned his lesson, but the last line and the final double-page spread (if it can be called that) bring even that into question.  It's a punch in the gut, the most bitter and potent ending I've read in some time.  Do yourself a favor and don't flip straight to the end - earn the moment, as Lel does.  Or doesn't.

The Originals creatively exploits comics' tension between art and narration, which you might expect from the artist behind Watchmen, but with a difference; this time, the tension lies between what's shown and what's not said.  The result is a comic that balances between fantasy and autobiography, delusion and recrimination, the energy of youth and the sobriety of age.  It's one of the best and certainly one of the most accomplished comics of the year.

It Took Me Right Out of the Blogosphere

J. W. Hastings offers an earnest defense of one my least favorite critical crutches, the line "It took me right out of the story."  The catalyst is this post at Peiratikos about one recent invocation of the phrase.

In response J. W. offers a thoughtful explication of a phrase that's usually deployed without much self-reflection.  It's quite useful, except for the casual potshots at analytical criticism and the "academic mindset."  (Most egregiously, J. W. assumes - or overstates - that practicing analytical criticism means the critic becomes unable to appreciate works of art "in a commonsense, everyday manner," that is, in terms of aesthetic enjoyment.  This dichotomy is false on many levels, from its faux populist assault on the academic elites to its radical opposition of analysis and appreciation, but chiefly it overlooks the difference between experiencing a work of art and writing about it.  A critic may appreciate a work aesthetically, emotionally, viscerally, but that doesn't mean they'll have anything interesting to say about their appreciation.  Having read more of the "pre-theory" American literary criticism from the 1950s and 1960s than I'd care to, I greatly appreciate those analytic critics who spare us their unremarkable thoughts on aesthetics and tastemaking.)

I can see where the potshots come from, though, because I think Steven Berg and Dave Fiore read "It took me right out of the story" too literally as indicating a total commitment to illusionism and a loss of the distinction between fantasy and reality.   J. W. offers a much more sensible and charitable interpretation of the phrase as a condensed argument about genre conventions and expectations.  (In fact, in his reading the phrase becomes a tiny act of analysis, a good illustration that appreciation and critical thought are not as mutually exclusive as his post suggests.)

But I don't see a bias against aesthetic appreciation in Steven's or Dave's comments - I see a bias against a certain kind of obdurately lazy critical shorthand.  "It took me out of the story" may sometimes convey the generic analysis J. W. describes, but all too often it's a handy way for reviewers to pass off a personal preference as a structural flaw in the work under discussion.

The line seems especially inappropriate for the story that started this discussion, Grant Morrison and Ed McGuinness's JLA: Classified #1, where Morrison's scripting of a Batman in possession of a "sci-fi closet" (paging Andy Medhurst!) has irritated some readers who would prefer a Batman more in continuity with the street-level "urban legend" of his own titles.  The discrepancy between the two versions of the same character took them right out of the story.

Yet the more charitable interpretation doesn't appear to apply here. Morrison's story features a floating city of superhuman marines, an infant universe, a parasitic intelligence from "the vampire sun" and a man-eating telepathic gorilla.  Which, in this tale, would be the greater violation of that generic wiggle room:  a typically hypercompetent Batman with an emergency supply of sci-fi goodies, or the sudden appearance of a terse, broken, bleeding urban avenger in the Miller-cum-Bendis mold?  Would such a character better fit this story?  Would the knowledge that DC comics had maintained its inter-title continuity soothe over any gaping narrative cracks it created?  And would that reaction truly be any more "commonsense" than Steven's or Dave's?

The problem isn't obtusely illusionistic readers or obtusely analytical academics, it's the obtusely lazy criticism that comes with the reliance on any cliché.

McSweeney's Atones

Consider this a coda of sorts to my July columns about comics’ latest bid for respectability.

The McSweeney’s website has a hilarious (and oddly familiar) retirement speech by the Riddler and a not quite as hilarious evaluation of the utility of Minneapolis as a home city for various superheroes (links courtesy of the Comics Journal message board).  Personally, I prefer this Keith Pille piece to the Minneapolis one, but they’re all of a kind, absurd and ironic takes on familiar characters.

They aim low but they hit the mark, which is sadly more than I can say for many of the selections in the all-comics issue of McSweeney’s that came out this past summer.  This issue was never more exciting to me than when it existed purely as a concept.  I devoured it when it arrived in the mail, but each successive time I’ve picked up the book I’ve also put it down more quickly.  The anthology includes plenty of great material, but the Ware and the Sacco and the Brunetti and the Burns get weighed down by lengthy sections of tedious diarism and joyless devotion to past comics masters.  (Despite their incredibly serious subject matter, Art Spiegelman’s pages from In the Shadow of No Towers edge into both of these territories.)

The more I read this collection, the more I’m inclined to agree with Martin Rowson’s caustic review. Rowson errs in using the collection to pass judgment on the entire medium of comics, and he displays the snide contempt that successful “serious” cartoonists have all too often held for their pulpish cousins, and his idea that comics are meant only to be adolescent entertainment is as disappointing as it is inane. (Where would that leave his own comics adaptations of Tristram Shandy and The Waste Land? Or do literary adaptations not count?)

But while I want to reject every general claim, his specific criticisms of the McSweeney’s anthology – especially the bit about the text pieces and their “reverential, almost fetishistic awe for iconic artifacts of comic art” – gather more force with each rereading. Too many of the McSweeney’s selections are poorly executed, narcissistic, juvenile, or in thrall to past comics, a litany of failings that sounds suspiciously like the superhero comics and superhero comics fandom that this collection supposedly leaves behind. Is the archivist who carefully decrinkles largely blank pages of discarded Charles Schulz doodles really that different from the budding Superman commodity fetishist of Glen David Gold’s story? Aren't they both just reading an auric value where there is none?

I’m also struck by the disconnect between the comics and the text pieces, many of which seem to revolve around fond memories of exactly the sort of comics that the people who do the comics in this collection don't do. The Michael Chabon, Glen David Gold, and Chip Kidd essays, all filled with poignant nostalgia for superheroes and middle school, look like they were meant for the Sean Howe book and got delivered to the wrong address. Which isn’t to say I’m clamoring for more decrinkled doodles and breathless exegeses thereof.

As one correspondent has observed, the collection is split between reprinted work that will be most appreciated by readers who are new to alternative comics, and historical material of interest only to a tiny subset of dedicated fans. (Nostalgic late-thirtysomething novelists comprise a third, mostly marginal faction.) There isn’t much left for readers who have seen these Los Bros Hernandez pages before but who can’t work themselves into a lather over unfinished Krazy Kat strips. Nor does the limited palette of artists help; too many talented alternative creators are left out to justify the narrow repetitions of theme and style.

A reader completely new to alternative comics might come away with the impression that they’re all as derivative and self-referential and beholden to past comics greats. They aren’t, of course; there’s too much good work, even in this issue, that destroys the stereotype. But the self-obsessed contingent is rather too well represented, in both comics and essay form, and it threatens to overwhelm those comics that make a bold leap outside nostalgia, outside fetishization, and outside the self.

Really, though, I just think it’s funny that this high-end collection, an implicit promise of the state of the art in alternative comics, so frequently replicates the flaws of the mainstream comics industry it shuns. Riddle me this: how’d that happen?

The Justice League of Mutual Admiration and Respect for the Customs of All Nations and Indigenous Peoples

One of the first comic book storylines I followed avidly was in Justice League of America issues 166, 167, and 168, a pleasant romp in which the Secret Society of Super-Villains swaps bodies with five members of the Justice League.

I've been casually looking for those issues for a while now, although when I heard the story was referenced in Identity Crisis I figured the chances of finding any cheap copies on Ebay had pretty much evaporated.  To my surprise, I then discovered the first two issues right here in Nashville, and now I've read them for the first time in twenty-five years.

Fortunately, I had no illusions that they'd live up to memory.  But if the wonder of a child reading their clichéd body-switching plot for the first time is gone, I can appreciate them even more as products of that most unique and mysterious of cultural moments - the first one I remember.  They're perfect representatives of the late-70s gentle decline of superhero comics into the steady formulas of the Bronze Age.  These are comics that reliably sacrifice plot and action for forced characterization, that spend more time dwelling on a ruminating android than they do illustrating the climactic beat-downs of the Justice League.  They display all the curious mixture of adult aspirations and fannish obsessions that you would expect from a writer of Gerry Conway's era, and in many ways no writer is more of Conway's era than Conway himself.

Just one example:  the first part opens with a bit of denouement from the previous issue as the Justice League attends the funeral of Zatanna's mother, a whole lot of dancing and garland-throwing.  There's a nice moment as Batman grouses that the wake is too festive for his tastes - and Conway doesn't oversell it, doesn't give us the two-panel origin recap that we'd expect to explain just why Batman isn't comfortable at any funeral, especially this touchy-feely earth-mother crap. When Batman calls the ceremony "a celebration of her death!" his discomfort is palpable; we know we could drop out the "her" and get an even better sense of what's really bothering him.

Conway doesn't quit while he's ahead, though.  Wonder Woman delivers a long, inspirational, rather insufferable justification for the festivities, culminating at the exact moment when the body of Zatanna's dead mother is physically absorbed into the souls of the mourners/celebrants.  Batman is horrified, but Superman chides him with a lecture so patronizing that he can only be acting as Conway's mouthpiece:

On Krypton, we had our own methods of dealing with our dead, methods you might find equally strange.

Different cultures... different customs. The Norsemen once burned their honored dead on ships... some American Indians would leave their dead on platforms in open air...

If there's anything that we in the League should understand... it's that no culture or tradition is any more fitting than any other. We're fighting for truth and justice, my friends... not necessarily our way...!

Is it just me, or does Superman sound oddly like Dave Fiore? Or, more likely, does Dave sometimes sound oddly like a Gerry Conway comic book?

Anyway.  I was stunned when I read this speech, with its vivid reminder of a world very different from our present one.  It was published in February, 1979, the same era when the Super Friends were knocking down barriers by admitting a hypertrophic Indian chief and a black guy who could turn his ass into a lightning bolt.  Conway races beyond the concrete political initiative of affirmative action, though, making a purely ideal push for cultural relativism.  This is an artifact as ancient and strange to us as the gryphon-like statue that takes over "Our minds--our bodies!!" (our selves?),  a kids' comic that takes enthusiastic part in what Timothy Burke calls "the domestication of the counterculture" and its attempted dissemination into the culture at large.  It's the sort of comic that, were it published today, would probably result in neoconservative pundits blaming Superman for September 11th.

And yet it was already too late.  Superman has no idea that the stage for backlash has already been set, that Khomenei and Reagan are waiting just around the corner (and that Anita Bryant has rallied the advance force).  This comic doesn't exactly represent the high-water mark of liberalism, or even the high-water mark of the ambitious but presumptuous left-wing cultural reform that too easily gets conflated with liberalism.  Call it a piece of driftwood, left after the waters have receded.

Who would have thought that, in a comic filled with the superheroes of my youth, this cloying speech would prompt the most powerful and ambivalent nostalgia?  I don't miss the speech itself, which is so busy touting the values of other cultures that it forgets the validity of Bruce's own reactions (and so the backlash brews even in stately Wayne Manor), but the evident acceptance of the idea that it's okay to have different beliefs and that it's okay for a comic or any other work of art to talk about them.  Today's comics may offer a better brand of dialogue, but they've beat a cultural retreat so thorough that the winning formula is to have superheroes posture and boast exactly like our flight-suit donning commander in chief.

Whatever you say, Mr. President.

On the other hand, in this week's comics a squad of trash-talking neoconservative superheroes in the Mighty Millar Manner get their asses handed to them in JLA: Classified #1, and their only accomplishment is exacerbating the very threat they came to destroy.  The message is, of necessity, a more defensive and cynical one, but all is not lost.  Hey, Grant:  keep on keepin' on.

Indy Magazine

My apologies for the silence of late. It's been a busy semester here: first planning and hosting ICAF, then catching up on all the work I'd put off for ICAF, and of course volunteering for John Kerry. The past couple of weeks, every spare moment I've had after teaching and canvassing has been devoted to writing my first commissioned piece, a lengthy analysis of Peter Bagge's Reason comics for Indy Magazine (named "Best New Comics Magazine" in New York by the Village Voice).

I hadn't intended to take a second pass at Bagge's strips, but Bill Kartalopoulos had a great concept for his fall issue (the theme is politics and comics) and I'm glad I took him up on his offer. It's quite a jolt just to be published in the same issue with some of Bill's other contributors - now I've finally realized my lifelong dream of collaborating on a project with Henry James. (I thought I'd have to wait until Dreamworks releases our duet album in 2006.)

Hopefully, things will calm down after election day (mind you, that's what I said about ICAF too). I'm already planning my triumphant return with a post about what may be the mushiest liberalest comic ever made, courtesy of Gerry Conway, Dick Dillin, and Frank McLaughlin. In the meantime, the autumn issue of Indy Magazine is recommended to your attention.

"No, Mr. Singer, I expect you to die"

Back, exhausted and elated from last week's ICAF and SPX. Since this was the first time I've attended the Small Press Expo while earning a real salary, I brought back quite a few great comics...

• Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art, a Fantagraphics coffee-table retrospective of the great MAD artist and Kurtzman collaborator

• The two most recent issues of The Comics Journal, mostly for the Kurtzman/Elder "Goodman Goes Playboy," the Brubaker interview, and the Dirk Deppey two-parter on Marvel's advance and retreat

• Subatomic and The Supernaturalists by Patrick Neighly and Jorge Heufemann, published by Mad Yak Press (the authors of the indispensible Disinformation Guide to the Invisibles)

• A Louis minicomic from Metaphrog

• Balthazar no. 1 by Tobias Tycho Schalken and Eiland no. 4 by Schalken and Stefan van Dinther. These are true gems; Schalken and van Dinther produce formally innovative, eerily resonant, and meticulously designed comics. The Balthazar book resembles an exhibition catalogue, with a number of art-historical mock-ups (medieval illuminated manuscript, 1930s comic, performance art video installation) and a set of annotations that imply some mysterious medieval religious eugenics movement. Schalken, an ICAF guest, mentioned Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire as an influence, and that alone would have been enough to sell me. He was the second artist that day to cite Nabokov, after the incredibly learned John of Metaphrog, which I take as a good sign for the comics medium. The Eiland artists also earn bonus points because "Tobias Tycho Schalken" sounds, to American ears, like the sort of name that goes along with an undersea headquarters and a plot to blow up the moon.

If I'd had a lick of sense I would also have picked up a couple of Miguelanxo Prado volumes, most likely Streak of Chalk, as I had plenty of opportunities to get them signed. Unfortunately, I had to moderate a long (but rewarding!) R. Sikoryak/Paul Karasik double-bill immediately after the Prado session, and by the time I got around to looking for his comics the NBM booth was sold out and Big Planet was closed. I'll just have to pick them up online and hope I have another chance to meet Prado - he's an entertaining speaker and dinner guest as well as a tremendously talented artist.

I also got the latest issue of the International Journal of Comic Art and a couple of comics that I haven’t been able to find in Nashville, Eddie Campbell’s Batman: Order of the Beasts Elseworlds and Daniel Clowes’s Eightball no. 22, "Ice Haven." And then I left them at the in-laws', so it'll have to be a few months before I join the chorus of bloggers who have already proclaimed "Ice Haven" the single greatest achievement in the history of representational art. (And the accolades aren't stopping there! Look out, Pollack!)

Between ICAF and the Small Press Expo (not to mention time catching up with family and old friends) it was a pretty hectic weekend, but an intensely satisfying one. This year's ICAF had one of the most consistently excellent slates of guest artists and speakers that I can remember (for which all credit goes to my colleagues; I had nothing to do with it), and there's nothing quite like spending a weekend in the company of people who share my interest in the intersection of comics and academics. Where else could I sit around a crowded dinner table with renowned artists and brilliant scholars and talk about the finer points of the Beyonder?

Red in Tooth and Claw

Grant Morrison's last creator-owned project, Seaguy with Cameron Stewart, was a charming graphic novella with unfortunately low sales (though apparently not low enough to forestall a trade paperback and, one hopes, a much-needed sequel). I should think the prospects for his next project, We3, are somewhat better; this time Morrison is working with Frank Quitely, who always seems to bring out the best in him. And indeed, their latest collaboration has already proven to be ambitious. If Seaguy experimented primarily with genre and mood, then We3 takes aim squarely at the visual and narrative language of comics.

Morrison and Quitely pull off a number of impressive moves, borrowing liberally from Chris Ware, Frank Miller, Geoff Darrow, from their own silent issue of New X-Men and from Chris Weston’s work in The Filth. The result is a brash and stunning display of what talented artists can do with pictures in sequence. Morrison and Quitely are challenging themselves on almost every page, displaying absolute mastery of the comics form.

The first issue’s most ecstatic moment is a brilliantly placed double-page spread which, coming after six uninterrupted pages of claustrophobic security-camera images, perfectly conveys the characters’ newfound sense of freedom. Quitely also seems to be winking at the celebrated panel-breaking/window breaking sequence in The Dark Knight Returns, an effect that’s reinforced when the next page transforms his broken panel grid into the broken chain link fence, then back into the wall of screens and their reflections in Dr. Trendle’s eyeglasses, reestablishing the narrative in a site of rigid - but fatally ruptured - control.

Like much of Morrison’s recent work, We3 is more culturally engaged than usual, offering pointed commentaries on animal rights and American foreign policy – and yet it’s also a Wolverine comic about rogue government killers, right down to the other weapon prototypes that will no doubt produce lots of blood-soaked action. (The government project has already deployed the rats and I think we all expect to see Weapon 4 an issue or two down the road.) The comic works because it isn’t just a chilly formal experiment or a strident political screed; both aspects are situated within the context of a surprisingly conventional action story. Like any action movie, We3 begins with a pre-credits sequence showing its protagonists' standard mission procedure before a nervous general disrupts the routine and the narrative proper begins. As I’ve said before, Morrison’s best work delivers visceral entertainment as well as intellectual food for thought, and this is no exception.

I can’t say it any more enthusiastically, folks. This is the stuff comics are made of. Grant Morrison’s customary self-promotional hyperbole is, for once, not hyperbolic at all. This could be the finest work he and Quitely have ever done.

Buy this comic.

Black-Bagge Job

Peter Bagge takes on the art world in his online comic for Reason, in terms that will make even the most resilient reader check for the traces of spittle flecked across their face:

95% of what they're hyping is pure crap, yet if you dare to say as much out loud you'll be looked upon as a clueless philistine!

And perhaps you should be, if you can't say it any better than this petulant swipe at an easy yet poorly-observed target.

I have to say at the outset, I should be a much easier sell for this sort of thing. I typically don't care for minimalists or conceptualists or most of the more famous performance and installation artists (to overgeneralize terribly). I find nothing more depressing than that inevitable moment when, upon visiting one of those great museums organized along the old and increasingly rare chronological model, my tour leads me from gallery upon gallery of astonishing Dadaists and Vorticists and cubists and surrealists and pop artists into a room full of dull beige slabs or a few knotted metal cables.

I'm more than willing to entertain criticisms that conceptualism is a vacant or overvalued or even suffocating direction in contemporary art. But I'd rather that critique be a little more incisive than Bagge's frothing about "pure crap" and "nonsense" and "rackets," impotent stabs that work only if you presume your audience already agrees with you. Bagge's own subtitle acknowledges that he's belaboring the obvious, but when he criticizes the "eye-roll inducing self-indulgence" of performance art he seems not to be aware that these old chestnuts roll about as many eyes. His is the sort of piece in which art critics are bitter, elbow-patched hunchbacks, in which the art-world cognoscenti are at least a little queer ("Clay, you have a flair for decorating..."). I was amazed not to see a pair of bongos anywhere.

If the piece were only cliched I would have nodded to Johanna Draper Carlson's concise reactions and left it at that, but the criticisms go beyond Bagge's usual formless misanthropy. They're also deeply confused. At one point, Bagge restates Marcel Duchamp's critique of the aestheticizing effect of the art museum while also dismissing his "Fountain" as a "stupid thing" - and invoking the ghost of Duchamp himself to do it. (Isn't it just possible that the swooning onlookers understand the piece, that they're as in on the joke as Duchamp and Bagge? Why would they fawn if they didn't get it? Do they think it's that great a urinal?)

Bagge also ignores an important element of Duchamp's readymades, their attack on the notion of "taste" as the constituent element that separates art from not-art. That attack, of course, refutes many of Bagge's shrill claims; doesn't this artifact, purely conceptual and deliberately tasteless, say something far more significant than do the technically proficient, aesthetically vapid works of the old salons?

But, conversely, once Duchamp said it it had already been said, and little of the conceptually-driven art to emerge in his wake has been as witty or as deep. There is a serious question here about how we should evaluate this mode of art and its hold on the art world, but Bagge doesn't ask or answer it. (Neither, so far, has Brian K. Vaughan, who raises the same issue in less histrionic but not especially more nuanced terms over in current issues of Ex Machina.) A more effective dismissal, it seems to me, would engage this kind of art as art, challenge and dismantle it on its own terms.

Bagge also picks some puzzling targets. It's one thing to suggest that peformance artists, installation artists, and everybody's favorite piss-boy Andres Serrano are willfully obtuse, but by the third page his litany of "unintelligible" artists includes William Shakespeare. Apparently being produced by the NEA is reason enough to declare him the Yoko Ono of Avon.

Similarly, in one of Bagge's most bizarre digressions he takes PBS to task for airing fundraiser-month specials on Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees. Obviously he isn't railing against unintelligibility in the arts anymore (nor is it clear why appearing on PBS automatically confers upon Les Freres Gibb the status of high art; I suppose we'll be seeing "Are You Being Served?" at the next video installation, then) - he's casting about, looking for reasons why anything that public art agencies do is bad. If they focus on ideas, they're obscurantist; if they tackle political or social subject matter, they're dogmatic and elistist; if they offer the popular art for which Bagge has been clamoring, then they're panderers to boot. (Naturally, Bagge doesn't consider that public television stations might not have to pander to their audience if they received adequate funding in the first place.)

If the public sector can't get it right, who then can? Since Bagge's piece appears on Reason's website, it's unsurprising that his answer inevitably boils down to the free market. While he makes some feints towards quality as the ideal arbiter of art, that's one of the grounds on which he persistently refuses to engage the artworks he mentions. He does say, though, Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs were not simply excellent (in his view, I should add) but "commercially successful," as if the two always go hand in hand. He reminds us that Steven Spielberg and Madonna are artists, too, as if their wealth proves that no artist needs support. As Johanna says, "I'm surprised that a cartoonist whose recent bids for mainstream success (Yeah, Sweatshop) were so roundly rejected would make an argument that popularity says something important about art."

But even the artistic vision of Kabbalah-worshipping cone-wearers pales before the awesome vistas of the commercial landscape. In his last two panels, Bagge gushes over "the industrial designs on display in Sony's Tokyo showroom," the "beautiful new cars out on the streets these days" - a P.T. Cruiser and an Audi coupe - and, just for good measure, a Japanese candy wrapper. I won't disagree that consumer products can be stunningly designed, although even his own examples require the necessary and shallow intercession of hipster irony; I love the corn-syrup surrealism of the "Furuta" package that's still sitting somewhere in my belongings, but it won't be displacing Max Ernst anytime soon.

Instead of educating people about art, Bagge says, "we should instead be marveling at the countless inspired man-made objects that literally surround us, both inside and outside our own homes." It's a free-marketeer's wet dream - all the art you need, in the things you and your neighbors are buying anyway!

It's a world aswim in art, but also a world utterly devoid of it. Bagge's gallery of cars and candy wrappers contains no place for content, theme, tone, narrative, emotional affect or social context, no suggestion of humanity's place in relation to itself or the universe save behind a wheel or a wallet. It's a fantasyland without public art; it's also a dystopia with no private access to intellectual stimulation, emotional reach, or aesthetic transport.

Bagge rightly berates contemporary artists and art lovers who undervalue craft and design. But in his zeal he reduces art only to those things, becoming just another variation on the tunnel-visioned critics he despises.

Pow! Zap! Comics Aren't Just For Adults Anymore!

Michael Chabon has set the comics world all a-twitter with his call for more comics for kids at his 2004 Eisner Awards keynote speech. (Links courtesy of the ever-entertaining Fanboy Rampage.)

Perhaps surprisingly, and perhaps not, his speech has provoked a rather prickly response from pros like Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis over at Millarworld. (This at least does us the courtesy of preempting the regularly scheduled discussions about rape and child abuse.) Some of the more interesting and less defensive thoughts come from Ultimates penciller Bryan Hitch.

It's perhaps not a surpise that when Alan Moore was being Mister Innovative producing books like Watchmen he was selling far more copies than when when he became Mister Sliver Age Retrospective with ABC.

I certainly enjoyed Watchmen more than I have most of the ABC line, but let's remember: a guy smearing his shit all over Bristol boards in the eighties would sell far more copies than a comic written by Shakespeare, drawn by God, and released in 1999. Arguing quality from sales is always suspect, but it's doubly so given the time differences involved here.

That being said, Hitch has a good point about contemporary attempts to make kids' comics. When I was young, I didn't get hooked on comics written expressly for kids (well, except for one very early on, featuring a kid-friendly Thanos). I got hooked on the continuity mammoths of the Bronze Age, comics written for precocious adolescents and nostalgic adults, distinctly un-childlike comics where Speedy was a recovering addict and the Flash was guilty of murder. At age ten, my classmates and I were astonished by Terra's betrayal of the Teen Titans, a punch we never could've gotten from today's juvenilized cartoon version. By age fifteen, I was devouring Watchmen; I think I would have been faintly insulted by Tom Strong. All Hitch is really saying is that instead of pandering to what they think children want, creators should tell stories for themselves, the strongest stories they can imagine.

Those are, of course, exactly the kind of stories Chabon called for; his four-point plan is practically a recipe for Silver and Bronze Age style storytelling. His logic, like Hitch's, seems to be that if it hooked him, it can work again. Maybe that's a combination of nostalgia and wishful thinking - maybe you couldn't get kids today to care who killed Mr. Terrific; maybe it wouldn't matter unless you also changed comics' marketing, distribution, and retail. But I think you'd have a better chance of that than getting them to care about page after page of Hawkeye yammering about which supervillains he'd do.

And maybe that's why some people are getting so defensive.