Narratives and panels and plots...ah hah...

I mentioned my distaste for a number of recent mainstream comics, in the post on American Splendor. Of course my reading habits have changed since I was a kid and I would no longer go into a comic book store and steal the comics I couldn't afford to buy (just had to have them), but the list of titles I would avoid like the plague has never been so large. One of the reasons I hate a lot of today's stuff is the colouring, it is just plain horrible. I think Brian (Mom's Cancer) Fies described much of it as 'garish', that is certainly an apt description. I really find it offensive, and I just won't read stuff that looks like that. There is no excuse for it.

That said, I'm also put of by all those muscles, and not just on the men, some of the sweater-meat has bulging man-muscle behind it, it's very scary.

I think though, it is more often the ridiculous writing that really grinds my gears, I just put the comics down or throw them across the room.

Thankfully, by allowing Yoshinori Natsume some creative freedom, Batman, Death Mask, avoids all three of my bette-noirs, and I have just been in Seventh Heaven pouring over the work. It is, for me, not just the best Batman in a long time, but one of the best comics I have ever read.

I was always going to be hooked by this page. I am interested in masks, not just literal masks but masks as a metaphor. Of course here, in Edinburgh, we had two famous historical 'masked' figures, Deacon Brodie, and his literary likeness, Edward Hyde. This was looking very promising.

The moment I saw the cover I recognised the creator's name as the man behind Togari, and when I realised that the comic was to be a real manga/Batman hybrid, uncoloured and with each page reading right to left, I had to have it (relax, I bought it). I was not disappointed, right from the start the symmetry of the work, its easy flow, hooked me. Even familiar material seemed more exotic and the reading pattern seemed clearer than much of the western comics that I am supposed to be more easily familiar with.

The Batman origin again? Yes, but look how well told it is; in 4 panels. See how large the first panel is, it's around half the page. It is not the costumed Batman that makes the most impact, it is the moment of his birth in the young boy above. It is a sombre scene that is depicted and even if the grown man has put the memories of that dark night behind him - it must forever weigh heavily on his psyche.

I read somewhere that some mainstream comic editors want to remove thought balloons from comics. That has to be the stupidest idea I have ever heard mooted. One of the triumphs of the best manga, and best Western comics (like American Splendor and Ganges), is the inner-life of the characters, the inner thoughts that can propel them through page after page of wordless stories. And Batman, himself is forever toiling with his past and his inner-demons. Here (above), Batman ruminates on the existence of super villains, many of whom appeared after Batman was created. Would they have existed to threaten Gotham if Batman wasn't around?

I hope the Japanese-style layout will not put anyone off buying the comic, because it certainly does not detract from understanding the story; quite the reverse, in my opinion it aids the reader. For instance, take a look not at the way the story is to be read, but how the story is read with the drawings working in tandem with the words; illustrated in the pages above. The flow works quite naturally and this is not always the case with today's Western comics which often mistake wordiness, crammed in all over the place, for sophistication.

We are clearly in the hands of a master of the genre here. It's not down to chance that I enjoyed this story, take a closer look at the way the reader is being led through the adventure.

This is, I think, an important element in any story. An appeal to the senses. One of the reasons The Portrait of Dorian Gray was frowned upon was because Wilde mentioned the unmentionable; 'smells'. It doesn't matter that the smells were pleasant, well, some of them, just that they were smells (coincidentally, there is much talk of masks in that story 'Dorian lit a cigarette and walked over to the glass and glanced into it. He could see the reflection of Victor’s face perfectly. It was like a placid mask of servility. There was nothing to be afraid of, there. Yet he thought it best to be on his guard'.). There is a lot of noise in your average mainstream western comic book, but that is all. If thinking is cut out of the things there will be very little left in, apart from the over-muscled, garishly-coloured drawings, that is.

Of course it helps that the character, Batman, is strong enough to be reinterpreted in this manner. His resurrection over and over again is testament to his durability. Indeed, Bob Kane's creation seems bulletproof, given that not even the camp TV shows and dire Batmovies could sink him.

My other favourite Batman tales are, in their own way, as experimental as Death Mask, and also involve reinventions and earlier incarnations of the character. Batman, The Golden Streets of Gotham, published by DC Comics/Elseworlds imprint and written by Jen Van Meter was one story that avoided all the horrors I mentioned in the first paragraph above, and the art by Cliff Chiang and Tommy Lee Edwards, the Colouring by Dave Stewart and lettering by John Workman all blended together to form a coherent work that was pleasing on so many levels.

This is a page of the original art, the coloured version is below. You can buy this, and other pages at this link HERE. Click for a lovely big view of this page.

One of my other all-time favourites is Eddie Campbell's spellbinding work, Batman, and the Order of Beasts. The comic is drawn, painted and co-written by Eddie Campbell and Daren White. I came across the comic after reading a review of it by someone who didn't like the artwork. It was a very strange review to read because I was looking at marvelous drawings from the book, and reading this oddly juxtaposed text telling me they weren't very good. What I was seeing was unrelated to what I was reading. Of course I realised that the reviewer was really a fan of the horrible stuff mentioned in paragraph one, above, so I knew then that The Order of the Beasts, was the kind of comic I would like.

All this has all helped me decide without doubt what I like and what I don't like in this artistic medium. I want drawings that please me. I want a good story well-told. And I don't mind experimentation. What I don't want is comic book cliche. I don't want muscle-bound anatomically correct (yeah right) drawings of 'money-shots'. I don't want a comic that wants so much to be a movie that it has forgotten to tell me a story. I don't necessarily like franchised characters but, I will read them when the writers and artists are given freedom to produce their very individualistic take on the character.

I would certainly like to see more of the Batman imagined by Scott Hampton and by Tim Sale, for the Solo series; which was a pretty great series, by the way. A Solo collection would be pretty nifty.

Just to round things off. Here is a particularly horrible illustration of what I don't like. This comic book, Megas, by Virgin, has every quality I particularly dislike; it is garishly coloured, and the panels and therefore the narritive is confused, you can see that from the first couple of pages.

However, I don't need the garish colouring to put me off, I can take an equal dislike to a black and white story, if the panels and the story make little or no sense to me. Resurection, by Oni, is an example of that, and it is particularly annoying because the cover promises so much. It's a really good cover.

That really irks me. There must be some alternative to cramming all that text into that space. There is a nice post about dialogue on the Comics Comics blog, and some of this crosses into territory that Derik A. Badman covers in Panels, Pictures and Text in comics.

There is a very good essay you can download in pdf form, on panels, covering the latest thoughts on this matter by Neil Cohn over at his site. I'd urge you to download and read more of his material. Meanwhile, I'd like you to go here, if you have the time, to enjoy the perfectly formed Lost and Found, featuring Glen Ganges, by Kevin Huizenga, and after you enjoy the story, nip out and buy his latest comic, Ganges 2.

Now that's a nice clean layout with neat clear writing - and it is visually stimulating. Not a muscle-clod twit in tights or a pair of unaturally large hooters in sight. Who would have thought...

More Splendor

This is great. If you checked out the post below and the comments section, you'll know that WIZZYWIG creator, Ed Piskor has kindly put his breakdowns and unlettered pages from Kirkus, his recent collaboration with Harvey Pekar from the new American Splendor, (American Splendor, Season 2, # 1, published by Vertigo) online. This is a must-see for all beginning cartoonists, and even old farts like me can learn things from looking at the work. Marvelous stuff. Click here to pop over and see the pages.

Ed Piskor's pages from the story Kirkus, featured in American Splendor, Season 2, # 1, from Vertigo.

Three Big Rousing Cheers for American Splendor

Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, with DC since 2006, has begun a new run of 4 comics with the Vertigo (go get the nifty poster) imprint. It's 30 years and a few publishers since Harvey began creating his masterpiece, and I can't tell you how much joy reading this one brought me, especially since I read it after I suffered looking over some of the most depressing mainstream comics I have ever seen. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you I just couldn't read the things; they were bewilderingly bad - but that's for another post; today we are celebrating the one shining clear beacon amid a veritable sea of wasted paper.

Two things struck me about the American Splendor comic, that it appears to be better value than any other comic simply because so much good observation is crammed into it, and the stories are simply so darned good, grown-up, reading, and I really, really, prefer to see a mixture of artistic styles of the one subject, rather than one 'approved' version.

The story I particularly enjoyed though was the one were Harvey teamed with the illustrator Ed Piskor, with whom he worked on the graphic novel Macedonia, (along with Heather Robertson) again, to have a go at the critic who made some ill-informed critiques of that publication. It's a good old Harvey Pekar rant and the man is totally right; graphic novels and for that matter comics too, can be polemics, they can be 'lectures' and didactic and why shouldn't a writer take a position when they feel moved to do so? As Harvey says, 'You can do anything with words and pictures'.

Product Design

Back soon. Hey Bren, I get the Calcutta thing now.

All Cartoons are Art - except yours

There is no dispute about whether or not Cartoons are art. There never was. Cartoons are visual art by any definition:

"The most common usage of the word "art," which rose to prominence after 1750, is understood to denote skill used to produce an aesthetic result.[8] Britannica Online defines it as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art

The dispute about cartoons is whether or not they are 'good' art, and given that the cartoon gets over that hurdle, whether or not it is 'low art'. These archaic notions still exist and they matter, in the Art World, if nowhere else.

My position is simple, my cartoons are 'good' art - your cartoons are not. The reason I can say this with confidence is because I am Roderick McKie, BA (hons) Open, Dip HE, BA (Stirl), and I am telling you that in my considered opinion, my cartoons are 'good' art.

Now, before we go any further let me remind you that R.D Laing and Noam Chomsky warned you about letting 'experts' like me tell you things that you might not believe coming from someone else other than an 'expert' like me - don't believe it just because I told you so. Although it happens to be true.

Although all cartoons are art, it would be wrong to argue that all cartoons are 'good' art because they simply are not. Some cartoons are not even good enough to be 'bad' art.

The cartoonist Herge, creator of Tintin produced 'good' art, and this would be the point at which we academics would argue over 'public' and 'private' consumption and the purpose of production and class issues and the high and low debate, but I'm going to spare you that argument and I'm going to get right to the heart of everything that 'ART' is about; money:

An original piece of artwork from the popular comic Tintin has sold at a Paris auction for a record price of €764,200 ($1.23 million Cdn).
Auction house Artcurial announced Sunday that a 1932 oil painting, created for the cover of Tintin in America, was sold on Saturday, smashing the world record for an original comic book work.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2008/03/30/tintin-coverart-record.html

Many thanks to Dirk Deppey for highlighting this nugget on Journalista

That cartoon sold for about $1,000,000 (£500,000) then, so somebody clearly thought it was 'good' art, but quite what that means I wouldn't want to guess; it could simply mean they think the drawing is a going to go up in value, but that has really always been what art is about, its worth, its value is what someone is prepared to pay for it.

The original cover art for Robert Crumb's underground comic, Mr Natural #1, sold for $101,575, (around £50,000) making it the first Crumb original to break the $100,000 barrier. And Charles Schultz's baseball-themed Sunday page, dated April 10, 1955, realized $113,525 (about £65,000).

More recent comic book art isn't doing to shabbily either, a page from The Killing Joke by Brian Bolland brought $31,070 (around £15,000) and as Brian recently redrew some pages for the new revised re-coloured version, a wise art investor or collector might think those new pages would prove their worth over time.

Now me, I have always collected cartoon art. I began way back in the 1980s by swapping original drawings with my friends and colleagues, then I started buying the cartoons I liked because I have always preferred having original art on the walls, rather than a copy or a print. It's all about personal taste.

So, let me go over this once again just so we are perfectly clear about it, all cartoons are art, but not all cartoons are 'good' art. Charles Schulz's original comic strips sell for a lot of money, but then he was the only cartoonist to have a retrospective at the Louvre. Because Charles Schulz's originals are good art and sell for a lot of money, it does not follow that the cartoons of Joe Bloggs are good art.

And let me once again make this clear: MY cartoons are art, your cartoons are NOT art, so if I ever contact you to swap cartoons or even offer to buy one of yours don't go thinking you can jack-up the price because I think your cartoons are art - your cartoons are NOT art, so you can let me have the thing pretty cheap, maybe even for the exposure.

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Which brings us neatly to the 2008 Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival, which runs from the 18th - 20th April. The festival has been held there since 2003 and this time this international event, which attracts around 40 full-time, professional cartoonists and caricaturists from the UK and abroad, promises to be a lulu (Matt Buck told me so).

You shouldn't hesitate and you have to go to this event. If you have never seen cartoonists in the wild, in a pack (actually we call them a 'pen') then you are in for a real treat.

You know, these events can be a little special, because they remind us all how important cartoons can be, and that's valuable. Every so often I have a small crisis about being a cartoonist. Actually, that isn't true, what I have a crisis about is being 'just a cartoonist','just a freelance cartoonist', the lowest of the low on the artistic scale.

And no wonder, ten years and more after they have died, the man in the pub still talks fondly about his favourite syndicated comic strip artist, and even wonders if you know them and if they live nearby. Such talk often sets them off on a nostalgic romp through a past peppered with humour, favourite comic books, comic strips and radio shows and comedy series and jokes they have enjoyed, and even, yes, even cartoons that made them laugh so hard they nearly choked, but never, never, do they remember the name of the gag cartoonist who caused them that involuntary ejaculation.

Sometimes, for my sins, in my darkest moments, when I'm sitting drawing into the wee small hours, and that big black dog sneaks into my silence and curls up into a ball at my feet to lick my between my toes, I think that the lowest rung on the ladder of art is just exactly where we cartoonists deserve to be. After all, it is a ridiculous 'profession' is it not? Isn't the cartoonist just a modern day Court Jester? Isn't he or she just a Fool, a harmless idiot, whose sole purpose is to distract the King and the Court from the loftier problems of politics and the ghastly truth of real life? Isn't the lowly cartoonist, this imbecile falling over to amuse the crowd, beating itself about the head with a pig's bladder on a stick, the most absurd figure you can imagine in this status, fame and wealth-obsessed time in which we live?

So what are we to believe - that this strange, lonely creature that labours long hours, often at the expense of its health and eyesight, and often for little money and little or no attention or acclaim, and at times even in complete anonymity - that it does so simply to make us laugh, to amuse us, to lighten our burden?

Well, yes, hard as it may be to believe, all the evidence points to that being the simple truth. The lowly cartoonist doesn't do this job for fame. They moan only amongst ourselves about payments overdue, but still produce more work, and they sit quietly by watching helplessly from a distance when misguided publications drop their cartoon quotas. They quietly seethe and seem to see it all, all of life, as material for more cartoons. They are often so anonymous as to be invisible, a hint, a myth, a ghost that still haunts publications as old as the history of cartooning, practising their arcane art to do with parchment, sharpened quills, and bull's blood.

But something new is beginning to happen. Cartoonists are in the news, either because Herge's painting of a Tintin cover has sold for £500,000, or because Peanuts strip has fetched six figures or because Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Rodrick Rules, is sitting up there at the top of the Best Sellers chart, or because the Education Department of yet another country has introduced graphic novels into its curriculum. The currency of the lowly cartoonist has never been so high, and that is bringing the work of these shy retiring creatures and even the cartoonists themselves, more and more into the public gaze in the form of exhibitions and talks and lectures and blogcasts, et al.

One such event is this one taking place in Shrewsbury from April the 18th -20th, and it presents an opportunity to get an early look at these strange humour-makers before, despite their best efforts to stay behind the scenes, they lose their anonymity and become tomorrows superstars artists.