The Bible, the Book of Genesis in particular, has been coming up in my daily rounds, lately. I’ve been on a Bible binge of late: read the King James Five Books of Moses, got the Wolverton illustrated version, and was just looking at some nice linoleum prints of the text in my local library.
And…R. Crumb’s long-anticipated illustrated version of the first book of the Bible, “All 50 chapters! Nothing left out!” has arrived at last. For devotees of Crumb or the good book, it’s a happy day. Crumb has played it straight, so if you are hoping that he has turned the stories into an excuse for weirding us out, you will be disappointed. If you doubt it, look at his representation of Onan in the leading image of this post: Who would have thought that coitus interruptus would be treated with such discretion by the creator of the Snoid, Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, and innumerable other phallic maniacs?
He stays very close to the text, although the words are not my favorites, but a modern translation, and he’s done a lot of research. He did take a liberty with the serpent – showing him as an upright lizard with legs rather than a snake – or did he? In his notes, he gives a convincing justification for his change from tradition.
Abraham is the patriarch to whom God makes an offer that he cannot refuse. He really can’t - declining an offer from Yahweh is not an option. Somehow, I feel that the story of Abraham and Isaacis the center of the whole convenant thing between Jehovah and the Jews. Was it really such a good deal for the Jews to be the Chosen People? It had advantages, but oy!, in the long-term? There really wasn’t a choice in the matter, maybe that’s the ultimate lesson of the story.
Which brings us up to the present time: Marek Edelman was remembered in an obituary in the New York Times yesterday. Edelman was the last survivor of the Jewish uprising – he didn’t think that word was appropriate – against the Nazis as they moved to destroy the Warsaw ghetto and murder all of its inhabitants…liquidate is the word that everyone uses. Apparently, he was prone to speaking inconvenient truths, are at least, truths as he saw them. He dismissed the word “uprising” saying it was simply the desperate attempt by a couple of hundred people to determine when they would die and how. There was not question of success. He was not keen on Israel or Zionism. He decided to remain in Poland all his life, a fact which drove some Jewish scholars of the Holocaust batty. He ridiculed the notions of heroism that people retroactively assigned to some peoples’ actions, while others, those who went quietly to their deaths, were categorized as passive. He said they only did what they could to maintain their dignity, to comfort their families for whom there was no hope at all of rescue.
For some Jews, the question of the nature of the deal they got from God rankles. “If we are the Chosen People, how could you let this happen?” Which brings up the question – Chosen for what?
For a depressing sample of scholarly venom deployed against Edelman, read these letters in Commentary from the 1980s regarding an article on Poles and Jews. Commentary is a creature of the Podhoretz gang, a bunch of Jewish former leftists who “got religion” and turned hard right. The original neo-cons.
In an earlier post, I commented on Art Spiegelman’s remark that comics aretime turned into space. Different moments in time are disposed across the page in separate units, or panels. This idea popped up again in my head as I read what John Ruskin had to say about the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an independent self-styled group of painters who were not “recognized” by the Academy. Ruskin was very sympathetic to their aims.
In a letter to the London Times in 1854, Ruskin praises the PRB by saying, “…[it] has but one principle, that of absolute, uncompromising truth in all that it does..,” and he discusses William Holman Hunt’s painting, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia in detail. Looking at the picture, it’s attention to detail is obvious and remarkable, but it struck me as somehow stiff and unrealistically staged. That’s when Spiegelman’s comment came to mind.
The Hunt painting shows us what we can never see because the elements of the world are always in motion. Not until the development of the strobe light was it possible to “freeze” motion completely, or nearly so, in a photographic image to show us the “reality” behind the blur. Anyone who has been in a disco with a strobe can testify to how bizarre and unreal the dancers look in the light, yet it is their real movement one sees.
Well, what is the real? For the medieval thinker, and those were the ones the PRB would favor, the real, the essence of something was outside of time. A Platonic ideal, not the mere appearance one percieved in everyday life. For an artist, the decision is always, shall I show how things are, or how they appear? In medieval art, the choice was for the former. For the Impressionists and Futurists, to name two, it was the latter. (Of course, each group thought it was depicting the real…)
So, in medieval art, the Idea is the real, and that’s what is shown. Figures are often not to scale – important subjects are bigger, the better to represent what they are. Perspective was not unknown, but not used much, because that was mere appearance. (The renaissance was preoccupied with mathematically precise perspective.) Different moments in time are shown in the same picture, as in my favorite from the apocalypse where we see John both receiving and eating the same book, two chronologically sequential events, in one frame. (To us moderns, it seems he’s eating one book and greedily grabbing for another!)
In later art, the juxtaposition of multi-times is often less explicit. In this famous painting of the Adoration of the Magi by Gentile de Fabriano, the (earlier) procession to seek Jesus is seen in the back of the picture, while the Magi, at their goal, are shown in front. Here, in the detail, we see the three Magi in different stages of adoration: standing, bending to the knee; and on the knees in front of the infant Saviour. It is almost like a sequence of animation frames, and the juxtaposition is intended to refer to motion and the reality of time.
Hunt’s painting shows us one moment, and one moment only. The figures are frozen as if they had been captured in movement by a strobe flash, and the artist achieves this revelation of the reality by his fidelity to truth, and his shunning of mere appearances.
Do comics, with their straightforward acceptance that the artist must depict the idea, and their more realistic way of representing time, direct us to higher truths? Does the matrix of time degrade all ideas to falsity? Is the preoccupation of The Decadents with “the moment” not a decadence, but an aspiration? What do we see?
I think that practically every thought in my muddled head since I was ten years old has been a variation on this merry-go-round of ideas…
How did I not know that Richard Sala’s Delphine No. 4, the final issue in his reworking of the Snow White story, had been published? I just happened to wander into Forbidden Planet, and there it was, with some looking, on the shelf!
The story is sort of like Snow White from the Prince’s point of view, and it’s dark, gothic, and a downer. Did you think there would be a happy ending? (That’s as much as I’ll give away.) No, Sala is into the rich soil of the real stories behind the Disney fairy tales. They are not that hard to find – just go to Brothers Grimm. You may be surprised at how goth they are! (And for a wonderful essay on fairy tales in the raw, check out Robert Darnton’s book, The Great Cat Massacre.)
Sala’s style here is at its most muted, more ”realistic,” less far-out weird than his stuff has been in the past – this suits the tone and pace of the story. His art in Delphine is like a subtle basso continuo that sets off the hysterical, shrieking, hilarious weirdness of earlier pieces like One of the Wonders of the World. It’s one long tone-poem on obsession, frustration, longing, illusion, fear, and some other not too pleasant topics.
He is a sorely under-appreciated storyteller and I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps because his influences are decidedly anachronistic, out of pace with current pop culture in spite of the work being deeply entrenched in popular culture’s folklore
I hope he’s getting the attention he deserves, but I don’t keep tabs on the comics business world. The reviewer makes a fine point when he touches on the paradox that Sala is out of sync with todays pop culture (explicit sex, vulgarity, explosions, violence, knowing irony and sarcasm…am I a crank?) while his work is “deeply entrenched in popular culture’s folklore.”
Sala doesn’t make “references” or “allusions” to “pop icons.” There’s nothing knowing or arch about him. He has absorbed vast realms of imagery and literature, and he writes and draws what he loves – in this sense, completely “in genre.” (What is his genre, though?) I see him as an exemplar of the personal mythologist, and as it happens, his myths are very sympatico with mine! A very brief and incomplete list of “influences” that I detect in reading him:
And speaking of Kafka, at his new site, Sala has an old story, Herman, the Human Mole, that brings to mind that author’s story, The Hunger Artist. (Also Nightmare Alley).
This story is in my favorite Sala vein and style, and has now supplanted Wonder of the World as my all-time favorite. It features a variation on this character from 13 O’Clock, another favorite. Outcast, Peter Lorre-, sensitive-type.
Reading this story is like diving into a maelstrom of genre-moods: noir, geek stories, tortured adolescent, loser kid, crazy misunderstood artist, mama-fixated psycho, I-was-framed-for-murder, culminating in a sick and hilarious reprise of the feral-child cum geek. Is this what artists are? Is this a self-portrait?
From the collection of Glenn Bray, on display at this Exhibition.
Wolverton wrote for the comics, for MAD Magazine, where most of his fans probably encountered him, and produced an amazing set of illustrations for the Bible published by the California church of which he was a member. Looking at his images, it’s clear he was a formative influence on many artists in the undergound comix scene, Art Crumb, among them. (See the Snoid after looking through Wolvertson’s stuff if you don’t believe me.)
When I was a boy, I read a sci-fi story about space travelers who arrived on a planet populated by giant reptilian creatures that lived for tens of thousands of years. The creatures moved so slowly that the earthlings thought that they were inanimate rocks. For their part, the reptilians were only dimly aware of the spacemen, perceiving them as transitory flicks of light moving throughout their world.
Something of the same eerie sensation applies to my dipping into the Mary Worth comic. Nothing seems to happen. Or rather, things happen, but in some other sort of time. Comic-glacial, comic-geological time. It seems that this is part, maybe all of her appeal. Dropping in for the long haul. La durée or la temps profond as the French sociologists and historians call it. Perhaps it is real time.
I knew about Mary Worth when I was a boy reading the Sunday comics, but after a glance or two, I consigned her to the realm of entertainments reserved for people from planets different from the one I lived on. I guess that’s the point – that space travel theme again. Which brings us inevitably to time and time travel.
I was struck by a phrase in this book of comics by Art Spiegelman, of Maus fame, that comics are time turned into space. Each panel in a strip represents a different moment in time, and they are spread out in space, on the page. A really interesting idea.
What of film? Time shown in the illusory space of a screen?
This brings me back to this image from an earlier post of mine about the tapistries in the Chateau d’Angers. Here we see Saint John eating the book given him by the angel Gabriel. But what is going on? There are two books! In fact, it is one book, one and the same.
In medieval art, it is common to see separate moments in time shown in the same space. They didn’t have comics! This, despite the beauty and sophistication of their visual popular culture – think of all those Bible stories in stained glass! The angel is shown handing him the book which he exhorts him to eat, and with the other hand, at a later moment, John is nibbling away at it. Almost as if it were a modern multiple exposure photograph. Or a flip-book that has been somehow frozen in time.
Jim Woodring is the latest comics artist to come to my enthusiastic attention. Though he no longer does comic strips, he is legendary for his color and black and white stories about Jim – autobiographical I guess – and Frank, a humanoid figure who wordlessly moves through a landscape that exceeds the bounds of the surreal. In fact, to use that term, “surreal,” to describe him is to sink to cliche. His stories of Frank are dreamlike and terrifying, but in a way that lacks the self-conscious arti-ness of so much surrealism, while being no less powerful. I’d say, his images smack more of what I have experienced in my rare spells of delirium, but his stories all make sense, often moral sense.
The color page below will give you an idea of the eerie weirdness and humor that “Frank” brings to the world. You can visit this link to see a faithful animation of his Frank character, but I think I like the regular old ink-on-page comics better.
The black and white page is from an issue of his “Jim” comics, and as usual, it is more structured along the lines of a wordy narrative…but of course, there is that giant talking frog! I love this story for its wit, subtlety, irony, and sly philosophy. It reminds me a lot of Italo Calvino’s story, “The Aquatic Uncle.” The mastery of tone in this page, keeping to a steady highminded satire while portraying a sexy “girl-form,” a pompous and sensitive frog…prince? philosopher? demon?…and a tense socratic dialog on fear and human potential is amazing. BRAVO!
…and gore…
Yes, somewhere there is a graduate student laboring on a Ph.D. dissertation on the comparative treatment of gore in Richard Sala, Tony Millionaire (two other of my favorites) and Woodring. Consider first, Richard Sala:
His “noir”, Edgar A. Poe-esque adventure stories are filled with hacking, stabbing, decapitation, skull crushing violence. Still, it evinces a laugh because he works within a genre and its anti-universe, always keeping it at a considerable emotional distance from us. When I see those knives flashing, or helter-skelter piles of semi-clothed dead maidens…I chuckle or leer.
Tony Millionaire goes for the grand guignol, with a devilishly funny twist. He’s not trying to scare us out of our seats. More likely, he’d like to get us up and running to the can to vomit in disgust,
even as we nearly choke for laughing. When I look at his sliced up bodies (Everything always seems to grow back fine for the next page!) and buckets of throw-up, I grimace with disgust and chortle.
Then there’s Jim Woodring. His violence is cool, often wordless and soundless. Sometimes we don’t even know what is devouring or mutilating what. Sometimes, however, it’s just straight out barbarity, but with no visual change in tone from the other actions. Consider below: Manhog observes Frank having a picnic with his dolls and grows distraught at his exclusion from the fun. He rushes in and upends Frank’s picnic spread and runs off.
Later, Frank walks alone, despondent, but he happens on the debauched Manhog sleeping. Watch him take revenge!
Is there any more clinical depiction of the savagery of human violence? It is truly disturbing, distilled to its terrible essence by the magic of the strange, ridiculous incongruity of the cartoon format.
I went to a wonderful exhibit of prints by Albrecht Durer today, including many of his most famous – The Knight, Death, and the Devil, Melancholia, and St. Jerome in his study. Looking at the detail from an image in his Apocalypse series shown above, (full image) I was struck by the forlorn aspect of this beast from hell as he vomits fire onto the world. He doesn’t want to do it, but he must. It’s his life. Laying waste to the world. Godzilla had his tragic aspect too, no?
I was also struck by the vomit imagery, so much like this visual trope that is to be found in Maakies again and again. (See the whole strip here.) It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Tony Millionaire were a fan of Durer.
And then, there is that beautiful image of the Prodigal Son at the moment when he is inspired to return to his father and beg his forgiveness. I can’t help but think that the pigs, on which Durer has lavished so much loving attention, are looking at the wayward son slyly, a little knowingly…”Oh, you’re leaving are you? Well, be gone with you. We have eating to do…“
I was much taken as well by this image of Christ before Pilate, a woodcut from his Small Passion series. I love the slightly crazy steps, rendered carefully in perspective but not like any steps I’ve seen lately. They give it a slightly dreamlike atmosphere, I think.
I was flipping through cable TV the other night, and I hit on a Spanish language crime show. It features some lean, handsome young guy with spiky hair who rides a Harley chopper and hangs out with an old, hatted, portly detective. The show, The Panther, I have since learned is based on a comic strip, and it always takes place in Mexico City. I was intrigued because it had unusual editing, used split images, and the atmospherics were highly unusual for a TV crime series - very noir.
The video sequence above is a series of stills from the first crime in the show. Apologies for the quality – I couldn’t find a clean way to get this posted.
The woman enters a large, ancient church to steal antiquities. She is surprised by a priest, and she shoots him! She delivers the loot to her boss outside, and then makes her way…where? Is that a dance show? That 60s style decor?! Who are those women watching her as she strips her nun’s habit and does her sexy dance? Why is she there?
The feel of this sequence struck me as if Bunuel had been employed doing TV serials. And the theme of the sexy, murderous nun – such imagery is lacking to us denizens of protestant countries. And she is murderous – later on in the episode she hacks a woman to death, and uses a paper cutter to decapitate a scholarly gentleman.
The episode is called “The Nun”, but it makes me think of another bloodthirsty, gothic celibate, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s creation, The Monk!)
If there are any Spanish speaking viewers out there who are familiar with this episode (no.5) please explain!
I just purchased the page from Richard Sala’s “Chuckling Whatsit” on which this panel is found. I love the two hip, NYC-type art collectors out looking for “finds” in the junkstores of the hinterland. Sala is a genius.
I am always on the lookout for sources of new stimulation, literary and visual. Sometimes this means I stumble on something that has been around for a while without my knowing about it. So it is with the comics of Tony Millionaire. He is known not so much for “graphic novels” as for a syndicated comic strip, “Maakies” that I am sure that I have seen many times – I don’t know where – and for which I now have an intense enthusiasm after reading his latest book of collected strips.
Millionaire (presumably a pen name, though he has denied it) has a style that is rich and detailed. His landscapes recall to my mind those of R. Crumb, though their style is otherwise very different. They do share an intense dedication to the possibilities of black and white ink line work and to exploiting control and detail. I also think of Windsor Mckay (Little Nemo and Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend). Another illustrator, one of my favorites, W. Heath Robinson, comes to mind, but in a recent email exchange with Millionaire, he said he’d never heard of Robinson. (“Is he funny?” he asked.)
Maakies (why the name, I dunno) is very funny, absurd, wierd, extremely vulgar, sometimes scatological…I could go on. It also veers into the literary and metaphysical with bizarre wit. I frequently exploded in laughter to tears on reading some of the strips in “With the Wrinkled Knees,” the new collection. The ones I read mostly featured a perpetually drunken crow (Drinky Crow) that seems like Heckel or Jekyll on a bender, and his Uncle Gabby, a mentally deviant (Irish?) monkey. Many of the strips play out in a nautical setting that seems lifted from hallucinations induced by 19th century searfaring stories – Melville’s “Benito Cereno”, Poe’s “Arthur Gordon Pym”, and London’s “Sea Wolf” come to mind, but you need to imagine them through the fog of psychosis or radical inebriation.
Click on the strips below to see a full-size image -
Philosophical Maakies:
Nautical Phantasy Maakies:
Surreal Maakies:
Escapist Maakies:
These strips bring up an arcane association in my mind, the 19th century novel, Atar Gull, by Eugene Sue. That story shared a nautical setting with Maakies, and it was about Gull, a captured African being transported to the slave market and his subsequent escape and adventures. The slave captain is a total opium addict – in fact, so deep is his addiction that he believes his opium dreams to be reality, and he is certain that the hellish life on board the slave ship is simply his bad dreams.
Flying like a cosmic homunculus-sperm through the universe at accelerated light-speed, Stardust, the hero of Fletcher Hanks’ comics, repeatedly saves New York City from destruction. In fact, he saves civilization, wherever it may be, from destruction. This is the male side of the superhero comics collection I have just discovered in I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets. (It includes a heroine, Fantomah, too.) These comics were produced in a brief spate of creativity in the early 1940s, and are now collected in a wonderful book that is available through the link provided above.
I have said too much already – the comics are so weird, so wonderful…I have never seen anything like them. Look for yourself. Here’s the first page from my favorite so far. (Click to enlarge it.)
declining an offer from Yahweh is not an option. Somehow, I feel that the story of Abraham and Isaac is the center of the whole convenant thing between Jehovah and the Jews. Was it really such a good deal for the Jews to be the Chosen People? It had advantages, but oy!, in the long-term? There really wasn’t a choice in the matter, maybe that’s the ultimate lesson of the story.
Posted by lichanos 
Posted by lichanos 
Posted by lichanos 
