Favorites: All-Star Superman

All-Star Superman Vols. 1 & 2Grant Morrison, writer Frank Quitely, artist DC, 2008-2010, believe it or not 160 pages each $12.99 each

The cheeky thing to say about the brand-new out-of-continuity world Grant Morrison constructed to house his idea of the ideal Superman story is that it's very much like the DC Universe we already know, but without backgrounds. Like John Cassaday, another all-time great superhero artist currently working, Frank Quitely isn't one for filling in what's going on behind the action. One wonders what he'd do with a manga-style studio set-up, with a team of young, hungry Glaswegians diligently constructing a photo-ref Metropolis for his brawny, beady-eyed men and leggy, lippy women to inhabit.

But, y'know, whatever. So walls and skyscrapers tend to be flat, featureless rectangles. Why not give colorist/digital inker Jamie Grant big, wide-open canvases for his sullen sunset-reds and bubblegum neon-purples and beatific sky-blues? We're not quite in Lynn Varley Dark Knight Strikes Again territory here, but the luminous, futuristic rainbow sheen Grant gives so much of the space of each page--not to mention the outfits of Superman, Leo Quintum, Lex Luthor, Samson & Atlas, Krull, the Kryptonians and Kandorians, Super-Lois, and so on--ends up being a huge part of the book's visual appeal. And thematically resonant to boot! Morrison's Superman all but radiates positivity and peace, from the covers' Buddha smiles on down; a glance at the colors on any given page indicates that whatever else is in store, it's gonna be bright.

Moreover, why not focus on bringing to life the physical business that carries so much of the weight of Morrison's writing? The relative strengths and deficiencies of his various collaborators in this regard (or, if you prefer, of Morrison, in terms of accommodating said collaborators) has been much discussed, so we can probably take it as read. But when I think of this series, I think of those little physical beats first and foremost. Samson's little hop-step as he tosses a killer dino-person into space while saying "Yo-ho, Superman!"...Jimmy Olsen's girlfriend Lucy's bent leg as she sits on the floor watching TV just before propositioning him...clumsy, oafish Clark Kent bumping into an angry dude just to get him out of the way of falling debris...the Black-K-corrupted Superman quietly crunching the corner of his desk with his bare hands...Doomsday-Jimmy literally lifting himself up off the ground to better pound Evil Superman's head into the concrete...the way super-powered Lex Luthor shoulders up against a crunching truck as it crashes into him...the sidelong look on Leo Quintum's face as he warns Superman he could be "the Devil himself"...that wonderful sequence where Superman takes a break to rescue a suicidal goth...Lois Lane's hair at pretty much every instant...You could go whole runs, good runs, of other superhero comics and be sustained only by only one or two such magical moments. (In Superman terms, I'm a big fan of that climactic "I hate you" in the Johns/Busiek/Woods/Guedes Up, Up & Away!) This series has several per issue.

And the story is a fine one. Again, it's common knowledge that rather than retelling Superman's origin (a task it relegates to a single page) or frog-marching us through a souped-up celebration of the Man of Steel's underrated rogues gallery (the weapon of choice for Geoff Johns's equally underrated Action Comics run), All-Star Superman pits its title character, directly or indirectly, against an array of Superman manques. The key is that Superman alternately trounces the bad ones and betters the good ones not through his superior but morally neutral brains or brawn, though he has both in spades, but through his noblest qualities: Creativity, cooperation, kindness, selflessness, optimism, love for his family and friends. I suppose it's no secret that for Morrison, the ultimate superpower of his superheroes is "awesomeness," but Superman's awesomeness here is much different than that of, say, Morrison's Batman. Batman's the guy you wanna be; Superman's the guy you know you ought to be, if only you could. The decency fantasy writ large.

Meanwhile, bubbling along in the background are the usual Morrisonian mysteries. Pick this thing apart (mostly by focusing on, again, Quitely's work with character design and body language) and you can maybe tease out the secret identity of Leo Quintum, the future of both Superman and Lex Luthor, assorted connections to Morrison's other DC work, and so on. But the nice thing is that you don't have to do any of that. Morrison's work tends to reward repeat readings because it doesn't beat you about the head and neck with everything it has to offer the first time around. You can tune in for the upbeat, exciting adventure comic--a clever, contemporary update on the old puzzle/game/make-believe '60s mode of Superman storytelling in lieu of today's ultraviolence, but with enough punching to keep it entertaining (sorry, Bryan Singer). But you can come back to peer at the meticulous construction of the thing, or Morrison's deft pointillist scripting, or the clues, or any other single element, like the way that when I listen to "Once in a Lifetime" I'll focus on just the rhythm guitar, or just the drums. Pretty much no matter what you choose to concentrate on, it's just a wonderfully pleasurable comic to read.

Favorites: Blankets, plus a Tori Amos video

[This is a reconstructed post from Google Cache; originally posted by Sean!] Greetings, fans of savagery! Been a long time since I posted here, and I’m barely doing so now, even. I just wanted to direct your attention to an interview I did with Tom Spurgeon as part of The Comics Reporter’s holiday interview series on the Books of the ’00s. Mine was about Craig Thompson’s Blankets, a book I’d eventually have gotten around to writing about for my Favorites series here at SC. So if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in, check it out.

On a semi-related note, here’s Tori Amos performing her song “Bells for Her” in 1994 — it’s both my favorite Tori Amos song and my favorite song that uses the word “blankets.” Synergy!

[youtube]ZPH80CpBYwI[/youtube]

Favorites: The Dark Knight Strikes Again

Lara Years ago I came across an eye-opening quote from Jaron Lanier in the liner notes of the reissued Gary Numan album The Pleasure Principle. Google reveals that it was pulled from this Wired essay. Here's what it said:

"Style used to be, in part, a record of the technological limitations of the media of each period. The sound of The Beatles was the sound of what you could do if you pushed a '60s-era recording studio absolutely as far as it could go. Artists long for limitations; excessive freedom casts us into a vacuum. We are vulnerable to becoming jittery and aimless, like children with nothing to do. That is why narrow simulations of 'vintage' music synthesizers are hotter right now than more flexible and powerful machines. Digital artists also face constraints in their tools, of course, but often these constraints are so distant, scattered, and rapidly changing that they can't be pushed against in a sustained way."

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Lanier wrote that in 1997. I'm actually not sure which vintage-synth resurgence he was talking about, unless you count the Rentals or something (although everyone and their grandfather was namechecking Gary Numan back then, which was sort of the point of including the quote in the liner notes. Maybe he meant Boards of Canada?).

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But golly, it sure seems prescient now, huh? Here we are, in the post-electroclash, post-Neptunes, post-DFA era. The hot indie-rock microgenre is glo-fi, which sounds like playing a cassette of your favorite shiny happy pop song when you were three years old after it's sat in the sun-cooked tape deck of your mom's Buick for about 20 years. And my single favorite musical moment of last year, as harrowing as those songs are soothing, was the part of the universally acclaimed Portishead comeback album that sounded exactly like something from a John Carpenter film score. (It's at the 3:51 mark. It's awesome, isn't it?)

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And that's just on the music end. Visually? Take a look at Heavy Light, a show at the Deitch Gallery this summer featuring a murderers' row of video artist specializing in primary-color overload and technique that doesn't just accentuate but revels in its own limitations. Foremost among them, at least for us comics folks, is Ben Jones, member of the hugely influential underground collective Paper Rad and recent reinterpreter of the massively mainstream The Simpsons and Where the Wild Things Are. But the ones with the widest cultural import at the moment are Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of the astonishingly funny and bizarre Adult Swim series Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!. Their color palette is garish, their digital manipulations are knowingly crude, and their analog experiments are even more so. When they combine the three, god help us all. And let's not forget Wareheim's unforgettable, magisterially NSFW collaboration with fellow Heavy Light contributor and Gary Panter collaborator Devin Flynn.

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Yeah, most of these guys are playing it either for laughs or for sheer mind-melting overload, but I think there's frequently beauty in there to rival what some of the musicians are doing. (Click again on that first Ben Jones link.) And (thank you Internet God) this amazing video by Peppermelon shows that you can do action, awe, even sensuality with this aesthetic. The rawness, the brightness, the willingness to let the seams show--it all gives you something to push against again.

Fight

When I've written about The Dark Knight Strikes Again I've been fond of saying it was years ahead of its time. Sometime in the past week and a half or so, there was a day when I was listened to Washed Out at work, then came home and stumbled across that Deitch show link in an old bookmark, then watched an episode of Tim & Eric, then came across that Ben Jones WTWTA strip--and suddenly I realized I was right! Not that it matters--at all--whether or not Miller and Varley have any real continuity with any of this material. They certainly didn't get there before Paper Rad, unless I'm wildly mistaken. But then half the fun of DKSA is spotting all the stuff Miller does, from naked newscasters to superheroes ruling the earth rather than just guarding it, seemingly without realizing someone's done it first. What difference would that make? Meanwhile, in all the off-the-beaten-path references Frank Santoro has cited during the production of his Ben Jones collaboration Cold Heat--essentially a glo-fi comic book--I haven't heard word one about this book. But I'm not saying Miller & Varley paved the way for anything. I'm saying that when Miller abandoned his chops (and, for the most part, backgrounds!) for the down and dirty styles he (thought he) saw at SPX, and when Varley decided to use photoshop to call attention to itself rather than to create a simulacrum of something else, they were using the same tools, tapping the same vein, seeking the same sense of excitement, discovery, and trailblazing as these newer movements.

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I've also been fond of likening DKSA to proto-punk, taking a cue from Tony Millionaire's jacket-wrap blurb: "Miller has done for comics what the Ramones et al have done for music. This book looks like it was done by a guy with a pen and his girlfriend on an iMac." The idea is that it's raw, it's loud, it's brash, it doesn't have time for the usual niceties--it's getting comics back to their primal pulp roots. I spoke to Miller several times during and following the release of the book, one time for print, and he said as much. (I certainly never would have bought the cockamamie idea that this thing was some sort of corporate cash-grab even if he'd never said word one.) He even mentioned to me his belief that the brightly colored costumes of the early superheroes served mainly the dual purpose of a) telling them apart from one another, and b) proving they weren't naked, so even his thinking in historical terms had him ready to peel back from realism as a form of reclamation. And of course it's not exactly like the story was at all subtle in this regard: Batman and his army came back to overthrow the dictators that kept us fat and happy and turned the superheroes into boring wimps. But ultimately the punk comparisons were just a little off. Born less of despair than of delight, filled less with anger than with joy, The Dark Knight Strikes Again anticipated a way of doing things that is not intended to look or sound effortless, that draws attention to its own construction, but which--with every pixelization and artifact, with every crayolafied visual and left-in glitch, with every burbly synth and sky-bright color--pushes against that construction and springs out into something wild and wonderful.

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The funniest comic I've ever read: Boy's Club #3

Boy's Club #3Matt Furie, writer/artist Buenaventura Press, 2009 40 pages $4.95 Buy it from Buenaventura Press

It might seem premature to cover a comic I read for the first time a little over a week ago in my "Favorites" series. It might be premature—if that comic weren't Boy's Club #3. Find out why I'm breakin' all the rules after the jump.

Two Fridays ago some friends and I gathered 'round the flatscreen for a drunken, junk-food-laden, back-to-back marathon viewing of Crank 2: High Voltage, RoboCop, and Road House. At least, that was the plan. Unfortunately we're not as young and irresponsible as we once were, so fully half the group punched out after the first (AMAZING, SEE IT RIGHT NOW) movie. By the time we got through RoboCop there were only four of us left, and none of us felt that watching Dalton clean up the small town of Jasper, Missouri in a quiet little quartet would do the late Patrick Swayze justice. So we called it a night, our grand plan abandoned.

Beery, belchy, and bloated, in addition to just plain disappointed, I spent 45 minutes in a livery cab slowly winding it sway down the West Side of Manhattan while playing Christian contemporary music on the radio, barely making the late-night "drunk train" back to Long Island. I finally get home and start staggering up the stairs when I notice a package from Buenaventura Press. Inside was the latest issue of Matt Furie's Boy's Club. I was not about to delay that particular gratification no matter how badly I let down the ghost of Patrick Swayze earlier in the evening, and so, choosing to kill two birds with one stone, I brought it with me for a little bathroom reading.

A few minutes later I'm sitting there, my body literally convulsing with suppressed laughter. I'm trying desperately not to just crack up, thus waking my sleeping wife and causing her to wonder what the hell it is I'm doing in the bathroom at two in the morning that's giving me the giggles. The second I realized what the story of the issue was about, whoa man, I could barely stand it. Whatever else went wrong that night, Boy's Club #3 went very, very right.

If you've never come across it before, Boy's Club is an irregularly produced humor comic chronicling the misadventures of four muppet-like roommates: Pepe, the big eater; Brett, the dancing machine; Landwolf, the party animal; and Andy, the funnyman. They drink, they do drugs, they play video games, they eat junk food and watch TV, they speak in catchphrases, they pull pranks on each other involving nudity and bodily functions, they sit around doing nothing in particular--they are, essentially, me and my roommates from 1997-2000. Furie's line is as unadorned as his character designs are rock-solid and reliably funny. Their simplicity allows nuances to shine, so he's able to capture just the right pose for a goofy dance or just the right disgusted facial expression in reaction to foot-fetish porn. Their simplicity also makes the strip's frequent psychedelic explosions truly mindblowing in their hyperrealistic detail. The combination is stupid like a fox, at once a celebration of idiocy and a ferociously funny satire of the culture that encourages it.

When I reviewed Boy's Club #1 I called it "one of the funniest comic books I've ever read." When I reviewed Boy's Club #2 I said "I like it even better than the first issue." Well, I like Boy's Club #3 best of all. In other words, Boy's Club #3 is the funniest comic book I've ever read. What puts it over the top compared to its predecessors? I'd say it's the shaggy-dog story that ties this issue together. In the past, Boy's Club issues consisted of stand-alone strips. Some were little vignettes of the Club's dissolute life of sloth and shenanigans...

Others were hallucinatory drug-induced freakouts...

A lot were riffs on cheesy, disposable pop-culture glossolalia...

And still others were clever tweaks of reader expectations using the basic mechanics of the comic's simple six-panel grid...

Boy's Club #3 has all that in spades, and more: It has a story that connects every sub-strip into a cohesive whole.

A story about a giant turd.

I'm not going to spoil whose turd it is, what happens to it, or even what almost happens to it. I'll simply say that an actual Boy's Club story could have been a fun-sapping disaster, but instead it just brings out more of what I love about these characters and this concept. Now I realize they don't have to be relegated to one page gags—they can do things or interact over a period of time and still be just as funny as they are in short bursts. Letting them live out a story for the length of a comic makes them even more reminiscent of the embarrassing, hilarious, gloriously stupid things I myself lived out in my day.

Boy's Club #3 is like the Side B of Abbey Road of poop jokes. Buy three copies--one to read, one to lend out, and one to leave in the bathroom.

Favorites: The Diary of a Teenage Girl

PhotobucketThe Diary of a Teenage GirlPhoebe Gloeckner, writer/artist Frog, Ltd., 2002 312 pages $22.95

Heartbreak and rage: that's what I feel when I read this book. It's the story of one Minnie Goetze, a 15-year-old girl growing up in '70s San Francisco, doing so in large part by having sex with her alcoholic mother's adult boyfriend and, as time goes by, through various other increasingly drug-fueled sexual encounters. There are a couple of noteworthy tricks to the book, and I talk about them after the jump... There are a couple of tricks to The Diary of a Teenage Girl. The first is that "Minnie Goetze" is Phoebe Gloeckner. Gloeckner doesn't so much deny that the book is autobiographical as question the validity of the very notion of autobiography, but I mean, that's a photo of teenage Phoebe Gloeckner on the cover, what can I say. Does it matter, more than in just a lurid/tabloid way? I think it does a bit, in that you can then see the book not just as a novelistic chronicle of a precocious teenager's troubled adolescence but as a product of that adolescence, and of the subsequent lived experience of its author. It also goes a long way toward explaining how perfectly Gloeckner is so able to capture teenagedom's unique combination of acute self-awareness and total cluelessness, its passion for physical pleasure and mental/emotional inability to process that pleasure's ramifications: Presumably, a lot of this is lifted from an actual diary of an actual teenage girl.

The second trick is that the book is a hybrid, "An Account in Words and Pictures" as the subtitle puts it. The bulk of the book is prose, a series of entries from the titular diary. That material is the voice of 15-year-old Minnie, pure and simple. Though she frequently addresses an imaginary audience in those entries, they really have an audience of one, Minnie herself, and they're where you get her unfiltered in-the-moment understanding of what is going on in her life. Then there are doodles and full-fledged, underground-style comics created by 15-year-old Minnie (actually 15-year-old Phoebe) interspersed throughout, revealing how Minnie is processing her experiences into art, just like any artist would. (At 15 she could already draw the pants off a lot of underground cartoonists, by the way).

Next there are illustrations by the grown-up Gloeckner (we never have a sense of the presence of a grown-up "Minnie"), sometimes presented as spot illos, other times receiving a full Victorian-style page with a caption beneath it. Here is where the current, adult author inserts herself, crafting psychologically subjective images of whatever is going in the narrative. Sometimes they're just impeccably drawn portraits of the characters ("Ricky Ricky Ricky Wasserman, that exquisitely handsome boy") or doodles of the minutiae and marginalia of Minnie's life and mental environment ("the image of the dinosaur that is travelling through space right now"). Other times they're stylized for effect, highlighting the venality and ridiculousness of Minnie's situation with satirical savagery. A favorite weapon in Gloeckner's artistic arsenal is to exaggerate the size of Minnie and her teenage friends' heads in proportion to their body, or exaggerating the size and fleshiness of Monroe, Minnie's adult lover, in proportion to Minnie--emphasizing the fact that for all her intelligence and sexual experience, Minnie is a child, often with a child's way of relating to the world. (It's easy to understand the implication of her near-constant crying before and after liaisons with Monroe, or while there's just as much of a thematic connection between her sexual and pharmacological voraciousness with her sweet-tooth as there is with the alcoholism and drug use of her mother and Monroe himself.)

Finally there are the comics, which is why I'm talking about this book on this site to begin with. This, again, is adult Gloeckner expressing herself, but this time with the dispassionate yet brutally condemnatory eye of reportage--a Joe Sacco of Polk Street, right down to the formidable chops. (Gloeckner worked as a medical illustrator, which helps explain images like these--"exceptionally unsafe for work," as the site warns.) Using a couple of simple grid templates and relying on few illustrative tricks except exceptional craft, the comic sequences generally focus not on the truly disturbing moments in her life, the statutory rape and the heroin--for that, see Gloeckner's first book, the collection A Child's Life--nor on the girly teenage fun stuff that pops up in the illustrations and prose with just as much frequency as the sordid material. Rather they depict the run-of-the-mill not-right-ness of her everyday life. A mother who parties with a lawyer they've nicknamed "Michael Cocaine" in front of Minnie and her sister, though he'd never do so in front of his own kids. A married man Minnie's friend Kimmie babysits for, getting them high and driving to a hotel to have sex with them. Various men, from family friends to upperclassmen, making comments about Minnie that are just this side of uncomfortable and inappropriate. Minnie's mischievous antics around Monroe, Monroe's dismissiveness and emotional unavailability and predation toward Minnie. There's a bravura, wordless sequence where Monroe takes Minnie and Kimmie to the beach, and as we and Minnie watch, Monroe seduces her friend. Another knockout where Minnie and the girl she falls in love with, Tabatha, smoke a joint that Tabatha then tells Minnie was laced with angel dust, the neat grid of the comic giving way with a page-turn to a midnight-black splash page peppered with psychedelic non sequitur images (the dinosaur travelling through space makes a return appearance), evoking the mystery and terror of chemically blowing a mind that isn't nearly finished growing on its own.

It's not easy material, that's for sure. But it's warm and detail-driven and just so, so smart, even at its most potentially sensationalistic. And it's rich, extraordinarily so. The main storyline is devastating, no doubt--this time around reading the book, I found myself getting physically nauseated when Minnie's diary falls into the wrong hands, the same way I felt when I had a similar experience as a teenager; meanwhile my anger and disgust for Monroe and Minnie's neglectful (or outwardly abusive, depending on how charitable you feel like being) mother were almost physical as well, as was my delight in reaching the book's final illustration/caption combo (you'll enjoy it when you get there, too). But you can just as easily spend a read-through focusing on, say, the contrasting qualities of the illustrated material like I did above. Or the development of Chuck and Pascal, the two characters who genuinely appear to have Minnie's best interests at heart, and their fates as we learn whether or not that is in fact the case. Or the '70s countercultural touchstones: David Bowie, Donna Summer, Pink Floyd, EST, Rocky Horror, R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders. Or how fearlessly Gloeckner addresses teenage sexuality and sex in general. The raw pleasure, the hunger for it...

Oh God, you know, you can really feel it when they come inside of you.

I know Monroe would miss me if I wasn't around. I know he'd think about me then because he doens't know anyone else like me. I think of him all the time.

And that hot breath...dreamy.

And when they're just as hard as rocks and they're stabbing you and you could just scream you can hardly breathe it is so 78vghjftgj46z35uzsfyubyuib78cx5742q24xr68v680b790[79[v689pc568ozx3463455yw46uc46759v689pvyuiuilv679

...and the barely suppressed disgust at the physicality of it...

The sexual nature of Kimmie Minter is a viscous cervical mucus that always welcomes mating. She was slimy and wet even though she always says she doesn't like Monroe and she says Marcus' dick is much bigger and it's too bad I didn't see it.

...and the emotional trauma it can cause when people who should know better have made it so that's all you see yourself as good for...

I hate men. I hate their sexuality unless they are gay or asexual or somehow different from the men I've known. I hate men but I fuck them hard hard hard and thoughtlessly because I hate them so much. At least when they're fucking me, they're not looking at me. At least I can close my eyes and just hate them. It's so difficult to explain.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl is, in that sense, the diary of a lot more than one teenage girl. It's the intimate mind-life of a segment of society populated by men, so very very very many men throughout the book, who sense pain and hunger like that radiating off a 15-year-old and swoop in like moths around a flame, like vultures around a carcass. And for every extraordinarily strong and brilliant and talented Minnie who manages to emerge from the swarm intact enough to recount her experiences decades later, how many don't? It's a comic from the edge of the abyss, and I love it.

PS: In case you missed the link, here's a lengthy interview I conducted with Gloeckner back in 2003. It's one of my favorite interviews I've ever done.

Favorites: The Last Lonely Saturday

The Last Lonely Saturday Jordan Crane, writer/artist Red Ink, 2000 Currently available from Fantagraphics 80 pages, softcover or hardcover $8

I find it both impossible and undesirable to separate The Last Lonely Saturday from the pivotal role it played in my life as a comics reader, and thus in my life in general. During the year 2001 I took a job as an editor at the A&F Quarterly, Abercrombie & Fitch's big giant magazine/catalog/softcore porn hybrid publication. My boss there, Savas Abadsidis, was and is a big fanboy, and a chance encounter with a Wizard magazine on his desk, which contained an article teasing an upcoming revamp of the X-Men by Grant Morrison (whom I remembered favorably from my days as a comics reader in high school for Arkham Asylum) and Frank Quitely, led me into Jim Hanley's Universe on 33rd Street to track down the series. This was the first time I'd entered a comic shop to purchase anything that wasn't either an isolated Acme Novelty Library, Savage Dragon, or Frank Miller comic in years--the birth of my modern comics readership. (The rest of the story after the jump...)

Intrigued by the offerings on hand, and empowered by a complete lack of editorial oversight that enabled us to write about anything we wanted in the Quarterly--not to mention Abercrombie's expense account--I made a solemn vow to buy something completely unfamiliar to me every week. Jordan Crane's The Last Lonely Saturday was one of my first such purchases. From there it was a short journey to Crane's anthology NON, his distributor Highwater Books, the Fort Thunder aesthetic in general, and thence all of alternative comics.

None of that was likely to happen if I didn't just love The Last Lonely Saturday to pieces. And that itself might seem unlikely. It's a slight book--many of its 80 pages are endpapers, and the rest contain all of two panels apiece. Dialogue is minimal; the majority of it of it comes from a little boy's triplet proclamations: "It's a man," "Look man run," "Ha ha! Windy!" It has a simple red, white, and orange color scheme. Although a ghost is involved and a character dies, we're pretty far from the violent morality plays that make up much of Crane's recent work.

What The Last Lonely Saturday is is a love story, a romantic fable. To some eyes, it might be a creepy one at that. In the tradition of the Police's "Every Breath You Take," albeit in something of a gender reversal from that song, Saturday could be looked at as a depiction of the role fixation and selfishness, even emotional violence, frequently play in love. But just as the sweeping, insistent, intimate, evocative sound of "Every Breath You Take" make it one of the great love songs regardless of the obsessive lyrics, so too the particulars of The Last Lonely Saturday make it pretty much the best love story in comics form I've ever come across. Crane's character designs are at their most adorable here. His jolly little potato-shaped protagonist, with his rumpled suit and charmingly crinkled brow, looks like the grandpa of our collective unconscious made real. His beloved Elenore's jaunty hairdo, long eyelashes, and high-wattage smile evoke beauty and charm that transcends her cartoony form, while her two lines of flashback dialogue upon receiving flowers from her beau ("Oh sweet heart! They're just lovely!") nail me to the floor with sweetness every time. Everything seems airy--leaves and papers float and twirl in the breeze, the little old man's car jauntily jumps along the road, puffy white clouds are a constant presence in the background--until, at the story's moment of truth, Crane weighs down his line and crumples his art toward the center of the panel. I'm a huge, huge sucker for emotionally devastated old men, so imagine my utter joy when our hero is granted a reunion with his dear Elenore! (Think the video for Blur's "Coffee & TV" and you've pretty much got it.) At that point, it doesn't matter to me how it happened--that it did happen is what's important, and that Elenore understands that is what makes this a great love story, in that it appreciates that what can seem unpleasant to outsiders is, within that world of two, an act of grace. It's an intelligent, moving, beautiful, terrific little comic.

Best of the 00s/Favorites: Black Hole - A Discussion

Dick Hyacinth here. In case you've forgotten, Sean and I both reviewed Black Hole for our first posts here at the Savage Critics (Sean's post, my post). It seemed kind of silly to have two reviews of a four year old (or twelve year old, depending on how you look at it) comic on the site without something or another to tie to the two together. So over the course of a week of emailing, Sean and I discussed Black Hole and each other's reviews. We examine gender, genre, eroticism, the horrors of adolescence, and a host of other issues after the break.

DICK: One thing I didn't really get to talk a lot about in my review was the character of Eliza. I think she's interesting in that she isn't really like any of the other characters; she seems to occupy liminal space in several respects. While Keith, Chris, Rob, Dave, and almost all the other characters are still in high school, Eliza apparently is not. But her infection places her at least partly in the world of teenagers. Sexually, her tail is something of a phallic object. When she and Keith have sex, it writhes around in his hand as he grips it tightly. She has a great deal more freedom than the characters who still live with their parents or are confined to the woods, but as you mention in your review, she's very much haunted by her past.

It's also interesting that Eliza seems to be the most distinctive looking of Black Hole's characters. I'm a great admirer of Burns' art, but I think it's safe to say most of his characters look like they come from his repertory company (to borrow a concept from Eddie Campbell). Eliza is different; there's something oddly specific about her. Other characters' expressions are reminiscent of those one would see in horror or romance comics (the latter being particularly true for Chris), but Eliza's facial expressions are much more naturalistic; they look photo referenced. Especially that first panel she appears in--she looks so different from all the other characters, it just pops off the page.

Chris and Eliza

The other thing I can't quite figure out about Eliza--and this might speak to my own ignorance--is what we're to make of that drawing which seems to depict Keith, gagged and bound to a tree in the woods. On one level, we can take it as a purely symbolic thing. At the end of the book, she draws a picture of Keith soaring above the other bug victims, suggesting escape from his problems (and adolescence, maybe). The value of that symbol is increased if you consider the woods as a symbol of stagnation. In this interpretation, the forest is essentially imprisoning Keith by preventing him from escaping his adolescence; the later picture correlates freedom with movement beyond the woods. In this sense, the pictures reflect the events going on in the book rather unambiguously.

But Burns blunts this positive interpretation in a couple of ways. First, Eliza seems somewhat embarrassed by the drawing of Escaping Keith. It's much more optimistic than her other work; she calls it "corny." One almost gets the sense that she's telling Keith what he wants to hear, rather than expressing her true thoughts about their new situation. The other, more troubling thing is the nature of the Bound Keith picture. First of all, it's something she drew before she knew him--making it oddly prescient. Secondly, her flashback to sleeping in the woods as a runaway indicates that she actually saw this scene in reality (in which case it's not actually supposed to be Keith in the drawing after all). There's no indication of who the bound figure is or who is responsible for his condition. You might suppose that Eliza was camping in the outcast colony, and that Dave and Rick were responsible for the incident, but Burns leaves it open enough that this is interpretation is more speculative than definitive.

For Keith, I think Eliza represents the allure and danger of adulthood and the future in general. Eliza's mystery and experience make her more attractive than the girls his own age. At the same time, he hardly knows her; there's no particular reason to think that they will have a happy future together. She seems more aware of this than Keith.

What's your take on Eliza?

SEAN: Eliza is an interesting case to me, because to be honest, when I think of her I think of sex. I think that Tom Spurgeon did a Five for Friday one time about comics characters you find attractive, and she was at the top of my list; to be honest, after her there really didn't need to be a list. I know that admitting that sort of thing is seen as creepy, especially if you're a dude, especially if you're a dude who also reads and likes superhero comics, but I've sort of been making an effort lately to talk about arousing art in the context of being aroused by it, reclaiming that space as valid, and that's where I'm at with Eliza--something about her triggers my lizard brain (no pun intended). Like I mentioned in my review, this is probably in part due to her resemblance to a girl I knew IRL, but that's not all of it by a long shot. For starters, you're right, she's much more realistically drawn than the rest of the gang, including (for the most apples-to-apples comparison) Chris. She pops against the other characters. And Burns takes advantage of how the added level of detail and nuance to milk very specific facial expressions and body language: being really fucking high, being surprised, being dazed, being lonely, being happy about something simple like an ice pop or sandwich or bumping into a friend in the grocery store.

She's also older and freer, as you note, at least in the sense that would register with Keith, i.e. she lives outside the sphere of parents and school. As we learn, she's actually less free than Keith, Chris, and the other kids, since she's sort of in thrall to these college-kid drug dealers and her own history of abuse. But there's a glamour to her ability to walk around a house half-naked, spending all her time getting baked and making art. "It's all right there," as Keith says--she's created a life out of articulating, however inarticulately, the feelings he has to keep bottled inside. What I like about this is that her sophistication, her devotion to her work, and her talent are all part of what makes her sexually attractive to Keith. I feel like that's the sort of thing you see more when the shoe's on the other foot, and you're telling a story about a male artist and his female admirer/muse. I don't go in for playing spot the phallus all that often, but it seems fair to point out as you do that she's the character with the vestigial dick--yet she's never less than breathtakingly (literally!) feminine. Here, it's the guy who's blown away by the girl's artistic gifts and commitment to them. (Creative void my ass, Dave Sim!) And it's not just some intellectualized admiration, it's a turn-on.

Indeed, Keith actually becomes Eliza's muse there at the end. I believe her earlier drawings of a boy tied to a tree were meant to represent a real-life incident she witnessed in the woods involving not Keith, but some other victim of Dave and Rick the Dick's depredations, but there's obviously no question who her drawing at the end is of. Because I'm a cockeyed optimist (LOL), I like to believe this represents some kind of maturation for Eliza. Her past subject matter was uniformly sinister; perhaps this liberating image represents a turned corner in terms of what she expects from life and herself. Moreover, I also like to believe that Keith and Eliza have a better than even shot at making a go of things. Surely there's a reason their situation is so sharply contrasted with Chris's at the end, seeming so much more comforting and hopeful. Again, this is personal experience talking, but I really did meet my future wife in high school and begin dating her back then. We had our ups and downs, but we made it work, knowing each other barely at all at first, connected by physical attraction and mutual admiration and intrigue. So to Keith and Eliza, I say, Yes we can!

But that raises a question perhaps you can take a crack at for me: Why do you think Chris's story ends on such a down note? She seems to have a lot more going for her than Rob, in several departments: Brains, looks, social proficiency. What are we to make about the magnitude of the personal tragedy that befalls her, her inability to process it (contrast it with Eliza shaking off her sexual assault, which maybe isn't a whole lot better a way to process trauma but she at least has picked herself up and moved on), and her ultimate near-suicidal state?

DICK: Chris' fate is something that I've struggled with as well, partly because of a knee-jerk reaction to a story that ends with the male protagonist moving forward and the femal protagonist regressing. At first glance, it doesn't speak well to the book's gender politics, but that's a rather shallow reading (and thankfully one I haven't heard come up very often--maybe those likely to offer this response aren't reading books like Black Hole?).

To understand what happens to Chris, we obviously have to go back to her relationship with Rob. As I said in my review, Rob's death leaves Chris feeling like she has nothing to live for. The death of someone so close is, of course, a tragic thing, but the severity of her response speaks to what you said about the teenage characters' overreactions to everything, good or bad. Part of being an adult is accepting the idea that people are going to die; we never really get over the deaths of those closest to us, but we (hopefully) eventually figure out how to go on living. When she buries that picture of Chris, you do kind of get the sense that Chris has accepted that she has to move on with her life. That's the silver lining to her ending; I guess you could interpret her retreat to the womb as temporary, a safe shelter in which she can heal her wounds then move on.

The Chris-Rob dynamic also sheds a little light on Keith's relationship to Eliza. There's a little bit of a counterfactual in Chris' reaction to Rob's death: what would have happened to Keith without Eliza in his life? Would he have survived, or would he have met a fate similar to Rob or Dave? I don't think Burns is saying anything as facile as "surviving adolescence requires good friends (platonic or otherwise)," though I do think that anyone who's made it through to adulthood will agree that good friends make the teenage years a lot easier.

On the other hand, we're all aware that those who are popular have an easier time of adolescence. If we think of the bug as the supreme determinant of who's popular and who's not, I think it sheds some light on Chris' situation. She's popular, studious, and attractive, but all that evaporates in the span of about a week. It's the sort of sudden reversal of fortune that teenagers undergo all the time. The bug isn't that different from other adolescent traumas like pregnancy, substance abuse, parents' divorce, or the realization that one is gay. Those are all legitmate problems, and teenagers haven't developed the emotional mechanisms to deal with them. Which is why it's so important to have some external support, be it from friends, SOs, family, teachers, or whatever.

Again, I think Chris' burial of the photo and explicit rejection of suicide point to an ending which, while not as hopeful as Keith's, at least suggests that she will try to deal with the traumas she's encountered. I think the difference between her and Eliza may well be time; she hasn't had as long to process what happened, and seems to be in the middle of her potential recovery as the book ends. But, to again cite your review, recovery is a process, not an event. There will be setbacks along the way, but there are plenty of things worth living for. Eliza is fortunate to have Keith (who, in turn, is fortunate to have Eliza). Maybe Chris really does need her parents.

And that brings me to another point about Black Hole: the startling absence of adults. You mentioned before that most of the characters dismiss adults as incapable of understanding their problems. Is there anything more to it than that?

SEAN: Before I tackle the parent angle, I feel I should add that as a horror enthusiast, I have no problem with serving up extremely bleak endings for your protagonists. It satisfies some nihilistic part of myself to see a fundamentally together person get broken down in a story like this, so even if there were no more "reason" for Chris to end up in a darker place than Rob than "because it's disturbing," I'd be fine with that. I think this is even reflected in Burns's visual treatment of Chris, who occasionally looks ripped straight from a romance comic--I'm thinking in particular of the shot after she and Rob first have sex and she realizes he has the bug; by the end of the story you've seen her all dirty and hairy and practically passed out naked in a stranger's bathtub. And this in turn reflects Keith's realization that he's been in love with a figment of his imagination, with an idealized girl who in no way resembles the very real girl with very real problems that actually exists. Of course, you could argue that he then goes and does the exact same thing with Eliza, but I think you can see his enthusiasm for her art, and his willingness to talk her through the traumas she's faced, as signs that he loves Eliza as she is, not as he imagines her to be.

Meanwhile, I'm glad to see you reject the gender-politics read of the book, which as you say would be a pretty shallow way to approach it. My favorite definition of feminism, and certainly the way I try to live it, is that it's the radical proposition that women are human beings. No more, no less! The reason that strikes me in the context of Black Hole is because I feel that this is what Burns is trying to say regarding sex: It's not the be-all and end-all serving of awesomesauce that teens (particularly teen guys) think of it as, nor is it necessarily a sqaulid and dangerous recipe for disaster. It's a powerful, ideally pleasurable, physical mode of interaction between two people, no more, no less. It can be dangerous for you, physically and emotionally--obviously that's the whole point of the teen plague idea, and you see it manifested in less fanciful ways with Rob and his ex, Keith's friends, even Eliza's rape. But when you look at the sex scenes Burns actually chooses to depict, they seem to be a lot of fun for the participants, and to bring them closer together emotionally. I've always found Black Hole's even-handed, if warts-and-all, approach to teen sex refreshing.

Back to Chris and adults: I think you're right to point out that there are hints toward the end there that she may be preparing to truly process her grief and loss and move on, and to me one of the biggest signs in that regard is her acknowledgement (even if it leads to a rejection, at least for now) of the potential for adults--the kindly woman on the beach, her parents--to help her solve her problems. Prior to that, adults throughout the book are uniformly thought of as sources of embarrassment, conflict, and oppression, when they're thought of at all; most of the time they don't even register. Now, I think that's a slight exaggeration of how kids live--I know I thought of my parents and their reactions to things I did pretty constantly, even if in certain cases it didn't affect how I behaved--but it's emotionally true in the sense that kids, particularly troubled kids like the ones in the book, tend not to feel that grown-ups can offer any succor or insight into the problems that afflict them emotionally and psychologically. But even more importantly to the book--here, perhaps, is the "more to it than that" you asked about--the absence of parents just makes everything feel that much more insular and claustrophobic, really a must to pull off a convincingly frightening horror story. It's the plot-mechanic equivalent of going so heavy on the blacks in the visual department, as you pointed out. The presence of grown-ups would not only create opportunities for the characters to escape the worst aspects of their situation, it would also serve to remind them on some level that you can grow up and get out, that things do get better as I've said. For the story to work, for the story to be the story it is, those options can't exist.

Hmm, one thing I'm noticing as I discuss the book is that I'm sort of splitting my time between talking about it in genre terms, as horror or as erotica, and in your basic non-genre human-drama terms. Do you feel it functions effectively in both worlds?

DICK: I've never really viewed Black Hole as a type of erotica, mostly because it doesn't work that way for me at all. So I don't really have much to say about that. As horror: I think that's an interesting question, and kind of relates to something Jeff mentioned in the comments to my review. Jeff wondered if the gorgeous art in Black Hole might make it a little more accessible; I would say the horror aspects to the book might function similarly. I haven't read everything Burns ever did, and it's been a while since I've read anything by him other than Black Hole. But my memory is that Burns tends to use horror trappings as a way to enhance larger themes in his other work. The Big Baby work, of course, deals with a character on the cusp of puberty, but I remember it being pretty similar thematically (though not nearly as rich as Black Hole).

Mostly, though, I've always thought of Burns as an excellent horror artist, but not really a horror cartoonist, so to speak. I might have a narrow view of horror, but his comics don't work on that level for me. The mouth in Rob's throat is an unsettling image (actually, that kind of makes Rob another liminal character--he possesses both vagina and penis), as are the tadpole growths on Keith's side, but they're not the kind of images that really stick in my brain like that underwater scene at the begining of Inferno (to use a horror film I really like as an example). And I was never scared by anything in Black Hole, at least not in a horror genre kind of sense. For me, Black Hole inspires dread rather than fear.

It would be interesting to consider his work in the context of other cartoonists of a similar stripe: Mat Brinkman, Josh Simmons, Tom Neely, early Chester Brown, Richard Sala, maybe even Rory Hayes, and certainly a bunch of other people I'm surely forgetting. I think Neely, who works in a very attractive EC Segar-influenced style, probably comes the closest to doing what Burns does. I'd go on, but we've already reached epic proportions. And you're the horror expert, so it's only fair to give you the final word on this. Does it work as horror for you, and how does it stack up to other horror comix (for lack of a better term)?

SEAN: So, nothing sexy in Black Hole for Dick Hyacinth, huh? Well now I feel like a bit of a freak myself. Aw, who am I kidding: Own it, Collins! I can't help but feel that sex scenes involving attractive people drawn attractively enjoying themselves having sex are intended to be erotic, regardless of those scenes' surroundings or their ultimate outcome in the narrative. Indeed I think that's part of Black Hole's power: Its ability to titillate and repulse in rapid succession, or even simultaneously. When people liken the book to the work of David Lynch, I'm pretty sure they don't just mean that both Black Hole and Twin Peaks take place in the Pacific Northwest, you know?

Now for the horror. You've actually got a leg up on me in terms of placing Black Hole within Burns's oeuvre, because this is literally the only book of his (other than that little photography collection D&Q put out a couple years ago) that I've read. Why? Because his past work fails my "is it visually appealing on a cursory flip-through surface level?" While he's always been almost ridiculously talented as a craftsman, his '50s and '60s trash-culture/Famous Monsters of Filmland aesthetic previous to Black Hole just doesn't speak to me much. Call it the narcissism of small differences if you will, but that whole tradition of combining horror iconography with outsider/alternative music and culture--you can also see it in psychobilly, John Waters, even Lynch's Wild at Heart--is just a few steps removed from my own similar aesthetic journey, but they're big steps, I guess.

So in the sense that Black Hole's brand of horror is more straightforward, darker, more sexual, less comical, more "realistic," then yes, that gives me more of an in. And I'd imagine that's true for other horror-interested readers as well. I've certainly tried to sell Black Hole to other people as The Greatest Horror Comic Ever Made, the same way people sell Watchmen as The Greatest Superhero Comic Ever Made, even though in both cases these books have myriad other concerns beyond just being a good horror comic or a good superhero comic. Granted, I have a pretty catholic definition of horror (Barton Fink, Eyes Wide Shut, Heavenly Creatures), one that definitely weighs dread pretty evenly alongside fright. But the list of horror-ish comics creators you cite--I'd throw Junji Ito in there quite comfortably, by the way--sort of makes this point for me. You're not including, say, Steve Niles, or even Robert Kirkman, whose The Walking Dead I actually quite like; you're talking about alternative cartoonists whose work doesn't "look scary" the way all the "horror comics" that clog up Previews do, and who in some cases never considered their work to be horror (Tom Neely has told me that until he saw me describe The Blot as a horror comic, the thought had never occurred to him), but whose work has the power to discomfit, disgust, disturb, and unnerve us. Jump-scares may be few and far between, but reading those comics has a sort of darkening effect on me, like turning some sort of psychological dimmer-switch way down low. Everything's a little creepier and more uncomfortable after I'm finished reading. Black Hole does that better than any other comic I've read, even as its lovely art and sympathetically messed-up characters keep inviting me back to start the process over again.

Favorites: Watchmen

This past summer, with Watchmen movie hype already in full swing, I reread the book for the first time in a while and posted a review on my blog. Now that I've got a "Favorites" review series going here, and with the movie almost upon us, I figured it's a good time to share the results with Savage Critic(s) Nation after the jump. Hope nobody minds a re-run... PhotobucketWatchmen Alan Moore, writer Dave Gibbons, artist DC Comics, 1987 416 pages $19.99

Like half the nerds in America, I recently re-read this graphic novel, inspired to do so by the trailer for Zack Snyder's upcoming movie adaptation. I feel much older than I did when I first read the book during my sophomore year in college, and much of what I appreciated about it then fails to impress me now...or perhaps "fails to impress itself upon me" is the better way to put it. Moore's scripting, for example, seemed wildly sophisticated compared to the house-style comics of the '90s with which I could then compare it, but comes across shopworn, even hokey to me now. All those panel transitions where what someone is saying in one place is placed in a dramatically/ironically appropriate caption box over something unrelated yet thematically linked in some other place! There's one groanworthy bit in the Owlcave where Nite Owl says something about a reflection while we're shown his reflection, and I liked the failed sex scene juxtaposed against the commentary for Ozymandias's gymnastics routine better when it was Phil Rizzuto doing play-by-play for Meat Loaf in "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." I mean, maybe it's just that I'm sick of the fact that people like J. Michael Straczynski are still doing stuff like this 20-odd years later, maybe it was a total revelation then, but to me, this sort of neat thematic coincidence requires far more suspension of disbelief than just having guys run around in costumes. It feels emotionally artificial, which of course is the problem I tend to have the most with Moore's rigorously, ostentatiously authored work.

Instead, what strikes me hardest here, what I don't think I ever thought about all that much before, is how much power the story draws from its uniformly engaging sad-sack main characters. I think it's here that Dave Gibbons's contribution is at its most valuable, with his all but countless shots of heroes and do-gooders worrying, frowning, furrowing their brows, being uncertain. It must be noted that this is worlds away from the Identity Crisis-style vogue for angst and selfish over-emoting. All the characters in those "you'll believe a man can cry"-type supercomics are just as 100% sure of their emotional experience as their relentlessly upbeat Silver Age counterparts used to be. Not so in Watchmen, where the primary mode of emotional interaction with the world is confused dismay. The mileage Moore can get out of this is almost inexhaustible. These aren't emo Batmen, they're Tony Sopranos and Seth Bullocks, idiosyncratic and troubling portraits of great physical strength and moral violence juxtaposed against tremendous emotional and psychological weakness. Their failures--and they spend pretty much the whole book failing--are hard to stomach, especially giving the truly impressive air of impending doom Moore creates out of snippets of current-events and vox-pop cutaways; we hope for their success even though the art and the script both do everything they can to show us without coming out and saying it that their failure is inevitable. I'll tell you, reading the book this time around, when Rorschach takes off his mask at the end and yells "Do it!" at Dr. Manhattan, tears streaming down his face, I nearly started to cry. To me now, it's almost as devastating as that line "I did it thirty-five minutes ago" and the subsequent reaction shot were 11 years ago.

I noticed a lot more than that this time around, too. For example, everyone remembers the symmetrical Rorschach issue and the Dr. Manhattan flashback/flashforward issue, but the rest of the individual chapters were all quite structurally different from one another as well. Issue #1 is a pretty straightforward superhero whodunnit. Issue #2 does the classic-flashback thing that the creators of Lost borrowed so effectively. Issue #3 is moved along by those transitions I mentioned earlier. The penultimate issue is driven at least as much by the "normal" characters as the superheroes, and the final issue is as straightforward as the first one. It's a restlessly creative book, uncomfortable with being this thing or that thing exclusively.

It's also much funnier than I gave it credit for, especially early on, before the final failures. Rorschach, for example, is kind of a scream, constantly making mental notes to investigate whether this or that character is gay or a Communist or having an affair, obliviously wondering why so many superheroes have personality disorders. There's also the running rivalry between the left-leaning Nova Express and the right-leaning New Frontiersman. I always thought Moore rather stacked the deck against the more or less nakedly racist and anti-Semitic conservative publication, compared to the smooth Rolling Stone-isms of the magazine that (one assumes) more closely aligned with Moore's own outlook. This time, however, it suddenly jumped out that while their culprits (Russian and Chinese Reds) were off, pretty much everything the New Frontiersman alleged about what was going on in the world was accurate, while Nova Express was literally a bought and paid dupe of crazy old Ozymandias. That's pretty funny, actually. So is the fact that at least four of the main characters are crazier than shithouse rats and, if one wants to be literal about it, serial killers. And the more I think about the ending, the more convinced I become that it's perfect as-is and the kvetchers should zip it. I mean, if you stick with the Comedian/sick joke leitmotif, this very serious book about nuclear war, sociopathy, sexual dysfunction, the intractability of human suffering and so on needed a punchline in the worst way; if you run with Ozymandias and slicing the Gordian knot, this rigorously realistic take on superheroes needed an outside-the-box climax; and for either one, how can you top teleporting a brain-squid-thing into a metal concert at Madison Square Garden?

The ending, and the book overall, are more problematic when viewed as a serious hypothetical response to real-world political problems. Moore's diegetic voice-of-reason when it comes to geopolitics, Dr. Milton Glass's "Super Powers and the Super-Powers" prose piece, posits a Soviet Union every bit as undeterrable and ultimately suicidal as the current neoconservative conception of Iran; granted, Moore/Glass's policy prescription for what do do in the face of such an opponent is 180 degrees away from your Podhoretzes and Kagans, but clearly the validity of the underlying viewpoint was not borne out by events. In that light, there's something faintly ridiculous about watching Ozymandias go through all this trouble to end the Cold War when boring old military expenditures, international negotiations, and internal politics pretty much took care of it here in the real world. Moreover, I can't be the only person soured enough by recent years on the idea of the ends justifying the means to completely, 100% side with Rorschach's doomed decision to reveal Ozymandias's malfeasance to the rest of the world, right? A faint over-willingness to forgive bad shit done in the name of Moore-ish beliefs can be detected in Moore's work from V for Vendetta to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and while it's perhaps fainter here than ever, it's there, and to the extent that it is there it rankles.

But that's fine. Great art should encompass enough ideas that you can find at least one that makes you a little uncomfortable. And Watchmen encompasses tons and tons and tons of ideas--the clockwork clues, the extensive Tolkien-style barely-glimpsed backstories, the alternate history, the intricate panel layouts, the emotional texturing, the Charlton riffery, and everything else I just ran down. It's simply full of ideas, which makes it rich and exciting and thrilling and fun. It's not someone's movie pitch or someone's attempt to write comics like a summer blockbuster, or like anything else, for that matter. It's a great comic book.

Favorites: Black Hole

Hi folks! I've decided I'll use my slot as a Savage Critic to talk about my favorite comics of all time. I'm kicking things off with Charles Burns's Black Hole--which, coincidentally, Dick Hyacinth had also chosen to use as the inaugural book for his series on the best comics of the decade. So Dick and I will be tag-teaming on this one: I'm going first, then he'll post his thoughts without reading mine, then we'll check out what the other guy has to say and post responses. Should be a pip. Meanwhile, I've also dug a review of the book I wrote for the geek-culture iteration of Giant magazine out of the archives and posted it on my blog--check it out. And now, without further ado... PhotobucketBlack Hole Charles Burns, writer/artist Pantheon, 2005 368 pages $18.95, softcover EXCELLENT

You lose a lot of extremely impressive supplemental material if you purchase or read only the collected edition of Black Hole rather than the individual issues from Fantagraphics (and, earlier, Kitchen Sink). The full-color front and back covers for each issue are probably what stand out in most people's minds, followed perhaps by the almost masochistically detailed endpage spreads, and last but not least those terrific ripped-from-the-hotbox dialogue snippets that accompany Burns's yearbook-portrait openers. I think everyone is probably partial to the one where a guy asks to be cremated if he dies so that his friends can smoke his ashes, but the one from the first issue isn't some nugget of stoner wisdom, it's the premise of the entire book:

It was like a horrible game of tag...It took a while, but they finally figured out it was some kind of new disease that only affected teenagers. They called it the "teen plague" or "the bug" and there were all kinds of unpredictable symptoms...For some it wasn't too bad - a few bumps, maybe an ugly rash...Others turned into monsters or grew new body parts...But the symptoms didn't matter...Once you were tagged, you were "it" forever. 

That quote made it into the collected edition as the back-cover blurb. This one, from the twelfth and final issue, didn't:

It's like tryin' to explain sex to a nun - there's no way you'd ever understand it unless you lived it. I was there, okay? Half my fuckin' friends died out there, man. I never dreamed I'd get out of that shit-hole...but one day I notice the stuff on my face is starting to heal and a couple of months later, I'm totally fuckin' clean...out walking around with all the normal assholes. 

This directly contradicts the quote from the first issue and upends the premise it establishes. Turns out the horror of the teen plague is finite. Turns out everything that happened in the book didn't need to happen, not the way it did, not based on the assumption that nothing was going to change and they'd never get better. Turns out, in other words, that the teen plague was ultimately like being a teenager itself: It sucks, but you grow out of it.

Rereading Black Hole for the fourth time or so, it's easy to see the set-up for this punchline. Keith in the woods during the kegger where he finds out Chris has the bug, peeing on a tree and grumbling to himself, "This is it...this is all it's ever gonna be. It'll never get better...I'll always be like this..." Chris's similarly themed rebuke of her parents: "You don't understand! You'll never understand! Never!" The constant hyperbole the kids use to describe virtually everything even potentially enjoyable: "It was going to be the best day of my life"; "Rob had brought along all kinds of incredible things to eat...black olives, an avocado, french bred, salami, cheese..."; "All right! That's gonna blow your fuckin' mind!"; "It's called Monument Valley--you won't believe how amazing it is!"; and my favorite, "I want to show you how to make the best sandwich in the world." Chris telling Rob "I'll love you forever, no matter what," and Keith and Eliza telling each other the same thing. Chris's repeated refrain "I'd stay here forever if I could"--in Rob's arms, in the icy water looking up at the night sky. Everything is either the best it can possibly be or the worst it can possibly be, and it will never change.

Needless to say that's just about the most accurate depiction of the emotional life of teenagers I've ever seen. It's how I remember high school. It's not terribly far removed from how I remember college. (And to be perfectly honest, when I think of how I look at the world even now, it's within spitting distance of how I live today, which is probably a big part of why this is one of my favorite comics.) But of course, things do change. Bad things usually get better, which is why it's such a goddamn tragedy any time a teenager commits suicide because of a bad grade or a breakup--or when a group of sick kids feels it necessary to drop out of school, run away from home, and in the case of some characters literally throw their lives away. And unfortunately, good things often get worse; parents do understand, at least some of the time, and it's damn hard to tell someone "I'll love you forever, no matter what" and mean it, and two stoners driving across country probably won't be able to find a cozy apartment where he can make an honest living and she can work on her art and they both live happily ever after. That's a tragedy too.

So why remove the quote that points this out, the quote that completes the metaphor? Maybe--and I'm just guessing here; I've interviewed Charles Burns about this book a couple of times but I don't recall asking him about this--he didn't want to give us that escape valve. Maybe he doesn't want us to read this and think, "Silly kids, if only they knew." Maybe he wants to eliminate anything that lessens the number-one effect of the story and the art here: claustrophobia.

Honestly, the claustrophobia of Black Hole is what struck me the most in this reread. Take the panel gutters, for example. Burns employs a traditional method of delineating between real-time action and dreams or flashbacks--straight gutters for the real stuff, wavy gutters for the reveries. But those wavy gutters still create as uniform a grid as ones drawn with a ruler would. Instead of dreaminess, they evoke haziness, like heat waves radiating up from a road or the room spinning when you're cataclysmically wasted. Indeed, the few times the grids do deviate from the norm is when the characters are completely blotto, or completely panicked--even there, panels remain locked in tiers, and the effect is like careening from one side to another when you're too drunk to stand up straight and really, really wish you were suddenly sober again but you're stuck drunk. There's no way out.

Then there's the look of the art itself. Elsewhere I've described it as like immersing yourself in a blacklight poster, which is apt not just because of the subject matter (look and you'll see a few such posters on a few walls, in fact) but because looking at this book can practically give you a contact high. While I read the book this time around, I thought it might be neat to listen to a couple of playlists I recently made of the kind of electronic music I listened to in college, a time when presence of the kind of emotions you find in Black Hole still feels fresh to me, a time when I got stoned pretty frequently listening to that very music. Even though I did this on the commuter train out of New York, I'll be damned if I didn't feel the pressure on my eyeballs, the weight in my limbs, a slight throbbing of the vision when staring at Burns's flawless blacks and the trademark shine effect of his characters' hair. For the first time in his career, I think, style and substance lined up perfectly. It's not for nothing, though, that the use of drugs and alcohol in the book almost always reduces the options available to the characters--most of the time they prevent people from doing what needs to be done or saying what needs to be said, and even during the story's few positive depictions of inebriation, intoxicants are used to push things toward a preordained conclusion rather than open up other possibilities. No minds are expanded.

Maybe the most powerful aspect of the book's claustrophobic effect is its eroticism. True to adolescent love and lust, the desire these characters have to fuck one another is irresistible and all-consuming--it has to be, or else the story couldn't have happened, and virtually every major plot development wouldn't have taken place either. Frequently the very environments where the sex takes place contribute to this feeling. Rob and Chris's fateful liaison takes place in a graveyard. Keith first sees Eliza, nude from the waist down, under the harsh and unforgiving glare of florescent kitchen lights. He first becomes aroused by her when her tail struggles against the restraint of her towel. Their romance is kindled in her bedroom, surrounded by hundreds of her bizarre (and very blacklight) drawings. They first have sex while stoned as fuck, a red scarf draped over the lamp and bathing everything in crimson. The atmosphere is oppressive, but so can be the feeling of being very, very turned on. "That's all it took to get me totally sexed up and crazy," says Keith of his first kiss with Eliza. "I could hardly catch my breath." (Is it worth noting I knew a girl who looked a bit like Eliza back in college? Probably.)

One final motif comes to mind when I think of how Black Hole works to confine and oppress: repetition. I've already mentioned some of the repeated dialogue, and there are any number of repeated visual cues--shattered glass, snakes, holes--and even repeated scenes--Chris floating in the water, those dream sequences. But there are two instances of repetition that stand out to me the most. The first is when Keith angrily leaves his parents' house to avoid watching some lame TV movie with them, only to end up tripping on acid and watching the very same movie at his friend's girlfriend's place. The second, and the most chilling, is Eliza's sexual assault, which is an implied echo of never-directly-described abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather--and, as her nightmare at the end of the book indicates, will likely continue to haunt her dreaming and waking life. Even her and Keith's blissful roadtrip escape is just a tour of places she's already been, trying to recapture the happiness she knew long ago. And maybe this more than anything else is why cutting that final reveal that the bug was temporary was the right move: Bad things usually get better, but that doesn't mean they never come back--different, perhaps, but the same in all the ways that count. Sometimes you can break free of something only to spin right back around to it, spiraling inward into that gravitational maw until that bad thing might as well be constant, for all you can truly escape from it.

I mean, the book is called Black Hole.

Black Hole #11 by Charles Burns