Longbox Coffin

I would be interested in a study of how contemporary serialized superhero comics effect invested readers’ brain chemistry, how people deal with the existence of a narrative, running in parallel to their own lives, possessing higher stakes, as I assume most readers are middle-class enough that their lives are somewhat stable, consist of ups and downs, peaks and valleys, acts of horrific violence meant to make the acts of heroism that follow seem greater, almost in replication of the highs and crashes of drug use, the greater amounts of spectacle and raw sensation necessary to bring one back to a state of “normalcy,” an imagined childhood state that nostalgia is felt for.

I know that there are not actually that many people who read these comics. I know that the majority of the people I see everyday, riding the bus, looking unhappy, probably don’t. But the pattern playing out makes me feel sick to think about, even from my distance. These narratives of hero and villain, subsumed into an overall horror of cyclical violence, can be found in the news as well, if you are invested in partisan politics. The highs are increasingly rare- if you are left-leaning, please recall the slight relief you felt at Democrats election at the conclusion of this past election cycle, and then remember the pit of despair you now live in, at all the ways your civil liberties continue to dwindle.

Narrative surrounds us. Storytelling alters consciousness. The stories that are sold to us should be held up to the light of inquiry, for their possible narcoticizing and addictive effects. I am downright certain they do not all serve the function of making us more empathetic to our fellow man. Or woman: It is pretty crazy to see the way misogyny enforces itself, either via violent/sexualized imagery in comics or through the way revulsion and misunderstanding of women’s bodies dictates political discourse.

What’s interesting, also, is how hard it is to write plot, when encountering all this history, all this backstory of events that brought us to where we are today that cannot be undone, how hard it is to find a place to start a story that will come to a conclusion. I discovered this in college, trying to write fiction: I did not know, really, how people acted to bring about change in their lives, too large are the systems we are stuck in, too dumbfoundingly false the Horatio Alger myth. I found it hard to find a job, hard to do anything that could theoretically bring about an improvement in my life. Plotting fiction, having multiple characters interact with each other, all serving their own interests, felt machiavellian and sinister, an impossibility anathema to my character. I talked about this with another student who had the same problem, writing stories where things happened. I am past this point now and can sort of tell a story that almost has a plot. I have gotten jobs through friends I’ve made, and sort of felt accomplished; and now I think in terms of characters, and hold the new people I meet at a distance even without me consciously knowing I’m doing it, trying to probe them and figure out who or what they are, trying to be a human being, while they in meta-awareness see themselves in third person and are reticent to have the strong and present voice that is the fount of American literature and personal charm. Perhaps we feel limited by the self for all the multitudes we contain.

Yet still somehow I walk around and look at people’s faces and feel like I maybe am a little bit less defeated than most, and think that maybe it’s because of the edifying qualities of art, music, film, comics, self-expression, genuine communication, that through these routes I am sometimes spoken to like a human being, these things that feel like gifts even though I have to pay for them, on these margins where there is not enough money at stake to address me merely as a consumer, a hole to fill with slop and pills.

-Brian Nicholson

I like westerns a lot, and while partly this owes to the high level of craft to be found in the films of Sergios Leone and Corbucci, and the evocativeness of Morricone scores wherever they be found, there is perhaps still a deeper appeal. I am not, particularly, a genre person. I do not loiter sections of the bookstore with easy headings, do not go seeking out more of that which I am already familiar. I get bored easily. I like that the defining characteristic of the western is its setting, that of an open landscape. This minimalism of porous borders and open spaces is reminiscent of Beckett, while the very phrase “wild west” is synonymous with anarchy, divested of leftist notions  and reduced to a scrambling chaos. This, basically, is where I want fiction to take place, an open zone where anything can happen, removed from the rigorous codes of behavior and expectation present in a more defined setting. The details of milieu that some readers find immensely pleasurable cause me to become disinterested immediately upon seeing them cataloged as points of interest in a book’s plot summary.

Stories taking place in other settings can become westerns- Walter Hill considers most of his films to be westerns- when they are about the areas wherein codes of behavior fall apart and people are pitted against each other, and can no longer talk like civilized people, and civilization no longer exists as a force. The western, then, as a genre, is defined by a setting that is a non-setting. Things basically stop being westerns when they accumulate too much of anything other than inherent violence. It is a dumb, masculine, genre, that has at the heart of it an animal feeding on another’s carcass. These are stories that all become about manhood, in some basic, essential way.

The western is also, arguably, the American myth. Thomas Pynchon, writing about Oakley Hall’s Warlock, correlates 1880’s Tombstone to the myth of Camelot. Digging through the introduction to that book written by Robert Stone, we find this D.H. Lawrence quote: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Some proponents of the myth view anything other than triumphalism in the tale of lawman versus outlaw, or white man versus native, as being revisionist. Perhaps it is revisionist to look back on the past with modern sensibilities, but it seems more useful than propagating the lie told at the time.

When I say I like westerns a lot, the disclaimer that I am not much one for genre should signal that I have in some ways not dug too deeply: I have never sought anything out based on the notion of it being a western, rather coming to these works by other means: I came to Warlock via Pynchon, I came to Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood through a general film appreciation, and while I have not read many comic book westerns, the fact that the Blueberry volumes were drawn by Jean Giraud will provide another in. One day last week, I watched Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar and read Christophe Blain’s Gus And His Gang, a book put out by First Second some years ago that somehow I had missed was on the “top comics of the year” lists of some of my favorite critics.

In a short comic Peter Milligan wrote for a Vertigo anthology, he has the narrator define the conflict of the western as about being between the wildness of the frontier with the domesticity of the town, “In short, the conflict between men and women.” While that story was a comedy, and the narrator is killed by the end of its scant pages, Gus And His Gang and Johnny Guitar both are odd works within the western genre, for depicting men who are defined in relationship to women.

The character design of Gus is marked by his long thin nose, never conspicuously used as a phallic symbol, but omnipresent nonetheless in this comedy about men’s frustrations trying to get laid and their melancholic longing. Gus is often drawn with two noses, protruding from each side of his head, to depict that he is looking around, from side to side, a bit of cartoon storytelling I personally found a bit off-putting. But this type of cartoon stylization is the fun of Blain’s drawing, this sort of confusion an elaboration of an inherent humor.

There is not the realistic depiction of mountains and cactus found in Blueberry, the type of light Robert Stone talks about as “an afternoon brightness, a clarity that is, I think now, the essence of good realism… The light I guess I had recognized the first time as western light.” He was speaking of prose; I am construing his words for my own purposes, to discuss the imagined look a western comic might be thought to have. I am thinking of Blueberry, perhaps because when JH Williams did his little western section in Seven Soldiers, just a few pages long, the linework was in a Blueberry style, signalling that style has crossed into shorthand. But I do not want realism all the time, I want there to be an open space where anything can happen, and Blain, in focusing on the figure, in giving us loosely-drawn sex scenes, in his colorist Walter giving us dynamic non-naturalistic color, gives that.

-Brian Nicholson

P.S. - Currently I’m reading Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, another western, that I think I was hipped to via Sammy Harkham, somewhere. It’s good, and so is Johnny Guitar, which I did not intend to give short shrift to, but I worried I was losing focus.

I am really excited about the news that Blank Slate Books is going to put out 6 books of Anke Feuchtenberger in English. This news was in their bio on the TCAF website but hasn’t been picked up anywhere else.

Hey all you Tumblr teens, maybe you can help me out, looking at this comic cover right here, is this that “soft grunge” I’ve been hearing so much about?

I think that Tom Spurgeon once referred to the flood of comics DC put out in the mid-nineties featuring new characters as “comics no one has any nostalgia for” and while I am certainly not going to argue with that assertion, I was thinking today about how many comics DC put out in the mid-nineties that were either targeted to an idea of youth culture or at least acknowledged that youth culture existed, in a way I’m not sure corporate comics are pursuing presently. Specifically I recall the existence of a comic called “Superboy and the Ravers” which I never read and whose covers look boring but at least achieves the effect of being humorously of its time today. I remember house ads for Anima that asserted that its female protagonist was a “grrrl” in reference, I believe, to her bear-powers. Another comic whose characters were computer hackers and that led to them doing Mission Impossible style heists. I think the character in the critically acclaimed Starman owned a vintage store. I recall these ads for Damage and The Ray that were black and white photos, with photoshopped special effects, basically looking like Calvin Klein ads but for pamphlets filled with drawings rather than the clothing the models wore. There was also Major Bummer, pitched as “he’s not a superhero, he’s a slacker!” Over at Marvel there was an X-Men spin-off called Generation X. 

I was really into the Mark Waid/Humberto Ramos issues of Impulse, this Flash spin-off comic about a teenager. I remember reading solicitation for issue 3, where the hero, a time-traveller from the future, is too weird for his school, and gets everyone mad at him, and unknowingly starts a fight with the entire student body, and thinking “Yes, this sounds perfect, this sounds like the comic for me,” seeing myself in it. There are issues of that comic I straight-up loved, the way you would love a cool older sibling giving you a mixtape, but maybe less judgmental because it’s a comic book and as such inherently nerdy.

In some ways these comics are descendants of 1960s experiments like Brother Power The Geek or Prez, cleaned up into a superhero formula. But for real I don’t know why there wouldn’t be more comics like this, these things sort of presuming to pitch to people in their teens and twenties that can be read by kids aspiring to a status where they have more control of their destiny, and see these things as lessons in how to act, and maybe they can be read nostalgically by people pining for their younger days.

This seems like an important vein to mine, this ephemera produced by people too old to get it for an audience too young to know better, where both creator and audience have this shared desire to understand something beyond them. It is kind of a beautiful gesture. I wonder if there aren’t analogs to these works today because youth culture seems too alienating and forbidding or because franchise upkeep has been determined to be a more easily attainable goal. Or, wait, maybe there are:

I guess in a lot of ways Kick-Ass is basically exactly what I’m talking about, its race-charged and rape-tinged sense of humor that of Reddit, Mark Millar a men’s right activist. Its cynicism is presumptuous, and as such unhelpful and ultimately destructive, but maybe that is the key to its commercial success, where more naive works from other eras failed.

-Brian Nicholson

Uncivilized Books is getting into the comics criticism game later this year, with a line of books designed to be like the 33 1/3 or Deep Focus lines, but for comics. There’s going to be a book about Carl Barks’ Donald Duck, also, but more interesting to me is Brian Evenson writing a book about Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur. Evenson is a figure I’ve become intrigued by, as of late- I have a collection of his short stories, Fugue State, sitting in my pile of books to be read, and he’s acclaimed by all sorts of people as a fairly experimental horror writer. He lives in Providence, and is seemingly a bit of a noisenik, having written an article for Arthur about Earth and Sunn O))) a few years back, that I read probably around the same time as I read his story “Mudder Tongue” in McSweeney’s, which is collected in Fugue State, alongside a story that ran in Mome, illustrated by Zak Sally.

He’s a really prolific writer, churning out widely acclaimed novels and short story collections, while also, under a slight alias (B. K. Evenson) turning out sort of hackwork, like writing a novelization of the new Rob Zombie movie, The Lords Of Salem (which actually looks like a pretty good movie, although the reviews I’ve read of the novelization- billed as a collaboration with Rob Zombie- have been pretty negative). He also wrote the introduction for that Julio’s Day collection that just came out, according to Amazon, which is where I found out about this book existing. I am doing this sort of career overview because I have yet to really dig into his body of work, and so am deferring to other people’s knowledge, and associations. It should be an interesting book. Yummy Fur is a pretty cool comic. A few years ago I was watching my friend’s cats at Christmastime, and on Christmas morning I dug through her comics archives to read a bunch of the Gospel adaptations that ran in the later issues of Yummy Fur and Underwater. The Gospel adaptations was a really weird project. Another interesting tidbit about Brian Evenson: Excommunicated from the Mormon church after a student of his at Brigham Young University complained about his book’s violent and fucked-up content. Ed Vs. Yummy Fur looks to be an interesting match of author to work under critical discussion.

- Brian Nicholson

Probably there will not be any comics published this year with better drawings than what you will find in Blutch’s So Long, Silver Screen.