Book Shelves #6, 2.05.2012
Book shelves series #6, sixth Sunday of 2012: In which we dig into the comix inside the book shelf we looked at last week.
When I was 13, I sold a fairly large collection of superhero comic books and earned enough money to buy an electric guitar—a weird mutant by Fender called the Bullet—and a small practice amp. It was the early nineties, and Marvel was about to burst the comic book bubble big time by flooding the market with gimmicky covers, hologram cards, and other nonsense.
I continued to buy comics (or comix, if you prefer) over the years, although eventually economic concerns led me to just wait for graphic novel editions. Anyway, the book shelf above now contains most of the “underground” comix that I own. A few samples:
Most of the comix in this unit though are issues of Dave Sim’s epic (and insane) series Cerebus. I bought issues of Cerebus intermittently for years at a time, usually getting frustrated and then waiting for the “phone book” graphic novel editions of the series. Sim, along with background artist Gerhard, produced 300 issues of Cerebus over 25 years. The issues from the early ’80s to the early ’90s are brilliant; eventually Sim cracked though and went on an insane, reactionary (and arguably deeply misogynistic) bent. He created his own religion, a mix of hardline Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and the later books in the series suffered greatly, as the book detoured to chronicle projects that seemed far outside its original scope (including strange, long satires of Hemingway and Fitzgerald). Anyway, some issues:
Cerebus Jam, a one-off collaboration with a cover by one of my favorite artists Bill Sienkiewicz (I still have his entire run on Marvel’s The New Mutants in a box somewhere):
A panel from the issue’s collaboration with comic book legend Will Eisner, featuring his seminal character The Spirit:
Kate Beaton Explains Psychoanalysis at Hark! A Vagrant
Kate Beaton’s take on psychoanalysis. From Hark! A Vagrant.
Guy Fawkes Day and V for Vendetta
“Remember, remember the 5th of November…”
I was lucky enough to live in New Zealand for a few years as a kid, so I got to experience Guy Fawkes Day. We made effigies of Guy, then we burned them on a bonfire. There was a barbecue and fireworks. To my American ass, it seemed a mixture of the Fourth of July and Halloween—strange and marvelous.
It was a few years after my last Guy Fawkes experience that I read Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. V, an anarchist who wears a stylized Guy Fawkes mask, wages a vigilante war on a harsh authoritarian government. Along with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, V was a first for me, something different from the comics I was reading at the time, stuff like Chris Claremont’s run on The Uncanny X-Men and other Marvel titles.
A film version of V for Vendetta was released in 2006; Alan Moore famously had his name removed from it. I enjoyed the film, although it certainly wasn’t as good or thought-provoking as Moore’s original story. And even though the film looked good, the passive experience of watching an action movie can’t measure up to David Lloyd’s original art work and that wonderful space between the panels of comics that engages the reader’s imagination.
This afternoon [see editorial note below] I finished the first graphic novel of Alan Moore’s run writing Swamp Thing, and I can’t wait until my library hold on the second graphic novel comes in. I had no idea Saga of the Swamp Thing would be as good as it was, nor as beautifully illustrated; it’s actually better than V for Vendetta or Moore’s other famed work, Watchmen (and none of these titles are even in the same league as Moore’s masterpiece, From Hell). Alan Moore and Steve Bissette’s run on the DC Comics series essentially led to DC’s creation of the edgier Vertigo imprint for their more “mature” titles, such as The Sandman. These titles helped to change the audiences of “comic books” and helped to make the graphic novel a new standard in the medium (no mean feat, considering the fanboyish culture of comic nerds, a culture that prizes rarity of print run over quality of storytelling).
One of the lessons in V for Vendetta is to illustrate what happens when we don’t allow for dissent, what happens when ideas are both prescribed and proscribed, and all dialogue is muted. Authoritarian governments consolidate their power from the silencing of ideas. A healthy society requires all sorts of opinions, even ones we don’t like. The smiling Americans in this photo aren’t burning effigies of would-be revolutionaries, they are burning something much more dangerous–books.
[Editorial note: So, I ran a version of this post on Nov. 5, 2006---it's actually one of the first posts I ever did on the blog, which I began in Sept. 2006. Looking over it---which is to say editing it and making minor revisions (and grimacing frequently, but trying to keep those revisions minor, like moving commas)---I can see the growth and scope of the blog; especially I can see my own limited sense of what I wanted Biblioklept to be. The post also strikes me as excessively vague and preachy (especially that last paragraph, written after years of Bush Era Fatigue, which is kinda sorta still going on, I guess, Bush Era Fatigue, I mean, only I'd give it another name now). I wish I could remember more details of Guy Fawkes Day/Night, but I was young---9, 10, 11---and it seems vague. I still remember the history of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, although that's probably more a result of paying attention in AP European History than anything else. This editorial note is way too long. I never finished Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, but the second volume was good, as I recall].
AV Club Interviews Daniel Clowes
The AV Club interviews comix creator Daniel Clowes. (Read our review of Clowes’s hilarious and acerbic book Wilson)From the interview—
The A.V. Club: People often ask musicians if they listen to their old albums or filmmakers if they watch their old movies, but do you reread your old comics?
Dan Clowes: I try not to. [Laughs.] It usually doesn’t lead to anything good. The only way I can ever experience them really is if I completely forgot what they were about. Once I send it off to the printer, I try to never look at the work again, if I can help it. Usually when I put together a book like this Death-Ray hardcover or that Ghost World special edition, then I have to reread it and see if there is anything I want to change or any re-coloring I want to do. That’s when I’m faced with the actual work. When I’m working, I’m too close to it. I’m sort of inside, and I can’t see it at all. So when I have that experience of rereading it years later, it’s jarring.
More Wuthering Heights Humor from Hark! A Vagrant
The AV Club Interviews Cartoonist Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant)
The AV Club interviews Kate Beaton, she of Hark! A Vagrant. Here, she talks a bit about A Game of Thrones—
AVC: You were a history major. Do you still read history for fun?
KB: I do, yeah. I pick up books every now and then. The only problem is, I pick up books and I don’t read them, because if I do reading, it’s for a comic. But I will. I will probably pick up the second half of John A. Macdonald’s biography, which comes out this year. [Laughs.] Because I think he’s a fascinating guy. [Macdonald was the first prime minister of Canada. —ed.] I read so much, but it’s always for comics, and there’s not much time in between to just settle down and start reading something for yourself. Recently, I started reading that Game Of Thrones that everybody was reading. It’s kind of a quick and fun read. And that was really nice, because I made time to read something that wasn’t for comics. Reading history for fun will turn my brain into, “How do you make this into a comic?” and then it turns into work. [Laughs.] There’s dangerous waters there.
AVC: I’d love to see the Kate Beaton take on A Game Of Thrones. And that’s at least somewhat less polarizing than politics. You do a lot of literary strips—would you ever consider one about contemporary literature?
KB: [Laughs.] Oh, no. No. I like doing literature that’s popular, that a lot of people have read or know about, so Game Of Thrones does fit into there. I did do a couple drawings and put them on Twitter, and they get good reactions. But I feel like, for a while, everybody was doing Game Of Thrones something or other, so I just sort of stayed out of there. And besides, you could hardly do a comic about that without spoiling it, because someone new dies every chapter. [Laughs.] It’s likeGame Of Massacres. And you wouldn’t want to ruin that for anybody.
Hark! A Vagrant Does Wuthering Heights
At Hark! A Vagrant, satirist supreme Kate Beaton sends up Wuthering Heights. Beaton’s book is now available for preorder.
Books Acquired, 8.28.11
My mom brought over a bunch of stuff tonight including a collection of early ’70s Doonesbury strips in a four volume box set. I guess this was my dad’s? I’ve never understood a single Trudeau strip, ever, although I haven’t read one in years.
Said