Bill Randall

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Good news: Domingos Isabelinho has a new blog.  And, of course, it is essential reading.

For proof, just read this quote:

I have a confession to make: I have a problem with humor. I firmly believe that art’s purpose (apart from formalist concerns that must always be present) is to unveil some kind of truth. Humor, as Baudelaire said more than a century ago (1855) is satanical…

I find these gems of thought less important to argue, than just to accept and see what they do to me.  So today, a change of pace: no humor, no Satan, just truth.  And a generous collection of images, including Rutu Modan’s visual growth and the perfect formalism of some old French satirical art.

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But if you read nothing else today, look at his canon of essential comics.

The most singular I’ve seen, perhaps, as it rejects what most comics readers and critics take as their birthright: comics as kids’ stuff.  So no Peanuts or Tintin, though Carl Barks makes an appearance.  But no junk culture, no nostalgia for their own sake.

Instead, Oesterheld, Deprez, Feuchtenberger, and Blegvad.  The list’s a fine collection of some of the best the medium has to offer, as well as a touchstone for people willing to trade the art’s liveliness for a little sophistication.  My favorite inclusion is Ana Hatherly, the Portuguese poet, whose O Escritor confounds all boundaries.  (For a sample, scroll down just a little here.)

Should I ever write my own canon (which must wait until I read some Aristophane, surely), I will no doubt liberally crib from Domingos’ list.

A small Sakabashira blog-swirl led me to this animation, which reminded me.  Even though Japan has its own impressive variety of explosive-scribble power lines, and continental Asia more, the most magnificent of all, now gone, came in Kowloon Walled City.

Compare:

(from the Archidose site dedicated to the city)

35,000 people on six and a half acres, with an unimaginable tangle of human stories overlaying all the space. It sprouted because it was in an administrative non-area that fell through the legal cracks, and so housed all manner of illegal activity, including– most horrific of all– scads of unlicensed dentists.

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At the other end of the spectrum,  Masanobu FUKUOKA passed on.  He was 95.  The old farmer pioneered a form of “do-nothing” agriculture after having a kind of revelation of the interconnectedness of things while working in ag science in Yokohama.  He was in his 20s, then, and the war was ramping up; then he moved back to his family’s plot of land in rural Shikoku and farmed it until he died.

He did make it out now and then, to lecture, and wrote a number of books, like The One Straw Revolution, finally to be reprinted by the New York Review of Books Press.  At times he seems either crank or Jeremiah, like Wendell Berry (who wrote the English edition’s introduction). Sometimes he sounds like an old-school Japanese right-winger, sometimes a genius.

Fukuoka’s system seems to have sprung complete from his head.  It anticipates current green trends like biomimicry, ecosystem design, and locavorism.  But even if Kowloon Walled City was its own contained ecosystem, I think Fukuoka would have hated it.

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Meanwhile, my country’s uncontained, inane dog-and-pony show has effectively choked out all meaningful dissection of policy, at a time when we should be forming a Manhattan Project to address energy generation & environmental degradation.  I encourage everyone to vote based on conviction and data, not personality; not to watch the dog-and-pony show; and to chastise your circle should they bring it up.

And if I look at Politico again, you can shoot me.

And photos, I suppose, though I don’t know the context of the works in this gallery.  I just wish I’d been walking down the street when they were taken, especially if it was before I’d ever read Sakabashira’s ink-drunk manga.  They’re dreams, both dreadful and absurd.

I’ve written about him twice before, though I don’t know that it’s brought me closer to understanding his work.  He’s in a tradition that started with Yoshihiro Tatsumi, if just for their backgrounds.  He freely mixes pan-Asian sources in his flowing brush line.  A favorite scene of shopping streets appears over and over again, a rotting Chinatown in Bangkok, Penang, Kobe, or all three at once.

His Surreal stories often follow a quest, a merciful gesture for the reader.  “Libertine’s Sea” in MaMaFuFu, for instance, rides a moped to the sea for 50 pages.  It goes through grotty alleyways filled with bizarre sights, from a box-hatted widow to a horse on oxygen.  In part, the stories give an excuse for the drawings, leading to the grand non sequitur of the ending, when the biker pulls a crab-man out of a box.

However, many of the images feel familiar.  Sakabashira darkens and troubles the kaiju genre of goofy movie monsters.  So he owes much to Toru Narita, the designer behind Ultraman and Ultra Seven, whose inventive creatures held those shows together.  In a fitting symmetry, noted by Takashi Murakami in Little Boy, Narita drew on the Surrealists.  One of his monsters was even named “Breton.”

Much thanks to Aeron at Monster Brains for the impetus.

I recently had the pleasure of corresponding with the great, sabres-drawn critic Domingos Isabelinho, who has written for TCJ and John A. Lent’s International Journal of Comic Art, among others.  Our brief chat sent me back to his singular list of the greatest comics.

One in particular caught me again: Philip Guston’s Poor Richard.  In 72 drawings, Guston charts the life of a bigfoot Nixon and his pals Kissinger (a pair of glasses) and Spiro (a triangle).  They go to China, change history, wallow in self-pity.  For thirty years this book, a curio in an equally odd ouevre, remained unpublished until a 2001 edition from University of Chicago Press.

Comics readers should find it welcoming.  Thanks to Art Spiegelman’s praise, Guston’s already well-known in that circle.  Yet I don’t see his paintings as cartoons.  The forms may recall E. C. Segar and Bud Fisher, but they’re built from an abstract expressionist’s paints. A comic accrues in a succession of images; a single Guston painting can glow like a Rothko, if with putrid colors.  One favorite hangs in the Cincinnati Art Museum’s attic gallery, where a nearby Kiefer landscrape [sic] can’t drain its warmth.

Poor Richard, though, works just like a comic.  Setting aside the humor, its loose narrative holds together with buoyant cartooning.  Poor Richard’s phallic, punny head carries both hope and woe.  Guston’s signature bric-a-brac clutters the landscape, undermining democracy’s pomp. Critic Debra Bricker Balken compares it favorably to Philip Roth’s anti-Nixon farce Our Gang.  Guston’s neighbor, Roth felt Guston was joining him in satire.  But Poor Richard transcends political cartooning.  Instead of ridiculing Nixon, it reveals him.

Another writer, also Guston’s friend, became his greatest critic.  The poet, novelist, and critic Ross Feld befriended the painter by writing a positive review at a time when the New York art world had written Guston off as an aesthetic suicide.  He and Feld, who lived for years in Cincinnati, corresponded until Guston’s death.  Their letters, as well as eight luminous essays, make up Feld’s book Guston in Time.

Any of Feld’s pages yields a half-dozen quotes in waiting; many sing.  Just one to finish, then, that fits Poor Richard:

Painting after painting offers us plain things with the deadpan capacity to hold history.

(happy republican national convention)

I have a long essay about Seiichi HAYASHI’s Red Colored Elegy in the new TCJ.  It’s one of the most important of all manga translated in English, so I’ve been mostly disappointed in the online reviews.  Most treat it as just another book to rush through for the next of fifty blog posts.  Must!  Create!  Content!

Eddie Campbell’s review, though, puts it in context.  He rightly notes the link to cinema– Red-Colored Elegy recalls the storytelling of the early Nouvelle Vague–and that many of today’s readers have more linear tastes.  (Or maybe they’re just impatient.)  Campbell’s one of the most articulate of all cartoonists, so he could pan my favorites and I’d walk away agreeing.

Anyway, my essay talks about Hayashi’s earlier works and the political context.  It was the early 70s.  May ‘68 lingered; the cool kids were protesting the US security treaty.  And living in sin.  The book was popular, perhaps, because of the moment, maybe just the song.  At least the book deserved the attention.  It still does.

Here are some resources and scraps of interest from the Web:

• Seiichi HAYASHI’s offical web page
• The book’s theme song & Hayashi’s album art
• Ga-nime’s recent anime version, with a short preview (I haven’t seen this yet)
• An English-language short history of the Left in Japan.  Radical politics informs much of the era’s manga and animation.  I discuss this at length in the essay, especially the links to Hayao MIYAZAKI & his pal Isao TAKAHATA back in the day
• Hayashi’s design for Lotte’s Koume candy, on a retro package.  He’s probably better-known as an illustrator than a manga artist.  I swear I’ve seen a YouTubed commercial with his animation, but it disappeared in a sea of Olympic ping-pong videos.
• The closing credits for the movie version, Boku Ha Tenshi Dyanai Yo! is on YouTube still, but I won’t link to it because it’s just ridiculous.

Also, Adam Stephanides, another critic for TCJ, had the first(?) English-language review of the book back in May ‘04.  He’s a smart critic, and one of the few who read Japanese.  A follow-up post has more.

Finally, some Japanese-language resources I found helpful:

• Interview for the opening of a 30-year retrospective of Hayashi’s work at Hachioji’s Dream Museum in 2007
• Anido, the venerable animiation society. Has a thin English page.
• Brief history of the strike at Toei Animation
• There are a half-dozen short biographies of Hayashi out there, including on Wikipedia, but the Japanese in the links turns to gibberish in WordPress.

I now eagerly await the review carousel of Hayashi’s other major work, pH 4.5 The Guppy Doesn’t Die.

I had thought I whatever insight I have outweighs any sloppy mistakes I make, but I’m starting to wonder.

Two boneheaded indiscretions, immortalized in print in the new TCJ:

1. In the Azumanga Daioh review, snark fails me as I translate “Monthly” (”gekkan“) as “Weekly” (”shuukan“). Did I know better?  Apparently not.  I also think “kabushiki shijou” means “lottery.”
2. In the Red-Colored Elegy essay, I choose rhetorical flourish over simple clarity, making it sound as though Dousei Jidai has no hit song.  Was I listening to the theme song to Dousei Jidai’s film when I wrote the article?  You bet! It just wasn’t as big a hit– and yes, both comics discussed have film versions, though I can’t recommend either.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent the last year thinking my nephew is a girl; thought taxes were optional; and occasionally put my pants on the wrong end.  All I can ask is forgiveness, or bald indifference.