Bill Randall

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Dirk at Journalista!, the blog of the magazine I write for, has declared it “Garo Week” after lucking into a copy of the late, lamented, legendary manga anthology for the avant set. I figured I’d join him. He’s posting whole stories, but I’m too lazy for that. Besides, I never like more than half an issue– some artists I revere, others I loathe.

Its covers, however, I love unreservedly. Shonen Magazine had a better run when Tadanori YOKOO took the point, but Garo ran great covers for over 25 years. The last few years sucked, and some of the early ones were hit-and-miss, but the best could make a great coffee-table book. Considering half the artists inside couldn’t really draw, that’s saying something.

I have just a very small collection of Garo, picked up mostly at the Osaka Mandarake when I was on an IGUCHI Shingo kick. I paid less than they cost back in the day. Some I got just for the covers, like this one. More after the jump, from May ‘68 to the mid-90s.

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I’ve been watching the small row about the upcoming Kramers Ergot 7, the influential art-comics anthology. Chris Mautner has the best summary, with his own thoughts; the short version is that it’s an expensive book, so some readers feel priced out. More interesting, others see a tension with comics’ populist roots. At least one person thought art should reach as many people as possible. Others spoke of a need to expand the audience.

I suppose people who can will buy Kramers and the rest will borrow it and conveniently lose touch. But the row raises the question of whom art, any art, should reach.

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First, charging for art is always dicey. Gallery artists know this better than anyone, with wealthy buyers speculating on art like stock options or oil futures. But art is only treated like a commodity; good luck making a living with it. Many artists moonlight: Rimbaud (quit poetry to run guns), Joyce (taught at Berlitz), and half the comics artists now working (drawing spot illos). But the right combination, like a dog and a bald kid, can lead to absurd riches.

I know no better chart of these tensions than The Gift by Lewis Hyde, a mix of anthropology, economics, and poetic associations. Hyde supported his own art– criticism– with straight jobs as an electrician and carpenter before becoming a teacher. Read it, and keep in mind that music, like air, apparently wants to be free; that playing in the Hollywood sandbox now costs upwards of $100 million dollars; and that some artists make works that exist for just a few minutes before they wash away.

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Second, on Koya-san, the mountain at the center of the Shingon Buddhist universe, scores of monasteries have unimaginably beautiful religious art. I used to live by the foot of the mountain, but I saw little art. My trips up usually ended with ten empty cans and the shakes next to a coffee vending machine. I can’t read Buddhist art well, my own limitation, so I probably got as much out of the coffee as I would have out of the art.

The writer Alex Kerr has a better Koya-san story in his book Lost Japan. He’s taking some friends there (pardon if I misremember parts) from Osaka to show them Traditional Japan. During the train ride, he gripes about the cancerous urban development. Once he arrives, he gripes about the crummy town. Eventually, he lucks into seeing a particularly fine statue of the Buddha. It’s beautiful; he’s moved. The next day he discovers that they only reveal this statue for one day every few hundred years. The rest of the time it stays hidden from everyone, even the monks.

Another Japan observer, Chris Marker, notes in his film Sans Soleil that “censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show.  … It points to the absolute by hiding it.”  He’s reading soft porn, and the Vatican’s treasures, and old Shinto sex totems, but the idea expands past that. One could say it might be better that a work of art not be seen.

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Finally, on some obscure Greek island there’s a movie screen in a field. Robert Beavers, the protege and lover of Gregory Markopoulos, has been following the elder filmmaker’s last wishes and restoring his life’s work for display. On 27-28 June 2008 he will show the final parts of ENIAIOS to those who want to come. Campsites are available.

The site is called the Temenos, and watching these movies thus becomes a pilgrimage. I’ve only seen one; it relied on lush images and classical allusions. I understood only parts. Were I to travel to Lyssaraia to watch the 80-hour film cycle, I would certainly educate myself better, rather than rely on travel to make sure I’m worth what I’m watching.

Of course, Beavers could just upload them all to YouTube so the maximum number of people can watch them while simultaneously downloading porn and getting their scores. Now that we can fit the Complete Works of Humankind on the head of a pin, there’s no reason not to, if it’s just information, another commodity.

But there are different kinds of information. Some asks to be free; some asks to be enclosed. Some is enclosed, in a market, a box in a monastery, or a small community of people with the tools to read and appreciate it. By being so enclosed, it can increase its force, for those able to understand and see it, like water flows faster when it’s focused, like when as kids we put a thumb on the end of a hose and ran through the spray.

I have a long essay about the stellar artist Daisuke NISHIJIMA, written in a haze of flu, in the latest issue of The Comics Journal. It’s online now for subscribers, but for everyone here are a few additional links about this artist:

A couple of Japanese-only sites, with art:

• His official site and blog (Japanese only, but the source of this witch picture, among others).
• His alter ego “Mangacchi” has a blog on the slow life: Mangacchi 2.0
• Actually, it looks like “Mangacchi” has been set to private.  Oops.  I fixed the link for the official site, though.

Awful YouTube has his charming flipbook animation, showing his philosophy of vapor trails.

A couple of interviews:

• Commonsphere Interview, translated into English.
• A 2005 interview by translator Matt Treyvaud, in English.

The French, as usual, are way ahead of us. Nishijima’s French publisher’s page explains that Nishijima is a “grand amateur de musique, et il écrit régulièrement pour des mensuels consacrés à la musique comme Studio Voice ou Music Magazine et il prend le nom de Mahôtsukai, pour ses activités de DJ.”

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From music to movies, Nishijima has an inveterate love of pop culture. His first work, O-son Senso (”The Universal”), riffs on Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and Neon Genesis Evangelion, the anime TV series. He also tips the pen to:

• Blur’s video for the song “The Universal”
• Superflat.
• Some Hollywood movies: John Carpenter’s The Thing, Rambo, Rocky, like they need links. Like Coca-Cola needs to buy ads.
• The Prisoner (which once had Jack Kirby as its interpreter)

That’s just in his debut volume. Later ones have more riffs; Dien Bien Phu draws extensively from Vietnam War literature and film, particularly the author Tim O’Brien. Nishijima begins the comic with a quote from O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” (link to .pdf), but as always, Nishijima transforms his sources into his own idiom.

Re-reading David B.’s L’Ascension du Haut-Mal (released in English as Epileptic), three images struck me.  The book concerns his family, burdened by his older brother’s crippling seizures; looking for a cure, his parents turned to macrobiotics and metaphysics.  David B. draws liberally on fantasy throughout, mixing childhood perceptions with spiritual maps and strange history.

1. He also includes his childhood art,  not that far removed from his adult work.  All children draw, usually until some too-harsh criticism makes them stop; at a young adolescent stage, they often focus on the detail at the expense of the whole.

This focus also characterizes the art of the mentally ill, repeating intricate patterns like fractals.

2. As the book progresses, the images increasingly give way to diagrams, which mix and flow into the normal world of David B.’s family.  These images, drawn largely from medieval symbology and occultism by modern esoteric sects, show the world as a map, populated by strange creatures.  So do the meridian systems of Traditional Chinese Medicine, as Jean-Christophe is early treated by an acupuncturist.  They echo the scientific progress of mapping the body, always with an eye to control; they never do.

3. Likewise, the adult David B., cocooning himself in lines and meridians, only with his own pattern.

When Saul Steinberg passed away, we lost one of the greatest cartoonists, one whose virtuoso line work barely kept pace with his intellect. He played with the language of images in still fresh ways. For his subject, he chose America. Its mishmash of high and low cultures suited his talents, especially with the immigrants flowing into mid-century New York. Nonetheless, he never sampled their rich soup of language. What word balloons there were overflowed with drawings, fake calligraphy, or scrawls, nothing more. This linguistic acrobat remained mostly silent.

Thanks to the posthumous volume Reflections and Shadows, Steinberg has broken this silence with an eloquent book-length autobiography. He never conducted a major interview in English during his life, so this volume fills a major void. While written as a prose autobiography, the book represents a series of conversations between Steinberg and his close friend Aldo Buzzi, an Italian architect, publisher, and writer.

Buzzi guided the book’s construction, editing their talks into chapters for Steinberg to approve. While these conversations occurred in the mid-70s, not until 2001 did the Italian edition of this work appear. That’s a long wait, but the book never seems dated. Steinberg’s works maintained a remarkable consistency throughout his career, and the book largely concerns his early life and impressions of the United States.

While much better with cartoons, Steinberg proves an engaging raconteur. The book consists of keenly observed episodes concerning people from his native Romania to the rural Midwest. As an immigrant, he had a fine eye for the minute differences in cultures; as a satirist, he had a keener eye for human foibles. Of the many drawings included, his sketches of his family grow much richer when compared to his descriptions of these people, like the uncle no-one was allowed to talk about, or their smells, each unique.

Nonetheless, Steinberg draws the best portrait of himself.  His favored themes grow clearer in reading, as well as the history that made his work possible in the first place.  Like many Europeans Jews, his strange path out of Europe fascinates.  His went through Italy and prison.  He had been studying architecture, but shortly after the war broke out he was arrested and sent to a refugee camp.  He describes the journey there as full of wonders: when curious girls see him held by the police, he recalls, “For women a prisoner is a romantic, adventurous character, who has done something unlawful and thus might even do something unlawful to them, or rather for them. …Admired and desired by those girls, I felt perfect.”

Just as perfectly observed are his thoughts on food. It lies at the root of culture; one might even say it is culture.  He sums up his homeland’s history in a dish: “the cooking was Jewish, partly Polish-Russian, partly northern Romanian, Hungarian, Austro-Hungarian: paprika, vegetables.”  He finds similar parallels in American restaurants, which he cannot stand, focused as they are on socialization rather than good food.  To his European palate, “gastronomy in America, the restaurants, the taste of the nation are governed by the tastes of children.”  He never speaks so directly in his cartoons.  Here he seems at times like an English gentleman horrified at the colonies.

In the final analysis, Reflections and Shadows works best alongside Steinberg’s drawings and paintings.  It sharpens our understanding of them.  Steinberg may tell a good story, and he certainly has a fascination with words, but he seems uncomfortable relying on them.  Fortunately, this book points to his others, with a bibliography of books and exhibition catalogues. Unfortunately, none remain in print in his adopted country. For an artist of his stature, working for The New Yorker no less, not to have had a major retrospective published soon after his death remains simply baffling. As fine as this book is, it is no substitute.

Soon after I wrote this article, a few years after Steinberg’s death, I bought a used copy of The Inspector. Like the rest of his books, it had been out of print for years. The bookstore’s owner commented that they were getting harder to find, and going up in price, too.

Recently, however, publishers have tried to make up for lost time, with the art book Saul Steinberg: Illuminations in 2006 and a 2005 edition of another collaboration by Buzzi and Steinberg. In this case, it is a The Perfect Egg, a book of Buzzi’s writings on, of all things, food.

(A version of this article originally appeared in The Comics Journal, #258 February 2004)

Stu called from Toronto last night to make fun of my country’s asinine health care system, so I had to respond by forwarding a bunch of Kate Beaton comics. Take that, Canadian!

I love her work. It is hilarious, full of in-jokes for the historically astute that will make you laugh regardless. She has a marvelous sense of the absurd– Napoleon eating cookies is always funny– and exact timing.

Often enough her comics are about identity, focusing on her origins or a country’s. As a hick, I can relate to her strips about being a from the sticks. Her “Conversations with a Younger Self” also delve into her identity. They show grownup Kate and child Kate, blaming each other for screwing up their life. Her two History Comics series contain her finest work yet, with a gag mixing Dr. Naismith with his creation’s future. The gags are always rooted deeply in fact, so the absurdities don’t seem cheap.

Best of all, she can just plain draw. Her vibrant line that reminds me of Steig, and she slides effortlessly between figuration and doodling, often in the same strip. She draws Georgiana Babbage quite foxily indeed, and Elizabeth I as a furious mound of circles. Her characters’ hands are especially nice, going from squiggles to realistic depending on the comic’s needs.

Most comics I’ve read on the web last in my mind no longer than the light they’re printed on. Beaton’s will have a place on my shelf, should they ever make the leap to print. In the meantime, she could adopt the same model as other web cartoonists. I don’t want to live in a world where she can’t make a living off t-shirts of her first panel of Anges MacPhail. (Should I live in that world, and so fall ill, please Lord let it not be in the US of A.)

On Wednesday, I’ve been invited to lecture at a small college out in the sticks, so Tuesday’s post will appear Wednesday, with notes on the talk. It’s a pleasant lecture about ethics and the documentary image, not a stern one about cleaning your room. Until then, some notes:

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In the inbox moments ago, Warren Craghead has released another downloadable, do-it-yourself mini of his fine drawings. Time to break out the saddle stapler.

Also, his Postcard project has recently appeared as a blog (link pilfered from Tom Spurgeon).

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The Economist gets in on the Murakami=Warhol kick. May soon become subscriber only. The title, “Infantial Capitalism,” scans well, and the reviewer notes that M.’s a better theorist than artist, but nothing much new save the copperplate prose.

More interesting that the Warhol angle: manga artist Eiji OOTSUKA elevating four-panel cartoonist Takashi MURAKAMI over the gallery artist. This will get even more interesting if Western critics throw their hands up and say, “we don’t get it,” while M.’s work becomes seminal in the East. In a way, it’s moot, because his sources are already that influential, even if his take on them falls away.

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I translated David B.’s “La Bombe Familiale” for a friend ages ago, and I have a book of anime scripts lying around from back in the day.  So the existence of the collaborative translation site Comics Influx came as a pleasant surprise.  Especially nice is how it skirts the scanlation conundrum of people reading and not buying these things (at least the Japanese ones).  (Link trail: Dirk > Katherine Farmar)

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Finally, preparing for this lecture, I’ve been watching When the Levees Broke, which is remarkable for both its restraint and its comprehensiveness. Movies suck at not shoehorning everything into an ill-fitting box, but this one manages to give things shape without distorting the things themselves.

I have a deadline coming up, for a long essay on Drawn & Quarterly’s Summer ‘08 release of Seiichi Hayashi’s Red Colored Elegy (”Sekishoku Erejii”), now open for preorder. The book, first serialized in GARO from 1970-71, far outstrips contemporary U.S. undergrounds in narrative sophistication. It focuses on a young couple living in sin, but the action’s all in Hayashi’s oblique storytelling and graphic range. Its appearance in English is some kind of milestone, and D&Q’s edition is a good one. To whet your appetite, links & images:

First, Seiichi’s bio on D&Q’s maddening web page.

Second, YouTube video of the hit song inspired by the comic. I weep nostalgic tears for the Showa Era, thanks to Morio Agata’s haunting melody.

Finaly, a handful of (grayscale, sorry) pages from the Japanese edition, showing Hayashi’s range, storyboard-like layouts, and Tsuge influence:

“I’m a newspaper man—and the Pope is my beat!”

A relic from an odd union of the Holy See and Stan Lee, The Life of Pope John Paul II makes for a curious footnote in American comics history. Published in 1982, I remember quite clearly being perplexed, even as a child, by a four-color Pontiff next to Spider-Man on the drugstore rack. John Paul II must have seemed unusual enough to warrant such treatment: a young, vibrant Pope from a Communist country instead of Italy. Interesting how he turned out, more superhuman than almost anyone in recent memory, more of a world leader than those actually elected, and more polarizing than he had to be.

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A not-quite aside from the recent talk of poetry, Peter Blegvad’s minicomic “Filling Tooth” has as much substance as books ten times longer. A small effort few have read, it starts with just “tooth,” punning and rhyming the word & image into far more than their sum.

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