Bill Randall

HOME ART TEACHING WRITING ABOUT

For reasons I’ll never understand, one of my teaching jobs occasionally pitted me against vicious packs of screaming teens expecting entertainment. So we played 5-Card Nancy instead.

Years ago, an old friend printed me a deck on company cardstock right before his employer went bankrupt. It turns out the deck’s a great teaching tool. Doing film, the Soviets, the Kuleshov Effect? Here’s Nancy, here’s a burger. Pacing? What happens if you put thirteen panels of Nancy walking in a row? Leibniz? Each panel’s a monad!

Most of the people I’ve played with don’t really know the strip. A few have never seen it before. But they all take to the game– that is, Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip– like it’s as natural as breathing. Everybody knows when a panel’s right, or wrong, or deliciously wrong.

Some panels are so right they don’t need anything else. Like this one, which I wish were on a 12×12 canvas hanging in my postindustrial loft:

Or better yet, on billboards all through the countryside, advertising Nancy’s absorbent hair as it drinks in the pathetic fallacy’s rotgut.

***

There is an online version, in color, with its own clutch of panels. And a huge list of examples from someone’s LJ.

And I have trouble arguing with the Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn, or even its video. Copacetic!

Not the idea that, if S is any nonempty partially ordered set in which every chain has an upper bound, then S has a maximal element, but the Hollis Frampton film. Since I don’t live near New York or San Francisco in the 70s, seeing it was almost as hard as understanding S without a mathy companion. But Ubuweb is a kind mistress, making the experimental film ghetto a little more open.

Not to say the film has a clear meaning. I haven’t done the required reading yet, and Zorn is not a gracious host. If such art for the last several decades has relied on a primer, unique to each artist, I’m left in the cold. But that can be an advantage of sorts, a reminder to trust experience.

(more…)

I want join the chorus with a pox on the Tokyopop contracts for their “Shining Stars” program, which were issued in “hey dude” language from a company founded by a lawyer.

The “hey dude” language, utterly disingenuous from a corporation, reminds that Tokyopop is essentially a marketing firm: it exists, and has been successful, as an importer of a popular culture wholly created and owned by other people. Its unique contribution has been spin. For instance, when Japanese creators uninterested in other countries’ customs refused to flip their art, Tokyopop released it unflipped and spun it (quite successfully) as “authentic.” No matter one’s flipping preference, it is clear that Tokyopop’s approach stemmed from no principled commitment to authenticity. That matters if you’re interested in a business relationship with the company.

Then recall what Stu Levy, Tokyopop’s founder and CEO, said in Tom McLean’s Bags & Boards interview for Variety:

I was realizing at the time, well we’ve proven our name as Tokyopop, that we can market and we can distribute. But a lot of people, especially in Japan, were treating us like we were a distributor, maybe even like we were an agent.

So I decided that, yeah, it’s important for us to prove that not only can we work with finished product and adapt it, but we can work with creative people and we can express ourselves creatively as well and become more of a studio. … We think we understand the secrets of the success of Japanese manga, and why it resonates worldwide, so let’s take a stab at it.

To put it differently, and simply, if Tokyopop only licenses, packages and redistributes Japanese-owned goods, then it has no company assests. If it loses a few of its top licenses, it could sink the company. The logical step is to own properties, so that their work building the company isn’t wasted. They have already taken this step with OEL manga, in a co-ownership arrangement. Whether these manga are “authentic” or not has given way to the “manga lifestyle,” Levy’s phrase, with the implication that this lifestyle is not (owned by) Japanese.

A paragraph later in that interview, Levy talks about copyright.

…my personal view on how to approach copyright is I really tend to lean towards opening it up and embracing fans expressing themselves creatively with [intellectual property] that other people have created.

This is in the context of fan-made tributes, mash-ups, and dojinshi, and my pointing it out is perhaps unfair. But I would hope that the creators of characters and stories (”intellectual properties”) might have the same consideration as fans and pirates.

Tokyopop does promise co-ownership, vaguely. However, their goal is clearly the development of related properties, like film and television. It brings to mind “Hollywood deals,” “Hollywood contracts,” all shorthand for getting ripped off. I fully admit the bizarre, sleazy Americana of the place and the industry, but at least they have SAG, DGA, WGA, and other assorted unions that ensure things like residuals and health care. Yes, they are very hard to get into, and no, just because you can get SAG rates doesn’t mean you’ll work every day, or even any day, but at least there is a strong institution with leverage in that industry.

Comics creators have no similar institution protecting them. They also don’t have the same barriers of entry into their field. Creating a movie requires piles of money and the cooperation of talented, unionized craftspeople. Comics require pen and paper. The tradeoff in making a movie is that you don’t own it, but it gets made, and you get paid (usually). The tradeoff in comics, in the case of this Tokyopop deal, is a lot less clear. What do you get, their distribution might? From a company who has produced exactly zero breakout hits in OEL manga? In order to consider signing away the rights, I would hope they would offer a hell of a lot more than they are.

***

The Hollywood comparison reminds me that Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton both owned and had creative control of their movies (until Keaton signed with MGM and lost both). So everyone in the Bay Area please please please check out the San Francisco Silent Film Festival coming up in July. I wish I could be there to watch The Unknown, The Man Who Laughs, and even– HER WILD OAT!

***

Also: if anyone has had good or bad experiences with Tokyopop or other OEL manga publishers, on or off the record, please drop me a line. I’m working on an article that is leaning in that direction, and I’d like to hear from you.

***

EDIT: At first glance, it brought to mind the pay-to-play reading fees for contests in literary journals. Except that economics says these journals can’t afford contests without entry fees, as their readership fits in a pickup truck. By contrast, Shining Stars looks like trawling for marketable properties with a very wide net by charging the people who just aren’t good enough.

I misread and then misrepresented this part of the contract about the “pilot fee,” for which I apologize; it is evidence of my non-legal mind and perhaps the fact that “hey dude” is actually just as confusing as legalese.  Fortunately for my credibility, it was not my main argument.

I would still like to hear from OEL manga creators (and publishers) about their experiences.  For the record, it is not a Michael Dean-esque work of investigative reporting; I’m a critic, not a journalist. Normally I just read a bunch of books in context and react; in writing for the first time in several years on the English-language manga industry, it is becoming clear that the context of English manga centers on creators’ rights and licensing.

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.

(more…)

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.”

***

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.

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.)

Good to see more people saying what I have (on this blog & in an article in the new TCJ) about Takashi MURAKAMI not being “Japan’s Andy Warhol,” as Mia Fineman does in a slide essay for Slate . Instead, she compares him to Walt Disney, another master marketer. But Japan already has its Disney, Osamu TEZUKA, another example of a tidy comparison that muddies the water.

Tezuka, Disney, and Murakami all have signature characters; they all founded employed other artists in their studios; they all produced animation. Respectively, they’re a humanist, a fantasist, and an otaku evangelist. Murakami’s the odd one out because he’s trying to change the structures of the fine art market, whereas the others somehow created high art in popular media.

Since Murakami should be judged in his context, I propose that he become “No Irony Art Baron Jeff Otakoons.” Besides the faux Engrish and awful pun, it’s more precise, and includes the last Next Andy Warhol in the bargain. If it doesn’t take off, it’s clear evidence that we’ll suffer Next Andy Warhols for another fifty years until the media finally gets another celebrity artist it can use for shorthand. Murakami’s too Japanese, and too otaku, for that to happen now in the West. Maybe soon.

Finally, moving from Warhol to Disney has troubling implications. It relies on an arbitrary wall between high & low culture. Fineman writes, “For those of us who were reared on the idea that art is a special kind of luxury product—more contemplative, denser with meaning, somehow resistant to the status quo—- Murakami’s radical leveling of art and commerce can be pretty unsettling.” While I (and most Cistercians) bristle at the linking of luxury and contemplation, I can’t relate to the split. For those of us reared on the experience and not the idea of these things, there are multivalent works, some trash, some exalted, all on a level field. A lot of the trash commands high prices in the white cube, while some of the lowest forms reward the most contemplation. My reading of Murakami finds little in his work, outside the attempt to build a fine art market in Japan from scratch, not already fully realized in the anime and manga he mines. I think his writings confirm this. To call his work “historically important” without engaging the otaku culture that defines it is to suffer from myopia.

One more thing: can we declare a moratorium on “rictus”? Thanks.

I wind up at PingMag, a bilingual English-Japanese design journal, fairly often.  I first found it through this article on Namaiki while researching Fukuokan permaculture and the Power of Duck.  Since then, I often return to its articles on art, film, design, and pop-cult detritus .  A sample:

• This time, I was researching Koi no Mon, a crazed manga by Jun HANYUNYUU.
• Gez Fry, self-taught illustrator who fled a diplomacy career, explains his “manga-style” and slags US comics art
• The producers of Tokyo Loop, an omnibus of animation feature Tabaimo, Yoji KURI and Kotobuki SHIRIAGARI, among others.
• The making of Tekkon Kinkreet into an anime, with lots of production art and photos around the studio.
• The Butt-Biting Bug, about which the less said the better.
• YMCK, pioneering 8-bit band, with videos.
• Dark & comic animation from Run Wrake, described in an interview.
• Jennifer Baichwal, director of Manufactured Landscapes, a fine doc on Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photography (pictured above).
• Some guy who dresses in olde clothes and hand-cranks a projector to show film’s incunabulae.

Always interesting Harold Henderson has summed up an article in Technology Review on television news quite well:

TV “news” isn’t liberal or conservative, it’s stupid.

Written by former Dateline NBC producer John Hockenberry, it covers twelve years of missed chances as producers continually look for an “emotional core” where there isn’t one. Not Al Qaeda’s complexities; firefighters. Not politics; puppies.

His main point is that network news is doomed, thanks to the self-organizing communities made possible by the Internet. No kidding. He chronicles the inside reasons throughout the article, and make me feel glad not to work in network news. Let it die.

The vacuity of the network form, especially of Dateline, comes into fine relief near the end. Hockenberry laments one of his pet projects that got cut. He thought it innovative. In it, a porn spammer gets confronted on-camera by a miffed housewife, like a watered-down To Catch a Predator. When he mentions that dreck in the next sentence, I wonder if he can’t see the connection.

More interesting are the suggestions, not developed, that 1) ads are innovative because they respect the audience; and 2) something inherent in film/TV leads us to look for the emotional core. You can’t control the Kuleshov effect, in other words. So filmed war coverage has to be Us vs. Them. Even worse, it always becomes mythic. Which leads to the question: how different would my country and its politics look if we’d all just been reading about 9/11? Or better yet, if all the voters had seen nothing but tables of raw data the entire time?