Very, very busy with school at the moment but some more real posts are coming up in the next few days. For now, another roundup of things I wrote elsewhere.
Here's a Zoilus guest post about Toronto jazz group Canaille: http://www.zoilus.com/documents/general/2009/002415.php
Any regular reader has probably seen this already, but for the sake of comprehensiveness, my interview with Yoshihiro Tatsumi: http://comicscomicsmag.blogspot.com/2009/10/tatsumi-in-toronto.html
And, uh, this is me on Twitter, many months after I started nattering there: https://twitter.com/randlechris
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Sunday, October 4, 2009
They also wrote comics criticism, no. 2
A while back I posted about a writer-on-comics primarily known and acclaimed as a novelist/playwright, trolling for more examples of this species in comments. Several rolled in, but no one suggested Angela Carter. Just 51 when she died of cancer in 1992 and slighted before then - most of the British literary establishment treated the author like her friend J. G. Ballard, as a curio - Carter's reputation only thrived posthumously. Her severely creepy modern fairy tales are an obvious antecedent of Guillermo del Toro's. (More sex, though - The Bloody Chamber throbs with perverse intensity.) I knew she'd written plenty of essays and criticism but never read any of it until I picked up a cheap used copy of her non-fiction collection Expletives Deleted earlier this week. And there next to considerations of Edmund White and Grace Paley is a piece on Gilbert Hernandez.
It was apparently published as the introduction to an early British edition of Duck Feet from Titan Books, which I imagine is now out of print. Here's a sample: "Gilbert Hernandez' comic strips in the series, Heartbreak Soup...are about gossip. Especially, about yesterday's gossip, about the memories our parents share with us so we almost come to think that they are our memories too. The intimate folklore of family. Gilbert Hernandez' family, of course, is not my family, or your family, but this kind of folklore has a cross-cultural similarity, most of all in cultures where people often find themselves short of a bob."
"...The daily life of Palomar is a cruel parody of the chaste suburbia pictured in that family newspaper strip of my childhood, Blondie. It is a world of brawling kids and feckless, licentious, drunken men, dominated in every sense of the word by endlessly fecund earth mothers, furiously sexy women who might have come undulating straight out of the crudest kind of male fantasy if they didn't pack such big punches...Sexiest and most furious of all is Luba of the big breasts and uncertain temper."
"...There are things about Heartbreak Soup that make me think Gilbert Hernandez must respond sympathetically to the politics of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but of course, he didn't have to know about Macondo to invent Palomar. They are both places that existed once, in a continent caught between post-colonialism and neo-imperialism; but to think of Heartbreak Soup as a sort of Classic Comics version of Garcia Marquez is to do Gilbert Hernandez a great disservice. What Heartbreak Soup is most like is life."
Some bits could almost be written by a '00s comics blogger. Carter says that Heartbreak Soup "is easy to talk about as if it were a novel; and it isn't, of course. But it is fiction, a category that includes novels, movies, soap opera, sitcom, tragedy, comedy, and comic strips." Even more ahead of its time was her essay "Once More Into the Mangle", which examined Rapeman-esque gonzo manga all the way back in 1971. A feminist outsider drawn to Japanese culture, Carter writes that the quasi-porn comics "would appear to be directed either at the crazed sex maniac or the dedicated surrealist" (coming from her, this was probably a compliment). I feel like we should revive "mangle" as a critical term in tribute. Ineptly flipped localizations, maybe?
It was apparently published as the introduction to an early British edition of Duck Feet from Titan Books, which I imagine is now out of print. Here's a sample: "Gilbert Hernandez' comic strips in the series, Heartbreak Soup...are about gossip. Especially, about yesterday's gossip, about the memories our parents share with us so we almost come to think that they are our memories too. The intimate folklore of family. Gilbert Hernandez' family, of course, is not my family, or your family, but this kind of folklore has a cross-cultural similarity, most of all in cultures where people often find themselves short of a bob."
"...The daily life of Palomar is a cruel parody of the chaste suburbia pictured in that family newspaper strip of my childhood, Blondie. It is a world of brawling kids and feckless, licentious, drunken men, dominated in every sense of the word by endlessly fecund earth mothers, furiously sexy women who might have come undulating straight out of the crudest kind of male fantasy if they didn't pack such big punches...Sexiest and most furious of all is Luba of the big breasts and uncertain temper."
"...There are things about Heartbreak Soup that make me think Gilbert Hernandez must respond sympathetically to the politics of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but of course, he didn't have to know about Macondo to invent Palomar. They are both places that existed once, in a continent caught between post-colonialism and neo-imperialism; but to think of Heartbreak Soup as a sort of Classic Comics version of Garcia Marquez is to do Gilbert Hernandez a great disservice. What Heartbreak Soup is most like is life."
Some bits could almost be written by a '00s comics blogger. Carter says that Heartbreak Soup "is easy to talk about as if it were a novel; and it isn't, of course. But it is fiction, a category that includes novels, movies, soap opera, sitcom, tragedy, comedy, and comic strips." Even more ahead of its time was her essay "Once More Into the Mangle", which examined Rapeman-esque gonzo manga all the way back in 1971. A feminist outsider drawn to Japanese culture, Carter writes that the quasi-porn comics "would appear to be directed either at the crazed sex maniac or the dedicated surrealist" (coming from her, this was probably a compliment). I feel like we should revive "mangle" as a critical term in tribute. Ineptly flipped localizations, maybe?
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