On The Subject Of Return Reading
The author and music writer David Gates penned an article this summer for Newsweek -- where I think he's a staffer -- on the pleasures of re-reading. Gates seems to view re-reading as way to spend time in the company of memorable characters that have touched him in his lifelong give-and-take with literature. It further seems he experiences this pleasure through specifically lively usage of language. Gates appears to be particularly fond of Charles Dickens, in whose works the characters' names are frequently worth a second visit all by themselves. I found Gates' piece fascinating for the accrued force of his recollections and for the amount of conflict it sparks in him about what those books he reads indicates about his own life, its predilections and potential shortcomings.
I think comics has a harder time than prose with the question of what gets read over and over and why. The various comics industries' longtime devotion to impermanence may have fostered a suspicion of reading a few works a bunch of times as opposed to as many works as possible a single time or two. Further, comics are such a powerful expression of nostalgia and act as such highly effective totems of negotiating childhood issues and rough life periods that there's a tendency to want to equate re-reading with the kind of emotional wallow many of us have experienced diving back into a big stack of mental comfort food. I know that I can make my way through a down period armed with a large stack of comics that feel and smell a certain way. At those times, the specific comic doesn't matter as much as it being comics.
As I get older, however, I find I return to very specific comics to re-experience their inherent virtues, that I'm spending less time reading comics in general than I am trying to fully and effectively read and re-read the great comics or the comics that are important to me. Here are four that I find on my night table more than once a year, and some reasons why this may be so.
*****
Hicksville, Dylan Horrocks, serialized in Pickle 1992-1996, published in book form 1998, Tragedy Strikes Press/Black Eye Press/Drawn and Quarterly.
It's not difficult to figure out why I might have been interested in Hicksville during its serialization in Dylan Horrocks' great comic book Pickle. One of its main characters and arguably the audience's viewpoint character is the comics critic Leonard Batts. In the mid-1990s I was one of maybe a half dozen people in the world who could argue that he had Batts' job or something very close to it (there are many more now). My job did not involve writing books about Jack Kirby or being sent around the world to track down the biographical details of a prominent cartoonist. It did mean I paid a lot of attention to comics and cartoonists without being one of their number, a feeling of being part of a special club but far outside of it that Horrocks nailed.
Hicksville went on to become a beloved graphic novel for many people enamored of cartooning, particularly those in the post-alternative generation who I think were looking for a narrative that spoke to their struggles with the art form that didn't express it as a push away from mainstream comics, a rebellion against content and practices about which they might not have felt strongly in the first place. I think its success is due in part to the fact that Horrocks manages to suggest something deeply mysterious and wonderful about the making of comics and a care in reading them that ropes in the horrible futility experienced by many of its best creators, then and now. Some people complain about its lighthouse metaphor being way too spot on, but I think there's a solicitousness to Dylan's choices of metaphor and meaning that should be appreciated. There's something to comics that the creation of a bold metaphor can have meaning to people who read the story even as the actual thing has meaning to the people in the world where they get to walk inside the thing.
Going back to Hicksville always feels to me like getting to have a long conversation with Dylan about art and related issues. It's interesting how much that conversation changes even though the book has remained the same. More of Hicksville is revealed to me each time out. In terms of its narrative, I'm usually struck by how measured Dylan's pacing and tone are, how little happens and how much heaven and earth move -- sort of literally -- on the relatively modest decisions about life and art embraced by the characters. In fact, the more I read it, the more I tend to see the characters over the ideas they represent. I don't wonder after comics as cartography as much as I might have 10 years ago, but I ponder Grace's garden quite a bit, the wisdom of returning home and the way that none of our personal lighthouses have much to do with comics and that's okay, too.
As The Kid Goes For Broke, Garry Trudeau.
I have no desire to read Doonesbury on a daily basis. Unless I'm reading a newspaper that carries it, I never even see Garry Trudeau's still slowly unfurling document of Baby Boomer adulthood. When I do, I'm surprised by how relatively handsome it is, and how sympathetic his strips about the soldiers are, and how he's solved a lot of the problems that used to crop up when he dealt in abstractions of real-world figures rather than allowed his amazingly diverse cartoon cast to carry those moments. I recognize its quality, and suspect that making it still gives its cartoonist a charge and thrill. I'm happy to remind people that it's arguably the great comics feature still running.
The Doonesbury comics I will read are the 1970s book collections, the small white books that carried two panels a page and resembled in proportion similar collections from any number of popular gag cartoonists of the time period. There's nostalgia involved. Because Doonesbury was comics, I read it far ahead of my interest in its subject matter. It seemed to me a very adult strip, in that it reflected the way I heard adults talk to one another when I was in the room being quiet or otherwise unobtrusive. As adulthood was a club that would eventually have me as a member, and as a member of 1970s American culture I was certain at all times that I was not being given the best information possible, I paid an inordinate amount of attention to Doonesbury just trying to decipher what the hell all these people were up to.
The great congressional campaign storyline in As The Kid Goes For Broke -- on of Trudeau's career highlights -- was the first time in any medium I'd seen people pursuing jobs that seemed personally fulfilling and fun. This was a great boon in imagining some sort of future for myself beyond becoming an important pawn in a world-shattering end of millennium contest between good and evil. There was a casual certainty to what was going on that seemed like it was loaded with insights, anyway.
When I read the book these days I'm struck by how fantastic a character Joanie Caucus is, and how little she gets mention in examinations of the great comics characters. There's something that feels much more real and observed about Joanie Caucus than even those characters in Doonesbury with easy-to-nail, real-life antecedents. It's so, so difficult to make an admirable character that's still as funny as Trudeau makes her. I'm also reminded by how hard Doonesbury hit with audiences at the time. For one thing, I'm pretty certain that a criticism aimed at Trudeau in those days years before Scott Adams came along was that he was a terrible artist and the strip would improved 10,000 percent if he could find a decent craftsman to see his vision through. This seems absurd now, but it's fun to look at some of the oddball aspects of Trudeau's character design -- the big, wide, eyes that looked so ugly in people aping his style -- and some of the solutions (static imagery, voices off panel, dropping details) that he used to avoid having to draw certain things in explicit fashion. I don't know if Trudeau's comfort drawing was part of the origin of the silent third panel he mastered and every single cartoonist has at least thought about using since, but that's a delightful craft element to track, as effective a use of silence as any Jack Benny employed.
The best-known sequence in the book is all silent panels, of course: Joanie and Rick Redfern in bed together introduced to us by a sweeping view through the neighborhood. It remains hilarious not just for the skill displayed in that silent lead-in, but for the confidence Trudeau had in doing that part of the story that way in the first place. There's an element of rooting for the characters that seeps in that feels a bit manipulative, but was there ever a better character to root for?
Sick Sick Sick, Jules Feiffer.
I think Jules Feiffer's Sick Sick Sick is a perfect comic book. The one I re-read is a fourth or fifth edition, the one depicted above and the one most people I know think of when they think of this work in print form. Sick Sick Sick great-looking, it's of a size that is pleasing to hold and read, it's of a length that flatters Feiffer's unique voice, the material inside remains amazing and its overall historical significance is undeniable. It is all by itself proof that comics for an adult, sophisticated readership can exist, that they can be done in a style far away from given commercial standards, and that they can yield major artistic returns. It is singular and it is Ruthian.
It's also fun. Feiffer's cartooning is so lively in this selection of cartoons. Feiffer's running men and the way he draws slumped shoulders and his tiny women are all pantheon-worthy in terms of the art form's great visual depictions. The bitter disappointments of manhood in the post-War world and neuroses that drove so many novels were also rich territory for Feiffer, maybe richer because of the deep subtext afforded in giving these expressions a visual life and the modest act of Greenwich Village rebellion that was taking on such subjects in cartoon form in the first place. This was another book I used to try and understand adults when I was a kid, although it'd be years and hundreds of readings later before I realized that many of the concerns upon which Feiffer seized were funny because they were beyond easy understanding.
Feiffer's had a wonderful career, in cartooning and as a writer, which is almost a minor miracle in itself. Reading this very great book as I like to do every month or so I'm still astonished by how little credit he's given for the towering accomplishment of creating work that was two or three decades away from fostering a sustained movement. If we valued the graphic novel as much for its capacity for psychological insight and ability to deal with sophisticated issues and propensity towards expressive artwork as much we do for the number of pages involved, Feiffer would rightfully be seen as one of the major cogs in its creation. As things stand, his work exists in its own little world, and this pungent phase to his career continues to call me for round after round of personal reckoning.
The Death Of Speedy Ortiz, Jaime Hernandez, multiple collections.
I had a significant crush on The Death Of Speedy Ortiz the summer I was 20 years old, reading and re-reading the serialized story with a passion I had never brought to a single comic story before then. There are a number of Hernandez Brother works from that general time period that feel special to me for their content and for how completely each knocked me on my ass: "Tear It Up, Terry Downe," "For The Love Of Carmen" and "Frida" all spring to mind. But it's "Speedy Ortiz" to which I always return. It's such an irresistibly sentimental and sweetly romantic story on so many levels. It's full of nighttime adventures of the kinds that only young people can have, the promise of sex and violence, lovers kept from each other by fate, friends and family sticking up for friends and family. The story's ending is a Godzilla-sized choke-up moment of Speedy's goodbye and the final reveal as to his fate, followed by the next page's King Kong-level gut-punch of a moment from the characters' past where they're all heading different directions towards the same depressing result. I think people sometimes take it less seriously for its appealing qualities, as if there's something too easy or smoothed-over about this approach. I thought it was wonderful that summer I read it 10,000 times, and I remain convinced it's a special story every time I've picked it up since.
Although I'm a long way divorced from the mind-set shared by so many of the characters in Death Of Speedy Ortiz, and most importantly have broken with the simple desire it invoked in me to want to live way Hernandez depicts these people living their lives, I like the comic more than ever for its power and luminous art work and what I see now as instances of narrative restraint. There are stunning panels in here -- Maggie and Speedy sharing a kiss at a barbecue, a moment of Maggie as she likely appears to Ray, Litos flailing his arms around as a sign of the youthful energy he can't leave behind -- that illustrate instances that aren't high moments of action but the way we assemble memories and ascribe meaning. A gifted and unappreciated writer, Hernandez further underlines the story's theme by shifting much of the action off-line and focusing on the reaction that the cast members have to those moments. Even a crucial instance he depicts within the story, a drive-by shooting, seems more important for the way in which both of the major characters involve react than for the physical consequences involved. When I read Death Of Speedy now, I see a little bit more of how Jaime Hernandez uses single moments and narrative flow to comment on how we build memories and meaning.
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Describe A Favorite Comic In Five Words So That It's Clear What You're Writing About, But Don't Name The Comic." Here are their results, anonymously posted.
I liked these enough and had so much fun figuring them out, I thought I'd extend that to you. So: instant contest. Can you identify the following comics based on their five-word description from a CR reader? Most accurate set of answers wins. (Clue: there is at least one comic described twice.) Contest Ends 5 PM ET Monday. Winner announced and names restored the next day. I reserve the right to dump incomprehensible entries. Depending on the location of winner, I'll rustle up a decent prize, perhaps based on the principle of 5. And yes, you get credit for naming your own entry!
The following stumped me and are worth 2X Points. In fact, if this is yours, please identify it even if you don't want to be in the contest so I can be certain.
*****
Bonus Entry 01
1. Hat
2. Contest
3. Causes
4. Frequent
5. Earthquakes
The top comics-related news stories from September 26 to October 2, 2009:
1. A double-appearance on Yale's campus of author Jytte Klausen and cartoonist Kurt Westergaard near the fourth anniversary of the original publication of the Danish cartoons calls into question issues surrounding the original event and the decision by Yale's press not to publishing any imagery depicting Muhammad in Klausen's new book.
2. Cartoonist Pahé arrested in Gabon for drawing two police officers.
3. Keith Knight cartoon crosses a line several students not willing to let Knight cross, actually reading the comic be damned.
Winners Of The Week
Your 2009 Ignatz Award winners.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* here's a nice write-up on Jytte Klausen's speech at Yale last night, including some video. She dances along the line that is her position against the images not being included because the danger cited runs against the entire thesis of her book but also not wanting to be sucked into a controversy that would include taking the book somewhere. It's the most credible she's sounded on the issue, I think. Also, Joseph Cumming defended the Press' decision at the meeting.
* I'm not sure what you did for International Blasphemy Day, but I hope it was a good one. I had planned on blackmailing a late-night talk show host, but that fell through.
Haller's first published work in comic books seems to have been on "Deputy Dawg" for Spotlight Comics at the tail end of the black and white boom period. His most high profile work may have come for Marvel's Star line on licensed series including Alf in the early '90s. He has also made comics for the Flintstones franchise and later provided work to DC's Looney Tunes titles. One of the comics he worked on during that period was an Eek! The Cat book from Hamilton Comics. His partner on that issue was Nat Gertler, who later published a great deal of Haller material through is own publishing effort, About Comics. Gertler wrote a long letter to several sources about Haller.
Rusty was one of my regulars, working on a number of About Comics projects. He worked on every issue of Licensable BearTM, and also contributed to The Factor and Many Happy Returns.
Gertler says that Haller may have worked on some licensed material related to comics in addition to comics themselves.
Haller had recently found a level of creative satisfaction with his work on Ace and Queenie, his own creation. Ace and Queenie is an anthropomorphic adventure-romance that appeared in Radio Comix' Furrlough, and enjoy an on-line following through a devoted site. He had anticipated collecting that work. According to a post by Elin Winkler, Haller also contributed to the Radio's Hit The Beach and was in discussions for several new projects, including some on-line.
According to several postings by friends, Haller had been displaced after the death of a family member and drop in work opportunities. He had recently moved to Ohio to live with a friend. Describing him as someone who loved comics more than they loved him, Gertler mentioned that he remained hopeful to the end.
When last we talked, he had plans in place to go to some convention... which would involve his first ever airplane flight. I think I brought up once again the idea that it might be time to find something beyond comics to earn a living, but that wasn't in him. It may be a slightly poetic memory bank telling me that he said that he'd be doing comics until he died... but even if he didn't voice it that way, it was certainly how he felt.
Haller had recently found a level of creative satisfaction with his work on Ace and Queenie, his own creation. 
