 | Comics Review: Bottomless Bellybuttonby X. M. Verdammt |
This comic was somewhat arbitrarily described as the "graphic novel of the year" by a magazine. By what criteria is a work given this title? Who were this year's other contenders? It did not say. Still, based on what I read, I had high expectations. I really did.
An ambitious "graphic novel" with a large cast of completely fictional, non-autobiographical characters? A classification of "family comedy/drama/horror/mystery/romance/NOT for children" printed on the back of its massive spine--impious labels, such as one would find on a DVD case, or perhaps use to describe a commercial comic book, intended to entertain? An epic comedy/drama/horror/mystery/romance about a family, just like The Brothers Karamazov or at least (as someone commenting on the New York Magazine article pointed out) The Corrections, except taking advantage of the inherent awesomeness of pictures, of the comic book form?
On the one hand, despite not being autobiographical, Bottomless Bellybutton appeared to use lots of the other indie conventions: "humble" line art, a story about a family that we know is "realistic" because the main plot point is they are getting Divorced. On the other hand, possibly Mr. Dash Shaw--of our own neighborhood of Bed-Stuy--had taken those lame conventions and used them to make something good? Could this be?
Dash Shaw's artistic manifesto.
From the beginning, I was conflicted about the art in this book. Mr. Shaw is a recent graduate of the Cartooning Department at the School of Visual Arts. The pages of Bottomless Bellybutton show that he went to school for Cartooning and learned the right way to draw simple characters talking and doing stuff in such a way that it is clear what is happening.
The world of serious comics is in love with this art style. It is in love with the simple visuals of Charles Schultz and Jeffrey Brown. It cannot get enough of how much like real life these artists' work is, and how different from the juvenile bombast found in superhero comics, those false gods. "Why do you think James Kochalka has a wife/girlfriend? It is because he draws sensitive, legible comics about his life, not crass 'power fantasies' about physically fit men in 'capes and tights.'"
I, myself, do not inherently have a problem with the "simple and clear" comic book art style. First of all, there are lots of variations to the thing. Some artists emulate the look of instructional diagrams; sometimes, they go way overboard with the schematics and the dead eyes and become very awesome and bombastic. Some artists use "clear lines" to depict visually complex things, like a frigate full of pirate treasure, in more detail than would have been possible otherwise. And some artists (like Charles Schultz, actually, or scary Lyonel Feininger) use but a few decisive strokes to give their work an authentically weird and distinctive appearance, the comics' "form" inextricable from their "content."
However, what I don't like as much is when comics artists--for example, Jeffrey Brown, Alison Bechdel, "Seth," maybe everyone at Top Shelf--think "simple" means "serviceable and boring." It isn't even the presence of the boring art style that rankles. I liked Bechdel's Fun Home okay, even though it was not very interesting to look at. My problem is with how the boring "cartooning" style is privileged as artistic and honest in comics, the same way Hemingway's writing style used to be in literature. The same way, arguably, that literature now privileges boring "realistic" subject matter.
Unfortunately, in Bottomless Bellybutton, Mr. Shaw is guilty of drawing in a boring style, as though the minutely-traced movements and soulful stares of his competently-rendered stick figures contained a deeper artistic truth (and the figures really are "competently," even "well" rendered; you can tell the guy can draw, that isn't the problem). Do they contain a deeper artistic truth? That brings me to the next part of my review.
It is kind of a credit to the art and writing in Bottomless Bellybutton that you a) can always tell what is happening on the page, and b) always want to turn the page. The dialog is plain, but natural-enough sounding, with constant minor tensions and resolutions (e.g. How will Julie react to Peter blowing his nose? What do the girls chat about in the car?) . Similarly, there are many lucid multi-panel sequences of beer bottles rolling into the gutter, or characters approaching doors. It is the same principle that makes it hard to resist watching TV, if it's on. The reader is eased into a "rhythm."
As for the story, it is that the entire "Loony" family is under one roof again, because the mom and dad are getting divorced. That is the story's drama. The comedy, I guess, is that only the oldest of the three now-adult children cares, and everyone else has separate, unrelated adventures. This is a good idea, but, unfortunately, these adventures are kind of underwhelming.
The book's best character is Peter, the youngest sibling. He is drawn as a frog who always wears Mickey Mouse gloves, even while masturbating. There is real pathos in this, especially in the panels where his sexless, embryonic frog-face contrasts with his naked, post-pubescent body, its tragic weight apparent even though it's just a simple cartoon. Also in the panels when he gets frightened and his giant frog eyes turn into liquidy pupils and nothing else. That is when the book is at its best.
However, except for the frog thing, Peter's doesn't go very far beyond his role of being that stock figure of indie comics and maybe of all Western art since The Sorrows of Young Werther--the figure that is far more cliched than even Superman. I am talking about figure of the lonely young man. His adventure is, he finds a girlfriend.
The middle sibling, Claire, is just a girl. She has some emotions, sure--all women do--but she is subdued and has common sense. Consequently, she doesn't do very much. Her adventure is, she goes to a club with her sister-in-law and discovers she can loosen up. She reminisces about her ex-husband. Meanwhile, Claire's spirited teenage daughter, Julie, worries about her personal appearance.
It is a credit to the modest, weirdly involving art and writing in Bottomless Bellybutton that, despite all these problems, I didn't realize it wasn't very good until I was about halfway through.
In the book, the oldest sibling, Dennis, becomes obsessed with figuring out why his parents are getting divorced, as he was raised to believe in the myth of family. The "mystery" transpires when Dennis finds a "mysterious" stash of his parents' old love letters. One of the letters is in code and the reader has to solve it! "Is this good or lame?," I wondered, upon I reaching that point. I wasn't sure, but, after about 5 minutes of embarrassed deliberation, I picked up a pen. I guess I had to get to get to the bottom of, uh, David and Margaret Loony's story.
Slowly, a text emerged, in my handwriting. If hadn't already known the answer, and someone asked me, "Was this text written by a reserved science fiction enthusiast from the 50's who was very much in love? Or by a modern-day author of sensitive comics?"--I would probably have said, "a modern-day author of sensitive comics."
The decoded letter, which revealed the meaning of the book's title, was full of "poetic" yet "quirky" imagery, such as a simple man would supposedly use to talk about the big feelings. It had an "and... and... and" construction. It ended with the words, "I'm sorry I'm not a poet." I bet an actual science fiction enthusiast would have written a long and pompous letter, but maybe that would have struck too close to home for Mr. Shaw.
The letter was the book's only obvious false note, as far as what the characters said or wrote. Was this because it was the book's only attempt to ascribe to the characters words that went beyond the blandly "naturalistic"? Or was the letter's inadequacy simply more evident because I had written it out?
I wondered what to do with this literary artifact. What if that arrogant Stephen Future found it, and mistook it for one of my own efforts at prose! I stuffed the "love letter" in my pocket. And that was when I decided that Bottomless Bellybutton was not very good.
Mr. Shaw's web comic, BodyWorld, is much better.
Posted by xerxes on Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:06:02 -0400 -- permanent link
 | How About 95%?by Miracle Jones |
MODERN WAMPUM?
Really...what exactly are "publishing companies" doing when they publish an ebook, besides providing their illustrious name and allowing writers to come into the office and poke around; to chat with interns; to act all big?
Several British men all agree that "if I do the work of picking an apple, then it is my apple, and I can do what I want with that apple, including put it into a bag for my lord." So what are publishing companies doing for ebooks, and why should authors let them take 85% of the NET on a pure-profit investment that requires no WORK?
If you can copy and paste words from a text document, you can "publish" an "ebook." Writers expend 95% of the effort here, and publishers do actually, literally nothing, except provide validation, and pay for the ebook to be "designed," which I am willing to value at 5% of the labor.
They don't need warehouses, a supply chain, ink, dye, paper, flap-copy, NOTHING. Writers already do their own book tours and promotion...and now they are going to give publishing companies 85% of the profits on their books made from blood and divorces?
Writers: do not listen to vanity publishers like Simon and Schuster! Know what your product is worth! Know who is doing the work! Do not let them stroke your ego while they steal your wallet and the wallets of your friends and fellow writer-wretches!
IN FACT, think about this: by letting your publishing company turn your book into an ebook, you are tanking the SHIT out of the future potential for making money off your print edition. I steal books all the time from the internet. Those files are so cute and petite! You can get 1000 ebooks in maybe three minutes, and that's this year. What about next year?
Writers are gonna lose money in the long run because of ebooks, and publishing companies are gonna disappear altogether -- poof. Watch it happen! Maybe they will be replaced by private editing cabals. I don't know.
But 15%?
DO NOT LET A FAST-TALKING WAG WHO HAS ACCESS TO AN INTERNET CONNECTION AND A TALL BUILDING IN MANHATTAN SHACKLE YOUR ANKLES TO SAGUARO CACTI, STRIP YOU DOWN TO YOUR HOMBURG AND SOCKS, AND RAPE YOU WITH A JAGGED BOTTLE OF TONER THAT HE OR SHE NO LONGER NEEDS FOR THE PRESSES THAT ARE NO LONGER RELEVANT.
If you need someone in New York to be your friend, I will be your friend. Especially if I can sleep on your couch next month.
Comment!
Posted by miracle on Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:55:27 -0400 -- permanent link
 | William McGonagall, God Of Fictionby S. Future |
And there are the few who have no choice. If they did not write fiction, they would come apart altogether. Without fiction they would have no reason to remain alive. Without fiction they would have no ability to remain alive.
William McGonagall came to fiction in his fifties when he lost his job as a weaver due to mill closures. Slowly starving in his back room in the town of Dundee, he realized that he had spent his entire life serving a false master. It was time to take the sacrificial knife and lie down before the altar of poetry, his new arbitrary God.
Yes, okay, technically McGonagall is a poet. And if we are not really against poetry here at the Fiction Circus, we are at least unwilling to talk with it at family get-togethers beyond a few smiles over the potato dip. But the fact that McGonagall is a poet is completely incidental. Viewed as a poet, McGonagall is unmentionable and unreadable, except for a laugh. He not only isn't good at making his poems scan, but he doesn't even seem to be aware that scansion exists.
McGonagall is a bad poet, but he is a wonderful fiction writer. His fiction is that he was a genius. His narrative was his life. His medium was rhyming verse, written about railway disasters, poverty, and people he hated. At least two of those three things are true for anyone who writes seriously, no matter what they tell themselves.
Why was this particular man famous? First of all, there is the poetry. A typical example, on the subject of Shakespeare, the only man McGonagall acknowledged as his superior:
In his beautiful play, "As You Like It," one passage is very fine,
Just for instance in the forest of Arden, the language is sublime,
Where Orlando speaks of his Rosilind, most lovely and divine,
And no other poet I am sure has written anything more fine.
Or on the subject of New York, about which all books are ultimately written:
Then there's the elevated railroads about five storeys high,
Which the inhabitants can hear night and day passing by;
Of, such a mass of people there daily do throng--
No less than five 100,000 daily pass along;
And all along the city you can get for five cents--
And, believe me, among the passengers there's few discontent.
Or on the subject of alcoholism:
... Trust in God, and worship Him,
And denounce the publicans, because they cause sin;
Therefore cease from strong drink, and you will likely do well,
Then there's not so much danger of going to hell!
There are a million of these! Each of them was printed as a broadsheet and sold by McGonagall himself on the street corners under the collected title "Poetic Gems." Typical subject matter included poems about demon rum, revenge poems, poems about famous battles in with Scots people murdered English people, and the famous "Tay Bridge" trilogy:
Part I: The Tay Bridge is the greatest architectural marvel of our day!
Part II: The Tay Bridge collapsed, killing ninety. Let's use buttresses on our bridges in the future.
Part III: The new Tay Bridge is the greatest architectural marvel of our day!
An excerpt:
As soon as the catastrophe came to be known
The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown,
And the cry rang out all o'er the town,
Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down,
And a passenger train from Edinburgh,
Which fill'd all the peoples hearts with sorrow,
And made them for to turn pale,
Because none of the passengers were sav'd to tell the tale
How the disaster happen'd on the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.
Like the Divine Comedy, McGonagall moves seamlessly from inferno to paradise. Like all fiction writers, McGonagall assumes that his private obsessive concerns are excellent reading matter for the public. Like modern fiction writers, McGonagall sees no reason to mediate or question this assumption whatsoever.
McGonagall was also big in the "slam poetry" scene of his day. At that time it was called "poet-baiting", and it was more openly admitted that no one in the audience actually liked what they were hearing. The worst poets were requested for these "poet-baiting" events, since the worse the poetry, the more fun you could have throwing plates of food and glasses and rocks at the hapless, sonorous vessels of beauty on stage. Then they would take your money and use it to buy food of their own!
Can you imagine if the writers of today performed a show in which literary work was read aloud so that disinterested people could chuckle and laugh at writerly antics and braggadocio? What fun! What would that be like, I wonder?
Like Dave Eggers, McGonagall too dabbled in autobiography. Most of his books are about himself and his various journeys, focusing on the most dramatic events in his life. These include:
- The time McGonagall arranged for a poetry reading in the back room of a blacksmith's shop for some quick cash. On the way home, McGonagall passed three men on the road. Terrified that the men would rob him, McGonagall beat them all with cudgels, pre-emptively. Then he ran to the sheriff's office to file a complaint. The sheriff promised to look into the matter. McGonagall cursed him and ran home, where he ate bread and butter and went to sleep.
- The death of Tennyson, which inspired McGonagall to walk sixty miles through the rain to apply in person to Queen Victoria at Balmoral Castle for the now-vacant position of Poet Laureate. When the caretakers told him that Victoria wasn't at home, McGonagall turned around and walked back.
- McGonagall's famous trip to New York, most of which was spent looking for money. He tried to sell his broadsheet poems, but New Yorkers wouldn't have any of it; the Queen's coat of arms was printed at the top of every page. A friend suggested that he cut off the coat of arms. McGonagall said no--his coat of arms would follow him wherever he went. Then he asked for money.
You are McGonagall, whether you know it or not. You are hungry, and you are involved in the business of writing for the wrong reasons some of the time and for the right reasons some of the time. The question is whether or not you'll own up to this, whether you'll make it work as well as did McGonagall.
This is a man who starred in the only performance of Macbeth in which Macbeth refuses to die. Why should he, thinks McGonagall? The actor playing Macduff was a jerk, a publican! Fuck him! Let him stab me over and over while I laugh and dance and caper about the stage, Macbeth, jute weaver, putative Poet Laureate over the never-waning British Empire. Let the audience cackle and throw peas at me. Let Macduff finally end the performance by smashing my hands so I can no longer hold my sword, then sweeping my legs from under me so I crash like a tin solider to the floor, back spasming and peas and rat droppings rolling around my eyes, laughing, laughing.
I am McGonagall! I am fiction itself, and I will never die.
Comment!
Posted by future on Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:15:20 -0400 -- permanent link
 | Thomas Bowdler: Shatterer of Worldsby Goodman Carter |
Once upon a time, there was a man called Thomas Bowdler, a terrible man who lived on an island and played chess with prisoners. This man Bowdler got an idea. An awful idea. Bowdler got a wonderful, awful idea.
Bowdler decided that the works of Shakespeare were a little too edgy for Victorian audiences, and that he should remove all of the "adult themes" that weren't suitable for children. A bit of the old Comstockery!
Oh, please don't ask why. No one quite knows the reason. It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. Or maybe his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small.
Bowdler's father used to read Shakespeare to his family at night, and the whole Bowdler family would listen to the tales with wide eyes. But what they didn't know, and what Bowdler found out when he was older, was that his father took out passages that he didn't think would be good for the kiddies, like all the stuff about whores and cross-dressing and donkey shows. The stuff, in other words, that made England a literary force to be reckoned with.
So Thomas got the idea to rewrite the plays and publish The Family Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family. And thus the great cycle of Christianity continues: the sins of the father shall be visited upon the tenth generation. The abused shall become the abusers. And this was the case with the Bowdler family. The entire clan was obsessed with picking apart great literature, from Bowdler's father to his evil sister, Henrietta. In fact, Henrietta was the one who published the first edition of The Family Shakespeare in 1807.
Here are a few changes Bowdler and his family made:
1. Bowdler made Ophelia into a bad swimmer. Instead of accurately representing her decision to no longer weather the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Bowdler changed Ophelia's suicide into an accidental drowning. For Christmas' sake. If he went that far, why didn't he just save the day and give Ophelia an inner tube or those inflatable arm bands that babies wear in the pool?
2. Bowdler took all the sexy stuff out of Romeo & Juliet.
What is the point of a teen sex comedy with no sex?
It starts at the beginning. He decides to omit I.i.13: "Tis true, and therefore women being the weaker vessel are ever thrust to the wall."
Juliet's line in III.ii.5 is changed from "Spread thy close curtain, love performing night" to "Spread thy close curtain, and come civil night." "Love performing night" isn't risque, not even to your humble pilgrim servant, Goodman Carter. But "come civil night" is just lame.
Maybe these are forgivable for a bad editor. But Bowdler's biggest mistake was fucking with the one guy you do not fuck with in this play: Mercutio. He changed Mercutio's line, "the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon" to "the hand of the dial is now upon the point of noon." (II.iv.61) Come on, that's the first rule of the drama: no one wants to read a play without at least one prick in it.
3. Bowdler devolved Lady Macbeth's "Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!" into "Out, crimson spot!" Jesus Christ, if Bowdler was really a moralizer and deluded himself into thinking that literature should only be written for didactic purposes, then why didn't he love this line? Lady Macbeth is unknowingly proclaiming God's judgment of fire and brimstone for her gravest sin: murder. She is a strong woman, and so she's going to hell! Bowdler should love this! But when Bowdler sees naughty words, he just screeches "Heavens to Betsy!" and crosses a line through anything within a ten foot radius.
4. Bowdler removed all the fun racist bestiality from Othello. Seriously, who does this?
When I read Othello for the first time, the line that stuck with me the most were Iago's words to Desdemona's father, Brabantio: "an old black Ram is tupping your white Ewe." The imagery, coupled with Iago's "your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs," were examples of Iago's crude vision of sexuality when contrasted with Othello and Desdemona's love. When you cut these lines or change them, you cut the character, and you cut the meaning.
5. Bowdler took out a prostitute from Henry IV Part II. He took her out on the town for a night full of blow, gambling, and tiddlywinks. No, Doll Tearsheet is a prostitute, and Bowdler took her out of the play. Get it, Doll Tearsheet? But that lofty pun takes on a different significance when you actually discover what this asshole did. Now she doesn't exist anymore! He tore sheets from the Folios, thinking it was a jolly old time to squander entire characters that Shakespeare was given by the Most High! And if you think that's bad...
6. Bowdler thought he was a better editor than God. This man bastardized The Old Testament by removing things that he thought might make our dear children too squeamish. Many of you foul pagans and unbelievers who have strayed from the Path might praise this decision as a rebellion against the tyranny of an unjust god. But what fun is the Old Testament if you don't get to read about awesome stuff like Lot sleeping with his daughters, Onan's grave sin of spilling sacred sperm, or Hebrews enacting laws that let them kill each other?
7. Bowdler was not a good writer. When I realized that I really didn't know that much about this man other than what I had researched online, I decided to take a look at some of his actual writing, not just his editing. I eagerly turned to his famous best-seller, Letters Written in Holland, in the Months of September and October: to which is added a Collection of Letters, and Other Papers, Relating to the Journey of the Princess of Orange on the 28th of June, 1787. Here is a portion of this delightful work:
Throughout my entire life, people have made fun of me for finding boring things interesting. I cannot find this book interesting. Perhaps Mr. Bowdler could have used an editor himself?
If you want, you can read Bowdler's entire Family Shakespeare here. The only problem is this: why would you want to when you can read Shakespeare instead?
But let's not be too hard on Bowdler. The guy did have some redeeming qualities. He liked chess, for instance. Secondly, he wasn't the one that gave King Lear a happy ending, no matter what Neil Gaiman has to say about it. That unhappy honor is bestowed upon Nahum Tate, the poetaster poet laureate. That's about it.
Oh yeah, and he also cut up Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. What a jerk.
Some will tell you that many other than Bowdler edited Shakespeare's words and "augmented them" with their own, including Alexander Pope! They're right; all of these people did bad things, but Thomas Bowdler was the worst.
Algernon Swinburne, one of Bowdler's few defenders, once claimed that "more nauseous and foolish cant was never chattered than that which would deride the memory or depreciate the merits of Bowdler. No man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children." Oh yeah, Algernon Swinburne? I just bowdlerized your oeuvre full of sex, drugs, and ass-paddling, and guess what? There was nothing left to print.
Just to make sure this shit never happens to you, writers, consider adding this to all of your future works as an appendix:
"For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book."
That should scare the fuckers off.
Comment!
Posted by kevin
on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:00:11 -0400 -- permanent link
