n i j o m u

September 1, 2010

Jason’s blog

Hey, Jason has a blog, Cats Without Dogs. And it’s in English for those of us who can’t read Norwegian and have trouble with complex French. And he has a cool little comic about Darth Vader and Tom Waits.

August 30, 2010

Final Girl Film Club: Hellbound

This is another Final Girl Film Club review.

In this film, Chuck Norris stops the Book of Revelations from happening. Doesn’t that sound cool? Can’t you just picture Chuck giving a roundhouse to the anti-christ? Or taking down the many-eyed goat while the streets erupt in fire and the angels blow their trumpets? Well, keep dreaming. This isn’t that movie. Besides the goat eyes sported by the main bad guy, here’s the only demon in the entire movie:

There are no cool demons, no skies raining blood. And there are no roundhouses here. There are hardly any fights at all. I mean, I knew this movie was going to be bad, but I hoped for some good fight scenes. Nope. Mostly what we get is Norris standing around staring at things. But maybe this wooden veneer hides a complex subtext…

So the movie starts in 1186 during the Crusades. An emissary of the devil, the pharmaceutically named Prosatanos, is opening diplomatic negotiations between hell and the human world by trying to stab a baby with a huge golden dildo complete with golden nut sack. As he raises his phallus to impale the infant, Prosatanos is pierced with two shafts himself. Then he gets reamed up the backside by a priest. Those priests… Prosatanos is shoved back inside his womb-like tomb, vowing to be born again. Then the king takes his own mighty phallus and chops up the emissary’s golden dildo into nine little pieces. These nine pieces are then scattered around the world so that the phallus may never rise again.

In 1951, Prosatanos is awoken from his slumber. And who, you may ask, awakens him? Two grave-robbing Arabs of course. Yes, two Arabs unleash the forces of hell on the world. Is this an American movie, or what? So anyway, the devil’s emissary is back and has to piece together his broken phallus before he can do any more impaling.

Now the movie skips ahead thirty years to the gritty streets of Chicago. Norris plays a Chicago cop who is supposed to be a tough, Dirty Harry type. Yet mainly he just stands around because I guess it’s tougher to look like you could kick ass than to actually go and kick any. And his name is Shatter. Shatter. But wait, it’s a cool self-referential thing, because the main special effect in this movie is the breaking of glass. People are thrown through windows and against glass shelves, over and over again. So yeah, his name’s Shatter. He discovers a horrible murder in which a rabbi has had his heart ripped out and Chuck Norris is beaten up by the murderer, Prosatanos, who is sporting a mullet longer than Chuck’s. Yes, you heard that right: Chuck Norris is beaten up. Actually, he’s thrown against a wall. Why a guy who can rip people’s hearts from their chests just throws Shatter against a wall is beyond my feeble mind to contemplate. Anyway, clues lead Shatter and his annoying partner to discover the love interest. The love interest serves only to prove Shatter’s manliness to his partner, since heterosexuality for men is actually dependent upon homosocial approval. The partner concedes that Shatter is in fact manly and the story goes on. To Israel.

And here the movie makes a subtle commentary on world politics. First, we are lead to learn that the Israeli police are ineffectual at dealing with their own problems. The Middle East can’t handle itself: check. Then we also learn that Interpol has been following a string of murders but can’t put the pieces together. Europe has all the evidence it needs, but doesn’t have the brains or guts to act: check. So enter America, or at least it’s blonde mulletted emissary. Shatter takes with him his subservient black partner who only thinks about basketball and food. The two of them break local laws and use local thieves to uncover the truth they know is hidden and – voilá! – you’ve got American foreign policy in a neat little mulletted package served piping hot with centuries-old stereotypes.

So this all must build up to a killer fight scene, right? RIGHT? Sadly, no. Yes, there is a fight scene, but it mostly involves Shatter and his partner falling over and Prosatanos playing teleportation hide-and-seek. No martial arts showdown ensues. Instead, Shatter picks up the fallen golden phallus and then throws it at 200 miles an hour, shoving the thing deep within Prosatanos. This causes Prosatanos to light up like a sparkler and explode. Ah, the sweet release. After this pyrotechnic ejaculation, the dildo is back in nine pieces, which are then collected by a guy impersonating Jesus wearing a Mary Magdalene robe. And the movie ends with Shatter not kissing the love interest, because girls are icky. Real men prefer the company of other men.

Now just imagine all this with painfully bad acting, dark lighting, and boring shots and you can rush out right now and remove this movie from your Netflix queue. This is one bad movie.

August 28, 2010

sequential art – You, Want, I, Want, You by Harry Bowers

I was at the de Young last week and saw these. First off, these are not assemblages of clothes; these are photographs (or photos of photographs…). In person, they look 3D, a photographic trompe-l’oeil. As you can probably guess, what struck me about this piece is that it is intended to be sequential. At the de Young, the photographs hang next to each other like a series of comics panels or film stills, and they’re obviously meant to be read left to right, which gives the impression of the clothes dancing.

Also, this illustrates something that I’ve thought about before. Oftentimes, comics artists are encouraged to vary the point of view from panel to panel, vary the shots (both the terms point of view and shot are problematic here, maybe “composition” would be better). How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is one such proponent of this approach. And it’s true that the same composition over and over again can get stale. Yet varying things excessively from panel to panel just for the sake of doing it can really hurt the readability of a story. Look at any of the early Image comics for examples. And if you look at early newspaper strips, like Little Nemo, there isn’t much variation of the point of view actually. Sure, McCay plays with things a lot, but generally the characters appear at the same distance from the same angle from panel to panel. This actually grounds his flights of fancy and makes them readable. The panel borders act as a frames of measurement that the reader can use to measure change. For example, the reader can tell Nemo is getting bigger because he gets closer to the panel borders in each successive panel. Likewise, the static nature of the frame can be played off against the movements of the characters. Since the shot doesn’t change, the movement of the characters gets highlighted. This is what Bowers does in You, Want, I, Want, You.

In other words, while the panel border is not supposed to be read as part of the picture plane (generally) it is still a graphical element and its lines have a relationship with the lines that are within. I think more talented comics artists have an intuitive understanding of this. Furthermore, this is something that really sets comics apart from film, and, I suspect, is why some film approaches to shots don’t translate well to comics. And c0nversely, why comics don’t always translate well to film. It’s not just the stillness of comics; it’s the two dimensionality of the panel. The depth of the image within a panel–it’s trompe l’oeil of space–is dependent on that image’s relationship to the flat panel border.

August 26, 2010

Satoshi Kon dead

I just learned from Same Hat! that Satoshi Kon, the director of Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika, and Paranoia Agent, just died of cancer. At the age of 46. It’s heartbreaking and it’s a huge loss.

If you’ve never seen the work of Satoshi Kon, then I suggest you treat yourself. His work is “anime,” but unlike any anime you’ve seen. His characters have depth and his narratives are structurally adventurous. He is a filmmaker. Or was.

This LA Weekly article has a nice discussion of Kon and focuses mostly on Paranoia Agent, which you can view here.

August 25, 2010

duotone Carnivale page 94

This will probably be the last Carnivale post for a few weeks.

August 23, 2010

so… what’s going on?

Yeah, I haven’t posted much in awhile, especially any Carnivale updates. Mostly this has been due to the distractions of summer and increased parental responsibilities. But there will be fewer Carnivale updates for a little while for another reason. I’ve been asked by the Nashville Review to do a story for their fall issue and I need to get working on it. They don’t want the story to be published previous to the issue date, so don’t expect any preview pages here. But I’m playing around with doing the story in ink and marker, like the images above. I’m working on thumbnailing the story out now. It’s based off my own experiences after graduating from college and moving up to Seattle, but it’s not autobiographical. Anyway, I’m just hoping I can get the bulk of it done from now till the end of September.

August 14, 2010

new Pentalic Paper for Pens

Awhile ago in the local art and office supply store, I saw that Pentalic had a new cover for its “Paper for Pens.” I wondered if the paper itself had changed, but I didn’t try it out. My experience with the old “Paper for Pens” was that while it advertised itself as being “crisp and bleedproof,” it wasn’t. All ink lines I put on it, no matter what the ink, feathered. To be fair, I live near sea level and there tends to me a lot of moisture in the air, but I found that the Borden & Riley Bleedproof Paper for Pens was, in fact, bleedproof. But on the last few Carnivale pages, I have been noticing that even this paper isn’t as crisp as I’d like it. So today at the art store, I ran my fingers over the new Pentalic Paper for Pens and found it incredibly smooth, much smoother than the old version and even smoother than the Borden & Riley. So I bought a pad. Well, I just did a test and found that it is bleedproof. It seems like a great surface to use pen and ink on. I think it may replace the Borden & Riley as my favorite paper, though I’ll need to use it for awhile to really ascertain that. Still, it is definitely a major improvement over the old version. Here’s a link to it at the Pentalic site.

August 7, 2010

short reviews of some recent Fantagraphics stuff I’ve read

• It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi. If you’ve read novels like All Quiet on the Western Front or poems like Hardy’s “The Man He Killed” or Owen’s “Dulce and Decorum Est” then you have some idea of the tone Tardi strikes in this graphic novel. Maybe that’s my way of saying that this book doesn’t cover anything you may have heard before, but this book still contains a lot of power. Tardi’s art is in top form here and he uses three panoramic panels per page to show us the horror he wants us to see. Just the visual nature of this book alone makes it powerful, but his narrative choices are also affecting. I had read a few of the stories here before and had enjoyed them, but all next to each other another meaning emerges. Since there isn’t a single character to take us through the entire book, we understand that the misery felt by one character is the same as the misery felt by another. So the book becomes not a story of a single person, but a story of all the soldiers who fought in the First World War. And when Tardi finally gives us all the statistics in the end– how many dead, how many wounded, etc.– it has a real punch that statistics by themselves usually don’t have, since we have seen what those statistics mean in the previous chapters. War books are not light entertainment by any means, but they are important. We need to continually remind ourselves what happens during war. We all too easily forget.

• Werewolves of Montpellier by Jason. This doesn’t break any new ground for Jason. If you’ve read a Jason book before, well, you know what to expect here. Still, I love this book. A few things struck me here. One, I was impressed by how Jason lets the reader figure things out. In the beginning of the book, I was a bit confused about the relationships between the characters. But as the narrative progressed I figured things out. “Oh, he’s a neighbor. And she’s a lesbian.” I admire this trust Jason has in his readers. He doesn’t use exposition; he expects us to get things from context. And we do. The other thing I enjoyed was how little it meant to be a werewolf. I don’t want to give anything away, but the end here is wonderfully anti-climactic. Also, as another reviewer pointed out (I can’t find the review again or I’d link to it), since Jason draws anthropomorphic animals anyway, when one of them becomes a werewolf they don’t look much different than anyone else. So the whole “transformation” motif inherent in most werewolf stories gets deflated, which fits Jason’s tone perfectly. And this book has some of the best dialogue in a Jason book yet.

• Mome Vol. 18: Spring 2010. I keep wanting to like Mome. I’ve enjoyed a few stories here and there, the ones by David B, for instance. Still, over and over again I find this to be an underwhelming anthology. This issue is no different. The little bright points in this issue are the stories by Nicolas Mahler. I guess I just always prefer the European artists. One thing I find interesting about Mome is it is a useful place to study influence. Since Mome tends to feature newer artists you can see who they are looking to. For instance, Tom Kaczynski’s “10,000 Years” in Mome Summer 2007 has a few panels swiped directly from Dan Clowes. However, the cartoonist that most the artists in Mome are influenced by is Chris Ware. It happens so much that it seems that there’s a rule for Mome that at least one artist in every issue must be heavily influenced by Ware. The rule is obeyed in this issue by Jon Adams. Now influence isn’t bad and Ware’s work is a well of ideas from drawing to pacing to layout to symbolism. Still, the stories in Mome always feel like undigested ideas. They are glimmers of possibility, but they aren’t complete and satisfying works. I’m really happy that Eric Reynolds and Gary Groth are supporting new talent, but I don’t think I can keep up with the $15 price tag.

• Baobab 2 by Igort. While I enjoyed the art in Igort’s 5 Is the Perfect Number, I didn’t really like the book. I didn’t get into the story and the characters never felt real to me. So I bought Baobab 1 because of the art. The story intrigued me, but left me confused. So I bought Baobab 2 for the art again, but also because I was curious. And what I found in issue 2 blew me away. Not only is the story finally getting its feet and drawing me in, what Igort is able to do on the page is breath-taking. The story is about an alterate history of comics, which means he depicts the art styles of different artists. He does this seamlessly. He also likes to illustrate dreams, hallucinations, and fever visions. The effect is a book that winds in and out of reality and shows us the visual and emotional possibilities of the comics medium. As you can tell, I think this is a wonderful book. I guess I’ll get issue 3.