Paul Auster’s City of Glass
by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli
adapted from the novella by Paul Auster

In fact, artist David Mazzucchelli has two comics in the Top 100, City of Glass and Rubber Blanket, which is pretty good for a cartoonist who produced maybe a dozen comics, total, in the 20th century.  Mazzucchelli’s career has followed a strange, rambling path; surely there’s no other creator whose five best-known works are a Batman story, a Daredevil story, an underground comic book, an adaptation of a postmodern metafictional novel, and a graphic novel about an aging professor.  If nothing else, his portfolio shows range.

Mazzucchelli established himself in the 1980s as a top superhero artist, drawing the acclaimed Daredevil: Born Again and Batman: Year One for Ultimate All-Time Wizard Hot Pick Frank Miller.  (Spoilers: The female leads are whores.)  In the wake of the success of Year One, Mazzucchelli abruptly abandoned superhero comics to self-publish the alternative anthology Rubber Blanket, which survived for three legendary issues, and to draw City of Glass.  The dynamic, Miller-influenced art of his superhero work folded in on itself into a toned-down, naturalistic style.  Then Mazzucchelli dropped out of comics for fifteen years except for the occasional short story for Fantagraphics or the Spiegelman/Mouly editorial team, only to re-emerge in 2009 with the thick graphic novel Asterios Polyp.

City of Glass was presumably a labor of love for Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik, a writer and editor best known for editing such seminal anthologies as RAW, Masters of American Comics, and the Fletcher Hanks collections.  I mean, why else would they adapt a 1980s postmodern noir mystery into comic-book form?  I can’t think of any other American comics project remotely like this.  There have been surprisingly few adaptations of prose literature that go beyond the level of Classics Illustrated (which is not to bag on Classics Illustrated comics, which I love), and those few tend to focus on big-name classics of Western literature, like Crumb’s sallies at Franz Kafka and the friggin’ Bible.  Very seldom does a cartoonist try his or her hand at a contemporary novel.  Whatever possessed Karasik and Mazzucchelli to do this?  And then nobody ever did it again.

A story like City of Glass should defy adaptation anyway.  It’s postmodern fiction, which means it’s an excuse for the author to be aggravatingly clever.  City of Glass is, sort of, the story of Quinn, a crime novelist who gets mistaken for a detective and hired to protect a client in a real case.  Except that the detective he’s mistaken for is named Paul Auster, and when Quinn finally tracks him down he finds Paul Auster the author (that’s another level of cleverness on Auster’s part, having a name that sounds like “author”), but by that time Quinn is beyond surprise, having gotten entangled in a cruel, decades-long experiment to recover the language of God.

Most cartoonists wouldn’t want to try to illustrate something like this, but Karasik and Mazzucchelli not only find ingenious ways to convert the cerebral concepts into concrete images, they make the visual dimension of City of Glass into a thematically crucial element of the story.  The adaptation transcends the original, becomes its own entity.  Karasik and Mazzucchelli don’t do this with a lot of fancy comic-book effects.  On the contrary, their comic is visually modest, consisting mostly of small, simple drawings arranged in variations of the traditional nine-panel grid.  Mazzucchelli shifts through an amazing array of styles–stripped-down iconography, faux-woodcut, noirish chiaroscuro with Tothian inks–but he does so subtly, never calling attention to himself, letting his art serve the story.  The result looks almost blandly illustrated, like a civilian’s generic idea of a comic book, until a closer reading reveals visual richness.

And there’s a lot of postmodern cleverness: repeating visual motifs, images that melt and shift form, fingerprints that change into city streets that change into letters of the alphabet.  In the comic’s most praised sequence, a character’s strange stream-of-consciousness account of his life trickles out of word balloons that emerge from a series of objects, possibly symbolic, possibly meaningless: a cave painting, a gramophone, a newspaper comic strip, a pile of shit.  And maybe the monologue is a pile of shit, or a cartoon, or a magic trick.  The creators aren’t telling.

I first read City of Glass in college, when these kinds of puzzles delighted me.  They still do, but as time goes on I’m increasingly impressed by the craft that went into the book: Karasik’s deceptively clean and straightforward storytelling, Mazzucchelli’s simple, amazingly flexible art.  Nobody else ever did anything like this.  Possibly because it’s harder than it looks.

I realize I’ve been remiss in providing updates on the shows at my beloved Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.  Sorry.  This is the latest one. From Bloom County to Mars: The Imagination of Berkeley Breathed is a sweeping retrospective of one of the storied triune of cartoonists who stood astride the newpaper syndication market like a colossus in the 1980s, then departed for, if not greener (who knows what Watterson is doing), then certainly other pastures.  The show includes art from Bloom County, Outland, Opus, and Breathed’s many children’s books, plus the only political cartoon he ever published.

Also!  The Museum is currently holding a Kickstarter drive to fund a full-color catalog for the show.  So if you want an autographed show catalog, and maybe a museum membership and such, get on that. I interviewed Breathed for the catalog, which was one of the more intimidating things I’ve done in my cartoon-world career, given that I grew up on his comics and have ripped off most of his good ideas at some point.

The lineup of shows at CAM is pretty darn solid right now.  In addition to the Breathed show in the main gallery, we’ve got Overture: Looney Tunes Behind the Scenes, a show of Looney Tunes preproduction art and rare oddities (including an entire  Bugs Bunny comic book); and Drawn from the Economist: The Editorial Art of Kal, a really nice selection of art from a top editorial cartoonist and magazine artist. It always sounds boring when I try to describe an editorial cartoon show, but they invariably end up being great, which is why the museum does them.

So. Berkeley Breathed, Looney Tunes, Kal from The Economist. Also, show catalog fund drive. It’s been a busy few months.

Which I totally loved doing, of course, because there is nothing I enjoy more than bossing people around with my opinions.  I’m also a Gallup pollster.

The process involved a lot of reading.  I mean, a lot of reading.  Especially in the first quarter of 2010, when the panelists turned in tons of nominations to prove we were on top of things.  By the fourth quarter, we were all slacking off except for the two or three people who actually do read all the comics criticism on the Internet, so there were considerably fewer nominations.  But the final list was still crazy long.  And yes, I did read all the nominees, even the ones that went on for, like, pages.

So.  The final list, with my bossy opinions.

SIX VOTES

(1) Jason Thompson: The Other Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name (and other articles)

A no-brainer.  Thompson’s writing on manga got six out of seven possible votes, more than any other critic received. Jason Thompson is simply the best English-language writer on manga, and one of the best writers on comics, period. To begin with, he knows every damn thing about manga; he has about fifteen years of experience as a manga editor and rewriter, he was the first editor of Shonen Jump magazine, he read every manga available in English translation for his book Manga: The Complete Guide, he used to sleep in a bed made from his manga collection, I could go on but it would start getting scary.

But beyond his expertise, Thompson brings a humanity to his writing that takes it beyond dry criticism and into a thoughtful, wryly amused exploration of why he and so many other people choose to immerse themselves in this stuff.  In his regular column “House of 1,000 Manga,” a discussion of Maison Ikkoku becomes a story about growing up and discovering love.  A column on Video Girl Ai becomes a meditation on teenage lust as an experience simultaneously sublime and mundane.  A column on Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure…okay, that’s mostly just about how awesome Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is, but it’s a really awesome manga.

This win is technically for “The Other Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” on the squicky and seldom-explored theme of incest in manga, but just about everybody on the nominating committee had a favorite Jason Thompson piece.  My initial nomination was for his column on the mad Yuu Watase gender-studies-thesis-masquerading-as-a-shojo-manga Ceres: Celestial Legend, but hell, they’re all good.

FIVE VOTES

(1)  Katherine Dacey: Ayako

Dacey is probably the best regular manga reviewer online, and she can always be counted on to provide an original take on the material.  Some of her best work is on the more offbeat/literary titles, a breath of fresh air in the manga blogosphere, which too often overlooks innovative or classic work in favor of the current big thing.  Her comparison of Ayako, a typically insane Tezuka graphic novel, to Russian realist novels is the kind of unique, interesting approach typical to her pieces.  I initially voted for her comparison of Sexy Voice and Robo to Harriet the Spy, which has the kind of light humor and whimsy lacking from a lot of the nominees (we tend to get all serious when we’re assembling a best-of), but her Ayako review is excellent too.

(2)  Joe McCulloch: The Problem with American Vampires Is That They Just Don’t Think

Speaking of whimsy, Jog of course got massive bonus points just for the title of his essay on the demise of the thought balloon.  There were some good essays on comics formalism among the nominees; I also really liked Ed Piskor’s The Art of Cause and Effect in a Solitary Comic Panel.  Jog provides a nice overview and analysis of a question often asked by comics outsiders (including, in this piece, Stephen King): “Why don’t characters use thought balloons anymore?”

FOUR VOTES

(1)  Craig Fischer: Born Again Again

The adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass done by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli is one of my all-time favorite comics, and I’ve long been curious about Mazzucchelli’s weird and varied career.  Fischer’s in-depth comparison of two wildly different Mazzucchelli comics, his recent graphic novel Asterios Polyp and his run on Daredevil: Born Again, may be the only meaty criticism I’ve ever read of Mazzucchelli, which is one of those things that’s just wrong about comics.

THREE VOTES

(1)  David Bordwell: Tintinopolis

Just a solid essay on what makes Herge a great cartoonist, and also how crazy popular he is in Belgium, with photo evidence.  Sometimes these things aren’t too complicated; you just explain stuff about how Tintin works.

(2)  Dirk Deppey: The Mirror of Male-Love Love

This one, on the other hand, goes beyond description.  Deppey and I were both on a tcj.com roundtable on yaoi, specifically reviewing a book of academic papers on yaoi and shonen ai.  Deppey put in his two cents, and then, out of the blue, he turned in a “sidebar” several times the length of his main essay, a piece that starts out by delving into the historical precedents for male-male romance literature, in Japan and elsewhere, and then becomes an intensely personal discussion of what this all means in the life of one particular gay man who grew up in late-20th-century America.  As Deppey continues, his trademark snarkiness falls away, layer after layer, revealing pain and joy and, in the end, some level of contentment.

It’s the best thing he’s ever written, and he’s written some damn good stuff in his day (except when he’s dissing on me, in which case he’s totally wrong).  And, I cannot stress enough, it came out of nowhere.  This list would have no meaning if Deppey’s piece weren’t on it somewhere.

(3)  Ken Parille: Casper, Formalism, and the “Great” Search Party

To be honest, I feel this piece is a little slight.  It feels like the beginning of a much more thorough discussion of the core building blocks of visual storytelling, using old children’s comics as ideal stripped-down examples.  (Ditko Spider-Mans would be good for this.)  But Parille is on-target with his analysis of how and why a particular page of Casper the Friendly Ghost works at telling a story, plus I love the banal insanity of old Harvey comics, so I hells of voted for it.

Some Other Nominees I Really Liked:

1) Brian Chippendale: Secret Avengers 1

Mean-spirited and constantly veering off in bizarre directions: that’s how I like my reviews of superhero comics.

2) Sarah Boxer: America’s First Wordless Novelist

To see how far comics criticism has come, compare Art Spiegelman’s recent essay on Lynd Ward, the type of uncritical, stubbornly defensive push for comics-as-art that was common—nay, necessary—twenty years ago, with Boxer’s much more nuanced piece, which approaches Ward as an important artist and seriously analyzes what does and doesn’t work in his comics.  I really wanted this one to make the final list.

3) Peter Sattler: Crumb’s Limited Literalism

For similar reasons, I really enjoyed watching Sattler knock Crumb off his pedestal and point out that, as brilliant a draftsman as he is, there are things he doesn’t do well—like, say, anything requiring subtlety—and that his much-praised adaptation of Genesis brings out some of his worst artistic habits.

4) Chris Sims: “Life With Archie: The Married Life” #1 Is the Most Fascinating Archie Comic of All Time

Okay, this one’s just hilarious.  All the more so because Sims is simply describing what actually happens in the “Archie gets married” series, in case you weren’t following it.

Since the ’90s, many of these companies’ titles have been picked up by other publishers.  Others remain in limbo.  And at least one graphic novel was published by both Tundra and Kitchen Sink and, to my knowledge, has never been reprinted since.

From Inside
by John Bergin

I first read From Inside for a college English class called “Hypermedia and Phanopoeia,” which is the kind of thing you do at a liberal-arts school.  It creeped me out, as it’s no doubt creeped out most people who have read it.  The simplistic story is given weight by Bergin’s photorealistic painted art, weird dream/hallucination sequences, and haunting imagery suggestive of the female body: blood, babies, fire, mysterious red boxes, trains.

Okay, trains aren’t female.  Trains are the opposite of female.

Bergin is an artist, animator, and musician who began drawing comics in the 1980s. After publishing some one-shots, he and his friend James O’Barr were picked up by Tundra; Bergin drew From Inside, O’Barr drew The Crow, and the two of them edited the anthology Bone Saw.  The Crow was, as everyone who was a gothy teenager in the ’90s remembers, adapted into a sleeper hit movie, for which Bergin’s band Trust Obey recorded a soundtrack album.  When Tundra went under, both Bergin and O’Barr moved to Kitchen Sink.  After From Inside, Bergin drew the cyberpunk series Golgothika for Caliber, did a few short comics, then moved on to animation and music.

As far as I know, From Inside hasn’t been reprinted since the Kitchen Sink edition, which is too bad, because it’s a pretty good comic and clearly a labor of love. The relentlessly grim, claustrophobic story follows Cee, a pregnant young woman wandering a blasted wasteland of ruins, corpses, and lakes of blood. Eventually she boards a train containing what appear to be the only other living people, headed for some unknown destination.

Cee, recovering from a recent trauma, suffers from vivid nightmares and confusion about what is and isn’t real. Only gradually does it become clear that, aside from Cee’s dreams, most of the bizarre things we see are really happening, including the train, the blood-red lakes, the dog with a skull for a head, and the guy wrapped in bandages who follows Cee around.

The story, as it becomes clearer, is pretty straightforward. What makes the comic memorable is its disturbingly realistic, lovingly painted renderings of strange quasi-Jungian images, many suggesting nightmarish aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and babies. There are unsettling pregnancy dreams. A creepy masked doctor. A fantasy where Cee becomes a rag doll. A recurring nightmare drawn in charcoal, in a different style from the rest of the book. An apocalyptic version of The Little Engine That Could, also rendered in its own style.  Cee’s fear of the engine’s boiler.  And then there’s the train, a big smoke-belching phallic symbol shooting through it all toward the unknown.

In 2008, Bergin produced a limited-animation feature film of From Inside that made the rounds of the film festivals. This would be a good time for some publisher to bring back the graphic novel.  Eerie and peculiar, it occupies its own niche apart from anything else in comics.  Also, my copy is falling apart and I could really use another one.

The Scott Pilgrim series is the first comic for cyborgs.  Or maybe not the first, but the first really good one.  It’s a comic by and for the generations that grew up online, the people for whom cyberspace is as real as meatspace.  Cyberspace looks a little different than William Gibson imagined it.  Turns out there are more coins and mushrooms.  But when you’re there, it’s real.

The opening sentence of Gibson’s Neuromancer, the novel that launched the “cyberpunk” genre, was hammered out on an olive-green manual typewriter by a man with no special interest in computers.  He didn’t realize he was writing something that would resonate so strongly with the generation coming up behind him, the young people for whom computers were as common and essential as toasters.  The funny thing is that the meaning of that first sentence changes depending on how old you are.  It’s the same with Scott Pilgrim, I think.  Just look at the sharp divide of opinion over the recent movie: the Internet populace rallied fiercely around it while the rest of the world scratched its head.  The rest of the world, maybe, is not yet sufficiently jacked in.

Scott Pilgrim is what the less computer-literate and more book-literate might describe as magical realism, the genre that deliberately blurs the line between pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ways of perceiving the world.  Except that with Scott Pilgrim, what we’re looking at is post-Enlightenment and post-post-Enlightenment, the perspective of young people whole relationship with the world bleeds out of physical reality and into the virtual spaces of the mind.  It operates by video-game logic, like more and more people do nowadays.  One of my favorite scenes is a small moment early in the saga: Scott, curled up in bed, idly comments that he wishes he could curl himself into a ball and roll into the bathroom, Metroid-style, and his OTP Ramona Flowers says she knew someone once who could do that.  It wasn’t that great.

The series starts as a high-concept, tongue-in-cheek portrayal of dating as a video-game battle, then develops into a casually sprawling relationship drama as Bryan Lee O’Malley becomes less interested in Nintendo jokes and more interested in his expanding cast of characters.  By the final volumes, Scott has squeezed himself into a ball and is rolling toward an overwhelming question: is it possible to be Scott Pilgrim, in the reality Scott inhabits, and grow up?

That’s one of the great puzzles of every American generation to come along since the Baby Boomers: what does it mean to be a grown-up, anymore?  Grown-ups play video games now.  They fool around on the computer.  It’s a happier kind of adulthood, or maybe just a more pleasantly deluded one.  When people Gibson’s age read the first sentence of Neuromancer, they picture a gray, stormy sky, because that’s what a dead channel was when they were growing up.  People my age–I’m 32–picture a flat blue sky, because that’s what a dead channel looks like when you have a cable hookup.  The sky of an easy summer day.

Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour, the sixth and final book in the series, finds a satisfying resolution to Scott’s dilemma, because O’Malley understands his lead character.  One of the saving graces of the series is that Scott is kind of  an asshole, and the comic knows it.  His feckless man-child behavior charms people, then hurts and alienates them.  Arguably the most serious flaw in the Scott Pilgrim movie was the casting of Michael Cera in the title role.  It should have been perfect, but Cera is apparently incapable of projecting anything other than gentle cluelessness, whereas Scott Pilgrim should project aggressive cluelessness.  Cera plays him as a nice guy, rather than a guy who thinks of himself as nice, which, as many women can tell you, is a very different thing.  Growing up, for Scott, doesn’t mean leaving his video-game reality.  But it does mean letting other people in.

Now that the Scott Pilgrim series is complete, its possible to see its flaws.  The plot meanders in the central volumes, as O’Malley kills time between battle scenes with manga-style side trips and new possible love interests for Scott, like he needs them.  Smug rock promoter Gideon is somewhat lacking as a Big Bad, and it’s sometimes hard to say exactly why he’s supposed to be so evil, except that Ramona can’t get over him and Scott finds him annoying.  (Spoilers: It’s entirely appropriate that Gideon is far more powerful and menacing inside the characters’ heads than he is in the external–I hesitate to say “real”–world.)  Ramona herself doesn’t develop much of a personality beyond Hipster Dream Girl until the final volume, when O’Malley makes a hurried but convincing case for her as Scott’s perfect distaff.

And, well, the video-game and anime references can get oppressive.  One of my other favorite moments in the series is a single panel, in the last volume, of a ruined Scott muttering desperately to himself, “I beat this one guy…video games…”  Sums it all up, in a way.  (Finest Hour contains many such moments of wry self-awareness, another indication that this is a comic for cyborgs: it’s pretty clear O’Malley has been following all the discussion and speculation online.)

But discussing the storytelling flaws in Scott Pilgrim is like discussing the storytelling flaws in Star Wars. What it does is so new, and speaks so strongly to a particular segment of the population–the younger segment, mostly–that such criticism is almost beside the point.  Scott Pilgrim comes from a place that’s new to literature, but it’s a place many of its readers know well.  Especially readers younger than me.  I didn’t have Internet access until college, for heaven’s sake.  I didn’t grow up as a cyborg.

Readers younger than me…they don’t know what a dead channel is.  In their reality, the TV always has a signal, and you mostly watch things online anyway.  I don’t know what they see when they read the first sentence of Neuromancer.  I don’t know what they see when they read Scott Pilgrim.  Whatever they want, I think.  Scott Pilgrim was written by someone my age, but, whether he knew it or not, he wrote it for them.

In a funny way, I hope the curtain is finally falling now, and Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac really is the last great newspaper comic strip, because it would be such a beautiful strip to end on.  Bill Watterson even came out of retirement to write a glowing introduction to the first collection, as if to acknowledge that the funny pages had one good reason to have kept going on without him.

This is a gloomy way to begin, isn’t it?  That’s wrong, because Cul de Sac isn’t gloomy.  It’s weird and colorful and deceptively robust, making the most of the increasingly hostile newspaper environment, like a lichen twisting into spindly, surprising shapes to hook into every crack in the rock.  Like the giant tubeworms that flourish around the hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, the cold, sunless place where life began.  They grow there in glorious colors, pink and yellow and shocking red,  even though there’s no light to see them by.  Not until someone brings a light down.

The Cul de Sac Golden Treasury of Keepsake Garland Classics (a satisfyingly sarcastic title) isn’t the one with the Watterson intro.  It belongs to another phylum of comic-strip reprint, the oversize omnibus with commentary from the artist.  I love all such collections and have ever since I was a teenager and pored over that old fat paperback retrospective of Bloom County, another strip that was going to be one of the last ones.  Thompson chooses a solid selection of key Cul de Sac strips and comments winningly on his characters, his artwork, his references to Alexander Pope and Huckleberry Finn, his firm belief that pancakes are funnier than waffles (a thesis I find dubious), and things he’s seen children do with ice cream.  ”Petey is likely also a fan of the more somber and intense modern graphic novelists,” he notes, providing a grim reminder of what you could be reading instead of Cul de Sac.  And, “A wise man once said you can break hearts with a joke.”

Cul de Sac, for those still looking forward to the pleasure of reading it, is a daily strip about a nuclear family, the most tired and easily-abused of comic-strip genres, but also the sturdiest.  The action focuses on the two children of the family: grade-schooler Petey, a budding neurotic with a lovingly-assembled collection of eccentricities, phobias, weird tics, and totemic security objects; and preschooler Alice, hurtling like a locomotive through a happy world that exists only for her.  Petey is the one who spends soccer practice lost in existential fantasies where he has multiple out-of-body experiences and argues with crowds of himself.  Alice is the one who collects sticks.  There are a couple of parents, a scary grandma, a bunch of other kids (most notably Alice’s friend Dill, one of those hard-luck kids who attaches himself to someone else’s family because his own is too chaotic–in this case Dill has a huge number of older brothers constructing medieval siege engines in their front yard), and a guinea pig, and that’s just about enough to make a strip.

Making oddball characters work in a daily strip is hard; that’s why most comic-strip characters are flat and predictable stereotypes.  A strip about Petey has to be funny if you know Petey, but also on its own.  Fortunately, everyone knows some weird kids, and Thompson knows how to make his characters’ personal quirks universal.  This is a difficult balancing act to pull off, and I’m still not entirely sure how he does it.

The art is both beautiful and funny–another balancing act–and, like the writing, is deceptively complex.  It wasn’t until Thompson pointed it out in his commentary that I realized he does all his shading by hand with crosshatching; I didn’t miss the lack of screentone, the lazy black-and-white illustrator’s friend, at all.  The art is sketchy and organic, and the characters have funny faces.  Too many cartoonists overlook the value of funny faces.

The Cul de Sac Golden Treasury of Keepsake Garland Classics feels like an artifact from another universe, a universe where, for the past fifteen years, comic strips kept getting better.  It doesn’t belong in this world, it’s too cheerfully and effortlessly good, but here it is.  Strange and funny and lonely and beautiful, like a tubeworm, like a Joshua tree.

But before SNL or National Lampoon, O’Donoghue was hired by the Evergreen Review to write a comic. An eclectic literary magazine, the Review had started publishing a lot of softcore cartoons and illustrations, classy-artsy stuff along the lines of Playboy or European comics albums. Reportedly, the editors asked O’Donoghue and up-and-coming Marvel artist Frank Springer, whose celebrated run on Nick Fury was just beginning around this time, to produce something along the lines of Jean-Claude Forest’s sexy sci-fi romp Barbarella.

O’Donoghue, naturally, took it too far.

Phoebe Zeit-Geist
by Frank Springer and Michael O’Donoghue

Phoebe Zeit-Geist is a parody of exploitative porno action comics that manages to be more exploitative, pornographic and action-packed than any of the material it sends up. You can feel O’Donoghue’s presence behind every page, one hand on a revolver and the other down his pants, still trying to decide whether or not he’s enjoying this ironically. Springer, for his part, realizes that the only way for an artist to play this material is totally straight, and he plays it to the hilt, rendering O’Donoghue’s bizarre flights of fancy in lush, dramatic black-and-white. His renderings of Phoebe’s eternally nude form, in an endless variety of action poses, are gorgeous, exactly what the editors of The Evergreen Review were probably looking for. It’s just that the story surrounding them doesn’t want to play along.

So. At “one of those elegant garden parties in Antwerp,” beautiful and multi-talented heiress Phoebe Zeit-Geist is kidnapped by an ex-Nazi who strips her naked, whips her, and ties her to a helicopter to be flown naked through the city. She will not regain her clothes for the rest of the series. From there, Phoebe hurtles helplessly through a series of violent, erotic adventures, each more ridiculous than the last. At various times she is:

– imprisoned by a shoe fetishist who makes her wear boots on her head and dreams of shrinking her feet to an inch long;
– thrown headfirst into a garbage can, sealed inside, and shipped overseas;
– chained in a dungeon behind the Iron Curtain, there to be raped by a Komodo Dragon;
– kidnapped by a serial-killer tattoo artist who plans to cover her with ink (“your buttocks will be devoted to lyrical themes such as ‘Fortitude Slaying Avarice with the Lance of Sagacity’”) before killing her;
– locked in a cage on the coast of New Zealand by The Blob Princess and her Band of Incredible Lesbians; and
– dead.

In fact Phoebe spends a sizable chunk of the story as a corpse, which has remarkably little effect on her role. The only thing she never does is have sex, at least as most people would define it.

The “Perils of Penelope” plot gets more fragmented, and more self-aware, as the serial continues. At one point Phoebe is rescued from one weird and hideous fate, only to have her rescuer immediately spring another one on her. (To wit: “My intention is to transport you to Japan, there to tie you to the railway tracks, whereupon you’ll be mashed by a speeding locomotive!”) Another chapter introduces a square-jawed savior for Phoebe, only to kill him off before the two even meet.

O’Donoghue is good at keeping the shaggy-dog story going as long as he can, but the material, by its nature, can only last so long before burning itself out. The final chapter dissolves into a free-for-all, with all of Phoebe’s many tormentors descending en masse, in a two-page spread lovingly rendered by Springer.

The whole thing gives the impression of O’Donoghue throwing the readers’ lascivious desires back in their faces: “You think you want pervy pictures, do you? I’ll show you perversion! How d’ya like them apples?” (Here, “apples” means “drawings of a naked woman in chains having dead beetles glued to her armpits in preparation for being set upon by a swarm of half-starved gila monsters.”) It’s a cruel, mocking rebuke to anyone who opened the magazine in search of Barbarella-style sexytime fun. But at the same time it is sexy, at least the way Springer draws it. It’s hard not to imagine that O’Donoghue was genuinely turned on by Phoebe’s adventures, or at least more than he would have been by a conventional softcore romp.

It’s also, of course, completely tasteless, but it wants to be tasteless, and tasteless wasn’t that hard to do even in 1968. What’s much more impressive is that it’s funny. I would write more, but suddenly I am run over by a truck.

This is a big show for the Cartoon Art Museum, with a catalog and everything, thanks to the sponsorship of the Jewish weekly newspaper The Forward. It’ll be at the Museum until January, when it will travel to the Koffler Centre for the Arts in Toronto.

It took me a while to find my manga cause obscurité, mostly because I can’t read Japanese, but last year an impulse buy at the Mandarake store in Akihabara opened my eyes to the equally whimsical and disturbing charms of Hiroshi Masumura’s Atagoul. Now I’m in love.

Atagoul
by Hiroshi Masumura

I wrote about Atagoul for Comixology a year ago, as part of my list of favorite untranslated manga (as one of the leading nerds in the field of irritating manga nerds, I have to maintain a list). Since that time, one of my picks, Everything by Moto Hagio Ever, has edged into the realm of licensed translation with the fantastic A Drunken Dream, the first of a series of Hagio collections from Fantagraphics. But I want to share a little more of Atagoul, because it’s great.

Since there’s little information about Atagoul in English, my knowledge is sketchy. The manga started in 1976 and has gone through four separate series, the most recent of which, Atagoul is Cat’s Forest, launched in 1999 and is now at least 11 volumes long. All four series are the work of Hiroshi Masumura, who likes to draw his characters as anthropomorphic cats because he’s not all that great at drawing humans.

The manga’s iconic lead character is a big yellow cat who loves sake and food (especially octopus) and lives in a forested world full of giant fruits and flowers and populated mostly by cats. In each storyline, he and his friends encounter dreamlike, quasi-Jungian adventures in the seemingly endless expanse of forests, fields, lakes, seas, and mountains surrounding the cat village. These adventures typically start out cheerful and whimsical, but then unsettling things happen: characters get skewered on long, sharp objects, are infected by crystals or other substances growing on their skin, change size, distort into strange shapes, or have rays shoot out of their bodies. This usually happens without warning mere pages after everyone has been happily swigging sake and tripping the light fantastic. Still, it always seems to end all right. Again, I can’t read Japanese, so it’s taken me a while to piece this much together.

In Japan, Masumura is known for Atagoul and for his manga adaptations of the works of beloved children’s novelist Kenji Miyazawa, author of Night on the Galactic Railroad or Milky Way Railroad. (Miyazawa’s books have been adapted into manga by many, many creators, as chronicled in this chapter of the manga-about-manga Kingyo Used Books.) The haunting 1985 anime adaptation of Night on the Galactic Railroad, released in the U.S. by Central Park Media and now, sadly, very hard to find in English, is based on Masumura’s adaptation, which is why the main characters were changed to cats. He just really likes cats, is all.

Atagoul shares Galactic Railroad‘s dreamlike atmosphere, wondering delight at the universe, and tantalizingly suggestive visual symbolism (one could spend a lifetime or a graduate thesis unpacking Miyazawa’s idiosyncratic, mystic fusion of Christianity, Zen Buddhism, astronomy, and evolutionary theory). But where Galactic Railroad is spiritual and melancholy, Atagoul is pragmatic and cheerful, a weird and unpredictable but ultimately reassuring fantasy adventure. Studio Ghibli, in its early days, approached Masumura about adapting it into a movie, and Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro, with its big furry totemic hero and fascination with the magic of the natural world, resembles a gentler, more childlike Atagoul.

All the scans in this post are from the most recent Atagoul series. I also have some volumes of the earlier series in reprints from Sun Comics, purveyor of cheap editions of a lot of old shonen manga. The stories are similar but shorter; the early volumes comprise self-contained, chapter-long stories, whereas nowadays storylines can cover several chapters and even multiple volumes. Masumura’s art gets more polished over the thirtysomething-year run, but even his latest work retains the old-school, organic look of manga from the days before million-copy circulations and home studios with teams of assistants. He’s still pretty bad at drawing humans, but that hardly matters when he’s so good at drawing, say, a cat with an eyepatch fighting an army of crystal people, or a pub made out of a giant apple. Masumura is easily one of the top cat artists in manga. I see a little of his cats, for example, in Leo-kun, Moto Hagio’s recent manga about her cat Leo:

There’s always the danger, “reading” untranslated manga with no comprehension of Japanese, that the translation will never live up to the version in your head. For instance, Hagio’s early story “Girl on Porch with Puppy” was hypnotically fascinating when I only had the untranslated version and had no idea what the hell was going on in the final pages. When the story was translated in A Drunken Dream, finding out what the characters were saying almost kind of ruined it for me. Maybe that’ll be the case with Atagoul, but I’m not too worried. I mean, the cat’s still going to be drinking sake, right?

This week’s comic is no exception. But after reading it, I’m not going to flush that toilet.

Self-Published Collection of Shary Flenniken Cartoons About the 1977 California Drought
by Shary Flenniken

Shary Flenniken is my favorite cartoonist of whose work I’ve read the least. If, like me, you were a zygote in the ’70s, you can only catch up on her ouvre by spending long afternoons in used bookstores leafing through basement-stanky back issues of National Lampoon. Which I do, but I’d still appreciate it if someone would liberate Flenniken’s beautiful, evil-minded Trots and Bonnie strips from the lacertan clutches of the direct-to-DVD licensors who currently own the National Lampoon brand and put out a big overpriced hardcover for me to buy.

In the meantime, I keep an eye out for old self-published sketchbooks and small paperbacks like this one.

Drought Chic is a 1977 collection of cartoons by Flenniken about the Great Western Drought of that year. For the curious, this article in the Time archives provides an overview of drought panic, including concern at the time that California could turn into another Dust Bowl. The real crisis was on California’s farms, source of a quarter of the nation’s food and consumers of 85% of the state’s water. Several of Flenniken’s strips make reference to Northern California’s wineries and nascent wine culture; the Judgment of Paris had, only a few years before, set into motion the oenological revolution that would someday result in Two-Buck Chuck and people liking Sideways.

But even non-agricultural communities cut their water usage down to the bare minimum, some with government-mandated restrictions, others with voluntary self- and neighborhood policing. People called the cops on neighbors who sneaked out to wash their cars at night. Senators urged their constituents to stop flushing. Everyone drank more booze. Even for Yuppies, it was serious.

Reading Flenniken’s drought cartoons over 30 years later, I’m not surprised by the incredibly narrow focus on a single, short-lived local issue; I’m surprised that more people haven’t done the same thing. I live in California. Massive crises that are equal parts earth-shaking and ridiculous happen on a roughly semiannual basis here. One could easily self-publish a 50-page collection of hilarious comics on any of the following topics:

1. Gay marriage
2. Scientology
3. How we thought it’d be funny to elect the bad guy from “Pumping Iron”
4. That time Enron loaded all our electricity onto trucks and drove it into Utah in the dead of night
5. Having the eighth-largest economy in the world and still running out of money
6. People liking Sideways
7. Comic-Con

Maybe cartoonists today are just less on the ball. I’ve spent the past six months trying to assemble a single comic book with the help of five other people. If I had to produce a collection of comics about a current event before said event made it into middle-school history textbooks, I’d be hosed.

Flenniken’s drought cartoons are inevitably dated, but that’s what makes them interesting. They provide a snapshot of a very particular time, a particular place, a particular panic. Eventually it rained in California, but Drought Chic remained. So thanks, Shary Flenniken! And thanks to the dealer at Supercon in 2008 who inexplicably had a whole stack of copies.