WOLK: How much design work went into League before you started drawing the story itself?

O’NEILL: Quite a bit, actually. The original drawings I sent to Alan still had a trace of 2000 AD about them — slogans and stuff on walls, lots of very odd machines and stuff like that. He was very, very polite, but he said, “Drop the slogans and stuff,” and when I looked at it more closely, I could see: Yeah, he’s right. I designed it from the ground up — if there had been anyone else’s version around, it would’ve put me off. The great thing about Nemesis and Marshal Law was it was virgin territory. That was important. I started reading all the original novels and novellas, rooting out details about the characters, like Nemo being Prince Dakkar in The Mysterious Island — all the engravings of him were of this Caucasian, white-bearded, white-haired character, but we ran with the Indian look for him and the Nautilus. The Invisible Man was a lot of fun, funnily enough. I used to lightly pencil him in — his early appearances had balloon tails on his balloons, but I erased that later on, so you don’t quite know where he is.

On the second series, when we got to Hyde’s revenge on the Invisible Man, I had a phone call from Scott Dunbier, who was the editor of the book, and he said, “Have you got the latest script?”

I said, “Yeah, it’s terrific, it’s incredible.”

And he said, “Well, could you be really careful?”

I said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “Well, you know.”

And I said: “He’s invisible!” But there’s something very strange about it — it’s the utter politeness of Hyde and what he’s doing. He’s such a monster, and his revenge is so monstrous — I thought that’s a fantastic sequence. And the blood on the tablecloth — that was cool. I think that’s the only area where they were bugged by potential censorship problems.

Oddly enough, in Greece, when they were reprinting that strip, I got a call saying could they extend the shirttail over Hyde’s buttocks? And I said, “No!” They ended up publishing as it was — I don’t think there was any trouble over any issue of League, apart from the advert, the Marvel advert. Which was a genuine Victorian unaltered ad. Which didn’t bother Marvel — nothing seems to bother Marvel!

WOLK: Tell me about your collaboration with Ben Dimagmaliw. You’ve worked with some colorists before, but you’ve also colored a lot of your own work.

O’NEILL: I’ve seen some good coloring, some bad coloring and some stuff that was done very quickly — it almost always bugged me how things looked. It was Scott who suggested Ben, and when I saw it I thought it was absolutely fantastic. I sent him very detailed color notes in the beginning, and the only detailed notes I sent him after that were for the covers — I’d just color a Photostat and send it to him. Now I’ll just color in a dress or the color of a uniform or something he might not recognized. It became more and more notes rather than color notes, because Ben really got it from day one, and contributed a lot to the atmosphere of the book. One thing he does that amazes me is that Ben’s blue skies are informed by someone who’s spent a lot of time in California — our blue skies are never as blue as that! I suppose in our alternate universe, a better Britain, we have a Britain with slightly bluer and nicer skies. And we’ve had superb letterrers on the series, Bill Oakley and Todd Klein. It’s often the case or used to be that people only noticed lettering when they saw bad lettering — misplaced balloons, perverse balloon placement. That’s something I learned working at IPC, I always sent balloon overlays with the artwork, just an old habit. I don’t need to with Todd these days, but it’s one of these muscle memory things.

WOLK: When you were heading into the second League series, was the feeling different from what it was at the beginning?

O’NEILL: Right before the first series came out, Alan told me he’d had a conversation with Alex Ross, who asked him what the new book was he was doing, and Alan told him “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” I’m probably misquoting him, but Alex said “Oh, it’ll never be successful with a title like that!” I was surprised at how successful the book was — it wasn’t as complex at the very beginning as it’s become now, but when we were working on the early parts of the book, we realized that we were having so much fun dropping in other fictional realities beyond the fictional characters and the villains that this thing could go in all sorts of directions, and it didn’t actually matter if you didn’t get all of it — it’s not there to exclude people.

On the second book, I think we were aware that we had, perhaps, greater latitude with content, and by the Black Dossier, it’d become fairly combustible with DC … the book was originally for Wildstorm before they were bought out by DC. I might have been working on the first issue when someone rang me up and said, “Wildstorm’s been bought by DC,” and I thought, “Oh, Jesus, that’ll be the end of that, then,” knowing how Alan felt about DC. But Jim Lee and Scott Dunbier flew to Britain and visited Alan personally, and I think Alan felt that so many of the ABC books had artists he’d committed to, Alan naturally felt the honorable thing to do was to continue on those books, but made very, very certain that the books were firewalled — there’s no mention of DC in any of the books, they’re completely separate, the payments come from Wildstorm … we’ve kept as far as humanly possible from DC. Of course, what happens as the years go by is that Wildstorm, I guess, has become more subsumed by DC. Jim Lee has always been a champion of the book. Jim is doing his stuff at DC, and it’s inevitable that the two companies have merged closer and closer. We did begin to notice that payments at a certain point shifted from Wildstorm’s offices to being paid out from New York, and so on. And also there were these pressures on Alan, like the Cobweb story which was knocked back, and he spent hours and hours on the phone with the legal people, and the Marvel ad, which caused issue 5 of the original series to be pulped … and that seemed a kind of arbitrary thing. We felt very aware of DC’s presence in things.

After the second series finished — we were very successful, and Scott expressed it in a way that perhaps he may have regretted years later: “You guys can have anything you want.”

Alan was going to take a break then, and he said maybe in a year or so he’d think about doing a third series — I guess he just took pity on me, leaving me as a hobo or something, and he rang me up one day and said, “How about we do a sourcebook?” Just a 48-page thing, with some backstory — a better-quality sourcebook, since most sourcebooks are pretty poor. Inevitably, that led to working out a story connecting up all the information, and it grew from 48 to 64 and then exponentially up — they finally put a cap on it around the 200-page mark, or quite possibly we’d still be working on it now. And when they said, “You guys can have anything you want,” we thought, well, great, we’re doing a story set in 1958, we can have a 3-D section, and there was going to be a record and a Fanny Hill section on different paper, and it was going to be sealed like an old book where you had to cut the pages apart — that idea got dropped later. So we were doing all these things and it was going to be very elaborate, and it was taking ages and ages. The 3-D section — I’ve never read a more complicated script in my life. It makes perfect sense, but it is kind of a headfuck. So we were working on this thing and chaos was created by the problems with DC.

Ultimately, what happened was I was very aware that Alan had all these problems with the V for Vendetta movie — and a collected edition came out with some text wrong on the back cover, all kinds of stuff was going on. Alan is one of the most charming gentlemen you can meet, but you don’t want to cross him. And then there was pressure to get the book out a year or so earlier than it ever appeared, for financial reasons and stuff like that, but it was taking as long as it took — it was just very complicated. Lawyers got involved and looked it over, with dozens and dozens of characters, and it’s set in a more modern period than the previous two books — it was all going fine, it was all approved by the lawyers, it was print-ready, everything was set up, the record was going to be pressed, I designed a label for the record.

And then all the trouble with Scott Dunbier started, where suddenly the book wasn’t right, and — We’re on tricky ground here! A Hollywood film producer insisted on seeing the book, long before publication, in the early part of the year it was finally published. He was putting a lot of pressure on DC, and if I understand the story correctly — I’ll try to keep names out of this — someone important at DC flew out, showed the assembled book to the guy, who was flicking through the pages going, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, you guys are going to be sued out of existence, oh my God, what are you doing, what are you thinking …” And the guy flew back to New York — we never knew any of this at the time, of course — and things settled down. But suddenly the book was delayed from being relatively quick, like the spring of that year, to being put off to that summer. And I thought oh, Jesus — the royalties from these books really support us, you know? The advance was so small and the exchange rate so poor that the greater the delay the more financially problematic it became.

Then, unfortunately, the same producer was at a book fair in New York, and met someone from DC and said, “Jeez, you’re not still publishing that thing?” It panicked them, and they started taking the book apart. I got a phone call saying — (this was when Scott Dunbier was euphemistically working at home) — because they’re not allowed to ring Alan, you understand, Scott and his assistant Kristy Quinn were the only ones who were allowed to ring Alan — I got a phone call saying, “The book’s got legal problems, we might have to change a bunch of things.”  And I said, “Oh, Jesus Christ,” this is like a year after it’s all been approved, people have known the content of this book for literally years, they’ve read the scripts, there’s been lots of artwork finished for a long time. And this is where Jim Lee performed a kind of intervention on the thing, because he wanted the book to come out and he wanted us to be happy with it. So there were minor changes, a few words here and there.

And it was odd, because we’d used Billy Bunter, the Greyfriars character. I pointed out that several years earlier, Time Warner bought IPC — they actually own all that IPC stuff. They own Billy Bunter! So within the company, it’d be easy enough to clear the use of it. But one of the changes made is we couldn’t use his full name, so he’s simply William. Bizarrely, when the book came out, the indicia has a permission thanks for the IPC people for using his full name — which we couldn’t use in the book! When Kristy asked if we could put the name back in, she was told, “No, you can’t touch it.” The whole thing was a legal rat’s nest, and Jim and I were talking almost every day about it for several weeks. He said he wouldn’t send me the complete list of things they wanted altered, because it’d freak me out, which I’m sure it would’ve done. We got it whittled down, and now I had to ring Alan and relay these ghastly fucking changes they want made. There was one final change — to the P.G. Wodehouse-meets-H.P. Lovecraft pastiche in the book, which was very funny. Ever since P.G. Wodehouse was first published, people have been parodying his work and using the names of the characters. But DC decided to dig their heels in on this and say, “We can use the character names in America, but we can’t use them in Britain or Europe, and indeed can’t print the book in Canada for legal reasons,” so it had to be printed in the U.S.A., which also threw things into disarray.

So that’s what happened. That was the final straw. After saying there’s only one thing left to change, some minor color change, equally absurd … I think Alan felt like you kind of prod someone long enough and they’re going to snap. We thought: This will lose a lot of money for us, but fuck it. The book will come out as we want it to come out, but we guess only in America. And of course, what happened is that bootleg copies appeared via all sorts of sources almost straightaway. At that point, we had decided we’d switch publishers. Because even if we changed things they could always come back with one more petty alteration — it was like having a boot on our neck. As it turned out if not for the intervention of Jim Lee the Black Dossier may never have been published. Which would’ve been a complete fucking disaster for many reasons.

WOLK: I believe League is the only one of the America’s Best books that the creators own the rights to. How did that happen?

O’NEILL: I think originally when Alan mentioned it to me, it was going to be a stand-alone, creator-owned book, and then its becoming the first of the books under Alan’s imprint happened later. But I think it’s more of a case of the movie rights were sold almost before I’d finished drawing the first issue. Again, I think Jim kept his eye on the contracts on Alan’s behalf — the book was a creator-owned book, and I’m not quite sure why the other ABC books were not. It could be as simple as the artists on them would get a higher advance rate. There’s always a risk doing a creator-owned book — you get very low advance money and take a chance on royalties, which aren’t always there; in fact very often not. I’m not sure; I’ll have to ask Alan that. But we were saying that between us we only own a handful of things after all these years in the business. The shift to Top Shelf and Knockabout was effortless and straightforward. I think Chris Staros thought long and hard about taking this thing on, but after Black Dossier, we wanted to work with grown-ups. Top Shelf had done a fantastic job with Lost Girls, and fielded all the flack and all the aggravation and everything, and it seemed like a natural home. It’s worked out well. We’ve had no dropoff of readers.

WOLK: I wanted to ask you about the stylistic range that you got to play around with in the text pieces in Volume 2 and in the Black Dossier.

O’NEILL: In the first book, we decided we like comic books that are designed cover to cover — Marshal Law, in its comic-book form, was mostly advertisement-free. I used to be on the mailing lists for these things; I’m not any more, but I get so fucking annoyed when you’re reading a comics story and you’ve got some Adidas ad or Lethal Weapon on Home Box Office ad interrupting the flow of a story. It just destroys it for you. So we were responsible for filling the book from cover to cover. In the first one, it was the Victorian advertisements, which I searched high and low and assembled as many as I could — there are only a few fake ones in there. And the letters pages, which Alan did — I sent him a whole bunch of Boys’ Own letters as an example, because they’re poisonous, those old Boys’ Own letters pages. I’m almost sorry we didn’t reprint his letters pages in the books, because Alan’s replies are always very funny and in the spirit of the time.

In the second one, Alan decided on the Almanac — that was a lot of work, more work for Alan than for me, but it was a chance to draw lots of different things. It was fun, and Todd Klein, when he was assembling the final thing, he’s a brilliant designer, so we got the kind of text and picture integration that we wanted. I think some people skip it — we’re aware of that — and some of the sniffy reviews of the Black Dossier ask why it isn’t all comics. It’s an odd kind of snobbishness, really — if you read the text, you do get a lot of hints about the future of the series as well.

WOLK: Looking at your artwork in that section, there’s the beautiful fake Doré engraving, the medical illustrations, all these styles that you tackle …

O’NEILL: We’re both huge admirers of Mad in its heyday — Bill Elder’s art was stunning. Bill Elder, I worship at his altar. He could really adopt any style — it was just dazzling. I remember looking at it as a kid: You could fall into those pictures and go back and find new things in them, they’re so layered and textured with material. We were trying to get some of that energy, which, looking around, falls into an area where there’s not much in it for people who are actually doing it, you know? You make just as much royalties leaving space for house ads … but we felt, in the long run, the readers would appreciate it, and we control the look of the book. But the Almanac almost certainly led to the derangement of the Black Dossier, where “you guys can have anything you want,” so — we thought we’d have everything. And ultimately we found we couldn’t have a gatefold, which would’ve been nice for the Nautilus — we had a gatefold in the second collection, which was the game, which was a lot of fun. But they started to pull back from giving us everything. We got the 3-D, which was great, and the glasses. The record’s another thing, where at the last minute — they designed special boxes to ship the Black Dossier in, which were designed to keep the record intact, and at the very, very last minute, they pulled the plug on it. I know people were disappointed.

WOLK: I was disappointed!

O’NEILL: I’ve been talking in interviews for a good couple of years about it. As if we needed any more final straws, that really was it … it was very frustrating. But I’m very proud of the Black Dossier book. I think some people didn’t know what to make of it when it came out, but it did sell very well. I think it’s grown on people.

WOLK: I was always curious: what was up with the Golliwog’s appearance in there? How did he come into the picture?

O’NEILL: That was a curious one! Going back some years before the Dossier, when we were doing the first series, I saw an article about the Golliwogg books, Florence Upton’s original Golliwogg books, which end with an O double G rather than OG. They were hugely popular, they were published every Christmas — it wasn’t so much a racist icon, a minstrel-suited kind of image. He had a curious relationship with the Dutch dolls, they often walk around naked. They’re very odd books. The text was written by Florence Upton’s mother. I was talking to Alan and I said, “This is very interesting: She never trademarked the Golliwogg, so as soon as the character became popular, people just changed the spelling a bit and ripped her off.” So all the Golliwogs that my sisters had when I was a kid, the whole industry of Golliwogs comes from her just not protecting her rights. We’d been talking about doing the Dr. Moreau stuff, and integrating various Beatrix Potter characters and stuff. When we got around to the Dossier, I’d got a reprint of one of the Golliwogg books, and there’s some strange bit of text in there where he’s described as the King of Panky-Wank. It was very odd language. So Alan devised this whole new language for the Golliwog; and his relationship with the Dutch dolls is … well, it is what it is. I think the guy’s making out like gangbusters in Toyland.

We had no problems with Wildstorm — no one said anything about it. I did a signing at Golden Apple, and a black photographer said how much she liked the book, “but I have one problem” — and I knew immediately what she was going to say. I think she called it the Polliwog, I don’t know if that’s an American variation or a slang term, but I told her what I just told you. He’s possibly the only black figure in that period of children’s publishing — there’s nothing comparable. In Enid Blyton, Golliwogs are evil characters, they’re stealing Noddy’s car and clothes! But the original was quite a swashbuckling character. She was kind of happy to hear that — she didn’t know any of the history, where he had come from, only how he had been subject to grand larceny from publishers and toy manufacturers. We are going to use the Golliwogg again. He’ll come back — we liked him a lot. Some people thought it was going too far.

WOLK: He turns up on a portrait on the wall in 1910.

O’NEILL: Yes, he does. He will appear later. Looking back, when I was a kid I was always a fan of Arthur Rackham’s work … there’s an incredible amount of suggestion in Rackham’s work, the nymphs and the mermaids and the casual nudity. We accept it when he did it, even in reprint form, but we wouldn’t have had that in contemporary books when I was growing up. They’re very sexy books — I think even to kids they were probably sexy. It’s probably an uncomfortable thing for educators to talk about, but it’s there, running through it. We will use the character again.

WOLK: You mentioned that the 3-D section was incredibly complicated. What went into drawing that?

O’NEILL: The first thing we talked about was we wanted a 3-D section for a ’50s flavor — I think 3-D comics only lasted a year or so, ’54, ’55, that period. We were thinking about how they mostly don’t work — they’re just kind of a crappy “poking spears at you” kind of thing. When I was a kid, I looked at them but I didn’t really read them. Alan thought there must be a way of doing a story in 3-D, so he thought of the Blazing World, and the characters in the story wear the glasses I designed for the readers to look at that section in. And when we got rolling on it, we were talking about all kinds of things we liked — Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, that sort of thing, and all the characters we could fit in, and fairies flitting in and out of things. But I should’ve guessed what I was getting into when I got the script. It was people walking through layers, and I’d been looking at the old ’50s blinky effects where you look through one eye at one picture and through the other at another picture, so Alan integrated that in, and we used pretty much everything we could. We knew Ray Zone was going to be doing the separations, and he’s the best. I think the most complicated thing I’ve ever done was designing it to accommodate the balloons with the characters walking through the different frames through a party, all the dialogue fitting just right — it was incredibly complicated. And when it’s finished, I think it’s just taken for granted. The big spectacle scenes of airships and things, which possibly to people are more memorable, are far, far easier to do than straightforward people standing at a party in 3-D. That was hellishly complicated. And I think we ran out of room as well — the page count had been set — and the Just So Animals sequence, which really deserved a couple of pages, I think, we had to fit that into a page. But I’m very, very pleased with it — if you read it, it’s actually about something rather than just about 3-D effects. We are going to revisit the Blazing World, so there’ll be another 3-D section in the future. Probably more complicated than this one — who knows?

Blood and Thunder

• by our readers

Journal Datebook

• by Eric Millikin and staff

A Cartoon Interview with Gary Groth

• by Noah Van Sciver

Conversations

• Introduction by Gary Groth
• Art Spiegelman and Kevin Huizenga
• Jean-Christophe Menu and Sammy Harkham
• Frank Quitely and Dave Gibbons
• Dave Mazzucchelli and Dash Shaw
• Alison Bechdel and Danica Novgorodoff
• Howard Chaykin and Ho Che Anderson
• Denny O’Neil and Matt Fraction
• Jaime Hernandez and Zak Sally
• Ted Rall and Matt Bors
• Jim Borgman and Keith Knight
• Stan Sakai and Chris Schweizer

• Acme Novelty Library #19, by Chris Ware
  reviewed by Chris Lanier
• Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli
  reviewed by Charles Hatfield

Columns

• Meet the Comics Press
  by Rich Kreiner
• Funnybook Roulette
  by R. Fiore
• Continental Drift
  by Matthias Wivel
• Comicopia
  by R.C. Harvey
• Lost in Translation
  by Bill Randall
• Post-Human Review
  by Tom Crippen

Coming Comics (October-November 2009)

• by Staff

Acme Novelty Library #19
Chris Ware
Drawn & Quarterly
80 pages, $15.95
Color, Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1897299562

Part of the fun of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #19 is seeing him apply his style to a new mode. The first half is a science-fiction adventure story involving a desperate struggle for survival, a failed escape across inhospitable terrain, the murder of several dogs, and even a brief bout of auto-cannibalism. All this transpires on a faltering colony on Mars, and the arid setting allows Ware to maintain his usual formal distance without shortchanging the urgency of the plot. At its core, the story is one of abandonment — both intimate and infinite.

The pioneering Mars colonist who narrates the story is first cut off from the human race when signals from Earth stop coming — but it wounds him more deeply when he’s emotionally cut off from his fellow colonists, and especially the woman who was to be his co-pioneer and wife. The scale of events is deliberately distorted in visual terms, using an overriding schema to fix circular forms in rigid square grids. The square is the window of the panel, while the circle is a variety of things, wildly different in size, but contained within the frame. (The narrator remarks that space travel makes you “lose all sense of scale.”) The circular inventory includes a toy ball, portholes, the glaring halo of a flashlight lens and the illuminating circle it projects, the bubble of an oxygen helmet, the planet Mars itself, spaceship dials and buttons, and a single drop of water, suspended in zero gravity, the highlight a circle within the encircling blue. The stark mathematical relation between square and circle creates an atmosphere that’s impersonal, implacable — something that won’t bend to human desire.

While there are moments of high drama in the story, there is also room for the kind of stasis that permeates Ware’s work, as though time were mostly an accumulation of awkward pauses. In Ware’s universe, the clock doesn’t tick; it intermittently clears its throat. The very beginning of the book is unstuck in time. Ware doesn’t reveal at first that the setting is Mars, and we’re introduced to the main character in his house as he shaves. The home itself is a wood cabin, and the man’s clothes suggest a rural homesteader of the ’20s. But more details from incompatible time periods begin to appear. An electric generator squats outside the house. There’s a photo pinned next to the mirror, and the people in it sport hairstyles that could date from the ’50s. Finally, when the man emerges from the house, we see next to the homestead the heavy metal arrow of a rocketship. It seems that the march of eras, with its particulars of costume and architecture, is negotiable. What is fundamental across time is the studied and futile self-maintenance of a man shaving. For Ware, these are the sorts of things that count as eternal verities: the patch of ceiling one stares at while lying awake in bed, and the rasp of razor against stubble.

In the course of the story it becomes obvious that the main character, as he narrates the travails of the colony, is deeply unreliable. His “gee whiz” locutions spackle over the fact that his fellow colonists come to regard him with suspicion, and then outright fear. As companions go, he has an easier time with the dogs that were brought along with the settlement — though the fidelity of the dogs doesn’t end up doing the dogs much good.

An unreliable narrator isn’t where the unreliability stops: it turns out the story we’ve been reading is a story-within-a-story, titled “The Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars,” written by the fictional character W. K. Brown. Brown is now a high-school English teacher, but in the ’50s he wrote a couple of promising science-fiction stories, of which “The Seeing Eye Dogs” was the first. In it, he was trying to nudge the genre tropes of science fiction into a more self-consciously literary realm; he would have been a fellow traveler of ambitious pulp toilers like Philip K. Dick and Cordwainer Smith. The second half of Acme #19 follows the young W. K. Brown around the time he wrote “The Seeing Eye Dogs,” while he was working at the bottom of the food chain in a Nebraska newspaper office. “The Seeing Eye Dogs” becomes an extension of, or a compensation for, a failed relationship with a woman who also worked at the office. Writing the story is a way of sifting through the pain and humiliation of the rejection he suffered, recasting a somewhat tawdry affair against a backdrop of cosmic struggle. This is how those ’50s hairstyles infiltrate the future timeline of the Mars colony: They’re fragments of the time when the story was written, not when it was supposed to be taking place. The science-fictional first half of Acme, it turns out, is sifted through the perceptions of the adult W. K. Brown, re-reading his story in an upstairs office of his home. So we have an unreliable narrator being read by an unreliable reader.

The few paragraphs of text reproduced from the story — along with some faux covers of ’50s science-fiction magazines — allow Ware his delight in pastiche. For the magazine covers, Ware can break out of his semaphore visuals, where characters have been stylized to agglomerations of circles and ovals, not inhabiting buildings and landscapes but rather being stranded in schematics and blueprints. Ware has shown, in his sketchbooks, how warm and varied his style can be — for the cover of the issue of Nebulous Worlds of Imagination that features Brown’s story, he gets to go in for a stolid, macho pulp tableau. The protagonist of the story — who comes across as a neurotic, decidedly average physical specimen in the story itself — here looks like someone who could easily win a bar brawl, shooting his virile space-gun (no space-gun actually appears in the story) at some indeterminate target in the Martian sky. His dog is aggressive and wolfish; the object of his desire, collapsed to her knees in the foreground, is wearing some sort of diaphanous astro-gown, which provides her both an oxygenated helmet and a vista of exposed cleavage.

For the paragraphs of Brown’s story, Ware shows off his talent for good bad writing. At this point, with years of verbiage from the fictional conglomerate the Acme Novelty Library under his belt, he could probably reel off comically solicitous catalog copy in his sleep. “The Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars” gives him room to stumble toward cosmic poetry, stubbing toes against precociously “scientific” prose: “A six minute-old sixty million mile-long needle of starlight pierced his cornea, threaded through the vitreous gel of his eyeball, and scratched a spark on the slippery black moviescreen of his retina.” It would embarrass Ware to approach such an image frontally. To put it in the mouth of an obscure science-fiction writer — now a teacher in high school, a mediocre-at-best husband and dad — with all its awkwardness, its shabby pretensions intact, opens up a wide and fertile area between the image itself and its expression.

Asterios Polyp
David Mazzucchelli
Pantheon Books
344 pp., $29.95
Color, Hardcover
ISBN: 9780307377326

Great things have been expected from cartoonist David Mazzucchelli. Asterios Polyp is a great thing. In fact it’s one of the rare graphic novels worthy of the tag.

Its ambitions are grand. Whatever the idea of the novel has meant to novel-readers — a microcosmic fictive world, a deep evocation of consciousness, a series of extraordinary encounters with the ordinary, a fluid genre capable of multiple voices and outlooks — Asterios Polyp aims to get there. In the process it pulls off both a dazzling constellation of effects and, more importantly, a beautifully observed and moving story. By dint of its scope, fullness and overarching form, the book confirms that Mazzucchelli took the challenge of the graphic novel just as seriously as he took the challenge of the comics short story the better part of 20 years ago.

Mazzucchelli’s last new book-length work, his collaboration with Paul Karasik on the Paul Auster-based City of Glass, appeared long enough ago (1994) to have slipped out of print, become a cult classic, gotten reprinted 10 years later, and served as Exhibit A in numerous critical and academic analyses. Since then his output has been slender and scattered, anthologized here and there in unpredictable fashion, the only constant about the work being the way each new story, however short, seemed a departure and a considered step forward. Though fairly quiet, Mazzucchelli has not been idle all these years: His track record is one of artistic challenges taken up with deliberateness, skill and an ever-expanding technical palette (a progress spectacularly on view in a current exhibition of his work curated by Dan Nadel for NYC’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art). Asterios Polyp represents the harvest of more years — I expect Mazzucchelli is tired of deflecting the question of just how many more — of cultivation and study.

A novel about an intellectual run to ground, Asterios Polyp is at once a piece of realist fiction (with some magical-realist license) and an argument for the futility of realism as a critical standard for comics. Its orbit is that of contemporary literary fiction — to that end, its selective attention to the minutiae of daily life is impressive — but its graphic delivery is extravagant, lush and well nigh fantastical. A character study at heart, the novel takes its aggressively uncommercial title from its protagonist, a highfalutin professor of architecture at an unnamed Cornell-like university who writes books with titles like Modernism with a Human Face. That’s Asterios Polyp, renowned as a “paper architect” (none of his designs has ever been built in reality) but now in retreat from life: disaffected, detached, anomic; divorced, alone, rudderless and lost. This is familiar turf — the territory of that durable genre, the academic novel, which tends to be populated with spoiled and unhappy Laputans — but Mazzucchelli won’t quite go there. Instead he starts by pitching his protagonist head-first out of his malaise: in the novel’s opening pages, Asterios’s apartment is summarily struck by lightning and burned to ash (on his 50th birthday, no less). Asterios escapes with the clothes on his back, a wallet full of money, and a handful of small, but as it turns out, significant, objects rescued from the blaze. He takes a Greyhound at random to the town of Apogee, where he falls in with auto mechanic Stiffly (Stiff) Major and his comical household and friends, including wife Ursula (a zaftig earth-goddess figure), young son Jackson and a loose band of other local types. Apogee becomes the scene of the novel’s unfolding present tense, and these parts of the story have a joyous waywardness that reminds me of Jaime Hernandez. Alternating with these are flashback chapters that recount how Asterios got to where he is now, specifically his marriage to, intellectual competition with, and eventual divorce from the sculptress Hana Sonnenschein (ha), the love of his life. Hana is the character whose complementary presence gives the story its wholeness. We can tell at times that Asterios keenly feels her absence.

In fact, his life seems to be have been structured by another such absence, for, Elvis-like, he had an identical twin who was stillborn, and, seemingly as a result, Asterios is obsessed with twinnings, doublings and dialectical tensions of all kinds. He has a systematic, system-making mind. In a curious conceit, Mazzucchelli has the novel narrated in part by the lost twin — or perhaps (as I ended up thinking) by Asterios himself in the third person, in a kind of distanced and dissociated frame of mind. If the thought of this never-known double haunts Asterios, it is the twinning of Asterios and Hana that gives the novel its shape. In the end, one doubling overtakes the other, and Asterios emerges, as the saying goes, a changed man.

It should be clear from the above that, efforts at realism notwithstanding, Asterios Polyp is comical in spirit — at times even archly satiric — and also thick with obvious symbolism. A nifty symbolic watchworks, the novel is at once playfully knowing but also mannered and deliberate. It dances a suave and elegant dance with formalism — slick, purposeful, methodical — as if to make of itself a kind of system. Bit by bit, sequence by sequence, Mazzucchelli builds up and then cannily deploys a graphic/symbolic vocabulary unique to the book, a vocabulary that, remarkably, is dense but not hermetic; accessible, eminently readable, but never sledgehammer-obvious. Reading the novel from end to end means learning and internalizing this system — my point being that, like the best comics, Asterios Polyp works up a graphic language local to itself, then invites us to become fluent. Choices in coloring, lettering, hachuring (or its absence), perspectival depth, and layout and design are braided into patterns of recurrence and variation that make of the book a complete, and complexly patterned, graphic world. In short, the novel is its own ecosystem. I’ve never seen a comic, long or short, whose disposition of formal elements is more careful and expressive. Every character speaks in his/her own font (that is, hand), yet the effect is not overwhelming. Every chapter observes and serves to extend the book’s color scheme, yet the consistency of Mazzucchelli’s choices is not suffocating. Formal rigor and lightness of touch have seldom moved so well in step.

For all its meticulousness, then, Asterios Polyp does not feel like a straitening exercise in formal discipline. Mazzucchelli makes generous choices that continually spring the reader from the clutches of formalism, not least of which is his relaxing of the page grid and welcoming of negative space, here deployed to positively poetic ends. The book’s layout is protean, adaptable, endlessly delightful, never stifling. Many of its pages have a loosely jointed, open quality: panels and figures float in white space, as if to breathe more freely. The panels tend to be separated — almost but not quite decoupled — rather than braced against each other, abutting, in traditional gridlike fashion. This approach is in invigorating contrast to that of Mazzucchelli’s best-known previous works: the relentless gridding of City of Glass, the full-to-the-margins graphic intensity of Rubber Blanket, the ink-clotted noir of his Batman and Daredevil. With the exception of a very few short stories since 1996, density has been Mazzucchelli’s ambit; Asterios Polyp, by contrast, is a breeze.

But what really frees this novel from the astringency of high formalism is Mazzucchelli’s teasing, dismantling way with systems and abstractions of all kinds. Above all, Asterios Polyp is a tolerantly human story with a healthy distrust of formal absolutes. Though it’s about a mind — a man — bound up in the pursuit of a pure logic, a man for whom abstractions trump lived-in experience, thankfully the book does not succumb to that sort of hermeticism. In effect, the novel is a supremely well-thought-out satire on a certain kind of thinking: the dialectical, the linear, the polarizing, the systematizing, architectonic, grandly alienated and disembodied. Asterios, we are told, has a yen for abstractions, in particular for balance, “counterpoise,” dialectics, and the linear analysis of space. He also has, we know, a very personal obsession with doubles that shapes his more conscious intellectual pursuits. The book, which is dialectical in design, shares this obsession to some extent yet also spoofs it; even as Mazzucchelli indulges in abstractions of his own, he teases out the limitations of the abstracting mind. He has fun with the limits of his protagonist’s vision, and with his own formal preoccupations. What’s more, Mazzucchelli counters Asterios’ sensibility with those of Hana and the other key players, bringing his overweening protagonist into vitalizing contact with people who take life on very different terms.

Parodic riffs on dialectical reasoning run throughout the book, as if in mocking reinforcement of Asterios’ fixation on twinning. Gradually Mazzucchelli lays out a cluster of dualities that participate in and reinforce each other: Asterios/Hana, male/female, blue/red, abstract/concrete, ideal/real, paper architecture/embodied sculpture, line/form, schematics/solids, empathy/egocentricity, logical abstractions/lived attention to the world. Where Asterios sees two shapes — blocks laid out next to each other, in an poignant echo of the World Trade Center towers — Hana sees three, that is, both the blocks and the negative space that at once separates and joins them. Whereas Asterios, when he draws into himself, become a canted architectural drawing in crisp blueline, Hana becomes a rounded space defined by a nest of organic line-work in red-magenta. Examples like this are legion. Going further, the book alternates between present/past and urban/rural by invoking a contrastive color scheme, with blue and magenta marshaled to tell the story of Asterios and Hana (the past) and yellow designated for everything that happens to Asterios after the fire (the present); thus Mazzucchelli introduces a dialectic tension even on the global level of novelistic structure. In this way the novel becomes a craftily self-reflexive artist’s book about art. That it turns out to be about more is one of its many graces.

Something Old and Something New

Yes, it’s the 300th issue of the Journal. Another of those magic round numbers. Comics fandom is so wrapped up in numbers that you’d think it was baseball. But it’s not baseball. It’s not even hardball. It’s comics, the medium of pictures and words, not numbers. Still, counting as we go, we take up Art Spiegelman’s latest production, the reissue last year of Breakdowns, which obliges us to cast a moistly rolling eye back 30-some years in comics history to see, by comparison, what we may have learned in the three decades that the Journal has been published by the present proprietor.

Time travel is always risky. We may discover that a foray into Breakdowns is more excuse than measure, but it’s an excuse worth taking.

The Irish novelist James Joyce once, in a flight of verbal fancy, wrote: Nobirdy avair soar anywing to eagle it. If not high praise, at least acknowledgment of extraordinary achievement. And we may say the same about Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young @&%*! (76 10×14-inch pages, many in color, hardcover; Pantheon, $27.50).

My invocation of Joyce is neither facetious nor arbitrary: Joyce, the inventor of stream-of-consciousness writing, was a formalist, unabashed and unrepentant; ditto, with a vengeance, Spiegelman, but with pictures. And Breakdowns is the par excellence exemplar of his preoccupation. This dubious relationship between formalists has scarcely evaded Spiegelman’s attention: The subtitle of his book echoes that of Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novel.

Spiegelman’s book gives us the perfect pivot upon which we can turn to look back while standing, firmly rooted, in the present. With Breakdowns as the fulcrum and the Journal as the lever, we should be able to move the world of comics.

Breakdowns is part reincarnation: the part that reprints the original 1978 48-page book of that title that was almost accidentally — and certainly perversely — published (just 30 years before the reissue) by Belier Press, otherwise a specialist in fetish fantasies, which became the publisher of record by paying the printer who had printed the book that Nostalgia Press could no longer afford to pay for. The other part bookends the original publication with two Spiegelman specialties, a prefatory 20-page autobiographical comic strip and a postscriptive eight-page autobiographical essay.

Considering the content, it’s not impossible to imagine how this edition of Breakdowns came into being.

Spiegelman is a notoriously slow worker: It took him two years to complete his last book, In the Shadow of No Towers, which he undertook to express his alarm and anger in reaction to the terrorist attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, just a few blocks from his studio and near the school one of his children was attending.

“Reaction” implies something nearly immediate, but Spiegelman’s treatment soon evolved into a pousse-café of the agonies the cartoonist endured in the immediate and ensuing aftermath of 9/11, in which he layered allusion after allusion in his original comics construct and then laminated the whole thing with reprints of vintage newspaper comic strips.

In his compulsive tinkering and jiggering with the visual elements of his work, Spiegelman is again like Joyce, who, asked by his biographer how his Work In Progress was progressing, said that it was going as well as could be expected: He had decided on the words to use in a particular sentence and was now trying to determine their order.

(Some of the first Tower pages were published pretty soon after 9/11 in the Jewish weekly, Forward, but Spiegelman’s modus operandi soon slowed production, and the publication of the subsequent pages took place at too distant a remove to be a “reaction,” strictly speaking.)

Pantheon, the publisher of Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning Maus in two volumes (1986 and 1991, but the five-year interval doesn’t reflect the preceding eight years that Spiegelman labored on the first book), was probably growing impatient, waiting for the meticulously dilatory cartoonist to produce another book that would earn both shekels and laurels. Weary of being nagged about it, Spiegelman doubtless looked around his SoHo studio to see what he could use to silence Pantheon’s plaints and landed on Breakdowns, which, in its initial publication, had sunk like a rock as soon as it was launched and was therefore virtually unknown, as close to being a “new” book as possible without actually being freshly minted. This vintage effort from his youth Spiegelman offered Pantheon, and Pantheon seized upon it eagerly.

But Spiegelman, a canny promoter as well as a painstaking craftsman, realized that simply recycling work from his salad days would inspire a certain quantity of scoffing among his critics and sour gripes among his fans, and so he offered to put the comic strips of the original Breakdowns in the context of his creative life by prefacing them with an autobiographical comic strip. This pleased Pantheon, which had long recognized that autobiographical comic strips were Spiegelman’s métier.

But then, probably — I’m making all this up, you understand, even though most of it corresponds roughly to what Spiegelman himself has said — the cartoonist, who is better at explaining the allusive complexities of his art than he is at actually drawing the pictures he explains (he’s not bad at drawing: he’s just better with words than with pictures), thought his antique opus had still not received an adequate exegesis and decided to explain it all again, this time in a verbal autobiographical essay, which is more explicit about cause-and-effect relationships and the like than the comic strip is with all its fuzzy visual metaphors and allusions.

The essay is akin to Spiegelman’s comics: It is crammed with the verbal equivalent of layered visual allusions, a meaty stew of verbiage marching smartly by, calling its own cadence as it goes, and ending with a metaphysical flourish.

Spiegelman worried, he explains, about the sexually explicit pictures in one of the strips (repeated pictures of fellatio predominate as the image of sexual relations, which makes one wonder…), but Pantheon wasn’t worried at all. Times, since Breakdowns‘ inaugural publication 30-odd years ago, have changed. Spiegelman was comforted at the realization: “I know that America has changed dramatically,” he opined, “…and I know its moral center is located somewhere between Janet Jackson’s nipple and Paris Hilton’s clit — it’s just that I can’t figure out exactly where.”

See what I mean about his verbal dexterity? And his final flourish is just as packed: “I’m glad to see Breakdowns get a new spin around the block, now that comics are thriving while the rest of America turns to shit. The discoveries I made while working on the strips in that book have somehow been absorbed by those interested in stretching the boundaries of comics over the past thirty years, even if only second or third hand. As a result, some may look at Breakdowns as a mere artifact of its time. But for me, it’s a manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note and a still-relevant love letter to a medium I adore.”

Adroitly, Spiegelman, after claiming to be the medium’s trail-blazing innovator (“the discoveries I made”), manages to slip into self-deprecation (“a crumpled suicide note”) and soft, warm navel lint (a “love letter”), thereby earning our sympathetic regard for being so fondly dedicated to his art rather than being just egotistically self-aggrandizing.

Watching Spiegelman’s footwork as he dances through a paragraph is often as much fun as studying the pictures he laces with alternative implications. Spiegelman’s oft-professed love for comics as an artistic medium probably accounts partially for his overriding interest in its “forms.” As he told Dave Welch last fall at Powells.com, the strips in Breakdowns came “from an interest primarily in How pages are made. What is the stuff of comics that makes up its comics-ness?”

More recently (in April), Spiegelman talked to Adam Phillips at Voice of America: “I was trying to make comics that weren’t like anything else I saw. They weren’t directed toward punch lines, and they were surreal. They had no possible place to be published!”

We may gauge the daring Spiegelman saw in his comics when alleging that they were “unpublishable” by remembering that when he did the strips in the 1978 Breakdowns, he was sometimes pretty far underground with the likes of Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton and others of that storied ilk — all doing comics that deliberately broke the rules that had for so long governed cartooning and affronted the social order by attacking it in its most tender places. “These [comics] were things that were kind of out of control,” Spiegelman told Phillips. “That was really exciting. I was trying to out-violent them, out-sex them, out-whatever [them].”

Said Phillips: “He knew he had succeeded when Crumb’s wife banned him from the house.”

The title Breakdowns refers to the essential cartooning act of breaking a narrative down into discrete pictorial “moments.” (The title also refers, much more obliquely, to the mental breakdown Spiegelman suffered in the late 1960s, although, reading his description of how he got himself sent to a mental institution, I suspect his behavior wasn’t so much insane as it was bizarrely comedic, even satiric, and none of those around him could recognize it for an attempt at humor and therefore thought him crazy. Not an unusual failing on the part of the multitudes.)

At the center of Spiegelman’s formalistic interest, however, is a profound artistic deficiency: He loves to draw comics but has no story to tell. And so he pursues his love affair by fooling around with “how” comics work. The briefest as well as best demonstration of the validity of this assessment is found in the very first of his experiments, the one-page 1972 “Zip-a-Tunes and Moire Melodies,” in which Spiegelman is unapologetically merely playing with the visual impressions that can be created with Zipatone, a dot-patterned self-adhesive cellophane-like overlay that can be stuck onto line drawings to give them gray tones.

The one-pager serves no other purpose. It has no “story”; it has only gray tones and a celestially punning title. Memorable, but it’s all form and no content.

Similarly, many of the individual undertakings in the book, for all their pyrotechnical storytelling methods, are often meaningless in any but a purely formalistic sense.

The longest “story” — the eight-page “Ace Hole, Midget Detective” — is a witty visual-verbal spoof of the hardboiled-detective genre, deploying visual allusions to Picasso as well as to classic comic strips (with a telling dig at the Comics Code), but it doesn’t conclude so much as it simply stops, as if Spiegelman had run out of allusions to make. All form but no content.

I don’t mean to imply that Breakdowns is somehow inferior. It decidedly isn’t. As a demonstration of the capabilities of the comics art form, the book is usually superior. And the demonstrations are not the stuff of dry classroom lectures: They are entertaining. One-to-three pages long, they’re short and quippy, a little like blackout playlets but often without punch lines.

In “The Malpractice Suite,” Spiegelman appropriates a few panels from Rex Morgan, M.D. and constructs around each panel as originally published a faux “background”; so we see in the original, a close-up of nurse June Gale talking to Dr. Morgan who appears at mid-range, nearly full figure, but Spiegelman has extended the picture in the panel by drawing the rest of June Gale’s body, which, we see, is completely naked from the neck down.

The form of the comic strip with its necessarily limited prospect is deployed here to show us what is really happening outside the tunnel-vision focus of panel borders within which we catch only a glimpse of the “real world.” In effect, in a comic strip, we see the world through a porthole and therefore miss much of it.

Spiegelman’s examination of how a joke works supposedly inspired Scott McCloud to propound his masterpiece, Understanding Comics. A couple of the one-pagers herein have been published as stand-alone strips in the New Yorker, at which his wife, Françoise Mouly, is art director; I hasten to add that she is not cartoon editor.

In at least two of the longer pieces in the book, the introductory autobiographical comic strip and a lust story called “Little Signs of Passion,” Spiegelman is toying with a filmmaker’s storytelling tricks. He was hanging around some experimental filmmakers, whose methods he envied: They could shoot “footage” willy-nilly, and then go back to their labs and edit the images into a story. Spiegelman was intrigued. As he explained last fall to Tom Gatti at the London Times, employing one of his most extravagantly arcane metaphors: “Comics are a narrative medium, but a narrative is a story, which comes from the Latin historia, referring to the horizontal rows [floors] of a building — and that comes from those early painted-glass comics that were used in churches to tell the superhero story of that guy who could walk on water. I was ultimately obsessed by comic structure” — that is, to pursue his metaphor, the “architecture” of comics. The bricks in the building are the panels of a comic strip.

His obsession with structure in cartooning persisted through Towers. While making the strips in that volume, Spiegelman was tortured by his sense that both his personal world and the larger outside world embodying George W. Bush’s reaction to the 9/11 attack were fragmented, fractured beyond recognition.

“What could have been more fractured than September 11th?” he asked Phillips. “The structure of comics is what really interested me, and here I was dealing with structures that were falling all around me: the structures of democracy and the structures of those buildings.”

In 1974, deeply engrossed in exploring the ways comics worked, Spiegelman threw caution to the wind and decided to make a comic strip with the filmmaker’s devices: For “Little Signs of Passion,” he “shot” footage by drawing his pictures in equal-sized panels, then, like a film editor, he re-arranged the panels for publication. The object of this exercise was to “rupture” the “illusion of time that is created by juxtaposing images [panels of pictures] on a page.” He does somewhat the same sort of thing in the reissued book’s introductory autobiographical comic strip.

But these exercises, like most of Breakdowns, are what a cartoonist does when he can’t think of a story or a joke to tell. He doodles. He plays with his food, his tools. And much of the alleged “content” of Breakdowns is elaborate doodling.

Except for Spiegelman’s autobiographical forays. In those he finds his real subject: himself.

He says he was introduced to the concept of autobiographical comics by Justin Green, whose Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary opened his eyes “to the possibility that confessional autobiography could be subject matter for comics.” In the events and adventures of his own life, Spiegelman found “stories” that he could tell in his beloved medium.

The Firing Line Forms Here

Once upon a time there was no Comics Journal. Coverage of comics, let alone comics criticism, was very, very different.

In 1976, print commentary ruled the roost in a way that would be difficult to imagine with our Internet-powered free-for-all. Newspapers, a going concern at the time, were the pre-eminent source of useful, daily information, challenged only in certain ways by television. Local papers carried no reviews of comics in their book pages or weekend literary sections. Like, ever. In part this was because comparatively few comics of recognizable social ambition or self-evident artistic heft were widely available. Name your period comic-book benchmark: Arcade? A blaze across the sky, begun in ’75, gone in ’76. American Splendor? Issue #1 is ’76. A Contract With God? ’78. Tantrum? ’79. Raw? First in 1980. Weirdo? A year later. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary? OK: 1972.

Intriguing comics, too much like every succeeding new cutting-edge art movement, seemed to require an introduction, an explanation through which common folk could gain entrance. There apparently was education to be done. Such orientation was made necessary, in part, because of the lack of consensus regarding the nature and significance of comics. Or rather if there was a consensus it was none too flattering. At best, comics were entertainment for children and the momentary diversion of newspaper-buying adults. At worst, they were the opium of the subliterate. For some, the stink of “seducer of the innocent” still clung, probably strengthened by the liberties of the undergrounds. As such, newspaper-column inches considering comics as a developed, expressive medium of communication were hard to come by. (Full disclosure: That was the way it was presented to me, then lacking a permanent address and irresistible fourth-estate skills, as I attempted to place funnybook-related articles in the paying press.)

If comics did generate notice in the papers, it was usually within the “Holy Attic Stash! Old Comics Worth BIG MONEY!” school of journalism. It was either that or personality pieces on local artists breaking in or trying to break into the professional ranks by landing a job with a major publisher. These were just as likely to wind up in the People and Personality pages as in the Arts section. One exception would be where drawings were so accomplished, so sensational, that they could be splashed across the first page of the Leisure section supported by so little prose apart from captions that a journalist’s byline wasn’t warranted.

In select cities of sufficient size, there was also notice paid to local conventions, gatherings where fans (“from ‘fanatics’,” we were invariably reminded) spent some of that BIG MONEY for old comics, often, apparently, dressed in colorful, handmade costumes.

No, back in the day, bulk prose on funnybooks was pretty much left to fanzines (“magazines made by fans for other fans”). Titles rose from humble beginnings as intimate, hand-wrought, idiosyncratic objects. Many were little more than unabashed mash notes, their affections imprinted in an inaccessible past. Paeans, plot summaries, personal relationships and fan art abounded. En masse, they seldom seemed interested in achieving much more. Individually, they appeared to be the work of principal instigators aided by a like-minded cadre of acolytes. They were what a sentimental garage band might have produced if it had a copier instead of instruments.

Some zines made an effort to keep abreast of mainstream news, where “news” consisted of books canceled or about to be launched and what creators were on or off what corporate properties. To get the slenderest jump — aka “scoop” — on the most routine of business decisions made by mainstream companies, friendly relationships with publishers were plainly thought to be a necessity. Friendlier still and there might be an interview to be had with an industry pro. Of course, such relationships had to be based on trust, which is to say the zine’s assurance of unconditional positive regard backed by a track record of flattering copy.

It was much the same for getting and keeping advertisers, particularly for adzines. These were little more than printed bazaars noisy with offers to buy or sell. The bigger the zine the more it seemingly relied on bigger dealers with bigger advertising budgets to regularly hawk back-issue stock, hobby supplies and original products. These parties too were to be courted.

Thus the cornerstones of zine journalism were good thoughts and cozy relations twice over. Accordingly, seldom was heard a discouraging word about companies, pros, titles, advertisers or their wares. It was the perfect antithesis to criticism.

Select zines were able to achieve a higher profile, thanks to some combination of bigger mailing lists, more advantageous access to professional ranks, wider followings, greater advertising patronage, better production values and perhaps nurtured commercial and professional ambitions. My own experiences with these was limited (being without a permanent mailing address and all) but titles like Rocket’s Blast Comicollector, Alter Ego, Mediascene, Cartoonist PROfiles, Cinefantastique and Comics Buyer’s Guide seemed preeminent. About The Nostalgia Journal I had no idea.

In time, even DC and Marvel found the packaging of favorable gloss, controlled publicity and parceled insider information so attractive that they appropriated it for their own versions, The Amazing World of DC and FOOM (for “Friends of Ol’ Marvel”).

But one thing back-checking reveals is that none of these efforts had any consistent interest in generating criticism-as-we’d-commonly-recognize-it (which, for the record, involves varying degrees of descriptive, analytic, interpretative and evaluative reflection relative to an artistic work; theoretical aspects of the form invariably underlie the discussion, either implicitly or explicitly, and a bit of historical perspective only helps). To be fair, many fanzines forthrightly warned of their other, varied preoccupations right in their titles: a tout for movies devoted to the fantastic; a composite “scene” assembled from media veneers; in-house PR organs; and most prominently, periodicals designed to help you buy and collect and possess comic books.

Those last in particular, as aids to acquisition, spoke directly to a theory of criticism, which was proving more persuasive by the day. It posited that capitalism had essentially made criticism a non-issue. In replacing criticism with a cash-and-carry mentality, in establishing a mindset where everything was capable of being expressed in currency relative to a rate of exchange, the possibility of meaningful analysis and judgment was effectively destroyed. If you are the kind of person who argues that criticism is an instrument dependent upon standards, adopting cost-benefit analyses as your governing principle intuitively begins at a dead end. That sort of for-sale yardstick thrives in reviews today where the summary evaluation boils down to what’s worth the money and what isn’t, an authoritative buy/no buy bottom line. After that, price guides represent only a warped “cost of everything, value of nothing” extrapolation.

All that I’ve since come to know about The Nostalgia Journal can be found in The Comics Journal #235, the one celebrating the title’s 25th anniversary. This single issue is as close to a magazine’s autobiography as can be imagined (yes, as autobiography it carries the possibility for self-mythologizing, but that pitfall is mitigated by its composite nature. A lot of people got to weigh in and a remarkable corroboration is achieved, bequeathing the whole thing a kind of “writer-response” integrity).

If you haven’t picked it up elsewhere, The Nostalgia Journal was a struggling adzine that Gary Groth and Mike Catron bought out in 1976. Right out of the gates, their very first editorial went straight after the reigning 400-pound gorilla of adzines, The Buyer’s Guide. In inaugural issue #27, Groth, microphone in hand, hunted down Buyer’s Guide publisher Alan Light at a New York City con, hounding him and a crony about their business practices.

For comics coverage, this was — as they say — different. It was the fusion of participatory New Journalism and raw gonzo zeal set loose upon the funnybook flock. You would probably have to have been there, but that first Groth/Catron issue of The Nostalgia Journal printed the entire transcript of the confrontation in all its thrusting, dogged, righteous, fulminating glory.

I know this thanks to Michael Dean’s piece on the origins of news reporting in The Comics Journal in that aforementioned #235. Dean traced the beginnings and early evolution of the magazine’s “Newswatch” feature, particularly as it deviated from industry practices of sentimentality, whorish fiscal relations and abject ball-scrubbing. It was apparent from the get-go that Groth and company were out to bite the hand common knowledge said was feeding them. Moreover, the new regime seemed to be sizing up the head beyond the hand, anxious to see if it could be swallowed in one bite.

“The whole point of editorial content in an adzine is to have editorial content that enhances the advertisers. Whereas we wanted to piss off advertisers,” said Groth. As for making nice with publishers, Catron reflected in #235 on his partner back in the day: “Gary had a very definite point of view. He felt that comics should be an art and that the biggest impediment to comics becoming that were the major comics publishers of the day.”

With attitudes like that, the reaction of old Nostalgia Journal advertisers, prominent publishers, contented readers and frightened onlookers was immediate and predictable. Writes Dean, “The choice before [the] new owners then was to retreat to the more typical and commercially viable ad-driven formula or to push their vision all the way and turn the publication into an editorial-driven magazine.”

Not to puncture the suspense, but we know that in time The Comics Journal came to refer to itself as “The Magazine of Comics News and Criticism” (apparently that motto won out over “Resisting Arrested Development Since the Ford Administration”). In an article far more objective than this one, Dean recreated the fledgling steps of the magazine’s news-gathering arm as it bushwhacked industry heavyweights. But what of the publication’s twin engine, that of criticism?

Comics by Noah Van Sciver

Age of Geeks

In the late 1970s, when this magazine came to be, Alan Moore was kicking around from one clerk job to another, collecting his paychecks from places like the Northampton gas board. He wanted to be an artist and seer, but he couldn’t find the nerve to collar his destiny. One night he had a dream: His 10-year-old self looked at him and wanted to know what had happened to their life. A decade later, Moore was finishing Watchmen, and now he sits in his living room in Northampton, keeping an irritated distance from the $150 million dumb idea Hollywood has raised over his bright idea from a quarter-century back.

A lot happened because Alan Moore found his destiny, with the Watchmen movie being one of the biggest and dullest consequences. I don’t think anyone in 1977 could have predicted it: “No, they’re going to do superheroes like they’re adults, and people will keep buying the same comics for decades, so down the road one of the adult-hero comics will be a classic and there’ll be a big movie based on it, and the movie is going to try to copy the adult-hero comic panel by panel, do it like a souvenir pamphlet advertising the comic, and it’s going to be really creepy seeing people getting moved around and forced to wear those costumes just so they can illustrate the pamphlet, and anyway the guy making the movie just knows that he loves comics; he doesn’t understand anything about this particular comic — I’m talking about a future where it turns out people keep being Trekkies or whatever their whole lives. So the movie will be like a big mausoleum for the comic and it’s going to bomb, and then the studio will sell copies in little disks about the size of a 45. And people will play the movie at home and finally it’ll get an audience, because at home people can make the film stop or speed up or go slow or play it back. And you wind up with a bunch of people making a cult over the thing, watching it over and over but not at the normal speed. They want to see the details go by fast, popping up, and they want to look at the costumes without having to listen to the dialogue or get weirded out by the actors getting treated like wax dummies.”

We have lived into a geekish future — I think that’s the key lesson of the scenario above — and the Watchmen movie is a historic failure of geekism. The giveaway isn’t just the eternal life enjoyed by a pop-culture product, or the fuss over the product’s details, or the thought of people hunched alone in their rooms watching the Comedian’s funeral in fast-forward for the seventh time. It’s all that plus this: The movie would not have been nearly as bad if anybody had been thinking, and at the same time, it’s clear that people were thinking. The project got done, a lot of contractors and staff put some excellent attention into props and costumes. (Check out the Owl Ship’s control panel — that is admirable stuff.) Mental activity, rather sophisticated and disciplined mental activity, was involved from start to finish. But… no one was thinking. Get those two elements together, the structured mental activity and the absolute blind pointlessness, and you have a key geek indicator. It’s not infallible, since the same combination was found in planning the Sevastopol campaign or the Iraq war, but it’s still crucial.

Geekism is the modern mind being especially modern and especially useless. The mental skills that can make or break a life as lived today — structuring and understanding systems, absorbing and analyzing information, registering detail — have their purpose turned inside out and become a replacement for reality. Nowadays, with so much knowledge and data-processing ability so widely disseminated, it’s also the case that purpose has been miniaturized. People doing quite sophisticated things may be joined into an organization that makes them feel like a leg on a caterpillar. The results of their actions become a matter of faith, located off in the web of abstract interconnections that keeps the modern world running. Important and unimportant become hard to judge; they turn into parodies of each other. A computer expert or a health care expert can say she is a geek because the use for her knowledge isn’t right there in the room. A real geek can say he is a geek because he knows Jedi history or Klingon grammar. The two usages are joined at the back by the idea of pointlessness and disciplined mental activity. But I have to believe that health care data is not really pointless. So, to me, the idea of a health care geek is sort of an homage to the Star Wars geek or Star Trek geek. A geek in his or her geekiest aspect would be someone who knows a great deal about a science-fiction or fantasy entertainment franchise, someone who worships it, buys it and, most of all, studies it, reading or watching the same episodes or books or comics over and over with the sort of attention that might normally go to national emergency-room statistics.

Alan Moore and geekism came up together. In 1977, around when Moore put his hand on destiny’s shoulder, a series of gigantic changes took place — gigantic in the right context. Star Wars came out, Terry Brook published Sword of Shannara, Stephen R. Donaldson published Lord Foul’s Bane, Douglas Adams got going with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And so on. All of them second- or third-generation pop-culture recyclings, all of them vast hits. It was like the ground rose beneath the feet of the otherworlds-genre-product ghetto; all of a sudden people were getting rich. And around this time we start hearing the term “geek,” for computer people but especially (or that was my impression) for people fixated on otherworlds adventure franchises; in practice, of course, the two groups weren’t expected to be much different.

Alan Moore is a product of that time, maybe its best. If you want some recycled pop fantasy, I think you’re better off with “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” than you are with Star Wars. In fact I’d say his big titles of the 1980s, Watchmen most of all, are the only examples I’ve come across of really fine, substantial works devoted to recycling other-reality entertainment staples. But something went wrong. His Watchmen became Watchmen the movie, which is bad enough. What’s worse is that Moore wrote Lost Girls and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and — well, just about every comic he’s turned out since 1989 or so. If I had to think of reasons to say why Alan Moore was great, I’d have a hard time finding anything from his comics work of the past 20 years. There’s issue 12 of Promethea, but then there’s the rest of Promethea. There’s From Hell, but no, not really. He hasn’t stopped being a genius; only a genius could fail in the way he does, with such energy and ambition, such amazing fireworks. But when I put one of his comics down, I have to remind myself to pick it back up. I think his post-’89 comics are stunted. No matter how big he tries to be, he winds up being small.

The explanation that jumps to my eye is geekism. Here’s a parallel. On the one hand, you have the boast by Zack Snyder, the director of Watchmen, that he made damn sure Hollis Mason’s “We Fix ‘Em” sign would be in there. His mission was to get all those little details that only the fans notice. (That’s one of the great things about Snyder, says Alex McDowell, the movie’s production designer — he cares about “finding the Easter eggs.”) But in the book the “We Fix ‘Em” sign matters because of the words right underneath: “Obsolete Models a Specialty.” Hollis specialized in standard car engines, but then Doctor Manhattan invented electric cars and poor Hollis was out in the cold. The thing is that the movie Watchmen doesn’t have electric cars; it was easier to tell the story without them. The choice makes sense, but now the sign doesn’t.

On the other hand, you have this line from Lost Girls: “Outside, with the gaslight, the sky over New York looked green, sorta.” That’s Moore’s version of Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz, visiting New York City. A lot of people complained about how Moore borrowed Wendy, Alice and Dorothy for his big comic about sex. What bothered me was that there was nothing he really wanted to do with them. Most people know the characters from childhood, so he figured that using the characters would bring him to the right spot in the reader’s consciousness for a talk about primal matters (identity and sex, aggression versus creation). I remember he explained the choice during an interview, and he didn’t seem bothered that The Wizard of Oz and the rest had never been favorites of his. But if writing about the characters didn’t do much for him, what could he find to write about them? He settled for sticking on a series of parallels and minor references, appliqué work atop his big ideas and the material about nipples and elbows. The result is as stupid as anything Snyder gets up to in his Watchmen movie. And much the same mistakes were being made: careful and systematic reproduction for no clear purpose. After all, if Moore isn’t thrilled by Wendy and Peter Pan and the rest, maybe other people aren’t; possibly the characters won’t get him where he wants to go in the universal consciousness. But he never thinks about it.

Michael Slembrouck:

I thought it was funny that issue 298 of The Comics Journal had a lengthy essay [Comicopia, R.C. Harvey] about the dead chimp/stimulus bill editorial cartoon and how, racist or not, the author failed in the presentation of his opinion, which was preceded by a review that did that exact thing. My initial reaction to Robert Stanley Martin’s review of Speak of the Devil was juvenile, but oh well: This guy’s a jerk-off. I’m a Beto fan (no dis to Jaime, but I prefer Beto) but, sure, Speak of the Devil didn’t impress me all that much compared to some of his other work. I even partially agree with Martin’s complaint (and he has only one, which he harps on and on about for the whole “review”) and it’s that the story could use a little more depth. That’s where I stop agreeing with him, even partially.

Martin correctly identifies his complaints as pedantic, but I’m not sure who he’s trying to impress by painting himself as an expert on high school athletes, girl gymnasts and the suburban mindset. He seems to be rather stereotypical in his opinions of all three, however, which puts his demand for more depth in the form of realism on shaky ground. His claims that no one will believe the crimes portrayed in the story because we all watch CSI not only add to that but are offensive (or, more mildly, irritating). The “fact” that apparently no club anywhere has had their wait-staff dress as bunnies in decades and how this helps to ruin the book make me really start to think that this guy (Martin) is actually not a jerk-off but someone clearly lacking intelligence yet putting on the airs that he’s not. Maybe no club anywhere does currently make its wait-staff dress as sexy bunnies, I don’t know, I haven’t visited every club everywhere regularly for ten plus years to keep up on their dress codes (I have been to a Hooters in the past decade, though, and anyone who claims their outfits aren’t comparable to bunny outfits is blind). But that’s not the point. Clearly, what has made Beto’s comics so great is their realistic attention to minute details of very specific stereotypes.

Everything becomes clear at the end of the review, though. Robert Stanley Martin is one of those people who enjoys saying of an artist: “their early stuff is better, before they sold out,” or something along those lines. This is not the elitist attitude that TCJ has been criticized for, it’s the pretentious claptrap found in any fandom that stops it from being expanded. I stand by my initial reaction and really hope he doesn’t contribute anything else to TCJ in the future. Strong opinions are of course a trademark of TCJ, but they’re intelligent opinions, too.

Otherwise, an excellent issue.

Robert Stanley Martin Replies:

Michael Dean offered me the opportunity to reply to this letter, but I’m not quite sure what to reply to without rehashing the review. Mr. Slembrouck continually misstates or exaggerates what I wrote. Attitudes are attributed to me that I never expressed and do not hold. He finds my views of “high school athletes, girl gymnasts and the suburban mindset” stereotypical, but he doesn’t elaborate on what he finds hackneyed or simplistic about them. Part of me wonders if the letter is a joke. The writing skills on display are pitiful, and the author barely seems to know how to read.

The only complaint that isn’t completely incoherent or nonsensical deals with my criticism of a character’s Playboy-Bunny-style work outfit. However, it’s a straw man. In my review, I wrote that the outfit was an anachronism, and that, in terms of the story, it raised questions about Hernandez’s depiction of her husband. Mr. Slembrouck ignores the latter part of that criticism, and he exaggerates the rest into an absolute, no-exceptions claim that no establishment anywhere today has their servers dress in such a manner. My response is that, beyond drastically improving his reading comprehension skills, Mr. Slembrouck needs to learn the difference between something being generally true and universally so. Of course, Mr. Slembrouck also thinks Playboy Bunnies and Hooters Girls have similar outfits, so maybe that is too fine a distinction for him to understand.

Mr. Slembrouck asks whom I was trying to impress with my critique of Speak of the Devil. The answer is no one. The Journal commissioned a review of 1,000-6,000 words and sent me a copy of the book. I just fulfilled the assignment. I took no pleasure in writing the review. My preference is to talk about work I enjoy, and if I don’t like something, my hope is that it is bad in an interesting way. Speak of the Devil didn’t even manage that. It is a mind-numbingly awful book. I mean that literally; the experience of reading, thinking and writing about it left me depressed. Reading, thinking and writing about Mr. Slembrouck’s insulting and illiterate letter didn’t leave me feeling much better.

Corrections: There were many names on the splash page of Bob Levin’s superb feature article on The Someday Funnies in TCJ #299, but unfortunately, none of them were Levin’s. Readers had to turn to the contents page to learn that he was the author. Sorry. The pull-quote on page 70 should also have been credited to Levin. Sorry. Sorry. If there is any karmic justice, Levin will receive much credit in the future for things he did not write.

Draper Hill, 1935-2009

May 13: Draper Hill was unique. A historian and scholar of the arts of editorial cartooning as well as an adroit practitioner in the arena of the day’s news — professionally as well as personally, he was like no other. Dead at 73, he leaves a hole in the world of editorial cartooning — a keyhole unattended.

Born July 1, 1935 in Boston, he grew up in Wellesley Hills, Mass., but spoke without a trace of the regional accent. He attended Harvard and drew cartoons for the college’s famed humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon, where, during Hill’s freshman year, a fellow cartoonist was John Updike, then a senior, who also wrote for the publication and was its president (Lampoonese for “editor”). After he graduated in 1954, no one ever heard again of Updike the cartoonist, but Hill persisted: He became art editor of the Lampoon his senior year and then staff editorial cartoonist at a succession of daily newspapers. But first, upon graduating magna cum laude in 1957, he rewarded himself with a summer tour of Europe, during which he initiated a friendship with England’s legendary political cartoonist, David Low. Back in the U.S. in the fall, he was hired by the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., as reporter and odd-job illustrator (which included the occasional editorial cartoon).

In 1960, he left on a Fullbright scholarship to continue his artistic and scholarly pursuits in London at the Slade School of Fine Arts. When he returned to the States in 1964, he became editorial cartoonist for the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram until 1971, when he went to Memphis and the Commercial Appeal, where he stayed until joining the Detroit News in 1976 for the next 23 years.

In many of his cartoons, Hill did what most of his cartooning brethren wouldn’t dare do: he made visual and verbal allusions to literature, history, the Bible and famous works of art. Most editoonists have learned that such maneuvers are over the heads of their readers, many of whom are steeped only in popular culture, not historic or artistic.

In Detroit, Hill created his most celebrated cartoon character in his caricature of five-term mayor Coleman Young, the city’s first African American mayor. Young was a canny and picturesque politician. His 20-year administration was controversial, dogged by rumors and accusations of corruption and incompetence, but he was re-elected four times by substantial majorities. His style was confrontational: he was always blunt and frequently profane. Some of his more pyrotechnical utterances include: “I’m smilin’ all the time. That doesn’t mean a goddamn thing except I think people who go around solemn-faced and quoting the Bible are full of shit.” And: “We don’t need no goddamn Greenpeace!” Without Hill, Young was a cartoon character; with Hill to mock or applaud, Young achieved an apotheosis of political personality. And Young was mayor of Detroit for almost the entire time of Hill’s tenure on the Detroit News: they were a symbiotic pair.

In 1990, a year into Young’s last term, Hill journeyed to Landau, Germany, where he received the Thomas Nast Prize for editorial cartooning excellence. Hill was president of Association of American Editorial Cartoonists in 1975-76.

Viacom Shuts Down Nickelodeon Magazine

June 3: Viacom announced Nickelodeon Magazine will be ceasing publication in December 2009 and 30 staffers will be laid off, according to the Los Angeles Times. The magazine, which was a National Magazine Award finalist, was launched in 1993 and had a circulation of close to 1 million and an audience of more than 6 million. It was, at one point, an important marketing tool for the children’s cable network, even though it covered topics outside the programming on the network. Each issue of the magazine included a section called “The Comic Book” that featured comic strips from alternative cartoonists like Sam Henderson, Richard Sala, James Kochalka, Craig Thompson, Johnny Ryan and Drew Weing. It also contained comics from the cable channel’s cartoon programs like The Fairly OddParents, CatDog and Rugrats. The sister publication Nick Jr. Magazine will also be discontinued in December.

Judge Dredd Artist Cleared of Child Rape Charge

June 12: British comic artist Ronald Smith has been cleared of raping and sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl. The alleged victim, who is now 39, claimed the abuse took place over three years in the 1980s. Smith maintained his innocence throughout the trial, and said he never touched the woman “at any time or in any way,” suggesting she fabricated the allegations out of spite due to past events. Smith worked for the weekly British comic 2000 A.D. in the 1970s and 1980s. He drew Judge Dredd in the 1980s and is credited with creating the character Otto Sump. Smith also drew a weekly Judge Dredd comic strip for the Daily Star newspaper.

SCAD Professor, Webcomic Artist Jeremy Mullins Dies

June 13: Web-comics creator and professor at Savannah College of Art and Design Jeremy Mullins, 32, died after slipping and falling 60 feet while hiking in the Catskills of New York. Mullins held a Masters of Fine Art from the sequential art department of SCAD. He won an outstanding thesis award in 2005 for his “Digital Delivery and the Empowerment of the Sequential Artist.” Mullins created a Web-comic called Sweetwater Is an Asshole, ran the Seqa Lab podcast for SCAD, and had previously worked for the Savannah Morning News.