The Vonnegut Moment

In the classic Annie Hall, Woody Allen argues with a fellow movie patron about Marshall McLuhan. To hammer home his point, Woody brings the McLuhan from off-camera, and he destroys the other guy. It's one of those surreal comedy moments Allen excels at.

There's also a nice, little Rodney Dangerfield movie called Back to School. HBO used to show it roughly 30 times a day. A rich businessman goes to college to show his show how far he's willing to support him. The teacher assigns a paper on Kurt Vonnegut. The dad hires Kurt Vonnegut to write the paper. The writer shows up at the dorm room to get started. The teacher later accuses the student of cheating and says whoever wrote the paper didn't know anything about Vonnegut. And then Dangerfield chews out Vonnegut over the phone.

The scenes are similar enough that I lump them together in what I call the Vonnegut Moment. And I had one yesterday. This goes back to the continuing row over comic readers sharing their interest with women.

In the first indignant hysteria bomb that started this mess, the blogger cited my mention of Frank Miller and was aghast that I would suggest any woman read his material. She went on to say this: That sound you hear is Lea Hernandez's head exploding at the notion of Frank Miller as the perfect female-friendly cartoonist. When I responded, I cited this attitude attributed to Hernandez. And then she, or someone claiming to be Hernandez, appeared and called me out on it. I was Vonneguted. I told her that I was merely repeating what was said originally, and we've since drifted into a conversation about the growing trend in comics toward pure cheesecake art.

She has a point, and I agree with her. No one who's read comics for more than ten years can argue. What used to be all-age comic material (Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, etc.) has devolved into softcore as artists abandon storytelling for titillation. But my argument was to say a Frank Miller book like Sin City can't be lumped in with the current hero cheesecake. They aim for different audiences and tell different stories. At least they used to aim for different audiences. When Your Sis or you open up a Sin City comic, you would expect to see material that you might not expect from a Spidey comic (However, a recent comic displayed full frontal Spidey, and Marvel insists no one noticed until the book was printed and shipped). But the sad reality of comics is that kid readership has plummeted, and publishers are trying to win over the predominantly 20-something readers with lowest-common-denominator tactics. Ergo, tits a'plenty.

It's gotten so bad and artists have gotten so lazy that Marvel had to issue a memo demanding their people stop copying images directly from sources such as porn films, gossip magazines, and movie stills. It's really distracting to open a comic and see the artist has cast celebrities as certain characters. Samuel L Jackson, Eminem, Gene Hackman, Brad Pitt, Sawyer for "Lost," Lucy Liu. I've seen 'em with my own surprised eyes.

Hernandez railed against tit-and-ass in traditional superhero books, and she's right. You can't argue anymore that men are just as abstracted to physical perfection in comics, because artists aren't presenting male characters in such a blatantly exploitive way. We agree on that point, but I can't agree that women should be given only a certain type of comic or discouraged from reading other comics, because of their assumed delicate constitutions. And that's what I was saying when Hernandez (or someone claiming to be her) popped in to set the record straight.

What started as cliche internet rambling has become a chance to talk with a comic creator (or someone claiming to be her) about a pernicious development in the medium we work in.

And speaking of which ...

Picture of the Day
These are the thumbnails for the food comic. It's three pages. I always work thumbnails this way -- in ink and very small. You can see where I redid a panel or two and moved one strip to the top of the next page. Thumbnails allow the page architecture to develop before you commit to drawing. You can compile panel angles and cropping of bodies with an eye for word balloons and redundancies. I hammered out a quick script to be followed by a quick art session. I still don't know the deadline so I have to assume it's soonish. To save time, I'm going to run fine-art images in panels; that's why some panels only have words in them. You can click the image here for a larger version. You can do that with all my pictures. You knew that, right?

Potential Fallout

Yesterday, I talked about accusations concerning Your Sis and I from another blogger. This person ranted about Fanboy Reading because the subjects of her diatribe didn't pay enough homage to manga and webcomics. I've since learned that she has a manga-influenced webcomic. So there you have it; she's mad because we don't like what she likes or, more to the point, didn't pay her lip service. I got no response from her after posting my subsequent comments. Probably because I didn't allow them to devolve into hysterical generalization. I don't expect consistent rational discourse online, not when we're swimming in the same ocean with a buncha freaks. But this bolt from the blue was wholly unwelcome and uncalled for. I told Your Sis about it, and she wondered why married couples sharing interests would be called trickery by anyone who is supposedly married, as this woman is.

The stage manager for the play asked me for the link to the theatre blog. I sent it along to her with the caveat that it's purely subjective and intended for a private audience. Not that I said anything untrue. But this kind of disclosure has more impact when its printed. We'll see what happens there.

Picture of the Day
Jordeans' Fall of Man. This is playing a part in my anthology comic.

Charlotte's Web of Needless Drama

I read Charlotte's Web for the first time at the request for Your Sis. She bought the book at Best Buy the weekend before Valentine's Day. She loves it and apparently has since she was young. I was always told it was a girls' book, and our purchase experience cemented that. As Your Sis read the first chapter to me in line, the lady in front of us turned and said she had memorized that chapter as a girl. And then the cashier told us how she worshiped the book as a girl. So, yeah, it's not a boys' book. I was reading Encyclopedia Brown and Judy Blume. OK, and as many comics as my tiny hands could carry. Point being, this was always in the library stack of Books Girls Should Read, and I was not to touch those lest I got the cooties.

But I did read it starting this weekend. As a kids' book, it stays within its own universe very well except for the part where Charlotte, after securing Wilbur the Pig's new destiny and laying her eggs, dies and dies alone. The author makes sure we understand that this saintly spider is completely unnoticed, unattended, and unmourned as she dies at the abandoned fairgrounds. This is sure to crack the heart of a child, many of whom fear solitude. This smacks of cruelty. But at least it doesn't commit the cardinal sin of so many -- and I feel secure in saying "hundreds" -- of children's stories from the '80s where children watch a beloved thing die, weep for the loss, and discover the thing resurrected thanks to magic and love. That's cruelty as well. It sets them up for a crash of reality later on. We boys didn't have that. When Optimus Prime dies in the '80s Transformers movie, he didn't come back in that movie. When he was revived years later for the cartoon series, it felt cheap. Manipulative, even. And we youngsters booed en masse.

I believe such a reliance on death in these stories is a genesis of the goth lifestyle. I remember many adventures involving my toys that ended in death and a funeral. Minutes later, the toy would be unearthed and cleaned and put back with the rest of them. But there would be a good five-minute blanketing of sorrow I would relive week after week. I can't tell you why I did it. But it happened, and no one ever knew about it until you read this. This is what the book sparked in my memory. I liked feeling dark. It was a calming, temporary mindstate. And maybe many of us don't want to give that up as we mature. Maybe it's their one pure feeling that isn't diluted by incidents later in life. It's a comforting constant.

I did like the book, mainly because of the dialogue. My favorite quote is from the rat: "Is your appetizing yarn true? I like living high, and what you say tempts me." I think I'll spring this on telemarketers.

We watched a re-jiggered original "Star Trek" episode last night. Paramount has replaced the original special effects with new CGI material. The old, blueish white Enterprise is now a sterling gray ship and the space shots allow richer planet images. It doesn't at all affect the charm of the original series, and we caught a great installment: Spock goes into heat. This is classic geek stuff, as we see the planet Vulcan for the first time and witness a campy fight to the death between Kirk and Spock. The fight music is legend in nerd circles. Hum it at a convention and a chorus will break out. I TiFauxed it when it ran Sunday to watch next week when Your Sis is out of town. To my surprise, when we were couched in front of the TV last night, she said she wanted to watch it. So we did.

Speaking of geeks, you might want to know about this. I posted on a message board about how Your Sis likes Frank Miller comics. You know, Sin City, 300, etc. The message thread was about comic readers who had introduced their girls to comics. This lit a fire under some folks online who think we're trying to "trick" our women into -- here, you can read the start of something needless right here. Amid the protests about us sad geeks trying to foist comics onto our women, my example of Miller material is considered inappropriate for women because he's not a "perfect female-friendly cartoonist." Keep in mind, this is a woman writing this. She's saying Your Sis and you should be offended because the comic includes violence, bad language, and various nipples.

Seriously, you -- YOU, the Peace Corps grad student -- need to be protected from this because you're a girl. You can't enjoy it because you're a girl. And this is a woman saying this. I responded that Your Sis could choose and read what she liked. It's a backward-ass feminism that limits what a woman can choose to like and a rank paranoia that says geek boys will bury their defenseless, mindless gals in things the latter won't like. Jesus, of all wives, Your Sis is hardly a welcome mat. People we don't know are saying she should stick to Charlotte's Web and can't possibly choose to watch "Star Trek." We get enough shit from people who think all pop culture is worthless and juvenile. We don't need this shit from our fellow connoisseurs.

Picture of the Day
It's enough to make the Butter Jesus cry.