The last post ever at this blog.

I'm giving up this blog. In fact, more than that: at some point before the end of November, I'm going to be deleting it. This post is by way of a warning, so that my devoted readers (all six of you) can update your linkrolls and download any posts of mine you particularly want to preserve.

Keeping this blog has been immensely rewarding in a number of different ways, but for the past year it's been more of a burden than a pleasure, for several reasons: I took a very demanding and time-consuming job; my interest in comics waned somewhat as I rekindled my love of theatre; I channelled a lot of my remaining interest in comics into the paper I presented at the conference in April; and having presented that paper, I found my own thoughts on comics were taking shapes that weren't suitable for a blog, or maybe just weren't suitable for this blog.

What's more, there's a danger in blogging, at least the way I've been doing it; I express an opinion which is more or less half-baked, and then I get challenged, and generally that makes my opinion harden, even when it was kind of a stupid opinion to begin with. There's a lot of stuff I've posted to this blog that I can't stand over and don't want to defend; things I've changed my mind about, or was never really all that certain about to begin with. I've been troubled by this, by the fact that I've effectively signed my name to public statements I no longer agree with. In a relatively trivial area, to be sure, but it still bothers me.

And further, the fact of having this blog has made me self-conscious about my comics reading; every time I'd pick up a graphic novel, I would have at the back of my mind the thought: can I blog about this? What can I say? Will I have to read other people's reactions to be able to say something interesting and fresh? Some people seem to blog about everything they read, more or less, and don't have a problem with it; I envy them, because after a while I found it immensely wearying. As soon as blogging stopped being an outpouring of spontaneous enthusiasm (or irritation), it became an onerous task. I found myself losing the ability to just enjoy comics, to the point where I basically stopped reading them (apart from the BL manga I reviewed for Manga Village). Since I made the decision to abandon this blog a few weeks ago, I've been reading comics again, and loving them again, because my reaction hasn't mattered.

What it comes down to is this: in order to enjoy reading comics, it looks like I have to give up blogging about comics. I may still occasionally write about comics -- every so often I review one for the Irish Times, and there's always the occasional rant on my Livejournal -- but this blog needs to die. Not updating it has not been enough; its mere existence out there on the internet has been like an albatross around my neck.

So long, folks. It's been a trip.

The only essay about Watchmen that you will ever need to read.

Everyone who has ever had an opinion about Watchmen, or superhero comics in general, should read Who Sent the Sentinels? by Andrew Rilstone.

"I dreamt I met Alan Moore. He was halfway across Clifton Suspension bridge. I don't know if he saw me or recognised me. I ran towards him to talk to him. I wanted to tell him everything his comic books meant to me. But as I ran, the bridge disappeared. Alan Moore carried on walking as if nothing had happened, but I couldn't walk on empty air..."

"A superhero can't invade the plain, factual black and white of the headlines without becoming plain, factual and black and white. But the reason we liked superheroes to begin with was because they were bright and colourful..."

"Alan Moore's characters, with the exception of Dr. Manhattan, are ordinary people pretending to be superheroes and not pretending very well. The comic asks "If there were superheroes in the real world, what would they be like?" and replies "Not very much like superheroes." But the film which brings these superheroes from a comic about a world where superheroes come to life to life manages to turn them back into comic book heroes..."

"I've never stopped being surprised that something as geeky as Watchmen is so popular with people who are not geeks. How can a book which so full of superhero in-jokes be so much admired by people who have never read a superhero story -- by people who purport to dislike superhero stories -- by people who sometimes end up denying that Watchmen has got superheroes in it... Maybe Watchmen manages to generate its ironic double-vision internally: the text itself tells you both what superheroes are meant to be like, and what these superheroes are actually like, and it would do so even if there had never been another superhero comic in the world... Or maybe the people who were so enthusiastic about Watchmen were unaware of the idea of superheros, and read the story simply as a story - with an un-ironic single vision.
"In which case they'd be reading a different comic to me and it wouldn't be surprising if they assessed it differently..."

"...The comic-books which acquire the most devoted fan-following are not necessarily the best written or the best drawn. They’re the ones which can be used to play these kinds of games. The ones with great gaping holes and contradictions which invite speculative explanations or fan fiction. The ones in which sex and sexuality are never mentioned, allowing readers to fantasize about what's going on behind closed doors. The ones with labyrinthine back-stories – five superpets, a substitute Legion, all the Green Lanterns you can eat and more Jedi councillors than you can shake a glowy stick at. The ones which leave narrative spaces in which you can write "I wonder if Element Lad is gay?" or "In addition to Superman, how many Kryptonian survivors were alive at the time of the first Crisis?" The ones which have, well, geek potential..."

"The real point of Watchmen is not that we read it as Rorschach and Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan perceive their world. The point of Watchmen is that Rorschach and Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan perceive their world as if it was a comic book. Which it is..."

"Watchmen is about the power of stories, of ideas, of comic books. Bernard, the comic book reader, is it’s hero. He has in his hands the grand key to the whole story, and he couldn't care less. In the middle of this great insane complicated game the comic book fan is the voice which debunks the whole exercise.
"'Lotta people called Bernard, man. Don't signify nothing.'"

Seriously, though: read the whole thing. It's setting off fireworks in my head.

Review: Skim by Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki

This review first appeared in The Irish Times on Saturday the 18th of July, 2009.

Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, Walker Books, 148pp. £9.99

"BEING SIXTEEN is officially the worst thing I've ever been." So says Kimberly Keiko Cameron, also known as Skim. She is half-Japanese, overweight, introspective, too cynical to fit in with the "normal" kids at her private Catholic school in Canada but not cynical enough to maintain a veneer of cool aloofness. She is an unwilling outsider, as demonstrated by two poignant flashbacks: at the age of six, "I was in the school play and they ran out of parts for people. And so I was The Night Sky"; at the age of 13, she is invited at the last minute to the birthday party of a popular classmate and spends most of the evening upstairs watching television with the only other Asian girl there – that is, until the two of them are rushed out of the house with cries of "Fire drill!", and left outside to make their own way home while the others continue the celebration. The casual cruelty of youth is never directed quite so blatantly at Kim again, but it is a threatening presence throughout the graphic novel, something she can never quite forget.

Skim is narrated by Kim's diary entries; clear as it is that she feels more deeply and sees more clearly than the people who surround her, the authors have resisted the temptation to make her preternaturally knowing or precociously self-aware. Rather, she is an utterly believable teenager, with all of the self-absorption, self-deception, and inarticulacy that entails. She fumbles clumsily to express herself in words, and we see her crossed-out false starts and the way she changes her mind about what she will write down, carefully editing even the story she tells herself.

Kim lives through some unusual events: she breaks her right arm, attends a combination Wiccan circle/AA meeting, learns of the suicide of a classmate's boyfriend, falls in love with her English teacher, Ms Archer. And yet what is extraordinary and very refreshing about Skim is how ordinary it all is. Everyday life keeps on going, with all its messy incompleteness: biology class, shabby diners, inconvenient rain.

The grand passions must co-exist with much less grand things, and their grandeur seems almost unreal in the face of all that pettiness. Kim always seems to be looking down or to the side, as if averting her gaze from life, and this tentativeness is reflected even when she is not on the page; the images in the panels are decentred, as if we the readers were looking at them from the corners of our eyes.

No medium can capture the sense of being plunged into another person's mind like comics can, and Skim is the perfect example, its words and pictures and storytelling so unified in conjuring Kim’s world that it comes as a surprise to see it has two creators rather than one. Alongside and reinforcing the off-centre placement of the panels is the subtle use of narration: there is a gap between what we see happening and what Kim thinks about what happens, and what she wants to think about what happens. The careful layering of perception, desire and reality is handled so deftly that the effect is almost subliminal. Jillian Tamaki's art is deceptively simple, her fluid lines fading to grey, or black, or white, to foreground what we need to see in detail – again, so subtly and so naturally that what you notice is not the skill with which Tamaki uses the technique, but the shifting of Kim’s attention signalled by it.

Stories by or about adolescents have a tendency towards the didactic, and it could be said that there are lessons in Skim, but they are too complex to be easily summarised. The Tamakis have done the hardest and most rewarding thing an artist can do: they have captured the texture of real life and made it into something beautiful.

Review: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe

"Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it. I would punch your life in the face."

A friend of mine who is an enthusiastic comics reader once told me that she couldn't stand the Scott Pilgrim series -- couldn't even finish the first volume. For a microsecond, the sentence "well, that means we can't be friends any more because clearly there is a profound spiritual chasm between us" flashed across my brain; then I pulled myself together and asked her why. "Urgh!" she said, her face contorting in disgust. "Scott is such a dick! How can anyone stand him?"

She had a point, but the funny thing was that this fairly obvious and fairly salient fact had somehow passed me by. Throughout my reading of the (at that time) four volumes of the series, I'd been so caught up in the candy-coated rush of it all, the wit and the metatextuality and the gleeful insanity of Scott's world -- all of this delivered through O'Malley's gloriously kinetic drawing style, with its thick outlines reminiscent of an early Genndy Tartakovsky cartoon, large-eyed character design clearly owing something to manga but hybridised so cleanly with American influences and O'Malley's own individual style that calling it "mangaïste" seems overly crude, and this is without even getting into O'Malley's use of a mostly flat picture plane and shallow perspective, or the way he incorporates explanatory captions and visual elements derived from video games into the story -- that I hadn't taken much notice of the main character's... well... character. It didn't matter that much to me, to be honest; there was so much in the series to enjoy. It was a bouncy, frenetic, hilarious, incredibly skilfully made comics series which brought me so much joy that I couldn't see anything negative about it.

But once my friend (who is a person of great wisdom in many ways) had said that Scott Pilgrim was a dick, I found I had to concede the point, even though it had never occurred to me to think of him that way. After all, Scott's childlike self-absorption, his complete inability to plan for the future, his tendency to freeload off his friends, and his blissful lack of awareness of anything (and I do mean anything) beyond whatever currently has his attention, are traits that, in a real person, would have me smiling politely and making excuses to leave after about five minutes. Scott is not malicious, but he's careless and thoughtless and irresponsible to a breathtaking degree. Of course, in Scott Pilgrim's world, it doesn't matter that much that he's kind of a dick; Scott Pilgrim's world revolves around Scott Pilgrim. He is, and knows himself to be, the hero of his own story, which is most definitely an epic action-adventure drama and not anything so inconvenient as a tragedy. Things just sort of fall into place around him.

Or at least, they used to. Now that volume five, Scott Pilgrim Vs The Universe, is out, and now that I've finally gotten around to reading it, I'm beginning to wonder whether the dickishness was in fact part of the point all along. If volume four was Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, volume five could have been Scott Pilgrim Runs Around Frantically While It All Falls Apart. Suddenly it doesn't seem like a given any more that Scott's going to defeat the seventh evil ex-boyfriend and live happily ever after with Ramona. Life is still exceptionally convenient for Scott (turns out he has rich and indulgent parents, which explains a lot if you think about it), but for the first time not only the reader but Scott himself is aware of the other characters having lives that have nothing to do with him. For the first time, Scott is made to reflect on the things that he's done, and the conclusions he comes to aren't always pleasant.

While he's fighting this volume's evil ex-boyfriends, Scott wrestles with the things he's learned about Ramona, and about himself, and tries out a little bravado -- "I just have to defeat you and Gideon, and then everything will be perfect!" -- but for once his unstoppable self-belief seems to be a denial of reality rather than a means of warping it to fit his fantasies. The kinds of things that are standing in between him and perfection are not things he can fight -- at least, not with his fists. A bit of emotional maturity is called for, and that's something Scott's never shown any sign of developing up to now.

As of the end of volume five, Scott Pilgrim is still largely the same ditzy, oblivious, irresponsible manchild of the previous volumes, but his world has been tilted on its axis. Uncertainty has been allowed to impinge on him. He is dimly aware of being inadequate, but has only the vaguest notions as to why or how, or what to do next. And I share Scott's uncertainty, though for a different reason: with this development, the series seems to be pulling the rug out from underneath itself, unravelling its original premise and structure. This kind of auto-deconstruction is a risky manoeuvre: pull it off, and the results can be magnificent (it's a very Grant Morrison move, now that I think of it), but a failed auto-deconstruction is just a mess, and for a series as light-hearted and frolicsome and joyous as Scott Pilgrim to collapse under the weight of its previously-unsuspected ambitions would be a terrible shame.

What is Scott Pilgrim's world, if it does not revolve around Scott Pilgrim? I don't know the answer to that one; I hope Bryan Lee O'Malley does. Only volume six can remove all doubt.

Microcomics

One of the things I find perennially fascinating about comics is the way constraints can spur artists on to new heights of creativity. Sometimes the constraints are aesthetic and sometimes they are purely physical; sometimes they're self-imposed and sometimes they're imposed from outside. Often there's no way to tell which is which as you read; only the artist knows whether the decision to, for example, use only black ink came from economics or aesthetics. Sometimes it's in the overlap between economics and aesthetics that the most fertile ground is to be found.

One extremely obvious physical constraint that gets overlooked precisely because it's so obvious is size. Most comics tend to be within a relatively small range of sizes; there's a lot more variation on the market now than there was 20 years ago, but for practical reasons, comics much bigger or much smaller than the standard US floppy format tend to be niche productions. So it is with Brian John Mitchell's minicomics, which are so small they should really be called microcomics. Smaller than a box of matches, they are; so small that you could lose one between the sofa cushions without even creasing the pages. Even smaller than the 8-page Greenbelt comics I blogged about three years ago, which were made on one side of a sheet of A4 card. The fact that he's managed to create coherent and interesting stories in such a tiny space is enough to raise eyebrows.

The stories themselves are relatively conventional. XO (art by Melissa Spence Gardner) is a straight-up power fantasy of the "protagonist gets to kill unpleasant people without consequences" type; it's competent but unremarkable. Lost Kisses (art by Mitchell) is a stick-figure comedy series about bad relationships which may or may not be autobiographical. I found it very funny and occasionally infuriating; the main character is self-absorbed and sometimes a little self-righteous with it -- a dangerous combination. I waver between thinking that the humour I find in the series is entirely unintentional (and feeling very uncomfortable) and thinking it's entirely intentional (and laughing like a hyena). The truth is probably somewhere in between; certainly Mitchell sometimes seems to be laughing at his protagonist, but some of the most off-putting statements seem to be the ones where he is most sincere, and that makes me wonder.

Probably the best of the three is Worms (art by Kimberlee Traub), a sci-fi thriller about a girl embroiled in a bizarre conspiracy involving people being injected with apparently extra-terrestrial worms. The storytelling is straightforward enough, but Traub's stark, expressionist art does an impressive job of conveying the main character's bleak situation and her nightmarish mental state.

It's obvious that Mitchell is only starting out with these comics; he may want to use them as a springboard for something on a (literally and figuratively) larger canvas. I'd be intrigued to see what a more experienced creator could do with a set of teeny-tiny pamphlets like these. But as an experiment, these microcomics are so pared-down that it's hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a bit of a dead end from an artistic point of view -- the ne plus ultra of minimalism. There's never more than one panel per page, which limits what can be done in the way of visual or narrative effects, and while, as I said, limits and constraints can encourage creativity, too extreme a set of limits can be stifling. These microcomics are interesting, but not likely to start a trend.