The Gaza Flotilla Raid in May that left nine dead and dozens wounded has already faded into the background of oil-soaked news. While in Seattle earlier this month, the Rabbit witnessed attempts at keeping the issue alive: dueling protests on the University of Washington campus in which both bullhorned sides invited the other into the space between them for “real” discussion (neither side budged while we watched), and a large, pro-Palestinian march the following day through downtown. Similar actions have been  reported around the country and the world. The opposing UW protests emerged in our mind as an symbol of how little chance there is of worthwhile resolution to the West Bank and Gaza issue. No doubt,  by the time summer is over, the flotilla incident will be just another footnote in a long, cruel and bloody struggle.

The death toll in the flotilla incident is small compared to that alleged in the two incidents illustrated in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. The book is a long account of Sacco’s investigation of two actions in Gaza that occurred back in 1956, one in the town of Khan Younis that left 275 Palestinians dead, another in Rafah that left 111 dead. While the overall effect of Sacco’s narrative is one of shock, disgust and shame it also serves as a reminder of the on-going nature of repression and killing that has marked the Palestinian-Israeli struggle for some 60 years.

Sacco, author-illustrator of Palestine and Safe Area Grorazde is the premier graphic journalist, the creator of detailed, researched, investigative comics that are no laughing matter. He approaches his subject in classic Gonzo style, injecting his search for stories into a larger narrative. This injection strengthens his reporting with its wide-angled, contemporary background to, in this case, events over 50 years old. That he concentrated on personal accounts, often to make up for a lack of official documentation, makes his work extremely engaging. Perspective–no pun intended– is everything in his work.

Sacco traveled to Gaza in 2001 with reporter Chris Hedges for Harper’s magazine and soon returned to collect accounts of the massacres that occurred during the ‘56 Suez conflict. As readers of Palestine know, his sympathies are with the Palestinian people and this will disqualify him as a legitimate source for many readers. Yet anyone reading his book and examining the illustrations cannot help but conclude that the Palestinians suffer overwhelming poverty, repression and the effects of  what amounts to war. His infrequent sympathies for Israelis thrust into terrible situations as well as infrequent but obvious disapproval of some Palestinian actions offer precious little balance to a story that has little of it to offer.

In his introduction, Sacco acknowledges  the “scant” official documentation of the events he investigates as well as the questionable reliability of oral testimony. What documentation he was able to discover by sending researchers into the Israel State Archives and the archives of the Israel Defense Forces is listed (and quoted) in the Appendix. He issues the hope that his work will cause some Israeli veterans to come forward with accounts of their own.

Sacco also cautions readers not to see his illustrations as fact. Despite using historical photos when drawing his landscapes, he says that drawing comes with “a measure of refraction” and should be seen as such. (It’s surprising how little things have changed from his depictions of 1956 to the  current day drawings.)

Sacco makes clear the complications of life in Gaza; the waste, the shortages, the crowds, the filth.  He claims that the half of Gaza’s workforce which once worked in Israel have found themselves replaced by Thai, Romanian and Chinese workers.  Invited by a United Nations Relief Worker Agency employee to visit a home in Khan Younis, Sacco sweats and becomes claustrophobic at the tight conditions in which 11 people live.. He considers what little work is avaialble hunting scrap or the rare teaching position funded by UNRWA. He finds that the Palestinian Authority hires police whose only duty seems to be to collect salaries. The most well-off man he meets works for an American aid agency as a facilitator of “democratization.”  “Basically, it’s bullshit,” says the man.

These modern-day accounts of Sacco’s investigation and story gathering make the book far more relevant than just an account of the massacres. When those accounts do come, they are filled with horror, grief and inexplicable cruelty. Some of Sacco’s most extreme panel’s are over-sized Hieronymus Bosh-like nightmares depicting killing, detention and states of cruel pandemonium. Cross-hatched scenes of darkness or those with the story-teller super-imposed on his own story are done to chilling effect.

Unlike Palestine, the art work doesn’t evolve but maintains a direct, composed style. The strongest work in Palestine is its portraits. Here, the portraits are all of a kind, similar in mood and expression. Footnotes’ best illustrations comes in the narrative flow. Sacco is a master at finding the right action and composition to move his story forward and even the scatter of spent shell casings on a blank background has an impact on his story.

Comic touches are few. A restaurant menu is rolled open to reveal “Bombings! Assassinations! Incursions!” Sacco makes laughs at his own expense and his is the only overly characterized face: large lips, receding hairline, eyes constantly whited out behind  large, round spectacles. He also makes fun of the press corp and their proclivity to drink and party even as duty calls in sections that recall the indifferent press in the movies The Year of Living Dangerously and Under Fire.

That party scene  serves to illustrate his frustrations — and hopes — beyond the murderous bickering. Among the international crowd of reporters and N.G.O.s are “hepcat Arabs from Ramallah and right-on Jews from Tel Aviv sharing salads and grooving to the same post-bop jazz. Are the dark-haired cuties who jump up when the dance beat kicks in Palestinian or Israeli?…Ahhh, even in the belly of the world’s most intractable conflict there’s a glimmer of hope in which to exalt!”

At end, Sacco feels shame for what he’s lost while gathering his accounts, “for losing something along the way as I collected my evidence, disentangled it, dissected it, indexed it, and logged it onto my chart.” This confession comes as something of a surprise as he has shown nothing but compassion for those who experienced the killings. In a series of almost four wordless pages he runs a final account through his mind, from a perspective inside the punished crowd, as if in attempt to develop an empathy he didn’t have. If he didn’t succeed with himself — and what preceeds it suggests that he did — Sacco certainly succeeds with the reader.–Cabbage Rabbit

The best thing about The Best American Series’ The Best American Comics is that it reminds us of comics we enjoyed a couple years ago. Anyone who stays half-way current  with alternative comics and graphic novels will have seen a good portion of what’s in each edition of this four-year old series. Still, there’s always something missed as well as something new to discover.

The latest volume, edited by Big Baby and Black Hole artist Charles Burns, fits the bill. There’s well-known stuff from the Crumbs, Daniel Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Jason Lutes, Tim Hensley and Art Spiegelman, stuff we enjoyed back in the day, as well as a less easily obtained piece from Chris Ware. The Rabbit had overlooked Kevin Huizenga’s popular Ganges series. He found Huizenga’s “Pulverize”– an ironic story of the cruelties of  dot-com life and video games–to be the collection’s previously-unseen highlight. Then there’s always new material he absolutely missed (blame rabbit hole isolation) such as David Sandlin’s demented, magenta dream-work “Slumburbia” pulled from the pages of Hot Wire.

Another service The Best American Comics series provides is to remind us of what’s become tiresome. This year, it’s parodies of classic comics, complete with comic-like advertising, no matter how crude or absurd. Tim Hensley’s brightly-colored, Archie-inspired teen serial “Gropius” (three installments spread through this volume) didn’t strike us as funny this time around. Michael Kupperman’s “Indian Spirit Twain & Einstein” is a clever-enough comic-tv series spoof, drawn in classic golden age style, that plays too far past its initial couple of pages. This stuff’s been done before and better by Ware, Spiegelman and others all the way back to Harvey Kurtzman.

In the past, the guest-editor’s introduction has often served up insight into craft and creation. Burns’ piece, disappointingly,  is standard bio fare. We learn that his father collected comics and that his parents succumbed when, as a child, he demanded all six volumes of the Tintin saga published in the U.S. by the Golden Press. We’d never realized that Olympia, Washington’s Evergreen State College was a comic breeding ground, but Burns, Matt Groening and previous series editor Lynda Barry were all there at the same time. The story of Burns’ association with Spiegelman shows that the mentor-student relationship is as rewarding to comic illustrators as it is to other artists.

We all knew that The Best American Comics, always published in time for the holiday gift  cycle, is best suited for the casual and non-comic reading public. But it serves a purpose–or two–for fans as well.–Cabbage Rabbit

It’s fitting–or maybe ironic– that Fahrenheit 451,  favorite of high school librarians everywhere, has been turned into a graphic novel. About half-way through Ray Bradbury’s familiar story of a world where books are put to the torch, Fire Captain Beatty tells the story’s wavering central character, Guy Montag, how books went wrong.  “Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater,” explains Beatty. ” No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive.”

Fahrenheit 451 evolved from a number of incarnations, or so Ray Bradbury tells us in his introduction to this new edition (Bradbury’s intro  makes the new book worthwhile even to those of its fans who might think the comic treatment sacrilege).  It’s premise, as any high school student from the last 50 years will tell you, is that books and the ideas they contain can be subversive and a challenge to authority. Firemen, no longer needed for their namesake purpose since the invention of fire-proof buildings, go about torching books and occasionally their readers. A mechanical hound,  symbol of evil technology, sniffs out and brings down. When Francois Truffaut’s movie of the same name came out in 1994 (minus the hound but with Julie Christie), Bradbury said the book wasn’t so much about censorship as it was about television destroying our desire to read. In the era of flat screens, Blackberries and iPhones, his message seems more heated even as Kindle and other e-machines seek to throw water on the flames.

Illustrator Tim Hamilton’s visualization of Fahrenheit may make it even more attractive to high school readers. With Bradbury’s blessing, Hamilton has skillfully distilled the story, paraphrasing or quoting the original verbatim, and illustrating it with panels that speak to contrast: fleur-de-lis flames against black backgrounds, dark figures against flaming umber backgrounds. Every panel is serious and to the point. Much of what’s seen  is presented, appropriately enough, in blacks, grays and twilight blues. Light and flame almost seem alive. Hamilton has a great sense of  suggestion and symbology. When Beatty and Montag have their discussion on the demise of the written word, Beatty’s pipe smoke swirls around the characters like a snake.

By turning the  story into a cartoon, Hamilton has neutralized some of the original’s hamminess. Re-reading the original for comparison, the Rabbit found the illustrated adaption more to his liking if only because it did away with some of the gravity and heavy-handed sermonizing that’s endemic to science fiction in general. No doubt, all those spinning high schoolers will find the graphic adaption more to their liking as well.–Cabbage Rabbit

The Rabbit loved superheroes as a kid but seldom identified with them. It took growing up to do that. I was well into my 20s before I realized that every mild-mannered male had a secret identity, if not a colorful leotard with or without the requisite “S.”

I was somewhere in between youth and manhood, at least psychologically, when Marvel introduced Omega: The Unknown in 1976. There was plenty to identify with if I’d only been paying attention. Not that I could have imagined myself as the grim, buff-and-caped hero of the series or the adolescent, curly-haired James Michael, whose parents looked like Clark Kent and Lana Lang even if they were robots. But the identity confusion James Michael felt and his alienation; that would have been immediately recognizable and no more unusual than it was for a skinny, middle-class Midwestern kid to identify with a New York prep school brat named Holden.

Writers Jonathan Lethem, Karl Rusnak and illustrator Farel Dalrymple’s new Omega is less pumped and super. Their James Michael, here named Titus Alexander, is a skinnier, less curly-haired and handsome kid. But the shared story—battling battalions of alien robots while figuring out their own identities—is, if you can believe it, more believable in Lethem and Dalrymple’s hands. Alexander’s parents are tired and worn, even if they are robots. The women who become his guardian angels are fatigued and hardly bodacious. Super villains don’t just fall out of the sky as they do in the Marvel series which ran through ten issues of Omega The Unknown and two issues of Defenders before vanishing (still available in the Marvel collection Omega: The Unknown Classic). The main antagonist, other than alien robots, is a scene-stealing, self-promoter in a fuchsia body suit who monopolizes the local superhero franchise with an army of surrogates and a panel truck. His fearsome name: Mink.

Yes, Lethem plays for laughs as well as parody. He’s a genius at injecting elements of fantasy even though there’s not as much contrasting reality as there was in Fortress of Solitude. He’s extracted the best facets of the original Omega and done away with some that drowned its fantasy in commercialism. It’s an improvement on the original and, at the same time, something entirely different.

In his notes at the end of the remake, Lethem calls Steve Gerber and Mark Skrenes’ original Omega “simply the greatest single comic book I’d ever read.” But after its promising first issue, Omega reverted to serial Marvel form, dropping in appearances from Electro and, yes, The Incredible Hulk as well as a cameo from Spider Man. Lethem sticks with Mink and the robots while keeping all of the original’s clever devices: James-Michael/Alexander’s sympathetic pain for the shadowy Omega, their shared, palm-sized super power, Omega’s struggles to deal with life on Earth, and Alexander’s own struggle to survive in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen.

One of the standout sections in both the original and the remake concerns Alex’s bullied fellow student. The statement here is that street life can be as terrifying as an invasion of alien robots. Dalrymple’s drawings, as stereotyped as the originals were exaggerated, spare us the visual consequences of intimidation that the original does not. Despite the stereotypes, the illustrations lend a further element of believability to the story, even at its most surreal turns. The dully lit, often dark backdrops from colorist Paul Hornschemeier, and the grayness in the deteriorating Omega’s face, make for a sort of visual foreshadowing. There’s a standout panel early into the tale of our young hero and his roommate in front of the New York Public Library that suggests a little knowledge is like entering a shadow. Dalrymple’s most manic scene is the full-page that opens section VI. There’s a palpable madness in the single eye, seen through a desk magnifier, of a robotics student as he works on an alien appendage. Section VII, drawn by the acclaimed Gary Panter, is a child’s nightmare of the devolving situation, primitively horrific in black, beige and blood red.

The original Omega is known for its overly ambitious caption narration, words that dealt with the metaphorical elements of the story in grandiose language (sample: “THE ENERGY—THE CREATIVE FORCE—COULD BE DISCIPLINED ONLY SO STRICTLY, HELD SEETHING IN CHECK ONLY SO LONG, BEFORE IT BURST FORTH—“). In staying true to this form, Lethem brings the story a new sense of literacy (“NIHILISM MAY BE THE SOLE BRAND OF SELF-ASSERTION THAT CAN’T BE PACKAGED AND SOLD BACK TO ITS ORIGINAL OWNER”) as well as finding an excuse to have some fun (“KILL OR BE KILLED, EAT OR BE EATEN, ENGULF AND DEVOUR… DON’T PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD”).

There are details galore to put together as one tries to make sense of the plot, not all of them welcomed by this long-eared reader. Robotic insects, tap-dancing street people and a giant, severed hand keep things complicated. A fictional fast food conglomerate plays an important role and Omega is taken in by a kindly old man who serves hot dogs and Italian ice from a street wagon. A pensive, over-sized bust in a park watches over all. Some of the comic turns here threaten to derail the story. Others are just part of some symbolic shtick. At one point, the starving Omega climbs a tree and grabs a bald eagle for his dinner.

Still we expect comics to be comic, even if they are about revenge and interplanetary destruction. Lethem and Rusnak have succeeded in taking the myth of a boy come to Earth to save a second planet (shades of Superman and Terminator!) from out-of-control robotics (Blade Runner!) and making it smart, intriguing and worthy of illustration. The last several brilliant pages share something important with the original: no chance of a sequel. Then again, in comics…..—Cabbage Rabbit

We’re preparing for first publication elsewhere (newsprint lives!) a review of the Harvey Pekar-Paul Buhle collaboration The Beats: A Graphic History (Hill and Wang, hardback, $22) . Our love for all things Beat made its arrival an event, especially after Pekar’s honest and enlightening history of the SDS . (Frankly, we found the last run of Pekar’s American Splendor series from Vertigo in 2008 something of a disappointment…it was as if Pekar had exhausted the ways to make his  stories relevant).  The Beats‘ first section was somewhat unsatisfying. Sure, we love Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg. And the way Pekar has made no-man-is-an-island connections between them emphasizes the communal effort that made Beat literature a true movement. But in light of all the excellent (and not so) biographies of these three and books on the Beat generation in general, we were a bit disappointed in the simplistic, boilerplate hash of their lives. Buhle and Pekar acknowledge as much in the book’s intro:

“The book before you is a comic art production with no pretension to the depth of coverage and literary interpretation presented by hundreds of scholarly books in many languages, a literature also constantly growing. It has a different virtue, curiously in line, somehow, with the original vernacular popularization of the Beats.”

So we were ready to forgive the summary treatment, especially if the book introduces a new generation to an important artistic, political and social movement that could inspire them to resist the contemporary brand of square American conformity. As we read on, any reservations we might have had disappeared. The book’s second hundred pages entitled “The Beats: Perspectives” places a heavy emphasis on the era’s poets and the important role of women to both its creative achievement and social consciousness. Poets Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson and others, not all of them necessarily pegged as Beats, are given brief, respectful treatment. Joyce Brabner’s “Beatnik Chicks” is an eyes-open view to the contributions and hardships, not to mention stereotyping, faced by women of the movement. Pekar and Mary Fleener’s chapter on poet Diane di Prima, first seen in Everett Rand and Gioia Palmieri’s spring 2008 edition of Mineshaft (a great publication true to the underground comics and literary spirit…it regularly features R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, Kim Deitch and others…find it here). Fleener’s spiritualistic surrealism is worth the hardback’s $22 tariff by itself. In other words, we highly recommend The Beats for both old hands and initiates alike.—Cabbage Rabbit

]]> http://cabbagerabbit.com/2009/04/26/weve-got-the-beats/feed/ 0 http://cabbagerabbit.com/2009/04/05/wham-bam-i-love-you-mam/ http://cabbagerabbit.com/2009/04/05/wham-bam-i-love-you-mam/#comments Sun, 05 Apr 2009 22:20:49 +0000 bill http://cabbagerabbit.com/?p=190

At what point does sexual obsession become sexual addiction? In Francis Levy’s can’t-get-enough novel Erotomania it comes right around page 84 when the story’s compulsive over-extender and the object of his desire start seeing a therapist. Before the clinical appraisal, sex merely dominates the lovers’ time, causing structural damage to their apartment…

At what point does sexual obsession become sexual addiction? In Francis Levy’s can’t-get-enough novel Erotomania it comes right around page 84 when the story’s compulsive over-extender and the object of his desire start seeing a therapist. Before the clinical appraisal, sex merely dominates the lovers’ time, causing structural damage to their apartment and, post-coitus, leaving them blank, clueless and wanting more. Sound like addiction to you?

Levy’s frank tale of compulsion has earned him comparisons with Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. But Erotomania seems more like Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1973 film Last Tango In Paris, that hot-buttered, Marlon Brando vehicle of sexual possession that introduced American movie audiences to the back door. Like Bertolucci, Levy focuses on his characters’ overwhelming need no matter how lewd.

Still, Erotomania isn’t all that erotic. The sex scenes are mostly handled in wham-bam fashion, more matter-of-fact than titillating. Detailed descriptions—except for the repeated insertion of a single thrilling finger in a particular orifice or a long golden-shower scene in a busy restaurant restroom—are few. It’s the between-sex thinking, the fixation on body parts and submission that drives readers and the book’s narrator crazy. Unending desire prompts Levy’s narrator James to question everything. It makes him recall a scene in “Wild Kingdom” in which a hyena kills a baby kangaroo. “It was feasting on the kangaroo’s intestines, its mouth covered with blood, even as the creature’s limbs were still moving….was this feasting on each other, like animals on the steppe, the true essence of man…?”

The twist here is hinted at in the book’s subtitle: A Romance. Ultimately, Erotomania’s story is a familiar one: how relationship complicates sex. In its early pages, there is no relationship. Sex is all the lovers have. They don’t talk, they don’t share meals, they don’t even know each other’s names. They just go at it. Moving in with one another makes it worse, especially for the other tenants of their apartment building. It’s not until they begin to seek a traditional relationship—again around page 84—that things get complicated.

We generally consider sexual addiction to be free of romance, practiced in abandon with whomever is willing—or sometimes not—to quench an unending thirst. James is fixated on a single person and, more specifically, a single body part which he discusses in hairy detail. The fact that he doesn’t even bother with his lover’s name, despite repeated meetings, makes it hard for him to find her when they lose track of each other. As a sign of how desperate his obsession is, James reads through the entire phone book just to see if anything will jar his addled memory. Reunited, the lovers again take up their rabbit ways.

It’s easy to see the psychology behind the obsession. James is taught French kissing by his mother who continued to demand sexual favors through his teenage years. Mom dies when James is a freshman in college and he can’t make himself stay in the hospital with her as she does, instead running off to hookers and X-rated movies. After she’s gone, he suffers from impotence. Monica—yes, he finally gets her name—is the product of an abusive father. She makes love, says James, as if she’s going through childbirth.

The sessions with the therapist lead them to other interests, all of which lead to sex. Monica displaces her obsession with an interest in contemporary art. This results in them having sex in public galleries. Chinese food becomes a fixation but not before sex, which frequently keeps the delivery boy waiting outside watching their kung-pao copulation through the window. The other person in their life, James’ cook Bill, is in love with his boss and resentful (thus the takeout). Drinking, television, weight gain and workouts all are tried as stand-ins. Finally, as their lives become more divergent, their relationship solidifies. You might say the sex is pounded out of them.

Levy is a terribly thoughtful writer–too thoughtful at times–letting James ponder his overwhelming needs even as he satisfies them. The writing is direct, satisfyingly dirty and disarmingly personal. Convoluted images–remember the African hyena killing the Australian kangaroo and the reference to the European steppes?—seem to underscore James’ confusion. But, like Erica Jong’s long-ago metaphor of the “zipless fuck” from Fear of Flying, Levy believes in the superiority of sex minus identity. He sees the hypocrisy of romance, contrasting the “Candlelight talks at restaurants whose architecture created the appropriate mood to induce fornication” with the hair pulling and corn holing that follow. Ultimately, he seems to be saying sex, of any kind, at any level, is just sex. You can almost hear that hyena having the last laugh.—Cabbage Rabbit

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Comics are the perfect vehicle for memoir, both fictional and…well, is there any other kind? Ames and Haspiel’s The Alcoholic takes full advantage of illustration’s ability for aggrandizement and visual parody. Cartoonist Haspiel (American Splendor) draws Ames’ sodden narrative with stylistic humor and consitent exaggeration. “A.” has razor-sharp features (that nose!) and the girls he beds possess endless legs. How much of author Jonathan Ames is present in his fictional character Jonathan A. is open to question. But readers of Ames’ previous work—The Extra Man, I Love You More Than You Know–will see a pattern. The story delves into sexual confusion, obsession, addiction of all kinds and the inevitable effects of guilt. Ames frames his narrative in hilarious anecdotes. He’s caught in the backseat of a car with a drunken matron, buries himself at the beach to avoid the police, pursues an elusive love, shares a sausage with Monica Lewinisky and maintains a life-long love for a devoted aunt (which may explain the drunken matron incident). A.’s cycle of binge and purge gives the whole thing a weary inevitability and the book’s last, full-page panel says volumes about the alcoholic’s dilemma. It’s one picture worth more than a thousand words.–Cabbage Rabbit

Before slasher films, rap music and internet porn, even before rock ‘n’ roll, self-righteous America found cause for juvenile delinquency in comic books. Columbia journalism professor and former Entertainment Weekly editor David Hajdu unearths the largely forgotten 1950s campaign against illustrated pulp and discovers larger issues of censorship and Puritanical scape-goating that continue in one form or another to this day. Hajdu, whose previous book Positively 4th Street explored the dysfunctional side of modern folk music (after reading it, we ended up disliking Dylan even more), traces the rise of comics from its birth as a newspaper marketing tool used to build readership among lower and immigrant classes to its position as leading culture medium in the pre-television world. As cold war paranoia reached its zenith, alarmist forces armed with dubious studies accused often seamy crime and horror comics of putting the wrong ideas in young people’s heads. Boycotts, comic burnings, Senate hearings and a standards code followed. Hajdu’s meticulous research and engaging story-telling reflects on larger culture issues relevant to this day. He suggests that the work of the comic book creators—many were literally children when they started—whose genre was killed off by establishment of the Comics Code are the forefathers of post World War II pop culture. A must for cultural warriors and comic fans; the epilogue’s interview with Robert Crumb is worth the price of the book. Subtext: Hajdu explains how pulling up on the free reins of comic books led to one of America’s great cultural icons: Mad magazine.—Cabbage Rabbit