Graphic Narratives for Adults

From Judith Thurman's really excellent profile of Alison Bechdel, in the New Yorker:

Graphic narratives for adults, by a single author, unlike comic books, which are often produced by a collective, began to appear [Hillary] Chute [author of the academic study Graphic Women, which puts Bechdel's work alongside that of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Marjane Satrapi, Phoebe Gloeckner and Lynda Barry] writes, only in the early nineteen-seventies, when a Catholic outsider artist named Justin Green, who was obsessed with evil "penis rays" emanating from his sex organ, published Binky Brown Meets the Virgin Mary. The genre, from its inception, has been raunchy and anarchic. Bechdel, with many of her peers, shares Green's impulse to commit sacrilege. They treat a serious subject-- abuse, persecution, pathology, with crude humor and raw imagery, and subvert a form of entertainment associated with the childhood thrill of defying parental strictures about "good" and "bad" books. "Sometimes I think I became a cartoonist because my mother simply doesn't get comics," Bechdel said. "They're like the ultrasonic ringtone on a teenagers phone."

There's a lot of really complicated, really interesting stuff going on here, but what strikes me more than anything else is how far out of her way Thurman has to go to avoid the term "graphic novel" in the first sentence. Bechdel, in Thurman's view, is following a tradition of long form graphic narrative and thus makes "graphic narratives for adults" rather than graphic novels. I don't like that latter term, so I sort of appreciate that Thurman is trying to use something different, but I think that she has to bend so far backwards to make the paragraph work in part because she (or, rather, Hilary Chute) isn't really talking about a matter of length, which is what separates, to my mind, "comic book" and "graphic novel" but is instead speaking about the alternative comics tradition, which includes Kominsky-Crumb and Art Spigelman but probably not Marjane Satrapi. Not only can I not really get behind using this terminology for this distinction, but, for what its worth, I like the phrase "graphic narratives for adults," even less than I like the phrase "graphic novels," which already reeks of a wildly ill-advised to legitimize a medium that, probably since Maus, no longer really needs legitimating for those with open minds.* Obviously, the "for adults" part is problematic in part because it presumes that comic books are for children (and, to beat a dead horse, because what Will Eisner did, for example, was intelligible by children but really for adults), but, again, why are we resistant to calling things what they are? Bechdel is a cartoonist, and she draws comics. It doesn't make what she does, and what Bechdel does is draw some of the highest quality comics that there are, any less legitimate to call the medium that she works in by its real name.

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*There's a post coming about Maus and the prejudice against comics, but its a few days away.

On Captain Marvel

We've talked before about how awesome the new Captain Marvel costume is, and there have been a lot of people having a lot of fun with it. To wit:

 Terry Dodson's cover for Avenging Spiderman #9

 Conley 

Cameron Stewart

...and then there's Ed Mcguinness's sweet cover for Captain Marvel #1

These are all great and, like McKelvie's design, marvelously fun and cartoony, which is part of what makes the look work. For the book itself, though, we're stuck with these dark, sludgy, pointy, deadly serious Dexter Soy paintings. It's like Marvel is trying to get the book canned. 

How Do I Get To Heaven?

I was in born in 1990, so let's just say I came to the Band rather belatedly. Being late to the party, though, has certain advantages, and in this case I can pinpoint the exact moment when they started to matter: Parents Weekend, my freshmen year of college. We went to this talk in the campus center, my parents and I, led by this rock n' roll historian who played clips of bands that he had synced up to songs that those bands weren't singing-- in hindsight, it was hysterical. He was a pretty chill dude, though, and as he tried to explain the 70s he heaped in decent portions from Creedence, Led Zeppelin and, most miraculously of all, this group of guys who had once been Dylan's backing band, and then had holed up in a big pink house the other side of the Hudson River (not so very far from where I was sitting, really) and made a record that almost no one heard. Then they made another record, called The Band, which everybody heard.

Anyway, I went back to my room that night and, uh, acquired two records I listened to for the rest of the semester. I was hooked; the instrumentation was distinctive, almost playful, the harmonies were pleasant, the themes straight out of America's muddy backroads, and keeping it all together was a heavy limbed rhythm at the front the mix, like a proud staple rather than a hidden stitch. The music was big, big enough that it filled a lot of space that Fall, and, as I listened, I read up. I wouldn't come across the definitive text, their chapter in Greil Marcus' Mystery Train until much later, but I did enough research to know who everyone was, to have a sense for the band, to be sort of saddened by the deaths, long in the past, of two men (Rick Danko and, particularly, organist Richard Manuel), and to know that they had had as their first last act the most well-received concert movie in history, Martin Scorcese's The Last Waltz and that if The Band hadn't planned to break up before the release of that movie, they almost certainly would have after. I didn't really care from who wrote the songs, though, or about how much more screen time than anyone else Robbie Robertson had had in their last hurrah-- all that matter was that I liked the music, and that the man keeping the whole thing together, drummer Levon Helm, lived not that far from where I did.

Levon, who died last Thursday at the age of 71, was something of a local hero. Although he wasn't from the Hudson Valley, he had adopted it as his home, hosting concerts, called Midnight Rambles and featuring basically any musician you can think of, at his combination house/studio on his farm in Woodstock, and just sort of generally being present. Up here, we celebrated those recent Grammy wins like sports fans celebrate championship victories, and when people say Levon, there's no question who's under discussion. So, when the Helm family announced that Levon was in the final stages of a war against the cells in his throat, one that he'd been waging since the late nineties, the area held its breath. Bard's director of security, a man sort of semi-famous for his incorrigible emails, even sent out a short, solemn note:

Levon Helm has been and remains a local musical treasure, living and performing in Woodstock.
I share this distressing news for those who may not be aware we are close to losing an important  cultural asset.
ken

 And then, two days later, another:

Levon Helm has passed - Rest in Peace
k

Now, I'd never met Levon Helm, only listened to his music, and being a college student, I'm not even a transplant to the area. For me to lay claim to any of this grief seems somewhat disingenuous. Still, between his roles in Music for the Big Pink and The Band and his influence on later music that I love (if you want to know were Americana got started, you should look no further), I was bummed. It was a beautiful day, though, and I decided to take a ride down the Taconic to my comics store in Salt Point. Radio Woodstock, which is the only thing I listen to in my car when I'm up here, was playing nothing but songs by Levon and The Band-- "Ophelia," "The Shape That I'm In," the version of "The Weight" from The Last Waltz, the one with The Staples Singers along for the ride, and talking about Levon nonstop. It felt like the best possible tribute, and I'm glad I caught a couple hours of it. For my part, I've decided to take a page from their book, and so my radio show, The Hydrogen Jukebox, is paying tribute to Levon   on Tuesday night (4/24), from 8-10 pm Eastern time. Listen in here, if you're so inclined, and particularly if all of this is lost on you; you won't be disappointed.

Quote For The Week: Erika Moen

Erika Moen, in a marvelously revealing interview over at Comics Bulletin:

I've had many, many people tell me that my comics helped them come to terms with their sexuality or gender identity or made them feel less alone. That gives me goosebumps just writing it out! It is surprising to me how many queer people there are out there who have gone through almost the exact same experiences as me and received the same backlash and rejection from the "queer community," so while my comics help them feel less alone, their letters back to me make me feel less alone too! 

And, oh god, there has been a hilarious amount of ridiculous and painful criticism of my work. That it is bi-phobic, trans-phobic, privileged, sexist, racist, anti-feminist, advocates rape (yes, really), that I'm not allowed to call myself queer, that I'm trying to force queers to get married to oppositely-sexed partners like I did... Oh my god, the list could go on and on, only increasing in absurdity. It's fine though. People are allowed to project their interpretations onto my work; we're all entitled to do that! Doesn't mean that's the message I ever had in mind when I was making my comics, though. 

When I get hate mail or people confronting me at conventions, I process the experience in the same way that I do when a drunk, crazy, homeless man comes up and yells at me on the street: they're experiencing their own reality and expressing it outwardly, but that has absolutely no bearing on my life or who I am. If anything, I hope my supposedly offensive comics help inspire people to create the kind of comics they do want to read and that do"correctly" portray their views! People can write me angry emails that I'm not going to finish reading before I delete, but wouldn't they feel so much more empowered if they took that same time it would take to yell at me and funneled their anger into something productive, like creating their own comics.

I'm a big fan of not wasting energy on futility (such as screaming into the abyss of the internet) and instead making the content you want to exist, whether it's in the form of a comic, a story, or whatever medium you prefer. 

But then again, some people just like to scream, and that's enough for them.

A New Defender: Jamie McKelvie

iFanboy has the second best news involving Matt Fraction that I've read all day:

Today at C2E2 in Chicago, Marvel announced at the Next Big Thing panel that fan favorite artist Jamie McKelvie would be joining Fraction with The Defenders #8 as the regular artist.

 They also have a page:

Isn't that pretty? As sad as I am to see Terry and Rachel Dodson go, I think its awesome that McKelvie gets a monthly gig, and on one of the the most exciting books that Marvel is publishing right now, as opposed to some backwater, like New Mutants or something. The only downside, as near as I can tell, is that it won't be nearly as easy to talk to him at conventions anymore; he and Gillen are regularly my favorite artist's alley conversations and, two years in a row now, I've walked right up to him without having to wait in line, had a quick chat, and bought something from his table. It's hard to be too upset about that loss, though: if you love a comic book artist, you should set them free, right?

Good on Marvel for this one; good for McKelvie, too.