See Hatfield

Thought Balloonists' Launch

This past week, my friend and colleague Craig Fischer and I launched a new blog devoted to comics reviews and criticism, Thought Balloonists:

www.thoughtballoonists.com

Each Tuesday we'll be reviewing a single work in a call-and-response format, with Craig and I taking turns opening the discussion. In addition, we'll be posting solo reviews, and sometimes profiles, interviews, thinkpieces, etc., every Thursday, or as the mood strikes. Check us out!

All Hail the New Art Rock! (3)

   
   

    
   

http://www.decemberists.com

This series could also be titled More Music I Learned about Courtesy Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. (my sometime across-the-hall co-conspirator at CSUN, now at SDSU and much missed, and the author of Poetry's Playground, which is essential stuff for students of children's poetry and contemporary poetry more generally). Thanks, J!

OSU 2007

Re: the recent OSU Festival of Cartoon Art, I'm not sure what I can add to the substantial write-ups already posted by Chicago-area cartoonist Mark Thompson and by my traveling buddy Mike Rhode. The Festival was wonderful, full stop!

But, as promised, here are some attempts at further reflection:

The OSU Fest (which I attended during the second half of my recent trip) differs fundamentally from ICAF (which I attended, and helped put on, during the first half of my trip). Whereas ICAF is an event focused squarely on academic presentations, the OSU Fest is mostly celebratory in character. The setting is larger and the atmosphere different: busier but perhaps less intensive. Less cloistral too.

This is not to say that the OSU Fest lacks scholarly substance (far from it), or that academics are not involved; the beating heart of the OSU Fest is, after all, the Cartoon Research Library. But the balance of programming at OSU is tipped toward artists' talks, and opportunities for artists and enthusiasts to mingle informally. The Festival is underwritten by major support from the National Cartoonists Society and various syndicates and publishers, and many of its attendees are in fact syndicated newspaper cartoonists. I would call the Festival a celebratory summit for cartoonists. Certainly it felt like a celebration to me; I had a great time, and hope very much to attend the next (2010!).

Having said that, there was one firmly academic aspect of the Festival, and I gather that this was unusual. This time the Festival kicked off with an academically-focused one-day symposium (Thursday, 10/25) titled Graphic Storytelling: Academic Perspectives. This "pre-conference" was a co-presentation of the Cartoon Research Library, the OSU Department of English, and Project Narrative, a fascinating initiative developed by that department to promote interdisciplinary research and teaching in narrative studies.

Essentially, the Festival of Cartoon Art joined together for a day with Project Narrative's own three-day symposium, Multicultural Narratives and Narrative Theory (running concurrently with the Festival but mostly at a different site). In this connection, it helps to remember that the entire FCA, this time around, was subtitled Graphic Storytelling, partly in tribute to Milton Caniff.

   

I gather that this dovetailing of events was spearheaded or facilitated by Jared Garner, of OSU's Dept. of English (himself a presenter at ICAF 2006). Jared was a constant guiding presence at the panels, and his enthusiasm and influence were much in evidence.

In contrast to my pal Mike, I found many of the papers of particular interest. Not all were successful, I think, at making or substantiating their arguments, but the level of discourse overall was high and invigorating. I was especially interested in papers by:

Daniel Yezbick, who presented part of his ongoing and deepening work on George Carlson;

David Olsen, who spoke on "Keeping Time in Graphic Narratives";

the team of John Jennings & Damian Duffy (also ICAF veterans), who likewise addressed the question of time/timing in comics, in this case in the context of a virtual reality gallery exhibit of their own devising;

and Kai Mikkonen (U of Tampere, Finland), author of The Plot Machine, on the question of narrative agency in comics, focusing particularly on Jiro Taniguchi's manga Quartier Lointain (Haruka Na Machi He, 1998/9, trans. 2002).

To me this was a most welcome way of kick-starting the Festival, though of course the venue and atmosphere changed markedly the next day (Friday), when the more large-scale and festive events began. I do hope that OSU and the Cartoon Research Library will continue to mount this kind of academic think-tank session before the Festival per se; it holds such great promise.

The Thursday PM follow-up reception at the Thurber Center was an added treat.

Re: the Festival on Friday & Saturday, I'll simply say that among the highlights, from my POV, were the exhibits at the Cartoon Research Library reading room and Hopkins Hall; the tour of the CRL stacks that I got on Friday night; and the presentations by Frank Stack, P. Craig Russell, Paul Pope, and the hysterical Mike Peters.

Also, it was delightful simply to take it all in with friend and fellow scholar Mike Rhode, and to talk to good people like Martha Kennedy of the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division and Patrick Hogan of the University of Connecticut, one of the readers of my dissertation years ago, whom I ran into unexpectedly at the Thursday night reception (he was there for the Project Narrative symposium)!

Again, see Mike Rhode's and Mark Anderson's blogs for further info.

Also, the Cartoon Research Library has now posted its own "Highlights" page!

All Hail the New Art Rock! (2)

 

http://www.menomena.com

ICAF 2007, continued

As promised (more or less), some reflection on ICAF 2007, hosted Oct. 18-20 by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress and housed at the Madison Bldg. on Capitol Hill:

I can't fairly be expected to be objective about the ICAF (International Comic Arts Forum), an event I've been part of organizing for about a decade now. But I can say that, as the nature of the event keeps evolving, the ICAF's commitment to rigorous scholarship, in particular academic work, remains firm. This year's ICAF had the character of a thinktank, with its strengths being precisely the strengths of its papers and panels.

There was, to my thinking, a serviceable balance of material, and a good wheat-to-chaff ratio overall: many good papers, several excellent ones that I'll be thinking about for a good while, and only a very few that were disappointingly under-done. All had promise; some I would love to see in print right this minute! Presenting styles and the use of visuals were generally strong, in many cases quite engaging. Most importantly, there was discussion, and lots of it: typically twenty to thirty minutes of nonstop productive chatter after each panel or keynote.

2007's highlights for me included:

1. Friday afternoon's presentation by Lat (Datuk Mohamed Nor Khalid), probably Malaysia's most beloved cartoonist, one of the superstars of Southeast Asian cartooning, and a wonderful, funny, touching storyteller.

Lat's also author of the fantastic Kampung Boy trilogy of autobiographical comics (1979-93), of which two parts, Kampung Boy and Town Boy, have recently been republished in the USA by the reliably terrific First Second Books.

 

 

   
2. Friday night's nervy roundtable on Iconophobia: Comics, Politics, and the Power of the Image, another in our series of collaborations with George Washington University and its Gelman Library.

This one featured cartoonists Lat, Kevin "KAL" Kallaugher, and Drew Chapman, along with ICAF Chair Marc Singer (Howard University), in a discussion of the incendiary nature of satirical images. This event was inspired partly by the Jyllands-Posten "Muhammad" cartoons fiasco of 2005-06, but took in a larger context.

3. The sustained and substantial discussion after most of the panels, but particularly those on "Comics in Cultural Institutions" (moderated by Geppi Museum curator Arnold Blumberg) and "The Theory and Practice of Comics Studies" (which I got to moderate, a stroke of luck).

In all, ICAF 2007 served as an intensive thinktank in comics studies, without the attempts at wide-scale festival-style programming of some past years and without major fanfare on-site. The atmosphere was very conducive to serious discussion, something we hope to preserve in years to come. One downside may have been the absence of festive collateral programming, that is, things to break up the intense discussions and inject new energy into the proceedings. Another downside was the absence of scholarly publications at the event itself. These I regard as areas for improvement (though I hasten to add that I'm speaking here for myself, personally, and not necessarily for any ICAF consensus).

ICAF offers, and plans to continue offering, the most international and diverse academic symposium in comics study. I'm proud to be a part of it.

© MURAKAMI

OK, I'm not gonna get to the ICAF and OSU post(s) I had hoped to get to today. Instead I'm gonna talk briefly about the exhibit Mich and I took in today at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Arts, © MURAKAMI, a career-spanner for Japanese "Superflat" po-mo Pop  artist Takashi Murakami.

Happily, we got to see this with our friend Bart Beaty (author of Unpopular Culture among others), who is here in L.A. for a brief spell and whose current research encompasses Murakami and a helluva lot else.

Oval Buddha, Murakami (2007)

Before this I didn't know much about Murakami's work, or, more broadly, the "Superflat" art movement (his coinage) of which he seems to be the standard-bearer. I had heard of Murakami, perhaps seen some of his work online, but was disengaged. This exhibit, at the Geffen Contemporary @ MOCA, certainly engaged me.

I don't know that I buy the inflationary, at times inadvertently funny hype re: Murakami that seemed to swaddle the works on display. I wondered about the straight-up, poker-faced seriousness of the documentation, given the puckish humor on view in so many of Murakami's pieces. I also found some of the pieces, in the frankly exhausting context of the exhibit, repetitious and mannered. Hell, it's no keen insight to call Murakami "mannered," since the very nature of his work, which flirts continually with corporatization and is informed by a savvy commercial design sense, is all about mannerism and branding.

Mich said she found the work amusing, but not deeply engaging. "Glad I saw it, probably wouldn't see it again," was her summation. She did appreciate the humor in the work, and was happy to have learned about it, but she says she didn't find the work enthralling enough to spend a lot of time with it. Bart opined that Murakami's work is optimistic and future-oriented, in contrast to some outwardly similar American cartoonists (I'll leave him to pursue this further in print!). Me, I found the work bright and snazzy but also often creepy; in fact, the more creepy and confrontational the work, the more I could engage it critically and the more I liked it, generally. In contrast, the seemingly ironic (?) smiley-face banalities (take for instance the endless repetition of the cutesy "Cosmos" flower) didn't do much for me.

Many of the pieces combined anime/manga-influenced design (kawaii cute) with chilly irony or horrific details. I was particularly impressed by Gero Tan (2002), a huge, multipanel painting (one of many such) depicting a cheerfully morbid scene of multiple cute figures gaping retching, erupting, etc.: a personal apocalypse?

I was also impressed by some of the very large sculptural pieces, such as the "Buddha" above. OTOH, these huge installations also bothered me, because they so obviously represented the turning inward, intensification, and massification of Murakami's work, its hardening into a shtick, and its dependency on lavish patronage (commercial and/or corporate). You simply cannot fabricate works like these without a bargeload of money.

I also enjoyed the Masamune Shirow-like transforming babe/airplane (Second Mission Project ko2 Advanced, a precisely fabricated series of sculptures), which takes that sort of eroticized mecha look to an even more perverse extreme; and Kaikai & Kiki, the first episode of an animated film-in-progress, which played like an ironic, slightly scatological take on a Hayao Miyazaki animistic nature fantasy for children (imagine Totoro with gags about shit as fertilizer: an ironic parable about Murakami's own career?).

Again, there was a numbing sameness about some of the work. And the embedded Louis Vuitton boutique (with Murakami-designed handbags) was a drag. OTOH, some of the exhibit spaces were spectacular (again, that bargeload of cash). And I came away digging the work more than I would have expected. Very cool to be exposed to this, and I'm thinking that this might make a good field trip for my "Studies in Popular Culture" class next term.

This museum visit was bookended for us by, first, some pleasant shopping in Little Tokyo, and, second, a nice long dinner with Bart at a nearby Japanese restaurant. A great afternoon and early evening!

All Hail the New Art Rock! (1)

    

http://www.grizzly-bear.net

ICAF and OSU 2007

Come mid-October I did something rare, and foolhardy: I left for a week-and-a-half trip in the middle of the Fall semester. This meant lots of arranging for substitutes and activities to keep my classes productively working during my absence. It now means that I owe a lot of people a lot of thanks.

Now, it's not unusual for me to go off for four or five days in October. Every year I participate in organizing and presenting ICAF, that is, the International Comic Arts Forum, a  scholarly symposium founded in 1995 that I've been helping put together for, oh, about a decade. ICAF, traditionally a September or October event, is always one of the highlights of my academic year, and, although it has gotten much harder for me to get to since my family and I moved from Connecticut to California, I make a point of getting there every year.

What made this year's ICAF trip unusual, though, was the near-coincidence of ICAF with Ohio State U's triennial Festival of Cartoon Art, presented by OSU's justly-famed Cartoon Research Library under the leadership of curator Lucy Caswell. I decided to take in both in one long trip. Whereas I'd been to ICAF some, what, ten times? I had never been to the OSU event, and this year's, titled "Graphic Storytelling," promised to be special, since it marked the centennial of the birth of Milton Caniff, the famed cartoonist, proud Ohioan, and founding donor of the Cartoon Research Library.

So, in essence, it was to be a celebration of the very figure who made the Library possible, and the artist who, arguably, most inspired the founding greats of the comic book (among them Will Eisner and my longtime fave and current book topic, Jack Kirby). I really wanted to go.

To make matters sweeter, Michele, my wife, was able to travel with me for the D.C. leg of the trip: her first ICAF since 1997! So, after much mad scrambling and begging of favors, I planned out a full week-and-a-half trip in the middle of the Fall semester. And we went. Whew.

ICAF 2007 (the twelfth) took place October 18-20 in Washington, D.C., with events at the Library of Congress Madison Building and George Washington University. The OSU Fest (the ninth, the Festival having run every three years since 1983) ran a week later, from October 25-27, at several sites on the OSU campus but primarily at the nearby Columbus Renaissance Hotel, in downtown Columbus.

During ICAF Mich and I stayed (and during the days just afterward I stayed) with our good friend Mike Rhode and his family, Cathy and Claire (would that I had a picture of all three of them together to put up here!). Mike, an archivist by vocation, is a fellow comics fiend, compiler of a forthcoming book on Harvey Pekar, and proprietor of the terrific D.C.-area comics blog, ComicsDC. Mike and I traveled to the OSU Fest together.

The short version of this long story is that I had a wonderful, exhausting trip, or trips, with far too little sleep and too much thinking about comics and cartooning. Mich and I had a great time during the ICAF (Thurs-Sat), taking in panels, meeting up with old friends, and, in Michele's case, doing some museum-hopping outside the conference, again with friends. We hung out with Rusty and Terri Witek on Saturday evening, 10/20, then Mike took Mich and I to a book sale at the State Dept. in D.C. on Sunday, 10/21, just before Mich's flight back to CA (sigh). Then, after the ICAF, I spent a couple of days meeting up with possible future contacts in D.C., dreaming/scheming for future conferences, and getting ready for the Columbus trek.

Mike and I drove from Arlington, VA, to Columbus on October 24-25, stopping on the night of the 24th to stay with fellow comics scholar Mark Rogers and his wife Jessica at Walsh University in North Canton, OH (thanks, folks!). The OSU Fest included an academic pre-event consisting of panels and papers (Thurs), followed by two days of festivities involving cartoonists, scholars, and fans (Fri-Sat). I flew back to CA from Columbus on Sun, 10/28. Some crack about my arms being tired is probably due here.

Rather than try to describe each of the two events (which were very different) in exhaustive detail, I'll refer you to Mike's own account of OSU, with pictures, and go on to write a post or two reflecting on, in a nutshell, the different and complementary natures of the two. I know I haven't been timely here (hell, the events in question are already two weeks old), so I'll have to be, er, ruminative instead. Chew, chew.

Expect more tomorrow...

ICAF 2007: The Doodlebug's Revenge

The following drawings appeared in my conference notebook during the run of the 12th annual International Comic Arts Forum, October 18-20, 2007, at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.:

 

Let these stand as preview to forthcoming posts re: ICAF and the OSU Festival of Cartoon Art.

Slow Marching Band

Yesterday, during a visit to our local branch of the Los Angeles County Public Library, my son Coleman found for me Scott Allen Nollen's book Jethro Tull: A History of the Band, 1968-2001 (McFarland, 2002).

So, again I'm spinning down the long ages, nostalgia-ridden, happily lost, reflecting on past passions as well as a newly intensified desire for recovery, rediscovery, re-claiming of some of my "past" things. I suppose this has to do with moving, recently, and a self-imposed necessity to pare down, to part with a lot of old stuff, and, at the same time, to put the old stuff into new, more readily accessible, less cramped but also less overwhelming form. Ironically, this drive has meant getting rid of old vinyl LPs (see my prior post on the great retailer Amoeba Music) and then getting back into some of the same old music via CDs.

I've been toying with writing about prog rock, a genre with which I suppose I have a love-hate relationship, for a while. I'm not interested in most textbook examples of prog, and I don't at all like the idea of "neo-prog" or prog metal or any such revivalist/revisionist trend. But Jethro Tull, well, Tull is an example central to my adolescence (including early college years); being a Tullite was once a proud pastime of mine. Though I failed to get tickets to Tull's upcoming Lancaster, CA show in time (they've sold out), that hasn't stopped me from wanting to dig in, once again, and so the Nollen book comes at the right time.

Though of course a great gift to Tullites, frankly it's a disappointment, sometimes even irritating, due to its polite dancing around the rather troubling facts of the band's history, including bandleader Ian Anderson's seeming arbitrariness and prickliness. There are quite a few distressing events in the band's "history" that are palmed off by Nollen with a frustrating lack of authorial judgment, feeling, or even, seemingly, curiosity. Anderson, who wrote the book's brief foreword, seems content to have these less-than-flattering elements recounted (good), but the silent bargain here seems to have been that Nollen not pursue any difficult threads too determinedly (bad, from my POV).

The main problem may be that only a diehard fan of Tull, past and present, could muster the energy, and gain the access, needed to do a book like this, yet, at the same time, a diehard fan past and present is at risk of plunging full-on into uncritical backstage chumminess. Indeed chummy is the reigning quality of Nollen's text, epitomized by an autobiographical Preface, frankly grating, that establishes his personal "history" with the band at the cost of his credibility as a critic.

Mostly the book consists of descriptions of every Tull album and tour (this takes up, oh, about 270 of the book's 360-ish pages). Credits are duly rehearsed, some details are given re: the recording process and critical response, and occasional tour anecdotes are bizarre and enlivening (yay), but the analytical dimension of the book is too easily summed up by Nollen's overuse of the word "masterpiece" and his too-easy praise of weak or derivative material.

On the other hand, I have to admit that I'm actually more curious now to hear some of the Tull albums of the past twenty years, which I've mostly given a skip (from 1989's Rock Island onward, I've avoided the new Tull studio albums, the exception being 2003's charming if lightweight Jethro Tull Christmas Album).

I guess I can say that Tull retains some of its hold on me, despite Anderson having lost IMO, one, his best band (the late 70s edition, summarily shitcanned circa 1980); two, his songwriting edge; three, the live-in-studio feel of the band's best stuff (from 1981 on, a lot of what I've heard is depressingly piecemeal, and sounds canned and stolid); and, fourth and finally, his voice, once one of the loveliest, most idiosyncratic voices in rock. Despite all these losses, Anderson remains in my mind a charming presence, despite his manifest lack of flexibility and near control-freakish precisionism.

Gads, I sound like I'm about to start rehashing hoary old complaints from the rock press, which, by the time of my teenage years, was ideologically averse to all things Tull (the Rolling Stone album guide once called Anderson a "dictatorial pharisee"!). Lest I sound crusty and ungrateful, let me hasten to add that prime Tull, which to me includes most every full-fledged new album release between 1968 (their start) and 1980, was a splendid thing: absurd, romantic, and, somehow, freeing. I got a lot from Tull, a band that, temperamentally, seemed a good mirror for me, and, ideologically, probably influenced me in no small measure.

As I see it, the real spectacle of Tull's early stardom was seeing Anderson, a man of, arguably, conservative sentiment, turned into the unwilling spokesperson of a fractious, rebellious generation. The arc between two of my favorite Tull albums, the seminal Stand Up (1969) and the beautiful, folk-leaning Heavy Horses (1978), nearly a decade apart, show Anderson growing into the woolly traditionalist role always implied by the band's namesake (the 17th-century farmer and inventor Jethro Tull).

As original Tull bassist Glenn Cornick, quoted in Nollen's book (pp. 58-59), points out, a streak of Scottish Presbyterian moralism seems to run through Anderson despite his throwing-off the shackles of institutional religion as a young man. That's one of the charming things about Anderson, actually: his firmness, his rigor, his righteous intensity. It's also, of course, a drag. Yet, as Anderson and the band have aged, he's grown into a kind of guarded civility and gentlemanliness that come from observing the limitations of one's craft and taking them on in the most professional manner possible: a secret to his professional survival?

The Nollen book gets only so close to that carefully guarded sensibility, of course. One of the perhaps inadvertent revelations here is how difficult it is for anyone, including other members of the band, to get to know Ian Anderson on any level other that the strictly circumscribed one of on-stage musical colleagueship. I take it this distancing too is a survival strategy, one cultivated very early on when Anderson became the band's leader and songwriting mill. (Nowadays, his persona is that of an affable elder statesman of rock: if expectations for Tull are lower, personal edges have become less jagged too.)

I won't say I've learned very much more from the book than I have over the years simply by soaking in the odd news story about Tull (I would have liked more on the old stories that trouble me, such as the breakup of the 70s edition). And of course Anderson's own ever-changing views of the music, cited here and there, have always called for a grain of NaCL, inasmuch as his comments about the old records, or rather about his ambitions for the old records, often seem revisionist or just plain not in keeping with the records themselves. He has to continually remake the band's history into something that he can use, after all, something that feels alive and useful to him.

But my respect for the group's longevity and professionalism (themes that Nollen touts quite often) are, if anything, enhanced by reading the book. And the Tull catalog from 1968 to at least 1978 is ruefully under-rated by all except us Tullites!