Graphic Novels

On-line Graphic Novel About Iranian Election and Aftermath

~ bythefirelight

The excellent blog Arabic Literature (in English) turned me on to this site. It is a graphic novel about the aftermath of the Iranian election in 2009. Written by a Persian (American) writer, an Arab artist and a Jewish editor it and “Zahra’s Paradise weaves together a composite of real people and events.”  It comes out Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in installments of one four to six page panel, which in itself I like. There is something about stories that are published serially that makes the experience of reading them interesting. There are only a few installments, so it is a little difficult to tell how good it is going to be, but a first read it is interesting. I’ll be curious to see how the art evolves, if at all during the run. I imagine it is a difficult task to create the same characters week after week in the same style.

You can start at the beginning here, or go to the most recent episode.

Zahra’s Paradise isn’t just a cemetery where the world comes to an end. It’s also a womb, a garden, where the world is reborn. Sure, Neda is dead, Sohrab is dead, Mohsen is dead, and they’re all buried in Zahra’s Paradise. But just as there is death, so there is life and light bursting out of their shadow. Their virtual reflection, wrapped as fictional characters, allows us to raise our own imaginary army to intervene in history in real time.

Zahra’s Paradise is a wall drawn around the constitution of Iran’s children. Initially, I wanted to avoid grief by taking refuge in farce. The events in Iran, the protests, broke through. Every day, we’d catch glimpses of Iran’s youth (anyone under eighty), their faith, dreams, courage and cool, breaking out through an electronic wall. But their story appeared as fragments scattered across the face of time. Zahra’s Paradise is the garden where we’ve tried to piece together the fragments, and put a name and face to the story. Mehdi.

Arabic Literature (in English)

New Words Without Borders – Graphic Novels

~ bythefirelight

The February Words Without Borders has been posted. This month it is featuring excerpts of graphic novels. Zeina Abirached’s panels are quite interesting and make this issue worth looking at. There are also excerpts from Israeli, French, Dutch, and Chinese writers.

The Swallows Game - Zeina Abirached

The Perfect Graphic Novel in 6 Panels

~ bythefirelight

The Stranger has a great 6 panel graphic novel from David Lasky. It really sums up the myopia and isolation that often define the genre. Worth the look.

Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater
Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater

Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater is a beautiful book about the art of Manga Kamishibai, a precursor to manga, and a phenomenon that lasted for only about 30 years in Japan before succumbing to the powers of television. Manga Kamishibai is the art of story telling using a series of pre-drawn comic panels of about 12 x 12 inches to entertain and later educate. The Kamishibai men would set up in a park or public space in Tokyo or other big city and entice the local children to come see the show. They would sell the kids candy, which is how they made their money, and then would narrate the adventure described on the cards. The men would use different voices and act out the stories, keeping the children entertained with a hybrid of theater and comics. It was a uniquely Japanese phenomenon that disappeared with the coming of TV and after school study sessions that left children with little free time.

The art runs the gamut from western movie inspired work, to more traditionally Japanese styles. However, they all have a comic sensibility with broad strokes instead of fine detail which made it easier for the audience to see the drawings. The stories were a mix of super heros, such as the Golden Bat who looks more like Superman with a skull for a head, and samurai tales. The stories will last about 20-40 stills and each week, and like the Saturday serials in the US the stories would change rapidly to insure the kids would continue to come. At its height before the WWII, there  were 100’s of Kamishibai men and near 40 studios producing the slides.

The book also has a chapter on Kamishibai during WWII when it was converted into propaganda. The charactures of the evil Americans is somewhat funny. They all look like Alex Guiness in Bridge on the River Kwai. The focus of the propaganda was to tell the Japanese that the Americans were brutal savages who took no prisoners. At the beginning of the war, the Kamishibai told of Japan’s great victories, but as the war began to go badly the Kamishibai switched to an educational focus and explained how to fight fires and other civil defense matters, most of which were useless against fire bombing. Unfortunately, during the fire bombing many of the Kamishibai publishers were destroyed along with the art work. After the war, the US used the Kamishibai men to spread the new changes that were coming to Japan.

Eric Nash’s text makes for interesting reading and Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater is more than just a pictures of comics, but a cultural history of a little know element of Japanese culture.

The Unknown Soldier from DC Comics

~ bythefirelight

I used to read DC war comics when I was younger, finding even then the superhero comics less than interesting. Which is not to say that if drug my copies of those comics out of the closet I might not find them insipid. Yet there was a reality to them that was more than real, less trapped in the generic conventions of super heroes which despite the fans of the genre who see a larger world reflected in them are still a let down when reading. I can still remember when one of the crew from the haunted tank in G.I. Combat was killed by a strafing airplane.

I mention this because the New York Times has an article about the reworking of the Unknown Soldier series from Vertigo and DC. In this reworking the Unknown Soldier takes place in Uganda and explores the civil war and its atrocities. It looks like tough stuff:

Unknown Soldier is unflinching in its depiction of violence, and that comes across even more strongly in the collected edition, without the monthly break between issues. One particularly horrific scene deals with the disfigurement of the title character: an inner voice navigates him through the violence, but when he reaches his breaking point, he hacks at himself to try to silence it. That gruesome episode came from Mr. Dysart’s imagination; some details he learned from his trip, he said, were too awful for the comic.

The art, too, communicates the violence in a stylized fashion and expands the work of comics as journalism that authors like Joe Sacco have created.

War’s End – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Joe Sacco is a writer whose work has always seemed to show the great power of the Graphic Novel. His comic journalism (not a disparaging description) is some of the best work I’ve seen in the field (and thankfully avoids the self obsessed woe is me story of other graphic novels). His artistry is in the comic genre, tending towards the caricature with people, but his drawings are realistic and detailed in a way that strives to document and highlight the story at hand. The stories in War’s End: Profiles From Bosnia 1995-1996are those of Bosnia at the end of the war. This is the third of his books in Bosnia, obviously not as strong as his master work Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, but still showing his deft ability to write about war and yet never forget that for good or bad, he as a journalist is part of the story.

Soba, the first story, is not so much a story of war, but aftermath, an exploration of PTSD and rootlessness that comes after war. Yet it is more than just the soldiers coming back from the front, but a whole generation, a whole society that thought it was civilized and modern. What Sacco finds is the self destruction and disappointment that often comes with at the end of such wars. It is a solid, if brief, examination of the all to common and I think not repeated enough result of intense combat.

The second story, Christmas with Karadzic, isn’t as strong, but it does show that Sacco is aware of himself as participant and doesn’t try to deceive himself that he is an impartial professional. During the Christmas of 1995 he with several other journalists goes to interview Karadzic. It is not a particularly perilous journey, but it has its adventure and adrenaline. They get the scoop in the Republica Serbska and return to Sarajevo. Joe finds that he loves it; it was exciting and the other journalists, who live on cigarettes and tips, give him a rush. It is a two edged sword, because the idea is they are sending facts back to the papers, but it is as much an adventure as anything else. The willingness to show the reporters as part of the story is what makes Sacco interesting.

It is too bad that he has said that he probably can’t keep writing books like this because he can’t keep doing the journalism. Hopefully, the next one will be as interesting.

Black Jack Vol 1 – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

I continue to read graphic novels because I think I’ll find some gold in them, and occasionally I do as with the work of Joe Sacco. Lately I’ve been trying Manga, and except for the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi in Good Bye I have been disappointed. Black Jack, Vol. 1was not an exception. Although Osamu Tezuka is a pioneer and master of the form, I found his work, or perhaps it is just the form, lacking much depth.For those who don’t know, Black Jack is a mysterious doctor who doesn’t have a license but is the greatest doctor on earth and can save patients in complicated surgeries all by himself. While the concept itself is not bad, in execution the mysterious doctor flies in for the life saving surgery just at the right moment not only to save a life, but to give someone his due. The stories are formulaic: someone is ill or injured; they deny they need help or denied help; Black Jack shows up and offers to save the ill person and against everyone’s wishes he succeeds to everyone’s amazement. Black Jack pretends to be a selfish man, but in reality he has a heart of gold. While Black Jack does play with themes of health and the power of science, the stories are not particullarly long lasting and are emphemoral like so much pulp. I hold out hope that Manga will truely be interesting, and will in the words of Yani Mentzas will “stay within the framework [of Manga]to analyze and foreground its themes, especially the controlling one, that which exceeds man.”

Jetlag – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Jetlag by Etgar Keret is a short but fascinating collection of five short stories set to drawings by five different Israeli artists: Mira Friedman, Batia Kolton, Rutu Modan, Yirmi Pinkus, Itzik Rennert. Keret, one of Israel’s best writers, creates what might be better called fables. His stories are brief and always have an element of unrealty to them. The unreality, though, is designed to turn the reader back to the strangeness of reality.

The first story is about a magician who suddenly begins to have trouble pulling the rabbit out of the hat. One time he pulls a bloody rabbit’s head from the hat and in a another he pulls a dead baby. But the audience seems to love it and a child keeps the bloody head of the rabbit as a memento. Instead of magic revealing the wondrous, the unfathomable becomes the way the audiences accept death and the grotesque as entertainment. The magician gives up his trade, and finishes the story saying,

…I don’t do much of anything. I just lie in bed and think about the rabbit’s head and the baby’s body. As if they’re some clues to a riddle, as if somebody was trying to tell me something; that now it’s not really the best of times for rabbits or for babies. That it’s not the best of times for magicians.

In the story Jetlag the narrator finds himself on an airplane where a flight attendant is paying extra attention to him. At first it seems as if she wants him to join the clichéd mile high club with her. A ten year-old girl at his side tells him he should go have sex with her, then claims she is a 30 year-old dwarf smuggling heroin. Eventually, the narrator goes to the back of the plane to talk to the flight attendant. She doesn’t want to have sex with him, but instead, wants to give him a parachute because the plane has orders to crash. The flight attendant says they crash a plane every year or two so that passengers will take flight safety seriously. As the story ends he says, the rescue looked quite heart warming on TV. Again, Keret takes liberties with a reality that has become all too common—the disaster coverage on TV—and uses it as an opportunity to look at it as a fiction, switching genres to make it observable. What should be a horror, becomes just entertainment.

In each of the stories Keret is able to say something about modern society, its violence, its loneliness, its spectator culture, and question how it effects us. His stories are marvels of compression and an unreality that seems real.

Manga, Genre and Osamu Tezuka in Words Without Borders

~ bythefirelight

Yani Mentzas makes some interesting points about how one should view the work of Manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, and how in general the graphic novel should be approached when trying to make it more serious.

Narrative comics can mature in two diverging ways: either by jettisoning the juvenile framework in favor of standards borrowed from realism, or by staying within the framework to analyze and foreground its themes, especially the controlling one, “that which exceeds man.” My personal preference is against the former path, which leads to comics that give an impression of wanting to be art, cinema, or literature rather than comics and that indeed seem only the more shame-faced the better they are. I believe the latter is the royal road of intelligent comics in that it sees the merits of cartooning’s openness to caricature, acceptance of absurdity, and unflagging curiosity about that which exceeds man.

I’m not sure I agree completely but he does have a point. However, I think there is a mistake in equating the medium, pictures and words, with the genre, superhero or fantastic stories. Having tried to read Charles Burns’ Black Hole, a richly drawn work, I couldn’t stand the fantasy element. On the other hand, Shortcomings a fine graphic novel is so chatty perhaps it would have been better as a play.

He does make an interesting point about the transition to or the search for more serious work. A market does need to develop for everything:

What’s more striking in fact is the comparable paucity of these elements in the early oeuvre of the master who’d eventually come to employ them so deftly. We could attribute this difference to the fact that aging tends to inculcate a greater interest in spirituality, but Tezuka’s mature phase began when he was in his forties, which is hardly old. The better answer has to do with intended readership; to simplify a little but not much, in his early period before 1970 Tezuka wrote for children, while he had grownups in mind after the seventies due to an immense demographic shift in manga buying.

Waltz With Bashir in the Nation

~ bythefirelight

The Nation has a large selection of panels from the Waltz With Bashir graphic novel.

Part 1

Part 2

Good-Bye

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Good-Bye
Yoshihiro Tatsumi

As often as I read graphic novels I often feel there is something lacking, the story perhaps, or maybe the characters, but I think it is the drawings themselves. They draw on traditions or images that once were pulp with little to say and the visual connection between the two weakens the power of the story. I know I had that feeling reading Will Eisner’s Contract with God, another early work in the genre. Tatsumi certainly has moments of visual power as you can see in the first story Hell, which takes place right after the bombing of Hiroshima. His drawings of the city leave a stark power that in later stories seems to more related to romance conics with their simple rendering of faces and expressions that become stand ins for complicated emotions that are difficult to express in 20 word bubbles.

Thematically, though, Tatsumi’s interest range from the complexities of the post war to frustration of everyday loneliness. Taken as a whole it creates a Japan that is not quite the miracle it seemed. Many Japanese have been left out: the veterans who survived the war but are scarred with old memories; old men who seem to be forgotten or lost in the new, hyper modern country; and the women who having ended up as hostesses, prostitutes, or attempted suicides, find themselves unable to break out of the roles thrust on them.

Of particular interest is Hell, a story that questions the sacredness of the victims. An army photographer takes a picture of a carbon shadow, one of those hideous legacies of the Hiroshima bombing. It looks like a son giving his mother a massage. The photographer sells the photo 10 years later and it quickly becomes a national symbol. But the photographer learns that it was really the son’s friend killing his mother for him. The son tries to blackmail him, but the photographer kills him so the image will keep its power. Unfortunately, they find the body of the son and the sweet narrative of a loving son looses its power. The photographer is haunted by the guilt of the crime from then on.

The story according to Tatsumi (in the interview in the back of the book) made a few people uncomfortable. However, it does question how a country creates hits symbols. Are they transitory as the story suggests? No one knew about the murder so the symbol of the mother and son still could have had the same power. It was not just the victim, but the context; or the projection of context, because the shadow only shows two figures. It is up to the reader to determine what they were doing. Tatsumi’s suggestion that not only ate the national symbols constructed, but they are constructions from one’s own perception gives Hell a weight its otherwise Telltale Heart like plot might weaken.

Hell, though, is thematically an exception to most of the stories, which are a mix of loneliness and sexual longing that show a troubled isolated society where sex is easily substituted for relationships. Its a melancholic almost nihilistic view and in Rash and Click Click Click it is taken to its furthest extreme when the protagonists contemplate suicide. Good-Bye, though, might best represent his view of the relations between men, women and families.

Mariko is a prostitute during the American occupation and her clients are all Americans. She has a steady American client who talks about marriage and love and seems to believe him. At the same time her father, a veteran who comes around for handouts, comes into the picture. He councils self control, but she has none and all he can do is slink off to bars and wonder how he ended up the way he has since it wasn’t his fault they lost the war. In the end the American goes home and she decides to get drunk. Her father comes around at the same time and tells her to sober up, but it only enrages her and she grabs him and forces him to receive her sexual motions until he ejaculates. Shamed he walks out of the room. She cries but says it is for the best. The last scenes are of him walking crowded street wondering when it will end, and of Mariko leading an American to her home.

The story creates a world where the traditional has been destroyed and what is left are the power relations: client to prostitute; father to daughter; shame to transgressions. Tatsumi si not only showing the legacy of war, but the movement away from the traditional pre-war Japan to the American influenced culture. At the same time, though, the power relationships have changed: American, youth, tradition, all in that order. While Tatsumi uses prostitutes as his symbol for this a little too often, it illustrates this dynamic quite well, much like Suzuki’s Gates of Flesh.