Podcast: Alison Bechdel

I feel bad doing this, because I really owe the blog a "real" post. But instead I'm going to direct your attention to the Writers At Cornell Blog, where I have just posted a brief interview with cartoonist and graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel. We talked about the fluidity of memory, the pitfalls of writing about real people, the advantages of drawing small, and how obsessive-compulsive tendencies can be brought to bear upon the making of good art.

I want to reiterate here how much I love Bechdel's book, Fun Home, and how much I admire her for writing it. If you're a fan of her long-running indie comic Dykes To Watch Out For, you're accustomed to her political acumen, distinctive drawing style, and memorable characters. But nothing in the strip really prepared me for Fun Home, which I find amazingly moving and genuine and deep. Her evocation of childhood--specifically, the childhood of an artist--is extraordinary. The book is obviously deeply personal, but it also creates a kind of universal portrait of the birth of the creative imagination, and is a must for anyone obsessed with making things.

Alison gave a fantastic reading and presentation at Cornell last night, one that included not only an emotional delivery of the book's first chapter, but a hilarious and instructive explanation of how it came to be. It speaks volumes about what kind of person Alison is that, after presenting this material many times to many audiences over the past couple of years, she was still visibly moved by it, and managed to move all of us, as well.

Acme Novelty Library No. 18

I just finished reading the latest installment of Chris Ware's ongoing comic series, and it's my favorite thing from him in quite a while. I've been enjoying the single-day-of-school narrative, "Rusty Brown," that the last two books have focused on, but No. 18 returns to the one-legged anti-heroine of the "Building Stories" cartoons that ran last year in the New York Times Magazine. I'm glad for it. This installment deepens the character enormously, and brings real pathos to a series that I was worried might be a little too cute for its own good.

The front endpapers are devastating--a swirl of text and images, set against a black background, which represent the narrator's contemplation of suicide. You have to turn the book around and around to read it, and it's a big book--the result feels like driving the death bus. We read her fragmented thoughts, and watch her imagine who might discover her corpse: her parents, her landlady, her cat. It's terribly sad and real, as are the back endpapers, which depict her lying awake in bed, over and over, at different ages. The last drawing in the book shows a sleepless night at perhaps age three; her leg is not yet missing, but she is still sad.

In between we get some back story--a boyfriend, an abortion--but the real strength of the work comes from the Ware's stunning illumination of workaday detail. He shows us, over two pages, the evidence of time passing at a florist's: the light changing, the gradual droop of a rose. There's a wonderful bit where the protagonist tosses a pair of stained underpants into a washing machine, and I can't quite explain why it's so moving. And several pages are dedicated to stripping away the layers of her body, like the acetate pages in the encyclopedia she read as a child. We see her frumpy clothes, her flesh, her muscles and bones, while all around the panels tear away the layers of her misery. Ware's ability to move the eye around the page is unmatched; he continues to experiment with the architecture of comics in emotionally satisfying ways.

I wasn't as wild about Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings, the story of Ben Tanaka, an insufferable prick who nevertheless is always surrounded by beautiful women. Reviews of this book have praised its addressing of the politics of dating among Asian-Americans, but really, if you've been to college in the past twenty years, you've heard it all already.

What I do like about Tomine is his drawing style--he's great at depicting the bland details of urban living so that they seem wonderfully alive. His characters are also hugely expressive in their faces and body language--so much so that the best bits of this book are the panels where nobody's saying anything, and nothing's going on. This is why I love Tomine's New Yorker covers--they pack a lot of story into one picture. Special props for the look on Ben's girlfriend's face when she discovers his cache of white-girl porno, and he lamely points out that there's a Latino chick in there somewhere. It's perfect.

Best American Comics 2007

A few of you might remember my post back in January about Best American Comics 2006--I was pretty stoked about this anthology (guest-edited by Harvey Pekar), and about comics in general.

I still am excited about comics as a literary art, and thrilled when Rhian brought home the new Best American Comics 2007, edited by the great Chris Ware. If Pekar had put together a great collection, then Ware--perhaps my favorite cartoonist--ought to put together something brilliant.

I don't think this year's anthology is as strong as last year's, though. Without question, there are some great moments, but overall it feels a bit slack. Ware, in his introduction, issues a non-apology for the problem, which he explains by quoting a New York Times critic*, who referred to a

"creeping sameness" to much of what he was leafing through, "semi- or wholly autobiographical sketches of drifting daily life and its quiet epiphanies." Admittedly, as comics have entered their late adolescence as art/literature, a preponderance of autobiographical work has accrued.

Ware goes on to defend autobiography, which is not what the critic was complaining about--rather, he was complaining about really boring autobiography, for which there is no good defense.

There is some fantastic autobiography here--an excerpt from of what became Alison Bechdel's stunning Fun Home, and several genuinely strange and fascinating episodes from David Heatley's series of illustrated dreams. But there are some clunkers, too, most notably a series by the ordinarily excellent Jeffrey Brown, in which he basically goes to various record stores, buys lots of indie rock CD's, then listens to them while thinking about his ex-girlfriend.

Late adolesence or not, navel-gazing is never interesting. The analysis of self is interesting (see: Philip Roth), but the bar has been set too low for comics, and it's time for the form to grow up.

Of course, it already is growing up. A few of these comics are extraordinarily, gratifyingly strange--C. F.'s "Blond Atchen and the Bumble Boys" springs to mind, with its Henry-Dargeresque pencil-and-paint style, as do the post-apocalyptic fuzzed-out scribbles of Gary Panter. These comics delight in their willingness to reshape certain conventions of the form, or abandon linear narrative when it suits the material; their meaning is elusive, but they are never vague in their presentation of detail.

I suspect that Ware has included some cartoonists for who they are and what they represent to him, rather than whether they were at their best this year. That's OK. Everything in here is diverting, and that's more than anyone can hope for in an anthology of this kind. The fact that some of it is actually stunning is merely a bonus.

*It's John Hodgman, in case you were wondering.

Odds -n- Ends

There are several things I've been wanting to post about, but none that warrant an entire post all to themselves--so here's a little clearinghouse of thoughts and recommendations.

First off, I just finished reading The Exception and wanted to throw in my two cents on top of Rhian's buck fifty from last week. This is really a terrific book, and I highly recommend it. As soon as I realized it was a novel about workplace bullying, I was instantly envious--this is an amazing subject, and Jungersen cleverly uses the microcosm of the office to explore big truths about the nature of evil. He also employs the bizarrely direct tactic of including little essays on the topic in the text of the novel, ostensibly written and published by the main characters. I must say I appreciated it; the essays were fascinating. My only complaint is that the ending, while it certainly satisfies as the culmination of a thriller, imposes itself from without, and I couldn't help but wish that the book had managed to wrap itself up without leaving the hothouse of its setting. In any event, a great read, and very scary.

Second, I wanted to recommend the Drawn & Quarterly Showcase series, a kind of short-fiction literary magazine for cartoonists. I've got books two and three and now need to go back and find the first one--great little stories from up and coming artists and writers, brimming with the vitality that this new art form seems to have an endless supply of.

Finally, and OK, this could have been its own post, but I can't think of enough good examples to support it, I'd like to say that product manuals just aren't what they used to be. Time was, you could buy something, and the manual would include a concise little history of that thing, and put the item into some kind of practical context. These days it isn't unusual for manuals (often poorly translated) to actually serve as an impediment to using the item, as is the case with the documentation for the Oregon Scientific WMR968 Cable Free Complete Weather Station, a great item that is almost impossible to install. I got this thing for Rhian for her birthday, and it is now working great, but it took me weeks to buckle down and figure it out, and the manual was no help at all, packed as it was with references to nonexistent parts, incorrect assembly techniques, and misleading usage tips.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you're into home audio recording, there are some great product manuals out there, like the free-to-download Mastering With Ozone guide, from iZotope, Inc. "Mastering" is the process music is put through before being committed to CD and sold in stores; it seeks to eliminate errors in the recording and give it greater impact when heard on your stereo. It's a rather arcane science, difficult and many-faceted, and this guide not only explains Ozone, the mastering software it serves as the manual for, but what mastering is, why it's done, and whether it's even necessary. It might be the best product manual I've ever read.

This is probably not likely to be very interesting to the average reader, but why can't your hammer come with something like this as well? Your toaster? Your coffee maker? Why can't manufacturers go the extra mile and provide a context for the stuff you own, making the experience of owning and using it more rich and interesting? Perhaps they feel that this would prevent you from throwing it out and buying another one in six months.

Best American Comics

We're pretty faithful readers of the Best American Anthology Series, particularly the fiction one. And though this year's fiction is good (and is edited by our former teacher Ann Patchett), I don't think there's been a book in this series in ten years that's anywhere near as good as the new Best American Comics. There's something going on with comics these days--they have an energy, an aesthetic and moral vitality, that reminds me of the way short stories felt in the eighties. A sense not merely of skilled practitioners working in isolation from one another (which is true of any era), but of a unified, yet varied, vision, a community with a shared understanding of the world.

Frankly, it makes me wish I could draw. A few standouts in the book are Lilli Carré, whom I'd not heard of before this book (that's her stuff on the right, there, and also on the cover of the anthology)...also David Heatley, with his portrait of his father...the always reliable Lynda Barry...and the Beckett-like minimalist weirdness of Anders Nilson, whom I can't seem to find an adequate link for.

Anyway, this is a terrific book, a snapshot of a genre whose moment has come. Fiction writers, pay attention to the cartoonists. We could use some of their mojo.