Don't Trust The Humanoids: Liz Suburbia & Your Pituitary in Panels

My high school years were absolute shit.  I was an all-state trumpet player and mathlete, but the only real highlight for me was the senior prom after-party where I smoked pot for like, the third time in my life, with a kid I hadn’t seen since elementary school as we proceeded to talk about our Pokemon club in third grade.  I never got as messed up ever again in my life as I did at that party and the various graduation parties after.  They were never about socializing for me, they were purely and completely about getting fucked up for free and with the help of some really irresponsible adults.

When the parties ended and high school ended, I was left at home with no similar outlet, however unhealthy and destructive that outlet might have been.  One day I broke down and explained how empty I felt to my mother and a few years of therapy went a long way.  The other stories I have—the worst ones, the ones we all have about when we were at our most lonely and vulnerable—still aren’t anywhere near the experiences of so many others.  Still, I can tell you honestly that I believe I am lucky to be here.

The world didn’t end.  But it was close.  The psycho-sexual existential lurch comprised by the chemical warfare occurring in a teenager’s brain is The Formative Thing for us.  And, for me, without parents that were as supportive, it is quite literally not something I would have survived.

Sacred Heart takes us to a world that is identical to ours.  The kids in this book are just that: kids.  The one differences is that, at some point, you realize that none of their lives are circumscribed by responsible adults; or, you know, by any adults.  The truly unchecked flare-ups in teen angst are not cute and unfortunate, but monstrous, tragic, and sad.  What’s worse is that without any guidance at all, the tragic does not even register as such with these teens.

Maybe some of that has something to do with the cultishness instead of the outright lack of adults.  But make no mistake, even within the confines of this cult, the cult itself is fundamentally changed by its lack of adults.  It becomes a cult of angst alone, which looks much less like selfies, votes for Bernie Sanders, and--I don’t know, however else young kids are stereotyped these days—and more like a mix of cliche sex in parked cars and, oh, you know, dead bodies all over the fucking place.  Sacred Heart is a mix of horror story and a really great, really straight-shooting coming of age high school drama.  These kids won’t, in fact, be alright, but god damnit even in this intensely fucked up reality, they’re sort of managing.

Voices literally fade into the background as Empathy focuses in on approaching the cute lead singer. 

My love of this book doesn’t emanate primarily from my probably only mildly jacked up high school years; no, as usual, what first reached out and grabbed me was Suburbia’s supreme ability visual narrative tricks right where they need to be. 

A huge part of this… what’d I call it?  Yes, the “psycho-sexual existential lurch” of teenagery— a huge part of that is not what happens to us but the intensity and pure novelty with which we experience the things that happen to us.  Seeing the boy across the room as a pure visual story beat is actually really fucking uninteresting.  Even if every reader knows that it’s a big character moment because of how similar situations felt to them, the goddamn book isn’t about the reader’s experience.  (Now, cut me some slack: sometimes it very well is, as I have talked about before).  Suburbia is constantly interested in driving the point home.  At moments where she could let the reader do the work and lose very little, she instead gains a lot with some clever choices.

LOOK AT THIS PAGE

On another of my favorite pages, while being chatted up by some guy with the typical “meh meh no makeup natural beauty bleh” lines, his dialogue actually goes in one ear and out the other.  Christ, everything about this page is fantastic.  Look how the story beats are broken up.  You get a little bit of the convo happening to the left, and then don’t get another piece until later in the page.  Her tunnel vision can only be so… tunnely because she’s wasted at this point, so her attention is sort of popping around here and there, with the exception of the cockbag next to her who is just so easy to ignore.  That top panel that could have been one single panel broken into three instead gets zoomed slightly as we step to the right.  This gives it a cinematic effect because it makes it feel more like a pan than a weird show-offy comic thing; at the same time, though, it is an effective comic show-offy thing because it paces that top sequence better.  Reading that top line of panels as a single panel is impossible, so you have to stop, read, stop, read, and then boom, you get to Ben drunk on the couch.

At another point, Ben confronts her friend-with-benefits Otto about wanting to forego any further sexual encounters in favor of saving their friendship, making for an obviously awkward encounter.  The well-paced, flowing visual narrative of Sacred Heart comes to a grinding halt, begetting nine-panel grids of awkward back and forth between the star-crossed not-lovers-but-sort-of-lovers-but-mostly-friends.  And you’ve had these conversations: the ones where everything else drops away and it’s just you and another person and it’s just gut-wrenchingly hard to say what you planned on saying because the other person is making it as hard as possible for you, or at least it seems that way because of the hours you spent having a pre-meditiated version of this conversation alone in the dark with some weirdly idealized imaginary version of your interlocutor.

And there’s even more to like about this book.  I adore how often Suburbia injects two or three panel moments of innocence into what is really a grim story.  I would read a comic strip by her in a *snap*, which isn’t something I often come away from such a long, substantial work saying.  There’s a chapter in the middle told from the dog’s perspective, and not in the incredibly convuluted Pizza Dog way but in the sense of literal perspective.  Interestingly enough, that chapter is the heaviest with a sense of foreboding and something being amiss: the lack of caregivers is face-punchingly obvious when the story is shifted to the perspective of the one character in the story who actually has a caregiver.  It’s just such a mature, big-picture storytelling choice.  Another of my favorite things throughout the book is the way that Suburbia juxtaposes rigid depictions of light with flowing, ethereal depictions of both light and sound.

I could go on and on, but honestly this is one of those great books where I want to open up to a sequences and shove it in a friend’s face and yell “LOOK AT WHAT SHE DID HERE.  DO YOU SEE THIS.”  I was on such a comic-high coming off of A Drifting Life (which I did write about, by the way, but my essay is such a behemoth that it needs a lot of work) that whatever came next had to be good.  And goddamn this book was good.

"Gekiga" roughly translates to, "Depressing as Fuck"

Usually when I write something, I like to focus in on a particular thing and if I happen to wander into some concentric topical circles, then that’s OK.  Writing about Yoshihiro Tatsumi has proven to be a slightly more complicated task.  I made the mistake (not that it hasn’t been a pleasant and interesting one) of reading Abandon the Old in Tokyo, a compilation of Tatsumi’s shorter works, at the same time as A Drifting Life, a beat-up-somebody-without-leaving-bruises length autobiography.  I could give you any amount of historical context for Tatsumi’s notable and historically important approach to storytelling in comics; however, since Holmberg has already written on this, any attempt by me to contextualize gekiga or Tatsumi any better would be in vain.

Actually, that’s not true: some guy fucks a dog in one of these stories (not the autobio).  Does that paint a picture for you?  Yes?  Ok.  There you go.

Perspicuous as fuck.

Previously, I have written about one of Tatsumi’s contemporaries, Tadao Tsuge.  The two share important similarities in the themes they tackle, and the intersection of those similarities is really the heart of what gekiga was trying to accomplish.  These shorter stories from each author, often seen in the alt-manga publication Garo, are almost always deeply Japanese.  It is impossible to separate most of these stories from their taking place in post-war Japan.  Perhaps you can draw connections to broader themes (as I did when I was ranting about Tsuge and Hume), but even when a story is about a search for identity in society, it is very specifically in that society at that point in its history.  Tsuge’s story about the man who vanishes is most felicitously considered as being reflective of a real missing persons problem at that period in Japanese history.  Similarly, when the twisted steel and concrete of the city imposes itself on Tatsumi’s characters, it is not just a general statement about men finding their place in a cold world: it is always wrapped tightly in the chaotic, often depressing cocoon of post-war Japan.

What blows me away about Tatsumi is how he succeeds in accomplishing the same kinds of deep dark themes as Tsuge while playing his stories entirely realistic and straight.  Tsuge’s pages are ethereal, and the stories typically play out somewhere between the shadows and the people themselves, with inanimate objects often acting as mere extensions of the persons being drawn.  For Tatsumi, however, people are placed firmly in reality and goodness gracious what a reality it is.

Tatsumi achieves the darkness of a story by letting things play out in a fucked up way.  It’s sort of shockingly simple, but it’s not something many artists were doing before Tatsumi.  I want to avoid overstating his influence, since many folks who eventually figured out they could do this with comics likely had no exposure to his work, but that doesn’t take anything away from his accomplishments as a storyteller.

Unlike many other artists exploring the dark corners of the ways in which humans deal with living amongst each other, Tatsumi does not marry us to visual metaphors.  He draws much more from the dark, unseen internal motivations of his characters.  His stories are not loaded with captions and, in some stories, the main character rarely speaks at all.  Tatsumi knows that if he writes just a weird enough story, the darkness will make its way through to the reader with fairly minimal effort

A balancing act ensues with this approach to telling a story.  The story must be simultaneously extraordinary and everyday.  Tsuge reached this balance by honing in, almost pedantically, on one particularly normal thing—say, an encounter with a friend you haven’t seen in awhile, or some reporters interviewing a guy about his disappearance—and then surrounding that painfully simple thing with absurd visual asides.  Tatsumi similarly leans on absurdity; however, he works hard to find the absurdity in the mundane.  For instance, “The Washer” revolves around a man who, through a window he is cleaning, finds his daughter caught up in a love affair with her boss.  An absurd situation, yes, but one that is at least nomologically possible as presented on the page: it could happen and, if it did, this is what it would look like.

The obtuse aspects of the story are not mysterious, conceptually thick visuals. Instead, the reader will find themselves being rapped on the eyes by the blunt end of realistically shitty situations.  In the titular “Abandon the Old in Tokyo,” a man who just wants to spend time with his fiancée without worrying about his elderly mother finds himself desperately carrying the body of his dead abandoned mother through the streets.  Tatsumi’s story formula is to take these simply relatable but inherently complex real life situations and then realize something approximating the reader’s worst fears at the very end.  Sometimes, as in “The Washer,” these fears are darkly comical; other times, as in “Abandon the Old,” they are powerful and tragic.

Tsuge liked to visually demonstrate people losing their humanity.  In Abandon, Tatsumi is much more interested in the essential but secondary bestal nature of man.  Stories that aren’t centered around the omni-present gekiga theme of sexual humiliation show characters being lowered to the level of animals, either by acting like them or by, erm… dog sex.  The loss of humanity is something that happens in the company of fellow humans, but is shown explicitly as a descent from whatever the human was before.

To me, that’s where Tatsumi shines.  I didn’t like Abandon the Old in Tokyo as much as A Drifting Life, and found it wanting in a lot of ways.  However, when you keep seeing this descent from human to animal in Tatsumi’s work, there’s a point at which you have to find yourself asking, “okay… but what were they before?  What is it that placed us above the monkeys and the dogs and the eels such that these stories characterize a descent from some higher place?”

Nothing.  Tatsumi’s answer in these stories assumes no separation!  There is an inevitability to these stories such that the ending is not a demarcation of the character’s final descent: it’s a curtain being pulled back as to what they were all along.  Though the character who fornicates with the dog claims that he wanted to hang on to the last bit of his dignity after forfeiting it, the manner in which Tatsumi presents the story makes it clear that this character could not get lower.  He only appears lower, finally, in the eyes of others, than he was before.  But as a person, very little has changed.

I mean, fuck, let’s be serious here: a person who is inclined to have sex with a dog—a person who is even in possession of that disposition in some robust sense—is probably at rock bottom in some way already.  Is there a meaningful loss of humanity still awaiting that person?  Tatsumi argues, quite reasonably, no.

"Unpaid" (the dog story) is a good example for this because of the main character’s own reflection that he wanted to hold onto the last of his dignity: the fact of the matter is, there was very little of substance to be lost.  The first story in the book, "Occupied," underscores this.  The main character is clearly a pretty harmless pervert, like most of us are.  Yet he makes this decision to draw a naked woman on a bathroom stall and through the fact that everyone starts calling him out on it we are supposed to believe that he has somehow descended into the dregs of society.  "Occupied" is more about sexual humiliation than loss of humanity, but there's a common thread of some kind of dignity being lost by someone in some substantial way throughout all of these stories.

Tatsumi’s storytelling embraces the reality that his art depicts.  We are unambiguously inhabitants of a modern society; a garbage-filled, over-populated, smoggy swamp that locks us by the ankles in its filth at birth (it should not be lost on the reader, by the way, that the one somewhat comedic moment in this whole book involves a newborn being dragged into this crap).  The only difference between people is the that some decisions quicken our descent into darkness. 

If Abandon the Old in Tokyo isn’t nihilistic, then it is a series of questions that roughly equate to, “but what am I to do?” in the face of a familiar series of desperation-inducing problems.  I don’t fault Tatsumi for not answering, but by the end of the book I at least wish he asked a different question once or twice.

Next week: I’m going to write about A Drifting Life, Tatsumi’s autobio and really just a genuinely lovely book; tremendously uncynical.

New School: Dash Shaw and Comics as Collage

“Sometime around 2010 I had a thought ‘comics are a collage medium — they’re collages that you can read.’  Everything I’ve done since then has been extrapolating from that idea in different ways.” - Dash Shaw

[I'm at it again with the cell camera pictures, this time because I wrote this and put it together mostly in a waiting room.  I think this is actually the second of my posts done while one of my parents was in surgery (both are doing well, independent of the genes that begot me).  And oh yeah, I didn't crop my distractingly blue striped shirt out of the pictures because I thought it fit with talking about Shaw.]


Not all collages are comics.  But, if you think about it (as Dash Shaw clearly has), all comics are collage.  While I think we can probably define comics more loosely than I sometimes want to admit, I don’t think that definition can ever (meaningfully) become identical with something as broad as collage.  Taking comics as an aspect of collage seriously in one’s work, however, leads to interesting results: New School is an example of quite a few of the ways that this exploration can both succeed and fail.

As you enter into the world of New School, for a brief time, the art is underwhelming.  It’s not that it feels unfinished, per se; but, the reader is left wanting some color, some environment, some movement—something more from the world that Shaw is building.  In rather short order, the layouts become more interesting, with panel borders willing to slant, sometimes even become triangular, and with lovely hand-lettering that serves to flourish awkwardly (but charmingly) flowery dialogue from the book’s main characters.

Then come the blocks of color.

New School’s most unique and deservedly noteworthy feature is Shaw’s use of blocks of color that occur outside the lines on the majority of his pages.  Not only is it unorthodox as deployed at all, but it especially stands out because of its centrality to this work’s identity.  Perhaps the story is the same without any of these color blocks, but New School would certainly not be the same book in any real, interesting sense without them.

Above is an early use of the color blocks and one of the more successful ones.  Readers who are not used to this—really, any reader, I would think—will need to spend extra time on these pages absorbing what Shaw is up to.  Maybe people who have spent more time viewing different types of art than me will be able to go through New School at a medium pace.  I, however, found myself having to pause on pages like this one and really consider what Shaw was trying to acheive: what is this page doing?  Does it work?

The color blocks are intentionally haphazard, but do have a degree of order to them that is important to notice.  The above green block envelops the tree; additionally, the reader ought to notice that the pervasive sunset-violets are lined up to contrast within specific points of surrounding panels.  Yes, this is coloring outside the lines; however, where Shaw colors outside the lines often has specific narrative and aesthetic impacts that match and sometimes extend the typical, inside-the-lines colors that readers expect from a comic.

Here, another of my favorite sequences combines two of the most aesthetically salient and successful things that Shaw does: the block coloring approach and the intentionally stilted captions in lovely hand-lettering.  Here, in a significant character moment, the main character goes on a bike ride with his brother to the beaches of the island of X.  Here is one of the first places where Shaw demonstrates that the block colors can achieve both the avant-garde narrative functions that the reader is becoming accustomed to, and the more traditional environment-building we’ve come to expect from comics.  The last two panels in particular are gorgeous renderings of a beach at sunset that impinge upon everything in the scene, including the characters.

The last panel is something I adore: here is a boy who is coming to terms at that very moment with the fact that he can trust strangers in some context, as opposed to the very stark, typical reality that strangers are often something to be feared and implicitly reviled.  That is a big moment for a young man, and it’s important for him that he’s having it right there.  The environment is brought to the forefront by Shaw’s block color approach, and exaggerated to match its narrative importance by the way the block colors are deployed across the page.

Syrupy coloring *outside the lines* becomes, on pages like this one, a ray of light emanating from a significant discovery, which here impresses itself upon the main character in waves that reflect the ocean coming through the glass.  Shaw does not spend a lot of New School doing physical world-building: most of Clockworld is just a jumble of anachronisms without any real character of its own.  The customs of the Xians are where most of the world-buildery is focused.  Sequences like the one above, however, show that even where novel world-building is concerned, Shaw is leaning on his idiosyncratic color choices to take us somewhere we haven’t seen before, even if that “somewhere” is comprised mostly of unfamiliar collisions between aesthetic feelings.

As the story continues, Shaw’s coloring becomes more adventurous.  Above is yet another great example of the block colors accentuating the bold lettering choices, while emanating out to envelop several more items of the narrative on the same page.  I like this page in particular because Shaw’s artistic choices leave a fair amount of ambiguity as to how you ought to see them.  While one part is clearly getting you to focus on the books, the choice of stripes is one that could elicit different feelings—some concrete and others looser—in a variety of readers.

The more adventurous Shaw gets the more overwhelming it sometimes becomes.  The blocks of color give way to actual pictorial elements, overlayed with the comic’s panels in such a way that the collages are, by the end, obfuscatory on a regular basis.  For the less avant-garde-inclined reader, I think a lot of New School is worth the effort; by the end, however, the story starts to unravel as the Comics con Collage becomes mostly just… Collage.

While this page is as effective as earlier pages despite taking a bigger risk artistically, many of the pages using real-world elements for the collage around this point in the story are far too over-the-top for my tastes.  It’s clear why a timelessly beautiful bust would make sense as being visually fused with a woman’s smile at this moment in time to this character.

Is there a correlation there?  Should Shaw’s blocks of colors and collage had been limited to being easily interpretable to a neophyte (wannabe) art critic like myself?

I don’t think so.  Even as far as pure color blocks are concerned, Shaw makes plenty of choices that you cannot always put your thumb on.  But that’s art, and narrative art in particular, isn’t it?  As much as some creators will try to convince you otherwise, not every creative choice that gets made is one with a big, specific purpose.  That’s one of the reasons that people need editors (or at the very least, a very good editing eye): a lot of small things add up (or fail to add up) to bigger aesthetic impacts or narrative functions on a comics page, or throughout an issue.  In an important respect, as odd as Shaw’s artistic choices appear in the context of our typical comic expectations, the collage-esque coloring choices are really just cogs in the narrative machine.  The difference is mostly one that lies with the reader: you aren’t used to it, so you have to struggle with it.

Still, I have a nose for when I’m offering an interpretation of something where there is no clear felicitous interpretation to be offered; or, if you prefer, I have a good sense for when I'm going to have to talk bull shit about something.  While much of New School coalesces in a way such that the colors fold into the story in a new and exciting way, the crescendo of the story in parallel with the crescendo of the collage elements brings the two into conflict such that the dissonance you feel at the end of the story is not satisfying, but frustrating.