Borrowing the Reader's Stories: Richard McGuire's "Here"

Herein lies a deep, bellowing, “fuck you, buddy” to the very thought that objectivity is the paramount thing (let alone the only thing) we ought to strive for in critical discussions, especially of art.  Comics do not only consist of constituent parts each of which individually and collectively inspire certain thoughts and feelings; they also take a piece of the reader, digest it, and spit it back out.

Lying quietly in bed on the evening of New Year’s Day with my partner, I turn to her and I say, “here, I want you to see this.”  (Note: What a wonderful sentence out of context).  I reach down by the base of my bed where a stack of late library books is sitting and grab Richard McGuire’s Here.  Still lying flat on our backs, I put my arm back around her, reach straight up with both hands and the book, and slowly turn the pages, re-reading McGuire’s magical little book, but mostly watching her gaze as it slowly glided over the same pages I had already painted with my own eyes. 

We said nothing.  A few pages here, a few pages there, still nothing.  I thought about how she has told me comics “aren’t really her thing” and basked gleefully (and with a playful touch of spite) in the silence and the fact that she hadn’t yet looked away from the book.  Like me, she moved away from her original childhood home at a young age and I knew that she often thought about what the new inhabitants had done with the place.  I thought about how the kids in my old house would never get to be creeped out by the musty old wet bar that I helped my dad sheet-rock off into a storage space.  I thought about—well, you know, turning the pages.  Making sure I didn’t turn more than one at a time.  Duh.

Then, we got to this page:

“In my mom’s old house, they had wood panelling in the living room,” she said, breaking the silence, but continuing to appraise the page, “and she said if anybody takes it out, my grandfather will kill them or come back and haunt them because of how much of a pain in the ass it was to put it in.”  It wasn’t my story.  And, you might say, that it wasn’t really the story of Here. 

But I’m not sure that’s quite right.  I can hem and haw all day about the visual aspects of a comic that make it comprise a narrative, but the fact of the matter is that some works have an impact on the reader specifically because they borrow the reader’s own experience and gingerly transform it into a unique visual melody.  I don’t know if art is a mirror—if it’s supposed to be a mirror, or if it’s usually a mirror, or if it’s really just inherently conversational—and, frankly, I don’t really care about bold general claims like that. 

Here is special in the manner in which the narrative ebbs and flows, asserting itself on the reader, and then retreating to become more of a substratum for the reader’s own stories.  The bits with Ben Franklin are rather explicitly about Ben Franklin.  Tender moments where a single person stands at a window, looking out, seem very particular to that character. Yet many parts of Here, the above page being one of them, are presented in a manner such that they feel open-ended.  The people are connected by the space but at the same time they are cardboard cutouts in a much bigger scene.  The whole thing is composed as to almost be one big tender nudge to the reader asking, “remember?”

And I do.  I remember the couch at the old house that I never wanted to part with but that desperately needed to be junked and set on fire and set on fire again.  And here, right fucking Here, antithetical but also in lock-fucking-step with McGuire’s work, I sit in a house of which my family are the first inhabitants.  And yet the crude stone wall that I helped my father dig out of our back yard was a rustic (and heavy) reminder that this house did not spring into being here, even if my awkward, miserable high school years sort of did pop into existence right here, out of nowhere, in a torrent of hormones.

Just as it all begins, each little story will end, as will they all, together, in a series of inevitable cataclysmic scientific fuckeries.  As a page in Here reminds the reader, the sun will swallow the earth and all of our heres will become nowheres.  Ultimately, you could probably carve up space-time in such a way that even what we lost can still be indexed.  Somewhere in the four-dimensional space-time worm you can, however abstractly, point to the plot of land where you had your first kiss.  But even the heat death of the universe will make sure your memories will keep from being eternally etched into anything quite so lasting.

Here uses a kind of magic that really only works in comics to bend four dimensions of one cubic bit of space over time.  In bending that one space as McGuire does—with history, color, humor, tragedy, drama, and some of the ugliest fucking wallpaper I have ever seen—he allows his book to be an artistic end in itself as well as a reflexive gateway through the pages, back into our own memories.  That last bit really is special to comics.  Though you might think Here would work as an animated slide show, there is a tremendous amount of importance in the fact that my partner could stop, reflect, and in that moment tell me a story without me turning a page.  When we are allowed to have time stand still in our consumption of a narrative, we can allow ourselves to be led outward (and in this case, inward) by the experience.

We can attend, at our own pace, to what is happening right here.

Stay Tuned

Hello, darlings.  Today, I have a bit of a job interviewy thing going on, so I spent a good deal of yesterday preparing.  I did not have the time I would like to have to devote to a new post, but I want to stick to my Monday, Wednesday, Friday release schedule.  I have a lot of things to write about, so that's no worry.  Friday, I do believe I will be publishing a piece about Richard McGuire's Here.

~On Friday~  

Here was released when I was writing my Master's thesis in which I defended a certain definition of comics from a bunch of criticisms in the philosophy of comics literature.  You can imagine my horror, then, when a high-profile, very well-received comic came out that was a perfect embodiment of a comic which violated major intuitions we have about storytelling in comics.  Ultimately, I believe Here actually cuts deep to the heart of a good definition, rather than being something which violates it.  That's not to say Here doesn't push boundaries; rather, it pushes them on its way to the heart of what makes this form so effective and resonant.

What I write on Friday, however, won't be about any of this technical drivel.  It will be a rather more personal piece than I am likely to write many other times; but, that's just the kind of reaction that I believe Here inspires.  And damnit if that isn't really beautiful and cool.

~Wednesday (today!), Elsewhere~

 

I have been writing at Comic Bastards for well over a year.  I stumbled ass-backwards into some Twitter account and then e-mailed Dustin, the dude who runs the site, a fucking wall of text because I really wanted to write about comics.  Throughout the day today I will have five or six reviews going up.  Be on the lookout in particular for my review of Island #6, which I was particularly happy with.  I mean, I got to write about furries.

Check out other reviews while you're there.  There are wildly divergent tastes and some damn good writers.

~Subscribe and Stuff~

 

The blog isn't going anywhere, and I have a lot of really great stuff lined up.  Subscribe via RSS or e-mail, and follow me on Twitter if either of those things scare you more than me tweeting about Age of Empires II.  Or just follow me anyway.  Whatevs.  It's all you.

~Tell Your Friends About Me~

 

Read that in a Chris Tucker voice.  From the end of Rush Hour.  You know, when he takes the gun from the guard and then knocks him out. 

Ok bye.

A Complicated World in Clean Lines: Gene Luen Yang's 'Boxers & Saints'

The spread of Christianity, to me, is a terribly interesting topic, particularly as far as the Jesuit missions go.  The Jesuits were famously well-learned, but are perhaps less well known as being the ultimate pragmatists.  Wherever they went, their strategy was to save as many souls as possible, and this often involved two things: tailoring Catholic teachings to concepts that would be easily grasped by the natives, and converting from the top of society, down (much to the chagrin of other orders, particularly the Franciscans).  The latter part of the strategy meant that their success at converting people would trickle down in any society where the government had control of its people. 

The former part of the strategy—tailoring teachings to already existing concepts in native societies—meant that almost everywhere the Jesuits went, one-of-a-kind mythologies began to spring up.  Fusions of Catholicism and more rudimentary theological elements from the native culture would sometimes go as far as becoming recognizable, theologically developed religions of their own (this happened in North America in a few places, perhaps the most recognizable being the Peyote Church, which developed much later). 

Another tangential element of the spread of Christianity was the religious reawakenings that happened in the places which were either confused or reacted negatively (usually a lot of both) to the circumstances of European arrival.  A prime example is the increase in depictions of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl’s return from the east right when Cortez showed up.  The Aztecs had absolutely no reference point for the arrival of strange, imposing foreigners from the east, and so they dipped back into and reaffirmed coincidentally salient aspects of their already existing mythology.

Enter Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints and its tale that takes place during the Boxer Rebellion.  The history of Christianity in China is uniquely long and interesting compared to many other places where it hasn’t done so well.  If you want to read more about it, I recommend googling The Chinese Rites Controversy and reading about the pretty incredible Matteo Ricci.  In any case, the tension between Christianity and the collateral European influence that it brings was at a fever pitch leading up to the Boxer Rebellion.  The Chinese government was almost non-existent during The Century of Humiliation, and Yang distills this large continent and complicated set of historical circumstances into the splintered desires and hopes of a handful of desperate young Chinese teenagers.

Gene Luen Yang is able to take very big, very interesting, but very complicated and important historical and theological elements and distill them into small, bite-sized, almost relatable pieces of his narrative.  We see Bao dip back into his rudimentary understanding of Chinese folklore through opera in order to reintegrate it into his nationalistic purposes.  Yang presents this simultaneously as something immature and wholly adult.  The cartoon depictions of famous cultural figures like The Monkey King, Guan Yu, and Qin Shi Huang look like things you’d normally see a kid staring at in the mirror in a much less violent, more languidly paced coming-of-age story.  Next thing you know, these macho-mythic projections are swinging swords, piercing flesh, and towering over fields of corpses.  Yang depicts this unsophisticated sort of mythologizing through his choice of a simple cartoon medium and his insistance in staying with that style through violent scenes we would normally never seen drawn with such joyful colors.

Additionally, Yang gives things a fair shake.  While he always stops short of lampooning the boys for believing that bowing to a bean garden and eating ashen paper will make them bulletproof, he at all times takes care to make the reader understand that this is what they really believed.  Born out of desperation or not, motivated entirely by a destitute government and a foreign invading force or not, this crude mythologizing was the result.  Importantly, he also doesn't limit himself to a brief dissection of the Boxer's beliefs.  He also takes time in Saints to put us in the shoes of That Kid in Sunday school.

  

 

Here we see Four-Girl asking about the Trinity, the Eucharist, and the Person of Christ, all of which are really wacky metaphysical things when you actually talk about them.  The teacher responds not with an explanation or an account of the Christian ontology that would help one understand just how God can be three things but those three things are not each other, (or how a cracker could also be part of a dude); no, the teacher just lets Four-Girl know what the Correct answer is.  Again, Yang is not lampooning his own faith, but he is at the very least doing the same kind of elbow-nudge we see with his depiction of the Boxer psuedo-faith.  And he achieves this by narratively and visually laying out aspects of the faith as simply as possible, so that the reader can't help but scratch their head a bit.

To me, this is the great thing about Boxers & Saints, and one I wish I saw more explicitly stated in earlier discussions of the work.  It is not just that Yang distills a complicated and interesting period in history into his own well-crafted fictional tale: it’s that the simplicity with which he depicts these big historical, anthropological, and theological concepts is in perfect harmony with the visual simplicity that drives the work.

Certainly it helps that Yang is very good at what he does independent of his being suited for this particular project.  Think in abstract for a moment about just how hard it is to pack a human emotion into a face drawn on a page.  Boxers & Saints is more or less defined by its ability to externalize the otherwise unseen emotions of its various protagonists.  With only as many clean, intensely deliberate lines as you can count on two hands, Yang cartoons characters who leave absolutely no mystery as to how they’re feeling.  More importantly, he juxtaposes these emotive characters often to the point that sometimes the most powerful imagery on a given page is a furrowed brow, as it represents the climax of an internal storm shown to the reader through facial expressions.

One image in particular, at the climax of the Saints half of his work, represents one of the biggest things Yang seems to have taken away from having researched and created this work.  Earlier, in Boxers, we see Bao and Mei-wen juxtaposed against a backdrop of the goddess of compassion, Guan Yin.  Other than being gorgeous, there is nothing really special about this depiction of Guan Yin, a goddess developed in Chinese Buddhism on the foundation of its original Buddhist depiction, Avolokiteshvara.  In Saints, there is a companion depiction of Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t have hundreds of arms, nor does he have eyes in his hands.  Vibiana has felt very much like an outsider her entire life, and has fallen more-or-less ass-backwards into becoming a Christian.  But in this moment, it’s very clear that she has her first and most important epiphany wherein she really identifies with this man’s teachings.  The borrowed elements from Guan Yin represent the true essence of this religious awakening: in a realm of familiar concepts, she has found a lens through which to view Jesus.  Through Guan Yin, through understanding his compassion through hers, she has found a way to appreciate what Jesus had to say.

In just a few pages, Yang is able to depict what must have been reality for millions of Chinese converts to Christianity.  Wielding the power of story by image, Yang demonstrates up until the very end of his story just how much you can say with a simple series of pictures executed well.

Hanhara's Grasp: Letting the World Tell the Story in 'From Under Mountains'

In his review of the first issue of From Under Mountains, Nick Philpott called it a “gorgeous tone poem of a comic.”  In three reviews since I haven’t really found a better term than “tone poem,” because I’m not sure there’s a better way to describe the overarching work that artist Sloane Leong is doing on the title.  Leong’s approach to this book came out of the gate strong in the first issue and it has carried through in all four.

Leong's flowing linework is a constant, but what stands out to even the least discerning reader is the color work and willingness to play with page layouts.  Still, it’s hard to talk about the colors in this title as if they’re on a spectrum with much else colorful on the stands.

Colors in many comics are just sort of... there.  Lately I’ve heard Michael Deforge talk about this or allude to this in a few places: if you’re creating a comic, you really ought to be asking why you’re adding the color.  Of course, the reason for many mainstream comics is the fact that typical superhero fare does better with its target audience when it’s colored: financial reasons are reasons nonetheless.  But, as a reader, in order to get the most out of your comic reading experience, you really ought to hitch your wagon to this idea that colors in comics should be worth your time.

What Leong does with colors on this title is not only quality work in and of itself: it is instrumental to the narrative.  Everything—panel layouts, lines, inks, colors, words, word placement—plays into the narrative structure of a comic.  Colors, even when they augment the narrative, often do so in small, practical ways.  But in From Under Mountains, colors are often carrying more narrative weight than the words themselves.  Rather than the colors doing small background work while the words push the narrative forward, I would argue that words serve an accompanying role to the slow burn of Leong’s issue-long color gradients.

One of the reasons that the role of color is allowed to shine through in such a feature role is because of Leong’s equal willingness to let panel layouts do the talking.  Many comics you read have panel layouts designed to do nothing terribly more than act as a container for (what the creators hope to be) an effective storytelling rhythm.  Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; in fact, when the creator has a mastery of rhythm, he can play his layouts pretty vanilla to great impact (see: Naoki Urasawa, Alan Moore).

Each of Leong’s experimental choices work well on their own.  What amplifies them greatly is that these choices often serve to represent the scene within the overarching color gradient for a particular issue.  One thing that Leong does here and there is have characters step off the side of the scene and take their panels with them.  The effect is a stair-like construction on the page, down to the right, which no doubt plays on the reader's perceptions of the page ending.  What makes it really work, though, is that it reveals the color of the scene behind it, giving the overall tone of the page itself a prominent place front and center where the story was once occuring.  You get a sense that in order to leave the page you’re reading, not only do you have to move on from that color gradient: the story does too, in a quite literal, visual sense.

Just what kinds of narrative roles do colors play?  The most noticeable one is the representation of times of day via the ambient sunlight, or simply the color of the sky.  Leong uses these colors to transition entire pages often, but also harnesses the sky as a theme within panels to do stepping transitions, just as is done with people.  Here Leong shows how a comic artist doesn’t just need a script to create story beats: the beats are the at the whim of how the story is presented visually, and out of thin air Leong often creates small rhythms that add a deceptive amount of structure to the story.  It is a mistake to think of a lot of these panels and color choices as mere ornamentation: stories happen across places and times, and rather than opting for straight captions, Leong moves the reader through the world as if they were within its boundaries.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite pages from the story so far, one of the penultimate pages from issue four.  Here, we see yet another example of color and panel layout working together to tell a story.

There is so much that goes unsaid in this image, so much foreshadowing, so much that is revealing about both of these individuals, and all because of the way Leong chooses to juxtapose one speaker as bigger than another.  The differing sizes of the speakers on the page really only works because of the way Leong broke up the panels which, by the way, also serves to let the foundational color of the page itself bleed through—a color which is only pierced by the oppressive red setting sun in the distance.

Tadao Tsuge's "Manhunt"

"We can form no wish, which has not a reference to society.” - David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature 2.2.5

Tadao Tsuge’s Trash Market is a simultaneously playful and depressing master class in wrestling with one’s own society through narrative art. These stories are Springsteen-esque in the readiness with which they juxtapose frivolity and the soul-crushing existential circumstances brought on by a lower-middle class life in tough times in a tough area. Despite the fact that Jersey sort of smells like a trash market as well, there are no Courtney Cox cameos in Tsuge's work, so I guess the similarities end somewhere. In any case, Trash Market was very well received, and Shea Hennum has already done justice to the overarching spectrum of Japanese life presented in Trash Market.  The story I am going to focus on is "Manhunt," a brief, strange, but effective meditation on the defining relationship between our identities and society.

The story centers on the cornerstone of Japanese society, a salaryman, this one by the name of Mr. Taguchi. Mr. Taguchi had been missing for some time, you see, and upon his return, all he seems to remember is loitering outside of a strip club and a burning desire to see a steam engine. As two reporters try to get the scoop on Mr. Taguchi’s disappearance, they continue to press him on his reasons for leaving. And the more they press him for concrete reasons—the more sensible, logical questions the two men ask him—the more Mr. Taguchi becomes alien to the scene.

From a rudimentary understanding of Japanese culture, it’s clear to see what’s going on here: a salaryman is such a vanilla, routine, automatic, ubiquitous part of culture in Japan that their disappearances are truly odd, newsworthy events. We can imagine such a thing being odd in smaller towns here in America, but even back when this story was created, such disappearances were probably a given in urban life on this side of the ocean.

But notice that Tsuge does not leave it at that. After an off-kilter introduction which is justified as a product of Mr. Taguchi’s shoddy memory, things begin to appear more normal in this story. Tsuge quickly makes things weird again after an inciting moment made up by the reporters dealing, mutually, with facts. Simply being asked why he disappeared is enough to put distance between Mr. Taguchi and the two reporters. Tsuge silhouettes them and veils them in Kirby dots leaving Taguchi alone, cast off by a simple request for reasons.

What makes a reason a good reason, generally speaking? Well, we could probably debate for several hundred years (and sort of have been!), so let’s just look at the particular case. Mr. Taguchi’s response to being asked why he left is, “honestly, there was no real reason. Suddenly I just really wanted to see a steam engine.” But he very clearly did have a reason, and he knows it because he just said it: he wanted to see a steam engine. Sure, maybe he had no reason for that and it was just a deep, weirdly powerful and specific impulse to get acquainted with the latest in not-actually-the-latest train technology. Yet he knows that to them—to the reporters and literally anyone else in society—just wanting to see a steam engine is not even a bad reason for walking out on his life:

It’s not a reason at all.

“Manhunt” occurs in a world much like ours in which people are strange but singular genetic and behavioral warps on the interconnected web of civilization. To put it another way, “no man is an island.” Yet, via Mr. Taguchi, Tsuge depicts just how odd it would be for a man to make himself one.

The Hume quote that I share above bears repeating: “We can have no wish, which has not a reference to society.” Starting with Rousseau, in an intellectual tradition that runs straight through Hume and has a big revival with John Dewey, (by way of Hegel, but let us not speak of Hegel), there is a thought that it might be mistaken to think of an individual as being the sum total of what they are without any reference to the society in which they exist. In fact, not only is it perhaps mistaken to think the primary, foundational unit is an individual; but, imagining a fully-formed individual without any meaningful ties to their society might be inconceivable (!!!). Rousseau thinks that once humans entered into an organized society, for reasons that are fun to talk about but far too long-winded for this post, there is no going back. There is No Exit, as it were. Society is there to stay, and every person born into society has the entirety of their values and passions molded as a result, no take-backsies.

Any time you talk about something that is inconceivable, things get really interesting and disappointing at the same time. You have reached the edge of something which we can wrap our heads around— THE conceptual limit, the end of our flat intellectual planet hive-mind thing. That’s really cool. But it also means the conversation will end on that vista. If you ask any enterprising philosopher sympathetic to this notion, "what would it be like to exist free of the chains of society?" you will receive a shoulder shrug.

What philosophers resist doing with their dialectic (perhaps not because it's impossible, but because they choose to toil elsewhere), Tsuge does with “Manhunt.” Shit, he does it in one panel:

Here is what you would be if you took a full shot at self-exile form the society that defines what you are: a goddamn ape! The ever-musing Ales Kot was recently pondering on twitter about whether humans are the only animal who feel guilt and shame. Well, I’m sure that discussion is going on somewhere, but the fact is even if we are not the only animals with something resembling a public shared value system, we are the only animals with THIS shared value system. Certainly if Fido has something resembling a standard to which he holds himself among his fellow dogs, he doesn’t have anything remotely similar to the very specific thought that abandoning your family to go see a fucking steam engine is wacked.

The monkey mask that Mr. Taguchi wears is not a mask at all. It is the shedding of a mask. It is a bare look at what hides in the shadows throughout his other lost, silhouetted depictions. The mask he wears is a human one, not in the cliché sense that we all put on a facade, but in the very real sense that our personal identities are sutured to the culture in which we exist just as the masks in “Manhunt” are sutured to the faces of men. Mr. Taguchi succeeds in losing his mask when he succeeds in finding no reason at all to step away from the very thing that defines him: life within society.  

To the reporters, he is at least a curious salaryman.  To the strippers, he is at least a real weirdo.  To the steam engine, Mr. Taguchi is nothing.

And we actually see the moments where things begin to unravel. After several hours of sitting at his work desk, festering in the lukewarm pot of his day job--a pot meant to simmer with other ingredients during daylight hours--Mr. Taguchi becomes paralyzed “like a puppet feeling his strings attached.” Here he spies the secret of the puppet show, and rather than going outside and having a smoke like the rest of us when we see it, he yanks at his strings and flounders through a handful of days as a hopeless marionette ronin clanking about the Japanese countryside.

At the end, the two reporters sit and wonder what will happen if he inevitably goes missing again. Of course, they’re mainly worried about losing their story, as any good, modern, immoral journalist would be thinking. But then one of them wonders much more specifically, “what’s there to keep him?” We of course know the answer: everything. Inherently, society itself should keep him, somehow, because the minute he is no longer kept, the minute he steps outside of its limits, he is no longer ‘him’ and ceases to be entirely. "Manhunt" is an ode to this existential tautology.

As Tsuge cuts to the last panel, one reporter lights a cigarette for the other, as he thanks his friend for the light, unspoken. Where Mr. Taguchi's reasons were obtuse, his mind impenetrable, even at times from his own internal gaze, a simple thank you readily passes without words between the two reporters, dancing across The Ties That Bind like a telegram.