Nuts and Peas

In THE CLIFF, Book 3: Murder in Varanasi there will be some characters who, although new, may appear familiar.  This is, of course, a total coincidence.  The first new character is already dead by the time we meet him--Carlos Brown, millionaire mastermind murdered by a mystery assailant in a fleabag hotel in Varanasi...

Carlos Brown's sad fate from "Varanasi: A Crime Story"

(first published by Ambient Zero in Fear Itself #6 in 2003 and later reprinted

by Editions TRIP in Fear Itself: Matthew Brown's Comix Compendium

1988-2004 in 2011)

From a promotional brochure made in 2002

In Book 3 we learn that Carlos Brown became a millionaire by founding the "Wishy Washy Detergent" empire with his brother-in-law (to be pictured in the next post,) Linux Fan Belt.

Wishy Washy Detergent -

"What Immortal Hand or Eye..."





The Sleep of Reason

Francisco Goya, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"

1799

Partridge Bark, Mutt Blue and Torvek

Rotinski asleep on the Inner River -

from THE CLIFF Books1&2,

2012

Of Stolen Swords and Feet

In a previous post I talked about "swipes"--which is when you're ripping off another comic book, either the drawing or the words or both, and you don't realize it.  However, there is also the intentional "borrow," or nod of the hat, or homage... and I'm going to talk about two of my own, to comic book author/artists who particularly inspired me... Frank Miller and Dave Sim.



from Ronin Book 5, pg.18-19, 1984

by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley

As I've mentioned before, Frank Miller's Ronin hit me like a ton of bricks when I first saw it (and fell in love with it) on the shelf of the Silver Snail comic book store in Toronto at the age of 11.  Miller had previously shown he was great by reinventing the Marvel superhero Daredevil as a gritty noir drama with a) lots of ninjas, b) sexy chicks, and c) lots of violence.  The drawings had been great, but still well within the Jack Kirby/Will Eisner lineage of most North American superhero comics.

The big one... Daredevil #181, where

Frank Miller allowed Daredevil/Matt

Murdock's love interest Elektra the

Assassin to get skewered on

her own Japanese "sai" weapon

However, with Ronin he was inking his own work for the first time (Klaus Janson had been inking Daredevil beautifully with thick-brushed photographic panache) and I read Frank saying years later that he wasn't sure how to ink his own work. So he was experimenting.  And I responded really well to that experimentation. 

As Frank Miller's guides on his first own completely self-created, written, pencilled and inked comic book, Ronin, he was adopting two non-North American models... 1. Jean "Moebius" Giraud from France... who adapted the "clear-line" style to science fiction...

Moebius, "Rock City"

Jodorowsky and Moebius, "The Incal"

...and 2., Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub from Japan.  This manga featured long balletic fight sequences with lots of expressive wild crosshatching and very few words, both of which were highly unusual for North American comic books at the time...



Koike and Kojima's

Lone Wolf and Cub

So, the essential ingredients for Ronin were dystopian science fiction (via Moebius) and cynical samurai drama (via Koike and Kojima.)  Of course Frank Miller was already a genius, so it's not like he was really ripping these people off.  He was allowing their language and graphic approach to free him up. 

In addition he left his black and white line work, with its exquisite shakiness and crosshatching, open enough for his wife, Lynn Varley, to paint the glorious colours.  (This was not much done at the time, either.)  These "poetry of violence" action sequences were so dramatic that I was often left breathless after reading them.  So, my own homage to Frank Miller's "poetic violence" a-la-Ronin (with tongue only partly in cheek) is found below...

The Penguinistas and Sheriff Raymont Raymont's posse

prepare to battle it out for control of Nexus Island

& The Equivocal Smattering of Miscellaneous

Territories, Etc., from THE CLIFF-Book Two,

"The Inner River", 2012



And "nod' number two is towards the feet... the feet of Sheriff Raymont Raymont of Nexus Island and the Equivocal Smattering of Miscellaneous Territories, to be exact...

Sherrif Raymont Raymont of Nexus Island and

the Equivocal Smattering of Miscellaneous

Territories, Etc. dives under

the mask of the largest Penguinista

to ensure the continuance of law

and order, from THE CLIFF-Book Two,

Do the Sheriff's feet look familiar?  They should, to anyone who ever read Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark.

Cerebus sits pensively in the rain,

courtesy of Dave Sim and Gerhard

The above image is from the cover of Cerebus # 99/100, the only issue which contained two full- length stories under one cover.  It was also the only issue to print one of my letters--which read, "Dear Dave, Imagine a particularly stimulating episode of Family Ties where Alex has fled to the moon with Kruschev's frontal lobes."  Not only did Dave Sim publish my letter, his response was "Exactly.  And so...?"

(I could have remembered the letter a bit wrongly... I gave away that issue of Cerebus and many other priceless comics that were in the same box.  But that's another story.)

Furthermore, when I mailed Dave my first self-published effort at the age of 18, Entropy (1990), he sent me a cheque for ten dollars and an encouraging note.  He was a staunch advocate of self-publishing and hated the idea of editors.  Even before the Internet he made his comic book a soapbox for expressing his opinions and interacting with fans in addition to regularly delivering the content everybody came for.

Cerebus was the first comic I ever saw to feature such elegant, black-and-white linework, sometimes stencilled lettering, often with no panel borders, also a wide range of photo-realistic to extreme-cartoony characters interacting with each other on the same page, as well as wide social and political satire mixed with physical gags and nods to other comic books; and last but not least, long story-arcs where you really got to know and love the characters.

I absorbed the drawings but never tried so much to copy them.  It was Dave Sim's writing and sequencing that indelibly effected me.

Oh well, that's it for now.  Does all this stuff about comic books really matter?  Does the Sistine Chapel ceiling really matter?

“What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists?  In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.”                                  

                                                                      - Woody Allen





"The Inner River", 2012



Two Maxims to Live By

Your life has a porpoise.

Everything happens for a raisin.

The Most Uncompromising Artist I Know

Here are two videos I recently made of the most uncompromising artist I know, Ezra Azmon, playing violin on the streets of Toronto.

(The sound and image quality are not perfect; but the attempt is to capture this sharing of Bach in the midst of urban 21st century life...)

Ezra Azmon, July 24, 2012

Toronto, evening

Ezra Azmon, July 26, 2012

Toronto, afternoon

Confounding Images

Comics are a kind language; I know for sure that some people just don't "get" them.  Like ballet, or poetry, if you didn't grow up reading comics it can be pretty hard to pick one up and get anything out of it when you're "grown up."
This is even true across cultures... my wife, who grew up reading Japanese manga-style comic books, doesn't enjoy North American-style comic books.

Charlie Brown, from Charles Schulz's "Peanuts...

what I grew up with

Conan the Detective, by Gosho Aoyama...
what my wife grew up with.

(As to the amazing potential of the visual language of comic books, Scott McLoud said it all and more in Understanding Comics, and so did Will Eisner in Comics & Sequential Art: Principles & Practice of the World's Most Popular Art Form!)

At any rate I was fortunately exposed to great comics from a young age, mostly via a comic-geek high school student of my father's who gave us stacks of dog-eared and yellowing Archie, Dennis the Menace and Silver-age Marvel Comics reprints like Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, X-Men and also Superman. 

There was my dad's old stack of MAD Magazine from the late 1950's to the early 60's.  I especially loved the spoofs in them where it looked like Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Nancy, Bumstead, Superman and other familiar comic strip heroes were doing and saying things they weren't supposed to.

But I still had to figure the language of comics out for myself; and I spent many hours immersed in these fascinating pictures and stories.  Two particular images I remember now were particularly confounding.  I just never "got" them until much, much later...

From the Star Wars movie adaptation comic book, 1978,

drawn by Howard Chaykin and Steve Leialoha

When I was six years old I could not make any sense of the above drawing of Princess Leia.  Was it one face, or two faces?  The reason being that one half of her face was pink and the other was blue!  I found it very disturbing. 

Fortunately at that age I didn't have to confront Picasso's Cubism...

... which by now has been sequed into comix language by geniuses such as Art Spiegelman.

But the comics panel below, which I encountered when I was eleven, really bothered me...

Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, RONIN, Book 3,

1983

I first saw Frank Miller's reimagination of Daredevil at the corner store in the early 1980's, but with Ronin he galloped over the traces and challenged everything possible about what North American mainstream comics could be.  For me Ronin  was, and still is Frank Miller and North American comics' most exciting masterpiece.

What bothered me about the panel above though at the age of eleven was the waiter carrying the tray with the drinks in the middle of the panel, on the left-hand side.  Look at his chest!  It goes in a straight line down from his collar.  That was not how chests were supposed to look...  and the rest of him was weirdly squared-off, like the pixellated computer game graphics at that time... 

Space Invaders, the first and last video

game I was ever good at

I just could not wrap my head around what had gotten into Frank Miller when he drew that waiter who looked like a cardboard cutout.  Did Frank get lazy?  But if so, why did the rest of the comic look so awesome?

Of course now I realize that he was experimenting with stylization; borrowing the flattening and patterning techniques of say, Henri Matisse...

or more likely, Matsushika Hokusai...

It was a good challenge to my assumptions that these artists experimented with the graphic conventions of comic books.  I'm glad they were restless, and I'm glad I was disturbed.  We're all the richer for it. 

Here's to confounding images!

____________________________

On a related note about the potential of comics to communicate in their unique words/graphics combo, here is an article about using comics to teach doctors, shared with me by my friend Janet Glasspool!

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1231183--comic-books-have-something-to-teach-future-doctors

Comic Books and Freedom

Are comic books about freedom?

For some writers and artists they are.

Above is the final scene from comics genius Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark #50.  His first "graphic novel" or extended novelistic storyline, "High Society" ends with the revelation that the narrator has been writing his triumphant political epic on a prison wall the whole time. 

Liberty.

This scene, so sad and poignant at the end of an epic that was often farcical, still leaves me teary-eyed.

The below story by French comics legend Moebius is also a mindblowing ode to freedom...

I first read this story when I was 13 or 14 and it was like a puzzle-- challenging me to understand the prisoner's "double evasion."  First he magically and calmly levitates, thereby refuting all the premises of Western science.  Then the ogre guard shoots him, and he dies... but in so doing he transcends the tyranny of his oppressor, because he surpasses the material world and corporeality itself! 

What a game-changer!

But there is also the freedom of  Robert Crumb, who gloriously gave full expression to every lustful impulse society would have him repress...

I found his comix on the bottom shelf of Pages Bookstore on Queen St. West, in Toronto, at the tender young age of twelve... along with Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly's RAW Magazine, Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead, Vaughan Bode's sexy hallucinations and Chester Brown's Yummy Fur.

RAW Magazine

Zippy the Pinhead

One of Vaughn Bode's scrumptious

and dangerous science fiction vixens

Chester Brown's "Yummy Fur"

These comics were about freedom from social convention, freedom from making sense and freedom from consensus reality itself!  In a more serious vein, they acknowledged the power of comics to channel the unconscious and assault conventional thought structures.

I challenged myself to be as courageous and unrestrained in taking dictation from my own subconscious.

Somebody who looks a lot like me literally "opening his mind" from

THE CLIFF Book One: "My Helicopter"  (Prologue: The Dream of the Elephant and the Mouse)--soon to be released!!