The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2264: Mr. Natural #3, 1977

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Though he's considered the founder of the underground comix movement, I don't really enjoy R. Crumb's comics all that much. He's been rightly called out for his violent and misogynistic portrayals of women in his work, as well as his use of ethnic caricature, well into a time when he should have know that such things were not particularly acceptable.

Mr. Natural is a pretty OK character, an old Hippie trying to find the peace and cosmic tranquility promised by that generation. In today's issue, his quest for enlightenment causes him to be placed in an asylum, and that's actually the last we see of the titular hero. The next few pages are made up of slimy magazine editors trying to get the story on Mr. Natural and how this icon of the 60s ended up locked up in the 70s.

Some of the reading I did on Shamanism way back when points to the idea that, in tribal societies, the shaman often lives apart from the rest of the tribe, and evinces behaviours that we, in our spiritually-vacant scientific way, would label as schizophrenic. To this end, whenever I pass someone on the street who is obviously living in both our world and another one that only they can see, I tend to listen, just in case I glean a pearl of wisdom from them. We treat our extreme neuroatypical people like they're diseased, rather than touched by something that we cannot understand completely. These are the sorts of things I was thinking about while reading this comic. Mr. Natural is committed by his old friend Flaky Foont who, by the 70s, has moved on from enlightenment seeking and into the secular reactionary period of the late 70s and 1980s. The Hippie stuff didn't make its way back around until the 90s, when I was in high school.

This is, of course, not to say that when someone is suffering from a mental state that is dangerous to themselves and others that we shouldn't take some steps to keep everyone from harm. But perhaps we ought to be listening to what they're saying and not simply taking it as the ramblings of a diseased mind.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1659 - 1664: Playing Catch-Up

I honestly don't know why I've been having such trouble keeping up with my blog over the last little while. Being unemployed (or rather, partially employed) is difficult. I find I have little energy for much these days.

So, here's what I've been reading over the last little while:

A pretty diverse week, all things considered. Some really cool comics, though that last Marvel one was so very, very early 90s.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1256: The People's Comics, April 1976

As I've noted, I've been getting into undergrounds lately, and I picked this one up today at Purple Gorilla Comics, my go to place for things weird and wonderful.

I'm never quite sure about Robert Crumb. But I think that's partially the point. The inside of his head is a very strange place, but I think the insides of all of our heads are. Crumb just has the guts to share it with the rest of us.

Of course, sometimes, perhaps, the things in our heads should stay there.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 751: The Spirit: The New Adventures #5, July 1998

I'm going to make a confession that's a dodgy one to make: I'm not a huge fan of Will Eisner's work.

There. I said it.

Don't get me wrong. His draftsmanship is unquestionably amazing, and his dedication to the craft and cause of comics is beyond reproach. He's done more for the field than many ever will. But his stories just don't move me, I guess. It's an odd thing to say, considering there's so much emotion behind his various works. They're just not my cup of tea.

That said, what little of Paul Chadwick's work I've read I have always enjoyed, so today's comic was, for me, a mixed bag. The periodizing of the piece was a little uncomfortable occasionally, especially the overtly racist cultural attitudes, but I get that it makes the comic read more like something from the 30s or 40s than the 90s when it was published. And Chadwick's take on Eisner's particular aesthetic is pretty impressive (I said I wasn't a fan of Eisner, btw, not that I hadn't read him). In terms of crime comics, I'm fairly new to the genre. There's some in the collection, but they're in a vast minority, so I've little with which to compare today's comic. I think it comes down to differentiating between a crime comic and a mystery comic, in that, in a mystery comic, I want to have enough clues presented to me that I can solve the case along with the detective. A crime comic, on the other hand, does not present that evidence, and asks the reader to follow along through the story, rather than the mystery. It's a fine line, admittedly, but an important one. Today's comic was a crime comic, rather than a mystery.

Not much else to say, I'm afraid, though I feel like I ought to given the pedigree of today's piece. Perhaps I'll come to a fuller appreciation of Eisner, and of crime comics, as I progress. But I appreciate Chadwick. If nothing else, this comic makes me want to go out and read all of Concrete, and that's not a bad thing.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 1 - Morbus Gravis I, 1993

The long-promised weekly graphic novel finally makes its first appearance. It's taken a while, I admit, to figure out my time and inclination, but as I come up on 6 months of blogging my collection, I'm feeling more and more committed to the project, and so I'm going to start delving into all its nooks and crannies.

Serpieri is 100% my favourite artist that I have discovered in my reading of Heavy Metal Magazine. He draws women remarkably well (and men too, but Druuna is obviously his muse). In contrast to many comics artists, especially North American superhero artists, Serpieri seems to have a notion of the way that proportion plays a role in the human body. Yes, Druuna is quite buxom, but the size of her breasts is not disproportionate to the rest of her body. She is a large, solid woman. And this makes sense, given the milieu within which she has her adventures. This is a world of survival and chaos, and while intellect has to play a role in one's continued existence in such a world, so too does body. Druuna is built to survive her environment. And look good while doing it.

I did have a few concerns as I read this book, though. The story revolves around a decadent city in which the citizens are succumbing to a disease that turns them into vicious mutants. As far as I can tell, from this opening volume, the mutation seems to give every penises as well. This ranges from the almost human-looking altruistic mutants that try to help Druuna, and the bestial, canine-like tentacle beasts that attack the "normal" citizens. Coupled with this are the two fairly explicit scenes of rape that occur in the story. Druuna is forced into fellating a mugger, though she then leads this criminal and his cohort to her apartment where they are torn apart by her mutating lover. And later a woman is attacked by one of the most bestial of the mutants, and is raped and then eaten. (Please note, these scenes are not fully illustrated the way I've just described them. There's a lot of implied horror in this book.) I was uncomfortable with this aspect of the story, until just after the second incident. The very next panel depicts a number of "normal" citizens entranced by the spectacle of the woman being raped and eaten, treating it as entertainment, and claiming that the woman is enjoying it. It's at this point that one begins to wonder whether there is really much difference between the mutants and the normals. They all seem to be monstrous. Would it be reading too much into Serpieri's weird horror tale to claim it is a critique of the rape culture within which we currently exist? At certain moments during the story, Druuna uses her sexual whiles to further her goals. She also demonstrates a desire to have sex, to enjoy sex. But she demonstrates these characteristics in a world in which a virulent disease is turning normal citizens into tentacled, raping monsters. Serpieri's narrative is pointing to the fact that this disease, which is identified by its physical attributes, is very much the same as a virulent attitude that infects the minds of the non-mutated citizens. And that somehow, in the midst of this toxic environment, there is a woman who utilizes and celebrates her sexual nature in defiance of the culture within which she lives.

But maybe I'm wrong. I don't know much about Serpieri, nor have I read much about the Druuna stories. I'm going to keep this in mind as I read more of them though. The depictions of rape in the Druuna stories have always bothered me, but having read this initial tale, I begin to see them in a different light. What got to me was that Druuna is always depicted beautifully and erotically, even when these terrible things are happening to her. But perhaps that's a part of it too. We should react the way I have when we see something so horrible happening to someone, and if we can see that that someone looks the same in the bad situation as well as in a good situation, then we begin to see the person as a person, not an object. Druuna is beautiful when she makes love, and, sadly, is beautiful when she is attacked. Let me also note that she's a fully realized character as well. I've focussed mainly on the visual element of the character, but she's also a feisty, resourceful, brave adventurer in this strange world. We connect with her, her being the focal character, and this makes the attacks on her all the more difficult to take. In his depictions of her, Serpieri takes care to craft both her body and her mind in ways that will foster a reader connection. And having done so, we are deeply disturbed at the moments where this character is abused.

Morbus Gravis I is the only collection of the Druuna stories I own. I have some more in Heavy Metal, but that means that next week's graphic novel will not be a continuation of this line of thought or this series. Just FYI.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 120: Alien Fire #1, January 1987

Over the last week or so, I've tried to reconceive my project as something like mining. I know that there are valuable things to be unearthed, but they're hidden by lots of rock and dirt. I think today's comic is that little trace of gold that keeps me digging.

Now, I don't remember where I got this comic. It's old enough in the collection that I didn't input purchase information when I catalogued it. It's from Kitchen Sink Press, which gives it a pretty good pedigree to begin with, but pedigree is not always a sign of a well-constructed comic. I also am pretty sure I've never read this one before, which means it probably came to me in a large pile of comics and was lost in the shuffle.

I'm glad to have re-discovered it, then.

I'm not a huge science fiction fan these days. I used to adore author Robert Sawyer, but then I read some of his non-fiction, essays and addresses and such, and he came across as being every bit as myopic from a rational viewpoint as many religious pundits are from their viewpoints. It wasn't something I could really accept, and I stopped reading his books. So Alien Fire is really some of the first hard sci-fi I've looked at in years. And it's really good. Anthony Smith and Eric Vincent do a wonderful job of building a world, of elaborating different sentient points of view, even to the point of really well-demonstrating some alien points of view. They also manage to show the human point of view as alien, which is a nice touch in interplanetary science fiction, and one that really helps with a supposed verisimilitude in storytelling about something that we don't have a reality of yet.

The art is gorgeous, filled with detail. We're treated to a desolate 21st century Earth, ship-to-ship space combat, glimpses of the rich and beautiful at an interstellar port, and the realities of maintaining an interplanetary vessel in the depths of late, late, interplanetary capitalism. Vincent also manages to convey very convincingly emotions in non-humans through depictions of body language and facial (and sometimes tentacle) expression. I truly look forward to seeing where the rest of the story goes, if I can manage to track it down.

Moreover, the focal human character who is an archivist on board The Wooden Bird is a collector. Earth popular culture ephemera is a going concern outside of the solar system, so the story is not only a good hard science fiction piece, but also a metatextual celebration of the very form the story is being told within. Also, it makes me feel hopeful that my own collection might one day be valued as cultural artefact. Though maybe that's a bit narcissistic for a Wednesday morning.

I'm hoping to be able to find the rest of Alien Fire some time in the future, but until then, we'll be mining further into the various strata of the collection. See you tomorrow. Bring your headlamps!

(Edit: I lost numbering here. Was originally published as Day 121.)