The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1460: The Complete Alice in Wonderland #4, 2010

And so ends year 4!

A bit of a rocky finish, and I will post something to do with the comics I read during my break from blogging, but I'm back and feeling positive, so let's just continue, shall we?

A beautiful series. Really, really beautiful. Ms. Awano injects life into every little bit of Wonderland and Lookingglassland, and the team of Moore and Reppion provide a novel retelling of the old story. I think I'd like to have seen a bit more playing with form - some of the most memorable bits of Alice are when the text gets caught up in the chaos of the story. Think of how the mouse's tale is told as a tail in the original. The technical layout of the story was really very straightforward, where I'd think that Alice's fantasy lands would provide an excellent playground for some experimental layouts.

That said, chaos in the gutters (so to speak) might have been too much, tipping the story from that delicate balance of comprehensible and random straight into the chaos it celebrates.

And that's it for 10% of the collection. Tomorrow, to start year 5, I'll be getting back to the original run of Doom Patrol.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1459: The Complete Alice in Wonderland #3, 2010

I've never been as big a fan of Looking Glass as I am of the first book. I think this might be because Looking Glass reads to me like it was written as a book, rather than told as a story. There's far more structure to this tale than the last, made plain by the overt references to chess. There's a nice conceit in this comic that whenever Alice moves from square to square, it's as if she's entering yet another looking-glass. She vanishes from one setting and appears at another. Sometimes it's off-putting for her, sometimes not.

I also hadn't realized just how much poetry/song is in this book. More, I think, than the last. And while I appreciate the nonsense rhymes, I don't always find it so interesting to read panels of someone reciting them.

Erica Awano's art is still brilliant. She evokes a weird realness to this dream landscape, which, to be honest, makes the comic slightly unsettling. The events and characters in the narrative simply cannot happen in reality, but the realism of Ms. Awano's backgrounds seems to fly in the face of that idea. It's a nice effect, though, again, I think it was of more use in the more Discordian Wonderland than the mathematically-precise Looking Glass.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1458: The Complete Alice in Wonderland #2 2009

Before I get going on today's comic, I wanted to say something. I've started writing again due to a few factors. I'm starting to realize how much I need structure in my life, and there's not a lot right now, so this feels like a good way. I've also glanced back at a few old posts, and I was actually saying some neat things (I think) about the comics I read, so I'd like to start doing that again. But mostly, it's because a little while back I received an email, quite out of the blue, from a former student. He'd kept up with the blog occasionally, and saw that I was having a difficult time lately, so he reached out to let me know the difference I'd made for him with regard to literature, and to let me know he was thinking of me. I have a lot of trouble holding onto the feeling of being valued. This helped.

On to today's comic.

What is it about this story that fascinates us so? I have so many different versions: books, comics, films, action figures. But there are also musicals, and songs, and, unsurprisingly, porn, and the story itself has become a metaphoric touchstone for all things weird and revelatory. Remember Neo's instructions to "Follow the White Rabbit?" The very idea of falling down a rabbit hole has become an idiom in Western culture. And we keep retelling it, keep finding new ways to tell this old story. It is an old story. We should never imagine that Alice was the first person to find themselves in a strange land after an encounter with a strange animal (or mushroom, perhaps?). But she is the first, I think, to really grapple with the idea in a modern, and by this I mean popular and intelligent, way. And I think this is why the story has such wonderful longevity and adaptivity.

As a parent, I was delighted when I took my son to see Monsters, Inc. While shiny and fast and colourful (which I also enjoyed), it was also savvy enough to know that it wasn't just kids that were going to be consuming this. The writers managed to add enough humour for the adults that the torture of taking a toddler to the movies was assuaged somewhat.

If you haven't done it, you don't know. You just don't know.

One way that I consider myths of all stripes is that they're stories meant to remind us of a time when the world seemed more magical. People could perform miracles, deities actually spoke to humans, and things tended to connect more symbolically. This sounds to me rather like the experience of childhood. Of wonder, perhaps. But rather than a dry bit of epic poetry about a trip to Hades, or of some poor waif being molested by Zeus dressed up as an animal, we're given a story for children that reminds adults of how disturbing and magical the world used to seem. Lewis Carroll does this effortlessly in Alice. He creates mystery for us. A hookah-smoking caterpillar? A Cheshire Cat that leaves behind its smile? What does it mean? It's too well-ordered, in its own chaotic way, to be meaningless? Is it just a dream story for children, or is it saying something more about who we are and how we think? People have been enthralled by this tale since it was published. My own impression is that it taps into something very deep in our imaginations, something that has forgotten the uncanniness of childhood. It is a time of guessed-at connections between events. Things seem to have influence upon one another, but you haven't quite figured out the system yet. Once you do, life loses its sheen of surreality, and settles into reality.

Well, that's what it does for me, anyway.

Onward...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1457: The Complete Alice in Wonderland #1, 2009

For the last four days of Year Four, I'll be back to blogging with this lovely rendition of Lewis Carroll's masterpiece. I've decided it's time I start blogging again. The routine is good for my health, and I miss writing about these wondrous and wacky comics. At some point I'll post a list of what I've read during my break, for the completists out there!

Year Four will kick off with a return to The Doom Patrol, both because I kicked off this year with them, and because their new television series is, for at least one episode, a fucking triumph. But there certainly never could have been a Doom Patrol of any kind without this weird little tale of a child's hallucinatory adventure through dreams.

Of course, the first thing I noticed is that Alice's dress is blue. When I taught the book at the U of C, I always asked the class what colour Alice's dress was. Invariably, the answer was blue. There is, however, no mention of colour anywhere in the original text. Blue, I'm afraid, comes from the Disneyfication of our society. I've no doubt that blue was a popular colour for little girls of the time, but surely there were others.

Anyway, that aside, this is a lovely adaptation, just different enough from previous iterations that it really does add something to the story. In a lot of ways, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland really is an anime/manga waiting to happen. The non-sequiturs, randomly talking animals, sudden and fantastic shifts in perspective (I'm looking at you, Kill La Kill) - all hallmarks of manga. Érica  Awano's manga-esque (she's Japanese-Brazilian, so her art is a cool hybrid) style brings to Alice a kinetic energy that the book actually sort of lacks. Rather than a tale told lazily while floating down a river (as the original was composed), this is a sitting on Saturday morning with a bowl of sugary cereal watching cartoons version. And it's beautiful.

Alice holds a dear place in my heart. The first time I ever really delved into literature the way that is not second nature to me was in an OAC English Literature course in my last year of high school. I wrote a paper contrasting Alice and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as journeys into the psyche. A bit obvious, I know, but not bad for a 17-year old to pull off. But Alice has also stuck with me for its embrace of chaos, of weirdness, of the idea that truth doesn't only lie in cold, hard facts, but in the vast, wild ranges of the imagination too. Which, really, is also a nice lead in to the Doom Patrol.

More to come...