CEREBUS the ARDVARK Volume 1.

"Mmm. he's short. And he looks sort of furry and muscular and really cute!"
"Cute? Let me see--I want to see! ...Yuk! He isn't cute--he's gruesome. ...He's just standing there -- why is he just standing there? He's sort of swaying -- why is he sort of..."
"AWWWWWW."
"Faw down go boom."
"Hmm. Perhaps he is not all that gruesome..."

Having finished it, I'm actually surprised how much I really likes this book. Surprised because for much of the time I was reading it I wanted to be done with a dialogue balloon as soon as I started it. Cerebus--a stocky crude barbarian aardvark largely inspired by Conan--was definitely a wordy read. Reading the first volume felt a lot like sitting down and reading 3 years worth of archives of a web-comic. But the fuzzy gray guy really has a way of worming his way into your affections and growing on you without you noticeing until it's too late. Indeed, "endearing" would probably be the last word you would use to describe him after reading the first issue through, but by the end of the first volume that adjective pretty much becomes his main function.

Despite Cerebus's flaws as an apparent jackass with no principles, his  redeeming rugged ardvarkian exterior ends up really working for him once you see enough of it.
Like Wolverine, only not as sweet and tender.

By the end of the first volume a strong flavor is already twisted into the back of your consciousness that he is somehow, not actually that jackass he seems to be. Something that anyone with practical intelligence or girl parts in series tends to pick up on upon meeting him. I think the rest of the series will involve some questions and answers and self discovery in that department, as 'Cerebus an earth pig born' seems quite oblivious, and or apathetic, to his nature of (ironically) integrity in the face of the hair-pulling state of the status-quo in the society around him.

Though it seems like injustice and just annoying, harsh reality at first glance, when you look at the track record of his "adventures", he continues to get swept up by other people's plots and problems, and idiocy so much, that it seems like Cerebus is unconsciously bringing it upon himself. It's the seed of total alienation combined with the very very buried seed of need to be acknowledged and have human contact. But that's all covered up by lots of booze, scars, and sarcasm.

He talks a lot about chopping the heads off of characters that, as the reader who has to put up with them as well, you'd really like him to chop the heads off--of but he almost always ends up hanging around with them and complaining mentally instead. After all, where else does Cerebus have to go and what else does he have to do but party in the tavern? Methinks there is a strong possibility that Cerebus's reincarnation was Mrs. Dalloway, and Mrs. Dalloway's is Dexter. Ironically at a dinner party Cerebus would kill Clarissa, causing Dexter to kill Cerebus, very quickly.

There are however some major problems in this series --the pacing and the plotting (clarity). It's too wordy! (combined with the colloquialisms and some characters that literally say the same thing 3 times in a sentence its just too much). There is a certain extent to which this is a combination of an excessive reliance on play by play account of things like military speak, as well as verbosity of character for the sake of the writing process--then there's also that key element of making you want to rip the heads off of everyone around Cerebus as much as Cerebus himself does. It's a procedural, episodic comic that relies on a deeply rooted mythology that I feel in the first volume is way too broad and uncommitted to (eg. characters will be brought back and instances referred to but you have no idea who any of their names are and which cities and locations differ from others. making the connections would involve a lot of painstaking backtracking research which isn't worth it because there's usually no necessary plot point made out of the reference).
This map helps.

I can easily see this as the growth of the story and development of the character from the initial seemingly random excersize the idea was, but that's what's kind of annoying. The aardvark thing actually does start to make sense. The actual animal manages to be totally adorable and hideous at the same time.

It needs a re-write and then it could be totally wonderful and amazing but the material between the spaces just isn't there right now in a really solid delivered form ...much like Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere, but that's a different blog post.  Perhaps I in general think of comics (and all narrative mediums for that matter) too much like "literary texts" ...like novels, and hold them to the same esteem and creative process when the production expectations and process is totally different.

I don't totally know why, but I still love Cerebus.

PLANETARY V.1 & the Impossible Archaeologists

PLANETARY- (note: I'm taking this vol. as a stand alone with no prior knowledge or background) Okay: so this is probably my snobby-academic archaeology background--and throwing around the term archaeological-[superhero] with no prime, rooted passion or dirt-relevance pisses me off--but for someone who's been obsessed with the impossible and even just the word 'archaeology' since 1rst grade, this little book tag-lined "Archaeologists of the Impossible" just didn't do much in the way of delivery.

Sorry Warren Ellis... they're not archaeologists! and that's an easy thing to stretch with romanticism and the theoretical, but this stretch is just a bit too far. They're investigators, private investigators (of crazy monster things--like Scooby-Doo meets the Watchmen meets B movie noir) BIG difference from archaeology in a basic sense (...but we all know archaeology is cooler).

Now, when you take the whole series under the pretenses of...

"The idea of the series is to create a concise world in which archetypes of superheroes, pulp fiction heroes, science fiction heroes, and characters from just about every possible mass media format, live in one large universe while the Planetary team investigates them and ties together the ends." (-'Planetary' wiki)

...Well then, I'm sure that might be an entirely different story. And if I hadn't read Alan Moore's intro. that speaks of this pretense itself, I would have missed out on the story completely.

But don't you think a story should do that on it's own accord? Even just the first volume? Even just the first issue? Though it seemed really promising at first, without that Intro.'s background I would have put it down before it got to "the point" (if there was one in vol. 1).

Interesting concept and whatnot... isn't exactly communicated by the work alone after however many single issues made up the volume itself. Though I suppose comics work much off of reputation and word of mouth, ie. the first vol. of the Runaways was good to okay and now I'm having fan-person issues NOT getting sucked back into it on an hourly basis.

Point, this is what most other people seem to think about Planetary:

"I missed the sneak peek of this series in the previously released Planetary Preview, so this was my first official exposure to the “archaeologists of the impossible” and I was down from the minute Jakita Wagner walked through the door of that diner with the dog urine flavored coffee. In one single issue the entire thing is laid out for you---the fantastic characters, the awe-inspiring visuals, the central mysteries that will ultimately be revealed, and the ideology that will always push the narrative forward. Strange worlds make for strange stories, and what the hell is greater than that? Also worth mention is the first appearance of one Doc Brass, still awake after fifty years for the entire world’s sake, and the explanation of how the Snowflake actually worked. "

It took me many readings of Kurt Busiek's Astro City before I was able to get a hang of the theme and find the city itself as the protagonist--much like here in Planetary, where I think the flavor of the 'mysteries' take over the characterization of the story. I really did like Planetary at first and in theory, but it felt like after pages and pages the "set-up" that seemed like it was leading somewhere at first just got eaten by the show's flare. The larger metaphorical concepts that put EVERYTHING on the table, meshing tons of very different conceptual worlds (each with their own brain-frameworks and distinct metaphors themselves), are fine--difficult for me to digest, but I'm sure some people love to have it all right there. HOWEVER, when they're not grounded in base character development and/or focused individual plotting there's a problem. The reader can get so removed, that they have to 'survive' off of sentiment for those bottle-rockets that the conceptual side of the book is evoking, with no backbone of it's own but the presentation itself. The reader thus has to make way too much of an effort to hook themselves.


The single overarching quasi "multi-verse" "quantum computer" theme (that sounds cool but was way too oversimplified to feel like it might sound) that coursed through the book as the obvious generator of ALL of the "mysteries" seemed too self-conscious and dry while being presented as imperative and grandiose.

It, the big glowy "Snowflake" (with infinite individual UNIVERSES spinning around inside of it that were pictured as little EARTHS (that looked kind of cheesey)), was supposed to be dramatic or at least intense--


...all i could think about was the Rainbow Fish from that children's book.



















I felt the same here with PLANETARY as Watchmen made me feel (i.e. ...meh). Only Watchmen had the excuse that the coldwar world was totally outdated, and appreciating it as a youngin now becomes an objective part of the experience.

PLANETARY did what Watchmen did, in a broad sense, that turned me off. The entire story arc was covered with the goopy application of a (quasi-scientific) world-view, rigid and a bit too ultimate, which in the process boxed the characters into a pre-determined theoretical 'message'--restricting them from naturally springing forth and blossoming into independent, sentient beings by default. They were restricted from naturally having infinite dimensions themselves, and thus really having space to become a part of the reader on an intimate level or to develop on their own terms.

It's almost like the feeling you'd get reading an 18th or 19th century novel by a christian sympathizer who's using most of the subtleties of the text to project. Not a bad thing, but a product of subjectivity that's too confined to deliberateness while being written (I'm hyper conscious of that mistake, because it's an easy one to get stuck in when you don't think the status is so quo). In 'Planetary v.1.' The big bad imperative point is kind of just 'meh', or missing, and the characters that revolve around it lack strong enough foundations or exposition to carry the story as the focal point (that's where Watchmen did a much better job).


...Kinda took all of the mystery out of it?

This is the multiverse! Woh, shiney! (or boring?)
What is it? Does Ellis just not have a good sense for drama and human subtlety but is pretty great at everything else? Was that an ignorant statement because I'm not familiar with his other work or where Planetary goes? Maybe it was the story that he was boxed into? Somehow I don't really think so. So maybe he just takes a lot of preliminary time to warm up.

I'm trying, but nothing ever felt imperative for me. Except when the Japanese extremist decided everyone needed to eat dead rotting monster flesh on his gun toating order. I was definitely feeling for his bespeckled side-kick then (who--yay!--stood up to him!). Then the main characters came back and it fell flat again.

But, I really did like the Artemis crew, especially William Leather (well constructed character there, especially visually). And the hot Nazi physicist (until you realize shes probably a hot nazi, bleh). Also the fact of who the story was ended with holds promise in the larger arc to me. I can't deal with these pulpy 1-dimensional guys though. Also with the non-character-imperative plot drives. Its a thing of mine.

Tomb Raider in all of her Bond-mentality glory was infinitely more identifiable and multidimensional than this leather-dipped chick. She bopped back and forth between somehow looking like the reproducable side of every female action hero I've ever seen and giving off the impression that she was the result of cheap casting of an overly made-up/hackneyed "kick-butt-woman" stand in, the kind that usually appears in soft-core porn or formulaic string budget horror films. (And yeah, it's not lost on me that of course almost all of the girls ever cast as stand-in Lara Crofts for the superficial fan-boys were just what I'm describing Jakita as here).

The costumes side of the characters didn't work for me either... (like no-ones going to look twice at a guy dressed totally in white with white hair walking around with a tall skin-tight red-fringed woman dressed totally in black with black hair.) Ellis was mashing relatively realistic, dirty edged attitudes into a very candy-eyed world and wardrobes and (at least in the first vol.) he never found a middle ground to harmonize that discord. Everyone was too cagey and self-consciously cool.

Except for the diner-waitress, who i think was the best character in the whole thing, but she was an extra.

I liked the deserted monster island metaphor for that period of noir but the way it was inserted in the story didn't work for me...maybe that one was the art. But I just think with what they were trying to do it needed to be done either satirically and in a formulaic story of the month manor, or much more character based and real. It was attempting both and ended up not delivering either successfully.


I know, Warren Ellis is supposed to be this kick-ass legitimized script-writer and how am putting that down, for example, next to Tomb Raider comics (well duh, archaeology). But is that just because those Tomb Raider comics are serialized or is it something more? Because they aren't trying to be anything than they aren't, can't they actually be more successful and go deeper? Like Xena?

Okay, I'm sure as it goes along it probably gets much more concise and worthwhile. But the problem is, this alone didn't make me want to continue: there weren't 'hints' in the writing of things to care about (without trying) in the characters or plot line to come, or of depth and heartstrings and meaning to be teased out. The two main characters (Elija Snow & Jakita Wagner) didn't seem to have any chemistry to speak of, and if you give the writer the benefit of the doubt this could be intentional and a great source of exposition later on, but again, no hints, subtleties, or hooks--and it's the whole 1rst volume.

Me thinks the setup(&"branding")'s not so good for the general theme and for the concepts to come. If it wasn't for the reputation and "potential" I wouldn't even try to give the doubt-benefits there, but I guess it's just not my bag of tea. Who knows, maybe there's some magic writing thing that happens later that I'd get hooked on and if I read up to vol. 3 it'll be my new favorite thing. I respect Brian K. Vaughan more than any other writer out there and I feel the exact same way about Ex Machina. I also used to feel that way about sushi.

R. CRUMB: Documentary & His Work

Robert Crumb--“considered the father of underground comics”-- is a difficult man to comment on, he operates from the inside-out on such a large basis, from so practical a point-of-view, that his work and personality both demand to be left alone. Finding their own ways to operated, they’re gold mines for psychotherapy that are better off never being psychoanalyzed. His cards are laid out on the table, but not in consciously thought out duress—he’s anything but full-of-shit, but not necessarily on purpose--and his presence demands to be taken as it is—whether it’s gimpy and painful or not, which is exactly how his artwork functions as well: it would rather be like that than attempt to be something it’s not.





Consequently Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary on R. Crumb and his family (Crumb) is relevant in a way that’s almost entirely regardless of his presence and impact on cartoons, graphic novels, and visual-narrative as a whole. What it says, it says on a sensitive human level that has nothing to do with his celebrity. It’s like the only really important role his fame plays is getting the film crew to his door in the first place (though he already knew the director from elsewhere--I was surprised to see that David Lynch produced this).


Indeed, I would have to go look up some dissected history of any of the fore-mentioned mediums to be able to tell you exactly what the impact he had was in the first place. But it's easy to know from a quick overview of his work and placement of its context that he did have some huge kind of lasting and important role in getting those mediums to the place their in now. That impact probably ranges from presentation to illustrative style and subject matter, and its core has to be in the point-of-view that lies behind the way Crumb delivers his narrative images as serious, realistic, and accurate representations of feelings and observations in our social reality, with no self-consciousness about the medium or content whatsoever.



He made his comics un-apologetically because he wasn't thinking of them as anything less than necessary--almost as if they weren’t “comics” at all, but just the way he managed to project his subconscious into something external, something that functioned inside of the socio-cultural setting, and that kept him from going insane while in it himself. And I'm only talking about the style and presentation of the medium he used--the filter through which everything was rendered, but it’s even truer of the content that that medium held a dialogue with. Together they contributed to building a foundation that would push comics and cartooning into a realm where they can exist as they are now--from the Watchmen to Family Guy. It’s a hard thing to pin down, and operating off of an intuitive innately human drive in the first place, it asks not to be.


Crumb’s work operates at the base of human consciousness and shouldn’t be dissected, or even given too much credit for that matter—it should be taken for what it is. And all of this is of course, especially true of his sexually explicate content that’s often taken by some as "pornographic”, whatever that means—I guess even the most sarcastic and the most poetic of erotica would be considered porn when put in “cartoon” form, especially if done so by a man.



“R.Crumb Draws the Blues” works like that: all it is, is a biography with cultural background and information that he happened to care enough about to talk about and preserve, and which would probably have been lost disjointed from history otherwise. The fact that it's a comic was extremely significant to the medium of comics at in the time-period it was made, but totally irrelevant to the thing itself and to what it’s function is. R. Crumb wasn't trying to blast open the comic-book industry and revolutionize something or other with realistic, socially pertinent, or adult material. He was just writing what he felt like in comic-form, because that's what his pen did, that's what made sense to him, it’s what let whatever it was he had coming out of him come out. The end.


What I find most interesting at the core of this perspective he has on reality is the way that everything he writes and draws, to him is very un-exaggerated. If I had seen his work with no background context and sense of this perspective I wouldn't have liked the artistic style at all. I would have taken it as cartoony and uninviting to my tastes and walked the other way before I even got to the juicy stuff. Having that background context (or taking a lot of LSD) pulls you into Crumb’s almost magical lens on reality. After watching the documentary and being made aware of that perspective behind the art, I found myself looking around New York at eccentrically shaped characters, noticing visual character ticks, ranges of steatopygia, etc. etc. and seeing how un-exaggerated many cartoon depictions actually are. Once you have that kind of lens it’s easy to see how Crumb’s representations of people are realistic to him.



The place he resides in is one where those characteristics are at the forefront of perception as opposed to the linearly organized judgments, social cues, and definitive stances in social life, two-dimensional and photographic, that we get programmed into taking by the modern western world. A sensibility of the beauty of—not just the feminine form, but of all human images—under many different apparitions and frames is crossed out of our wiring by this two-dimensionality, and replaced by cookie cutter ideals that are actually…well, not so sexy. Crumb’s take on women, though it can be a bit ominous, is refreshing. It’s as much an admittance of the colossal strength and dominance of women as it is of totally objectifying and patronizing urges. Between the “Zohan-like” lack of superficial pickiness or constructed ideal of what's attractive, and the honesty in the objectifying, self-serving perspective of attraction—there's something very base and primal about the way he neurotically resides within our species—It’s in a very real and full-of-presence kind of way—It comes from that larger lack of bullshit sensitivity that lies behind Crumb’s perspective.



It seems to me that if the confrontational side of his work at once kind of bothers and kind of interests you its a good thing, and if it bothers you to the point you think it's distasteful and "bad", it says more about your flaws and issues as a natural human being than it does about his. I don’t think these themes should be questioned. They make sense. And they need to be ripped open and pulled out of people more than they are now. It’s a part of us that’s kept hidden and trampled by the idea of psychotherapy, of sinning, a big-brother mentality, and a sense of the Other peering over your shoulder in a world where things that shouldn't be repressed are—and that’s was inevitably causes the real problems. In a world where the symbolic concept of incest never comes out of the back of people’s heads, their personal monsters are going to continue to make them mal-function on a daily basis, and worse things will sneak out in the dark at night than incest.

THE SURROGATES: Flesh and Bone

Robert Venditti's prequel to his original series the Surrogates reads as a very well executed crime-drama. The story's neat and clean in its style, as is the art ...and it's all a bit disappointing. But I haven't read the original series, so perhaps this just reads better as a prequel and not a stand alone. Venditti created a fictional world that's extremely socially relevant, fun to interact with, and that has a natural affinity towards directly and actively engaging the reader whether its through new-media or the paper content itself (eg. see the Surrogate-world pamphlets and articles printed inside the book itself)--and even almost in a meta-fiction sense given its subject matter.

BUT, the formulaic crime-drama style seems to totally undermine the potential of that world--especially in terms of character development, thus (at least for those of us that reside on the human-connection side of the spectrum) hindering reader-identification. That pulls you out of the narrative in my book, and if you don't care too much about the characters in the story--no matter how great the conceptual-world is--you don't care too much about the narrative underway. Even if you have a wonderful conceptual backdrop I think its 95% necessary to have very identifiable uniquely driven characters to pull people in. But not just "pull people in": really do something significant and cathartic, to the point where they really do care, and can fall in love with the universe of circumstance that's surrounding those characters on a level that brings everything to life (Eg. Starwars, re-Star-Trek, District 9, Y the Last Man, Battlestar Galactica, pretty much everything Whedon has ever done (even kinda Toy Story & granted Dollhouse is just getting there), and on and on and on). I almost think that's what makes meaningful, successful Sci-Fi and Fantasy (at least when there are large socially/politically relevant circumstances at hand). The SUBJECTIVE human element is what makes it matter. When you have an impersonal, universal concept, you need a very personal ground-level place to set the focus.

Big concept, immediate meaningful subject---that's what it's all about right now, between Einstein, the economy, the politics, three-dimensional interactive television, and vacuum-robots that eat things you drop on the floor, it's what people need in our present socio-ecological situation. (eg. Pomo -> 'Altermo'?)

All of "The Surrogates" seems kind of impersonal and bland, formulaic, like Law and Order (<--everybody running around playing with dead people, and rapists, and murderers, and you never even see the inside or their apartments where they're probably drinking themselves to sleep at night). Perhaps this just isn't Vendetti's strong suit, and this will (hopefully, because there is so much great potential here) be a case where the movie adaption more successfully delivers, and at once expands, what's been offered up here. Interestingly enough, the way Vendetti's set the story up seems like it should be a movie, not a comic--and that it will work much better as such (--action driven, visual landscapes, core base-protagonist that's someone Bruce Willis can hop in and play--). If the marketing says anything about it, hopefully it will deliver--



--hopefully it will really manifest a concept and be able to get at people's throats while involving them in the 'play'. I just wish these marketing schemes behind wonderfully constructed corporate funded sci-fi endeavors would take it a step further. It's always just a marketing thing, for the buzz etc.--a business model--viral, guerrilla, new-media, whatever: it's never taken deeper into part of the actual medium and narrative, but remains a means to an end upon that mediums release ( 1 ).

Fans are still taking it upon their own initiative to 'involve in the media' on a visceral level, and in that atmosphere the involvement can only be taken seriously by the fanatical and the escapists, or by anyone ballsy enough to ignore reality and go the 'play' alone: (--all dressed up in your personalized Battlestar Galactica dogtags with nowhere legitimizing to go--). It's the kind of thing that's going to have to stem from one big breakthrough in the entertainment world (to alter people's sense of what's possible and legitimate), and from the ground up. Because even in the best of worlds, the 'Industry' and the people that work in it are either concerned with industry standards and deliverables (Eg. money for money) or too busy working their fingers to the bone inside of it to do their thing and create their creations the secure, reliable way.

But back to Surrogates.


Even if you give the author the benefit of the doubt, that he made conscious decisions to do things this way, it isn't working. An attempt to go over the top with impersonal edge..? Yeah, not so much. There's nothing to contrast the bland "personality take-over" to without at least one primary, uniquely driven and conflicted central starting point. You need to have some meaty good stuff before you can rip it open and spill those guts on the table--and you need a real-looking person, a real-feeling character before there's a response to it's face falling off (it's the moment Terminator cut into his forearm before the act of tearing up a human-looking android got it's own status quo).

Even the antagonist feels two dimensional. And I'm not sure what it was, or if it was even intentional, but the way black people were treated in the narrative was ishy. Maybe there's a larger political thing he's trying to say about minorities, or maybe it's an Atlanta, Georgia cultural context that I'm totally unaware of, but this didn't feel open ended enough, and I kept waiting for some conclusive punch to an end 'message' that was being set up but it never came...

The protagonist is real, not fictional, and becomes real to readers, when delivered by the right conductors--the right MEDIUMS that will balance the character of the content with our reality-based sensitivities, deliver their livliness to our concept of reality.

Thre is the same kind of de-sensitizing effect with the art-- it seems like an attempt to de-personalize the setting, literally wash it out, to only hop up the details on certain significant objects, etc. But it just doesn't work, especially given the new-media esque style of the story. You need genuine faces here (actors provide all that's missing without having to create it seperately--they give us a highly individualized empty cell, or vehicle for the character).

The whole point is that these Surrogates, these robots, are real simulations, and that the contrast between them and the 'Boners' (not a reference to what some people might be doing using the robots for, but a slang term in the series for real, physically present, human-bodied people) is their warm-blooded gritty reality. The loss of identity delt with here by the subject matter is a subtle and psychic one, not a visual one--it's of the individual and of living energy, maybe even going as far as raising questions of our 'souls' (where do they really live?!) in the face of avatars and technology.


Hence: artwork, story approach, general filter over the package: great package but when you get down to it...ERRRN-, not working. I'd like to see this become a larger more collaborative circuit (movies, tv would probably work well) or even just be expanded into a larger comic-series (sans Brett Weldele on the inside panels, as interesting and stylistically refined as he is).


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Notes!:

1. For example, Dollhouse had an alternate reality interactive video blog online (www.rprimelabs.com - recently taken down, hopefully because they're going to do something new) pre-release that went so far as to have an actor playing an unknown doll (Hazel/Foxtrot) interact with and rely on 'viewers' to get her out of a dramatic jam. But even many of the hard-core Joss Whedon fans still don't know about it while it was happening, and it's something that could have been extremely significant via viewer-participation not only for campaigning at a point of desperation when the show was almost canceled, but for building upon the narrative without the prime-time slot if it was canceled, and generating awareness and marketing virally throughout the time prior to this season. The older generation that's 'running the show' in the entertainment business just doesn't think this way. That is going to change.
   

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