Los Supermachos

Years ago I picked up a copy of Rius’s Los Supermachos, which started back in 1965. I finally got around to finishing the book.

It’s a satire on Mexican life, at the small town level.  It’s only available in Spanish, I’m afraid, which is a pity, since it’s a useful counterpoint to the idealized, feminized world of Beto Hernandez’s Palomar.  Rius’s San Garabato de las Tunas is highly patriarchal, with strong and open class and race divisions.

The comic is apparently hilarious, though I can’t exactly see it.  It’s my fault, though: when I read it to my wife, she laughs at every page.  I don’t have any trouble seeing the humor in (say) Fontanarrosa’s Inodoro Pereyra, so I have to conclude that Rius has a way with words that doesn’t always translate well.

At the time he was creating Los Supermachos, Rius was a communist; this is chiefly noticeable here in a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve as a parable of the Cuban Revolution.  It’s actually one of the weaker chapters, as the satire is much more pointed– and universal– when he focuses on the inhabitants of San Garabato: the pompous and stupid landowners, the avowedly fascist cop, the socialist shopkeeper, the religious old ladies, the local bum, the agreeable everyindian Calzónzin.

One thing that comes across very well is the paradox of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional)– Rius calls it the RIP– the party that had a near-absolute domination of Mexico fro,m 1928 to 2000.  The party began in a revolution and retained the rhetoric of democracy and social justice, and yet was soon taken over by landowners and bureaucrats.  Thus the mayor of San Garabato, Don Perpetuo, is in general a racist rich exploiter, but in his election speeches he’s all about the Revolution and the People.  It’s a rich environment for a satirist.  In one of the chapters, just to drive the point home, Rius introduces an (anachronistic) Villista– an actual revolutionary– who comes down from the mountains to inquire after the revolution, and is disgusted by its current guardians.

He’s more generally amusing when he’s not so didactic, however.  One of the best chapters starts with one of the characters discovering that some canny operator made a ton of pesos by faking an appearance of the Virgin.  This leads to not one but two groups who try to do the same in San Garabato.  Their candidates to impersonate the Virgin are both male and ugly, but nighttime and a coat of paint are expected to take care of that.

Though Rius wrote at least one book on feminism, one weakness of the comic is that he does not have a very evolved view of women.  His female characters basically fall into the categories of naive and silly, old and superstitious, or dominating viragos.

(Another bit that rubbed me the wrong way: one chapter borrows, without credit, some situations and jokes from Jonny Hart’s B.C.  Not cool, comrade.)

One of the fascinations of the book is its attempt to reproduce colloquial mexicano.  Lots of interesting slang terms and sound changes…  (Plus, one of Rius’s gags is how his not-very-educated characters tend to mangle learned words.  Even the mayor is illiterate.)

 

Animated Pogo

Fascinating article over at Cartoon Brew, showcasing Walt Kelly’s attempt– after a collaboration with Chuck Jones he felt had debased his characters– at animating Pogo by himself.

To get this far– to do a 13-minute film when he was in failing health– Kelly had to skimp on the framerate. But he obviously hadn’t forgotten how to animate, and this is one of the very few instances of a comic strip artist animating his own work. Naturally he has no trouble staying on model. And his hand coloring looks suprisingly good.

The pacing is, well, pre-Internet slow. It’s an adaptation of a 10-page comic, which works much better on the printed page. (On the other hand, it’s enhanced by Kelly’s own voice work– he makes a perfect P.T. Bridgeport.)

If you haven’t heard of Pogo, that’s a shame. It’s a contender for Best Comic Strip Evah, and I’ve loved it since I was a kid– I haven’t covered it over in Bob’s Reviews only because I haven’t been sure I could do it justice.  I’ll have to tackle it, but not today.

And as a Pogo freak, I’ve been poring over screencaps of Jones’s version of Miz Mam’selle Hepzibah, trying to figure out why it looks wrong, despite it not being terribly different.

Graphically, the changes are in the eyes, nose, and mouth– all in the direction of making her more human. The problem, I think, is that Miz Mam’selle was already as cute, for an anthropomorphized skunk, as she needed to be. Jones has taken the character into some dimension between cutesy and disturbing.

 

Alison Bechdel’s mother

I sat down to read the first chapter or two of Alison Bechdel’s new book Are You My Mother?, and ended up reading the whole thing.  It’s great stuff.

If you read her book about her father, Fun Home, the basic method is the same.  It’s more of a profusely illustrated text than a normal graphic novel– it has a running narration, which occasionally goes off in a different direction than the pictures.  And it weaves in ruminations on a set of heavy books– Virginia Woolf, Freud, Alice Miller, Adrienne Rich, and above all Donald Winnicott, who happens to have written a lot about the mother-infant bond, and particularly the type Alison feels she had.

But it works way better than Fun Home, for several reasons.  The storytelling is better– more assured, more playful.  The books aren’t examined so drily, but actually shed light on the relationships.  She was highly confessional in the first book, but even when talking about her own problems or neuroses her tone was professorial.  But this book seems alive and human.

In a sense the personal pain comes through more sharply precisely because her relationship with her mother is less dramatic, more normal.  Plus her mother is still there, is reading the book over our shoulders so to speak, and though this causes Alison a little extra angst, it makes the book more of a duet.  The ultimate problem with Fun Home, I think, was that it only had one real character, Alison herself.  Her father was oberved intently but entirely from the outside.

Are You My Mother? is mostly about the mother-daughter relationship.  Winnicott talks about “good enough” mothers, and without explicitly saying so Alison makes it pretty clear hers wasn’t.  There was something lacking there, and it takes years of therapy, and multiple readings of those psychoanalytic books, to figure out what.  In fact the book is about the therapy process as much as it is about mothers.  And she’s quite honest about the fact that writing this very book is another form of therapy; she is literally constructing a narrative to explain her own life to herself, to get a handle on it.

Does that sound self-indulgent?  Her mother suggests as much; she thinks the best art has no ‘I’ in it.  Alison counters that you can use the specific to get at general truths, and her book is the proof.  Some of our most intimate feelings (and neuroses) are tied up in our relationships with our parents, and we can learn a lot by seeing how someone else works them out.

After writing all this, I checked some reviews, and I’m surprised to find that many people had the opposite reaction– they liked Fun Home better.  Mostly this seems to be because her father was a strange gargoyle of a man, and we always like to read about families that are weirder than ours.

There are complaints that there’s too much psychoanalysis talk here.  It’s true that the quotations from Winnicott and others don’t affect us as they obviously affected Alison.  But as I said, they provide her with a narrative, a model, and that narrative-building process is a big part of healing emotional trauma.  Again, I think it all works better than (say) the discussions of Proust did in the first book.

 

 

 

Darkness

This is a great little comic, by Boulet– nom de BD of Gilles Roussel.  (If you know French, read the original instead, as Boulet’s translation is wonky in places.)  I think it’ll speak to any guy who’s had a friend who has inexplicable success with women.

It starts out a little slow, but soon picks up, and I love the way he adds just a bit of surrealism that reinforces the story.  Don’t miss the glass of whisky that turns into Count Chocula.

What’s most impressive is that it’s a 24 hour comic.

 

The Tintin movie

We saw a new movie the other day!  We went to see The Adventures of Tintin.  We both liked it.

Reviews have been mixed, but in general it seems people who are familiar with the comics like it a lot more.  It’s true that the movie is pretty much uninterrupted action… but, well, that’s what Hergé does too.  With the exception of the Tchang stories, it’s just not a reflective, cerebral series.  If anything, the film does a better job actually explaining what Tintin does (i.e. being a reporter).

(Not that either comics or movie treat this realistically.  Who does Tintin work for, where does he get his money, why are they hiring a teenager?  But his situation is just a magical device to enable Hergé’s storytelling.  Indiana Jones doesn’t act like a real archeologist either.)

The film is mostly based on Le secret de la Licorne, though it’s taken many liberties, including entirely replacing the main villains. 

The CGI has gotten a lot of bad press, but I can see one major advantage: it adds spectacle.  Drawn animation is just not at its best in presenting straight adventure– it looks cheesy.  With near-realistic environments, as in the rollicking climax, the effect is impressive instead.  And of course near-realistic environments require near-realistic characters.  Sometimes the big heads look a little odd, but I think it works OK.

Thomson and Thompson were a little off.  They’re supposed to be utter imbeciles, and the film missed an opportunity to show off one of Hergé’s favorite running gags– their invariably awful idea of local costumes.

I’m glad they kept the film within period (La Licorne was published in 1946).  Tintin doesn’t belong to the hypercivilized modern era; he belongs to a wilder era when non-Western nations were invitingly strange and airplanes were easy to fly.

 

 

 

 

Catwomen

Sparked by playing Arkham City, I grabbed a bunch of Catwoman TPBs from the library.  I have to say I am not overwhelmed, but by God can Adam Hughes draw Catwoman.  It looks to me like his depiction is the chief basis for the one in the game.

Down to the Wayne Tech invisibility barrier protecting her cleavage.

I read one book by Loeb/Sale and three by Pfeifer/Lopez/Lopez.  It’s probably something about my age, but superhero comics have to be phenomenally well done to escape the basic cheesiness of the concept.  Pfeifer tries for a certain realism, but he can’t dent the inherent fantasy.  He throws in something very real like Catwoman having a baby, and then the baby gets kidnaped by Soviet supervillains or Amazon warriors.  Loeb goes for more camp, but then he has things like mafiosi pledging allegiance to whoever has a certain ring, which sounds like a quest from Skyrim.  I never get the sense that the writers know a thing about crime, about thievery, about mafiosi, or even about psychopathy. 

 

Why does it work in the video games?  Partly because they’re interactive: stuff that would be cheesy in a comic or movie isn’t when you’re doing it.  And partly, they go for gothic excess rather than realism.  Or to be more precise, they use realism to heighten immersion, not to model everyday life.  It was probably wise that the game lets you see into Catwoman’s apartment but not go inside: making her an everyday figure who has to worry about diapers and nannies does not really improve her.  (The exception is Peter Parker, but that’s not an endlessly repeatable formula.)

 

 

Comics update

Updated the French comics page with some recs from Mathieu Richir, and the Latin American comics pages now that I finally read Keko and Mort Cinder.

 

Silent exposition

Today’s Order of the Stick contains a fascinating bit of storytelling.  The situation: Elan (rightmost figure) has just learned something devastating about his father.  He rushes to tell his girlfriend Haley (the redhead).

The clever bit is, we don’t hear their conversation; we just see their gestures and facial expressions, while listening to snippets of the unimportant conversation of the three characters in the foreground.

It’s clever, because something has to be done to indicate that Elan brought Haley up to date, but it’s inherently dull (we just saw the events ourselves in the previous strips).  In a novel you could just say “Elan quickly told Haley what he learned”, but that doesn’t work as well in comics.  So Burlew found an innovative way to say the same thing without the dull part.

Burlew has a way with villains, by the way.  His Xykon, evil overlord as bored CEO, is amusing.  But Elan’s father is a neat creation.  He has two sons, naive but good bard Elan and evil plotting rogue Nale, and his personality is a perfect triangulation between the two: he’s got the calculation and amorality of Nale and the friendliness and theatricality of Elan.  The combination is interesting and refreshingly far from the usual eeeevil.

 

L4D comic

I don’t often get to check both of those categories.  Valve has created a Left 4 Dead comic… really a whole 178-page graphic novel.

Use fire, Bill! Oh, you know already.

(Spoilers ahead, so read this later if you have to.)

It’s pretty good. I don’t entirely care for the art style, but it’s well written, and chock full of meaty information if you’re interested in the L4D1 characters.  It has some backstory on all of them (Francis was going to jail, who could’ve seen that coming?), and covers the interval between the army rescue at the end of Blood Harvest and the new campaign, The Sacrifice, which in turn intersects with the L4D2 campaing The Passing where both sets of survivors meet.

Most interestingly, it addresses some puzzles set by L4D2.  At the end of  The Parish, the military on the final bridge asks the L4D2 survivors if they’re “immune”, which they carefully distinguish from “not infected”.  Graffiti on the walls in L4D2 also talk about carriers and suggest that these are being shot by the military.  So how do you distinguish carriers from immune, which are our survivors, and if the military thinks they’re carriers why do they bother letting them across the bridge at all?

The comic pretty well clears this up.  There’s a test for the virus– and the L4D1 survivors are carriers.  Chillingly, they may have helped spread the zombie virus.  (As Francis points out, the news chopper pilot had been bit; but they may well have infected the other pilot.)  And that in turn means they can’t get to whatever safe havens remain; thus Plan B… finding a zombie-free island. 

I’m still unsure what made many graffiti-writers in L4D2 so sure they weren’t carriers.  We’re told the virus keeps mutating… even if you got tested that wouldn’t be much assurance.  But it’s realistic enough that people would cling to the idea that they were immune, on good evidence or none at all.

Actually the comic implies that there are three classes of non-zombies: immune, asymptomatic carriers, and susceptibles.  The latter are just those who haven’t encountered the virus yet; naturally you won’t find any more in an infected area (including saferooms).  Presumably many of the remaining safe havens are mostly populated by susceptibles. 

The comic also explains what seemed like a dumb bit of  The Crossing: why didn’t the two teams of survivors join together?  The L4D1 survivors said they preferred being on their own; this fits in with Bill’s insistance in the comic that they stand by each other– and leave everyone else (4 dead) if necessary.  In their circumstances trusting other people may no longer be an option– plus there’s the frightening chance that they might infect someone new.  (Though if they’ve been fighting their way through the South, Coach et al. must not be susceptible.)

Presumably we’ll find out eventually what happens to the L4D2 survivors after their own ‘rescue’ by the military.  And presumably we won’t learn more about Zoey, Francis, and Louis.  (Without Bill they’re not even suitable for new L4D1 campaigns.)  They make it to the island; no hint of the remaining key question: who does Zoey make it with?

 

Moebius dessine

Neat video simply showing legendary French artist Moebius drawing. Which can’t be embedded apparently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-YVtV7G-q4#watch-main-area

I’m always fascinated by (and jealous of) the speed of real artists. He has a rough sketch, but he can lay down the final line immediately and perfectly.

Also: graphics tablet/monitor: WANT.