Jake Johnson and the Case of the Philosophical Visitation

Out of all the things about her visit, I was most interested in Ms. Corsetto’s manner. It’s very difficult to explain, but in my eye there has always been a vague demarcation between being a student artist and a true one. There’s something which confers successful creatorship which you can feel in an individual, the spark that differentiates class projects and creative writing workshop entries from published masterpieces.

It seems intuitive, that the world should act this way. Even if the spark manifests differently, there are people who just seem to have it. Neal Stephenson, Lawrence Miles, and J. G. McCrae all possess the aura of a creator. This isn’t actually a good thing, given that it’s hard to attribute a spark to people you know, especially yourself. I don’t think that I exude writer-ness, and it’s rare to find anyone else in this university who seems to, even if they have true talent. 

And yet Danielle Corsetto doesn’t feel like a creator, and she’s made a fortune by art standards. My map is full of holes, and it doesn’t match the territory, and her existence in my field of view helped me notice that. Being a success in a creative industry is something which can be accomplished without a prerequisite feeling, in much the same way that plenty of newly-minted adults don’t feel terribly mature.

(N.B. I've read Poorcraft now, and I have to say that it's an invaluable book.)

Comic Plans

For my 16-page comic, I'm going to cover an event in my life, rather than a friend's: my trip to Ocean City last summer. This was a week-long vacation taken by myself, my younger brother of 3 years and my mother, and it was in the wake of my father's death.

For him, a four-year battle with cancer ended when it spread to his brain, and because his last wish was to die in his home, the family basically revolved around him, and his mother and father came to help take care of him. I spent my nights staying up, sacrificing sleep to pace the basement and get a little peace of mind, but I was eventually found and put on the night shift, sleeping a few hours a day and spending the dark hours near a baby monitor, checking to make sure he was still breathing.

He lost the ability to speak properly, then the ability to speak at all, then the ability to communicate, then consciousness. I think the last thing he ever said was "No."

So, in short, we needed a break. My mother braved a gigantic metal bridge and we all put up with carsickness in order to travel to Florida while it was still bearable. We received the highest corner hotel room on the best hotel available, so big it cast shadows across the beach.

And the beach...

The water in the beach is all composed of the same type of atoms moving at roughly the same speed. It's connected to every river and ocean in the world, and if you wade into it you're touching millions of people by proxy. That water is the same water as rain, the same water as drinking fountains and soda, the same water as blood and urine. That water is older than living organisms, and has comprised all of them. The water in your body was in rainstorms that battered Rome, the guts of dinosaurs, and the roiling seas before the first cells. It comes from meteors and obeys only the moon, and when you see the way it moves you understand why cultures near large bodies of water seem calmer and simultaneously you feel like it's reaching out for you and you remember the dangers of being pulled out to sea by a current.

And then you see the sky and there's nothing else to make it seem closeby or dome-shaped, no clouds to give it distance or depth, but it rises from the horizon higher than you can see even though there's nothing in your way it's all there but you can't comprehend it just like the water there shouldn't be that MUCH of it there and it's so unnatural even though it is Nature and

I finally understood agoraphobia.

I slept on the couch, because there weren't enough beds to go around. And that week, I read On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony, which sounds symbolically fitting, but I though it was very flawed for a masterpiece. After the couple hours I spent on that, I spent the rest of the week reading all (at the time) 102 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It was 600,000 words, difficult to describe without sounding silly, and one of the three best things I've ever read.

Especially this.

Ironically, I never swam. I did try, during the evening, but no one told me that all the shells came in as the sun waned.
I couldn't step into the tide without being shredded by them, and eventually I had to give up and head back to the hotel. Walking the boardwalk was pretty fun, though, and so was the area in general. There are some great pictures of it in wintertime, where the whole area's closed and covered in snow.

That was one of the big seeds, I think, in my turn to travel. I'd love to go back there, someday soon.

Maus and Truth

In Maus, Art Spiegelman records the experiences of his father, Vladek, an old man who lived through the Holocaust. This book is regularly referenced as the reason that comic books began to be taken seriously as a medium, instead of being seen as a childish pursuit. The reason for this is obvious- saying that Maus doesn’t mean anything means criticizing the account of a Holocaust survivor, and so even people who loathe comics must change their opinions of them at least slightly to accommodate it.

Holocaust survivor stories are, by their nature, brutally honest, and Spiegelman makes the decision (at least, as far as the reader knows) not to keep anything off of the page. This doesn’t just extend to the account, however- although it first seems to be a framing device, the author and his father continually break immersion into the story to talk about tangential topics or to do other things which they did at the time of the interviews.

This raises the less obvious, but still challenging problem for Spiegelman of portraying his father as he really is. Vladek is prone to complaining and penny-pinching, something both his son and wife acknowledge in the course of the book. More than that, he’s overbearing and, at times, tries to manage his son’s life. People expect a Holocaust account to be full of graphic details and tell a truth they don’t really want to hear, but it’s another level of brutal honesty entirely to show that someone can survive these events and have a story to tell, but may not be a likeable person.

What’s more, Spiegelman shows his own family drama, the sort of things that even a memoir writer might choose to keep quiet, including Vladek’s relationship with his wife, or a comic book Spiegelman wrote following his mother’s death. These are uncomfortable, but not in a way we’ve been primed for. Plus, the controversy so big that it’s mentioned within the story itself:

Maus is a story that cares enough about honesty that it’s willing to seem completely racist in one of the worst possible contexts in order to tell its story properly. At this point the only question of ethics left is the question of whether it’s better to publish all of this or to hold back on some of it and save the risk to one’s reputation, and it’s clearly already been made. The very publication of the book is a serious statement, and as an attempt at getting uncomfortably close to reality, it succeeds all too well.

A Child's-Eye View of Revolution

It’s an old saying that hindsight is 20/20, but for the memories of childhood, hindsight can be positively transformative and seem downright wrong. Persepolis’ protagonist/author, Marjane, sees the Islamic Revolution not just through the eyes of a person who was in Iran at the time, but the eyes of a child who’s learning of extremely adult matters. 

This is very important to the story, and to giving the whole event its impact- without a person there to give us a view of the events, any historical event is reduced to an encyclopedia entry. And telling these events from the point of view of a child is especially jarring, and reveals the awful truth that in the scary parts of human history, children have experienced the same horrors as adults. In fact, it serves to show us a more vulnerable view of the world-at-large, one which cuts to the emotional quick of living through the revolution and the society that came afterwards. 

For the record, I’m aware that this wasn’t really a choice on the part of the author, but it does lend Persepolis a special weight. The Shah’s mass release of political prisoners is shown in the documentary “Fall of a Shah” as a political gesture, one of many in a much larger story, but to Marjane it was the time when people close to her were freed. Likewise, the Iranian secret police, Savak, are an unpleasant part of that society when viewed years afterward, but their torture and imprisonment of people gains impact when filtered through the imagination of a child.

Most striking, though, is what simply isn’t covered by the scope of the documentary. Communists are hardly mentioned in it, and yet almost the entire cast is made up of communists and socialists. What’s more, the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini is something that actively threatens them. When students take over the U.S. embassy, it’s not a footnote about what happened shortly after the Ayatollah took over, it’s the end of Marji’s ability to get a visa and escape to America- a closing instead of a new, interesting development.

These are significant changes in the larger tale of Iranian government, and meaningful on a scale of megadeaths, but for someone this small and human, they’re boiled down to moments of celebration and tragedy, joy and death. These are the footprints that big events leave on all of us, and they serve as the greater context for all our lives.

Is Anyone Else Pronouncing It "fyoon hōm"?

The images in Fun Home have a definite style, which is distanced just far enough from minimalism to seem complex. Characters are drawn with little shading, few details other than the necessary, defined mostly by face shape and hair, and even have very similar expressions in most panels. Even characters shown in films or in flashbacks seem to have small creases under their eyes and frown slightly. (For examples of the general expression, check pages 14, 21, 42, 77, 118, 129, 177, 200, 213, and 229. Alternatively, roll 2d100+4d8.)

This is, as with anything consciously drawn so many times, an artistic choice, and the meaning isn’t tough to grok. FH is at least partly a depressed story, lingering around death, emotional damage, dysfunctional relationships, negligence and secrets. Everyone has a similar expression because that’s the way they were perceived at the time. This style of drawing people exists, on the sliding scale of realism vs. the conceptual, only slightly towards the real. The backgrounds are more idealized and head toward the conceptual, unless there are important details to notice. Scott McCloud talks about these sudden jumps in complexity in page 44 of Understanding Comics, during that bit where he plays with the short-sword (which looks very much like a fancy-hilted gladius).

There’s also an exception in FH which proves the rule. Everything is mildly cartoonish, jumping to prominence as the plot demands, but only during the story proper. Chapters have their own images, and these are fully shaded. They’re not exactly photorealistic, at least not by the standards nine years hence, but they look like grainy printed copies or high-quality charcoal rubbing of real things. They demonstrate the conceit of the other images, and also (if you want to be shallow about it) confirm the artistic talent of the author.

In fact, there seems to be a deliberate conservation of detail throughout this story, or maybe it would be better called and ebb and flow of detail- the panels that make up the story are all done in a consistent style and stretch out for dozens of pages, while one much more realistic image exists to show a lot of extra meaning that the subsequent chapter balances out. Information is conveyed at two different paces, intentionally working in tandem because understanding the realistic version requires a foray into the author’s memory, where everything unimportant has been omitted from the retelling.

Concerning the Slanted Lines in Cowborg

Cowborg is a comic very fond of wide, open scenes that bleed off of the page (or, technically, about a quarter-inch from the margin), and contains two separate two-page spreads, but apart from that it uses the typical square panel layout to communicate its story. To be fair, it's not a very challenging or avant-garde story, even in the realm of the bizarre- it's certainly no Steel Ball Run- but for a Chick-Fil-A comic it is pretty impressive.

The part I'll be drawing your attention to, though, is this section:

Now, these three panels are the only ones with slanted borders on their page, in the surrounding five pages, and possibly in the entire comic. They're also a montage, and all of the story before and after them is a clear narrative- scientist makes Cowborg, Cowborg trains, Cowborg goes to state fair, Beef-Eating Villain reveal, showdown, heroic triumph. This is a break from the story's regular pace, expressed only by turning the panels 45 degrees so that scanning them horizontally encompasses some of the second while reading the first, and some of the third while reading the second. No special attention is paid to it, but it manages to exist wordlessly as a completely separate timeframe.

Well, apart from the NA-NA-NA-NA!

Concerning the Circle on Page 37 of Fun Home

There's some intent that can be coaxed out of these panels, with the way that smaller information boxes are placed inside them, in the way that they show what is basically a montage while the text outside of them does most of the describing, and so on. However, the big eye-catcher here is the small circle in the bottom third of the page. See it? This isn't the first time these explanatory bubbles have pointed at things, but it is the first time one's been used to make up a panel. Or a semi-panel, perhaps, given that its equally an intruder in both of its neighbors. The shape is also different from the rest while still being part of the typical eye-path that makes it a part of comics' linear time instead of an aside.

I'm convinced it's a stylistic choice held in reserve, like an expression that conveys an idea wonderfully, but is so obscure it's never used. It doesn't really advance the story, or show us things from the perspective of the author (at least, when she was a kid), but it does a great job of revealing details about its setting. It's a silent moment of worldbuilding, unacknowledged by its story.