Emma Peel Sessions 49 – Up from the Dread Dimensions

I haven’t had the chance to link to it here because the past week I haven’t been home. NYCC was a hell of a great time. Relatively, anyway, as I broke my ankle on the way into the show and spent the rest of the con on crutches. What I did manage to see was worth the trek into the city, and here is the short version – I loved seeing every blogger on the planet in the post-Comics Alliance panel, blowing more money than I care to reconcile at the Alcan booth (THEY HAD MOEBIUS, THEY HAD TOPPI, THEY HAD BENGAL, THEY HAD THAT TRAVIS CHAREST METABARONS),meeting Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, Nathan Fox, Cliff Chiang, Sheldon Vella, and Geof Darrow in artist alley, and spending time with all sorts of fantastic people.

Anyhow,The Mindless Ones’ long-in-production PDF zine has finally dropped. It’s called The Prism.  It features a massive anti-annotations by Zom, Bobsy and Amypoodle on the latest Alan Moore/Kevin O’Neil League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1910), which is the real selling point here. It’s a massive undertaking and insanely in-depth – when I first read it a couple months back I couldn’t decide if it was overkill for a work that didn’t deserve it or exactly the kind of level of interrogation that should be applied to these thing on a regular basis. Now, either way its a great piece of writing and I want to see these guys do so much more in this vein. Annotations are always going to fall short of being real criticism, just because they’re about connecting dots rather than digging in for what those dots are showing you. So these can’t be annotations. On top of that, David Allison has an essay in it on Brian Chippendale’s minicomics which also serves as his silent re-entry into blogging about comics, now as a the latest member of the Mindless crew. David Allison writing = never a bad thing.

Less interesting: I have a relatively long and in-depth piece on the first volume of Casanova. It was written last year in a moment where I saw that book as the greatest of the single-issue-based pop comics of the 00s (such as Fell, Phonogram, Godland, Criminal, Nightly News, etc) – a movement that maybe didn’t exist, but really meant something to me. All of those guys got jobs at the big companies and the books went away because none of them made any money. Which is a shame, but its the way that comics works, so whatever. Casanova being recolored was a problem for me then, less now, but I felt like it was fundamentally changing the work away from its Barbarella duotone roots. Its a little thing, sure, but it bothers me. Casanova as a story had so much to say about what makes comics and the spy genre interesting and important, as well as art itself. Casanova has a deep undercurrent of caring about actually making something and finding a voice through a specific genre. Eventually it stops being a mixtape and starts bending the genre to its wishes. Art-wise, Gabriel Ba and later Fabio Moon (though I mostly talk about the first seven Ba-drawn issues) were turning out some of my favorite comics ever made on this book, and they have maintained a very high standard for themselves in the years that followed. Fraction is different, his Marvel work is not only not the kind of thing I’m interested in, it feels like a different writer. There have been bright spots – Iron Fist certainly, the Mandarin-as-Kanye West story absolutely felt like the same guy who did Casanova and Five Fists of Science and Lex Nova. The Mandarin story reminded me that this guy had ambitions in the art form not just to write fight scenes for Greg Land and Salvador Larocca to photoshop. So coloring or not, I was interested in Casanova coming back, especially when we’ll get to see a post-Daytripper, post-Umbrella Academy Ba go back to this book in a few months.

And then the text piece in the back of the first Casanova color reprint has Fraction, a guy who made his name on the internet tearing up Wizard Magazines in the shop and blogging about it, talking about “the subtractive” and “snark” in reference to people writing about his comics. “You diminish yourself, you diminish us all.” he says. I  don’t want to drop his comics because he said that, but it does raise some questions for me relating to his writing and whether or not he thinks our collective memories are that short. Casanova is great comics, its alive and weird and beautiful and flawed – its comics as they are meant to be, smart and fucked up and personal. Just because Fraction says something I find objectionable, doesn’t mean I’m going to drop the book. Great art isn’t made by people who agree with everything you think, and it shouldn’t be.

But I don’t know if I could feel the same way about that comic now that I did when I wrote this piece last January. I fucking meant it then, and I stand by it, but I don’t think the mixture of feelings I had for that book are ever going to be that heated again.

I know that the creator and the work should be seperated, but Fraction has never made any bones about saying that Casanova is an intensely personal work – even to the point where he’d use the backmatter essays as confessionals. Fraction is also someone who was also a critic, an online one at that – That magazine he used to run is probably archived somewhere, so is the WEF, The Basement Tapes are still up, and Artbomb is too. He’s got some great pieces up there about Howard Chaykin and Paul Pope and Ashley Wood and Grant Morrison. His opinions might have changed in the years since, but going from critic to writer doesn’t change anything – tell me that piece on Popbot isn’t as snarky as anyone else you’d care to mention on the web. But also tell me that it isn’t good writing.

Its never going to be that simple as “fuck that guy” because of what he said, but it really bothers me that same guy who wrote this amazing comic that made feel so damn much that I had difficulty putting it into writing, that I wrote draft after draft trying to say exactly what I could find inside it, can sit here and tell me not to be “subtractive” because it robs from his creation. It cheapens the work. It cheapens everything, but it changes nothing. No matter what he says I mean it. No matter how good the comic is, him saying that is always going to bother me.

But I wouldn’t write it again today. Take that however you want it to.

- Sean Witzke Oct 2010

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