john and jana

My Year Writing This Book About My Year Writing This Book

My Year Writing This Book About My Year Writing This Book

Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw

So rampant is the idea of dysfunctionality in our culture that almost any given person will describe their family as such. Each unit contains an air of mystery and each member flaunts an individuality that can make dysfunction seem real, as if being on your own track is the same as being on a separate one. More often the different tracks of family are parallel, more like lanes than entirely separate roads — but that, as with anything familial, is all a matter of perception.

What happens when a dysfunctional situation is deemed normal even expected? What if a family goes through the motions thereby creating a a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Dash Shaw investigates this matter and many more in the mature and surreal graphic novel “Bottomless Belly Button,” in which the Loony kids grapple with the unexpected divorce of their parents after four decades of marriage. The split seems strangely matter of fact as if this were the expected result of their years together, a passionless and lackluster nod to inevitability — it seems as though they are supposed to split up, so they do. The children exhibit their reactions through self-fulfilling personal prophesies that find their own plummeting expectations of life creating the very dysfunction that their parents are forcing along.

Called together for a final reunion at a beach house, gathered to witness the forced family decay together, the Loony offspring are largely too self-absorbed to really pour over the strangeness of the parents’ actions. Frog-faced son Peter continues to plunge into his own awkward, lonely misery until he meets a girl who provides a unique opportunity to blow off his parents altogether. His sister Claire has the exact opposite of her parents — an early divorce that offers her freedom in life that really only enslaves her and sends her wandering in confusion most of the time. Brother Dennis is torn apart by the announcement, obsessed with uncovering the reason behind the absurdity but really reacting to the crumbling of his own safety zone. Meanwhile, granddaughter Jill, an already awkward teen, has now been revealed the futility of the future thanks to her grandparents and the uncomfortability of her own skin seems to be an inevitable and permanent existence.

Shaw works with different kinds of symbolism, from the sand that sprinkles on their skin to the various types of water that can be applied to emotions and family history. It’s no accident that these are the two ingredients used by God to create the hapless, unintentionally wicked Adam, who was surely spiraling towards some kind of legendary self-fulfilling prophecies by eating the apple and being cast from paradise. Such behavior is in our heritage, but that doesn’t make us evil. It just makes us sad.

Shaw’s enormous graphic novel — it’s 720 pages and seems to weigh a few pounds — literally intrudes on the most private moments of the Loony family, a narrative that spirals through their misguided thoughts, as well as their showers, literally stripping them down for rough examination. It’s the level of space and pace that isn’t often directed at mundane family dynamics, but there’s something in there that each of us might recognize and certainly appreciate for the care with which it’s all been dissected.

Tiny People

“Hmm, yes. Hmm. Uh huh.”

My Year Writing This Book About My Year Writing This Book

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell

When it comes to legendary comic book artist Steve Ditko, there are two paths of interest in his story. One is obvious — as the co-creator of Spider-Man who wrote and drew the first few years of the character’s existence, his skill as an great innovator in the comic book for is of great importance.

There is another side to Ditko, less known to those who might know of him from his work with Marvel Comics decades ago — his unwavering devotion to the philosophies of Ayn Rand and his compulsion to inject those philosophies into his work. It starts out as a guiding principle, but soon Objectivism overtakes Ditko’s talents, commandeering both the stories he told and the career that never seemed to rise to the level it should have.

In “Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko,” author Blake Bell mixes up a career history and art critique of the legend with a more intricate study of the apparent psychological and social decline of the man. More importantly, Bell provides the link between Ditko’s often outrageous imagery and the mind that conceived of them.

Ditko’s career was as a rather mild-mannered, working cartoonist of obvious brilliance when he hit what, back in the day, was the big time. Ditko became a major player at Marvel Comics, partnering with Stan Lee (antagonistically) and bringing glory to the company through Spider-Man and his other tour de force, Doctor Strange.

A bad experience with the business end of Marvel Comics sent Ditko on his decades-long spiral that had him exhibit extreme paranoia towards associates and fans alike. Equally, his work began to focus more and more on his Randian beliefs so that characters were created and utilized for the sheer purpose of acting out Randian-fused fables. It was a bizarre descent, one that saw uncompromising principles see public form as erratic and self-destructive behavior and turned his work away from the fresh brilliance of Spider-Man and into screeds often resembling a Randian version of the Jack Chick Christian comics — so much wooden lecture that the words almost crowd the pictures out of the frame.

The real focus of the book, though, is the art and that his handsomely covered through reproduction and discussion. Ditko was a great innovator regardless of his eccentricities and his work deserves to be celebrated beyond the comics medium. No one could depict the psychological landscape in physical form better than Ditko — his visuals were quirky and unique.

Ditko’s demise — he is still with us, but hidden away — is sad and perhaps one of the best arguments against the validity of Objectivism as full-proof philosophy of life. His story, though, is fascinating and his art, as with so many others touched with creative greatness, will outlive his peccadilloes, even as they function as the physical form of his own psychological landscape.

Flight 5

If there’s one thing that the science fiction genre and mainstream comic books have lost it’s the sense that there is power in simplicity — too many people have a tendency to over-tell a tale, extend characters and situations beyond their usefulness or interest.

Comic books have degenerated into cross-company epics that depend on the spectacle more than character or story — the fact that any given character has been in existence for decades points to how properties are wrung dry over the years, with pockets of original concepts here and there.

Film and television is no better — do we really need all these versions of “Star Trek”? And the worst offender is “Star Wars” — talk about missing the beauty in a simple tale, ironically the original point of the original film, now the story is tiresome in its fine tooth comb approach to gathering dollars by flogging a dead horse.

For these reasons — and many more — is the “Flight” series of books so wonderful. Editor Kazu Kibuishi understands that there is intensity in simplicity and slices reveal epics — and both of these circumstances stem from trust in an audience to exercise their own storytelling skills in imagining the possibilities extending from any scenario.

Now on its fifth volume, “Flight” is a comic book anthology defined by its graphical brilliance — rarely will you see so many talented and diverse illustrators and cartoonists gathered between two covers for the purpose of creating inventive tales for the young adult crowd. More often than not, the stories that accompany the art are just as exciting.

One of the triumphs of the series is its penchant for humorous adventure fantasies on par with anything you’ll see in an animated film these days. Actually, let’s be honest here, most of the stories in this volume are far more alluring, the graphic novel equivalent of a Pixar story, leaping off the page with energy and creativity.

Michael Gagne’s beautiful science fiction pantomime “The Saga of Rex” opens the book, both gentle and cosmic and promising to be so much more. Tony Cliff’s “The Aqueduct” and Reagan Lodge’s “The Dragon” take more action-oriented approaches to their stories and do better than most comics in getting the blood pressure rising, while not skimping on characterization.

The best bits in the book are the ones trimmed of girth but not of humor nor emotion, such as Sonny Liew’s sweet “Malinky Robot,” which takes an understanding look at a robot servant who doesn’t quite live up to the dreams of young boys. Just as strong are Scott Campbell’s hilarious “Igloo Head and Tree Head,” Graham Annable’s devilish “Evidence” and Sarah Mensinga’s meltingly gorgeous and totally sweet fairy tale “The Changeling.”

Those are merely the highlights, however — there’s not a bad story in this book and many are to be commended for taking on story subjects that do go beyond the science fiction or fantasy trappings, like Richard Pose’s baseball epic “Beisbol 2″ or Svetlana Chmakova’s tale of grade school hostility, “On the Importance of Space Travel.” And there are a few that take some narrative chances, offering something a little more experimental, like Ryan North and John Martz’s self-explanatory “Scenes in Which the Earth Stops Spinning and Everybody Flies into a Wall.”

If you have any interest in turning a kid onto comics, but not buying into the crass possibilities that comics-as-usual have offered over the years, you can do no better than “Flight 5.” Just make sure to read it before you give it to the kid — not to make sure it’s appropriate, but just to have some fun. Even adults deserve to read fun comics.

My Year Writing This Book About My Year Writing This Book

Other People’s Lives

My Year Writing This Book About My Year Writing This Book

Scrambled Ink

“Scrambled Ink” seems like an obvious attempt to duplicate some of the beauties of the Flight series by utilizing some top animators for sequential art side projects of a charming variety and for the most part it works wonderfully. Animation and comics are finding equal ground as the elevated ghetto apart from the film world, finally getting their due with mainstream audiences, so it only makes sense that they would come together in such a form. Here, creators for DreamWorks animated division takes to the page.

There is some real beautiful work in here. David G. Derrick Jr.’s “Kadogo: The Next Big Thing” is a nice, old fashioned jungle tale about an elephant grappling with his embarrassing friendship to a bird, with art that, at times, recalls Don Freeman. David Pimentel’s “Burger Run” is a hilarious, retro-fueled crime tale, part O. Henry and part Friz Freleng, that has burger joint heist going sour. “Greedy Grizzly,” written by Keith Baxter and Ken Morrissey and drawn by Morrissey recalls a gentle but wacky Disney of old as a bear attempts to pretty much eat an entire forest and encounters a little girl who teaches him some respect. Don Freeman gets recalled yet again in the old-fashioned girl tale “Point and Shoot,” by Jenny Lerew, about a young girl’s job-related visit to Paris and the unlikely friend she meets.

The two remaining stories, though, create a real problem here and take the whole collection out of balance. Ennio Torresan’s “The Guy From Ipanema” is mildly crude, entirely over-the-top and mostly unfunny, while J.J. Villard’s “Dig, Dig, Die, Die” is like a lesser experimental work that might have appeared in RAW in the 1980s. Given the tone of the other stories in the book, these two are entirely out of place and mature enough that they really undo what seems like the logical market for the rest of the book — kids. Four out of six of the stories would not be out of place as standalone children’s books — in fact, three of those seem to be homages of some sort to old fashioned children’s books — but the Torresan and Villard’s stories make it a little hard to recommend buying the book for a kid. By the same token, the girth of the children’s stories makes it hard to recommend to an adult.

That’s too bad, because the children’s stories are refreshing, not jaded or sarcastic, and with a sweetness that is often lacking in the sometimes cloying children’s book market.

Slow Storm

Firefighter Ursa Cain has a lot to prove and in Danica Novgorodoff’s “Slow Storm,” you begin to wonder if she ever will. Ursa is the only female firefighter in a firehouse in Kentucky, constantly having to prove herself as good as any of the guys and particularly tortured by her own brother, who mocks her education relentlessly.

A barn fire has Ursa encounter an illegal Mexican immigrant — and also make a move against her brother that unlocks a chain of events that will eventually bond the two outcasts, giving them an opportunity to find some common ground amidst the mess they have both created.

Unfortunately, Novgorodoff has bit off more than she can chew here. Ursa’s actions seem harsh given the circumstances and Novgorodoff employs symbolic backdrops involving Catholic saints and brewing tornadoes that hint at a deeper level but never really deliver. Symbolism is fine, but there has to be something in the foreground that it can latch onto and elevate.

Furthermore, while Novgorodoff’s artwork has its appeal, it sometimes seems as though she is using style to cover up for an inability to render anatomy or certain perspectives. At its worst, it can sometimes get confusing as to what is actually going on in the frame.

Novgorodoff has something going on — it’s not a hopeless failure by any means, it’s more of a brave leap that didn’t quite make it to the edge. You can see the ideas brewing and you can witness the hands crafting a visual style that evokes a mood, but it’s too much, she needed to do this in a much smaller story that brought everything together in a more concise manner. As it is, there is just too much space to fill with too little substance.

Hopefully Novgorodoff will pare it down in her next effort, I think she has something good to offer with the right focus and scope.