strips

the first english phrase i learned was “i’m sorry, i don’t speak english.” i spent a lot of time practicing it on our flight to the us, and readily used it on a unsuspecting woman on the plane who was trying to practice her chinese.

my first years in the us was a constant struggle to communicate. i did ok in math but was lost in any class involving english, which was pretty much everything except for lunch. instead, i could be found in the back of the room, devouring the pile of mad magazines my friend david had brought in. i guess the teachers were fine with not having to sweat me, so i would literally spend days immersed in the strips: don martin’s high-steppin’ freaks in floppy shoes, antonio prohias’ existential struggle in black and white, the mind-bending al jaffee fold-ins, and sergio aragones’ neurotic pantomime scrawled on the page margins.

when i was younger, comics were considered by most parents as amoral, low-brow distractions that will keep their kids from becoming a doctor or a lawyer. they went after it with a zeal that some parents today reserve for rap and video games. so while as a kid i was able to enjoy prince, a comics monthly, or "big auntie" and “robots" by godfather of taiwanese comics liu hsing-ching, it was completely on the q.t., like porn. not that there’s anything wrong with porn.

needless to say, i didn’t let on at home i was squandering tuition money on comic books. after all, i reasoned, i was “reading”, and to a large extent, learning english from those pulpy pages.

the drawing and narrative skills of those early mad artists went beyond simple storytelling, they conveyed pop sensibilities and quirks. this made their work very effective examples of everyday language and communication, rich in nuances of social interaction, so even newbies like me quickly got it, and stopped talking like we all went to the same esl class.

but mad was a portal to harder stuff. one minute i was chuckling at “a mad look at the clorox commercial”, the next i’m hiding r. crumb’s big ass comics under my mattress. it was a long and torturous downward spiral from there: zap comix’s hallucinogenic mix of sex and violence, the r-rated and french-flavored métal hurlant, especially richard corbin’s fluorescent hormonal rampages and the tech-savvy discipline of moebius’s luminous panels, and the pungent mexican soap opera of gilbert hernandez’s palomar stories.

the palomar series were a revelation. while i never got into love and rockets, for whatever reason, the magical realism of luba et. al.‘s misadventures resonated deeply. the distinctly hispanic take on the universe has the flavors of a garbiel garcia marquez story, and made ethnic perspective and voice not only interesting but cool.

palomar also brought me full circle in my schooling. mad was my entrée into an american culture that has morphed over the years to reflect a more heterogeneous make-up, and views as disparate as french-roasted musing of manu larcenet and giant robot’s 2nd generation a-pop.

i read derek kirk kim’s elegant “same difference” with a weird déjà vu that i’m again learning about american culture from the comics. this time around, the jokes are more mature and have a distinctive asian-american slant, but they are no less visually compelling and insightful about the peculiarities of our time.

unlike kim, who tends to give into bouts of obsession and hysteria, adrian tomine prefers cooler temperature. it doesn’t mean his work lacks passion, just that he likes to frame his emotional turmoil with mannered lines and colors. tomine’s recent “subway” cover for the new yorker, for instance, is a lesson in understatement that deftly captures a poignant moment in big city life. if art spiegelman is pastrami, tomine is sushi.

tomine edited and wrote the introduction to “the push man and other stories” (drawn and quarterly, 2005), a handsome hardbound collection of strips by old school japanese underground cartoonist yoshihiro tatsumi. although his modest, loosely drawn panels bear little resemblance to the loud and hyper manga of today, tatsumi’s influence still reverberates. his short, oblique stories peel away social conventions and provide a rare and unvarnished glimpse into the japanese psyche. disturbing panels like “bedridden” and “telescope,” both originally published in 1969, are as revealing about japanese self-image and social mores as feng zikai’s take on lu xun’s classic “the true story of ah q” is about the chinese.

tatsumi and tomine are a natural match. unlike contemporaries crumb or gilbert shelton, the creator of wonder wart-hog, tatsumi eschews pushing the boundaries of good taste or overwhelming the senses like a bad trip. many of his restrained and stylized panels echo the studied geometry of, say, tomine’s optic nerve #6 or #9 and found visually compelling ways to document the more ephemeral feelings and ideas of everyday life.

examples of musical equivalent of contemporary graphic novels or comics are many; the challenge, in a time when fashion is often confused with style, is to find original voices/visions that resist caricature or easy stereotype.

charlie chan is not exactly a product of multicultural tolerance and understanding, but the 1972 hanna-barbara cartoon spin-off, “the amazing chan and the chan clan,” is also not quite what you would expect. trying to replicate the successful scooby-doo formula (aka hardy-boys-go-coed-with-dog), the action was shifted to the more culturally assimilated chan kids (the unfortunately named “chan clan”), complete with their own surfy theme song. intentional or not, it was a cultural collision that produced a novel outcome.

dan nakamura (aka the automator) was destined to be a gorillaz, that mother of all comics-inspired band. but “cartoon capers,” taken from “a much better tomorrow” (75 ark, 2000), revels in john woo and anime sci-fi references and easily surpasses the more polished but less flavorful posturing of albarn/hewlett's crew.

putting their best prozac smile forward, morphine work irony, if not sarcasm, into their “top floor, bottom buzzer” (from “the night”, dreamworks, 2000). the delivery is self-consciously upbeat, as much the late mark sandman could muster anyway, and exudes the jagged noir of a frank miller strip.

Posted by cellpharmer at January 31, 2006 01:06 PM