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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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Fortified with a bowl full of Halloween candy I knew no child would come to claim, I bring you the latest column, just one more step in my quest to uncover the mysteries of our friend, the horse. You may think it’s about comics, but I say thee neigh. I don’t pay a ton of attention to the “comics blogosphere” these days, not out of any feeling of superiority, just out of busyness. But I did catch some recent discussion about whether the blogosphere was “dead.” It’s not; it’s merely changed as things will once they’ve been around a while. A few things have happened to cause this change. First, I think after the initial blush has worn off, a lot of those who used to blog every day have become a bit less prolific as the novelty wears off and life intrudes. Others have probably translated, or are seeking to translate, their blog work into paying gigs; the proliferation of political and cultural blogs—some now required reading within their respective fields, some linked to big hubs like MSN is evidence that the format is considered a valid one by the masses, so why not comics? A number of comics bloggers and online reviewers and columnists have gone on to work in comics print publications such as The Comics Journal and Wizard, which represents a benevolent co-opting of that initial comics blog excitement. I also think that the sheer volume of comics blogs these days makes it nigh-impossible to have any kind of movement or gathering place like when Dirk Deppey ran Journalista. There are too many voices out there to follow, which is a good thing, really, in that it means things are evolving and people are inspired by those who were around before. It’s really a sign of growth for a medium when it becomes so sprawling and diverse only the hardiest enthusiasts can keep track of it all. The San Jose film scene? The St. Louis hip-hop scene? The Stanford blogosphere? It’s cool when things burst up and become more than you expected they would be. It’s natural that some would lament this, because it’s such an entrenched belief of many who read comics that everything must remain as close to the way it was when you were a teenager as possible. At 36, I realize I’m an old fart about some things, but I try my damnedest to be as open as I can to the changes. Bend but don’t break. And you have to think that if you just keep hanging in there and doing what you do, those who are suffocating comics and the comics blogosphere with their misguided love will eventually loosen their grip because of arthritis.
Though subtitled, “A Comic Book Novella,” the details of the Johnson-like Loren Foster’s life as a high school student on the island of Maui, plus his thanking of a “Lacey,” when there’s an important girl in the book with that name, suggests this is largely autobiographical. And the youthful memoir or mostly-true novel often tends to present the same sort of pros and cons. While there is often dazzling, precocious talent on display and an intensity of feeling often muted by older writers, such emotions, not tempered by experience and perspective, can border on histrionic or maudlin. Novels like Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise worked very well for me as a shell-shocked college freshman, but I believe they would suffer significantly if read now. Loren is first shown fishing at night off the volcanic boulders on the Maui shore, hence the title, though it doesn’t appear to carry any significance through the rest of the book. He has no mother in the picture, just a loving dentist dad who pushes him a bit hard to get straight As. There’s a friend, Shane, but Loren hasn’t seen much of him. There’s Lacey, a girl from school he likes but is afraid to approach, though apparently they’ve had some sort of episode together before that many students know about. Loren, not of Hawaiian descent and dressed like kind of a dork, is isolated, but not entirely so: he’s cool enough that the school drug dealer casually tries to sell him some week. Johnson does a very good job setting the stage, and there is much to enjoy in his artwork, which is reminiscent at this young age of his mentor, David Mazzucchelli, with some stylistic tricks of Frank Miller’s and others popping up as well, though already synthesized into a congruous whole. He also knows the dramatic value of stillness, and of breaking up silent sequences of people with beautiful shots of nature, and he adds to the illusion of reality by including some facsimiles of real documents such as an Hawaiian land deed and a map of Maui. His work is already accomplished and impressive, if not exactly awe-inspiring at this stage. It’s the art that surely sold Fantagraphics on the book, though, because the story is muddled and in sore need of editing. As is often the case, bright kids sometimes do stupid things and continue to hang out with childhood friends even when it becomes self-destructive to do so. Loren is a reactive character, and hard to be sympathetic, because he so easily and without protest jumps to Shane’s aid in making a drug buy: crystal meth, otherwise known as batu on the island. Not only that, but he’s soon smoking it with Shane and abandoning his schoolwork. Johnson earns some credit for not turning the rest of the book into a preachy, anti-drug story, but he also doesn’t really say much about the turn of events. Loren’s narrative voice becomes less reflective and more expository, reciting statistics about the increasing number of Hawaiians moving to Las Vegas and telling an anecdote about a supporting character—neither of which moves the story forward. The dialogue between Loren and Shane about girls and college and the like likewise doesn’t move things forward, nor does it add much to either of their characters. Shane remains an enigma throughout, Loren not much more. If I had to guess, I’d say the third act, with Loren, Shane and a couple of Shane’s drug buddies get involved in a small crime—getting an adult to buy them malt liquor—was perhaps fictional, at least the part with the police chase and almost getting away with it and all. It’s a good sequence, actually, and provides a dramatic close to Loren’s and Shane’s friendship. The denouement is rather bland, but at least creates some small hope that Loren has learned from the experience and is trying to put his best foot forward, starting with Lacey. The main problems here are that he never developed Lacey at all beyond just being an object—always in a tight uniform—and Loren’s and Shane’s friendship is never developed. We don’t know what it was like before; we just see they’re not very close now and it is only holding together because Loren is willing to do whatever stupid thing Shane wants to do. The Night Fisher jerks the line too quickly, failing to reel me in, but I will say that Johnson has a great deal of talent and bears watching.
You never forget your first wet dream. Your first badly-timed hard-on tenting your pants, or pushing up against an unyielding school desk. The first tentative kiss, and the improvements in the second and third. The annoyance of a brassiere and the delight it encapsulates. Always the awkwardness and insecurity, the inappropriate laughter or embarrassing blush or loss of breath. Fumbling, fumbling. The first love that starts with holding hands and ends like a shovel to the chest or the barely-suppressed rage to lay waste to your hometown. Charles Burns has surely not forgotten any of this, and Black Hole is his ode to, or exorcism of, the scar tissue of puberty and high school that never really goes away. Keith is an average, young high school student in the ‘70s, in a nondescript but woods-surrounded town. Not a jock or a nerd, just one of the kids who don’t get noticed too much. He has friends, though, and much of their time is spent smoking dope, drinking beer and bullshitting. Good times, but at that age, the hormones take over sometimes, and Keith has got it bad for his Biology lab partner, Chris, who’s very cute but also an average girl, not a cheerleader. The book follows both characters, who rather interestingly don’t get together—she falls for another guy at a party, which changes her life, and Keith eventually moves on and finds his own girl. All well and good, but did I mention the hideous mutations? In this story, there’s a kind of disease spreading among the teenagers through sexual contact that causes their bodies to change in unique, often grotesque ways. When Chris has sex with Rob (who thinks she already knows he’s infected—he has a tiny second mouth in his neck, covered by his shirts), she soon develops a frequently-shedding skin, which causes her to be ostracized from all but her best friend. Keith finds a very sexy girl who is perhaps even sexier due to the gently swaying, reptilian tail she’s grown. Burns’ work has always been characterized by the obsessively lush depictions of bizarre, deformed characters, and in books like El Borbah and Big Baby he’s married his unsettling style to off-kilter parodies of crime fiction. The stories were always weird, usually funny, but only in Black Hole, which was a decade in the making, does one sense Burns has gotten closer to the source of his obsessions, the fount of his inspiration, and it’s a much more affecting work for this, not to mention he’s never taken so much room to develop plot and characters before. Keith and Chris are not deep, multifaceted characters, but their longings and anxieties are recognizable to anyone, and strongly if simply expressed. The enduring success of Marvel Comics’ X-Men franchise has often been ascribed to these youngish characters’ mutations being a metaphor for the common emotional disfigurement of puberty, and whether consciously or not, Burns has taken this metaphor to at once a more disturbing but in many ways more believable level. These kids are picked on for their looks, often refused service in restaurants, but like most of us, they find ways to band together and get along. Despite the ten years it took Burns to complete the twelve issue series, the art and story are remarkably consistent, of a piece. What felt somewhat disjointed in serial form flows confidently now, some of this due to the beautiful device Burns employs to begin each chapter. On the left hand page is always some strange object, such as a “black hole” like that of a wound in a foot or the rip in Chris’ old skin, and on the rightbhand page a different object will echo the shape of the one on the left. A good example would be some chicken bones bound together with twine into a “C” shape, then the curled figure of a sleeping girl in that same shape. The title of the book almost suggests science fiction, and though the mutations would technically qualify this graphic novel as belonging to that genre, it really refers to the theme of the book, which as I’ve stated is teen angst and puberty and, specifically a young man’s fear of, and longing for, that black hole from whence he came. Although Burns has become a much more mature and sophisticated cartoonist, his dark humor clearly hasn’t left him.
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The Night Fisher
Black Hole