#fallentreesbringrepercussions

[squarehead333]

Dylan Horrocks, Alan Moore, Steve Grove and Dan Clowes: imagining comics that don't exist.

[squarehead333]

You don't argue with artists, you just say words, and they say words, and there is absolutely no connection. Absolutely none. Beautiful on both sides, full of new words and flourishing language and so forth, but no actual exchange and no understanding of the other one's ideas.

Marcel Duchamp, interviewed by Calvin Tomkins, 1964

[squarehead333]

I guess I see more of the potential of comics than the actual… Well, I think what it is is having grown up reading so many books that the comics make me… The stories, in most cases, even if they're good, they're still not as good as most books, most novels are. So it's frustrating to read a comic when I could be reading some great literature.

Gabrielle Bell, interviewed by Gary Groth for the second issue of Mome, 2005

[squarehead333]

My rule of thumb is that making a movie out of a comic strip is like making a love song out of a blowjob: You may well make a perfectly decent love song out of it, but it will lack the characteristics one values in the original experience.

R. Fiore, 2011

[squarehead333]

Nowhere Fast: Bruce Dawe, 1970; Nabiel Kanan, 1991; E L U C I D, 2024.

[squarehead333]

"Those who have been comic artists do not make good directors" reads, in bold, a recent maxim from one of those guys who gets paid to give new movies star ratings. "Those who have been comic artists," one reads between these lines where it is implied that those on their way to becoming the next Mique Barceló [a young, 28 at the time, popular Spanish fine artist] would "end up resenting that inheritance in their painting". Which is to say: that predestination that we were assured had Protestants as its champions plays its role in fine art when we have a past as dishonorable as the birth of comics behind us. It is, apparently, about eliminating all bastard references from the "canon" and facing oil or celluloid with that nakedness of which a good chunk of the priests of criticism can only resort to calling dark or lyrical literature. What's more: here at Madriz we are willing to incinerate our archives as long as we do not mortgage the future of any collaborator for whom, tomorrow, precisely because of that collaboration, it can be said that they are accused of "a manifest mastery of narrative" or "a formal subordination to the intrinsically graphic" instead of starting from an assumption in which each person is judged solely by their work, regardless of their background. Great art, which is sometimes only great because it is printed in letterpress with capital letters, should not be defended, no matter how environmentalist it may be, as if it were a national park.

Felipe Hernández Cava, introduction to issue 17 of the comics and arts magazine he edited, Madriz, from 1985. Translation is mine. Cava is a major, possibly the foremost, comics scriptwriter in Spain, and possibly the best comics writer to do it in that language, there would be no question if not for Hector Germán Oesterheld.

It can be hard to quantify just how ahead of the curve Madriz was, not only in the context of Spain but of the whole comics world. People weren't talking about comics like this in France until maybe the mid nineties, and the only comics they published that were nearly as forward-thinking were translations of Madriz contributors. Frémok, the all time artiest Franco-Belgian publication house, basically formed because a bunch of ambitious art-school kids got really into Madriz, Alberto Breccia and the cult French cartoonist Alex Barbier. Eric Lambé, a key Frémok artist, had some of his first comics published in a fanzine heavily indebted to Madriz he started with fellow cartoonist Alain Corbel, called Mokka.

[squarehead333]

For many years and in profound loneliness and incomprehension I have worked with honesty and love trying to take comics along more adult and artistic paths. That attitude earned me ostracisation and marginalisation…

Alberto Breccia (the greatest cartoonist of all time), in a letter to the cartoonist Raúl Fernández Calleja sent in 1993, months before Breccia's death. My translation.

[squarehead333]

But now, after the news of Barthelme’s death, this simple fact of presence or absence, which I had begun to recognize in a small way already, now became the single most important supplemental piece of information I felt I could know about a writer: more important than his age when he wrote a particular work, or his nationality, his sex (forgive the pronoun), political leanings, even whether he did or did not have, in someone’s opinion, any talent. Is he alive or dead? — just tell me that. The intellectual surface we offer to the dead has undergone a subtle change of texture and chemistry; a thousand particulars of delight and fellow-feeling and forbearance begin reformulating themselves the moment they cross the bar. The living are always potentially thinking about and doing just what we are doing: being pulled through a touchless car wash, watching a pony chew a carrot, noticing that orange scaffolding has gone up around some prominent church. The conclusions they draw we know to be conclusions drawn from how things are now. Indeed, for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. The dead can be helpful, needless to say, but we can only guess sloppily about how they would react to this emergent particle of time, which is all the time we have. And when we do guess, we are unfair to them. Even when, as with Barthelme, the dead have died unexpectedly and relatively young, we give them their moment of solemnity and then quickly begin patronizing them biographically, talking about how they “delighted in” x or “poked fun at” y — phrases that by their very singsong cuteness betray how alien and childlike the shades now are to us. Posthumously their motives become ludicrously simple, their delights primitive and unvarying: all their emotions wear stage makeup, and we almost never flip their books across the room out of impatience with something they’ve said. We can’t really understand them anymore. Readers of the living are always, whether they know it or not, to some degree seeing the work through the living writer’s own eyes; feeling for him when he flubs, folding into their reactions to his early work constant subauditional speculations as to whether the writer himself would at this moment wince or nod with approval at some passage in it. But the dead can’t suffer embarrassment by some admission or mistake they have made. We sense this imperviousness and adjust our sympathies accordingly.

Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story, 1991