73

Writings of Sarah Horrocks

[whitelippedviper]

Had a chance to read the just finished Mister Miracle mini? I’d love it if DC & Marvel did more mini series outside of main continuity like this.

Nah. It takes a lot to get me to read those books over the other comics I read, and I guess that isn't it, yet.

[whitelippedviper]

What Gundam should I start with?

The 0079 movie trilogy. It's the foundational myth for a reason. Plus then you can go right into Zeta and ZZ gundam which I think are the best.

In terms of non UC universe series, Iron Blooded Orphans and 00 Gundam are the best.

[whitelippedviper]

Have you read the 2nd volume of Pretty Deadly? I really love the difference between the 2volumes in terms of setting and wondered if you felt the same.

I have. I liked it a lot. I thought the writing and coloring both really leveled up and I remember being quite moved by the comic towards the end

[whitelippedviper]

what's the most recent marvel or dc comic you've bought?

I got a collection of McFarlane's Spider-Man: Torment back in May. I also have pre-ordered that Omnibus of Cable: Soldier X comics.

[whitelippedviper]

I remember you mentioning once that Makie’s story arc in BOTI made up for the manga kind of overstaying it’s welcome in certain places and I just wanted to ask what parts of the story you specifically thought lasted a touch too long?

That section where they are experimenting on manji in the middle volumes.

[whitelippedviper]

Some Purple Milo Manara Comics I Read This Week

This article originally appeared on my patreon.  Which you can subscribe to here.

I just wanted to ramble about these two Milo Manara comics I read this week.  The Golden Ass, and To See Once More the Stars, respectively.  You can buy The Golden Ass on its own and To See Once More The Stars is in the fifth volume of the Manara library, if you are scoring at home. What drew me to both of these books was the gorgerous purply watercolor washes that I feel perfectly accents his style and gives it this almost chrome edge?  Basically I read The Golden Ass and was so smitten with it that I checked Google for other work he made around the same time and then looked to see if it was colored this way or not.  I think To See Once More with Stars is the most like The Golden Ass in terms of art. Both of these books perfectly exemplify why the outrage over Manara's unimportant work for Marvel doing random ass covers drove me absolutely up the wall.  In general I find the reductive nature of criticism of Manara's work extremely infuriating.  People act as if because these comics are so sexual, they must also be brainless or artless--but Manara comes from a generation when sex wasn't considered so passe as to be in poor taste when mixed with ART.  Guido Crepax is a similar artist. Both are extremely literate comic artists who execute stories at a technical level that few ever can match. The Golden Ass is an adaption of an old Roman novel on par with Satyricon.  Which makes this a great doble feature with Blutch's Satyricon, which is one of my favorite comics ever.  It's a story about a dude who fucks around and gets turned into a donkey, and then has all of these, often sexual, adventures as a donkey.  It largely functions as a kind of donkey's eye view of roman society of the time, looking to expose the absurdity of class cruelties and structures in roman culture of the time.  It's not as black metal as Satyricon as a story, but it is maybe more raucous?  Which makes it a good fit for Manara.  

It's pretty gorgeous.  There's also a lot of references to film hidden all through it.  Especially to Fellini's Satyricon.  But also in this image you can see the titular Iphigenia from the Cacoyannis film, and the boy from Satyricon(and the man too).

The other Manara comic I read was a Guiseppie Bergman joint called To See Once More The Stars.  Which the title is a line from Dante.  The comic is about Bergman meeting this girl who has a book of classical paintings and whenever she looks in it, she assumes the identity of the woman in the painting.  And because of the nature of so many classical paintings, this means she is often nude and objectified.  Which of course horrifies those in the reality in which she lives her fantasy.  It's a fairly complex metatexual comic that mostly is an execuse for Manara to do a bunch of classical paintings.  It does have a fair bit to say about how women have been treated in art for thousands of years, and how if a woman tried to embody all of these fantasies she'd seem completely mad.  Which I think is a point that a lot of the people who slammed Manara after the Spider-woman cover would be shocked to see him make. The comic is stunning and like I said, it's in this purple water color style that really adds to the surreal nature of the comic.

It also drops this cool page:

The woman has become so depressed from society as it is that she has enduced in herself a death fantasy.  While Bergman frantically tries to get her to come back to life, a painter happens by and he frantically tries to paint images on the wall to revive her(mostly great italian comics(see Zanardi here!)).  He fails to bring her back to life, so Bergman asks you the reader to supply the image that will bring her back.  I haven't filled it in obviously.   But what I loved about this is that we've just gone through page after page of Manara laying out how fucked we are as a people in society.  How exploited and brain washed we are into horrors that we will never stop cycling into no matter how bad it gets.  How are you supposed to justify living in this kind of hell?  For Manara in this comic, the answer is one you give yourself, through expression(or non expression).  Whether that is creating art, or simply viewing it.  We can't give up in our thirst for this unique experience that art gives us.  Which isn't to say that art is an escapist thing.  But it helps us fill in ourselves.  When we look at art, we are seeing ourselves communicated back to ourselves through suggestive tricks of light.  We may not be able to escape the horrors of this world, and the pain of living, but we can try to know ourselves and in doing so make the choices that make up our lives as ourselves.   I always think of this thing Passoa wrote about how life is like we are all in this inn.  And some people are fucking upstairs.  Some people are drinking.  some people are serving drinks.  Some people are singing.  Some people are just waiting outside for the next bus to come up.  It doesn't matter what you are doing, so long as it is the thing that you want to do.  None of it is more important than any other choice.  What matters is that you come to know yourself in the limited amount of time we have to live, such that you can do the thing you most want to do with your time in this inn.  I think anyways.   For me this Manara page is like "here.   Here is a space for you.  Who are you?  You matter just as much as me, even if that is not at all".  To me that is a beautiful sentiment because it is a true one.

[whitelippedviper]

Hey Sarah, Big fan of your comics and criticism, this may be entirely out of left field if she's not an artist you care about, but do you have any thoughts on Kathy Acker? Been getting into her, and curious what your take is. Thanks! -Sam

I have her Don Quixote book, but I haven’t read it yet, so I don’t have much of an impression.

[whitelippedviper]

The Spiritual versus the Political in Art

The desire to see one’s own politics reflected in art is childish.  You should have enough conviction as a fully formed adult to not vainly need affirmation of your views from art.  Unfortunately, this seems to be the goal of a lot of readers in comics right now.  Not only do they prefer the adventures of the literal toys of their childhood, but they want those toys now married to the politics of their adulthood.  It’s this bizarre cocoon adults are entombing themselves within.  A mixture of the warm escapism of childhood nostalgia with a pinch of echo chamber adult politics.  Unfortunately when this becomes the goal of art, it suffers.  And while there are avenues where politics and art make good bedfellows(for instance propaganda) the utility of that kind of thing is very short lived and super contextual.  And in the end, what survives are at best shadows of the politics, well off from the primacy of the image.  I almost think of propaganda like art that wears a shroud for 100 years before revealing itself.  And what’s the point of that for the artist?  The experience of art should not be the experience of history. The primary thing art is, is the image(I’m obviously not talking about writing, but this is true to an extent with writing as well–just more…complicated).  The first thing and the last thing a piece of art ever is, is the experience of seeing it.  You see this thing and you have an experience with it, that is this complex system of internal and external contexts that can be intensely felt like a trauma but never fully put into words to explain to someone else.  You can’t really explain your experience with art to someone else, you can only show them the thing.  Your explanation is itself another thing that exists separate to the art, never touching it, and itself becoming another relationship of experience.  It’s like all of these bubbles of air popping out over time.  Everyone can see them, but when you reach for them they are gone. This is a spiritual experience.  Art is intrinsically spiritual not political.  When I say spiritual, what I am talking about is that part of you that you feel but can never escape, never express, but just exists on you like a weight or like a god only you can hear.  A spiritual experience is the thing that reminds us of the madness of our own consciousness.  It’s the thing that reminds us of the unknown that wraps itself around our lives that we call death.  It’s beauty, the sublime.   The goal of art should be to resonate in this space to remind us of the inexplicable nature of our impending death and prepare us for it, so our last moments aren’t spent in complete panic.  I think our last moments must last a lifetime, because like xeno’s arrow, consciousness shutting down is not something that consciousness can perceive, so it’s like you perceive and then you don’t–but you can never see not perceiving, so you never don’t.  So the goal with life I think is to figure out how to spend that forever last moments in the least amount of panic as you can.  I think this is why we have elaborate last rite rituals because on some level we perceive this to be true.

Now the opposite of the spiritual is the political(and this is why the two should never mix!(but often are)).  The political is life.  It’s the attempt to exploit life for power over it.  Politics is the thing where I am going to try and craft an idea that gets the most amount of people to exploit themselves for the achievement of my goals.  It’s cynical, a pestilence, and it intrinsically sociopathic.  It exists because the 20 percent of us that are born with a kind of defect that destroys any kind of ability for the rest of us to trust one another enough to love another as a baseline.  These are your ceos, your generals, your politicians, the middle managers at your job, serial killers, church leaders who stand between the congregation and the divine, coaches–anyone who starts out with their baseline for life that they should be over another human being.  This is politics.  When we zoom out on the image, the image gains in its divinity, as its mystery increases and its aesthetic becomes more and more focal and out of step with time–the image ascends.  Politics descend.  Far enough away politics just become human slaughter and hatred.  Politics is watching a pack of wolves tear apart a screaming deer.  

So when we say that art should be political or should match our politics, we are asking it to be a part of this exploitation which is so temporary.  We are asking for the potency of the experience, the one thing that art can truly offer to us in life, to be sacrificed for this temporary thing which is so brutal and so crass.  And for what?   Picasso created Guernica which even seen in a google image search is still incredibly potent, a true masterpiece against war expressing the atrocity of it–and yet it did not stop one jew from being thrown into the ovens.  Art has given politics masterpieces and achieved nothing for it, beyond what art already had–which was awe. None of this is to say that politics can’t enhance that sense of awe.  Sometimes the truth of a piece intersects with politics–but what’s important is that truth.  That poetic image.  To create that image, you have to look at what is true for it.  I always try and remind myself of this in my own art, and I often mostly fail, but when I draw a table in a comic, I want it to be my table, I want it to be the true table of this image.  You have to allow for things you don’t understand and that are complex and contradictory to come into being in the service of beauty.  Otherwise, what are you even doing?  And so sometimes you do have to include the political.  For instance, March, a comic about John Lewis’ life is going to include the political as part of its whole being.  But that comic isn’t just John Lewis manifesto.  The poetic truth and what makes it good is in between those things. And of course none of this is to say that the artist should be apolitical.  But for me, I view being political as something that I do as a person.  Like if you are a student.  Your education is something you pursue, but it’s not like…how you feel when you hear someone has died.  I also think it is important not to be consumed by politics to such a degree that you lose your ability to see outside of it.  And our politics…we should understand ourselves both within the larger movements we participate in, and outside of them as ourselves.  You are not a democrat, you are not a republican, you are not a communist.  When you say you are those things, it warps you to where you can’t hear people around you.  You can’t think about anything in terms of how it affects you, only in how it affects the party–you give up humanity to be an organ, and the returns on that are not always satisfaction.  They aren’t designed to be.  Political parties, affiliations, they are designed to extract life from you, to leave you a withered husk in their demands for power.  Play the game, don’t let the game play you.   As an artist, I think whatever it is that is that pure thing you might express is kind of in the crosshairs of every aspect of society.  Everyone wants to drag you away from the truth, to serve their immediate ends.  And it’s just how do you find yourself within that and grow that self, so that you can produce that thing that keeps you up at night.  How do you express that truth that burns through your life before it’s too late?

[bionic-heehaw]

I’m kinda curious about what you think of the term, the personal is political? They way I live and view the world is viewed as inherently political by a lot of people, even if it’s not something I’m conscious of.

So in a way any art I create, which tends to be an extension of my lived experiences and views about life, becomes political because of the inherent politicalness of my life and choices. Even if I don’t want my life to be political, because we live in a society populated by other humans who have power either over us or we have power over them, it is. The choices of our leaders, which are chosen by politics, directly impact my life. Their choices are informed by politics. In my view of life everything is in a way connected to politics, as we are all created as a result of our society and our society is formed and forms by our politics.

I think even if not I make ever again is explicitly political, it is still political as it is an expression of my thoughts and a product of the interaction between my being and society.

[whitelippedviper]

I view that as the attempts by society to appropriate the personal for their political ends.  No matter what way society wants to treat you, you are you.  Unique.  One of a kind.  Just like everybody else.  Your politics such that you have them represent an ideology of one.  And you should never compromise that ideology simply to cede autonomy and become an organ of a political body. Which isn’t to say, don’t be political.  Actually quite the opposite.  But understand your political actions as aspects of your person and not the other way around.  The personal is not political, but the political is personal. What is special about your work is not the expression of a particular political ideology, but the expression of that unique thing that you carry inside of yourself as a product of the totality of your life, beginning to end.  It’s important to express that.  Not simply regurgitate the political ideas you’ve been fed, simply because, because.  Respect yourself above all.  You are all you have and all you will ever have.

[whitelippedviper]

Gundam Diaries: ZZ, "My Soul Throbs"

I think this is the realest scene I’ve seen in any UC Gundam so far.  After everything that has happened to Judau and his friends, Judau is just like…”why? For what?  What did we accomplish?” and all Bright can really give him is a “welp...hit me if you like”...it’s so monstrous.  My relationship to Bright Noa over the series has really fluctuated.  In 0079 I thought he became a brilliant commander, and I thought he managed Amuro and the crew pretty well in a situation where there weren’t a lot of other options.  In Zeta, I think it’s a different Noa that shows up. The scars of the One Year War show themselves in a new kind of relationship to people like Kamille. Where before he would kind of tolerate Amuro’s rebellions or at most throw him in the brig, he beats the shit out of Kamille whenever he wants.  Most of the higher ups for Aeug haven no qualms about slapping children to get them in line.  I feel like Noa is so desperate to avoid the mistakes he felt he made in the One Year War that cost the lives of people like Ryu--but in the end, the atrocity to those he loves is even greater.  The death of Katz and the ruination of Kamille’s mind evolves Noa to this place of detached commander.  He never really relates to Judau and his crew, and is finally to the point as a commander where he mostly just sees these people as tools to meet objectives that...really are somewhat dubious.  So when Judau asks him what was this all for...it’s just so horrifying, because you know it was for nothing.   It loops back into the central question I have been looking at while watching Gundam which is where does War start?  Seeing Judau at this dark dark place, compared to where he started--how did that happen? Where did the corner get turned from protecting his friends to being a soldier at war?  I think for Judau it’s that point where Beecha and Mondo betray the Argma to try and sell the Zeta Gundam to Axis and Judau rather than side with his friends, thinks more about it in terms of his role as the hero who pilots the gundam.  It’s a turn that happens to pretty much all of Judau’s crew too.  Beecha eventually becomes the captain of the Nahel Argama for petesakes.  And it’s the same thing.  They appeal to these teenagers need to be special, their egos, and eventually they kill enough or see enough killing that they commit full to the war.  It’s a manipulation that by this point Noa has mastered.  And it makes him something of the villain of ZZ.

I think if ZZ has a central focus at all, it’s the way that honor, pride, ego, can be manipulated by those in power for their ends, which will cost you your soul.  This is seen verrrry clearly in the character of Mashymre Cello who is probably the best character in ZZ.  He starts out as this buffoon of honor. More interested in doing things the right way than even accomplishing them at all.  He wants his own glory so that he can prove worthy of his love for Haman. Early on this makes him a very comedic figure and a wonderful foil for Judau and crew as they scooby their way into figuring out how to pilot mobile suits.  But those urges which define Cello, which make him endearing and wonderful, are polluted by Haman.  She is able to convince him, for his honor, to drop the colony on dublin.  And so while his honor for Haman is left in tack, his personal honor as a human has been destroyed, to such a degree that he even gives away his precious rose, which in turn mirroring the change in the series, wilts.  The Mashymre Cello by the end of Gundam ZZ is a truly tragic man.  His elegance gone.  His hair disheveled.  Forced to carry the weight of an atrocity beyond imagining.  And even in his final sacrifice, it’s viciously sad.  He awakens truly powerful newtype abilities that threaten to end the conflict then and there, but in the end it is just an artifice which destroys his own suit and kills him in the process.  It’s so fucking sad, and cynical, and beautiful at the same time. Even just writing about it makes me cry, and this is a character you definitely don’t expect that is where you are going to end up with them.

Which brings us to Haman herself.  A brilliant commander and powerful newtype, blinded by her own honor and ego.  Judau directly confronts her with this, and tries to redeem her.  But she defies him to the very end, and kills herself to preserve her ideals.  Which is a huge difference between her and noa.  Noa is a manipulator on the scale of Haman, but he has no ideology except a defensive posture in conflict.  He aims to win whatever the war he is in.  But he has nothing that he is truly fighting for by this point.  He’s a clerk at death’s door, making sure all of your forms are in order. In terms of formalistic things, one of the cool things if like me you are watching ZZ right on the heels of Zeta is that the tone shift to a kind of punk kids giant robots humor thing really was the perfect decision by Tomino and crew.  I didn’t realize until watching what a weight Zeta was on my chest.  I felt like the first 20 so episodes of ZZ are you finally getting to breathe a little bit.  Of course then things change, and there are parts of ZZ that I think are even darker than Zeta.  Kamille spends all of ZZ pretty much as a looming reminder of the depression of Zeta and sacrifice in that show. In terms of mobile suits, I think the designs in Zeta are a lot better.  There wasn’t really a truly memorable mobile suit in ZZ for me.  The Double Zeta is in fact kind of annoying because it has to constantly form itself before they can do anything, and it really is the annoying end point of the idea that these mobile suits should transform at all.  I think Haman’s Qubeley is the best suit in the show and it’s from Zeta.  Actually scratch that.  My favorite suit in the show is Chara Soon’s Geymalk:

It has these kind of chunky funnels on it’s back which give it a kind of hunch.  A great horn.  And it’s best attack is this thing where it basically just goes nuts and shoots lasers out of every orifice, which I think fits Chara Soon as a character too, and I like her as a character.  I like that she’s completely mad.  She’s overcome by her impulses and freely acts upon them whether they are in line with an objective or not. In that way she’s a very pure person, even if she can’t put one thought in front of the other.  She’s this great scribble of a character, and I think the Geymalk captures that while still being really cool in its own right.

BONUSSSSS: I also watched Char’s Counterattack.  I may write some more about it next week, but besides Quess who is basically the Lana Del Rey of Gundam, it’s kinda...I mean it does finally bring closure to Amuro and Char--but I don’t know.  I have to think about it more.  I guess the main difference between Char, Haman, and Gihren is that Char is doing what he’s doing with the full knowledge of how evil it is, and is willing to shoulder the weight of that horror, where I feel like Haman and Gihren just considered atrocity a step between places.  There’s a sadness to char’s counterattack where on some level it feels like what Char really wants is to finally die so he concocts something evil enough to summon the ol grim reaper himself Amuro Ray to space to battle one last time.  Then there’s the whole thing with Hathoway, Chan, and Quess.  Hathoway killing Chan for killing Quess is definitely something young Kamille would have done.  But Four actually loved Kamille.  Quess has no love for Hathoway.  He’s a fool.   Also is it weird that when Kamille or Judau speak about the potential of humans I’m right there, but when Amuro does it, I am like “I don’t believe you, you need more people”.  In that respect I hate that Amuro gets the last word with Char, because I don’t think Amuro has demonstrated he is anything but a pilot.  What is Amuro going to do for spacenoids after this while the earth federation continues to exploit and suppress the space colonies?  Probably nothing!  And is he going to use his newtype powers to stir a new age of human evolution?  Unlikely.  He’ll do what he did after 0079.  He’ll go live on a ranch on earth, a high class prison designed by his earth federation overlords.  God.  I fucking hate Amuro. As for Mobile Suits.  The Nu Gundam is tight.  I like the black paint ant angular arrow sheath of funnels.  It’s also kind of sleek and quick compared to the Zeta or Double Zeta.  Of course the best suit is Char’s Sazabi.

Bulky and red like the Geymalk, with the same cool backpack funnel design.  I still kinda like the Geymalk a shade better.  But check those shoes.  Magnifique :) Anyways. I am on to War in the Pocket.  So wish me luck.

[whitelippedviper]

The Spiritual versus the Political in Art

The desire to see one’s own politics reflected in art is childish.  You should have enough conviction as a fully formed adult to not vainly need affirmation of your views from art.  Unfortunately, this seems to be the goal of a lot of readers in comics right now.  Not only do they prefer the adventures of the literal toys of their childhood, but they want those toys now married to the politics of their adulthood.  It’s this bizarre cocoon adults are entombing themselves within.  A mixture of the warm escapism of childhood nostalgia with a pinch of echo chamber adult politics.  Unfortunately when this becomes the goal of art, it suffers.  And while there are avenues where politics and art make good bedfellows(for instance propaganda) the utility of that kind of thing is very short lived and super contextual.  And in the end, what survives are at best shadows of the politics, well off from the primacy of the image.  I almost think of propaganda like art that wears a shroud for 100 years before revealing itself.  And what’s the point of that for the artist?  The experience of art should not be the experience of history. The primary thing art is, is the image(I’m obviously not talking about writing, but this is true to an extent with writing as well--just more...complicated).  The first thing and the last thing a piece of art ever is, is the experience of seeing it.  You see this thing and you have an experience with it, that is this complex system of internal and external contexts that can be intensely felt like a trauma but never fully put into words to explain to someone else.  You can’t really explain your experience with art to someone else, you can only show them the thing.  Your explanation is itself another thing that exists separate to the art, never touching it, and itself becoming another relationship of experience.  It’s like all of these bubbles of air popping out over time.  Everyone can see them, but when you reach for them they are gone. This is a spiritual experience.  Art is intrinsically spiritual not political.  When I say spiritual, what I am talking about is that part of you that you feel but can never escape, never express, but just exists on you like a weight or like a god only you can hear.  A spiritual experience is the thing that reminds us of the madness of our own consciousness.  It’s the thing that reminds us of the unknown that wraps itself around our lives that we call death.  It’s beauty, the sublime.   The goal of art should be to resonate in this space to remind us of the inexplicable nature of our impending death and prepare us for it, so our last moments aren’t spent in complete panic.  I think our last moments must last a lifetime, because like xeno’s arrow, consciousness shutting down is not something that consciousness can perceive, so it’s like you perceive and then you don’t--but you can never see not perceiving, so you never don’t.  So the goal with life I think is to figure out how to spend that forever last moments in the least amount of panic as you can.  I think this is why we have elaborate last rite rituals because on some level we perceive this to be true.

Now the opposite of the spiritual is the political(and this is why the two should never mix!(but often are)).  The political is life.  It’s the attempt to exploit life for power over it.  Politics is the thing where I am going to try and craft an idea that gets the most amount of people to exploit themselves for the achievement of my goals.  It’s cynical, a pestilence, and it intrinsically sociopathic.  It exists because the 20 percent of us that are born with a kind of defect that destroys any kind of ability for the rest of us to trust one another enough to love another as a baseline.  These are your ceos, your generals, your politicians, the middle managers at your job, serial killers, church leaders who stand between the congregation and the divine, coaches--anyone who starts out with their baseline for life that they should be over another human being.  This is politics.  When we zoom out on the image, the image gains in its divinity, as its mystery increases and its aesthetic becomes more and more focal and out of step with time--the image ascends.  Politics descend.  Far enough away politics just become human slaughter and hatred.  Politics is watching a pack of wolves tear apart a screaming deer.  

So when we say that art should be political or should match our politics, we are asking it to be a part of this exploitation which is so temporary.  We are asking for the potency of the experience, the one thing that art can truly offer to us in life, to be sacrificed for this temporary thing which is so brutal and so crass.  And for what?   Picasso created Guernica which even seen in a google image search is still incredibly potent, a true masterpiece against war expressing the atrocity of it--and yet it did not stop one jew from being thrown into the ovens.  Art has given politics masterpieces and achieved nothing for it, beyond what art already had--which was awe. None of this is to say that politics can’t enhance that sense of awe.  Sometimes the truth of a piece intersects with politics--but what’s important is that truth.  That poetic image.  To create that image, you have to look at what is true for it.  I always try and remind myself of this in my own art, and I often mostly fail, but when I draw a table in a comic, I want it to be my table, I want it to be the true table of this image.  You have to allow for things you don’t understand and that are complex and contradictory to come into being in the service of beauty.  Otherwise, what are you even doing?  And so sometimes you do have to include the political.  For instance, March, a comic about John Lewis’ life is going to include the political as part of its whole being.  But that comic isn’t just John Lewis manifesto.  The poetic truth and what makes it good is in between those things. And of course none of this is to say that the artist should be apolitical.  But for me, I view being political as something that I do as a person.  Like if you are a student.  Your education is something you pursue, but it’s not like...how you feel when you hear someone has died.  I also think it is important not to be consumed by politics to such a degree that you lose your ability to see outside of it.  And our politics...we should understand ourselves both within the larger movements we participate in, and outside of them as ourselves.  You are not a democrat, you are not a republican, you are not a communist.  When you say you are those things, it warps you to where you can’t hear people around you.  You can’t think about anything in terms of how it affects you, only in how it affects the party--you give up humanity to be an organ, and the returns on that are not always satisfaction.  They aren’t designed to be.  Political parties, affiliations, they are designed to extract life from you, to leave you a withered husk in their demands for power.  Play the game, don’t let the game play you.   As an artist, I think whatever it is that is that pure thing you might express is kind of in the crosshairs of every aspect of society.  Everyone wants to drag you away from the truth, to serve their immediate ends.  And it’s just how do you find yourself within that and grow that self, so that you can produce that thing that keeps you up at night.  How do you express that truth that burns through your life before it’s too late?

[whitelippedviper]

Gundam Diaries: Love Versus War in Zeta Gundam

This entry originally appeared on my patreon.  Subscribe today!

Zeta Gundam really does half launch itself out of Lalah’s death in 0079.  What really struck me with it is that at its core it’s a battle between war and love.  Zeta is constantly moving key characters allegiances between the various factions in Zeta, the effect of this is that it destabilizes you from the political ramifications of the war between the Titans, AEUG, and Neo Zeon movements in a way that you never were with the Zeon/Federation One Year War.  It reduces war to an obstacle between the ability of these characters to love one another and understand one another.  Their mobile suits strain with energy and can literally not maintain their form, such is the strain of this emotional maelstrom.   With Kamille we have a powerful newtype who is riddled with guilt and angst and more than anything love.  He continually puts himself in danger trying to save those around him.  Where Char and others see humanity as a bridge to the newtype as being, Kamille sees it as an awareness that life powers space, and because of that life is precious, love is precious. And he’s stuck with this kind of ideology in the middle of a war, it’s really interesting. It’s something as a pacifist I think a lot about.  How do you avoid war and also protect what you love?  And also, while war rages can you be neutral or in that neutrality are you just benefiting by being able to continue to live while others suffer in the absence of your attempts to save them?  Kamille’s answer to all of this is to expand who he loves rapidly.  From Four, to Fa, to Sarah, to Reccoa, to Katz, to Rosamia, to Char.  His newtype abilities like Lalah’s allow him to almost instantly make connections with life around him, and see it as worthwhile.  With the exceptions being Haman and Sciracco, who he condemns because they are like him, but they use their abilities to treat those around them as tools to an end, and Kamille asserts that people like them are the root of war.

These ideas are complicated in the character of Reccoa Londe, who I think is an even purer expression of what Kamille feels institutionally, because she wants to protect all of those people AND Scirocco.  Her position is that war took away her feelings initially.  Hallowed her out to where she was constantly taking on the most dangerous missions on some level hoping to die, because there was nothing left to her.  But with Scirocco she feels something again.  She is awakened to those dead feelings of love, and she decides to completely discard allegiances to pursue it.  Her flaw though is that she loses herself in love, and I mean...she gasses a whole colony.  But some extent by that point she’s just made the decision that war is almost just this function she performs to chase after her love. She’s intellectually moved beyond war, even though she is trapped as a participant until her death.  I think the reason she says that Kamille couldn’t understand is that Kamille’s love is wild and unfocused on any one person.  Whereas Reccoa is just devoted to a singular love.  And she’s willing to commit atrocities to pursue it in a way that I don’t think Kamille is.  Though then we have Kamille and Four, and the destruction of Hong Kong basically because Kamille is singularly obsessed with his love for Four.  Though I don’t think if Four asked Kamille to gas a whole colony that Kamille would do it. Another interesting thing with Zeta is where does it all start?  Where does War start?  For Kamille it kind of just starts with Jerid insulting him and punching him and spins out from there.  You can’t say it was the death of his parents because he was already joining up with AEUG even before that. His arc is more that he wanted to become a soldier in some respects, but then awakened to his newtype abilities, began to see the value and interconnectedness of life, and by the end war objectives completely disappear as he kills Scirocco when Scirocco had already lost.  War starts as a personal offense to his sensibilities, and then finishes as one for Kamille.  In killing Scirocco, Kamille steps out of war and into murder, and it so invalidates the way he’s connected to the universe, that Scirocco is able to take his soul down with him, and Kamille is driven mad.

Which he’s not the only one.  Zeta Gundam is full of madness and hysteria.  It’s like the one year war has manifested a PTSD throughout the cosmos, through survivors and participants alike.  Char and Amuro are both shadows of their former selves.  Bright Noa in some respects is much more distanced from his crew than he was at the white base, like he doesn’t want to feel the loss of anymore.  And then we have the characters of Four and Rosamia whose pasts have been traumatically ripped away from them, and for whom war is an insanity they endure only because their bodies are such inescapable prisons for their minds.  Even Haman has kind of lost it because of the war.  She’s following the lead of a young girl, on a ship full of inexperienced and incompetent remnants of Zeon--she’s scrambling after a past that was horribly ripped from her.  There’s a sense that this is all she has left.  And of course Kamille who is the most hysterical character in the show.  Full of tears, irrational actions that endanger himself and others it’s like all of the pain of the one year war has traveled through time to land on this one kid.

Artistically, the textures and special effects in Zeta are really a thing to behold.  And there’s a kind of deliberate obfuscation of the mobile suits through the constant use of overlays that besides warmly reminding me of comics, is just another way that this show hammers home this notion of the mobile suits as barriers to a shared humanity.  Of course the logical end point of this idea is in Evangelion with the AT fields--but it’s interesting to see what were probably some of the roots of that here.  To say nothing of an epically angsty teen genius pilot.  The mobile suit designs themselves have Mamoru Nagano’s fingerprints all over them.  I’m not sure which ones he’s actually designed but there’s definitely the spirit of five star stories lurking through Zeta Gundam which is kind of perfect because 1) Five Star Stories is perfect and 2) I think these kind of sweeping romantic designs fit really well with the tone of the show as a whole.  I mean imagine a Qubeley dropping into 0079.  It would have been crazy looking.  But by the time we see it it both stands out and seems like a logical progression of most of the suits.  It’s probably with the Methuss my favorite suit in the series.  What I love with the Methuss is that crazy kind of hook that goes from the head of the mech down it’s back and up it’s crotch and the way it kind of sits back off its hips somewhat, and then it’s transformation form is really pretty too.

I also really like the Fashion of Zeta Gundam.  It’s like this combination of drapey capes, and kind of weird cleaned up space biker gang aesthetics.  Anyways.  Those are sort of my thoughts on Zeta Gundam.  I also thought it was really remarkable how many women are in this.  It’s something like a 3 to 1 ratio of badass women to men on this show.  These days something like that would be almost unheard of.  I mean they kill off better women in the first 12 episodes of this show than a lot of stories have for their whole arc.  And even the male protagonist/gundam pilot of the show has a “girl’s name”.  There’s actually a debate in the climax of zeta between Emma and Reccoa about the role of women which I mean...while I think some of the ideas are pretty dated, it’s just an interesting thing to put in that I haven’t seen a lot elsewhere and it just shows how malleable science fiction can be even within something as narrow as gundam. So all that said...onto Gundam ZZ!

[whitelippedviper]

Hey Sarah, are there any new books you are anticipating for 2018?

I'm not great at remembering what is coming out but Mort Cinder and Devilman are the two that spring to mind quickly.

[whitelippedviper]

Gundam Diaries: Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 Compilation Movies

This article originally appeared on my patreon...for more content like this, plus art from my comics, subscribe to my patreon.

“The life Ral and I had was so much richer than yours!  And the one who ended it, kid, was you!” -Lady Hamon, Mobile Suit Gundam the Origin (Yaz)

Watching the Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 movies, I was really struck by how much an elegy they are.  This is something that is really ramped up in Origin--but is still very much in this series.  Ostensibly, Amuro Ray, our “hero” stalks his way through the old world order, destroying everything in his path without sentiment.  It’s notable that Ray is not the one who kills the actual terrible members of the Zabi family, like Gihren.  Instead Ray kills good people like Ramba Ral, Lady Hamon, and Lalah--and then a bunch of random zeon soldiers who get in his way, counting them being the only sentiment he really can conjure up.  You get the sense that he is only with the white base because that’s where the gundam ended up and nothing more.  

I was trying to pinpoint the moment Amuro switches over from the false justification of protecting others to simply ushering in a new newtype era--but I don’t think that moment exists.  When his father says that the gundam is more important than people--Amuro questions him that once, and that I think is the question that ends up powering his character through these films.  Do human lives matter more than the gundam?  And the Gundam is the way by which Amuro’s powers become manifest and he is able to become a god and decide who lives and who dies(with only the sort of antichrist figure Char to oppose him).

Char is interesting because even though he eventually gets the point of espousing a newtype supremacist message, it’s also at the same time that he is professing to be a man “who has abandoned his past”--which he says while riding a horse he learned to ride in the colony he grew up in, TO his sister, who it turns out he never actually abandons.  And even when he says he revenge against the Zabi family was no longer his goal, even that eventually is shown to be something of a lie.  Char is such a conflicted identity--I mean he’s three people--he’s the child Casval pledging revenge, he’s Édouard Mass--an identity and age between two points, not quite Casval anymore, but not Char yet--and then Char, hero of Zeon.  I think fundamentally he’s someone who could never let go of the pride of being ostensibly royalty. So everything he does is to protect his vanity, and not admit his own fault--and so his ideologies, mostly just shift to what identity is most flattered by that moment.  He’s like one man with three faces, behind a mask, trying desperately to make sense of the horror of his world and the catastrophic choices he’s made.  The difference between Char and Amuro is that Char has a conscience that he has to ignore to function--Amuro doesn’t--Amuro only knows one direction and that is forward to the new age.  And Amuro was like that even before the war started.  Or you could say the war started for him early, since his father basically split his family apart to go make weapons. It reminds me of the weapons manufacturing links to something like the columbine shootings, and this was something Dylan and Kleebold brought up, was that this was a place where the bombs were made.  I wonder what kind of strain it puts on you as a child to reconcile the prosperity of those around you in your community with the exportation of death around the world?  I think it must have some effect.  Like for me as a kid, the issue was the idea of a judgemental divine omniscient being that I remember even like five or six years old, just being torn apart by that idea.  And how going through that kind of existential crisis at such an early age, made it easier for me to sidestep the kind of angsty teen approach to religion a lot of people get, and helped shaped my empathy for others in a weird way.  I don’t know what it is to be a child and be confronted with weapons manufacturing for the empire? I think in Amuro’s case, it helps turn him into a sociopath.  Since his father doesn’t love him and instead loves weapons, Amuro never learns to love humans, and instead learns to fetishize machines.  There’s a panel in Origin that I can’t get out of my head when watching 0079.  It’s Sayla watching as a zeon ship is destroyed, “In that flash of light, hundreds of lives ended, and you get used to it...yes...I can tell”(Origin, YAZ)--everytime Char or Amuro blow up an entire ship, I just think the only difference between that ship and the white base is we actually get to see the lives of the people on white base.  And I think the difference between Amuro and Char in this is that when Char destroys these ships, it’s his Char personality--the zeon hero--he’s doing it as part of his larger, Casval scheme for revenge against the Zabis--so I like to think maybe the Édouard Mass part of his personality hates it all, because Édouard hated bullies to a large extent, and he doubted authority.  Amuro doesn’t have those bifurcations.  He’s pure newtype.  In that respect, his rival was really Lalah, who was a much purer character in some respects--she only fought out of love of Char.

Which is probably larger theme I’ll talk about in terms of Gundam--like where is the turning point where fighting for something so micro and personally important becomes just an inconsequential needle in the haystack of slaughter that is war?  Also when is war justified?  Is it ever justified?  In 0079, we are presented with a situation where earth was definitely exploiting the colonies to an unbearable degree--but then a fascist took charge of that moment and dropped one of those colonies on earth--at what point did the justifiable position of Zeon independence become an attempt to wipe humanity from earth?  But also why did Revil turn down peace talks?  Was he right to take that attack on earth as such an unconscionable act that it demanded even more blood?  Think about it in terms of the US after 9/11...we frame all of these wars as after 9/11--but the attacks themselves are rooted in a bloody imperialist history dating back to WW2.  We say, like Revil, that we are the victims and someone must pay--but the people who pay, were already paying before 9/11 and that’s why 9/11...and you roll it over in your mind enough times, and the only thing that you see that makes sense is just the senseless slaughter of people--we are all people, some were born here, some were born there--but we all want the same things--but history has been thrust on us, and these systems are in place that perpetuate themselves in terms of hatred, in terms of blood, in terms of war.  The US itself exists to the degree of prosperity that it does, because it profited off of both world wars.  Basically all the wealth of europe that europe had taken out of the rest of the world got transferred to the US at that point--and once we got a taste for that, we just kept it going.  The cold war was mostly just Americans and Russians getting fat of exporting war around the globe.  Even today the US and Russia are the top two weapons dealers, and third place is very distant.  This happens in 0079 too.  One of the colonies, Side...6 I think...professes neutrality, but is mostly just profiting off of selling weapons to both sides.  So I’m just like...where do you say these things start?  Where do they ever end?  How many more Chars and Amuro’s were made to repeat this cycle? I dunno.  Kai is the only real dude in this whole show.

[whitelippedviper]

So what is it about Goodnight Punpun that connects with you so much? I've tried reading through it multiple times and I just don't get the hype behind it. (For reference I really liked Nijigahara Holograph, so I get that Asano loves this kind of overbearing existentialism.) But I just don't understand what isn't connecting with me and Punpun.

The end where they are on the run, deranged, falling apart and all of the things they spent their lives hoping for are completely corrupted.

[whitelippedviper]

My Online Writing for 2017/Year in Review

Comics:

Trans-Grotesqueness in Zanardi

Andrea Pazienza’s “Mardi Gras Night”: Can’t Say Shit If You Aren’t About Shit

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin. Fuck war, love comics.

Pop Comics #5: Astonishing X-men #3. Is Clarity Enough?

Pop Comics #4: Saga #46. Come Mush with Me

Pop Comics #3: The Flash #29. Negative Rebirth Crisis on Infinite Multiverses RIP 52

Pop Comics #2: Dark Nights: Metal #1

Pop Comics #1: Titans #14 and Slanty Ass Panels

MAKING THE ART OF THE TWO-PAGE SPREAD MATTER AGAIN

INTER-REVIEW: HWEI LIM + EMMA RIOS AND THEIR BOOK MIRROR

“I’ve Always Felt Legitimate”: An Interview with Katie Skelly

RanXerox: Holy Fucks For the People

Blame! Vol. 2: Revisiting

Movies:

Spoiler filled explanation of why I didn’t feel Blade Runner 2049

My Ten Best Comics of 2017: 1. Zanardi by Andrea Pazienza 2. Goodnight Punpun by Inio Asano 3. Golden Kamuy by Satoru Noda 4. H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound by Gou Tanabe 5. Mirror by Emma Rios and Hwei Lim 6. Shade the Changing Girl by Castellucci, Zarcone, Fitzpatrick 7. Girls Last Tour by Tsukumizu 8. Kakegurui by Homura Kawamoto and Toru Naomura 9. My Pretty Vampire by Katie Skelly 10. Happiness by Shuzo Oshimi

Best Experiences reading comics this year:

-Dulled Feelings by Igort

-Zanardi by Andrea Pazienza

-Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

-Goodnight Punpun by Inio Asano

-Reading JRJR and Anna Nocenti’s Daredevil run

Best Comics Experiences This Year:

-Getting to see Ian MacEwan’s Art in Person. If Goro looks a lot better in the second half than the first half, Ian is to blame.  Getting to see his art in person was a trip. He does so much with texture, and his figures are really that nice balance of expressionistic and weighty.  When the book he’s been working on comes out, I hope people actually look at the art, because it’s insane!

-Getting to meet and hang out with Emma Rios for a weekend, in terms of comics for me, in the west, her and Ron Wimberly are the best--so even if all I had gotten to do was see her in person, that would have been cool.  But she’s an even better person than artist, I think.  Which I think anyone who has met her can attest.  So cool to get to pick her brain and here what she is thinking about going forward.  If you’ve read I.D. or Mirror you know what a complex thinker she is.  I’m really excited for the rest of island, and her projects after that.

-Watching a Knife selling show on TV late at night with Tessa Black, Ameka, and Brandon Graham.  Probably the hardest I’ve laughed at any con.

-Hanging out with Jung Hu Lee in Seattle and Portland. A really talented artist in his own right. His perspective about sort of work and art balance is one I relate a lot to, just a really cool dude who can do like fifty million things and I feel like has a better handle on how to pass the time living than most people I know.

I got to do these things largely because notorious comics villain Brandon Graham gave me places to stay in both instances and because in the second instance Goro sales were able to comp my airfare. 

[whitelippedviper]

(second ask, sorry, I don't have social media accounts or anything) regarding your other points on Paz / art in general, I saw the Paste review of him where they're like "omg no narrative! and the characters do bad things!", does anyone think this could be improved by Zanardi to having a character arc and growing as a person, so maybe we can see him like getting yoga classes? It's written by a smackhead who died aged 32. Maybe his world was pretty brutal and art is about confrontation.

Yeah I found the Paste review almost insulting. Zanardi does take Kendo classes though!  Haha.  But yeah, I think the fact that you have to reconcile that we live in a world of abject horror and despair, and that within that, are beautiful moments, and those things just exist next to each other, and nothing you can do in your life will diminish either force.  In fact, I think that beauty exists as a RESULT of despair--beauty is this awe inspiring moment that you feel in you, and it can’t be wittled down and given from you to someone else, you alone experience it, because it’s a glimmer of the world outside of life--it’s a part of the peace of death.  They say that if you actually see God’s face you go mad, and I think that that means if you were to see the all encompassing cessation of all worldy desires in a single moment, it invalidates everything around it--you lose desire, which is required to push your mind through the pain of living.  So obviously something like that could never fully exist in life--but maybe that is what the acceptance of death is right before you finally pass on?  And maybe that’s why there is such an emphasis through human history of how to handle people’s final moments?  But anyways.  These moments are like shadows of that final beauty. And I think artistically it’s much easier to call them into being with horrific ugly surroundings than utopian ones.  I think it’s for two reasons: 1) just contrast.  It’s easier to see things when they are contrasted and 2) because the true nature of life is pain, horror, isolation, and despair--that’s what it means to be conscious moving your body through time--so if in art we reflect this true nature, I think it is much easier to create the conditions of the sublime.  Which I don’t think is something Paz is at all ignorant of, given the totality of what is going on in the Zanardi stories.  His work is cartoonish, but also very interested in impacting the soul.  The paste review for me, only told half the story, and took the easy way out.  But what can you do?  We live in an age of adult children...she said, as she logged off to go watch G Gundam....

[whitelippedviper]

Hey, you probably get asked this quite a bit, but are you going to revive the Trash Twins podcast anytime soon, or do you have any similar projects planned? I only just found both your blog and the podcast, I guess it'll be a while before I run out of episodes so I can deal with it but it's basically the only podcast I want to listen to and I found it like seven months after it ended, which is kind of a bummer. Loving your blog, also!

I doubt it. But you never know.