The Love and Rockets Companion – 30 Years and Counting


Edited by Marc Sobel & Kristy Valenti (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-579-2

In the 1980s a qualitative revolution forever destroyed the clichéd, stereotypical ways different genres of comic strips were produced and marketed. Most prominent in destroying the comfy pigeonholes we’d built for ourselves were three guys from Oxnard, California; Jaime, Mario (occasionally) and Gilberto Hernandez.

Love and Rockets was an anthology magazine (which first appeared as a self-published comic in 1981) featuring intriguing, adventuresome larks and bold experimental comic narratives that pretty much defied classification, all wrapped up in the ephemera of the LA Hispanic and punk music scene.

Most stories focussed on either the slick, sci-fi-soused hi-jinx of punky young gadabouts Maggie and Hopey (and their extended eccentric circle of friends) or the heart-warming, terrifying, gut-wrenching soap-opera fantasies from the rural Central American paradise of Palomar.

Jaime Hernandez was always the most visible part of the graphic and literary revolution: his sleek, seductive, clean black line and beautiful composition – not to mention impeccably rendered heroes and villains and the comfortingly recognisable comic book iconography – being particularly welcomed by readers weaned on traditional Marvel and DC superheroes.

However his love of that material, as well as the influence of Archie Comics cartoonists (I often see shades of the great Sam Schwartz and Harry Lucey in his drawing and staging), accomplished and enticing as it is, often distracted from the power of his writing, especially in his extended saga of Maggie Chascarillo and Hopey GlassLas Locas, something never true of Gilbert, whose cartoony, reined-in graphics never overwhelmed the sheer magnetic power of his writing…

The Hernandez Boys, gifted synthesists all, enthralled and enchanted with incredible stories that sampled a thousand influences conceptual and actual – everything from Comics, TV cartoons, masked wrestlers and the exotica of American Hispanic pop culture to German Expressionism. There was also a perpetual backdrop displaying the holy trinity of youth: Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll – for which please hear mostly alternative music and punk rock.

The result was dynamite. Mario only officially contributed on rare occasions but his galvanising energy informed everything. The slick and enticing visual forays by Jaime explored friendship and modern love whilst destroying stereotypes of feminine attraction through his fetching coterie of Gals Gone Wild, and Gilberto created a hyper-real microcosm in the rural landscape of Palomar: a playground of wit and passion in the quicksilver form of a poor Latin-American village with a vibrant, funny and fantastically quotidian cast created for his extended serial Heartbreak Soup.

Everything from life, death, adultery, magic, serial killing and especially gossip could happen in Palomar’s metafictional environs, as the artist mined his own post-punk influences in a deceptively effective primitivist art style which blended the highly personal mythologies of comics, music, drugs, strong women, gangs, sex and family.

The denizens of Palomar still inform and shape Beto’s work, both directly and as imaginative spurs for spin-off stories.

Winning critical acclaim but little financial success, the brothers temporarily went their own ways, working on side projects and special series before creatively reuniting a few years back to produce annual collections of new material in their particularly peculiar shared or, rather, intermittently adjacent pen-and-ink universes.

In more than three decades of groundbreaking creative endeavour, Los Bros Hernandez have crafted a vast and magnificent canon of cartoon brilliance and literary wonder and this long-overdue companion volume collects rarely seen conversations with the boys as well as two new interviews and also offers a host of truly essential lists and features no serious student of Love and Rockets lore can afford to miss.

Heavily illustrated throughout with candid photos, seen, unseen and unpublished art from the artists and excerpted examples by the many assorted creators who inspired them – everybody from Jack Kirby monsters to Jesse Marsh’s Tarzan to Warren Kremer and Ernie Colon’s Hot Stuff, the Little Devil – this invaluable volume commences with Interviews…

The first is from The Comics Journal #126 (January 1989), conducted by publisher Gary Groth and covering ‘Origins’, ‘Early Affection’, ‘Mostly Music’ (with a Love & Lists  album discography) and a solo section on both Jaime and Gilbert.

The Comics Journal #178 (July 1995) saw Los Bros chatting candidly with Neil Gaiman on personal work and the state of the Comics biz.

Completists will be delighted to know that although both these features have been edited for relevance the entire, unexpurgated interviews can be found online if you are of an historical bent.

Marc Sobel conducted a new interview with Los Bros especially for this volume, discussing ’30 years and Counting’, ‘Family’, ‘Bent Worlds’, a list of the story within a story of ‘Rosalba Fritz Martinez’ B-Movie Roles’, ‘The Naked Cosmos’, ‘Influences’, ‘Post-Comics Depression’, ‘The Indy-Comics Ghetto’, ‘Preconceived Notions’, ‘Anthologies’, ‘The Future of Comics’ and more.

The editor also spoke at length with Gary Groth on why and how he took a chance on three unproved kids and the effect the series has had on the global comics scene, encompassing, ‘Back to the Beginning’, how ‘Four-Color Separations’ worked, ‘Breaking into Bookstores’, ‘Foreign Affairs’ and so many more dark secrets…

Fascinating as the background insights are, the true worth of this huge tome (368 pages and 195x240mm) is the fan-friendly such as the 20-page Timelines listing all the stories, descriptions and references for both Locas and Palomar continuities, and the immense (73 page) Character Guides for each ongoing epic – originally compiled by Chris Staros in his fanzine The Staros Report and completely updated for this book.

Love and Rockets took the comics community by storm when it debuted and although the magazine only infrequently published letters of comment, when they did the missives were usually outrageous and often from impressive and familiar names. In the Letter Column Highlights section the likes of Steve Leialoha, Scott Hampton, Steve Rude, Mark Wheatley, Christie Marx, Kurt Busiek, Evan Dorkin, Andi Watson and many others famed and infamous passed comment and made waves. This is followed by an illuminating group of Bros.’ Favorite Comics which is both revelatory and charming.

Invaluable to all devotees and prospective beginners alike, the Checklist catalogues every story and piece of artwork by the brothers in all iterations of Love and Rockets as well as all the specials, miniseries, side-projects and even outside commissions ranging as far afield as GI Joe to DC Who’s Who, and the whole glorious compilation is capped off with a vast fold out dust-jacket featuring the Locas/Luba Family Charts.

A genuine phenomenon and classic of comics entertainment, Love and Rockets should be compulsory reading for any friend of the art form. This Companion tome will make navigating the huge interconnected Hernandez universe simplicity itself and I thoroughly commend it to your house…
© 2013 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. Love and Rockets © 2013 Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez. All images, articles and stories © their respective copyright holders.

A Cartoon History of the Monarchy


By Michael Wynn Jones (Macmillan)
ASIN: B001H0OAOO           ISBN: 0-333-19805-0

Just picked this up in a second-hand shop and thought of you – well, some of you anyway – on this anniversary day…

We’re far too reluctant in this country to celebrate the history and quality of our own cartooning tradition; preferring simply to remark on the attention-grabbers or impressive longevity of one or two classic and venerable veterans of the pen-&-ink game, when the actual truth is that for an incredibly long time the political art movement of the Empire and Commonwealth – and its enemies – was vast, varied and fantastically influential.

The British wing of the form has been magnificently serviced over the centuries by masters of form, line, wash and most importantly ideas, repeatedly tickling our funny bones or enraging our sleeping consciences and sensibilities, all whilst poking our communal pomposities and fascinations.

From its earliest inception, satiric draughtsmanship has been used to attack and sell: initially ideas, values, opinions and prejudices or but eventually actual products too. In newspapers, magazines and especially comicbooks, the sheer power of graphic narrative, with its ability to create emotional affinities, has led to the creation of unforgettable images and characters – and the destruction of real people or social systems.

When those creations can affect the daily lives of millions of readers, the force that they can apply in the commercial or political arena is almost irresistible…

In Britain the cartoonist has held a bizarrely precarious position of power for centuries: the deftly designed bombastic broadside or savagely surgical satirical slice instantly capable of ridiculing, exposing, uplifting or deflating the powerfully elevated, unapproachable and apparently untouchable with a simple shaped-charge of scandalous wit and crushingly clear, universally understandable visual metaphor.

For this method of concept transmission, lack of literacy or education is no barrier. As the Catholic Church proved millennia ago with the Stations of the Cross, stained glass windows and a pantheon of idealised saints, a picture is worth far more than a thousand words…

For as long as we’ve had printing in this country there have been scurrilous gadfly artists commentating on rulers, society and all iniquities: pictorially haranguing the powerful, pompous, privileged and just plain perfidious through swingeing satire and cunning caricature. Sometimes artists have been just plain mean…

Britain had no monopoly on talent and indignation, and this canny compendium also frequently features European – and latterly American – takes on our scandalous Royals and oddball citizenry…

Released in 1978 and desperately in need of updating and re-issue, A Cartoon History of the Monarchy offers a potted, far from hagiographic history and deliciously skewed view of our Ruling Elite in all their unsavoury glory; an unbroken line of jibes, asides and broadsides gathered from divers sources by jobbing journalist and aficionado of japes, lampoons and sketches Michael Wynn Jones, who here casts a discriminating eye from the reign of Elizabeth I up until just before the Silver Jubilee of the second Regina to bear the name…

Following a handy list of the Kings and Queens of England, the pomposity-puncturing procession commences with The Age of Intolerance, reproducing cartoons and adding commentary dealing with the doings of the ten monarchs from Elizabeth I – George II.

The accompanying essays describe the zeitgeist of those times – the religious question as England, Wales, Ireland and eventually Scotland came to numerous crises regarding succession.

That issue always revolved around whether the land should be Catholic or Protestant. ‘Popes, Plots and Puritans’ led to the final solution when ‘The Men from Hanover’ arrived to settle the matter and fully cement the nation under the Church of England.

The savage sampling of the nation and continent’s opinions are represented here by 26 visual bombards such as the allegorical assault ‘Diana and Callisto’ by Dutch artist Miricenys from 1585, the anonymous ‘England’s Miraculous Preservation’ from 1648 and ‘The Royal Oake of Brittayne’ (from 1649) amongst so many others.

Cartoon grotesques such as ‘Cromwell’s Car’ (1649) or ‘Babel and Bethel’ (1679) appear beside such scandalous foreign attacks as Dutch illustrator Dusart’s ‘Fr. James King’ and the anonymous French pictorial polemic ‘Notice of Burial’ (both from 1690). We British riposted with jeering celebrations of martial triumphs such as ‘The Arrival of William and Mary’ (1689), ‘The Great Eclipse of the Sun’ (simultaneously a topical spin on a solar event in 1706 and the defeat of “Sun King” Louis XIV by the British armies of Queen Anne), and ‘A Bridle for the French King’ from the same year.

Domestic contretemps are highlighted through such draughtsman’s delights as the anonymous 1743 shocker ‘The Hanover Bubble’, Ebersley’s ‘The Agreeable Contrast’ (from 1746 and attacking King George’s brother “Butcher” Cumberland’s treatment of Jacobites after the defeat of the Young Pretender), and the exposure of Popish influence in the Highlands described by ‘The Chevalier’s Market’ from 1745…

Whereas much of this material – both British and foreign – was generally national commentary and straight religio-political assault, by the time period covered in The Wickedest Age: George III – George IV (1760-1830) the cartoon had also evolved into a weapon designed to wound with wit and crush through cruel caricature.

After covering the major crises and scandals of the generally sensible – if parsimonious – third George in ‘The Royal Malady’, ‘“The Dregs of Their Dull Race”’ and ‘Twilight Years’, a veritable Golden Age of popular disapproval and artistic mugging of the Prince Regent and much-delayed, frustrated monarch (and his many mistresses) is covered in ‘The Prince of Whales’, ‘The Secret Marriage’, ‘“Pray Get Me a Glass of Brandy”’ and ‘Delicate Investigations’.

The public disdain of the times generated a fusillade of cartoon prints, represented here by 35 graphic bombards and savage cartoon sallies by names which have become as famous as any ruler. However master character assassins Townsend (‘The Scotch hurdy-gurdy’), George Cruikshank (‘Royal Condescension’), Gillray (‘A New Way to Pay the National Debt’, ‘A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion’), Rowlandson (‘The Prospect Before Us’) and Heath (‘A Triumph of innocence over perjury’) are ably bolstered by lesser lights West (‘The Save-all and the Extinguisher!’), Williams (‘Low Life above stairs’), Vowles (‘The shelter for the destitute’) and Marshall (‘The kettle calling the pot ugly names’) and a few anonymous pen-pricks who nevertheless hit hard with ‘Tempora Mutantor’, ‘The captive Prince’ and ‘Reading of the Imperial decree’ and more.

As periodical publication overtook print-shops as the greatest disseminators of carton imagery, the open savagery and targeted vulgarity of caricaturists was gradually replaced with mannered, if barbed, genteel observation.

Thus The Age of Discretion: William IV, Victoria (spanning 1830-1901) offers a different style of Royal Commentary: no less challenging, but certainly much more overtly respectful when critical. Sometimes, though, this new family-oriented cartooning, even in magazines such as Punch and The Times, simply sunk to fawning veneration as the institution of monarchy became more and more removed from the lives of the citizenry.

William’s times are summed up in text via ‘The Sailor King’ and ‘Reform Billy’ whilst Victoria’s epochal reign and the Parliamentarians who increasingly wielded the decisive power is described through ‘The Queen of the Whigs’, ‘Revolutions are bad for the Country’, ‘The Black and the Brown’ and ‘Years of Widowhood’.

The 36 collected images capture those days of Empire, with Heath, Seymour and Doyle predominant in illustrating bluff sea-dog William’s socially contentious days of Reform.

Victoria’s years, from engaging popular ingénue Queen, through happy bride to politically intrusive grand dame of European Court intrigue, highlights the craft of Doyle (‘The Queen in Danger’, 1837), Leech, (‘There’s Always Something’, 1852), Tenniel (‘Queen Hermione’, 1865, ‘New Crowns for Old Ones!’, 1876), Morgan (‘Where is Britannia?’ and ‘A Brown Study’ – both 1867) and Sambourne (‘Kaiser-i-Hind’, 1876) amongst so many others.

Her latter years also saw a rise in social conscience cartooning as displayed by the crusading Merry with ‘The Scapegrace of the Family’ (1880), ‘The fall of the rebels‘ in 1886 and more, or the telling modernist take of Max Beerbohm whose ‘The rare, the rather awful visits of Albert Edward to Windsor Castle’, cuttingly illustrated the rift between the Empress and her playboy heir…

Despite her well-known disapproval, the good-time Prince became an effective king as was his son, both covered in The Edwardian Age: Edward VII – George V, spanning 1901-1936. Their dutiful achievements are recounted in ‘The Coming King’ and ‘The First Gentleman of Europe’ before war with Germany necessitated a family name change for George – ‘The First Windsor’…

With kings increasingly used as good-will ambassadors and being cited in scandals that frequently ended in court, the 30 cartoons included in this section include many German pieces from not only the war years but also the tense decade that preceded them, as Imperial Superpowers jostled for position and tentatively used propaganda to appeal to the world’s “unwashed masses” for justification for their aims and ambitions.

Beside veteran caricaturists such as Leech, Morgan, May, Partridge, Staniforth and David Low are merciless lampoons from German cartoonists Brandt, Blir, Heine, Gulbransson and Johnson as well as French illustrator Veber and lone American Kirby.

Our pictorial history lesson concludes with The Age of Respectability: Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II generally skipping World War II, concentrating instead on the openly secret scandal of Edward and Mrs Simpson in ‘Abdication’ before the advent of ‘New Elizabethans’ brought a modern age of rulers as sideshow attractions…

Although Fleet Street chose to whitewash and suppress the affair between a King-in-waiting and the American divorcee, the rest of the world made great play of the situation: as seen here with 11 telling cartoon shots from Americans McCutcheon and Orro, whilst French scribbler Effel posited typically insouciant Gallic ‘Une Solution’ and German-based Gulbransson played up the true romance angle…

In the meantime British cartoonist Low had to be at his most obliquely hilarious, delineating the crisis by not mentioning it, and Punch stars like Partridge steadfastly pursued a line of deferential, tragic sacrifice…

Although there is very little material featuring wartime monarch George VI – a propaganda casualty of the conflict – the last 20 images herein celebrate the changing image of a very public Royal Family as pictured by names very familiar to contemporary cartoon lovers.

The imagery is also contextually far more familiar – and presumably comfortable – to modern tastes as print media generally learned to save their vitriol for politicians and celebrities and reserved only minor chidings and silly teasing for “the Royals”, as seen in ‘Birthday Greetings’ and ‘Under the Splendid Empire Tree’ by Shepard from 1947 or Illingworth’s 1951 panels ‘Family Ties’ and ‘Happy Returns’.

Papers were, however, happy to utilise the monarchy to score points against governments, as seen in an attack on Enoch Powell (Cummings’ ‘Ministry of Repatriation’) and the battle between Rhodesia’s Ian Smith and Harold Wilson lampooned in ‘Your Move!’ by Jak (both from 1968) or the legendary Giles’ ‘New Rent Assistance Bill’ (1971).

Also offering acerbic jollity of a far more blueblood-specific variety are cartoon giants Trog and Waite who join the abovementioned in exploiting the Royal Family’s gift for headline-stealing gaffes in such daring gags as ‘I Suppose we did send them to the Right Schools?’, ‘I Suppose she’ll think these are of the Queen Mother’, ‘More Pay’ and ‘Andrew’s Exchange Student’: coming full circle with the best of Hanoverian excesses scrutinised by a cost-conscious government and public – but this time for rather more gentle laughs…

Appended with a scholarly section of Acknowledgements, Illustration sources and Index of artists, this is an extremely welcoming and effective introduction to the lasting relationship between Royalty, Church and Fourth Estate that offers a fantastic overview of Regal adaptability and cultural life through a wealth of cunningly contrived images and pictorial iconography that reshaped society and the world.

These are timeless examples of the political pictorialist’s uncanny power and, as signs of the times, form a surprising effecting gestalt of the never-happy nation’s feeling and character…

None of that actually matters now, since these cartoons have performed the task they were intended for: shaping the thoughts and attitudes of generations of voters. That they have also stood the test of time and remain as beloved relics of a lethal art form is true testament to their power and passion.

Stuffed with astounding images, fascinating lost ephemera and mouth-watering tastes of comic art no aficionado could resist, this colossal collection is a beautiful piece of cartoon history that will delight and tantalise all who read it and truly deserves to be back on bookshelves…
© Michael Wynn Jones 1978. All rights reserved.

Race to Incarcerate – a Graphic Retelling


By Marc Mauer & Sabrina Jones (The New Press)
ISBN: 978-1-59558-514-7

This book made me really, really angry.

That’s okay though; it was supposed to.

Marc Mauer is the Executive Director of The Sentencing Project, a non-profit organisation working for over 25 years to establish “a fair and effective U.S. criminal justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing policy, addressing unjust racial disparities and practices, and advocating for alternatives to incarceration”.

They provide training for American defense lawyers, explore methods of changing the ferociously slanted legal system in regard to socially disadvantaged and racial minorities, debunk politically advantageous myths about the efficacy of incarceration and work towards reducing the nation’s reliance on prison sentences through advocacy and by affecting policy on how best to safeguard the citizenry and punish criminals.

Highlighting disturbing trends and inequities in the criminal justice system since 1986 – especially in the treatment of non-white and juvenile offenders – the organisation has been consulted by Congress, The United States Sentencing Commission, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and other Federal Agencies, subsequently overseeing changes to national drug policy guidelines and helping shape The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.

The Project particularly concerns itself with combating racial disparity in detention, cataloguing various forms of felony disenfranchisement and has led campaigns to end the widespread practice of condemning juveniles to life without parole as well as working to beef up the mandate of The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act.

All of which made Mauer the perfect person to write 1999’s landmark expose Race to Incarcerate, which detailed the causes and minutia of the meteoric rise in America’s prison population since 1970. He then followed up in 2002 with Invisible Punishment: the Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (co-edited by Meda Chesney-Lind).

A telling indictment of a flawed, cruel, unfair and unscrupulous system, Race to Incarcerate was re-released in 2006 and now the powerfully polemical tract has been brilliantly updated, revised and adapted by cartoonist Sabrina Jones into a ferocious indictment re-positioned to engage and inform the general public and especially older kids as well .

Jones is a painter, illustrator, scenic artist, writer and activist whose evocatively lush and organically primitivist work has graced such politically aware publications as Studs Terkel’s Working, FDR and the New Deal for Beginners, The Real Cost of Prisons, graphics collective World War 3 Illustrated and autobiographical anthology GirlTalk amongst many others. Her most notable solo project to date is the beguiling Isadora Duncan: a Graphic Biography.

Following an evocative Foreword from Civil Rights lawyer and author Michelle Alexander and an updated, heart-rending but hope-filled Preface by author Mauer, the bare, bald facts are starkly presented in ‘Introduction: U.S. Prisons from Inception to Export’ which follows the invention of penitentiaries by the Puritans to the current situation where America has the disturbing honour of being number 1 country in the field of locking up citizens. The USA has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

Perhaps that’s because they don’t just execute their criminals… no, wait…

The stunningly effective visual history lesson is followed by the political background and lowdown on ‘The Rise of the “Tough on Crime” Movement’ from 1973, examining the divisive policies and calculated duplicity of Nixon and the Republicans in the wake of the triumphant Civil Rights Movement and tracking the switch from programs of rehabilitation to specious but vote-winning punitive prison policies.

The situation culminated with ‘The Triumph of “Tough on Crime”’ which casts a spotlight on the disparities in dealing with increasing drug abuse during the rise of the Black Power movement and focuses on the draconian, tragically trend-setting policies of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who instigated the harshest drug laws in the USA when ‘The Rock Gets Rolling’…

With prison populations rising rapidly and disparately, things took a turn for the worst from 1980 as seen in ‘Crime as Politics: The Reagan-Bush Years’ after which a particularly heinous travesty of justice is spotlighted in ‘Kemba Smith: a Case of Extreme Sentencing’.

The problem was not simply the self-serving prejudice of one party as poignantly, frustratingly illustrated in ‘Crime as Politics: The Clinton Years’, but hit new depths of hypocrisy in 2000 as ‘Crime as Politics: The George W. Bush Years’ stomach-churningly shows…

Over the last half-century the whole situation seems to have been predicated upon a few fallacious if not deliberately disingenuous dictums clearly exposed in ‘The Prison-Crime Connection’ which inexorably led to a monumental institutionalised injustice system generating ‘Color-Coded Justice’ and concentration on a profiling or criminality as seen in ‘The War on Drugs and African-Americans’.

The biggest shock however comes in ‘A New Direction’ as the authors reveal that – despite all the rhetoric and entrenched biases – the situation is actually improving as more and more States abandon the old, costly, failing punishment policies to try something new and humane.

After decades where States stopped building schools to pay for bigger and bigger prisons – with no appreciable effect other than depriving kids of an education – various localities are trying different approaches and finding that where costly incarceration and harsh punishments don’t work social programs, rehabilitation projects and investment in people do…

Coda:  Also included in this book are details of outreach projects asking readers to contribute books to prisoners or become pen-friends with inmates, illustrated by Carnell Hunnicutt, a long-term inmate whose comics about his penal experiences and prison issues first inspired Mauer to release Race to Incarcerate as a graphic novel.

Packed throughout with shocking, well-documented, specific cases and backed up by an eye-watering torrent of shameful statistics, this is a work with the power to change society, so, with British politicians increasingly keen on emulating the idiotic mistakes and politically-advantageous, socially destructive criminal justice policies of our American cousins, Race to Incarcerate is a book every school library and home should have.

Moreover if you care about people and justice it’s one you must read…

© 2013 by The New Press, based on Race to Incarcerate by Marc Mauer © 1999, 2006 by The Sentencing Project. ‘Kemba Smith: a Case of Extreme Sentencing’ © 2013 by Sabrina Jones. Foreword © 2013 by Michelle Alexander. Preface © 2013 by The Sentencing Project. All rights reserved.

Superman and Philosophy – What Would the Man of Steel Do?


Essays by various, Edited by Mark D. White (Wiley-Blackwell)
ISBN: 978-1-118-01809-5

With the latest Superman movie set for a summer release there’s going to be a lot of ancillary material around, so here’s a comics-adjacent item that celebrates 75 years of the Man of Tomorrow whilst offering an interesting view askew of the merely expected…

Like organised religion, the discipline of Philosophy has had a hard time relating to modern people in the last half century and, just like innumerable vicars in pulpits everywhere, the greatest and most all-consuming preoccupation of the mind of Man has sought fresh ways to make its eternal questions and subjective verities understandable and palatable to us hoi-polloi and thickoes…

Publishers Wiley-Blackwell have certainly succeeded in making their message relevant by repackaging key and core concepts of the never-ending debate. Their intriguing and imaginatively far-ranging Philosophy and Pop Culture Series includes more than 40 enticing titles such as Batman and Philosophy: the Dark Knight of the Soul, Downton Abbey: the Truth is Neither Here Nor There, The Avengers and Philosophy: Earth’s Mightiest Thinkers and Terminator: I’ll Be Back, Therefore I Am amongst others. These engaging tracts marry the product of millennia of deep thought to easily accessible and seductively shared contexts you and I know like the backs of our hairy hands.

That’s applied phenomenology, that is…

It doesn’t hurt either that all the essays, produced by a legion of very smart people possessing a vast degree of familiarity with both their academic subject and the impossibly convoluted minutiae of the Superman mythology in all its multifarious multimedia formats, keep their arguments and verbal illustrations short, sharp, sweet and joyously funny.

And, by the way, this is a grown-up book so don’t expect any pictures inside…

The immensely engaging and successfully thought-provoking journey begins with

Following ‘Introduction: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane… It’s Philosophy!’ our rocket-ship ride to reason opens with a crash course in Utilitarianism, Deontology and Virtue Ethics.  Part One – The Big Blue Boy Scout: Ethics, Judgment, and Reason investigates the underpinnings and outcomes of doing good by scrutinised the powder-keg of “moral philosophy” (concerned primarily with questioning the best way to live) through the super-vision lenses of ‘Moral Judgment: The Power that Makes Superman Human’ by Mark D. White, ‘Action Comics! Superman and Practical Reason’ by Brian Feltham, ‘Can the Man of Tomorrow be the Journalist of Today?’  by Jason Southworth & Ruth Tallman and ‘Could Superman Have Joined the Third Reich? The Importance and Shortcomings of Moral Upbringing’ by Robert Sharp.

The conundrums continue in Part Two – Truth, Justice and the American Way: What Do They Mean? as Daniel P. Malloy posits ‘Clark Kent is Superman! The Ethics of Secrecy’ after which Christopher Robichaud investigates the true meaning of ‘Superman and Justice’ and Andrew Terjesen asks ‘Is Superman an American Icon?’

Part Three – The Will to Superpower: Nietzsche, the Ãœbermensch, and Existentialism goes a long way to cleaning up the cruelly tarnished reputation of the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra (inexplicably and unnecessarily retitled these days as Thus Spoke…) with ‘Rediscovering Nietzsche’s Ãœbermensch in Superman as a Heroic Ideal’ by Arno Bogaerts, ‘Superman or Last Man: the Ethics of Superpower’ by David Gordon, ‘Superman: From Anti-Christ to Christ-Type’ by Adam Barkman and the tantalising argument ‘Superman Must be Destroyed! Lex Luthor as Existentialist Anti-Hero’ by Sarah K. Donovan & Nicholas Richardson…

We get to the heart of the matter – for comicbook geeks like me anyway – with Part Four – The Ultimate Hero: What Do We Expect from Superman? Using some very specific canonical examples, we sift through ‘Superman’s Revelation: The Problem of Violence in Kingdom Come by David Hatfield, ‘A World Without a Clark Kent?’ by Randall M. Jensen and close the case with ‘The Weight of the World: How Much is Superman Morally Responsible For?’ by Audrey L. Anton.

The review of the Big Picture continues with Part Five – Superman and Humanity: A Match Made on Krypton?, as Leonard Finkelman guesstimates ‘Superman and Man: What a Kryptonian Can Teach Us About Humanity’ whilst Terjesen returns to ask ‘Can the Man of Steel Feel Our Pain? Sympathy and Superman’ and Carsten Fogh Nielsen deliberates on ‘World’s Finest Philosophers: Superman and Batman on Human Nature’ before it all wraps up for now in Part Six – Of Superman and Superminds: Who Is Superman, Anyway? with the deepest levels of Persona examination in ‘“It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane… It’s Clark Kent” Superman and the Problem of Identity‘ by Nicholas Michaud, ‘Superman Family Resemblance’ from Dennis Knepp and ‘Why Superman Should Not Be Able to Read Minds’ by Mahesh Ananth.

In proper, rigorous academic manner there are also biographies in Contributors: Trapped in the Philosophy Zone, plenty of notes and attributions and a full Index: From Brainiac’s Files to aid you if your interests are piqued and your enquiring mind wants to know more…

Philosophy doesn’t exist in a vacuum: its primary purpose, whatever substrate espoused (Aesthetics, Epistemology, Ethics, Logic, Metaphysics, Social theory, Politics or any other field concerned with understanding reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind or language), is to promote discourse and debate. The whole point is to get you thinking too…

And this delightfully appealing tome does exactly that…

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Superman and Philosophy – What Would the Man of Steel Do? is set for publication on May 16th 2013.

Signal: 02 – A Journal of International Political Graphics


Edited by Alec Dunne & Josh MacPhee (PM Press)
ISBN: 978-1-60486-298-0

“A week is a long time in Politics” – Harold Wilson

I’m going to go all traditional here and offer a few on-line dictionary definitions before I head off on one of my own oblique and off-kilter diatribes.

Politics can be reduced to:

  • The art or science of governing – especially of a political entity such as a nation – and the administration and control of its affairs.
  • The activities or affairs engaged in by a government, politician, or political party.
  • The methods or tactics involved in managing a state or government.
  • Intrigue or manoeuvring within a political unit or group in order to gain control or power.
  • The often internally conflicting interrelationships among people in a society

I’d like to add my own codicil which translates as

  • “Getting large groups of people to do what you want by making them believe it’s their own idea; as perpetually practiced by advertisers, teachers in classrooms, rich folk, commercial organisations and special interest groups, trades unions, and organised religions”.

The early years of the 21st century were plagued with horrors and disasters exacerbated by a hideous global proliferation of lying, greedy, venal, demented and just plain stupid bosses and governments. These paragons finally succeeded in elevating politicians of every stripe to that phylum of generally useless tools and pimples on the butt of humanity once only occupied by lawyers and management consultants.

Since then so many apparently entitled and greedy types like bankers, astrologers, wedding planners, doorstep evangelists, CEOs, celebrity gossip columnists, newspaper editors, the shamelessly privileged and all types of psychics have joined their rarefied ranks, and I’m thinking I probably need to either cut down on coffee or refine my critical parameters…

The century before that wasn’t much better either, but it did spawn a global awareness of the sheer symbolic power of pictures to promote debate, action and change. The political image was used over and over again by the underdogs – and to be honest, the more savvy oppressors – in countless intellectual wars as an irresistible Weapon of Mass Deliberation…

When creative passions are aroused there is no more powerful medium of expression or tool of social change than graphic narrative working in seamless conjunction with a trenchant, targeted image. Whether it’s the swingeing satire of reformers such as Hogarth, the prose of Dickens illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne AKA “Phiz”, the publications of Mark Lemon and Henry Mayhew (founders of Punch), the questing explorations of Will Eisner, Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi or even the devastatingly deployed propaganda art of every nation on Earth, the incisive, excoriating or simply biting illustration wedded to the well-loaded word is an overwhelming force and Mass Communication’s only renewable resource: cheap, universally accessible and capable of extrapolating terrifying conclusions from the scarcest of supplied data.

Although not strictly a graphic novel, Signal: 02 was selected to begin this Week in Politics season because it embodies and celebrates the earliest and still most effective forms of mass communication; circumventing reason and language – often even literacy itself – by reaching through the eyes right into the heart and the gut of the viewer.

Signal is produced by illustrator, historian and printmaker Alec Dunn and designer/artist Josh MacPhee, co-founder of the Interference Archive and organizer of Celebrate People’s History Poster Series. Their occasional periodical is dedicated to documenting and sharing political graphics, creative projects and cultural artefacts of international resistance and liberation struggles.

Utilising typography and design in the same bold exuberant manner as the British Vorticist Movement‘s manifesto Blast (which declared war on traditional art in its landmark edition of 1914) to disseminate and keep alive historic moments of global mass-movements, this edition opens with Judy Seidman’s ‘Malangatana’s Fire’: a comprehensive review of the life and achievements of legendary revolutionary painter and UNESCO Artist for Peace Malangatana Valente Nguenha.

The liberally-illustrated piece celebrates the Mozambiquan painter, poet, musician and intellectual whose life and haunting works spanned his rural upbringing under Portuguese colonial rule through revolution and years of civil war to the current national renaissance and his role as Mozambique’s Cultural Ambassador to the World.

The artist’s stunning, moodily symbolic works carried his people through the liberation, civil war, decades of political turmoil and savage brutality into the peaceful present by exalting the people’s age old roots and symbols…

This is followed by ‘Street Murals in the Portuguese Revolution’ wherein Phil Mailer details the guerrilla art and its factional creators who plastered the walls of the nation in a massive explosion of anonymous popular creativity during and after a military coup toppled the Fascist government which ruled Portugal in April 1974, after which Editors Dunn & MacPhee offer a fascinating typographical treat in ‘Selling Freedom’.

This glorious visual reminiscence reveals a riot of ‘Early Twentieth-Century Anarchist Broadsides’ – letterpress printed, broadsheet advertisements for the venerable (established in 1886 and still going) publication Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism. This entrancing example of the polemical power of the printed word is followed by ‘Cranking It Out Old School Style’ as Lincoln Cushing describes the age of Gestetner printers which first brought the process of mass communication into the hands of the people, long before photocopiers, faxes, computer printers, instant messaging and e-pages of every sort. In the hands of imaginative and determined artists visual miracles were made, from campaigns seeking to end violence against women to populist movements fighting prejudice and social injustice …

The ‘Art of Rebellion’ by Deborah Caplow then explores Oaxacan street art in context, recounting decades of internecine strife in Mexico, after which The Center for International Research on Anarchism: Japan describes the life of seminal printer, propagandist, anti-fascist, anti-militarist Esperanto advocate Taiji Yamaga who published radical periodical The People’s Newspaper and opposed the repressive militarist regime of the expansionist Warlords who were de facto rulers of Japan until the end of WWII. At the end of a turbulent life, the great thinker recreate key moments of his life in an autobiographical comic, and ‘Sketches from Memory’ is undoubtedly the star of this show, focussing a surmising light on ‘The Yamaga Manga and Japanese Anarchism’…

By captivatingly relating days and years of domestic intimacy, personal imprisonment, triumph, tragedy and turmoil under appalling political duress, Yamaga turns a spotlight on an aspect of Japanese history carefully glossed over and almost redacted from conventional histories…

‘A Heart of Concrete through Fire and Water’ by Kasper Opstrup Frederiksen explores the history and achievements of the Danish Røde Mor art collective 1968-78 which adopted showbiz techniques and public stunts to change the cultural landscape and mindset. After years of challenging, surreal events, the core of dedicated New Left surrealists in the “Red Mother” art collective gradually became subsumed into the national psyche, as a graphic workshop, a band, a circus and finally a fund to finance political art projects.

So was that a victory or a defeat?

Scholarly, challenging, utterly engrossing and intoxicating, this is a superb treat for everyone whose mind works in pictures and causes…

© 2012 PM Press. Individual copyright retained by respective contributors.

Philosophy – A Discovery in Comics


By Margreet de Heer with Yiri T. Kohl (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-698-3

There’s no use denying it: Annual Gift-Giving Season isn’t far off and it’s never too early to think of the ideal item for that troublesome family/friend unit. So here’s something that might fit the bill for any argumentative soul fed up with socks, pants and pen-sets…  

It has long been a truism of the creative arts that the most effective, efficient and economical method of instruction and informational training has been the comic strip.

Advertising mavens have for over a century exploited the easy impact of words wedded to evocative pictures, and public information materials frequently use sequential narrative to get hard messages over quickly and simply. Additionally, since World War II, carefully crafted strips have been constantly used as training materials in every aspect of adult life from school careers advice to various branches of military service – utilising the talents of comics giants as varied as Milton Caniff, Will Eisner (who spent decades producing reams of comic manuals for the US army and other government departments), Kurt Schaffenberger and Neil Adams.

These days the educational value and merit of comics is a given. Larry Gonick in particular has been using the strip medium to stuff learning and entertainment in equal amounts into the weary brains of jaded students with such tomes as The Cartoon History of the Universe, The Cartoon History of the United States and The Cartoon Guide to… series (Genetics, Sex, Computers, Non-Communication, Physics, Statistics, the Environment and more).

Japan uses a huge number of manga text books in its schools and universities and has even released government reports and business prospectuses as comic books to get around the public’s apathy towards reading large dreary volumes of public information.

So do we, and so do the Americans.

I’ve even produced one or two myself.

Now the medium has been used to sublimely and elegantly tackle the greatest and most all-consuming preoccupation and creation of the mind of Man…

Margreet de Heer was born in 1972 into a family of theologians and despite some rebellious teen forays to the wild side of life – fascinatingly covered in the ‘Know My Self’ section of this fabulous graphic primer – studied Theology for 9 years at the University of Amsterdam. After graduating in 1999 she decided to become a cartoonist – and did – but also worked at the wonderful comics and cool stuff emporium/cultural icon Lambiek in Amsterdam.

Whilst there she collaborated with industry expert Kees Kousemaker on a history of Dutch comics before becoming a full-time professional in 2005, with commissions in publications as varied as Yes, Zij aan Zij, Viva Mama, Flo’, Jippo, Farfelu and NRC.Next.

In 2007 she began a series of cartoon philosophical reports for the newspaper Trouw, which prompted a perspicacious publisher to commission a complete book on this most ancient of topics. Filosofie in Beeld was released in 2010 and translated into English by NBM this year as Philosophy – a Discovery in Comics.

This gloriously accessible tome, crafted by a gifted writer with a master’s grasp of her subject, opens with the core concept ‘What is Thinking?’ examining the processes of mind through a number of elegantly crafted examples before moving onto ‘Who Do We Think We Are?’

Those paradigms of ‘Self-Awareness’, ‘Logical Thinking’, ‘Language’, ‘Symbols’, ‘Abstract Thinking’ and ‘Humor’ are captivatingly covered before the history and cognitive high points of civilisation are disclosed with ‘The Foundation of Western Philosophy’.

This potted history of ‘Dualism’ relates the life stories, conceptual legacies and achievements of ‘Socrates’ and the ‘Socratic Discourse’, his star pupil ‘Plato’ and the universal man ‘Aristotle’, all winningly balanced with a balancing sidebar autobiography in ‘Know My Self’ plus some cogent observations and a few comparisons with the Eastern philosophy of ‘Unity’…

‘Medieval Philosophy’ deals with the influence of the Christian Church on ‘Augustine’ and ‘Thomas Aquinas’, the “Great Thinkers” of early Europe, examining the warring concepts of ‘Free Will’ and ‘Predestination’ and exploring the lives of ‘Erasmus’ and ‘Humanism’, ‘Descartes’ and his maxim ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ and ‘Spinoza’ whose consummate faith-based dictum was ‘Know Thyself’…

The charming, beguiling foundation course continues with ‘What is Reality?‘ bringing us up to the modern age with ‘And Now’ with another brilliantly clever diversion as de Heer includes the ‘Personal Philosophies’ of families and friends.

Her husband – and this book’s colourist – Yiri bases his outlook on the incredible life of outrageous comedian ‘George Carlin’, her aged friend Gerrit looks to ‘Nietzsche’, mother-in-law Yolanda modelled herself on Cambridge lecturer and intellectual ‘George Steiner’ whilst De Heer’s little brother Maarten prefers to shop around picking up what he needs from thinkers as varied as ‘Aldous Huxley’ to cartoonist ‘Marten Toonder’ as well as bravely putting her money where her mouth is and revealing her own thoughts on Life, the Universe and Everything and asking again ‘What Do You Think?’…

This is a truly sharp and witty book – and the first of a trilogy that will also deal with Religion and Science – which splendidly reduces centuries of contentious pondering, violent discussion and high-altitude academic acrimony to an enthralling, utterly accessible experience any smart kid or keen elder would be happy to experience. Clear, concise, appropriately challenging and informatively funny Philosophy – A Discovery in Comics is a wonder of unpretentious, exuberant graphic craft and a timeless book we can all enjoy.

© @2010 Uitgeverij Meinema, Zoetermeer, TheNetherlands. English translation © 2012 Margreet de Heer & Yiri T. Kohl.

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Perfect for anybody with a brain or heart… 9/10

The Co-operative Revolution – A Graphic Novel


By Polyp, with Paul Monaghan, Rachel Vorburg-Rugh, Gillian Lonergan, Ed May and Ian Nixon (New Internationalist on behalf of the Co-operative Group)
ISBN: 978-1-906523-19-0

You might not be aware of it but 2012 is the United Nations International Year of Co-operatives – which I’ll define here as people working in community rather than competition, and applying that fundamental principle to the world of business.

Today Co-operative societies and groups have spread to every corner of the globe and proved a successful and frequently innovation-friendly alternative model to straight consume-expand-or-die Capitalism in commercial arenas as varied as wholesale and retail, agriculture, journalism, banking, car-making, textiles, construction, hotel management, all sorts of service industries and even Healthcare provision.

The potential of the simple notion of working together for mutual benefit seems to terrify some people – let’s call them greedy and selfish – but since the successful experiment of the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844 the philosophy has grown and blossomed and provided decent livelihoods for generations of workers and enabled them to provide increasingly better lives for their children.

Co-operation isn’t a tactic or model but rather a philosophy that encourages people to take full responsibility and reward for the fruits of their labours, which necessarily makes all their endeavours operate on a human scale and with a face anonymous corporate production finds impossible to match or emulate. The modern, thriving international movement grew from an impassioned but measured response to the worst excesses of the Commercial Age and is deftly recounted in the first section of this compelling and informative graphic history.

During the early years of the Industrial Revolution it was standard practice for the owners of British factories and industrial works to pay appalling wages to their workforces and simultaneously run the only shops where those meagre remunerations could be spent. Usually the bosses also owned the houses where workers lived: another method of ensuring the monies they paid out coming back into their own coffers.

As you’d expect such a closed system was easily prone to abuse: sales to the labourers – food, candles, clothes and every other household need – were rife with shoddy, cheap workmanship, with debased and adulterated food frequently sold in short measures and priced in such a way as to keep workers alive but with no hope of improving themselves or escaping the system. Credit was always extended – with no real intention of ever collecting on it – and workers were trapped forever in an inescapable spiral of debt to the company. It was pure economic feudalism and little better than slavery.

Many times before, workers had attempted to address the problem by uniting to buy goods in bulk and distribute them communally, but always the enterprises had failed. However on December 21st 1844 in Rochdale, a small band of working men – weavers, colliers, woolsorters and cloggers – pooled their small cash reserves and opened a rough-and-ready general store selling flour, sugar, butter and candles, promising “unadulterated wares in honest weights and measures”.

Instead of mutually ruinous credit, The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers offered all members of their collective enterprise a dividend – a fair and regular redistribution of profit after working costs were covered.

As the chapter ‘Yesterday’ details, despite fierce and unscrupulous opposition from established businessmen and authorities terrified of revolution by the lower class, the Co-operative movement endured and grew. When farmers and companies were squeezed to stop them providing produce to the Pioneers, the Society simply went further afield and even began sourcing or making their own items – a process and solution repeated over and again through nearly 170 years of continued existence and growth.

The burgeoning movement was a constant force for social mobility and improvement: in their first rented premises in Toad Lane, the upper floor swiftly became meeting rooms and a free Library, with not just books but microscopes, globes and all modern scientific instruments where the poor could educate themselves to eventually escape the trap of ignorance and poverty the wealthy created for them…

The slow but solid growth and geographical expansion of the radical movement is charted against the changing social and cultural climate in a beguiling and elegiac potted history after which ‘Today’ recounts many examples of successful Co-operative practice currently improving lives better all over the world.

One of the movement’s greatest successes was the establishment of Fair-Trade farms, plantations and other businesses around the globe, from Canada where more than a third of the World’s Maple Sugar is produced by Co-ops, to the USA where 900 rural Co-ops produce 42% of the nation’s electricity distribution, covering 75% of the landmass.

In India – where 239 million people belong to a Co-operative society – a tribe of hereditary snake-catchers even transformed their unique, traditional but dying trade into a thriving repurposed business.

Closer to home, when I first started freelancing as an artist/graphic designer, I belonged to a loose association of specialists who shared or traded jobs according to our specialities and particular strengths…

Almost as soon as they were published, Darwin’s discoveries regarding the fundamental evolutionary principle described as “Survival of the Fittest” were co-opted by Capitalists, hungry to justify their appalling excesses. Here ‘Always’ focuses on the plenitude of scientific discoveries which counter those spurious commercial notions and act as a happy rebuttal to the spurious commercial mantra of an utterly unchecked free market which continuously permits greedy and cavalier bankers to bankrupt economies and nations, whilst rapacious rampant tycoons and corporations create Crash after Recession after Depression, over and over again and with no thought of redress or reparations to the billions of people they impoverish…

‘Tomorrow’ takes a speculative look at how Co-operation could take us to even greater communal achievements by following a really good day in 2044 when the happy partners of the Rochdale Aerotech Co-op celebrate their contribution to the mission which is landing men on Mars…

This alluring and pleasingly education chronicle concludes with an absorbing ‘Timeline’ following the progress of “Co-operation Through History” by tracking changes in politics and culture promoted, prompted and provoked by the movement from the very first recorded 1769 bulk purchase scheme of the Fenwick Weavers to the 2012 UN declaration of the International Year of Co-operatives…

Since its creation, the Co-operative movement has promoted education for the poor, social equality, universal health, and equanimity in farming, banking, manufacturing and production. By making simple retail fair it has freed society’s least advantaged from de facto slavery, shaped political and social reform across the world and offered true opportunity for improvement and a better life for all people.

This wonderful book – hopefully destined for every school library and history syllabus – using all the force and power which only comics narrative can provide, is a sterling example of what people can do when working together and in unity and one no fair minded individual should miss.

© The Co-operative Group. All rights reserved.
Radical cartoonist and activist Polyp has worked with campaigning organizations around the world for over fifteen years. He lives and works in a co-operative housing complex inManchester,England.

Japan Inc. – an introduction to Japanese Economics


By Shōtarō Ishinomori, translated by Betsey Scheiner (University of California Press)
ISBN: 978-0-52006-289-4

It’s often been said, but bears repeating here: “Comics are an integral part of Japanese life”. There’s no appreciable difference to Eastern eyes between sequential pictures and prose, so it makes sense that such a medium should be used to educate and elucidate as well as entertain. After all the US military reached the same conclusion after WWII when they commissioned comics legend Will Eisner to design instruction manuals in strip form, and produce similar instructive material for Services magazines like P*S, the Preventative Maintenance Monthly, which even the least schooled G.I. could understand…

In late 1986 Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan’s analogue of the Wall Street Journal, commissioned manga star Shōtarō Ishinomori to adapt a serious economic text – Zeminaru Nihon keizai nyÅ«mon published by the newspaper – into a mass market comicbook. Manga Nihon keizai nyÅ«mon sold more than half a million copies in its first year…

Soon after, Securities and Investment companies were using strip brochures to explain the complexities of their latest stock market products and by the mid 1980s benkyō and jitsumu manga (“study comic” and “practical comic”) were an integral part of school and college libraries. Naturally, there were sequels to Manga Nihon keizai nyūmon…

Shōtarō Ishinomori (nee Onodera and Ishimori; January 25th 1938 – January 28th 1998) is officially the World’s most prolific comics artist. After his death the Guinness Book of Records posthumously recorded his 128,000+ pages – often generated at the rate of 200-300 pages a month! – the most ever produced by a single creator.

In 1955, when the boy was simply keen fan of Manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, the God of Comics took the lad on as his assistant and apprentice, beginning with the iconic Tetsuwan Atomu – or Astro Boy to you and me…

Thereafter, until his death Ishinomori worked ceaselessly in Manga, Anime, Games and Tokusatsu (live action superhero shows such as Kamen Rider – a genre he practically invented) developing groundbreaking series such as Super Sentai, Cyborg 009, Sabu to Ichi Torimono Hikae, Ganbare!! Robokon and countless others.

There is a museum dedicated to his career in Ishinomaki, Miyagi and trains to and from the site are decorated throughout with his myriad cartoon creations.

Following a comprehensive and informative account on the development and growth of comics in Japan by Stanford University’s Peter Duus, this oddly engaging English-language edition reveals the way the Japanese perceived their own economy’s function and global position through the fictionalised lives of a small group of workers at the mythic conglomerate Toyosan Automobile Corporation and its affiliate the Mitsutomo Company.

The cast are idealised concepts of the nation’s business life: Kudo is a good and kind-hearted executive, always seeking to put profit in a social framework that benefits everybody, whilst his colleague and rival Tsugawa is a ruthless, go-getter to whom people are expendable and only the Bottom Line matters. Above them is wise manager Akiyama, with the women’s role exemplified by shy yet passionate Miss Amamiya, whilst young office junior Ueda portrays the verve, exuberance and inexperience of the next generation of Japan’s workers…

The elucidating episodes begin with ‘Trade Friction’ as in 1980 American car workers begin attacking imported Japanese cars. Ever hungry for a fast buck, the US motor industry lays off staff and attempts to force Washington into curtailing Japanese imports…

If the exporting nation is to maintain its growth, it may have to shift production to the USA and leave its own workers and subcontractors out in the cold. Soon there’s panic at Toyosan’s factory and the union is up in arms, but whilst Tsugawa has no problem with that, the ingenious Kudo is working on a plan to diversify and provide new jobs for the ordinary Japanese suffering under the outrageous US tactics…

‘Countering the Rise of the Yen’ sees the disparity in international exchange rates threaten Imahama City as their crucial export trade crumbles. When Tsugawa seizes the opportunity to buy the place cheap and turn it into a Mitsutomo amusement park, once more Kudo interferes, seeking a way to keep all the citizens of the district fully employed whilst delivering a sound lesson on the way to balance family life and duty to the company…

Geo-political affiliations and the ever-shifting balance of power in rogue states comes under scrutiny in ‘Industrial Structure’ when a Middle-Eastern country seeks to revive a secret industrial process and past alliance with Mitsutomo. The shady deals that were struck in the pursuit of guaranteed resources offer huge potential profit but a concomitant risk of disastrous political and financial fall-out if the scheme is exposed. Of course Tsugawa and Kudo and their respective mentors Toda and Akiyama are in the thick of things in a chapter dramatically illustrating how changes in international political climate reshape Japan’s industrial structure…

The nation’s welfare system is tested in ‘Deficit Finance’ as Ueda’s aged grandmother comes to visit and Japan’s social services are scrutinised by Tsugawa and Kudo, who learn the advantages and drawbacks of government-led initiatives whilst both learning some hard-hitting historical lessons about the last (in their case 1965) Recession…

‘A Monetary Revolution’ describes the inexorable global banking de-regulation of the 1970s and 1980s as Tsugawa visits London following the “suicide” of an Italian banker and falls into a hornet’s nest of trouble by involving Mitsutomo in a “Fi-Tech” scheme (covert financial speculation between banks, usually achieved by mutually monkeying with the proposed profit margin) that involves the Vatican’s Mafia-run Financial House… Anybody else positively dizzy with déjà vu…?

When it all comes bubbling to a head it’s only Kudo’s swift thinking and sharp dealing that turns an unmitigated catastrophe into a business triumph, after which the ‘Epilogue’ neatly sums up the subtly effective lessons learned throughout the book and depicts our cast as the look forward to what might lie ahead

Using a stylish soap-opera and captivatingly effective scenario to put a personal face on history – or indeed Global Finance in this case – is a technique the modern film industry has used for decades, with fictionalised accounts of historical figures and events as far-ranging as The King’s Speech to Flight 93 to Shakespeare in Love leading a vital veracity to even the most fanciful proceeding, and it works magnificently here whilst the subplots (sex, political intrigue, bribery, espionage, blackmail, sacrificing family life for the job and, of course, the war between prosperity and personal honour) all work perfectly to put a human frame to what might seem dry and dusty lecturing

Whilst not to everyone’s taste, this book certainly shows how emphatic and powerful a tool comics can be, whilst to my mind it has a far more lasting dramatic appeal than many of its contemporary money-worshipping entertainments such as Dallas, Dynasty or Wall Street…

One interesting point about this book is the perceptible subtext and open undercurrent describing a general mistrust of all politicians – shadings that most British scholarly texts are keen and careful to disguise at all costs. US President Ronald Reagan is constantly depicted as either a buffoon or a conniving demon but he gets off lightly compared to Japanese officialdom, from the lowliest local administrator or union rep all the way to the highest statesmen in the land…

Here the words and pictures don’t prevaricate: Business Good, Politicians Bad…

And on that I couldn’t possibly comment…

© 1988 the Regents of the University of California. © 1986 Shōtarō Ishinimori, reprinted by permission of Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc.

The Comics Journal #301


By various, Edited by Gary Groth & Kristy Valenti (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-291-3

After far too long a hiatus the new incarnation of The Comics Journal is available and as inspired as ever.

The Journal is the paramount English-language publication dedicated to the Art of graphic narrative, covering comics, cartooning and related fields domestic and global; interviewing creators, disseminating the facts and even advertising the best and most challenging product. They’ve done it competently, passionately and proudly for decades. You won’t always agree with the opinions expressed – editorial or from the many and various insiders and cognoscenti who have been featured – but you’d be an idiot to ignore or dismiss them if you care at all about the industry or the medium.

This latest offering, a truly monolithic square-bound book; 624 mostly monochrome pages but with lots of colour where necessary, devotes most of its mass to possibly the most important comics work of this new century whilst still finding ample room to examine one of its few rivals for primacy from the entire 20th century, an appreciation of a lost classic, an examination of the latest blockbuster from the founder and master of comics-reportage and much, much more.

In 2009 W. W. Norton and Co. released The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb. The 200 page comics adaptation of the Robert Alter version of the old testament was the stunning result of four years of intense research, creative thought and non-stop drawing… and for most of us it’s a big contender for the artist’s absolute magnum opus.

R. Crumb: The Genesis Interview sees the always intriguing and painfully forthcoming master draughtsman talking to Gary Groth about every aspect of the project after which Roundtable: the Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb is thrown to a pack of critics and cognoscenti for analysis, rebuttal, refutation and literary transubstantiation. Rick Marschall contributes ‘Pilgrim’s Process’, Donald Phelps describes ‘An Epic Visualized’, Robert Stanley Martin declares ‘Crumb Finally Finds his Limits’, Jeet Heer dispassionately examines ‘Genesis Revisited’ and Tim Hodler follows the ‘Straight Lines’, whilst Alexander Theroux considers why and how ‘Crumb Goes to Church’ and Kenneth R. Smith caps off the initial set of theses with ‘A Book For Man Recounted in a Book By/For/Of Man’.

This is followed by an utterly absorbing Roundtable Responses feature in which the assembled contributors react to what each other propounded…

After that compelling 190-odd page lead section the first Sketchbook instalment delves into the mind and portfolio of Jim Woodring, in a compelling interview liberally spiced with the cartoonist’s working drawings, doodles and photos from Weathercraft and a host of other superbly eclectic classics

Al Jaffee & Michael Kupperman in Conversation is another magical dose of back and forth banter between an industry legend and rising star, moderated by Groth and liberally illustrated with work from both parties in case you’re unfamiliar with their oeuvre. In this case the stellar career and newest work of the Mad Magazine veteran and inventor of “Fold-ins” is counterbalanced with the surreal enticements of the unique talent behind Tales Designed to Thrizzle.

Warren Bernard (co-author of Drawing Power: A Compendium of Cartoon Advertising 1870-1940) outlines the career of one of the early industry’s greatest stars in John T. McCutcheon: A Cartoonist and His Dog before Sketchbook: Tim Hensley highlights the work of the relative newcomer behind the wonderful Ticket Stub.

Tim Kreider is the brilliantly acerbic and effective cartoonist/essayist/political gadfly behind Twilight of the Assholes and here he examines a series I’ve always loved but been too timid and lazy to review in Irredeemable: Dave Sim’s Cerebus.

Joe Sacco on Footnotes in Gaza is another illuminating interview by Groth, wherein indomitable champion of truth Sacco discusses his latest graphic novel, whilst Sketchbook: Stephen Dixon reveals the stunning an nigh-obsessive graphic facility of the prolific novelist and short-story writer behind Tisch, I, Time to Go, Meyer and so many others…

The ‘Reviews’ section further covers Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza with a comprehensive dissertation from Kent Worcester, Ryan Holmberg dissects Yoshiro Tatsumi’s Gekiga manga masterwork Black Blizzard and Robert Stanley Martin delves into the collected wonderment of Eddie Cambell’s semi-autobiographical gem Alec: the Years Have Pants.

Marc Sobel’s ‘The Decade in Comics’ examines what might be the milestones of the last ten years – you decide – R. Fiore has “another Go-round with Racial Caricature” in the challenging ‘Affectionate, Sympathetic and Completely Racist’ and ‘Cartoonists Leading Cartoonists’ by Rob Clough reports on a unique industry mentoring program at the Center for Cartoon Studies.

In ‘Gus Arriola and the Comic Strip that Never Was – Until Now’ R. C. Harvey explores another strip which might have added to the late ‘Gordo‘ creator’s lustre: the adumbrated adventures of Persian delight Pussy Willow – a cat of means and many sharp ends…

‘Maggots and Time’ by Chris Lanier examines Brian Chippendale’s expressive and experimental Maggots comic in the context of art capturing motion and progression and a huge full colour comics section reprints Dell’s comicbook adaptation and licensed continuation of UPA’s cartoon classic ‘Gerald McBoing Boing’ – itself an animation of a superb Dr. Seuss tale – introduced here by animation legend Gene Deitch, after which the whole colossal chronicle circles back to point zero by revealing ‘Three Questions Answered about Robert Crumb’: a retrospective disquisition by Tom Crippin which closes this fabulous treasure trove of intellectual comics discourse.

Although it feels like it has always been part of our lives, TCJ only began business in 1976, interviewing creators, reporting on trends and events and generally assuming the critical role of critique-ing: a self-aware gadfly within and without our industry: celebrating the history and innovation of all aspects of cartooning and graphic narrative, keeping the balance between sales and artistic integrity firmly tipped on the side of the latter. It has for decades been the only place Americans hear of what the rest of the world of comics is doing.

This is a superb uber-magazine for comics lovers: it won’t ever tell you where and when to buy but it will certainly make you wonder why you do or don’t…
© 2011 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All images/photos/text © their respective copyright holders. All rights reserved.

Blabworld #1


By various, edited by Monte Beauchamp (Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-746-4

For decades Monte Beauchamp’s iconic and innovative narrative and graphic arts magazine Blab! has highlighted the best and most groundbreaking trends and trendsetters in cartooning and other popular creative fields. Initially published through the auspices of the much missed Dennis Kitchen’s Kitchen Sink Press it moved over to Fantagraphics and now it has resurfaced, reformed in a snazzy hardback annual format from Last Gasp.

As ever there is an eclectic and eye-popping mix of strips, articles and features on show and Blabworld #1 opens with a gloriously enchanting sequence of paintings describing everything you wanted to know about ‘Slime Moulds’ crafted by Geoffrey Grahn, after which Kari Laine McCluskey enchants and disturbs with a series of toy and doll photomontages entitled ‘Colloidion’.

Greg Clarke delivers a droll and dry assault on the obsessive ownership mentality with ‘The Neurotic Art Collector’, Bill North examines youth’s most popular graphic symbol in ‘Skull!’ – an article tracing the use of the memento mori in popular publishing with loads of cool covers to ogle and covet – and Nora Krug relates in unique cartoon manner ‘Quicksand: The Tumultuous Life of Isabelle Eberhardt’, before cover artist Shag delivers another magically hip gag on the consumer society.

The major central portion of this volume is devoted to magnificent artworks in a variety of media from a stellar collection of artists grouped together under the umbrella theme of ‘Artpocalypse’:

Ron English contributed ‘The Creation of Evolution’, Ryan Heshka depicted ‘The Rapture’, Owen Smith showed ‘Fin’ and Jean-Pierre Roy revealed ‘No Secrets Left From Us.’ ‘Beyond the Fence’ came via Martin Wittfooth, Kathleen Lolly showed ‘Knowledge Dies Too’ and Andy Kehoe painted ‘When the Last Leaf Falls’. Andrea Dezso contributed ‘Strangely Normal’, Natalia Fabia ‘Hooker in the Apocalypse’, Karen Barbour ‘Lamentations Over the Merciless Void’, Edel Rodriguez ‘Farewell to Grace’ and Fred Stonehouse ‘Dream of St. John’.

‘Well-Matched Lovers’ by Marc Burckhardt is followed by Femke Hiemstra’s ‘Hayano & Koheu’, Calef Brown’s ‘Endtime Tigerbird’, Larry Day’s ‘Rapture in Birdville’ and underground commix legend Spain Rodriguez delivers a glimpse of ‘2012’.

Lowbrow art virtuoso Mark Ryden displays his ‘End of the World’, Yoko D’Holbachie contributes ‘Final Farewell’, Gary Basemen ‘Another Average Day’, Alex Gross ‘Jozaikai (Purgatory)’, Sue Coe ‘Revenge of the Swine’, Sofia Arnold ‘Smoke Cave’ and Gary Taxali illuminates both ‘End World’ and ‘Rapture’.

‘Armageddon Flub’ by Travis Lampe, John Pound predicts ‘All Things Must Fall’, Kris Kuksi conducts ‘An Opera for the Apocalypse’ and Ryan Heshka returns to deliver a ‘Flaming End’ (as well as the mesmerising back cover).

Michael Noland reveals the ‘Revelation Roaches’, Teresa James collects ‘Weapons of Divine Power’, and Tom Huck a ‘Pile O’ Poon’ before Joe Sorren wraps it all up with ‘The Secret Collapse of Miss Lorraine’.

After the art show Sergio Ruzzier takes up the comic strip baton with a mercurial watercolour saga entitled ‘The Life of an Artist’, designer Steven Heller explores the hypnotic cover art of R. Crumb in ‘Covering Weirdo’ whilst James Lowe relates the astounding history of ‘Propaganda Caricature Art of World War II’ in ‘Axe the Axis!’ before Mark Landman amuses and offends with the story of ‘Fetal Elvis’ Art Empire’.

Steven Guarnaccia adapts Julia Moores poem ‘Lament on the Death of Willie’, Mark Todd details the sordid horror of ‘The Dreaded Mothman of West Virginia’ and ‘Ballpoint Bravura: Drawings by CJ Pyle’ spotlights the incredible dexterity and imagination of the rock drummer turned graphic craftsman with superstar Peter Kuper dramatically closing out this first fantastic happening with his appropriately apocalyptic strip ‘Four Horsemen’

There has never been a more vibrant and exciting time for lavish imaginative art and cutting edge graphic narrative and this superb catalogue of marvels is sure to become a watchword for what to watch out for.

© 2010 by the respective creators and contributors. All rights reserved.