Inside Moebius, Part III by Jean "Moebius" Giraud

This book is probably close to incomprehensible without its predecessors, so I might have just a short post today.

In the Aughts, Jean Giraud - a French cartoonist who worked mostly as Moebius (for a long sequence of SFnal and imagistic stories, from The Airtight Garage and the Incal stories with Alejandro Jodorowsky to a bunch of film conceptual work in the '80s) and as Gir (for the long, very popular, Blueberry western series with writer Jean-Michel Charlier) - wanted to quit smoking pot.

So he spent six years making a six-volume, roughly seven-hundred-page metafictional epic, mostly in a quicker, sketchbook style than his usual work, in which "he" ruled and/or explored "Desert B" (a complicated pun in French - it's pronounced the same as désherber, the slang term for quitting smoking, and also is an allusion to bande dessinée, the French term for comics), as his most famous characters remonstrated with him to give them more interesting things to do and his younger self also kibitzed, and a manifestation of the unconscious briefly looked to become an important character before disappearing entirely. The author stand-in on the page spent a lot of time flying through this barren landscape (bodily flying, by jumping off a roof and missing the ground, in best Douglas Adams fashion), and rummaging through random doors in a vast "ego-bunker" that led him to various places and times, mostly as pages of comics he created. Oh, and Osama bin Laden was also an important character, before he was turned into a sexy girl.

Yes, exactly.

Inside Moebius is quirky, deeply self-indulgent, and wouldn't have been published if Moebius were not Moebius. But he was, and so it was. It still took nearly a decade to get translated into English, where it was published as three two-in-one volumes, perhaps assuming an American audience could be induced to pay for this weirdness three times, but not more than that.

So earlier this year I read Part I and then Part II. (See those links for more details and my attempt to explicate the plot, such as it is.) Now I'm at the end, with Part III.

And I have to say the end is even looser and less focused than the beginning. The entire second half of the final book is made up of mostly single-page surrealistic illustrations, in Moebius's full-art style, of bizarre transformations and organic forms, mostly involving him. And what comes before that isn't much clearer and focused: this reads a lot like Moebius had gotten all of his random thoughts and ideas down on the page in the prior volumes, and was casting about for something else to do with them, some way to tie them up neatly and make an ending.

I don't want to call Inside Moebius a failure, because it's not aiming to do anything specific enough to define success. It is weird and borderline offensive in its beginning, bizarre and self-indulgent throughout, and descends into random second-hand mysticism and pure image at the end to force a climax. It is very much only for people who are already Moebius fans, those willing to see how far he will go when he has no bounds or controls or script.

Ex Libris by Matt Madden

You are reading a blog post. It is about a book. You immediately worry that this is going to be some kind of pomo bullshit, probably designed to mimic the book itself, and that the blogger thinks he's being clever.

Reader, you are so very right.

Ex Libris is a visually inventive but thematically vague graphic novel about comics and reading and creation and all of those things, unfortunately mostly on a very superficial level, by the cartoonist, editor, and translator Matt Madden. If it were about something more culturally impressive, I would say it smells heavily of the lamp. As it is, it smells of...what? India ink? Whatever a fresh piece of illustration board smalls like? It smells like ambition and comics and trying too hard, frankly.

We open with a person entering a room - we are the person entering the room, like a first-person shooter. Madden very deliberately avoids any identifying details - even as he provides the protagonist with a sad romantic backstory with "M." - to maintain the sense that this person is "me," the reader. (Madden gets more specific just before the end: I'm not sure if that's meant to be a big reveal or just an admission that no one can commit to the bit that fully and still have the thing work.)

The person closes the door and sleeps on a futon. When "we" wake, "we" notice there is a bookcase: the only other piece of furniture in the room. Leaving the room is never mentioned; it's not forbidden so much as merely outside the scope of possibility.

The bookcase is full of books, of course. All graphical in nature: comics and manga and bande dessinee and collections of strips and graphic novels and improving non-fiction and literary short stories and metafiction. Because comics can be any kind of story or book you can think of, of course!

Ahem. Yes. So can poetry. So can prose. So can film and TV and songs, opera and site-specific art installations. I hope we're beyond the "Bang! Pow! Special Pleading for my favorite artform!" '80s-style apologetic for comics, but maybe we will never get over Macho Grande.

Madden goes on from there, with a whole bunch of examples of the comics "you" are reading in this room, all of which are intrinsically connected to "your" mental state and "your" internal monologue. Unless you are thinking, "this is artistically impressive, but awfully empty," because Madden doesn't have an answer to that.

It is artistically impressive. Madden draws in a couple of dozen styles here, for a panel or multiple pages, and constructs inventive pages with multiple styles and quirky eye-catching devices and panels-within-panels and more complicated things I don't have a good vocabulary for. Ex Libris would be a great book for a course about how to tell stories in comics, since it includes nearly all of the potential ways to do that.

But the story it tells is a massive, dull cliché: "you" are a frustrated comics-maker, and "you" just need to pick up the pen and tell your story!

Well, no. Not for the vast majority of people who will read Ex Libris. Not at all. Most of us like to read books, and we like the books we read to tell us something - about themselves, about the outside world, about a fictional world. We don't much like them to harangue us to stop reading and do something else.

If you are looking for a book to inspire you to make comics, Ex Libris is your baby. If you like quirky metafiction and comics told in different styles, you'll find a lot to like here. If you just want a story, stay far away.

Folklords by Matt Kindt, Matt Smith & Chris O'Halloran

I am exactly the kind of person who would say "I never metafiction I didn't like," and actually mean it. Bad puns, metafiction, fussy literary forms - all right up my street.

So I'm surprised that I didn't like Folklords more than I did. Oh, it's fine: it's an entertaining story. But it seems rushed in spots and not entirely baked, like there was going to be (or may yet be) more to it than this. I do wonder if it was originally planned or envisioned to be a longer series, and ended up as just these five issues somewhere along the way. In any case, it's fun and professional, written by Matt Kindt with line art by Matt Smith and color by Chris O'Halloran.

Ansel lives in Generic Fantasy Village. It's not called that, but that's what it is. Everyone bustles around town carrying baskets of stuff, there's one elf and one troll, there's no larger polity or world (just dark forests and the like), and there doesn't seem to be nearly enough fields and farmers around it to feed everybody. Oh, and there's also a treetop village across the river which is not terribly well explained: it could be the home of some subgroup (it's where I'd expect the elves to be if there were more elves), but it seems to instead be just an overgrown tree-fort that the town's kids use for all of their gatherings and carousings. (All entirely PG-rated, as far as we see, which is also weird and surprising.)

Ansel's story is narrated, at least the first page or two of each issue. Someone not in this story is telling us this story, and we assume we will find out who that storyteller is, and that the storyteller's identity will be important. (Spoiler: no and no.)

Ansel is about to turn eighteen, which is when everyone in Generic Fantasy Village goes on a Quest. There are a lot of kids about to turn eighteen - looks like a dozen or more - which implies a village size and/or an infant-mortality rate and/or a population growth rate that don't entirely match the small, cozy, unchanging vibe. And Ansel, who has been having strange, vivid, troubling dreams (of our modern world, it is heavily implied) his whole life, wants to do the Forbidden Quest: to seek the fabled Folklords, who the reader will assume run the whole world.

(There's a bunch of things in Folklords that seem to be aiming to be mythic or folkloric but just seem generic: mythic is actually much harder than it looks to pull off.)

Ansel is an appropriate hero: he has experiences (his visions) and skills (he can build stuff he sees in his visions, at least some of which really works, which is superhero-tinkerer-level power) and is driven to learn the truth of his world no matter the cost. So it's all set up for a picaresque adventure across different lands, probably picking up allies and enemies along the way, before he finally discovers who and what the Folklords really are.

Oh, but first! First he must be denied the quest.

The authorities in this world - or at least this part of it, as usual with semi-mythic fantasy, the political structure is deeply hazy - are the Guild of Librarians (wink wink nudge nudge!), who are, as they must be, a militaristic masked order of humorless bastards who mete out summary executions at their whim. And they interrupt the Quest Ceremony at the first mention of Folklords, instead giving all of the kids dull Stasi-esque local quests to investigate various things.

Ansel will not stand for that, obviously. So he's off. And the plot I alluded to above - picaresque, episodic, gathering new characters as it goes - does begin exactly like that. But the series is only five issues long, so it goes quickly and Ansel, along with a few new compatriots, quickly meets a Folklord with a very signposted name.

And there's a flurry of confused activity and exposition, including what may be the reveal of the narrator on the very last pages, and what seems to be a sequel hook...except it's presented like, "OK, we did X, which was necessary but not sufficient, and now need to head off to do Y, which is vastly more important...oops, wait, here's THE END."

I want to believe this was not planned to be five issues, because it's really not structured well for five issues. The stuff Ansel builds should be more important, and used more. How this world actually works needs to either be explained or not teased at all - if you have Folklords, you need to show how they lord over folk, and what gives them the power to do that. If there's ever a second Folklords story, I'd want to check it out: there's a lot left on the table here. But, if this is the whole thing, it's more than a bit disappointing.

Book-A-Day 2018 #333: Doom Patrol by Grant Morrison, Richard Case, and others (3 and/or 6 volumes)

More time has passed since these stories per published than had passed for the whole history of the Doom Patrol to that point. As with so many things in corporate comics, in 2018 we're now deep in second- or third-order nostalgia, memories of particular revised versions of things that have been around, and generating income for some corporation, for five or eight decades.

I tend to think Grant Morrison, and his Doom Patrol characters, would be just fine with that: they already think the world is random and bizarre and mostly unbelievable, a thin scrim over chaos and madness and conspiracy theories and various kinds of unlikely mysticism.

Doom Patrol was always pretty weird, right from the initial '60s version by Arnold Drake, Bob Haney and Bruno Premiani. Introductions in the current editions of the Morrison run lean heavily into that: the idea that this team was always "freaks" and "misfits," the ones fixing weird and surreal problems that more conventionally superheroic characters couldn't handle. I haven't read much of the Drake/Haney/Premiani run, so let's say that's correct: it sounds a bit like special pleading to me, but clearly it was weird by the standards of the time.

Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, on the other hand, is weird by any standard. A hundred or more years from now, if people are still around and reading comics, they'll still think this stuff is really out there. And it is.

Morrison took over what was a more-or-less conventional superhero team with declining sales in early 1989 and bet all of his chips on the freaks -- it worked out, with the Morrison Doom Patrol  becoming an immediate success and eventually becoming one of the core books of the new Vertigo line a few years later. Morrison's issues ran from early 1989 (#19) through early 1993 (#63), plus a piss-take of the then-popular X-Force called Doom Force.

The Morrison run has been collected twice in the last decade: first as six volumes from 2000-2008, and then as three double-sized books in 2016 and 2017. (There's also, as there must be, the single big-crushing volume for those who must own something larger than anyone else.) For various quirky reasons that are very Doom Patrol appropriate, I read the first two big books and then volumes 5 and 6 of the previous series -- all of the Morrison stories, in order.

It begins, very much corporate-comics style, in the aftermath of a crossover: Invasion! in this case. The members of the old team are dead (Celsius, Scott Fischer) or retired (Tempest) or comatose (Lodestone) or depowered (Negative Woman). Left standing alone is Robotman (Cliff Steele), who, maybe because of that, has since become the iconic character who is in every version of Doom Patrol. And the Chief (Niles Caulder) who originally formed the DP, is back to run it again.

Cliff is in some kind of psychiatric facility -- modern and rehabilitative, so I won't call it an "insane asylum" -- where he meets Kay Challis, a woman who was systematically abused in childhood and developed sixty-four personalities from that abuse. And, from the "gene bomb" in Invasion!, all of those personalities now have independent superpowers.

Meanwhile, Larry Trainor, once Negative Man before the "Negative Spirit" left him, is also recuperating from his own problems when that spirit returns and forcibly merges Larry, itself, and a doctor named Eleanor Poole into a single entity that starts calling itself Rebis.

The three of them will be the new Doom Patrol team -- Robotman, Kay as Crazy Jane, and Rebis. The former Tempest, Joshua Clay, becomes the team doctor but isn't active even though he still has his fire-energy-beams-from-his-hands power. And they're soon joined by Dorothy Spinner, a pre-teen with a deformed face who can bring her dreams and ideas to life (sometimes even on purpose), who is also what the Chief calls "the support team."

They battle weird existential menaces for a few years of comics time -- the Brotherhood of Dada, trying to drag the world into a painting; the Scissormen, foot-soldiers of a rapacious metafiction; Red Jack, who claims to be both God and Jack the Ripper and abducts the former Lodestone as his new bride; the Brotherhood of the Unwritten Book, in a semi-parody of Alan Moore's post-Crisis Swamp Thing story about a magical apocalypse; the inter-dimensionally warring Geomancers of the Kaleidoscape and the Orthodoxy of the Insect Mesh, who also have plans for a now-awake and -transformed Lodestone (who is called by her real name, Rhea, throughout); the Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E., who want to make the whole world "normal;" and a few more variations of the same themes.

Along they way, they meet the sentient dimension-hopping Danny the Street, who becomes something between their new HQ and a member of the team. And they meet the long-lost Flex Mentallo, man of muscle mystery, who wandered off for his own mini-series and I don't think has been seen much since. (Or maybe he's in the Teen Titans now; stupider things have happened in the DC Universe.)

In the end, the last villain of Morrison's Doom Patrol run is inside the team, of course, and he gets to run through one more level of deconstruction before ending his Doom Patrol stories with a bang. (And then, to close out all of these books, comes that Doom Force one-shot, a deliberately ugly and dumb takedown of the stupid comics from the people who would very soon found Image and get rich very quickly.)

There's not much else like this Doom Patrol: it's the first major flowering of Morrison's tropism towards metafiction and superhero-as-mythic-figure and a strong example of a case where his magpie gathering of every last random thing he reads or experiences really works well. And he's ably assisted on art through this long series -- primarily by Richard Case, who pencilled the majority of the stories, with other contributions by Simon Bisley (most of the iconic covers), Kelley Jones, Jamie Hewlett, Ken Steacy, and Sean Phillips.

For me, this is the quintessential Grant Morrison Big Two comic. I like to pretend that these are the kinds of characters and stories that his career focused on, that he didn't turn to telling ham-handed episodes of superhero porn. Remember: we all create our own canons in our heads; we don't ever need to let anyone else tell us what matters.

Animal Man: 3 volumes by Grant Morrison, Chas Truog, and Doug Hazlewood

The idea has gone from unknown to exciting to cliche and then all the way to passe, but there was an era where "choose a minor superhero-universe character and get a British writer to take him seriously" was brilliant and new. Frankly, it was the source of a lot of the best mainstream comics for close to a decade. Alan Moore on Swamp Thing led the pack, of course, but Peter Milligan did it to Shade the Changing Man and Neil Gaiman did it to Sandman and Grant Morrison did it to Doom Patrol.

And, at about the same time, to Animal Man.

Morrison's Animal Man, though, was a lot shorter than those other examples -- twenty-six issues, barely two years. And it arguably went a lot farther a lot faster than those others, gleefully deconstructing itself and the entire concept of corporate superhero comics at high speed before Morrison lept off, specifically stating as Grant Morrison in his last issue of the comic that someone else would be coming along:

They might play it safe and write you as a straight action superhero who fights animal-inspired villains every issue. They might do the obvious and go for shock by turning you into a meat-eater. I don't know.

It's not hyperbole to say that Animal Man -- along with Doom Patrol, which was less blatantly metafictional and closer to the path he'd continue to follow -- showed us exactly what Grant Morrison would be writing about for the next quarter-century, and the kinds of fictional toys he would return to again and again during that time.

Morrison's relaunch of Animal Man -- drawn by Chas Truog and Doug Hazlewood for almost the entire run -- started out as something more conventional, with an '80s gritty Buddy Baker meeting superhero-style with the even more obscure (and rightfully so) B'wana Beast and giving the comeuppance to the usual comics-style evil scientists, who do nasty experiments just because they're evil and cruel. It looked like that would be the pattern of the comic: Buddy fights evil scientists, keeps learning more about their creepy pointless animal-torture, gets more radical, turns vegan, and maybe eventually joins Earth First! and does something even Morrison thinks is morally wrong in pursuit of his cause.

But that was sidelined almost immediately with the fifth issue of the series, which stands with Alan Moore's Swamp Thing #27 as one of the strongest and most radical changes of tone and substance for a corporate comics series. "The Coyote Gospel" wasn't about Animal Man at all, really -- it was about Crafty, a Wile E. Coyote figure from a "lower reality" who was moved into Animal Man's world by "God," to suffer and be maimed and heal, over and over again. It was both a wonderfully blasphemous take on the Christ narrative and a sign that just telling this story was already starting to bore Morrison: he didn't want to tell a story, he wanted to write about story, as centrally and purely as he could.

So he did, more and more over those next twenty issues, reveling in obscure comics continuity through the lens of the Psycho Pirate, a very minor character who was the only one to officially remember the DC Universe before the still-recent Crisis (back when that was the first and only universe restructuring; not even fans can remember them all, these days). And edging closer and closer to making himself a character in the story, which he finally did in that last issue. Buddy Baker didn't meet his maker, exactly, but he did get to meet the comics avatar of the writer who was currently making him jump through hoops. It was as weird and exhilarating as it sounds, and if it made it difficult for anyone to follow, well, that's the problem with metafiction. It's difficult to step back down to plain old fiction afterward.

And it's a good thing the metafiction got so strong so quickly, because the animal-rights stuff was expressed in a frankly silly and childish way -- the Grant Morrison character blatantly states that the life of a human child can't possibly be considered of more value than that of a lab rat, because human beings have caused environmental damage. (There are similar sentiments, on about that level of plausibility, throughout Morrison's run -- but he was smart enough not to dwell on them, however much he believed them.) That is a stupid argument in several ways, not least that animals will cause environmental damage as well, destroying entire habitats by overpopulation before dying out. It's agitprop for the point of agitprop, and I hope Morrison never meant it literally.

But, even more crucially, there's a serious issue with being a vegetarian in the DC Universe, where intelligent plants are not uncommon. Morrison's trying to draw a real-world bright line in a very unreal world with lines that run in very different directions. I hope any morality of food in the DC Universe would start with "don't eat anything that can talk," and presumably get more sophisticated from there. Focusing on the kingdom an entity came from is not the way to go.

But corporate comics are always messy -- there's always some stupid crossover that messes up the pace of the story, costumes that change for no reason, and secondary characters who either changed from the script to the final page due to Recent Shocking Development or are shoehorned in just to keep their trademarks alive. Animal Man dealt with that stuff better than most, but they're inevitable speed bumps for what could otherwise be a smooth ride. If some of the messiness of Animal Man came out of Morrison and his own passions instead of the usual DC continuity bullshit, that's at least a better quality of messiness to deal with.

The Morrison run was collected, finally, a decade later -- the first volume came out at the time, but nothing else -- as something like a trilogy. The first book is just Animal Man, the second is Origin of the Species, and the third is Deus Ex Machina. The work of the folks who followed Morrison is also being collected, I see: I didn't read those at the time, and don't really plan to do so now. (But you can if you want.)

A mic drop is something to be respected.

Snoopy and "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" by Charles M. Schulz

Back when we all did our shopping in person, malls -- remember malls? that was where we did a lot of that shopping -- had bookstores, and those bookstores had checkout counters. And on those counters would be a collection of silly small books, designed for impulse purchase and quick reading. Perhaps it was designed to catch your eye for yourself, or for Aunt Gladys whose birthday is coming up, or for that nice Johnson boy who delivers the paper, but there would be a small clutch of cardboard displays, each with eight-to-ten copies of something amusing, often tied into some vague media idea or fad. (The Olympics or Yuppies or cats or whatever -- it's what we did before the Internet made memes a competition sport.)

And so a lot of things that had "regular" books also threw off little books, for that particular ecological niche. Because if your audience is already shopping for books, why not try to grab them again just before they leave?

That's how the world got Snoopy and "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night." It's essentially the graphic-novelization of the sequences of strips from the late '60s in which Snoopy (then in the process of taking over Peanuts from that round-headed kid) wrote a bad novel and tried in vain to get it published, presented as what may be drawings from those panels or may be then-new art from Sparky. (The book does not make this entirely clear. Knowing Schulz's work ethic, though, my suspicion is that he re-drew it for the book, or at least a lot of it.)

The words, though, are very familiar, as they must be. ("It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.") Snoopy is writing a bad novel here, obviously, full of melodrama and cliches -- and more amusingly, writing it in the space of two pages, because comic strips don't have that much space to begin with.

But there is enough space for metafiction in Dark and Stormy; we see Snoopy write the book, we see him send it off and be accepted by a publisher, and we eventually see him receive his own copies of that book. And then we read that book, with a cover by Lucy (actually painted by Mark Knowland in a fictional-fussbudget style) and all of the words we've seen Snoopy type -- again, it's not that many of them -- organized together into two sections to form something that vaguely looks like a narrative if you squint really hard.

And the old publishing hand of me is particularly happy to see that the book-in-the-book is printed on different paper and in a different font than the frame story: that's the way to do it.

This is a very silly object, that only exists because Peanuts was world-famous at this point and the licensing folks were happy to leap on any hint of product that could be sold. Still, it's a wonderful silly object, and I'm glad to finally have a copy for my very own after all these years.

Movie Log: Paper Heart

Paper Heart presents itself as a documentary -- as the true story of young actress/comedian Charlyne Yi examining the concept of true love, and her own belief that love doesn't really exist -- but it is actually a fiction, constructed by Yi and Nicholas Jasenovec (who, in a neat bit of metafiction, is also the director, but is played as the director of the documentary that Paper Heart pretends to be, by Jake M. Johnson). So there are wheels within wheels here, and I'm not sure it's entirely kosher to pretend to be a documentary for fictional purposes. The heart of the movie is Yi's relationship with Michael Cera, who is playing himself and pretending not to be playing at all. Their courtship is as Michael Cera-ish as any viewer could expect, with Yi even more tentative and awkward than Cera himself, as unlikely as that may seem. (They both seem to be entirely devoid of the hormones that, in most people their age, are what drives people towards each other in the first place.) So some of the scenes in Paper Heart are Yi interviewing various people about love, from long-wed couples to schoolkids -- and, of course, finding out that all of them, most especially the schoolchildren, are wiser and more thoughtful and serious than she is. And then the rest of the scenes are of Yi and Johnson-as-Jasenovec, talking about making the movie, and pretending to be behind the scenes, with and without Cera, as the boyfriend who hasn't figured out why a boy might be interested in girls, anyway. (To forestall the inevitable comeback: Cera's characters, particularly the distilled essence of Cera he plays in this movie, are even less interested in boys, if that is mathematically possible.) As usual, the audience cuts a documentary extra slack, because it's real -- but this is a "documentary," and not real...or not entirely real. As a complete fiction, it's quite plotless and erratically structured. As a complete documentary, it has a number of touching moments and thoughtful passages -- though most of those do come from the people Yi interviews, and not her interactions with the Platonic Michael Cera. So Paper Hearts isn't a failure, precisely, but it's not quite successful as whatever it's actually trying to do. And it will probably frustrate a large percentage of the people watching it. ---------------- Listening to: The Octopus Project - An Evening with Rthrtha via FoxyTunes