CBR III #5: Blake Bell's Fire & Water: Bill Everett, the Sub-mariner, & the Birth of Marvel Comics

Part of me wants to adopt the voice of Stan Lee: Because you demanded it, the bio; Excelsior. But that’s just not true. In Bill Everett’s twilight years of creating comics and superheroes for generations, Stan Lee came to power and created what we now know as comics. Stan Lee is a household name. Bill Everett is not. Yet Bill Everett had laid down all the right notes before Stan was even a gofer.

Bill Everett was an alcoholic who struggled with the bottle as much as his chosen profession. He constantly missed deadlines and let people down. But such was his personality and his work that someone would always keep hum employed.

He created the Sub-Mariner. He created the Human Torch. He introduced a bold muscular violence to comics that never existed before him. Today, we thrive on action and heroics in the movies. Bill Everett made that happen. He died of a broken liver with little fame. And he bequeathed soaring action to the comics.

This book is not a biography, isn’t painstakingly researched, and doesn’t profess to be so. It’s a big coffee table art book filled with anecdotes, and legend and endless pages of really good art. It is exactly what it purports to be.

I am myself not an expert in the history of comics, and I sometimes do not see what is described in the book. There was much better draftsmanship to come. Better stories. Better ideas. But when people first started to think about stapling together comic drawings and selling them, Bill Everett was THE maverick.

I don’t even like his drawing style. But I did see his motion and narrative and learned a lot about the art form. That is why you want this book.

Yes, the stories of comics in the forties are memorable and nostalgic. But that isn’t the focus here. It’s a big book. It is filled with his art. You get your money’s worth just for that. The text is secondary.

What it does do is give a portrait of a just born art, and the way one man shaped graphic narrative for decades to come. I will never love his drawings; they really do seem cheap and empty to me. I have not eyes to see that part of history. What I did learn, though, was the birth of motion through panels, of suspense, of trepidation. The kinds of layouts that Bill Everett produced from his imagination allowed all future generations of comics to be. He had no history to draw upon. And no one paid him enough to care. He, in fact, professed not to care. And yet here we are, basking in the wealth that he helped form.

If you ever loved comics, this book is for you. If you want a critical biography, keep on truckin’, but you won’t find a better one of Bill Everett. The book tells three stories: The birth of comics, the growth of an artist, and an artist’s downfall. It does so with love and reverence, between the mighty pages of art. What else can I say?

If he had come on the scene 20 years later, someone might have said excelsior. He might command better respect and be better known. But that didn’t happen. At least we have this book today. Thank god for that.

CBR III #4: Michael Chabon’s the Yiddish Policeman’s Union

Reading Michael Chabon inevitably leaves me with my skin tingling, my senses rapacious and my soul restless with a passionate and earnest urgency to be awake in the world.  I can’t underscore the vibrant hot-bloodedness of his work enough.  I haul the most tawdry hyperbole out of the cellar that I can find, and it is lacking.  My shriveled black heart blooms and mutates in his work.  I have trouble looking people in the eye afterward because I am vulnerable and teary, a naked and painful love-creature bounding, swollen with both jubilation and melancholy.  I don’t normally try and articulate the wonder of his work; I just give people his books, like a dime store apostle.

People familiar with Chabon will know that he is a shameless lover of genre fiction and has an alchemist’s skill for twisting and blending supposed low-brow conventions into penetrating art.  The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is an alternate history that speculates on an outcome of WWII and an Israeli war that results in a 60 year interim Jewish state in Alaska.  The story takes place in the waning days of the Sitka Jewish state.  2 million citizens are paralyzed with anxiety over what is to become of them and it is a credit to Chabon’s story-telling that it takes over a hundred pages of embedding the reader into this world to truly reveal the fear.  In this world, the Jews are not welcome anywhere.  Mirroring actual histories, they are being evicted, without any options for where to go.  The theme of being forced into action, but with no good choices to make is reflected in layer after layer of the actual story, a motif that frames the story in the chess conundrum of zugzwang .

In this fully realized world, Chabon delivers a hardboiled noir of a mystery that comfortably stands shoulder to shoulder with Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Jim Thompson.  In true Chabon fashion, the mystery is a love letter to the genre and Chabon uses it to explore the rich themes that always flow through his work:  love, family, father son relationships, identity, loss, grief, endurance, guilt, redemption.

We meet Meyer Landsman, a depressed, drunk, down-at-the-heel police detective who wants nothing more than to disappear into a black hole after his marriage implodes over a pre-natal tragedy (another zugzwang in the story).  Unfortunately, a junky is murdered down the hall from him and the hollow empty death takes hold of Landsman and won’t let go.  Soon it becomes apparent that the murder is a single loose end in something far larger, as the case is buried and closed, from the highest orders.  Like Marlowe, or the Continental Op, this sets Landsman on an obsessed course to find the truth no matter what is uncovered and no matter the lumps he takes.  It’s a pitch perfect story in this regard:  the seemingly isolated crime, the hints of wealth and power being tied to the crime, the exhausting labyrinth that becomes more dangerous and more futile at every turn, the improbably large conspiracy revealed by the dogged obsession of the detective.  Chabon braids politics, organized crime and Jewish mythology into an audacious almost hammy story that successfully juxtaposes pathos with almost keystone kop silliness.

Like any good potboiler, the story, despite being vast, is actually a claustrophobic embroilment of several interwoven families and their secret violent histories.  The protagonist and the murder are catalyst for everything to unravel.

If it was only a noir, it would be a great noir.  If it was only a literary journey through the painful hearts of marriages, families and communities it would be a great literary journey.  If it was only a subtle and nuanced exploration of a speculative alternate history providing insight into the real world and its history, it would excel on that front too.  But Chabon sets the bar high, and goes for the trifecta and achieves it.

The other thing that needs mentioning (unless you’ve read anything by Chabon) is his virtuoso opera of language.  Chabon’s gift of language requires lusty, athletic, blood streaked metaphors to describe.  It’s punk, not chamber music; it’s a cage match not fencing, it’s needy primal fucking, not lovemaking.  In any lesser hand, Chabon’s brand of extravagant verbosity and punch drunk metaphors would be shameless purple prose, but he has an inner wizardry that transcends the rules and even the most jaded reader can’t help but become ecstatic.

Stop reading this review, go read the book!

CBRIII #2-3: Little Things and Funny Misshapen Body by Jeffery Brown

Jeffery Brown is a bit of an enigma.  In photos, he looks a big strapping handsome man of Scandinavian descent and he has a MFA from a prominent school.  But his fame and stock in trade are crude uncertain drawings depicting a small boyish person consumed by neurosis.  A self proclaimed autobiographist, he purports to render a relative truth.  I guess he could be lying.  Or else, his drawing style, his self personification, and the clipped moments of insecure life he depicts might demonstrate the vulnerability in us all.

I’m a long time fan of brown’s work, and I often have a hard time putting my finger on anything justifiable about it.  It’s easier to say it is badly drawn and overly focused on teen-age like melodrama than to argue for it being penetrating, engaging and memorable.  For that reason, if I had guilty pleasures, his work would be in that bag.

But for the most part, Brown does remarkable things.  He displays great humility in not justifying his protagonist.  He also teases out an earnestness, a sincerity that cuts through the distanced hipster stance that might be expected among his peers.  He’s never short of a humour with warmth and intimacy, never lowers himself to a cheap or bitter laugh.  He allows moments to hang in the air.  He allows things to be unsaid.  He’ll take a risk trying to convey pages in a single glance.  And as portrayed, he’s danmned likable.

All that said, Little Things was tremendously disappointing.  I felt I had been conned into purchasing cast off half starts.  Meaningful silence was replaced with empty moments.  Carefully ugly drawings were replaced with overworked pages depicting nothing.  Stories that end hung in a precious moment were replaced with fitful cut offs that made no sense and engendered no feeling.  I highly recommend not buying it ever, unless you are a die-hard fan/stalker type.  (I’m not that type, I was just ignorant of the book).

Now, all that said, Funny Misshapen Body rolled off the press a year later and delivered not just the Brown I love, but a more mature and reflective Brown. A balance of stories, in his usual anti-chronological way that swirl together to create a full novelistic image of people, places and developments, working with new themes, and yet tied to the old and magnifying the scope of his storytelling.   

There’s also a greater range in the artwork, combining the early simple scrawl with the burdened later ink.  We see the rest of Brown’s protagonist’s life (I realize that is cumbersome, but I differentiate between an author and his alter ego): his childhood experiences, his life with art, his schooling, a troubled medical history, his jobs, his solo adventures.  We see the Brown who isn’t simply hung up on a girl. And it is captivating.

Brown’s “love trilogy” sold because he underlined every unsaid thing that never makes it to relationship stories, but that we all relate to.  He could easily keep selling books on this ‘schtick’.  But instead there is this incredible expansion.

I don’t know how to reconcile the two books.  I suppose one way would be to say I read them both in two days, some 700+ pages of work—the same pace for both the book that made me angry I spent money on,  as the one that was warm and alive in my hands.  Could be my mood, I am mercurial.  Either way, I was compelled to read on.

All of brown’s stories always have to do with a shortlist of topics—loneliness, connection, love affairs, struggle and confusion, strife and understanding.  His recent stories paint a vivid portrait of the young man as an artist rather than the artist as a young man and that has added a dimension to the tale. 

I hesitate, but will compare his work to the Alec tales of Eddie Campbell, who also utilized a difficult style of drawing and catalogued random, sometimes pointless and often humiliating experiences and worked up an unmatched  magnum opus of growth and life.  Brown has a long ways to go to reach up to those heights, but then he has a lot of time too.  I think Jeffery Brown is still just getting started and still just shaking off the discomfort of youth.

CBRIII #1: Trickster, An Anthropological Memoir by Eileen Kane

Eileen Kane is a professional anthropologist, with the fieldwork to prove it, but she made her mark in the world educating the rest of us shmucks, not the cognoscenti.  I think that was probably more valuable to us.

Her memoir of her first foray into fieldwork is replete with humour, detail and wisdom.

She spins the tale of a young female anthropologist venturing out with insecurity into a male dominated world, in 1964, right after her marriage, risking everything, including the cross looks from folk in her home town.

I am not an anthropologist, but if I was, I would prescribe this book as a primer to let people know how different the classroom is from the sloppy mess of real life.  Even for the anthro students, it paints a vivid picture of the changes going on in that field at the time.  She is sent to catalogue a language, make a census, and categorize a people.  Instead, she plunges deep into the qualitative world of understanding a people.

I will not reveal anything of her journey here, except to say that like any transformative journey, trickster was along side.  Here, you can just taste the beginning.

She arrives in a tiny impoverished town, to interview and catalogue the Paiute Indians.  She may as well have parachuted.  She is on her own, her letters of passage are lost, or hidden by mischievous helpers.   The only thing provided by her university is a vehicle, and they provide a labeled police car.  Very useful in earning the trust of her subjects.

No one adopts her in the cinematic fashion.  Everyone toys with her, and the children follow her and ply her with lies.  The elderly tempt her with hints of history and language, constantly delaying so as to retain the company and amusement.  They mislead her and send her on dead end hunts with their mytho tales.

And there is no malice.  The narrative weaves itself into a world where everyone plays at being simple country folk while all having, if not nefarious agendas, complicated and playful agendas.  They are heartfelt in wanting to help her, but it is the definition of help that is in question.  They dole out lore ever so slowly, as if enjoying her hunt.  They delight when she sweats about not being able to get her answers.

Kane uses the powerful tool of reflection to juxtapose the history of her own colourful town, and her emerging feminist awakenings with the stories she learns in the dusty town.

I cannot attest to whether she is a good anthropologist, but I can say she is a master of layering the complexity of experience and fully imbuing it with the mighty spirit of the trickster.  In this volume we get an ethnography of the Paiute, a coming of age tale, a story of feminist coming out, mischievous and magical tales of coyote, and a sober reflection of lessons learned young as reviewed by an elder.

I feel lucky to have only accidentally discovered this book (trickster laughs).  I am working hard at selling it to a professor for a paper.  I’d say wish me luck, but I can hear the snickering and trust the wind to go where it wants.

Find it here:

Chapters

Amazon

Cannonball III

Pajiba, the site of Scathing Reviews and Bitchy People, annually commences a marathon of reading—peculiar if you ask me as it distracts from watching movies and television, which is their main source of bread and butter—and it is that time of year:  The Cannonball Read 3.0

Anyone and everyone are encouraged to join in.

The seed idea is to read 52 books over the course of a year and post a review of each book to a blog.   The review doesn’t have to meet London Review standards.  It can be just a few paragraphs about the book and what the reader thought of it.  Pajiba provides links to all the nerdy bookworm’s blogs, and once or twice a week will post a particularly yummy review up on Pajiba.  For every participant who uploads 52 book reviews to a blog, Pajiba makes a donation to the education fund for the child of beloved passed-away member, Alabama Pink who was an inspired reader and eloquent commenter on the site.  By the time that kid grows up, not only will a hoard of strangers get her to college, but said hoard will be less illiterate and more connected too.

Evolving to address the needs of a busy overtaxed populace, the Cannonball Read wants everyone who ever has ink stained fingers to feel welcome and will accommodate those who only feel bold enough to shoot  for a half(26) or quarter(13) cannonball. 

I believe, the idea is that even if you only manage to read and write on 3 books over the course of a year, that’s still pretty cool, literate, and interactive.  Unlike job interviews and dodging traffic, at Cannonball success is inconsequential and effort and enthusiasm are everything.  Completion is just gravy.

When I was only knee-high to a house, I used to read 2-3 books a week, but then other responsibilities kicked in and knocked it back to less than 1 per week.  Recent years of exhaustion have driven me to that ultimate narcotic, the television, and I am lucky if I read a dozen books in a year that are not scholastically related.  So, in a fit of disgust for my cathode ray wallowing  filth (what, I can’t afford a flat screen), I’ve signed on to the good ship Cannonball.  I am one lazy sumbitch so I am holding firm on the enthusiasm clause.

Feel free to follow or join in.  Crack open a book, and like Pandora famously quipped, “What harm can just opening it do?”