Doctor Comics on Tolkien, Women, and The Fall of Arthur

This isn't so much a post as me plugging a friend in what has been a wonderful discussion to witness. My friend and fellow scholar Dr. Jason Tondro (who I blame for almost everything I've done in the last two years) wrote a blog post today about women in the fictional works of J.R.R. Tolkien. You can, and absolutely should, read it HERE. A lively, friendly, and wickedly smart discussion arose around this post on Facebook, between Jason and UC Riverside's Kody Lightfoot. If the HTML does what I want, hopefully you can read the comments below. Cheers!

Post by Jason Tondro.

Funnymen: My Reconciliation with Comedy

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts in the studio lately. Headphones in, I am insulated from the distractions of the outside word, focused on the details of my work, in the proverbial zone. Inkstuds is my go-to show, a brilliant series of interviews with cartoonists by the cheerfully sardonic Robin McConnell out of Vancouver, BC. I started going through the Inkstuds archives starting from the first episode in November 2005, and over the last couple weeks I've learned a metric crap-ton of stuff about comics from Robin and his guests. I also backed his recent Kickstarter campaign, a roadtrip that I am sure will yield a wealth of knowledge and inappropriate humour. There's still a week left. Get on it.

More recently, though, I've been listening to Marc Maron's comedy podcast WTF, which I stumbled across on YouTube entirely by accident while feeding my Dylan Moran addiction. I love his humour, and have for years. I had recently watched the incredibly dry and darkly funny A Film With Me In It, which I was delighted to discover because I was getting a little tired of watching Black Books on repeat. I found this interview with Moran and started listening to it, realizing more and more just how quintessentially little I really knew about this man's life. That realization led me on a brief search for more interviews with the man, culminating quickly in my discovery of WTF. 

I was hooked immediately. It was the comics that did it. I clicked play on this interview with my favourite comedian, and the first thing mentioned was comic books. It turns out Maron is a fairly avid comics reader, asking Dylan Moran what, if any, experiences he had had with comics as a child growing up in Ireland, and it segued perfectly into a discussion of Irish life, isolation, and Catholic religion and their influences on Moran's comedic career. And I realized, this man has had a hell of a life. He's been through a sort of emotional genocide, in a country that existed under oppressive theocracy in all but name, and he's managed to come out the other side with enough will and humour left in his command to say something about it. I began to see some common ground. Not with me, understand. I have lived an exceedingly safe and sheltered life without alcoholism, divorce, abuse, or religious oppression. I'm incredibly grateful for this, but at times I can't help but feel a little...boring. I'm talking about the comic greats. On a whim two days ago, I started reading this book, Comix: The Underground Revolution by Dez Skinn. I didn't know much before this week about the first comix artists, or even how to properly define "comix". I had no idea of the messy, hallucinogenic, violent, sexual, socially prophetic stew these books were birthed from.

Dez Skinn's cover

Reading cartoonist R. Crumb's self-appraisal gave me pause: "[I was] a painfully shy out-of-it nerd...a lonely maladjusted weirdo with heavy Catholic guilt.". I thought, Damn, but that's a lot of weight for a guy to carry. No wonder these guys  turned their baggage into humourous catharsis. I've read many interviews with Spiegelman. I know how much he loathes the survivor's guilt he inherited from his parents, the leftover weight from a human extermination experiment that occurred outside of his lifetime, yet influences every moment of it. He hates it so very, very much, and it drives a significant part of his work. I listened to Louis C.K. talk about the depression and shame that he builds on in his self-deprecating routines. Stewart Lee mentions the questions he has to ask himself about where to apply critical pressure as someone sitting in a privileged position at essentially the center of society. the motivations are varied, often tragic, and wholly fascinating to me. It's a world I simply didn't give enough credit.

Spiegelman, the Holocaust inheritance

I've had...issues with stand-up comedy the past couple years. I think it had something to do with not being able to stand being around the people I knew who were doing it. I just didn't like them, at all. I have a better idea of why that was now. I have no idea if they were good comics. I've been to live stand-up a handful of times, usually standing in the back drinking and chatting with someone else who happened to be as disinterested as I. Dylan Moran was the only stand-up comic I had any interest in watching. I never paid attention to the craft of it. Listening to these podcasts by Maron and McConnell, I think I get it at least a little. I hear them talk about things like comedic timing, in both a visual and a performative sense, and realize that these two traditions are more closely related than I ever gave them credit for. The people who are great comics and cartoonists are craftsmen of this thing called "humour" that maybe I've never really understood, and avoided in my writing because it weirded me out a bit. I don't want to generalize. I'm not prepared to say that you can only be properly funny as a career if you're a legitimately fucked up human being, but I see common ground in the guilt, shame, and loathing of great comic figures, and I have to wonder if I could ever pull that attitude off in my work. I don't think I want to, because I don't want to fake it. I'm not a Comix artist, and can't be, because I'm not experimenting with drugs and my sexuality in the late '60s. I'm in the wrong context.

My own recent work, doodling in the pub

So, this becomes a question for me to wrestle with in my own work: do I want to pursue humour in my comics, and if so, where is it going to come from? I've never even felt the White guilt that weighs down some of my friends. I've got no Russian Mennonite shame fuelling my art. It has to come from somewhere else. Maybe the solution is whimsy, or nostalgia. Maybe it's academia, a world in which I find myself more and more immersed. Maybe it's the world of comic fandom itself, self-referential mockery, but that feels a little overdone. Geek culture has already been making fun of itself for years (Penny Arcade, anybody?). I dunno. It's a fun question to have on my plate.

I drew the page posted above after a frustrated night in the studio were I threw down my pen and went to the pub. I ended up sitting at the bar, doodling about some guy struggling in a vaccuum with his tenuous, dysfunctionally intimate relationsip with the voice inside his head. It isn't self-referential, in case you were worried. But, maybe it is. Maybe it was me fretting about my block, that evening's lack of inspiration. The "voice" in my head had deserted me and I was feeling a little lost. And it sucked. I rather like this little comic, and while it's not funny, per-se, it's something. It's a hint of that place where good art has its roots, quite simply...self. I'm going to look at it as a starting point to answering my question about humour. When I'm studying in England next year I'm going to track down some comedy clubs and give stand-up a second chance. And for now, I'm going to keep listening to and learning from Marc Maron and his guests, because I like laughing in the studio, even if it makes it really bloody hard to draw a straight line.

The Banner Saga - Remembering the Meaning of Epic

I am, possibly, the slowest gamer I know. So when I say that I'm 6 hours into Stoic Studio's The Banner Saga it's implied that I've been taking my sweet time. Because this isn't a game you can rush through. This game is a tale, a myth, an epic in the truest sense of the word.

And above all else, it is beautiful.

There was a really excellent review written by Chris Suellentrop for the New York Times last week that drops names and gives production stat for this game. I recommend you read it. Chris sums up the game nicely when he says,

...the story is well plotted and set in an original world with a deep mythology and history, even if it approaches boilerplate high fantasy: The gods are dead. The sun is frozen. War has returned. The end of the world is nigh.

Why, Chris, you say "high fantasy" like it's a bad thing! That is precisely why I am going to gush all over this game; it feels like a true medieval epic brought to life. I've been looking for a game like this for some time. Way back in 2013 (practically ancient history), I played King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame for a couple months, and boy was it fun. For fans of Mary Stewart's Arthurian fiction, the game is full of pleasantly familiar places, people, and tropes. After a while, though, it felt a little forced. I lost interest in the story, because there wasn't really a story. I was undertaking a long series of disconnected quests with no real investment. I didn't know who my knights really were beyond their stat bonuses and magical powers; there was no real dialogue, very little you could say in character to change the story. So while the game was both challenging and very, very pretty I felt that it was squandering a lot of narrative potential. And I stopped playing.

The Banner Saga caught my eye on Steam the other day, as I perused lists of games that I really don't have time to be playing. It was the art that jumped out at me, not the glossy digital airbrushing makes up most video game art but crisp cartoon lines and vibrant colour, like the love child of Disney and Arthur Rackham. Actually, very similar to the work Fiona Staples is doing for (ironically) Saga with Brian K. Vaughan's. I was wonderstruck, and hesitant, fully prepared to be let down by shoddy game graphics and shallow gameplay after such a wondrous initial image. But it never happened.

Having only recently read Stephen R. Donaldson's essay on the nature of Epic Fantasy (recommended reading by Nobody Important), the sudden discovery of a story on this scale was a brilliant surprise. Donaldson writes of The Epic in the following manner:

...what makes something "epic?" Length, of course. But nothing in literature is that simple. An epic is not "epic" merely because it is longer than anything else. As Marx observed, "Differences in degree become differences in kind." An epic is "epic" because it deals explicitly with the largest and most important
questions of humankind: what is the meaning of life? why are we here? who is God and what is She doing? what is the religious and/or moral order of the universe? In fact, back in the days when epics were more commonly written, their acknowledged purpose was to tackle such questions. The "epic" was the highest form of literature, and was expected to say the highest things.
In effect, epics articulated the best religious and cultural, the best social and psychological self-perceptions of their times: they recorded the way humankind looked at itself.
It's interesting that throughout English literary history no writer has been able to write an enduring "epic" without using the metaphor of magic and the techniques of personification. Apparently, to be "epic" a work must not only be long and profound; it must almost be fantasy.
The reason for this is simple. Throughout English literary history, the writers of "epics" have wanted either to say something transcendent about what it means to be human, or to say something about the nature of transcendence itself. The tools and resources of fantasy were formed for just those subjects.

The game reads like it was plucked straight out of the pages of Heaney's Beowulf or the Volsungsaga. It is epic in the way The Lord of the Rings is epic, a story of warriors and kings and people fighting for survival in a world of truly mythic proportions. And yes, I say "reads" very deliberately; the voice acting is minimal and the script elaborate, leaving you to play out the dialogue in your head (or, in my case, in terrible Scandinavian accents when nobody else is home). You play through parallel stories in alternating chapters, as the leaders of two ragtag clans made up of Viking-like Humans and horned giants called Varl. The two races live under a tenuous alliance born of necessity in the forge of war, when the gods were killed, and the world was ravaged by the colossal and ferocious Dredge. That war ended years ago, but now a new crisis has arisen: the Sun is frozen. It hangs, motionless, in the sky, leaving the northern lands in a bleak perpetual daylight. Alliances must be maintained, but in this time of forced diplomacy the Dredge have returned. The clans find themselves on the move, though for different reasons. You must become a leader willing to make the hard choices to save your people...or you will die.

The creators of this game have created a living, breathing world with an elaborate history. From the beginning of the game you have access to the map of Ubin, the clan chronicler, depicting a vast world stretching hundreds of miles in all directions. Clicking place names brings up a window briefly detailing the role each landmark played in shaping the history of this brutal land. Now, this is no open-world RPG. Your movements are scripted, the path you must walk already planned for you. You're being railroaded, in short. Your input comes in the form of the decisions you must make along the way. Travel is no small matter; collect what resources you can, stay on the move, keep an eye on the size of your caravan as starvation threatens your clansmen and raiding monsters descend from the hills on the slow and weak. At one point I had to sacrifice a wagon full of treasure to save the life of one of my dearest warriors. It was costly, but Gunnulf is still with us. Thank the gods...no, wait, they're dead. Never mind.

The thing that jumps out of Donaldson's description (above) at me is the idea that "[Epics] recorded the way humankind looked at itself". In that regard, writing a fictional epic seems a little divorced from the whole concept, and I love the way The Banner Saga addresses that. The banners referenced in the title are long, trailing swathes of fabric that writhe in the wind as you watch your caravan trundle across the northern hills. Upon them are embroidered the running history of your people, with a section for each family's lineage. Members of the family (admittedly usually the women) learn to master the art of embroidery, for it is their responsibility to keep the story of their blood alive. There is talk of The Menders, arcane weavers of history, and an enchanted banner in the King's city that records events upon itself. This is a story about Stories of the most sacred kind, the stories that cultures tell of themselves, that form the foundations of their identity. The standard bearers in the armies of old were skilled warriors, tasked with defending the colours at all costs and until the bitter end. The 2011 film The Eagle expounded upon the weight of a soldier's honour tied to the symbol he fought for; the 2001 film The Last Castle with Robert Redford did much the same. The Banner Saga instills you with that respect for the symbol of your people. So I find myself fighting desperately to keep my clan alive, knowing that if they fall to the Dredge and the banner is lost it will mean the end of their history.

One last note on character development. I am impressed, because the women in this game are phenomenal. If there's one term I'm sick of hearing, it's "strong female character". Thankfully I'm not alone; this gem of an article was written back in August with the sub-header "Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to be Strong." (Sophia McDougall). Damn right. So when I found myself in the middle of this conversation with Oddleif, the chieftain's wife, I literally fist-pumped and yelled for joy. We'd just come out the wrong end of a brutal skirmish to discover her husband lying dead in a cart, and this is what she had to say:

People tell me I'm a "strong woman". It's funny, my father named me Oddleif before I was even born. He wanted a boy so badly. Strong woman. What does that even mean? If I feel nothing about my husband dying people think I'm strong. If I cry because my insides feel life they're on fire I'm weak. Why does that feel so backwards?

To whoever scripted that bit of dialogue: someday I will find you, and I will hug you. I've also had a character refuse to auto-attack in combat because she decided through a conversation I had with her that she didn't want to kill Humans or Varl. It was a shock, and a welcome realization that this game means business when it come to knowing who your characters are.

Needless to say, The Banner Saga tells a beautiful tale. It's slow, quiet, contemplative at times and emotionally desperate at others. It's immersive in its scale and intricacy. Above all else, it is epic.

The Artist's Voice: Rachel Dukes on Creative Credit and Exposure

There's a lot of crap that pisses art students off. We're an angsty bunch, the whole lot of us, griping about professors giving us poor critiques and wine bottles that run dry too fast (not to perpetuate stereotypes, but...) Anyway, we like to complain. Some of us would even claim that such disenfranchisement with the world at large is what drives their artistic practice, that they're pouring their soul out onto their canvas, dripping long streams of oil paint as if it were the lifeblood of society being sacrificed in Art for the good of Humanity.

Thank goodness I'm only a humble cartoonist.

One of these complaints is significantly marginalized. It lacks, by and large, a voice, though there are certainly a number of us who sit around and whine about it. It's a line we are fed on a weekly if not daily basis:

"It'll be good exposure."

...which is the world's way of saying "Look here, I need something drawn, or painted on, or otherwise creatively endowed, and all I can do is stick figures. So, if you wouldn't mind pouring your heart and soul into this until it's up to my standards, I won't pay you per se, but I'm sure somebody will see it eventually and wonder who made that." Oh, thank you. Then I'll get another person asking me for free art. Wonderful.

It's not an uncommon problem. There's definitely a part of me that wishes society would develop an Italian Renaissance mentality toward artists and just view us as one more craftsman to be hired. Instead we get funny looks when we tell people we're artists, and lines like, "Yeah, I used to draw a lot in high school." There's this overwhelming assumption that what we do isn't actually work. We must love every second, and it must comes as naturally and easily to us as breathing, and therefore it's not worth paying for. So when Tom Spurgeon posted this earlier this month, it kinda clicked.

The article that Rachel Dukes (Mixtape Comics) wrote about uncredited work making its way across the vast reaches of the internet is pure gold. It picks out all the key points in detail, nails down exactly why artists are getting screwed online. You see, it's a little tricky to get "good exposure" if nobody knows who made the thing they're looking at. Just doesn't work.

Dukes' article is a little stats-heavy, but so very much worth reading. The numbers are the real one-two punch, an overwhelming bit of insight on just how much we don't care about stealing other folks' creative work. On the one hand, I can't even count the number of images I have saved on my computer that have no credit attached to them, and on the other, I'm paranoid about my own portfolio and whether or not you can copy/save my images from it. And I have to wonder, am I going about this all wrong? Art school does some strange things to you. It tells you that you have to sell your work if you're going to get out there, build a successful practice for yourself after graduation...and it tells you that work made in class that is commercially viable is a sell-out, not worth academic consideration, not worth making. It tells us that we should make money and protect our image rights, while offering us opportunities to donate work and volunteer our skills for exposure. We have the unique opportunity to get our education in a burbling melting-pot of mixed messages. Ain't we lucky?

So, I won't pretend to have the answers. This is more of a critique, which is to say I'm taking an issue and bitching about it, this is good, this is bad, this could use improvement, and I love what you did with the green in that corner, it adds a sense of life...yeah, don't mind me, just putting my degree to good use. But give it some thought. Think about what you can do in your online life to give true exposure to the multitude of artists and graphics people whose work we enjoy every day. If it means doing a little searching to figure where a cartoon originated, it's worth the time. For Art, yeah?

The money isn't’t the point. But this is a thing that’s happening. This isn't’t just happening to me. It’s actively happening to the greater art community as a whole. (Especially the comics community. Recent artists effected by altered artwork/theft off the top of my head: Liz Prince, Luke Healy, Nation of Amanda, Melanie Gillman, etc.) Our work is being stolen and profited off of. Right this second.
I do my best to see the positive in these events but the very least I can do as a creator is stand up in this small moment and say “This is mine. I made this.”- Rachel Dukes

The Article: http://mixtapecomics.tumblr.com/post/68277854434/after-a-discussion-last-week-with-several-of-my

Cheers!
Asher

pretentious Art School nugget