The Best Comics of the Decade #60-41

For the next couple of days, I'll be posting a countdown of the 60 best comics of the last decade, from 2000-2009. I've put a lot of work into this list, which is surely incomplete (I haven't read everything) but nevertheless gathers together what I feel is some of the best work to appear in the comics artform. The list will be posted twenty entries at a time. Numbers 60-41 are below, 40-21 are here, and the top 20 is here. I have written a brief blurb about each comic included, not as a definitive analysis or commentary, but only to provide some suggestion of what each entry is like. I encourage others to chime in with their own choices and commentary as well. Though this probably doesn't need saying, this list reflects only my own personal taste, idiosyncratic as it is. I have attempted to include a wide cross-section of modern comics, but my biases and preferences have surely dictated the relatively small sampling of superhero or autobiographical comics included here, to name two popular genres, as well as the marked dominance of more formalist and experimental artists. I have also made an effort to include only works truly produced and released for the first time during this decade, thus excluding the wealth of older reissues that have come out in recent years. For the most part, each entry represents a single work, though in a few cases I thought some artists were better represented by their complete oeuvres or some combination of similar books rather than a single representative piece.

In making this list, I confirmed my impression that the artform of comics has reached a creative apex in recent years. The comics produced from 2000-2009 are varied and encompass a diversity and general high level of quality previously unimagined for an artform once considered pulpy trash for children. This is a great time to be reading comics, and this list is my perspective on this especially fecund era's most satisfying works.

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60. CEREBUS
by Dave Sim & Gerhard, 1998-2004

Dave Sim's long-running warrior aardvark series Cerebus finally wrapped up, after 300 issues and 27 years, in early 2004, marking the end of Sim's grand project to tell the life story of his title character. Of course, by the time of the 300th issue, the book had changed dramatically, increasingly focusing on Sim's oddball ideas, including his (to say the least) troubled attitude towards women and, especially in the last few extended story arcs, on his, ahem, unusual ideas about religion. What's fascinating about Cerebus in these later stretches is watching Sim become a better and better visual artist with every page, restlessly experimenting and honing his craft, while descending further and further into absolutely loony theology and misanthropy. The nadir, in terms of both ideas and visuals, is the lengthy stretch in Latter Days where Sim offers up, in eye-strainingly small text, Cerebus' line-by-line reinterpretation of the book of Genesis according to Sim's own idiosyncratic reading of the first book of the Bible.

So what's Cerebus doing on this list, anyway, if its glory days were already behind it? Well, the two-book extended story arc represented by the collections Going Home and Form and Void are some of Sim's finest work, at least as an artist. Bolstered by the gorgeous background work of his collaborator Gerhard, throughout these books Sim experimented with form and style, breaking down the page in innovative ways while introducing more of his characteristic metafictional elements. A sequence during a blizzard is especially evocative, as the snow seems to flow in white streaks across the page. He offers up dead-on caricatures of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, even aping the latter's literary style for certain sequences.

Even in the less successful later books, Sim's imagination and feel for the comic page comes across. The final book, The Last Day, opens with one of the most formally dazzling sequences in comics, as Sim collages in photocopies and draws processes happening on both the cosmic and molecular scale, while seamlessly incorporating dense footnotes and textual effects. That this formal ingenuity is linked to some of Sim's silliest ideas only slightly takes away from its overall impact. These books aren't without their problems in terms of the narrative and ideas, but there are few comics that display more formal panache or sheer visual wonder, and for that alone it deserves a place on this list. Cerebus, at times one of the best comics around, ended in the 2000s, and any list that didn't acknowledge this fact would feel somehow incomplete. [buy] | [buy] | [buy] | [buy]

59. SLEEPER
by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips, 2003-2005

It's fairly routine by now to inject a noir sensibility into superhero comics, but few series have done it better than Sleeper, written by Ed Brubaker with art by Sean Phillips. In Brubaker's conception, the superhero concepts and powers mostly take a backseat to strong character writing and crime fiction tropes, as he follows deep-cover secret agent Holden Carver as he infilitrates a powerful criminal organization. The problem? The only man who knows he's undercover, as opposed to a genuine crook, is in a coma. The series boasts a wealth of twists and turns, and all the double-crosses and intrigues one could expect, but its true worth is in its characters, in the way they change over time, always balancing just on the boundary line between good and evil. Moreover, as much as Brubaker underplays the superhero aspects of the story, Sleeper still boasts, bar none, the best use of superpowers in a mainstream comic. The character of Miss Misery, the series' femme fatale, is a woman beset by an illness that saps her strength unless she commits evil acts; the more bad things she does, the better she feels and the more powerful she grows. Over the course of the series, Brubaker exploits this unique "power" in inventive, revealing ways, placing his anti-heroine in paradoxical situations where Miss Misery's central dilemma creates strangely moving ramifications for her and those around her, including Holden. [buy] | [buy]

58. POPEYE AND OLIVE/P+O
by Richard McGuire, 2002

Richard McGuire has only a small body of work within comics, mostly limited to a few short stories (including the seminal "Here" from Raw) and his experiments with E.C. Segar's Popeye character. Collected in two French volumes, McGuire's Popeye drawings are abstract representations of the famous sailorman and his beanpole-thin girlfriend Olive Oyl. It's a demonstration of the inherent power of cartoon iconography: strip these familiar characters down to stylized outlines in a single primary color (either red or blue) and they're still recognizable, still resonant. On page after page, McGuire delineates Popeye and Olive with blobs and pipes shaped to suggest their cartoon figures. There's no narrative, just endless transformations and variations, McGuire riffing on these basic forms, demonstrating the variety of ways in which he can explore the same visuals, and the massive warping that Popeye can withstand while remaining recognizable and iconic. Popeye and Olive is the original collector's edition book, massively expensive and long unavailable (but excerpted in Dan Nadel's great anthology The Ganzfeld), while P+O is a sequel in which McGuire's improvisations take on a distinctly sexual nature, positioning his heroes within abstract narratives of desire and lust, like geometric porn.

57. THE TICKING
by Renee French, 2007

The Ticking relates the dark fable of Edison Steelhead, an isolated boy born with his eyes on the sides of his misshapen head, like a fish. His mother dies in childbirth, and his father, from whom he inherited this appearance, wants Edison to get plastic surgery to correct his looks. When Edison refuses, his father begins lavishing more of his attention on his new adopted "child," a monkey who he puts in a dress and introduces to Edison as a new sister. It's a strange book, then, to say the least, exploring the traumas and confusions of childhood through this unsettling story. French's delicate artwork only accentuates the eerie quality of Edison's struggle to come to terms with the world and his own uncertain place in it. French's beautifully rendered pencil drawings, enclosed within undersized panels isolated in large areas of white space, are haunting in the way they balance naturalism with surrealism. In the same way, French balances the tragedy of Edison's youth against her deadpan sense of humor and feel for unusual imagery. [buy]

56. PLANETES
by Makoto Yukimura, 2001-2004

Makoto Yukimura's Planetes is an exceptionally intelligent, enjoyable "hard" sci-fi manga, concerning the low-key adventures of a trio of deep-space "garbage men" tasked with clearing away the clutter and debris left behind by space exploration. The environmentalist idea at the core of the story — that technological advances inevitably have unintended and far-reaching consequences — is only one current in Yukimura's episodic five-book narrative, which is equally involved in the lives and ambitions of the central characters, the various political and revolutionary plots fermenting behind the scenes, and the day-to-day routine of a spaceship crew. The series sketches out a very complex universe, but never gets too bogged down in the details, instead focusing on the rich character relationships. It helps, too, that Yukimura's artwork is absolutely gorgeous, with a hyper-realistic style that lends weight to all the images of gleaming spaceships racing through a dense black void. [buy] | [buy]

55. INCANTO
by Frank Santoro, 2006

Incanto is a strange little comic, artist Frank Santoro's nearly wordless appropriation of manga-style aesthetics and storytelling, marrying the look and feel of manga to an abstract, experimental approach, stripping down manga's form to a raw essence scribbled across the page. It's a book about moods and feelings, evoking rather than telling a story; its effect is approximate rather than specific. Santoro uses a small palette of colors — just orange and blue — and a deliberately sketchy style to suggest a dreamlike flow of violence, sexuality, horror, memory, nature, separation and reunion. One doesn't so much "read" it as get swept along by the elusive evocations of its images, which occasionally crystallize from the fragmentary linework of hazy, half-remembered dreams into the startling clarity of a particularly important memory. Santoro depicts several landscape scenes with a crayon-and-marker virtuosity that makes them look like romantic children's drawing vistas, standing out with raw potency from the sketchy, indistinct figures who roam through this non-story. [buy]

54. LUMAKICK
by Richard Hahn, 2002-2004

Richard Hahn's poetic comics are among the most original works to come along in years. Hahn's self-published series takes its name from Popeye's mispronunciation of the word "lunatic," and the way this malapropism links Hahn's comics to the history of cartoon iconography makes it a very appropriate moniker for his own work. Not that Hahn is a direct descendent of E.C. Segar in any obvious way, but that he draws upon the basic elements of cartooning in order to craft his own minimalist abstractions and lyrically poetic interludes. The short pieces in the two issues of Lumakick range from enigmatic abstractions to quietly emotional stories in the key of novelist Paul Auster to the deadpan wit of Hahn's recurring characters, the losers Clemenza and Tessio. His minimalist style is equally well-suited to all these varying modes, which coexist comfortably alongside one another. [buy]

53. MASTERPIECE COMICS
by R. Sikoryak, 2000-2009

R. Sikoryak is one of the cleverest, sharpest parodists in comics, a chameleon seemingly capable of appropriating any style in order to explore unexpected junction points between pulp culture and fine literature. He's been working in this mode, sporadically, for a long time now, but the 2000s saw some of his best and most fully realized parodies: his retelling of Crime and Punishment through the filter of Batman, his Bronte/EC horror pastiche, his casting of Little Lulu as Hester Prynne's daughter, his existentialist Beevis and Butthead strip. These pieces reveal a sometimes startling thematic continuity between his literary and his trash culture sources, recasting popular antiheroes as literary icons and reveling in the friction sparked off by this fusion. His work is both outrageously funny and unexpectedly revealing, suggesting that high and low culture are more unified than one would expect. [buy]

52. TALES DESIGNED TO THRIZZLE
by Michael Kupperman, 2005-ongoing

Tales Designed To Thrizzle is Michael Kupperman's latest showcase for his absurdist, Dadaist humor strips, a compendium of bizarre gags and non-sequiturs. Kupperman's lunatic imagination conjures up the unlikely duo of Snake and Bacon, who simply recycle their familiar catch phrases no matter what ridiculous situation they find themselves in. He also concocts whole alternate histories, in whimsical visions of imaginary pasts when a sex-starved populace, deprived of release by constrictive laws, had to turn to loophole refuges like sex blimps and sex holes, taking their illicit sexual encounters either below the ground or high in the air. These absurd scenarios proliferate throughout each issue of Kupperman's series, as he follows each loony premise through to its (il)logical end result. He's a versatile stylist as well, employing a clean aesthetic that shifts from a pastiche of woodcut engravings to the cartoony melange of Snake and Bacon or his Mark Twain caricatures. [buy]

51. THE BEAST MOTHER/MOME STORIES
by Eleanor Davis, 2006/2007-2008

The short stories of Eleanor Davis draw on myth and horror to craft succinct, mysteriously moving little parables, like Grimm fairy tales where the "monsters" are almost always infused with pathos and feeling. In her standalone minicomic The Beast Mother, a grotesque, naked female monster kidnaps and cares for all the children from surrounding towns, bringing them to her cave where she tenderly cares for them. With her lumpy body and distended breasts, she is a caricature of motherly affection, feeling raw needs that she fulfills in the only way she can. The story, told mostly without words, is about a hunter who tracks and kills this beast, thereby freeing her half-feral children so their true parents can reclaim them. The beauty of Davis' story is its moral ambiguity, the way she manages to make this ending bittersweet and emotionally shaded; the hunter seems ambivalent about what he's done, and even the children aren't grateful when he destroys the only mother they ever knew. Only the townspeople are happy, paying off the hunter and gathering up their long-missing kids. The hunter goes off to camp, and who knows what happens to these newly reunited families. There's an air of sadness in this ending, an air of loss. There's a similar emotional complexity at work in the handful of stories Davis has contributed to the anthology MOME. In the best of these short works, illustrated in Davis' striking style with sepia washes for color, a ferryman brings a parade of monsters hauling sacks across the water to a gathering, never questioning what's in the sacks, even though they rustle like something alive. It's a parable about the ordinary man's encounter with horror and evil, and how easy it is not to ask questions, to simply do one's job and go about the prosaic business of one's day as if nothing unusual is going on. It's a resonant piece, asking hard questions about morality and conscience in an accessible, stylish way. This is, perhaps, Davis' greatest strength as an artist. [buy] | [buy] | [buy] | [buy] | [buy]

50. AUTOMATIC KAFKA
by Joe Casey & Ashley Wood, 2002-2003

Automatic Kafka is one of many comics to tap into the post-millennial zeitgeist and deliver a frenzied, passionate critique of the junction points between media, superheroes, sex, drugs, war and politics. Like Richard Kelly would later do in film with Southland Tales, writer Joe Casey and artist Ashley Wood mimic the sensory overload and cluttered landscape of modern culture. Wood's art, descended from the Barron Storey/Dave McKean school of sketchy multimedia collage, especially sets the tone, with his frenzied scribblings, bold use of color, and abrupt stylistic shifts. The series — which unfortunately still hasn't been collected to rescue it from oblivion — is a brilliant and scattershot satire centering around a robotic man called Automatic Kafka and his fellow degenerate ex-heroes. Casey's heroes have long ago stopped doing anything remotely heroic, and now instead dedicate themselves to various vices, and to pimping out their celebrity on TV, or as ass-kicking government agents. And they live in a deeply strange world, as reflected by Wood's wild artwork: scorpions deliver cryptic warnings, the panels are surrounded on all sides by commercial advertisements, and a man with a firecracker for a head plots behind the scenes. The apex of his approach comes in the series' third issue, in which the title hero's TV game show is visualized through a manic cluster of slogans and icons threatening to overload and crowd out the actual images of the narrative. It's a smart, funny, provocative, visually stimulating comic that remains very unfairly overlooked.

49. ELVIS ROAD
by Elvis Studio, 2007

The artistic duo of Helge Reumann and Xavier Robel, together known as Elvis Studio, have a distinctive, obsessively detailed style, crafting sprawling landscapes where something seems to be happening in every corner, every inch, of the drawing. This style reaches its apex in Elvis Road, an ambitious and original book in which the pair drew a lengthy, scrolling crowd scene stretching out across a roll of paper. The book is designed to be read, not in the traditional manner, but as one very long scroll; the accordion-folded pages can unfurl into a single 20-foot-long sheet. Within this epic sprawl, the two artists feverishly doodle out various mini-narratives and scenes that play out inside a wild, apocalyptic framework. Within the chaos, cops and criminals do battle, characters from popular culture and world history make appearances, factories spew smoke, Klansmen and Nazis go on parade, and Jesus and the Devil themselves prepare for epic battle. [buy]

48. 100 BULLETS
by Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso, 1999-2009

Brian Azzarello's 100-issue crime drama started off as a satisfying high-concept gimmick based around its title: a mysterious man known only as Agent Graves would show up out of nowhere, give some down-and-out malcontent a suitcase, and tell them that it contains both a gun loaded with untraceable bullets and information about a person who wronged them. It plops a moral dilemma into the laps of Graves' selected people. Will they seek revenge? Will they change their lives? Will they use the gun? And, if so, how will they use it? Conceivably, Azzarello — his pulpy, punny writing bolstered by the striking noirish artwork of collaborator Eduardo Risso — could have kept pumping out variations on this formula indefinitely. It's a strong formula and one that allows for nearly infinite stories. Instead, over time Azzarello subtly began revealing the broad outlines of a much bigger, more complex story, a history-spanning intrigue incorporating secret organizations, betrayals, double- and triple- and quadruple-crosses, gangsters, drug lords and the American aristocracy. Ultimately, the series offers up a potent critique of the lust for power, the nearly irresistible drive for various forms of control: money, sexuality, prestige. Throughout its length, the large cast gathers into nebulous alliances, and Azzarello cleverly keeps the multiple plots and subplots up in the air without ever sacrificing characterization or his underlying themes about greed and corruption. Taken as a whole, 100 Bullets is both an utterly engrossing crime/conspiracy thriller and a cogent American satire. [buy] | [buy] | [buy]

47. EIGHTBALL #23: THE DEATH RAY
by Daniel Clowes, 2004

The 23rd (and final, as of now) issue of Daniel Clowes' long-running series Eightball is a self-contained epic in miniature, poking at superhero archetypes, with their ideas about "responsibility" and "right," in order to tell a quiet, maudlin story of loneliness and self-isolation. For Clowes' characters, great power — a "death ray" that can zap anyone out of existence, but which only works for the loner protagonist Andy — never really manages to make things better or change their lives in any appreciable way. Instead, while imagining life as a costumed adventurer putting things right, Andy uses his death ray in small, petty, inconsequential ways, because basically he's a small, petty, inconsequential man. This dark, cynical vision is bolstered by Clowes' clean, austere artistry, particularly his striking use of color, utilizing an array of palettes to convey various memories, fantasies and emotional states. The layout is intriguing as well, eventually drawing together the strands of narrative through the use of seemingly disconnected shorter strips, in numerous styles and from a multitude of perspectives. It's this multiplicity that makes the book more than just another sadsack loser tale. Clowes insists on incorporating the lives of others into Andy's isolated world, allowing the story's ripples to fan out beyond the narrow confines of simple genre parody. Instead, The Death Ray is a poignant lament, and a blistering portrayal of the ways in which people's simplistic understanding of life, love and happiness prevent them from even imagining ambitions beyond their immediate vicinity. [buy]

46. WHAT IT IS
by Lynda Barry, 2008

What It Is is a wonderfully inspirational book, a book that's overflowing with creativity and generosity. Barry has essentially crafted a very aesthetically rich "how to" volume that seeks to get people excited about writing and drawing and inventing their own stories. The book is divided into several sections. In the first, Barry alternates between short comics that relate stories from her childhood and collage sequences in which dense patchwork constructions of text and images raise basic questions about memory, imagination, creativity, aesthetics and thought. Barry is constantly suggesting provocative ideas, offering up challenges to the reader, and her tightly packed pages defy traditional reading. Instead, the eye flows freely around her pages, picking up various threads and following them from one idea to the next, letting her web of associations and questions evoke all sorts of images and concepts. This is the book's longest segment, but she follows it with two shorter "how to" sections, in which she lays out several exercises intended to jumpstart creativity and get would-be writers or artists used to the process of telling stories and exploiting the rich veins of memory. Finally, there's an excerpt from Barry's own sketchbook exercises and margin notes. The whole thing would be reminiscent of those vaguely New Agey "anyone can write" motivational seminars, except that Barry has such enthusiasm, and such restless creativity in every page she crafts, that her example is genuinely inspiring and beautiful. [buy]

45. YOTSUBA&!
by Kiyohiko Azuma, 2003-ongoing

There are few comics as purely joyful and exuberant as Yotsuba&!, a series that's unusual for generating a surprising amount of substance from an especially slight premise. The title character, Yotsuba, is a very happy four-year girl who lives with her adoptive father, a slacker who doesn't always seem to be paying the most careful attention to his perpetually curious, cheerful, somewhat strange little daughter. Yotsuba might be four, but her behavior could best be described as that of a newborn who can talk: she is fascinated by and curious about everything, and she approaches each new discovery with the wide-eyed, gape-jawed, squealing-with-delight reaction it deserves. The book's title thus provides its structure as well. Each more-or-less self-contained chapter revolves around Yotsuba's encounters with a variety of everyday objects, places, concepts and people: Yotsuba & TV, Yotsuba & Shopping, Yotsuba & Drawing, even Yotsuba & Global Warming. The framework is simple, but allows for near-infinite variations. Yotsuba invariably encounters something and then milks every bit of nuance and emotional catharsis from the experience, reacting to life with a voracious and seemingly inexhaustible supply of joy and pleasure. As her bemused father says at one point, smiling with resignation, nothing ever gets Yotsuba down, while seemingly everything surprises and delights her. Kiyohiko Azuma documents Yotsuba's domestic adventures with a clean, attractive style, shifting ably from semi-realist depictions of the natural world to the cartoony exaggerations of Yotsuba at her most emotional. And the book is frequently hilarious; Azuma has a keen comic timing, and a good sense of body language, so that he sets up visual gags perfectly through the rhythms of his panels. These books present a character who enjoys life to its fullest, who appreciates the splendors of the world, of other people, of the simple delights just waiting everywhere to overcome us when we're not expecting it. Within this deceptively simple work is an ode to taking life as it comes and appreciating every day as though the world had been made anew, just for us, every morning. [buy] | [buy]

44. SKYSCRAPERS OF THE MIDWEST
by Joshua Cotter, 2005-2008

Skyscrapers of the Midwest is Joshua Cotter's loose blend of autobiography and fantasy as a way of evoking the experience of a typical middle American childhood, presumably his own. But instead of assuming a direct autobiographical mode, Cotter turns himself and the rest of his family into anthropomorphized cats — and then further abstracts them by spending much of the book within the head of the deliberately unnamed protagonist, who frequently imagines himself as robot superhero Nova Stealth. A giant-size Nova Stealth also appears as a rather melancholy incarnation of God, a shambling, outdated model who seems to be just going through the motions in continuing to dole out life and death. Obviously, Cotter's ambitions extend beyond mere quotidian slice-of-life drama; his book's clever shifts between stylistic modes reflect a boldly experimental sensibility and an eagerness to visualize childhood's slights and wounds through a child's imaginative mind. As a result, the book is packed with great sequences, with devastating insights, heartbreaking incidents and moments of surprising humor. At the book's climax, Cotter flows so brilliantly from a comic book-inspired fever dream into a poignant vision of the afterlife that this sequence — in which the central protagonist is depicted solely as a silent robot — is utterly overwhelming. [buy]

43. POWR MASTRS
by C.F., 2007-ongoing

Powr Mastrs is the first real long-form work by artist C.F. (also known as the noise musician Kites). It is an exercise in sci-fi/fantasy world-building, establishing a complicated fictional world with its own rules of magic and technology, and a large interlocking set of characters who perform arcane rituals, reference seemingly rich pasts, and engage in various plots, adventures and daily routines. Drawn in C.F.'s distinctive minimal style, these stories read as though the bored margin doodlings of a high school have come to life, with details filling in and characters acquiring personalities and back stories of their own. C.F.'s faux-naif style, stripped-down and with a great deal of white space, lends an air of childlike enthusiasm and imagination to his stories. With the second volume, C.F. introduced spot watercolor to his black-and-white drawings, a welcome addition since the best of his previous work has always exploited his feel for color. In these first two volumes, it still feels like C.F. is setting the groundwork for a complex epic to come, introducing characters and establishing relationships. But on the other hand one can equally easily imagine a whole series like this, in which grand dramas are subsumed by the surreal daily life of this imaginary land. [buy] | [buy]

42. ABSTRACT COMICS: THE ANTHOLOGY
by Andrei Molotiu (editor) & various, 2009

Abstract Comics is an important book because it gathers in one place a persuasive argument for thinking about comics, not in terms of narrative or even figuration, but as pure sequences of images with complicated and ambiguous relationships between one image and the next. Editor Andrei Molotiu believes firmly in abstract comics — comics with no narrative throughline or even "unified narrative space," as his introduction puts it. The anthology then presents an overview of this nascent field, ranging from freshly commissioned pieces to classic examples, and encompassing artists who have never worked in the form before, artists whose work has occasionally flirted with abstraction, and those who have, mostly in recent years, created whole bodies of work meeting Molotiu's definition of abstract comics. They are comics where the sequence is everything, where the pure flow of images is the whole content of the experience. These pieces cannot really be "read" in the conventional sense, but rather challenge viewers to come up with whole new ways of appreciating and understanding them, encouraging a reading experience somewhere between looking at a painting and reading a sequential narrative. Maybe it's the experience of looking at a series of paintings in order.

In any event, the book features some truly stunning and imaginative work: the organic blobs of Anders Pearson, the Duchampesque watercolor scrawls of Casey Camp, Henrik Rehr's shifting currents of densely packed lines, Mike Getsiv's suggestive, boldly colored swirls, Warren Craghead and Richard Hahn's mastery of panel rhythms, the unexpected visual gag inserted into Geoff Grogan's multimedia collage, Alexey Sokolin's forbidding stormclouds of black scratching, Andy Bleck's sensual scribble figures, Derik Badman's renderings of only background fragments from old Tarzan comics, the multiple contributors who turned in dense, virtuoso ink pieces towards the end of the book. Not everything here is at the same high level, but it's a surprisingly consistent anthology, unified by its theme and Molotiu's commitment to including pieces that advance his definition of this particular approach to comics. What's best about the book is how open its territory ultimately is, how much room it leaves for artists to come up with their own ideas about abstraction and sequence. It is a truly groundbreaking book that points the way towards a whole new conception of comics and challenges readers and artists alike to explore this new area. [buy]

41. ASTERIOS POLYP
by David Mazzucchelli, 2009

David Mazzucchelli is a master of comics form, so his first long-form work is of course reason to rejoice. Asterios Polyp is the work that everyone has been waiting for from Mazzucchelli, a formalist masterpiece whose cartooning gestures and densely layered sight gags provide visual delight on nearly every page. The title character is a pompous failed architect who, wallowing in self-pity following his divorce from his beloved Hana, sets off to abandon his former life, while compulsively returning to the past in painful memories and dreams. Ostensibly narrated by Asterios' stillborn twin, who periodically shows up as a dotted-line absence standing next to his living brother — yes, this is a very high-concept work — the book deploys one bold storytelling device after another as Mazzucchelli cleverly probes the relationship between Asterios and Hana. One of the book's best devices is the way every character is drawn in a subtly different style, complete with distinctively varied font styles for their dialogue. Thus the hard lines of Asterios and the fluid curves of Hana clearly set them up as opposites, as does the fact that, during their first meeting and on occasion afterwards, Asterios is drawn as a conglomeration of blue polygons while Hana is red and sketchy. When they're connecting and falling in love, Mazzucchelli depicts their two worlds coming together, her red crosshatching filling in his polygons, his clean blue lines infiltrating her more rounded form. It's an elegant visual metaphor for the idea that each individual sees the world differently, and that reconciling two different worldviews in a relationship can be a great challenge. Mazzucchelli packs the book with clever visual touches like this, casually evoking Will Eisner or Frank King with his layouts, or drawing a train worker's irate word balloon so it resembles the MTA logo, or using a dotted line to fill in the missing portion of a broken beer bottle. Each page offers up surprises and flights of fancy, and Mazzucchelli's panels are stuffed with clever details that enrich his characters, fill in the narrative, or simply offer up a diverting chuckle. It's a fun, innovative book, not so much for its story (which is rather typical at heart) but for the ways in which Mazzucchelli breathes new life into familiar situations and characters, simply through the grace and beauty of his art. [buy]

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The second part of this list, encompassing numbers 40-21, has now been posted here. The top 20 is here.

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D.

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. is the new IFC.com web series from comic artist Dash Shaw, representing his first venture into an animated series after establishing himself as one of modern comics' most innovative and unusual formalists. The series, which can be viewed in its entirety for free at the IFC site, consists of four episodes, each roughly two minutes long, applying Shaw's characteristic style — a blend of clean-line cartooning, diagrammatic precision, and stylistic collage — to the animated form. Shaw is an astonishingly precocious young artist, who in the last few years has progressed from the sketchy but intriguing formalism of his short story collection Goddess Head to the fully flowering imagination on display in his 700-page tour-de-force family drama Bottomless Belly Button and, more salient to this film, in the online strip Bodyworld and his sci-fi contributions to the Mome anthology. It's the style of these stories, which exploit Shaw's idiosyncratic use of color overlays, that directly led to the style of The Unclothed Man.

The Unclothed Man, like most of Shaw's work, is concerned first and foremost with ways of visually representing complex and difficult-to-express ideas, with ways of looking at and understanding the world. As in Shaw's very similar Mome stories, the film uses a slim sci-fi premise as a hook to examine an unusual experience and its effect on the human body and mind. Shaw is continually dissecting experiences, stretching out time so that each component of a moment might be studied in depth. In Bodyworld, he portrays the subjectivity of drug experiences and various metaphysical states, while some of his short stories deal with intradimensional travel and overlapping worlds. In Bottomless Belly Button, the anthropomorphized appearance of one character — in a cast otherwise consisting of humans — is a reflection of that character's opinion of himself, his feeling of being an outcast.


In The Unclothed Man, these tropes play out in the way Shaw examines the experience of modeling for an art class while trying to maintain a rigid, unmoving posture. The film's hero is a rebel agent in a future where human-like droids have taken over many routine tasks, including that of modeling for artists. As part of an anti-droid rebel resistance, the hero Rebel X-6 poses as a droid in an art class, shaving himself and taking pills to maintain a stiff, robot-like stasis. The second episode, in which X-6 poses nude for a drawing class, breaks down his experience with a montage of body parts, each one accompanied by pop-up captions describing the sensations coursing through his body, as the art style gracefully shifts between various modes, from charcoal shading to Photoshop-style filters, reflecting the ease with which the future's artistic processes allow artists to mold their computer-generated "drawings."

It's this fluidity that makes The Unclothed Man so dazzling and exciting. Shaw juxtaposes different styles within the frame, allowing his more cartoony characters — like the big-nosed art class instructor, a callback to old-school newspaper comic stereotypes — to clash against the mannequinesque minimalism of his central character or the wavy, giraffe-like curves of the drawing student who takes a special interest in X-6. Similarly, various emotional and physical states interweave in interesting ways, so that a scene that might at first seem to be an objective observation from a distance opens up into an examination of X-6's inner reactions and psychological/physical responses. The second episode closes with "a dream," in which abstract designs swirl and congeal into Freudian psychosexual images, Masonic/conspiratorial symbology, and eventually a maze of cartoon symbols, the building blocks of a drawn language. It's all very self-consciously about representing ideas and emotions through the drawing, through the line and the symbol; the words "a dream" themselves, placed before this sequence, quickly morph into rows of teeth as the boxes surrounding the words form the outline of a mouth.


As far as incident goes, the film's plot is almost inanely simple, and the brief "synopses" included with each episode mock the film's plotless ambling. It's all so much more about the imagery and internal wanderings triggered by the basic situation. In the first episode, we're introduced to Rebel X-6 through one of his missions-in-progress, which plays out in a mix of conventional animation with interludes that mimic old text-based computer games, with blocky computer type scrolling across the screen. The mission apparently consists of the rebel destroying a droid outpost using something called a "black hole mouth," but Shaw introduces high-concept sci-fi accoutrements like this only as an excuse to display some stunning imagery, in this case the rebel spaceman floating through the void, sucking an orbiting satellite into a swirl of color that streams into his mouth like water down a drain hole. Space, in Shaw's conception, looks like a crayoned child's drawing. His sense of color, always strong, is especially vivid at moments like this, when what's actually happening becomes abstracted into blocks of pure color. Later in the episode, Shaw details X-6's preparations for his modeling assignment, particularly his process of shaving: a closeup looks like the diagrammatic inserts in a Schick commercial, showing the blades of a razor plucking hairs from their pores. These micro-processes interest Shaw, who's always examining what's going on with his protagonist at the physiological level, whether it's his struggle not to sweat (droids don't sweat!) or his paranoia about a non-existent pimple that might break his cover.

Other episodes are similarly introspective and devoid of drama. The second episode concerns itself with X-6's subjective experience of posing, the creation of art in the technology-driven 35th Century, and X-6's symbolic dream. In the third episode, X-6 as a model droid unexpectedly forms a connection with an artist, and passes out from the physical strain of modeling. This tirggers another subjective abstraction, as his fainting spell is visualized by Rothko-like color fields blurring and overlapping. He then finds himself in a room that's like a catalogue of 20th Century art, culture, technology and design, the past encroaching upon the future. It seems the artist who's interested in X-6 has a nostalgic tendency, a desire for a connection with the past that's otherwise absent in this obsessively forward-looking culture. Finally, in the fourth episode, mirroring the first, X-6 reveals himself as an anti-droid rebel and once again utilizes his "black hole mouth," sucking in an entire world, blurring everything together as though mixing paints. This time, though, the act of destruction becomes a metaphor for sexuality, for union as mouths and tongues join together into one form, one drawing.


The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. is a fascinating first animated work from one of today's most original and unusual artists. Shaw adapts well from the comics page to the cinematic form. His animation (assisted by Jane Samborski, working from Shaw's drawings) is sometimes stiff and overly static, and some of his "camera" moves are slightly awkward, betraying the fact that Shaw is a newcomer to cinema. He sometimes seems to be still rooted in comics, as his heavy reliance on text suggests; to be fair, though, the text is in nearly every case inventively incorporated into the image, as one more visual element, rather than treated simply as a way to tell the story without dialogue or spoken narration. There's very little spoken dialogue in the film, just a few garbled transmissions from X-6's superiors, but strangely enough one hardly misses it. The low-key soundtrack, by James Lucido, is in any case a perfect complement to Shaw's immersive images.

In other ways, too, Shaw brings to animation the same restless curiosity about form that runs through all his comics work. At one point, conveying movement, he has a character race across the frame, and surrounds him with an arrow-shaped border, blending the kinetic language of film with the static, symbolic language of comics. The arrow, strictly unnecessary to convey motion since the character is actually moving, works instead as a meta intrusion, a reminder of the film's obsession with expressing abstract concepts and subjective experiences visually. At the end of the sequence, as a flying ship crashes to ground, the arrow condenses into a tiny irregular triangle, a slash of visible space within a black void.

Though Shaw is only just beginning to explore animation, The Unclothed Man already displays evidence of the cartoonist's affinity for animation. Almost as well as his comics, this film expresses Shaw's ongoing desire to look at the world from a slightly askew perspective, to express his fascination with the complexity of people's inner universes. Thus, sci-fi is perhaps the perfect genre for him, even though he's suggested that after this film he's going to abandon sci-fi for at least a while. The form allows him to map his visualizations of inner realities onto various equally stylized outer realities, whether that's the black of space, temporal intersection points, or the distant future. Shaw's first animated film is very much worth viewing for anyone interested in checking out one of modern art's freshest and most consistently challenging new artists. As a bonus, IFC has made available, as "extras," a complete Shaw comic (Look Forward, First Son of Terra Two, from Mome) and several wallpapers (including nice tributes to Gus Van Sant and Guy Maddin). Of course, as welcome as these extra tidbits are, it's the film itself — a probing, emotional examination of what it means to make art and to forge meaningful human interactions — that should be the main draw.

Shintaro Kago short films

There are few things in this world stranger than the work of Japanese manga artist and filmmaker Shintaro Kago, whose bizarre contributions to both comics and extreme low-budget videos encompass Cronenberg-esque gross-out horror, pranky scatological humor, outlandish porn and dizzying formal experimentation. His 16-page comic Abstraction (which can be read in its entirety here) is one of the most formally ambitious works in the medium, a psychosexual mindfuck that seems to be desperately trying to break free of the two-dimensional constraints of the page. Unfortunately, none of Kago's willfully over-the-top comics work is available in official English translations, which has relegated most of his stories to being passed around the Internet in the form of fan-translated scans. Among the admittedly small number of admirers of avant-garde manga, however, his work has become legendary, an utterly unique fusion of comics' most advanced and original formal inventions with some of the most defiantly low-brow material imaginable.

Of late, Kago has also taken to posting his even less-known video work to his YouTube channel. In these jokey short films, many of them crudely animated, Kago's sick sense of humor reaches its full heights of absurdity. There's a playful surrealist sensibility to Kago's work, as well as a tendency to revel in the ridiculous, the crude and the disturbing. His work straddles a weird boundary between avant-garde experimentation and low-brow fart jokes — the punchline of one of these films is literally an oozing torrent of shit — although, admittedly, his videos seem to lean a bit more heavily towards the fart jokes than his comics. But hey, who doesn't appreciate a good fart joke once in a while?

Above, I've posted embedded links for two of my favorite Kago videos, two of the ones that made me laugh out loud with that mixture of shock, disgust and hilarity that often characterizes my reaction to his work. Attack of the Anteater's Tongue is exactly what its name implies: still images of an anteater are animated so that a wiggly pink tongue darts out towards the ground. Soon, the pink tongue is everywhere. It pokes up through the pants of a smiling Japanese politician, lounging around with George W. Bush. It sticks out of the tip of Dirty Harry's gun and then from the barrels of the cannons on a row of tanks — a flower in the barrel of a gun isn't nearly as effective (or funny) a surreal anti-war statement as a gun literally sticking out its tongue at the world. The film ends with an infestation of pink anteater tongues, taking over a city in a synchronized snake-like dance. Like all of Kago's best work, this video is basically an extended non sequitur, an absurd punchline that seems to be missing its joke; one senses, anyway, that only Kago would get the joke.

Terror of Golf Course is animated in more of a traditional, albeit crude, anime style, with static backgrounds and roughly moving figures. Accompanied by a soundtrack of eerie insectile hum and wheezy moans, the short starts as a typically silly gag, a golf hole neatly dodging a putter's attempts to sink a shot. The turn to horror at the end, telegraphed by the creepy soundtrack, is a cruel and nonsensical punchline. Not content to simply screw up this poor guy's golf game, this particular hole wants blood. One can imagine some kind of deadpan horror tagline for this film. On this course, it's par... or else.

Kago's weird work fits in naturally amidst the chaotic silliness of YouTube, where ridiculous amateur videos proliferate, some of them genuinely funny, many more puzzling or embarrassing or annoying. It's true that very little YouTube content has ever lived up to the tremendous promise of freely distributed online expression, but some of the stranger viral videos have seemed to illuminate unique sensibilities crafting weird little fragments of pop culture. Kago's odd short videos fit comfortably in this niche. Besides the two I posted above, there's also a wonderfully surreal mermaid sketch, a grisly new Olympic sport, and a frankly stupid cell phone joke. Check out YouTube for all the fun. (And don't forget to give Kago's comics a look, too. The great manga blog Same Hat! Same Hat! has scans of many of Kago's best stories, including The Memories of Others, Multiplication and Blow-Up. All NSFW, by the way.)

Watchmen

It is nearly impossible to separate Zack Snyder's Watchmen from its source material, the landmark 80s comic miniseries written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons. In Snyder's film, Moore's words find a new home, as do Gibbons' images, the framings reproduced with impeccable accuracy. Incidents are shuffled around and altered, dialogue is sometimes changed, and everything is necessarily condensed from the density and complexity of Moore's original work. But as adaptations go, this is, like Snyder's 300 before it, an extraordinarily faithful translation of a work from one medium to another. Snyder's faithfulness makes him reliant on his source material in a way few great directors are. Frank Miller's 300 is a truly nasty, fascistic piece of work, a comic that manages to be both homophobic and homoerotic at once; Snyder's adaptation followed suit, if anything amplifying the repellent qualities of Miller's worst writing. Moore's Watchmen, on the other hand, is an iconic and enduring work, a moving, sophisticated Cold War fable about the destructiveness of humanity and the hypocrisies and contradictions at the heart of the superhero archetype. To the extent that Snyder's film translates even a fraction of Moore's brilliance to the screen, the film is successful.

More than that, Snyder's Watchmen is frequently breathtaking. What comes through more than anything is how strong Alan Moore is as a writer: long passages are taken verbatim from the comic, and surprisingly they actually work on screen, coming out of the mouths of actors. Moore's prose is often verbose and heavily stylized, particularly the voiceover monologues taken from the journal entries of the psychopathic vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), but the writing maintains its dark wit and verve when translated off the page. The story takes place in an imagined alternate universe in which America won the Vietnam war thanks to the intervention of the god-like Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the world's one true super-powered being, a man made unfathomably powerful by a scientific accident. Dr. Manhattan's mere existence changed the status quo in many ways: Richard Nixon, riding high on post-Vietnam public acclaim, is still in office in 1985, when the story opens; Manhattan's near-omniscient intellect fostered great leaps forward in science and technology; a legislative act sent all the other non-powered superheroes, now irrelevant, into early retirement. Both the book and the film open with the murder of former costumed hero the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), more recently a government operative. Snyder chooses to build up to the comic's famed opening page, its slow pullback from a blood-splattered smiley-face button lying in the gutter, all the way up to the high window from which the Comedian plunged to his death. Snyder draws out the fight that preceded this image, tracing its fast, brutal details. He then cuts from the smiley face to the opening credits, a montage of photographs and press clippings that cleverly establishes the contours of Watchmen's imaginary world, including a hilarious variation on the famous image of a returning World War II soldier jubilantly kissing a nurse.

It's undeniable that Snyder's Watchmen is an immersive experience, a distillation of the comic into moving images, each frame packed with details and subtle in-jokes that will be especially resonant for those who know the Moore comic backwards and forwards — like the shot of Mothman getting dragged away to an asylum during the opening credits, an image that could only be puzzling to those not versed in the comic. The film is a love letter to the book it is adapted from, which is both its greatest asset and its greatest failing. Because when the film soars, as it often does, it does so on Moore's wings, and when it falters, as often as not, it does so at those points where it has attempted to leave him behind. Snyder gets a lot right: his way of visually expressing the fluidity of past, present and future that marks Dr. Manhattan's experience of the universe; the awkward middle-aged despair of Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), formerly the superhero known as Nite Owl but now only a lonely failure; the hateful rhetoric of Rorschach, a heroic crimefighter who's also a right-wing crackpot. Snyder's heavily CGI-processed images are crisp and beautiful, and yet also dark, evoking a futuristic world that is nevertheless grimy and decaying. The framings of the images are often reproduced from the comic panels, but the film's visual palette draws only perfunctorily from the art of Dave Gibbons or colorist John Higgins. Even so, the final effect is not so far from the comic's distopian worldview.


As is often the case in a work like this, where Snyder for the most part slavishly follows his source material, the points at which he diverts from the Moore/Gibbons comic are especially telling. Of course, no adaptation of a book as dense and complex as Watchmen could carry over everything to the screen, and some of Snyder's changes are obvious: he jettisons the pirate comic that served as a metatextual parallel to the main story, along with the text interludes that purport to provide excerpts from primary documents of the Watchmen universe. In many ways, Moore's comic is impossible to adapt completely to the screen, since so many of the effects he achieved could only be done in comics, depending as they do on the juxtaposition of word balloons and the layout of panels in relation to one another.

Some of Snyder's changes are thus unavoidable, and a lot of smaller plot elements are gone or significantly condensed in order to make the film come in just under three hours, already a lengthy blockbuster. Some of these changes are damaging, though: the sex scene between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) is considerably drawn out from the comic, and laughably accompanied by Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Snyder seems to have made the scene so explicit only to include some T-and-A, though the sequence's capping joke — the couple accidentally setting off the flamethrower on the front of the Nite Owl's airship at the climactic moment, a gag Moore hinted at but didn't quite deliver — nearly redeems the silliness that precedes it. Even worse, though, is that Snyder then substantially cuts the couple's post-coital conversation, which was actually the whole point of the scene in the comic: the sense of power and sexual awakening that these two former superheroes rediscover when they once more don their costumes, the transformation from ordinary nobodies with screwed-up lives into something more. Snyder seems not to have gotten the emotional and psychological undercurrents in the developing relationship between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, seeing only the opportunity to show Akerman's naked body for an extended period of time.

More ire from Watchmen fans will likely be directed at the film's ending, which is considerably altered from the comic. In some ways, though, the film's version of the mad scheme of Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) is actually preferable to Moore's ending, at least as it plays out on screen: it's hard to imagine the faked alien invasion scenario of the comic being anything but silly in a film version. The problem with the film's ending is thus not necessarily in the changes it makes from the comic, but in its pacing, which is noticeably off. The comic's climactic showdown at Veidt's Antarctic stronghold is actually an anticlimax, the book's supposed heroes arriving too late to stop the ambiguous "villain" from... well, saving the world, actually, albeit through truly horrifying means. The comic's ending is a slow, elegiac cool-down, as the heroes come to the realization that they must accept the horrors they have witnessed for the good of the world: to preserve peace, they must maintain a terrible secret. This resolution is sad and low-key and quiet, and Snyder is of course adept at none of these moods. He shatters the lonely snowbound death of Rorschach with the piercing scream of the Nite Owl (a cartoonish "nooooo!" that is, believe it or not, not in the comic), and insists on inserting one more brutal beating afterwards.

Whenever Snyder runs roughshod over the subtlety and grace of moments like this, one wonders how he even got so much right in this film. And yet it's undeniable that he does. For every place where his inclinations towards slo-mo violence and grotesquerie run away with him, there's something like the beautifully executed Mars sequence, with Dr. Manhattan ruminating on his life and his understanding of the universe while creating alien designs on the red planet's surface. He has a fine cast — with the exception of the consistently flat Akerman, who is often distractingly awful — and a shiny, richly textured visual aesthetic, and he's building from one of the great works of superhero comics. And yet Watchmen could have easily been an embarrassing failure, yet another brilliant Alan Moore-scripted comic adapted into a watered-down movie. It might sound like faint praise to credit Snyder with finally making a Moore adaptation that doesn't outright suck. In fact, the film is often compelling and smart, even if just as often it seems to miss the point. Snyder has made a fascinating but flawed film that hints at the richness of its source material, suggesting though never quite realizing the depth of the heady concepts and potent ideas at its core.

Crumb

There is no artist in comics more confounding and fascinating than Robert Crumb. He is a central figure to the artform as it has developed in the last fifty years; arguably, he is the central figure without whom comics would not have developed in quite the same way that they have. His work is inescapable for those interested in all sorts of strains within modern comics: he popularized autobiographical storytelling, particularly of the nakedly confessional kind; he was a driving force behind the development of underground, independently published books; he influenced several entire generations of cartoonists with his combination of pristine draftsmanship and an untethered id, fearlessly exploring sexuality and perversions of all kinds alongside pointed political and social satires. And yet his work is simultaneously a challenge to the very concept of good taste; Crumb could always be counted on to draw and write about the things that no one else would even think, or if they did, that they would never dare to let out in public. His work is a catalog of his often grotesque and horrifying obsessions, his fetishized sexuality, his broad misanthropic tendencies, his ranting intolerance for most of his fellow humans, his rage and depression and ugly emotions. There are few artists in comics who draw as well as Crumb — as realistically or as expressively — and there are few whose subject matter is so frequently off-putting and offensive. His work is both thought-provoking and queasiness-inducing.

It might be expected, with such an unrepressed and confessional artist, that there would be nothing left to document. Why make a film about a man who has essentially poured his deepest, darkest thoughts and most potentially incriminating ideas out onto the page, then published it all for anyone to see? And yet Terry Zwigoff's remarkable documentary Crumb manages to be startling and revelatory even for those intimately familiar with its subject's body of work. Zwigoff is a sympathetic but relatively objective biographer, clearly fascinated by Crumb's art and yet also in some sense grappling with it, trying to understand it and the man behind it, with all of his contradictions and openly unpleasant characteristics. Zwigoff never flinches away from Crumb or his disturbing, complicated art. He seems to be circling around his subject, trying to see him from as many angles as possible. There are interviews with art critics and fellow cartoonists who have various wildly contradictory perspectives on what Crumb is doing with his art. There is, of course, a great deal of time spent in the company of Crumb himself, watching him draw, walk the streets and people-watch, or interact with his wife (and sometimes collaborator) Aline Kominsky-Crumb and their daughter Sophie (who has since grown up to be a cartoonist herself). There are interviews with several of the artist's ex-girlfriends, usually while Crumb himself is awkwardly, uncomfortably sitting nearby, and candid conversations with his first wife Dana and their son Jesse. Most importantly, though, and most revealingly, there are the scenes that take up the bulk of the film, dealing with Crumb's complex and tortured relationship with his mother and his two brothers, Charles and Maxon.


To see Robert, Charles and Maxon Crumb speaking about their childhood is to understand, in a sudden, unavoidable flash of insight, exactly the forces that conspired to create the artist that Crumb has become. The three of them grew up almost unnaturally close together in rotten, abusive household. All three slept in the same bed until they were sixteen, and they were virtually inseparable, playing imaginative games (mostly concocted by the domineering Charles) and even drawing comics together, creating an elaborate fantasy world centered around the Disney movie Treasure Island. They grew up with a depressive, perpetually scowling and occasionally abusive father and an amphetamine addict mother, prone to wild mood swings and violent, manic behavior. In this atmosphere, the three brothers seem to have retreated into art for as long as their childhoods lasted. What is striking, though, is the different paths they took once they grew up.

Charles, who says he was possessed by constant homicidal urges — he describes suppressing the desire to stab Robert in the head with a butcher knife, as Robert laughs uncomfortably — essentially withdraws from the world after a brief period of wildness. He sits alone in his room at home, still living with his mother, self-medicating with tranquilizers and compulsively re-reading the same books that he had once read as a child. His art, so expressive and vital even in the childhood comic books that Robert has saved, was confined to his pre-pubescent years, tapering off and then ceasing altogether as he grew older. In one of the film's most poignant scenes, Robert flips through one of Charles' old books, admiring the dark beauty of the drawings in these bastardized Treasure Island tales, the weird textures that Charles layered over everything he drew. Towards the end of the book, as Charles became less and less interested in drawing, more isolated in his own hermetic world, the drawings become smaller and the word balloons larger, until finally there are just pages of cramped, tiny text that verges on unreadability; Robert sadly closes the comic.

Maxon is an equally interesting case. He speaks with casual honesty about the "phase" in his life when he liked to molest women in the streets, though he insists that he stopped short of rape. When Zwigoff and Robert speak to him, he has become involved in a strange quasi-spiritualism that involves sitting on a bed of nails and ingesting a long rope of cloth intended to clean out his insides. Unlike Charles, he still makes art, creating warped, Cubist paintings that bear some obvious relationship to the styles of his two brothers, but are nevertheless inflected with his own frightening sensibility. It is like the odd, unsettling savant work of a mental patient, and the interviews with Maxon — who is inexplicably missing one eyebrow and has an unbalanced appearance as a result — do little to dispel the sensation of barely modulated insanity. Zwigoff's primary accomplishment in this film is to put the most famous Crumb into the context of his familial life, making it clear that Robert, however deviant and unfettered his art can often seem, is the sane one in his family, the only one of the three equally troubled brothers who has managed to successfully sublimate his sexual hang-ups and instability into art while maintaining a hold on the real world.


The film is equally interesting for the way it grapples with Crumb's sexual perversity and what the artist himself has described, in a famous story, as his "troubles with women." Crumb has often been labeled a misogynist, someone with a great deal of aggression and negative feelings towards women, and it's difficult to completely deny the charge. The film goes into great depth in documenting one of his most offensive and hateful stories, in which the manipulative guru character Mr. Natural decapitates a woman and walks her body around to be used as a sexual toy; it could not be any more blatant in its depiction of women as sex objects and its disregard for female intellect if it was an illustrative example in a feminist textbook. Not all of Crumb's work is so nakedly aggressive and creepy, but he returns again and again to his fetishized depictions of female bodies, his repetitive fantasies about powerfully built, muscular, Amazonian women. The weedy, nerdy, buck-toothed Crumb is a Freudian's dream patient, a bundle of psychosexual neuroses with obvious mommy issues: he wants to be simultaneously dominated by a powerful female archetype, and to dominate her in return.

Crumb makes no excuses for the blatantly sexual and exploitative nature of his art, and neither does Zwigoff. The film is not an apologia for the misogynistic elements of Crumb's work, and Zwigoff does an excellent job of situating these comics in multiple critical perspectives. These range from the gushingly admiring to the cautiously conflicted to feminist distrust and disgust. At times, the film even seems to be poking fun at those who attempt to intellectualize and rationalize Crumb's profoundly irrational art. When Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, the most consistent Crumb admirer in the film, is told that Crumb masturbates while looking at his own work, he launches into a lengthy and somewhat tortured monologue trying to find an artistic justification for this behavior, grasping at explanations for the artist's treatment of his own work like pornography. Once he finally runs out of steam, he laughs nervously and then looks into the camera, earnestly asking, as though he doesn't really believe it, "does he really do that?" Well, yes, he does, at least if you believe the perpetually over-honest Crumb, and in any event it's obvious that on some level these stories are sexual fantasies translated onto paper. They're already a form of masturbation. Zwigoff also gives ample time to two women critics who have more conflicted views of Crumb's work, for obvious reasons. While cartoonist and critic Trina Robbins is openly disappointed that Crumb abandoned his earlier lighthearted, jokey work and dedicated his tremendous artistic talent to what she sees as disgusting material, Deirdre English seems more torn between the aesthetic qualities of the work and its status as satire, and its less defensible components. Zwigoff never lets the film come down too hard on the side of any of these critical interpretations, instead letting the disagreements stand as evidence of the severely divisive nature of Crumb's idiosyncratic genius.


Even considering the film's depth and breadth of inquiry into Crumb's life and art, Zwigoff still can't manage to encompass the full extent of Crumb's prodigious range as an artist. The perverse sexuality of his comics naturally makes for the best, most vibrant material — like former girlfriend Dian Hanson's hilariously deadpan insistence that Crumb "is endowed with one of the biggest penises in the world" — but it means that the other aspects of Crumb's work often get short shrift. It would be easy for someone unfamiliar with the full range of Crumb's gifts to conclude that he's simply a dirty-minded pornographer, as there's little discussion of his propensity towards social satire, his work illustrating the restrained autobiographical writing of Harvey Pekar, or his more serious-minded, non-sexual material. Zwigoff does provide a nod in this direction towards the end of the film when he animates, panel by panel, Crumb's famous strip "A Short History of America," which documents the progression of a single plot of land from an empty field to a modern street corner. It's also disappointing that Zwigoff doesn't engage more fully with the nature and roots of Crumb's use of racist caricatures and stereotypes. There are some passing references to this aspect of his work, including a walkthrough of a segment from the always shocking "Angelfood McSpade" strip, but the film never really deals in-depth with Crumb's racial views the way it does with his sexuality and treatment of women.

Still, these are minor complaints in the context of a film that deals intelligently and fairly with one of the 20th Century's most controversial and divisive artists. Crumb not only delves into the nature of its subject's art and life, but explores the crucial questions of the ways in which experiences and obsessions can be channeled into art.

The Bechdel Rule for Movies

First off, enlarge the above image and read the comic strip.

Interesting, no?

This was called to my attention by comic critic Tom Crippen at the blog The Hooded Utilitarian. Alison Bechdel is a feminist comic writer/artist who is perhaps best known for her recent memoir Fun Home, though she also writes and draws a weekly comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For, which is, I believe, where the strip in question originated.

The rule she posits in that strip isn't quite a rule, actually — I don't think most people would use it as an unbreakable guideline for what they see, even if Bechdel's friend apparently does — but it does bring up some very interesting questions about the role of gender in (especially) Hollywood movies and the relationship of these movies to their presumed audiences. Thinking about what movies might meet the rule and what movies wouldn't is a useful test for determining what constitutes a movie made "for" women, as opposed to one made "for" men. I don't think the rule necessarily separates anti-feminist movies from pro-feminist ones, or sexist ones from non-sexist ones, but it does help gauge the position of women and their interests in films. As a general rule, films that pass the test give screentime to women independently of their relationships to the men in the films, whereas in films that fail the test, the women (if any) exist primarily only in relationship to the male leads. As Tom points out, there are films that might fail the test that nevertheless have strong central women characters; he cites the Terminator cycle, and he probably has a point there.

To give some idea of what results the test might yield when applied to various types of films, I thought about some recent films I've watched myself. Of the films I posted about here in December, the ones that pass the test are In My Skin; The Women (Naturally, I thought of this one first; though Tom cites it as a debatable case, I'd say the titular women, who are always talking, do talk about something other than men at least part of the time. At the very least, they talk about each other, too.); Le Pont du Nord (perhaps unsurprising from the greatest director of actresses); and The Seventh Victim (some women talk to each other about Satanism!). Considering that I've written about 15 films here so far this month, the fact that only 4 of them meet the qualifications of Bechdel's test goes a long way towards proving her thesis. Of the films that do not meet the test, however, it's worth pointing out that Rohmer's A Summer's Tale does have very complex and well-developed women characters. Interestingly, it would also fail a corresponding test for male characters.

The percentage for November's viewing is arguably even worse. I wrote about 33 films and still only 4 met the test's strict requirements: Bell, Book and Candle (women talking about witchcraft), Naked (women talking about poverty and jobs), A Prairie Home Companion (women talking about music and the past), and Far From Heaven (women talking about race, politics, etc). Equally interesting are the films that are left out. Sink Or Swim would doubtless be an exception for Bechdel and her friend, since the film is a one-woman show, an avant-garde pastiche with a voiceover; it is inarguably feminist. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is another intriguing exclusion: it features two women friends who, as far as I can remember, rarely if ever talk about anything besides men in the course of the film. And yet this is in many ways the point of the film, which is a satiric commentary on the ways in which society requires women to conform to various stereotypes imposed by men. Clearly, Bechdel's rule does not allow for the complexity of themes that can underlie the treatment of gender, even in a seemingly straightforward musical comedy like this.

Anyone else have any thoughts about this comic and what it says about film and gender?

On Violence and Restraint in The Dark Knight

I don't want to take exception too stringently with Keith Uhlich's angry, opinionated takedown of The Dark Knight from The House Next Door, one of my favorite daily blogosphere stops. He's entitled to his opinion, and some of the fanboy brush-offs of his review have been hilarious in their stupidity and short-sightedness. I disagree pretty intensely with most of his feelings about the film, but much of what Uhlich says is hard to argue with because it's so subjective and personal, intimately connected with his own visceral responses to the film. Do Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine spout "gloomy old man platitudes?" Does the film's dialogue possess the "solemnity and verbosity borne of a beat-down Western warrior spirit?" Is director Christopher Nolan "a high-minded con artist — the Barry Lyndon of the Hollywood elite?" Is the film a case of "shallow artistry" at work? I didn't think so, but any defense of such vague, rhetorical argumentation would basically have to boil down to a game of "yes it is"/"no it isn't," so I'll leave the review's more high-flown language alone, for the most part.

I also don't think that The Dark Knight is a perfect film, and I don't want to quell debate over the film's merits. The fanboys flooding the comment threads of every negative review with variations on "you suck" do nothing for film criticism in general or the discourse about this particular film. Quite to the contrary, I think Nolan's film is complex and ambiguous, susceptible to multiple readings that include the negative ones, and I find it a worthy subject for further discussion. I hope there will be more negative reviews like Uhlich's, provided they stimulate more intelligent conversation. Consider this my own humble contribution to that discourse. I want to take exception, primarily, with one aspect of Uhlich's argument that I think is particularly off-base and deserving of greater scrutiny than the knee-jerk name-calling that flooded into the original review's comments thread. The relevant passage is quoted here:

For a movie purported to be so, well, "dark," The Dark Knight spends a more-than-noticeable amount of time turning its gaze from the horrors it perpetrates. There's an early scene where The Joker holds a mob boss at knifepoint, telling a made-up backstory as to how he got his facial scars. The buildup is suitably intense, but Nolan whiffs the follow-through by having The Joker's mouth-slitting finale occur offscreen. It's the pencil gag all over again, only rendered ineffectual, monotonous, the "now you see it, now you don't" philosophy injected ruinously into the film's aesthetic fabric."

There something, let's say, interesting about a critical perspective that simultaneously lambastes a film for being "sadistic" while also criticizing the filmmaker for not showing more onscreen violence. This contradictory criticism aligns Uhlich, ironically, with that peculiar breed of fanboys disappointed in the film's PG-13 rating, thirsting for Saw-level blood-splatter and gore. The film itself has little patience for such base urges, and the violence in the film is depicted with an economy and tact that communicates the horror of the Joker's actions while never satisfying the desire to ogle his atrocities firsthand. This isn't flinching away from horror, it's tastefulness, a quality that has long been absent from mainstream filmmaking, and a quality that Uhlich doesn't seem to miss. Conditioned on one bloody violence-porn fantasy after another, have we really come to a point where we feel compelled to criticize the rare film that depicts violence without splattering the screen with it?

In point of fact, the film never "turn[s] its gaze from the horrors it perpetrates" in any real sense. Nolan's quick cuts away from the Joker's bloody actions do nothing to dull the impact of those actions, which are brutally felt in the imagination and the intellect. In the scene mentioned in the above quote, Nolan builds up the tension to an almost unbearable point, emphasizing the feel of the knife blade in the corner of the mobster's mouth, holding this moment for an uncomfortably long amount of time, cutting away only when the Joker finally does the inevitable with a flick of his wrist. Are our imaginations so limited that we need to actually see the act in order to feel it? Judging by the reactions in the packed theater when I saw it, the moans of horror and sympathetic pain, I think Uhlich underestimates modern audiences. In fact, it may be that an old chestnut that some may have thought was outdated — that seeing an act of violence is never as horrifying as imagining it — still has some life in it after all. There was a time when filmmakers were praised for such restraint, for doing as much with what's not shown as with what is. In another negative review of the film from Salon, Stephanie Zacharek makes some fairly misguided comparisons between Nolan and Alfred Hitchcock, but at least she appreciates the film's tact in its treatment of violence, even while failing to understand that this is one of the few areas in which her comparison holds true.

The film's treatment of violence is given further complexity by the way that Nolan handles DA Harvey Dent's transformation into the divided Two Face. For a film that supposedly flinches away from violence, The Dark Knight addresses Two Face in a startlingly head-on manner. Dent's appearance in the second half of the film is profound evidence of the impact of violence on an individual human life. Dent's plight, given real emotional heft by both the screenplay and Aaron Eckhart's sensitive performance, is externalized in the violence done to his face, and here Nolan confronts the horror with raw physicality. This is not the cartoonish, outlandish Two Face of the original comics or, Heaven forbid, Tommy Lee Jones. The right side of Dent's face is a mess of raw, exposed muscles, bone, and nerves, making it impossible to ignore the character's origins or the violence done to him. This is not the impersonal blood and guts of Saw, but a deeply felt document of the effects of violence on both external appearance and internal persona. If Nolan had flinched away here, if he had hedged in showing the grisly violence done to Dent in order to make him become Two Face, then I could better understand Uhlich's criticisms about Nolan's supposed squeamishness.