A Better Life Through Technocracy

August 14th, 2010

Politics are something of a passion of mine, in particular the more obscure and bizarre forms of government that have been posited from time to time by people who think they know what’s best for mankind.  Though traditionally I’ve had a great interest in total government theories (the Corporate State, Fascism and Communism), recently I happened to come upon a couple of books dealing with the subject of Technocracy.

Now, the word “Technocrat” is kind of a common-usage term, normally applied to the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, people at the cutting edge of computers and science.  But you may not be aware of the fact that Technocracy was actually proposed, in a very serious way, as a system of total social reorganization for the whole of North America, and at its peak, was very nearly popular enough to get itself off the ground, albeit in a limited way.

The basic idea was that the Technocrats saw human society as a kind of an engineering problem, which could be solved by the application of scientific study and technique.  Rather than permitting society to be run by the lowest common denominator, as they believed democracy was doing, the entire population and its future would be placed in the hands of the technical élite, namely scientists, engineers, architects, mechanics, efficency experts, academics, and technical intellectuals generally.  The economy would be centrally planned on the basis of an energy-input theory of value, and all citizens compelled to perform labor for the state based upon a government assessment of their aptitudes and capabilites.  There was also an unusal obsession with hydrology that I still don’t fully understand, with plans for massive networks of hydroelectric dams and canal systems for continental transport.

All of this would eventually lead to the establishment of a superstate extending from Venezuela to the Arctic Circle, called the North American Technate, wherein all citizens would work for the good of the self-perpetuating scientific-engineering government-society-complex.  Beyond that, the plans became distinctly vague.  For example, no extensive mention was made of how the Technate would cope with international issues such as defense, trade, population growth and movement, diplomatic relations, and so on, though the implication was that the Technocrats’ emphasis on isolation and self-sufficiency would somehow resolve those issues automatically.

The key point in Technocratic theory was that, probably because of the times (the movement reached its peak in the 1930’s) the price system of Capitalist economics seemed extremely fragile, and the movement’s directing minds predicted the collapse of Capitalism by 1941.  When this failed to happen on schedule, even when the date was pushed back to 1948, and then later to “sometime in the 1950’s,” the group’s adherents began to drift away.  It also did them no good that they staged numerous marches in their distinctive grey-and-red uniforms during the war years, drawing the inevitable comparison to Fascism and leading to the group’s being banned by the Canadian and American governments between 1941 and 1943.  The core directing group of the Technocracy movement still exists, as “Technocracy, Incorporated,” with its headquarters somewhere in Washington State, but the whole thing is kind of a political relic, now, and a particularly wierd one at that.

And yet, I find it to be representative of a particular trend in Western thought that is still alive and well, namely that human beings cannot be left to their own devices, and need to be “consciously controlled,” (a Technocratic term, borrowed from Socialism) in order to force society into a particular shape.  It’s representative also of the fact that people’s faith in each other is distinctly limited, and that there is a secret longing in the collective unconscious of the West to have the difficult tasks of the world done for us, even if it means sacrificing our liberty to get it done.  And in the 1930’s, when the world seemed so very fragile, and Europe and Russia seemed to be getting so far ahead of us, a group like this, a kinder, gentler form of total government that made itself seem so logical, is hardly surprising to see.

One thing that, of course, is never really meantioned is how the Technocrats would deal with people who didn’t want to go along with their plans, nor how they would go about incorporating 34 sovereign countries into a single continental state.  But if history is any guide, camps would be involved, and central Canada is a pretty big place – almost as big as Siberia.

Beginning, Middle, and End

August 9th, 2010

Maybe it’s the insomnia talking, but it seems to me, lately, that a lot of the comics I cut my teeth on back in the proverbial “Old Days” are allowing themselves to go the way of The Hollow Men (if you’ll forgive the cliché), succumbing to the inevitable, not with a bang, but with a whimper.  Almost to a one, the cause of this seems to be lack of support (whether real or perceived) from their readers, combined with a general frustration that seems to be a commonplace of all those of truly creative inclinations.  And in this, I cannot help but wonder whether I see my own looming destiny.

Though not the first to go, Tim Krieder’s The Pain: When Will It End? was the first one I really noticed.  For some time prior to placing the comic more or less on hiatus, Kreider had been leaving sad little messages woven into his weekly posts, to the extent that the decline of his comics career, at least that phase of it, was not truly a surprise.  It was still something a shock, however, seeing it in black and white.  Kreider is something of an artistic inspiration for me the link between his style and my own is pretty clear, to me at least, and I had corresponded with him at various times (which is to say I wrote him several emails to which he responded politely but with a vague annoyance that made me decide to drop it).  But to see him hang up his pen, more or less, as he has done, was really a loss to the cartoonist’s profession.

Then came Alpha Shade, which I so vigorously critiqued some months back.  In one of the Brudlos Brothers’ most recent (and most tendentious) posts, they detailed the long, frustrating decline in their readership, the rise in expenses, the difficulty of “making it” as cartoonists, and the general horror of the literary life.  Then came the little hints here and there at the edges of Sluggy Freelance.  Not to mention nearly a year’s hiatus.  And from there, the list went on.  And on.

And on.

One has to wonder at this.  Have these artists simply bitten off more than they can chew?  After all, Alpha Shade’s intended total length was stated to be somewhere near 1600 pages, a length that would make Ayn Rand sweat bullets.  And Sluggy and The Pain, being open-ended, had little hope of ever ending without the deliberate intentions of the artist.  But to have them wind down like this, with a sad little burp at the bottom of the Web, seems so, well, unworthy, to me.

All good stories, like all lives well lived, have a beginning, a middle, and an end.  And even when you may not be telling a single story, I think that there’s something to be said for treating your artistic career as though you are.  Take my current comic, 6-Commando, for example.  I have a very specific story that I’ve outlined, and it is finite.  Now it will take quite a while to complete, but I think it’s a manageable goal (10 chapters at 32 pages each).  But knowing this ahead of time gives me the luxury of knowing when and how the story will begin, rise, fall, and ultimately end.  For me, that’s enough to get me through the next page.  And I tend to think that, were my fellow cartoonists to look at it in a similar way, even if only as an exercise, these precipitous abandonments would not be happening.

Now to be fair, Alpha Shade is still onging, albeit very irregularly.  And Sluggy is back to the dailies, for now at least.  And even Krieder is updating his site every couple of months or so, while pursuing a career as an essayist and progressive know-it-all for the New York Times (his editorials are an excellent read, even though I think his politics are totally batshit).  But to have such great artists sell themselves so short on the medium of their birth is a very sad thing, to me.  Sure, everything changes, and the dust evetually settles on all of us alike.  But it seems a shame to just allow one’s efforts to cut off or fade away, like those essays we all wrote in third grade that ended with “I’m running out of paper now so this is the end.”  If you’re going to end, do so in a way worthy of the work you’ve done.  Either that, or do what I plan to do – die with your boots on.

On the other hand, give me five years and I’m sure I’ll be eating my own words.  So what do I know?

The End Of Culture

July 29th, 2010

O yes, I shall eat this Sammich! And then I shall turn on all my heroes, an' eat them for BRUFFIXT!

I have been thinking a lot recently about the subject of language and writing, mainly because I’m working on the second chapter of my graphic novel 6-Commando.  At the root of it (and I’m aware of the irony here) is my own love-hate relationship with the internet, and on a larger scale, with the digital age as a whole.  I, like others of my generation, am an internet junkie, but the development of the Information Age has happened during my lifetime, on a measurable timeline, and this gives me an interesting perspective on the issue.  My life spans the whole age of the personal computer, which had not truly been invented when I was born, but now, three decades on, has become so ubiquitous that we carry them on our wrists and in our pockets.  However, far from being the dream of Star Trek realized, I have come to believe that the digitization of literature is doing serious and continuing damage to the intellectual culture of the West, and is probably doing just as much violence to the East, as well, if not more.

Profound and pervasive paradoxes exist at the very core of our current civilization, but are not questioned by the current generation, who have been trained, by and large, either to be bored by or to ridicule the introspective frame of mind that pondering these questions entails.  Take literature, for example.  The rise of the internet has led as it were inevitably to the expansion of access to information, while at the same time eroding the process of critical thinking that was once associated with the gathering and assimilation of knowledge.  Where previously, the primary source of the body of human knowledge was the book, or by corollary, the library, one can find anything online these days with only a few clicks.  However, using a library or opening a book required that one make some kind of preliminary mental effort.  Physically moving to the place where the desired information was stored, selecting the proper book, and then further the proper page, required the individual to place themselves in a preparatory state of mind, where they interacted consciously with the physical objects that contained the knowledge that they sought.

The internet, however, has drastically telescoped this entire process.  The advent of search engines has largely replaced the actual selection of information by the individual, reducing the ordered intellectual process with summarized info-junk, without requiring that the computer user conjure up more than a few selected words.  This act of condensing the thought process has devalued it, and has led, I am convinced, to a profound degradation of the English language, allowing what one could once have considered “Standard” English to be replaced by slang and nonsense words, with the guiding principle being that language is fluid and therefore can change according to need, even at a moment’s notice.  Even worse is the enormous speed with which junk words and phrases, and the predigested ideas attached to them, make their way into common culture.  Take a phrase like “It is what it is,” for example, with its connotations of resigned acceptance and implied disinterest in making any attempt to change a given state of affairs.  Or even nonsense words like “proactive,” whose added syllable means nothing but extends the ability of the speaker to make sound issue from his larynx.  These linguistic tricks add nothing to the substance of the language; rather, they diminish it by breaking down the boundaries of meaning.  Their true purpose is not to advance any kind of understanding, but rather simply to prevent someone else from speaking for an extra fraction of a second.

The fundamental basis of knowledge, in the Western, Greco-Roman sense, is that things mean things, and that there is an essential truth to the world that is, therefore, knowable.  However, in order to have any kind of meaningful discussion about the ideas underlying our culture, there have to be common terms with which we can discuss them.  A professor and mentor of mine once made the point very forcefully in class, when he took off his shoe and shook it at a reticent student.  “If I call this a shoe, and you call it a woman, and we’re both somehow supposed to be correct, then how can we have any kind of discussion about anything?” he said.  “Unless we can agree on some kind of meaning, about what something is and what it isn’t, then nothing has any meaning, and there’s no point in even talking at all!”

In a world in which anything can mean anything, or, worse, in which nobody cares about meaning, except insofar as they can bend it to their own needs, culture cannot long survive.  The development of a valid and authentic connexion of representations about the truths and realities of the world as we experience it depends entirely upon our ability to express ourselves to each other.  A word can have many meanings, but adding or removing them capriciously or for some temporary purpose damages the word’s substance.  Why say “proactive” when you mean “active?”  That is, why not just say what you mean?

This kind of intellectual sloppiness is at the root of the degradation of intellect in our society.  Elevating slang to the same level of propriety and usage as Standard English is immoral – it implies a level of sameness that does not exist.  It encourages, in fact, a level of connexion that makes real, properly constructed language the same as verbal garbage, and in so doing, diminishes the value of valid, educated discourse.  It’s the same as claiming that a dime novel is just as valid a literary expression as Rousseau or Shakespeare.  It’s intellectual sloth in its most decadent form, and like any kind of laziness, it leads only to more of the same.  Ordered speech is a sign of ordered thoughts; and only ordered thoughts can produce literature.

I can only wonder at what will become of our culture in another two millennia, when we are the Ancients – will we be the Athenians of our age, or the Visigoths?  I would prefer the former, but I fear we are choosing the latter.

Note the Dude Wearing A Miniskirt

June 27th, 2010

I draw science fiction comics featuring self-aware robotic tanks (oops, did I just give away a plot point?  Aw, who cares, nobody reads this anyway!) so I think I can be forgiven a little serious geekiness.  So I’ll come clean – when I color my comics, I run old episodes of Star Trek in the background.

And today, I happened to flip on an old episode which had the delightful little scene shown at left, here.  I forget which episode it is, actually, as I found this particular little tidbit far too enthralling.  I had never remembered seeing dudes wearing skirts when I watched this show before, and yet here he is, an escapee from the crew of the NIMBUS, in all his glory, strutting through the corridors of the U.S.S. Enterprise.  I must be quite literally the last to get this joke.  I had never believed it until today.

I’m not freaking kidding.  I knew Star Trek was celebrating an open-minded and forward-thinking future, but miniskirt singlet uniforms for dudes?  Astonishing.  Either someone in wardrobe fell down on the job or the future is going to be really, really interesting.

Look especially at the grim expression on the guy’s face.  This is definitely not his granddaddy’s Starfleet.  Must have drawn the short straw at the casting call.

This goes hand in hand with the scene in Wrath of Khan where Kirk stops to check out a guy’s ass.  It’s in there – you don’t know that you’ve seen it, but you have.

Oh, come on, go watch it again.  I don’t want to ruin it for you.

The Achiever’s Index: PvP

June 17th, 2010

(c)2010 Scott Kurtz. Image used under Fair Use doctrine in support of a review.

Yeah.  Takin’ on the big dogs.  And in the world of webcomics, it doesn’t get much bigger than Scott Kurtz’s PvP.

Player versus Player, known most commonly by its portmanteau, is one of the biggest commercial successes in the webcomics world and as such has been the touchstone of this burgeoning online industry.  It follows the staff of a gaming magazine of the same name: Cole, the editor; Brent, and Jade, the staff writers; Francis, the sometime intern and now junior writer; and Skull, the loveable office troll.  The initial setup, way back in 1998, was a typical office-follies kind of strip.  The characters had fairly average comic-strip office gripes: deadlines, friction, not getting along.  By the time the strip underwent a major overhaul in 1999, the stories had expanded into a broader exploration of the characters themselves, and their various game-related fantasy lives.

It didn’t last.

Sure, the fantasy sequences are still there, as are the various pop-culture references, movie and game parodies, and all the rest of it.  But somewhere along the line, the development of the characters slowed to a near-halt, and they became what they are now – and that’s where they’ve stayed ever since.

I got into PvP back in college, and that was a decade ago.  So this might be the result of my jaded tastes as they have developed over time.  But I’ve read PvP over the past twelve years and I’ve seen its ups and downs.  And where it sits now, and where it has been for some time, is definitely what I have to call a plateau.  It’s a successful comic, and I don’t want this coming off as trashing the big guys.  PvP has a definite appeal.  But somewhere along the way, I think that Kurtz got a little too comfortable with his characters as they were, and let them just stay that way.  I can’t be sure of that, of course, but the five central members of the cast had, for a moment, somewhere around 2002, a really palpable feeling of humanness that they have since lost, becoming instead somewhat predictable office archetype cutouts.

Cole is the Older and Wiser one.  Brent is the wisecracking smartass.  Francis is the kid.  Jade is the woman in a man’s world.  PvP set its pattern and has adhered to it stoically for over a decade.  Little changes crop up here and there, but it still feels like a sitcom – I can almost hear the laff track.  And it’s a shame, because for a while, PvP was really blazing new trails.

Consider that in the late 1990’s, webcomics were really new and fresh.  They were caught in the gravity of their cultural antecedents, the Newspaper Comics, but they rapidly morphed into something totally unique, and the last decade has seen them explode into a universe of types, genres, styles – PvP is, in no small part, responsible for this major transofrmation of the industry.

But at the same time, Kurtz made himself businessman first and artist second.  I hesitate to say that because it sounds as though I’m maligning his strong sense for making his work profitable, which is exceptionally praiseworthy.  But I think it somehow stunted his artistic development, made him reluctant to take risks.  His most adventurous piece of storytelling, the short-lived comic book Justin, has so far seen only a single release, and that, too, may have made him pull back from the riskier side of comics creation.  The really deep development of his characters has effectively ceased, replaced with story twists, which are not the same thing. And though the strip remains as good as it ever was, it is still, in the end, the same as it ever was.

It was this safe uniformity that has all but killed the newspaper comics, now in their final death throes amidst a jumble of smarmy animal characters and predictable family humor.  But PvP, in going with what it knows, seems on the cusp of the same decline.  Ultimately, I’m torn on the subject of PvP.  On the one hand, the art is of a type that appeals to me very deeply.  It’s been consistently strong from the beginning, and yet has not been stagnant, developing towards its current, considerably more dynamic and engaging form.  Its format is still the “daily strip,” but the pacing is excellent and never seems dull.

On the other hand, the subject matter is distinctly limited.  One might call this knowing one’s market, but its occasional dalliances with deeper and more emotive subject matter hint at a comic that could concievably have much more to it.  But Kurtz has consistently drawn back from these deeper plot and character developments and his characters feel, in the end, kind of flat, cold even, and in reading the strip I am far more conscious that I am reading a comic strip than I’d prefer.  The conflicts are all fairly superficial and don’t reveal much about the characters themselves.  A sequence in which Jade and Brent find their nascent relationship threatened by an online romance, and one in which Brent contemplates the possibility of fatherhood, are notable exceptions.  But in spite of these much more engaging blips on the PvP radar, the characters  remain office clichés, almost verging on the Dilbert mode, and (I make no secret of this) I find Dilbert to be the most unfunny comic in human history.  So why go that route?  It’s not that I have an alternative direction I’d like to see the comic go - anything I think of is invariably trite and silly.  And maybe that’s PvP’s strength, in the end – that it synthesizes these little tropes into something readable and mildly amusing.  But in the best tradition of “yeah, but is it ART?”, I’m forced to ponder the question of whether or not that is really enough for me.

I can’t deny PvP’s continued commercial success and extreme popularity.  But in a hundred years, I don’t know if I can honestly say it will have contributed anything of lasting value to the substance of our civilization (and as I’m unlikely to last much beyond the next thirty years, I’ll just never know).  It’s a comic I read and think “That’s funny,” but which I never laugh at.  It’s a comic that is fantastically beautiful and with a slick, refined, high-style layout that is undeniably appealing, but there’s just something about it that I can’t ever get into.  So maybe it’s not fair of me to rate it as low as “Bummer,” but to me, it’s just missing something.  Call it a certain… “THINGness.”  Where comics like Sluggy Freelance did the expected in unexpected ways, PvP does the expected in expected ways.  And it is the lack of this ineffable substance that holds it back, and keeps it pretty much in an eternal loop.  How many ways can you parody video games?  How many geek in-jokes can you pile on?  How close can you get to being Penny Arcade without being Penny Arcade?  Like the movie tropes it taps into, it is just, after a while, somehow tired.  And as I’m sure Cole would say (and if memory serves, DID say at one point, in Yoda form) “that is why you fail.”

STRIKE: The art is slick and refined, and has been since the early revamp which occurred in 1999.  Since then, it has gotten progressively more expressive and colorful, and in its present form is stylized to a degree I really find that I like.  There have also been a number of notable story sequences that are truly engaging, two of which I mention above.  And with comics being a business, one can’t deny that the commercial success of PvP is admirable, and the strip itself went leaps and bounds towards normalizing webomics as a serious business.

GUTTER: The story, conflict, and character development have become shallow, and the characters themselves, perhaps victims of their own success, have lost a great deal of the three-dimensionality they once had.  The comic has become in many ways a Penny Arcade clone (do we really need more than one Penny Arcade?), with web-based snarkiness and tech-geek in-jokes replacing the more interesting storylines.  One-off strips are proliferating, many of them with somewhat inexplicable punchlines that read like the “You Had To Be There” jokes I grew up with – and still find boring.

OVER THE LINE: The problem is really that PvP no longer ventures over the line.  The strip risks nothing, and so produces a conservative comic in the guise of an edgy one.  Sure, it’s popular, and sure, it’s successful, but it’s also just the same as it was a year ago, or more, and at its core has become predictable, a quality which is death to any art form.  Just look at the funny pages and you’ll see the same tired tendencies.  Being online, in and of itself, is no longer good enough, and PvP is not keeping up.

Overall Rank: BUMMER

I read PvP every day, and yet it’s just like a newspaper gag strip – momentary, mild, conservative, and ultimately transient.  Its artwork is top-notch, and the writing has moments of great excellence.  But the majority of those moments seem to be in PvP’s past at this point, and the most current story arcs seem to be an amalgam of disjointed tech-industry gags.  Frankly, I think the comic was stronger when nobody in the office cared about printing the damn magazine.  The ins and outs of reviewing video games are only of limited interest, and the interjected fantasy lives of the characters are far more engaging; would that they were more numerous.  PvP’s relative success in the webcomics world notwithstanding, it’s ultimately too self-conscious of a comic to really make it a real Achiever in my book, and its two-dimensional characters, with their snarky wisecracks and Seinfeld-esque layabout behavior don’t really force me to like them the way that, for example, the titular characters in Anders Loves Maria did.  Perhaps the future holds greater things for PvP, but for now, I have the distinct feeling that the strip’s great days are behind it, and though I’ll read it as loyally as the next guy, it will be with a little pang of regret for what might have been.

PvP updates daily.  You can read it at http://www.pvponline.com.

PvP is written and drawn by Scott Kurtz.

He Often Speaks of The Coming War Between Man and the Brotherhood of Machines

June 12th, 2010

By now, anyone plugged into the comics trade probably has heard of the brouhaha surrounding the impending change for ComicPress to a “paywall” model.  And flames aside, it doesn’t look terribly promising.

First up, thousands of artists, myself included, have become dependent upon ComicPress to help manage their online presence, and we got into it on the premise that it was being offered for free as an open-source product.  Putting it behind a pay barrier (and a rather steep one at that – $80) is understandable, since people have to make a living, but it really just kind of smacks of a cosmic “fuck you” to comic artists on the web.

The whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that the move to a pay model is cloaked in vagueness and rhetoric.  It may cost more than $80 depending on who’s selling it.  You may or may not actually be able to modify it yourself.  There are indications that it actually has to be installed and maintained by an ComicPress designer, to whom you have to give access to your website, database and SQL base.  The free version may or may not be fully supported, and may or may not be compatible with whatever new pay version is coming up.  None of these things is entirely clear, and it’s all kind of a muddle on the forums while we cartoonists wait for the other shoe to drop.

I’m a capitalist.  I believe in making a buck.  But I also believe in knowing your market and not alienating your base, and this move, in its currently-evident form, seems to do both of those things.  The developers, when asked, seem to be rather coy and more than a little snarky about the whole thing.  And this is not confidence producing.  The tone of the whole thing is that the potential customers pretty much owe the developers, and the time is coming when they’ll get theirs.  And that kind of an entitled attitude is a great way to make potential customers pretty much despise you.  Remember how well-received that idea Microsoft had was, about making Windows a subscription system, where to keep your computer running you’d have to pay them every month?  That really made people rush to buy Microsoft products, didn’t it?  Moreover, if the word is true that only some developer or third party can install the damned thing, well, let me be among the first to say fuck THAT.  I’m not handing anyone the keys to my website just yet, thank you very much.

This is all still developing, of course, and may end up being a tempest in a teacup.  But I for one am going to start coming up with a contingency plan.  If ComicPress goes this route for real, I would rather get into the HTML and code my own site from scratch.  Or hire a designer I can be sure is working for me, and not some software developer.  And though these things are always mired in hype, I urge all my fellow-cartoonists to keep an eye on this.  As of now, it’s not looking like smooth sailing ahead.

The Achiever’s Index: SLUGGY FREELANCE

June 11th, 2010

Well, with work and work, and more work, which occupies the vast majority of the time I don’t spend at the fringes of consciousness, I thought it would make an interesting re-grouping move to take on one of the oldest and most established comics online: Sluggy Freelance.  I was first plugged into comics (that is, COMICS, period!) by this deceptively simple strip by my roommate way back in my college days.  He went on to marry, start a family, and become a successful midwestern philosophical know-it-all, whose intellect continues to leave me in total awe.  And of course I, on the other hand, went on to become a bachelor-architect who still draws comic books, and still reads Sluggy Freelance every goddamn week.

And a good thing, too!  Sluggy is one of those rare combinations of story, design, and arch parodic humor that moves so many directions at once that it’s nearly impossible not to be totally engaged by it.  Everyman Torg, a failed web designer, and his sometime roommate Riff, an unusually successful tinkerer and inventor, headline the buddy movie-style adventures, which begin with an attempt to summon Satan via the internet, and only get more bizarre from there on out.  The pair hop from dimension to dimension, dragging in everyone around them in the best tradition of an online singularity, including such classic characters as Bun-bun, Torg’s violent pet mini-lop rabbit, Zoe, their next door neighbor (a foil and sometime romantic interest for both Riff and Torg), a seemingly endless set of alternate selves, TV- and film-parody characters, and a recurring group of the most beautiful demons, fresh from the Dimension of Pain.

If this sounds outlandish and disjointed, it’s because it kind of is.  But it also makes an odd kind of sense, too.  To attempt to quantify the entirety of the series beyond this general setup would be futile, of course, but the story’s twists and turns, its naked parodies contrasted against its moments of sincerity and poignace, and the intense feeling you have throughout that the comic is a work of pure joy and total committment on the part of the artist, clearly set this comic head and shoulders above most others of its kind.

What is most interesting to me is that Sluggy spans the gap between print and online comics, and so acts as kind of a record of the development of comics from a syndicated, purely-print object (in the 1990’s) to their present form, in which the traditional big-publisher print houses are contending with the increasing power of on-demand self-publishing.  Sluggy’s early adventures are fairly routine outings, episodic on the one-week/six-week pattern common to the old-style newspaper cartoon.  But by about 2000, author Pete Abrams began really pushing the limits of both his characters and the medium, and story arcs became longer, more intricate, and the art fell into the present cartoony but generally-refined look it has kept ever since.  In this, Sluggy Freelance, true to form, has its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

In all honesty, from an artistic standpoint, one could rarely call this comic more than middling (with some arcs, including the current one, being notable exceptions).  But that’s just the point.  Where the art is weak, the story is strong, and where the story is weak, the art is invariably there to pick up the slack.  The result is a cohesive artistic whole that I find to be nothing less than sublime.  It bears all the hallmarks of the classic print cartoons like Gould’s Dick Tracy or Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey.  The goal is not that every panel be a masterwork of intricate, computer-generated subtlety, but rather that the whole object, the comic as a universal sum total, live up to its standard as a body of work.  In this, Sluggy Freelance is the comic artist’s comic – a playbook for the genre that shows it at its best: not as a series of pinup artist’s obsessive nightmares, but as a readable visual story which accepts its shortcomings alongside its strengths.

Never drawn simply to be drawn, and never manipulative or contrived (well, maybe once or twice, but I’ll forgive it!), Sluggy Freelance has covered a tremendous amount of territory in the last thirteen years.  And though only now just beginning to sound like it’s on the verge of heading into a long walk to retirement, it has already achieved so much that it will always remain a masterpiece of the wecomics genre.

STRIKE: Sluggy Freelance’s strengths lie in its continuities.  The stories interweave vast amounts of pop culture and geek-scene in-jokes, synthesizing them and distilling out stories that are amazingly accessible.  The artwork is stylized and “comic strippy,” in a way that makes its inspiration in its print antecedents quite obvious.  I would not exactly call it a “family” comic, as this has become synonymous with smarmy nonsense like The Family Circus, but Sluggy is acceptable for everyone and has only the most mild and occasional risqué elements.  And yet, it has maintained a clear tap on the main cable of the Geek community that has stayed remarkably up-to-date and relevant, and there are some continuities, particularly the current one, with incredibly moody and evocative artwork that belie the simplicity of the earliest story arcs.

GUTTER: The very nuanced and topical satire may sometimes be lost on people who are not totally plugged in to the geek community.  The humor is widely variable, sometimes arch, sometimes slapstick, and sometimes totally absent.  Reading Sluggy Freelance is a widely variable experience and though, ultimately, it has something for everyone, it is also guaranteed to have lots of things that are not for everyone.

OVER THE LINE:  Sluggy remains a product of its time, and its strength is in its pioneering attitude towards the medium and its consistently strong storytelling, but this comic reached an artistic plateau some time ago, and though this is fine for most purposes, it’s far from being your average “comic book” kind of art.  This, of course, does not make it in any way bad, per se, but people expecting the dazzling artistic tours-de-forces of comics like The Phoenix Requiem or The Meek might be put off if seeing Sluggy for the first time. 

Overall Rank: ACHIEVER

It’s impossible, in my opinion, to really get a grip on the webcomics genre without a thorough grounding in Sluggy Freelance.  In the strip’s thirteen years online, Pete Abrams has covered all the bases with remarkable aplomb, and yet each new storyline remains fresh and engaging.  The comic, in its massiveness, its adventurousness, its tone, and the remarkable blending of really engaging characters with a bizarre and delightfully warped sense of humor, is a true webcomics classic, and little can be added to the genre that Abrams has not already at least partially explored.  I consider Sluggy Freelance to be basic reading for anyone wishing to understand webcomics, but be prepared for a major undertaking: a decade’s worth of daily strips await, and getting through it is no small task.

Sluggy Freelance is written and drawn by Pete Abrams.  You can read it online at http://www.sluggy.com.

The Achiever’s Index: ANDERS LOVES MARIA

May 19th, 2010
[Editor's Note: Anders Loves Maria is graphic and is not suitable for children or for work.]

Anders Loves Maria is one of those unique stories that worked itself into my subconscious so seamlessly that I cannot now remember how I first came upon it.  A work of deceptive graphic simplicity and enormous complexity in story, character development and structure, I am so totally blown away by it that I can barely contain myself.  And I’m not the first to rave.

The initially simple love story is set up pretty clearly from page one.  Anders von Silfersked and his girlfriend Maria Holm, co-habitating in a Stockholm apartment, are living on the fringes of the twentysomething urban art scene, doing what twenty-five-year-olds do, and pondering the next step in their relationship.  But Engstrom soon piles on layer after layer of complexity over this simple scenario, dragging you kicking and screaming into web of broken promises and equally broken people.

Anders, for starters, is the son of an ageing and reclusive Swedish petit-noblewoman – an agoraphobe and late-in-life lesbian who is romantically involved with the family lawyer.  Maria is the daughter of rural alcoholics who nurses a deep grudge towards her home town and her dysfunctional family.  Anders is living the life of ease that all artists crave – complete freedom to pursue his photographic career – and yet, like all people so empowered, he finds himself torn between his hereditary ease and the draw of the neo-beatnik art world he pretends to.  Maria has spent her years in Stockholm reinventing herself, and lives in the midst of a complex morass of fears and resentments connected to her troubled upbringing.

And now, Maria is pregnant.

From here the story spins wildly from person to person in a constantly-evolving synchronicity, where sex meets love meets heartbreak meets sadness meets loss.  And yet the entirety of the story is so seamlessly woven together that the whole becomes a remarkably tender and incredibly moving human drama that, once you start, you will almost be comeplled to finish at a single sitting.  This is not at all the kind of defiant, “how-dare-you-judge-me” kind of story that I’ve seen produced by the literary it-boys of the United States “comix” scene.  Engström, rather, is subtly judgemental, but she is judgemental of all her characters, equally.  No attempt is made to centralize any one character as the standard which the others are held up against.  They are all shown as they are, and their emotions are remarkably real: Maria’s insecurities, Anders’ selfishness, the very real hurt they cause each other and those around them, and the enormous love they share, in the end, with all its imperfections and tragedies.  The result is a story that is constantly changing course, right up to the very end, which some readers may find disorienting or confusing.  But taken for all and all, it truthfully depicts the kinds of lives these sorts of people lead.  I know a lot of people like this – I work with them, studied with them; in a sense, I am one of them.  And this is how we are.

With all the depth of the story, it’s equally remarkable that the artwork is just as layered, varied and complex.  This is due more to the vagaries of the artist’s life (scanners breaking, illness that prevented pages from being colored, and so forth, to which I, for one, can relate) but in one of those sublime coincidences that happens only in real life and great fiction, it works.  The constant changes page size and composition, the abrupt differences in color, linework, style – they draw out and emphasize the mercurial nature of the characters’ lives, and underscore the great conflicts, deep pain and profound affections that they all share.  Engström, in her blog, from time to time speaks about “changing” the story when it goes to print, and my great fear is that she will, in the process, equalize the art and story styles and so rob the story of its rough-hewn variations, which are the root of its enormous beauty.  This being the case, of course, I urge you to read it online as well, lest this impact be diminished in print.

Simply put, this is one of the best comics I have read in a long time.  Unpretentious and unashamed, with a story that resonates with everyone who’s had to endure the hellish years of their late twenties, Anders Loves Maria is by my assessment a colossus of the comics world.  It is not a comic for children, and deals with sex and physical relationships in a very straightforward and often graphic fashion, so be prepared.  But in the end, the reality that it portrays is so effortlessly generated, the tragedy atmospheric and so palpable, and the world so beautifully constructed, that, in the midst of a sea of superheroes and self-indulgent underground angst, it has almost singlehandedly restored my faith in the art.

Achiever’s Assessment:

STRIKE: On all points, this is a fantastically beautiful, touching, and extraordinary work of graphic art.  The fact that the art is highly stylized makes the characters more accessible, since, in the Scott McCloud sense, you are not trying to decode what they’re trying to be, you’re simply accepting them as they are.  This simplicity is deceptive, however, both characters and story are very serious.  It also intensifies the relationship between the two eponymous characters, and draws you into the trials and tribulations of their romance in a way I’m convinced that no other method can do.

GUTTER: The changes in art style over the run of the comic may take some people by surprise, or put off the casual reader.  Though originally seriallized on a semi-daily basis, in its current form, this is not a story you can dip in and out of effectively – you basically should sit and read it at a single go, or you won’t get the most out of it.  Also, the artist has made some noises about going back to change parts of the story before it sees print, something I would caution her strongly against doing.  Even though this probably makes me something of a hypocrite, with my constant talk of revision and re-drawing in my own comics, I really do believe this work is complete as it is, and any revision would only diminish it.

OVER THE LINE: The story’s simple and stylized art style belies the deadly seriousness of the issues the characters face.  Sex, love, lies, betrayals and drug and alcohol use are presented very graphically.  This is not a story that is appropriate for children or for the workplace, and it’s well that a reader know this going in.

Overall Rank: ACHIEVER

I am in awe of Rene Engström.  This enormous work, with its experiments in art, story and media, its dynamic and constantly-developing style, and its believable, lovable and totally three-dimensional characters, represents the very best of what I think webcomics should be all about.  Without imposture or pretension, it tells a distinctly human story to which we all can relate, and though I may quibble with its slightly abrupt ending, it manages to be so emotional and poignant without being manipulative.  The story as a whole is a graphic and literary triumph and is well deserving of the international attention it has garnered in the years it was being written.  Quite literally, were I to have to recommend the one comic to read immediately, I’d have to say this is the one.

Anders Loves Maria is a complete work – the story has concluded.  You can read the entire story online at http://anderslovesmaria.reneengstrom.com.  Though highly stylized and dealt with very seriously, the art and story content are not suitable for work.

Anders Loves Maria was written and illustrated by Rene Engström.

The Achiever’s Index: ALPHA SHADE

May 4th, 2010
[Editor's Note: This is the first in a new feature series on Vicious Print: The Achiever's Index.  In it, I will be identifying and analyzing the comics I follow.  Comic art, like any other art form, is extremely dear to its creators, as I well know, and it is a tough thing to take criticism.  Please know that I do not offer it in anything but the best spirit of comraderie from a fellow comics creator, and is more for my own desire to understand my tastes than to find fault or weakness in others.]

A friend of mine in our fine nation’s Capital turned me on to this comic about a year ago, and I was immediately taken with its lovely, steampunkish retro-future style.  Aerial ironclads, a Great War-style conflict, all the trappings of trench warfare in their gritty, sweaty intensity – it spoke to me.  It seemed to me the kind of comic I had always wanted to draw, and I was totally impressed.

Alpha Shade begins in medias res, on the front lines of a trench war between a Northern and a Southern superpower (both are called “Empires,” and I’ll touch on that later).  As the story opens, the youthful soldiers of Gearia, a vassal state caught in the midst of the conflict, are laying siege to a key desert city on the frontier between the two Empires.  With barely more than late Steam Age weapons (biplanes, field guns, and long rifles), they make their advance across the denuded wasteland, and the battle is met, and you’re basically certain, right from the getgo, that the authors are not at all afraid to deal violently with sympathtic characters.  After all, this is war.

This is a truly gutsy move on the part of the two creators, and signalled a story that would require a lot of attention to follow.  The plight of youth confronting mortality is a theme as timeless as literature itself, and makes for a consistently interpretable and relatable story.  As I sat down to read and really started to get into the first chapter, the story drew me in.

For anyone as obsessed as I am with the Great War and its impact on humanity, the first chapter of Alpha Shade does not disappoint.  In this world, though flying ironclads are apparrently commonplaces of “modern” warfare, airplanes and tanks have only just been invented, and most combat is with snipers, infantry charges and artillery duels.  And you don’t have to know a whole lot about history to know how that worked out in the real world, at places like Verdun and Argonne Forest.  Even though this particular front in the conflict seems very small (very small, like several hundred yards small) the fullness of primitive infantry combat plays out in gritty realism, assisted by steampunk technology here and there.  Alpha Shade has the makings of a really intense war story, and I was just getting to love the intense feeling of entrapment a trench soldier would feel, fighting for a dusty patch of worthless ground – a Gallipoli or a Tel-El-Khebir.  But then something happened.

The psychic cats arrived.

Now, granted, this is Amerimanga we’re talking about, here.  And as a well-defined subculture, Japanese-style comics drawn by Americans use a number of stock plot elements that are identified with the high end of Japanese pulp comic book stories.  Often, it’s done as a wink or homage to the Manga community.  But in Alpha Shade, the tropes run so thick, and are permitted to drive the plot so centrally, that they are impossible to ignore.  There are intelligent, quasi-magical cats, dragons, feudal and hierarchical/clan-based social systems, magical amulets, bullet-dodging swordplay, smooth-talking warrior-women, ninjalike assassins – all the amassed trappings of the genre, and all in one place, taking on a prominence that gradually threatens to make the plot devices more important than the characters themselves.

These elements are the ones that are most immediately recognizable to American readers of Manga, and so it’s a small wonder they should find their way into the American genre they inspire.  Hell, even in the West, things like quasi-Feudalistic futures and Amazon warrior women with swords have been part of the science fiction groupmind for close to a century (vide: the John Carter series, Foundation, Dune, etc.).  It’s a sure hallmark of a writer’s influences when he resorts to the trappings of empires, lordship and feudal hierarchies instead of trying to imagine something more unique; think of a fantasy story that doesn’t have Elves in it: it’ll take you a minute.  Granted, even sci-fi demigod Gene Roddenberry couldn’t imagine that a democratic future could be for everyone – the long-suffering Federation is beset on all sides by empires and dictators.  Maybe it’s because feudalism seemingly had such a clear hierarchy, and complex democracies too easily get bogged down in politics when you’d rather just be kicking ass and taking names.  As the Devil Ned Flanders said, “This is always so much easier in Mexico.”

And, of course, any comic requires that you suspend disbelief.  And I would willingly overlook some little things, like the very strange left turn that the plot takes in Chapter 2, or the fact that the entire Gearian officer corps is made up of pubescent teenagers (their Character Bios set their ages at twentysomething, but they all look about fourteen the way they’re drawn).  But there are just so many of these small things, these little pre-formed plot elements, that the combination of all of these elements together felt, in the end, just so… not predictable, exactly.  Perhaps, “not-unpredictable.”  It’s not at all that they make the comic bad – it isn’t, by any stretch.  It’s just that it starts off so uniquely that you come to expect that it will continue that way, and for them to fall back on the same tired Manga clichés I’d already seen so many times before was slightly disappointing.  The makings of a really great war story were already there on page one – none of these other elements were needed at all!  Had the logic followed out with just that simple early setup, the story would have been truly unique.  But somewhere around the third quarter of Chapter 1, I had the distinct sinking feeling that the authors had somehow, perhaps subconsciously, either got caught up in their world’s “Oh, cool!” factor or simply lost confidence in the strength of their first setup’s own merits, and they began to pile on the rest of the predigested Manga devices to “fill it out.”

And in spite of the gorgeous art, the cool technology, the engaging story and the consistently strong pacing, the failing of Alpha Shade is that it fell into this trap so easily.  Had the creators been just a little more disciplined with their world-building, they might have avoided this pitfall, and dared to forge ahead into uncharted territory instead of falling back on tried and tested but decidedly overused Manga devices.  This is a fully understandable impulse, one I’ve probably succumbed to myself without even knowing it.  However, while I can understand it, I don’t agree with it, and the authors’ decisions on these points are what is ultimately holding back this unique and intelligent comic ever so slightly from truly breaking away from the average Amerimanga.

However, for all that, the story still carries me away, and the battle and war scenes are so convincingly plotted and drawn that they overpower the clichés.  For now.  It is my ardent hope that the authors will get back to the basics of their story and worry less about plot twists, crossworld intrigues, psychic animals and magical amulets, and get back to the hard core of what makes their story unique: the young facing up to the inevitable.  If they can do this, and let the rest of it fade away, they will drag the story back towards its exciting and truly outstanding beginning, and reassert the story as something truly unique in the comics world.

Achiever’s Assessment:

STRIKE: The art and style of the story are excellent, and the pacing is wonderful.  The characters are engaging and, though the story’s emotion skews towards the maudlin at times, the total effect of the comic is of a fully-developed world that lets you forget that you are reading a comic.  This, plus the unique setting and the well-developed technological background, makes the comic worthy of note, and places it far above most others of the genre.  Gritty and atmospheric, the artwork calls up an odd mixture of historical fiction and personal nightmare, and does so seamlessly.

GUTTER: From time to time, the mustard-yellow transfer look of this comic can be tiring on the eyes.  I know it’s meant to denote a wartime sepia photo look, but some pages are rather more washed-out than I’d prefer they be.  This is only a very minor artistic problem, though (and it abates somewhat in the scenes in Chapter 2) and it’s probably mostly internal to my own head, so take it with a grain of salt.  A bigger problem is that the characters, even the ones meant to be elderly, all look like they hover between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, and this can radically skew your view of the entire mise-en-scène.  However, the underlying strength of the artwork as a whole unit tends to nullify any minor problems present, and the consistency of the whole is a strong binding element.

OVER THE LINE: Psychic cats, pre-teen military commanders, dragon riders, samurai swords, peerages and feudal empires.  These tropes are so common to Amerimanga as to be clichés at this point, and though worked into this story pretty well, they’re too recognizeable as such for me to ignore them.  In the same way as Elves and Dwarves are the unmistakeable mark of a fantasy story, the clichés in Alpha Shade feel too much like compulsory add-ons that scream “See!?  It’s MANGA!  GET IT?”  Yes, I get it.  But a more sophisticated approach to the setting would have really made the story stand up and work, and even though they don’t really damage the comic per se, they are, in my book, definite weaknesses, when held against how strong the story could have been without them.

Overall Rank: FAR OUT

In spite of my vocal disapproval of certain points, I cannot help but like it.  Alpha Shade’s following in the comics community is well-deserved, and in spite of its choice of several rather weak story elements (the feudalism, the dragons, the psychic cats, etc.) it is beautifully drawn, well-realized and definitely more than worth your time to read.  It is, however, the prevalence of these weaker story elements that keep it from fully achieving, and they are so entrenched in the plot at this point that they are impossible to overlook.  And although, for now, Alpha Shade falls short of full status as an Achiever, I cannot overstate the visual impact of the artwork, which started strong and has gotten even more refined over 240 pages.  And even though it seems to be on something of a hiatus at the moment, in spite of my nitpicky misgivings, I find myself wanting to see what will happen next; this, in the end, is the mark of an effective story.

At the time of publication, Alpha Shade is updating only irregularly.  However, you can read the entire comic, and its related materials, at http://www.alpha-shade.com.

Alpha Shade is written and illustrated by Christopher and Joseph Brudlos.

Saving the Earth, One Free-Thinker At A Time

April 22nd, 2010

Ah, Earth Day. That invented fabrication of time and space that allows people of all races and creeds to come together to pore over the excruciating miniutiae of every single daily decision and its impact on “THE ENVIRONMENT.” So, yes, everybody, HAPPY FREAKIN’ EARTH DAY.

I’m not totally sure when it stopped being okay to just appreciate the works of nature for their own sake, but it was probably around 1970, if I had to take a guess. That’s when being a naturalist became a pseudoscientific profession, and when lovers of nature got co-opted by people who wanted to redesign the world in their own graven image. I’m reminded of an episode of South Park, in which a character in the year 2546 says “Using logic and reason aren’t enough – you have to be a dick to everyone who doesn’t think the same way you do.” Well, as we hurtle headlong towards that future of scientific balance devoid of art, humanism and philosophy, Earth Day has become another hallmark of our increasingly denuded society.

It’s not an opportunity to take the day to appreciate the beauty of the American Wilderness (of which there are still VAST amounts, in spite of the propaganda about over-urbanization), it’s a day to teach kids that if you use anything amde of plastic you’re worse than Hitler. I remember having this crap drummed into me back in grade school and even then I thought it was unnatural and vaguely suspect.  And in this world, where our self-described progressives look approvingly to China for ideas about social order, and where unelected international forums take place in foreign countries to dictate the structure of “the carbon economy,” I guess it’s no surprise that this national guilt trip is imposed on us with ever greater vigor each year.

I’m constantly shocked (though maybe I shouldn’t be) by the offhanded way in which our culture is tumbing downwards towards hierarchical serfdom, just at the very moment when real liberal democracy is becoming attainable worldwide.  I know I’m the beneficiary of the EPA and the Clean Air Act and all that good stuff, but even so Earth Day seems like just another day for people hankering after social power to impose their view of society on the rest of us.  The false dichotomy of THE ENVIRONMENT holds no more water than Bush’s cowboy “If your not FER us yer AGIN us!” but this seems to have no more impact on the progressives of the world than the latter had on the knee-jerk Reactionaries.

Well, the world keeps spinning.  But so long as I can do so, I’ll never give in to the Green Police.  After all, I’m French-Polish-Catholic.  I’m immune to guilt.