THE MERCHANT'S WAR

Been reading quite a bit of Golden Age sci-fi recently, although my wanderings have occasionally taken me out of the golden age and into the silicon age, like 1984s sequel to The Space Merchants - The Merchant's War.

As this is the sequel to The Space Merchants, one of the greatest sci fi novels of all time, I had high expectations for this book. Okay, C.M. Kornbluth, Pohl’s co-writer on the first book, was long dead by the time he got around to writing this sequel in the early 80s, but still, Fred Pohl is the guy who wrote Gateway, so, safe hands, right?

Wrong.

It’s difficult to convey quite how bad this book is. Oh, okay, I’ve read far worse. When I say ‘bad’, I’m talking about the disparity between the talent of the author and the level of the performance, because, dammit, Pohl is a great writer! It’s just so frustrating to see him waste his talents, because despite a great premise, and plenty of penetrating satire, The Merchant’s War is a narrative vehicle whose wheels just keep spinning, but never get anywhere.

The Story

some time has elapsed since the first novel. Venus is colonised, though still harsh to live in, and all advertising is banned, a fact that provokes some (highly amusing) observations on life without adverts. Here is a Venus ad:

      All cocktails are canned premixes and taste like it.

      The red wine is corky and not a good year. The white is a little better.

Our hero is “Tarb”, a (bizarrely gullible) Star Class Copysmith (like Mitch Courtney in the first book) secretly operating out of the Earth embassy on Venus. In the first few pages you are led to think that something terrible is going to happen, involving planted agents, or kidnapping, or something. Only it never does. Or rather it does, but way, way later. Meanwhile, Tarb moves to Earth. Tarb accidentally gets addicted to a chocolatey drink called ‘Mokey Coke’ and his career fortunes suffer. Tarb starts working hard, and his fortunes revive. Then, suddenly, he gets shipped off in a troop carrier to Mongolia, where he drinks more Mokey Coke and gets sunstroke…

Yes, we are in ‘One Damn Thing After Another’ territory, the curse of the improvisatory writer, where lots of stuff happens, but none of it really matters. You could take the chapters from the middle of The Merchant’s War and, honestly, you could shuffle them around and it wouldn’t make one bit of difference to the story, because there isn’t any development or plot line to speak of. It’s safe to say that the strongest, in fact the only motivation that Tarb really has, is to find out where his next Mokey Coke is coming from.

Sadly, that isn’t enough to make the book interesting. Frustratingly, potentially great scenes, such as Tarb finally going to a rehab camp for consumer addicts, are rushed and reach nothing like their full potential. "Darn, that should have been a good scene!" I kept thinking. But it wasn't. Towards the end of the book, Pohl remembers the plot he was setting up at the beginning, and things start to come together a little, but only a little. Then it ends, abruptly. Incidentally, the characterisation is shocking, even by science fiction standards, and the world-building here is slapdash at best.  

Why couldn’t Pohl pull it off? Let’s go back to The Space Merchants, the original novel Pohl co-wrote with Cyril Cornbluth way back in the early 50s. There have been differing views over the years on what contribution each author made to the original story. Kingsley Amis, in his survey of the science fiction field, New Maps of Hell, suggested that Kornbluth’s role was “to provide the more violent action while Pohl filled in the social background and the satire”. I think that was partly true. Cornbluth certainly knew how to keep a story moving. Damon Knight (see In Search of Wonder) actually suggested Space Merchants was “at least three-quarters Kornbluth”, but later revised that opinion as unfair. Pohl’s own account of the novel’s creation (see his memoir, The Way the Future Was) has it that he had already completed the first third - that is, the set up - before getting stuck. He then turned it over to Kornbluth for the (action-packed) middle section and then wrapped up the ending, before revising the whole thing for style and consistency. 

My own feeling, from the longer Pohl works that I have read, (Gateway, Jem, In the Problem Pit) is that Kornbluth also provided much-needed development and structure. In all these works I mention, Pohl’s heroes suffer from depression, lack aim and dither from one (sometimes great) scene to the next, without really caring about the outcome. In Gateway, this doesn’t matter so much because the whole story is about a guy struggling with his lack of resolution. That's probably why Gateway works and the others don't really come off. 

If all this sounds like there are no redeeming qualities to The Merchants' War, that's not the case. It has a lot of great ideas and funny satire. It's a book that's full of potential which is just never realised. It’s just a shame that there wasn’t a Kornbluth around who could kick this story into shape.

Interestingly, if you pick up a copy of 'Our Best', which is an anthology of shorter collaborations between Pohl and Kornbluth from back in the 50s, you can read the original Epilogue to Gravy Planet (The original magazine title for what would become The Space Merchants). It was never used in the book reprints, and Pohl says it went in a direction he didn't want for the sequel. Shame. Those 2 1/2 chapters have better writing, more action, more story, than anything in The Merchants' War. 

Kurtzman and Spontaneity

I'm a big fan of Harvey Kurtzman. For me he's one of the greatest comic creators of all time. What I love about Kurtzman's work, above all, is the element of spontaneity which he manages to get into his work. It literally looks like he's thought it up and just slapped it down on the page with barely any thought at all, because the inks are so loose and expressive.
















Of course, anybody who knows anything about Kurtzman's work processes at all, knows that this is far from the truth. Kurtzman was a fastidious perfectionist, constantly working and reworking elements until he got them just right. When working with other artists, as he did on EC titles like Frontline Combat and Mad, as well as on his retirement ticket Little Anny Fanny, he was also a control freak, ensuring at every stage that the product turned out exactly the way he wanted it.






Yet the fact is that in Kurtzman's best work, there's a wonderful looseness to his stuff that belies the preparation that's gone into his work. The Jungle Book is probably the best example of this.
















There are some occasions, however, when you wish Kurtzman had stopped at the first or second draft. On certain jobs, Kurtzman's control freakery basically squeezes all the life out of his work, leaving it a lifeless husk. This usually happens when he works with another artist. For example, in the Comics Journal Library special on Kurtzman [which is an excellent resource for Kurtzman images and interviews], there is a record of an illustration job that Kurtzman worked on with Al Jaffee for a magazine cover set in a restaurant. The number of processes that Kurtzman goes through to get to the finished product is quite staggering. After getting an initial sketch from Jaffee, Kurtzman goes through several revisions himself. Then he goes to the restaurant and does a series of perspective drawings and reference sketches. After that, he prepares a colour guide for the artist. It's weird that any art editor, however talented, would get this involved with the art process of an illustrator. After all, what are you hiring an illustrator for, if not to get them to give you the unique benefit of their vision? I'm not convinced, actually, that Kurtzman's collaboration with Jaffee, in that case, or with the EC artists earlier on resulted in their, or his, best work. My opinion is that artists tend to produce their best work when they are given some artistic licence, not when they are slavishly following someone else's designs. Ironically, when Kurtzman went on to draw Little Annie Fanny, he was himself the victim of micromanagement by Playboy editor Hugh Hefner. Okay, there's a world of difference between being micromanaged by an artist on an art job, and being micromanaged by a guy with no art experience, but still...






If you want the ultimate in laboured control over work processes, look no further than Little Anny Fanny, the strip that Kurtzman worked on with his old Mad buddy, Bill Elder.
















Many people think it's sad that Kurtzman spent so many years on this strip, a strip which was essentially, soft porn with a few chuckles. The economic argument for Kurtzman doing this strip was irrefutable, of course. Kurtzman was a shy guy working in an industry which favours the huckster. It's a miracle, really, that he found any outlet at all for his idiosyncratic talent. In my opinion, however, the problem with Little Anny Fanny isn't the trivial subject matter actually - it's the tediously faultness execution. Kurtzman and Elder went through draft after draft, with roughs, colour guides, inks, and so on, before the final version (you can find full details of this process in the terrifically illustrated, The Art of Harvey Kurtzman). It sure looks polished by the end, but is it art? All evidence that it was created by a living, breathing human being, with the heart that beats in Kurtzman's best work, seems to be absent.

Ten Great French Comics

All the comics below are guaranteed excellent, by me!

1.       Blutch/Sfar/Trondheim - Donjon Monstres:  Mon Fils le Tuer

2.       Blutch – Le Petit Christian

3.       Bruno Heitz – Un Prive a la Cambrousse

4.       Johan Sfar –Bestiare Amoreux

5.       Stanislas – Les Adventures de Victor Levallois

6.       Lewis Trondheim  - Mr O

7.       Christophe Blain –Isaac le Pirate

8.       Jean Pierre Duffour – Les Sept Vies du devourer d’hombres

9.       Lucie Durbiano – Rouge vous va si bien

10.   David Cali & Vincent Pianina – Dix Petits Insectes

Chaminou et le Khrompire

Kim Thompson wrote an excellent series of articles a couple of years back on the occasion of the publication of his Fantagraphic translation of Sybelline (as Sibyl-Anne) on the life and work of Raymond Macherot. In one of his interesting asides, Thompson discusses Macherot’s first work for Spirou, “Chaminou et Le Khrompire”, in pretty glowing terms.

"...one of the defining masterpieces of Franco-Belgian comics, and is both a huge leap beyond and summation of his previous work: It’s a secret-agent funny-animal thriller, very self-aware, with some off-kilter characterizations (Chaminou is a bit of an egomaniacal dandy and occasional screw-up) and some genuinely dark moments. (Macherot tended to go a little more graphic in the animals eating one another premise than most cartoonists.) There’s a scene in it that conceptually duplicates the final scene in Freaks, one of the most horrific scenes in any movie ever made, and plays it for laughs. It’s just unbelievably bold for the time (1964), one of those art objects that seems unique and decades ahead of its time, like Night of the Hunter (one of Macherot’s favorite films, incidentally) or Kiss Me Deadly."

Thompson goes on to note that readers were not exactly enthusiastic about the new direction Macherot was taking.

"The readers were baffled, the publishers were dismayed, and even Macherot’s fellow cartoonists including Franquin — to his discredit, I must say — didn’t care for it [...] and Chaminou went on the scrap heap."

After reading this, I just had to get hold of a copy of Chaminou et le Khrompire, which is more difficult than it sounds, as there aren’t that many copies around, and those that are tend to be priced between 50-100 euros, which is more than you might want to pay, even for a ‘defining masterpiece’ of Franco-Belgian comics. I eventually, as these things go, ended up with two different editions, one from 1979 (25 Euros), and the other from ten years later, published in a J’ai Lu pocket edition(5 Euros), with many frames cut into pieces to make them fit onto the page (what the hell?)

After a write-up like Thompson’s, it was inevitable that Chaminou would come as a bit of a disappointment. After reading it, I had to shrug my shoulders and say (to my discredit, no doubt) that I’m on the side of Franquin and the unthinking reading public: Chaminou et le Khrompire is no defining masterpiece, and I’ll tell you why.

There’s no doubt that Macherot was hoping Chaminou would be his masterpiece: you can see he’s put everything he has into creating the world of Zoolande, in which Chaminou is based, with it’s up-to-the-minute furnishings, architecture and vehicles. The character designs are faultless, and for once, Macherot doesn’t change drawing instrument every three pages as an experiment, which lends the thing a visual coherence which even his best Chlorophylle stuff lacks. Yes, Chaminou is a masterpiece on a technical level, but as a work of art, it just doesn’t work in the way Chlorophylle, for example, does, of have a tenth of its charm. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, whereas the hero here is relatively interesting (although you never find out much about him, which is frustrating), the villain doesn’t arouse the sympathy that Anthracite (a good contender for best comic book villain of all time) does in the Chlorophylle books. Anthracite is an eternal underdog, which is crucial in gaining your sympathy, so that you are half rooting for him, even as he tries to kill our heroes, much as with Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons. The villain in Chaminou, however, Governor Crunchblott, is already a powerful figure, and this means the reader dislikes him from the start. As for the story, Chaminou is rather like an episode of The Man from Uncle, and has all the 60s paraphernalia of secret trapdoors, pool of sharks, and so on. The story is full of suspense, but it short on laughs. Most of the gags are actually quite annoying, like the hero’s secretary, who stays in bed and shouts at him all the time, or Chaminou falling down the stairs. It seems that compared to Chlorophylle,  although the veneer of the world Chaminou occupies is more grown up, the humour has become less sophisticated. Nothing in the book, for example, matches the scene in Chloro a la Rescousse, in which Anthracite tries to hijack a fighter jet with a pilot who can’t fly, or indeed any of Anthracite’s classic attempts to escape from prison. I should, while I am at it, demystify a remark that Thompson makes about a scene that ‘conceptually duplicates’ a scene from Freaks. Well, a character does get turned into a duck, but then that kind of thing happens a lot in cartoons, so it isn’t such a big deal, although it is a strange scene all right. 

It’s a shame that Macherot’s hopes for Chaminou were not fulfilled, and it’s nice to believe the cliche of the public that is too dumb to recognise the masterpiece that breaks the mould, but Chaminou et le Khrompire just isn’t the lost masterpiece that Thompson claims it is. For once - well, actually, not for the first time, the public were right.

GI JOE: Retaliation

I just watched GI Joe: Retaliation, and feel as stupid as anyone deserves to feel for going to see a movie with that title. However, I enjoyed GI Joe 1, so I had a reasonably good expectation that it was going to be more of the same. It wasn’t . If GI Joe was a small, functional family business, that did what was it was supposed to do without any pretensions to greatness, then GI Joe: Retaliation resembles an aggressive corporate takeover, where profit has been maximised and half the staff have been sacked (Dennis Quaid goes, as does Christopher Ecclestone, and several other of the more interesting cast members) and replaced with talentless corporate drones - Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, and Bruce Willis. I like Bruce Willis as much as anyone, but not if he’s just phoning his performance in for five minutes so they can put his name on the poster. Most lamentably, they’ve chucked most of the crazy sci-fi elements of the first movie overboard (nanobite robots! Invulnerable super-soldiers!  Accelerator suits!) and replaced them with boring gung-ho soldier antics (hooah!) Point to note: Channing Tatum dies in the first five minutes, so I don’t know why he’s on the poster. That’s not a spoiler, because they spoiled the film prior to releasing it.

work in progress