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

On Holidays

On Holidays

A voluntary exile. A purposeful disruption from the normal run of life. The desire to ‘go on holiday’, like the desire to have children, can only keep recurring by episodes of selective amnesia. Every year, people have awful, traumatic experiences in foreign countries, but yet they keep coming back for more - why?

I’ve recently been on holiday. As holidays go, it wasn’t too bad. It had several enjoyable moments. But already, I can feel that the bad bits, of which there were also several: the tedium of the flight, for example, and the frustration of having constant access to all my books and music, are fading into the background. The real holiday is being replaced in my mind by a fictional holiday, with all the bad bits cut out. Already, when people ask me if I had a good time, I feel the urge to lie to them and make it sound better than it was. I’m not sure why this is. I think I might feel ashamed of telling people that I didn’t have a good enough time.

When I think of holidays, I just think of the good bits. When I am considering planning a holiday,  the last thing I think about is the practicalities. This is the first trick that holidays pull on you. Because if you thought about the booking of holidays, the dilemmas of packing, the trauma of travel and the inevitable disappointment on arrival, then you would probably decide to stay at home. The holiday in its infancy, its foetal stage, much like the ultrasound scan of a 3-month-old dictator in the womb, does not resemble the tyrannical misery-inducing force it is going to become. The pre-natal holiday is a vague confluence of elements - blue skies, sun, food, ‘culture’ - that are barely thought about. They are just images in the mind’s eye: a beach in the afternoon; the turquoise blue sea; a meal with people one hasn’t ever met laughing across a table; a hotel balcony and exotic guitar music drifting up from the town square. That none of these events will materialise, or if they do, their specificity will annihilate the pleasure that the vagueness of anticipation allows, hardly crosses the mind. After all, when thinking of holiday, very little does. 

The actual experience of a holiday will vary, depending mainly on one factor: how much money you have. The old adage about money not buying happiness, but buying a first class ticket whilst you are looking for it, is most directly applicable to the holiday situation. Money allows you to smooth the rough edges off even the most unpleasant experiences. Money buys you a more exclusive, less crowded destination; expensive seats on flights at reasonable times of the day. Taxis - another expense - eliminate the effort at each end of the flight. Then there are the hotel suites, beaches, restaurants etc. In this sense, money makes for better holidays. The only thing to be said against having this kind of money is that it must be so insulating that the transit from one state of luxury to another must be about as fascinating as the transit from the living room to the bedroom. 

For some, only the random intrusion of unwanted interventions that relative poverty foists upon us can make for a successful holiday. This would accord with the theory that happiness is not something that can be planned, but rather always waits in ambush where you least expect it. By that token, a holiday that goes exactly as planned is, paradoxically, a disaster. In the worst of all possible disaster scenarios, when friends or colleagues ask you how your holiday went, you would simply be able to hand them the brochure and say, ‘that’. Not being able to do that is one of the luxuries of the budget holiday. A luxury the rich cannot afford.

The holiday brochure, along with the communist manifesto and the airline magazine, are the most mendacious works of literature yet published. The most obviously manifest falsehood is the complete lack of beggars and thieves in holiday brochures. Beggars are everywhere in the modern world, and we are all used to seeing them at home. They scarcely become more exotic in a foreign country, although we tend to feel less responsibility for them. They are not our beggars: we didn’t make them destitute, and we can safely ignore them. Thieves on the other hand, can’t be ignored. The herd of tourists, ignorant of local places, customs and prices represents, for the thief or swindler, the equivalent of the home shopping experience. Being robbed abroad is an integral part of a great number of people’s holiday experience. The ideal holiday brochure would offer you a portfolio of criminal experiences: pickpocketed on an escalator in Barcelona; robbed in a Warsaw hotel room; mugged on a Caribbean beach. Who hasn’t sat for hours in the dreary and frightening interior of a foreign police station, ready to be taken through a casting directory of local pimps and hoods? That is what a truthful brochure would include.

A holiday always disappoints, but we always come back. That’s because a holiday is metaphorical. What is a holiday, but the dramatic enactment of life’s eternal search for happiness? It is a fantasy, sustained in community, that happiness is an achievable finished state. How do we know we can be happy? Because we had it - for that afternoon, on a hillside in Kashmir, on a beach in Malaga. And once happiness has been achieved, our gut instinct tells us that since it has been achieved once, it can be repeated ad infinitum, and drawn out for ever. Of course this isn’t true. The thing that makes that afternoon, that evening so perfect is the very fact of the rupture from normal activity. To draw it out for several months would be pointless: that would become the new routine, and only something completely different would seem like paradise. Enjoying holiday then, the concept of holiday, depends not just on the involuntary amnesia of forgetting the peripheral agonies of travel, but also on willfully submitting to a collective fantasy that happiness is something other than a state of mind. In that dictatorship, happiness is a place, and that place is called Holiday.