The One-Panel Critics: Dan Clowes's Wilson

Speaking of Dan Clowes and his new book...

I enjoyed Wilson, which I read on the day of its release. It's got an unusual pace. It's constructed of single-page comic strips, some of which are separated by years of intervening time, and some of which happen indefinite hours or moments apart. Assembling these disjunct moments in the narrative is a big part of reading and understanding Wilson.

But one page, and really one panel in particular, stood out to me on a personal level.

Maybe it's because I've been reading with great interest James Sturm's column for Slate about quitting the internet cold turkey, or maybe it's because I'm becoming increasingly self-conscious about the time I spend consuming rather than producing in front of this little screen.

But when Wilson—misanthropic enough to puncture any social piety, but also repugnant enough that we can't follow him in all of his criticisms—surfs the internet ...



Well, this one put a dagger of ice through my withered heart.

And then I decided to blog about it.

Even taking the panel out of context, you can see the stasis in Wilson's posture, the gravity bending his pipecleaner arms and his hunched-over back. From this angle, you can see how hopelessly small the Powerbook is, and how clownish his features (and his feet) have become.

Taking the panel in its context, we see Wilson almost totally static, with small changes of hand position from panel to panel. Wilson's not a very active character, but this sequence embodies the combination of inertia and disdain that characterizes so much of our online universe. (By hating things, and merely rejecting them, we never have to reflect on ourselves or to change.)

Here are the third and fourth panels from this sequence, so you can see what I mean.




Mike and I have been talking about doing a series of "one-panel critics" posts. Maybe there will be another such post shortly.

Doodle Penance: "how do you pronounce daniel clowes"

Mike here, posting the Doodle Penance for a change. Today's formerly fruitless search item: "how do you pronounce daniel clowes." Well, it so happens that Isaac and I are well qualified to answer that question, having both had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Clowes more than once--myself as recently as last night, when he appeared at a local DC bookstore to promote his new book Wilson.
And indeed, the first word uttered by Mr. Clowes was his own surname, to correct the first of several mispronunciations of it by the employee who was introducing him as "Daniel Clothes." In an instant Mr. Clowes swiveled his microphone to his mouth to pronounce his name rightly, which did not stop the employee from calling him "Daniel Clothes" at least twice more. (At one point Mr. Clowes lowered his head in mock despair.)

So let's clear this up right away: it's NOT PRONOUNCED LIKE "CLOTHES." Or like "CLOSE" (with a voiceless S). Nor is it pronounced like "CLUES" (though it might have been in Chaucer's day). No, Isaac's handy doodle below should set the record straight once and for all:
Got it? Maybe if Mr. Clowes had resorted to the language of cartooning, as above, he might have reached the reptile brain of the employee and fixed his goofing.

Clowes was joined in the formal part of his appearance last night by Washington Post writer Dan Kois, who helpfully shouted out "Clowes as in cows," but to equally ill effect. But no matter; the mispronunciations were soon forgotten as Clowes & Kois (as in "voice") jointly commented and questioned an amusing slide-show presentation of material from Clowes's life and career, including a picture of 13-year-old Dan; two pages from his early minicomics ("Melvin the Clown" and "Sidney the Cat," based on TV's Bozo the Clown and an animated cartoon of Felix the Cat); snippets of Clowes's video for Tom Waits's "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" as performed by the Ramones;

and a few minutes from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! including a rube of a gas-station attendant scorned as an "eightball" mere moments before someone else (or was it something?) is described as "like a velvet glove cast in iron." Anyway, it was a pretty cool appearance, and I'm glad I got to check it out. And I even got Mr. Clowes's permission to post this sketch, so check it out:
Pretty sweet, huh? Meanwhile, you may have noticed that I haven't exactly offered up my own image for this week's Doodle Penance. Fact is, Isaac's cartoon pretty much covers it, plus I had a narrative to offer on the very topic that takes care of it as well as, or better than, another cartoon. But I do have a doodle, inspired by the cover to Wilson and dedicated to my co-cartoonist:

Not the best likeness, by a long shot, but perhaps partaking of some small measure of that creepy face-front pose that Clowes has been seeking at least since his mid-70s sketch of Gerald Ford (pictured in the slide show) and exemplified in this charming specimen from Eightball 8:

A Chaucerian comic for a Chaucerian day

So it's May 3 (for a little while, yet), a day with interesting significance for the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, supreme English poet of the fourteenth century (no matter what those Langlandites say!). The significance of May 3, 2010, for me was Chaucerian twice-over: first, I graded a bunch of Canterbury Tales exams (um, whoot?); second, one of my grad students sent me THIS:

It's merely the latest and greatest take on the blank Dinosaur Comics template. Images arranged by Ryan North; Chaucerian dialogue arranged by Erin Webb. Go, litel comik!

Two Poetry Podcasts? I Guess So.

Sorry for the blog silence these last few weeks, folks. It's the end of the semester. Regular posting will probably resume in a week or so.

Meanwhile, here's an odd collection of two poetry podcasts:

One, here, has the audio from a reading I gave last month at the art museum here on campus. (I read with another poet, Abby Paige, who has the second half of the reading.)

Another, here, went out on the radio Thursday morning when my advanced creative writing students took a field trip to the campus radio station to read their poems on-air.

I think they're both pretty pleasant to listen to. My thanks go to Chris Evans, whose "Writers@WRUV" program hosted both the broadcasts and the podcasts.

Doodle Penance: "bede comics for sale"

... And just like that, here's another "Doodle Penance." This week, someone came to the site looking for "bede comics for sale."

I happen to know that there is an extraordinarily cute black-and-write cartooned children's booklet (it's stapled, so in some ways it resembles a minicomic more than a book) called The Story of the Venerable Bede, by Beryl McCartney, available in the cathedral in Durham where Bede is interred. I thought for sure they'd also have this cute little book at Bede's World in Jarrow, but I can't find any sign of it on their website. (That's right: the website for an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monastery.) Anyway, dear Google searcher, if you contact both of those places, you might be able to get the booklet for £3 or thereabouts.

On the other hand, maybe a cute kids'-book approach is not what our Googler was looking for. In that case, let me show you a house ad for the rare (because it only existed in an alternate universe) 38th issue of Bede Comics, which introduced, as you can see, the sensational character find of 730:


(click to enlarge, if you dare)

I'm pretty sure Bryan Talbot got hold of this extra-dimentional rarity, and perhaps a few other issues of Bede Comics, when he was working on his massive Alice in Sunderland:




Bede also figures prominently in Talbot's Alice...



... so maybe our Googler would be content to click this Amazon link.

Mike's off traveling this week, so I guess he gets a pass on doodling. Hopefully I've been Medievally learned enough that he won't feel like our brief was mishandled.

Doodle Penance: "comics about sauron"

Here's another week-late "Doodle Penance." A couple of weeks ago, someone found the blog while searching for "comics about sauron."

Now, I suspect I know which of our pages drew this searcher to the site, but it's true that Sauron is a subject Mike and I really haven't broached. So, in order to satisfy that long-gone Doodle Searcher, here's some of our faux comprehensiveness:

Mike got his "doodle" done first. He adds, he says, "some relevant text" to the template from Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics, by which he has been much charmed of late.

Please click to enlarge, because this blog template's not good at displaying Dinosaur Comics legibly:


Mike adds, "I am pleased to note that a search for the terms 'hobbit' and 'hobbits' in the archives of Dinosaur Comics turned up no hits."

As for myself, by dint of the peculiar reading practices of my childhood, "Sauron" to me never primarily signifies the End Boss of the Rings. Rather, Sauron is this guy: a psychic-vampire were-pterodactyl predator on mutants whom the Claremont-Byrne X-Men encountered during their post-Magneto's-Antarctic-Base sojourn in the Savage Land. Again, click, if you want to see my scribbles bigger.



Here are some "process" thumbnailing doodles that I include simply for the sake of completeness. You needn't click on those. I have to say: Sauron's not as easy to draw as I thought he'd be. Those wing-arms of his are pretty hard to work out, and his head is a weird shape.




Uncanny X-Men #115 was one of the first comics I ever owned, and I read it to pieces, engraving it into my brain so thoroughly that I still had a clear visual memory of Sauron hypnotizing Wolverine into thinking his teammates were monsters, a couple of decades after the last time I looked at the comic. Still, before I could draw this doodle, I felt I had to do some image research.

Here's the cover, yanked from the Grand Comics Database:



The previous issue ends with the revelation of Sauron as a villain, resurrected (or retconned into survival) from a pair of issues in the Neal Adams X-Men era, in a splash panel that also contains some stunningly pulchritudinous Storm cheesecake. (I am stunned also because the seven-year-old Isaac that grabbed that issue from the newsstand didn't even register it.)

Wolverine, in his early one-dimensional "hothead" mode, charges in to attack Sauron in another dynamic splash page. (There's a nice bit of foreshadowing in the previous issue, in which, via "fastball special," Wolverine kills a gigantic pterodactyl that has grabbed Storm out of the air.) Cyclops warns him not to get too close, but for the time being, no one else on the team knows that Cyclops has faced Sauron before.





I love that last pair of panels: the heroes transformed into monsters. That's the way the general population is supposed to see the X-Men anyway, right? Looking at them now, I wonder whether there's an inking or coloring mistake in the monster version of Nightcrawler. Maybe it's just supposed to be a creature of creeping shadow? (The highlights between his ears could be eyes, I think.) But hey, I'm not going to say Terry Austin mis-inked Byrne, nor will I blame any influential art directors of The New Yorker for misreading Terry Austin's inks.



Anyway, there's the sequence I remembered so vividly.

The next thing Cyclops does, in case you're worried, is knock Wolverine unconscious so that the three unhypnotized heroes don't get cut to ribbons.

And young Isaac grows up to be a bit of a nerd.

Holy Nostalgic Camp, Batman!

Oh, man, you guys.



Someone has gone and archived audio for every one of Burt Ward's Robin's "Holy Something!" exclamations from the Batman TV show. Who knew there were so many?

Favorites include:

What to say when you meet the knock-off actor, Ted Damson...

Is it still a catchphrase if it becomes predictable? ...

What to say when you start a pilgrimage to the Hyde Park Bar & Grill...

Don't ask Adam West how to pronounce nuthatch...

...And of course, the ode to Fredric Wertham.

They're downloadable samples, so get your beatboxes fired up to do some remixology. I want you to get all Art of Noise on this business.

Thanks to our pal Gerry Canavan for the tip.

P.S. I don't mean that doodle to be a caricature of Burt Ward in particular. It's just a grotesque little Robin cosplayer, in a sort of stylistic homage to a Tony Millionaire story I read this weekend.