My Fans Are Pretty Geeky and I Say That With Some Degree of Pride

The title is a quote from this NY Times Video staring "singer/songwriter, musician and internet superstar" Jonathan Coulton (link via).* Yes, Noble Readers: I've decided it's time for more Jonathan Coulton-y goodness.

Coulton just got prominently featured in this (fascinating) NYT Magazine piece (to which the above-linked video is an accompaniment), so I'm guessing his name might be familiar to more of you than was true a week or two ago. In case it's not, though, I've written a post about Johnathan Coulton before, right after first discovering his music.** In that post I listed some of my favorite Coulton songs. But I've developed some new favorites since then. I intend to name names.

First, though, let me direct you to a great new page on his site: The JoCo Primer - Listening Suggestions. Coulton's done a lot of songs by now (I haven't heard them all myself, though I've listened to more than two dozen more than two dozen times each (probably a serious understatement, actually)); here he has set up a primer by categories; four each of "Most Popular Ones", "Funny Ones", "Sad Ones", "Funny/Sad Ones", "Geeky Ones" and "Sweet Ones". Almost certainly the place to start if you haven't listened to him before. (Apart from all my sage suggestions in my two posts, of course.)

Okay, on to some new suggestions:

• Shop Vac. This is definitely one of the half-dozen or so Coulton songs constantly contending for position as my all-time-favorite Coulton song: I started out liking it, but it's grown on me the more I hear it. In his primer, Coulton lists it under his "funny/sad" songs, but that seriously understates the number of different registers at work. One's first impression of the song is that it's a corking good rock song: you could do a good dance to it. The funny is the second impression: like much of Coulton's work, it's very funny indeed. The sad comes third -- but instead of "sad", it's closer to "suburban existential despair". And the end of the song -- with the news show noticeable but not quite audible under the music -- veers into the realm of the eerie, if not downright menacing.

But what makes it work is that, through all of these different modes, the others remain: the song remains a corking good rock song, even once you notice that it is also a funny, menacing song about suburban existential despair. This sort of two-step is, I think, absolutely essential to Coulton's appeal. Even after going all the way through the humor, the songs remain good and powerful. As you listen, over and over (if you do), you go through the different cycles, re-experiencing (in this case) Shop Vac as powerfully rocking, funny, despairing, eerie by turns, as if for the first time. The temporary predominance of other impressions clears the way for the others to return with yet more strength. The sweet and the sour play off each other, each enhancing the other, in an endlessly rising gyre.

This is also the reason that the various comparisons I offered in my previous post don't bear up. I mentioned Weird Al Yankovic -- but Yankovic, funny as he can be, isn't nearly as rich a talent as Coulton: equally funny, perhaps, but lacking the other dimensions that Coulton has.*** Tom Lehrer (who I mentioned by comparing Coulton's The First of May with Lehrer's Poisoning Pigeons in the Park) has been suggested to me as a better comparison, and in some way he is: the different mimicry of genres, the sophisticated as well as distinctly geeky humor, etc, are very much parallel. But I think that ultimately Coulton's songs work better simply as songs than Lehrer's -- which, admittedly, is probably more a genre preference on my part (rock music over solo nightclub-style piano) than anything else, but my feeling nevertheless stands.****

Anyway, Shop Vac is a great humorous rock ballad of suburban despair. When we were in Benicia, California recently for a wedding, my wife & I kept singing this song to each other.

• SkyMall. This one isn't in Coulton's primer, but if it were it'd probably be in the funny/sad category too. It's not quite as rich as Shop Vac -- funnier, but not quite as despairing (although definitely somewhat) -- but it, too, is a good rock song. And, hey, it's about SkyMall: yes, the airline magazine. ("There's something special waiting there/It's a whimsical statue of a bear/That holds a bottle of wine...").

• The Future Soon. This one's also in the primer -- actually, all the rest of the ones I'm going to recommend are in the primer, although I'd picked them out as a favorites before he posted the primer; I think it shows that he did a good job of selecting them (but then, I would think that). Anyway, the Future Soon, like "Shop Vac" is there under funny/sad -- which it is, although I would have categorized it under "Geeky". In some ways it's the ultimate geek song, since it talks about the experience of being a geek in geek terms: sort of a two-fer.

I'm hesitant to say to much about this because -- while this song plays wonderfully on its fiftieth play (cough, cough) -- the first verse is actually very different from the rest to the extent that talking about it too much could actually constitute a spoiler. Let's just say it starts out at sweet and geeky... and veers into weird and hilarious and wild and geeky, before returning to sweet and sad and menacing and geeky. Geeky is the common thread, sure, but the song goes lots of other places too: the Coulton two-step goes on.

• I'm Your Moon. This one is in the primer under "sweet": and it is. It's become one of my favorite love songs -- it's just so touching and so tender and so overwhelmingly sweet in a "I'll-always-love-you- it's-us-against-the-world" sort of way. A great love song.

What makes it a Coulton love song is that it's a love song sung by Charon (yes, the moon) to Pluto upon the latter's demotion from "planet" to "dwarf planet", trying to buck it up:

They don’t think you matter
Because you don’t have pretty rings
I keep telling you I don’t care
I keep saying there’s one thing they can’t change
I’m your moon
You’re my moon
We go round and round
From out here, it’s the rest of the world that looks so small
Promise me
You will always remember who you are

It's a hilarious song -- a really funny reaction to Pluto's demotion. (It's what I was trying to get at when I wrote a post titled Pluto, We Still Love You! as a reaction to the news. But Coulton has the talent to do it really right.) While there were lots of other funny reactions (see my post for some links), Coulton's is definitely my favorite...

...because, again, it's not just funny. Once you're past the joke, you return to the really sweet love song. It doesn't matter that it's sung by one dwarf planet to another. It remains an incredibly sweet, touching -- even moving -- song of devotion and loyalty and love.

Just what Charon would really say -- almost certainly did say -- in the situation.

• A Talk with George. This one is in the primer under "sweet" -- but that's not how I'd describe it. In some ways it's geeky, but it's literati-geeky rather than the usual nerd-geeky or math-geeky that the word "geek" conjures.

The song is mostly a biography of journalist George Plimpton -- through the literary device of having him accost you in a "dark and smoky" bar and give you some advice about "the things that you should do/If you don’t want to take life lying down". But for some reason it is far more powerful than it has any right to be -- it ends with a stanza saying, roughly, "seize the day" -- but coming from a man who seized it so thoroughly, and so powerful a way, it transcends the cliché that that sentiment can become. Plimpton really did live a rather remarkable life, which Coulton documents well. My favorite lines, I think, are (and remember that these are offered as advice on how to live):

And when they shoot poor Bobby down
Wrestle Sirhan to the ground

and:

You should go three rounds with Archie Moore and Sugar Ray
It’s so damned scary you won’t mind the pain

Anyway, I like this song all out of proportion to any reason I can articulate. Give it a listen.

• You Ruined Everything. Yet another "sweet" one; this one I would have filed under "sad" -- but I get why Coulton didn't. This is a song about the birth of his daughter; the full lyric that the title excerpts is "You ruined everything/In the nicest way". It's a love song, sure -- another touching one (Coulton's good at them) -- but it's also a comparatively rare acknowledgement that parenthood sucks (especially with a newborn).

But here I'll let Coulton speak for himself; here's how he describes the genesis of the song:

I was having a conversation with a friend who had recently become a parent, and she reminded me of something I had forgotten about since my daughter was born. She was describing this what-have-I-done feeling - I just got everything perfect in my life, and then I went and messed it all up by having a baby. I don’t feel that way anymore, but the thought certainly crossed my mind a few times at the beginning. Eventually you just fall in love and forget about everything else, but it’s not a very comfortable transition. I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood. At least that’s how it was for me. At any rate, it’s complicated.

This is something I've seen in a lot of my friends who become parents; but most won't admit it -- because, primarily, they genuinely and overwhelmingly love the child (who nevertheless ruined everything) and, second, because the culture says so strongly that Parenthood Is A Good Thing.

Anyway, it's a wonderful song -- and it's love (as is often the case with such emotions) comes through all the stronger and clearer and more powerfully for the genuineness that accompanies a frank acknowledgement of problems. This may be why I find what I have referred to as "the Coulton two-step" (metaphor still under construction) so powerful -- one of the reasons so many people love Buffy the Vampire Slayer: that mixing modes and genres makes each more powerful. Real humor makes genuine emotion stronger, since it allows (or requires) admitting elements that go against the emotion stronger (and there's always something: life is too complex to let any single reaction ever fully capture a moment). By putting in a frank acknowledgement of the "ruined everything" aspect, the "in the nicest way" -- the love song -- works all that much better.

That's really why, all the way through, Coulton works so well: his many modes each make the others stronger.

Oh, and that detour into the riff on "parenthood-as-vampirism"? Also why I totally love Coulton, or at least another part of why. You gotta have a bit of love for vampires and zombies and such to like Coulton, I think.

Which is why his fans are pretty geeky.

***

Still more fun ones that I don't like quite as much as those five (and which I'm too lazy to write up), but which are also good (and which I may write up if I ever do a third Coulton post): See You All in Hell, I Crush Everything (primer category: "sad"), Soft Rocked By Me, Furry Old Lobster, My Monkey, Todd the T1000, Betty and Me.

And none of this is to take anything away from the many favorites I discussed in my earlier post: Re: Your Brains, Chiron Beta Prime, Mandelbrot Set, The Presidents, Code Monkey, and so on, and so forth...

Oh, and that NY Times Video (which is about the internet success of Coulton's song "Code Monkey")? It's actually interesting and, as Patrick said, rather "oddly moving" (I'd add: and unexpectedly sweet). If you like the song, it's worth a look. (The video Coulton discusses at the end, with the dance, is here.)

_________________________
* The quote continues: "...because I'm also a geek myself."

** Also from Making Light. Have I mentioned the Nielsen Haydens' blog is awesome?

*** In fairness to myself, I wasn't claiming that he was. What is comparable to Coulton (although maybe not even) is the combination of Yankovic's lyrics with the musical inventiveness and power of the artists he's satirizing: he (often) replaces banal lyrics with funny ones in songs with genuinely catchy music, creating a superior result. Coulton does the same thing... but better, and he's writing original music, and his lyrics (often) aren't just funny.

**** Incidentally, towards the end of my recently-concluded semester at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, I polled my two classes (right before starting, waiting for stragglers) and not one single student in either class had heard of Tom Lehrer. I found this rather shocking. When I was in college (1989-1993) Lehrer was still quite popular and widely known. Nor can this be attributed to my being an old-age, out-of-it old fogey: Lehrer had stopped recording songs before I (and most if not all of my classmates) were born, so he was no more out of date for my students than he was for us. (I missed all sorts of references in Lehrer songs for years after I had (as a teenager) memorized them through repeated listening. -- Actually, the same has happened for me with Coulton in at least a few cases.) I don't know if this is a cultural difference between where I went to school (Harvard) and HWS, or if there has been a genuine cultural shift over the past decade and a half whereby Lehrer has ceased to be popular, or if my dual non-randomized samples (college friends; students) just happened to fall out that way (were my friends that much geekier than any of my students? (quite possibly, I'd say)), or if there is some other explanation I haven't thought of. Anyone who has any data, or even anecdotes, on this are encouraged to leave them in comments; I'm curious. Do kids still like Tom Lehrer?

100 Great Pages: J T Waldman's Megillat Esther, page 84

Tenth of a series of posts about 100 great comics pages.
Links to: an introduction to the series; an index of posts by creator; an index of posts by title.

"Megillat Esther" is the Hebrew term for the Biblical book of Esther ("Megillat" means "scroll"); and it's the title that JT Waldman uses for his 2005 graphic novel version of it. (Throughout this piece I'll use "Esther" to mean the biblical book and "Megillat Esther" to mean the graphic novel). Megillat Esther isn't, strictly speaking, an adaptation of Esther into comics form -- because it's not quite right to say it's an adaptation: the entire text is presented, in Hebrew, as well as in English in Waldman's own original translation,* and it seems not quite right to say that something is an "adaptation" when the original is fully present. But Waldman's version isn't simply an illustrated translation either: it's much more centered in its visual presentation than that would imply.

Waldman's own term for what he's done is "midrash". On his own web site, Waldman defines midrash thusly:

Midrash is the name for the process and body of work that interprets and expands stories from the Bible.... Midrash fills the gaps or holes within the biblical narrative. Unexplained changes in continuity, peculiar grammatical syntax and other strange phenomenon in the Bible are addressed through Midrash.

As Waldman suggests, "Midrash" can refer to both a specific set of texts -- the canonical Midrash from the Talmud, Midrash Rabbah and elsewhere -- and to a type of storytelling which has continued into modern times. Waldman is not adapting Esther -- the whole text is there: he's using the comics medium to engage in midrash on it.

Waldman engages in midrash in multiple ways. Simply by illustrating the story, he engages in midrash -- adding details, suggestively rewriting passages, finding hidden treasures of story where the Biblical text only suggested. Much of this is original to Waldman himself, but other elements are in fact drawn from the earlier midrashic tradition, with Waldman showing visually details which are in the midrash but not in the basic text of Esther. The visual elements drawn from earlier sources Waldman dutifully footnotes -- including the notes right in the art, which I've never seen before, although he manages to make it quite unobtrusive (indeed, they're easy to miss entirely.)**

In addition to those varieties of midrashim, Waldman adds ten different passages that he terms "interludes", which are more explicit midrashim on the story, ones which are more personal and less grounded in earlier tradition, although even here they often (always?) have some grounding in the earlier midrashic texts. These are often in a humorous vein, such as putting Biblical characters into the vernacular of a modern game show. Others of these are simply inclusions biblical passages which the Midrash connect to Esther. One of my favorites of these, however, is a visual retelling of this Midrash:

Timna, a princess of Hor, yearned to join the tribe of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but they did not accept her. So she went to Esau and said, "I would rather be a servant to your people than a princess of another nation." Esau heeded her request and gave her to his son Eliphaz as a concubine. Timna then bore Amalek, he who greatly afflicted Israel. And why did this come to pass? Because the patriarchs should not have rejected her for not reason. (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 99b)

This Midrash is retold purely visually, in five stark, silent pages right at the beginning of Megillat Esther. Esther as a biblical book is rather triumphalist, including a rather nasty piece of preventative (in the just-war-theory-sense) slaughter which may be justified but is rather horrible to celebrate. But the Jews also have a very admirable tradition of self-criticism, and by placing this wonderful midrash at the front of his book Waldman places himself explicitly in that tradition.

So far as I can tell, JT Waldman is a first-time graphic novelist (and Megillat Esther took him seven years, so I suspect it'll be a while before we see a second from him.) But he's an extremely talented comics artist, and his book is a visual feast: I bought it on sight because I was simply bowled over by how visually rich the work was.

Megillat Esther got a lot of attention from Jewish media (magazines, newspapers, blogs) -- but not as much, that I've seen, from comics media, despite it's back-cover plugs from Will Eisner and Scott McCloud. I'd heard of it before coming across it (at the always-fabulous Harvard Book Store's (deducibly-but-also-actually) fabulous graphic novel section), but it really hadn't gotten the sort of attention that work of this caliber should be getting. Of course, it was published by JPS (the Jewish Publication Society) rather than, say, Drawn & Quarterly or D.C.; and I think it was marketed accordingly. But it's a shame, and while it is, indeed, a work with deep and rich roots in the Jewish tradition -- one which will interest anyone seriously engaged with that tradition*** -- it's also a simply terrific graphic novel, and one I recommend to fans of the form (and, really, to almost everyone: it's purely and simply a great book.)

The book also has one other feature that I feel impelled to mention, an interesting attempt to make not only the visuals of the book, not only the layout of a page, but even the physical experience of the book as an object contribute to the narrative experience. Halfway thought, you get a crazy page (as the King dreams) which is topsy-turvy: to read it you have to flip the book upside down. And then, for the second half, the book proceeds backwards. Instead of turning pages right to left, moving from the left-hand cover towards the right-hand cover, you begin turning the pages left to right, moving from the right-hand cover towards the left-hand one. Reading in this direction can be disorienting if you're not used to it, although readers might be familiar with it, since a number of books are created to be read that way. Two types are particularly relevant here: books in Hebrew are read "backwards" (relative to English speaker's expectations), since of course Hebrew itself is read right to left, and thus the opposite order on the larger scale follows; and, in the world of comics, Japanese manga are read in a way that is to English speakers backwards since Japanese, like Hebrew, is read tfel ot thgir. For manga, this affects the pictures to: series of panels are read right to left just as the text is; and in the second half of Waldman's graphic novel, the pictures, like the pages, are read in the opposite direction than in the first half. ****

It's an intriguing device, an interesting attempt to bring the physicality of the book to bear on the emotion and texture of the story.

But the page I want to talk about, page 84, comes (just) before the switch (which occurs at chapter 6, verse 1 -- halfway through the book), and therefore reads in the familiar, left-to-right fashion of ordinary English-language comics.

Page 84 is the beginning of chapter 5 -- the first half of verse 1. In the 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation, Esther 5:1 reads:

On the third day, Esther put on royal apparel and stood in the inner court of the king's palace, facing the king's palace, while the king was sitting on his royal throne in the throne room facing the entrance of the palace.

It's a dramatic moment in the story, when, after a three-day preparatory fast, Esther goes to the King (breaking the law by approaching him unsummoned), as prodded by her uncle Mordecai, hoping to beg, beguile or seduce him into saving the Jewish people from the genocide the King's advisor Haman has planned. Here's how Waldman illustrates the moment:

(Click for larger version.)

In the beginning was the word, as the Distinguished Competition says, so let's start with the language: the Hebrew on the page corresponds to the words "On the third day, Esther put on royal apparel and stood in the inner court of the king's palace...". But while the rest of the Hebrew verse continues on the next page, the illustrations/English on page 85 are already dealing with the text of verse 2 ("As soon as the king saw Queen Esther standing in the court, she won his favor"), the Hebrew of which is also on page 85. Thus while the English words on page 84 are a more-or-less literal translation of the Hebrew words also on the page, the second half of verse five ("...facing the king's palace, while the king was sitting on his royal throne in the throne room facing the entrance of the palace") is shown only in the illustrations (even though, again, the Hebrew text appears to be complete). The Hebrew is thus not always perfectly aligned with the illustrations/English, although it's close.

Visually, the most striking thing about this page is probably Waldman's use of the tree as the organizing structure of the page, with its trunk melding into the archway where Esther stands "facing the King's palace". It's a wonderful design, which lends a marvelous unity and balance to the page, the atmosphere of calm within a larger narrative tension. Why a tree? I'm not entirely sure: it may simply be that Waldman decided, rightly, that it looked cool. But there are other reasons too. As a frontpiece to the work -- even before the title page -- is a (partial) family tree, with the names placed on the literal image of a tree, showing how various characters -- Mordechai, Esther, Haman -- are related to the first patriarch, Abraham. (The relation of Haman to Abraham is of course through Esau, based on the aforementioned midrash from Sanhedrin 99b.) This image is recalled by the tree's use on page eighty-four. And it is of course precisely this familial connection -- in the larger sense of a people, a tribe -- that Mordechai has called on to get Esther to go to the king: she, too, is a Jew (even though no one knows that), and she has responsibilities to her people. So the notion of Esther's roots is very much tied up with this moment, and thus the tree's use as an organizing device has thematic resonance in addition to simple visual elegance.

The top two-thirds of the page show Esther's preparations over the three days in which she has given herself to prepare (asking the entire Jewish community to fast as she does, presumably as a sort of prayer, although it's not spelled out). On the top tier (the panel order is still quite clear despite the use of tree-branches as gutters) we see her fasting: dancing, bathing, laughing (along with her chorus of maidens who follow her around through this part of the story like it was a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta). This is all midrash on the notion that she "put on royal apparel": this is a big moment, and we see her treating it as such.

It's also worth noting the stylized suns in panels two and four (as well as on the second tier, in panel six, where the sun (wonderfully!) doubles as a window on the wall in Esther's room), as well as the stylized stars in panels one, three and five. These are not meant as literal representations: the stars are in a semi-circle, the sun in a semi-circle bending in the opposite way. But even the highly symbolic sun and stars work quite well: they note the passing of time and they add pleasing elements to the design (with the alternating curvatures of the stars and the sun lending a nice element to the page too).

Most dramatic, perhaps, is the fifth panel, in the upper-right-hand corner of the page. there we see Esther the night before she is to approach the king crying, terrified -- being comforted by one of her maidens at a moment when her nerve is breaking. It's a terrific touch: Esther is (as she points out to Mordechai on the previous page) breaking the law, risking her life, to go to the king. Of course she'd be scared... but it's not made explicit in the story (and to my knowledge not in any Midrash either; at least Waldman doesn't cite any for this particular page). It forces us to reinterpret the previous image as well: the rejoicing with her maidens is not simple partying, but rather a desperate, over-the-top attempt to keep her fear and trepidation away -- an attempt that fails in the end, as her spirit momentarily quails. This is a marvelous example of what I mean when I say that Waldman is doing midrash on the biblical text: Esther, like much of the bible, is written in a very spare, almost minimalist style: not much time is spent on character development or private emotional moments. So here Waldman shows us one: the three days of preparation, and how Esther, momentarily, lost it.

But only for a moment. On the second tier we see her making her final preparations the day before, adjusting her hair before a mirror, a bowl and pestle (for make-up?). Then we see her staring out the window: she was -- again one is tempted to say of course -- ready too soon. She has to wait for the right time. So she stairs moodily out the window, perhaps ruminating on the risk she is taking, perhaps preparing herself mentally for whatever she will have to go through, or perhaps simply checking the time by the moon to see if the moment is ripe.

And then, finally, we see her standing there -- "in the inner court of the king's palace, facing the king's palace, while the king was sitting on his royal throne in the throne room facing the entrance of the palace". She grounds the page: all the preparation are rooted in the necessity of this moment, they are all preparation for this. The instant is drawn straight-on, with the classical perspective strongly highlighted by the tiling on the floor. The outer columns of the courtyard frame the panel in the way that the tree branches did the upper panels: now Esther has left the comforting, natural roots of her maidens and has come to the cold, stone world of the king. Inside are more columns; and inside, smaller still is the king.

The king is slumped to his right (leaning is a traditional prerogative of kings in Jewish folklore, which is why you're supposed to lean at a seder, since on Passover everyone is royalty); it also is the only departure in the middle-bottom of the page from the absolutely balanced, renaissance-style order -- one which keeps it from being too ordered and too dull. The figure of the king is quite small -- when he wants to Waldman is perfectly willing to use (and capable of using) very tiny figures† -- but his body language is still quite clear: he is bored. And he's lonely: the book of Esther starts off with his exiling his earlier queen and then regretting it, and Esther's judgment about when to approach him is clearly quite good.

The words, of course, are central to the design here: the Hebrew is inscribed (white against dark hatching) on the trunk of the tree, their English translation on the floor of the court. There are fewer words on this page than on many (although more than on some), but still they're very prominent: Waldman does not shy away from using the look of his words as part of his design, of making them things not simply superimposed on an image, but that contribute to the image itself. (Waldman, incidentally, did the Hebrew calligraphy along with the translation and the art; but the English lettering was done by Elisha Solmes.) Using the two types of letters help tie together the two backgrounds: the wood and the stone, the private world of Esther and the cold public world of the court. They also help fill up the page: Waldman's pages are stuffed full; -- not overfull (at least I never find them so), but they're rich, with lots happening everywhere. Part of this is because of his decision to include the text in two languages along with his images: it demands a busy style, since it's simply a lot to get in. But he uses the lettering as part of the drawing (often far more literally and directly than here), and it ends up balancing his art very well.

What about the two figures in the bottom-right and bottom-left corners -- what's up with them? They, it turn out, are part of a parallel story, a sort of harmony that runs in parallel throughout chapter five (which, like many such devices Waldman uses, helps give chapter five its own visual unity and distinctiveness). Throughout the seven pages devoted to the chapter,†† Waldman devotes the lower corners of each page to these ongoing narratives. The narratives are silent, save for the Hebrew names on page 84, which are finally given their English equivalents on page 90 at the side-stories' end: that's Bezalel on the left and Joshua on the right. Their appearances on page eighty-for is simply designed to introduce the characters, whose tales are then told by their appearances on the remaining six pages of the chapter.

Hold on. Joshua, of course, is the eponymous character from the sixth book of the Hebrew bible, the successor to Moses. But who is "Bezalel", anyway? -- I hear you cry. -- Well, Bezalel is a character from Exodus, who is the architect who builds the tabernacle. -- Okay, but why does Waldman telling us the tales of Bezalel and Joshua in parallel to chapter five of Esther?

That, I have to admit, I'm not sure about. All Waldman says on the matter (in the footnotes) is this: "The juxtaposition of Joshua the Conquerer [sic] and Bezalel the Artist alludes to the decisive action of Esther in chapter 5." (p. 163) Waldman says this as if Joshua and Bezalel are typically contrasted -- but if so, I don't know anything about it. And why chapter five is unclear to me too. (Oh, I could make something up. But I'd be faking it, so I won't.)

Certainly for the purposes of page 84, they work quite well as part of the design. The focus, at the bottom of the page, has to be on Esther and her straight line-of-sight through to the king on his throne: having panels in either corner would be distracting... unless they're clearly separate from the narrative, as here. The strong blacks of Bezalel contrast with the lightness of the panel above it, while the lightness of Joshua contrast with the blackness of Esther's robe in the panel directly above it. So they work very well on this page, even if I personally don't know what they're supposed to mean.

And, anyway, I think it's okay that I don't. As Waldman says, when asked about this (and other motifs) in an interview:

The Midrashic subplots are intended to add layers of depth and context to the Book of Esther. I really enjoyed developing them, but if the reader finds them extraneous they can simply skip over them. I wanted there to be some mystery to my interpretation and not have everything be on the nose. The subplots manifest the mystique of the work.

This is simply one of the mystiques of the work -- an extra element that plays along with the main story, adding (as it were) a harmony to the main melody.

Start again. Another way to look at this page is as all about Esther's hair. We see her, prominently, washing it at the top center of the page; we see her combing it in the panel on the left-hand side of the page; and it is the main focus of our attention when Esther stands before the king with her hair braided to perfection. The hair here stands (as it does in Judaism more generally, and indeed in other religious traditions as well) as a metonymy for beauty and sexual attractiveness, and indeed Esther's hair is part of her voluptuousness which Waldman is not shy about emphasizing. Esther is certainly not drawn in the model-thin-with-breasts-of-silicone style that has, alas, become the stereotype for "sexy" in too many mainstream comics. But she is drawn as alluring -- as she has to be to make the story work -- and, indeed, as self-consciously so. (I also find that her face looks quite conventionally Jewish -- on this page you can see this most clearly in panel four, when she's dancing -- which I think is sort of a nice touch too.) This page is, in many ways, the preparation for a seduction scene -- not a literal one (no sex is shown), but an implied (or anyway symbolic) one, in which Esther gets the king to fall for her in order to save her people.

I should talk at least briefly about Waldman's linework. You can see just on this page a lot of different type of line: the dark, thick hatching that makes up the tree; the stylized parallel lines that form the night sky on the top tier; the detailed lines that make up the human figures throughout; the thicker line that serves to draw Bezalel, and the lines without any sort of hatching that make up the figure of Joshua. There are a lot of different styles on this page -- the highly stylized stars and suns, the marvelous realism of Ester, the abstraction of Bezalel and Joshua.

Waldman is also a master of balance: the darks and the lights, the various figures, the detailed, thick, rich art all serves to make a pleasing, whole pattern, rather than simply the chaotic mess that this much detail and information might make in the hands of lesser draftsman.

Waldman uses a panoply of visual styles -- his various interludes, for example, are drawn rather differently than the main story is; individual chapters will have stylistic unities the rest of the text doesn't; and certain pages are simply wildly different in various exuberant and effective ways. A lot of this art has its visual roots in Jewish sources, as Waldman explains on his web page:

Most of the architecture and design influence [for Megillat Esther] came from the Achamenian period of Persian art from 600 - 400 B.C.E. Other examples include a Renaissance depiction of a scene from the Book of Esther, a 16th century Persian painting, and a 1970s French illustrated Megillat Esther.

(I should emphasize that none of these sources are used at all slavishly or reductively: they are perhaps inspirations and guides, but Waldman's style is, quite clearly, very much his own.)

Given this richness of stylistic variation, it's hard to say what a "typical" page of this graphic novel looks like. But in many ways that page 84 is about as typical of Waldman's style as you can find. (It's greatest divergence is probably that the Hebrew is somewhat less prominent than on many pages -- although there are also totally silent pages, with neither Hebrew nor English, so it's not all that extreme even along this dimension.) And at the very least it is typical in its inventiveness, its visual excitement and interest, and its richness of design and image and thematic motif. And from the pictures of Esther you can get a sense of the way that Waldman draws people, which is always important in how one relates to a comics narrative.

If you look at this page and say, 'Yeah, so what, it's the bible story with some pictures" -- well, then Waldman's work is not for you. But if you find yourself interested by the richness of the design; if you find yourself moved by the story implicit in the partying-against-fear and breakdown in panels four and five; if you find yourself intrigued by the decision to lay the stories of Bezalel and Joshua alongside that of Esther for a chapter -- then seek out Waldman's book. There's far more richness and narrative power and intriguing intertextuality where this came from, and it's all beautifully drawn and thought out, richly attentive to the traditions both of biblical midrash and of the graphic novel. If you like this page, I urge you to seek it out.

_______________________
* That is to say: the Hebrew text is, I believe, complete -- although I certainly didn't check it. The English text, however, is definitely partial: some of the "translation" is done through the illustrations rather than through the use of English

** Why bother to footnote? Waldman himself explains, in one of the appendices that follow the main graphic novel, "Why is it Important to Cite Sources" (p. 157):

According to Rabbi Chanina (200 B.C.E.), "Whoever repeats something in the name of one who said it brings redemption to the world." ... This quote connects with verse 2:22 of the Book of Esther, when Esther notifies King Achashverosh in the name of Mordechai of the treachery of the palace. The tradition of citing sources has remained a continuous and integral aspect of rabbinic study for centuries. The inclusion of the rabbinic sources within Megillat Esther locates this book within the framework of rabbinic literature.

Hence footnotes.

*** Although a few of the pictures -- Esther is presented as very much the temptress (as fits with the story) -- may put off those of a more orthodox bent. (Although I'd say it's all pretty strictly PG-13 (or even just PG) -- suggestive not revealing.)

**** In English translations of manga, you find both books that are "flipped" so that the pages read as English-language (and French, and Spanish, etc.) comics do, and ones that are translated and presented as-is. But anyone who reads manga seriously (which I admittedly don't) will certainly have come across the "backward" versions (which I believe are preferred by purists).

† Page nine of Megillat Esther is a wonderful page with well over a hundred panels, of varying sizes but mostly quite small, showing the richness of the king's court. As usual in writing entries for this series, I had many possible pages that I thought of using; page nine was one of them.

†† pp. 84 - 90. Chapter 5 is done comparatively succinctly: Esther has ten chapters, and Megillat Esther is 153 pages long, not counting its (comics) preface, or its textual footnotes, explanations, etc. Even leaving some of those aside for Waldman's midrashic interludes, the chapter adaptations still vary in length, and I think the pages given to chapter five -- well superbly done -- are terser than other parts of the narrative.

Look, Ma! Links!

• Since I've written a few times on the Codex Seraphinianus, I certainly should mention the excellent essay on the Codex in the most recent issue of The Believer. (via)

• Hey, my high school has a Wikipedia page! How 'bout that.

• Speaking of Wikipedia: Teresa Neilsen Hayden gives up on Wikipedia; a long and fascinating thread ensues -- probably the best discussion I've ever seen about Wikipedia's strengths and flaws anywhere. Definitely worth a read if it's a topic of interest to you. For the Reader's Digest version read the posts linked to in the updates to the main post. (Also from Making Light: Patrick vs. genre snobs.)

• I honestly don't remember if I've linked to this before or not, but I don't think I have. And it's one of the funniest things ever (at least for me) -- after several read throughs I still can't get through it without laughing so hard that oxygen really becomes an issue.

You know those "lateral thinking tests" that test if you can think outside the box? (Y'know, this sort of thing?) Well, here's a page that really teaches you to think outside the aardvark. Warning: works best if read in order and not browsed. (If memory serves, I got this link from Making Light too; but it was a while ago, so I might be wrong about that.)

• These 10-word judgments of Tony Blair are really quite surprisingly evocative, especially if you read a whole bunch of them. (via)

• Someone has posted the entire documentary Jesus Camp online. (via) Creepy and gripping and well worth watching: a powerful glimpse of today's America. (But if you want to see it, watch it soon; RIAA only knows how long it'll be posted there...) And I'd forgotten that Ted Haggard had a significant role in the film...

• While I'm on religious themes: this bit of biblical reasoning is my favorite post from the latest carnival of the godless. And lest anyone think I'm being one-sided here, this is a rather sharp skewering of Dawkins' book The God Delusion (via Andrew Rilstone, who has a rather lengthier (and more Douglas Adams-flavored) attack on Dawkins of his own.)

• Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie married last weekend. Neil Gaiman has photos. (via)

Update: Links added.

Buying Comics in California: Three Tales

My oldest friend (i.e. friend of longest standing) got married last weekend. So, despite it being a rather busy time of year, my wife & I made a quick trip out to Berkeley so that we could go -- for my part, squeezing it in between my semester's last class and first exam.* We were only there for two days -- just long enough for the wedding, really -- but Berkeley is a Town of Very Good Bookstores (even with the loss of the Telegraph Avenue Cody's), and in what little spare time we had we, naturally, went to them. And since I've had comics on the brain recently, I made a special point of checking out both the graphic novels sections of general-purpose bookstores and a few comics stores. Herewith, three reports.

1. The Platonic Comics Shop

There are a number of comic book stores that are recognized by the cognoscenti as a step above the ordinary local comics stores that you can find all over the place. For instance, in the Boston area (where I lived for many years), there's the wonderful Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square. Well, the Bay Area, naturally, is also home to a few of these. I didn't have a chance to get into San Francisco, where a few famous ones are located, but I did get to a store in Berkeley which is widely well-regarded (hey, it says so on the internet, so it must be true...): Comic Relief on Shattuck Avenue.

And it's really quite extraordinary. While years of familiarity have made the Million Year Picnic dear to my heart, I have to admit it: Comic Relief is the best comics store I've ever seen. Indeed, I'll go farther, and say that it probably is pretty much the Platonic Ideal of a comic store.

What makes it so extraordinary?

Well, in every area that I could test in a brief, 30-45 minute browse, it not only got all the fundamentals right, but it did them extremely well. It has a superb selection -- broad, deep and rich. And the atmosphere is wonderful: it looks and feels like a bookstore, which is just what one would want -- not an ounce of the grimy feel that poorer comics stores can have, it has nice rugs, shelves with the books neatly placed, tasteful magazine racks for its floppies which don't feel crammed (and which don't overwhelm the book shelves). This is an extremely important aspect, one that it seems ought to be easy to get right, but must not be, since so many comics stores get it wrong. It doesn't feel like a toy store or magazine rack or game store or Den of Geeks** or anything. Things are clearly displayed, without stacks of dissimilar materials hiding each other. The store is, as Hemingway wrote in a rather different context, a "clean, well-lighted place". It's just a nice place to be. Which is a plus if you want people to, y'know, be there so they can shop.

(I didn't have time to test the knowledge, efficiency, politeness, etc, of the staff, although the brief interactions I had with them were favorable.)

But what really makes the store is the organization.

A lot of comics shops -- most of the ones I'm familiar with, even the really good ones -- organize their material by publisher. Now, in one sense, this makes a lot more sense than it would in most book stores: Marvel and DC aren't just publishers, they're brand names, associated with characters; they're linked stories, in many ways, so grouping them is like putting different issues of a serial together. Fantagraphics, Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly have more-or-less clearly defined aesthetic sensibilities, so that if one of their books appeal to a reader others are more likely to. And so forth.

Now all stores break this to some extent -- grouping together publications from big-name writers like Alan Moore or Brian K. Vaughan, say, even if they're from different companies. And good ones break it more.

But Comic Relief departed from it (almost) entirely.

They had a few big categories. The biggest and most interesting one was "Fiction and Literature". Yeah, I know: obvious. Practically every bookstore in the country has a section like that. But comics stores don't. They have an "independents" section, a Vertigo section, and so forth. But to put almost all the fiction, on bookshelves, spine out, in simple alphabetical order by author...

It felt like a revelation.

Next to it was a section -- a separate section! -- for journalism & other non-fiction.

I suppose it's a testimony to the sad state of the comics store that this was so impressive. But there it is.

Now they didn't go quite all the way with it. Manga, all-ages comics, books of cartoon strips, film-based books, erotica (and "underground" comics, although this was much narrower than equivalents in other stores that include anything that isn't PG-13), foreign-language comics, etc, each had their own section. But each of these makes sense in its own way. (I almost yelped with joy when I saw for sale a copy of the incredibly-hard-to-find but also incredibly-high-reputation David Mazzucchelli book Discovering America... until I noticed it was in Italian. Damn. But I had just walked in: in another minute I wouldn't have made that mistake, and that's a good thing.)

And they had some other sections too: new and notable books; art books (i.e. that aren't comics, or aren't primarily comics); a "weird culture" table (my term -- I don't recall what they called it) of quirky books that might appeal to comics fans (the example I remember is the (no longer the?) most recent issue of the McSweeney's Quarterly, with the Oulipo selection in it); and some others in a similar vein.

They have a charming little "undersized books" rack right over their "oversized books" rack: a wonderful idea, since the former are as prone to getting lost as the latter are to not fitting, and it's nice to see them set aside, for the same practical reasons.

And so on.

But the biggest departure from their scheme was one other separate section: superheroes.

Now, I've nothing against superhero comics as such; certain superhero comics are among some of my favorite comics. But as Warren Ellis famously said:

Fuck superheroes, frankly. The notion that these things dominate an entire genre is absurd. It's like every bookstore in the planet having ninety percent of its shelves filled by nurse novels. Imagine that. You want a new novel, but you have to wade through three hundred new books about romances in the wards before you can get at any other genre. A medium where the relationship of fiction about nurses outweighs mainstream literary fiction by a ratio of one hundred to one. Superhero comics are like bloody creeping fungus, and they smother everything else.

By "genre" in the second sentence he means "medium"; but otherwise he's right. It's not that superhero books can't be good or fun or even profound. But the proportions are wildly out of whack... and while, yes, I hope we've all come a long way in the last decade, comics are now taken very seriously by mainstream culture, and we no longer need to say "comics can be more than superheroes!" in every article...

Well, yes, we no longer need to say it, and graphic novels sections at mainstream bookstores look like we don't need to say it. But, more often than not, comics shops don't. And it can turn people off.

So yes, Comic Relief has all the superhero comics you could want... on the left side of the store. Not what you see when you first walk in. (And, as I've seen mentioned on the web before, their new comics racks are in back, where you have to walk to get them (except for the "new and noteworthy" table, which is a different kettle of crab), a much better idea than up front...). What you see are the, well, other sections. Y'know, fiction.

And fiction is all fiction that isn't in one of the other categories: if it's not erotica, manga,*** or superheroes, then it's there. The bleak realism of Chris Ware is cheek-by-jowl with the hip thrillers of Brian K. Vaughan. Everything from SF to what would in any other literary context be called "mainstream". Just not superheroes.

But that's not all. The real genius is that they apply the same system to their pamphlets. They have a "fiction and literature" rack that has non-superhero pamphlets of all sorts... and a separate rack for the superhero comics.

I can see why this might irritate superhero fans. And on some abstract level, I agree -- just as, on some abstract level, Affirmative Action is unfair to whites. But given the actual history in both cases, some positive discrimination is required to make up for the corrosion set in by a long history. And in the case of comics, that's against superheroes and for everything else.

Anyway, I trust you've gotten the point. It's not that other good stores don't do many of these things. It's that I've never seen any other store do them all, and do them so thoroughly or so well.

Before the trip, I'd tried, once or twice, to envision what a perfect comics store would be like -- perfect within the limits of the real world, I mean; I'm not talking Hicksville here -- just on a physical level, what it would look like, how it would be organized. I think I had a pretty good sense of what should be done.

And that's precisely how Comic Relief looked.

Which is to say: perfect.

If I ran a comics store, I'd want it to look like Comic Relief.

2. Free Comic Book Day

It just so happened that the day of the wedding was also free comic book day. Since FCDB began only six years ago, the only place I'd ever seen it was at my home-town comic book store, Comics for Collectors in Ithaca, New York. But the wedding wasn't until the afternoon, a free comic is a free comic, and hey, FCDB is the happiest day of the year. So I went to the handy-dandy comic shop locator and found a convenient comics shop to go to. Now, the actual wedding was in Benicia, California -- which was the state capital of California for two years in the mid-Nineteenth Century, and they don't let you forget it for a moment while you're there, believe me -- so rather than make the (longer and traffickier) drive back into Berkeley, I went to Flying Color Comics in Concord, California (which Tom Spurgeon also includes on his list of favorites, along with Comic Relief and the other stores mentioned or linked to in part one), which was supposedly only 20 minutes from Benicia.

Hmm, make that 30. Still, I got there at 11, right at the time the store opened; the owner had warned on his blog to get there early, and it's hard to get there earlier than opening, right?****

Now, at C-for-C here in NY, FCDB is a big day: which means you might have to stand in line behind a few people, maybe even two or three, to get your free comics. And the store is usually rather busy. Maybe not the best day to browse. But it honestly never occurred to me that it might take any significant amount of time to get the comics. I thought I pick up the ones I wanted, browse for half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes, drive back to the hotel, suit up, and be ready to go sheva some brachot. So I got to the store -- suburbs, yuck, big mall, parking lot, where's the store, oh there it is...

With a line down the block, around the corner, and halfway down the next block.

Damn.

I ask the owner at the door how long he thinks it'll take: about an hour, he guesses. Even assuming he's right, and even assuming I whiz through the store without any time to browse afterwards, and even forgetting about the pile of term papers back at my hotel room that need to be graded (that I didn't think to bring because, to repeat, it never occurred to me that I'd have to wait for as long as five minutes)... even with all that, I'd be stressed the entire hour, worried about the timing. It wasn't worth it.

So I went home.

Pressing my nose against the glass from outside, it did look like a pretty cool comics store, if not a genuine rival to Comic Relief. But I obviously can't testify to that with any real force.

It was rather a bummer, I must admit: an hour's round trip (and, though I didn't know before I set out, $4 in tolls) for nothing. But as a fan (and wanna-be creator) of this field of comics, I was pleased: clearly the promotion is working quite well, at least for somebody.

At least in California.

(Update: An actual, honest-to-God retailer's thoughts on FCDB's success as a promotion can be found at the aforelinked site (via my increassingly desperate need to procrastinate on the !@#$% exams I have to grade.))

3. The Pièce de Résistance

But none of those was the real jaw-dropper of the weekend (even restricting myself to comics-buying related program activities). The real jaw-dropper came at a regular-old bookstore, Moe's on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Moe's is a mixed new & used book store, with new books down on the lower level and used books on the upper floors. I wandered in Friday afternoon, went up to the third floor, wandered about, looking for the graphic novels, where are they, probably stuck away on some small shelf some place...

But no. They had more than three full bookcases of used graphic novels. The best selection of used graphic novels I'd ever seen -- by an order of magnitude. I got a number of good deals on books I'd been wanting, and a few obscure items I hadn't had an opportunity to buy before -- and saw a few books I'd never even heard of, which frankly happens rarely enough in new comics stores -- but in all honesty most of the time I was there I just sat there, looking at the shelf, feeling totally stunned.

If you, Noble Reader, haven't spent much time in used bookstores looking at graphic novel sections (or sighing the lack of them), this may not seem like much to you. But far more than anything else I've ever read, graphic novels are hard to come by, price-wise. They're expensive, compared to prose -- particularly given that they take less time to read.***** Even though libraries are starting to carry more and more of them -- and even though our much-beloved local public library has a rather jaw-droppingly good selection of graphic novels itself -- you can't go to a library with the expectation that they'll have more-or-less any graphic novel that you want to read, except maybe very obscure ones, the way that you can with prose novels. (University libraries, which have very good prose collections obviously, have particularly bad graphic novel collections.)

And they're very hard to find used. Even very good used bookstores usually just have a handful of them -- and often not very interesting ones at that. Oh, you can order used graphic novels on line -- but shipping costs drive up the price considerably.

And here I was, with a selection that would put most new bookstores -- hell, would put a lot of comic book stores -- to shame. In a used bookstore.

I had never seen anything like it. I hadn't, really, thought that there was anything like it.

Now, having since been to Comic Relief, I can see that with stores like that in the area, perhaps Moe's selection was understandable. Still, I was floored.

And I should say that Shakespeare & Co., half a block away, had a very respectable 3+ shelf selection of graphic novels, too, plus some interesting floppies. I would probably have been extremely impressed with that selection if I hadn't just seen the one at Moe's.

So if you're in Berkeley, and you're a comics fan, go to Moe's and pick some used graphic novels up. And if you're in Berkeley, and you're not a comics fan, stop by Comic Relief: it's a good place to browse, and maybe get interested.

And always go early to Free Comic Book Day.

Update: Edited to fix those little typos that gremlins always -- and I mean awlays -- insert in a post after the final proofread and before it winds its ways through the wires to actually sit on my blog. (As I usually do without bothering to mention it. But I'm feeling procrastinatey (exam grading sucks!), so I thought I'd tell you this time.)

Later Update: So it seems that Comic Relief won the Eisner Spirit of Retailing Award in 1993 (the very first year it was offered, if that list's complete); Flying Colors Comics won in 1995. Million Year Picnic seems not to have ever won (which is too bad; it is quite a good store).

_____________________
* Why, since you asked, yes, it was a lovely wedding. It was a Catholic ceremony -- the first I've been to since I was too small to remember -- which, it turns out, is quite wonderful, very solemn and beautiful. (I was even asked to say a Hebrew blessing, to honor the Jewish side of my friend's heritage.) And my friend was glowing, which was good to see. And as my people say, the bride was beautiful and graceful. (True in this instance, although the problem with following Hillel's rule is that, since you're always supposed to say it, no one ever believes you really mean it! (...Yes, of course, the rule can be understood to mean that, really, all brides are beautiful and graceful. And in a sense that's true. But to the extent that it's necessarily true, it doesn't mean much to say it -- save as an emotional speech-act which boils down to: I was at a wedding. (What if I point out that the groom was beautiful and graceful? You're not required to say that, so maybe people will take me seriously...)))

** Not that there's anything wrong with that.

*** Arguably the least defensible separation -- the one most like keeping Vertigo and Fantagraphics separate, as other stores do -- but I guess nothin's perfect. Even Platonic perfection. Not in this crazy world.

**** I was already in the air by the time of his next post (I just saw it now looking for a link for this entry) and didn't think to check the blog in CA, or I might have been prepared for the day's events. Ah, well.

***** Which isn't a slur on them as an art form: films take less time to see than novels take to read, and (practically) no one thinks film is a lesser form. It simply has to do with the efficiency of human visual information processing versus linguistic processing. And there are compensations: graphic novels are much harder to skim, so I, at least, find I am more likely to read every word of one than of a prose book; and because they're swift, I'm more likely to reread them.

100 Great Pages: Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess's Sandman #19, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", p. 13

Ninth of a series of posts about 100 great comics pages.
Links to: an introduction to the series; an index of posts by creator; an index of posts by title.

One of my concerns when I began this series was that the idea behind it was an inherently distorting mechanism: the criteria for 'great pages' only partly overlap those for great comics, and thus this series would necessarily present a distorted slice of the field -- one that would probably omit many great comics -- even some of my very favorites. One of the ways in which the series would distort, I feared (and fear) is that it would privilege comics with dazzlingly beautiful art -- which is not all great comics.

It's as if one were to make a list of great sentences from novels: some novels would lend themselves far more readily to the notion. I do love novels with dazzling, poetic prose -- prose which simply sings on a phrase-by-phrase level -- novels by writers like Proust, Nabokov, Updike. But writers with clean, clear, but less overtly acrobatic prose can be equally good novelists: Jane Austen is a gorgeous writer, but in a quieter way: one which emphasizes character and incident more than dazzling metaphor. But she's at least as good as Proust, Nabokov and Updike. She just does different things.

As a push-back against this, I want to make sure to try and excerpt pages from comics which have art that is good in a clear, clean, crisp sense rather than in a dazzling-with-effects sense. It should be clear by this point that I love fancy page layouts and the like: but there are other great ways of being a great comics page.* Sometimes the art simply helps to present the words clearly and powerfully, rather than dominating our sense of the work.

Which brings me to Neil Gaiman and Sandman.

Sandman was inarguably influential in the comics field -- building on its immediate predecessor (Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing) to be sure; but nevertheless powerfully influential in all sorts of ways, such as pushing American comics publishers to keep trade paperbacks in print (and put them out in the first place), not to mention its precedent-setting cancellation for artistic rather than commercial reasons.

Despite this, however, I feel like Sandman doesn't get quite as much respect in the comics world as it should. I feel at times as if comics fans are divided between proponents of lit'rary comics (who get nervous at genre, and prefer to scurry to the socially respectable safety of mainstream fiction and memoir)** and proponents of superhero comics (who get nervous without enough tights and fight scenes); Gaiman gets pegged as overhyped by both sides. (The comparative weakness of his recent work for Marvel (1602, at least; I haven't read his Eternals series) hasn't helped.) Thus the introductions to the Sandman trades tend to be by people like Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany and Gene Wolfe, rather than people primarily associated with the comics field. My guess is that you're more likely to hear Gaiman referred to as one of the great writers of recent times at an SF convention than a comics convention.***

But then, Sandman always appealed widely to those who read few other comics. I think it still does. (If I'm wrong about this, incidentally -- and I might well be -- so much the better.)

All of this is a roundabout and probably overly defensive way of saying that I, for one, think of Sandman as one of the great achievements in the graphic novel to date; it feels to me underrated, even by people who take comics very seriously; but I think it is a simply marvelous work.

So let's look at a page.

The page I want to talk about is from issue #19, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" -- one of the 'short stories' that Gaiman would periodically do in his comic, that is, stories that were complete in and of themselves in the issue, rather than part of a longer story arc. This one you can find collected in the third Sandman trade, Dream Country, or in the recently-released oversized hardback, Absolute Sandman, Volume 1. It tells the story of the first performance of William Shakespeare's play "A Midsummer Night's Dream" -- which, in Gaiman's tale, was commissioned by Dream of the Endless, an anthropomorphic personification of the realms of Dream and Story, and which (as part of the commission) was premiered before an audience of Faerie, including the Queen Titania, King Oberlin, Puck (AKA Robin Goodfellow) and the other characters portrayed in the play. (This issue, rather famously (or infamously?), won the World Fantasy Award, inspiring a rule-change to keep comics from winning what some people felt should be a prose-only award; rather like the twenty-second amendment's posthumous revenge on FDR for winning four terms, this particular ex post facto rule change only served to increase the distinction of the object of its spite.)

Page thirteen is from the middle of the story. The top two tiers of the page show a backstage conversation between Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, and Tommy (in a dress: he's playing Helena (this historically accurate, of course: women's roles were played by boys in English plays during Shakespeare's time)). The bottom tier shows two panels of the ongoing performance (lines by Puck and Bottom), and a comment from the real Puck in the audience. Here's what it looks like:

(Click for larger version.)

(That scan, by the way, is from my (comparatively old) copy of Dream Country. In addition to Gaiman & Vess, it was inked by Malcom Jones III, (correction from Neil Gaiman (!) in comments) colored by Steve Oliff and lettered by Todd Klein. The version in Absolute Sandman may have been recolored (although it's not clear that it was; from what Gaiman says here it sounds like only issues #1-18 were recolored), so might look different -- but, as with Absolute Watchmen, Absolute Sandman too pricey for some of us. So what you get here is a scan from the trade paperback. (If anyone out there with a copy of Absolute Sandman and a scanner wants to scan the page & send it to me, I'll post an update...))

One of the things Gaiman does marvelously well is have people tell brief, verbal stories: it happens throughout Sandman (and in his other work too), and it works well here. This page gives us Hamnet's story (and, yes, the name is real: in this case, as in so many others, Gaiman's "history is real history and his myth is real myth" (in the marvelously accurate words from Gene Wolfe's introduction to Fables and Reflections)). Hamnet feels pain at his father's preoccupation:

He's very distant, Tommy. He doesn't seem like he's really there any more. Not really. It's like he's somewhere else. Anything that happens he just makes stories out of it. I'm less real to him than any of the characters in his plays.

Mother says he's change din the last five years. But I don't remember him any other way. Judith -- she's my twin sister -- she once joked that if I died, he'd just write a play about it. "Hamnet."

Mother ordered him to have me for this summer. It's the first time I've seen him for more than a week at a time, that I remember. But we live five days' ride from London, up in Warwickshire, and see him seldom.

All that matters to him... all that matters is the stories.

A simple, powerful version of a familiar complaint (familiar in modern times, at any rate; I'm not sure how anachronistic it is to put it in the mouth and mind of a boy from four hundred years ago, although I have a nagging sense it might be somewhat). Which pleads the question: why is this little story so powerful?

It's all about the context. This story is an ordinary story, but it is juxtaposed to fantastic, extraordinary events. Shakespeare's company is presenting its play to an audience of faeries: an audience of otherworldly, bizarre, frightening beings who appeared through a magic door in the middle of a field. The dream play that they are crafting, it turns out, is about real creatures -- creatures far stranger and more menacing than their portrayal in Shakespeare's play. Yet in the midst of these eldritch events, Hamnet is still feeling -- still able to articulate -- the pain of his father's emotional distance. One common experience in genre literature is to put fantastic things against an ordinary backdrop to magnify their power; here Gaiman does just the reverse.

More context: on some level, we can't help but feel that Tommy's right. Hamnet's father is William Shakespeare -- that's William Fracking Shakespeare, who is not only the greatest writer in the English language but whose name has become, as often as not, a symbol for an abstract Unmatchable Genius as much as it is a symbol for the actual genius of his actual works. Proud of your Shakespearean father? How could you not be!? -- Which again highlights through the extraordinary the power of the ordinary: what boys want from a father is not Unmatchable Genius but love and attention and... well, a good and present father. Shakespeare is a genius; and geniuses pay attention to their work, not their sons.

Of course, this entire page (arguably much of the comic as a whole) is all about people not paying attention to what others are saying. Tommy says that Hamnet must be proud of his father. Although Hamnet seems to listen -- "proud? I guess" -- he then goes on to talk about a wholly different topic: his relationship with his father. He does not, in other words, answer Tommy's question. And then, at the end of Hamnet's story, Tommy returns the favor: he returns to his original theme ("I'd be proud of him, if he were my father") as if he hadn't heard what Hamnet was saying. And, of course, Hamnet's speech is itself all about his father's ignoring him (that, indeed, is the "people not paying attention" which is most likely to engage the average reader's attention). These multiple instances of non-connection, each playing off the other, are yet another context that give Hamnet's story its power (and save it from sentimentality): Hamnet no more pays attention to Tommy than Tommy does to him, or than either does to the actor playing Bottom who comes to get his mask in the midst of Hamnet's speech, or than any of them do to their weird (and wyrd) audience.

And then there's the fact that we see, three pages later, Shakespeare grieve for a death when Dream tells him that Kit Marlowe is dead. Dream says to Shakespeare that he did not realize that the news "would hurt you so"; Shakespeare replies:

You did not realize? No, your kind care not for human lives. Dark stranger, already I have regret our bargain. But come, our night's comedy begins once more.

Shakespeare does grieve, because he is not fully in the world of Story -- the world of Dream -- where pain is taken and made into things of beauty. He's enough in it that he can reverse his pain with the last sentence, and re-focus on the night's comedy; enough in it that he himself is partially one of Dream's kind, who cares not for human lives -- only for stories. But he isn't fully one. And so we suspect that he will, in fact, care deeply for Hamnet's death -- that Hamnet (and his sister Judith) are wrong.

We suspect: although we never quite fully know. There are more stories here than meet the eye, or the ear. (Often the most powerful stories are ones that are just hinted at, ones we are forced to imagine rather than hearing. And that's part of what we get here.) That Shakespeare's historical son, Hamnet Shakespeare, bore some relation to his play, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is not an original speculation on Gaiman's part. But he makes us imagine it as a story: the grief, and the grief filtered through the prism of a story to become great art -- to because enjoyment for audiences. Pain distilled to bitter to make a delicious dish. It is not only, as Puck calls it, a magic art, but it is a somewhat sinister one too, as Gaiman is at pains to point out.

This is a story all told off-panel. We don't see Hamnet's death; we don't see Shakespeare's grief or his use of it to write his most famous play. In the final issue of Sandman, when we see Shakespeare again (towards the end of his life), he mentions both his son and his use of experiences in his art -- but not together. Scott McCloud says that a man who dies between panels dies a thousand deaths, and indeed is killed differently by every reader; Hamnet Shakespeare dies, as it were, between panels, in the gutters: readers will tell themselves the story of his death, and it is all the more powerful for the forced necessity of our using our own personal invocation of Dream's art to do it.

Does Shakespeare care? Of course: we even see the pain, at the end of the run, when he asks Dream if Hamnet would have lived had they not made their bargain. He cares very deeply -- and uses that pain to write a play, arguably the best of his plays. It is that dichotomy that this page (and much of this comic) is about -- and that contrast that lends each side its power.

"But we live five days' ride from London, up in Warwickshire, and see him seldom." Those last four words -- "and see him seldom" are beautiful: spare, graceful, just archaic enough to fit the context but not so much so as to be obscure or ostentatious; making (as Marilyn Hacker once said) the reader add all the ugly parts of a sentence. Gaiman writes good prose: the prose on this page isn't straining to be poetic, but even there, there is quiet but unmistakable craft in it.

So far I have been discussing the top two tiers on this tree-tier page. Those tiers are backstage; the seventh and eighth panels return us to the stage: the dialogue here is Shakespeare's, from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III, Scene 1. Then, in the final panel, the real Puck -- the menacing Puck of Faerie, not the "merry wanderer of the night" of the play -- gives his judgment: "This is magnificent -- and it is true! It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?" The answer, of course, is that it is the magic art of story: "a lie that makes us realize the truth", as Picasso put it. But it is an art -- a magic -- that comes with a price beyond that of lying: a distance from life, from friends: a willingness to choose perfection of the work over that of life (quoting Yeats, this time). Here Gaiman and Vess show us -- on a single page -- what is gained (by quoting Shakespeare's actual poetry, showing the reaction of a naturally tough critic) and what is lost (by showing us Hamnet's pain).

One small skillful touch on this page is the use of the asses's head prop to tie to otherwise unconnected (or only thematically connected) parts together. Hamnet begins by cradling the prop, a physical articulation of his loneliness for his father's attention. Then, on the second tier, the actor playing Bottom interrupts the story (not hearing it, not even noticing that Hamnet is telling it: yet another example of people not listening to each other on this page packed full of it) to get the head and (in the background in panel five) puts it on. It's not even quite right to say that he interrupts: Hamnet pays no more attention to him than he to Hamnet, the story goes on with his costuming very much in the background, and the reader is likely to hardly notice the event, caught as we are in Hamnet's tale. But it means that when we switch back to the play -- the scene where Bottom awakes with an asses's head -- the on-stage action is subtly (possibly even unconsciously) but powerfully tied to the tale we just heard. It links all the events as part of a larger scene, links them in time, in space and in theme.

The artwork here is, as I said, not the focus of attention. But it is quite artfully done, presenting Gaiman's words in their best dress. Here is one small example of the skill: note that the panels on the bottom tier are a different shape (smaller & squatter) than the other six, with thicker gutters setting them off from each other and from the higher tiers. It's a small thing -- most readers won't consciously notice it at all -- but it helps differentiate the six panels presenting the part of the story behind the stage from the three panels that have shifted location to on (and in the audience of) the stage. Most likely without the reader's conscious attention, it helps clarify our sense of the movement of the story in an important, skillful way.

Vess's figures are extremely expressive too. Look at Hamnet's posture in panels one and five: the hunch in his back, the way he cradles the asses's head prop (in panel one) or buries his hands in his lap (panel five), all color his words. One of the reasons that Gaiman's simple story is so evocative is precisely these pictures: they lend an air of sadness (not unlike the workings of a good film score) that adds weight and tone to the tale. Hamnet's features, particularly in panels two and three, are individual and expressive. Vess's art is not as flashy as some of the art I've discussed previously in this series, but it is extraordinarily effective and graceful at what it does.

I want to return, however, to the issue of Story -- and I think it should be capitalized, for in the imagination of many fantasy writers (including, I think, Neil Gaiman) Story is an essential, a power almost as real and conscious as Dream in the world of Sandman. (In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (to which Gaiman contributed a few entries), John Clute writes about how awareness of the power of Story is essential to the nature of fantasy (as distinguished from the fantastic); see the entry for "story" and follow the cross-references.) I want to return to it because it ties in to my one criticism of this page (and of Gaiman and Vess's "Midsummer Night's Dream" more generally).

"Story" is a term with a certain resonance and meaning in Gaiman's work (and, judging from interviews and the like, his world more generally): story is, one might say, his term for the craft he practices so well, whether in comics or prose fiction or film or whatever-medium-it-is. Dream is, of course, Prince of Stories, and that identity is as central to his nature and narrative as are literal (REM-sleep-induced) dreams.

But was there ever a great writer of fictive narratives for whom the term seems less apt than Shakespeare? Oh, sure, one can define story to make it fit. But on a basic level Shakespeare seemed to care about everything involved in making a play except stories. His poetry and characters are unmatched, as original as any that have ever been crafted anywhere by anyone; his stories he borrowed from wherever. I find it difficult indeed to imagine thinking of Shakespeare's artistic process as all he cares about is the stories: that may fit a lot of writers -- may, perhaps, fit Neil Gaiman above all -- but Shakespeare? Surely all he cared about was the poetry; the language; the characters; the drama -- the play. If you want to say that poetry and language and characters and drama are story, well then fine. But at the very least it seems like an oddly chosen word in this context: more to the point, it seems like a case of slightly misplaced projection on Gaiman's part.

(I suppose it might be intended as a mistake of Hamnet's, misunderstanding his father even as his father ignores him -- or might anyway be read as such. But I see no sign of this in the text, and it seems to me the word's resonance in the Sandman series as a whole speaks against this.)

I doubt that this matters. In Sandman, historical accuracy is entwined with, well, dreams and stories: that Shakespeare was entranced with story makes a good one, even if it seems a bit odd based on the historical character we know of.

And in this one page, Gaiman gives us what might be a distillate of an entire thread of Sandman: the reality and fiction, the power and pain of Story. Here we see what story costs: Shakespeare is not there for his children; to Hamnet's death, his reaction (we can only assume) is precisely what his daughter Judith jokingly predicted: a play. But it's a great play, a great story: a story that crushes and distills the real to make a purer vintage than it can provide on its own. Puck -- even Puck, a "giggling-dangerous- totally-bloody- psychotic-menace- to-life-and-limb", as we have been told already in this issue, and as we will further see as the series progresses -- testifies to the power of the stories.

Stories are a magic art, an art that can make things more real than reality. In Puck's enjoyment, we see their power. In our enjoyment -- of Shakespeare's words (all the more powerful if we know and love the play, but powerful enough even without that), and of Gaiman's -- we see their power.

And, together, on this page, we see their cost. To make stories, an artist must suck his life dry. Magic is never free of consequences. This page powerfully pairs both the wonder and the pain that are the result.

Update: minor edits for clarity, and one factual correction.

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* Some people deny this: some people talk about how, if comics are too wordy, they can't be good comics, since comics are (definitionally) a visual medium. This is (I think) the sort of nonsense that drives Eddie Campbell to vanish from his own books in rage; and on this point I quite agree with him. The R. C. Harvey-ism of judging comics by an artificial (and deliberately simplistic) standard -- how well do art and words work together? -- is just silly. There's a place in comics for comics with brilliant dialogue and art which simply helps present it. (Because why ever not?) Good dialogue can tell a good story just as well as anything else; and there are brilliant novels and films which are -- roughly -- just talking heads, with little else. Why not comics?

** As a long-time fan of self-consciously literary SF, I had a bit of culture clash when I first began reading comics in a serious way again eight or nine years ago. I had thought that people who liked more literarily sophisticated SF and those who liked more literarily sophisticated comics would be natural allies in getting good narrative art that was shunned for silly reasons the attention that it deserved; but I think the dividing lines here are in fact -- counter-intuitively -- deeper than they appear. Oh, sure, SF fans will often read and like Gaiman and Moore. But they don't tend (in my experience) to explore the further reaches of the flowering medium of the graphic novel. And those who try to promote "comics as literature" (or art) tend to do so by distancing themselves from genre fiction (which in comics is dominated by superhero stories). I haven't seen it much remarked on -- I think few people are aware of it -- but there is an interesting culture clash here that I (as a fan of both forms) find frustrating.

*** Yes, of course I know that Delany and Ellison have both done work in comics; I've already discussed Delany's work in an earlier entry in this series, for Pete's sake. But they aren't primarily known as comics writers, but as SF writers (much as Ellison might hate the latter designation).

**** Assuming that the comics blogosphere is representative of the latter, since I haven't actually, y'know, been to any comics conventions.