Book review: Robert Williams: Conversations, ed. by Joseph R. Givens and Darius A. Spieth

 reviewed by John A. Lent

Joseph R. Givens and Darius A. Spieth, eds. Robert Williams:  Conversations. Jackson, MS:  University Press of Mississippi, 2023. 183 pp. US $25.00 (Paperback). ISBN:  978-1-4968-4403-3. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/R/Robert-Williams

 

Robert Williams makes for a fascinating interviewee, with his vast knowledge on an assortment of subjects, his unwavering opinions, and his ability to take a conversation afar--strengthening it with variants of the word “fuck” and punctuating it with some wicked humor--and then return it to the question posed with an erudite answer. He is capable of playing havoc with the established protocol and schema of interviewing, and does, to good effect.

These traits are evident in the 15 interviews with Williams that Joseph R. Givens and Darius A. Spieth pulled together, spanning the period from 1987 to 2015. The first interview, conducted by Paul Gravett, appeared in the tenth number of his Escape. Among other interviewers were the actor Nicolas Cage and the tattoo specialist, Jonathan Shaw. A sixteenth interview of Greg Escalante, promoter of lowbrow art and Williams, was made by the editors. Eighteen images are scattered throughout the book, and a very useful chronology of Williams’ life is provided.

Each interview introduces different aspects of Williams’ life and career, though duplication is to be expected, especially when interviews commence with, “Let’s start at the beginning.” In this set of interviews, when Williams received such a request, he answered that he was born in Albuquerque in 1943, on a cold and rainy morning. In her interview with Williams, Michelle Delio followed up with a jocular, “And then what happened?” to which he answered, “Well, my parents got married and divorced about four or five times.” To another interviewer, he claimed vaguely recalling that he did not want to emerge from his mother’s womb. The unexpected can be expected of Williams, an example being when Delio was about to conclude their conversation and asked, “Anything else we should talk about?” “Women’s asses,” Williams retorted, and then launched into a spiel on “whether a “woman’s ass is a temple of God or merely an object of beauty?”

In a number of the interviews, Williams reflects on his youth--moving about with his military father, not doing well in school, getting into trouble with the police as a gang member, his absorptive interest in hot rod cars and girls, and his being fired from one job after another until he was hired by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in 1965 He also spends considerable time discussing his introduction to underground comix, joining the Zap collective in 1969, and drawing a cover for Yellow Dog in 1970, how his and other underground artists’ “asses were up for grabs” with the police, and how the underground bridged the gap between his fine art and comics.

Williams minces no words about his feelings towards many aesthetic principles and the work churned out in the name of art. He refers to himself as a “counter aesthetician” and carries a business card inscribed with, “Fouling the Art World’s Nest since 1957.” About many contemporary artists, he said, “You’ve got all these fuckin’ flash geniuses, but they are not going to hold up posthumously. There again, I’m not interested in posthumous success. I want to live now, and after that, I really just don’t give a shit.” At other times, he has compared the art world to a “locked matrix of economics and people trying to get involved,” lamented that he has had difficulty getting into galleries, while his artwork “sells like crazy,” and told his British interviewer that England’s art “seems very constipated.”

Two events that came up more than once in the interviews were his painting of the cover of “Appetite for Destruction” for the rock band, “Guns N’ Roses,” and his participation in 1992, in the “Helter Skelter” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Both caused Williams considerable consternation, while vaulting him to “the rank of a figure of public notoriety.” “Appetite for Destruction,” sometimes interpreted as a secret rape fantasy, met much protest from feminist groups and others, resulting in the record company replacing the original cover and moving Williams’ painting to an inside sleeve. Williams was hesitant to do the cover when first approached by the then little-known band in 1979 and finally relented in 1987. The album became the best-selling debut album in the U.S. and sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. Williams received a few hundred dollars.

The “Helter Skelter” exhibition allocated a room for the display of Williams’ paintings. A large canvas titled, “Oscar Wilde in Leadville, April 13, 1882,” meant to be an homage to the famous writer whom Williams admires, was misinterpreted as a slur about Wilde’s homosexuality, leading to the gay and feminist communities picketing him on the night of the opening.

In other chapters, Williams chatted with Jonathan Shaw about tattooing; about beatniks, the abstract movement, surrealism, and the “Zombie Mystery Paintings,” with Donald M. Bailey and Long Gone John; his being an “esthetician of the preposterous” by Delio; movies, virtual reality, and hot rods with Cage; cartoon surrealism and Williams’ “new work” with Carlo McCormick; Roth with Gwynned Vitello; his sculptures with Kenny Scharf; Williams as the “master of the slang aesthetic” with Jeffrey Deitch, and his paintings as very “kitsch to an abstract level” with Chris Campion.

Robert Williams:  Conversations is a vault of rich data and opinions, on a wide scattering of topics, and presented in everyday discourse, fit for casual reading and serios contemplation. Highly recommended.

Book review: Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture ed, by Jonathan Najarian

 
reviewed by John A. Lent

Jonathan Najarian, ed. Comics and Modernism:  History, Form, and Culture. Jackson, MS:  University Press of Mississippi, 2024. 336 pp. US $30.00 (Paperback). ISBN:  978-1-4968-4958-8. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Comics-and-Modernism

 

Jonathan Najarian (Colgate University) has drawn together the thoughts of fourteen researchers (counting himself) about the overlap between comics and literary and artistic modernism. In his introduction, Najarian points out that Comics and Modernism… results from the concurrent developments of new modernist studies and comics studies. He explains that the new modernish studies were ushered in “by revaluations of the modernist canon and directed scholars to new avenues of exploration,” specifying the vertical (“high” and “low” art) and horizontal or spatial (across geographical regions) (p. 6). The tearing down of the concrete wall that separated high and low art was helped along by factors, such as the recognition of the importance to art of magazines (including comics) and books, the fondness for, and imitation of, comics by “fine” artists, such as Picasso, e. e. cummings, and T.S. Eliot, and the artistic refinement that is found in comics by the likes of George Herriman, Winsor McCay, and Lyonel Feininger.

Najarian’s treatment of comics scholarship could use some re-adjustments. He claims “before roughly the 2000,” there were a “few niche scholars” (e.g., Tom Inge and Joseph Witek, both tucked away in a footnote, and Bill Blackbeard, who is identified as having “no academic affiliation”), completely ignoring the many young researchers who were presenting astute papers at International Comic Art Forum, Popular Culture Association, or the International Association of Mass Communication Research, and publishing in Inks and the University Press of Mississippi series. Granted that comics studies exploded in the past quarter century, but to attribute this growth solely to Art Spiegelman, Françoise Mouly, and Hillary Chute is completely unfounded.

Comics and Modernism… is organized somewhat chronologically into four parts, starting with early 20^th Century newspaper funnies and progressing to contemporary comics:  “Modernism and Comics,” “Print, Ephemera, Circulation,” “Pop/Art:  Comics Low and High,” and “Comics as Modernism.” The chapters provide a rich blend of theory, particularly that of “Entanglements of Style:  The Uniqueness of Modernism in Comics,” by Glenn Willmott; history, those by Katherine Roeder on the Armory Show of 1913, Winsor McCay by Noa Saunders, “Krazy Kat” by David M. Ball, and “Torchy Brown” by Clémence Sfadi, and a hefty assortment of approaches and techniques used to explain modernism and comics.

While all of the essays are well done, those that this review found to be most interesting, because they present new topics, are:  Roeder’s “Modernism for the Masses:  The Armory Show in Comics”; Jean Lee Cole’s “Four Repulsive Women:  Marjorie Organ, Nell Brinkley, Kate Carew, Djuna Barnes,” and Nick Sturm’s “‘Our First Literature’:  The Poetics Underground of Joe Brainard’s New York School Comics.”

The Armory Show introduced Americans to European avant-garde art (especially to cubism), which used visual strategies cartoonists had deployed for years, such as motion lines. American cartoonists had much fun mocking the modern art. But, as Roeder makes clear, their mockeries “brought modernist ideas and sensibilities directly into people’s homes…thereby casually introducing them to abstraction with a wink and a nod” (p. 45).

Cole shows how the cartoons of Organ, Brinkley, Carew, and Barnes, published at the beginning of the 20^th Century, transgressed both Victorian femininity and feminine print culture and forced them to express “vivid and perhaps even repulsive truths about women’s place and experience in modernity” (p. 109), thus, subjecting themselves to indignities and assaults. Except for Brinkley, whose career was captured in print by Trina Robbins, the other three women, until now, had not made it even to a footnote in the histories of journalism and comics.

Also absent from comics scholarship is Joe Brainard, his C Comics, “composed mostly of comics made in collaboration with poets” (p. 207), and his dozen-plus strips in the underground East Village Other. While exploring Brainard’s relatively-unknown work, Sturm concludes that, “some of the most aesthetically-suggestive and ambitiously multimodal work has been done not in book-length comics but in little magazines and periodicals that circulated among local groups of artists and poets” (pp. 221-222).

Though not pointed out by the editor, this volume is limited to comics and modernism in the U.S., which is acceptable, but should be acknowledged. Modernism has been interlocked with comics in parts of Europe, no doubt, Japan, and perhaps, other parts of the world, and, hopefully, will merit additional scholarship.

Comics and Modernism… is a comprehensive and readable account of various dimensions of the subject that answers many questions, while bringing up others, that will keep the subject on a front burner. It is highly recommended.

 

Asian Political Cartoons, by John A. Lent nominated for an Eisner Award

IJOCA's publisher and editor John Lent has been nominated for one of his volumes of histories covering the non-Western world of comics. Congratulations to him.

Best Academic/Scholarly Work

Asian Political Cartoons, by John A. Lent (University Press of Mississippi)

 

Other awardees can be seen at https://www.comic-con.org/awards/eisner-awards/

 

A comprehensive and heavily illustrated exploration of Asian political cartooning

Description

2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
2024 Eisner Award Nominee for Best Academic/Scholarly Work
In Asian Political Cartoons, scholar John A. Lent explores the history and contemporary status of political cartooning in Asia, including East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, North and South Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), and South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka).

Incorporating hundreds of interviews, as well as textual analysis of cartoons; observation of workplaces, companies, and cartoonists at work; and historical research, Lent offers not only the first such survey in English, but the most complete and detailed in any language. Richly illustrated, this volume brings much-needed attention to the political cartoons of a region that has accelerated faster and more expansively economically, culturally, and in other ways than perhaps any other part of the world.

Emphasizing the “freedom to cartoon," the author examines political cartoons that attempt to expose, bring attention to, blame or condemn, satirically mock, and caricaturize problems and their perpetrators. Lent presents readers a pioneering survey of such political cartooning in twenty-two countries and territories, studying aspects of professionalism, cartoonists’ work environments, philosophies and influences, the state of newspaper and magazine industries, the state’s roles in political cartooning, modern technology, and other issues facing political cartoonists.

Asian Political Cartoons encompasses topics such as political and social satire in Asia during ancient times, humor/cartoon magazines established by Western colonists, and propaganda cartoons employed in independence campaigns. The volume also explores stumbling blocks contemporary cartoonists must hurdle, including new or beefed-up restrictions and regulations, a dwindling number of publishing venues, protected vested interests of conglomerate-owned media, and political correctness gone awry. In these pages, cartoonists recount intriguing ways they cope with restrictions—through layered hidden messages, by using other platforms, and finding unique means to use cartooning to make a living.

Reviews

"In its collection of analytical histories and ‘state of the cartooning nation’ for the most important cartoon art territories of Asia, Asian Political Cartoons represents a highly significant contribution to the literature on the form."

- John Etty, author of Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: “Krokodil”’s Political Cartoons

"In 300 mostly-color and beautifully-laid-out pages Lent takes us deep into the rich and culturally complicated history of the political cartoon in a part of the world that has seen staggering and tumultuous political change over the last century. . . . It’s a grand tour through cartoon territory not very well known by many of us. A journey well worth taking."

- Matt Wuerker, International Journal of Comic Art Blog

"In addition to being a superior one-stop introduction to Asian political cartooning, this book is a pioneering and invaluable resource for visual culture in Asia. Essential."

- J. G. Matthews, CHOICE

"This English-language book will broaden international readers' horizons about cartoons in Asia, a theme that art critics rarely pursue. . . . Coupled with [Lent's] focus on cartoons and comics as well as direct experience in Asian countries, including Indonesia, this book is very valuable, especially for those who want to seriously study the art of visual narrative."

- Ivan Gunawan, Indonesian Journal

"A meticulous scholarly tour de force, Lent's Asian Political Cartoons connects the past, present, and future of the genre in Asia."

- Sheng-mei Ma, Journal of Popular Culture

IJOCA - books received and available for review

USA only due to postage costs. Email ass't editor Mike Rhode directly with your interest and qualifications please.

Matt R. Reingold. The Comics of Asaf Hanuka. Academic Studies Press.

David Whitt, John Perlich. The Disney+ Kingdom. McFarland.

Baridon & Laureillard. Caricatures en Extrême-Orient. Hemisphères.

The book is in French, and the potential reviewer must be fluent in French.

Soseki Natsume's Botchan: The Manga Edition. Tuttle.

Akutagawa's Rashomon and Other Stories. Tuttle

Justin Gardiner. Small Alters. Tupelo Press.

A lyric essay/memoir in which comic books and superheroes play a central role in a young child's life before his death.

We also have 4 cookbooks if your interest runs that way.

Ken Forkish and Sarah Becan. Let's Make Bread! Ten Speed.

Christina de Witte and Mallika Kauppinen. Noodles, Rice, and Everything Spice. Ten Speed.

Cooking with Deadpool. Insight / Marvel

Marvel Eat the Universe: The Official Cookbook. Insight / Marvel

We would like to have the reviews for 26:1, so the deadline would be July 1

Book Review: Ben Katchor by Benjamin Fraser

Benjamin Fraser. Ben Katchor. University Press of Mississippi, 2023. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/B/Ben-Katchor3

reviewed by Matt Reingold

            Benjamin Fraser’s recent biography of American cartoonist Ben Katchor is the first book to explore Katchor’s lengthy career and vast catalogue. Much like his previously published monograph Visible Cities, Global Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), Fraser draws upon his own training as an urban geographer to consider the ways that cities take on a life of their own.

            Readers expecting a traditional biography that tells a chronological narrative of Katchor’s career will quickly realize that this is not the approach that Fraser employs in Ben Katchor. Instead, each chapter (aside from the introduction and the conclusion) is built around one or two of our senses – sight, touch, sound, smell, and taste – and how they are featured in Katchor’s illustrations of urban life. The cumulative effect created is a work built around showing the ways that Katchor creates an immersive and sensory experience.

            Fraser’s approach focused on the small details in panels like sight lines, noises, the ways that panels abut each other, the beautiful onomatopoeia created with the sounds of eating, and the ways that words can convey multiple meanings. He conducts beautiful close readings of the choices that Katchor makes to draw readers in to the richness of urban life. I left the Fraser’s biography with a deeper appreciation for Katchor’s techniques and world-building approach. At the same time, I would be remiss in not acknowledging that I also feel like I left the work with a limited understanding of the stories that Katchor tells in his comics or the larger thematic considerations that cut across his works (if any such exist). This is a consideration that Fraser, too, recognizes in his conclusion when he suggests that more books about Katchor still need to be written. Nevertheless, I found myself impressed with how Fraser engages with urban spaces and physical geography to analyze comics in a way that differs from other such scholarship. It is an emphasis on methodology, technique, and intention and left me thinking deeply about both Katchor’s cartoons and the urban spaces where I live.  

 

Book Review: Superheroes! The History of a Pop-Culture Phenomenon from Ant-Man to Zorro

reviewed by Dominick Grace

Brian R. Solomon. Superheroes! The History of a Pop-Culture Phenomenon from Ant-Man to Zorro. Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2023. xxii + 322 pp. 26.95, paperback, 978-1493064519. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781493064519/Superheroes!-The-History-of-a-Pop-Culture-Phenomenon-from-Ant-Man-to-Zorro

As the exclamation point in the title of Brian R. Solomon’s Superheroes! The History of a Pop-Culture Phenomenon from Ant-Man to Zorro indicates, this is a book that is enthusiastic about its subject matter. And while Superheroes! is published by a company that deals primarily in books on film and theatre—Solomon does pay a lot of attention to superhero films but does not reference any stage adaptations—the book also and appropriately focuses mainly on comic books, with some passing attention to comic strips. The A to Z reference in the title, coupled with the publisher’s assertion on its webpage that the book is “the ultimate reference book about” superheroes, suggests an encyclopedic coverage and structure that the book lacks.

The book offers a chronological history of the superhero—that is, characters with exceptional powers, rather than the superhero genre or industry per se—each of the sixteen chapters concluding with an “Icons” section focusing on a specific character. As the list of these figures indicates—Superman, Batman, the Flash, the Fawcett Captain Marvel, Green Lantern, Captain America, Wonder Woman, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, Black Panther, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Spawn—Solomon's focus (unsurprisingly, but somewhat disappointingly) is on American superheroes, and further focused (also unsurprisingly) on the Big Two publishers and white, male figures (only one woman, only two Black superheroes, only three not published by Marvel or DC—one of whom is now in fact part of the DC stable, albeit renamed Shazam). While American superheroes are (at least in North America) the best-known such figures, and while the comic book superhero was created in North America, a book that is promoted as encyclopedic and the “ultimate reference book” should, I think, have offered a bit more diversity. To be fair, there is more diversity in the chapters proper, but the “Icons” selections are, I think, instructive. Superheroes other than those owned by the Big Two also tend to get short shrift (e.g. Charlton characters are only mentioned in passing and primarily in relation to DC’s repurposing of them). Ironically, perhaps, Zorro, referenced in the title, is discussed only briefly and in relation to the original 1919 pulp story, with no mention of any of his comics, film, or TV appearances.

Solomon begins with the question of definition, concluding that superheroes have three defining traits: some sort of exceptional ability (not necessarily superhuman); service to the greater good; and free agency (that is, they are not representatives of any formal system of law or government). He then lists some of the categories of extraordinariness such figures may possess: either exceptional training or some sort of technological augmentation; some sort of inherent or acquired physical/mental power (e.g. mutation, radioactive spider bite); supernatural/magical power; divine or quasi-divine status. This last perhaps most obviously leads to Solomon’s reiteration of the long-held association of superheroes with modern mythology and his tracing of the genesis of superheroes back to figures from myth (some of whom have, in fact, been folded into modern superhero universes—Thor, Hercules, etc.).

Subsequent chapters track the genesis of the superhero in comics and media from the earliest examples through to the explosion of superhero appearances on film and TV (chapters eight to twelve, in fact), followed by a chapter on supervillains, and one on famous superhero creators Chapter fifteen, “The Weird and Wonderful,” focuses on lesser-known and odd examples from comics and other media, including various parodic takes on superheroes, such as Too Much Coffee Man. Sadly, Solomon devotes only 10 pages to this section, entirely ignoring major examples such as the underground figures Trashman and Wonder Warthog, not to mention Kurtzman’s various superlative parodies in Mad and elsewhere, such as the Goodman Beaver stories about Tarzan and Superman. Chapter sixteen devotes a mere nine pages to superheroes from outside the USA, entirely skipping major regions such as India, China, and Africa. As a Canadian, I am perhaps overly irked by the devotion of part of only one sentence to Canada and the absence of any reference to Canadian characters other than Cerebus (admittedly, there are not many). Others may have different quibbles about who is excluded, as well as about occasional errors of fact (e.g. I was happy to see Asterix referenced but note that Solomon is off by over fifteen years in his dating of Asterix’s first appearance—which he gives as 1976 rather than 1959, and 1969 for the first English translation).

Basically, Solomon’s chapters are all short and breezy, skimming over the surface rather than offering deep dives. Even when specific characters do get extended treatment, this rarely runs for more than a page or two. In a relatively short survey trying to cover what is after all a huge number of characters, this is not really a flaw, but it does mean that readers should not expect in-depth discussion of their favorite characters, or new insights.

More troubling, perhaps, is Solomon’s general glossing over of the messy complexities of how superheroes were created and who benefited. For instance, Solomon does not question the Marvel position that Stan Lee basically created everything, with figures such as Kirby and Ditko, the former especially, not given their due. Similarly, Siegel and Shuster’s treatment by DC is barely mentioned and skewed favorably.

Overall, Superheroes! The History of a Pop-Culture Phenomenon from Ant-Man to Zorro is aimed at a general audience but offers only a minor addition to the array of books on the subject that are available already. It is not the comprehensive reference book it is promoted as being. Readers already well-versed in the history of the superhero are unlikely to find much here that will add to their knowledge. For those looking for a breezy overview of the genesis of the superhero, this book will serve well, especially as Solomon’s prose style is easily digestible, and his enthusiasm for superheroes is evident.

Trina Robbins' How I Became a Herstorian from 2002

"How I Became a Herstorian," IJOCA 4:1, pp. 78-83, Spring 2002.