Feature: Shapes Shifting - pt. 3

Part III: The Manhunter from Mars

One would think the superhero genre would be filthy with interesting stories featuring shape-shifters: no special circumstances or explanations are required as shape-shifting is no more outlandish an idea than unaided flight, super-strength and heat vision. It isn’t the case. No doubt there are a decent number of superhero shape-shifters and stories that contain, but in almost every case their powers are used for infiltration or some derivative thereof.

There are other options for storytellers to choose. So far we've looked at the shape-shifter's kinship with creativity itself, and how that kinship allows shape-shifters like Merlock Jones to play tricks on the reader that a character with a concrete form cannot. In contrast to Merlock, and his creator E.C. Segar, who may not have intended the effect outlined in the previous installment, there are certain creators who not only fail to play tricks on the reader using their shape-shifter, but who make no attempt to tell a story in which a shape-shifter's presence creates a unique experience. Even if Segar didn't intend Merlock's month of haunting, he intentionally used Merlock's abilities as a master of disguise for a unique comedic effect similar to the classic mirror scene in Duck Soup.

There are several shape-shifting superheroes/villains who are complete failures judging by the above criteria, but there’s one whose track record is interestingly pockmarked. The Martian Manhunter first appeared in the iteration which fans now recognize him in the November 1955 edition of Detective Comics, #225.* In “The Strange Experiment of Dr. Erdel,” written by Joe Samachson and drawn by Joe Certa, a brilliant scientist named Mark Erdel wrenches J’onn J’onzz, Martian, from his home world. Erdel greats J’onn with a convenient heart attack, trapping J’onn on Earth as Erdel is the only man alive who can operate the accidently-steal-an-alien contraption. Within that same strip, J’onn decides to take the form of a human man in order not to frighten all who see him. Again, here our hero’s aim is infiltration, this time into the entire human race. This is a better use of the infiltration plot than most: perhaps because as the character grows infiltration might meld with the themes of human intolerance and the other among us. Sadly, though, from 1953 until the 1959 episode, “The Unmasking of J’onn Jonzz,” the Martian is more or less confined to his human body, and whenever he does change to his true form he stays invisible, always solving crimes unnoticed and ending every strip with a wink to the reader: the sole witness to his feats. This leaves no room for a shape-shifting theme because each episode is concerned with what crazy new power J’onn will have in order to keep them winking moments fresh.**

Eventually The Martian Manhunter’s abilities are codified to match those of Superman but with telekinesis and shape-shifting to boot. J’onn could, then, in the hands of an intelligent creator, branch out on his own and become his own character rather than a poor substitute for Superman.

For one of the best examples of how his shape-shifting abilities make him unique, we turn to issue #24 of the Martian Manunter ongoing series that began in 1998. This particular issue was written by the series’ regular writer John Ostrander and penciled, thank the sweet Martian Christ, by fill-in artist Doug Mahnke. (Tom Mandrake was the regular artist on the series, and his pages are unerringly sloppy.) The Martian Manhunter, you see, has a bit of an obsession with Oreos (chocos, they’re called), and apparently, when J’onn doesn’t get his chocos, shit gets real. Here J’onn’s partners Booster Gold and Blue Beetle not only hide J’onn’s personal stash of chocos, they buy up all the chocos in the stores immediately surrounding Justice League HQ causing J’onn to go into a comedic, choco-withdrawal induced rampage through the city.

J’onn’s shape-shifting abilities grant the story two very special features. The first and more obvious is along the lines of what was discussed in the first post of this series, namely, the changing of shapes based on whim or, in this case, blinding rage. As the rampage progresses and his rage builds, J’onn grows more and more monstrous, eventually coming to resemble The Hulk almost to the letter.*** Which leads us to the second feature of the story—parody. And not just parody, but iconographic parody more effective and natural to comics than a snarky bit of dialogue.

Taken together, these two features make the prospect of a Martian Manhunter story much more appealing: that although we know for the Martian mind and body are linked in a unique fashion, the changes he undergoes are not always what he wills. What better an allegory for the addictive process in which the subconscious mind affects so much of what we do? That part of the mind most mysterious having control over his form, what new and interesting shapes might the Martian Manhunter and his stories take?

Admittedly, a list of three is a poor census of the shape-shifting population, but the three examples do illustrate the important distinction between shape-shifting and “solid” characters: in one way or another they are possibility personified, be it in plot, theme or character, and have the ability to teach us about ourselves and the medium in which they exist simultaneously. 

-- Ian Burns

*The reason I’ve chosen The Martian Manhunter over Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, arguably the more obvious choice for a superhero shape-shifter, is that the latter is entirely too successful by this essay’s standards and an analysis of him would yield too similar a conclusion to part one of this series.

**Within only months J’onn gains “molecular hypnosis,” which he uses to fix a baseball game in order to thwart a fixer; “Martian lungpower,” which he will later use to fly; x-ray vision, the ability to walk through sold objects, and my personal favorite: “super-willpower,” which … well, J’onn should do the talking. “Through deep concentration, I can will my body to any part of the world! I want to be downtown … Downtown … DOWNTOWN!” He then appears downtown.

***Darwin Cooke uses J’onn as a walking pop-culture reference as well in his New Frontier books.

Read More

Comics: Plague Johnny #5

Plague advances whatever defeat within a feat tiger. When will the censorship jump? The scrap tolerates plague. The inheritance compacts Johnny. The background comprehends Johnny near the padded shadow...

Read More

Review: Celluloid by Dave McKean and The Wolf by Tom Neely

Celluloid - Dave McKean (w/a)
Fantagraphics, $35, 978-1-60699-440-5

The Wolf - Tom Neely (w/a)
I Will Destroy You, $25, Buy it here 

When we think of silent films, the very name indicates to us that something is missing, so to refer to these two recent graphic novels as “silent” would be entirely selling them short — not to mention that the word also carries connotations of quietude that doesn’t quite fit either.  Yet, the fact that Dave McKean and Tom Neely chose to tell their stories without dialogue, narration or words of any kind still leads us to look at them differently.  When the author refuses to present us with anchoring text — and, in the case of these books, a conventional plot — it can often feel like being cast adrift, treating every image as a puzzle to be solved and somehow jigsawed together with the adjoining pieces.  Rather than work against them, though, that feeling seems almost an integral part of these comics, which deal in their own way with very similar themes of transcendence, transformation and sex.

Dave McKean

In McKean’s Celluloid — his first long-form comics work since 1996’s Cages — a young woman, finding herself unexpectedly returning home to an empty house, decides to watch a reel of film that sits in a projector, ominously placed on a pedestal.  The film that unfolds seems to show her having sex in a darkened room, which we presume to be a home movie, and she begins to masturbate.  At the film’s — and her own — climax, the reel stops and the celluloid melts.  Rather than white light, what remains on the projection screen is a door.  When the woman, of course, opens the door she finds herself taken through various sexual tableaux, each one rendered in a distinctly different mixed-media style by McKean, and shifting ever more towards realism until the book becomes pure photography in its final scene.

Tom Neely

Neely’s The Wolf is a similarly hallucinatory nocturne.  A man’s night-time transformation into a wolf sparks an exploration of his identity and a sexual journey of uninhibited desire.  Alongside the male and female protagonists, who each go through their own transformation, he brings into play the images of skinless creatures and anthropomorphic trees that have featured in his work before. Neely seems less interested in a plot than using his players to riff on certain universal themes and to delve symbolically into the human psyche.

The body is a primary concern for both authors.  Given that these are, in their own ways, erotic narratives, we find ourselves frequently confronted with the naked body.  This was a feature of Neely’s previous work The Blot, although the overtly cartoonish style of the work made it quite jarring; here in The Wolf, his style is much more aggressive and representational, lending itself well to exploring the human form.  The bodies of his two leads, especially the wolf, are impossibly gangly which lends an awkward creepiness their movements.  When it comes to love-making, the overextended limbs make the act seem more protean and balletic, rather than animalistic.  But the body is also a source of horror, spilling forth nightmarish creatures from its guts — the aforementioned skinless ones — who, for the wolf, seem to reprimand his baser urges, constraining and devouring him; for the woman, they appear to taunt her with a memento mori of the ageing to come: sagging breasts and withered flesh.  They become an outward manifestation of their inner doubts and fears that must be overcome in order to be happy.

Dave McKean

McKean’s treatment is much more traditional, however.  The young woman of Celluloid begins as a mere pencil sketch on the page and rarely do we see a full-figure view of her.  The body becomes compartmentalized — a finger, a nipple, lips, legs, vagina — like an infant’s view of the world.  As she progresses through the first door, she become solid and corporeal, but merely an observer of the carnal acts going on around her in the fantasy wonderland, until she reaches its second tier.  It is here she encounters an “earth mother” figure, haloed in fruit and with fourteen breasts.  Unlike Neely’s work, the abnormalities here are presented as beautiful, and as the woman consummates her meeting with the goddess, the resultant imagery throws some interesting analogies between fruit and the body (there is even some poetic visual rhymes, as a physalis becomes a clitoris).  The result is that the flesh is constructed as something enticing, without any guilt or doubt surrounding its enjoyment.  This makes her next foray with an engorged incubus seem perfectly natural, and their frenzied oral copulation simply another facet of sex.

Tom Neely

This treatment of sex and eroticism as an engagement with nature, and an almost spiritual act, is reflected in the way that McKean has his protagonist change through each scene.  Initially, it is a sketchy figure who watches photographic images on film, and as her journey progresses, she moves further and further towards the photographic image herself while her partners become increasingly abstract.  By the end, it is an indistinct shadow that she finds herself taking pleasure from.  The underlying theme that sex makes us whole and has the potential to change our image of ourself is also a concern in Neely’s book.  Given the nature of the work, it is ambiguous whether the transformations that the man and woman undergo are supposed to be symbolic, hallucinations, or part of the surreal fabric of his fictional world.  Nevertheless, the transformations are central to the book’s working, seeing the male character become more wolflike as he sheds his inhibitions and indulges instincts of not only desire, but also devotion and loyalty.  The female metamorphosis in The Wolf is curiously evocative of McKean’s earth-mother figure, with the woman undergoing a literal blossoming from flowers, to branches and leaves until she becomes a tree entirely — a living embodiment of life itself.

Dave McKean

For all the pell-mell of the mindbending plots, the creation of altered states and surreal fantasies would be for nothing, if it were not for the sheer virtuoso talent of both creators.  McKean has long been established as a master of multimedia imagery and Celluloid represents possibly his finest work.  The clarity and seamlessness with which he combines photography with drawings and paintings makes every scene entirely convincing.  It’s this hyper-reality that encourages us to submit to the dream-logic of the story.  It’s all the moreso with The Wolf, though, as Neely deliberately breaks the connection to reality with his visual quirks.  When the skinless creature first emerges, he wears the mime-gloves of old Disney cartoons as a telling sign that the rules of reality no longer apply, and we are in the realm of elastic physics.  This allows Neely’s expressiveness to play and amplify the world of the story — the introduction of full colour is later used to indicate the passion between the two central figures and, much like McKean’s world, the characters become fuller and more realised the further they indulge their passions.  When they finally do have sex, right at the centre of the book, the art descends to pure expression — swirls of colour collide, lashed by inky black strokes and water splashes — Jackson Pollock with a dildo up his arse.

Tom Neely

It’s difficult to compare these books with other work simply because they are so unique and the artists have such idiosyncratic styles that, really, these stories could only be told by them.  By losing the words, the art’s connection to the story is drawn so much tighter.  Perhaps comparisons with silent cinema are not so uncalled for after all, as when else has cinema paid quite so much attention to the singular image, or been unafraid to break boundaries of convention?  That same spirit rests in both these books which are two extraordinary examples graphic storytelling.

-- Gavin Lees

Read More

Interview: Tom Neely on Comics and Music

Tom Neely is a painter and cartoonist living in Los Angeles with his wife and a dog. In addition to creating several well-received comics such as The Blot and the infamous Rollins/Danzig slash fiction Henry and Glenn Forever, Tom has worked on numerous music-related projects for the likes of The Melvins, Isis, Wolves In The Throne Room and Decibel Magazine. He will destroy you.


In anticipation of his new graphic novel, The Wolf, I spoke to him about his various projects and his love of metal music.  But mostly just metal.  

-- Craig Collins

Graphic Eye: So, how did you find your way into metal?

Tom Neely: I’ve been into metal as long as I can remember listening to music.  When I was about three years old, my older brother didn’t have enough piggy bank money to afford KISS’s Love Gun.  He convinced me we should buy it together. Continuing down that path my brother and I were both way into hair metal in the ’80s, but sometime around age 12, I somehow ended up with the $5.98 EP by Metallica which got me into Thrash and Death Metal, but also introduced me to The Misfits and punk rock. I’ve been hooked ever since.

GE: You DJ at “Heavy Tuesdays” in what is purportedly “Highland Park’s hippest dive bar”. How do you like the opportunity to inflict your favourite stuff on a captive audience?

TN: I used to try and convince my friends to let me DJ their parties and everyone always hated it... But now there are people who come out to hear this stuff. It’s fun!  I love it.  And it’s always great to hear what records the other regular DJs, Scott Carlson (of Repulsion) and J. Bennett (writer for Decibel Magazine), bring every week.  Those guys know everything, so I’m always learning about new metal from them. And the bartender, Laurel, is awesome and a true metalhead and she lets us play whatever we want (except don’t play Ministry or you’ll get a lecture about why that’s not “metal”).

GE: You’ve mentioned your upcoming graphic novel The Wolf may have a soundtrack to accompany the book, created in collaboration with Aaron Turner of Isis / House of Low Culture. Without giving too much away, how do you go about creating music that appropriately interacts with art, and the story itself?

TN: Originally we planned this as a collaborative book with a soundtrack idea.  After the Mevlins book, I approached Aaron with the idea for The Wolf.  It was an interesting process for both of us, but unfortunately we felt like the collaboration wasn’t working.  I think we each decided that our parts in the project had become more personal, and it didn’t make sense to release them together. So, the book will be released without a soundtrack.  Aaron is releasing a new House of Low Culture album soon. 

GE: Metal is the subject of and an influence in a lot of your work, but you’ve also talked about being a fiend for jazz. Did either of these bear an influence on your new book The Wolf?

TN: Oh sure... I’m always listening to all kinds of music when I’m working in the studio, so it’s bound to have some influence on me.  I think my sense of timing and rhythm in comics is very influenced by the music I listen to. While working on The Wolf I listened to a lot of metal, but also a lot of experimental music and free jazz and a lot of Miles Davis’ early ’70s records. I think for my next book I’ll probably be listening to a lot more early blues and jazz.  But there’s always punk and metal in the mix. 

GE: Conversely, how did you approach Your Disease Spread Quick, creating a comic that accompanied The Melvins’ (A) Senile Animal?

TN: Hydrahead Records asked me if I’d want to do a comic book for the Melvins. Of course!  Who wouldn’t? It had some relation to the album (A) Senile Animal.  I asked for feedback from the band, but they were completely hands off and just let me do whatever I wanted.  So, I just took inspiration from the song titles like “A Talking Horse” and “Blood Witch” to come up with character ideas, and then wrote a surrealistic dreamlike story that sort of moves with the rhythm of the album. It’s cool that they let me do whatever I wanted, because I think the story, without the Melvins music, works on its own as a short surrealist comic book. 

GE: What is it that you find so fascinating about Black Metal?

TN: Well, I’ve always been into heavy music, and it’s one of the few interesting things happening in rock music these days.  And the mutations of black metal that are happening with these art rock bands who are appropriating black metal into their sound is really interesting, too. 

GE: You’ve done work that reflects the ‘mature’ side of Black Metal — the often highly developed music and artistic aesthetics involved, and its more ridiculous aspects too. What do you think of these seemingly contadictory aspects?)

TN: I like a lot of different things for different reasons. Listening to Mercyful Fate is like watching a Hammer horror movie.  It’s fun.  Listening to Wolves in the Throne Room is a completely different experience. But it’s all just a fantasy anyway... I’m just a dude makin’ comic books and listening to this stuff... some days I wanna take myself seriously, and some days I wanna listen to Dio sing about wizards and shit. 

GE: You produced Self Indulgent Werewolf to accompany a 2007 solo exhibition. How did that go down with visitors in the gallery?

TN: There was a record player with a headset in the gallery, but I think the soundtrack was largely ignored by the visitors at the show.  I only pressed 130 copies of that record and I still have most of them — ha!  But actually Aaron Turner played DJ at my opening for that show, so my music was mixed in with a lot of other weird stuff throughout the night.  The record was totally a self indulgence project for me.  I always wanted to make an album, so I did.  

GE: From the track I found online, hidden away in an Inkstuds podcast, it was pretty cacophanous stuff but with a folky thread emerging. Did you have any particular influences in its writing, or is it purely True Californian Tom Neely Black Metal?

TN: I wouldn’t call my record “black metal.”  It has a bit of that influence in a couple of the songs, and I had fun making a black metal style logo of my name, but it’s mostly experimental noisy stuff made out of my love of fucking around with instruments. I’m not really a musician, and a master of no instruments at all... But I like to make noise. 

GE: Tell us more about Grienhals.

TN: It started out as a “fake rock poster” for an art show at Floating World Comics in Portland, OR.  But then it became the name for my new one-man-band that has yet to record much.  I’ve been messing around with a few new noisy sound ideas. I hope to one day finish some more music, but music is more of my fun hobby and I need to spend most of my time making visual art. 

GE: Your love of Black Flag and The Misfits was pretty crucial in making Henry & Glenn Forever such successful comedy. Do you think you would ever approach their music again in art or comics? Seriously or comedically?

TN: We are planning a second Henry & Glenn book.  It’s going to be very different from the first one. We have some good ideas going. I would also love to do more animation with the characters (I made a short Henry & Glenn Forever X-mas special cartoon and released it on YouTube back in December). So, there’s still life in the idea for now.  I don’t wanna beat it to death, but as long as it’s fun, and we can find new ideas, we’ll do some more Henry & Glenn stuff. 

GE: Regarding the Henry & Glenn animation — how long did it take, and was it a fun undertaking?

TN: From storyboards to YouTube, it took me about four months to complete. I wrote it last August, got some friends together to do the voices, then spent the next three months animating it all by night and whenever I had some spare time. Then my brother, who does music for film and TV, helped me with all the sound and everything. We finished it about 2 days before I put it up on YouTube.  It was a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun and reminded me how much I enjoy doing animation. 

GE: How did you pick up the animation skills? Do you plan any other animations based on your other work?

TN: I’ve always been interested in animation.  When I was a kid I used to make stop-motion movies with my Star Wars figures and Transformers. I was always messing around with it for fun, but when I was about halfway through my MFA in painting, I started to realize there wasn’t much I could do with a painting degree other than work in an art supply store. I had some friends who were working for the Disney websites, so I started teaching myself to animate while finishing art school. After graduating, with the help of those friends, I got a job as a Flash animator at Disney online back in 2000.  I left there after a couple of years and have since been freelancing in animation to pay the bills and bankroll my comics ambitions. I’ve made several other little short animations over the years, including an anti-Bush short film I made with a friend back in 2004 and a music video for The Muffs song “Don’t Pick On Me.” I’d love to do more animation of my own, but it’s very time consuming. Plus, since that’s what I’m doing all day to pay the bills, when I’m feeling creative I’d rather go draw comics than animate.  But I do hope to do more.  And I’ve got a really good idea for another Henry & Glenn cartoon that I’d love to do in the near future.  Argh... always more ideas than time.  

GE: You mentioned that producing a Morbid Angel album cover would be a dream job. What else would you love to do?

TN: Yeah that was 14 year old tom that wants to do the Morbid Angel cover.  I’d imagine they’re so big at this point, that doing a cover for them would be a nightmare of approvals and sketches and too many chefs in the kitchen... I think I prefer working with smaller bands where it can be more of a collaborative process. I might be doing another book project with my friends’ band in the near future. 

What else would I love to do?  Live in Hawaii and make art all day long.

GE: While we’re on the topic of Morbid Angel, have you heard the new album? Was it “Too Extreme!” or do you say “I Am Morbid”?

TN: Oh, I’ve been too scared to listen to it yet.  They’re probably my all-time favorite death metal band and I was anticipating the release, but I’ve heard so many conflicting reviews that I think I have to give it some time before I listen, so I can have my own opinion. Ask me again next year maybe.*

GE: And finally, let’s play Desert Island Discs. You’ve run aground on an island of the blackest stone covered in inverted palm trees. What metal albums do you need to survive?

TN: Oh the desert island question always causes some anxiety in me... I like way too much music...  and the idea of being limited to a few records on a desert island fills me with the dread of getting tired of one of these favorite albums.  Can I cheat and bring a solar powered iPod with me?


*Tom later emailed to say: Oh fuck... I just got curious and started listening to it.  

Read More

Feature: Shapes Shifting - pt. 2

Part II: The Ghost of Merlock Jones

Compared to those in comics, animated shape-shifters are deficiently mysterious: not concerning their roles in the narrative, but the way in which they change and the effect of the change upon the reading experience. Rather than changing with the help of fluid motion, comics shape-shifters have to pass through gutter. If they were to undergo a change within one panel, they run the risk of muddling the action with what could be interpreted as two separate characters, or the sense of time may simply disappear. The comics gutter actually gives shape-shifters more space, specifically, blank space, negative space, in which they do nebulous, invisible tricks.

Again, as with “Duck Amuck,” we’re reading the following example by transplanting ourselves into the world/medium of the character rather than wrenching him into our own. The laws of cartoon physics (if there are any at all) are frighteningly different from our own, and if we insist on placing a cartoon character in 4-D, conforming to the law of gravity, or the conservation of mass, their abilities and personalities become negligible and boring, respectively.

            
Merlock Jones first appeared in E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre in June 1932, preceding the start of a new Popeye adventure called “The Eighth Sea.” Castor Oyl, Popeye’s frequent cohort and partner with whom he founded a detective agency in a previous story, fears Popeye will be hurt or killed while visiting the dangerous hide out of Woo Fong, keeper of the precious black parrot that holds the secret to a great treasure. Castor tasks Merlock Jones, a master of disguise, with tailing Popeye and later, once Popeye and his crew are set to sail, with stowing away and guarding the worthless King Blozo. “Merlock Jones,” Castor says giving the sleuth his orders. Merlock, it should be known, has already taken several guises in three daily strips’ time. “...Won’t you let me see your real face?” Merlock replies: “No living man hath seen my pan—not even myself.”

            
Previously, when he trails Popeye on the way to Woo Fong’s dockside hideout, Merlock’s shape-shifting is drawn as a flurry of hands and motion lines and takes up one panel of space per change. The base form is in the panel preceding the change, the new one following. But when he aims to stow away, the change is quite spectral. We never see Merlock stowing away. It happens in the gutters, so to speak, and in fact the reader, because an entire month passes between Merlock receiving his orders and reappearing aboard Popeye’s ship, could wonder whether Segar redacted Merlock from the adventure entirely. If we re-read the “The Eighth Sea,” returning to this point of absence it’s clear here is where Merlock initially shape-shifts, and that it is indeed absence the non-shape he assumes. Merlock, if our attention is on his whereabouts at the beginning of “The Eighth Sea,” haunts the strip until he reappears a month later.* One week after Merlock receives his orders from Castor, a stow-away appears aboard Popeye’s ship: an old granny named Missus Snoodenbocker who claims to have mistook Popeye’s boat for a ferry. Now, for all the reader knows, and in fact what makes the most sense to believe, is that Missus Snoodenbocker is none other than Merlock Jones. Even though we don’t see it, we know Merlock stowed away, and based on past experience we know he can take whatever shape he chooses. That Missus Snoodenbocker turns out not to be Merlock is less important than that for an entire month her character is possessed by Merlock Jones, and it isn’t until he reappears that she regains her identity: her “self,” effectively. Any other member of the cast would be ill equipped for a haunting such as this. It is the privilege of the shape-shifter.

            
Besides his ghastly non-presence, his idea-shape that possesses Missus Snoodenbocker, Merlock’s absence does have a concrete representation: the strip-shaped (or page-shaped depending on the format) latticework of the comics gutter. This is the shape that symbolizes the ghostly nature of the shape-shifter that Merlock taps into for an entire month of story. It is a symbol, like the capricious, frenetic illustrator in “Duck Amuck,” of the possibility inherent in the white page. And a shape-shifter, again, because of its kinship with the basic creative process in comics and cartoons, is an accessible tool to help recognize the ethereal properties of cartoons and comics.

-- Ian Burns

*The Fantagraphics collection, Popeye Vol.3, “Let’s You and Him Fight!” provided the structure for Merlock’s absence and return. Specifically: They have created a chapter heading titled “Presenting: Merlock Jones.”

Read More