Chris Gavaler's Blog, page 23

My Zombie Life

I had assumed raising your hands to protect your face when you fall was an automatic reflex, but my mother’s Alzheimer’s proved me wrong. She fell a lot that last year in the second-floor memory unit of her assisted living facility. She kept looking for the door that would lead her out again. After the worst fall, they had to ambulance her to a Richmond hospital an hour away. When I got there, the horror wasn’t just her face—which looked uncannily like the make-up for a zombie extra—but the emptiness in her eyes. She had not the slightest idea who I was.

I grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb a couple miles from the mall where George Romero shot Dawn of the Dead. There was a video arcade instead of a gun shop, but otherwise it was the same. I didn’t see the movie till college—and then the ongoing horde of other movies and TV shows still shuffling after it. I used to teach the Walking Dead comic book in my first-year writing seminar too. One of my best, though unpublished, short stories is titled “The Zombie Monologues.” Zombies apparently come naturally to me.

The single good thing about my mother’s Alzheimer’s was how it forced my sister and me together. We’d been estranged for a few years, and probably would have remained that way, but then we were digging out our mother’s nest of a condo, and researching assisted living places, and juggling the chaos of her thankfully deep finances. Her actual death brought a slew of new work too, but then that would be it. I was no longer driving over to Williamsburg once a month. There were no more plot contrivances to keep us in the same scene.

My sister is a dancer and choreographer. I’d seen the movement direction she’d done in the theater department at William and Mary, particularly for a production of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—a sequence of vignettes performed by a student cast changing roles for each piece.  I thought: Monologues are like vignettes. And then I said: Do you want to make a play together?

We started meeting for long brunches once a month in a little town exactly half way between Williamsburg and Lexington. She played dramaturg, asking questions about the evolving script: How do the zombies change roles? They touch objects and become infused by the former owners. Who is presenting these monologues? A therapist trying to convince people to become zombies. Why would he do that? Because he’s sinister. No, two-dimensional villains are boing—I tell my fiction writing classes that every semester. He’s something much much worse: he’s sincere. He actually thinks he’s helping his patients by ending their suffering.

Joan suggested new sections too, helped figure out the arc of the sequence, as we also plotted the new story of how one evening the therapist’s seminar goes terribly wrong. As much as he would like to think his zombies are happily emptied vessels, there’s still some disruptive humanity swirling inside them. That’s a good thing. In fact, it’s the only thing keeping them alive and the therapist from achieving his tragic success.

After our mother’s funeral—we spilled her ashes into the hole the groundskeepers dug in front of the family gravestone six months after her New Years death—the artistic producer at Richmond’s Firehouse Theatre said he’d like to stage the show. My sister had worked there before, and had showed him the script after we’d revised it into the best shape we could without seeing actors actually perform the words and movements.

The pandemic hit a few months after that, just weeks after the first read-through. We pivoted to Zoom and created a shortened online preview version of mostly solo performances, reprising the old title “Zombie Monologues.” Then at the start of this year, we again got the green light for an August stage production and started rehearsals back up, soon with three new cast members. That process was oddly ideal, combining actors who were familiar with the material with new actors who very quickly leapt to the same level. After the first stumble-through rehearsals, I got to revise with a new ear for how the words actually worked in performance. My sister’s directorial style is not surprisingly movement based, so she would ask for specific revisions and additions based on how the play was actually unfolding physically on stage. Our two skill areas, text and movement, are a perfect collaboration.

The project has achieved my initial goal of staying close to her. That’s probably ironic for a play about zombies trying to convince people to let go of all human connection. It’s hard work. You have to walk with your hands reaching in front of you. You can’t worry about falling. Just keep grabbing anything you can before it disappears again. The Zombie Life opens this week and closes the week after.

Weirding Whiteness: Genre & Eugenics

I was lucky to participate in last year’s Outer Dark Symposium, originally scheduled in Atlanta in March, then moved to Zoom in August due to the pandemic. An audio recording of my presentation came available via the Outer Dark Podcast last December, and a video is in the works via the Outer Dark YouTube channel.

Below are my PowerPoint slides, and if you’d like to follow along with my voice, it starts about nine minutes into the audio recording:

TOD 088 Deep Down: The Weird in Conversation with Southern Gothic, Black Gothic Revival, and Other Regional Strange Tales

My argument in a nutshell: white supremacy is in the DNA of early 20th century Weird fiction.

Here are my notes from the excavated gravesite:

Why are conservatives blaming progressives for changes in trans rights?

[This post originally appeared as an op-ed in the Roanoke Times on July 24 under the title “Gavaler: Transgender issue isn’t left. vs. right”.]

Last month, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court’s decision to allow trans students to use restrooms that correspond with their gender identities. The case was from Gloucester County, Virginia, where the school board had instead created a small number of single-person restrooms for trans students, while still barring them from facilities that didn’t correspond with their biological sex. The Fourth Circuit Court declared that policy unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court agreed when it voted 7-2 to decline hearing the school board’s final appeal.

All three of Donald Trump’s conservative appointees—Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—voted with the majority. That means they agree that trans students should be allowed to use their preferred restrooms. Did Trump pack the Supreme Court with radical leftists? Obviously not. As Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell orchestrated one of the most ideologically lopsided Courts in the history of our country, barring two-term President Obama from making any appointments, while giving his one-term successor three. 

Yet the McConnell-Trump Court also backed trans rights in 2020, when it ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay and trans employees from discrimination based on sex. Justice Gorsuch, Trump’s first appointee, wrote the majority opinion: “Today we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear.”

But instead of attacking the Republican-appointed Supreme Court for this new status quo, many conservatives blame Democrats. Last year, the Democratic-controlled Virginia Legislature passed a law requiring “the Department of Education to develop and make available to each school board model policies concerning the treatment of transgender students.” This year those model policies specify that students “should be allowed to use the facility that corresponds to their gender identity.”

Some conservatives call that policy pro-pedophilia and label anyone who agrees with it a pedophile. Unless they are Supreme Court justices appointed by a Republican president.

Now, since our conservative-packed Supreme Court has made explicit that barring trans students from their preferred restrooms is unconstitutional, Virginia, like every other state in the nation, will have to do more than just “make available” “model policies.” Trans rights are now undisputed law. For a school to disregard federal law is not only illegal but also a trigger for lawsuits with an insurmountable legal precedent. The Gloucester County school board lost all of its appeals, and now so will every other school board that violates trans rights.

But don’t blame progressives. Blame Trump and McConnell. Or maybe when a hyper-conservative Supreme Court doubles down on the rights of trans people, it’s time to accept that trans people are just people?

The problem isn’t that the radical left is taking over the country. The problem is an unwillingness to let go of a past wrong. It used to be considered okay to openly ridicule and discriminate against trans people. It also used to be okay to openly ridicule and discriminate against gay people. If you grew up with those norms, they may still seem normal and reasonable—even when some of the most conservative judges in the country say otherwise.

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett recognize that earlier anti-trans bigotry was wrong. They recognize that fact while also remaining firmly conservative. It’s not a struggle between left and right. Go back fifty years, and progressives of the 1970s were certainly not advocates for trans rights either. They were generally as bigoted toward trans people as everyone else. What’s happened now is the recognition of trans rights across the political spectrum. It’s a shared American victory we should celebrate together.

How do you view this comic?

I’m completing the final draft of my next book, The Comics Form: The Art of Sequenced Images, due to my editor at Bloomsbury next month. It’s an attempt to pull back, re-examine and then re-approach a lot of what we assume about things we call comics—as well as about things we tend not to call comics. Though the book falls into the broad category of comics theory, and my pal in the philosophy department assures me it’s also a work of philosophy, I also intend it to be practical.  

To see just how practical, I’m trying a test run on the above comic (recently sent to me by the author, John Gavaler, who not coincidentally is also my father). Following the ideas I discuss in The Comics Form, here are the steps one might follow when viewing something through a comics lens.

1.

Is the “something” visual, flat, and static? If it’s, say, a sculpture garden and so not flat, or if it is a visual image or images that are moving, as with a film or video game, then viewing it through a comics lens probably won’t be very helpful.

My father’s comic is visual, flat, and static, so I’ll proceed to the next step.

2.

Do you perceive it as consisting of more than one image? A lot of visual objects are made of distinct parts, but those parts aren’t necessarily understood as separate images. Many flags, for instance, consist of one or more panels, but those kinds of panels aren’t treated separately from the flag as a whole.

My father’s comics appears to me to be made of multiple, separable images.

3. 

How many images?

I count twelve.

4.

Are the images juxtaposed? While ‘juxtaposed’ can mean different things (in film juxtaposed images are not next to each other but appear separately, one immediately after the other), let’s focus first on whether the images are contiguous—do they touch?

Since the images in my father’s comic do not touch (an area of negative space appears between them), they are not strictly contiguous. But if we accept a less strict definition, we could say they are indirectly contiguous and so still juxtaposed in the sense of being arranged together within the same visual field.

More specifically, the images are arranged in a 4×3 grid with uninform horizontal and vertical gutters created by the negative spaces between identically (or practically identically) sized and shaped images. Each image is also unframed.

If you got this far, I’d say you’re safe to call the object you’re looking at a comic—though only if you accept that a comic can be defined formally. If you don’t, then I’d still say the work is in the comics form. That form can be defined in different ways, but it’s most commonly defined as juxtaposed images or as sequenced images (the difference, if there is one, is complicated, and not helpful at this early stage).

My dad’s comic is in the comics form.

5.

Is the comic in the comics medium? That can mean a variety of things, none of them formal. Most basically, I’d say things are in the comics medium if the creators, publishers, and/or consumers say the are. So something published by a publisher that identifies as a publisher of comics is probably in the comics medium. Though not everything in a newspaper is a comic, those things that appear in a newspaper’s comics section mostly are.

My father’s comic is not published and so not part of any media.

6.

Can something be in the comics medium anyway?

Some definitions of media require publication, or an equivalent process, and so might necessarily exclude my father’s comic, but when he sent it to me, my father wrote: “I’m attaching my newly minted comic book.” If authorial intention matters, then that may be sufficient. Unless he was joking, since he added: “Or, maybe, it should be properly called a graphic novel.” Since my father knows that graphic novels are longer, multi-page works, and since his attachment was a single page, he presumably wasn’t serious that it might be a graphic novel. Was he serious about calling it a comic? I think so, but that’s my interpretation of his statement, and someone else might argue for a different interpretation.

This is why defining something by authorial intention is a problem.

But even if I can’t know my father’s intentions, I perceive his comic as having his intentions—even if I’m completely wrong about his actual intentions.

7.

Are the multiple images in a specific order?

I’m neutral about whether my father’s comic is in the comics medium, because the criteria of inclusion applies ambiguously in this case. The comics form is ambiguous too, since it’s not entirely clear whether images that are juxtaposed are necessarily sequenced too.

Happily, for my father’s comics, they are both. The content of the images are representational and depict a sequence of chronological moments in which a work crew removes a damaged tree. Though a viewer is always free to view the images in any order, only one order produces the (presumably intended) narrative.

8.

Does the specific order create a specific viewing path through the arrangement of images?

Yes. In fact, it may be impossible to perceive the image order without simultaneously perceiving the resulting viewing path.

Unless you understand the path to be independent of the image order because a work in the comics medium follows certain viewing conventions. My father’s comic is row-based, creating a Z-path viewing path. If you begin with the assumption that the comic follows that convention, you will likely start by looking at the top left image. Some conventional comics are instead column-based, creating N-paths, but since that’s less common, you would probably attempt a Z-path first, proceeding next to the middle image in the second row instead of the second image in the first column. The image content in my father’s comic would reward that attempt, allowing a viewer to continue a Z-path through the rest of the arrangement. But if the image order were arranged instead in columns, a viewer would have to discover that through trial and error.

The trial-and-error approach is often overlooked, and it applies earlier in the viewing process than is often considered. Viewers who assume my father’s comic follows a viewing path common for works published in the comics medium do so because they have first perceived other conventions that lead to that assumption. Probably the 4×3 grid of square panels and uniform gutters does the trick.

But just because a set of images is arranged in a uniformly spaced grid doesn’t mean it has a pre-determined viewing path. A lot of Warhols don’t. That means there’s always a trail-and-error approach in play. If an attempt to view the images in a specific path is rewarded by the image content following the same order, then the viewer will likely continue. If the image content doesn’t reward that path, or any path, and instead the images appear to be unordered, the viewer likely will abandon following any prescribed path and scan in any direction at any time.

That means image content and order ultimately determine viewing paths—not the other way around.

9.

Does the author care about any of this?

I don’t know, but I’ll ask. My father did say in his email: “In any case I’m expecting a critique. ”

I think this probably counts?

New Comics @ Shenandoah

I’m delighted to see the new issue of Shenandoah is now online! I’m especially delighted to see the cover art by Leigh Ann Beavers. The piece is titled “whitethorn project: flattened whitethorn bouquet study no. 5“:

I’m probably a bit biased toward Leigh Ann, since she and I co-wrote Creating Comics and co-teach our hybrid creative-writing/studio-arts Making Comics course every other spring term. We were teaching it for the third time this past May when Beth (Shenandoah‘s editor) was in the process of selecting the image from an array of Leigh Ann’s works.

As usual, I had nothing to do with the cover art selection process. Unusually, I also had nothing to do with the comics selection process for this issue too. I became Shenandoah’s first-ever comics editor six issues ago in 2018, and though I hope to continue in that role indefinitely, it was an honor to step aside for Shenandoah‘s first-ever comics guest editor, Rachelle Cruz.

I wish I could take some tiny credit, but Beth and Rachelle met without my involvement, though I did know a little about Rachelle from her textbook Experiencing Comics (which I excerpted last winter for my WRITING 100 Superheroes seminar).

In addition to selecting comics, Rachelle selected a theme for her curated issue. Please read her introduction, “A Song or a Warning: Shenandoah’s Comic Artists Contemplate Survival,” for more detail, but bottom line: we appear to have survived the pandemic. Rachelle writes:

“In the summer of 2020, I was graciously invited by Beth Staples, editor-in-chief, to edit the comics section of the spring 2021 issue. “You can even come up with a theme, if you’d like,” Beth said. I’m privileged in so many ways (my ability to work from home is one of them), but the question, how am I—how are we—going to survive this, is one I wanted to ask cartoonists.”

Each of her three comics artists responded deeply.

In Trinidad Escobar and Meredith Hobbs Coons’ “So Much Good,” Rachelle sees: “Or survival as a bounding through our inner and outer landscapes to seek the intimacy of ourselves and others where there is ‘the rim light of your emerging joys’ and ‘so much good’ that emerges from this communion.”

Here’s the first page:

In Breena Nuñez “Invitation,” Rachelle sees: “Survival, or surviving, can be a space for holding our tears, our multiple embodied selves (younger and present) and our expectations of them.”

Here’s the first page:

And in Mita Mahato’s “Alligator Gut: A Representation of Survival with Papers, Polyethylene, and Residual Ink,” Rachelle sees: “survival as a complicated tangle of alligator guts, of what persists through paper-woven, collaged digestion.”

It’s wonderful to see Mita return to the virtual pages of Shenandoah, since she is also the first comics creator I contacted when I became editor. Her “Lullaby” appeared in Fall 2018, and her artwork was featured on the cover of the same issue, the first to feature Beth as editor. It’s equally wonderful to welcome Trinidad Escobar to Shenandaoh. When Rachelle mentioned during an early Zoom that she would be contacting her, I was thrilled. And I’m equally thrilled to be introduced to Meredith Hobbs Coons and Breena Nuñez.

Beth also welcomed another guest editor for the new issue. DW McKinney took over nonfiction (check out her introduction, “What is Home?: Shenandoah Essayists Eulogize and Celebrate Places of Belonging“). For this issue, poetry editor Lesley Wheeler also curated a special section on “uncanny activism” (a term she explains in her introduction, “A Grimoire: Poems in Pursuit of Transformation“). And translations editor Seth Michelson focused on Arabic poetry (“Contemporary Arabic Poetry in Contemporary Translation“). That’s all on top of the usual amazing array of fiction and nonfiction.

Check it all out!

The New and Improved Testament

Religions tend to be distinguished by their scriptures. Jews are not Christians because Jews believe the Tanakh and only the Tanakh was inspired by and so indirectly written by God. Christians are not Jews because Christians believe both the Tanakh, as reconfigured as the Old Testament, and the New Testament are holy books and no others. Christians are not Mormons because Mormons believe that, in addition to the Bible, the Book of Mormon is scripture—though, since Mormons do consider themselves Christians, perhaps a Christian is anyone who considers the Bible to be divinely inspired. If so, all Mormons and all Christians are by the same logic Jews, a view I suspect most Jews, Christians, and Mormons would reject.

The Mormon Church further expanded its list of holy books in 1976 when it declared: “The success of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War came about through men who were raised up by God for this special purpose,” and “The Constitution was and is a miracle. It was an inspired document, written under the divine guidance of the Lord.” Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism in 1830, said as much: “The Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God. It is a heavenly banner.” Brigham Young added that it “was dictated by the invisible operations of the Almighty.”

This would seem to be further evidence that Mormons are not Christians, since the belief that human documents are scripture is heresy from the Christian perspective that only the Bible is divine. The notion that Jesus Christ would favor one nation over all others also seems to contradict the Gospels (“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” the parable of the Good Samaritan, and Luke 14:26’s demand to reject even family allegiances), but Mormons aren’t the only Americans with that belief.

The Pew Research Center found in 2020 that 32% of Americans believe that God chooses U.S. presidents, specifically Obama and Trump—though most believe so in the broad sense of elections being part of God’s plan rather than as an endorsement of specific candidates. QAnoners, who believe that Jesus Christ selected Donald Trump to war against Satan-worshipping, sex-trafficking, child-raping, and child-eating Democratic leaders, is a notable exception. Americans broadly believed in Manifest Destiny, a term coined in 1845 to describe the notion that God willed the western expansion of the U.S., including the conquest and annexation of lands owned by other nations, including Mexico and dozens of native tribes.  

Again, such beliefs seem remarkably non- and even anti-Christian to me—unless the term “Christian” is used in the expanded Mormon sense of belief in the Bible as scripture but not the Bible exclusively. If so, a major new religion emerged over the past two hundred years with a following of potentially millions. Its followers refer to it as “Christianity,” though to differentiate it from other uses of the term, I will tentatively call it “Church of America,” because religions that expand on previous religions tend to be identified by their additional scriptures.  

Whatever its name, it has four holy works: the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Its latter-day saints include Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and George Washington. Since the Church of America does not recognize the Book of Mormon as scripture, it is distinct from Mormonism, though both recognize the U.S. founding documents as divinely inspired.

In the last chapter of Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith: A Philosophical Account, my co-author Nathaniel Goldberg and I trace the development of the Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in terms of two kinds of revision of scriptures, expansions (often called sequels in other contexts) and retcons (which require reinterpreting but not erasing pre-existing facts), as well as a previous religious community’s ability to holdout against a revision. The relationships are complex, but Nathaniel compressed them into a single graph:

The Church of America is an expansion of “Christianity” (as defined as the exclusive belief in the Bible), but I’m not going to ask Nathaniel to try to add the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to the graph.

How popular is the Church of America? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s massive. I co-founded a Facebook page where conservatives and progressives (sometimes) try to talk across the ideological divide. A Friend commented recently: “America was founded when we were inspired by God to recognize liberation from the King.” It’s a notion I’ve read there before, sometimes in significantly more detail. Another Friend wrote in response to my question:

“I do believe that the founding fathers were inspired by God in developing the founding ethos in our Declaration and the Constitution later made to ensure government is in line with that ethos. This perspective would be commonly held among Christian Conservatives who would draw from the more modern rhetoric of Reagan and Coolidge, along with ideas from Lincoln and statements by the founding fathers in their writings. … That being said, many in the religious right probably have not studied the rhetoric or Reagan, Coolidge, Lincoln, and the Founding Fathers in depth, but this conception of America’s founding is culturally recognized in the household and I would say a majority of politically active republicans likely view the founding in a manner like this.”

The belief explains why, when I pointed out the historically incontrovertible fact that the founders were racists (they believed African people were innately inferior to European people), I was accused of “demonization.” The opposite is true: the Church of America deifies the founders as holy instruments of God who produced sacred texts. To acknowledge their human flaws (there is no sense in which they were not racists) seems like demonization because it diminishes them to a similar degree but only because of their holy status.

Though I was raised Catholic, I am not now a Christian, so I am not in a good position to express opinions about what is or is not Christianity. I will say though that at a gut-reaction level the belief that political documents written by human beings were actually written by God through divine inspiration strikes me as sacrilegious. But understanding the Church of America as a distinct religion does make intuitive sense to me, because I have often been perplexed by conservative policy positions that seem to contradict the central tenants of the Gospels (where abortion is never mentioned, but Jesus directs his followers to relinquish all of their wealth and help the poor about a dozen times).

Many U.S. Christian conservatives prioritize securing the border over aiding impoverished people attempting to cross it. If they are not “Christians” but members of the Church of America, then the apparent failure to obey the New Testament may be explained by the stronger belief in the sacredness of the U.S. This follows since religions that expand on previous religions tend to hold their new scriptures in higher and more defining esteem. Christians, for example, see the New Testament as fulfilment of and in some ways a corrective to the Old Testament, and what would the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints be without its latter-day saints?

The Church of America seems similarly to privilege the U.S. and its founding documents over the Bible.

Icelandic Comics

More specifically Reykjavik street art, which you may or may not agree should be called ‘comics.’

This sequence is across from the Hlemmur Matholl, where we ate dinner our second night.

Though not a comic according to a medium-based definition (it’s not on paper, it’s not reproducible, it’s not hand-held, and it’s not been published by an entity that identifies as a publisher of comics), the three-image unit is is a comic according to a form-based definition, which boils down to two wonderful words: sequenced images.

The division of the building windows (which reverses the typical panel/gutter relationship) physically separates the three images, but I suspect viewers would likely still identify them as separate images even if they were painted edge-to-edge because the image content produces recurrence: it’s the same figure pictured three times in three evolving states.

That evolution also makes is a sequence with a viewing path and not just a series open to any viewing order and direction. Though the three states need not be chronological, the middle image seems to be a mid-point between the two outer images, implying a step-by-step transformation. That combined with a left-to-right reading habit (whether reading in English or Icelandic) is enough to establish order and direction.

This next one offers a different formal challenge:

That’s two sides of the same building. If a comic is formally two or more juxtaposed images, are the sides of a building continuous and so part of the same surface and so not juxtaposed? Or are does the 90 degree angle mean a change in canvas, producing two images that are juxtaposed like two facing pages in a book? And, more complexly, what if the image content is continuous between surfaces?

Those continuous four-part arms wraps all the way around the four sides of the building. Does that mean it’s one image, the way a tri-fold page folds out from a book? Would it be four images if each side instead featured no connecting lines between the four sides?

If you want my opinion, I’d say yes to both questions. But what about definitions that require an image to include text to be considered a comic?

Fantomas is an early 20th-century French pulp, so good proto-source material. The use of the top hand as a word container is a nice effect too, but what about images that include only words?

Words are always images, and the use of green, blue, and red is significant to the content, differentiating time periods and (I’m guessing) countries in feminist history. Is that enough to make the image an “image”? Personally, I’d say no, but other words are clearly more image-focused.

Not quite sure what this says, but I assume those are all letters:

Google translate failed me for “Andrymi” posted on the sign in front of the yellow arms house, but apparently “STRAX!” means “IMMEDIATELY!” I’m not sure if the graphic elements are enough to push the word-image into word-image art, but if you think conventions are enough to make a comic a comic, check out the word balloons embedded in this one:

Or the sound emanata painted around the figure’s mouth:

Or maybe a cartoon style is enough?

Or conventional Marvel/DC house style plus conventional subject matter?

Check out the manga chin:

Or maybe you don’t care what they’re called and just enjoy looking at street art?

By the way, you just took about a five mile hike around Iceland’s capital. You deserve to rest with a cup of tea in your two-night rental apartment before heading out to explore glaciers, waterfalls, and volcanoes tomorrow morning. Please enjoy this three-image photocomic as you relax.

[BONUS IMAGES! If you’re suffering from jetlag and light-induced insomnia, this is what the Reykjavik sky looks like a half hour after the midnight sunset. Fortunately, I don’t know what the 3:10 sunrise looks like.]

Medium, Technique & Style: Eight Heads

Nesting dolls might be a good metaphor, with medium as the largest outer container, which twists open to reveal technique, which twists open to reveal the tiny center doll of style.

My medium is, as usual, MS Paint. Though officially “deprecated” since 2017, the doddering grandparent of graphics software remains my preference in part because post-Photoshop tech intimidates me, but also because limitations are paradoxically freeing. I use no pre-set or built-in effects. It’s all idiosyncratic invention.

The resulting technique is hard to describe, but it leans heavily on the “Transparent selection” button. I tend to start by scribbling an embarrassingly simplistic sketch of facial features using the touchpad on my laptop on the thinnest “pencil” setting. Next I copy and past layers and layers and layers until the original lines get lost and the image grows thicker and soft edged. I use that new conglomerate image as a filter over itself, creating multiple partial versions, that I then recombine in new layers. Final steps vary, but there’s a lot of scissoring out sections and rearranging pieces, usually with overlapping edges.

Style is even harder to define. I’m told the effect is charcoal-like, but that may have more to do with the oddity of the technique. I also suspect that someone else following the same steps would produce images that look different from these. The style is also emergent, meaning I don’t know what things are going to look like until they start looking like something that I didn’t exactly plan. Someone else might not-plan something that ended up evolving very differently.

Ronald Reagan’s Favorite Philosopher

Chih-chung Tsai, a renown cartoonist in Asia, publishes as C. C. Tsai in English. Dao De Jing, which translates roughly as “The Way of Virtue,” is his fourth in a continuing series of Chinese philosophy adaptions, in collaboration with translator Brian Bruya. While the best known of the selected philosophers to English-speaking readers is likely Confucius, Laozi may be equally influential and, according to legend, briefly taught Confucius. Bruya in his introduction acknowledges that Laozi may never have existed and that his famed book may have been written by multiple authors compiled over many years—and yet Dao De Jing’s insights still endure.

A possibly non-existent main character also provides Tsai the greatest freedom of interpretation. His cartoon Laozi features a head roughly a third the size of his entire body. His chin merges with his neck in a single pen stroke, and his mouth is seemingly obscured by a comb-like mustache draped from his oval of a nose. His enormous curving ears are his largest features, extending almost to the top of his flat head.

While it’s odd to read the talk-balloon musings of a Yoda-proportioned philosopher, the juxtaposition provides a humorous undercurrent to the esoteric philosophy. Would the would-be Laozi approve of his words being mouthed by a cartoon version of himself? Based on Bruya, who praises the original work for its “catchy and superficially appealing” style, I suspect he would. I certainly do. Still, Little Laozi (he’s not named that, but there should be some way to differentiate the historical character from Tsai’s rendering) alters Laozi’s words just by appearing to utter them.

Tsai applies the same cartooning norms to the philosopher’s surroundings. While likely uninfluenced by him, Tsai’s carefully curving and angled shapes are reminiscent of Al Hirschfeld’s hyper-stylized caricatures popular in the U.S. in the 1970s. Tsai’s sharp clean lines form similarly exaggerated and simplified figures. No crosshatching suggests depth or texture, so the interior spaces of most bodies are as empty as the interior panel space surrounding them. As it adapts aphorism about simplicity and balance, the style resonates well beyond its surface.

That style as well as the book’s layout approach are identical to Tsai’s The Way of Nature, an adaptation of Zhuangzi also published by Princeton University Press in 2019. I admit that at first glance, I was disappointed that Dao De Jing could easily be mistaken for the earlier work. But that’s a little like complaining that Shakespeare wrote only Shakespearean sonnets. When you innovate your own effective form, why alter it?

Tsai’s layout remains elegant. Built around consistent two-page spreads, each left-hand page opens with a full-height caption box containing Laozi’s original Chinese text inside double frames, and each right-hand page closes with the same. The side caption boxes never vary in size, but the amount of writing does, with as many as five columns of ideographs and as little as one, and always with copious white space unused. The side boxes also visually highlight where Tsai steps beyond his philosopher’s text. The opening of Tsai’s adaptation features six pages with empty side boxes—meaning the content, a brief biographical introduction to Laozi, is all Tsai.

I can’t read Chinese, but I appreciate the general translation principle of providing originals and, even better, how well Tsai integrates them with the translated content sandwiched between. Tsai uses the columns as a visual element, with the lines that compose the ideographs echoed in the cartoon sections between them. Gutters separate the caption boxes, but adjacent frames are interconnected with single lines defining each set of panels. It’s a subtle effect, but the choice compresses the multiple panels into a single ideograph-like page unit. The interiors of the panel are sparse, with the English text floating freely in negative space that merges with the mostly undrawn backgrounds of the cartoons. The thick black lines of the drawings, the English words, the frames, and the ideographs all combine in balanced compositions well-suited to the themes of Laozi’s writings. Such sage observations as “The idea cannot be clearly explained through language” takes on additional meaning. Tsai also creates a visual rhythm with Laozi often speaking the final, moral-like statement in the white space of an unframed final panel.

Bruya’s introduction is especially targeted at American readers who, he warns, tend to read Laozi through a Reagan-eque, libertarian lens. Reagan, Bruya notes, quoted the Dao De Jing when arguing for smaller government. Bruya’s translation of Chapter 60 is less pithy than the one coopted by Reagan’s speech-writer (“Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish; do not overdo it”), but I suspect it’s more accurate: “Governing a large country is like frying a small fish—you can’t turn it over too often.” And to Bruya’s credit, he encourages readers to seek out many translations to study their “different perspectives and explanations.”

Still, his warning seems key. Reading Chapter 57’s “The more laws there are, the more outlaws there will be” in isolation destroys the balancing principle at the heart of Laozi’s teachings. The goal is not less government, but less self—a concept harder to cut and paste into a GOP political speech. Laozi instead concludes his book with an aphorism well-known even during his lifetime, “To give is better than to receive,” because it encapsulates the “non-contentious spirit” of sages, as well as “the spirit of the dao.”

Appropriation/Transformation Comic #2: O’Keeffe, Series 1, No. 8, 1918 (2021)

What might the Supreme Court have to say about my appropriation of O’Keefe’s image to create this comic strip? I remain deeply uncertain, but another recent decision could matter.

Google v Oracle is nothing like the artistic cases I discussed earlier (including Warhol’s Prince series and Fairey’s HOPE), yet the third factor for evaluating fair use, “amount and substantiality of the portion used,” seems key. Here’s the passage from the decision that seems to apply:

“If one considers the declaring code in isolation, the quantitative amount of what Google copied was large…. The question here is whether those 11,500 lines of code should be viewed in isolation or as one part of the considerably greater whole. We have said that even a small amount of copying may fall outside of the scope of fair use where the excerpt copied consists of the “‘heart’” of the original work’s creative expression…. If a defendant had copied one sentence in a novel, that copying may well be insubstantial. But if that single sentence set forth one of the world’s shortest short stories—“When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.”—the question looks much different, as the copied material constitutes a small part of the novel but the entire short story…. Several features of Google’s copying suggest that the better way to look at the numbers is to take into account the several million lines that Google did not copy….”

That could bode badly for appropriation artists, since in the case of my O’Keefe-appropriated comic, I use all of her painting, not just a portion (and so the common question of whether that portion is its “heart” is moot). Though the original painting in its unaltered form is only the first image of my sequence, like the court’s (surprisingly odd) example of a one-sentence short story, the comic strip uses the image in its entirety.

But then maybe that’s okay? The decision continues:

“The “substantiality” factor will generally weigh in favor of fair use where, as here, the amount of copying was tethered to a valid, and transformative, purpose… In a sense, the declaring code was the key that it needed to unlock the programmers’ creative energies. And it needed those energies to create and to improve its own innovative Android systems. We consequently believe that this “substantiality” factor weighs in favor of fair use.”

So based on that assessment, could I appeal to the Supreme Court using their new precedent to argue that my comic strip had a valid, and transformative, purpose, and the original O’Keefe image was the key that I needed to unlock my creative energies to create and improve my own innovative artwork?

I have no idea.

[Here are parts one, two, three, four, and five of my previous fair use musings.]