Matt Fraction's Blog, page 447

Henry and the Ray

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The day after

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The punchline is we all got to go back to worrying ourselves sick about Japan

Tsunami sky

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five books that make me think of this time of year

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(Haven't sat in front of my machine since I hit POST on the last one of these. Ahem)

5.

MARVEL MASTERWORKS v 23: DR. STRANGE

Reprinting STRANGE TALES #114-141

Also available in the more-affordable, softcover, black and white ESSENTIAL DR. STRANGE VOL. 1)

(My edition 1992; there've been a few other printings)

First, how perfect is it that this is volume 23 of the MASTERWORKS series?

Second, the cover is a surreal purple and gold; whereas all the other masterworks were varying colors of marble… this one was appropriately strange. And lovely. I kind of hate hardcovers, too– I can't have nice things– but this one I really treasured. Left it out and around all the time.

Uh, until I sold it for rent money. Anyway.

In his most early of stories, Dr. Strange was something like a proto-KOLCHAK-THE NIGHT STALKER. The formula goes: somebody with a Weird Problem seeks out Dr. Strange; Dr. Strange uses a Weird Solution to solve the problem, as it is a problem arcane and occult-y in nature. The pages are in a creepy Ditko nine-panel grid and full of creepy Ditko shapes that many more, and many more talented, people than I have written about. Most of them are right, and Ditko, if you've never really experienced the guy's stuff, really stands as a singular creative entity in the world.

I kind of miss that edge to the character, the Occult Private Eye thing; the way Ditko drew strange when he was deliberately trying to draw strange is genuine and spooky. These stories, especially the early ones where this formula is in place, are short and crude in the writing, oftentimes clumsy, but there is sincere and eerie edge. There is nothing obvious here that places DR. STRANGE within the Marvel Universe– it's always been the equivalent of a pachuco cross on the thumb-webbing of the all-American kid. DR. STRANGE is like the Steely Dan of the Marvel canon. It can't really be inflicted but rather discovered… and forcing the issue will just turn your target against you.

I got it for Christmas 1993. There is something perfectly winter-cold about Ditko, and about these stories. They can put frost on windows and down the length of your spine.

five books that make me think of this time of year

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4.

RONIN

Frank Miller and Lynn Varley

DC Comics, Absolute Edition 2008

There's a double page spread of New York– I think it's supposed to be New York, I think it's supposed to be the Lower East Side?– after the first snowstorm in forever that stands as immaculate and great. Whenever it snows in a city, whatever city, not just New York, and I see it, I can't help but think about that spread a little bit.

That says something about this book– and me, but that's sad and easy– and how Miller makes it lodge in the mind. Big chunks of these pages, looser and more experimental than Miller'd get for decades, can stay stuck there, knots to be untangled and savored. Why'd he never draw like that again? What was he thinking here? What the hell is going on? There's a young samurai. Who fails his master and is killed by a demon. But it's not a demon, it's a computer. And he's not a samurai– or even a ronin, now that the master is dead– but a limbless psychic boy in techno New York circa 1999 or whatever. Uh… then there's this girl…

You know what, the story doesn't even matter but, god, he goes for it here. There are stories, all apocryphal but all repeated with a kind of Samizdat-seriousness, about where the book came from and how and why; about Miller's page rates and the industry's reaction to the thing. All that matters, though, is this: RONIN is the first time an American master is absolutely unshackled by anything other than the depth of his own vision and the limits of his ambition. It is brutal and messy and glorious. It's fearless in the way young people are fearless, never bothering to ask permission, only wondering why not. You'll see Japan in these pages, you'll see France. The weird stylistic flourishes that made for odd fits on his DAREDEVIL run are given free reign.

The stories about how RONIN came about might not be true but it feel like a blank-check book.

This is my favorite work by Frank Miller who's got, by my lights, three masterworks to his credit, a slate of incredibly strong works in addition to that, and, as of late, has either turned into some kind of unknowing parody of himself or has vaulted so far ahead of everything else he might as well be Mondrian in Manhattan, depending on who you ask.

The best thing about Ronin it's seams split at the sides with all that possibility.

And then right in the middle of it all, a blanket of snow obliterates everything leaving only pure intention.

five books that make me think of this time of year

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3.

THE WILD PARTY

Joseph Moncure March and Art Spiegelman

Pantheon ed., 1994

(sorry this is late; i had a deadline and my fingers were being stupid)

Joseph Moncure March's most-recognizable contribution to American arts and letters– the phrase, "Pardon me while I slip into something more comfortable" (or some version thereof; that's lightly paraphrased)– suggests nothing of the man who would produce the work that Williams S. Burroughs would say "(W)as the book that made me want to be a writer." And yet that's just what Joseph Moncure March did, with 1928's THE WILD PARTY– an epic poem of the Jazz Age!– that was reprinted and illustrated by art spiegelman (small a, small s) in 1994. And while "an epic poem of the jazz age" would lose me, William S. Burroughs saying "It's the book that made me want to be a writer," alongside the presence and attention of spiegelman, would be enough to win me over.

It's a story of a party, of course, during prohibition, full of easy women, hustlers, bathtub gin, sex, violence, dragons to chase and a casual racism and holiday dollop of antisemetism that places the work firmly in its time without dating it– the shocking rush that comes from the… the, what, the sin, the titillation of all these wasted vaudeville wastrels transcends all that. It's about any bunch of sex and booze-fueled losers chasing after debauchery in an apartment with back rent due. It's timeless.

There's nothing winter about this book– in fact Queenie, our wastrel-in-chief, smokes out and luxuriates naked to try and beat otherwise oppressive heat– but it was given to me at Christmas, right before I ran off into a world of high drama and low rent for myself. Hell, it's barely even comics, with a kind of wood-cut illustration adorning each spread there's hardly any sequential visual narrative at all, but it's the first book I'd seen from spiegelman after the tour de force that was MAUS, whose importance and power really can't be overstated. And every Christmas I dig it out and read it a few times.

Like every other inevitable goddamn thing about the holidays: the doors always spring open; the cops always rush in.

five books that make me think of this time of year

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2.



THE BRADLEYS

"Merry Fucking Christmas"

Peter Bagge, Fantagraphics, 199…5?/2007

In the middle of the story "Merry Fucking Christmas," there comes this one bit:

It's Christmas eve, and Tom, Buddy, and Lisa sneak out to drink in the snow and talk while Buddy's parents and neighbors get loud on a bottle of Johnnie Walker black. Eventually Tom and Lisa make out. It's bookeneded by lots of screaming and yelling. It is, believe it or not, hilarious. Most of THE BRADLEYS, and all of HATE, which follows it, is hilarious.

Parents partying. Sneaking out. Getting drunk outside, at night, in the snow. Finding out about shithead high school friends dying in dumb, startling, ways. Making out with a girl that you'd never have had a chance with when you were in school and never will again. This little scene rings such specific bells in me.

I think there's this magic window of time, after you Leave Town when Come Home for the holidays. You go out, you see some of the old gang, but everything's remixed. The old cliques can't survive the end of senior year, and that first year of college makes it real clear real fast who peaked in high school and who didn't. A couple random encounters, a strange party, and before the fade out on "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), you're making out with girls that'd not give you the time of day the year before.

THE BRADLEYS is peppered with the small realities of life growing up in a town you train yourself to escape. The holiday dry hump victory lap of triumph is a tiny detail in this story, and in life, I suppose, but still. Listen and you can hear the bells ringing.

five books that make me think of this time of year

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1.

THE BALLAD OF DR. RICHARDSON

Paul Pope, Horse Press, 1993/1998

Dr. Richardson is an Art history academic stymied by his oppressively stuffy work environment and the crippling, uninspiring path his life has taken. A chance encounter with an alluring and difficult former student sends him daring to, pardon the phrase, disturb the dumb universe. Radiators hiss; coffee brews; la femme is cherchezed.

Steeped in romance for the metropolitan and for metropolitan romance, BALLAD is a winter book, pure and clean. The snowflakes float like clouds of foam across oppressive onyx towers and breath exits the mouth in fat arabesques. I can feel the stickiness atop the bare hardwood floors with my toes as Noel pads across it barefoot; I remember silent purple-morning tugs-of-war fought over too-small duvets. The hot dust smell that greets the first cold snap of the year. Hot drinks as requisite. Finding last years gloves and last years jacket with last years love notes still in the pocket. Cigarettes and pine needles. The crunch of frozen grass under your feet. Café windows fogged up from the inside, sweating.

This is a chase story and a love story about two people finding warmth together in a very cold night and it is as earnest and fearless as can be. Open fire, you cynical bastards: tonight you'll fall asleep alone with your quips and stabbing nastiness while the good Doctor put it all out there and tonight sleeps curled up with something considerably warmer. Pope was twenty-four when he made this. It feels like it, in all the good and aching ways that means, and, I suspect, were you to ask him, in all the embarrassing kiddie ways, too.

Which is a shame: it's a lovely book about falling in love in the snow.

Singapore travelpod

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Iron Man…

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…used to party pretty hard, y'all.