If Labor Day weekend finds you in San Francisco instead of at Fire Dude or whatever they call it (or, God forbid, just having a vacation), check this out. I would say so even if I weren’t in it (and it’s the first time I’ve been in one of these)... and even if I weren’t organizing it (so you can look forward to some entertaining technical disasters; fortunately I’m not MCing it though).
And here’s the official text without the confusing pictures:
Visit the Cartoon Art Museum for our third annual evening of live readings by some of the best indy-comics creators out there, including SFZF 2010 Special Guest Jesse Reklaw (10,000 Things To Do), John Porcellino (King-Cat Comics), Ed Luce (Wuvable Oaf), Jamaica Dyer (Weird Fishes), Hob (The Witness), Noah Van Sciver (Blammo), Susie Cagle (Nine Gallons), and Jonas Madden-Connor (Ochre Ellipse)! Come enjoy a glass of wine and experience comics in a whole new way!
Friday, September 3rd, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m - Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission St between 3rd and New Montgomery
$5 suggested donation (no one turned away for lack of funds)
All proceeds benefit SFZF and CAM!
Got a nice mention from Sean Collins for a comic I did a couple years ago. He got slightly more existential dread out of it than I intended, but I guess it depends on what you think is going on at the end, which I'm still not entirely sure about. Or maybe I just take the dread for granted.
H.G. Wells (1906)
What an odd little book. I was surprised to see that Wells wrote this later than all his other famous, hyper-influential SF novels, because it reads more like an early failed experiment, but it sure is interesting.
The first section, a realistic portrait of a not very interesting Victorian young man, is quite a slog; you can tell that this novel was not serialized, because most readers would’ve given up after several chapters about his career decisions and romantic disappointments, wondering when he’d get to the damn comet.
Then [spoiler:] there’s a comet, and everyone is scared, but instead of destroying the world, it saves it— since as luck would have it, the comet is basically made out of magic Prozac. And then the rest of the book is a utopia, but since it’s a new one rather than an established one, everyone’s trying to adjust to no longer being screwed up and neurotic.
Unlike a lot of idea-based utopian narratives, Wells pays attention to what it might feel like, personally, to be cured of anxiety— how promising yet totally weird it would be— and sometimes he gets it across well, as early on when a guy accidentally breaks his ankle and notices that although it hurts and all, he’s not freaking out, it’s just one of those things that happens. And the earlier realistic slog pays off somewhat as the narrator realizes how all the vague angst he’d been going on about was just silly and unnecessary, but he still feels duty-bound to keep worrying about it, even though he’s now physically unable to worry; he keeps trying to stay jealous of his ex-girlfriend and her new guy, even as she’s trying to tell him that everything’s cool because now they can all be lovers. That stuff rang true to me; Wells understood that when people have spent their whole lives learning how to be serious and unhappy, they’re not going to want all that effort to have been wasted.
On the other hand, it also has one of the weirdest bits of oblivious racism I’ve ever seen. There’s a post-comet scene where some businessmen and politicians are testifying ruefully about what jerks they used to be, and one of them is a Jewish banker... not just any Jewish banker, but the Jewish banker, the creepy greedy smelly sneaky one of anti-semitic legend. But now, like everyone else, he’s a decent guy; and he tells his own story, which is basically: “Wow, we Jews sure were greedy and awful! But it was just because of our mental hangups about being so weird and inferior! Now, thanks to the comet, we can all just get along.” It’s particularly bizarre because Wells obviously thought of this as an enlightened view— i.e. they’re not genetically bad, they’re just all twisted and evil for psychological/cultural reasons. And yet, ew.
It’s no mystery why the book isn’t well known: it basically has no plot, and in the end it’s a big “wouldn’t it be nice if” relying on a deus ex machina. (And although it’s always appealing to think that we could be awesome if we just weren’t being held back by some kind of psychic debris— Gurdjieff, Colin Wilson, and L. Ron Hubbard come to mind— Wells refuses to give us any superpowers as a result of this, other than happiness, so SF readers may feel cheated.) But because it never caught on like his other books (many of which created whole subgenres), I found it kind of fresh and surprising despite the clunky aspects.
Oddly, the closest connection I can think of in later SF is in the work of Samuel Delany, who had two very different takes on parts of the premise: Triton, where human nature hasn’t changed but there’s still a (sort of) utopia where a neurotic guy has trouble adjusting, and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, where you can get a treatment to make you incapable of worrying about anything but then you immediately get sold into slavery.
There are more tributes than I can count or read, but here’s Josh Neufeld, Tom Spurgeon, and various people in the comments on this article. (Update: and a lot more from Tom Spurgeon.)
Here’s another story, which is self-centered but what the hell:
When I was about 11, my parents started talking about how their friend Joyce was “eloping to Cleveland” because of this weird guy she’d just met. Soon after that, they acquired a bunch of the weird guy’s comic books, which were like nothing I’d ever seen. A lot of it was over my head, and off-putting in the same way as grown-up things like coffee or beer that tasted too strong and complicated to be fun... but it was totally fascinating. The writing style was conversational and poetic and dry and angry and jokey all at once, with a strange energy that showed through even in (or especially in) the pauses and empty spaces. The art was hard for me to process; being a kid, I was of course drawn to the more polished and stylized pieces drawn by Crumb and Shamray, but just the variety of different approaches— and the whole idea of drawing such everyday things— opened up my mind in a way I’m still trying to absorb. I read every issue for the rest of the 20th century (I know there are some I’ve missed since then; the proliferation of titles and mini-series got confusing once he got a publisher).
About a year later, my folks collaborated with Harvey on an American Splendor stage play (not the later one that’s depicted in the movie; see tiny photo under 1985-1986 here). This was at their theater in Lancaster, PA, and people there didn’t know what to make of it at all: a play based on a comic book? and it’s not a proper comic book, it’s about regular life?? with swearing??? It was a good piece though, and Harvey got really into it.
He and Joyce came to visit for a little while, and I sort of forgot they weren’t theater people, because they were just as eccentric, cranky, generous and interesting as the theater people that I was used to eavesdropping on. They were also obviously made for each other. Although they weren’t around after that and I only heard from them through my folks, they always stuck in my mind as sort of a legendary far-away aunt and uncle, fixed permanently at the age they were then (which made it really weird to see the AS movie, because the actors playing the 1980s Harvey and Joyce looked more accurate to me than the older real people). Reading comics about huge events like his bouts with cancer and their adoption of a daughter— a year or two after I had heard about those things as they happened— was strange, disturbing, moving, and instructive. (Sorry about all these lists of adjectives, but that’s just how it is.) I couldn’t imagine being so open about your own struggles and flaws, and at the same time able to craft them into stories worth reading, more or less in real time.
During the late ’90s, as I started to get to know people from my own generation who were making comics, this weird feeling of twice-removed family got even weirder as some of those people started to draw stories for AS. Previously the artists had seemed like an invisible crew of mythological creatures. It took me a little while to realize that Josh Neufeld was the same person as “Josh” in the comic— and I remembered with some embarrassment how I was originally irritated to see this new guy added to the book, just because it was always sort of disorienting to get used to a whole new style, but now he seems like an obvious natural. And Dean Haspiel was the last guy I would’ve ever imagined to be in it, with his big bold lines and very very non-introverted persona, but he was obviously right too. Although AS was often described as something that had been going on forever just chronicling Pekar’s day to day in more or less the same way, it wasn’t so; he was always trying new things and following new obsessions, and he seemed to really enjoy figuring out how to play to a new artist’s strengths.
It never occurred to me to try to draw for him myself. I wouldn’t have dared. I still felt massively validated when a tiny story of mine got into an anthology he guest-edited— and then I panicked, thinking it might be some kind of distant nepotism thing. So it was a huge relief when I finally met him again after that and introduced myself with my real name (the story was under my pen name) and he stared at me for a second like maybe it was some kind of prank, and then he apparently decided it was just one of those things that happens: “Huh! That’s you? Huh! Nice to meetcha again. Say hi to ya folks.” (This was at a book signing in Berkeley, where the still-alive B.N. Duncan showed up in the front row to Harvey’s great delight. The Q&A&A&A that ensued was hilarious and, with their unique vocal qualities, probably unintelligible to anyone more than ten feet away— it sounded like a vacuum cleaner wooing an outboard motor.)
Can’t think what else to say. I thought he would be around for about a hundred years.
So we went in for a while and gazed lasciviously at the equipment (and at the pretty decent mini-comic collection that was pinned up on the wall like butterflies), and tried to find out what the fuck this was all about. Apparently you can walk in and do some printing, at least on weekends. Whether you can just do whatever you want, I can’t really tell. There were no written rules or explanations, and the guy who appeared to be in charge (or at least in charge of talking to me) was like some hyper-cheerful avatar of public relations, answering every question with some variation on “this isn’t about a corporate thing, I don’t like corporations either, this is a coalition of local artists, but the [Brand of Blue Jeans] Company believes in what we’re doing here and we want to show that handmade things can be special.” I said something like “You know you’re preaching to the choir here, I’m into this stuff, I was just wondering who runs it and who provided this pretty decent mini-comic collection”... didn’t matter, still got the same spiel.
I did find out that the whole thing is only going to be there for two months (yes, they moved a one-ton Vandercook press into a storefront for two months); then the blue jean genie will appear somewhere else to do something equally random.
There’s a fairly smarmy website about the campaign at “workshops dot l*vi dot com”(*), which at least sort of answers the question the cheerful guy wouldn’t answer about who some of the local artists are. Unsurprisingly, they’re mostly designers working in ad-type stuff, including Shepard Fairey’s company. The Women’s Building and 826 Valencia are also associated in some way— although the latter clearly didn’t have any input into the decor, which looks about as handmade and funky as the hotel in 2001.
(* I’m being coy about writing out the link and the company name just because I’m 100% sure that there’s someone whose job it is to analyze mentions of this on the web, and that’s fine, but I just don’t feel like becoming a data point for the next PR campaign. “Some people seem to think this came across as phony and calculated. How can we adjust that image?” Etc.)
If I seem a little cranky about this, it’s probably because I would really love for San Francisco to have something like Portland’s IPRC, a genuinely homegrown fortress of coolness that you could probably run for 500 years on the money and effort that goes into this sort of promotional gadget.