Review: Paris

Paris, written by Andi Watson, drawn by Simon Gane, SLG Publishing, 2007, 128 pages, US$10.95

Juliet, an American art student in Paris in the 1950s, is hired to paint a portrait of Deborah, an English debutante. The two girls fall in love.

With a plot outline like that, you probably have a good idea of where this is going: either Juliet and Deborah will defy society, but end up living happily ever after, with Juliet recognised as an artistic genius; or they will defy society but be crushed by stifling bourgeois conformity, possibly with one of them dying. It all depends on whether the switch is set to “romance” or “tragedy”.

Actually, the story takes a rather different tack. Juliet’s portraits are not recognised as great art by anyone, and when she switches to the dominant American mode of abstract expressionism, that isn’t a great artistic success either, though it serves to reunite her with Deborah. Deborah, in turn, seems to acquiesce in an arranged marriage of convenience, which will leave both her and her husband free to pursue their own romantic interests. It seems to be a story of finding happiness through accommodation with an unsympathetic society, rather than through rebellion, which is a refreshing change. This point is, however, ambiguous: Deborah’s decision is not shown, and thereafter she is drawn with gloves, so that we cannot tell if she is wearing a ring. If you prefer the heights of romance, you can read the story as if she rejected the marriage and ran off to America to find Juliet. But that would be so much less interesting.

The main themes of the book are nicely anticipated by Watson and Gane in the opening sequence. Juliet walks through boulevards packed with mid-century Parisian clichés, all marked by sprays of small, sharp, pointed leaves.


Then we get our first sight of Deborah. She is wearing a bodice decorated with patterns of flowers with short, sharp, pointed petals, connecting her visually with the leaf motif we associate with Paris and Juliet. Her aunt then tells her to cover up her underclothes (and thus, to conceal her relationship-to-be).



A drawback of the book is that neither Juliet nor Deborah comes across as a strong, distinctive character. The supporting characters – Deborah’s ghastly traditionalist aunt and louche brother, Juliet’s bohemian friends – come across more powerfully: they are one-dimensional, but their single dimensions are clear and familiar.

But the strongest character is the one in the title: Paris itself, as limned by Gane’s quirky, blocky line. There are frequent splash pages in which Gane suppresses perspective, giving all the bustle and activity of the city equal status with the action of the lead characters. The lettering, too, reinforces the line and mood of the drawings.


So strong is the association of drawing style and location that it actually becomes something of a liability in the final chapter, in which Deborah returns to England and Juliet to America. Boxy, modern Manhattan, in particular, looks wrong laid out in the crooked lines of the Old World. But this is a small price for the visual pleasure provided by the book as a whole.

Recent Reads

Once again, I’m going to use a subject suggested by Tom Spurgeon’s Five on Friday feature as an excuse to throw together a random mix of observations, each too inconsequential for a post in its own right. Plum pudding or mess of potage? You decide.

I’m going to expand the theme of “the last five comics you read, good or bad” to the last ten.

10. Posy Simmonds True Love
Eddie Campbell blogged about this book and wrote, “In a better world, you'd read my affectionate recollection and immediately go out and buy a copy.”

I’d like to think I’m making the world a little better.

9. Jules Feiffer Jules Feiffer’s America: From Eisenhower to Reagan
I have long underestimated Feiffer as a draughtsman. Based on my memories of reading his Village Voice strips (published over here by The Observer), I had categorised him alongside Thurber as a writer who also drew a bit, rather than as a cartoonist. But there is some very fine drawing and cartooning here, with solid and effective composition and a particular understanding of the uses of repetition. Feiffer gets a remarkable amount of weight out of his nervous lines, particularly in his gnarled caricatures.


8. Andi Watson Glister Issue 2: “House Hunting”
Somehow, when I reviewed the first issue of Watson’s charming children’s fantasy, I failed to notice how reminiscent his drawings were of the work of the classic children’s illustrator Edward Ardizzone, especially in the quality of line. So I’ll mention that here instead.


7. Ilya (ed) The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga Volume 2
Sadly, I am coming to the conclusion that I don’t really like the most obvious elements of manga – the pacing, the melodramatic “acting” of the characters, the graphic devices used to convey emotion, and, above all, the ubiquity of pointy-faced goggle-eyed androgynes. There are manga that I do enjoy a lot (Lone Wolf and Cub, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Ranma 1/2), but that is probably despite their common stylistic ticks, rather than because of them. Volume 2 in Constable & Robinson’s series is, on the whole, more faithful to the surface elements of clichéd manga style than Volume 1, and I found less to enjoy in it. It is probably no coincidence that by far my favourite comic strip here is Laura Howell’s The Bizarre Adventures of Gilbert & Sullivan, which may render its characters in a style somewhere pitched between chibi and Rumiko Takahashi, but which does so on top of a structure that is pure Leo Baxendale.


6. Rick Veitch Army@Love Volume 1 The Hot Zone Club
There are some good satirical side-swipes here, and a solid handling of narrative. But just as a million and one books, films and comics about the Vietnam war pay no attention to the Vietnamese, Army@Love treats America’s wars in the Middle East as being entirely about Americans. The natives of the fictional country of Afbaghistan appear only as targets and set decoration, except for a small family whose supporting role is to disrupt the marriage between two more important (because American) characters. There’s a huge flaw in the central conceit of the comic: the army is using a hedonistic lifestyle as a recruitment tool, but it is also trying to keep it secret. How do you use a secret in your recruitment ads? But look at this panel which addresses the desire for secrecy.


The implied belief – which may be the character’s, but which may also be Veitch’s own – is that what was shocking about Abu Ghraib was the embarrassment caused by the lack of self-control among Americans, not the torture and humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners. There’s a difference, and its an important one.

5. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Severin, Jim Steranko and others Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD Volume 1

4. John Aggs Robot Girl

3. The Beano Issue 3404
Something of a relaunch, with a higher price, all of 99p, a Dennis the Menace strip that ends on a cliffhanger, and two new series: London B4 12 (is that a pun on the lost Lon Chaney silent horror movie London After Midnight, and if so, how many 11-year olds will get it?) and Tales of Johnny Bean from Happy Bunny Green, which uses twee stylings, including the return of the libretto, recounting the whole story in narrative captions, to tell a tale of juvenile delinquency. The art is by the versatile Laura Howell, looking quite different here from her manga. She also provides inks to Hunt Emerson’s pencils for Ratz.


The inside front page provides quite a break from publisher DC Thomson’s tradition of leaving the comics’ creators in anonymity: it lists “top stories” (six out of fifteen this issue) and actually credits the artists. That leaves nine strips uncredited, and the writers’ names are still nowhere to be seen, but at least it’s a step out of the nineteenth century.

2. Scott Adams Dilbert
The first book I ever read about cartooning was The Cartoon Connection by William Hewison, then art editor of Punch. He came up with several categories of cartoon humour, one of which was “Recognition Humour: Recognition Humour at its most humble is straightforward reportage heightened very slightly by a dash of theatricality; here the cartoonist plucks at our sleeve and points to an ordinary everyday event, and as we are looking he flashes a beam of torchlight at it. The edges become sharper, the shadows darker, the action a little more exaggerated – we see that this very familiar thing is suddenly more significant.” Most days, Dilbert shines that torch with precision. (On the other days, it goes to Elbonia.)

1. Andy Riley Roasted

Review: Glister, Clubbing

Glister issue 1, by Andi Watson, 64 pages of strip, Image Comics, August 2007, US$5.99
Features:
“Glister and the Haunted Teapot”
Skeleton Key “Rock, Scissors, Paper”

A young girl called Glister Butterworth acquires a teapot haunted by the ghost of Philip Bulwark-Stratton, a Victorian novelist, who keeps badgering her to transcribe his final, unfinished novel.

This is a delightful, if slight, tale for children, with much humour arising from Bulwark-Stratton’s convoluted melodrama, and from Glister’s attempts to rid herself of the teapot and ghost which are monopolising her time. The lead character is sparky, and the setting is full of little details that give the imagined world texture, and which can be explored later in the series. Adults can enjoy the craftsmanship and the parallels with the real Edward Bulwer-Lytton (though they might wonder what the point is of the Thomas Pynchon reference, "lot 49" - unless the mysterious postal delivery of the teapot is significant).


Watson draws his own story in a style pitched somewhere between Quentin Blake and Fred Banbery’s illustrations to Paddington Bear, producing the very appropriate feel of a classic children’s book.


The back-up is an addition to Watson’s series about a dimension-hopping girl and her friend, a Japanese fox spirit, in a story about an unusual type of vampire. The draughtsmanship is in a style similar to that on the lead feature, but the panel compositions are, appropriately enough, much more manga-influenced.

The whole thing is a neat little package in a slim, case-bound B-format paperback. I only hope that, as a periodical publication by Image Comics, its distribution is not confined to comics shops, but that copies make their way into regular bookshops, where children might actually find them.


Clubbing, written by Andi Watson, illustrated by Josh Howard, lettering by Travis Lanham, 142 pages of strip, Minx/DC Comics, 2007, US$9.99

Watson’s other recent publication, in collaboration with artist Josh Howard, is less successful.

Lottie Brook, a rich teenage goth, is sent to stay with her grandparents in the country after being caught trying to sneak underage into a nightclub. There she stumbles across a murder on the golf course.

Watson’s story is a slightly uncertain mix of genres – culture-clash comedy, teen romance and whodunnit, with another genre thrown into the mix at the twist ending. None of these aspects is really developed enough to be satisfactory.

Howard’s art is a major let down. I enjoyed his work on Dead @ 17, but this script demands greater subtlety, and Howard does not rise to the challenge: his characters are inexpressive and his layouts rather dull. The only thing that seems to have engaged his interest is Lottie’s goth wardrobe. Although the story is set in one of the most distinctive landscapes in Britain, the Lake District, Watson and Howard just give us generic countryside – this could be happening in Surrey or upstate New York. When they take us to a town, the results are disastrous.


This might be a failed attempt at a faux-naïf style, but after checking, I notice that Howard avoided any challenging perspective drawing in Dead @ 17, so it may be genuinely naïf. Either way, it is ugly stuff, and a stark contrast to the character with which Watson infuses buildings in his own artwork.

Something of a misfire on all levels, then. Oddly, Clubbing was the first of the Minx line of books to have a sequel announced, presumably following Lottie on the trip to Tokyo announced on the last page here. I hope that Watson and Howard find themselves more in sympathy with the world’s biggest city than they did with an English National Park.