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sluttybruises:

i went to the brooklyn comics and graphics festival on saturday and got to meet one of my favorite artists, jonny negron!! he signed/drew in my book and i totally fangirl-ed and babbled about how much i love the way he draws women’s bodies but WHATEVER it was v. cool

Dream fan!

I watched three Alan J. Pakulla movies. “All The President’s Men” is quite well-paced, practical, procedural. “The Parallax View” sticks together a bunch of remarkable action sequences and feels like one of those dreams where you fall out of your bed and start drowning. “Klute”.. well, Klute has Jane Fonda on it, this commanding presence that needs to be cooled down by a stone-faced Donald Sutherland. Godard was fascinated by Fonda, brought her over for “Tout va Bien”, and then spit on her a year later when she went to Hanoi. His basic argument was: how can the intellectual add to the class struggle? He should cede his voice to the underclass, rather than reenact the facts and upstage the actors. “Klute” is predictable and a bit convoluted in parts, but instead of seeing Fonda playing a hooker, I see a hooker playing Fonda, getting lost on the role to the point of creating a very refined thing. Every actor plays a character, but stars always play themselves.

Fan Fiction’s Mansa Musa, based on the historical figure or maybe just on a playable character from Civilization.

Kirby’s Black Panther is an odd book. I’ve been chasing the old Jungle Action storyarc by Don McGregor, but it’s really expensive, and I ended up getting the Kirby book because it showed up on eBay. The colors are amazing and have nothing to do with the pictures above. Just like the Captain Marvel collection from the 90s. They don’t print that sort of yellow anymore.

I believe this is the first Panther solo book, and yet the story has to do with collectors and odd archeological objects. I notice the kind of action in the book would otherwise be quite passable, if it weren’t so disjointed as well. This is a good thing. The art is surely “kinetic” and effervescent (fights, jumps, screaming, etc.) but that’s not the point. My insight here is that maybe Kirby uses the 2x3 grid model in a way that is different from the one I grew up with. Most “physical” action goes on in the smaller frames, so it can decomposed, elaborated on, reinforced. The wider frames or the splash pages serve to cut the rhythm, like they’re made of a heavier material. The extra-space has nothing to do with depth of field or detail, but raw fervor (for instance, the pure joy of Black Panther boarding a plane with Mr. Little and Princess Zanda. 

There are also quite a few vehicles; a plane, a chopper, a chariot.. travel being exhibited as an end in itself, not disposed of as a plot tool. The Panther is lost in all of this, and not “black” by any means, or, maybe he is “black” insofar as “black” means “being a conduit for the exotic”, a celebration of otherness, sometimes bordering the ridiculous (there are Samurais here), but 100 times more interesting than searches for spiritual and social selves. Obviously I concur that restlessness is a good idea for a superhero, and joy a passing sight (but always related to restlessness). I must tie this now with a Fred Halsted quote from a interview with William E. Jones:

I come maybe one out of ten tricks that I like. Coming is not the point. The point is revelation – the why.

Watched Paris is Burning last night, which matched Crumb closely. Crumb, so reputed as a “social critic”, is repeatedly set against the new decade, and he declares without pause that everything is decaying. He emerged against the phony postwar culture with sexual fervor, but later on he is self-reflexive, antisocial, and “a pervert”, like he’s carrying the height of all this lowbrow judgment. The documentary ends with his move to France, where he’s spent his latter years in isolation with his wife. There’s a hopelessness to this period, akin to exhaustion, that also sits at the background of Paris is Burning. Drag balls overcome the gross banality and blatant affirmation of privilege in late 80s hetero/success culture by choreographing in detail a better version of it (therefore, they don’t just play the part, they feast on it). The award categories grow and at some point there are all these social roles being judged.