Don’t buy this book: Monologues for the coming plague

Post-script to my last, super-”ironic” post: I swiped the original image from another “parody” online. I didn’t actually buy, or read any of, Civil War.

That’s for those of you keeping track of my credibility. It’s important that you keep track, because I’m about to destroy it anyway by suddenly coming over all philistine.

***

Monologues for the coming plague, Anders Nilsen. Fantagraphics, 2006. $18.95, 260 pages.

In general, art can be evaluated along two dimensions: on the one hand, its purely aesthetic qualities, how it looks, feels or sounds; on the other, its conceptual elements, what it is about or represents, the thoughts it is meant to evoke. One of the most sustained developments throughout the twentieth century, across a range of media, was the detachment of these two dimensions from one another. Take visual art, for instance. In one direction, artists began to abandon traditional “realist” modes of representation and present art as pure visual experience, form without object. Flourishing at various historical moments as cubism, abstract expressionism etc., this trend reached its kitschy apogee in the (now badly-dated) op art movement.

In the other direction, we get conceptual art*, art with little to no aesthetic value whose function is instead to be all object and no form, as it were. The point of conceptual art lies not in experiencing it, but in seeing what it “means”. And often it has meant little more than subverting the very notions of “art” or “meaning”. For mine, conceptual art peaked early–once Duchamp has stuck a bicycle wheel upside-down on a stool, anything else  looks lame and unoriginal–but it’s still going strong in contemporary art galleries around the world.

Both kinds of art, the purely conceptual and purely aesthetic, have tended to evoke a philistine response from the person on the street (typified by Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word).** My favourite example of this reaction, and the art world’s reasoned counter-reaction, occurred on an old TV arts show. A viewer had written to the program complaining, of some artwork or other, that she (the viewer) could have done better with one hand tied behind her back. Having read the letter aloud, the host turned to the camera and deadpanned:

“Imagine what this modern Prometheus could do with both hands free.”

In other words: fuck you too, and ha-ha, ain’t it grand to épater les bourgeois?

Visually speaking, Anders Nilsen’s Monologues for the coming plague is a pure one-hander. There’s nothing to recommend it visually, or formally, as comics. The art is (I assume deliberately) crude, with a range so limited it makes Michael Turner or Rob Liefeld look like Winsor McCay. But Nilsen also treats us with an insight into his process, leaving word balloons with words scratched out, and free-floating dialogue which has also been scratched out because he decided to put the word balloon in a different place. At last, an artist so conceptually outré that he doesn’t use white-out, an artist whose very mistakes have such merit that they are worth our studied attention. Not to mention our $18.95.

Or maybe not.

But it’s pointless to complain about the minimal visual talent on display, when aesthetic pleasure is so clearly not Nilsen’s intent here. No, Nilsen obviously wants us to appreciate Monologues on an entirely conceptual level.

Which is a pity, because the actual content of Monologues is similarly devoid of much interest or worth either. Sequences here include the sophomoric Semiotics, in which two figures (one of them with a smudge for a head) jokingly discuss semiotics; a recurring series of pages with a woman feeding a pigeon, with one or the other speaking sub-New Yorker gags, only they’re not incisive enough to count as ironic commentary on gag panel conventions; a handful of non-figurative doodles; and the aptly named Mediocrity Principle. Some of this stuff is slightly amusing (the story with Buddha is good for a wry chuckle), but it’s ultimately no more insightful or interesting than the typical blog of a fine arts or English major.

There’s a joke academics like to tell about philosophers and mathematicians. Mathematicians are the second cheapest academic for a university to hire, because all they need is paper, pencils and a wastepaper basket. Philosophers are the cheapest because they don’t need the basket. Perhaps in the future, Nilsen could prove himself even cheaper by forgoing the paper and pencils as well. He’s already done away with the basket, and with panels, transitions, visual skill and conceptual interest. The only place to go from there is to abandon the physical comic entirely and create a comic of pure being.

The best part? A comic of pure being wouldn’t cost $18.95.

* I’m using “conceptual art” in a broader sense than would some art historians, I suspect.

** Aesthetic reactionaries are often assumed to be political reactionaries as well. But, apart from some famous figures who were both aesthetic and political reactionaries (like Wolfe himself), I don’t see why. In general, there are better ways of helping the comrades than avant-garde art; so one can dislike the latter while valuing the former.

Recommended? Um, no.

IYL: The worst of conceptual art’s pretentious excess; or if you read that one issue of Eightball with the Dan Pussey story about modern artcomix–each issue with coffee stains, random pages torn out, etc.–and wished the comic actually existed.

Don’t buy this book: Adventures in the Rifle Brigade

Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, Garth Ennis, Carlos Ezquerra, Brian Bolland, Glenn Fabry, Patricia Mulvihill, Kevin Somers and Clem Robins. Vertigo/DC, 2004. $14.95, 144 pages.

Writer Garth Ennis was in the comics news recently, when DC head honcho Pulpin’ Paul Levitz cancelled Ennis’ new ongoing series The Boys over concerns about content. The book’s fans were pleased to learn, however, that it would continue at a different company.

I was not, to put it mildly, one of those fans. To me, The Boys seemed to have been written by some sophisticated computer program that cut and pasted the worst of Ennis’ excesses and writerly tics: among other things, various forms of stereotype and cliché, mean-spirited slapstick, toilet humour and a fundamental discomfort with sex.

Come to think of it, it needn’t have been a computer program. A monkey with a typewriter would have sufficed.

I stopped reading The Boys after two issues, supposing that it represented the lowest point of Ennis’ recent decline into self-parody. After reading Adventures of the Rifle Brigade, however, I am happy to report that I was wrong. The Boys could have been so much worse.

Rifle Brigade reprints two three-issue series published between 2001 and 2003. It is intended as a parody of the boys’ ripping war yarns that Ennis evidently grew up on. Ennis’ dedication in the frontispiece is to British war comics such as Battle Picture Weekly and Commando, but it might as well have been to the gutter-dwelling, scatological humour comic, Viz.*

The Rifle Brigade themselves are a rag-tag team of fightin’ misfits, including: the straight man captain; a mad Scotsman; an American; a lower-class yob; a fat guy; and–get this, it’s the funniest thing ever–a fag. It would be too kind to call these characters one-note. They can barely muster a note between the lot of them.

This goes especially for the fat guy, the yob and the American. The big–all right, the only–joke about them is their catchphrases, the only dialogue they ever speak. It’s funny once, maybe twice, but Ennis uses the catchphrases to fill any lacunae in the otherwise non-stop flow of unfunny business. And never just one catchphrase from one character; we must always get all three in unison. It’s like a Greek chorus, if the chorus was that annoying guy at the office who won’t stop parroting catchphrases from the latest sitcom.

Just as the characters broadly parody stock types from British war comics, so does the plot parody their plots. This stuff might have played a little better in Ennis’ neck of the woods, but even the non-British reader can make do with a general knowledge of common war-story motifs. And by “make do”, I mean “realise how completely unfunny it all is”.

There’s nothing wrong per se with dumb humour or scatological gags. Hell, I read Johhny Ryan’s strips every week. But there’s one cardinal rule of humour. Pay attention, because you’re about to learn something. Humour has to be funny. You can occasionally appreciate a horror movie that isn’t scary, or a romance movie that isn’t romantic, because they can still have other virtues. But a humour comic, a comic whose only intention is to be humorous, such a comic without humour is nothing.

Which is exactly what Ennis has given us. Apart from a few bits that might elicit a brief chuckle, this book is worthless. Carlos Ezquerra’s pencils and inks are decent but, tied as they are to a putrid and unfunny script, hardly to be praised. That would be like praising the sound design on a snuff movie.

It’s particularly frustrating to see an artist of Ennis’ talent producing this putrid tripe, as though Orson Welles had lived to direct one of the Porky’s sequels. In books like Preacher, Punisher, Hitman and War Stories, Ennis has proved himself a master of gross-out comedy and gallows humour while revealing a surprisingly sentimental humanity underneath.

If the black comedy is the baby and Ennis’ humanity is the bathwater, Adventures of the Rifle Brigade throws out the baby with the bathwater.

And then the bathtub and the rest of the plumbing, too.

*NB: nothing to do with the manga publishers.

Recommended? Only if you think a German officer named Venkschaft is the funniest thing ever, or (what is probably redundant) you’re a developmentally arrested eleven year-old boy.

IYL: Preacher or Hitman, but wish that they had any depth or humour removed.

PC Alert: The whole book is pretty offensive. Which would be fine if it weren’t also aesthetically offensive.