TCAF follow-up: "This Will All End in Tears"

I vaguely recall Roger Ebert once being asked whether he's ever troubled by all of the depressing art-house movies that he's required to watch. His response was wonderful: "No good movie is depressing." (Granted, this means that bad movies with depressing stories are all the more depressing, but that's a topic that I don't feel inclined to pursue...)

For whatever reason, this line flashed through my mind after I finished Joe Ollman's "This Will All End in Tears", the winner of Best Book at the Doug Wright Awards. A collection of 5 short stories, each ranges from mundane to miserable and offers little or no obvious (that is, cheap) consolation to the reader. Likewise, the characters range from the tragically flawed to painfully flawed. And just to show that the trifecta is in play, Ollmann's art - arranged in a tight, regular grid as if they were comic strips in a newspaper - does little to provide us with the sorts of visually appealing (or at least idiosyncratic) characters that we tend to find even in small press comics. I wouldn't even classify Ollman's art as 'realistic'; if anything, his characters are actually grotesque.

Recontextualizing Ebert, briefly: I was talking about this book with a friend, and I remarked on the disturbingly large number of indie comics that batter us with the same sort of tragic or bathetic characters in sad circumstances, books that crank the EMO-factor up to an 11 and leave it there until we either find ourselves either a) unable to continue or b) masochistically compelled to finish. But the best of these books never actually depress or enrage us, never leave us wondering why we misspent our time making ourselves feel miserable. And if it wasn't already obvious, "This Will All End in Tears" is one of the best.

One brief example: in "Hanging Over", the final story, Ollman concludes - very suddenly - at the moment that one might suggest is leading directly into what should be, structurally, the expected climax. At the moment when Dennis is no longer able to defer or delay his decision and must decide to take care of his brother or send him to a home, the story ends. Dennis picks up the phone, says "Hello?", and we flip the page to find... some notes on each of the various stories. It may be a cop-out - Ollmann, as well as Dennis, is saved from the responsibility of making a choice - but where can the story go from here? Dennis decides to take care of his brother or he decides to hand him over to caregivers. If Ollmann would choose to be dishonest, then the choice would be between disappointing us by proving Dennis an asshole or disappointing us by going the cheeseball route and having the brothers live happily ever after - an option that Dennis openly mocks on the second last page. More likely, though, and in the case of either potential ending, Dennis would come to begrudgingly accept but regret his decision. But ending (that's not really right, is it? it's not an ending, but i don't know what to call it) the narrative in that moment provides a sort of liminal space - however small, however tenuous - in which the decision doesn't ever have to be made.

Does it violate the spirit of a verisimilitudinous story, or is it unfair to the reader who demands some sort of narrative closure? I don't think so. In fact, it's a solution that seems to reconcile both our readerly desire for some emotional satisfaction and Dennis' own desire, expressed on the final page, to find "an idyllic, utopian" space where he doesn't have to make hard, hurtful decisions. It's unrealistic, yes, but only because that's the point.

TCAF follow-up: "The Luxury of Living"

I never followed-up on the books that I picked up at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, so I'll write about one today and another in the next day or two. (Since committing to blogging tomorrow is never a good idea.)

The first is one toward which I feel rather ambivalent - Michael Noonan's "The Luxury of Living". I'll start with a brief comment on the visuals, toward which I feel absolutely no ambivalence. Noonan's pencils remind me of David Mazzucchelli, which is no small compliment. I don't know if it's that Noonan's lines seem somewhat scratchier than Mazzucchelli's, or that the directness of his prose - while the entire piece is a letter, of sorts, he occasionally speaks directly to the reader - is creating the connection in my brain, but I'm also reminded of "Waking Life" aesthetic. And so Noonan's carefully composed line-work, seeming to barely contain the anxiety that creeps out through those lines and that's likewise expressed in his text, appears to shake and undulate as if a part of that (equally anxious, paranoid) film. (One minor problem? The computer-typed text - it has the opposite effect, given that it is clean and uniform, often ill-fitting, sometimes misspelled, and simply disruptive of the experience.)

Of course, "Waking Life" is something of a precocious and precious film - and so too is
"The Luxury of Living". The book is, in almost equal parts it would seem, an expression of love for his daughter and disgust for his ex-wife. And this is something of a problem, as the latter seems to necessarily drain some of the sincerity from the former. I don't doubt Noonan's emotions, but the comic seems to be implicated in the custody battle that Noonan describes - it makes for a problematic and discomforting experience. It feels as if this if the daughter herself is secondary to striking back at charges that he's the poorer parent. And arguing that, in fact, the reverse is the case.

Well intentioned as he might have been, Noonan's book feels like a thinly-veiled attempt to drag his daughter into the fight, though indirectly. And whether he's totally conscious of the book's instrumentalism, he at least acknowledges his inability to keep her entirely sheltered from the fighting. In the book's first short narrative, Noonan argues with his ex-wife's boyfriend over the phone. He checks on his sleeping daughter afterward, hoping that she hasn't overheard. Satisfied that she's asleep, he closes the door - and her eyes open.

Briefly recapping the panel at TCAF...

A brief entry on the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, which happened this past weekend and was much larger than I was expecting. (This thing grew exponentially between the 2003 and 2005 editions - I don't know that it grew that much between 2005 and 2007, but I wouldn't be surprised if it grew significantly in terms of attendance and the number of artists.)

The 'Comics in the Academy: How to Study Comics and Why' panel seemed to be well-received. Though it got to be nail-biting and I was reduced to begging for at least one panelist to attend, our panel went ahead with Rohanna Green (University of Toronto, English), Alan Rhodes (York University, Communication and Culture), Anne Rubenstein (York University, History) and Jeet Heer (York University, History - though quite well-known, it seems, for his comics journalism). I would've loved to include someone who studies the actual drawings, but the panel was about as inter/multidisciplinary as I could have hoped for - and certainly better than the many worst-case scenarios that were running through my head.

More interesting than the disciplinary lines, though, were the strange ways in which the speakers handled their 15 minute speaking bits in wholly different ways - ranging from the conversational and off-the-cuff to powerpoint presentations. So we didn't simply have content for many different folks, but presentations of very different kinds. (Not surprisingly, then, a number of friends in attendance would later tell me that they really liked 2 or 3 of them disliked one person or another - whether it was their delivery or their content that was a turn-off also varied. But this is what happens when everyone brings something different to the table.)

Another interesting tidbit: despite our being the first panel of the day, the attendance at the start was actually rather good. I think I counted 35 people when I scanned the room right before we started, and it was probably closer to 45 at the time we finished. Granted, I haven't attended many panels at festivals or academic conferences (this falls somewhere between the two), but this seemed rather unusual. Here's hoping that I get the chance to organize this panel (or panels?) next time around. And maybe the content will be less general - can it get any more general than 'how to study comics and why?' - and we can speak to more specific issues.

'Comics in the Academy' at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival

I'm organizing the 'Comics in the Academy' panel at this year's Toronto Comic Arts Festival (August 18-19), and I'm currently looking for people interested in participating as panelists. Respond if you're interested, and pass it along if you know someone or some people that it might appeal to. Details below...



“Comics in the Academy:
How to Study Comics and Why”
Toronto Comic Arts Festival ( http://www.torontocomics.com/tcaf/ )
Old Victoria College, University of Toronto /// Sunday, August 19^th (time TBD)

Since its emergence in Europe, Japan, and North America during the 1930s, and especially in the past two decades, the modern comic book has enjoyed increasing legitimacy as an artistic and literary medium. That said, the study of comic books in the University remains a marginal project: many still dismiss comics as (gasp!) popular culture or (gaaah!) ephemera, most academic papers appear in little-read and/or hard-to-find journals, and new scholars are often at a loss as to where and how they should begin their research.

The proposals being sought for this panel at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) are not for analyses of particular comics (though they can/should certainly be used as examples) or a defense of the study of comics itself (as we will take their worthiness to be a given), but rather for the presentation of a particular disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach to the comic book form and/or its various subject matter. In short, we are looking to discuss the various ways of embarking on a study of comics (“how to study comics…”), as well as an explanation of the merit and/or necessity of such an approach (“…and why”). However, as the TCAF is a public event, submitters should be mindful of the fact that their audience will likely consist of many (if not mostly) non-academics, and so presentations should be very accessible, even conversational, and avoid academic jargon and the ever-dreaded “name-dropping” of theorists wherever possible.

Presentations will be approximately 15 minutes, and it is expected that panelists will submit a preliminary (if not finished) copy of their paper/discussion notes a week in advance, so as to allow the organizer and their fellow panelists the opportunity to prepare thoughtful questions and enter into dialogue with them. Submitters are asked to prepare a 250-350 word proposal and brief biographical statement in a single Word or Rich Text file and submit them to the panel organizer, Neil Shyminsky (shym@yorku.ca). All proposals will be accepted for consideration until at least July 25^th, and questions of any sort can be submitted to the organizer at the same email address.