HEY DO WE HAVE SOME GREAT ANNOUNCEMENTS COMING UP IN THE FUTURE

YES WE DO

Well, it’s finally here: Sixteen interviews with comics great (and great talker about comics) Howard Chaykin, from an early 1975 interview with a young Dave Sim to a previously unpublished interview with yours truly conducted in 2010.

Chaykin is a fascinating character in the development of American comics: Steeped in the idioms and tropes of mainstream adventure comics, working mainly in the monthly serial format favored by the industry’s major players, he’s also a fierce proponent of comics as a complex medium capable of offering unique aesthetic experiences and dealing with politics, culture, and human nature with intelligence and humor. Comics may be stupid junk, Chaykin’s work tells us, but they don’t have to be. For anyone interested in the development of comics as an art form and as an industry, Chaykin’s appraisals—sometimes caustic, sometimes hilarious—of his contemporaries and their employers are must reading. I’m glad to have had this opportunity to bring them together and bring them to light again, most of them for the first time since their initial publication.

Assembling this book further cemented my firm belief that Chaykin’s contribution to comics is broader, weirder, and more varied than even many of his staunch fans usually acknowledge. The tendency to see Chaykin as playing endless variations on the first three issues of American Flagg! vol. 1 is understandable—those are aggressively ambitious comics, comics designed specifically to make you feel bad about everything else on your pull list, and many of his most persistent themes and spectacular formal effects are present there in highly concentrated form. But such a view neglects how Chaykin’s art and writing are perpetually evolving, how what seem to be the basic premises of his visual style and his thematic preoccupations are constantly being challenged (as I suggested in this post on the second year of American Flagg!). A major takeaway from the book for me is a sense of Chaykin’s basic restlessness: the Chaykin of “Cody Starbuck” is not the Chaykin of Flagg! is not the Chaykin of Time² is not the Chaykin of City of Tomorrow, and on and on. Chaykin’s range of influences is deep and wide—and completely idiosyncratic—and his reflections on how his relationship to those influences has changed over the years offer valuable insight into his craft. They also underscore just how omnivorous a medium comics can be, capable of adapting visual styles from a diverse array of traditions into the service of narrative.

The book is available from the publisher, as well as from Amazon. Barnes and Noble has it at 10% off (as of this writing). The best discount I’m seeing at the moment is at Sci-Fi Genre, where it’s listed at $31.99. If you prefer to do your buying through the direct market, it should be in comic shops as early as this Wednesday.

I don’t want to rehash the acknowledgments page here, but: Much appreciation is due the crack team at the University Press of Mississippi, including Walter Biggins, Valerie Jones, Shane Gong, and Steve Yates for their patient and unflagging assistance throughout the process of putting this book together. Thanks to Seth Kushner for use of the cover photo. I’m glad to have this book out in the world and delighted at how great it looks.

Like zen, whatever you expect Practicing Zen to be, it will be different. Think of a source-book on the origins of zen, like the scholarly source-books that we use today to study zen’s origins in Chinese Buddhism and its coming to full flower in Japan. Such source-books are necessarily fragmentary, since much of the original writing has been lost. Now translate that source-book to the 25th century, and replace the fragments from China and Japan with fragments from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the only remaining records of how a version of zen (called Easy) took over the U. S. Throw in a wildly humorous and semi-science-fictional version of history, and spice it up with anecdotes about and utterances by fictional zen masters, who quarreled among themselves.

You can get it at Amazon right now. My copy is wending its way Baton Rouge-ward and I’m looking forward to diving in to a book that is sure to be strange and disorienting—in the very best ways.

Visitation has attracted a fair amount of critical attention over the years, including some very worthwhile studies by Robert McRuer, Suzanne Jones, and George Hovis, among others. My essay is about the curious silence in the criticism on the subject of the novel’s dense web of allusions to superhero comics, science fiction stories, and general geekery; while critics have been quick to tie Kenan to William Faulkner, it makes just as much sense, I argue, to tie him to William Gibson—maybe more, given that one of the novel’s epigraphs is from Neuromancer. But ultimately the piece is about how Faulkner v. Gibson is a false dichotomy, about how our notions of what constitutes “southern culture” can be enlarged and usefully complicated if we think of, say, reading Batman comics and participating in a hog slaughter as mutually informing aspects of the experience of living in the South.

The essay was a ton of fun to write and research—I got to dig through old Avengers back issues at LSU’s Hill Memorial Library in search of a particular reference, which Kenan was generous enough to confirm for me. And of course anyone who followed our roundtable on Jujitsu for Christ, or read my interview with Jack Butler in Mississippi Quarterly, knows that this issue is a source of ongoing fascination for me, and one around which I’m hoping to build a larger project.

(This is essentially the academic version of my shorter, quasi-semi-autobiographical piece “Tony Stark in Belzoni,” soon to appear in Lost Battles alongside the work of some swell writers.)

This ends the self-promotion. For now.

Music! If the Extra Glenns had given us nothing but the lyric “Our love is like Jesus, but worse,” their place in indie-rock Valhalla would be secure. But why not raid a few more monasteries and maybe get bumped up to first class? And so this week here comes the new release from the moderately renamed Extra Lens. I haven’t had a chance to give it a thorough listen since I’m chest-deep in indexing, so the quieter songs haven’t sorted themselves out yet, but that’s also because I’ve had “How I Left the Ministry” on repeat for the last 30 minutes. It is a 100% perfect piece of songcraft of the sort that should make most other, lesser songwriters stop, but probably won’t. Franklin Bruno contributes a chiming guitar that you at first think is ironic, given the protagonist’s compromised position: but then you realize that while you would probably regret doing what he did, he’s not so sure it wasn’t worth it after all. The final track, “Dogs of Clinic 17,” is a stand-out as well: a hyper-compressed version of the psych-ward drama in John Darnielle’s Master of Reality book, “Dogs” does a lovely sneaky thing near the end where the elegiac turns abruptly queasy, as the narrator reveals that the “light” that’s “in all of us” has begun “eating its way through me.” Because in a John Darnielle song, being born again is just as messy and painful as it was the first time around and he’s not going to let you pretend otherwise.

Oh yeah: I downloaded it so don’t have the liner notes, which I hear are, unsurprisingly, a treat. I have ordered the vinyl so will get to read them in 2-4 weeks!

Books! In anticipation of the Coens’ new adaptation of True Grit, I decided to read a little more Charles Portis. Not True Grit, of course, because I certainly don’t want to be that guy reading a book that is just about to be made into a movie. I have my pride. So I dusted off longtime shelf-sitter The Dog of the South. I’m having much the same reaction that I did to Portis’s conspiracy-theory farce Masters of Atlantis a few years ago: The books are funny as hell, and Portis is a master at creating characters who counterbalance their lack of self-awareness with an intense and unfounded faith in their own competence. But what’s funny for a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter seems curiously flat over the course of the whole novel—the plot isn’t that engaging, the characters aren’t getting any more or less deluded, and so on. This sounds like a harsher criticism than I really mean it to be—Portis’s narrative voice is strong enough to carry me along to the end—but ultimately I’d like chapter ten to be something other than a repetition of chapter one but with different jokes.

2. So I was all set to write about how great PrettyFavorite Victor Gischler’s new X-Men #1 was last week, except that new comics were delayed at my otherwise awesome shop, so now I can’t until later this week. Apparently, someone in the distribution channel believes that “Baton Rouge, LA” is a suburb of Los Angeles, because that’s where the books ended up. (If you’re in the same boat I’m fishing with vienna sausages from, you can whet your appetite with this Gischler interview with Laura Hudson.) I am still pretty sure it’s great, though. I know some of you are thinking, “Oh great, vampires. I have plenty of vampires in my life, thanks.” But you thought that about zombies, too, didn’t you? And have you been reading Gischler and Bong Dazo’s Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth? Because it is all zombied up, and yet it is, by far and no kidding, the flat-out most fun comic Marvel is publishing right now. I laugh out loud at least once an issue, and I chuckle several more, and sometimes I giggle like the whisky priest, but that’s for other reasons entirely. I would say that Gischler’s DP is the best entry in the comical-adventure genre by a mainstream publisher since the Giffen/Dematties Justice League of the 1980s (and it looks all the better compared to G and D’s recent return to those characters). Victor has a knack for exploiting the absurdities of the superhero genre without letting the underlying story collapse beneath the weight of the gags.

So seriously: OK, there’s a lot of Deadpool out there, and a lot of zombies out there. But only Gischler is putting them together in comics that involve blimps, slovenly and uncommitted AIM troopers, and Cowboy Deadpool in a story that has been drawn by both Kyle Baker and Rob Liefeld in the same issue.

If you prefer your books without pictures, but would still like to support Victor Gischler’s gambling addiction, you could do a lot worse than buy a copy of his new novel The Deputy, which I read last week and which stole my wallet and gave me herpes.

Confidential to VG: Please give my dog back now.

3. My usual summer reading program involves reading at least a couple of the books that I pretended I’d already read when I was in grad school. I’m about two-thirds of the way through Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory right now and thoroughly enjoying it; I thought that after devoting the years 1997-2002 to Walker Percy that I had read my fill of a particular brand of Catholic fiction, but Greene is (at least in this work, the first of his I’ve read) a less didactic writer than Percy, and altogether more harrowing. His flat descriptions of the horrible lengths to which life will go and the depraved transformations it will endure, his unblinking portrait of the cost of integrity, his depiction of people living off flecks of ash in a world burned down to the blackest cinder, his scorched and sometimes hallucinatory prose —I can’t help but think that I’d really like to read a very loose Gilbert Hernandez adaptation of this book in his Troublemakers / Chance in Hell format.

Local folk: All the Baton Rougeans of good taste and discerning judgment will be at the Citiplace Barnes and Noble on Thursday night at 7:00 for a reading, signing, and exorcism by Gischler. FIRST TWO ROWS WILL GET WET.

So—the new Oxford American special issue on southern literature is out, and, like most all issues of OA, it’s well worth your time. In addition to some smart and insightful essays, the new ish includes their top-ten “Best Southern Novels of All Time” list.

I was one of the judges for the list, and I thought it might be interesting to see how my ballot lines up with the final results. You can see their list and read some comments from judges at the OA website, but for the sake of convenience, here’s their top ten:

1. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
2. Warren, All the King’s Men
3. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
4. Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
5. Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Percy, The Moviegoer
7. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
8. Ellison, Invisible Man
9. O’Connor, Wise Blood
10. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

On the one hand, it’s hard to complain about any single one of those selections. And it’s tough to begrudge Faulkner his three spots on the list, though it does make me wish the magazine had enforced a one-book-per-writer policy—if only because such a result was completely predictable and tends to make southern lit look narrower and more traditional, as though most southern writers are just scribbling in Faulkner’s margins, which already contain his handwritten annotations, so there’s even less room than you think. Also worth pointing out: Take Twain away, and all of those books were published between 1929 and 1961. Perhaps we should revise the frequently asked question from “What is southern literature?” to “When is southern literature?” Because this list makes it seem like it flowered briefly in the early-to-mid twentieth century and then went away. No plantation novels, no slave narratives, no excessive postmodern head trips. (Well, unless you read Absalom, Absalom! that way, which I do.) My own list is twentieth- and twenty-first-century heavy, so I can’t complain much about the absence of early work, although I did include Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl on my ballot for the nonfiction list—it didn’t make it.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Ellison’s Invisible Man on the list—the one work included that works to broaden the definition of “southern literature” toward something like “literature about the South” and dispenses with a lot of the familiar anxiety about regional exceptionalism and southern-fried bona fides.

So, my ballot. These are unranked—judges were given an option to single out a book as the #1 pick, but I decided against it:

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples
Lewis Nordan, Wolf Whistle
Jack Butler, Jujitsu for Christ
Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada
Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman
Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days

I suppose it goes without saying that there are10, 20, 30 other works that I could just have easily have chosen; I chose somewhat strategically, in hopes that my picks would nudge the canon slightly toward the current moment, but alas.

Judges were also given the option to cite one book that they felt was the most underrated work of southern literature. It will surprise no one that I chose our fellow contributor Jack Butler’s novel Jujitsu for Christ. The magazine ran a few sentences of the comments that accompanied my ballot, but they had to slice and dice it a bit*, so here they are in full verbosity:

Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ (1986) isn’t underrated in the sense that the people who read it don’t get it; rather, it’s that not enough people are reading it in the first place. This is because the novel is bizarrely, criminally, out of print. It would be irresponsible to speculate that it is being kept that way by a shadowy cabal of writers—not just southerners, either, but American writers generally and a few Swedes as well—who know that their work would seem dim and anemic compared to Butler’s, so I won’t do that. But I will say that the novel is funny, sexy, disturbing, heartbreaking, and completely unlike any of the books that you might think it would be like based on its title, cover illustration, or jacket description. There is something to delight or horrify on every page, but if you need to scan a few pages to be convinced, look no further than the section labeled “Summertime”: an accurate, hilarious, and devastating description of the uniquely hallucinogenic properties of a Mississippi summer. You’d be cheating yourself to stop there, though. The novel does not so much forge connections between apparently disparate topics such as civil rights, martial arts, science fiction, and Southern Baptists as it reveals how inextricably connected all those things, and dozens of others, already are in the first place. And maybe that’s the novel’s signal achievement: How it challenges assumptions about what can be said and what should be discussed about the South; how it reveals Mississippi to be a bigger, stranger, and more mysterious place than most people ever allow themselves to recognize.

*Just like when I wrote that impeccably argued 1500-word letter to West Coast Avengers editor Mark Gruenwald detailing the twenty-three reasons that Hank Pym should lead the WCA instead of that showboat Hawkeye, and then he only printed the first eighteen. It violated the delicately crystalline logical-rhetorical structure of the whole list! Item 12 doesn’t even make sense until it is retroactively refracted through item 22! I was so embarrassed.

Not that you have to address all of that. Hell, one line will do. Just tell the man what his writing means to you. Just say something, anything.

This culture is so obsessed with the new that we neglect the true achievers. Harington’s not just some factory process to produce stories. He’s a human, and right now a human in pretty serious trouble. He could use a bit of encouragement.

Victor Gischler offers more details about the development of the screenplay here, and Anthony Neil Smith provides his take here. Other links of interest:
The official PULP BOY web site.
Emerson LaSalle on Wikipedia.
In Last My Heart is Murder: The Emerson LaSalle Blog
Emerson LaSalle on Pretty Fakes:
Modem Mama
Never Again, Forever
“Remembering Emerson LaSalle, Novelist”

Let’s just breathe it in: Emerson LaSalle biopic. EMERSON LASALLE BIOPIC. Okay, I stopped breathing it in and started huffing it there at the end. So pure. So sweet. So mucous-membrane dissolving.