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zayntoxicateme · 6 years ago

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June 18, 2018

We managed to catch up with the quietly enigmatic singer.

Read "How Do You Explain Zayn?"

Zayn, the one-named man who found himself reborn after leaving One Direction, is now on GQ's cover. In his shoot with Sebastian Mader, Zayn channels Tyler Durden and Leo DiCaprio's Romeo. And the wildly enigmatic singer also let down his guard, briefly, in talking to writer Carrie Battan about his relationship with Gigi Hadid, the self indulgence of being a "star," and his crafty use of the paparazzi for his own devices—a story you can read here (full story is below; the link will take you to the GQ website)

How Do You Explain Zayn?

Carrie Battan

Photographs by

Sebastian Mader

The 25-year-old British singer is deeply, maddeningly, almost trolling-ly enigmatic. And that cultivated mystery—along with his disdain for the standard rules of superstardom—is probably what puts him on the short list for COOLEST HUMAN ALIVE. On a recent Friday night, though, he dropped his guard and spilled his guts.

There are exactly two places in New York on a Friday night where Zayn Malik can smoke Marlboro Lights as liberally and openly as he pleases, unencumbered by gawkers or the city's increasingly draconian anti-smoking laws. The ﬁrst is Zayn Malik's SoHo apartment, where he spends the majority of his time, zoning out, reading books, listening to music, and "partaking in the herb," as he says. The second is the Mary A. Whalen, a 172-foot-long restored-tanker-ship-turned-nonproﬁt-hangout-spot that is docked off the shore of Red Hook, Brooklyn. The ship is closed for business after 6 P.M., but tonight its leader, a hardy blonde ship preservationist named Carolina, has agreed to keep it open late to accommodate us. No crowds, a few plastic chairs, and a gently lilting surface that is basically a giant ashtray.

There is just one problem: The temperature on deck is decreasing rapidly with the setting sun, and Zayn—the 25-year-old former British-boy-band member, current solo pop-ish star, and all-around inscrutable avatar of contemporary celebrity—has arrived with nothing on his person but a lighter, a backpack, and an iPhone. No jacket on his rail-thin five-ten frame—just a pair of charcoal skinny jeans, a distressed Pink Floyd T-shirt, a bright pink beanie that obscures his new ﬂower skull tattoo (or "tah-oo," as Zayn pronounces it). He looks so modernly cool, blending a hip-hop swagger with a punk-rock edge, that he should receive a cut from Urban Outﬁtters every time someone makes a purchase. He is the only man whose Disney-princess-long eyelashes seem to bolster his machismo rather than diminish it. Nobody this dreamy has ever bothered to check the weather to see if he should grab a jacket before leaving the house. Through chattering teeth, he rejects multiple offers of blankets. "It's all good," he insists, burping faintly after taking a swig of his Peroni. "I'm cool."

Still, Carolina avails us of the ship's warmer galley. "I might have a cigarette ﬁrst?" Zayn asks, as though he needs permission, gesturing toward the other side of the ship. Over there is his assistant Taryn, a young woman with French-braided pigtails that make her look more like a high school soccer player than someone designated to manage the everyday logistics of a notoriously slippery superstar's life. She is the custodian of his pack, doling out individual cigarettes to Zayn periodically.

But Carolina assures us Zayn will not have to stay outside to smoke his cigarette. She'll let us smoke belowdecks on the condition that Zayn provide her one of his Marlboros and permission to snap a photograph. She promises she won't post it until after the story runs. "Uh…yeah?" Zayn replies, sounding sincerely surprised that he is the one who has to answer a question that was directed at him.

A steely detachment from life's mundane logistical concerns is part of almost every celebrity's existence, but it is the core of Zayn's being. This character trait has ruinous potential, but it also means he gets to live his life exactly how he pleases. And it means that he doesn't have to express a single word or hint of desire in order for the conditions around him to re-arrange to his liking and comfort. There's a hapless Peter Pan quality to it that makes it tough to hold against him.

We settle around the table in the '70s-style kitchen on the boat. It's 15 degrees warmer down here and private. Zayn instantly appears relieved, his shoulders unclenching and his brow de-furrowing. He stops shivering. He is in a womb-like space, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, and he seems palpably and unexpectedly happy. "Thanks," he says quietly and earnestly in Carolina's direction as she seals off the door behind us. "Couple of times I tried to quit. But I just like smoking cigs. Simple as that."

There is a major conundrum in Zayn's life, which is that he may be constitutionally incapable of being a star. He tells me so almost immediately. "I don't work well in group situations, with loads of people staring at me. And when you say 'star'…everyone wants you to be this kind of character that owns a room or is overly arrogant or conﬁdent. I'm not that guy," he says. "So I don't want to be a star." Zayn seems to aspire to the soul of Prince, or some cult '90s skate-punk ﬁgure, but is trapped in the trajectory of a Justin Timberlake.

A decade ago, someone like Zayn would not have become the Chosen Member of a band like One Direction. The Chosen Member is the boy-band graduate whose solo career evolves and hurdles into grown-up relevance, ultimately overshadowing the band's legacy. Until recently, you could spot a Chosen Member from a mile away—he was unequivocally the best dancer and the one the most girls wanted to bring home to their parents. But Zayn never ﬁt the mold of a Chosen Member. From the day One Direction formed, on the U.K. show The X Factor in 2010, he was cast as the smoldering background foil to the eager-to-please Harry Styles and Liam Payne. His energy and his dance moves were muted. He presented as the quiet, disillusioned one.

But in the past ﬁve years or so, it has become acceptable—necessary, even—for a young pop star to show some edge. Thanks to the social-media-fueled, ever intensifying quest for authenticity, real or feigned, we no longer expect our most famous musicians to be toothless and virginal robots. Now we demand that they show a certain degree of lustiness, instability, anti-heroism. The Weeknd scored a No. 1 hit with an elaborately coded song about a cocaine binge—and then followed it up with another No. 1 hit, this one explicitly referencing a cocaine binge. Lana Del Rey's entire aesthetic revolves around a kind of narcotized death wish. And Taylor Swift spent her last album desperately trying to persuade us that she really is villainous. Even Disney's babiest-faced of pop princesses, Selena Gomez, is getting mileage out of her demons, playing a Girl, Interrupted–style heroine and rocking a hospital bracelet in a music video. Face tattoos are basically required for entry onto the Billboard Hot 100 these days. Squeaky-clean is no more.

And yet even for the most tortured-seeming of these artists, there is still a ﬁerce expectation that they play the game. Mild drug habits or mental illnesses are perfectly acceptable, so long as someone is willing to write catchy songs about those tendencies and then later gussy them up for arena audiences and gamely ﬁeld jokes from talk-show hosts. Even Justin Bieber, the poster child for our current era of troubled pop stars, is always just one phone call with his pastor away from being able to quiet his demons and pop-and-lock on demand.

Zayn seems like a perfect avatar for this new generation of bruised pop heartthrobs, but he's the only one of his cohorts who can back it up with a sincerely jaded disposition and an unpredictable way of being. He is the only one who is staunchly unwilling to play the game. You will not ﬁnd Zayn cheesing with a random group of famous people for someone's Instagram story at Coachella, nor will you ﬁnd Zayn learning the latest viral dance move with Ellen DeGeneres. When he released his solo debut, Mind of Mine, two years ago, he opted out of touring altogether, surely pissing off a bunch of emotionally and ﬁnancially invested parties. And although he promises to be more public-facing this time around—he insists he will tour—he's still removed from the album-cycle content churn. He says the creators of Atlanta have reached out to him to appear on the show—a dream opportunity for anyone in the music industry at this moment—but persnickety Zayn is still mulling the potential. "If the part's right, I'd be really into it," he says. Even the "behind-the-scenes" video that accompanied his new single fails to actually take anyone "behind the scenes"—it's just the song playing over some B-roll. "I guess the cameraman didn't get too much footage," Zayn says on the boat. "I might have been running away from him a bit."

When I ask him why he failed to show up at the Met Gala a couple days earlier, he almost chokes on his cigarette smoke as he exhales. He went to the Met Gala once, in 2016, and that experience symbolized everything he detests about being a famous person—and the litany of coercion and artiﬁce that someone in his position experiences.

"I did go, but I didn't go there to be like, 'Yo, take me serious,' " he remembers. "I was taking the piss! I went there as my favorite Mortal Kombat character, Jax."

He continues: "The Met Gala is not necessarily anything that I ever knew about or was about. But my [former] stylist…would say to me, 'This is really good for you to do.' And no matter how strong you are mentally, you can always be swayed to do certain things. Now, it's not something I would go to. I'd rather be sitting at my house, doing something productive, than dressing up in really expensive clothes and being photographed on a red carpet.… To do the self-indulgent Look at me, I'm amazing thing on the red carpet, it's not me."

Here Zayn catches himself, probably realizing this might register as a diss of Gigi Hadid, the 23-year-old supermodel he's been in an on-again, off-again relationship with for two years. The supermodel who very much seemed to enjoy dressing up in really expensive clothes and being photographed on the red carpet days earlier.

"I get it, and I understand that people gain enjoyment from it," he says. I ask if he followed along with the coverage from his couch. "No, no," he says, and pauses. "Gi stole the night, though. The stained glass on her dress. Everyone else just put a cross on."

When I ask Zayn if he has any conﬁdants in the industry, he shakes his head vigorously. "No," he says. "I don't ever want to cross wires with other people too much. I just want to see the world through my eyes."

Zayn grew up with three sisters ("I was outnumbered," he says) and is still surrounded by women, ensuring that there's a high level of exasperated but fond maternal energy swirling at all times. Blood relatives and the Hadids—particularly Gigi's mother, Yolanda, who seems to have taken on a Kris Jenner–ian role in his life—make up much of his inner circle today. ("We get on. She's really fucking cool. She's a Capricorn. She's the same star sign as me.") He recently parted ways with his high-proﬁle manager. His best friend is a younger cousin.

"I'm not [in] the mix," he says. "I'm outside the mix."

This kind of stubborn non-participation, of course, is a reaction to the years Zayn spent being in a mix that was not to his liking. When he was a kid, growing up in the northern working-class city of Bradford, singing was just one part of an aimless but all-consuming creative impulse. He never thought he was much of a singer, until one day the choir leader at his performing-arts school praised his voice and suggested that he try out for Britain's premier vocal-competition show. Zayn's mom had to drag him from his bed at 4 A.M. to attend the audition, where he broke from the typical pop fare with a rendition of Mario's "Let Me Love You."

After his X Factor audition, there was an exchange (never aired) in which head judge Simon Cowell probed baby Zayn. " 'You know, with all these online platforms, why haven't you ever put out anything prior to this?' " Zayn remembers Cowell asking him. Zayn seemed the type, after all: a soft-spoken and artistically gifted teen who liked to sing alone in his bedroom and tinkered with rudimentary song-recording equipment. "I didn't necessarily think my stuff would be seen amongst the millions of people who put their stuff online. So I went with X Factor at that age," he says now. Like any ﬁckle teenager, Zayn "just did it for fun, to see what would happen."

The day that Zayn auditioned, he was among many aspiring solo artists rejected by the judges. But ﬁve of the young singers were cobbled together as a boy band in a later segment. Thus was born One Direction and a rabid fandom that British people love to compare to Beatlemania. A craze so ﬁerce and massive that it generated global synchronized ﬂash mobs and fan-ﬁction authors who've reportedly scored six-ﬁgure book deals. In an instant, Zayn was thrust into a star-making boot camp, fast-tracked to an uncontrollable type of notoriety without being given the opportunity to consider alternatives.

It's no secret that Zayn didn't love One Direction's sound or his bandmates. "My vision didn't necessarily always go with what was going on within the band," he says. There was something so earnest, so wholesomely dweeby, about the whole thing. It wasn't cool, and Zayn didn't particularly enjoy being dragged around the world to look like an epic dork during the prime of his youth.

When he split off, in 2015, Zayn ﬁnally got to do all the things he hadn't been able to in One Direction: dye his hair, grow his beard, sing about sex. But he was also introduced to a fresh army of puppeteers trying to guide him, and he felt disoriented, adrift. The only way to ground himself was to resist the pull of anyone's expectations and answer only to Zayn. He'd spent ﬁve years taking direction and had become allergic to it.

There are plenty of clichéd expressions about how toxic and stiﬂing freedom can be, and Zayn experienced many of them when he went solo. "I didn't really, like, make any friends from the band. I just didn't do it. It's not something that I'm afraid to say. I deﬁnitely have issues trusting people," he says. When he was living in Los Angeles, aimless, he fell in with a crowd of industry people: "Producers, musicians, tailors, stylists, managers. Them kind of things," he says. "It got too crazy. I just got too much into the party scene. Just going out all the time. And I was too distracted." So he left L.A. permanently and moved to New York earlier this year as a way to bring himself back down to earth.

Running a bit further, he recently bought a farm in rural Pennsylvania on the advice of Yolanda Hadid, who also has a farm there. The farm? "Cool." The state of Pennsylvania? "Cool." If you haven't picked up on it for yourself yet, Zayn loves the word "cool"; he loves it so much that he uses it more than 43 times over the course of our conversation. And now that Zayn likes to go to his farm and visit the Hadids, he and Gigi even have a horse together, named Cool. He's just getting things going on the farm, but already there are crops of cherries, tomatoes, and cucumbers. He likes to ride his ATVs. Sometimes he and Gigi will go at the same time, and she'll ride a horse, like Cool, while he watches.

Zayn has a habit of speaking in a conditioned state of detachment, responding in friendly but anodyne one-liners. Still, even someone who willfully projects this kind of cool two-dimensionalism can get irked from being flattened all the time by those around him. I catch myself flattening him, even when he's right in front of me. When I bring up the deceased Lil Peep, with whom he shared a manager, I say that it's a shame they never met—they seem like kindred spirits who could have made a great song together, or at least bonded over tattoos.

Zayn begins to laugh. "I'm not just going to be friends [with people] because we've both got tattoos. Loads of people come up to me and they're like, 'Yo, I got tattoos, you got tattoos. Let's be friends.' And I'm like… 'We're not just going to be friends because we've both got tattoos.'

"There's a bit more depth to me than that," he says, admonishing me.

One topic that will draw out this aforementioned depth is, unexpectedly, America. Despite the fact that he is living in a country under a leader that is exceptionally hostile to immigrants, the fantasy of America as a come-one, come-all melting pot is alive and well in Zayn's mind. He says he'd vote for Oprah if she ran for office because he likes her "ideologies about the world" and she's a "badass businesswoman."

"The UK is like, Fuck you, you're successful. That's not a nice attitude to have," he says. "You come to America, you're a bit shocked at first: Are these people being genuine? Are they really interested in me? Do they want to have a conversation? But they do! And that's a really nice thing. And I feel like it's misrepresented across the globe. For the kind of country it is, because everybody supports, no matter what color, what gender, what sexuality, what class—none of that matters here. People genuinely want to know you for who you are. And that's how America should be represented across the world."

Watch Now:Zayn Rocks Summer’s Best Swerves

Maybe you should run for office, I say.

"Maybe. It'd be cool. I feel like it's a beautiful place. [Because of the current political climate,] people are expressing how they really feel about where they come from and their heritage and their backgrounds. They're all mixed. To be American, you are mixed.

"So that's how I feel about it—it's a beautiful place, and it's a beautiful time to be alive."

Another unlikely topic that will break Zayn out of his default conversational mode and get him talking in jolting, paragraphs-long monologues: the paparazzi. The paparazzi who have been trailing him for years and, recently, every time he sets foot near Gigi's NoHo apartment, feeding the endless tabloid speculation about the state of their relationship. The paps used to piss Zayn off, until he realized their utility.

"That's my promo," he says. "I come outside, they take photos." He gets to quietly remind people that he exists—and gets photographed looking like the second coming of Johnny Depp, leaving the apartment of one of the most gorgeous women in the world—without doing a thing. "They stay outside and do all the work!" he says. "You can get pissed off about it and be like, 'Yo, this is a hindrance on my life.' Or you can use it for your own beneﬁt and be like, 'Well, if they're going to take the photos, then let them.' You've gotta earn your dollar, and I've gotta earn mine."

Which is to say that just because Zayn loathes the cornball industry churn doesn't mean he needs to surrender his relevance. Zayn represents an era in which underground cool and mass-market, Calabasian-style popularity have collapsed into one another. He operates on a plane where celebrity is predicated chieﬂy on relevance and intrigue, and Zayn—with his equally illustrious girlfriend, his brooding glare, and his following of millions—has about as much relevance and intrigue as anybody. He is both a casualty and a beneﬁciary of this uniquely modern form of celebrity. In running from his stardom, he's only fueling it.

I suppose now is the time to dispense with the rest of the intel I gleaned from Zayn about his relationship with Gigi Hadid, which was a less sensitive subject than I had anticipated. The two met at the end of 2015 at a party—which "pah-y," Zayn will not disclose, but suffice it to say it was a "cool pah-y"—and just days later, Zayn learned she'd broken up with Joe Jonas. He reached out to her and asked her to dinner at the Bowery Hotel. And thus was born a couple that will go down in history as one of the most iconic and Zeitgeisty pairings of all time, a couple whose images I will show my grandchildren to prove that the world was better in my day. All of the gossip about their relationship being an opportunistic setup by their respective management is bullshit, Zayn says: "If a relationship is for your career, you can fucking walk out the door. No way. See you later."

Despite the dramatic announcement of their split a couple of months ago, Zayn and Gigi are very much still close, as evidenced by myriad photos of him leaving her apartment or kissing her on the street. Zayn speaks about Gigi in a purely misty-eyed, worshipful tone that telegraphs he may be atoning for something. "I'm really thankful that I met her," he says. He uses the term "we" in the present tense quite a bit: "We go to the farm." "We have horses." The time he actually rode a horse with Gigi, he says, "I looked like a complete idiot and she looked like a complete professional.… We're still really good friends, and we're still in contact," he says. "No bad blood." He laughs. "…Taylor Swift.

"We're adults. We don't need to put a label on it, make it something for people's expectations." To hear Zayn tell it, Gigi is the hyper-organized, clear-headed, and positive counterweight to his disposition, which can dip into a vacant or negative state. She helped him reset his attitude when he was releasing his ﬁrst solo album, partying too hard. "I had a very negative outlook on things. That might have been adolescence or testosterone or whatever the fuck was running through my body at the time," he says. "She's helped me to look at things from a positive angle."

As Zayn heads into his new album cycle, Gigi has been a font of support and organizational heft. He says she's especially good with dates, which I mishear as "good with debts."

She's good with debts? You're in debt?

"No, no. Dates. She doesn't handle my ﬁnances yet," he says. "We'll get to that eventually."

When Zayn Malik went solo, he dropped his last name. The mononymic "Zayn" took on a potency and directness that enabled him to break free from the chains of boy-band drudgery and lameness. Zayn: It's a single syllable that conjures a vaporous sexuality and a moodiness that blurs the line between contemplative and blank. You can imagine the black-and-white commercial for L'Eau de Zayn.

In the years since he dropped his last name, the word "Zayn" has also become, to insiders, an equally potent verb. To "Zayn" means to be within someone's reach one moment and then completely disappear the next without any explanation. Poof! To be "Zayned" is to witness a French exit so aggressive that it almost has a supernatural quality. I know this because it happened to me.

We emerged from the ship's galley, and as I prepared to launch into more conversation, he asked Carolina where he could ﬁnd the toilets. She pointed him toward a porta-potty on dry land, and Taryn wordlessly followed behind him, obviously accustomed to this ritual. Before I could get my bearings, he was zipping off into the parking lot adjacent to the tanker, no doubt scurrying home to his fortress of solitude and cigarette smoke in SoHo. I'd been Zayned.

We were supposed to hang out the following week, and I patiently waited for him to reach out. But I knew that he never would. And much as I'd like to be the exception to the Laws of Zayn's Nature, I get it. Who among us has never fantasized about blowing off pesky professional obligations we deem useless? Zayn—driven by a spirit that is part self-destruction, part self-preservation, part youthful punk contrarianism—actually has the balls to live that fantasy. It's self-absorbed, immature, and unprofessional. I'd be offended if I didn't think it was so fucking cool.

Carrie Battan is a staff writer for 'The New Yorker' and a contributor to 'GQ'.

An abridged version of this story appeared in the July 2018 issue.

#zayn #gq #interview #magazine #print interview #love of my life

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danschkade · 7 years ago

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PAGE x PAGE ANALYSIS — “GANGBUSTER: SWING ANNA MISS” from THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500 (1993)

PUBLISHED: DC Comics, June 1993

SCRIPT: Jerry Ordway

PENCILS: Tom Grummett

INKS: Doug Hazelwood

COLORS: Glenn Whitmore

LETTERS: Albert De Guzman

EDITORIAL: Mike Carlin with Jennifer Frank

A couple days ago, I took a look at a short segment of the sixty-five page ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500 — specifically, the four-page introduction to Superboy by Karl Kesel and Tom Grummett. Today, I wanted to revisit a different part of that same issue: the nine total pages of subplot that focus on the nobody’s favorite hard-hitting hero of Suicide Slum: GANGBUSTER.

Oh, Gangbuster. While many casual comic history buffs may cite 90s comic character design trends in terms of pouches and spikes, I feel like Gangbuster represents the aesthetic of that era in an equal but opposite way. His “What if Firestorm was Robocop” look is such a prime example of what straight attempts at designing new comic book characters in the classic superhero mold looked like at the time. The shoulders. The helmet. His little logo. He’s so serious. He’s just the worst. I think I might love him.

But hey, Andrew Weiss I ain’t — far better to let you see my man Gangbuster in action and let his performance speak for itself. So let’s tuck in and take a look at his subplot in ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500, which I’ve entitled, for the purposes of discussion: “GANGBUSTER: SWING ANNA MISS.”

THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500 and all characters contained therein are property of DC Comics, reproduced here solely for educational purposes.

***

PAGE ONE

Aww, yeah. Drink him in.

Grummett and Hazelwood create a sense of distance between the buildings by showing the foregrounded building Gangbuster’s hanging off of in full detail, while the buildings in the background are rendered in black silhouette, suggesting they’re far enough apart that light affects them differently. This has the side affect of giving Gangbuster a sense of height — if the buildings behind him feel far away, we automatically assume the ground must be equally far below. This is a great hero shot, besides. From this first image, we know what kind of superhero Gangbuster is: the weapon and helmet suggest he has no powers, the collar implies he’s kind of a squarejohn. To my eyes, his design invokes two moralistic Marvel characters: Daredevil and Cyclops.

The message is clear: the Super R.A. is here to kick some ass.

PAGE TWO

Excellent establishing shot of the alleyway — going with an over the shoulder angle concretely places Gangbuster, our audience surrogate character, relative to the other characters below. When added to the previous splash page, this gives us a very strong understanding of the space: a narrow alleyway with entrances on both sides.

Note how Grummett makes panels two and three a smaller inset of panel one, giving the feeling that what we’re seeing is a detail of the larger scene. Colorist Glenn Whitmore even makes the gutters of these panels a dark red, a color we already associate with Gangbuster, further coding the scene as being observed by him, even though panels two and three are not literally from his POV. This might be reading into things too much — this color coding might just be a happy accident. Super minor continuity issue with his nunchucks: they’re dangling free on page one, but gathered into his fist here. Personally, I’d think the clinking chain connecting them would give him away. But who knows? It’s the DC Universe. Maybe they’re hard rubber instead of metal. Moving on.

Also, that guy next to the car. Keep an eye on him.

PAGES THREE AND FOUR

These pages work together as a sort of splash in three parts. The black field floating behind the panels on page three is a great way to add depth to the layout — Grummett employs this several times over the course of the issue, always to good effect. On the big splash page, I really like the visual representation of the whipping motion of the nunchucks; it adds force and speed to a weapon the can often look sort of ineffective on a static comic book page. The slowly increasing size of Gangbuster across both pages conveys the growing intensity and brutality of his attack on these guys. This also sets up this moment as the height of Gangbuster’s evening — we’re clearly meant to be more or less on his side right now. After all, we need a hero now more than ever. Superman’s dead.

PAGE FIVE

The first three panels on this page consist of tight action shots, limiting our ability to see our environment, so we share in Gangbuster’s surprise when we pull to a wide shot in the last panel. Dropping out the border in panel four, surrounding the figures in negative space, enhances the feeling that the cops have swarmed him from out of nowhere — although note that Grummett adds enough puddles and junk on the ground to make the figures feel like they’re standing on something solid. Lastly, making all of the figures the same cool shade effectively equalizes them; Gangbuster isn’t a superhero, he’s just some schmuck that’s about to get canned.

PAGE SIX

Is the cop who calls out to Gangbuster in panel four the same one who fires at him in panel five (“Charlie”)? Logistically, It would make sense — there’s no one in front of him in panel four, and Charlie in panel five is clearly in front of the “Charlie -- No!” cop in that panel (who we’ll call “Killjoy”). Character-wise, however, it would make more sense for the panel four cop to be Killjoy — he’s even holding his gun the same way in both panels.

I point this out as an example of the pitfalls of making characters in identical outfits too physically similar. If you’re drawing a group of big city cops, there’s no reason not to make them diverse in race and gender, if for no other reason than to add easy distinguishing elements between what is otherwise a totally homogenous pack of unnamed characters (although there’s plenty of other reasons why this is a good idea).

All that said, great bit of action between panels one and two. The close-up of Gangbuster grabbing the cop in panel one, a right to left motion, leads directly into the huge left to right throw in panel two. I love the anatomy in this scene — you can really feel how much effort the decidedly non-superhuman Gangbuster has to put into the throw. Once again, Grummett and Hazelwood create a feeling of space in panel two by dropping the back two cops into black silhouettes, with their badges still visible to create a feeling overwhelming, encroaching authority.

Also, considering how ineffective small arms typically are against costumed crimefighters, our boy Charlie is one crackerjack marksman. Or maybe — just maybe — Gangbuster is a goddamn terrible superhero.

PAGE SEVEN

Here is where I point out a minor flaw in this whole sequence; now that we’ve left the alleyway, we can say conclusively that the guy in the suit standing next to the car on page two never showed up again. He’s not even in the pack of cops surrounding Gangbuster on page five — we just lose track of him entirely. It’s a small thing, but since Grummett (or possibly Ordway in the scripting process) chose to include him in that establishing shot of the alleyway, it would have been nice to see him again when the Undercover Cops twist goes down. Losing him like this adds to the hash this scene makes of the work done to establish this space on the first two pages.

Couple possible fixes: One, take the guy in the suit out entirely. The initial interaction of the undercover cop and the drug dealer is framed very tightly and personally, so just have them be there (ostensibly) alone. Then pull the reveal of the undercover cop as is, and all the uniformed cops still swarm him from — the walls? I guess? They kind of come out of nowhere.

Two, and my preferred fix, would be to have a couple of guys in suits sanding by the undercover cop’s car on page two, with one distinct guy standing next to the drug dealer — a big guy in a leather jacket, something that screams “bodyguard.” On page three, Gangbuster takes out the bodyguard in panel two instead of the drug dealer. We keep Gangbuster wailing on the drug dealer on page four — that looked great. On page five, instead of just punching out that one cop, we have Gangbuster diving into the men in suits in a more “superhero takes on a bunch of thugs” type fight. Then the men in suits reveal themselves to be undercover cops, instead of the uniformed cops just appearing out of nowhere at the end of page five— something I keep bringing up because it really does bother me, since the geography of the narrow alleyway was so well established on page two, making the sudden appearance of the uniformed cops feel a little like a cheat. Wouldn’t Gangbuster have been ideally situated to see them hiding in the alley, from his vantage point on the fire escape high above? This proposed scenario cleans all that up, and loosely preserves the extant flow of action. And even though I did ramble on about this for a goodly while, it is ultimately a minor flaw. But then, that’s the thing about minor flaws; there’s usually a pretty easy fix.

Meanwhile, this page: Really strong lettering from Albert De Guzman at play here. Look how he guides our eye down the page, helping Grummett’s already clear line of motion by creating an arrow of words pointing right to Hob’s Bay.

Grummet consistently makes Gangbuster small (I.E. less powerful) on this page, a clear contrast to how huge he was during the opening pages. Here he’s dwarfed by everything on the roof, from vent pipes to chimneys, culminating in the huge cop’s hand + gun in panel four. I personally would’ve liked to have shown a little more of the cop’s arm, enough to see an official insignia up on his shoulder, but we’ve already established that the cops’ jackets have furry cuffs, so it works fine enough as is.

PAGE EIGHT

There’s been no shortage of great layouts in this issue, but this page is a cut above. The narrow verticality of that first panel bleakly lays out the stakes at play; the cop on the roof, the three story jump, the bay below. Grummett and Hazelwood use the fog off the bay to drop the buildings beyond into the deep background, visually “clearing the path” to the bay.

The second panel eliminates everything but this huge full-figure shot of Gangbuster diving, with a couple scraps of lead paint from the roof to place him in space. We can’t see his expression, but his captioned dialogue is tremendously affecting. Note also how while Gangbuster is diving towards the bottom on the page, the lettering still leads us organically to his plunge into the bay in panel three, even though that panel is layout-wise much higher on the page.

Nice reverse shot in that last panel, reminding us how far Gangbuster has just jumped and adding tension to the idea that he might not have survived. The last line is continued in a caption on the following page: “…No way anyone could’ve survived THAT!”

Another note about the last couple pages: Grummett always has Gangbuster moving in the same direction, left to right, throughout the entire rooftop chase. For this reason, the bullet Gangbuster catches is in his right arm — the arm that’s always facing us.

Oh man! It could’ve been a cool visual dichotomy, if we had seen the official insignia on the sleeve of the cop pointing the gun at him at the end of page seven! The officer of the law has a symbol of his authority where the vigilante has a bullet wound! Ahh, well. Still a phenomenal page.

PAGE NINE

We come back to this subplot after about twenty pages with a nice, low-energy establishing shot of the docks. The wafting, flapping paper is a great way to suggest windchill and urban decay. The bay is to the left of the page — when last we saw Gangbuster, he was making a rightward dive into the bay. On a storytelling level, we’re on “the other side” of the bay. Gangbuster got away clean.

High-Pockets is immediately helpful here, despite having a crummy night. No deep analysis to be had here, I just like it. Good little character trait for a good little character. As he hauls Gangbuster out of the drink, we see he’s transferred his wine to the pocket of his coat, which he then gives to Gangbuster. High-Pockets doesn’t offer him his hooch, mind you — Gangbuster just straight jukes it. We end on a nice reverse silhouette as High-Pockets and the slumped, defeated Gangbuster lope off into the shadowed, Superman-less city of Metropolis. Gangbuster’s last line concludes in caption on the next page: “…Then I’ll be finished with this stinking place!” Our hero, kids.

Again, this is one of the first comics I even read. When I think about it, Gangbuster has to have been one of the first, say, fifteen superheroes I was ever aware of. Before Green Arrow or Daredevil or The Question or Black Canary, I knew about Gangbuster — a character who, as depicted here, just isn’t really cut out to be a superhero. He’s a washout, a bencher, a big ol’ can of coulda beans. He’d be one of the hockey pad Batmen from The Dark Knight, only they wouldn’t let him join because he’s just such a giant prick. He’s awesome. Gangbuster, man! Gangbuster.

***

You can buy the full 65-page issue of THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #500 for the surprisingly low price of $1.99 off Comixology! It’s absolutely worth the read, containing a truly emotional Pa Kent story as well as the introduction of Cyborg Superman, which is, if nothing else, exceptionally well-paced.

Meanwhile -- we’re in the final days of the Kickstarter for SECTION ZERO!

Tom Grummett reunites with writer Karl Kesel to bring back the high quality old school team-based adventure comic — one of the few types of fiction that genuinely does work better in the medium of comics than it does anywhere else, and these guys are high in the top list of creators who can pull it off. If these awesome Gangbuster pages above did anything for you, SECTION ZERO is totally on your frequency.

If you want to read some preview pages and learn more about the project, I highly encourage everybody to check out the SECTION ZERO Kickstarter — it’s entering its last week and I very much want to see this book on my shelf.

***

As always, feel free to check me on any mistakes I might have made, add your own commentary, or share similar examples of good comics done well. I’ll be back next week with a different comic to peruse.

Be well!

PREVIOUS PAGE x PAGE ANALYSES:

MINI-ANALYSIS — FIRST SIGHTING: SUPERBOY

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #69 (with Aud Koch)

THE SHADOW STRIKES! #13

PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN #13

BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES #17

#Gangbuster #Page x Page Analysis #comics #educational purposes #Superman #DC Comics #Tom Grummett #jerry ordway

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 6 years ago

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MARY ANN NEWMAN STILL LIVES in the same apartment she was born and raised in. That apartment happens to be in Chelsea in New York City, and it also happens to be part of the reason she fell in love with Catalan and Spanish literature.

The neighborhood she grew up in wasn’t the glamorous, prohibitive destination it has become, but rather a working-class neighborhood where she heard and saw Spanish on the streets as often as English. She later became enamored of Spanish literature and went on to discover Catalan culture and history. She has since devoted her life to being an ambassador of Catalan literature and has been justly rewarded for it. A celebrated translator, editor, and cultural critic, she is the director of the Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the US.

I first encountered Mary Ann Newman’s work when I read her translation of Quim Monzó’s novel Gasoline (Monzó is the previous interlocutor in this series of conversations on Catalan literature). My husband, Leonardo Francalanci, a Catalan scholar, had just taught her translation of Josep Maria de Sagarra’s Private Life, an epic chronicle of life in Barcelona before the Spanish Civil War. She has also translated a short story collection by Quim Monzó, essays by Xavier Rubert de Ventós, and a collection of poems by Josep Carner. In this interview, we talk about translation as an embodied practice, her journey from New York City to Barcelona, the contemporary Catalan crisis, and the evolution of her love affair with Catalan literature over the years.

AZAREEN VAN DER VLIET OLOOMI: When did you first travel to Catalonia and become aware of it as a region with a cultural identity that is distinct from the rest of Spain?

MARY ANN NEWMAN: I went to Spain in 1972, at 20, for a junior semester abroad. I knew there was such a thing as Catalonia, and Galicia, and the Basque Country. There had been Galician children in my grammar school in New York in the ’50s. West 14th Street was still known then as Little Spain, and I lived on West 16th Street. One day in high school, as other students were being drilled in conjugations, I started leafing through the Spanish culture text we never cracked, and read that there were four languages in Spain — Spanish, Catalan, Basque, and Galician. I remember perfectly the hand-drawn map of the Iberian Peninsula with the regions outlined.

These little bits of information — the Galician classmates, the map — are like iron filings: when you finally encounter the magnet of the culture, they jump into shape and become meaningful. They allow you to be attentive to difference.

During my semester in Madrid, I took a train to Barcelona. It was love at first sight, with the landscape, with the architecture, with the quality of the light and the sky. And with the sound of the language. I felt the difference right away. It was easy to make the leap from there to the distinct cultural identity.

I tend to think of acquiring a second or third language as entering into a love affair: the process is enigmatic, visceral, and powerful enough to shift our sense of identity. Can you describe your love affair with Catalan? When did you start learning Catalan, and why? How is it different from your relationship to Spanish?

I think it’s contiguous with my relationship to Spanish. One’s reaction to cultures, cities, landscapes, and languages is, or can be, as intense and visceral as it is to people and lovers.

My love affair began with Spanish. I love the Spanish language, its immense variety, all the cultures that fall under the rubric of “Hispanic,” even the conflicted history of its relationship with the languages it has suppressed. I grew up in a very bilingual environment — at the grammar school I mentioned before, St. Francis Xavier, a large proportion of the children were of Latino origin, mostly Puerto Rican. My neighborhood was full of stores with “Spanish” products — “Spanish” covered everything in those days. My first childhood encounter with a foreign country was Cuba, where I learned my first words in Spanish, tasted my first rice and beans, and absorbed some sort of deep-seated familiarity, a sort of subcutaneous recognition, with Hispanic culture. Later, as an adult, Spanish allowed me to take a distance from monolingual American culture, to see the United States from another, often disapproving or denunciatory perspective. I moved from this general love of Hispanic culture to the specific enchantment with Catalan culture, which, in turn, gave me perspective on Spanish. They are not entirely at odds. For most Americans, Spanish (in the broad sense my neighborhood applied) is the gateway to Catalan.

This was very organic and informal. I started learning Catalan in 1976, in Madrid. I was completely smitten with the culture. I had developed wonderful Catalan friendships in New York, with people who loved to talk about their hometowns (Barcelona, but also Valls, Tarragona…). I attended two classes in Madrid, the only two classes I ever took, at the Círculo Catalán. My classmates were all young madrileños, political progressives who loved Lluís Llach or Raimon, who expressed their solidarity with the Catalan people by learning the language.

In 1977, I moved to Barcelona and started speaking Catalan with everyone who would put up with me. Back in New York, in 1978, I bought Alan Yates’s Teach Yourself Catalan — I still highly recommend it — and did just that. I got a group of friends together, I would study up a chapter and teach it to them. It worked. I learned the grammar. But the passion for the language was already deep, and everything I had learned by living in Catalonia only reinforced it: the markets, the architecture, the politics — 1977 was the year of legalizations, the year of the Anarchist Days, the first LGBT demonstration, the first mega-demonstration in favor of the Statute of Autonomy and the release of Catalan political prisoners. It was the perfect year for a young American progressive to be initiated into Catalonia. Above all, I started reading: Salvador Espriu, Mercè Rodoreda, Biel Mesquida. If you know another Romance language well, you can read before you can talk, and when you start talking, all that reading — the words, the sentence structures — is at your disposal.

What was the first book you read in translation? And the first book you translated?

It was probably Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I loved them and read them over and over. I remember loving Babar the Elephant. My first grown-up reading was an immense collection of stories by Guy de Maupassant. Of course, this is all in retrospect. I had no idea I was reading translations — they were just books I loved. In high school, I discovered The Stranger and The Trial (which I loved) and Steppenwolf (which I hated), and all the books that thrill an inquiring teenager. And in freshman year of college, One Hundred Years of Solitude (I borrowed it from a lending library in a tobacconist on 8th Street for 25 cents) was what convinced me to major in Latin American literature. It was a lightning bolt.

The first book I translated was O’Clock, by Quim Monzó.

What do you think the art of translation has in common with the art of listening? Do you consider the process of conducting a translation to be an embodied experience?

It is for me. But so is reading itself. And translation is the most radical form of reading, the most deep-rooted.

When you read, you can sort of slide by things that are opaque. When you translate, you can’t slip by, you have to dig down to understand them, and it involves all the senses: What is this character seeing, smelling, feeling (both touch and emotion), hearing? What were people wearing?

This is the empiricism of translation: it entails a trial and error, a continuous editing and rereading. All of which is very physical; it cycles back and forth between rationality and instinct. Many language devices are unconscious or even pre-conscious; unremembered things, words, concepts rise to the surface when they are called up by the translation. It has a psychoanalytic quality.

How does your relationship to the translation change depending on whether you are working with a living or dead author?

I think it doesn’t. My relationship is with the text, and with the author insofar as he or she inhabits the text. It’s wonderful to be able to consult with the author, and my two living authors, Quim Monzó and Xavier Rubert de Ventós, were always very helpful, but in the end, it’s my job, and my book. You can only hope the author approves.

How did you happen to start translating Quim Monzó?

I was living in Barcelona in 1980 on a Fulbright, and reading everything I could. Quim’s books were breaking all the molds in Catalan literature, and in world literature. I met Monzó there, but, even more fortunately, it turned out that he was going to spend the following year in New York. In New York, I proposed a translation, he agreed, I put together a dossier with three stories, bio, et cetera, sent them to an agent, who loved them, who sent them to a publisher, who loved them … It was deceptively simple.

What is the most enjoyable part of translating Monzó, and what is the most challenging?

As often happens, the most enjoyable and the most challenging come together. Quim’s writing is very approachable, very readable, so the quality of his art can be imperceptible. Through translation, it becomes evident. His writing is spare and dense. His sentences are reduced to the absolute minimum, but packed with meaning. There is no extraneous matter. To render this in English should seem like a no-brainer, but English is dense and spare in a different way from Catalan, and they don’t always overlap. It’s a challenge, but it’s also great fun to crack the code.

How was translating Josep Maria de Sagarra’s Private Life different from your other translations? Did you have to do historical research?

It’s useful to compare it to Monzó. Sagarra is the grand pre–Civil War chronicler of Barcelona. He set out intentionally to write the great Catalan novel, to hold Stendhal’s mirror up to the life of the city. And he wrote this broad, florid, marvelous tapestry, with billowing sentences and a plethora of adjectives and adverbs. It was a blast to translate.

I had some knowledge of the period, so the research was more of a deep dig: sometimes it seemed as if he were using a photograph to evoke a scene, and in a number of cases I actually found the photograph in question. There were a few mystifying passages and references that I was able to track down and, in one case, flesh out — a bit of creative editing that might be considered controversial. It was interesting: after my first draft, I read the Spanish translation. I was sure it would resolve my doubts. But the apparent closeness of Spanish to Catalan allowed Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and José Agustín Goytisolo to translate obscure passages literally, which I couldn’t do in English. Still, the detective work was a lot of fun. So, the interesting thing about going from Monzó to Sagarra, is that Sagarra is splendidly sweeping and baroque, and Monzó is perfectly minimalist and spare, but they share a sensibility, a willingness not to prettify the subjects they portray. It feels like a Catalan sensibility, certainly a Barcelonan sensibility.

How has your work as a cultural administrator and translator changed since the Catalan referendum?

It hasn’t affected me, professionally, but it has affected the people I deal with.

Personally, and professionally, it is distressing to perceive the normalization of a kind of pessimism. Life goes on, everyone does his job, Catalonia prospers, but there is a cloud hanging over people’s heads, and a subtle brake on thinking long-term. Having political prisoners, living in a state of antagonism with a government that is supposed to serve you — in the case of Catalonia, the Spanish government — creates a kind of suspension, an unreal quality. It is not unlike living in Trump’s America. It will take a while to have the distance to understand this moment.

How would you describe the attitude American publishers have toward Catalan literature?

Truth be told, publishers are receptive to Catalan literature. They know it is of great quality, they are even more interested now that Catalonia is a trending topic, and they know there is funding, which is an extraordinary help, especially for small publishers. Some publishers have made a real commitment to Catalan literature — Open Letter, Archipelago, Dalkey Archive, for example — and I know others are looking for the next great thing.

What could we be doing better to support Catalan literature and culture?

I think there is a problem with the haphazardness of translations, in what gets translated when, and who connects the dots for the readers.

For example, there is a considerable body of 20th-century Catalan works available now, but as there isn’t an apparatus to relate one book to another, the corpus is invisible. New books appear in isolation, and reviewers, even publishers, often don’t have the information to establish links among the Catalan books or, even more distressingly, between the Catalan books and comparable texts from other literary traditions.

What can we do? Perhaps consider writing articles that would connect those dots and define the canon. By the way, I don’t think this problem is limited to Catalan literature: any less familiar literary tradition faces a similar challenge.

Is there a Catalan writer whose works you would like to translate but don’t because of a perceived lack of interest from publishers?

There are numerous writers whose work I would like to translate. I have a certain confidence, which I hope is not misplaced, that if I presented a project, particularly with the financial backing of the Institut Ramon Llull — which underlies a great deal of the success in bringing Catalan literature to English — it would find a good home. The problem is less with the publishers than with the time I dispose of.

What is your process when conducting a translation?

It really depends on the book, but I tend to do a quick and dirty first draft, making lots of notes and setting down options, and writing queries, and then going back and editing it to death. Four or five readings, and constant revision. It is a luxurious method, in the sense of the luxury of time; as you know, my translations are few and far between.

Do you think of literary translations as a form of self-translation? Do you think of it as a journey? How does translation change or influence your relationship to time and space?

I don’t, really. It is an extraordinary creative process, and I think I have referred to the psychoanalytic quality, the reflective quality, but it also has an artisanal aspect that keeps it real.

It is definitely a form of writing, and a creative vehicle, but it is not like writing from scratch, and there is always the source text between you and yourself.

Who are some of your favorite Catalan authors, and why?

Mercè Rodoreda, beyond any doubt. One of the great 20th-century world writers.

Like Sagarra and Monzó, she is merciless in her portrayals, and yet you also see, with empathy (yours, not hers), how her characters are buffeted by their circumstances and by the trends of history. I love her combination of real, surreal, and hyperreal. J. V. Foix, the poet, is the epitome of surrealism anchored in everyday reality, on a parallel in poetry with Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí in the visual. I love Ausiàs March, the Valencian Renaissance poet, and Tirant lo Blanc, by Joanot Martorell, still gorgeous and eminently readable in David Rosenthal’s translation. And Joan Maragall, the marvelous turn-of-the-century poet who could be a historian, a romantic, or a mystic, by turns.

And, oh my God, do I love Eugeni d’Ors, the “household philosopher” who educated a whole generation of readers (1906–1920-ish) from his daily newspaper column. Joan Fuster, the Valencian essayist, is a dazzling skeptic. I recently learned about Cèlia Suñol i Pla, an elegant midcentury novelist who had been lost and is being relaunched. I would love to translate her. And Marta Rojals, a brilliant chronicler of Generation X. And, finally, in the most chaotic order (I am not following my mandate of making the canon visible), I love love love Francesc Trabal. I encourage people to read his novel, Waltz, translated by Martha Tennent. Oh, wait, and Pere Calders, a mordant and deadpan short story writer (Mara Faye Lethem is working on him, and I look forward to that!). I have to stop.

What are your duties as the chair of the Pen American Translation Committee?

The PEN America Translation Committee advocates for translators within the scope of PEN, in every way PEN advocates for writers. We are concerned with every aspect of translators as writers: their legal and financial status — we are working on establishing contract guidelines with both the Authors’ Guild and a pro bono legal team, their status in publishing and in the hierarchy of writing. We bring to the fore the fact that literary and cultural transmission depends to a great extent on translators and translations, and we press for this to be recognized both in prestige and, concomitantly, in remuneration.

Are you currently working on a translation?

I am recreationally translating Oceanography of Tedium by Eugeni d’Ors. Since it is a little allegorical jewel, whose structure is dictated by its origin as daily newspaper articles, I can go about it in between other things. I haven’t tried to sell it or place it; I’m just doing it for the pleasure of it.

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of Call Me Zebra.

The post The Catalan Paradox, Part II: Conversation with Translator Mary Ann Newman appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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how2to18 · 6 years ago