#sometimes his sexiness is almost too much for columbo

[tvsnationalgeosapphic]

hes so insanely drawable.

[forthegothicheroine]

How other great detectives would solve the disappearance of Rowan Morrison from Summerisle

A series I do sometimes. I think most horror fans know the basic idea behind the original Wicker Man, but if you don’t and want to avoid spoilers, scroll away.

I don’t think most of these detectives are virgins- maybe Miss Marple or Poirot, but maybe not- so I’ll be assuming that for ritual purity purposes, just refusing Willow will have to be enough.

Sam Vimes: Haha. Haha. Oh wow, haha. Picking a detective who’s already an apathetic polytheist sure throws a wrench in Lord Summerisle’s plans! Vimes starts arresting people when he arrives and basically doesn’t stop, mostly for child endangerment (don’t send your children to go jump over fire! there are plenty of murderers out there to do that to them!) He starts kicking back on the other side of the door when Willow starts singing until she gives up and goes away. There’s still some strong danger here since Vimes would fulfill the role of a man who came with kingly power (oh boy he’d hate hearing that!) but Vimes does have one advantage Howie doesn’t have: a loyal team. Lord Summerisle said that no one would come for Howie- maybe he was right or maybe he was bluffing, but he’d sure as hell be wrong where Vimes was concerned, and that’s assuming they got him to come here without any other Watch members in the first place. Without dying or after death, he’s pulling this place down.

Columbo: Here’s the best omen for Columbo’s success- I didn’t think of it until this list, but Lord Summerisle dresses exactly like a Columbo villain! Anyway, schlubby little Columbo solves his cases more or less by pecking at key suspects until he can figure out which ones are lying to him, so I think that bodes well here. He steps off the plane and finds everyone clearly lying to him; he takes out a notepad, writes “THEY ALL DID IT”, and gets back on the plane. Or maybe he could steal a boat and escape later at night so I can give him the chance to annoy Lord Summerisle ("Mythology, huh? My wife has a book about that, very interesting stuff. You know, I thought it was kind of funny how that inn was called the Green Man. See, in that book, Sir Gawain goes to meet this green man with the force of the whole round table behind him, but they’re planning to test and then kill him. Funny thing, right?”)

Phryne Fisher: This makes so much more sense if it was Jack they were after and due to plot hijinks, Phryne ended up there instead of or in addition to him. She has sex with Lord Summerisle almost immediately, and the village isn’t really sure if that counts as breaking ritual purity or not (Willow doesn’t seem like her type.) Besides the ritual purity, they have to deal with the fact that she does not have the authority of a king- she probably doesn’t even have police permission to be here! This whole operation has been a tremendous cockup on the cult’s part.

Dale Cooper: Despite being friendly where Howie was prickly, Cooper has a lot in common with that other doomed policeman who came to a creepy town to save or avenge a young girl. Things might go more or less the same as they did in the movie, but there’s one circumstance under which he might get out with his life. Willow bangs on his door naked, singing a sexy song, and he opens the door for her. She’s a bit disappointed that he failed the test, but instead of going along with the seduction, he tells her that she’s too young for him but that it looks like she could use a friend, and that he thinks she might be lonlier than people realize. Maybe- just maybe- the first genuine offer of nonsexual friendship she’s had in years might break through to her, and she might start to talk.

Philip Marlowe: I love Marlowe, he’s my guy, but I don’t think he’s getting out off this. He’s thrown naked girls out of his bedroom before- why should he think this time is any different? He and Summerisle have nice long chats about history and literature, but in the process he demonstrates that he has a very strong sense of morality and propriety (if not religion) and that he thinks of himself as a sort of fairy tale knight. That’s bad. That’s very, very bad.

Sam Spade: I think he ruins this by trying to extort Lord Summerisle for blackmail money and Summerisle just kills him and needs to find a new detective to trap. Either that, or he gets away with it because he absolutely sleeps with Willow.

Poirot: This trip is the single most miserable experience of Poirot’s life. Even more so than the nudity, he knows he has plunged into hell upon eating the terrible food and finding they don’t even have any of their famous apples! In fact, I like the idea that it’s their famous food that first leads him in the direction of the answer; the harvest was bad, the book suggests they might have made a sacrifice, but they’ve had girls pose by those crops every year without anything bad happening to them. If the girls aren’t the sacrifice, who is? Willow’s attempted seduction certainly upsets him (David Suchet says he played him as asexual, but even if that’s not your interpretation, naked youths pounding on his door are the last thing he wants!) I don’t know if he can escape, but I think he can pull the right threads to figure things out and ruin the event.

Miss Marple: Boy, does Lord Summerisle feel like an asshole about this! Miss Marple does her best not to judge anyone for so much nudity- these young people today do insist on being modern, she just hopes they don’t catch cold. I think she’d really frustrate the islanders by not seeming to actually do her role. She’s not breaking down doors and demanding answers, and when Willow sings at her door she just chats about how nice it is that youngsters are interested in traditional folk music, seeming not to even get the test. What they don’t know is that Miss Marple is very, very good at listening and observing. She knows. And she’s going to play the part of the dotty old lady right up until the very point when she can get back on that plane.

Kinsey Milhone: Kinsey may be in trouble here. Innocent young people being put in danger, especially when she could have saved them, is the sort of thing that drives her courage but could also propel her blindly into her doom. If things don’t go exactly as they did in the movie, it will be because she focuses on a different question- who sent her that letter? Everyone acts like they know what’s going on, so who “didn’t know” where Rowan was and was “afraid something terrible had happened”? The bigger the conspiracy looks, the less likely it is that anyone could have been ignorant or even sent a secret letter, and that might let Kinsey realize it was sent on purpose.

[how2to18]

THE GRAND EXPERIMENT continues. Reviewers, at least some of them, experienced a kind of wonderment at the appearance of the first three volumes of the Graphic Canon. Five years later, the wonderment has deepened to just this side of bafflement. Not that editor Russ Kick, known for his work in the underground press way back, and his exposure of government secrets later on, means to be secretive. Not in the least. Indeed, he is so attached to his indirect creation (that is, the work of the artist-adaptors, and only occasionally his own adaptation scripts) that he provides a sometimes intensive, sometimes casual introduction for each entry. He really wants this project taken seriously in the large field of comic art. And understandably so, since he has managed to create something unprecedented in comic art, at least in the English language.

Or perhaps the reader is only likely to infer that claim because Kick’s volumes have now reached thousands of oversized, intermittently color pages, and stand to reach many more. The initial series of three volumes covered assorted literary genres across the ages, from antiquity to present, in more or less chronological order. This was followed by two volumes of children’s stories, told without much talking down or dilution of the scary parts. Now we have passed on to the world of noir, where practically everything is scary, and not much in a supernatural way.

There is so much good art and fine storytelling in this latest volume that complaints and criticisms seem almost niggling. But I consider the vision or map rather too broad when we can go from Solomon and Sophocles to de Sade, from Boccaccio to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Agatha Christie, within a single volume. “Crime and Mystery” becomes, in the process, a catch all for the stories that fascinate the omnivorous editor, and for which he has found a talented (mostly very talented) set of illustrators who also usually functions as adapters.

But crime and mystery, as a generic category, might be defined more precisely as literary responses to the social realities of the last couple centuries. Slavery, mass slaughter, and so on are, of course, present in previous eras and just as monstrous as they are today. But what sets off crime and mystery as a genre, what makes it the object of endless treatments in every phase of popular culture, is modern property relations. The novel in general emerged to transcribe the drama of the worthy rising bourgeoisie against sinking aristocrats, and for Dashiell Hammett and Columbo right down to the classic years of Law & Order, the contemporary master class is ultimately the guilty one. Hammett himself, as a teacher of mystery writing in the left-wing Jefferson School of the 1940s, supposedly told his students, “Look for the money, always look for the money.”

Never mind. What is here is remarkable enough. I am especially drawn, for instance, to Sophia Wiedeman’s retelling of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in black and white with the use of one color, of course red. I am not sure that Wiedeman has captured the interiority of Hawthorne himself and his acceptance of guilt, as a descendant of New England’s pitiless Puritan settlers, for the American conquest of the land from its earlier inhabitants. But the fate of women, one woman, caught in the maw of patriarchal judgment — Wiedeman nails that, for sure.

Elsewhere in the volume, Rick Geary brings his vine-like style to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and captures the heart of the story, its essential action, in only a few pages. Another painterly Dostoyevsky, this one Hadar Reuven’s The House of the Dead, invokes the Holocaust with its scenes of men in beards in a monstrous prison.

Arriving in the 20th century, Sarah Benkin misses the crypto-racism of the wife and murderer of her husband in James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (“He’s so greasy!” the scheming missus says about her husband in the original), instead showing hubby as a jolly Italian American. She also misses the lust that drives her collaborator into the murder. But the essential story is here, anyway. Ellice Weaver’s full-color version of Iceberg Slim’s Pimp, meanwhile, works as a series of amazing paintings with a subordinated narrative.

It would be easy to go on indefinitely, but I’ll mention only a few more examples. Theo Ellsworth’s adaptation of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a 30-page comic novella in itself, so intense that the reader gets a feeling of emotional exhaustion, in a good way, pages before the end. Robert Berry has made a section of James Joyce’s Dubliners into a Mutt and Jeff dialogue of sorts, in a bow to the immortal (for old time comics fans) Bud Fisher as much as to Joyce. As I am an admirer of R. Sikoryak’s intriguing approaches to comics history, I find his rethinking of de Sade as a series of comic book covers in “Sadistic Comics” — with an improbably helpless Wonder Woman at the center — utterly delightful. That may exhaust my list of particular favorites in the volume, except for the adaptation of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s short story “Talma Gordon” (reputed to be the first mystery published by an African-American writer) by C. Frackes, herself a rising feminist artist.

If I commit myself to describing particular stories, it’s because every generalization about this volume fails and must fail. While each piece, taken by itself, is not necessarily strong or convincing, together they convince.

Convince us of what? That is the question, at least for this reviewer. We can usefully examine The Graphic Canon from another angle. The international sweep of its cast of artists and writers offers impressive evidence of a global comics community. It also testifies to Russ Kick’s amazing capacity for outreach. But as with Kick’s career, we find the essential origins of the series in the breakthroughs of the 1960s and 1970s, breakthroughs that left behind so many of the limitations long imposed upon comic art.

The comics-reading public, mostly readers under the age of 30, know little of this history today. Superheroes of every kind; quirky and sexy personal stories of mostly inward or troubled youngsters; the occasional historical saga (March, eulogizing John Lewis within his lifetime) — these comprise nearly all of today’s menu of comics, to judge from sales and advertising on the web. Hardly remembered now, except as an influence on today’s graphic memoirs, the distinct comics of the Vietnam Era and a decade after profited from artists’ ownership of their uncensored comic art, delivering up marijuana use, feminism, denunciation of corporations and the government, and flagrant sex of every variety, often flavored with humor. (The Southern California feminist series Tits & Clits Comix comes to mind.) Contemporary readers, excepting academic or those with a taste for the “old stuff,” tend to be familiar with only a fraction of this body of work — perhaps R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman, along with slightly younger figures like Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry, and the Hernandez Brothers.

Stop for a moment and contemplate what that origin of a new comics, a new comic art, meant. It was a ragged community (just ask the feminists), but it was a real one. It recalled, in American life and art, nothing so much as the Works Progress Administration artists of the 1930s or the group gathered around The Masses magazine in the 1910s. These had rebellion of form and content, narrative and style, written all over them, but also a vision of a different relation between art and popular life in a better future. In the comics world, this is what slipped away by 1980 or so.

The elevation of comic art followed, although its arrival at true respectability arguably awaited Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize in 1992 — and arguably, dolefully, also awaited the return of the cutting-edge comics publishing locus from California back to New York, its historic location. Today, with the advance of college teaching into visual culture, the comics canon is taught very much as the canon of literature has been taught forever. In part, this is the nature of canonization: the few remembered, the mass of artists forgotten.

But this is also the case because the comic art anthology, pretty much the foundation stone of underground commix, has practically ceased to exist. Post-1970s efforts, like Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s Raw magazine, could not be sustained financially. My own series of topical anthologies ended with the volume Bohemians (2014), because these efforts no longer seemed worth publishers’ attention. The annual Best of Comics anthologies and the more or less annual World War 3 Illustrated appear too infrequently, and have too few pages, not to mention idiosyncratic editorial tastes. Rumors of a revival of Arcade, the Spiegelman and Bill Griffith–edited anthology from the late 1970s, appear to be unfounded, for various reasons.

Altogether, we see too little work side by side — and more than that, we get far too little sense that comic art has a purpose comparable to the socialist modernism of a century ago or the counterculture of the late 1960s. Perhaps the website The Nib is the exception, because its social criticism comes fast and furious, day by day, topic by topic. But we need more, much more, with a dialogue among artists and their admirers, editors, and others. At least, this is my conclusion after 50 years as an editor.

Russ Kick’s Canon thus does something that too few venues for comic art do nowadays. It is, for now, the most sustained anthology of comic art in the English language — the best showplace of what comic art is today and what it can do. That’s quite an accomplishment.

¤

Paul Buhle was publisher of Radical America Komiks (1969) and has edited a dozen comics since 2005. His latest is Johnny Appleseed, drawn by Noah van Sciver.

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