I picked up Super Spy at the Decatur Book Festival last month. I was talking with the guys at the Top Shelf Comics booth, asking them to steer me away from ennui and towards something a bit more exciting. This was their pick of the pile, on the genre fiction side of the spectrum. Matt Kindt‘s book is a spy novel.

It story starts off really well, and then settled down to a comfortable “good.” The different chapters jump around in time, changing focus among a cast of characters whose stories intertwine. The pace of the storytelling is very quick. People you get to know in 4 or 5 panels are dispatched a page or two later. I don’t think I spoil much by saying it happens a lot. Lots of dispatching. Or that’s how it seemed when I was reading.

The art gave me pause for a second, but grew on me. It’s not super-realistic or refined, but more slashy and dramatic, lots of contrast and rough edges and changes in perspective. It’s a muted palette throughout. The design of the book is pretty cool. Each chapter is a dossier and the space behind the panels is colored to look like a worn folder. In one scene, a death in the panels is underscored with blood spatter in the gutters:

Nice detail there. The whole thing is worth a look. Here are some sample pages from Super Spy.

I wanted this to be better. It starts off well, introduced by Nick Hornby. With a few exceptions, most of the other 40-something essays in the book didn’t do much for me.

Rodney Rothman‘s piece—”I Still Like Jessica”—is probably my favorite. It’s a transcript of an interview with an old sweetheart (hear the interview and see an animated version of “I Still Like Jessica”!). Perhaps I liked it because it’s the most real and clumsy, and makes the fewest overt, Sedarian attempts at being funny, and is therefore actually funny. (Disclaimer: my struggles with humorous writing are well-documented.)

I really liked one of David Rees’ lessons about life and love in “Get Dumped Before It Matters”:

1. The fact that you mope around your “home office,” sighing and scratching the five o’clock shadow spilling down your neck, while you “work on your screenplay in your mind,” wearing sweatpants on a Wednesday afternoon, does not mean you are a tortured creative genius. It means you are a LOSER. If you’re old enough to drive, you may no longer wear pants with drawstrings—even if they are your “dressy sweatpants.” Look respectable for your woman, even while she’s at work. It will comfort her to know you are wearing a belt.

Dan Vebber‘s “Sex Is the Most Stressful Thing in the History of the Universe” is good, as is Andy Richter’s “Girls Don’t Make Passes at Boys with Fat Asses.” The context isn’t that relevant, but I can relate to Richter here:

There were moments in my childhood where a preternatural maturity rose up in me, where the Future Me would seem to pop through to the surface and say, “Hold on, wait a minute, what’s going on here is fucked up.”

Tom Shillue ponders the benefits of the ambiguous relationship in “Eggs Must Be Broken…”

Happy Fake Marriage -> Callous Behavior -> Half Apology -> D?©tente

And Paul Simms‘ “I’m Easy” is a funny and all-too-familiar look at crushing at first sight. And how it elevates and and destroys your hopes and dreams over and over again.

Marcellus Hall‘s “The Sorrows of Young Walter, or The Lessons of a Cyclical Heart” is also good:

I’ve picked the best parts of the book for you. Skip the rest.

Dan Roam does a pretty good job with this one: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. One of Roam’s main arguments (sometimes belabored) is that we were all comfortable drawing when we were in kindergarten. Somehow we got frigid. We play visually dumb. We don’t need to.

Visual thinking is neglected, but luckily we’re hard-wired for it. When we see things, we instinctively begin to sort out the essentials and answer a few questions. We can’t help it:

• who/what?
• how much/many?
• when?
• where?
• how?
• why?

Visual thinking borrows from that natural process a bit more intentionally. It starts with looking (collecting & screening data), seeing (selecting & grouping), then imagining (reconfiguring, manipulating, analogizing), and finally showing (cleaning up, putting it all together). And, hey, what do you know… according to Roam’s <6><6> model, the ways we see things and the questions we need to answer match up directly with the tools we have to show things:

• who/what? = portraits
• how much/many? = charts
• when? = timelines
• where? = maps
• how? = flowcharts
• why? = multi-variable plots

That’s one of the basic insights that’s really nice to be reminded of. We have specific tools to answer specific questions. Roam also has the SQVID, a framework that helps you figure out how to present the information in the most appropriate way for the intended audience, tracing your way through 5 choices:

Simple vs. elaborate
Quality vs. quantity
Vision vs. execution
Individual attributes vs. comparison
Delta (change) vs. status quo

And when you cross-reference the SQVID with the <6><6> model, you get a codex that guides you to whatever pictures you need to make for the problems you need to solve. The acronyms and frameworks sound a bit confusing outside of the book, but Roam ties it together pretty nicely with lots of visuals throughout. And it’s actually kind of… practical. That doesn’t mean that the products of visual thinking are guaranteed to be easy or simple, no more than writing or talking about the ideas would be:

One of the most important virtues of visual thinking is its ability to clarify things so that the complex can be better understood, but that does not mean that all good visual thinking is about simplification. The real goal of visual thinking is to make the complex understandable by making it visible—not by making it simple.

An obvious weakness for the book: it’s really hard to learn something like this from a book. You can learn about it. But it’s one of those things that you have to DO, and more examples are always helpful. The long case study that takes up the last 40% of the book lets you see the different frameworks in action, but it’s also kind of boring to read about the same fictional software company and its fictional competitors and fictional customers for 100 pages. I imagine this was a tough part of the book to write as well.

I’d still recommend it. Heaven knows it’s refreshingly different from most of the other books in the business section, and there’s some real meat in there.

Otto Neurath had developed a method to communicate complex information on society, economy and politics in simple images. For his ‘Vienna method of visual statistics’, he needed a designer who could make elementary signs, pictograms that could summarize a subject at a glance.

Arntz’s clear-cut style suited Neurath’s goals perfectly, and so he invited the young artist to come to Vienna in 1928, and work on further developing his method, later known as ISOTYPE, International System Of TYpographic Picture Education. During his career, Arntz designed around 4000 different pictograms and abstracted illustrations for this system.

“Holy crap!” indeed.

The narrator is a baker living in Normandy, who becomes obsessed with Gemma’s adultery as it happens and as it’s later revealed in her diaries. The story pokes a lot of fun at the stereotypes of the English and the French, and the absurdities of middle-class escapism. It’s dark, but not cynical. A lot of fun even though the impending doom is spelled out in the first page (and in its inspiration, Madame Bovary). There are some more samples on the publisher’s website.

Here’s a funny bit from an interview with Simmonds in the Comics Journal:

I would ask lots of French people, “Tell me the eight or 10 best things about France and then the things you like best about England.” They’d enthuse about le vin [wine], le fromage [cheese], le paysage [landscape], the fashion, the food, the roads, the culture, etc. in France… and when they got to England they would go, “Err, whiskey,” and they’d think very hard and go, “Harrods,” or they’d go, “London taxis,” and someone said, “Scaffolding, your scaffolding’s very good.”

The style is much more loose and slashing, not quite as tidy as the earlier works. Taking on a larger, broader story, the panels also become more thematic. There’s a lot more abstract icons embedded in the pictures. Panels are less explicitly connected to the ones on the previous pages. Characters don’t really carry over from scene to scene, but the ideas accrete and overlap over a series of page turns.

[update: images removed for copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. so it goes.]

Here’s the opening, with its huddled masses:
Later we get to the expressionist bits.
Sturm und drang. I love this one.
Masereel’s omnipresent, beckoning sun.
A rare pastoral scene.
The space age.

I’m out of Masereel books now, so this is the end of the Masereel Appreciation Festival. Previous installments included a tidbit from L’Idee, Masereel in Film, and selections from Die Stadt and Die Sonne.

[update: photo of a really awesome woodcut removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst]

From L’Idee by Frans Masereel.

A couple other bonus points: the movie was scored by Arthur Honegger (who’s best known for Pacific 231), and the soundtrack features an ondes martenot—possibly the first-ever use of an electronic instrument in film.

According to that first link, Bright Lights After Dark, Masereel’s work in Die Stadt (my brief review of Die Stadt) was also a big influence on Walter Ruttmann‘s hour-long silent film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Gro?üstadt. More about Die Sinfonie at Wikipedia and shorter clips available on YouTube.

[update: images removed due to copyright complaint from from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity---good luck finding it]

If you look at this image in the original size, you can see the faces of the men walking about. With just a few cuts here and there, he managed to make them unique with mustaches, beards, long noses, weak chins. Most of them are in profile, which probably helps.

I like the perspective in this one, monstrous city receding but growing taller.

Different architecture for each walk-up. Sunlight filtering through the trees.

This one is probably my favorite overall. A slight curve in the edges gives this incredible softness to her skin and clothing. Really amazing.

[update: images removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity---you'll have to trust me that it's worth your time]

Take a look at some other woodcuts from Die Sonne. This is the first of four Masereel books that I recently picked up at the Emory library. I’m sure I’ll enjoy the others over the next week or two.

In the first section, set in 1997, we see the older Abraham walks from room to room in the old Clyde Fans storefront. Abraham keeps a constant monologue. As the only speaker in the first section, and perhaps the only family member remaining, he’s both narrator and the only repository of family history. Abraham reminisces as he wanders throughout the old building telling old jokes or digging up old stories—as you might daydream through your own past, stopping every now and then to pick up a memory and turn it in the light before you move on to another. Although he controls the story, he leaves the building only briefly.

Like Abraham’s nostalgia, Simon’s memory has him trapped, too. The second section rolls back 40 years to follow an anxious Simon, finally given a chance as a company salesman. His narrative, following him as he hoofs it from place to place with display sample in tow, always circles back to his memories: the high expectations of his brother, brush-offs from failed sales calls. The combination of his recurring flashbacks, his obsessive recall of failure, and his own expectations cripple him.

Beyond Seth’s good writing is the attention to detail that helps you trust his writing in the first place. It’s the subtle attention that wins you over. Take a look at this image from the first page. You can see the stars high up in the sky, and as in real life, the lights from the street make it hard to see stars closer to the horizon. There’s that band of darkness that shifts into a field of stars:

And further into the first part of the book, there’s a stream of water from a faucet. Seth illustrates that sweet spot of water flow. At a certain water pressure, the flow is slow enough to not be forceful and straight, but fast enough that it escapes from the thin trickle. Seth draws that exact moment that makes the cool spiraling, helical column:

And the faucet handles even have shadows playing on the tub. Seth drafts some great architecture throughout the book. There are the cityscapes and building snapshots to make the setting, of course. But like the faucet shadows, in the interior scenes you can find all sorts of little details that make the time and place come alive, like molding at the joins of floor and ceiling, or wainscoting, or the floor tiles that aren’t standard squares, but octagons with little diamonds between them. And shadows, always wonderful soft shadows falling and bending together.

The worthy detail makes it happen. When you can trust the writer as an observer, you can trust them as a storyteller that much more. You don’t have to draw or write every detail—Seth leaves out a lot—but a few well-chosen particulars make the rest of the story that much more compelling.

Fiction:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
Burning Chrome by William Gibson

Non-Fiction:
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean by Douglas Wolk
He’s Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis
Interaction of Color by Josef Albers
Theory and History by Ludwig von Mises
Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams

Comics:
Curses by Kevin Huizenga
Tales of Woodsman Pete by Lilli Carr?©
Plastic Man: Rubber Bandits by Kyle Baker
The Surrogates by Robert Venditti

Too bad I don’t have a better remembrance of what I read but didn’t review. Need to keep better track of that.

I don’t know where the nonist found this image. I love it. Maybe he will tell if you ask nicely.

By the by, the publishers of The Surrogates, Top Shelf Productions, is having a nice little seasonal sale until the end of this month.

It was really good. Some of his criticism was lost on me simply because I didn’t know the comics he was writing about, but it was worth reading anyway. I don’t remember the book well enough to write a lot. Nevertheless, I wanted to make sure I shared some quotes I enjoyed:

• “Anytime a French word comes into play in an English-language discussion, you can be sure there are some class dynamics going on.”
• “The meta-pleasure of enjoying experiences that would repel most people is, effectively, the experience of being a bohemian or counterculturalist.”
• “There’s a certain kind of rain that falls only in comics, a thick, persistent drizzle, much heavier than normal water, that bounces off whatever it hits, dripping from fedoras, running slowly down windowpanes and reflecting the doom in bad men’s hearts.” (aka eisenshpritz)
• Following The Dark Knight Returns, “a sense of eschatology crept into superhero stories, as their battles became battles for the soul of modernity.”
• “There are two kinds of horrors stories. One is matin?©e horror, in which some kind of monster or grotesquerie rages across a landscape of innocence until it’s finally destroyed and the natural order of things is restored. Its threat is neatly defined—it’s Frankenstein, a vampire, a werewolf, a plague of zombies, a serial killer in a mask; there are always specific rules for how it can be beaten. The pleasure of reading the story is the pleasure of seeing justice done and the formula cleanly executed.”

And that last one is broadly applicable to any genre. That’s why action movies and romantic comedies work. I like that idea of the pleasure of seeing it executed. Aside from any literary merits of the work, that is the reader’s experience. They generally know the expectations of the genre, the wonder comes from seeing how the author meets or betrays them.

Joel Priddy, “The Amazing Life of Onion Jack”: a short bio of an aging superhero who really wanted to be a chef. I liked the clean stick figure styling in this one. Charming humor and great timing.

Lilli Carr?©, “Adventures of Paul Bunyan & His Ox, Babe”: the classic folk hero, re-imagined. Paul is a sensitive, Proust-reading guy with real-world difficulties. His well-paced dialogue with Babe is reinforced by this really clear, powerful sense of setting.

Ben Katchor, “Goner Pillow Company”: about pillows designed for sitting at windows. I like the basic concept here, briefly fantasizing about a world where people look out of windows instead of into our electronic boxes.

Jonathan Bennett, “Dance with the Ventures”: early morning, a guy goes scavenging for old records in the trash. I love the dramatic inner dialogue. You can instantly relate to it.

John Porcellino, “Chemical Plant/ Another World”: driving through a factory at night. I don’t know how, but he captures a spooky night-time scene in panels that are really white-heavy.

David Heatley, “Portrait of My Dad”: short vignettes about his father. I love the color and density of the pages. Here’s the first page. Just an all-around beautiful chronicle of the relationship.

Jessica Abel, “Missing”: an argument with a mirror, and an argument with a friend. The body language is wonderful in this excerpt from La Perdida.

Kurt Wolfgang, “Passing Before Life’s Very Eyes”: an old man dies, floats around, learns the truth. The dialogue borders on the preachy-casual, but the final panels are really satisfying.

Jesse Reklaw, “Thirteen Cats of My Childhood”: a memoir of family and feline relationships. I had expected to hate this one, but I loved it. It was more text-heavy than many of the others, so you can really dig in to the story.

I went out to dinner with my wife at a sushi place in Brooklyn. Right as we were seated at our table, the couple at the adjacent table begins the following exchange:

WOMAN: So, did you read that book I gave you?

MAN: Which one?

WOMAN: The comic. Summer Blonde.

MAN: Oh, yeah. I hated it.