Colour, tone, getting naked, the usual.
I’ve been going through the ‘Best Short Story’ nominees for the 2019 Eisner Awards. This time around I’ve been reading Get Naked in Barcelona by Steven T. Seagle and Emei Olivia Burell from Get Naked from Image Comics.
The basic gist of the collection of shorts/essays, if you hadn’t already guessed, are auto-biographical stories related to nakedness, being in a state of undress, etc.
Each story gets a different artist and they vary in look and tone as a result.
Get Naked in Barcelona, is the first of the tales in the ‘Short Story’ category that I’ve looked at that doesn’t deal with some of the meatier themes of the here and now. Ghastlygun centered on the gun debate, Swamp Thing’s narrative, to me, spoke to man vs nature, and Life During Interesting Times was chock full of feelings and thoughts about the way we live now and how it will affect our future.
Barca launches into its narrative with a light, airy pastel-like tone. Burell imbues each scene and location with a colour, filling each panel chock full of it. The opening scene for instance, set in a hotel’s communal shower has a kind of turquoise sheen to it, perfectly capturing that idea of water/relaxation, etc.
The next scene, set outside a Spanish airport is rich with a warm orange tone, (you can see the start of this in the page above) capturing the humidity, but also some of the pressure and stress Seagle is under to catch his flight in time.
The colouring is obviously not as nuanced as the traditional method, but it conjures up thoughts, sense memories and the like just as effectively. Burell’s line and figure work here also fits the material perfectly, giving us the eccentricities and differences of the human form.
Her work with expressions is equally as important.
The story itself is a kind of classic ‘comedy of errors’ with an auto-biographical slant as Seagle tries to catch a flight on time, then takes a shortcut to skip the lines before embarrassment and social awkwardness ensues.
One aspect that Seagle nails is the notion of being a stranger in a foreign land, separated from the rest of the population through language. There’s a sense of being ‘the other’ that the story captures that is absolutely integral to the strip’s ‘punchline’.
Based on this strip, and the ones that precede it, I’m looking forward to digging into the rest of the collection. It’s a welcome change of pace from some of the ‘heavier’ stories in the category.
As a bonus, the chapter heading title pages in the book are in a mock ‘travel poster’ style and look beautiful.
Links
Maciej Ceglowski dropped ‘The New Wilderness’, a piece on privacy, surveillance and the state of the internet.
“Our discourse around privacy needs to expand to address foundational questions about the role of automation: To what extent is living in a surveillance-saturated world compatible with pluralism and democracy? What are the consequences of raising a generation of children whose every action feeds into a corporate database? What does it mean to be manipulated from an early age by machine learning algorithms that adaptively learn to shape our behavior? “
= = =
The always excellent William Langewiesche has a fascinating (and horrifying) long read at The Atlantic on the ultimate fate of Malaysia Airline Flight MH370.
After that, if you’re in the mood for some excellent journalism and reporting, I highly recommend his 2002 book American Ground about the 9/11 cleanup efforts. His presentation of the rubble strewn landscape and the tireless efforts of the rescue workers is one that sticks with you long after reading.
His piece on oceanic salvage crews for Vanity Fair is also a doozy.
= = =
Neon Genesis Evangelion released on Netflix recently. I’ve never seen it but heard good things. I’m about three episodes in so far. But Polygon recently ran an excellent piece by Mandy writer Aaron Stewart-Ahn about the show’s legacy, origin and the trials and tribulations of its central creative force, Hideaki Anno.
“Anno later declared in the Japanese magazine NewType that “Evangelion is like a puzzle, you know. Any person can see it and give his/her own answer. In other words, we’re offering viewers to think by themselves, so that each person can imagine his/her own world. We will never offer the answers, even in the theatrical version. As for many Evangelion viewers, they may expect us to provide the ‘all-about Eva’ manuals, but there is no such thing. Don’t expect to get answers by someone. Don’t expect to be catered to all the time. We all have to find our own answers.”
Preach.
= = =
The Baffler on the book Red Meat Republic and the centuries of exploitation built into the American beef industry.
“Nineteenth-century government policy saw the Great Plains ecosystem turned from a grass-bison-nomad system to a grass-cattle-rancher one, with the Indian Wars a necessary step in the establishment of the rancher mythos. Bison herds were decimated as a practice by settlers who saw them as “monstrous,” with cattle representing civilization. Along with those herds also went the communities that depended on hunting them for survival.”
= = =
Always here for anyone dunking on Jordan Peterson. Here’s Omer Aziz’s essay on ‘the professor’ at Harpers.
“How a reader of Solzhenitsyn and a critic of authoritarianism like Peterson could look at the history of gender relations and minimize the state-sanctioned subjugation of women suggests to me that he abandoned his intellectual calling at least a year ago. While valorizing traditional masculinity, Peterson doesn’t see—or doesn’t wish to see—how, for many men, power over a woman is the defining quality of manhood. “
= = =
The Baffler on the horrid legacy of Henry Kissinger.
“Every day of the Trump era brings evidence of a new break with American traditions and norms. There’s no point in denying that—this president is more brazen than any other in our lifetimes about saying publicly whatever comes to his addled mind. “This is not normal,” has become the plaint of these times. Yet the more you think about Nixon and Kissinger, the more you have to face the fact that a certain kind of corruption and dishonesty and brutality have been, well, the norm in American politics and especially in foreign policy.”
= = =
The New Yorker has a lengthy and excllent profile on Chinese SF author Liu Cixin, including this horrifying anecdote about his family history:
“When the civil war resumed, after the Second World War, both sides conscripted men. Liu’s paternal grandparents had two sons and no ideological allegiance to either side, and, in the hope of preserving the family line, they took a chilling but pragmatic gamble. One son joined the Nationalists and the other, Liu’s father, joined the Communists. He rose to the rank of company commander in the Eighth Route Army, and, after the Communist victory, he began his career in Beijing. To this day, Liu doesn’t know what became of his uncle.”
= = =
Teen Vogue slaying it again with a piece on Emma Goldman on her 150th birthday.
= = =
I’m off to try and exercise in this ridiculous heat that decades of industrialisation has wrought. See you in two!