Colin Marshall

The edge of insanity

My favorite xkcd strips, a set which includes the one seen above and the much-quoted "Dreams", also known as the "FUCK. THAT. SHIT." one, deal with the theme of the harm routine and expectation do to the perception and experience of interestingness. Why, I wonder, do so few comics — hell, so few works — openly recognize humanity's ongoing ignorance, and hence waste, of its absolute freedom? For Randall Munroe, it increasingly seems to be a founding plank of his creation.

For completeness' sake, here's what xkcd sucks had to say:

[ ... ] the other thing that annoyed me about the comment was how clever the first character things he's being, woo, no one has ever thought of that stuff before. "It's only my mental rules that stop me from punching you" is so stupid too, there's plenty of good other reasons not to punch someone - they may be stronger, they may have a more powerful weapon on them with which to get their terrible revenge, also you might get arrested. Or the word may go out that you are a douche. That's a lousy result too. Basically what the character wants to say is "people take long term consequences into account because they aren't idiots. But they could ignore them if they wanted!" GENIUS!

(God, if only someone felt the need to start a popular blog called "Colin Marshall Sucks". Or at least a Twitter feed. Maybe I should make one myself.)

If you'll permit me to condense and rephrase this objection, I think it comes to this: people don't stray too far from behavioral norms because they aren't insane. (I'll leave aside the whole other discussion about the suckiness of human ability to "take long-term consequences into account" with any accuracy.) But I've come to believe that insanity in the pursuit of interestingness is no vice, at least in moderate doses. I stand by my tweet of February the 23rd:

To reliably cut through creative blocks, your mind's blade must bear a micron-thin edge of audacity — if not insanity.

I base this on something of a meta-Oblique Strategy I've been roadtesting: when in doubt, or in confusion, or in a muddle, jack up the boldness. Do whatever's less expected, whatever's crazier. Ask a question that comes seemingly out of nowhere. Post something nutty to the net. Punch a guy. (Or commit the equivalents thereof in your own medium.)

Reading the collected work of Seth Godin, I've become mildly obsessed with the concept of "remarkability." In Purple Cow and elsewhere, Godin writes that it's all well and good to be excellent, but without being remarkable — like a purple cow is remarkable! — all the excellence you can summon won't make a difference. How different, then, are the ingredients of remarkability from a slight touch of the old insanity?

The huddled masses of Brooklyn-based novelists and poets in their mid-twenties? Not remarked upon. Tao Lin, who's often called at least weird and at worst some sort of sociopath? Remarked upon. Danish film directors? Not usually remarked upon, outside circles of northern-Europe cinephilies. Lars von Trier, thought of as so insane that his insanity as been paid tribute by the best Onion News Network video. 20th century composers? Not much remarked upon unless you're hanging in the music department grad lounge. John Cage, who doesn't give a FUCK? Remarked upon and then some.

We tend to tell ourselves that ideas are ever so valuable, each one we dream up a potential ticket to lifelong glory and satisfaction. But — and I realize I circle back into my own well-trod territory here — how much are they worth? Compared to, like execution? Allow me to defer to Merlin Mann, perhaps the wisest public intellectual currently speaking — or tweeting — on this subject:

The guy who worries people will "steal" his idea might better ponder why nobody "steals" his implementation.

You could say that idea multiplied by execution equals goodness. I wouldn't call that a misrepresentation, but I find this conception even more useful: ideas are effective only in their capacity to motivate me to seen the execution through. Again: ideas are effective only in their capacity to motivate me to see the execution through. The easiest way I've found to make an idea sufficiently interesting to accomplish that is to allow it an edge of insanity. Normality, which always and everywhere exerts its insidious gravitational pull, is no motivator; best to get abnormal as soon as possible, if only for your own excitement.

Unsexy technocrats

My unimpressedness with Idiocracy is well-documented, but I like xkcd's take:

I don't know whether or not the rightmost stick figure is correct about all that being absolutely false — I've found the data on this sort of thing to be really screwy — but the line about more harm done by panic over decline than decline itself rings true. (That, and the unsexiness of technocrats.)

Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, 1986)

When I finally picked Watchmen off my girlfriend's bookshelf, I took care not to read it in public. It isn't that I'm one of those guys who can't be seen reading a comic book, but the big-deal IMAX adaptation is playing in theaters as we speak, and I didn't want to come off like I was half-assedly reading the book just because the movie came out. Problem is, I actually was reading the book — albeit, I would argue, full-assedly — because the movie came out; despite having for years harbored a vague intention to open the thing already, I wasn't moved to crack it until I just couldn't take hearing and reading any more discussion about subject matter which which I had no familiarity. Faced repeatedly with talk of mysterious entities like "Rorschach", "Doctor Manhattan" and "giant space squid", and, inevitably, felt a burning urge to find out more. In the name of curiosity, I got over myself and read the book, exposed to all the world, at Coffee Cat. Part of my hesitancy to get on with it must have sprung from the sheer amount of baggage Watchmen carries, or at least the sheer amount of baggage that all I'd heard about Watchmen made me bring to it. According to friends, acquaintances, commentators, bloggers and wags, the book is pretty much the Best Thing Ever, or at least a Great Thing Indeed. The voluminous, subtle detail! The groundbreaking comic storytelling techniques! The resonances internal and external! The capturing of the zeitgeist! The "total, devastating deconstruction of virtually every archetype in the genre's history!" (Thus spake Mark Tillich.) If nothing else, I take from Watchmen that it is difficult indeed to experience any work with such vertiginously built-up expectations, especially given that my experience with superhero comics is limited to a handful of Spider-Man annuals and the premiere issue of Force Works, which I never removed from its bag for fear of damage. (This was back when comic books were briefly considered a viable investment vehicle.) My journey from panel to panel was significantly slowed by my constant asking of myself, "Did you catch all the greatnesses in that text bubble? What about in that image? Is there some greatness in the background that you're missing?" The unceasing Easter-egg hunt for awesomeness exerted a strong drag. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed the book. Hell, it probably merits "very enjoyed", but I know full well that I don't — perhaps can't — have an uncorrupted perspective on such an oft-quoted, oft-imitated, turgid-academic-paper-inspiring work. As with other pieces of art whose fans grow devoted, though, I can relate the experience that they often wish aloud they could have again: that of taking it in for the very first time. (I take my duties as a Watchmen virgin seriously.) Going in, I only knew two facts about Watchmen, besides that of its belovedness. The first was that it's written my Alan Moore, the eccentric, heavily-bearded fellow behind such critically-acclaimed comic books as The Killing Joke (own it, read it, can't fully appreciate it due to lack of Batman background), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (liked the concept and saw the film, which is... just as good as you've heard), From Hell (saw the film, which surprisingly dim memories indicate I enjoyed) and Lost Girls (which I got Madelaine for her birthday and may read myself Real Soon Now). Moore's name doesn't draw me to nor repel me from a work. The second was that it's known for — here comes that word again — its "deconstruction" of superhero comic conventions. In this case, it seems that by "deconstruction" people mean "treatment as real". For years, I heard Watchmen pitched to me as the tale that dares to ask what superheroes would be like if they existed in the real world. The concept struck me as cool until Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins revealed that even the best, most detailed rooting of Batman in the real world results not in a Batman story, but the story of a Batman impersonator. And given his famous lack of superpowers, Batman should be the easy one to make realistic! The good news is that Moore and artist Dave Gibbons seem to execute the real-life-superheroes idea just about as well as it can be executed. Watchmen's main "costumed vigilantes", a slouchy amateur ornithologist, the bitter daughter of the previous generation's star heroine and a socially maladroit grown orphan with a rigidly Manichean worldview, are drawn from messy, imperfect life indeed. They're filled, in varying measure, fear, anger, doubt, disappointment and resentment. (I seem to recall "actual" superheroes being broody too, though in a less realistic fashion.) They labor under normal troubles like loneliness, awkwardness and piles of messy dishes. What pleasantly surprised me was that the characters not only exist in a real place, they exist in a real time; the story actually takes place in October 1985, though the October 1985 of a tweaked alternate America. (Richard Nixon, to take one of the most visible departures, is still president.) Watchmen's (relatively) young generation of heroes are given birthdates in the 1930s and 40s; their predecessors in the 1910s and 20s. Their lives are tied to the eras in which they've played out. The characters are, in short, made to exist. Which is why it seems like heresy, not to say a grand mal missing of the point, to claim that the superhero angle actually feels like a bit of wrench thrown into the works. I'm with the characters until they assume the thousand-yard stare and reminisce about the days when they used to run around in costume chasing down thugs. The idea, see, is that in this alternate America, the superhero thing actually bled from early Superman comics to real life; ordinary people, fed up with the failings of the justice system or whatever, chose to lead lives imitating paneled art. Despite early complications — a cape fatally caught in a revolving door being a memorable mishap — several such costumed crusaders join forces to form the "Minutemen", a league that tensions external and internal ultimately dissolve. It's the heirs of the Minutemen that Watchmen is concerned with, the straggly remnants of superherokind left after the 1977 outlawing of flamboyant vigilantism. And make no mistake, it is pretty cool to see some of the possible ramifications of the superhero lifestyle played out in a setting more closely resembling reality. The aforementioned ornithologist, who fights crime under the name of the Nite Owl, endures more than most, once losing a criminal's tail thanks to time wasted while strugging with his suit during a bathroom break and another time getting his arm broken by a malfunctioning powered exoskeleton. (He's the Batman analog, though his gear isn't quite as reliable.) There's also a familiar theme from The Killing Joke, that of the codependency of superheroes and supervillians. Watchmen's world appears to have always suffered from a paucity of supervillains, or at least of competent ones, leaving the heroes to beat up on petty miscreants when they're not feeling enervated by this new "white-collar" crime. But here's the problem I couldn't shake: there aren't superheroes in real life. There never were. There wasn't, to the best of my knowledge, even an aborted dress-up-and-fight-crime craze, much less one spanning two generations. And yeah, duh, positing a scenario where there are superheroes in real life is the whole raison d'etre of a speculative work like this, but the mental itch insisting that things didn't add up never went away. I ended up having to switch perceptive gears every time the characters talked about or did superhero stuff, requiring a more favorable mechanical ratio to suspend the vastly increased weight of my disbelief. This, on top of the self-conscious greatness-spotting, put me on a rocky reading road indeed. The plot is essentially this: when someone defenestrates the Comedian, the youngest of the former Minutemen who became a sort of nihilistic patriot in middle age, Rorschach wants to know who and why. Several deaths later, he comes to suspect a conspiracy intent on specifically killing costumed vigilantes or, as he calls them, "masks". The trouble Rorschach proceeds to both make and get into jostles the Nite Owl and the second Silk Spectre, ever-reluctant heroine and daughter of the first one, out of retirement. Amid NYC's mounting chaos, Rorschach and the Nite Owl discover an elaborate, wide-reaching scheme on the part of Adrian Veidt, formerly the superhero Ozymandias and currently a simple millionaire captain-of-industry genius. He plans, from his high-tech Antarctic hideout, to simulate a giant space squid invasion in order to end intra-humanity hostility by directing it toward a perceived non-human enemy. (It speaks volumes about the common perception of comic books that it comes as a pleasant surprise to find that Veidt, the closest thing Watchmen has to a villain, does not openly regard himself a villain.) Above all the proceedings, sometimes in more ways than one, stands Dr. Manhattan, a "big blue space guy". (Thus spake Brandi Jensen.) For all those concerned about how a formerly mild-mannered physicist could possibly turn into a bald, naked, blue giant (when he decides to be giant) who never ages, who may be made of pure energy, who can synthesize any element, who possesses full knowledge of the past and future, who can split into two or teleport himself wherever he wants, rest assured: it was an experiment gone wrong. Naturally, the U.S. military takes the poor alienated guy on a superweapon, using him to win Vietnam and hold the threat of even more mutually assured destruction over the Soviets. More to the point, he acts as a genuine, superpower-possessing — maybe all-superpower-possessing — superhero in a setting where the other main characters are just regular schlubs, albeit schlubs in better-than-average shape and goofy suits. I'm still wrestling with whether Dr. Manhattan's presence wrecks the superheroes-in-reality device by making reality too unreal, or whether it enriches it by forcing the workaday "superheroes" to reconsder their roles in a world containing an invincible dude who goes around raising floating castles on Mars with his mind. But even I, a Watchmen tyro, realize that to spend a lot of time on the plot is to ignore the book's greatest successes. Moore set out to create a comic book that takes full advantage its medium, and boy does it. Even in the sequential art renaissance that's supposedly going on as you read this, I haven't read anything that more actively exploits the strengths (and maybe even weaknesses) of its medium. The insertion of pages ostensibly from things that aren't comic books, for instance — a retired superhero's autobiography, another's paper in an ornithology journal, a back-page interview with another in one of those gotcha-question 70s magazines — or the threading through of an E.C. homage pirate story that parallels... well, it parallels a lot of things. (Watchmen is big on parallelism.) There are specific examples to cite of comic book techniques pulled off well, but it's more of a gestalt thing; the story unfolds in a way that only comics (and the fact that the comic reader can spend as much time as they want with a panel) allow. This clarifies Terry Gilliam's labeling of the material as "unfilmable", but clouds the modern decision by Zack Synder et al to film it anyway. So much would presumably get lost in translation that I'm not sure what the appeal is. And yes, Hollywood's all about the quick buck, but how bankable a property is a 22-year-old DC graphic novel like Watchmen, really? As I understand it, box office returns have thus far disappointed. Nor, as a Watchmen tyro, can I ignore the book's greatest excesses. From what I know of Alan Moore, he loses against the urge to politics-up his work as often as he wins, and he can't chalk up this occasion as a victory. I happen to listen to quite a lot of albums produced in England in the late 1970s and 1980s, and thus have grown accustomed to what I've come to call the "incoherent anti-Thatcher rant". In that era and country, you see, it was apparently in bigtime artists' fashion to hate on the prime minister, and to that end a number of musicians wound up including a track or five on their records of the period that, thinly veiled if veiled at all, attack her. While I'm generally on the side of criticizing those in power and while many of those numbers are musically quite enjoyable, the batting around of the same old icon of evil in these pop stars' internal cosmologies gets old quickly, especially since songs can't really deliver convincing arguments. Speaking in prose rather than verse, the singers did little better; evidently they thought maddeningly incomplete assertions like "Oi, Maggie Thatcher says there's no such thing as society, right!" would do the job. The most cosmopolitan of these pop politicos would also include Ronald Reagan on their roster of forces currently dismantling the world, sometimes paranoiacally lumping Thatcher and the Gipper into a their own sneering, mustache-twirling alliance of destruction. My problem isn't that they attack Reagan and Thatcher — I don't have any special attachment to those politicians — my problem is they don't seem to care enough to make their attacks hold water. If you argue that Reagan and Thatcher are so self-evidently bad that if I don't automatically agree with you I'm part of the problem, then sorry, I'll have to take Reagan and Thatcher. While the reasoning-free impressionism of those songs make Watchmen's own jabs at the leaders of the day look like an article from Nature, the politics with which Moore imbues the work aren't much more thoughtful. The narrative's being rooted with unusually dense detail in its era dates it in a good way; its treatment of matters political dates it in a bad way. I suspect that Moore — and especially the Moore of a, say, V for Vendetta — has a touch of the standard artist's process for assuming political stances: take positions based not on the ideas but on your like or dislike for the people who profess them, and make sure the like or dislike is as aesthetically-based as possible. (How else to explain the prevalence of Che shirts?) Anthony Lane's criticism of the Watchmen movie, I think, holds true for this aspect of the book: "it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear — deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation — is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along." It does nothing to change my provisional position that works of fiction shouldn't make political arguments — or arguments of any kind, really — since they're inevitably undercut, no matter how well-argued, by the unaccountability of their delivery system. But with maturity, I've learned to be bothered less by political puerility in art. If I let it get to me, after all, what art could I enjoy? Certainly vast tracts of comicdom would go right off the table. Neo-realist film wouldn't stand much of a chance, either. And what non-Stoppard playwright could I ever appreciate? (Not that I have much theater appreciation left over for the non-Stoppards.) Watchmen is, in practically all its other aspects, not a flimsy piece of art, and even that statement understates the case. The book may get clunky when it butts up against reality, but internally, there's a fine nuance and a damn fine structure. I'll soon read it again, I'm sure.

Ghost World (Daniel Clowes, 1997)

Enid and Rebecca, a pair of cynical late-teenage hipsters in the mid-1990s, go around peoplewatching, looking for ironically enjoyable diners, and snarking on everything they see. When Enid kind of sort of starts thinking about maybe going to college, a rift opens between the two friends.

* * *

 

Ghost World is recommendable for a whole bunch of mild reasons: it's a well-observed slice-of-life, it's well-paced, and the art (in black, white and some kind of light blue I can't describe very well) is neat. But perhaps Clowes' greatest achievement is the two main characters, who also happen to be the two of the most loathsome characters I've ever encountered, fictitious or otherwise.

Madelaine called Enid and Rebecca "modern monsters," a description accurate enough to warrant my appropriation. They're ironigirls, bundles of attitude all posed, horn-rimmed and faux-jaded with no place to go. What do they do with their time? Nothing so square as as school or work: they hang out in eateries, badmouth their mutual acquaintances and eyeball grotesques all day long. Enid is thrilled when they happen upon a dingy 1950s-themed restaurant ("This place is god") or when they see a hunched old man with wilted flowers ("It's so cute! I'm dying!"). After donning a leather jacket, spiking and dying her hair green, putting in a safety pin as an earring and cuffing her jeans above her Chuck Taylors, Enid gives the following monologue, revealing much about her worldview:

It's not like I was "going punk" or something... I'm not fucking thirteen... anybody with half a fucking brain could see that I wasn't dressed like some modern hardcore asshole... it was like an old 1977 punk look... [ ... ] I wish I could just come up with one perfect look and stick with it... like what if I bought some entire matching 1930s wardrobe and wore that every day... the trouble with that is you look really stupid and pretentious if you go to a mall or a Taco Bell or something... and you have to act a certain way and drive an old car and everything and it's a real pain in the ass!

(All the ellipses read better on the page, I swear.)

And no, I don't think Enid's fixation on the cultivation of a "look" is supposed to be sympathetic, but... yow. She reminds me of why, even though I wasn't drawn to the mainstream kids in high school, I also found the self-proclaimed outsiders repellent, focused as they were on outwardly defining themselves without a whole hell of a lot of inward self to define in the first place. The quest for a lost childhood record aside, there's not much in Ghost World about music, but I can totally picture Enid and/or Rebecca — Rebecca goes with the flow a bit more smoothly, except when she doesn't — being the type for whom it's critically important to demarcate precisely the dividing line between the music she does and does not listen to. I was very nearly the same way — though, I would submit, only at a fraction of the normal magnitude — at their age, but now I look back and laugh: could there ever have been a time when our lives were so small that we had to cling so desperately to the identity loaned us by the genre of organized sound we put in our backgrounds? (Or by the primary color of our hair? Or by the brand of safety pin in our ears?)

There is nothing in the world that could induce me to spend a day with real-life versions of these two, but when they're flat on the page I can get just enough breathing room. (And breathing room is precisely what I needed to read the book, looking up and away as I did every so often just to momentarily distract myself from these personalities with the world around me.) It's a testament to Clowes' skill as an artist and writer that, despite their awfulness, Enid and Rebecca don't come across as one-dimensional strident slackers; they're neither his piñatas nor his mouthpieces, though they may contain ingredients of both. Just as Enid and Rebecca are well-rendered and fascinating in a sort of unappealing way, so is Clowes' work as a whole: just excellently put together and highly compelling, but simultaneously repulsive on a deep, hard-to-articulate level. It comes through in a visceral way in the visuals: Clowes is one of the most skilled artists working in "alternative" comics and it shows, but he draws everything in this subtly ugly way that seems designed to seep into the reader's subconscious. Witness Enid's bulbous nose, jutting philtrum, slight overbite and the quease-inducing sneery edge to most of her facial expressions — and she's supposed to be one of the attractive characters.

I'm not going to be among the first thousand to make a Catcher in the Rye comparison, but here goes: these two kids are kinda like Holden Caulfield, huh? Am I right or am I right? The only problem is that, because Holden Caulfield is a guy, I could spend the entire length of Catcher in the Rye fantasizing about beating the living crap out of him, especially if he were to utter the word "phony" just one more time. (Friends ask, "But couldn't you identify with Holden's attitudes?" God, no.) Enid and Rebecca are girls, so as a nonalcoholic, I can't beat them up. And to Clowes' credit, he avoids creating protagonists that are just bundles of psychodramas. Holden Caulfield is really a concept, and hey, there's nothing at all the matter with beating up a concept. Enid and Rebecca, on the other hand, exist as reasonably nuanced, well-defined people in their own world — distasteful, inconsequential people, but people nonetheless. That's not something you can count on getting in any given narrative, let along those of the comic book variety.

(Also, I credit Ghost World with cluing me in to the term "homeless tan"; I'd been looking for a descriptor for the sort of tan you see on the homeless, and now I've got one.)

David Boring (Daniel Clowes, 2000)

Having spent a good deal of his mental bandwidth determining his ideal of feminine beauty — which just so happens to directly coincide with the appearance of a cousin he spent one summer kissin' — the titular nineteen-year-old security guard happens upon Wanda, a woman who fits the bill and then some. After she disappears without explanation and an unidentifiable assailant shoots David non-fatally, the Boring family — sans the long-absent father, who David never met and has only a single issue of a superhero comic the man drew in the 50s as proof of his existence — and David's lesbian roomate Dot take a trip to their island vacation home, where they find the mother's cousin's family staying. An old uncle later shows up claiming that nuclear war has commenced, causing things to get pretty Lord of the Flies on the island: one member of the group drowns, the food runs out, accusations are flung.

Eventually, David winds up back on the non-nuclearly-devastated mainland, dating a vegetarian who lacks the posterior of size that he so desires. He discovers that the guy who shot him is a professor who also fell for Wanda, and after meeting and commiserating it becomes clear to them that she's one of those girls who presents herself as the picture of purity — to each of the many dozens of guys she's run off with since, like, thirteen. Investigating Wanda's background, David then falls for her older sister Judy, who's essentially a less flaky version of her sibling. David and the professor tack Wanda down in a nearly-abandoned cult commune, some cops get on David's trail, and David ultimately finds himself back in the island house, kissin' his cousin.

* * *

Madelaine brought home a bunch of Daniel Clowes comics last week, and out of curiosity I read them all. I'd been aware of the guy's work for years, but for some reason always preferred that of his close artistic cousin (and Marketplace of Ideas guest) Peter Bagge. My judgment so far is that Clowes, like Bagge, has mastered the skill of portraying loners and losers in alternative comics, but he draws more realistically and writes less realistically. Bagge combines wildly cartoonish artwork with plots that could happen to your roommate; Clowes combines almost grotesquely real-looking artwork with plots that only kind of make sense.

Consider David Boring. Though in these writeups I prefer to provide the premise of the work in question rather than the complete story, that wasn't really possible here; I couldn't have just described the background of the book and let your imagination go to work, because you wouldn't have imagined anything remotely resembling the comic's actual narrative. I suppose I could have written "and then a bunch of weird stuff happens" after Wanda drops out of sight and David gets plugged, but that seems somehow... unsatisfying.

Not that the story really adds up, even in full. I can't help but read a lot of Clowes' work as autobiographical — the details feel a little too authentic, and they appear in the lives of characters with uncanny biographical similarity to the author — but the events of David Boring are too weird to have happened to anyone, except maybe in a dream. The trouble with stories like these is that they don't stick, at least to me; I had to consult Wikipedia to make sure I even had the plot right, which really doesn't bode well for my ability to pull themes out of the thing.

I don't know how much this says about me, but the most resonant one I could identify was the straight man's struggle against — or, as the case may be, capitulation to — his precisely dialed-in preferences in the female form. (Maybe women and gay men have equivalent problems, but I can't claim direct experience.) By this I don't mean male enslavement to the pursuit of female beauty in general; that's a way-overblown idea, and besides, it doesn't feel like enslavement from the inside. I mean the way that some guys can define to the smallest practical level of detail what they can't do without in a woman. (As opposed to the guys for whom anything biologically female with a body temperature of eighty degrees or more means game on — I don't understand those guys.) Such a practice brings the practitioner face to face with one big question: better to compromise the ideal in the name of expediency, or hang on through the long, hard slog in order to satisfy your every little requirement?

In most cases, I don't think the ideal these men hold is that of a centerfold: blonde, DD cup, turn-ons: sense of humor and long walks on the beach, turn-offs: war. In fact, the appeal of having specific preferences is in part that they are idiosyncratic. David Boring describes his ideal woman thusly:

I am cursed by two things: an unsympathetic eye for perfection and a blossoming knowledge of my own feminine ideal, specifically: the head (round eyes and mouth, a jaunty arc to the nose bridge), smallish and ovoid, leading with a particular tilt to an extended neck, swooping outward at the shoulders. A substantial carriage and arms; smallish round breasts; a convex stomach dividing powerful hips which, from side to back, describe a meaty semi-circle; proceeding downward to thick, girlish legs and insignificant feet.

This ideal conflicts with that held by his quick-to-die buddy Whitey: "gaunt, fashionable and dumb." Neither much coincide with my even-more-detailed vision of the Perfect Woman^TM, probably because I don't have one: I've got more like a thousand small preferences that don't add up to a coherent whole. (None conflict directly, though most don't correllate; it's like wanting a car with pop-up headlights, a t-top, an ultra-specialized sound system and an unturned odometer.) But I'm a pragmatic sort of dude, so this sort of thing doesn't bend my life out of shape as it does David's.

It's clear that his pursuit of the ideal is what gets David into this surrealistic mess. But it's less clear that he could do otherwise: I mean, it's his ideal. When you've got the ideal in the crosshairs, you don't care about the consequences of locking on. And after being knocked around emotionally, roughed up, shot twice, chased by the fuzz and knocked out with a baseball bat, he winds up with the woman who formed his ideal, the original, so the hassle was presumably well worth it. So listen well, kids: follow your dream, but know that the path may grow nightmarish and that you might be satisfied only in an indirect way. But don't worry; it'll be a big, indirect, marginally incestuous way.

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko (Dan Pink and Rob Ten Pas, 2008)

Despite having made the grades and followed the rules, young Johnny Bunko finds he's become just one more bored corporate drone. Only when he comes into possession of a set of disposable chopsticks that, when snapped apart, summon a fairy that gives him career advice does he begin to turn things around.

* * *

Anybody who can bring together seemingly disparate elements of their life and work together to create something new and bold impresses me, just as does a chef who can combine whatever ingredients happen to be around into a meal both unusual and unexpectedly delicious. That's just about what Daniel H. Pink has done here: having written two books about the changing demands of the modern economy and gone to Japan on a fellowship to study the country's comic books, he's put together a book that's essentially career advice manga.

The fairy Diana teaches the hapless Johnny Bunko these lessons:

1. There is no plan. Johnny majored in accounting because (a) his dad told him to major in accounting so he'd "always have a job" and (b) some guidance counselor said that he'd do well to grind his way to management at whatever firm would let him in, then transfer to "another company closer to [his] interests." Diana tells him he's living in a fool's paradise:

   You can do something for instrumental reasons — because you think it's going to lead to something else, regardless of whether you enjoy it or it's worthwhile... or you can do something for fundamental reasons — because you think it's inherently valuable, regardless of what it may or may not lead to. The dirty little secret is that instrumental reasons don't work. Things are too complicated, too unpredictable. You never know what's going to happen, so you end up stuck. The most successful people — not all of the time, but most of the time — make decisions for fundamental reasons.

2. Think strengths, not weaknesses. Johnny gets all fired up about repairing his weaknesses, but Diana shoots him down: "Successful people don't try too hard to improve what they're bad at. They capitalize on what they're good at."
3. It's not about you. Assigned to come up with marketing ideas for shoes, Johnny doodles some Naruto-lookin' characters. Diana gives him a basic lesson on how the market works: "The most successful people improve their own lives by improving others' lives. They help their customer solve its problem. They give their client something it didn't know it was missing. That's where they focus their energy, talent and brainpower."
4. Persistence trumps talent. Johnny and his team get stuck working on more shoe stuff. Frustrated, he summons Diana, who tells them that they might be a talented bunch, but drive matters more: "There are massive returns to doggedness. The people who achieve the most are often the ones who stick with it when others don't. The world is littered with talented people who didn't put in the hours, who gave up too early, who thought they could ride on talent alone. Meanwhile, people who might have less talent pass them by."
5. Make excellent mistakes. Johnny comes up with a seed-filled shoe designed to plant trees wherever the wearer walks. The CEO chews him out, reminding him that people wear shoes indoors, too. "Too many people spend their time avoiding mistakes," Diana says. "They're so concerned about being wrong, about messing up, that they never try anything — which means they never do anything. Their focus is avoiding failure. But that's actually a crummy way to achieve success. The most successful people make spectacular mistakes — huge, honking screwups! Why? They're trying to do something big. But each time they make a mistake, they get a little better and move a little closer to excellence."
6. Leave an imprint. Diana reminds Johnny that we're none of us long for this world: "Recognize that your life isn't infinite, and that you should use your limited time here to do something that matters."

Unlike some business/management/career books I could name, Johnny Bunko excels by dispensing advice that at least doesn't obviously suck. (Yeah, the bar's that low.) The lessons are broad, sure, but I think they're for the most part sound. Let's take 'em one-by-one:

1. There is no plan. This one's worth as much as the other five put together, both for its contrarianism and its truth. (I like both qualities equally, but I usually have to settle for one or the other.) No battle plan survives the first shot fired, they say. This is not to suggest that you shouldn't give any thought to your goals, but attempting adherence to a rigid, step-by-step plot sounds like a recipe for disappointment. I see it all the time in people who were truly excellent in the relatively lab-like conditions of academia, but then break down when they're released into the contaminated, unpredictable non-academic world. Best, I think, to define your goals in a general way, one amenable to heuristics you can use to decide between the countless random choices thrown at you.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses. Sure, why not; comparative advantage and all. I must add that having any kind of glaring, conspicuous weakness does annoy me, so I'd at least want to build myself up in weak areas so that I'm not irritated by my own deficiencies. I may not, say, run a marathon any time soon, but I wouldn't want to have trouble running across campus.
3. It's not about you. If nothing else, a reasonable anti-solipsism message. I do notice, though, that certain otherwise intellectually sharp people seem to forget that they live in a world of humans, and that they're going to have to deal with those humans — on human terms — to succeed. I don't particularly resent this reality, but boy, some sure do.
4. Persistence trumps talent. This is a fact I see examples of every single day, but so few seem to actually believe it. Maybe there's an appeal in the idea that only the anointed rise inexorably to the top, but it's contradicted by even a cursory survey of who actually succeeds. It's not the far right end of the talent bell curve, but it does look to be the far right end of the persistence bell curve. And I don't mean "persistence" as in some American Dream, up-by-the-bootstraps ideal — indeed, to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps originally meant to do something patently impossible, even faintly ludicrous — but in the sense that they repeatedly, almost stupidly, try again and again. Research some time how many failed efforts even marginally successful individuals have in their pasts; it's stunning.
5. Make excellent mistakes. This one doesn't mean so much to me; I suppose it's most usefully parsed as "Try things that give you components, knowledge or experience you can re-use in later iterations", which is nothing to scoff at. "Excellent mistakes" sounds a tad too management-speaky, though. Even just "excellent" has been badly devalued at this point.
6. Leave an imprint. Self-evident, to my mind; show me someone who doesn't want to leave their mark.

I doubt following any of this advice could hurt, and I'd be surprised if, dilligently kept in mind, it didn't help. Nevertheless, they're all conclusions you'd have come to in your own head with enough deliberate consideration; then again, your head wouldn't have put them into manga form. Though the combination of career talk and Japanese comics sounds ridiculous, Johnny Bunko is in reality a really slick, seamless piece of work; nothing feels like a kludge, not even the art by Wisconsin's Rob Ten Pas, who perfectly apes the Japanese visual style. (I guess I missed the point, somewhere along the line, when the meaning of manga shifted from "Japanese comics" to "a style of comics with a very specific aesthetic sensibility and conventions from Japanese Culture that even Wisconsinites want to make.")

Also, this is the only comic book you'll ever see that contains a superdeformed Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. And that's a promise.

The Mask: The Hunt for Green October (Evan Dorkin and Peter Gross, 1995)

An ominous jade mask of obscure provenance transforms the wearer into an an amoral, hyperactive, invincible version of themselves. Those that discover the Mask are at first thrilled with their newfound powers, seeing them as a way to finally get their lives in order. Unfortunately, the Mask's persona controls them as much as — and perhaps more than — they control it, leading to regrettable acts of property damage and even murder.

A bag woman discovers the Mask on the outskirts of Sky City, a decrepit East Coast-y burg that's seen better days. She sells it to Ray Tuttle, a crippled artist and junk shop owner who, still bitter about the faulty merry-go-round that crushed his hands and wife years ago, goes on the requisite Mask rampage, killing the developer who owned the offending amusement park. Though he regrets his actions, Ray also notices that his mute daughter has become a fan of "Big-Head", as the media had previously dubbed what they assumed to be a single green-skinned maniac. On the days leading up to Halloween, warring gangs of neo-Nazis, Yakuza, Mafia and something called the "Iron Triad" all descend on Sky City in search of the Mask.

* * *
The Mask was one of my favorite comic lines as a kid. While I rejected the cartoonified Jim Carrey movie — as every Mask fan surely did — I embraced the genuine ink-and-paper article. Written by cartoonist Evan Dorkin and drawn by Peter Gross, The Hunt for Green October was the third or fourth Mask series and probably the darkest, which is saying something, considering that, in the first series, the Mask-wearer immediately sets out to beat the crap out of his first-grade teacher.

I came back to it when I found all four issues while flipping through my old comic book collection. As with anything from childhood to which I return, there's a chance that I'll grasp references I couldn't before, but there's another, even larger chance that I'll discover that what once thrilled me is actually lame-o. The Hunt for Green October turned out to give me a little of both: I caught a couple Clockwork Orange gags, a play on "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" and a reference to Dorkin's own Milk & Cheese for the first time, but I also realized that there's not all that much to this series.

If you haven't read any Mask comics, you should be apprised of the formula. So first, someone somehow acquires Mask. (That's the genius of the concept: Dark Horse could theoretically spin out series after series forever, able to change absolutely everything about the setting and characters except that one of them has to wear the Mask.) Then, they wreak ultra-violence on nearly everything and everyone around them. When they take the Mask off, they see the consequences of their actions. Regardless, they usually put it back on anyway, causing second- and third-act complications that must usually be resolved with the aid of the Mask, either on the finder's face or someone else's.

Because the Mask-wearer can transform into anything he wants and materialize objects at will, the artist has complete freedom to draw whatever. In one panel, Big-Head might turn into a steamroller and crush some cars. In the next, Big-Head will turn into a green Arnold Schwarzenegger and Terminate some stuff. In the next, Big-Head will suddenly be morbidly obese, crushing all in his path with pure girth. All the while, he will crack corny jokes, usually puns or riffs on famous movie lines.

This lets the writers and artists get creative, but it's maddening for the reader. Because no rules apply to Big-Head — even Big-Head's head doesn't have to be big, though it does have to be green — anything is possible. Because anything is possible, nothing matters, least of all to the reader. Though Big-Head's actions do have repercussions in the world around him, a protean psychopath who's totally invulnerable makes for a rather uninteresting centerpiece.

The one advantage to this device is that it can amplify the underlying character's traits. Receipt of the Mask is a potentially effective analog for sudden windfalls of money, power or influence and how they tend to, for lack of a better term, exaggerate a person, for better or worse: the quixotic become more quixotic, the generous become more generous, the spiteful become more spiteful.

Protagonists of Mask series tend to be spiteful. Stanley Ipkiss, the milquetoast lead of the first series, was spite embodied, quivering with rage at a world he thought had been playing him since childhood. His rampages were strikes at life's nuisances. Ray Tuttle, he of the skeletal hands, dead wife and silent child, has more to complain about, though he does it pretty generically ("Damn that Nelson Hathaway and his shoddy, uninspected merry-go-round!") before the Mask. After the Mask, he's still generic, all about class resentment, sticking it to "yuppies", "fat cats" and what have you. He even materializes a Robin Hood costume for a couple panels.

So, lost opportunity. Ray could have been a more complex incarnation of Big-Head. He could've been more like the brilliantly-written out-of-town lawyer in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, who's utterly convinced that there is someone to blame for the small town's school bus crash: maybe it's the bus manufacturer who skimped on one safety feature too many, maybe it's the bus inspector who slacked off for a day, maybe it's the county government who negligently ignored ice on the road, maybe it's whoever installed a railing that might not have been up to code. But it's someone; of that he's damn sure.

But no, The Hunt for Green October gives a garden-variety "eat the rich" type. When Emily dons the mask, she's a little better defined as she rails loudly and crudely against the thousand indignities of childhood, but it's too little, too late. By the end, I found that the story of the whole series is basically this:

1. Ray acquires Mask, rampages
2. Ray rampages again
3. The gangs swarm into town
4. Emily acquires Mask, rampages
5. The Nazis capture ray, but Emily gives him the Mask
6. Ray rampages, defeating all gangs in the process

A thin gruel indeed. Or am I expecting too much subtlety from a comic where Nazis fight the Yakuza?