Comics for Comics' Sake

Hello. It’s been nearly a year since I last blogged here; another APE has come and gone, and The Stack is now even bigger. So I’m going to revisit the concept and try to stick with it this time. Starting with a pair of minis by “reportage cartoonist” Susie Cagle, This Is What Concerns Me and I’m Here From The Government.

This Is What Concerns Me is a short sampling of one-page strips that I gather are compiled from her eponymous website. How you react to her taken-from-life vignettes will probably depend a lot on how much time you’ve spent in San Francisco, where Cagle lives and works. Subjects like hippie stench, vegan shopping, and random crazies on the street are probably more interesting if they’re new to you and not everyday facts of life.

Cagle’s actual storytelling is more interesting than her choice of stories to tell here. The one- and two-page material at the front of the book is all right, but she’s at her best when she gives herself space to let a story breathe. The two-and-a-half “Security” strips in the 13-page book showcase her skill for evocative recreations of San Francisco’s distinct environs, all sloped sidewalks, tall brick buildings, and unassuming walk-by shops. She uses a much looser style in these strips than in I’m Here From the Government, but it’s still effective at capturing her own unease and irritation, as well as the creepiness of the characters she encounters.

If you only read one of the two, however, I’m Here From The Government is the one to go for. This is the one where Cagle lives up to her title and provides some intriguing cartoon reportage on what it’s like to be a census taker. (Or Enumerator, to use the official term. See, it’s educational!)

Pretty much the only thing I knew about enumerators prior to reading this was hearing stories of paranoid fringe lunatics attacking them during the 2010 census, wholly convinced that they were agents of the New World Order keeping tabs on them for some future mass roundup into indoctrination camps. Cagle worked in the rather more liberal San Francisco, so if you’re hoping for tense tales of confrontations with belligerent responders, you won’t find them here. (Though there are hints of danger evident in the safety training seminar the enumerators receive, with advice such as “Wear comfortable walking shoes. These may come in handy should there be a need to run.”)

These stories are more procedural; half the book is devoted to the training sessions before Cagle takes a step onto the streets to poll people. What’s most impressive about these sections is how much went into the preparation before Cagle drew a single line. It’s clear from the specific details given at every step, from reproductions of the actual test questions Cagle answered to get the job to a dizzying array of jargon and acronyms peppering the dialogue, that Cagle took thorough notes during the process for later use. (One of the chapters is even titled “Verbatim.”)

Once the enumerators are out in the field, the tone bounces around between comedic (the enumerators joking around about “Census Regionals”), informative (did you know government writing utensils are made by Skilcraft, a manufacturer created to employ blind workers? I didn’t!), and uncomfortable (“Operation TNSOL,” a night spent cataloguing the homeless in park spaces, makes effective use of garbled dialogue balloons to convey Cagle’s fear and shame).

The line in these stories is thicker and more solid than the scratchiness of This Is What Concerns Me, which goes a long way toward improving its readability. Cagle’s gift for faces and expressions is put to even better use here with the expanded cast–the enormous mouth and huge-pupiled stare on Cagle’s CL makes her even more memorable as a character, especially in contrast with her thin-lipped, perpetually-silent assistant.

IF SUSIE CAGLE EXHIBITS AT NEXT YEAR’S APE I WILL: Pick up more of her long-form/reportage comics and skip the collections of one-offs.

And so The Stack grows.

For the fifth or sixth year now, I went to the Alternative Press Expo at the Concourse in San Francisco. This year, it was a little special because it fell on my 30th birthday, and I have to say: any kind of life where I can spend my 30th birthday at a comics convention is a pretty good one in my book.

The thing that impresses me most, every time I go, is how many people got out there, made some comics, and are there at APE letting their work speak for them. Even the hackiest, most cheaply photocopied minis took effort and courage to get down on paper and on the show floor. I’ve made tentative steps, once, toward producing my own comic, but going to APE always gets me motivated to give it another stab. (No pun intended.) Will I have something to show by APE 2011, or will I be there solely in a consumer capacity once again? We’ll see.

Not that going there just to buy stuff is a bad time. I buy comics at APE the way some people buy hurricane supplies–gotta stock up, because it could be a long time before you have another opportunity. The full list of my haul, as well as photos of the books and some snapshots of the con itself, are after the jump.

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North Korea didn’t get its reputation as the bogeyman of international policy just because it’s a militarized nation with institutionalized anti-West ideologies led by a half-crazed dictator. It did so by being all of those things and keeping itself almost completely unknowable. With the citizenry prevented from having any contact with the outside world and the few foreigners allowed within its borders from having any contact with the citizenry, North Korea’s reclusiveness just added to the fear.

Which is why books like Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang are so important. There have been glimpses into North Korea before, such as the Vice Guide to North Korea, but they tend to try a bit too hard to be scandalous exposes rather than simple inquiries into what life in the country is like.

What makes Delisle’s account different is that he wasn’t there to observe horror stories and report them back to an audience eager to hear tales of oppression and paranoia. He was there to do his job, which happened to take him to the North Korean animation studio SEK just as it had previously taken him to studios in China and Vietnam. He was there for two months, giving him plenty of time to settle in and have a good look around the place. Or as good a look as any foreigner is allowed to have around Pyongyang, at any rate.

But the particulars of the two-stop subway, the empty highways, and the omnipresent guides can be found in nearly any account of the city. Pyongyang shines in its recurring characters, the party officials and fellow expatriates and how they reveal themselves over the course of Delisle’s stay.

On the DPRK side, there’s Comrade Sin (sometimes mockingly called Captain Sin), Delisle’s chaperone around the city, and an unnamed translator who later replaces him. Sin is for the most part implacable and unnerving; he’s got a military background and insists that everyone Delisle sees doing manual labor is “volunteering.” In one of the book’s creepiest exchanges, he calmly explains that a former star animator in the studio isn’t on any of the current production teams, didn’t transfer studios, or go abroad, but remains silent on Delisle’s obvious follow-up question: “He didn’t just disappear, did he?”

Delisle wonders of Comrade Sin the same thing most people who learn the basic facts about life in North Korea do: “Do they really believe the bullshit that’s being forced down their throats?” As he points out–more often in narration than dialogue, since to casually discuss the truth with his guides could be a very bad idea–North Korea has serious problems and its neighbors, if and when things come crashing down, are not going to be sanguine about supporting a bunch of brainwashed, jobless refugees. Is there hope for these people?

Probably so. You can see it in the cracks and between the lines of Delisle’s story. The officials who let down their guards on the one outdoor afternoon they spend following a trip to the surreal Friendship Museum. The pure joy on Comrade Sin’s face as he receives a gift of Hennessy cognac. Even the fear, in places, is revealing. When Delisle lets a translator borrow a copy of 1984 he brought with him and later asks what he thought, the translator starts trembling and stammers that he doesn’t like science fiction. The slip in the carefully maintained doublethink shows that the translator, like everyone else, knows the score. Someday he may even be able to say so.

After all, as Delisle shows, the facade can’t last forever. Even during his two-month stay, there’s a revolving door cast of expatriates in the form of fellow animation vets, fashion designers, tech experts, and NGO workers coming to and from the country all the time, an inevitable factor in the country’s economy since it requires so much foreign aid and foreign investment to stay afloat. All that imported help comes at the price of further exposure to ordinary Western people, in stark contrast to the Museum of Imperialist Occupation or the propaganda films that comprise the sole programming in the country’s movie theaters.

The cracks are there, and they’ll widen, and it’s books like this that will drive the wedge. The propaganda films isn’t as scary as long as you know there’s one guy there willing to say he thinks they’re boring. The guides’ authority isn’t as absolute after they’ve laughed their heads off at a subversive joke you made. The country isn’t as alien once you know they’re waiting for the same thing we are.