Monday, June 3, 2024

A Report From Nancy Fest

  

 

A Report From Nancy Fest

 



We (my son and I) arrived at Nancy Fest at around 7:30 on Friday, May 24 so we missed most of the welcome talk. We drove the 650 miles from Des Moines to Columbus through torrential storms in Illinois and I forgot that we were driving from the central time zone to the eastern time zone. We should have left earlier. Anyway, we arrived hungry and were happy to find vegan hot dogs at the reception. We checked out the exhibit and talked to some people. The first person I talked to happened to be the guy who goes by “Erniebushmillerjrjr” on Instagram. We chatted with Bill Griffith, not realizing that he had been talking with Chris Ware!. There were more Nancy and Sluggo t-shirts here than I’ve ever seen anywhere else. 




 

On Saturday morning, we showed up at 9 for donuts and coffee. The first panel of the day “The Nancy Summit, oyr, The First Official Meeting of the Ernie Bushmiller Society” convened at 10. Brian Walker, Dennis Kitchen, Gary Hallgren, Kaz, and Bill Griffith (Patrick McDonnell had to cancel) discussed how and why they first came to appreciate Nancy and Bushmiller. I was not taking notes so I don’t remember exactly what everyone said (I know, great report) but one moment stood out for me. During the Q&A session, a member of the audience asked the panel what they thought of Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy. I was expecting to hear some disdain at this point, but that didn’t happen. A few panelists said they didn’t really follow Jaimes’s strip that much, but they were glad that the strip was popular. Brian Walker, who curated the exhibit, then said that he read a book called The New Nancy by some professor whose name he couldn’t remember. That professor was me. Walker said the book led him to appreciate what Olivia Jaimes was doing in the space between newspaper comics and webcomics. I was thrilled that he had read my book. 

 

At 11:30, the next presentation, and the one I was most excited for, started. The panel was called simply “The New Nancy.” Olivia Jaimes had planned to attend Nancy Fest in person, but could not. She recorded a slide presentation and asked that it not be recorded by the audience and that it be deleted right after her talk. Even as the voice reading the presentation spoke in the first person as Jaimes, I believe it was actually Jaimes’s editor, Sheena Wolf, who was reading.  Regardless, Jaimes presentation “How to Write Nancy” showed that she has studied Nancy in depth. 

 

Jaimes’ presentation used the humor that she brings to Nancy. She began by noting that what was to follow was “simply my take” and then saying “I am totally right about everything.” Jaimes argued that “a very specific type of gag defines Nancy.” Using a Bushmiller strip where Nancy looks at a crooked picture hanging on the wall and, instead of straightening the picture, she makes the chair she is sitting in crooked, Jaimes said that one could remove Nancy, Bushmiller’s draftmanship, and even change the words of the strip and it would still be recognizable as a Nancy gag. For Jaimes, a Nancy gag is a kind of analogy that makes “a nice shape” so that “Crooked frame is to straight viewer as straight frame is to crooked viewer.”  Jaimes went on to give multiple examples of these shapes in Nancy comics. She began to wrap up by saying “I love her.  I love Nancy so much.” Jaimes concluded by saying that she is “talking a brief and mysterious break” and that guest strips of Nancy would start appearing at the end of June. 

 

 

After a lunch break, Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik spoke on their foundational book How to Read Nancy. I’m sure most people reading this are familiar with their book so I won’t recap their discussion. I will note that their talk made clear just how much work they put into gathering the materials for their book, finding original copies of strips, and painstakingly working on the book’s appearance. They also noted that they thought they were finished writing about Nancy but wrote a short essay for the exhibit catalog about Nancy’s face. 

 

The next speaker was Bill Griffith, talking about and reading from his graphic biography of Bushmiller, Three Rocks.  His talk was fascinating. Griffith said that he hears his creation Zippy the Pinhead’s voice as somewhere between Raymond Burr and Julia Child. I had never thought about what Zippy sounded like, so this information has changed the way I read Zippy. Among other insights, Griffith argued that Fritzi’s and Nancy’s relationship was antagonistic and that Bushmiller had wished he could drop Fritzi from the strip, as he had inherited her character from Larry Whitington. Griffith talked about rejecting the idea of there being a firm line  between art and comics, which I’m sure his audience wholeheartedly agreed with. He talked about some similarities between Edward Hopper’s work and Nancy. He talked about the strangeness of 8-year old Sluggo’s libido. (It’s worth noting that Jaimes’s reboot of Nancy did away with any idea of a romantic relationship between Nancy and Sluggo, as well as leaving behind Sluggo’s attraction to every pretty girl he sees.) Griffith briefly talked about Olivia Jaimes. He said that Jaimes has not captured  the surrealism of Bushmiller’s work. He also said that Jaimes seems not to be concerned with craft. I think he’s completely right about both of these things. I think that Jaimes has used concerns about craft as content of her strip. Her “bad” art often serves as the gag in Nancy. See, for instance, her December 22, 2018 and March 5, 2019 strips.








But getting back to Griffith’s presentation, he read the epilogue to Three Rocks, in which his comic alter ego “Griffy” meets up with an aged Nancy at the “United Features Retirement Facility No. 34” which is situated behind the “Bushmiller Museum of Comic Art” in Stamford, Connecticut.  The epilogue is my favorite part of Three Rocks.  Readers see that Nancy characters Plato, Spike, and Dagmar all live in the retirement village. Sluggo, however, does not. Nancy thinks to herself “I dream about him all the time.” Sluggo meets up with Griffy and decides to go talk to Nancy. Sluggo has a long white beard and moustache. They play bingo and reconcile. I don’t think many people would say that Nancy is emotionally poignant, but Griffith’s epilogue certainly is. It was a joy to hear him read it and comment on it. 

 

At the book signing, I got Bill Griffith, Paul Karasik, Mark Newgarden, Denis Kitchen, Pete Maresca and Brian Walker all to sign my copy of the Sunday Press catalogue for The Nancy Show: Bushmiller and Beyond. Brian Walker was sitting next to Bill Griffith. I thanked Brian for reading my book, and I’m somewhat embarrassed to say,  I gave a copy of The New Nancy to Griffith. He at least pretended to be interested in it. While waiting in line at the signing, I talked to Gary Hallgren, who was selling original art. I had not known that he was now the artist for the comic strip Hagar the Horrible. I then realized that this fact answered a question that I had been wondering about for over a year. On May 5, 2023, Helga is sitting at a table with a woman who looks like what an adult version of Nancy drawn in the Hagar comic style would look like. Hallgren put her in the comic pretty much because he could. 

 





We unfortunately missed Tom Gammil’s play A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller as my son wanted sushi for dinner. I stopped briefly by the afterparty but did not stay long as I was tired. We drove home on Sunday. 

 

Nancy Fest was incredibly well done. Brian Walker’s curation of the exhibit is stellar.  Caitlin McGurk and the staff at Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum did a brilliant job. It was well worth driving over a thousand miles round trip in three days. Nancy Fest is over but the exhibit is at the museum until November. If you haven’t seen it, you should go. And you should buy a copy of The Nancy Show: Bushmiller and Beyond and, if you don't already own them, How to Read Nancy and Three Rocks





 

 

 

Sunday, January 1, 2023

This Year in Nancy

 The Year in Nancy

 



 

Olivia Jaimes published this comic strip on December 31, 2022, as a sort-of analog parody of apps like Spotify that give users year-end “Spotify Wrapped” lists of their most played songs. Such lists remind us that everything we do online leaves a record behind. Jaimes offers an analog solution, as she notes that newspaper comics cannot “automatically generate” a list of readers’ interactions with Nancy. Of course, as a few commentors on the GoComics website have pointed out, such a list could be generated for those who read Nancy online. A few commentors provided links to their ten favorite strips and answered the other questions that the strip posed. In that same spirit, but with perhaps a bit more detail, here is my list. 

 

This year I read 365 Nancies (assuming that doesn’t include reading pre-2022 strips or rereading 2023 strips). 

 

My favorite character was Poochie. I admire her ability to continually hide her being from Nancy’s attempts to document Poochie’s essence.

 

Here, in reverse order, are my top ten favorite Nancy strips from 2022. 

 

10.  January 30, 2022


 


This Sunday strip is a call back to my favorite Jaimes Nancy strip of January 20, 2019 where Nancy exclaims “But I broke the fourth wall” as she attempted to steal a cookie from the jar on top of the refrigerator. This strip uses a similar visual perspective with Aunt Fritzi in a room adjoining the kitchen. The refrigerator, with the cookie jar atop it, can be seen through a doorway into the kitchen. In the first three panel of this strip Sluggo tells Fritzi he doesn’t know where Nancy is while he contorts his right arm and hand into weird postures in each of the first three panels. Panels four, five, and six replay the first three panels with two differences in perspective. The images show closer views of Sluggo’s hand and arm while also rendering them as translucent. We learn that Nancy was “behind Sluggo’s hand” in each panel. His arm movements matched her movements as she climbed the chair, reached the cookie jar, and took it down from the top of the fridge. Sluggo and Nancy coordinated their movements so that Fritzi wouldn’t see Nancy getting the cookie jar. So many of Nancy’s jokes are about the difference between character perspective and reader perspective. 

 

 

9. November 16, 2022


 


This strip exemplifies Nancy’s use of overlapping speech and thought balloons filling panels and overlapping each other. Nancy’s teacher tries to convince Nancy that you can only learn so much in one day. The examples she gives Nancy all fail. Nancy never gets full; she can watch TV all day. But she can use her thought balloon to block out a lecture. 

 

8. September 01, 2022


In Jaimes’ strip, Aunt Fritzi and Nancy share many traits. Both often get caught in recurring thought spirals and both are addicted to technology. While Nancy refuses to admit her addiction, Fritzi constantly tries for self-improvement. Putting rubber bands around a phone is pretty nonsensical, as is simply tossing one’s phone away. Putting them together creates a great physics joke. 

 

7. February 03, 2022



I find myself drawn to meta-Nancys that project their self-awareness as a classic strip “rebooted for the twenty-first century. The text box in panel one provides that reflection in the shape of another contemporary media formation, the movie preview voice over. This strip is part of a series of strips in early 2022 where Nancy and Lyle, sometimes joined by other friends, sit in a movie theater. The final panel reminds us that nothing has actually happened in this day’s strip. The February 3, 2022 Nancy is just a preview for the 2/4/22 Nancy. The serial nature of daily comics has been explained. 

 

 

6. January 24 2022

 


 

Poochie appears infrequently in 2022. This strip exemplifies Nancy’s inability to take a good picture of her dog. Panel one shows us a blurry screen shot of Poochie. Panel two shows us Nancy attempting to take a picture of Poochie. Readers can see a clear image of Poochie even as we know Nancy’s camera cannot capture the image we see. Panel three moves the action to outside. Poochie sits regally in the same exact three-quarter profile while Nancy bounces on a trampoline with camera in hand. She wants to exactly match her bouncing with Poochie’s movement to get a clear picture. The  sound effect in panel three is redundant. Readers can see that Nancy is moving up and down because her body looks blurry. Comics are static but they have lots of ways to imply motion within panels. “Sproing.”

 

 

 

5. January 3, 2020


 

Nancy has always loved food. While her food-based gags are often visual (Nancy sees an object that reminds her of food), here the joke is language-based. Face down on her pillow, Nancy imagines a giant spatula, then a pancake, and so on. Panel four’s simple “feed me” tells readers all the need to know about Nancy’s relationship with food. Nancy must be fed.

February 3, 2022. 

 

4. November 11, 2022

 

 

Nancy still loves food. This strip seems particularly funny because the first two panels do not reveal to whom Sluggo is speaking. Besides the campfire and tree, he is standing among two rocks (the third rock is probably behind the big rock). His plan to use a fishing rod and hook to toast his marshmallow while keeping smoke out of his eyes is the kind of elaborate solution that characters in the strip often come up with. Nancy biting the marshmallow and looking like a caught fish on the right side of the final panel delays the joke as long as possible. I hope she didn’t get impaled on the fishhook.

 

 

3. June 7, 2022

This strip is a pure visual perspective joke. Sluggo holds a measuring cup at arm’s length between himself and a mirror to see what a new hat might look like. Nancy takes this occasion to smugly claim that bows are superior to hats. She notes that she will not be seen without her bow, which is of course part of her iconic look. Sluggo gets his revenge in the final panel by holding up a black spaghetti strainer, that exactly matches Nancy’s hair, directly in front of her bow. The perspective of the panel works to block reader’s view of the bow and Nancy does not look happy. 

 

 

2. November 21, 2022


The creator’s signature in a panel of the comic is a longstanding gag in comics. Ernie Bushmiller used it numerous times. Jaimes’ twist on the gag introduces a temporal element to the old joke. Nancy contemplates how to get a signature on a field trip form. In panel two she says she has to “wait” as she hold the permission slip right along the bottom edge of the panel. With an exclamation, Nancy sees the strip signed by Olivia Jaimes in the third panel. As she moves the permission slip in panel four, the signature stays on the form. “Signature” jokes often lead characters to reflect on the fact that they are a created thing. For Nancy, the joke is more about manipulating space and time. Knowing that “Olivia Jaimes” is a pseudonym and that Jaimes changed her signature over the first few months of the strip before sticking with the signature that readers see here shows that some scribbled cursive cannot guarantee one’s identity but it can get you permission to go on a field trip. Jacques Derrida could not have said/written it better in “Signature Event Context.” 

 

 

1. September 5, 2022.


 


Some of Ernie Bushmillers’ funniest Nancy’s were Labor Day strips; for me, this is likewise true with Jaimes. Jaimes’ Labor Day strip traces Nancy’s origin in the Fritzi Ritz strip in the 1930s  back to prehistoric times, with “Eukaryote Ritz” appearing in the fossil record 2.7 billion years ago. The Ritzocene provides the earliest known date for “the simple genius of the original.” Future comics historians may one day find an earlier geologic, or even extraterrestrial, marker, that remakes the whole field of comics studies. The “simple genius” of strips like this may date to the origin of the universe. 














Monday, September 12, 2022

This Week in Nancy: September 5 to September 12, 2022

 This Week in Nancy: Labor Day and Beyond

September 5 to September 12, 2022

 

After a long time off from doing this, I’m back. Anyway.



 

Labor Day, September 5, 2022

Keeping with her variation of Ernie Busmiller’s tradition of “not working” on Labor Day, Olivia Jaimes published a funny, text-heavy strip that pokes fun at the veneration of Nancy’s Bushmillerian legacy. Jaimes hearkens back to the early days of her strip, circa April 2018, when she anticipated and declawed critiques of her work by noting that “questionable art” was just a snapchat filter, and having Nancy say that she ignores “negativity on the internet.” Nancy even went meta by saying “I’m sick of all these reboots and restarts.”

 

Four and a half-years later, Jaimes offers readers a look at her “upcoming book on the history of the Nancy comic strip.” She notes that “diehard fans” know that Nancy was originally a character in the Fritzi Ritz comic strip. Jaimes extends this logic as she points out that Fritzi had been a side character in a strip about her aunt, as readers see an image of a suffragist named “Bathsheba” Ritz with her niece Fritzi. This panel pushes Fritzi’s origin to the late 19th / early 20thcentury, setting  the date of her origin decades earlier than previously known. (Fritzi Ritz debuted on October 9, 1922.)     

 

Jaimes then absurdly extends this origin to prehistory, as we see an image of “Eukaryote Ritz” from 2.7 billion years ago. Somehow, the billions-years-old cellular organism look like Nancy and Fritzi; the “Nancy” organism’s shape mimics the spikes of Nancy’s hair and the “Fritzi” organism seems to be looking backwards at Nancy. 

 

No matter how much of an expert on comics history you might be, Jaimes shows readers that there’s always someone who knows more. For Jaimes, “the simple genius of the original” does not refer to an early Bushmiller cartoon. Rather, Nancy’s austere roots are evident in the fossil record. We are not living in the Holocene or the Anthropocene. Our age is the Ritzopocene. 

 

In other action this week, Nancy drives Fritzi crazy by gluing the wheels of an office chair to the carpet on September 7, rearranging crooked pictures into the shape of a house on September 8, and fitting the wind chimes outside her window with pool noodles on September 11, a move that gets a giant “!” when Fritzi sees them. Nancy’s solutions continue to trump logic, even as her teacher warns her about poor grades on September 9. Nancy justifies her claim that she’s “the best at everything” because she knew that any bad news she got would simply be “the universe trying to bring me down a peg.” If Nancy can “call” it before it happens, she’s still the best. I don’t disagree. 

 

Detail from September 11, 2022 Nancy


Monday, November 25, 2019

Re-presenting Poochie

Re-presenting Poochie

 I’m back writing about Nancy, hopefully on a more regular basis.
Readers of Nancy will know that Olivia Jaimes does not use many Ernie Bushmiller legacy characters besides the obvious big three of Nancy, Sluggo, and Aunt Fritzi.  Peewee, a toddler who Nancy sometimes babysat, is now a small child who takes things way too literally. When he is told that a basketball game is going to be “a walk in the park,” (July 10, 2019) readers see him in the final panel strolling through a park “miles away.”


But we haven’t seen any of Bushmiller’s adults such as Phil Fumble, Mr. Sputter and his wife, or Professor Floogle. Likewise the neighborhood kids Spike, Knuckles Noonan, Rollo the Rich kid, Nosy Rosie, Irma, Janie, and many others remain in the past. Nancy’s pet monkey, pig, sheep, and cat have not come back, and until recently her dog Poochie has only appeared once, briefly and unnamed, on June 27, 2018.


But, finally, during the last week of September, Poochie became the focus of five daily strips in a row.  As if reminding herself, her readers, and the characters in the strip that Nancy has a pet dog, Jaimes starts the week with a visual joke about Poochie’s existence. Her teacher, unaware that Nancy has a dog, asks her about it. Nancy then mentions Poochie by name for the first time in Jaimes’ strip, and then describes her. Nancy then implies that Poochie has been present by asking her teacher, “You’ve never noticed Poochie!?!” The punctuation “!?!” shows that Nancy is confused at her teacher’s lack of observational skills. Jaimes then has Nancy make a meta- joke by saying that Poochie is just a bit too short to appear in the comic. 




 There’s more than meets the eye going on with this joke. Comics scholar Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, in her essay “Reading Spaces: The Politics of Page Layout” has noted that comics “may be representations of space and spaces of representation simultaneously.”  Poochie’s invisibility exemplifies this point.  The rectangular panels of Nancy can be considered as “representations of space” in two ways. First, each panel delineates an exact space—panel one in the above strip represents the space that holds Nancy and her desk, a small section of the floor, a part of the wall, and a small bit of window. The third and fourth panels draw a rectangle around a smaller space—two thirds of Nancy’s desktop, her upper body, and part of the wall behind her. Second, readers of the comic read the strip as a whole and understand that the four strips together represent a classroom. Even if we only see Nancy at her desk in three panels and her teacher’s upper body in one panel, along with the aforementioned floor, wall, and window, we “see” that these four fragments represent a larger classroom that contains more desks, students, floor, walls, and window. We tend to do this seemingly without thought; we know Nancy and her teacher are in a classroom even as most of the classroom remains invisible to us.


Likewise, this strip can be seen as a “space of representation” in two ways. First, readers, and this writer, have to bring a lot of assumptions to the act of reading to see a classroom in this strip. Most readers will have their own experience of an elementary school classroom, of desks, and teachers, and floors, walls, and windows. As Kelp-Stebbins writes, readers and creators “activate and mobilize these technical possibilities into emergent forms of expression and meaning.” That is, our familiarity with these objects and this spatial arrangement is something we take for granted—we think the elements of the strip mean “classroom,” and we might take this representation of a classroom as a universal one. After a bit of thought, such taken-for-grantedness reveals itself as false. Not every child has access to a learning space like Nancy’s. Being able to understand what a space means is always political; that’s how I take what Kelp-Stebbins writes. Yikes! I’m now pretty far away from thinking about what’s funny about Jaimes’ joke. The second way I want to take “space of representation” gets closer to the joke. The panel can be seen as a space of representation in a very literal way in that it marks out what is actually drawn and thus represented to readers. In this way, the panel is like frame. We can see everything inside the frame precisely because Jaimes determines the perspective and scale of the frame. We see what she wants us to see. If she had wanted, she could have framed a panel so that readers could see multiple desks and students or even the entire classroom (minus the fourth wall, of course, that would make the room impossible to see). The perspective of panel four just happens to be “exactly” as low as Poochie is tall so we cannot see her, even if she is there. Nancy explains Poochie’s seeming absence from the all other strips (with that one earlier exception) when she universalizes her claim. Poochie is not just the exact right height not to fit in the panel in question, she is too short for “the bottom edge of every panel.” Poochie may have been in every single Nancy up to now and we would never have known because we could not see her. She does not seem to be in this particular strip though, as the first panel shows us the space below the bottom edge of panel four. Unless Poochie is below the floor we can see in panel one, she is not in this strip.  As a subtle final touch to this joke, Jaimes draws Nancy’s hand in the fourth panel so that a part of her thumb covers over the line that marks the bottom edge of the panel, and marks the tiny space between the bottom line and the top of Poochie. 

This joke seems to set Poochie free. The next day, she makes her way into all four panels. 



Notably, this strip is wordless and uses old-style visual cues to tell readers what is happening. Panel one sets up that Nancy wants Poochie to jump through a hoop, with a biscuit as a reward. The next three panels show us that Poochie has other thoughts, as represented by an “X” that marks a starting point for where Poochie is and dotted lines signifying the route that Poochie walks (or runs) to reach the treat without jumping through a hoop. Poochie cannot talk and we are given no words, but we know how she thinks. While this strip is not drawn from Poochie’s point of view, it does give us Poochie’s perspective on tricks and biscuits. As the next day’s strip illustrates, Poochie has become a means to think and joke about perspective and representation.
 
On September 25, we first see Poochie in the second panel, framed within the portrait view of Nancy’s camera. We have a representation of a representation, as Poochie appears within two frames, when she previously was outside of all frames. Nancy becomes distracted by the third frame in panel two, a television showing Pikachu. If Poochie won’t entertain Nancy and help her to become famous, Nancy will just watch t.v., filtered through her phone screen. 

The next day, Nancy, is outside eating a dripping ice cream cone while saying that she doesn’t get into trouble because she only spills food on the “black polka dots” of her pants (even though the ice cream cone looks brown?). Her upper body fills about two thirds of the panel and the speech bubble above her head fills the rest of the panel. Agnes, in panel two, framed pretty much the same way, asks her what happens if she’s standing up and eating. 



The joke of panel three at first seems to be that, when standing, Nancy only spills food on Poochie’s black spot. But the funnier joke takes us back to panel four of September 23. As Poochie is revealed in the third panel, we can retroactively see her below the panels of frame one and two, exactly where she would be if we think about how each panel represents space. 

The next day, Poochie does not appear in the first two panels, and Nancy does not even refer to her by name, only as “my dog."There’s a joke about acorns, and training, and squirrels as Esther questions Nancy. Both Nancy and Esther are shown from the waist up in panel one; Nancy is shown from the shoulders up in panel two. I cannot concentrate on what they are saying because I am wondering what Poochie is doing below the bottom panel. Panel three uses depth to show a squirrel in the foreground contemplating running the obstacle course that Nancy has created for it. But that is just and excuse to place Nancy and Esther far back in the landscape. We see their whole bodies standing on the horizon between ground and sky. They look tiny to signify that they are far away. Their height is only about 1/9th of the panel’s height; they are drawn just about the same size as the squirrel in the foreground. And who is sitting there next to Nancy, drawn reaching up to Nancy’s midsection: Poochie, who has been in that exact spot the whole time. The perspective joke is funnier than the squirrel joke. Poochie returns to the strip  a few times in October but I wonder if she ever leaves. 


Sunday, January 20, 2019


Is this the best Nancy strip ever? 


Olivia Jaimes has written what is perhaps the greatest Nancy comic ever, and it is published on January 20, 2019. 

The comic uses a regular trope of the Bushmiller years in which Nancy reaches for a cookie jar and is caught be Aunt Fritzi.



In the foreground of panel one, we have a refrigerator with a cookie jar on top. Nancy peers from the kitchen into the living room, where Aunt Fritzi sits on the couch reading the newspaper. We see Nancy from behind and from mid-torso up. We do not see her eyes, but based on her head position, we can see that she is looking into the living room to see if Aunt Fritzi is watching her. Jaimes has set up the joke, a joke that was an Ernie Bushmiller staple (and more broadly, a comic staple): Nancy will come up with an ingenious scheme to reach the cookie jar. Aunt Fritzi will discover Nancy with her hand in the cookie jar. Nancy will be punished. 

Panel two supplies the means for Nancy. A ladder appears on the right side of the panel and Nancy is nowhere to be seen. Look at the geometry of this panel. The left third of the panel gives us the rectangle of the refrigerator. The center third gives us another rectangle, the doorway between kitchen and living room, through which we can see Aunt Fritzi on the couch. The truncated triangle of the ladder takes up the right third of the panel, with the ladders supports dividing the triangle into three four-sided shapes. The panel is crowded. We only see the top two-thirds of the refrigerator and of the ladder. We can see the living room floor but not the kitchen floor. A foreshortened oval cookie jar sits atop the refrigerator. Jaimes has left more open space in the top of the panel than one might expect. Note, too, that the refrigerator and the ladder butt up against the left and right frame of the panel. We do not see the back of the refrigerator and we see less of the right side of the ladder than of the left. And Jaimes has set up a spacial problem. The ladder is too far away from the refrigerator to aid Nancy in reaching the cookie jar. 

Nancy takes advantage of the open space at the top in panel three. We see the same view in panel three: refrigerator with cookie jar, doorway framing Fritzi, and ladder. But now, Nancy stands atop the ladder in profile. Her upper body, her arms, and her head cross into the gutter (the white space between panels) and part of her face extends into the next panel. Nancy breaks the barrier of panel three, of the gutter between panel three and four, and panel four. In the process, she changes our understanding of how the panels relate to one another. We unthinkingly assume that each panel of the comic has been giving us the same point of view of the kitchen over a series of sequential movements. But now we see that Nancy, standing in the extreme right of panel three is also standing to the left of panel four. She is behind the refrigerator. The implied (but undrawn) wall behind the refrigerator (whose refrigerator is not against a wall?) does not exist. Nancy reaches into the left side of panel four with her hands. We see the result of this action in panel four. Two motion lines show us that she has used the ladder to reach the cookie jar and to throw it from its heretofore unreachable perch atop the refrigerator. The cookie jar flies through the air in the top of the panel. A small part of the cookie jar even crosses into the gutter at the top of panel four. Importantly, the jar flies above the doorway so that Aunt Fritzi cannot see what Nancy is doing. But who will catch the thrown cookie jar? 

Nancy will, of course, in panel four. But stay with Nancy in panel three for a moment. Notice that she has anchored herself with her left leg along and the right edge of panel three. She leans so far on top of the ladder that she should fall. Most of her left foot and part of her left leg, though, is obscured by the panel line and the gutter. It’s a three-dimensional joke in a two-dimensional space. The way her skirt and upper-body exist in the foreground—both in panel three and in front of it (as she crosses the gutter) makes it impossible for her left leg to be leaning against the panel line, which would be behind her if the space were three-dimensional. In two dimensions this is not a problem. She can lean against the panel line to support part of her body while another part of her body crosses through another part of the panel line and through the gutter and through the left panel wall of panel four (not to mention the implied wall that the refrigerator should be up against). 

The use of space becomes even funnier as a reader realizes that, even as the panel lines and gutters have become a physical part of Nancy’s world (they exist within her two-dimensional frame of reference or she wouldn’t be able to move across/through them), the gutter still serves its traditional purpose of denoting the passage of time between panels. Even as we see the cookie jar in a moment of frozen flight in panel four, we realize that the Nancy at the top of the ladder in panel four, drawn in profie, slightly crouched, with arms out, in anticipation of catching the jar, has turned 180 degrees between panel three and four. And she has turned fast, within the time it takes Nancy in panel three to throw the jar nearly half way across panel three, otherwise the jar would hit panel four Nancy in the back of the head. Jaimes does not illustrate Nancy’s movement. Unlike the motion lines that show the movement of the cookie jar, Nancy of panel four is simply facing in the opposite direction as Nancy of panel three. For the comic to make sense, we just have to know that she has quickly pivoted atop the ladder in the elapsed time of the gutter (which remains an actual physical space at the same time). 

Panel five shows us Nancy sitting atop the ladder, her hand inside the cookie jar, content in the knowledge that Aunt Fritzi has not looked up from the newspaper through the first five panels, and has thus not seen Nancy’s trick. Panel six shows us Nancy with a cookie with a bite taken out of it in hand. She thinks she has gotten away with her cookie thievery. She does not seem to notice that Aunt Fritzi has arisen from the couch and is walking toward the kitchen, with the newspaper under her arm. 

While I first thought that the comic’s gag was in the breaking of the wall between the third and fourth panel, the joke reaches another level in panel seven. Nancy is caught, as Aunt Fritzi, now in the kitchen, stares up angrily at Nancy. Nancy says, “But I broke the fourth wall! How could you see me?” At this point, it seems like Nancy’s awareness that she’s in a comic strip—“I broke the fourth wall)—is what Bushmiller called the snapper, the moment the joke hits home. But then we have the final panel, panel eight.

Panel eight closes in on Fritzi’s face. She hold up the newspaper in her left hand and point to it with her right. She has been readingNancy, which allowed her to see what Nancy was up to in panels one through eight. The final panel, partially obscured by Nancy’s hair (and note how we cannot see Nancy’s face in this panel, just as we cannot in panel one), shows us the face of a tiny Aunt Fritzi pointing at a newspaper. We cannot see the newspaper inside the comic, which also would show us Nancy’s face looking at the comic page into infinity. Aunt Fritzi does not have to say a word. She is like Destiny from The Sandmancomics; she can read what has happened, what is happening and what will happen, but she does not have to say anything. 

And there’s still more. Nancy, as it appears on the GoComics website, contains eight panels. The Nancythat appears in the newspaper in panel eight is made up of nine panels. There’s an extra panel in the newspaper. Looking closely, panels one and two of the online comic correspond to the first three panels the newspaper comic. Panels three through eight of the the web comic correspond to panels four through nine of the newspaper comic. Panel three of the newspaper comic, which is partially obscured by Nancy’s head in panel eight of the web comic, does not appear in the web comic. It seems to exist in the space between panel two and panel three of the web comic. In terms of time, the newspaper panel seems to take place during the time in which Nancy actually climbs the ladder, which we are never shown, because we don’t need to see it. If you look closely at panel three of the newspaper comic (in panel eight of the web comic), you can see the refrigerator, the cookie jar and part of the doorway, but Nancy’s hair blocks our view of the ladder, so that we can see her climbing in neither the web comic nor the newspaper comic. And for a final snap, I bet more people read today’s Nancyonline, not in newspapers. 





Thursday, November 15, 2018

Blooming heads in Jeff VanderMeer’s Recent Fiction

Blooming Heads in Jeff VanderMeer’s Recent Fiction

Why a Duck?

Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne cannot seem to end. Less than four months after its April 2017 publication, Tor.com released The Strange Bird: A Borne Story digitally that August. Eight months later, “The Borne Bestiary” appeared online (and was then included as an addendum to the subsequent paperback publication of Borne. In May 2018, VanderMeer was finishing a novella, The Three, also set in the Borne universe. That work has grown into a novel, Three Dead Astronauts, that will be released in 2019 (?). Borne moves backwards in time, too. The Subterranean Press limited edition of The Complete Borne, which was originally slated to include “The Three” as a short story, has now substituted VanderMeer’s 2008 work, “The Situation,” as a “proto-Borne novelette.” Like Area X from VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, the Borne narrative universe is ever-expanding. The Borne world is “sticky,” in the sense that Timothy Morton uses the term.

Indeterminate, open to change, moving backward and forward through time and space. The Borne-world exemplifies ecologically engaged fiction not through a mimicry or representation of a world in crisis. Instead, it enacts and engages such a world. Our world is in crisis. Borne-world is in crisis. How these two worlds relate to each other is in flux.

Many abstractions work here—fungal, growing, infectious, ecological, unknowable, indeterminate, world-ending, late-capitalistic—be they literary, biological, climate-sciencey, economical, or apocalyptic. But it should not be a question of who can shout HYPEROBJECTS the loudest, of who can say “Anthropocene” is already archaic, that we’ve already moved beyond it. Everything is sticky and everything is in flux. There are no entry or exit points. One just either starts somewhere or one does not start at all.

I will start with a duck, a duck that is not a duck. Toward the end of Borne, as Rachel and Wick make their way across a blighted landscape, they see a bird.  “Coming off the plain, we spied a single duck with a broken wing near a filthy puddle. It waddled back and forth in front of the puddle, drank from it, stood sentry, drank again, stood silent. Waiting. A kind of mercy that no one had killed it, that it had escaped notice” (264). The act of spying the duck shows us that Rachel is wrong to say that “it had escaped notice.” She and Wick see it, and she notes it.  Rachel means that the duck “had escaped notice” from those who might kill it for food or for a thrill. Regardless, this encounter with the duck is short, almost inconsequential. After noting the duck, Rachel says, “we moved on, toward the Company.” A reader might remember this duck or he/she might not. It’s hard to say.  My bet is that the duck did not take up residence in the memory of most of Borne’s readers. Imagine a reading quiz: What animal do Rachel and Wick see as they make their way toward the Company?  A Fox? A minnow? Wait, is it a duck? No—it’s a trick question.

What they see is “not a duck.” Or, that’s what they see if you read The Borne Bestiary’s entry “Duck With Broken Wing (p. 264)” which even gives us the page number to re-find the duck. The Bestiary says

Often sighted and also often misunderstood, the duck with a broken wing reported as living alone on the approaches to the Company building is in fact not a duck at all. But none who have approached it have ever lived long enough to report as to its true nature. As a result, ducks have flourished as a species in the City due to a general suspicion and caution. (See also Elongated Elastic Creatures) (11).

Our reading is altered. We, readers, now know something that Rachel, the narrator, did not know. She and Wick dodged a bullet. Had they approached the duck, they would not have lived to report their notice of it. For a reader, this inconsequential detail has acquired great consequence. Had Rachel and Wick approached the duck, their whole story would be different. But we would not know their story because they would not exist. The duck is not a duck at all. But we still call it a duck. We do not know that the duck is unknowable.

Everything is this duck. Everything in Borne-world and everything in our world. The concept of fiction. of reading. Of authorship. Of memory. Of species.  Of global warming. Of mass extinction. The “duck with broken wing” that is not a duck can stand for abstraction itself. It is how we grasp something and how it slips away; it is how we know something and how we don’t. It is the success and failure of figurative language. In his essay “The Slow Apocalypse and Fiction,” VanderMeer writes about the ways that fiction might engage hyperobjects, and specifically how it might engage the “slow apocalypse” of global warming. He notes that humans have difficult understanding the many variables, the ways that objects interrelate with each other, at play in global warming.

“For one thing, we are unable to hold in our minds the necessary number of variables and the connections between those variables; thus immobilized, sometimes also misled by disinformation, we rationalize or compartmentalize. In a sense, the enormity of the situation renders us irrational, could also be said to act as an invading agent or alien presence in our thoughts that destroys the impulse toward necessary autonomous action” (9).

We cannot grasp this “invading agent;” we cannot act; we do not know how to respond to this “alien presence” in our midst. VanderMeer does not propose an answer to how we might more effectively engage this presence. Rather, he defines this question as the content of his fiction, as something that he has “irrevocably turned toward” (18) even as it remains a question “without definitive answers” (18). It becomes a question about a question. VanderMeer asks,
“How do we more effectively convey ineffectiveness?” (AS 2). How can he tell us that we do not know a duck that is not a duck?  He can do what he does; he can write fiction.  In the Borne-world, via duck, we can engage the difficult question of why humans want to destroy the world.

Why do Humans Want to Destroy the World?
(destroy and destory)
Why do humans want to destroy the world? There is a short answer and a series of longer answers. The short answer is disarmingly simple: the Enlightenment and Capitalism. We have been told this time and again, from Marx to Derrida to Haraway. We clearly do not want to listen. In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing offers as succinct a summary as anyone. ““Ever since the Enlightenment, Western philosophers have shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentionality of Man, which could tame and master Nature” (2). Nature is there; we are here. We want “there” to become “here”.  This answer has a lot going for it. It is true. But it is ineffective. That is, knowing that capitalism turns Nature into commodities, and knowing that the Western philosophical tradition has done backflips, first to justify this mastering and then to reject it, only gets us so far. We can define the problem; we can acknowledge the problem. But then we get stuck. We cannot engage the problem, which, it turns out, is not one problem, but many.

Tsing does not offer a solution but something much more modest: a reminder. She writes, “it was left to fabulists, including non-Western and non-civilizational storytellers, to remind us of the lively activities of all beings, human and not human” (2). Those who make things up—fabulists and storytellers—offer words that might imagine something other than progress narratives, something other than tales of mastery. Fiction, then, can offer glimpses of multiple, entangled forms of life. VanderMeer makes a similar claim about how fiction should strive to engage non-human life. “Somehow we need to be humble enough to finally admit to the true complexity of and importance of animal life — not just some anthropomorphic and patronizing sympathy —and in the process continue the necessary step of de-centralizing the human experience” (SA 15). Fiction can imagine non-human centered worlds; novels can present biological complexity that both responds to, simplifies,  and exceed the biological complexity of our world. Tsing reminds us that, even though Japanese research institutions have spent millions of yen, it remains “impossible for humans to cultivate matsutake” (4). The complexity of matsutake growth, its relationship to trees and soil, cannot be replicated by humans. To grow, matsutake “require the dynamic multispecies diversity of the forest—with its contaminating relationality” (4). Such “contaminating relationality” resists the logic of agricultural science that seeks to isolate a species from all connection to other things (think of endless rows of corn growing in the Midwest). Tsing’s fabulists understand this “contaminating relationality,” and, in turn, amplify and broadcast it to receptive readers. VanderMeer’s creatures, like his duck that is not a duck, gesture toward a complexity that undermines human centrality in the world. Humans, then, can imagine themselves out of a world of mastery, conquest, and progress and imagine themselves into worlds of contamination and entanglement.

Imagining such worlds can paradoxically offer a reminder that these worlds of contamination and entanglement actually exist. They are not idyllic or nostalgic, though; they are dangerous. Tsing continually argues that humans (and some humans more than others) live in a state of “precarity” and “indeterminancy.”

The world’s climate is going haywire, and industrial progress has proved much more deadly to life on earth than anyone imagined a century ago. The economy is no longer a source of growth or optimism; any of our jobs could disappear with the next economic crisis. . . Precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that all our lives are precarious—even when, for the moment, our pockets are lined. In contrast to the mid-twentieth century, when poets and philosophers of the global north felt caged by too much stability, now many of us, north and south, confront the condition of trouble without end. (7).

Precarity has become the state of all life. Climate science essentially gets ignored, even as it notes with more and more precision the economic, social, and political devastation of global warming.  Tsing claims that we must recognize “precarity as an earthwide condition” (8) in order to imagine other possibilities, to look for “life in this ruin” (9) of a world formed by global capitalist practices. In these ruins, Tsing finds matsutake mushrooms, sprouting in human-altered forests, building assemblages that spread nearly unnoticed through the cracks of accumulation and concentration of wealth. She asks “What do you do when the world starts to fall apart?” This question has infinite answers. Tsing’s very localized answer is that she goes for a walk and hopes to find mushrooms, to remind herself that “there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminancy” (7). Tsing’s walk, though, is not a Thoreauean romantic withdrawal from the world. Rather, it is a way to become part of an assemblage that breaks off in multiple unknown directions. This walk becomes an entry point into the multiple entanglements of The Mushroom at the End of the World. For my purposes, it also serves as both a reminder of and a way into a world, that in the title of VanderMeer’s short story, is “full of monsters,” a world that is not about humans telling stories to other humans, but about stories as alien agents, stories as assemblages that attack us with precarity, with indeterminancy, with ineffectiveness. They grow on us, into us, through us; they are fungal, arboreal, bacterial, viral, bio-mechanical. They can even be dead. Stories infect tellers and tellers transmit infection to readers, listeners, receptors. Through this interactions, stories become “story-creatures.”


What do “Story-Creatures” want?

In Jeff VanderMeer’s short story  “This World is Full of Monsters” stories themselves might be the most monstrous beings. The first section of the story “I Did not Recognize What Sought Me” presents “a tiny story” as a living, sentient being that infects the “I,” the narrator who tells us elliptically, “I am a writer . . . I was a writer” (3). The story that the writer encounters was “covered in green fur and lichen” (3). It had “large eyes that could see in the dark, and sharp teeth” (3). It is not a metaphor, not a narrative, but an attacking agent that infects the writer.  It bursts out of “the top of my skull in a riot of wildflowers, goldenrod, and coarse weeds” (3). It then grows “roots [that] plunged greedily through my brain and through my soft palate and through my lower jaw, seeking the soil” (4). It grows through the “I” of the narrator; it leaves his body, but only after it has altered the “I” to a state beyond recognition. The narrator loses parts of his memory; his sensory inputs get skewed so that “the world as it had become held a strangeness too vast for me to understand (6). The story-creature spreads the impossibility of understanding through the world. “It did not care about your belief system, your grasp on reality, the excellence of your
analysis or your senses” (16). The “I” continually transforms; it continually waits for “the next thing” (23), the “next part of the story” (23). The “I” does not understand what is happening, but it does absorb “a capacity to understand beyond my actual ability to understand” (17).

And that’s what it feels like to read “This World is Full of Monsters.” I might understand the story; I might read it as a story about the capacity to understand stories. I might disappear into the ether of my own close reading. The story ends with these words. “Now I would be a story-creature and have a world of my own” (24). This could be a dead end of perception dissipated into a world, of story and world inextricably, precariously rooted into each other, forever noting Tsing’s “terrors of indeterminancy.” Stories can only do so much.

In the “Slow Apocalypse,” VanderMeer asks “if you were standing in a hideous post-apocalyptic landscape, would you want me to tell you a story or would you just want me to shut up long enough so you could convert me into edible protein?” (SA 2). I take this question as rhetorical. I would want edible protein. But. Maybe we are in this “hideous post-apocalyptic landscape” already.  So maybe the question is not rhetorical. I still want stories, even in the land of what Tsing calls “third nature, that is, what manages to live despite capitalism” (3). Third nature, according to Tsing, often remains invisible when we have been “blinded” by “progress stories” (3). Counter-stories, anti-stories become necessary. Tsing writes “To even notice third nature, we must evade assumptions that the future is that singular direction ahead. Like virtual particles in a quantum field, multiple futures pop in and out of possibility; third nature emerges within such temporal polyphony” (3). Instead of turning the writer into edible-protein, we might want them to spew out all the stories they can, to be a story-creature, a telling and a thing at the same time.

The duck-that-is-not-a-duck shows us third nature. It looks like the narrator’s description of a moment in the transformation of the world.

The terrain became more floating than fixed, the ground covered with a thin stubble of vegetation while the clouds had come close above and turned sea-green and from them tumbled down a forest that hung wrong, the bird-things that were not birds stitching their way through that cover upside down. 11

Everything is messed up and backwards. The whole world is “hung wrong.” We still live in it, though. And we live with “bird-things that were not birds” with ducks that are not ducks.





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A Report From Nancy Fest

      A Report From Nancy Fest   We (my son and I) arrived at Nancy Fest at around 7:30 on Friday, May 24 so we missed most of the welcome t...