Writing in the Margins
Our new monthly roundup of indie publishing: Junko Mizuno's deranged manga, Disney's war against the underground, Flann O'Brien on life during wartime, lefty theorist Mike Davis' children's book (set in Greenland), and William Upski Wimsatt bombs the 2004 election.
By Scott Thill
Feb. 11, 2004 | If you think noteworthy book releases begin and end with the New York Times' bestseller list, my condolences. Much of what appears on that list is P.R.-engineered phantasm, what William Gibson might have called "a consensual hallucination" had he not used that phrase to describe his invented "cyberspace" in the epoch-making novel "Neuromancer." How the bestseller lists of the New York Times, USA Today and Publishers Weekly are composed is a secretive process, about as complicated -- and crooked -- as the U.S. tax code.
In other words, there is a brave world to explore once you put down that volume by Ann Coulter (or even Al Franken). It's all in the margins, sometimes known as independent publishing, other times known as under-the-radar circulation. And although right and center fields are dominated by the major publishing houses, some of their releases have underperformed compared with their indie counterparts, a few of which are greater in substance, enjoy much longer shelf lives, and are -- every so often -- more lucrative to boot. So throw away your pretensions and burn your bestseller lists. They never did that much for you anyway.
But this is all prologue -- we're here to talk about the unheralded releases of past, present and future, as well as why you should care about any of them.
"Junko Mizuno's Princess Mermaid"
By Junko Mizuno
144 pages
Viz Communications
Order from Powells.com
Junko Mizuno is a feminist conundrum, kind of like the dark arts anti-heroine played by the amazing Brigitte Lin in the blood-soaked Hong Kong film "The Bride With the White Hair." Like Lin's Bride (now you know where Tarantino came up with that whole business in "Kill Bill"), Mizuno's nubile and sometimes nude protagonists, who preen and pulverize with aplomb in her fractured graphic novels, are guilty male pleasures. They're hot, sometimes naked women who kill faster than Russ Meyer's infamous pussycat, Tura Satana. Think the Power Puff Girls with curves and no bras and youre there.
But Mizuno is a female working in the male-dominated world of manga (cartooning) and a Japanese sensation on top of it (you can get a Mizuno screensaver for your phone, for Pete's sake). That twist makes much of which is dominated by sweet-faced cuties that eat their own offspring, or the men they seduce, even more complicated and problematic.
Or, as Eric Nakamura -- publisher of Asian/American pop culture's de facto bible, Giant Robot -- explains in an interview, "Mizuno's style is emerging into the psyches of many designers and American artists spawning copycat T-shirt graphics and club flyers. She rounds up psychedelia, Japanese big-eyed manga and nippled princesses with intensity, and then slam-dunks it into a narrative geared towards 3-year-olds. Her books are for adults and loaded with gummy D-cups that visually rain Japanese muscat soda."
Got that?
Maybe that's another way of saying that readers will need to sift through Mizuno's ambiguous, provocative graphic novels using their own theoretical filters. Sure, men -- and boys -- will gorge themselves on the mermaid hotties populating Mizuno's third revisionist fairy tale, "Princess Mermaid," published last month by North American manga giant Viz Communications. But the women -- and girls -- will most likely enjoy witnessing those same vengeful sea sirens take out their frustration with the human race by destroying every male sailor they come across. Like her previous excursions through popular folklore -- 2003's garish but gleeful "Hansel and Gretel" and 2002's hilarious "Cinderalla" (featuring a hapless prince on I.V. life-support) -- "Princess Mermaid" is a nightmarish narrative that will probably ensnare fans of David Lynch and Camille Paglia alike.
But once again, buyer beware: "My Pretty Pony" this ain't.
"The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture"
By Bob Levin
270 pages
Fantagraphics Books
Order from Powells.com
Here's a story you can tell your kids -- if you want them to cry all night. In 1963, Dan O'Neill became the youngest syndicated cartoonist in American history, up until his "Odd Bodkins" strip got too comfy with San Francisco's counterculture (evidently there was something strange going on in that town, circa the late '60s!), at which point he was summarily dropped by the stodgy San Francisco Chronicle. Sure, O'Neill was probably sampling the brown acid in the Haight, but what pissed the Chron off more than anything else was the cartoonist's proclamation that Mickey Mouse had to be destroyed. Once and for all.
What happened next is the meat of Bob Levin's rollicking book, and it isn't pretty. O'Neill formed the Air Pirates Funnies with other like-minded animators, and the crew started mercilessly lampooning Disney's moneyed stable from a warehouse owned by Francis Ford Coppola. As you can guess, the always incendiary and sometimes blue satire didn't sit well with the House of Mouse, so their legal department took sure aim between the Air Pirates' eyes. I won't spoil the ending for you -- you've got Google, after all -- but it doesn't matter anyway, because the treat of Levin's book lies in its Merry Pranksterish narration, equal parts smart-ass opinion and conventional reportage.
The whole affair, as Levin recently explained to me, "was a classic '60s struggle. Disney fostered a view derived from an idealized small-town, Midwestern, turn-of-the-century America -- an unquestioning patriotism, a puritanical morality, a celebration of consumption and conformity, an unflagging obedience to father, God and the FBI. The Air Pirates were for sex, drugs, and end-the-fucking-war. It was better than Frazier and Ali."
"The Pirates and the Mouse" is out now from Fantagraphics Books, the finest publishing house for those seriously looking for comic culture and its attendant issues and neuroses. Fantagraphics publishes the work of everyone from the brave "cartoon journalist" Joe Sacco ("Palestine," "Safe Area Goradze") to "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz (in fact, in a publishing coup, Fantagraphics is reprinting all 50 years' worth of Schulz's "Peanuts" strips). In other words, these guys know what the hell they are doing. So does Levin.