Did I ever tell you where this column's title comes from?
(It's rhetorical, and I can't hear you anyway.)
It's a line from a Modest Mouse song--well, to be accurate, it's an adaptation of a line from a Modest Mouse song. The actual lyrics go like this:
This plane is definitely crashing
This boat is obviously sinking
This building's totally burning down
And my, and my [Repeat]
And my heart has slowly dried up
The song was on the first Modest Mouse album I ever heard,
The Lonesome Crowded West, which doesn't happen to be the first Modest Mouse album ever released. The band had been around at least four years before
Crowded West came out, and the only reason I caught it was because of my college roommate, who had seen them at a few random bars. He was an "old school" fan of the band, and while he may have never mentioned it out loud, it was generally understood between us that the only reason I knew anything about the band was because he had turned me onto them. A few years after that, the band signed with a major label-Epic Records, a subsidiary of the Sony corporation--and within a few years and a few albums, they had a Nissan commercial and a Grammy nomination. By then, my roommate and I had weirdly ended up no longer in the position of the guy who followed the other guy's musical taste, but in the place where a band that had felt a bit "private"--in that we didn't know anybody else who had heard of them--had become something that a whole ton of people, many of whom were younger than us, were just as into.
Everybody I've ever met has something like that--it's usually music. Something that was small, unpopular, an acquired taste--a band you could catch at a bar for almost nothing without pre-ordering tickets, a movie line you could quote that brought nothing but confused stares--something that seemed to explode overnight, saturating all the people you couldn't, or didn't want to, convince or interest. I think when you're younger, the tendency would be to mention how long you'd been into it, how many different stores you'd had to get your dad to drive you to just so you could find the latest release--the attitude that says "Man, their first book/single/album was better, I've been into them since '88, you don't even KNOW." Part of that noise is pride--immature and silly--but pride nonetheless in the simple fact that by luck or chance, you got to something great before anybody else did. You were there first, and while that doesn't mean much to anybody else, it means a lot--especially when young--to you. There's nothing wrong or unusual when that little drama plays out amongst teenagers. The problem I see--the one I can still see in myself sometimes--is when that behavior lasts long enough that it turns into some kind of puffed up arrogance. When it turns into nostalgia.
There's really two kinds of nostalgia, as I see it. There's the kind where you look to the past just to enjoy it and learn from it, whether it's to obsessively figure out which decade produced the best jug bands, or to find the first strip where Lucy yanked the football away. A dive into history for pleasure or anaylsis--nothing more. The other form, now that's the one that gives a bad name to nostalgia, and it's the same one that turns "I was a Fugazi fan when they were still Minor Threat, I bet you don't even have the Embrace record". It's the kind of nostalgia where you look to the past and turn it into some carnival of magic and chance, where opportunity fell from trees, where Everything Was Just Better. It's the kind of thing that turns smart, valuable human beings into irritating jokes, because all they can do is spit out some variation on the cliched "We walked twenty miles in the snow, and it gave us character". It's decrepit, it's dishonest, and it's useless. Looking to the past--the real past--has massive, possibly revelatory value.
Making up a fantasy doesn't.
All this was what popped into my mind after I spent the better half of a recent Saturday at the Pen World Voices Festival at New York's Cooper Union. The event I attended was called "An Afternoon With International Graphic Novelists", featuring the wildly successful Neil Gaiman and the new to America manga icon Yoshihiro Tatsumi--who has actually been around for decades, although us Westerners can only just now lay claim to him due to the work of Drawn & Quarterly and Adrian Tomine. Between these two powerhouses was Shaun Tan, Jonathan Ames, Emmanuel Gilbert & David Polonsky. All in all, that's five countries represented, not including the US. I had a pretty good time, I'm not even going to pretend I didn't. I figured I would, or I wouldn't have gone--but even if the whole day had been a wash, I would have enjoyed just getting the chance to see Yoshihiro Tatsumi, reclining all the way back in a wooden chair as he laughed and coughed his way through some nerd's super-specific question about why Tatsumi didn't publish in
Garo more often. (Tatsumi's translated answer was, roughly, "I was really poor and they couldn't pay me." In your face, buddy. You just got Owned by Yoshihiro.)
The main thing that struck me about the event was how well attended it was. I've been to a few of these comic things now, and yet I'd never walked into a room as packed full of people as it was in the "Great Hall" before Neil Gaiman walked in. (I'm not counting New York Comic Con itself in that statement, although I am including all the panels I attended. No question: Gaiman can fill a room.) Seeing that many people, a range of ages and gender in no way comparable to any comic book store I've ever been too, it was easy to see why more and more people are acknowledging comics, if not outright reading and buying them. While they didn't all stick around for the rest of the day, it was still something else to not be, once again, another random 20-something white guy in a room full of random 20-something white guys when the Tatsumi and Tomine show hit the stage. The two of them were great together, in part because Tatsumi was so geniuine in his excitement to see so many different people there to celebrate his work, and even more so because Tomine came across as being as enraptured with Tatsumi as the audience was.
My complaints about the event didn't really dawn on me as much as they ate away over the following days. I'd enjoyed listening to Neil Gaiman, despite the fact that most of his anecdotes and stories felt like the sort of well-reheased stories that make up his many (well-deserved) speaking engagements. But there was a trail of thought he'd started that bugged me, and it stuck with me because of the way Tatsumi had dealt with it when he arrived on stage. See, both of these guys had some very basic similarities when they got started--they were doing work in comics that wasn't in line with whatever the "norm" was at the time, they were publishing the kind of work that gets to be called "dangerous" by the sheer fact that it's Unique Compared To Everything Else. When Gaiman talked about that time--when a speaking engagement of his at a college was boycotted by the school's English department, solely because he "just wrote comic books"--he talked about it with an attitude of wonder and humor. "Wasn't that crazy! Oh what a wacky time for all and sundry!" And for the audience, it worked--I smiled myself, thinking of those silly fools and their silly, pointless college boycott. (College was, and is, for sex and drinking. People who boycott stuff in college are doing it wrong.) Hours later, when Tatsumi--who describes a similarly veined public disdain for the "gekiga" work he and his contemporaries were publishing in his recently released "Drifting LIfe"--was asked how he felt about his recent acclaim in the US, including his jaw-dropping write-up in the New York Times, his reaction couldn't have been more different. He spoke with wonder, yes. He laughed about it too.
But all he cared about was how magical it was to be alive right now, to be surrounded with praise by a country who had known nothing of him for so much of his life. There wasn't an ounce of reverence for his down-in-the-gutter beginnings. He was glad that his struggle--to do serious work and have it treated seriously--was over. He was excited to talk about where he was going next--a possible sequel to Drifiting Life, an eager anticipation of whatever Adrian Tomine was going to release next. Gaiman, on the other hand? He treated the past like a mythical period of punk rock rebellion, a time when nobody was getting paid and everybody was doing what they loved "just 'cuz." He talked about a boycott like it was a sign of approval--and while there's some truth to that, it's also a sign of a group of people awash in cultural ignorance, and I don't necessarily agree that's worth romanticizing. I know full well from listening to Neil Gaiman that he feels the same, that he's as excited as any of his fans that he was able to look at his career today and see how far it has come. I'm not going to burn the guy for something he said without context--it isn't, after all, his fault that he got me thinking about what I hate about nostalgia. That's just what happened.
It's a joy and a pleasure for me, as a guy who has read comic books off and on for over a decade now, to know that the people who do great work can be celebrated alongside their artist peers that have been respected for years. I'm glad that big organizations like Pen are willing to book gigantic theaters for cartoonists and writers to congregate, be it so they can promote a book or talk about their career. What I don't care about is pretending that the past--whether it's when what became DC kicked the Shusters of the world down a flight of stairs or when a bunch of chumps at some college thought the guy who wrote Sandman was going to warp the brains of their (probably awful) future failure kids--was something to be bronzed and smiled at. The work? That matters. The people? They matter.
But nothing good comes of patting the ignorance of the past on the head, of treating it like a tamed fight dog. Nothing ever will. If I was more melodramatic--which I am, I guess I'm just not feeling it right now--I'd find some way to shoehorn in a "don't forget the blah blah or you'll end up blah blah repeating stuff" and then you make some reference to the Third Reich just so you can totally blow your made-up argument out of the water. I don't think that a minor reference to something stupid in the course of a story is going to blind us all to danger and end up bringing back the bad old days of putting EC Comics on trial for causing--what was it it caused? Kids were going to eat their parents? Just this, and that's all: those people who boycotted Neil Gaiman because of comics?
They didn't go anywhere. They're just waiting for their moment to try again. And while laughing at them might work--it also makes it that much easier for them to harden their resolve.
Okay, that was still pretty melodramatic.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
