In his recent book Outliers, journalist Malcolm Gladwell investigates the phenomenon of the truly gifted who excel in their chosen fields and professions. What he finds is simply mind-boggling. Success it seems, is not so much rooted in talent, but relies on a vast and unseen network of lucky breaks that appears together with aptitude. The ‘self-made man’ is a myth, and ultimately one that proves dangerous to society.

In deference to this myth we fail to engineer opportunities that would allow for a proper meritocracy, Gladwell argues. We continue in the belief that hockey players are born rather than bred. Because of this we extend multiple opportunities to children born in the first three months of the year. These accumulated advantages create a vast ‘talent gap’ between children born in the first half of the year and their slightly younger counterparts. This is just one example, that when reengineered would prospectively double the pool of future hockey stars.

In 45 available this month from publisher Com.X, writer Andi Ewington treads a similar path to Gladwell. He makes use of long-form journalism as a tool for investigating the sociology of success. In a world populated by superheroes, a soon-to-be father attempts to structure his hopes and fears for his child by interviewing a series of super-powered humans. What could his child become in a world as wondrous as this one? Ewington’s fictional father undertakes a similar investigation to Gladwell in his preparation for Outliers.

But written during his wife’s pregnancy and by strange coincidence completed on the day of his son’s birth, 45 represents a very personal project for Ewington. With each ‘interview’ conducted in a unique graphic style, illustrated by a different artist, the book also represents a radical shift in comics storytelling.

The social realism of superheroes is a subgenre that stretches as far back as Denny o’ Neill and Neal Adams in the 1970s. It enters the popular imagination with Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen in the mid-80s. Ewington reinvigorates this subgenre by reinventing it. Conceptually, he transcends even Moore and Gibbons’ offering. By offering a tale linked to the personal, by coordinating multiple visual styles in a single storyline, by presenting a journalism of the sociology of success, Ewington secures his own place in comics history.

This week’s Iconographies offers an in-depth profile of Andi Ewington and insight into his genre-defining debut work, 45.

—shathley Q

I was working at a comic book store back when Dark Horse released the first of 28 volumes of a series I had never heard of called Lone Wolf and Cub. We had gotten in a larger number of copies of the book. Back then this was typical for our usual manga order. But, besides a cursory examination of the item I had no idea of its true significance.

Over the next few days several customers came in demanding to know where the book was, and ordering us to put the entire series down on their subscription list. It was explained by several excited people—who weren’t typically the ‘mangaka’ type—that this series had been released in the U.S. previously but had stopped before the final issues had come out. The relief that these customers felt at the knowledge that they would at last know what happened at the end was impressive. Furthermore, I had learned that our sister store in Sacramento had a competition to see who could sell the most copies of this title. By the time I heard of this, Sacramento had already been able to unload dozens of them. Between the excited fans at the store and the obvious potential for increased sales, I decided to redress this obvious oversight in my product knowledge and check it out.

I can only say now that I am thankful that I picked this book up. Lone Wolf and Cub, without exaggeration or hyperbole, is one of the finest stories I have ever read. It is powerful, exciting, and is emblematic of everything that makes me enjoying reading. For those of you who haven’t read, I envy you. You’re about to embark on one of the greatest reads in literature. And for those of you who have read it, read it again. I’m researching this series of features for the Iconographies I’ve had the joy of rereading Lone Wolf and Cub. And though I’ve reread it several times already, I am continually amazed and the subtle layers and brilliant nuance of the story.

My first essay will give a brief history of the story and analyze the way it has influenced other creators. The subsequent essays will examine the important characters, themes, and innovations that have all come together to create this masterpiece. I encourage any fans of the series to please comment on the articles and share your thoughts about Lone Wolf and Cub.

—Shawn O'Rourke

Perpetually smiling and jokey, Kazuo Umezu seems to have cornered the market on “Where’s Waldo”-style red and white jerseys. He looks like a jovial dude, a little goofy, and more likely to tell a fart joke and giggle inapproprately than to plumb the macabre depths of emotions through haunting tales (unless fart jokes do that for you).

By contrast, Hideshi Hino looks like manga’s ichiban badass motherfucker.

Since the 1970s, these two mangaka have shaped the genre of horror in Japanese comics, and indirectly, Japanese and Western horror movies. Along with their love of terror, and degree of influence upon artists who followed them, Umezu and Hino also share a storytelling style that leans heavily on Japanese folklore, and an early grounding in comedic work.

With so much common ground between them, it’s their differences that make them compelling and fascinating subjects for comparison, even on a superficial level. For example, the two men could not appear more differently in public.

This Friday’s upcoming Iconographies feature will examine two seminal works by these artists, both of which were recently republished in the West: Umezu’s two-volume Cat-Eyed Boy, and Hino’s Lullabies From Hell.

—Oliver Ho

The twin themes of identity and individuality have been persistent, domineering forces in storytelling, and, indeed, everyday life since the days of cave paintings in the cradle of civilization. For good or for ill, these twin aspects define humanity and don’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

The slave trade? Segregation? What ended up happening to the persons involved was entirely dependent on their skin color.

The Crusades? The Inquisition?  One’s personal religion either vilified or redeemed them.

McCarthyism? Rigged elections? Dependent on one’s perceived political proclivities.

One needs to do no more than research the Indian caste system, South African apartheid, American marriage laws and health care concerns and the various attempted genocides in the Middle East and Africa to know that identity-based persecution isn’t going to go the way of the dinosaurs anytime soon.

Though it takes place in 1994 and is loosely based on H.G. Wells’s 1897 classic The Invisible Man, Jeff Lemire’s insightful and touching new graphic novel The Nobody is both timely and timeless, its artwork and narrative lending a haunting air to a world on a slightly different vibrational frequency from our own. In this version of the tale, ostensibly occurring pre-9/11 but obviously created many years after the attacks that changed the world forever, a small town’s concern over a man garbed head-to-toe in bandages is palpable, but only serves as a potent reminder of the secrets that every resident of every small town on this planet has. This version of the transparent strange, here called “John Griffen” as opposed to “Doctor Griffin” (no doubt as an homage to “Jack Griffin”, as in the 1933 James Whale film of The Invisible Man) is feared not necessarily because he could have a terrible communicable disease, an upsetting, scarred visage or even a record of dire criminal activities; he is feared because his very physical essence is a reminder of humanity’s own deep, dark hearts and minds, and the secrets carried beneath every individual’s “bandages”.

—Kevin M. Brettauer

Merriam-Webster defines the word “planetary” as “of, relating to, or belonging to the earth” or “having or consisting of an epicyclic train of gear wheels”.

Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s recently-concluded epic series, Planetary, is a cultural hodgepodge, the mythology of the last 150 years of adventure stories shoved into a distinctly Ellis-owned blender, building to an emotional catharsis that can, in fact, only be described as epicyclic.

It was stated recently that, when it comes to his views on humanity and respect for the rest of the species, Warren Ellis is a lot like a perpetually hung-over Joss Whedon. It would probably be more accurate to call him the UK’s Kurt Vonnegut; here is a man whose work always finds a way to betray or subvert the angry, bile-filled venom inherent in his characters by the end of a given tale. While it’s clear that Ellis, like Vonnegut did, has a cynical view of the group “humanity” as a whole, he is always open to, and actually encourages, being surprised by the individual. Is that, after all, not the purpose of Spider Jerusalem, Miranda Zero, Doktor Sleepless and, indeed,  Planetary’s own Elijah Snow?

Ellis has always portrayed Elijah Snow as a man with a very simple, very human mission, perfectly replicating the human condition by depicting that mission’s constant evolution and taking it to its only logical closure point. One realizes, upon finishing their first read of the series, that Elijah Snow doesn’t just want to keep the world safe and strange—he wants to save the life of the Individual, here typified by the missing Ambrose Chase.

Because Elijah Snow, despite his frosty behavior towards some and the cold shoulder he gives to others, is just like the rest of us; beneath his white suit and pale skin is a warm, beating heart.

While cloaked as a cultural history of the last 150 or so years, Planetary is really the Joseph Campbell-inspired tale of a hero’s second chance at life and attempt at the hero’s journey and, indeed, how one man can make the world a better place, no matter how strange it really is—even if it means keeping it that way.

This coming week, The Iconographies explores both the series as a whole and the years-in-the-making final issue of Planetary.

—Kevin M. Brettauer

If you were a Martian trying to figure out America in the second half of the 20th century, you could do worse than to start by reading Jules Feiffer’s Village Voice cartoons.  His strips for the Voice basically invented the genre of the adult comic, and that’s adult in the “content which would interest a mature person who thinks about the world around them” sense rather than in the XXX Pussycat Theatre sense. He created a model for strips like Tom Tomorrow’s “This Modern World” and David Rees’ “Get Your War On” which use the medium of comics to deliver a satirical take on current events and the world around us.

Feiffer took on the big public issues of the day. He was the first cartoonist to speak out against the war in Vietnam, he skewered Dwight Eisenhower for failing to support the Civil Rights movement, and pointed out the absurdities of the Cold War and the growing military-industrial complex. He tirelessly highlighted the misuse of language and the abuse of power, drawing on first-hand experience of the latter thanks to a stint in the U.S. Army.

If Feiffer had a recurring theme, it was the refusal of those in power to confront reality, describe it clearly, and take action. Not content to bask in America’s postwar prosperity, he always prodded his country to be better. But Feiffer was not always abrasive: when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he ran a strip in which a child reads a fairy tale about a handsome prince who woke up a sleeping country—but when the prince was assassinated they went right back to sleep.

Feiffer developed a distinctive style incorporating a flexible number of “frames” which were usually just images separated by white space. They often featured a single individual speaking directly to the reader, like an actor delivering a monologue on stage. That may have been a metaphor for the isolation of modern man but also accommodated Feiffer’s somewhat undeveloped artistic style: his strength was characterization and dialogue, not elaborate backgrounds or action sequences. Concentrating on dialogue let him display his knack for capturing how different types of people presented themselves in speech while subtly undermining their statements with his art.
 
A memorable strip in 1963 featured a spokesman for the peace movement who’s just discovered the reason for the movement’s failure: they haven’t marketed peace as a product. But they’re going Madison Avenue now and as with any advertising campaign, it’s important to find the right tone: “If we’re going to make peace catch on as a product, we’ve got to make it as masculine as war!” How to accomplish this? By borrowing the language of the Pentagon, so peace councils become “Peace Commands” (Peace Comms for short) and peace workers become “Trouble Shooters” who run programs with themes like “Peace Escalation.” He concludes: “Gentlemen, once we make the image of peace more warlike, our fund raising problems will be over! I’m sure congress will be happy to give us all we want.”

Fantagraphics is issuing Feiffer’s Village Voice strips in bound volumes: the first to appear is Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips 1956-1966 which came out in May. Some of the material treated in these comics is past history: we no longer have to deal with Joe McCarthy or worry about the Soviet Union blowing us all to smithereens. But it’s amazing and somewhat disheartening how contemporary many of them seem.

In 1961 Feiffer drew a strip of a well-dressed man explaining the news business to the unwashed: publish diverting trivia and press releases and leave real reporting alone. “Free press? We’re a nation of trade journals!” The only reason that’s not totally current today is because we barely have any newspapers left worth paying attention to. Even the Village Voice, once a leader in investigative journalism, has today become just another free weekly from New Times Media. So criticizing newspapers may soon be a nostalgic pursuit tantamount to complaining about the scratchy sound from your record player or that the keys on your typewriter are sticking.

Feiffer’s greatest contribution may be his enduring portraits of notable types among his fellow private citizens. He views them through a rather jaundiced eye and of course they’re studied in their neuroses (cultural note: neurosis is a basic emotion for New Yorkers) and totally full of themselves, but so vulnerable and human at the same time. He ceased cartooning for the Voice in 1997 but his characters live on in popular culture.

There were Bernard and Huey, two masculine archetypes who would later turn up as Sandy (Art Garfunkel) and Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) in Mike Nichol’s 1971 film Carnal Knowledge. Bernard was timid, reflective, and sensitive and never got the girl, while Huey was confident, oblivious and had to fight them off with a stick. And of course Bernard could never figure out what he was doing wrong, while the women who went home with Huey saw no contradiction in declaring that they like sensitive guys only to ditch him every time for the brute.
Then there was the leotard-clad modern dancer perpetually offering a “dance to Spring” or a “dance to the loss of innocence” which always began optimistically and frequently ended with her twisted up like a pretzel or cowering in the corner. She’s still with us, most recently as the subject of a production at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 2009.

Pointless (and often self-imagined) personal competitions were a regular theme, and often music was the battleground. In those days it was jazz rather than indie rock but the spirit was exactly the same. A Feiffer beatnik confidently proclaims that jazz was invented by Steve Allen in 1955 and is taught at the New School.  “If you don’t like it, you’d better learn. It’s the coming thing.”

In another strip, a middle-class gentleman is determined to puncture the pretensions of those who claim to be cool. It’s become difficult since everyone has learned the “right” books to buy and the “right” records to listen to: yes there were recipes for hip non-conformity in the 1950’s just as there are today. But not to fear, he’s found the solution to unmasking the pseudo-hip: he sneaks over and turns on their radios! If they’ve left it on WQXR, they’re busted! The take-home message:  take care to change the setting on all your radio dials to an approve station before throwing a party, lest an undercover hipness detective be on the guest list.

Here’s a final image which should prove that the more things seem to change, the more they really don’t. Two small boys inspect a crater. One explains that programs for public housing and school construction were proposed to boost employment, but were politically unacceptable as government interference with the free market. Then a bomb fell out of the sky, leaving a huge crater, and workers had to be hired to fill it in. So the solution to unemployment was found by accident: the government started a bomb-dropping program and put people to work filling in the craters. As the boy concludes, this leaves everyone happy because “Nobody complains about national defense.”

—Sarah Boslaugh