I really like the fat little horses Satrapi draws in The Sigh

Just wanted to get that out there.

Meanwhile...

In Las Vegas Weekly I have a review of Harvey Pekar's Cleveland by the late Pekar and artist Joseph Remnant, and at Robot 6 I have a review of Marjane Satrapi's standalone illustrated prose story The Sigh, if you would like to read either of them. The above image is the merchant father negotiating with The Sigh from Satrapi's book.

Three pieces of cartooning advice from Marjane Satrapi (one of which is secondhand)...

...as gleaned from from Da Capo Press' 2009 book Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics and Culture* by David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague (Hajdu's piece quoted from below—everything in italics is him—was originally published in the October/November 2004 issue of Bookforum)

1.) BE LIKE A LIZARD
"Emile Bravo told me, 'When you are drawing, be like a lizard—be perfectly still, but aware of everything around you. Don't waste your energy with a lot of movement while you're working. Be like a lizard.'"

2.) DRAW IN INK
Dispensing with drawing-class convention, she uses a marker rather than pencil; the ink, being less forgiving, "forces me to concentrate," she says. "Otherwise I would sit here all day and draw shit."

3.) USE CHEAP PAPER
She draws on the most inexpensive paper she can find. "If I use very good paper, I feel like I have to make a masterpiece," she says, "and the best way to make shit is to feel like you have to make a masterpiece. I feel now like the world is waiting for a masterpiece every time I put a brush in my hand, and that is a bad thing. Cartoonists shouldn't have to be too good."



*Mostly music, though. By my count, only four of the 40 articles collected in the book are about comics or comics creators.

Marjane Satrapi's Monsters Are Afraid of the Moon

While rereading Chicken With Plums to re-review the new paperback edition, I came across one other English-language Satrapi book I had yet to read, children's picture book Monsters Are Afraid of the Moon (Bloomsbury; 2006).

It's not a comic or a hybrid picture book/comic book, but I thought it would be well worth taking a look at here, since Satrapi is primarily known for her comics work. It also provides readers with an opportunity to see the cartoonist working with subject matter that differs greatly from her autobiographical and family history work, and in a somewhat different style. Plus, it's in color! That's the first thing I noticed when flipping it open; when I think of Satrapi, I immediately think of the stark black and white (with no gradations of gray) of her comics.

The story is the story of Marie (that's her up there on the cover), a young girl with a normal, happy, care-free life. Or at least, normal, happy care-free day times. Night time is a different matter, as each night she's visited by "three of the scariest monster who ever lived."

That's how Satrapi describes the monsters, anyway. They don't look all that scary to me:
And their behavior seems more irritating than alarming. They pinch her "right on the nose," pull her hair and "the third scary monster would stick out his tongue and go cross-eyed." What a bunch of jerks.

Thinking of a solution, Marie realizes that monsters are afraid of light and decides to sleep with the light on, and thus she lived happily ever after.

No, that's not what happened.

Instead, Marie decides to cut down the moon, using a pair of scissors with really long blades, and shee keeps it in a birdcage in her room. So now it's always bright in her room at night, and the monsters no longer trouble her.

However, the night sky is now dark, which causes some problems for the town's cats, who can't see where they're going any more, and are always getting injured.

Satrapi draws pretty good anthropomorphic cats. Here they are, with all of their cute little injuries:
(Apologies for the shadow on the left edge of the scan there).

Oh, and check out this ambulance the cats ride in:
Is that a little cat-sized ambulance with a tiny little cat-sized human ambulance driver? Or are those giant cats?

With so many cats injured, the town's rat population goes wild, and start ruining things for cats and humans alike. It gets so bad that the cats go to "his majesty the Cat King." (Not King Cat, so I don't think John Porcellino has cause to sue Satrapi over this or anything).
(The Cat King)

(King Cat)

Once the Cat King explains the situation to Marie, she agrees to put the moon back, in exchange for a cat guarding her at night, since monsters are also afraid of cats. And now Marie and everyone else lives happily ever.

Well, except for the monsters.

And perhaps some neighbor girl who doesn't have a cat, whom the monsters will terrorize from now on...

Marjane Satrapi's Azrael

Pantheon just re-released Marjane Satrapi's 2006 Chicken With Plums in softcover, which gave me the opportunity (well, excuse really) to re-read it. I was happy to find that I liked it every bit as much as I did the first time I read it, as that means I must have been pretty on-the-nose when I reviewed it for the first time (That review no longer exists, due the paper it appeared in having redesigned their site, but I did re-review it this weekend at Blog@, and you can read it here if you like).

Chicken With Plums is named for protagonist Nasser Ali Khan's favorite dish, something he fantasizes about and has offered to him during the eight days he lies in his bed, waiting for death to claim him once he's decided he would rather die than live in his present circumstance. It's a really good comic and you should totally read it if you haven't already; I think Persepolis is probably more important and significant, but Chicken With Plums is my favorite of Satrapi's books.

During the main character's eight day ordeal, he is visited by many people, some of whom are as real as he is, and some of who are more fantastical. One of them is Azrael.

You know Azrael right?
He's Jean-Paul Valley, an assassin created created by The Sacred Order of Saint Dumas through gene-splicing and brainwashing who temporarily took over the mantle of Batman for a few months. He was created by longtime Batman writer and editor Denny O'Neil and a young artist named Joe Quesada in 1992.

Wouldn't Marjane Satrapi drawing a Joe Quesada character creation cirica 1992 be fantastic?

I imagine it would look like this:

(Only Satrapi would have made the legs the same size as one another, and proportionate to the rest of the body).

Well, as it turns out, there's another Azrael aside from the Batman supporting character and Gargamel's cat on The Smurfs. There's also the Middle Eastern angel of death. Go figure.

It is, of course, the angel of death version that appears in Chicken With Plums, so Satrapi's Azrael actually looks like this: That's Azrael on the left, looking intently at a mourner.

He visits Nasser Ali Khan on the sixth day, and tells the dying man a story about another man who had seen him without instantly dying:



It's a nice scene in a nice story.

I still wouldn't mind seeing Satrapi draw a Quesada character someday though. Maybe Ash...?

January 31st's Meanwhile in Las Vegas...

This week's Las Vegas Weekly comics review is of the IDW release of Jim Munroe and Salgood Sam's Therefore Repent!. If you happen to have read Therefore Repent!, let me know what you thought in the comments. It's a pretty different sort of book, so I'm really interested in other people's take on it.




If that whole being an editor thing doesn't work out for DC's Jann Jones, maybe she can get a job hand-crafting products for DC Direct. Did you see that image of her crocheted Ambush Bug in this week's DC Nation column. I'd totally buy one of those.

The Ambush Bug doll that is, not the new Ambush Bug: Year None miniseries. Well, actually, I will buy that, too, but that's not what I was referring to two sentence ago. I'm both a little surprised and a little impressed that DC's even attempting an Ambush Bug mini.

Considering how terrible a lot of these returns to "old favorites" sell, be they miniseries or maxiseries, new retooled versions by newcomers or straight-up original flavor and creators, they've got to know this thing isn't going to do very well. And yet they keep rolling 'em out—Checkmate, Omega Men, Suicide Squad, Infinity Inc., Captain Carrot, et cetera. I guess you've gotta kind of admire that. Or at least be happy you're getting a new Ambush bug series. (Me, I woulda first tested the Bug waters by commissioning Keith Giffen and Phil Jimenez to do a JLA: Classified story set during 52 #24 over a year ago, but what do I know).




How weird was it to see not one comic-centric cast on The Colbert Report of late, but two—both Marjane Satrapi and Joe Quesada sat down with Colbert this week (although I suppose the former was there more as a movie maker than a comics creator, but the line is awfully blurry, given that she made a movie based on the comics that she made).

That was the first time I've seen Satrapi in live-action...I'm much more used to her comics avatar and, when I think of "the real" Satrapi, I think of that black and white photo on the inside back covers of her books. I was kinda surprised how different Satarapi the comics creator looks from Satarapi the comics character, although I suppose there's no reason I should have. Most of the time when I see the "real" cartoonist after spending hundreds of pages with their self-drawn avatars, I'm surprised by the gulf between the two. When I bought some comics from Jeffrey Brown at SPACE one year, for example, I couldn't believe he was actually him. Joe Sacco's glasses aren't really opaque, James Kochalka's not really an elf, Art Spigelman's not really a mouse nor does he wear a mouse mask, etc.

In fact, the only autobio comics creator who looks exactly the same in both their comics and in real life that I can think of off the top of my head is probably Harvey Pekar, and Pekar doesn't draw himself, but is drawn by others. Someone smarter and better connected than I could probably write a pretty intersting article about why autobio comics creators draw themselves the way they do, and why they tend to look less like their avatars than autobio comics creators who are drawn into their comics by other people (ala Pekar).

Or maybe not.

Regarding Quesada's appearance, I thought he handled himself much, much, much better than he did upon his first appearance on the Report during which I cringed and winced quite a bit. Of course, he and Colbert seemed to have rehearsed much of the interview, which might have helped account for that, but I didn't cringe or wince once.

Thinking about Quesada as media personality—how come Dan DiDido's never on the Report or Howard Stern?—it occurred to me that as much as he tries to channel Stan Lee's old huckster persona, it never quite feels right. That is, seeing him in public as the face of Marvel Comics still seems off, as opposed to seeing Stan as the public face of Marvel.

Stan seemed like an eccentric uncle, whereas Quesada often seems like a smarmy older brother, and I'm not certain of why that is (Maybe just that Lee's old enough to be my grandfather, whereas Quesada and I are much closer in age?).

I think part of it might just be that Lee is a more strking visual persona. He has a "look" and a sound all his own. The two-tone hair, the shaded-glasses, the moustache—Lee is designed into a character. Quesada's just a guy with a haircut that makes me think he's a jerk. Maybe he should cultivate some unique physical attributes, in the hopes of acheiving a sort of iconic visual look some day.

I'm thinking a huge, bushy beard.