Animals and Murderers

Newspaper comics, five children's books, illuminated poetry, epic poetry and my first viewing of a noir classic.

Comics Chorale

Still working my way through Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume Four. Jansson structures her Moomin stories in languid, discursive sections with individualized titles. “Moomin and the Comet” is a sophisticated one that evinces an ambience of genuine eeriness and dread, forcing the denizens of Moominvalley to reckon with eschatological mortality and let themselves go insane or euphoric to greater or lesser extents. I wonder if this was a direct or indirect cartoon antecedent for one of the best episodes from one of the best seasons of The Simpsons “Bart’s Comet” in which Springfield is confronted with the same threat of death from above and approximately the same shrugging deus ex machina resolution as Moominvalley in “Moomin and the Comet.”

Highlights include a sequence in which Moomin, his girlfriend Snorkmaiden and their friend My wander a dried-out sea floor that has been emptied by an impending tidal wave and a single bravura daily strip that climaxes the story’s action when “the comet and the tidal wave strike simultaneously.” Jansson’s drawing chops fully unshackle the yearnings of her whimsical and meandering imagination; some of her best cartooning work is on offer at this point in the development of Moomin.

Literature Litany

Per previous entry, I took the trouble to re-read Dr. Seuss's Book of Animals just so I could recall what it is. Turns out it’s a Dr. Seuss book about animals. While I was at the library I plucked from the shelves two other Seuss titles, The Shape of Me and Other Stuff, an exercise in which the good Dr. confines himself to drawing every character and object in black silhouette, and Come Over to My House, written by Seuss in 1966 and realized as an illustrated book in 2016 by Katie Kath, who pleasingly interprets his words entirely in her own style and doesn’t fall into the trap of trying to imitate her master predecessor. The results are harmless, banal, feel-good fun.

I also finished, FINISHED reading The Aeneid of Virgil: A verse translation by Rolfe Humphries, which I do not wish to discuss at excessive length, having written about it over the last three entries. I will say that it’s great even though (and perhaps because) it ends on something of an abrupt note, which Humphries explains in his notes happened because Virgil got sick and died while he still had several years’ worth of work he wanted to do on The Aeneid.

This abrupt note is the final combat between Aeneas and his rival Turnus, which is to finally determine the outcome of the war for the territory that will become Rome on which Aeneas’s Trojans have finally washed up. While war breaks out along several intersecting dramatic axes, Aeneas sets about forming alliances with other local tribes in order to subdue, make peace with and eventually intermarry with the indigenous “Latins,” a union which in Virgil’s fictional schema will give rise to the imperial Roman society of his own time. The duel between Aeneas and Turnus finally settles this war and resolves the conflict between the enemy coalitions.

It’s fitting and satisfying that the book closes on a note of deeply personal and quietly desperate hand-to-hand combat, since most of the back half of The Aeneid in which the war is described comprises a marvelously bloody cavalcade of scenes of brutal large-scale violence of which Virgil is an admirably descriptive and inventive chronicler. Spears, arrows, swords, hooves and wheels crush and pierce all parts of men, women and horses. Faces are spattered with “warm brains,” heads cut in half, appendages severed, chariots commandeered and breasts exposed — well, one anyway, that of the fearsome warrior-maid and Turnus’s ally Camilla, the selfsame breast soon thereafter being penetrated by the spear that permanently neutralizes this fascinating personage who sorely deserves her own spin-off epic. During a magisterial siege sequence there’s also a battle-tower that gets set ablaze and comes crashing down upon those inside it who are “pierced through and through by shafts of their own making, their chests transfixed by jagged broken timbers.”

Stuff like that, positively intoxicating fictional violence. You just can’t beat the old-timers for blood ‘n guts. Georgics notwithstanding, I’m gratified to close the book on Virgil FOR NOW and to get on to some other stuff, including soon returning to re-reading the early works of James Ellroy.

Roulette

This entry’s three randomly-selected items from the complete list of all books I’ve read since early 2011.

Man Gave Names to All the Animals by Bob Dylan, illustrated by Jim Arnosky, read in 2019. Dylan, no more of a sage, songsmith, poet or prophet than he is clever businessman and enterprising entrepreneur, has a line of children’s books where illustrators bring visual life to his songs. This endeavor required absolutely zero effort on Dylan’s part because the songs that gave rise to these books were all finalized decades ago and he presumably didn’t have to do anything except sign off on the project, approve of the chosen illustrators (if that, which I doubt) and wait for the money to show up. It’s good business sense and the resulting books, of which I read four others around the same time as Man Gave Names to All the Animals, are quite good just on their own merits as straightforward children’s literature.

It’s interesting to observe though that none of the tunes that gave rise to these five good books are among the greatest (or worst) of Dylan’s career. They’re solid, folksy, hummable, middle-of-the-road Dylan, the kind of stuff he can churn out whenever he wants, whether or not the muse has kicked in the doorway of his soul and kindled his heart with inspiration on any particular occasion. His very best stuff, which his most recent record of new material demonstrates he can still put out, would be far too complicated, allusive and image-rich to be interpreted in the children’s book format. You would need something closer to a graphic novel, which leads me tidily to the next random drawing from my complete reading list:

Songs of Innocence: Color Facsimile of the First Edition with 31 Color Plates by William Blake, read in 2021. There very likely never would have been a Dylan if there hadn’t been a Blake first. Blake, like Dylan after him, was famous for being a profoundly good lyricist who was often miles ahead of his contemporaries and cursed to wait for the culture to catch up with him. And like Dylan Blake was also a drawer, artisan and crafstman. You could even look at Blake as a cartoonist, for example in his books Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience where he made colorful hand-printed illuminated manuscripts of his own poetry collections. In 2021 I found copies of both in a Little Free Library and read them back to back.

Crash! The Cat by David McPhail, read in 2016. My notes record that this is a children’s book but I have no memory of what specifically it is, where I found it or for what particular reason I read it. Might have been something I read with my learner during my volunteer work as an adult literacy tutor or something I read for fun on my own. We will never know.

Picture Psalm

I watched Double Indemnity from 1944, a very good and thematically pitch-black noir picture directed by Billy Wilder and written by Wilder and the legendary if overrated detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler. This movie has some cracklingly whipsmart back-and-forth dialogue and great performances from the three leads Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson, none of whom I can remember ever having watched perform before and am glad to have now seen ply their sophisticated craft on camera.

Wilder and his collaborators pull off a neat trick here: telling you in the opening five minutes of the picture that the protagonist is a murderer and that he is about to die, then spending the flashback story that comprises the bulk of the movie making you like him in spite of the former and hope for his success in forgetful disregard of the latter. I’m sure this gets taught in many a screenwriting class and rightly so, for the structure, dialogue and moral stakes are exquisitely crafted, even if the third act loses just a bit of the delicious adrenaline and thrilling momentum of the first two. Double Indemnity was recommended to me by an artist pal I’ve been hanging out and making comics with who knows my taste in old-timey Golden Age Hollywood pictures and he was right — this is a good one, far superior to the negligible Chandler-associated The Big Sleep which was released two years later.