Crickets and Carnage

I finish reading a comics collection, watching a picture, reading a graphic novel and reading a nonfiction book.

These dog days feel like a season of transition. Leaving certain things behind and working a few new angles. I was waiting to write this installment until I was done with the comics collection, movie, graphic novel AND prose book on hand and now I am. I also want to get this newsletter out before I start anything else in any of those categories. Rack ‘em up and break.

First, I finished the Bill Amend collection I’ve been reading, FoxTrot: Assembled with Care. As I’ve noted before, Amend’s gag-writing style was stale by this point but his drawing and design skills were sharp and I found the risks he was taking with the Sunday strips to be the most interesting part of this collection. There’s one I really liked near the end of the book where the Fox family are waiting at the end of a looooong airport line. Amend divides the allotted space into three tiers and draws out the entire length of the line as a crude pictographic tapestry; if you skim over it without examining the individual characters waiting ahead of the Fox five you might miss that the queue includes Dilbert, Frankenstein’s monster and C-3PO and R2-D2. This typifies where FoxTrot was as a strip in these middle years: the eye-rolling punchlines are afterthoughts that are reverse-engineered to give Amend interesting visual concepts to express with his experimental design choices.

I also watched the 2023 picture Creed III. I didn’t know until the credits rolled that it was directed by the franchise star Michael B. Jordan, which might be one of the main choices that made this movie into a bit of a stumble for what has been a very solidly entertaining series. But then to say that Creed III isn’t nearly as good as Creed or Creed II is to say that it is merely a reasonably good film instead of a very good one.

Some of what was so admirable about those first two pictures is still evident here: it’s just hard not to have fun with movies that are this lovingly and sensibly made. If you didn’t speak a word of English you could watch Creed III without subtitles and still pretty much follow everything that was happening, and I mean that as a compliment to the franchise’s mature, accessible, fluent aesthetic language. And perhaps most importantly for a boxing movie, Jordan reuses the visual technique developed by his regular collaborator Ryan Coogler when Coogler directed the first Creed picture: fashioning the camera as if it were a third presence in the ring, ducking and weaving and pivoting intimately with the two gladiators, giving us a sense not that we are in the stands looking in but are caged in the ring with our man Adonis Creed as he battles it out with his antagonist.

That antagonist is a character named Damian who used to mentor an adolescent Creed in the art of boxing before going away to do years of prison time for an incident that was partly Creed’s fault. Damian is played pretty well by an actor named Jonathan Majors, but Michael B. Jordan is so captivating and practiced as Creed and Tessa Thompson so poised and alert as Creed’s wife Bianca that it is difficult for Majors as Damian to convey a sense of menace for the viewer; he finally comes off as more sleazy and annoying than threatening. Anyway the arc is that the newly-released Damian at first comes on like an old friend, but as Creed admits to himself and Bianca that he shares some of the responsibility for Damian’s fate it becomes apparent that in Damian Creed is really confronting the demons of his past. Damian reveals himself to be gunning for Creed’s title and reputation and so becomes an in-ring surrogate for Creed to box an unflattering version of himself, something his mentor Rocky challenged him to do back in the first film by shadowboxing into a mirror.

Sylvester Stallone’s famous Rocky character is entirely absent from Creed III and this is another notable problem for the film. Having come up with the Rocky parent franchise he still gets a producer credit on Creed III but leaving Rocky Balboa out of what is probably the concluding chapter of Creed’s life is a disappointment. One also has to imagine that simply having the gifted and experienced actor/filmmaker Stallone on set as an advisor to novice-director Jordan would have been as beneficial to the installment overall as Rocky’s tutelage was to Creed in the previous two.

The third act of Creed III is rushed and miscalculates by going mildly artsy and symbolic during the climactic fight sequence. This doesn’t come close to squandering the good will that Jordan, Stallone, Thompson, Coogler et al have amassed during this very good series of films. Creed III is missing a fully satisfying ending but is still a well-filmed, solidly-acted and decently entertaining couple of hours at the movies. It’s just a mild drag as a concluding note for the character of Adonis Creed (if that is in fact what it is, and I certainly hope at this point they back off on making more of these pictures).

The graphic novel I finished was the recent Blood of the Virgin by Sammy Harkham. Some of the separate chapters of this sprawling tale were originally published as semi-discrete stories in Harkham’s comic book Crickets and his comics anthology Kramers Ergot. As the text on the dust jacket flap notes, Blood of the Virgin “explores the intersection of twentieth-century America, parenthood, sex, the immigrant experience, the dawn of early Hollywood, and, shockingly, the Holocaust.” It also contains diverting ruminations on film editing as craft, the easygoing permissiveness of Los Angeles in the Seventies and some of the contrasts in culture (like Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewry) and nationality (like American and Kiwi) that were catalyzed in that particularly strange time and place. There’s also the arresting image of a disaffected young mother, home alone with her infant son, letting him scream with hunger from another room while she masturbates to the sound. It’s a bizarre, unsettling and beautifully-illustrated sequence that exemplifies much of what’s great about Blood of the Virgin. There’s also an interesting penultimate sequence where the protagonist Seymour gets a talking-to from a down-and-out industry elder who advises him to stop giving a shit about what the image-obsessed B-movie business thinks about him or his talents. I’d hazard a guess that this is partly Harkham addressing himself as a creative as well.

I could go on about lots of other details because Blood of the Virgin is quite a hefty project but I don’t feel like it. Really the only other thing I want to mention is that the elegantly restrained and sweetly childlike style Harkham uses to depict his characters gave me the odd idea that this story is almost kinda about what the neurotic and angst-laden children of the Peanuts gang of the Fifties might have been like if they had aged into boozing, self-conflicted twenty-somethings in the Seventies. The decade-math checks out and you can clearly see the classic-era Charles Schulz style as a direct influence on Harkham’s way of drawing human faces — all of which I observed before a supporting character nicknamed “Snoopy” became a key part of one of the longer chapters in Blood of the Virgin.

The prose piece I read was the 2022 book Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O'Hagan. It’s a transcribed collection of a series of conversations the famous and talented Australian musician and songwriter Cave had with the Irish journalist O’Hagan. I really like Nick Cave’s music but this book drags and is really only for serious enthusiasts, of which I may not have been quite a serious or enthusiastic enough exemplar. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine — it’s profound, it’s congenial, it’s a spirited meditation on the dispiriting times through which we’re all living (to which the “Carnage” partly refers), it has plenty of things to say about love and death and remorse and forgiveness and religion and art. “I think anyone who says they don’t have any regrets is simply living an unconsidered life. Not only that but by doing so they are denying themselves the obvious benefits of self-forgiveness,” says Cave, and I happen to think he’s precisely right.

He’s even occasionally quite funny. All the Nick Cave stuff. It just took me what felt like a surprisingly long time to get through. I might squeeze in something else short but then I’m getting back into fiction in a serious way, targeting an imposingly lengthy classic of world literature. Kinda like when I read Anna Karenina, but think different author/country/century. More in due course.