Swamps and Victims

Reading lots of comics, watching a lengthy documentary, reading a quarterly journal and a children's book and starting a long nonfiction book.

Comics Updates

The comics and cartoons I am reading:

• The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family, created by Matt Groening, edited by Ray Richmond. This is a reference book covering the first eight seasons of The Simpsons. I used to read this book all the time as a kid and am currently re-reading every word just because I want the title recorded on my complete reading list. (And because I love The Simpsons.) The last thing I read in this book is a bumper section in between the seventh and eighth seasons listing all of the dubious products Krusty the Clown merchandised during the first eight years of the program.

• The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Ominous Omnibus Volume 3: Fiendish Fables of Devilish Delicacies, written, drawn, colored, lettered and edited by many luminaries of the comics, television and art worlds. Last story I read was a so-so submission scripted by Thomas Lennon and penciled by Tone Rodriguez called “The Elixir.” But the one before that is an ingenious and deservedly well-remembered Treehouse of Horror vignette written and drawn by the renowned artist and zinester Ben Jones entitled “Boo-tleg,” in which characters throughout Springfield gradually get replaced Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style by bootleg versions of themselves. “Boo-tleg” finds Jones riffing on the influence The Simpsons had on his own creative style and on the philosophical and cultural implications of the global The Simpsons bootlegging industry. Subversion on subversion on subversion. It’s also just a very funny and silly Treehouse of Horror story.

• I finished re-reading Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book One, written by Alan Moore with art by Stephen Bissette, John Totleben, Dan Day and Rick Veitch, colored by Tatjana Wood and lettered by John Costanza and Todd Klein. Series co-creator Len Wein wrote the introduction for this volume and someone named Ramsey Campbell wrote the foreword. Moore’s reinvention of Swamp Thing ingeniously retcons the character’s origin story and establishes a whole new set of narrative possibilities, while Bissette and Totleben find their footing as the primary visual interpreters of Moore’s trippy concepts.

• I re-read Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book Two (written by Moore and Len Wein with art by Bissette, Totleben, Shawn McManus, Veitch, Alfredo Alcala, Ron Randall and Berni [sic] Wrightson, colored by Wood and lettered by Costanza) in one go entirely within the grounds of the San Francisco Botanical Garden. (Reading Saga of the Swamp Thing among the plants, you see.) This volume includes the issue penciled by McManus in which Moore interweaves the sage of the Swamp Thing with the swamp-dwelling cartoon characters from Walt Kelly’s classic American newspaper comic strip Pogo, positing the Pogo characters as interstellar wanderers who speak in Moore’s faultlessly clever mash-up of science fiction hyperbole and Pogo patois. This might be the finest single issue of a superhero comic that I’ve ever read. Moore’s contemprary Neil Gaiman, whose work I have never gotten around to reading, wrote the introduction to this book.

• I re-read Saga of the Swamp Thing: Book Three (written by Moore with art by Bissette, Totleben, Stan Woch, Veitch, Alcala and Randall, colored by Wood, lettered by Costanza) in one go entirely within the grounds of San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden, often sitting near swamp-like ponds from which I could have envisioned Swamp Thing emerging. This volume largely deals with Swamp Thing getting onto an even footing with his new mentor/bête noire John Constantine, marking Constantine’s first appearance in comics. (In the book he looks like Sting, not Keanu Reeves.) Bissette, my former art teacher and an all-around great guy, wrote a spirited introduction for this volume. Shall I read the fourth book in this series inside of the Conservatory of Flowers?

• The third volume of The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson. Reading a few of these each day. Last strip I read is the one from July 19, 1990, in which Larson does a meta-gag about “How to draw cartoons.” Something at which I require no further instruction, given my sophisticated control of the form:

Film Selection: Bearing Witness

I have been intending to take pressure off of myself to watch feature films. Been meaning to get into more experimental, animated and/or silent short films.

So, instead of doing what I want, I watched a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Holocaust, the legendary 1985 film Shoah by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. Essential viewing, especially today, even if you don’t feel like it. Firsthand testimony from survivors, perpetrators and reluctant but complaisant go-alongs at the death camps and the Warsaw Ghetto.

Lanzmann used a contemplative, roaming, talking-head-vérité documentary style with no archival footage, no non-diegetic music and lots of blunt interviews with historical eyewitnesses. These conversations oscillate between ones gathered in comfortably seated indoor locations and many in the field (for example interviewing a Treblinka survivor and gas chamber witness while the fellow absently works cutting hair in an Israeli barbershop). Lanzmann and crew in several cases even used hidden recording techniques to obtain information from former Nazis who observed or participated in the mass killings. These all-too-human ghouls seem at times to bubble with subdued pride or smirking rationalization for their atrocities.

This leads me to want to say something about Lanzmann having a feel for ideas lurking just beneath the surface, and in some cases forcing his suggestions through editing, for example in a striking sequence where he juxtaposes the audio from an account of preparations for a camp escape with a contemporaneously-captured image of some rabbits inching towards the fence of the same camp. But I think the subject matter and Lanzmann’s approach to it are too profound and unnerving and I’m not sure I can put what I have to say about it into words that don’t seem vulgar.

Shoah is a complex text. I’m still processing it. And there are parts of it I wish to watch again. I’m relieved I took the trouble to watch the whole thing at least once. Disconcerting, maddening and profoundly saddening, as is anything genuine on this subject. Lanzmann shot a lot of footage, including many hours of interviews, that never made it into the finished film but are included as bonus material on the DVD I got from the library. I may dig into those as well.

Tangentially Related Literary Update

I read Sapir: Ideas for a Thriving Jewish Future: The Issue on Activism, Volume Seventeen, Spring 2025, edited by Bret Stephens with articles by various authors. I got a free subscription to this on a recommendation from Dan Senor’s podcast Call Me Back.

I also read Skeletown: Hola. ¡Adiós! by Rhode Montijo, after previously stumbling across Montijo’s work and loving it.

I had previously stated an interest in reading Benny Morris’s book 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War and Michael Oren’s book Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.

Instead I’ve begun reading Morris’s 2001 book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. I think it will be more useful to read something more expansive and with a wider scope, and I can always read those other two books if I want a fine-grained look at the military and political history of the 1948 and 1967 wars.

Morris is famous for a combination of distinguished excellence in scholarship, talent as a writer and fidelity to facts, regardless of whatever uncomfortable conclusions they lead to. Consequently he manages to piss off lots of people on all “sides” of these debates on such a contentious set of issues, mainly the type who want or need to believe that any one group of people or set of interested parties are always only righteous or are always only victims. I’m already learning a lot and having some concepts challenged or reframed, others strengthened or affirmed. The title, and a chilling epigraph taken from an infamous Auden poem about the onset of World War II, set a tone for the history that has already been elucidated from the portion I’ve read so far: conflicted groups with seemingly irreconcilable interests can have equally compelling reasons for why they do what they do (or don’t do) to one another and to themselves. (And we’re only up to 1907 in my reading.) This is a corner of history that has had generated so much smoke and heat without having nearly enough light cast back on it, and Morris is respected as a historian who from what I’ve read so far does a rigorous but readable job at unearthing, compiling and explaining well-sourced historical facts.

It’s a long and dense book. I do want to get through it. I think as I did with Chernow’s book on Grant, the longest history book I’ve ever read, I should set a daily page-count for Morris’s book. I still want to get into those Dostoevsky and Homer books this year. And some snappier things too, like possibly getting more into Chesterton.