KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art

by Bruce Grenville, Editor
University of California Press, Berkeley CA USA, 2008
276 pp., illus. 200 col. Paper,$34.95, £19.95
ISBN: 978-0-520-25784-9.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan

mosher@svsu.edu

This is a fun book, an informative catalog of an art exhibition that must’ve been rich and exciting to experience. The googley-eyed dude on the cover (from a Dan Clowes comic) catches the eye of all visitors to my office when the book sits on the corner of the desk. KRAZY! rewards anyone who picks it up and opens it at random with cool visuals in context.

The book’s editor, Bruce Grenville, is Senior Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery and coordinating curator for the KRAZY! exhibit held there in 2007. He wisely chose six co-curators and picked their brains to make choices within each medium and provide informed commentary. Grenville’s team included Art Spiegelman and Seth (for Comics), Tim Johnson (Animated Cartoons), Kiyoshi Kusumi and Toshiya Ueno (Anime and Manga), and Will Wright (Video Games). The seven media or genres—anime and manga are Japanese animated cartoons and comics, respectively—are so clearly interrelated, it’s a bit of a surprise that curators haven’t assembled numerous shows like this one. In the last section, Grenville himself makes choices and writes about contemporary fine artists who are influenced by the above media.

Art Spiegelman and Seth chose both comics and graphic novels, the “long and short” of that narrative medium. Through the1920s into the 1940s, George Herriman created “Krazy Kat”, in what Spiegelman calls a “perfectly coherent little universe”. In the 1950s Harvey Kurtzmann mastered the comic book form, in both the war comics he drew and the humor comic called MAD he invented and scripted, soon leaving after its transformation into a humor magazine. Representatives of long-form projects include Milt Gross, Philip Guston (odd putting him here rather than visual art, but that’s their prerogative), Daniel Clowes, Shawn Tan and Kim Dietch. There’s clearly a preference for autobiographical work, with the inclusion of Justin Green, Linda Barry, Chris Ware, plus Spiegelman and Seth themselves.

Besides Lotte Reininger’s 1926 “Sinbad the Sailor” and Bruce Sharpsteen’s Disney animation team on “Dumbo”, Tim Johnson’s choices of Animation include Windsor McKay’s hand-drawn “Gertrude the Dinosaur”. McKay certainly deserves recognition, and was probably considered by Spiegelman and Seth for his newspaper comics “Little Nemo in Slumberland” and “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend,” too. Will Wright guides us through games, beginning with Toru Iwatami’s Pac-Man (1980) and Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario World (1990). The three-dimensional environments of Quake by Id Software and the Grand Theft Auto series from Rockstar Games are included, as well as Wright’s own projects The Sims and Spore, a social environment and a critter-building biophysical one.

Japanese Anime is presented in workmanlike, methodical descriptions by Kiyoshi Kusumi and Toshiya Ueno. In the early 1980s, Ichiro Itano’s mecha (an aerial squadron of spaceships and transformer robots) distinguished “SuperDimension Fortress Macross”. Resistance fighters on motorcycles sped through the streets of Neo-Tokyo in Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 “Akira”, and “Patlabor 2” by Mamuro Oshii was skeptical of war after the 1990-91 one in the Persian Gulf. Others who are cited here are anime soundtrack composer Yoko Kanno, untraditional animator Masaaki Yuasa, and Satoshi Kon, whose 2006 “Paprika” was inspired by the psychoanalytic and symbolic novels of Yasutaka Tsutsui. Among the Games, this reviewer was most impressed by Shigeru Miyamoto’s “The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Walker” (2002), which combined the sensibility of anime and manga with cel shading that achieved a hand-drawn and satisfying less three-dimensional look.

The Manga section was also selected and annotated by Kusimi and Ueno. We see examples of Hisashi Eguchi J-Pop “nonsense” style, and Mamuro Nagano’s robot knights. Taiyo Matsumoto “Black and White” tale of orphan twins alludes to Taoism, says Kusimi. “Afro Samurai”, a tale of futuristic feudal Japan that Takashi Ozazaki created from 1994 to 2008, was turned into a cartoon voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. The “New Engineering” comic by Yuichi Yokoyama is compared by Kusumi to Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” land sculpture in their muteness. The multitalented Yokoyama creates short comics, works as an illustrator doing graphics for band Sunny Day Service, paints newspaper ad-inspired Pop paintings, and records tracks as a musician influenced by Brian Eno.

Moyoco Anno creates shojo (girls’) manga like “Sakuran”, the story of courtesans in the red-light district of old Edo, reminiscent of the subject matter of the printmaker Utamaro. The comics of Junko Mizuno plays within the Lolita subculture My Little Pony cute and Punk, pill popping mainlining vixens, cute dead cat tattoos and vibrators, a robot maid serving her in a parody of Manet’s “Olympia”, a confection served up with a saviness comparable to the Detroit painter Niagara (www.niagaradetroit.com). How many collectors have lusted (literally) after Mizuno ‘s “Kaoiri the Nurse” sculpture?

Visual Art that one would find in a museum or gallery setting is curated and described by Bruce Grenville. He begins with discussion of commercial art influences on 1960s Pop, like Roy Lichtenstein paintings and Claes Oldenburg sculpture. Raymond Pettibon’s ink drawings have a stiff, amateur look (he draws awful hands) yet are oddly compelling. Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno create anime-inspired works incorporating multiple media. Christian Marclay, who also constructs mammoth musical instruments, is represented with “Onomatopoeia”, a 2006 collage in which a comic book’s sound balloons surround a rip in center evocative of Jackson Pollock’s painting “The Deep”. Marcel Broodthaers is represented with his 1973-74 slide show “Ombres Chinoises” with coded Chinese motifs, while Cao Fei’s photos of “Cosplayers” from 2004 depict costumed frolic in Guanzhou port city, which Grenville describes as situational communities of affect and desire.

It’s a bit surprising there are no British comics-influenced artists of the Pop era included in the show, no Eduardo Paolozzi, Duggie Fields, Patrick Caulfield or today’s Julian Opie. Or what of the grand sprawling, shaggy comics-styled works of Oyvind Fahlstrom? Fahlstrom is woefully underappreciated now as during his lifetime. Mike Kelley, who also might have been included here, once wrote how Fahlstrom was neglected by art school faculty when he arrived to speak at University of Michigan.

From Japan, Chiho Aoshima creates wide digital wall murals, prints and shojo manga-influenced screens, very smart, decorative and elegant. Then there’s Mr., a disturbed guy with artwork akin to the “Lollicom” (Lolitia comics) of Japan that feature prepubescent girls. For years the panty-glimpse has been a staple in boys’ manga, and one might also locate Mr.’s sexuality in the arena of the obsession with voluptuous women in the comics of Robert Crumb, who is an unspoken presence lurking behind the curtains of the Comics part of the show.

This reviewer has one complaint about the book KRAZY!. A movie or good Pop song is supposed to leave you wanting more, but not a university press book. A consumer can accept limitations on time-based media: political discussion TV show “The McLaughlin Group” is probably a rousing hour of argument that we then see edited into half an hour. In the book KRAZY!, the text is well redacted and supplies salient information on each contributor. Yet I wish the full sprawling conversations, such as between Spiegelman and Seth that we know took place from the fine fragments we’re given, were published in the book’s appendix or on the publisher’s website.