Jens Jakobsson: Alexanders arvtagare ("Alexander's heirs")

Well, we all know that Alexander the Great conquered a huge truckload of land to practically no point at all since he died shortly afterwards, but what happened then? Molecular biologist Jens Jakobsson has the answers, and offers them in Alexanders arvtagare. (No, the fact that he's a molecular biologist has nothing to do with the popular history book he's written; I just thought it was kinda cool.)

Basically, what happened when Alexander died was what could be expected – civil war broke out and the huge empire was split up between his generals. Since he'd defeated some of the strongest states there were at the time, it's no surprise that some of the pieces of his crumbling empire would also become quite strong players – like Ptolemaic Egypt, or the main subject of Jakobsson's book, the Seleucid Empire.

Jakobsson offers a recap of the events and wars leading to the splitting up of Alexander's empire between the Diadochi, and then concentrates on the successful Seleucus (who carved a nice big piece for himself) and his heirs. Seleucus appears to have been an intelligent man, who ruled reasonably well by the standards of the day and didn't go overboard with the killing of opponents, or defeated enemy armies. The huge and varied empire he created for himself was kept under control by a well organized bureaucracy, a huge standing army, and a network of cities – many of them founded by Seleucus. In this, he appears to have taken the lead of the Persians, who had ruled large chunks of his empire before. Still, the strong centrifugal forces of such a disparate empire meant that a lot of its rulers' time, energy and resources would be spent on simply keeping it together, and in the end, that would prove to be an impossible task. Partly this was because of the forces inherent in the empire, partly outside pressures (like the nascent Roman empire, which would turn out to be the victor in the end – only to eventually fall apart itself) and to a large extent, internal strife within the ruling class. That's something that's struck me again and again when reading about all these powerful ancient and medieval civilizations and states – if you stand united, you often seem to have a decent to good chance of standing up to even rather powerful adversaries, but if not, then you're pretty much screwed.

Anyway, Jakobsson depicts the political history of the Seleucid Empire (with the occasional gaps where the sources are unclear or simply non-existing), from Seleucus I, who was murdered in 281 BC, when he was about to conquer Macedonia and Thrace, and through the ebbs and resurgences of the empire until its final remains were defeated by the Roman general Pompey in 63 BC. He also makes excursions into the history of its neighbors – including kingdoms breaking out of the empire, like Bactria (on which he has done some research of his own) and the Maccabees. It's at times impressive how rulers managed to hold the empire together in the face of outside dangers, and at other times depressing how they wasted resources, married their sisters, fought with their mothers and generally made ordinary people's lives a lot harder than they should have been.

Basically, Jakobsson eventually concludes, the empire was simply too disparate and its Greek rulers too much of a foreign elite for it to last – and most importantly, its constant civil wars eroded both the empire's resources and the populations confidence in and respect for their rulers. To this can be added that the Romans developed military tactics  and a level of organization that made the Greek phalanx obsolete, and that the Seleucid capital was a tad too vulnerable, placed at the Western edge of the empire instead of in a protected center. End result: No more Seleucid Empire.

So is this a book worth reading? Absolutely. I mean, its size alone makes the Seleucid Empire worth knowing about, and its at times sorry history also has something to teach us about how to govern, and how not to govern. That said, this is not a perfect book, partly due to circumstances beyond the author's control.

The main problem with the book is that it is, frankly, a bit of a mess. That's not Jakobsson's fault, though. Rather, it's the Seleucids'; there are so many of them, they fight constantly (and almost without exceptions die in strife rather than of old age), and keep losing and adding provinces, allies and enemies to their empire. So this is not a book that gives you a simple, easy-to-remember overview of the history of the Seleucid Empire, mainly because there isn't one to be had; prepare to read with care. Also, the publisher should have done one final proofreading of the book; there are plenty of small errors dispersed throughout the book that don't have any major impact on the quality of the narrative, but which seem a bit unnecessary.

Finally, the emphasis on political history leaves out a lot of stuff that might have made this an easier read; culture, philosophy, daily life and such, but the book is already at 200+ pages. Any more than the brief cultural overview in the introductory chapter would probably have made it overlong, even though Jakobsson writes an easy-going prose that makes this less of a hard slog than it might otherwise have been. Perhaps there will eventually be a follow-up book? I'd read it.

Recommended – albeit with the caveats already mentioned. You want the brief, easy-to-read version, you might want to start with Wikipedia.


Another review (in Swedish) of Jakobsson's book here.

Book: Sergel

Finished the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts' book "Sergel", about the Swedish 1700s sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel. Born 1740, Sergel started out working in his father's embroidery shop, showed artistic talent and received training in drawing by Jean Eric Rehn and then sculpting training from Adrien Masreliez and Pierre Hubert L'Archevêque, both of them French and recruited to work on the Swedish royal palace being built in Stockholm – and to train a generation of Swedish artists and sculptors. L'Archeveque brought Sergel with him to Paris for six months, during which time Sergel met and was inspired by neoclassicist sculptor Edme Bouchardon and retired soldier, amateur etcher and conoisseur Comte de Caylus.

Sergel brought drawings by Bouchardon with him home to Sweden and worked hard at acquiring the French master's elegant draughtsmanship, developing exquisite technique. Recognized as an impressive talent, at 27 he received a stipend to go to Rome to study the classical originals. This initially led to a "culture shock" for a Swede who hadn't really been party to this European tradition before. So he started drawing the antique sculptures, moving on to drawing paintings and eventually sculpture. And so, after a couple of years, he starts sculpting, which leads to international recognition. However, as most of his creations ended up in comparatively isolated Sweden, they haven't really entered the world art history canon. 


Eating too much rendered Sergel rather fat during his stay in Rome, and he also developed gout and depression when his future started to seem uncertain after rumors that the Swedish government might revoke his stipend. Still, he produced some impressive works, developed a reputation and received international interest. In the end, his old teacher L'Archeveque returned to France in ill health, and Sergel returned to Sweden to take his place as the royal sculptor. He largely didn't get to do the monumental statuary he was hoping for, which led to more melancholy, but was instead deluged with commissions for portrait busts of the royal family and Swedish nobility, as well as doing various decorative stuff for the king. Still, he held Gustav III in the highest esteem, and was justly celebrated for his skills.

Self-portrait.

He died in 1814. If you're ever in Stockholm, it's not a bad idea to seek out some of his works, for example the altarpiece in Adolf Fredrik's Church. 

This book is, if I haven't misunderstood it entirely, the catalogue for a large Sergel exhibit at the National Museum. It concentrates a bit too much on his various sketches and caricatures for my taste, good as they are – I'm not against caricatures per se, far from it but I'm a huge fan of beautiful draughtsmanship, so I would have liked to see a bit more of that.

(The ink line in this and a number of other of other drawings reminds me of  Swedish artist and
Emil of Lönneberga illustrator Björn Berg. I don't know if anybody agrees with me, but it still does.)

On the other hand, just like I often find nicely rendered sketches more interesting than the finished inked comics art and finished paintings, I find some of of his terra cotta statuary sketches more interesting than the finished, smoother marble sculptures.

Anyway, anything that shows off great art is A-OK in my book, and Sergel is well worth anybody's time, even though I think the biographical narrative could have gotten a little bit more space – though it is an exhibition catalogue, and I understand that the narrative structure is affected by that. Anyway, recommended.

Ira Katznelson: When Affirmative Action Was White

This is a book for people with low blood pressure, because if reading it doesn't get you riled up, I don't know what...

Here's the story, in brief:


In the early 1900s, the American South was really, really poor, and the poorest people there were the blacks, to a large extent eking out an existence in poorly paid jobs as agricultural (to a large extent seasonal) workers or house servants. During the New Deal, the federal government did try to do something for the people who were suffering economic hardship, and a sort of coalition emerged where northern Democrats wanted to help working-class families and southern Democrats also wanted to help working-class families – just not black ones. Hence, the southern Democrats in Congress, who had tenure and lots of experience in political wheeling and dealing, thanks to having rather safe seats, thanks to the massive disenfranchisement of the South's black population, guided legislation through Congress that would get lots of federal money into their states, but keep federal bureaucrats – who might insist on rules being enforced fairly and equally for both blacks and whites – out of the actual administration of the aid. This was later repeated with the G.I. Bill, much to the detriment of black veterans. With administration of the bill largely decentralized to local white officials, bankers etc, they were largely screwed.


All sorts of dirty tricks were used. Unemployment benefits? Well, sure, you can get them… but you have to have had continuous employment to qualify. So you're a black agricultural laborer who only gets badly paid seasonal employment? Well, tough on you then. And besides, if they get unemployment benefits, they might not want to get back to back-breaking work for a pittance of a salary.


Social Security benefits? Well, sure, you can get them… unless, of course you're domestic help or work in agriculture, the two areas where blacks were hugely overrepresented.


Minimum wages? Well, fine… But not across racial lines down here in the South, where that would mean having to pay blacks much more than today – or, to quote Florida Rep. James Mark Wilcox:


“There has always been a difference in the wage scale of white and colored labor. So long as Florida people are permitted to handle the matter, the delicate and perplexing problem can be adjusted; but the Federal Government knows no color line and of necessity it cannot make any distinction between the races (...) You cannot put the Negro and the white man in the same basis and get away with it.”



Etc. The federal government and the northern Democrats went along to get something done, at least, and the South profited mightily from the inflow of capital – but the black population was seriously underrepresented among those who gained from this aid.


Unions were very important to non-Southern Democrats representing large industrial constituencies, and the South was willing to support their wishes for union and labor rights provided the statutes didn’t threaten Jim Crow. Southern incumbents traded their votes for the exclusion of farmworkers and maids. But as unionization threatened to fuel civil rights activism, they joined with northern Republicans to crack down on it with the Taft-Hadley Act, which helped stop unionization in the South. Instead, unions would concentrate on areas where they were already strong, and instead of fighting for a more advanced welfare state for all Americans, negotiate with employers to secure private pension and health insurance provisions for union members.


Like I said, this is a book to raise your blood pressure. But does it make the case for current affirmative action? I don't know, really. There are so many poor and generally underprivileged people in the USA today that perhaps you should just target programs according to income level or somesuch – but be prepared for the current Republican party to racialize the issue anyway, like for example Ronald Reagan did in his campaigning, talking about "welfare queens" and "young buck". As can be seen from some of the responses to Barack Obama being elected president, racism and race-baiting is still a powerful force that can be used for populist purposes if you don't have any policies to offer that actually make sense.


Highly recommended.


(Here's a review by somebody far more knowledgeable than I on these issues. And here is another one.)

Bryan Talbot: The Naked Artist. Comic Book Legends

Comics artist and writer Bryan Talbot (The Tale of One Bad Rat, among other things) has written a book compiling a huge load of gossip about comics biz people, mainly British comics creators and US. superhero creators. It's both anecdotes he's got first-hand knowledge about and those that are the stuff of legend, told and retold among the professional brotherhood. Some of them are a bit meh, some are absolutely brilliant, but most of them are at least entertaining, or even highly entertaining.

You'll learn what can happen at signings – especially if you bother Simon Bisley too much – and what happens it you foolishly offer British comics creators free drinks, and why it's in many cases probably better to just immensely enjoy reading the work of your favorite comics writer rather than actually palling around with him.

My favorite anecdote in this volume isn't all that funny, though. It has The Question artist Denys Cowan having made loads and loads of money selling art and doing sketches at a San Diego Comic Con, and deciding to pay off the hotel bill with some of that cash rather than carrying all of it around.

Having paid the bill, Cowan goes back to his room to pack up his bags. After a while, he hears an odd sound outside his room, so he opens the door to check it out – staring straight into the barrel of a Highway Patrolman's gun.

Denys Cowan is black, you see, so when he showed the hotel that he had a lot of cash, the conclusion they reached was: drug dealer. It took Cowan twenty minutes to convince the officer that his earnings were legit.

Anyway, the book also carries illustrations by by Hunt Emerson, whose Firkin the Cat and especially the excellent Lady Chatterley's Lover are highly recommended, and who's characteristically funny here as well. Recommended.

Horst Schröder: Framtiden i serierutor ("The future in comics panels")

I've previously reviewed Horst Schröder's book about the earliest U.S. newspaper comics, De första serierna (The earliest comic strips). This is the second volume in what was intended as a series of books on comics history, and which also became a series of books on comics history – but unfortunately only a series of two.

Schröder has a background in history of literature; his doctor's thesis was about American science fiction literature, so he has a solid knowledge base on this subject, and he starts off the book with an essay on the sci-fi genre. He then proceeds to present quite a bunch of sci-fi comics, according to the model established in the previous book: about five pages per strip, giving a short description and some analysis – often incorporating a political perspective – and some pictorial examples.

Schröder presents strips like Buck Rogers, Jeff Hawke and Valerian and Laureline, as well as works by creators like Basil Wolverton, Jack Kirby and George Metzger, and he does it well. He writes a crisp, lively prose (probably aided by some editorial assistance from fellow comics expert Göran Ribe), and is clearly knowledgeable about his subject. There are still remnants of a 1970s, somewhat naive leftism/Marxism in his analyses (the book is from 1981), but that's just about the only thing I can find to complain about. This book sets out to introduce a bunch of sci-fi comics to an interested public, and that's what it does – well. If you read Swedish and like comics, it's well worth your time, and it's a shame that it became the last book in what could have been an excellent series.

Recommended.

Paul Krugman: The Accidental Theorist

What is a public intellectual? According to Wikipedia, it is (roughly) an intellectual who takes important debate to the public.

(This is a pretty darn awful cover, if you ask me.)

I'd add a rider to that definition: the public intellectual needs to be doing so in an intelligent, elucidating manner. That rider eliminates quite the number of so-called "public intellectuals" who are merely propagandists (like most of the op-ed writes of the Weekly Standard, the National Review or the Wall Street Journal) or cranks either blowing up personal hang-ups to ridiculous proportions, or putting out a lot of garbage under the pretense that it's worthy of somebody's attention. (I'd nominate somebody like Jan Myrdal in this category, for – for example – going to China and being totally snookered by the Maoist dictatorship, and then propagating that vicious regime as some sort of "model" for the rest of the world.)

Paul Krugman is, to me, pretty close to the ideal of what a public intellectual should be. He is a prolific writer with not only a twice-weekly NYT column and a blog, but several books under his belt as well – some of them economics textbooks, some of them essays on current economic history – and a number of articles, in journals as well as aimed at the general public. The Accidental Theorist falls under the "collections of essays aimed at educating the general public" banner. In it, Prof. Krugman tells us, among other things, that

• No, losing jobs in one sector of the economy due to productivity growth doesn't mean that the whole economy is tanking; rather, other sectors will usually pick up the slack if you don't have policies that actively work against job creation. (This doesn't apply to the current crisis, where the job loss is in practically all sectors of the economy and not caused by increased productivity.)

• Programs that help the working poor is a Good Thing, and should be fought tooth and nail for.

• Fine phrases will unfortunately never overrule the reality that hard, realistic analysis describes. You have to base your policies on that analysis, not on your own wishful thinking. (This point was made in connection with French economic policy, but also got me thinking of the back-of-the-envelope calculation Prof. Krugman did of the stimulus the Obama administration was trying to get through Congress despite the united obstructionism of the Republicans and some unwilling Democrats as well as the demand loss that it was supposed to compensate for, and how he – from the numbers, mind you, not ideology – concluded that the stimulus was too small and wouldn't be enough to kick-start the economy. It did stop the bleeding – see, for example, here – but it wasn't enough. His prediction was validated by events, unlike the ideologically driven and/or just plain paid for "stimulus doesn't work, stimulus doesn't work"-chanting of bought-and-paid-for pundits like the ones at the Weekly Standard or the National Review.)

• No, the right-wing meme that tax cuts pay for themselves isn't true; nor was it when it was used by the Reagan administration to get the US started on its current, long-lasting huge deficits trajectory. (And no, the economic recovery under Reagan wasn't particularly awesome.)

• Right-wing propagandists like Richard Armey et al lie frequently, and shamelessly. Exposing those lies is pretty much a full-time job, since the lies – being useful to a rich and influential segment of society – return again and again; again, frequently being mouthed by bought-and-paid-for pundits (and so-called "scholars" of equally so-called "think tanks"). Yes, that applies to supply-side economics as well. Especially to supply-side economics.

• Globalization isn't ruining the world; the rich world has to accommodate to the fact that competition is increasing, but that can be done without crashing our economies or our socio-economic safety nets, and the many millions of people in the Third World whose standard of living improves if they can get relatively decent work and use trade to improve their living standards are better off than they would be if locked into the previous status quo.

That's pretty much half the book right there; the second half, you'll have to read all on your own. And you should. If you're a liberal, for affirmation and for getting the necessary arguments to stand up against strident left- and right-wingers. If you're a left- or right-winger, to get a different perspective from your own, and one that is very, very well argued.

Professor Krugman is indeed a gem of a public intellectual, writing clearly and understandably on important subjects. (Here is a recent example of him performing that important task yet again.) This book is warmly recommended, and I'll wind this down by quoting it directly:


"Particularly depressing for anyone who would like to believe in intellectual progress is the reappearance of decades- or even centuries-old fallacies, stated as if they were profound and novel insights – as if those who propound them have transcended conventional views, when in fact they have merely failed to understand them."


Another review of the book can be found here.

Modern Masters Vol. 3: Bruce Timm

Eric Nolen-Weathington's Modern Masters series features substantial interviews with great comics creators, which is something I always appreciate. (By "substantial", I mean that Nolen-Weathington gets into the details of what makes the creator tick, his influences and how he approaches his craft, but doesn't go into various theories about this or that more esoteric subject to show off or to make himself look "intellectual", something that put me off the early Comics Journal interviews.)

Anyway, this book highlights the career of animator and comics artist Bruce Timm, and does so very very well. Timm tells about his start in the animation business and his initially unsuccessful attempts to break into the comics industry, who his major influences as an artist were, and the learning process that would eventually lead him to some very successful projects – like the animated Batman, Superman and Justice League shows. That would have been enough to make this a reasonably interesting book, but elevating it to very nearly must-read status is the fact that he and Nolen-Weathington also discuss the creative process behind his work in detail, and that it is richly illustrated throughout by Timm's designs and storyboards. It then wraps up with 20+ pages of pinups in both color and black-and-white, but that is unfortunately the weakest part of the book. The pinup girls and the posing heroes don't stand out in such a manner as to become really interesting; you've seen it all before, and Timm's artistic talent isn't mainly in this territory IMO; while he certainly draws pretty (if cartoony) girls, they're usually not sufficiently erotic nor rendered beautifully enough to  merit the full-page treatment – even though he is very good with colors.

On the other hand, when presented in connection with the interview in the book and in a slightly smaller format, I often find his drawings quite beautiful. Timm presents himself in the book as storyteller first and foremost, and I would agree with that – his drawings work best in the context of a story.

Black Canary. Note how beautifully the he spots the blacks on her
sleeves to tell the story of both the creasing and the texture of the fabric.

In a special, shorter chapter, TImm enumerates his greatest influences among comics artists – Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, John Buscema, Wally Wood, Alex Toth, Frank Frazetta, Jim Steranko and Mike DeCarlo – which isn't really surprising when take a careful look at his art and his storytelling. From Kirby, for example, the staging and poses, from Kurtzman, the pacing of the storytelling, from Buscema muscle shapes and posing, from Wood shadows and lightplay, etc. I would have thought that there might be some Frank Robbins there as well, but nope – though Robbins is mentioned later on in the interview.

Timm's road into the animation and comics businesses is interesting, but it's when Nolen-Weathington turns the subject to the whys and hows of creating the various shows and comics Timm has produced, and goes into the details of some of particular episodes, that the book really shines. First of all because Timm himself is very forthcoming about what is done and the reasoning behind various choices, but also – credit where credit is due – because Nolen-Weathington knows the subject matter well and is able to engage Timm in a dialogue on it. I've noted that comics creators often appreciate it when they're interviewed by somebody who actually knows what he's talking about and can ask intelligent – sometimes even perhaps slightly provocative – questions. Nolen-Weathington falls in this category, and I doff my hat in his general direction.

Timm tells about the selection process to get the right lineup of Justice League members that can play off each other in the best fashion; how he starts out with pretty clichéd dialogue as more or less "placeholders" in a story, going over it towards the end to polish it up, retaining the general meaning but moving towards better dialogue, and how sometimes because of unforeseen time constraints, more of the clichés will remain in the story than intended; how him penciling a story a bit loosely – because a lot of what he does, he does in the inking process– and then handing it over to somebody else to ink to save time might not always work out because the inker has too much respect for his pencils and can't let loose on his own; and many other interesting tidbits about the creative process in both animation and comics, and throughout it all, you're also offered a cornucopia of excellent illustrations. Of course it's warmly recommended.

Look at how beutifully the highlights of Talia's black hair shows off both shape
and, yes, texture.  (I got some strong Steranko vibes off this picture, I might add.)

(If you don't have the money to spend on buying books, you can do what I did and borrow it at the specialized comics library in Stockholm, Serieteket. And they're on Facebook!)

Horst Schröder: De första serierna (The earliest comic strips")

Horst Schröder is the comics expert who went from critic and theorist to publisher and as such brought a lot of great European and American comics creators to the Swedish comics market. Unfortunately, he seems to have sort of overreached with his publishing venture, and it is now on a much smaller scale, even if it is still alive and kicking.

Illustration from the Swedish comics wikipedia, Seriewikin.

Despite its subtitle, "Dagspresserier i USA från sekelskiftet till 30-talet" ("Daily strips in the US from the turn of the century to the thirties") his book doesn't really chart the development of the earliest daily strips; it gives a cursory overview of that, and then it concentrates on a number of important strips and creators. These include Moon Mullins,Gasoline Alley, George Herriman, George McManus, Mutt and Jeff, etc. I don't have a big problem with that; the book is from 1981, and – as Schröder rightly points out – the research on comics wasn't very strong at the time, so this book is part of introducing some basic facts about comics for the interested public and (as is emphasized in the foreword) usually ignorant journalists and debaters.

So how does it work? Rather well, actually. Schröder is a good writer, an expert on his subject and also has analytical skills (and the doctor's degree to prove it). So as a quick introduction to the subject, and especially to the strips and creators he focuses on, it works very well. I think he's still a bit too rooted in the seventies – the book could have done without some of the references to Marxist class theory and Freudian theory – but unlike some more ideological Swedish comics critics (like this guy) he's knowledgeable enough about comics (and enough of a comics fan) to not let the ideology overwhelm and wreck the analysis.

Another problem is that he doesn't seem to have read very much of some of the strips he presents; he doesn't hide that, rather, he points out from the start how hard it is (or rather, was at the time) to find the old comics, especially those who weren't extremely popular. However, it does hamper the analysis when it is – as it seems in a few cases – based on the writings of other comics scholars and the occasional example they may have provided. It makes the book weaker than it might have been, but it doesn't ruin it; it's still worth a read. At 100 pages, it's not a hard slog, either.

So, in conclusion, if you're a Swedish-reader, I'd certainly recommend that you borrow this book at the library and read it – but for a really, really good work on the history of US newspaper strips, I'd recommend Brian Walker's excellent The Comics, which combines the history of the comic strip business, its creators and comic strips, with a look at the changes society underwent concurrently and how they affected the comics. It's huge, eminently readable and very interesting – especially the first part, about the pre-1945 strips. Get it and read it, as soon as possible.

Basically a must-read.

Joe Kubert: How to Draw from Life

Joe Kubert is a living legend in the comics industry – and all the more precious not only since have we lost so many of its legends in recent years, but also because he's still been producing excellent stuff at a very advanced age. His How to Draw from Life from Vanguard is no exception from the general rule that if it's drawn by Kubert, it's excellent.

However, don't buy this for the gorgeously rendered Kubert art you might justifiably expect; this is about life drawing, not rendering, and usually about capturing the essence of a model's pose in a very short period of time, so often it's just sketches. Sketches doing very well what they intend to do, namely capturing the essence of a pose, an attitude or direction, or how the model's weight is distributed, tensions and relaxations of the muscles, etc.

Some pieces that Kubert has spent a bit more time on are really beautiful to behold, though. And as an added bonus, he's working in a variety of styles, with a variety of tools, so you'll see a slightly different side of his drawing talent than the one you usually see in his comics.

Kubert also shares some drawing tips and a bit of his drawing philosophy. Mainly it's about how you need to practice on your live drawing to be able to do what you're supposed to do as a (comics) artist. If all you learn is actually from comics, you'll never understand what underlies the pictures you draw, and your art will suffer from it. For example, if you learn from comics artists that a mouth is drawn as a thin line with a shadow put in slightly below to indicate the lower lip, you can do what Alex Raymond and Hal Foster did, but you won't be able to actually draw mouths.

Similarly, many comics artists, having learned their anatomy from comics, have an unrealistic view of the human body. Their characters' muscles are all flexed, all the time. You need to practice life drawing to learn what the muscles look like when they're not flexed, and to learn how parts of the body may be tensed, muscles flexed, while others are not. Also, through life drawing, you'll learn how light actually plays on the body. Frequently, in order to do fine rendering of all of a character's body and muscles, people will treat it as if all of it is lighted exactly the same and very clearly all over, which isn't usually the case.

So, this book shows a consummate master of his craft constantly working to expand his mastery – and not only that, he'll give you some drawing tips as well. Of course it's recommended.

John Amato and David Neiwert: Over the Cliff. How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane

Do you have high blood pressure? A propensity to get angry? Do you become easily depressed?

Don't read this book, then. In it Amato and Neiwert detail, not so much how the American Right went insane (although there are actually elements of that, as well, but those elements weren't very high on the sanity scale to begin with), but the venality of a very prominent part of the American Right today, from Glenn Beck to Sarah Palin. As a bonus, we also get glimpses of how the traditional media have failed rather shamefully to expose the outright cancer that the right-wing smear machine has become on American political discourse.

Nothing in this book is new, really. If you've read the liberal blogs since President Obama was elected, you're likely aware of most of this stuff, anyway. Neiwert, among others, has covered a lot of it on Amato's Crooks and Liars blog. However, getting so much of it in one helping in a book is... Well, I thought it was so depressing, I had to stretch reading it out over a couple of days, even if it's a pretty easy read.

Anyway, the 270 pages contain nine chapters detailing:

1."It's the end of the world as they know it."  The world is coming to an end after a black man has been elected president – examples of creepy people freaking out over having a black president, insisting that he's a malignant foreign influence. There's arson, vandalism, hate-related crimes, threats of violence, etc, and racial and ethnic animus expressed on the internet and elsewhere.

2. "Into the abyss." The conservative movement chooses which road to take, and goes for ugly smear tactics instead of reviewing its policies. Accusations of socialism, communism, and fascism fly – a lot of them on Fox News. Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck do their stuff, and their stuff is mainly exploiting and fomenting resentment – with very little allegiance to the concept of "truth".

3. "Reaping the whirlwind." Several loonies act out their violent fantasies, and the militia movement experiences a resurgence.

4. "Bloodying the shirt." Conservative hate-spewers accuse those who point out that they're a) lying, b) spewing irresponsible garbage of trying to silence dissent.

5. "Mad hatters and March hares." The "Tea Party" movement gets going, with a large amount of help – funding from astroturf groups (like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks) and and a near-constant propaganda blitz from Fox News.

6. "Right-wing populism and the politics of resentment." The politics of "iberals, feminists and minorities have ruined my America!".

7. "Fox's war on the White House." The Fox propaganda blitz on the White House hasn't been just near-constant, it has been constant. It has provided endless fodder for The Daily Show, but also for resentful creeps all over the U.S.  See also Media Matters (even if they occasionally take up things that are pretty harmless and over-interpret them).

8. "The brakes fail." The Republican Party has problems controlling the Tea Party movement, and parts of the right-wing media machine is getting out of hand even according to some conservative pundits.

9. "The only thing we have to fear." Here, the authors try to tie it all together – or maybe not, either way, it doesn't really work as a tying-together chapter IMO – and then put forth a glimmer of hope: there is a liberal/progressive movement on the internet fighting back at right-wing propaganda and lies. Their solution is for the Democratic Party and liberals to empower their own progressive populist power base, to strengthen their own grassroots, and to stand up against the bullying tactics of the Right.

Me, I look at the way the Republicans blame President Obama for all the ills of today, regardless of most of them having originated during the Bush presidency and how they obstruct all efforts to actually better the situation for ordinary American citizens, and I'm amazed not only at their brazenness but also that they keep getting away with it.

  

Part of that is IMO that American media generally aren't doing their job. Another important part is that the current administration and the Democratic Party are simply too wussy and not a) condemning the right-wing's appalling behavior strongly enough, b) not putting forth strong enough policies to improve the American economy and the lot of poor and ordinary Americans. Those liberal populists had better get their act together soon – and so does the Obama administration – or a bad situation's bound to get even worse.

Recommended. Amato and Neiwert occasionally overstate their case, IMO, but all in all, they do yeoman work, and the situation they depict is genuinely scary.

D Lindholm & D Nicoll: The Scandinavian Baltic Crusades 1100–1500

Well, this was a somewhat boring book. No, that's not an insult. The book is supposed to be boring, as it is made with the express intent of – among other things – teaching you about the weapons and armor used in the Scandinavian crusades in the Baltic states. Detailing those utensils of war, and the changes they underwent during that period, can only be kinda dull, especially since you just don't have very many examples of them remaining in nice condition.

Anyway, the book starts with a brief history of the Baltic crusades and continues with the arms-and-armor part – which is interesting if you're inordinately interested in medieval weaponry, but I'm not; I kept wishing for more pictures and less text in this section. Notably, there are pictures, but the format of the book (only 48 pages) leaves little space for the amount of illustrations that would be needed to keep my interest up.

After that, we get a brief look at the tactics and strategies used in the decidedly inhospitable environment that the Baltic states were. There was little chance of living off the land, not a lot of roads, often terrible ground conditions, especially in the spring and fall (at least in the winter, you could move across the frozen lakes and swamps, which was a lot harder in spring...).

Now, tactics and strategy, that I like to read about, so this is my favorite chapter. Basically, it seems the strategy for conquering the Baltics was based on the fewer-in-numbers crusaders taking and building strongholds while gradually pacifying the area surrounding them and raiding into neighboring territory. Then conquer a bit more land, and repeat the process all over again. You couldn't take too much territory at a time, because you had to be able to support the stronghold you established against the attempts to take that territory back.

Eventually, Sweden would establish control over Finland (and eventually lose it in  Gustav IV Adolf's idiotic war against Russia) and establish a power base in the Baltic states that served us well in our brief period as an expanding great power.

Well, even if I'm not sufficiently interested in the minutiae of medieval weapons to make this a book for me, I'll recommend it anyway, as it is an Osprey book and you can reasonably trust them to give you good info. Me, however, I need more and better pictures, or more of a narrative, to sustain my interest.

BTW, if you can read Swedish, here's a page on medieval armor and weapons.

David Kunzle: Father of the Comic Strip. Rodolphe Töpffer

The most amusing part of this book about the Swiss creator of comic albums – or "graphic novels" as they are now rather pompously called in many circles – was the idea that he created comics because he was a pretty good writer and a pretty good artist, but not able to make a full career out of either, because that is what Charles Schulz said about his own tremendous success with "Peanuts". Unfortunately, that's about as amusing as it gets, because while Kunzle is undoubtably knowledgeable on his subject, he's chosen to structure the book in a way that makes it less accessible, and his writing would have been well served by being less convoluted and having fewer speculations on this and that inserted here and there.

Now, were I to write a book analyzing a comics creator's oeuvre, I'd probably do it the traditional and somewhat boring way: start by describing the works to be analyzed; then analyze its protagonists and themes that pop up in it, etc; and then perhaps look at some IMO interesting details. It's the safe, if somewhat boring, way to do it.

Instead, Kunzle jumps right into enumerating the themes he's found in Töpffer's work, before dealing with the stories themselves. For somebody who hasn't already read them, that sort of leaves you hanging a bit. (Having compiled, translated and annotated an edition of Töpffer's comics, perhaps Kunzle was just too intimately knowledgeable of them to distance himself sufficiently from his text to give due consideration to the fact that not all of his readers would share his knowledge of the stories.) Also, Töpffer's biography is given sort of "as the criticism rolls along", not in a chapter of its own, which I think would have made more sense.

Another problem is his language. I don't know how many learned books about comics I've read that have lost part of their value to me because of unnecessarily meandering language. You want to learn how to write legibly about comics without the text losing any of its analytical/informational value? Read Brian Walker's excellent The Comics, or just about anything by Frederik Schodt; their writing is crisp and clear, and that detracts nothing from the quality of their thinking. Kunzle, OTOH, obscures his own reasoning with unnecessarily complicated language and sometimes not particularly relevant speculations – and, in one case, a dig against the Bush administration. (I certainly think that particular dig was well-deserved – in fact, I could think of quite a number of other digs that the Bush administration would deserve – but it's so completely out of place in a critical analysis of Rodolphe Töpffer's comics that it just stopped me in my tracks for a moment, thus detracting from what the book is supposed to be doing; namely, educating the reader about Töpffer and his comics.) 

Anyway, I'll give an example of both the language and the speculation, so that you can judge for yourself:

"The scenario by which the blameless petty bourgeois is 'exposed' (accused of a crime, found naked, in itself an offense) plays on the shame and confusion surrounding the ethics of getting on – in business, in the world, where all is appearance anyway. Trictrac is Töpffer's comedy (or farce) par excellence of  mistaken identities, his classic vis comica, involving abrupt and often involuntary switches of costume. These are symptoms of the flux of social roles in the real world, of temptations and pitfalls, of the need to appear as something other than what one is, or was, and the tendency to be taken for what one is not.

The petty-bourgeois fascination with the criminal, who stalks tall through the nineteenth-century popular novel, the man from the margins capable of great acts of power, like the Count of Monte Cristo, is a fantasy of those excluded from power, or given paltry symbols of it, like the grocer-national guardsman. To imagine oneself arrested as a  petty criminal is thus a deterrent against, or advance punishment for, harboring criminal fantasies."

Apart from the somewhat dubious psychological theories, I think most of those sentences could be improved by removing 10-15% of them (and I say that as someone who is constantly struggling to not overload my own sentences with words and clauses). 

OK, so that's what I don't like about the book. What do I like?

Well, it does give you a lot of info the man, his work and the world he lived in, even if it doesn't do it in as structured way as I would prefer. His father was an accomplished artist, and he himself was no slouch, if not good enough to make a living from it – partly from bad eyesight. He worked as a schoolmaster and professor of literature, and would write criticism and fiction, and published his comics stories on the side. His stories found their way to Goethe, who found them very amusing, and somewhat later, he started publishing them for a larger public to buy. (Exactly why he finally chose to publish his stories isn't quite clear to me from Kunzle's text, and with the biographical data spread out over more or less the whole book, it's hard to go back and check particular facts without re-reading the whole book.) 

Anyway, the albums were quite successful, and Töpffer sold them himself instead of via a publisher, and apparently made good profits off them. They became rather well-known, and inspired both plagiarists and original works by other artists. He developed his own sort of theory about how to create graphic novels, about the interplay between words and pictures, about the need for clarity and the need to let go of realism to get pictures full of movement and action.

Working in autolitography, a technique that allowed him to simply draw his stories instead of going through the tedious woodcut or engraving procedures, Töpffer created lively, farcical works that attracted the attention of many. Kunzle offers a chapter on the influence Töpffer had on those who came after him, and how the sort of picture story he pioneered fared in the following decades. He also offers a look at what might bee seen as the precursor of Töpffer's own comics albums, his illustrated diaries of the Alp-hiking summer trips he took with the boys of his boarding school.

All in all, this could have been a great book if it had only had a more reader-friendly structure. As it is, it's not a waste of time, but it's unnecessarily hard work for the info and insights to be gained. My favorite part is actually the appendix where Kunzle has translated a critique from 1846 by a Professor Fr. Vischer, capturing IMO the essence of good comics creation:

"While Gavarni captures as it were in flight single moments with epigrammatic intensity, while the piquant glimpses we are allowed through the keyhole give us a synthetic view of society today in compilations arranged loosely around various themes and going from point to point, Töpffer by contrast is quite continuous, he never lets go of his topic in order to switch to another. Rather he develops the same topic, lets one scene grow organically out of another, and does not stop until he has spun it out fully, exhausted all the motifs he has seeded there and brought to fruition; he narrates, he draws novels. (...)

A comic character thus constitutes a plot pivot in each of the albums, This character is inescapably prisoner to some inexorable caprice, passion, or weakness. No experience, no obstacle, no humiliation can teach him better."

I would submit that such perspicacious comics criticism is still not particularly common today, despite all the talk about how far we've come. Too much of it is aimed at either establishing the critic's learned status, or at scoring points against stuff he/she doesn't like, or at satisfying his/her childhood nostalgia. (Of these problems, the last one is the least problematic, however. Because the nostalgic isn't moved by ulterior motives, his/her research into a comic's or creator's history, motivations, etc, will likely be perhaps a bit too uncritical, but it will be thorough and extensive, which will make it an excellent source for other comics researchers to draw upon as well.)

Anyway, I can't really recommend this unless you're specifically interested in Töpffer and his contributions to creating the medium of comics. At the very least, I'd recommend that you start out by reading Kunzle's edition of Töpffer's collected works, which is in itself an excellent contribution to our understanding comics history and worthy of respect and praise.

Töpffer

Michael Löwy: La pensée de Che Guevara – un humanisme révolutionaire ("Che Guevara's thinking – a revolutionary humanism")

How do you know that a biography's going to suck? Well, you can't be certain, of course, but a pretty good indicator is if it starts out by claiming that its subject lived a dazzling, meteoric, exemplary life and is easily compared to the giants of the Renaissance thanks to his multifaceted, unique personality as doctor and economist, revolutionary and banker, deep political thinker and populist agitator, a secular Christ who used the pen and the machine gun with the same ease, etc, etc, ad nauseam.

In other words, Che Guevara – en revolutionär humanist (the Swedish title) is a distasteful hagiography jam-packed with the sort of ridiculous superlatives that graced the more dogmatic "Marxist" (or, if you prefer, far left-wing) writing that was so common during the seventies. Unsurprisingly, this book was originally published in 1969; it is more surprising that anybody would have considered it worthy of republishing in the nineties – yes, it is that bad, and the Röda Rummet publishing company ought to be ashamed of themselves for publishing this drivel.

Anyway, Löwy works very hard to paper over some very basic facts about Guevara:
a) he had a fondness for killing;
b) he pretty much sucked at organizing the "new society" (except for the "killing one's predecessors as the ruling elite" part, that is); and
c) he failed rather miserably as a revolutionary, because he didn't think through what he did, and because his so-called brilliant revolutionary thought was, basically, a shambles and totally useless as analysis of the situation.

For this papering-over, however, he unfortunately has to resort to logical and linguistic contortions of a rather bizarre variety. Now, that's not much of a problem for a 70s far-left-wing intellectual, because they engaged in it all the time – they had to, in order to keep up the pretense that communist dictatorships were the true democracies and the Western democracies horribly oppressive hellholes – but for a more modern or less ideologically pure reader, it makes for pretty awful reading.

Che's analysis told him that the bourgeoisie was to timid and treacherous for the "people" to work together with them. Thus, the true Latin American revolution could only come about through the cooperation between workers and peasants. They would work together to accomplish the important democratic reforms: land reform, national liberation and bringing the country out of underdevelopment. Exactly how he intended that to be done without resorting to the tried-and-true methods of democratic capitalism remains a bit unclear, partly because Che – and Löwy – remains pretty much silent on the actual details (preferring to pepper their theorizing with empirically meaningless catchphrases like "revolutionary consciousness" and "revolutionary praxis" instead), and partly because, hey, Che had the opportunity to show the superiority of his methods when he ran Cuba's economy, and that supposed superiority failed to result in the successes it had promised.

So what did Che do then? Did he take in the empirical information of that lack of success, process it, and adjust the policies to achieve the results he envisioned?

Nope. He quit, and started gallivanting around the globe in search for new revolutionary wars to participate in, found one in Congo and threw himself into it without much in the way of success to show for his troubles. Then he went back to Latin America, and failed there as well. He got himself – and a bunch of others – killed for his troubles. The end.

Well, not quite. He also became an icon for disaffected youths in the Western world (you all know the famous picture on all those posters and t-shirts, I trust) and actually still works pretty well as a symbol for quite a lot of "radicals" in the Western capitalist world today – on two levels, even: First, they seem to like to think of themselves as Che supporters; it seems to give them a sense of connection with the revolution they're never going to take part in. Second, and from a more outside perspective: like Che, they're never going to accomplish much to improve the lives of poor people in the Third World – post-the literacy campaign in Cuba, that is; even if it would most likely have been very successful under any leader who implemented it thanks to the enthusiasm of the Cuban people, Che did head it if I'm not misinformed, so give him credit for that. But don't read his "philosophy", it isn't actually philosophy but an attempt to justify the violent methods he chose to use for regime change, methods that turned out to be pretty much useless for actually improving the world.

In closing, apart from the recommendation to not waste your time reading this wretched book, I have a small suggestion for the fashionably revolutionary, safe-in-their-snug-jobs-paid-for-by-capitalism bourgeois and the (in their own eyes) heroic outside-society-and-proud-of-it-while-demanding-that-the-welfare-state-pay-for-their-upkeep revolutionary romantics (frequently idolizing "direct action" as somehow acts of revolution): why don't you first of all have a

– and then go to the Third World country of your choice as a volunteer to help people learn to read, get safe water, get functioning infrastructure like roads and electricity, and set up democratic grassroots movements that'll actually help them improve their lot? Because strutting around in comfortable Western democracies pretending that you're making a difference for the poor people in the world by idolizing murderers and incompetents like Guevara and his ilk is pretty darn transparent.