Pop Culture Diary: 'History of Concrete,' 'Frank Miller: Push the Wall,' More

What I've Been Into...

"The History of Concrete" Director John Wilson has genius ability to locate the weirdness beneath everything we find mundane.

His ceaselessly entertaining "How To" show on HBO found him fixated on scaffolding, how to make small talk and how to cover furniture. Here he takes note of all the concrete surrounding him — cracked, patched, wet — and decides to investigate. Despite the film's title, which promises boredom, it's a wild ride and stays interesting even over the longer-than-TV running time.

To detail the twists and turns would spoil the fun, but suffice to say we see Jonathan learning about how to get gum off sidewalks and viewing revelers dancing at a concrete convention at which there's also a contest to see how fast people can haphazardly build a brick wall.

Stayed tuned for "How to Watch Paint Dry." I'll be there.

"Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling," by Frank Miller. I was a big fan of Miller's first Daredevil run but less so of most that followed. No doubt, "The Dark Knight" was revolutionary in terms of tone and graphic storytelling, but it yielded so much grim grittiness in its wake that, for many years after, it essentially wiped out the whimsy of a comics genre intended for young readers. Not Miller's fault that so many less imaginative creators chose to imitate him, but the damage was done, nevertheless.

The hard noir of his "Sin City," meanwhile, was mildly amusing and I dug the black-and-white art, but a little went a way long ways. And, from what I've seen, Miller hasn't been able to do much other than riff on Spillane ever since. He even stole Mickey's hat.

But I'm glad I was curious enough to pick up Miller's new book from the library. It's less of a memoir and more of a message to aspiring writers/artists of any medium, not just comics. It's tone isn't grim, gritty or even hard-boiled, but generous, thoughtful and encouraging.

Miller doesn't dive into step-by-step details of how to write a story, or draw a page, or create a character, but instead offers useful advice based on his experience as a creator. Stuff like, get your character into trouble right away, embrace collaboration, welcome inspiration and explore what you love. Do that, he says, and you'll make mistakes (embrace and learn from those) and catch criticism (ditto), but artistic satisfaction and, perhaps, even success, will come.

I enjoyed the book quite a bit, and found it inspiring. I also came away realizing that, even though I might not care for Miller's creations, I do like, and respect, him as a creator.

Reads:

The Comics Journal offers a appraisal of Jesse Marsh's Tarzan comic book art.

...Dan Nadel rightly points out Marsh’s study of ukiyo-e woodblocks.3.[/efn_note] Their sharp, figurative style is as close an ancestor for his idiosyncrasies as we can get. Take the work of Harunobu, the first wood-block artist to paint in full color. Harunobu is most remembered for his elegiac portraits of courtesans and noblewomen. Though the depth of color is wider than his predecessors, what is most pronounced is the completeness of his shadows and night skies. The blacks are opaque and somber, even eerie, as in “Woman Admiring Plum Blossoms at Night,” where a woman’s lamp only illuminates the blossoms and their branch, while the rest of the night is undefined, severe. One can definitely see Marsh’s shadows in Harunobu. The world appears severed, emaciated under an encroaching darkness. In even the most impressionist works of the famous Hokusai, the viewer can feel that hidden sparseness and terror; what Edmond de Goncourt calls “drawings of the most absolute reality,”4 absolute because there appears no life outside the frame, or inside, drawings complete in their acceptance of apparent nothingness. “Absolute reality” can also be a mantra for Marsh, sans its religious connotation for Hokusai. During his tenure on Tarzan he worked exclusively with writer Gaylord DuBois. DuBois had been writing for Dell-Western since 1944, mostly on their western and frontiersman stories like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. He was a practiced explorer and outdoorsman, which allowed his work an uncommon accuracy in rugged wilderness knowledge.