Saga

Guest post by Peter Martin, see also Old Rope blog: https://oldrope.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/saga/

A comic about an alien family on the lamb in a flying tree in space? You had me at comic, but yes, obviously I want to read that. It’s been going since 2012? Why has no one told me about this sooner? My dear friend Giro recommended me the curious tale of the Saga, er, saga. Yeah, it’s not a great name I grant you, but to quote Lisa Simpson, it’s apt – APT! At the time of writing, the 54 issues of the series have been collected into nine volumes, with six comics comprising each story arc. The series is planned to finish at 108 issues or 18 volumes. I have read four so far and it is these that inform the below.

Drawn by Fiona Staples and written by Brian K Vaughn, Saga follows the plights of Alana and Marko, a couple who are on the run from both sides of an intergalactic war. Their crime is falling in love with the enemy and having an interracial baby, a political affront to the two extraterrestrial species embroiled in the long-standing conflict. They hop from planet to planet, hunted by soldiers, hired assassins, irate parents and disgruntled exes, all the while just trying to live a normal family life.

Saga is no ordinary comic and not just because it is narrated by a baby. Though it would be disingenuous to say that the medium is all unsubtle macho superhero fodder – and also conceding that I am no expert – it’s rare to get something so rich and varied in the mainstream (it’s published by Image, one of the big three publishing houses). Saga’s themes of family, motherhood, racism, war, politics and sex, while by no means unique to this book, are a rich and refreshing blend. Not only are the heroes young struggling parents, they are actively refusing to fight in the war that rages around them, setting this story apart from much of the work we might wish to compare it to. Pacifism is seldom at the forefront of popular sci-fi, bristling with blasters, troopers, space-battles and laser-swords, nor its fantasy counterparts with whopping big blades, magic and monsters. That’s not to say that Saga doesn’t have its fair share of any of the above – it does in spades – and barely an issue goes by without some form of gratuitous, albeit funny, violence.

Our protagonists are basically sexy alt-rock tattoos come to life. Alana, with her dyed fringe and unlikely post-natal smoking bod, is from the planet Landfall where the locals sport delicate insect-like wings. Her beau is Marko, all brooding brows, trench coats and a massive pair of curly goat horns. Phwoar! Don’t worry, they regularly go at it like hammer and tongs, as if unable to resist the collective yearning of hundreds of thousands of swooning readers. Sex is never shied away from throughout the pages of Saga, be it the impossibly hot and passionate form in the early days of Alana and Marko’s relationship, the lovesick longing of the hit man loner reminiscing of his time getting it on with an armless spiderwoman (armless not harmless, she too is a deadly hired assassin) or the seedy underbelly of alien sex work where anything goes. Taboo is a strong undercurrent, from forbidden love in the prism of societal racism lived by our heroes or the homophobia experienced by journalists Upsher and Doff, to alien fetishism, subversive literature and indeed the belief in peace in a time of war.

Taboo also bleeds into real life with several instances of censorship affecting the book. As a young mother, Alana is regularly shown breast-feeding Hazel – tolerable until it graced the cover of the hardback edition prompting squeamishness from retailers. Digital editions of the book were also briefly censored for an act of homosexual fellatio, shown on a blurred TV screen. The American Library Association included Saga in its 2014 list of the ten most frequently challenged books that year, for containing nudity, offensive language and for being “anti-family, … sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group.” And people wonder why it sold so well.

Like many endearing works of serialised fiction, one of Saga’s strengths is its cast of thousands. Alana and Marko may be recognisable lead characters – fit, loveable, morally right – but they are ably supported by a bonkers, imaginative and genuinely diverse bunch: Izabel the disembodied severed-at-the-waist war casualty teen baby-sitter, a sort of floating ghost with hanging entrails; Prince Robot IV, from a breed of royal androids with TVs for heads; the Freelancers, with their distinctive definite articles, The Will, The Stalk, The Brand; Marko’s relatably in-the-way mum and dad, but doting grandparents to Hazel; Lying Cat – a giant feline who speaks only to tell if someone is fibbing or not; whatever the heck loveable fan-favourite Ghüs is; and of course D. Oswald Heist, author of the dangerous polemic that ‘radicalised’ Alana and Marko.

A Night Time Smoke, the fictional novel by Heist, is shown in glimpses through the perspectives of characters on all sides of the war. From what we know of it, at face value it’s a fairly trashy affair, akin to pulp fiction or throwaway romance of the Mills and Boon ilk. Coursing through its pages, however, is the outrageous message that war is – get this – ‘bad’ and worse, the cover art shows us that the principal characters, Contessa and Eames the rock monster are from different races.

I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for a text within a text. From The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, by Hawthorne Abendsen (Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle), to K/L. Callan’s Marx, Christ and Satan United In Struggle (Stewart Home’s Red London), to The Benefit Of Christ Crucified (Luther Blissett’s Q), to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), to the endless quotations of Stewpot Hauser and Out To Lunch (Ben Watson’s Shitkicks and Doughballs), to the book within the book within the book within the book neo-pulp madness of Bobo the Monkey (Steven Well’s Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty). It’s all good baby and super meta.

Returning briefly to the issue of diversity, something that many well-known comics have struggled with in recent years. Though I am sure there are plenty of books telling stories other than those of hetro-normative, mostly white massive ab-ed and big boobed superheroes, it’s fair to say that many of the medium’s biggest sellers still have room for improvement. Clumsy attempts to make minor characters ‘come out’ still result in shitfits from keyboard warriors lamenting the fact that writers can’t make new, minor, LGBQT or POC heroes that they can ignore. Saga shouldn’t need to be lauded for starring loads of women (including breastfeeding mums), gay characters and every kind of alien-sexual preference you can think of, but it does feel uncommonly vibrant.

It’s not all politics, proxy wars, racism towards ‘horns and wings’ and baby McGuffins. Much of the story is about how hard it is to be a parent, the challenges of keeping relationships afloat and the pressures of daily life. There is much that is relatable despite the fantastical settings. Gun for hire The Will munches space-cereal and sulkingly blanks his ex’s calls. There are translation problems (the Horns speak some sort of Latinate, Esperanto language). Alana gets an acting gig on a space soap opera. Marko takes their toddler on play-dates. Unions struggle against employers. Mums – albeit ones with TV screens for faces – take their kids to the beach. People have baths. This is key to making the world of Saga appealing and enduring. It’s not all decapitations and saggy-testicled ogres, there’s hues of real life in all its humorous mundanity. And it does make you laugh. Liar Cat and the Royals with TV heads are the gifts that keep on giving and Staples’ artwork veers between heart-string tugging poetry and mischievous comedy.

Vaughn has made clear that much of the inspiration behind the narrative of the book came from the birth of his own child. Let’s leave the final word to him:

I realized that making comics and making babies were kind of the same thing and if I could combine the two, it would be less boring if I set it in a crazy sci-fi fantasy universe and not just have anecdotes about diaper bags … I didn’t want to tell a Star Wars adventure with these noble heroes fighting an empire. These are people on the outskirts of the story who want out of this never-ending galactic war … I’m part of the generation that all we do is complain about the prequels and how they let us down … And if every one of us who complained about how the prequels didn’t live up to our expectations would just make our own sci-fi fantasy, then it would be a much better use of our time.

J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of Tomorrow Book

Following on from the 2014 'Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard in Space and Time' conference, a new edited volume of essays, J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of Tomorrow, has been published by Brill. The publisher recently shared an editor interview on their Facebook page, reproduced below:

An interview with Richard Brown, Elizabeth Stainforth and Christopher Duffy, editors of Dialogue 22, J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of Tomorrow, who answer questions about the volume they recently collected and edited for the Dialogue Series.

1. Describe your interest in J.G. Ballard’s life and art. How did you come to study his writings?

Richard Brown: Personally speaking, I’ve been a fan since I was studying and working in London in the 70s and 80s. It was the experimental Atrocity Exhibition that first excited me. Coincidentally my father-in-law worked in Road Safety which lent an unusual perspective to my early readings of Crash! As a critic of postmodern and millennial literatures I came back to his work in a big way as it matured in new directions around the turn of the century.

Elizabeth Stainforth: I first encountered Ballard’s work as a reader of science fiction and, following on from that, I did my BA dissertation on the The Atrocity Exhibition. Later, I became interested in Ballard’s collaborations with Eduardo Paolozzi in Ambit, which led to an exhibition and essay for the Henry Moore Institute in 2011.

Christopher Duffy: I’ve been a long-time fan, beginning with a teenage enthusiasm for science fiction that steadily matured into an interest in experimental and postmodern literature. Given Ballard’s widespread influence in contemporary British culture – including films, music, and visual art – it seems like he has been a constant presence in many areas during my academic development. Fascinated by textual representations of space, I finally decided to make him the subject of my PhD thesis.

2. Was there a method involved in the selection of essay-chapters for the volume? What were the selection criteria for the work?

As we explain in the Introduction the volume partly emerged from a conference we ran in the University of Leeds on May 4th 2014. Ballardian expert David Pringle had once been a student at Leeds and enthusiasm for his work across the Humanities has grown strongly since those days and entered the curriculum in ways that would have been hard to anticipate back then, partly as a result of the rise of Postmodernist cultural theory and partly, no doubt also, as a result of the successful film adaptations of his work. Contributors to that conference provided the core of the volume. Gradually the Landscapes theme emerged as the focus of a volume and we selected essays and developed them through the editorial process towards various aspects of that theme.

3. How would you describe the current field of Ballard scholarship and criticism, and your volume’s relationship to it?

We chose the Landscapes of Tomorrow theme to highlight significant aspects of emerging research in physical, social, cultural, digital spaces and selected or encouraged development of essays in the light of that theme. One of the great things about Ballard’s work that we hope the volume takes forward is the wide range of academic disciplines that are beginning to register its importance centrally in what they do. Much great work on Ballard has begun to appear and we hope our volume will take this further and with an international dimension for example for North America and for China, areas where Ballard’s work has clear relevance but is not yet fully recognised.

4. How did Fay Ballard’s work come to be included in the volume, and on the book’s cover?

Fay Ballard was brilliant from the start, picking up on news of the conference and contributing fully, though really busy at the time with the exhibition of her own drawings House Clearance, based on found objects from her father’s house following his death in 2009. She was fantastically generous in her enthusiasm for our project and in letting us use a detail from one of her “Memory Box” works, which became our cover image. Her sister Bea was also terrific in her support for our project.

5. What will your next Ballard-related projects be?

Now that Landscapes is out we are having a small launch event together in Leeds and lots of other Ballard related projects are taking place. Chris did a lecture for Liverpool John Moore’s University around the launch of the film of High-Rise, Liz’s invisible library collaboration with Mike Bonsall is ongoing (http://fentonville.co.uk/invisible-library/), Richard is appearing in Rick McGrath’s Deep Ends 2016 and soon speaking at Thomas Knowles’s day workshop on Ballard and the Natural World at Birmingham City University.

About the editors:

Richard H. Brown, Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Leeds, has published widely on the works of James Joyce, among others, and teaches courses in modern, contemporary and millennial literatures.

Liz Stainforth is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Leeds, where she is conducting research on digital culture and memory.

Christopher Duffy earned his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds; his doctoral dissertation was on the writings of J.G. Ballard.

J.G. Ballard's Invisible Library

Untitled (White Library) by Wilfredo Prieto at MoNA

“... I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures” - JG Ballard, The Pleasure of Reading, Antonia Fraser (ed.), 1992.

A couple of months ago I published a write-up of the 'Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard in Space and Time' conference, which took place at the University of Leeds on 3 May 2014. In that post, I mentioned the collection of ephemera that Ballard would refer to as 'invisible literatures', including but not limited to scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents and PR company position papers - in Ballard's own words: 'part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination'.

For some time, I've been interested in the significance of these texts and their influence on Ballard's writing, which prompted the current Invisible Library project, a collaborative online catalogue. This is a joint effort with Mike Bonsall, whose own site, Digital Ballard, carries the tagline 'Adventures with J.G. Ballard in the Digital Humanities'. Mike's site interprets Ballard's fiction using a variety of digital tools, with fascinating results. Highlights include Another Terminal Beach, an Interactive Fiction based on Ballard's short story, The Concordance, compiled using all the material in Ballard's published novels and High-Rise: The Movie, an animation of the High Rise plot, made using SketchUp.

With Mike's help an open source list has now been created, collected from various sources, to record the reading material Ballard came into contact with and attempt to make the invisible visible.

So far, the list comprises over 600 items. It's an ongoing project, which invites contributions. To find out more, please visit: http://fentonville.co.uk/invisible-library/

Subversive Urbanism

I came across this blog at a film showing of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. Or rather, I came across the blog's author, Phil Wood. Funnily enough, I'd seen him give a presentation more than a year before at a Leeds Psychogeographers event, otherwise known as urban walking. The title of his Tumblr site, Subversive Urbanism, reflects his interest in this field, and surveys some of the lesser known architectural sites across Europe, Asia, Latin America; as he notes in the introduction, 'most of us actually live in places that you’ve probably never heard of'. The images Phil posts are striking, often haunting and utterly science-fictional, particularly those from former Soviet countries. This example (see below) is a Yugoslav war memorial, an enigmatic concrete structure, upturned to the sky like an alien bloom or an extraterrestrial transmitter.

Stone Flower, a monument to the victims of Jasenovac

Little wonder, then, that I should see him at a Tarkovsky film. Stalker itself is a meditation on inner and outer space, with most of the action taking place in the mysterious Zone, a site fabled to have the power to grant peoples' deepest desires. Phil has visited many of the places where films like this were shot; let's hope his travels through urban space will continue to generate memorable images and insights into architectural and urban endeavours all over the world.

Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard - University of Leeds Event

Date and Time: Saturday 3 May 2014, 10am-4.30pm

Venue: Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds



This workshop-conference, 'Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard in Space and Time', which took place earlier in the month, was co-organised by myself and colleagues Dr Richard Brown and Chris Duffy (University of Leeds). Here, I'll try and give an overview of what was a thoroughly interesting day of research sharing and lively discussion. The theme - space and time - was deliberately broad to allow for the inclusion of papers exploring diverse aspects of Ballard's writing, including physical and psychological zones of transit, modern consumerism and post-cultural spaces. Being in the Gallery, Ballard's visual art influences were also a central focus of the conference. Papers covered topics including:

* Non-places of Modernity
* Collective Memory
* Space and Mediation
* Romanticism
* Modernism and the History of the Future
* Desire, Class and Consumer Millenarianism
* Invisible Literatures
* Inner Space and Geometries of the Imagination

The keynote speaker, Dr. Jeanette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin University), started off the day with her paper, ‘Fascisms and the Politics of Nowhere in Kingdom Come’. After presenting Giorgio De Chirico’s little-known, interwar novel Hebdomeros (1929) as a narrative of 'nowhere' that resists all sense of orientation, she spoke about how in the novel, Kingdom Come (2006), Ballard takes up, and re-conceives, the 'nowhere' motif as part of his surrealist analysis of contemporary history, politics and culture. Within the surrealist imagination, an imagination rendered artistically and politically out-of-place in an emerging Fascist Europe, 'nowhere' repeats as a resonant motif for interrogating narratives of geo-political displacement, homelessness and exile. Baxter argued that fascism returns in modified forms in Ballard’s contemporary 'nowhere', from the 'soft-totalitarianism' forged by the illusion of consumerist choice, to the neo-fascist communities that commit racially-motivated acts of violence against displaced, immigrant workers.

The morning sessions 'Zones of Transit' and  '(In)visible Literatures' followed. In the afternoon, the sessions were themed around 'Consuming Futures' and 'Post-cultural Spaces', which featured a paper from PhD candidate Catherine McKenna (King's College, London), who catalogued 565 items from the Ballard estate. These will be the subject of a new book by Chris Beckett (forthcoming, 2015). An evening panel discussion, 'Ballard’s Shanghai Orientation', introduced special guest Fay Ballard, who shared recollections of her father, and spoke a bit about related influences in her exhibition 'House Clearance' (2 May-27 June 2014), at Eleven Spitalfields Gallery.

My own paper, entitled 'Ballard's Invisible Literatures', was included in the morning session and discussed the collection of ephemera known as invisible literatures, compiled during Ballard's lifetime and kept in his coal-shed:- he would describe them, aptly, as 'the most potent compost for the imagination'. They included material such as market research reports, pharmaceutical company house magazines, promotional copy, technical journals and scientific manuals. I explored the significance of these texts further and traced their influence, focusing on Ballard's time as prose editor at the journal Ambit and his own modification of Surrealist collage in The Atrocity Exhibition novel. I also raised the tentative question of if and to what extent it might be possible to reconstruct Ballard’s invisible library as an object of study.

Thanks again to the speakers, delegates and to everyone that helped to make the conference possible.

The First Strike in Space

Skylab space station (1973-74)

Back to the stuff from which science fictions are made, I recently picked up on this story about the first space strike when the organiser, William R. Pogue, died on 3 March 2014. He was one of a three-man crew that flew the longest, and the last, manned mission aboard Skylab, from 16 November 1973 to 8 February 1974.

The strike, which took place while in orbit, was staged (amazingly) to negotiate more time for contemplating the universe. Pogue, an Air Force officer, explained his actions and those of the crew as just wanting more time to look out the window and think. In Science News (1985), he said the flight had made him “much more inclined toward humanistic feeling toward other people, other crewmen [...] I try to put myself into the human situation, instead of trying to operate like a machine”. While his reasoning baffled ground controllers, who thought perhaps the strike was a sign of depression, the chance to reflect on what must have been a unique and aweing set of circumstances definitely seems like something worth fighting for.