Graphic novels and 'the nerd diaspora'

When Jaime Hernandez and his brother, Gilbert, started writing and drawing the comic book "Love and  Rockets" in the early 1980s, there was no market for graphic novels. "By the late 1980s," says Jaime Hernandez, "it had become hip."

"I think it's the nerd diaspora," chimed in fellow author Cecil Castellucci. "A lot of people who grew up reading comic books have now become the tastemakers."

Even as the popular and cultural cachet of print publishing declines--fueled in part by a hyper-mediated, web-based culture better versed in visual than literary cues--the past few years have seen an explosion in top-shelf graphic novels. Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" and Joe Sacco's "Palestine" make the political very personal while Charles Burns' "Black Hole" spins a beautiful sci-fi/coming-of-age drama and Alison Bechdel writes and illustrates her autobiography in "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic."

"Graphic novels are at an interesting juncture. A few years ago you mostly saw superhero stories or small personal stories in the vein of R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar," said Deb Vankin, moderator of the "Every Picture Tells a Story" panel at the Festival of Books on Sunday.

Sitting down with living legend Jaime Hernandez, Castellucci ("The Plain Janes," "Boy Proof," "Beige") and Joe Matt ("Spent," "Peepshow," "The Poor Bastard"), the trio of authors discussed their inspiration, their methodology (or whether they even have one), their love of the comic book medium and the cathartic drive to work through their personal memories. Or as Hernandez said, "That's why a lot of us do comics, because we want to hide behind our work."

Elina Shatkin

[Image: From the Hernandez brothers' "Love and Rockets Collection"]

Confessions of a 'Thriller' maker

Director John Landis has no guilty pleasures--at least not when it comes to movies. The unabashed filmmaker who directed such low-comedy classics as "Kentucky Fried Movie," "Animal House," "The Blues Brothers" and "¡Three Amigos!" not to mention "An American Werewolf in London," Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video and the ill-fated segment of "Twilight Zone: The Movie" during which actor Vic Morrow and two child actors died.

He spoke Sunday at a Festival of Books panel led by Tim Curry. Landis is an unabashed geek who grew up in a house behind the L.A. National Cemetery cemetery in Westwood began indulging his predilections early. At age 12, he would bicycle to nearby UCLA to catch movies at Melnitz, the building that houses the university's film school. "I remember sitting next to this guy who always smoked dope while he watched movies," Landis said. "That was Jim Morrison."

He dropped out of high school and worked as a mail boy on the 20th Century Fox lot, where he remembers watching Bruce Lee practicing his high kicks and teaching martial arts to James Coburn. "Film was only 100 years old, so I was able to seek out and meet people who had created the language. Most of them thought I was weird because I wasn't French."

With a voracious movie-going appetite that spans everything from Walt Disney's "Pinocchio" to Federico Fellini's "La Strada" to Russ Meyer's "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," Landis still recalls the landmark moment he first realized he didn't have to see every movie that came out. "I was on Hollywood Boulevard with Joe Dante watching an awful movie, and he turned to me and said, 'You know, life's too short.' "

Not too short for "The Brain That Would Not Die," which comes about as close as Landis has to a guilty pleasure. The 1962 picture stars Jason Evers as a doctor whose fiancée gets decapitated in a car crash. He saves her head and then spends the rest of the film trying to find the perfect body, which, of course, necessitates trips to strip joints, beaches, nude modeling classes and the like. Says Landis approvingly, "It's very tawdry."

PS: One of the funniest moments came when Landis was asked he got involved with the "Thriller" video. His response: "Michael Jackson called me up and told me he wanted to become a monster." Long pause. Panel moderator Curry: "Boy, did he."

Elina Shatkin

(Photo: John Landis in New York on Thursday by Will Ragozzino/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)

Raymond Chandler wrote Los Angeles

Raymond Chandler's detective novels -- "The Big Sleep," "Farewell My Lovely "-- made such good movie material that Hollywood came calling. His first screenplay, written in testy collaboration with Billy Wilder, was "Double Indemnity." For six years he stuck to screenplays; finally in 1949, he returned with "The Little Sister," which, in addition to featuring an icepick killer, focused on Hollywood.

When his publisher asked him for material for the front & back of "The Little Sister," he answered:

"No dedication. No front matter from me, unless you want to vary the usual protection clause on the back of the title page by saying that 'The people and events in this book are not entirely fictional. Some of the events happened, although not in this precise time or place, and certain of the characters were suggested by real persons, both living and dead. The author regrets any resemblance to reality that may be found in the pages of his books, and he particularly regrets that he has on occasion made use of the names of real localities. He admits with shame that there actually is a place called Hollywood and a place called Los Angeles. It has streets and he has named some of them. It has a police department and he has referred to it. Los Angeles County has a District Attorney and said District Attorney has an office. To all of these matters the author has alluded. How careless of him! He should have called Los Angeles Smogville. He should have called its police department its Ministry of Corrections.' …"

If you're curious about Raymond Chandler's Smogville Los Angeles, Esotouric is doing their Chandler Bus Tour this Saturday. This tour focuses on Hollywood sites that informed his writing, appear in his books or maybe movies. Your $55 gets you four air-conditioned hours with erudite tour guides who'll take you down  Chandler's "mean streets."

Because it was Chandler who wrote "Down these mean streets a man must go." He knew Los Angeles.

Carolyn Kellogg

Post-Festival of Books: Science fiction notes

Joe Hill and his dad: It was nice to find Joe Hill completely at ease talking about his father, Stephen King, during the science fiction/fantasy/horror panel Sunday morning. "He's my first reader," he said. "I've learned a lot from him." But, as he told the audience, he decided not to approach publishers as Joseph Hillstrom King (his given name) because "it would have been beneficial for me only in the short run."

  "If I had done that, I'm sure they would have been willing to publish work that wasn't ready, just for the advantage of having a tie to my family," he said.

But because "Heart-Shaped Box" received favorable reviews, Hill feels comfortable enough now when the question is raised about his father. When an older audience member approached the mike and even complained -- "There's a lot that's wrong with horror today, all that slasher stuff, and much of it has to do with Stephen King" -- Hill responded that his father's work "in large part explores the experiences of the middle class, what they're feeling. I think he prides himself on being a reporter of what's going on. But if you want Lovecraft and all that, go ahead, man. It's a wide field. You can always find something else to read."

Other bits: Kevin Anderson, who completed Frank Herbert's "Dune" saga with Herbert's son, Brian, told the audience that a new motion picture of "Dune" may be in the works. "Let's keep our fingers crossed," he said. The special effects technology that's available today, he said, might lead to an even richer realization of that book than what one sees in David Lynch's 1984 film.

James Howard Kunstler wasn't on this panel (he was on a fiction panel later in the day), but he easily could have been for his novel "World Made By Hand." His novel looks at life in a future world where energy resources have run out and people revert to an existence resembling 19th century life.

I'm mentioning it here because Kunstler explained that he wanted his book to respond to the post-apocalyptic picture of the world that readers get in Cormac McCarthy's harrowing novel "The Road." "I want people to feel some hope about the future," he said. "I just want them to realize that there are alternatives to what that novel presents."

-- Nick Owchar 

Joe Hill photo: Beth Gwinn

Where would T.C. Boyle go?

SoCal lit blogger John Fox and the good people of Red Fence hit the L.A. Times Festival of Books with a camera crew and tracked down some fabulous fictioneers (T.C. Boyle, Shelley Jackson, Lydia Millet among them) to ask them about art and literary pilgrimages.

Where have they gone? Which one ate a page of Shakespeare? Watch to find out.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

RedFence: Festival of Books - Author Interviews from James Roland on Vimeo.

Hearing alternative voices

Left to right: Shelley Jackson, Steve Erickson, David Ulin, Zachary Lazar, Nina Revoyr

Big ideas -- reinventing myth, writing (or rewriting) Los Angeles and the relationship between history and fiction -- were tackled by the Festival of Books panel "Fiction: Alternative Visions" on Sunday afternoon.

In a cool, modern auditorium in UCLA's business school, Zachary Lazar ("Sway") and Nina Revoyr ("The Age of Dreaming") talked about the challenges presented by writing historical figures in a fictional way. Revoyr -- whose book is based loosely on the life of Japanese silent film actor Sessue Hayakawa -- said she started with factual history but quickly departed from it to serve her fiction. Lazar, on the other hand, said he stuck to bizarre real-life events as closely as possible to bring the smaller human moments to life: His book is set in the late '60s and includes Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, a Manson family member and filmmaker Kenneth Anger.

Steve Erickson's work occasionally includes historical figures ("Tours of the Black Clock," "Zeroville"), but he takes imaginative leaps to create impossible universes; Shelley Jackson, too, creates fictions of pure imagination. Both of these authors also talked about playing with conventional narrative form -- which Erickson did recently in "Our Ecstatic Days" -- to such an extent that he pulled back from that for "Zeroville," his latest. Jackson's projects include the 2006 novel "Half Life" and "Skin," a short story tattooed on volunteers, one word at a time.

Sitting in on these conversations was a little like eavesdropping on a smart dinner party, and the audience, which asked astute questions, seemed to appreciate the level of discourse. The best moment, however, came when Lazar returned to something Jackson had said in passing, that an observation from her past was a terrible idea for a novel but that it then became a part of "Half Life." Lazar pointed out that he was listening to the Rolling Stones when the idea to write about the band came to him, but initially he too thought this was a terrible basis for a novel. He went ahead and wrote "Sway."

"Here's advice for you aspiring writers out there," moderator (and L.A. Times Book Review editor) David L. Ulin said. "That terrible idea? Run with it."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

There's magic, then there's flat-out lying

When the moderator of of the Festival of Books panel "Magic in Everyday Life" asked author Aimee Bender, "Why did you write a story about a woman who kept trying to destroy magic potatoes that eventually morphed into babies?" it was panelist and author Alice Hoffman (left) who piped up.

"If you had children, you would understand," Hoffman told Christine Smallwood, associate literary editor for the Nation.

The panelists -- including novelists Yxta Maya Murray (her newest, "The King's Gold," comes out this week) and Alex Espinoza ("Still Water Saints") -- all argued that reading about fantastical worlds teaches us about this one. Bender's story as well as fairytales such as Little Red Riding Hood contain metaphors that apply to reality.

Not only is magic a useful literary tool, it also gives people and things a voice that otherwise might be silenced. Nonfiction literature, they said, is confined to that which is documented. But what about the voice not recorded? Because not all occurrences in history were  recorded, they noted, perhaps fiction is more accurate than nonfiction. 

Magic and literature, therefore, are inextricably intertwined because the mere act of creating a world out of words is magic in and of itself.

While panelists discussed the merits of fiction and magic, they also made a clear distinction between the unreal and flat-out lying. For example, all four unanimously denounced Margaret Seltzer's fake autobiography about growing up among gangsters in South Los Angeles. 

--Melissa Rohlin

(Photo: Alice Hoffman by Deborah Feingold/Random House)

The accidental chef?

[For the record: A previous version of this post incorrectly said that "Top Chef" was on the Food Network and that Lakshmi is a vegetarian.]

Padma Lakshmi, author, former supermodel, and host of the Bravo's reality show "Top Chef,"  opened her Culinary Stage act on Sunday by announcing that she was waiting for her mother.

Lakshmi wanted her mom, who was supposedly on her way over via golf cart, to watch the demonstration. She stalled for a few minutes, chatting with the large crowd but then eventually decided to get going on the recipe -- goat cheese and mushroom flautas accompanied by a date/mint/lemon/chili salsa.

The Indian-born vegetarian (who isn't a vegetarian any longer because of her food-tasting role) really hopes to encourage people to try new ingredients, including many of the spices in her latest cookbook, "Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet." She seems to get the biggest kick from having people use these spices to amp up their own favorite dishes.

Looking much younger than her age (37), Lakshmi was dressed in jeans, tennis shoes and a tank top. She read a funny story about gathering roses for her mother one Mother's Day from a grouchy neighbor's front yard, and an excerpt on the joy of ice cream -- licking descriptions included. (Could she have learned some writerly tricks from her brief marriage to superstar novelist Salman Rushdie?)

Lakshmi said her culinary career began by accident after she wrote her first book, "Easy Exotic: Low-Fat Recipes from Around the World," the sort a traveling top model would need to stay svelte. She says she also keeps up her figure by jumping rope backstage between scenes on "Top Chef."

--Leslie Anne Wiggins

(Photo: Padma Lakshmi at the Festival of Books by David Livingston/Getty Images)

Post-partum depression among novelists?

Finishing a novel produces different feelings in different writers, or so three mighty practitioners of the form said Sunday at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.

Jane Smiley confessed to feeling spent, even a bit shaken, after completing the novels "A Thousand Acres" (1991) and "Moo" (1995). 

Smiley's 1988 effort at epic writing, "The Greenlanders," on the other hand, left her feeling so energized that she immediately turned to finish another manuscript she'd set aside.

Ron Carlson was so thoroughly submerged in "Five Skies" (2007), his first novel in three decades (though he produced four short-story collections in the interim), that the experience was perhaps as exhausting as finishing up a quarter of teaching at UC Irvine, where he now co-directs the graduate fiction writing program.

Tobias Wolff, who has written two novels ("Ugly Rumours" and "Old School") and is considered a master of the memoir and short story (including the latest collection, "Our Story Begins"), usually finds himself in a celebratory mood on finishing a work. But he noted that the prolific Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope would finish one book and immediately begin another, adhering to a regimen of writing at least 10,000 words a week.

"If it were me, I'd be at the bar for about a year," Wolff said. Then drolly comparing his output to Trollope's, he added, "You will see there's a flaw in my procedure. It may be the celebration part."

L.A. Times staff writer Susan Salter Reynolds (and moderator of the panel, "Fiction: Serious Prose") also wanted to know their thoughts on the recent flaps about authors who presented elaborate fictions as memoir. (Remember mixed-race author Margaret B. Jones exposed as white writer Margaret Seltzer, who grew up in upper middle class Sherman Oaks, not in a foster family in the 'hood of South Central Los Angeles? And Mischa Defonseca, who admitted that her 1997 book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," was a work of fiction?)

Carlson quipped: "All the dialog in my novel is 100% accurate!"

Wolff opined that perhaps some of the blame can be laid at the feet of gullible audiences. "Imagine their shock" he said of Defonseca's readers' reaction to her confession after believing that "a little girl toddled off into the woods and was raised by wolves."

-- Kristina Lindgren

(photo of Tobias Wolff by Elena Seibert)

Sewage and Ahmed's refrigerator ...

Frustration was palpable Sunday among participants in the lone L.A. Times Festival of Books panel discussion specifically aimed at the Middle East. The occupation of Iraq, the now 60-year-old conflict between Israel and dispossessed Palestinians, as well as the vilification of Islam and Muslims in the West -- all have made the region more combustible than ever and our own U.S. democracy that much more tenuous.

"We are one or two terrorist attacks away from a police state in this country," journalist and writer Chris Hedges told more than 200 people in a packed UCLA auditorium Sunday for the panel, "Contentious Ground: The Middle East."

Hedges, a former New York Times correspondent who has covered the wars in Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia and El Salvador, decried the "gross mischaracterization of Islam as a religion of violence," which has skewed the U.S. public's perceptions about Muslims, the Arab world and the real sources of instability in the Middle East. Citing his experiences while covering the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s as just one example, he said, "Bosnian Muslims were the only peaceful ones in the conflict."

But what does that have to do with sewage, or a refrigerator?