The Hooded Utilitarian

Event of the Century!

2009-11-30T12:00:00.000-08:00

Image United #1
Writer: Robert Kirkman
Artists: Larsen, Liefeld, McFarlane, Portacio, Silvestri, Valentino

Working for Marvel Comics may be a dream come true for a lot of young artists, but it's a raw deal when you think about it. If you just do your job and get your pages in on time, nobody but hardcore fanboys will ever remember your name. But if you're actually creative and introduce some new characters and ideas, Marvel "rewards" you by taking ownership of all your creations and maybe paying royalties if by a miracle your characters appear in other media. In 1992, several superstar artists said enough was enough and they left Marvel to form Image Comics.

For a brief period, Image was king. Everyone* was excited about the next generation of superheroes, who all had cool names like Spawn and Savage Dragon. But according to Internet wisdom, those early Image comics weren't any good. Lacking in competent characterization and storytelling, the comics relied instead on flashy art and lots of gore and cheesecake. I can't personally confirm any of that, as my knowledge of Image was limited to a few issues of Spawn and WildCATS that I borrowed from my brother and neglected to return. I didn't hate them (I was a kid and easy to pander to) but they must not have made much of an impression because I don't remember anything about those books and never bothered to collect them.

But that was back in the 90's. It's almost 2010 now, and Image is an established publisher (if nowhere near the size of Marvel or DC). And being an established comics publisher in North America means publishing superhero crossovers. Even a cursory glance at the Direct Market sales for Secret Invasion or Blackest Night reveals that everyone** loves superhero crossovers. That's why the hot shot creators from 1992 (minus Jim Lee) came together to give the fanboys one more thing to buy, Image United. And I bought it too, because what the hell, it's only money.

So what does a creator-owned crossover look like?

Right off the bat, I recognized Spawn, Savage Dragon, and Witchblade, but I had no clue who the rest of them were. To his credit, Robert Kirkman seems to understand that Image United could be a reader's first exposure to Image, so he spends a good portion of the book laboriously introducing everyone. And since these are Image characters they all have hardcore names like Badrock (big guy in back), Ripclaw (below Spawn), Shadowhawk (upper left), Fortress (middle), and the unironically named Shaft. Things get complicated fairly quickly though, as a dozen more characters are introduced in rapid succession. With such a large cast, it's not surprising that most of the characters lack distinguishable personalities.

With all the introductions, the story just barely gets started. Supervillains are simultaneously causing trouble in various cities, and the heroes don't know who's coordinating the attacks. But the readers do, because the main villain shows up at the end. Apparently, the Image Universe is being threatened by none other than Al Simmons! Don't feel bad if you have no idea who the hell Al Simmons is, I didn't either. If you look up "Al Simmons" on Wikipedia you'll find entries for a baseball player and a Canadian musician who specializes in children's music. But Al Simmons was also the civilian identity of the original Spawn, who I guess lost the job at some point. You learn new things every day.

But screw the story, let's talk about the art. Six different artists worked on this book, but don't ask me who did what because ... I'm going to level with you guys. I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of comic book artists. I don't know what Whilce Portacio's style looks like. I'm pretty sure I can recognize what Rob Liefeld drew but only because of the extra teeth in each mouth. Does that mean I'm not qualified to review this comic? If you're a hardcore fanboy, my opinion probably doesn't mean shit to you, but I'm okay with that. I'm still going to argue that the art in this comic leaves something to be desired.

(The following image may be offensive to people who hate cheesecake and/or bad anatomy). Let's begin with this panel featuring Cyberforce.

There's a lot of linework and detail, but it's all in service to a rather drab scene. A bunch of generic, techno-themed heroes are standing in front of boxes and gray walls. That's not eye-catching. And the woman on the far right is trying her hardest to pull off the brokeback pose.

Moving on to big fight scene. There are about five gallons worth of steroids in this panel.

This is supposed to be the dramatic smackdown of the issue, but it feels rather flat. Like so many listless fight scenes in so many mediocre comics, the characters come across less like they're pounding each other and more like they're posing for a picture. The static nature of the fight is only reinforced by the tendency of the characters to have lengthy chats in between punches. Of course, many superhero fans would argue this is just a convention of the genre. But it's a shitty convention perpetuated by lousy comics, so why defend it?

Now for the big reveal.

I have to admit, if I were a 12 year old I'd probably think this was the coolest image ever (except for the left hand, which seems detached from the rest of the body). But how many 12 year olds are actually reading superhero comics these days? I suspect that Image United is geared towards the same adult readership that DC and Marvel compete for. And judging this panel as an adult, Omega Spawn comes across as a design that tries too hard but doesn't get very far. He looks just like regular Spawn, but with more pointy crap layered on the standard outfit.

To sum up, the creators tried to make a book that was appealing to new readers, but they couldn't think outside the tiny box that is mainstream superhero comics. While the story is easily comprehensible, only the true believers will give a shit. In my case, I didn't know who half the characters were but I was able to follow along. But the comic didn't have any emotional impact on me, as there's nothing in the story that leads me to care what happens to these people. I'm not terribly concerned that Omega Spawn is going to blow up the Image Universe and deny me the awesomeness of (white) Shaft. The art is also intended for the true believers, relying heavily on genre conventions like talky fight scenes, steroidal men, and ridiculously busty women.

But maybe the Image creators were only ever interested in pandering to the same old base. And if they wanted to produce a crossover as insular and self-reverential as Secret Invasion or Blackest Night, then they've succeeded.

*By everyone, I mean 12 year old boys.

**By everyone, I mean 30 year 0ld men.

Can Wonder Woman Be a Superdick? (part 1)

2009-11-29T08:36:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a series of posts about superheroes and gender. In the most recent I talked about superdickery. Superdickery here refers to the way super-heroes tend to stand in for the uber-patriarch, both as benign law-giver and as evil ogre-father. In the post, I talked especially about how Marvel's innovation was to shift more explicitly towards the idea of superhero as nightmare ogre-father (the Hulk! the Thing!) Ultimately, though, the ogre-father is still the father; Marvel comics are still about dreams of empowerment, rather than about denigrating or undermining those visions of absolute mastery.

Okay. So...if superheroing is all about superdickery, what happens when you have a female superhero? As the title up there says, can Wonder Woman be a superdick? And, if so, how, if at all, is that dickishness different when it's attached to a woman?

There have been a couple of gestures at making Wonder Woman dickish. As I mentioned last post, Kate Beaton's butch WW can be seen as dickish to some extent. And Greg Rucka's WW in the Hiketeia might be considered superdickish in some sense too.

Overall, though, male writers have seemed distinctly uncomfortable with having Wonder Woman act as a superdick. I'm going to talk about some specific examples in a minute. First though, I want to discuss briefly why the superdickery meme is so hard (as it were) to apply to female characters.

In general, the whole point of the superdick is that you have some non-powered weakling (Bruce Banner, Clark Kent, whoever), and then the superhero acts as empowerment fantasy. Bruce Banner can't lay down the law — but Hulk can smash. Peter Parker can't replace Unlce Ben — but Spider-Man can! Bruce Wayne cant' fight evil in his undies — but Batman will. Etc.

On the one hand, this is a pretty simple formulation. On the other hand, though, it is, I think, plugged into some fairly profound dynamics around male identity. As I discussed in this post, this post, and this post, male identity is built around a central incoherence. This incoherence can be seen as biologically Oedipal (with Freud), or as cultural (with Eve Sedgwick.) Either way, the point is that a male is both identified with patriarchal power (the father) and distanced from that power (the child.) To be identified with patriarchal power is to turn one's back on femininity, and in some sense on humanity — so that the uberpatriarch is both a monster and, in some sense, unmasculine, since he rejects women (what gender is the Thing under those briefs, exactly?) But, on the other hand, to be a sniveling child outside of patriarchal power is to be feminized.

In short, the engine behind the super-hero split identity is the anxiety of maleness. Peter/Spider-Man is constantly vacillating between two people because neither one is stable. Peter is under pressure to take up the rod of superdickery and become a real man; Spider-Man is under pressure to cast aside the rod of superdickery and pay attention to the girls already so he can become a real man.

Women aren't implicated in this psychodrama. Female identity isn't incoherent — or at least, it's not incoherent in the same way. A commenter on a recent article of mine at Reason put the point succinctly:

girls can think ninjas are cool without any blowback. Any man who likes sparkly emo vampires is probably sorting through some issues.

That's exactly the point; a girl who likes ninjas doesn't have her femininity called into question (on the contrary, butch women are often considered especially hot, as I argue here. Men who like romance, on the other hand, open themselves up (as it were) to the charge of not being sufficiently masculine.

So that means women have it easy compared to poor, conflicted men, right? Well, not exactly. It's true that female identity is in some sense more stable...but there's a certain amount of coercion which goes into enforcing that stability. Men are always defined by their lack of the phallus, always anxiously scurrying after the unattainable superdick...or dropping it like a hot potato and scurrying away when they get it. Women, on the other hand, aren't supposed to have the superdick in the first place, so they're just kind of supposed to sit there and be. Basically, for women, the ideal is more coherent, which means that individual slip ups (watching ninja movies) aren't necessarily always as important. However, overall, a more coherent ideal can actually be more limiting. Always striving and failing is tiresome, but probably preferable overall to being stuck in prison.

Which brings us back to Wonder Woman.

That's from Denny O'Neil and Mike Sekowsy's first issue on WW from 1968. And, as you can see, the creators seem to be of the opinion that WW is a freak. And why is she a freak? Not because she's actually a monster like the Thing, but simply because she's got "muscles" and is a woman. And, not coincidentally, in the following issues of their run on the series, O'Neill and Sekowsky actually depowered WW, turning her into a civilian spy — still a crime fighter, but one who wouldn't necessarily scare the (male) kiddies.

O'Neill and Sekowsky are more blatant than most, but they're hardly alone in their discomfort with the super-powered WW. Throughout "The Greatest Wonder Woman Stories Ever Told," there's a constant, insistent effort to evade the image of Wonder Woman as superdick — to domesticate her, if you will. In Robert Kanigher's "Top Secret," Steve Trevor engages in an elaborate plot to get Wonder Woman to marry him. His scheme fails...but it forces WW to create her Diana Prince identity in which (of course) she serves under Steve in the military. In this story, then, Wonder Woman isn't Diana's empowerment fantasy; rather, Diana is *Steve's* empowerment fantasy. WW does get the better of Steve, but only by doing what he wants. She bows to his superdickery and relinquishes her own.

Similarly, in Robert Kanigher's revealingly titled "Be Wonder Woman...and Die!" the emotional focus of the story is on a terminally ill young actress who impersonates Wonder Woman and then expires beautifully. It's pretty clearly a Mary Sue story in some sense — a WW fan appears, is lauded by her idol, and then shuffles off the mortal coil to great acclaim. But you do have to wonder — if this is a Mary Sue, whose Mary Sue is it? Who exactly is getting off on a depowered and dead WW clone? Could it be the male writer,by chance?

One final example; Wonder Woman #230, from 1977. (Todd Munson very kindly gave me this issue when I visited his class at Randolph-Macon a few weeks back. ) This issue is by Marty Pasko, and it's set in the 1940s to tie in with the then-current TV series. It's also obsessed with doubling. The villain is the Cheetah, who suffers from multiple-personality disorder; normally she's an everyday socialite (Priscilla Rich), but when she sees Wonder Woman she has a psychotic episode and turns into a supervillain. In this sotry, Priscilla accidentally encounters WW and has her transformation triggered. As the Cheetah she then manages to discover WW's secret identity, and makes plans to use the information to kill her. However, Cheetah turns back to Priscilla before she can take action. Priscilla then contacts Diana Prince...and hypnotizes her into forgetting she's Wonder Woman, figuring that if Wonder Woman disappears, Priscilla herself will never change into the Cheetah again.

So along the way here there are several suggestive incidents.

— Early in the issue, Steve Trevor is gushing on and on about Wonder Woman. Diana Prince is clearly quite pissed about this; she's jealous of her alter ego. Thus, there's a definite implication that Diana *wants* to get rid of WW, just as Priscilla wants to get rid of the Cheetah.

— There's an erotic tension between the female antagonists. Priscilla's repressed emotions are released whenever she sees Wonder Woman; it's not hard to read a lesbian subtext into that. Moreover, the hypnotic encounter between Priscilla and Diana is framed as seduction; Priscilla even comments (lasciviously?) on how "naive" Diana is.

In breaking the mirror here, Priscilla is banishing both Wonder Woman and the Cheetah. Where agonized male-male tensions tend to lead to heroes hitting villains and hyperbolic violence, the female-female encounter/seduction does the reverse. It doesn't redouble anxieties around female identity; it eliminates them. Priscilla is ushering Diana back into femininity. (I don't think it's a coincidence that in the last panel Diana's face seems definitely softer and less butch than it does towards the top of the page.)

Priscilla can be seen, in other words, as patrolling the boundaries of femininity. This is actually a fairly common dynamic, I think; women are often harsher on (small) infractions against femininity than men are. My wife pointed out that Patti Smith in the 70s once commented that there's nothing more disgusting than seeing some woman's breast hanging over a guitar. The quote is interesting too, because, like this encounter, there's definitely some not quite dealt with eroticism there; Smith is perceiving female guitarists as sexual beings; there's a same-sex frisson. I haven't quite worked this through, but it seems like there's a parallel here with Eve Sedgwick's ideas about male homosociality. That is, men form homosocial bonds (and repress explicit homosexual ones) as a way of cementing patriarchal power. Women might be seen as forming homosocial bonds (and repressing explicit homosexual ones) as a way of policing or reaffirming femininity — which again essentially has the effect of cementing patriarchal power. That seems like a good description of what Priscilla is doing here, certainly — she seduces/explains the error of her ways to Diana in order to prevent Diana from becoming a superdick, and so leading Priscilla herself into superdickery.

On the one hand this ends up being a false consciousness argument (women reinforcing the patriarchal order out of a mistaken fear of their own power/acceptance of their natural role.) On the other hand, it might also be seen as a not unrational risk assessment. Priscilla is worried that Wonder Woman's escape from femininity will bring reprisals against Priscilla herself (she'll become the cheetah, get herself in trouble, and end up being punished.) Similarly, Patti Smith, as a female rockstar, could be seen as covering her own ass — too many female rockstars might cause trouble.

I don't know; not sure that that's all thought through as well as I might like. But I think there is definitely a sense in which bonds between women are used to patrol femininity just as bonds between men are used to patrol masculinity. And the obsessively doubled relationship between Priscilla/Cheetah and Diana/Wonder Woman seems to get at that.

Though at the same time, of course, there's a tradition of feminist sisterhood which is about confronting or challenging patriarchy. It's interesting in that regard how, even though this is set in the 40s when the Marston /Peter stories took place, there are just a lot less women here than in Marston's writing. The only woman who's around is Priscilla, which is obviously an antagonistic relationship....

— Because WW has disappeared, Steve has to take her spot in a video. (The director comments "I'd rather shoot a war hero than some broad in a silly get-up anyway!") The Cheetah has booby-trapped the camera, though. Priscilla doesn't want to kill anyone...so she figures she has to remind Diana of who she was. She leads Diana off to the side (which looks again very much like femme/butch seduction)

and this time the female/female encounter brings WW and the Cheetah both back.

Because we see this entirely from Priscilla's perspective, though, this comes across more as sad necessity than triumphant victory. The return of female superpowers may be necessary, but it's not ideal or normal. And, moreover, it really does result in bad news for Priscilla; she gets beaten up, captured, and sent off to Paradise Island for reeducation (where presumably she'll be reintegrated back into femininity.)

—Soon after WW reappears we get this panel:

The reappearance of WW seems to humorously undermine Steve's maleness. When a woman wields the superdick, men are less male. Not only can't Steve take WW's place, but even in wanting to he becomes ridiculous; less of a man.

— The comic ends with WW back in Diana Prince identity, talking to Steve. Steve is worrying about the possibility of WW disappearing again — and Diana suggests that if WW does disappear Steve should spend more time looking for her. There's certainly a hint here that Diana would like WW to go away— she wants Steve to recognize, or respond, to Diana instead. Like Priscilla, Diana seems to in part want to lose her super-powers and her super-identity.

This isn't that unusual a trope — as I mentioned in the last post, Spider-Man often wants to lost his powers, as does Bruce Banner, and so forth. The difference here is, perhaps, that when Diana is just Diana, there's no indication that she wants to be anything else. She doesn't wish she had her powers back, or think about WW. Instead, Priscilla has to remind her who she was. When Peter Parker, or whoever, is depowered, his identity remains incoherent; he still wants the superdick. But for Diana, the only tension is when she's Wonder Woman. A feminized Diana, sans superdick, is perfectly happy — just as, presumably, a Priscilla without the Cheetah would be perfectly happy. There isn't the attraction/repulsion for patriarchal authority that you tend to feel in male super-hero narratives. Instead, the energy of the story seems to push pretty firmly towards just turning superfemales into ordinary women and being done with it. Of course, it can't end up there because, you know, Wonder Woman's name is on the cover of the comic, and you need more stories with her. But that isn't Marty Pasko's fault. He didn't create the character.

And next time we'll talk about the guy who did create the character and how he felt about superdickery. Hopefully we'll get to that next week.

In the meantime...this is actually part of a long series of posts on latter-day Wonder Woman iterations. You can read the whole series here.

Partially Congealed Pundit: A to Z

2009-11-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

I wrote these all between 2000 and 2004 or so.

Anthropology A to Z

Analyzing bigamy, chiropractors dissecting Ethiopians find gratuitous horniness. "Inferior jism kills," lament medical non-Negroes. "Our prostitutes qualmlessly relish sable, towering usufructuaries." Vampire-vivisectionist-vasectomites want xenopotency — yea, zoöplasty.

Grants A to Z

Argh. Bastard coins demand enthusiastic flim-flam, genuflecting horse-pucky — iterated. Jejune kleptomaniacs like myself nuzzle other's piss (quantified.) Respect seeps through undergarments viscously. Wampum-warranted xenogenesis yields zilch.

Marx A to Z

Attacked by capitalists, Dimitri Endclass fretfully grunted, "Help!" Injustice jouster King Lumpen materialized. "No obstreperous prole quashing, reactionary swine!" the über-underdog vociferated. "Working-class xanthochroi yean Zion!"

Physics A to Z

"Atomic bomb," cogito. Deductively, ergo, funding. Gravity's hierophant, I, Jehovah-Kewpie, license meritocrats; noblesse oblige. Prosper, quantum Rotarians! Seek, thou, universal vacuity! Wantonly X-ray your Zeitgeist!

Spielberg A to Z

Amiable Bildungsroman chug-a-lugs deep emotions, feels great! Heroine (innocent, jiggly) kisses lachrymose morality’s nether orifice. Peddlers quiver righteously! Suddenly, teleologically, upstart visionaries win! Xeroxed youngsters zombify!

Xmas A to Z

Avaricious bambinos covet Disney-detritus. Elders' Fallopian genitals, heaving immaculately, jaculate kenosis-knickknacks. Levittowners merrily nurse organized pedophilia. Quasi-riant revenue-ravenous Santa Taws uncoil. Vultures watch Xt.'s yummy zygote.

Utilitarian Review 11/27/09

2009-11-27T12:30:00.000-08:00

It's been a slowish week here with the holidays, but I did want to mention that i had a brief but (IMO) entertaining review of the very aptly named Horsemeat Disco comp over at Metropulse.

And I love this Por Parichart video.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Best Of

2009-11-26T07:42:00.000-08:00

I'm participating in the music best of madness which Tucker and Marty are organizing over at Factual Opinion. As part of that I put together a list of my favorite songs of the year that I remembered at the moment, and, what the hey, I organized them in descending order of goodness. Some of these have shown up in downloads before...but now they're in an exciting new list!

1. Ina unt Ina — Teacher (All Sides of Ina)
2. Justin Townes Earle — Mama's Eyes (Midnight at the Movies)
3. Amerie — Dangerous (In Love and War!)
4. Funeral Mist — White Stone (Maranatha)
5. Antony and the Johnsons — One Dove (The Crying Light)
6. Legion of Two — Legion of Two (Riffs)
7. Lovers — Let's Stay Lost (I Am the West)
8. Brooke Valentine — Dr. Do Right (Physical Education Mix Tape)
9. Drukdh — Distant Cry of Cranes (Microcosmos)
10. Mariah Carey — More Than Just Friends (Memoir of an Imperfect Angel)
11. The Horse's Ha — Asleep in a Waterfall (Of The Cathmawr Yards)
12. The Juan Maclean — One Day (The Future Will Come)
13. Ithdabquth Qliphoth — Funeral Spirit of Holy, Holy and Holy Trance-formation (Funeral Spirit of Holy, Holy and Holy Trance-formation)
14. Raekwon — Surgical Gloves (Only Built For Cuban Linx II)
15 Electrik Red — Friend Lover (How to Be a Lady: Volume 1)

Download Best of.

Last week's mix, with gospel and other stuff, is here.

TwiHard the Hunter

2009-11-25T10:00:00.000-08:00

I've gotten into a bit of a back and forth about the Twilight series with pop-culture blogger Alyssa Rosenberg. It started with Alyssa's article on the Atlantic website in which she argued that the Twilight is a poor excuse for a fantasy series because Bella is overly passive:

I don’t imagine that I was alone when I was young in wishing there was something magical about me – or in reading Talking to Dragons until it became dog-eared or keeping The Mists of Avalon perpetually on renewal at the library. What girl doesn’t wish she could discover some special attribute about herself that would smooth her way through the demons of junior high school and beyond—particularly if that something would get her noticed for the first time by a boy or girl with special attributes of their own? But earlier this week, when I stumbled over the Twilight finish line, reaching the final page of Breaking Dawn, the series’ last book, it seemed clear to me that even in my younger days, Bella Swann would never have captured my imagination in the same way Cimorene, or Juniper, or Wise Child, or Morgaine had, and still do. Those heroines understand the joy of being loved by someone else. But their stories make the case that being a witch, or a warrior, or a queen—even without a king—might be better than an eternity as a metaphorical princess in a metaphorical tower, no matter how much the vampire company sparkles.

I responded in an article on Splice Today:

The real issue is, as Rosenberg says, that Bella's actions are all inspired by her love for family and friends, rather than by a desire to save entire kingdoms and uphold "justice and freedom." Of course, by this standard, Elizabeth Bennett isn't much of a role model either—why, she never saves anyone! And what about Jane Eyre, refusing to sacrifice herself by going off to do mission work among the poor and heathen and benighted. What kind of model for young girls is that?

Rosenberg might as well just come out and say, "You know what? I don't really like romance—and, on top of that, I'm kind of a liberal do-gooder who thinks that abstract notions like justice and power are more important than love and family." Rosenberg accuses Meyer of turning Bella into a "metaphorical princess in a metaphorical tower." But she's not a princess in a tower; she's a wife in a family, and one who at the end is not only equal to her husband in strength and magical powers, but actually superior to him. That hardly seems rabidly anti-feminist to me-but I like Pride and Prejudice too, so what do I know.

Rosenberg came back on her own blog to tell me that I'm still wrong, most pointedly because she does in fact like romance novels. Assuming makes an ass out of me as they say...though, as I'll argue here, for somebody who likes romance novels, Alyssa is awfully uncomfortable with some of the central points of the genre.

So first, on a couple of interpretive points. Alyssa takes me to task for overestimating Bella's achievements and power. In my Splice Today essay, I argue that Bella has to practice to master her magical vampiric abilities in the last volume, and that she ends up being stronger than Edward. Alyssa responds:

I think Noah's actually mistaken: when Bella finally uses her powers, she exerts them much farther than she's ever been able to in her practice sessions, which kind of defeats the point if you're trying to make an argument about "determination and commitment." (Also, to the point Noah makes in a paragraph I pull out below about Bella being more powerful than Edward, Meyer seems to establish pretty clearly that that's just because she's a new vampire, not that it'll be permanent.)

Bella does become much more powerful at the end of the book all of a sudden; the rationale is that her loved ones are threatened, and that gives her the inspiration to exert an extra oomph. But it's not clear to me that therefore all the training and work was worthless. Surely the point could just as easily be, you put all the effort in, you exert yourself to the limit, and maybe that will be enough to get that miracle you need. It's a little overly pat, sure; but I think it's a stretch to argue that it's not about Bella working to achieve success.

As for the strength thing — Bella's natural vampiric strength will fade after she's a newborn, sure. But her power seems to only be getting stronger — and it's her power (the ability to negate other vampires' powers) which really makes her more special, and more powerful, than Edward. (It's also worth noting that Bella is unusuall self-controlled for a new vampire, which is a big part of the reason she's even able to use her physical strength in a way that's at all useful to her or anyone else.)

To move onto more substantial disagreements: Alyssa responded to my comparison of Bella with Elizabeth Bennett and Jane Eyre by saying this:

I think Noah forgets that I'm writting a critique of Twilight within the realm of fairy tale, and about why it's a step backwards within the innovations of that genre. But I absolutely agree that I would be completely and utterly freaked out if teenage girls wanted to emulate Jane Eyre. Less so if they wanted to be little Lizzy Bennets, since she's an intellectual and stands up to class prejudice (to the extent capable within her constraints of course). But I do think those books are regularly read with the acknowledgment that a) they're about an era when women's choices were substantially limited, b) frequently read in a context like a classroom where those roles can be discussed, and c) presented social criticisms in the times they were written. Twilight is neither set in another era (although it's curiously removed from the technology of today) nor is it mostly read in a critical context like a classroom. And while I recognize that many, many Twilight readers can distinguish fact from fiction, I do think that some of the book's themes demand a critical context, particularly the obsessiveness of the love affairs. Perhaps it's just me, but I think it's important, especially with young girls, to have a conversation about the fact that sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, if he leaves you, he is never coming back. I don't think this is a trifling point: Bella never experiences permanent romantic loss, something a lot of contemporary fairy tales have managed to incorporate into the genre, and that's a genuinely valuable lesson in a society where most people date before they marry.

So there's a bunch there...but let's start at the top.

First, I wasn't saying that Jane Eyre was a bad model. On the contrary, I was saying that, at least in the incident I referenced, she's a fine model. At the end of the book, the aptly named St. John tells Jane that she should marry him and come with him to be a missionary in some far away, benighted land. Despite great pressure, from St. John and her own conscience, Jane eventually refuses to go, putting her love and family above the call to change the world for the better. That's a choice Bella would agree with. Would Alyssa?

Alyssa is more willing to accept Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice as a role model...but even here, she's leery. Elizabeth, after all, isn't really sufficiently independent; she doesn't save the world, she marries to devote herself to the estate and her husband — not quite independent enough, for all her spunkiness. So, to make Pride and Prejudice safe, we need to read it in a classroom context, where girls can be taught what to think and what not to think about their chosen romance.

As someone who spent 14 years developing curriculum for high school students, I can say with some certainty that this is utter nonsense. The only thing students get from studying a book in school is bored. If Pride and Prejudice ever had any relevance, the fastest way to denude it of same is to relegate it to the classroom. And Alyssa's comments on Twilight in this connection are almost Kantian; the problem with the books is that they're not read in a classroom context, and as a result, girls actually enjoy them! The fall of society and/or feminism is certainly at hand.

I also find this point kind of bizarre:

"Bella never experiences permanent romantic loss"

It's true; Bella gets everything she wants. At the end. Along the way, though, she experiences intense, brutal despair, not once, but multiple times. Edward rejects here and she really thinks he doesn't love her, causing her to be almost nonfunctional for months.Then Jacob rejects her, making her miserable for an extended period. And it's those experiences, as much as (or more than) the eventual triumph, that are really the heart of the series. To suggest that Bella needs to be *more* depressed really seems kind of ridiculous. I do get the point that most girls are going to not get the first guy they love, and that it's useful to point that out . But at the same time, Twilight is not shy about acknowledging, and even reveling in, romantic disappointment.

The real heart of our disagreement is here, though:

As for the assertion that "I'm kind of a liberal do-gooder who thinks that abstract notions like justice and power are more important than love and family." First, it's a mistake again to conflate the abstract concepts of justice and equality as they exist in fairy tales with contemporary politics. And one of the things I find fascinating about contemporary fairy tales of all stripes is the ways they've managed to make the condition of societies and of individual marriages co-equal. In a lot of contemporary fairy tales, the main characters have to establish peace or societal equilibrium in order to craft a space where a marriage can thrive....I actually think it exalts love to tie it to larger societal concerns, rather than to isolate it entirely from society, and it makes for wider-ranging and more interesting stories, too.

Abstract justice in fairy tales doesn't map exactly onto contemporary politics, of course...but it isn't divorced from them either. And, indeed, in the rest of her argument here Alyssa goes on to make parallels between how life and politics work in a fairy tale and how they work in the real world. She likes certain fairy tales, she says, because they present an image in which men and women fall in love and work together to save the world (or work together to save the world and fall in love.) The dream Alyssa wants is one in which social and political engagement maps onto romance, and the two enrich each other. That's why she doesn't like the message in Jane Eyre, where political and social engagement is shown as existing in contrast to love; it's why she's uncomfortable with the message in Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennet never really thinks all that much about social or political engagement (Alyssa says at the end of her essay that Elizabeth engages in rebellion...but really, calling a little satirical wit rebellion seems fairly desperate wishful thinking.) And her enthusiasm for great social change and rebellion is also why Alyssa absolutely hates Forks, the little town where Bella spends her life.

There is no larger world beyond family and Forks in the Twilight books, and if I were immortal, I think I might get kind of bored with that after a while. But then, I was never the kind of girl who could stare at a guy's face for that long.

Okay, sure, I get that the treacly romance eternal love thing is irritating. But what is wrong with Forks? And why, as Alyssa repeatedly insists, is it lame, or passive, to save your loved ones and your entire family? Why exactly is Bella a failure? Because she doesn't want to rule a kingdom? Because she doesn't want to save the world? Because she's chosen to care for those she loves and not impose her passing messianic dreams on the rest of the populace? Because her story — which is much more romance than fairy tale — ends in private happiness rather than public triumph?

Alyssa reminds me that she works as a political reporter, and is therefore not a liberal do-gooder at all, but instead is non-partisan. All right. Then she should be fine with the following argument, hopefully. Most people — girls, boys, what have you — they're not going to save the world. Most of them don't even want to save the world, you know? Is that because they're victims of false consciousness and read too many Twilight books? Or is it because wanting to save the world is a kind of megalomaniacal sickness that most people just aren't especially afflicted with? Or is it because there are different strokes for different folks? In any case, the fact remains; Bella, like most people, cares about the people she cares about. On their behalf, she's able to do great things — risk her life, battle against evil, even perform miracles. But she doesn't get off — and most of her readers don't get off — on writing the wrongs of the world. Does that make her, and them, less virtuous or wrong? Are all those people in the Forkses of the world just not ambitious enough? I'm a liberal do-gooder myself, but still, that seems like a pretty presumptuous conclusion to me.

Update: It sounds like Alyssa is probably not going to respond further, so I should probably add that she's been incredibly gracious and pleasant throughout the whole back and forth. So thanks, Alyssa. It's been fun.

Desert Island Comics

2009-11-24T07:30:00.000-08:00

As you may have heard, the HU bloggers are taking a break this Thanksgiving week.

I will be heading off to Indonesia myself so it seemed "appropriate" to bring up the subject of desert island comics (see here for Shaenon K. Garrity's survey of various industry professionals on the same subject). I was first exposed to the whole concept through the BBC's Desert Island Discs about 20 years back. Now I won't be following all the rules laid down by Roy Plomley but the radio program did have the useful proviso that the guest would be "automatically given the Complete Works of Shakespeare and either the Bible or another appropriate religious or philosophical work" (from Wikipedia).

One way in which I'll deviate away from that program's premise is that I'm going to be choosing a comic and only a single one at that. I've never viewed a desert island comic as one which a person might objectively consider the best ever made. Nor would it necessarily be that person's favorite comic (though this would be the most obvious choice) or even a comic which has affected the person the most deeply. These factors might be seen to overlap but some books have a habit of affecting readers at particular periods of their lives only. Rather, it whould be a combination of all these factors to varying degrees: aesthetic beauty, emotional involvement or attachment, length and most importantly timelessness - a complex simplicity which affords endless re-readings. After all, you'll be stuck on that island for quite a bit of time - maybe for the rest of your life.

Lest we forget, you'll be taking along your desert island disc and desert island book as well. In my case, I will be searching for a desert island comic to go along with my copy of Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms and a piece of music by J. S. Bach. It certainly wouldn’t be a copy of Watchmen, a run of Kirby's Fantastic Four, Chris Ware's The Acme Novelty Library or a collection of comics by Robert Crumb. As far as modern day pamphlet comics are concerned, Love and Rockets probably stands as good as chance as any of being included in my short list but even that would be a stretch. I would consider bringing along a collection of Krazy Kat or Peanuts strips. The former in particular seems to demonstrate quite engagingly the growth of the artist from his early years of enthusiasm to a middle period of great flowering before the final months of unmistakable and very palpable struggle and depression.

[Second to last Krazy Kat Sunday from Rob Stolzer's collection.]

But what I would really need is something to balance out a palate made raw by too much erudition and history and whenever I think about this, it is Carl Bark's Disney Duck Comics which come to mind first (the Uncle Scrooge stories in particular have a place close to my heart). When I read Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly's Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics a few months back, one thing I noticed was how exceptional Bark's stories were even in the presence of his illustrious peers. It must be said though that I can't discount the effect of nostalgia here. "The Paul Bunyan Machine" story from Uncle Scrooge #28 was one of the first comics I ever read as a child.

Is it perhaps a bit disturbing that I'm putting a Barks Duck story in the same category as Shakespeare or one of the most important books in Chinese literature? Perhaps. It may simply be a reflection of the youthfulness of comics as an art form. Still, as far as reading material is concerned, there are few things as relaxing or viscerally delightful as a good comic. Certainly no piece of traditional literature has offered me so much for so little effort. In the same way that the qualities of the best children's comics exceed those of most (if not all) children's literature, what comics have always offered is a very accessible and intensely rich and fulfilling experience, one which has every chance of breaking down the crumbling barriers between high and low art. Only time will tell if it fulfills this promise.

...And Kids Like Them!

2009-11-23T09:09:00.000-08:00

There's been a bit of a back and forth on the old internets about all ages comics. Christopher Butcher weighs in and summarizes the kerfuffle here. His take is basically that it's much ado about nothing, and that the complaining about a lack of all ages titles is really mostly about super-hero nostalgia:

So let’s really, really narrow this discussion about “all ages” comics to what it really is: Superhero Fans Want To Buy Superhero Comics For Their Kids That Are Simultaneously Exactly What They Read As Kids AND All New At The Same Time. They want all the comics on the stands to be ’safe’ for children, while still engaging them on an adult level like all of the other media targeted at adults. They want the stuff they read as kids and teenagers in the 70s and 80s (or hell, the 60s) to be the same as what’s published today for their kids. They will accept no substitutions, and most importantly they need it to be CANON. That’s right, even if the Superhero comics meet every other criteria, they can’t take place in their own “universe” or be the “for kids” version (even if it’s for ‘all ages’), it has to be part of the 616 or DCU continuity or else it isn’t ‘real’. Superhero fans want validation for their tastes and interests, just like the OCD football dad who couldn’t make it to the NFL and is going to live out his dreams in his son. Exactly the same sentiment, but without a million dollar paycheck at the end of ‘reading superhero comics’, so waaaay less pressure.

And that’s what Retailers, older retailers in particular, want to sell them. Because it’s what they read, and it’s what they know, and they have the same nostalgic feelings for and biases towards that material.

I'm always willing to sneer at superhero fans, as most folks know. But I think this maybe misses or downplays a fairly major point — kids really, really, really like superheroes. A lot. It's not me who was foisting my old Spidey Super Stories and Super-friends comics on my kid because I desperately wanted him to read them for the sake of my overwhelming nostalgia. On the contrary, I pulled those out of the long boxes because my son was obsessed, and I figured it would be cheaper than buying new reading material. And let me tell you, by the time I'd read them fifty or sixty times out loud, any lingering nostalgia I felt for the material was killed well nigh dead.

Butcher goes on to talk about the Marvel Adventures all ages books, which he notes haven't been doing so hot, especially in pamphlet form — especially, especially in the direct market. The Marvel Adventures books have come up more than a time or two on this blog (Most recently in a Vom Marlowe review here.) They're in general quite good; certainly, my son has enjoyed a number of them, from Spider-Man to the Fantastic Four to the Avengers. And I can confirm as a parent that they tend to be more fun to read than old Superfriends comics.

The point, it seems to me, is that super-hero comics really should, in some sense, be for kids; that's where the biggest potential audience would be, in any logical world. There are a small percentage of 35 year old men who are consumed with the desire to read super-hero comics, but there's a much larger percentage of 5-10 year old boys who would (at least potentially) like to read those comics. The industry hasn't totally abandoned the younger audience,it's true — but it definitely sees them as a side-issue which it addresses fitfully, nervously, and not always very effectively.

So Butcher may be right that most of the hand-wringing about all-ages titles is from retailers working through misplaced nostalgia. But even if that's so, I think it's indisputable that Marvel and DC and the industry as a whole don't really know how to sell super-hero comics to kids, which is embarrassing given the fact that selling super-hero comics to young boys should be about as difficult as distributing crack to addicts. I mean, it's clear enough what the problem is in terms of distribution barriers, institutional focus, marketing, and so forth. But still, it's pitiful.

Update: Heidi also weighs in on Chris's post (link thanks to Brigid.

Lovers — I Am The West

2009-11-22T15:29:00.000-08:00

Lovers
I Am the West
[Pop Heart Records]

Sometime in the oughts, folk and shoegazy pop crossbred, creating a sparse, drony, soundtrack for coffee-shops gently orbiting the moon. Is this Chan Marshall’s fault? And has somebody named it already?

In any case, whoever’s responsible, and whatever it’s called, I’m all for it. As are the Lovers; lead singer and writer Carolyn Berk’s tunes range from mid-tempo to slow. Everything’s a dreamy trudge; a nice fuzzy blanket of sound, sprinkled with sweet little songwriting shivers: a touch of harmony here, a dollop of strings there. I go back and forth on which is my favorite tune…but Let’s Stay Lost is certainly a contender. It has a syncopated keyboard and drum intro, ending in a half beat of silence before Berk comes in with a hooky, strolling vocal line “You and me babe/we got lost in the same maze,”; a couple more couplets and then there’s another voice, singing long held “ahhhhs” — and then you get to a fantastic, weird, bridge, with the bandmembers doing sunny, almost Beach Boys harmonies while somebody plays what sounds like a banjo. “Stay Another Night” is great too; it’s got the slow grace of Dylan’s ballads, plus a goofy keyboard burble halfway through and some fuzz feedback at the end — plus that banjo again. I love banjo.

The only downside is that Berk’s lyrics are sometimes a little too clever for their own good. “Your eyes are two deep pools of mud” is funny,; following it with “Maybe I got stuck/Baby I got stuck” is kind of beating a dead metaphor around the bush. Even if you’re occasionally tuning out the words, though, this is a thoroughly enjoyable album.

I Dub Thee: Shoefolk?
Or Maybe: Birkenstockgaze?

Break to Gobble

2009-11-22T06:24:00.000-08:00

Most of your utilitarian bloggers are going to be taking off this week, so things will be a bit quiet around here — though there will still be content of some sort, never fear.

Shortly after the holiday I'm told we may be moving over to our new location at TCJ.com. I'll pass along more details when they're available....

Utilitarian Review 11/21/09

2009-11-21T13:00:00.000-08:00

On HU

I started this week off with a post on how superdickery has changed through the ages.

Richard wrote about mediocre French mainstream title Spin Angels.

Suat wrote about living with Walt Kelly original art.

Kinukitty wrote about the somewhat squicky yaoi title Two of Hearts.

Vom Marlowe discussed the mediocrity which is X-Men.

And this week's music download features lots of gospel and thai music.

Last week's droney mix can still be found at the link.

Utilitarians Elsewhere

Bill and Tom have moved off HU, of course, but I thought I'd mention that they both have great articles in the most recent, and last, Comics Journal, #300, available in a store near you hopefully.

Tom argues that Alan Moore has fallen prey to his own rampant geekery.

Alan Moore is a product of that time, maybe its best. If you want some recycled pop fantasy, I think you're better off with "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" than you are with Star Wars. In fact I'd say his big titles of the 1980s, Watchmen most of all, are the only examples I've come across of really fine, substantial works devoted to recycling other-reality entertainment staples. But something went wrong. His Watchmen became Watchmen the movie, which is bad enough. What's worse is that Moore wrote Lost Girls and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and — well, just about every comic he's turned out since 1989 or so. If I had to think of reasons to say why Alan Moore was great, I'd have a hard time finding anything from his comics work of the past 20 years. There's issue 12 of Promethea, but then there's the rest of Promethea. There's From Hell, but no, not really. He hasn't stopped being a genius; only a genius could fail in the way he does, with such energy and ambition, such amazing fireworks. But when I put one of his comics down, I have to remind myself to pick it back up. I think his post-'89 comics are stunted. No matter how big he tries to be, he winds up being small.

Bill, meanwhile, argues for the uniqueness — and probable transience — of the anime/manga invasion of the U.S.

In 2000, you could name the people and companies working to bring manga to the West on one hand, maybe two. Now keeping up with just the English-language commentators has become a full-time job. A few of the writers, like Jason Thompson, Xavier Guilbert and the chaps at Same Hat! Same Hat!, deserve careful reading. Most of the rest barely need a skim. Which is not necessarily a criticism if you have 3,000 people writing about the same book, what are the odds most of them will say the same things?

What happens instead is that they say the same thing in different places. There is no one essential place to read about manga in English. Instead, the trickle of information from 30-plus years ago became a healthy flow. Then, as with everything in the current age, the forces behind it pool into isolated spots. Each one hosts a dialogue or a tribal area or even an intellectual prison; each speaks to a particular subjectivity. One could tip the pen to Postmodernism, were that movement not first passé and second ironic. Manga and its fans have favored bald emotions, putting them closer to New Sincerity, or the Reconstructivists, or whatever the movement after pomo ends up being called. It seems less like forward progress through the history of ideas than an atomization.

Meanwhile, on the Internets, I have an essay about the new Twilight movies over at Reason.

If Edward represents agelessness as a perfect fantasy, Jacob Black represents aging as a horror-film disaster. As you almost certainly know from advance publicity (and if you don’t, here comes the spoiler,) Jacob discovers partway through the film that he’s a werewolf. Lycanthropy, as it turns out, is adolescence on steroids. Jacob loses control of his emotions, grows hair where he shouldn’t, starts hanging out with the wrong crowd, and begins thinking so loudly that all his friends can hear him.

In choosing between Jacob and Edward, Bella is choosing between growing up, with all its dangers and messy unpredictability, and staying a faery child, forever young and lifeless. In the end (here’s another spoiler), without much of a fight, she opts for immortality. Thus, the Twilight series isn’t so much a coming-of-age story as a refusing-to-come-of-age story.

And finally I have a brief review of the new Leona Lewis album over at Metropulse.

Other Links

Matthew Brady pointed me to this unpublished black and white Wonder Woman story with art by Harry Peter and script possibly by William Marston. It's a treat.

And your Thai luk thung/morlum video of the week, sung by Siriporn Umpaipong.

And what the hey, here's another one by Ajareeya Bussaba. Adorable caterpillars.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: How Far Am I From Thailand?

2009-11-20T15:14:00.000-08:00

Gospel, thai, and some other stuff....

1. Five Blind Boys of Mississippi — How Far Am I From Canaan? (Five Blind Boys of Mississippi 1947-1951)
2. Soul Stirrers — I'm a Soldier (Kings of the Gospel Highway)
3. Spirit of Memphis Quartet — Jesus Jesus (Kings of the Gospel Highway)
4. Swan Silvertones — Working on a Building (Kings of the Gospel Highway)
5. Sensational Nightingales — Sinner Man (When Gospel Was Gospel)
6. Marion Williams — Traveling Shoes (When Gospel Was Gospel)
7. Marion Williams — Sit Down Servant (Gospel Soul of Marion Williams)
8. Thomas A. Dorsey with Sallie Martin — I'll Tell It Wherever I Go (Precious Lord)
9. J. Robert Bradley — The Day Is Past and Gone (All God's Sons and Daughters)
10. June Christy — Shadow Woman (Ballads for Night People)
11. Pamela Bowden — Ao Kwam Kom Kuen Pai Ting Mae Kong (The Bitterness of Leaving Mae Kong) (Kaew Ta Duang Jai)
12. Pamela Bowden — Nong Chum Wan Nee Pee Chum Wann Na (Kaew Ta Duang Jai)
13.Mangpor Chonticha — Mai Dai Am Chan Rork (I Can't Get) (Mae Krua Hua Kai)
14. Mangpor Chonticha — Pee Lhuang Yah Luang Nong (Mae Krua Hua Kai)
15. Mazzy Star — Blue Flower (She Hangs Brightly)
16. Gene Loves Jezebel — Dream a Big Dream (VII)
17.Teenage Filmstars — You Mystify Me (Buy Our Record, Support Our Sickness)
18. Teenage Filmstars — Jeepers Creepers (Buy Our Record, Support Our Sickness)

Download How Far Am I From Thailand?

And if you missed it, you can download last week's droney mix here.

Face Down in the Mainstream: Astonishing X-Men, Grumpy Vom is Grumpy

2009-11-19T11:26:00.000-08:00

Astonishing X-Men #30 by Ellis, Bianchi, et al.

I picked this up because the art looked cool. And, you know, the art is cool. The inks are interesting, with washes as well as lines and a very grimy palette of off green and brown and blue. The anatomy is well-done overall. The facial expressions, while not perfect, are realistic. There are some clear artistic patterns like large pouty lips. There are attempts to make the layout interesting by using weapons as layout lines. See?

Pretty, isn't it?

But it was not enough.

For one thing, the art is very realistic. It's not picture perfect (blue lion mutants with glasses don't actually exist), but it's styled to be real. The artist likes to include things like red lines in the eyes, to show the craziness of the villain or spittle flying to show that people are shouting.

Unfortunately, the craziness comes off more like caaaaaaaarrrraaaaaziness and the spittle just seems sort of gross. The story is just--irritating, and the art could be so awesome, and yet it doesn't all mesh the way a visually told story should.

Instead of making me look forward to more or compensating, the art just reinforced those parts of the story that pissed me off. The basic plot is that the X-Men have found the source of some fake mutants. Their ex-fellow, Forge, has gone bastshit (as one does) and started to make fake mutants to combat evil warriors from an alternate dimension. They've denned Forge in his lair in order to stop him.

And Forge proceeds to act like a cartoon villain, right down to the rolling red eyes and the spit and the dramatic gestures and weird poses. It's sad. I actually felt bad for the guy.

Especially when they cut off his leg and then laugh about it. I mean, jeez, people. Aren't you the heroes? Wasn't this guy your old pal?

(And maybe Forge really is a terrible person worthy of laughter, but really, people. Cutting off someone's leg and then laughing is just bad form. Tacky! Yes, he had some mutant-dampener in it, but I don't care. Show a little respect!)

The X-Men battle the fake-o mutants with no trouble. Forge wanted to lure the X-men into dealing with the cause of the interdimensional warriors by mounting an attack via a large cube (as one does). The X-Men tell Forge off, then whack off his leg in response. Which is gratitude for you, I guess.

You'd think, after the random amputation and cracks about how dumb/crazy Forge is to believe that the interdimensional warriors are a Threat To Humanity As We Know It, that they'd all just leave. But no. The blue lion guy has his girlfriend nuke the place from orbit, just to be sure. Which blows up the special cube and therefore through it to the interdimensional warrior scout dudes' homeworld, which, blue lion now explains, is probably toast.

Well, that's nice, isn't it? I mean, clearly Forge was blood-thirsty and crazy for trying to send a couple of mutant warriors through to make sure no one messed with our Earth. So much better to just toss in a great big old world destroying bomb without bothering to make contact.

Gluey Tart: Two of Hearts

2009-11-18T17:45:00.000-08:00

Two of Hearts, Kano Miyamoto, 2008, Deux Press

Cat reaction shots. I love gratuitous cat reaction shots.

And you know what else I like? Romantic tales with damaged people who help each other heal. Which is what this story is about. There's an older guy who suffers from writers block – which is, of course, a manifestation of his inability to have a real relationship. (Of course, everybody suffers from writers block, and of course people who aren't able to really connect with their deepest emotions write books all the time, but we'll let that slide because there's no need to be obstructionist.)

So, what we mostly have here is a sweet little story about two people finding each other. There's the blocked writer, Haruya, and there's a magnificently fucked up high school boy, Maki. Maki has OCD and a stutter and crippling shyness and some very difficult personal circumstances, and he's really quite appealing. Haruya is kind of letting his life drift by but is obviously a pretty good person, as he's moved to go far out of his way to help Maki when he happens to run across him. Their interactions are pleasantly ambiguous, initially, and their growing relationship is satisfying.

Except. This is another one of those yaoi titles with a bizarre rape scene (or near rape – they get interrupted just before they get to the full monty) that just leaves you scratching your head. It seems to come from a "guys are different" kind of place, but it doesn't play right. The motivation is extremely sketchy, and no one reacts anything like appropriately. "Oh, sorry I was getting ready to rape your emotionally damaged boyfriend who's still in high school – Oh, don't worry about it." "Sorry my friend tried to rape you; he's just upset because he's been in love with me for years and I've been ignoring it – Oh, that's fine, then."

This weird lack of concern over what should be a seriously traumatizing event is part of what ruins the ending for me. Miyamoto is so determined to make everything heartwarming and sweet and happy that she goes overboard. Everybody is going to be fine, all the problems be damned. I like a dazzlingly romantic ending as much as the next yaoi fan, but this time, the happy-ever-after is cloying. There were some interesting complications, and suddenly everything is – all right. Maki is able to get it on with Haruya and straighten out his life. The rapist is able to help Haruya write that prize-winning novel everyone knew he had in him, and to move on with his life and find someone who loves him. Haruya is able to realize that he loves Maki and to work past his emotional distance, write brilliantly, and love selflessly. Just all of a sudden, like Miyamoto got fed up with the whole thing and decided she needed to wrap this up and move on to the next manga. Which might well have been the case – and I've been there, Kano, I really have.

So, is it wrong for me to be disgruntled in the midst of all this comprehensive bliss, just because I find it kind of under-motivated and sudden? I don't know. There's a lot to enjoy in this story, and it will not leave you weeping, even if you're in a state where you're feeling sorry for yourself and you're getting overly emotional and sniffly over the whole Jon and Kate Gosselin saga (so brilliantly, ably, and thoroughly covered in Us Magazine). I wouldn't have bothered to tell you about Two of Hearts if I didn't think there was something special about it. But – you know. There are problems. Forewarned is forearmed.

Oh, right. The cat. It's a stray that Haruya takes in and grows to love. Get it? Yes, of course you do. It's still pretty cute, though.

Original Art: Living with Comics Art

2009-11-17T07:30:00.000-08:00

As with any hobby, collecting comics original art has its own complexities which take in both the aesthetics and economics of the form.

The latter aspect is one of the most hotly debated topics in the hobby because of the escalation of prices of original art over the last few years - prices which which have been barely affected by the ongoing global recession (more on this at a late date).

With regards the aesthetics of original art (i.e. an original page of comics art viewed in isolation on a wall), the academic Andrei Molotiu has written an approach to this in The International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) the main points of which I might bring up sometime in the future.

That article uses Molotiu’s own collection as a frame of reference. I should say here that much of the writing concerning original art tends to focus on the individual writer’s personal collection if only because of the lack of public access to most of the art in question. Not only are public collections of comic art small in number, even fewer have sufficient depth to allow for the study of a broad range of cartoonists. In fact, the vast majority of important pieces lie in private hands. There are exceptions of course. The large collection of original art from Little Orphan Annie under safekeeping at Boston University and the complete art to Amazing Fantasy #15 for example.

Viewing a piece of original art can sometimes reveal circumstances not immediately apparent on a simple reading of the final product (i.e. the comic itself). For example, some might find the number of corrections and white out marks on this page by Frank Miller from The Dark Knight Triumphant worthy of interest.

The fact that people own small panels from the same comic which are likely to be Miller's reworking of some scenes as well as possible corrections to Klaus Janson's inking might also be of note historically speaking.

At the risk of stating the obvious, pages from The Dark Knight Returns are some of the most expensive pieces of art in modern comics. Pages from Walt Kelly’s Pogo on the other hand are cheap. Certainly much cheaper than a page from The Dark Knight Returns but also considerably less expensive than art from some other classic strips like Flash Gordon, Krazy Kat or Prince Valiant etc.

[A Pogo Sunday from an upcoming Heritage Auction which is another site to find high quality scans of comics original art.]

Most of Kelly’s strips have not seen publication for a few decades which obviously contributes to their lack of visibility and desirability. Only a person with access to a sizable collection of vintage newspaper cartoon sections would be apprised of the bulk of Kelly's run.

Pogo is, to me, one of the greatest strips ever published. A full Sunday is available at a fraction of the price of other more illustration-based strips or even the estimated price of a Calvin and Hobbes daily - a strip which it influenced significantly and to which it compares very favorably. This relates to supply and demand. Not only is art from Calvin and Hobbes much more desired than art from Pogo, the supply is virtually non-existent (though there's this example by one of the biggest collectors in the hobby) because of Bill Watterson's understandable reluctance to sell his art work.

One of the pleasures of "living" with a piece of art is that you begin to notice details which you would not in a 2-3 minute gallery appraisal (online or otherwise). Most readers would probably have read through an average Pogo Sunday like the one below in a matter of minutes (if not less). Take a moment to read it now.

As most readers will know, while Pogo is of particular note for its political content, it began life as a children's comic in Dell's Animal Comics. The example above reflects the strips more light-hearted origins. Even so, it reveals a great deal of Kelly's craft.

For one, there's the extensive wordplay which may not register, in all its fullness, on a simple Sunday morning read through. The constant exposure to the Pogo Sunday above (which hangs in my apartment) has made me even more acutely aware of the density of Kelly's technique.

In the fourth panel of the strip, we have Miz Beaver commenting on "the finest mess of pies..ever seed" in anticipation of what is to happen later in the strip – something which would require more than a single reading to pick up (And who has actually asked the question of her? Are we the readers asking with anything but our eyes?).

In the sixth panel, Albert breaks into a soliloquy on the seasons declaiming, "Off I spring, as prettily as a summer zephyr..." , as he launches into one of his cricket hops. In the eighth panel, Miz Beaver exclaims, "Oh dear, always they go Splobsh", almost as if she had some experience in the bespatterment of pies, while the last 2 panels of the Sunday suggest a reference to the economics of the same. The pies are noted to be "a mite tart but tasty", not only referring to their slightly acidic taste (def: 1 : agreeably sharp or acid to the taste 2 : marked by a biting, acrimonious, or cutting quality) but also a synonym for that type of confection. And let's not forget that Albert is using the word in relation to a female baker who has recently laid out her wares.

Perhaps most complex of all is Albert’s complaint in the third panel where he states, "My Ma was cricket champeen of Ol' Gummidge-on-the Wicket". Gummidge-on-the-Wicket is an obvious reference to a cricket ground and nothing to do with insects. Nor is it named after any notable first class cricket ground but is ostensibly some Anglicized village in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp in the Southern United States. If anything, the name of the cricket ground has more to with the nature of Albert's mother. One online encyclopedia defines "gummidge" as:

"Gummidge a peevish, self-pitying, and pessimistic person, given to complaining, from the name of Mrs Gummidge, a character in Dickens's David Copperfield (1850)."

And here we have the Wikipedia entry which I have not confirmed myself since I read David Copperfield far too many years ago to remember the character's exact nature:

"Mrs. Gummidge – The widow of Daniel Peggotty's partner in a boat. She is a self-described "lone, lorn creetur" who spends much of her time pining for "the old 'un" (her late husband). After Emily runs away from home with Steerforth, she changes her attitude to better comfort everyone around her and tries to be very caring and motherly. She too emigrates to Australia with Dan and the rest of the surviving family."

The crickets which appear in over half the panels remain silent bemused observers throughout, pacing along with Pogo while not demonstrating any of their own hopping skills.

Beyond the dense wordplay, there are certain elements which can be seen only upon viewing the original art. There's the carefully hand-drawn title "Pogo" which contrasts with the occasional title paste-ups which occur in some of Kelly’s Sundays.

There are the ubiquitous blue pencils which were used to sketch in the script in many of Kelly's strips and his careful arrangement (or rearrangement) of word balloons.

A pencil sketch which does not correspond to the final inked version is used to delineate Albert's flight (a change of heart or merely a guide?) ...

... and later, Kelly corrects the disposition of one of Miz Beaver's pies to allow for a more accurate trajectory with respect to a previous panel.

Something else which might not be apparent from a simple reading of the final printed strip is Kelly’s effortless technique which is devoid of hesitation, a single inking correction or white out.

A simple and somewhat insignificant Pogo Sunday like this one may not have the endless fascination of a truly great painting or etching but it still affords a reasonable amount of pleasure whenever I glance at it each day.

La Nouvelle Action

2009-11-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

Spin Angels (a.k.a. Cross Fire)
auteur: Jean-Luc Sala
artiste: Pierre-Mony Chan
éditeurs: Soleil/Marvel

Bonjour! Comment allez-vous?

I may have missed out on the Sequential Surrender Monkeys roundtable, but I'm still going to review a comic from the Frenchiest country on Earth -- France! However, I'm playing it safe and sticking with the mainstream; none of that artsy-fartsy stuff for me. Surely even their lamest comics must be better than ours, given the lack of decrepit superhero franchises peddled by corporate IP-holders. And one such IP-holder apparently agrees with me, because Marvel has partnered with Soleil to bring mainstream French comics like Spin Angels to the U.S. market.

And what does the French mainstream look like? Think Dan Brown with more cheesecake.

The story in Spin Angels follows the agents of the Vatican's Secret Office, a clandestine paramilitary team operating out of Rome. These guys don't hunt demons like your typical Catholic kill squad. Instead, they acquire or steal documents that could cast doubt on the legitimacy of Catholic dogma. Now, some of you may be thinking that this group is about 500 years too late to do any good. But from the Catholic perspective, Protestantism is just a fad, like emo (Judaism is a much older fad, like disco). Sooner or later all those emo crybabies will come to their senses, and the Catholic Church will be ready to take them back.

As for the plot, the lead investigator for the Secret Office, Sofia D'Agostino, stumbles upon a conspiracy involving the Inquisition, a missing book of the Gospel, and the Templars (it always comes back to the fucking Templars). When things start getting dicey, her boss decides that she needs some extra protection, so he calls in a favor with a buddy in the Sicilian Mafia (!) who sends his best hitman to protect her. What follows is a predictable action-adventure with an opposites attract subplot.

Considering all the lazy, unimaginative superhero crap that I've read in my life, perhaps it's unfair to label this book as derivative. At the very least, it isn't nostalgia porn. On the other hand, everything about it feels unoriginal. It's as if the creators decided that the best way to tell their story was through a Catholic conspiracy theory checklist: apocryphal scripture, lost Templar treasure, Mafia connections, Vatican hitmen, etc. Then they topped it off with every action movie cliché of the last 30 years.

I found the art to be a bit more agreeable, but it doesn't quite work with the story. Chan's style is consistent with traditional Western comic art, but it's also heavily influenced by manga and anime. For example, the following panel has the "grossed-out" reaction that's nearly ubiquitous in mainstream anime.

This style might work well enough for a comedy or even a superhero comic, but it doesn't "sell" the realistic violence within this story. There's also plenty of cheesecake shots, but Chan's style is too cartoony to deliver anything that's genuinely sexy.

To sum up, Spin Angels reads like a Da Vinci Code knockoff regurgitated by a committee. But while I didn't enjoy the comic, there's something encouraging in the idea that even the French are capable of uninspired genre hackwork. We're one world! There's no such thing as the French mainstream or the American mainstream. There's just the mainstream, which happens to be completely devoid of new ideas.

The Superdick in the Closet

2009-11-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I posted a series of discussions about the way in which super-hero comics tend to be structured around homosocial desire and the closet. You can read the whole series here.

Just to resummarize quickly: the basic argument is that a character like Superman is a male power fantasy. That fits in with Freud and the Oedipal conflict. Clark Kent can be seen as the "child" who imagines himself supplanting the Father/lawgiver/god. You can also take this one step away from Freud and argue (via the theories of Eve Sedgwick) that what we're talking about here is not, or not solely, an internal psychological desire, but rather a cultural/social formulation. Men turn away from femininity in order to identify with patriarchal power; or, to see it another way, to be patriarchal requires the denigration or hiding of weakness. That's the closet; Clark Kent is living a lie, pretending to be powerful in order to be powerful, when his truth is actually a weak, wimpy child. And, again, the closet is powered by male-male desires and fantasies, making it homoerotic (though, as I argue at some length, it's actually a straight person's homoerotic fantasy — we're talking about how straight men bond or interact with the patriarchy in particular, and arguing that that interaction is structured by ideas about, and within, gayness.)

Okay, so that's basically where we left things. In the last few posts, I was mostly interested in pointing out similarities in the way this basic blueprint was used across different kinds of comics, from Superman and Batman through Spider-Man and Hulk and on to the work of folks like Chris Ware and Dave Sim. But, of course, there are differences too from case to case, and it's interesting to look at some of those, and how they work.

So first, I've been thinking a little about the differences between some of the early heroes of the 30s and 40s and the later iconic Marvel heroes. Generally, I think, the argument is that Marvel heroes were different because they were more realistic; they faced everyday problems, made mistakes and so forth.

I wonder how true that is exactly, though. The fact is, none of the Marvel characters are all that realistic. Peter has girl troubles, sure, and he gets bullied — but Clark Kent had girl troubles, and he got bullied too. And Peter's a genius inventor. And he's drawn to look like he's 40 even though he's only like — what? 16?

Anyway, the point is, I don't think the change had all that much to do with verisimilitude. We're still in the world of preposterous fantasy, after all, with cosmic rays and gamma rays and super strength and defeating your enemies by punching them in the face. The difference, it seems to me, has more to do with anxiety. The Oedipal split is always somewhat agonized and anxious; the superfather for Freud is also the super-castrating ogre. And in those early Superman stories, Clark is despised and castrated; there's a definite feeling of loathing.

However, the loathing is in these directed mostly towards the castrated, not the castrator. The problem, the thing to be ridiculed, is powerlessness, not power.

Over time, though, the faith in that image of absolute power started to waver. In the 50s and 60s there was a lot of more-or-less playful experimentation with the idea of superman as evil father. Thus, the aptly (and Freudianly) named Superman is a Dick website.

Here's a particularly apropos picture:

I don't know that I can really add anything to that.

Of course, the stories here always resolved by showing that Superman was acting for everyone's good; he may have looked like the evil father, but he's still really the good father; patriarchy is still to be trusted, power is still great, and all the boys still want that super dick.

Marvel's innovation was not that it gave us stories that were different in kind from Superman's kid, Jimmy Olsen. Rather, the difference was that it was able to take exactly this story and treat it as tragedy rather than farce. The problems most Marvel super-heroes face is precisely that of the superdick. That is, they aren't beset by normal, everyday problems — they're beset by the Thing — the monster phallus itself. Peter Parker's mega-problems (the death of his uncle in particular) stem from being Spider-Man; which is why, when he loses his powers, he's acutely relieved. The early Marvel comics loved to portray super-powers as a crippling curse, a disaster. The Hulk is maybe the purest example; the uber-masculine ogre who hates and wants to destroy his weaker self. You couldn't really come up with a more lurid Oedipal castration fantasy.

The Marvel stories, then, are about mistrust of patriarchal authority; they insistently question whether the great gay bargain — exchanging individual weakness for patriarchal strength at the cost of always hiding your weakness — is really worth it. In this, they're not unlike exploitation films, which are from roughly the same time period and which were also obsessed, in various ways, with authority and changing ideas about masculinity and femininity.

But where exploitation films could, and did, revel in the perverse pleasures of fucking with authority, Marvel comics never (for various reasons) went there. As with Superman as Superdick, the stories always ultimately ended up affirming the worth of power as power. Peter Parker is relieved to lose his powers...but then his Aunt and girlfriend are captured, and he realizes how much he Needs to Be a Man and grasp the superdick in order to save them. And even though he's an ogre, The Hulk, somehow, always ends up being a force for good (and eventually became childlike himself, neatly undercutting the evil-ogre-father aspect of the character, which was much more prominent in the first issues.) Moreover, Stan was hardly above indulging in some Superman style superdickery himself; Professor X and other father figures are always running the X-Men through this or that idiotic test for their own good. "Yes, my X-Men, I gutted Ice Man and used his bloody remains to lubricate the gears of my Cerebro computer, then let you think he was dead for weeks. But! The experience has made you stronger as a team! And Cerebro is working really well now! And besides, before I brutally murdered him, I created a perfect robot duplicate, whose powers work better and who doesn't engage in annoying pranks. Say hello to you new teammate: Ice-Bot!"

Having just written that super-hero parody, I have to say...it's interesting how much super-hero parody revolves around superdickery. Chris Ware's Superman, for example, is essentially a brutal sadist destroying everyone who contradicts him; Johnny Ryan has a superman/god character who works in a similar way. And then there's Kate Beaton's bad-ass Wonder Woman. And a lot of the humor in Mini-Marvels is based on the kid heroes behaving like megaomaniacal uber-fathers (Reed Richards cheerfully sending the Hulk off into space for example.) And, of course, that's the whole point of Marvel Zombies too, with the heroes turned into evil ogres and at last wholeheartedly embracing their inner superdickery.

In fact, the genius of the early Marvel comics is not that they undercut (as it were) the superdick, but rather that they reconsecrate it by more fully acknowledging its dickishness. Males (and especially adolescent males, the ones reading these comics) are always ambivalent about sadism and patriarchal power, both because the sadism and patriarchal power is likely as not to be directed against them ("go to your room!" go off to war!") and because, you know, who wants to be always about to become the ogre raping and murdering their own loved ones? That very guilt and fear, however, function as a lever and a spur. Peter Parker kills his father....and his life is thereafter defined by the guilt that demands he himself become a monster/father to take Uncle Ben's place. The Hulk, in his later incarnations, is not just the destructive phallus, but the wounded child as destructive phallus; the fantasy, both terrifying and fascinating, is to become the ogre-father while still an infant, eternally both torturing oneself and satisfyingly wreaking instant vengeance, on oneself and others, for the torture. Marvel figured out that you don't need to deny the anxiety and guilt attendant upon the power fantasy; rather, you can harness them to make the green monster grow.

So a couple more comments about this.

— I think that, as others have pointed out, power fantasies (or superdickery) is really central to the super-hero genre. And I think that what that means in part is that the super-hero genre is — not always, or everywhere, but quite centrally nonetheless — sadistic. It's about identifying with power — either for good, or for ill. It's about being the beneficent god or the evil ogre father, or both at once. To the extent that you do identify with weakness, it's generally as a prelude to releasing your inner hulk, or going out to websling, or whatever.

—This is a big part of why superheroics and horror (as opposed to goth) don't mix especially well. You can certainly have gore in something like Blackest Night, because gore and violence fit perfectly well with sadism; you can be the ravening ogre father chomping on bones, hooray! And, yes, sadism does have a place in horror too — thus torture-porn — and to that extent it does make some sense to think of Blackest Night or Marvel Zombies as some kind of horror crossover. But the central mode of horror really is not sadism; it's masochism. It's about being the devoured child, not the devouring father — in horror, while you may cheer for the ogre at various points, you never actually are the ogre; you're the victim, which is where the fear comes from. The whole point of Shivers or the Thing or the Living Dead movies is that the characters are consumed; they are destroyed, and then eaten up or filled up by the Other (which is pretty explicitly the phallus, in Shivers and the Thing, especially.)

But super-hero comics never do that; even when the super-heroes are evil, they have a recognizable personality, and are the stars with which you (more or less) identify. The two genres, super-heroes and horror, are simply diametrically opposed; they are committed to opposite goals. Super-hero comics are fun because they empower; horror is fun because it disempowers. You can't do both at once. (Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is an exception that tests the rule, perhaps...I found the Swamp Thing vampire story at least fairly scary. But Moore accomplished that by keeping Swamp Thing himself off screen for most of the story while various civilians are terrorized and slaughtered. When Swamp Thing did show up to do battle with a giant frog/lizard/vampire thing, the horror quickly dissipated.)

—Masochism is central to the way that exploitation films, such as horror, express their distrust of the status quo. Not that horror films are actually revolutionary, per se, or that I Spit on Your Grave is going to overthrow the patriarchy or anything. But, effectual or not, a film like Last House on the Left really expresses a visceral distaste for patriarchal authority. It sneers at good dads and bad dads alike, and at the war they perpetrated, and at the whole concept of justice and truth. And again, it does this through masochism — through identifying with victims and getting pleasure/excitement/terror through fantasies of disempowerment rather than through fantasies of empowerment.

Super-hero comics on the other hand, have a lot of trouble making that kind of perverse identification with the disempowered. This is the case even with parodies like Marvel Zombies or Ted Rall's Fantabulaman or even Chris Ware's Superman/Jimmy Corrigan strips, where there's generally a kind of contempt for Jimmy's weakness which echoes the distaste for Clark Kent or Peter Parker. In all these parodies, the focus is largely on the evil father doing the ogrish evil; the victims are much less personified or even visualized. Even if you have your tongue in your cheek while admiring the superdick, you're still kind of admiring the superdick.

Grant Morrison's mainstream work provides an even clearer example. In his Justice League and X-Men runs, he often has his villains launch fairly damning critiques of the heroes as egotistical, self-satisfied, godlike assholes. But then he always kind of takes it back; the heroes waltz on and show that they're noble and good and they save the world and you're supposed to be all enthusiastic, I guess. Obviously, Morrison identifies with the critique to some extent, but there isn't any way in a super-hero comic to let it have the last word, or to have it be the point (as it is, to some extent at least, in the Invisibles.)

Another example is Greg Rucka's Hiketeia. Rucka puts a certain amount of effort into making the story masochistic. The cover features Wonder Woman stepping on Batman's head, and the plot is a rape-revenge, in which a young girl slaughters her sister's killers, taking the knife to patriarchal notions of justice and fairness. Men get beat down by storng women. However...in the first place, this is a Wonder Woman comic, and a lot of the emotional oomph comes from watching her beat the tar out of Batman — you identify with her, which is sadistic rather than masochistic. Secondly, the story ends up being not about the girl and her revenge at all, but instead about the tragic rift that the girl's rape-revenge creates between Wonder Woman and Batman; a rift the girl, rather inexplicably, sacrifices herself to heal. It's like she hears all the genre rules yelling at her that she's supposed to be the one getting castrated, not doing the castrating, and she finally acquiesces — perhaps just because she can't stand being written by Greg Rucka any longer.

Again, Watchmen is perhaps an exception of sorts here, where the role of all-powerful father is both questioned and in various ways deflated. But it took Moore a number of false starts before he got there (Miracleman and V for Vendetta try to mount an anti-establishment critique via super-hero, but ultimately, I'd argue, end up defeated by the genre conventions.)

The point here isn't that stories supporting status quo are necessarily bad. Dark Knight is pretty unabashed in its worship of the superdick, and it's great. And, as the Dark Knight kind of suggests, the status quo has numerous benefits (stable currency and revolutionaries not stringing up me and mine from flagpoles = good.) It is interesting, though, the extent to which the superhero genre's bias towards and fascination with the superdick makes it difficult for authors to tell certain kinds of stories (horror, anti-status-quo) even when they're clearly trying to do so.
_______________________

Well, that was about twice as long as I thought it would be. I still want to discuss the question of whether Wonder Woman can be the superdick...but I think we'll have to leave that for another day.

Utilitarian Review 11/14/09

2009-11-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

On HU

This week started out with my review of Young Schulz, a collection of Charles Schulz's comics featuring young adults at church.

Kinukitty reviewed Way to Heaven which is not as good as the rock band Angel.

I reviewed a handful of mahwa and manga, including Click, Bizenghast, and a collection of Hiroki Endo's short stories.

Vom Marlowe reviewed the electronic art program Corel Painter and its official magazine.

I insisted that superheroes aren't dead, despite the best efforts of Marvel and D.C.

And finally this week's droney music mix is available for down load. Also, in case you missed it, you can still get the discoey mix from last week.

Utilitarians Elsewhere

A bunch of stuff this week, starting with:

Something completely different over at Splice Today, where I attempt to get in touch with my long denied genetic destiny as an NPR confessional essayist.

As a child, I was told that I mumbled. And, as kids will, I believed it—and went on believing it well after I had left home. In fact, I don’t think I fully realized this deception until well into adulthood. I was 28, I think; my parents had come into Chicago to visit and we were having dinner in a restaurant with a cousin and my wife-to-be. My cousin showed up late, bearing a relatively spectacular bit of news: My grandmother had caught her eye on a car door and was in the hospital. My mom sat up straighter in her chair, lifted her chin, and with that east-coast Jewish nasal edge that sounds like a jackhammer pulled across a blackboard, bellowed out, “Holy Fuck!”

Over at comixology I discuss ukiyo-e prints and Satoshi Kitamura's children book "When Sheep Cannot Sleep."

Kitamura's book reads like a Japanese print series in a number of ways, from his off-center compositions, to his subtle use of blank space, to his lovely color palette, all the way to his clever, intentionally humorous use of visual puzzles. You're always wondering from page to page what you're supposed to be counting and where it is, just as in Yoshitoshi's series you're always looking for (and not always finding) the moon.

On Madeloud I discuss a number of unusual christian albums, including the Violent Femmes' Hallowed Ground.

Anenoidal weirdo Gordan Gano played up his adolescent angst and played down his religious inclinations on most Violent Femmes releases — except for his second effort, 1984's aggressively bizarre Hallowed Ground. Starting off with a plunking tale of child murder and ending with a joyful plea for watery apocalypse, the album recasts the fire and brimstone of old timey country as manic, off-kilter stagger: it’s Christianity as bi-polar disorder. Nowhere is this clearer than on "Black Girls," a concupiscent vaudeville-meets-free-jazz paean to interracial affection, featuring a guest-spot from John Zorn’s Horns of Dilemma and the immortal lines “You know I love the lord of hosts/father son and the holy ghost/ I was so pleased to learn that he’s inside me/ In my time of trouble he will hide me….I dig the black girls!” Just like the squeaking saxophones and the bluegrass banjo, the cheerful lust and earnest faith exist side by side — angular, dissonant, incongruous, and perfect.

Bert Stabler has posted some more email conversations between the two of us, this time about Slavoj Zizek and God. Here's me snarking at Zizek:

Aha! Just got to Zizek on the resurrection; it's apparently a metaphor for the way an inspirational example lives on in a community of radical believers. "I may die, but what I stood for will inspire you...and so I live on!"

Which seems like really weak tea. Zizek goes to a lot of effort to read the death of God literally...and then we're supposed to take the resurrection as not just a metaphor, but a cliched metaphor? Joan Baez on Joe Hill is the meaning of the resurrection? I mean, I like Joan Baez, and labor organizing is cool, but...why are we talking about Christ at all then if this is the point, exactly? And if this is indeed the point, why aren't you out there organizing rather than having a debate about God?

Finally, over at the Knoxville MetropulseI review the recent release by Belgian psychedelic weirdos Sylvester Anfang.

Other Links

This is a great Wonder Woman cartoon by Kate Beaton.

Absolutely gorgeous Beardsley-like opium illustratons by Attila Sassy. I don't say this enough, but thanks to Dirk for the link.

Ariel Schrag has a statement about a middle school pulling her anthology about middle school kids, Stuck in the Middle, off its shelves.

And your Thai pop video of the week, featuring Mangpor Chonticha:

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Little Red Drone

2009-11-13T11:00:00.000-08:00

Mostly droning and buzzing.

1. Robert Wyatt — Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road (Rock Bottom)
2. Terry Riley — Anthem of the Trinity (Shri Camel)
3. Mazzy Star — So Tonight That I Might See (So Tonight That I Might See)
4. Teenage Filmstars — Lapse (Rocket Charms)
5. Suishou No Fune — The Storm of Light/Cherry (Shining Star- Live)
6. Nihill — Aard (Grond)

Download Little Red Drone.

And if you missed it, last weeks discoey mix is here.

Ain't Dead Yet

2009-11-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

Steven Grant (who guest blogged here last week) declares the super-hero dead dead dead:

it's patently clear to anyone studying market history that the fans are disinterested too. They don't buy new superheroes. They don't want them. Maybe it's economics, maybe they've been burned too many times to come back for what might be more, maybe they're waiting for Something Truly Different and don't feel like spending more on what are basically variations on themes they already buy, but reasons don't much matter. They do not buy them, and haven't for a long, long time.

So even logical ways of introducing new superheroes are right out the window. Theoretically (and ignoring all issues of creator rights for the moment) the best way to intro a character would be in an existing top character's book. Let the readers get to know the new superhero that way, then spin him into his own book. That should work. It doesn't, even with characters readers respond well to, like The Silver Surfer....

The superhero genre may not be the Titanic, no icebergs in sight, but everyone's still just rearranging deck chairs now. That's how the companies want it, because they're no longer marketing creations. They're peddling brands. Branding is everything now, and it's almost always more profitable to cash in on a long-established brand than to create, develop and market a new one. The superhero as brand name might be with us until the end of time, now, but the superhero as expression of genuine creativity is pretty much dead.

Steven's argument is fun both because it's so devastatingly true...and because it's completely wrong. Yes, yes, Marvel and D.C. and the handful of smaller comics companies peddling traditional super-heroes are so creatively bankrupt that you wonder how it's possible that the "creatively" doesn't just disappear from that formulation. Neither of them has had any success introducing new characters in forever, and it's equally clear that the don't have any idea what to do with the ones they've got other than continue an unending soap-opera playing to fewer and fewer true-believers. That's absolutely right.

But the reason it's right isn't because nobody likes super-heroes. People love super-heroes. Here, for example, is a partial list of some of the most successful super-heroes introduced in the past twenty odd years.

Ben 10

Sailor Moon

Captain Underpants

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Edward (from Twilight)

Neo (from the Matrix)

all those folks on Heroes

You get the idea. The concept of a character with some combination of unusual powers and abilities and/or a secret identity and/or a costume, maybe, is hardly dead. On the contrary, it's been essential to some of the most successful media properties of the last couple of decades

So the question then becomes, not why are super-heroes unpopular, but why are the super-heroes parlayed by Marvel and DC so darn unpopular? Why can everybody and their idiot cousin create successful super-heroes except for the companies that spend all their time, 24-7, writing about super-heroes?

Well, when you look at the successful super-heroes above, you notice a couple of things:

1. Almost all of them are genre blends. That is, they're super-heroes and something else — fantasy in Sailor Moon, sci-fi in Ben 10, satire in Captain Underpants, goth horror in Buffy and Twilight. That doesn't make them less about super-heroes — pulp genres cross-hybridize all the time (detective and romance, for example, mix so often it's become positively indecent.) But what it does do is make them more creative. Steven says:

Don't forget, the original context of the superhero was a poverty-stricken America heading into World War II. Superheroes were basically a big pep talk, later a big jingoistic pep talk as the country went to war. The earliest superheroes, cats like Superman and Batman, were hardly law-abiding citizens, but the '30s weren't a great time for staunch belief in the law. The notion that anyone could stand against presumed widespread corruption, could stand for a higher, nobler morality, that was heady stuff, especially at a time when whole nations seemed to be going nuts. Didn't last long; before long, and once war was declared, superheroes were mostly chatting up the policeman as Our Friend and how all good Americans should follow the rules, take their vitamins, say their prayers, collect tin and aluminum and buy war bonds and that was a message the time was ready for, but it was no coincidence that the end of the war was almost an end of the superhero. It was the end of any semblance of relevance for the superhero.

And yes, sure, there's something to that: superheroes started in a certain time and place, and they had to change to continue to be relevant. But...that's how genres work. Tolkien started modern epic fantasy as a response to WW II. When WWII was over, fantasy was less relevant...so folks like Ursula K. Le Guin came along and did something else with it that made it speak to changing gender roles and race and other stuff that made sense to the people of the time. That's how genres work; they're not carved in stone. You pick them up and do something new with them that's grounded in tradition but makes sense for a different time and place.

And that's what folks do with super-heroes too. Buffy shows how to use super-hero stories to talk about contemporary high-school and girls coming of age. Captain Underpants shows how to use super-hero stories to talk (or at least snicker) about contemporary elementary schools. The Matrix uses super-heroes to talk (dumbly but popularly) about modern paranoia around technology, among other issues.

The only ones who can't figure out how to gracefully use super-heroes to talk about anything that matters is the big two. And maybe, you know, that does in fact have something to do with the fact that they're using the same damn heroes from 40 to 70 years ago. Though, on the other hand, Smallville manages to update Superman effectively, and the Batman cartoons are fine.... I don't know. Maybe, on second thought, DC and Marvel are just catastrophically stupid.

2. The other thing about all of the most popular super-heroes is that they come complete with their own worlds. That is, the super-heroes aren't just random folks who happened to gain super-powers and then go off to fight random evil stuff. Rather, the super-hero's powers, their missions, and their enemies are all part of a single story and a single world. One of the most satisfying parts of Twilight is the geekily thorough way in which Stephanie Meyer apportions powers and weaknesses to her vampires and werewolves and such, and then has those powers drive the plot in particular ways (there are always incredibly intricate plans to stop the mind-reading Edward from picking up thoughts he shouldn't hear, for example.) I don't know much about Ben 10, but I do know that his powers and the DNAliens he fights are all tied together in a single backstory.

All of which suggests that people do like reading super-hero stories...but they most of all like reading stories. Folks are willing to suspend their disbelief if you give them a reason to — but DC and Marvel don't even bother. Their titles just assume, pretty much, that all these various randomly powered, disconnected super-folk are running around, fighting similarly disconnected super-villains. In some ways, the lust for crossover that we've seen in recent years is an effort to get around this — to provide the narrative and the rationale that most people reading a story naturally want. But it's too much of a mess, and mired in too much backstory, to actually be all that interesting to anyone beyond the small core of true believers.

________________________

On the one hand, you might argue I guess that Steven's tendency not to see the super-heroes all around him is of a piece with the status quo among the big two; that is, if they could only start to think about super-hero stories in different ways, maybe they wouldn't be so perpetually shitty. Perhaps they could finally start telling stories somebody cared about, and maybe even come up with some new heroes that were different from the old heroes in ways which would allow them to appeal to a broader audience.

But really, I think that's too harsh on Steven and not sufficiently harsh on DC and Marvel. The truth is, DC and Marvel seem pretty thoroughly irredeemable. Steven was right; they're creatively D.O.A. They're going nowhere and changing nothing, and the chances of either of them ever coming up with an exciting, marketable new concepts is roughly the same as the chances of a monkey crawling out of my butt and handing me a power ring. So, yeah, I think it's important to recognize that super-heroes are still popular, but not because doing so will help DC and Marvel. On the contrary, I think it's important because, until you realize that super-heroes are doing just fine, you can't really understand how truly lame Marvel and DC are.

Corel Painter Official Magazine

2009-11-11T07:57:00.000-08:00

www.paintermagazine.com
With especial emphasis on the tutorials of Wen-Xi Chen.

For those who don't play in the fields of digital art, Corel Painter X (or XI, which has just been released) is the big "other" art program. Unlike Photoshop, Painter is designed to mimic the natural materials so many artists use. Sure, Photoshop has some natural material brushes, but it doesn't have a mixing palette or blending brushes or brushes which naturally and intuitively pick up the underlying paint and mix it, or make impasto, or a dozen other things. For the curious, here is a shot of the desktop:

See all the color options and the palette?

The mixing of paints, the vast variety of brushes, and the intuitive nature of color choices and ease of vast color picking make Painter a very strong program. One of the biggest flaws I see in digital art today is the tendency to use a very dark, very gray palette, with a photo-realistic, brush-stroke-less style for the people and a lot of green-gray-yellow shadows. This isn't so much an artistic choice as it is a habit induced by some curious features of Photoshop. Art created in Painter has a tendency to be much livelier in color and to have unexpectedly quick and fun brushstrokes. It's easier to do certain kinds of paintings spontaneously in Painter and it's deeply easy for an artist decently skilled in craft but relatively new to digital tools to create something worthwhile:

This is a study of a gingko that I did about a year ago; it took me about an hour total in Painter. The entire time I just focused on what I wanted the piece to convey, and none of the time was spent mucking about with filters or complex low opacity blending techniques that Photoshop would have required. I did not know Painter then, I just picked up a bit of a tutorial, flipped through it, thought, how hard could it be, and did this piece.

Painter doesn't get much respect at times, but I think that's a shame. One reason that it doesn't always appeal to artists (digital and traditional) is that it's a rather powerful program and with great power, as we all know, comes great responsibility. Or at least the need for a tutorial or two. Which brings us to Painter Magazine.

Painter is so utterly different than Photoshop and so full of yummy options (a dizzying array of brush types and brush tips and watercolors that require special layers and some paints that interact and others that don't) that a guide is delightful and necessary. Unfortunately, many of the traditional guide options suck. The books are either old or too complicated or are pretty much how to turn photographs into 'art', which is all very boring. Some of the Deviant Art tutorials are good, but they're insufficient, by their nature.

Which is why I really like the Painter magazine. It's one of those beautiful English magazines that comes with a CD full of goodies and some ads for cameras I'd never be able to afford. I have to buy mine at the Borders and they're always a month or so behind the English release date, but it doesn't really matter. The magazine isn't cheap: It retails for fifteen bucks (14.99), but it's well worth it.

The magazine is divided up into some regular sections and features. It's designed to appeal to Corel Painter newbies as well as some really advanced artists. The format is roughly:

A tutorial on cloning a photo into art
A tutorial to create a painting in a famous artist's style, using media brushes that the artist favored, like Baroque portraits or Sargent or Vermeer.
A tutorial on a brush family, like Sumi-e or art markers
A tutorial on creating the cover art
A traditional art tutorial (such as drawing skills)
A few more tutorials on differing subjects (like portraits, landscapes, color use or seasons)
Some reviews and interviews

The CD goodies always include a trial version of Painter, often a trial version of another software, and stock images, underdrawings from tutorials, brushes or special settings, and often a video tutorial

The tutorials are well done and have some unique features. My favorite is that they are graded by difficulty (easy, intermediate, and advanced) and have a suggested time. Five hours is a common time, but there are also tutorials that list 36 hours. I love that.

There are many fine artists who are, to put it politely, less than stellar instructors. Fortunately, Painter chooses its artists carefully. My favorite tutorial writer by far is the artist Wen-Xi Chen. Her art is stunning, but equally important, her tutorials make sense and help me make my art better. She is a frequent writer for Painter and has done at least two covers, the lush and beautiful feature on portrait painting eyes and the latest issue with Sumi-E.

This eye isn't perfect, by any means, but I think it's turning out rather well, and it's all down to Wen-Xi Chen's fine tutorial.

The latest issue of the magazine (at least the one available in the states) has another Chen cover. Her tutorial on Sumi-E brushes has me excited to try another simple portrait and test out some new brushes and tools. The program is lovely, but having this kind of solid, useful guide is fantastic and makes it possible for someone like me, who just does this as a hobby, to enjoy it more fully. I highly recommend the magazine. It's not necessary to get it every month, but I hope if you're interested that you'll pick it up and give it a look see.

Manga! Manga! Manga!

2009-11-10T16:53:00.000-08:00

Youngran Lee
Click 1-2
NetComics
B&W/softcover
ISBN# 978-1-60009-202-2

Click is a comic about a transexual and his/her heartache. If it were American, that would make it an alternative comic, probably with some sort of feminist agenda. Instead, it’s a Korean comic in shoujo style — which means its romance for girls, with its eyes on a mass market audience and its heart in a soap opera narrative.

Gender-bending is standard in shoujo. Still — and especially for an American audience — *Click* takes the trope to a bizarre extreme. Our hero, Joonha Lee, is a dreamboat guy — until one day he turns into a dreamboat girl. His comically detached parents explain that a chromosome shift runs in the family, and, after several desperate trips to the bathroom, Joonha accepts his fate.

And yes, that’s all the explanation we get. The rest is all unrequited love and teen angst. Oh, and did I mention the unrequited love? Everyone, male or female, falls for Joonha, including deceptively deep playboy Taehyun, Taehyun’s ex-girlfriend Yoomi, and all the girls in two separate high schools. Meanwhile, Joonha herself pines romantically for Heewon, a girl he once had a crush on, and for Jinhoo, his best (male) friend growing up. His tragic transformation separates him from both of them, resulting in many longing looks from dewy, close-up eyes. Forget love triangles, we’re talking love tesseracts here.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with the experience of actual transsexuals. Nor does it have much to do with the series’ ostensible message of gender-blind empowerment for all (“What does it matter whether you’re a girl or a guy? What’s important is how you live your life.”) Instead, Lee, like many shoujo creators, is simply (or not-so-simply) fascinated and, indeed, titillated by gender slippage. It’s not just Joonha whose sex is ambiguous; virtually all the characters are drawn as glamorously languorous ectomorphs, posed angularly beneath their seductively swirling hair.

And yet, the more androgynous the trappings, the more decidedly female the core. The story is a haze of floating crushes which obscure and then obliterate genital reality. It evokes the hot-house emotional atmosphere of a stereotypically feminine pre-adolescence — the powerful affections involved with, but not quite synonymous with, gender identity — and presents it as gay utopia. The whole thing is completely ridiculous, and more than a little brilliant. I’d recommend it for girls, of course, but also for boys — and, indeed, for everyone else as well.

__________________________

M. Alice LeGrow
Bizenghast vols 1-2
Tokyopop
B&W/softcover
$9.99 each

Western efforts to imitate manga tend to range from middling to execrable, so when I first saw Bizenghast, I was thrilled. Others have figured out the psychic connection between shoujo and goth, but creator M. Alice Legrow actually has the chops to render the detailed filigree and sumptuous outfits which are crucial to both genres. Moreover, she’s a smart writer, with a quick sense of humor and a knack for character interaction. Dinah and Vincent are types we’ve seen before — young, earnest, beautiful, and burdened with melodramatic backstory and Victorian wardrobes. But they’re rendered with enough love that they can occasionally surprise you — as when Vincent glances up Dinah’s skirt and blushes for all he’s worth, or when Dinah traps a human-headed spider under a glass and then coldly and unconcernedly watches it asphyxiate.

Alas, for all its virtues, the series doesn’t bear up under close inspection. LeGrow has a good feel for horror tropes, and I could see Bizenghast really working as a psychological chiller. But instead of exploring the inside of Dinah’s head or the interior of her ghost-infested house, LeGrow gets enmeshed in a truly tedious plot. Dinah and Vincent discover an old graveyard and must come back every night to free various trapped spirits, for reasons which are about as unconvincing as you might imagine. After releasing a certain number of these ghosts, the pair are rewarded with a “cute” mascot named Edaniel, who appears, hideously enough, to be voiced by Billy Crystal.

Both the video-game narrative and the totem animal are staples of shoujo fantasy series like Cardcaptor Sakura. But LeGrow’s imitations lack the breathless conviction and intricacy of the originals. In fact, the free-one-spirit-a-night routine becomes so, well, routine that LeGrow appears to be boring herself — some adventures are shown only in truncated form, and some are skipped over altogether . LeGrow does manage a few creepy moments by playing against shoujo expectations: my favorite is probably the scene in which the cuddly Edaniel takes human form and aggressively attempts to make out with a disgusted and freaked-out Dinah. But more often LeGrow’s efforts to add psychological weight and urgency are undermined by the repetitive structure. For instance, LeGrow, like many fantasy writers, is fascinated by the breaking of taboos. In well-told stories (like the movie Pan’s Labyrinth) breaking a taboo is the terrifying emotional center of the tale — a moment that encapsulates the arbitrary relationship between magic and death. But when Vincent gives the guardian silver instead of gold, nothing happens except that he has to go on yet another brief, lame quest.

These failings aren’t the fault of the shoujo genre itself, which is perfectly capable of producing moving, complicated narratives. The problem instead is that LeGrow’s hand with the shoujo is a lot less sure than her hand with the goth. I have no doubt that in a few years, we will see many, many excellent shoujo titles produced by Western writers. Bizenghast is a harbinger of a glorious future — but it’s also a sign that we haven’t quite gotten there yet.

_____________________

Hiroki Endo
Tanpenshu
Dark Horse
230 pages/B&W
ISBN 10:1-59307-637-1
ISBN 13: 978-1-59307-637-5

This collection of three short stories is my first exposure to Hiroki Endo’s work...but reading it, I had a sinking sense of familiarity. I mean, philosophizing gangster spiritually saved by innocent girl; sexually conflicted high-school student revealed as violent powder-keg; teen ensemble reveling in bittersweet profundity — haven’t I seen these movies somewhere?

It would be one thing if the genre exercises were rendered with insight, or even enthusiasm. But Endo’s story-telling style is flat almost to the exclusion of affect; characterization is reduced to perfunctory, Freudian backstory and the mouthing of quasi-Buddhist aphorisms. The exception is“For Those of Us Who Don’t Believe in God,” in which a group of university drama students engage in witty sit-com banter. The inevitable tragic revelations are delivered with clunky ineptitude, but at least a couple of the interactions here do seem sweet and unforced — one male-male kiss, punctuated by bystanders chanting “yaoi, yaoi, yaoi”, made me laugh out loud. Unfortunately, the serial-killer-behind-bars-confronts-victim dialogue in the play the students perform is such unconscionably derivative piffle that it rather ruins the whole. Here’s a breaking bulletin from Dark Adolescent Pessimism 101: “...words like ‘God’ don’t save us from anything. When we die, that’s it.” Maybe this sort of thing is all the translator’s fault, but I kind of doubt it.

Though I’ve had enough of Endo’s writing to last me for the duration, I’d be happy to see more of his art. His layout and composition skills are strictly okay, but his drafting is first rate, and when he gives himself something interesting to draw — like the alternately silhouetted and subtly-detailed crows in “The Crows, The Girl, and the Yakuza,”,— the results are gorgeous. The shoujo set-pieces in “Because You’re Definitely a Cute Girl” are less involving —aping full-bore romanticism, even ironically, probably isn’t a good idea for a creator this detached. On the other hand, the play the students perform in the third story allows for some nice uses of space and pattern — a two-page spread of a spot-lit chain-link fence is especially arresting. To be fair, if I saw this level of skill and professionalism in a mainstream — or even alternative — American comic, I’d be pretty thrilled. But I expect more from manga.

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All of these reviews ran at one point or another in the Comics Journal.

Gluey Tart: The Way to Heaven

2009-11-09T11:30:00.000-08:00

The Way to Heaven, Yamimaru Enjin, 2009, Digital Manga Publishing

Why don't I like this book? Well, for starters, the backward E in Heaven. Let me share my thought process with you. I said, good lord, that's a beautiful cover. Those young men are gorgeous. Must read pretty book! What's it about? Oh, who cares! What lovely art! Why the hell is the first E in Heaven backward, though?

I found that E annoying, and I should have resisted the lure of pretty tie-boy and gone with my initial misgivings. (I'm drawn to the tie itself, not just the prettyboy wearing it; the color, the rendering – it's a very nice tie. It's the best thing about the manga, so I urge you to take another look and fully enjoy it.) Unlike the guys in this story, though, I haven't been plucked from my painful personal drama by a hot and annoyingly playful alien who agrees to give me another chance by allowing me to go back in time for an additional fraction of a second for every test tube I can fill with blood or semen. Looking deep into my heart, I find that I'm really, really OK with that, though.

I'm sorry, I can't advance the narrative because I keep going back to that damned E. You know what it reminds me of? The logo for Angel, a sort of proggy glam rock band from the 70s. I had pictures of them on my wall and was especially enamored of Punky Meadows.

In fact, this picture right here might have been the initial building block of my lifetime interest in prettyboys. This post is starting to have a monumental, historical sort of feel, isn't it? Wow. I feel so close to all of you right now. I hope you've enjoyed this sharing thing as much as I have. Anyway, I used to have an Angel t-shirt that pleased me immeasurably, partly because I really liked Angel, but mostly because the logo reads the same upside down as it does right-side up.

I drew it on my notebooks and stuff. Nifty, isn't it? Well, you, The Way to Heaven, are no Angel logo.

Where does this book go so wrong? It isn't like the plot isn't clinically insane. There's the afore-mentioned gathering of fluids. Also, the alien riffs on Sailor Moon. (This gets pointed out, by the mangaka or by the translator, but I was already on it because, in the spirit of over-sharing I've just established, yes, I read the whole Sailor Moon series – and no, I can't explain myself; it's just one of those things, like Us Magazine and peach Fresca). The drawing is nice throughout, and the two main characters fall in love, just like they're supposed to. By the way, one of them gets turned into a vampire, all the better to collect the blood, and the other one gets turned into a werewolf (not that he ever turns into a wolf or uses any werewolf powers), the better to collect the semen. Wait. Huh? Don't ask me – I don't know.

Here's a plot sketch. A former boxer, who was forced to quit the sport because of an eye injury, walks across a pedestrian bridge and falls off it while trying to rescue a puppy. Pretty tie-boy sees this happening and tries to save him. They both go overboard and get hit by a truck. A lovely alien lady, who's been sent to save the earth by setting up an energy recycling system, tells them she's chosen them for her pilot project. For every vial of blood and semen they collect, she'll let them go back in time a fraction of a second from "ground zero." That setup didn't push any buttons for me – I mostly was just upset because it looked like the dog died. Also, I don't know – going out and collecting vials of blood and semen for a really, really long time (especially when it's made clear that semen-guy would rather not – which doesn't seem like the wrong response, I don't think) – not sexy. Just isn't. I realize there are no absolutes in what people find erotic, or in anything else, really, but – this isn't an especially hot setup, is it? Maybe I'm missing something.

Or maybe that's supposed to be the funny part. Because the back of the book says "The Way to Heaven passes through comedy, drama, and steamy passion on its way to spiritual Shangri-La!" I assume they mean Shangri-La as in finding true love after a life spent searching, rather than in the sense of the Nazis looking for an ancient master race that hadn't been ruined by Buddhism. Although, who knows, really. I wouldn't put anything past this book, and to tell you the truth (since we're sharing so much already in this post), I had kind of stopped paying strict attention by the time I got to the end. So maybe they slipped some kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark subplot in there and I just missed it.

So. There are plot complications, but the boys find true love. The set up and plot complications made it impossible for me, however, to give a damn. I mostly just wanted the book to end – and, there, at least, it did deliver. If what I've described sounds like just the thing to you, I'd suggest you run over to Amazon.com and buy it now because even though it was just released in February, it seems to be out of print. While you're there, you might want to read the five-star reviews, which compare this to The Matrix. It doesn't especially remind me of The Matrix, but I didn't especially like that, either, so maybe this book was just a bad fit for me. The art is certainly pretty, and there is sex and romance. Either way, go in peace.

You’re a Decent Church-Going Adolescent, Charlie Brown

2009-11-08T06:31:00.000-08:00

Charles Schulz
Schulz's Youth

The publishing world is doing right by Charles Schulz; virtually everything the man did is making its way back into print. So now, alongside Fantagraphics’ steady reissue of all the Peanuts strips, we also have available a wealth of side-projects. That includes this series of cartoons which Schulz drew in the ‘50s and early ‘60s for Youth, a magazine aimed at religious teens in the Church of God (Anderson) movement, with which Schulz himself was affiliated.

The content of the strips doesn’t seem especially promising — I mean, cartoons about church socials and god-fearing teenagers? That sounds pretty dull even by the unexacting standards of The Lockhorns or Marmaduke. But Schulz is an expert at finding the point where the bland meets the loopy. And besides, he clearly has a real, albeit wry, love for the world of the faithful, in which cosmic themes and mundane concerns wander confusedly about each other until their heads conk together. “The topic before the panel tonight is ‘What do you think it was that was bugging ol’pharoah?’” declares one puzzled-but-earnest-looking youth. “My girl and I have a religious problem, Mom. She says Ah-Men and I say Ay-Men,” explains another. A third tells a young woman, “Last night, just before I went to sleep, I prayed that if I asked you for a date, you’d accept... Sort of puts you on the spot, doesn’t it?” A fourth stands up clutching a notebook and, as the characters around him stare forward with blankly bemused expressions, declares “The minutes of the last meeting were read and accepted. Isn’t that wonderful? That sort of gets me right here!”

That last is a perfect Schulz non-joke — the funny bit isn’t so much a punchline as an aphasiac misfiring of neurons. But for all its genius, the timing feels a bit off. In his Peanuts strips, Schulz was working towards perfecting an idiosyncratic mastery of comic flow — obscure, methodically unfolding in-jokes delayed from panel-to-panel; offhand, mistimed punchlines followed by flat expressions of exasperation; space-slapstick-space-space. Schulz tries to cram this effortlessly wrong-footed approach into a single panel, but it doesn’t quite work. What he ends up with instead are really long captions, which take a moment — or sometimes several moments — too long to detonate. And not in a good way.

Still, there’s no cloud that doesn’t have its pot of silver lining, as Linus might say. At the time he was working on these cartoons in the ‘50s, Schulz had not simplified his drawing as much as he would in later years. The larger format, and the use of full-sized people instead of children gave him a chance to really strut his stuff, and he enjoys it fully. You can almost feel his delight in some of the scenes which feature six year-olds being instructed by teenagers. The adolescent’s whole body is folded at the waist and knees; if the teacher stood up, he’d be (a) about twice times the height of an actual adult human and (b) completely unable to fit in the panel. The kids, of course, all have enormous heads and quizzical expressions. It’s a look at what would have happened if one of those off-camera adults in Peanuts had ever been squashed down to fit in the strip.

As this suggests, many of the best moments here rely on playing with scale in a way that was more or less impossible in Schulz’s regular feature. Everywhere lanky teenagers stretch up to the ceiling or drape out across furniture in a rush of long, fluid pen lines — in one gag a diminutive mother is forced to hurdle her sons’ surreally extended appendages in order to get from one side of the living room to the other. In another panel elegant enough to make Hank Ketcham jealous, a teen lies on his back with his legs extended way, way up in the air. He’s talking on the phone, and the gracefully curving cord contrasts with the slightly wavy motion lines extending from the boy’s shoe, which has fallen off his foot. “Could you hold the line for just a moment?” he asks. “I think I’m about to be hit on the head with my own shoe.” Or there’s the one with the over-sized African mask which seems about to swallow its wearer’s entire torso (as far as I can tell, from the gag, the mask is there entirely because Schulz felt like drawing it.) Or, my absolute favorite, a picture of a teen shouting off into the distance “Okay! All set for the wieners!” Beside him, and dwarfing him, is an illustration of an absurdly gargantuan, semi-stylized fire, set against a quietly spectacular night-time background of slanting brush strokes and blots(.

Toward the back of the book is a separate group of cartoons, again with a church theme, but this time featuring children. It’s from 1965, when Schulz was at the height of his powers, and the problems he had working in single-panel strips have largely evaporated. The art is pared back, and a couple of the captions still drag a bit. But, for the most part, the writing has the whimsical, absurdist economy of Charlie Brown’s best gags. Indeed, the panels are almost indistinguishable from Schulz’s more famous work. You can easily see Linus extending his hand and walking across a room declaring, “Hi! I’ve just been told that I am one of God’s children...who are you?” or Sally furrowing her brow in frustration as she exclaims “Just when I was getting strong enough to be able to defend myself, they start telling me about sharing!” Nobody writes cynical/sweet fuddy-duddy koans like Schulz. Someday, no doubt, we’ll get a book of his margin doodles, and they’ll be great too.

__________
This review first ran in the Comics Journal.

Utilitarian Review 11/7/09

2009-11-07T00:23:00.000-08:00

On HU

Most Utilitarian energy this week was spent Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over our roundtable on race. Extra thanks to Steven Grant for his guest contribution.

Also of roundtable-related interest, Supergirl artist Jamal Igle stopped by in comments (he's got a couple of comments, so scroll down.)

Almost buried in all the roundtable activity, I had a brief post explaining why Jeet Heer is wrong, wrong, wrong about what should be done with the Comics Journal.

And finally this week's mix, featuring disco and Amerie and Thai pop is available for download.

Off HU

Bert Stabler has posted an email conversation between the two of us about Slavoj Zizek, self-identity, and the gender of god. If abstruse, confusingly formatted philosophical discourse is your cup of tea, this just might be your divine non-tea aporia/emporia. Here's a bit from Bert:

You'e right, it's definitely all about love-- love cannot be easily dissociated from sin. It's almost the only reason to keep a transcendent God-- so that there's some magic wall that keeps His fecundity and violence from being similar to our own. That magic wall became the death of Christ-- it's almost as if what died on the cross was not only the certainty of a transcendent dimension, but also the banal self-identiity of the tangible world. Take that, equivocal/univocal/paradoxical academic philosophers!

My review of John Ronson's book Men Who Stare At Goats (now a major motion picture, as they say) is online at Splice Today.

But is evil less evil just because it’s ridiculous? One of the most diabolical scenes in the book doesn’t occur in a torture chamber or in a warzone, but in a friendly interview with Christopher Cerf, a longtime writer of Sesame Street songs like “Put Down the Ducky.” Some of Cerf’s jingles seem to have been used in interrogations, and he and music supervisor Danny Epstein joke and riff on the idiocy of the military (“Put Down the Ducky” could be used to interrogate members of the Ba’ath Party, they suggest) and the possibility of collecting royalties from the government. As Ronson notes, though, “The conversation seemed to be shifting uneasily between satire and a genuine desire to make some money.” Cerf and Epstein, in short, think the government is ridiculous and the war on terror a joke, but their humor has no moral edge. They don’t care that their songs, intended for children, are being used to torture human beings; on the contrary, they’d like to turn a profit on that torture. Their laughter is what James Baldwin called “the laughter of those who consider themselves at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real.”

I have an interview with 33 1/3 series editor David Barker over at Madeloud.

My mixed review of Sokai Stilhed's latest album is up on Madeloud as well.

A review of Amerie's new album is at Metropulse.

And a brief review of Stephen Asma's book On Monsters is at the Chicago Reader.

Other Links

Nina Stone's review of Gotham Sirens, complete with sticky mess is pretty fabulous.

It was nice to see Robert Stanley Martin giving Lilli Carre some props. She should be more appreciated.

I kind of doubt I'd actually like this Captain America comic all that much, but Sean Collins' enthusiastic review of it is entertaining.

Similarly I'm still not that big a fan of J.H. Williams, but Jog's heartfelt appreciation of him is hard to deny as a labor of love.

Rich Watson begs for DC to take simple steps to make JLA suck less.

And finally, I'm sure no one cares and that it just shows my own poor fashion sense, but I think Rihanna looks great, damn it.